vassal of the Pope. It was in St. Paul's that Cardinal Otho sat as dictator of the clergy of England, with her bishops and abbots at his feet; and promulgated his celebrated Constitutions, which were, as subsequently enlarged and confirmed by Cardinal Ottabuoni, to form the law of the Church of England. It was in St. Paul's the first capital sentence “De Hæretico comburendo" was pronounced by Archbishop Arundel on William Sautree. It was in the nave of St. Paul's that the English Bible was publicly burned in the presence of Cardinal Wolsey. Upon such scenes no Englishman would needlessly care to dwell. One notable scene occurs during all this dreary period. We mean what Dean Milman speaks of as “ the first public appearance of the earliest champion of religious freedom, the rude apostle of principles which—matured, refined, harmonisedwere to make a religious revolution in half Europe, to establish the Church of England as an important branch of the great Catholic Church of Christendom,-a revolution which was not confined to any time, to any province, to any nation of the Christian world.” The citation of Wycliffe before William de Courtenay would of itself invest with imperishable interest the Cathedral in which the scene took place. An interesting account of it, extracted from the Dean's History of Latin Christianity, is inserted in his present work; but as it relates to an event in history with which most of our readers must be sufficiently familiar, we forbear extracting it. It may be more to the purpose now, when even in the Church of England men can be found full of sympathy for the pre-Reformation period, and striving to uphold its institutions, to submit what the Dean terms a tremendous increpation against the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's, issued by King Edward III. “super nefandis abusibus in Ecclesiâ Sancti Pauli,” which he extracts from Rymer's Fodera :

“ Their refectory had become the resort of base mechanics, their inner chambers no better than hired brothels. Where there used and ought to be the daily maintenance and sustentation of the ministry in holy worship, were all kinds of foul and abominable acts of laymen. The very sacred vessels and ornaments were pilfered and held up for sale. Worse than these abuses, revenues designed for this sacred purpose were wasted, or unequally distributed; some were rolling in affluence, others were miserably poor: the chantries and altars were alienated to other uses. The manors and farms were mismanaged. The King ordered that the establishment should be placed on its old footing. The public table was to be restored, the bakehouse, the brewery, which had gone to ruin, were to be rebuilt ; the daily ale and bread distributed. The execution of this stern mandate is committed, not to the Bishop, but to th , Lord Mayor and Sheriffs of the city.

* Bishop Braybroke's reform, which he carried throngh with difficulty against the opposition of the Canons, was of an abuse which had grown up out of the constitution of the Chapter. The Residentiaryship had formerly been beld a burden ; the Canons thought it more pleasant to reside each on his separate estate, leaving to others the irksome duty of attending the long and wearisome services of the Church, for which each had his ill-paid deputy. Gradually, however, from the great increase of the common fund, (the domus), by oblations, obits (more of these bereafter), and other sources, shared out to the residentiaries, this burden became an enviable privilege. There was a rash to become residentiaries. At this time, too, the residentiaries had an ingenious device to exclude their eager brethren. The Canon who would become a residentiary, was obliged to pay six or seren hundred marks, to be spent in feastings So the residentiary Chapter had sank down to only two. The affair was brought before the King for his arbitration, and he ordered that residence should be determined according to the usage of the Church of Salisbury.

“But not the Chapter only, the church itself had fallen into grievous disrepute. To high-toned religions feeling, a building dedicated to God and His service has an inherent awfulness and sanctity, breathed, as it were, from its atmosphere. But in coarser, not altogether irreligious minds, this reverence either is weakened, or wears away. In all times there has been a strife, more or less obstinate, between the worldly and the unworldly, for exclusive possession of churches. The place of concourse becomes a place of trade. Bishop Bray broke issued letters denouncing the profanation of St. Paul's by marketing and trading in the church itself. He alleges the example of the Saviour, who casts the buyers and sellers out of the Temple. “In our Cathedral, not only men, women also, not on common days alone, but especially on Festivals, expose their wares, as it were, in a public market, buy and sell without reverence for the holy place. More than this—the Bishop dwells on more filthy abuses. Others, too, by the instigation of the devil, do not scruple with stones and arrows to bring down the birds, pigeons, and jackdaws which nestle in the walls and crevices of the building : others play at ball or at other unseemly games, both within and without the church, breaking the beautiful and costly painted windows to the amazement of the spectators.' The Bishop threatens these offenders, if they do not desist, on monition, from these irreverent practices, to visit them with the greater excommunication." (pp. 82—84.)

It is a relief to turn from such disgraceful records, and from the scenes of perjury and murder to which St. Paul's was doomed to be a witness during the wars of the Roses, to some brief notice of one whom Dean Milman has truly described as “one of the most remarkable and admirable men who have beld dignity in the Church of England, assuredly in the Church of St. Paul's.” Of him he says

“As Dean of St. Paul's Colet stood forth among the Churchmen

infirmities, of his order : unimpeachable blamelessness of life, generous hospitality, not indiscriminate though profuse, but delighting in a narrow circle, intellectual as well as religious, in which, according to the fashion of the day, theological readings mingled with the cheerful banquet. Those without this pale of course taunted him as niggardly and covetous, prodigal as he was of the emoluments of his office. This revenue was before long to be augmented by the great wealth of his father, which he entirely devoted to objects of public advantage and to charity. Colet rapidly worked a complete change, not in the ceremonial or ordinary services of the Cathedral, but as introducing a new system of religious instruction. For the first time the pulpit of the Cathedral, or that of Paul's Cross, freely opened the Sacred Scriptures to the people. Colet himself preached regularly on every Sunday and holiday, and obtained the aid of the most learned and eloquent preachers of the day, like himself devoted to the study of the sacred writings and their practical application. He adhered to his famous axiom, 'Keep to the Bible and the Apostles' Creed, and let divines, if they like, dispute about the rest.' He founded a kind of catechetical lecture for the young, in English, which the chronicler Grafton seems to notice as something altogether new

“As a preacher Colet had the one great indisputable qualification -he was thoroughly in earnest. He was so possessed with the truth of his mission, that the whole man might seem to preach. It is undoubted that he was listened to by all ranks and orders with unexhausted interest. Thomas More considered the day when he did not hear Colet preach as a void in his life." (p. 118.)

It was, however, in the establishment of his celebrated school that Dean Colet rendered the most lasting and important service to his country; the following is the interesting account which is furnished of this foundation-Esto perpetua!

“ John Colet's name is preserved to our days by the pious memory of those who have been educated at the school which he founded in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral, and endowed with a large part of his patrimonial wealth, to the amount of £30,000 or £40,000 of our money. Among the amiable parts of Colet's character was fondness for children. He placed an image of the youthful Jesus. as the guardian and example of his school. But Colet had wider views than the indulgence of such feelings, remarkable as they may be in one who had denied himself, by his ordination vows, the luxury of the parental affections, and on whose strict adherence to those vows there never was the slightest impeachment. He sought to train up generation after generation in the broad and liberal, but devout Christianity which was dawning on his mind and that of his friend Erasmus. His school was to be strictly religious, but not monastic. With the rules of the school, and the studies to be pursued, he took infinite pains. He was assisted by the advice of Erasmus, who, as has been said, drew up a grammar and other elementary Vol. 68.-No. 381.

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books for the school. Colet was fortunate in his master, the oncecelebrated William Lily, the model of grammarians. He took the greatest pains to provide a second master to act ander Lily. Colet deviated in many respects from the usage of the founders of such schools. Schools attached to cathedrals were usually ander the care and control of the Chapters. But Colet and his Chapter were not in barmony: the Chapter, no doubt, like the Bishop, looked with jealousy on the new learning, with which they were but slightly gifted. They had repudiated Colet's statutes. Colet left the whole conduct of the school and its endowments to the Mercers' Company, to which his father had belonged, and of which himself by descent might claim to be a member. The property, therefore, never being mixed up with that of the Chapter, was probably better managed. To all appearance it has been carefully and justly administered by that honourable Company.

“ There are other remarkable provisions in the statutes of Colet's school. In general the founders of those schools had encumbered them with narrow and inflexible regulations, sure to become obsolete, as to the scholars to be admitted, and the studies to be cultivated. In such schools there is a constant strife with the knowledge and the manners of succeeding ages. With a wise prescience Colet threw aside all these manacles on posterity. There is no limitation whatever, as to admission, of descent or kin, country or station. It is a free school in the broadest sense. Of all the mul. titades who then or thereafter might flow to central, busy, metropolitan London, no children were proscribed or excluded. It is a more singular instance of prophetic sagacity, that Colet should have anticipated the truth so long andreamed of, that education must conform itself to the social state, the habits, manners, wants, and progressive knowledge of the day. The studies in St. Paul's School are absolutely without statutable restrictions. They may adapt themselves, or be adapted by the wisdom of the master, to the demands of every period and stage of civilization. And this from a man of the profound religion of Colet! But Colet saw that the dominant religion, or rather the form of that religion, was drawing to a close, and who should determine where that change would be arrested ? Christianity would never fail ; but what was to be the Christianity of the future, John Colet presumed not to foresee." (pp. 126--128.)

Colet was succeeded by a very remarkable man, Richard Pace, of whom the Dean furnishes some curious particulars. He was one of the most remarkable and accomplished men of bis time, and employed in State affairs of the first importance. Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Wolsey the remarkable comment upon him

“He was a fool,

For he would need be virtuous.” It is a melancholy instance of the instability of all human greatness to hear how he ended his days in destitution, cast out

of his deanery“ with the scholar's mind all overthrown," to die no one knows where.

We have not space to follow the course of events connected with St. Paul's through the Reformation times. Bonner was succeeded by Ridley. Before the latter would enter the choir, he commanded the lights on the altar to be extinguished ; chantries, rood-lofts, crucifixes, images, altars, were swept away we might fondly, a short time ago, have hoped into the

“backside of the world far off,

The Limbo large and broad,” of which Milton speaks, but they seem to be issuing from their Paradise once more.

“On Allhallows Day began the book of the new service at St. Paul's, that beautiful liturgy which had gradually grown into its present form, and was now, if not absolutely, nearly complete. That liturgy has ever since, for above three centuries--with one brief and immediate interruption, another at a later period—been read in all our churches : that liturgy, with some few imperfections (and what human composition is without imperfections ?), the best model of pure, fervent, simple devotion, the distillation, as it were, and concentration of all the orisons which have been uttered in the name of Christ, since the first days of the Gospel : that liturgy which is the great example of pure vernacular English, familiar, yet always un. vulgar, of which but few words and phrases have become obsolete; which has an indwelling music which enthrals and never palls upon the ear, with the full living expression of every great Christian truth, yet rarely hardening into stern dogmatism; satisfying every need, and awakening and answering every Christian emotion ; entering into the heart, and, as it were, welling forth again from the heart; the full and general voice of the congregation, yet the peculiar utterance of each single worshipper. From this time our Church ceased to speak in a language not understanded' of the people, our English fully asserting its powers of expressing in its own words the most profound and awful verities of our religion, the most ardent aspirations of the soul to communion with the unseen.” (pp. 228, 229.)

As for the discarded vestments and other ornaments of the old splendid ceremonial,

“They were too rich a prey to escape the rapacious Government. On the 25th May (1553) came the Commissioners, with the Lord Chief Justice and the Lord Mayor, to make the last remorseless sweep of these riches, and seized to the King's use all the treasures of the Church, even the plate, leaving but a scanty stock of less precious vessels for the simpler services. The Ritualist of our day may read in Dugdale-if he can read for tears of fond but vain regret—the pages which recount the gorgeous robes, the chasubles, copes, and other purple and gold and embroidered attire, once the possession, once the raiment, of the clergy of St. Paul's. Bishop