it operate like Fortunatus’s wishing-cap or Harlequin’s wooden sword?  Doth it make a man a conjurer?  In fine, what is it?  It appears to be a something going much out of fashion, falling into ridicule, and rejected in some countries both as unnecessary and expensive.  In America it is considered as an absurdity; and in France it has so far declined, that the goodness of the man and the respect for his personal character are the only things that preserve the appearance of its existence.”

“Mr. Burke talks about what he calls an hereditary crown, as if it were some production of Nature,—­or as if, like time, it had a power to operate, not only independently, but in spite of man,—­or as if it were a thing or a subject universally consented to.  Alas! it has none of those properties, but is the reverse of them all.  It is a thing in imagination, the propriety of which is more than doubted, and the legality of which in a few years will be denied.”

“If I ask the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the tradesman, and down through all the occupations of life to the common laborer, what service monarchy is to him, he can give me no answer.  If I ask him what monarchy is, he believes it is something like a sinecure.”

“The French Constitution says, that the right of war and peace is in the nation.  Where else should it reside, but in those who are to pay the expense?

“In England, this right is said to reside in a metaphor, shown at the Tower for sixpence or a shilling apiece:  so are the lions; and it would be a step nearer to reason to say it resided in them, for any inanimate metaphor is no more than a hat or a cap.  We can all see the absurdity of worshipping Aaron’s molten calf, or Nebuchadnezzar’s golden image; but why do men continue to practise themselves the absurdities they despise in others?”

The Revolution and Hanover succession had been objects of the highest veneration to the old Whigs.  They thought them not only proofs of the sober and steady spirit of liberty which guided their ancestors, but of their wisdom and provident care of posterity.  The modern Whigs have quite other notions of these events and actions.  They do not deny that Mr. Burke has given truly the words of the acts of Parliament which secured the succession, and the just sense of them.  They attack not him, but the law.

“Mr Burke” (say they) “has done some service, not to his cause, but to his country, by bringing those clauses into public view.  They serve to demonstrate how necessary it is at all times to watch against the attempted encroachment of power, and to prevent its running to excess.  It is somewhat extraordinary, that the offence for which James the Second was expelled, that of setting up power by assumption, should be re-acted, under another shape and form, by the Parliament that expelled him.  It shows that the rights of man were but imperfectly understood at the Revolution; for certain it is, that the right