 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 a-cross 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
sun-shine of whose countenance, or the clouds which pass a-cross 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
household and paternal power; - which, for a century, he said, and more, had
gradually been degenerating away into a mix'd government; -- the form of which,
however desirable in great combinations of the species, -- was very troublesome
in small ones, - and seldom produced any thing, that he saw, but sorrow and
confusion.
    For all these reasons, private and publick, put together, - my father was
for having the man-midwife by all means, - my mother by no means. My father
begg'd and intreated, she would for
