The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.  It is the history of a constant movement of the public mind, of a constant change in the institutions of a great society.  We see that society, at the beginning of the twelfth century, in a state more miserable than the state in which the most degraded nations of the East now are.  We see it subjected to the tyranny of a handful of armed foreigners.  We see a strong distinction of caste separating the victorious Norman from the vanquished Saxon.  We see the great body of the population in a state of personal slavery.  We see the most debasing and cruel superstition exercising boundless dominion over the most elevated and benevolent minds.  We see the multitude sunk in brutal ignorance, and the studious few engaged in acquiring what did not deserve the name of knowledge.  In the course of seven centuries the wretched and degraded race have become the greatest and most highly civilised people that ever the world saw, have spread their dominion over every quarter of the globe, have scattered the seeds of mighty empires and republics over vast continents of which no dim intimation had ever reached Ptolemy or Strabo, have created a maritime power which would annihilate in a quarter of an hour the navies of Tyre, Athens, Carthage, Venice, and Genoa together, have carried the science of healing, the means of locomotion and correspondence, every mechanical art, every manufacture, everything that promotes the convenience of life, to a perfection which our ancestors would have thought magical, have produced a literature which may boast of works not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us, have discovered the laws which regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, have speculated with exquisite subtilty on the operations of the human mind, have been the acknowledged leaders of the human race in the career of political improvement.  The history of England is the history of this great change in the moral, intellectual, and physical state of the inhabitants of our own island.  There is much amusing and instructive episodical matter; but this is the main action.  To us, we will own, nothing is so interesting and delightful as to contemplate the steps by which the England of Domesday Book, the England of the Curfew and the Forest Laws, the England of crusaders, monks, schoolmen, astrologers, serfs, outlaws, became the England which we know and love, the classic ground of liberty and philosophy, the school of all knowledge, the mart of all trade.  The Charter of Henry Beauclerk, the Great Charter, the first assembling of the House of Commons, the extinction of personal slavery, the separation from the See of Rome, the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Revolution, the establishment of the liberty of unlicensed printing, the abolition of religious disabilities, the reform of the representative system, all these seem to us to be the successive stages of one great revolution—­nor can we fully comprehend