ground, were broken with sledge-hammers, hewn with axes, trampled, torn, and beaten into shreds. A troop of harlots, snatching waxen tapers from the altars, stood around the destroyers and lighted them at their work. Nothing escaped their omniverous rage. They desecrated seventy chapels, forced open all the chests of treasure, covered their own squalid attire with the gorgeous robes of the ecclesiastics, broke the sacred bread, poured out the sacramental wine into golden chalices, quaffing huge draughts to the Beggars' health; burned all the splendid missals and manu scripts, and smeared their shoes with the sacred oil, with which kings and prelates had been anointed. It seemed that each of these malicious creatures must have been endowed with the strength of a hundred giants. How else in the few brief hours of a midsummer night, could such a monstrous desecration have been accomplished by a troop, which, according to all accounts, was not more than one hundred in number! There was a multitude of spectators, as upon all such occasions, but the actual spoilers were very few.

The noblest and richest temple of the Netherlands was a wreck, but the fury of the spoilers was excited not appeased. Each seizing a burning torch, the whole herd rushed from the cathedral, and swept howling through the streets. Long live the Beggars!' resounded through the sultry midnight air, as the ravenous pack flew to and fro, smiting every image of the Virgin, every crucifix, every sculptured saint, every Catholic symbol which they met with upon their path. All night long they roamed from one sacred edifice to another, thoroughly destroying as they went. Before morning they had sack d thi ty churches within the city walls. They entered the monasteries, burned their invaluable libraries, destroyed their altars, statues, pictures, and, descending into the cellars, broached every cask which they found there, pouring out in one great flood all the ancient wine and ale with which those holy men had been wont to solace their retirement from generation to generation. They invaded the numeries, whence the occupants, panic-stricken, fled for refuge to the houses of their friends and kindred. Th: streets were filled with monks aud nuns, running this way and that, shrieking and fluttering, to escape the claws of these fiendish Calvinists. The terror was fmaginary, for not the least remarkable feature in these transactions was, that neither insult nor injury was offered to man or woman, and that not a farthing's value of the immense amount of property destroyed was appropriated. It was a war, not against the living but against graven images, nor was the sentiment which prompted the onslaught in the least commingled with a desire of plunder. The princip: 1 citizens of Antwerp, expecting every instant that the storm wou d be diverted from the ccclesiastical edifices to prîvate dwellings, and that robbery, rape, and murder would follow acrilege, remained all night expecting the attack. and prepared to defend their hearths, even if the altars were profaned. The precaution was needless. It was asserted by the Catholics that the Confederates, and other opulent Protestants, had organised this company of profligates for the meagre pittance of ten stivers a day. On the other hand it was believed by many that the Catholics had themselves plotted the whole outrage in order to bring odium upon the Reformers. Both statements were equally unfounded. The task was most thoroughly performed, but it was prompted by a furious fanaticism, not by baser motives.

Two days and nights longer the havoc raged unchecked through all the churches of Antwerp and the neighbouring villages. Hardly a statue or picture escaped destruction. Yet the rage was directed exclusively against stocks and stones. Not a man was wounded nor a woman outraged. Prisoners, indeed, who had been lamguishing hopelessly in dungeons were liberated. A monk who had been in the prison of the barefoot monastery for twelve years, recovered his freedom. Art was tran.pl. d in the dust, but humanity deplored no victims.

GEORGE BANCROFT.

The history of the United States has been ably and copiously related by a native historian, MR. GEORGE BANCROFT This gentle man was born in 1800, at Worcester, in Massachusetts. His father, Dr. A. Bancroft, a Congregational or Un tarian minister, had written a Life of Washington,' 1807, and the paternal tastes and example

had probably some effect in directing the literary labours of the son. Having graduated with distinction at Harvard College, he afterwards studied in Germany, and on his return entered the Church. A love of literature, however, prevailed, and Mr. Bancroft commenced author by publishing a volume of Poems.' Some translations from German, chiefly the historical manuals of Professor Heeren, next engaged Mr. Bancroft, and he added to these precarious literary gains by opening a school at Northampton. He seems next to have tried public employment, and was successively collector at the port of Boston and secretary of the navy. In 1846, he was appointed minister plenipotentiary to England. The latter appointment may be considered as due to the literary reputation of Mr. Bancroft, who had then entered on his great historical work. In 1834 appeared his History of the Colonisition of the United States,' volume I. Α second volume was published in 1837, and a third in 1840. The success of this work induced the author to continue his researches, and he commenced the History of the American Revolution.' From 1852 to 1858, four volumes were published, making seven in all, devoted to the history of the United States. There was much new information in these volumes, for manuscript and unpublished sources were thrown open to their author; his style was lively and energetic, and his democratic prejudices, though sometimes unnecessarily brought forward, gave a warmth and individuality to the narrative. The historian was in earnest-a hearty lover of his country, and of the founders of its independence. At the same time, his narrative must be pronounced fair and candid, and free from any attempt to awaken old animosities.

Massacre of English Colonists by Indians.

Between the Indians and the English there had been quarrels. but no wars. From the first lauding of colonists in Virginia, the power of the natives was despised; their strongest weapons were such arrows as they could shape without the use of iron, such hatchets as could be made from stone; and an English mastiff seemed to them a terrible adversary. Nor were their numbers considerable. Within sixty miles of Jamestown, it is computed, there were no more than five thousand souls, or about fifteen hundred warriors. The whole territory of the clans, which listened to Powhatan as their leader or their conqueror, comprehended about eight thousand square miles, thirty tribes. and twenty-four hundred warriors; so that the Indian population amounted to about one inhabitant to a square mile. The natives, naked and feeble compared with the Europeans, were nowhere concentrated in considerable villages, but dwelt dispersed in hamlets, with from forty to sixty in each company. Few places had more than two hundred; and many had less. It was also unusual for any large portion of these tribes to be assembled together. An idle tale of an ambuscade of three or four thousand is perhaps an error for three or four hundred; otherwise it is an extravagant fiction, wholly unworthy of belief. Smith once met a party that seemed to amount to seven hundred; and so complete was the superiority conferred by the use of firearms. that with fifteen men he was enabled to withstand them all. The savages were therefore regarded with contempt or compassion. No uniform care had been taken to conciliate their good will; although their condition had been improved by some of the arts of civilised life. The degree of their advancement may be judged by the intelligence of their chieftain. A honse having been built for Opechancanough after the English fashion, he took such delight in the lock

and key, that he would lock and unlock the door a hundred times a day, and thought the device incomparable. When Wyatt arrived, the natives expressed a fear lest his intentions should be hostile; he assured them of his wish to preserve inviolable peace; and the emigrants had no use for firearms except against a deer or a fowl. Confidence so far increased, that the old law, which made death the penalty for teaching the Indians to use a musket, was forgotten; and they were now employed as fowlers and huntsmen. The plantations of the English were widely extended in unsuspecting confidence, along the James River and towards the Potomac, wherever rich grounds invited to the culture of tobacco; nor were solitary places, remote from neighbours, avoided, since there would be less competition for the ownership of the soil.

Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, remained, after the marriage of his daughter, the firm friend of the English. He died in 1618; and his younger brother was now the heir to his influence. Should the native occupants of the soil consent to be driven from their ancient patrimony? Should their feebleness submit patiently to contempt, injury, and the loss of their lands? The desire of self-preservation, the necessity of self-defence, seemed to demand an active resistance; to preserve their dwelling-places, the English must be exterminated; in open battle the Indians would be powerless; conscious of their weakness, they could not hope to accomplish their end except by a preconcerted surprise. The crime was one of savage ferocity; but it was suggested by their situation. They were timorous and quick of apprehension, and consequently treacherous; for treachery and falsehood are the vices of cowardice. The attack was prepared with impenetrable secrecy. To the very last hour the Indians preserved the language of friendship; they borrowed the boats of the English to attend their own assemblies; on the very morning of the massacre, they were in the houses and at the tables of those whose death they were plotting. Sooner,' said they, shall the sky fall, than peace be violated on our part.' At length, on the twenty-second of March (1622). at midday, at one and the same instant of time, the Indians fell upon an unsuspecting population, which was scattered through distant villages, ex ending one hundred and forty miles on both sides of the river. The onset was so sudden, that the blow was not discerned till it fell. None were spared; children and women, as well as men; the missionary, who had cherished the natives with untiring gentleness; the liberal benefactors, from whom they had received daily benefits all were murdered with indiscriminate barbarity, and every aggravation of cruelty. The savages fell upon the dead bodies, as if it had been possible to commit on them a fresh murder.

In one hour three hundred and forty-seven persons were cut off. Yet the carnage was not universal; and Virginia was saved from so disastrous a grave. The night before the execution of the conspiracy, it was revealed by a converted Indian to an Englishman, whom he wished to rescue; Jamestown and the nearest settlements were well prepared against an attack; and the savages, as timid as they were ferocious, fled with precipitation from the appearance of wakeful resistance." In this manner, the most considerable part of the colony was saved.

The Town of Boston in the Last Century.

The king set himself, and his ministry, and parliament, and all Great Britain, to subdue to his will one stubb rn little town on the sterile const of the Massachusetts Bay. The odds against it were fearful; but it shewed a life inextinguishable, and had been chosen to keep guard over the liberties of mankind.

The Old World had not its parallel. It counted about sixteen thousand inhabitants of European origin, all of whom learned to read and write. Good public schools were the foundation of its political system; and Benjamin Franklin, one of their grateful pupils, in his youth apprenticed to the art which makes knowledge the common property of mankind, had gone forth from them to stand before the nations as the representative of the modern plebeian class.

As its schools were for all its children, so the great body of its male inhabitants of twenty-one years of age, when assembled in a hall which Faneuil, of Huguenot ancestry, had built for them, was the source of all municipal authority. In the meeting of the town, its taxes were voted, its affairs discussed and settled; its agents and public servants annually elected by ballot; and abstract political principles freely debated. A small property qualification was attached to the right of

suffrage, but did not exclude enough to change the character of the institution. There had never existed a considerable municipality approaching so nearly to a pure democracy; and, for so populous a place, it was undoubtedly the most orderly and best governed in the world."

Its ecclesiastical polity was in like manner republican. The great mass were Congregationalists; each church was an assembly formed by voluntary agreement; self-constituted, self-supported, and independent. They were clear that no person or church had power over another church. There was not a Roman Catholic altar in the place; the usages of papists were looked upon as worn-out superstitions, fit only for the ignorant. But the people were not merely the fiercest enemies of 'popery and savery;' they were Protestants even against Protestantism; and though the English Church was tolerated, Boston kept up its exasperation against prelacy. Its ministers were still its prophets and its guides; its pulpit, in which, now that Mayhew was no more, Cooper was admired above all others for eloquence and patriotism, by weekly appeals inflamed alike the fervour of piety and of liberty. In the Boston Gazette,' it enjoyed a free press, which gave currency to its conclusions on the natural right of man to self-government.

Its citizens were inquisitive; seeking to know the causes of things, and to search for the reason of existing institutions in the laws of nature. Yet they controlled their speculative turn by practical judgment, exhibiting the seeming contradiction of susceptibility to entusiasm, and calculating shrewdness. They were fond of gain, and adventurous, penetrating, and keen in their pursuit of it; yet their avidity was tem pered by a well-considered and continuing liberality. Nearly every man was strnggling to make his own way in the world and his own fortune; and yet individually, and as a body, they were public-spirited.

'A Popular History of the United States,' by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, the poet, and SYDNEY HOWARD GAY, was commenced in 1876, to be completed in four volumes. This will be a very splendid work, finely illustrated and printed, and written in a pleasing style.

Three Periods in American History.

The history of the United States (says Mr. Bryant) naturally divides itself into three periods, upon the third of which we lately, at the close of our civil war, entered as a people with congruous institutions in every part of our vast territory. The first was the colonial period; the second includes the years which elapsed froin the Declaration of Independence to the struggle which closed with the extinction of slavery. The colonial period was a time of tutelage, of struggle and dependence, the childhood of the future nation. But our real growth, as a distinct member of the community of nations, belongs to the second period, and began when we were strong enough to assert and maintain our independence. To this second period a large space has been allotted in the present work. Not that the mere military annals of our Revolutionary War would seem to require a large proportion of this space, but the various attendant circumstances, the previons controversies with the mothercountry, in which all the colonies were more or less interested, and which grew into a common canse; the consultations which followed; the defiance of the mothercountry in which they all joined; the service in an army which made all the colonists fellow-soldiers; the common danger, the common privations, sufferings, and expedients, the common sorrow at reverses and rejoicing at victories, require to be fully set forth, that it may be seen by how natural a transition these widely-scattered communities became united in a federal republic, which has rapidly risen to take its place among the foremost nations of the world, with a population which has increased tenfold, and a sisterhood of States enlarged from thirteen to thirty-seven.

So crowded with events and controvers es is this second part of our history, and the few years which have elapsed of the third: so rapid has been the accumulation of wealth and the growth of trade; so great have been the achievements of inventive art and the applied sciences; with such celerity has our population spread itself over new regions, and so vehement have been the struggles maintained against its abuses, moral and political, that it has not been easy to give due attention to all of them, without exceeding the limits prescribed for this work...

We are not without the hope that those who read what we have written, will see in the past, with all its vicissitudes, the promise of a prosperous and honourable future, of concord at home, and peace and respect abroad; and that the same cheerful piety, which leads the good man to put his personal trust in a kind Providence, will prompt the good citizen to cherish an equal confidence in regard to the destiny reserved for our beloved country.

DANIEL WEBSTER.

As we have noticed the popular forensic oratory of Erskine and Brougham, the great American orator, DANIEL WEBSTER (1782–1852), should not be overlooked. He was the Chatham of the New World, and Chatham could not have pronounced a more glowing eulogium on England than fell from the lips of this Western Republican..

Eloquent Apostrophe to England.

Our fathers raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compareda power which has dotted the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun in his course and keeping pace with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.

The remarkable fact of the simultaneous death of Adams and Jef ferson-the second and third presidents of the United States--happening on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (July 4, 1826), could not but powerfully affect the mind of Webster, as it did that of the whole nation. Jefferson had written the Declaration, and Adams had proclaimed it in congress. Daniel Webster, speaking at Boston on the 2d of August following, thus characterized the departed statesmen:

Adams and Jefferson:

Adams and Jefferson are no more; and we are assembled, fellow-citizens, the aged, the midd e-aged, and the young, by the spontaneous impulse of all, under the authority of the municipal government, with the presence of the chief magistrate of the Commonwealth, and others its official representatives, the University, and the learned societies, to bear our part in those manifestations of respect and gratitude which pervade the whole land. Adams and Jefferson are no more. On our fiftieth auniversary, the great day of national jubilee, in the very hour of public rejoicing, in the midst of echoing and re-echoing voices of thanksgiving, while their own names were on all tongues, they took their flight together to the world of spirits. If it he true that no one can safely be pronounced happy while he lives. if that event which terminates life can alone crown its honours and its glory, what felicity is here! The great epic of their lives, now happily concluded! Poetry itself has hardly terminated illustrious lives, and finished the career of earthly renown, by such a consummation. If we had the power, we could not wish to reverse this dispensation of the Divine Providence. The great objects of life were accomplished, the drama was ready to be closed. It has closed; our patriots have fallen; but so fallen, at such age, with such coincidence, on such a day, that we cannot rationally lament that the end has come, which we knew could not be long deferred. Neither of these great men, fellow-citizens, could have died, at any time. without leaving an immense void in our American society. They have been so intimately, and for so long a time, blended with the history of the country, and especially so united, in our thoughts and recollections, with the events of the Revolution, that the death of either would have touched the chords of public sympathy. We should have felt that one great link, connecting us with former times, was broken; that we had lost something more, as it were, of the presence of the Revolution itself, and of the Act