must have advised, it is hard to prove that such qualities have ever belonged to any human being. Many a Jesuit has been a martyr--and I give the Chancellor credit for such an attachment to the Episcopal Church as would have led him to suffer on its behalf, but no man could be more Jesuitical than he was in the course of policy which he adopted for its establishment. So dark a fate as covered the last days of Strafford, Laud, and Charles I., did not attend the final destiny of the great Minister of Charles II.; still, calamities overtook him after the sunshine of his prosperity--his sun set in a cloud; and thus, like his predecessors in the defence of the Church, he has secured from posterity, through sympathy with him in his misfortunes, gentler treatment than the defects of his character would otherwise have received.[529] [Sidenote: CLARENDON.] [Sidenote: 1667.] By an obvious association we are led to compare the political founder of the Church of England in the seventeenth century with his predecessor in the same capacity a hundred years before. Both Cecil, Lord Burleigh, and Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, had great difficulties in securing the stability of the civil government--in dealing with political discontent and disaffection, in defending the Throne against perils, and in providing revenues for the Crown. Both statesmen, in laying the corner stones of their ecclesiastical polity, had to build in troublous times, and each, "with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other hand held a weapon." Both of them, blind to the principle of religious liberty, employed persecuting laws in the service of what they deemed the best form of Christianity; and both also, together with other crooked means of ruling, employed spies, wherewith to see what was done at a distance, and agents wherewith to put in action secret and remote machinery. The contrast between the two, however, is more striking than the resemblance. If difficulties encompassed the navigation of the vessel, the helm of which rested in the hand of Clarendon, far greater difficulties of the same and other kinds--political and ecclesiastical, Popish and Puritan,--surrounded the course of Burleigh. Clarendon was not as cautious, not as timid, as Burleigh. Perhaps neither of them exhibited a lofty order of genius; but Clarendon appears inferior in originality of plan, and in consistency of method. Cecil struck out ideas in commerce too wise for the age in which he lived; and as the fruit of careful meditation in retirement, he laid down a comprehensive scheme of government on the accession of Elizabeth, from the fundamental principles of which he did not deviate in his long administration; but Hyde never showed himself to be more than an experimentalist, adopting expedients as circumstances arose. Cecil was more intolerant towards Papists than towards Puritans. Hyde seemed more averse to Protestant Nonconformists than to Popish recusants. Cecil had broad Protestant sympathies,