only in questions of tithes, patronage, scandal, make : 66 Esope ane tale puttis in memory How that ane Dog, because that he was pure, Callit ane Sheep to the Consistory Ane certain bread fra him for to recure: Ane fraudful Wolf was judge that time, and bure And on the Sheep send forth ane strait Sum mòn. thus refused on the ground of enmity or other personal objection was very peculiar, and consisted in an arbitration between the judge and party to have the objection disposed of. This is explained in Oughton's Ordo Ju diciorum, a well-known book of practice in Ecclesiastical Law: "Si quis fuerit conventus coram Judice, sibi suspecto ac minus indifferente: Primo et ante omnia facienda est Recusatio in scriptis, contiUtpote; Quia Judex est tibi inimicus (et specinens specificè causas hujusmodi Recusationis : ficandæ sunt hujusmodi Inimicitia) vel quia est Consanguineus partis Adversa; vel quia lites et Controversiæ, inter se et Judicem Recusatum conclusione hujusmodi Materia Recusatoriæ, pendent (specificando easdem) et similia. Et in tenetur Recusans referre causas Recusationis nandi sunt, ex parte Recusantis Arbitri duo vel Et adstatim nomihujusmodi ad Arbitros. tenetur nominare tot Arbitros pro parte sua. tres Probi viri, et Judex (in isto casu Recusatus) Et isti Arbitri Judices fient et judicabunt de causis Recusationis hujusmodi." The citation in ecclesiastical causes, we know, was made under pain of excommunication, which, after being pronounced and This, accordingly, is the course here followremaining for some time in force, might be ed. The Bear, and the Brock, or Badger, followed up by imprisonment and seizure of as arbiters," the matter took on hand;" goods by the secular authorities: and after a long disputation, and examination of authorities, decided that the objection was unfounded, and the cause proceeds. The Sheep is very speedily cast, and ordered, "I, Maister Wolf, partless of fraud and guile, And answer to ane Dog before me here." 66 Peremptourlie, within twa days or three. The execution is made before witnesses, and indorsed upon the writ. The clerk of such courts was generally a notary, which may have led to Henryson's having personally assisted at such proceedings. In this case the Fox officiates in that capacity, while the Gled and Graip, i. e. the kite and vulture, appear as Advocates for the Dog The Sheep has no counsel, but when called upon to plead he makes answer by objecting to the tribunal and whole proceeding "Here I decline the Judge, the time, the place. The mode of proceeding when a judge was In the morality that follows, the silly Sheep is compared "to the poor Commons that daily are oppressed by tyrant men." The animals of prey are the emblems of corrupt officers of justice, who enrich themselves is a sheriff, who, having bought from the by an abuse of their functions. The Wolf king some of the numerous forfeitures of goods and estates which were then common, carries about with him a corrupt jury, in order to enforce his claims. The Raven is The Porteous here referred to was the portable roll of indictments prepared for the Circuit Air, and which continued to be in use till our own time. It is an old English as well as a Scotch word, and is applied to any manual, including prayer-books or breviaries. The Promptorium Parvulorum contains it in this form: "Poortos booke. Portiforium, breviarium." a Coroner or Crowner, who, being intrusted | dition of our own with regard to the Fox, under the Justiciar with the citation and ar- who was known among the Scottish peasantry rest of accused persons for trial at Circuit, by the name of Lowrie, which Henryson corrupts the record or "Porteouss" of the treats as a diminutive of Laurence. But the Indictments, by the deletion or insertion of origin or connexion of the name of Tod the names of the accused, and so extorts Lowrie is, we confess, quite unknown to us. bribes from different parties whom he thus The wolf still existed in Scotland at this threatens. time, but seems to be the subject of no native tradition. The French or Flemish Reynard, however, was freely imported as an exotic production into several of the countries. surrounding the North Sea, and the invention of printing was soon applied to the task of multiplying_translations of it in various directions. A Low German version, in rhyme, made from the Flemish, was printed at Lubeck in 1498, and was long looked upon as an original; while an Eng lish Reynard the Fox, in prose, was printed by Caxton in or soon after 1481, and is said to have been taken from a Dutch rédaction, which was produced at Gouda in 1479. From what source Henryson took those fables which are founded on incidents in the Reynard, it is not very easy to tell; but he seems to impute them to sop, equally with the proper Esopean fables. That the offices of Sheriff and Coroner were at this period liable to great abuse, and needed a close and constant control over them, may be gathered from the Act of James III., 1487, c. 103, which directs that the Sheriff and the Crowner "suld thoill ane assise the last day of the aire" (Circuit). The words of the Act are, "It is statute and ordained, that there be charge given to the Justice, that he in time to cum, the last day of this aire, give ane assise to the Schireffe and Crowner, gif they have used and done their office treulie. And gif they be convict and foundin false therein, that they be punished therefore, after the forme of law and their demerites." It would be interesting to know if this Act or Henryson's fable were the first in date. The complaints of the Sheep as to the miseries and oppressions inflicted on him are given with heartfelt earnestness and considerable power, but we have not room for further extracts. Neither have we room for an analysis of the other sopean Fables of Henryson; but we would particularly refer to the tale of the "Uplandis and the Burges Mouse," which is told with a very happy circumstantiality. In the "Lion and the Mouse," and the "Preaching of the Swallow," there are also passages which would well deserve quota tion. Several of the remaining fables of Henryson belong obviously to the cycle of Reynard the Fox. That very celebrated model of the Animal-Epic seems to have had its native home or habitat in Flanders and the north-east of France, and its characters and topics cannot, we believe, be traced as having any popular currency among the Anglo-Saxons, or among the mixed Teutonic races of England and Scotland. In Scotland we seem to have had some tra The tale of "Schir Chanteclier and the Fox" is from the Nun's Priest's Tale in Chaucer. The tale of the Fox "that beguiled the Wolf in the shadow of the moon," deserves more particular notice, and the original source of it admits of no doubt. It is well known that the Jews formed a very efficient vehicle in the middle ages for conveying stories, as well as other good things, from the East to the West, and that in this way we may explain the importation into Europe of several Oriental fictions, such as the "Seven Wise Masters." Among the individuals of that nation who took a part in this sort of commerce was a Spanish Jew named Moses or Moyses Sephardi, who, being converted to Christianity about the year 1105, took the name of Petrus Alphonsi, that is, Peter Alphonsus' son, in honour of St. Peter, on whose day he was baptized, and of Alfonso, King of Castille, who was his godfather, and whose physician he became. The book by which this learned convert is now best known is his Disciplina Clericalis, so called, as he tells us, from its rendering the clergy well-disciplined or instructed. It consists of a series of moral sayings, maxims, and proverbs from Arabic or other Eastern sources, with illustrations from stories and fables, and quotations of poetry. Among the stories are several that are to be found in Bidpai, and some that appear in the Arabian Nights. The work was translated into French prose in or about the fifteenth century, under the title of La Disci- more than once in the "Tale of Melibeus," The Wolf is satisfied, and desires the Fox to get it, who accordingly descends by one of the buckets, but declares the cheese is too big for him to lift, and desires the Wolf to come down in the other bucket and help him: "Than lichty in the bucket lap the loun; His wecht, but weir, the other end gart rise. The Tod came hailland up, the Wolf yeid doun; Than angerly the Wolf upon him cries: 'I cummand thus downwart, quhy thow uphart hies?' 'Schir,' quod the Tod, 'thus fares it of Fortoun; As ane comes up, scho quheillis ane other doun.'" The Fox thus gets to the surface and escapes, and the Wolf is left in the lurch with the Shadow of the Moon for a cabock. This fable deserves attention in another respect, that it is either a combination of two different stories, which we are now about to mention, or those two stories have been made out of it by disjoining its component parts. There is a fable in the comWolf who overhears a nurse consigning a mon sop, found also in Avianus, of a naughty child to the tender mercies of the lupine species, and who thereupon waits about for some time in the credulous expectation of the threat being fulfilled. This corresponds with the beginning of Henryson's fable. Corresponding to another part of it, there is a story in Reynard, of the Fox The story is this:-"A husbandman, buckets of a well, and afterwards rescuing having gone by mistake into one of the angry with his oxen for ploughing ill, ex- himself by inducing the Wolf, who is passclaims, May the wolf take ye!' The Wolf overhears him, and, encouraged by the of course, in its descent, elevates the lighter ing by, to go into the other bucket, which, Fox, who is also present, accosts the husbandman at his return homeward, and de- leaves the Wolf below. As the two buckets weight to the top, when the Fox escapes and mands the oxen, as having been promised to him. The husbandman demurs, but at last pass each other, Alfonsi does not give an acagrees to refer the matter to the Fox, who animals, but in the Reineke Vos, a convercount of anything passing between the two enters on his judicial duties by trying sep-sation is introduced, which agrees with what arately to cajole both parties. He offers Henryson has made them say. It is singuprivately to decide in the husbandman's lar also, that Pulci, in his Morgante Magfavour in return for the promise of a hand- giore, which was published in 1481, has the some present of poultry to himself and his wife. He then takes the Wolf aside, and :— same incident, and makes the Fox give a exposes the absurdity of his demands, but similar explanation to the Wolf in passing: states the readiness of the other party to give him a good cabock,' or cheese, to let him off. The Wolf wishes to see the cheese, and the Fox leads him to a drawwell, where he assures him it will be found. "Disse la Volpe: Il mondo è fat' a scale, Vedi, compar, chi scende, e chi le sale." We have thus rather a curious proof of the popularity of this part of the story in the fact, that about the very same point of time, three writers, in three different languages, -Broad Scotch, Tuscan, and Low Saxon,were introducing it to their several readers with the same amusing details. It may seem singular that jests or stories which some may now think puerile, should thus have engaged the attention of men of genius and learning, and supplied so much of the material of literature. One explanation may be, that the reading or listening public were then in a state of pupillage; and we may parody Goldsmith's line on the Italians, and say, "The tales of children satisfy the child;" but, after all, it may be doubted whether such jocular fictions, recognised in all ages from India to Iceland, are not as well worth hearing as a great part of our sensational novels, or metaphysical poems. The review we have thus taken of Henryson's productions will support, we hope, the character we ventured to give him at the outset. He was not so great as Dunbar, for he had not his genius or power, but he was also free from his asperity, and from some other faults; and when we compare him in reference to diction and versification, it should he remembered that he is the earliest of his countrymen who wrote any considerable number or variety of poems. works ought to be in the hands of every Scotchman; but they also mark an important stage in the progress of English literature; for they were republished in England, and cannot have been without their influence at the time. Dr. Nott thought it not improbable that Sir Thomas Wyatt was indebted for the idea and plan of his first satire to Henryson's "Two Mice." His The extracts we have given may at the same time afford a sufficient proof and illustration of the vigorous vernacular in which Henryson writes; and we think it cannot be enough remembered that, in an age like the present, when a certain degree of literary power is almost universal, but when, in consequence, a stereotyped set of indirect indications and conventional circumlocutions often take the place of plain and pointed speaking, the faults which become incident to style are best corrected by recurring to writers who could only succeed in their art by expressing their ideas in the shortest, the simplest, the most intelligible, and the most appropriate manner. A familiarity with Chaucer, and the older Scottish poets, and with one of modern date, still greater than any of his older countrymen-we mean Burns -must suggest excellences in diction, which would give additional strength and beauty to the best poetical language of our own day; and it is in this direction accordingly that our greatest poets have been tending since the end of the last century. The provincial dialects of England, though none of them can have received the same polish as our Scottish tongue, have deservedly and with advantage obtained of late a greater share of attention than was formerly paid to them, and examples are not wanting where their rustic called forth as to help in restoring the standand primitive beauties have been so well ard of true English simplicity. Even in Germany vigorous efforts have recently been made to revive the long lost excellences of the Lower Saxon dialects, and if thereby German writers can be led to write with greater clearness, shortness, and precision than most of them at present practise, it will be a blessed change, both for themselves and for their readers. WHAT is the Ecclesiastical Commission? It is an attempt to give practical expression to an original idea, the invention of this cenual office in the Church of England ought tury-the idea that every holder of a spiritto have some duty to do, that he ought to be on the spot where the duty is, and that he ought to have some money-reward for doing it. stormful indignation against sinecures and This great idea first showed itself in pluralities; but the modern pluralist, on whom the storm fell, was nothing to the grand growths in that kind which the rich soil and dank atmosphere of the middle ages could produce. We take two well-nurtured specimens. Bogo de Clare, son of the Earl of Gloucester, in the time of Edward L., held no less than eighteen livings, and was, besides, treasurer of the chapter of York, and dean of Stafford. In his church of Simonbourne, a hurdle out of a cowhouse, smeared with the filth that proved whence it came, was erected instead of carved and fretted reredos; and the vestments and or*We ought perhaps to explain that in the spell-naments of the Minster were used for garing of our extracts we have not followed Mr. Laing's text; but have thought it best, in an article like the present, to adopt often the modern spelling, where the pronunciation did not interfere. ments and posset-cups for the fruitful wives of the city in their extremity, with a grotesque and shocking benevolence. William of Kildesby, the Secretary of Edward III., | diocese about 150 miles long, on condition held within three years these offices:-Mas- that he should have the parish of Bishopster of the Rolls, Privy Seal, Canon of Wet- gate to "retire" to, with its addition of wang, Warden of the chapel in Tickhill 12,000 souls. The diocese included fat Castle, Prebendary of Darlington, Canon of Cheshire, and teeming Lancashire, and the Southwell, of Bath and Wells, of Howden, mountain fastnesses of Westmoreland, with of Lincoln, and of London, and Rector of a part of Cumberland. There were no railWorfield. These do not exhaust the cata- roads; London was distant from Cheshire logue; and they sat so lightly upon the by a day and a night of hard travelling. fortunate ecclesiastic, that when in the latter But, on the other hand, the endowment of years of his life he was moved to make a Chester was very inadequate; it could be pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he was not moved held with the living, but must have been to resign even one of his ecclesiastical dig- declined without that. Accepted it was; nities. and yet it was in perfect sincerity that the Bishop chose for one of the subjects of his Charge, in 1825, the duty of clergymen of residence upon their benefices. The evil was seen and felt, and from a mind so clear and upright it could have nothing but condemnation. The system of commendams and pluralities, rebuked and banished by all kinds of legislation and exhortations, survived in great vigour from Othobon to George IV.; but its hour was come. John Wycliffe, the Reformer, has become a historical puzzle, because of the variety of posts and employments attached to his name. Late writers have cut the knot, by assuming that there were two, or even three, persons of the same name at the same time. If Wycliff of Fylingham, Wycliff of Mayfield, and Wycliff of Leckhamstead are three different persons, at any rate Wycliffe the Reformer was living and holding offices at Oxford whilst he was changing and adding to his preferments in the country; and in an amusing passage he asserts the right of non-residence, and would only reform it in the way of making it easier:-" Also, if such curates been stirred to gone learn God's law, and teach their parishers the gospel, commonly they shallen get no leave of bishops but for gold; and when they shallen most profit in their learning, then shallen they be cleped home at the prelate's will." This complaint is from one who for fourteen years that is, from 1360 to 1374-being the incumbent of at least one country parish, was resident in Oxford, at various colleges, "learning God's law doubt, but making no great haste to "teach his parishers the gospel." After the great mediæval examples, modern cases of pluralism are like our weak attempts at smallpox since the days of vaccination, when compared with the florid luxuriance of the old disease. When the Rev. Dr. Blomfield was offered the bishopric of Chester, being then rector of Bishopsgate in London, a lady of quality hastened to exhort him to take the new, but by no means to resign the old preferment. "Why should you not keep your St. Botolph ?" Why, indeed? It was a parish with the cure of some 12,000 souls; but the tradition from the days of Edward I., to that present day was, that souls could be cured from any distance. Bishop Blomfield was an upright and a candid man, and did much to bring about better things. But in 1824 he accepted a From Why Poor Priests have no Benefices. no Now, when men began in earnest to carry into practice the old truth, that the "labourer is worthy of his hire," with its two corollaries that each should do his own labour, and that he should be recompensed for it, two great obstacles were found in the path. The first was, that some of the episcopal incomes were so small, as to require the addition of some other place of emolument, in order to make the offices tenable. "The incomes of one half of the bishoprics fall below the sum necessary to cover the expenses to which a bishop is unavoidably subject. . . . In considering these incomes, it is necessary to advert not only to the expenses necessarily incurred in journeys for the purposes of confirmation, consecration, and state-official duties; in maintaining ancient and extensive houses of residence; in keeping hospitality; and in contributing to all objects connected with religion and charity in a manner suitable to their station, but to a burden which presses seldom men of wealth. The unavoidable exheavily on newly promoted bishops, who are penses attending their appointment are so considerable, that they may be calculated at the income of one whole year, in most of the sees, and at much more than a year's income in the smaller ones.' It has been seen that the see of Chester was held with a London rectory. Another see was held with a canonry of Westminster. Some people remember how the fretted woodwork of the stalls was covered in one place with padding and leather, because the rich *First Report of Church Inquiry Commission, 1835. |