Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/15

Rh for the end and for the cause that seemed to be just and right. The process of events, and the action of various systems of politics, have in a great measure served to alter the views which at the time were taken of the wars of the last century and of the early years of the present. We have learned some of us to approve, and more perhaps to acquiesce in, proceedings which our fathers looked on as in the last degree unrighteous and intolerable. The days in which men go to war for an idea, and accept subjugation because they cannot afford to be sentimental, can safely smile at the errors of statesmen and the short-sightedness of kings, to whom justice and honesty were still justice and honesty, although disguised in the mock solemnities of dynastic shadows. But we will not deny either to kings or to peoples the credit of zeal for what they believed to be right, and the glory they had, so far as it was real, of counting no cost too great to be incurred for what they saw to be the cause of order and of society. They fought, as they believed, for their own existence and ours.

George I, whatever may have been his personal faults, and, however little adapted he may have seemed in his own days, or may seem now, to fulfil the ideal character of kingship in a free and enlightened people, comes on the stage of English History as the representative of a principle which has been found to answer, and as the inaugurator of a period of national prosperity. So far at least we have no cause to blush for our founder. But as our founder, I think we may look at him more closely. The house of Brunswick has always had the reputation for the good sense to patronise literature, and especially historical literature. Not to seek for precedents so far back as Henry the Lion, who superintended the writing of the annals of his country in the twelfth century, it will perhaps suffice to give a general reference to the enormous number of historical books which, during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, issued under ducal patronage from the presses of Helmstadt, Hanover, and Göttingen. George himself had been the patron of Leibnitz, of Jo. George Eccard, Burckhard Gotthilf Struve, and Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, whom I name rather as familiar to English ears