expatiated with a sentiment of exultation on the power and
splendour of her foreign masters, and has lamented the decay of
that power and splendour as a calamity to our country. This is,
in truth, as absurd as it would be in a Haytian negro of our time
to dwell with national pride on the greatness of Lewis the
Fourteenth, and to speak of Blenheim and Ramilies with patriotic
regret and shame. The Conqueror and his descendants to the fourth
generation were not Englishmen: most of them were born in France:
they spent the greater part of their lives in France: their
ordinary speech was French: almost every high office in their
gift was filled by a Frenchman: every acquisition which they made
on the Continent estranged them more and more from the population
of our island. One of the ablest among them indeed attempted to
win the hearts of his English subjects by espousing an English
princess. But, by many of his barons, this marriage was regarded
as a marriage between a white planter and a quadroon girl would
now be regarded in Virginia. In history he is known by the
honourable surname of Beauclerc; but, in his own time, his own
countrymen called him by a Saxon nickname, in contemptuous
allusion to his Saxon connection.

Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in
uniting all France under their government, it is probable that
England would never have had an independent existence. Her
princes, her lords, her prelates, would have been men differing
in race and language from the artisans and the tillers of the
earth. The revenues of her great proprietors would have been
spent in festivities and diversions on the banks of the Seine.
The noble language of Milton and Burke would have remained a
rustic dialect, without a literature, a fixed grammar, or a fixed