beatior, si sua
semper bona intellexisset. Tanti est, jura regiae successionis trabali
lege semel fixisse.' Aye, faithful and sagacious Casaubon! there lies
the secret. In that word '_fixisse_'--the having settled once and for
ever, the having laid down as beams and main timbers those adamantine
rules of polity which leave no opening to doubt, no licence to caprice,
and no temptation to individual ambition. We are all interested,
Christendom to her very depths is interested, in the well-being and
progress of this glorious realm--the kingdom of the lilies, the kingdom
of Charlemagne and his paladins; from the very fierceness and angry
vigilance of whose constant hostility to ourselves has arisen one chief
re-agent in sustaining our own concurrent advancement. Under the torpor
of a German patriotism, under the languor of a _sensus communis_ which
is hardly at all developed, our own unrivalled energy would partially
have gone to sleep. We are, therefore, deeply indebted to the rancorous
animosity of France. And in this one article of a sound political creed
we must be sensible that France, so dreadfully in arrear as to all other
political wisdom, has run ahead of ourselves. For to what else was
owing our ruinous war of the Two Roses than to an original demur in our
courts of law whether the descendant of an elder son through the female
line had a title preferable or inferior to that of a descendant in the
male line from a son confessedly _junior_? Whether the element to the
right hand of uncontested superiority balanced or did _not_ balance that
element to the left hand of undenied inferiority? How well for us
English, and for the interests of our literature so cruelly barbarized
within fifty years from the death of Chaucer (A.D. 1400), had we been
able to intercept the murderous conflicts of Barnet, Towcester,
Tewkesbury, St. Albans! How happy for Spain, had no modern line of
French coxcombs (not succeeding by any claim of blood, but under the
arbitrary testament of a paralytic dotard) interfered to tamper with the
old Castilian rules, so that no man knew whether the Spanish custom or
the French innovation really governed. The Salic law or the interested
abrogation of that law were the governing principle in strict
constitutional practice. To this point had the French dynasty brought
matters, that no lawyer even could say on which side the line of
separation lay the _onus_ of treason. We have ultimately so far improved
our