heresy, whilst, like children, they were playing in the marketplace. But whatever commerce might do to promote an intercourse amongst the different states of Europe, pilgrimage did morethe more distant the object of devotion, the greater was the merit in visiting it; and every country took care to be provided with a source of gain so simple and commodious.-Many were the bones left to whiten on their road to St. James of Compostello, or our Lady of Walsingham. The wife of Bath 'Thries hadde ben at Jerusaleme, She hadde passed many a strange streme, Indeed, so common appears to have been the practice amongst our own countrymen of visiting Rome, that the name of that holy city has, perhaps, furnished us with our most familiar term to express wandering to a distance. The Eternal City was long the political capital of the world, and was then frequented by the nations as the seat of arts, of arms, and of lucrative employment. She was now the religious capital of the world, and frequented, with perhaps equal zeal, as the seat of the true faith, and the fountain of ecclesiastical preferment. Like Jerusalem at the feasts, it was the resort of persons dwelling in every region under heaven, and a certain circulation of ideas was by this means established throughout the whole of Christendom. The spirit in which those religious rambles were undertaken, and the motley character of the pilgrims brought together, are well seen in the Canterbury Tales, or the humorous Peregrinatio of Erasmus; and all that curiosity could extract or loquaciousness impart, would not fail to come out by the way. Nor was this all-under various pretences, the pope claimed a right to present to benefices even in countries beyond the Alps; and Italian priests, who would naturally maintain a correspondence with their friends at home, were everywhere to be found. The universities of note, again, collected students from distant lands. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, there were so many English at the university of Ferrara, as to form a distinct and influential body in that learned society. An interchange of professors, moreover, which was constantly taking place, contributed to expedite the communication of thought and knowledge amongst those classes of men who were precisely the best fitted to speculate, and to impart their speculations to others; and Latin, being then an universal language, both among scholars and diplomatists, removed at once the obstacle to intercourse, which must have arisen out of a difference in vernacular tongues, by by providing a medium common to all. Freemasons, again, were a kind of nomade tribe, who journeyed on, and, like the patriarchs of old, marked their resting-places by setting up noble altars to their God; their very occupation must have rendered them conversant with religious matters, and the suspicion with which they were soon regarded, and which, in a measure, has descended to our own times, may possibly have had its origin in some heretical opinions they might be supposed to entertain and propagate. John of Gaunt, who patronised Wickliffe, patronised them. Minstrels were ever upon the stroll from abbey to abbey and from hamlet to hamlet, retailing their own adventures, or the wonders they might have heard, to the monks and villagers, who, like the Athenians, and for the same reason, were always right glad to hear some new thing,' though it should be (as it often was in the case of the monks) to their own prejudice and mendicants by profession, often, no doubt, assuming the cowl, as they now do the sailor's jacket, rambled over a country in the spirit of Autolycus, in numbers of which we may judge from the multitudes executed in our own land after the dissolution of the monasteries, when they betook themselves to plunder for their bread. These were some of the channels through which, in former times, province communicated with province, and nation with nation; and how effectually, may be guessed even from the vocabulary of our own tongue. We have often thought that it would be a subject of curious and most interesting inquiry, to trace the history of England, political, religious, and domestic, in its language, and in its language alone. We are persuaded that it might be done, and that upon such an investigation it would be found that our intercourse with Italy has been far greater than our vulgar annals, or even our literature itself, would lead us to conclude. Though our literature bespeaks it to have been considerable, and especially in its more popular department of ballads, plays founded upon ballads, and gossips' stories, the substance of which must have circulated chiefly per ora virum,' from mouth to mouth; as now a favourite air creeps by degrees throughout Europe. The nature of that intercourse (the arts, the conveniences, the vices introduced by it) would be discovered in the class of Italian words we have naturalized. Independently of ecclesiastical and theological terms, (which would, of course, prevail,) from Italy we derive, in a great measure, our terms of war, of book-keeping, of cookery, of gambling, the names of some of our commonest sports and pastimes, (blind man's buff, for instance,) and very many of our strongest expressions of abuse, contempt, and abhorrence-these last the dregs, perhaps, of the camp of the crusaders. Johnson Johnson, who is least happy in the etymological department of his dictionary, has not kept Italy sufficiently in sight, and has, consequently, sometimes embarrassed himself, (as in his miserable exposition of the word rubbish,') where an attention to this principle would have set him at ease. But we must hold our hand from a seductive subject, which we have been led incidentally to touch upon, whilst we have been endeavouring to show the communication which in ancient times subsisted between remote countries, and the facility with which opinions might be spread, and knowledge conveyed, throughout the civilized world. Thus it was, we apprehend, that many of those religious truths, which the Reformation brought out, had been already dispersed, with more or less local success, over a great part of catholic Europe; and that Luther's province was, not to call into existence the spirit which shook the popedom to its foundations, but to call it into action. Wickliffe, indeed, has been usually allowed to have been the forerunner of Huss, and Huss of Luther; but even Wickliffe seems to have been but the avowed representative of a very large portion of his countrymen, and the organ by which they spoke sentiments hitherto suppressed through dread of consequences. He neither believed in the supremacy of the pope, nor in transubstantiation, nor in the right of the clergy to monopolise the scriptures; yet so far were his doctrines from being offensive to the people, that when he was brought before the bishops, at Lambeth, they clamoured for his release-so far were his tenets from being unpopular, that persons holding them travelled from county to county, preaching them, not only in churches and churchyards, but in markets and fairs, 'to the great emblemishing (as it was said) of the Christian faith.' Knyghton, a contemporary historian, does not scruple to say, that you could not meet two people in the way, but one of them was a disciple of Wickliffe; and Wickliffe himself asserts that the third part of the clergy thought with him on the Lord's Supper, and would 'defende that doctrine on paine of theyr lyfe.' Nor will this be matter of surprise, when it is recollected that some centuries before Wickliffe's translation of the New Testament, Saxon versions of portions of the Gospels at least had been made, 'for the edification,' as it is expressly said, of the simple, who know only this speech.' Spirits congenial to Wickliffe were already in Bohemia, where the effect of his writings was acknowledged by the severity with which they were suppressed. The Albigenses had been denounced by canons, preached at by St. Bernard, and tortured by St. Dominic, so early as as the twelfth century. About the same period Peter Waldo lifted up his voice at Lyons, with a success that called forth the anathema of the pope ;-and the valleys of the Alps were peopled, from an age the most remote, with a race of hardy mountaineers, whose seclusion had preserved their faith from corruption, and' whose protestant tenets are the subject of authentic record to this day. It is the testimony of an enemy (Raynerius) and, therefore, above suspicion, that they did not believe in modern miracles, rejected extreme unction and offerings for the dead, denied the doctrines of transubstantiation, purgatory, and the invocation of saints, and, to sum up all, regarded the church of Rome as the woman of the Revelations. It is true, that he mixes up these accusations of heresy with heavy charges against their morals; but this has ever been the artifice both of pagans and of catholics, to crush a rising sect. In the present instance, nothing is wanted to expose the futility of such charges, but to compare them with those of others no less hostile (as the learned Usher has done,) when it will be found that their testimony agreeth not together.' On the other hand, the more friendly voice of La Nobla Leyçon, a Waldensian document written about the year 1100, and the authority of which has never been questioned, enforces the law of the ten commandments, that against idols not excepted the duty of searching the scriptures-as also of praying to the Trinity, though without a word in favour of the invocation of saints or the Virgin, and represents confession and absolution as unavailing, the power of forgiving sins, though claimed by the priest, belonging to God alone. With the history of this heroic band of brothers the public has, of late, been made familiar; but whilst the sufferings and the constancy of the original stock of the Vaudois have claimed and received the sympathy of every man who has a heart, the fate of a colony, which it sent forth to seek its fortunes in the south of Italy, has been unworthily overlooked: In the year 1370,' writes the learned and able author now before us, 'the Vaudois, who resided in the valleys of Pragela, finding themselves straitened in their territories, sent some of their number into Italy, to look out for a convenient settlement. Having discovered in Calabria a district uncultivated and thinly peopled, the deputies bargained with the proprietors of the soil, in consequence of which a number of their brethren emigrated thither. Within a short time, the place assumed a new appearance: villages rose in every direction; the hills resounded with the bleating of flocks; and the valleys were covered with corn and vines. The prosperity of the new settlers excited the envy of the neighbouring villagers, who were irritated at the distance which they preserved, and at their refusal to join with them in their revels and dissipation. The priests finding that that they received nothing from them but their tithes, which they paid regularly, according to the stipulation entered into with the proprie tors; and perceiving that they practised none of the ceremonies usual at the interring of their dead, that they had no images in their chapels, did not go in pilgrimage to consecrated places, and had their children educated by foreign teachers, whom they held in great honour, began to raise the cry of heresy against the simple and inoffensive strangers. But the landlords, gratified to see their grounds so highly improved, and to receive large rents for what had formerly yielded them nothing, interposed in behalf of their tenants; and the priests, finding the value of their tithes yearly incresse, resolved, prudently, to keep silence. The colony received accessions to its numbers by the arrival of their brethren, who fled from the persecutions raised against them in Piedmont and France; it continued to flourish when the reformation dawned on Italy; and, after subsisting for nearly two centuries, it was basely and barbarously exterminated.'—p. 4. Thus do we find, that at either extremity of Italy itself, (to say nothing of other heretical countries, which were in constant communication with Italy,) bodies of men were living depositories of the true faith, more or less complete, during a period which, as the Roman catholic church would persuade us, exhibited universal concurrence in her doctrines and submission to her decrees. Meanwhile, in spite of the jealousy with which the clergy endeavoured to keep exclusive possession of the scriptures, several translations into the Italian, ill done indeed, but still indicating the latent spirit, whose workings we are examining, made their appearance in the fourteenth century, if not earlier; while that of Malermi, a monk of Camaldovi, was printed at Venice in 1471, and is said to have gone through no less than nine editions in the ensuing thirty years. Indeed, the establishment and continuance of the Inquisition, a contrivance expressly for the extinction of freedom of opinion in matters of faith, is of itself a most distinct acknowledgment, on the part of the Roman catholic church, how early there existed a formidable opposition to her dogmas; and, accordingly, when that opposition developed itself more fully after the preaching of Luther, those sanguinary tribunals were proportionally multiplied, as the legitimate and approved extinguishers of heresy. The limits of a review will not allow us to enter into details necessary to do justice to this part of our subject; sufficient, however, has been said to show, that long before the era of the reformation, commonly so called, many of the sentiments of the reformers were cherished in several places to our certain knowledge, and, probably, in still more, where the tyranny of the times has left us in ignorance of them. Dante, undoubtedly, was not speaking at random, in his assertion, (and it is worthy of attention, |