as either prevailed. And while the
Tories, the October club gentlemen, the High Church parsons that held by
the Church of England, were for having a Papist king, for whom many of
their Scottish and English leaders, firm churchmen all, laid down their
lives with admirable loyalty and devotion; they were governed by men who
had notoriously no religion at all, but used it as they would use any
opinion for the purpose of forwarding their own ambition. The Whigs, on
the other hand, who professed attachment to religion and liberty too,
were compelled to send to Holland or Hanover for a monarch around
whom they could rally. A strange series of compromises is that English
History; compromise of principle, compromise of party, compromise of
worship! The lovers of English freedom and independence submitted their
religious consciences to an Act of Parliament; could not consolidate
their liberty without sending to Zell or the Hague for a king to live
under; and could not find amongst the proudest people in the world a
man speaking their own language, and understanding their laws, to govern
them. The Tory and High Church patriots were ready to die in defence of
a Papist family that had sold us to France; the great Whig nobles, the
sturdy republican recusants who had cut off Charles Stuart's head for
treason, were fain to accept a king whose title came to him through a
royal grandmother, whose own royal grandmother's head had fallen under
Queen Bess's hatchet. And our proud English nobles sent to a petty
German town for a monarch to come and reign in London and our prelates
kissed the ugly hands of his Dutch mistresses, and thought it no
dishonor. In England you can but belong to one party or t'other, and you
take the house you live in with all its encumbrances, its retainers, its
antique discomforts, and ruins even; you patch up, but you never build
up anew. Will we of the new world submit much longer, even nominally,
to this ancient British superstition? There are signs of the times which
make me think that ere long we shall care as little about King George
here, and peers temporal and peers spiritual, as we do for King Canute
or the Druids.

This chapter began about the wits, my grandson may say, and hath
wandered very far from their company. The pleasantest of the wits I
knew were the Doctors Garth and Arbuthnot, and Mr. Gay, the author of
"Trivia," the most charming kind soul that ever laughed at a joke or
cracked a bottle. Mr.