280 CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS^ 



to destroy the buildings ? If purification were necessary, purify by all 

 means, but to destroy wantonly the finest specimens of excellence in 

 buildings, in sculpture, and in paintings, was a barbarity which nothing 

 can justify, and all men of taste and reflection must regret this cruel 

 spoliation of the works of art, — ** monuments," as Dr. Card justly 

 observes, ** of the skill as well as the piety of our ancestors." Impartial 

 history has affixed the name of Cromwell,* the King's Secretary, as 

 instigator, prime agent, and director of this nefarious proceeding. 

 *' He," says the accurate Strype, **had the great stroke in all this. All 

 these counsels and methods were struck out of his head ; for which, as 

 he received the curse, and brought upon himself the hatred of many, so 

 many more, well affected to a reformation of superstitions in the church, 

 extolled him highly." We are disposed to rely upon Strype in pre- 

 ference to Hume, whose prejudices in this, as in many other instances, 

 overpowered his love of consistency and justice. The history of the 

 reigns of Henry VIII., Mary, and Elizabeth, by the latter, we do not 

 hesitate to say, is a mass of prejudicacy, sophism, and misrepresentation, 

 most unworthy of a scholar and a man of truth and honour. 



By the supplication of Bishop Latimer, however, Malvern Priory was 

 screened from the general wreck of abbeys, and it still retains most of 

 its original perfection. Of the accuracy of the following description we 

 can speak most confidently : — 



♦' Occupying a spot as lovely as the eye ever rested upon, and built after the 

 customary form of a cross, this venerable structure, in its magnitude, proportions, 

 and decorations, with its dark grey tower so full of impression and effect, — with its 

 pierced battlements and graceful pinnacles, — presents a most beautiful specimen of 

 that florid style of English architecture which prevailed in the reign of Henry VII. 

 The whole length of this majestic and picturesque fabric, as given by Mr. 

 Chambers, in his History of Great Malvern, is a hundred and seventy-one feet, its 

 breadth sixty-three feet ; and that of the tower a hundred and twenty -four feet. 



'• When the Priory was dissolved, it was granted by Henry, together with certain 

 lands and tenements immediately adjoining, and others in Upton and Hanley, to 

 William Pynnock and his heirs, who in the following year alienated the same to 

 John Knottysford, Esq. Sergeant at Arms, from whom the church was purchased 

 by the inhabitants of Malvern ; and to the happy circumstance of its being made 

 parochieil, we owe the preservation of a fabric so touching to the heart of the 

 christian, and which serves to gratify the eye of the painter as well as the antiquary, 

 from its having all the painter's beauties of intricacy of form, and light and shade. 

 The older portions of the church, the round piers worked with plain capitals, the 

 semi-circular arches of the nave, are decidedly architectural features of an early 

 Norman origin, and coeval with the foundation of the monastery ; the rest of the 

 edifice is an elegant and diversified specimen of design and embellishment in the 

 latest period of the pointed style." 



* A man of the most cold-blooded and heartless character, distinguished for his 

 impiousness, baseness, and dastardliness ; who was the inciter and willing agent of 

 the atrocities which marked that frightful period, but who finally and justly became 

 the victim of his perfidy and crimes. On the morning of the 10th of June, 1540, 

 he was all-powerful : in the evening of the same day he was in prison as a traitor. 

 He lived only forty-eight days after his arrest, occupying his entire time, not in 

 soliciting the mercy of heaven for his countless robberies and murders, but in 

 abjectly praying to the King to spare his life. Of all the mean and dastardly 

 wretches that ever died, this was the most mean and dastardly — he, who had been 

 the most insolent and cruel of ruffians when he had power, was now the most 

 offensively slavish and base. In his letters to his royal master, he fawned on him 

 in the most disgusting manner ; compared his smiles and frowns to those of the 

 Deity ; besought him to suffer him " to kiss his balmy hand once more, that the 

 fragrance thereof might make him fit for heaven!" Hume deeply laments this 

 man's fate, although he has not a word of compassion to bestow upon all the 

 thousands that had been murdered or ruined by him — neither does he hint at the 

 fact of his being the very man who first suggested the condemning of people to death 

 without trial ! What could be more just than that he should die in the same way ? — 



