True it is that God hath restored to us our old laws, and the rightful line of our kings.

Yet, how I know not, but it seems to me that something is wanting--that our court hath not the old gravity, nor our people the old loyalty.

These evil times, like the great deluge, have overwhelmed and confused all earthly things.

And, even as those waters, though at last they abated, yet, as the learned write, destroyed all trace of the garden of Eden, so that its place hath never since been found, so hath this opening of all the flood-gates of political evil effaced all marks of the ancient political paradise." "Sir, by your favour," said Mr Milton, "though, from many circumstances both of body and of fortune, I might plead fairer excuses for despondency than yourself, I yet look not so sadly either on the past or on the future.

That a deluge hath passed over this our nation, I deny not.