But sacred Saviour! with thy words I woo
Thee to forgive, and not be bitter to
Such as thou knowest do not know what they do."
The Commonwealth of England, whose first grand state seal dated 1648, came virtually to its end at the death of its founder in 1658; and a few years later Charles II. was called from exile to the throne of his fathers.
He is called the merrie monarch; but very far from merrie was the nation under his rule—dissensions and discontent pervaded it in every direction. The truth is, that the prominence given in brief histories to this epithet, the madcap frolics of his court, the witty and unprincipled nobles, and the uncommon array of female beauty which made up the surroundings of his own indolence and love of pleasure, lead to a sort of general idea that all England was one grand carousal. A nearer view changes the scene. The religious contests between conformists and non-conformists, which began in 1662 and lasted some twenty-six years—the fruitful harvest planted in preceding years of anarchy and fanaticism—present pictures of persecution and suffering such as enter only into religious warfare; and which, perhaps, it is most charity to refer to the importance which the opposing parties attach to their subject. During these twenty-six years it is computed that the penalties which were inflicted amounted to between twelve and fourteen millions sterling, and the sufferers for conscience' sake numbered 60,000. Homeless, and hungry, and penniless, they wandered about or were immured in jails; and contemporary writers (Defoe, Penn) assert that from 5000 to 8000 perished "like sheep, in those noisome pest-houses." Surely that was not the day of merrie old England, beyond the precincts of the court.
Charles was succeeded by his brother, James II., who was soon deposed, and William, Prince of Orange, who had married his daughter Mary, was invited to the throne. Next to these came another daughter of James, Queen Anne; and with her expired the line of the Stuarts. The dark fortunes of Mary Stuart rested in some form on all her descendants.
IV.
In what quiet library, in what lordly mansion, was this old book safely stored away through all these changing scenes of pageantry and splendor, of riot and bloodshed? Who was he that first received it, new and comely, from the hands of William Stanly, printer, (who is saved to fame in a little corner of the title-page,) and what name is this, written on the margin in ink, embrowned now and almost obliterated, which evidently was once intended to establish ownership? The dedication to my Lord of Ellismere bespeaks for it a place with the noble and learned; who among them found time then to seek
"how to liue wel and how to die wel, from our Seneca—whose diuine sentences, wholesom counsailes, serious exclamations against vices, in being but a heathen, may make us ashamed being Christians." (Translator's preface.)
What statesman, by lamplight perhaps, when the toils of the day were over, turned these very pages, and drew a rule for his steps from the maxims of the Roman? Hadst thou but a tongue, old book, what tales thou mightest tell! Where wert thou when that pestilence, the plague, swept from London 100,000 of its inhabitants? or where when its career was checked by that other horror, the great conflagration? when the bells from a hundred steeples tolled their own requiem, and the number of houses in London was diminished by 13,000.
One hundred years had passed over it when George I. ascended the English throne; then came Georges II., III., and IV., King William and Queen Victoria. Under the two first, no small portion of the troubles, both at home and with foreign nations, were traceable to the plots and intrigues of the last solitary scion of the house of Stuart; and with George III. a new war boomed over the Atlantic. At last it was finished; and at the somewhat mature age of two hundred and fifty-six years, but still in good condition, our time-honored volume has crossed the ocean to find a new home under the stripes and stars. One more exponent, in its silent eloquence, of that