in the career of men so influenced, and plausible too are the charges against them of concealment, treachery, and breach of faith; but an impartial consideration of facts, and honest views of human nature, will lead to conclusions at once more favourable and more just. The truth is, that the members of the Long Parliament were not theorists intent on working out some perfect ideal, but practical men who looked at things as they were, and with upright intentions endeavoured to mend them as best they could. They aimed at reforming institutions much in the same plodding way as that in which their fathers had founded and reared those institutions. The opening of the States General in France presents in this respect a contrast to the opening of the Long Parliament in England; the brilliant theoristic Frank cannot be confounded with the sober, practical Saxon. The defiance or treachery of opponents filled our religious patriots of the seventeenth century with alarm, drove them to take up a higher position than they at first assumed, and to encamp themselves behind more formidable entrenchments than it then entered into their minds to raise. Another class in the House of Commons requires attention. Many were favourably disposed to the Church of England, advocating a moderate episcopacy and approving the use of the Common Prayer, with a few alterations. They had no liking for Presbyterian schemes of government, much less for a congregational polity. Their sympathies went with the Church of their fathers, the Church of the Reformation, the Church which was built over the ashes of Ridley, Latimer, and Cranmer. They cannot be called Anglican Catholics; but they were to the heart English Churchmen. Despising the mummeries of Laud, and not liking the instructions of his school, then so common in parish churches--these persons loved the old Gothic and ivy-mantled edifices where they had been baptized and married, and by whose altars their parents slept under quaint old monuments, which touched their hearts whenever they worshipped within the walls. They wished to see the Church of England reformed, not overturned. [Sidenote: _Members of the Long Parliament._] [Sidenote: 1640, November.]