Waters of Strife.[1] The most just and salutary revolution must produce much suffering. The most just and salutary revolution cannot produce all the good that had been expected from it by men of uninstructed minds and sanguine tempers. Even the wisest cannot, while it is still recent, weigh quite fairly the evils which it has caused against the evils which it has removed. For the evils which it has caused are felt; and the evils which it has removed are felt no longer.
Thus it was now in England. The public was, as it always is during the cold fits which follow its hot fits, sullen, hard to please, dissatisfied with itself, dissatisfied with those who had lately been its favourites. The truce between the two great parties was at an end. Separated by the memory of all that had been done and suffered during a conflict of half a century, they had been, during a few months, united by a common danger. But the danger was over: the union was dissolved; and the old animosity broke forth again in all its strength.
James had during the last year of his reign, been even more hated by the Tories than by the Whigs; and not without cause: for to the Whigs he was only an enemy; and to the Tories he had been a faithless and thankless friend. But the old royalist feeling, which had seemed to be extinct in the time of his lawless domination, had been partially revived by his misfortunes. Many lords and gentlemen, who had, in December, taken arms for the Prince of Orange and a Free Parliament, muttered, two months later, that they had been drawn in; that they had trusted too much to His Highness's Declaration; that they had given him credit for a disinterestedness which, it now appeared, was not in his nature. They had meant to put on King James, for his own good, some gentle force, to punish the Jesuits and renegades who had misled him, to obtain from him some guarantee for the safety of the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of the realm, but not to uncrown and
- ↑ This illustration is repeated to satiety in sermons and pamphlets of the time of William the Third. There is a poor imitation of Absalom and Ahitophel entitled the Murmurers. William is Moses; Corah, Dathan and Abiram, nonjuring Bishops; Balaam, I think, Dryden; and Phinchas Shrewsbury.
