NORTHERN WORTHIES.

ANNE CLIFFORD,

COUNTESS OF DORSET, PEMBROKE, AND MONTGOMERY.

JOHN KNOX, during his second residence at Geneva, put forth "The first blast of the trumpet against the monstrous regiment of women." It was aimed at that Mary of England who was persuaded by priests and other ill-disposed persons to attempt the re-establishment of what she conceived to be the CHURCH, by the exertion of her secular power. John Knox ought to have written "against the monstrous regiment of priests," which in kingdoms as in private families, is always most powerful over women, because women are more docile, more confiding, have a much greater yearning after heaven than men. Moreover, they are almost sole patentees of the virtue of self-denial, and if once they can be convinced that humanity, pity, toleration, or what you will, is a self-indulgence, and a self-seeking, it follows as necessarily as U after Q, that cruelty, hard-heartedness, and intolerance, are a mortification

VOL. II.

* i. e. the Government.

B

of the flesh, meritorious exactly in proportion as it is painful.

The priests of some religions undertake, for a donsideration, to bear the sins of such of the laity as put trust in them. They may perhaps find, at last, that they have spoken more truth than they meant to do.* It is no small portion of the sins of the earth,

*These petulant crudities of indigested thoughts from the prima viæ of reflection, these temerities of interpocular talk, vex my spirit in dear Hartley's writings. So here. In abusing the Priest he at once justifies the principle or assumption by which he deludes, and removes all the mischief consequent upon the delusion, that is, makes it practically no delusion at all. So, too, Southey has taken pains to quiet the universal conscience, by the assurance that prayers offered to the Virgin Mary, or St. Boniface, will be equally acceptable to God, and bring down the same blessing, as those offered to the Omniscient through the only Mediator. But in this charity to the poor benighted Papists, what a cruel bill of indictment is brought against Wickliff and Luther, yea, against John and Paul !-S. T. C.

The heresy against which these earnest and suggestive remarks are directed, is that which denies the existence, despairs of the attainment, or slights the value of objective truth, in things spiritual, making the whole efficacy of religious observances to consist in intention. This inference however was not present to the mind of the writer when he penned the passage in question. He prayed sincerely, and in his way contended earnestly for the prevalence of truth over error; to which he would have attributed an immense importance upon the whole, however charitably, however hopefully, he may have looked upon the case of individuals. With Dr. Arnold, and many, very many pious thoughtful Protestants, both before and after the Reformation, he held the Christian Priesthood, to be in reality, as in name, a Presbyterate, ministerial and pastoral merely. To sacerdotal pretension, under every disguise, he was irreconcilably opposed, as well on religious as political

of which priests shall bear the blame, and the whole blame; for the reluctant obedience of those who accepted them for the sake of the Lord, whose com

grounds. On the other hand he views the relation upheld, amid all the throes of an imperfect, transitory state, by every created thing, to the Creating Love,-by every human soul, to the Almighty Father of spirits,-with an affectionate hopeful faith, a certain tender believingness-which if it often appeared in the form of sentiment, was by no means merely sentimental. In the depths of weakness and error, under whatever seeming contradiction, he traced a work of atonement going on, and in particular, he recognised an effectual appeal to heaven, in the upward glance, in every suppliant and precatory sigh, however dim the eye, or feeble the utterance. With the deeper thought and clearer insight of the elder Coleridge, he had indeed less acquaintance than might have been expected: he had not fully possessed himself of the reconciling idea which his father spent the latter portion of his life in developing, and setting forth, though he was far indeed from affecting to make light of it. His intellectual vocation was different; and it was very well that he did not adopt a phraseology of which he had not fully mastered the forces but whatever error may lurk in his expressions, or however they may fall short of the truth, his views on the Church, as they appear in the above passage, and throughout his writings, were certainly part and parcel of a sincere, a pious, and a humble mind-early formed, gradually matured, and consistently, but not uncharitably maintained and if this be so, whatever may be the freedom and vivacity of his language, he is not really amenable to the charge of petulance or temerity, in so far as these terms convey a moral reproof,

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Both father and son have gone to their rest, and to their account. They live to the world only as thinkers and. writers, with equal and independent rights. As such, with whatever perplexity of feeling, they must now be regarded, by a literary executor, while acting in that capacity, however nearly related to both.-D. C.

mission they had forged, shall not lose its reward. He that said that a cup of cold water, given for his sake, should not be given in vain, would take no exception, if for his sake, it were ignorantly given to Judas Iscariot.

We have been induced to sound this "Counterblast" to the "first blast of the Trumpet," because we believe that women, when they do err, err far more frequently from superstition, than from passion, and that their worst errors proceed from too great a distrust of their common sense and instinctive feelings, and too great a reliance on men, or serpents, or priests, who promise to make them wise. Under the name priest, we comprehend all creatures, whether Catholic or Protestant, clerks or laymen, who either pretend to have discovered a byeway to heaven, or give tickets to free the legal toll-gates, or set up toll-gates of their own; or, either explicitly or implicitly discredit the authorised map, and insist upon it, that no one can go the right way, without taking them for guides, and paying them their fees.

We then conclude, that the main disqualification of women to rule, arises from the easiness with which they are ruled, and their proneness to give the reins into dishonest and usurping hands; a fault so nearly allied to the Christian virtues of humility, docility, and obedience, so germane to that gentle, confiding spirit, which is at once their safety and their peril, their strength and their weakness, that we doubt whether the defining power of words can fix the landmark between the good and the evil. It must be "spiritually discerned."

But no good woman wishes to rule. Ambition, a far deadlier sin than the world conceives, and a degrading vice into the bargain, makes worse havoc in a female heart than in a male. For the graces

of womanhood are all womanly,-shy, timid, apt to fly from the most distant approach of harm. In man, many virtues sometimes consort with a giant vice, as we read in the book of Job that there was a meeting of the sons of God, and that Satan came also among them. But in woman, the dominance of any one evil passion is as the "abomination of desolation sitting where it should not;" as the unclean spirit in the empty house that took seven spirits worse than itself, and dwelt with them. There are few instances in which ambitious women have even retained the conservative virtue of their sex. We do not recollect more than one virgin Queen in authentic history. But what is yet more fearful, ambition perverts, where it does not extinguish, the maternal affection, and makes the holiest feelings a mighty incentive to crime. Semiramis, Agrippina, and Catherine de Medici, are not the only instances that might be adduced of women who have not merely scrupled no wickedness for their sons' advancement, but actually corrupted the minds of their offspring, and plunged them into an excess of sensuality, that themselves might govern in their names. But we

need not look so high to see the mischief at work. There is no situation on earth more undesirable than that of a portionless beauty with an ambitious mother. The manœuvres, the falsehoods, to which parents who are poor and proud, will sometimes condescend, in order to bring about what is called a great match for a daughter, (that is to say, a connection with a family by whom she will most likely be despised, even now, and in the good old times, might very probably have been poisoned,) far exceed the utmost ingenuity of novelists to devise. And though it is to be hoped that such intrigues and plottings are comparatively rare in the cultivated part of society,