he was elected M.P. for the borough of Appleby, and made his maiden speech in 1791, in reply to Mr. Whitbread, who had attacked the Government on the question of the Russian Armament. Mr. Pitt, in complimenting Mr. Jenkinson on this speech, declared in the House that "it would have done credit to the most practised debater and the most experienced statesman that ever existed.' In 1792 Mr. Pitt offered him a seat at the India Board; and, from that date till his death, he was, with one short exception, in constant employment. His first important occupation was the framing of the famous Peace of Amiens with the French Consul, when, in 1801, Pitt retired, and Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth, became Prime Minister. At this time he showed the germs of those liberal opinions to which he adhered to the last, having agreed with Pitt in the justice to the Roman Catholics of what was called "Catholic Emancipation," though neither of them was able to prevail over the strong prejudices of the King and his fear for his Coronation Oath.

Four years later Mr. Jenkinson, now Lord Liverpool, performed the important service to the country of reconciling Pitt and Addington, who, though not enemies, had been since the Peace on unfriendly terms; still later, he was ready to serve as Home Secretary under that effete old man, the Duke of Portland, who had been selected as temporary head of the Tory party. During the long troubles at home caused by the high prices and European war, Lord Liverpool maintained the dignity of his office, being apparently the only one who, from the first, never shrunk from his belief in the Duke of Wellington. We all know how bitterly the Duke wrote from the Peninsula, and how severely he animadverted on the feebleness and hesitation of the then Home Government, when every nerve ought to have been strained to afford him as much national aid as was possible; but few, if any, of these angry letters were addressed to Lord Liverpool; or, at all events, without some apology, showing that the Duke was well aware and ready to admit that Lord Liverpool was not himself to blame for not having greater influence over his colleagues. In 1809 Mr. Perceval became Prime Minister; and, after his assassination in 1812, Lord Liverpool succeeded to this, the highest office of the English Government, and retained it till his death in 1827. During this long period, though there was as yet a want of that freedom-not to say licence-which prevails now among almost all classes, much was in progress for the release of religion and trade from bonds which for ages had been thought necessary for their security. In this movement Lord Liverpool was an honest and high-minded agent. Thus, in 1814, he brought in a Bill permitting the free exportation of corn, supporting his plan by arguments founded on the fact that Free Trade was right in principle, though it was no less evident that the time had not yet come when it was possible to carry that full measure, with which Mr. Cobden's name has been so justly associated. It is assuredly remarkable that one whom his opponents are never weary of calling a mere Tory Minister" should so early have called Free Trade "the one sound system of legislation on such matters which ought never to be departed from, except on some special ground demanding particular exceptions." The following years were those of riot, disturbance, and misery in England; caused, no doubt, in no small degree by the collapse of trade, on the cessation of the twenty-five years' war of the French Revolution. During this period, as we gather from Lord Liverpool's letters and speeches, though strenuously in favour of law and order, he was averse, by the gentle constitution of his mind, from carrying out the extreme penalties of the law, except in cases of the gravest importance.

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In 1818 Lord Liverpool introduced and carried through Parliament a measure righteous in itself, but which at the present moment would be negatived in both Lords and Commons by majorities of more than two to one. This was nothing less than the obtaining a grant of a million of money for the purpose of providing additional church accommodation in London. Though in its subsequent application much money was unwisely expended-not to say wasted-in structures whose architectural ugliness can hardly be defended by their moral value, there can be no question but that Lord Liverpool's action in this matter was the spur to that splendid flow of private beneficence in the same direction, which internal dissensions among Churchmen have never availed to check, and which has enabled the last three Bishops of London to consecrate, we believe, more than 300 places of worship during the forty years of their united Episcopate. Another work in which Lord Liverpool shared con amore was the carrying through of Sir Robert Peel's first Act for the regulation of the hours of children's labour in factories-a measure which was ultimately crowned with success by the untiring energy of Lord Shaftesbury, aided by the main body of the Conservatives. In 1822 Lord Liverpool introduced measures for the reduction of the malt tax and for a further revision of the corn laws, the effect of which was to be the lowering of the price at which corn could be imported duty free, with the imposition, of course, of lower duties. It is a curious instance of the way in which political feelings vary according, too often, as a great party are in or out of office, that, on this occasion, the Whigs came out as the friends of the farmer, and declared that the Government were sacrificing the agricultural to the commercial interest! In the same liberal spirit it is clear that Lord Liverpool acted to the end of his days, and that to him are mainly due the special training of such men as Peel and Canning, and the ultimate success of the great measures of Catholic Emancipation and of Free Trade. In conclusion, we feel justified in saying that no political biography has been published for many years which will be read with a more lively interest than this by Mr. Yonge. He has well executed the task he has set himself, and shown remarkable judgment in the separation and arrangement of the mass of materials he had before him. Judiciously, too, he has passed over many minor and unimportant acts, that he might have space to bring out in clearer and bolder relief those measures whereby Lord Liverpool has, as a statesman, his highest claim on the gratitude of his country.

Mr. Folkestone Williams, in his "Lives of the English Cardinals: including Historical Notices of the Papal Court from Nicholas Breakspeare (Adrian IV.) to Thomas Wolsey, Cardinal Legate," two vols., has produced a work which is fairly entitled to praise for the straightforward honesty with which it has been compiled. Mr. Williams cannot, we think, be congratulated on much originality of style, or on the vivacity with which he tells a particular story, or narrates a striking event; but, in the arrangement of masses of facts, and in the building them up with a solidity worthy of Sir John Vanbrugh's brick Palaces, Mr. Williams is without a compeer. Some errors, we perceive, have crept into his book which he can easily amend in a later edition, as where, for instance, he speaks of Becket's murderers being all punished for their crime, whereas it is well enough known, and may be found in Bowden, or any other life of that Archbishop, that two of them, De Morville and De Tracy, lived long afterwards, and not in seclusion or disgrace.

In what may perhaps be called a special branch or form of biography, we have the continuation of an excellent and standard work, viz. vols. vi. and vii. of the Dean

of Chichester's (Dr. Hook's) "Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury," at a period, too, far more interesting to most readers than any previous time, to wit, the Reformation period. For many of the previous centuries, as he is indeed the chief witness, so must the antiquary be considered as the chief student; to him remote and fragmentary facts of early Saxons or later Normans have the charm of a novel, and the delight of successful research in special training, too, gives him the right to speak glibly of names and matters, which are as little the food of the universal world as are the special names of the ropes in a man-of-war to persons of what is called "respectable" education. When, however, we come down to the Reformation days-to the story of the great fight, then as men gladly hoped, completely won, but which the practices of our most modern times lead us to think must be fought once again,-the red-hot iron of religious controversy being used as a brand, where before it was often little more than a stimulant, every reader, be he Catholic or Protestant, must have an undying interest, either to upset the presumed heresies it has begotten, or to wave again before the nations the "Semper Eadem," the banner of that glorious Princess, who, with all her faults, or, if you will, her feminine weaknesses, has done more than any one else to promote and to establish the moral no less than the intellectual renown of England.

Surely we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that many of the great questions our fathers too hastily deemed to have been settled once and for ever at the Reformation, are again, after a torpor of three hundred years, awakened suddenly among us. For do we not see around and before and behind us, advocates of theories and doctrines we thought we had got rid of the neces sity of confession, the celibacy of the clergy, the maiming, for the laity at least, of the great Sacrament of the Eucharist, to say nothing of the proposed dismemberment of a National Church by suppression of the English Church in Ireland-a measure which, if it could be proved to be an act of justice to the smaller island, logically implies the destruction of the National Church in the big island no less than in the little. Hence it is that this portion of Dr. Hook's long story is so much the more interesting, as it is also so much the more important, involving as it does the necessity, that, if treated at all, it should be treated by a man armed at all points; above all by one accustomed to weigh evidence and to state results. It is, therefore, with great pleasure we state that, in these two last volumes, the Dean has shown himself thoroughly equal to the occasion. The lives of Archbishops Warham and Cranmer are naturally the two round which the whole story of the Reformation revolves. It is pleasant, therefore, to see the good sense with which Dr. Hook writes of each of them, not indeed without a certain dry humour which is his characteristic at all times. What men who peruse these volumes may most chiefly and usefully learn from them is, that the Church of England is not the modern creation the Romanists and other sectarians are so glad to aver; and further, that many of the practices, the section among us, who are never tired of talking of the Church being in fetters to the State, would remove by a separation of Church and State, have always existed in this land, sometimes with even more of apparent authority than is pleaded for them at present. Thus the supremacy of the Crown, as Professor Brewer has ably shown in his Preface to the "Letters and Papers of Henry VIII.," had continued from times immemorial, as a right, if not always as a fact; and any usurpations of this right were resisted and modified by the energy and will of the Sovereign. Again, it is an

entire mistake to suppose that, antecedently to the Reformation, Convocation could pass a single canon without the King's consent, still less that a Bull or an Ecclesiastical Constitution could be published in any part of this realm without the King's express concurrence. Bishoprics were in those times filled up by the Crown, as gifts, before it granted to the several chapters the modified right conferred by the Congé d'Élire. Even under the Congé d'Élire we know that the King constantly made his selection directly, as in the memorable case of Bishop Tunstall. Men seem to forget the troubles which embittered the relations between Rome and this country during centuries preceding the Reformation; and, more than this, that, though the Pope never failed in his efforts to obtain the recognition of his claim to be the fountain-head of all ecclesiastical jurisdiction, this claim was never admitted, but, by God's grace, always in the long run successfully resisted. The Dean well points out that the only time in history when there was any real fear of failure of these great principles was during a short period after the Reformation had become an admitted fact; for, says he, we must admit that "the distinction between the royal and the sacerdotal powers was totally disregarded by Thomas Cromwell and the unprincipled men who formed the Government of Edward VI." . . . . and that "much injury was done to the cause of the Church through the mistaken policy of our leading ecclesiastics under the unfortunate dynasty of the Stuarts. To strengthen their position against the Romish Nonconformists on the one hand, and the Puritan Nonconformists on the other, they exaggerated the Royal prerogative."

3. MISCELLANEA.

Among the more interesting works on general literature issued during the year 1868, we cannot omit noticing "Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands, from 1848 to 1861, &c., &c.," by Her Majesty the Queen-a work which it is not too much to say could only have been published by an English Queen, and addressed to an English audience. In this remarkable book the Queen has spoken, and not in vain, to the domestic sympathies of her people. Its claim to the universal notice and appreciation it must surely obtain, being the genuine simplicity with which the story of the private life of the Royal family is told. We learn from it, what those who have been admitted within that charmed circle have ever told us was the case, that the first lady in this land loves, whenever she can withdraw herself from the serious duties of her position, to pursue the simple tastes and amusements of a woman's life. Thus we find her watching the progress of her children as they grow up from day to day, showing herself familiar with all the details of the lives of even her servants, sharing with intense pleasure the pursuits, the sports, the tastes of her husband, and recording from day to day these jottings in her journal, never with the view of their reaching any eye but her own, and, even now, only permitting them to appear in the garish light of day, that the world may learn from her unadorned and contemporaneous narrative, how great the loss she and England have suffered by the death of so able and so good a man as Prince Albert. As was well remarked shortly after the volume appeared, its lightness and elegance proved an universal passport. Laying no claim to the dignity of history or the gravity of literature, its merits are precisely those which graver historians and more practised writers often fail to attain. To say simple and common things well is not an easy task, still less to say them in such a way that they may im

press the memory and touch the heart. Contrast the lives of Louis XIV. or of George IV. with that of Prince Albert and his Queen. The lives of those men were in their day deemed the highest types of refinement and majesty, yet, infected with the vulgarity of vice, they lived a purely artificial life, the coarseness and meanness of their nature being ever ready to show itself through the tinsel of their outward glory. But the Highland life of Prince Albert's court was but the simple life of any house in the Highlands. It would be difficult to design a more pleasing accurate picture of life and character in any one of them than the Queen has given us from Balmoral. Mr. Helps, the wise editor of this excellent book, justly remarks, in his unassuming preface, that the notes the Queen has thought fit to affix to the names of her personal attendants with the object of describing their relation to herself, and even their past history in her service, illustrate in a striking manner the patriarchal feeling (if one may apply such a word as 'patriarchal' to a lady) which is so strong in the present occupant of the throne." We conceive the appearance of, and the reception that it has met with from the public at large, and, as we have reason to know, its appreciation by the poorer classes, for whose benefit the Queen has, with her usual consideration, permitted a cheap reprint, is a manifest proof that the rubbish of ecstatic novels and of sensational dramas has not yet sapped the sound foundations of English feeling and morality.

The School Inquiry Commission has published during the last year some very important papers, and among them "A Report of the System of Education for the Middle and Upper Classes in France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland," by M. Arnold, Esq., the collected materials of which will be interesting to those who have leisure to wade through the pièces justificatives, which form by far the most important part of his volume. The work, however, to our notions, is much marred by the spirit in which it is written, and by the strange ignorance which meets us every where as to the changes which have been made in English Education during the last twenty years. Thus, in cases where Mr. Arnold has to compare French teaching with English teaching, he has, apparently, no alternative but to fall back on what he may chance to recollect of the stories of Winchester or Rugby when he was himself a boy. He evidently does not, as a rule, know where to look for flaws in any given system; hence, he too often takes the official programme as the representative of something like perfection. Nor does he appear to have made much preparation for the seven months spent abroad at the expense of the country. He is always, during these travels, in a restless state of astonishment, and his report, therefore, too often reminds the reader of a traveller's tale of an unexplored country. Last of all, there are, during these supposed researches, but slight traces of his own personal experience; his visits are often timed just when the schools are shut for vacation, while, we cannot help thinking, that a report so meagre might with ease have been drawn up by any clear-headed dealer in statistics from the various French and other official programmes without sending Mr. Arnold away on this Continental tour of inspection. Another thing we must be allowed to enter our protest against, and that is, the constant abuse with which Mr. Arnold speaks of every thing English. It is one thing to adopt the supposed national habit of thinking every thing done by other than Englishmen bad, or weak, or useless; another to run down every thing English, and to cry up every thing foreign. Mr. Arnold's Report is one continued grumble from the first page to the last; every thing foreign is good, every thing English is bad. One foreign school he imagines.