plendid
rhetoric is employed in awakening, by turns, the indignation and contempt
of the reader in contemplating the character of the wrong-headed king.
In portraying that character, he has brought into exercise all those
powers of invective and merciless ridicule which give such a savage
relish to his delineation of Barrere. To preserve the consistency of
this character, he denies the king any credit for whatever was really
beneficent and praiseworthy in his government. He holds up the royal
delinquent in only two lights: the one representing him as a tyrant
towards his people; the other as the abject slave of foreign priests,--
a man at once hateful and ludicrous, of whom it is difficult to speak
without an execration or a sneer.

The events which preceded the revolution of 1688; the undisguised
adherence of the king to the Church of Rome; the partial toleration of
the despised Quakers and Anabaptists; the gradual relaxation of the
severity of the penal laws against Papists and Dissenters, preparing the
way for the royal proclamation of entire liberty of conscience throughout
the British realm, allowing the crop-eared Puritan and the Papist priest
to build conventicles and mass houses under the very eaves of the palaces
of Oxford and Canterbury; the mining and countermining of Jesuits and
prelates, are detailed with impartial minuteness. The secret springs of
the great movements of the time are laid bare; the mean and paltry
instrumentalities are seen at work in the under world of corruption,
prejudice, and falsehood. No one, save a blind, unreasoning partisan of
Catholicism or Episcopacy, can contemplate this chapter in English
history without a feeling of disgust. However it may have been overruled
for good by that Providence which takes the wise in their own craftiness,
the revolution of 1688, in itself considered, affords just as little
cause for self-congratulation on the part of Protestants as the
substitution of the supremacy of the crowned Bluebeard, Henry VIII., for
that of the Pope, in the English Church. It had little in common with
the revolution of 1642. The field of its action was the closet of
selfish intrigue,--the stalls of discontented prelates,--the chambers of
the wanton and adulteress,--the confessional of a weak prince, whose
mind, originally narrow, had been cramped closer still by the strait-
jacket of religious bigotry and superstition. The age of nobility and
heroism had well-nigh pas