there I was born. That I should ever take the degree of Bachelor of Arts seemed not to be in the stars. How must I have surprised people by turning monk, and then again by changing the brown cap for another? By so doing I occasioned real grief and trouble to my father. Afterwards I went to loggers with the pope, married a runaway nun, and had a family. Who foresaw this in the stars? Who could have told my career beforehand ?"

No one, assuredly: the career of Luther, though doubtless written in the heavens, cast no prophetic shadow upon earth, and it is quite vain to look for serpents strangled in the cradle of the spiritual Hercules; but inquiry has enabled the historiographer of his life-revealed destiny to ascertain that Martin Luther was born at Eisleben, when his mother was on her way to Mansfield. The date of his birth, though disputed by certain astrological opponents of the Reformation, who will have it that it took place on the 22nd of October, 1483, in order to connect it with some sinister conjunction of five planets in that day or night, but for which skyey influences it would appear Tetzel would never have preached indulgences, nor Luther been roused to denounce them-really occurred on the 10th of November, 1483, nearly three weeks subsequent to the heretical council held by the five stars.

The actual circumstances surrounding the birth of Luther are, however, noteworthy and interesting. His father, Hans (John) Luther, was born and grew to manhood at Mærk, a Saxon village near Eisenach. He was a poor miner, and married the daughter of a lawyer of needy condition there. Her name was Gretha (Margaret), and she was a native of Neustadt, in Franconia, where her family had previously resided. Hans Luther had the misfortune, it is said, accidentally to kill a man whilst at work in a meadow-an incident which rests upon slight authority, and, if true, may involve no imputation upon the involuntary homicide. Be this circumstance, however, an invention or a verity, it is certain that Hans and Gretha Luther quitted Mark hurriedly in the winter of 1483, on foot, albeit Gretha was near her confinement. The purpose of Hans Luther, which he succeeded in, was to obtain employment in the mines at Mansfield; but his wife, overcome by fatigue and anxiety, could reach no further than Eisleben, where she was delivered of her son, Martin, at about eleven o'clock, Melancthon assures us, upon the authority of the mother herself, on the evening of the 10th November, 1483. As soon as it was possible to do so, the wife proceeded to Mansfield, where her son was baptised, and hence, doubtless, Luther's misapprehension as to his place of birth.

Very industrious, worthy people were the poor miner Hans Luther and his wife. Spite of their extreme poverty, they contrived to keep their son at school, stimulated thereto, it is fair to presume, by the glancing forth of some sparkles of the fiery intellect which was thereafter to set Europe in a blaze. They were assisted in this by one Dame Ursula, the widow of John Scheiveicken, who hoped the promising talents of the boy might one day be dedicated to the service of Holy Church, as indeed they were, though not precisely in the mode which the good dame would probably have chosen. Luther's education com

menced essentially at Magdeburgh, a place which faintly glimmers in the memory of the world as the prison-fortress of Baron Trenck and General Lafayette. Thence he was transferred to Eisenach, in Thuringia, and finally to Erfurth, and while studying for the law in the University there, what seemed a direct call from God himself summoned him to a conventual life, and the office of the priesthood.

appear.

All that Luther's parents could spare from their scanty earnings, helped by the contributions of Dame Ursula, ill sufficed to defray the cost of his maintenance at school, slight in English estimation as that would Like other similarly situated German students of the time, he was accustomed to perambulate the streets of Magdeburgh, singing hymns and songs, interrupted, whenever a sympathising ear was likely to be reached, by cries of Panem propter Deum (Bread for God's sake). Luther's love of music, like all other emotions that welled up from that fiercely pulsating heart, was a passion. "Music," he says, "is the art of the prophet, the only one which, like theology, can calm the trouble of the soul, and put the devil to flight.' He had, moreover, a fine ear and pleasing voice, and his taste for the divine art was no doubt, in some degree, quickened by the means it afforded of improving his chance of obtaining Panem propter Deum. He learned to play the flute, and touched the lute also with considerable skill. "Bread-Music," he used to call his displays in singing and instrumentation--very frequently unsuccessful ones. Upon one occasion, whilst at Eisenach, he sallied forth with his lute, after having passed many hours without food, with the inspiriting hope that the influence of the bright day, shed down from the deep blue cloudless heavens, might dispose his hearers to sympathy and kindness. He was grievously mistaken. Hour after hour the future Apostle of the Reformation exerted both voice and fingers-now soaring upon the winged harmonies of a Laudate or an Alma; and therein unsuccessful, gliding gently down to the sweet sadness of a psalm, or the love breathings of a soul touched by a more earthly devotion: vain alike was canticle, psalm, and song, and it seemed that on that particular day the quiring of the cherubim must have failed to move the purse-strings of the deaf-eared burghers of Eisenach. As a last effort Martin wandered forth to the suburbs of the city, only to encounter the same ill success, and at one house of more pretentious aspect than others a dog was loosed to drive away the unfortunate minstrel. Fainting with hunger, indignant, footsore, utterly disconsolate, Luther, after feebly tottering to some distance from the inhospitable mansion, threw himself upon a rustic bench, beneath tall shadowing elms in front of a cottage, and burst into passionate sobbing expression of the emotions of his soul, in the broken melody of an interpretative song. Conrad, the master of the cottage, was absent, but his wife was fortunately at home, and listened with womanly sympathy to the plaintive strains of the suffering student, whom she forthwith invited to enter the cottage, where he was plentifully regaled with such coarse but abundant fare as it contained. Luther never forgot this act of kindness, and frequently alluded to the circumstance in after-life, as if he believed it to have been a special interposition of Heaven in his favour. The good woman, like Luther himself at the time, was a Roman Catholic,

'The

and, it seems, followed the Reformer in his change of faith, supposing that she was the occupant of the cottage, when, some twenty years subsequently to her charitable entertainment of the distressed minstrel, the sentence "men have entertained angels unawares," was carved over the doorway. Though Luther chanced to meet with a beneficent spirit on this occasion, he was not always so fortunate in similar extremities, if we may believe the story of a garrulous monk, Steingel, a fierce denouncer of the pestilent "Heresiarch." "In the year 1501," writes this veracious chronicler, "just before the Heresiarch, Luther went to Erfurth-he was wandering in a forest, hungry in belly, and disturbed in mind, and presently, throwing himself upon a bank, bemoaned his hard fate with loud and piteous lamentings, forgetful that a pater or an ave would have stood him in better stead. At this moment Sathanas appeared suddenly before the Heresiarch, not in his own natural bodily likeness, as he did afterwards, when he and Luther were better acquainted, but in the semblance of a beautiful child, with fair skin, blue eyes, and golden hair, and tendered his helpmate that was to be a large apple, which, upon eagerly snatching and eating thereof, he found to be of delicious flavour, and affording marvellous nourishment; and, what should have warned him of the devilish device, did not diminish in size, though he ate his fill thereof! 'How do you feel now?' asked Sathanas, speaking by the voice of the child. Proud as an emperor, strong as a lion! replied the Heresiarch. Methinks I could break down this tree!' and thereupon striving at a mighty oak-tree, wherefrom, however, he could only shake down with all his force a few dead leaves and withered branches. fruit,' said the fiend's voice, 'contains the essence and principle of selfconfidence and pride, and is a sovereign cure for all faintness of body and humility of spirit. It will last as long as you desire it, and will never lose its virtue.' Having said this, the child, that is, the devil, vanished into the air, of which he is the prince, and it was by continually eating of the accursed fruit so given him, that the Heresiarch nourished his pride, and hardened his heart against the warnings and counsels of holy men." This narrative of Steingel's is rather a favourable specimen of the thousand and one stories circulated, ay, and believed by tens of thousands of simple people to this day, of Luther. One intimation it contains is, at all events, correct-that Martin Luther left Eisenach for Erfurth in 1501, where his mode of life appears to have resembled his previous one-intensely studious by fits and starts-moody-restless, except when under the influence of music or wine-and latterly, a strong devotional bias, untinged by the slightest doubt relative to the dogmas of the Church of Rome or the attributes of the papacy, strikingly manifested itself. His manners, albeit, were still boisterous, noisy, roystering, like most students of his age-and whoso had seen him in the third week of Lent, 1503, swaggering on his road homewards, accoutred with a hunting-knife and a sword, that was perpetually getting between his legs, and shouting, singing, gesticulating with gleeful rollicking mirth, could hardly have imagined they were looking upon one destined to shake the papal throne to its foundation, and rend away some of the brightest jewels of the triple crown.

Yet was the hand of time already close upon the signal-hour whose thunder-stroke was to rouse Luther from the vacant dreams of boyhood to the perception of his allotted life-task, dim and clouded for awhile with the lingering impressions of his youthful slumber, but gradually brightening till its giant reach and lofty significance stood out full and clear in the great Future. That he was approaching a crisis of some kind in his life appears to have for some time strongly impressed his imagination: his law-studies had been thrown aside; the light literature in which he had always taken pleasure palled upon his fancy; and except in bodily exercise and the practice of music, he found no respite from the disquietude by which his mind was haunted. At last the turning-point of life was reached. He was standing in a field with a fellow-student, on a bright day of summer, July 17, 1505, discoursing of life, death, and judgment to come-seeking by reasoning to lighten somewhat to themselves the burthen of the mystery of existence and futurity-when suddenly thunder rolled in the previously unclouded sky, and the next moment Luther's companion was struck dead, at his side, by lightning. The awe-stricken survivor uttered a loud cry, a cry which was a thanksgiving and vow to Saint Anne, so instinctively and entirely Catholic still was he, that he would immediately turn monk.

When the first consternation caused by this terrible incident had subsided, Luther did not in the slightest degree waver in his purpose. He passed the earlier part of the evening as usual with his friends, and at about nine o'clock withdrew to a convent of Augustine monks at Erfurth-his sole wealth a Plautus and a Virgil. The monastic vows were pronounced by the zealous neophyte after the usual interval of probation, though much against the wishes and advice of his father, Hans Luther, who was not for a long time reconciled to the irrevocable step, as it then appeared to be, which his son persisted in taking. A copy of the New Testament came into the young monk's hands soon afterwards, and the cloistered seclusion of the Augustine convent became from that hour the birth-womb of the Reformation.

HE literary partisans of the Restoration appear to have felt no scruple in gratifying their patrons with any number of boldly-inventive fables relative to the early life of this able and distinguished, if fanatical and usurping, soldier and statesman. According to them, he whose stern menace arrested the persecution of the Vaudois by the princes of Piedmont, was hand-in-glove with the devil from his childhood; the fiery and sagacious commander who disconcerted the tactics and overthrew the armies of every Royalist general-Prince Rupert inclusive— that had the misfortune to encounter him; the politician who penned or dictated the letters, speeches, and despatches recently collated by Mr. Carlyle, was a born dullard, as well as villain and buffoon, whose history, from the cradle to the grave, was unredeemed by the faintest indication of genius, intellect, or humanity! The coarse daubing of those mercenary limners, exposed of late years to the keen atmosphere of a searching criticism, has fallen off in flakes, and if the image of the boy-Cromwell in the national mind is still somewhat smirched and stained by the impressions left by the crumbling lamp-black with which it was so lavishly encrusted, its true lineaments and character can now be discerned with sufficient accuracy to satisfy us that it is at all events no vulgar, merely brutal spirit, that gleams forth from beneath the massive forehead-that speaks more clearly than in words, by the firmly-closed, flexile lips; and we are enabled at once to recognise one of those faces upon which a great life early dawns and glasses itself.

The birth and lineage of Oliver Cromwell have taxed the ingenuity of