that it was the last act his lord did, to confirme and ratify the said last will and testament. Saing, with a sad heart, for the want of this will to sett all right in the family, we were all most destroyed."

It does not seem, however, that the discovery did so much good as was to be expected, for Mrs Thornton was more or less in contention with her brother Christopher until her dying day. Irish estates were hard to manage, and difficult to get profit from, or any settlement of, in that day as at this. The poor lady had many oppositions and troubles to meet with. She had many children, and many deaths among them. Her husband was ailing, unthrifty, and of a melancholy temperament, and her sad forebodings in marrying seem to have been to a great extent realised. It is true that once he was dead and interred in "his own alley [aisle] at Stongrave church," he became " my dearest heart" to his wife, and she herself an inconsolable widow; but during his lifetime he would seem to have been an entirely incapable person, leaving everything upon her hands, and signalising himself only by sudden mortgages of his estate, and engagements to pay money which he did not possess. Mrs Thornton was careful and troubled about many things, it is evident, out of one vexation into another, with enemies who did all they could to harm her. A certain Mistress Anne Danby, with a malicious maid Barbary, who tells evil stories to her discredit, appear dimly in a mist of passion and tears, declaring her to be naught, and her parents naught, which unfounded accusation against the dead father and mother who were her pride, and from whose higher estate she had condescended to Mr Thornton, who was but one of the small gentry, made her "swound" with indignation and distress, although on her own side

of the question we find plenty of friends, and one good, honest friendservant attached to the family all her life, who closed Lady Wandesforde's eyes, and reappears on the scene whenever there is anything wanted-the good Dafeny (Daphne) who cares for Mistress Alice when she is a girl, and defends her when an injured wife. The muddle, however, into which the troubled woman gets in these unfortunate moments is beyond our power to follow. The reader will perceive that it is not too easy at any time to keep the thread of her discourse; and when it is accompanied by the impassioned recollections of wrong, even though she is piously glad to know that these wrongs have been avenged by Providence, her style baffles description. Altogether, our glimpse into the curious dim interior where the father has periodical fits of palsy and a continuous melancholy, where the mother is striving always hotly, tearfully, with a sense of wrong, to manage the common affairs and get her children provided for, is not a happy one. There is a young curate in the background, afterwards Dr Comber, Dean of Durham, but for years established in the house at East Newton as a sort of chaplain and catechist, amusing Mr Thornton with his facetious conversation, declaring his love for young Alice, the gentle Nally, when she was but fourteen, and, slanderers said, making himself agreeable under this cover to her still young mother, whose presence introduces a possible tragedy into the narrative. But he marries Nally eventually, notwithstanding that she too has the smallpox and loses her lovely complexion, and becomes a well-known divine and dignitary of the Church; so that no doubt all was right. The second daughter also marries a clergyman,—no very satisfactory match for a gentleman's daughter in these days; and

the only son, much longed for and prayed for a little Samuel devoted from his birth to God's service, and showing all the sweetness of premature devotion while still a child -would seem to have been a very unsatisfactory man, and died early before his mother; so that the poor soul had but little consolation, one way or other, in her life. Her letter to this cherished boy, when he is supposed to be recovering from a fever apparently brought on by his own careless life, is heart-rending: "Your poore and desolate mother who has moned herselfe away for your iniquitys, and now must suffer much more by your calamitys," she calls herself. "Sonn, I cannot adde any more for teares, which I pour out for you with my humble prayers," she says. This was forty years from the time when she entered sick and sorry into the marriage which brought her so little good. She died at eighty, after restoring with sound rafters her "alley" in Stongrave Church, and handing on her mother's "harpsicall virginals," along with the more solid parts of her property, to a number of Combers and Purchases, her progeny through the humble marriages her daughters had made.

We must add her contribution to the religious history of the time from the Cavalier side :

"Since the sad and dismall times of distraction in Church and State, the people in most of the northerne country was much deprived of the benefitt of those holy ordinances of the Word and Sacraments; but especially of the latter, which, with the use of the Lord's Praier, was wholey laid aside, as under the notion of reliques of idolatrie and popish supperstition. Soe that, least we should offend God by serveing Him in His own way and command, supperstitiously, and pray to Him in His own words, there was found out another manner of worship, by presenting to His Majesty

praier contineually out of our owne braine composed, and that not with And the premeditation too often. Lord's Praier was by many despised glected out of a compliance with the as drie and insipid, by others netimes. Alsoe the Holy Sacrament, which was the testimoniall of the highest act of our Saviour's love to us lost men, was had in contempt as useless to the Church of Christ.

Noe wonder, then, if we were brought to such plagues and confusion in this land, whoes pride was soe great and devotion soe dead. But we who thirsted after these waters of life did still all these times affter my dear mother came to Hipswell, as well as at Weschester, injoy this blessing through the mercy of God-even all the time of my mother's life, to my exceeding great sattisfaction and comfort; but affter her death, and my coming from St Nicholas into my own house at East Newton, which was above two whole years, I had not once the opportunity of receaving. For there was not then any minister at Stongrave which did administer the Sacrament, nor had done there for many years. Soe that I was holy destitute of an opportunity to perform that comfortable refreshing duty which my soul longed for and grieved much for the want thereof. But I could not obtaine that

happiness, in regard that the ministers had not given it on this side during the warres; nor was it again established here (August 1662) since the coming of the king. Neither indeed had we any minister settled at Stongrave, our parish church, which was a great griefe to me."

We need not point out the extraordinary peculiarities of Mrs Thornton's spelling. She seems to have had a great inclination to put in double consonants wherever it was practicable, which does not hinder her from cutting one out whenever it strikes her fancy. The science of orthography seems in those days to have had no existence. But Mrs Thornton is a Johnson in comparison with some of her less cultivated correspondents.

cussed in public by statesmen and politicians during these long years of peace and prosperity? A reasonable answer to this is, that it is this very duration of peace and prosperity which diverts the current of men's thoughts away from war. A new generation grows up in the course of it, which has no knowledge and therefore no fear of the difficulties of war, and whose wish is father to the belief that war at least, such war as their predecessors suffered under-will never occur again. Some indications of such a belief might have been observed at the time of the first great International Exhibition in 1851. A sort of hope was in the air then that that great worldmeeting would be the beginning of a new era in international polities, in which the peaceful rivalries of commerce would take the place of ancient animosities; but, alas! it proved to be the burial of the pipe of peace instead of the hatchet of war, and to be the birthday of a generation of wars that have succeeded each other with little intermission ever since.

This same hope in perpetual political sunshine caused our country, notably among others, to be ruled mainly during the long peace by political economists, who represented the best spirit of the peaceful aspirations of their generation, and also its moderate capability in politics. Those great politicoeconomical maxims which a previous generation of statesmen had been satisfied to keep in a secondary position, in company with like general maxims of humanity and temperance, were now elevated into the first rank, and became a primary article in their political creed. To buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, whether they were in or out of the country, was no longer a mere abstract truth in

national economics, to be applied or not as suited the other political requirements of the day, but a sort of shibboleth through which to govern nations, and a panacea for all other political difficulties.

Hence when a time came that the population began to outgrow the supply of food producible in the country, the people and their rulers were prepared to apply this all-powerful nostrum to a trouble that was keenly felt by everybody, and to which it appeared a simple and satisfactory remedy. The supply of cheaper food that came in from the outside world assisted the general prosperity of the long peace in forcing on the commercial enterprise of the country; and this, again, demanded a fresh application of the nostrum to supply the raw food for its manufacturing needs; and as the manufacturing population increased rapidly under the stimulus, still larger supplies of food were quired, leading to further extensions of the great panacea -until, in the delirium of hope that the secret of universal peace had been discovered, almost all restrictions on commerce, food - supplies, and everything else, were swept away.

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And as long as this country was in a position to control the markets of the world in manufactures, and as long as peace lasted, this new political system succeeded beyond expectation; but when war began to interfere with the supply of raw material, as in 1863, and when the competition of foreign manufactures began to interfere with our control over the markets, as is happening now, there appeared to be another side to the picture; and now the rule of free trade seems to be subject to greater dangers than the ordinary political system.

The greatest of these dangers is that included in the question now submitted for consideration.

We

now draw nearly half of our ordinary food-supply from foreign countries. In a few years, when the population will have increased, and the supply of home produce in food will remain about the same, we shall draw fully one-half of what we may call the ordinary food—that is, bread-stuffs of all kinds, and meat of all kinds-from abroad. Some authorities seem to think that the home produce will be increased in future years, partly by expected improve ments in the processes of agriculture, and in the conditions under which it is carried on, and partly from the difficulty of foreign food-supplies competing with the home growth. But even if this fulfils the sanguine hopes of its believers, there is an absolute limit to the home produce it is only postponing to a few years later the time when the population will have so far outgrown the home supply that half, and more than half, the consumption must be got from abroad. The effect of a war with any one of the Great Powers of the world upon this supply would be immediately felt, not only in the reduction of the supply itself, but in the risk and expense attending the carriage of the whole of that half of our food that comes from abroad. We can form some idea of the effect it would have on prices from the fluctuations in the price of corn before the Corn Laws were repealed. Then our population was mainly supplied with food from our own country; and yet the effect of variable harvests, both in our own and other countries, was sufficient in time of profound peace to cause such extreme and sometimes sudden changes (owing to speculation) in prices, that it was used as one of the strong arguments for the freer introduction of foreign corn; and the steady price at which corn has stood upon the whole, since its free import, has been held to be a strong

evidence in favour of the advantage of that measure.

If, then, this fluctuation occurred when only a small part of the whole supply came from abroad, what will be the effect of an uncertainty in the supply of half the whole quantity required? The rise in prices will not be merely in proportion to the loss from the one country we happened to be at war with, but will include the war risks upon the remainder, and the effect of those risks upon the ordinary speculations, and on the ordinary fluctuations owing to weather, &c.

In former wars the price was to some extent limited by the extra produce from the country, stimulated by the circumstances. This was when the ordinary produce nearly provided for the whole wants, and therefore only a proportionately small increase was required-still, however, insufficient to prevent its being comparatively very dear. But can any one suppose that, under any possible rise in prices, the land in these islands could be suddenly made to produce double, or even half as much again, as it does in ordinary times? The extreme amount of possible increase would bear a small proportion to that part of the supply subject to war risks, and therefore in a very much less degree would it influence the general prices.

The political economist would reply to this fear about the effect of a war with one or even more countries on our food-supplies, that we could hardly expect to be at war with the whole world at once; and that it is the great merit of free trade, that it enables us to draw our supplies of every kind from any part of the world most convenient to ourselves,—and therefore, that it affords us the widest possible basis for our food-supply under any circumstances of difficulty, whether in war or peace: