The council of Constance is eminent by the number and character of the persons present at its deliberations, the regularity of its proceedings, and the wisdom and energy of its decrees. It was attended by thirty cardinals, four patriarchs, twenty archbishops, three hundred bishops, and a thousand other ecclesiastics*. The emperor Sigismund, and several electors and princes of the second arder, assisted at it in person; the other European princes of the first order, and several of the second, were represented at it by their deputies.

The council voted by nations: christendom was supposed to be divided into five; the Italian, the German, the French, the Spanish, and the English; but the admission of the latter was opposed by the French, and was the subject of a great national contest; the French ambassadors contending that christendom was essentially distributed into the four first of these nations, and that the lesser kingdoms, as England, Denmark, Portugal, and others of the same description, were comprehended under one or other of these divisions. To this, the English ambassadors opposed the extent, the power, and the dignity of the British Islands, which, with England, Scotland, the four kingdoms of Ireland, and the Orkney Islands, were decorated with eight royal crowns. The arguments of the English ambassadors, assisted perhaps by the victories in France of Henry the fifth, their monarch, prevailed;

* L'Enfant, pref. iv. Bellarmine, Lib. de Conc. et Eccl. cap. vii.

and the council decreed the English to be a fifth and co-ordinate nation*.

A good history of the Historia Reformationis ante Reformationem, (an expression familiar to the writers on the continent) is much wanted.-We are informed by the editors of Beausobre's Histoire de la Réformation, that something of this kind was found among his papers, with the title of Préliminaires de la Réformation; if it has issued from the press, it has not found its way to London. The abbé Barruel promised the public an Histoire du Jacobinisme du Moyen Age, but has not performed his promise.

It is not easy to mention, with precision, either the tenets generally imputable to all the separatists from the church, whom we have occasion to notice in this chapter, or the tenets which distinguished one class from the othert. The grand distinction

* See "Hermanni Von der Hardt, Historia Ecumenica "Concilii Constantiensis. Francofurti 1697, (6 tom. in 3 vols. fol.);"-tom. iv: a rare work; for the loan of which and several other rare and important works, the author is indebted to the liberality of the University of Cambridge, which he takes this opportunity of gratefully acknowledging.-L'Enfant abridges these proceedings, tom. ii. p. 447, &c.-They are summarily noticed by Gibbon, c. 70, note 75.

+ The best account of these, which has fallen under the eye of the writer, is to be found in father Persons's "Three Con" versions of England," part iii. c. 3.-He states in it, briefly but perspicuously, the distinctive doctrines of each class, and shows their several agreements and disagreements with the catholic and the established church. Father Persons had not the advantage of perusing several learned and curious histories and compilations, which have appeared since his time; but he

is into the Albigenses and Waldenses, and their respective followers. All the contemporary writers represent the former as holding principles equally destructive of religious, civil, and social order; and as endeavouring to spread their doctrine by violence and fraud. These horrid principles and practices cannot be imputed to the Waldenses, or the first filiations from them. But, in the course of time, some portions even of these seem to have adopted, in a greater or less degree, the obnoxious principle, that right to dominion, proprietorship, and magistracy, in church and state, is founded in grace, and that the right to them ceases, where grace is lost. The authority of the council of Constance, and the increasing diffusion of learning, and of the light which always accompanies it, showed the folly and perniciousness of these opinions: the controversies, generated by the reformation, took a different turn :-but even in these, as among John Knox and his primitive disciples, something of the kind is too often discernible.

lived nearer to the period of these events, and consulted original authors.-The 11th book of the Variations is dedicated to the same subject, and abounds in excellent matter, and vigorous argument: but the polemic is sometimes too discernible. It is to be wished that we had the work of some Albigensian or Waldensian, who related the history of his own party.

X. 9.

Remarkable Publications during this period.

In his "State of Europe during the Middle Ages*, "-Mr. Hallam has accurately described the state of the public mind at the time to which this chapter relates:-"The rich envied and

longed to plunder the estates of the superior "clergy; the poor learned from the Waldenses, and "other sectaries, to deem such opulence incompa"tible with the character of evangelical ministers: "the itinerant minstrels invented tales to satirize "vicious priests, which a predisposed multitude "eagerly swallowed."

The most important of these satirical poems is "The Visions of Pierce Plowman," published towards the middle of the fourteenth century, and attributed to Robert Langland, a secular priest and fellow of Oriel college in Oxford; it consists of a series of visions, which happened to the poet, as he slept on the Malvern hills in Worcestershire. In strong allegoric painting, he describes a multitude of corruptions and superstitious practices, which he charges on the clergy. "Pierce the Ploughman's "Creed," is generally subjoined to the Visions. The author feigns himself to be ignorant of his creed; he applies for instruction to the four religious orders, the grey-friars of St. Francis, the black-friars of St. Dominic, the Carmelites and

* Chap. vii.-a work of research and observation.

Augustinians. Each advises him to beware of the other, but none gives him the instruction he solicits; this, at length he receives from Pierce a poor ploughman, who resolves his doubts, and instructs him in the principles of religion. The writer was evidently a follower of Wickliffe, and mentions him with honour.

Before the appearance of either of these works, William, called from his native place, of Occam in Surrey, a fellow of Merton college in Oxford, archdeacon of Stow in Lincoln, a friar minor and definitor of the whole order of St. Francis, had attacked the claim of the popes to the deposing power, by "A Dialogue between a Knight and a Clerke concerning the Power spiritual and temporal," afterwards printed by Berthelet with the privilege of Henry the eighth. The whole of it is transcribed into the celebrated "Songe du Vergier," ascribed to Raoul de Presles, who lived in the reign of Charles the fifth, in France*. Posterior in date to these two works, but written on the same principles, is "Le livre appellé Songe du vieux Pelerin, "addressant au blanc Faucon à bec et piéz doréz, "fait par Messire Phelipe de Maisiére, en son "etre, chevalier chancelier de Chippre†;" it was published about the year 1397; and has often been confounded with the Songe du Vergier, but it is quite a distinct work.

Wetstein, in the introduction to his edition of the

*See Oldys's Librarian, p. 5.

+ See the Dissertation et Analyse in Durande de Maillane's Libertés de l'Eglise Gallicane, tom. iii. p. 504.