Melancthon was born at Brette, a village of the Palatinate, on the 16th of February, 1497. In his childhood he made an astonishing progress in the acquisition of languages. Luther, and his doctrines, appeared about this time, and Melancthon stood forward as one of their most strenuous supporters; indeed the Lutheran system was in a great measure planned by him, and the famous instrument by which it was publicly declared, called the Confession of Augsburg, was the production of his pen. Melancthon was the intimate friend of Erasmus, and Erasmus the patron of Holbein. This connection will account for his appearance in a Collection of Portraits, drawn by Holbein, of the principal personages in the Court of Henry the Eighth, though Melancthon never was in this country. An engraving of him is among the Holbein Heads, published by Mr. Chamberlaine, and there is a full-length portrait of this great Reformer, with a fac-simile of his writing, in his Life, published by the Rev. F. A. Cox, London, 1815, 8vo. HOUSE OF COMMONS. A considerable number of treatises were written in the middle and latter end of the seventeenth century, and a few in the beginning of the eighteenth, respecting the period at which the House of Commons asserted that independence which it is so material to the security and happiness of the country it should possess, and obtained that share in the legislature it now enjoys; but the writers on both sides,[35] eager in the maintenance of the cause they espoused, and taking advantage of the scanty means the public had of knowing what was contained in the early Rolls of Parliament[36] and other ancient records, suppressed from partiality and interested zeal, much of the information themselves possessed, which rendered of little use to the public an inquiry that might otherwise have been attended with considerable advantage.