it into the grave. For centuries, every vigorous intellect or free spirit that started up in Spain, had expiated its offence by the dungeons of the Inquisition, or death. The hour of national peril came; the hero and the statesman were then wildly called for, but the call was unanswered; they were not in existence; the soul was in the grave, or on the winds; and Spain, once so admirable for the brilliancy of its warlike and political genius, exhibited the extraordinary reverse, of ten millions of brave men without a soldier to lead them; and juntas and councils in every province without a statesman capable of directing them to any measure of common wisdom. The burden soon fell on the British, and it was heroically sustained. But the successes of the peninsular war are too familiar to be detailed here. Six years of almost uninterrupted campaigns, in which all the resources of the art of war were displayed on both sides; proved that England could be as invincible by land as on the ocean, placed the Duke of Wellington in a rank with Marlborough, planted the British standard in France for the first time since the Henries and Edwards, and gave the first blow, within his own frontiers, to the hitherto unchecked and unrivalled career of Napoleon.

The British army alone had interposed between Spain and total slavery. For some years its strength was inadequate to the extent of the

field, and to the vast resources of the French empire. But a large share of its difficulties arose from the Spaniards themselves. The successive parties which assumed the government were found equally feeble. The spirit of the juntas was timid, frivolous, and formalising. With the most worthless part of national pride, they felt it an insult to be saved by the sword of strangers; with the lowest part of national prudence, they dreaded to irritate the enemy by defeating him. They hated the French, but they would not be helped by the English, and they could not help themselves. In this decrepitude, they solaced their wounded vanity by satires and ballads, determinations of future heroism, and the grand recollection, that their forefathers had expelled the Moors, though the feat had cost them three hundred years!

Those absurdities should be remembered for higher purposes than ridicule. They show how totally the spirit of a grave and high-hearted people may be perverted by a false system of government. The old, generous virtue of the Spanish soil had now force enough only to throw up those flaunting weeds. With liberty, it had lost the rich productiveness of liberty. juntas differed from the courtiers of the Philips and Ferdinands in nothing but a cockade.

The

A few years saw them sink into insignificance; and they merited their fate. They had made no

use of the highest advantages of their connexion with England. From the great land of freedom, literature, and religion, they borrowed nothing but money and arms. They shrank from the natural and only means of renovating the national heart. While Spain was under the foot of her enemy, with the blood gushing from a thousand wounds, they would suffer no infusion of that living stream of health and virtue which glowed under the impregnable corslet of England. They turned away their purblind eyes from the splendours which should have taught them to see; and abjured her press, her legislature, and, above all, her religion. The cry of " Heresy" was as keen as in the day's of Loyola. They dug up the bodies of the English soldiers, as unworthy to sleep in the same clay with a Spaniard. They repelled and suppressed the Bible! that first book which a true legislator would put into the hands of his people, even as the noblest manual of patriotism.

All the art of man was never able to reconcile religious slavery with civil freedom. What can be the independence of him who, but by the permission of a priest, dares not read the Bible-that first and most perennial source of freedom; that highest fount of stainless principle, unhesitating courage, and fidelity strong as the grave; which, while it ministers, beyond all philosophy, to the contentment of a private career, and divests the bosom of all eagerness for the trivial and vanishing

distinctions of public life, yet lays every man under the responsibility of exerting his best powers for the public good; that book, which, teaching him to be zealous without violence, and aspiring without ambition, and filling his mind with calmer and loftier contemplations than the unsubstantial visions of earth, prepares him to look with composure on the severest sacrifices, solicit no other praise than the testimony of his own conscience, and silently devote himself to the cause of man, and of that mighty Being who will not suffer him to be tempted beyond his power.

CHAPTER XV.

THE REGENCY.

THE Prince of Wales, after a long retirement from public life, was recalled by an event which created the deepest sorrow throughout the empire. The affliction which, in 1788, had made the king incapable of government, was announced to have returned.* A Regency Bill, with restrictions, to last for a year, was passed. The more than useless bitterness of the old contest was not renewed; its leaders had perished; a judicious declaration that the prince, from respect to the king, would make no immediate change in the ministry, at once quieted fears and extinguished hopes; and, with all resistance at home conquered, or neutralised, he entered upon the great office of Regent of a dominion extending through every quarter of the globe, numbering one hundred millions of people, and constituting the grand resource of liberty, knowledge, and religion, to mankind.

The reign of George the Third was now at an end, for though nominally monarch, he never resumed the throne. The lucid intervals of his

* October 25, 1810.