Page:The coronation of Edward the Seventh - a chapter of European and imperial history.djvu/13

Rh than the throne, exchanged convivial cannonades with the modern greenswards of Hyde Park. The streets re-echoed with the national hymn, pacific in its melody, compared with the defiant Marseillaise. Its refrain was handed down from the foundation of a monarchy, five hundred years old when the Tarquins ruled in Rome, and possibly coeval with the reign of Theseus at Athens or of Priam at Troy —first formulated at the anointing of a Syrian herdsman, when "All the people shouted and said, God save the King."

It would be a pastime unworthy of a historian to strain a comparison between two events long distant from one another, merely because of a coincidence of days of the month. But there is a connection between the downfall of the ancient regime in France and the consecration of the British Empire in the person of the King of England which is manifest to all who have studied the intervening history of Europe. At vespers on the Sunday before the sack of the Tuileries, when the doomed king and queen attended divine service for the last time, in the Chapel Royal of the palace, it was observed that the choir-men sang with insolent loudness the words of the Magnificat: Deposuit potentes de sede. The general terms in which is couched that revolutionary verse, ascribed by Saint Luke to the Blessed Virgin, well indicated the mental attitude of the French population