sword in his hand, crying, " Victory! victory!" He ordered bonfires; he issued a pamphlet—an unhappy pamphlet, which the English ambassador speedily answered. "That which cometh from me," said the latter, " will be believed, for I have not been used to tell lies, and, in very truth, I have not the face to do it." Soon after he wrote a pamphlet, in his turn, to compete with that of Mendoza, and his was decidedly the more successful of the two. He was "desirous,” as he said, "of touching up the impudence of the Spaniard," and his style was therefore caustic; so much so that the saucy pages of the French Court took to chaffing Mendoza, begging from him some old refuse town or so in England, such as York, Canterbury, London, till the infelicitous Don was ashamed to show his face. Philip himself, when he heard of the retreat from before Calais, to which it was said the Armada was compelled by the weather," began to be somewhat uneasy; and his letters to Farnese and Sidonia expressed his solicitude. Still he trusted in "the help of the Lord," and his spirits were revived by the accounts which reached him in September, by way of France. It was reported thence that the Armada had taken many Dutch and English ships; that there had been an action, which the English had attempted in vain to avoid, off Newcastle; that Medina Sidonia had sunk twenty ships, captured twenty-six others, taken a fort in Scotland, and disposed of every Englishman of note, except Drake, who had escaped in a cock-boat. "This is good news," added the writer," and it is most certain."

But, to pass over the intermediate stages, the true news came at last, when the Invincible Armada, broken, ruined and forlorn-so far as it still existed-had reached a Spanish port. Great was then the consternation of the two secretaries, Idiaquez and Moura, as they listened to the tale, and very desirous was each of them that the other should discharge the unwelcome duty of introducing the courier to Philip. The two secretaries were pacing up and down the corridor before

PHILIP'S RECEPTION OF THE NEWS.

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the door of Philip's cabinet, when at length one of them, Moura, ventured to enter. We can imagine his sensations with his hand upon the door-handle. He found Philip seated at his desk. Of course, he was writing letters. He had received the news of the victory of Lepanto with solemn equanimity; he had been extraordinarily cheerful when he heard of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew; on a later occasion he had rushed eagerly to scream through his daughter's keyhole the three words, " Antwerp is ours." But now he listened to the greater news without even changing countenance. "And how did his Majesty receive the blow?" asked Idiaquez. "His Majesty thinks nothing of the blow," answered Moura; "nor do I consequently make more of this great calamity than does His Majesty."

What was the meaning or value of this wonderful calmness? Was it the serenity of a high spirit defrauded of its object, but resting impavid on its consciousness of right? Why, the very heavenly host had deserted and denied him; the stars in their courses had fought against Sisera; Deus aflavit et dissipabantur. His prayers were rejected, or his idols were spurious. His choicest relics were but wooden nutmegs now. Any other man, with a true belief in his mission, or a sincere self-respect, would have taken to his bed and died. But Philip went about his ordinary business, writing, and still writing, upstroke and downstroke. His failure did not crush him, as it would have crushed a higher nature. A delicately tempered spirit would have succumbed instantly. A great man of a rougher type would have yielded up the ghost painfully, as William Pitt is said to have done after the news of Austerlitz. But Philip laid down the burden of Ferdinand and Isabella and the bequest of Charles V. as if it had been a common porter's knot. He had been charged with a great purpose in much the same sense that you charge a popgun. The pellet passed through a wooden tube, and the tube was unaffected. Goethe has fathomed the problem

of an opposite conception, in his exquisite and immortal criticism upon Hamlet. There, too, there is a purpose imposed upon a nature inadequate; but this nature is choice, refined and elevated. Goethe has estimated the moral conflict and the inevitable result, with a penetration supported by his own luminous image. The purpose here is like an acorn, deposited in a vase which should have borne only pleasant fruits or beauteous flowers. "It was an oak tree, planted in a costly jar; the roots expand-the jar is shivered." But Philip was a common potsherd, impervious to a sense of doom. He was of the type devised by nature to prove that tenacity is not courage, that insensibility is not greatness, and that the emotions of a genuine bigotry are far more stupid than Divine. "There is but one 'p' in Tophet," it might please him to remark, as he was descending thither with entire serenity. There was but one resource when the waves were rolling over his galleons, to persist in his delusion of governing by his goose-quill, and to chant his hollower Te Deum, as if his was the deliverance.

THE ENGLISH ALTERNATIVE OF 1640-41.

OLD OR NEW ENGLAND?

Fecundity of the New England Stock.-The Emigration an Experiment.—The option of two Courses.-Were Cromwell, &c., intending Emigrants?—The Grand Remonstrance.-Cromwell's own Avowal.-Composition of the Massachusetts Company.-Nature of its Operations.-Transfer of its Charter. -The Emigrants invited back.-Return of many of their Leaders, Winthrop, &c., excepted.-Cromwell's Irish and Jamaica Projects.-The Main Body declines to return.-Possible Alternatives and concluding Inference.

To whichever side our sympathies incline in the present rupture of the American Commonwealth, we can hardly deny that so long as the Union lasted, the States which bear the common title of New England were the substantial nucleus of its strength and prosperity. They were great in the connection of a common empire, and they must be great hereafter, though separated from their associates. Under any circumstances it is impossible to conceive that their influence on the destinies of the American population will be unimportant, or their own status decline to insignificance. It is, indeed, far more probable that they will continue to occupy the same relative position which they have occupied hitherto that of the preponderating element on the American Continent.

But whatever their part in the future of the American States, there is that in their history and the circumstances of their origin which is far more impressive than those of their competitors. Their founders, as every English schoolboy is taught, were refugees from civil and ecclesiastical tyranny They were brave and serious spirits, of reasonable aspirations,

capable of self-control, but cramped and harassed by the rigour of the Tudor and the petty vexatious duplicity of the Stuart; and they derived from the shores of the mothercountry an impulse, exasperated by a season of pressure, which they preserved and diffused over a wide area, through the natural expansion of a lusty posterity. Thus far their history is known and accepted as an exodus of a robust and antique type, which has given them a high historic prominence, but of which we only learn all the national bearings in consequence of certain recent investigations. Some of these are more important from an English point of view than we had hitherto conceived of them, but most of them deserve attention, which must be closer than usual to appreciate them fully, for they involve a profusion of names, dates, and details.

In the first place, we now have materials to estimate the limits and duration of the emigrant movement by which the New England States were originally peopled. Nor can it fail to surprise us that the stream was so slight, and that it flowed westward for so brief an interval, when we compare it with the vast extent of its ultimate expansion in the accommodating depths of the American Continent. There is something patriarchal in the fecundity of this germ under the favouring circumstance of tranquillity in a fertile wilderness. Compare any of the recent emigrations from Europe-Irish, French, or German; or, if these are too near to us to judge of their results, compare that of the Salzburgers displaced in the time of Frederick William of Prussia, or that of the Huguenots, eliminated from France by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and we may be proud of the procreative exploits of our own kinsmen, who have eminently outdone all their modern competitors. They would probably themselves have boasted in the language of the Psalmist, that "the trees of the Lord were full of sap," and it really seems to bear out their claims as a chosen people, that they should