nourishment, and regain with it their natural strength and beauty:--I would
effectually provide, That the meadows and corn fields of my dominions,
should laugh and sing;--that good chear and hospitality flourish once
more;--and that such weight and influence be put thereby into the hands of
the Squirality of my kingdom, as should counterpoise what I perceive my
Nobility are now taking from them.

'Why are there so few palaces and gentlemen's seats,' he would ask, with
some emotion, as he walked across the room, 'throughout so many delicious
provinces in France? Whence is it that the few remaining Chateaus amongst
them are so dismantled,--so unfurnished, and in so ruinous and desolate a
condition?--Because, Sir' (he would say) 'in that kingdom no man has any
country-interest to support;--the little interest of any kind which any man
has any where in it, is concentrated in the court, and the looks of the
Grand Monarch: by the sunshine of whose countenance, or the clouds which
pass across it, every French man lives or dies.'

Another political reason which prompted my father so strongly to guard
against the least evil accident in my mother's lying-in in the country,--
was, That any such instance would infallibly throw a balance of power, too
great already, into the weaker vessels of the gentry, in his own, or higher
stations;--which, with the many other usurped rights which that part of the
constitution was hourly establishing,--would, in the end, prove fatal to
the monarchical system of domestick government established in the first
creation of things by God.

In this point he was entirely of Sir Robert Filmer's opinion, That the
plans and institutions of the greatest monarchies in the eastern parts of
the world, were, originally, all stolen from that admirable pattern and
prototype of this houshold and paternal power;--which, for a century, he