crossed the bridge, and entered the outer gateway or arched door, through a solid square tower. The portcullis was drawn up, but I could see the projecting end. Another similar gateway, a few steps further on, showed the care with which the defense was managed. This passed, a large court opened, surrounded on every side with towers, walls, and vast ranges of buildings. Here I beheld the pictures which I had seen on paper magnified into gigantic realities. Drawings of many-faced, irregular Gothic mansions, measuring an inch or two, with which my childhood was familiar, here stood before me measuring hundreds and hundreds of feet. It was the first sight of a real baronial castle. It was a historic dream breaking forth into a waking reality. It is of very little use to tell you how large the court is by feet and rods, or that Guy's Tower is one hundred and twenty-eight feet high and Cæsar's Tower one hundred and forty-seven. But it may touch your imagination, and wheel it suddenly backward with long flight and wide vision, to say that Cæsar's Tower has stood for eight hundred years, being coeval with the Norman Conquest! I stood upon its mute stones, and imagined the ring of the hammer upon them when the mason was laying them in their bed of ages. When these stones were placed it was yet to be two hundred years before Gower and Chaucer should be born. Indeed since this mortar was wetted and cemented these stones the original people-the Normans, the Danes, the Saxons-have been mixed together into one people. When this stone on which I lean took its place there was not then a printed book in England. Printing was invented hundreds of years after these foundations went down. When the rude workmen put their shoulders to these stones the very English language lay unborn in the loins of its parent tongues. The men that laughed and jested as they wrought, and had their pride of skill; the architect and the lord for whose praise he fashioned these stones; the villagers that wondered as they looked upon the growing pile; why, they are now no more to men's memories than the grass they trod on, or the leaves which they cast in felling the oak!

Against these stones on which I lay my hand have rung the sounds of battle. Yonder, on these very grounds, there raged, in sight of men that stood where I do, fiercest and deadliest conflicts. All this ground has fed on blood.

I walked across to Guy's Tower, up its long stone stairway, into some of its old soldiers' rooms. The pavements were worn, though of stone, with the heavy grinding feet of men-at-arms. I heard them laugh between their cups. I saw them devouring their gross food. I heard them recite their feats, or tell the last news of some knightly outrage, or cruel oppression of the despised laborer. I stood by the window out of which the archer sent his whistling arrows. I stood by the openings through which scalding water or molten lead were poured upon the heads of assailants; and heard the hoarse shriek of the wretched fellows from below as they got, the shocking baptism. I ascended to the roof of the tower, and looked over the wide glory of the scene, still haunted with the same imaginations of the olden time. How many thoughts have flown hence besides mine-here where warriors looked out, or ladies watched for their knights' return!

Grand and glorious were the trees that waved in the grounds about the castle; but, though some of them had seen centuries, they were juvenile sprouts

in comparison with these old walls and towers on which William the Conqueror had walked.

Already the sun was drooping far down the west and sending its golden glow sideways through the trees, and the glades in the park were gathering twilight as I turned to give a last look at these strange scenes. I walked slowly through the gateway, crossed the bridge over the moat, turned and looked back upon the old towers, whose tops reddened yet in the sun, though I was in deep shadow. Then, walking backward, looking still, till I came to the woods, I took my farewell of Warwick Castle.

XVII.-A SABBATH AT STRATFORD-ON-AVON.

As I approached the church I perceived that we were to pass through the churchyard for some little distance; and an avenue of lime-trees, meeting overhead, formed a beautiful way, through which my soul exulted to go up to the house of God. The interior was stately and beautiful-it was to me; and I am not describing anything to you as it was, but am describing myself while in the presence of scenes with which, through books, you are familiar. As I sat down in a pew close by the reading-desk and pulpit I looked along to the chancel, which stretched some fifty or sixty feet back of the pulpit and desk, and saw upon the wall the well-known bust of Shakespeare; and I knew that beneath the pavement under that his dust reposed.

In a few minutes a little fat man, with a red collar and red cuffs, advanced from a side room behind the pulpit, and led the way for the rector, a man of about fifty years, bald, except on the sides of his head, which were covered with white hair. I had been anxious lest some Cowper's ministerial fop should officiate, and the sight of this aged man was good. The form of his face and head indicated firmness, but his features were suffused with an expression of benevolence. He ascended the reading-desk, and the services began. I can not tell you how much I was affected. I had never had such a trance of worship, and I shall never have such another view until I gain the Gate.

I am so ignorant of the church service that I can not call the various parts by their right names; but the portions which most affected me were the prayers and responses which the choir sang. I had never heard any part of a supplication-a direct prayer-chanted by a choir; and it seemed as though I heard not with my ear, but with my soul. I was dissolved. My whole being seemed to me like an incense wafted gratefully toward God. · My soul, then thou did'st magnify the Lord, and rejoice in the God of my salvation! And then came to my mind the many exultations of the Psalms of David; and never before were the expressions and figures so noble and so necessary to express what I felt. I had risen, it seemed to me, so high as to be where David was when his soul conceived the things which he wrote. Throughout the service, and it was an hour and a quarter long, whenever an "Amen" occurred it was given by the choir, accompanied by the organ and the congregation. Oh, that swell and solemn cadence rings in my ear yet! Not once, not a single time, did it occur in that service, from beginning to end, without bringing tears from my eyes. I stood like a shrub in a spring morning-every leaf covered with dew, and every breeze shook down some drops. I trembled so much at times that I was obliged to sit down. Oh, when in the prayers, breathed forth

in strains of sweet, simple, solemn music, the love of Christ was recognized, how I longed then to give utterance to what that love seemed to me! There was a moment in which the heavens seemed opened to me, and I saw the glory of God! All the earth seemed to me a store-house of images, made to set forth the Redeemer; and I could scarcely be still from crying out. I never knew, I never dreamed before, of what heart there was in that word—amen. Every time it swelled forth, and died away solemnly, not my lips, not my mind, but my whole being said-Savior, so let it be.

XVIII. THE FRENCH ASSEMBLY OF 1792. MACAulay.

They are called the Constituent Assembly. Never was name less appropriate. They were not constituent, but the very reverse of constituent. They constituted nothing that stood or deserved to last. They had not, and they could not possibly have, the information or the habits of mind which are necessary for the framing of that most exquisite of all machines—a government. The metaphysical cant with which they prefaced their constitution has long been the scoff of all parties. Their constitution itself-that constitution which they described as absolutely perfect, and for which they predicted immortality-disappeared in a few months, and left no trace behind it. They were great only in the work of destruction.

The glory of the National Assembly is this, that they were in truth, what Mr. Burke called them in austere irony, the ablest architects of ruin that ever the world saw. They were utterly incompetent to perform any work which required a discriminating eye and a skillful hand. But the work which was then to be done was a work of devastation. They had to deal with abuses so horrible and so deeply rooted that the highest political wisdom could scarcely have produced greater good to mankind than was produced by their fierce and senseless temerity. Demolition is undoubtedly a vulgar task. The highest glory of the statesman is to construct. But there is a time for everything— a time to set up, and a time to pull down. The talents of revolutionary leaders and those of the legislator have equally their use and their season. It is the natural, the almost universal law that the age of insurrections and proscriptions shall precede the age of good government, of temperate liberty, and liberal order.

And how could it be otherwise? It is not in swaddling-bands that we learn to walk. It is not in the dark that we learn to distinguish colors. It is not under oppression that we learn how to use freedom. The ordinary sophism by which misrule is defended is, when truly stated, this: The people must continue in slavery, because slavery has generated in them all the vices of slaves. Because they are ignorant, they must remain under a power which has made and which keeps them ignorant. Because they have been made ferocious by misgovernment, they must be misgoverned forever. If the system under which they lived were so mild and liberal that under its operation they had become humane and enlightened, it would be safe to venture on a change. The English Revolution, it is said, was truly a glorious revolution. Practical evils were redressed; no excesses were committed; no sweeping confiscations took place; the authority of the laws was scarcely for a moment suspended; the fullest and freest discussion was tolerated in Parliament; the

nation showed by the calm and temperate manner in which it asserted its liberty that it was fit to enjoy liberty. The French Revolution was, on the other hand, the most horrible event recorded in history,-all madness and wickedness, absurdity in theory, and atrocity in practice. What folly and injustice in the revolutionary laws! What fanaticism! What licentiousness! What cruelty! This it is to give freedom to those who have neither wisdom nor virtue.

It would be impossible even to glance at all the causes of the French Revolution within the limits to which we must confine ourselves. One thing is clear. The government, the aristocracy, and the church were rewarded after their works. They reaped that which they had sown. They found the nation such as they had made it. That the people had become possessed of irresistible power before they had attained the slightest knowledge of the art of government-that practical questions of vast moment were left to be solved by men to whom politics had been only matter of theory-that a legislature was composed of persons who were scarcely fit to compose a debating societythat the whole nation was ready to lend an ear to any flatterer who appealed to its cupidity, to its fears, or to its thirst for vengeance-all this was the effect of misrule, obstinately continued in defiance of solemn warnings and of the visible signs of an approaching retribution.

XIX.-DEFEAT OF THE SPANISH ARMADA. J. LATHROP MOTLEY.

Never, since England was England, had such a sight been seen as now revealed itself in those narrow straits between Dover and Calais. Along that long, low, sandy shore, and quite within the range of the Calais fortifications, one hundred and thirty Spanish ships-the greater number of them the largest and most heavily armed in the world-lay face to face, and scarcely out of cannon shot, with one hundred and fifty English sloops and frigates, the strongest and swiftest that the island could furnish, and commanded by men whose exploits had rung through the world.

It was a pompous spectacle, that midsummer night, upon those narrow seas. The moon, which was at the full, was rising calmly upon a sea of anxious expectation. Would she not be looking by the morrow's night upon a subjugated England, a re-enslaved Holland-upon the downfall of civil and religious liberty? Those ships of Spain, which lay there with their banners waving in the moonlight, discharging salvoes of anticipated triumph, and filling the air with strains of insolent music, would they not by daybreak be moving straight to their purpose, bearing the conquerors of the world to the scene of their cherished hopes?

That English fleet toe which rode there at anchor, so anxiously on the watch, would that swarm of nimble, lightly-handled, but slender vessels, which had held their own hitherto in hurried and desultory skirmishes, be able to cope with their great antagonist now that the moment had arrived for the death grapple? Would not Howard, Drake, Frobisher, Seymour, Winter, and Hawkins be swept out of the straits at last, yielding an open passage to Medina, Oquendo, Recalde, and Farnese? Would those Hollanders and Zealanders, cruising so vigilantly among their treacherous shallows, dare

to maintain their post now that the terrible Holofernes with his invincible legions was resolved to come forth?

Next day, Sunday, August 7, 1588, the two great fleets were still lying but a mile and a half apart, calmly gazing at each other, and rising and falling at their anchors as idly as if some vast summer regatta were the only purpose of that great assemblage of shipping. Nothing as yet was heard of Farnese. Thus far, at least, the Hollanders had held him at bay, and there was still breathing-time before the catastrophe.

On the other hand, upon the decks of the Armada there was an impatience that night which increased every hour. The governor of Calais, M. de Gourdon, had sent his nephew on board the flag-ship of Medina Sidonia with courteous salutations, professions of friendship, and bountiful refreshments. There was no fear-now that Mucio was for the time in the ascendencythat the schemes of Philip would be interfered with by France. The governor had, however, sent serious warning of the dangerous position in which the Armada had placed itself. He was quite right. Calais roads were no safe anchorage for huge vessels like those of Spain and Portugal; for the tides and cross-currents to which they were exposed were most treacherous. It was calm enough at the moment; but a westerly gale might in a few hours drive the whole fleet hopelessly among the sand-banks of the dangerous Fleming coast.

And the impatience of the soldiers and sailors on board the fleet was equal to that of their commanders. There was London almost before their eyesa huge mass of treasure, richer and more accessible than those mines beyond the Atlantic which had so often rewarded Spanish chivalry with fabulous wealth. And there were men in those galleons who remembered the sack of Antwerp, a few years before-men who could tell from personal experience how helpless was a great commercial city when once in the clutch of disciplined brigands-men who, in that dread "fury of Antwerp," had enriched themselves in an hour with the accumulations of a merchant's life-time, and who had slain fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, brides and bridegrooms before each others' eyes, until the number of inhabitants butchered in the blazing streets rose to many thousands; and the plunder from palaces and warehouses was counted by millions before the sun had set on the "great fury." Those Spaniards and Italians and Walloons were now thirsting for more gold, for more blood; and as the capital of England was even more wealthy and far more defenseless than the commercial metropolis of the Netherlands had been, so it was resolved that the London "fury" should yield them a richer harvest than that of Antwerp, at the memory of which the world still shuddered. And these professional soldiers had been taught to consider the English as a pacific, delicate, effeminate race, dependent on good living, without experience of war, quickly fatigued and discouraged, and even more easily to be plundered and butchered than were the excellent burghers of Antwerp.

And so these southern conquerors looked down from their great galleons and galliasses upon the English vessels. More than three quarters of them were merchantmen. There was no comparison whatever between the relative strength of the fleets. In number they were about equal, being each from one hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty strong; but the Spaniards had twice the tonnage of the English, four times the artillery, and nearly three times the number of men.