the Romanists are at this day bound; or to the extracts from Stillingfleet in the volume addressed to yourself, Sir, by Mr. George Townsend, a gentleman whose work will render it unnecessary for me to enlarge upon those branches of our subject which he has so ably and convincingly treated.

You charge me with sins of omission because some pages in the Book of the Church have not been bestowed" on the edifying holiness of St. Neot; the monastic sanctity and extensive learning of Bredfirth, the monk of Ramsay; the extensive learning of Bede, and the royal virtues and piety of Alfred." "On themes like these," you exclaim, "how much did justice call on you to dwell! But how little do you say upon them!"* And you press this on my consideration as an important remark. A little consideration on your own part might have shown you that, unless the scale of my work had been greatly extended, there could be no room for entering upon the merits of such persons as St. Neot and the monk of Ramsay.

* P. 71.

With

†The last work of Whitaker, the hypothetical historian of Manchester, was "the Life of St. Neot, the Oldest of all the Brothers to King Alfred." It is, like his other works, laborious, minute, inductive, positive-and inconclusive. When

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regard to Bede, it sufficed to mention him as he was there mentioned; and perhaps, Sir, you may now be inclined to wish that I had past over his life and writings as cursorily in these Letters as in the work which you have called upon me to vindicate and substantiate. not enlarge upon "the royal virtues and piety of Alfred," because the theme was altogether irrelevant. Thus much for the specific points

I did

the reader comes to the end he wonders how so much crudition and ability and vigour of mind can have been employed to so little purpose. One singular mistake occurs in this volume. (p. 194.) In a game law of 33 Henry VIII. he finds the inhabitants of certain places allowed to use their guns, so that it be at no manner of deer, heron, shovelard, pheasant, partridge, wild-swine, or wild-elk, or any of them;" and this he adduces as incontestable evidence that "that astonishing animal, the morse deer, or elk, roamed in our woods very late-even so late -could we think it? as the sixteenth century"-that it " isted among us, and was universally known to exist, even within a COUPLE OF CENTURIES FROM OUR OWN TIMES." It would have surprized him to have been told that the wild-elk of Henry VIII's law exists among us still, being, in fact, nothing more than the wild swan.

ex

If this monk was, as Mabillon conjectures him to have been, (Lingard's Antiq. of the Ang. Sax. Church, n. p. 395.) the coeval biographer of St. Dunstan, whose work is printed in the Acta Sanctorum, he would deserve notice for something very different from sanctity, though it entered largely into the character of many a monkish saint.

of omission for which you have arraigned me; the general charge is once more repelled as confidently as it has been made. My declared purport was not only to expose "the errors and crimes of the Romish church," but also to show "in what manner the best interests of the country were advanced by the clergy even during the darkest ages of papal* domination;" and this was done in the Book of the Church, not faintly and insidiously, but fairly and fully, with the sincerity of one who knows the strength of his argument, and leaves the tricks of disingenuousness to those who may be weak enough in themselves, or in their cause, to need them.

This imputation is followed by a charge which must not be dismissed so lightly. You notice as a great but unintentional misrepresentation that I have praised "the primate Theodore for prohibiting divorce for any other cause than that which is allowed by the Gospel." The courtesy with which this is expressed is your own; the remark appears to have been adopted from your coadjutor the Titular Bishop Milner, who, pro singulari humanitate sua, says, in this place, that I have "falsified a synodical decree

* Vol. i. p. 2.

† P. 71.

Merlin's Strictures, p. 7.

in order to decide an important controversy between (Roman) Catholics and Protestants." "It is false then," he says, "that Theodore, or rather the council of Herudford, over which he presided, mentioned, or so much as alluded to, the unlawful practice of divorce."

That you would not follow this ill-mannered*

* Bishop of Castabala I had called him, till I learnt from his present pamphlet that he had been translated to the see of Billingsgate.

This Vicar Apostolic has written under the name of John Merlin, for what other reason than his liking for an anagram I have not been able to discover, unless it be that John Merlin might (in large letters, p. 64.) advise his readers" to consult the unanswerable LETTERS TO A PREBENDARY, AND THE END OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY, by Dr. Milner ;"-wherein he asserts himself to have proved-some of the rankest falsehoods that ever proceeded from the Jesuits manufactory of slander.

There have been three eminent persons of the name of Merlin. Merlin Sylvester (or Merddin Wyllt as the Welsh call him) was the first. He was a poet, a prophet, and a madman ; the Titular is neither. The second is the Merlin of Spenser and the Round Table Romances, the well-known enchanter. Dr. Milner works no miracles himself; he only testifies to those of St. Winifred, and believes in those of St. Dunstan and Co. This Merlin, moreover, though the son of the Devil, was, as his biographer assures us, a gentleman on the mother's side;" now the Titular writes as if he were without a drop of gentle blood in his veins. Mr. Berington indeed observed long ago that he had no aristocracy in his manners.

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man in his language was to be expected, Sir, from your habitual urbanity; a disposition which will always prevent you from thus exciting the scorn of your antagonists and the sorrow of your friends; and and perhaps you have only repeated his remark for the sake of silently re

The third and last Merlin was the ingenious mechanist well known in his day, who, had he lived in the proper age and been lay-brother in a convent, with this worthy defender of St. Dunstan for Abbot, might have enriched the fraternity by making images weep, sweat, speak, lift their hands and roll their eyes, more than he enriched himself by the amusing exhibition, which I remember some four-and-thirty years ago in London.

To neither of these Merlins can I trace any resemblance; but there is a fourth to whom some similitude may be recognized, as he figures, not in the French Revolution, but in an epigram as rememberable as a good Welsh triad.

Connoissez-vous rien de plus sot,

Que Merlin, Bazire et Chabot?
Non, je ne connois rien de pire

Que Merlin, Chabot et Bazire ;
Et personne n'est plus coquin

Que Chabot, Bazire et Merlin.

Both the spirit and the temper of this person's writings are worthy of Bishop Bonner; but I believe that Bonner himself would have had more decency than to have written one of the notes in the thoroughly malignant and scurrilous publication which has provoked this notice;-a publication, be it remembered, for which the British Roman Catholic Association voted their thanks in a body to its author! Bene nobiscum agitur quod latrare, non etiam mordere, possunt.