“To be broken into and rifled within a century; to be set under the foot of a Henry VIII. and pinned to the petticoat of an Elizabeth; to be mocked at in the death of a Mary, Queen of Scots, and a Charles; to be thrown out of window by a Cromwell. Our charters and our liberties! Oh! we are a thrifty race. We can pocket them all when it suits our convenience, and flaunt them to the world on exhibition-days. Our charter did not save young Raymond Herbert his neck for sticking to his faith during the Reformation, though I believe that same charter provided above all things that the church of God should be free; and a Chief-Justice Herbert sat on the bench and pronounced sentence on the boy, not daring to wag a finger in defence of his own flesh and blood. Of course the Catholic Church was not the church of God, for so the queen’s majesty decreed; and to Chief-Justice Herbert we owe these lands, such of them as were saved. Great heaven! we talk of nobility--English nobility; the proudest race under the sun. The proudest race under the sun, who would scorn to kiss the Pope’s slipper, grovelled in the earth, one and all of them, under the heel of an Elizabeth, and the other day trembled at the frown of a George the Fourth!” I need not dwell on the fact that in those days I had a particular fondness for the sound of my own voice. I gloried in what seemed to me startling paradoxes, and flashes of wisdom that loosened bolts and rivets of prejudice, shattered massive edifices of falsehood, undermined in a twinkling social and moral weaknesses, which, of course, had waited in snug security all these long years for my coming to expose them to the scorn of a wondering world. What a hero I was, what a trenchant manner I had of putting things, what a keen intellect lay concealed under that calm exterior, and what a deep debt the world would have owed me had it only listened in time to my Cassandra warnings, it will be quite unnecessary for me to point out. “I suppose I ought to be very much ashamed of myself,” said Kenneth good-humoredly; “but I still confess that I find my own country the most interesting of any that I have seen. It may be that the very variety, the strange contradictions in our national life and character, noticed by our radical here, are in themselves no small cause for that interest. If we have had a Henry VIII., we have had an Alfred and an Edward; if we have had an Elizabeth, we have also had a Maud; if our nobles cowered before a woman, they faced a man at Runnymede, and at their head were English churchmen, albeit not English churchmen of the stamp of to-day. If we broke through our charter, let us at least take the merit of having restored something of it, although it is somewhat mortifying to find that centuries of wandering and of history and discovery only land us at our old starting-point.” “I give in. Bah! we are spoiling the night with history, while all nature is smiling at us in her beautiful calm.”