472

L ETTERS

OY

JULIU S.

VOL. I.

FIAT JUSTITIA, RUAT COLUM.

LONDON:

PRINTED FOR W. SAMS, BOOKSELLER
TO HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS THE DUKE OF YORK,

ST. JAMES'S STREET.

J. Rogers, Printer, 66, Red-Lion-Street, Clerkenwell, London.

In dedicating to you the First Volume of my Letters, I feel happily conscious that I am inseribing the labours of at least a. disinterested pen, to : the freestand most enlightened Nation in the world. Your freedom is the heir-loom of a glorious ancestrys; it was purchased at the price of the costliest blood, and requires, to guard it inviolate, a vigilance which shall surpass even that with which the vestal virgins kept alive the sacred fire of their immaculate goddess.

The highest point of perfection is often the most critical : the nicest ad. justment of the balance that which will take least to produce the most obvious derangement: the excitement promoted by endeavours to conquer the summit, is unfriendly to the stationary repose which alone can ensure to us its continuous occupation. The critical acmé of a properly-controlled power of the Crown having been attained to about the middle of the last reign, since that period we have evidently betrayed a declension into the extreme of popular encroachment. This encroachment, without dispute, is the domestic malady for which it now behoves us most diligently to provide a specific remedy. Many causes conspire, at this moment, to create in the body polític a predisposition to this particular kind of diseased action.

The crisis in which the power of the Crown became subject to that control