to his hostile son-in-law. James was secretly warned that Churchill
was about to betray him, but he refused to believe it of one from whom
he had hitherto experienced such devotion, and was only wakened from his
dream of security by learning that his favourite had gone over with the
five thousand men whom he commanded to the Prince of Orange. Not content
with this, it was Churchill's influence, joined to that of his wife,
which is said to have induced James's own daughter, the Princess Anne,
and Prince George of Denmark, to detach themselves from the cause of the
falling monarch; and drew from that unhappy sovereign the mournful
exclamation, "My God! my very children have forsaken me." In what does
this conduct differ from that of Labedoyere, who, at the head of the
garrison of Grenoble, deserted to Napoleon when sent out to oppose
him?--or Lavalette, who employed his influence, as postmaster under
Louis XVIII., to forward the Imperial conspiracy?--or Marshal Ney, who,
after promising at the court of the Tuileries to bring the ex-emperor
back in an iron cage, no sooner reached the royal camp at Melun, than he
issued a proclamation calling on the troops to desert the Bourbons, and
mount the tricolor cockade? Nay, is not Churchill's conduct, in a moral
point of view, worse than that of Ney; for the latter abandoned the
trust reposed in him by a new master, forced upon an unwilling nation,
to rejoin his old benefactor and companion in arms; but the former
abandoned the trust reposed in him by his old master and benefactor, to
range himself under the banner of a competitor for the throne, to whom
he was bound neither by duty nor obligation. And yet such is often the
inequality of crimes and punishments in this world, that Churchill was
raised to the pinnacle of greatness by the very conduct which consigned
Ney, with justice, so far as his conduct is concerned, to an ignominious
death.

"Treason ne'er prospers; for when it does,
None dare call it treason."

History forgets its first and noblest duty when it fails, by its
distribution of praise and blame, to counterbalance, so far as its
verdict can, this inequality, which, for inscrutable but doubtless wise
purposes, Providence has permitted in this transient scene. Charity
forbids us to scrutinize such conduct too severely. It is the deplorable
effect of a successful revolution, even when commenced for the most
necessary purposes, to obliterate the ideas of man on rig