stances did Walsingham make the use he did of Babington, Ballard, Morgan, and the rest, and allowed Mary again such apparent liberty of action as to be able to enter into the plot they had formed; and by means of a double-dyed traitor, Gifford, she was entrapped into a correspondence with the conspirators, in which she warmly entered into a Spanish invasion, and renewed her promise to make Philip her heir; and upon Babington communicating to her the scheme for Elizabeth's assassination, she gave it her consent. Every letter she wrote or received had passed under Walsingham's eyes, who seems to have had no scruples or repugnance to the means he employed or the agents he worked by. We must regard such devices with abhorrence, but our censures of Walsingham are no sort of exculpation of Mary. She was a free agent, and voluntarily wrote what was brought as proof of her complicity in the plot. She had no scruples in doing so; we can hardly expect her to have them, when Philip, without her provocations, so warmly entered into the scheme, extremely commending Mary for having subordinated her love for her son to the service of God and of Christendom, and regarded the six gentlemen who were to murder Elizabeth as under the protection of God. As soon as the conspiracy was ripe, Walsingham laid before the Queen the plans for the invasion of her kingdom and her own assassination, which he justly thought likely means to bring her to the desired point; the suddenness, the wide extent of the plot, her own imminent peril and that of her country did produce fear, and altered her purposes, and in some way her state of feeling towards Mary. Elizabeth, on the question of the trial, the sentence, and the part which then fell on herself, and which she could not evade, the signing of the death-warrant, showed unequivocal dissimulation, a dissimulation which we despise. But this is not incompatible with true feeling, and may often be seen working with it. All her prejudices were against putting a queen to death; her principles were on one side, her personal danger and what she might well plead as necessity on the other; and while she wished to be rid of Mary, she very sincerely detested having to do it. Vacillating counsels constantly look like dissembling, but it seems certain that her ministers were really afraid of not being able to bring her to the point, and braved her displeasure at the last with an air of being more really apprehensive than subsequent writers upon the event seem to realize. Elizabeth was not sanguinary; compared with her times and with the example of her fellow-sovereigns, she was even merciful, and frequently showed a very remarkable forbearance towards her enemies, and a magnanimity for which she does not get sufficient praise. As an instance, Mary at one

time in a fit of passion wrote an insulting letter to Elizabeth, incompatible we should say with any delicacy, not to say decency of mind, pretending to repeat a number of gross slanders uttered against Elizabeth by the Countess of Shrewsbury. There is no doubt about the genuineness of the letter, Labanoff has seen it and vouches for this; but he and M. Mignet think it probable that the letter never reached Elizabeth, for no other reason that we can see but that she never took any notice of it or avenged it, as it was in her power to do. But our concern is with Mary, not with that strange compound of great and little qualities, of what is admirable and (must we say) despicable?— of magnaminity, tinctured, as Hume expresses it, with malignity,' of genius, wisdom, prudence, penetration, foresight, vanity, and coquetry, our English queen; who, however far we must abate our admiration and temper our respect with opposing sentiments, must yet be acknowledged for one of the greatest women, and beyond this, one of the greatest sovereigns that ever lived.

The history of Mary's death, when considered in relation to her life, is very remarkable. Doubtless she conducted herself with great grandeur, with an undaunted courage, and what is more, with seeming Christian resignation. Her last hours were calculated to make a great impression on all who witnessed them. But yet we are forced to the conviction that it was a scene, that she was consciously acting before the present spectators, and before posterity, for to the very last she was asserting with every circumstance of solemnity, things that were not true, in regard both to her son and to Elizabeth. It was probably impossible for bystanders not to believe her in that solemn hour, at least, those who interrupted the awful pageant with their mistimed doubts, get set down for brutal fanatics-witnessing her dignified composure, her unshaken courage, her religious deportment; but irrefragable evidence proves that what she so emphatically denied was yet true-that with an unflinching constancy, for no other purpose but to sustain her credit and to die grandly, she was false to the lastthat she entered the presence of God with a lie in her right hand. It is startling to write such things, it is terrible to believe them, but history leaves us no other course. M. Mignet, who details with enthusiastic admiration Mary's last hours, has by the whole tenor of his previous facts taught his readers to shudder where he himself sees ground for reverence and the most excited praise. Such courage, such constancy in the very face of death, were genuine. It is evident that she thought herself a martyr, that she believed she died in God's favour and for His cause, and yet the wicked habit of her life stuck to her. Truth and purity had never been any part of her religion, her

moral sense, tainted at its source, was utterly depraved. She did not know God as a hater of evil. The Church for which she thought she died was-as she had known it from her cradle to her grave-evil and corrupt, She had been inured to see its wickedness in high places-she knew it under no better aspect. She was the martyr, not of the Church Catholic, nor yet of the Church of Rome, but of its corruptions. It was those corruptions which misled her through life, it was those corruptions which held back remorse and terror at her death, and enabled her to die as she had lived, dauntless and heroical in a bad

cause.

Such then was Mary; brave, high-spirited, princely, full of talent and intellect, radiant with beauty and grace; blessed too with an even temper, a happy disposition, a freedom from petty weaknesses and foibles, and gifted with all companionable and social qualities-but heartless and unprincipled, and, as her whole life shows, living, acting, hoping, joying, grieving, plotting, sinning, for self alone.

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ART. III.-1. The Law of Pews in Churches, &c. By G. H. H. OLIPHANT, ESQ. Barrister-at-law. London: Longman & Co. 1850.

2. Church Pews, their Origin and Legal Incidents, with some Observations on the Propriety of abolishing them. By JOHN COKE FOWLER, ESQ. Barrister-at-law. London: Rivingtons. 1844.

3. The Pew System the chief Hindrance of the Church's Work in Towns. A Sermon by the Rev. EDWARD STUART, M. A. London Masters. 1852.

IF much has been said and written upon any theoretical principles, be they good or bad, the advocates of those principles would do well to keep in view some external index, such as circumstances will never fail to give them, of the manner in which their influence is gaining ground. This external index is afforded, in Church matters, by the material buildings in which Churchpeople assemble together to exercise their common offices of religion, and by the arrangements which are then and there observed. Of architecture, as symbolizing the principles of the Church, in hewing out of earth's deep and awful caverns the glorious temples of the living God, as creating some foretaste of nature's own redemption; or of that inspired wisdom by which God's will may be done in earth, after some sort, as it is in Heaven, through means of a certain exquisite harmony and beauty in which nature cooperates with man in the praises and in the work of our common Maker; of Christian art, in short, we mean to speak but little it is to the practical arrangements of plain men and women when occupied in public religious offices, that we would now call the attention of our readers. This is the substance, we must always bear in mind, which it is the province of art to adorn; nay, even, in the first instance, of bare walls to shelter and protect, if beauty cannot be consulted. Christians may worship and have worshipped under the open sky; the running stream was the font of early converts; the desert has been the scene of Christian eloquence in its turn, as have aisles and naves of sculptured stone; caves and holes of the earth have witnessed the highest mysteries of our religion, in common with that type of the heavenly Jerusalem which the Christian sanctuary may represent to our outward senses. It is not, then, of architecture, which shuts out the world and suspends a hallow

ing canopy over the sacred work of God's service; it is not of painting and sculpture, that remind the assembly of God's people of the glory of heaven, and that teach them of Christian truths; it is not of music, that unites and refines and spiritualizes the expressions of assembled prayer and service; it is not of ascending incense, that betokens the oblations of our hearts' devotion, and the sweet perfume with which heaven envelops the performance of its own work; it is not of these adornments, which divers branches of the Church have more or less adopted as the accompaniments of Christian worship, but it is of the rude mass which preceded all these in point of time, and which now precedes them in importance, it is of the assembly of people themselves that we would now speak, supposing them met together on free and open ground in the primitive and patriarchal simplicity of divine worship. There is a pleasure in the thought of personal freedom on which much of our peace of mind or power of concentrated attention must ever depend. The open air and common ground is the normal type and natural image of this freedom; and now that the joke of Lydian worship has had its sway, we must be excused for sympathising in some sort with its noble propounder, in using such a well-authorized figure to express his yearning after a mode of service that was free from certain things which he felt to be restrictions to his soul's free action. This our sympathy is also in common with a lower order of creation than the above-named object, for our own feeling in many churches, is to desire the fair and open banks of a river, resting on the smooth and verdant turf, as eagerly as the panting sheep immured in the pens of Smithfield. Our sympathy, indeed, is more closely connected with these latter objects, for it is not a desire that any of our brethren should, as it were, be shorn of their white garments; it is not our dread of surpliced priests, but it is our natural and personal dislike to be knocked about at the mercy of others, and to be shut up in pens or pews, without any choice on our part, unless we madly rush forth and forfeit the whole object in view; we like not to be stuck up, classed, and registered, according to our sleekness or our poverty, for two or three mortal hours. We do not mean that a certain restriction of personal liberty is to be avoided, for it necessarily occurs in any mutual arrangements between men and men but our immediate object in suggesting this pastoral simile, is to realize the normal idea of a congregation with its pastor, before any artificial methods of order have been established, or even any conveniences have been developed. We wish to start afresh, as it were, and would be repelled by the evils and abuses of existing practices to the very origin and essential elements of Christian worship, alike free from the