Turin alone, attached to the house of Saxony, was silent, and proscribed Alfieri.

In England, the mind, a long time free, had produced sound morals.  The aristocracy felt itself sufficiently strong never to become persecuting.  Worship was there as independent as conscience.  The dominant religion was a political institution, which, whilst it bound the citizen, left the believer to his free will.  The government itself was popular, only the people consisted of none but its leading citizens.  The House of Commons more resembled a senate of nobles than a democratic forum; but this parliament was an open and resounding chamber, where they discussed openly in face of the throne, as in the face of all Europe, the most comprehensive measures of the government.  Royalty, honoured in form, whilst in fact it is excluded and powerless, merely presides over these debates, and adds order to victory; it was, in reality, nothing more than a perpetual consulate of this Britannic senate.  The voices of the leading orators, who contested the rule of the nation, echoed thence, through and out of Europe.  Liberty finds its level in the social world, like the waves in the common bed of the ocean.  One nation is not free with impunity—­one people is not in bondage with impunity—­all finally compares and equalises itself.

X.

England had been intellectually the model of nations, and the envy of the reflecting universe.  Nature and its institutions had conferred upon it men worthy of its laws.  Lord Chatham, sometimes leading the opposition, sometimes at the head of the government, had expanded the space of parliament to the proportions of his own character and his own language.  Never did the manly liberty of a citizen before a throne—­never did the legal authority of a prime minister before a people display themselves in such a voice to assembled citizens.  He was a public man in all the greatness of the phrase—­the soul of a nation personified in an individual—­the inspiration of the nation in the heart of a patrician.  His oratory had something as grand as action—­it was the heroic in language.  The echo of Lord Chatham’s discourses were heard—­felt on the Continent.  The stormy scenes of the Westminster elections[7] shook to the very depths the feelings of the people, and that love of turbulence which slumbers in every multitude, and which it so often mistakes for the symptoms of true liberty.  These words of counterpoise to royal power, to ministerial responsibility, to laws in operation, to the power of the people, explained at the present by a constitution—­explained in the past by the accusation of Strafford, the tomb of Sidney, on the scaffold of a king, had resounded like old recollections and strange novelties.