preconcerted signals, such as our sham clairvoyants and spirit-rappers now use.

These cunning men told farmers where their sheep had strayed, and the farmer's wife how to save her chickens from the fox. They generally knew a little chemistry and a good deal of jugglery, and could frighten the simple by optical tricks and simple legerdemain.

Agrippa tells us that the heavenly tends to earthly, earthly to heavenly, and that in everything in nature there is aspiration and progression, as grass eaten by an animal becomes living and sentient, and part of that animal. He, in fact, teaches a metempsychosis which is also the concealed doctrine of many of our modern poets, who look with awe at flowers as once men or about to

become so.

They believed that the position of the stars at the time of our birth decided our fate in life. To ascertain this, and to read the future, they divided the heavens into twelve divisions called mansions or houses, the first house was that part of the sky on a level with the horizon when the sun rose; the second was at noon; the seventh at sunset; and the fourth at midnight; the rest filled the intermediate degrees, and were either cadent or suc

cedent.*

* Manual of Astrology, passim, 1828.

The first was the house of life, the second of riches, the third of kindred, the fifth of children, the sixth of sickness, the seventh of marriage, the eighth of death, the ninth of religion, and so on.*

There were also four trigons,—fiery, airy, earthly, and watery; and five aspects, sextile, quartile, trine, oppositive, and conjunctive.

These related to the relative distances of the planets from each other; the trine was when the sun had gone a third of the distance from the meridian; the sextile when it had gone a sixth.

But no more of this jargon; all the truth in which is allegorical, and all the error plain.

* Zadkiel's Horoscope, p. 47.

Sketch of Wapping. - Adventures of the Age. - Heroism. — Ex

tension of Commerce.

Scene in a Sea-side Tavern. — Hatred

of the Spaniard. Sea Chivalry. - Voyage of Master Parker of Plymouth.- Escape to Guatimala. Sea Yarns. Valiant Fight

of Ten Merchant Ships of London and Twelve Spanish Galleys. The Centurion of London. - Escape of John Fox from a Turkish Prison. The religious Sentiment. - Spanish Cruelties. - Names of Vessels. — Our Navy. - English Army. — Decline of Archery. -Uses of Archery. - Archer's Fittings. - Defects of Archers. |

THE Wapping of Elizabeth's day was a dense net-work of narrow, dirty streets, whose fronts nodded to, and almost touched, each other. Below were rope walks, biscuit shops, old clothes stores, and dusty piles of Indian curiosities, much as are at present in such localities. In the parlour of the " Drake's Head," or "Gallant Howard," sat old sunburnt, scarred sailors, talking of Virginny, or of the chase of some Indian chief. Incredible lies are heard emerging, like the utterance of oracles, not from the incense of an altar, but from dense clouds of tobacco

smoke, lit here and there by stars of dull red flame. There are tales of the Inquisition Chambers, with baring of shrivelled arms and branded breasts, and much stripping of legs to show the red band where the fetters clasped, or the dark hole where the poisoned arrow entered; what cheers, too, from the balconies and the great chimneycorner when some great captain enters, and proposes a fresh cruise to the Golden City, the vexed Bermoothes, or the pearl fisheries. Lion hearts, every one in iron frames, ready for hot or cold death,— fire or steel, — so the dollars are won, and the Spaniards can be stripped. Away they go, flag flying, and men cheering, for the Horn Cape, El Dorado, or the Land of Fire.

Whoever has any love for the golden age must have read the three folios written by that excellent scholar and brave spirit, Richard Hakluyt, preacher, and sometimes student of Christchurch, Oxford.

It is from those wonderful records alone that we can fully learn to appreciate the ardour of commercial enterprise that animated the voyagers of this reign, when a lion-hearted Queen ruled over lion-hearted subjects; was it not then that Richard Chancelor reached Russia by the North Cape, and by a new route then that Sir Hugh Willoughby coasted Nova Zembla, and Frobisher and Davis toiled for the North-West Passage? Raleigh, and Drake,

and Hawkins, were all contemporaries in the reign in which Shakspere and Jonson flourished, Burleigh go

There was not a ship that set out from Plymouth but had a crew of Argonauts, heroes who loved England, and were ready to die for her. Against the Papist and the Spaniard, the greatest successes with the smallest means were the rules with these men. The Sunshine, a smack of 50 tons, leaves Davis to discover a passage between Greenland and Iceland; the Centurion, of London, a tall ship, weakly manned, beats off five Spanish galleys in the Straits of Gibraltar.

The Primrose, of London, 150 tons, escapes from under the very guns of Bilboa, and carries off the Corregidor himself.

The enterprise is in all regions: sober citizens of London travel to Moscow, are found in China, visit Barbary, embark for Guinea, colonise Virginia, trade with Goa, have consuls at Damascus, threaten the King of Algiers, and obtain privileges from the Grand Turk.

It is John Fox, a simple English sailor, who delivered 266 Christian slaves from captivity at Alexandria. There is Miles Phillips, one of Hawkins's sailors, who eats parrots with the cannibals, who is sold as a slave at Mexico, who is imprisoned by the Inquisition, who, hearing