What need had England to consent to our last troubles?çoisRené Shut up in her island and in her national enmities, she was sheltered. What need had the Cabinet of St. James to dread the separation of Ireland? Ireland is only England's long-boat: cut the painter, and the long-boat, separated from the big ship, will go to wreck amid the waves. Lord Liverpool himself had sad forebodings. I dined with him one day: after dinner, we talked at a window overlooking the Thames; down the river we saw a portion of the City, of which the fog and smoke enlarged the bulk. I praised to my host the solidity of the English Monarchy, kept in balance by the even swing of liberty and power. The venerable peer, raising and stretching out his arm, pointed to the City and said:
"What sense of solidity can there be with these enormous towns? A serious insurrection in London, and all is lost."
It seems to me as though I were finishing a journey in England like that which I made, in earlier days, on the ruins of Athens, of Jerusalem, of Memphis and Carthage. Summoning to my presence the centuries of Albion, passing from renown to renown, seeing them swallowed up by turns, I feel a sort of painful giddiness. What has become of those brilliant and riotous days in which lived Shakespeare and Milton, Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, Cromwell and William[223], Pitt and Burke? All that is finished; superiorities and mediocrities, hatreds and loves, bliss and wretchedness, oppressors and oppressed, executioners and victims, kings and people, all sleep in the same silence and the same dust. But what nullities we are, if it is thus with the most living part of the human kind, with the genius which lingers like a shadow of olden time in the present generation, but which no longer lives in itself and which does not know that it ever existed!
How many times has England, in the space of a few hundred years, been destroyed? Through how many revolutions has she not passed to come to the brink of a greater, a more deep-laid revolution, which will envelop posterity! I have seen those famous British parliaments in all their mightiness: what will become of them? I have seen England in her ancient manners and in her ancient prosperity: everywhere the little lonely church with its steeple, Gray's country churchyard, everywhere narrow and gravelled roads, valleys filled with cows, heaths spotted with sheep, parks, country-houses, towns; few large forests, few birds, the sea-breeze. It was not those plains of Andalusia, where I found the old Christians and the young loves among the voluptuous remains of the palace of the Moors in the midst of the aloes and palm-trees: