pendence, than of any desire on his to throw it off and render himself an arbitrary sovereign. He would gladly have been as absolute as the king of France, if circumstances had brought the English monarchy to that form; for he thought government was a much safer and easier thing when the authority was believed infallible, and the faith and submission of the people was implicit.' But his good sense and his constitutional temper prevented this opinion from influencing his conduct: he loved ease and indulgence too well, and had wisely determined that no imprudence of his own should ever compel him to set out again on his travels. Yet the reign which commenced thus auspiciously proved in its course deeply disgraceful both to the king and to the nation. Even at this distance of time it is difficult to determine whether the one party or the other were more sinned against or sinning, so much is there on either side which must appear utterly indefensible to those who consider it impartially. Much of this must undoubtedly be ascribed to the King's personal misconduct; more to the profligacy of those who were at one time his ministers, at another the most inveterate and dangerous of his enemies. But mostly the events of this reign may be traced to those predisposing causes whereby the character not of Charles alone and the politicians of his age, but of the nation and the times had been formed. The sins of the father were visited upon the children. So it was announced by revelation to the Israelites that it should be; and so upon the great scale of things it is, and must be in the order of Providence; for in this respect mankind are and always will be under a visible dispensation. I have heard, indeed,' says Dryden, ❝ of some virtuous persons who have ended unfortunately, but never of any virtuous nation; Providence is engaged too deeply when the cause becomes so general.' It is equally true that no wicked nation has ever escaped its deserved punishment. 1 The extreme profligacy of the lower orders in Paris, which the better part of the French people perceived and deplored, even before the Revolution called it into full action, was ascribed by many of the French themselves to the extreme misery which had prevailed in that city during the time of the League. Private afflictions, when they come in the ordinary course of nature, are not more salutary to the individuals whom they chasten, than great and overwhelming national calamities are destructive to general virtue. In this respect, ages of revolution and anarchy are like seasons of pestilence, which is less frightful for its ravages, even when death is in every house, than for the horrible dissolution of social and moral ties which it produces. How,' says Quarles, when he describes the feelings of the plague affrighted man,' 'how is the bitterness of thy death multiplied by the quality of thy fears! were it a sickness whose distraction took not away thy means of preparation, it were an easy calamity: were it a sickness whose contagion dissolved not the comfortable bonds of sweet society, it were but half a misery. But as it is, sudden, solitary, incurable, what so terrible! what so comfortless?' At such times Heaven's music, which is order, seems unstrung, The mystery of God, unbeautified, Disordered, marr'd, where such strange scenes are acted. The Restoration was the only possible remedy for the evils which, so many years of misery and triumphant wickedness had induced. But remedies are always slower in their operation than the evils for which they are administered; and the state of England, when that desired event by which alone legitimate order could be restored was brought about, may be likened to the condition of a cultivated and fertile country, after the waters of some wide and terrible inundation have subsided: landmarks obliterated, roads broken up, houses overthrown, foundations laid bare, the labours and the hopes of the year destroyed; fields and gardens covered with slime and wreck, or rendered barren, some because the soil has been swept away, others because it is buried beneath stones and gravel; yet even these are less mournful than the consequences of a revolution, for they may sooner and more surely be repaired. Though Charles the Second had few virtues, he was not without some redeeming qualities which are akin to them; and it would be disparaging human nature were we to doubt that, when he landed, his intentions were just and his feelings generous, But he was soon made to feel how impossible it was to set right a time so "out of joint,' and to lament that he had neither the means of being generous, nor the power of being just. When be past the act of indemnity, he told parliament that he had not been able to give his brother one shilling since he came into England, nor to keep any table in his house but that at which he ate himself; adding, with characteristic good nature, that which troubles me most is to see many of you come to me to Whitehall, and to think that you must go somewhere else to seek your dinner.' The bill which he then past was called by those whose hopes it defeated, an act of oblivion for his friends and of indemnity for his enemies. The Earl of Bristol had supported it in a remarkable speech, and with a feeling worthy his better days, though he thought it defective in many things reasonable, and redundant in many things unrear sonable. " This, my lords,' said he, may appear a surprizing motion from a person thought to be (as indeed I am) as much inflamed as any man living with indignation at the detestable proceedings of the late usurped power, so pernicious to the public, and and so injurious to my own particular; in whom the motion may seem yet more surprizing, when I shall have told you with truth, that I am irreparably ruined in my fortune for my loyalty, if this bill of indemnity to others for their disloyalty should pass. But the ground I go upon is this received maxim as to all public sanctions, better a mischief than an inconvenience: yea, better innumerable mischiefs to particular persons or families, than one heavy inconvenience to the public.-My lords, I profess unto you, I find myself set on fire when I think that the blood of so many virtuous and meritorious peers, and persons, and others of all ranks, so cruelly and impiously shed, should cry so loud for vengeance, and not find it from us! That many of the wretchedest and meanest of the people should remain, as it were, rewarded for their treasons, rich and triumphant in the spoils of the most eminent in virtue and loyalty, of all the nobility and gentry of the kingdom! What generous spirit can make reflection upon these things and not find his heart burn into rage within him? Here it is, my lords, that we sufferers have need of all our philosophy! But when I consider that these are mischiefs only to the sufferers, and that to insist upon a remedy might perhaps expose the public to an irreparable inconvenience, I thank God I find in an instant all my resentments calmed and submitted to my primary duty.' The principle upon which Digby thus argued could not be contested. But the Cavaliers had some reason for saying, when they compared themselves to Job, both for poverty and patience, that they had been tried with severer provocations. Men were well enough contented,' says Clarendon, that the King should grant indemnity to all men that had rebelled against him; that he should grant their lives and fortunes to them who had forfeited them to him. But they thought it very unreasonable and unjust that the King should release those debts which were immediately due to them, and forgive those trespasses which had been committed to their particular damage. They could not endure to meet the same men on the king's highway, now it was the king's highway again, who had heretofore affronted them in those ways, because they were not the king's, and only because they knew they could obtain no justice against them. They could not with any patience see those men who not only during the war had oppressed them, plundered their houses, and had their own adorned with the furniture they had robbed them of, ride upon the same horses which they had then taken from them, upon no other pretence but because they were better than their own; but after the war was ended, had committed many insolent trespasses upon them wantonly, and to show their power of justices of the peace, or committee men, and had from the lowest beggary raised great estates, out 8 out of which they were well able to satisfy, at least in some degree, the damages the other had sustained.' This is indeed jus datum sceleri, and must have been more galling than the injury itself to those who, amid all their sacrifices, had cheered themselves with believing all would be well, when the king enjoyed his own again.' The necessity of thus sacrificing justice to expediency was too evident, but this necessity is one of the most fatal consequences which revolutions leave behind them. Claudian tells us in one of his finest passages, that the prosperity of the wicked made him doubt the providence and even existence of the gods, satisfied as his understanding had been of both when he contemplated the manifestations of their wisdom and power in the visible creation. 13 Sæpe mihi dubiam traxit sententia mentem, The heathen poet proceeds to say, that by the punishment of Rufinus, his mind was relieved from this disquietude, and the gods were acquitted: ༈ནས།།་ Abstulit hunc tandem Rufini pœna tumultum That just and right-minded man Sir Philip Warwick confesses that he had been led into the same temptation. When he arrives in his Memoirs at, the last stage of his royal master's life, he says, knowing his goodness and Christian patience, I ever expected (and there were often rational hopes to feed that desire) such a deliverance from God in his behalf, as He had at other times afforded unto David, by teaching his hands to fight, and giving victory unto his Anointed. But his end, (I speak it to my shame,) as it flung me into great melancholy so it did into some diffidence; and was the occasion to me of attempting an essay about knowing God VOL. XXIX. NO. LVII. M God and a man's self by the light of reason and revelation. Distributions of temporal justice, indeed, are not needed to confirm the well founded belief of those who look beyond the grave for that general and perfect retribution which they know to be impossible here. But when justice vails to triumphant wickedness, and the greatest criminals secure for themselves impunity by the very magnitude of their crimes, the faith of the weak is shaken, and reprobates are strengthened in impiety. In no other age of English history had so many causes combined to injure the national character. The very misery of their condition had tended to deprave those royalists who (in Clarendon's words) had been born and bred in those times when there was no king in Israel. They contracted habits of drinking to excess, from the mere uneasiness of their fortunes, or the necessity of frequent meetings together, for which taverns were the most secure places.' The consequences of riotous intemperance were disre garded by men who were ready to set their lives upon the hazard in any desperate attempt, and it was even politic in those who were planning such attempts, to affect a dissolute and careless course of life; thereby to shelter themselves from suspicion. Cleavelaud confirms this in one of his Cavalier-songs. 6 ཟེ༑་་་་་ it 91 But the vices into which the Cavaliers, according to their own confession, were led by pride, poverty and passion,' were imitated when their day of triumph arrived, by the vilest of their former enemies; hypocrites, who formerly would as soon cut a Cavalier's throat as swear an oath, and esteemed it a less sin,' became sinners as ostentatiously as they had enacted the part of saints before,' terming us,' says Captain Hammond, fools, that we did not turn knaves as they did, and then face about with them.' Knavery had long reigned paramount: the ragged and thread-bare cloak of hypocrisy was now thrown off, and men attained that last degree of depravity in which they feel and avow self-gratification to be the main spring and sole principle of their conduct. One set of men were debauched by undeserved prosperity; others were ruined in mind as well as fortune, by the miseries to which not their own misconduct, but the deplorable circumstances of the kingdom had reduced them. For it is worthy of consideration, that the afflictions which come in the order of nature, and those which are induced by the course of society, differ as much in their effect as in their cause. Sickness. |