nation was a presumption in favour of its innocence. The guilty gallant always stole in secret to his wanton's bower ; the honourable knight publicly visited the illustrious dame, of whose friendship he boasted. "Wise and pious prince," continued he, "remember your recent sufferings from the indulgence of intemperate passion. The church has just removed your suspension from your civil duties: go, then, and resume your station in the state and in your family. Reform what is amiss; but do it with temper and discretion. Deal gently with your erring spouse; and, by appearing to forget her past misconduct, prevent her future backslidings. Henceforth I trust you will be suffered to remain the steady guide and daily observer of her conduct. We expect not stability from the vine, but sweetness; and if we remove its support, and break down its fence, shall we

wonder at the beast of prey devouring its prostrate tendrils?"

"Father," returned the Earl," "if but one roving thought ventured to question. the purity of my wife, I would not stand here, a weeping wittol, but with decisive firmness abjure at once my sorrows and my shames. The justification may be spared, where no doubt is entertained. But surely it is enough, that the penitent who left England, bowed down with the burden of his own transgressions, should find on his return, that the woman whom his choice fixed on, or rather the specious beauty who disputed his idolatrous heart with his Maker, that she, instead of propitiating justice in his behalf, and hastening his return by her alms-deeds and prayers, has kept carnival in his absence, making a league with ruinous prodigality and measureless indiscretion. The harp of the minstrel, and

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the heel of the dancer, echo through my castles; but the unfed poor wail at the gate, and the porter deals out blows instead of largesses; nay, worse, even the selected pensioners she promised to support, are driven shivering from their unprovided cloisters, to supplicate a precarious meal from the already over-burdened monasteries, or to increase the number of wretches such as I have hitherto met, whose gaunt bodies and hollow eyes, downcast from despair, seem to consider the earth, not as a generous nourisher; but only as one vast grave. How unlike are the objects by which you are now surrounded!-oh! how unlike the

happy peasantry whose strength shewed satiety, while their visages looked content! How different, too, from yon gay minion, whose crisped locks and scented mantle speak the soft sybarite, not the son of a British banneret, trained in his baron's castle to acquire fair pre-eminence in arts

and arms. 'Tis well for thee, Sir Fopling, that I am now unarmed, or this sanctuary would scarce protect thy insulting luxury."

The Bishop crossed himself, and adjured the Earl not to despoil the grace of his newly-attained reconciliation with the holy church, by forfeiting his scarcelyconfirmed absolution of the seven deadly sins; only two were in strictness carnal, and men fell into the others often through inordinate self-esteem of their own spiritual attainments. "You have," said he," for your soul's good, of late principally conversed with valiant crusaders and mortified anchorites, from whose manners those of a princely lady's domestics must be widely dissimilar. My conscience and my habits alike require me to use plainness of speech. -In correcting the faults of your consort, remember your own. If unbounded indulgence has begot levity, be not rigid or hasty in straitening the cords of restraint,

lest you should break the spirit, whose supports you have contributed to undermine. I will advise the lady Alicia to prepare for your return; and may your mildness in shewing her wherein she has been to blame, and her ingenuousness in anticipating your censures, render you henceforth as conspicuous for your conjugal felicity as your piety and prompt obedience to those holy watchers who are the guides of your soul."

As the Earl of Lancaster's superstitious zeal impelled him to pay his devotions at the shrine of St. Cuthberg, (the selected patroness of the lands and castle of Canford,) before he presumed to enter its precincts; so the obligations of chivalry required some testimony of grateful recollection from a knight safely returned from combating infidels, to the memory of a King who had fallen in battle against the pagan Danes, and lay buried in Wimborn minster. On the tomb of Ethelred,