The people of England are loyal to the house of Hanover, not from a vain preference of one family to another, but from a conviction that the establishment of that family was necessary to the support of their civil and religious liberties. This, sir, is a principle of allegiance equally solid and rational; fit for Englishmen to adopt, and well worthy of your majesty's encouragement. We cannot long be deluded by nominal distinctions. The name of Stuart of itself is only contemptible: armed with the sovereign authority, their principles are formidable. The prince who imitates their conduct should be warned by their example; and while he plumes himself upon the security of his title to the crown, should remember that, as it was acquired by one revolution, it may be lost by another.
[331]: The whole compass of language affords no terms sufficiently strong and pointed to mark the contempt which I feel for their conduct. It is an impudent avowal of political profligacy as if that species of treachery were less infamous than any other. It is not only a degradation of a station which ought to be occupied only by the highest and most exemplary honour, but forfeits their claim to the character of gentlemen and reduces them to a level with the meanest and the basest of their species. It insults the noble, the ancient, and the characteristic independance of the English peerage and is calculated to traduce and vilify the British legislature in the eyes of all Europe, and to the latest posterity. By what magic nobility can thus charm vice into virtue, I know not nor wish to know, but in any other thing than politics, and among any other men than lords of the bedchamber, such an instance of the grossest perfidy would, as it well deserves, be branded with infamy and execration.
[332]: A parliament thus fettered and controlled, without spirit and without freedom, instead of limiting, extends, substantiates, and establishes beyond all precedent, latitude, or condition, the prerogatives of the crown. But though the British House of Commons were so shamefully lost to its own weight in the constitution, were so unmindful of its former struggles and triumphs in the great cause of liberty and mankind, were so indifferent to those primary objects and concerns for which it was originally instituted, I trust the characteristic spirit of this country is still equal to the trial; I trust Englishmen will be as jealous of secret influences as superior to open violence; I trust they are not more ready to defend their interest against foreign depredation and insult, than to encounter and defeat this midnight conspiracy against the constitution. (Fox's speeches, t. II, 262.)
[333]: Recherches sur l'origine de nos idées du beau et du sublime.
[334]: Every man of rank and landed fortune being long since extinguished, the remaining miserable last cultivator who grows to the soil, after having his back scored by the farmer, has it again flayed by the whip of the assignee, and is thus by a ravenous because a short-lived succession of claimants lashed from oppressor to oppressor, while a single drop of blood is left as the means of extorting a single grain of corn.
[335]: That debt forms the foul putrid mucus in which are engendered the whole brood of creeping ascarides, and the endless involutions, the eternal knot added to a knot of those inexpugnable tape-worms which devour the nutriment and eat up the bowels of India.
[336]: The grants to the house of Russel were so enormous, as not only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. Huge as he is, and whilst 'he lies floating many a rood,' he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers me all over with the spray—everything of him and about him is from the throne.
[337]: Lord Heathfield, the Earl of Mansfield, Major Stringer Lawrence, lord Ashburton, lord Edgecombe, etc.
[338]: Burke, Reflexions on the French Revolution, 1790.
Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, while thousands of great cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray, do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that after all they are other that the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour.