prevented at least those stretches of vindictive tyranny which disgrace the annals of other countries. The praise, however, must be understood as comparative. Some cases of harsh if not illegal convictions could hardly fail to occur in times of violence and during changes of the reigning family. Perhaps the circumstances have now and then been aggravated by historians. Nothing could be more illegal than the conviction of the earl of Cambridge and lord Scrope in 1415, if it be true, according to Carte and Hume, that they were not heard in their defence. But whether this is to be absolutely inferred from the record[378] is perhaps open to question. There seems at least to have been no sufficient motive for such an irregularity; their participation in a treasonable conspiracy being manifest from their own confession. The proceedings against Sir John Mortimer in the 2nd of Henry VI.[379] are called by Hume highly irregular and illegal. They were, however, by act of attainder, which cannot well be styled illegal. Nor are they to be considered as severe. Mortimer had broken out of the Tower, where he was confined on a charge of treason. This was a capital felony at common law; and the chief irregularity seems to have consisted in having recourse to parliament in order to attaint him of treason, when he had already forfeited his life by another crime. I would not willingly attribute to the prevalence of Tory dispositions what may be explained otherwise, the progress which Mr. Hume's historical theory as to our constitution has been gradually making since its publication. The tide of opinion, which since the Revolution, and indeed since the reign of James I., had been flowing so strongly in favour of the antiquity of our liberties, now seems, among the higher and more literary classes, to set pretty decidedly the other way. Though we may still sometimes hear a demagogue chattering about the witenagemot, it is far more usual to find sensible and liberal men who look on Magna Charta itself as the result of an uninteresting squabble between the king and his barons. Acts of force and injustice, which strike the cursory inquirer, especially if he derives his knowledge from modern compilations, more than the average tenor of events, are selected and displayed as fair samples of the law and of its administration. We are deceived by the comparatively perfect state of our present liberties, and forget that our superior security is far less owing to positive law than to the control which is exercised over government by public opinion through the general use of printing, and to the diffusion of liberal principles in policy through the same means. Thus disgusted at a contrast which it was hardly candid to institute, we turn away from the records that attest the real, though imperfect, freedom of our ancestors; and are willing to be persuaded that the whole scheme of English polity, till the commons took on themselves to assert their