whenever
we prayed for the prosperity of our country, or our own, we at the same
time prayed for the life and welfare of the Protector, as indissolubly
linked to it. Your hours were devoted to our benefit, your ambition was to
obtain our commendation. You decorated our towns with edifices, you
bestowed on us useful establishments, you gifted the soil with abundant
fertility. The powerful and unjust cowered at the steps of your
judgment-seat, and the poor and oppressed arose like morn-awakened flowers
under the sunshine of your protection.

"Can you wonder that we are all aghast and mourn, when this appears
changed? But, come, this splenetic fit is already passed; resume your
functions; your partizans will hail you; your enemies be silenced; our
love, honour, and duty will again be manifested towards you. Master
yourself, Raymond, and the world is subject to you."

"All this would be very good sense, if addressed to another," replied
Raymond, moodily, "con the lesson yourself, and you, the first peer of the
land, may become its sovereign. You the good, the wise, the just, may rule
all hearts. But I perceive, too soon for my own happiness, too late for
England's good, that I undertook a task to which I am unequal. I cannot
rule myself. My passions are my masters; my smallest impulse my tyrant. Do
you think that I renounced the Protectorate (and I have renounced it) in a
fit of spleen? By the God that lives, I swear never to take up that bauble
again; never again to burthen myself with the weight of care and misery, of
which that is the visible sign.

"Once I desired to be a king. It was in the hey-day of youth, in the pride
of boyish folly. I knew myself when I renounced it. I renounced it to gain
--no matter what--for that also I have lost. For many months I have
submitted to this mock majesty--this solemn jest. I am its dupe no
longer. I will be free.

"I have lost that which adorned and dignified my life; that which linked me
to other men. Again I am a solitary man; and I will become again, as in my
early years, a wanderer, a soldier of fortune. My friends, for Verney, I
feel that you are my friend, do not endeavour to shake my resolve. Perdita,
wedded to an imagination, careless of what is behind the veil, whose
charactery is in truth faulty and vile, Perdita has renounced me. With her
it was pretty enough to play a sovereign's part; and, as in the recesses of
your beloved forest we acted masques, and imagined ours