and uninterrupted precedent; and the church was become a considerable barrier to the power, both legal and illegal, of the crown. Peace, too, industry, commerce, opulence, nay, even justice and lenity of administration (notwithstanding some very few exceptions); all these were enjoyed by the people, and every other blessing of government, except liberty, or rather the present exercise of liberty and its proper security."

Observe now Lord Clarendon; observe the facts that he first lays down, and then the remarks which he thinks it necessary to subjoin. His facts are these :-"Supplemental acts of state were made to supply defects of law; obsolete laws were revived and rigorously executed; the law of knighthood was revived, which was very grievous; and no less unjust projects of all kinds (page 67, octavo), many ridiculous, many scandalous, all very grievous, were set on foot; the old laws of the forest were revived; and lastly, for a spring and magazine that should have no bottom, and for an everlasting supply for all occasions, a writ was framed in a form of law, &c.—the writ of ship money." He tell us, "That for the better support of these extraordinary ways, and to protect the agents and instruments who must be employed in them, and to discountenance and suppress all bold inquirers and opposers, the council-table and star-chamber enlarged their jurisdiction to a vast extent, holding (as Thucydides said of the Athenians) for honourable that which pleased, and for just that which profited; and being the same persons in several rooms, grew both courts of law to determine right, and courts of revenue t bring money into the treasury; the council-table, by proclamations, enjoining to the people what was not enjoined by the law, and prohibiting that which was not prohibited; and the star-chamber censuring the breach and disobedience to those proclamations, by very great fines and imprisonment; so that any disrespect to any acts of state, or to the persons of statesmen, was in no time more

penal; and those foundations of right, by which men valued their security, to the apprehension of understanding and wise men, never more in danger to be destroyed."

And yet at the close of his description of this most alarming state of England, what are his observations ? They are these "Now after all this, I must be so just as to say, that during the whole time that these pressures were exercised, and these new and extraordinary ways were run, this kingdom enjoyed the greatest calm, and the fullest measure of felicity, that any people, in any age, for so long time together (i. e. for the above-mentioned eleven or twelve years) have been blessed with, to the wonder and envy of all the other parts of Christendom."

Soon after he adds, having first given a more distinct enumeration of the blessings which England enjoyed, these words :—" Lastly, for a complement of all these blessings they were enjoyed by, and under the protection of a king of the most harmless disposition, the most exemplary piety, the greatest sobriety, chastity, and mercy, that any prince hath been endowed with."

Such are the words of Lord Clarendon. Now what I have to press upon your reflections is this :-If men like these, a calm, deliberating philosopher like Hume (though favourable to monarchy, yet certainly not meaning to be unfavourable to the interests of mankind), if Hume at the distance of more than a century in the security of his closet; and Clarendon, a lover of the constitution of his country, a patriotic statesman, while delivering, as he rightly conceived, a work to posterity: if such men could think that these were observations on the subject, too reasonable to be withheld from the minds of their readers, how difficult must it have been for men at the time to have escaped from the soothing, the fatal influence of such considerations; this supposed prosperity of their country, this peace, this order, these domestic virtues and piety of their king, their safety under his kind protection; how difficult to have been generous enough to think of those

Englishmen who were to follow them, rather than of themselves; how difficult to have encountered the terrors of fines and imprisonments, for the sake of anything so vague, so abstract, so disputed (such might have been their language), as the constitution of their country; how difficult to have resisted all those very prudent suggestions with which sensible men, like Hume and Clarendon, not to say the minions of baseness and servility, could have so readily supplied them; how difficult, when all that was required of them was a little silence, and the occasional payment of a tax of a few shillings.

Yet if our ancestors had not escaped from the soothing, the fatal influence of such consiuerations; if they had not thought that there was something still more to be required for their country, than all this peace, and industry, and commerce, this calm of felicity, this protection and repose, under the most virtuous and merciful of kings; if they had not resisted with contempt and scorn all the very prudent suggestions with which their minds might have been so easily accommodated; if they had not been content to encounter the terrors of fines and imprisonments, the loss of their domestic comforts, the prospects of lingering disease and death for the sake of their civil and religious liberties; if they had not had the generosity and magnanimity, the virtue and the heroism, to think of their descendants as well as themselves, what, it may surely be asked, would have been now the situation of those descendants, and where would have been now the renowned constitution of England.

LECTURE XV.

CHARLES I.

In my last lecture, I proposed to my hearers, when they came to the examination of this most interesting reign of Charles I., to divide it into different intervals, and during these intervals, to compare the conduct of the king and his parliaments, the better to appreciate, on the whole, the merits and demerits of the contending parties.

Disquisitions of this kind form an important part of the instruction of history: the great principles of human conduct are, on these occasions, examined and reflected upon, and we are thus enabled to draw general conclusions. The language, for instance, which I yesterday quoted from Lord Clarendon, constituted, no doubt, much of his conversation to those around him at the time. We see it afterwards the language of Hume; it will be the language of a certain portion of the community, and that by no means the least respectable, at all times, whenever the conduct of any government becomes the subject of inquiry and remark. I therefore draw your attention to it; but I observed then, and I must repeat now, that such sentiments would have been fatal to our ancestors and ourselves, if they had prevailed in the time of Charles. Their tendency is, more or less, fatal in every period of society, and when a mixed and free constitution has been at length established, and general prosperity has been the natural result, this turn of thinking seems to be one of the last, but certainly one of the most formidable enemies, which any such mixed and free constitution has to encounter.

After dividing the reign of Charles into two intervals, the first, of four years from his accession, the next, of eleven years

immediately succeeding, I mentioned to you, as a specimen of the transactions that took place, the Petition of Right and the question of tonnage and poundage. They gave occasion to the quotations I recommended to your attention from Clarendon and Hume.

It is to this second interval that belongs the celebrated question of ship-money. The very name of Hampden will recall it to your mind. Observe the instruction which is to be derived from some of the circumstances that took place ; observe the manner in which the great leaders of the popular party could be brought over to the court; how even a man, so able and so severe as the celebrated Noy, the attorneygeneral, could be so misled, or so flattered, as to become, in fact, the author of the writ for ship-money; how the judges themselves could be tampered with; how an opinion which they pronounced theoretically, and in the abstract, could be abused in practice, and turned to the most illegal purposes; how an exercise of the prerogative (confined and bounded in its original application) could be extended indefinitely, and converted into a regular mode of legislation, which it was no longer necessary in the court to justify, nor allowable for the subject to question; when remarks like these have been made, we may surely see, but too plainly, how many are the dangers to which all civil liberty must be for ever exposed; how precarious, as well as precious, is the blessing. Let us honour, as we ought, the constitution of England, but let us consider, as we ought, how, and from whom, we have received it, and we may then learn to pronounce with gratitude and reverence the name of Hampden.

Such, indeed, have been the sentiments with which that name has been always pronounced by Englishmen. The historian Hume himself seems affected, for one short moment, by the common enthusiasm, when he arrives at this part of his narrative.

"When this assertor of the public cause," says he, "had resisted the levy of ship-money, the prejudiced, or prostituted