the fullest instruction on the mysterious questions of the Apostolical succession and the imposition of hands had been imparted by the very logical process of putting the legs of the students into wooden boots, and driving two or more wedges between their knees; that a course of divinity lectures, of the most edifying kind, had been given in the Grass-market of Edinburgh; yet that, in spite of all the exertions of those great theological professors, Lauderdale and Dundee, the covenanters were as obstinate as ever. The contest between the Scotch nation and the Anglican church had produced nearly thirty years of the most frightful misgovernment ever seen in any part of Great Britain. If the Revolution had produced no other effect than that of freeing the Scotch from the yoke of an establishment which they detested, and giving them one to which they were attached, it would have been one of the happiest events in our history.

The third great benefit which the country derived from the Revolution was the alteration in the mode of granting the supplies. It had been the practice to settle on every prince, at the commencement of his reign, the produce of certain taxes which, it was supposed, would yield a sum sufficient to defray the ordinary expenses of government. The distribution of the revenue was left wholly to the sovereign. He might be forced by a war, or by his own profusion, to ask for an extraordinary grant. But, if his policy were economical and pacific, he might reign many years without once being under the necessity of summoning his parliament, or of taking their advice when he had summoned them. This was not all. The natural tendency of every society in which property enjoys tolerable security is to increase in wealth. With the national wealth, the produce of the customs, of the excise, and of the post-office, would of course increase; and thus it might well happen that taxes which, at the beginning of a long reign, were barely sufficient to support a frugal government in time of peace, might, before the end of that reign, enable the sovereign to imitate the extravagance of Nero or Heliogabalus,-to raise great armies,―to carry on expensive wars. Something of this sort had actually happened under Charles II., though his reign, reckoned from the Restoration, lasted only twenty-five years. His first parliament settled on him taxes estimated to produce £1,200,000 a year. This they thought sufficient, as they allowed nothing for a standing army in time of peace. At the time of Charles's death, the annual produce of these taxes considerably exceeded a million and a half; and the king who, during the years which immediately followed his accession, was perpetually in distress, and perpetually asking his parliaments for money, was at last able to keep a body of regular troops without any assistance from the house of commons. If his reign had been as long as that of George III., he would probably, before the close of it, have been in the annual receipt of several millions over and above what the ordinary expenses of the state required; and of those millions he would have been as absolutely master as the king now is of the sum allotted for his privy purse. He might have spent them in luxury, in corruption, in paying troops to overawe his people, or in carrying into effect wild schemes of foreign conquest. The authors of the Revolution applied a remedy to this great abuse. They settled on the king, not the fluctuating produce of certain fixed taxes, but a fixed sum sufficient for the support of his own royal state. They established it as a rule that all the expenses of the army, the navy, and the ordnance should be brought annually under the review of the house of commons, and that every sum voted should be applied to the service specified in the vote. The direct effect of this change was important. The indirect effect has been more important still. From that time the house of commons has been really the paramount power in the state. It has, in truth, appointed and removed ministers, declared war, and concluded peace. No combination of the king and the lords has ever been able to effect anything against the lower house,

backed by its constituents. Three or four times, indeed, the sovereign has been able to break the force of an opposition by dissolving the parliament. But if that experiment should fail, if the people should be of the same mind with their representatives, he would clearly have no course left but to yield, to abdicate, or to fight.

The next great blessing which we owe to the Revolution is the purification of the administration of justice in political cases. Of the importance of this change no person can judge who is not well acquainted with the earlier volumes of the state trials. Those volumes are, we do not hesitate to say, the most frightful record of baseness and depravity that is extant in the world. Our hatred is altogether turned away from the crimes and the criminals, and directed against the law and its ministers. We see villanies as black as ever were imputed to any prisoner at any bar daily committed on the bench and in the jury box. The worst of the bad acts which brought discredit on the old parliaments of France,-the condemnation of Lally, for example, or even that of Calas,—may seem praiseworthy when compared with those which follow each other in endless succession as we turn over that huge chronicle of the shame of England. The magistrates of Paris and Toulouse were blinded by prejudice, passion, or bigotry. But the abandoned judges of our own country committed murder with their eyes open. The cause of this is plain. In France there was no constitutional opposition. If a man held language offensive to the government, he was at once sent to the Bastile or to Vincennes. But in England, at least after the days of the long parliament, the king could not, by a mere act of his prerogative, rid himself of a troublesome politician. He was forced to remove those who thwarted him by means of perjured witnesses, packed juries, and corrupt, hard-hearted, brow-beating judges. The opposition naturally retaliated whenever they had the upper hand. Every time that the power passed from one party to the other, took place a proscription and a massacre, thinly disguised under the forms of judicial procedure. The tribunals ought to be sacred places of refuge, where, in all the vicissitudes of public affairs, the innocent of all parties may find shelter. They were, before the Revolution, an unclean public shambles, to which each party in its turn dragged its opponents, and where each found the same venal ferocious butchers waiting for its custom. Papist or protestant, tory or whig, priest or alderman, all was one to those greedy and savage natures, provided only there was money to earn and blood to shed.

In

Of course, these worthless judges soon created around them, as was natural, a breed of informers more wicked, if possible, than themselves. The trial by jury afforded little or no protection to the innocent. The juries were nominated by the sheriffs. The sheriffs were in most parts of England nominated by the crown. London, the great scene of political contention, those officers were chosen by the people. The fiercest parliamentary election of our time will give but a faint notion of the storm which raged in the city on the day when two infuriated parties, each bearing its badge, met to select the men in whose hands were to be the issues of life and death for the coming year. On that day, nobles of the highest descent did not think it beneath them to canvass and marshal the livery, to head the procession, and to watch the poll. On that day, the great chiefs of parties waited in an agony of suspense for the messenger who was to bring from Guildhall the news whether their lives and estates were, for the next twelve months, to be at the mercy of a friend or foe. In 1681, whig sheriff's were chosen; and Shaftesbury defied the whole power of the government. In 1682 the sheriffs were tories. Shaftesbury fled to Holland. The other chiefs of the party broke up their councils, and retired in haste to their country-seats. Sidney on the scaffold told those sheriff's

that his blood was on their heads.

Neither of them could deny the charge; and

one of them wept with shame and remorse.

Thus every man who then meddled with public affairs took his life in his hand. The consequence was that men of gentle natures stood aloof from contests in which they could not engage without hazarding their own necks and the fortunes of their children. This was the course adopted by sir William Temple, by Evelyn, and by many other men who were, in every respect, admirably qualified to serve the state. On the other hand, those resolute and enterprising spirits who put their heads and lands to hazard in the game of politics naturally acquired, from the habit of playing for so deep a stake, a reckless and desperate turn of mind. It was, we seriously believe, as safe to be a highwayman as to be a distinguished leader of opposition. This may serve to explain, and in some degree to excuse, the violence with which the factions of that age are justly reproached. They were fighting, not for office, but for life. If they reposed for a moment from the work of agitation, if they suffered the public excitement to flag, they were lost men. Hume, in describing this state of things, has employed an image which seems hardly to suit the general simplicity of his style, but which is by no means too strong for the occasion. "Thus," says he, "the two parties, actuated by mutual rage, but cooped up within the narrow limits of the law, levelled with poisoned daggers the most deadly blows against each other's breast, and buried in their factious divisions all regard to truth, honour, and humanity."

From this terrible evil the Revolution set us free. The law which secured to the judges their seats during life or good behaviour did something. The law subsequently passed for regulating trials in cases of treason did much more. The provisions of that law show, indeed, very little legislative skill. It is not framed on the principle of securing the innocent, but on the principle of giving a great chance of escape to the accused, whether innocent or guilty. This, however, is decidedly a fault on the right side. The evil produced by the occasional escape of a bad citizen is not to be compared with the evils of the reign of terror, for such it was, which preeeded the Revolution. Since the passing of this law scarcely one single person has suffered death in England, as a traitor, who had not been convicted on overwhelming evidence, to the satisfaction of all parties, of a really great crime against the state. Attempts have been made in times of great excitement, to bring in persons guilty of high treason for acts which, though sometimes highly blamable, did not necessarily imply a design of altering the government by physical force. All those attempts have failed. For a hundred and forty years no statesman, while engaged in constitutional opposition to a government, has had the axe before his eyes. The smallest minorities, struggling against the most powerful majorities, in the most agitated times, have felt themselves perfectly secure. Pulteney and Fox were the two most distinguished leaders of opposition since the Revolution. Both were personally obnoxious to the court. But the utmost harm that the utmost anger of the court could do to them was to strike off the "right honourable" from before their names.

But of all the reforms produced by the Revolution, perhaps the most important was the full establishment of the liberty of unlicensed printing. The censorship, which, under some form or other, had existed, with rare and short intermissions, under every government, monarchical or republican, from the time of Henry VIII. downwards, expired, and has never since been renewed.

We are aware that the great improvements which we have recapitulated were, in many respects, imperfectly and unskilfully executed. The authors of those improvements sometimes, while they removed or mitigated a great practical evil, continued to recognise the erroneous principle from which that evil had sprung.

ANON.]

JACOBITE BALLAD.

Sometimes they failed Sometimes, when they had adopted a sound principle, they shrank from following it to all the conclusions to which it would have led them.

to perceive that the remedies which they applied to one disease of the state were certain to generate another disease, and to render another remedy necessary. Their knowledge was inferior to ours; nor were they always able to act up to their knowledge. The pressure of circumstances, the necessity of compromising When these things differences of opinion, the power and violence of the party which was altogether hostile to the new settlement, must be taken into the account.

are fairly weighed, there will, we think, be little difference of opinion among liberal and right-minded men as to the real value of what the great events of 1688 did for this country.

The Jacobite Ballads were one of the most powerful weapons used against the successors of James II., and the greatest support to the cause of the exiled Stuarts. The following one dates from William and Mary's reign —

I hae nae kith, I hae nae kin,

Nor ane that's dear to me;
For the bonnie lad that I lo'e best,
He's far ayont the sea.

He's gane wi' ane that was our ain,

And we may rue the day

When our king's ae daughter came here
To play sic foul play.

Oh, gin I were a bonnie bird

Wi' wings, that I might flee!

Then would I travel o'er the main,

My ae true-love to see.

Then I wad tell a joyfu' tale

To ane that's dear to me,

And sit upon a king's window
And sing my melody.

The adder lies i' the corbie's nest

Aneath the corbie's wing,

And the blast that reaves the corbie's brood
Will soon blaw hame our king.

Then blaw ye east, or blaw ye west,

Or blaw ye o'er the faem,

Oh, bring the lad that I lo'e best,

And ane I darena name.

THE REIGN OF QUEEN ANNE.

THE EDITOR.

Anne succeeded peaceably to the throne on the death of William III. She was married to prince George of Denmark, but he neither greatly desired, nor could she obtain for him any share in the sovereignty. The queen was herself at that time completely under the influence of lady Marlborough, whom she probably feared as well as, loved. Anne was a well-meaning, but dull woman; and would probably never have felt enough ambition to act as she did towards her father, had not the Churchills instigated her conduct. As it was, they made her as false and treacherous as themselves, and she repeatedly and eagerly assured her sister and the prince of Orange by letter that the young prince of Wales was a supposititious child. Nevertheless, when William and Mary had gained the crown, the princess Anne did not live on pleasant terms with the relatives whom she had urged to fill her father's place. The sisters quarrelled early in the joint-sovereigns' reign, and were never reconciled. One cause of this unfriendly feeling was Anne's devotion to her friend lady Marlborough, whom Mary II. detested, and constantly urged her to resign. William and Mary were both aware that Marlborough (who had deserted his old master and benefactor James II. for them) had returned to his allegiance to the exiled monarch, and had actually betrayed a British expedition to disastrous defeat and death for the sake of king James. nothing would make Anne forsake the friend who had been her companion from her early girlhood.

But

The influence of lady Marlborough over the princess was indeed absolute. It was by her evil counsels, as we have said, that Anne had been induced to calumniate her infant brother, and desert her father in his hour of need, a father who (by the testimony of his enemy, bishop Burnet) had always treated her with tenderness and indulgence. In the ardour of her friendship for lady Marlborough, Anne insisted on all the tokens of rank being dropped between them, and on their taking the names of persons of equal and inferior position; she called herself Mrs. Morley, lady Marlborough assumed the name of Mrs. Freeman-as she made a boast of the frankness and sincerity of her disposition-and under these names a romantic correspondence was carried on between the princess and her servant. But this absurd friendship had serious political consequences. When Anne became queen, nothing could be obtained or done except through the Marlboroughs or their connections, and a family clique thus ruled the kingdom through the submissive and oppressed queen.

The war declared by William against Louis XIV. was carried on by his successor, because Marlborough was sure of the appointment of captain-general of the English forces at home and abroad. He also received the garter, and was appointed master of the ordnance. His wife was made groom of the stole, and mistress of the wardrobe, and had the care of the privy purse; his two danghters were installed as ladies of the bedchamber; and the husband of his second daughter, lord Sunderland, obtained a renewal of his pension of £2,000 a year, granted him by the late king. Anne was a tory; she hated the whigs, whom she considered enemies of the crown and of the church. Marlborough was ready to be (or to appear) either whig or tory, as suited his interests. Godolphin, as insincere in his political opinions as his friend and family ally, was entrusted with the sole management of the finances, and was in reality prime minister, and as much despotic head of the civil government as Marlborough was of the military. But to gain Anne's favour and hold this power, they had to pretend at least to be—if they actually were not-tories. The only whigs left in power then were the duke of Devonshire, lord high steward; and