ly allege that he misapplied, at any
rate, his own funds. Wise or not, the act concerned his own private
household. Yet, on the other hand, in the case of money _really_ public,
the confusion of the two expenditures invited and veiled the transfer
of much from national objects that could wait, and were, at any rate,
hidden from effectual scrutiny to the private objects which tempted the
king's profusion. When Mr. Macaulay speaks so often of England sinking
under this or that Stuart to a third-rate power, he is anachronizing.
There was no scale of powers. Want of roads and intercommunication
forbade it. And hence until the Thirty Years' War there was no general
war. Austria, as by fiction the Roman Empire, and always standing
awfully near to North Italy, had a natural relation and gravitation
towards Rome. France, by vainglory and the old literary pretensions of
Anjou, had also a balancing claim upon Italy. Milanese formed indeed (as
Flanders afterwards) the rendezvous for the two powers. Otherwise, only
Austria and Spain (and Spain not till joined to Austria) and France--as
great powers that touched each other in many points--had ever formed a
warlike trio. No quadrille had existed until the great civil war for
life and death between Popery and Protestantism. It was another great
evil that the functions towards which, by inevitable instincts and
tendency of progress, the House of Commons was continually
travelling,--not, I repeat, through any encroaching spirit as the Court
and that House of Commons itself partially fancied,--were not yet
developed: false laws of men, _i.e._, laws framed under theories
misunderstood of rights and constitutional powers, having as much
distorted the true natural play of the organic manifestation and
tendency towards a whole, as ever a dress too tight, or a flower-pot too
narrow, impeded the development of child or plant. Queen Elizabeth,
therefore, always viewed the House of Commons as a disturber of the
public peace, as a mutineer and insurrectionist, when any special
accident threw it upon its natural function; she spoke of State
affairs, and especially of foreign affairs, as beyond their
'_capacity_,' which expression, however, must in charity be interpreted
philosophically as meaning the range of comprehension consistent with
their _total_ means of instruction and preparation, including,
therefore, secret information, knowledge of disposable home resources as
known to the official depo