clude, and should alone exert, a Power so important.

In Times dark, tumultuated and dangerous, no Wonder extraordinary Laws
should pass: _Desperate Diseases_ require _desperate Remedies_: But when
the _Fever_ is removed, it certainly is a horrid Management to leave the
blistering Plaister _still sticking_ to the _recovered_ Patient's Back.

The Distempers of this Nation were heavy, complicated and chronic; and
finally curable, only by the salutary all-healing Hands of our present
King, and present Parliament.

To _Henry_ the Seventh succeeded _Henry_ the Eighth, as consummate a
Tyrant, in every Sense, as ever swayed the _British_, or any other
Sceptre; whose whole Life was so continued a Scene of wanton Dissipation,
Lust, Cruelty, Rapine, Bloodshed and Sacrilege, that it must have been a
peculiar Happiness, to any Part of his Dominions, to have been _neglected_
or _forgotten_ by him: Nor could the two succeeding Reigns of _Edward_ the
Sixth, and Queen _Mary_, short, various, cloudy, and vastly agitated on
the Score of Religion, (which, in those two Reigns, took Faces almost
diametrically opposite,) afford this Kingdom much reflected Sunshine.

To those ensued that of Queen _Elizabeth_, a Princess of powerful
Abilities, who, truly intent on the Peace and Welfare of her Subjects,
caused her Laws to operate, and Justice to circulate in this Kingdom,
abandoned, as hath been observed, to a State almost of Anarchy, thro' a
dismal Series of seventeen Reigns: But the Reformation in Religion, which
she established in _England_, and introduced in _Ireland_, much obviated
her Purposes for the latter Kingdom: For, the _Irish_, more tenacious of
their Altars, than of their Fire-places, could not easily reconcile
themselves to the Exchange of a Religion they deemed a _new one_, for
_that_ they had been in Possession of from the fourth, to the fifteenth
Century: Which produced a rebellious Defection, in a few of the principal
Chieftains of this Land, and gave Occasion to the greedy Provincial
Precedents, of trumping up _imaginary Rebellions_, to pave the Way to
_real Forfeitures_; thereby to aggrandize their own Houses; what some of
them effectually accomplished, to the Ruin and Extirpation of many honest
Families.

This great and illustrious Princess, (whose Reign had remained
untarnished, had it not been for the Death of the ill-fated Queen of
_Scotland_) was succeeded by _James_ the Sixth of _Scotland_, and the
first of the _S