leading spirits in both. Ronge was a church reformer, and a political regenerator. The noble-hearted Robert Blum was one of the presiding members in the free congregation at Leipzig, as well as a political martyr at Vienna. Ronge had now an unrestricted diocese to visit, and into whatever city he entered, as the Hero of Church Re-organization, the people flocked round him in countless crowds, asking him also to address them on the new organization of the state, which the patriot-reformer invariably did. These two grand ideas, political freedom and spiritual independence, interpenetrating and complementing each other, had the full range of his soul, and he never neglected an opportunity of pouring them forth, in their native inspiration and worth, upon every congregation he addressed. Ronge now visited and refreshed the communities which the Protestant tyranny of the King of Prussia had laid low. Besides which there now lay another and higher game before him. His old enemy, Metternich, who had hitherto forbidden him to enter Austria, and had even been generous enough to offer no small sum for his head, was now on his travels, sent off by the indignant execrations of the population of Vienna. The same men who had banished the hoary absolutist, now sent an invitation to the apostle of all freedom to visit them. His ideas have already, spite of Metternich's proclamation, penetrated the Catholic population of Vienna to a great extent, and only his presence is necessary to organize the congregation of Free Catholics. The invitation he accepts, and sets forward with high beating heart to the metropolis of despotism. On his journey, Ronge exclaims to one of his travelling companions, "What is yonder castle aloft there ?" "Stolzenfels." "Ah! it is just three years since Metternich, up there resolved on the extirpation of the German Catholics, and now I am on my way to Vienna." It was on the 14th of September, 1848, that Ronge and his brother entered Vienna. The old placards on all the walls announcing the "old sinner's" reward of 100 ducats to any one who would catch Ronge, dead or alive, were now covered over with others intimating his arrival. No one, however, seems to have any lingering for the ducats. The people

in Vienna had endured quite long enough the "old sinner's" iron rule, and were quite prepared for reform and liberty. On the following Sunday, Ronge met the congregation in the great room of the Odeon. From eight to ten thousand people were assembled. Dr. Pauli introduced Ronge to the assembly, and gave him a hearty welcome to their society; then Mr. Scholl presented to him a company of young ladies clothed in white robes, and said, "The Viennese German Catholics greet thee through their darlings-through their children." This was a brilliant reception for Ronge, and inspired him to speak to the immense multitude with fervour and effect, which, in return saluted him with vehement applause. On the same day upwards of two thousand people joined the free congregation; and before the expiration of three weeks, upwards of four thousand more were enrolled. In this visit to Vienna, Ronge found that in no country in Europe is the national feeling in favour of democratic institutions and religious freedom so intense and wide, as in the one whose rulers are the very ideal of absolutism and despotism.

For a short time Ronge's star is in the ascendant-bright and beautiful it is, till the black thunder-clouds of imperial despotism shall have re-collected themselves. For the moment the hearts of the true men in Austria are lighted up with an unwonted joy; they feel themselves men, and are almost ready to fall down and worship the intrepid apostle of liberty and humanity. But while they are revelling in their dearbought privileges, Windischgrätz is preparing to extinguish it, and clap the hoof of oppression on them heavier than ever. But so long as the sun does shine, Ronge has hay to make. Having assisted the congregation in Vienn into self-sustaining energy, he prepares to accept an invitation to visit Styria, where there are multitudes waiting to receive his ideas and join his community. Gratz, the capital of this province, is the first place he visits. The Jesuits endeavour to prevent him getting a place to hold his meeting in; but a large riding-school supplies his wants. There he spoke, for a time, to an immense congregation, which listened joyously to him, till towards the close, the Jesuits succeeded in getting

sovereigns. Take away these, or even reduce them to the condition of honest and oath-fearing men, and Ronge might at this moment return to his labours, and find his churches re-organised and strengthened, and the people as enthusiastic as ever. The probabilities are even now strong that better days are in store for Prussia in a not very remote future, for the Jesuits the king took into his bosom have stung him, and become a plague to him that he would gladly be rid of. He has got a proper recompence; let him now see and do justice to the true man whom he has persecuted.

To return to Ronge in England. He has been here now about two years. The retreat of the exile is on the shady base of Hampstead Heath. Here he has dwelt, and still dwells, in a quietude which, independently of his exile, must be grateful to his fretted spirit, after the toils and agitations of the last eight years. Nor has he here been without labour. The never-resting spirit within him has been planning some schemes to keep up the fervour of his friends in Germany, and to awaken the sympathies and co-operation of British patriots with his labours on the continent. The spirit of freedom and reform which he has brought | over with him is now for the time a British spirit; it has gone into the general circulation of that rushing stream which ceaselessly presses round British life and British institutions; the tale of his labours and wrongs has become a portion of our own literature, free among ourselves what must not be published in the imperial dominions. Ronge is also about to organize a free German catholic church in London, at which he will in a measure repeat those services which have so often been the terror of both priests and despots on the Continent. Another movement has already been set on foot, called the "United German Democratic League." This designs to aid in the accomplishment of the real political redemption of the fatherland, and Ronge is associated with it as its treasurer.

Already has Ronge become an object of pious solicitude to an arch priest of high eminence in England. Some little time since he was waited on by an inferior priest, who stated to him that his master had heard he was ill, and in all Catholic love had sent him to in

quire if he did not think it a favourable moment to return to his allegiance to the church he had injured; the worthy priest also assured him he had been urging on all pious Christians the duty of praying earnestly for his soul, and had himself been so much absorbed in the devout exercise that he had been praying for him all the way from the Bank down to Hampstead in the omnibus; at present all these devotions seem to have been attended with no fruit, nor had the priest sufficient power of persuasion to induce him to a reconciliation with the holy church, which was holding out her loving arms to welcome back the straying sheep. What another sixpenny ride may effect, with simultaneous supplications, remains to be seen. Another Jesuit priest has also been trying his hand on Ronge; he went to his house in plain dress, but could not thereby hide his nature from view. His was a most benevolent mission; he, supposing Ronge to be a poor and destitute exile, to whom a little money might be serviceable, went and told him that he had an excellent friend, who had conceived the humane thought of handing over a little cash to him, which would undoubtedly be given as hush money; Ronge informed him that he was in no circumstances of want himself, but that any donation the unknown friend might be pleased to give toward the new German Catholic Church in London he would be happy to receive and appropriate to that purpose. Foiled in his attempt to bribe, the priest brought no money for the church.

Ronge has been styled the New Luther. The comparison between him and the early reformer has some points truly of concidence; but in others it altogether fails. The movements with which their names are respectively associated both had their origin in a barefaced attempt of the Romish church to fling dust in the eyes of the people, in order to find an easy way into their pockets. Tetzell, in the 16th century, went round Germany hawking his indulgence-wares, selling pardons for sins either committed or contemplated, at an unusually low charge. This was the signal for the outburst of the feeling which led to Luther's reformation. Arnoldi, the old clothes bishop of the 19th century, hung out an old 'acket for all the ladies

and gentlemen to "walk up and see," who were willing to pay the showman for the peep. This functionary also went too far, for he brought the old house about his ears with a terrible crash. In this respect, the making use of a gross hypocrisy as the startingpoint for a new development in the church, the two reformers acted in common. But almost from this point the comparison ceases. Luther was assisted in his crusade against indulgences and Rome by the powerful arms of several of the princes of Germany. Ronge had only his own sense of duty and a national feeling to support him; all the princes who were not dead against him turned to him at least the cold shoulder, and bade him get on as best he could. Luther provided for his secession a stereotyped church constitution, and a creed settled and fixed till the resurrectionday. Ronge, on the other hand, has provided his churches with a constitution which will adapt itself to the spirit of the time, subject to all the amendments which the progress of time suggests as necessary, and has bound them to no definite symbolic creed, but affords scope for the growth and enlargement of their convictions and belief. Luther confined himself to church duties proper, and never went beyond them, but even enjoined on the members of his churches not to meddle in politics, but to be content with just such privileges as the princes spontaneously gave them; Ronge, on the contrary, has made religious freedom and political liberty inseparable, and urged his followers to be at once Christians and patriots, and has himself set the example. The difference between the two men is interpreted in the fact that Luther lived in the 16th and Ronge in the 19th century. The ideas which were groaning for birth in the 16th century found a full and adequate exponent in Luther; and but for the previous development of these, Ronge had had no platform on which three centuries later he could unfold the ideas of his own age. We make no invidious distinctions between these two noble-souled men. If it be true that Luther had to confess he had made many mistakes in the organisation of his movement, true also it is that Ronge will one day, with equal frankness, deplore many errors that exist in

his reformation. The two men, however, have this in common, that where we are obliged to withhold our assent from any of their proposals or acts, we are yet compelled to accord to both of them our hearty admiration.

But as the qualities of the movements led by these two men respectively have necessarily so few points in common, yet if we look into the interior of the men, we shall there see a wonderful harmoniousness and unity. Both of them, sons of the old church, gave their mother a deadly bite. Both of them, sons of truth, were constant and filial to their sublimer parent. Their attachment to truth was hardy, almost desperate. Whatever she moved them to they would speak, and speak boldly. Both were men full of courage and gigantic bravery when truth was assailed. Luther would go to Worms, and tell his revelations of truth, though "there were as many devils in Worms as there were tiles upon the house-tops." Ronge would always rush to the point of danger, and say what truth had commissioned him, though a despot met him in every town, or a prison yawned to immure him, or priests hired drunken assassins to murder him, or lewd fellows of the baser sort had had their orders to pitch him into the river. The castle at Wartburg for a long time concealed the early reformer and made him silent, but it never stopped his ear against the truth which was whispering therein; Ronge's imprisonment led him but into a closer communion and a holier alliance with truth, and each on their deliverance became only the more valiant for the truth. The inner movements of each of these men's lives became the seed of life-revolutions, whose effects are not limited by the centuries in which they sprang up. Luther's truth-created organisations exist, or have been enlarged into better existing ones, at this day; Ronge's have in many cases been suppressed by the tyrant's iron hand, but they are not silenced, they still grow spiritually; and some hundreds of now-existing churches proclaim them to be still living, and waiting only for freer times that they may flourish again.

Misrepresentation is a powerful instrument in the hands of priests with which to darken a man's designs and paralyse his power, and this they laid

thickly about Ronge. He has been declared to be a man whose character comprises all the means and the extremes of licentiousness; but, happily for Ronge, the imputations rest upon nothing but the exacerbated ire of the priests. He has been published as an anarchic republican, a communist, and a levelling socialist. With respect to the two last charges, Englishmen who have been taught to believe them ought to accept the unqualified repudiation of them which he himself has given; as to the first of the three, Ronge is a republican, but not an anarchist; and however content we may be with our excellent constitution and free institutions, we have yet to learn that to be a republican is a crime in a man, who on the continent has so often been made the victim of the perjury of princes, and who, with his friends, has so often been smitten by the iron hands of absolutist despots. Ronge is a republican, because he sees in the sovereignty of the people their only extrication from the savage and cruel bondage which they endure, and their deliverance from those crushing social evils which the excesses and lusts of their princely rulers have entailed upon them. Ronge is a republican because his great heart sympathises with the enormous sorrows that wring the souls of his countrymen ;the princes by their despotic rule are a fearful incubus on the freedom, industry, cultivation, intelligence, and morals of the people; and in the removal of such irresponsible power, he sees the highest moral, social, and religious elevation which the people may attain to.

But we must close this sketch. Ronge is in England, and the man who spends a day, or even an hour, with him cannot but feel the intercourse an honour and a privilege, nor will he quit his society without feeling himself drawn into a vortex of sympathy with him and with the noble cause which has made him an exile. Ronge is a man of personal appearance truly prepossessing, in height not beyond the middling stature, about five feet six; the long trailing curls which once offended his church superiors still flow gracefully round his head! his forehead is ample and high, his eyes are jet-lights which dazzle and penetrate his upper lip and chin are covered

one,

by a luxuriant dark moustache and beard, which we fancy would make him still more terrible should he ever again confront the Pope or any of his minions. Unlike to the fat burly portraits of Luther, he is somewhat spare in his build, and altogether suggests the idea of a man of refinement and high cultivation.

Far distant, we say, be the day when it shall become necessary to write a complete biography of Ronge! There is work we believe for him yet to do. We would not over-tax the abilities of any man who has already wrought well; but labour is the life of Ronge, and we believe we only feebly utter the heart-longings of the man himself when we say, we hope the time may speedily come when he may freely return to his own country and complete his noble work of emancipating his brethren from the claws of the despots and the fangs of the priests; and, finally, in the salutation of his fatherland, we say to him from our heart of hearts, Leb' Wohl.

CHARLES DICKENS.

"C'est un panorama mouvent de toutes les classes de la société anglaise; une critique fine et piquante de tous les ridicules, une vaste composition, ou mille personages se mouvent et posent devant le lecteur."-Preface of the French Translator of Dickens.

LITTLE more than forty years ago, at Landport, Portsmouth, the most popular, if not the greatest modern author, Charles Dickens, was born. His father, Mr. John Dickens, who has but recently deceased, was at the time filling a post as clerk in the Navy Pay Office, which required him to reside at one or another of the various ports of the kingdom, and, as it fell out, at Portsmouth, on the 15th of February, 1812, his most celebrated son was born.

When the war ceased, there being, fortunately for England and the world, far less occasion for navy pay clerks Mr. John Dickens retired upon a pen sion, and going to London, he (being a man of considerable talent and good education) obtained an engagement to report the debates in Parliament, and eventually became attached to the "Chronicle," on the staff of which he remained for some years. Dickens's early recollections of Portsmouth are

probably few and far between; but he visited it at a later period and gathered matter from it for some of his vivid delineations. There was the theatre of the magnificent-minded Mr. Vincent Crummles; and there, too, was the abode of Bulph the Pilot, "who decorated his house with a boat-green door, and exhibited on the mantelshelf of his parlour, among natural and maritime curiosities, the little finger of a man who had been drowned." The description of Bulph's residence and its singular ornament, is no doubt a real picture. There is a touch of pilot-nature in that little-finger relic, which probably would not have suggested itself to even the fertile imagination of Charles Dickens.

To what particular school Dickens went, and whether he was a quick boy or a slow one, or whether his habits were gay and child-like, or teeming with old world fancies, we are not aware. The power with which he describes thoughtful, retired children, and the love he has for delineating them and picturing their fancies, indicates a sympathy most probably springing from his own early memories; but our record of him begins with his entrance into life when, after finishing his education, his father determined on articling him to an attorney, in whose office he actually passed sufficient time to make him acquainted with legal technicalities. We have heard it declared that he finished his articles, but believe the statement to be erroneous. Certain it is, that Dickens early evinced a determination to follow his father's profession of reporter, and set himself to acquire short-hand. That is a task surrounded by difficulties, which have sufficed entirely to deter less persevering students than Dickens, who thus describes his progress:

"I did not allow my resolution with respect to the Parliamentary debates to cool. It was one of the irons I began to heat immediately, and one of the irons I kept hot and hammered at with a perseverance I may honestly admire. I bought an approved scheme of the noble art and mystery of stenography (which cost me ten and sixpence), and plunged into a sea of perplexity, that brought me, in a few weeks, to the confines of distraction. The changes that were rung upon dots,

which in one position meant such a thing, and in another position something else entirely different; the wonderful vagaries that were played by circles; the unaccountable consequences that resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects of a curve in the wrong place-not only troubled my waking hours, but re-appeared before me in my sleep. When I had groped my way blindly through these difficulties, and had mastered the alphabet, which was an Egyptian temple in itself, there then appeared a procession of new horrors, called arbitrary characters-the most despotic charecters I have ever known--who insisted, for instance, that a thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expectation, that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvantageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind I found that they had driven everything else out of it; then beginning again, I forgot them; while I was picking them up I dropped the other fragments of the system-in short, it was almost heart-breaking."

a

The difficulties once mastered, however, Dickens progressed rapidly, and obtained his first engagement as reporter on an ultra-liberal paper called the "True Sun," which was manfully struggling for an existence. The politics of a paper on which a man is engaged must not be identified with his own-liberal, Mr. Dickens is, as every man of extensive thought and mind must be, as regards social questions, but his politics are not of that class generally understood by the term ultra-liberal.

From the staff of the "True Sun" Mr. Dickens passed into the reporting corps of the "Morning Chronicle," and it was whilst engaged upon that paper he first gave proofs of his intellect.

His reports were distinguished by clearness, vigour, and extreme exactness; and he had the power of seizing upon the peculiar style of each speaker. Few people know how much the orators of all grades owe to reporters. Speeches which are delivered with pompous verbosity and laboured attempts at eloquence, and which tire the hearer and distract his attention, read in the columns of the next morning's paper as plain, straightforward, and sometimes eloquent orations. Elaborations and repetitions are pruned down