ping the king, or as some writers say, he never took
the office up: this was for another purpose, in times when

License they mean when they cry liberty.

Voluntarily parting with one's liberty is, however, very different to
having it taken from us, as in the anecdote of the citizen who never
having been out of his native place during his lifetime, was, for some
offence, sentenced to stay within the walls a whole year; when he died
of grief not long afterwards.

State imprisonment is like a set of silken fetters for kings and other
great people. Thus, almost all our palaces have been used as prisons,
according to the caprice of the monarch, or the violence of the uppermost
faction. Shakspeare, in his historical plays, gives us many pictures of
royal and noble suffering from the loss of liberty. One of the latter,
with a beautiful antidote, is the address of Gaunt to Bolingbroke, after
his banishment by Richard II.:--

All places that the eye of heaven visits,
Are to a wise man ports, and happy havens:
Teach thy necessity to reason thus:
There is no virtue like necessity.
Think not, the king did banish thee;
But thou the king: woe doth heavier sit,
Where it perceives it is but faintly borne.
Go, say--I sent thee forth to purchase honour,
And not--the king exiled thee: or suppose,
Devouring pestilence hangs in our air,
And thou art flying to a fresher clime.
Look, what thy soul holds dear, imagine it
To lie that way thou go'st, not whence thou comest:
Suppose the singing birds musicians;
The grass whereon thou tread'st, the presence strew'd;
The flowers, fair ladies; and thy steps, no more
Than a delightful measure, or a dance;
For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite
The man that mocks at it, and sets it light.

Even Napoleon, whose wounds were almost green at his death, sought to
chase away the recollections of his ill-starred splendour, by rides and
walks in the island, and conversation with his suite in his garden; and
Louis XVIII. after his restoration to the throne of France, passed few
such happy days as his exile at Hartwell, which though only a pleasant
seat enough, had more comfort than the gilded saloons of Versailles, or
the hurly-burly of the Tuilleries, with treason hatching in the street
beneath the windows, and revolution stinking in the very nostrils of the
court. Shakspeare might well call a crown a

Polished perturbation! golden care!