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As time passed on legislation became more and more minute and inclusive. Few interests in human life escaped the paternal attention of government under the Tudors and Stuarts, and this great mass of enactment it became the duty of the groups of country gentry in the counties and of the civic magistrates of the towns to put into force.

Are you alluding to the progress of inclosures, which from the accession of the Tudors to the age of the Stuarts were complained of as the great and crying evil of the times? Sir Thomas More. That process originated as soon as rents began to be of more importance than personal services, and money more convenient to the landlords than payments in kind. Montesinos.

The first feeling must have been one of deep relief that the hateful tyranny of the Tudors had passed away, to be supplanted by the rule of their kinsmen the Stuarts kinsmen, because the Scottish line of kings was directly descended from that Dal Riada colony which Ireland had sent so long ago to the shores of Albania, to a branch of which Columbkill belonged.

But the peace of the Tudors was the death-bed of the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism of the early eighteenth century which made possible the birth of democratic England. The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is deep-rooted in the conditions of the past. Locke could not have written had not Hobbes and Filmer defended in set terms the ideal of despotic government.

Meanwhile the remains of James were escorted, in the dusk of the evening, by a slender retinue to the Chapel of the English Benedictines at Paris, and deposited there in the vain hope that, at some future time, they would be laid with kingly pomp at Westminster among the graves of the Plantagenets and Tudors. Three days after these humble obsequies Lewis visited Saint Germains in form.

It is a mistake to suppose that the Inns of Court contain at the present time a larger proportion of idle members, who have no intention to practise at the bar, than they contained under the Plantagenets and Tudors.

The use of silk, however, was so rare in England down to the time of the Tudors, that a pair of silk hose formed an acceptable present to Queen Elizabeth. The principal supply of raw silk is now derived from China, where silks are much worn, and there Marco Polo several centuries since found silk robes in very general use.

The proportion of people wanting peace and firm government steadily increased, and, when the internecine Wars of the Roses, which affected the lords and kings far more than the people, were followed by the protection and order provided without excessive cost by the Tudors, it was the people who most welcomed the change.

The half savage chieftains who reigned beyond the pale had submitted one after another to the lieutenants of the Tudors. At length, a few weeks before the death of Elizabeth, the conquest, which had been begun more than four hundred years before by Strongbow, was completed by Mountjoy.

But the difficulty is, not to see that the present state of things, which has come about almost by accident, is irregular and unsatisfactory, and that in it the civil power has stolen a march on the privileges which even Tudors and Hanoverians left to the Church, but to suggest what would be more just and more promising.