expedition.  This is the talent which has made judges without law, and diplomatists without French, which has sent to the Admiralty men who did not know the stern of a ship from her bowsprit, and to the India Board men who did not know the difference between a rupee and a pagoda, which made a foreign secretary of Mr. Pitt, who, as George the Second said, had never opened Vattel, and which was very near making a Chancellor of the Exchequer of Mr. Sheridan, who could not work a sum in long division.  This was the sort of talent which raised Clifford from obscurity to the head of affairs.  To this talent Osborne, by birth a simple country gentleman, owed his white staff, his garter, and his dukedom.  The encroachment of the power of the Parliament on the power of the Crown resembled a fatality, or the operation of some great law of nature.  The will of the individual on the throne, or of the individuals in the two Houses, seemed to go for nothing.  The King might be eager to encroach; yet something constantly drove him back.  The Parliament might be loyal, even servile; yet something constantly urged them forward.

These things were done in the green tree.  What then was likely to be done in the dry?  The Popish Plot and the general election came together, and found a people predisposed to the most violent excitation.  The composition of the House of Commons was changed.  The Legislature was filled with men who leaned to Republicanism in politics, and to Presbyterianism in religion.  They no sooner met than they commenced an attack on the Government, which, if successful, must have made them supreme in the State.

Where was this to end?  To us who have seen the solution the question presents few difficulties.  But to a statesman of the age of Charles the Second, to a statesman, who wished, without depriving the Parliament of its privileges, to maintain the monarch in his old supremacy, it must have appeared very perplexing.

Clarendon had, when Minister, struggled honestly, perhaps, but, as was his wont, obstinately, proudly, and offensively, against the growing power of the Commons.  He was for allowing them their old authority, and not one atom more.  He would never have claimed for the Crown a right to levy taxes from the people without the consent of Parliament.  But when the Parliament, in the first Dutch war, most properly insisted on knowing how it was that the money which they had voted had produced so little effect, and began to inquire through what hands it had passed, and on what services it had been expended, Clarendon considered this as a monstrous innovation.  He told the King, as he himself says, “that he could not be too indulgent in the defence of the privileges of Parliament, and that he hoped he would never violate any of them; but he desired him to be equally solicitous to prevent the excesses in Parliament, and not to suffer them to extend their jurisdiction to cases they have nothing to do with; and that to restrain them within their proper bounds and limits is as necessary as it is to preserve them from being invaded; and that this was such a new encroachment as had no bottom.”  This is a single instance.  Others might easily be given.