proved complicated and troublesome, and I was obliged to place my interests in the hands of a lawyer who had been recommended to me as extremely skilful. The business at last settled, I found myself entitled to about forty thousand florins, which I proposed to embark in trade. I was happily married, and Ellen was seven years old. Our little fortune had been greatly impaired by a succession of losses, for which this inheritance would compensate. One day I went to my lawyer's to receive the money. He had disappeared, taking it with him. Despair took possession of me; I dared not impart the fatal news to my wife, and, I confess it with shame, I determined on suicide. All that day I rambled about the country, and at nightfall I approached the banks of the Spree. Climbing upon the parapet of a high bridge, I gazed with gloomy delight into the dark waters that rolled beneath. On my knees upon the stone, I offered up a short but fervent prayer to Him who wounds and heals; I commended my wife and daughter to His mercy, and precipitated myself from the bridge. I was struggling instinctively against death, when I felt myself seized by a vigorous arm. A man swam near me, and drew me towards the shore, which we both reached.

"It was so dark that I could not distinguish the features of my preserver, but the tones of his voice made an impression upon me which has not yet been effaced, and I have met but one man whose voice has reminded me of that of the generous unknown. He compelled me to go home with him, questioned me as to my motives for so desperate an act, and, to my extreme astonishment, handed me a portfolio containing forty thousand florins, on the express condition that I should take no steps to find him out. I entreated him to accept my marriage-ring, at sight of which I promised to repay the

loan, as soon as it should to do so. He took the my heart brimful of gra

"I will not attempt to joy with which I once wife and daughter. God benefactor all the good ranged my affairs, and w where I formed this esta I can not consider myse temporary possessor. men, that Ellen has no d that we may at any mom very precarious position."

Ellen's face was hid When Mr. Müller cease listened. Presently the

"I have little," he sa narration; the man who to render you a service, for the rest of his days. into the Spree, he stru and since then he limps,

We were all motion Then Malthus drew a r and handed it to Mr. M nance of the latter, gene expression, was suddenly tated: tears started to his himself into his preserver

"All that I possess cried, "and I have the h you that your capital has

"Of all that you pos thus, "I ask but one thi no right."

The worthy German to daughter, who trembled surprise, and, placing Jew

"Sir," he said, address "you who have seen the disinterested in this que that I could do better?"

or palliated. Indulgencies are no longer on public sale. The morals in monasteries and convents, and those of the secular clergy, are decent there is less of violent active persecution. But a church which claims to be infallible can not really reform her doctrines. Every error that she has once adopted becomes stereotyped, every step by which she has diverged from truth is irretrievable. All the worst superstitions of the Romish church are maintained by her at this instant as stoutly as they were when Luther first renounced her communion. The prohibition of inquiry, the reliance on legendary traditions, the idolatry of relics, the invocation of saints, the adoration of the Virgin Mary, the merit ascribed to voluntary suffering, and to premeditated uselessness, "the conversion of the sacraments into charms, of public worship into a magic incantation muttered in a dead language, and of the duty of Christian Holiness into fantastic penances, pilgrimages, scapularies, and a whole train of superstitious observances worthy of paganism in its worst forms,"* are all in full vigor among many of the Teutonic races and among all the nations whose languages are derived from the Latin. The clergy of France, once the most intelligent defenders of the liberties of the Gallican church, are now more ultramontane than the Italians.

We repeat our belief that if Luther had not been born, or if he had wanted any one of that wonderful assemblage of moral and intellectual excellences that enabled him to triumph in the most difficult contest that ever was waged by man, if he had had less courage, less self-devotion, less diligence, less sagacity, less eloquence, less prudence, or less sincerity, the Pope would still be the spiritual ruler of all Western Europe and America, and the peculiar doctrines of Romanism would prevail there, doubted, indeed, or disbelieved, or unthought of, by the educated classes, and little understood by the uneducated, but conformed to by all.

On the other hand, if Charles V. had been able, like the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse, to shake off the prejudices of his early education,-if, like them, he had listened to Luther with candor, and, like them, had been convinced, and, instead of striving to crush the Reformation, had put himself at its head, a train of consequences would have been set in motion not

have followed the submission or the premature death of Luther.

The Reformation would have spread over the whole of Germany and of the Netherlands. The inhabitants of those vast countries were all eager to throw off the dominion of Rome, and were kept under her yoke only by the tyranny and persecution of Charles. Germany would have remained an empire. It required the enthusiasm of a religious cause to rouse her feudatories to rise against their sovereign, and to force on him a treaty which in fact admitted their independence. It was to the treaty of Passau, to the shock then given to the Imperial sovereignty, that the Elector of Brandenburg, a hundred and fifty years after, owed his crown, and the Emperor, who had recognized one of his vassals as a king, lost all real authority over the others.

If the whole of Germany and the Low Countries had remained one united body, if the former had not been laid waste by the thirty years' war, and the latter by the war which produced the independence of the United Provinces, such an empire would have been the arbiter of the Continent. Flanders, Alsace, Lorraine, and Franche Compté would have remained German; France would not have been able twice to threaten the independence of Europe; a Bourbon would not now be reigning in Spain.

No country would have gained so much by such a change in the course of events as Spain. In the first place, she would have become Protestant. Few of the phenomena of that remarkable period are more striking than the weakness of the hold which peculiar religious opinions then possessed over the bulk of the people of Europe. Henry VIII, Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth, turned the English backwards and forwards, from Romanism to Protestantism, and from Protestantism to Romanism, at the will, we had almost said at the caprice, of the monarch for the time being. The pride of the Roman Catholics had not been roused by the rivalry of a new Church, with bishops, and revenues, and patronage, and power, and rank of its own. The Reformation appeared to them not the introduction of a hostile faith, but a purification of the old one, and wherever it was not persecuted it was adopted.

Ireland may appear to be an exception; but the real sovereigns of the greater part of Ireland were then its native chieftains. Henry VIII. and his immediate successors

were

that the Reformation was not preached to the Celtic Irish. They could not read Latin, and no reformer wrote or preached in Irish. But if Spain had been Protestant, she would have escaped the Inquisition--the brutalizing instrument which more than any other means of misgovernment, more than despotism, or insecurity, or lawlessness, or oppression, has degraded the Spanish mind. She would have escaped the religious wars which wasted her strength for more than sixty years. She would not have been governed by Jesuits and bigots. She would not have been deprived, by the expulsion of the Moors, of the most industrious part of her population. Naples and Sicily, like Spain, would have adopted the faith of their master; and it is probable that Romanism, after lingering for a short time in a portion of France, of Italy, and of Poland, would have gradually died out, and have been remembered, with magic, astrology, and alchemy, as one of the strange delusions of the dark unreasoning ages.

We can not but be eager to know more of the men on whose conduct such vast consequences depended. To know how far that conduct was the result of the dispositions implanted in them by nature, and how far of the circumstances in which they were placed. How far it is to be imputed to their advisers, and how far to the solitary working of their own faculties and passions.

We have ample materials to form an estimate of Luther. The business of his life was to write and to talk, and his friends preserved his letters and his conversation with the care, we may say the veneration, which all that came from such a man deserved. In his correspondence and his tisch-reden, we have a fuller and a more detailed revelation of his innermost man than we possess of any other person, with the single exception of Dr. Johnson.

We see his strong conscientiousness, his religious fervor, his impulsive sense of duty, his unwearied diligence, his heroic courage never rushing into rashness; his vivid imagination, checked, though not sufficiently controlled, by his strong reason; and as the result of these passions and faculties, an aggressive force, a power of destruction, which no spiritual reformer, except perhaps Mahomet, ever directed against deeply-rooted abuses. We see also a fearful amount of credulity, superstition, intolerence, and violence, to be imputed partly to the ignorance and rough energy of the 16th century, and

at first in privation, in want, and in beggary and afterwards among the ascetic observances and dull degrading duties of a monastery.

We see, too, what perhaps was also the result of this education, his deep melancholy, his early and constantly increasing disgust at life, his regrets at not having died in infancy, his despair of improvement; indeed, his expectation that human affairs would go on from bad to worse till the last day, a day which he hoped and believed to be at hand, should close the reign of evil.

Before the publication, the title of which is prefixed to this article, Charles V. was known to English readers chiefly in the judicious but somewhat pompous pages of Robertson. Robertson remarks that the circumstances transmitted to us with respect to his private deportment and character, are fewer and less interesting than might have been expected from the great number of the authors who have undertaken to write an account of his life. And the little that he himself has related of them is so full of error, that we need not regret that he has not given

us more.

Within the last twenty years, however, a flood of light has been shed on the details of the great figure, of which, till then, we had seen only the outlines. The " "Correspondenz des Kaisers Carl V.," by Dr. Carl, published in 1845-46, the "Colecion de Documentos ineditos para la Historia de España," and the 'Relazioni degli Ambasciatori Veneti," both works still in course of publication, and the "Papiers d'Etat du Cardinal de Granvelle," have revealed so much that was unknown, and rectified so much that was mistaken, in his history as an emperor and a king, that it might almost be rewritten; and it now appears that his life, from the time of his abdication, on which little had been published, and that little turns out to have been often erroneous, had been recorded with as much minuteness, and far more fidelity, than even that of Napoleon.

The new sources of information are, A Narrative of the Re-idence of Charles V. in the Monastery of Yuste, written by one of the monks, and A Correspondence between Charles and his Family, and between his Confidential Attendants and the Spanish. Court, embracing rather more than two years, beginning with his arrival in Spain after his abdication, and terminating some months after his death.

These records, however, have, as yet, been