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Their very houses might be broken open and searched; their books and furniture destroyed, on the mere allegation that they bore relation to idolatrous worship; their horses and arms might be swept off by an order from a single magistrate.

Can our readers conceive of anything in store-still worse? Yet these were only the pains and penalties for such Catholics as were willing to take an oath by which they renounced allegiance to the Pope in temporal matters. If they would go so far, then they were to be welcomed with all these indulgences. But if they would not do this, for so kindly and tolerant a government-if they had grown fanatical in their obstinacy, under what they would persist in looking on as a ferocious and infamous policy, they were to be imprisoned for life, forfeit all their personal property, and the rents of their lands.

History ought to be true; and these are facts which seem to be as well proved as any that history can have to deal with, yet one can scarcely resist a kind of incredulity on hearing of them, so senseless as well as so barbarous do they now appear. One half expects to discover that they are mere childish tricks-a kind of political play, which will presently be ended, and the actors appear in their true and more comprehensible character. But, alas! there was no delusion about the hanging, drawing, and quartering of Jesuit priests; or about the multitudes of Catholic prisoners who thronged the jails; or about the spirit in which the penal laws must have been administered for many years, as evidenced by a single example: A Catholic gentleman (Mr. Floyd) happened, in the year 1621, to express an opinion on foreign affairs distasteful to Protestants at home, and particularly unpleasant to James, as it related to the affairs of Bohemia, where his daughter was queen. So Mr. Floyd was fined £5000, pilloried, degraded from the rank of a gentleman, and ordered to be held as infamous; and, in visible token thereof, sent to Newgate for life.

It evidently needed but a slight degree of temptation more to induce the Government to revive the fires of Smithfield against the Catholics. Probably fear alone prevented, for men had been again sent to heaven by the old martyr's path, during this reign. Legate, an Unitarian, was burned in Smithfield, in 1612, and Wightman (who is supposed to have been insane), also for heresy, shortly after. And there, at last, was reached the end of such exhibitions. The people had grown sick of them--lawyers began to question their legality-bishops doubted whether they were advancing the interests of the Church; "So," says

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DISHONESTY OF JAMES'S ANTI-CATHOLIC POLICY.

Fuller, "James accordingly preferred that heretics should hereafter silently and privately waste themselves in prison." Let our readers try to understand, if they can, all the horrors wrapped up in that brief sentence.

But there was to be a great relaxation before long, at the instance of the same monarch. Who could, beforehand, divine the cause? Secret doubts of the humanity or right of such legislation? growing fear of the danger of new gunpowder plots? more intelligent views of State policy? Nothing of the kind. The cause was, James took it into his head to marry his son to the daughter of a Catholic king, and, of all kings, to a king of Spain-the very beau ideal of a faithful Catholic country. Behold, by the revelation of this one fact, the worth of all the religious professions, on which alone James's government could base their cruel and infamous legislation! They disappeared in an instant, when dynastic and family considerations supervened. The jails were now opened, and the liberated Catholics were counted by "thousands," although probably many remained behind who could not give the security required for their reappearance when called on. All Catholic recusants were pardoned who applied to the King. Millennium surely was come at last; Catholic lion and Protestant lamb should lie down together, and no more be afraid. James actually wrote to the Pope. Prince Charles went to Spain to see his proposed bride. Still advancing in the new path, even seminary priests and Jesuits-men always the first to suffer, the last to be relieved—were discharged from the London prisons. Yes, the reign of religious brotherhood must be coming. But all at once the Spanish match goes off, and with it the illusion of Catholic hope; all things relapse into the old course. Fresh orders for persecution were issued. To please the Parliament and the Established Church, James even solemnly, on one occasion, called God to witness his determination never to permit any indulgence or toleration. And then, to end this frightful travestie of government, when Charles did marry a Catholic after all—Henrietta Maria of France-James once more promised liberty of conscience to the Catholics. And so, see-sawing between the desire to please Catholic allied sovereigns, and to temporize with anti-Catholic persons at home, James went on; until he died in 1625, and left to his heir such a legacy as never before, in all recorded history, had passed at a royal death-the legacy, we mean, of a kingly power in civil and religious matters, apparently almost unbounded in

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idea, but accompanied with certain elements of opposition in the public mind that not only threatened to seriously compromise that idea in all its practical developments, but which proved to be so deep and strong as gradually to lead to the Civil War, and the exhibition of a monarch on trial before his own subjects, and his going thence to the scaffold, guarded by his own soldiers, and dying the death of a

"traitor ;"-he, a crowned and anointed king, who had imbibed with his earliest breath the belief that treason was, in essence, simply opposition to the royal will.

To make this legacy still more dangerous, there were peculiarly able men ready on both sides to carry the policy they enforced onward to the most rigorously logical conclusions. What, perhaps, Charles esteemed one of the most fortunate of circumstances, his being blessed with an adviser and coadjutor like Laud, who shared his own