ted with
its forms: and while it bids us look forward to a new destiny for the
human race, it teaches us that the maxims and the oracles by which that
destiny must be guided, are to be sought elsewhere than in the Republic of
Plato and the grottos of Egeria.

Compared, then, with the monuments of classic antiquity, those of England
claim the distinction of being associated with an order of things which is
still existing and still in process of development: compared with those of
the rest of christian Europe, they recall a progress, which, much more
consistently than in other countries, has tended in the direction of
popular rights and constitutional liberty. The reader of English history
indeed has too often occasion to blush for the vices or mourn for the
madness of his species, as the spectator who looks upon the grim
fastnesses of the Tower, or into the gloomy purlieus of St. Giles', will
need but little else to remind him of the despotism and inequality which
have pursued liberty into this her boasted and sea-girt retreat. But the
Bastile, certainly, did not look in its day upon scenes of less flagrant
atrocity than the 'towers of Julius;' while this advantage has always
obtained in favor of the latter, that he who turned with disgust or terror
from that image of despotic pride and violence, might behold at no great
distance the piles of Westminster, the seats of law and legislation, where
the irrepressible spirit of freedom in the bosom of the Commons was still
nursing its resentment or muttering its remonstrances at seasons of the
deepest gloom and depression. Henry VIII. might have heard that voice
mingling with the groans of his victims; Charles II. could not altogether
shut it out from the scenes of his midnight revel and debauchery. But no
such hopeful contrast meets us in the features or the history of the
neighboring continent. Democracy, it is true, the rough and hardy growth
of the German forests, struck an earlier root and flourished at first with
better promise _there_ than in England. But this different fortune awaited
it on the continent and the island; that in the former it was soon rooted
out, and required in modern times the most violent and sanguinary efforts
to reproduce it; in the latter it has constantly survived and struggled
through every disaster toward a hopeful development. Such has been the
different political fate of two branches of the great Teutonic family; let
us observe whether some co