and generals defired to be buried there, because the founder, St. Joseph, had buried the Lord. Continually new grants of eftates and privileges were made to it by kings and great men and women, till in time it became the most wealthy and magnificent monaftery, as well as the most ancient, in the kingdom. Amongst the principal donors of land were king Arthur, king Domp, king Cenewalch, king Baldred, Wilfrid archbishop of York, king Kinewulph, king Ina, who built the great church, king Offa, king Egbert, king Athelwulf, king Alfred, queen Elfleda, king Edwin, king Edgar, king Edmund Ironfides, Edward the Elder, and Edward the Younger, king Canute, befides many other kings, queens, dukes, and noble men and ladies.

Amongst the chief perfons interred in the church and the cemetery were numbers of faints and bishops, as well as kings; of course, Joseph of Arimathea and his fon, the bishop of Shiraz, Phaganus and Diruvianus, the restorers of the place; St. Dunstan, one of the most famous of Glastonbury abbots, and archbishop of Canterbury, renowned for his pinching the devil's nose with hot tongs, but by his cotemporaries more renowned for his active genius. He built a small room near the oratory, where he worked. He wrote, he painted, he carved cups and croffes and other articles, as well as made vestments for the mass, which our author fays were kept to his time. He was deeply versed in historical ballads, and the magical songs of the Saxons, regarded in those dark times with peculiar horror. St. Urban the pope and martyr lay there, faints Appollinarius a disciple of the apostle Peter, and Ofwald, Patrick, Benignus, Aidan, bishop of Lindisfarne, the Venerable Bede; the bones of St. Gildas the hiftorian, of St. Hilda, abbess of Whitby, and of many other abbeffes and fainteffes.

As for kings and great men, fuch were the numbers brought

hither to be buried, that the whole pavement of the church, even about the high altar, above it and below it, and on each fide, and those of the two chapels, and the furface of the whole cemetery, were fo crowded by them that it was difficult to find place for any other. And those who lived in distant regions, even to a certain Soldan, fent for its facred earth to be buried with them. Here king Arthur, who was fond of seeking rest and retirement from the cares of government at the abbey, died of a wound received from his nephew, the ufurper Modred, in Cornwall, and was buried in the cemetery about the year of our Lord 542. Nine feet deep was he buried, left the Saxons his enemies, whom he had fo often conquered, should find and insult his remains. On a leaden cross, however, placed under the ftone which covered him, and with the writing turned next to the ftone for concealment, was infcribed:" Hîc jacet fepultus inclitus rex Arthurus in infula Avallonia, cum Guennevera uxore fua fecunda." But Guennever was buried sometime after, and placed over king Arthur, only fix feet deep. Six hundred years afterwards his remains, at the repeated inftigation of Henry II., were fought for and found, as well as those of his queen Guennever. The cross and infcription were entire. The bones of the king were of an enormous size; and the hair of the queen ftill looking fresh and enveloping her bones, yet falling to powder on being touched. These were transferred to the church and buried in separate tombs; that of the queen being at the foot of that of the king, before the high altar. Here Edward the First, and Elinor the queen, coming in 1278, had these tombs opened, and found all as before defcribed. The king then wrapped the bones of Arthur in a rich pall, and the queen did the same by those of Guennever, and replaced them in their tombs, sealing them with their feals. But they retained the scull and

the legs of each, to place on the tombs for the devotion of the people, with an inscription commemorating these facts. Both our great Edwards vifited Glaftonbury. Edward III., with his queen Philippa, in 1331, came with a princely train, and on leaving presented the abbey £80, and four filver cups, one very magnificent, and an emboffed water jug also of filver.

As for facred relics collected at Glaftonbury, their mere catalogue would make a little book. They included almost everything in facred hiftory.-Fragments from the tomb of Rachel; the altar of Mofes; the rod of Mofes; the manna of the children of Ifrael; the fepulchres of Isaiah and Daniel; the remains of the three men in the fiery furnace, of the fwaddlingclothes of our Saviour; two portions of the very manger in which he lay; the ftone from Jordan on which Chrift ftood to be baptized; one of the ftones offered by the devil when he defired Chrift to command the ftones to be made bread; one of the water-jars in which our Lord turned the water into wine; a piece of the bread with which he fed the five thoufand; a piece of the stone on which he stood in the temple, of his garment without a seam, of the robe that Herod put upon him, of the scourge with which he was scourged, of the table at which he supped with his disciples, of the sponge offered to him with vinegar, of the cross, the fepulchre, of the hole in which the cross stood; one of the thorns from his crown; the ftone from which he ascended into heaven, and of every other imaginable thing connected with his hiftory. And the fame of the Virgin Mary, of the apostles, of John the Baptist and all the martyrs, the faints by hundreds, and holy virgins by dozens. The lift of these relics by John of Glastonbury fills feventeen closely-printed octavo pages.

What a pile of mendacious rubbish with which to gull the fimple fouls of thofe dark times! These were the baits with

which the Romish Church then fought to draw people to what they called Christianity. Can any one wonder that, as soon as light dawned, all these spurious trumperies, all the lying miracles which kept them company, and of which we have most ludicrous examples in our chronicler John, and all the purgatorial inventions following after them, fhould not only move disgust, but tend to destroy faith in the real miracles, and the real hereafter of revelation? The blow given to a vital faith in Christianity by the Church of Rome by these base and selfish arts, and of which their own hiftorians are the attestors, is felt even in the present day, in the feeble credence of profeffed believers, and in the vaft fpread of a hopeless materialism.

Sailors at sea bait for fifh with a mere bit of red rag, the mockery of a piece of flesh; but the Romanifts of the middle ages baited for fouls with more empty and sapless things. Yet for the cupidity of the rich and powerful, God made them unconsciously and blindly bait with substantial temptations. Their vast hoarded wealth, their gold and filver vessels, their shrines garnished and loaded with jewels, their pictures by the greatest masters, and ftill more their magnificent eftates, drew the eyes and hearts of kings and nobles even as they pretended to worship, and at length they laid rapacious hands on the whole ftupendous prey. The fyftem was built on the delufive fands of impofition, and when the floods and tempefts of fecular power beat upon it, it fell, and great was the fall thereof. What a moral in this worldlinefs! The very things which they imagined were building up their strength were preparing their destruction.

What a right royal estate did that of Glastonbury grow to! From the wicker church and the ten hides of marshy, thicketty land-in the time of the abbot Richard Beere, in the year

E

1507, and the eighteenth of the reign of Henry VII., the abbey had grown into a most magnificent pile, full of opulence and dead men's bones, and its lands and lordfhips to an amplitude which required a volume merely to enumerate them. Such a volume the abbot Richard Beere had compiled from

GLASTONBURY ABBEY, CHANTRY CHAPEL.

actual furveys and perambulations, which was duly preserved in the abbey library, of which the mere extracts given by John of Salisbury amount to fixty-fix pages. Thomas Sutton, “humilimus, quanquam lonnge indignus, hujus facri cœnobii professus, officium gerens cellerarii forinfici," who wrote the book called the "Terrarium coenobii Glaftonienfis," tells us