Stuarts than for the Ptolemies, and were ready to kiss the dust off
George the Fourth's feet at his visit to Edinburgh)--'Victrix causa
Diis placuit, sed victa puellis.'

The historian of a time of change has always a difficult and
invidious task. For Revolutions, in the great majority of cases,
arise not merely from the crimes of a few great men, but from a
general viciousness and decay of the whole, or the majority, of the
nation; and that viciousness is certain to be made up, in great part,
of a loosening of domestic ties, of breaches of the Seventh
Commandment, and of sins connected with them, which a writer is now
hardly permitted to mention. An 'evil and adulterous generation' has
been in all ages and countries the one marked out for intestine and
internecine strife. That description is always applicable to a
revolutionary generation; whether or not it also comes under the
class of a superstitious one, 'seeking after a sign from heaven,'
only half believing its own creed, and, therefore, on tiptoe for
miraculous confirmations of it, at the same time that it fiercely
persecutes any one who, by attempting innovation or reform, seems
about to snatch from weak faith the last plank which keeps it from
sinking into the abyss. In describing such an age, the historian
lies under this paradoxical disadvantage, that his case is actually
too strong for him to state it. If he tells the whole truth, the
easy-going and respectable multitude, in easy-going and respectable
days like these, will either shut their ears prudishly to his painful
facts, or reject them as incredible, unaccustomed as they are to find
similar horrors and abominations among people of their own rank, of
whom they are naturally inclined to judge by their own standard of
civilisation. Thus if any one, in justification of the Reformation
and the British hatred of Popery during the sixteenth century, should