or to measures of vengeance as cruel as those which they have reason to expect.  A Minister in our times need not fear either to be firm or to be merciful.  Our old policy in this respect was as absurd as that of the king in the Eastern tale who proclaimed that any physician who pleased might come to court and prescribe for his diseases, but that if the remedies failed the adventurer should lose his head.  It is easy to conceive how many able men would refuse to undertake the cure on such conditions; how much the sense of extreme danger would confuse the perceptions, and cloud the intellect of the practitioner, at the very crisis which most called for self-possession, and how strong his temptation would be, if he found that he had committed a blunder, to escape the consequences of it by poisoning his patient.

But in fact it would have been impossible, since the Revolution, to punish any Minister for the general course of his policy, with the slightest semblance of justice; for since that time no Minister has been able to pursue any general course of policy without the approbation of the Parliament.  The most important effects of that great change were, as Mr. Hallam has most truly said, and most ably shown, those which it indirectly produced.  Thenceforward it became the interest of the executive government to protect those very doctrines which an executive government is in general inclined to persecute.  The sovereign, the ministers, the courtiers, at last even the universities and the clergy, were changed into advocates of the right of resistance.  In the theory of the Whigs, in the situation of the Tories, in the common interest of all public men, the Parliamentary constitution of the country found perfect security.  The power of the House of Commons, in particular, has been steadily on the increase.  Since supplies have been granted for short terms and appropriated to particular services, the approbation of that House has been as necessary in practice to the executive administration as it has always been in theory to taxes and to laws.

Mr. Hallam appears to have begun with the reign of Henry the Seventh, as the period at which what is called modern history, in contradistinction to the history of the middle ages, is generally supposed to commence.  He has stopped at the accession of George the Third, “from unwillingness” as he says, “to excite the prejudices of modern politics, especially those connected with personal character.”  These two eras, we think, deserved the distinction on other grounds.  Our remote posterity, when looking back on our history in that comprehensive manner in which remote posterity alone can, without much danger of error, look back on it, will probably observe those points with peculiar interest.  They are, if we mistake not, the beginning and the end of an entire and separate chapter in our annals.  The period which lies between them is a perfect cycle, a great year of the public mind.