Montesinos.—­I perceive your drift:  and perceive also that when we understand each other there is likely to be little difference between us.  And I beseech you, do not suppose that I am disputing for the sake of disputation; with that pernicious habit I was never infected, and I have seen too many mournful proofs of its perilous consequences.  Towards any person it is injudicious and offensive; towards you it would be irreverent.  Your position is undeniable.  Were society to be stationary at its present point, the bulk of the people would, on the whole, have lost rather than gained by the alterations which have taken place during the last thousand years.  Yet this must be remembered, that in common with all ranks they are exempted from those dreadful visitations of war, pestilence, and famine by which these kingdoms were so frequently afflicted of old.

The countenance of my companion changed upon this, to an expression of judicial severity which struck me with awe.  “Exempted from these visitations!” he exclaimed; “mortal man! creature of a day, what art thou, that thou shouldst presume upon any such exemption!  Is it from a trust in your own deserts, or a reliance upon the forbearance and long-suffering of the Almighty, that this vain confidence arises?”

I was silent.

“My friend,” he resumed, in a milder tone, but with a melancholy manner, “your own individual health and happiness are scarcely more precarious than this fancied security.  By the mercy of God, twice during the short space of your life, England has been spared from the horrors of invasion, which might with ease have been effected during the American war, when the enemy’s fleet swept the Channel, and insulted your very ports, and which was more than once seriously intended during the late long contest.  The invaders would indeed have found their graves in that soil which they came to subdue:  but before they could have been overcome, the atrocious threat of Buonaparte’s general might have been in great part realised, that though he could not answer for effecting the conquest of England, he would engage to destroy its prosperity for a century to come.  You have been spared from that chastisement.  You have escaped also from the imminent danger of peace with a military tyrant, which would inevitably have led to invasion, when he should have been ready to undertake and accomplish that great object of his ambition, and you must have been least prepared and least able to resist him.  But if the seeds of civil war should at this time be quickening among you—­ if your soil is everywhere sown with the dragon’s teeth, and the fatal crop be at this hour ready to spring up—­the impending evil will be a hundredfold more terrible than those which have been averted; and you will have cause to perceive and acknowledge, that the wrath has been suspended only that it may fall the heavier!”

“May God avert this also!” I exclaimed.