Wonders will never cease. A few years since, the present pope, willing to do honor to a great nation, conferred on one of its subjects the highest dignity in his gift. The new cardinal was a man honored alike in England and America for his learning and ability, as well as for his never departing from the strict line of his priestly and episcopal functions. One would have supposed that the English government and people would have felt flattered, and that the English sovereign, who is queen not only of certain Protestant Englishmen, but of a mass of Catholic subjects who cannot number much less than twenty millions, would, while thanking his holiness, have hinted that her twenty millions should have more than one representative in the Sacred College. Instead of this sensible course, a period of insanity ensued--England frothed, England foamed, England grew rabid. To judge by this book, England is actually becoming sane. The author seems to feel that England is slighted because she has no cardinal. "There has recently been a creation of cardinals, and, though some disappointment may have been caused by the omission of an eminent English name from those so honored, the extraordinary claims of one of the most active of Roman Catholic prelates are not likely to be overlooked by so discriminating a pontiff as Pio Nono." Mr. Williams here, in two goodly octavos, gives the lives of the English cardinals, from Robert le Poule to Wolsey, as he conceives it; and a rapid examination of the whole, and careful scrutiny of portions, leads us to the judgment that seldom has a work been attempted by a man so utterly unfitted for the task. As though his proper task did not afford him a field sufficiently large, he gives an introduction of eighty pages on the Papacy, the Anglo-Saxon Church, and the Anglo-Norman Church. The whole history of the church down to the Reformation is thus treated of, and to the mighty undertaking he brings only the usual superficial reading of our time, with a more than ordinary amount of religious flippancy, and false and prejudiced views of Catholic dogma, practice, polity, and life. There is not a silly slander against the church that he does not adopt and give, with all the gravity imaginable, as undisputed fact, not even deigning to quote vaguely any of his second-hand authorities or modern treatises, while, to make a parade of his learning, he gives us a four-line note in Greek to support his opinion as to a topographical question as immaterial to the history of the English cardinals as a discussion on the Zulu language would be. As instances of his utter unfitness, we might refer to his treatment of such points as St. Gregory VII., Pope Joan, and the institution of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. {140}