during that and the whole subsequent reign—a period of eighteen years. He received, however, an excellent education, which was some amends; he found also an English wife worthy of him; and he turned out, doubtless by help of his adversity, the greatest prince that ever sat on a Scottish throne, as Alfred, by a like process, did upon that of England. He wrote also a beautiful poem in his prison, tasting of the primitive sweets and fire of his master, Chaucer. The Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward the Fourth. Edward the Fifth and his brother, said to have been smothered in the Tower. But the whole history of that period has turned out to be in very problematical condition. Sir Thomas More, beheaded on Tower Hill; a man whose natural benevolence and clear greatness of understanding stand out to posterity in melancholy but not useless contrast with his acquired bigotry and cruelty, the result of a superstitious education. We suspect, however, that More had in him harsher blood than is supposed, from the very first; otherwise he would hardly have given into such excesses on the unkindly side. Anne Bullen, beheaded within the precincts of the Tower. The visitor, in the course of his progress from building to building, is shown a square spot of darker hue than the rest, amidst the pavement between the White Tower and the buildings near the wall. The darkness is occasioned by darker stones. It is the spot on which the scaffold stood where Anne Bullen, Catherine Howard, and the Earl of Essex, were beheaded; most other executions having taken place, as is well known, outside the walls, upon the Hill. In the White Tower these poor women had held royal festivities; Anne's prison before execution looked right towards it. Catharine Howard; some of the charges against her were avowedly better founded, than can be said of those against Anne. But what a man was her husband, or what an age, when such atrocious injustice could be shown towards women, by a sex that gave itself every license! Anne Askew,-racked and executed, for denying, in matters of faith, what people are now allowed to deny by law. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey; beheaded by the bloated and dying tyrant, out of exasperated jealousy at his supposed pretensions to the crown. He was the second genuine English poet, next in time to Chaucer. Lady Jane Grey; victim to an ambition forced upon her by her kindred, but to which (contrary to what is generally supposed, and to the undoing of a pleasing romance about her and her husband) she appears to have been but too ready to give wayat least in no right spirit; for she immediately showed a desire to lord it over the husband to whom she is supposed to have been so much attached; nor is there reason to believe that there was any real love between them. Her love of books is a better founded part of her reputation, and she affectingly owned a comfort in them to the last. It seems pretty clear that Mary would not have put her to death, had not an insurrection occurred, which made her think she had no security but in removing the rival candidate for the throne. The simple account of her last moments, her anxiety to be quickly despatched, and her saying when she was blindfolded, and feeling about for the block, "What shall I do? where is it? where is it?" will long thrill the hearts of those who read the annals of that time. Queen Elizabeth: a prisoner here, while but a princess, for her religion. It doubtless helped her to be the great and thoughtful queen she was. Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex; whose execution within the walls of the Tower was probably a last piece of consideration for him on the part of his exasperated mistress. Sir Walter Raleigh; the terror of Spain, the friend of Spenser, and the author of the History of the World:' beheaded in consequence of James the First's unmanly subserviency to the Spanish interest. The celebrated action of Raleigh on his first coming to court (his throwing his velvet-cloak in the mire as a stepping-cloth for the Queen) showed him to have the ready wit of a right gentleman; and his conduct towards Elizabeth Throckmorton (whom he married under circumstances which a low-minded man would have taken occasion of to leave her) proved that he had the heart of one. He fell a sacrifice to a mean-souled prince: and, alas! in some degree to his own wilfulness, and "politic" want of truth-painful blots in an otherwise truly great character. Lord Bacon, who was for three days in the Tower after his fall. The Conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot-imprisoned here before execution: men who, had they lived now, would have been the fiercest of the opponents of their own creed. For it is idle and simple to the last degree to think that the same faith is at all periods indicative of the same feelings. The faith is an accident of education; the feeling is innate; and the persecutor, if he could live through all the reigns of a history upon the principle of the metempsychosis, would go through half a dozen different faiths, and be a persecutor in all. Sir John Elliot, one of the great men of the first Revolution, the founders of our existing liberties. He died here, the victim of poor Charles's revengeful obstinacy,-himself destined to perish violently by the orders of Elliot's avengers. Selden and others were imprisoned with him in the first instance. All that Mr Bailey has to say upon this subject is as follows: "In 1628 several members of the House of Commons, among whom were Hollis, Selden, Hobart, Elliot, and Valentine, were committed to the Tower as close prisoners for their violent conduct in Parliament on the question of tonnage and poundage. Their papers were seized; they were treated with severity at once injurious to their health and fortunes; and thus Sir John Elliot died."-p. 545. We need not stop to rebuke the historiographer for this courtly brevity. The lustre of the great men of that great day widens with posterity every hour; and Mr Forster's late eloquent publication has avenged them of a world of previous shabby silence. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, executed on Tower Hill by order of the Parliament. William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury-his fellow-conspirator in the unholy cause of arbitrary government. He was a little, staring, bustling man, honest as far as self-persuasion went, but instinctively craving power in order to make up for conscious weakness. Harrison, Marten, Ludlow, Hutchinson, and other Regicides; imprisoned here, some before execution, and others before imprisonment elsewhere, or discharge. Their characters include all the various shades of honesty, turbulence, false spirit and true, great views and little. The Rye-House Plotters, in Charles the Second's time. Seeing so many calamities caused by so many different opinions, each triumphant or sacrificed in its turn, one might be tempted to think the world itself a bubble, and this thing, called the Tower, nothing but a hard and bloody excrescence on the surface of it, did not myriads of throbbing and happier hearts (or noble in their unhappiness) crowd about the foolish supposition, and point triumphantly to beloved graves, and the skies, and the endless hopes of man, and his new prospects even here, and the present full, quick-lived, existing, sunny moment, one healthy respiration in whose air, and the sight of whose energetic millions, are sufficient to show us what a great and good thing even existence itself is for its own sake-almost setting aside the infinite beauties of nature and genius, that render it worthy, amidst all its evils, of being that star among other stars, known to us by the name of Earth. ART. X.-1. Rough Notes taken during some Rapid Journeys across the Pampas and among the Andes. By Captain F. B. Head. London, 1826. 2. English Charity. London, 1835. 3. Bubbles from the Brunnens of Nassau. By an Old Man. London, 1834. THE bad distinction this gentleman has obtained as a Governor of Upper Canada, and the fact which has been openly asserted that he is an author, have naturally excited curiosity as to how he wrote who governed so ill, and what class of writers have the honour of enrolling among their numbers a Governor who sent away his troops because he knew there was to be an insurrection. Sir Francis Bond Head belongs to a class of writers numerous enough of late, the men who write chiefly for effect and sale, and whose creed is that "high and sane art never attempts to express that for which it does not claim and expect general sympathy.” The talk, common in all literary circles, and dominant in some, which assumes as the ready and definite standard of success in literature, the amount of sale obtained, is the practical and every-day form of this opinion. The avowal of it, however, is a novelty, and could have been made in no other age in the history of literature without the avower of it being immediately extinguished with scorn. Many circumstances in our time are favourable to charlatanerie in letters;-such as the absence of any stormy convulsions of opinion in our island for nearly a century and a half previous to the present generationa cause of formulism and shallowness, because involving youth in an education of formulas and trivialities; and the recent success of Byron and Scott in obtaining sums of money by literature which were formerly obtained only by trade, the one calling in the quackery of egotism and the other the quackery of mystery, to assist brilliant talents in obtaining an applause denied for a time to men far their superiors-in making them the peculiar stars worshipped by an age which confined to little coteries the recognition and admiration of a Coleridge, a Wordsworth, and. a Bentham. The consequence has been an identification of merit and money; and a successful author has come to mean, not a man who has added a new truth to the immortal treasury whence all ages are enriched,-not a man who by "words, like battles," gains new blessings for humanity,-not a man who having nobler conceptions of the beautiful than those of his time, raises his fellow-men to a like high appreciation of it,-not a man of the godlike sort of whom one feels that it is a glory to the earth that they have trod upon it, and to our common manhood that they shared it,-not a man akin to any of the thinkers, and creators, and heroes, in uttering whose names men of successive millenniums falter reverently, and feel themselves ennobled by their veneration ;-but a man of whom "it is confidently whispered in the best informed circles, that Mr Murray has given him a THOUSAND POUNDS for his splendid work, which was undoubtedly the sensation of the season." Sir Francis Head is a writer of travels; a type of the English travellers of the day, a race who have neither German accuracy nor French enlargement of views. Other travellers carry in their minds the lights of historical philosophy-they separate a people into races-they estimate nations by institutions. Coleridge, in one of his best similes, compared the light of history to a lamp in the stern of a vessel, which shines only on the track already past: the historical philosophy of Vico and his expositors Guizot and Michelet, and the applications of it by men like Tocqueville and Chevalier, if we may carry out the metaphor, are shifting the lamp from the stern to the bulkhead-directing its rays over the breaking waves and through the darkness a-head, to the coming dangers. But to English travellers, the past furnishes no principles for understanding the present. It is not true, however, that our travellers have ears and hear not-they have long and acute ears for gossip:-that they have eyes and see not-they see, if men, the ancles of the young Poissarde at Calais, and if women, the lustrous eyes of the young Priest at Paris. They have eyes for small affairs ;-blind to the formation of character and the spiritual varieties of men, they prattle of running brooks :-dull to the thoughts in the minds of a people, they are lively to the details of dinners;-and while the noblest of all spectacles, the diversities of society, and the animated procession of human existence as it passes onwards in its destinies to fruition and the |