How more than English was all this!  England had been growing away from and beyond Westminster Abbey, William Pitt, and Charles James Fox; but this Virginia Englishman, living alone in his woods, with his slaves and his overseers, severed from the progressive life of his race, was living still in the days when a pair of dissolute young orators could be deemed, and with some reason too, the most important persons in a great empire.  A friend asked him how he was pleased with England.  He answered with enthusiasm,—­

“There never was such a country on the face of the earth as England, and it is utterly impossible that there can be any combination of circumstances hereafter to make such another country as Old England now is!”

We ought not to have been surprised at the sympathy which the English Tories felt during the late war for their brethren in the Southern States of America.  It was as natural as it was for the English Protestants to welcome the banished Huguenots.  It was as natural as it was for Louis XIV. to give an asylum to the Stuarts.  The traveller who should have gone, seven years ago, straight from an English agricultural county to a cotton district of South Carolina, or a tobacco county of Virginia, would have felt that the differences between the two places were merely external.  The system in both places and the spirit of both were strikingly similar.  In the old parts of Virginia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, you had only to get ten miles from a railroad to find yourself among people who were English in their feelings, opinions, habits, and even in their accent.  New England differs from Old England, because New England has grown:  Virginia was English, because she had been stationary.  Happening to be somewhat familiar with the tone of feeling in the South,—­the real South, or, in other words, the South ten miles from a railroad,—­we were fully prepared for Mr. Russell’s statement with regard to the desire so frequently expressed in 1861 for one of the English princes to come and reign over a nascent Confederacy.  Sympathies and antipathies are always mutual when they are natural; and never was there a sympathy more in accordance with the nature of things, than that which so quickly manifested itself between the struggling Southern people and the majority of the ruling classes of Great Britain.

Mr. Randolph took leave of public life, after thirty years of service, not in the most dignified manner.  He furnished another illustration of the truth of a remark made by a certain queen of Denmark,—­“The lady doth protest too much.”  Like many other gentlemen in independent circumstances, he had been particularly severe upon those of his fellow-citizens who earned their subsistence by serving the public.  It pleased him to speak of members of the Cabinet as “the drudges of the departments,” and to hold gentlemen in the diplomatic service up to contempt as forming “the tail of the corps