even of this kind; and the reality of the
supposition, though for the future it ought ever to be little looked
for, must, by all candid inquirers, be acknowledged in the past. But
between dethroning a prince and punishing him, there is another very
wide interval; and it were not strange, if even men of the most enlarged
thought should question, whether human nature could ever, in any
monarch, reach that height of depravity, as to warrant, in revolted
subjects, this last act of extraordinary jurisdiction. That illusion,
if it be an illusion, which teaches us to pay a sacred regard to the
persona of princes, is so salutary, that to dissipate it by the formal
trial and punishment of a sovereign, will have more pernicious effects
upon the people, than the example of justice can be supposed to have a
beneficial influence upon princes, by checking their career of tyranny.
It is dangerous also, by these examples, to reduce princes to despair,
or bring matters to such extremities against persons endowed with great
power as to leave them no resource, but in the most violent and most
sanguinary counsels. This general position being established, it must,
however, be observed, that no reader, almost of any party or principle,
was ever shocked, when he read in ancient history, that the Roman senate
voted Nero, their absolute sovereign, to be a public enemy, and, even
without trial, condemned him to the severest and most ignominious
punishment; a punishment from which the meanest Roman citizen was, by
the laws, exempted. The crimes of that bloody tyrant are so enormous,
that they break through all rules; and extort a confession, that such a
dethroned prince is no longer superior to his people, and can no longer
plead, in his own defence, laws which were established for conducting
the ordinary course of administration. But when we pass from the case
of Nero to that of Charles, the great disproportion, or rather
total contrariety, of character immediately strikes us; and we stand
astonished, that, among a civilized people, so much virtue could ever
meet with so fatal a catastrophe. History, the great mistress of wisdom,
furnishes examples of all kinds; and every prudential, as well as moral
precept, may be authorized by those events which her enlarged mirror is
able to present to us. From the memorable revolutions which passed in
England during this period, we may naturally deduce the same useful
lesson which Charles himself, in his late