principles have remained unanswered for above thirty years, and yet when it is attempted to act upon any of them, what a clamour![1] If the Emperor Joseph had been content to sow and not to plant, he would have done more good, and saved a great deal of ill. Men require to be bribed into doing good, or permitting it to be done.
"Richard Cromwell lived many years after the Restoration till late into Queen Anne's reign in a private station, quiet and contented. He was by accident obliged to attend the Court of Chancery in some private cause, when Lord Cowper was Chancellor, who was much of a gentleman, and immediately ordered a chair to be set for him. To form a judgment of Charles the Second's reign, see Hume, Macpherson, Ralph, the State trials, and above all Sir William Temple's works, and the French memoirs of the time. For James the Second see the same, besides a multitude of tracts and letters. There is a singular account of his final departure in either the London or Gentleman's Magazine, written by a country gentleman, I think, from Faversham in Kent.
"The Revolution brought in William III., a proud sagacious Dutchman, and his reign filled up the remainder of the century. Most men are led by some ruling passion; his was War, and War against the French, for which it is easy to trace a complication of motives. Nothing can be more false and absurd than the enthusiasm entertained for his character, on account of his supposed love of liberty. He saw too much of it in Holland, where, by his plans for undermining it and by his ambition, he sowed the seeds of a great deal of the confusion and corruption which put an end to the Government of that ill-used country. When Parliament sent away his Dutch Guards, he said, if he had had children or any posterity, he would not have suffered it. I cannot trace a single act of inferior regulation that we owe to him, which did not immediately gratify his ambition. The history of his favourites is scandalous. None of the families which he brought over with him have proved either an ornament or a service to
- ↑ Written in 1801.
