Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/16

VIII There are three cycles, it has been said, in the scheme,—cycle within cycle; the second comprised within a seventh portion of the first, and the third within a seventh portion of the second. Be this as it may, we may at least see something that exceedingly resembles it in that actual economy of change and revolution manifested in English history for the last two centuries. It would seem as if events, in their downward course, had come under the influence of that law of gravitation through which falling bodies increase in speed, as they descend, according to the squares of the distances.

Though there may be little to encounter in such a state of society, there must, of necessity, be a good deal to observe: the traveller may have few incidents to relate, and yet many appearances to describe. He finds himself in the circumstances of the mariner who sits listlessly in the calm and sunshine of a northern summer and watches the ever-changing aspect of some magnificent iceberg, as its sun-gilt pinnacles sharpen and attenuate, and its deep fissures widen and extend, and the incessant rush of the emancipated waters is heard to reëcho from amid the green light of the dim twilight caverns within. Society in England, in the present day, exists, like the thawing iceberg, in a transition state, and presents its consequent shiftings of aspect and changes of feature; and such is the peculiar degree of sensitiveness at which the government of the country has arrived,—partly, it would seem, from the fluctuating nature of the extended basis of representation on which it now rests—that, like some nervous valetudinarian, open to every