tion and the French frigate L'Insurgente, in which the latter, after a spirited action, was captured by Commander Truxton.

The news came too late to reach the ear of Washington. The last scene of life's strange and always tragic drama had arrived for him. A brief illness, the immediate cause of which was his being caught in a shower of rain whilst out riding on his estate at Mount Vernon, terminated his eventful career on the 14th of December 1799. He expired surrounded by his weeping family and friends, his servants amongst the most sorrowing of those friends. He suffered considerably, but no murmur of complaint or impatience escaped him. 'I am dying hard,' he observed with a faint, pale smile to the physician in attendance, but it will soon be over.' Thus calmly and resignedly passed away that childlike, giant man; and, his earthly mission well accomplished, he slept peacefully with his fathers, having lived sixty-eight years.

'Let me be buried privately, and let no funeral oration be pronounced over my remains,' was one of his last injunctions. Those who have disobeyed that solemn command have done so vainly, for Time alone can write his fitting epitaph-that future and advancing Time, in whose clear day the grim and fantastic shadows mistaken for true heroes in the darkness and twilight of the world are destined to pass away and be forgotten, but which light from heaven will only add new lustre to the aureole of moral beauty, dignity, and worth which encircles the brows of the great American.

The will of George Washington contains, as we read it, not only a great lesson for the world, but an especial admonition to his countrymen. The admonition is contained, veiled if you will, in the first paragraph after the general bequest to his wife, in which, with so much solemn earnestness, he decrees the freedom of all his slaves at the death of Mrs Washington, lamenting that he durst not order their immediate liberation because of the misery that would result to themselves in consequence of their intermarriage with the dower slaves, over whom he had no control. He further orders, that when the time for freeing them shall have arrived, those amongst them that may from age or infirmity be incapable of supporting themselves, shall be comfortably fed and clothed by his heirs: the children he directs to be educated and provided for till they are twenty-five years of age. "These dispositions,' he writes, 'I solemnly and pointedly enjoin on my heirs to see religiously fulfilled.' To us it appears evident that Washington bitterly felt and lamented the foul blot which negro slavery— the sad inheritance, we must not forget, bequeathed by the vicious policy of former governments-stamps upon the glory of the stars and stripes; and that, possessing no power to abate the evil by legislative action, he was desirous of showing by his own example-recorded in the most solemn document man can frame, for it is his last-how necessary he esteemed it, if his countrymen would not continue to give the lie to their professions of natural freedom and equality, to rid themselves, at the earliest moment it could be done, without creating a greater evil than it was intended to abolish, of an institution inconsistent alike with real safety and true greatness. The lesson to the world, and especially to conquerors and their

dupes and tools, is the oft-quoted passage in which he bequeaths his swords to his nephews:-'These swords are accompanied with an injunction not to unsheath them for the purpose of shedding blood, except it be for self-defence, or in defence of their country and its liberties; and in the latter case, to keep them unsheathed till the object be accomplished, and prefer falling with them in their hands to the relinquishment thereof.' Words which, whilst they express his and every just person's abhorrence of aggressive war, must ever stir as with a trumpet the heart of every man compelled to arm in defence of home, freedom, and country.

There is not much requiring remark in the after-career of any of the distinguished associates of this great man; their public acts were for the most part modelled upon his. Adams and Jefferson, the second and third presidents, by a remarkable coincidence, both died on the same day, the fiftieth anniversary of Independence'-one at the age of eighty-four, and the other ninety-one years of age. The last days of Jefferson were unfortunately embittered by pecuniary difficulties. The inscription on his tomb, written by himself, records that he was the author of the Declaration of Independence,' and the Virginian Statute of Religious Freedom,' and the Father of the University of Virginia.' No mention is made of his having been president of the United States. Franklin died some years before Washington. The quaint epitaph composed for himself by the calm-minded philosopher, though familiar to most readers, will always be worth quoting as long as the absurd notion shall linger in the dark holes and corners of the world, that a belief in the immortality of the soul is inconsistent with a knowledge and love of natural science :- The body of Benjamin Franklin, printer (like the cover of an old book with its contents torn out, and stript of its lettering and gilding), lies here food for worms: yet the work itself shall not be lost; for it will (as he believed) appear once more in a new and more beautiful edition, corrected and amended by the Author.' Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel by the notorious Colonel Burr. The mention of this person's name reminds us of an anecdote connected with Washington, which rests, we believe, upon his (Colonel Burr's) authority. It was reported in America that George III., on being told by some one that the newly-appointed American commanderin-chief once asserted that 'he loved the whistling of bullets,' had remarked that the Virginian officer said that because he had heard so few. Many years afterwards Washington was asked if he could ever have made use of such an expression? I think not,' replied the veteran; but if I did, it must have been when I was very young!'

Here this brief summary of an important chapter of the world's history naturally concludes; and we may, without rendering ourselves justly obnoxious to the charge of passing rash judgments, draw the following conclusions from the premises :-1st, That admiration of the conduct of the leaders of American resistance is perfectly consistent with the highest respect for monarchical institutions, inasmuch as the liberties which those leaders armed to defend were liberties enjoyed under charters consecrated by successive English monarchs; 2dly, That the resistance of the British colonists was strictly a defensive one, and the real

revolutionists therefore the British ministers, who made unlawful war upon an unoffending, loyal, and peaceable people; 3dly, and lastly, That the very worst use to which the valour and resources of the British people can be directed, is an endeavour to subject distant communities of Englishmen to a yoke they would not themselves endure at home, or to set about converting, by the employment of violence and insult, a kindred and friendly people into a jealous and hostile one. The hateful memories of former unjust violence towards the American States are now happily passing away, and the old influences arising from identity of race, language, and ancestral achievement, are resuming their natural sway. It is the inclination--whatever incendiaries may say or sing-as well as the duty and interest of this country, to aid that return to old feelings of mutual friendship and respect; for assuredly if there is one nation in the world on which Englishmen ought to look with pride, it is America; just as it is equally natural and true that the 'Old Country' is the only kingdom in Europe which our American brethren regard with affection and esteem.

CROMWELL AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

MR

[R HUME'S perversions of the reign of Charles I., once so popular, and still quoted as authority in certain quarters, have, thanks to the industry and zeal of modern historians and commentators, lost all claim to respect; and the reaction naturally consequent upon a discovery of the injustice that had been done the great men of the Commonwealth, has reached to such a height, that there now seems a tendency to canonise as spotless saints and heroes the very persons whom it was so long the fashion to slander and depreciate. The truth, as ever, lies not in either extreme. Cromwell and his associates were men of like passions to ourselves; their motives, as their acts, a mingled yarn of good and evil, of spirituality and earthliness: the good survives to bless us; the evil has descended with their bodies to the grave. And even that dust, rendered sacred by the memory of their struggles, their toils, their sufferings, their apparent defeat-dying, as many of them did, amidst the shouts and execrations of an ephemeral restoration-we would reverently approach, remembering how many of the errors-crimes if you will-with which they have been charged are fairly attributable to the circumstances of the time in which their lot was cast, rather than to their own wills and purposes.

The aspect of Europe in the middle of the seventeenth century must have suggested utter despair to the timid lover of freedom-to the pale doubter in the progress of humanity. Despotism, enthroned on the ruins of the feudal system, and surrounded by disciplined armies dependent on the sole will of the monarch, had extinguished or enslaved all the independent jurisdictions of the continent. The Parliaments of Paris, which the war of the Fronde vainly strove to maintain in virility and power, were virtually subjugated; and in that country a government of autocratic will was, by the genius of Richelieu, rapidly consolidated, and covered by the ægis of success and victory. The Councils of Castile and Arragon had long since disappeared; and many years previously Cardinal Ximenes told the deputies of Castile-pointing from a window to the armed battalions of Charles V.-that it was by virtue of those men the king of Arra gon commanded in Castile. The United Provinces was a republic but in name and form, so that the faintly-acknowledged liberties of these countries were the sole rights remaining to the human race. Happily for Europe, for the world, the English and Scottish peoples were faithful to their great trust, and neither kingly nor sacerdotal force or fraud was found able to

bend them to the yoke imposed upon the nations of the continent. To the Puritans and Covenanters of that period even Mr Hume was compelled to admit we owe the freedom which we, and if we, Europe, now enjoy. The parliamentary leaders-and there can be no higher praise-were equal to the high mission imposed by the time; and no unprejudiced man, versed in their histories, can refuse acquiescence in the testimony borne to their merits by Bishop Warburton, 'that the interests of liberty were conducted and supported by a set of the greatest geniuses for government that the world ever saw embarked together in a common cause.'

Constitutions, other than paper and ephemeral ones, it has been remarked with profound truth, are not, cannot be, made-they grow; and it is both curious and instructive to mark the growth of this English one, which, albeit that it envelops the entire land of Britain, guards our free homes, speaks million-voiced in our assemblies and countless printing-presses, cannot, it is often sneeringly reproached to us, be found neatly copied out and duly labelled in the pigeon-hole of any desk in the kingdom. It began, some tell us, with Magna Charta: the mailed barons set their seals, not being able to write, to the first assertion of English liberties., A very great mistake this of the eulogists of the illiterate lords. Those liberties date from before Alfred, and Magna Charta was more a declaratory than an enacting statute. A very valuable one certainly: litera scripta manet (the written thing remaineth). And there, in plain old text, principles were copied out which could always be appealed to, and which no minister or judge could successfully explain away. Slight thanks are, however, due to the iron barons for that great piece of service, for nothing is more certain than that they looked upon the instrument solely as a means of protecting themselves from the encroachments of the sovereign; and it was with as much surprise as indignation they afterwards found that the same weapon which restrained royal prerogative was equally potent to curtail baronial privilege. The reign of Edward III., the English Justinian, as he has been called, marks great and lasting progress on the part of the people. The nation had thoroughly recovered from the shock and stupefaction caused by the Norman invasion. The victories of Cressy and Poitiers had amply vindicated, in the eyes of the dazzled world, the reputation of English valour, ignorantly deemed to have been tarnished by the result of Hastings; the English language, the language of the people, illustrated by the genius of Chaucer, was again that of the government; the 'Commons' of England were a distinct and recognised estate of the realm; and the old foundations, deep and broad, were everywhere zealously widened and strengthened for the gradual erection of the system of government under which the British people have long dwelt in peace, freedom, and security, by example teaching the nations how to live.' The deposition of Richard II. is also an important passage in the constitutional history of this country-a practical verification of the theory which professes to restrain or punish prerogative. It was the Commons who gave validity and force to Henry IV.'s title and power; and no one was more thoroughly impressed with that truth than himself. In the reign of his renowned son, the fifth Harry, the 'privileges' of the Commons, that especially which debars the sovereign from taking cognisance, either personally or through any of his courts of law, of the speeches or acts of the Commons when assembled in