It has been said, that from the date of the dissolution of the religious houses, the Reformation laboured in its progress. Even Henry seems to have been appalled at the violent reaction which followed, and to have held his hand. But those wise and good men whose object it had been all along to save what they could of the wreck, out of which to construct another ark, were still on the watch to promote the great cause in which they were embarked, both by permanent institutions and present instruction. Accordingly, whoever might be the advisers of the measure, out of the spoils of the monasteries six new bishoprics were now founded--those of Westminster (since suppressed), Chester, Gloucester, Peterborough, Oxford, and Bristol, together with deaneries and prebends respectively annexed, all slenderly endowed, and upon the whole a sad falling off from the splendid expectations which the king had originally held forth of eighteen new sees, together with a proportional number of suffragrans--expectations which the act of suppression had encouraged, and by which many were reconciled to the confiscation of the church property, as hoping that it was only to be fused and cast into a better mould. Its authors, however, “liked not that paying again; it was a double trouble.” Accordingly they compounded with the creditor, and the dividend (with the addition of funds for the endowment of some of the metropolitan hospitals, a few professorships in either university, and a college in Cambridge,) was what we have seen. The cathedrals fared better than the monasteries; having been hitherto in the hands of the regulars, they were now put upon the same footing as the new institutions of the like kind, and their revenues appropriated to the maintenance of secular dignitaries. Here, however, the plan proposed by Cranmer, owing probably to the opposition of the Roman Catholic party, was not adopted. In the settling down of the establishment once more, it was his wish that the cathedrals should be converted into theological colleges; that readers of divinity, of Hebrew, and of Greek should be attached to them; that a body of students should be maintained in them, out of whom the bishops might always find clerical recruits duly qualified for the pastoral office; that here, in short, should be realised a second time the institution which Samuel (the great reformer of his own church) established throughout all the land of Israel, “schools of the prophets,” and that thus might be filled up most effectually the gap which had been occasioned in the system of public instruction by the extinction of the religious orders. What might have been the effect of such a measure, which would have completed the Reformation in an important particular where it was left greatly defective, it may now be in vain to conjecture. Whether such establishments might not have contributed to stave off the crisis which was at hand from