lay their hands on a treasure hid for ages. America, it was said, had been discovered in one sense above three centuries; but this was the true discovery-the effectual access to its resources. Every new contract for a Mexican mine produced a rise in the shares of the companies, as if this fresh undertaking must necessarily be a source of profit to the others. And the result was, that in January 1825, the premium on the shares of each of the companies mentioned above exceeded cent. per cent., although no substantial reason could be given for any advance whatever. It must not however be imagined that this rise of price was occasioned solely by the competition of individuals who intended to continue to hold stock, and to trust to the dividends made by the companies for a return. That this was the case in the first instance is, speaking generally, true. But others, actuated by very different views, speedily entered the field. A peculiar combination of circumstances, at the head of which must be placed an almost incredible degree of ignorance and folly on the part of a considerable portion of the public, spread a spirit of gambling among all classes. Many, who were most eager in the pursuit of shares, intended only to hold them for a few days or weeks, to profit by the rise which they anticipated would take place, by selling them to others more credulous or bold than themselves. The confidence of one set of speculators confirmed that of others. Meanwhile the public gullibility, or rather its indiscriminating rapacity, was liberally administered to. Company after company was formed without any previous contract; in other words, without any foundation whatever. The plan was to fix on a district in America, understood to contain mines; to form a company bearing the name of such district; to obtain a first payment from the shareholders, and to send out agents or commissioners, as they were termed, to survey the district, and engage mines. Such was the case of most of those having the names of districts in South America; it was the case also of the Hispaniola and St. Domingo Company, formed on the basis of accounts given by Dr. Robertson, of mines wrought in that Island some three centuries ago. And yet lawyers, clergymen, and even the nobles of the land, were candidates for shares in these miserable bubbles, in the hope of finding (in which luckily most of them were disappointed) some dupe to buy their shares at a premium.

As the year 1825 proceeded, the mining mania gradually declined, not from any falling off in the prospects of the companies, but in the supply of money in London. Speculative merchants had made immense importations of cotton, silk, wool, timber, and other articles; money was of course wanted to pay for these; the banks were drained; discounts became difficult; mining shares and South American Stock were brought to sale, and the holders found, to their cost, that the public had recovered its senses. The panic in December, 1825, took place; the shares of the three principal companies, some of which had been at a premium of 500 per cent., fell to par, that is £100 in money, and no more could be got for £100 of the company's stock. This price they maintained for a considerable time, because most of the parties interested continued to have a favourable impression of the issue of their undertakings. Demands, however, were made for additional sums to meet the expenditure abroad: the shareholders felt all the pressure of these demands, after their incomes at home had been reduced by the change of times, and in 1826 and 1827 mining shares progressively declined, so that £100 stock fetched only £20 or £25 in money. The bubble companies were entirely destroyed, and the few only remained who had some foundation to stand upon.

Even these would have been relinquished, or have shrunk into very small dimensions, had not the directors been able to enforce further payments, by forfeiting, in default of such, whatever had been previously paid by the subscribers. The usage was, that, on becoming a shareholder, each person subscribed the deed of the company, engaging to pay, when called on, such instalments or sums to account (generally £10 on each share) as should be required by the directors, until he had completed payment of the £100. Now a shareholder, who had advanced £50 or £60 naturally consented to pay £10 from time to time, rather than incur the forfeiture of all that he had paid. Those who held only a few shares, felt this in a less degree; but to the holders of a number of shares the grievance was most serious. They raised the money with great difficulty; often selling at a heavy loss their family property, or prevailing on relations to make them advances, to their great inconvenience; and as far as can yet be seen, with very little prospect of a return from the mines; a memorable lesson of the caution that should be exercised before signing any engagement in the nature of a company deed. Resentment would be excited against the directors, had they not been in general the heaviest sufferers; their regulations required them to hold a certain number of shares (perhaps 20 or 30); but in their blind confidence they

frequently held 200 or 300, and drew on themselves a proportionate sacrifice-in several cases the loss of their whole property.

The managers of the companies formed in the outset, are chargeable with ignorance only; they trespassed, not knowingly, but from want of information. There had till then been little communication between this country and Spanish Of the America, the monopoly enforced by Old Spain having prevented it. Spaniards settled in Mexico, and driven from it by the civil wars and consequent emancipation of the country, none, or almost none, found their way to this country; they repaired to Cuba, to the south of France, or to Spain. Nor were the published accounts of the country entitled to much confidence. Humboldt's travels formed the chief authority; but their illustrious author, though generally cautious, seems in this instance to have placed too much confidence in vague exaggerated statements. Our merchants knew generally that silver mines formed a main branch of the productive industry of Mexico, and had enriched very many families originally in humble circumstances; but they had no idea of the extent of injury sustained by the mines during the civil wars, nor of the amount of expenditure required to bring them into a working state; nor were they aware how little useful information could be expected from the natives; the working of the mines, like every operation requiring skill and intelligence, having been superintended by natives of Old Spain, who had either fallen in the civil war, or been expelled after the Mexicans succeeded in the contest. Hence the agents of our companies found on the spot only native Mexicans, men without education or experience in business, and, it must be added, without any due sense of the importance of candour or probity. They urged our countrymen to drain the mines, not by machinery, of which they had no idea, but by animal power, the use of which was of advantage to the Mexican landholders, by employing their horses, and creating a great consumption of maize, the principal grain of the country. Then, as to the last and most important stage in the business of mining-the mode of extracting the silver from the ore. The Mexicans, wholly unacquainted with the improvements made in Germany during the last half-century, recommended amalgamation, a process conducted by them in a very rude manner, and which, in most qualities of silver ore, fails to extract the whole, or anything like the whole, of the metal. The object of the Mexicans, in short, was merely to cause English capital to be circulated among them; thus giving employment to their people for a time, and bringing the mines into an improved state, in which state they (the Mexicans) might hope to resume them after our countrymen had exhausted their resources, or had become weary of their contracts.

;

Actuated by these views, the Mexicans pressed one undertaking after another on the agents of the companies, who were but too eager to enter on them without such incitement. All the companies fell into errors of the same kind, viz. engaging too many mines, and conducting them for a time, as if their funds were unlimited. They reckoned on finding, as they proceeded, supplies in the produce of the mines; but that produce, though considerable in quantity, seldom yielded the expected result, owing to the very imperfect method of extracting the silver from the ore, as well as to the various disadvantages attendant on the vast distance of the undertakings from this country. These disadvantages were ill supplied by the agents of the companies. Mining in England is not conducted on a scale sufficient to afford any great choice of superintendents for mines abroad it was necessary in such appointments to waive the qualification of mining knowledge, and to be satisfied with men of fair character and reputed ability in their respective professions, however different from mining. Hence the appointment as agents of several officers, naval and military, on the half-pay list; whose habits, whatever might be their personal merits, were very different from those required for such concerns. Mercantile men might have been more suitable; but a merchant, fully employed in business, was not likely to relinquish or suspend it; and those who in middle age are not fully employed, frequently are indebted for their leisure to vacillation, want of exertion, or deficient judgment. This suffices to account for the disappointments of the companies in a very material point-the conduct of their commissioners or agents abroad; for of the whole number it would be difficult to point out more than two or three entitled to the praise of judicious management. The same applied to most of the inferior employés-to the practical miners, clerks, and mechanics.

The expense of conveying the requisite machinery from the coast of Mexico to the mining districts, generally at a great distance in the interior, absorbed much capital. The country has few practicable roads, draught carriages are almost unknown, and burthens are carried on the backs of mules and horses; add to this that Mexico being underpeopled, labour is nearly as high as it is in the United CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 35. 4 P

States of North America; and the mechanical arts being in a manner unknown, all skilful workmen, such as carpenters, blacksmiths, and working engineers, had to be sent from England at a heavy expense.

Such were the chief causes of the failure of the Mexican mining companies; and several of these may be referred to one radical disadvantage-the non-existence of silver mines in England. We have, in Cornwall and in North Wales, considerable mines of tin and copper, while in the northern counties we have mines of lead; but of silver we have none that deserve the name. How much better had it been had our countrymen set out with a consciousness that Germany is the only country in Europe, or indeed in the world, in which the treatment of silver ore is conducted on scientific principles. The Saxons at Freyberg succeed in extracting a profit from ore of very inferior quality, often worth only a fourth or fifth part of the ore raised in abundance by the Mexicans on account of our companies, but which, wrought by their crude, inefficient, and expensive process, fails to afford anything like a satisfactory return. There seems no reason to doubt that the German process may be applied to silver ore in Mexico as in Europe; the difficulties arise, not from difference in the quality of the ore, but from the want of experienced smelters, and the general backwardness of the Mexicans in mechanics. A German mining company established in Mexico has not as yet succeeded; but they have had to contend with the same difficulties as the English companies, with the additional disadvantage of insufficient capital; so that their methods have not had a fair trial. But though the companies were in all other respects successful, they have a serious drawback to contend with in the unsettled state of the country. No government has as yet been established in Mexico, or in any other of the newly constituted American states, with power sufficient to put down disturbances, or to enforce the observance of contracts. So long as the companies were struggling to put their mines into order, they seem to have sustained little inconvenience from the circumstances now mentioned; but the moment they had succeeded in bringing them once more into a more productive state, and were beginning to have a reasonable prospect of obtaining some return for their enormous outlays, they were annoyed by questions as to title, and by the setting up of claims on the mines, of which they had never heard before. Recently, we understand, the claimants have occasionally had recourse to violence, and in some instances the companies' servants have been forcibly ejected from their works. We hope, though we can hardly say we believe, that these outrages may be repressed and punished. If they be permitted to continue, it is difficult to see how the companies, how well soever they may be otherwise established, can escape ruin.

F. S.

MEMOIR OF BISHOP MILES COVERDALE.

For the Christian Observer.

On the 4th of October, being the 305th anniversary of the publication of the whole of the Bible in English, the (supposed) remains of the venerable translator Miles Coverdale, which had been exhumed from the church of St. Bartholomew, adjoining the Bank of England, to make room for the new buildings, and transferred the preceding evening to St. Magnus Church, near London Bridge, were deposited in a vault against the east wall of that church, a part of the old building in which he preached, at the expence of the parish, to whom the remains had been consigned by the Bishop of London. The parish merited this mark of attention, having recently shewn its veneration for this eminent confessor, by erecting, about three years ago, a tablet to his memory, with a suitable inscription, which speaks of him as having held and acted upon that fudamental Protestant and scriptural truth, that "The pure word of God ought to be the sole rule of our faith, and guide of our practice.' The deposition of the remains was strictly private and void of ceremonial; a proceeding befitting the occasion, for though we ought to honour God in his saints, and to be mindful to follow them as they

followed Christ, and to take encouragement for the strengthening of our faith and patience from being encompassed with so great a cloud of witnesses, yet ought we to eschew that superstitious veneration for the mortal relics of Saints, which has led to so many of the corruptions of Rome.

The interesting recollections connected with the name of Coverdale being thus revived, we purpose to lay before our readers the chief memorials which time has spared of his valuable labours. The events of his life have been but scantily recorded, and much doubt hangs over several of them; for though martyrologists, historians, and the compilers of religious tracts and biographical dictionaries, have done honour to his memory, they have for the most part copied from one another, without much labour in seeking for new materials, or at least success in finding them. But the commemoration in 1835 of the tercentenary of the publication of his Bible, which has been reprinted by that good man and spirited biblical publisher, Mr. Bagster, has led to the issuing, from the same respectable press, of a laborious and original memoir of Coverdale, with divers matters relating to the promulgation of the Bible in the reign of Henry the Eighth. The compiler (whom we guess to be Mr. Offor, the valuable fruits of whose diligent labours for the elucidation of the life of Tyndale are known to our readers) has explored not only various allusions to Coverdale scattered through works little read, but also the manuscript treasures in the British Museum, and the Chapter House at Westminster, whereby he has been enabled to clear up, or illustrate, sundry particulars connected with his narrative; and these gleanings being added to the facts detailed by the older biographers (chiefly Fox), with the modern additions of Chalmers and others, afford a copious account of Coverdale's life and labours. Of these various materials we shall avail ourselves in laying before our readers the following sketch.

Miles Coverdale was born somewhere in Yorkshire, in the year 1487 or 1488. Nothing is known of his parentage, or the exact spot of his nativity. It was usual for persons devoting themselves to a monastic life to express their renunciation of all earthly ties, by relinquishing their family name, and assuming a new one, so that even their own relatives often lost all clue to them. Now as Coverdale was first known to the world as an Augustine friar, it has been conjectured that this may not have been his family name, but may have been adopted by him upon his entering his monastery from the district so called in the county of York, which may have been his birthplace; and that, being thus customarily designated in his younger years, he may never have thought it worth while to resume his original name. All this, however, is merely hypothetical, in order to account for his birth-place and parentage not being known; but on the other hand, as his family was perhaps obscure, and his contemporaries probably never took the trouble to make any inquiries respecting his early history, the absence of information is too slight a basis on which to build a conjecture that he may have changed his name; though some of the reformers did so, and it was no uncommon or discreditable circumstance in those days The Augustine monastery where he studied, at Cambridge, was suppressed at the general dissolution in 1539. It was situated between Free-school Lane and Slaughter-house Lane.

At the time when Coverdale pursued his academical course at Cambridge, nothing could be more jejune and profitless than the studies of the place. Classics and mathematics, the Sacred Scriptures, and even the Fathers of the Church, were all neglected. Popery had indurated the heart, and stunted the growth of the intellect; and frivolous questions, abstruse absurdities, the dogmas of the schoolmen, and the burdensome ceremonials of a superstitious ritual, absorbed the contemplations of the aspiring scholar. Morality was at as low an ebb as literature; and religion had evaporated into unprofitable or idolatrous observances.

Amidst this general barbarism, the House at which Coverdale was educated was rising to distinction under the care and learning of its prior, Dr. Barnes; and many of those who sojourned at the University for learning's sake, were in the habit of attending the prior's lectures, and began to devote their attention to useful studies, and particularly to biblical learning. That unspeakably important invention, of which a bigotted priest, the vicar of Croydon, said in a sermon at St. Paul's Cross, "We must root out printing, or it will root out us," was, under the blessing of God, opening the way for the Protestant reformation; and the gleam of light which had begun to dawn upon Germany, had cast some rays of illumination upon England. Barnes, who had studied at Louvain, had probably very early inclined towards the opinions of the Reformers, though he did not at once openly declare them. Instead of Duns and the other books of scholastic sophistry then most commonly used at Oxford and Cambridge, he read to his auditory St. Paul's Epistles ; "whereby," says Fox, "in a short space he made sundry good divines." Among his constant hearers was Coverdale. By publicly reading the Scriptures, Barnes became familiar with Divine truth, and was prepared to abandon the errors of Popery: for when Bilney, the Professor of Civil Law in Cambridge, afterwards a martyr, "expounded to him the way of the Lord more perfectly," he at once embraced and avowed the principles of the Reformation. Many also of those who attended his lectures, embraced the sentiments of the Reformers, their minds being already prepared, by a knowledge of Scripture, to receive the pure doctrines of the Gospel. Thus between the years 1526 and 1531, the Reformation made great progress in Cambridge. Many members of the university being accustomed to assemble together to discuss the doctrines which were then rapidly spreading among the German states, a house near St. John's College, in which they met, it being convenient because its vicinity to several colleges allowed of an unobserved access, was called in mockery Germany. Thus Cambridge became a centre of radiation, whence many went forth to preach the doctrines of the reformed religion in different parts of the country. Among the number was Coverdale; who had received holy orders in the year 1514, and soon became a zealous preacher. We do not hear much of him for several years; but an incident, which occurred in 1528, serves to shew that his labours were not in vain in the Lord. One Topley, an Augustine friar, who heard him preach and conversed with him that year at Bumstead in Essex, confessed that he had abjured the worship of images, the invocation of saints, and private confessions, in consequence of his arguments. Walking in the fields with him, he says he was convinced by his discourse that "it was sufficient for a man to be contrite for