every one, to stand as an accused person, and if this oath, Mr. Rich, which you have taken be true, I pray I may never see God in the face, which I would not say, were it otherwise, to gain the whole world." He then related what really occurred between them, adding quietly: "In truth, Mr. Rich, I am more sorry for your perjury than for my peril." The senseless rule of the English law, which to this hour debars an accused person from giving evidence on his own behalf, enabled the Lord Chancellor in charging the jury to tell them that they were to attach no weight to the denial of the prisoner as against the oath of the Solicitor-General; and so, after an absence of fifteen minutes, the jury, who no doubt had been carefully selected beforehand, returned a verdict of Guilty. Such was the flutter of the court at securing the verdict, of which for some time they had been in doubt, that the Lord Chancellor was about pronouncing sentence without even going through the essential legal form of giving the prisoner the opportunity of speaking in arrest of judgment. "My Lord," said Sir Thomas, very calmly, "when I was towards the law, the manner in such cases was to ask the prisoner, before sentence, whether he could give a reason why judgment should not proceed against him." The Lord Chancellor stopped, and had the question put to him, but I need hardly add that all the prisoner said against the statute and the form of the indictment was said in vain, and the following sentence was pronounced: "That Thomas More, knight, be brought back to the Tower of London by William Bingston, Sheriff, and from thence drawn on a hurdle through the city of London to Tyburn, there to be hanged till he be half dead, after that cut down yet alive, be ripped open, his entrails burned, and his four quarters set up over four gates of the city, and his head upon London Bridge." This frightful sentence had been literally executed in all its details on the poor Carthusian monks; but in the case of Sir Thomas More, Privy Councillor and Lord Chancellor, custom and mere decency compelled the King to commute it into simple beheading. To Sir Thomas, I suppose, it made little difference. When this change of his punishment was announced to him with a pompous declaration of the King's great mercy in remitting all the rest of the sentence, he answered with his usual grave irony: "God forbid that the King should show such mercy to any of my friends, and God preserve my posterity from such pardons."

To return, however, to what occurred immediately after his sentence. He then, as if a load had been lifted from his mind, declared that he now at last felt himself free to speak out what he thought of this law. He said he had studied for seven years together through all the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and that he never could find a trace of authority for the position that a layman could be head of the Church. The Judges then assailed him with the same cry which had been round him from the beginning, asking him why he should be so obstinate as to set himself against the Bishops of the

"Bishop for Bishop," said Sir Thomas; "where you can produce one I can produce a hundred; and as against this single realm, the consent of all Christendom for more than a thousand years."

He wound up his speech very beautifully. "More have I not to say, my Lords, but that like the blessed Apostle St. Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, who was present and consenting to the death of the proto-martyr, St. Stephen, holding their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet they be now both twain holy saints in heaven and there shall continue friends for ever; so I verily trust and shall heartily pray, that, though your Lordships have been on earth my Judges to condemnation, yet we may hereafter meet in heaven merrily together to our everlasting salvation." He was borne from Westminster Hall to the Tower, with the edge of the axe turned towards him as was usual in the case of persons attainted of treason. When he reached the Tower wharf, a very touching scene awaited him. His daughter, Margaret Roper, his best beloved child, was there to receive his last blessing. Without consideration or care of herself, passing through the midst of the throng and guard of men, who with bills and halberts compassed him round, she there openly, in the sight of them all, clasped him round the neck and kissed him, unable to utter any word but "Oh! my father, oh! my father." He blessed her, and exhorted her to patience and submission to the will of God. Even now when he had tranquilly made up his mind to die, the King would not let him be in peace. He would have bought his apostacy at any price. A courtier come to him with the old importunity that he would change his mind; to which Sir Thomas answered at last, "Well, I have changed my mind." The courtier running off to the King with the news was at once commanded to go back and learn in what his mind was changed. "Well," said Sir Thomas, "I will tell you the truth. I had intended to shave before I died, but I have changed my mind, and now I intend that my beard shall go with my head." The night before his execution he wrote with a coal (the only material within his reach) a very beautiful letter to his daughter Margaret, sending her at the same time privately his shirt of hair and scourge, not wishing that the world should publicly know that he used these austerities.

On the morning of the 5th of July Sir Thomas Pope came to him. and told him that it was the King's pleasure he should die that day. Pope, who brought the message, had been a friend of More's, and he burst into tears as he spoke. More, as it were, reversing their offices, comforted him, talking cheerily in his usual pleasant vein.

On his way to the scaffold a charitable woman offered him a cup of wine, which he declined, saying that Christ drank only vinegar and gall. Another woman took this very fitting occasion to importune him about some papers, which she said were left with him when he was Chancellor. "Have patience with me, good woman," said he, "and in another hour the King will relieve me from all trouble about your papers and all things else."

His bright wit, the testimony of a still brighter conscience, attended him to the last. His confinement had weakened him so much that he required help in ascending the scaffold. "Assist me up," said he to the Lieutenant of the Tower, "and in coming down I will shift for myself." And what he said to the executioner when his head was actually on the block, is the best known of all his utterances.

"Wait," said he, "till I put aside my beard, for that never committed treason."

The mean and brutal resentment of Henry was not satisfied with his death. He not only seized on his property under the law confiscating to the Crown the estates of traitors, but he had a special Act of Parliament passed for the purpose of annulling a settlement which More had made upon his children before the Supremacy Statute had been thought of. All he allowed his widow was a pension of £20 a

year.

At the tidings of his death a cry of horror arose from all Europe. which has found its echo down to our day. In justice to mankind it is to be said, that writers of all times and of all tongues have united in execrating the atrocious iniquity of which he was the victim. I was about to say without exception; but there is one. That exception is Mr. James Anthony Froude, the same who has published three octavo volumes in support of his view, that the capital fault of England in dealing with the Catholics of Ireland has been too great leniency and gentleness. He has chosen to adopt King Henry VIII. as his hero, and we may pardon him for sake of the result; for, let him paint him an inch thick, he succeeds on the whole in rendering him, if possible, more truly hideous than he appears in the pages of any other writer. Mr. Froude alone justifies Henry's proceedings towards More. But it is not pleasant to have to say that in his account he entirely suppresses the flagrant perjury of Rich, suppresses the Lord Chancellor's indecent and illegal precipitation in passing sentence, and, worst of all, suppresses the grasping vindictiveness of Henry in deliberately seeking to reduce to beggary the family of the man who had been his companion, preceptor, and bosom friend in days gone by.

That I may not part from Mr. Froude in entire reprobation, I have to add that I cordially concur with him when he says that, if England had held many men as ready to lay down their lives for the Faith as Bishop Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and the saintly monks of the Charterhouse, the change of religion in that kingdom would have been impossible. He adds from his point of view: "perhaps it would not have been needed."

It was to the honour, and, let us hope, to the eventual good of England that she did produce a few such men. It was to her ruin,

spiritually speaking, that she produced no more.

I cannot, I think, more fitly conclude this Lecture than with a portion of a sonnet of the poet Wordsworth:

66 Therefore to the tomb

Pass, some through fire, and by the scaffold some,
Like saintly Fisher and unbending More.
Lightly for both the bosom's lord did sit
Upon his throne-unsoftened, undismayed
By aught that mingled with the tragic scene

Of pity or of fear; and More's gay genius played
With the inoffensive sword of native wit,
Than the bare axe more luminous and keen."

D

EAR, O how dear! the present is to me:
Yet would I fain into the future grope,
And cast for thee, dear girl, thy horoscope,
And guess at all the things that yet must be.

The years shall onward pass, and thy young mind,
Like those fair flowers that with the dawn unfold
Their sleepy leaves of purple and of gold,
Shall open and shoot upward and unbind.

The years shall onward pass, and girlhood's grace
Shall be matured in tender womanhood;
And power to will the evil or the good
Shall take of childhood's innocence the place.

The

years shall onward pass, and struggles strange Shall move thy heart, and thou shalt inly crave For other friends than those thy childhood gave, For other love less limited in range.

The years shall onward pass; perchance by thee
The radiant crown of wifehood shall be worn,
And happy, black-eyed children shall be born
To kiss thy brow and cling about thy knee.

And thou shalt just for one short moment turn

To childhood's years, and, sighing, wish them backThese very days, dear girl, which seem to lack Something for which thy soul doth inly yearn.

But oh! believe me, naught can ever fill

This void of heart; there must remain through life, As child and maid, as mother and as wife, A something longed for, and all vainly, still:

A thirst that never more shall be sufficed,
So long as thou, like Israel's sons, art led
Through desert tracts, though on sweet Manna fed;
Nor till thine eyes behold the Face of Christ.

B

THE STRANGE SCHOONER.

A STORY OF BOFIN ISLAND.*

BY ROSA MULHOLLAND, AUTHOR OF "HESTER'S HISTORY," &c.

CHAPTER I.

DELSIE'S OLD WOODEN MUG.

OFIN is a rock-bound fishing island of scanty pasturage, seven miles out in the ocean; destitute of tree, flower, and shrub; tormented and impoverished by sea and tempest, though sometimes momentarily gifted by these capricious elements, when curious spoils of shipwreck are tossed upon its shores. Seen from the mainland (which Delsie Prendergast always hated), it is a veritable Nibelungen Land, like those dream-islands just by the gate of heaven which one descries out of the sea-side broom on a drowsy summer's day.

One wild spring evening Delsie was standing all alone in her cabin, her hands clasped and her eyes on the ground. The cabin was empty; nothing in it but Delsie and a large wooden drinkingvessel which hung from a nail upon the wall. All the small effects of her father, lately dead, had been sold, one by one, to the neighbours during the past hard winter; but the old wooden mug on the wall could not be touched.

The fading light came through the open door, and fell on the desolate maiden and on her solitary piece of furniture. Delsie was not the kind of girl to sink into slovenliness or self-disrespect through misfortune; there was, even now, a neatness in her striped cotton bodice, and a grace in the folds of her crimson flannel skirt. She was active and healthful, and of a mirth-loving, true-hearted nature. Once this little cabin had been well stored, and Delsie had had enough to do to mend her father's nets and keep house; but the cruel winter came, as it will come, and swept away the home and all the little properties, and drove the old man into his grave. The boat was broken, the nets in rags; the fisherman might no more be ill treated by wind or tide.

A shadow darkened the door, and a man came in. The girl started from her troubled reverie.

66

Well, Delsie, what way is it goin' to be wid you?"

My old aunt Graunia's comin' from West Quarter to live wid me. She'll be here to-night wid her bits o' sticks, an' I'm goin' to my service in the mornin'. An' yersel', Murt ?"

"No news, Delsie. No work to be had."

Murt was young, stalwart, weather-beaten, and his head dropped on his breast as he spoke; his whole attitude was hopeless.

* [The Author of this tale has yielded to our request that it should be saved from the wreck of a periodical which met with the same fate as the schooner.-ED. I. M.]