Looking at the allegiance of the respective shires to the two parties that divided the nation, one cannot help observing the wonderful similitude of their sentiments then as now--almost a parallelism. In those centres where the cavaliers or malignants held sway, their modern representatives--Tories and Jingoes--are still in the ascendant. With some changes and exceptions, true; places which have themselves changed by increase in population, wealth, refinement, and enlightenment--in short, all the adjuncts of civilisation. And in all these, or nearly all, the altered political sentiment has been from the bad to the better, from the low belief in Divine rights and royal prerogatives to a higher faith in the rights of the people, if not its highest and purest form--Republicanism. From this standard rather has there been retrogression since that glorious decade when it was the Government of England. At the Restoration its spirit, with many of its staunchest upholders, took flight to a land beyond the Atlantic, there to breathe freely, live a new life, call into existence and nourish a new nation, ere long destined to dictate the policy and control the action of every other, in the civilised world. This "sure as eggs are eggs;" unless the old leaven of human wickedness--not inherent in man's heart, as shallow thinkers say, but inherited from an ancestry debased by the rule of prince and priest--unless the old weeds of this manhood's debasement spring up again from the old seeds and roots, despite all tramplings down and teachings to the contrary. It may be so. The devil is still alive on the earth, busy as ever misleading and corrupting the sons of men; in many places and countries, alas! too triumphantly successful, even in that land _outre mer_, over the Atlantic. At the breaking out of our so-called, but miscalled, "Great Rebellion," in the belt of shires bordering Wales, the Royalists were in the majority; perhaps not so much in numbers as in strength and authority. The same with Wales itself; not from any natural belief in, or devotion to, the thing called "Crown," but because this spirited people were under the domination of certain powerful and wealthy proprietors of the Royalist party, who controlled their action, as their political leanings. Of this Monmouthshire offers an apt illustration, where the Earl of Worcester, Ragland's lord, held undisputed sway to the remotest corners of the county. Still, Wales was not all for the King; and where such influence failed to be exerted, as in Pembroke and Glamorgan in the south, and some shires and districts of the north, the natural instincts of the Welsh prompted them to declare for liberty, as they have lately done at the polls. From any stigma that may have attached to them in the seventeenth century they have nobly redeemed themselves in the nineteenth.