ing on the various government establishments.
A new Imperial flag is hoisted at the Tower, and I now hear the guns
saluting it with their roar.

The last century was the era of Intrigue in politics, in war, in courts,
in every thing. In England, the Revolution at the close of the Century
before had extinguished the power of Despotism. Popery had perished
under the heel of Protestantism. The Jacobite had fled from the face of
the Williamite. The sword was seen no longer. But the strifes of party
succeeded the struggles of Religion; and Parliament became the scene of
those conflicts, which, in the century before, would have been fought in
the field.

I strongly doubt which age exhibits the national character in a more
elevated point of view. The war of Charles I. was a period of proud
feeling. It was the last burst of Chivalry. Men of rank and fortune
periled both from a sense of honour, and some of the noblest who fell on
the royal side, were as fully convinced of the royal errors as the
orators of Parliament; but their sense of honour urged them to the
sacrifice, and they freely shed their blood for a King, whose
faithlessness and folly were to be redeemed only by his martyrdom.

From the period of the Revolution, the character of the country had
changed. Still bold, sensitive, and capable of sacrifice, it had grown
more contemptuous of political romance, more clear-sighted as to public
merits, and more fixed on substantial claims. The latter part of the
seventeenth century had seen the worthless and treacherous Charles II.
brought back by the nobles and gentry of the land in a national triumph.
The middle of the eighteenth century saw the expulsion of the Pretender,
a gallant and adventurous prince, whose only adherents were the Scottish
chiefs, and whose most determined opponents were the whole multitude of
England.

France had lost her Chivalric spirit nearly a hundred years before. It
had died with Francis I. The wars of the League were wars of Chicane;
Artifice in arms, Subtlety in steel coats. The profligacy of the courts
of Louis Quatorze, and his successors, dissolved at once the morals and
the mind of France. That great country exhibited, to the eye of Europe,
the aspect of the most extravagant license, and the most rapid decay.
There lay the great voluptuary, under the general gaze; like one of its
feudal lords dying of his own debauch--lying helpless from infirmity,
surrounded with useless pomp, and in th