himself into the power of a fiercer and more daring party. If he
had foreseen it, we suspect that the royal blood which still
cries to Heaven every thirtieth of January, for judgments only to
be averted by salt-fish and egg-sauce, would never have been
shed. One who had swallowed the Scotch Declaration would scarcely
strain at the Covenant.

The death of Charles and the strong measures which led to it
raised Cromwell to a height of power fatal to the infant
Commonwealth. No men occupy so splendid a place in history as
those who have founded monarchies on the ruins of republican
institutions. Their glory, if not of the purest, is assuredly of
the most seductive and dazzling kind. In nations broken to the
curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred from one
tyrant to another, a man without eminent qualities may easily
gain supreme power. The defection of a troop of guards, a
conspiracy of eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an indolent
senator or a brutal soldier on the throne of the Roman world.
Similar revolutions have often occurred in the despotic states of
Asia. But a community which has heard the voice of truth and
experienced the pleasures of liberty, in which the merits of
statesmen and of systems are freely canvassed, in which obedience
is paid, not to persons, but to laws, in which magistrates are
regarded, not as the lords, but as the servants of the public, in
which the excitement of a party is a necessary of life, in which
political warfare is reduced to a system of tactics; such a
community is not easily reduced to servitude. Beasts of burden
may easily be managed by a new master. But will the wild ass
submit to the bonds? Will the unicorn serve and abide by the
crib? Will leviathan hold out his nostrils to the book? The