NOTES BY THE AUTHOR 269

influence of Religion upon the fate of Nations have been singularly earnest and successful-a writer with whom I faithfully and firmly believe that England will never be prosperous again, that the honour of her arms will be tarnished, and her commerce blighted, and her national character degraded, until the Romanist is expelled from the place which has impiously been conceded to him among her legislators. “Whatever be the lot of those to whom error is an inheritance, woe be to the man and to the people to whom it is an adoption. If England, free above all other nations, sustained amidst the trials which have covered Europe, before her eyes, with burning and slaughter, and enlightened by the fullest knowledge of divine truth, shall refuse fidelity to the compact by which those matchless privileges have been given, her condemnation will not linger. She has already made one step full of danger. She has committed the capital error of mistaking that for a purely political question, which was a purely religious one. Her foot already hangs over the edge of the precipice. It must be retracted, or the Empire is but a name. In the clouds of darkness which seem to be deepening on all human policy-in the gathering tumults of Europe, and the feverish discontents at home-it may be even difficult to discern where the power yet lives to erect the fallen majesty of the constitution once more. But there are mighty means in sincerity; and if no miracle was ever wrought for the faithless and despairing, the country that will help itself will never be left destitute of the help of Heaven.” (Historical Essays, by the Rev. Dr. Croly,¹ 1842.) The first of these essays, “England the Fortress of Christianity,” I most earnestly recommend to the meditation of those who doubt that a special punishment is inflicted by the Deity upon all national crime, and perhaps of all such crime, most instantly on the betrayal, on the part of England, of the truth and the faith with which she has been entrusted.²

NOTE 2 (p. 67 above).³

“Does not admit iron as a constructive material.”-Except in Chaucer’s noble temple of Mars.

In the former editions, a note on the structural use of iron quoted Chaucer’s description of the temple of Mars; but only in the Chaucer English, which few readers quite understand, and which I certainly do not always myself. I rewrite it now in as familiar spelling as may be, with a little bit of needful explanation.

“And downward from a hill under a bent

There stood the temple of Mars armipotent,

Wrought all of burnëd steel; of which th’ entree

Was long, and strait, and ghastly for to see.

5. And thereout came a rage, and such a vise

That it made all the gatës for to rise.

The Northern light in at the door shone,

For window on the wall ne was there none,

¹ [For Croly, see Vol. I. pp. 409, 445.]

² [Ruskin expresses the same opinion on Catholic Emancipation in The Stones of Venice, vol. i. ch. i. § 11.]

³ [”7, p. 37” in eds. 1 and 2. Appendix III. in 1880 and later editions.]

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