honourable presence, that any such presumptions should be alledged in this open court.' 'What,' quoth my Lord Cardinal, Domine Doctor Reverende. No, my Lord, there belongs no reverence to this matter, for an unreverent matter may be unreverently answered;' and so left off, and then they proceeded to other matters. Thus passed this court from session to session, and day to day, till a certain day the king sent for the cardinal to Bridewell, who went into the privý chamber to him where he was, about an hour, and then departed from the king, and went to Westminster in his barge; the Bishop of Carlisle being with him, said, It is a hot day to day. Yes,' quoth the cardinal, if you had been as well chafed as I have been within this hour, you would say you were very hot.' My lord no sooner came home, but he went to bed, where he had not laid above two hours, but my Lord of Wiltshire, Mrs Anne Bullen's father, came to speak with him, from the king; my lord commanded he should be brought to his bed-side, who told him, it was the king's mind he should forthwith go with the cardinal to the queen, being then at Bridewell, in her chamber, and to persuade her, through their wisdoms, to put the whole matter into the king's own hands, by her consent, which should be much better for her honour than stand to the trial at law, and thereby be condemned, which would tend much to her dishonour and discredit. To perform the king's pleasure my lord said he was ready, and so prepared to go: But,' quoth he further to my Lord of Wiltshire, 'you, and others of the lords of the council, have put fancies into the head of the king, whereby you trouble all the realm; but at the length you will get but small thanks, both of God and the world;' with many other earnest words and reasons, which did cause my Lord of Wiltshire to be silent, kneeling by my lord's bed-side, and, in conclusion, depart ed. And then my lord rose, and took his barge, and went to Bath House, to Cardinal Campaine's, and so went together to Bridewell, to the queen's lodgings. She being then in her chamber of presence, they told the gentleman usher that they came to speak with the queen's grace, who told the queen the cardinals were

come to speak with her; then she rose up, having a skain of red silk about her neck, being at work with her maids, and came to the cardinals, where they staid attending her coming; at whose approach, quoth she, Alack, my lords, I am sorry that you have attended on me so long: what is your pleasures with me?' 'If it please your grace,' quoth the cardinal, to go to your privy chamber, we will shew you the cause of our coming.'

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My lord,' said she, if you have any thing to say to me, speak it openly before all these folks, for I fear nothing you can say to me, or against me, but that I am willing all the world should both see and hear it, and, therefore, speak your minds openly.'

Then began my lord to speak to her in Latin. Nay, good my lord, speak to me in English,' quoth she, though I do understand some Latin." Forsooth,' quoth my lord, good. madam, if it please your grace, we come both to know your mind, what you are disposed to do in this matter, and also to declare to you, secretly, our counsels and opinions, which we. do for very zeal and obedience to your grace.'

"My lords,' quoth she, I thank you for your good wills, but to make answer to your requests, I cannot so suddenly, for I was set amongst my maids at work, little thinking of any such matter, wherein is requisite some deliberation, and a better head than mine to make answer, for I need counsel in this case which concerns me so near, and friends here I have none; they are in Spain, in my own country. Also, my lords, I am a poor woman, of too weak a capacity to answer such noble persons of wisdom as you are, in so weighty a matter; and therefore I pray you be good to me, a woman destitute of friendship, here in a foreign region; and your counsel I shall also be glad to hear; and therewith she took my lord by the hand, and led him into her privy chamber, with the other cardinal, where they staid a while, and I heard her voice loud, but what she said, I know not.

"This done, they went to the king, and made a relation unto him of the passages between the queen and them, and so they departed."

able to the revenue, which will make some compensation for the incumbrance on commerce. Merchants, manufacturers, and others, will also reap some advantage, as they will have their bills more readily discount ed. But these, after all, are merely incidental advantages, which by no means overbalance the disadvantages. Messrs George Chalmers, Southey, and Gray, who tell us, that to recommend retrenchment in the present circumstances of the nation, is as absurd as to recommend inanition to a person dying of hunger, must surely be aware that the measures recommended by them will not cure the evils of the system; on the contrary, continued expenditure will multiply embarrassments, and render the crisis more alarming. The continuance and even advance of the present system may be necessary for government, as the mass of taxes, which they must have, could not be raised, if the circulation of bank-notes were diminished; but the consequences are not problematical.

Let us, in turn, consider the consequences of restriction and economy. If the Bank of England be again obliged to give specie for their notes, on demand, they must diminish their issues, and consequently their profits will be diminished; they will be less able to accommodate government and private individuals; the price of all commodities will fall, which will occasion great confusion and embarrassment among traders, and all classes of the community; the taxes, too, will be less productive, and thus government will also feel the pressure; and unless the national expences be reduced and proportioned to the revenue, the most serious evils will arise; the more so, as loans will be impracticable, and exchequer bills, and other expedients out of the question. Thus there is a difficulty either way, whether the restriction be continued or taken off. It is at best but a moot point: turn the question as you will, still difficulties occur; it is like taking a piece of hot iron in your hand, hold it in any position, it will always

burn.

The appropriate remedy for an over issue of notes is, no doubt, the convertibility of them into coin, at the will of the holders; and certainly the recommendation of the bullion committee was founded on just principles,

and would have effectually answered the purpose intended; but the remedy would have been worse than the disease; it would not have cured but destroyed the paper. The evils of paper-money may be arrested in their infancy, without any very extensive devastation-for instance, the present debt of the United States of America, which amounts only to 110. millions of dollars, or about 27 millions sterling, which is little more than half-a-year's interest of our debt, may be liquidated without any serious inconvenience, or being sensibly felt:-but when the Rubicon has been once passed, when the mass has become unwieldy, there is no retrograding without extensive ruin.

Serò medicina paratur, Cum mala per longas invaluêre moras.

Paper-money, at best, is but an expedient: it may answer a temporary. purpose; but it cannot be permanently beneficial. It is promising at first, and of a progressive nature; it creates a shew of prosperity, and has actually some advantages; it is peculiarly acceptable to statesmen, as by it they can most easily cater to their wants, (which are generally insatiable;) but its facilities soon change into embarrassments, and experience has proved, that the best which can be expected, after a certain period, is to escape, with some bruises, before ruin is inevitable. "Le Belier est sorti de l'eau en secouant sa laine; il aurait mieux valu qu'il n'y fut pas tombe." If the bank restriction be taken off, and the principles of the bullion committee acted upon, the consequences are quite obvious; and this, no doubt, is the reason why government are so very shy in repealing it, and so many writers, of a certain class, plying the public with pamphlets and paragraphs to prove the necessity of its continuance. Their logic is of a milk-and-water kind; but, as it coincides with the interest and views of many, and is, besides, soothing to the supporters of the present ministry, it is, in general, very palatable. People do not love to be told that they are pursuing an evil course; and, even when they know it, it is always reckoned good policy to put off the evil day; and, if a catas trophe is inevitable, to delay it is some gain. When a French minister was told of the unavoidable consequences

tion and example of posterity? That our age is so unexampled in female talent, we think is clearly traceable to the spirit of chivalry, which, in its effects at least, has not gone by; and we trust that it will long continue to have an abiding influence in fostering female talents, accomplishments, and worth. The names are few, indeed, which have come down to us of literary women, and even they are but feeble spirits when placed beside those of our own age. Sappho stands almost alone among the classic writers of Greece, and her two little songs which remain to us are certainly exquisite productions, though we think they have been matched, if not surpassed, by more than one British minstrel. But even the sublime praise of Longinus, echoed and re-echoed from critic to critic, will never place Sappho on a level with the De Staels of the nineteenth century. We cannot at present stop to talk of Anna Commena, and a few other female names, which spot the wilderness of history like the scattered palm-trees of the desert; we must hasten to a period of more recent interest, and to the lady whose lamented death has led us to think of the illustrious women "honoured by the nations," who have gone before her.

Mrs Brunton belongs to a class of females in a great measure peculiar to our own times. Sappho and Eloisa were distinguished for their genius in delineating the workings of the heart; Lady Jane Grey and Madame Dacier for their extensive learning; but the talents of those distinguished women evaporated in display, and in administering to the taste of the age they lived in. Our lamented country-woman, and her famed contemporaries, Miss Edgeworth and Mrs Hamilton, have not so much conformed to the taste of the age as created for themselves, by the mere force of their genius, an appetite for moral and religious truths among readers to whom these were formerly a mockery and a scorn; and we cannot withhold from them the loftiest praise we can bestow, nor can we refuse to place them in the highest order of those who have added to the happiness of the human race, by fostering the spirit of virtue, and reforming the vicious in the only way likely to be successful-stripping

lawless pleasures of their unreal seeming, and depicturing all the varying shades of criminality in their naked and undisguised ugliness. Works of fiction, whose influence on the public mind must be powerful, from their almost unbounded circulation, had, with a few wandering exceptions, become the vehicles of every sort of mental poison; and licentiousness and infidelity were served up under a gorgeous and glittering array of imagery, and interesting narration, to fascinate the young heart, and draw it with syren spell from the rectitude of innocence. In vain did the careful father warn his daughters of their peril, if they indulged in novel-reading; the anxious mother watched in vain to detect and destroy the prohibited volumes; nor were the vituperations daily thundered from the press and the pulpit, in well-meaning uprightness of heart, of more avail. In spite of every exertion, the demand for novels increased so rapidly, that the diseased taste begotten and pampered by their perusal seemed to be fast becoming incurable.

The illustrious female writers, among whom our authoress holds a distinguished place, struck upon the on-ly plan which, in the hopeless circumstances of the case, could be successful. They perceived it vain to preach and declaim against the evil, and resolved to attack it with all the witchery of genius that they could "com mand, on the very ground in which it seemed so secure from assault. They have been successful-and have performed for the novel-readers of the day a şimilar disfranchisement from the control of disordered fancy and excited passions, as Cervantes did for the readers of the extravagant romances of chivalry. Their manner of doing this has been different, indeed, from' his, but it has not, we believe, been less efficient; and, to the credit of fe male thinking, which is so untruly characterized by writers as light and frivolous, the views they have gone upon are founded on a deep and clear perception of human nature, and the means adopted to influence and cor rect its aberrations. They went, as Mrs Brunton herself expresses it, on high authority in using fable as the vehicle of truth, for, not to mention the sublime allegories employed by some of the sacred writers, even the