THE INTERREGNUM.

443

character was so peculiar is sufficiently obvious, and yet chap.seems not to have been always understood either by eulogists 168S .or by censors.

The continental revolutions of the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries took place in countries where all trace of thelimited monarchy of the middle ages had long been effaced.

The right of the prince to make laws and to levy money had,during many generations, been undisputed. His throne wasguarded by a great regular army. His administration couldnot, without extreme peril, be blamed even in the mildestterms. His subjects held their personal liberty by no othertenure than his pleasure. Hot a single institution was leftwhich had, within the memory of the oldest man, affordedefficient protection to the subject against the utmost excessof tyranny. Those great councils which had once curbed theregal power had sunk into oblivion. Their composition andtheir privileges were known only to antiquaries. We cannotwonder, therefore, that, when men who had been thus ruledsucceeded in wresting supreme power from a governmentwhich they had long in secret hated, they should have beenimpatient to demolish and unable to construct, that theyshould have been fascinated by every specious novelty, thatthey should have proscribed every title, ceremony, and phraseassociated with the old system, and that, turning away withdisgust from their own national precedents and traditions,they should have sought for principles of government in thewritings of theorists, or aped, with ignorant and ungracefulaffectation, the patriots of Athens and Home. As little canwe wonder that the violent action of the revolutionary spiritshould have been followed by reaction equally violent, andthat confusion should speedily have engendered despotismsterner than that from which it had sprung.

Had we been in the same situation; had Strafford suc-ceeded in his favourite scheme of Thorough; had he formedan army as numerous and as well disciplined as that which,a few years later, was formed by Cromwell; had a seriesof judicial decisions, similar to that which was pronouncedby the Exchequer Chamber in the case of ship-money, trans-