with which, during the war, he had been fundamentally at variance, after having long avoided it: Parliament claimed its primitive rights in their fullest extent, and would assent to nothing but an unmistakeably Protestant policy. In the course of this struggle the native enthusiasm of the Irish also rose in arms, to cast off the subjection in which they were held by the superior power of the Protestant and Teutonic element. Charles I was not formed by nature to wage such a war successfully: he was not fully master of his own court and council, which was full of cabals in which foreign powers took part, in the very year of this contest. While he only took counsel with his partisans, he could not prevent some of them from acting with an eye to their own particular interests, which made others adopt the opposite view with embittered pertinacity. He himself was always occupied with his own intentions; the purposes, strength, and probable acts of his opponents he had not the penetration to measure: we see him with the utmost confidence undertaking what was to the last degree ruinous. With this was united a false wisdom: for the sake of some greater end he would assent to things which in-themselves he disapproved. Then when his ultimate views came again to light, beside those which for the moment he had admitted, he appeared in himself untrue and untrustworthy: his opponents held themselves justified in taking security by any means against his returning to his old intentions. His adversaries on the other hand, were consistent, vigilant, and suspicious: in opposition to the notion of a compact power, not weak in itself, but merely represented as such, and always dreaded, they placed the feelings of provincial and constitutional autonomy, which, when once penetrated by the feelings and ideas of individual freedom, disclosed [A.D. 1642.] an invincible strength. Thus it came to pass that one of the British kingdoms attained to an independence which robbed the crown of all substantial influence: the second was striving to conquer by a bloody insurrection, stained with horrible crimes, the same independence for its Catholic population which was enjoyed in the first by the Protestants: while in the third and greatest an authority was being established which aimed at absorbing the royal power. The course of events had virtually decided that the original system of the Stuarts could not be established: but what shape the British kingdoms would assume, whether they would hold together or separate, what forms and principles of government would ultimately triumph,--all this lay buried in total darkness.