EXECUTION OF SIR THOMAS MORE. 541 "So about nine of the nothing, but rather loved him extremely." clock he was brought by the lieutenant out of the Tower, his beard being long,-which fashion he had never before used,—his face pale and lean, carrying in his hands a red cross, casting his eyes often towards heaven." He had been unpopular as a judge, and one or two persons in the crowd were insolent to him; but the distance was short and soon over, as all else was nearly over now. The scaffold had been awkwardly erected, and shook as he placed his foot upon the ladder. "See me safe up," he said to Kingston; "for my coming down I can shift for myself." He began to speak to the people, but the Sheriff begged him not to proceed, and he contented himself with asking for their prayers, and desiring them to bear witness for him that he died in the faith of the holy Catholic Church, and a faithful servant of God and the king. He then repeated the Miserere psalm1 on his knees; and when he had ended, and had risen, the executioner, with an emotion which promised ill for the manner in which his part in the tragedy would be accomplished, begged his forgiveness. More kissed him ; "Thou art to do me the greatest benefit that I can receive," he said; "pluck up thy spirit, man, and be not afraid to do thine office. My neck is very short; take heed, therefore, that thou strike not awry, for saving of thine honesty." The executioner offered to tie his eyes: "I will cover them myself," he said; and binding them in a cloth which he had brought with him, he knelt and laid his head upon the block. The fatal stroke was about to fall, when he signed for a moment's delay while he moved aside his beard. "Pity that should be cut," he murmured, "that has not committed treason." With which strange words,—the strangest, perhaps, ever uttered at such a time, -the lips most famous through Europe for eloquence and wisdom closed for ever. "So," concludes his biographer, "with alacrity and spiritual joy he received the fatal axe, which no sooner had severed the head from the body, but his soul was carried by angels into everlasting glory, where a crown of martyrdom was placed upon him which can never fade nor decay; and then he found those words true which he had often spoken, that a man may lose his head and have no harm." This was the execution of Sir Thomas More, an act which sounded out into the far corners of the earth, and was the world's wonder, as well for the circumstances under which it was perpetrated, as for the preternatural composure with which it was borne. Something of his calmness may have been due to his natural temperament, something to an unaffected weariness of a world which in his eyes was plunging into the ruin of the latter days. But those fair hues of sunny cheerfulness caught their colour from the simplicity of his faith; and never was there a grander Christian victory over death than in that last scene lighted with its lambent humour. 1 Psalm li. XXIV. DR GUTHRIE. DR THOMAS GUTHRIE is well known as the most eloquent among the preachers of the Free Church, and as the able advocate of "Ragged Schools," and every other philanthropic measure for advancing the moral and social welfare of the lower classes of the community. He is a native of Forfarshire, where he was born in 1800, and has been for nearly twenty years a clergyman in Edinburgh. Within the last few years he has published "A Plea for Ragged Schools," a volume of "Sermons on some Passages in Ezekiel," another on part of Colossians, and a series of four Sermons on "The City, its Sins and Sorrows." His works have been more extensively popular than those of any contemporary theological writer; and the eloquence, pathos, lively fancy, brilliant imagination, and, above all, the strong and never-failing sympathy for sorrow and distress which they everywhere exhibit, have irresistibly gained the esteem of thousands of readers. 1. GRADUAL DEGRADATION OF TOWNS. ("THE CITY: ITS SINS AND SORROWS.") There is a remarkable phenomenon to be seen on certain parts of our coast. Strange to say, it proves, notwithstanding such expressions as the stable and solid land, that it is not the land, but the sea, which is the stable element. On some summer day, when there is not a wave to rock her, nor breath of wind to fill her sail or fan a cheek, you launch your boat upon the waters, and, pulling out beyond lowest tide-mark, you idly lie upon her bows to catch the silvery glance of a passing fish, or watch the movements of the many curious creatures that travel the sea's sandy bed, or creeping out of their rocky homes, wander its tangled mazes. If the traveller is surprised to find a deep-sea shell embedded in the marbles of a mountain peak, how great is your surprise to see beneath you a vegetation foreign to the deep! Below your boat, submerged many feet beneath the surface of the lowest tide, away down in these green crystal depths, you see no rusting anchor, no mouldering remains of some shipwrecked one, but, in the standing stumps of trees, the mouldering vestiges of a forest, where once the wild cat prowled, and the birds of heaven, singing their loves, had nestled and nursed their young. In counterpart to those portions of our coast where sea-hollowed caves, with sides the waves have polished, and floors still strowed with shells and sand, now stand high above the level of the strongest stream-tides, there stand these dead decaying trees-entombed in the deep. A strange phenomenon, which admits of no other explanation than this, that there the coast-line has sunk beneath its ancient level. Many of our cities present a phenomenon as melancholy to the eye of a philanthropist, as the other is interesting to a philosopher or geologist. In their economical, educational, moral, and religious GRADUAL DEGRADATION OF TOWNS. 543 aspects, certain parts of this city bear palpable evidence of a corresponding subsidence. Not a single house, nor a block of houses, but whole streets, once from end to end the houses of decency, and industry, and wealth, and rank, and piety, have been engulfed. A flood of ignorance, and misery, and sin, now breaks and roars above the top of their highest tenements. Nor do the old stumps of a forest, still standing up erect beneath the sea-wave, indicate a greater change, a deeper subsidence, than the relics of ancient grandeur and the touching memorials of piety which yet linger about these wretched dwellings, like evening twilight on the hills-like some traces of beauty on a corpse. The unfurnished floor, the begrimed and naked walls, the stifling, sickening atmosphere, the patched and dusty window through which a sunbeam, like hope, is faintly stealing, the ragged, hunger-bitten, and sad-faced children, the ruffian man, the heap of straw where some wretched mother, in muttering dreams, sleeps off last night's debauch, or lies unshrouded and uncoffined in the ghastliness of a hopeless death, are sad scenes. We have often looked on them. And they appear all the sadder for the restless play of fancy. Excited by some vestiges of a frescopainting that still looks out from the foul and broken plaster, the massive marble rising over the cold and cracked hearth-stone, an elaborately carved cornice too high for shivering cold to pull it down for fuel, some stucco flowers or fruit yet pendent on the crumbling ceiling fancy, kindled by these, calls up the gay scenes and actors of other days-when beauty, elegance, and fashion graced these lonely halls, and plenty smoked on groaning tables, and where these few cinders, gathered from the city dust-heap, are feebly smouldering, hospitable fires roared up the chimney. But there is that in and about these houses which bear witness of a deeper subsidence, a yet sadder change. Bent on some mission of mercy, you stand at the foot of a dark and filthy stair. It conducts you to the crowded rooms of a tenement, where, with the exception of some old decent widow who has seen better days, and when her family are all dead, and her friends are all gone, still clings to God and her faith in the dark hour of adversity and amid the wreck of fortune from the cellar-dens below to the cold garrets beneath the roof-tree, you shall find none either reading their Bible, or even with a Bible to read. Alas! of prayer, of morning or evening psalms, of earthly or heavenly peace, it may be said, the place that once knew them knows them no more. But before you enter the doorway, raise your eyes to the lintel-stone. Dumb, it yet speaks of other and better times. Carved in Greek or Latin, or our own mother-tongue, you decipher such texts as these: "Peace be to this house!" cept the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it." "We have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." "Fear God;" or this, "Love your neighbour." Like the mouldering remnants of a forest that once resounded with the melody of birds, but hears nought now save the angry dash or melancholy moan of breaking waves, these vestiges of piety furnish "Ex a gauge which enables us to measure how low in these dark localities the whole stratum of society has sunk. 2. JUVENILE IGNORANCE AND MISERY. People who find it difficult enough, with all the appliances of a good education and religious training, to keep their children in the paths of honesty and rectitude, wonder that there is so much crime. If they saw what some of us have seen, and knew what some of us have known, they would still wonder, but wonder there was so little crime. To expect from those who have been reared in the darkest ignorance, and in a very hot-bed of temptations, anything else but crime, is sheer folly. A man might as well wonder that he does not see wheat or barley growing in our streets—where plough never goes, and where no seed is sown. What can a farmer expect to find in a field left fallow, abandoned to wild nature, to the floating thistle-down, and every seed furnished with wings to fly, but evidence of his own neglect, in a rank vile crop of weeds? Look at the case of a boy whom I saw lately. He was but twelve years of age, and had been seven times in jail. The term of his imprisonment had run out, and so he had doffed the prison garb and resumed his own. It was the depth of winter; and having neither shoes nor stockings, his red, naked feet, were upon the frozen ground. Had you seen him shivering in his scanty dress-the misery pictured on an otherwise comely face-the tears that went dropping over his cheeks as the child told his pitiful story-you would have forgotten that he had been a thief, and only seen before you an unhappy creature more worthy of a kind word, a loving look, a helping hand, than the guardianship of a turnkey and the dreary solitude of a jail. His mother was in the grave. His father had married another woman. They both were drunkards. Their den, which is in the High Street-I know the place-contained one bed, reserved for the father, his wife, and her child. No couch was kindly spread for this poor child and his brother, a mother's son, then also immured in the jail. When they were fortunate enough to be allowed to lie at home, their only bed was the hard bare floor. I say fortunate enough, because on many a winter night their own father hounded them out. Ruffian that he was, he drove his infants weeping from the door, to break their young hearts and bewail their cruel lot in the corner of some filthy stair, and sleep away the cold dark hours as best they could, crouching together for warmth, like two houscless dogs. A friend listened with me to that too true tale, and when he saw the woe, the utter woe in that child's face, the trembling of his lip, the great big tears that came rolling from his eyes, and fell on one's heart like red-hot drops of iron, no wonder that he declared, with indignation flashing in his eyes, "They have not a chance, sir; they have not a chance." In circumstances as hopeless, how many are there in every large city of the kingdom! AUSTIN LAYARD. 545 XXV. AUSTIN LAYARD. AUSTIN LAYARD, the most famous traveller of our day, was born in Paris in 1817. His grandfather had been Dean of Bristol, and his father held an important office in Ceylon. Part of his youth was spent in Florence, where he acquired the Italian language, a taste for antiquities, and considerable skill as an artist. On his return to England, it was intended that he should study for the law; but after a brief trial of the profession, his love of adventure prevailed, and he set out on a continental tour, in which he visited Russia, and several of the northern kingdoms, Germany, and Turkey. From Turkey he passed into Asia, and in the course of a lengthened sojourn in Arabia and Asiatic Turkey, he made himself thoroughly acquainted with the languages, customs, and objects of interest of these countries. Of these early travels several memoirs were written and communicated to the Royal Geographical Society. In 1842, while passing through Mosul on his way to Constantinople, he heard of the excavations of the French Consul, M. Botta, on the site of the ancient Nineveh, and this first excited his interest in the subject with which his name is now indissolubly connected. In 1845, by the assistance of the British ambassador, Sir Stratford Canning, he was enabled to commence operations at Nimroud. The amazing discoveries which were made, so full of interest to the antiquarian and the student of sacred history, have been narrated by him in his "Nineveh and its Remains," which was published in London in 1849, in two volumes; and a subsequent volume contains an account of the discoveries made since that date. No discovery of equal importance has been made by any modern traveller; and his works, without any pretensions to the graces of style, are among the most interesting which this age has produced. 1. DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT LIONS AT NIMROUD. 66 In the morning I rode to the encampment of Sheikh Abd-ur-rahman, and was returning to the mound, when I saw two Arabs of his tribe urging their mares to the top of their speed. On approaching me they stopped. Hasten, O Bey," exclaimed one of them, "hasten to the diggers, for they have found Nimrod himself. Wallah, it is wonderful, but it is true! we have seen him with our eyes. There is no God but God!" and both joining in this pious exclamation, they galloped off, without further words, in the direction of their tents. On reaching the ruins I descended into the new trench, and found the workmen who had already seen me as I approached-standing near a heap of baskets and cloaks. Whilst Awad1 advanced and asked for a present to celebrate the occasion, the Arabs withdrew the screen they had hastily constructed, and disclosed an enormous human head sculptured in full out of the alabaster of the country 1 Chief of a small Arab tribe, and the host of Mr Layard. |