406 THE PRINCIPLE OF LOYALTY. 



This is "loyalty," a word signifying, with us, exclusively a passionate 

 attachment to the existing monarch, as such. How it has happened to 

 be thus consecrated to royal use in a country generally thought less 

 obsequious to kings than many others, we have not been able to discover ; 

 but certain it is, that the same term is differently inflected in different 

 European dialects (lovaute, Icatd, #c.), and has the more enlarged signifi- 

 cation of rank, honesty, and of perfectly good faith. Leaving, however, 

 this verbal discussion, it may be worth while to bestow some consideration 

 on the origin and nature of this passion, which acts so important a part 

 as the " cheap defence" of thrones. 



A person raised by power above the rest of mankind, may at first be 

 regarded with jealousy, and even aversion ; but if he be successful in 

 maintaining his station, it throws about him a kind of nimbus of 

 grandeur which soon causes him to be looked upon with awe and 

 reverence ; and these feelings readily slide into those of attachment 

 and devotion. The simple and ignorant placed at a distance from 

 the throne come to regard him as the source of all those blessings 

 which they enjoy, in the social institution of which he is the head ; 

 while the ambitious and designing regarding him as the fountain of 

 honour and emolument treat him with all the incense of adulation, to 

 gain his favour, and enhance his consequence. By such a process, in the 

 origin of all monarchical governments, the spirit of loyalty has been 

 created, and the influence of courts has been too successfully employed 

 to raise it to the first rank among political virtues. From the remotest 

 times, the East has been peculiarly distinguished for its devotion to the 

 person of its sovereigns : and we find Virgil, in the Georgics, making 

 the Oriental passion of loyalty a comparison for the ardent attachment 

 of bees to their king. He himself, however, and other poets of the 

 age, were as extravagant in adulation of Augustus, as if they had been 

 born the subjects of an Eastern despot : and the long and prosperous 

 reign of that emperor, doubtless, laid the foundation of that spirit of 

 loyalty which succeeded to Roman liberty during the Caesarian dynasty, 

 though its objects were some of the most contemptible and detestable 

 of mankind. Suetonius has left us a curious picture of one of the early 

 Roman loyalists, in the person of Lucius Vitellius, father of the emperor 

 of that name. He, it seems, was the first who paid divine adoration to 

 that paragon of princes, Caligula, not presuming to approach him but 

 with his head veiled, and falling prostrate at his feet. When Claudius 

 succeeded to the throne, he humbly requested of the virtuous Messalina, 



