nst
Louis XIV.--See _Regicide Peace_, i.]

It was Bolingbroke, and not Swift, of whom Burke was thinking, when he
sat down to the composition of his tract. The _Patriot King_ was
the fountain of the new doctrines, which Burke trained his party to
understand and to resist. If his foe was domestic, it was from a
foreign armoury that Burke derived the instruments of resistance. The
great fault of political writers is their too close adherence to the
forms of the system of state which they happen to be expounding or
examining. They stop short at the anatomy of institutions, and do not
penetrate to the secret of their functions. An illustrious author in
the middle of the eighteenth century introduced his contemporaries
to a better way. It is not too much to say that at that epoch the
strength of political speculation in this country, from Adam Smith
downwards, was drawn from France; and Burke had been led to some
of what was most characteristic in his philosophy of society by
Montesquieu's _Spirit of Laws_ (1748), the first great manual of the
historic school. We have no space here to work out the relations
between Montesquieu's principles and Burke's, but the student of the
_Esprit des Lois_ will recognise its influence in every one of Burke's
masterpieces.

So far as immediate events were concerned, Burke was quick to discern
their true interpretation. As has been already said, he attributed to
the king and his party a deliberateness of system which probably had
no real existence in their minds. The king intended to reassert the
old right of choosing his own ministers. George II. had made strenuous
but futile endeavours to the same end. His son, the father of George
III., Frederick, Prince of Wales, as every reader of Dodington's Diary
will remember, was equally bent on throwing off the yoke of the great
Whig combinations, and making his own cabinets. George III. was only
continuing the purpose of his father and his grandfather; and there is
no reason to believe that he went more elaborately to work to obtain
his ends.

It is when he leaves the artifices of a cabal, and strikes down below
the surface to the working of deep social forces, that we feel the
breadth and power of Burke's method. "I am not one of those," he
began, "who think that the people are never wrong. They have been so,
frequently and outrageously, both in other countries and in this. But
I do say that _in all disputes between them and their rulers, th