civil. Everybody knows the steps by which this embodied selfishness

achieved his emancipation from a dominant Church. It little concerns us now, except as a question of historic curiosity, what his motives were. Judging from the analogy of all his other actions, we should say they were bad; but by some means or other the evil deeds of this man were generally productive of benefit to his country. He cast off the Pope that he might be freed from a disagreeable wife; but as the Pope whom he rejected was the servant of Charles, (the nephew of the repudiated queen,) he found that he had freed his kingdom at the same time from its degrading vassalage to the puppet of a rival monarch. He dissolved the monasteries in England for the purpose of grasping their wealth; but the country found he had at the same time delivered it from a swarm of idle and mischievous corporations, which in no long time would have swallowed up the land. Their revenues were immense, and the extent of their domains almost incredible. Before people had recovered from their disgust at the hateful motives of their tyrant's behaviour, the results of it became apparent in the elevation of the finest class of the English population; for the "bold peasantry, their country's pride," began to establish their independent holdings on the parcelled-out territories of the monks and nuns. Vast tracts of ground were thrown open to the competition of lay proprietors. Even the poorest was not without hope of becoming an owner of the soil; nay, the released estates were so plentiful that in Elizabeth's reign an act was passed making it illegal for a man to build a cottage "unless he laid four acres of land thereto." The cottager, therefore, became a small farmer; and small farmers were the defence of England; and the defence of England was the safety of freedom and religion throughout the world. There were some hundred thousands of those landed cottagers and smaller gentry and great proprietors established by this most respectable sacrilege of Henry the Eighth, and for the sake of these excellent consequences we forgive him his pride and cruelty and all his faults. But Henry's work was done, and in January, 1547, he died. The rivals with whom he started on the race of life were still alive; but life was getting dark and dreary with both of them. Francis was no longer the hero of "The Field of the Cloth-of-Gold," conqueror of Marignano, the gallant captive of Pavia, or the winner of all hearts. He was worn out with a life of great vicissitudes, and heard with ominous foreboding the news of Henry's death. [March 11, 1547.] A fate seemed to unite them in all those years of revelry and hate and friendship, and in a few weeks the most chivalrous and generous of the Valois followed the most tyrannical of the Tudors to the tomb. A year before this, the Monk of Wittenberg, now the renowned and married Dr. Martin Luther, had left a place vacant which no man could fill; and now of all those combatants Charles was the sole survivor. Selfish as Henry, dissolute as Francis, obstinate as Martin, his race also was drawing to a close. But the play was played out before these chief performers withdrew. All Europe had changed its aspect. The England, the France, the Empire, of five-and-twenty years before had utterly passed away. New objects were filling men's minds, new principles of policy were regulating states. Protestantism was an established fact, and the Treaty of Passau in 1552 gave liberty and equality to the professors of the new faith. Charles was sagacious though heartless as a ruler, but an unredeemed bigot as an individual man. The necessities of his condition, by which he was forced to give toleration to the enemies of the Church, weighed upon his heart. A younger hand and bloodier disposition, he thought, were needed to regain the ground he had been obliged to yield; and in Philip his son he perceived all these requirements fulfilled. When he looked round, he saw nothing to give him comfort in his declining years. War was going on in Hungary against the still advancing Turks; war was raging in Lorraine between his forces and the French; Italy, the land of volcanoes, was on the eve of outbreak and anarchy; and, thundering out defiance of the Imperial power and the Christian Cross, the guns of the Ottoman fleet were heard around the shores of Sicily and up to the Bay of Naples. The emperor was faint and weary: his armies were scattered and dispirited; his fleets were unequal to their enemy: so in 1556 he resigned his pompous title of monarch of Spain and the Indies, with all their dependencies, to his son, and the empire to his brother Ferdinand, who was already King of Hungary and Bohemia and hereditary Duke of Austria; and then, with the appearance of resignation, but his soul embittered by anger and disappointment, he retired to the Convent of St. Just, where he gorged himself into insanity with gluttonies which would have disgraced Vitellius, and amused himself by interfering in state affairs which he had forsworn, and making watches which he could not regulate, and going through the revolting farce of a rehearsal of his funeral, with his body in the coffin and the monks of the monastery for mourners. Those theatrical lamentations were probably as sincere as those which followed his real demise in 1558; for when he surrendered the power which made him respected he gave evidence only of the qualities which made him disliked.

The Reformation, you remember, is the characteristic of this century. We have traced it in Germany to its recognition as a separate and liberated faith. In England we are going to see Protestantism established and triumphant. But not yet; for we have first to notice a period when Protestantism seems at its last hour, when Mary, wife of the bigot Philip, and true and honourable daughter of the Church, is determined to restore her nation to the Romish chair, or die in the holy attempt. We are not going into the minutiæ of this dreadful time, or to excite your feelings with the accounts of the burnings and torturings of the dissenters from the queen's belief. None of us are ignorant of the cruelty of those proceedings, or have read unmoved the sad recital of the martyrdom of the bishops and of such men as the joyous and innocent Rowland Taylor of Hadleigh. Men's hearts did not become hardened by these sights. Rather they melted with compassion towards the dauntless sufferers; and, though the hush of terror kept the masses of the people silent, great thoughts were rising in the general mind, and toleration ripened even under the heat of the Smithfield fires. Attempts have been made to blacken Mary beyond her demerits and to whiten her beyond her deservings. Protestants have denied her the virtues she unquestionably possessed,--truthfulness, firmness, conscientiousness, and unimpeachable morals. Her panegyrists take higher ground, and claim for her the noblest qualifications both as queen and woman,--patriotism, love of her people, fulfilment of all her duties, and exquisite tenderness of disposition. It will be sufficient for us to look at her actions, and we will leave her secret sentiments alone. We shall only say that it is very doubtful whether the plea of conscientiousness is admissible in such a case. If perverted reasoning or previous education has made a Thug feel it a point of conscience to put his throttling instrument under a quiet traveller's throat, the conscientious belief of the performer that his act is for the good of the sufferer's soul will scarcely save him from the gallows. On the contrary, a conscientious persistence in what is manifestly wrong should be an aggravation of the crime, for it gives an appearance of respectability to atrocity, and, when punishment overtakes the wrong-doers, makes the Thug an honoured martyr to his opinions, instead of a convicted felon for his misdeeds. Let us hope that the rights of conscience will never be pleaded in defence of cruelty or persecution.

[A.D. 1554.]

The restoration of England to the obedience of the Church, the marriage of Mary, the warmest partisan of Popery, with Philip, the fanatical oppressor of the reformed,--these must have raised the hopes of Rome to an extraordinary pitch. But greater as a support, and more reliable than queens or kings, was the Society of the Jesuits, which at this time demonstrated its attachment to the Holy See, and devoted itself blindly, remorselessly, unquestioning, to the defence of the old faith. Having sketched the rise of Luther, a companion-picture is required of the fortunes of Ignatius Loyola. We hinted that a Biscayan soldier, wounded at the siege of Pampeluna in Spain, divided the notice of Europe with the poor Austin Friar of Wittenberg. Enthusiasm, rising almost into madness, was no bar, in the case of this wonderful Spaniard, to the possession of faculties for government and organization which have never been surpassed. Shut out by the lameness resulting from his wound from the struggles of worldly and soldierly ambition, he gave full way to the mystic exaltation of his Southern disposition. He devoted himself as knight and champion to the Virgin, heard with contempt and horror of the efforts made to deny the omnipotence of the Chair of Rome, and swore to be its defender. Others of similar sentiments joined him in his crusade against innovation. [A.D. 1540.] A company of self-denying, self-sacrificing men began, and, adding to the previous laws of their order a vow of unqualified submission to the Pope, they were recognised by a bull, and the Society of Jesus became the strongest and most remarkable institution of modern times. Through all varieties of fortune, in exile and imprisonment, and even in dissolution, their oath of uninquiring, unhesitating obedience to the papal command has never been broken. With Protean variety of appearance, but unvarying identity of intention, these soldiers of St. Peter are as relentless to others, and as regardless of themselves, as the body-guard of the old Assassins. No degradation is too servile, no place too distant, no action too revolting, for these unreasoning instruments of power. Wilfully surrendering the right of judgment and the feelings of conscience into the hands of their superior, there is no method by law or argument of regulating their conduct. The one principle of submission has swallowed up all the rest, and fulfilment of that duty ennobles the iniquitous deeds by which it is shown. Other societies put a clause, either by words or implication, in their promise of obedience, limiting it to things which are just and proper. This limit is ostentatiously abrogated by the followers of Loyola. The merit of obeying an order to slay an enemy of the Church more than compensates for the guilt of the murder. In other orders a homicide is looked upon with horror; in this, a Jesuit who kills a heretical king by command of his chiefs is venerated as a saint. Against practices and feelings like these you can neither reason nor be on your guard. In all kingdoms, accordingly, at some time or other, the existence of the order has been found inconsistent with the safety of the State, and it has been dissolved by the civil power. The moment, however, the Church regains its hold, the Jesuits are sure to be restored. The alliance, indeed, is indispensable, and the mutual aid of the Order and of the Papacy a necessity of their existence. Incorporated in 1540, the brothers of the Company of Jesus considered the defections of the Reformation in a fair way of being compensated when the death of our little, cold-hearted, self-willed Edward the Sixth--a Henry the Eighth in the bud--left the throne in 1553 to Mary, a Henry the Eighth full blown. [A.D. 1558.] When nearly five years of conscientious truculence had shown the earnestness of this unhappy woman's belief, the accession of Elizabeth inaugurated a new system in this country, from which it has never departed since without a perceptible loss both of happiness and power. A strictly home and national policy was immediately established by this most remarkable of our sovereigns, and pursued through good report and evil report, sometimes at the expense of her feelings--if she was so little of a Tudor as to have any--of tenderness and compassion, sometimes at the expense--and here she was Tudor enough to have very acute sensations indeed--of her personal and official dignity, but always with the one object of establishing a great united and irresistible bulwark against foreign oppression and domestic disunion. It shows how powerful was her impression upon the course of European history, that her character is as fiercely canvassed at this day as in the speech of her contemporaries. Nobody feels as if Elizabeth was a personage removed from us by three hundred years. We discuss her actions, and even argue about her looks and manners, as if she had lived in our own time. And this is the reason why such divergent judgments are pronounced on a person who, more than any other ruler, united the opinions of her subjects during the whole of her long and agitated life. Her acts remain, but her judges are different. If we could throw ourselves with the reality of circumstance as well as the vividness of feeling into the period in which she moved and governed, we should come to truer decisions on the points submitted to our view. But if we look with the refinements of the present time, and the speculative niceties permissible in questions which have no direct bearing on our prosperity and safety, we shall see much to disapprove of, which escaped the notice, or even excited the admiration, of the people who saw what tremendous arbitraments were on the scale. If we were told that a cold-blooded individual had placed on one occasion some murderous weapons on a height, and then requested a number of his friends to stand before them, while some unsuspecting persons came up in that direction, and then, suddenly telling his companions to stand on one side, had sent bullets hissing and crashing through the gentlemen advancing to him, you would shudder with disgust at such atrocious cruelty, till you were told that the cold-blooded individual was the Duke of Wellington, and the advancing gentlemen the French Old Guard at Waterloo. And in the same way, if we read of Elizabeth interfering in Scotland, domineering at home, and bellicose abroad, let us inquire, before we condemn, whether she was in her duty during those operations,--whether, in fact, she was resisting an assault, or capriciously and unjustifiably opening her batteries on the innocent and unprepared. Fiery-hearted, strong-handed Scotchmen are ready to fight at this time for the immaculate purity and sinless martyrdom of their beautiful Mary, and sturdy Englishmen start up with as bold a countenance in defence of good Queen Bess. It is not to be doubted that a roll-call as numerous as that of Bannockburn or Flodden could be mustered on this quarrel of three centuries ago; but the fight is needless. The points of view are so different that a verdict can never be given on the merits of the two personages principally engaged; but we think an unprejudiced examination of the course of Elizabeth's policy in Scotland, and her treatment of her rival, will establish certain facts which neither party can gainsay.

1st. From this it will result, that, to keep reformed England secure, it was indispensable to have reformed Scotland on her side.

2d. That, in order to have Scotland either reformed or on her side, it was indispensable to render powerless a popish queen,--a queen who was supported as legitimate inheritor of England by the Pope and Philip of Spain, and the King and princes of France.

3d. That Elizabeth had a right, by all the laws of self-preservation, to sustain by every legal and peaceable means that party in Scotland which was _de facto_ the government of the country, and which promised to be most useful to the objects she had in view. Those objects have already been named,--peace and security for the Protestant religion, and the honour and independence of the whole British realm.

To gain these ends, who denies that she bribed and bullied and deceived?--that she degraded the Scottish nobles by alternate promises and threats, and weakened the Scottish crown by encouraging its enemies, both ecclesiastical and civil? In prudishly finding fault with these proceedings, we forget the Scotch, French, Spanish, popish, emissaries who were let loose upon England; the plots at home, the scowling messages from abroad; the excommunications uttered from Rome; the massacre of the Protestants gloried in in France, and the vast navies and immense armies gathering against the devoted Isle from all the coasts and provinces of Spain.

In 1568, after the defeat of the queen's party at Langside, Mary threw herself on the pity and protection of Elizabeth, and was kept in honourable safety for many years. She did not allow her to collect partisans for the recovery of her kingdom, nor to cabal against the government which had expelled her. To do so would not have been to shelter a fugitive, but to declare war on Scotland. In 1848, Louis Philippe, chased by the revolutionists of Paris, came over to England. He was kept in honourable retirement. He was not allowed to cabal against his former subjects, nor to threaten their policy. To do so would not have been to shelter a fugitive, but to declare war on France. Even in the case of the earlier Bourbons, we permitted no gatherings of forces on their behalf, and did not encourage their followers to molest the settled government,--no, not when the throne of France was filled by an enemy and we were at deadly war with Napoleon. But Mary was put to death. A sad story, and very melancholy to read in quiet drawing-rooms with Britannia ruling the waves and keeping all danger from our coasts. But in 1804, if Louis the Eighteenth or Charles the Tenth, instead of eating the bread of charity in peace, had been detected in conspiracy with our enemies, in corresponding with foreign emissaries, when a thousand flat-bottomed boats were marshalling for our invasion at Boulogne, and Brest and Cherbourg and Toulon were crowded with ships and sailors to protect the flotilla, it needs no great knowledge of character to pronounce that English William Pitt and Scottish Harry Dundas would have had the royal Bourbon's head on a block, or his body on Tyburn-tree, in spite of all the romance and eloquence in the world.

Mary's guilt or innocence of the charges brought against her in her relations with Darnley and Bothwell has nothing to do with the treatment she received from Elizabeth. She was not amenable to English law for any thing she did in Scotland, nor was she condemned for any thing but treasonable practices which it was impossible to deny. She certainly owed submission and allegiance to the English crown while she lived under its protection. Let us indulge our chivalrous generosity, and enjoy delightful poems in defence of an unfortunate and beautiful sovereign, by believing that the blots upon her fame were the aspersions of malignity and political baseness: the great fact remains, that it was an indispensable incident to the security of both the kingdoms that she should be deprived of authority, and finally, as the storm darkened, and derived all its perils from her conspiracies against the State and breaches of the law, that she should be deprived of life. Far more sweeping measures were pursued and defended by the enemies of Elizabeth abroad. Present forever, like a skeleton at a feast, must have been the massacre of St. Bartholomew in the thoughts of every Protestant in Europe, and most vividly of all in those of the English queen. That great blow was meant to be a warning to heretics wherever they were found, and in olden times and more revengeful dispositions might have been an excuse for similar atrocity on the other side. The Bartholomew massacre and the Armada are the two great features of the latter part of this century; and they are both so well known that it will be sufficient to recall them in a very few words.

This massacre was no chance-sprung event, like an ordinary popular rising, but had been matured for many years. The Council of Trent, which met in 1545 and continued its sittings till 1563, had devoted those eighteen years to codifying the laws of the Catholic Church. A definite, clear, consistent system was established, and acknowledged as the religious and ecclesiastical faith of Christendom. Men were not now left to a painful gathering of the sentiments and rescripts of popes and doctors out of varying and scattered writings. Here were the statutes at large, minutely indexed and easy of reference. From these many texts could be gathered which justified any method of diffusing the true belief or exterminating the false. And accordingly, a short time after the close of the Council, an interview took place between two personages, of very sinister augury for the Protestant cause. Catherine de Medicis and the Duke of Alva met at Bayonne in 1565. In this consultation great things were discussed; and it was decided by the wickedest woman and harshest man in Europe that government could not be safe nor religion honoured unless by the introduction of the Inquisition and a general massacre of heretics in every land. A few months later saw the ferocious Alva beginning his bloodthirsty career in the Netherlands, in which he boasted he had put eighteen thousand Hollanders to death on the scaffold in five years. Catherine also pondered his lessons in her heart, and when seven years had passed, and the Huguenots were still unsubdued, she persuaded her son Charles the Ninth that the time was come to establish his kingdom in righteousness by the indiscriminate murder of all the Protestants. An occasion was found in 1572, when the marriage of Henry of Navarre, afterwards the best-loved king of France, with the Princess Margaret de Valois, held out a prospect of soothing the religious troubles, and also (which suited her designs better) of attracting all the heads of the Huguenot cause to Paris. Every thing turned out as she hoped. There had been feasts and gayeties, and suspicion had been thoroughly disarmed. Suddenly the tocsin was sounded, and the murderers let loose over all the town. No plea was received in extenuation of the deadly crime of favouring the new opinions. Hospitality, friendship, relationship, youth, sex, all were disregarded. The streets were red with blood, and the river choked with mutilated bodies. Upwards of seventy thousand were butchered in Paris alone, and the metropolitan example was followed in other places. The deed was so awful that for a while it silenced the whole of Europe. Some doubted, some shuddered; but Rome sprang up with a shout of joy when the news was confirmed, and uttered prayers of thanksgiving for so great a victory. If it could have been possible to put every gainsayer to death everywhere, the triumph would have been complete; but there were countries where Catherine's dagger could not reach; and whenever her name was heard, and the terrible details of the massacre were known, undying hatred of the Church which encouraged such iniquity mingled with the feelings of pity and alarm. For no one henceforth could feel safe. The Huguenots were under the highest protection known to the heart of man. They were guests, and they were taken unawares in the midst of the rejoicings of a marriage. Rome lost more by the massacre than the Protestants. People looked round and saw the butcheries in the Netherlands, the slaughters in Paris, the tortures in the Inquisition, and over all, rioting in hopes of recovered dominion, supported by his priests and Dominicans, a Pope who plainly threatened a repetition of such scenes wherever his power was acknowledged. Germany, the Netherlands, England, Scotland, and the Northern nations, were lost to the Church of Rome more surely by the scaffold and crimes which professed to bring her aid, than by any other cause. Elizabeth was now the accepted champion and leader of the Protestants, and on her all the malice of the baffled Romanists was turned. To weaken, to dethrone or murder the English heretic was the praiseworthiest of deeds.

But one great means of distracting England from her onward course was now removed. In former days Scotland would have been let loose upon her unguarded flanks; but by this time the genius of Knox, running parallel with the efforts of the Southern reformers, had raised a religious feeling which responded to the English call. Scotland, freed from an oppressive priesthood, did manful battle at the side of her former enemy. Elizabeth was kept safe by the joint hatred the nations entertained to Rome, and, as regarded foreigners, the Union had already taken place. On one sure ground, however, those foreigners could still build their hopes. Mary, conscientious in her religion, and embittered in her dislike, was still alive, to be the rallying-point for every discontented cry and to represent the old causes,--the legitimate descent and the true faith. The greatest circumspection would have been required to keep her conduct from suspicion in these embarrassing circumstances. But she was still as thoughtless as in her happier days, and exposed herself to legal inquiries by the unguardedness of her behaviour. The wise counsellors of Elizabeth saw but one way to put an end to all those fears and expectations; and Mary, after due trial, was condemned and executed. [A.D. 1587.] Hope was now at an end; but revenge remained, and the great Colossus of the Papacy bestirred himself to punish the sacrilegious usurper. Philip the Second was still the most Catholic of kings. More stern and bigoted than when he had tried to restrain the burning zeal of Mary of England, he was resolved to restore by force a revolted people to the Chair of St. Peter and exact vengeance for the slights and scorns which had rankled in his heart from the date of his ill-omened visit. He prepared all his forces for the glorious attempt. Nothing could have been devised more calculated to bring all English hearts more closely to their queen. Every report of a fresh squadron joining the fleets already assembled for the invasion called forth more zeal in behalf of the reformed Church and the undaunted Elizabeth. Scotland also held some vessels ready to assist her sister in this great extremity, and lined her shores with Presbyterian spearmen. Community of danger showed more clearly than ever that safety lay in combination. Chains, we know, were brought over in those missionary galleys, and all the apparatus of torture, with smiths to set them to work. But the smiths and the chains never made good their landing on British ground. The ships covered all the narrow sea; but the wind blew, and they were scattered. It was perhaps better, as a warning and a lesson, that the principal cause of the Spaniard's disaster was a storm. If it had been fairly inflicted on them in open battle, the superior seamanship or numbers or discipline of the enemy might have been pleaded. But there must have mingled something more depressing than the mere sorrow of defeat when Philip received his discomfited admiral with the words, "We cannot blame you for what has happened: we cannot struggle against the will of God."

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

Kings of France.

A.D.

HENRY IV.--(_cont._)

1610. LOUIS XIII.

1643. LOUIS XIV.

Emperors of Germany.

A.D.

RODOLPH II.--(_cont._)

1612. MATTHIAS.

1619. FERDINAND II.

1637. FERDINAND III.

1658. LEOPOLD I.

Kings of England and Scotland.

A.D.

ELIZABETH.--(_cont._)

(_House of Stuart._)

1603. JAMES I.

1625. CHARLES I.

1649. Commonwealth.

1660. CHARLES II.

1685. JAMES II.

1689. WILLIAM III. and MARY.

Kings of Spain.

A.D.

PHILIP III.--(_cont._)

1621. PHILIP IV.

1665. CHARLES II.

Distinguished Men.

BACON, MILTON, LOCKE, CORNEILLE, RACINE, MOLIÈRE, KEPLER, (1571-1630,) BOYLE, (1627-1691,) BOSSUET, (1627-1704,) NEWTON, (1642-1727,) BURNET, (1643-1715,) BAYLE, (1647-1706,) CONDÉ, TURENNE, (1611-1675,) MARLBOROUGH, (1650-1722.)

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

ENGLISH REBELLION AND REVOLUTION--DESPOTISM OF LOUIS THE FOURTEENTH.

We are apt to suppose that progress and innovation are so peculiarly the features of these latter times that it is only in them that a man of more than ordinary length of life has witnessed any remarkable change. We meet with men still alive who were acquainted with Franklin and Voltaire, who have been presented at the court of Louis the Sixteenth and have visited President Pierce at the White House. But the period we have now to examine is quite as varied in the contrasts presented by the duration of a lifetime as in any other age of the world. Of this we shall take a French chronicler as an example,--a man who was as greedy of news, and as garrulous in relating it, as Froissart himself, but who must take a very inferior rank to that prose minstrel of "gentle blood," as he limited his researches principally to the scandals which characterized his time. We mean the truth-speaking libeller Brantôme. [A.D. 1616.] This man died within a year or two of Shakspeare, and yet had accompanied Mary to Scotland, and given that poetical account of the voyage from Calais, when she sat in the stern of the vessel with her eyes fixed on the receding shore, and said, "Adieu, France, adieu! I shall never see you more;" and again, on the following morning, bending her looks across the water when land was no longer to be seen, and exclaiming, "Adieu, France! I shall never see you more." The mere comparison of these two things--the return of Mary to her native kingdom, torn at that time with all the struggles of anarchy and distress, and the death of the greatest of earth's poets, rich and honoured, in his well-built house at Stratford-on-Avon--suggests a strange contrast between the beginning of Brantôme's literary career and its close: the events filling up the interval are like the scarcely-discernible heavings in a dark and tumultuous sea,--a storm perpetually raging, and waves breaking upon every shore. In his own country, cruelty and demoralization had infected all orders in the State, till murder, and the wildest profligacy of manners, were looked on without a shudder. Brantôme attended the scanty and unregretted funeral of Henry the Third, the last of the house of Valois, who was stabbed by the monk Jacques Clement for faltering in his allegiance to the Church. A sentence had been pronounced at Rome against the miserable king, and the fanatic's dagger was ready. Sixtus the Fifth, in full consistory, declared that the regicide was "comparable, as regards the salvation of the world, to the incarnation and the resurrection, and that the courage of the youthful Jacobin surpassed that of Eleazar and Judith." "That Pope," says Chateaubriand, the Catholic historian of France, "had too little political conviction, and too much genius, to be sincere in these sacrilegious comparisons; but it was of importance to him to encourage the fanatics who were ready to murder kings in the name of the papal power." Brantôme had seen the issuing of a bull containing the same penalties against Elizabeth, the death of Mary on the scaffold, and the failure of the Armada. After the horrors of the religious wars, from the conspiracy of Amboise in 1560 to the publication of the edict of toleration given at Nantes in 1598, he had seen the comparatively peaceful days of Henry the Fourth, till fanaticism again awoke a suspicion of a return to his original Protestant leanings, as shown in his opposition to the house of Austria, and Ravaillac renewed the meritorious work of Clement in 1610. Last of all, the spectator of all these changes saw England and Scotland forever united under one crown, and the first rise of the master of the modern policy of Europe, for in the year of Brantôme's death a young priest was appointed Secretary of State in France, whom men soon gazed on with fear and wonder as the great Cardinal Richelieu.

In England the alterations were as great and striking. After the troubled years from Elizabeth's accession to the Armada, a period of rest and progress came. Interests became spread over the whole nation, and did not depend so exclusively on the throne. Wisdom and good feeling made Elizabeth's crown, in fact, what laws and compacts have made her successors',--a constitutional sovereign's. She ascertained the sentiments of her people almost without the intervention of Parliament, and was more a carrier-through of the national will than the originator of absolute decrees. The moral battles of a nation in pursuit of some momentous object like religious or political freedom bring forth great future crops, as fields are enriched on which mighty armies have been engaged. The fertilizing influence extends in every direction, far and near. If, therefore, the intellectual harvest that followed the final rejection of the Pope and crowning defeat of the Spaniard included Shakspeare and Bacon, and a host of lesser but still majestic names, we may venture also to remark, on the duller and more prosaic side of the question, that in the first year of the seventeenth century a patent was issued by which a commercial speculation attained a substantive existence, for the East India Company was founded, with a stock of seventy-two thousand pounds, and a fleet of four vessels took their way from the English harbours, on their first voyage to the realm where hereafter their employers, who thus began as merchant adventurers, were to rule as kings. The example set by these enterprising men was followed by high and low. During the previous century people had been too busy with their domestic and religious disputes to pay much attention to foreign exploration. They were occupied with securing their liberties from the tyranny of Henry the Eighth and their lives from the truculence of Mary. Then the plots perpetually formed against Elizabeth, by domestic treason and foreign levy, kept their attention exclusively on home-affairs. But when the State was settled and religion secure, the long-pent-up activity of the national mind found vent in distant expeditions. A chivalrous contempt of danger, and poetic longing for new adventure, mingled with the baser attractions of those maritime wanderings. The families of gentle blood in England, instead of sending their sons to waste their lives in pursuit of knightly fame in the service of foreign states, equipped them for far higher enterprises, and sent them forth to gather the riches of unknown lands beyond the sea. Romantic rumours were rife in every manor-house of the strange sights and inexhaustible wealth to be gained by undaunted seamanship and judicious treatment of the natives of yet-unexplored dominions. Spain and Portugal had their kingdoms, but the extent of America was great enough for all. Islands were everywhere to be found untouched as yet by the foot of European; and many a winter's night was spent in talking over the possible results of sailing up some of the vast rivers that came down like bursting oceans from the far-inland regions to which nobody had as yet ascended,--the people and cities that lay upon their banks, the gold and jewels that paved the common soil. Towards the end of Elizabeth's reign, these imaginings had grown into sufficing motives of action, and gentlemen were ready from all the ports of the kingdom to sail on their adventurous voyages. In addition to the chance those gallant mariners had of realizing their day-dreams by the tedious methods of discovery and exploration, there was always the prospect of making prize of a galleon of Spain; for at all times, however friendly the nations might be in the European waters, a war was carried on beyond the Azores. Not altogether lost, therefore, was the old knightly spirit of peril-seeking and adventure in those commercial and geographical speculations. There were articles of merchandise in the hold, gaudy-coloured cloths, and bead ornaments, and wretched looking-glasses, besides brass and iron; but all round the captain's cabin were arranged swords and pistols, boarding-pikes, and other implements of fight. Guns also of larger size peeped out of the port-holes, and the crew were chosen as much with a view to warlike operations as to the ordinary duties of the ship. The Spaniards had made their way into the Pacific, and had established large settlements on the shores of Chili and Peru. Scenes which have been reacted at the diggings in modern times took place where the Europeans fixed their seat, and ships loaded with the precious metals found their way home, exposed to all the perils of storm and war. Drake had pounced upon several of their galleys and despoiled them of their precious cargo. Cavendish, a gentleman of good estate in Suffolk, had followed in his wake, and, after forcing his way through the Straits of Magellan, had reached the shores of California itself and there captured a Spanish vessel freighted with a vast amount of gold. All these adventures of the expiring sixteenth century became traditions and ballads of the young seventeenth. Raleigh, the most accomplished gentleman of his time, gave the glory of his example to the maritime career, and all the oceans were alive with British ships. While Raleigh and others of the upper class were carrying on a sort of cultivated crusade against the monopoly of the Spaniards, others of a less aristocratic position were busied in the more regular paths of commerce. We have seen the formation of the India Company in 1600. Our competitors, the Dutch, fitted out fleets on a larger scale, and established relations of trade and friendship with the natives of Polynesia and New Holland, and even of Java and India. But the zeal of the public in trading-speculations was not only shown in those well-conducted expeditions to lands easily accessible and already known: a company was established for the purpose of opening out the African trade, and a commercial voyage was undertaken to no less a place than Timbuctoo by a gallant pair of seamen of the names of Thomson and Jobson. It was not long before these efforts at honest international communication, and even the exploits of the Drakes and Cavendishes, who acted under commissions from the queen, degenerated into lawless piracy and the golden age of the Buccaneers. The policy of Spain was complete monopoly in her own hands, and a refusal of foreign intercourse worthy of the potentates of China and Japan. All access was prohibited to the flags of foreign nations, and the natural result followed. Adventurous voyagers made their appearance with no flag at all, or with the hideous emblem of a death's head emblazoned on their standard, determined to trade peaceably if possible, but to trade whether peaceably or not. The Spanish colonists were not indisposed to exchange their commodities with those of the new-comers, but the law was imperative. The Buccaneers, therefore, proceeded to help themselves to what they wanted by force, and at length came to consider themselves an organized estate, governed by their own laws, and qualified to make treaties like any other established and recognised power. Cuba had been nearly depopulated by the cruelties and fanaticism of its Spanish masters, and was seized on by the Buccaneers. From this rich and beautiful island the pirate-barks dashed out upon any Spanish sail which might be leaving the mainland. Commanding the Gulf of Mexico, and with the power of crossing the Isthmus of Panama by a rapid march, those redoubtable bandits held the treasure-lands of the Spaniards in terrible subjection. And up to the commencement even of the eighteenth century the frightful spectacle was presented of a powerful confederacy of the wildest and most dissolute villains in Europe domineering over the most frequented seas in the world, and filling peaceful voyagers, and even well-armed men-of-war, with alarm by their unsparing cruelty, and atrocities which it curdles the blood to think of.

Eastward as far as China, westward to the islands and shores of the great Pacific, up the rivers of Africa, and even among the forests of New Holland and Tasmania, the swarms of European adventurers succeeded each other without cessation. The marvel is, that, with such ceaseless activity, any islands, however remote or small, were left for the discovery of after-times. But the tide of English emigration rolled towards the mainland of North America with a steadier flow than to any other quarter. The idea of a northwest passage to India had taken possession of men's minds, and hardy seamen had already braved the horrors of a polar winter, and set examples of fortitude and patience which their successors, from Behrens to Kane, have so nobly followed. But the fertile plains of Virginia, and the navigable streams of the eastern shore, were more alluring to the peaceful and unenterprising settlers, whose object was to find a new home and carry on a lucrative trade with the native Indians. In 1607, a colony, properly so called,--for it had made provision for permanent settlement, and consisted of a hundred and ten persons, male and female,--arrived at the mouth of the Chesapeake. The river Powhatan was eagerly explored; and at a point sufficiently far up to be secure from sudden attack from the sea, and on an isthmus easily defended from native assault, they pitched their tents on a spot which was hereafter known as Jamestown and is still honoured as the earliest of the American settlements. Our neighbour Holland was not behindhand either in trade or colonization, and equally with England was excited to fresh efforts by its recovered liberty and independence. In all directions of intellectual and physical employment those two States went boundingly forward at the head of the movement. The absolute monarchies lay lazily by, and relied on the inertness of their mass for their defence against those active competitors; and Spain, an unwieldy bulk, showed the intimate connection there will always exist between liberal institutions at home and active progress abroad. The sun never set on the dominions of the Spanish crown, but the life of the people was crushed out of them by the weight of the Inquisition and despotism. The United Provinces and combined Great Britain had shaken off both those petrifying institutions, and Englishmen, Scotchmen, and Dutchmen were ploughing up every sea, presenting themselves at the courts of strange-coloured potentates, in regions whose existence had been unknown a few years before, and gradually accustoming the wealth and commerce of the world to find their way to London and Amsterdam.

To go from these views of hardihood and enterprise, from the wild heaving of unruly vigour which animated the traffickers and tyrants of the main, to the peaceful and pedantic domestic reign of James the First, shows the two extremes of European character at this time. The English people were not more than four millions in number, but they were the happiest and most favoured of all the nations. This was indeed the time,

"Ere England's woes began, When every rood of land maintain'd its man;"

for we have seen how the division of the great monastic properties had created a new order in the State. All accounts concur in describing the opening of this century as the period of the greatest physical prosperity of the body of the people. A great deal of dulness and unrefinement there must still have been in the boroughs, where such sage officials as Dogberry displayed their pomp and ignorance,--a great deal of clownishness and coarseness in country-places, where Audreys and Autolycuses were to be found; but among townsmen and peasantry there was none of the grinding poverty which a more unequal distribution of national wealth creates. There were great Whitsun ales, and dancings round the Maypole; feasts on village greens, and a spirit of rude and personal independence, which became mellowed into manly self-respect when treated with deference by the higher ranks, the old hereditary gentry and the retired statesmen of Queen Bess, but bristled up in insolence and rebellion when the governing power thwarted its wishes, or fanaticism soured it with the bitter waters of polemic strife. The sturdy Englishman who doffed his hat to the squire, and joined his young lord in sports upon the green, in the beginning of James's reign, was the same stout-hearted, strong-willed individual who stiffened into Puritanism and contempt of all earthly authorities in the unlovely, unloving days of the Rump and Cromwell. Nor should we miss the great truth which lies hidden under the rigid forms of that period,--that the same noble qualities which characterized the happy yeoman and jocund squire of 1620--their earnestness, energy, and intensity of home affections--were no less existent in their ascetic short-haired descendants of 1650. The brimfulness of life which overflowed into expeditions against the Spaniards in Peru, and unravellings of the tangled rivers of Africa, and trackings of the wild bears among the ice-floes of Hudson's Bay, took a new direction when the century reached the middle of its course, and developed itself in the stormy discussions of the contending sects and the blood and misery of so many battle-fields. How was this great change worked on the English mind? How was it that the long-surviving soldier, courtier, landholder, of Queen Elizabeth saw his grandson grow up into the hard-featured, heavy-browed, keen-sworded Ironside of Oliver? A squire who ruined himself in loyal entertainments to King James on his larder-and-cellar-emptying journey from Edinburgh to London in 1603 may have lived to see his son, and son's son, rejoicing with unholy triumph over the victory of Naseby in 1644 and the death of Charles in 1649.

Great causes must have been at work to produce this astonishing change, and some of them it will not be difficult to point out. Perhaps, indeed, the prosperity we have described may itself have contributed to the alteration in the English ways of thought. While the nation was trampled on by Henry the Eighth, with property and life insecure and poverty universally diffused, or even while it was guided by the strong hand of Elizabeth, it had neither power nor inclination to examine into its rights. The rights of a starving and oppressed population are not very great, even in its own eyes. It is the well-fed, law-protected, enterprising citizen who sees the value of just and settled government, because the blessings he enjoys depend upon its continuance. The mind of the nation had been pauperized along with its body by the life of charitable dependence it had led at the doors of church and monastery in the olden time. It little mattered to a gaping crowd expecting the accustomed dole whether the great man in London was a tyrannical king or not. They did not care whether he dismissed his Parliaments or cut off the heads of his nobility. They still found their "bit and sup," and saw the King, and Parliament, and nobility, united in obedience to the Church. But when this debasing charity was discontinued, independence came on. The idle hanger-on of the religious house became a cottager, and worked on his own land; by industry he got capital enough to take some additional acres; and the man of the next generation had forgotten the low condition he sprang from, and had so sharpened his mind by the theological quarrels of the time that he began to be able to comprehend the question of general politics. He saw, as every population and potentate in Europe saw with equal clearness, that the question of civil freedom was indissolubly connected with the relation between Church and State; he perceived that the extent of divergence from the old faith regulated in a great measure the spirit, and even the constitution, of government where it took place,--that adhesion to Rome meant absolutism and dependence, that Calvinism had a strong bias towards the republican form, and that the Church he had helped to establish was calculated to fill up the ground between those two extremes, and be the religious representative of a State as liberal as Geneva by its attention to the interests of all, and as monarchical as Spain by its loyalty to an hereditary crown. Now, the middle ground in great and agitating affairs is always the most difficult to maintain. Both sides make it their battle-field, and try to win it to themselves; and according as one assailant seems on the point of carrying his object, the defender of that disputed territory has to lean towards the other. Both parties are offended at the apparent inconsistency; and we are therefore not to be surprised if we find the Church accused of looking to both the hostile camps in turn.

James was a fatal personage to every cause he undertook to defend. He had neither the strength of will of Henry, nor the proud consistency of Elizabeth; but he had the arrogance and presumption of both. Questions which the wise queen was afraid to touch, and left to the ripening influence of time, this blustering arguer dragged into premature discussion, stripped them of all their dignity by the frivolousness of the treatment he gave them, and disgusted all parties by the harshness and rapidity of his partial decisions. Every step he took in the quelling of religious dissension by declarations in favour of proscription and authority which would have endeared him to Gregory the Seventh, he accompanied with some frightful display of his absolutist tendencies in civil affairs. The same man who roared down the modest claims of a thousand of the clergy who wished some further modification of the Book of Common Prayer threw recusant members of Parliament into prison, persecuted personal enemies to death, with scarcely a form of law, punished refractory towns with loss of franchises and privileges, and made open declaration of his unlimited power over the lives and properties of all his subjects. People saw this unvarying alliance between his polemics and his politics, and began to consider seriously whether the comforts their trade and industry had given them could be safe under a Church calling itself reformed, but protected by such a king. If he was only suspected in England, in his own country he was fully known. Dearer to James would have been a hundred bishops and cardinals seated in conclave in Holyrood than a Presbyterian Synod praying against his policy in the High Kirk. He had even written to the Pope with offers of accommodation and reconcilement, and made no secret of his individual and official disgust at the levelling ideas of those grave followers of Knox and Calvin. Those grave followers of Knox and Calvin, however, were not unknown on the south side of the Tweed. The intercourse between the countries was not limited to the hungry gentry who followed James on his accession. A community of interest and feeling united the more serious of the Reformers, and visits and correspondence were common between them. But, while a regard for their personal freedom and the security of their wealth attracted the attention of the English middle class to the proceedings of King James, events were going on in foreign lands which had an immense effect on the development of the anti-monarchic, anti-episcopal spirit at home. These events have not been sufficiently considered in this relation, and we have been too much in the habit of looking at our English doings in those momentous years,--from the end of James's reign to the Restoration,--as if Britain had continued as isolated from her Continental neighbours as before the Norman Conquest. But a careful comparison of dates and actions will show how intimate the connection had become between the European States, and how instantaneously the striking of a chord at Prague or Vienna thrilled through the general heart in Edinburgh and London.

The Reformation, after achieving its independence and equality at the Treaty of Augsburg in 1555, had made great though silent progress. Broken off in Germany into two parties, the Lutheran and the Calvinist, who hated each other, as usual, in exact proportion to the smallness of their difference, the union was still kept up between them as regarded their antagonism to the Papists. With all three denominations, the religious part of the question had fallen into terrible abeyance. It was now looked on by the leaders entirely as a matter of personal advancement and political rule. In this pursuit the fanaticism which is generally limited to theology took the direction of men's political conduct; and there were enthusiasts among all the sects, who saw visions, and dreamed dreams, about the succession to thrones and the raising of armies, as used to happen in more ancient times about the bones of martyrs and the beatification of saints. The great object of Protestants and Catholics was to obtain a majority in the college of the Prince Electors by whom the Empire was bestowed. This consisted of the seven chief potentates of Germany, of whom four were secular,--the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, and the Marquis of Brandenburg; and three ecclesiastic,--the Archbishops of Mentz, Trèves, and Cologne. The majority was naturally secured to the Romanists by the official adhesion of these last. But it chanced that the Elector of Cologne fell violently in love with Agnes of Mansfeldt, a canoness of Gerrestein; and having of course studied the history of our Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn, he determined to follow his example, and offered the fair canoness his hand. He was unwilling, however, to offer his hand without the Electoral crozier, and, by the advice of his friends, and with the promised support of many of the Protestant rulers, he retained his ecclesiastical dignity and made the beautiful Agnes his wife. This would not have been of much consequence in a lower rank, for many of the cathedral dignitaries in Cologne and other places had retained their offices after changing their faith; but all Germany was awake to the momentous nature of this transaction, for it would have conveyed a majority of the Electoral voices to the Protestants and opened the throne of the empire itself to a Protestant prince. Such, however, was the strength at that time of the opposition to Rome, that all the efforts of the Catholics would have been ineffectual to prevent this ruinous arrangement but for a circumstance which threw division into the Protestant camp. Gebhard had adhered to the Calvinistic branch of the Reformation, and the Lutherans hated him with a deadlier hatred than the Pope himself. With delight they saw him outlawed by the Emperor and excommunicated by Rome, his place supplied by a Prince of Bavaria, who was elected by the Chapter of Cologne to protect them from their apostate archbishop, and the head of the house of Austria strengthened by the consolidation of his Electoral allies and the unappeasable dissensions of his enemies. While petty interests and the narrowest quarrels of sectarianism divided the Protestants, and while the Electors and other princes who had adopted their theological opinions were doubtful of the political results of religious freedom, and many had waxed cold, and others were discontented with the small extent of the liberation from ancient trammels they had yet obtained, a very different spectacle was presented on the other side. Popes and Jesuits were heartily and unhesitatingly at work. "No cold, faint-hearted doubtings teased them." Their object was incommoded by no refinements or verbal differences; they were determined to assert their old supremacy,--to trample out every vestige of resistance to their power; and they entered upon the task without scruple or remorse. Ferdinand the Emperor, the prop and champion of the Romish cause, was as sincere and as unpitying as Dominic. When he had been nominated King Elect of Bohemia, in 1598, while yet in his twentieth year, his first thought was the future use he might make of his authority in the extermination of the Protestant faith. The Jesuits, by whom he was trained from his earliest years, never turned out a more hopeful pupil. His ambition would have been, if he had had it in his power, to become a follower of Loyola himself; but, as he was condemned by fate to the lower office of the first of secular princes, he determined to employ all its power at the dictation of his teachers. He went a pilgrimage to Loretto, and, bowing before the miraculous image of the Virgin, promised to reinstate the true Church in its unquestioned supremacy, and bent all his thoughts to the fulfilment of his vow. Two-thirds of his subjects in his hereditary states were Protestant, but he risked all to attain his object. He displaced their clergy, and banished all who would not conform. He introduced Catholics from foreign countries to supply the waste of population, and sent armed men to destroy the newly-erected schools and churches of the hateful heretics. This man was crowned King of Bohemia in 1618, and Emperor of Germany in the following year.

The attention of the British public had been particularly directed to German interests for the six years preceding this date, by the marriage of Frederick, Elector Palatine of the Rhine, with Elizabeth, the graceful and accomplished daughter of King James. Frederick was young and ambitious, and was endeared to the English people as leader of the Protestant cause against the overweening pretensions of the house of Austria. That house was still the most powerful in Europe; for though the Spanish monarchy was held by another branch, for all the purposes of despotism and religion its weight was thrown into the same scale. Spanish soldiers, and all the treasures of America, were still at the command of the Empire; and perhaps Catholicism was rather strengthened than weakened by the adherence of two of the greatest sovereigns in the world, instead of having the personal influence of only one, as in the reign of Charles the Fifth. All the Elector's movements were followed with affectionate interest by the subjects of his father-in-law; but James himself disapproved of opposition being offered to the wildest excesses of royal prerogative either in himself or any other anointed ruler. Besides this, he was particularly hostile to the young champion's religious principles, for the latter was attached to the Calvinistic or unepiscopal party. [A.D. 1619.] James declined to give him any aid in maintaining his right to the crown of Bohemia, to which he was elected by the Protestant majority of that kingdom on the accession of Ferdinand to the Empire, and managed to show his feelings in the most offensive manner, by oppressing such of Frederick's co-religionists as he found in any part of his dominions. The advocates of peace at any price have praised the behaviour of the king in this emergency; but it may be doubted whether an energetic display of English power at this time might not have prevented the great and cruel reaction against freedom and Protestantism which the victory of the bigoted Ferdinand over his neglected competitor introduced. A riot, accompanied with violence against the Catholic authorities, was the beginning of the troubles in Bohemia; and Ferdinand, as if to explain his conduct to the satisfaction of James, published a manifesto, which might almost be believed to have been the production of that Solomon of the North. "If sovereign power," he says, "emanates from God, these atrocious deeds must proceed from the devil, and therefore must draw down divine punishment." This logic was unanswerable at Whitehall, and the work of extermination went on. Feeble efforts were forced upon the unwilling father-in-law; for all the chivalry of England was wild with sympathy and admiration of the Bohemian queen. Hundreds of gallant gentlemen passed over to swell the Protestant ranks; and when they returned and told the tale of all the horrors they had seen, the remorseless vengeance of the triumphant Church, and all the threatenings with which Rome and the Empire endeavoured to terrify the nations which had rebelled against their yoke, Puritanism, or resistance to the slightest approach towards Popery either in essentials or externals, became patriotism and self-defence; and at this very time, while men's minds were inflamed with the descriptions of the torturings and executions which followed the battle of Prague in 1620, and the devastation and depopulation of Bohemia, James took the opportunity of forcing the Episcopal form of government on the Scottish Presbyterians.

"The greatest matter," he says, in an address to the prelates of the reluctant dioceses,--"the greatest matter the Puritans had to object against the Church government was, that your proceedings were warranted by no law, which now by this last Parliament is cutted short. The sword is now put in your hands. Go on, therefore, to use it, and let it rest no longer till ye have perfected the service trusted to you; or otherwise we must use it both against you and them." While the people of both nations were willing to sink their polemic differences of Calvinist and Anglican in one great attempt to deliver the Protestants in Germany from the power of the house of Austria,--while for this purpose they would have voted taxes and raised armies with the heartiest good will,--the king's whole attention was bestowed on a set of manoeuvres for the obtaining a Spanish-Austrian bride for his son. To gain this he would have humbled himself to the lowest acts. At a whisper from Madrid, he interfered with the German war, to the detriment of his own daughter; and England perceived that his ineradicable love of power and hatred of freedom had blinded him to national interests and natural affections. If we follow the whole career of James, and a great portion of his successor's, we shall see the same remarkable coincidence between the events in England and abroad,--unpopularity of the king, produced by his apparent lukewarmness in the general Protestant cause as much as by his arbitrary acts at home. Whatever the nation desired, the king opposed. When Gustavus Adolphus, the Lion of the North, began his triumphant career in 1630, and re-established the fallen fortunes of Protestantism, Charles concluded a dishonourable peace with Spain, without a single provision in favour of the Protestants of the German States, and allowed the Popish Cardinal Richelieu first to consolidate his forces by an unsparing oppression of the Huguenots in France, and then to almost compensate for his harshness by a gallant support of the Swedish hero in his struggle against the Austrian power.

There was no longer the same content and happiness in the towns and country districts as there had been at the commencement of the century. Men had looked with contempt and dislike on the proceedings of James's court,--his coarse buffoonery, and disgraceful patronage of a succession of worthless favourites; and they continued to look, not indeed with contempt, but with increased dislike and suspicion, on the far purer court and dignified manners of his unfortunate son. A French princess, though the daughter of Henry the Fourth, was regarded as an evil omen for the continuance of good government or religious progress. Her attendants, lay and clerical, were not unjustly considered spies, and advisers with interests hostile to the popular tendencies. And all this time went on the unlucky coincidences which distinguished this reign,--of Catholic cruelties in foreign lands, and approaches to the Catholic ceremonial in the reformed Church. While Tilly, the remorseless general of the Emperor, was letting loose the most ferocious army which ever served under a national standard upon the inhabitants of Magdeburg, heaping into the history of that miserable assault all the sufferings that "horror e'er conceived or fancy feigned,"--and while the echo of that awful butchery, which has not yet died out of the German heart, was making sorrowful every fireside in what was once merry England,--the king's advisers pursued their blind way, torturing their opponents with knife and burning-brand upon the pillory, flogging gentlemen nearly to death upon the streets, and consecrating churches with an array of surplice, and censer, and processions, and organ-blowings, which would have done honour to St. Peter's at Rome. People saw a lamentable connection between the excesses of Catholic cruelty and the tendency in our sober establishment to Catholic traditions, and became fanatical in their detestation of the simplest forms.

In ordinary times the wise man considers mere forms as almost below his notice; but there are periods when the emblem is of as much importance as the thing it typifies. Church ceremonies, and gorgeous robes, and magnificent worship, were accepted by both parties as the touchstone of their political and religious opinions. Laud pushed aside the Archbishop of Glasgow, who stood at Charles's right hand on his visit to Scotland in 1633, on the express ground that he had not the orthodox fringe upon his habit,--a ridiculous ground for so open an insult, if it had not had an inner sense. The Archbishop of Glasgow professed himself a moderate Churchman by the plainness of his dress, and Laud accepted it as a defiance. Meanwhile the essential insignificance of the symbol threw an air of ridicule over the importance attached to it. Dull-minded men, who had not the faculty of seeing how deep a question may lie in a simple exposition of it, or frivolous men, who could not rise to the real earnestness which enveloped those discussions, were scandalized at the persistency of Laud in enforcing his fancies, and the obstinacy of a great portion of the clergy and people in resisting them. But the Puritans, with clearer eyes, saw that a dance, according to proclamation, on the village green on Sunday, meant not a mere desecration of the Sabbath, but a crusade against the rights of conscience and an assertion of arbitrary power. Altars instead of communion-tables in churches meant not merely a restoration of the Popish belief in the real sacrifice of the mass, but a placing of the king above the law, and the abrogation of all liberty. They could not at this time persuade the nation of these things. The nation, for the most part, saw nothing more than met their bodily eyes; and, in despair of escaping the slavery which they saw the success of Ferdinand in Germany was likely to spread over Europe, they began the long train of voyages to the Western World, which times of suffering and uncertainty have continued at intervals to the present day. It is said that a vessel was stopped by royal warrant when it was on the point of sailing from the Thames with emigrants to America in 1637. On board were various persons whose names would probably never have been heard of if they had been allowed in peace and safety to pursue their way to Boston, but with which in a few years "all England rang from side to side." They were Oliver Cromwell, and Hampden, and Haselrig, Lord Brook, and Lord Saye.

Affairs had now reached such a crisis that they could no longer continue undecided. A Parliament was called in 1640, after an unexampled interval of eleven years, and, after a few days' session, was angrily dissolved. Another, however, was indispensable in the same year, and on the 3d of November the Long Parliament met. The long-repressed indignation of the Commons broke forth at once. Laud and Wentworth, the principal advisers of the king, were tried and executed, and precautions taken, by stringent acts, to prevent a recurrence of arbitrary government. Everywhere there seemed a rally in favour of the Protestant or liberal cause. The death of Richelieu, the destroyer of French freedom, opened a prospect of recovered independence to the Huguenots; the victories of Torstenson the Swede, worthy successor of Gustavus Adolphus, brought down the pride of the Austrian Catholics; and Puritans, Independents, and other outraged sects and parties, by the restoration of the Parliament, got a terrible instrument of vengeance against their oppressors. A dreadful time, when on both sides the forms of law were perverted to the most lawless purposes; when peacefully-inclined citizens must have been tormented with sad misgivings by the contending claims of Parliament and King,--a Parliament correctly constituted and in the exercise of its recognised authority, a King with no flaw to his title, and professing his willingness to limit himself to the undoubted prerogatives of his place. [A.D. 1642.] It was probably a relief to the undecided when the arbitrament was removed from the court of argument to the field of battle. All the time of that miserable civil war, the other states of Europe were in nearly as great confusion as ourselves. France was torn to pieces by factions which contended for the mantle of the departed cardinal; Germany was traversed from end to end by alternately retreating and advancing armies. But still the simultaneousness of events abroad and at home is worthy of remark. The great fights which decided the quarrel in England were answered by victories of the Protestant arms in Germany and the apparent triumph of the discontented in France. The young king, Louis the Fourteenth, carried from town to town, and disputed between the parties, gave little augury of the despotism and injustice of his future throne. There were barricades in Paris, and insurrections all over the land. But at last, and at the same time, all the combatants in England, and France, and Germany--Huguenot, Puritan, Calvinist, Protestant, and Papist--were tired out with the length and bitterness of the struggle. So in 1648 the long Thirty Years' War was brought to a close by the Peace of Westphalia. Kingly power in France was curtailed, the house of Austria was humbled; and Charles was carried prisoner to Windsor. The Protestants of Germany, by the terms of the peace, were replaced in their ancient possessions. They had freedom of worship and equality of civil rights secured. A general law preserved them from the injustice or aggressions of their local masters; and the compromise guaranteed by so many divergent interests, and guarded by such equally-divided numbers, has endured to the present time. The English conquerors would be contented with no less than their foreign friends had obtained. But the blot upon their conduct, the blood of the misguided and humbled Charles, hindered the result of their wisest deliberations. Moderate men were revolted by the violence of the act, and old English loyalty, delivered from the fear of foreign or domestic oppression, was awakened by the sad end of a crowned and anointed King. [A.D. 1649.] Nothing compensates in an old hereditary monarchy for the want of high descent in its ruler. Not all Cromwell's vigour and genius, his glory abroad and energetic government at home, attracted the veneration of English squires, whose forefathers had fought at Crecy, to the grandson of a city knight, or, at most, to the descendant of a minister of Henry the Eighth. Charles the Second rose before them with the transmitted dignity of a hundred kings. He counted back to Scottish monarchs before the Norman Conquest, and traced by his mother's side his lineal ancestry up to Charlemagne and Clovis. English history presents no instance of the intrusion of an unroyal usurper in her list of sovereigns. Cromwell stands forth the solitary instance of a man of the people virtually seizing the crown; and the ballads and pamphlets of the time show how the comparative humility of his birth excited the scorn of his contemporaries. And this feeling was not limited to ancient lords and belted cavaliers: it permeated the common mind. There was something ennobling for the humblest peasant to die for King and Cause; but, however our traditions and the lapse of two hundred years may have elevated the conqueror at Worcester and Dunbar, we are not to forget that, in the estimation of those who had drunk his beer at Huntingdon or listened to his tedious harangues in Parliament, there would be neither patriotism nor honour in dying for bluff Old Noll. But there were more dangerous enemies to bluff Old Noll than the newness of his name. The same cause which had made the nation dissatisfied with the arbitrary pretensions of James and Charles was at work in making it intolerant of the rule of the usurpers.

The great soldier and politician, who had overthrown an ancient dynasty and crushed the seditions of the sects, had increased the commercial prosperity of the three kingdoms. Wealth poured in at all the ports, and was rapidly diffused over the land; internal improvements kept pace with foreign enterprise; and the England which long ago had been too rich to be arbitrarily governed was now again too rich to be kept in durance by the sour-faced hypocrisies of the Puritans. Those lank-haired gentlemen, whose conduct had not quite answered to the self-denying proclamations with which they had begun, were no longer able to persuade the well-to-do citizen, and the high-waged mechanic, and the prosperous farmer, that religion consisted in speaking through the nose and forswearing all innocent enjoyment. The great battle had been fought, and the fruits of it, they thought, were secure. Were people to be debarred from social meetings and merry-makings at Christmas, and junketings at fairs, by act of Parliament? Acts of Parliament would first have been required strong enough to do away with youth and health, and the power of admiring beauty, and the hopes of marriage. [A.D. 1641-49.] The troubles had lasted seven or eight years; and all through that period, and for some time before, while the thick cloud was gathering, all gayety had disappeared from the land. But by the middle of Cromwell's time there was a new generation, in the first flush of youth,--lads and lasses who had been too young to know any thing of the dark days of Laud and Wentworth. They were twenty years of age now. Were they to have no cakes and ale because their elders were so prodigiously virtuous? They had many years of weary restraint and formalism to make up for, and in 1660 the accumulated tide of joyousness and delight burst all barriers. A flood of dancing and revelry, and utter abandonment to happiness, spread over the whole country; and merriest of the dancers, loudest of the revellers, happiest of the emancipated, was the young and brilliant king. Never since the old times of the Feasts of Fools and the gaudy processions of the Carnival had there been such a riotous jubilee as inaugurated the Restoration. The reaction against Puritanism carried the nation almost beyond Christianity and landed it in heathenism again. The saturnalia of Rome were renewed in the banquetings of St. James's. Nothing in those first days of relaxation seemed real. King and courtiers and cavaliers in courtly palaces, and enthusiastic townsfolk and madly loyal husbandmen, seemed like mummers at a play; and it was not till the candles were burned out, and the scenes grew dingy, and daylight poured upon that ghastly imitation of enjoyment, that England came to its sober senses again. Then it saw how false was the parody it had been playing. It had not been happy; it had only been drunk; and already, while Charles was in the gloss of his recovered crown, the second reaction began. Cromwell became respectable by comparison with the sensual debauchee who sold the dignity of his country for a little present enjoyment and soothed the reproaches of his people with a joke. Give us a Man to rule over us, the English said, and not a sayer of witty sayings and a juggler with such sleight of hand. And yet the example of the court was so contagious, and the fashion of enjoyment so wide-spread, that on the surface every thing appeared prosperous and happy. The stern realities of the first recusants had been so travestied by the exaggerated imitation of their successors that no faith was placed in the serious earnestness of man or woman. Frivolity was therefore adopted as a mark of sense; and if the popular literature of a period is to be accepted as a mirror held up to show the time its image, the old English character had undergone a perfect change. Thousands flocked every day to the playhouses to listen to dialogues, and watch the evolvement of plots, where all the laws of decency and honour were held up to ridicule. Comus and his crew, which long ago had held their poetic festival in the pure pages of Milton, were let loose, without the purity or the poetry, in every family circle. And the worst and most disgusting feature of the picture is that those wassailers who were thus the missionaries of vice were persecutors for religion. While one royal brother was leading the revels at Whitehall, surrounded by luxury and immorality as by an atmosphere without which he could not live, the other, as luxurious, but more moodily depraved, listened to the groans of tortured Covenanters at Holyrood House. Charles and James were like the two executioners of Louis the Eleventh: one laughed, and the other groaned, but both were pitilessly cruel. A recurrence to the dark days of the Sects, the godly wrestlings in prayer of illiterate horsemen, and the sincere fanaticism of the Fifth-Monarchy men, would have been a change for the better from the filth and foulness of the reign of the Merry Monarch and the blood and misery of that of the gloomy bigot.

But happier times were almost within view, though still hid behind the glare of those orgies of the unclean. From 1660 to 1688 does not seem a very long time in the annals of a nation, nor even in the life of one of ourselves. Twenty-eight years have elapsed since the Revolution in Paris which placed Louis Philippe upon the throne; and the young man of twenty at that time is not very old yet. But when men or nations are cheated in the object of their hopes, it does not take long to turn disappointment into hatred. The Restoration of 1660 was to bring back the golden age of the first years of James,--the prosperity without the tyranny, the old hereditary rule without its high pretensions, the manliness of the English yeoman without his tendency to fanatical innovation. And instead of this Arcadia there was nothing to be seen but a kingdom without dignity, a king without honesty, and a people without independence. England was no longer the arbiter of European differences, as in the earlier reigns, nor dominator of all the nations, as when the heavy sword of Cromwell was uneasy in its sheath. It was not even a second-rate power: its capital had been insulted by the Dutch; its monarch was pensioned by the French; its religion was threatened by the Pope; the old animosities between England and Scotland were unarranged; and the point to be remembered in your review of the Seventeenth Century is that in the years from the Restoration to the Revolution we had touched the basest string of humility. We were neither united at home nor respected abroad. We had few ships, little commerce, and no public spirit. France revenged Crecy and Poictiers and Agincourt, by dressing our kings in her livery; and the degraded monarchs pocketed their wages without feeling their humiliation. Therefore, as the highest point we have hitherto stood upon was when Elizabeth saw the destruction of the Armada, the lowest was undoubtedly that when we submitted to the buffoonery of Charles and the bloodthirstiness of James.

But far more remarkable, as a characteristic of this century, than the lowering of the rank of England in relation to foreign states, is the rise, for the first time in Europe, of a figure hitherto unknown,--a true, unshackled, and absolute king, and that in the least likely of all positions and in the person of the least likely man. This was the appearance on the throne of France of Louis the Fourteenth. Other monarchs, both in England and France, had attained supreme power,--supreme, but not independent. No one had hitherto been irresponsible to some other portions of the State. The strongest of the feudal kings was held in check by his nobility,--the greatest of the Tudors by Parliament and people. Declarations, indeed, had frequently been made that God's anointed were answerable to God alone. But of the two loudest of these declaimers, John, who said,--

"What earthly power to interrogatory Can tax the free breath of a Christian king?"

had shortly after this magnificent oration surrendered his crown to the Pope; and James the First, who blustered more fiercely (if possible) about his superiority to human law, was glad to bend before his Lords and Commons in anticipation of a subsidy, and eat his leek in peace.

But this phenomenon of a king above all other authority occurred, we have observed, in the most unlikely country to present so strange a sight; for nowhere was a European throne so weak and unstable as the throne of the house of Bourbon after the murder of Henry the Fourth. The moment that strong hand was withdrawn from the government, all classes broke loose. The nobles conspired against the queen, Marie de Medicis, who relied upon foreign favourites and irritated the nation to madness. Paris rose in insurrection, and tore the wretched Concini, her counsellor, whom she had created Marshal D'Ancre, to pieces; and, to glut their vengeance still more, the judges condemned his innocent wife to be burned as a sorceress. Louis the Thirteenth, the unworthy son of the great Henry, rejoiced in these atrocities, which he thought freed him from all restraint. But he found it impossible to quell the wild passions by which he profited for a while. Civil war raged between the court and country factions, and soon became embittered into religious animosities. [A.D. 1622.] The sight of a king marching at the head of a Catholic army against a portion of his Reformed subjects was looked upon by the rapidly-increasing malcontents in England with anxious curiosity. For year by year the strange spectacle was unrolled before their eyes of what might yet be their fate at home. Perhaps, indeed, the success of the royal arms, and the policy of strength and firmness introduced by Cardinal Richelieu, may have contributed in no slight degree to the measures pursued by Wentworth and Laud in their treatment of the English recusants. With an anticipative interest in our Hull and Exeter, the Puritans of England looked on the resistance made by Rochelle; and we can therefore easily imagine with what feelings the future soldiers of Marston Moor received the tidings that the Popish cardinal had humbled the capital of the Huguenots by the help of fleets furnished to them by Holland and England! Richelieu, indeed, knew how to make his enemies weaken each other throughout his whole career. [A.D. 1627.] Those enemies were the nobility of France, the house of Austria, and the Reformed Faith. When Rochelle was attacked the second time, and England pretended to arm for its defence, he contrived to win Buckingham, the chief of the expedition, to his cause, and procured a letter from King Charles, placing the fleet, which apparently went to the support of the Huguenots, at the service of the King of France! After a year's siege, and the most heroic resistance, Rochelle fell at last, in 1628. And, now that the Huguenots were destroyed as a dangerous party, the eyes of the great minister were turned against his other foes. He divided the nobles into hostile ranks, degraded them by petty annoyances, terrified them by unpitying executions of the chiefs of the oldest families, showed their weakness by arresting marshals at the head of their armies, and during the remaining years of his authority monopolized all the powers of the state. To weaken Spain and Austria, we have seen how he assisted the Protestants in the Thirty Years' War; to weaken England, which was only great when it assumed its place as bulwark and champion of the Protestant faith, he encouraged the court in its suicidal policy and the oppressed population in resistance. Ever stirring up trouble abroad, and ever busy in repressing liberty at home, the ministry of Richelieu is the triumph of unprincipled skill. But when he died, in 1643, there was no man left to lift up the burden he threw off. The king himself, Louis the Thirteenth, as much a puppet as the old descendants of Clovis under their Mayors of the Palace, left the throne he had nominally filled, vacant in the same year; and the heir to the dishonoured crown and exhausted country was a boy of five years of age, under the tutelage of an unprincipled mother, and with the old hereditary counsellors and props of his throne decimated by the scaffold or impoverished by confiscation. The tyranny of Richelieu had at least attained something noble by the high-handed insolence of all his acts. If people were to be trampled on, it was a kind of consolation to them that their oppressor was feared by others as well as themselves. But the oppression of the doomed French nation was to be continued by a more ignoble hand. The Cardinal Mazarin brought every thing into greater confusion than ever. In twenty millions of men there will always be great and overmastering spirits, if only an opportunity is found for their development; but civil commotion is not the element in which greatness lives. All sense of honour disappears when conduct is regulated by the shifting motives of party politics. [A.D. 1648-1654.] The dissensions of the Fronde, accordingly, produced no champion to whom either side could look with unmingled respect. The Great Condé and the famous Turenne showed military talent of the highest order, but a want of principle and a flighty frivolity of character counterbalanced all their virtues. The scenes of those six years are like a series of dissolving views, or the changing combinations of a kaleidoscope: Condé and Turenne, always on opposite sides,--for each changed his party as often as the other; battles prepared for by masquerades and theatricals, and celebrated on both sides with epigrams and songs; the wildest excesses of debauchery and vice practised by both sexes and all ranks in the State; archbishops fighting like gladiators and intriguing like the vulgarest conspirators; princes imprisoned with a jest, and executions attended with cheers and laughter; and over all an Italian ecclesiastic, grinning with satisfaction at the increase of his wealth,--caballing, cheating, and lying, but keeping a firm grasp of power:--no country was ever so split into faction or so denuded of great men.

It seemed, indeed, like a demoniacal caricature of our British troubles: no sternness, no reality; love-letters and witty verses supplying the place of the Biblical language and awful earnestness of the words and deeds of the Covenanters and Independents; the gentlemen of France utterly debased and frivolized; religion ridiculed; nothing left of the old landmarks; and no Cromwell possible. But, while all these elements of confusion were heaving and tumbling in what seemed an inextricable chaos, Mazarin, the vainest and most selfish of charlatans, died, and the young king, whom he had kept in distressing dependence and the profoundest political inactivity, found himself delivered from a master and free to choose his path. This was in 1661. Charles and Louis were equally on their recovered thrones; for what exile had been to the one, Mazarin had been to the other. [A.D. 1641-1660.] Charles had had the experience of nineteen years and of various fortunes to guide him. He had seen many men and cities, and he deceived every expectation. Louis had been studiously brought up by his mother and her Italian favourite in the abasement of every lofty aspiration. He was only encouraged in luxury and vice, and kept in such painful vassalage that his shyness and awkwardness revealed the absence of self-respect to the very pages of his court; and he, no less than Charles, deceived all the expectations that had been formed of his career. He found out, as if by intuition, how brightly the monarchical principle still burned in the heart of all the French. Even in their fights and quarrellings there was a deep reverence entertained for the ideal of the throne. The King's name was a tower of strength; and when the nation, in the course of the miserable years from 1610 to 1661, saw the extinction of nobility, religion, law, and almost of civilized society, it caught the first sound that told it it still had a king, as an echo from the past assuring it of its future. It forgot Louis the Thirteenth and Anne of Austria, and only remembered that its monarch was the grandson of Henry the Fourth. Nobody remembered that circumstance so vividly as Louis himself; but he remembered also that his line went upwards from the Bourbons, and included the Saint Louis of the thirteenth century and the renewer of the Roman Empire of the ninth. He let the world know, therefore, that his title was Most Christian King as well as foremost of European powers. He forced Spain to yield him precedence, and, for the first time in history, exacted a humiliating apology from the Pope. The world is always apt to take a man at his own valuation. Louis, swelling with pride, ambitious of fame, and madly fond of power, declared himself the greatest, wisest, and most magnificent of men; and everybody believed him. Every thing was soon changed throughout the land. Ministers had been more powerful than the crown, and had held unlimited authority in right of their appointment. A minister was nothing more to Louis than a _valet-de-chambre_. He gave him certain work to do, and rewarded him if he did it; if he neglected it, he discharged him. At first the few relics of the historic names of France, the descendants of the great vassals, who carried their heads as lofty as the Capets or Valois, looked on with surprise at the new arrangements in camp and court. But the people were too happy to escape the oligarchic confederacy of those hereditary oppressors to encourage them in their haughty disaffection. Before Louis had been three years on the unovershadowed throne, the struggle had been fairly entered on by all the orders of the State, which should be most slavish in its submission. Rank, talent, beauty, science, and military fame all vied with each other in their devotion to the king. He would have been more than mortal if he had retained his senses unimpaired amid the intoxicating fumes of such incense. Success in more important affairs came to the support of his personal assumptions. Victories followed his standards everywhere. Generals, engineers, and administrators, of abilities hitherto unmatched in Europe, sprang up whenever his requirements called them forth. Colbert doubled his income without increasing the burdens on his people. Turenne, Condé, Luxembourg, and twenty others, led his armies. Vauban strengthened his fortifications or conducted his sieges, and the dock-yards of Toulon and Brest filled the Mediterranean and the Atlantic with his fleets. Poets like Molière, Corneille, and Racine ennobled his stage; while the genius of Bossuet and Fénélon inaugurated the restoration of religion. For eight-and-twenty years his fortunes knew no ebb. He was the object of all men's hopes and fears, and almost of their prayers. Nothing was too great or too minute for his decision. He was called on to arbitrate (with the authority of a master) between sovereign States, and to regulate a point of precedence between the duchesses of his court. Oh, the weary days and nights of that uneasy splendour at Versailles! when his steps were watched by hungry courtiers, and his bed itself surrounded by applicants for place and favour. No galley-slave ever toiled harder at his oar than this monarch of all he surveyed at the management of his unruly family. It was the day of etiquette and form. The rights of princesses to arm-chairs or chairs with only a back were contested with a vigour which might have settled the succession to a throne. The rank which entitled to a seat in the king's coach or an invitation to Marly was disputed almost with bloodshed, and certainly with scandal and bitterness. The depth of the bows exacted by a prince of the blood, the number of attendants necessary for a legitimated son of La Vallière or Montespan, put the whole court into a turmoil of angry parties; and all these important points, and fifty more of equal magnitude, were formally submitted to the king and decided with a gravity befitting a weightier cause. Nothing is more remarkable in the midst of these absurd inanities than the great fund of good common sense that is found in all the king's judgments. He meditates, and temporizes, and reasons; and only on great occasions, such as a quarrel about dignity between the wife of the dauphin and the Duchess of Maine, does he put on the terrors of his kingly frown and interpose his irresistible command. It would have been some consolation to the foreign potentates he bullied or protected--the Austrian and Spaniard, or Charles in Whitehall--if they had known what a wretched and undignified life their enslaver and insulter lived at home. It was whispered, indeed, that he was tremendously hen-pecked by Madame de Maintenon, whom he married without having the courage to elevate her to the throne; but none of them knew the pettinesses, the degradations, and the miseries of his inner circle. They thought, perhaps, he was planning some innovation in the order of affairs in Europe,--the destruction of a kingdom, or the change of a dynasty. He was devoting his deepest cogitations to the arrangement of a quarrel between his sons and his daughters-in-law, the invitations to a little supper-party in his private room, or the number of steps it was necessary to advance at the reception of a petty Italian sovereign. The quarrels between his children became more bitter; the little supper-parties became more dull. Death came into the gilded chambers, and he was growing old and desolate. Still the torturing wheel of ceremony went round, and the father, with breaking heart, had to leave the chamber of his deceased son, and act the part of a great king, and go through the same tedious forms of grandeur and routine which he had done before the calamity came. Fancy has never drawn a personage more truly pitiable than Louis growing feeble and friendless in the midst of all that magnificence and all that heartless crowd. You pardon him for retiring for consolation and sympathy to the quiet apartment where Madame de Maintenon received him without formality and continued her needlework or her reading while he was engaged in council with his ministers. He must have known that to all but her he was an Office and not a Man. He yearned for somebody that he could trust in and consult with, as entering into his thoughts and interests; and that calm-blooded, meek-mannered, narrow-hearted woman persuaded him that in her he had found all that his heart thirsted for in the desert of his royalty. But in that little apartment he was now to find refuge from more serious calamities than the falsehood of courtiers or the quarrels of women. Even French loyalty was worn out at last. Victories had glorified the monarch, but brought poverty and loss to the population. Complaints arose in all parts of the country of the excess of taxation, the grasping dishonesty of the collectors, the extravagance of the court, and even--but this was not openly whispered--the selfishness of the king. He had lavished ten millions sterling on the palace and gardens of Versailles; he had enriched his sycophants with pensions on the Treasury; he had gratified the Church with gorgeous donations, and with the far more fatal gift of vengeance upon its opponents. The Huguenots were in the peaceful enjoyment of the rights secured to them by the Edict of Nantes, granted by Henry the Fourth in 1598. But those rights included the right of worshipping God in a different manner from the Church, and denying the distinguishing doctrines of the Holy Catholic faith. [A.D. 1685.] The Edict of Toleration was repealed as a blot on the purity of the throne of the Most Christian King. Thousands of the best workmen in France were banished by this impolitic proceeding, and Louis thought he had shown his attachment to his religion by sending the ingenuity and wealth, and glowing animosity, of the most valuable portion of his subjects into other lands. Germany calculated that the depopulation caused by his wars was more than compensated by the immigration. England could forgive him his contemptuous behaviour to her king and Parliament when she saw the silk-mills of Spitalfields supplied by the skilled workmen of Lyons. Eight hundred thousand people left their homes in consequence of this proscription of their religion, and Germany and Switzerland grew rich with the stream of fugitives. It is said that only five thousand found their way to this country,--enough to set the example of peaceful industry and to introduce new methods of manufacture.

But the full benefit of the measures of Louis and Maintenon was denied us, by the distrust with which the Protestant exiles looked on the accession to our throne of a narrower despot and more bigoted persecutor than Louis; for in this same year James the Second succeeded Charles. Relying on each other's support, and gratified with the formal approval of the repeal of the Edict of Nantes pronounced by the Pope, the two champions of Christendom pursued their way,--dismissals from office, exclusion from promotion, proscription from worship in France, and assaults on the Church, and bloody assizes, in England,--till all the nations felt that a great crisis was reached in the fortunes both of England and France, and Protestant and Romanist alike looked on in expectation of the winding-up of so strange a history. Judicial blindness was equally on the eyes of the two potentates chiefly interested. James remained inactive while William Prince of Orange, the avowed chief of the new opinions, was getting ready his ships and army, and congratulated himself on the silence of his people, which he thought was the sign of their acquiescence instead of the hush of expectation. All the other powers--the Papal Chair included--were not sorry to see a counterpoise to the predominance of France; and when William appeared in England as the deliverer from Popery and oppression, the battle was decided without a blow. [A.D. 1688.] James was a fugitive in his turn, and found his way to Versailles. It is difficult to believe that any of the blood of Scotland or Navarre flowed in the veins of the pusillanimous king. He begged his protector, through whose councils he had lost his kingdom, to give it him back again; and the opportunity of a theatrical display of grandeur and magnanimity was too tempting to be thrown away. Louis promised to restore him his crown, as if it were a broken toy. It was a strange sight, during the remainder of their lives, to see those two monarchs keeping up the dignity of their rank by exaggerations of their former state. No mimic stage ever presented a more piteous spectacle of poverty and tinsel than the royal pair. Punctilios were observed at their meetings and separations, as if a bow more or less were of as much consequence as the bestowal or recovery of Great Britain; and in the estimation of those professors of manners and deportment a breach of etiquette would have been more serious than La Hogue or the Boyne. In that wondrous palace of Versailles all things had long ceased to be real. Speeches were made for effect, and dresses and decorations had become a part of the art of governing, and for some years the system seemed to succeed. When the king required to show that he was still a conqueror like Alexander the Great, preparations were made for his reception at the seat of war, and a pre-arranged victory was attached lo his arrival, as Cleopatra wished to fix a broiled fish to Anthony's hook. He entered the town of Mons in triumph when Luxembourg had secured its fall. He appeared also with unbounded applause at the first siege of Namur, and carried in person the news of his achievement to Versailles. Every day came couriers hot and tired with intelligence of fresh successes. Luxembourg conquered at Fleurus, 1690; Catinat conquered Savoy, 1691; Luxembourg again, in 1692, had gained the great day of Steinkirk, and Nerwinde in 1693. But the tide now turned. William the Third was the representative at that time of the stubbornness of his new subjects' character, who have always found it difficult to see that they were defeated. He was generally forced to retire after a vigorously-contested fight; but he was always ready to fight again next day, always calm and determined, and as confident as ever in the firmness of his men. Reports very different from the glorious bulletins of the earlier years of the Great Monarch now came pouring in. Namur was retaken, Dieppe and Havre bombarded, all the French establishments in India seized by the Dutch, their colony at St. Domingo captured by the English, Luxembourg dead, and the whole land again, for the second time, exhausted of men and money. It was another opportunity for the display of his absolute power. France prayed him to grant peace to Europe, and the earthly divinity granted France's prayer. Europe itself, which had rebelled against him, accepted the pacification it had won by its battles and combinations, as if it were a gift from a superior being. [A.D. 1697.] He surrendered his conquests with such grandeur, and looked so dignified while he withdrew his pretensions, acknowledging the Prince of Orange to be King of England, and the King of England to have no claim on the crown he had promised to restore to him, that it took some time to perceive that the terms of the Peace of Ryswick were proofs of weakness and not of magnanimity. But the object of his life had been gained. He had abased every order in the State for the aggrandizement of the Crown, and, for the first time since the termination of the Roman Empire, had concentrated the whole power of a nation into the will of an individual. And this strange spectacle of a possessor of unlimited authority over the lives and fortunes of all his subjects was presented in an age that had seen Charles the First of England brought to the block and James the Second driven into exile! The chance of France's peacefully rising again from this state of depression into liberty would have been greater if Louis, in displacing the other authorities, had not disgraced them. He dissolved his Parliament, not with a file of soldiers, like Cromwell or Napoleon, but with a riding-whip in his hand. He degraded the nobility by making them the satellites of his throne and creatures of his favour. He humbled the Church by secularizing its leaders; so that Bossuet, bishop and orator as he was, was proud to undertake the office of peacemaker between him and Madame de Montespan in one of their lovers' quarrels. And the Frenchmen of the next century looked in vain for some rallying-point from which to begin their forward course towards constitutional improvement. They found nothing but parliaments contemned, nobles dishonoured, and priests unchristianized.

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

Kings of France.

A.D.

LOUIS XIV.--(_cont._)

1715. LOUIS XV.

1774. LOUIS XVI.

1793. LOUIS XVII.

Emperors of Germany.

A.D.

LEOPOLD I.--(_cont._)

1705. JOSEPH I.

1711. CHARLES VI.

1740. MARIA-THERESA.

1742. CHARLES VII.

1745. FRANCIS I.

1765. JOSEPH II.

1790. LEOPOLD II.

1792. FRANCIS II.

Kings of England and Scotland.

A.D.

WILLIAM III. and MARY.--(_cont._)

1702. ANNE.

(_Great Britain_, 1707.)

1714. GEORGE I. }

1727. GEORGE II. } House of Hanover.

1760. GEORGE III. }

Kings of Spain.

A.D.

1700. PHILIP V.

1724. LOUIS I.

1724. PHILIP V. again.

1745. FERDINAND VI.

1759. CHARLES III.

1788. CHARLES IV.

Distinguished Men.

ADDISON, STEELE, SWIFT, POPE, ROBERTSON, HUME, GIBBON, VOLTAIRE, ROUSSEAU, LESAGE, MARMONTEL, MONTESQUIEU, FRANKLIN, (1706-1790,) JOHNSON, (1709-1784,) GOLDSMITH, (1728-1774,) WOLFE, (1726-1759,) WASHINGTON, (1732-1799.)

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

INDIA--AMERICA--FRANCE.

The characteristic feature of this period is constant change on the greatest scale. Hitherto changes have occurred in the internal government of nations: the monarchic or popular feeling has found its expression in the alternate elevation of the Kingly or Parliamentary power. But in this most momentous of the centuries, nations themselves come into being or disappear. Russia and Prussia for the first time play conspicuous parts in the great drama of human affairs. France, which begins the century with the despotic Louis the Fourteenth at its head, leaves it as a vigorous Republic, with Napoleon Buonaparte as its First Consul. The foundations of a British empire were laid in India, which before the end of the period more than compensated for the loss of that other empire in the West, which is now the United States of America. It was the century of the breaking of old traditions, and of the introduction of new systems in life and government,--more complete in its transformations than the splitting up into hitherto unheard-of nationalities of the old Roman world had been; for what Goth and Vandal, and Frank and Lombard, were to the political geography of Europe in the earlier time, new modes of thought, both religious and political, were to the moral constitution of that later date. The barbarous invasions of the early centuries were the overflowing of rivers by the breaking down of the embankments; the revolutionary madness of France was the sudden detachment of an avalanche which had been growing unobserved, but which at last a voice or a footstep was sufficient to set in motion. In all nations it was a period of doubt and uneasiness. Something was about to happen, but nobody could say what. The political sleight-of-hand men, who considered the safety of the world to depend on the balance of power, where a weight must be cast into one scale, exactly sufficient, and not more than sufficient, to keep the other in equilibrio, were never so much puzzled since the science of balancing began. A vast country, hitherto omitted from their calculations, or only considered as a make-weight against Sweden or Denmark, suddenly came forward to be a check, and sometimes an over-weight, to half the states in Europe. Something had therefore to be found to be a counterpoise to the twenty millions of men and illimitable dominions of the Russian Czars. This was close at the conjurer's hand in Prussia and her Austrian neighbour. Counties were added,--populations fitted in,--Silesia given to the one, Gallicia added to the other; and at last the whole of Poland, which had ceased to be of any importance in its separate existence, was cut up into such portions as might be required, with here a fragment and there a fragment, till the scales stood pretty even, and the three contiguous kingdoms were satisfied with their respective shares of infamy and plunder. If you hear, therefore, of robberies upon a gigantic scale,--no longer the buccaneering exploits of a few isolated adventurers in the Western seas, but of kingdoms deliberately stolen, or imperiously taken hold of by the right of the strong hand; of the same Titanic magnitude distinguishing almost all other transactions; colonies throwing off their allegiance, and swelling out into hostile empires, instead of the usual discontent and occasional quarrellings between the mother-country and her children; of whole nations breaking forth into anarchy, instead of the former local efforts at reformation ending in temporary civil strife; of commercial speculations reaching the sublime of swindling and credulity, and involving whole populations in ruin; and of commercial establishments, on the other hand, vaster even in their territorial acquisitions than all the conquests of Alexander,--you are to remember that these things can only have happened in the Eighteenth Century; the century when the trammels of all former experiences were thrown off, and when wealth, power, energy, and mental aspirations were pushed to an unexampled excess. This exaggerated action of the age is shown in the one great statement which nearly comprehends all the rest. The Debt of this country, which at the beginning of this century was sixteen millions and a half and tormented our forefathers with fears of bankruptcy, had risen at the end of it, in the heroic madness of conquest and national pride, to the sum of three hundred and eighty millions, without a doubt of our perfect competency to sustain the burden.

If the tendency of affairs on the other side of our encircling sea was to pull down, to destroy, to modify, and to redistribute, the tendency at home was to build up and consolidate; so that in almost exact proportion to the wild experiments and frantic strugglings of other nations after something new--new principles of government, new theories of society--there arose in this country a dogged spirit of resistance to all alterations, and a persistence in old paths and old opinions. The charms which constitution-mongers saw in untried novelties and philosophic systems existed for John Bull only in what had stood the wear and tear of hundreds of years. The Prussians, Austrians, Americans, and finally the French, were groping after vague abstractions; and Frederick the Soldier, and Joseph the Philanthropist, and Citizen Franklin, and Lafayette and Mirabeau, were each in their own way carried away with the delusion of a golden age; but the English statesmen clung rigidly to the realities of life,--declared the universal fraternity of nations to be a cry of knaves or hypocrites,--and answered all exclamations about the dignity of humanity and the sovereignty of the people with "Rule Britannia," and "God save the King." How deeply this sentiment of loyalty and traditionary Toryism is seated in the national mind is proved by nothing so much as by the dreadful ordeal it had to go through in the days of the first two Georges. It certainly was a faith altogether independent of external circumstances, which saw the divinity that hedges kings in such vulgar, gossiping, and undignified individuals. And yet through all the troubled years of their reigns the great British heart beat true with loyalty to the throne, though it was grieved with the proceedings of the sovereigns; and when the third George gave it a man to rally round--as truly native-born as the most indigenous of the people, as stubborn, as strong-willed, and as determined to resist innovation as the most consistent of the squires and most anti-foreign of the citizens--the nation attained a point of union which had never been known in all their previous history, and looked across the Channel, at the insanity of the perplexed populations and the threats of their furious leaders, with a growl of contempt and hatred which warned their democrats and incendiaries of the fate that awaited them here. There are times in all national annals when the narrowest prejudices have an amazing resemblance to the noblest virtues. When Hannibal was encamped at the gates of Rome, the bigoted old Patricians in the forum carried on their courts of law as usual, and would not deduct a farthing from the value of the lands they set up for sale, though the besieger was encamped upon them. When a king of Sicily offered a great army and fleet for the defence of Greece against the Persians, the Athenian ambassador said, "Heaven forefend that a man of Athens should serve under a foreign admiral!" The Lacedemonian ambassador said the Spartans would put him to death if he proposed any man but a Spartan to command their troops; and those very prejudiced and narrow-minded patriots were reduced to the necessity of exterminating the invaders by themselves. Great Britain, in the year 1800, was also of opinion that she was equal to all the world,--that she could hold her own whatever powers might be gathered against her,--and would not have exchanged her Hood, and Jervis, and Nelson, for the assistance of all the fleets of Europe.

Nothing seems to die out so rapidly as the memory of martial achievements. The military glory of this country is a thing of fits and starts. Cressy and Poictiers left us at a pitch of reputation which you might have supposed would have lasted for a long time. But in a very few years after those victories the English name was a byword of reproach. All the conquests of the Edwards were wrenched away, and it needed only the short period of the reign of Richard the Second to sink the recollection of the imperturbable line and inevitable shaft. Henry the Fifth and Agincourt for a moment brought the previous triumphs into very vivid remembrance. But civil dissensions between York and Lancaster blunted the English sword upon kindred helmets, and peaceful Henry the Seventh loaded the subject with intolerable taxes, and his son wasted his treasures in feasts and tournaments. The long reigns of Elizabeth and James were undistinguished by British armies performing any separate achievements on the Continent; and again civil war lavished on domestic fields an amount of courage and conduct which would have eclipsed all previous actions if exhibited on a wider scene. We need not, therefore, be surprised, if, after the astonishing course of Louis the Fourteenth's arms, the discomfiture of his adversaries, the constant repulses of the English contingent which fought under William in Flanders, and at last the quiet, looking so like exhaustion, which ushered in the Eighteenth Century, the British forces were despised, and we were confessed, in the ludicrous cant which at intervals becomes fashionable still, to be not a military nation. How this astounding proposition agrees with the fact that we have met in battle every single nation, and tribe, and kindred, and tongue, on the face of the whole earth, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, and have beaten them all; how it further agrees with the fact that no civilized power was ever engaged in such constant and multitudinous wars, so that there is no month or week in the history of the last two hundred years in which it can be said we were not interchanging shot or sabre-stroke somewhere or other on the surface of the globe; how, further still, the statement is to be reconciled with the fact, perceptible to all mankind, that the result of these engagements is an unexampled growth of influence and empire,--the acquisition of kingdoms defended by millions of warriors in Hindostan, of colonies ten times the extent of the conqueror's realm, defended by Montcalm and the armies of France,--we must leave to the individuals who make it: the truth being that the British people is not only the most military nation the world has ever seen, not excepting the Roman, but the most warlike. It is impossible to say when these pages may meet the reader's eye; but, at whatever time it may be, he has only to look at the "Times" newspaper of that morning, and he will see that either in the East or the West, in China or the Cape, or the Persian Gulf, or on the Indus, or the Irrawaddy, the meteor flag is waved in bloody advance. And this seems an indispensable part of the British position. She is so ludicrously small upon the map, and so absorbed in speculation, so padded with cotton, and so sunk in coal-pits, that it is only constant experience of her prowess that keeps the world aware of her power. The other great nations can repose upon their size, and their armies of six or seven hundred thousand men. Nobody would think France or Russia weak because they were inactive. But with us the case is different: we must fight or fall.

Twice in the century we are now engaged on, we rose to be first of the military states in Europe, and twice, by mere inaction, we sank to the rank of Portugal or Naples.

Charles the Second of Spain died in November, 1700,--a person so feeble in health and intellect that in a lower state of life he would have been put in charge of guardians and debarred from the management of his affairs. As he was a king, these duties were performed on his behalf by the priests, and the wretched young man--he succeeded at three years old--was nothing but the slave and plaything of his confessor. Yet, though his existence was of no importance, his decease set all Europe in turmoil. By his testament, obtained from him on his death-bed, he appointed the grandson of Louis the Fourteenth his heir. A previous will had nominated Charles of Austria. A previous treaty between Louis and William of England and the States of Holland had arranged a partition of the Spanish monarchy for the benefit of the contracting parties and the maintenance of the balance of power. But now, when a choice was to be made between the wills and the treaty, between the balance of power and his personal ambition, the temptation was too great for the cupidity of the Grand Monarque. He accepted the throne of Spain and the Indies for his grandson Philip of Anjou, and sent him over the Pyrenees to take possession of his dignity. The stroke was so sudden that people were silent from surprise. A French prince at Madrid, at Milan, and Naples, was only the lieutenant in those capitals for the French king. The preponderance of the house of Bourbon was dangerous to the liberties of Europe, and when the house of Bourbon was represented by the haughtiest, and vainest, and most insulting of men, the dignity of the remaining sovereigns was offended by his ostentatious superiority; and the house of Austria, which in the previous century had been the terror of statesmen and princes, was turned to as a shelter from its successful rival, and all the world prepared to defend the cause of the Austrian Charles. The affairs of Europe, which were disturbed by the death of an imbecile king in Spain, were further complicated by the death of a still more imbecile king at St. Germain's. James the Second brought his strange life to a close in 1701; and, though the advisers of Louis pointed out the consequence of offending England at that particular time by recognising the Prince of Wales as inheritor of the English crown, the vanity of the old man who could not forego the luxury of having a crowned king among his attendants prevailed over his better knowledge, and one day, to the amazement of courtiers and council, he gave the royal reception to James the Third, and threw down the gauntlet to William and England, which they were not slow to take up. William of Orange was not popular among his new subjects, and was always looked on as a foreigner. Perhaps the memory of Ruyter and Van Tromp was still fresh enough to make him additionally disliked because he was a Dutchman. But when it was known over the country that the bigoted and insulting despot in Paris had nominated a King of England, while the man the nation had chosen was still alive in Whitehall, the indignation of all classes was roused, and found its expression in loyalty and attachment to their deliverer from Popery and persecution. Great exertions were made to conduct the war on a scale befitting the importance of the interests at stake. Addresses poured in, with declarations of devotion to the throne; troops were raised, and taxes voted; and in the midst of these preparations, the King, prematurely old, in the fifty-third year of his age, died of a fall from his horse at Kensington, in March, 1702, and the powers of Europe felt that the best soldier they possessed was lost to the cause. Rather it was a fortunate thing for the confederated princes that William died at this time; for he never rose to the rank of a first-rate commander, and was so ambitious of glory and power that he would not have left the way clear for a greater than himself.

This was found in Marlborough. Military science was the characteristic of this illustrious general; and no one before his time had ever possessed in an equal degree the power of attaching an army to its chief, or of regulating his strategic movements by the higher consideration of policy and statesmanship. For the first time, in English history at least, a march was equivalent to a battle. A change of his camp, or even a temporary retreat, was as effectual as a victory; and it was seen by the clearer observers of the time that a campaign was a game of skill, and not of the mere dash and intrepidity which appeal to the vulgar passions of our nature. Not so, however, the general public: their idea of war was a succession of hard knocks, with enormous lists of the killed and wounded. A manoeuvre, without a charge of bayonets at the end of it, was little better than cowardice; and complaints were loud and common against the inactivity of a man who, by dint of long-prepared combinations, compelled the enemy to retreat by a mere shift of position and cleared the Low Countries of its invaders without requiring to strike a blow. "Let them see how we can fight," cried all the corporations in the realm: "anybody can march and pitch his camp." And it is not impossible that the foreign populations who had never seen the red-coats, or, at most, who had only known them acting as auxiliaries to the Dutch and often compelled to retire before the numbers and impetuosity of the French, had no expectation of success when they should be fairly brought opposite their former antagonists. Friends and foes alike were prepared for a renewal of the days of Luxembourg and Turenne. In this they were not disappointed; for a pupil of Turenne renewed, in a very remarkable manner, the glories of his master. Marlborough had served under that great commander, and profited by his lessons. He had fifty thousand British soldiers under his undivided command; and, to please the grumblers at home and the doubters abroad, he made the reign of Anne the most glorious in the English military annals by thick-coming fights, still unforgotten, though dimmed by the exploits of the more illustrious Wellington. The first of these was Blenheim, against the French and Bavarians, in 1704. How different this was from the hand-to-hand thrust and parry of ancient times is shown by the fate of a strong body of French, who were so posted on this occasion that the duke saw they were in his power without requiring to fire a gun. He sent his aid-de-camp, Lord Orkney, to them to point out the hopelessness of their position; and when he rode up, accompanied by a French officer, to act, perhaps, as his interpreter, a shout of gratulation broke from the unsuspecting Frenchmen. "Is it a prisoner you have brought us?" they asked their countryman. "Alas! no," he replies: "Lord Orkney has come from Marlborough to tell you you are his prisoners. His lordship offers you your lives." A glance at the contending armies confirmed the truth of this appalling communication, and the brigade laid down its arms. The tide of victory, once begun, knew no ebb till the grandeur of Louis the Fourteenth was overwhelmed. Disgraces followed quickly one upon the other,--marshals beaten, towns taken, conquests lost, his wealth exhausted, his people discontented, and the bravest of his generals hopeless of success. Prince Eugene of Savoy, equal to Marlborough in military genius, was more embittered against the French monarch, to whom he had offered his services, and who had had the folly to reject them. France, on the side of Germany and the Low Countries, was pressed upon by the triumphant invaders. In Spain, the affairs of the new king were more desperate still. Gibraltar was taken in 1704. Lord Peterborough, a wiser Quixote, of whose victories it is difficult to say whether they were the result of madness or skill, marched through the kingdom at the head of six or seven thousand English and conquered wherever he went.

When the war had lasted eight or nine years, the reputation of Marlborough and the British arms was at its height. Our fleets were masters of the sea, and the Grand Monarque sent humble petitions to the opposing powers for peace upon any terms. People tell us that Marlborough rejected all overtures which might have deprived him of the immense emoluments he received for carrying on the war. [A.D. 1711.] Perhaps, also, he was inspired by the love of fame; but, whether meanness or ambition was his motive, his warlike propensities were finally overcome,--for his wife, the imperious duchess, quarrelled with Queen Anne,--the ministry was changed, and the jealousies of Whitehall interfered with the campaigns in Flanders. [A.D. 1713.] Marlborough was displaced, and a peace patched up, which, under the name of the Peace of Utrecht, is quoted as showing what small fruits British diplomacy sometimes derives from British valour. Louis the Fourteenth, conquered at all points, his kingdom exhausted, and all his reputation gone, saw his grandson in possession of the crown which had been the original cause of the war, and Great Britain rewarded for all her struggles by the empty glory of filling up the harbour of Dunkirk, and the scarcely more substantial advantage, as many considered it at the time, of retaining Gibraltar, a barren rock, and Minorca, a useless island. After this, we find a long period of inaction on the continent produce its usual effect. When thirty years had passed without the foreign populations having sight of the British grenadiers, they either forgot their existence altogether, or had persuaded themselves that the new generation had greatly deteriorated from the old.[A.D. 1743.] [A.D. 1745.] It needed the victory of Dettingen, and the more glorious repulse of Fontenoy, to recall the soldiers of Oudenarde and Malplaquet.

In the interval, amazing things had been going on. Even while the career of Marlborough was attended with such glory in arms, a peaceful achievement was accomplished of far more importance than all his victories. An Act of Union between the two peoples who occupied the Isle was passed by both their Parliaments in 1707, and England and Scotland disappeared in their separate nationalities, to receive the more dignified appellation of the Kingdom of Great Britain. This was a statesman's triumph; for the popular feeling on both sides of the Tweed was against it. Scotland considered herself sold; and England thought she was cheated. Clauses were introduced to preserve, as far as possible, the distinctions which each thought it for its honour to keep up. National peculiarities exaggerated themselves to prevent the chance of being obliterated; and Scotchmen were never as Scotch, nor Englishmen ever so English, as at the time when these denominations were about to cease. As neighbours, with the mere tie between them of being subjects of the same crown, they were on amicable and respectful terms. But when the alliance was proposed to be more intimate, their interests to be considered identical and the Parliaments to be merged in one, both parties took the alarm. "The preponderating number of English members would scarcely be affected by the miserable forty-five votes reserved for the Scotch representatives," said Caledonia, stern and wild. "The compact phalanx of forty-five determined Scotchmen will give them the decision of every question brought before Parliament," replied England, with equal fear,--and equal misapprehension, as it happily turned out. When eight years had elapsed after this great event in our domestic history, with just sufficient experience of the new machinery to find out some of its defects, it was put to the proof by an incident which might have been fatal to a far longer established system of government. This was a rebellion in favour of the exiled Stuarts. James the Third, whom we saw recognised by Louis the Fourteenth on the death of his father in 1701, made his appearance among the Highlanders of the North in 1714, and summoned them to support his family claims.

But the memory of his ancestors was too recent. Men of middle age remembered James the Second in his tyrannical supremacy at Holyrood. The time was not sufficiently remote for romance to have gathered round the harsh reality and hidden its repulsive outlines. A few months showed the Pretender the hopelessness of his attempt; and the tranquillity of the country was considered to be re-established when the adherents of the losing cause were visited with the harshest penalties. The real result of these vindictive punishments was, that they added the spirit of revenge for private wrong to the spirit of loyalty to the banished line. Many circumstances concurred to favour the defeated candidate, who seemed to require to do nothing but bide his time. The throne was no longer held, even under legalized usurpation, as the discontented expressed it, by one of the ancient blood. [A.D. 1714.] A foreigner, old and stupid, had come over from Hanover and claimed the Parliamentary crown, and the few remaining links of attachment which kept the high-prerogative men and the Roman Catholics inactive in the reign of Queen Anne, the daughter of their rightful king, lost all their power over them on the advent of George the First, who had to trace up through mother and grandmother till he struck into the royal pedigree in the reign of James the First. It was thought hard that descent from that champion of monarchic authority and hereditary right should be pleaded as a title to a crown dependent on the popular choice. As years passed on, the number of the discontented was of course increased. Whoever considered himself neglected by the intrusive government turned instinctively to the rival house. A courtier offended by the brutal manners of the Hanoverian rulers looked longingly across the sea to the descendant of his lineal kings. The foreign predilections, and still more foreign English, of the coarse-minded Georges, made them unpopular with the weak or inconsiderate, who did not see that a very inelegant pronunciation might be united with a true regard for the interests of their country.

The commercial passions of the nations succeeded to the military enthusiasm of the past age, and brought their usual fruits of selfish competition and social degradation. Money became the most powerful principle of public and private life: Sir Robert Walpole, a man of perfect honesty himself, founded his ministry on the avowed disbelief of personal honesty among all classes of the people; and there were many things which appeared to justify his incredulity. [A.D. 1720.] There was the South-Sea Bubble, a swindling speculation, to which our own railway-mania is the only parallel, where lords and ladies, high ecclesiastics and dignified office-bearers, the highest and the lowest, rushed into the wildest excesses of gambling and false play, and which caused a greater loss of character and moral integrity than even of money to its dupes and framers. There was the acknowledged system of rewarding a ministerial vote with notes for five hundred or a thousand pounds. There were the party libels of the time, all imputing the greatest iniquities to the object of their vituperation, and left uncontradicted except by savage proceedings at law or by similar insinuations against the other side. There were philosophers like Bolingbroke and clergymen like Swift. But let us distinguish between the performers on the great scenes of life, the place hunter at St. James's, and the great body of the English and Scottish gentry, and their still undepraved friends and neighbours, whom it is the fashion to involve in the same condemnation of recklessness and dishonour. We are to remember that the dregs of the former society were not yet cleared away. The generation had been brought up at the feet of the professors of morality and religion as they were practised in the days of Charles and James, with Congreve and Wycherly for their exponents on the stage and Dryden for their poet-laureate.

It seems a characteristic of literature that it becomes pure in proportion as it becomes powerful. While it is the mere vehicle for amusement or the exercise of wit and fancy, it does not care in what degrading quarters its materials are found. But when it feels that its voice is influential and its lessons attended to by a wider audience, it rises to the height of the great office to which it is called, and is dignified because it is conscious of its authority. In the incontestable amendment visible in the writings of the period of Anne and the Georges, we find a proof that the vices of the busy politicians and gambling speculators were not shared by the general public. The papers of the _Spectator_ and _Tatler_, the writings of Pope and Arbuthnot, were not addressed to a depraved or sensualized people, as the works of Rochester and Sedley had been. When we talk, therefore, of the Augustan age of Anne, we are to remember that its freedom from grossness and immorality is still more remarkable than its advance in literary merit, and we are to look on the conduct of intriguing directors and bribed members of Parliament as the relics of a time about to pass away and to give place to truer ideas of commercial honesty and public duty. The country, in spite of coarseness of manners and language, was still sound at heart. The jolly squire swore at inconvenient seasons and drank beyond what was right, but he kept open house to friend and tenant, administered justice to the best of his ability, had his children Christianly and virtuously brought up, and was a connecting link in his own neighbourhood between the great nobles who affected almost a princely state, and the snug merchant in the country town, or retired citizen from London, whom he met at the weekly club. The glimpses we get of the social status of the country gentlemen of Queen Anne make us enamoured of their simple ways and patriarchal position. For the argument to be drawn from the character and friends of Sir Roger de Coverly and the delightful Lady Lizard and her daughters, is that the great British nation was still the home of the domestic affections, that the behaviour was pure though the grammar was a little faulty, and the ideas modest and becoming though the expression might be somewhat unadorned. Hence it was that, when the trial came, the heart of all the people turned to the uninviting but honest man who filled the British throne. George the Second became a hero, because the country was healthy at the core.

A son of the old Pretender, relying on the lax morality of the statesmen and the venality of the courtiers, forgot the unshaken firmness and dogged love of the right which was yet a living principle among the populations of both the nations, and landed in the North of Scotland in 1745, to recover the kingdom of his ancestors by force of arms. The kingdoms, however, had got entirely out of the habit of being recovered by any such means. The law had become so powerful, and was so guarded by forms and precedents, that Prince Charles Edward would have had a better chance of obtaining his object by an action of ejectment, or a suit of recovery, than by the aid of sword and bayonet. Everybody knows the main incidents of this romantic campaign,--the successful battles which gave the insurgents the apparent command of the Lowlands,--the advance into England,--the retreat from Derby,--the disasters of the rebel army, and its final extinction at Culloden. But, although to us it appears a very serious state of affairs,--a crown placed on the arbitrament of war, battles in open field, surprise on the part of the Hanoverians, and loud talking on the part of their rivals,--the tranquillity of all ranks and in all quarters is the most inexplicable thing in the whole proceeding. When the landing was first announced, alarm was of course felt, as at a fair when it is reported that a tiger has broken loose from the menagerie. But in a little time every thing resumed its ordinary appearance. George himself cried, "Pooh! pooh! Don't talk to me of such nonsense." His ministers, who probably knew the state of public feeling, were equally unconcerned. A few troops were brought over from the Continent, to show that force was not wanting if the application of it was required. But in other respects no one appeared to believe that the assumed fears of the disaffected, and the no less assumed exultation of the Jacobites, had any foundation in fact. Trade, law, buying and selling, writing and publishing, went on exactly as before. The march of the Pretender was little attended to, except perhaps in the political circles in London. In the great towns it passed almost unheeded. Quiet families within a few miles of the invaders' march posted or walked across to see the uncouth battalions pass. Their strange appearance furnished subjects of conversation for a month; but nowhere does there seem to have been the terror of a real state of war,--the anxious waiting for intelligence, "the pang, the agony, the doubt:" no one felt uneasy as to the result. England had determined to have no more Stuart kings, and Scotland was beginning to feel the benefit of the Union, and left the defence of the true inheritor to the uninformed, discontented, disunited inhabitants of the hills. When the tribes emerged from their mountains, they seemed to melt like their winter snows. No squadrons of stout-armed cavaliers came to join them from holt and farm, as in the days of the Great Rebellion, when the royal flag was raised at Nottingham. Puritans and Independents took no heed, and cried no cries about "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon." They had turned cutlers at Sheffield and fustian-makers at Manchester. The Prince found not only that he created no enthusiasm, but no alarm,--a most painful thing for an invading chief; and, in fact, when they had reached the great central plains of England they felt lost in the immensity of the solitude that surrounded them. If they had met enemies they would have fought; if they had found friends they would have hoped; but they positively wasted away for lack of either confederate or opponent. The expedition disappeared like a small river in sand. What was the use of going on? If they reached London itself, they would be swallowed up in the vastness of the population, and, instead of meeting an army, they would be in danger of being taken up by the police. So they reversed their steps. Donald had stolen considerably in the course of the foray, and was anxious to go and invest his fortune in his native vale. An English guinea--a coin hitherto as fabulous as the _Bodach glas_--would pay the rent of his holding for twenty years; five pounds would make him a cousin of the Laird. But Donald never got back to display the spoils of Carlisle or Derby. He loitered by the road, and was stripped of all his booty. [A.D. 1746.] He was imprisoned, and hanged, and starved, and beaten, and finally, after the strange tragi-comedy of his fight at Falkirk, had the good fortune, on that bare expanse of Drummossie Moor, to hide some of the ludicrous features of his retreat in the glory of a warrior's death. Justice became revenge by its severity after the insurrection was quelled. The followers of the Prince were punished as traitors; but treason means rebellion against an acknowledged government, which extends to its subjects the securities of law. These did not exist in the Highlands. All those distant populations knew of law was the edge of its sword, not the balance of its scales. They saw their chiefs depressed, they remembered the dismal massacre of Glencoe in William's time, and the legal massacres of George the First's. They spoke another language, were different in blood, and manners, and religion, and should have been treated as prisoners of war fighting under a legal banner, and not drawn and quartered as revolted subjects. It is doubtful if one man in the hundred knew the name of the king he was trying to displace, or the position of the prince who summoned him to his camp. Poor, gallant, warm-hearted, ignorant, trusting Gael! His chieftain told him to follow and slay the Saxons, and he required no further instruction. He was not cruel or bloodthirsty in his strange advance. He had no personal enmity to Scot or Englishman, and, with the simple awe of childhood, soon looked with reverence on the proofs of wealth and skill which met him in the crowded cities and cultivated plains. He was subdued by the solemn cathedrals and grand old gentlemen's seats that studded all the road, as some of his ancestors, the ancient Gauls, had been at the sight of the Roman civilization. And, for all these causes, the incursion of the Jacobites left no lasting bitterness among the British peoples. Pity began before long to take the place of opposition; and when all was quite secure, and the Highlanders were fairly subdued, and the Pretender himself was sunk in sloth and drunkenness, a sort of morbid sympathy with the gallant adventurers arose among the new generation. Tender and romantic ballads, purporting to be "Laments for Charlie," and declarations of attachment to the "Young Chevalier," were composed by comfortable ladies and gentlemen, and sung in polished drawing-rooms in Edinburgh and London with immense applause. Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome," or Aytoun's "Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers," have as much right to be called the contemporary expression of the sacrifice of Virginia or the burial of Dundee as the Jacobite songs to be the living voice of the Forty-Five. Who was there in the Forty-Five, or Forty-Six, or for many years after that date, to write such charming verses? The Highlanders themselves knew not a word of English; the blue bonnets in Scotland were not addicted to the graces of poetry and music. The citizens of England were too busy, the gentlemen of England too little concerned in the rising, to immortalize the landing at Kinloch-Moidart or the procession to Holyrood. The earliest song which commemorates the Pretender's arrival, or laments his fall, was not written within twenty years of his attempt. By that time George the Third was on the safest throne in Europe, and Great Britain was mistress of the trade of India and the illimitable regions of America. It was easy to sing about having our "rightful King," when we were in undisputed possession of the Ganges and the Hudson and had just planted the British colours on Quebec and Montreal.

This rebellion of Forty-Five, therefore, is remarkable as a feature in this century, not for the greatness of the interest it excited, but for the small effect it had upon either government or people. It showed on what firm foundations the liberties and religion of the nations rested, that the appearance of armed enemies upon our soil never shook our justly-balanced state. The courts sat at Westminster, and the bells rang for church. People read Thomson's "Seasons," and wondered at Garrick in "Hamlet" at Drury Lane.

Meantime, a great contest was going on abroad, which, after being hushed for a while by the peace of 1748, broke out with fiercer vehemence than ever in what is called the Seven Years' War. [A.D. 1756-1763.] The military hero of this period was Frederick the Second of Prussia, by whose genius and skill the kingdom he succeeded to--a match for Saxony or Bavaria--rapidly assumed its position as a first-rate power. A combination of all the old despotisms was formed against him,--not, however, without cause; for a more unprincipled remover of his neighbour's landmarks, and despiser of generosity and justice, never appeared in history. But when he was pressed on one side by Russia and Austria, and on the other by France, and all the little German potentates were on the watch to pounce on the unprotected State and get their respective shares in the general pillage, Frederick placed his life upon the cast, and stood the hazard of the die in many tremendous combats, crushed the belligerents one by one, made forced marches which caught them unawares, and, though often defeated, conducted his retreats so that they yielded him all the fruits of victory. In his extremity he sought and found alliances in the most unlikely quarters. Though a self-willed despot in his own domains, he won the earnest support and liberal subsidies of the freedom-loving English; and though a philosopher of the most amazing powers of unbelief, he awakened the sympathy of all the religious Protestants in our land. All his faults were forgiven--his unchivalrous treatment of the heroic _King_ of Hungary, Maria-Theresa, the Empress-Queen, his assaults upon her territory, and general faithlessness and ambition--on the one strong ground that he opposed Catholics and tyrants, and, though irreligious and even scoffing himself, was at the head of a true-hearted Protestant people.

It is not unlikely the instincts of a free nation led us at that time to throw our moral weight, if nothing more, into the scale against the intrusion of a new and untried power which began to take part in the conflicts of Europe; for at this period we find the ill-omened announcement that the Russians have issued from their deserts a hundred thousand strong, and made themselves masters of most of the Prussian provinces. [A.D. 1758.] Though defeated in the great battle of Zorndorf, they never lost the hope of renewing the march they had made eleven years before, when thirty-five thousand of them had rested on the Rhine. But Britain was not blind either to the past or future. At the head of our affairs was a man whose fame continues as fresh at the present hour as in the day of his greatness. William Pitt had been a cornet of horse, and even in his youth had attracted the admiration and hatred of old Sir Robert Walpole by an eloquence and a character which the world has agreed in honouring with the epithet of majestic; and when war was again perplexing the nations, and Britain, as usual, had sunk to the lowest point in the military estimate of the Continent, the Great Commoner, as he was called, took the government into his hands, and the glories of the noblest periods of our annals were immediately renewed or cast into the shade. Wherever the Great Commoner pointed with his finger, success was certain. His fleets swept the seas. Howe and Hawke and Boscawen executed his plans. In the East he was answered by the congenial energy of Clive, and in the West by the heroic bravery of Wolfe. For, though the war in which we were now engaged had commenced nominally for European interests, the crash of arms between France and England extended to all quarters of the world. In India and America equally their troops and policies were opposed, and, in fact, the battle of the two nations was fought out in those distant realms. Our triumph at Plassey and on the Heights of Abraham had an immense reaction on both the peoples at home. And a very cursory glance at those regions, from the middle of the century, will be a fitting introduction to the crowning event of the period we have now reached,--namely, the French Revolution of 1789. The rise of the British Empire in the East, no less than the loss of our dominion in the West, will be found to contribute to that grand catastrophe, of which the results for good and evil will be felt "to the last syllable of recorded time."

The first commercial adventure to India was in the bold days of Elizabeth, in 1591. In the course of a hundred years from that time various companies had been established by royal charter, and a regular trade had sprung up. In 1702 all previous charters were consolidated into one, and the East India Company began its career. Its beginning was very quiet and humble. It was a trader, and nothing more; but when it saw a convenient harbour, a favourable landing-place, and an industrious population, it bent as lowly as any Oriental slave at the footstool of the unsuspecting Rajah, and obtained permission to build a storehouse, to widen the wharf, and, finally, to erect a small tower, merely for the defence of its property from the dangerous inhabitants of the town. The storehouses became barracks, the towers became citadels; and by the year 1750 the recognised possessions of the inoffensive and unambitious merchants comprised mighty states, and were dotted at intervals along the coast from Surat and Bombay on the west to Madras and Calcutta on the east and far north. The French also had not been idle, and looked out ill pleased, from their domains at Pondicherry and Chandernagore, on the widely-diffused settlements and stealthy progress of their silent rivals. They might have made as rapid progress, and secured as extensive settlements, if they had imitated their rivals' stealthiness and silence. But power is nothing in the estimation of a Frenchman unless he can wear it like a court suit and display it to all the world. The governors, therefore, of their factories, obtained honours and ornaments from the native princes. One went so far as to forge a gift of almost regal power from the Great Mogul, and sat on a musnud, and was addressed with prostration by his countrymen and the workmen in the warerooms. Wherever the British wormed their way, the French put obstacles in their path. Whether there was peace between Paris and London or not, made no difference to the rival companies on the Coromandel shore. They were always at war, and only cloaked their national hatred under the guise of supporters of opposite pretenders to some Indian throne. Great men arose on both sides. The climate or policies of Hindostan, which weaken the native inhabitant, only call forth the energies and manly virtues of the intrusive settler. No kingdom has such a bead-roll of illustrious names as the British occupation. That one century of "work and will" has called forth more self-reliant heroism and statesmanlike sagacity than any period of three times the extent since the Norman Conquest. From Clive, the first of the line, to the Lawrences and Havelocks of the present day, there has been no pause in the patriotic and chivalrous procession. Clive came just at the proper time. A born general, though sent out in an humble mercantile situation, he retrieved the affairs of his employers and laid the foundation of a new empire for the British crown. Calcutta had been seized by a native ruler, instigated by the French, in 1756. The British residents, to the number of one hundred and forty-six, were packed in a frightful dungeon without a sufficiency of light or air, and, after a night which transcends all nights of suffering and despair, when the prison-doors were thrown open, but twenty-two of the whole number survived. But these were twenty-two living witnesses to the tyranny and cruelty of Surajah Dowlat. Clive was on his track ere many months had passed. Calcutta was recovered, other places were taken, and the battle of Plassey fought. In this unparalleled exploit, Clive, with three thousand soldiers, principally Sepoys, revenged the victims of the Black Hole, by defeating their murderer at the head of sixty thousand men. This was on the 23d of June, 1757; and when in that same year the news of the great European war between the nations came thundering up the Ganges, the victors enlarged their plans. They determined to expel the French from all their possessions in the East; and Admiral Pococke and Colonel Coote were worthy rivals of the gallant Clive. Great fleets encountered in the Indian seas, and victory was always with the British flag. Battles took place by land, and uniformly with the same result. Closer and closer the invading lines converged upon the French; and at last, in 1761, Pondicherry, the last remaining of all their establishments, was taken, after a vigorous defence, and the French influence was at an end in India. These four years, from 1757 to 1761, had been scarcely less prolific of distinguished men on the French side than our own. The last known of these was Lally Tollendal, a man of a furious courage and headstrong disposition, against whom his enemies at home had no ground of accusation except his want of success and savageness of manner. Yet when he returned, after the loss of Pondicherry and a long imprisonment in England, he was attacked with all the vehemence of personal hatred. He was tried for betraying the interests of the king, tortured, and executed. The prosecution lasted many years, and the public rage seemed rather to increase. [A.D. 1766.] Long after peace was concluded between France and England, the tragedy of the French expulsion from India received its final scene in the death of the unfortunate Count Lally.

Quebec and its dependencies, during the same glorious administration, were conquered and annexed by Wolfe; and already the throes of the great Revolution were felt, though the causes remained obscure. Cut off from the money-making regions of Hindostan and the patriarchal settlements of Canada, the Frenchman, oppressed at home, had no outlet either for his ambition or discontent. The feeling of his misery was further aggravated by the sight of British prosperity. The race of men called Nabobs, mercantile adventurers who had gone out to India poor and came back loaded with almost incredible wealth, brought the ostentatious habits of their Oriental experience with them to Europe, and offended French and English alike by the tasteless profusion of their expense. Money wrung by extortion from native princes was lavished without enjoyment by the denationalized _parvenu_. A French duke found himself outglittered by the equipage of the over-enriched clove-dealer,--and hated him for his presumption. The Frenchman of lower rank must have looked on him as the lucky and dishonourable rival who had usurped his place, and hated him for the opportunity he had possessed of winning all that wealth. Ground to the earth by taxes and toil, without a chance of rising in the social scale or of escaping from the ever-growing burden of his griefs, the French peasant and small farmer must have listened with indignation to the accounts of British families of their own rank emerging from a twenty years' residence in Madras or Calcutta with more riches than half the hereditary nobles. It was therefore with a feeling of unanimous satisfaction that all classes of Frenchmen heard, in 1773, that the old English colonies in America were filled with disaffection,--that Boston had risen in insurrection, and that a spirit of resistance to the mother-country was rife in all the provinces.

The quarrel came to a crisis between the Crown and the colonies within fourteen years of the conquest of Canada. It seemed as if the British had provided themselves with a new territory to compensate for the approaching loss of the old; and bitter must have been the reflection of the French when they perceived that the loyalty of that recent acquisition remained undisturbed throughout the succeeding troubles. Taxation, the root of all strength and the cause of all weakness, had been pushed to excess, not in the amount of its exaction, but in the principle of its imposition; and the British blood had not been so colonialized as to submit to what struck the inhabitants of all the towns as an unjustifiable exercise of power. The cry at first, therefore, was, No tax without representation; but the cry waxed louder and took other forms of expression. The cry was despised, whether gentle or loud,--then listened to,--then resented. The passions of both countries became raised. America would not submit to dictation; Britain would not be silenced by threats. Feelings which would have found vent at home in angry speeches in Parliament, and riots at a new election, took a far more serious shape when existing between populations separated indeed by a wide ocean, but identical in most of their qualities and aspirations. The king has been blamed. "George the Third lost us the colonies by his obstinacy: he would not yield an inch of his royal dignity, and behold the United States our rivals and enemies,--perhaps some day our conquerors and oppressors!" Now, we should remember that the Great Britain of 1774 was a very narrow-minded, self-opinionated, pig-headed Great Britain, compared to the cosmopolitan, philanthropical, and altogether disinterested Great Britain we call it now. If the king had bated his breath for a moment, or even spoken respectfully and kindly of the traitors and rebels who were firing upon his flags, he would have been the most unpopular man in his dominions. Many, no doubt, held aloof, and found excuses for the colonists' behaviour; but the influence of those meditative spirits was small; their voice was drowned in the chorus of indignation at what appeared revolt and mutiny more than resistance to injustice. And when other elements came into the question,--when the French monarch, ostensibly at peace with Britain, permitted his nobles and generals and soldiers to volunteer in the patriot cause,--the sentiments of this nation became embittered with its hereditary dislike to its ancient foe. We turned them out of India: were they going to turn us out of America? We had taken Canada: are they going to take New York? We might have offered terms to our own countrymen, made concessions, granted exemptions from imperial burdens, or even a share in imperial legislation; but with Lafayette haranguing about abstract freedom, and all the young counts and marquises of his expedition declaring against the House of Lords, the thing was impossible. [A.D. 1778-1780.] War was declared upon France, and upon Spain, and upon Holland. We fought everywhere, and lavished blood and treasure in this great quarrel. And yet the nation had gradually accustomed itself to the new view of American wrongs. The Ministry, by going so far in their efforts at accommodation, had confessed the original injustice of their cause. So we fought with a blunted sword, and hailed even our victories with misgivings as to our right to win them. But it was the season of vast changes in the political distribution of all the world. Prussia was a foremost kingdom. Russia was a European Empire. India had risen into a compact dominion under the shield of Britain. Why should not America take a substantive place in the great family of nations, and play a part hereafter in the old game of statesmen, called the Balance of Power? In 1783 this opinion prevailed. France, Spain, and Holland sheathed their swords. The Independence of the United States was acknowledged at the Peace of Versailles, and everybody believed that the struggle against established governments was over.

France seemed elevated by the results of the American War, and Great Britain humiliated. Prophecies were frequent about our rapid fall and final extinction. Our own orators were, as usual, the loudest in confessions of our powerlessness and decay. Our institutions were held up to dislike; and if you had believed the speeches and pamphlets of discontented patriots, you would have thought we were the most spiritless and down-trodden, the most unmerciful and dishonest, nation in the world. The whole land was in a fury of self-abasement at the degradation brought upon our name and standing by the treachery and iniquities of Warren Hastings in India; our European glory was crushed by the surrender at Paris. It must be satisfactory to all lovers of their country to know that John Bull has no such satisfaction as in proving that he is utterly exhausted,--always deceived by his friends, always overreached by his enemies, always disappointed in his aims. In this self-depreciating spirit he conducts all his wars and all his treaties; yet somehow it always happens that he gets what he wanted, and the overreaching and deceiving antagonist gives it up. His power is over a sixth of the human race, and he began a hundred years ago with a population of less than fourteen millions; and all the time he has been singing the most doleful ditties of the ill success that always attends him,--of his ruinous losses and heart-breaking disappointments. The men at the head of affairs in the trying years from the Peace of Versailles to 1793 were therefore quite right not to be taken in by the querulous lamentations of the nation. We had lost three millions of colonists, and gained three million independent customers. We were trading to India, and building up and putting down the oldest dynasties of Hindostan. Ships and commerce increased in a remarkable degree; the losses of the war were compensated by the gains of those peaceful pursuits in a very few years; and we were contented to leave to Paris the reputation of the gayest city in the world, and to the French the reputation of the happiest and best-ruled people. But Paris was the wretchedest of towns, and the French the most miserable of peoples. When anybody asks us in future what was the cause of the French Revolution, we need not waste time to discuss the writings of Voltaire, or the unbelief of the clergy, or the immorality of the nobles. We must answer at once by naming the one great cause by which all revolutions are produced,--over-taxation. The French peasant, sighing for liberty, had no higher object than an escape from the intolerable burden of his payments. He cared no more for the rights of man, or the happiness of the human race, than for the quarrels of Achilles and Agamemnon. He wanted to get rid of the "taille," the "corvée," and twenty other imposts which robbed him of his last penny. If he had had a chicken in his pot, and could do as he liked with his own spade and pick-axe, he never would have troubled his head about codes and constitutions. But life had become a burden to him. Everybody had turned against him. The grand old feudal noble, who would have protected and cherished him under the shadow of his castle-wall, was a lord-chamberlain at court. The kind old priest, who would have attended to his wants and fed him, if required, at the church-door, was dancing attendance in the antechamber of a great lady in Paris, or singing improper songs at a jolly supper-party at Versailles. There were intendants and commissaries visiting his wretched hovel at rapidly-decreasing intervals of time, to collect his contributions to the revenue. These men farmed the taxes, and squeezed out the last farthing like a Turkish pasha. But while the small land-owner--and they were already immensely numerous--and the serf--for he was no better--were oppressed by these exactions, the gentry were exempt. The seigneur visited his castle for a month or two in the year, but it was to embitter the countryman's lot by the contrast. His property had many rights, but no duties. In ancient times in France, and at all times in England, those two qualities went together. Our upper classes lived among their tenants and dependants. They had no alleviation of burdens in consequence of their wealth, but they took care that their poorer neighbours should have alleviation in consequence of their poverty. Cottages had no window-tax. The pressure of the public burdens increased with the power to bear them. But in France the reverse was the case. Poverty paid the money, and wealth and luxury spent it. The evil was too deep-rooted to be remedied without pulling up the tree. The wretched millions were starving, toiling, despairing, and the thousands were rioting in extravagance and show. The same thing occurred in 1789 as had occurred in the last glimmer of the Roman civilization in the time of Clovis. The Roman Emperor issued edicts for the collection of his revenue. Commissioners spread over the land; the miserable Gaul saw the last sheaf of his corn torn away, and the last lamb of his flock. But when the last property of the poorest was taken away, the imperial exchequer could not remain unfilled. You remember the unhappy men called Curials,--holders of small estates in the vicinity of towns. They were also endowed with rank, and appointed to office. Their office was to make up from their own resources, or by extra severity among their neighbours, for any deficiency in the sum assessed. Peasant, land-owner, curial,--all sank into hopeless misery by the crushing of this gold-producing machinery. They looked across the Rhine to Clovis and the Franks, and hailed the ferocious warriors as their deliverers from an intolerable woe. They could not be worse off by the sword of the stranger than by the ledger of the tax-collector. In 1789 the system of the old Roman extortion was revived. The village or district was made a curial, and became responsible in its aggregate character for the individual payments. If the number of payers diminished, the increase fell upon the few who were not yet stripped. The Clovis of the present day who was to do away with their oppressors, though perhaps to immolate themselves, was a Revolution,--a levelling of all distinctions, ranks, rights, exemptions, privileges. This was the "liberty, equality, fraternity" that were to overflow the worn-out world and fertilize it as the Nile does Egypt.

Great pity has naturally been expressed for the nobility (or gentry) and clergy of France; but, properly considered, France had at that time neither a nobility nor a clergy. A nobility with no status independent of the king--with no connection with its estates beyond the reception of their rents--with no weight in the legislature; with ridiculously exaggerated rank, and ridiculously contracted influence; with no interest in local expenditure or voice in public management; a gentry, in short, debarred from active life, except as officers of the army--shut out by monarchic jealousy from interference in affairs, and by the pride of birth from the pursuits of commerce--is not a gentry at all. A clergy, in the same way, is a priesthood only in right of its belief in the doctrines it professes to hold, and the attention it bestows on its parishioners. Except in some few instances, the Christianity both of faith and practice had disappeared from France. It was time, therefore, that nobility and clergy should also disappear. The excesses of the Revolution which broke out in 1789, and reached their climax in the murder of the king in 1793, showed the excesses of the misgovernment of former years. If there had been one redeeming feature of the ancient system, it would have produced its fruits in the milder treatment of the victims of the reaction. In one or two provinces, indeed, we are told that hereditary attachment still bound the people to their superiors, and in those provinces, the philosophic chronicler of the fact informs us, the centralizing system had not completed its authority. The gentry still performed some of the duties of their station, and the priests, of their profession. Everywhere else blind hatred, unreasoning hope, and bloody revenge. The century, which began with the vainglorious egotism of Louis the Fourteenth and the war of the Spanish Succession,--which progressed through the British masterdom of India and the self-sustaining republicanism of America,--died out in the convulsive strugglings of thirty-one millions of souls on the soil of France to breathe a purer political air and shake off the trammels which had gradually been riveted upon them for three hundred years. Great Britain had preceded them by a century, and has ever since shown the bloodless and legal origin of her freedom by the bloodless and legal use she has made of it. We emerged from the darkness of 1688 with all the great landmarks of our country not only erect, but strengthened. We had king, lords, and commons, and a respect for law, and veneration for precedents, which led the great Duke of Wellington to say, in answer to some question about the chance of a British revolution, that "no man could foresee whether such a thing might occur or not, but, when it did, he was sure it would be done by Act of Parliament."

War with France began in 1793. Our military reputation was at the lowest, for Wolfe and Clive had had time to be forgotten; and even our navy was looked on without dismay, for the laurels of Howe and Boscawen were sere from age. But in the remaining years of the century great things were done, and Britannia had the trident firmly in her hand. Jervis, and Duncan, and Nelson, were answering with victories at sea the triumphs of Napoleon in Italy. And while fame was blowing the names of those champions far and wide, a blast came across also from India, where Wellesley had begun his wondrous career. [A.D. 1798.] Equally matched the belligerents, and equally favoured with mighty men of valour to conduct their forces, the feverish energy of the newly-emancipated France being met by the healthful vigour of the matured and self-respecting Britain, the world was uncertain how the great drama would close. But the last year of the century seemed to incline the scale to the British side. [A.D. 1799.] Napoleon, after a dash at Egypt, had been checked by the guns of Nelson in the great battle of the Nile. He secretly withdrew from his dispirited army, and made his appearance in Paris as much in the character of a fugitive as of a candidate for power. But all the fruits of his former battles had been torn from his countrymen in his absence. Italy was delivered from their grasp; Russia was pouring her hordes into the South; confusion was reigning everywhere, and the fleets of Great Britain were blocking up every harbour in France.

Napoleon was created First Consul, and the Century went down upon the final preparations of the embittered rivals. Both parties felt now that the struggle was for life or death, and "the boldest held his breath for a time," when he thought of what awful events the Nineteenth Century would be the scene.

FOOTNOTES.

[A] The following is a carefully compiled table of the forces of Europe in the year 1854-55. Since that time the Russian fleet has been destroyed, but the diminution has been more than counterbalanced by the increased navies of the other powers.

Military Forces of Europe in 1855.

Men. Ships. Guns.

Austria 650,000 102 752 Bavaria 239,886 ... ... Belgium 100,000 ... ... Denmark 75,169 120 880 France 650,000 407 11,773 Germany 452,473 ... ... Great Britain 265,000[1] 591 17,291 Greece 10,226 25 143 Ionian Isles 3,000 4 ... Modena and Parma 6,302 ... ... Netherlands 58,647 84 2,000 Papal States 11,274 ... ... Portugal 33,000 44 404 Prussia 525,000 50 250 Russia 699,000 207 9,000 Sardinia 48,088 40 900 Sicilies 106,264 29 444 Spain 75,000 410 1530 Sweden 167,000 ... ... Switzerland 108,000 ... ... Tuscany 16,930 ... ... Turkey 310,970 ... ... ---------- ---- ------- 4,611,229 2113 45,367[2]

[1] Indian army 250,000, and militia 145,000, not included; making a total of 660,000

[2] Taking an average of ten men to each gun, the sailors will be 453,670; which gives a total of fighting-men, 5,064,899!!!

[B] He was called Le Grand Bâtisseur.

[C] Wickliff's English Bible, 1383.

[D] Popular History--Henry VI.

[E] Dr. Robertson.

INDEX.

Abdelmalek the caliph, 167.

À-Beckett, the elevation and career of, 290 _et seq._

Abelard, rise of free inquiry with, 280.

Abou Beker, the exploits, &c. of, 157, 158 --chosen Mohammed's successor, 160 --his exploits, 161.

Absolutism, rise of, in France under Louis XIV., 475 _et seq._

Abu Taleb, uncle of Mohammed, 138.

Academies, establishment of, by Charlemagne, 196.

Adrian, the emperor, accession and reign of, 45 _et seq._ --his death, 48.

Adrian IV., Pope, 289.

Africa, progress of the Saracens in, 166 --trading-company to, 452.

Agincourt, battle of, 381.

Agriculture, state of, in seventh century, 142.

Agrippina, the empress, 22.

Alans, the, 100.

Alaric the Goth, first appearance of, 98 --hostilities with, 101 --sack of Rome, 106 --his death and burial, 107.

Albigenses, tenets, &c. of the, 299 --the crusade against them, 302 _et seq._

Albinus, a candidate for the empire, 60.

Alboin, King of the Lombards, 129.

Alcuin at the court of Charlemagne, 194 --as Abbot of Tours, 195.

Aleppo taken by the Saracens, 163.

Alexander VI., character, &c. of, 389, 406.

Alexandria, the monks of, 115 --taken by the Saracens, and destruction of the library, 163.

Alexis, the emperor, and the Crusaders, 263.

Alfred, rise and exploits of, 215.

Ali becomes caliph, 167 --the exploits &c. of, 157, 158, 160.

Alva, the Duke of, the St. Bartholomew massacre planned with, 441 --his cruelties in the Netherlands, 441.

Amadis de Gaul, the romance of, 349.

America, the discovery of, 396 --growing importance of its discovery, 402 --progress of British power in, 517.

Amru, the Saracen conqueror, 163.

Anagni, the arrest of Boniface VIII. at, 329.

Anglican Church, the, under Henry II., 289 _et seq._

Anglo-Saxons, establishment of the, 120.

Anne, the literature of the reign of, 506.

Anselm, learning, &c. of, 247.

Antharis, conquest of Italy by, 130.

Antioch, the capture of, by the Crusaders, 264 --the battle of, 265.

Antoninus Pius, the emperor, his character and reign, 49.

Aquileia, siege of, by Maximin, 70 --taken by Attila, 110.

Aquitaine, power of the Dukes of, 204, 232.

Arcadius, the emperor, 101.

Architecture, advancement of, during the eleventh century, 242, 243.

Argentine, Sir Giles d', death of, 353.

Arians, enmity between, and the orthodox, 94 --quarrels between, and the Athanasians, 117.

Aristocracy, the Roman, their decay, 32 _et seq._

Aristotle, supremacy given to, 297.

Armagnac, the Count of, 364 --struggle between, and Burgundy, 377.

Armies, the modern, of Europe, 57.

Arnold of Brescia, the revolt of, 278 --his death, 279.

Arteveldt, James Van, 355.

Asia, stationary condition of, 14.

Asti, siege of, by Alaric, 105

Ataulf the Goth, career of, 108.

Athanasians, division between the, and the Arians, 117.

Attila the Hun, career of, 109 _et seq._

Augustin, influence of, on Luther, 424.

Augustus, the supremacy of, 17 --his reign, 18.

Aulus Plautius, landing of, in England, 21.

Aurelian, the emperor, 72 --his triumph, 79.

Austrasia, kingdom of, 155.

Austria, the power of, in the seventeenth century, 463 --the seven years' war, 512.

Auvergne, the Marquises of, 205.

Avars, junction of the Lombards with the, 129.

Avignon, acquired by the Pope, 306 --the residence of the Popes at, 342.

Azores, discovery of the, 395.

Bacon, Roger, gunpowder known to, 372.

Badby, John, martyrdom of, 367.

Bahuchet, a French admiral, 355.

Balbinus, appointment of, 69 --his death, 70.

Baldwyn, Count of Flanders, 263 --habits of, in the East, 270.

Baliol, maintained by Edward I., 319.

Ballads, influence of, on the common people, 372.

Bannockburn, the battle of, 352.

Barbarians, first appearance of the, 25 --their increased incursions, 51 --their continued progress, 71 --their increasing strength, 79 _et seq._

Barbavara, a Genoese admiral, 355.

Barcho-chebas, the rebellion of the Jews under, 47.

Bedford, the Duke of, in France, 384.

Belisarius, exploits of, 124 --disgraced, 125.

Bells, the invention of, 196.

Benedict. _See_ St. Benedict.

Benedict XI. poisoned, 331.

Benedictine monks, industry, &c. of the, 142.

Berenger, transubstantiation assailed by, 247.

Bernard de Goth, elevated to the papacy as Clement V., 331 _et seq._

Beziers, massacre of Albigenses in, 305.

Bible, Wickliff's translation of the, 342 --the first book printed by Guttenberg, 422.

Bishops, increasing alarm of the, in the ninth century, 205 --warlike, of the eleventh century, 251.

Black Hole of Calcutta, the tragedy of the, 515.

Blanche, mother of Louis IX., urges the persecution of the Albigenses, 304.

Blenheim, the battle of, 500.

Boccaccio, the works of, 344.

Bohemund, the Crusader, 265.

Boniface VII., Pope, 236.

Boniface VIII., bull against Edward I. by, 315 --jubilee celebrated by, 325 --contest with Philip le Bel, 326 _et seq._ --his arrest, 329 _et seq._ --his death, 330.

Boniface, Archbishop of Mayence, 175.

Books, early value of, 372 --multiplied by printing, 373.

Borgia, elevation of, to the Papacy, 369.

Brantôme, the memoirs of, 447.

Bribery, prevalence of, under Walpole, 505.

Brittany, power of the Dukes of, 204 --acquired by Rollo the Norman, 226.

Bruce, the victory of, at Bannockburn, 352.

Bruges, defeat of the townsmen of, at Cassel, 353.

Brunehild, cruelties and career of, 150 --her death, 150.

Brunissende de Périgord, mistress of Clement V., 332.

Buccaneers, rise of the, 452.

Burghers, increasing importance of the, 279.

Burgundians, conquest of Gaul by the, 108.

Burgundy, kingdom of, 155.

Busentino, burial of Alaric in the, 107.

Cade, the insurrection of, 374.

Cadijah, wife of Mohammed, 138.

Calais, taken by Edward III., 356.

Caligula, the character, &c. of, 19.

Caliphs, habits of the, 165.

Calvinists and Lutherans, hatred between, 460.

Cambrai, the league of, 409 _et seq._

Canada, the conquest of, by the British, 517.

Cannon, first employment of, 342.

Capetian line, commencement of the, 231.

Caracalla, character of, 62 --his accession and reign, 65.

Carausius, the revolt of, 75.

Carlovingian line, close of the, 231.

Carthage, subdued by the Saracens, 166.

Cassel, the battle of, 353.

Cassius, the rebellion of, 52.

Cathedrals, building of, during the eleventh century, 242.

Catherine de Medicis, the massacre of St. Bartholomew planned by, 441.

Catholicism, resemblances between, and Mohammedanism, 271.

Cavendish, the naval exploits of, 451.

Caxton, books printed by, 393.

Celibacy, priestly, neglect of, during the eleventh century, 252 --enforced by Hildebrand, 256.

Centuries, characters of different, 13, 15, _et seq._

Chæreas, assassination of Caligula by, 20.

Châlons, the battle of, 110.

Change, prevalence of, during eighteenth century, 491.

Charlemagne, accession and reign of, 186 _et seq._ --his conquests, 187 --crowned Emperor of the West, 188 --his era, 188 _et seq._ --his polity, &c., 189 --his court, &c., 193, 194 _et seq._ --his encouragement of literature, &c., 195 _et seq._ --his death, and disruption of his empire, 198, 201 _et seq._

Charles, son of Louis the Debonnaire, 201 --character and reign of, 206.

Charles the Simple and Rollo the Norman, 225, 226, 227.

Charles VI., decline of the French nobility under, 360 _et seq._ --death of, 384.

Charles VII., accession of, 384 --the Maid of Orleans, 386 _et seq._ --his desertion of her, 389.

Charles IX., the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 442.

Charles V., the emperor, extent of his dominions, 404 --and Luther, 427 --close of his career, 431, 432.

Charles I., unpopularity of, 465 --the execution of, 470.

Charles II., England under, 472 _et seq._

Charles II. of Spain, death of, and his will, 497.

Charles Edward, the rising under, 507.

Charles Martel, the defeat of the Saracens by, 176, 179, _et seq._

Chatham, the ministry of, 513.

Chaucer, the works of, 344.

Childeric III., the last of the Merovingians, 182.

Chivalry, rise of the orders of, 344 --principles inculcated by, 349.

Chosroes, King of Persia, 158.

Christ, the birth of and its influence, 17.

Christian Church, progressive development of the, 76 --its organization, 78 --corruption of the, 114 --divisions in it, 116 --persecutions, 118.

Christians, persecution of the, by Nero, 23 --policy of Adrian towards, 49.

Christianity, influence of, 17 --the first effects of, 36 --progress of, 55 --establishment of, by Constantine, 85 --commencing struggle of, with Mohammedanism, 141.

Church, the privileges conferred on, and its advantages, 145 --corruptions, 147, 148 --at variance with the nobility, 153 --its unity, 155 --state of, in England during eighth century, 172, 173 --monarchical principle established in the, 183 --effects of the Crusades on, 273 --increasing pretensions and power of, 206, 207 --possessions, &c. of, in France in the tenth century, 228 --resistance to it, 230 --policy of Hugh Capet, 231 --state of, during the tenth century, 219 --during the eleventh century, 253 --in England under Henry II., 292 _et seq._ --conditions of Magna Charta regarding, 308 --changed position of, 342 --state of, in the fifteenth century, 368 _et seq._ --before the Reformation, 419 _et seq._

Church of England, the, and its influence and tendencies, 457.

Churches, schism between the Eastern and Western, 133 --rebuilding, &c. of the, in the eleventh century, 242 --their objects, &c., 244 _et seq._

Churchmen, warlike, during the eleventh century, 251.

Citeaux, the Abbot of, 305.

Claudius, reign and character of, 20 --his death, 22.

Clement V., election of, 331, 332 --his rapacity, &c., 332 --the persecution of the Templars, 337 _et seq._

Clergy, the, privileges conferred on, 145 --corruption of the higher, 148 --increasing claims of, in the ninth century, 204 _et seq._ --claims of, in the tenth century, and resistance to them, 229 --policy of Hugh Capet, 232 --the higher character of, during the twelfth century, 274 --character of, in Provence, 300 --taxed in England by Edward I., 315 --support Henry IV. in England, 365 --the French at the time of the Revolution, 523.

Clive, the exploits of, 515.

Clotaire, overthrow of Brunehild by, 150.

Clothilde, anecdote of, 153.

Clovis, accession of, in France, 119 --the descendants of, 175 --set aside, 182.

Cobham, Lord, martyrdom of, 367.

Colonies, the first English and Dutch, 454.

Colonna, the arrest of Boniface VIII. by, 329.

Columbus, the career of, and his discovery of America, 395.

Commerce, progress of, in England under Elizabeth, 449 _et seq._

Commodus, accession and character of, 58 _et seq._

Commons, rise of the, in England, 306 --House of, first constituted in England, 311.

Condé, the Great, 478, 481.

Conrad, the emperor, heads the second Crusade, 284.

Conservatism, strength of, in England during eighteenth century, 494.

Constantine, accession of, and removal to Constantinople, 84 --his character, 85 --establishes Christianity, 85 --his system of government, 86 --nobility founded by him, 87 --his system of taxation, 89 --death, 92.

Constantinople, removal of the seat of empire to, 84 --subordination of the Bishop of, 125 --supremacy claimed for the Bishop of, 132, 133 --assailed by the Saracens, 166 --early subordination of the Popes to, 174 --pretensions of the emperors, 176, 177 --the Crusaders at, 262, 263 --diffusion of learning by capture of, 422.

Convents, state of the, during the tenth century, 221.

Coote, Sir Eyre, 516.

Cornelius and Novatian, the schism between, 78.

Council of Toledo, the, 151.

Count, origin of the title of, 88.

Courtrai, the battle of, 335.

Covenanters, persecutions of the, in Scotland, 473.

Crecy, battle of, 356.

Cromwell, the rise &c. of, 470 --England under, 471.

Crown, position of the, in England and France during the tenth century, 230 --new position given to the, under Hugh Capet, 233 _et seq._ --its increasing power, 359 _et seq._

Crusades, first suggestion of the, 242 --the first, 260 _et seq._ --losses in it, and its effects on Europe, 269 --of children, 269 --the second, 284 --the third, 285 --influence of, on the distribution of wealth, &c., 272 --end of, 316.

Crusading spirit, first rise of the, 250

Cuba, the buccaneers at, 453.

Culloden, the battle of, 507, 509.

Cunimond, defeat and death of, 129.

Curials, the, under the Roman emperors, 90, 523.

Cyrene, conquest of, by the Saracens, 166.

Dagobert, King, 151.

Dance of Death, the, 374.

Danes, the invasions of the, 209, 210 --their invasions of England, 212 _et seq._ --their settlements, 214, 215 --continued incursions into England, 234.

Dante, the works of, 325, 344.

Democracy, early alliance of the Church with, 154.

Dettingen, the battle of, 502.

Diaz, Bartholomew, discovery of the Cape of Good Hope by, 395.

Didius, purchase of the empire by, 59 --his death, 60.

Diocletian, accession and reign of, 74 --abdicates, 76 --system introduced by him, 83.

Dominic, originates the crusade against the Albigenses, 301 _et seq._ --establishment of the Inquisition under, 304.

Domitian, the reign of, 28, 34.

Dorylæum, the battle of, 264.

Drake, the expeditions of, 451.

Dress, distinctions from, among the Franks, 152.

Dudley, the informer, 404.

Duncan, the victories of, 525.

Dunois, bastard of Orleans, 387.

Dutch, the maritime settlements of the, 452.

East India Company, founding of the, 450.

Eastern Church, schism of the, 133.

Eastern empire, falling supremacy of the, 185.

Ecclesiastical power, decay of, in the thirteenth century, 313.

Edessa, the Crusaders at, 264.

Education, measures of Charlemagne for, 195.

Edward I., taxation of the clergy by, 315 --character of the reign of, 318 --his attempts on Scotland, 319 _et seq._

Edward II., the defeat of, at Bannockburn, 352.

Edward III., the Garter instituted by, 344 --policy of, his alliance with Flanders, &c., 354 _et seq._ --war with France, 355 _et seq._ --battles of Helvoet Sluys and Crecy, 355 --of Poictiers, 356.

Edward the Black Prince, his treatment of John, 349 --his character, 349 --his victory at Poictiers, 356.

Egbert, subjugation of the Heptarchy by, 193, 194.

Eginhart, the life of Charlemagne by, 195.

Egypt, surrender of Louis IX. in, 317.

Eleanor, wife of Louis VII., 286.

Elizabeth, policy of, with regard to the Reformation, 428 --the policy and measures of, and their results, 436 _et seq._ --the Armada, 444 --papal bull against, 448 --changes in England under, 449.

Elizabeth, daughter of James I., married to the Elector of Palatine, 462.

Ella, King of Northumberland, 214.

Eloisa, influence of, 282.

Empire of the West, restoration of, under Charlemagne, 188.

Empson, the creature of Henry VII., 404.

England, conquest of, by the Romans, and its effects, 21 --severance of, from the Roman Empire, 107 --formation of the Heptarchy in, 120 --state of, in the sixth century, 128 --divided state of, 155 --state of, in the eighth century, 171 --the Church and clergy, 172, 173 --union of, under Egbert, 193, 194 --state of, in the ninth century, 211 _et seq._ --the invasions of the Danes, 212 --its divided state, 213, 214 --settlements of the Danes, 215 --rise and career of Alfred, 215 --the Church and the Crown in, during the tenth century, 229 --state of, during the tenth century, 234 --origin of the wars with France, 285 _et seq._ --subservience to the papacy in, 289 --position of the Church, and feeling towards the Normans, 292 --state of, under John, 294 --rise of the Commons, &c. in, 306 --Magna Charta and its effects, 308 _et seq._ --reign of Henry III., 311 --supremacy of the papacy in, 314 --independence of the Church, 316 --the reign of Edward I. in, 318 --the battle of Bannockburn, 352 --the policy of Edward III., 354 --decline of the nobility in, 360 --divided state of, on accession of Henry IV., 365 --the ballads of, 372 --state of, during fifteenth century, 374 --loss of her French possessions, 376 --conquests of Henry V. in France, 378 _et seq._ --accession of Henry VIII., 404 --increasing commerce of, 413 --first idea of union with Scotland, 414 --battle of Flodden, 414 --the reformation in, 428 --the reign of Mary in, 433 --the policy of Elizabeth and its results, 436 --progress of, under Elizabeth, 450 --the colonization of America by, 454 --under James I., 455 _et seq._ --state of parties, &c. on accession of Charles I., 465 _et seq._ --political and religious parties, 466 --the great rebellion, 468 --the reaction against Puritanism in, 472 --under Charles II., 472 --its degraded position, 473 --ingress of French Protestants into, 484 --reign of James II., 484 --William III., 486 --state, &c. of, during eighteenth century, 493 --state of, under the Georges, 494 --is she a military nation? 496 --the war of the succession, 498 _et seq._ --the peace of Utrecht, 502 --the ministry of Walpole, &c., 505 --the Pretender in, 509 --supports Frederick the Great, 512 --the rise of her Indian empire, 514 _et seq._ --the revolt of the United States, 518 _et seq._ --her progress, 520, 521 --her revolution and freedom contrasted with those of France, 525.

Episcopacy, James's attempt to force, on Scotland, 464.

Ethelbald, the reign of, 214.

Ethelwolf, the reign of, 214.

Etiquette, supremacy of, under Louis XIV., 481.

Eugene, Prince, 501.

Eugenius III., Pope, 279.

Eunapius, character of the early monks by, 115.

Europe, modern, compared with ancient Rome, 56 _et seq._ --state of, in the seventh century, 167 --in the eighth, 171 --rise of the modern kingdoms of, 190 --state of, during the tenth century, 219 --effects of the first Crusade on, 269 --progressive advances of, 297 --state of, during fifteenth century, 375 --changed aspect of, in sixteenth century, 431 --sensation caused by massacre of St. Bartholomew, 442 --changes in, during eighteenth century, 491, 492 --the seven years' war, 512.

Famines, frequency of, during the tenth century, 236.

Faust and the mention of printing, 391.

Favorinus the Grammarian, anecdote of, 46.

Ferdinand of Spain, a party to the league of Cambrai, 409 --declares war against France, 412.

Ferdinand, the emperor, character and policy of, 462.

Ferdinand and Isabella, union of Spain under, 403.

Feudal organization, long retention of, in Scotland, 415.

Feudal system, origin of the, 149.

Feudalism, progress of, in the ninth century, 210 --full establishment of, 279 --decay of, 333, 341 --continued decline of, 359.

Fields of May or March in France, the, 151.

Fine arts, encouragement of, by Charlemagne, 196.

Flagellants, tenets, &c. of the, 374.

Flanders, power of the Dukes of, 232 --rise of the towns of, 277 --the alliance of Edward III. with, 354.

Flodden, battle of, and its effects, 414, 415, _et seq._

Fontenelle, the abbey of, 244.

Fontenoy, the battle of, 502.

France, accession of Clovis in, 119 --accession of Pepin to crown of, 183 --position of, under Charlemagne, 198 --loses the boundary of the Rhine, 203 --power of the great nobles, 204 --state of, during the tenth century, 219 --settlement of Rollo in, 222 _et seq._ --possessions of the clergy in, 228 --accession of Hugh Capet, 231 --his policy, 232 _et seq._ --its separation from the empire, 233 --monasteries in, 244 --origin of the English wars, 285 _et seq._ --the kings of, contrasted with the Plantagenets, 288 --acquisitions of, in Languedoc, &c., 305 --reign of Louis IX. in, 311 _et seq._ --the parliaments of, 312 --supremacy of the papacy in, 314 --degeneracy of the clergy, 315 --independence of the church, 316 --subserviency of the Popes to, 342 --title of King of, assumed by Edward III., 355 --depressed state of, at close of fourteenth century, 356 --decline, of the nobility in, 360 --state of, during fifteenth century, 374, 375 --expulsion of the English from, 376 --its history during the century, 376 --career of Joan of Arc, 386 --accession of Francis I., 405 --a party to the league of Cambrai, 409 --the massacre of St. Bartholomew in, 442 --changes witnessed by Brantôme in, 448 --rise of absolutism under Louis XIV. in, 475 et seq. --policy of Richelieu and reign of Louis XIII., 476 _et seq._ --the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 483 --changes in, during eighteenth century, 491 --contests in India and America with, 513 --the policy and overthrow of, in India, 514 _et seq._ --depression and discontent before the Revolution, 517 --aids the North American colonies, 519 --causes of the Revolution, 522 --general discontent, 523 --the Revolution, 524 _et seq._

Francis I., accession and character of, 405 --death of, 431.

Franks, tribes composing the, 71 --state of the, in the sixth century, 128 --institutions, &c. of the, 151 --divisions of their kingdom, 155.

Frederick the Great, the career of, 512.

Frederick, Elector Palatine, marriage of, to Elizabeth of England, 462.

Frederick Barbarossa, capture, &c. of Rome by, 279.

Free lances, the rise, &c. of the, 350 _et seq._

Freedom, rise of, in England, 306 _et seq._

French ballads, the early, 372.

French Revolution, the, 524 _et seq._

Fritigern, defeat of Valens by, 100.

Froissart, the writings of, and their influence, 347.

Fronde, the wars of the, 478.

Galba, the emperor, 24.

Garter, institution of order of, 344.

Gaul, severance of, from the Roman empire, 108.

Gebhard, Elector of Cologne, 460.

Genoa, prosperity of, during the Crusades, 272 --greatness of, 277.

Genseric, sack of Rome by, 111.

George I. and II., characters of, 494.

George III., loyalty to, in England, 494 --the alleged loss of the United States by his obstinacy, 518.

Georges, England under the, 494.

Germans, defeat of the, by Probus, 73.

Germany, state of, in the sixth century, 128 --divided state of, 155 --separation between France and the Empire, and reign of Otho the Great, 234 --progress, &c. of the Reformation in, 460 --ingress of French Huguenots into, 484.

Geta, murder of, 65.

Gibraltar, cession of, to England, 501.

Gladiatorial shows, passion of the Romans for, 34 _et seq._

Glo'ster, the Duke of, uncle of Henry VI., 384.

Godfrey of Bouillon, 263 --chosen King of Jerusalem, 266 --his death, 270.

Good Hope, Cape of, discovered, 395.

Gordian, appointed emperor, 69 --his reign, 70 --his death, 72.

Goths, first appearance of the, 98 --admitted within the empire, 99.

Gothia, the Marquises of, 205.

Granada, loss of, by the Moors, 403.

Great Britain, the union of, 502, _See_ England.

Great Rebellion, origin and history of the, 467 _et seq._

Greek fire, the, 166.

Gregory the Great, Pope, 133.

Gregory VII., (Hildebrand,) career, &c. of, 249 _et seq._, 255 _et seq._ _See_ Hildebrand.

Gregory IX., persecution of the Albigenses under, 305.

Guienne, how acquired by England, 286.

Guinegate, the battle of, 418.

Gunpowder, influence of discovery of, 342.

Guthrum, alliance of, with Alfred, 215.

Guttenberg, the invention of printing by, 390 --printing of the Bible by, 422.

Hadrian. _See_ Adrian.

Hair, distinction from the, among the Franks, 152.

Harfleur, siege of, by Henry V., 378.

Harold of the Fair Hair, the reign of, 213.

Hastings the Dane, defeated by Alfred, 216 --enters the service of France, 224.

Heathenism, Julian's attempt to restore, 95 _et seq._

Hegira, the, 157.

Helena, the mother of Constantine, 86.

Heliogabalus, the reign of, 66.

Helvoet Sluys, battle of, 355.

Henrietta Maria, unpopularity of, 466.

Henry I., acquisition of Normandy by, 285.

Henry II., claims of, on France, 286 --character of, 288 --and À-Beckett, 289 _et seq._ --his death, 294.

Henry III., reign of, in England, 311.

Henry IV., divided state of England under, 365.

Henry V., persecution of the Lollards under, 365, 366 --invasion of France by, 377 --captures Harfleur, 378 --battle of Agincourt, 381 --his death, 384.

Henry VI. recognised as King of France, 384.

Henry VII., character, &c. of, 371 --treasure accumulated by, and how, 404.

Henry VIII., accession and character of, 404 --declares war against France, 412 --triumphs of, in 1513, 418 --controversy of, with Luther, 426 --throws off the papal supremacy, 430 --death of, 431.

Henry III. of France, the murder of, 448.

Henry, the emperor, 237.

Henry IV. of Germany, attacks of Hildebrand on, 256 --the struggle between them, 257 _et seq._ --the death of, 260.

Heptarchy, the, 120 --subjugation of the, by Egbert, 193, 194.

Heraclius, Emperor of the East, 158.

Heresies, various, of the thirteenth century, 298.

Heretics, first crusade against the, 302 _et seq._ --first law against, in England, 365.

Highlanders, the, in the Forty-Five, 510.

Hildebrand, the career, &c. of, 249 et seq., 255 _et seq._ --his struggle with the emperor, 257 _et seq._ --his death, 259.

Hippo subdued by the Saracens, 166.

Hira subjugated by the Mohammedans, 162.

History, uses of, and difficulties of studying it from its extent, 11.

Holland, increasing commerce of, 412 --the colonies of, 454.

Holy Land, the first Crusade to the, 262 --and last, 317.

Honorius, the emperor, 101 --besieged by Alaric, 105 --murders Stilicho, 106.

Hugh Capet, accession of, to the French throne, 231 --his policy, 232.

Hugh the Great, Count of Vermandois, 263.

Huguenots, the, the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, 483.

Huns, first appearance of the, 99.

Huss, the martyrdom of, 367.

Iconoclast emperor, the, 185.

Images, defence, &c. of, 185 _et seq._

Immaculate conception, dogma of the, 283.

India, Vasco da Gama's voyage to, 401 --effect of the new route to, on Venice, 412 --rise of the British power in, 491, 514 _et seq._

Indulgences, protest of Luther against, 425.

Innocent III., originates the crusade against the Albigenses, 302 _et seq._ --excommunication of John by, 307, 310.

Innovation, general tendency to, during eighteenth century, 493 _et seq._

Inquiry, commencement of, with Scotus Erigena, 207 --rise of, with the Crusades, 280.

Inquisition, the, established under Dominic, 304.

Intellect, direction of, in the present century, 13.

Invention, the present century distinguished by, 13.

Investiture, claims of Hildebrand regarding, 257 _et seq._

Irish Church, the early, its state, &c., 156.

Isabella, queen of Charles VI., profligacy of, 362.

Italy, ravaged by Attila, 110 --irruption of the Lombards into, 129 --state of, in seventh century, 141 --divided state of, 155 --state of, during the tenth Century, 235 --conquests of the Normans in, 254 --rise of the republics of, 277 --state of, before the Reformation, 420.

Jacobite songs, the, 510.

Jacques de Molay, death of, 339.

James I., England under, 455 --influence of his character, &c., 458 --his conduct towards the Elector Palatine, 464 --his attempt to introduce Episcopacy into Scotland, 464.

James II., persecution of the Covenanters by, 473 --accession of, in England, and his dethronement, 485 --death of, 498.

James III., the rebellion in favour of, 503.

James IV. of Scotland married to Margaret of England, 414 --the battle of Flodden, 416.

Jamestown, the first English settlement in America, 454.

Jerome, the martyrdom of, 367.

Jerusalem, importance given by Christianity to, 17 --the capture and destruction of, 30 _et seq._ --named Ælia Capitolina by Adrian, 47 --taken by the Saracens, 162 --commencement of pilgrimage to, 260 --the capture of, by the Crusaders, 266 --the kingdom of, 266.

Jervis, the victories of, 525.

Jesuits, institution and influence of the, 435.

Jews, the dispersion of the, 30 _et seq._ --their rebellion against Adrian, 46 --crusade against the, 251 --spoliation of, by Philip le Bel, 333.

Joan of Arc, history of, 386 _et seq._ --her death, 390.

John, (of England,) character of, 288 --state of England under, 294 --excommunication, &c. of, 307 --signs Magna Charta, 308 --his attempt to evade the charter, 310.

John, (of France,) the treatment of, by Edward the Black Prince, 349 --his capture at Poictiers and ransom, 356.

John XII., Pope, 236.

John, Duke of Burgundy, 361 --murders Louis of Orleans, 362 --assumes the regency, 363 --rule of, in France, 376.

John, Bishop of Constantinople, supremacy claimed by, 133.

Jovian, the emperor, 97.

Jubilee, the, in 1300, 325.

Julian the Apostate, reign and character of, 93 _et seq._

Julius II., character of, 408 --acquisitions from Venice, 410 --declares war against France, &c., 410 --impression made on Luther by, 424.

Justinian, efforts of, to recover Italy, 124 --internal government of, 134 --his law-reforms, 135 _et seq._ --re-introduction of code of, 297.

Khaled, the lieutenant of Mohammed, 158 --his exploits, 162 --and death, 163.

Kieff, the kingdom of, 213.

Kilmich, murder of Alboin by, 130.

Kingdoms, modern, rise of, 190.

Klodwig or Clovis, accession of, in France, 119. _See_ Clovis.

Knight, position, &c. of the, 334, 335.

Knighthood, decay of, 333, 341.

Lally, Count, the execution of, 516.

Land, grants of, and system these originate, 149.

Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, 247 --defends transubstantiation, 247.

Languedoc, the Albigenses in, 299 --extirpation of the Albigenses in, 304 --peace of, 305.

Laud, Archbishop, 467 --execution of, 468.

Law, the reform of, by Justinian, 135.

Laws, great increase of, in Rome, 67.

Lea, defeat of the Danes at the, 216.

Learning, advancement of, during the eleventh century, 246 _et seq._

Leo the Iconoclast, 185.

Leo, Pope, Rome saved from Attila by, 110.

Leo X., character of, 407 --influence of, on the Reformation, 425.

Leuds or Feudatories, the, 149 --their struggle with the crown, 150 _et seq._

Libraries, early, 372.

Liege, massacre at, by John the Fearless, 363.

Literature, revival of, with Dante, &c., 344 --the modern, of England, 345 --slow diffusion of, before printing, 372 --French, under Louis XIV., 481 --English, during the eighteenth century, 506.

Lombards, or Longobards, irruption of the, 129 _et seq._ --character and polity of the, 131 _et seq._

Long Parliament, the, 468.

Lothaire, son of Louis the Debonnaire, 201, 202, 203 --emperor, 204.

Louis, origin of name of, 120.

Louis the Debonnaire, reign of, 200.

Louis, son of Louis the Debonnaire, 201.

Louis VII. heads the second Crusade, 284 --divorces his wife, 286.

Louis VIII., crusade against the Albigenses under, 304.

Louis IX., crusade against the Albigenses under, 304 --character and reign of, 311 _et seq._ --seventh Crusade under, 317 --prisoner and ransomed, 317 --his death, 318.

Louis XI., first despotic King of France, 371.

Louis XII., a party to the league of Cambrai, 409 --war with the Pope, 411 --expelled from Italy, 412.

Louis XIII., reign of, in France, 476.

Louis XIV., accession of, 469 --rise of, as the absolute King, 475 _et seq._ --the accession, policy, and reign of, 479 --private life of, 482 --the revocation or the Edict of Nantes, 483 --his reception, &c. of James II., 485, 486 --his successes in war, 486 --peace of Ryswick, 487 --the war of the Succession, 489 _et seq._ --the peace of Utrecht, 502.

Louis XVI., the execution of, 524.

Louis of Orleans, struggle of, with John of Burgundy, 361 --his murder, 362.

Lower classes, how regarded by the Crusaders, 271.

Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, 406 --character of, and institution of the Jesuits by, 434.

Luitprand, King of Lombardy, 182, 183.

Luther, early life of, 406 --the rise and career of, 423 _et seq._ --death of, 431.

Lutherans and Calvinists, hatred between, 460.

Luxembourg, the marshal, 481 --the victories of, 486.

Macrinus, the emperor, 66.

Magdeburg, the sack of, 466.

Magna Charta, effects of, 306, 308 --its conditions, 308 _et seq._

Magyars, first appearance of the, 99.

Mahomet. _See_ Mohammed.

Maid of Norway, the, 319.

Maintenon, Madame de, married to Louis XIV., 482.

Marcus Aurelius, accession and reign of, 50 _et seq._

Marlborough, the victories of, 499 _et seq._

Martin V., Pope, 368.

Mary, the reign of, in England, 433.

Mary of Scotland, policy of Elizabeth toward, 437 _et seq._ --defence of her execution, 439, 443.

Mary de Medicis, position of, in France, 475.

Matilda, the countess, 255, 258.

Maximilian, the emperor, a party to the league of Cambrai, 409 --hostilities with the Pope, 411 --proposed as his successor, 411 --turns against the French, 412 --in the pay of Henry VIII., 418 --and Luther, 426.

Maximian, the emperor, 75 --abdicates, 76.

Maximin, the accession and reign of, 68.

Maximus, appointment of, 69 --his death, 70.

Mayors of the palace, origin of the, 150 --powers, &c. of the, 176.

Mazarin, the cardinal, the policy, &c. of, 478 --his death, 479.

Mecca, capture of, by Mohammed, 158.

Mediterranean, supremacy of Rome over the, 56 --diminished importance of the, 413.

Meroveg, King of the Franks, 110.

Messalina, the empress, 20 --her death, 22.

Mexico, conquest of, by the Spaniards, 404.

Michelet, picture of France in the ninth century by, 208.

Middle Ages, commencement of the, 131.

Middle class, destruction of the, under the Roman emperors, 90.

Milan, sack of, by the Franks, &c., 124.

Military spirit, strength of the, in England, 496.

Military strength, the, of ancient Rome and modern Europe, 56 _et seq._

Minorca ceded to England, 502.

Mirandola, Julius II. at siege of, 410.

Mohammed, birth and career of, 138 --death of, 159 --his successors, 159 _et seq._

Mohammedanism, commencing struggle of, with Christianity, 141 --progress of, 157 _et seq._ --first arrested by battle of Tours, 179 --resemblances between, and Catholicism, 271.

Monarchical principle, restoration of the, with Pepin, 183.

Monasteries, influence of, on agriculture, 143 --their intelligence, &c., 146 --commencement of corruption, 147 --the early English, 173 --reformation of, by St. Benedict, 200 --state of the, during the tenth century, 221 --number of, in France, 244 --dissolution of the, in England, 430.

Monks, the early, 115 --industry, &c. of, 142 _et seq._ --the early English, 172, 173 --gluttony, &c. of the, 274 --degeneracy of in the thirteenth century, 314.

Moors, final loss of Spain by the, 403.

Municipalities, rise of the 277 --their growing importance, 279.

Murder, fines for, among the Franks, 152.

Music, encouragement of, by Charlemagne, 197.

Nantes, edict of, its revocation, 483.

Napoleon, the rise, &c. of, 525.

Narses, exploits of, in Italy, 127.

National debt, the English, its growth, 493.

Navareta, the battle of, 351.

Navies of Modern Europe, the, 57 _et seq._

Nelson, the victories of, 525.

Netherlands, Alva's cruelties in the, 441.

Nero, character and reign of, 22.

Nerva, the emperor, 42, 44.

Neustria, kingdom of, 155.

Nice, the Council of, 92.

Nicea taken by the Crusaders, 264.

Nicene creed, the, 92.

Nicholas Breakspear becomes pope, 289.

Niger, a candidate for the empire, 60.

Nobility, new, originated by Constantine, 87 --collision between, and the Church, 153 --policy of Hugh Capet towards the, 232 --effects of the Crusades on the, 276 --conditions of Magna Charta regarding the, 308 --decline of the, 359 _et seq._ --policy of Richelieu against the, 476 _et seq._ --the French, at the time of the Revolution, 523.

Nogaret, Chancellor of France, 329.

Nominalists, rise of the, 248.

Normans, the conquest of England by the, 253 --feeling against the, in England, 292.

Norman kings, character of the, 288.

Normandy, settlement of the Normans in, 222 _et seq._ --power of the dukes, 232.

Norsemen, Charlemagne's prescience regarding the, 197 --progress of the, in the ninth century, 208 --their invasions of England, 212 _et seq._ --results of the settlements of the, in France, 219 --settlement under Rollo, 222 _et seq._

North America, the English colonization of, 454.

Novellæ of Justinian, the, 136.

Novatian and Cornelius, the schism between, 78.

Novgorod, the kingdom of, 213.

Nunneries, reformation of, by St. Benedict, 200 --of the twelfth century, the, 283.

Odoacer, King of Italy, 111 --overthrow of, 118.

Omar, the lieutenant of Mohammed, 158, 160 --chosen caliph, 162 --destruction of the Alexandrian library, 164 --his habits, 163, 165.

Orleans, the siege of, 385 --relieved by Joan of Arc, 387 _et seq._

Ostrogoths, overthrow of the, in Italy, 127.

Otho, the emperor, 24.

Otho the Great, the emperor, 234.

Padua, destroyed by Attila, 110.

Palos, the return of Columbus to, 397.

Palestine, eagerness for news from, during the Crusades, 275.

Pandects of Justinian, the, 136.

Pantheism, form of, in the thirteenth century, 298.

Papacy, the, state of, during the tenth century, 220, 235 --supremacy of, under Hildebrand, 250 _et seq._ --general subjection to, 289 --triumphs of, in the thirteenth century, 314 --diminished consideration of, 325 --struggle of Philip the Handsome with, 326 _et seq._ --the schism in, 342 --state of, in the fifteenth century, 369.

Papal supremacy, the, abjured by England, 430.

Paper, first manufacture of, from rags, 392.

Paris, state of, under John the Fearless, 364 --the massacre of St. Bartholomew in, 442.

Parliament, first summoned in England, 313 --concessions wrung from Edward I. by, 320.

Parliaments, the French, what, 312.

Party libels, prevalence of, under Walpole, 505.

Passau, the treaty of, 431.

Peasantry, the, insurrection of, during fourteenth century, 356 --state of, during fifteenth century, 374 _et seq._ --the French, before the Revolution, 521.

People, state of the, under the early emperors, 34 _et seq._ --conditions of Magna Charta regarding the, 309.

Pepin, accession of, 182 --crowned king, 183.

Persia, new monarchy of, 71 --subdued by the Mohammedans, 165.

Pertinax, accession and murder of, 59.

Pestilence, frequency of, during the tenth century, 236.

Peter the Hermit, preaches the first Crusade, 262.

Peterborough, Lord, the victories of, in Spain, 501.

Petrarch, the works of, 344, 346.

Philip, the emperor, 72.

Philip I. of France, attacks of Hildebrand on, 256.

Philip le Bel, struggle of, with Boniface VIII., 326 _et seq._ --arrests the latter, 329 _et seq._ --poisons Benedict XI., 331 --secures election of Bernard de Goth, 331 --the persecution of the Templars, 337 _et seq._

Philip VI., war with Edward III., 355.

Philip II., accession of, 432 --the Spanish Armada, 444.

Philip of Valois, the victory of, at Cassel, 353.

Philip Augustus, conquest of the English possessions by, 305.

Pinkie, the battle of, 415.

Pitt, (Lord Chatham,) the ministry of, 513.

Plague of Florence, the, 356.

Plantagenets, character of the, 288.

Plassey, the battle of, 513, 516.

Pococke, Admiral, exploits of, in the East, 516.

Poictiers, the battle of, 356.

Poitou, how acquired by England, 286.

Poland, the partition of, 492.

Polemo, a philosopher, anecdote of, 50.

Pompeia Plotina, wife of Trajan, 45.

Pondicherry, the capture of, by the English, 516.

Poor, relations of the Church to the, 274.

Pope, the claims to supremacy of, 132 _et seq._ --efforts of the early English monks on behalf of, 172, 173 --his position in the eighth century, 174, 175 --alliance, &c. between Charles Martel and, 182 --crowns Pepin, 183 --supremacy of, after Hildebrand, 259 --the revolt of Arnold of Brescia against, 278 --his supremacy denied by the Albigenses, 299 --position, &c. of, before the Reformation, 420.

Popes, the, the claims of supremacy by, 148 --increasing supremacy of, 133 --increasing pretensions of, 186, 190 --subservience of, to France, 342 --the rival, 342.

Popular assemblies, early, 151.

Portugal, maritime discoveries of, 395 --increasing naval power of, 412.

Prætorian Guards, sale of the empire by the, 59.

Printing, influences of, 14 --discovery of, and its effects, 373, 391 --growing importance of discovery of, 402.

Probus, the emperor, 72 --his conquests and policy, 73.

Protestantism, influence of, 402 --establishment of, by treaty of Passau, 431 --established in England under Elizabeth, 436 _et seq._

Protestants, the, expelled from France, 484.

Provençal dialect, disappearance of the, 304.

Prussia, rise of, during eighteenth century, 491, 492 --the seven years' war, 512.

Puritanism, origin, &c. of, in England, 456 _et seq._, 464 --growing tendency to, 466.

Quebec, the battle of, 513.

Raleigh, the naval exploits of, 452.

Ravenna, the Exarch of, 137 --the exarchate of, 177 --transferred to the Pope, 183.

Raymond of Toulouse, the leader of the Albigenses, 299.

Raymond VII., Count of Toulouse, 303 --deprived of his possessions, 306.

Realists, rise of the, 248.

Rebellion of 1715, the, 504 --and of 1745, 507.

Reformation, influences of the, 14 --supreme importance of, 419 --state of the Church before it, 419 _et seq._ --the rise of the, 422 _et seq._

Regner Lodbrog, 214.

Relics, the system of, 262 --passion for, during the Crusades, 276.

Religion, state of, during the tenth century, 219 --in the thirteenth century, 298 --before the reformation, 422.

Republics, the Italian, rise of, 277.

Revolution of 1688, the, 485.

Rheims, coronation of Charles VII. at, 388.

Richard Coeur de Lion, character of, 288 --heads the third Crusade, 285.

Richelieu, Cardinal, 449 --the policy of, and its results, 476 _et seq._ --the death of, 468.

Robert of Normandy, the Crusader, 263 --loss of Normandy by, 285 --a prisoner in England, 286.

Robert, son of Hugh Capet, 237.

Robert Guiscard, conquests of, in Italy, 254 --sack of Rome by, 258.

Rochelle, the capture of, from the Huguenots, 476, 477.

Rois fainéants, the 175, 176.

Rollo, settlement of, in Normandy, 222 _et seq._ --created Duke of Normandy, 225 _et seq._

Romans, the conquest of England by, and its effects, 21 --passion of, for gladiatorial shows, 34.

Roman empire, first broken in on by the barbarians, 51 --its extent and forces, 56 --compared with modern Europe, 57 _et seq._ --divided into East and West, 97.

Roman law, reintroduction of, in Europe, 297.

Rome, the supremacy of, the characteristic of the first century, 16 --power of the emperor, 20 --state of, during the first century, 35 --increasing weakness of, 79 _et seq._ --removal of the seat of empire from, 84 --the sack of, by Alaric, 106 --sacked by the Vandals, 111 --causes of her fall, 111 _et seq._ --recovered by Belisarius, 124 --taken, &c. by Totila, 125 --supremacy of the Bishop of, 126 _et seq._ --fallen state of, in the sixth century, 133 --the Bishops of, claim supremacy, 148 --influence of the unity of, 184 --state of during the tenth century, 235 --sack of, by the Normans, 258 --the Crusaders at, 262 --Arnold of Brescia in, 278 --jubilee at, 1300, 325 --state of, before the Reformation, 420 --Luther at, 424.

Romish Church, influence of the Jesuits on, 434 _et seq._ --rejoicings of, on massacre of St. Bartholomew, 442.

Romulus Augustulus, the emperor, 111.

Rosamund, wife of Alboin, 129.

Roses, the wars of the, 393 --effect of, on the nobility, 360.

Rouen, occupied by the Normans, 222 --execution of Joan of Arc at, 390.

Royal power, general consolidation of, in the fifteenth century, 370.

Russia, the Danes in, 213 --rise of, during eighteenth century, 491, 492 --the seven years' war, 512.

St. Bartholomew, the massacre of, 442 --its effects, 442.

St. Benedict, industry, &c. inculcated by, 142, 143 --the second, 200.

St. Bernard on the luxury, &c. of the clergy, 274 --discussions of, with Abelard, 281 --the second Crusade originated by, 284.

St. Boniface, coronation of Pepin by, 183.

St. Columba, and Brunehild, 150.

St. Dominic. _See_ Dominic.

St. Francis of Assisi, 315.

St. Louis. _See_ Louis IX.

St. Remi, Clovis baptized by, 119.

Sapor, the capture of Valerian by, 72 --death of Julian in war with, 96.

Saracens, the, the conquests of, 162 _et seq._ --their defeat by Charles Martel, 176, 179 _et seq._ --in Spain, 246 --crusade against, in Italy, 251 --in Palestine, 270, 271.

Sarmatians, the, 71.

Sassanides, dynasty of, 71.

Saxons, feeling of the, towards the Normans in England, 292.

Saxony, the Elector of, and Luther, 426, 428.

Scholastic philosophy, rise of the, 247.

Schools, establishment of, under Charlemagne, 195.

Scotland, state of, in the eighth century, 171, 172 --resistance to the papacy in, 314 --Edward I.'s attempt on, 319 _et seq._ --the battle of Bannockburn, 352 --the ballads of, 372 --effects of battle of Flodden in, 414, 418 --its subsequent state, 415 _et seq._ --the policy of Elizabeth in, 437 _et seq._ --James's attempt to force Episcopacy on, 464 --persecution of the Covenanters in, 473 --the Union Act, 502 --the rebellion of 1715, 504 --and of 1745, 507.

Scotus Erigena, career, &c. of, 207.

Septimania, power of the Dukes of, 204.

Serfs, conditions of Magna Charta regarding the, 309.

Seven years' war, the, 512.

Severus, Alexander, accession and reign of, 67.

Severus, Septimius, accession and reign of, 60 _et seq._

Sicily, conquest of, by the Normans, 255.

Simon de Montfort, the crusade against the Albigenses under, 302 --his death, 303.

Simon de Montfort, summoning of parliament by, 313.

Sixtus V., approval of the murder of Henry III. by, 448.

Slaves, state of the, under the Romans, 35, 90.

Smalcalde, the Protestant league of, 429.

Society, state of, under James I., 455.

Solway Moss, the battle of, 414.

South Sea bubble, the, 505.

Spain, severance of, from the Roman empire, 108 --the Saracens in, 246 --threatened predominance of, in sixteenth century, 402 --its increasing importance, 403 --increasing naval power of, 412 --consolidation of, in the sixteenth century, 413 --continued hostilities with, at sea, 451 --the attacks of the buccaneers on her colonies, &c., 452.

Spanish Armada, the, and its defeat, 444.

Spanish Succession, the war of the, 498 _et seq._

Spurs, the battle of the, at Courtrai, 336 --at Guinegate, 418.

Staupitz, connection of, with Luther, 423.

Stephen, the wars of, in England, 292.

Stilicho, opposed to Alaric, 101, 105 --his murder, 106.

Strafford, execution of, 468.

Succession, the war of the, 498 _et seq._

Sulpician, a candidate for the empire, 59.

Supino, betrayal of Anagni by, 328.

Surenus, minister of Trajan, 45.

Surrey, the Earl of, at Flodden, 416.

Switzerland, ingress of French Protestants into, 484.

Sylvester II., Pope, 238, 242 --his character, &c., 246.

Syria, progress of Mohammedanism in, 158, 161.

Talbot, raises the siege of Orleans, 387.

Tancho, the invention of bells by, 196.

Taxes, system of collecting, under Constantine, 89.

Taylor, Rowland, the martyr, 433.

Tchuda, check of the Saracens at, 166.

Templars, the destruction of the, 337 _et seq._ --the charges against them, 340.

Tetzel, the sale of indulgences by, 425.

Theodora, wife of Justinian, 134.

Theodoric the Goth, at the battle of Châlons, 110.

Theodoric, the reign of, 119 --his supremacy, 123 --his death, 123.

Theodosius, the emperor, 101.

Tiberius, the reign of, 18 --his character, 19.

Tilly, the sack of Magdeburg by, 466.

Timbuctoo, expedition by Englishmen to, 452.

Tinchebray, the battle of, 286.

Titus, the reign of, 28 --the siege and capture of Jerusalem, 30 _et seq._

Torstenson, the victories of, 468.

Totila, King of the Goths, 125, 127.

Toulouse, the Marquises of, 205 --power of the Dukes of, 232 --the Albigenses in, 299.

Tours, the battle of, 179 _et seq._

Towns, effect of the Crusades on the, 273, 277 --increasing power of the, in the fourteenth century, 334.

Trajan, the accession and reign of, 42, 44 _et seq._

Transubstantiation, doctrine of, 247.

Trebonian, the Justinian code drawn up by, 136.

Tripoli, conquered by the Saracens, 167.

Troubadours, attacks on the clergy by the, 300.

Truce of God, the, 238.

Tunis, crusade of Louis IX. against, 318.

Turenne, the victories of, 478, 481.

Union Act, passing of the, 502.

United States, the revolt of the, 518 _et seq._

Universal church, belief in a, before the Reformation, 419.

Urban II. and the first Crusaders, 262.

Utrecht, thy peace of, 502.

Valens, the emperor, 97 --his defeat and death, 100.

Valentinian, the emperor, 97.

Valerian, the emperor, 72.

Vandals, conquest of Africa by the, 108 --sack of Rome by the, 111 --overthrow of the, by Belisarius, 124.

Vasco da Gama, the discovery of the route to India by, 401.

Venaissin, acquisition of, by the Pope, 306.

Venice, rise of, 277 --power, &c. of, 407 --attacked by Julius II., 408 --league of Cambrai, 409 --decay of the power of, 412.

Verona destroyed by Attila, 110.

Versailles, Louis XIV. at, 481 --its cost, 483 --the peace of, 520.

Vespasian, accession of, 24.

Vicenza, taken by Attila, 110.

Vidius Pollio, anecdote of, 36.

Vikinger, the, 208.

Virginia, settlement of, by the English, 454.

Visigoths, settlements of the, in Spain, &c., 128.

Vitellius, the emperor, 24.

Wales, early state of, 171, 172.

Wallace, the victories, &c. of, 320.

Walpole, Sir R., the ministry of, 505.

Wartburg, seclusion of Luther at, 428.

Wealth, influence of the Crusades on, 272.

Wellington, the victories of, in India, 525.

Wenilon, Bishop of Sens, 206.

Wentworth, execution of, 468.

Western Church, severance of the Eastern from, 133.

Wickliff, his translation of the Bible, 342.

Wickliffites, persecution of the, 365.

William of Normandy, churches, &c. erected by, 244 --the conquest of England by, 253 --character of, 288.

William Rufus, character of, 288.

William III., accession of, in England, 485 --his reign, 486 --the death of, 499.

Winchester, the Bishop of, 384.

Winifried, the monk, 175.

Witig, King of the Ostrogoths, 124 --his overthrow, 125.

Wittenagemot, the, 151.

Wolfe, the conquest of Canada by, 517.

Woman, increased respect paid to, 283.

Worms, the Diet of, Luther before, 427.

Yeomanry, rise of, in England, 431.

Yezdegird, King of Persia, 162, 165.

Zorndorf, the battle of, 513.

THE END.

"_A great and noble work, rich in information, eloquent and scholarly in style, earnestly devout in feeling._"--LONDON LITERARY WORLD.

D. APPLETON & CO., NEW YORK,

HAVE JUST PUBLISHED

The Life and Words of Christ.

_By CUNNINGHAM GEIKIE, D.D._

With Twelve Engravings on Steel. In 2 vols. Price, $8.00.

_From Dr. DELITZSCH, the Commentator._

"A work of gigantic industry, noble in outward form, of the highest rank in its contents, and, what is the chief point, it breathes the spirit of true faith in Christ. I have read enough of it to rejoice at such a magnificent creation, and especially to wonder at the extent of reading it shows. When I shall have occasion to revise my Hebrew New Testament, I hope to get much help from it."

_From Bishop BECKWITH, of Georgia._

"The book is of value not merely to the theological student or student of history, but the family. It furnishes information which every one should possess, and which thoughtful people will be glad to gain from so agreeable a teacher."

_From Dr. JOHN HALL._

"The author has aimed at producing book of continuous, easy narrative, in which the reader may, as far as possible, see the Saviour of men live and move, and may hear the words he utters with the most vivid attainable idea of his circumstances and surroundings. The result is a work to which all Christian hearts will respond."

_From Bishop LITTLEJOHN, of Long Island._

"Dr. Geikie has performed his task--the most difficult in biographical literature--with great ability. His pages evince abundant and accurate learning, and, what is of even more consequence, a simple and cordial faith in the Gospel narratives. The more the work shall circulate, the more it will be regarded as a most valuable addition to a branch of sacred literature which ought in every age to absorb the best fruits of sacred scholarship, and to command the highest gifts of human genius."

_From Rev. Dr. ADAMS, President of the Union Theological Seminary._

"Another invaluable contribution in proof of historical Christianity. It is a beautiful specimen of typography, and we anticipate for it an extensive circulation, to which it is entitled for its substantial worth, its erudition, its brilliant style, and its fervent devotion."

_From the Rev. W. LINDSAY ALEXANDER, D.D., S.T.P., Edinburgh, Member of the Old Testament Company of Revision, Editor of Kitto's "Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature," etc._

"Dr. Geikie's work is the result of much thought, research, and learning, and it is adorned with many literary excellences. It cannot fail to become a standard, for its merits are substantial, and its utility great."

_From the Rev. Dr. CURRY._

"A careful examination of Dr. Geikie's work seems to prove, what might before have been doubted, that just such a work was needed to meet a real want; it successfully indicates its own right to be, by responding to the necessity that it discovers."

Dr. Geikie's Life and Words of Christ.

OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.

"These fresh volumes are marked throughout by a humane and devout spirit. The work is sure to make for itself a place in popular literature."--_New York Times._

"In Dr. Geikie's volumes the person and works of Christ receive the chief attention, of course; but the background is so faithfully and vividly drawn, that the reader is given a fresher idea of the central figure."--_New York Independent._

"A monument of industry and a mine of learning. The students of our theological colleges, ministers, and others, will find much of the information here given of great worth and novelty."--_Nonconformist._

"Dr. Geikie's paraphrases are generally most excellent commentaries.

"An encyclopædia upon the life and times of Jesus Christ, but an encyclopædia which has an organic unity, pulsating with a true and devout spirituality of thought and feeling."--_London Christian World._

"His style is always clear, rising sometimes into majestic beauty. His most steady point of view is the relation of Christ to the elevation of the race, and he struggles to make clear the amazing richness of Christ's new things--the profound character of his philosophy, and the practical humanity that wells up out of these great deeps."--_New York Methodist._

"The 'Life of Christ' may be fitly compared to a diamond with many facets. From every point of view, the light that streams forth upon us is beneficent. No two observers will probable ever catch precisely the same ray, but, for all who look with unclouded eye (whatever their angle of vision may be), there shines forth 'the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.' Without disparaging in any sense the noble labors of his predecessors, we think Dr. Geikie has caught a new ray from the 'Mountain of Light,' and has added a new page to our Christology which many will delight to read."--_New York Evangelist._

"The chief merit of Dr. Geikie's volumes lies in the attention paid to the surroundings of our Saviour's earthly life; so that the reader is presented with a picture of the Jewish people, national characteristics, social customs, and religious belief and ritual.

"It is with reluctance that we take leave of these splendid volumes, for it is an enjoyment to examine and a pleasant duty and privilege to commend them. We feel sure we could desire no more valuable and useful addition to Christian libraries."--_Episcopal Recorder_ (Philadelphia).

"If any one desires a reliable and intelligent guide in the study of the Gospel history, he cannot, we think, do better than take the graphic pages of Dr. Geikie. The American edition is got up most elegantly; the binding is very handsome, the paper good, the type large and clear; the engravings and maps are excellent. They are, indeed, two beautiful volumes."--_Evangelical Churchman_ (Toronto).

"Of all that has been written hitherto on that life, nothing seems to us to equal in beauty that which we find in the two magnificent volumes before us. They bring to view the social conditions in which Jesus made his appearance. They give us a vivid portraiture of those who were about him--both the friends and the enemies--the parties, the customs, the influences that prevailed."--_Episcopal Register_ (Philadelphia).

_D. APPLETON & CO., Publishers,_ 549 & 551 BROADWAY, NEW YORK.

Transcriber's Note

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved. Sidenotes have been enclosed in brackets and moved to the beginning of the respective sentence.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Eighteen Christian Centuries, by James White