se whatever, has made it difficult or dangerous for English Protestants
and Catholics to effect the same coalition. Having no room left for a
fuller exposure of this delusive representation, we shall here content
ourselves with an illustrative allusion or two. The Moors were expelled
from Spain before any English Catholics became the objects (having
wilfully _made_ themselves the objects) of something like proscription
under English laws. The chasm between the Moors of this day and their
ancestors stretches over more than three centuries. Has that rent closed?
Have those wounds healed? Is the reader aware of the figurative language,
under the symbol of house-door keys, still hanging over Moorish hearths,
&c., by which, to this hour, the Moors cherish for their children's ears
deep vindictive remembrances of their ancient habitations in Spain, and
their haughty vision of a bloody re-entrance? Does the reader imagine that
an invasion by Moors of Italy or France would move under the same burning
impulses as an invasion of Spain? The return of the Moors to Spain would
be like the _recoil_ of a catapulta. And, allowing for higher
civilization, of the same deep memorial character would have been any
re-entry of Roman Catholics upon _power_ in England, had it been less
gradual than the prudence of Parliaments made it. The deep outrages of
Catholics upon English rights, under the troubled movements amongst the
thrones of Europe during the century of strife, which made the temptations
to treason irresistible for vassals of Rome, forced from the Protestants
such stern reactions, as have left with both parties an abiding sense of
profound injuries. Attainders to be blotted out, judgments to be reversed,
burning records of shame for persons and for creed, sculptured in our
laws, to trample under foot, are likely to stimulate the malice (calling
itself the retribution) of lineal descendants, even if there were no
_estates to reclaim_. And surely those fantastic persons who think, that
merely to bear the name or classification of "_Catholic_" must confer upon
one, pleading no shadow of a connexion with the founder of a college, some
claim to a dividend upon its funds, are not entitled to hold cheap the
very different sort of claims, resting upon acknowledged heirship, which
are now lying amongst the muniments of thousands. It is a record of the
political imbecility, it is to the high _disgrace_, of the continental
states, that with most