Page:Letters of Junius, volume 2 (Woodfall, 1772).djvu/116

106 of their mistaken conduct might have been a warning to their successors. Yet the errors of those princes were not without excuse. They had as many false friends as our present gracious Sovereign, and infinitely greater temptations to seduce them. They were neither sober, religious, nor demure. Intoxicated with pleasure, they wasted their inheritance in pursuit of it. Their lives were like a rapid torrent, brilliant in prospect, though useless or dangerous in its course. In the dull unanimated existence of other princes, we see nothing but a sickly, stagnant water, which taints the atmosphere without fertilizing the soil.—The morality of a king is not to be measured by vulgar rules. His situation is singular. There are faults which do him honour, and virtues that disgrace him. A faultless, insipid equality in his character, is neither capable of virtue or vice in the extreme; but it secures his submission to those persons, whom he has been accustomed to respect, and makes him a dangerous instrument of their ambition. Secluded from the world, attached from his infancy to one set of persons, and one set of ideas, he can neither open his heart to new connexions, nor