Page:A History and Defence of Magna Charta.djvu/305

Rh their great expences, after forty days they are free to go home, and the King has no wrong done him.

what is the meaning of theſe forty days, but that they had waited a juſt ſeſſion? And how ſhould the parliament-mens’ wages be otherwiſe adjuſted, when at the end of every parliament in thoſe times they were diſmiſſed, with deſiring them to ſue out their writs for their wages? And I leave it to the antiquaries, becauſe I am not now able to travel in that point, to confider how the ſeveral proportions of land which are allotted for the knights and burgeſſes in ſeveral counties for their wages, can be adjuſted without a certainty of the length of their ſeſſions.

not a word of this is my preſent buſineſs, which was to ſhew, that parliaments by the conſtitution are not to be ſtale; as in a former reign one was retained about nineteen years with penſiens, and another for fewer years, with places and turning out of places; but if a parliament were corrupted neither of theſe ways, yet a ſtanding parliament will always ſtagnate, and be like a country-pond which is overgrown with ducks-meat. The worſt King, or at leaſt, one of them that ever the nation had, was ſo limited by the conſtitution, that he did not know how to