Luther's Hymns (Vol. ii., p. 327.).—A writer in the Parish Choir of September last (p. 140.) has traced the words "In the midst of life we are in death" to a higher source than the Salisbury Service-book. It occurs in the choir-book of the monks of St. Gall in Switzerland, and was probably composed by Notker, surnamed the Stammerer, about the end of the ninth century, or the beginning of the tenth.
C.H.
St. Catherine's Hall, Cambridge.
Osnaburg Bishopric (Vol. ii., pp. 358. 484.).—The occupiers of this bishopric were princes ecclesiastical of the empire, and had not only the ordinary authority of bishops in their dioceses, but were sovereigns of their provinces and towns in the same manner as were the princes temporal.
The bishopric of Osnaburg was founded by Charlemagne, and was filled by various princes until 1625, when Cardinal Francis William, Count of Wartemburg, was elected by the chapter.
By the Treaty of Osnaburg, 1642, which was ratified at the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, the House of Brunswick resigned all claims to the archbishoprics of Magdeburg and Bremen, and to the bishoprics of Halberstadt and Ratzburg; and received the alternate nomination of the bishopric of Osnaburg, which was declared to belong jointly to the Catholic and the Protestant branch of Brunswick.
Under this arrangement, on the death of Count Wartemburg in 1662, Ernest Augustus I., the sixtieth bishop, patriarch of the present royal family of England, succeeded to the government of Osnaburg, which he held for thirty-six years.
Ernest Augustus II, sixty-second bishop, Duke of Brunswick and Lunenburg, was made Duke of York and Albany, and Bishop of Osnaburg, in 1716, in the room of Charles Joseph of Lorraine. He died in 1748.
Frederick, second son of George III., was appointed bishop at an early age; he being called, in a work dedicated to him in 1772, "An infant bishop."
By the Treaty of Vienna, the bishopric of Osnaburg was made part of the kingdom of Hanover.