the fee-farm of the hundred of Banbury, which he holds of the king, and bestow it on one of Cromwell's friends; and he ends with offering Cromwell 200l. to obtain it for him. Sir Simon Harcourt writes to him to procure him from the king a little house of Canons in Staffordshire: "His grace shall have 100%., and your mastership, if it be brought to pass, 1007. for your pain, and 201. fee so long as you live." But if it be dissolved, and Cromwell can obtain the grant of its farm for the petitioner, he will give him 100 marks. Thos. Candell offers him, when privy seal, 10l. to obtain the king's patent and seal for a friar's house and lands. Lady Mary Capell offers him 207. to buy a hobby, if he will get the arrears of her annuity paid up. Sir Piers Eggecombe desires a grant of the suppressed priory of Totness. He offers the king 800 marks for it, and Cromwell a present of 100l. to procure the king's favour. He obtains his request, and then asks for two manors in Devonshire. A wretched constable employed by him as a visitor of the religious houses begs him to stay the conclusion of a bargain between one Broke and the abbot of Bardsley. "Hear me speak or you conclude with him: it shall be in the way of 200 marks." Archbishops and bishops, noblemen and widows, purchased his smiles with eager hands. The black-mail which he levied under the name of new-year's gifts, fees, and annuities, was enormous: 401. a year from Cranmer, 201. a year from the other bishops, and 10l. a year besides in the shape of a new year's gift; sums of 2l., 5., 107., and 201. from most of the abbeys and priories in England; 401. from the Earl of Wiltshire, 20. from Queen Jane Seymour, the same from the unhappy Countess of Salisbury; 201. from Dr. Lee, the same from Dr. Leighton, and 107. from Dr. Landon, his visitors of the monasteries. The entries in his steward's book reveal the same tale: 6l. 13s. 4d. in a little white purse; "in a pair of gloves," 131. 6s. 8d.; "in a handkercher," 66. 13s. 4d.; "in a black velvet purse," 201.; and 101. "with a purse of silver and gilt." "A purse of crimson satin," containing 66l. 13s. 4d.; in "another crimson satin purse," 20l. ; 207. "in a white paper;" 201. “in a glove under the cushion in the gallery window;" "under a cushion in the middle window in the gallery," 10. "Under the cushion in the gallery window, in a purse of white leather," 100l.; "the same day 501. in a purse of red leather;" "in a purse of white leather," 107. ;-all lying close together in those eventful months, when nobles and peasantry were dissipating and plundering the abbey lands. We might enlarge these instances almost to any amount. The poor monks at Canterbury, who paid him an annuity for his protection, had a summer's residence at Bekesborne, the envy of the neighbourhood. The king was desirous to have it, and offered the prior any lands of equivalent value in exchange. In great trepidation he laid his griefs before the minister; the monks could not consent to part with it on any terms, it was their only place of recreation, nothing could be an equivalent for its loss. The powerful intercession of the minister saved it from the clutches of the crown, and the monks were profuse in their gratitude: but in his very next letter he demanded and obtained a lease of it for himself. Pensions and annuities from abbots and priors trembling for existence; presents of money from grasping squires and nobles eager to clutch at the prey and forestall each other; hampers of game, fish, and poultry; eggs, cheeses, and venison pasties from less wealthy suitors, all anxious to bespeak the favour of this man, more powerful than the king himself, poured in at his gates. The venison sent him fed his servants and saved his butcher's bills, as his thrifty steward informs him ;-if it got a little damaged by the journey, it was baked in a pie, and that was food for the man which was no food for his master. For though he rose to the highest offices in the state, and his income was enormous, the business-like habits and frugality of the merchant still reigned in his heart and his household. No wonder whilst the minister grew wealthy the crown grew poor. It was thought a great thing that Cardinal Wolsey, once in his magnificent administration, with foreign wars and continual loans to Maximilian, to Charles, and after his captivity to Francis I., should have once demanded a subsidy from the House of Commons; now, in a period of profound peace, with parliamentary subsidies, the enormous fines paid by the clergy to escape the premunire, with annatys and first-fruits, which had hitherto rolled a stream of gold to Rome, all turned into the exchequer, the king "woke up," after six years, to find himself on the eve of a rebellion, with no funds to meet it, unless he melted his plate and sold his jewels. These details are not taken from Protestant or from Popish legends, so much deprecated by Mr. Froude; they are not the blind suggestions of malice and envy; they are derived from an authority which Mr. Froude himself will not dispute -Cromwell's own correspondence. We do not contend that they present the whole account of the matter, and that Cromwell's character is to be judged by these facts alone, to the exclusion of others: that would be to fall into the fault we condemn. But whether they bear out Mr. Froude's views, and whether an impartial historian ought to have ignored them, our readers can decide for themselves. R2 H Hutton ART. VII.-MR. BROWNING'S POEMS. The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Three volumes. Third Edition. Chapman and Hall. MR. BROWNING, though commanding a wider intellectual sweep of view than almost any artist of our day, is yet a poet not of European, nor even of national celebrity, but rather the favourite of an intellectual sect; and this, not from any sectarian tendency in his poetry,-nothing could be more catholic, -but from the almost complete absence of that atmosphere of fascination about his verse, that melody of mind and speech, which is the main attraction of poetry to ordinary men, and but for which, mere imaginative power, however great, would scarcely arrest their attention at all. Coleridge once defined poetry very badly we conceive-as "that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species (having this object in common with it) it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part." Now Coleridge certainly did not intend to exclude Mr. Browning's works by anticipation from all claim to the title of poems; if he had lived to read Mr. Browning, Coleridge's profound, rich, and catholic imagination would scarcely have failed to appreciate fully the power and insight of the younger poet; but no definition of a poem could have been contrived more ingeniously calculated to exclude Mr. Browning's works from that class of composition. Most of Mr. Browning's poems might be described precisely as proposing for their immediate object truth, not pleasure, and as aiming at such a satisfaction from the whole as is by no means compatible with any very distinct gratification from each component part.' In other words, Mr. Browning's poems, though, when clearly apprehended, they seldom fail to give that higher kind of imaginative satisfaction which is one of the most enviable intellectual states,-give scarcely any immediate sensitive pleasure. There is none of the thrill through the brain, of the vibrating melodious sweetness, of the tranquillising touch and atmosphere of loveliness which we usually associate with the highest powers of poetical expression. And then, as to the relation of the whole to the part, which is Coleridge's second test of a poem, Mr. Browning's poems are not so organised that the parts have any gratification for you at all, till you catch a view of his whole. Coleridge says, that "the reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the solution, but by the pleasurable activity of the mind, excited by the attractions of the journey itself. Like the motion of a serpent, which the Egyptians made the emblem of intellectual power, or like the path of sound through the air, at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which again carrics him onward." Nothing could be farther from describing the movement of Mr. Browning's poems. Instead of fascinating you with his harmony of movement, and gradually insinuating the drift and spirit of the poem into your imagination, Mr. Browning rushes upon you with a sort of intellectual douche, half stuns you with the abruptness of the start, repeats the application in a multitude of swift various shocks from unexpected points of the compass, and leaves you at last giddy and wondering where you are, but with a vague sense that, were you but properly prepared beforehand, and warned as to its laws of approach, you might discern a unity and power in this intellectual water-spout, though its first descent only drenched and bewildered your imagination. Take the following short poem for example, one of really marvellous force, indeed of true genius, but which we purposely decline to present to our readers with any further introduction than Mr. Browning has himself accorded us; in order to illustrate this characteristic of his, that the whole must be fairly grasped before any of the "component parts" are intelligible,-the component parts, indeed, being little more than diminutive wholes, too diminutive in scale to be clearly legible until you have seen the whole, whence you go back to the component parts again with a key to their meaning that at last gradually deciphers them : "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister. Needs its leaden vase filled brimming? At the meal we sit together: What's the Latin name for parsley' ? What's the Greek name for Swine's Scout! Whew! We'll have our platter burnished, Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores Bright as 'twere a Barbary corsair's? When he finishes refection, Drinking watered orange-pulp- Oh, those melons! If he's able How go on your flowers? None double There's a great text in Galatians, Sure of Heaven as sure as can be, Or, my scrofulous French novel Hand and foot in Belial's gripe: Or, there's Satan !-one might venture Such a flaw in the indenture As he'd miss till, past retrieve, |