llower of Nature, Sir Joshua Reynolds, has
somewhere applied it, or something like it, in his own profession. It is
this: that, if ever we should find ourselves disposed not to admire
those writers or artists (Livy and Virgil, for instance, Raphael or
Michael Angelo) whom all the learned had admired, not to follow our own
fancies, but to study them, until we know how and what we ought to
admire; and if we cannot arrive at this combination of admiration with
knowledge, rather to believe that we are dull than that the rest of the
world has been imposed on. It is as good a rule, at least, with regard
to this admired Constitution. We ought to understand it according to our
measure, and to venerate where we are not able presently to comprehend.

Such admirers were our fathers, to whom we owe this splendid
inheritance. Let us improve it with zeal, but with fear. Let us follow
our ancestors, men not without a rational, though without an exclusive
confidence in themselves,--who, by respecting the reason of others, who,
by looking backward as well as forward, by the modesty as well as by the
energy of their minds, went on insensibly drawing this Constitution
nearer and nearer to its perfection, by never departing from its
fundamental principles, nor introducing any amendment which had not a
subsisting root in the laws, Constitution, and usages of the kingdom.
Let those who have the trust of political or of natural authority ever
keep watch against the desperate enterprises of innovation: let even
their benevolence be fortified and armed. They have before their eyes
the example of a monarch insulted, degraded, confined, deposed; his
family dispersed, scattered, imprisoned; his wife insulted to his face,
like the vilest of the sex, by the vilest of all populace; himself three
times dragged by these wretches in an infamous triumph; his children
torn from him, in violation of the first right of Nature, and given into
the tuition of the most desperate and impious of the leaders of
desperate and impious clubs; his revenues dilapidated and plundered;
his magistrates murdered; his clergy proscribed, persecuted, famished;
his nobility degraded in their rank, undone in their fortunes, fugitives
in their persons; his armies corrupted and ruined; his whole people
impoverished, disunited, dissolved; whilst through the bars of his
prison, and amidst the bayonets of his keepers, he hears the tumult of
two conflicting factions, equally wicked an