history affords. For though philosophy had given some admirable rules for maintaing the out-works of virtue, Christianity is the only religion which ever pretended to expel vice from the heart. The best qualities of Paganism want the best motives. Some of the overgrown Roman virtues, also, though they would have been valuable in their just measure and degree, and in a due symmetry and proportion with other virtues, yet, by their excess, helped to produce those evils which afterwards ruined Rome; while a perfect system of morals, like the Christian, would have prevented those evils. Their patriotism was oppression to the rest of the world. Their virtue was not so much sullied by pride as founded in it; and their justice was tinctured with a savageness which bears little resemblance to the justice which is taught by Christianity.

These two simple precepts of our religion, Thou shall love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbour as thyself; — these two principles, kept in due exercise, would, like the two powers which govern the natural world, keep the intellectual and spiritual world in order; would restrain, impel, unite, and govern it..

In considering the ancient philosophy, how does the fine gold become dim, before the sober lustre of that divine Legislator, whose kingdom, indeed, was not of this world, but who has taught "kings of the earth, princes, and all people," those maxims and principles which cast into shade all the false splendours "of the antique world!" Chris

tianity has furnished the only true practical comment on that grand position of the admirable author of the sublime, that nothing is great the contempt of which is great. For how can triumphs, honours, riches, power, conquest, fame, be considered as of intrinsic value by a Christian, the very essence of whose religion consists in being crucified to the world; the very aim and end of whose religion lies in a superiority to all greatness which is to have an end with this life; the very nature and genius of whose religion tends to prove, that eternal life is the only adequate measure of the happiness, and immortal glory the only adequate object of the ambition of a Christian!

But the royal pupil is not to wander always in the wide field of universal history. The extent is so vast, and the time for travelling over it so short, that after being sufficiently possessed of that general view of mankind which the history of the world exhibits, it seems reasonable to concentrate her studies, and to direct her attention to certain great leading points, and especially to those objects with which she has a natural and more immediate connection. The history of modern Europe abounds with such objects. In Robertson's luminous view of the state of Europe, the progress of society is traced with just arrangement and philosophical precision. His admirable histories of Charles V. and of Mary Queen of Scots, sẹparate from their great independent merit, will be read with singular advantage in connection with the contemporary reigns of English history. In the writings of Sully and Clarendon may be seen how, for a long time, the passions of kings were contradicted, and often controlled by the wisdom of their ministers: sovereigns who were not insensible to praise, nor averse from flattery, yet submitting, though sometimes with a very ill grace,

to receive services rather than adulation. Ministers who consulted the good rather than the humour of their princes; who promoted their interests, instead of gratifying their vices, and who preferred their fame to their favour.

Mr. Hume.

Hume is incomparably the most informing, as well as the most elegant of all the writers of English history. His narrative is full, well arranged, and beautifully perspicuous. Yet, he is an author who must be read with extreme caution on a political, but especially on a religious account. Though, on occasions where he may be trusted, because his peculiar principles do not interfere, his political reflections are usually just, sometimes profound. His account of the origin of the Gothic government is full of interest and information. He marks with exact precision the progress and decay of the feudal manners, when law and order began to prevail, and our constitution assumed something like a shape. His finely painted characters of Alfred and Elizabeth should be engraved on the heart of every sovereign. His political prejudices do not strikingly appear till the establishment of the house of Stuart, nor his religious antipathies till about the distant dawn of the Reformation under Henry V. From that period to its full establishment he is perhaps more dangerous, because less ostensibly daring than some other infidel historians. It is a serpent under a bed of roses. He does not (in his History at least)

so much ridicule religion himself, as invite others to ridicule it. There is in his manner a sedateness which imposes; in his scepticism, a sly gravity, which puts the reader more off his guard than the vehemence of censure, or the levity of wit; for we are always less disposed to suspect a man who is too wise to appear angry. That same wisdom makes him too correct to invent calumnies, but it does not preserve him from doing what is scarcely less disingenuous. He implicitly adopts the injurious relations of those annalists who were most hostile to the reformed faith; though he must have known their accounts to be aggravated and discoloured, if not absolutely invented. He thus makes others responsible for the worst things he asserts, and spreads the mischief, without avowing the malignity. When he speaks from himself, the sneer is so cool, the irony so sober, the contempt so discreet, the moderation so insidious, the difference between Popish bigotry and Protestant firmness, between the fury of the persecutor and the resolution of the martyr, so little marked; the distinctions between intolerant frenzy and heroic zeal so melted into each other, and though he contrives to make the reader feel some indignation at the tyrant, he never leads him to feel any reverence for the sufferer; he ascribes such a slender superiority to one religious system above another, that the young reader who does not come to the perusal with his principles formed, will be in danger of thinking that the Reformation was really not worth contending for.