The desire of rule in William III. was as magnanimous and public-spirited as ambition can ever be in a human bosom. It was the consciousness not only of having devoted himself to a great cause, the security of Europe, and especially of Great Britain and Holland, against unceasing aggression, but of resources in his own firmness and sagacity which no other person possessed. A commanding force, a copious revenue, a supreme authority in councils, were not sought, as by the crowd of kings, for the enjoyment of selfish vanity and covetousness, but as the only sure instruments of success in his high calling, in the race of heroic enterprise which Providence had appointed for the elect champion of civil and religious liberty. We can hardly wonder that he should not quite render justice to the motives of those who seemed to impede his strenuous energies; that he should resent as ingratitude those precautions against abuse of power by him, the recent deliverer of the nation, which it had never called for against those who had sought to enslave it. But reasonable as this apology may be, it was still an unhappy error of William that he did not sufficiently weigh the circumstances which had elevated him to the English throne, and the alteration they had inevitably made in the relations between the Crown and the parliament. Chosen upon the popular principle of general freedom and public good, on the ruins of an ancient hereditary throne, he could expect to reign on no other terms than as the chief of a commonwealth, with no other authority than the sense of the nation and of parliament deemed congenial to the new constitution. The debt of gratitude to him was indeed immense, and not sufficiently remembered; but it was due for having enabled the nation to regenerate itself, and to place barriers against future assaults, to provide securities against future misgovernment. No one could seriously assert that James II. was the only sovereign of whom there had been cause to complain. In almost every reign, on the contrary, which our history records, the innate love of arbitrary power had produced more or less of oppression. The revolution was chiefly beneficial, as it gave a stronger impulse to the desire of political liberty, and rendered it more extensively attainable. It was certainly not for the sake of replacing James by William with equal powers of doing injury, that the purest and wisest patriots engaged in that cause; but as the sole means of making a royal government permanently compatible with freedom and justice. The bill of rights had pretended to do nothing more than stigmatise some recent proceedings: were the representatives of the nation to stop short of other measures, because they seemed novel and restrictive of the Crown's authority, when for the want of them the Crown's authority had nearly freed itself from all restriction? Such was their true motive for limiting the revenue, and such the ample justification of