ugh their ludicrous
doggerel.
____
* Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us
too hard on Captain Bethune compare them.

"For Wetharrington my harte was wo,
That even he slayne sholde be;
For when both his leggis were hewen in to,
He knyied and fought on his knee."

Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad,
gives up this stanza as hopeless.
____

When to these offences of the Society we add, that
in the long laboured appendices and introductions,
which fill up valuable space, which increase the
expense of the edition, and into reading which many
readers are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing
which assists the understanding of the stories which
they are supposed to illustrate, when we have found what
is most uncommon passed without notice, and what is
most trite and familiar encumbered with comment: we
have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these
volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave
of them and go on with our own more grateful subject.

Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that
of the Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English
constitution were limited in the highest degree, was,
notwithstanding, more beloved by her subjects than
any sovereign before or since. It was because,
substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it
was given to her to conduct the outgrowth of the
national life through its crisis of change, and the weight
of her great mind and her great place were thrown on
the people's side. She was able to paralyze the dying
efforts with which, if a Stuart had been on the throne,
the representatives of an effete system might have made
the struggle a deadly one; and the history of England
is not the history of France, because the inflexible will
of one person held the Reformation firm till it had
rooted itself in the heart of the nation, and could not
be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was no longer
able to furnish standing ground on which the English
or any other nation could live a manly and a godly
life. Feudalism, as a social organization, was not any
more a system under which their energies could have
scope to move. Thenceforward not the Catholic Church,
but any man to whom God had given a heart to feel
and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom
men were to listen; and great actions were not to
remain the privilege of the families of the Norman
nobles, but were to be laid with