which had been extinct since the Reformation.  As these events, though all-absorbing to the actors in them, (as are so many others of very secondary importance,) have now shrunk to their true dimensions, and are, in fact, infinitely less momentous than others which were silently transpiring at the time almost without notice, I shall content myself with simply condensing a brief contemporaneous document which gives the chief points, without passion or prejudice, in a narrative so simple that it vouches for its own veracity:—­

“Without permission of the Crown, or any negotiations with the Government whatever, Pope Plus the Ninth divided the whole of England into twelve sees, and assigned these to as many Roman Catholic bishops with local titles and territorial jurisdiction.  The chief of them was one Nicholas Wiseman (by birth, it is said, a Spaniard), who was created Archbishop of Westminster and Cardinal.

“’The said Wiseman issued a pastoral letter, which was read on the 27th day of October, 1850, in all the churches and chapels of the Romanists, congratulating Catholic England on the reestablishment of the Roman hierarchy.  In it he used the startling expression, “Our beloved country has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament, from which its light had long vanished.”

“’The nation was the more surprised at all this, inasmuch as the position of Pio Nono was not such as to warrant any expectation of a step so audacious.  Little more than a year had elapsed since his own subjects in Rome itself rebelled against him, murdered his Prime Minister, and compelled him, in the disguise of a menial, to fly from Rome; nor was he restored except by the arms of the French, who besieged and took Rome in 1849.

“’That the Pope, while holding his own little dominions on so precarious a tenure, should venture to assume such an exercise of supremacy over the most powerful nation in the world,—­a nation so jealous of its independence, which had so long been, and which still was, most averse to his claims,—­seemed almost incredible to the people of England; and they were proportionably indignant.

“’Some affirmed that the aforesaid Cardinal Wiseman was the chief cause of it all,—­the spectacle of many conversions from the Church of England to that of Rome having deceived him into a notion that the national mind was far more generally disposed to receive Romanism; and to make up the long-standing breach with the Papacy, than was really the case.  The principal cause of the conversions above mentioned was what was called the “Oxford Movement.”  In the University of Oxford had sprung up a body of men who had consecrated their lives to the diffusion of doctrines indefinitely near those of Rome.  They spoke of the Reformation contemptuously; advocated very many, obsolete rites and usages; magnified the power of the church and the prerogatives of the priesthood.  Many of them, at length, finding that they could not,