he had gratified the
public-feeling. Though the persecution of individuals, and actions of
glaring oppression and injustice, soon excited discord in peaceable
times, and under the government of a legitimate King, they were so
congenial to the nature of tyranny, that people were more apt to rejoice
in their own escape than to animadvert on the sufferings of their
neighbours. Nor would an accumulation of such deeds rouse to arms a
nation, that had recently bled so copiously from the multiplied wounds
of civil war. Dreadful calamities had stupified the finer feelings,
while self-interest and a mean anxiety for personal safety absorbed
their sensibility for the distressed. Above all, he regretted to say
that an unfavourable impression of the young monarch's personal
qualities had gone abroad; and though the disadvantageous reports might
be aggravated by ill-will, it would be inferred that the person on whom
they fastened was by no means blameless. For all these reasons, Dr.
Beaumont feared that the present ostensible form of a republican
government would imperceptibly slide into the restoration of what the
laws, institutions, habits, and character of England required, a limited
monarchy in the person of one of Cromwell's family, should such a one
arise, who, without being stained by the atrocious guilt of his
progenitor, should display qualities that would eclipse the legitimate
prince. Much, he said, depended on the personal character of a King of
England, who was not, like an Eastern sovereign, shown from a distant
eminence to be worshipped with prostrations, or, like a Grand Monarque,
to be flattered and implicitly obeyed. He ruled over a nation of
freemen; he lived in the observation of his subjects, not as a despot
coercing slaves and parasites, but as the administrator of public
justice, and the conservator of the national rights. He could not put up
a more salutary prayer for his country, than that each future Prince
(especially in times of great political turbulence) would remember that
he is set like a city upon a hill, and that his whole conduct is
canvassed by a free, inquisitive, and, generally speaking, an
intelligent and high-minded nation, attached to hereditary rule, but
indignant at the contamination of the blood-royal. It was impossible for
persons eminent for birth to sin in secret; and one bad action of
theirs, divulged to the public, did more injury than the machinations of
the most subtile traitor. Woe