Fortunate are the people who have only to pass through a single crisis. But in the wrath of Providence there may be reserved another connecting crisis in the chain of human events, and this we term a reaction, usually accompanied by a retaliation; then comes the hoarded vengeance and the day of retribution on which issues no amnesty. In physics, action and reaction are equal; the reciprocation of any impulse not being greater than the impulse itself. Nature in her operations thus preserves an equilibrium; but the human hatreds and the partial interests which man has contrived for his own misery, can only find that equilibrium when he submits to a toleration. But a toleration is a partition of power, and predominance is the vitality of a party. The Catholic vengeance of Mary in its reaction was out of all proportion greater than the Protestant docility of Edward. Our nation has been more subject to this crisis and this reaction than perhaps any other. The reign of Charles the First was a crisis, that of Charles the Second a reaction; that of James the Second brought on a crisis, and the revolution of 1688 was the consequential reaction. But never have the people suffered more than during the three reigns of Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth; a terrible intolerance disorganized the whole community: the conflict of old and of new creeds; of reciprocal persecutions, and alternate triumphs; of abjurations and recantations; of supple compliers and rabid polemics; and of pugilistic contests of the ejected with the ejectors--rapid scenes at once tragic and ludicrous. Henry the Eighth died in 1547, and the accession of Elizabeth was in 1558. In this short period of eleven years we were governed by two sovereigns, whose reigns, happily for the English people, were the shortest in our annals. A new era was opening under the dominion of Henry, for he was a monarch of enlarged views. But the intellectual character of England in its vernacular literature was retarded by the events which occurred in the reigns of the two successors of this sovereign. The nation indeed suffered no longer from the civil wars of the rival Roses; but another war now shook the empire with as merciless a rivalry--it was a universal conflict of opinions and dogmas. The governing powers themselves combated each other; and whether in opposing the Reformer to the Romanist, or in restoring "the papelin" to root out "the gospeller," in these two mutable reigns, they neutralised or distracted the unhappy people; and while both maintained that they were proffering "the true religion," religion itself seemed to have lost its eternal truth. Edward with an infirm hand established, what from her short reign Mary, with her barbarous energy, could only imperfectly cast down.