prosecute these hints for their advantage, unless a dreaming correspondent shall communicate something to me on the subject that shall supersede my own observations.

N° 23. SATURDAY, MAY 26.

In tumbling over our family manuscripts a day or two ago, my attention was arrested by a long epistle addressed to a king. It seems to have been written by one of the Olive-branches, who was in holy orders. But, as many of us have been of the clerical profession, and as this performance happens to be without date, I must leave my readers to guess at the crisis of the state, and the period of our history, in which it was written, by the complexion of its matter.

Sir,

every

TO THE KING.

As I consider this as a moment in which honest endeavour should be made to tranquillise the suspense of the nation, and to fix the public opinion on the safe and sober side, I look upon myself as justified by the character I maintain of a gentleman, and a clergyman of England, in thus addressing your majesty on a subject so critically interesting to yourself and us all. It is in vain that I hold forth from my pulpit thus twice a week the solemn truths and injunctions of religion, and endeavour through the week to keep up in my parishioners

the practice of what I have taught, while their minds are discomposed and ruffled by menaces and alarms, and while their attention is drawn towards objects of immediate concern to their repose and preservation.

At a juncture like this, so big with destiny, and so prolific of change, every thinking man is contemplating whatever is most dear and sacred to him, in the system in which he moves, with an aching solicitude; and you, sir, above all, must feel yourself touched with the present instability of thrones, of constitutions, and establishments.

I have ever contemplated your majesty as the greatest prince in Christendom; not because you have the greatest power, not because you are at the head of the greatest nation, but because you are of all princes the most important to the people over whom you reign. It must assuredly give you great weight in your own eyes, to reflect that you make an essential part of a constitution under which mankind have been happier and greater than in any state of things hitherto experienced. But if there be a crisis in the history of your country, in which this your consequence to your subjects is more particularly felt, I scruple not to say that this is that crisis. When the caprice of innovation, and the indefinite love of change, gets abroad among a sanguine people like your English subjects, it is natural and right for good men to turn towards the resources which the constitution has provided for its own security and continuance.

Now that part of it to which wise men have principally ascribed its poise and stability, is the share which your majesty enjoys; a share which has excluded the fluctuating rage and unbridled ambition of Democracies, while it has admitted and strength

ened all the virtuous efficacy of the Republican form. It is this steadiness and integrity which the state has derived from the crown, that enables us to boast that the frame of our constitution has undergone no material change since the æra of the Restoration, if we except the triennial law passed under King William, and repealed under George the First. This principle of conservation, so characteristic of your majesty's crown, naturally holds it up to those who are conspiring against the blessings of our constitution, as the great mark of their destroying system. This they obscurely drive at through the medium of collateral ruin; to this end a thousand arts and deceptions are employed, in a progressive course of operation; and the mildest professions and projects of reform are at this time only the first steps of the scale of destruction, the initiative forms of that towering fabric of mischief which they meditate in their hearts.

The base of every revolution is broad and comprehensive; a multitude of different factions unite to compose it, characterised by one spirit of discontent, but with different views and different motives. The disappointment, however, of their separate endeavours, brings them closer together; the society of resentment shapes the cause of the one to the cause of the other; each considers that the wishes of the rest run parallel to a certain length with his own; as their spirits become heated, their thoughts become blended; till at last the views of the violent and the wicked prevail altogether, and a common desperation overspreads the whole. Your majesty's acquaintance with history must bring to your mind a sufficient number of examples of this gathering and condensing principle in all plots and machinations against government; it must put you upon your

guard against those specious reforming requisitions, which, however reasonable they may be, when abstractedly considered, are always to be distrusted when they make their appearance in unreasonable times, in times of heat and of clamour, like the present. I speak of this spirit of innovation with reference to our happy constitution: in other places it may be justified by other circumstances; but while we sit under the shade of our own laws, and feel all the cherishing benignity of our own government, it is fair almost to look with distrust and prejudice on all projects of change whatever, and to regard them as necessarily involving much hazard and danger.

In a constitution so complicated as ours, and composed of so many minute parts which require a sound knowledge of human affairs to understand their subserviency to the whole, it is not for every pretender to tell us what we can spare, or what props are necessary to an edifice which has not been erected at once on mathematical principles, or after any pre-concerted plan or model, but has grown and spread with time, occasion, and emergency; and has been pieced and parcelled into various apartments, more with a view to accommodation than grace, to capacity than proportion, to interior comfort than outward symmetry and order. A constitution so mysteriously wrought, so fashioned to the changing condition of the human mind, so pliable to the wants and demands of our nature, however slow in finishing, has a higher claim to our regard, than if it had been woven at once in the brains of a single set of men, or in the revolution of a single æra, to fit with scrupulous adjustment the philosophy of the times, or a transitory crisis of popular opinion.

It is enough for us to know that our constitution

has been sealed with the sanction of time and successive generations; that it has been found answerable to all the purposes of national aggrandisement; that fighting under its banners we have gloriously conquered; that under its protection we have maintained our religion; that we have found its spirit-congenial to commerce, and friendly to the progress of knowledge and humanity: it is enough to know this, without troubling ourselves to inquire into the nature of its origin, or its qualifications of birth.

If our constitution, whole as it is, had no original foundation in the free consent of a people; if we do not enjoy it as the entire gift of a solemn confederation; there is nevertheless no part of it that has not been tried in all its points, and all its bearings; that has not many times over been weighed in the balance by contending interests; that has not been examined, in times of trouble and in times of repose, with jealous scrupulosity; and that has not come down to us, marked with no particular humour of a particular juncture, but bearing in its aspect the reverend authority of time, the different subscriptions of different ages, and the broad testimony of human nature at large.

Those, therefore, of your majesty's subjects, who are so pleased with discovering that our government is no constitution, because they are unable to trace it back to any general association and consent of the people, are solicitous about formalities that have no natural ground in human affairs, which proceed by an involuntary course of incidental progression and improvement. Secure in the actual blessings of political freedom, we need not contend about forms and titles: we will not make war upon these verbal politicians, in vindication of our right to the name of constitution, if they, on their part, will not insist on