With such, money is the procurer of our common blessings. Money is then the universal talisman, the mainspring of our social system, the lever that moves the world. Some moderns, like Socrates (who wrote in praise of poverty on a table of solid gold), cynically speak against wealth. It is, however, the great motive agent in all departments of the social economy; helping on the civilisation of the world, and ministering not merely to the elegances, but also the essentials of life. Money represents labour, and who can adequately describe the triumphs of labour, urged on by the potent spell of money? It has extorted the secrets of the universe, and trained its powers into myriads of forms of use and beauty. From the bosom of the old creation it has developed anew the creation of industry and art. It has been its task and its glory to overcome obstacles. Mountains have been levelled, and valleys been exalted before it. It has broken the rocky soil into fertile glades ; it has crowned the hilltops with fruit and verdure, and bound around the very feet of ocean, ridges of golden corn. Up from the sunless and hoary deeps, up from the shapeless quarry, it drags its spotless marbles, and rears its palaces of pomp. It tears the stubborn metals from the bowels of the globe, and makes them ductile to its will. It marches steadily on over the swelling flood, and through the mountain clefts. It fans its way through the winds of ocean, tramples them in its course, surges and mingles them with flakes of fire. Civilisation follows in its paths. It achieves grander victories, it weaves more durable trophies, it holds wider sway than the conqueror. His name becomes tainted and his monuments crumble; but labour converts his red battle-fields into gardens, and erects monuments significant of better things. It rides in a chariot driven by the wind. It writes with the lightning. It sits crowned as a queen in a thousand cities, and sends up its roar of triumph from a million wheels. It glistens in the fabric of the loom, it rings and sparkles from the steely hammer, it glories in shapes of beauty, it speaks in words of power, it makes the sinewy arm strong with liberty, the poor man's heart rich with content, crowns the swarthy and sweaty brow with honour, and dignity, and peace.

78. MARKETS AND WAGES IN THE REIGN OF HENRY VIII.

Wheat, the price of which necessarily varied, averaged in the middle of the fourteenth century tenpence the bushel; barley averaging at the same time three shillings the quarter. With wheat the fluctuations were excessive; a table of its possible variations describes it as ranging from eighteenpence the quarter to twenty shillings; the average, however, being six-and-eightpence. When the price was above this sum, the merchants might import to bring it down; when it was below this price, the farmers were allowed to export to the foreign markets; and the same average continued to hold, with no perceptible tendency to a rise, till the close of the reign of Elizabeth.

Beef and pork were a halfpenny a pound-mutton was threefarthings. They were fixed at these prices by the 3rd of the 24th of Henry VIII. But this Act was unpopular both with buyers and with sellers. The old practice had been to sell in the gross, and under that arrangement the rates had been generally lower. Stowe says: 'It was this year enacted that butchers should sell their beef and mutton by weight-beef for a halfpenny the pound, and mutton for three-farthings; which being devised for the great commodity of the realm—as it was thought -hath proved far otherwise : for at that time fat oxen were sold for six-and-twenty shillings and eightpence the piece; fat wethers for three shillings and fourpence the piece; fat calves at a like price; and fat lambs for twelvepence. The butchers of London sold penny pieces of beef for the relief of the poor-every piece two pounds and a half, sometimes three pounds for a penny; and thirteen and sometimes fourteen of these pieces for twelvepence; mutton, eightpence the quarter; and an hundredweight of beef for four shillings and eightpence.' The Act was repealed in consequence of the complaints against it, but the prices never fell again to what they had been, although beef, sold in the gross, could still be had for a halfpenny a pound in 1570.

Strong beer, such as we now buy for eighteenpence a gallon, was then a penny a gallon; and table-beer less than a halfpenny. French and German wines were eightpence the gallon. Spanish and Portuguese wines a shilling. This was the highest price at which the best wines might be sold; and if there was any fault

in quality or quantity, the dealers forfeited four times the amount. Rent, another important consideration, cannot be fixed so accurately, for Parliament did not interfere with it. Here, however, we are not without very tolerable information. 'My father,' says Latimer, 'was a yeoman, and had no land of his own; only he had a farm of three or four pounds by the year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep, and my mother milked thirty kine. He was able, and did find the king a harness with himself and his horse. I remembered that I buckled on his harness when he went to Blackheath field. He kept me to school, or else I had not been able to have preached before the king's majesty now. He married my sisters with five pounds, or twenty nobles each, having brought them up in godliness and fear of God. He kept hospitality for his poor neighbours, and some alms he gave to the poor; and all this he did off the said farm.' If 'three or four pounds at the uttermost' was the rent of a farm yielding such results, the rent of labourers' cottages is not likely to have been considerable.— J. A. Froude.

79. THE LAST MINSTREL.

The way was long, the wind was cold,
The minstrel was infirm and old;
His withered cheek, and tresses grey,
Seemed to have known a better day;
The harp, his sole remaining joy,
Was carried by an orphan boy.
The last of all the bards was he
Who sung of border chivalry;
For, well-a-day! their date was fled ;
His tuneful brethren all were dead;
And he, neglected and oppressed,
Wished to be with them, and at rest.
No more, on prancing palfrey borne,
He carolled, light as lark at morn ;
No longer, courted and caressed,
High placed in hall, a welcome guest,

He poured, to lord and lady gay,
The unpremeditated lay:

Old times were changed, old manners gone;
A stranger filled the Stuarts' throne;

The bigots of the iron time

Had called his harmless art a crime.

A wandering harper, scorned and poor,
He begged his bread from door to door,

And tuned, to please a peasant's ear,

The harp a king had loved to hear.-Walter Scott.

80. CHEERFULNESS.

Men of truly great powers of mind have generally been cheerful, social, and indulgent, while a tendency to sentimental whining or fierce intolerance may be ranked among the surest symptoms of little souls and inferior intellects. In the whole list of our English poets we can only remember Shenstone and Savage-two certainly of the lowest who were querulous and discontented. Cowley, indeed, used to call himself melancholy; but it was not in earnest, and at any rate was full of conceits and affectations, and has nothing to make us proud of him. Shakspeare, the greatest of them all, was evidently of a free and joyous temperament; and so was Chaucer, their common master. The same disposition appears to have predominated in Fletcher, Jonson, and their great contemporaries. The genius of Milton partook something of the austerity of the party to which he belonged, and of the controversies in which he was involved; but, even when fallen on evil days and evil tongues, his spirit seems to have retained its serenity as well as its dignity; and in his private life, as well as in his poetry, the majesty of a high character is tempered with great sweetness, genial indulgences, and practical wisdom. In the succeeding age our poets were but too gay; and though we forbear to speak of living authors, we know enough of them to say with confidence, that to be miserable or to be hated is not now, any more than heretofore, the common lot of those who excel.-Francis Jeffrey.

81. PATRIOTISM.

There is probably no nation in Europe that does not take a sort of naïve pleasure and pride in believing that it stands towards its neighbours in the position of an original inhabitant, and that its own manners and customs are far more ancient and respectable than the manners and customs it sees on every side of it. The French democrat flatters himself that he is the representative of the Latin race, and that he inherits from immemorial ages a right to take the lead in all the affairs of the Continent. Mr. Matthew Arnold's Arminius plumes himself on a name which is two thousand years old. And the Englishman is conscientiously persuaded that an honest Briton is not only the noblest, but the oldest work of heaven, and that, whatever may be his faults, there is at any rate nothing newfangled about him:

I am the old traditional man bull;

And from my ancestors having been Ionian,
I am called Ion; which, by interpretation,
Is John; in plain Theban, that is to say,

My name's JOHN BULL. I am a famous hunter,
And can leap any gate in all Boeotia.

Some dignified sentiment of this kind is bound up with and forms an unconscious part of the opinions of most of us upon every political, moral, and theological subject that presents itself. We are pleased to think that there is something about all that we say and do which has stood the test of time. The most rabid Protestant of the day would be shocked to be told that his particular form of creed is no older than the Reformation. According to Mr. Whalley and Dr. Cumming, it is the Church of Rome that is the novelty and the excrescence, and Exeter Hall would repudiate with indignation the idea that its favourite tenets only date back to the age of Luther or of Henry VIII. In politics it is just the same. In fact, each of us has a secret conviction that in some mysterious way or other he is, like the Oriental potentate, if not a brother, at any rate some sort of lineal descendant, of the Sun and Moon. The last knockdown argument which the Briton applies to anything that he does not like or that he does not understand is, that it is not English. Ritualism and the ballot, French claret and German