ont smiled them into a persuasion that she was an
angel, and they adored her because they thought she loved them; while
Madam Mellicent chided them for their faults, traced their misfortunes
to their imprudence, and instead of trying to persuade them out of their
prejudices, informed them that their capacities and education best
fitted them for the duty of obedience. She was a woman of natural
shrewdness, but not sufficiently conversant with the world to know the
advantage of prudently temporizing, or the usefulness of forbearance.
She had not allowed herself to study the temper of the times; she saw
not that the bands of subordination were relaxing, and that the
populace, leaving the practice of duties, were now busy in ascertaining
rights. A change so important and so similar to that to which of late
years public opinion has again leaned, will justify a few remarks on its
causes, before I describe its effects.

The coercive system of government, which, during the arbitrary reigns of
the Tudor family, wore the dignified aspect of prescriptive authority,
was submitted to by a people grateful to that popular house, whose
accession healed the wounds of a long protracted civil war; but when
continued by what England esteemed a race of foreign Kings, it was
stigmatized by the name of tyranny. The favours and privileges which
Henry the Seventh bestowed on the commons, and the stratagems he
employed to reduce the power of those barons who had been the makers and
unmakers of Kings, had, during the course of five reigns, created a new
order of men, whose power and influence in the commonwealth were yet
unknown to the advisers of the crown. The long internal peace of a
century and a half, added to the stimulus which commerce had received
during the reign of Elizabeth, introduced a vast influx of wealth. The
religious disputes, which were the only contests that disturbed this
repose, engrafted a sour spirit of theological controversy on the warm
devotional feelings that distinguished the age immediately succeeding
the reformation. This temper was fomented by the clerical disputants
among their respective flocks; the pulpit became a stage for spiritual
attack and defence, and the most illiterate congregations were crazed
with discussions of metaphysical divinity, or inflamed with rancorous
hatred against the opponents of their peculiar preacher, who might be
truly said to preach his own doctrine and defend his own cause, and not
t