can remember the passing of the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and the granting of Roman Catholic emancipation have probably seen greater changes in the shifting of the centre of political power, the conception of government and the ends of government, along with the mode of regarding social and economical questions, than all the generations of men who lived between the Restoration of the Monarchy and the first Reform Bill. We cannot therefore say with Mr. Green that there is a substantial agreement as to the grounds of our political, our social, our intellectual and religious life between the views of the men who followed the Restoration and those which prevail in England as we see it in the present day.

At the Restoration of 1660 the current of national life, which had been during the Commonwealth forced into a new and strange channel, returned for the most part into the original bed in which it had for centuries been flowing. Cromwell, it must be kept in mind, helped somewhat to bring about this result. The longer he held his office of Protector, the less he showed a wish to make it dependent on the Army, the more he strove to connect it with such institutions as the country had known and recognized. He tried to get Parliaments and to get them fairly chosen, though he did not succeed well in this experiment. He wished to have a national church-a very broad churchconsisting of Presbyterians, Baptists, and Independents; at the same time excluding indeed all those who were faithful to the Book of Common Prayer.

But let us not suppose the Restoration brought back all which the civil wars had taken away. The abolition of the tenure of knight service by one of the early Acts of Charles II's reign may have affected chiefly the greater landed proprietors, but it was a sign that feudalism had done its work and was in process of dissolution. The notion of doing without Parliament had passed out of the Stuart mind. Its power may be often inconvenient, but must be recognized. In casting up the accounts of the time these items must be taken into calculation. The notorious profligacy and corruption of the court must not usurp all our notice. fermentation was taking place throughout England, of which

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this profligacy was one symptom, and of which there were other symptoms scarcely less melancholy. But if we look below the surface we shall see that the great middle class among the people of England were shaping themselves into a kind of order, and were determined to hold their own in the face of both courtiers and mobs.

We find instances of all this in the history of the Isle of Wight. A Governor is appointed once more by the Crown in succession to Hammond and Sydenham, who had retained their commissions of lieutenancy from Parliament. Thomas, Lord Colepeper, the son of the political associate of Hyde and Falkland, was unfortunately one of those cavaliers who, like the French Bourbons, 'had forgotten nothing nor learnt anything' during his exile from England. He was as arbitrary in his proceedings as his predecessor, Sir George Carey, and satisfied neither those whom he was set to rule nor those who appointed him. The gentlemen of the Island therefore presented a petition to the King and Council praying for redress. They accused him of having enclosed a great part of the forest of Parkhurst to the great damage and empoverishment of many poor people' who had enjoyed it as a common pasture. He had assumed the title of Governor, to which he had no more right than the Crown's lieutenants in other counties. He had imprisoned many unoffending persons 'in a noisome dungeon in Carisbroke Castle,' among others the Mayor of Newport and one Anthony Dowding. Moreover, the ancient magazines and stores of the Island were neither so full nor in so good repair as formerly, nor the Militia of the said Isle in so good a condition and posture of defence.' The petition itself, and the reply to it from Lord Chancellor Clarendon, can be read at length in Worsley's History of the Isle of Wight, pp. 136, 140. The conclusion of Clarendon's letter is characteristic—‘As to the Militia Lord Colepeper will be appointed to go down and put it in order. My Lord Colepeper, had not this petition been presented, would before this time have been removed, and another put in his place; forasmuch as the King being in the Island took notice that he was not respected of the gentry as became his government; and truly my Lord is not to be blamed to

be willing to leave the command of the place where he is not respected, but now he shall go down to show you he is not out of favour with the King, although his Majesty is unwilling to put persons to employments not suitable to their capacities. As for instance, he would not command me to ride post. And finding this place not so proper for his command, he intended to remove him to some employment fitter for him. But, I believe, though you may possibly have one that shall live more sociably among you, you may never have one that will use his power less than Lord Colepeper.'

His deputy, Captain Alexander Colepeper, appears to have been of a kindred spirit. There exists A Letter of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to the Lord Colepeper, Governor of the Isle of Wight, requiring information of the enormities of Captain Alexander Colepeper, his lordship's deputy, to a Swedish ship in distress and the persons in her.' The laxity of the times afforded opportunity for such offences, as well as for the embezzlement of the public revenue. Thus we find the Council issuing an order to Lord Colepeper to examine into the practices of 'one John Lisle of Cowes,' a pretended public notary, who had issued certain attestations by way of passes, which enabled the merchant vessels of Hamburg and Holland (with which Governments England was then at war) to deceive the King's frigates, February, 1664.

At last Colepeper found it advisable to resign his office as Governor. In 1669 Charles II granted the whole domain of Virginia in America to Lord Colepeper and Lord Arlington for three years, whereupon the local Assembly of the Colony took alarm lest the grantees should claim appropriated land as unappropriated. Lord Colepeper came out in 1680 and persuaded the Assembly of Virginia to raise his salary from £1000 to £2000. It had been a custom for the captains of ships to make certain presents to the Governor. Colepeper changed this into fixed dues. In 1683 he left the Colony. Lord Colepeper left an only daughter and heir, Catherine, married to Thomas, fifth Lord Fairfax, and the title went to his brother John, who dying in 1719 was succeeded by his brother Cheney, fourth and last Lord

Colepeper, on whose death in 1725 the title became extinct. Thomas, sixth Lord Fairfax, inherited through his mother, the heiress of Lord Colepeper, the very large fortune of his grandfather, consisting of several manors in Kent, estates in the Isle of Wight, and a tract of land in Virginia called the Northern Neck, comprised within the boundaries of the rivers Potomac and Rappahannock, containing by estimation 5,700,000 acres. Thomas, contented with his American property, gave up his English estates in Kent and the Isle of Wight to his brother Robert, who succeeded to the title of Lord Fairfax on the death of his brother Thomas, who died unmarried in 1782. Robert, seventh Lord Fairfax, married twice, but died without issue in 1793, when his Kentish and Isle of Wight property devolved upon his nephew, the Rev. Denny Martin, and the barony was continued in the House of Lords in 1800 to his kinsman, the Rev. Bryan Fairfax, who thus became eighth Lord Fairfax.

As descendants of the Fairfaxes, the family of Wykeham Martin of Leeds Castle, Kent, have, ever since the death of the seventh Baron Fairfax, retained the Colepeper estates in the Isle of Wight and the large Jacobean manor house which stands a little to the north-east of Arreton Church, with its interesting wood carving. The first and most famous Lord Colepeper, the father of the Governor of the Isle of Wight, was the only son of Sir John Colepeper, of Wigsell, Sussex, and Elizabeth Ledley. His character is described at length by Clarendon and Sir Philip Warwick. Both agree in praising his ability in debate and his fertility in counsel, and complain of a certain irresolution and changeableness, which prevented him adhering to his first conclusions. His uncertainty of temper also greatly hindered his usefulness. Clarendon, in his correspondence, frequently speaks of the difficulty of doing business with him; Nicholas echoes the same charge; and Warwick talks of his eagerness and ferocity.' This was largely the result of his education. 'When he came to court,' says Clarendon, he might very well be thought a man having never sacrificed to the Muses or conversed in any polite company.'

October 25, 1890.

THE CHRISTIAN' FAMILY IN THE

ISLE OF WIGHT.

THE local and familiar word 'overers,' by which the people of the Isle of Wight designate such of the inhabitants as are not born natives, has an ancient and distinguished lineage. The name 'Hebrews,' so we are told by scholars who have studied the Oriental languages, denotes men who had crossed the mighty flood which separates the narrow strip of Palestine from Syria, and who had come over the Euphrates.

After the chalk hills of the Wight rose slowly from the depths of the sea through the milky cretaceous waters the first occupants of the Island came over the Channel or the Solent, bringing with them a higher civilization than that of primaeval man. The Belgic tribesmen, the Romans, the Jutes, and the Normans were all 'overers.' In this way, up to our own days, the Isle of Wight is always receiving fresh blood. Among the more distinguished of the 'overers of the later times were the Christians, who have inscribed their name on the annals of England's naval warfare. Early in the fifteenth century the name of Christian is found in the rolls of the House of Keys, the local Parliament of the Isle of Man. The office of hereditary 'deemster'—that is, the man who pronounced the 'doom' on offenders against the law, a criminal judge-was vested in one of the Christian family. Readers of Sir Walter Scott's novel of Peveril of the Peak will remember that great writer's account of the trial and execution of Captain Christian on January 4, 1662-63, for acts connected with an insurrection twenty years before, which are still involved in considerable obscurity, and which constituted a charge of high treason against the Countess Dowager of Derby, the lady of the Isle of Man, on his part, but in popular estimation made him a martyr for the rights and liberties of his countrymen. In the Manx Note Book, No. 3, July, 1885 (for which I am indebted to the courteous kindness of a lineal descendant of the family-Major Hugh Henry Christian, J.P., of Portobello, N.B.), it appears that