The Church, the Kingdom, and the Isle of Man. 309

concealed beneath the hope of reconciliation, was soon laid bare to view. A complete separation had taken place among the princes of the empire, and the division had already extended to the cities. One instance may suffice:-In Augsburg the emperor's presence, of course, caused much embarrassment, and it was thought necessary to revert to the extraordinary measure of convoking the great council, in which members of all the guilds took part; but the Protestant spirit had already penetrated the body of the citizens too deeply for them to find it possible to renounce the confession. In the very face of the confessor, Augsburg refused to accept the recess.

Other matters yet remained to be settled at this Diet, which proved to the confessor the independent position assumed by all the German States in matters which concerned even their tem poral welfare. But the most important question was, what attitude the emperor and the majority would assume in their relations with the States which had rejected their recess? The emperor's warlike disposition may be learnt from a letter dated 25th of October to the cardinals, in which he says :—

"We declare to you that, for the termination of this affair (with the Lutherans), we will spare neither kingdoms nor dominions: nay, that we will devote to it body and soul, which we have wholly dedicated to the service of God Almighty."

There is a pause here in Ranke's division of his great work. With the termination of the Diet of Augsburg he closes the fifth book. The sixth book is devoted to an examination of the "Origin and Progress of the Schmalkaldic League," embracing the period, 1530-1535. Few ininds are so barren as not to have some thoughts and opinions which they would like to give utterance to upon the mighty events which have just been made to pass in array before us; but our task is the humbler one of recording the thoughts of the historian.

ART. III.-The Isle of Man : its History, Physical, Ecclesiastical, Civil, and Legendary. By the Rev. JOSEPH George CUMMING, M.A., Vice-Principal of King William's College, Castletown. London: John Van Voorst. 1848.

"READER (says Southey, in a chapter of 'The Doctor,' treating upon the moral interest of topographical works and local attachment)-Reader (says he), if thou carest little or nothing for the Yorkshire river Don, and for the town of Doncaster, and for the circumstances connected with it, I am sorry for thee." Southey's venerable friend Dr. Dove was, as he tells us, of a

different disposition: he was one who loved as Southey himself loved :

uncontrollable as in a stream,

To muse upon the course of human things;
Exploring sometimes the remotest springs,
Far as tradition leads one guiding gleam;
Or following upon Thought's audacious wings
Into futurity the endless stream."

Dr. Dove, as his quaint biographer informs us, could not only find

66

tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

But, we are told, he endeavoured to find all he could in them; and for that reason he delighted to enquire into the history of places and of things, and to understand their past as well as their present state. The revolutions of a mansion-house within his circuit were as interesting to him as those of the Mogul empire; and, as Southey concludes by telling us, he had as much satisfaction in being acquainted with the windings of a brook, from its springs to the place where it fell into the Don, as he could have felt in knowing that the source of the Nile had been explored, or the course and termination of the Niger.

We confess to something of the spirit which, in this wise, animated the immortal doctor; and it is because of this that we accordingly and heartily greet a work which, in brief space and happy phrase, tells us of the Isle and Kingdom of Man, of its fortunes, its church, its condition, aspect, traditions, and hopes. It is extraordinary how very little we know of this interesting island of this real gem of the Irish Sea-whose fate it has been ever to be set in the crown of a stranger. We possess, generally, a world more of knowledge touching localities not half so well worth knowing, and in which we ought to be infinitely less interested. The isles of the Ægean or the Mediterranean are, in their ancient history at least, as pages which we have by rote; but who amongst us is a tithe as familiar with the legendary annals of Mona or Vectis? What have we not read, for instance, and that in our school days, of Chios? Plutarch, and Horace, and Strabo, and Mela were our tutors; and at their feet, even in our teens, we knew that Chione gave name to the isle; and that the proud daughter of Deucalion, so Naso tells us, was changed into a hawk for preferring her venal beauty to that of the chaste Diana; and it was early matter of perplexity to us to reconcile the virtues of a population, among whom the sin of adultery was not known for seven centuries,

with the vicious example set them by their great foundress who was, at one and the same time, the mistress of Apollo and Mercury! Our young memories are crowded with the names of the hundred cities of Crete-with examples of the wisdom of Minos-and the utter rascality of the people for whom he gave himself the vain trouble of being wise. And Delos-how familiarly are we all acquainted with the history of that magnificent lying-in hospital which Neptune created at a word for the reception of the light-robed and slender-reputed Latona? There is Paros, too: its Lychnite marbles are better known to us than any production of our own quarries. Do we not know that all the Egeans were originally ants, and that they never exhibited half the industry and perseverance of their ancestors? Salamis-its glory and misfortunes are as household words in our mouths. Naxos, obeying kings, establishing a republic, and worshipping Bacchus, is as a story of yesterday; and Cyprus, with its nine kingdoms, its change of masters, its worship of Venus, its three temples, and the constancy which the people manifested in being inconstant-are not all these things written in Strabo, and Ptolemy, and Florus, and Justin; and do we not know volumes more about them than of Eubonia in the Hibernicum Mare, or of Vectis and the Solent?

And yet the histories of the Isle of Wight and of the Isle of Man are as full of pages replete with interest and moving incident as that of any island of ancient days, wherein unclean monarchs presided and unclean manners prevailed. The early annals of the former bristle with fierce aspects; and battles, of which we know little, were as plentiful as blackberries. Before the Solent, or the Solvent, Sea divided the Ictis of Diodorus from that portion of Britain which was then inhabited by the Belga or Regni, the Romans shipped their tin for Gaul from the harbours of the Undercliff. The whole story of the resistance given by the natives to the Roman invasion is worthy of better study than it receives at the hands or heads of ingenuous British youth; and of no less interest, though equally unknown "to the general," are the Saxon conquest; the bloody conversion of the inhabitants from Druidism, under the barbarous arguments of that ruthless missionary king, Cadwella, and the sanguinary rule maintained there by the Danes. Wight, like Man, was long an independent sovereignty. At the conquest, FitzOsborne subdued the island for his own use and profit, and became the first Lord of Wight; for two full centuries after the conquest, the Isle of Wight continued to be governed by its sovereign lords. In 1293 Edward I. purchased the regalities, and the King of England became thenceforth, "Lord of the

Island," governing the same by custodes or wardens. The person who sold the regalities was Isabella de Fortibus, "Lady of Wight." Thus it came by the sword and went with the distaff. The abdicating lady got six thousand marks (4,000.) by the bargain; and, on the day she alienated the sovereignty from her family, she was suddenly visited by the inevitable angel and summoned to the narrower possession of the grave.

But the variety which characterises the annals of that little island in the English Channel, which is still yearly invaded by hordes of tourists, is monotony itself when compared with the ever-shifting scenes of Manx history. The very opening page of this history begins with the reign of a primitive king with a painful name: it is no other than Mannanan-beg-mac-y-Sheive, who was not only a king but a conjuror, and who deserves to be for ever immortal for declining to impose taxes upon his wondering and grateful people! A king who could maintain his state without a revenue drawn from the purses of his subjects was, of course, clever enough for anything; and, accordingly, we hear that he could "raise the wind"-not metaphorically-but in as destructively matter-of-fact style as old Æolus himself, for whose professional qualities we refer our readers to the wellknown passage in Maro. No invader successfully visited the isle under the halcyon reign of this exemplary king; for the latter entrapped him into imaginary quagmires, affrighted him with visionary volcanoes got up for the nonce, or put him out of his reckoning ere he landed on the isle by snatching the latter from his sight and enshrouding it within a barrier of impervious mist. The solitary objection to this story is that it belongs to a legendary period, and no one appears called upon to believe a word about it-the more the pity: we would gratefully entertain reminiscences of a monarch who never levied a contribution upon his subjects, and who was never represented at his people's threshholds by that unpopular official, the district tax-gatherer, with his slip of odious paper and the not less odious intimation of

"Taxes (says he), and shall not call again!"

Out of this romance we step into grave realities; and we find the island monarchy falling into the hands of all sorts of people, save the Manx themselves: it has been ridden over by the Romans and held by the Scots: it has groaned under the Welsh sceptre and been subject to Irish mastery. The Icelander, the Norwegian, and the Dane have, by turns, held and lost it. It has in its day afforded a species of Schleswig-Holstein quarrel

for the arbitration of the English crown; and, after enduring or enjoying monarchy for a period longer than England has enjoyed the same condition (from the Heptarchy), was sold to her great eastern neighbour--and, oh wonder! has never once called out for a repeal of the union.

The record of all these matters is made at greater length by Mr. Cumming than we can venture to imitate. We can only give in a summary what he tells so well in detail, and, to do that, we plunge in medias res. That great knight-errant, Arthur of the Round Table, visited the island when it was held by the Scots, who had themselves succeeded to the Romans: this was in the year 520. Arthur drove out the foreigner, and in his place established a prince of the native line. In about twenty years the Scots returned, and kept their conquest until ejected by the King of Northumberland. Soon after this, Man was incorporated with the kingdom of North Wales, and only became again a sole and independent sovereignty when the Sovereign of Wales, like Charlemagne, divided his kingdom among his heirs, and left the island to one of his three sons. At this period we have reached the tenth century, when the Northmen appeared, and, like Cæsar, conquered where they looked; but these men came with laws as well as swords, and they established the House of Keys, and founded the ceremony of the Tynwald, and divided the island into six sheadings (scheide-division?). They were a magnificent race; and old Haco, in 973, appears to have been as great an admiral as he was a king. He is gravely reported to have possessed a fleet of three thousand six hundred ships, with which he kept the pirates, of a most piratical age, from the shores of England: and he was one of eight kings who conducted Edgar in the royal barge up the river Dee, Haco, as the chief of the eight, holding the royal helm. Haco gave to the island his own shield of arms-a ship in full sail. It was not for three hundred years that Man received the blazoning of which she still boasts. In 1273, Alexander III. of Scotland gave the island three legs for its arms, with the motto, Quocunque jeceris stabit. Sicily has a shield very much resembling this, but it cannot boast of the same significant motto. Man has, with all its changes, stood pretty firm upon its human tripod. Sicily is even now tottering on its three legs, and its new crown is going a-begging for want of a master to maintain it in steadiness.

It is not very clear whether the Northmen, who had established themselves in Man, were Icelanders or Danes-they were probably the latter: the same men established a sovereignty in Dublin, and during the eleventh century the sove