- lowed by all to be "sharp and sententious," | drily inserted. Thus maintaining the usewill not by all be reckoned "audacious with- lessness of the habit, among learned divines, out impudency," where Selden says of of running to the text for something done Church Councils: "They talk, but blas- among the Jews, that nothing concerns Engphemously enough, that the Holy Ghost is land, 'tis just, he says, if a man would have president of their general councils, when the a kettle, and he would not go to our brazier truth is, the odd man is still the Holy Ghost." to have it made as they make kettles, but he Or this fling at popular preachers of that day would have it made as Hiram made his brass-and not of that day only: "To preach work, who wrought for Solomon's Temple. To long, loud, and damnation, is the way to be quote a modern Dutchman, he says, where cried up. We love a man that damns us, you may use a classic author, is as if you were and we run after him again to save us"- to justify your reputation, and for that end which doctrine he enforces by a homely illus- were to neglect all persons of note and qualtration of his own sort. Such plain-spoken ity that you know, and bring instead the paragraphs, too, as that on divine "Judg- testimonial of the scullion in the kitchen. ments," that on long sermons, &c., must Ceremony, he shrewdly observes (and seahave grated on many a seventeenth-century sonably withal), keeps up all things: 'tis like ear, at least of the crop-eared party; thus: a penny-glass to a rich spirit, or some excel"We cannot tell what is a judgment of God; lent water; without it the water were spilt, 'tis presumption to take upon us to know. In the spirit lost. Talking of political turncoats, time of plague we know we want health, and affirming that if a man be weak enough and therefore we pray to God to give us to change once, he will change again, he health..... Commonly we say a judgment remarks: your country-fellows have a way falls upon a man for something in him we to try if a man be weak in the hams, by can not abide. An example we have in King coming behind him and giving him a blow James concerning the death of Henry IV. of unawares; if he bend once, be will bend France: one said he was killed for his wench- again. To the text of "Old friends are best," ing, another said he was killed for turning his illustration is, that King James used to his religion. No, says King James, who could call for his old shoes; they were easiest for not abide fighting, he was killed for permit- his feet. Moralizing on the changes which ting duels in his kingdom." "Preaching," Preaching," had affected the court of England, he pleassaid Selden, in the palmy day of preaching, antly says, that as, at a solemn dancing, first "is for the most part the glory of the preacher, you had the grave measures, then the coranto show himself a fine man. Catechising toes, and the galliards, then "Frenchmore," would do much better." And in the day of and the cushion-dance, and then the dance of obtrusiveness in "religious conversation," he all the company without distinction-lord and made bold to object: "King James said to groom, lady and kitchen-maid,-so in the the fly, have I three kingdoms, and thou English court of Elizabeth's time, gravity and must needs fly into my eye? Is there not state were kept up; in King James's time enough to meddle with upon the stage, or in things were pretty well; but in King love, or at the table, but religion ?" It must Charles's time, quoth he, "there has been nobe owned that Selden's "reasons at dinner" thing but French-more and the cushion-dance, on these and cognate topics are latitudinarian omnium gatherum, tolly polly, hoite come enough; and that, both in the spirit and in toite"-an almost Rabelaisian façon de parlor the letter, they, together with miscellaneous on the part of Mr. John. The King (Charles) remarks in which he is hardly "pleasant calling his friends from the Parliament, bewithout scurrility," or at least coarseness, cause he had use of them at Oxford, is, saith "show cause" for the testimony of Usher our table-talker, as if a man should have use and Hale. of a little piece of wood, and he runs down into the cellar, and takes the spigot; in the meantime all the beer runs about the house: so, his friends being absent, the king will be lost. lost. On the thesis, "They that govern most make least noise," the illustration is: you see when they row in a barge, they that do drudgery work, slash, and puff, and sweat; while he that governs, sits quietly at the stern, and scarce is seen to stir. Upholding, as with consistency and sagacity he was for To listeners with an ordinary palate, and normal digestive power, table-talk without illustration or anecdotage were as bad as pudding without plums. The plums are not forgotten, not sparsely inlaid either, in Selden's pudding; but are plentiful as blackberries, and have often a racy flavor, fresh and fruity. Selden loves to give zest to his grave discourse by some familiar allusion, aptly introduced, or smart figure of speech, ward to do, the use of liturgical forms in | For, it must be owned, Mr. John Selden was habitually ungallant; and if not a confirmed woman-hater, at least a pronounced woman-mocker. This is in keeping with the undue development in his nature of what is hard, dry, coarse-grained and radically prosaic. Little inkling had he of how divine a thing a woman may be made. "The sex" found in him a satirist as bluff as Monkbarns, without Monk barns' latent kindness and his sweet blooded humanity. A passage or two *Table-talk, pp. 20, 30, 31, 32, 74, 95, 97, 157, 161, 164, 165, 201, 226. from the Table-talk will suffice as samples of 66 'Tis rea He was tolerably impartial, all but the very partial will admit, in his opposition to "spiritual despotism," whether invested in scarlet, or lawn, or black Geneva gown. Popery, prelacy, presbyterianism,―none of them escaped his satire. Now he ridicules the notion of a curse entailed on lay proprietors of abbey lands-now the papal jurisdiction-now the divine right of episcopacy. Equally he scouts the divine right of presbyterianism. As with priest, so with puritan. As with malignant, so with roundhead. As with high-church bigot, so with parliamentarian fanatic. And after all, he evidently prefers, as English gentleman and temperate thinker, the via media of prelacy to the low level of the sects. Denouncing episcopal pretensions, he yet opposes those who are for abolishing episcopacy. If he is strong against firebrands within the pale of Anglicanism, he is stronger against more vulgar firebrands without. He scorns the clap-trap of those who charge on churchmen things that they know not; he is above Ibid., pp. 31, 41, 227. the ignorant zeal which is intent on getting up a cry. "We charge the prelatical clergy, says he, "with popery to make them odious, though we know they are guilty of no such thing." Speaking of the Trinity, he says, that if the second Person is made of a piece of bread by the papists, the third Person is made by the roundhead of his own phrensy, malice, ignorance, and folly. "One the baker makes, and the other the cobbler; and betwixt the two, I think the first Person is sufficiently abused." The frequent occasion he takes to uphold the liturgy against extemporaneous effusions is also observable; and so are his repeated sarcasms on Sabbatarians, on proxlixity in preaching and prayer, on the private interpretation of the word, and the vaunted right of private judgment, upon which the sectaries laid so much stress. Naturally it was the same with Selden's politics. He was a middle-man. Ultras of either side he eschewed. His was not the spirit of a martyr, nor, reformer though he was, of an enthusiast in reform. He was indeed again and again committed to custody for his freedom of speech in the House of Commons-which he entered a year or two before the death of James I., as member for Lancaster, and in which he subsequently had a seat for Great Bedwin, and also for the University of Oxford-but he was too reflective, and not sufficiently einseitig, to be a thorough party-man; neither intellectually nor morally, neither by conviction nor by temperament, was he shaped for a revolutionary leader. "In a troubled state," he says at table," we must do as in foul weather upon the Thames, not think to cut directly through, but rise and fall as the waves do, give as much as conveniently we can.' ** He lived to see the waters abated, and the vessel of the State making way in comparative calm, under the pilotage of Cromwell; but how far he was sanguine of his country's weal under such a steersman, and with what degree of approval he watched the dictator's policy, or what tokens of stability his prophetic eye recognized in the protectorate, we should be glad to find in his "Table-talk," but find not. CHEVALIER WIKOFF.-A strange story has been brought to light in the course of the last week. Lord Palmerston, it is said-and strong documentary evidence is produced in support of the assertion-in the course of the year 1850 hired the services of a certain person, who, in return for his pay, "was to make known clearly through the medium of the French and the United States' press, the liberal, and especially the pacific character, of the policy of Her Majesty's government.' The words quoted form part of a letter said to be addressed by Mr. H. U. Addington, in the name of Lord Palmerston, to the author Some affect to descry in Selden's " easy conscience" the key to his certainly very "easy circumstances." How Selden got together his money, is not altogether clear; but neither need any mystery be made of it, considering his profession as a conveyancer and chamber counsel, and his opportunities from connection with the Kent family. To his wealth, as conjoined in a rare degree with remarkable learning, the witty Fuller probably alludes, in his dry way, when he says: "Mr. Selden had some coins of the Roman emperors, and a great many more of our English kings." At least, it would not be like Fuller if there were no such sub-surface meaning in the sentence, but only the literal one obvious to very literal readers. of a little work named, "My Courtship and its Consequences." The author is said to be one Nichoff. It is stated that this man Nichoff is a Russian agent, employed to write Russian articles in the New York Herald. For some reason or other, this worthy personage ceased to give satisfaction to his employers, or they ceased to have occasion for his services. Due notice was given to him by Mr. Addington that at the end of June, 1852, his engagement with the English Foreign-office was to be considered as terminated, and it was brought to a conclusion accordingly. It may be as well to state that Nichoff, the Russian agent on one authority, is by another stated to be a citizen of the United States. It is added, from his own account, that he was sentenced by a criminal court at Genoa to fifteen months' imprisonment for a scandalous outrage upon a lady. The two assertions are far from incompatible. Nichoff, the Russian agent, may well be a Russian by birth, naturalized in America, the agent of the British Foreign-office, the Russian spy, the hero of the criminal outrage at Genoa, the correspondent of Mr. H. U. Addington, and the author of "My Courtship and its Consequences." From Fraser's Magazine. ST. STEPHEN'S CHAPEL. Ir is seldom we can trace with exact pre- | cision the source of a great river. We see the high land whence it has descended, the plain below enriched by its full stream, but we fail to mark the exact spot where first the infant waters trickle from the earth. So it is often with the origin of great institutions -so it is with that greatest of modern European institutions, the British Parliament. It is scarcely possible to say exactly when and how it took its origin. It is certain that when that event took place, which is often regarded as the origin of Parliament, the signing of Magna Charta, the word itself, though doubtless with a sufficiently different signification from that which it now bears, was in common use. Still that event is not improperly chosen as the heading for a chapter on Parliament; it was the Barons of Runnymede, headed by those true patriots, Stephen Langton and Richard Earl of Pembroke, who wrested from King John that great concession which still forms one of the fundamental props of our present constitution -viz., that the king shall raise no money from his people without the sanction and the aid of Parliament. Through this first great Act of Parliament frequent attempts were made to drive a coach and six, as has been done through so many of its successors. But the principle was then announced on a summer day in 1215, and has never since been quite forgotten. Often was this great wall of liberty sorely breached by able, vigorous, and despotic Plantagenets; by haughty, impetuous, and wilful Tudors; by wily, treacherous, and imperious Stuarts: but again and again were the breaches built up, in repeated confirmations of the Charta, in the Provisions of Oxford, in the Petition of Right: it was to be cemented with blood, to be maintained at any cost change of dynasties, the death of kings, the pains of civil war, all were to be endured rather than abandon the principle that taxation rests not upon the will of the sovereign, but the law of the land; the principle, in obedience to which Mr. Gladstone yearly submits his budget to the House of Commons, and the House of Commons furnishes Her Majesty with supplies for carrying on the Russian war. The second chapter of Parliamentary History has Simon de Montfort for its hero. This man was one of the many foreigners whose arrival in England, during the reign of Henry III., gave great offence to the country. Hated by the people, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, was a favorite with the king, and was allowed to marry Henry's own sister. The wedding took place in the precincts of the Royal Palace, in that sanctuary which Stephen had built in troubled times, and which was now used as an appendage to the Westminster Palace-in St. Stephen's Chapel. Little thought Simon de Montfort, as he stood at the east end of that oblong chamber, that his actions during the next years of his life were to make it the focus of English history; that the room in which he was marrying a king's daughter would be the scene of those contests which would limit the power of the king's posterity. De Montford, soon after his marriage, quarrelled with Henry III., and put himself at the head of the hostile barons. A few victories made him virtual king of England; but he knew that Englishmen loved not usurpers; he used his power in the king's name to effect a silent orderly revolution: the writs which for the first time summoned two knights from each shire and two burgesses from each borough to serve the king in Parliament, were issued, indeed, by De Montfort, but signed in due order by King Henry III. Thus two great steps towards a parliamentary constitution were accomplished. The first we owe mainly to a Norman baron and an English priest; the second to one, who in days when the Norman Government itself had not altogether lost its foreign character, was still more a foreigner: the same free infusion of foreign elements which has so strengthened and enriched our language, was destined also to widen and strengthen the basis of our constitution; it The division of Parliament into two Houses appears to have existed as early as the reign of Edward I. They met both in one building, but in separate council, at the upper and lower end of Westminster Hall; that is to say, when the Parliament was held at London, for it still retained during many years its character of a royal council, and followed the king wherever he might be, to Oxford, York, or Carlisle. It was not till the reign of Edward III. that the accumulation of parliamentary records and other documents at Westminster suggested the propriety of Parliament's becoming independent of the migrations of the sovereign; since that reign only fourteen Parliaments have been held elsewhere, and most of those during the troubled times of the Stuarts. In 1877, the House of Commons were removed from Westminster Hall to the Chapter House of the Abbey. Here they remained till the reign of Edward VI., when they removed to the Chapel of St. Stephen. The peers continued to use Westminster Hall, nor does it appear clearly when they began to occupy that chamber which Guy Fawkes designed to blow up, and which was pulled down at the commencement of the present century. is to the Saxons, the Danes, the Normans, | ileges. In the days of the Commonwealth the Alfreds, the Canutes, the De Montforts, it was the glory and the blessing of England that the rich concrete, the English, owes its that the Parliamentary system did not perish. existence. It is not the least weighty evidence of the sobering and strengthening effect of representative institutions, that in England the most effectual and thorough revolutions have been so little revolutionary. When the Puritan fervor was at its height, when the monarchy was abolished and the House of Lords dispersed, the House of Commons sat on, headed by the Speaker, in its own chamber-its forms and etiquettes were rigidly observed; its manner of proceeding differed little from that of the present time; matters of ceremony were debated with an earnestness scarcely inferior to that bestowed on the most important questions of State policy; an earnestness which those will not be inclined to ridicule who regard it as evidence of that strong desire in the middle of change to abide as much as possible by the ancient paths, which has given so noble an aspect to all English reform, which gives that permanence to progress, without which it rapidly becomes convulsion and ruin. When Cromwell became virtually King of England his keen sagacity saw how hard it was to change the warp which had been so slowly and so carefully worked into the English constitution; he knew on what seeming trifles great liberties depended; how utterly unfitted was the genius of the English people for a republican, or indeed for any other than a monarchical form of government. With this view he did what he could to put back ancient landmarks; he restored the other House as much as possible on its former footing; he even tried to procure for it the old name of House of Lords, a proceeding from which the House of Commons, more shy of the name than the reality, shrank in alarm. He desired that there should be a king, doubtless he would have himself accepted the royal title when offered to him, had he not known that his past career had made this impossible for him in the eyes of those whom he could not offend; that he, who had dealt so terrible a blow to kingship, could never become, in name at least, King of England. We know with what joy, as a bow unbent, all England threw itself into the movement which brought about the Restoration. The monarchy was reëstablished; it found the Parliament, with its old apparatus all prepared at Westminster; the parliamentary records preserved in an unbroken series; the old parliamentary terms not fallen into desuetude; the Chapel of St. Stephen duly That legislation could only be the joint work of King, Lords, and Commons, appears to have been first regarded as a fixed principle-the third great step, we shall call it, in parliamentary progress-in the reign of Edward III. In the reign of Richard II. we find the House of Commons for the first time choosing their Speaker, and petitioning for that liberty of speech which is still sued for as a matter of form by the Speaker of each successive Parliament: in the reign of Henry IV. a fourth step was taken in the postponement of subsidies as conditional on the redress of grievances in the reign of Henry VI. the fifth and sixth steps-viz., the assertion and establishment by the House of Commons of its exclusive right to initiate money bills, and the exchanging the process of Petition for that which still exists of Bill, brought the English Parliament to a form, subject indeed to much extension, but not materially different from that in which it now exists. The Pyms and Hampdens of the Civil War were nobly occupied rather in the vindication of old than the demand for new priv |