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any long delay, In that year (1534), three important laws were passed. First, "Act of Succession." By this, Henry's marriage with Catherine was declared void, and the issue of his union with Anne announced as heirs to the throne. An oath was required in favour of this succession, under pain of confiscation and imprisonment. Second, the King was made Supreme Head of the Church, and the authority of the Pope excluded from the control of ecclesiastical affairs. To these were added, an Act, declaring it high treason to will or express, by words or writing, a desire to deprive the children of Henry and Anne Boleyn of their rights of succession. Soon after, the monarch, triumphing in his new titles, struck a medal, with a legend in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, which provoked the saying, that he had Crucified the Church as Pilate had crucified the Saviour, with the solemnity of three inscriptions. As a scrupulous lawyer, More could not accept the first of these laws; as a conscientious Roman Catholic, he could not acknowledge the second; as a brave man, he could not fear the third.

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Therefore, when the oath was imposed, More joined Bishop Fisher in rejecting it. The marriage, he asserted, was unlawful, and Catherine was still his Queen. "By the mass, Mr. More," said the Duke of Norfolk, "it is perilous striving with princes." Indignatio principis mors est." "Is that all my lord," he replied "then, in good faith, the difference between your grace and me, is only this, that I shall die today, and you to-morrow.” Well he knew the hollow of the block would soon be glutted with his blood. To him, as to the Genevese philosopher in after times, opinion was the Queen of the earth, and princes themselves were first among its slaves. Yet the origin of this power was from one anterior-conscience, the voice of the soul, less fallible than reason, the appeal of virtue against the sophistry of weak desires. If not in these terms, at least on principles of this kind, the persecuted man resigned himself to suffer for a conduct he could not change without violating the purity of his honour. When, therefore, about a month after the oath was passed, he was cited with other clergymen to appear before Cranmer in Lambeth, he went piously to mass, and then by the

river to his destination. It was his usage on leaving home, to be accompanied to his boat by wife and children, whom he lovingly kissed and bade adieu; but this time, as with a prophetic sentiment of the end that was at hand, he closed the wicket gate of his_garden, desired none to follow him, and said in a melancholy voice, what to the place and its peace he felt to be a last farewell.

The oath was solemnly tendered to him, and solemnly he refused to take it. A friendly counsellor sought to persuade him by the logic of a rich man, resolved to compound with conscience for the preservation of his wealth; but he adhered to his declared opinion, and during four days was held in custody by the Abbot of Westminster. At length, the King, with an ingratitude consonant to his other actions, and with the malice of exasperated and conscious turpitude, ordered his committal to the Tower, together with Fisher, on a charge of high treason. All grants that had been made to him were declared void, and every device was used to insult him and embitter his closing days. Then the character of the lauded monarch glowed in its full brilliance through the veil with which panegyric and loyalty had it shrined from view. If there was any lustre in it, it was like that bloody glare of the sun, which terrified old voyagers when sailing from the North. Like his Roman prototype Constantius, he never showed mercy to any accused of treason; and like Čaligula, he never satisfied his purulent malice unless by taking the life of those he had injured and feared to provoke. His miserable limping soul, never docile in youth, was incorrigible in maturer age; unhappily his power was equal to his vice, and thus through an error of mankind, originated by fraud, and perpetuated by apathy, this flattered traitor and forsworn assassin, found himself with the power to degrade and murder the noblest of the human race.

At the Tower Gate, the porter demanded of More what he wore uppermost. The knight gave him his cap, and was sorry it was no better. But wit was not current there, so he was disrobed, and conducted to an apartment, where in about a month his daughter received permission to visit him. Looking out of the window one day with her,

he saw a father of Sion" and three monks going to execution for refusing the oaths. "Lo! dost thou not see, Mag?" he said, "that these blessed fathers be now as cheerfully going to their deaths as bridegrooms to their marriages." Soon after his wife came to see him, and besought him to do as he was required by the king, that he might escape from being shut up with mice and rats, and go back to Chelsea to his house, his library, his gallery, garden, and orchard. But he told her heaven was as near him in the Tower, as in his own home, and he would not lose eternity even to gain a thousand years of life. Lady More, however, was not in patriotic virtue, a Rachael Russell, she still solicited him to accept the oath and thus procure his freedom. Possibly, she may have been an emis. sary of the court, in a taste to which her own worldly ideas inclined her, for many attempts were made to corrupt the knight and break his resolution. Agents, also, were sent to entrap him into treasonable words, though the utterance of these was not essential to his condemnation, for with Henry VIII. perjury was as useful an appanage of royalty as the globe and sceptre.

In this manner a whole year passed away. More was then arraigned for treason at the King's Bench bar. Weak, emaciated, afflicted with a disease in the breast, pale and bent he tottered, leaning on a crutch, to meet his eight judges. The names of the Jury have been preserved. They fill so many lines in the calendar of infamy; but it is not necessary to repeat them, since they were only dragged from obscurity by the baseness of their crime, and are only saved from oblivion by the same crucifixion of history which keeps Monk and Ephialtes perpetually hanging like malefactors before our eyes. An indictment of ponderous prolixity was read, charging him with a malicious, treacherous, and diabolical" refusal of the oath. Witnesses were suborned to swear falsely against him, and he told one of them to his face that he was perjured, and would be accountable for that offence to God. The trial, however, was a form to mock the sanctity of justice. Already was the prisoner doomed, guilty, of course, the jury found him, and hurriedly he was asked why sentence of death should not be recorded against his crime. With a plain

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and manly eloquence he defended the acts of his life, and the principles for which he avowed himself ready to die. To death, then, was he condemned, and on passing back to the Tower, Margaret, his daughter, stealing from the crowd, fell upon his neck and wept, the expressions of her affection and sorrow. He blessed her, bade her be comforted, and went forward to prepare for the scaffold on which he was to appear at the expiration of a week.

More could be facetious even at this time. A light-headed courtier came to him, and with garrulous impertinence asked him to change his mind. "I have changed it," at length he answered. A report of this reached the King, who sent to demand an explanation, for there was grace for him still, if he would now recant. The knight replied that his meaning was, that whereas he intended to have been shaved on the morning of the execution, he had now changed his mind, and his beard should share the fate of his head!

Early after dawn on the 6th of July, 1535, Sir Thomas Pope came to the prisoner's chamber with a message from the King and Council, that he should prepare himself for death before one o'clock that morning, and that he should not use many words at his execution. For, still the cowardly tyrant feared the judgment of his victim's last utterance upon him; and More was submissive enough to obey. He put on his best clothes. The Lieutenant of the Tower advised him to change them, saying he was but a rascal who would have them. What, Mr. Lieutenant," he cried, "shall I account him a rascal who shall do me this day so singular a benefit? Nay, I assure you, were it cloth of gold, I should think it well bestowed on him, as St. Cyprian did, who gave his executioner thirty pieces of gold." However, he afterwards changed his dress, and gave the headsman a present in money.

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The time came. He was conducted by the Lieutenant to the place of execution. His beard was long, his face thin and pale; he carried in his hands a red cross, and walked with his eyes turned towards heaven. Even then, however, he was humorous with his guards. ascending the scaffold he found it ricketty and begged assistance, saying, "I pray, see me up safe, and for my coming down, let me shift for myself." All he said to the spectators was, that they should

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The author took home his work, versified it, and brought it again: "Aye," said the Chancellor, now it is something. It is rhyme; but before, it was neither rhyme nor reason." He once employed a clever fellow to rob a justice on the bench, who had declared that none but careless fools ever had their pockets picked.

pray for him, and remember that he died for the Catholic faith. He next knelt and repeated a psalm; then he rose, and when the executioner asked forgiveness, kissed him, and said cheerfully, "Thou wilt do me this day a greater benefit than ever any mortal man can be able to give me. Pluck up thy spirit, man, and be not afraid to do thy office. My neck is very short; take heed, therefore, Sir Thomas More, however, will be that thou strike not away, for saving thy remembered chiefly for his literary works. honesty." After this he laid his head The Utopia or Happy Republic is a on the block, but exclaimed, "wait until household name. It was written in Latin I have removed my beard, for that has about the year 1516. Great applause never committed treason." The axe fell, greeted it all over Europe, and English, and humanity was outraged by seeing French, Italian, and Dutch translations the head of this pious man fixed on a were speedily circulated. In this ingepole on London bridge. Margaret, his nious scheme of a commonwealth, the daughter, however, found means to pur-author embodied his own ideas of governchase this memorial of her monarch's ment. As Swift did in his Travels of crime, enclosed it in a leaden box, and ordered it to be buried with her own body, in a vault under Saint Dunstan's, Canterbury. The Knight's corpse lies in the Tower chapel, though some have said it was afterwards removed by his daughter.

Henry received the report of More's execution when he was playing at draughts, and Anne Boleyn was looking on. He cast his eyes on her and said, "thou art the cause of this man's death." He then shut himself up in a chamber and feigned, or perhaps really felt melancholy, but his attempt to fix on his wife the stigma of this crime, only increases the scorn with which all posterity regards his abhorred and wretched name.

More was religious, and his religion was clouded by superstition; but he was not a bigot. In his habits he was simple, and in his abstinence austere. Loyal, beyond virtue, to the King, he resisted his demands when they disagreed with the dictates of conscience. Affectionate to his family, he was benevolent to all men, and though he died in an exploded faith, we may reverence his memory as that of a wise and good man.

The anecdotes of his wit are innumerable. One of his best replies was that to a person named Manners, who, on his elevation, said to him, "honores mutant Mores." "In English that is true" retorted the Knight, for then "honors would change Manners."

A friend brought him a stupid book in manuscript, for his opinion. More with grave humour told him it would be

Gulliver, so did he in this, obliquely censuring those principles of the English administration which were opposed to his theory of policy and public justice. Such pictures of a state in ideal perfection, have been the favourite studies of men. This suggested the new Atlantus, of Lord Bacon; and the same fancy painted those fabulous creations of the ancient mind-the halcyon or legendary isles, the Makaрwv vηoo, the Vales of Bliss and Cities of the Just, in which as in other brilliant illusions the imagination of mankind is prone to indulge. A History of Richard the Third, a Life of Pius of Mirandula, many controversial works and some quaint but interesting letters, have been preserved. It is curious, and is not honourable in our nation, that the writings of Sir Thomas More have been admired more in almost every country than in his own, indeed, they have here been little read, and the polemical part of them would be profitable only to theological and political students. But there is the witchery of a beautiful romance in "Utopia"-the last library edition of which, was printed side by side with. the New Atlantis, with commentary and introductory discourse, by J. A. St. John. It formed, in fact, part of a series, in which the Religio Medici and Hydrotaphia, or Urn Burial, by Sir Thomas Brown were included. If there be any of our readers who have not read this singular work, I am sure they have neglected one of the richest compo sitions in the language. It is like a Titian picture, lighted up with the pure aerial tints of Claude, in relief to the

deep Rembrandt chiaroscuro, in which so clearly what he was, that the world some of the groups and scenes are en- may judge him from that account. veloped. They are imperfectly familiar What I cannot avoid, however, is the with the literature of their country, reflection that More was a good and who have not studied this composite pious man, sacrificed by an odious masterpiece of philosophy and fancy. prince, before whom the English nation was then content to bow down. And as these occurrences multiply with the pages of our annals, who can wonder, and, still more, who can regret, that in the next century, that infamous and decrepit tyranny was overthrown first in the field by Cromwell, and second in Parliament by the liberal and patriotic antagonists of the Second James.

I will not add any elaborate summary on the character of Sir Thomas More. We know a man when we see how he has acted. What he speaks or writes may be a disguise, or an epitaph for the tomb. In the history of More's life, however, his motives reveal themselves in the general tenour of his actions. It is not, indeed, the chief merit of biography to judge the person whose career it paints; but to show

RAFFAELLO SANZIO.

BEAUTY is not to be considered merely as the fair flower that blooms by the side of the wanderer's path; it is not merely the line of silver or of gold that streaks the edges of the dusky cloud; or the bright feathery foam that crowns the crest of the dark and rugged wave. It is all of these, and it is something more. It is not an extrinsic ornament, nor one of life's dispensible luxuries; but, in a greater or less degree, it is an absolute necessity, and most truly a powerful agent to purify the soul from material tendencies, to strengthen and to elevate, to spiritualize and refine. Beauty, in the highest sense, the ideal, the transcendental, leads the soul infallibly upwards from the earthly and the human to the immortal and divine. It is the likeness of God shining through his works; the monograph of the Great Artist; the type of that radiant splendour that shall bloom evermore in his fair Paradise.

and that selection is difficult. The principles relating to ideal loveliness have, however, recently attained a more perfect development; and hence follow results less likely to perplex the earnest thinker. But we must keep aloof from a question so abstract. It is, however, very evident that many intelligent persons even, have singularly chaotic ideas upon this interesting subject.

To quote the words of an acute and clear-seeing critic: "The conceptions of the elder Greeks regarding beauty were nobler than ours, and for that reason their art was of a loftier character. Their beauty was divine, not human; intellectual, not sensuous; and, like the Jews and Persians, they sought in the loveliness of the human form a type of the perfections of the Deity. Beauty, then," continues the same eloquent writer," is a thing of the intellect. It is universal and divine; it is incapable of tarnish or desecration; the beauty of holiness,' and the beauty of God,' of the Hebrew prophets, are better imaged in the heathen deities of Greece than in the pictured saints of the Roman Church.”

Hence, to elevate the public taste, becomes the duty of all "Art-interpreters," who are as the evangelists of the ideal, through whom we receive revelations of the beautiful. Among people in general, rare indeed is a true appre- The truth that beauty is universal, ciation of this high excellence, which has too often been overlooked; many is, or ought to be, the animating soul having sought to imprison their idea of painting, sculpture, architecture, thereof within some one particular type, music, and poetry. Such recognition instead of recognising it in every form, is rather educational than intuitive. It and in all the varieties of its developwill be objected, that the world has ment.

been inundated with theories of beauty,! It is the work of the true artist to

reveal to the sons of earth the wondrous sights and sounds that throng the "world of beauty," in visible imagery, or with the glad voice of song. For he ever stands near to the pearly gates of heaven, and through the portals opening at intervals, he receives benedictions of loveliness, and glimpses of celestial glory, which he transmits to us through "pictured and enmarbled dreams," or amid the lofty harmonies of "starry poesy."

The mantle of inspiration which enfolded the painters and sculptors of ancient Greece, seemed to descend with especial power upon the artists of modern Italy. The residents of the fairest land in Europe, a country rich in historic recollections, in proud and lofty memories of heroic time, and thoughts of many wrongs still deeper in stern influence, to them in particular, was intrusted (second to the Greeks) the mission of interpreting the poetry of art. The annals of painting and sculpture in Italy, form a bright and most interesting record, for the Italian artists have given examples of almost every variety of excellence, in the beautiful and the pathetic, in the terrible and the sublime. And among the brilliant galaxy of names included in such history, not one star shines with more untroubled lustre than the name of the "divine Raphael," which is never pronounced by the art-student without the sincerest reverence and the truest love.

RAFFAELLO SANZIO DI URBINO was born on Good Friday, 1483, in the city of Urbino. He was the son of a respectable painter named Giovanni Sanzio, who was patronised by the Duke Federigo of Urbino. Raphael lost his mother early in life. His father married again, and his second wife, Bernardina, a fair, loving creature, was as kind and affectionately attentive to the subject of this memoir as if he had been her own child. Giovanni Sanzio was his son's first instructor, and the boy was soon able to assist his father in his most important works. And thus passed away the childhood of Raphael, amid the sweet and gentle influences of home, beneath the soft Italian sky, his spirit ennobled and purified by a contemplation of all that is fair and lovely, and thus rendered a shrine for those lofty thoughts which must be ever sultant from a right study of the beautiful, the ideal, in nature and in art. But

how many, alas! there are who fail to introduce into their souls that harmony which ought so surely to follow a true devotion to any object that is noble and good. Why is this? It is because unworthy motives intrude upon their worship. Love of display, self-gratification, desire of gain, looking for the praise of men; these are the sources of ill-success. Ah, not thus, oh thinker-worker! Stand forth amid the world's tumult, free, earnest, and sincere, with no thought of self, no wish of recompense, save that which flows of necessity from the deep love through which your work is accomplished, and whence you discover, in truth, in high thought, or action, each is "its own exceeding great reward." So live and act, and rest assured, in due time, not only shall you enjoy this supreme satisfaction, but yours shall also be the palm to the victor's hand, the crown to the poet's brow.

Raphael's father left home for Perugia, in 1404, in order to make arrangements for placing his son under the tuition of Pietro Perugino, the most renowned artist of the time, but before the completion of these arrangements, Giovanni Sanzio died, in the August of the same year. The negotiations were, however, carried on by his widow and a friend named Simone Ciarla, and so at twelve years of age, the young Raphael was sent to study under Perugino, with whom he remained until he was about twenty years of age.

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Pietro Vannucci, surnamed Il Perugino, from his residence in Perugia, was an intimate friend of the great Lionardo da Vinci. In a poem by Giovanni Sanzio, these two artists are gracefully alluded to as "par d'etate e par d'amore." The works of Vannucci are distinguished by simplicity and sweetness, and a "pure and gentle feeling." early productions of Raphael bear evidence to the influence of his master's manner. The charming little picture of "St. Catherine in the National Gallery is to be referred to this period. The young artist was a most industrious student. His favourite subject was the Madonna and the infant Christ. Many beautiful pictures were painted by him while he was with Perugino. Perhaps the most famous is the one reprere-senting the " Marriage of Mary and Joseph," now at Milan. Raphael soon greatly surpassed his master. In 1504

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