you have done in time past, and to be in help of my rude answer unto the King's Majesty, so that I may stand in no displeasure with His Grace."

Another widow, Margaret Lady Audeley, wrote to Cromwell in similar, but still more amusing, terms. Sir George Aylesbury had been sent to her in character of a suitor; but, either ignorant of his errand, or unwilling to appear to know it, she had made him good cheer, simply as a person come from the King. Cromwell wrote to thank her for this, which he considered a favourable omen of the success of the wooing; but she wrote back at once, declaring that she deserved no thanks for entertaining any, though it were the meanest, person that could come from His Majesty; adding, that,

"For any intent or purpose of marriage, either to the said Aylesbury or any other living creature, as yet I have none. And if it shall chance me hereafter to have any such fantasy or mind, (which I pray God I may not have,) it is not he that I can find in my heart to take to my husband, of all creatures alive. And my trust is, that, as the King's Highness hath been always good and gracious Lord unto all other his poor widows, His Majesty will be so much my good and gracious Lord to give me liberty to marry, if ever it be my chance, such one as I may find in my heart to match unto; either else, undoubtedly, I am fully purposed to abide and continue in this estate during my life."-Letters, &c., vol. ii., p. 270.

The minors were in still worse plight than the widows. Their wardship and marriage were commonly bought and sold; and a mother who really loved her child would not unfrequently pay a large sum of money, that he might become her ward. One lady informs us, "I bought my son of my Lord of Norfolk: I must give him £100, to the intent that I would marry my son to his comfort." Noblemen who had daughters frequently bought the wardship and marriage of minor Peers, as the best means of providing suitable sons-in-law; and, if the purchase-money for the husband were faithfully paid, an honorary obligation was thereby made out that the wife's jointure should not be curtailed nor impeded. In a series of angry letters from the Duchess of Norfolk to Cromwell, she complains, amongst other grievances, of the non-payment of her jointure. She urges that her husband had every reason to act differently, "seeing that my Lord my husband chose me himself, for my Lord my father had bought my Lord of Westmoreland for me, and had with me two thousand marks." And she mentions it as an extraordinary circumstance, that Queen Anne Boleyn, who, at that time, especially favoured the Duke of Norfolk, had procured for him the young Duke of Richmond as a husband for his daughter, the Lady Mary, and this "clear favour without any payment; for the King's Grace gat never a penny for my Lord of Richmond." One inconvenience resulting from this system was, that it became the interest

of the guardian to raise and extend the property of the eldest son, at the expense of the widow and younger children; since, the larger the jointure he could afford to assign to his bride, the higher would be the price realized for his sale in the matrimonial market. In consequence, we find complaints very numerous of the deprivations and injustice committed upon these more helpless members of the community. This system extended to the middle orders, where it was felt still more injuriously, as the right of wardship was often considered hereditary, or a perquisite of office. "Alas, my Lord!" exclaims one poor widow, suffering under this grievance; "this is an extreme fashion to use a poor woman; for, an they may have the heir and the land, they care not an I and the other children go a-begging." She thus details the circumstances of her case :

"MY GOOD LORD,—

"Pleaseth your good Lordship to understand, that, fourscore years past, the Abbot of St. Alban's, that was in those days, had, wrongfully, my husband's grandfather to his ward. When he was fourteen years old, the Abbot sold him to a fishmonger of London, and he kept him two years; and then this child ran away from the fishmonger unto a Knight, one Sir Davy Phillip, which Knight married this child unto Mr. St. John's daughter, of Kent, and then the friends of his wife sued with the Abbot, and proved him not his ward. Then the Abbot gave him, in recompence for the wrongs he had done, a farm, which is called Ballard's, beside Luton, in Bedfordshire; but this young man was not contented with that gift. Then the Abbot gave him more, to have an end with him, and made him master of his game. This my father-in-law, Mr. Creke, and my husband did tell me many times; and yet there be old men in the country, and in Rickmansworth parish, that will say thus at this day. Whereupon I lowly desire your good Lordship's help, or else the Abbot that is now will do my children wrong; for he will not show his records, but doth say he will have my son to his ward, and I am not able to go to the law with him, nor never shall have end with him, except it will please your Lordship, of your abundant charity, to send for the Abbot to come afore your Lordship. He is now in London, in a house of his own, by the Charterhouse gate. And thus Jesu save your good Lordship!

"Your poor Beadwoman,

-Letters, &c., vol. ii., p. 267.

"JOANNA CREKE, Widow."

Literature was so completely beyond the pale of ordinary life, that the slightest allusion to a book is a most rare occurrence, except as connected with the change of religion. Our glimpses of the state of science are still more imperfect, if, indeed, science may be said to have existed at all, in the modern acceptation of the term. The practice of surgery was encumbered with much superstition; and its true principles were so imperfectly understood, that experience was often found a

much better safeguard than professional skill, so called. We have an interesting detail, from the pen of a noble lady, of the modes she adopted to cure the fatal sweating-sickness, so prevalent in the summer of 1528. Her letter is addressed to Wolsey :

'My Lord, I beseech Your Grace to have me excused that I do write so boldly unto Your Grace; it is for my poor love unto Your Grace. My Lord, if it would please you, if that you have the sweat, from the which I pray God defend you, for to send me word. I shall send Hogon and William Hastings unto Your Grace, the which shall keep you as well as is possible, after the temperate fashion. I have the experience daily in my house of all manner of sorts, both good and bad; and, thanked be God, there is none miscarried, neither in my house nor within the parish that I am in. For if they that be in danger perceive themselves very sick, they send for such of my house as hath had it, and knoweth the experience, whereby, thanked be God, they do escape; and if they be sick at the heart, I give them treacle and water imperial, the which doth drive it from the heart; and thus have holpen them that have swooned divers times, and that have received the Sacraments of the Church; and divers doth swell at their stomachs, to whom I give setwell to eat, the which driveth it away from the stomach. And the best remedy that I do know in it, is to take little or no sustenance or drink, until sixteen hours be past. And, my Lord, such of your servants as have had it, let them not come about Your Grace of one week after. And thus I do use my servants, and I thank our Lord as yet I have not had it. Vinegar, wormwood, rosewater, and crumbs of brown bread, is very good and comfortable, to put in a linen cloth, to smell unto your nose, so that it touch not your visage. My Lord, I hear say that my Lord of Norfolk hath had the sweat, and that divers in his house are dead, and, as I think, through default of keeping."-Letters, &c., vol. ii., p. 28.

Such was ENGLAND, three hundred years ago:-its King, a bluff, good-natured, but capricious and wilful, tyrant, ruling, where he could, with absolute sway, and, where he could not rule, crushing the daring resister of his will, were he Noble or peasant, and setting at defiance the laws and customs of Western Europe; its Ministry, if such it might be called, dependent upon, and cringing to, the will of the Prime Minister, who was always the personal favourite of the Sovereign; its Parliament little more than the tool of the Court; its Nobility often venal, disorderly, and violent, yet brave, and showing many examples of chivalric bearing; its Priesthood divided in opinion, corrupt in practice, receiving their dicta of faith from the lips of a Monarch, whose character was stained by the foulest crimes; its Commonalty ignorant, superstitious, impulsive, and easily carried away by designing plotters; its commerce circumscribed, its literature insignificant, its science hardly born. Who can recognise our England under such a guise? And what but the interfused ele

ment of pure, religious, Protestant truth, spreading amongst the masses of a nation possessing intrinsically the seeds of that which is good and noble, could have produced, in the space of three centuries, a change much greater than had transpired in double that period previously? And now, if we look forward three centuries,-centuries during which "England expects every man to do his duty," who can foresee the point of religious, commercial, literary, and scientific elevation, which will form the mental vantage-ground of the future historian, who shall exercise his antiquarian predilections, and amuse his readers with a glimpse of ENGLAND UNDER QUEEN VICTORIA?

ART. VII.—1. The Resources of New Granada. By GENERAL MOSQUERA New York: Dwight. 8vo.

2. History of Yucatan: from its Discovery to the Close of the Seventeenth Century. By CHARLES St. JOHN FANCOURT, ESQ. London: John Murray. 8vo.

3. Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro. By A. R. WALLACE. London: Reeve and Co. 8vo.

SHADED maps have been recently employed to convey truth in colours. Two maps on this plan, adapted to the fertility and the present population of the globe, would effectually meet all the fears of the Malthusian philosophers. One would show that the world has never yet contained one-tenth of the number of inhabitants for whom provision has been made; and the other, that the disengaged portions equal the occupied regions in fertility, and excel them in magnitude. They would assure all men that the world was not modelled on too small a scale. The Creator of the earth counted all its inhabitants from the beginning, and his calculations are never erroneous.

We sympathize with those agricultural and economic writers who say that no European country is fully peopled; and we believe that more food could be, and will be, annually extracted, even from Britain or Belgium, than either has yielded hitherto: still, we can suppose a case of over-population in an island, or the corner of a continent, realizing all Malthusian horrors, but only from defective energy among the inhabitants, or the repression of commerce, and not from the want of means, or of room for men to live in the world.

The Old World's gardens and granaries in Western Asia have been, for long, only desolate and dreary wastes,-far-spreading cemeteries of mighty nations and numerous races, with a few shepherds pitching their tents and leading their flocks, like watchers over the dead. The most fertile country of Eastern Europe is only now awaking, amid the tumult of a hostile

Philippe's 401. has not been subscribed in vain. As Englishmen, we somehow have a great anxiety that this memorial should be completed, and if there is any want of funds, we pledge ourselves to collect in the United Service Club ten times his CitizenMajesty's Subscription. But we fear that the design is abandoned, for we see in a late article of the Revue des Deux Mondes, a publication of high authority in France, a full and fair admission that after all that has been said about it—the plain truth is, we [the French] lost the battle, but lost it with honour.'—vol. xix. p. 766.

Before we conclude, we must add one or two important observations suggested by these papers-which, besides the light they throw on the conduct of the Peninsular war, afford an answer to a question which has been often asked, and never, that we know of, quite satisfactorily explained; namely, how it was that all Buonaparte's marshals abandoned him so suddenly, so readily, and apparently so ungratefully. It has been usually accounted for by their having grown old and rich, and being anxious to realise, as it ere, and secure their prodigious but precarious prosperity; and this had no doubt a great immediate effect; but these papers show, we think, a powerful predisposing cause. There seems to have been not one of these haughty marshals whom he did not, at every turn of his temper, treat with an insolence and injustice which would have offended even the most patient man, but which must have been peculiarly and almost intolerably revolting to these parvenu soldiers of fortune, proud, presumptuous, and peppery-many of whom had been his superiors-all his equals; and who exactly in the proportion in which they were inclined to domineer over others, would be alienated and exasperated by such affronts to their own vanity and amour propre. Yet Buonaparte was afraid of them, or rather of the army of which they were representatives -he would offend individuals, but he never ventured on any step that they might feel as a body. He never ventured to establish, and still less to enforce, any clear idea of military subordination amongst the marshals, and seemed rather pleased to see that those who obeyed him would obey nobody else. But with what recollections of affronts and offences he must have stored all their minds ! We see even in the few documents which M. Belmas has brought to light-in so narrow a space, and so short a period of Buonaparte's domination, what extensive dissatisfaction must have existed. We see that every one in succession, Soult, Massena, Ney, Bessières, Marmont, Augerau, Jourdan, Victor, Suchet, Dorsenne, Gouvion St. Cyr, were either ensured or superseded; and that those who were not spontaneously recalled, successively

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