lth in this compass? how many things? Show me another entire
government consisting but of thirty orders. If you now go to law with
anybody, there lie to some of our courts 200 original writs: if you stir
your hand, there go more nerves and bones to that motion; if you play,
you have more cards in the pack; nay, you could not sit with your ease
in that chair, if it consisted not of more parts. Will you not then
allow to your legislator, what you can afford your upholsterer, or to
the throne, what is necessary to a chair?

"My lords, if you will have fewer orders in a commonwealth, you will
have more; for where she is not perfect at first, every day, every hour
will produce a new order, the end whereof is to have no order at all,
but to grind with the clack of some demagogue. Is he providing already
for his golden thumb? Lift up your heads; away with ambition, that
fulsome complexion of a statesman, tempered, like Sylla's, with blood
and muck. 'And the Lord give to his senators wisdom; and make our faces
to shine, that we may be a light to them that sit in darkness and the
shadow of death, to guide their feet in the way of peace.'--In the name
of God, what's the matter?"

Philadelphus, the secretary of the council, having performed his task
in reading the several orders as you have seen, upon the receipt of
a packet from his correspondent Boccalini, secretary of Parnassus, in
reading one of the letters, burst forth into such a violent passion of
weeping and downright howling, that the legislators, being startled with
the apprehension of some horrid news, one of them had no sooner snatched
the letter out of his hand, than the rest crying, "Read, read," he
obeyed in this manner:

"The 3d instant his Phoebean majesty having taken the nature of free
states into his royal consideration, and being steadily persuaded that
the laws in such governments are incomparably better and more surely
directed to the good of mankind than in any other; that the courage of
such a people is the aptest tinder to noble fire; that the genius of
such a soil is that wherein the roots of good literature are least
worm-eaten with pedantism, and where their fruits have ever come to the
greatest maturity and highest relish, conceived such a loathing of
their ambition and tyranny, who, usurping the liberty of their native
countries, become slaves to themselves, inasmuch as (be it never so
contrary to their own nature or consciences) they have taken th