the nobility and higher classes of the subjects, have made great advances in civilization since that time. Literature and science are cultivated, commerce is extended, and the official administration of the country is placed on a new footing; but in other respects Russia has not advanced in civilization. Her government is as despotic as ever; and, with the exception of the higher classes, and the chief cities, her people appear to be as barbarous. We are not aware that there is any great improvement in the character of the priesthood; and recent events appear to show that even with her sovereign and his ministers, honesty and good faith are as little regarded as in the times which preceded the age of Peter the Great. We really know little of the internal condition of this great empire; but what we know leads us to believe that its civilization will only be advanced by some great internal revolution, or outward calamity, which may perhaps be nearer at hand than we suppose. At all events, these curious relations of the state of Russia at the time when she was undergoing one revolution, slight and imperfect as it may have been, cannot be read without a considerable degree of interest. Russia, no doubt, owes much to Peter the Great, but she owes more to modern events, which have turned to her advantage, not by the foresight, or by the talents or power of her governors. Napoleon served Russia in the same way as Charles XII; her political position in Europe at the present moment is the result of external accidents; and it is for this and other reasons very difficult to predict her future.

ART. VI.-Leland the Antiquary.

Part I of the Lives of those eminent Antiquaries, John Leland, Thomas Hearne, and Anthony à Wood; containing the Life of John Leland, Antiquary, in the Reign of King Henry VIII, to which is added:1. The Ancient Treatise of Leland's New Year's Gyfte to King Henry. with the Commentaries of J. Bale, first printed in the year M.D.XLIX; also, 2, a Summary Account of the said J. Bale, sometime Bishop of Ossory in Ireland. Oxford: Printed at the Clarendon Press, for J. and J. Fletcher, in the Turl, and Joseph Pote, at Eton College, M.D.CC.LXXII. [2 vols. 8vo.]

ΚΥΚΝΕΙΟΝ ΑΣΜΑ. Cygnea Cantio. AVTORE IOANNE LELANDO, ANTIQUARIO.

CRANMER and Leland should stand in the fane of history side

by side on fellow pedestals, as they were two great minds needed and fitted for the crisis of the Reformation; and both rode

in the whirlwind, and one with greater and the other with less might directed the storm which overthrew the church as it stood on Romish grounds, with its monasteries and their learning; for though it was the lot of Leland to work out less good in behalf of learning, than Cranmer won for the church, and therefore he must be placed on Cranmer's left hand, yet while Cranmer's wisdom kept the church in her Catholic form, Leland's zeal rescued many treasures of the monastic learning from the hand of the spoiler.

Leland was the father of English antiquaries, a body of men who, since his time, have worked on in their humanizing pursuit, often under the sneer of satire, and the laughter of worldliness, till they can at last come to the wittenagemot of the learned of the nation, with a science worthy of fellowship with the proudest branches of our knowledge.

Although, when Henry assumed the headship of the church after his quarrel with the Pope, he was more likely to correct her in anger than in judgment; yet it seems to have been a happiness to the nation, that he had been bred a scholar; so that by his choice of the learned Cranmer and Leland, as wise workmen in the Reformation, the Catholic form of the church and much of her learning was preserved for posterity.

John Leland, or Laylande, was born at the beginning of the sixteenth century, in London, and most likely, as his biography says, in the parish of St. Michael le Querne, in the month of September, of one of the later years of the reign of Henry VII.

Leland lost his father and mother in his infancy, and was taken under the care of a kinsman, Mr. Thomas Myles, who placed him at St. Paul's School, under the grammarian Lillye; and at length sent him to Christ's College, Cambridge, whence he afterwards migrated to All Souls College, Oxford.

It is said that on the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, in the middle of the fifteenth century, many of the Greeks left their fatherland and withdrew to Italy, whither they carried to the learned of the land the welcome treasures of their language, and the works of their great forefathers. The tide of Greek learning is believed to have set towards England in the time of Leland; and he, with other Englishmen, went as far as France to meet it in the University of Paris: while a few scholars, among whom was Grocyn, the first teacher of Greek at Oxford, where Cardinal Wolsey founded a professorship of Greek, went still nearer to the spring head of the new learning, to Italy. Grocyn is said to have studied Greek at Florence, under Demetrius Chalcondyla; but how he could have

brought home from the tongue of a Greek, the pronunciation of the language, which we now hold in our schools and universities, we cannot understand.

Burnet, in his History of the Reformation, says that in the time of Henry VIII, there was a settlement of the controversy on the pronunciation of the Greek tongue. Cheeke, the Greek reader of Cambridge, opposed himself to the pronunciation of it like English, rather than like the Greek of Grecians; and Gardiner, who was chancellor, displaced him from his chair. Cheeke, however, with Sir Thomas Smith, Secretary of State, and others on his side, wrote a book in behalf of his Grecian Greek; and Burnet says that their reasoning settled the dispute, and the true way of pronouncing the Greek took place! Did it? What has become of it? If the true way has taken place in England, there is a wrong one in Greece, so that we may claim it is true, a kind of circumstantial evidence that we had our pronunciation from Greece, inasmuch as, since it is not found there, we may believe it is gone somewhere else.

We suppose that Latin has hardly ever been silent in England since the time of Cæsar. It was spoken by the Romans and Romanized Britons, and we need not believe that the language and learning of the Romans left Britain with the last of their legions; since Leland affirms, that before Oxford was built, there were in the neighbourhood of it two schools for Latin and Greek learning, and that they were called Græcolada and Latinolada; words which bear a Welsh form, as the olada may be aelodau, members or fellows as of a college and we are told by Geoffery of Monmouth and others, that the Britons had schools at Winchester, Chester, Caerleon, and Bangor; and it is as well known that Pelagius or Morgan was a Briton, as that he was a powerful writer in the Latin tongue in the fifth century.

The language and learning of the Romans could hardly have been given up by the Britons, when Latin was brought to the Saxons by Augustine, as the language of the Saxon or Romish Church; and, from his time till ours, it has been written or spoken daily, in the church before the Reformation; or in the University, as that of the reformed Church.

While Leland was in France, he not only ripened his knowledge of Greek and Latin, but learnt French, Italian, and Spanish; and he had wisely furnished himself with most useful keys to the written learning of his fatherland, in a knowledge of Welsh and Saxon; so that it would not be easy for the mind of a man in our days to

undertake the work of an antiquary with a better outfit of qualifications than those of Leland.

His editor Bale says of him,

"As for all authors of Greke, Latyne, Frenche, Italian, Spanish, Bryttishe, Saxonyshe, Walshe, Englyshe, or Scottyshe, towching in any wyse the understandynge of oure Antiquities, he had so fully redde and applyed them that they were in a manner grafted in hym as of nature.”

How needful it is that the antiquary should understand both of the old tongues of South Briton, Welsh, and Saxon, may be shown only by the name of a place in the Isle of Wight, Appuldore Comb. If an antiquary were to hear the name Appuldore Comb; and knew only Welsh and not Saxon, he would be almost sure to think, Oh! Appuldore Comb! is "y Cwm y pwll y dwr," or in short, "Cwm y pwll dwr," the valley with the pool of water; and if he understood Saxon, but not Welsh, he would be as likely to take it for what it is said to be, the Appuldre Comb, or the Valley of Appletrees. A topographer with only Welsh is likely to make all place-names British, and one with Saxon is as likely to deem them all Saxon; and so Leland with both tongues in his scales, weighed the etymologies of places with a discretion rarely excelled even with our generation.

When Leland came back to England, he took holy orders, and afterwards became chaplain to Henry VIII, who gave him the rectory of Poppeling or Pepling or Popering, within the marches of Calais.

Henry VIII was bred a scholar, so that Burnet says that he was the most learned prince that had been in the world for many ages, though the learning of his time was mostly school divinity or the canon law;" but we must bear in mind that the Universities must even then have had the faculty of arts, or otherwise they could not have given degrees in them. We cannot well hold that the yet unreformed church was loreless, whatever might be the quality of its learning; and Leland, who was a reformer and his editor Bale, who called the monks hard names, speaking of “Monkes, Chanons, Frires, Nonnes, Heremites, Pardoners, and Soule-Syngers,"

as

"Antichristes noyful cattle, and execrable sects of perdicion," are free and trustworthy witnesses to their treasures of books, which old Waterhous calls "the now lost libraries of our Cathedrall and Collegiate churches;" and the church had learned men from the time of Neot under Alfred, reckoning Lanfranc under Rufus, Thomas à Becket under Henry II, and William Wickham in the

time of Richard II, to Cardinal Morton and Cranmer, and the clerical founders of the University Colleges,

Bale says in his dedication of Leland's New Year's Gift to Edward the Sixth

"I dolourouslye lamente so greate an oversyght in the most elawfull overthrow of the sodometrouse Abbeyes and Fryeryes, when the most worthy monumentes of this realme, so myserably peryshed in the spoyle. Oh, that men of learnyng and of perfyght love to their nacyon, were not then appoynted to the serche of theyr libraryes, for the conservacyon of those most noble Antiquitiees."

At another place he says to the reader

"Yet remayned there of late yeares in serten lybraryes of thys realme (I have seane parte of them) the moste worthye monuments, concernynge Antiquite of Ninianus, Patricius, Ambrosius, Merlinus, Gildas-Albanius, Merlinus Sylvester, Thelesmus, Melkinus, Kentigernus, Nennius, Samuel, and other lyke, of whome the more parte wrote longe afore them."

"But thys is hyghly to be lamented, of all them that hath a naturall love to their contrey, eyther yet to lerned antiquyte, whiche is a moste syngular beuty to the same. That in turnynge over of the superstycyouse monasteryes, so lytle respecte was had to theyr lybraryes, for the saveguarde of those noble and precyouse monumentes. I do not denye it, but the monkes, chanons, and fryeres, were wycked both wayes as the oyled byshoppes and prestes for the more parte are yet styll. Fyrst for so much as they were the professed souldyours of Antichrist, and next to that, for so much as they were moste execrable lyvers. For these causes, I must confesse them most justly suppressed. Yet this would I have wyshed (and I scarcely utter it without tears) that the profytable corne had not so unadvysedly and ungodly peryshed wyth the unprofytable chaffe, nor the wholesome herbes with the unwholesome wedes, I meane the worthy workes of men godly minded, and lovelye memoryalles of our nation wyth those laysy lubbers and popysh belly goddes."

He says,

Avaryce was the other dyspatcher, whych hath made an ende both of our lybraryes and bokes, wythout respecte lyke as of other moste honest commodytees, to no small decaye of the commen welthe."

Whether Bale means that it was the avarice of the first buyers of the monasteries which dispatched the books, we do not know; but it seems from what he says elsewhere, that some of them sold books cheap enough to consumers. He writes,

"I knowe a merchante man, whyche shall at thys time be namelesse, that boughte the contentes of two noble lybraryes for forty shyllynges pryce, a shame it is to be spoken. Thys stuffe hath he occupyed in the stede of graye paper by the space of more than ten yeares, and yet he hath store ynough for as many years to come."