backs and shoulders, while their beards were kept close shaven, except upon the upper lip, where it was suffered to grow. The dress of savage nations is everywhere pretty much the same, being calculated rather to inspire terror than to excite love or respect. Their religious superstitions were terrible. Besides the severe penalties which they were permitted to inflict in this world, they inculcated the eternal transmigration of souls, and thus extended their authority as far as the fears of their votaries. They sacrificed human victims, which they burned in large wicker idols made so capacious as to contain a multitude of persons at once, who were thus consumed together. To these sights, tending to impress ignorance with awe, they added the austerity of their manners and the simplicity of their lives. They lived in woods, caves, and hollow trees. Their food was acorns and berries, and their drink water. This was the condition of the Briton at the time the island was invaded by the Romans. They introduced civilization there, and from that time savage life gradually declined, and as early as the invasion of the Danes, Britain could boast of learned men. Her learned Alfred, who flourished at that time, cultivated both learning and the Muses, when barbarism and ignorance overspread the rest of Europe.

Learning and civilization had progressed so far as early as the reign of Henry II, that the use of glass in windows, and stone arches for building, were introduced, and in the reign of King John the famous Magna Charta was framed, the very bulwark of English liberty. Nor must we omit to mention Roger Bacon, who flourished in the dark ages, and was the

forerunner in science to the great Bacon, Lord Verulan, as the latter was to Sir Isaac Newton. Among the other curious works written by this illustrious man, we find a treatise upon grammar, mathematics, physics, the flux and reflux of the British sea, optics, geography, astronomy, chemistry, logic, metaphysics, ethics, medicine, theology, philosophy, and upon the impediments of knowledge. He lived under Henry III, and died at Oxford about the year 1294. The industrious Leland, who was himself a moving library, was the first who published a short collection of the lives and characters of those learned persons who preceded the reign of Henry VII. Edward IV, during his short life, did a great deal for the encouragement of learning, and encouragement was given to learned foreigners to settle in England. The Liturgy of the Episcopal church was composed in this reign, and with the exception of two articles, is the same the church uses at the present day. Learning as well as liberty suffered an almost total eclipse in England during the bigoted bloody reign of Queen Mary, but it revived again in the reign of Elizabeth. Although she was so dictated to by her ministers, as to suffer the poet to languish to death in obscurity, she was no stranger to Spencer's Muse. She tasted the beauties of the divine Shakespeare, and raised genius from obscurity. During her long and peaceful reign knowledge shone with effulgent brightness. Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, and the Earl of Essex, the politest scholar of his age, flourished in her reign. Her successor, James I, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, gave encouragement for learned foreigners to reside in

England. He was himself no great author, but his example had a considerable effect upon his subjects, for in his reign were found those great masters of polemic divinity whose works are almost inexhaustible mines of knowledge. He was likewise the patron of Camden and other historians, as well as antiquaries, whose works are to this day standards in those studies. What was most noted in his reign was the translation of the Bible from the original tongue by the learned men, and is the same used at the present day. His son, Charles I, had great taste for the polite arts, especially sculpture, painting, and architecture. He was the patron of Reubens, Vandyck, Jones, and other eminent artists, so that had it not been for the civil wars, he would probably have converted his capital into a second Athens. The Earl of Arundel was, however, the great Maecenas of the age, and by the immense acquisitions he made of antiquities, especially his famous marble inscriptions, he may stand upon a footing as to the encouragement and utility of literature with the greatest of Medicean princes. The distinguished Milton, and poet laureate, also flourished in his reign. The public encouragement of learning and the arts suffered indeed an eclipse during the times of the civil wars, and the succeeding interregnum. Many very learned men, however, found their situation under Cromwell, though he was a stranger to their political sentiments, so easy that they followed their studies to the vast benefit of every branch of learning, and many works of vast literary merit appeared even in those times of distraction. Usher, Walton, Wallis, Harrington, Wilkins, and a number of other great names were

unmolested, and even favored by that usurper. The reign of Charles II was chiefly distinguished by the great proficiency to which he carried natural knowledge, especially by the institution of the Royal Society. The king was a good judge of those studies, and though irreligious himself, England never abounded more with learned and able divines than in his reign. His reign, notwithstanding the bad taste of his court in several of the polite arts, by some is reckoned the Augustan age in England, and is distinguished with the names of Boyle, Halley, Hooke, Sydenham, Harvey, Temple, Tillotson, Barrow, Butler, Cowley, Waller, Dryden, Wyckerly and Otway. Classic literature recovered many of its native graces, and though England under him could not boast of a James and a Vandyck, yet Christopher Wren introduced a more general regularity than had ever been known before in architecture. St. Paul's cathedral was built by him, which was thirty-seven consecutive years in building. He lived to see it finished after himself had laid the corner stone. The reign of James I, though he likewise had a taste for the fine arts, is chiefly distinguished in the province of literature by the compositions that were published by the English divines against popery, and which for strength of reasoning and depth of erudition never were equalled in any age or country. The names of Newton and Locke adorn the reign of William III, and he had a particular esteem for the latter. Learning, says the historian, flourished in his reign merely by the excellency of the soil in which it was planted. The improvement which learning and all of the polite arts received under the auspices of Queen Anne, put

his court at least on a footing with that of Louis XIV, in its glorious and palmy days. Many of the great men who had figured in the reigns of the Stuarts and William, were still alive and in full service of their faculties, while a new race sprung up in the republic of learning and the arts. Addison, Prior, Pope, Lord Bolingbrook, Lord Shaftsbury, Arbuthnot, Congreve, Steele, Rowe, and many excellent writers, both in verse and prose, need but to be mentioned to be admired, and the English were as triumphant in literature as in war. The learned ministers of George I, were patrons of erudition, and some of them were no mean proficients themselves. Although George II was himself no Maecenas, yet his reign yielded to none of the preceding in the numbers of learned and ingenious men that it produced. In the reign of George III the great Earl of Chatham made the United Kingdom ring with his eloquence. In the reigns of William IV and Queen Victoria, there are Sir Robert Peel, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Chalmers, and Whiteside.

From what we have collected from history, we learn that it was civilization that roused England from her lethargy and barbarism, where she had been slumbering for the long lapse of ages. It was civilization that enabled her to arise upon the wings of destiny, and throw her future glories and splendors around her. It was civilization that enabled her to spread her commerce over the fairest portions of the globe, from the east to the west, from the Arctic ocean of the north to the great southern ocean. She has sent her couriers over the bounding seas, and every gale of the ocean