were designed for your destruction: You have
not only restored, but advanced the revenues of your
master, without grievance to the subject; and, as if
that were little yet, the debts of the exchequer, which
lay heaviest both on the crown, and on private persons,
have by your conduct been established in a certainty
of satisfaction.[2] An action so much the more great
and honourable, because the case was without the ordinary
relief of laws; above the hopes of the afflicted, and
beyond the narrowness of the treasury to redress,
had it been managed by a less able hand. It is
certainly the happiest, and most unenvied part of all
your fortune, to do good to many, while you do injury
to none; to receive at once the prayers of the subject,
and the praises of the prince; and, by the care of
your conduct, to give him means of exerting the chiefest
(if any be the chiefest) of his royal virtues, his
distributive justice to the deserving, and his bounty
and compassion to the wanting. The disposition
of princes towards their people cannot be better discovered
than in the choice of their ministers; who, like the
animal spirits betwixt the soul and body, participate
somewhat of both natures, and make the communication
which is betwixt them. A king, who is just and
moderate in his nature, who rules according to the
laws, whom God has made happy by forming the temper
of his soul to the constitution of his government,
and who makes us happy, by assuming over us no other
sovereignty than that wherein our welfare and liberty
consists; a prince, I say, of so excellent a character,
and so suitable to the wishes of all good men, could
not better have conveyed himself into his people’s
apprehensions, than in your lordship’s person;
who so lively express the same virtues, that you seem
not so much a copy, as an emanation of him. Moderation
is doubtless an establishment of greatness; but there
is a steadiness of temper which is likewise requisite
in a minister of state; so equal a mixture of both
virtues, that he may stand like an isthmus betwixt
the two encroaching seas of arbitrary power, and lawless
anarchy. The undertaking would be difficult to
any but an extraordinary genius, to stand at the line,
and to divide the limits; to pay what is due to the
great representative of the nation, and neither to
enhance, nor to yield up, the undoubted prerogatives
of the crown. These, my lord, are the proper
virtues of a noble Englishman, as indeed they are
properly English virtues; no people in the world being
capable of using them, but we who have the happiness
to be born under so equal, and so well poised a government;—a
government which has all the advantages of liberty
beyond a commonwealth, and all the marks of kingly
sovereignty, without the danger of a tyranny.
Both my nature, as I am an Englishman, and my reason,
as I am a man, have bred in me a loathing to that
specious name of a republic; that mock appearance
of a liberty, where all who have not part in the government,