will consign him to execration in this world, and perdition in the next. This country would not now have been great and happy if the yoke of bondage had not long ago been broken here: but, in the transition which the lower classes made from the state of villeins to that of free labourers, a mass of immediate evil was produced of which the unexaggerated* report might almost startle our belief. The Reformation aggravated the evil, not only by depriving the poor of that eleemosynary support which the monasteries afforded when there was no other constant source of relief, but because men who shared the plunder of the church in the vile way in which it was lavished, became hard landlords, and the rents of the abbey tenants were heavily raised, in consequence of the same act which destroyed the chief market for their produce. Never was there a good work so wickedly effected as the Reformation in England. It is at once our chief blessing and our foulest reproach.

These circumstances aggravated the evil; but the decrease of villenage was its cause. 'Manufactures,' says Sir Morton Eden, 'by creating a necessity for free hands, and, consequently, enabling men to make use of the most valuable of all property, their own industry, subjected those who were any ways incapacitated from availing themselves of that fund, to the miserable alternative of starving independently;' and he states it as an inevitable conclusion from his inquiries, that manufactures and commerce are the true parents of our national poor. Had the price of labour, when it first became a marketable commodity, found its proper standard,

"

It seems probable that there has been some exaggeration. Hume, on the authority of an act passed 1512, says, that the number of prisoners for debt in the different gaols in the kingdom exceeded 60,000; but Sir F. Morton Eden, with good reason, doubts whether the words of the act warrant any such construction; they are as he gives them: Where (whereas) the workers and makers of caps and hats, within this realme of England, have daily occupied and set on worke in making of caps and hats of the king's natural subjects, that is to say, men, women, maidens, and children, (borne within this realme of England,) to the great reliefe and comforte of poor prisoners within this realme, to the number of threescore thousand persous and above, in carding, spinning,' &c.-Rastell's Statutes, I. 407. Hume was a careless writer in matters of fact, and the construction which he has given to this passage is one proof of his carelessness. But Sir Morton Eden himself seems to rely too implicitly upon Harrison's belief, rather than assertion, that Henry VIIIth, in the course of his reign, hung up 'threescore and twelve thousand great thieves, petty thieves, and rogues; for Harrison makes this statement upon the authority of Cardane, and tells us that Cardane writeth it upon the report of the Bishop of Lexovia.' It would require something better than these authorities, far fetched and little worth, to establish so monstrous a fact. Justice had certainly not relaxed when Harrison himself wrote, and he states the annual consumption of the gallows in his time at a loose average of from three to four hundred, evidently with no disposition to under-estimate the amount.

Of Sir Morton Eden's three volumes upon the state of the poor, nearly two might well have been spared; but it is a work for which the public are indebted to him, and the early death of the author may be regarded as a national loss. Few men in his station have applied themselves with such meritorious industry to useful pursuits.

SO

so that the labourer in youth and health might have been enabled to make provision for sickness and age, this consequence would not have followed; but we must not blame our ancestors for not discovering with prospective wisdom, as the means of prevention, what we ourselves after so long and heavy an experience of the evil have not yet adopted as the cure. It was mitigated at first by the spirit of adventure, then more prevalent among the lower classes, than now. Harrison speaks of emigrants to France, Germany, Barbary, India, Muscovia and very Calicut;' and shortly afterwards our colonies in North America were established. And though, when labour is underpaid and the labouring classes are kept poor, poverty must always be upon the increase, the increase was less rapid than in later times, because of the flourishing state of the country, whose progress seems scarcely to have sustained any interruption by the civil wars of Charles I. because the virtues of the feudal system survived that system awhile, and because the manners of the peasantry were not yet corrupted.

Harrison states the number of vagabonds in his time, upon a rude estimate, at above 10,000. This is, perhaps, short of the number-there is a document in Strype, which affirms that there

The passage is a very curious one. It is not yet full three score years since this trade began, but how it hath prospered since that time it is easy to judge, for they are now supposed of one sex and another, to amount unto above 10,000 persons, as I have heard reported. Moreover, in counterfeiting the Egyptian rogues, they have devised a language among themselves, which they name canting, but others pedlars French; a speech compact thirty years since of English, and a great number of odd words of their own devising, without all order or reason; and yet such is it as none but themselves are able to understand. The first deviser thereof was hanged by the neck, a just reward, no doubt, for his deserts, and a common end to all of that profession. A gentleman also of late (Thomas* Harman) hath taken great pains to search out the secret practices of this ungracious rabble. And among other things he setteth down and describeth three-and-twenty sorts of them, whose names it shall not be amiss to remember, whereby each one may take occasion to read and know also by his industry what wicked people they are, and what villainy remaineth in them.

The several Dis-orders und Degrees amongst our idle Vagabonds.

Probably the Mr. Harman, a Warwickshire gentleman,' who is mentioned in Stanley's Remedy.

were

were at least three or four hundred able bodied vagabonds in every county, who lived by theft and rapine, and who sometimes met in troops to the number of sixty, and committed spoil on the inhabitants. It adds, that if all the felons of this kind were reduced to good subjection, they would form a strong army; and that the magistrates were awed by their association and threats, from enforcing the laws against them. But in Scotland, a century later, the evil was ten or twenty fold greater-for, during that century, Scotland had been stationary, if not retrograde, and the people were in a more savage state than even the worst of the wild Irish at the present day. Fletcher, of Saltoun, gives a dreadful picture:

'There are, at this day,' he says, (1698), 'in Scotland, besides a great many poor families, very meanly provided for by the church-boxes, (with others, who by living upon bad food fall into various diseases,) two hundred thousand people begging from door to door. And, though the number of these be perhaps double to what it was formerly, by reason of this present great distress, yet in all times there have been about one hundred thousand of those vagabonds, who have lived without any regard or subjection either to the laws of the land, or even those of God and nature; fathers incestuously accompanying with their own daughters, the son with the mother, and the brother with the sister. No magistrate could ever discover, or be informed, which way one in a hundred of these wretches died, nor that ever they were baptized. Many murders have been discovered among them, and they are not only a most unspeakable oppression to poor tenants (if they give noť bread, or some kind of provision to, perhaps, forty such villains on one day, are sure to be insulted by them) but they rob many poor people who live in houses distant from any neighbourhood. In years of plenty many thousands of them meet together in the mountains, where they feast and riot for many days: and at country weddings, markets, burials, and other the like public occasions, they are to be seen, both men and women, perpetually drunk, cursing, blaspheming, and fighting together.'

Fletcher was a lover of liberty, and a sincere one; yet he seriously proposed, as a remedy for this evil, the re-establishment of domestic slavery, drawing arguments from the example of his favorite republics. A system of parochial education was shortly, afterwards established in Scotland, and the result was, that Scotland, then one of the most barbarous countries in Christendom, became the most orderly. Provision had been intended for securing a like advantage to the people of England by Edward VI. whose life, short as it was, is honourable to human nature; and whose accession ought to have been made a red-letter day in the English Kalendar, and set apart for pious and grateful commemoration, as long as the blessings which we have derived from it shall endure. Monstrificus puellus Cardan calls him for his at

tainments;

tainments; and a Protestant, without superstition, may be allowed to call him blessed King Edward,' for his virtues. This spotless prince enumerates, among the remedies for the sores of the commonwealth, good education as the first in dignity and degree, and declared his purpose of showing his device therein.' This,' he said, shall well ease and remedy the deceitful working of things, disobedience of the lower sort, casting of seditious bills, and will clearly take away the idleness of people.'

Edward's early death was probably the greatest misfortune that England ever sustained: Elizabeth effected the work of reformation, rather in the spirit of a politician, than with that sincere and conscientious, and enlightened piety which directed and sanctified his conduct. The provision which was made for the religious education of the people was less extensive and less complete than he would have made it; and such as it was, the greater part of the parochial clergy were not qualified to give it effect. This was one of the evils which arose from the Reformation: from the commencement of that great revolution, divinity became a perilous profession: those studies which formerly led to honourable ease, benefices and dignities, led then to exile, imprisonment, and martyrdom; and thus while the issue of the struggle was doubtful, the supply of students was materially diminished. The robberies (for they deserve no better name) which were committed upon church property, tended to the same effect.'

It would pity a man's heart,' says Latimer, to hear that I hear of the state of Cambridge. What it is in Oxford I cannot tell. There be few that study divinity, but so many as of necessity must furnish the colleges, for their livings be so small and victuals so dear, that they tarry not there, but go every where to seek livings, and so they go about. It will come to pass that we shall have nothing but a little English divinity, that will bring the realm into a very barbarousness, and utter decay of learning. It is not that, I wiss, that will keep out the supremacy of the Pope of Rome. There be none now but great mens' sous in colleges, and their fathers look not to have them preachers-so every way the office of preaching is pinched at.'

There are few books which throw so much light upon the manners and morals of the times, and the state of society, as Latimer's Sermons; they may be ranked among the most curious and amusing specimens of our early literature.

My lords and masters,' says he, I say that all such proceedings, as far as I can perceive, do intend plainly to make the yeomanry sla very, and the clergy shavery. We of the clergy had too much, but this is taken away, and now we have too little. But for my own part I have no cause to complain, for I thank God and the king I have sufficient, and God is my judge I come not to crave of any man any thing; but I know them that have too little. There lieth a great matter by these

appro

appropriations; great reformation is to be had in them. I know where there is a great market town, with divers hamlets and inhabitants, where do rise yearly of their labours to the value of 50 pound: and the vicar that serveth (being so great a cure) hath but 12 or 14 marks by year; so that of this pension he is not able to buy him books, nor give his neighbours drink; and all the great gain goeth another way.' What an unreasonable devil is this!' exclaims the honest old bishop, on another occasion, making use of Satan in his favourite way. What an unreasonable

The reader will not, perhaps, be displeased to see a specimen of Latimer's peculiar vein. It occurs in his Sermon of the Plough, preached in the shroudes at St. Paules church, in London, the xvii day of January, 1548. He is touching upon the unfitness of giving secular employment to the bishops. A prelate hath a charge and cure otherwyse, and therefore he cannot discharge his dutie, and be a lord president too. For a presidentship requireth a whole man, and a byshop cannot be two men. A byshop hath his office, a flocke to teach, to look unto; and therefore he cannot meddle with another office, which alone requireth a whole man. Let the priest preach, and the noble man handle the temporal matters. Moses was a marveilous man, a good man; Moses was a wonderful fellow, and did his dutie, being a marryed man: we lacke such as Moses was. Well, I would all men would look to their dutie, as God hath called them, and then we should have a flourishing Christian common weale. And now I would aske a strange question. Who is the most diligentest bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? I can tell, for I know him who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and harkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the other, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all Englande. And will ye know who it is? I will tell you. It is the devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other; he is never out of his diocese; he is never from his cure; ye shall never fynde him unoccupyed; he is ever in his parish; he keepeth residence at all times; ye shall never find him out of the way; call for him when you will he is ever at home, the diligentest preacher in all the realme; he is ever at his plough; no lording or loytering can hynder him; he is ever applying his busyness; ye shall never fynd him idle I warrant you. And his office is to hinder religion, to mayntaine supersticion, to set up idolatry, to teach all kynde of popers. He is ready as can be wished for to set forth his plough, to devise as many ways as can be to deface and obscure God's glory. Where the devill is resident and hath his plough going, there away with books and up with candles! away with bibles and up with beads! away with the light of the gospel and up with the light of candles, yea, at noon dayes. Where the devill is resident that he may prevayle, up with all supersticion and idolatry, sensing, paynting of images, candles, palmes, ashes, holy water, and new service of mens' inventing, as though man could invent a better way to honour God with, than God himself hath appoynted. Down with Christ's cross, up with purgatory pick-purse, up with him, the popish purgatory I mean. Away with clothing the naked, the poor and impotent; up with decking of images, and gay garnishing of stocks and stones. Up with man's traditions and his lawes, down with God's traditions and bis most holy word. But here some man will say to me, what, Sir, are ye so privy of the devill's counsell that ye know all this to be true?' Truely, I know him too well, and have obeyed him a little too much in condescending to some follyes. And I know him as other men do; yea, that he is ever occupyed and ever busy in following his plough. I know by S. Peter, which sayth of him, Sicut leo rugiens circuit quærens quem devoret, he goeth about like a roaring lyon seeking whom he may devour. I would have this text well viewed and examined every word of it. Circuit, he goeth about in every corner of his dyocese. He goeth on visitation daily. He leaveth no place of his cure unvisited. He walketh round about from place to place and ceaseth not. Sicut leo, as a lyon; that is, strongly, boldly and proudly, stately and fiercely, with haute lookes, with his proude countenances, with his stately bragginges. Rugiens, roaring; for he letteth not slip any occasion to speake or to roare out when he seeth his tyre. Quarens, he goeth about seeking, and not sleeping as our bishops doc, but

be