Charles died, and his brother came to the throne; but, though the person of the sovereign was changed, the love and awe with which the office was regarded were undiminished.  Indeed, it seems that, of the two princes, James was, in spite of his religion, rather the favourite of the High Church party.  He had been specially singled out as the mark of the Whigs; and this circumstance sufficed to make him the idol of the Tories.  He called a parliament.  The loyal gentry of the counties and the packed voters of the remodelled boroughs gave him a parliament such as England had not seen for a century, a parliament beyond all comparison the most obsequious that ever sate under a prince of the House of Stuart.  One insurrectionary movement, indeed, took place in England, and another in Scotland.  Both were put down with ease, and punished with tremendous severity.  Even after that bloody circuit, which will never be forgotten while the English race exists in any part of the globe, no member of the House of Commons ventured to whisper even the mildest censure on Jeffreys.  Edmund Waller, emboldened by his great age and his high reputation, attacked the cruelty of the military chiefs; and this is the brightest part of his long and checkered public life.  But even Waller did not venture to arraign the still more odious cruelty of the Chief Justice.  It is hardly too much to say that James, at that time, had little reason to envy the extent of authority possessed by Lewis the Fourteenth,

By what means this vast power was in three years broken down, by what perverse and frantic misgovernment the tyrant revived the spirit of the vanquished Whigs, turned to fixed hostility the neutrality of the trimmers, and drove from him the landed gentry, the Church, the army, his own creatures, his own children, is well known to our readers.  But we wish to say something about one part of the question, which in our own time has a little puzzled some very worthy men, and about which the author of the “Continuation” before us has said much with which we can by no means concur.

James, it is said, declared himself a supporter of toleration.  If he violated the constitution, he at least violated it for one of the noblest ends that any statesman ever had in view.  His object was to free millions of his subjects from penal laws and disabilities which hardly any person now considers as just.  He ought, therefore, to be regarded as blameless, or, at worst, as guilty only of employing irregular means to effect a most praiseworthy purpose.  A very ingenious man, whom we believe to be a Catholic, Mr. Banim, has written a historical novel, of the literary merit of which we cannot speak very highly, for the purpose of inculcating this opinion.  The editor of Mackintosh’s Fragments assures us, that the standard of James bore the nobler inscription, and so forth; the meaning of which is, that William and the other authors of the Revolution were vile Whigs who drove out James from being a Radical; that the crime of the King was his going further in liberality than his subjects:  that he was the real champion of freedom; and that Somers, Locke, Newton, and other narrow-minded people of the same sort, were the real bigots and oppressors.