poor; I have never been guilty of debauchery with women; I have discharged the duty of a just and equitable prince; I have nothing to reproach myself with; and I can appear before the tribunal of God with confidence.' 'We are all sinners,' replied the almoner; and the most righteous of us all sins seven times a day.' 'When we have done all that is commanded us, we are still unprofitable servants.' We all remarked that he was displeased with this discourse: he repeated more vehemently still: No; I have to reproach myself with nothing; my people may weep for me as their father.' He preserved silence for some moments, after which he begged us to withdraw. The privy councillors came next; he made them a long harangue, in which he detailed all the obligations which the country was under to him, and repeated nearly what he had said to the clergyman. He recommended them strongly to have the good of their country always at heart, and to be attached to their new master; after which he took his last leave of them. He had sufficient strength of mind to take leave of his whole court, from the prime minister to the lowest of his domestics. I was very much affected : but it cannot be denied that there was a good deal of ostentation in his proceedings; for he carefully pointed out to all of them the care which he had always taken for the good of his country. It will be afterwards seen that he did not think himself dying, and that all this was merely theatrical. At the end of this melancholy ceremony, however, he became extremely weak: when it was over, he begged us to withdraw."—Memoirs ii. 245.

The poor old margrave died in a few days, apparently much in the same state.

As our object is rather to delineate the religion and morals of mankind than to describe their wars or enter into their political intrigues, we have been led away from the subject more immediately before us, to which we now return. Professor Ranke is a true German he is indefatigable in research; he gives us his authorities from the times of which he writes; and as we have no means of consulting them, we must assume that he quotes correctly. His object is to lay before his readers the rise and progress of the House of Brandenburg. After a short sketch of the early electors he begins with the grandfather of Frederick the Great, and continues his history through the first ten years of Frederick's reign, concluding with a few chapters on the character of the king, and the improvements introduced in his reign. The laws of Prussia were one great object of his care, and Professor Ranke's account of the legal reforms is highly interesting. In the sixth year of his reign he undertook to draw up a code of civil laws; and in this task he was assisted by his legal adviser, Samuel Cocceji: this code, however, was soon superseded. Frederick's chief success as a reformer was in the administration of justice,

and to this he always gave the greatest attention. He preferred corporal punishment to fines, as more summary and less injurious to the revenue, as fines tended to impoverish the tax-payers.

He ordered a new scale of fees for legal certificates and bills of sale, which ignorant or corrupt magistrates had raised to an exorbitant price, and which they enforced with the stick. He appointed Cocceji controller-general of the courts, with power to revise all proceedings, and if he thought a cause unjustly decided, to bring it before the king in council. He abolished appeals to the imperial tribunal, and references to foreign lawyers, whom it had been usual for the judges to consult in difficult cases. By Cocceji's advice the office of attorneys was abolished, and the number of barristers limited, and they were obliged to confine their practice to one court. Every precaution was used to prevent delay, as Cocceji declared it was better that the debtor should suffer, than that he should be allowed to ruin his creditor on pretence of protecting himself. (Our law courts might take a hint from this maxim.) An ordinance was also issued calling upon judges and lawyers to make a return of the suits then pending, the length of time they had been before the court, and the reasons which prevented their being decided. The result was as follows::

"In May, 1747, Cocceji announced with no little satisfaction that a lawsuit between the court of exchequer and certain nobles touching certain boundaries, that had lasted more than 200 years, and filled above seventy volumes of manuscript, had been brought to a conclusion satisfactory to the parties mainly by the industry of Jarriges and Fürst. In this manner they worked during the whole year. In January, 1748, Cocceji reckoned that, during the past year, 1600 old, and 684 new suits had been before the court in Stettin; and 800 old, and 310 new, in Cöslin. All the old cases had been decided; and of the new ones, only 183 remained outstanding in Stettin, and 169 in Cöslin. Your Majesty perceives,' exclaimed Cocceji, 'what can be done by courts of justice presided over by learned and upright men.'"-Ranke, vol. iii. 371.

In Frederick's arrangements there was one element of the feudal system which he left unchanged, and which has led to half the revolutions of Europe: while he gave distinct privileges to peasants and nobles, he left the impassable barrier between them unbroken. The nobleman must be a land-owner, the peasant a farmer, and the burgher a merchant. The burgher was not allowed to invest his capital in land, for fear of withdrawing it from trade; and the peasant could not become a landed proprietor, because his birth disqualified him from holding the commission of an officer. These distinctions, like those of the patricians and plebeians at Rome, must always give rise to jealousies and dis

turbances. Mankind have in themselves quite sufficient tendency to split into factions, without legal distinctions to facilitate their doing so. If a law were passed in England that every native of the counties north of the Trent must wear a white hat, and every man to the south a black one, two new factions would be at once created, and the streets of London would be an arena for their trial of strength. Though England possesses an aristocracy, yet the poorest man in the kingdom may rise to become a member of it; and there is no law to prevent a man, whose father was in trade, from rising to be a general officer or a bishop.

To prevent the revival of old disputes, Frederick declared that no nobleman should be called upon to prove his title to his estate further back than 1740; and he endeavoured to give each of his new provinces a government according to the habits and genius of the people. Frederick William had long ago projected improvements in agriculture and commerce, which his son continued with the greatest zeal. Vast tracts of land were drained by his orders, and families who understood spinning were encouraged to settle. He considered it a fortunate discovery, that where his predecessors imported yarn, he imported the men to make it. To his manufacturing families he allotted a house and garden, and the grass of two cows; and reckoned that he could thus settle a thousand families in the year. He encouraged bricklayers who came to Berlin to remain in his dominions, and found employment for them. When he found his colonists troublesome (as a transplanted race usually are), he comforted himself that though the first generation are not worth much, their descendants would improve. The local governments were allowed to reserve to themselves the right of regulating the number of artisans in each branch; and if they increased too much in any given locality, they were sent without appeal into the next province. Thus we have an instance of the singular combination of improvement and despotism which characterizes all the acts of Frederick the Great.

All this, and much more, will be read with interest; it is to us by far the most agreeable portion of the book. We have little knowledge of tactics; and the dry details of skirmishes and engagements, in which the Prussians are one day victorious, and defeated the next, is matter of little curiosity to us. We confess ourselves, therefore, little able to appreciate either the professor's details or the king's narrative of his own exploits; and we feel rather inclined to sympathize with Gil Blas, when he was valet to the old colonel, and thought himself safe, if, in undressing his master and taking off his leg, he could escape with two battles and a siege. Again, political manoeuvring is as little interesting

to the generality of readers as military tactics; and it has this disadvantage, that the accounts are less likely to be properly authenticated. What George II. or his advisers desired to do; what Charles VI. or Maria Theresa would have done if they could, and what they pretended to do in order to conceal their real intentions, are to us matters extremely apocryphal, and for this obvious reason,-diplomacy is the art of concealment; the politician has always reversed the principle of the philosopher, and instead of wishing that others should know what he knows, his maxim is,

"Si sciat hoc alter, scire tuum nihil est.”

We do not suppose that Sir Robert Walpole or Lord Bute could penetrate the schemes of their German contemporaries, much less is it possible to do so accurately at this day. This must plead our excuse with our readers for departing from our immediate subject, and rather leading them to join us in gossipping with the Princess Wilhelmina, than following the hero through the toils of the camp, or the politician through the mazes of diplomacy. Our professor does both, and to those who prefer such studies as more solid, he will doubtless be more acceptable than lighter reading. We have given but a short sketch; but, as much has been written and published lately, if we have awakened curiosity, our readers will find ample means of gratifying it. The proper study for mankind is man; and he who reads for his own improvement will always turn with pleasure to the history of genius, and the gradual development of the powers of nations and Frederick, however, presents another instance of the vanity of all earthly ambition; he lived long, and gained much, but he did so at the expense of almost incredible labour; and he seems to have forgotten that true happiness consists in the knowledge and service of God, and that,

men.

"Give all he can, without Him we are poor,

And with Him rich, take what He will away."

ART. IX.-The History of the Church of England. By J. B. S. CARWITHEN, B.D., late of St. Mary Hall, Oxford, &c. Parts 1. and II. In 2 vols. Oxford: J. H. Parker.

THE real value and importance of Church history consists in its bearing upon the actual state of things in the present day. We find ourselves in the midst of a certain system, amidst institutions, creeds, customs, forms, opinions, and beliefs; and to be enabled to comprehend what we see around us, or to enter into its spirit, we are compelled to inquire how this state of things has arisen. In this point of view there is no part of ecclesiastical history which is valueless to the student. He should be more or less acquainted with the progress of events from the very beginning to the present day. The Reformation was an event of the highest importance, but it was preceded and followed by other events not less important in the history of Christianity, and which deserve equal attention. But how to bring this to bear on the actual composition of an ecclesiastical history is a difficult question. A history should not be a library in itself; and yet there are materials enough to make it equal to a large library: neither should it be a mere sketch, conveying no distinct notions on the most important points. But between these extreme limits a wide field remains for the exercise of the judgment of the ecclesiastical historian in the selection of his materials, and the mode of treating them. In truth, it is impossible to conceive one history adapted to general use. A learned divine will require one kind of book; a student of divinity" another; an intelligent layman a third; and an ignorant person a fourth. One requires a book of reference, another an interesting narrative, another a compendious survey of the chief facts, another an instructive series of religious examples. In our literature there are examples enough of works adapted for the use of students, or of general readers; but there are comparatively few works which rise to any thing of a higher character and position-few, we mean, that can properly be called histories. do not refer to the ancient ecclesiastical writers of England, but to more modern writers, and amongst them we are unable to point out any writer of a general Church history; the efforts of Fox, Burnet, Strype, and Collier-our principal writers-having been restricted to English Church history. Each of the writers we have mentioned has his defects, and Collier alone has attempted

We