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King Christmas.*

King Christmas has come with garlanded brows,
And snowy locks downfalling,

And over the land with a cheery voice

To gladness and mirth is calling.

His throne is placed 'neath a glistening bower
Of holly and ivy mingled,

Jewelled with coral and misletoe pearl,

From the staunchest oak tree singled:
For the forest king gave his diadem up
For another king's adorning,

And wears in its place the woodland gems,
The diamond drops of morning.,

King Christmas wears always a cheerful face,
A welcome guest is he ever,

For his coming illumines the weary months
That autumn and spring-tide sever.

And here in our school where the Christmas Tree
Is proudly its head uprearing,

With industry's fruits upon every branch,
Through mazes of green appearing.

King Christmas is holding his court to-night,
He laughs at the children's voices,

The monarch whose age is by centuries told
Still in youthful glee rejoices.

A shadow comes over King Christmas's face-
A shadow of thought and sorrow,

And even his brow from a nation's woe

Some traces of care must borrow.

A mist of trouble is o'er the land,

And deadens the joy bells ringing.

* These verses were written as a contribution to a Christmas Tree, to be held in Saint Saviour's School, Manchester, in aid of the Relief Fund. January 2, 1863.

And millions of weary, desolate hearts

Are sighing instead of singing.

And "what can we do for God's chasten'd ones?"
Is the question we all are asking;
While noble workers with hand and brain,
To the utmost their strength are tasking.

And those who may only stand by and wait,
By prayers and by faith are aiding ;
Even words of pity have priceless worth,
To hearts from which hope is fading.
So King Christmas uplifts a quieting hand
And whispers a word o warning,
Lest mirth untempered should steal away
Some holier feelings dawning;

And bids us look back through the gathering years,
To the Christmas that first shone o'er us;
When a star arose on the world's dark night,
For ever to shine before us,

Leading us up from the lights of earth,

Its sorrows, and pains, and pleasures,
To the glory of God, and the rest of Christ,
And the city of garnered treasures.

And teaching to walk as onr Saviour walked-
And striving to rescue others,

And jewel the crowns of our heavenly home,
With souls of less fortunate brothers.

There King Christmas's wreath will an emblem be
Of amarinth crowns undying,

And his misletoe pearls of pure blood-bought souls,
In Christ's shadowless glory lying.

M. P.

History of Walsall Grammar School.

CHAPTER I.

Depravity of the Monastic Order-Suppression of the Monasteries and Chantries-Founding of the Grammar School.

FOR many centuries after the establishment of religious houses in Britain, their members formed the finest body of the disciples of Jesus that the christian religion has been able to boast during its long and chequered history. They illustrated in their lives, with noble simplicity, the doctrine of self-sacrifice.

They surrendered, in their three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, everything that makes earthly existence attractive. Accepting as their mission here, to labour for other men's temporal good, and to pray for other men's spiritual welfare. Wealth flowed in upon them, and for a time was seen the noble spectacle of property administered as a trust, from which the possessors reaped no benefit, but only increase of toil. But possession of riches often brings contamination, as if the gold for which Judas betrayed his master, should always bear a curse. Opportunity for crime is too often the cause of crime, and so it was with the monks of old. Riches and plenty brought with them declination from austerity, piety, and even virtue.

Popular belief ascribes not only the Reformation in England, but the destruction of the monastic system, to the despotic lust of Henry VIII., whereas those deeds were but the culminating acts of generations of discontent, and would not have been retarded a single generation, had Anne Boleyn never existed.

The venerable piles-at whose gates charity had ever sat, dispensing with an unsparing hand, relief to the poor and suffering; and within whose walls the voices of holy men had ever resounded in intercession for the sins of mankind-had become the abode of the epicure, the drunkard, and the debauchee, who, beneath the guise of the priest's cowl, gave the rein to passions which they professed to mortify.

Wycliffe, in the 14th century, first sounded the tocsin of reform, and attacked the backslidings of the monks, who the popular clamour of the day declared, lived in idleness, neglecting their duties, appropriating revenues left for the poor to their sensual indulgencies, and misapplying and alienating the estates of the abbeys, to their own immediate kin. These charges against them so increased, that the House of Commons petitioned Henry

IV. to secularize their property. And in a parliament held at Leicester, in 1414, Henry V. was obliged to pass an act to suppress more than an hundred priories and abbeys, as a warning to the rest, in order to appease the increasing outcry.

This example was deprived of its salutary effect by the occurrence of the "Wars of the Roses," when the attention of the people was entirely engrossed with the contending factionswhen brother met brother in deadly strife, and the plains of England were cumbered with the dead, slain by kinsmen's hands, of more than a dozen bloody battle fields. The monks were thus left to pursue their pleasures and downward path from virtue unchecked, so that on the burning out of the fire of civil warfare they were found in the reign of Henry VII. to have declined so far in religious virtue, that the then Pope, Innocent VIII., issued a commission of visitation, and conferred on the Archbishop of Canterbury power to admonish, correct, and punish, as might seem to him desirable. But the mild way in which he performed his office, did nothing to reduce the evil, which, in the reign of Henry VIII., had risen to such a height, that the celebrated Wolsey formed the scheme of converting the endowments of the religious houses to the purposes of education, and in 1525, obtained from the Pope permission to suppress a number of small monasteries, with which he founded the great college of Oxford, now called Christchurch. It was the most magnificent establishment of its day. Wolsey determined to make it as perfect as art could make it, sought professors for it from Rome, and all the universities of the continent were ransacked for teachers for it.

Talent was the only credential he desired, and so anxious was he to obtain it, that he overlooked many shortcomings on the score of orthodoxy, which no doubt is a reason why the doctrines of the Reformation took so early such a firm hold in that citadel of learning. Wolsey was tolerant in his religious views, and sought to win recusants from the faith again by moderation, not light them by the torch of martyrdom from it.

The fall of Wolsey, and the marriage of Henry with Anne Boleyn, brought the Pope and King into direct antagonism, and upon Henry shaking off the Pope's spiritual supremacy, and declaring himself the head of the English Church, he appointed Cromwell as his vicegerent in all ecclesiastical matters. One of Cromwell's first steps was to issue a commission for a general visitation of all religious houses, universities, and spiritual corporations. Drs. Legh, Leyton, and Ap. Rice, were appointed to conduct the expedition, and roughly and most thoroughly did

they fulfil their office, laying bare extensive abuses of trust and frightful irregularities of life. Priests were found engaged in all kinds of commercial speculations and trades, instead of attending to their clerical duties. The nunneries were anything but the retreats of virtue. That of Lichfield particularly distinguished itself. "Several of the sisterhood being in a condition which indicated that they had lent a too willing ear to the licentious desires of their unchaste confessors; a fact which the prioress endeavoured to hide by secreting the frail ones, and when discovered, to exculpate." The abbots were found emulating eastern life, in the number of ministering houris, which their private seraglios contained, whilst the estates of the establishments were alienated, in order to portion off their illegitimate offspring. In short, modesty will not allow the describing of a tithe of the depravity of morals existing in the religious houses of the period, as laid bare by the Commissioners. This report, afterwards destroyed by order of Queen Mary, excited a yell of indignation against the whole order; and the mutinous spirit evinced by the monks, combined with the scurrilous and obscene allusions which they made in their public and private discourses to the new Queen, who they chiefly regarded as the author of their troubles, proved to the government that the evil was past reformation, and therefore suppression must be the result.

The "Black Book," as it was called, which was then laid before Parliament, 1534, in its summary proceeded to say, "That two-thirds of the monks in England were living in habits which may not be described (giving confessions of many of the implicated parties). Their vows were not observed. The lands were wasted, sold, or mortgaged. The foundations were incomplete. The houses falling to waste, and in the smaller abbeys, where, from the fewness of members, they were able to connive at each other's irregularities, drunkenness, simony, and profligacy abounded." Of course, there were exceptions. Some of the greater abbeys were managed with decency and honour. But these exceptions were very few. At this Parliament, Latimer and Cromwell (who inherited the designs of Wolsey) advocated, not the taking away from the church the lands of the abbeys, but the transferring them to the high and true interests of religion, and converting the houses into places of education. Cranmer, however, was for suppressing them entirely. The result of the debate was the suppression of all the monasteries whose incomes were under £200 per annum; the lands being given to the King. The monks where either distributed among

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