hat would have
been unintelligible to any peasants but her own.

As a politician, Miss Thorne had been so thoroughly disgusted with
public life by base deeds long antecedent to the Corn Law question
that that had but little moved her. In her estimation her brother
had been a fast young man, hurried away by a too ardent temperament
into democratic tendencies. Now happily he was brought to sounder
views by seeing the iniquity of the world. She had not yet reconciled
herself to the Reform Bill, and still groaned in spirit over the
defalcations of the Duke as touching the Catholic Emancipation. If
asked whom she thought the Queen should take as her counsellor, she
would probably have named Lord Eldon, and when reminded that that
venerable man was no longer present in the flesh to assist us, she
would probably have answered with a sigh that none now could help us
but the dead.

In religion Miss Thorne was a pure Druidess. We would not have it
understood by that that she did actually in these latter days assist
at any human sacrifices, or that she was in fact hostile to the
Church of Christ. She had adopted the Christian religion as a milder
form of the worship of her ancestors, and always appealed to her
doing so as evidence that she had no prejudices against reform, when
it could be shown that reform was salutary. This reform was the most
modern of any to which she had as yet acceded, it being presumed that
British ladies had given up their paint and taken to some sort of
petticoats before the days of St. Augustine. That further feminine
step in advance which combines paint and petticoats together had not
found a votary in Miss Thorne.

But she was a Druidess in this, that she regretted she knew not what
in the usages and practices of her Church. She sometimes talked and
constantly thought of good things gone by, though she had but the
faintest idea of what those good things had been. She imagined that
a purity had existed which was now gone, that a piety had adorned our
pastors and a simple docility our people, for which it may be feared
history gave her but little true warrant. She was accustomed to speak
of Cranmer as though he had been the firmest and most simple-minded
of martyrs, and of Elizabeth as though the pure Protestant faith of
her people had been the one anxiety of her life. It would have been
cruel to undeceive her, had it been possible; but it would have been
impossible to make her believe that the one w