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utmost, to bring in a representative of his own principles, which, if they be popular, may endanger the religion established; and which, as it has formerly happened, may alter the whole frame of go

vernment.

A standing army in England, whether in time of peace or war, is a direct absurdity: for it is no part of our business to be a warlike nation, otherwise than by our fleets. In foreign wars we have no concern, farther than in junction with allies, whom we may either assist by sea, or by foreign troops paid with our money but mercenary troops in England, can be of no use, except to awe senates, and thereby promote arbitrary power, in a monarchy, or oligarchy.

That the election of senators should be of any charge to the candidates, is an absurdity; but that it should be so to a ministry, is a manifest acknowledgment of the worst designs. If a ministry intended the service of their prince and country, or well understood wherein their own security best consisted, (as it is impossible that a parliament freely elected, according to the original institution, can do any hurt to a tolerable prince or tolerable ministry) they would use the strongest methods to leave the people to their own free choice: the members would then consist of persons, who had the best estates in the neighbourhood or country, or at least, never of strangers. And surely this is at least full as requisite a circumstance to a legislator, as to a juryman, who ought to be, if possible, ex vicinio; since such persons must be supposed the best judges of the wants and desires, of their several boroughs and counties. To choose a representative for Berwick, whose estate is at Land's End, would have been thought in former times a very great solecism. How VOL. X.

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much more as it is at present, where so many persons are returned for boroughs, who do not possess a foot of land in the kingdom?

By the old constitution, whoever possessed a freehold in land, by which he was a gainer of forty shillings a year, had the privilege to vote for a knight of the shire. The good effects of this law are wholly eluded, partly by the course of time, and partly by corruption. Forty shillings, in those ages, were equal to twenty pounds in ours; and therefore it was then a want of sagacity, to fix that privilege to a determinate sum, rather than to a certain quantity of land, arable or pasture, able to produce a certain quantity of corn or hay. And therefore it is highly absurd, and against the intent of the law, that this defect is not regulated.

But the matter is still worse; for any gentleman can, upon occasion, make as many freeholders, as his estate or settlement will allow, by making leases for life of land at a rack rent of forty shillings; where a tenant, who is not worth one farthing a year when his rent is paid, shall be held a legal voter for a person to represent his county. Neither do I enter into half the frauds that are practised upon this oc

casion.

It is likewise absurd, that boroughs decayed are not absolutely extinguished, because the returned members do in reality represent nobody at all; and that several large towns are not represented, though full of industrious townsmen, who must advance the trade of the kingdom.

The claim of senators, to have themselves and servants exempted from lawsuits and arrests, is manifestly absurd. The proceedings at law are already

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so scandalous a grievance, upon account of the delays, that they little need any addition. Whoever is either not able, or not willing, to pay his just debts, or, to keep other men out of their lands, would evade the decision of the law, is surely but ill qualified to be a legislator. A criminal with as good reason might sit on the bench, with a power of condemning men to be hanged for their honesty. By the annual sitting of parliaments, and the days of privilege preceding and subsequent, a senator is one half of the year beyond the reach of common justice.

That the sacred person of a senator's footman, shall be free from arrest, although he undoes the poor alewife by running on score, is a circumstance of equal wisdom and justice, to avoid the great evil of his master's lady wanting her complement of liveries behind the coach.

SHORT

REMARKS

ON

BISHOP BURNET'S HISTORY.

THIS author is in most particulars the worst qualified for an historian that ever I met with. His style is rough, full of improprieties, in expressions often Scotch, and often such as are used by the meanest people *. He discovers a great scarcity of words and phrases, by repeating the same several hundred times, for want of capacity to vary them. His observations are mean

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* His own opinion, however, was very different, as appears by the original MS. of his History, wherein the following lines are legible, though among those which were ordered not to be printed: "And if I have arrived at any faculty of writing clear "and correctly, I owe that entirely to them [Tillotson and Lloyd]; for as they joined with Wilkins in that noble though despised attempt, of an Universal Character, and a Philosophical Language, they took great pains to observe all the common errours of language in general, and of ours in parti"cular. And in drawing the tables for that work, which was "Lloyd's province, he looked farther into a natural purity "and simplicity of style, than any man I ever knew. Into all "which he led me, and so helped me to any measure of exact"ness of writing, which may be thought to belong to me." The above was originally designed to have followed the words "I knew from them," vol, i, p. 191, l. 7, fol. ed. near the end of A. D. 1661.

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and trite, and very often false. His Secret History is generally made up of coffeehouse scandals, or at best from reports at the third, fourth, or fifth hand. The account of the pretender's birth, would only become an old woman in a chimney-corner. His vanity runs. intolerably through the whole book, affecting to have been of consequence at nineteen years old, and while he was a little Scotch parson of 40 pounds a year. He was a gentleman born, and in the time of his youth and vigour, drew in an old maiden daughter of a Scotch earl to marry him. His characters are miserably wrought, in many things mistaken, and all of them detracting *, except of those who were friends to the presbyterians. That early love of liberty he boasts of, is absolutely false; for the first book that I believe he ever published, is an entire treatise in favour of passive obedience and absolute power; so that his reflections on the clergy, for asserting, and then changing those principles, come very improperly from him. He is the most partial of all writers that ever pretended so much to impartiality; and yet I, who knew him well, am convinced that he is as impartial as he could possibly find in his heart; I am

* Many of which were stricken through with his own hand, but left legible in the MS; which he ordered in his last will, "his executor to print faithfully, as he left it, without adding,

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suppressing, or altering it in any particular." In the second volume, judge Burnet, the bishop's son and executor, promises that the original manuscript of both volumes shall be deposited

in the Cotton Library." But this promise does not appear to have been fulfilled; at least it certainly was not in 1736, when Two Letters were printed, addressed to Thomas Burnet, esq. 8 of the second letter, the writer asserted, that he had in his own possession "an authentick and complete collection of the castrated passages."

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