text:  My prediction was formidably fulfilled: the firebrand and the pike ravaged the land; blood flowed in torrents; and when the country returned to its senses and the light of common sense once more dawned ministers and people alike had only the melancholy office of burying the common offences in that great resting-place where the faults of the past generation are marked by tombs and where the wisdom of the future is to be learned only from inscriptions recording the frailty of all that lived before