between barbarism and tyranny on the one side, and civilization and freedom on the other:  that which was death in the former, is but court disgrace in the latter.  George IV. was not cruel—­he had even a certain susceptibility; the spectacle of human suffering revolted him:  but suffering to affect him must have been present to his sense.  Was Henry VIII. gratuitously cruel?  That does not appear.  He took no pleasure for itself in shedding blood, and avoided being a witness of it.  Had he been obliged to look on whilst Anne Boleyn and Sir Thomas More were bleeding, he probably would have spared them.  He sacrificed them to his impulses from mere selfish indifference.  With their wives and mistresses Henry VIII. and George IV. were governed by the same self-indulgent despotism—­the same animal disgusts.  Henry VIII. had six wives, and sent one to the scaffold as the prelude to his marriage with another.  George IV. had only one wife, but she suffered the persecutions of six; and if she escaped decapitation or divorce, it was from no failure of inclination or instruments.  Henry VIII. was the tyrant of his people, and George IV. was not:  yet is there even here a similitude.  Both surrendered their understandings to their ministers, upon the condition of subserviency to their personal desires.  What George would have been in the age of Henry it might be ungracious to suppose; but it may be asserted that Henry, had he been reserved for the close of the eighteenth century, would have a very different place in opinion and history as a king and as a man,—­such are the beneficent, humanizing influences of knowledge, civilization, the spirit of religious tolerance, and laws mutually guarding and guarded by public liberty!”

* * * * *

AN ECLIPSE AT BOOSSA.

(From Landers’ Travels, vol. ii.)

“About ten o’clock at night, when we were sleeping on our mats, we were suddenly awoke by a great cry of distress from innumerable voices, attended by a horrid clashing and clattering noise, which the hour of the night tended to make more terrific.  Before we had time to recover from our surprise, old Pascoe rushed breathless into our hut, and informed us with a trembling voice that ’the sun was dragging the moon across the heavens.’  Wondering what could be the meaning of so strange and ridiculous a story, we ran out of the hut half dressed, and we discovered that the moon was totally eclipsed.  A number of people were gathered together in our yard, in dreadful apprehension that the world was at an end, and that this was but the ‘beginning of sorrows.’  We learnt from them that the Mahomedan priests residing in the city, having personified the sun and moon, had told the king and the people that the eclipse was occasioned through the obstinacy and disobedience of the latter luminary.  They said that for a long time previously the moon had been displeased with the path she had been compelled