the celebrated Giordano Bruno. His otherwise fruitless visit to England
left a deep impression on certain minds, learned and ignorant, and we
begin for the first time to hear of examinations and prosecutions for
atheism in this country. And this forms the subject of the sixth essay.
The recoil that invariably takes place after any great political,
social, or religious upheaval was not wanting to the Reformation in
England, and in the reign of Charles I. High-Churchism, under
Archbishop Laud, was thought to indicate a desire on the part of the
royalists for a return to Catholic unity. A Papal agent was dispatched
to England to negotiate between the Catholic Queen, Henrietta Maria and
Cardinal Barberini, with a view to the conversion of her husband, which
would, it was hoped, ultimately issue in the corporate reunion of the
country with Rome.

Thus, Part I. deals with some of the persons who had "their exits and
their entrances", who made history during this interesting period. Part
II. treats more especially the books and manuscripts connected with it.
The theme is therefore the same.

Even before England was England, she was the Isle of Saints, and
throughout the Middle Ages religion was her chief care, in a manner
almost incredible in this secular and materialistic age. She not only
covered the land with magnificent churches and cathedrals, to the
architecture of which we cannot in these days approach, even by
imitation, distantly, but she also built huge monasteries, and these
monasteries were the cradles, the homes of vast stores of
ever-accumulating knowledge. A system of philosophy, to which the world
is even now returning, recognising that there is no better training for
the human intellect, is so distinctly mediaeval, that all that savoured
even remotely of St. Thomas Aquinas or Duns Scotus in the University