plundered without pay, without reward, save what they could win for
themselves; and when they fell at last, they fell only when
surrounded by six times their number, and were cut to pieces in
careless desperation. Invariably, by friend and foe alike, the
English are described as the fiercest people in all Europe--English
wild beasts Benvenuto Cellini calls them; and this great physical
power they owed to the profuse abundance in which they lived, to the
soldier's training in which every one of them was bred from
childhood.

Mr. Froude's novel assertion about profuse abundance must be weighed
by those who have read his invaluable introductory chapter. But we
must ask at once how it was possible to levy on such an armed
populace a tax which they were determined not to pay, and felt that
they were not bound to pay, either in law or justice? Conceive Lord
Palmerston's sending down to demand a 'benevolence' from the army at
Aldershot, beginning with the general in command and descending to
the privates . . . What would be the consequences? Ugly enough: but
gentle in comparison with those of any attempt to exact a really
unpopular tax from a nation of well-armed Englishmen, unless they, on
the whole, thought the tax fit to be paid. They would grumble, of
course, whether they intended to pay or not,--for were they not
Englishmen, our own flesh and blood?--and grumble all the more in
person, because they had no Press to grumble for them: but what is
there then in the M.P.'s letter to Lord Surrey, quoted by Mr. Hallam,
p. 25, or in the more pointed letter of Warham's, two pages on, which
we do not see lying on our breakfast tables in half the newspapers
every week? Poor, pedantic, obstructive old Warham, himself very
angry at so much being asked of his brother clergymen, and at their
being sworn as to the value of their goods (so like are old times to