severity which Cromwell displayed; that the adoption of such a course at the outset prevented a greater effusion of blood in the end; and that the principles of peace were not in his day associated with those of Christianity. We do not admit, however, that the requirements of the Gospel can be lawfully violated in order to meet any supposed exigency. Unless Christianity be itself equal to every emergency, it is no longer a system of universal application, but what the world considers it to be—a beautiful theory, which it is impossible to reduce in all cases to practice. The defence offered on behalf of Cromwell's Irish massacres amounts to the dogma, that we may do evil that good may come; a doctrine summarily disposed of in the words of inspiration, which tell us that its condemnation is just. And if the principles of universal peace were not understood in the days of the Protectorate as they are at present, on whom does the guilt of ignorance fall, but upon the men of those times ? The Bible then was as complete and intelligible as it is now; and the Bible, and the Bible only, is not more the religion of Protestants than it is of peacemakers. Let us not be dazzled by the splendid career of the great Protector. Make him the object of our hero worship, and we are compelled to sacrifice to his memory every principle of liberty, whether civil HEROES OF OUR MENTAL HOMAGE. 89 or religious. Yet worship him as the transcendent of talented tyranny, the demigod of distinguished despotism, the acme of able autocracy, and he is adored at his proper shrine. Let his oblations be the slaughtered innocents of bleeding Erin; his priestess the wailing Banshee; the wreath to crown his statue's marble brow, the deadly upas. Let not the sacred cause of freedom, and the still more sacred interests of Christianity, be polluted by their association, in the nineteenth century, with the name of one who notoriously violated both. If we exalt any as a hero of patriotism, let it be "some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood," and not the grim memory of England's imperious dictator. In an arena far more peaceful than that of political discord or military strife; from our fruitful fields, our teeming factories, our scattered villages, our crowded towns, our happy homes, our cheerful firesides— thence let us select the heroes of our mental homage, those whom, "The applause of listening senates to command, To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land, And read their history in a nation's eyes, Their lot forbad; nor circumscribed alone Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined; CHAPTER III. SIR MATTHEW HALE. PERHAPS of all the localities in the British metropolis that are rich in associations of the days gone by, none are more remarkable than Westminster Hall. Originally erected as a banqueting room for the old palace, on the site of another raised by the Red King, and now adopted by a modern structure as a magnificent vestibule to the Halls of the Legislature, it has witnessed scenes of more thrilling interest than banquets, and contests far weightier than the wager of battle proclaimed within its walls on the eve of a coronation. There Richard the Second, the prince under whom the building had arisen, was despoiled of the royalty he so fearfully disgraced. Few kings that have reigned in the west ever exercised a despotism so completely oriental. To the gorgeousness and the tyranny he united also the mental incapacity which is the usual characteristic of a sheikh or of a sultan. WESTMINSTER HALL. 91 He displayed all the splendour and all the despotism, with none of the commanding abilities, which in a later age and another country were successfully exercised by the cruel but magnificent Louis Quatorze. And it was the want of such abilities, in the case of Richard Plantagenet, that prevented the nation from being deceived into supporting misgovernment, even though the king and his courtiers might be decorated with ermine, and arrayed in vestments rich with cloth of gold. A more able prince soon appeared in the person of his exiled cousin, and the power of public opinion, which has since been so often irresistibly put forth, was sufficient, after a few weeks of bloodless revolution, to place Henry of Lancaster on the throne which the king had been compelled to vacate, in the presence of the assembled estates in Westminster Hall. Many points of resemblance are to be traced between this earliest of our revolutions, and that of 1688, which we trust may prove the last, as it has been the latest. In both, the people, provoked by tyranny, were so completely of one mind, that the desired object was attained apart altogether from the aid of the sword. In each, the prince displaced was at once incapable and despotic, and the monarch who succeeded both powerful and wise. In the very faults of the leading characters we discern a parallel The fair fame of the Fourth Henry is tarnished by the mysterious disappearance of his predecessor: the memory of the Third William, so frequently celebrated as "glorious, pious, and immortal," is sullied with the treacherous massacre of Glencoe. And in many other respects, more resemblance exists than may at first be imagined, between Henry of Lancaster and William of Orange. But the great hall at Westminster has witnessed other scenes quite as spirit-stirring as the deposition of its founder. There, in the reign of the Eighth Henry, stood the illustrious More, one of the wisest of statesmen, one of the most virtuous of mankind, one of the most brilliant ornaments of the degenerate church to which he belonged, once the head of the legal profession, once the most illustrious minister of the crown, but now like "Darius great and good, Fall'n, fall'n, fall'n, Fall'n from his high estate ;" browbeat by insolent judges, denied when a prisoner at the bar that impartial justice he had ever dispensed from the bench; and all because he was not willing to sell his conscience and his faith, mistaken though they were, to the pleasure of an unjust and wicked king. And there, in after years, stood another victim of equal ability, but of far less virtue; not how |