Let creases, until a sovereign arises who determines upon the revolutionary measure of assembling the States-General-revolutionary, because resulting solely from royal will and pleasure. the French constitutional antiquaries say what they please, such an assembly as the Etats-Généraux was not grounded upon ancient usages, not taught by ancient traditions, not warranted by prerogative, not sanctioned by law; but the good sense, the vigour, the necessity, if you choose, of the crown stood in the place of usage, and tradition, and prerogative, and law. The ordinance which convoked the first States-General was as much a coup d'état as that which cost Charles X. his throne. The constitutional history of France begins with a revolution; and what was the result? The provincial states lost their authority: the StatesGeneral became unmanageable and effete, troublesome to the crown, unprofitable to the people, until the whole was swept away, and the new order of things established, which in all its waves and mutations exhibits only one element, a central despotic authority, into which all others are constantly tending to sink and disappear. If comparative anatomy be useful to the physiologist, not less instructive to the historian is the comparative development of constitutions. Perhaps due attention to the prevailing principle of our government, will enable us to afford something like an explanation of the contrast between England, and France, and Germany; but it is a principle which has never been appreciated by continental writers-except only Hegel-rarely by our own. The English constitution is not based upon liberty, but upon law; our law secures the liberty of the subject,- —our law knows nothing of the liberty of the people;-yet the subject values his liberty only to obtain the protection of the law. Our parliament is not a political assembly, but a tribunal; and in which, whatever the question may be, the vote of the member is the exercise of his functions as a judge—a judge, if need be, between the subject and the sovereign. Whatever abuse, whatever unconscientiousness may have been exhibited by individuals or parties, this, and no other, is the theory of all our conflicts and revolutions. Ours has not been a rude contest for assertion of individual independence, but an attempt to obtain an adjudication upon our rights. We have never contended for abstract rights or for general principles: our constitution is not a charter of maxims and definitions, divided into chapters and articles, but the result of definite remedies applied to definite grievances: when it ceases to be so, our empire will have completed its fall. Subjects and questions connected with the Conquest crowd upon us. Was the use of the French or Romance language in England 6 England the immediate effect of the Conquest? Did William the Conqueror introduce the 'feudal system?' Was there ever such a thing as the feudal system? Was there ever in England, such a villein as is described in law-books and romances, in Blackstone or Ivanhoe? Was there ever such a 'state of society' as exhibited in Dr. Robertson's View,' or in Mrs. Ratcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho?' What was the real "spirit of chivalry"-when did "chivalry" begin—when did it end-did it not end before it began? Was not Matthew Bramble in the right when he said that seeing how his contemporary antiquaries had exaggerated the 'influence of chivalry,' he expected that the use of trunk hose and spiced ale could be deduced therefrom? Where is the best comment to be found upon the pretensions of Pope Hildebrand? Must we not descend to the Peace of Westphalia to understand him? But all these topics we must leave undiscussed, and-hoping and trusting that if any of our readers are unacquainted with Thierry's narrative, they will now turn to it*-hasten to the conclusion of the Conqueror's reign. Amongst the other troubles and causes of trouble attached, as so many curses, to the inheritance of Rollo, was a claim possessed by William to what was afterwards usually called the Norman Vexin.† This district was a dismemberment of a once much more important territory. In the age of Cæsar and Ptolemy the Pagus Veliocassinus included the city of Rouen. One fine portion, afterwards called the Rouennais, fell to the share of Rollo. A second portion was held by the Kings of France, after the extinction of a line of Counts of obscure origin, who claimed great independence. It should seem that they were patrons of the Advowson of St. Denis;' and it was in this capacity that the Kings of France waved the oriflamme, afterwards deemed the distinctive banner of the crown. The third portion of the Vexin was the tract about which the present strife arose. It had been ceded to William's father; but, during his minority, the Kings of France had repossessed themselves of the territory. Whether from policy or from apprehension, William was, on the whole, loath to wage war against his liege lord, Philip; indeed, every battle which the Duke of Normandy fought against the King of the French, was an example of insubordination which recoiled upon the King of the English. At length, extensive depredations committed by the burgesses of Mantes-forays made into * We take this opportunity of thanking Mr. Charles Hamilton for a very wellexecuted translation of Thierry's History of the Conquest-it is the performance of an accomplished and discriminating scholar. + Mr. Stapleton's map and geographical comments should be consulted; they are invaluable for all such portions of French and Norman history. Normandy, Normandy, and these attacks, too, upon the lands of such proud barons as William de Breteuil and Roger de Jorcy, roused William to great anger. He was affronted by the insult received from those whom he viewed as his revolted subjects, and he demanded the cession of Mantes and Chaumont, in addition to the whole of the territory which, he alleged, had been withheld. Philip refused; cavilling, it is said, and instigated by the undutiful Robert, then at war with his father, and evading rather than denying the claim. Coarse jests passed between the sovereigns, by which they were mutually embittered; and William, now no longer to be restrained, prepared to assert his rights by the sword. In the style of the Trouveurs, our chroniclers tell us how the harvest was waving, the grapes swelling on the stem, the fruits reddening on the bough, when William entered the fertile land; as he advanced, the corn was trodden down, the vineyards havocked, the gifts of Providence wastefully destroyed. An imprudent sally of the inhabitants of Mantes enabled William to enter the city. It was fired by the soldiery; churches and dwellings alike sunk in the flames: even the recluses were burned in their cells. William, aged and unwieldy in body, yet impetuous and active in mind, cheered the desolation, and galloped about and about through the burning ruins. His steed stumbled amidst the embers: like the third sovereign who bore the name of William, the rider received a fatal hurt from his fall. A lingering inflammation ensued from the bruise, which the leechcraft of those days could neither heal nor allay. The noise, the disturbance, the atmosphere of the close, narrow, unsavoury streets of Rouen became intolerable to the fevered sufferer, and he was painfully removed to the conventual buildings of St. Gervase on an adjoining hill. The inward combustion spread so rapidly that no hope of recovery remained, and William knew that there was none. Now ensued that conflict of feelings, never entirely absent from the bed of death, but sometimes so painfully visible; when, as personified in the paintings which bespeak the mind of the ages that produced them, we behold the good angel and the evil demon contending for the mastery of the departing soul-the clinging to earthly things, with an entire consciousness of their worthlessnessself-condemnation and self-deceit;-repentance and obduracy-the scales of the balance trembling between heaven and hell. tongue can tell,' he said, 'the wickednesses which I have perpetrated in my life of toil and care.' He recounted his trials, the base ingratitude he had sustained, and also extolled his own virtues; he confessed himself, praised himself for his conscientious appointments in the church; his alms, and the seventeen monas 6 teries teries and six nunneries which under his reign had been founded in Normandy. But Rufus and Henry are standing by the bed side. Who is to be the Conqueror's heir? How are his domains to be divided? Robert, as firstborn, is to take Normandy. 'Wretched,' declared the King, will be the country subjected to his rule; but he hath received the homages of the barons; and the concession once made cannot be withdrawn. Of England I will appoint no one heir: let Him in whose hands are all things provide according to his will.' Bitterly lamenting the crimes, the slaughters, the wide-wasting wretchedness produced by his ambition, he declared he dared not bestow the realm thus won by wrongfulness. But this reserve was a mere delusion, and he evaded the import of his own words by declaring his hope that William, who from youth upwards had been an obedient son, might succeed him. Nor did he rest in the mere wish. He turned him round in his weary bed, and directed that a mandate should be prepared, addressed to Lanfranc, commanding him to place Rufus on the throne: and the dying man, he who had just vowed that he would not take thought concerning the sinful inheritance, affixed his royal signet to the instrument by which, in fact, he bequeathed the unlawful gain. And he forthwith delivered the same to Rufus, kissed him and blessed him, and Rufus hastened away to England, lest he should lose that blood-stained crown. And what was Henry Beauclerk, his father's favourite, to inherit? A treasure of five thousand pounds of white silver, told and weighed. Henry began to lament this unequal gift. 'What will all the treasure profit me,' he exclaimed, ‘if I have neither land nor home?' William comforted his youngest son, and that strangely, by the prophetic intimation that, becoming far greater than either brother, Henry should one day possess all his parental honours. William was now silent. Those who surrounded him, had heard of alms and of repentance, of contrition, and of distribution of the wealth, no longer his own—a little to the poor-all, save that little, to his sons. Of forgiveness nothing had been said by William; nothing of remission to the captives in the dungeon, upon whom the doom of perpetual imprisonment had been passed. Would not the king show mercy if he expected mercy? William assented. Morkar had been unjustly punished; this William confessed, and let him be forthwith freed. Roger de Breteuil had been rightly cast into prison, yet William assented to his enlargement. Wulnoth, the brother of Harold, a child when he fell into the hands of the Conqueror, who had sternly kept him in chains from his infancy, and Siward of the north, both now breathed the fresh air again; and William ended by ordering that all the prison doors in England and Normandy should be opened, except to one alone, except to Odo his brother. Much were they saddened at this hardness, many and urgent were the entreaties made. At length William relaxed his severity, without relenting, declaring that he yielded against his will. But this act of grudging, coerced, extorted forgiveness, was his last. A night of somewhat diminished suffering ensued. He sunk into that state, half sleep half stupor, when the troubled expiring body takes a dull, painful, unrestful rest, before its last long earthly repose; but as the cheerful, lifegiving rays of the rising sun were just darting above the horizon across the sad apartment, and shedding brightness on its walls, William was awakened from his imperfect slumbers by the measured, mellow, reverberating, lengthened, swelling toll of the great cathedral bell. It is the hour of Prime,' replied his attendants, in answer to his inquiry. Then were the priesthood, in full choir, welcoming with voices of gladness the renewed gift of another day, and praying in the words of the hymn* which once only in each year is now heard in one only congregation of the English Church, that the hours might flow in holiness, till blessed at their close. Now that the sun is gleaming bright, May guide us as we go. No sinful word, nor deed of wrong, And while the hours in order flow, O Christ, securely fence Our gates beleaguered by the foe, The gate of every sense. And grant that to Thine honour, Lord, But his day of labour and struggle, sin and repentance was passed, and William lifted up his hands in prayer, and expired. As was very common in those times, the death of the great and rich was the signal for a scene of disgraceful neglect and confusion. Not that we are now more humanized in heart; even in our own days, the degraded chamber of a departed monarch is reported to have witnessed the vilest rapacity; but in earlier periods, the eager greediness, now usually restrained from much outward demonstration by habits of decorum and dread of punishment, was displayed and vented, almost as a matter of course, without hesitation, fear, or shame. The attendants plundered the *The hymn ad primam,' common to all the ancient western liturgies, is sung in the original Latin by the scholars of Winchester College when they separate for the Whitsun vacation: 'Jam lucis orto sidere Dum precemur supplices Nil lingua nil peccet manus, Incœpta dum fluet dies, royal |