injuriously either his own interests or the liberties of his people.
Tempora mutantur: _nos et mutamur in illis_. Those whom we find in
fierce opposition to the popular party about 1640 we find still in the
same personal opposition fifty years after, but an opposition resting on
far different principles: insensibly the principles of their antagonists
had reached even them: and a courtier of 1689 was willing to concede more
than a patriot of 1630 would have ventured to ask. Let me not be
understood to mean that true patriotism is at all more shown in supporting
the rights of the people than those of the king: as soon as both are
defined and limited, the last are as indispensable to the integrity of the
constitution--as the first: and popular freedom itself would suffer as
much, though indirectly, from an invasion of Caesar's rights--as by a more
direct attack on itself. But in the 17th century the rights of the people
were as yet _not_ defined: throughout that century they were gradually
defining themselves--and, as happiness to all great practical interests,
defining themselves through a course of fierce and bloody contests. For
the kingly rights are almost inevitably carried too high in ages of
imperfect civilization: and the well-known laws of Henry the Seventh, by
which he either broke or gradually sapped the power of the aristocracy,
had still more extravagantly exalted them. On this account it is just to
look upon democratic or popular politics as identical in the 17th century
with patriotic politics. In later periods, the democrat and the patriot
have sometimes been in direct opposition to each other: at that period
they were inevitably in conjunction. All this, however, is in general
overlooked by those who either write English history or comment upon it.
Most writers _of_ or _upon_ English history proceed either upon servile
principles, or upon no principles: and a good _Spirit of English History_,
that is, a history which should abstract the tendencies and main results
[as to laws, manners, and constitution] from every age of English history,
is a work which I hardly hope to see executed. For it would require the