n, out of scores which compose "The Bow of
Ulysses," and upon which its phrases mainly hinge. Semper
eadem--"Always the same"--has been the proud motto of the mightiest
hierarchy that has controlled human action and shaped the destinies of
mankind, no less in material than in ghostly concerns. Yet is a vast
and very beneficial change, due to the imperious spirit of the times,
manifest in the Roman Church. No longer do the stake, the sword, and
the dismal horrors of the interdict figure as instruments for assuring
conformity and submission to her dogmas. She is now content to rest
her claims on herbeneficence in the past, as attested by noble and
imperishable memorials of her solicitude for the poor and the ignorant,
and in proclaiming the gospel without those ghastly coercives to its
acceptance. Surely such a change, however unpalatable to those who
have been compelled to make it, is most welcome to the outside world at
large. "Always the same" is also, or should be, the device of the
discredited herd whose spokesman Mr. Froude is so proud to be. In
nothing has their historical character, as shown in the published
literature of their [152] cause up to 1838, exhibited any sign of
amelioration. It cannot be affected by the spirit and the lessons of
the times. Mendacity and a sort of judicial blindness seem to be the
two most salient characteristics by which are to be distinguished these
implacable foes and would-be robbers of human rights and liberty. But,
gracious heavens! what can tempt mortals to incur this weight of
infamy? Wealth and Power? To be (very improbably) a Croesus or (still
more improbably) a Bonaparte, and to perish at the conventional age,
and of vulgar disease, like both? Turpitudes on the part of sane men,
involving the sacrifice of the priceless attributes of humanity, can be
rendered intelligible by the supreme temporal gains above indicated,
but only if exemption from the common lot of mankind--in the shape of
care, disease, and death--were accompaniments of those prizes.

In favour of slavery, which has for so many centuries desolated the
African family and blighted its every chance of indigenous progress--of
slavery whose abolition our author so ostentatiously regrets--only one
solitary permanent result, extending in every case over [153] a natural
human life, has been paraded by him as a respectable justification. At
page 246, speaking of Negroes met by him during a stroll which he to