'The times, in many cases, give great light to _true_
interpretations.'
_Advancement of Learning_.'On fair ground
I could beat forty of them.''I could myself
Take up a brace of the best of them, yea _the two tribunes_.''But now 'tis odds beyond arithmetic,
And _manhood_ is called _foolery_ when it stands
Against a falling fabric.'--_Coriolanus_.

The fact that the immemorial liberties of the English PEOPLE, and that idea of human government and society which they brought with them to this island, had been a second time violently overborne and suppressed by a military chieftainship,--one for which the unorganised popular resistance was no match,--that the English People had been a second time 'conquered'--for that is the word which the Elizabethan historian suggests--less than a hundred years before the beginning of the Elizabethan Age, is a fact in history which the great Elizabethan philosopher has contrived to send down to us, along with his philosophical works, as the key to the reading of them. It is a fact with which we are all now more or less familiar, but it is one which the Elizabethan Poet and Philosopher became acquainted with under circumstances calculated to make a much more vivid impression on the sensibilities than the most accurate and vivacious narratives and expositions of it which our time can furnish us.

That this second conquest was unspeakably more degrading than the first had been, inasmuch as it was the conquest of a chartered, constitutional liberty, recovered and established in acts that had made the English history, recovered on battle-fields that were fresh, not in oral tradition only; inasmuch as it was effected in violation of that which made the name of Englishmen, that which made the universally recognised principle of the national life; inasmuch, too, as it was an _undivided_ conquest, the conquest of _the single will_--the will of the 'one only man'--not unchecked of commons only, unchecked by barons, unchecked by the church, unchecked by _council_ of any kind, the pure arbitrary absolute will, the pure idiosyncrasy, the crowned demon of the _lawless_, irrational will, unchained and armed with the sword of the common might, and clothed with the divinity of the common right; that _this_ was a conquest unspeakably more debasing than the conquest 'commonly so called,'--this, which left no nobility,--which clasped its collar in open day on the proudest Norman neck, and not on the Saxon only, which left only one nation of slaves and bondmen--that _this_ was a _subjugation_--that this was a government which the English nation had not before been familiar with, the men whose great life-acts were performed under it did not lack the sensibility and the judgment to perceive.

A more _hopeless_ conquest than the Norman conquest had been, it might also have seemed, regarded in some of the aspects which it presented to the eye of the statesman then; for it was in the division of the former that the element of freedom stole in, it was in the parliaments of that division that the limitation of the feudal monarchy had begun.