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great honour which pope Alexander had thus conferred on their sovereign. Yet this pope was so exceedingly wicked, that the sins of which he was notoriously guilty could not be described without polluting the page. And his end was as horrible as his life. For he was hurried into the eternal world by drinking some wine, through mistake, which one of his base-born sons had prepared for the destruction of certain cardinals, whose wealth the pope and he coveted to possess; and had therefore invited them to dinner, to poison them. And now the faithful few might have been tempted to doubt whether the gates of hell had not prevailed against the church of Christ; seeing that the pope, who bore the title of "head of the church on earth," was so manifestly given up to serve the rulers of the darkness of this world. But if Satan triumphed in giving laws to the nominal Christian church, by the mouth of those who boasted that they sat in Peter's chair, he could still no more avoid promoting the purposes of GOD, than in that hour of seeming victory, when he had entered into Judas §, and prevailed on him and the chief priests to betray, and to crucify, the Lord Jesus. By suffering the papal throne to be occupied, at this time, by a succession of popes, whose wickedness was peculiarly offensive, the true Head of the Church was providing that all, who had any love of holiness, should be prepared for hearing the call of those reformers, who were soon to lift up a voice once more, and to cry against the church of Rome, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins . For information was al¶. ready so much more easily, and consequently more generally circulated, since the invention of printing, that the crimes of its ecclesiastical governors soon became known throughout all Christendom. And

• Matt. xvi. 18.

+ Eph. vi. 12.

Luke xxii. 53.

though the rules, by which most persons judged of right and wrong, were not taken directly from the law of GOD, and were, therefore, often at variance with it; still, if men would but think for themselves, instead of blindly following the interested misdirections of the popish priests, they were not likely to be very wrong in their judgment of such gross criminality. And rare as it had been, but a very few years before, many were now beginning to think for themselves; and to reason, with much independence, on the facts passing around them. This was much owing to having taken to the perusal of the philosophers, orators, and historians of Greece and Rome; instead of the legends of Romish saints, monkish chronicles, and the loose tales of the troubadours. For now that the press had made books far more cheap than heretofore, it had thereby enabled a few classical scholars to place the stores of Roman and Grecian literature within the reach of a number of persons, whose curiosity would have been entirely repressed in the preceding age; by their inability to bear the expence of purchasing manuscripts, or of travelling to gain access to some meagre library.

Since Henry the Seventh's accession, William Grocyn, a native of Bristol; John Colet, a citizen of London; Thomas Linacre, of Canterbury; and William Lily, of Odiham, had all visited Italy, or the Greek islands; and had studied under natives of Greece. And they returned to England with such reputation for extraordinary learning, as not only drew intelligent pupils around them, but procured some of them the means of becoming patrons and

benefactors to poorer scholars. Grocyn re1491. stored the study of Greek in Oxford; being first attended there, and then ably seconded, by the celebrated Erasmus, a Dutchman; though both were violently opposed, for a while, by ignorant priests, monks, and idle youths. Colet also taught Greek in Oxford; and was enabled, somewhat later, to com

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mand the respectful attention of a numerous audience, whilst he explained to them St. Paul's Epistles. As he was the son of a mayor of London, he inherited a private fortune, and being farther enriched by church preferment, he founded St. Paul's School, in the first year of the next reign. There he placed William Lily as its first master; and Lily contributed to the instruction of English youth that well known Latin grammar, which is still in use, and still called by his name. Whilst Linacre, having turned his attention to medicine, became physician to the court; and, growing rich by his professional emoluments, he gave estates to establish medical lectureships in both the English universities; besides founding, by his influence, the London College of Physicians.

To the dull and proud, however, this sudden appearance of a general desire to know what had been thought and written by men long since dead, seemed strange and humiliating. For they could perceive that it amounted to a confession that the readers felt themselves inferior to those antients in the knowledge of men, and in practical wisdom. "It is

enough," said a nobleman to Dr. Paice, the king's secretary, " for a nobleman's sons to blow their horn and carry their falcon fairly. They may leave study and learning to the children of mean people." But king Henry himself was more shrewd; and being convinced that noblemen whose chief thoughts turned upon horses, and dogs, and hawks, could only be fit to manage horses, and dogs, and hawks, he took care that his own sons, especially Arthur, prince of Wales, should be made familiar with the writings of those statesmen of Greece and Rome, whose worldly wisdom is universally acknowledged.

But there was still another cause operating to expand the minds of this generation, by carrying their thoughts beyond those every-day occurrences, and ordinary objects, to which men accommodate them

selves mechanically, and almost without any act of the understanding. All Europe rung with the discoveries now making by the adventurous mariners of Portugal and Spain. Our forefathers knew so little of the face of the earth, that, though they believed it to be round, the common notion was, that it had the roundness of a flat circle, not that of a ball. Hence, in maps drawn by the most learned geographers of the fourteenth century, the earth is represented as a circle, having four poles, or cardinal points, as they are sometimes called; the northern, not far from its true place; the eastern, in what should have been the middle of China; the south pole, in the heart of Africa; and the west point in the Atlantic ocean, not many leagues from Lisbon. In the centre of this map stands Jerusalem; and the whole is surrounded by an imaginary belt of sea, which washes these four points, so as to cut through the continent of Asia, in a manner which puts great part of Siberia, and half China, out of the world. Whilst still more of Africa is lost by making the same sea pass through the great deserts from which the Nile flows. But though the geography of the East was so little known, the spices and precious stones of India, and the silks of China, were sold in the European markets by the merchants of Genoa and Venice; after having been either brought to the ports of the Levant, by a long over-land carriage, on the backs of camels; or conveyed in Arab vessels up the Red Sea, and then across the isthmus of Suez. To obtain a share of this lucrative trade, the Portuguese had been advised by prince Henry, a younger son of John I., king of Portugal, by Philippa, daughter of our John of Gaunt, to endeavour

to reach India by sailing round the south of 1417. Africa. Had the map above described been at all correct, this would have been a short and easy course, unless the heat of the southern part of that belt of sea should prove, as some feared, hot enough

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1463.

to burn their vessel. A few attempts, however, made it manifest that the heat had nothing dreadful in it ; whilst, as they rounded each cape of the western coast of Africa, the extremity of that continent was found to be still beyond them. But their vessels being weak, and the seas unknown, each naval expedition returned to Lisbon as soon as it had advanced a little farther than that which had preceded it. So that though prince Henry devoted his attention for fifty years to the encouragement of maritime discoveries, the Portuguese had got no farther than Sierra Leone at the time of his death. Their kings, however, were now interested in the pursuit. For the pope had told them that all the heathen countries they should discover, they might take possession of, as his donation. Their mariners and shipwrights too were both gaining experience; and though the progress of discovery was somewhat checked, when they reached the negro kingdom of Congo, by the steps taken to make advantage of it, still, in twenty-four years more, Bartholomew Diaz had begun to get round the south of Africa, giving to its last western headland the name of Cape Stormy; which his sovereign, John II., exchanged for the more encouraging name of Cape of Good Hope. This point being gained, king Emmanuel, the successor of John II., had recently commissioned Vasco da Gama to put to sea with three vessels of no more than from 100 to 120 tons burthen, and, doubling the Cape of Good Hope, to proceed to India. In this Da Gama had fully succeeded; and having laden his vessels with valuable merchandize, at Calicut, on the Malabar coast, he had reached Lisbon again in safety, to the great joy of the Portuguese and the astonishment of all Europe, on the 29th of August, 1499, after an absence of two years and a month.

1487.

But whilst the Portuguese were as yet proceeding in their discoveries by the slow method of creeping