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LAU of St. David's. It. was now that he began to give full scope to his favourite views. His Visitation Articles of 1622 were a declaration of war against puritanism; and enforced the restoration in his diocese of all church decorations and arrangements anciently in use, which had not been expressly abolished by ordinance since the Reformation. Pictures, candelabra, rich altar hangings and painted windows, were again to be seen in the churches of South Wales; the communion table was turned into an altar; and the altar was separated by a screen from the less holy parts of the church. Bowing to the altar was also recommended, if not enjoined; and a royal order appeared, procured by Laud's influence, strictly forbidding the clergy to preach upon the subjects of predestination and election. It was evident to the nation that the church was now to be deprotestantized both in doctrine and worship, and that much of the work of King Edward's and Queen Elizabeth's divines was to be undone. The Romanists began to conceive new hopes; and the new ecclesiastical fashion set by the court began to produce its effects upon the nobles and gentry, in the form of frequent conversions to popery. The marquis of Buckingham himself, the king's chief favourite, was understood to be in some danger of going over to Rome; and Laud was appointed by the king to dispute with Fisher, the jesuit, in the presence of Villiers. He showed great ability in the discussion. The marquis at least was convinced by his arguments; and his manner of putting the case of the reformed church of England against Rome has always been highly satisfactory to Anglican divines of the same school as himself. His disputation with Fisher lays down very clearly the principles which he held, in distinction both from Romanism on the one hand and from puritanism on the other. He claimed for Anglicanism the glory of the true via media; but it is enough to mention that he rejected the Lutheran doctrine of justification, and substituted for it the Roman doctrine, in order to show how different his spirit was from that of Cranmer and Jewel, and how much stronger his recoil from puritan protestantism was than his dislike to Rome.

On the accession of Charles I., in March, 1625, it soon became evident that Laud was even a greater favourite with the new monarch than he had been with the old. He was chosen to officiate at the coronation in preference to Bishop Williams of Lincoln, whose puritanical tendencies had brought him into disfavour; and soon after he was promoted to the see of Bath and Wells, and made dean of the chapel royal and a member of the privy council. When Archbishop Abbott was suspended from his functions. Laud was one of five bishops intrusted with the administration of the primacy; he became the soul of the commission, and as such virtual primate of the realm. Soon after in July, 1628, he was elected to the see of London. After the assassination of Buckingham he became more indispensable than ever to the king; and along with Wentworth, earl of Strafford, with whose policy of "thorough" he was quite at one, he became the king's chief instrument in his fatal attempt to set up and establish an absolutism both in church and state. In May, 1633, he accompanied Charles to Scotland, where he would have introduced at once the English liturgy and order if he had not been overruled by the Scottish bishops, who, understanding better than he the feeling of the nation, advised that it would be safer to impose upon Scotland a service-book that might in some sense be called her own than the prayer-book, however excellent, of her "auld enemies of England." But his resolute will made itself felt in the composition of this new liturgy; if the book must be less English, it should also be less protestant; the consecration prayer in the communion service was brought as near as possible to the Roman formula; benedictions for the dead and other suspicious features were introduced; and blinded by the infatuation which has so often been the ruin of despotism. Laud and his misguided master never doubted that they should be able either to corrupt or to coerce the conscience of a whole nation, which, since the days of Knox, had never abated one jot in its hatred and abhorrence of "papistry" and all "popish dregs." Soon after his return from Scotland, on the 4th August, 1633, Laud was made archbishop of Canterbury; and on the same day, it is said, he had the offer of a cardinal's hat. He declined to become a prince of the church of Rome; but the form of his declinature was mild indeed. "He felt something in him which said no, so long as Rome was not otherwise than she was." What a feeble protest in the mouth of a protestant archbishop! How much more genuine his hatred of Geneva than of Rome! He was now at the pinnacle of power. He united in his own person many of the principal offices of church and state, and many high places which he could not fill himself, he filled with his nominees and creatures. He was a member of the high commission and the star-chamber, as well as of the privy council; he was chancellor of Oxford and Dublin, and visitor of Cambridge; he was placed in all the commissions intrusted with the management of the treasury, the crown revenues, and foreign affairs. The old times when churchmen monopolized all the power of the kingdom seemed to have come back again—Laud was a second Wolsey. He was even more powerful than Wolsey, for he excited less envy and opposition by the ostentatious and invidious display of power. He was simple and almost ascetic in his habits. But if he was less vain and sumptuous than Wolsey, he was also less placable and generous; he was cruel and unrelenting in the revenge he took upon his enemies, and the shocking severities in particular which he procured to be inflicted upon Dr. Alexander Leighton for his book against bishops, have left an indelible blot upon his name and memory. The story of his sudden fall and tragic end is well known to every reader of English history, and need not be here dwelt upon. When the Long parliament assembled in 1640, it became instantly evident that his life was doomed. On the 1st of March, 1641, he was thrown into the Tower, and there he lay for three years before his cause came to a public hearing. On the 12th of March, 1644, proceedings began in the house of lords, but it was not till 2nd January, 1645, that sentence was finally given against him. On the 10th of the same month he was beheaded on Tower hill, and he died with a composure and dignity becoming his character as a christian bishop. His body was removed in 1663 to St. John's college, Oxford. His dying words, to the effect that only his zeal for the church had brought him to the scaffold, need not be denied. But his zeal for the church had been intemperate and fanatical. It had made him a willing instrument of royal despotism, and a chief agent in trampling upon the rights and liberties of the kingdom. It had narrowed his understanding and poisoned his heart. His devotion was sincere, but tinctured with asceticism and superstition; and his morality, though pure and even severe in the sense of the cloister, was grievously deficient in the social qualities of justice and compassion. To the puritans at least, he showed himself in a high degree both unjust and unfeeling; and to pursue and put down the puritans was the great aim and business of his life. Nor had he even the sinister merit of success in that design. In 1639 his triumph seemed complete, for in that year the bishops reported to him that not a single nonconformist was to be found in all the dioceses of England. But in another year all was changed, and the whole fabric which he had reared up with so much labour and perseverance fell to the ground. He had undoubtedly some of the moral qualities of greatness—an iron will, an intrepid spirit, and an entire devotion to his aims. But the aims which he chose were neither wise nor right. He was blind to the real spirit and tendencies of his age and nation; and persevering in an impossible and unrighteous enterprise, he not only perished himself, but involved in the same ruin both the monarch and the church of his devoted love. But withal he was a liberal patron of learning and scholars. He was a great benefactor of the university of Oxford; and the sumptuous buildings which he erected there, the Arabic chair which he founded, and the numerous valuable manuscripts which he presented to the Bodleian library, still remain to attest his enlightened and munificent concern for the interests of education and letters.—P. L.  LAUDER,, Lord Fountainhall, a distinguished Scottish lawyer, was born in 1646, and was the eldest son of Sir John Lauder, at one time merchant in Edinburgh. He was sent to Leyden to prosecute his legal studies in accordance with the custom of his countrymen at that period, and was admitted to practise at the bar in 1668. He began immediately to record the decisions of the court of session; and to his labours the profession is indebted for the valuable collection entitled "Fountainhall's Decisions." He was one of Argyll's counsel in 1681, and along with the others was called before a committee of the privy council, and censured and warned on account of the opinions they had expressed, that the earl's explanation of the test act was not treasonable. In 1685 Sir John was chosen member of parliament for the county of Haddington, and 