actually adopted by Parliament in the succeeding reign; but though the Lords to whom it was submitted by Burnet accepted it unanimously, the Commons would have none of it. The irritation left by the Oates quarrel may in part have accounted for this, but Macaulay attributes too childish a temper to the Lower House in implying as he does that ill-humour is the sole explanation of their resistance. They in fact alleged several grounds of objection of unequal weight, but of which one at least has every appearance of _bona fides_, viz. that the mentioning of the House of Hanover would give an opportunity to foreigners of intermeddling too far in the affairs of the nation. But whatever the excuse, we can readily imagine that William regarded the action of the Commons as purely factious, and although the birth at this juncture of another son and heir to the Princess Anne deprived the succession dispute of its urgency, the cool-headed Dutchman can hardly but have been impressed with the keenness of that political strife which could keep the two branches of the legislature asunder when the cost of their dissension was the postponement of the greatest statutory assertion of their liberties since Magna Charta. For as a consequence of the irreconcilable dispute on the succession clause, the Bill of Rights had of course to be dropped; and between this date and the 20th of August, when Parliament was prorogued, the breach between William and the Whigs was still further widened by the rancour with which they pursued their political enemies, and resisted the attempts of the King to procure a statutory amnesty for past political offences. Impartiality was easier of course for him than them, but William's natural affinities of mind and politics cannot but have been rather with the Whigs than the Tories, and the steadiness of purpose with which he persisted in his patriotic though hopeless attempt at combining representatives of both political parties in his councils is, upon any view of the matter, highly honourable to him. It was the Whigs who from the first made the experiment hopeless, and who finally determined its failure. We owe them the English Constitution, but we owe them also, at any rate in the rigid inflexible shape which it has since assumed, that _genius vultu mutabilis albus et ater_, the English party-system.