haustion. As the sun of feudal power in England went down, it blazed forth with the light of a larger and redder orb through the clouds of war that gathered around its setting. During the whole extent of England's history, under the Saxon, Dane, or Norman, the mightiest of her barons was the king-maker Warwick. It was his power that made Edward king and his that unmade him. It was his power that dethroned King Henry and his that restored him. Each monarch in turn became the prisoner and captive of this great earl. With princely revenues and estates, Warwick's vassals were an army; and some notion could be formed of the force he could, at will, bring armed into the field, from the fact that he is said to have daily feasted, at his numerous manors and castles, upwards of thirty thousand persons. The other nobles possessed, in their degree, the power of an armed feudal retinue, ready to follow their lord to battle in any cause of his choosing; and thus there was a baronial power of which modern England shows only the shadow. As the traveller now beholds the stately walls of Warwick Castle, or wanders amid the ruins of Kenilworth, "Where battlement and moated gate Of hoary Time to decorate," he can scarce with all the impulse given to his imagination call up the vision of the armed hosts which, some three hundred years ago, could, at a moment's summons, be gathered there in battle array. The war of York and Lancaster was a self-exhausting contest of the nobles. At the battle of Northampton the order was given through the field to strike at the lords, knights, and esquires, rather than at the common people. In the course of the war eighty princes of the blood were killed, and the ancient nobility nearly annihilated. Reed. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY. THE fifteenth century belongs to those rare epochs in the history of the world, in which all the efforts of the human mind are invested with a determinate and common character, and manifest an unswerving direction towards a single object. The unity of these endeavours, the success with which they were crowned, and the vigor and activity displayed by entire nations, give grandeur and enduring splendor to the age of Columbus, of Sebastian Cabot, and of Vasco de Gama. Intervening between two different stages of cultivation, the fifteenth century forms a transition epoch belonging at once to the Middle Ages and to the commencement of modern times. It is the epoch of the greatest discoveries in geographical space, comprising almost all degrees of latitude, and almost every gradation of elevation of the earth's surface. To the inhabitants of Europe it doubled the works of Creation, while at the same time it offered to the intellect new and powerful incitements to the improvement of the national sciences in their physical and mathematical departments. The world of objects now, as in Alexander's campaigns, but with yet more preponderating power, presented to the combining mind the separate forms of sensible objects, and the concurrent action of animating powers or forces. The scattered images offered to the contemplation of the senses, notwithstanding their number and diversity, were gradually fused into a concrete whole; terrestrial nature was conceived in its generality, no longer according to mere presentiments or conjectures floating in varying forms before the eye of fancy, but as a result of actual observation. The vault of heaven also offered to the yet unassisted eye new regions, adorned with constellations before unseen. As I have already remarked, at no period has there been offered to mankind a greater abundance of new facts, or fuller ma terials for the foundation of comparative physical geography. I may add, that never were geographical or physical discoveries more influential on human affairs. A larger field of view was opened, commerce was stimulated by a great increase in the medium of exchange, as well as by a large accession to the number of natural productions valued for use or enjoyment; above all, there were laid the foundations of colonies, of a magnitude never before known; and through the agency of all these causes, extraordinary changes were wrought in manners and customs, in the condition of servitude long experienced by a portion of mankind, and in their late awakening to political freedom. When a particular epoch thus stands out in the history of mankind as marked by important intellectual progress, we shall find on examination that preparations for this progress had been made during a long series of antecedent centuries. It does not appear to belong to the destinies of the human race that all portions of it should suffer eclipse or obscuration at the same time. A preserving principle maintains the ever-living process of the progress of reason. The epoch of Columbus attained the fulfilment of its objects so rapidly, because their attainment was the development of fruitful germs which had been previously deposited by a series of highly gifted men, who formed as it were a long beam of light which we may trace throughout the whole of what have been called the Dark Ages. In the history of the contemplation of the universe the discovery of tropical America, by Christopher Columbus, Alonso de Hojeda, and Alvarey Cabral, must not be regarded as an isolated event. Its influence on the extension of physical knowledge, and on the enrichment of the world of ideas, cannot be justly apprehended, without casting a brief glance on the preceding centuries, which separate the age of the great nautical enterprises from the period when the scientific cultivation of the Arabians flourished. That which gave to the era of Columbus its distinctive character, as a series of uninter rupted and successful exertions for the attainment of new geographical discoveries or of an enlarged knowledge of the earth's surface, was prepared beforehand, slowly, and in various ways. It was so prepared by a small number of courageous men, who roused themselves at once to general freedom of independent thought, and to the investigation of particular natural phenomena; -and by the more extensive knowledge of Eastern Asia, which travelling merchants, and the monks who had been sent as ambassadors to the Mogul princes, circulated amongst those nations of south-western Europe who were most disposed to distant commerce and intercourse, and most eagerly desirous of discovering a shorter route to the Spice Islands. The fulfilment of the wishes which all these causes contributed to excite was in the most important degree facilitated towards the close of the fifteenth century, by advances in the art of navigation, the gradual improvement of nautical instruments, magnetical as well as astronomical; and finally, by the introduction of new methods of determining the ship's place. Without entering into details in the history of the sciences, we must cite among those who had prepared the way for the epoch of Columbus and Gama, three great names, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, and Vincent of Beauvais. I have given these three in the order of time,— but the name of most importance, and which belongs to the most comprehensive genius, is unquestionably that of Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk of Ilchester, who studied in Oxford and in Paris. All three were in advance of their age, and acted powerfully upon it. From their greater aversion to empty abstractions, they first urged the necessity of experience and the propriety of augmenting the bases of knowledge, and its recognition hrough the medium of the senses. Thus, this direction of men's thoughts was at least indirectly influential on the cultivation of experimental natural knowledge. Humboldt's Cosmos. THE ENGLISH CRIMINAL LAW IN THE PERIOD PRECEDING THE REFORMATION. THE English criminal law was in its letter one of the most severe in Europe; in execution it was the most uncertain and irregular. There were no colonies to draw off the criminals; no galley system, as in France and Spain, to absorb them in penal servitude. The country would have laughed to scorn the proposal that it should tax itself to maintain able-bodied men in unemployed imprisonment; and, in the absence of graduated punishments, there was but one step to the gallows from the lash and the branding iron. But, as ever happens, the extreme character of the penalties for crime prevented the enforcement of them; and benefit of clergy on the one hand, and privilege of sanctuary on the other, reduced to a fraction the already small number of offenders whom juries could be found to convict. In earlier ages the terrors of the Church supplied the place of secular retribution, and excommunication was scarcely looked upon as preferable even to death. But in the corrupt period which preceded the Reformation, the consequences were the worst that can be conceived. Spasmodic intervals of extraordinary severity, when twenty thieves, as Sir Thomas More says, might be seen hanging on a single gibbet, were followed by periods when justice was, perhaps, scarcely executed at all. The State endeavoured to maintain its authority against the immunities of the Church by increasing the harshness of the code. So long as these immunities subsisted, it had no other resource; but judges and magistrates shrank from inflicting penalties so enormously disproportioned to the offence. They could not easily send a poacher or a vagrant to the gallows while a notorious murderer was lounging in comfort in a neighbouring sanctuary, or having just read a sentence from a book at the bar in arrest of judgment, |