first (as I have already said) from the erroneous tone impressed upon the
national history by the irritated spirit of the clergy of the established
church: to the religious zealotry of those times--the church was the
object of especial attack; and its members were naturally exposed to heavy
sufferings: hence their successors are indisposed to find my good in a
cause which could lead to such a result. It is their manifest right to
sympathize with their own order in that day; and in such a case it is
almost their duty to be incapable of an entire impartiality. Meantime they
have carried this much too far: the literature of England must always be
in a considerable proportion lodged in their hands; and the extensive
means thus placed at their disposal for injuriously coloring that
important part of history they have used with no modesty or forbearance.
There is not a page of the national history even in its local subdivisions
which they have not stained with the atrabilious hue of their wounded
remembrances: hardly a town in England, which stood a siege for the king
or the parliament, but has some printed memorial of its constancy and its
sufferings; and in nine cases out of ten the editor is a clergyman of the
established church, who has contrived to deepen 'the sorrow of the time'
by the harshness of his commentary. Surely it is high time that the wounds
of the 17th century should close; that history should take a more
commanding and philosophic station; and that brotherly charity should now
lead us to a saner view of constitutional politics; or a saner view of
politics to a more comprehensive charity. The other cause of this
falsification springs out of a selfishness which has less claim to any
indulgence--viz. the timidity with which the English Whigs of former days
and the party to whom They [4] succeeded, constantly shrank from
acknowledging any alliance with the great men of the Long Parliament under
the nervous horror of being confounded with the regicides of 1649. It was
of such urgent importance to them, for any command over the public
support, that they should acquit themselves of an sentiment of lurking