Many people boast of being masters in their own house. I pretend to be

master of my own mind. I should be sorry to have an ejectment served

upon me for any notions I may chuse to entertain there. Within that

little circle I would fain be an absolute monarch. I do not profess the

spirit of martyrdom; I have no ambition to march to the stake or up to a

masked battery, in defence of an hypothesis: I do not court the rack: I

do not wish to be flayed alive for affirming that two and two make four,

or any other intricate proposition: I am shy of bodily pains and

penalties, which some are fond of, imprisonment, fine, banishment,

confiscation of goods: but if I do not prefer the independence of my

mind to that of my body, I at least prefer it to every thing else. I

would avoid the arm of power, as I would escape from the fangs of a wild

beast: but as to the opinion of the world, I see nothing formidable in

it. ‘It is the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil.’ I am not to

be brow-beat or wheedled out of any of my settled convictions. Opinion

to opinion, I will face any man. Prejudice, fashion, the cant of the

moment, go for nothing; and as for the reason of the thing, it can only

be supposed to rest with me or another, in proportion to the pains we

have taken to ascertain it. Where the pursuit of truth has been the

habitual study of any man’s life, the love of truth will be his ruling

passion. ‘Where the treasure is, there the heart is also.’ Every one is

most tenacious of that to which he owes his distinction from others.

Kings love power, misers gold, women flattery, poets reputation—and

philosophers truth, when they can find it. They are right in cherishing

the only privilege they inherit. If ‘to be wise were to be obstinate,’ I

might set up for as great a philosopher as the best of them; for some of

my conclusions are as fixed and as incorrigible to proof as need be. I

am attached to them in consequence of the pains, the anxiety, and the

waste of time they have cost me. In fact, I should not well know what to

do without them at this time of day; nor how to get others to supply

their place. I would quarrel with the best friend I have sooner than

acknowledge the absolute right of the Bourbons. I see Mr. —— seldomer

than I did, because I cannot agree with him about the _Catalogue

Raisonnée_. I remember once saying to this gentleman, a great while ago,

that I did not seem to have altered any of my ideas since I was sixteen

years old. ‘Why then,’ said he,’ you are no wiser now than you were

then!’ I might make the same confession, and the same retort would apply

still. Coleridge used to tell me, that this pertinacity was owing to a

want of sympathy with others. What he calls _sympathising with others_

is their admiring him, and it must be admitted that he varies his

battery pretty often, in order to accommodate himself to this sort of

mutual understanding. But I do not agree in what he says of me. On the

other hand, I think that it is my sympathising _beforehand_ with the

different views and feelings that may be entertained on a subject, that

prevents my retracting my judgment, and flinging myself into the

contrary extreme _afterwards_. If you proscribe all opinion opposite to

your own, and impertinently exclude all the evidence that does not make

for you, it stares you in the face with double force when it breaks in

unexpectedly upon you, or if at any subsequent period it happens to suit

your interest or convenience to listen to objections which vanity or

prudence had hitherto overlooked. But if you are aware from the first

suggestion of a subject, either by subtlety of tact, or close attention,

of the full force of what others possibly feel and think of it, you are

not exposed to the same vacillation of opinion. The number of grains and

scruples, of doubts and difficulties, thrown into the scale while the

balance is yet undecided, add to the weight and steadiness of the

determination. He who anticipates his opponent’s arguments, confirms

while he corrects his own reasonings. When a question has been carefully

examined in all its bearings, and a principle is once established, it is

not liable to be overthrown by any new facts which have been arbitrarily

and petulantly set aside, nor by every wind of idle doctrine rushing

into the interstices of a hollow speculation, shattering it in pieces,

and leaving it a mockery and a bye-word; like those tall, gawky,

staring, pyramidal erections which are seen scattered over different

parts of the country, and are called the _Follies_ of different

gentlemen! A man may be confident in maintaining a side, as he has been

cautious in chusing it. If after making up his mind strongly in one way,

to the best of his capacity and judgment, he feels himself inclined to a

very violent revulsion of sentiment, he may generally rest assured that

the change is in himself and his motives, not in the reason of things.

I cannot say that, from my own experience, I have found that the persons

most remarkable for sudden and violent changes of principle have been

cast in the softest or most susceptible mould. All their notions have

been exclusive, bigoted, and intolerant. Their want of consistency and

moderation has been in exact proportion to their want of candour and

comprehensiveness of mind. Instead of being the creatures of sympathy,

open to conviction, unwilling to give offence by the smallest difference

of sentiment, they have (for the most part) been made up of mere

antipathies—a very repulsive sort of personages—at odds with themselves,

and with every body else. The slenderness of their pretensions to

philosophical inquiry has been accompanied with the most presumptuous

dogmatism. They have been persons of that narrowness of view and

headstrong self-sufficiency of purpose, that they could see only one

side of a question at a time, and whichever they pleased. There is a

story somewhere in Don Quixote, of two champions coming to a shield hung

up against a tree with an inscription written on each side of it. Each

of them maintained, that the words were what was written on the side

next him, and never dreamt, till the fray was over, that they might be

different on the opposite side of the shield. It would have been a

little more extraordinary if the combatants had changed sides in the

heat of the scuffle, and stoutly denied that there were any such words

on the opposite side as they had before been bent on sacrificing their

lives to prove were the only ones it contained. Yet such is the very

situation of some of our modern polemics. They have been of all sides of

the question, and yet they cannot conceive how an honest man can be of

any but one—that which they hold at present. It seems that they are

afraid to look their old opinions in the face, lest they should be

fascinated by them once more. They banish all doubts of their own

sincerity by inveighing against the motives of their antagonists. There

is no salvation out of the pale of their strange inconsistency. They

reduce common sense and probity to the straitest possible limits—the

breasts of themselves and their patrons. They are like people out at sea

on a very narrow plank, who try to push every body else off. Is it that

they have so little faith in the cause to which they have become such

staunch converts, as to suppose that, should they allow a grain of sense

to their old allies and new antagonists, they will have more than they?

Is it that they have so little consciousness of their own

disinterestedness, that they feel if they allow a particle of honesty to

those who now differ with them, they will have more than they? Those

opinions must needs be of a very fragile texture which will not stand

the shock of the least acknowledged opposition, and which lay claim to

respectability by stigmatising all who do not hold them as ‘sots, and

knaves, and cowards.’ There is a want of well-balanced feeling in every

such instance of extravagant versatility; a something crude, unripe, and

harsh, that does not hit a judicious palate, but sets the teeth on edge

to think of. ‘I had rather hear my mother’s cat mew, or a wheel grate on

the axle-tree, than one of these same metre-balladmongers’ chaunt his

incondite retrograde lays without rhyme and without reason.

The principles and professions change: the man remains the same. There

is the same spirit at the bottom of all this pragmatical fickleness and

virulence, whether it runs into one extreme or another:—to wit, a

confinement of view, a jealousy of others, an impatience of

contradiction, a want of liberality in construing the motives of others

either from monkish pedantry, or a conceited overweening reference of

every thing to our own fancies and feelings. There is something to be

said, indeed, for the nature of the political machinery, for the

whirling motion of the revolutionary wheel which has of late wrenched

men’s understandings almost asunder, and ‘amazed the very faculties of

eyes and ears;’ but still this is hardly a sufficient reason, why the

adept in the old as well as the new school should take such a prodigious

latitude himself, while at the same time he makes so little allowance

for others. His whole creed need not be turned topsy-turvy, from the top

to the bottom, even in times like these. He need not, in the rage of

party spirit, discard the proper attributes of humanity, the common

dictates of reason. He need not outrage every former feeling, nor

trample on every customary decency, in his zeal for reform, or in his

greater zeal against it. If his mind, like his body, has undergone a

total change of essence, and purged off the taint of all its early

opinions, he need not carry about with him, or be haunted in the persons

of others with, the phantoms of his altered principles to loathe and

execrate them. He need not (as it were) pass an act of attainder on all

his thoughts, hopes, wishes, from youth upwards, to offer them at the

shrine of matured servility: he need not become one vile antithesis, a

living and ignominious satire on himself. Mr. Wordsworth has hardly, I

should think, so much as a single particle of feeling left in his whole

composition, the same that he had twenty years ago; not ‘so small a drop

of pity,’ for what he then was, ‘as a wren’s eye,’—except that I do not

hear that he has given up his theory that poetry should be written in

the language of prose, or applied for an injunction against the Lyrical

Ballads. I will wager a trifle, that our ingenious poet will not concede

to any patron, (how noble and munificent soever) that the Leech Gatherer

is not a fit subject of the Muse, and would sooner resign the

stamp-distributorship of two counties, than burn that portion of the

Recluse, a Poem, which has been given to the world under the title of

the Excursion. The tone, however, of Mr. Wordsworth’s poetical effusions

requires a little revision to adapt it to the progressive improvement in

his political sentiments: for, as far as I understand the Poems

themselves or the Preface, his whole system turns upon this, that the

thoughts, the feelings, the expressions of the common people in country

places are the most refined of all others; at once the most pure, the

most simple, and the most sublime:—yet, with one stroke of his

prose-pen, he disfranchises the whole rustic population of Westmoreland

and Cumberland from voting at elections, and says there is not a man

among them that is not a knave in grain. In return, he lets them still

retain the privilege of expressing their sentiments in select and

natural language in the Lyrical Ballads. So much for poetical justice

and political severity! An author’s political theories sit loose upon

him, and may be changed like his clothes. His literary vanity, alas!

sticks to him like his skin, and survives in its first gloss and

sleekness, amidst

‘The wreck of matter, and the crush of worlds.’

Mr. Southey still makes experiments on metre, not on governments, and

seems to think the last resort of English liberty is in court-iambics.

Still the same upstart self-sufficiency, still the same itch of new

fangled innovation directed into a new channel, still the same principle

of favouritism, still the same overcharged and splenetic hostility—all

is right that he approves, all is wrong that opposes his views in the

smallest particular. There is no inconsistency in all these anomalies.

Absurdity is uniform; egotism is the same thing; a limited range of

comprehension is a habit of mind that a man seldom gets the better of,

and may distinguish equally the Pantisocratist or Constitutional

Association-monger.

To quit this, which is rather a stale topic, as well as a hopeless one,

and give some instances of a change of sentiment in individuals, which

may serve for materials of a history of opinion in the beginning of the

19th century:—A gentleman went to live, some years ago, in a remote part

of the country, and as he did not wish to affect singularity he used to

have two candles on his table of an evening. A romantic acquaintance of

his in the neighbourhood, smit with the love of simplicity and equality,

used to come in, and without ceremony snuff one of them out, saying, it

was a shame to indulge in such extravagance, while many a poor cottager

had not even a rush-light to see to do their evening’s work by. This

might be about the year 1802, and was passed over as among the ordinary

occurrences of the day. In 1816 (oh! fearful lapse of time, pregnant

with strange mutability), the same enthusiastic lover of economy, and

hater of luxury, asked his thoughtless friend to dine with him in

company with a certain lord, and to lend him his man servant to wait at

table; and just before they were sitting down to dinner, he heard him

say to the servant in a sonorous whisper—‘and be sure you don’t forget

to have six candles on the table!’ Extremes meet. The event here was as

true to itself as the oscillation of the pendulum. My informant, who

understands moral equations, had looked for this reaction, and noted it

down as characteristic. The impertinence in the first instance was the

cue to the ostentatious servility in the second. The one was the

fulfilment of the other, like the type and anti-type of a prophecy.

No—the keeping of the character at the end of fourteen years was as

unique as the keeping of the thought to the end of the fourteen lines of

a Sonnet! Would it sound strange if I were to whisper it in the reader’s

ear, that it was the same person who was thus anxious to see six candles

on the table to receive a lord, who once (in ages past) said to me, that

‘he saw nothing to admire in the eloquence of such men as Mansfield and

Chatham; and what did it all end in, but their being made Lords?’ It is

better to be a lord than a lacquey to a lord. So we see that the

swelling pride and preposterous self-opinion which exalts itself above

the mightiest, looking down upon, and braying the boasted pretensions of

the highest rank and the most brilliant talents as nothing, compared

with its own conscious powers and silent unmoved self-respect, grovels

and licks the dust before titled wealth, like a lacquered slave, the

moment it can get wages and a livery! Would Milton or Marvel have done

thus?

Mr. Coleridge, indeed, sets down this outrageous want of keeping to an

excess of sympathy, and there is, after all, some truth in his

suggestion. There is a craving after the approbation and concurrence of

others natural to the mind of man. It is difficult to sustain the weight

of an opinion singly for any length of way. The intellect languishes

without cordial encouragement and support. It exhausts both strength and

patience to be always striving against the stream. _Contra audentior

ito_—is the motto but of few. Public opinion is always pressing upon the

mind, and, like the air we breathe, acts unseen, unfelt. It supplies the

living current of our thoughts, and infects without our knowledge. It

taints the blood, and is taken into the smallest pores. The most

sanguine constitutions are, perhaps, the most exposed to its influence.

But public opinion has its source in power, in popular prejudice, and is

not always in accord with right reason, or a high and abstracted

imagination. Which path to follow where the two roads part? The heroic

and romantic resolution prevails at first in high and heroic tempers.

They think to scale the heights of truth and virtue at once with him

‘whose genius had angelic wings, and fed on manna,’—but after a time

find themselves baffled, toiling on in an uphill road, without friends,

in a cold neighbourhood, without aid or prospect of success. The poet

‘Like a worm goes by the way.’

He hears murmurs loud or suppressed, meets blank looks or scowling

faces, is exposed to the pelting of the pitiless press, and is stunned

by the shout of the mob, that gather round him to see what sort of a

creature a poet and a philosopher is. What is there to make him proof

against all this? A strength of understanding steeled against

temptation, and a dear love of truth that smiles opinion to scorn? These

he perhaps has not. A lord passes in his coach. Might he not get up, and

ride out of the reach of the rabble-rout? He is invited to stop dinner.

If he stays he may insinuate some wholesome truths. He drinks in rank

poison—flattery! He recites some verses to the ladies, who smile

delicious praise, and thank him through their tears. The master of the

house suggests a happy allusion in the turn of an expression. ‘There’s

sympathy.’ This is better than the company he lately left. Pictures,

statues meet his raptured eye. Our Ulysses finds himself in the gardens

of Alcinous: our truant is fairly caught. He wanders through enchanted

ground. Groves, classic groves, nod unto him, and he hears ‘ancestral

voices’ hailing him as brother-bard! He sleeps, dreams, and wakes cured

of his thriftless prejudices and morose philanthropy. He likes this

courtly and popular sympathy better. ‘He looks up with awe to kings;

with honour to nobility; with reverence to magistrates,’ &c. He no

longer breathes the air of heaven and his own thoughts, but is steeped

in that of palaces and courts, and finds it agree better with his

constitutional temperament. Oh! how sympathy alters a man from what he

was!

‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind,

Kind deeds with coldness still returning;

Alas! the gratitude of man

Has oftener set me mourning.’

A spirit of contradiction, a wish to monopolise all wisdom, will not

account for uniform consistency, for it is sure to defeat and turn

against itself. It is ‘every thing by turns, and nothing long.’ It is

warped and crooked. It cannot bear the least opposition, and sooner than

acquiesce in what others approve it will change sides in a day. It is

offended at every resistance to its captious, domineering humour, and

will quarrel for straws with its best friends. A person under the

guidance of this demon, if every whimsy or occult discovery of his own

is not received with acclamation by one party, will wreak his spite by

deserting to the other, and carry all his talent for disputation with

him, sharpened by rage and disappointment. A man, to be steady in a

cause, should be more attached to the truth than to the acquiescence of

his fellow-citizens. A young student, who came up to town a few years

since with some hypercritical refinements on the modern philosophy to

introduce him to the Gamaliels of the age, but who would allow no one

else to have a right view of the common doctrines of the school, or to

be able to assign a reason for the faith that was in him, was sent to

Coventry by the true adepts, who were many of them as wise and as

fastidious as himself. He therefore turned round upon the whole set for

this indignity, and has been playing off the heavy artillery of his

scurrilous abuse, his verbal logic, and the powerful distinctions of the

civil and canon law upon the devoted heads of his tasteless associates;

‘perpetual volley, arrowy sleet,’ ever since! It is needless to mention

names. The learned gentleman having left his ungrateful party and

unprofitable principles in dudgeon, has gone into the opposite extreme

like mad, sticks at nothing, is callous to public opinion, so that he

pleases his employers, and can become ‘a thorn in the side of freedom’;

and fairly takes the bridle in his teeth, stop him who can. A more

obstinate being never took pen in hand. Yet, by agreeing to his

conclusions, and subscribing to his arguments (such as they are) it

would be still possible to make him give up every one of his absurdities

in succession, and to drive him to set up another New Daily Paper

against himself!

I can hardly consider Mr. Coleridge as a deserter from the cause he

first espoused, unless one could tell what cause he ever heartily

espoused, or what party he ever belonged to, in downright earnest. He

has not been inconsistent with himself at different times, but at all

times. He is a sophist, a casuist, a rhetorician, what you please; and

might have argued or declaimed to the end of his breath on one side of a

question or another, but he never was a pragmatical fellow. He lived in

a round of contradictions, and never came to a settled point. His fancy

gave the cue to his judgment, and his vanity set his invention afloat in

whatever direction he could find most scope for it, or most _sympathy_,

that is, admiration. His Life and Opinions might naturally receive the

title of one of Hume’s Essays—‘A Sceptical Solution of Sceptical

Doubts.’ To be sure, his WATCHMAN and his FRIEND breathe a somewhat

different tone on subjects of a particular description, both of them

apparently pretty high-raised, but whoever will be at the pains to

examine them closely, will find them to be _voluntaries_, fugues, solemn

capriccios, not set compositions with any malice prepense in them, or

much practical meaning. I believe some of his friends, who were indebted

to him for the suggestion of plausible reasons for conformity, and an

opening to a more qualified view of the letter of their paradoxical

principles, have lately disgusted him by the virulence and extravagance

to which they have carried hints, of which he never suspected that they

would make the least possible use. But if Mr. Coleridge is satisfied

with the wandering Moods of his Mind, perhaps this is no reason that

others may not reap the solid benefit. He himself is like the idle

sea-weed on the ocean, tossed from shore to shore: they are like

barnacles fastened to the vessel of state, rotting its goodly timbers!

There are some persons who are of too fastidious a turn of mind to like

any thing long, or to assent twice to the same opinion. —— always sets

himself to prop the falling cause, to nurse the ricketty bantling. He

takes the part which he thinks in most need of his support, not so much

out of magnanimity, as to prevent too great a degree of presumption or

self-complacency on the triumphant side. ‘Though truth be truth, yet he

contrives to throw such changes of vexation on it as it may lose some

colour.’ I have been delighted to hear him expatiate with the most

natural and affecting simplicity on a favourite passage or picture, and

all the while afraid of agreeing with him, lest he should instantly turn

round and unsay all that he had said, for fear of my going away with too

good an opinion of my own taste, or too great an admiration of my

idol—and his own. I dare not ask his opinion twice, if I have got a

favourable sentence once, lest he should belie his own sentiments to

stagger mine. I have heard him talk divinely (like one inspired) of

Boccaccio, and the story of the Pot of Basil, describing ‘how it grew,

and it grew, and it grew,’ till you saw it spread its tender leaves in

the light of his eye, and wave in the tremulous sound of his voice; and

yet if you asked him about it at another time, he would, perhaps, affect

to think little of it, or to have forgotten the circumstance. His

enthusiasm is fickle and treacherous. The instant he finds it shared in

common, he backs out of it. His enmity is equally refined, but hardly so

unsocial. His exquisitely turned invectives display all the beauty of

scorn, and impart elegance to vulgarity. He sometimes finds out minute

excellencies, and cries up one thing to put you out of conceit with

another. If you want him to praise Sir Joshua _con amore_, in his best

manner, you should begin with saying something about Titian—if you seem

an idoliser of Sir Joshua, he will immediately turn off the discourse,

gliding like the serpent before Eve, wary and beautiful, to the graces

of Sir Peter Lely, or ask if you saw a Vandyke the other day, which he

does not think Sir Joshua could stand near. But find fault with the Lake

Poets, and mention some pretended patron of rising genius, and you need

not fear but he will join in with you and go all lengths that you can

wish him. You may calculate upon him there. ‘Pride elevates, and joy

brightens his face.’ And, indeed, so eloquent is he, and so beautiful in

his eloquence, that I myself, with all my freedom from gall and

bitterness, could listen to him untired, and without knowing how the

time went, losing and neglecting many a meal and hour,

——‘From morn to noon,

From noon to dewy eve, a summer’s day!’

When I cease to hear him quite, other tongues, turned to what accents

they may of praise or blame, will sound dull, ungrateful, out of tune,

and harsh, in the comparison.

An overstrained enthusiasm produces a capriciousness in taste, as well

as too much indifference. A person who sets no bounds to his admiration

takes a surfeit of his favourites. He over-does the thing. He gets sick

of his own everlasting praises, and affected raptures. His preferences

are a great deal too violent to last. He wears out an author in a week,

that might last him a year, or his life, by the eagerness with which he

devours him. Every such favourite is in his turn the greatest writer in

the world. Compared with the lord of the ascendant for the time being,

Shakspeare is common-place, and Milton a pedant, a little insipid or so.

Some of these prodigies require to be dragged out of their

lurking-places, and cried up to the top of the compass;—their traits are

subtle, and must be violently obtruded on the sight. But the effort of

exaggerated praise, though it may stagger others, tires the maker, and

we hear of them no more after a while. Others take their turns, are

swallowed whole, undigested, ravenously, and disappear in the same

manner. Good authors share the fate of bad, and a library in a few years

is nearly dismantled. It is a pity thus to outlive our admiration, and

exhaust our relish of what is excellent. Actors and actresses are

disposed of in the same conclusive peremptory way: some of them are

talked of for months, nay, years; then it is almost an offence to

mention them. Friends, acquaintance, go the same road;—are now asked to

come six days in the week, then warned against coming the seventh. The

smallest faults are soon magnified in those we think too highly of: but

where shall we find perfection? If we will put up with nothing short of

that, we shall have neither pictures, books, nor friends left—we shall

have nothing but our own absurdities to keep company with! ‘In all

things a regular and moderate indulgence is the best security for a

lasting enjoyment.’ BURKE.

There are numbers who judge by the event, and change with fortune. They

extol the hero of the day, and join the prevailing clamour whatever it

is; so that the fluctuating state of public opinion regulates their

feverish, restless enthusiasm, like a thermometer. They blow hot or

cold, according as the wind sets favourably or otherwise. With such

people the only infallible test of merit is success; and no arguments

are true that have not a large or powerful majority on their side. They

go by appearances. Their vanity, not the truth, is their ruling object.

They are not the last to quit a falling cause, and they are the first to

hail the rising sun. Their minds want sincerity, modesty, and keeping.

With them—

——‘To have done is to hang

Quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail

In monumental mockery.’

They still, ‘with one consent, praise new-born gauds,’ and Fame, as they

construe it, is

——‘Like a fashionable host,

That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand;

And with his arms outstretch’d, as he would fly,

Grasps-in the comer. Welcome ever smiles,

And Farewell goes out sighing.’

Such servile flatterers made an idol of Buonaparte while fortune smiled

upon him, but when it left him, they removed him from his pedestal in

the cabinet of their vanity, as we take down the picture of a relation

that has died without naming us in his will. The opinion of such

triflers is worth nothing: it is merely an echo. We do not want to be

told the event of a question, but the rights of it. Truth is in their

theory nothing but ‘noise and inexplicable dumb show.’ They are the

heralds, outriders, and trumpeters in the procession of fame; are more

loud and boisterous than the rest, and give themselves great airs, as

the avowed patrons and admirers of genius and merit.

As there are many who change their sentiments with circumstances, (as

they decided lawsuits in Rabelais with the dice), so there are others

who change them with their acquaintance. ‘Tell me your company, and I’ll

tell you your opinions,’ might be said to many a man who piques himself

on a select and superior view of things, distinct from the vulgar.

Individuals of this class are quick and versatile, but they are not

beforehand with opinion. They catch it, when it is pointed out to them,

and take it at the rebound, instead of giving the first impulse. Their

minds are a light, luxuriant soil, into which thoughts are easily

transplanted, and shoot up with uncommon sprightliness and vigour. They

wear the dress of other people’s minds very gracefully and

unconsciously. They tell you your own opinion, or very gravely repeat an

observation you have made to them about half a year afterwards. They let

you into the delicacies and luxuries of Spenser with great

disinterestedness, in return for your having introduced that author to

their notice. They prefer West to Raphael, Stothard to Rubens, till they

are told better. Still they are acute in the main, and good judges in

their way. By trying to improve their taste, and reform their notions

according to an ideal standard, they perhaps spoil and muddle their

native faculties, rather than do them any good. Their first manner is

their best, because it is the most natural. It is well not to go out of

ourselves, and to be contented to take up with what we are, for better

for worse. We can neither beg, borrow, nor steal characteristic

excellencies. Some views and modes of thinking suit certain minds, as

certain colours suit certain complexions. We may part with very shining

and very useful qualities without getting better ones to supply them.

Mocking is catching, only in regard to defects. Mimicry is always

dangerous.

It is not necessary to change our road in order to advance on our

journey. We should cultivate the spot of ground we possess to the utmost

of our power, though it may be circumscribed and comparatively barren.

_A rolling stone gathers no moss._ People may collect all the wisdom

they will ever attain, quite as well by staying at home as by travelling

abroad. There is no use in shifting from place to place, from side to

side, or from subject to subject. You have always to begin again, and

never finish any course of study or observation. By adhering to the same

principles you do not become stationary. You enlarge, correct, and

consolidate your reasonings, without contradicting and shuffling about

in your conclusions. If truth consisted in hasty assumptions and

petulant contradictions, there might be some ground for this whiffling

and violent inconsistency. But the face of truth, like that of nature,

is different and the same. The first outline of an opinion, and the

general tone of thinking, may be sound and correct, though we may spend

any quantity of time and pains in working up and uniting the parts at

subsequent sittings. If we have mistaken the character of the

countenance altogether at first, no alterations will bring it right

afterwards. Those who mistake white for black in the first instance, may

as well mistake black for white when they reverse their canvass. I do

not see what security they can have in their present opinions, who build

their pretension to wisdom on the total folly, rashness, and

extravagance (to say no worse) of their former ones. The perspective may

change with years and experience: we may see certain things nearer, and

others more remote; but the great masses and landmarks will remain,

though thrown into shadow and tinged by the intervening atmosphere: so

the laws of the understanding, the truth of nature, will remain, and

cannot be thrown into utter confusion and perplexity by our blunders or

caprice, like the objects in Hogarth’s Rules of Perspective, where every

thing is turned upside down, or thrust out of its well-known place. I

cannot understand how our political Harlequins feel after all their

summersaults and metamorphoses. They can hardly, I should think, look at

themselves in the glass, or walk across the room without stumbling. This

at least would be the case if they had the least reflection or

self-knowledge. But they judge from pique and vanity solely. There

should be a certain decorum in life as in a picture, without which it is

neither useful nor agreeable. If my opinions are not right, at any rate

they are the best I have been able to form, and better than any others I

could take up at random, or out of perversity, now. Certainly opinions

vitiate one another, and destroy the simplicity and clearness of the

mind: nothing is good that has not a beginning, a middle, and an end;

and I would wish my thoughts to be

‘Linked each to each by natural piety!’

ON THE SPIRIT OF PARTISANSHIP

_The London Magazine._] [_December, 1821._

I have in my time known few thorough partisans; at least on my own side

of the question. I conceive, however, that the honestest and

strongest-minded men have been so. In general, interest, fear, vanity,

the love of contradiction, even a scrupulous regard to truth and

justice, come to divert them from the popular cause. It is a character

that requires very opposite and almost incompatible qualities—reason and

prejudice, a passionate attachment founded on an abstract idea. He who

can take up a speculative question, and pursue it with the same zeal and

unshaken constancy that he does his immediate interests or private

animosities, he who is as faithful to his principles as he is to

himself, is the true partisan. I do not here speak of the bigot, or the

mercenary or cowardly tool of a party. There are plenty of this

description of persons (a considerable majority of the inhabitants of

every country)—who are ‘ever strong upon the stronger side,’ staunch,

thorough-paced sticklers for their passions and prejudices, and who

stand by their party as long as their party can stand by them. I speak

of those who espouse a cause from liberal motives and with liberal

views, and of the obstacles that are so often found to relax their

perseverance or impair their zeal. These may, I think, be reduced

chiefly to the heads of obligations to friends, of vanity, or the desire

of the lead and distinction, to an over-squeamish delicacy in regard to

appearances, to fickleness of purpose, or to natural timidity and

weakness of nerve.

There is nothing more contemptible than party spirit in one point of

view; and yet it seems inseparable in practice from public principle.

You cannot support measures unless you support men;—you cannot carry any

point or maintain any system, without acting in concert with others. In

theory, it is all very well. We may refine in our distinctions, and

elevate our language to what point we please. But in carrying the most

sounding words and stateliest propositions into effect, we must make use

of the instrumentality of men; and some of the alloy and imperfection of

the means may insinuate itself into the end. If we do not go all lengths

with those who are embarked with us in the same views; if we are not

hearty in the defence of their interests and motives; if we are not

fully in their confidence and they in ours; if we do not ingraft on the

stock of public virtue the charities and sentiments of private affection

and esteem; if the bustle and anxiety and irritation of the

state-affairs do not kindle into the glow of friendship as well as

patriotism; if we look distant, suspicious, lukewarm at one another; if

we criticise, carp at, pry into the conduct of our party with watchful,

jealous eyes; it is to be feared we shall play the game into the enemy’s

hands, and not co-operate together for the common good with all the

steadiness and cordiality that might be wished. On the other hand, if we

lend ourselves to the foibles and weaknesses of our friends; if we

suffer ourselves to be implicated in their intrigues, their scrambles

and bargainings for place and power; if we flatter their mistakes, and

not only screen them from the eyes of others, but are blind to them

ourselves; if we compromise a great principle in the softness of a

womanish friendship; if we entangle ourselves in needless family-ties;

if we sell ourselves to the vices of a patron, or become the mouthpiece

and echo of a _coterie_; we shall be in that case slaves of a faction,

not servants of the public, nor shall we long have a spark of the old

Roman or the old English virtue left. Good-nature, conviviality,

hospitality, habits of acquaintance and regard, favours received or

conferred, spirit and eloquence to defend a friend when pressed hard

upon, courtesy and good-breeding, are one thing—patriotism, firmness of

principle, are another. The true patriot knows when to make each of

these in turn give way to or control the other, in furtherance of the

common good, just as the accomplished courtier makes all other

interests, friendships, cabals, resentments, reconciliations,

subservient to his attachment to the person of the king. He has the

welfare of his country, the cause of mankind at heart, and makes that

the scale in which all other motives are weighed as in a balance. With

this inward prompter, he knows when to speak and when to hold his

tongue, when to temporise, and when to throw away the scabbard, when to

make men of service to principles, and when to make principles the sole

condition of popularity,—nearly as well as if he had a title or a

pension depending in reversion on his success: for it is true that ‘in

their generation the children of this world are wiser than the children

of light.’ In my opinion, Charles Fox had too much of what we mean by

‘the milk of human kindness’ to be a practical statesman, particularly

in critical times, and with a cause of infinite magnitude at stake. He

was too easy a friend, and too generous an enemy. He was willing to

think better of those with whom he acted, or to whom he was opposed,

than they deserved. He was the creature of temperament and sympathy, and

suffered his feelings to be played upon, and to get the better of his

principles, which were not of the most rigid kind—not ‘stuff o’ the

conscience.’ With all the power of the crown, and all the strongholds of

prejudice and venality opposed to him, ‘instead of a softness coming

over the heart of a man,’ he should (in such a situation) have ‘turned

to the stroke his adamantine scales that feared no discipline of human

hands,’ and made it a struggle _ad internecionem_ on the one side, as it

was on the other. There was no place for moderation, much less for

huckstering and trimming. Mr. Burke saw the thing right enough. It was a

question about a principle—about the existence or extinction of human

rights in the abstract. He was on the side of legitimate slavery; Mr.

Fox on that of natural liberty. That was no reason he should be less

bold or jealous in her defence, because he had every thing to contend

against. But he made too many coalitions, too many compromises with

flattery, with friendship, (to say nothing of the baits of power) not to

falter and be defeated at last in the noble stand he had made for the

principles of freedom.

Another sort are as much too captious and precise, as these are lax and

_cullible_ in their notions of political warfare. Their fault is an

overweening egotism, as that of the former was too great a facility of

temper. They will have every thing their own way to the minutest tittle,

or they cannot think of giving it their sanction and support. The cause

must come to them, they will not go to the cause. They stand upon their

punctilio. They have a character at stake, which is dearer to them than

the whole world. They have an idea of perfect truth and beauty in their

own minds, the contemplation of which is a never-failing source of

delight and consolation to them,

‘Though sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk,’

and which they will not soil by mixing it up with the infirmities of any

cause or any party. They will not, ‘to do a great right, do a little

wrong.’ They will let the lofty pillar inscribed to human liberty fall

to the ground sooner than extend a finger to save it, on account of the

dust and cobwebs that cling to it. It is not this great and mighty

object they are thinking of all the time, but their own fantastic

reputation and puny pretensions. While the world is tumbling about our

ears, and the last hold of liberty, the ark containing our birth-right,

the only possible barrier against barefaced tyranny, is

tottering—instead of setting the engines and the mortal instruments at

work to prop it, and fighting in the trenches to the last drop, they are

washing their hands of all imaginary imperfections, and looking in the

glass of their own vanity, with an air of heightened self-complacency.

Alas! they do not foresee the fatal consequences; they have an eye only

to themselves. While all the power, the prejudice, and ignorance of

mankind are drawn up in deadly array against the advance of truth and

justice, they owe it to themselves, forsooth! to state the naked merits

of the question (heat and passion apart) and pick out all the faults of

which their own party has been guilty, to fling as a make-weight into

the adversary’s scale of unmeasured abuse and execration. They will not

take their ready stand by the side of him who was ‘the very arm and

burgonet of man,’ and like a demi-Atlas, could alone prop a declining

world, because for themselves they have some objections to the

individual instrument, and they think principles more important than

persons. No, they think persons of more consequence than principles, and

themselves most of all. They injure the principle, through the person

most able to protect it. They betray the cause by not defending it as it

is attacked, tooth and nail, might and main, without exception and

without remorse. When every thing is at stake, dear and valuable to man,

as man; when there is but the one dreadful alternative of entire loss,

or final recovery of truth and freedom, it is no time to stand upon

trifles and moot-points; that great object is to be secured first, and

at all hazards.

‘Entire affection scorneth nicer hands.’

But there is a third thing in their minds, a fanciful something which

they prefer to both contending parties. It may be so; but neither they

nor we can get it. We must have one of the two things imposed upon us,

not by choice but by hard necessity. ‘Our bane and antidote are both

before us:’ and if we do anything to neglect the one, we justly incur

the heavy, intolerable, unredeemed penalty of the other. If our pride is

stung, if we have received a blow or the lie in our own persons, we know

well enough what to do: our blood is up, we have an actual feeling and

object to satisfy; and we are not to be diverted from our purpose by

sophistry or mere words. The quarrel is personal to ourselves; and we

feel the whole stress of it, rousing every faculty and straining every

nerve. But if the quarrel is general to mankind; if it is one in which

the rights, freedom, hopes, and happiness of the whole world are

embarked; if we see the dignity of our common nature prostrate, trampled

upon and mangled before the brute image of power, this gives us little

concern; our reason may disapprove, but our passions, our prejudices,

are not touched; and therefore our reason, our humanity, our abstract

love of right (not ‘screwed to the sticking place’ by some paltry

interest of our own) are easily satisfied with any hollow professions of

good-will, or put off with vague excuses, or staggered with open

defiance. We are here, where a principle only is in danger, at leisure

to calculate consequences, prudently for ourselves, or favourably for

others: were it a point of honour (we think the honour of human nature

is not our honour, that its disgrace is not our disgrace—we are not the

_rabble_!) we should throw consideration and compassion to the dogs, and

cry—‘Away to Heaven respective lenity, and fire-eyed fury be my conduct

now!’ But charity is cold. We are the dupes of the flatteries of our

opponents, because we are indifferent to our own object: we stand in awe

of their threats, because in the absence of passion we are tender of our

persons. They beat us in courage and in intellect, because we have

nothing but the common good to sharpen our faculties or goad our will;

they have no less an alternative in view than to be uncontrolled masters

of mankind, or to be hurled from high,—

‘To grinning scorn a sacrifice,

And endless infamy!’

They do not celebrate the triumphs of their enemies as their own: it is

with them a more feeling disputation. They never give an inch of ground

that they can keep; they keep all that they can get; they make no

concessions that can redound to their own discredit; they assume all

that makes for them; if they pause, it is to gain time; if they offer

terms, it is to break them: they keep no faith with enemies: if you

relax in your exertions, they persevere the more: if you make new

efforts, they redouble theirs. While they give no quarter, you stand

upon more ceremony. While they are cutting your throat, or putting the

gag in your mouth, you talk of nothing but liberality, freedom of

inquiry, and _douce humanité_. Their object is to destroy you, your

object is to spare them—to treat them according to your own fancied

dignity. They have sense and spirit enough to take all advantages that

will further their cause: you have pedantry and pusillanimity enough to

undertake the defence of yours, in order to defeat it. It is the

difference between the efficient and the inefficient; and this again

resolves itself into the difference between a speculative proposition

and a practical interest.

One thing that makes tyrants bold is, that they have the power to

justify their wrong. They lay their hands upon the sword, and ask who

will dispute their commands. The friends of humanity and justice have

not in general this ark of confidence to recur to, and can only appeal

to reason and propriety. They oppose power on the plea of right and

conscience; and shall they, in pursuance of their claims, violate in the

smallest tittle what is due to truth and justice? So that the one have

no law but their wills, and the absolute extent of their authority, in

attaining or securing their ends, because they make no pretensions to

scrupulous delicacy: the others are cooped and cabined in, by all sorts

of nice investigations in philosophy, and misgivings of the moral sense;

that is, are deprived or curtailed of the means of succeeding in their

ends, because those ends are not barefaced violence and wrong. It might

as well be said that a man has a right to knock me on the head on the

highway, and that I am only to use mildness and persuasion in return, as

best suited to the justice of my cause; as that I am not to retaliate

and make reprisals on the common enemies of mankind in their own style

and mode of execution. Is not a man to defend his liberty, or the

liberties of his fellow-men, as strenuously and remorselessly as he

would his life or his purse? Men are Quakers in political principle,

Turks and Jews in private conscience.

The whole is an error, arising from confounding the distinction between

theory and practice, between the still-life of letters and the tug and

onset of contending factions. I might recommend to our political

mediators the advice which Henry V. addressed to his soldiers on a

critical occasion.

‘In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility;

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger;

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;

Let it pry through the portage of the head,

Like the brass-cannon: let the brow o’erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a galled rock

O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,

Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean:

Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide;

Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit

To his full height.’

So, in speculation, refine as much as you please, intellectually and

morally speaking, and you may do it with advantage. Reason is then the

instrument you use, and you cannot raise the standard of perfection you

fix upon and propose to others too high, or proceed with too much

candour and moderation in the advancement of truth: but in practice, you

have not your choice of ends or means. You have two things to decide

between, the extreme, probably, of an evil and a considerable good, and

if you will not make your mind up to take the best of the two with all

its disadvantages and draw-backs you must be contented to take the

worst: for as you cannot alter the state of the conflicting parties who

are carrying their point by force, or dictate what is best by a word

speaking; so by finding fault with the attainable good, and throwing

cold water on it, you add fuel to your enemy’s courage and assist his

success. ‘Those who are not for us are against us.’ You create a

diversion in his favour, by distracting and enervating men’s minds, as

much as by questioning the general’s orders, or drawing off a strong

detachment in the heat of a battle. Political, is like military warfare.

There are but two sides, and after you have once chosen your party, it

will not do to stand in the midway, and say you like neither. There is

no other to like, in the eye of common sense, or in the practical and

inevitable result of the thing. As active partisans, we must take up

with the best we can get in the circumstances, and defend it with all

our might against a worse cause (which will prevail, if this does not)

instead of ‘letting our frail thoughts dally with faint surmise;’—or,

while dreaming of an ideal perfection, we shall find ourselves surprised

into the train, and gracing the triumph, of the common enemy. It is

sufficient if our objects and principles are sound and disinterested. If

we were engaged in a friendly contest, where integrity and fair dealing

were the order of the day, our means might be as unimpeachable as our

ends; but in a struggle with the passions, interests, and prejudices of

men, right reason, pure intention, are hardly competent to carry us

through: we want another stimulus. The vices may be opposed to each

other sometimes with advantage and propriety. A little of the alloy of

human frailty may be allowed to lend its aid to the service of humanity;

and if we have only so much obstinacy or insensibility as enables us to

persevere in the path of public duty with more determination and effect,

both our motives and conduct will be above the ordinary standard of

political morality. To suppose that we can do much more than this, or

that we can set up our individual opinion of what is best in itself, or

of the best means of attaining it, and be listened to by the world at

large, is egregiously to overrate their docility or our own powers of

persuasion.

It is the same want of a centripetal force, of a ruling passion, of a

moral instinct of union and co-operation for a general purpose, that

makes men fly off into knots and factions, and each set up for the

leader of a party himself. Where there is a strong feeling of interest

at work, it reconciles and combines the most discordant materials, and

fits them to their place in the social machine. But in the conduct and

support of the public good, we see ‘nothing but vanity, chaotic vanity.’

There is no forbearance, no self-denial, no magnanimity of proceeding.

Every one is seeking his own aggrandisement, or to supplant his

neighbour, instead of advancing the popular cause. It is because they

have no real regard for it but as it serves as a stalking-horse to their

ambition, restless inquietude, or love of cabal. They abuse and vilify

their own party, just as they do the Ministers.

‘Each lolls his tongue out at the other,

And shakes his empty noddle at his brother.’

John Bull does not aim so maliciously, or hit so hard at Whigs and

Reformers, as Cobbett. The reason is, that a very large proportion of

these Marplots and regenerators of the world are actuated by no love of

their species or zeal for a general question, but by envy, malice, and

all uncharitableness. They are discontented with themselves and with

every thing about them. They object to, they dissent from every measure.

Nothing pleases their fastidious tastes. For want of something to

exercise their ill-humour and troublesome officiousness upon, they abuse

the Government:—when they are baulked or tired of this they fall foul of

one another. The slightest slip or difference of opinion is never

forgiven, but gives birth to a deadly feud. Touch but their petty

self-importance, and out comes a flaming denunciation of their own

cabal, and all they know about the individuals composing it. This is not

patriotism, but spleen—a want of something to do and to talk about—of

sense, honesty, and feeling. To wreak their spite on an individual, they

will ruin the cause, and serve up the friend and idol of the people

sliced and carbonadoed, a delicious morsel to the other side. There is a

strange want of keeping in this. They are true neither to themselves nor

to their principles. The Reformers are in general, it must be confessed,

an ill-conditioned set; and they should be told of this infirmity that

most easily besets them. When they find their gall and bitterness

overflowing on the very persons who take the lead, and deservedly take

the lead, in their affairs, for some slight flaw or misunderstanding,

they should be taught to hold their tongues, or be drummed out of the

regiment as spies and informers.

Trimming, and want of spirit to declare the honest truth, arise in part

from the same source. When a man is not thoroughly convinced of an

opinion, or where he does not feel a deep interest in it, he does not

like to make himself obnoxious by avowing it; is willing to make all the

allowance he can for difference of sentiment, and consults his own

safety by retiring from a sinking cause. This is the very time when the

genuine partisan, who has a rooted attachment to a principle, and feels

it as a part of himself, finds himself most called upon to come forward

in its support. His anxiety for truth and justice leaves him in no fear

for himself, and the sincerity of his motives makes him regardless of

censure or obloquy. His profession of hearty devotion to freedom was not

an ebullition called forth by the sunshine of prosperity, a lure for

popularity and public favour; and when these desert it, he still

maintains his post with his integrity. There is a natural timidity of

mind, also, which can never go the whole length of any opinion, but is

always interlarding its qualified assent with unmeaning _buts_ and

_ifs_; as there is a levity and discursiveness of imagination which

cannot settle finally in any belief, and requires a succession of

glancing views, topics, and opposite conclusions, to satisfy its

appetite for intellectual variety. I have known persons leave the cause

of independence and freedom, not because they found it unprofitable, but

because they found it flat and stale for want of novelty. At the same

time, interest is a great stimulator; and perhaps the success of their

early principles might have reconciled them to their embarrassing

monotony. Few persons have strength and simplicity of mind (without some

additional inducement) to be always harping on the same string, or to

put up with the legitimate variety to be found in an abstract principle,

applicable to all emergencies. They like changeable silks better than

lasting homespun. A sensible man once mentioned to me his having called

on —— that morning, who entertained him with a _tirade_ against the

Bourbons for two hours; but he said he did not at all feel convinced

that he might not have been writing Ultra-royalist paragraphs for the

——, just before he came, in their favour, and only shifted his side of

the argument, as a man who is tired of lying too long on one side of his

body is glad to turn to the other. There was much shrewdness, and equal

probability in this conjecture.

I think the spirit of partisanship is of use in a point of view that has

not been distinctly adverted to. It serves as a conductor to carry off

our antipathies and ill-blood in a quarter and a manner that is least

hurtful to the general weal. A thorough partisan is a good hater; but he

hates only one side of a question, and that the _outside_. His bigotry

throws human nature into strong light and shade; he has his sympathies

as well as his antipathies; it is not all black or a dull drab-colour.

He does not generalise in his contempt or disgust, or proceed from

individuals to universals. He lays the faults and vices of mankind to

the account of sects and parties, creeds and classes. Man in himself is

a good sort of animal. It is the being a Tory or a Whig (as it may

happen) that makes a man a knave or fool; but then we hardly look upon

him as of the same species with ourselves. Kings are not arbitrary, nor

priests hypocritical, because they are men, but because they are kings

and priests. We form certain nominal abstractions of these classes,

which the more we dislike them, the less natural do they seem, and leave

the general character of the species untouched, or act as a foil to it.

There is nothing that is a greater damper to party spirit than to

suggest that the errors and enormities of both sides arise from certain

inherent dispositions, common to the species. It shocks the liberal and

enlightened among us, to suppose that under any circumstances they could

become bigots, tools, persecutors. They wipe their hands clean of all

such aspersions. There is a great gulph of prejudice and passion placed

between us and our opponents; and this is interpreted into a natural

barrier and separation of sentiment and feeling. ‘Our withers are

unwrung.’ Burke represented modern revolutionists to himself, under the

equivocal similitude of ‘green-eyed, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed

philosophers, whether going on two legs or on four;’ and thus removed to

a distance from his own person all the ill attributes with which he had

complimented the thorough-bred metaphysician. By comparing the plausible

qualities of a Minister of state to the sleekness of the panther, I

myself seem to have no more affinity with that whole genus, than with

the whiskers and claws of that formidable and spirited animal. Bishop

Taylor used to reprimand his rising pride by saying, at the sight of a

reprobate, ‘There goes my wicked self:’ we do not apply the same method

politically, and say, ‘There goes my Tory or my Jacobin self.’ We

suppose the two things incompatible. The Calvinist damns the Arminian,

the Protestant the Papist, &c. but it is not for a difference of nature,

but an opposition of opinion. The spirit of partizanship is not a spirit

of our misanthropy. But for the vices and errors of example and

institution, mankind are (on this principle) only a little lower than

the angels: it is false doctrine and absurd prejudices that make demons

of them. The only original sin is differing in opinion with us: of that

they are curable like any occasional disorder, and the man comes out,

from beneath the husk of his party and prejudices, pure and immaculate.

Make proselytes of them, let them come over to our way of thinking, and

they are a different race of beings quite. This is to be effected by the

force of argument and the progress of knowledge. It is well, it is

perfectly well. We cast the slough of our vices with the shibboleth of

our party; a Reform in Parliament would banish all knavery and folly

from the land. It is not the same wretched little mischievous animal,

man, that is alike under all denominations and all systems, and in whom

different situations and notions only bring out different inherent,

incorrigible vices and propensities; but the professions and the theory

being changed for the one, which we think the only true and infallible

one, the whole world, by the mere removal of our arbitrary prejudices

and modes of thinking, would become as sincere, as benevolent, as

independent, and as worthy people as we are! To hate and proscribe half

the species under various pretexts and nicknames, seems, therefore, the

only way to entertain a good opinion of ourselves and mankind in

general.

‘THE PIRATE’

_The London Magazine._] [_January, 1822._

This is not the best, nor is it the worst (the worst is good enough for

us) of the Scotch Novels. There is a story in it, an interest excited

almost from the first, a clue which you get hold of and wish to follow

out; a mystery to be developed, and which does not disappoint you at

last. After you once get into the stream, you read on with eagerness,

and have only to complain of the number of impediments and diversions

thrown in your way. The author is evidently writing to gain time, to

make up his complement of volumes, his six thousand guineas worth of

matter; and to get to the end of your journey, and satisfy the curiosity

he has raised, you must be content to travel with him, stop when he

stops, and turn out of the road as often as he pleases. He dallies with

your impatience, and smiles in your face, but you cannot, and dare not

be angry with him, while with his giant-hand he plays at pushpin with

the reader, and sweeps the rich stakes from the table. He has, they say,

got a _plum_ by his writings. What have not the public got by reading

them? The course of exchange is, and will be, in our favour, as long as

he gives us one volume for ourselves, and two for himself. Who is there

that has not been the better, the wiser, and happier man for these fine

and inexhaustible productions of genius? The more striking characters

and situations are not quite so highly wrought up in the present, as in

some former instances, nor are they so crowded, so thickly sown. But the

genius of the author is not exhausted, nor can it be so till not a

Scotch superstition, or popular tradition is left, or till the pen drops

lifeless and regretted from its master’s hand. Ah! who will then call

the mist from its hill? Who will make the circling eddies roar? Who,

with his ‘so potent art,’ will dim the sun, or stop the winds, that wave

the forest-heads, in their course? Who will summon the spirits of the

northern air from their chill abodes, or make gleaming lake or hidden

cavern teem with wizard, or with elfin forms? There is no one but the

Scottish Prospero, but old Sir Walter, can do the trick aright. He is

the very genius of the clime—mounts in her old grey clouds, dips in her

_usquebaugh_ and whiskey!—startles you with her antique Druid spells in

the person of Elshie, or stirs up the fierce heat of her theological

fires with Macbriar and Kettle-drumle: sweeps the country with a far

war-cry to Lochiel, or sighs out the soul of love in the perfumed breath

of the Lily of St. Leonard’s. Stand thou, then, Meg Merrilies, on the

point of thy fated rock, with wild locks and words streaming to the

wind; and sit thou there in thy narrow recess, Balfour of Burley,

betwixt thy Bible and thy sword, thy arm of flesh and arm of the

Spirit:—when the last words have passed the lips of the author of

Waverley, there will be none to re-kindle your fires, or recall your

spirit! Let him write on then to the last drop of ink in his ink-stand,

even though it should not be made according to the model of that

described by Mr. Coleridge, and we will not be afraid to read whatever

he is not ashamed to publish. We are the true and liege subjects of his

pen, and profess our ultra-fealty in this respect, like the old French

leaguers, with a _Quand même_.

The Pirate is not what we expected, nor is it new. We had looked for a

prodigious _row_—landing and boarding, cut and thrust, blowing up of

ships, and sacking of sea-ports, with the very devil to pay, and a noise

to deafen clamour,

‘Guns, drums, trumpets,

Blunderbusses and thunder.’

We supposed that for the time ‘Hell itself would be empty, and all the

devils be here.’ _There be land pirates and water pirates_; and we

thought Sir Walter would be for kicking up just such a dust by sea, in

the Buccaneers, (as it was to be called) as he has done by land in Old

Mortality. _Multum abludit imago._ There is nothing or little of the

sort. There is here (bating a sprinkling of twenty pages of roaring

lads, who come on shore for no use but to get themselves hanged in the

Orkneys,) only a single Pirate, a peaking sort of gentleman, spiteful,

but not enterprising; in love, and inclined to take up and reform, but

very equivocal in the sentiments he professes, and in those he inspires

in others. Cleveland is the Pirate, who is wrecked off the coast of

Zetland, is saved from destruction by young Mordaunt Mertoun, who had

been so far the hero of the piece, and jilts him with his mistress,

Minna, a grave sentimentalist, and the elder of two sisters, to whom

Mordaunt had felt a secret and undeclared passion. The interest of the

novel hinges on this _bizarre_ situation of the different parties. Sir

Walter (for he has in the present work leisure on his hands to

philosophize) here introduces a dissertation of some length, but not

much depth, to show that the jilting of favoured, or half-favoured

lovers, comes by the dispensation of Providence, and that the breed of

honest men and bonny lasses would be spoiled if the fairest of the fair,

the sentimental Miss, and the prude (contrary to all previous and

common-place calculation), did not prefer the blackguard and the bravo,

to the tender, meek, puny, unpretending, heartbroken lover. We do not

think our novelist manages his argument well, or shines in his new

Professor’s chair of morality. Miss Polly Peachum, we do indeed

remember, the artless, soft, innocent Polly, fell in love with the bold

Captain Macheath; but so did Miss Lucy Lockitt too, who was no chicken,

and who, according to this new balance of power in the empire of love,

ought to have tempered her fires with the phlegm of some young chaplain

to the prison, or the soft insinuations of some dreaming poet. But as

our author himself is not in a hurry to get on with his story, we will

imitate him, and let him speak here in his superfluous character of a

casuist, or commentator on his own narrative.

[A long passage from Chap, XIII., beginning ‘Captain Cleveland sate

betwixt the sisters,’ follows.]

Suffice it to say, that we differ from this solution of the difficulty,

ingenious and old as it is; and to justify that opinion, ask only

whether such a man as Cleveland would not be a general favourite with

women, instead of being so merely with those of a particularly retired

and fantastic character, which destroys the author’s balance of

qualities in love? Indeed, his own story is a very bad illustration of

his doctrine; for this romantic and imprudent attachment of the gentle

and sensitive Minna to the bold and profligate Captain Cleveland leads

to nothing but the most disastrous consequences; and the opposition

between their sentiments and characters, which was to make them fit

partners for life, only prevents the possibility of their union, and

renders both parties permanently miserable. Besides, the whole

perplexity is, after all, gratuitous. The enmity between Cleveland and

young Mertoun (the chief subject of the plot) is founded on their

jealousy of each other in regard to Minna, and yet there had been no

positive engagement between her and Mertoun, who, like Edmund in Lear,

is equally betrothed to both sisters—in the end marrying the one that he

as well as the reader likes least. Afterwards, when the real character

of this gay rover of the seas is more fully developed, and he gets into

scrapes with the police of Orkney, the grave, romantic Minna, like a

true northern lass, deserts him, and plays off a little old-fashioned,

unavailing, but discreet morality upon him. When the reader begins to

sympathise with ‘a brave man in distress,’ then is the time for his

mistress with ‘the pale face and raven locks’ to look to her own

character. We like the theory of the Beggar’s Opera better than this:

the ladies there followed their supposed hero, their _beau ideal_ of a

lover, to prison, instead of leaving him to his untoward fate. Minna is

no NUT-BROWN MAID, though she has a passion for outlaws, between whose

minds and those of the graver and more reflecting of the fair sex there

is, according to the opinion of our GREAT UNKNOWN, a secret and

pre-established harmony. What is still more extraordinary and

unsatisfactory in the progress of the story is this—all the pretended

preternatural influence of Norna of the Fitful-Head, the most potent and

impressive personage in the drama, is exerted to defeat Cleveland’s

views, and to give Minna to Mordaunt Mertoun, for whom she conceives an

instinctive and anxious attachment as her long-lost son; and yet in the

end the whole force of this delusion, and the reader’s sympathies, are

destroyed by the discovery that Cleveland, not Mertoun, is her real

offspring, and that she has been equally led astray by her maternal

affection and preternatural pretensions. Does this great writer of

romances, this profound historiographer of the land of visions and of

second sight, thus mean to qualify his thrilling mysteries—to _back_ out

of his thrice-hallowed prejudices, and to turn the tables upon us with

modern cant and philosophic scepticism? That is the last thing we could

forgive him!

We have said that the characters of the Pirate are not altogether new.

Norna, the enchantress, whom he is ‘so fond’ at last to depose from her

_ideal_ cloudy throne of spells and mystic power, is the Meg Merrilies

of the scene. She passes over it with vast strides, is at hand whenever

she is wanted, sits hatching fate on the topmost tower that overlooks

the wilderness of waves, or glides suddenly from a subterraneous

passage, and in either case moulds the elements of nature, and the

unruly passions of men, to her purposes. She has ‘strange power of

speech,’ weaves events with words, is present wherever she pleases, and

performs what she wills, and yet she doubts her own power, and

criticises her own pretensions. Meg Merrilies was an honester witch. She

at least stuck true to herself. We hate anything by halves; and most of

all, imagination and superstition piece-meal. Cleveland, again, is a

sort of inferior _Gentle Geordie_, and Minna lags after Effie Deans, the

victim of misplaced affection, but far, far behind. Wert thou to live a

thousand years, and write a thousand romances, thou wouldst never, old

True-penny, beat thy own _Heart of Mid Lothian_! It is for that we can

forgive thee all that thou didst mean to write in the BEACON, or hast

written elsewhere, beneath the dignity of thy genius and knowledge of

man’s weaknesses, as well as better nature! Magnus Troil is a great

name, a striking name; but we _ken_ his person before; he is of the same

genealogy as the Bailie Braidwardine, and other representatives of old

Scottish hospitality; the dwarf Nick Strumpfer is of a like familiar

breed, only uglier and more useless than any former one: we have even

traces, previous to the Pirate, of the extraordinary agriculturist and

projector, Mr. Timothy Yellowley, and his sister, Miss Barbara

Yellowley, with pinched nose and grey eyes; but we confess we have one

individual who was before a stranger to us, at least in these parts,

namely, Claud Halcro, the poet, and friend of ‘Glorious John.’ We do not

think him in his place amidst dwarfs, witches, pirates, and _Udallers_;

and his stories of the Wits’ Coffee-house and Dryden’s poetry are as

tedious to the critical reader as they are to his Zetland patron and

hearers. We might confirm this opinion by a quotation, but we should be

thought too tedious. He fills up, we will venture to say, a hundred

pages of the work with sheer impertinence, with _pribble prabble_.

Whenever any serious matter is to be attended to, Claud Halcro pulls out

his fiddle and draws the long bow, and repeats some verses of ‘_Glorious

John_.’ Bunce, the friend of Cleveland, is much better; for we can

conceive how a strolling-player should turn gentleman-rover in a time of

need, and the foppery and finery of the itinerant stage-hero become the

quarter-deck exceedingly well. In general, however, our author’s humour

requires the aid of costume and dialect to set it off to advantage: his

wit is Scotch, not English wit. It must have the _twang_ of the uncouth

pronunciation and peculiar manners of the country in it. The elder

Mertoun is a striking misanthropic sketch; but it is not very well made

out in what his misanthropy originates, nor to what it tends. He is

merely a part of the machinery: neither is he the first gentleman in

these Novels who lands without an introduction on the remote shores of

Scotland, and shuts himself up (for reasons best known to himself) in

inaccessible and solitary confinement. We had meant to give the outline

of the story of the Pirate, but we are ill at a plot, and do not care to

blunt the edge of the reader’s curiosity by anticipating each

particular. As far, however, as relates to the historical foundation of

the narrative, the author has done it to our hands, and we give his

words as they stand in the _Advertisement_.

[Nearly the whole of the Advertisement is quoted.]

Of the execution of these volumes we need hardly speak. It is inferior,

but it is only inferior to some of his former works. Whatever he

touches, we see the hand of a master. He has only to describe action,

thoughts, scenes, and they everywhere speak, breathe, and live. It

matters not whether it be a calm sea-shore, a mountain tempest, a

drunken brawl, the ‘Cathedral’s choir and gloom,’ the Sybil’s

watch-tower, or the smuggler’s cave; the things are immediately there

that we should see, hear, and feel. He is Nature’s Secretary. He neither

adds to, nor takes away from her book; and that makes him what he is,

the most popular writer living. We might give various instances of his

unrivalled undecaying power, but shall select only one or two with which

we were most struck and delighted in the perusal. The characters of the

two sisters, daughters of Magnus Troil, and the heroines of the tale,

are thus beautifully drawn.

[Here follows the description of Minna and Brenda, from Chap. III.]

So much for elegant Vandyke portrait-painting. Now for something of the

Salvator style. Norna, the terrific and unhappy Norna, is thus finely

introduced.

[The first introduction of Norna is quoted from Chap. V.]

We give one more extract in a different style; and we think the comic

painting in it is little inferior to Hogarth’s.

[A passage, beginning ‘Now the fortunate arrival of Mordaunt,’ &c. is

quoted from Chap. XI.]

Shall we go on? No, but will leave the reader to revel at ease in the

luxuries of feeling and description scattered through the rest of the

work.

We have only time to add two remarks more, which we do not remember to

have seen made. One relates to the exquisitely good-natured and liberal

tone displayed in the author’s quotations from living writers. He takes

them every one by turns, and of all factions in poetry and politics,

under his wing, and sticks a stanza from Coleridge, from Wordsworth,

from Byron, from Crabbe, from Rogers, as a motto to his chapters, not

jealous of their popularity, nor disdaining their obscurity. The author

can hardly guess how much we like him for this. The second thing we

would advert to is a fault, and a remarkable one. It is the slovenliness

of the style and badness of the grammar throughout these admirable

productions. Badness of the grammar! Slovenly style! What do you mean by

that? Take a few instances, and we have done with the subject for ever.

We give them _seriatim_, as we marked them in the margin.

‘Here Magnus proceeded with great _animation_, sipping from _time_ to

_time_ the half diluted spirit, which at the same _time animated_ his

resentment against the intruders,’ etc. P. 16.

‘In those days (for the _present_ times are greatly altered for the

better) the _presence_ of a superior in such a situation,’ etc. P. 21.

‘The _information_, which she acquired by habits of patient attention,

_were_ indelibly rivetted in a naturally powerful memory.’ P. 48.

‘And I know not _whom_ else are expected.’ P. 56.

‘Or perhaps he _preferred_ the situation, of the house and farm which he

himself was to occupy (which indeed was a tolerable one) as _preferable_

to that, etc.’ P. 89.

‘The _strength_ of the retiring wave proved even _stronger_ than he had

expected,’ etc. P. 169.

But let us have done with this, and leave it to the Editor of the

Quarterly Review to take up the subject as a mighty important little

discovery of his own!

‘PEVERIL OF THE PEAK’

_The London Magazine._] [_February, 1823._

The author of Waverley is here himself again; and it is on English

ground that he has come upon his feet. Peveril of the Peak is all but

equal to the best of the SCOTCH NOVELS. It is no weaving up of old odds

and ends; no lazy repetition of himself at second-hand, and _the worse

for the wear_. Peveril is all new, good,[65] full of life, spirit,

character, bustle, incident, and expectation; nothing is wanting to make

it quite equal to the very best of his former productions, but that it

has not the same intense interest, nor the same preternatural and

overpowering imagery. Fenella, a deaf and dumb dwarf, attached to the

Countess of Derby, is, indeed, an exquisitely drawn character, and

exerts a sort of quaint, apparently magic influence over the scene; but

her connection with it is so capricious, so ambiguous, and at last so

improbable, as to produce or to leave none of those thrilling and

awe-struck impressions which were so irresistibly interwoven with some

former delineations of the same kind. But as a sketch, as a picture, the

little fairy attendant of the Queen of Man is one of the most beautiful

and interesting the author ever struck out with his enchanting and

enchanted pencil. The present Novel comes the nearest to OLD MORTALITY,

both in the class of subjects of which it treats, and in the

indefatigable spirit and hurried movement of the execution. It differs

from that noble master-piece in this, that Sir Walter (or whoever else,

in the devil’s name, it is) has not infused the same depth or loftiness

of sentiment into his English Roundheads and Cavaliers, as into his

Scotch Covenanters and Royalists; that the characters are left more in

the outlines and dead colouring; and though the incidents follow one

another as rapidly, and have great variety and contrast, there is not

the same accumulation of interest, the same thickening of the plot, nor

the same thronging together of eager and complicated groups upon the

canvas. His English imagination is not so fully peopled with character,

manners, and sentiment, as his Scotch understanding is; but, by the

mass, they are not ‘thinly scattered to make up a show.’ There is _cut

and come again_. We say this the more willingly, because we were among

those who conceived there was a falling off, a _running to seed_, in

some of the later productions of the author. The FORTUNES OF NIGEL

showed a resuscitation in his powers; that is, a disposition to take new

ground, and proceed with real pains and unabated vigour; and in his

Peveril, we think he has completed his victory over excusable idleness

and an inexcusable disregard of reputation. He may now go on upon a

fresh lease, and write ten more Novels, just as good or as bad as he

pleases!

There were two things that we used to admire of old in this author, and

that we have had occasion to admire anew in the present instance, the

extreme life of mind or naturalness displayed in the descriptions, and

the magnanimity and freedom from bigotry and prejudice shewn in the

drawing of the characters. This last quality is the more remarkable, as

the reputed author is accused of being a thorough-paced partisan in his

own person,—intolerant, mercenary, mean; a professed toad-eater, a

sturdy hack, a pitiful retailer or suborner of infamous slanders, a

literary Jack Ketch, who would greedily sacrifice any one of another way

of thinking as a victim to prejudice and power, and yet would do it by

other hands, rather than appear in it himself. Can this be all true of

the author of Waverley; and does he deal out such fine and heaped

justice to all sects and parties in time past? Perhaps (if so) one of

these extremes accounts for the other; and, as ‘he knows all qualities

with a learned spirit,’ probably he may be aware of this practical

defect in himself, and be determined to shew to posterity, that when his

own interest was not concerned, he was as free from that nauseous and

pettifogging bigotry, as a mere matter of speculation, as any man could

be. As a novel-writer, he gives the devil his due, and he gives no more

to a saint. He treats human nature scurvily, yet handsomely; that is,

much as it deserves; and, if it is the same person who is the author of

the Scotch novels, and who has a secret moving hand in certain Scotch

Newspapers and Magazines, we may fairly characterize him as

‘The wisest, _meanest_ of mankind.’

Among other characters in the work before us, is that of Ned Christian,

a cold-blooded hypocrite, pander, and intriguer; yet a man of prodigious

talent,—of great versatility,—of unalterable self-possession and good

humour, and with a power to personate agreeably, and to the life, any

character he pleased. Might not such a man have written the Scotch

Novels?

It has been suggested, with great modesty, that the Author of Waverley

was like Shakspeare. We beg leave with equal modesty to suggest another

comparison, which we think much nearer the mark; and that is, to the

writings of Mr. Cobbett. The peculiarity of Shakspeare’s mind is (we

humbly apprehend) that sort of power which completely levels the

distinction between imagination and reality. His mind properly has

wings, and it is indifferent to him whether he treads the air or walks

the earth. He makes us acquainted with things we did not know before, as

if we knew them familiarly. Now Sir Walter Scott only recals to us what

we already knew—he deals wholly in realities, or what are commonly

received as such; and so does Mr. Cobbett. Both are downright

matter-of-fact minds, and have little, if any, of that power which

throws into objects more than ordinary opinion or feeling connects with

them. Naturalness is the _forte_ of both these writers. They have a

strong, vivid, bodily perception (so to speak), a material intuition of

what they write about. All their ideas are concrete, and not abstracted.

Mention an old, dilapidated castle, and a thriving, substantial brick

mansion to Sir Walter Scott, and he immediately has an actual image of

some such objects conjured up in his mind, and describes them as he has

seen them, with all their local circumstances, and so as to bring back

some similar recollection to the reader’s mind, as if there had been

just two such buildings in the place where he was brought up. But this

revived reality is all; there is no new light thrown upon the subject.

It is a sort of poetic memory. Good. So set Mr. Cobbett to work upon the

subject of our agricultural distress, and with quite as much poetry, as

much of the picturesque, and in as good English as Sir Walter Scott

writes Scotch, he will describe you to the life a turnip-field with the

green sprouts glittering in the sun, the turnips frozen to a mere clod,

the breath of the oxen steaming near that are biting it, and the dumb

patience of the silly sheep. We should like to know whether he is not as

great a hand at this sort of ocular demonstration as Sir Walter himself?

He shall describe a Scotch heath, or an American wilderness against Sir

Walter for a thousand pounds. Then for character; who does it with more

master-strokes, with richer gusto, or a greater number of palpable hits

than the Editor of the Political Register? Again, as to pathos, let Mr.

Cobbett tell a story of a pretty servant girl or soldier’s wife, left by

her sweetheart, or shot dead in his arms, and see if he will not come

near the _Heart of Mid Lothian_? You may say it is not this or that, it

is coarse, low, the man has no feeling, but it is nature, and that’s

quite enough. The truth is, these two original geniuses have found out a

secret; they write as they feel. It is just like school boys being able

to read as they would talk. It is a very awkward difficulty to get over,

but being once accomplished, the effect is prodigious. Then, there is

the same strong sarcastic vein of _roystering_ pot-house humour in the

one as in the other; and as for giving both sides of a question, nobody

has done that more effectually than Mr. Cobbett in the course of his

different writings. His style also is as good, nay, far better: and if

it should be said that Mr. Cobbett sometimes turns blackguard, it cannot

be affirmed that he is a cat’s paw—which is the _dernier resort_ of

humanity, into which Sir Walter has retreated, and shuts himself up in

it impregnably as in a fortress. To conclude this parallel, we will be

bold to say in illustration of our argument, that there is hardly a

single page in the Scotch Novels which Mr. Cobbett could not write, if

he set his mind to it; and there is not a single page in Shakspeare,

either the best or the worst, which he _could_ write for his life, and

let him try ever so. Such is the genius of the three men.

So much by way of preface to our account of the most magnanimous Peveril

of the Peak, and now for extracts. We have not time or limits to give

the story, which, however, relates to the Civil Wars of England; but we

shall furnish our readers with a specimen of the spirit with which it is

written; it is the description of the meeting of Peveril with the dwarf

Fenella, where she tries to prevent his going to meet Alice Bridgenorth

at the Goddard Crovann-stone in the Isle of Man.

[The whole of Chap. XVI. of _Peveril of the Peak_ is set out].

We have been led to such length by the beauty of this description that

we have not room for another extract, or we would give that master-piece

of wit and irony, the scene where Peveril meets with Ganlesse and Smith

at a low alehouse, on his route through Derbyshire.

COMMON PLACES

_The Literary Examiner._] [_September-December 1823._

I. The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.

II. Liberty is the only true riches. Of all the rest we are at once the

masters and the slaves.

III. Do I not feel this from the least shadow of restraint, of

obligation, of dependence? Why then do I complain? I have had nothing to

do all my life but to think, and have enjoyed the objects of thought,

the sense of truth and beauty, in perfect integrity of soul. No one has

said to me, _Believe this, do that, say what we would have you_; no one

has come between me and my free-will; I have breathed the very air of

truth and independence. Compared with this unbiassed, uncontrouled

possession of the universe of thought and nature, what I have wanted is

light in the balance, and hardly claims the tribute of a sigh. Oh!

Liberty, what a mistress art thou! Have I not enjoyed thee as a bride,

and drank thy spirit as of a wine-cup, and will yet do so to my latest

breath!

IV. But is not Liberty dangerous, and self-will excessive? I do not

think so: for those who are not governed by their own feelings are led

away by prejudice or interest; and reason is a safer guide than opinion,

liberty a nobler one than fear.

V. Do I see a Claude? What is there to prevent me from fixing my eye, my

heart, my understanding, upon it? What sophist shall deter me from

thinking it fine? What is there to make me afraid of expressing what I

think? I enter into all its truth and beauty. I wonder over it, I detect

each hidden grace, I revel and luxuriate in it, without any doubts or

misgivings. Is not this to be master of it and of myself? But is the

picture mine? No—oh! yes, ten times over!

VI. That thing, _a lie_, has never come near my soul. I know not what it

is to fear to think or to say what I think.

VII. I am choked, pent up in any other atmosphere but this. I cannot

imagine how kings and courtiers contrive to exist. I could no more live

without daring to speak, to look, to feel what I thought, than I could

hold in my breath for any length of time. Nor could I bear to debar

others of this privilege. Were it not that the Great would play the part

of slaves themselves, they would hate to be surrounded with nothing but

slaves, and to see meanness and hypocrisy crawling before them, as much

as we do to see a spider crawling in our path.

VIII. I never knew what it was to feel like a footman. How many lords in

waiting can say as much?

IX. When I consider how little difference there is in mankind (either in

body or mind) I cannot help being astonished at the airs some people

give themselves.

X. I am proud up to the point of equality—every thing above or below

_that_ appears to me arrant impertinence or abject meanness.

XI. The ignorant and vulgar think that a man wants spirit, if he does

not insult and triumph over them. This is a great mistake.

XII. For a man to be a coxcomb, shews a want of imagination. No one will

ever pride himself on his beauty who has studied the head of the

Antinous, or be in danger of running into the excess of the fashion, who

has any knowledge of the Antique. The _ideal_ is incompatible with

personal vanity.

XIII. A scholar is like a book written in a dead language—it is not

every one that can read in it.

XIV. Just as much as we see in others, we have in ourselves.

XV. A painter gives only his own character in a portrait, whether grave

or gay, gross or refined, wise or foolish. Even in copying a head, there

is some difficulty in making the features unlike our own. A person with

a low forehead or a short chin puts a constraint upon himself in

painting a high forehead or a long chin. So much has sympathy to do with

the operations both of the eye and the hand, with observation and

practice!

XVI. People at a play hiss an unsuccessful author or actor, as if the

latter had committed some heinous crime—he has committed the greatest

crime, that of setting up a superiority over us which he has failed to

make good.

XVII. The rich, who do nothing themselves, represent idleness as the

greatest crime. They have reason: it is necessary that some one should

do something.

XVIII. What a pity that kings and great men do not write books, instead

of mere authors! What superior views they must have of things, and how

the world would be benefited by the communication!

XIX. The greatest proof of superiority is to bear with impertinence.

XX. No truly great man ever thought himself so.

XXI. Every man, in judging of himself, is his own contemporary.

XXII. Abuse is an indirect species of homage.

XXIII. From the height from which the great look down on the world, all

the rest of mankind seem equal.

XXIV. It is a bad style that requires frequent _breaks_ and marks of

admiration.

XXV. It happens in conversation as in different games. One person seems

to excel, till another does better, and we then think no more of the

first.

XXVI. Those who can keep secrets, have no curiosity. We only wish to

gain knowledge, that we may impart it.

XXVII. Genius is native to the soil where it grows—is fed by the air,

and warmed by the sun—and is not a hot-house plant or an exotic.

XXVIII. All truly great works of art are _national_ in their character

and origin.

XXIX. People are distinguished less by a genius for any particular

thing, than by a peculiar tone and manner of feeling and thinking,

whatever be the subject. The same qualities of mind or characteristic

excellence that a man shows in one art, he would probably have displayed

in any other. I have heard Mr. Northcote say, that he thought Sir Joshua

Reynolds would have written excellent genteel comedies. His _Discourses_

certainly are bland and amiable (rather than striking or original) like

his pictures.

XXX. The same kind of excellence may be observed to prevail in different

arts at the same period of time, as characteristic of the spirit of the

age. Fielding and Hogarth were cotemporaries.

XXXI. There is an analogy in the style of certain authors to certain

professions. One writes like a lawyer: it seems as if another would have

made an eminent physician. Mandeville said of Addison that he was ‘a

parson in a tye-wig:’ and there is something in _The Spectator_ to

justify this description of him.

XXXII. Salvator Rosa paints like a soldier; Nicholas Poussin like a

professor at a University; Guido like a finished gentleman; Parmegiano

with something of the air of a dancing master. Alas! Guido was a

gamester and a madman; and Parmegiano a searcher after the philosopher’s

stone. One of the happiest ideas in modern criticism was that of

designating different living poets by the cups Apollo gives them to

drink out of: thus Wordsworth is made to drink out of a wooden bowl,

Lord Byron out of a skull chased with silver, &c.

XXXIII. Extreme impatience and irritability are often combined with a

corresponding degree of indifference and indolence. When the eagerness

of pursuit or the violence of opposition ceases, nothing is left to

interest the mind, that has been once accustomed to a state of morbid

excitement.

XXXIV. Artists and other studious professions are not happy, for this

reason: they cannot enjoy mental repose. A state of lassitude and

languor succeeds to that of overstrained, anxious exertion.

XXXV. It is the custom at present to exclude all but Scientific and

Mechanical subjects from our fashionable Public Institutions, lest any

allusions to popular sentiments or the cause of humanity should by

chance creep in, to the great annoyance of the polite and well-informed

part of the audience.

XXXVI. People had much rather be thought to look ill than old: because

it is possible to recover from sickness, but there is no recovering from

age.

XXXVII. I never knew but one person who had a passion for truth—and only

one who had the same regard to the distinction between right and wrong,

that others have to their own interest.

XXXVIII. Women are the sport of caprice, the slaves of custom.

XXXIX. When men are not favourites with women, it is either from habits

of vulgar debauchery, or from constitutional indifference, or from an

overstrained and pedantic idea of the sex, taken from books, and

answering to nothing in real life.

XL. The object of books is to teach us ignorance; that is, to throw a

veil over nature, and persuade us that things are not what they are, but

what the writer fancies or wishes them to be.

XLI. My little boy said the other day, ‘He could not tell what to do

without a book to read—he should wander about without knowing what to do

with himself.’ So have I wandered about, till now, and, waking from the

dream of books at last, don’t know what to do with myself. My poor

little fellow! may’st thou dream long amidst thy darling books, and

never wake!

XLII. Political truth is a libel; religious truth, blasphemy.

XLIII. The greatest crime in the eye of the world is to endeavour to

instruct or amend it.

XLIV. Weighing remote consequences in the mind is like weighing the air

in scales.

XLV. A hypocrite seems to be the only perfect character—since it

embraces the extremes of what human nature _is_, and of what it _would

be thought_.

XLVI. The Scotch understanding differs from the English, as an

Encyclopedia does from a circulating library. An Englishman is contented

to pick up a few odds and ends of knowledge; a Scotchman is master of

every subject alike. Here each individual has a particular _hobby_ and

favourite bye-path of his own: in Scotland learning is a common hack,

which every one figures away with, and uses at his pleasure.

XLVII. A misanthropic writer might be called _the Devil’s amanuensis_.

XLVIII. To be a lord, a papist, and poor, is the most enviable

distinction of humanity. There is all the pride and sense of

independence, irritated and strengthened by being proscribed by power,

and liable to be harassed by petty daily insults from every, the meanest

vassal. What a situation to make the mind recoil from the world upon

itself, and to sit and brood in moody grandeur and disdain of soul over

fallen splendours and present indignities! It is just the life I should

like to have led.

XLIX. The tone of good company is marked by the absence of

personalities. Among well-informed persons, there are plenty of topics

to discuss, without giving pain to any one present—without submitting to

act the part of a _butt_, or of that still poorer creature, the wag that

plays upon him.

L. Londoners complain of the dullness of the country, and country people

feel equally uncomfortable and at a loss what to do with themselves in

town. The fault is neither in the town nor in the country—every one is

naturally unsettled and dissatisfied without his usual resources and

occupations, let them be _what_ or _where_ they may.

LI. Each rank in society despises that which is a step below it, and the

highest looks down upon them all. To get rid of the impertinence of

artificial pretensions, we resort to nature at last. Kings, for this

reason, are fond of low company; and lords marry actresses and barmaids.

The Duke of York (not the present, but the late King’s brother) was at a

ball at Plymouth. He danced with a Miss Byron, a very pretty girl,

daughter of the admiral of that name, and aunt to our poet. But there

was a Mrs. Fanning present, who was a paragon of beauty. The Duke asked,

‘Who is she?’ ‘A baker’s daughter,’ was the answer. ‘I don’t mean that;

but what is she now?’—‘A broker’s wife.’ The lady did not perceive, that

to a prince of the blood there was little difference between a

tradesman’s wife and the daughter of a naval officer; but that the

handsomest woman at a ball was an object of admiration in spite of

circumstances.

LII. It has been asked, whether Lord Byron is a writer likely to live?

Perhaps not: he has intensity of power, but wants distinctive character.

In my opinion, Mr. Wordsworth is the only poet of the present day that

is likely to live—_should he ever happen to be born_! But who will be

the midwife to bring his works to light? It is a question whether Milton

would have become popular without the help of Addison; nay, it is a

question whether he is so, even with it.

LIII. An anecdote is told of General Wolfe,[66] that he was out with a

party of friends in a boat the day before the Battle of Quebec. It was a

beautiful summer’s evening, and the conversation turned to Gray’s _Elegy

in a Country Churchyard_, which was just then published. Wolfe repeated

the lines, ‘For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey,’ &c., with enthusiasm,

and said, ‘I would rather be the author of those lines than beat the

French to-morrow!’ He did beat the French, and was himself killed the

next day. Perhaps it was better to be capable of uttering a sentiment

like this, than to gain a battle or write a poem.

LIV. Authors, a short time since, set upon Government: Government have

of late turned the tables on them, and set upon authors. In one respect,

it must be confessed, the court-tools have greatly the advantage of us:

they can go all lengths in vulgar Billingsgate and abuse, without being

charged with vulgarity. They have the sanction of the Court; they plead

the King’s privilege. It is not to be supposed that any thing inelegant

or gross can be patronised at Carlton-house. Every thing about a place,

even the convenience of an Admiralty secretary, must, one would think,

be kept sweet and wholesome. But instead of the least refinement and

polish, they treat us with nothing, but garbage. A lie and a nickname

are their favourite figures of rhetoric—the alternate substitutes for

wit and argument—the twin-supporters of the Bible and the Crown. They

use us (it seems) contrary to the advice of Hamlet, ‘according to our

own deserts, and not their own dignity.’ The dirt they fling sticks on

their opponents, without soiling their own fingers. Loyalty is ‘the true

fuller’s earth that takes out all stains.’ At all events, do or say what

they can, it is they who are the _gentlemen_, and we who are the

_blackguards_. If we were to call Sir Walter Scott a _Sawney_ writer, or

Mr. Croker _Jackey_, it would be thought shocking, indecent, vulgar, and

no one would look at our publication twice: yet on the Tory side the

same thing passes for the height of sense and wit; and ladies of quality

are delighted with the _John Bull_, gentlemen read _Blackwood_, and

divines take in the _Quarterly_. There is Mr. William Mudford, of the

_Courier_—a vapid common-place hack, pert and dull—but who would think

of calling him by the diminutive of his Christian name? No; these are

the extreme resources reserved for the Court-classics, who, in the zeal

of their loyalty, are allowed to forget their manners. There is, in

fact, nothing too mean for the genius of these writers, or too low for

the taste of their employers.

LV. A Tory can rise no higher than _the assumption of a question_. If he

relied on any thing but custom and authority, he would cease to be a

Tory. He has a prejudice in favour of certain _things_, and against

certain _persons_. This is all he knows of the matter. He therefore

gives you assertions for argument, and abuse for wit. If you ask a

reason for his opinions, he calls you names; and if you ask why he does

so, he proves that he is in the right, by repeating them a thousand

times. A nickname with him is the test of truth. It vents his spleen,

strengthens his own prejudices, and communicates them mechanically to

his hearers.

LVI. When an Elector of Hanover is made into a King of England, what

does he become in the course of a century?—A George the Fourth.

LVII. If I were to give a toast at a loyal and patriotic meeting, it

should be, _Down with the Stuarts all over the world!_

LVIII. The taste of the great in pictures is singular, but not

unaccountable. The King is said to prefer the Dutch to the Italian

school of painting; and if you hint your surprise at this, you are

looked upon as a very Gothic and _outré_ sort of person. You are told,

however, by way of consolation, ‘To be sure, there is Lord Carlisle

likes an Italian picture—Mr. Holwell Carr likes an Italian picture—the

Marquis of Stafford is fond of an Italian picture—Sir George Beaumont

likes an Italian picture.’ These, notwithstanding, are regarded as

quaint and daring exceptions to the established rule; and their

preference is a species of _lèse-majesté_ in the Fine Arts—as great an

eccentricity and want of fashionable etiquette, as if any gentleman or

nobleman still preferred old claret to new, when the King is known to

have changed his mind on this subject, or was guilty of the offence of

dipping his fore-finger and thumb in the middle of a snuff-box, instead

of gradually approximating the contents to the edge of the box,

according to the most approved models. One would imagine that the great

and exalted in station would like lofty subjects in works of art,

whereas they seem to have an exclusive predilection for the mean and

mechanical. One would think those whose word is law, would be pleased

with the great and striking effects of the pencil[67]: on the contrary,

they admire nothing but the little and elaborate. They have a fondness

for cabinet or _furniture_ pictures, and a proportionable antipathy to

works of genius. Even arts with them must be servile, to be tolerated.

Perhaps the seeming contradiction may be thus explained. These persons

are raised so high above the rest of the species, that the more violent

and agitating pursuits of mankind appear to them like the turmoil of

ants on a molehill. Nothing interests them but their own pride and

self-importance. Our passions are to them an impertinence; an expression

of high sentiment they rather shrink from as a ludicrous and upstart

assumption of equality. They, therefore, like what glitters to the eye,

what is smooth to the touch; but they shun, by an instinct of sovereign

taste, whatever has a soul in it, and implies a _reciprocity_ of

feeling. The gods of the earth can have no interest in any thing human;

they are cut off from all sympathy with the ‘bosoms and businesses of

men.’ Instead of requiring to be wound up beyond their habitual feeling

of stately dignity, they wished to have the springs of overstrained

pretension let down, to be relaxed with ‘trifles light as air,’ to be

amused with the familiar and frivolous, and to have the world appear a

scene of _still life_, except as they disturb it! The little in thought

and internal sentiment is a necessary relief and set-off to the

oppressive sense of external magnificence. Hence Kings babble and repeat

they know not what. A childish dotage often accompanies the

consciousness of absolute power. Repose is somewhere necessary, and the

soul sleeps, while the senses gloat around. Besides, the mechanical and

high-finished style of art may be considered as something _done to

order_. It is a task to be executed more or less perfectly, according to

the price given and the industry of the artist. We stand by, as it were,

see the work done, insist upon a greater degree of neatness and

accuracy, and exercise a sort of petty jealous jurisdiction over each

particular. We are judges of the minuteness of the details, and though

ever so nicely executed, as they give us no ideas beyond what we had

before, we do not feel humbled in the comparison. The artisan scarcely

rises into the artist; and the name of genius is degraded, rather than

exalted in his person. The performance is so far ours that we have paid

for it, and the highest price is all that is necessary to produce the

highest finishing. But it is not so in works of genius and imagination.

Their price is above rubies. The inspiration of the Muse comes not with

the _fiat_ of a monarch, with the donation of a patron; and therefore

the Great turn with disgust or effeminate indifference from the mighty

masters of the Italian school because such works baffle and confound

their self-will, and make them feel that there is something in the mind

of man which they can neither give nor take away.

‘Quam nihil ad tuum, Papinane, ingenium!’

LIX. The style of conversation in request in courts proceeds much upon

the same principle. It is low, and it is little. I have known a few

persons who have had access to the Presence (and who might be supposed

to catch what they could of the tone of royalty at second-hand, bating

the dignity—God knows there was nothing of that!) and I should say they

were the _highest finishers_ in this respect I ever met with. No

circumstance escaped them, they worked out all the details (whether to

the purpose or not) like a fac-simile, they mimicked every thing,

explained every thing; the story was not _told_, but acted over again.

It is true, there were no _grandes pensées_, there was a complete truce

with all thought and reflection; but they were everlasting dealers in

matters of fact, and there was no end of their minute prolixity—one must

suppose this mode pleased their betters, or was copied from them.

Dogberry’s declaration—‘Were I as tedious as a king, I could find in my

heart to bestow it all upon your worship’—is not so much a blunder of

the clown’s, as a sarcasm of the poet’s. Are we to account for the

effect (as before) from supposing that their overstrained attention to

great things makes them seek for a change in little ones?—Or that their

idea of themselves as raised above every one else is confirmed by

dwelling on the meanest and most insignificant objects?—Or is it that

from their ignorance and seclusion from the world, every thing is alike

new and wonderful to them? Or that dreading the insincerity of those

about them, they exact an extraordinary degree of trifling accuracy, and

require every one to tell a story, as if he was giving evidence on oath

before a court of justice? West said that the late King used to get him

up into a corner, and fairly put his hands before him so that he could

not get away, till he had got every particular out of him relating to

the affairs of the Royal Academy. This weakness in the mind of kings has

been well insisted on by Peter Pindar. It is of course like one of the

spots in the sun.

LX. I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a

wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of

the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.

LXI. Happy are they that can say with Timon—‘I am Misanthropos, and hate

mankind!’ They can never be at a loss for subjects to exercise their

spleen upon: their sources of satisfaction must hold out while the world

stands. Those who do not pity others, assuredly need not envy them: if

they take pleasure in the distresses of their fellow-creatures, they

have their wish. Let them cast an eye on that long disease, human life,

on that villainous compound, human nature, and glut their malice. There

is madness, there is idiotcy, there is sickness, old age, and death;

there is the cripple, the blind, and the deaf; there is the deformed in

body, the weak in mind, the prisoner and the gaoler, the beggar and the

dwarf; there is poverty, labour, pain, ignominy; there is riches, pride,

griping avarice, bloated luxury; there is the agony of suffering or the

lassitude of _ennui_; there is the sickness of the heart from hope

delayed, and the worse and more intolerable sickness from hope attained;

there is the gout, the stone, the plague, cold, fever, thirst, and

nakedness, shipwreck, famine, fire and the sword, all are instruments of

human fate, and pamper the dignity of human nature: there are the

racking pains of jealousy, remorse, and anguish, the lingering ones of

disappointment, sorrow, and regret; there is the consciousness of

unmerited, hopeless obscurity, and ‘the cruel sunshine thrown by fortune

on a fool;’ there is unrequited love, and—marriage; there is the coquet

slighting others and slighted in her turn, the jilt, the antiquated

prude, the brutal husband, and the common-place wife; there are vows of

celibacy and lost character; there is the cabal, the idle gossiping, the

churlishness and dulness of the country, the heartlessness and

profligacy of great cities; there are the listless days, the sleepless

nights, the having too much or too little to do; years spent in vain in

a pursuit, or, if successful, the having to leave it at last; there are

the jealousies of different professions among themselves or of each

other, lawyers, divines, physicians, artists; the contempt of the more

thriving for the less fortunate, and the hatred and heart-burnings with

which it is repaid; there is hypocrisy, oppression, falsehood,

treachery, cowardice, selfishness, meanness; the luck of fools, the

respectability of knaves; the cant of piety, loyalty, and humanity; the

lamentations of West-India planters over the ingratitude of their negro

slaves, and Louis XVIII. resigning to God and the Mother of all Saints

the credit of the success of his arms; there are sects and parties,

kings and their subjects, queens and common-council men, speeches in

Parliament, plays and actors _damned_, or successful for a time and then

laid on the shelf, and heard of no more; quacks at all corners,

mountebanks in the pulpit, and drones in the state, peace and war,

treaties of offence and defence, conspiracies, revolutions, Holy

Alliances, the sudden death of Lord Castlereagh, and the oratory of his

successor Mr. Canning, hid for the present like the moon ‘in its vacant

interlunar cave;’ and Ferdinand and his paper-kites, and the Cortes,

unconscious of the rebel maxim, ‘Catch a king and kill a king’; and Slop

raving at the bloodthirsty victims of courtly assassins, and whetting

mild daggers for patriot throats; and Mr. Croker’s _cheat-the-gallows

face_ in the _Quarterly_, and Lord Wellington’s _heart_ in the cause of

Spanish liberty, and a beloved Monarch retired amid all this to shady

solitude ‘to play with Wisdom.’ A good hater may here find wherewithal

to feed the largest spleen and swell it, even to bursting!

LXII. Happiness, like mocking, is catching. At least, none but those who

are happy in themselves, can make others so. No wit, no understanding,

neither riches nor beauty, can communicate this feeling—the happy alone

can make happy. Love and Joy are twins, or born of each other.

LXIII. No one knows when he is safe from ridicule.