nor was his aide de camp, Mr. Esmond, an
unfaithful or unworthy partisan. 'Tis strange here, and on a foreign soil,
and in a land that is independent in all but the name (for that the North
American colonies shall remain dependants on yonder little island for
twenty years more, I never can think), to remember how the nation at home
seemed to give itself up to the domination of one or other aristocratic
party, and took a Hanoverian king, or a French one, according 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 dishonour. 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