14

HISTORY OP ENGLAND,

chap. m ;nds between the greatness of a sovereign and the greatness— of the nation which he rules, that almost every historian ofEngland has expatiated with a sentiment of exultation on thepower and splendour of her foreign masters, and has lamentedthe decay of that power and splendour as a calamity to ourcountry. This is, in truth, as absurd as it would be in a Ilaytiannegro of our time to dwell with national pride on the greatnessof Lewis the Fourteenth, and to speak of Blenheim and Ra-milies with patriotic regret and shame. The Conqueror andhis descendants to the fourth generation were notEnglishmen:most of them were born in France: they spent the greater partof their lives in France: their ordinary speech was French:almost every high office in their gift was filled by aFrenchman:every acquisition which they made on the Continent estrangedthem more and more from the population of our island. Oneof the ablest among them indeed attempted to win the heartsof his English subjects by espousing an English princess. But,by many of his barons, this marriage was regarded as a mar-riage between a white planter and a quadroon girl would nowbe regarded in Virginia. In history he is known by the honour-able surname of Beauelerc; but, in his own time, his owncountrymen called him by a Saxon nickname, in contemptuousallusion to his Saxon connection.

Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, suc-ceeded in uniting all France under their government, it is pro-bable that England would never have had an independentexistence. Her princes, her lords, her prelates, would havebeen men differing in race and language from the artisans andthe tillers of the earth. The revenues of her great proprietorswould have been spent in festivities and diversions on thebanks of the Seine. The noble language of Milton and Burkewould have remained a rustic dialect, without a literature, afixed grammar, or a fixed orthography, and would have beencontemptuously abandoned to the use of boors. No man of