by the high altar. A later change in the fabric, probably an enlargement of the choir, caused a further translation of his body. On that occasion our local informant, a subject of the Norinan Henry, saw and handled the bones of Harold. For his tomb we now seek in vain, as we seek in vain for the tombs of most of the noblest heroes of our land. The devastation of the sixteenth century, and the brutal indifference of the eighteenth, have swept over Hyde and Glastonbury and Waltham and Crowland and Evesham, and in their destroyed or ruined choirs no memory is left of Alfred and Edgar and Harold and Waltheof and Simon of Montfort. But what the men of his 6 own time could do they did; the simple and pathetic tale of the local historian shows us how the fallen king was lamented by those who had known and loved him, and how his memory lived among those who had shared his bounty without having seen his face. Their affection clave to him in life, their reverence followed him in death; they braved the wrath of the Conqueror on his behalf; they bore him first to his humble and unhallowed tomb, and then translated him to a more fitting restingplace within the noble fabric which his own bounty had reared. . . . Thus was the last native king of the English borne to his last home in his own minster. Only 7 once since that day has Waltham seen a royal corpse, but then it was one which was worthy to rest even by the side of Harold. Two hundred and forty years after the fight of Senlac the body of the great Edward was borne with all royal honors to a temporary resting-place in the church of Waltham. Harold was translated to Waltham from a nameless tomb by the sea-shore; Edward was translated from Waltham to a still more glorious resting-place beneath the soaring vault of the apse of Westminster. But for a while the two heroes lay side by

side the last and the first of English kings-between whom none deserved the English name, or could claim 8 honor or gratitude from the English nation. The one was the last king who reigned purely by the will of the people, without any claim either of conquest or of hereditary right. The other was the first king who reigned purely as the son of his father, the first who succeeded without competitor or interregnum. But each alike, as none between them did, deserved the love and trust of the people over whom they reigned. With Harold our native kingship ends; the Dragon of Wessex gives place to the Leopards of Normandy; the crown, the laws, the liberties, the very tongue of Englishmen, seem all fallen, never to rise again. In Edward the line of English kings 9 begins once more. After two hundred years of foreign rule we have again a king bearing an English name and an English heart-the first to give us back our ancient laws under new shapes, the first, and for so long the last, to see that the empire of his mighty namesake was a worthier prize than shadowy dreams of dominion beyond the sea. All between them were Normans or Angevins, careless of England and her people. Another and a brighter era opens, as the lawgiver of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus seated once more upon the 10 throne of Cerdic and of Athelstan. The conqueror of Gruffyd might welcome a kindred soul in the conqueror of Llywelyn, the victor of Stamfordbridge might hail his peer in the victor of Falkirk; the king with whom England fell might greet his first true successor in the king with whom she rose again. Such were the men who met in death within the now vanished choir of Waltham. And in the whole course of English history we hardly come across a scene which speaks more deeply to the

heart than when the first founder of our later greatness was laid by the side of the last kingly champion of our earliest freedom-when the body of the great Edward was laid, if only for a short space, by the side of Harold, the son of Godwin.

THE STATE OF AMERICA IN 1784.

M'MASTER'S " HISTORY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.

This exordium of McMaster's and his description of "The Virginia Gentleman are strikingly suggestive of Macaulay's exordium to his "History of England" and his sketch of the “English Country Gentleman of 1688." The resemblance indicated is one of the many conspicuous illustrations of Macaulay's influence upon succeeding writers, and, so far from implying a censure, is creditable to the taste and judgment of the American historian.

THE subject of my narrative is the history of the peo-1 ple of the United States of America from the close of the war for independence down to the opening of the war between the States. In the course of this narrative much, indeed, must be written of wars, conspiracies, and rebellions; of presidents, of congresses, of embassies, of treaties, of the ambition of political leaders in the senatehouse, and of the rise of great parties in the nation. Yet 2 the history of the people shall be the chief theme. At every stage of the splendid progress which separates the America of Washington and Adams from the America in which we live it shall be my purpose to describe the dress, the occupations, the amusements, the literary canons of the times; to note the changes of manners and morals; to trace the growth of that humane spirit which abolished punishment for debt, which reformed the discipline of prisons and of jails, and which has, in our own

3 time, lessened the miseries of dumb brutes. Nor shall it be less my aim to recount the manifold improvements which, in a thousand ways, have multiplied the conveniences of life and ministered to the happiness of our race; to describe the rise and progress of that long series of mechanical inventions and discoveries which is now the admiration of the world, and our just pride and boast; to tell how, under the benign influence of liberty and peace, there sprang up, in the course of a single century, a prosperity unparalleled in the annals of human affairs; how from a state of great poverty and feebleness our country grew rapidly to one of opulence and power; how her agriculture and her manufactures flourished together; how, by a wise system of free education and a free press, knowledge was disseminated, and the arts and sciences advanced; how the ingenuity of her people became fruitful of wonders far more astonishing than any of which 4 the alchemists had ever dreamed. . . . Such a mingling of social with political history is necessary to a correct understanding of the peculiar circumstances under which our nation was formed and grew up. Other people in other times have become weary of their rulers, have thrown off the yoke, have come out of the house of bondage and set up that form of government which has always been thought the freest and most perfect. But our ancestors were indeed a highly favored people. They were descended from the most persevering, the most energetic, the most thrifty of races. They enjoyed the highest form of civilization; their climate was salubrious; their soil rich; their country boundless; they were hampered by no traditions; they were surrounded by no nations of whom they stood in fear. Almost alone, in a new land, they were free to work out their own form of 5 government in accordance with their own will. The re

sult has been such a moral and social advancement as the world has never seen before. The Americans who, toward the close of 1783, celebrated, with bonfires, with cannon, and with bell-ringing, the acknowledgment of independence and the return of peace, lived in a very different country from that with which their descendants are familiar. Indeed, could we, under the potent influence of some magician's drugs, be carried back through one hundred years, we should find ourselves in a country utterly new to us. Rip Van Winkle, who fell asleep when his townsmen were throwing up their hats and drinking their bumpers to good King George, and awoke when a generation that knew him not was shouting the names of men and parties unknown to him, did not find himself in a land more strange. The area of the repub-6 lic would shrink to less than half its present extent. The number of the States would diminish to thirteen, nor would many of them be contained in their present limits or exhibit their present appearance. Vast stretches of upland, which are now an endless succession of wheat-fields and corn-fields and orchards, would appear overgrown with dense forests abandoned to savage beasts and yet more savage men. The hamlets of a few fishermen would mark the sites of wealthy havens now bristling with innumerable masts, and the great cities themselves would dwindle to dimensions scarce exceeding those of some rude settlement far to the west of the Colorado River. Of the inventions and discoveries which abridge distance, 7 which annihilate time, which save labor, which transmit speech, which turn the darkness of night into the bril liancy of the day, which alleviate pain, which destroy disease, which lighten even the infirmities of age, not one existed. Fulton was still a portrait-painter. Fitch and Rumsey had not yet begun to study the steam-engine.