340 CHARLES AND HIS SUBJECTS. 



who may, there is the essence of everlasting truth in the proposition. 

 Answer who will, the words of the spirit of History will outlive bolh 

 monarchical despotism and oligarchical oppression. Albeit, it is not 

 now, as then, in the power of the PRIMOGENITURES, who recklessly 

 pretended to rally round and impiously sought to worship the great 

 animal who was made to bask under the meridian rays of the then 

 fading sun of England's glory : we repeat, twenty years (not to say 

 two centuries) have wrought strange alterations. The PRIMOGENI- 

 TURES are held and looked upon, by the enlightened people of 

 England, as so many incorrigible wasps ; and the animal in the 

 light of a marvellous creature not intellectual curiosity, possessing 

 characteristics of no mean origin ; and in the possession of the 

 faculty of speech, without prejudice to helpless inaction or prefigura- 

 tive insanity. Heaven itself will, we religiously hope, assist the 

 Britons if the Britons will not help themselves! They know full 

 well that it is high time to cast off the works of political darkness 

 parliamentary oppression and elective slavery, to put on the entire 

 and complete armour of polished freedom, unprejudiced truth, and 

 constitutional liberty ! They know how to be obedient to good works 

 and just laws; and how to reject and despise whatever approaches 

 to ungodly misrule, ministerial peculation, and administrative base- 

 ness and folly. Heaven only be praised ! The long-collected clouds 

 of our ill-starred political hemisphere are passing, nay, have been 

 driven far off; they now hang over the North, and still shadow forth 

 the embryo tyrannies the " ten thousand vile oppressions" of the 

 monster of Muscovy ; and we begin to see the resplendent radii of 

 that magnificent sun, whose " torrent flood" rolls onward! Onward 

 rolls that mighty stream compared to which, the deep and 

 unfathomable Nile is but as the shadow of a shade ; the ungodly 

 and foetid Tiber, but as the lingering outline of the mental territorial 

 sea, which shall out-pour upon public and private tyranny its 

 annihilating and irresistible elements of final destruction. 



To conclude. However we may condemn the majority of the 

 measures pursued by the parliament to, and ulterior to this calami- 

 tous civil war, this unjust and indefensible crusade against the rights 

 and liberties of the people ', however sincerely, as a matter of 

 humanity, we may lament the murder of the monarch, and feel 

 inclined to venerate the sovereign authority thus trampled upon, we 

 scarcely desire, at the same time, to withhold our deploration of those 

 arbitrary and pernicious measures which precipitated the catastrophe, 

 with all the madness of civic discord, the terrible malpractices of 

 tyrants, and their Jesuitical and manacled superior and inferior 

 slaves. Nor can we, in sober equity, refrain from making due 

 allowance for men born to freedom, and the social and constitutional 

 enjoyments of civil and religious liberty ; the same, too, having 

 been endowed by a just and merciful Creator with that quick and 

 spiritive apprehension of their interests, inherent in Englishmen, 

 attached to their rights, and resentful of injury. We are prepared 

 to encounter every peril, and manfully, with lion hearts and unpol- 

 luted hands, yield to every sacrifice for the preservation of their 

 liberties, and protection of their substance in fine their PROPERTY. 



