It is significant of the peaceful and, so to speak, constitutional character of our English Revolution that by far its most momentous scenes were enacted within the four walls of the meeting-places of deliberative assemblies, and find their chronicle in the dry record of votes and resolutions. We have no "days," in the French sense of the word, or hardly any, to commemorate. The gradual accomplishment of the political work of 1688-89 is not marked and emphasised like that of 1789-92 at every stage by some out-door event of the picturesque, the stirring, or the terrible kind--such for instance as those by which the 14th of July, the 6th of October, the 10th of August, and in a darker order of memories, the 2d of September, have been made landmarks in the revolutionary history of France. On every one of the days thus singled out for glorious or for shameful remembrance, some irrevocable step was taken--some new position gained by the advancing forces of French democracy from which there was no retreat. We in England have no anniversaries of the kind. We may remember, though we have ceased to celebrate in our churches, the day in which William first set foot on our shores; but we feel that after all it was not an "event" in the sense of that other great Protestant deliverance with which in month-date it so fortunately coincided, and for which the Anglican liturgy economically set apart a common form of thanksgiving. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot was an incident having results of the most permanent and unalterable character. It made all the difference between the safety and the destruction of the Sovereign and the three Estates of the Realm. Again, the execution of Charles I. determined something, by committing the country to the military autocracy of Cromwell and the powerful reaction of the Restoration. But this cannot be said of the landing of the Prince of Orange at Torbay--the mere opening of a drama which might have had any one of half a dozen _dénoûments_; it can hardly even be said of the second and definitive flight of James. The 23d of December 1688 was in one sense no more of an "epoch-making" day than the 5th of November in the same year. It is true that the sovereign's abandonment of his throne and country became something more than a striking dramatic event; it was elevated into an act of profound political import. It had or was invested with inward and most momentous legal significance, in addition to its outward historical prominence. But for all that it determined nothing at the moment of its occurrence but the future of a single man. It is quite conceivable that the mere flight of James II. should have settled no more than his own incapacitation--that it should not even have brought about the exclusion of his son from the succession, still less have led to the formal recognition of a new principle in the English Constitution. True it is that all these consequences were deducible from it as matter of