like its landscape, that culture has already laid its hand upon the
soil; has crowned the hill with verdure, and clothed the vale with
fertility; has run its ploughshare along the mountain side, and led
the stream from its brow; has sought out every finer secret of the
scene, and given the last richness of cultivation to the whole.

From the beginning of the reign of Anne, all was a contest of leading
statesmen at the head of parties. Those contests exhibit great mental
power, singular system, and extraordinary knowledge of the art of
making vast bodies of men minister to the personal objects of avarice
and ambition. But they do no honour to the moral dignity of England.
All revolutions are hazardous to principle. A succession of
revolutions have always extinguished even the pretence to principle.
The French Revolution is not the only one which made a race of
_girouettes_. The political life of England, from the death of Anne to
the reign of George the Third, was a perpetual turning of the
weathercock. Whig and Tory were the names of distinction. But their
subordinates were of as many varieties of feature as the cargo of a
slave-ship; the hue might be the same, but the jargon was that of
Babel. It was perhaps fortunate for the imperial power of England,
that while she was thus humiliating the national morality, which is
the life-blood of nations; her reckless and perpetual enemy beyond the
Channel had lost all means of being her antagonist. The French sceptre
had fallen into the hands of a prince, who had come to the throne a
debauchee; and to whom the throne seemed only a scene for the larger
display of his vices. The profligacy of Louis-Quatorze had been
palliated by his passion for splendour, among a dissolute people who
loved splendour much, and hated profligacy little. But the vices of
Louis the Fifteenth were marked by a grossness which degraded them in
the eye even of popular indulgence, and prepared the nation for the
overthrow of the monarchy. In this period, religion, the great
purifier of national council, maintained but a struggling existence.
The Puritanism of the preceding century had crushed the Church of
England; and the restoration of the monarchy had given the people a
saturnalia. Religion had been confounded with hypocrisy, until the
people had equally confounded freedom with infidelity. The heads of
the church, chosen by freethinking administrations, were chosen more
for the suppleness than for the