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was alienated, and every moderate partisan was driven into open opposition. The unsuccessful risings of Monmouth and Argyll really accelerated the downfall of James, by increasing enormously his blind self-confidence. At last, a more formidable leader appeared for the nearly universal discontent in England and Scotland, in which latter country Nonconformity had learnt by bitter experience the justice of its former distrust of James's professions of toleration. English Nonconformity had been very imperfectly conciliated by the dangerous Indulgence,' under which lurked designs of a very different nature. Then James struck his last and, as it proved to him, his fatal blow at the Church of England, in the persons of some of her most influential prelates, and even of some of the most devoted of the advocates of the right divine of kings. On this came the expedition of William of Orange, and the sudden panicstricken retractation by James of his madly rash measures. It was too late; and after a faint and ignominious struggle he left the shores of England to return thither no more; and after severe but decisive struggles in Scotland and Ireland, the legitimate line of the Stuarts ceased to reign over the Three Kingdoms.

To his downfall one of James's children had contributed through the person of her husband, while another had deserted him in the moment of his utmost need. The rationale of their conduct belongs

rather to subsequent papers in this series of Estimates. It is sufficient to say here that James was a fond father to his children when they were young, and that he always retained a certain sense of property in them, which approached, if it did not realise, the intensity of natural affection, though it did not prevent him from acting towards them on occasions in a manner which was somewhat inconsistent with that idea. As is well known, he was an uxorious but most unfaithful husband, his attachments to other women, which were very numerous, seeming to be, except perhaps in the case of Catherine Sedley, of a purely physical character. His choice of mistresses, however, seemed to be in general singularly independent of the common ideas of attraction, so that his witty brother used to conjecture that his ugly mistresses had been forced on him by his priests as a penance. But, in fact, his priests tried in vain to cheek this profligacy in their Royal convert. James was a devout Romanist, but an obstinate sinner, and with many promises and occasional penitence and remorse, he always relapsed into his evil ways. His sense of duty was in this case indeed feebler than in other ordinary matters. Everyone must admit that he had a far stronger sense of duty in general than his brother Charles, who can scarcely be said to have had any idea of duty, as such, at all. It was this which made James resolve on an open avowal of his religious principles; and

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this again, no doubt, was a great inciting cause of his unlucky attempt to establish Romanism on the ruins of Protestantism after he became King. This feeling of duty and perception of the difference between right and wrong did not, it is true, prevent James from being occasionally a liar and a dissembler, but in the main it lent to his character a certain weight which is its redeeming quality. If he was a dull bigot, he was certainly not a merely frivolous voluptuary. He had a purpose, and he endeavoured to carry it out with unfaltering pertinacity up to the fatal moment which disclosed to him the dangers of his position, and to the world his own want of presence of mind and of moral courage. His pursuit of a definite purpose gave him, as contemporaries have observed, the only intellectual advantage which he possessed over his able brother Charles. It is an unfortunate circumstance that it was also the main cause of his disastrous downfall.

The reputation of James would have been highest if he had been confined to the seclusion of private life; it would have been fairly good if he had been a permanent under-Secretary in a public office; it was very indifferent as a Statesman; it is calamitously evil as a Sovereign.

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WILLIAM AND MARY.

THE general intellectual ability of William of Nassau, Prince of Orange, has never been questioned, nor the great influence which he exercised over the course of European as well as English affairs from the time. when he first entered on the public arena. But a considerable difference of opinion exists as to the rank which should be assigned to him as an English Sovereign, not merely morally, but also intellectually. He was undoubtedly the originator and, during his lifetime, the very soul of that European combination which first checked Louis the Fourteenth in his progress towards an autocracy over Europe, and which, after William's own death, through the instrumentality of higher military ability than he possessed, completely destroyed the ascendancy of France. It is to his enterprise and firm judgment, far more than to any courage or capacity in Englishmen themselves, that we are indebted for the speedy and comparatively bloodless overthrow of all James Stuart's longcherished and matured schemes for the destruction of the liberties of England. Yet, on the other hand,

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there is scarcely a reign in our annals which is less satisfactory or agreeable than that of William the Third as an illustration of the relations between a king and his people, or a king who achieved less personal popularity than he did. The explanation of this seeming anomaly appears to lie partly in the peculiarities of his own character, and partly in the exceptional circumstances of his position.

In William the Third the wise discretion of his great-grandfather William 'the Silent,' the heroic leader of the Low Countries in their revolt against the oppression of Spain, appeared to be revived, but in a somewhat different and less favourable form. His early years had unfortunately been attended by circumstances which stiffened a naturally proud and reserved disposition into repelling coldness and brooding uncommunicativeness. His physical constitution, which is said to have been singularly poor-blooded, had no doubt something to do with this demeanour. But there was also a nervous irritability-usually displaying itself in a morose and sullen demeanour, or a rough and inconsiderate mode of expression, but sometimes surging up into violent explosions of passionand there were an ardour and intemperance in his few but deep personal attachments, which show that the frozen surface of his nature was not incompatible with the existence underneath of the boiling springs of a deeply sensitive and passionate spirit. That the rough and seemingly unfeeling manner to which he