text:  Can we wonder at the retribution which cast them out into the highways of Europe? Can we wonder at the ruin of the corrupted nobility? Can we wonder at the massacre of the worldly church which stood looking on at those vilenesses and yet never uttered a syllable against them if it did not even share in their excesses? The true cause for astonishment is not in the depth of their fall but in its delay; not in the severity of the national judgment but in that long-suffering which held back the thunderbolt for a hundred years and even then did not extinguish the generation at a blow! [Footnote 33: _Memoirs of the Reign of King George the Third by Horace Walpole