A most striking contrast presents itself between the conduct and fortune of John and his adversary Philip.  Philip came to the crown when many of the provinces of Prance, by being in the hands of too powerful vassals, were in a manner dismembered from the kingdom; the royal authority was very low in what remained.  He reunited to the crown a country as valuable as what belonged to it before; he reduced his subjects of all orders to a stricter obedience than they had given to his predecessors; he withstood the Papal usurpation, and yet used it as an instrument in his designs:  whilst John, who inherited a great territory and an entire prerogative, by his vices and weakness gave up his independency to the Pope, his prerogative to his subjects, and a large part of his dominions to the King of France.

FOOTNOTES: 

[82] A word of uncertain derivation, but which signifies some scandalous species of cowardice.

CHAPTER IX.

FRAGMENT.—­AN ESSAY TOWARDS AN HISTORY OF THE LAWS OF ENGLAND.

There is scarce any object of curiosity more rational than the origin, the progress, and the various revolutions of human laws.  Political and military relations are for the greater part accounts of the ambition and violence of mankind:  this is an history of their justice.  And surely there cannot be a more pleasing speculation than to trace the advances of men in an attempt to imitate the Supreme Ruler in one of the most glorious of His attributes, and to attend them in the exercise of a prerogative which it is wonderful to find intrusted to the management of so weak a being.  In such an inquiry we shall, indeed, frequently see great instances of this frailty; but at the same time we shall behold such noble efforts of wisdom and equity as seem fully to justify the reasonableness of that extraordinary disposition by which men, in one form or other, have been always put under the dominion of creatures like themselves.  For what can be more instructive than to search out the first obscure and scanty fountains of that jurisprudence which now waters and enriches whole nations with so abundant and copious a flood,—­to observe the first principles of RIGHT springing up, involved in superstition and polluted with violence, until by length of time and favorable circumstances it has worked itself into clearness:  the laws sometimes lost and trodden down in the confusion of wars and tumults, and sometimes overruled by the hand of power; then, victorious over tyranny, growing stronger, clearer, and more decisive by the violence they had suffered; enriched even by those foreign conquests which threatened their entire destruction; softened and mellowed by peace and religion; improved and exalted by commerce, by social intercourse, and that great opener of the mind, ingenuous science?