dy granted, the Parliament ended.

But this was rarely the fact. Sometimes they addressed James I. by what
the king called a "stinging petition;" or, when the minister, passing over
in silence the motion of the Commons, pressed for supplies, the heads of a
party replied, that to grant them were to put an end to Parliament. But
they practised expedients and contrivances, which comported as little with
the dignity of an English senate, as with the majesty of the sovereign.

At a late hour, when not a third part of the house remained, and those who
required a fuller house, amid darkness and confusion, were neither seen
nor heard, they made a protest,--of which the king approved as little of
the ambiguous matter, as the surreptitious means; and it was then, that,
with his own hand, he tore the leaf out of the journal.[A] In the sessions
of 1614 the king was still more indignant at their proceedings. He and the
Scotch had been vilified by their invectives; and they were menaced by two
lawyers, with a "Sicilian vespers, or a Parisian matins." They aimed to
reduce the king to beggary, by calling in question a third part of his
revenue, contesting his prerogative in levying his customs. On this
occasion I find that, publicly in the Banqueting-house at Whitehall, the
king tore all their bills before their faces; and, as not a single act was
passed, in the phrase of the day this was called an _addle_ Parliament.[B]
Such unhappy proceedings indicated the fatal divisions of the succeeding
reign. A meeting of a different complexion, once occurred in 1621, late in
James's reign. The monopolies were then abolished. The king and the prince
shed reciprocal tears in the house; and the prince wept when he brought an
affectionate message of thanks from the Commons. The letter-writer says,
"It is a day worthy to be kept holiday; some say it shall, but I believe
them not." It never was; for even this parliament broke up with the cries
of "some tribunitial orators," as James designated the pure and the impure
democratic spirits. Smollett remarks in his margin, that the king
endeavoured to _cajole_ the Commons. Had he known of the royal tears, he
had still heightened the phrase. Hard fate of kings! Should ever their
tears attest the warmth of honest feelings, they must be thrown out of the
pale of humanity: for Francis Osborne, that cynical republican, declares,
that "there are as few abominable princes as tolerable kings; because
princes must