which has elapsed since the Peace of Paris must be evident to every one. And while it is very questionable whether all the changes have been wise and politic, it must be equally apparent that most of them have been beneficial, and will be even more beneficial in the coming time. The most important of these changes, as we believe, was the Reform Bill. It not only extended the liberties of the people, destroyed old abuses, and preserved the peace, prosperity, and power of the nation, but it prepared the way for every good measure which has been carried in England since its passage, and gave strength and perpetuity to the Constitution. While France and nearly all the rest of Europe have been vainly seeking after peace and freedom, England has enjoyed both, through the beneficent action of the Reform Bill. It was the central fact to which all the political changes which preceded it pointed, and from which all that have followed have been colored. The period of the peace has been marked by moral and social improvements, as well as by political progress. The criminal law has been shorn of many of its harshest and most cruel features, through the fearless labors of Sir S. Romilly and his coadjutors. The civil law has been reformed; and the almost endless delays which disgraced the Court of Chancery under Lord Eldon, disappeared as soon as Lord Brougham took office. Slavery in the Colonies has been abolished, through the exertions of Wilberforce and Buxton. Prison discipline has taken deep hold of the popular mind since Mrs. Fry began her difficult task. Science has advanced, and has devoted much of its attention to the improvement of agriculture, manufactures, and the mechanic arts. Commerce took a new start when the East India Company lost its exclusive privileges. The financial system was greatly amended by the renewal of the Bank Charter, with its fortunate alterations. Education has risen to a place in the public regard, in some degree commensurate with its importance. Railroads and canals owe their great extension to this period; and have widely diffused the comforts of life, while they have directly tended to elevate the moral and intellectual condition of the lower classes. The rights of conscience are more respected now than they were at the commencement of the period. The 1850.] Exceptions to the General Progress. 79 Roman Catholics and the Dissenters have been gradually and constantly approaching the full enjoyment of their just political rights. But the time is yet far distant, we fear, when they will be placed on an equality with the Established Church, and the foul tyranny of ecclesiastical exactions be abolished. In looking at the religious history of the period, our chief ground of regret is in the rise and spread of Tractarianism; and on that movement we can look only with extreme distrust. We cannot regard it otherwise than as most absurd in its practices, unsound in its doctrines, and dangerous in its tendencies. But, like every other vagary of the human intellect, it will have its day, and then be numbered with the forgotten things of earth. In our own country it may serve to counteract the opposite, but equally dangerous, errors of Transcendentalism, and thus be productive of some good, by showing men the absurdity of extreme opinions. Yet it can only be regarded as a dark spot on the history of our times, that men should turn back to the Middle Ages, and prefer darkness rather than light. If in this general progress Ireland has had but a very small share, it is because no man has yet been able to discover any adequate remedy for the terrible evils under which she groans. Nor are the evils themselves understood. Ireland still remains the almost hopeless problem which every minister must try to solve. Scotland, on the other hand, has shared the same prosperity which England has enjoyed. This prosperity, however, we believe, has been greatly checked and impeded by the adoption of an unwise and ruinous system of free trade. The financial difficulties of 1846 and 1847 were as much owing to the abolition of the Corn Laws as they were to the potato-rot or the railroad mania; and it is within our knowledge, that the British manufacturers cannot compete with the Belgians and Prussians under such a system. Yet in every respect, political, social, moral, and religious, England has made a wonderful progress during the peace. May that progress be preserved, and her course still be onward, in spite of all opposing influences. C. C. S. THE pilgrim-scholar, who chances to enter on the Continent by the way of Holland, must be very much wanting in scholarly enthusiasm, if he does not linger a few hours about the quaint old town of Rotterdam, were it only for the sake of breathing the native air of one who, for half a century, was universally acknowledged king in the realm of letters, and of seeing an object which, more vividly than any thing else, places the man himself before the mind's eye. Crowning the centre of the bridge that arches over one of those canals which serve for streets in many of the towns of the Low Countries, and in the great market-square of the place, stands the brazen statue of a man of somewhat short and stooping stature, attired in a study-gown, trimmed with fur, having on his head the academic cap or turban of Sir Thomas More's day, and clasping with his slender fingers a folio volume, over the open pages of which his apprehensive eyes and delicate cheeks seem to hang intently. It is the celebrated Erasmus of Rotterdam. The huge volume of Erasmus's correspondence, which we have had the pleasure and perplexity of exploring, for the purpose of finding out, if possible, what the man was, contains, as its frontispiece, a bust-engraving of him, under which some ingenious editor has placed an epigram, that, translated quite literally from the Latin, would run somewhat as follows: "Of that great man, whose fame the wide world sounds Thou seest but half within this picture's bounds. Why not the whole?' Good reader, cease to admire ; Any one who should see the enormous volume from which this was taken might, indeed, be tempted to query * 1. Epistolarum D. Erasmi Roterodami Libri XXXI. et P. Melanchthonis Libri IV. Quibus adjiciuntur Th. Mori et Lud. Vivis Epistolæ, una cum indicibus locupletissimis. Londini. Excudebant M. Flesher et R. Young. Folio. pp. 3220. Edition of 1642. 2. Pilgrimages to Saint Mary of Walsingham and Saint Thomas of Canterbury. By DESIDERIUS ERASMUS. Newly translated, with the Colloquy on Rash Vows, by the same Author, and his Characters of Archbishop Warham and Dean Colet, and illustrated with Notes. By JOHN GOUGH NICHOLS, F. S. A. Westminster: John Bowyer Nichols & Son. 1849. 12mo. pp. 248. t Beza? 1850.] His Early Years. 81 whether the panegyrist meant to say that the world could not contain the soul of Erasmus, or all that he had written. One thing he would be pretty certain to suspect, that the author of that volume must have been a man of some weight in his generation. "The star of Germany," "the sun of literature," "the prince of letters," "the high-priest of polite learning," "the vindicator of theology," such were among the familiar titles of Erasmus in the mouths of his contemporaries; and it is said that letters were addressed to him with one or another of these superscriptions as their only direction, without the least fear of their miscarrying, because there was but one person in all the world to whom such titles could apply; wherein his correspondents were more safe than the modern Greek boy, who, having been sent to this country for his education, and desiring, on an early visit to his home, to communicate with his teacher, but forgetting his name and address, directed his letter to the American, wherever he might be. A letter to Voltaire as the Frenchman, wherever he might be, would once have been likelier than this boy's to reach its destination. Kings and emperors, cities and universities, popes and philosophers, vied with each other in their devotion to Prince Erasmus; and during nearly the first quarter of the sixteenth century, at least till the outbreak of the Lutheran revolution, his life (says a writer, † whom one might suspect to be a Frenchman, if not informed of the fact) was "a continued series of triumphs.....; an intellectual beatification, made up of feasts and concerts, at which were sung hymns composed in all the dialects. of Europe." "King of the literary realm" we called Erasmus; but when we trace the analogy between his fate and that of a certain modern monarch, we are tempted now to describe him as citizen-king of the re publican realm of letters. Erasmus of Rotterdam, "that eternal miracle of na. ture," (as one of the old editors makes Erasmus's own autobiography commence by calling him,) was born in that town, in the year (according to the inscription on his monument) 1467, though almost as many years contend for the honor of his birth, as there were cities that 66 * “ Πρὸς τὸν ̓Αμερικανον, ποῦ ἂν εἴη.” † Audin. claimed to be the birthplace of Homer. He was the natural son of a citizen of that place, named Gerard. Just before the child's birth, his father, in consequence of the opposition made to his marrying by his parents and numerous brothers, (the former for the sake of their pride, and the latter for the sake of the property, insisting upon his entering the Church,) - had fled to Rome, where he maintained himself for a time as a copyist, the art of printing not having reached there, and afterward gave himself to the higher studies. Hearing, shortly, from home that the object of his attachment was dead, for grief he took priestly orders. On returning home, however, he discovered that he had been imposed upon. He found her still living, a mother, and devoted to her child. This child was named Gerard, after his father; but when he grew up, he translated the Dutch name, which means "amiable," into equivalent words, both Greek and Latin, and styled himself Desiderius Erasmus. At the age of four the boy was sent to school, in a few years was employed as a singing-boy in the Cathedral of Utrecht, and at nine was transferred to the high school of Deventer. After three or four years the plague broke out in that region, scattered the school, and sent young Erasmus home, an orphan. His father had left him in the hands of two guardians, who, thinking they could manage the property more to their own satisfaction if the boy could only be put out of the way, tried to persuade him to become a monk, and prevailed upon him, in fact, to connect himself, on probation, with a certain college, called "Friars of Community." There he suffered greatly; "for," he says, "when they found a scholar that was of too high a spirit, and had too much life for a convent, they took more care to check and discourage him by threats and chastisements, than to instruct him in true learning." He returned, sick and sorrowful, to his tutors, who tried all means of getting him to enter the monastery, even hiring people to expostulate with him and threaten him; but, unlike young Luther, he had as little taste for monkery as for music. At last he said he would think of the matter, and on a certain day give them his decision; but when the day came, he made answer, that he had concluded to wait till he should understand better what the world was, what a |