voice, when loudly and firmly raised, was decisive on all questions of foreign and domestic policy.  There was no part of the whole system of Government with which they had not power to interfere by advice equivalent to command; and, if they abstained from intermeddling with some departments of the executive administration, they were withheld from doing so only by their own moderation, and by the confidence which they reposed in the Ministers of the Crown.  There is perhaps no other instance in history of a change so complete in the real constitution of an empire, unaccompanied by any corresponding change in the theoretical constitution.  The disguised transformation of the Roman commonwealth into a despotic monarchy, under the long administration of Augustus, is perhaps the nearest parallel.

This great alteration did not take place without strong and constant resistance on the part of the kings of the house of Stuart.  Till 1642, that resistance was generally of an open, violent, and lawless nature.  If the Commons refused supplies, the sovereign levied a benevolence.  If the Commons impeached a favourite minister, the sovereign threw the chiefs of the Opposition into prison.  Of these efforts to keep down the Parliament by despotic force, without the pretext of law, the last, the most celebrated, and the most wicked was the attempt to seize the five members.  That attempt was the signal for civil war, and was followed by eighteen years of blood and confusion.

The days of trouble passed by; the exiles returned; the throne was again set up in its high place; the peerage and the hierarchy recovered their ancient splendour.  The fundamental laws which had been recited in the Petition of Right were again solemnly recognised.  The theory of the English constitution was the same on the day when the hand of Charles the Second was kissed by the kneeling Houses at Whitehall as on the day when his father set up the royal standard at Nottingham.  There was a short period of doting fondness, a hysterica passio of loyal repentance and love.  But emotions of this sort are transitory; and the interests on which depends the progress of great societies are permanent.  The transport of reconciliation was soon over; and the old struggle recommenced.

The old struggle recommenced; but not precisely after the old fashion.  The Sovereign was not indeed a man whom any common warning would have restrained from the grossest violations of law.  But it was no common warning that he had received.  All around him were the recent signs of the vengeance of an oppressed nation, the fields on which the noblest blood of the island had been poured forth, the castles shattered by the cannon of the Parliamentary armies, the hall where sat the stern tribunal to whose bar had been led, through lowering ranks of pikemen, the captive heir of a hundred kings, the stately pilasters before which the great execution had been so fearlessly done in the face of heaven and earth.  The restored