was a patron of learned men, and might himself be accounted learned. But his favourite studies, instead of preserving him from the love of flattery, served to lay him open to it. Scholastic divinity, the fashionable learning of the time, as Burnet observes, suited his vain and contentious temper, and, as ecclesiastics were to be his critics, his pursuits of polemical theology brought him in the largest revenue of praise; so that there seemed to be a contest between him and them, whether they could offer, or he could swallow, the most copious draughts of flattery.

But the reign of James the First was the great epocha of adulation in England; and a prince who had not one of the qualities of a warlike, and scarcely one of the virtues of a pacific king, received from clergy and laity, from statesmen, philosophers, and men of letters, praises not only utterly repugnant to truth and virtue, but directly contrary to that frankness of manners, and magnanimity of spirit, which had formerly characterised Englishmen. This ascription of all rights, and all talents, and all virtues, to a prince, bold through fear, and presumptuous because he wished to conceal his own pusillanimity, rebounded, as was but just, on the flatterers ; who, in return for their adulation, were treated by him with a contempt, which not the boldest of his predecessors had ever ventured to manifest. His inquiry of his company at dinner, whether he might not take his subjects' money when he needed it, without the formality of parliament, indicates that one object was always uppermost in his mind ;* his familiar intercourse was employed in diving into the private opinions of men, to discover to what length his oppressive schemes might be carried; and his public conduct occupied in putting those schemes into practice.

But the royal person whom we presume to advise, may, from the very circumstance of her sex, have more complicated dangers to resist; against which her mind should be early fortified. The dangers of adulation are doubled, when the female character is combined with the royal. Even the vigorous mind of the great Elizabeth did not guard her against the powerful assaults of the flattery paid to her person. That masculine spirit was as much the slave of the most egregious vanity, as the weakest of her sex could have been. All her admirable prudence and profound policy could not preserve her from the childish and silly levity with which she greedily invited the compliments of the artful minister of her more beautiful rival. Even that gross instance of Melvil's extravagance enchanted her, when as she was playing on Mary's favourite instrument, for the purpose of being overheard by him, the dissembling courtier affected to be so ravished by her skill, as to burst into her apartment, like an enraptured man, who had forgotten his reverence in his admiration. It was a curious combat in the great mind of Elizabeth, between the offended pride of the queen, and the gratified vanity of the woman; but Melvil knew his trade, in knowing human nature; he calculated justly. The woman conquered.

Princes have in all ages complained that they have been ill served. But, is it not because they have not always carefully selected their servants? Is it not because they have too often bestowed confidence on the unwise, and employments on the unworthy? because, while they have loaded the

The requisition was allowed in a phrase as disgustingly servile, by Bishop Neile, as it was pleasantly evaded by Andrews.

undeserving with benefits, they have neglected to reward those who have served them well, and to support those who have served them long? Is it not because they have sometimes a way of expecting everything, while they seem to exact nothing? And have not too many been apt to consider that the honour of serving them is itself a sufficient reward?

By a close study of the weaknesses and passions of a sovereign, crafty and designing favourites have ever been on the watch to establish their own dominion, by such appropriate means as seem best accommodated to the turn of those weaknesses and passions. If Leonore Concini* and the Duchess of Marlborough obtained the most complete ascendancy over their respective queens, both probably by artful flattery at first, they afterwards secured and preserved it by a tyranny the most absolute. In connexions of this nature, it is usually on the side of the sovereign, that the caprice and the haughtiness are expected; but the domineering favourite of Anne exclusively assumed to herself all these prerogatives of despotic power, and exercised them without mercy, on the intimidated and submissive queen; a queen, who, with many virtues, not having had the discernment to find out, that the opposite extreme to what is wrong, is commonly wrong also, in order to extricate herself from her captivity to one favourite, fell into the snares spread for her by the servility of another. Thus, whether the imperious duchess, or the obsequious Masham, were lady of the ascendant, the sovereign was equally infatuated, equally misled.

That attachments formed without judgment, and pursued without moderation, are likely to be dissolved without reason; and that breaches the most trivial in themselves may be important in their consequences, were never more fully exemplified than in the trifling cause which, by putting an end to the intercourse between the above-named queen and duchess, produced events the most unforeseen and extraordinary. While the duke was fighting her majesty's battles abroad, and his duchess supporting his interests against a powerful party at court; a pair of gloves of a new invention, sent first by the milliner to the favourite, (impatient to have them before the queen, who had ordered a similar pair,) so incensed her majesty, as to be the immediate cause, by driving the duchess from her post, of depriving the duke of his command, compelling the confederates to agree to a peace, preserving Louis from the destruction which awaited him, making a total revolution in parties at home, and determining the fate of Europe.†

To a monarch, more eager to acquire fame than to deserve it, to pension a poet will be a shorter cut to renown than to dispense blessings to his country. Louis XII., instead of buying immortality of a servile bard, earned and enjoyed the appellation of "father of his people :" that people whom his brilliant successor, Louis the Great, drained and plundered, or, in the emphatic language of the prophet, "peeled and scattered," to provide money for his wars, his mistresses, his buildings, and his spectacles. Posterity, however, has done justice to both kings, and le bien-aimé is

* Leonore Galigai was the wife of the Marshal d'Ancre, on whose death she was tried for gaining by sorcery an ascendancy over the affections of the queen. To the demand, what magical arts she made use of to procure that influence; she replied, that the only magic she practised, was that of a strong mind over a weak one.-The sentence was, that she should be beheaded, and her body burnt to ashes: which was put in execution, July 8th, 1617.

+ Examen du "Prince."

remembered with affectionate veneration, while le grand is regarded as the fabricator of the ruin of his race.

How totally must adulation have blunted the delicacy of the latter prince, when he could shut himself up with his two royal historiographers, Boileau and Racine, to hear them read portions of his own history! Deservedly high as was the reputation of these two fine geniuses, in the walks of poetry, was that history likely to convey much truth or instruction to posterity, which, after being composed by two pensioned poets, was read by them to the monarch who was to be the hero of the tale? Sovereigns, indeed, may elect poets to record their exploits, but subjects will read historians.

The conquest of every town and village was celebrated by Boileau* in hyperbolic song; and the whole pantheon ransacked for deities, who might furnish some faint idea of the glories of the immortal Louis. The time,

however, soon arrived, when the author of the adulatory ode on the taking of Namur, in which the king and the gods were again identified, was completely overturned by the incomparable travesty of our witty Prior, as the conqueror of Namur himself was by its glorious deliverer

Little Will, the scourge of France,

No godhead, but the first of men.

A prince should be accustomed to see and know things as they really are, and should be taught to dread that state of delusion, in which the monarch is the only person ignorant of what is doing in his kingdom. It was to little purpose that the sovereign last named, when some temporary sense of remorse was excited by an affecting representation of the miseries of the persecuted protestants, said, "that he hoped God would not impute to him as a crime, punishments which he had not commanded." Delusive hope! It was crime enough for a king to be ignorant of what was passing in his dominions.

There have been few princes so ill disposed, as not to have been made worse by unmeasured flattery. Even some of the most depraved Roman emperors began their career with a fair promise. Tiberius set out with being mild and prudent; and even Nero, for a considerable time, either wore the mask, or did not need it. While his two virtuous friends maintained their entire influence, everything looked favourable. But when his sycophants had succeeded in making Seneca an object of ridicule; and when Tigellinus was preferred to Burrhus, all that followed was a natural consequence. The abject slavery of the people, the servile decrees of the senate, the obsequious acquiescence of the court, the prostrate homage of every order, all concurred to bring out his vices in their full luxuriance ; and Rome, as was but just, became the victim of the monster she had pampered. Tacitus, with his usual honest indignation, declares, that as often as the emperor commanded banishments or ordered assassinations, so often were thanks and sacrifices decreed to the gods !

But, in our happier days, as subjects, it is presumed, indulge no such propensities; so, under our happier constitution, have they no such opportunities. Yet powerful, though gentler, and almost unapparent means, may be employed to weaken the virtue, and injure the fame of a prince.

* See Boileau's Ode sur la Prise de Namur by Louis, and Prior's Poem on the taking of Namur by king William.

To degrade his character, he need only be led into one vice, idleness; and be attacked by one weapon, flattery. Indiscriminate acquiescence and soothing adulation will lay his mind open to the incursion of every evil, without his being aware of it, for his table is not the place where he expects to meet an enemy, consequently he is not on his guard against him. And where he is thus powerfully assailed, the kindest nature, the best intentions, the gentlest manners and the mildest dispositions, cannot be depended on for preserving him from from those very corruptions to which the worst propensities lead; and there is a degree of facility, which, from softness of temper, becomes imbecility of mind.

For there is hardly a fault a sovereign can commit, to which flattery may not incline him. It impels to opposite vices-to apathy and egotism, the natural failings of the great; to ambition which inflames the heart, to anger which distorts it; to hardness which deadens, and to selfishness which degrades it. He should be taught, as the intrepid Massillon * taught his youthful prince, that the flattery of the courtier, contradictory as the assertion may seem, is little less dangerous than the disloyalty of the rebel. Both would betray him; and the crime of him who would dethrone, and of him who would debase his prince, however they may differ in a political, differ but little in a moral view; nay, the ill effects of the traitor's crime may, to the prince at least, be bounded by time, while the consequences of the flatterers may extend to eternity.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Religion necessary to the well-being of states.

THE royal pupil should be informed, that there are some half Christians and half philosophers, who wish, without incurring the discredit of renouncing religion, to strip it of its value, by lowering its usefulness. They have been at much pains to produce a persuasion, that however beneficial Christianity may be to individuals, and however properly it may be taken as the rule of their conduct, it cannot be safely brought into action in political concerns; that the intervention of its spirit will rarely advance the public good, but, on the contrary, will often necessarily obstruct it; and, in particular, that the glory and elevation of states must be unavoidably attended with some violation even of those laws of morality which, they allow, ought to be observed in other cases.†

These assertions, respecting the political disadvantages of religion, have not been urged merely by the avowed enemies of Christian principle, the Bolingbrokes, the Hobbeses, and the Gibbons: but there is a more sober class of sceptics, ranged under the banners of a very learned and ingenious sophist, who have not scrupled to maintain, that the author of Christianity has actually forbidden us to improve the condition of this world, to take any vigorous steps for preventing its misery, or advancing its glory.

* See Massillon's Sermons, abounding equally in the sublimest piety and the richest eloquence.

It were to be wished that Cromwell had been the only ruler who held, that the rules of morality must be dispensed with on great political occasions.

M. Bayle.

Another writer, an elegant wit, but a whimsical and superficial, though, doubtless, sincere Christian,* who would be shocked at the excess to which impiety has carried the position, has yet afforded some countenance to it, by intimating, that God has given to men a religion which is incompatible with the whole economy of that world which he has created, and in which he has thought proper to place them. He allows, that government is essential to men, and yet asserts, that it cannot be managed without certain degrees of violence, corruption, and imposition, which yet Christianity strictly forbids. That perpetual patience under injuries must every day provoke new insults and injuries; yet is this, says he, enjoined.

The same positions are also repeatedly affirmed, by a later, more solid, and most admirable writer, whose very able defence of the divine authority of Christianity and the Holy Scriptures, naturally obtains credit for any opinions which are honoured with his support.

It may be expected that those who advance such propositions should at least produce proofs from history, that those states, in the government of which Christian principles have been most conspicuous, other circumstances being equal, have either failed through error, or sunk through impotence; or in some other way have suffered, from introducing principles into transactions to which they were inapplicable.

But how little the avowed sceptic, or even the paradoxical Christian, seems to understand the genius of our religion; and how erroneous is their conception of the true elementary principles of political prosperity, we learn from one who was as able as either to determine on the case. He who was not only a politician but a king, and eminently acquainted with the duties of both characters, has assured us that RIGHTEOUSNESS EXALTETH A NATION. And does not every instinct of the unsophisticated heart, and every clear result of dispassionate and enlarged observation, unite in adopting as a moral axiom this divinely-recorded aphorism?

It would, indeed, be strange, if the great Author of all things had admitted such an anomaly in his moral government; if, in direct contradiction to that moral ordination of causes and effects, by which, in the case of individuals, religion and virtue generally tend, in the way of natural consequence, to happiness and prosperity, irreligion and vice to discomfiture and misery, the Almighty should have established the directly opposite tendencies, in the case of those multiplications of individuals which are called civil communities. It is a supposition so contrary to the Divine procedure in every other instance, that it would require to be proved by incontestable evidence. It would indeed amount to a concession, that the moral Author of the world had appointed a premium, as it were, for vice and irreligion; the very idea is profaneness. Happily, it is clearly contrary also both to reason and experience. Providence, the ordinations of which will ever exhibit marks of wisdom and goodness in proportion to the care with which they are explored, has, in this instance, as well as in others, made our duty coincident with our happiness; has furnished us with an additional motive for pursuing that course which is indispensable to our eternal welfare, by rendering it, in the case both of individuals and of

*Soame Jenyns. It is true, he puts the remark in the mouth of "refined and speculative observers." But he afterwards affirms in his own person-That such is indeed the Christian Revelation.