we must content ourselves by referring our readers to the "Letters" themselves.

Mr. Page's Letter to Lord Ashley contains much valuable information. It is a pity that it was not put into a more methodical form. We fear many persons will be deterred from giving that "Letter" the attention it deserves, from the interminable-looking paragraphs which fill up its unbroken pages, and for want of some index or headings to guide the reader through a maze of arguments and piled-up facts.

Mr. Burgess's Letter to Sir James Graham is perhaps something too much of a parliamentary paper for the general reader. And Mr. Stowell's Letter, though meagre of information, is an animated appeal to "the powers that be," on behalf of the destitute millions. But there is one point upon which we shall offer a few observations before we terminate this already lengthy article—it is the question of compulsory attendance. Upon this our reverend Authors differ. Mr. Burgess thinks a compulsory system, like that of Prussia, is not to be thought of in this country; but our system must be one of inducement. (p. 11.) Mr. Page sees no valid reason why the legislature should not interfere to protect children from the sad consequences of a neglect of parental obligation (p. 113); and although he writes cautiously, it is easy to perceive that he leans towards the compulsory system. Mr. Stowell appears to have found a via media, which to us is new, and to him appears the most simple of all expedients. He would not use direct coercion, as in Prussia, but would have a law, "that no manufacturer, mechanic, nor any master whatever, shall engage any servant or apprentice who cannot read and write decently; or rather, who cannot produce a certificate from some minister or teacher that he has been not less than four years in some satisfactory school." It requires no great power of penetration to see the impracticability of a law like this, and, we may add, the injustice, in many cases, of visiting the sins of the parents upon the children. We have some recollection of a law made by a nation of antiquity, which ordered the parents to be punished for the crimes committed by their children; because it was alleged, that if the parents had done their duty towards their children, in properly training them up, they would not have committed the crimes. Mr. Stowell would reverse this ancient and curious piece of legislation, and punish the child for the remainder of his life, because the selfish parents had neglected to send him to school for four years. "An immense extension of the facilities for gratuitous education" would increase the guilt of the parents who neglected to use them, but would render the child a still greater object of

pity and regard. A more efficient mode of gathering poor children into our public schools would be, to gather, first, the parents into our churches, and place them under the appliances of religion. The clergyman, or the district visitor, will more easily "compel them to come in," than a legislative interference, by which the so much cherished personal liberty of an Englishman might be seriously invaded.

This great question of national education is again before the legislature and the country. The enormous evils of popular ignorance have been acknowledged by all parties; and instead of model prisons and penal colonies, men are inclined to try what schools and churches will effect. No previous administration ever had the subject so completely within its grasp. The question was never before brought into so manageable a shape; and if some decided measure for improving the religious and moral state of our poor and industrious classes be not proposed by the present government, despair, we fear, will seize upon the minds of all good men, and the fate of this country will be sealed. Another quarter of a century will be enough to brutalize the neglected districts; the alienation of the poorer classes from the rich will be complete; and the connexion between the governors and governed will be severed, except where it is kept up by a strong police force or a military encampment.

The problem, whether social order can be maintained without religion and moral influence, is now to be solved; and whether man, "being by nature a child of wrath," and prone to evil, can be safely left to himself, and to the corrupting world around him; or whether he should not rather be "trained up in the way he should go, that when he is old he may not depart from it."

THE WALDENSES; or, The Fall of Rora. A Lyrical Sketch, with other Poems. By AUBREY DE VERE. Oxford: Parker. 1842.

VALDENSES: VALDO: AND VIGILANTIUS. By the Rev. W. S. GILLY, D.D. Edinburgh: Black. 1841.

THERE are some things which seem too sad and solemn for verse. At least, we must confess our inability to enjoy this "Lyrical Sketch." We notice it, solely for the valuable testimony which the volume bears to truth; in its just and rational disregard of all the efforts of the Maitlands, and Dowlings, and Todds, to establish the hypothesis of Bossuet, and to deal with the Waldenses as a "modern sect." Here, in a beautiful little volume, issuing from the "Catholic" press of "J. H. Parker, of Oxford," and published in London by Mr. Maitland's own bookseller, Rivingtons, we are told, that "the Waldenses of Piedmont, whose origin is lost in the gloom of antiquity, are not to be confounded with the Reformers of the same name, so called from their master Peter Valdo." And again, "Is it not extraordinary,' says the historian Leger, 'that it has never once happened that any one of our princes or their ministers should have offered the least contradiction to their Valdensian subjects, who have again and again asserted in their presence, "We are descended from those who, from father to son, have preserved entire the apostolical faith, in the valleys which we now occupy. Permit us, therefore, to have that free exercise of our religion which we have enjoyed from time out of mind, before the dukes of Savoy became princes of Piemond."

Thus does the main effort of Mr. Maitland's life fall utterly ineffectual and lifeless to the ground. After his "Facts and Documents" have been for several years before the public; after his Letter to Dr. Mill had striven to prop up the crumbling argument; we have here a most satisfactory proof of the utter futility of all his efforts, inasmuch as the men of his own ranks treat the whole affair as a failure; and with a dozen words put aside his argument, quietly saying, "the Waldenses of Piedmont, whose origin is lost in the gloom of antiquity, are not to be confounded with the reformers of the same name, so called from their master Peter Waldo: "-Mr. Maitland's whole hypothesis depending on his being permitted thus to confound them.

The controversy, then, may be said to be at an end. In fact, after the signal overthrow sustained by Mr. Maitland, in the first volume of Mr. Faber's Provincial Letters, this result might rea

sonably have been looked for. We shall, therefore, allude to it historically rather than controversially, and shall merely re-produce, from Mr. Faber's work on the Albigenses and Vallenses, the principal facts which history has handed down.

The grand object with Bossuet, and, after him, with Maitland, Todd, and the whole Tractarian party, is-to urge the impossibility of Christ's Church having failed and become extinct during the middle ages and then to drive us to find that church in Rome. But, to accomplish this, it is absolutely necessary to maintain, and if possible prove, that it existed nowhere else. In order to effect this, the baseless calumnies of the persecutors of the Paulicians and Albigenses are eagerly adopted, and we are assured that "no one ever doubted" that all these sects were Manichæan. Still, were there any ground for this charge, there would yet remain the Waldensian church, against which no tenet now considered heretical by members of the English Church, can be alleged. This church, therefore, must be disposed of in another way. Peter Waldo, about the end of the twelfth century, formed a society called the "Poor men of Lyons ;" and these, in process of time, began to be called, from their founder, by the name of Waldenses. Seizing upon this fact with avidity, it is boldly declared that this was the commencement of the Vallensic church; and that, consequently, the preservation of Christ's truth through all the gloom of the dark ages must still belong to the Papacy.

Now this hypothesis can only be maintained, as Mr. Faber, in his Provincial Letters, has shewn, by the most resolute refusal to see or hear any evidence of a contrary description. It is not that there is any deficiency of historical information; but that Mr. Maitland, while he professes to search honestly after the truth, entirely suppresses all allusion to no fewer than twelve different witnesses, who tell us of the existence of a pure Church among the Cottian Alps, during century after century before Peter Waldo's birth; all which witnesses had been produced by Mr. Faber, in his learned work on the subject. These witnesses we shall now pass in review; and a very rapid and cursory glance at the facts to which they testify, will suffice to shew how utterly untenable is the assumption, that "the Waldenses were a modern sect."

The first circumstance in the chain of evidence, dates from the very budding of the Apostacy. It was towards the close of the fourth century, and commencement of the fifth, that the whole flood of those corruptions which afterwards became consolidated into the Papal system, began to pour in upon the Church. At that instant, one faithful witness was heard, one clear and powerful voice, protesting against the excessive veneration of saints and martyrs;

the blind adoration paid to relics: the undue honour and importance attached to celibacy, and the folly of reviving the heathen custom, of burning tapers in mid-day, before the tombs or shrines of the saints. This was Vigilantius.

By his protest, he brought down upon his own head the bitterest wrath of Jerome. The monk of Bethlehem pours forth the most furious diatribes against Vigilantius. It is from his tirades, however, that we gather the few facts which have survived concerning this early Protestant. As we owe to Petrus Siculus almost all our knowledge of the Paulicians, so the history of Vigilantius must be gleaned from the pages of Jerome. From those pages, however, we can distinctly gather, that this maintainer of primitive Christianity against the corruptions of the Nicene age, was not without a considerable body of supporters. His influence must have been extensive, to have created a necessity for the interference of Jerome. It was in consequence of the spread of his opinions that Riparius and Desiderius, two adherents of the growing superstition, sent from France to Palestine, to engage the pen of Jerome against the contumacious heretic.

And Jerome, in his treatise, allows the important fact to escape him, that not the common people only, but bishops even, were among the Vigilantian sect. One other circumstance, also, then of slight importance, but now of great interest, as denoting, probably, the real date of the rise of the Valdensian church, we find in an epistle of Jerome's; namely, that his antagonist wrote from the very spot which was afterwards the country of the Valdenses, "inter Hadriæ fluctus Cottiique Regis Alpes." 2

The next trace of the existence of pure religion in these districts, we may observe in another Popish writer, though of a much later date. Pilichdorf, in the thirteenth century, treating of the Valdenses in the most hostile strain, thus writes:

"They say," reports that writer, "that, in the time of Con"stantine, a companion of Pope Sylvester, disliking the excessive "enrichment of the Church by the donations of the Emperor, and "on that account separating himself from Sylvester, maintained "the way of poverty; asserting, that the true Church was conti"nued in the line of his own adherents, and that Sylvester with "his adherents had fallen away from the true Church. Further66 more, they say: that, at the end of three hundred years from "the time of Constantine, a certain person, named Peter, sprang up from a region called Valdis; who similarly taught the way

1" Proh nefas! episcopos sui sceleris dicitur habere consortes: si tamen episcopi nominandi sunt, qui non ordinant diaconos, nisi prius uxores duxerint."-Hieron, adv. Vigil. c. i. op. vol. ii. p. 158. 2 Hieron. epist. liii.