I am ashamed of you for more than hinting that legitimacy must be
given up, as far as kings are concerned. Alas! Diogenes must light
his lantern, and hunt through England for a Tory! You are bewhigged,
indeed, if you give it up that George III. was a legitimate king,
and that his grand-daughter is to you what no other person alive
can possibly be,--your true and hereditary sovereign lady! Must I,
a republican, say this to an English monarchist, who votes himself
a conservative, and who is the son of a sturdy old English Tory?
Is there no virtue extant, that even you allow yourself to be
flippant about "the divinity that hedges kings," and to trifle with
suggestions which your immortal ancestor, who fell at Prestonpans,
would have drummed out of doors with poker and tongs? Why, even
I, who have a right to be whatever I choose, by way of amateur
allegiance, and who have always found myself a Jacobite whenever
the talk has been against the White Rose--even I, in sober earnest,
yield the point, that George I. was a legitimate sovereign, and that
Charlie was a bit of a rebel. Those stupid Dutchmen! it makes me
mad to say as much for them; but I love Old England too well to own
that she bore with such sovereigns on any lower grounds than that of
their right to reign.
I am sorry you give in to the silly cant of revolutionists, and
confess yourself posed with their challenge. What if they do insist
upon a definition? Are you bound to keep your heart from beating
till you can tell why it throbs over a page of Shakspeare's Richard
II., and bounces, in precisely an opposite manner, over Carlyle's
Cromwell? Am I going to let a Whig choke me with a dictionary,
because it contains no explanation of my good old-fashioned word?
Let him, with his "Useful Knowledge Society" information, give me
an explanation of the magnetic needle, or tell me why it turns to
the pole, and not to the antipodes? The fellow will recollect some
twopenny picture of the compass, and retail me half a column of the
Penny Magazine about the mysteries of nature. And what if I talk
as sensibly from nature in my own heart, and tell the stereotype
philosopher that I am conscious of an ennobling affection, which
honest men never lack, and which God Almighty has made a faculty of
the human soul to dignify subordination; and that loyalty has no
lode-star but legitimacy? At least, my dear Whigo-Tory, you must
allow, I should succeed in answering a fool according to his folly.
But I claim more: I have defined legitimacy when I say it is the
home of loyalty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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