License they mean when they cry liberty.

Voluntarily parting with one’s liberty is, however, very different to having it taken from us, as in the anecdote of the citizen who never having been out of his native place during his lifetime, was, for some offence, sentenced to stay within the walls a whole year; when he died of grief not long afterwards.

State imprisonment is like a set of silken fetters for kings and other great people.  Thus, almost all our palaces have been used as prisons, according to the caprice of the monarch, or the violence of the uppermost faction.  Shakspeare, in his historical plays, gives us many pictures of royal and noble suffering from the loss of liberty.  One of the latter, with a beautiful antidote, is the address of Gaunt to Bolingbroke, after his banishment by Richard II.:—­

  All places that the eye of heaven visits,
  Are to a wise man ports, and happy havens: 
  Teach thy necessity to reason thus: 
  There is no virtue like necessity. 
  Think not, the king did banish thee;
  But thou the king:  woe doth heavier sit,
  Where it perceives it is but faintly borne. 
  Go, say—­I sent thee forth to purchase honour,
  And not—­the king exiled thee:  or suppose,
  Devouring pestilence hangs in our air,
  And thou art flying to a fresher clime. 
  Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it
  To lie that way thou go’st, not whence thou comest: 
  Suppose the singing birds musicians;
  The grass whereon thou tread’st, the presence strew’d;
  The flowers, fair ladies; and thy steps, no more
  Than a delightful measure, or a dance;
  For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite
  The man that mocks at it, and sets it light.

Even Napoleon, whose wounds were almost green at his death, sought to chase away the recollections of his ill-starred splendour, by rides and walks in the island, and conversation with his suite in his garden; and Louis XVIII. after his restoration to the throne of France, passed few such happy days as his exile at Hartwell, which though only a pleasant seat enough, had more comfort than the gilded saloons of Versailles, or the hurly-burly of the Tuilleries, with treason hatching in the street beneath the windows, and revolution stinking in the very nostrils of the court.  Shakspeare might well call a crown a

Polished perturbation! golden care!

and add—­

                  O majesty! 
  When thou dost pinch thy bearer, thou dost sit
  Like a rich armour worn in heat of day,
  That scalds with safety.

Goldsmith has somewhat sarcastically lamented that the appetites of the rich do not increase with their wealth; in like manner, it would be a grievous thing could liberty be monopolized or scraped into heaps like wealth; a petty tyrant may persecute and imprison thousands, but he cannot thereby add one hour or inch to his own liberty.