had been set at liberty for a few shillings. I have met with many convictions for deer-stealing in the Correspondence of the reign of Henry VIII.; I have met with but one instance where the letter of the law was enforced against the offender, unless the minor crime had been accompanied with manslaughter and armed resistance. The leaders of a gang who had for many years infested Windsor Forest were at last taken and hanged. The vagrancy laws sound terribly severe; but, in the reports of the judges on their assizes, of which many remain in the State Paper Office, I have not found one single account of an execution under them. Felons of the worst kind never perhaps had easier opportunities. The parish constables were necessarily inefficient as a police; many of them were doubtless shaped after the model of Dogberry; if they bid a man stand and he would not stand, they would let him go, and thank God they were rid of a knave. There was a sanctuary within reach all over England, even under the very walls of Newgate, where escaped prisoners could secure themselves. The scarcely tolerable license of ordinary times had broken its last bonds during the agitations of the Reformation; and the audacity of the criminal classes had become so great, that organised gangs of them assembled at the gaol deliveries and quarter-sessions to overawe the authorities. Ambitious or violent knights and noblemen interfered to rescue or protect their own dependents. They alone were the guardians of the law, and they at their pleasure could suspend the law; while the habit of admitting plea of clergy, and of respecting precincts of sanctuary, had sunk so deeply into the practice of the country, that, although parliament might declare such privileges curtailed, yet in many districts custom long continued stronger than law. The English, like the Romans, were a people with whom legislation became strong only when it had stiffened into habit, and had entered slowly and formally into possession of their hearts and understandings. Froude.

MARTIN LUTHER (1517).

His

LUTHER'S birthplace was Eisleben in Saxony; he came into the world there on the 10th of November, 1483. It was an accident that gave this honor to Eisleben. parents, poor mine-laborers in a village of that region, named Mohra, had gone to the Eisleben winter fair: in the tumult of this scene the Frau Luther was taken with travail, found refuge in some poor-house there, and the boy she bore was named Martin Luther. of Luther's words:

"His words are halfThe essential quality conquer; that he was

Richter says battles." They may be called so. of him was, that he could fight and a right piece of human valor. No more valiant man, no mortal heart to be called braver, that one has record of, ever lived in that Teutonic kindred, whose character is valor. His defiance of the "devils in Worms was not a mere boast, as the like might be if now spoken. It was a faith of Luther's, that there were devils, spiritual denizens of the pit, continually besetting men. Many times in his writings this turns up; and a most small sneer has been grounded on it by some. In the room of the Wartburg, where he sat translating one of the Psalms, he was worn down with long labor, with sickness, abstinence from food: there rose before him some hideous indefinable image, which he took for the evil one, to forbid his work. Luther started up with fiend-defiance, flung his inkstand at the spectre, and it disappeared! The spot still remains there, a curious monument of several things. Any apothecary's apprentice can now tell us what we are to think of this apparition in a scientific sense: but the man's heart that dare rise defiant, face to face, against Hell itself, can give no higher proof of fearlessness. The thing he will quail before exists not on this earth or under it.

Fearless enough! "The devil is aware," writes he on

If I had business though it rained What a reservoir

one occasion," that this does not proceed out of fear in me. I have seen and defied innumerable devils. Duke George,” of Leipzig, a great enemy of his, "Duke George is not equal to one devil, far short of a devil. at Leipzig, I would ride into Leipzig, Duke Georges for nine days running." of dukes to ride into ! At the same time they err greatly who imagine that this man's courage was ferocity, mere coarse, disobedient obstinacy and savagery, as many do. Far from that. There may be an absence of fear which arises from the absence of thought or affection, from the presence of hatred and stupid fury. We do not value the courage of the tiger highly! With Luther it was far otherwise; no accusation could be more unjust than this of mere ferocious violence brought against him. A most gentle heart withal, full of pity and love, as indeed the truly valiant heart ever is. The tiger before a stronger foe flies. The tiger is not what we call valiant, only fierce and cruel. I know few things more touching than those soft breathings of affection, soft as a child's or a mother's, in this great wild heart of Luther. So honest, unadulterated with any cant; homely, rude in their utterance, pure as water welling from the rock. What, in fact, was all that down-pressed mood of despair and reprobation, which he suffered in his youth, but the outcome of pre-eminent thoughtful gentleness, affections so keen and fine? It is the course such men as the poor poet Cowper fall into. slight observer, might have seemed a timid, modesty, affectionate, shrinking tenderness the chief distinction of him. It is a noble valor which is roused in a heart like this, once stirred up into defiance, all kindled into a heavenly blaze.

Luther, to a

weak man;

Once he looks out from his solitary Patmos, the castle of Coburg, in the middle of the night. The great vault of Immensity, long flights of clouds sailing through it, dumb, gaunt, huge,—who supports all that? "None ever saw

the pillars of it, yet it is supported." God supports it. We must know that God is great, that God is good, and trust where we cannot see. Returning home from Leipzig once, he is struck by the beauty of the harvest fields. How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair taper stem, its golden head bent, all rich and waving there, the meek earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again, the bread of man! In the garden at Wittenburg one evening at sunset, a little bird has perched for the night. "That little bird," says Luther, "above it are the stars and deep Heaven of worlds; yet it has folded its little wings, gone trustfully to rest there as in its home: the Maker of it has given it too a home." Neither are mirthful turns wanting; there is a great, free, human heart in this man. The common speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic* *, expressive, genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feels him to be a great brotherman. His love of music, indeed, is not this, as it were, the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wild unutterability he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. The devils fled from his flute, he says. Deathdefiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other, I could call these the two opposite poles of a great soul: between these two all great things had room.

Carlyle.

THE ENGLISH BIBLE.

THE publication of the English translation of the Bible, with the permission for its free use among the people, was accomplished in the year 1536, in the reign of Henry VIII. Before the Reformation two versions existed of the Bible in English, two certainly, perhaps three. One was Wy

* His translation of the Bible is only equalled by our own.

cliffe's; another, based on Wycliffe's, but tinted more strongly with the peculiar opinions of the Lollards, followed at the beginning of the fifteenth century; and there is said to have been a third, but no copy of this is known to survive, and the history of it is vague. The possession or the use of these translations was prohibited by the Church, under pain of death. They were extremely rare and little read; and it was not till Luther's great movement began in Germany, and his tracts and commentaries found their way into England, that a practical determination was awakened among the people to have before them, in their own tongue, the book on which their faith was built.

A person named William Tyndal felt his heart burn in him to accomplish this great work for his country; applied for assistance to a learned bishop, discovered rapidly that the assistance which he would receive from the Church authorities would be a speedy elevation to martyrdom, went across the Channel to Luther, and thence to Antwerp; and there, in the year 1526, achieved and printed the first edition of the New Testament. Copies were carried over secretly to London, and circulated in thousands by the Christian Brothers. The council threatened; the bishops anathematised. They opened subscriptions to buy up the hated and dreaded volumes. They burnt them publicly in St. Paul's. The whip, the gaol, the stake did their worst, and their worst was nothing. Three editions were sold before 1530, and in that year a fresh instalment was completed. The Pentateuch was added to the New Testament; and afterwards, by Tyndal himself or under Tyndal's eyes, the historical books, the Psalms and Prophets. At length the whole canon was translated, and published in separate portions.

All these were condemned with equal emphasis — all continued to spread. The progress of the evil had, in 1531, become so considerable as to be the subject of an anxious protest to the crown from the episcopal bench. They com