corrupt than other men of his time. But in truth the charge against Walpole, whether of being or of only seeming corrupt cannot be more than partially sustained. His ministry was long popular, never perhaps unpopular: in the great object of his life, the preservation of the throne to the Protestant house of Hanover, he was completely successful; and he gave no inconsiderable degree of attention, the more meritorious as it was not compulsory, to the interests of the middle and lower classes of the community.

The venerable antiquity of English liberty, its successive and hard-won victories over the tyranny of kings, priests and nobles,' have added something definite and practical to the English character nɔt observable among the other nations of Europe. In politics Englishmen are less prone than others to mistake words for things, because, from the House of Lords to the parish vestry all classes are habituated to self-government. And where shall we find so solid a security for civil freedom as habit? In charters? Men in power unaccustomed to such a restraint will observe them no longer than they are compelled to do so; and the people soon tire of watching them. In education? The mass of mankind has never yet been more than half-educated at the utmost in any country, and half-education only blinds men to difficulties, and sets them aiming at

impracticabilities. Hence it is that reflecting Englishmen value prescription so highly, and continental speculators not at all. The former have learned, what the latter have not, that the effects of changes are always different from, and generally less beneficial than what was previously anticipated, and that the risk of innovation is worth incurring only to remove a substantial grievance, not to establish a barren principle. There will never in this country be a king of the English.

How little could a reflecting German, under the brilliant dynasty of the Hohenstauffen, have foreseen the existing condition of Germany and France! Superstition destroyed the most splendid race of monarchs that ever sate on a throne. The grandeur of Frederic Barbarossa, had he been born a century later, would have done all, and more than all for Germany, that the craft of Philip Augustus did for France. But Frederic unhappily appeared when men's minds were at the darkest, and popery prevailed. France became concentrated, as Germany divided. How early might European society have been established on a secure basis, how many wars might have been spared, if the wretched dupes of the popes had not overthrown the Hohenstauffen!

The real founder of the French monarchy was Philip Augustus; before his time, with the exception of one great event, not peculiar to France, there is

little to interest in French history. Philip Augustus had the merit of seeing the true policy of a French king, and of acting upon it systematically through a long reign, the destruction of the great feudatories, finally completed by Louis XI.

France is distinguished by the establishment of the wide-spread feudal system in its most perfect form. If it be true, as some have thought, that the history of a nation is best learned from its laws, how wretched must have been the state of society,-how unprotected the life and property of the subject, at the period of the conversion of allodial into feudal tenures ! The precise date of this remarkable event does not appear; the change was probably gradual. But the empire of feudalism endured long; its traces still subsist, after the lapse of nine or ten centuries. The feudal polity must have been wise in its generation, or it would not have struck such deep roots; but it should serve to show us what little reason we have to envy our ancestors.

Chivalry, as well as feudalism, flourished chiefly in France. With much mummery, characteristic of the times, it must have originated in the generous efforts of a few noble minds among the privileged classes to protect the weak against the strong and the violent. Ridiculed as it has been, for the most part, by vulgar-minded men who could not believe in disinterestedness, it did good service to humanity.

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In our own time, doubtless, the objects proposed are far more completely attained, but the means employed have a less ennobling effect on the mind of the instrument.

France had its full share of the calamities which desolated Europe during the middle ages. To the English wars of Edward III. succeeded, after a very short interval, the still more disastrous civil wars of the wretched reign of Charles VI., followed, without breathing time, by another and more ruinous English invasion under Henry V. Yet, although war, and more especially civil war, be the greatest of national calamities, we must not conclude that the misery was altogether without mitigation, even of those miserable times. If the constant sense of the insecurity of life and property brutalises but too many, to some inaction is the worst of all evils. Though the licence with which war was then carried on was extreme, yet that very licence afforded a wider scope for generous actions, and gave opportunities which were not always neglected by the fantastic spirit of chivalry. Circumstances per

mitted some men to become heroes. The resemblance between the men of the world of the last century of the Roman republic and the men of the world of the present day, is not more striking than that between the heroes of chivalry and the heroes of the Homeric age. The general diffusion of knowledge, caused by the invention of printing,

seems to make the return of such times altogether impossible; and they are therefore the more interesting, not only because the aspect they offer of human nature is one we can ourselves never expect to see, but because it is difficult to comprehend how they could be so near to us and yet so different in character.

Louis XI. of France and Henry VII. of England, two of the three royal Magi of Lord Bacon, followed the same policy, of exalting monarchical at the expense of aristocratical power. But aristocracy is far more tenacious of life than either monarchy or democracy. Within a century from the death of Louis XI, during the religious wars of the sixteenth century, aristocracy again threatened the crown. It was curbed by the dauntless energy of Richelieu, and finally subdued by Louis XIV., in the only way in which aristocracy can be subdued, by compelling the great landed proprietors to continue in constant attendance upon his person, and thus making them strangers on their own estates, and holding out to them every inducement to dissipate their fortunes in the folly and profusion of his court. The Spanish nobles were not suffered to reside on their estates from a similar motive. Louis XIV., however, went beyond his object. He destroyed aristocracy, but he did not care to foresee that monarchy would not therefore necessarily be