public the terrible consequences which will follow, but who are so constituted that, when these results appear, they will not see them or accept them as perfectly legitimate. These men-and I now speak only of those who are sincere and disinterested-are called to present a singular spectacle and suffer a strange destiny. They have proclaimed more confidently, more unreservedly than any others, the principles of reform; while, in fact, none forget and violate those principles more than themselves. They are, more than any others, ardently bent upon that general welfare which is the end which reform proposes for itself; and, in their efforts to attain it, they completely lose sight of it. The country stirs itself without foreseeing what will happen; they do more, they advance onwards without ever seeing what has already happened. Their actions belie their principles, and events contradict their hopes; they care not, they accept everything, individual crimes, public calamities; they call them necessities, and firmly believe that the country ought to receive them as such. It cannot be so; their blindness outlasts and survives the recklessness of the people; as they are gradually forsaken they become successively a party, a faction, a coterie; still they are unconcerned; at first they refuse to believe in their isolation, and, when they believe it, they will not understand it; they have sacrificed all, even their fellow-countrymen, and their own principles to the necessity of success; success also forsakes them, they are yet unenlightened as to their moral discredit and reverses. Such were, in the English revolution, almost all the honest leaders of the Republican party; such, among others, was Edmund Ludlow. He was one of those limited and unbending spirits who are unable to admit more than one ruling idea; and who, when they have received this idea, are possessed by it, and allow it first to rule their conscience and then to acquire the undisputed sway of their whole being. To destroy the king and found the Republic, this was, I repeat, the fixed idea that governed his life. The despotism of the Long Parliament, first over the king's party, then over the nation when it desired to come to terms with the king; the despotism of the army over the Long Parliament, when this in its turn was desirous of peace; lastly, the despotism of the Rump over the army and nation when, after the death of Cromwell, all England demanded a full and free Parliament, which could not fail to recal Charles II.; all these violent and conflicting powers appeared to Ludlow just and necessary, because he expected they would issue, first in the downfal of Charles I., then in the success of the Republican government. To this name alone he successively surrendered the laws, liberties, and happiness of his contemporaries, and remained firmly convinced that the perfidy, first of the king, then of the Parliament, then of the army, then of Cromwell, and finally of Monk, had alone made him and his faithful friends miscarry in their patriotic designs. : Ludlow was mistaken the Republican party had brought its misfortunes entirely upon itself, by its own errors, its own unreasonableness, its own iniquities, and the evils which itself had caused to the country. It had aimed at imposing the Republic on England as Charles I. had aimed at imposing absolute power; it had not taken into consideration either existing interests, national feelings, the immediate results of its enterprise, or the justice of the means it adopted. It had obstinately shut its eyes to the rights which it violated, the resistance which it encountered, the reverses which it experienced, and to its own corruption, which soon came, and ended by bringing pretended Republicans into contempt, that over, into ridicule. Blinded by his infatuation, Ludlow, as long as he remained in active life, saw nothing of all this; when he wrote his Memoirs in the seclusion of his retreat, his infatuation was the same; in reviewing the past he perceived in it nothing which he could not have observed while mingling in its scenes, and his recollections were as confined as had been his judgment while the events were actually occurring around him. But England had seen and judged all; the antipathy and scorn which, in 1688, it again felt for the Stuarts, had not served to excuse, in public opinion, the former revolutionary factions; and when, at that period, Ludlow returned to his country, he did not find there any of the old prejudices which he took back with him; he was only recognised as one of the abettors of the absurd tyranny of the Rump, and one of the judges of Charles I. These were not the colours around which England was then rallying, and which were to be the heralds of the new revolution. If Ludlow had known himself better, if he had been able to analyse with impartiality what was passing in his own mind. when, proscribed and solitary, he was writing his Memoirs, he might have foreseen his unhappy disappointment. In vain is it that men mistake and elude the truth; it acts upon them while they fail to recognise it; it appears even in the efforts which they make to keep it from, their sight, and the blindness of the most obstinate is never exempt from a kind of bewilderment which betrays a secret apprehension of blame and error. Nothing could avail to enlighten Ludlow as to the faults of his party; he did not disapprove in his conscience, or disavow by his words, any of the acts to which it had given its concurrence. Nevertheless, we have only to read his Memoirs in order to be convinced that the remembrance of these acts, especially the condemnation of Charles I., was a source of regret and disquietude to him. He has defended, and wished to justify his conduct, but he constantly felt the absence of more solid grounds of justification. This is the thought from which all else in his Memoirs proceeded, and to which all is related; we are conscious that it pursues and annoys him; in spite of his patriotic disinterestedness he is oppressed by a peculiar position, in which he was especially involved; while he relates how the liberty of his country has been wrested from it, he is continually engaged in his own defence. This accounts for so many facts being unfaithfully represented, so much omission and reserve which it is difficult not to believe to be half-intended. Not only did not Ludlow see, in events, all that he might have seen, but he did not tell all that he had actually seen; he did not dare to relate in detail the death of the king, nor the resistance of the Presbyterian party in Parliament to the tyranny of the army, nor a number of the acts of the Republican party which his own principles condemned. He finds it necessary to dissimulate, to omit, or to pass rapidly over various circumstances, which were, nevertheless, weighty and important. In one word, his mind is naturally limited and obtuse, and even in its own sphere it is not free; blinded as he is, he is constrained to refuse admittance to the few rays of light which he cannot but see. I have now said with reference to Ludlow all that I think; I have shown in him an example, among others, of the deplorable consequences of that spirit of faction, and that passionate adherence to one fixed idea which, in advancing to its goal, has regard neither to the laws of morality nor to the lessons of experience. His was a sad lot; we cannot say that it was an unjust one; nevertheless he had a certain right to regard it as such, since he had been ever sincere. A friend to truth, and desirous of the general welfare of the commu nity, his actions were disinterested, and he steadily followed his convictions, while but little enlightened as to what was passing around him, and incapable of comprehending events and men, he had impulses to justice and liberty often superior to the enlightenment of his age. Easily beguiled by his hopes, he remained constantly inaccessible to fear; if the extent of his attachment to his party was blameable, Cromwell was never able to intimidate or corrupt him. He learnt nothing by experience; but he was not overcome by it. As a Republican he entered Parliament, and he died a Republican on the borders of the Lake of Geneva. In his judgment we can find little to esteem, and in his life there is much which we must blame; but his name deserves our respect; and among those of his time who judged it with rigour, certainly the greater part had no proper appreciation of him.* THOMAS MAY. ENGLAND has enjoyed its season of national gaiety and pleasure. This was during the reign of Elizabeth, when religious excitement, occasioned by fear of foreign invasion, arose in the very midst of the English Reformation. The condition of the people was still one of difficulty and agitation-liberty was far from complete, public prospects were uncertain; nevertheless the country was free from civil war, and seemed to be preparing itself for approaching prosperity. The government possessed the confidence of the nation: the queen, though often tyrannical, was popular and respected. În a time of such tranquillity there was no lack either of employment or of recreation. With the exception of the Puritans, then a small and obscure sect, the minds of the people, although active, were not absorbed by any one passion, nor committed to any regular system. They gave a ready reception to ideas and adventures, from whatever source they might be derived. In the pursuit of fame, wealth, or The Memoirs of Ludlow were first published at Vevey in 1698, in two volumes 8vo. A third volume appeared, also at Vevey, in 1699; and, in the same year, a French translation of the first two volumes was published at Amsterdam. The original text was reprinted in England, in 1751, in one volume folio, and has, since that time, passed through several editions. pleasure, no expense was spared, no difficulty seemed insurmountable. At court and among the people, alike in the cottages of the poor and the mansions of the rich, there was diffused a general taste for society, whether festive or serious; the peasant had his rustic, the noble his sumptuous, festivals. Luxury with the great was gay, though pompous; the poor also found their circumstances no hindrance to mirth. In London, both the higher and lower orders flocked to the theatres to witness the performance of Shakspeare's dramas; in the country, they listened to the strains of wandering minstrels. Banquets and games almost daily relieved the monotony of labour and the constraint of religious solemnities. It was a time of great moral and political turmoil, but of free and happy movement, in which all seemed young and fresh ;— a time at once peaceable and threatening, when society, as yet exacting little, was nevertheless full of ambition, curiosity, and hope. When Charles I. ascended the throne the stream of progress had increased, and England was much changed. The religious spirit had extended itself, and had become excited and gloomy. The spirit of liberty, gathering intelligence and vigour, sought to express itself, and spoke loudly of its rights and expectations. In the place of that unsettled and so to speak, floating activity, ready to recognise, and even to serve, without any consideration of payment, a glorious and formidable national power, there arose on all sides determinate ideas, ardent passions, undeveloped factions, a tendency to scorn and oppose King James and his ignoble government. In proportion as the country had become exacting in its requirements, and severe in its habits, power had become arrogant in its pretensions, and dissipated in its morals; and the court pageantry which, under Elizabeth, had so greatly excited popular curiosity and admiration, was, under her successor, an object only of reprehension and disgust. Charles I. invested royalty and its adjuncts with an imposing exterior. His character was dignified, his manners grave, and his morals pure. But things remained, in all essential respects, the same. The court, always brilliant, became more and more estranged from the country. The haughty nobility, indolent and impoverished, thronged round the prince, seeking only advancement and pleasure. The king's favourite, the Duke of Buckingham-an arrogant, haughty, pompous, frivolous man-trafficked with the power |