But this axiom has been so completely disproved, that no man with any knowledge of the historical progress of the last century would now think of defending it. Long before the time of Lucius we find monks almost every where in the Church; Ussher* has collected the testimonies of their presence in England; though several centuries later than Lucius, they are not lightly to be disregarded; but stronger proofs are desirable. Still we must not forget that, as far as ever we can push our researches into the ancient British Church, we find the monastic life flourishing; so much so, that it is the very basis of the ecclesiastical régime. These considerations, however, are far from being decisive. And it must be owned, with some regret, that no writer anterior to the Norman. Conquest has attributed the foundation of St. Martin's to the first Christian British king. We must, then, content ourselves with the assurance that the church was built before the Romans quitted the island. On this point Bede's testimony is decisive. Moreover, the present state of the church attests its Roman origin. Not that I suppose the actual building to be that which existed in St. Augustin's time; I agree with Gibbs, that "the present church of St. Martin is not the old one spoken of by Bede, as it is generally thought to be, but is a structure of the thirteenth century; though it is probable that the materials of the original church were worked up in the masonry on its reconstruction, the walls being still composed in part of Roman bricks." Here, as we have seen, Queen Bertha prayed; and here Liudhard performed the functions of his ministry, after reconsecrating the church, as we are expressly told in the ancient legend preserved by Capgrave, and in Goselin's life of St. Augustin.

But a far more important fact is, that a real episcopal see existed in this church till after the Conquest. We have several proofs of this; the oldest being, if I am not mistaken, in the life of Bishop Lanfranc, by Milo-Crispin, monk of Bec, and a contemporary of St. Anselm. He says, "In a suburb of Canterbury is a church of St. Martin, in which (it is reported) there was in old times an episcopal see; and (as they say) it had a Bishop before Lanfranc passed over to those parts. But as the authority of the canons evidently forbids that there should be two Bishops together in one city, Lanfranc ordered that a Bishop should be no longer ordained for the place." The parentheses, ut fertur, ut aiunt, do not in the least compromise the authority of this account. Milo employs them only because the facts came to him by report, and because he wondered at them. But the fact of Lanfranc's order being made, distinctly proves that when he first came over, there was a Bishop of St.

pp. 66, sqq.

+ We should be glad to see the question of King Lucius fully discussed by our learned correspondent. He is doubtless aware of the grave reasons that exist for doubting the story altogether. It would be especially interesting to have the matter treated with reference to Schöll, De ecclesiasticæ Britonum Scotorumque Historia Fontibus. Berol. 1850.—ED.

cap. xiii. num. 32.

Martin's. Gervaise of Canterbury, in his Acts of the Archbishops, says, in the chapter about St. Elphege, "the Archbishop of Canterbury once had a chorepiscopus, who resided in the church of St. Martin's, outside the town; but when Lanfranc came he was abolished, as we understand was the case all over the world." From a comparison of these passages, it appears that St. Martin's was a cathedral church, and that its titular Bishop was chorepiscopus of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Not that he was a chorepiscopus proper; we have precise information about his functions. Wharton* gives a historical fragment on the institution of the archdeaconry of Canterbury, written early in the fourteenth century, which contains some special information about the see of St. Martin. "From the time of St. Augustin, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, to that of Archbishop Lanfranc of blessed memory, for 472 years there was no archdeacon in the city or diocese of Canterbury. But from the time of Bishop Theodore, the sixth from St. Augustin, to that of Lanfranc aforesaid, there was in the church of St. Martin, in the suburb of Canterbury, a Bishop, who was ordained by Theodore with authority of Pope Vitalian, and who in the whole city and diocese of Canterbury supplied for the Archbishop in ordinations, consecrations of churches, confirmations, and other episcopal offices, for he had all jurisdiction in the city and diocese by authority of the Archbishop, when the see was full; in the absence of the Archbishop and vacancy of the see, he exercised the authority of the chapter over the whole province for 399 years, to the time of Lanfranc aforesaid." This shows, first, that the Bishop of St. Martin's had no ordinary jurisdiction in the diocese of Canterbury; he was not even what the Germans call a Weihbischof, or suffragan, with a title in partibus. These often perform episcopal functions, even in presence of the Bishops, and moreover supply the place of Vicarsgeneral. Nor, secondly, was the Bishop of St. Martin's an archdeacon. He had no other duties to the see of Canterbury than to supply for the absent Archbishop, and to fulfil at his death the duties which, since the Council of Trent, have been those of the Vicar Capitular. Doubtless all this was precarious at first; but established customs grow up by the mere repetition of things done simply by deputy. No other writer than the one just quoted assigns the establishment of the see of St. Martin's to the times of Theodore, or the authority of Pope Vitalian; no trace of this opinion is found in the numerous writings on the administration of the archbishopric. In the letter of Vitalian to Theodore, confirming to him. all the rights formerly conferred on Augustin, there is not a word about the establishment of a Bishop to supply for the Archbishop, absent or dead. Moreover it is clear, from Milo's account, that Lanfranc knew of no particular papal authority, as he abolished the see simply as contrary to the canons.

Thomassint has two passages on the see of St. Martin, sup* Anglia Sacra, tom. i. p. 150.

† De Disciplin. Eccles. pars i. lib. i. c. xxix. et pars i. lib. iii. cap. xli,

pressed by Lanfranc. He thinks it was either a bishopric established in a monastery, or else a British bishopric. He shows that in many monasteries there were formerly lines of Bishops-a fact which nobody denies, but which is inapplicable to the case in hand; because it is clear that, after the restoration of the church under Ethelbert, it was never monastic. To make it a British bishopric, he says, "There is some appearance that the Bishops who resided in this church were those of the ancient Britons, as distinguished from the successors of St. Augustin, the apostle of the English. Properly it was only of the English and Saxons newly arrived from Germany into Great Britain that St. Gregory and St. Augustin were the apostles; there still were, and were for a long time afterwards, a considerable number of the ancient British who were Christians and Catholics, having their own clergy and Bishops. And if the greater part of them retired into Wales, this could not have prevented some remaining in the other provinces of so large a kingdom." But the great difficulty of this theory is, that it is utterly inconsistent with all that we know of the districts occupied by the Anglo-Saxons, and particularly of Kent, still more of Christ Church and St. Martin's, Canterbury.

My own opinion is simply, that St. Liudhard established a see at St. Martin's; that the ordinary jurisdiction of the Bishop did not extend beyond the enclosure, or the cemetery, around the church; that St. Liudhard had a line of successors up to the time of Bishop Lanfranc, who, finding that they had become in a manner deputy Bishops to the Archbishop, thought that this was having two Bishops in one see, and so abolished the suburban bishopric, as contrary to the canons. Doubtless this opinion has the appearance of being a bare guess; but it has a basis partly in history, partly in ecclesiastical discipline. When the Anglo-Saxons invaded the southern and eastern parts of England, they enslaved the inhabitants who could not escape in time. St. Gildas the Wise says so. The clergy, especially the Bishops, behaved precisely as the Spanish Bishops did afterwards, at the Moorish invasion. They retired to the mountains of the west. Now it was ever a principle of ecclesiastical government, that when a Bishop is taken by pagans or schismatics, or prevented by them from administering his diocese, his see is considered in a manner vacant, and his jurisdiction devolves on his presbytery or chapter; or, in case of their dispersion, it is the duty of the neighbouring Bishops to provide as well as they can for the wants of the faithful of the widowed diocese. This principle is formally enunciated in Boniface VIII.'s decretal Si quis Episcopus, and applied by St. Gregory the Great to England, in his letter to Thierry and Theodebert, kings of the Franks, wherein he severely condemns the supineness of the French Bishops, in neglecting to provide for the religious wants of their neighbours, the AngloSaxons, whose "earnest longing for the grace of life had," he says, "reached his ears." Though St. Gregory only speaks here of the Anglo-Saxons, it is evident that he considers the countries occupied

by them as deprived of Bishops; and consequently he declares that it was the duty of the French Bishops to extend their apostolic functions to them. As we have seen, Liudhard, Bishop of Senlis, had gone to Canterbury, and had fixed his chair in St. Martin's; this was in itself the establishment of a new see; for at that time there was no need of all the formalities now requisite, and it was no part of the general discipline that no new bishopric should be erected without the consent of the Holy See. Liudhard, then, was real Bishop of St. Martin's, but his flock was very small; I doubt whether it was much more than Bertha and her suite. It seems certain that Liudhard would have attempted to dispose the Anglo-Saxons to receive the Gospel; he was a saint, therefore he must have been zealous. And the letter of St. Gregory the Great to the kings of France shows that the Saxons begged to be instructed. But it seems that Ethelbert was afraid of appearing to favour the propagation of the Gospel by a Bishop who was countryman of his wife Bertha; perhaps he did not like to seem to be under French influence, for fear of awakening the national susceptibilities,-who knows? It is certain that Christ Church, inside the town, was not assigned to the queen and Bishop Liudhard, but that Ethelbert granted them a church situated some way out of the town; an evident sign that his policy was not favourable to the propagation of the faith by the queen's chaplain.

It seems undeniable, then, that there were either national or personal obstacles to the zeal of Liudhard, and that his flock was very small. I need not relate how Augustin received little by little a much wider liberty of preaching, so that he soon became master of the position. The consequence was, that, as he had been the Apostle of the Anglo-Saxons, he was nominated by the Pope to the archbishopric of Canterbury. But this could not annihilate the bishopric of St. Martin's, whose rights remained inviolate, however its territory might have been straitened. These rights were only abolished about 1075. At that time Lanfranc was Archbishop; the Bishop of St. Martin's died. The Archbishop refused to consecrate a successor. Matters remained thus for some time; but soon afterwards the Prelate instituted the archdeaconry, and conferred it on a clergyman named Valerius, to whom he assigned a house near the monastery of St. Gregory, in one of the suburbs. The archdeacon could fulfil most of the duties which formerly fell to the Bishop of St. Martin's during the absence of the Archbishop.

After the suppression of the bishopric, the question would arise, To whom is the church to go? Ecclesiastical law would have given it directly to the Archbishop, if the Bishop had been a suffragan of Canterbury. But though the writer of the history of the archdeaconry says that Lanfranc, "alium substituere non decrevi," I should be sorry to affirm that this bishopric was not, so to say, acephalous; hence perhaps it was, that, so far as I know, his name is never found as having been present at councils, enthronisations of Archbishops, or other ceremonies, where a suifragan would natu

rally have been. But I am far from being positive, because my researches on this point have not been sufficiently minute. And, in general, I wish this letter to be taken, not so much as a definite essay, but as a series of questions proposed to those who have more time, more sagacity, and more books on English ecclesiastical antiquities, than I have.

Schmidt Weissenfels: Geschichte der französischen RevolutionsLiteratur.-History of the Literature of the French Revolution, 17891795. (Prague, 1859.) This book deserves attention as the first attempt, so far as we know, to treat of a very important but neglected branch of a popular subject. And it is the novelty of the subject, not the merit of the writer, that induces us to notice the work. Of his competency to write on French subjects, we may judge by his translating (p. 345) the title of Camille Desmoulins' paper, Le Vieux Cordelier, "The Old Shoemaker." Equally crude are his notions of the revolutionary theory, of which he says that "the first distinct traces are to be found in the Telemachus of Fenelon" (p. 4). Fenelon there addresses a king with the words, "It is by a contract made with the people that they are your subjects will you begin by violating your fundamental title? They owe you obedience only by reason of this contract; and if you violate it, you no longer deserve that they should observe it." So far from resembling, as our author affirms, the language of the Constituante, this is nothing more than has been repeatedly declared by Popes and prelates, and acknowledged by the princes themselves. It is the principle of legitimate resistance. Warnings of a more direct kind were not uncommon in the age which witnessed the calamities of the last years of Louis XIV. All the great preachers of the day, -for Bossuet and Bourdaloue died in the very year of the first great reverse, the battle of Blenheim,―preached penance, and pointed out the public evils against which repentance is a remedy. Before them, Marshal Catinat is said to have been the first to say that nothing would go well until the order of things had been overturned in France. There were signs, too, which lay deeper than those of the political world. "I find," writes Leibnitz in 1703, "that opinions of this kind are gradually insinuating themselves into the minds of men of the world, who direct others, and on whom depend public affairs, and penetrate into popular books, disposing all things for the general revolution with which Europe is menaced, and utterly destroying all that remains in the world of the generous sentiments of the ancients. If men can yet be cured of this epi