proposal and the Chancellor, declaring that such a step would be the setting up of a phantom of sovereignty, a puppet, an idol, an idiot, to which he disclaimed all allegiance.  A more perilous amendment was one proposed to another clause by Mr. Rolle, enacting that if the Regent should marry a Roman Catholic his authority should cease.  Since the Bill of Rights, as we have seen, forbade a sovereign to marry a Roman Catholic without incurring the forfeiture of his crown, it was evidently reasonable that the same restriction should be imposed on every Regent; but it was hard at the moment altogether to dissociate such a clause from the discussions of the preceding year; and Mr. Rolle endeavored to give the clause a more pointed meaning by an amendment to enact that the forfeiture should be incurred by the mere celebration of any marriage ceremony, whether the marriage thus performed were legal and valid or not.  His amendment, however, was unanimously rejected.  The bill was passed without alteration by the House of Commons; the Prince, while protesting in an elaborate and most able letter, drawn up for him by Burke, against the restrictions imposed by the bill, nevertheless consented to sacrifice his own judgment to the general good of the kingdom, and to accept the authority, limited as it was.  And by the middle of February the bill was sent up to the House of Lords.  There Lord Camden had charge of it, and his position as a former Chancellor gave irresistible weight to his opinion that the mode proposed to give the final sanction to the bill was strictly in accordance with the spirit and practice of the constitution.  The point with which he dealt was the previous one, how Parliament, which was to pass the bill, was to be opened, for, “circumstanced as it was, Parliament could not at present take a single step.”  The law, as he put it, declared that the King must be present, either in person or by a representative.  When he could not attend personally, the legal and constitutional process was to issue letters-patent under the Great Seal.  In the present dilemma, therefore, he recommended that the two Houses should direct letters-patent to be issued under the Great Seal, authorizing commissioners to open Parliament in the name of his Majesty.  He “must use the liberty to say that those who treated this proposal with ridicule were ignorant of the laws of their country.  A fiction it might be termed, but it was a fiction admirably calculated to preserve the constitution, and, by adopting its forms, to preserve its substance.”  The authority of the Great Seal he explained to be such that, “even if the Lord Chancellor, by caprice, put it to any commission, it could not afterward be questioned;” and he adduced a precedent of a very similar character to the course now proposed, which occurred “at the commencement of the reign of Henry VI., when, the sovereign being an infant of nine months old, the Great Seal was placed in his hand, and it was supposed to be given to him by the