Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 4.djvu/275

Rh who appeared to have any scruples concerning the present limitation of the crown. I therefore think it may very impartially be pronounced, that the number of those, who wish to see the son of the abdicated prince upon the throne, is altogether inconsiderable. And farther, I believe it will be found, that there are none who so much dread any attempt he shall make for the recovery of his imagined rights, as the Roman Catholicks of England; who love their freedom and properties too well to desire his entrance by a French army, and a field of blood; who must continue upon the same foot, if he changes his religion, and must expect to be the first and greatest sufferers, if he should happen to fail.

As to the person of this nominal prince, he lies under all manner of disadvantages: the vulgar imagine him to have been a child imposed upon the nation by the fraudulent zeal of his parents, and their bigotted counsellors; who took special care, against all the rules of common policy, to educate him in their hateful superstition, sucked in with his milk, and confirmed in his manhood, too strongly to be now shaken by Mr. Lesley; and a counterfeit conversion will be too gross to pass upon the kingdom, after what we have seen and suffered from the like practice in his father. He is likewise said to be of weak intellectuals, and an unsound constitution: he was treated contemptibly enough by the young princes of France, even during the war; is now wholly neglected by that crown, and driven to live in exile upon a small exhibition: he is utterly unknown in England, which he left in the cradle: his father's friends are most