of cattle that the people were threatened with distressing famine. Sir William Berkley, after having been forty years governor of Virginia, returned to England, where he soon after died.

Three years afterward, 1679, lord Culpepper was sent over as governor, with certain laws prepared in conformity to the wishes of the ministry of England, and designed to be enacted by the assembly in Virginia. One of those laws provided for raising a revenue for the support of the government. It made the duties perpetual, and placed them under the direction of his majesty.

On presenting these laws to the Assembly, Culpepper informed them that in case they were passed, he had instructions to offer pardon to all who had been concerned in Bacon's rebellion, but if not, he had commissions to try and hang them as rebels, and a regiment of soldiers on the spot to support him. The Assembly, thus threatened, passed the laws.

Berkley resumed the government indeed, but it seems to have been a bloody peace which he restored. After the death of Bacon, the mortified vanity of the irascible old cavalier raged against his broken and disbanded followers and abettors, until twenty-two had been hanged. It will be recollected, however, that he was a royalist governor, appointed by the king, and that his victims were the first martyrs to freedom on the American soil. Even the king disapproved of his ferocity. "The old fool," said the kind-hearted Charles II, "has taken away more lives in that naked country, than I for the murder of my father."

"He would have hanged half the country had we let him alone," said the colonial member from Northampton to his colleague from Stafford.

The Nathaniel Bacon who headed this unfortunate (in one sense only-that he died so early,) rebellion, appears to have been from the first distrusted by Berkley. A native of England, born during the contests between parliament and the king, his active mind had been awakened to a consciousness of popular rights and popular power, he had not, therefore, yielded the love of freedom to the enthusiasm of royalty. "Possessed of a pleasant address and powerful elocution," he had rapidly risen to distinction in Virginia. Quick of apprehension, brave, choleric, yet discreet in action, the young and wealthy planter carried to the banks of James river, the

liberal principles which he had gathered from "English experience;" no wonder, then, that groaning under the grievous imposition of the "navigation acts," under the arbitrary distribution of their lands-many of which were old, settled and improved plantations-given away without any regard to the rights of the settlers, by the careless prodigality of Charles II, to such men as Lord Culpepper, one of the most covetous in England, and Henry, Earl of Arlington, the dissolute, but accomplished father-in-law to the king's son by lady Castlemain, who, in a word, became jointly, factors of the King as joint owners of Virginia-together with the immediate pressure of a fierce war with the Susquehannas and Seneca Indians, retaliations for which the royalist, Governor Berkley, refused to sanction with his commission to Bacon; no wonder then, we say, that the people were "much infected" with the principles of this gallant planter, and of the Speaker of their assembly, Thomas Godwin, "notoriously a friend to all the rebellion and treason which distracted Virginia;" no wonder, too, that the gallant Bacon was hailed as the "darling of their hopes, the appointed defender of Virginia," when, having been elected by the Assembly, commander-in-chief, he took charge of the "grand rebellion in Virginia!"

The rebels under his command, both in the field and as a leading burgess in the Assembly, having compelled the unwilling Berkley to concede many important demands for amelioration, and this grateful feature of the legislation of the Assembly having been ratified, "that better legislation " was completed, according to the new style of computation, on the fourth day of July, 1676, just one hundred years to a day, before the Congress of the United States adopting the declaration which had been framed by a statesman of Virginia, who, like Bacon, was "popularly inclined," began a new era in the history of man. The eighteenth century in Virginia was the child of the seventeenth; and Bacon's rebellion, with the corresponding scenes in Maryland, Carolina, and New England, was the early harbinger of American independence and American nationality.

"Pretty good," says Sam, "for my Southern vagabonds!"

A new mystery-The rise of Luther and Protestant wars-Advent of the mystery of Jesuitism.

THOUGH Sam was in himself a mystery of the New World, yet was he not the only clouded Force to which these portentous times gave birth, and which was to become alike his foe and the terror of the old world as well as the New.

A mysterious Force! yes, a terrible mystery!-the mystery of spiritual annihilation—the mystery of "walking corpses" of humanity demonized to the greater glory of God!

Momentous years were those (1537 and 1620) which gave birth to the order of Jesuits and to Sam. Memorable forever will they be in the record of human_struggle. Strange that out of the mighty travail of the Protestant Revolution of the sixteenth century in Europe should have sprung these two births, the one so eventful to the death, the other to the life of hope for humanity! that to the smiting of the powerful wands of Luther and Calvin, upon the shadowy turmoil these giant foes stepped forth, the one beneath the sun of day, the other beneath the umbrage of deep night.

But as we have looked upon the birth of Sam, seen something of the stormy contrasts and opposing traits which constituted the majestic elements of the formative period of his career; have, in a word, regarded his prodigious infancy at

Perinde ac cadaver-The last words of the founder of the order of Jesuits.

the North and at the South, in the early Puritan and Cavalier, we may now turn our eyes on the same period in the coming of his arch and most deadly enemy.

The sixteenth century was, indeed, a period of ferment in the world's history! Absolutism had attained the climax of prerogative throughout the christian world. Europe was divided between three masters, Henry VIII, of England, Francis I, of France, and Charles V, of Spain, who held it in as many fields, and were fighting a triangular battle for the possession of the whole, with the aid of mercenary armies; for the feudal system, trampled in the dust, was no longer rampant to the setting up and pulling down of kings.

The gold of the newly-discovered Western World of Sam had now become a puissant arbitrator in these kingly quarrels, and soon the old time chimera of the "balance of power" seemed likely to come home to roost beneath the roof-tree of Charles V, of Spain.

Henry VIII, who, between the divorcing and beheading his wives, plundering the monasteries and keeping in check beneath his heel the dying throes of the "king-making" turbulence the "Warwick" blood of his nobility-found sufficient employment at home, after the issue of the electoral Congress of Frankfort, to retire upon from this contest and leave France and Spain to fight it out. Their wars continued to redden the fields of Europe with but little avail.

Meanwhile, as a compensation for these evils, the human mind, casting off the prejudices and ignorance of the middle ages, marches to regeneration. Italy becomes for the second time the center from whence the light of genius and learning shines forth over Europe. Leonardo da Vinci, Tiziano, Michael Angelo. are the sublime, the most divine interpreters of art. Pulci, Ariosto Poliziano, give a new and creative impulse to literature, and are the worthy descendants of Dante. Scholasticism, with its subtle argumentatious, vague reasonings, and illogical deductions, is superseded by the practical philosophy of Lorenzo and Machiavelli, and by the irresistible and eloquent logic of the virtuous but unfortunate Savonarola. Men who, for the last three centuries, had been satisfied with what had been taught and said by Aristotle and his followers-who, as the last and incontrovertible argument, had been accustomed to exclaim, ipse dixit, now

begin to think for themselves, and dare to doubt and discuss what had hitherto been considered sacred and unassailable truths. The newly-awakened human intellect eagerly enters upon the new path, and becomes argumentative and inquiring, to the great dismay of those who deprecated diversity of faith; and the Court of Rome, depending on the blind obedience of the credulous, anathematizing every disputer of the Papal infallibility, views with especial concern this rising spirit of inquiry, and has to tremble for its usurped

power.

Luther, the dogged monk, with the yearnings of an enslaved and trampled world, writhing like vexed serpents in his brawny breast, having been treated with contumely in his first humble appeal to his spiritual father, the Pope, for the solution of the conscientious doubts which had overtaken him in his too earnest study of the "Holy Book," threw himself suddenly upon his own obdurate and self-reliant will, and hurling his defiance back against his late master, in answer to the Bull of Excommunication with which he had been favored, stood cap-a-pie, in the breach which he had already made, to battle to the death for his doctrines.

The art of printing came opportunely to his aid, and wielding its magic, marvelous to tell, this burly champion proved meet to encounter, visor up and single hand, the serried chivalry of Europe and the wrong.

The German princes, partly persuaded of the truth of Luthers' doctrines, partly desirous to escape the exacting tyranny of Rome which drained their subjects' pockets, supported the Reformer. They protested at Spires, and at Smalkaden made preparations to maintain their protest by arms. In a few years, without armed violence, but simply by the persuasive force of truth, the greater part of Germany became converted to the Reformed faith. The honest indignation of Zuinglius in Switzerland, and, conspiring with the diffusion of the truth, the unbridled passions of Henry VIII in England, alike rescued a considerable portion of their respective countries from the Romish yoke. In France and in Navarre the new doctrines found many warm adherents; while in Italy itself, at Brescia, Pisa, Florence, nay even at Rome and at Faenza, there were many who more or less openly embraced the principles of the Reformation. Thus,