chooses one. The Council, consisting of the Governor and two Deemsters (so called either from their deeming ' or expounding the law, or from their recording the 'doom' or sentence of the judges), the Attorney-General, the Clerk of the Rolls, the Bishop, the Archdeacon, the two Vicars-General, the Water Bailiff, and Receiver-General, constitutes the Manx Upper House, and are, like the Keys, invested with judicial as well as legislative functions, having in the former capacity an appellate jurisdiction, and in the latter having power to originate Bills, and reject or amend those brought from the 'Keys.'

So here, within a stone's throw of our own shores, we have the singular phenomenon not of a colony, but an integral part of ourselves, governing itself by laws made in a Parliament of its own, and not governed even by them until proclaimed aloud in open air from the Tynwald Hill, in both languages. What can be more interesting than that lonely greensward mount-raised, it is said, with earth taken from each of the seventeen parishes of the island-with its tiers of turf-cut steps, on which for 1000 years the island population has loved to meet. The pageant in former days is described as having been 'surpassingly grand, and as dazzling the people with its splendour,' when coming in his royal array, as a King ought to do, in his chair of state covered with a royal cloth and cushions, his visage unto the East, and his sword before him with the point upwards, the Earl opened the Tynwald.' It was this constitution that earned for the Manx the encomium of remarkably illustrating that spirit of freedom and political ability which animated the men who in ancient times emigrated from Norway and the rest of the Scandinavian North.' And hither even still, for the same good purpose of proclaiming to the people the laws they are to obey, the Governor, attended by a military escort, sets out from Castletown every St. John Baptist's day, first hallowing the work of legislation by prayer in the adjoining Chapel of St. John's.

Surely the records of such an island are worthy to be preserved; and we are very glad to hail the appearance of the Manx Society, established in 1858, for the publication of the National Documents, and to congratulate them on the ability of the papers they have already issued. And we say this without any disparagement to the existing histories of Mr. Train and Mr. Cumming (who is, indeed, one of the contributors to the new serial), Mr. Bullock, Mr. Waldron, Bishop Wilson himself, and others. These papers cannot fail to be a great acquisition to the permanent literature of the island.

At the same time that we approach the subject of this article with the unfeigned respect we have expressed, we must not be de

terred

terred from approaching him, and we think Mr. Keble might, with advantage, have given us both less and more of the Bishop. He says, indeed, that it was impossible to tell the truth concerning him with less minuteness;' and, considering how a right judgment on the various legal points of his history depends on an accurate report of them, we can partly believe it. Yet for all this there is repetition, and we begin to weary of our subject before we reach the end; whilst on the other hand, of his domestic history we could have borne with a good deal more. We should have liked to know something more of the feelings with which he approached the sphere of his fifty-eight years' labours; of the impression which a life so singular made upon a mind so singular. We should like to have known something more of his life at Knowsley during those five best years of it which he devoted to young Lord Strange,' instead of knowing just one anecdote of his 'extraordinary management' of him during that not very short period, namely, how he dropped-not unintentionally -some burning sealing-wax on his finger in the way of gentle rebuke, for signing a paper before he had read it! We should have liked to have felt, and to be able to say, we knew him better before parting with him; and to have had some picture of his character (which we are left to infer from his memoranda and writings), and even of his person and daily habits of life. But we apprehend he was emphatically reserved and undemonstrative, without much love of the beautiful in art or nature, and did not give even those who knew him best much opportunity for knowing him intimately. His Prayer-book is his best biographer. To God at least-and perhaps alone-he poured out his inmost soul.

We think, moreover, that Mr. Keble has carried his admiration too far, when he attempts to justify his conduct in every circumstance. We are unable to detect a single instance in which Mr. Keble admits that he did, or may have done, anything amiss, or that he could have acted otherwise. Now, considering that in his long life of ninety-three years he was often placed in circumstances of the utmost difficulty and delicacy, and that his acts and opinions were generally in opposition to those of the majority, we think this is going rather too far. For the weak point with Wilson, the failing which often spoiled his best exertions, and prevented his attaining that still higher position which his piety, graces, and energy would otherwise have commanded, was his want of a sufficiently practical knowledge of life. He saw it through his own glasses, which were not always the most powerful; and of what he did see, he did not take a very extended view.

We

We cannot but think the touching case of Henry Halsall an instance of this, though it does not strike Mr. Keble in that light, who places all the blame on the conduct of the civil authorities. This young soldier, an officer of the Governor's guard, waited upon his clergyman and confessed voluntarily to an undue familiarity with the Governor's housekeeper. The Bishop ordered him to be confined seven days in St. Germain's prison and to perform three Sundays penance; all which was duly done and certified. The Governor then resolved that it was an offence against martial law for Halsall, as one of the garrison, to submit to the censures of an Ecclesiastical Court without his leave which it does not appear was ever obtained—and he was accordingly tried before a jury, found guilty of that offence, and sentenced to be imprisoned again, and afterwards to run the gauntlet through the garrison, (though that part of the punishment was remitted), and to be drummed out of it, his hat and shoes off. In the following September he died from a fever contracted in the gaol, aggravated, there is little doubt, by the humiliation he had undergone.

Now nothing could be sadder than all this; but it appears to us rather unfair to saddle the whole odium arising from it upon the punishment ordered by the Governor. Mr. Keble does not pretend that the allegation of a breach of martial law was false, and if not false the Bishop must have been supposed to know the law, and to have known also that he was lending himself to such a breach by punishing Halsall as he did. Was it, then, a judicious exercise of his power (we go no further than to'quarrel with his judgment), even allowing him not to have strained the law, to subject Halsall, to an imprisonment which involved a violation of his military duties? It seems reasonable enough that a voluntary withdrawal from those duties, or (which is much the same) a voluntary act which was pretty sure to result, and did result, in a withdrawal from them, for seven days-being virtually a desertion-should constitute a military offence, in which case the Governor would have no option but to animadvert upon it.

On the other hand, in a case, in which à priori we should have expected the Bishop, both from his own Church views, and also from the intrinsic merits, to have upheld the ancient discipline and resisted any attempt to undermine it, he surprises us by the ease with which he gave way. And this was on no less an important subject than the dissolubility of marriage. We refer to Hampton's case. This man's wife had been transported for felony, and had sworn never voluntarily to return to the Island without the Lord's permission, although the sentence seems to have been only

one

one of transportation to Jamaica for seven years; whereupon the husband wishing to marry again, coolly petitions the Bishop to give him leave to do so, and the Bishop (we must say, still more coolly) grants him the permission! Mr. Keble evidently feels oppressed by this decision, and seeks to get rid of it (though not in the way we should have thought the most effective and creditable to the Bishop, namely, by admitting that it was an indiscretion) by supposing the story to be too unlikely to be true; and that the permission attributed to the Bishop must have been a forgery. Yet he takes no exception to the evidence on which it rests; nor does he allege any reason for considering it to be spurious except its improbability. It appears as well authenticated as any other case. Hampton's petition is taken from the Episcopal Registry, so there can be no doubt about it; while the Bishop's answer, though not stated to be taken from the records of any court, must be presumed to be as authentic as any other of his MSS. which are printed in the pages of Mr. Keble. The old English law, it is true, had always attributed civil death to a man banished for life, or who went into a monastery and became a monk professed; and though this disability gradually was extended-at least as to general civil contracts-to banishment for a term of years certain, we can remember no instance in which it was held to reach the case of marriage: still less any in which an ecclesiastical court would have pronounced a dissolution a vinculo matrimonii upon it. Suppose, in the present case, the woman had returned to the Island with or even without the lord's permission, what would have been the result? Her disability having ended for all other purposes and in all other respects, was it to continue for the purpose of absolving her from the marriage tie alone? Were life-long obligations to be superseded by a temporary incapacity which had ended? If a sentence of seven years' transportation (which a pardon might have put an end to at any moment) dissolved the tie, why not two years? In short the question was full of anomalies, when closely considered, and there was no end to the difficulties, not to say absurdities, to which Wilson's doctrine might have led.

*

To return, however, to Halsall's case. This case only formed part of a system which Bishop Wilson determined to carry out as a whole, and therefore it may be said that he could not, in justice to others or in consistency with himself, have acted otherwise than he did. It is necessary, therefore, to look at that system a little more closely. Great allowance, it must be confessed, should be

made for him in what his enemies called his excesses of church discipline. The Bishop of Man had, as we have seen, peculiar privileges. He had a right to summon a yearly convocation. of his clergy, without licence from the Crown, and to pass laws on spiritual matters, which, with the assent of the Tynwald Court, bound the whole island. He presided over the oldest fixed bishopric of the British nation, and a national church, of which Lord Chancellor King had said that if the ancient discipline of the Church were lost, it would be found in all its purity in the Isle of Man.' In every parish church there was a throne for him. Above all, he was supported by the attachment, and what Mr. Keble considers the faith, of a people, whom indeed the Reformation had reached, but reached later, and leavened with less of visible change, than any other part of Great Britain. Such was the strength of the Bishop's position, and such the advantages with which he went forth to his mission. And yet, after making full allowance for all this, what man with an ordinary knowledge of lifewe had almost said what man of common sense, who looked only to a reasonable chance of obtaining his object-would have dealt with the people committed to his charge in such a manner? Granting his sole end to have been the glory of God, the advancement of his Church, and the salvation of the sinner-to force the discipline of the apostolic age upon the libertines and freethinkers of the seventeenth century was surely a Quixotic enterprise, and only escaped instantaneous discomfiture because practised on a simple and ignorant people in a country which few comparatively cared for or thought about. Imagine the Bishop of London dressing up penitents in white sheets and sending them the round of the City churches, attempting to put down the 'great social evil' by dragging offenders up and down the Thames at the boat's tail,' or putting an iron bit into the mouth of a West-End gossip or a Billingsgate scold! Nor can we find that the régime was justified by the result. Everywhere licentiousness was rampant; purity of morals made no progress; clerical as well as lay delinquencies multiplied, and at the close of the Bishop's long reign appear to have abounded as much as at its commencement; for the discipline ceased, not because it had done its work, but because there was no one to carry it on.

The Ecclesiastical laws of the island at the time of which we write, which laws were, of course, the bounds of Wilson's authority, consisted (1) Of 145 breast laws,' i. e. rules of the Ecclesiastical Courts of the island, which had originally rested in tradition or custom only, and the application of which had

resided