He who thinks that the British Constitution ought to consist of the three members, of three very different natures, of which it does actually consist, and thinks it his duty to preserve each of those members in its proper place and with its proper proportion of power, must (as each shall happen to be attacked) vindicate the three several parts on the several principles peculiarly belonging to them.  He cannot assert the democratic part on the principles on which monarchy is supported, nor can he support monarchy on the principles of democracy, nor can he maintain aristocracy on the grounds of the one or of the other or of both.  All these he must support on grounds that are totally different, though practically they may be, and happily with us they are, brought into one harmonious body.  A man could not be consistent in defending such various, and, at first view, discordant, parts of a mixed Constitution, without that sort of inconsistency with which Mr. Burke stands charged.

As any one of the great members of this Constitution happens to be endangered, he that is a friend to all of them chooses and presses the topics necessary for the support of the part attacked, with all the strength, the earnestness, the vehemence, with all the power of stating, of argument, and of coloring, which he happens to possess, and which the case demands.  He is not to embarrass the minds of his hearers, or to incumber or overlay his speech, by bringing into view at once (as if he were reading an academic lecture) all that may and ought, when a just occasion presents itself, to be said in favor of the other members.  At that time they are out of the court; there is no question concerning them.  Whilst he opposes his defence on the part where the attack is made, he presumes that for his regard to the just rights of all the rest he has credit in every candid mind.  He ought not to apprehend that his raising fences about popular privileges this day will infer that he ought on the next to concur with those who would pull down the throne; because on the next he defends the throne, it ought not to be supposed that he has abandoned the rights of the people.

A man, who, among various objects of his equal regard, is secure of some, and full of anxiety for the fate of others, is apt to go to much greater lengths in his preference of the objects of his immediate solicitude than Mr. Burke has ever done.  A man so circumstanced often seems to undervalue, to vilify, almost to reprobate and disown, those that are out of danger.  This is the voice of Nature and truth, and not of inconsistency and false pretence.  The danger of anything very dear to us removes, for the moment, every other affection from the mind.  When Priam had his whole thoughts employed on the body of his Hector, he repels with indignation, and drives from him with a thousand reproaches, his surviving sons, who with an officious piety crowded about him to offer their assistance.  A good critic (there is no better than Mr. Fox) would say that this is a masterstroke, and marks a deep understanding of Nature in the father of poetry.  He would despise a Zoilus who would conclude from this passage that Homer meant to represent this man of affliction as hating or being indifferent and cold in his affections to the poor relics of his house, or that he preferred a dead carcass to his living children.