Excerpt from The Miscellaneous Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 2 of 3 We once heard a celebrated and elegant historian and a hearty dug declare, he liked a king like George III. Better than such a one as Bonaparte; because, in the former case, there was nothing to overawe the imagination but birth and situation; whereas he could not so easily brook the double superiority of the other, mental as well as adventitious. So does the spirit of independence and the levelling pride of intellect Join in nith the servile rage of the vulgar! This is the advantage which an hereditary has over an eleetive inonarcliv for there is no end of the dispute about while merit is supposed to determine it, each man laying claim to this in his own person so that there is no other way to set aside all controversy and heart - but oings, but by precluding moral and intellectual qualifications altogether, and referring the choice to accident, and git ing the preference to a. Nonentity. A good king, says Swift, should be, in all other respects, a mere evpher. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.