widely and much more congenially employed in the establishment of a fresh league against France.  Louis had aroused a new feeling throughout Protestant Europe by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  The refugees whom he had driven from their native country inspired in those in which they settled hatred of his persecution as well as alarm of his power.  Holland now entered into all the views of the Prince of Orange.  By his immense influence he succeeded in forming the great confederacy called the League of Augsburg, to which the emperor, Spain, and almost every European power but England became parties.

James gave the prince reason to believe that he too would join in this great project, if William would in return concur in his views of domestic tyranny; but William wisely refused.  James, much disappointed, and irritated by the moderation which showed his own violence in such striking contrast, expressed his displeasure against the prince, and against the Dutch generally, by various vexatious acts.  William resolved to maintain a high attitude; and many applications were made to him by the most considerable persons in England for relief against James’s violent measures, and which there was but one method of making effectual.  That method was force.  But as long as the Princess of Orange was certain of succeeding to the crown on her father’s death, William hesitated to join in an attempt that might possibly have failed and lost her her inheritance.  But the birth of a son, which, in giving James a male heir, destroyed all hope of redress for the kingdom, decided the wavering, and rendered the determined desperate.  The prince chose the time for his enterprise with the sagacity, arranged its plan with the prudence, and put it into execution with the vigor, which were habitual qualities of his mind.

Louis XIV., menaced by the League of Augsburg, had resolved to strike the first blow against the allies.  He invaded Germany; so that the Dutch preparations seemed in the first instance intended as measures of defence against the progress of the French.  But Louis’s envoy at The Hague could not be long deceived.  He gave notice to his master, who in his turn warned James.  But that infatuated monarch not only doubted the intelligence, but refused the French king’s offers of assistance and co-operation.  On the 21st of October, the Prince of Orange, with an army of fourteen thousand men, and a fleet of five hundred vessels of all kinds, set sail from Helvoetsluys; and after some delays from bad weather, he safely landed his army in Torbay, on the 5th of November, 1688.  The desertion of James’s best friends; his own consternation, flight, seizure, and second escape; and the solemn act by which he was deposed; were the rapid occurrences of a few weeks:  and thus the grandest revolution that England had ever seen was happily consummated.  Without entering here on legislative reasonings or party sophisms, it is enough to record the act itself; and to say,