[The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson by Robert Southey]@TWC D-Link book
The Life of Horatio Lord Nelson

CHAPTER VI
10/83

The king was one of the Spanish Bourbons.

As the Caesars have shown us to what wickedness the moral nature of princes may be perverted, so in this family, the degradation to which their intellectual nature can be reduced has been not less conspicuously evinced.

Ferdinand, like the rest of his race, was passionately fond of field sports, and cared for nothing else.
His queen had all the vices of the house of Austria, with little to mitigate, and nothing to ennoble them--provided she could have her pleasures, and the king his sports, they cared not in what manner the revenue was raised or administered.

Of course a system of favouritism existed at court, and the vilest and most impudent corruption prevailed in every department of state, and in every branch of administration, from the highest to the lowest.

It is only the institutions of Christianity, and the vicinity of better-regulated states, which prevent kingdoms, under such circumstances of misrule, from sinking into a barbarism like that of Turkey.


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