than the throne, exchanged convivial cannonades with the modern greenswards of Hyde Park. The streets re-echoed with the national hymn, pacific in its melody, compared with the defiant Marseillaise. Its refrain was handed down from the foundation of a monarchy, five hundred years old when the Tarquins ruled in Rome, and possibly coeval with the reign of Theseus at Athens or of Priam at Troy[1]—first formulated at the anointing of a Syrian herdsman, when "All the people shouted and said, God save the King."
It would be a pastime unworthy of a historian to strain a comparison between two events long distant from one another, merely because of a coincidence of days of the month. But there is a connection between the downfall of the ancient regime in France and the consecration of the British Empire in the person of the King of England which is manifest to all who have studied the intervening history of Europe. At vespers on the Sunday before the sack of the Tuileries, when the doomed king and queen attended divine service for the last time, in the Chapel Royal of the palace, it was observed that the choir-men sang with insolent loudness the words of the Magnificat: Deposuit potentes de sede.[2] The general terms in which is couched that revolutionary verse, ascribed by Saint Luke to the Blessed Virgin, well indicated the mental attitude of the French population
- ↑ Chronologers used to assign the date of 1100 B.C. to the election of King Saul, and placed the siege of Troy in the same century before the Christian era. The adventure of Theseus with Helen, before Menelaus or Paris came upon the scene, places his reign in the well-filled lifetime of the heroine of the Trojan War. But the Higher Criticism is as merciless to Aryan as to Semitic legend, and the existence of Theseus, in spite of Mr A. J. Evans' discoveries at Crete, is put in the same category of fable as that of the first shepherd-king of Israel. My friend, M. Perrot, the head of the École Normale and the most eminent Hellenic archæologist in France, says: "Thésée est une création de l'orgueil national des Athéniens." Perhaps 3000 years hence the Higher Criticism will declare that Queen Victoria was the creation of the national pride of the British.
- ↑ Mémoires de Mme. Campan, c. xxi.
