He sacrificed them to his impulses
from mere selfish indifference. With their wives and mistresses Henry
VIII. and George IV. were governed by the same self-indulgent
despotism--the same animal disgusts. Henry VIII. had six wives, and sent
one to the scaffold as the prelude to his marriage with another. George
IV. had only one wife, but she suffered the persecutions of six; and if
she escaped decapitation or divorce, it was from no failure of
inclination or instruments. Henry VIII. was the tyrant of his people,
and George IV. was not: yet is there even here a similitude. Both
surrendered their understandings to their ministers, upon the condition
of subserviency to their personal desires. What George would have been
in the age of Henry it might be ungracious to suppose; but it may be
asserted that Henry, had he been reserved for the close of the
eighteenth century, would have a very different place in opinion and
history as a king and as a man,--such are the beneficent, humanizing
influences of knowledge, civilization, the spirit of religious
tolerance, and laws mutually guarding and guarded by public liberty!"

* * * * *

AN ECLIPSE AT BOOSSA.

(_From Landers' Travels, vol. ii._)

"About ten o'clock at night, when we were sleeping on our mats, we were
suddenly awoke by a great cry of distress from innumerable voices,
attended by a horrid clashing and clattering noise, which the hour of
the night tended to make more terrific. Before we had time to recover
from our surprise, old Pascoe rushed breathless into our hut, and
informed us with a trembling voice that 'the sun was dragging the moon
across the heavens.' Wondering what could be the meaning of so strange
and ridiculous a story, we ran out of the hut half dressed, and we
discovered that the moon was totally eclipsed. A number of people were
gathered together in our yard, in dreadful apprehension that the world
was at an end, and that this was but the 'beginning of sorrows.' We
learnt from them that the Mahomedan priests residing in the city, having
personified the sun and moon, had told the king and the people that the
eclipse was occasioned through the obstinacy and disobedience of the
latter luminary. They said that for a long time previously the moon had
been displeased with the path she had been compelled to take through the
heavens, because it was filled with thorns and briers, and obstructed
with a thousand other difficul