IIe was in truth far better qualified to save a nation than to adorn a court. In the highest parts of statesmanship, he had no equal among his contemporaries. He had formed plans not inferior in grandeur and boldness to those of Richelieu, and had carried them into effect with a tact and wariness worthy of Mazarin. Two countries, the seats of civil liberty and of the Reformed Faith, had been preserved by his wisdom and courage from extreme perils. Holland he had delivered from foreign, and England from domestic foes. Obstacles apparently insurmountable had been interposed between him and the ends on which he was intent; and those obstacles his genius had turned into stepping-stones. Under his dexterous management the hereditary enemies of his house had helped him to mount a throne; and the persecutors of his religion had helped him to rescue his religion from persecution. Fleets and armies, collected to withstand him, had, without a struggle, submitted to his orders. Factions and sects, divided by mortal antipathies, had recognized him as their common head. Without carnage, without devastation, he had won a victory compared with which all the victories. of Gustavus and Turenne were insignificant. In a few weeks he had changed the relative position of all the states in Europe, and had restored the equilibrium which the preponderance of one power had destroyed. Foreign nations did ample justice to his great qualities. In every Continental country where Protestant congregations met, fervent thanks were of fered to God, who, from among the progeny of his servants, Maurice, the deliverer of Germany, and William, the deliverer of Holland, had raised up a third deliverer, the wisest and mightiest of all. At Vienna, at Madrid, nay, at Rome, the valiant and sagacious heretic was held in honor as the chief of the great confederacy against the House of Bourbon; and even at Versailles the hatred which he inspired was largely mingled with admiration.

Here he was less favorably judged. In truth, our ancestors saw him in the worst of all lights. By the French, the Germans, and the Italians, he was contemplated at such a distance that only what was great could be discerned, and that small

blemishes were invisible. To the Dutch he was brought close; but he was himself a Dutchman. In his intercourse with them he was seen to the best advantage; he was perfectly at his ease with them; and from among them he had chosen his earliest and dearest friends. But to the English he appeared in a most unfortunate point of view. He was at once too near to them and too far from them. He lived among them, so that the smallest peculiarity of temper or manner could not escape their notice. Yet he lived apart from them, and was to the last a foreigner in speech, tastes, and habits.

One of the chief functions of our sovereigns had long been to preside over the society of the capital. That function Charles the Second had performed with immense success. His easy bow, his good stories, his style of dancing and playing tennis, the sound of his cordial laugh, were familiar to all London. One day he was seen among the elms of St. James's Park chatting with Dryden about poetry. Another day his arm was on Tom Durfey's shoulder; and His Majesty was taking a second, while his companion sung “Phillida, Phillida," or "To horse, brave boys! to Newmarket, to horse!" James, with much less vivacity and good-nature, was accessible, and, to people who did not cross him, civil. But of this sociableness William was entirely destitute. He seldom came forth from his closet; and, when he appeared in the public rooms, he stood among the crowd of courtiers and ladies, stern and abstracted, making no jest and smiling at none. His freezing look, his silence, the dry and concise answers which he uttered when he could keep silence no longer, disgusted noblemen and gentlemen who had been accustomed to be slapped on the back by their royal masters, called Jack or Harry, congratulated about race-cups or rallied about actresses. The women missed the homage due to their sex. They observed that the king spoke in a somewhat imperious tone even to the wife to whom he owed so much, and whom he sincerely loved and esteemed. They were amused and shocked to see him, when the Princess Anne dined with him, and when the first green pease of the year were put on the table, devour the whole dish without offering a spoonful to Her Royal

Highness; and they pronounced that this great soldier and politician was no better than a Low Dutch bear.

Our lit

One misfortune, which was imputed to him as a crime, was his bad English. He spoke our language, but not well. His accent was foreign: his diction was inelegant; and his vocabulary seems to have been no larger than was necessary for the transaction of business. To the difficulty which he felt in expressing himself, and to his consciousness that his pronunciation was bad, must be partly ascribed the taciturnity and the short answers which gave so much offense. erature he was incapable of enjoying or of understanding. He never once, during his whole reign, showed himself at the theatre. The poets who wrote Pindaric verses in his praise complained that their flights of sublimity were beyond his com-prehension. Those who are acquainted with the panegyrical odes of that age will perhaps be of opinion that he did not lose much by his ignorance.

It is true that his wife did her best to supply what was wanting, and that she was excellently qualified to be the head of the court. She was English by birth, and English also in her tastes and feelings. Her face was handsome, her port majestic, her temper sweet and lively, her manners affable and graceful. Her understanding, though very imperfectly cultivated, was quick. There was no want of feminine wit and shrewdness in her conversation; and her letters were so well expressed that they deserved to be well spelled. She took much pleasure in the lighter kinds of literature, and did something toward bringing books into fashion among ladies of quality. The stainless purity of her private life and the strict attention which she paid to her religious duties were the more respectable, because she was singularly free from censoriousness, and discouraged scandal as much as vice. In dislike of backbiting, indeed, she and her husband cordially agreed; but they showed that dislike in different and in very characteristic ways. William preserved profound silence, and gave the talebearer a look which, as was said by a person who had once encountered it, and who took good care never to encounter it again, made your story go back down your throat. Mary had

a way of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and playdebts, by asking the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read her favorite sermon, Dr. Tillotson's on Evil Speaking. Her charities were munificent and judicious; and, though she made no ostentatious display of them, it was known that she retrenched from her own state in order to relieve Protestants whom persecution had driven from France and Ireland, and who were starving in the garrets of London. So amiable was her conduct, that she was generally spoken of with esteem and tenderness by the most respectable of those who disapproved of the manner in which she had been raised to the throne, and even of those who refused to acknowledge her as queen. In the Jacobite lainpoons of that time, lampoons which, in virulence and malignity, far exceed any thing that our age has produced, she was not often mentioned with severity. Indeed she sometimes expressed her surprise at finding that libelers who respected nothing else respected her name. God, she said, knew where her weakness lay. She was too sensitive to abuse and calumny: he had mercifully spared her a trial which was beyond her strength; and the best return which she could make to him was to discountenance all malicious reflections on the characters of others. Assured that she possessed her hus band's entire confidence and affection, she turned the edge of his sharp speeches, sometimes by soft and sometimes by playful answers, and employed all the influence which she derived from her many pleasing qualities to gain the hearts of the people for him.

JUDGE JEFFREYS. 1685.

[History of England, Chapter IV.J

THE Great Seal was left in Guildford's custody; but a marked indignity was at the same time offered to him.(') It was determined that another lawyer of more vigor and audacity should be called to assist in the administration. The person selected was Sir George Jeffreys, Chief - justice of the Court of King's Bench. The depravity of this man has passed into a proverb. Both the great English parties have attacked his memory with emulous violence: for the Whigs considered him as their most barbarous enemy; and the Tories found it convenient to throw on him the blame of all the crimes which had sullied their triumph. A diligent and candid inquiry will show that some frightful stories which have been told concerning him are false or exaggerated. Yet the dispassionate historian will be able to make very little deduction from the vast mass of infamy with which the memory of the wicked judge has been loaded.

He was a man of quick and vigorous parts, but constitutionally prone to insolence and to the angry passions. When just emerging from boyhood he had risen into practice.at the Old Bailey bar, a bar where advocates have always used a li cense of tongue unknown in Westminster Hall. Here, during many years, his chief business was to examine and cross-examine the most hardened miscreants of a great capital. Daily conflicts with prostitutes and thieves called out and exercised his powers so effectually that he became the most consummate bully ever known in his profession. Tenderness for others and respect for himself were feelings alike unknown to him.

(') This passage is taken from Macaulay's account of the changes which, at his accession to the throne, James the Second made among the ministers and the judges.