upon this page of history: he who runs may read the conspicuous and majestic result.

In England, freedom of faith, freedom of thought, and freedom of government, perfected and assisted by each other, have triumphed in their common efforts: the relation of the soul of man to its Maker, the expression of the human intellect to its fellow men, are alike free; whilst free institutions secure the personal rights of every man and the public rights of all. Under the protection of these institutions and these liberties, the prosperity and power of the nation have marvellously augmented, and still increase from day to day. Christian principles, joined to a reverence for the past and a respect for the law, have carried us unscathed through' our severest trials; for by the happy constitution of this country, the essential condition of the morality, strength, and happiness of human society, -namely, the union of permanence and of progress, of conservation with improvement,-has been obtained and secured, as far at least as the incurable frailty of all human works will permit it.

In France, both in the seventeenth and in the eighteenth century, political freedom was wanting. Religious freedom, which had been accepted and secured by the enlightened liberality of Henry IV., perished under the bigoted and arrogant despotism of Louis XIV. But in spite of all legal impediments, the intellectual freedom of the French nation has ever asserted an empire of its own; that independence and public spirit which were absent from the institutions of the country, took refuge in social life, where the animated expression of opinion, the pleasures and pursuits of the mind, have kept their place in the favour of the nation, and sometimes even in the favour of the absolute sovereign. They were relished by Louis XIV.; they were tolerated by Louis XV. The faculties of the human mind remained free and active, though without any direct or precise application to the administration of the country; but their influence, which was recognised by the government-a government less despotic in its spirit than in its form,-sufficed to keep up the circulation and vital movement of the moral and social powers of the nation. France was ill-governed, but not, in the strict sense of the term, oppressed, and she had lost neither her lustre, her prosperity, nor her greatness. The day came at last when this intellectual freedom of the country, controlled by an authority too mild and too weak to resist it, imperiously demanded freedom of conscience and freedom of government in the name of the rights of man and of the people. From that day to the present, France has been tossed by storm

after storm across the pathless seas, and it is still a problem whether she will ever reach that haven for which she started, and which she has twice appeared to have attained. But thanks to that intellectual freedom which she has ever retained, and thanks to the temperate policy of her kings, she has encountered these trials in the full possession of her powers; she has borne them without perishing; and she has wrested from those frightful convulsions results of no common value. She has reformed the internal condition of society; she has emancipated the industry of the country from internal restrictions; the administration of public affairs, and what may be termed the mechanism of society, has attained a high degree of perfection; freedom of conscience, though ill-defined and imperfectly secured by the law, is nevertheless established. In spite of her mistakes and her reverses, France has a right to believe that she has not yet seen the close of her achievements any more than of her trials; and that the efforts and the progress she has made in the last three centuries will never be complete until she has secured, by public liberty, the pledge of her triumphs and realisation of her hopes.

The destinies of Spain are more melancholy and more obscure. That noble people remained for three hundred years doomed to stagnation by its spiritual and temporal tyrants, and it submitted to its fate until the insults and the arms of a foreign invader roused it from its lethargy. But the victory secured to the Spanish nation in that contest by the alliance of England gave birth to no lasting principle of political regeneration. The burden of centuries of apathy, sterility, and decay is less easily shaken off than the burden of foreign oppression. The Spaniards may pursue their task, but has Europe sufficient reason to place confidence in the result?

In thus endeavouring to trace the principles and the results of the distinct systems of policy which have, for the last three hundred years, disputed the empire of modern society, we have confined these observations to three States of Western Europe. But this survey might be carried further: the same political systems might be compared in the States of Northern and in those of Southern Europe, or in the British and Dutch colonies and the colonies of Spain, both in America and in Asia. Everywhere the results are the same; everywhere the same answer must be given to the same interrogatories. Wherever Catholic absolutism has reigned, it has stopped and congealed the life of society; it has stricken the nations with barrenness; by stifling freedom, it has established an authority without real çoherence and force,-an authority which has never prevented

the occurrence of great days of trial, and which, those trials having begun, fails to curb their excesses, and proves to be almost equally incapable of reform and of stability. Wherever, on the contrary, Protestantism has prevailed, as in England, Holland, or in the North of Europe; or even the more moderate and enlightened form of Catholicism, as in France, Belgium, and a part of Germany, where the Church of Rome has not been either the instrument or the mistress of the civil power,moral activity, social energy, public prosperity, have spread and increased, under different shapes and with various success, but always with fruits beneficial and glorious to mankind. These nations may have committed great faults, or great crimes; they may have endured great sufferings; their progress has been more or less rapid, more or less complete; but they have not fallen into decrepitude or extinction; through all the aberrations of their course and the vicissitudes of their destiny, they have remained or have become capable of the highest culture. These abundant results, though sometimes in appearance contradictory, are in reality the harmonious product which fulfils the task of humanity and satisfies the wants of society; and thus they have continued to advance towards that boundless future which is the sublime goal of Christian civilisation and the mark of its divine origin.

The two works which stand prefixed to this article have for their subject the earlier scenes and the most prominent actors in the great European drama which we have here sought to follow in its plot and its significance-the Spanish monarchy in its gloomy splendour, and the Commonwealth of the United Provinces in its bloody origin-Philip II. and William of Orange-Catholicism and Protestantism-contending with equal fury and under their most indomitable champions. Starting from different points, and arriving at different periods, in this memorable history, Mr. Prescott and Mr. Motley relate the same tale. Both of them being Protestants, the one has chosen for his principal subject and the centre of his narrative the King and his Catholic court; the other the Prince and the people of the Reformed faith. The work of Mr. Prescott is to comprise the whole reign of Philip II.; but the two first volumes, which alone are now before us, contain no more than the first twelve years of that period,-from 1556 to 1568. Mr. Motley has taken the life of William of Orange as the standard of his book. He opens it with the accession of Philip, and closes it in 1584, when William fell by the pistol of an assassin paid by the King; and Philip exclaimed on the arrival of the intelligence, Had

⚫ that blow been struck two years ago, the Catholic Church and I should have gained by it." Philip had cause to temper his exultation with regret; for though William of Nassau was no more, the Commonwealth of the United Provinces was founded.

These publications have been seasonably undertaken; for the evidence necessary to a full and entire comprehension of the events and the men they describe has only become accessible in our own times. Not indeed that earlier chroniclers were wanting to record them. Charles V. and Philip II. had both taken especial care to provide this class of writers, and even to furnish them with information. Three Spanish historians and one Neapolitan, contemporaries of the period, Sepulveda, Herrera, Cabrera, and Campana, have left voluminous narratives of their reigns. Sepulveda and Herrera were the regular historiographers of Charles V. and Philip II. respectively, and the former seems to have enjoyed from his master a degree of independence equal to his opportunities of observation. On one occasion he wished to read to the Emperor some fragments of his work. 'No,' said Charles, I will neither hear nor read 'what you have written about me. Others will read it when I am gone; but if you require information on any point what'ever, I shall always be ready to give it you.' Even in his retirement at Yuste, the Emperor occasionally received Sepulveda, who was also living in retirement at a small country-house near Cordova, his birthplace, and writing his book as his master was closing his life, at a distance from the world, but not detached from it. There is no reason to suppose that Philip II. granted the same familiarity or the same freedom to his historiographer Herrera. These official historians, however, and especially Sepulveda, are not only important as contemporary and wellinformed witnesses, but they have a good deal of that unconscious impartiality which proceeds from an accurate knowledge of the persons and events they describe. In the history of Philip II. by Cabrera, which has no official character, and only the first part of which has been published, some traits of the character and secret policy of the King are to be found, so true and forcible, that the author himself appears scarcely to have felt their whole significance. In addition to these contemporary writers, several subsequent authors, such as Gregorio Leti in the seventeenth century, and Watson in the eighteenth, wrote the history of Philip II., but without having access to any new authorities. In our own time, fresh materials have been discovered in great abundance: in Spain, in Holland, in Belgium, in France, the public archives have been searched; diplomatic correspondence, private memoirs, the most authentic and secret

documents have been dragged to light and abandoned to the curiosity of the learned and the idle. Three great collections more especially, the archives of the house of Nassau, published at Leyden by M. Groen van Prinsterer; the correspondences of Charles V., Philip II., and William the Silent, which M. Gachard has published either textually or by extracts from the archives of Simancas and of Brussels; and the papers of Cardinal Granvelle inserted in the great collection of unpublished historical documents relating to the history of France, which was begun in 1833 by M. Guizot, then Minister of Public Instruction, have in the last twenty-five years poured a flood of light on the history of this period; and we may now be almost as well acquainted with the transactions of the sixteenth century as if the living men of that age were speaking and acting before us.

To these numerous documents, which were already known to the public, Mr. Prescott and Mr. Motley have added some new and hitherto unknown results of their own researches. Their books are not mere compilations from other books; they have prosecuted these discoveries in public libraries, in archives, in private collections of MSS.; each of them gives a careful account in his preface of his own sources of information, of the courteous assistance he has received, of the results which he hopes to have attained; and their works fully confirm, by their close and conscientious study of the subject, that confidence which the mere statement of their labours at once inspires.

As we proceeded in the history of Philip II. by Mr. Prescott, this confidence steadily increased. He has given us not only a complete and accurate narrative, but a narrative which is remarkably impartial; and this impartiality is not only the strict impartiality which consists in speaking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but the generous impartiality of a liberal mind which enters into opinions and feelings it does not share, assigns a fair place to diversity of situation, to disinterested motives, to traditional prejudices, to irresistible circumstances; and treats the memory of historic personages, whose principles and actions it execrates, with the equity and forbearance of an upright and humane judge passing sentence on their lives. Philip II. and the Duke of Alva, even Margaret of Parma and Cardinal Granvelle, sometimes put Mr. Prescott's virtue to a severe trial; but his virtue is never at fault. It does great honour to Protestant civilisation that it has furnished historians thus prepared to render full and free justice to its bitterest enemies. This impartiality, just without effort, is the result of a sincere homage to truth, of an earnest sentiment of Christian charity, and of the security of a cause already won.