tant land. Of the rabid religious ferocity of Louis XIV. in his dotage, when he was under the influence of his sainted wife, we felt nothing save in the blessed task of affording succour and refuge to the oppressed, who repaid the debt by bringing a new and valuable industrial element into our population.

In so far as the picturesqueness of fanaticism is attractive, these poor martyrs from the Cevennes and Languedoc made themselves eminently attractive to the mob of London, where they settled down at large, forming the colony of Spitalfields. They ranted profusely, and made converts of many English people, chiefly of the devouter sex. These ranted also; and as if to meet on common ground in their ravings, both French and English fanatics dealt in unknown tongues.

Mir

acles, too, were performed in abundance. One was attended by incidents rather conspicuous and troublesome. It was announced that the French prophets, as they were termed, were to raise a dead body in St Paul's Churchyard. A vast mob assembled to behold the phenomenon, but it was a failure; not one of the dead lying there would consent to rise. The failure was attributed to the fact of some unfaithful person looking on; and it is certainly a clear enough proposition, that in a mob of some sixty thousand of the refuse of London, there would be a considerable sprinkling of unfaithfulness in various shapes.

There is a rather happy supplement to this story, which we would like to see examined and traced home. The shape in which we have come across it somewhere is this: Some persons were prosecuted on this occasion for a nuisance in gathering a mob and blocking up a thoroughfare. Among these was a certain Sir John Bulkely, who was a great sympathiser in the cause of

VOL. CXV.-NO. DCCI.

the French prophets. He waited on Sir John Holt, the Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench, and intimated that the Lord had appeared in a vision to him-Bulkely-and told him to go to the Chief Justice and direct him to order a nolle prosequi in the proceedings. Holt is said to have answered gravely that he did not think it could have been the Lord who had given such instruction, since it showed gross ignorance of English law in sending him to the wrong officer--the Attorney-General being the only person who could order a nolle prosequi.

In these days England prospered apace, and was growing marvellously rich. It was the sight of this prosperity rousing up envious Scotland into hostility and rivalry that rendered that disagreeable affair, the Union, an absolute necessity. Scotland said she must in some way have participation in the trading and shipping privileges, or find the like for herself. The great moneyed and trading powers of England pronounced that she should have neither. By the navigation laws, Scotland was as absolutely foreign as all the rest of the world; and all efforts at any arrangement, either by a union or otherwise, to bring Scotland within the navigation laws and the privileges of colonial trade, were sternly repelled. The efforts of Scotland to create such a system for herself were crushed in the affair of Darien. There was more apology for such harsh dealing, than, with the opinions current at the present day, we can readily realise. It was a devout belief that all national profit must be realised by a loss somewhere, and if Scotland prospered it would be by the ruin of England. Were those prosperous gentlemen who had invested in the great chartered companies to vote away their children's bread? But there was a worse alternative in sight.

Y

Scotland might go back to her ancient alliance with France, and find as of old a steady and powerful protector. It would be these two who would open the new trade in the British waters; and apart from all questions about danger of invasion, a thing to be scorned of England, if it were a serious matter that the half-million or so of people in Scotland were to be enriched at their expense, how much more awful was the dispensation if it brought in the twelve or fourteen millions of France in addition!

So the Union was forced on by an irresistible pressure, guided by able managers; and when it came to pass, the expected calamities did not follow it. On the contrary, whether Scotland became richer or not, the progress of England in prosperity seemed to take a special impulse. Then, although it was some little humiliation to the proud Englishman to find that by Act of Parliament he belonged to "that part of Great Britain called England," he found that there was bound over to keep the peace towards him a certain discreditable poor relationone who went about swaggering in arms too, and might any day commit violence on his worshipful, comfortable, and wealthy kinsman. Many towns in England, and especially London, carry a permanent testimony of the wealth of Queen Anne's day. In the streets about Westminster we see domestic architecture brought to the stage where it has remained with little change down to the present day. We have the flat rows of houses with the front wall-plate instead of the gable to the street; the dining-room flat on a level with it, so that jolly topers could pass out and in with the minimum of risk and difficulty; the drawing-room flat above; and below, the area or basement story, in its quadrilateral pit,-all extremely an

tagonistic to the aesthetic, but withal comfortable.

The English working man had an ample share in the prosperity that was going. He became the envy of his brethren all over Europe. France was a terrible antithesis of splendour and squalor. The great Louis had made the fens and dirty ditches of Versaillesin to a Garden of Eden, and built on it palaces that might realise the dreams of a new Jerusalem. But there was intense penury even in Paris; the provinces were swept by famine, and often the peasant's cottage was found to contain nothing but the skeletons of those who had lived and worked in it, fighting with starvation until they fell in the struggle. The German peasant had often a hard struggle for a sufficiency of his black bread. The Dutchman, rather better off, was living very parsimoniously, and even saving a trifle to be laid aside for a rainy day.

In England the workman's use of his good fortune produced some of the unpleasant features that have reappeared at the present day. Not trained to husband the money passing into his hands, or to resist the stimulus to sensual indulgence, he cast away the fruit of his industry in luxurious living. If he had as much of this as he cared for, he cut away a portion of his work-day and spent it in idleness. In harder times, when the day's work barely supplied the day's necessities, he was renowned for his gallant contest with difficulties, and working more than any other workman, fed himself better, and kept up his strength for the contest. But now that he had all that he desired, and more, why should he work? The capitalist appealed to him in vain; the temptation that could stimulate him to the additional work had disappeared with the prosperity that made the capital of the employer. The one

was bent on increasing his hands— the other had no nucleus for accumulation. It was not his nature to begin such a process; and so "the British workman" became notorious for leading a life of idle luxury, and ending his days a pauper in the parish workhouse."

Still these were but the reactionary evils of prosperity and abundance. The land at large was amply blessed. It enjoyed this material wealth along with those glories of a victorious career that sometimes sufficed the gaunt enthusiast on the other side of the Channel when his vegetable meal was at its most attenuated level. The wars and desolation that must attend a victorious career were all far away from the happy homes of England. There was peace over the land as the companion of plenty. It was an age adorned with intellectual glory-surely Britain was a happy land. Yet within this stately edifice of prosperity there stalked the household skeleton. He did not much trouble the workman. It may be said that he was scarcely seen by the country at large. But statesmen were all too familiar with him-he haunted them every day, troubling them with fears and perplexities.

It was generally believed throughout the English populace that "the Pretender" was the son of the wife of a vagabond physician, who was secreted in the palace, so that her babe, when born, was brought in a warming-pan to the queen's bed by a nurse generally called Goody Wilks. Hence, when any great occasion called forth a demonstration of antiJacobite feeling by the mob of London, their enthusiasm was appropriately expressed by clanging discordant music upon tin warmingpans. Statesmen had, however, abandoned all the childish stories that delighted the populace. They believed too surely that on the other

side of the water there was growing up to manhood the youth who-if immediate hereditary descent were what the Jesuits called. it, a divine law, the footsteps of which could be followed with the precision of an exact science-was the heir to his father, and at his death the King of Britain. If either of the daughters of King James and Anne Hyde had left a son or a daughter, many who were driven to other conclusions would have come to a tacit understanding to forget the nearer claim -as on a later occasion, when the last grandson of King James died, people who had professed Jacobitism would not look towards the Sardinian family and the other descendants of Charles I. through his daughter the Duchess of Orleans, but obstinately held to the sort of fiction of law, that George III. was the next in the pure line of succession. In earlier times it was much easier than it had become in the reign of King George to hide such disagreeable conditions out of sight. Genealogies were cooked by adepts to accomplish such things; and if there were other adepts who knew the truth, and could contradict them, the task was not a safe one. The two sisters were each in the right line, and were received by the common people as the only legitimate representatives of that line. King William might, for the services he had done, hold the throne provisionally; and he too was in the line as a descendant of Charles I. But just as Queen Anne was mounting the throne, a gloom was cast over the land by an event of bitter sadness-the death of her son and only surviving child, the Duke of Gloucester. How it shook the land we can easily believe, when we remember the crisis of the winter before last. The country was told how it was caused by the fatiguing ceremonials of his birthday as Prince of Wales.

east their eye on this page may have had but an indistinct impression of William, Prince of Wales and Duke of Gloucester, who died in Queen Anne's reign. It is a significant fact, indeed, that it should have made so small a mark on history, and have passed away among its mere shadows, in the business of providing an immediate remedy for the loss, by going back to the Protestant descendants of the Princess Elizabeth, the unfortunate Queen of Bohemia, and out of the group of these descendants arriving by genealogical analysis at the Princess Sophia.

But statesmen must have felt how critical the conditions had become. It was the climax of many disappointments. The children born to Queen Anne were so many that authorities differ about their number—some saying seventeen, others nineteen. Of each one that lived for however short a time the death must have been felt as a separate shake to the Revolution settlement. The whole suggested strange superstitions and gloomy ideas among such of the common people as were inclined to Jacobitism. The repeated losses were judgments against Queen Anne for her undutiful and impious conduct to her father.* When the last blow came it was a signal of the Almighty's wrath, and plainly announced his decree that the impious projects for dis

carding the line of kings set by Him to reign as His vicegerents on earth were to be crushed and punished. Yet still the new Act of Settlement went calmly through the Houses, as if it had been the settlement of some municipal franchise for the election of common-council men, which, having fallen into confusion, had to be disentangled and settled by an Act of Parliament.

We may find valuable constitutional lessons running through the many shiftings and perils in this great passage of our annals; other nations may learn from them more than we require to seek. We are surely come now to the age when all may be examined dispassionately, and at freedom from the wayward influence of political forces. That the time has but recently come, and that many of our books of the period date from before its arrival, is an additional reason for bestowing special attention on the fourteen years elapsing between the death of King William and the accession of King George. It has to be remembered that after Jacobitism was long dead as a real political force to be dreaded, it had a picturesque and fanciful hold on literature-a hold innocent of all power of practical influence, but sufficient to have a distorting influence on history. It is not many years since Jacobitism got good-humoured toleration enough to create interest in a swaggering Pretender parading the