consequences, whose momentous importance it were impossible to exaggerate. And, albeit it should provoke the sneer of the optimist and the fatalist, to consider that the current of events might have run in another channel than that in which it shaped its way, it is difficult to escape the reflection how different might have been the history of the last two centuries, how different too the present condition of this country and the phases of its civilization, had Henry and not Charles Stuart ascended the throne of England. Then might the page that proudly records our progress have been unstained by the blood of an erring but unfortunate monarch; civil war, and restoration, and revolution might never have added their strange and swift vicissitudes to the catalogue of our crimes and follies; and our literature and our drama had perhaps retained something more of the noble grandeur of the Elizabethan age, and escaped the debasing pollution of the licence which followed unnatural and hypocritical restraint. And now, perchance, our national church—her cathedrals undesecrated by the sacrilegious hand of the Iconoclast, and her sacred spires studding at intervals more frequent our beautiful landscapes—might feed with spiritual and intellectual food the hungering millions of our dense population, neither needing the aid or experiencing the opposition of those sects and "subdichotomies of schisms,"[1] whose strifes and passions cannot but remind us of the too fiery zeal and too intemperate hate with which their stern forefathers rose up to defend, against kingcraft and priestcraft, the cause of conscience and of freedom.
But so it seemed not good to Him whose will it ofttimes is that nations, as well as individuals, should learn in the school of suffering.
With the exception of the case of the beloved Princess
- ↑ Milton.
