['Shall the blessed _Sun_ of _Heaven_ prove a micher, and _eat
blackberries_'? A question _not_ to be asked! Shall the blessed 'Son
of England' prove a thief, and take purses? A question _to be asked_.
'The _poor_ abuses of the time want _countenance_.'
_Lear_. Take that from me, my friend,
who have the power to _seal the accuser's_ lips.]
Who better qualified could be found to head the dangerous enterprise
for the deliverance of England from that shame, than the chief in whom
her Alfred arose again to break from her neck a baser than the Danish
yoke, to restore her kingdom and found her new empire, to give her
domains, that the sun never sets on,--her Poet, her Philosopher, her
Soldier, her Legislator, the builder of her Empire of the Sea, her
founder of new 'States.'
But then, of course, it is only by the rarest conjunction of
circumstances, that the movements and plans which such a state of
things gives rise to, can get any other than the most opprobrious name
and place in history. Success is their only certificate of legitimacy.
To attempt to overthrow a government still so strongly planted in the
endurance and passivity of the people, might seem, perhaps, to some
minds in these circumstances, a hopeless, and, _therefore_, a criminal
undertaking.
'That _opportunity_ which then they had to take from us, to resume, we
have again,' might well have seemed a sufficient plea, so it could
have been made good. But it is not strange that some few, even then,
should find it difficult to believe that the national ruin was yet so
entire, that the ashes of the ancient nobility and commons of England
were yet so cold, as that a system of despotism like that which was
exercised here then, could be permanently and securely fastened over
them. It is not strange that it should seem to these impossible that
there should not be enough of that old English spirit which, only a
hundred years before, had ranged the people in armed thousands, in
defence of LAW, against absolutism, enough of it, at least, to welcome
and sustain the overthrow of tyranny, when once it should present
itself as a fact accomplished, instead of appealing beforehand to a
courage, which so many instances of vain and disastrous resistance had
at last subdued, and to a spirit which seemed reduced at last, to the
mere quality of the master's will.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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