That was too much to hope, even in a dream, of the low-minded Charles II. Harrington could not obtain even the show of justice in a public trial. He was kept five months an untried prisoner in the Tower, only sheltered from daily brutalities by bribe to the lieutenant. When his habeas corpus had been moved for, it was at first flatly refused; and when it had been granted, Harrington was smuggled away from the Tower between one and two o’clock in the morning, and carried on board a ship that took him to closer imprisonment on St. Nicholas Island, opposite Plymouth. There his health suffered seriously, and his family obtained his removal to imprisonment in Plymouth by giving a bond of £5,000 as sureties against his escape. In Plymouth, Harrington suffered from scurvy, and at last he became insane. When he had been made a complete wreck in body and in mind, his gracious Majesty restored Harrington to his family. He never recovered health, but still occupied himself much with his pen, writing, among other things, a serious argument to prove that they were themselves mad who thought him so. In those last days of his shattered life James Harrington married an old friend of the family, a witty lady, daughter of Sir Marmaduke Dorrell, of Buckinghamshire. Gout was added to his troubles; then he was palsied; and he died at Westminster, at the age of sixty-six, on September 11, 1677. He was buried in St. Margaret’s Church, by the grave of Sir Walter Raleigh, on the south side of the altar. H. M. OCEANA PART I. THE PRELIMINARIES Showing the Principles of Government JANOTTI, the most excellent describer of the Commonwealth of Venice, divides the whole series of government into two times or periods: the one ending with the liberty of Rome, which was the course or empire, as I may call it, of ancient prudence, first discovered to mankind by God himself in the fabric of the commonwealth of Israel, and afterward picked out of his footsteps in nature, and unanimously followed by the Greeks and Romans; the other beginning with the arms of Caesar, which, extinguishing liberty, were the transition of ancient into modern prudence, introduced by those inundations of Huns, Goths, Vandals, Lombards, Saxons, which, breaking the Roman Empire, deformed the whole face of the world with those ill-features of government, which at this time are become far worse in these western parts, except Venice, which, escaping the hands of the barbarians by virtue of its impregnable situation, has had its eye fixed upon ancient prudence, and is attained to a perfection even beyond the copy. Relation being had to these two times, government (to define it de jure, or according to ancient prudence) is an art whereby a civil society of men is instituted and preserved upon the foundation of common right or interest; or, to follow Aristotle and Livy, it is the empire of laws, and not of men.