public anxiety, 1745.

"All our forces are come from Flanders. The Pretender's second son (Henry
Stuart, afterwards Cardinal of York) is come to Dunkirk, where it is said
there are forty transports. The rebels, it is said, are very
advantageously encamped between two rivers, and are fortifying their camp."

Another hurried letter says.

"An express arrives to-day, (Dec. 8th,) while his Majesty was at chapel,
which brought an account of the rebels being close to Derby, and that the
Duke of Cumberland was at Meredan, four miles beyond Coventry observing
their motions."

Another of the same date, six o'-clock at night, says, "The Tower guns
have not fired to-day. A letter has been received, stating that the rebels
had retreated towards Ashbourne."

Walpole, in a letter to Sir Horace Mann, on the 9th repeats the news, and
says, "The Highlanders got nine thousand pounds at Derby, and had the
books brought to them, and obliged everybody to give them what they had
subscribed against them. They then retreated a few miles, but returned
again to Derby, got L10,000 more, and plundered the town; they are gone
again, and got back to Leake in Staffordshire, but miserably harassed;
they have left all their cannon behind them, and twenty waggons of sick."

Nothing can give a stronger example of the changes which may take place in
a country, than the different state of preparation for an invader,
exhibited by England in 1745, and in little more than half a century after.
On the threat of Napoleon's invasion, England exhibited an armed force of
little less than a million, which would have been quadrupled in case of an
actual descent. In 1745, the alarm was extravagant, and almost burlesque.
The Pretender, with but a few thousand men--brave undoubtedly, but almost
wholly unprovided for a campaign--marched into the heart of England, and
reached within a hundred and thirty miles of the capital. But the
enterprise was then felt to be wholly beyond his means. A powerful force
under the Duke of Cumberland was already thrown between him and London.
What was more ominous still, no man of English rank had joined him, London
was firm, the Protestant feeling of the nation, though slowly excited, was
beginning to be roused, by its recollection of the bigotry of James, and
in England, this feeling will always be ultimately victorious. Even if
Charles Edward had arrived in London, and seized the throne, he would have
only had to commence a civil