"Lord Campbell, in his recent and admirably written life of Becket, as chancellor and minister of Henry II., tells us that his vituperators are to be found among bigoted Protestants, and his unqualified eulogists among intolerant Catholics. After stating, with the perspicuity of a judge in Equity, their respective arguments and opinions, he sums up in favour of the eulogists, and decides that, setting aside exaggeration, miracle, and religious prejudice, the most merciful view of the character of Becket is also the most just. And is it not pleasant, where the imagination has been so excited by strange vicissitudes and picturesque scenes of his various life--the judgment so dazzled by his brilliant and generous qualities, the sympathies so touched by the tragic circumstances of his death--to have our scruples set at rest, and to be allowed to admire and to venerate with a good conscience; and this, too, on the authority of one accustomed to balance evidence, and not swerved by any bias to extreme religious opinions? But it is not as statesman, chancellor, or prelate that Becket takes his place in sacred art. It is in his character of canonised saint and martyr that I have to speak of him here. He was murdered or martyred because he pertinaciously defended the spiritual against the royal authority; and we must remember, in the eleventh century, the cause of the Church was, in fact, the cause of the weak against the strong, the cause of civilisation and of the people against barbarism and tyranny; and that by his contemporaries he was regarded as the champion of the oppressed Saxon race against the Norman nobility." Why is the eulogy of the Church confined in this passage to the eleventh century? It was, and is, and ever will be, the cause of the people. We mean the Church as the Church should ever be, cleansed from every superstition, every impurity, the Reformed Church of England, or even that ancient Church which existed in this our land before Popery was--emphatically the Church of England in this _our_, not a Pope's England, free from superstitious, in principle unpersecuting. With regard to Becket, he was a sincere man, nor did he disparage the Benedictines in his own character. The strong man--the man of vigorous intellect and of direct purpose--will ever find in all minds but the mean a ready reception and excuse for actions which, in their nature distasteful, would not be tolerated in the weak, the vacillating, though even the more virtuous. Becket's history is well adapted to historical art. His mother, daughter to the Emir of Palestine, delivering his father from captivity, seeking him in England, knowing no English words but London and Gilbert, is of the richest tissue of old romance.