I have amused myself during the summer with some study of the history of reaction in France, and flatter myself that I have discovered the secret of its failure, and the great distinction between its spirit and that of English Conservatism. But this by the way; for I was going to say that I have found, in the writings of one of the chief of the reactionary party, some very sensible hints upon the subject I am discussing with you. Though in many respects a dangerous teacher, and, I fear, a little jesuitical in practice as well as in theory, I have been surprised to find the Count de Maistre willing "to be as _his master_" on this point, and to rest legitimacy very nearly on the sober principles of Burke. He is far from the extravagances of Sir Robert Filmer, though he often expresses, in a startling form, the temperate views of English Anti-Jacobins. Thus he says, with evident relish of its smart severity, _the people will always accept their masters, and will never choose them_. Strongly and unpalatably put, but most coincident with history, and not to be disputed by any admirer of the glorious Revolution of 1688! I suspect the Frenchman made his aphorism without stopping to ask whether it suited any other case. But Burke has virtually said the same thing in his reply to the Old Jewry doctrine of 1789, in which he so forcibly urges the fact, that the settlement of the crown upon William and the Georges "was not properly _a choice_, ... but an act of necessity, in the strictest moral sense in which necessity can be taken." Mary and the Hanoverians, then, were acknowledged by the nation, in spite of itself, as legitimate sovereigns; and even William was smuggled into the acknowledgment as _quasi_-legitimate. It is the clear, reasonable, and truly English doctrine of Burke, that _the constitution of a country makes its legitimate kings_; and that the princes of the House of Brunswick, coming to the crown according to constitutional law, at the date of their respective accessions, were as legitimate as King James before he broke his coronation oaths, and abdicated, _ipso facto_, his crown and hereditary rights. But De Maistre talks more like the schoolmen, though he comes to the same practical results. Constitutions, the native growth of their respective countries, he would argue, are the ordinance of GOD; and kings, though not the subjects of their people, are bound to do homage to them, as, in a sense, divine. Legitimacy, therefore, is the resultant of hereditary majesty and constitutional designation; it being always understood that constitutional laws are never written till after they become such by national necessities, which are divine providences. Apply this to 1688. The Bill of Rights was an unwritten part of the constitution even when James was crowned; and so was the principle, that the king must not be a Papist, at least in the government of his realms. Such, if I may so speak,