rs, with the more numerous
and concentrated Roman Catholics of the north, who clung with
superstitious tenacity to the pomp and ceremonies of the ancient worship,
continued through several successive generations, not only drenched the
kingdom with blood, but altered the character, and obliterated the virtues
of its inhabitants. Revenge became the only passion that retained its sway
over the human heart; cruelty so common, that its atrocity was no longer
perceived. The massacre of St Bartholomew, that lasting and indelible
stain on ancient, as the massacre in the prisons, and the Reign of Terror,
are on modern French history, is not to be regarded as the work of a
blood-thirsty tyrant, aided by a corrupt and perfidious court. The public
crimes of the rulers of men never can exceed, except by a few degrees,
those for which the nation is prepared. It is the frenzy of the general
mind which suggests and renders practicable the atrocious deeds, by which,
happily at long intervals from each other, the annals of mankind are
stained. The proscriptions of the Triumvirate, the alternate slaughters of
Marius and Sylla, the massacre of St Bartholomew, the _auto-da-fes_ of
Castile, the reign of the Duke of Alva in Flanders, the butchery of the
wars of the Roses in England, the blood shed by Robespierre in France, all
proceeded from a frenzied state of the public mind, which made the great
body of the people not only noways revolt at, but cordially support those
savage deeds, at which, when recounted in the pages of history, all
subsequent ages shudder. Even the massacre of St Bartholomew, perhaps the
most atrocious, because the most cold-blooded and perfidious, of all those
horrid deeds, excited at the time no feeling of indignation in the Roman
Catholic party throughout Europe. On the Contrary, it was universally and
cordially approved of by those of that persuasion in every country, as a
most effectual and expedient, and withal justifiable way of lopping off a
gangrened arm from the body politic, and extinguishing a pestilent heresy.
The discharges of the cannon from the castle of St Angelo, and the _Te
Deum_ sung in St Peter's, on the arrival of the glorious intelligence, by
the Head of the faithful at Rome, were re-echoed by the
acclamation--without, so far as appears, a single exception--of the whole
Romish world.[19]

It was the cessation of the hideous scenes of bloodshed and massacre which
had signalised the civil wars in the