Henry the Eighth rejected the Pope, but surely he died a Romanist. His unwieldy huge form was lifted up from his death-bed that he might prostrate himself, and, in the writer's language, who, however, was a papist, "bury himself in the earth," to testify his reverence for "the real presence," when it was brought before him. His will, which, though it was put aside, was not the less the king's will, attested his last supplications to "the Virgin Mary, and all her holy company of Heaven." And he endowed an altar at Windsor, "to be honourably kept up with all things necessary for _a daily mass_, there to be read _perpetually while the world shall endure_." At the same time Henry endowed the poor knights of Windsor, upon condition that they should repeat their eternal masses for his soul. His magnificence was proportionate to his sins; but his perpetual masses, and the world, did not endure together. With this fact before us, it is not therefore strange that foreign historians should have declared that our Henry the Eighth never designed a Reformation, that he altered nothing; and had only raised a schism which those who contest the papal sovereignty in their civil affairs, as the Gallican Church affected to do, would incline more to approve than to censure. This monarch has been lauded as a patriot king for the suppression of the monasteries and the national emancipation from the tiara--but patriotism has often covered the most egotistical motives. FOOTNOTES: [1] A fear of the restitution of these abbey-lands to their former uses appears to have prevailed long after their alienation. So late as in the reign of James the First, the founder of Dulwich College, in a dispute respecting the land, observes hypothetically--"If the State should be at any time pleased to returne all abbey lands to their former use, I must lose Dulwich, for which I have paid now 5000_l._" At a later revolution, when the bishops' lands were seized on by the parliamentarians, many obtained those lands at easy rates, or at no rate at all; the greater part reverted, but, if I am not misinformed, there are still descendants of some of these parliamentarians who hold estates without title-deeds. [2] See an abstract from one of his Proclamations in "Curiosities of Literature," vol. iii. p. 373.--ED. [3] This alludes to the well-known story of the old priest, who having blunderingly used _mumpsimus_ for _sumpsimus_, would never be put right, alleging that "he hated all novelties." A CRISIS AND A REACTION. ROBERT CROWLEY. There is a state of transition in society which we usually call a crisis. A crisis is the most active moment of conflicting principles; the novel must extirpate the ancient, the ancient must eject the novel; the one looks to be continued and the other to be settled; it is a painful state of obstinate resistance, like that of two wrestlers when neither can cast down the other.