serve no other purpose than to create animosity, and engender indolences, to encourage hypocrisy, and shackle inquiry, to check the advancement of religious knowlege, and to accelerate the growth of infidelity.

The passages that follow are from bp. Hurd's Moral and Political Dialogues", a work which has deservedly attained to a very considerable height of reputation. In stating his ideas, respecting the measures adopted by the two first British princes of the house of Stuart, and the consequent overthrow of Charles the First and the monarchy, he says, Every dormant privilege of the crown, every phantom of prerogative, which had kept the simpler ages in awe, was now very unseasonably conjured up, to terrify all that durst oppose themselves to encroaching royalty. Lawyers and churchmen were employed in this service. And in their fierce endeavor to uphold a tottering throne by false supports, they entirely overthrew it. The nation was out of all patience to hear the one decree the empire of the kings of England to be absolute and uncontrollable by human law: and the other gave more offence, than they found credit, by pretending that the right of kings to such empire was divine. Every artifice, indeed, of chicane and sophistry was called in to the support of these maxims of law and theology. But the season for religious and civil liberty to prevail over the impotent attempts of each was at hand. That a large proportion of the members of our hierarchy, of our legislature, and of our courts of law, have been extremely hostile to the cause of civil liberty, the ingenious

58 Men of timorous minds,' says a writer of a truly benevolent spirit, 'will suppress inquiry, lest conviction should endanger their comforts; they will continue indolent and ignorant, instead of laboring to know the truth; they will laugh away their time in trifles and impertinence, and sink into voluptuousness and ease or they will affect a kind of clerical state, that flimsy veil, behind which ignorance is wont to conceal itself, and to challenge a character of wisdom.' Dyer on Subscription, 2d ed. p. 344.

59 From the first edition, printed for Millar, in one volume 8vo. in the year 1759. 60 P. 299.

author of the Dialogues was completely apprised. Speaking of the regal power in this country, he says, the language of parliaments, the decrees of lawyers, and the doctrines of divines, have generally run in favor of the HIGHEST exertions of prerogative"."

What he observes in a subsequent page, with a reference to the arbitrary conduct of the Stuarts, and to the Revolution in 1688, which that conduct produced, may be applied to vindicate some of those measures of the French nation, which the priests and pensioners of England have most loudly reprobated. It too often happens, that when the evil is once removed, it is presently forgotten: and in matters of government especially, where the people rarely think till they are made to feel, when the grievance is taken away, the false system easily returns, and sometimes with redoubled force.

That Dr. Hurd entertained the most unfavorable ideas of the manners of a court, the following citation will I think decisively prove. It is taken from that dialogue, in which Mr. Cowley and Mr. Sprat are the speakers. My situation was such,' says Mr. Cowley, that I came to have a sort of familiarity with greatness. Yet shall I confess my inmost sentiments of this gilded life to you? I found it empty, fallacious, and even disgusting. The outside indeed was fair. But to me, who had an opportunity of looking it through, nothing could be more deformed and hateful. All was ambition, intrigue, and falshood. Every one intent on his own schemes, frequently wicked, ALWAYS

61 P. 256.

62 This single passage I have taken from the third edition; for it is there better expressed than in the first, vol. II. p. 99. This quotation from the prelate illustrates two important inquiries. Was the security of public liberty in France compatible with the preservation of its hierarchy and its different orders of noblesse? Had the French people any just grounds to fear, that the immense revenues, settled on the crown by the Constituent Assembly, would, at length, be employed in overturning the constitution they had established, and perhaps in forging chains yet more heavy and more galling than those which the national energy had broken?

base and selfish. Great professions of honor, of friendship, and of duty; but all ending in low views and sordid practices.' • Your ideas then of a court,' says Mr. Sprat, is that of A DEN OF THIEVES, only better dressed, and more civilized. That, said he, is the idea under which truth obliges me to represent it.-There are but two sorts of men, pursued he, that should think of living in a court, however it be that we see animals of all sorts, clean and unclean, enter into it. The one is, of those strong and active spirits that are formed for business, whose ambition reconciles them to the bustle of life, and whose capacity fits them for the discharge of its functions.-The other sort are what one may properly enough call, if the phrase were not somewhat uncourtly, the mob of courts; they, who have vanity or avarice without ambition, or ambition without talents. These by assiduity, good luck, and the help of their vices (for they would scorn to earn advancement, if it were to be had, by any worthy practices) may in time succeed to the lower posts in a government; and together make up that shewy, servile, selfish crowd we dignify with the name of a court.' 'I shall,' says Mr. Cowley, 'spend my time more innocently, at least, and, I presume to think, more usefully in-studies, than in that slippery station, if

it

may deserve to be called one, of court favor and dependence. And if I extended the observation to many others, that are fond to take up their residence in those quarters, I cannot believe I should do them any injustice.' But, resumed he, I intended no reflection on any of the clergy, and much less on the great prelates of the church, for their attendance in the courts of princes.—I cannot enough admire the zeal of so many pastors of the church, who, though the slavish manners and libertinism of a court must be more than ordinarily offensive to men of their characters, continue to discharge their office so painfully, and yet so punctually, in that situation.' But this encomium of the author of the Dialogues is not praise, but satire; for he immedi

ately adds in a note 3, in a tone of irony:

How amiable

is this candor! Licentious men, on the other hand, draw strange conclusions. Bishop Burnet tells us of Lord Rochester, "that the aspirings he had observed at court of some of the clergy, with the servile ways they took to attain to preferment, had made him often think they suspected the things were not true, which, in their sermons and discourses they so carefully recommended." Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Earl of Rochester, p. 121. We see that this unhappy lord, observing abundance of clergymen about the court, and not penetrating the true reason of their attendance, fell into the uncharitable surmise, that, like his lay-acquaintance, THESE REVEREND

PERSONS WERE THERE ONLY TO DO THEIR OWN BUSINESS64

In animadverting on the false notions, which many in this country have entertained in favor of the prerogatives of the monarchy, he says, unless these prejudices are cor¿ rected, there is constant reason to apprehend, not only that the royal authority may stretch itself beyond due bounds; but may grow, at length, into' an 'enormous tyranny.' Whether bp. Hurd, since his assumption of the character of a legislator, being aware of the eagerness with which royalty grasps at every opportunity of enlarging its power, has shewn himself a friend to the independency of parliament; or whether, on the contrary he has discovered a readiness to forward the encroachments of the crown, and a servile acquiescence in the measures of the minister; let those decide, who are acquainted with the tenor of his lordship's parliamentary conduct.

That the author of the Dialogues, Moral and Political, was almost prepared to stand forward as the advocate of

63 I know not whether this curious note occurs in any but the first edition of the Dialogues. In the third and all the later editions it is prudently suppressed.

64 P. 57, 62, 76, 77.

65 P. 178.

'

republicanism, the following passage would seem to evince. Being used to consider all political power as coming originally from the people, it seems to me but fitting, that they should dispose of that power for their own use, IN WHAT HANDS, and UNDER WHAT CONDITIONS, they please.”

In the Postscript to the first edition of his Dialogues, where he lays aside the style of dialogue, and attacks the recently published History of England by David Hume, Dr. Hurd speaks, still more unequivocally, like a warm and decided advocate of freedom. The preceding dia

logues, says he, are so eompounded as to afford a seasonable antidote to the poison of this new history.' We are told by the writer of it, "that in the particular exertions of power, the question ought never to be forgot, what is best? But in the general distribution, there can seldom be admitted any other question than what is usual?” Were this true, is that use to be estimated only from the immediately preceding times?-Shall a great people be so freely censured for looking back into their old charters; and, when so mighty a cause as that of liberty is pleading, shall they be rigorously tied up to the precedents of two or three reigns, when they could so easily defend themselves by alleging their elder usages, and by opposing to these novel encroachments the more reverend prescription of ages? At this rate I desire to know, how a free constitution could ever subsist, or at least preserve itself in any country? Ambition, Intrigue, Expediency, Neglect, and even Chance itself are constantly introducing, and for a time will frequently continue, infringements of a People's Rights. And shall usurpation, under the name of use, be

66 Dr. Parr, in contrasting the character of bp. Warburton and bp. Hurd, says of the former, he never thought it expedient,-to expiate the artless and animated effusions of his youth, by the example of a temporising and obsequious old age. He began not his course, as others have done, with speculative republicanism, nor did he end it, as the same persons are now doing, with practical toryism.' Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian, not admitted into the Collections of their Respective Works, 1789, ' p. 156. 67 P. 188.