ho lived before our Civil Wars,
though they are indeed our common heritage. And when you look at the
noble monuments of De Vere and Norris, the fathers of the English
infantry, you should remember that your ancestors and mine, or that of
any other Englishman, may have trailed pike and handled sword side by
side under those very men, in those old wars of the Netherlands, which
your own great historian, Mr. Motley, has so well described; or have
sailed together to Cadiz fight, and to the Spanish Main, with Raleigh or
with Drake.

There are those, again, who did their duty two and three generations
later--though one of the noblest of them all, old Admiral Blake, alas!
lies we know not where--cast out, with Cromwell and his heroes, by the
fanatics and sycophants of the Restoration--whom not only we, but Royalty
itself, would now restore, could we recover their noble ashes, to their
rightful resting-place.

And these, if not always our common ancestors, were, often enough, our
common cousins, as in the case of my own family, in which one brother was
settling in New England, to found there a whole new family of Kingsleys
while the other brother was fighting in the Parliamentary army, and
helping to defeat Charles at Rowton Moor.

But there is another class of warriors' tombs, which I ask you, if ever
you visit the Abbey, to look on with respect, and let me say, affection
too. I mean the men who did their duty, by land and sea, in that long
series of wars which, commencing in 1739, ended in 1783, with our
recognition of your right and power to be a free and independent people.
Of those who fought against you I say nought. But I must speak of those
who fought for you--who brought to naught, by sheer hard blows, that
family compact of the House of Bourbon, which would have been as
dangerous to you upon this side of the ocean as to us upon the other; who
smote with a continual stroke the trans-Atlantic power of Spain, till
they placed her once vast and rich possessions at your mercy to this day;
and who--even more important still--prevented the French from seizing at
last the whole valley of the Mississippi, and girdling your nascent
dominion with a hostile frontier, from Louisiana round to the mouth of
the St. Lawrence.

When you see Wolfe's huge cenotaph, with its curious bronze bas-relief of
the taking of the heights of Abraham, think, I pray you, that not only
for England, but for you, the 'little red-haired corporal'