Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 2.djvu/80

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An excellent historian of the last generation has said, "When a country continues to be inhabited by the same people, living under the same Government, professing the same religion, and speaking the same language, as the people of Britain did at this period, the changes in their manners, customs, virtues, vices, language, dress, diet, and diversions, are slow and almost imperceptible. These changes are, however, like the motion of the shadow on the sun-dial, real, and in process of time become conspicuous. If the heroic Henry V. were now to rise from the dead, and appear in the streets of London mounted on his war horse, and clothed in complete armour, what astonishment would he excite in the admiring multitude! How much would he be surprised at every object around him! If he were conducted to St. Paul's, he would neither know the church nor understand the service. In a word, he would believe himself to be in a city and amongst a people that he had never seen."



Betwixt the people of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, we should not therefore suppose there could be a very marked difference. Yet change, and the seeds of immense change, were actively at work. The revival of Greek literature, the invention of printing, and the progress of new ideas in church government and religious doctrines, were preparing the most complete revolution of mind, of state maxims, and of manners, which the world had never seen. The combined influence of the high-toned republican spirit of Greece, and of the cosmopolitan principles of the Gospel, the nobler tastes and more graceful imaginations infused by the Hellenic poets and philosophers, the profoundly just, generous, and popular sentiments of the Bible, were destined inevitably to produce a more enlarged and exalted standard of feeling and opinion, and to revolutionise all the ideas and practices of the country.



On morals and on manners these causes were yet too recent to have produced much effect. On the contrary, the wars, the strifes, the vile passions generated in the courts of both this country and France, and spreading with the desolating rapidity of the plague, had sunk the nation lower than ever. All principle and virtue appeared extinct. The change began in the outward husk of society. Already it was seen that the old feudal system was tumbling piecemeal. The barons had broken loose from their engagements, and civil war had decimated them. Even in the social pomp and circumstance of the system, vicissitude was making itself visible. Caxton cried out even