sneer so bitterly at the conduct of our Government
but a year ago would do well to study closely the
history of their own country in 1588, in which they
will find much matter calculated to lessen their conceit,
and to teach them charity. The Lincoln Government
of the United States had been in existence but little
more than thirty days when it found itself involved
in war with the Rebels; the Elizabethan Government
had been in existence for thirty years when the Armada
came to the shores of England, to the astonishment
and dismay of those “barons bold and statesmen
old in bearded majesty” whom we have been content
to regard as the bravest and the wisest men that have
lived since David and Solomon. Elizabeth, who
had a beard that vied with Burleigh’s,—the
evidence of her virgin innocence,—felt
every hair of her head curling from terror when she
learned how she had been “done” by Philip’s
lieutenant; and old Burleigh must have thought that
his mistress was in the condition of Jockey of Norfolk’s
master at Bosworth,—“bought and sold.”
Fortunately for both old women, and for us all, the
summer gales of 1588 were adverse to the Spaniards,
and protected Old England. We know not whence
the wind cometh nor whither it goeth, but we know
that its blows have often been given with effect on
human affairs; and it never blew with more usefulness,
since the time when it used up the ships of Xerxes,
than when it sent the ships of Philip to join “the
treasures that old Ocean hoards.” Had England
then been conquered by Spain, though but temporarily,
Protestant England would have ceased to exist, and
the current of history would have been as emphatically
changed as was the current of the Euphrates under
the labors of the soldiers of Cyrus. We should
have had no Shakspeare, or a very different Shakspeare
from the one that we have; and the Elizabethan age
would have presented to after centuries an appearance
altogether unlike that which now so impressively strikes
the mind. As that was the time out of which all
that is great and good in England and America has
proceeded, in letters and in arms, in religion and
in politics, we can easily understand how vast must
have been the change, had not the winds of the North
been so unpropitious to the purposes of the King of
the South.
The English are very proud of the victories of Crecy
and Agincourt, as well they may be; for, though gained
in the course of as unjust and unprovoked and cruel
wars as ever were waged even by Englishmen, they are
as splendid specimens of slaughter-work as can be found
in the history of “the Devil’s code of
honor.” But they owe them both to the weather,
which favored their ancestors, and was as unfavorable
to the ancestors of the French. At Crecy the
Italian cross-bow men in the French army not only
came into the field worn down by a long march on a
hot day in August, but immediately after their arrival
they were exposed to a terrible thunder-storm, in
which the rain fell in absolute torrents, wetting