There must be few of my readers who are unacquainted with the animated sketch that Hume has delineated of the English constitution under Elizabeth. It has been partly the object of the present chapter to correct his exaggerated outline; and nothing would be more easy than to point at other mistakes into which he has fallen through prejudice, through carelessness, or through want of acquaintance with law. His capital and inexcusable fault in everything he has written on our constitution is to have sought for evidence upon one side only of the question. Thus the remonstrance of the judges against arbitrary imprisonment by the council is infinitely more conclusive to prove that the right of personal liberty existed, than the fact of its infringement can be to prove that it did not. There is something fallacious in the negative argument which he perpetually uses, that because we find no mention of any umbrage being taken at certain strains of prerogative, they must have been perfectly consonant to law. For if nothing of this could be traced, which is not so often the case as he represents it, we should remember that even when a constant watchfulness is exercised by means of political parties and a free press, a nation is seldom alive to the transgressions of a prudent and successful government. The character, which on a former occasion I have given of the English constitution under the house of Plantagenet, may still be applied to it under the line of Tudor, that it was a monarchy greatly limited by law, but retaining much power that was ill calculated to promote the public good, and swerving continually into an irregular course, which there was no restraint adequate to correct. It may be added, that the practical exercise of authority seems to have been less frequently violent and oppressive, and its legal limitations better understood in the reign of Elizabeth, than for some preceding ages; and that sufficient indications had become distinguishable before its close, from which it might be gathered that the seventeenth century had arisen upon a race of men in whom the spirit of those who stood against John and Edward was rekindled with a less partial and a steadier warmth.[463] FOOTNOTES: [369] _State Trials_, i. 1148. [370] _Id._ 1256. [371] _Id._ 1403.