been heard when he presided, and had
not then been repressed. Yet, eager and angry as both sides were, the
speeches on both sides indicated that profound reverence for law and
prescription which has long been characteristic of Englishmen, and
which, though it runs sometimes into pedantry and sometimes into
superstition, is not without its advantages. Even at that momentous
crisis, when the nation was still in the ferment of a revolution, our
public men talked long and seriously about all the circumstances of the
deposition of Edward the Second and of the deposition of Richard
the Second, and anxiously inquired whether the assembly which, with
Archbishop Lanfranc at its head, set aside Robert of Normandy, and put
William Rufus on the throne, did or did not afterwards continue to act
as the legislature of the realm. Much was said about the history
of writs; much about the etymology of the word Parliament. It is
remarkable, that the orator who took the most statesmanlike view of the
subject was old Maynard. In the civil conflicts of fifty eventful years
he had learned that questions affecting the highest interests of the
commonwealth were not to be decided by verbal cavils and by scraps of
Law French and Law Latin; and, being by universal acknowledgment the
most subtle and the most learned of English jurists, he could express
what he felt without the risk of being accused of ignorance and
presumption. He scornfully thrust aside as frivolous and out of place
all that blackletter learning, which some men, far less versed in such
matters than himself, had introduced into the discussion. "We are,"
he said, "at this moment out of the beaten path. If therefore we are
determined to move only in that path, we cannot move at all. A man in
a revolution resolving to do nothing which is not strictly according to
established form resembles a man who has lost himself in the wilderness,
and who stands crying 'Where is the king's highway? I will walk nowhere
but on the king's highway.' In a wilderness a man should take the track
which will carry him home. In a revolution we must have recourse to
the highest law, the safety of the state." Another veteran Roundhead,
Colonel Birch, took the same side, and argued with great force and
keenness from the precedent of 1660. Seymour and his supporters were
beaten in the Committee, and did not venture to divide the House on the
Report. The Bill passed rapidly, and received the royal assent on the
t