out that the King could do wrong, and must expiate it also.

But there was a personal malice in the denunciations of Strafford indulged in by Pym and his associates, a malice which they showed by their unfounded aspersions on his private life. After gratifying their tongues at his expense for some hours, the Commons resolved to impeach him that very day, and immediately sent seven of their number for that purpose to the Lords.

These closing scenes of Strafford's career were one great tragedy, which circumstances combined to invest with a dramatic gloom and splendour. Thus Strafford, who had been resting at home all the morning after his hurried journey from York, entered the House to find the Commons at the bar, and himself ordered to kneel and hear their accusation. The storm had burst on his head sooner than he expected. It was well perhaps that his haughty spirit was already somewhat broken, else he could hardly have survived those minutes when he knelt bareheaded before the representatives of the people. It must have been a relief to find himself in the Tower, with all its boding terrors. The same day was arrested a more stinging but less formidable offender in the person of Laud.

Strafford's letters to his wife at this period are such as could hardly have been expected from one of his temperament; they display a fortitude and patience worthy of one who had better used his powers. Not only had Strafford done much to make himself hated, but there was a general tendency to strike him now that he was down. Accounts of his evil doings poured in, among them a large contribution from the Irish Parliament. How much the English Parliament really cared for Ireland and her wrongs was shown when one of the charges brought against Strafford turned out to be that he had shown "illegal favour to the Roman Catholics." His enemies might have found sufficient cause for impeachment in the matter of the Galway jurors, his treatment of Mountnorris, and other arbitrary measures. But they chose chiefly to dwell on Strafford's imaginary evil deeds. He had not been exceedingly considerate towards the Catholics. He had always disliked their religion. He had merely intermitted the recusancy tax, and forborne to press them hard, because he knew that Ireland could never prosper commercially, or yield a good revenue while the bulk of her people were ill used. This, however, was sufficient crime to condemn him in the eyes of the Puritans who were so tenderly anxious for the welfare of Ireland.

Injustice haunted Strafford throughout the accumulation of evidence and the trial which followed. In his "Life," we find a good description of the stately solemnity of this most grand and tragic of English state trials. The dark, heroic appearance of the prisoner himself, and his position as the personification of those principles against which the middle and lower classes were raging, greatly contributed to its peculiar interest. The wretched King looked on from a hidingplace, in an anguish partly selfish, partly sprung from the regard which he really felt for Strafford. It is impossible not to sympathize with Strafford at this crisis of his career, if only because so many of the charges against him were utterly unfounded. An indifferent spectator must have wondered at the malignity which could bring them forward when true ones were so easily to be found. But the conduct of Pym, his chief accuser, was throughout actuated by an acute personal spite. It seems that from the moment of Wentworth's political conversion Pym had vowed his destruction. By one of the extraordinary circumlocutory wrestings of truth which happily have long ceased to be practical in judicial matters, it was made out that Strafford was disloyal. As well might it have been said that Pym was loyal. The way in which this accusation was maintained was that Strafford had done and counselled that which must set the King and people at variance. But the worst feature of his impeachment was the production by Pym and young Henry Vane of a paper containing notes made by the older Vane at the Council-board, which showed that Strafford had counselled the King to make war on Scotland for the purpose of having a pretext to keep up an armed force, and to reign practically without a Parliament by means of military coercion; and that he proposed to use an Irish army for that purpose. Though this was no doubt strictly true,- for it was quite in accordance with Strafford's principles and practice, the breach of every law of honour in bringing against Strafford words spoken in the Privy Council, must affix on Pym and his associates a stigma as great as that which stains the character of their victim for proposing to break the constitutional laws of the realm. That he had thus committed himself Strafford himself allowed, when he argued that to do so was not high treason; but he certainly had reason to declare that if what was said in council was to be made not only public, but an article of impeachment, no one would consent to be a councillor. Hampden has generally been considered an honest man, but it is not much to his credit that he was Pym's associate in this digraceful impeachment.

There are few passages in English history so well known as the trial of Strafford. Hitherto the Radicals had proceeded against him by impeachment; but as his crime was not technically within the scope of the Statutes of treason they presently resolved to bring in a bill of attainder, which passed both Houses. Yet there were some men, both among Lords and Commons, who saw that Strafford's punishment was exceeding his offences; that the means taken to bring it about were dishonourable; and that he was being made to suffer not only for his own crimes but as the scapegoat of the King; and Lord Digby, who had at first favoured his impeachment, proved his own integrity by agitating, earnestly though vainly, in his favour; and a Liberal Parliament ordered Digby's speech to be burnt by the hangman. The bill passed the Lords on the 7th of May, 1641, and then began the terrible ordeal which Charles endured while he struggled with himself in his uncertainty as to whether or no he should sign the warrant. So far as he could feel friendship, he felt it for Strafford. To condemn him would also be to condemn his own policy and his own principles, and virtually to declare what this same Parliament actually declared not eight years afterwards, that he himself deserved the block. Yet his heart failed him when he heard around his palace walls the howlings of the London roughs, who, as much as Pym himself, thirsted for the blood of Strafford. Queen Henrietta, too, never the noblest of her sex, grew frightened, and urged him to sacrifice Strafford to the mob when his better self revolted against the thought. Juxon alone counselled the King not to give way to fear in so grave a matter of conscience. The imprisoned Earl himself, with that more than generosity which he always showed to his unworthy sovereign, wrote to Charles from the Tower releasing him from the promise he had made to save his life. Yet Strafford was astonished when he learned that the King had taken him at his word, and then, with a sudden intuition which was of no use to him now, he exclaimed, "Put not your trust in princes!" That was a lesson which, sooner or later, Charles I. taught all his subjects, both loyal and disloyal.

Strafford died with the heroism which he had shown throughout his trial. He had many natural good qualities, but little conscience, and he therefore left behind him a bad name which has swamped the remembrance of his merits; and it is well that a writer has been found to recover them out of the dust of more than two centuries. His execution was one of those concessions made by Charles I. to the Puritans which were of no use to himself whatever, but contributed greatly to their ever-increasing power; and may be

classed with the whole of his policy towards the country with which Strafford's name is chiefly associated in history.

Wo have looked at Strafford chiefly in the light of a LordLieutenant of Ireland. With all his faults and the odium which he has incurred, he was the best governor that Ireland had during that century, if we except Lord Robartes and one or two such as he, who were recalled almost immediately for their too mild and equitable conduct. There was nothing in Strafford's administration which exasperated the mass of the people, for to them he was comparatively considerate. Had he continued to govern, the civil war of 1641-53 might never have taken place, or at least would have assumed a very different aspect. It is true that he, as well as Ormond, knew how to play parties off against each other; but he would never have thrown himself into the arms of the Puritans as Ormond did. He would have preferred using the arms and loyalty of the Catholics. It was Ireland's misfortune that she so seldom had a viceroy strong either for good or ill. From such an one the Irish knew what to expect, and could-and did, during the heroic course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesact accordingly; but to guile and craft they always fell victims, untaught by their immense experience of those qualities.

ART. VIII.-THE IMPENDING WAR.

Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East. By the Right Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. Fifty-fourth thousand. London: John Murray.

A Speech delivered at Blackheath on September 9, 1876. By the Right Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. London: John Murray.

What the Turks are, and how we have been Helping them. Speech by the DUKE OF ARGYLL. Glasgow: James Maclehose.

The Eastern Question. Speeches by the Earls of BEACONSFIELD and DERBY. Published by authority. London: Holmes's Library.

HE world is waiting, with what patience it may, while in

the rigour of the northern sky and the overwhelming cares of empire, the Czar reluctantly makes up his mind to utter the word which will doom, it may be, a million of men to death, sudden and unprovided. The policy steadfastly pursued for a century has at last attained its moment of supreme opportunity; and so far as it is possible to read the signs of the times and to imagine the plans of the governments of Europe, there is no reason why the Cossack should not bivouac under

the walls of Constantinople, possibly before Christmas, certainly by next Easter. There is no real concert between the Powers whose interests are chiefly concerned - France, Austria, England, and who are, moreover, bound by a separate and most solemn treaty to declare war on any State, and especially on Russia, should it invade Turkish territory. By common consent this treaty, and with it, by mere consequence, all treaties affecting the affairs of Europe, except, perhaps, a few commercial treaties, are to be henceforth considered null and void. Each of these three countries is, in truth, as to questions of national conscience and policy, in the condition of a house divided against itself. Austria by the opposing forces of Slav and Magyar; England by the way in which Mr. Gladstone's agitation has paralyzed the influence of the Government; France by its one fixed idea of revenge, and its illusive hope that when a chance of revindicating Alsace and Lorraine does in the course of years come, Russia may not be unwilling to help, or may at least not be hostile to her. But, as for Germany, it becomes day by day evident enough that the same relations of "friendly neutrality," which existed between the two Powers during the war of 1870, and which sufficed to deprive France of even the chance of an ally, are now in force again, and this time for the benefit of Russia. Why then should the Czar hesitate? Opportunity has come to him in such guise that it might seem to be the bidding of Providence to unloose the hosts of all the Russias in one vast avalanche of fire and sword. With the Principalities absolutely at his orders, and already in great part occupied by his troops, with the Turkish army discouraged, demoralized, ill-clothed, ill-supplied, illcommanded, surely the army which advanced to Adrianople in 1826 can easily deal with any obstacle it may meet on its march from the Pruth to Constantinople in 1876. If indeed Alexander does hesitate, it is because, gentlest and honestest of his dynasty, he does not believe himself to be, in declaring such a war, the minister of God, but the fated -instrument of a Power of insatiable ambition and ruthless cruelty, which is a continual conspirator against the peace and security of all other nations for objects of its own, and the most inveterate and malignant enemy of the Church of God of all the sovereignties now standing on the globe.

It has been urged with much bitterness and with some point against the Catholics of the United Kingdom, and against the Catholic Church at large, that in the recent whirlwind of popular emotion generated by Mr. MacGahan's terrible descriptions of the conduct of the Turkish yeomanry in Bulgaria, they did not take a very prominent part in sup