The Cambridge History of English Literature, Volume 4 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 edition. Excerpt: ...door to popular excesses, that it should be concealed from the people unless the sovereign drove his subjects from their allegiance. This theory affected his view of the Stewart period. Ignorant of common law, as a Scotsman might well be, and of earlier English history, and inclined to scepticism, he failed to recognise the fundamental liberties of the nation. To him, they were "privileges," more or less dependent on the will and strength of the monarch; they had no common foundation in the spirit of the people, there was no general "scheme of liberty." He held that, at the accession of James I, the monarchy was regarded as absolute, and that, though Charles pushed the exercise of the prerogative too far, it was practically almost unlimited. The parliament made encroachments upon it: Charles defended his lawful position. Hume did not undervalue the liberties for which the parliamentary party contended, but he blamed them for the steps by which they asserted and secured them. His opinions were probably affected by his dislike of the puritans as much as by his erroneous theory of constitutional history: "my views of things," he wrote, "are more conformable to Whig principles, my representations of persons to Tory prejudices.' His scepticism led him to sneer at a profession of religious motives. To the church of England in Charles's reign, he accorded his approval as a bulwark of order, and, possibly, because in his own day it afforded many examples of religious indifference; and, including all the sects under the common appellation of puritans, he condemned them as "infected with a wretched fanaticism" and as enemies to free thought and polite letters. The extent to which his prejudices coloured...