h century were the manoeuvres of
a _garde du corps_, and the intrigues of a boudoir. Our fathers saw no
nation of thirty millions rushing to the field; frantic with the
passion for overthrow, no Napoleon thundering at the head of vassal
Europe against England; no conspiracy of peoples against thrones; no
train of crouching sovereignties, half in terror and half in servility,
ready to do the wildest will of the wildest despot of the world; no army
of five hundred thousand men ready to spring upon our shores, and
turning off only to the overthrow of empires. All was on a smaller
scale; the passions feebler, the means narrower, the objects more
trivial, the triumphs more temporary, the catastrophe more powerless,
and the glory more vanishing.

All has since subsided; and the mind of man is turned to efforts in
directions totally new. All now is the rigid struggle with the physical
difficulties of society. The grand problems are, how to level the
mountain, and to drain the sea: or, if we must leave the Alps to be
still the throne of the thunder, and suffer even the Zuyder-zee to roll
its sullen waves over its incorrigible shallows; yet to tunnel the
mountain and pass the sea with a rapidity, which makes us regardless of
the interposition of obstacles that once stopped the march of armies,
and made the impregnable fortresses of kingdoms. But the still severer
trials of human intelligence are, how to clothe, feed, educate, and
discipline the millions which every passing year pours into the world.
The mind may well be bewildered with a prospect so vast, so vivid, and
yet so perplexing. Every man sees that old things are done away, that
physical force is resuming its primitive power over the world, and that
we are approaching a time when Mechanism will have the control of
nature, and Multitude the command of society.

* * * * *

There are many families in England which, without any change of
circumstances, without any increase of fortune, or any discoverable
vicissitudes, have existed for centuries, in possession of the same
property, generally a small one, and handed down from father to son as
if by a law of nature. The family of Lord Sidmouth is found to have held
the proprietorship of the small estate of Fringford, in Oxfordshire,
from the year 1600, and to have had a residence in Bannebury about a
century and a half before;--the first descendant of this quiet race who
became known beyond th