punishments as made them take up.

Henceforth the country lives and great tables of the
nobility, which no longer nourished veins that would bleed for
them, were fruitless and loathsome till they changed the air, and
of princes became courtiers; where their revenues, never to have
been exhausted by beef and mutton, were found narrow, whence
followed racking of rents, and at length sale of lands, the
riddance through the statute of alienations being rendered far
more quick and facile than formerly it had been through the new
invention of entails.

To this it happened that Coraunus, the successor of that
King, dissolving the abbeys, brought, with the declining state of
the nobility, so vast a prey to the industry of the people, that
the balance of the commonwealth was too apparently in the popular
party to be unseen by the wise Council of Queen Parthenia, who,
converting her reign through the perpetual love tricks that
passed between her and her people into a kind of romance, wholly
neglected the nobility. And by these degrees came the House of
Commons to raise that head, which since has been so high and
formidable to their princes that they have looked pale upon those
assemblies. Nor was there anything now wanting to the destruction
of the throne, but that the people, not apt to see their own
strength, should be put to feel it; when a prince, as stiff in
disputes as the nerve of monarchy was grown slack, received that
unhappy encouragement from his clergy which became his utter
ruin, while trusting more to their logic than the rough
philosophy of his Parliament, it came to an irreparable breach;
for the house of peers, which alone had stood in this gap, now