BEFORE THE RESTORATION.

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ture had long been drawn by the English barons from the chap.

oppressed provinces of France. That source of supply was-■

gone; but the ostentatious and luxurious habits which pro-sperity had engendered still remained; and the great lords,unable to gratify their tastes by plundering the French, wereeager to plunder each other. The realm to which they werenow confined would not, in the phrase of Comines, the mostjudicious observer of that time, suffice for them all. Twoaristocratical factions, headed by two branches of the royalfamily, engaged in a long and fierce struggle for supremacy.

As the animosity of those factions did not really arise from thedispute about the succession, it lasted long after all groundof dispute about the succession was removed. The party ofthe Red Rose survived the last prince who claimed the crownin right of Henry the Fourth. The party of the White Rosesurvived the marriage of Richmond and Elizabeth. Leftwithout chiefs who had any decent show of right, the ad-herents of Lancaster rallied round a line of bastards, and theadherents of York set up a succession of impostors. When,at length, many aspiring nobles had perished on the field ofbattle or by the hands of the executioner, when many illustri-ous houses had disappeared for ever from history, when thosegreat families which remained had been exhausted andsobered by calamities, it was universally acknowledged thatthe claims of all the contending Plantagenets were united inthe house of Tudor.

Meanwhile a change was proceeding infinitely more ExUnc-momentous than the acquisition or loss of any province, than vilienage.the rise or fall of any dynasty. Slavery and the evils bywhich slavery is everywhere accompanied were fast disap-pearing.

It is remarkable that the two greatest and most salutary .social revolutions which have taken place in England, thatrevolution which, in the thirteenth century, put an end to the