the barbarous dramas of fire and blood that were in after ages to be enacted on this evil precedent. There are many grand places rich with historical lessons in London, and not a few sad ones; but the saddest of all is Smithfield. I can never pace the stones of this memorable site, where our noblest Scot, Sir William Wallace, was disembowelled and quartered to gratify the vengeance of an imperious Norman, without thinking of the sad fate of the young and beautiful Anne Askew. This lady, the daughter of a knight of good family in Lincolnshire, under some of those stimulants of thought which were stirring up the stagnant traditions of medieval piety, had been led to conceive serious doubts with regard to the Scripture authority for some of the most universally received doctrines of the Roman Church. This pious scepticism coming to the ears of certain leading persons in Church and State, who, after the example of the Nicean doctors, considered it a sacred duty in matters pertaining to religion to tolerate no contradiction, first brought this lady before the Lord Chancellor, who tore her limb from limb on the rack, because she would not say that she believed what she could not believe without denying her senses, and then dragged her to the blood-stained pavement of Smithfield, where she was girt with gunpowder bags and fenced with faggots, to be burnt to death, as if the God of Christians were a second and enlarged edition of the old Moloch of Palestine. And what was her offence--beautiful, young, pure, and truthful woman, not more than twenty-five years of age--that she should be treated in this worse than cannibalic style in the name of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Simply that Henry VIII., in that style of insolent masterdom which he showed so royally, and conceiting himself, like a Scotch fool who came after him, to be a considerable theologian, assumed the right to put the stamp of absolute kingship on the doctrine of the Church that a piece of bread, over which a priestly benediction had been pronounced by a priest, was by the mystical virtue of this benediction changed into flesh, while the fair young lady persisted in seeing nothing but bread. Let it be granted that the lady was in the wrong and the churchly tradition right, it never could be right to tear her flesh to shreds and to burn her bones to ashes because she held an opinion which, to say the least of it, looked as like the truth as its opposite. How sad, how sorrowfully sad, and what a commentary on what we are ever and anon tempted to call poor, pitiful, prideful, and presumptuous human nature, that Christianity had at that time been more than fifteen hundred years in the world, sitting in high places, and walking with triumphal banners over the earth, and yet neither the princes of the earth nor the rulers of the Church should have retained even a slight echo of that reproof from a mild Master to a zealous disciple, to the effect that no man who knew the spirit of the divine