search into its own nature and prospects; an this research shakes the mortal case shrewdly. Few can comprehend this, and I who feel it can hardly describe; but I certainly feel that those who eat largely of the tree of knowledge will surely die, and that soon. . . . I sometimes doubt if my course of studies and thinking affords happiness; gratification of no ordinary kind attends it sometimes, but it is only sometimes, and there are many hours of weariness, when the exhausted mind lies prostrate under the painful sense of its own littleness. . . I am not a bit well; head aching continually, and every breath of wind makes me shiver, but the sword has worn out the scabbard, and it is too late now to mend it, so I must go on as I can. I could find in my heart to do as I did once when a child, and sit down by my bedside and cry, nobody could tell why. I got a dose of physic for my pains then, and it cured me of crying for ever; but I should fancy my brains were none the better for that force done to nature, and I rather envy those who can open their eye-sluices and let off a little of that peril. ous stuff which weighs upon the heart."-P. 169. She said herself, that the gloom of the soul was never so deep with her after her experience of life in Italy, as before she "broke prison;" and that the sense of happiness she was then conscious of, as proving to her that happiness was at least a possibility, prevented her from being ever again overwhelmed by the sense of present ennui. Still, existence had no charms to make her love it; and every access of sickness seems to have been welcomed by her in the hope that it might prove a dismissal from the world and its perplexities. To one of her friends she begins a letter thus, in 1841: "The glow is bright in the evening sky, "But there is a brighter glow to come, When, though friends are weeping, The body lies sleeping, And the spirit breathes free in bliss. "This may be a sort of answer to your inquiries, my dearest Anna, for I would not that you should hear of illness in any other tone. I begin to feel the confident hope that my affairs with this world are drawing to a close. How happy this hope has made me I cannot make you comprehend; but at no moment of my life do I recollect to have felt so exhilarated."-P. 228. And again, a year or two after, when the breaking of an abscess on the lungs had brought her very near the grave :— "I cannot, things being as they are, entertain any great expectation of recovery, though I do not say that it is impossible. Now I am so far revived that I can write, propped up with pil lows, in my easy chair. But, as I have said already, it is in the hands of God; and if an easy mind and pleasure in the thought, rather than dread of death, can keep fever down, and give the constitution a chance of rallying, why, I have that chance. . . . If death comes, I shall receive it as a boon and a blessing; if not, I shall brace myself again for my pilgrimage, and see how much more I can do that may be useful whilst I stay here."-P. 247. Poetical composition was one of her resources, especially in those moods of depres sion to which she so often alludes. The verses printed in this volume are almost all of a sombre, melancholy cast. They have reference chiefly to personal emotion, and evince reflection and sensibility rather than high imaginative power. Among them are many translations from German, a language in which she became a proficient long before it was usual to find English ladies at all acquainted with it. But not only was Miss Cornwallis familiar with what we now call the ordinary modern tongues, she was skilled also in the dead languages, Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek; and not only was she well read in the philosophy, poetry, and history of all cultivated ages, but she was versed likewise in many abstruse sciences. When in Italy she made a study of Medicine and Anatomy. Chemistry, and the phenomena of Electricity, occupied much of her attention. Yet with all this she was an adept in woman's accomplishments too; was a skilful musician, both vocal and instrumental, could paint in water-colours and draw caricatures; could model in wax, and sometimes even, like Mrs. Carter, condescended to make a cap or pudding.* Ignorance, whether in man or woman, was in her estimation, as she was never tired of enforcing, the great bane of human existence, and intellectual progress the one sure road to moral happiness and improvement. From the time she conceived the idea of publishing the Small Books, her reading and writing ardour became hotter than ever. It was indeed no child's play to condense and popularize the lessons of philosophy and science, not into the form of mere manuals for reference, but into treatises calling out and suggesting the higher functions of generalization with reference to the moral and spiritual dispensations of creative wisdom. "Now I will tell you what I have been about," she writes to one of her coadjutors, in 1843. "In the first place, I got up Chemistry, of which I did not know a great deal before, and wrote the *We write some of these personal particulars from the recollections of friends, for the published volume of her letters gives but scant information of the biographical sort. 'Introduction to Practical Organic Chemistry;' | learning, the impartiality, the good sense, The works by which Miss Cornwallis has established her claim to a dignified place in the ranks of female authorship, are "Pericles, a Tale of Athens in the 83d Olympiad," of which Dr. Hawtrey, the late Head Master and Provost of Eton, said he had "never met with any work of fiction on a classical subject which united so much valuable information to so interesting a story" fifteen entirely, and four more partially, of the Small Books on Great Subjects, embracing the topics of Physiology, Metaphysics, Jurisprudence, Chemistry, Greek Philosophy, Grammar, History, and Social Science; a Prize Essay on Juvenile Delinquency, published by Smith and Elder in 1853; five articles contributed to the Westminster Review, on social and other subjects; and one or two to Fraser's Magazine, on Naval Education. The Small Books were received with great favour at the time of their publication, both in England and in America. Second and third editions were called for; "and," says the editor of Miss Cornwallis's letters, "it was in a spirit of triumph in which no mean or personal feeling had place, that she delighted to remark how through the long series no hostile criticism had discovered a misrepresentation or a mistake." In those of her books which treated of the history of Christianity, her method was to dwell with emphasis on the simple affirmations to which she firmly held, but not to provoke controversy or shock prejudice by drawing conclusions, which, she nevertheless believed, congenialed readers would not fail to discover for themselves. So it was that, with few exceptions, the critics of the press passed by the element of "unsoundness," and united in praising the Miss Cornwallis died in January, 1858. The published correspondence ends in November, 1856, and we have no record of the concluding period of her life; but from the list of her writings it appears that her pen | no restless desire to remedy the evils of a was active up to within a few months of her world immersed in sin and error. She writes decease, and that one of the latest subjects of the things and persons around her with that occupied her was the reform of the laws the taste and discrimination, but also with respecting the property of married women, something of the gossiping minuteness of a which she had the satisfaction of seeing car De Sevigné. And her personal appearance, ried through both Houses of Parliament the slight, pale, fragile, insignificant but for dark year before she died. intelligent eyes and a bright smile which sometimes illumined the pensiveness of her countenance, how different is this too from the outward aspect which we have heard as see ly affections and a sense of duty kept Eugénie de Guérin in the world, but natural inclination would have consigned her to a cloister. Miss Cornwallis, as we have had occasion to remark, was repelled from the amenities of social intercourse by the angularity of her own nature, by dislike of notoriety as a “learned lady," and by the want of natural objects for her softer affections; certainly not from the sense that the soul's perfection could best be attained by recluse meditation. On this subject hear her emphatic protest against the pietism of Wilberforce : seems to have overlooked the fact that all his And here we must claim a moment's pause for a comparison, which the recent publication of a supplemental volume of the letters of Eugénie de Guérin has suggested to us, be-cribed to the English lady philosopher. Famitween two female intellects of the nineteenth century, the one of the English Protestant, the other of the French Romanist type. We lay stress upon the first term in this qualification, for it is evident to us that national, as well as ecclesiastical influences, had their share in the mental development of each of these gifted ladies. In Caroline Cornwallis we see Protestantism resolving itself into Rationalism; in Eugénie de Guérin we Catholicism tending to Mysticism; yet, even with the uncompromising appeal to reason as the verifying faculty which limited Miss Cornwallis's theoretical faith, we still discern the workings of that deep sense of unseen realities which, amid all varieties of belief and disbelief, has ever been found brooding over the Teutonic mind, and enduring the contemplative, often gloomy intellect of the North, with its highest modes of imagination; while the pious meditations of the French lady are woven over the framework of a refined sentimentality, which, under other inspiration, might have afforded garniture for a novel of Balzac or George Sand. The earthly love and tenderness for friends, brother, home, and nature, in which Eugénie's soul was steeped, mingled with and led on to her devout life-consecration to a Higher Power. She felt the sense of bliss to consist in closeconfiding trust and self-abnegation; and for the full contentment of such yearnings as hers, she could find no satisfying object save such as dogmatic Christian doctrine afforded her. She knew no impulse for questioning or searching into the grounds of things. Her gentle marvel at life's mysteries was easily quelled by the dictates of faith; and she was content to accept her Church's view of what religion is, and to see beauty in all its forms, though, with her innate purity and elevation of soul, it was its spirit and not its form to which she really clung. Those portions of Mlle. de Guérin's writings which do not derive their whole interest from the self-communings of her faith and love, charm us chiefly by the minute and graphic touches of life and nature with which they abound. But in her small details there is no attempt at philosophy or generalization, no quickness to probe, "Wilberforce mistook his road (led away by the speciousness of the religious party he attached himself to), and strove to meditate' when he ought to have thought. He wasted precious time in writing down good resolutions and selfreproaches for doing less than he ought, yet writing and meditation was the cause of his doing little. Thought, happily for us, is very rapid; and if we were really determined to think when we ought to do so, with the full powers of our reason, five minutes would generally despatch the business, and well too; for the mind, already well stored with knowledge and accustomed to close application, can bring its powers to bear on any given subject at a moinent's notice with thorough effect. To set apart hours for thinking is mere indolence, and bas much the same effect on the mind that a diet of weak broth would have on the body: it enfeebles and unfits it for any vigorous effort. At fifty-two, Wilberforce complains that his memory is failing. He himself attributes it to having suffered his thoughts to be too desultory, and I have no doubt he was right; his watergruel meditations' had taken from him the power of grasping rapidly and firmly the objects brought before him; for I have invariably seen among my acquaintance that the powers of the mind failed the earliest in those who applied the least.”—P. 197. And here our remarks draw to an end. It so happens that the three clever women with whose memorials we have been occupying ourselves, take up their position respectively in the three departments into which the genius of ages and the genius of individuals are said to be alike distributable. Poetry, Narrative, and Philosophy or Science, have been by turns the favourite forms of human thought England and Norway in the Eleventh Century. since men began to think. In the present century they would seem to have each come in for their share in giving the prevalent direction to the public taste. The quality of imagination was certainly predominant in the days to which Joanna Baillie properly belonged, the days of the great minstrels-of Scott, Byron, Campbell, Southey. It was at History's shrine that Lucy Aikin paid her devotions, in company with, at however respectful a distance, Hallam, Mackintosh, and Sismondi. Philosophy claimed Caroline Cornwallis as her own,-the critical philosophy which the new impulses of the time had brought from the German universities, and which is making its familiar home in the minds of the present generation. All honour be to the triad! They had neither of them cause to be ashamed of the place assigned to their productions on the shelves of contemporary literature. With whatever differences of taste or ability, they each in their several way helped to vindicate woman's right to the franchise of the human intellect, and have afforded man opportunity to show that the old days of jealousy and derisive compliment are at an end, and that the pretensions of a précieuse ridicule would be as unmeaning in this latter half of the nineteenth century as were the fantastic pedantries of La Mancha's knight among the working-day realities of the age of Cervantes. 2. Den Danske Erobring af England og Nor- BENJAMIN THORPE, for the Master of the his sons. June, ships, and wasted the south coast as he went. Brihtric sailed after him with 180 ships, and boasted that he would bring the traitor back quick or dead: but a great storm arose, the ships were dashed against each other, and driven on shore in a shattered state. Then Wulfnoth fell on them, and burned Brihtric's ships. When the news came to the King, he and his "witan" were reft of counsel. They end of that great armament was that every were all as "unready" as their lord; and the man went to his home, and England was as defenceless as ever, when Thorkell the Tall Lammas-tide, to revenge his brother Sigvald's came with his "huge hostile host," after death, who had fallen in the massacre of St. Brice's Day. But we have to deal with Wulfnoth rather than Ethelred and his evil counsel. The noble "Child" went into exile, and took with him his son Godwin, then probably a boy. We hear little more of the father. His name, which together with those of the false brothers Brihtric and Edric, is before found in Anglo-Saxon charters, appears his lot with King Sweyn Forkbeard and his no more; but it is probable that he threw in mighty son Canute, with whom Earl Godwin, or Godwinus Dux, soon rose to high rank.* ing Canute's charters; and the year after, As early as the year 1018, we find him signwhen Canute, having laid all England under his feet, and being firmly seated on the Danish throne by the death of his brother Harold, made an expedition to Jomsborg, on the east coast of the Baltic, Godwin, at the head of a self that the English were ever afterwards held band of English troops, so distinguished himby Canute as good as the Danes, and their Githa, the King's consin, and sister of Ulf young leader was rewarded by the hand of Jarl, who had married Astritha, the great King's sister. All through Canute's reign his Saxon favourite kept his love, and at his very outset of Canute's reign there can be no doubt temporary deeds, that whatever might have been *It is clear, from the unfailing evidence of conciled to Ethelred, for in the will of Athelstan the father's fate, the son returned and was reconAtheling occurs the following passage:-"And I THE reign of Edward the Confessor in Eng-ton, which his father before had;" and in all likeli grant to Godwin Wulfnod's son the land at Compland was really the rule of Earl Godwin and hood he is the "Godwin minister" who signs seveThe foundations of the fortune of that family had been laid in exile. Already, in the year 1009, in the reign of Ethelred the Unready, Brihtric, the brother of the arch-rary life of Edward the Confessor-first printed by The writer of the most interesting contempotraitor Edric Streon, had slandered Wulfnoth well knew the King, as well as Earl Godwin and Mr. Luard for the Master of the Rolls,-a man who the "Child," a noble Thane of the South his sons and daughter-thus describes Earl GodSaxons, to his weak-minded master; and that win's character and position in Canute's reign:too at the very moment when a mighty fleet was gathered together to meet a threatened invasion of the Danes. The result was that Wulfnoth went into banishment, with twenty This Godwin, as he was wary in counsel, so also in warlike matters had he been proved by the King temper, he was in the greatest favour with every one as well as the King; a man matchless for the as most valiant. Besides, for the evenness of his death, in 1035, we find Godwin and his friends standing by Emma and her son Hardicanute, rather than by Harold Harefoot, Canute's son by a Saxon concubine, and thus espousing the Danish rather than the Saxon side. But when Hardicanute loitered in Denmark, and lost time in settling his quarrel with Magnus of Norway, the Danish Thingmannalid the Varangians of the Danish dynasty in England-had their way. From the first they had sided with Harold, who was on the spot, rather than with his brother, who was abroad. They thought that if a crown was worth having it was worth seeking, and as they went England went. Hardicanute's party lost ground. Emma was banished to Flanders by her rival's son, and Godwin went over to Harold's side. constancy with which he girded himself to work, and accessible to all, with a cheerful and ready good-will. But when certain sufficient affairs of state had recalled the King to his own nation-for in his absence some had thrown off his yoke and made them ready to rebellion--Godwin clung to him on his whole journey as his constant companion. Here the King had more opportunity of observing, in the example of this great chief, his foresight, his endurance of toil, and his skill in warfare. He saw also how deep-seated was his gift of speech, and felt, if he could bind such a man to himself more closely by some fitting gift, what a gain it would be to him in governing his newly won kingdom of England. Having proved him, therefore, a little longer, he made him one of his councillors and gave him his cousin to wife. Whence, too, when he returned to England, having set all things on a right footing in his Danish kingdom, he (Godwin) is made by the King an earl, dux, and the King's spokesman (bajulus), or president of the Council. Nor when he had attained so great a dignity was he puffed up, but to all good men, to the best of his ability, proved himself a father; for he did not now throw off that gentleness of spirit which he had learned from his boyhood up, but cultivated it as a natural gift, by continually practising it both to his inferiors and his equals. Whosoever did wrong, from him what was lawful and right was instantly exacted. For which reason he was looked on by all the sons of his country in the light of a father rather than a lord. From such a sire, sons and daughters were born not unworthy of their origin, for they were remarkable as inheriting both their father's and their mother's honesty, and in bringing them up Godwin paid special attention to instruct ing them in those arts, by which he prepared in these his children, both a bulwark and a delight to the nation. So long as the aforesaid King Canute reigned, he, Godwin, flourished in his Court as first among the great chiefs of the kingdom, and by reason of his fairness, all agreed in thinking, that what he was for writing should be written, what was for cancelling should be cancelled." There can be no doubt, from the precedence given to Godwin in almost all Canute's charters, that he was in the highest rank. In a very little while after Canute's conquest of the kingdom, we find him signing and continuing to sign next after the King, and that before Earl Eric, Earl Hacon, the sons of Earl Hacon of Norway, and also before Earl Ulf, the King's cousin and brother-in-law. he But before she went, if we may believe one MS. of the Saxon Chronicle, Godwin had done a deed of blood which was noteworthy even in that bloody age. In the year 1036, "the harmless Atheling" Alfred, Ethelred's elder son by Emma, tried to make his way to his mother at Winchester, but Earl Godwin, according to this MS., "would not suffer it, nor other men, who had great power in this land; for the voice of the people was then much for Harold, though it was unrightful. But Godwin hindered him and threw him into prison, and his followers he scattered, and some cruelly killed. . . . Never was a bloodier deed done in this land since the Danes came and here took up free quarters." It is remarkable that this foul deed is laid to God Cotton. Tib. B. iv. *This is Cotton. Tib. B. i. leaves out Godwin's name altogether and imputes the crime to Harold Harefoot. Thorpe, in his edition of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, has here made a ridiculous nistranslation. The Saxon words are "her frith namon," which he renders "here made peace." That the Danes came into England to make peace, or that they made it when here, is startling in itself, and much more so coming after the story of such a deed of blood. But the words mean nothing of the kind. They correspond exactly to " free quarters," -a place where they could store up their booty in peace, holding it with a strong hand against all comers; where they could, in short, have an asylum. But, alas, there are many mistakes in this edition. We shall find another when we speak of the said Godwin's 'career. Take another, just before this story of the harmless Atheling. When Canute died, one of the MS. of the Chronicle, Laud. Bodl. 636, says, "tha lithsmen on Lunden gecuron Harold," which Mr. Thorpe translates "the lithsmen of London chose Harold," adding in a note to "lithsmen," "sailors, from lith, a ship." Now it so happens that these lithsmen" do not come from lith, a ship, nor were they sailors, nor were they sailors of London. They were the soldiers of the "Thingmannalid," whose quarters were in London. We shall have to speak of them more at length. Again, having thus inistaken the meaning of the word "lithsmen," a little farther on he finds the word "huscarl," in the passage where the same MS. says, that Emma-Elfgifu, Canute's widow, sat at Winchester" mid thæs cynges huscarlum hyra suna," with the king's housecarles, her sons; here Mr. Thorpe has another note to "huscarlum," as fol lows: "The Danish body-guard, though retained till the time of the Conquest." But here again he is quite wrong. The king's housecarles were the king's private body-guard, the rank and file, as it were, of his "hird,' hired or comitatus. They were in no sense a national militia or condottieri, as the Thingmannalid were. This is plain from many passages in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself, but in none more so than the account of the Northumbrian rising against Tostig, where Cott. Tib. B. i., says, "All the thanes in Yorkshire fared to York, and slew there Earl Tostig's housecarles." tiges earles huskarlas thar ofslogon," where the parallel passage in Cott. Tib. B. iv. runs "ofslogon his (Tostiges earles) hiredmen ealle," where it will be seen that "huskarlas " and "hiredmenn" are used as equivalent terms. "Tos |