Page:The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Volume 2).djvu/393

Rh There are better examples to emulate than those who have only refrained from depraving or tyrannizing over their subjects, because they remembered the fates of Pisistratus and Tarquin. If generosity and virtue should have dominion over your actions, my lessons can hardly be needed; but if the discipline of a narrow education may have extinguished all thirst of genuine excellence, all desire of becoming illustrious for the sake of the illustriousness of the actions which I would incite you to perform. Should you be thus—and no pains have been spared to make you so—make your account with holding your crown on this condition: of deserving it alone. And that this may be evident I will expose to you the state in which the nation will be found at your accession, for the very dead know more than the counsellors by whom you will be surrounded.

The English nation does not, as has been imagined, inherit freedom from its ancestors. Public opinion rather than positive institution maintains it in whatever portion it may now possess, which is in truth the acquirement of their own incessant struggles. As yet the gradations by which this freedom has advanced have been contested step by step.