"He shewed mercy to one for his wit, as I have read in an old manuscript. For examining a Protestant whose name was Silver, he told him after his jesting way, that " Silver must be tried in the fire." "Ay," said Silver, "but Quicksilver will not abide it." (Stripes Records.)

Doctor Bonner, bishop of London, was deprived of his bishopric by queen Elizabeth, and cast into the Marchelsea prison, Southwark, in which he was confined during the remainder of his life; except that he was occasionally permitted to pass the prison walls by the courtesy of the gaoler, who required no other security than his promise to return. The bishop was of a facetious disposition, and probably deserved not all the severe reproaches which have been heaped upon him by most of our historians, whether infidels or protestants. Wood, relates the following anecdotes of him. """Tis said that Doctor Bonner being sometimes allowed liberty, he would walk as occasions served him in the street; and sometimes wearing his tippet, one beg'd it of him (in scoff) to line a coat: "No (saith he,) but thou shalt have a fool's head to line thy cap." To another that bid him Good-morrow bishop-quondam ;" he straight replied, Farewell knave semper."-When another person shewed the said Bonner his picture in the Acts and Monuments of the Church, &c. commonly called The Book of Martyrs, on purpose to vex him, he merrily laugh'd and said, "A vengeance on the fool, how could he get my picture drawn so right?"

Bishop Bonner's warm return to the Court of commissioners, when Acrhbishop Cranmer told him for his intemperate sallies, he deserved to be sent to prison-he replied that de facto, they might send him whither they pleased, and he would obey them, unless they meant to send him to the devil whither he would not go at their command; "I have a right in three things" says he, "a few effects, a poor carcase, and my soul; the two first you may make a prize of, though unjustly, but I will keep the last out of your power." (Collier, Col.)

"When a poor blind man in Warwickshire, that was accounted very cunning in prognosticating of weather, upon a certain day as Epsom, a great lawyer as he rode that way, said in scorn of

his cunning, "I pray you tell me father when doth the sun change?" The chafed old man that knew his corrupt conscience answered, "when such a wicked lawyer as you goeth to heaven." (Camd. Remains.)

"It is recorded that St. Philip Neri, who lived in the neighbourhood of the English Seminary, at Rome, would frequently stand near the door of the house, to view the students going forth to the public schools. The saint used to bow to them and salute them with these words: "Salvete flores Martyrum." (Plowden, on Panzani.)

"Father Nicholas with his undaunted spirit in a diminutive body, was so zealous in the exact practise of ye holy rule, which is so particular about trying of spirits, that when ye Doctour Gifford returning from a sermon he had been sent to preach, did not reach home time enough, and therefore went into the garden to excuse himself to him, where he was at recreation with ye community, he ordered him to prostrate; though ye ground was covered with snow, and bidding him rise said aloud: "There lay ye print of a Doctour." All which ye venerable Doctour took with yt spirit which St. Bennet requires." (Weldon's Cron. Notes.)

"In all he (Doctor Gifford,) spent fourteen years in preaching at Paris. Of which preaching a pleasant thing is assured, to wit: yt being much upon seeking to inspire the public with loyal minds, that virtue being somewhat off the hinges, notice was given him to take heed or he would be pistol'd; but he persisting intrepidly in his duty, one day a coach stopt at ye door where our Fathers then liv'd, and an unknown person demanded him, gave him a bag full of gold pistols, praying him to continue in his lessons of loyalty. Coming up stairs he told his brethren he was pistol'd. But to ease them of their grief he presently showed how." (Weldon's Chron. Notes.)

·

"When Count Stolberg, a celebrated German writer was converted to the Catholic religion, a Protestant Prince said to him, I am not fond of those who change their religion.' 'Neither am I,' replied Count Stolberg, and if our ancestors had not changed theirs three centuries ago, I should never have thought of changing mine now.'" (Leval's Conv.)

In the month of March last, the King of Spain gave the following remarkable proof of his piety. The day before his departure for Aranguiez, as he was returning to his palace, he met a priest carrying the Holy Viaticum to the sick. His majesty immediately alighted from his carriage, made the priest get in, and himself shut the carriage door. He then took a lighted taper, and accompanied the priest on foot. The king went even to the house of the sick person, and then assisted at the administration of the Holy Viaticum, and, the prayers for the departing soul. These examples are the more precious as they are rare in these times of languishing piety and half extinguished faith. This trait of genuine piety may be called bigotry, and all the opprobrious epithets applied to it which we are so accustomed to see lavished on the king of Spain; but it will edify the true Catholic-who knows that as another humble monarch has written; "the king shall rejoice in God;....because the mouth is stopped of them that speak wicked things." (Psl. lxii. 12.)

FOX'S MARTYRS.

Mr. Editor-We have at length arrived at the last month of a Calendar, which comprises the names of four hundred and fifty-six individuals, some of whom existed only in the inventive brain of the annalist. They may be classed in the following manner; five bishop-martyrs, one bishop-confessor, one kingconfessor, three maid-martyrs, three hundred and ninety-three martyrs of various degrees, and fifty-three men and women confessors. In this catalogue may be found individuals who maintained the various prevailing heterodox opinions of the times in which they lived, the dogmas of which were oftentimes in direct contradiction to each other. They were all, with the exception of a very few, either from the lowest paths of society, or men whose crimes had rendered them unworthy of performing the functions of their sacred ministry; among them may be enumerated two hundred and eighty two`husbandmen, weavers, shoemakers, and other handicraft-men, sixty-four poor women,

twenty-five apostate monks and friars, thirty-eight apostate priests, and nineteen felons, who were tried and condemned as such by the laws of their country. Such are the materials which compose this vaunted list of protestant saints, and martyrs. As the martyrologist draws towards the close of his labours, we find him less cautious with regard to his entries; for in the present month, we have several fictitious or ideal beings; one whose story has been told ten months since, and two who always professed the Catholic religion. William Tracey, the first upon the list for the month, appears to have lived and died unmolested in the full enjoyment of his own peculiar religious notions, whatever they might have been: but thinking fit to leave a will behind him filled with erroneous declarations, it was not suffered to he proved iu the bishop's court, nor was his body allowed to remain in consecrated ground; it was therefore removed and burned in the year 1534. Of the next, Peter Sapience, martyr, nothing is known. Then comes George Bucker, alias, Adam Damlipp, an apostate priest, who was executed at Calais, for treason and sedition; but Fox drags him in as a martyr, because he had formerly been cited to appear before Cranmer, who, after one examination, had connived at his escape. We have now several, who are all probably the children produced by the fertile imagination of John Fox. These are, an old man of Buckinghamshire, two Grey Friars, John Hilton and John Coignes, confessors, and a Scholar of Abberville, martyr. Then comes a Jew martyr, who certainly died a Catholic, if he ever became a christian. We have afterward, Richard Hunne, a merchant of some property. Fox calls him a double martyr, and gives his name in red letters; he then acknowledges that he was "no full Protestant," but was a papist, heard mass, and used his beads in prison. He was committed to the Lollard Tower upon suspicion of heresy, and was afterwards found hung in his own girdle. As party spirit ran high at that time, a violent altercation ensued, his friends insinuating that he had been put to death by the contrivance of his keeper, and the opposite side declaring that he had hung himself. A coroner's inquest was held upon the body, and the jury, by their verdict, seemed to favour the first opinion.

King Henry VIII. then had the matter examined into by his law officers, and they unanimously agreed that he destroyed himself. John Tewexbury, martyr, follows. He was a leather seller in London, in the reign of Henry VIII. and became a convert to the opinions of Tyndal, in consequence of reading some of his works, particularly the book called The Wicked Mammon. He was apprehended and examined concerning his new faith, which he firmly maintained during two different examinations; but on the third he retracted, did penance by bearing a faggot at Saint Paul's Cross, and again relapsed: he was then tried, convicted, and finally executed. James Gore is the next. He was a poor man, and died in Colchester prison, where he had been sent, according to Fox, "for the right and truth of God's word." Another of the same class, is William Wiseman, a cloth-worker of London, who died in the Lollard's Tower, and was afterwards buried in the fields.

We now come to another red-letter martyr; John Philpot, he was from Hampshire, and was a gentleman by birth. Joined to a great knowledge in the languages, was his proficiency in the civil law, which he studied during six or seven years in New College Oxford; he had travelled to Italy, had visited Rome, and had taken holy orders upon the continent, and through the interest of Bishop Gardiner, he had obtained the Archdeaconship of Winchester. After king Edward came to the throne, he passed for one "Altered in his wits." And in queen Mary's reign, he carried himself with the grearest violence imaginable in the Convocation-house; the result was, that he was detained and examined no less than fourteen different times, in presence of several bishops, lords of the council, and others. At each examination he was equally intemperate, and broached sundry heterodox opinions, the creatures of his own imagination: he was, however, finally condemned by Bishop Bonner the 13th of December, 1557. The two following were executed together in Smithfield; John Rough and Margeret Meringe, martyrs. The former was a Dominican friar, who had married, and had run away from Scotland in king Edward's days. He had obtained a living near Hull, in Yorkshire. But when Mary ascended the throne, he thought it prudent to quit the kingdom