terests of the See that had so long detained her in expectation. So confident were the destructive party of the temper of the approaching Parliament, and of the irresistible pressure of the times, Octoberthat the general burden of conversation at the dinner-tables in the great houses in London was an exulting expectation of a dissolution of the Church establishment, and a confiscation of ecclesiastical property; the King himself being the only obstacle which was feared by them. 'These noble lords imagine,' continues the same writer, 'that the Cardinal once dead or ruined, they will incontinently plunder the Church, and strip it of all its wealth,' adding that there was no occasion for him to write this in cipher, for it was everywhere openly spoken of.[1]
Movements, nevertheless, which are pregnant with vital change, are slow in assuming their essential direction, even after the stir has commenced. Circumstances do not immediately open themselves; the point of vision alters gradually; and fragments of old opinions, and prepossessions, and prejudices remain interfused with the new, even in the clearest minds, and cannot at a moment be shaken off. Only the unwise change suddenly; and we can never too often remind ourselves, when we see men stepping forward with uncertainty and hesitation over a road, where to us, who know the actual future, all seems so plain, that the road looked different to the actors themselves, who were beset with imaginations of the past, and to whom the gloom of the future- ↑ Legrand, vol. iii. p. 374.
