Yet I may safely affirm for our great author
(as men of good sense are generally honest) that he was still of
republican principles in heart.
"Secretosque pios; his dantem jura Catonem."
I think I need use no other argument to justify my opinion than that
of this one line taken from the eighth book of the AEneis. If he
had not well studied his patron's temper it might have ruined him
with another prince. But Augustus was not discontented (at least,
that we can find) that Cato was placed by his own poet in Elysium,
and there giving laws to the holy souls who deserved to be separated
from the vulgar sort of good spirits; for his conscience could not
but whisper to the arbitrary monarch that the kings of Rome were at
first elective, and governed not without a senate; that Romulus was
no hereditary prince, and though after his death he received divine
honours for the good he did on earth, yet he was but a god of their
own making; that the last Tarquin was expelled justly for overt acts
of tyranny and mal-administration (for such are the conditions of an
elective kingdom, and I meddle not with others, being, for my own
opinion, of Montange's principles--that an honest man ought to be
contented with that form of government, and with those fundamental
constitutions of it, which he received from his ancestors, and under
which himself was born, though at the same time he confessed freely
that if he could have chosen his place of birth it should have been
at Venice, which for many reasons I dislike, and am better pleased
to have been born an Englishman).
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