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historian, admits that it was a premeditated deed, so does the Italian, Davila, in his History of the Civil Wars of France;' and the entire history of the policy and doings of the Romish church forbid us to deem this improbable. This, moreover, is the natural conclusion to which Mr. White's own history leads us. Mr. White goes so far as to say that, on the part of Charles and Catherine, it was a deed of revenge, and spite, and plunder, and that the plea of religion was not once put forward.' We do not demur to the somewhat more favourable, or rather, less execrable light in which Mr. White presents Catherine. She is more of a woman, less of a fiend, and is probably therefore more truly portrayed. One instructive lesson may be learned from Mr. White's history of the causes of the Huguenot catastrophe, and of the virtual extermination of their 2,000 churches, when they numbered nearly half the nation, viz., the essential weakness of a church when adulterated by secular principles and polity. In such a case immediate success must be with the most determined and unscrupulous. Mr. White has no great historical genius. He is somewhat dull and plodding; but he is laborious and careful, and has discovered new material of great value to the student of those troubled times.

Life of Sir Walter Raleigh, 1552-1618. By JAMES AUGUSTUS ST. JOHN. 2 Vols. London: Chapman & Hall. 1868. Mr. St. John has spent seven years in preparing his work, and has used original documents from Paris, Venice, our own State Paper and Record Offices, and the archives of Madrid and Simancas. He enumerates in his preface fifteen principal topics, on which he claims to have thrown new light by his researches. This collection and assortment of new material is not, however, the only object he has set before him. He remarks, that it seems needful for nations to review from time to 'time the achievements and characters of their great men, that they may be made to appear in the light in which they ought to be regarded in a 'civilised age; and he adds in another place, I trust it will be allowed that I have spared neither pains nor expense in the endeavour to do justice to the memory of Raleigh, whose conduct, motives, and misfortunes I have sought to describe and explain with truth and im'partiality.'

Mr. St. John is entitled to commendation and thanks for his labours. The cause is worthy of them, for few biographies are better worth writing than Raleigh's; and numerous as have been the lives of him, they constitute no reason for refraining from the production of another when fresh materials are discovered. We may often feel disposed to wish that our investigators, instead of at once writing for us new histories and biographies, would simply print, with such explanatory comments as may be needed, the new evidence they find; that they would confine themselves to the effectual prosecution of that which seems to be peculiarly the work of our time, namely, the discovery, examination, and sorting of materials; and that they would leave to a future day-probably to another generation-the use of these materials in reconstructing the old stories of persons and nations in times past. Both works would be better done, and we are inclined to think both sets of workers would profit more from their efforts. But how can we hope for such selfabnegation P

The general character of Raleigh and the ordinary estimate of his life does not appear to be much affected by the new evidence brought forward

by Mr. St. John, but some important matters which were formerly believed on insufficient grounds, are now proved by the best of evidence. A principal instance is the urgency of Philip III. and his minister Gondomar for Raleigh's destruction. The Simancas documents show that in the proceedings against Raleigh, which ended in his execution, James was simply acting as Philip's tool, and demeaned himself and his high office to become the executioner of his greatest subject, to please his country's greatest foe.

The

The narrative is a readable and in some places an eloquent one. The description of the attack on Cadiz, is perhaps one of the finest passages; but on the whole the story is not very clearly given. The parts are not subordinated according to their respective importance. Some capital topics are scantily treated, and some small and slightly relevant details are related at undue length. Of Virginia, Guiana, and Raleigh's plantations there, though they were the objects of his life-long thought, and the most considerable of his works, scarcely anything is told us. Mermaid Club which he founded, is not, we believe, mentioned, and his relations with the wits and literary men of his day are very slightly dilated on. The author also seems to us to fail in that review of his hero's achievements and character,' which he proposes as one chief end of his work. Some of the most critical points in Raleigh's life are also the most obscure. Take for instance his conduct to Elizabeth Throgmorton, afterwards his wife. Mr. St. John, on very insufficient evidence as it seems to us, arrives at the conclusion that his connection with Elizabeth Throgmorton was a seduction and a desertion.' The facts are ugly, and the case may have been as thus stated, but the evidence is not enough to prove it to have been so. The culprit is entitled to the benefit of some doubt. Notwithstanding these defects, Mr. St. John's book is valuable, and not only for the purposes which he mentions in his preface, but also for the further reason that many will read a life of Raleigh named in Mr. Mudie's list of new books, who would never read an old one.

A History of the Free Churches of England from A.D. 1688-A.D. 1851. By HERBERT S. SKEATS. London: Arthur Miall.

The history of English Nonconformity is one of which we may well be proud. Since the first days of Christianity, when the apostolic churches found themselves in numerical insignificance, bore the utmost test of obloquy and persecution, and grew to a numerical magnitude and social strength which commanded the recognition and homage of Constantine, there has been no such history of simple principle and conscientious conviction, bravely maintained and carried to its triumph against all the odds that organized power commands. Nay, the triumph is the more signal, inasmuch as it has been not the cause of Christianitya pure and noble religion against Paganism, a corrupt and debased onebut the cause of only a true and free embodiment of Christianity against a false and authoritative one. The established church as well as the free churches has had the strength and sanctity of Christian doctrine and morality; and men are less urgent when fundamental doctrine and morality are common, than when they are on one side only. It took nearly three centuries of obloquy, opposition, and persecution to achieve the triumph of Christianity. It has taken nearly three centuries of almost equal disadvantage to achieve the triumph of free religious life and equal social status which apparently is just at hand.

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It is easy enough in a retrospect of the history of English free churches, especially with our modern lights, to hit upon defects, to demonstrate incongruities of theory and principle, accidental results into which men blundered, ex post facto systems, men inconsistent with principles but half understood, ignorant men, coarse-minded men, men guilty of great extravagancies in every department of church thought and life, free churches vulgarized by the increasing preponderance of the plebeian ' element,' great contrasts in culture and power even among ministers. We may well afford to disregard such like reproaches, they have their parallels or equivalents in every history; and if reminiscences of this kind are to be indulged in, Nonconformists will hardly be at a disadvantage. It is, moreover, somewhat ungenerous to inflict social and educational disabilities, and then reproach us with them. If, moreover, notwithstanding these disabilities, Nonconformists in England have multiplied like the Israelites in Egypt, the à fortiori argument is very obvious; if, notwithstanding all these advantages, Established churches have not been able to compete with Free churches, it only makes the indictment against them the more damnatory. We hear, too, a great deal about the greater degree of real spiritual freedom in Established churches. It is, to say the least, a great anomaly if it be so; while in fact all the liberalism of the country during the last two centuries has been among the Free churches. A Nonconformist Tory is as rare as a Radical bishop, much more rare than a Liberal rector. Somehow or other Nonconformist ministers are not conscious of any want of liberty, may it not be because they have no fetters to gall them? There are, of course, characteristic evils and disabilities in Nonconformist churches, but somehow or other they are rarely those that, according to the theorists of the Establishment, ought to be prominent and painful. Most Nonconformists, we imagine, simply smile when men like Dean Stanley speak of the lack of freedom to think and act that there must be in Nonconforming churches. Mr. Skeats's history will help to dispel many such illusions; it is the record of generations of brave, manly, successful struggle for freedom of thought and life against both creeds and churches; of men with noble instincts of liberty commonly doing a greater work than they suspected. Mr. Skeats has done a great service in bringing together into one compact volume the course of this struggle from the Revolution to the present time, introducing it by an able retrospect of the various forms and degrees of ecclesiastical freedom that had been previously asserted. He has done his work with very great ability; his research has been minute, his breadth of view is comprehensive, his estimates fair and philosophical, and his presentation simple, lucid, and elegant. He necessarily passes over the ground rapidly, but with sufficient leisure to give completeness of outline, while ample references enable more extended investigation if it be desired. The men who fill his canvas are admirably sketched with equal succinctness and vividness; a few touches and the characteristics of each are conveyed to the mind. It is interesting just now to examine under Mr. Skeats's guidance the great Comprehension scheme of 1689, and the lesser endeavours that preceded it. Men who think that union is more important than truth or liberty, may well regret their failure, but men who think that establishments are per se inimical to both, have abundant cause to rejoice therein. We care but little for organized union; almost uniformly truth, liberty, and life have suffered from it. The essential condition of freedom and health is diversity-diversity of belief, church, and worship-and we shall do well to remember just now that the only thing worth striving for is a true brotherhood of churches, a determination

that no diversities of belief or practice shall disturb our confidence or lessen our esteem and affection, even while we strenuously contend for what we may deem the truth.

A fatality has always demented men in power:-a determination to concede nothing to right or conscience, but to enforce conformity if possible-if not, to disqualify Nonconformity. Mr. Skeats shows how often great opportunities have thus been lost. Calamy affirms that at least two-thirds of the Nonconformists at the Revolution were anxious for comprehension upon reasonable terms. So before, in 1662, the Act of Uniformity called thousands of Nonconformists into existence, while subsequently the movement of Whitfield and Wesley was driven out, like Hagar and Ishmael, only to multiply in the desert. More by its intolerance than by its opinions the Establishment has made Dissenters; and it is so still. The village clergyman, sometimes the town clergyman, may feel himself in a position to treat the Nonconformist with condescension, hauteur, or scorn; but if he imagines that thereby he diminishes his dissent he is greatly mistaken; he repeats the folly of the north wind in the fable. Dissent, like all other forms of conviction, prospers under oppression, and by-and-by the Nemesis comes, in a population leavened with it: the clergyman in his deserted dignity in the parish church, and the Nonconformist chapel crowded with vulgar tradesmen and peasants; pretty much, we suppose, as it was in the upper room at Jerusalem, to the great indignation and contempt of the Jewish priests. Mr. Skeats's history of modern dissent from the time of Wesley is full of vivid interest, and is narrated for the first time. Several histories of Dissenters have been written, but they are such as only determined students will read. Mr. Skeats has produced a volume that will be interesting to the general reader. He has skilfully unfolded the motives and the course of action of the various champions of Free church life, and has thus furnished a philosophy as well as a history of Dissent. In Nonconformist families this will, we trust, be a household book, and will make their younger members familiar with their glorious principles and no less glorious ancestry; while in the crisis of their present perplexities, churchmen may ponder its pages with advantage.

QUAKER LITERATURE.

The Fells of Swarthmoor Hall and their Friends. By MARIA WEBB. 2nd Edition. London: F. B. Kitto. 1867.

The Penns and Penningtons of the Seventeenth Century. By MARIA WEBB. London: F. B. Kitto. 1867.

Thomas Shillitoe, the Quaker Missionary. By WILLIAM TALLACK. London: S. W. Partridge. 1867.

Peter Bedford, the Spitalfields Philanthropist. By WILLIAM TALLACK. London: S. W. Partridge. 1865.

Hannah Lightfoot; Queen Charlotte and the Chevalier D'Eon. By W. J. THOMS. London: W. G. Smith. 1867.

We have been made familiar in the Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family, and its companion volumes by Mrs. Charles, with the domestic life of religious sections of the community, both in this country and Germany, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the first two

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volumes in our list, got up in an equally attractive style, Mrs. Webb introduces us to another phase of religious biography, the family life of the early Quakers. The real internal life of Quakerism is a terra incognita even to many who are well-read in the various aspects of Christian life; this singular people are even now almost as little understood by the world generally as are the American Shakers, or some of the other peculiar sects introduced to us by Mr. Hepworth Dixon in his New America.' This no doubt is due in great measure to the awkward and almost unintelligible phraseology, in which not only their doctrinal works, but also the majority of their biographies are written, rendering them very unprofitable reading to all except members of their own society. That some of the best of their own writers are not unaware of this defect in their literature was shown by the different style adopted by Mr. Seebohm in his Memoir of Stephen Grellet,' which ensured for that admirable biography a general popularity hitherto unknown in Quaker literature. Mrs. Webb has still further improved upon this example, and her two interesting volumes are admirably free from any conventionality of style. It must not, however, be supposed that, like Mrs. Charles's works, they are fiction founded on fact; we have here nothing but genuine history, based to a considerable extent upon letters and other private documents laboriously hunted up and never before published.

The Fells of Swarthmoor Hall' is a sketch of the lives of some of the earliest members of the Quaker body, grouped round the central figure of Margaret Fell, the wife of George Fox, the founder of the sect. Margaret Fell was herself of the seed of the martyrs; her maiden name was Askew, and she was lineally descended from Anne Askew, who suffered martyrdom in 1546, and who was the last woman burnt at the stake for heresy in this country. Her first husband was Judge Fell,—a man not without mark in his day,-the owner of Swarthmoor Hall in Lancashire, Justice of the Peace, and Member of Parliament for Lancaster. During the Civil War he attached himself to the Parliamentary party; but in the latter part of Cromwell's administration, he became dissatisfied with some of the proceedings of the government, and retired from active public life. Judge Fell appears to have been a man of high personal character, and an honest, upright magistrate; and though he never joined the Friends of Truth,' his house was always open to George Fox and his fellow professors; and his efforts to shield the members of the obnoxious sect from unjust persecution, involved him in much obloquy with his brother magistrates. His wife was very early 'convinced of the truth' by George Fox's preaching, and, being a woman gifted with remarkable powers of mind, soon became a shining light among the Quakers.

The student of religious history will read with interest Mrs. Webb's account of the rise and tenets of the early Quakers. Partaking to the full the religious zeal, the excitement, and the controversial spirit of the age, the Friends of Truth' nevertheless presented some peculiarities, which made them as remarkable at that time as their successors are now: The 'plainness of speech, behaviour, and apparel,' as their 'Advices' have it, is regarded in the present day as a mere harmless eccentricity; and the majority of their younger members, still attached to the distinguishing principles of the body, are now abandoning these peculiarities, as having no foundation in their religious faith. In those days, however, it was very different. To such an extent did men then carry subserviency in manner and language towards those higher in station than themselves, that a firm stand was needed to be taken by those who held as an article of their creed the perfect equality of all