ighteous
king know himself to be ordained for his people, and not his people for
him."

The truth is always concealed by those writers who are cloaking their
antipathy against monarchy, in their declamations against the writings of
James I. Authors, who are so often influenced by the opinions of their
age, have the melancholy privilege of perpetuating them, and of being
cited as authorities for those very opinions, however erroneous.

At this time the true principles of popular liberty, hidden in the
constitution, were yet obscure and contested; involved in contradiction,
in assertion and recantation;[A] and they have been established as much by
the blood as by the ink of our patriots. Some noble spirits in the Commons
were then struggling to fix the vacillating principles of our government;
but often their private passions were infused into their public feelings;
James, who was apt to imagine that these individuals were instigated by a
personal enmity in aiming at his mysterious prerogative, and at the same
time found their rivals with equal weight opposing the novel opinions,
retreated still farther into the depths and arcana of the constitution.
Modern writers have viewed the political fancies of this monarch through
optical instruments not invented in his days.

[Footnote A: Cowell, equally learned and honest, involved himself in
contradictory positions, and was alike prosecuted by the King and the
Commons, on opposite principles. The overbearing Coke seems to have aimed
at his life, which the lenity of James saved. His work is a testimony of
the unsettled principles of liberty at that time; Cowell was compelled to
appeal to one part of his book to save himself from the other.]

When Sir Edward Coke declared that the king's royal prerogative being
unlimited and undefined, "was a great overgrown monster;" and, on one
occasion, when Coke said before the king, that "his Majesty was defended
by the laws,"--James, in anger, told him he spoke foolishly, and he said
he was not defended by the laws, but by God (alluding to his "divine
right"); and sharply reprimanded him for having spoken irreverently of Sir
Thomas Crompton, a civilian; asserting, that Crompton was as good a man as
Coke. The fact is, there then existed a rivalry between the civil and the
common lawyers. Coke declared that the common law of England was in
imminent danger of being perverted; that law which he has enthusiastically
described as the perfectio