Wiat, for so he wrote his name, was a great wit; as, according to the taste of his day, his anagram fully maintained. We are told that he was a nice observer of times, persons, and circumstances; knowing when to speak, and, we may add, how to speak. That happened to Wyatt which can be recorded probably of no other wit: three prompt strokes of pleasantry thrown out by him produced three great revolutions the fall of Wolsey, the seizure of the monastic lands, and the emancipation of England from the papal supremacy. The Wyatts, beside their connexion with Anne Bullen, had all along been hostile to the great cardinal. One day Wyatt, entering the king's closet, found his majesty much disturbed, and displeased with the minister. Ever quick to his purpose, Wyatt, who always told a story well, now, to put his majesty into good humor, and to keep the cardinal down in as bad a one, furnished a ludicrous tale of "the curs baiting a butcher's dog." The application was obvious to the butcher's son of Ipswich; and we are told, for the subject but not the tale itself has been indicated, that the whole plan of getting rid of a falling minister was laid down by this address of the wit. It was with the same dexterity, when Wyatt found the king in a passion on the delay of his divorce, that, with a statesman-like sympathy, appealing to the presumed tendency of the royal conscience, he exclaimed, "Lord! that a man cannot repent him of his sin but by the pope's leave!" The hint was dropped; the egg of the Reformation was laid, and soon it was hatched! When Henry the Eighth paused at the blow levelled at the whole ponderous machinery of the papal clergy, dreading from such wealth and power a revolution, beside the ungraciousness of the intolerable transfer of all abbey lands to the royal domains, Wyatt had his repartee for his counsel: · - "Butter the rooks' nests!". that is, divide all these houses and lands with the nobility and gentry.

Wyatt should have been the minister of Henry; we should then have learned if a great wit, where wit was

ever relished, could have saved himself under a monarch who dashed down a Wolsey.

Surrey and Wyatt, though often engaged, the one as a statesman, the other as a general, found their most delightful avocation in the intercourse of their studies. Their minds seemed cast in the same mould. They mutually confided their last compositions, and sometimes chose the same subject in the amicable wrestlings of their genius. It was a community of studies and a community of skill; the thoughts of the one flowed into the thoughts of the other, and we frequently discover the verse from one in the poem of the other. Wyatt was the more fortunate man, for he did not live to see himself die in the partner of his fame perishing on a scaffold, and he has received a poet's immortality from that friend's noble epitaph. In his epitaph Surrey dwells on every part of the person of his late companion; he expatiates on the excellencies of the head, the face, the hand, the tongue, the eye, and the heart, - but these are not fanciful conceits; the solemnity of his thoughts and his deep emotions tell their truth. Wyatt was

"A head, where Wisdom's mysteries did frame,
Whose hammers beat still in that lively brain,
As on a stithy,* where some work of fame
Was daily wrought."

* The Smith's forge.

THE SPOLIATION OF THE MONASTERIES.

INCIDENTS of such an overwhelming nature in political history as are those of the Reformation can have no sudden origin. They are but the consequences of something which has preceded. In our country the suppression of the monasteries and the abbeys had been long prepared; it was not, and could not have been, the temporary passions, nor the absolute will, of an arbitrary monarch, which by a word could have annihilated an awful power, had not the royal edict been but the echo of many voices. It was attacking but an aged power dissolving in its own corruption, which, blind with pride, looked with complacency on its own unnatural greatness, its political anasarca. Its opulence was an object it could not conceal from its enviers, and its paramount eminence was too heavy a yoke for its rising rivals. This power, in the language of the times, had "covered the land with an Egyptian darkness,” and when appeared the "Godly and learned king," as the eighth Henry was called, he was saluted as “a Moses who delivered them from the bondage of Pharaoh." It is not therefore strange that the act which at a single blow annihilated the monastic orders and their "lands and tenements" was hailed as the most patriotic which had been ever passed by an English sovereign. It made even a tyrannous and jealous monarch, who cut off more heads of men and women than any other on record, popular and extolled even in his latter days.

Henry the Eighth had paused at the blow he was about to level. The plunder was too monstrous even for the hand of an arbitrary monarch. Its division among the nobility and gentry was an expedient which removed the odium from royalty, and invested it with that munificence which dazzled the pride of Henry. In the vast harvest, the king

refused the lion's share, looking for his safer portion in the secure loyalty of the new possessors to whom he transferred this vast and novel wealth.

As the scheme was managed, therefore, it was a compromise or copartnership of the king and his courtiers. The lands now lie the open prey of the hardy claimant or the sly intriguer; crowds of suppliants wearied the crown to participate in that national spoliation. Every one hastened to urge some former service or some present necessity as a colorable plea for obtaining a grant of some of the suppressed lands. A strange custom was then introduced, that of "begging for an estate." Kneeling to the king, and specifying some particular lands, was found a convenient method to acquire them; and these royal favors were sometimes capriciously and even ludicrously bestowed. Fuller has a pleasant tale concerning one Master Champernoun. One day, observing two or three gentlemen waiting at a door through which the king was to pass, he was inquisitive to learn their suit, which they refused to tell. On the king's appearance, they threw themselves on their knees, and Champernoun was prompt in joining them, with an implicit faith, says Fuller, that courtiers never ask anything hurtful to themselves. They were begging for an estate. The king granted their petition. On this Champernoun claimed his share of the largesse; they remonstrated that he had never come to beg with them; he appealed to the king, and his brother beggars were fain to allot him the considerable Priory of St. Germains, which he sold to the ancestor of the present possessor, the Earl of St. Germains.

The king was prodigal in his grants; for the more he multiplied the receivers of his bounties, the more numerous would be the stanch defenders of their new possessions.*

A fear of the restitution of these abbey-lands to their former uses appears to have prevailed long after their alienation. So late as in the reign of James the First, the founder of Dulwich College, in a dispute respecting the land, observes hypothetically: "If the state should be at any time pleased to returne all abbey-lands to their VOL. I.-30

Gratitude was the least of their merits. He counted on their resolution and their courage. The bait was relishing; and there were some, when land-grants became more scarce, whose voracity of reformation attempted to snatch at the lands of the universities, which had certainly gone, had not Henry's love of literature protected their trembling colleges. We have his majesty's own words, in replying to the suggestion of some hungry courtier: "Ha! sirrah! I perceive the abbey-lands have fleshed you, and set your teeth on edge to ask also those colleges. We pulled down sin by defacing the monasteries, but you desire to throw down all goodness by subversion of colleges. I tell you, sir, that I judge no land in England better bestowed than on our universities, which shall maintain our realm when we be dead and rotten. Follow no more this vein, but content yourselves with what you have already, or else seek honest means whereby to increase your worldhoods."

Lord Cromwell was the chief minister through whose mediation these novel royal grants of houses and lands were distributed. There was evidently no chance of attention from his lordship without the most open and explicit offers of the grossest bribery. The Chancellor Audley, in bargaining with Lord Cromwell for the Abbey of St. Osyth, for "some present trouble in this suit," one day sent twenty pounds, with "my poor hearty good will, during my life.” Perhaps the bribe, though only placed to account, had not its full weight, as the chancellor does not appear, in the present instance, to have possessed himself of this abbey ; though afterward, with the spoils of two rich monasteries, he built the most magnificent mansion in England, by which he perpetuated his own name in the once-famed Audleyformer use, I must lose Dulwich, for which I have paid now £5000.” At a later revolution, when the bishops' lands were seized on by the parliamentarians, many obtained those lands at easy rates, or at no rate at all; the greater part reverted, but, if I am not misinformed, there are still descendants of some of these parliamentarians who hold estates without title-deeds.