516 The Hanse Towns. [MAY, 



and the last privileges of the Factory were abolished by Elizabeth,* 

 when, in the closing years of her reign, she had at last fixed the un- 

 settled throne of her ancestors on an immoveable basis, and had built 

 round her empire the impregnable walls of liberty and religion. 



The same causes which repelled the League at so early a period 

 in England, began to operate on the continent in the following century. 

 The general European system gradually assumed a consistency, which 

 gave comparative security and peace to the people. Elective monarchy 

 was replaced by inheritance ; and commerce, no longer compelled to take 

 refuge under the protection of strangers, established itself nearer home. 

 The Hanseatic League then declined. Its purposes had been accom- 

 plished; and they were admirable and almost providential purposes. 

 But their necessity had passed away, and other substitutes less cum- 

 brous, and more consistent with the immediate good of nations, were 

 to assume its office. The allied towns gradually broke off their connec- 

 tion with the once famous League, and before the close of the seventeenth 

 century it was but a name. 



MY uncle is one of those extraordinary characters which unite with 

 the charitable affections the acrimonious petulance of a disposition 

 changed, by the unexpected reverses of life, from its original suavity. 

 I remember him, in early manhood, an example of gaiety, friendship, 

 generosity, and frankness ; confiding and lenient in his every opinion 

 sensitive, it is true, but not tenacious- and rarely animated to severity 

 against the vices of another, unless they evinced some immediate evil to 

 the fortune or well-being of a fellow-creature. He was then one of those 

 happy beings who took his notions of life, in general, from the unmin- 

 gled felicity of his own, and who imputed to the bulk of mankind the 

 harmless purposes of his own existence ; a sceptic of the evil propensi- 

 ties of human nature, which he always thought the mere imagination 

 of idle poets or professed tale-makers, who found their account in the 

 description of passions removed from the reality of common life. In 

 short, he looked on the even tenour of his past and present existence as 

 the type of our common destiny ; he had as yet suffered none of those 

 mortal privations which gradually desolate the exuberant yet tranquil 

 joys of a contented bosom ; nor had he learned, from the allotted bitter- 

 ness of experience, that friendships are sometimes fallacious that pros- 

 perity, however fairly maintained and rationally enjoyed, is liable to 

 unforeseen and unmerited interruption ; nor could he have imagined 

 that the placid nature of a bosom like his own required but the ordinary 

 collisions of life to give it the angry habit of commotion, and to rouse 

 resentments which, once intensely actuated, are seldom known to subside 

 in perfect peace, until infirmity or imbecility the occasional prefaces to 

 death consigns us to the blank insensibility which frequently involves 

 the end of a dissatisfied and disappointed career. In short, my uncle 

 was no practical philosopher ; and, like Person, in the moments of his 

 aggravation, was known to disapprove of " the nature of things/' He 

 was a compound of strong feeling, lacking the inestimable power of equa- 



* 1597- 



