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] suffer for his sake. Here, then, commenced the great cause of Nonconformity, and the formation of all those sects which from time to time have since appeared, each claiming—and justly—the right to worship God and to regulate their particular church as seems conformable to their understanding of the Scriptures. These separate assemblies, however, were stigmatised as conventicles, and many from this time became the laws passed to put them down, as we shall hereafter find. Amongst the Nonconformists a most zealous and resolute sect arose called Brownists, from Robert Brown, a preacher in the diocese of Norwich, a man of good family, and said to be a relative of Lord Burleigh. His followers soon acquired the name of Independents, which they still retain, from their denial of all ecclesiastical dignities and authority whatever, asserting that each congregation constitutes a complete church, with the right to nominate their own minister and conduct their own affairs. This body of Christians, at this day so extensive and respectable, of course felt the especial weight of the persecution of the Established Church, with which it refused to hold the slightest communion; yet to such a degree did it flourish—a proof of the onward spirit of the time—that Sir Walter Raleigh declared in Parliament that there were before the death of Elizabeth not less than 20,000 members of that body in Norfolk, Essex, and the neighbourhood of London.

In the narration of the struggles of this period in Scotland we have sufficiently traced the persecution of the Protestants by the Romish Church—the martyrdom of Patrick Hamilton, George Wishart, Walter Mill, and others; the murder of Cardinal Beaton, and the final triumph of Knox and his compeers, from which period the organisation of the Protestant Church of Scotland went on rapidly. In 1560 the lords of the congregation entered Edinburgh in arms; and Parliament assembling, abolished for ever the Pope's jurisdiction, abolished the celebration of mass, and authorised "The Confession of the Faith and Doctrine believed and professed by the Protestants of Scotland." An Act also was passed to pull down all cloisters and abbey-churches still left standing: and the Church, not waiting for any further enactment of the Parliament or Crown, went on exercising its own proper functions as an independent church, governed, not by the State, but by presbyteries, synods, and general assemblies. In 1580 the general assembly, after having at various times diminished the power and rank of bishops, declared that episcopacy was unscriptural and unlawful—a dictum which the Parliament fully ratified in 1592, establishing the Presbyterian Church as the national one, with general assembly, provincial synods, presbyteries, and kirk sessions. In 1597 the Parliament admitted certain representatives of the clergy to seats in it, to which the general assembly assented at its next meeting; and thus was completed the system of church government in Scotland at that time.

The present centennial produced as great a revolution in literature and science as in religion. We still look back to this era for some of the greatest names and greatest works which have adorned and enlightened not only our own country but the whole civilised world. When we enumerate Sir Thomas More, Lord Surrey, Roger Ascham, Spenser, Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, Buchanan, Gawin Douglas, Dunbar, and Sir David Lyndsay, we remind our readers that we are moving amid a constellation of genius, than which time has scarcely any brighter. But in the two words, Shakespeare and Bacon, we pronounce the names and glorious births of dramatic and philosophic genius, which have placed this country on the summit of intellectual fame, by works never since surpassed in any nation, and by discoveries in science and art which have flowed from the "Novum Organum" of Bacon as from an eternal and ever-strengthening fountain. True it is both these great men belong, by their published works, rather to the succeeding period than to the present, and in that we shall more fully review their works; but Bacon had, long before the death of Elizabeth, sketched out the plan of his immortal work, though he had not dared to publish it; and Shakespeare had not only written his poems, but had also written and acted in many of his most brilliant and original play's. By these great writers the English language was established as a great classical language; and though it has since extended and connected itself with the progress of knowledge and most astonishing and varied discoveries, we can produce no purer, no stronger nor more eloquent specimens of it than from the pages of Shakespeare, which continue to be read and listened to on our stage, the genuine speech of Englishmen—somewhat quaint occasionally, but always musical to the ear, familiar to the sense, and animating as old wine to the spirit.

The mass of men and topics with which we have to deal in this department of our subject is so great, that we must take but a cursory view of what can only be fully discussed in a history exclusively devoted to our literature and art. Our business is to sketch the great outlines of our progress; the reader must seek the details in the works and biographies belonging to the different subjects. The violent changes and spoliations of the Reformation did not check the foundation of new colleges and seminaries of learning—the fountains, under a more liberal order of things, certain to produce noble results. Even Henry VIII., in his wholesale destruction of endowed property, and though college property was included in the Acts which he procured from his obsequious Parliament, for the most part spared the resources of education. His reign was distinguished by the foundation, in Oxford, of Brazenose College, in 1509, by Sir William Smith, Bishop of Lincoln, and Sir Richard Sutton, of Presbury, in Cheshire. Old Richard Fox, Bishop of Winchester, who had been prime minister of Henry VII., and still was of the council of his son, in 1516 founded Corpus Christi. The only exception to Henry VIII.'s patronage of the colleges occurred in those founded by Wolsey—his Cardinal College at Oxford, and his college at Ipswich, which both fell with him. In 1515 Henry himself founded Christ Church instead of that of Wolsey, which he then dissolved. In 1554 Trinity College was founded on the basis of Durham College by Sir Thomas Pope. In 1555 Sir Thomas White, alderman and merchant tailor of London, founded St. John's College, on the site of Bernard College. These were in the reign of Queen Mary. In Elizabeth's time rose Jesus College, in 1571, from funds