THE FIRST READING OF ROBINSON CRUSOE.

And what the fancies that so charm his mind?

What the sweet day-dreams that enchain each sense?—
To live a Crusoe in his lonely isle.

Here day by day he reads the witching tale,
And here with love and labour consummate,
Within the orchard-bank, beneath the trees,
He has devised his island, built his hut;
And here his younger brother, wild and shy,
As gentle Friday, acts his faithful part.

Sweet days were those of fairy-land romance;
Prophetic of the future, when the boy,
Obedient to a Will beyond his own-
A Will converting even the sports of children
To His great purposes of love and use—
Was moulded for the future of the man,

Whom Providence appointed to His work.

Years passed, and duty's mandate called him forth

To perils more than Crusoe's, borne with more
Than Crusoe's bravery and true-heartedness:
Made him the leader of a little band

Who dared the perils of the wilderness-
The trackless, burning, unknown wilderness;
Foremost in danger, calmest in worst need,
His life within his hand, and with no guide
Save his small compass and the God he trusted,
Whilst his companions' trust was fixed on him.
And in the divers perils of the way-

Thirst's unassaugéd anguish, hope deferred,
The anxious watch by night, the toil by day-
The Crusoe-spirit of the boy, matured
Into the man of enterprise and trust,
Shrank not, and fainted not, nor knew a fear;
Calm in his hero-nature and his God.

Blessings on Crusoe! Let our children learn
His lessons of endurance; shape their fancies
According to his lonely island-life;

So shall we never lack brave men to lead
Their after-thousands into distant lands,
To colonize, to fertilize with love,

To make the desolate places of the earth
Affluent of life, and blossoming as the rose.

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THE same generation which groaned under perhaps the very worst king that ever sat upon the English throne, saw the see of Canterbury filled by one of its best and ablest archbishops. The name of Stephen Langton is familiar enough in connection with Magna Charta; he was in truth the very life and soul of that great national league which maintained against King and Pope the liberties of England. His position. was somewhat singular. An Englishman by birth, he was already a cardinal of Rome, when he was elected by the chapter of Canterbury,

on the Pope's nomination, in opposition to the nominee of King John. For six years he was an absentee primate, residing in Brittany, not venturing into the realms of his incensed sovereign, who had sworn "by God's teeth "—his usual horrible oath-that he would hang the Pope's archbishop if he caught him, and who was very likely to have kept that oath better than others. He had already banished the monks of Canterbury, and confiscated their property, for concurring in Stephen's election. The consequence was the spiritual "interdict," launched against all England by the Papal see, the excommunication of the king, and the bestowal of the English crown, as lapsed from a heretic, upon Philip Augustus of France,-when he might find it convenient to take it. When John had bought the Pope's pardon by the surrender of his own independence, Langton returned (having secured a "safeconduct" from some of the barons), and absolved him from his excommunication. But he returned to maintain, as stoutly as he had maintained what he held to be the Pope's prerogative, the civil and ecclesiastical liberties of England against the combination of Pope and king. Under his able leading, the confirmation of the Great Charter of Henry I. was forced from John; and when the Pope issued a bull to annul it, Langton refused to concur in its publication, and was in consequence suspended. The death of Pope Innocent released him; and when he saw the Charter confirmed by Henry III., he seems to have felt that his political life might fitly be closed. He was no ambitious statesman; his studies in theology might have won him a high place among divines, if his fame in civil history had not eclipsed his more private qualities. He had no doubt a strong fellow-feeling for the struggles of his predecessor Becket, for he it was who caused his bones to be translated with great pomp-the iron coffin borne on the shoulders of bishops and great barons of the realm-into the chapel specially dedicated to the memory of St. Thomas. That magnificent shrine, before which kings and peasants knelt alike for many generations, has lost its honours, and the "martyr's" claim is no longer suffered to pass without question; but the pilgrim to Canterbury in our own days will hardly pass by the plain stone coffin said to contain the bones of Stephen Langton, without some silent tribute to the memory of one of England's truest men.

The Roman see had gradually made good its hold over the English Church, and succeeding archbishops were neither wise nor bold enough to show even the moderate resistance made by Langton. The power which William the Norman had only used for his own purpose, had been appealed to for support by kings whose claims were doubtfullike Henry I. and Stephen-and had gradually succeeded in using kings for one great purpose of its own. Under John, the Pope had proceeded to appoint to vacant ecclesiastical offices of all degrees, at

his own pleasure. Langton had resisted this encroachment successfully for a while. But under his immediate successors, Italian monks were thrust into the richer benefices of the English Church, to the prejudice of the rights of the bishops, and the claims of the native clergy. The national spirit took its remedy against these foreign intruders in a very characteristic manner. "Certain madde fellows" went round their glebes, thrashed their corn out for them, and distributed it to the poor, and did other acts of rude justice; and this so openly, that it was plain that there were powerful friends in the background prepared to support these volunteer redressers of grievances. "After that," says Godwin, "the Italians were not so eager upon church benefices."

Even in the worst times, it is satisfactory to find how rarely the conduct of an archbishop brought any actual scandal on the church. There were prelates who were more influenced by worldly ambition than religious zeal, and others whose religious zeal led them into bigotry and intolerance; there were not a few who were soldiers under priests' vestments, some who were courtiers even while they professed the strictest monastic rule; but hardly one who did not command more or less respect from contemporaries, or who disgraced the pall by profligacy or crime. One of the least reputable was Boniface, son of the Earl of Savoy, and uncle to Henry III.'s queen, Eleanor; and whose noble birth and fine person were his sole recommendations. Selfish and unprincipled, and of an ungovernable temper, he defied the Pope and bullied his clergy. A good deal of his time was spent in fighting his brother's battles in Savoy; but when he did once make a progress through his English province, it was a visitation indeed! "The troublous visitation," they called it who were most concerned. The monks of Canterbury had procured from the Pope a charter of immunity from all visitation except by legates of the Holy See; Boniface threw it into the fire as if it had been the merest secular waste paper. The convent of St. Bartholomew, in Smithfield, denied that they were subject to visitation from Canterbury; Boniface knocked down the unfortunate sub-prior, who was the spokesman of the fraternity, tore off his cope, and trampled on it. In this instance he went a step too far. The Smithfield monks were popular, and all London rose at the outrage; the archbishop had to fly for his life to the Thames' side, and escape in a wherry to Lambeth, where he mostly resided. Thence he fulminated an excommunication against the brethren of St. Bartholomew, the Bishop of London, and all who had abetted them in their resistance. They in their turn appealed to Rome, and Boniface found it necessary to betake himself thither in person, and to compromise the matter as well as he could by the usual expedient of bribery. Yet this prelate, foreigner as he was, was persuaded to join in a complaint to the king, of the continual pre

ENCROACHMENTS OF THE PAPACY.

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ferment of strangers to English benefices. King Henry is said to have replied that the complaint was most just, and that it would be fit and proper that a reform in that matter should begin with his own family; for instance, said his majesty, "You and my brother Athelmar of Winchester, men utterly unlearned and aliens, shall do well to give over your places, and you shall see I will soon fill them with men you shall take no exceptions against." Boniface did not adopt the royal suggestion; he went off again to Savoy with all the money he could wring out of his clergy, and died there, still primate of all England, an office which he had held unworthily for six-and-twenty years.

His immediate successors, Robert Kilwarby and John Peckham, were nominated by the Pope-" ex plenitudine potestatis"-in despite of the royal prerogative or the chapter's right of election. Both were provincials of the Franciscan order of Friars Minors, who had established themselves in England in Langton's time, and rapidly increased in numbers and influence. Peckham-" Friar John, by divine miseration Archbishop of Canterbury," as he styled himself-ruled the church with a strong hand, and not unwisely. He did his utmost to discourage the growing evil of pluralities and non-residence; and made a visitation. of his province, which his clergy-remembering Boniface's exactionsrecorded as having been "wise and gentle." His gentleness did not extend to offences against the dignity of his office. When his brother of York presumed to have his cross borne before him within the province of Canterbury, Peckham issued a mandate ordering no man therein to furnish him with entertainment until the intrusive pretension was laid aside. When the Bishop of Coventry was imprisoned at York at the instigation of the royal favourite Gaveston, the archbishop would allow no matter to be debated in convocation until the civil power had taken its sacrilegious hand off a son of the Church. In cases of crying scandal, he literally did not spare the rod; he had Sir Osborne Gifford -who had carried off some nuns from Wilton-" whipped three Sundays following in the church of Wilton, and thrice in the church of Salisbury;" and not content with this correction, he ordered him to put off the apparel of a knight, and to wear plain russet, until he should have spent three years in the Holy Land. A rude and barbarous discipline, it may be said; not therefore ill-adapted to a semi-barbarous age; and one instance out of very many that the Church, even when such were its weapons, used them most often without respect of persons, and in defence of the morals of society.

The supremacy of Rome was now fully established in England; and during the succeeding century nearly every archbishop was appointed by what was called "provision" of the Pope. The chapters went through the ceremony of election; if their candidate was acceptable at Rome, he received the pall; if not, he was set aside without