Tutelary

When a minor is involved, tutelary powers frequently accompany powers of attorney.

Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to be free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite: they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have chosen their own guardians.

[T]he goat-herd lived / As calmly, underneath the pleasant brows / Of cool Lucretilis, where the pipe was heard / Of Pan, Invisible God, thrilling the rocks / With tutelary music, from all harm / The fold protecting.

[I]n the firſt of Henry the ſixth, the Company of Armorers in London were incorporated by the name of the fraternite of Saint George: which queſtionleſſe reflected on him, though not as Patron ſpecially of this Realme of England, yet as the tutelarie Saint of militarie men. Elſe to what purpose ſhould the Armorers, whoſe trade is onely deſtinate to the uſe of Souldiers, be made a Corporation by his name, and under his protection.

The iſland [of Lemnos] was conſecrated to Vulcan, whom the inhabitants worſhiped as their tutelary god. They were believed to have been the firſt blackſmiths, which gave the poets the occaſion to feign, that Vulcan, when he was thrown down from heaven, fell in the iſland of Lemnos, where he built his forge.

In our Athenian constitution, if we are weakly governed or capriciously, which hardly can happen, the mischief is transitory and reparable; one year closes it; and the people, both for its satisfaction and its admonition, sees that no corruption, no transgression, in its magistrates, is unregarded or unchastized. This, of all advantages, is the greatest, the most corroborative of power, the most tutelary of morals.

The tutelary genius of mankind / Ripens by slow degrees the final State, / That in the soul shall its foundations find / And only in victorious love grow great; / Patient the heart must be, humble the mind, / That doth the greater births of time await!

In Antwerp, for instance, as late as the sixteenth century Priapus was the tutelary god of the city.