ical kingdom, from whence you may guess at the
power which a king may exercise with respect to the laws and the
subject. For he is appointed to protect his subjects in their lives,
properties, and laws; for this very end and purpose he has the
delegation of power from the people, and he has no just claim to any
other power but this. Wherefore, to give a brief answer to that question
of yours, concerning the different powers which kings claim over their
subjects, I am firmly of opinion that it arises solely from the
different natures of their original institution, as you may easily
collect from what has been said. So the kingdom of England had its
original from Brute, and the Trojans, who attended him from Italy and
Greece, and became a mixed kind of government, compounded of the regal
and political."[373]

[Sidenote: Erroneous views taken by Hume.]

It would occupy too much space to quote every other passage of the same
nature in this treatise of Fortescue, and in that entitled, Of the
Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy, which, so far as
these points are concerned, is nearly a translation from the
former.[374] But these, corroborated as they are by the statute-book
and by the rolls of parliament, are surely conclusive against the
notions which pervade Mr. Hume's History. I have already remarked that a
sense of the glaring prejudice by which some Whig writers had been
actuated, in representing the English constitution from the earliest
times as nearly arrived at its present perfection, conspired with
certain prepossessions of his own to lead this eminent historian into an
equally erroneous system on the opposite side. And as he traced the
stream backwards, and came last to the times of the Plantagenet dynasty,
with opinions already biassed and even pledged to the world in his
volumes of earlier publication, he was prone to seize hold of, and even
exaggerate, every circumstance that indicated immature civilization, and
law perverted or infringed.[375] To this his ignorance of English
jurisprudence which certainly in some measure disqualified him from
writing our history, did not a little contribute; misrepresentations
frequently occurring in his work, which a moderate acquaintance with the
law of the land would have prevented.[376]

[Sidenote: Instances of illegal condemnation rare.]

It is an honourable circumstance to England that the history of no other
country presents so few instances of illegal