ngdom; the royal authority was
very low in what remained. He reunited to the crown a country as
valuable as what belonged to it before; he reduced his subjects of all
orders to a stricter obedience than they had given to his predecessors;
he withstood the Papal usurpation, and yet used it as an instrument in
his designs: whilst John, who inherited a great territory and an entire
prerogative, by his vices and weakness gave up his independency to the
Pope, his prerogative to his subjects, and a large part of his dominions
to the King of France.

FOOTNOTES:

[82] A word of uncertain derivation, but which signifies some scandalous
species of cowardice.

CHAPTER IX.

FRAGMENT.--AN ESSAY TOWARDS AN HISTORY OF THE LAWS OF ENGLAND.

There is scarce any object of curiosity more rational than the origin,
the progress, and the various revolutions of human laws. Political and
military relations are for the greater part accounts of the ambition and
violence of mankind: this is an history of their justice. And surely
there cannot be a more pleasing speculation than to trace the advances
of men in an attempt to imitate the Supreme Ruler in one of the most
glorious of His attributes, and to attend them in the exercise of a
prerogative which it is wonderful to find intrusted to the management of
so weak a being. In such an inquiry we shall, indeed, frequently see
great instances of this frailty; but at the same time we shall behold
such noble efforts of wisdom and equity as seem fully to justify the
reasonableness of that extraordinary disposition by which men, in one
form or other, have been always put under the dominion of creatures like
themselves. For what can be more instructive than to search out the
first obscure and scanty fountains of that jurisprudence which now
waters and enriches whole nations with so abundant and copious a
flood,--to observe the first principles of RIGHT springing up, involved
in superstition and polluted with violence, until by length of time and
favorable circumstances it has worked itself into clearness: the laws
sometimes lost and trodden down in the confusion of wars and tumults,
and sometimes overruled by the hand of power; then, victorious over
tyranny, growing stronger, clearer, and more decisive by the violence
they had suffered; enriched even by those foreign conquests which
threatened their entire destruction; softened and mellowed by peace and
religion; improved and exalted by comm