during years of profound peace. Comines was one of the most
enlightened statesmen of his time. He had seen all the richest
and most highly civilised parts of the Continent. He had lived in
the opulent towns of Flanders, the Manchesters and Liverpools of
the fifteenth century. He had visited Florence, recently adorned
by the magnificence of Lorenzo, and Venice, not yet bumbled by
the Confederates of Cambray. This eminent man deliberately
pronounced England to be the best governed country of which he
had any knowledge. Her constitution he emphatically designated as
a just and holy thing, which, while it protected the people,
really strengthened the hands of a prince who respected it. In no
other country were men so effectually secured from wrong. The
calamities produced by our intestine wars seemed to him to be
confined to the nobles and the fighting men, and to leave no
traces such as he had been accustomed to see elsewhere, no ruined
dwellings, no depopulated cities.

It was not only by the efficiency of the restraints imposed on
the royal prerogative that England was advantageously
distinguished from most of the neighbouring countries. A:
peculiarity equally important, though less noticed, was the
relation in which the nobility stood here to the commonalty.
There was a strong hereditary aristocracy: but it was of all
hereditary aristocracies the least insolent and exclusive. It had
none of the invidious character of a caste. It was constantly
receiving members from the people, and constantly sending down
members to mingle with the people. Any gentleman might become a
peer. The younger son of a peer was but a gentleman. Grandsons of
peers yielded precedence to newly made knights. The dignity of
knighthood was not beyond the reach of any man who could by