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read, and no person cares to purchase political poetry when the excitement which prompted it has passed over. singular theory, however, has of late years been broached by Mr. John Bellenden Ker, which looks, at first sight, very like a hoax to the common-sense reader, but, as Mr. Ker's book (published in 1832) has long since reached a second edition in the hands of highly respectable publishers, and has been reviewed in England as a serious essay on a serious subject, we suppose we must consider it put forth in good faith. His theory, if eredible, would put us in possession of a large number of lampoons, not, indeed, belonging to the period of which we are now speaking, but coming under the head of political songs.

According to this theory, in days of yore, when Charlemagne was persecuting the Saxons, and oppressing the peasantry by a foreign and onerous church sway, bringing with it a ministry of priests to whom the goaded people attributed fraud and vexation, the sufferers sought revenge by lampooning their tormentors. For a time the other party paid no attention to these squibs of a mob, till at length these became so violent and so numerous as to call for retributive measures. We must allow Mr. Ker to give the remainder of his own theory as follows:-"The remedy was ingenious, and worthy of the astuteness of the friars. An unparalleled and constant corruption of the dialect in which they were composed was taken advantage of, and the invective of the lampoon was gradually undermined by the introduction of a harmless, unmeaning medley, of a precisely similar sound and metre, in the latest forms of the altered dialect, till in time its original import was forgotten, and its venom and familiar use replaced by the present Nursery Rhymes!”

It is frightful to imagine the amount of disguised republicanism which the ears of the best English conservatives have drunk in in their childhood; how embryo archbishops have crowed over prophesies of the destruction of church rates and church establishments; and infant voices, afterwards to be raised in defence of the rotten borough of Old Sarum, have shouted in nursery numbers the first reformers' cry. Let us take as an amusing specimen the time hallowed old ditty of Goosey, goosey, gander:"—

OLD SAXON.

Guise, guise, gaèn dear!
Wûr schell-hey waene daer;
Op stuyrs, aendoen stuyrs,

End in mélyd is schem bear.
Dere ei met een ouwel-man,

D'aet woedn' aet sie eeis Par-heers! Hye tuck heim by die left legghe, End seer reuve hem doe aen stuyrs.

ENGLISH MEANING. Hear their insolent clamor! The committee, what axes! From us church-ridden elves

Nought but new rates and taxes, There they sit, in the tap-room,

Nor once think of compassion; We must pummel their noddles

If they grind in this fashion. Let us stop their long speeches,

Their high vaunting words; And, when they are gone to pot, We shall all live like lords.

We have selected by far the most striking specimen of this poetry in illustration of Mr. Ker's extraordinary theory, and, although we cannot believe in his strange notion of systematic corruption in this branch of Saxon literature, we are persuaded to think it not impossible that our nursery lyrics may be of very ancient origin-may have originally been Saxonand, passing down to us from mouth to mouth, may have gradually transformed themselves (without assistance from the monks) into the unintelligible English which has lulled to sleep generation after generation of our forefathers, and which is now to be heard, not in Britain only, or on our eastern coast, but in Oregon, Australia, and in "farthest Ind," wherever the Anglo-Saxon race has spread.

May our children continue to be nurtured with mere nonsense in the cradle! There has been of late years a conspiracy to supersede the fairy tales and Mother Goose, but we implore both the poet and the utilitarian to lay no sacrilegious hand upon the literature of long petticoats. Mothers and nurses take the side of law and order, church and king, by nature; alarm them not, O antiquary! by translating into revolutionary verses their favorite baby-songs. The age has grown too sceptical, because, according to our own new theory, we must understand and explain everything. Let mys tery at least rally round the cradle, by the side of each little epitome of human life, who, to the philosopher-who has the humility to confess with David, that any of the works of God are 66 too wonderful" for him-is the greatest mystery of all.

From the period of the Reformation, when the English language became settled, with the Anglo-Saxon of the vulgar for its groundwork, and with valuable additions from the Norman tongue, it becomes no longer difficult to trace the current of popular opinion; nor are we forced to search out in black letter volumes the scanty relics of popular songs.

There are few things which more distinctly mark the commencement of the period of modern history, than the settlement of language, although we may, perhaps, refer this mainly to that great invention which communicated a simultaneous impulse to all classes-which gave to the higher ranks their Shakespeare and the classics-to the peasantry their broadside ballads,—and to both the revelation of the Almighty in the common tongue. We know, however, very little of the state of feeling among the lower classes during the golden age of English literature. The attention of the student of history is absorbed by certain "bright particular stars," which, by their very brilliancy, obscure the "lesser lights" around them. We know that the rule of Queen Elizabeth bore harshly on her nobles and the squirearchy, whom it was ever the policy of the Tudor race to bring into abject submission, but her memory is still cherished among the people of England; even Cromwell, in his speeches, refers affectionately to her "glorious days;" and it was not until the reign of her successor, when the dignity of the crown was lowered, while the kingly prerogative was strained— when the Protestant cause was abandoned on the continent, and the Scots, exasperated by changes in church-discipline, made league with the Puritans of the North, that we find the robles, for the first time since the Conquest, again in league with royalty, and the people of England in opposition to their king.

What causes were at work beneath the surface of society to produce these political changes, which break suddenly upon the reader of history, and which a knowledge of the condition of the lower orders of society during the reigns of the Tudors would best explain?

The political poetry of England during the reigns of Elizabeth and Mary is extremely scanty. The great bards, whose writings we so proudly inherit, wrote only for the educated classes, and on subjects not likely to interest "the million." In the time of James I., we find

a considerable change, not only in the dialect of political poetry, but in its character, its adaptation, and its themes. About this time the manners of society in England appear to have experienced a very perceptible change, and the reign of James I. is perhaps the time at which we may date the decline of the "old English hospitality." A change frequently alluded to, especially in the well known song "The Fine Old English Gentleman," and its counterpart, which, in nearly the same language that we have them now, were written in King James' reign, to describe the change of manners so distasteful to the public, and to compare "the queen's old courtiers" with those of the Scottish king.

Whoever has read Mr. Macaulay's spirited ballad upon "the entry of the Cavaliers into London," has caught the very echo of the verses of the Long Parliament times. The language, style and sentiments are precisely those of the ballads embalmed in the thin, square and long-forgotten volumes with which the press of England (as much of it as was in the hands of the king's party), during this period of English history teemed. The Cavalier poets even vouchsafed an ironical assistance to the Roundheads. The following stanzas (though very unlike his usual manner) are by the mystical, quaint, emblem-loving Francis. Quarles:

Know then, my brethren, Heaven is clear,
And all the clouds are gone,
The righteous now shall flourish, and
Good days are coming on:
Come then, my brethren, and be glad,

And eke rejoice with me;
Lawn sleeves and rochets shall go down,
And hey! then up go we!

We'll break the windows which the whore
Of Babylon has painted;

And when the Popish saints are down,
Then Barrow shall be sainted;
There's neither cross nor crucifix

Shall stand for men to see!
Rome's trash and trumperies shall go down,
And hey! then up go we!

We cannot conclude this brief review of the popular superstitions of the middle ages, without remarking the effect they have produced upon the current opinions of more recent times, especially that belief in fairies and familiar spirits, which, as we have seen, dates from the days of the Druids, and as far back as we can trace the history of any portion of the Celtic race. These popular delusions

even directed the earliest enquiries of science; and while we mourn over the talent abused, the time and money wasted in searchings after the philosopher's stone, or the elixir of immortality, we must not forget that these pursuits were paving the paths of modern science from the Aristotelian system of mere verbal definitions to that of experimental investigation and discovery.

The astrologer of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries was supposed to hold communications with the spiritual world, and indeed all science was regarded by the vulgar as under the especial patronage of the Evil One. The fairies were always believed to be dwellers in dens, and lakes, and trees, and the astrologer conjured them into his glass or crystal, to direct him to the hidden treasures which they only knew. The witch differed from the astrologer, inasmuch as her power over the spirits was believed to be the result of a compact with the Spirit of Darkness, whereby he bound himself to serve her for a tine, on condition that he should afterwards be her master for ever. The witches were among the peasantry what astrologers were in rather more refined society, in their intercourse with the spirits. Royalty, religious feeling, and popular superstition, agreed during the first half of the seventeenth century upon a single subject only. King Jamie gave his loving lieges a treatise upon witchcraft; the Puritans applied verses from the Old Testament (directed against the magicians and astrologers of the East) to the miserable old women whom circumstances or local prejudices invested with the character of witches; up to that period all scientific discoveries had been connected with

astrology; professors of philosophy were learned in the Cabala, and societies for the advancement of magic and of alchemy were not uncommonly formed.

If we examine the reports of the trials for witchcraft which the Camden Society bas reprinted within the last few years, we shall find that the greater part of the stories alleged in evidence were mere mischievous freaks, in which we immediately recognize the mad pranks of Robin Goodfellow. If we are not mistaken, one of the last executions for witchcraft, which took place in Norfolk, so late as the eighteenth century, was preceded by a trial based almost entirely upon a charge of suddenly startling teams of horses, and overturning harvest carts without apparent cause, an amusement in which Puck and his fellow elves of happier memory were wont very largely to indulge. Unless indeed we are willing to admit that the familiar spirit of a pagan age became the grotesque and popular demons of our own, it would be difficult to account for the extraordinary and inconsistent attributes which the great author of evil has assumed. Whence has he borrowed the cloven foot he wears? Certainly not on the authority of Scripture; but the familiar spirits which haunted the houses of our forefathers, and presided over their household arrangements when they lived in caves and dens, are always thus described. One of the earliest woodcuts that has come down to us is appended to a ballad of Robin Goodfellow, and represents him with horns, hoofs, and tail, deformed and hairy, dancing in the midst of a ring of subject elves, such as the astrologers afterwards divided into legions, tribes, and bands of devils.

THE HE announcement of philosopher Fourier, that "Attractions are proportioned to destinies," albeit false in many, is, nevertheless, true in some respects. Thus, in literature, every longing and every susceptibility of the soul, and, in fact, every mental want, creates for itself a satisfaction and a supply. So, too, we may regard every phasis of literature as a typal manifestation of some profounder necessity that underlies and procreates it. For example: The Epos gives utterance to all the untold heroisms of our nature; and the Iliad is at once the embodiment of a nation's warlike daring, and the realization, to a certain extent, of a heroic ideal that finds its home and birth-place in every soul of man. Each man is, in a measure, an Achilles, and burns with the flame of his awful ire [Mūvis Ovλóμévn]; but genius alone, in

elevating everything she touches to the dignity of apotheosis, has touched with her mystic wand this side of the manysided soul; and lo! it lives and breathes perennially.

History, again, develops the infinite in man; and, as Frederick Schlegel remarks, "replies to the first problem of philosophy-the restoration in man of the lost image of God; as far as this relates to Science."

So, both the physical and the metaphysical sciences respond to opposite and distinctive poles in our mental organism; while the fine arts, which hold a maesothetic position between the two, are, in all their provinces, an effort after the realization of that which finds full expression only in that absolute, which is the birth-place of the soul. Thus, the mind, unsatisfied with itself and subjec