“whom pensions can incite, To vote a patriot black, a courtier white,”

we should set him down for something more democratic than a Whig.  Yet this was the language which Johnson, the most bigoted of Tories and High Churchmen held under the administration of Walpole and Pelham.

Thus doctrines favourable to public liberty were inculcated alike by those who were in power and by those who were in opposition.  It was by means of these doctrines alone that the former could prove that they had a King de jure.  The servile theories of the latter did not prevent them from offering every molestation to one whom they considered as merely a King de facto.  The attachment of one party to the House of Hanover, of the other to that of Stuart, induced both to talk a language much more favourable to popular rights than to monarchical power.  What took place at the first representation of Cato is no bad illustration of the way in which the two great sections of the community almost invariably acted.  A play, the whole merit of which consists in its stately rhetoric sometimes not unworthy of Lucan, about hating tyrants and dying for freedom, is brought on the stage in a time of great political excitement.  Both parties crowd to the theatre.  Each affects to consider every line as a compliment to itself, and an attack on its opponents.  The curtain falls amidst an unanimous roar of applause.  The Whigs of the Kit Cat embrace the author, and assure him that he has rendered an inestimable service to liberty.  The Tory secretary of state presents a purse to the chief actor for defending the cause of liberty so well.  The history of that night was, in miniature, the history of two generations.

We well know how much sophistry there was in the reasonings, and how much exaggeration in the declamations of both parties.  But when we compare the state in which political science was at the close of the reign of George the Second with the state in which it had been when James the Second came to the throne, it is impossible not to admit that a prodigious improvement had taken place.  We are no admirers of the political doctrines laid down in Blackstone’s Commentaries.  But if we consider that those Commentaries were read with great applause in the very schools where, seventy or eighty years before, books had been publicly burned by order of the University of Oxford for containing the damnable doctrine that the English monarchy is limited and mixed, we cannot deny that a salutary change had taken place.  “The Jesuits,” says Pascal, in the last of his incomparable letters, “have obtained a Papal decree, condemning Galileo’s doctrine about the motion of the earth.  It is all in vain.  If the world is really turning round, all mankind together will not be able to keep it from turning, or to keep themselves from turning with it.”  The decrees of Oxford were as ineffectual to stay the great moral and political revolution as those of the Vatican to stay the motion of our globe.  That