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HENRY THE Ensirrn.—It is certain that if he had died before the divorce was mooted, Henry VILE. like that Roman Emperor said by Tacitus to have been " consensu onmiumlignua imperil nisi imperasset," would have been considered by posterity as formed by Providence for the conduct of the Reformation, and his loss would have-been deplored as a perpetual calamity. We must allow him, therefore -the benefit of his past career, and be careful to remember it, when interpreting his later actions. Not many men would have borne themselves through the some trials with the same integri but the circumstances 'of these trials had not tested the true defects in moral constitution. Like all princes ot the Plantagenet blood, he was a person of a most intense and imperious will. His impulses, in general nobly directed, had never known contradiction ; and late in life, when his character was formed, he was foroed into collision with difficulties with -which the experience of discipline had not fitted him to contend. Educa- tion had done much for him, -but his nature required more correction than his position had permitted, whilst unbroken prosperity and early independ- ence of control had been his most serious misfortune. He had capacity, if his training had been equal to it, to be one of the greeted of men. 'With all his faults about him, he was still perhaps the greatest of hie contempo- raries • and the man best able of all -living Englishmen to govern England had been set to do it by the conditions of his birth.-FroRdea History of England.

Tan Drgonex OF CATHERINE OP ARRAGON.-Thus it is that, while we regret, we are unable to blame ; and we cannot wish undone an act to have shrunk from which might have spared a single heart, but might have wrecked the English nation. We increase our pity for Catherine because she was a princess. We measure the magnitude of the evils which human beings endure by their position in the scale of society ; and misfortunes which private persona would be expected to bear without excessive com- plaining, furnish matter for the lamentation of ages when they touch the sacred head which has been circled with a diadem. Let it be so. Let us compensate the poor Queen's sorrows with unstinted sympathy ; but let us not trifle with history, by confusing a political necessity with a moral crime. -Idetn.

FATHER PETO AND Knee HENRY.-On Sunday the 1st of May 1532, the

pulpit at Greenwich was occupied by Pete, afterwards Cardinal Peto, famous through Europe as a Catholic incendiary, but at this time a poor brother of the Observants convent. His sermon had been upon the story of Ahab and Naboth ; and his text, "Where the dogs licked the blood of Na- both, even there shall they lick thy blood, 0 King." The Xing and all the court were present; the 1st of May being the great holiday of the English year, and always observed at Greenwich with peculiar splendour. The preacher had dilated at length upon the crimes and the fall of Ahab, and had drawn his portrait in all its magnificent wickedness. He had described the scene in the court of heaven, and spoken of the lying prophets who had mocked the monarch's hopes before the fatal battle. At the end, he turned directly to. Henry, and, assuming to himself the mission of Micaiah, he i

closed his address n the following audacious words. "And now, 0 King," he said, "hear what I say to thee. I am that Micaiah whom thou wilt hate, because I must tell thee truly that this marriage [with Anne Boleyn] is unlawful ; and I know that I shall eat the bread of affliction and drink the waters of sorrow, yet because the Lord hath put it into my mouth I must speak it. There are other preachers, yea too many, which preach and persuade thee otherwise feeding thy folly and frail affections upon hopes of their own worldly promotion; and by that means they betray thy soul, thy honour, and thy, posterity-to obtain.fat benefices, to become rich ab- bots and bishops, and I know not what, Theee, I say, are the four hundred prophets who in the spirit of lying seek to deceive thee. Take heed lest

thou, being seduced, find lhab's punishment, who had his blood licked up by the dogs."-Idem.

Reunions PERSEC17TION.-There is, I think, no just ground on which to condemn conscientious Catholics on the score of persecution, except only this : that as we are now convinced of the injustice of the persecuting laws, so among those who believed them to be just, there were some who were

by an instinctive protest of human feeling to be lenient in the execution of those laws ; while others of harder nature and more narrow sympathies en- forced them without reluctance, and even with exultation. The heart, when it is rightly constituted; corrects the folly of the head.; and wise good men, even though they entertain no conscious misgiving as to the soundness of their theories, may be delivered from the worst consequences of them by trusting their more genial instinets. And thus and thus only, are we jus- tified in censuring those whose names figure largely in the persecuting lishr. Their defence is impregnable to login We blame them for the absence of that humanity which is deeper than logic, and which should have taught them to refuse the conclusions of their speculative creed.-Idem.

LORD LANSDOWNE 01V PUBLIC SFEAXING.-During my drive yester- day with Lord Lansdowne, in talking of public speaking, I asked him whe- ther he had ever experienced that sort of bewilderment in delivering him- self which he might have observed come over me at the Devizes dinner, and which I had once before experienced for a few momenta during my speech at the Revolution meeting in Dublin some years since, but recovered myself on that occasion almost immediately. He said, to my surprise, that he hardly everspoke in the House without feelhig the approaches of some such less of self-possession, and found that the only way to surmount it was to talk on, at all hazards. He added, what appears highly probable, that those commonplaces which most men accustomed to public speaking have ready cut and dry, to bring in on all occasions, were, be thought, in general used by them as a mode of getting over those blank intervals, when they do not know what to say next, but, in the mean time, must say something.- _Diary of Thomas Moore.

THE MOST WONDERFUL WONDER. IN SHARSFERE'S PLAY8.-I11 Shalt- spere, where everything is wonderful, there is yet perhaps nothing more wonderful than the way in which characters grow before our eyes, as the action of the drama proceeds. It is not merely that he gradually shows us more fully and from more various points of view what they are; but with the advance of the =lion his persons are different from what they were when it commenced;' they are in process of becoming. As in actual life no character stands still but all are changing, are either growing worse or better, so it i in the mimic life of his stage. You note, for instance, in his plays which have to do with our civil wars, the English Barons growing worse and worse, more unscrupulous, more cruel, more treacherous, more vindictive et every step ; the poet thus unobtrusively showing the hideous moral effects of such wars upon those who are engaged in them. Or agsin you see in Margaret of Anjou the forward flirt passing into the unfaithful wife, and the unfaithful wife into the cursing hag.-Trench's Essay on Calderon.

Tire Beartues.-They were the proudest and nearly the most necessitous of mankind. They were the hardest labourers in the field, and the most exclusive aristocrats in the world. They envied the wealth and the as- cendancy of the Central Government of Spain, and they despised the oldest noblesse of Castile as the very mushrooms of society. Their landowners held more frequently but a few acres of the soil, and they would have de- rided as ludicrous the pretensions of Prince Lichtenstein or Prince Ester- hazy. Their mechanical arts continued in their ancient barbarism, and they would have set down the people of Manchester for intolerable im- postors. Their house-doors were emblazoned with coats-of-arms, and their dwellings were devoid of the most ordinary requirements of social life. Their genealogies transcended those of the Austrians and the Scotch, and their civilization was inferior to that of most European nations. They considered themselves par excellence the gentlemen of Europe ; andLtahnez constituted themselves par excellence the Wore of Spain !-Border

of Spain mut France.

Loan Mirtsionnws's RECIPE FOR TREATING 'rouse Man.-Making small provision for young men is hardly justifiable; and is of all things the most prejudicial to themselves. They think what they have much larger than it really is, and make no exertion. The young should never hear any language but this-You have your own way in make, and it depends upon your own exertions whether you starve or not.-Diary of Thomas Moore.

DWELL AND ITS Darseas.-Over Diehl, Art has thrown a diviner charm than any that Nature has bestowed. That art rests in its inimitable and unequalled dinners. In cookery, Vienna and Paris carry away the palm from all the capitals of the earth ; but as, in this respect, Vienna, in my view, surpasses Paris, even so Ischl surpasses Vienna. It is the sanctum sanctorum of the great Austrian capital. Far away from the din of great cities, secluded in mountains and approached by lakes, lie those fair palaces and dwellings which serve to personify that great, sublime, and constructive art, which has there attained its most splendid and most extensive develop- ment. All over the world, there is no place like Ischl for its dinners. It develops the greatest advancement of all the leading systems of European cookery. There is no other such place on earth equal to thee for thy dinners and thy. wine. HailIschl ! worthy of the gods-the Styrian Olympus of nectar and

! It is all very well for valetudinarian Englishmen, with weak stomachs and worse digestions, either worn out by a wilful adoption of the English system of dinners, to sneer at all this. But, in truth, cookery is a. great art ; and more than this, it might be moulded into a great science. It has taxed the intellect of ages ; and it is even now without that complete system and classification which its various European schools may legitimately demand.-Border Lands of Spain and France.

FERTILITY OF Ginnus.-Almost all poets of a first-rate excellence, dramatic poets above all, have been nearly as remarkable for the quantity as the quality of their compositions; nor has the first injuriously affected the second. Witness the seventy dramas of .7Eschylus, the more than ninety of Euripides, the hundred and thirteen of Sophocles. And if we consider the few years during which Shakapere wrote, his fruitfulness is not leas ex- traordinary. The vein has been a large and a copious one, and has flowed freely forth, keeping itself free and clear by the very act of its constant ebullition. And the fact is very explicable ; it is not so much they that have spoken, as their nation that has spoken by them.-nench's Essay on Calderon.