sufficient political cause for its existence, without quickening it with the addition of this scourging plague. But lest I should be accused of appealing to the feelings of the moment, I shall dismiss this fruitful source of reproach, knowing that you yourself, with a large majority of the virtual" representation of the People, represented to your Sovereign, " that perseverance in these discussions could not but be derogatory from the dignity of the Crown, and injurious to the best interests of the People !" With respect to the immoralities of the Press, I am sure you will agree, that the shameless attacks on private character which are every day practised with impunity by the Treasury writers, towards all those who oppose the Ministers, call for the detestation of every lover of truth. lover of truth. But think not I would call down the vengeance of the law on even this "filthy splashing of vulgar abuse." No; rather let it fly the advertiser of its own impure origin. Yet, let these calumniators reflect, that should their excesses provoke a retaliation on private character, their game is one at which two can play the annals of the Jockey Club and the gaming table, and the orgies of Bacchus, will afford ample means. And though the Courier daily posts the ladies of noble birth who visit Brandenburg House, it might prove an awkward retort to spy out all the visitors of Carlton House, the Cottage, and Pavilion; to inquire into the times, the places, the purposes, and repetitions of these visits; to drop inuendoes and suspicions against all who enter in at the gates. By such vile conduct the exalted moral character of the King himself-his splendid virtues as a son,a husband, a father, and a friend-might be exposed to the same slander, as the virtues of the Queen, described by Mr. Canning→ "the life, the grace, and the ornament of society." I am one of those, Sir, who hold that the veil of mystery should surround the private character of the Monarch. I am not for dragging forward to public gaze the frailties of Royalty, but had rather decently inter them in the tomb of the Capulets. And while we are on this subject, let it not be forgotten that the character of a King is of far more import to the morals of his subjects; for "The higher a man's birth is," says Juvenal," the more exalted he is in dignity, and the more enormous is the crime he commits :" Omne animi vitium tanto conspectius in se Crimen habet, quanto major qui pescat habetur.' And let not Princes think they can escape this obligation to purity of private character. Cicero writes: "Nec enim tantum mali est peccare principes, quamquam est magnum hoc per seipsum malum; quantum illud, quod permulti imitatores principium existunt: quo perniciosius de republica merentur vitiosi principes, quòd non 'Sat. viii. solùm vitia concipiunt ipsi, sed ea infundunt in civitatem. Neque solùm obsunt, quòd ipsi corrumpuntur, sed etiam quòd corrum, punt: plusque exemplo, quam peccato, nocent."-De Leg. lib. iii. c. 14. This takes place especially with respect to Princes, and so much the more, because the consequences of their bad actions are very fatal to the State, from the great number of persons who endeavour to imitate them."-And though those "useful fictions" of the law may pronounce that the King can do no wrong, yet, with the Bishop of London's leave, there is a tribunal and a time" when the Kings of the earth shall stand before the judgment seat of GOD, and when He will execute judgment on All, and of all the hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him." The Bishop of London seems to have dived into the mysteries of the law, and to have studied well the last edition of Blackstone's Commentaries, with Mr. Christian's ultra-loyal notes: he appears vastly impressed with the "attributes" of the King-ascribed to him by the fictions of the law; with his "ubiquity," "immortality," and "impeccability." "Besides the attribute of sovereignty, the law also ascribes to the King, in his political capacity, absolute perfection. The King can do no wrong." "The King, moreover, is not only incapable of doing wrong, but even of thinking wrong.' Comm. vol. i. c. 7. Being myself a student of the law, and suspecting the Reverend Prelate of a too literal interpretation of the text, I may perhaps be allowed a short commentary on this "absolute wisdom" and perfectibility. Judge Fortescue, and all our constitutional writers of authority, lay great stress on the limited nature of the English monarchy: indeed, its original conformation was but a few removes from democracy. The noble principles of freedom in the institutions of our Gothic ancestors built up, in Parliaments and Juries, impregnable barriers against regal despotism; and our charters are not grants from the liberality of our Kings, but rather declaratory of liberties founded in the common law, existing from time immemorial; and frequently forced from despotic Princes, who had unconstitutionally usurped possession of them. The principle of the Constitution, that "the King can do no wrong," so far from originating in despotic power, has the very contrary implication: it is expressly called by Fortescue impotency:-" Sed propter privationes in adjecto impotentia potius denominandum."-De Laudibus Legum Anglia, c. 14. All power originates from and is held for the People, says that admirable writer. The King was never trusted with the power of doing wrong. Ministers were formerly held responsible to Parliament: Parliament being then the real representation of the People, the law, supposing it would ever remain so, held it impossible for a Ministry to commit an unconstitutional act with impunity; and, holding the purse-strings, judged it might safely grant a visionary inviolability to the King, as essentially neces sary to the exercise of his high prerogative: hence originated the old saying"England can never be undone, but by her Parliament." How far this responsibility survives, or how far Parliament is the representation of the People, "Oldfield's History of Boroughs." In the " Commonwealth of England, by Sir Thomas Smith, Secretary of Queen Elizabeth, 1601," I discover what it once was-"The Parlement of England, representeth, and hath the power of the whole Realme, both the head and the bodie. For every Englishman is intended to be there present, either in see One cannot but expose the hypocrisy of those who bawl out the profanation of the sabbath by Sunday newspapers, when it is noto rious that legal and royal business is transacted on a Sunday, and that Cabinet dinners then hold their inquests over the liberties of England. I well know the weight of public business, so honorably person, or by procuration and attorny, of what preheminence, state, dignitie, or qualitie soever he be, from the Prince, (be he King or Queen,) to the lowest person of England." And the consent of the Parliement is taken to be evere man's consent!!"-In justice, however, to his Grace of London, it should be acknowledged, that he is not singular in this vulgar notion of impeccability: I find that a Dr. Cartwright, (not the old Major,) Bishop of Chester, asserted in a sermon," that the King's promises were free donatives, and ought not to be too strictly examined or urged, and that they must leave his Majesty to explain his own meaning in them."-Rapin, vol. ii. p. 754. Judge Blackstone also informs us that the King can never die! Bishop Warburton relates with some humor, in a Letter to Hurd, a rebuke he received at a Royal Levee, from an old courtier, Colonel Robinson, for having the indecency to say he had heard that the King (George II.) was not well. "To which rebuke," says the Bishop, " I answered-I perceive then, Colonel, there is some difference between your master and mine. Mine was subject to all human infirmities, sin excepted: yours is subject to none, sin excepted." There is an anecdote of Bishop Berkeley, the well-known author of the Metaphysical System of the Non-existence of Matter, not altogether foreign to this subject. The Bishop contended, that sensible material objects, as they are called, are not external to the mind; but exist in it, and are nothing more than impressions or shadows made upon it by the immediate act of the Deity. In 1714 he was seized with a violent fever; and Dr. Arbuthnot, writing to Swift, has a little pleasantry at the expense of the Bishop's imagi nation: "Poor philosopher Berkeley has now the idea of health, what was very hard to produce in him; for he had an idea of a strange fever on him, so strong, that it was very hard to destroy it by introducing a contrary one." I have before expressed myself that there is a respect due to the chief magistrate of the country, without which no government can be maintained. "But this I can defend, without being of opinion, that Kings came down from Heaven with crowns upon their heads, and the People were all born with saddles on their backs. I own I am none of Issachar's asses, nor should I be willing to be governed by the Czar of Muscovy: I don't think, if a King wanted to walk across a dirty highway, his Majesty might command twenty or thirty of the heads of his followers to be cut off, to make steppings for his sacred shoes: I profess myself a dutiful subject to the Crown of England, and in that word I mean, to what head soever on which the Parliament of England shall place the crown; but I own no King who shall ever wear it without consent of Parliament, no King who shall, after such consent, employ the power of it to the destruction of the law and Constitution of the nation; who shall invade the property of the subject, invert the public justice, or overthrow the religion and liberty of England. Such a prince is a tyrant, and may be deposed by the same power that placed him on the throne; and hereditary succession, pretended divine right, supreme power, or other matter, cause, or thing, to the contrary in any wise notwithstanding." -Preface to DE FOE's Jure Divino. That admirable poem and satire is now almost lost in the dust and neglect of the book stalls; but having been one of the main props of the Revolution, I will close this long note with a short accomplished by the first lawyer who ever graced the woolsack; but we are not to be crocodiled out of our Christian liberty by a Levite, who thinks there is one law for the rich and another for the poor: and, perhaps, it would give much relief to the learned Lord alluded to, and make his Sunday more a day of rest, if he, who seems so encumbered with his own conscience, were eased of that fiction of law which imposes upon him the keeping the King's; and were relieved of the inconsistency of giving judgment in the House of Peers on appeals from his own Court: he might also be relieved from the task of issuing polite congés d'élire, in addition to the labor of dispensing secular law, and thus be better enabled to attend to his legislative duties. I cannot help suspecting both the law of God and man would be better tended. But, at all events, let us not receive these rebukes from those who rarely behold the interior of a church, except to qualify for place or pension, and to avoid the clutches of the informer; who are thus frugal of their public devotions-apprehensive, I presume, of that reflection on the Pharisees of old, that they spare their prayers at home, to the end that they may be liberal in public. Thank God, the decency, order, and pious observance of Sunday by the People needs not the confirmation of the court newsman, or the Mirror of Fashion in the Chronicle. I happen to know of a legal apostate, one of the last solicited, who was enticed into the trap at one of the Cabinet feasts of the Pass-over above alluded to; and this cant of sabbatical profanation brought to my mind the story of a loose woman, who wrote to the Pope a case of conscience-whether she was obliged to execute her cat for killing a rat on a Sunday! Thus, Sir, have I brought blasphemy home: and if a Bishop, on his road from Exeter to Lincoln, spoke the truth, when he is reported to have said, that the devil was abroad among the People; I think I have shown that he walks on both sides the road;-and Bad as he is, the Devil may be abus'd, Be falsely charged, and causelessly accused, Shift off those crinies on him which are their own. extract, for the benefit of those foreign members of the "Holy Alliance" who are now so zealously upholding legitimacy. "But Kings are Gods! that title own they must, Like him be sacred, and like him be just; If o'er the last the vicions lust prevails, The sanction dies, and all the Gudhead fails; And he's more vile than those he ought to rule; One of the most pregnant evils of the really corrupt Press is, that the principles of the Revolution, which placed the present family on the throne, are daily slandered and denied, in senseless commendation of the battles of Peterloo and Bonny Muir. Every petty pilfering of a mob is dignified with the name of treason, and the right of resisting tyrants confounded with the crime of sedition. As ultra-loyalty is busy, it may not be amiss to quote those sentiments of Sidney, (written long before the Guelphs were even heard of) which promoted that royal family from Hanover to St. James's; and they are quoted without the slightest reference to the present times, but to preserve the recollection of wholesome truths:-" "Tis ill that men should kill one another in seditions, tumults, and wars; but 'tis worse to bring nations to such misery, weakness, and baseness, as to have neither strength nor courage to contend for any thing; to have nothing left worth defending, and to give the name of peace to desolation. I take Greece to have been happy and glorious, when it was full of populous cities, flourishing in all the arts that deserve praise among men: when they were courted and feared by the greatest kings, and never assaulted by any but to his own loss and confusion: when Babylon and Susa trembled at the motion of their arms; and their valor exercised in these wars and tumults, which our author looks upon as the greatest evils, was raised to such a power that nothing upon earth was found able to resist them: and I think it now miserable, when peace reigns within their empty walls, and the poor remains of those exhausted nations, sheltering themselves under the ruins of the desolated cities, have neither any thing that deserves to be disputed among them, nor spirit nor force to repel the injuries they daily suffer from a proud and insupportable monster." Such are the immutable truths, and the memorable lessons taught by history. And, says a Greek writer, "After treating of our duty to the gods, it is proper to teach that which we owe to our country. For our country is, as it were, a secondary god, and the first and greatest parent. It is to be preferred to parents, wives, children, friends, and all things, the gods only excepted: and if our country perishes, it is as impossible to save an individual, as to preserve one of the fingers of a mortified hand." O FREEDOM! Sovereign boon of Heav'n! Beyond a mortal monarch's grace! CHRISTOPHILUS. 'Discourses on Government, Sect. XXVI. Civil wars and tumults not the greatest evils that can befall nations. |