Scene 1.

THE

COLLECTED WORKS OF WILLIAM HAZLITT

IN TWELVE VOLUMES

VOLUME THREE

_All rights reserved_

[Illustration: _Milton’s house N^o. 19, York Street, Westminster,

occupied by Hazlitt 1812–1819._]

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

WILLIAM HAZLITT

EDITED BY A. R. WALLER

AND ARNOLD GLOVER

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

W. E. HENLEY

❦

Free Thoughts on Public Affairs

Political Essays

Advertisement, etc., from The Eloquence of the British Senate

❦

1902

LONDON: J. M. DENT & CO.

McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.: NEW YORK

Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, (late) Printers to Her Majesty

CONTENTS

PAGE

FREE THOUGHTS ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS 1

POLITICAL ESSAYS 25

ADVERTISEMENT, ETC., FROM THE ELOQUENCE OF THE BRITISH SENATE 387

NOTES 427

FREE THOUGHTS ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS

IN A LETTER ADDRESSED TO

A MEMBER OF THE OLD OPPOSITION

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This pamphlet of 46 8vo pages was published by the author himself in

1806. The title-page was ‘Free Thoughts on Public Affairs, or Advice to

a Patriot; in a Letter addressed to a Member of the Old Opposition.

London, Printed by Taylor & Co., Shoe Lane, and sold by J. Budd, Crown &

Mitre, Pall Mall, 1806.’ Mr. W. C. Hazlitt reprinted the pamphlet from

the author’s own copy in 1885 (Bohn’s Library, _The Spirit of the Age,

etc._), and that reprint forms the text of the present edition. The

pamphlet is exceedingly rare. Mr. Alexander Ireland knew of only one

copy, that which belonged to Mr. W. C. Hazlitt. This he caused to be

transcribed; but it has not been possible to collate the present text

with either the original or Mr. Ireland’s transcription.

ADVICE TO A PATRIOT;

IN A LETTER ADDRESSED

TO A MEMBER OF THE OLD OPPOSITION

Sir, If the opposition of character between the individuals of different

nations is that which attaches every one the most strongly to his own

country; if the love of liberty instilled from our very cradle is any

security for the hatred of oppression; if a spirit of independence, and

a constitutional stubbornness of temper are not forward to crouch under

the yoke of unjust ambition; if to look up with heartfelt admiration to

the great names, whether heroes or sages, which England has produced,

and to be unwilling that the country which gave birth to Shakespear and

Milton should ever be enslaved by a mean and servile foe; if to love its

glory—that virtue, that integrity, that genius, which have distinguished

it from all others, and in which its true greatness consists,—is to love

one’s country, there are few persons who have a better right than myself

(on the score of sincerity) to offer that kind of advice which is the

subject of the following letter, however weak or defective it may be

found.

To love one’s country is to wish well to it; to prefer its interests to

our own; to oppose every measure inconsistent with its welfare; and to

be ready to sacrifice ease, health, and life itself in its defence. But

there is a false kind of patriotism, loud and noisy, and ever ready to

usurp that name from others, as an honourable covering either for

selfish designs or blind zeal, to which I shall make no pretensions. It

has been called patriotism, to flatter those in power at the expense of

the people; to sail with the stream; to make a popular prejudice the

stalking-horse of ambition, to mislead first and then betray; to enrich

yourself out of the public treasure; to strengthen your influence by

pursuing such measures as give to the richest members of the community

an opportunity of becoming richer, and to laugh at the waste of blood

and the general misery which they occasion; to defend every act of a

party, and to treat all those as enemies of their country who do not

think the pride of a minister and the avarice of a few of his creatures

of more consequence than the safety and happiness of a free, brave,

industrious, and honest people; to strike at the liberty of other

countries, and through them at your own; to change the maxims of a

state, to degrade its spirit, to insult its feelings, and tear from it

its well-earned and proudest distinctions; to soothe the follies of the

multitude, to lull them in their sleep, to goad them on in their

madness, and, under the terror of imaginary evils, to cheat them of

their best privileges; to blow the blast of war for a livelihood in

journals and pamphlets, and by spreading abroad incessantly a spirit of

defiance, animosity, suspicion, distrust, and the most galling contempt,

to make it impossible that we should ever remain at peace or in safety,

while insults and general obloquy have a tendency to provoke those

passions in others which they are intended to excite.

Being then of opinion, that to flatter is not always the duty of a

friend; that it is no part of the love of one’s country to be blind to

her errors, or to wish her to persist in them; I may take the liberty of

stating freely such observations as have occurred to an unprejudiced but

not indifferent spectator on the present state of things: and there is

at least this advantage in reflections which are not the echo of the

popular cry, that something may be found in them, however unsupported or

frivolous in general, which may be turned to good account by persons of

sounder judgment and more extensive means of information. It has been

said that ‘there is wisdom in a multitude of counsellors;’ but if they

only raise a clamour by repeating all of them the same thing, I do not

see how this advantage can be obtained.

What I would chiefly remark upon is,—How far the principles and views

acted upon by the late administrations are such as to afford us the

safest and most honourable ground for prosecuting a war which is said to

be carried on for the existence of the empire.

Had I to engage with an enemy in a struggle of this kind, the ground

which I should choose to occupy would be such a one as that he must feel

himself to be the aggressor. In a conflict which is to decide the fate

of a people, I think the greatest care should be taken to remove all

doubtful or frivolous causes of debate, to suffer no sinister motives to

divert their minds from the great object in which they are engaged or

lessen their steady confidence in the justice of their cause. It is

hardly to be expected that the mass of a people should defend the

patrimony of independence which they inherit from their ancestors with

the reverence, intrepidity, and dauntless zeal required of them, when

they see a minister ready to gamble it away for the first idle object

that excites his cupidity, or opens a door to the spirit of intrigue.

Examining the conduct of those who were the advisers and authors of the

late renewal of hostilities according to these maxims, which seem to me

well founded, it is not easy to imagine any thing more remote from true

dignity, magnanimity, or wisdom, than the manner in which we chose to

enter upon a war on which we were to stake our all. We chose to rest a

dispute, which was to involve every thing near and dear to us, on a

diplomatic ambiguity; on a technical question, as to the manner how and

to whom we were to give up a barren rock which was of no use to us, and

to which we had resigned all pretensions. It was clear that we had

refused to fulfil our share of a treaty which had been formally

ratified; but the reasons which we gave for doing this were by no means

equally clear and satisfactory. They sounded more like the excuses of

those seeking a pretence for the continuance of an unsuccessful contest,

than the remonstrances of persons sincerely anxious for peace, and

opposed by real difficulties. I remember at the time when the design of

retaining Malta was first made known, every one’s remark was,—Had we not

agreed to give it up? And as to the official reasons for this change of

measures, which were afterwards detailed to the public with such pomp

and circumstance, viz., that it was to have been given up to the Order

that formerly possessed it only on the supposition of that Order’s

remaining entire, though no such condition had been expressed, and under

the guarantee of another power whose consent had neither been asked or

obtained, I believe that no one who was not either indifferent to peace

or desirous of war ever thought them of sufficient consequence to

justify us in exposing ourselves to unnecessary reproach and odium, and

plunging into a sea of unknown troubles. It is certain that by the

generality of people they could neither be felt nor understood. On this

tottering foundation did Mr. Addington think proper to take his stand.

Doubt, perplexity, evasion, a general indifference as to the immediate

object of the dispute, and a direct accusation of breach of faith on the

part of the enemy were the auspices under which we were to begin a war,

which ought (from the tremendous consequences attached to it) to have

had no motives but what came home to the bosoms and businesses of men;

to every manly, generous, and honest feeling; that might not have been

uttered boldly without fear of contradiction in the face of an enemy;

that must not have beat in every heart, have strung every arm, and

animated every tongue. If the situation of the country was believed to

be at all precarious; if there was even a chance that the contest might

really lead to the dreadful alternative held out to us, the want either

of cautious prudence or of manly wisdom in ministers was at that time

inexcusable. It is no part of wisdom to hang the fate of kingdoms in the

balance with straws. It is no part of courage to fight, to show that you

are not afraid of fighting. Calm steady courage does not distrust

itself; nor is it afraid that by giving up a trifling or doubtful point,

it may afterwards be bullied into dangerous compliances. Firmness and

moderation seem to me not only not incompatible with each other, but

that the one is a necessary consequence of the other. On the other hand,

meanness and pride are nearly allied together. In common life we should

think that a readiness to seize the first occasion of quarrel shewed a

man to be either a bully or a coward; it would seem as if he was afraid

that by deferring his resentment he should either want courage or

opportunity for shewing it another time. Yet the great excuse for our

going into the war was,—that by yielding any thing to the demands of the

enemy, we should soon lose all power of resistance, and crouch in abject

submission at his feet. This was not a proud confidence in ourselves,

but a mean dread of our own pusillanimity and want of firmness. It was

to suppose that we had no security for our firmness, but in the heat of

our passions and the infliction of mutual injuries. But it may be said,

that whatever was the cause of the war, the consequences were the same.

The critical situation in which we stood, and the threats of the enemy

made it necessary for us to repel force by force, to call forth every

energy of which we were possessed, and to stand forth as one man in

defence of the country. But whatever this might prove as to the conduct

of the people, it forms no justification of the conduct of ministers. It

was not the danger of invasion which produced the taking up arms, but

the determination to take up arms which produced the fear of invasion.

The threatened invasion was not the cause of the war, but the

consequence of it. This reasoning, as applied to the commencement of the

war is preposterous. It is the same absurdity as to give yourself an

infectious disease in order that you may call in the physician, instead

of calling in the physician because you are attacked by the disease. It

is ridiculous, I say, to argue that the war was necessary to repel the

horrors and ravages of invasion; when, if the war had not taken place,

no such evils would have been possible. It was true, that so long as we

determined to carry on the war, it was necessary to guard ourselves

against the consequences of war; but to suppose (which seemed to be

generally the case with the good people of England in the height of

their panic) that to doubt for a moment of the necessity of the war was

the same thing as wishing that the French might come here and put every

one to the sword (when one chief object of peace would be to prevent all

such wild alarms), implies such an intricate confusion of ideas as I am

not able to unravel. At least I can account for it only in one way; by

supposing that this reluctance to distinguish between the necessity of

our going to war, and the necessity of self-defence, brought upon us by

it, arose from a deep consciousness in the human mind of the importance

of the motives by which we have been actuated to the success of our

undertakings, and a belief that he who lessens your confidence in the

grounds of your proceeding, thereby unnerves your resolution, and

lessens your safety. I know that immediate danger, however incurred,

produces the same necessity for self-defence; but it does not produce

the same temper of mind and motives for going through it. It may also

produce the same mechanical courage at the moment; but perseverance,

superiority to fear or disaster, self-confidence, a cheerful determined

submission to the greatest hardships and sufferings from a sense that

they were unavoidable, ‘the unconquerable will, and courage never to

submit or yield, and what else is not to be overcome;’ all these are not

in the gift of fear, or folly, or ignorance, or hatred. It is therefore

of the highest consequence to ascertain the true grounds and motives of

a war, such as the present, and to know the spirit and sentiments by

which it was brought about, and to what part of our character, whether

to its strong or its weak side, whether to our vices or our virtues,

those motives were addressed which called forth our ardour and readiness

to engage in it. It is not from loud boasting, from what we think or say

of ourselves, but from what we really are; not from a pretended, but

real love of justice, of independence, of honour, and of our country’s

welfare, that we can expect the fruits of victory. If we find in those

who lead, no higher principle of action than a wish to serve their own

interests, or gratify their own passions, and in those who are led, only

that zeal which arises from the drunken uproar of an ale-house, the low

credulity of ignorance, or the idle vanity of wearing a red coat and

shouldering a firelock—I will not say that the situation of the country

is desperate indeed, but I think it is not such as to afford the most

solid grounds of confidence in our security against a spirit of

unbounded ambition; the insolence of almost unexampled success,

resentment for supposed injuries, and the most consummate military

skill. ‘The still small voice is wanting.’... It is not in the order of

nature that an administration acting upon such principles as I have here

described should feel, or be capable of inspiring into others, either

true patriotism, a sincere and manly spirit of independence, or any

particle of that high-souled energy, which is necessary to contend with

inordinate ambition, armed with strength and cunning. That

administration is no more: I trust that its spirit has not survived it!

It seems almost impertinent at present to turn back to the diplomatic

pedantry and legal quibbling by which the retention of Malta was so

gravely justified at the time. After the repeated declarations that have

been made in parliament, and after having witnessed those tragical

events, to which, it seems, it was the necessary prelude, there can be

little doubt as to the real motives of that measure. From these motives

then we are to form our opinion of the conduct of ministers. If it was a

wise and necessary measure to plunge Europe again into the calamities of

war, to bathe it once more in that ‘fountain of blood,’ then and then

only was our refusing to fulfil our engagements a wise and necessary

determination; for the now avowed reason of our going to war was, that

we might not remain at peace! Here then was a war voluntarily undertaken

for its own sake, peace studiously shunned, and all the evils consequent

upon such a step incurred, for the sake of making one more desperate

effort to reduce the power of France and humble it with the dust. We

therefore entered upon this wild Quixotic scheme at our own peril, and

the responsibility of the war devolved upon us. We ought therefore to

have had strong grounds, either from a confidence in the result or from

the justice of the principle, for making such an attempt. But we have

seen what has been the result with respect to the other powers of

Europe, it remains to be seen how it will terminate with respect to

ourselves. As to the justice and generosity of the design, I may perhaps

speak of that hereafter.

I will not pretend to censure the general practice of obtaining a war

_under false pretences_, I leave it to the politicians to settle the

rules of honour among themselves: but I cannot help thinking that in a

war which is to try the spirit of a people, they ought not to be

tricked, or bullied, or unnecessarily forced into it. With respect to

the suspension of the war in consequence of the treaty of Amiens, it

certainly had this good effect (on the supposition that it was

absolutely necessary to go on with the contest), that it gave those who

had been enemies of the old war, and had been afterwards disgusted by

the conduct of the French, but did not like to relinquish their opinion

while the original cause of dispute remained—it gave all persons of this

class (of which there were great numbers) an opportunity to quit the

ranks of discontent without exposing themselves to the charge of

inconsistency. As it was a new war, they thought they had a fair right

to have a new opinion about it; and they exercised their freedom of

election as eagerly in approving the conduct of ministers in entering

upon the present war, as they had done in condemning their continuance

of the former one. For myself, I confess I have always looked upon the

present war as a continuance of the last, carried on upon the same

principles and for the same purposes, only without any hopes of success,

and therefore infinitely more wanton and foolish. For as, in the

commencement of the last war, it was our intention to conquer France, in

this we can only hope to defend ourselves. Of the necessity of this

defence there can be but one opinion. But to confound this with the

necessity of the war itself, or to argue as if the discontinuance of the

war would increase the dangers arising from it, is an improvement in

political logic, a luminous arrangement of ideas, that must have crept

in with the benefits of the Union.

The first plea that was made use of to give a colouring of interest to

the renewal of hostilities, before the discovery of that profound train

of policy, the explosion of which has left Europe a heap of ruins, was,

that after the incautious surrender of Malta, it had been found to be of

much greater importance to Great Britain than had been imagined at the

time; and that it could not be suffered to fall into the hands of the

French, or even become subject to their influence, without endangering

one of the chief sources of the wealth and prosperity of this country.

It seems Malta was the enchanted island, into which Buonaparte was to

convey himself by stealth, and thence passing easily into Egypt was, at

another vast stride, to come down _souse_ upon our possessions in India.

With these resting-places, and the help of the thousand-league boots

which our imagination had lent him, the political magician was to take

but a hop, step and a jump, from one hemisphere into the other. Or, in

the language of the day, Malta was the key to Egypt, and Egypt was the

key to our Eastern conquests. Both the points assumed in this statement

were directly denied, and their fallacy exposed at the time by one to

whose authority or reasonings on the subject I can add nothing; but I

may be permitted to make one general remark with respect to this part of

the subject, that if the mere possibility of the loss of an object of

national aggrandisement is to be considered as a sufficient ground of

war, there never could be such a thing as peace among mankind. If one

party is to be kept in a state of perpetual alarm from a distant

apprehension of losing the superiority they possess in wealth, or

luxury, or power, and the other to be perpetually goaded on by the hope

of speculative plunder; if one party is determined to forgo nothing, and

the other to grasp at everything; if future causes of contention are to

be anticipated, and we are to fight now to defend an object that may

never come into dispute hereafter; if we are not to wait till we see and

feel our danger, but to create it out of every fantastic occasion; if

our selfishness must be of that refined calculating comprehensive kind

as to overlook no possibility of danger or advantage however remote or

uncertain, and at the same time so inflexibly disinterested as to think

no sacrifices too great in pursuit of its favourite object—it is easy to

see that the world would soon be dispeopled. It is well for mankind that

our passions naturally circumscribe themselves, and contain their own

antidote within them. The only excuse for our narrow, selfish passions

is their short-sightedness: were it not for this, the jealousies of

individuals and of nations would never leave them a moment’s interval of

rest or quiet. It is well that the headlong passions which make us rush

on our own destruction and that of others are only excited by gross,

palpable objects; and are therefore transient and limited in their

operation. It is well that those motives which owe nothing to reason in

their birth should not afterwards receive either nourishment or support

from it. If in their present desultory state they produce so many

mischiefs, what would be the case if they were to be organized into

systems, and under the direction of pure abstract reason? Any object

that provoked a momentary resentment or excited our jealousy might

plunge us into a war that could only be expiated by seas of blood. But

in a war of mere interest or passion, it is surely allowable to sit down

and count the cost, and to strive to moderate our pride and resentment

instead of inflaming them. Virtue, truth, and patriotism require nothing

of us but an inviolable resolution and integrity in the defence of those

rights which are the common privilege of humanity; the rest is a

calculation of prudence, not a stern command of duty that admits neither

of compromise or delay. To defend at the point of the sword, and at the

risk of every thing valuable, our title to the possessions that are

neither necessary nor durable in their own nature, that are never worth

a hundred years’ purchase, that may crumble to pieces of their own

accord, or slip out of our hands in various ways before the end of the

contest, and which afterwards will be no more secure ‘against infection

and the hand of war,’ against the insidious or desperate designs of the

enemy, against the breath of accident or unforeseen decay than they were

before—is madness and folly. It is to defeat the intended favours of

Fortune, by paying for them before-hand a price much greater than they

can ever be worth. It is to squander away the whole estate of our

present happiness and comfort in purchasing security for that, for which

no security ever was or can be given—the continued smiles of fortune. We

cannot without a presumption that will involve its own punishment think

of placing beyond the reach of chance or fate that which by its own

nature and the fluctuation of human affairs is liable to change.

But this must be the case with all distant and maritime possessions:

indeed all naval superiority is attended with this necessary

disadvantage; that, though actual power, it is not self-dependent, or

the source of its own permanence. We cannot secure the possession of the

sea in the same manner by taking ships as we can the possession of the

land by taking fortresses and countries. The longer a successful

continental warfare is carried on, the more able is the conqueror to

carry it on: every new conquest that he makes furnishes him with the

means of making more, and secures to him what he has already gained by

striking at the heart of power, by disarming resistance, and by very

liberally rewarding the expence and trouble of keeping it—Whereas the

advantages that are gained at sea are, like that element itself,

infinitely treacherous and uncertain. We may take their ships; but this

will not hinder them from building others. We cannot build forts or

erect passes on the seas, or dig them into trenches to keep out the

enemy. We cannot enter their country and cut down their forests; we

cannot enter their ports and destroy their magazines;—all their means

and sources of power remain untouched. We cannot prevent their

exertions, though we may constantly render them abortive. Thus, while at

an enormous expence we maintain our actual superiority, we make no

advances to our object—which is security; but are rather further from

it. If we ever make peace, which I suppose will happen sooner or later,

we shall find that we have not in any one respect lessened the means or

palsied the energies of our rivals; and while we remain at war we are

teaching them two very dangerous things, resolution and skill. I

conceive no power can be long superior to the attacks of another, unless

where it has the means of crushing its resistance in embryo. Naval

dominion is in this respect what a government would be that should give

to insurgents a free communication with each other, full liberty of

forming plans and of organizing themselves into regular bodies of

troops, and the privilege of never being attacked till they themselves

gave the signal for the onset. Military conquests are therefore in their

nature to a certain degree secure; because in maintaining them we have

to contend with those whom we have bound hand and foot, from whom we

have taken all effectual power of resistance; while in maintaining our

naval superiority, we strengthen our adversary by struggling with him,

since he has the full use of every limb and muscle, has every inducement

as well as opportunity to exert himself to the utmost, and is in no

danger of receiving any material hurt; at least this must be the

consequence where our natural strength and advantages are at all equal.

I know nothing but some such reasoning as this on the inefficiency of

naval advantages, as a means of reducing the enemy to terms of

submission, that could form the least excuse for the late ministers in

their desperate attempt to turn the course of the war from a channel in

which it was sure to be successful, into one in which it was sure to be

disastrous; to throw the game knowingly and wilfully into the enemy’s

hands, and ruin us in our allies. They seemed to anticipate with fatal

apprehension the most splendid success that ever adorned the annals of

the British navy, and to be determined by an inverted ambition to match

it with a pattern, in their own style, of equal horror, discomfiture,

and dismay. They seemed to conspire maliciously with fortune, in

depriving Englishmen of the pure, unalloyed triumph of that day.—For the

present, the errors of the cabinet have entirely defeated whatever

advantages we might have derived from our naval success; and the effect

of our mistaken policy has been, that while we remain undisputed masters

of the seas, and are grasping at the commerce of the world, we see the

ports of Europe about to be shut against us. War on the continent is

therefore hopeless; war at sea useless, or worse than useless: for

methinks there is neither policy nor wisdom nor humanity ‘in resolving

to set no limits to your hostility but with your existence,’ when you

have to contend with a great and formidable foe; when you only know that

_he_ is safe from your attacks; when you can only distress him, when you

gain no advantage yourself in the mean time, and cannot possibly gain

any that can be put in competition with such an alternative; when we

consider that such a resolution (however heroically it may be formed)

cannot be always persisted in (for the desire of peace is natural, and

war revolting to the human mind); that the longer it is adhered to, the

more mischievous it will become, and the more dangerous in its

consequences afterwards, and will render the diminution of that maritime

preponderance, which we have held with such a convulsive grasp, more and

more an object both of policy and revenge to other powers.

I have promised to say something of the justice of the war in its

principle, not as a war of defence but as a war of interference; though

I think the less is said on this subject the better; it can only open

‘another Iliad of woes.’ It must lead to a train of recollections that

can be of no use to us at present; or revive sentiments and a spirit

that should be recalled only (if it were possible) to be disclaimed. The

less we retain of a spirit of offence, and the sooner we forget

ourselves in the character of aggressors, in however just a cause, the

better shall we be qualified for our present posture of defence: for

there is no ground of resistance so sure as a determined belief, for the

time at least, that all aggression must be wrong. I am far from thinking

that the arbitrary conduct of a government, even where it does not

affect ourselves, is not a just ground of war, or that the conduct of

the French government was not marked by a spirit of violent and unjust

ambition. Of course if that spirit can be resisted with effect, there is

no injustice, and there is a great deal of policy in doing it. But

before we can plead generous indignation and an uncontrolable love of

justice in excuse for our rashness and imprudence, it must be clear that

pride, revenge, and the lust of dominion have had no share in producing

this ardent concern for the rights and liberties of mankind. It is not

the nature or justice of the occasion, but the use intended to be made

of it; the principles and views on which we act, and the character of

those with whom we are associated in a common cause, that gives us a

right to arrogate to ourselves the title of assertors of the liberties

of mankind. If, however, our motives are not such as to be above all

suspicion, it is not enough that we are able to hide them from

ourselves, unless we can at the same time impose upon those who have not

the same interest in being deceived by the thin disguise that covers

them. Instead then of enquiring into the abstract justice of the war (a

sort of enquiry now very nearly exploded, and which would be of little

use in guiding our practical conclusions), let us examine in what manner

our remonstrances would be likely to be received by the government to

whom they were addressed, and how far the common feelings of humanity

would compel them ‘to bow their crested pride’ at the feet of their

accusers. Would they forget then that the undue and dangerous influence

in the affairs of Europe, which was so loudly complained of, had been

the consequence of the combined efforts of all Europe to accomplish

their destruction, and was so far from being the cause of the hostility

of other states, that it was their only security against it? That their

unjust and tyrannical encroachments on the independence of the

neighbouring states had been made in defending their own independence

from the aggressions of which they were made the instruments? They would

say, that to think of restoring the independence of those countries

would be putting into the hands of a mortal enemy, whom you have just

disarmed, the weapons with which he may most surely effect your

destruction; that whatever advantages they had gained had been bought

with their blood, shed for their country; that if there had been any

instance of unjust aggression, or inordinate ambition, it might at least

be _accounted for_ from that natural jealousy of others, and that fierce

impatience of control, that must become habitual to those who had had

every kind of difficulty to encounter, and who had triumphed over all

opposition. The gigantic strength and towering greatness of France had

arisen from her convulsive struggles for existence, and in the cause of

that liberty which was denied her. They, who had insulted her weakness

and blasted her hopes, had no right to complain of her strength or her

despair. Those who had not been able to make their country free and

happy, would be instigated by a just revenge to make her great and

formidable to her enemies. They might say, ‘You left us no choice

between the highest point of glory, and the most abject submission; we

must either be conquerors or slaves. If you gained an advantage, you

pursued it; if you were defeated, you returned to the charge; neither

success nor misfortune inclined you to listen to terms of accommodation:

we saw that we could never hope for peace, but either by giving to

France such an ascendancy as would overawe the rest of Europe, or by

throwing ourselves at last on the mercy of our unrelenting foe. We had

not forgotten the partition of Poland, the massacres of Ismael and

Warsaw; and we could not satisfy ourselves but that those who had had

the chief concern in these events, or had witnessed them without dismay,

might have other objects in view in entering France, besides the

tranquillity of the people, the restoration of order, or a disinterested

regard for the safety of thrones, and the independence of Europe. We

could not conceive that an implacable enmity to France was a full

atonement for all other crimes, or a security for every virtue. Pursued,

hunted down, driven to madness, we turned upon our pursuers, and

trampled them under our feet; and in the career of our fury, and the

plenitude of our triumph, you charge us with excesses, from which we

ourselves were the greatest sufferers; and with not having observed

those rules of justice and moderation, which reason required of us. We

were to have no indemnity, no security: we were to give back every

conquest, as soon as made; to fight every battle over again; to rely

solely on the faith or generosity of our adversaries, as a pledge that

no advantage would be taken of our confidence; or, if it were ten times

betrayed, we were not to complain, as we had no right to advantages

obtained by unjust violence, in a cause that exposed us to the enmity

and detestation of the human race: we were to plead guilty to our own

condemnation; to set the seal on our own infamy, and to receive as a

mark of favour and lenity, whatever implied our admission into the

common rank and privileges of mankind; and, after endless sacrifices and

exertions, we were only to prepare for new struggles and insults,

without ever hoping to end them. But from whom were we to learn this

extreme moderation, or that respect for the rights of justice or the

ties of humanity, which could be no defence to us? Why were we not to

pursue the objects of our ambition, with the same obstinacy as those

with whom we had to contend pursued the objects of their revenge? It

could hardly be expected that all the concessions were to be made by

those who were intoxicated with the pride of victory, in favour of those

who had reaped nothing but disappointment, and who were only urged on by

a sullen despair. In this manner was the war protracted, year after

year, by open hostility, by civil dissentions, and pretended treaties;

lingered out under various pretexts, which were artfully substituted for

each other as occasion required, so as to make it impossible ever to

arrive at any decisive issue to the contest. When defeated, the

continuance of the war was necessary to their own defence and safety;

when flushed with victory for a time, then nothing less than full

indemnity for the past, as well as security for the future would satisfy

them; and then their favourite object, the subjugation of France, and

destruction of the republic, was resumed with fresh ardour, and tempted

them on till their hopes again ended in defeat and ruin: thus adapting

every aspect of affairs to their own purposes, they constantly returned

in the same circle to the point from which they set out, and war was

always necessary, peace always unattainable. Or if at any time the

fainting resolution and exhausted strength of our adversaries seemed to

promise us that repose which was so necessary to us, we saw the dying

embers of war again eagerly rekindled by a country that, standing aloof

from the contagion, shouted from her rocky shores to see the flames that

consumed the vitals of Europe. The bitterest enmity that our early

struggles in the cause of liberty had drawn down upon us was to be shewn

by a people “that had long insulted the slavery of Europe, by the

loudness of its boasts of freedom.” English solicitation and English

gold were always ready to defeat that object, which was to be the reward

of so many triumphs, and of so many years of suffering, of havoc,

uncertainty, and dismay. A reluctant peace was at length extorted from

her: but her jealousy, avarice, and pride made her choose to risk every

thing rather than remain in a state so unnatural to her. Delicate in her

moral sentiments, disinterested in all her proceedings, she was shocked

at some violences of ours, which permitted her no longer to remain an

indifferent spectator of the calamities of other nations, and she sought

the first opportunity of evading the treaty that had been concluded, by

alarming the fears of her merchants for the safety of their Eastern

possessions. She lost no time in rousing to her aid her former

confederates in wrong. By her incantations, the hydra-headed monster,

which we thought we had finally subdued, again feels new life and vigour

restored to it, unites its severed folds, and with its triple crown

moves onward to its prey, and France must submit or perish, that England

may preserve her commerce.’ In some such manner as this would a

Frenchman repel the charges brought against his countrymen; and, if we

allow for the strength of national prejudices, there appears to be some

appearance of reason in what he says.[1] If the present quarrel had been

so managed as to have been completely disentangled from the former one,

we should have been better able to answer their reproaches, and I think

to resist their menaces. Had not Austria been precipitated unwisely into

that quarrel in the manner she was, she could not have fallen to the

ground without a struggle.

In what further remarks I have to make, I shall consider whether the

system of internal policy pursued by the late minister was in its

general tendency likely to increase the spirit of independence, and

consequently the security of the country. It seems to me a desirable

object to refer as much as possible of our proceedings both at home and

abroad to the influence of that minister’s character on the national

feelings, and to the blind confidence generally placed in his talents

and integrity. The errors that we have been led into by a confidence of

this sort will be sooner retrieved than if they proceeded from a change

in our own habits and dispositions. It is well if we can save the credit

of our national character, a little at the expence of our

understandings; for I cannot think that our confidence in that minister

was well bestowed. I know it is a general maxim, that we are not to war

with the dead. We ought not, indeed, to trample on their bodies; but

with their _minds_ we may and must make war, unless we would be governed

by them after they are dead. They who wish their sentiments to survive

them in the memories of men, must also expect to live in their censures.

The character of Mr. Pitt was, perhaps, one of the most singular that

ever existed. With few talents, and fewer virtues, he acquired and

preserved in one of the most trying situations, and in spite of all

opposition, the highest reputation for the possession of every moral

excellence, and as having carried the attainments of eloquence and

wisdom as far as human abilities could go. This he did (strange as it

appears) by a negation (together with the common virtues) of the common

vices of human nature, and by the complete negation of every other

talent that might interfere with the only one which he possessed in a

supreme degree, and which indeed may be made to include the appearance

of all others—an artful use of words, and a certain dexterity of logical

arrangement. In these alone his power consisted; and the defect of all

other qualities, which usually constitute greatness, contributed to the

more complete success of these. Having no strong feelings, no distinct

perceptions, his mind having no link, as it were, to connect it with the

world of external nature, every subject presented to him nothing more

than a _tabula rasa_, on which he was at liberty to lay whatever

colouring of language he pleased; having no general principles, no

comprehensive views of things, no moral habits of thinking, no system of

action, there was nothing to hinder him from pursuing any particular

purpose by any means that offered; having never any plan, he could not

be convicted of inconsistency, and his own pride and obstinacy were the

only rules of his conduct. Having no insight into human nature, no

sympathy with the passions of men, or apprehension of their real

designs, he seemed perfectly insensible to the consequences of things,

and would believe nothing till it actually happened. The fog and haze in

which he saw every thing communicated itself to others, and the total

indistinctness and uncertainty of his own ideas tended to confound the

perceptions of his hearers more effectually than the most ingenious

misrepresentation could have done. Indeed, in defending his conduct he

never seemed to consider himself as at all responsible for the success

of his measures, or that future events were in our own power; but that

as the best laid schemes might fail, and there was no providing against

all possible contingencies, this was a sufficient excuse for our

plunging at once into any dangerous or absurd enterprise without the

least regard to consequences. His reserved logic confined itself solely

to the _possible_ and the _impossible_, and he appeared to regard the

_probable_ and _improbable_, the only foundation of moral prudence or

political wisdom, as beneath the notice of a profound statesman; as if

the pride of the human intellect were concerned in never entrusting

itself with subjects, where it may be compelled to acknowledge its

weakness.[2] From his manner of reasoning, he seemed not to have

believed that the truth of his statements depended on the reality of the

facts, but that the things depended on the order in which he arranged

them in words: you would not suppose him to be agitating a serious

question, which had real grounds to go upon, but to be declaiming upon

an imaginary thesis, proposed as an exercise in the schools. He never

set himself to examine the force of the objections that were brought

against his measures, or attempted to establish them upon clear, solid

grounds of his own; but constantly contented himself with first gravely

stating the logical form, or dilemma to which the question reduced

itself, and then, after having declared his opinion, proceeded to amuse

his hearers by a series of rhetorical common-places, connected together

in grave, sonorous, and elaborately constructed periods, without ever

shewing their real application to the subject in dispute. Thus if any

member of the opposition disapproved of any measure, and enforced his

objections by pointing out the many evils with which it is fraught, or

the difficulties attending its execution, his only answer was, ‘that it

was true there might be inconveniences attending the measure proposed,

but we were to remember, that every expedient that could be devised

might be said to be nothing more than a choice of difficulties, and that

all that human prudence could do was to consider on which side the

advantages lay; that for his part he conceived that the present measure

was attended with more advantages and fewer disadvantages than any other

that could be adopted; that if we were diverted from our object by every

appearance of difficulty, the wheels of government would be clogged by

endless delays and imaginary grievances; that most of the objections

made to the measure appeared to him trivial, others of them unfounded

and improbable; or that if a scheme free from all these objections could

be proposed, it might after all prove inefficient; while, in the mean

time, a material object remained unprovided for, or the opportunity of

action was lost.’ This mode of reasoning is admirably described by

Hobbes, in speaking of the writings of some of the Schoolmen, of whom he

says, that ‘they had learned the trick of imposing what they list upon

their readers, and declining the force of true reason by verbal forks,

that is distinctions which signify nothing, but serve only to astonish

the multitude of ignorant men.’ That what I have here stated comprehends

the whole force of his mind, which consisted solely in this evasive

dexterity and perplexing formality, assisted by a copiousness of words

and common-place topics, will, I think, be evident to any one who

carefully looks over his speeches, undazzled by the reputation or

personal influence of the speaker. It will be in vain to look in them

for any of the common proofs of human genius or wisdom. He has not left

behind him a single memorable saying—not one profound maxim—one solid

observation—one forcible description—one beautiful thought—one humourous

picture—one affecting sentiment. He has made no addition whatever to the

stock of human knowledge. He did not possess any one of those faculties

which contribute to the instruction and delight of mankind—depth of

understanding, imagination, sensibility, wit, vivacity, clear and solid

judgment. But it may be asked, If these qualities are not to be found in

him, where are we to look for them? And I may be required to point out

instances of them. I shall answer then, that he had none of the

profound, legislative wisdom, piercing sagacity, or rich, impetuous,

high-wrought imagination of Burke; the manly eloquence, strong sense,

exact knowledge, vehemence and natural simplicity of Fox; the ease,

brilliancy, and acuteness of Sheridan. It is not merely that he had not

all these qualities in the degree that they were severally possessed by

his rivals, but he had not any of them in any degree. His reasoning is a

technical arrangement of unmeaning common-places, his eloquence merely

rhetorical, his style monotonous and artificial. If he could pretend to

any one excellence in an eminent degree, it was to taste in composition.

There is certainly nothing low, nothing puerile, nothing far-fetched or

abrupt in his speeches; there is a kind of faultless regularity

pervading them throughout; but in the confined, mechanical, passive mode

of eloquence which he adopted, it seemed rather more difficult to commit

errors than to avoid them. A man who is determined never to move out of

the beaten road cannot lose his way. However, habit, joined to the

peculiar mechanical memory which he possessed, carried his correctness

to a degree which, in an extemporaneous speaker, was almost miraculous;

he perhaps hardly ever uttered a sentence that was not perfectly regular

and connected. In this respect, he not only had the advantage over his

own contemporaries, but perhaps no one that ever lived equalled him in

this singular faculty. But for this, he would always have passed for a

common man; and to this the constant sameness, and, if I may say so,

vulgarity of his ideas must have contributed not a little, as there was

nothing to distract his mind from this one object of his unintermitted

attention; and as even in his choice of words he never aimed at anything

more than a certain general propriety and stately uniformity of style.

His talents were exactly fitted for the situation in which he was

placed; where it was his business not to overcome others, but to avoid

being overcome. He was able to baffle opposition, not from strength or

firmness, but from the evasive ambiguity and impalpable nature of his

resistance, which gave no hold to the rude grasp of his opponents: no

force could bind the loose phantom, and his mind (though ‘not matchless,

and his pride humbled by such rebuke,’) soon rose from defeat unhurt,

‘And in its liquid texture mortal wound

Receiv’d no more than can the fluid air.’[3]

By this lucky combination of strength and weakness, he succeeded in

maintaining an undiminished influence over the opinions of his own

country for a number of years, in wielding her energies as he pleased,

and guiding the counsels of almost all Europe. With respect to his

influence on the continent, that is an illusion that is past, and not

worth inquiring about; but it may still be of some use to inquire by

what means he strengthened his influence at home, as this may more

immediately concern our future conduct. This I think he effected in two

ways: by lessening the free spirit of the country as much as he could,

and by giving every possible encouragement to its commercial spirit. I

shall not here examine how far both these designs were wise and salutary

at the time; but I conceive that neither a spirit of dependence nor an

unbounded and universal spirit of trade will be the best security for

our safety at present. An indifference to liberty is not likely to

increase the love of independence; nor is an exclusive regard to private

gain likely to produce a disinterested concern for the public welfare.

Mr. Pitt, in making war, always considered peace as an object perfectly

indifferent in itself; and, in securing the prerogative of the crown,

seemed to think that the privileges of the people did not deserve a

moment’s attention. I do not in this mean to condemn his conduct:

perhaps we may suppose that the restrictions which he introduced on the

liberty of the subject, and the spirit of passive obedience and

non-resistance which was every where industriously diffused, the

contempt and obloquy which were poured on the very name of liberty,

might be required by the circumstances of the time, and necessary to

prevent the contagion of a dangerous example, and the mischiefs of civil

anarchy and confusion. The public were perhaps justly surfeited with

metaphysical treatises overturning the foundation of all civil rights,

and the very notion of liberty, with historical disquisitions proving

that the popular spirit of political institutions was the bane of all

internal quiet and happiness, the source of endless violence and

bloodshed, and the final cause of their dissolution; that human

happiness could never reach its utmost point of perfection but under the

mild and tranquil reign of universal despotism; that the forms of all

governments were alike indifferent, provided they secured the same

servile obedience and death-like apathy in the state. Perhaps it was

then necessary that we should be told, _ex cathedrâ_, that the people

had nothing to do with the laws but to _obey_ them: perhaps it was right

that we should be amused with apologies for the corrupt influence of the

crown; that integrity, honour, the love of justice, public spirit, or a

zeal for the interests of the community should be laughed at as absurd

chimeras, and that an ardent love of liberty, or determined resistance

to powerful oppression should be treated as madness and folly. But

however wise or necessary a temporary fashion of this kind might be to

counteract the poison of other views and sentiments, I am sure it can

neither be wise nor safe to continue it at present. We ought to do every

thing in our power to get rid of the effects of so dangerous a habit as

soon as possible. The fewer curbs there are on the spirit of the people,

the more vigorous and determined will it shew itself; the greater the

encouragement that is given to the principles of liberty, and the

greater confidence that is placed in the general disposition of the

country, the greater and more irresistible will be their habitual

attachment to liberty and independence. You give a manifest advantage to

an enemy if you in any way lessen the sources of enthusiasm, or in any

way check the ardour, confine the energy, degrade the sentiments, or

discountenance the erect, manly, independent spirit of your country. It

is dangerous to let any thing fall into disrepute or contempt which may

serve as a watchword to startle the dull ear, or rouse the frozen blood;

but to this purpose it is not enough that the name is retained, if the

habitual feeling is destroyed. A tame acquiescence in every encroachment

of power or exertion of undue influence, a disposition to assert our own

rights or those of others no further than fear or interest permit, a

habit of looking on the welfare of our country or the rights of mankind

as secondary considerations, no further to be regarded than as they are

connected with our own danger or convenience, these are not the symptoms

of the durable greatness and independence of a people. The causes of the

ruin of states have been almost always laid in the relaxation of their

moral habits and political prejudices. No kingdom can be secure in its

independence against a greater power that is not free in its spirit, as

well as in its institutions. I shall be happy if I have been mistaken in

thinking these observations at all applicable to our own country: but

the observations themselves are serious, and worth attending to. They

are such as have been recognised in all nations and ages, except those

indeed where their having been so would have rendered them suspected.

On the other hand, a commercial spirit is a very weak as well as

dangerous substitute for a spirit of freedom: a sense of self-interest,

of mere mercenary advantage, can but ill supply the place of principle.

The love of gain, however active or persevering this principle may be in

accomplishing its own particular ends, can never be safely trusted to as

an _ally_ in a cause where there are other objects to be attended to.

Men who are actuated by this sole principle will very obstinately, no

doubt, defend their wealth, while they can retain it; but when that is

no longer the case, they will think nothing else worth retaining, and

meanly compromise their independence for their safety. That common

birthright which they receive from nature, in which every Englishman has

an equal interest as such, appears of little value in their eyes.

Liberty is in their eyes a coarse homely figure, but for the jewels that

sparkle in her hair, and the rings on her fingers. It is inconceivable

to them how a man can have any attachment to a simple shed, or can take

any pride in his title to that respect, which is due to him only because

he feels himself to be free. They will defend England as connected with

her colonies, with her proud canopies of Eastern state, her distant

spicy groves and the rich spoils of her Western isles; but will they

defend her as she is England, as their country? Strip her of her

conquests, her slaves, and her plantations, her bales of goods, her gold

and silver, and leave her only herself, what would there be in all the

rest worth the labour of a struggle? Her barren acres, her brave,

simple, generous, honest-hearted, hardy race of men, her liberty, her

fame, her integrity they look upon with the most sovereign contempt and

indifference, and would be ready to sacrifice them all for the purchase

of some new golden settlement, ‘some happier island in the watery waste—

‘Where slaves no more their native land behold,

But fiends torment, and Christians thirst for gold.’

They would defend their country not as her children, but as her masters;

as a property, not as a state. There may be the same pride and luxury in

other classes of men, but they are accompanied with other feelings, and

drawn from other sources. It has been a customary compliment to consider

those as best entitled to come forward conspicuously in defence of their

country who had what is called the greatest _stake_ in it. This is

perhaps true of the real, old hereditary nobility and gentry, of those

who find their names enrolled high in the annals of their country, whose

affections have grown to her soil as it were in a long course of

centuries, who have an interest in looking forward to posterity, and a

pride in looking back upon their ancestors, who have not only present

possessions and advantages to defend, but feelings of inveterate

prejudice and inbred honour to defend them. The loss of respect, or of

their former privileges, is a change which to them appears like

something out of the course of nature, to which no force or accidental

circumstances can ever reconcile them. They are also men of liberal

education; and this is a great point gained. There is certainly this

advantage in a classical education, if not counteracted by other causes,

that it gives men long views; it accustoms the mind to take an interest

in things foreign to itself, to love virtue for its own sake, to prefer

fame to life, and glory to riches, and to fix our thoughts on the great

and permanent instead of narrow and selfish objects. It teaches us to

believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world,

surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and to

feel respect for that which is made venerable by its nature and

antiquity instead of that low and servile dread which bows only to

present power and upstart authority. It is hard to find in minds

otherwise formed either a delicate sense of honour, or an inflexible

regard to truth and justice. But the spirit of trade is the very reverse

of all this. It is the principle of this set of men to cry ‘Long life to

the conqueror,’ to feel a contempt for all obligations that are not

founded in self-interest, and to consider all generous pursuits and the

hope of unfading renown as romance and folly. ‘Virtue is not their

habit, they are out of themselves in any course of conduct recommended

only by conscience and glory.’ They would not give a hundred hogsheads

of sugar or a half-year’s income for all the posthumous fame that was

ever acquired in the world. If things should unhappily ever come to

extremities, they are not the people who will retrieve them, either by

their exertions or example. They have neither grand and elevated views,

nor the warm, genuine feelings of nature. They have no _principles_ of

action. Irresolute, temporizing, every thing is with them made a subject

of selfish calculation. Their friendships as well as their enmities are

the creatures of the occasion. Confident, insolent in the day of

success, and while their cause is triumphant, they are as soon dejected

and driven to despair, when they find the tide turned against them.

Fortune is with them the first of goddesses: success the only title to

authority and respect; and possession the truest right. Accustomed to

all the fluctuations of hope and fear, they consider nothing stable in

human affairs; thrown into the possession of power and affluence by

accidents which they know not how to account for, it can hardly seem

strange to them that they should again be stripped of them. They do not

‘lay the fault upon themselves but on their stars, that they are

underlings.’ If I hear a man say that we are to give up our public

principles whenever circumstances render it necessary, that we are to

inquire upon all occasions not what is right, but what is prudent to be

done, that those feelings, which lead us to adhere to the cause of truth

and justice if at all unpopular, or to incur any personal risk or

inconvenience in defending what is right, are weak and vulgar

prejudices, I know that that man will be first to truckle to an enemy,

and the last voluntarily to risk his life in defence of his

independence.

The courage of the soldier and the citizen are essentially different.

The one is momentary and involuntary; the other permanent and voluntary.

It is one thing to do all in your power to repel danger when it is

unavoidable, and another to expose yourself to it when you may avoid

going into it. Fear, or rashness, or necessity may be supposed to kindle

all the fury of battle: but principle alone can make us willing to

return to the charge after defeat. It is for this _re-action_ that we

ought to be chiefly prepared. For this nothing can prepare us but a true

love of our country, not taken up as a fashion, but felt as a duty; a

spirit of resistance not measured by our convenience, but by the

strength of our attachment and the real value of the object; but steady

enthusiasm; but a determination never to submit while hope or life

remained, and an indifference to every thing else but that one great

object.

What resistance has Holland ever made to the power of France from the

first moment? Commerce had spread its sordid mantle completely over her.

Wrapped closely up in this, she fell without resistance and without a

groan: she was not of a temper to fall in love with danger, to court

disasters. Since that time she has not made a struggle or breathed a

sigh for her release, but lies supine, secure, unmoved, and torpid,

‘Dull as her lakes that slumber in the storm.’

Two hundred years of commerce and riches, which had gone over her,

since, in that noble struggle for thirty years together, she had defied

the whole power and the utmost vengeance of Spain, had prepared her for

this striking change. But England is not yet quite commercial: the

spirit of trade has not spread its poison through the whole mass of our

blood and vital juices! As I do not wish that England (with all her high

hopes, and called to a far different destiny) may _ever_ share the fate

of Holland, I do not wish that she may ever resemble her in herself;

that every other feeling should give way to that of interest alone, but

that she may tremble at ever realizing the warning picture of the poet,

——‘When, stript of all her charms,

The land of scholars, and the nurse of arms,

Where noble stems transmit the patriot flame,

Where kings have toil’d and poets wrote for fame,

One sink of level avarice shall lie,

And scholars, soldiers, kings, unhonour’d die.’

Though a state cannot look to its commerce for its security, it may be

involved in endless difficulty and danger by the views of commercial

aggrandizement. The views of men wholly engrossed in such pursuits are

altogether low and mechanical. If they see far, it is always in a

straight line before them; their sagacity is confined to what

immediately concerns their own interest. They are so intent upon that

one object that they overlook every thing else; and their eagerness to

accumulate is such, that they would rather hazard all than relinquish a

pursuit which promises them some new acquisition. While they are

successful, it is impossible to persuade them that they ever can be

otherwise, or to restrain their rashness by any considerations of

prudence or humanity. Actuated only by gross, palpable objects, and full

of themselves, they laugh at all distant danger. All general reasonings

on the principles of human nature, or the operation of causes by which

they do not find themselves influenced, appear to them perfectly futile

and visionary. ‘They think there is nothing real but that which they can

handle; which they can measure with a two-foot rule, which they can tell

upon ten fingers.’ As they believe money to be the only substantial

good, they are also persuaded that it is the only instrument of power.

With this they think themselves invulnerable, and that the more of it

they have, the more secure they are. As long as their credit remains

unimpaired, and their remittances are regularly made, they consider the

fate of battles and the intrigues of cabinets as of very little

comparative importance. They look up with more awe and admiration to a

stock-jobbing broker surrounded with his clerks than they do to a

victorious general at the head of his army. The rise and fall of stocks,

and the demand for our manufactures abroad, are in their opinion the

only criterions of national prosperity. On the other hand, whatever

affects their own interest, the loss of an island, or the stopping up of

a port, is found immediately to threaten the ruin of the country. Their

fears are as rash and groundless as their confidence. Every thing in

which they themselves are concerned is viewed through a magnifying

medium, and demands all our vigilance and attention, while every thing

else dwindles into insignificance. I therefore think there ought to be

as little connection as possible between the measures of government and

the maxims of the Exchange, and that the interests of a great empire

ought not to be managed by a company of factors.

I have thus expressed the sentiments which occurred to me on the present

situation of our affairs, and some of the steps which led to it. I have

done this as freely and unreservedly as I could, because if they are

wrong, it is not likely that they will be much attended to; but if they

are right, they may be of some use. And I conceive that even they who

may think the view I have taken of the measures of the last

administration, and the application of particular observations to our

own conduct altogether unfounded, will not deny the truth of the general

principles on which they are built. Or that the sentiments of justice,

of honour, of reason and liberty, by which I think our views and conduct

_ought_ to have been regulated, can be too deeply impressed on our

minds.

End of FREE THOUGHTS ON PUBLIC AFFAIRS

POLITICAL ESSAYS,

WITH

SKETCHES OF PUBLIC CHARACTERS

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This work was published in 1819 with the following

title-page:—‘Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters. By

William Hazlitt. “Come, draw the curtain, shew the picture.” London:

Printed for William Hone, 45, Ludgate Hill. 1819.’ A ‘Second edition,’

with the same title and motto, ‘published by John Templeman, 39,

Tottenham-Court-Road; and Simpkin and Marshall, Stationers’-court,’

appeared in 1822, but was probably a mere re-issue. The text of the 1819

edition is here reprinted.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Dedication 29

Preface 31

The Marquis Wellesley 47

Mr. Southey, Poet Laureat 48

Mr. Southey’s New Year’s Ode 49

Dottrel-catching 51

The Bourbons and Buonaparte 52

Vetus 57

On the Courier and Times Newspapers 58

Illustrations of Vetus 63

On the late War 96

Prince Maurice’s Parrot 101

Whether the Friends of Freedom can entertain any sanguine hopes of

the Favorable Results of the ensuing Congress 103

The Lay of the Laureate 109

Mr. Owen’s ‘New View of Society,’ &c. 121

Speeches of Charles C. Western, Esq. M.P. and Henry Brougham, Esq.

M.P. 127

Mr. Coleridge’s Lay Sermon 138

—— —— Statesman’s Manual 143

—— —— Lay Sermon 152

Buonaparte and Muller 154

Illustrations of the Times Newspaper 155

Mr. Macirone’s ‘Interesting Facts relating to the Fall and Death

of Joachim Murat, King of Naples’ 177

Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review 192

The Courier and Wat Tyler 200

Mr. Southey’s Letter to William Smith, Esq. 210

On the Spy-System 232

On the same subject 234

On the Treatment of the State Prisoners 238

The Opposition and the Courier 240

England in 1798, by S. T. Coleridge 241

On the Effects of War and Taxes 243

Character of Mr. Burke 250

On Court Influence 254

On the Clerical Character 266

What is the People? 283

On the Regal Character 305

‘The Fudge Family in Paris’ 311

Character of Lord Chatham 321

—— of Mr. Burke 325

—— of Mr. Fox 337

—— of Mr. Pitt 346

‘Pitt and Buonaparte’ 350

An Examination of Mr. Malthus’s Doctrines 356

On the Originality of Mr. Malthus’s Essay 361

On the Principles of Population as affecting the Schemes of

Utopian Improvement 367

On the Application of Mr. Malthus’s Principle to the Poor Laws 374

Queries relating to the Essay on Population 381

To JOHN HUNT, Esq.

_The tried, steady, zealous, and conscientious advocate of the liberty

of his country, and the rights of mankind;_—

_One of those few persons who are what they would be thought to be;

sincere without offence, firm but temperate; uniting private worth to

public principle; a friend in need, a patriot without an eye to himself;

who never betrayed an individual or a cause he pretended to serve—in

short, that rare character, a man of common sense and common honesty,_

_This volume is respectfully and gratefully inscribed by_

THE AUTHOR.

PREFACE

I am no politician, and still less can I be said to be a party-man: but

I have a hatred of tyranny, and a contempt for its tools; and this

feeling I have expressed as often and as strongly as I could. I cannot

sit quietly down under the claims of barefaced power, and I have tried

to expose the little arts of sophistry by which they are defended. I

have no mind to have my person made a property of, nor my understanding

made a dupe of. I deny that liberty and slavery are convertible terms,

that right and wrong, truth and falsehood, plenty and famine, the

comforts or wretchedness of a people, are matters of perfect

indifference. That is all I know of the matter; but on these points I am

likely to remain incorrigible, in spite of any arguments that I have

seen used to the contrary. It needs no sagacity to discover that two and

two make four; but to persist in maintaining this obvious position, if

all the fashion, authority, hypocrisy, and venality of mankind were

arrayed against it, would require a considerable effort of personal

courage, and would soon leave a man in a very formidable minority.

Again, I am no believer in the doctrine of _divine right_, either as it

regards the Stuarts or the Bourbons; nor can I bring myself to approve

of the enormous waste of blood and treasure wilfully incurred by a

family that supplanted the one in this country to restore the others in

France. It is to my mind a piece of sheer impudence. The question

between natural liberty and hereditary slavery, whether men are born

free or slaves, whether kings are the servants of the people, or the

people the property of kings (whatever we may think of it in the

abstract, or debate about it in the schools)—in this country, in Old

England, and under the succession of the House of Hanover, is not a

question of theory, but has been long since decided by certain facts and

feelings, to call which in question would be equally inconsistent with

proper respect to the people, or common decency towards the throne. An

English subject cannot call this principle in question without

renouncing his country; an English prince cannot call it in question

without disclaiming his title to the crown, which was placed by our

ancestors on the head of his ancestors, on no other ground and for no

other possible purpose than to vindicate this sacred principle in their

own persons, and to hold it out as an example to posterity and to the

world. An Elector of Hanover, called over here to be made king of

England, in contempt and to the exclusion of the claims of the old,

hereditary possessors and pretenders to the throne, on any other plea

except that of his being the chosen representative and appointed

guardian of the rights and liberties of the people (the consequent

pledge and guarantee of the rights and liberties of other nations) would

indeed be a solecism more absurd and contemptible than any to be found

in history. What! Send for a petty Elector of a petty foreign state to

reign over us from respect to _his_ right to the throne of these realms,

in defiance of the legitimate heir to the crown, and ‘in contempt of the

choice of the people!’ Oh monstrous fiction! Miss Flora Mac Ivor would

not have heard of such a thing: the author of Waverley has well answered

Mr. Burke’s ‘Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs.’[4] Let not our

respect for our ancestors, who fought and bled for their own freedom,

and to aid (not to stifle) the cause of freedom in other nations, suffer

us to believe this poor ideot calumny of them. Let not our shame at

having been inveigled into crusades and Holy Alliances against the

freedom of mankind, suffer us to be made the dupes of it ourselves, in

thought, in word, or deed. The question of genuine liberty or of naked

slavery, if put in words, should be answered by Englishmen with scorn:

if put in any other shape than words, it must be answered in a different

way, unless they would lose the name of Englishmen! An Englishman has no

distinguishing virtue but honesty: he has and can have no privilege or

advantage over other nations but liberty. If he is not free, he is the

worst of slaves, for he is nothing else. If he feels that he has wrongs

and dare not say so, he is the meanest of hypocrites; for it is certain

that he cannot be contented under them.—This was once a free, a proud,

and happy country, when under a constitutional monarchy and a Whig king,

it had just broken the chains of tyranny that were prepared for it, and

successfully set at defiance the menaces of an hereditary pretender;

when the monarch still felt what he owed to himself and the people, and

in the opposite claims which were set up to it, saw the real tenure on

which he held his crown; when civil and religious liberty were the

watch-words by which good men and true subjects were known to one

another, not by the cant of legitimacy; when the reigning sovereign

stood between you and the polluted touch of a bigot and a despot who

stood ready to seize upon you and yours as his lawful prey; when liberty

and loyalty went hand in hand, and the Tory principles of passive

obedience and non-resistance were more unfashionable at court than in

the country; when to uphold the authority of the throne, it was not

thought necessary to undermine the privileges or break the spirit of the

nation; when an Englishman felt that his name was another name for

independence, ‘the envy of less happier lands,’ when it was his pride to

be born, and his wish that other nations might become free; before a

sophist and an apostate had dared to tell him that he had no share, no

merit, no free agency, in the glorious Revolution of 1688, and that he

was bound to lend a helping hand to crush all others, that implied a

right in the people to chuse their own form of government; before he was

become sworn brother to the Pope, familiar to the Holy Inquisition, an

encourager of the massacres of his Protestant brethren, a patron of the

Bourbons, and jailor to the liberties of mankind! Ah, John Bull! John

Bull! thou art not what thou wert in the days of thy friend, Arbuthnot!

Thou wert an honest fellow then: now thou art turned bully and coward.

This is the only politics I know; the only patriotism I feel. The

question with me is, whether I and all mankind are born slaves or free.

That is the one thing necessary to know and to make good: the rest is

_flocci, nauci, nihili, pili_. Secure this point, and all is safe: lose

this, and all is lost. There are people who cannot understand a

principle; nor perceive how a cause can be connected with an individual,

even in spite of himself, nor how the salvation of mankind can be bound

up with the success of one man. It is in vain that I address to them

what follows.—‘One fate attends the altar and the throne.’ So sings Mr.

Southey. I say, that one fate attends the people and the assertor of the

people’s rights against those who say they have no rights, that they are

their property, their goods, their chattels, the live-stock on the

estate of Legitimacy. This is what kings at present tell us with their

swords, and poets with their pens. He who tells me this deprives me not

only of the right, but of the very heart and will to be free, takes the

breath out of the body of liberty, and leaves it a dead and helpless

corse, destroys ‘at one fell swoop’ the dearest hopes, and blasts the

fairest prospects of mankind through all ages and nations, sanctifies

slavery, binds it as a spell on the understanding, and makes freedom a

mockery, and the name a bye-word. The poor wretch immured in the

dungeons of the Inquisition may breathe a sigh to liberty, may repeat

its name, may think of it as a blessing, if not to himself, to others;

but the wretch imprisoned in the dungeon of Legitimacy, the very tomb of

freedom, that ‘painted sepulchre, white without, but full of ravening

and all uncleanness within,’ must not even think of it, must not so much

as dream of it, but as a thing forbid: it is a profanation to his lips,

an impiety to his thoughts; his very imagination is enthralled, and he

can only look forward to the never-ending flight of future years, and

see the same gloomy prospect of abject wretchedness and hopeless

desolation spread out for himself and his species. They who bow to

thrones and hate mankind may here feast their eyes with blight, mildew,

the blue pestilence and glittering poison of slavery, ‘bogs, dens, and

shades of death—a universe of death.’ This is that true moral atheism,

the equal blasphemy against God and man, the sin against the Holy Ghost,

that lowest deep of debasement and despair to which there is no lower

deep. He who saves me from this conclusion, who makes a mock of this

doctrine, and sets at nought its power, is to me not less than the God

of my idolatry, for he has left one drop of comfort in my soul. The

plague-spot has not tainted me quite; I am not leprous all over, the lie

of Legitimacy does not fix its mortal sting in my inmost soul, nor, like

an ugly spider, entangle me in its slimy folds; but is kept off from me,

and broods on its own poison. He who did this for me, and for the rest

of the world, and who alone could do it, was Buonaparte. He withstood

the inroads of this new Jaggernaut, this foul Blatant Beast, as it

strode forward to its prey over the bodies and minds of a whole people,

and put a ring in its nostrils, breathing flame and blood, and led it in

triumph, and played with its crowns and sceptres, and wore them in its

stead, and tamed its crested pride, and made it a laughing-stock and a

mockery to the nations. He, one man, did this, and as long as he did

this, (how, or for what end, is nothing to the magnitude of this mighty

question) he saved the human race from the last ignominy, and that foul

stain that had so long been intended, and was at last, in an evil hour

and by evil hands, inflicted on it. He put his foot upon the neck of

kings, who would have put their yoke upon the necks of the people: he

scattered before him with fiery execution, millions of hired slaves, who

came at the bidding of their masters to deny the right of others to be

free. The monument of greatness and of glory he erected, was raised on

ground forfeited again and again to humanity—it reared its majestic

front on the ruins of the shattered hopes and broken faith of the common

enemies of mankind. If he could not secure the freedom, peace, and

happiness of his country, he made her a terror to those who by sowing

civil dissension and exciting foreign wars, would not let her enjoy

those blessings. They who had trampled upon Liberty could not at least

triumph in her shame and her despair, but themselves became objects of

pity and derision. Their determination to persist in extremity of wrong

only brought on themselves repeated defeat, disaster, and dismay: the

accumulated aggressions their infuriated pride and disappointed malice

meditated against others, returned in just and aggravated punishment

upon themselves: they heaped coals of fire upon their own heads; they

drank deep and long, in gall and bitterness, of the poisoned chalice

they had prepared for others: the destruction with which they had

threatened a people daring to call itself free, hung suspended over

their heads, like a precipice, ready to fall upon and crush them.

‘Awhile they stood abashed,’ abstracted from their evil purposes, and

felt how awful freedom is, its power how dreadful. Shrunk from the

boasted pomp of royal state into their littleness as men, defeated of

their revenge, baulked of their prey, their schemes stripped of their

bloated pride, and with nothing left but the deformity of their malice,

not daring to utter a syllable or move a finger, the lords of the earth,

who had looked upon men as of an inferior species, born for their use,

and devoted to be their slaves, turned an imploring eye to the people,

and with coward hearts and hollow tongues invoked the name of Liberty,

thus to get the people once more within their unhallowed gripe, and to

stifle the name of Liberty for ever. I never joined the vile and

treacherous cry of spurious humanity in favour of those who have from

the beginning of time, and will to the end of it, make a butt of

humanity, and its distresses their sport. I knew that shameful was this

new alliance between kings and people; fatal this pretended league: that

‘never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have

pierced so deep.’ I was right in this respect. I knew my friends from my

foes. So did Lord Castlereagh: so did not Benjamin Constant. Did any of

the Princes of Europe ever regard Buonaparte as any thing more than the

child and champion of Jacobinism? Why then should I: for on that point I

bow to their judgments as infallible. Passion speaks truer than reason.

If Buonaparte was a conqueror, he conquered the grand conspiracy of

kings against the abstract right of the human race to be free; and I, as

a man, could not be indifferent which side to take. If he was ambitious,

his greatness was not founded on the unconditional, avowed surrender of

the rights of human nature. But with him, the state of man rose exalted

too. If he was arbitrary and a tyrant, first, France as a country was in

a state of military blockade, on garrison-duty, and not to be defended

by mere paper bullets of the brain; secondly, but chief, he was not, nor

he could not become, a tyrant by right divine. Tyranny in him was not

sacred: it was not eternal: it was not instinctively bound in league of

amity with other tyrannies; it was not sanctioned by all the laws of

religion and morality. There was an end of it with the individual: there

was an end of it with the temporary causes, which gave it birth, and of

which it was only the too necessary re-action. But there are persons of

that low and inordinate appetite for servility, that they cannot be

satisfied with any thing short of that sort of tyranny that has lasted

for ever, and is likely to last for ever; that is strengthened and made

desperate by the superstitions and prejudices of ages; that is enshrined

in traditions, in laws, in usages, in the outward symbols of power, in

the very idioms of language; that has struck its roots into the human

heart, and clung round the human understanding like a nightshade; that

overawes the imagination, and disarms the will to resist it, by the very

enormity of the evil; that is cemented with gold and blood; guarded by

reverence, guarded by power; linked in endless succession to the

principle by which life is transmitted to the generations of tyrants and

slaves, and destroying liberty with the first breath of life; that is

absolute, unceasing, unerring, fatal, unutterable, abominable,

monstrous. These true devotees of superstition and despotism cried out

Liberty and Humanity in their desperate phrenzy at Buonaparte’s sudden

elevation and incredible successes against their favourite idol, ‘that

Harlot old, the same that is, that was, and is to be,’ but we have heard

no more of their triumph of Liberty and their _douce humanité_, since

they clapped down the hatches upon us again, like wretches in a

slave-ship who have had their chains struck off and pardon promised them

to fight the common enemy; and the poor Reformers who were taken in to

join the cry, because they are as fastidious in their love of liberty as

their opponents are inveterate in their devotion to despotism, continue

in vain to reproach them with their temporary professions, woeful

grimaces, and vows made in pain, which ease has recanted; but to these

reproaches the legitimate professors of Liberty and Humanity do not even

deign to return the answer of a smile at their credulity and folly.

Those who did not see this result at the time were, I think, weak; those

who do not acknowledge it now are, I am sure, hypocrites.—To this pass

have we been brought by the joint endeavours of Tories, Whigs, and

Reformers; and as they have all had a hand in it, I shall here endeavour

to ascribe to each their share of merit in this goodly piece of work. It

is, perhaps, a delicate point, but it is of no inconsiderable

importance, that the friends of Freedom should know the strength of

their enemies, and their own weakness as well; for

——‘At this day,

When a Tartarean darkness overspreads

The groaning nations; when the impious rule,

By will or by established ordinance,

Their own dire agents, and constrain the good

To acts which they abhor; though I bewail

This triumph, yet the pity of my heart

Prevents me not from owning that the law

By which mankind now suffers, is most just.

For by superior energies; more strict

Affiance to each other; faith more firm

In their unhallowed principles; the bad

Have fairly earned a victory o’er the weak,

The vacillating, inconsistent good.’

A Reformer is not a gregarious animal. Speculative opinion leads men

different ways, each according to his particular fancy:—it is prejudice

or interest that drives before it the herd of mankind. That _which is_,

with all its confirmed abuses and ‘tickling commodities,’ is alone solid

and certain: that _which may be_ or _ought to be_, has a thousand shapes

and colours, according to the eye that sees it, is infinitely variable

and evanescent in its effects. Talk of mobs as we will, the only true

mob is that incorrigible mass of knaves and fools in every country, who

never think at all, and who never feel for any one but themselves. I

call any assembly of people a mob (be it the House of Lords or House of

Commons) where each person’s opinion on any question is governed by what

others say of it, and by what he can get by it. The only instance of

successful resistance in the House of Commons to Ministers for many

years was in the case of the Income-Tax; which touched their own pockets

nearly. This was ‘a feeling disputation,’ in which selfishness got the

better of servility, while reason and humanity might have pleaded in

vain. The exception proved the rule; and this evidence was alone wanting

to establish their character for independence and disinterestedness.

When some years ago Mr. Robson brought forward in the House the case of

an Exchequer Bill for 3_l._ 16_s._ which had been refused payment at the

Bank, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (then Mr. Addington, now Lord

Sidmouth) rose, and in a tone of indignation, severely reprimanded Mr.

Robson for having prematurely brought forward a fact which he knew to be

impossible; and the House cheered the Minister, and scouted Mr. Robson

and his motion for inquiry. The next day, Mr. Robson repeated his

charge, and Mr. Addington rose, and in the same tone of official

authority, brow-beat Mr. Robson for having brought forward, as something

reprehensible and extraordinary, what he said happened every day, though

the day before he had undertaken of his own accord to pronounce it

impossible; and the House cheered the Minister, and scouted Mr. Robson

and his motion for inquiry. What was it to them whether Mr. Robson was

right or wrong? It was their cue (I speak this of the House of Commons

of 1803) to support the Minister, whether right or wrong! Every

corporate body, or casual concourse of people, is nothing more than a

collection of prejudices, and the only arguments current with them, a

collection of watch-words. You may ring the changes for ever on the

terms Bribery and Corruption with the people in Palace-yard, as they do

in the Room over the way on Religion, Loyalty, Public Credit, and Social

Order. There is no difference whatever in this respect between the Great

Vulgar and the Small, who are managed just in the same way by their

different leaders. To procure unanimity, to get men to act in _corps_,

we must appeal for the most part to gross and obvious motives, to

authority and passion, to their vices, not their virtues: we must

discard plain truth and abstract justice as doubtful and inefficient

pleas, retaining only the names and the pretext as a convenient salvo

for hypocrisy! He is the best leader of a party who can find out the

greatest number of common-places faced with the public good; and he will

be the stoutest partisan who can best turn the lining to account.—Tory

sticks to Tory: Whig sticks to Whig: the Reformer sticks neither to

himself nor to any body else. It is no wonder he comes to the ground

with all his schemes and castle-building. A house divided against itself

cannot stand. It is a pity, but it cannot be helped. A Reformer is

necessarily and naturally a Marplot, for the foregoing and the following

reasons. First, he does not very well know what he would be at.

Secondly, if he did, he does not care very much about it. Thirdly, he is

governed habitually by a spirit of contradiction, and is always wise

beyond what is practicable. He is a bad tool to work with; a part of a

machine that never fits its place; he cannot be trained to discipline,

for he follows his own idle humours, or drilled into an obedience to

orders, for the first principle of his mind is the supremacy of

conscience, and the independent right of private judgment. A man to be a

Reformer must be more influenced by imagination and reason than by

received opinions or sensible impressions. With him ideas bear sway over

things; the possible is of more value than the real; that which is not,

is better than that which is. He is by the supposition a speculative

(and somewhat fantastical) character; but there is no end of possible

speculations, of imaginary questions, and nice distinctions; or if there

were, he would not willingly come to it; he would still prefer living in

the world of his own ideas, be for raising some new objection, and

starting some new chimera, and never be satisfied with any plan that he

found he could realise. Bring him to a fixed point, and his occupation

would be gone. A Reformer never is—but always to be blest, in the

accomplishment of his airy hopes and shifting schemes of progressive

perfectibility. Let him have the plaything of his fancy, and he will

spoil it, like the child that makes a hole in its drum: set some

brilliant illusion before his streaming eyes, and he will lay violent

hands upon it, like little wanton boys that play with air-bubbles. Give

him one thing, and he asks for another; like the dog in the fable, he

loses the substance for the shadow: offer him a great good, and he will

not stretch out his hand to take it, unless it were the greatest

possible good. And then who is to determine what is the greatest

possible good? Among a thousand pragmatical speculators, there will be a

thousand opinions on this subject; and the more they differ, the less

will they be inclined to give way or compromise the matter. With each of

these, his self-opinion is the first thing to be attended to; his

understanding must be satisfied in the first place, or he will not budge

an inch; he cannot for the world give up a principle to a party. He

would rather have slavery than liberty, unless it is a liberty precisely

after his own fashion: he would sooner have the Bourbons than

Buonaparte; for he truly is for a Republic, and if he cannot have that,

is indifferent about the rest. So (to compare great things with small)

Mr. Place, of Charing-Cross, chose rather that Mr. Hobhouse should lose

his Election than that it should not be accompanied with his

Resolutions; so he published his Resolutions, and lost Mr. Hobhouse his

Election. That is, a patriot of this stamp is really indifferent about

every thing but what he cannot have; instead of making his option

between two things, a good or an evil, within his reach, our exquisite

Sir sets up a third thing as the object of his choice, with some

impossible condition annexed to it,—to dream, to talk, to write, to be

meddlesome and troublesome about, to serve him for a topic of captious

discontent or vague declamation, and which if he saw any hopes of

cordial agreement or practical co-operation to carry it into effect, he

would instantly contrive to mar, and split it into a thousand fractions,

doubts, and scruples, to make it an impossibility for any thing ever to

be done for the good of mankind, which is merely the plaything of his

theoretical imbecility and active impertinence! The Goddess of his

idolatry is and will always remain a cloud, instead of a Juno. One of

these virtuosos, these Nicolas Gimcracks of Reform, full of intolerable

and vain conceit, sits smiling in the baby-house of his imagination,

‘pleased with a feather, tickled with a straw,’ trimming the balance of

power in the looking-glass of his own self-complacency, having every

thing his own way at a word’s speaking, making the ‘giant-mass’ of

things only a reflection of his personal pretensions, approving every

thing that is right, condemning every thing that is wrong, in compliment

to his own character, considering how what he says will affect not the

cause, but himself; keeping himself aloof from party-spirit, and from

every thing that can cast a shade on the fancied delicacy of his own

breast, and thus letting the cause of Liberty slip through his fingers,

and be spilt like water on the ground:—while another, more bold than he,

in a spirit of envy and ignorance, quarrels with all those who are

labouring at the same oar, lays about him like mad, runs a-muck at every

one who has done, or is likely to do, any thing to promote the common

object, and with his desperate club dashes out his neighbour’s brains,

and thinks he has done a good piece of service to the cause, because he

has glutted his own ill-humour and self-will, which he mistakes for the

love of liberty and a zeal for truth! Others, not able to do mischief

enough singly, club their senseless contradictions and unmanageable

humours together, turn their attention to cabal and chicane, get into

committees, make speeches, move or second resolutions, dictate to their

followers, set up for the heads of a party, in opposition to another

party; abuse, vilify, expose, betray, counteract and undermine each

other in every way, and throw the game into the hands of the common

enemy, who laughs in his sleeve, and watches them and their little

perverse, pettifogging passions at work for him, from the high tower of

his pride and strength! If an honest and able man arises among them,

they grow jealous of him, and would rather, in the petty ostracism of

their minds, that their cause should fail, than that another should have

the credit of bringing it to a triumphant conclusion. They criticise his

conduct, carp at his talents, denounce his friends, suspect his motives,

and do not rest, till by completely disgusting him with the name of

Reform and Reformers, they have made him what they wish, a traitor and

deserter from a cause that no man can serve! This is just what they

like—they satisfy their malice, they have to find out a new leader, and

the cause is to begin again! So it was, and so it will be, while man

remains the little, busy, mischievous animal described in Gulliver’s

Travels!—A pretty hopeful set to make head against their opponents—a

rope of sand against a rock of marble—with no centre of gravity, but a

collection of atoms whirled about in empty space by their own levity, or

jostling together by numberless points of repulsion, and tossed with all

their officious projects and airy predictions, by the first breath of

caprice or shock of power, into that Limbo of Vanity, where embryo

statesmen and drivelling legislators dance the hays of Reform,

‘perpetual circle, multiform and mix, and hinder all things,’ proud of

the exclusive purity of their own motives, and the unattainable

perfection of their own plans!—How different from the self-centred,

well-knit, inseparable phalanx of power and authority opposed to their

impotent and abortive designs! A Tory is one who is governed by sense

and habit alone. He considers not what is possible, but what is real; he

gives might the preference over right. He cries Long Life to the

conqueror, and is ever strong upon the stronger side—the side of

corruption and prerogative. He says what others say; he does as he is

prompted by his own advantage. He knows on which side his bread is

buttered, and that St. Peter is well at Rome. He is for going with

Sancho to Camacho’s wedding, and not for wandering with Don Quixote in

the desert, after the mad lover. Strait is the gate and narrow is the

way that leadeth to Reform, but broad is the way that leadeth to

Corruption, and multitudes there are that walk therein. The Tory is sure

to be in the thickest of them. His principle is to follow the leader;

and this is the infallible rule to have numbers and success on your

side, to be on the side of success and numbers. Power is the rock of his

salvation; priestcraft is the second article of his implicit creed. He

does not trouble himself to inquire which is the best form of

government—but he knows that the reigning monarch is ‘the best of

kings.’ He does not, like a fool, contest for modes of faith; but like a

wise man, swears by that which is by law established. He has no

principles himself, nor does he profess to have any, but will cut your

throat for differing with any of his bigotted dogmas, or for objecting

to any act of power that he supposes necessary to his interest. He will

take his Bible-oath that black is white, and that whatever is, is right,

if it is for his convenience. He is for having a slice in the loan, a

share in a borough, a situation in the church or state, or for standing

well with those who have. He is not for empty speculations, but for full

pockets. He is for having plenty of beef and pudding, a good coat to his

back, a good house over his head, and for cutting a respectable figure

in the world. He is _Epicuri de grege porcus_—not a man but a beast. He

is styed in his prejudices—he wallows in the mire of his senses—he

cannot get beyond the trough of his sordid appetites, whether it is of

gold or wood. Truth and falsehood are, to him, something to buy and

sell; principle and conscience, something to eat and drink. He tramples

on the plea of Humanity, and lives, like a caterpillar, on the decay of

public good. Beast as he is, he knows that the King is the fountain of

honour, that there are good things to be had in the Church, treats the

cloth with respect, bows to a magistrate, lies to the tax-gatherer,

nicknames the Reformers, and ‘blesses the Regent and the Duke of York.’

He treads the primrose path of preferment; ‘when a great wheel goes up a

hill, holds fast by it, and when it rolls down, lets it go.’ He is not

an enthusiast, a Utopian philosopher or a Theophilanthropist, but a man

of business and the world, who minds the main chance, does as other

people do, and takes his wife’s advice to get on in the world, and set

up a coach for her to ride in, as fast as possible. This fellow is in

the right, and ‘wiser in his generation than the children of the light.’

The ‘servile slaves’ of wealth and power have a considerable advantage

over the independent and the free. How much easier is it to smell out a

job than to hit upon a scheme for the good of mankind! How much safer is

it to be the tool of the oppressor than the advocate of the oppressed!

How much more fashionable to fall in with the opinion of the world, to

bow the knee to Baal, than to seek for obscure and obnoxious truth! How

strong are the ties that bind men together for their own advantage,

compared with those that bind them to the good of their country or of

their kind! For as the Reformer has no guide to his conclusions but

speculative reason, which is a source not of unanimity or certainty, but

of endless doubt and disagreement, so he has no ground of attachment to

them but a speculative interest, which is too often liable to be warped

by sinister motives, and is a flimsy barrier against the whole weight of

worldly and practical interests opposed to it. He either tires and grows

lukewarm after the first gloss of novelty is over, and is thrown into

the hands of the adverse party, or to keep alive an interest in it, he

makes it the stalking-horse of his ambition, of his personal enmity, of

his conceit or love of gossipping; as we have seen. An opinion backed by

power and prejudice, rivetted and mortised to the throne, is of more

force and validity than all the abstract reason in the world, without

power and prejudice. A cause centred in an individual, which is

strengthened by all the ties of passion and self-interest, as in the

case of a king against a whole people, is more likely to prevail than

that of a scattered multitude, who have only a common and divided

interest to hold them together, and ‘screw their courage to the

sticking-place,’ against an influence, that is never distracted or

dissipated; that neither slumbers nor sleeps; that is never lulled into

security, nor tamed by adversity; that is intoxicated with the insolence

of success, and infuriated with the rage of disappointment; that eyes

its one sole object of personal aggrandisement, moves unremittingly to

it, and carries after it millions of its slaves and train-bearers. Can

you persuade a king to hear reason, to submit his pretensions to the

tribunal of the people, to give up the most absurd and mischievous of

his prerogatives? No: he is always true to himself, he grasps at power

and hugs it close, as it is exorbitant or invidious, or likely to be

torn from him; and his followers stick to him, and never boggle at any

lengths they are forced to go, because they know what they have to trust

to in the good faith of kings to themselves and one another. Power then

is fixed and immoveable, for this reason, because it is lodged in an

individual who is driven to madness by the undisputed possession, or

apprehended loss of it; his self-will is the key-stone that supports the

tottering arch of corruption, steadfast as it leans on him:—liberty is

vacillating, transient, and hunted through the world, because it is

entrusted to the breasts of many, who care little about it, and quarrel

in the execution of their trust. Too many cooks spoil the broth. The

principle of tyranny is in fact identified with a man’s pride and the

servility of others in the highest degree; the principle of liberty

abstracts him from himself, and has to contend in its feeble course with

all his own passions, prejudices, interests, and those of the world and

of his own party; the cavils of Reformers, the threats of Tories, and

the sneers of Whigs.[5]

A modern Whig is but the fag-end of a Tory. The old Whigs were in

principle what the modern Jacobins are, Anti-Jacobites, that is,

opposers of the doctrine of divine right, the one in the soil of

England, the other by parity of reasoning in the soil of France. But the

Opposition have pressed so long against the Ministry without effect,

that being the softer substance, and made of more yielding materials,

they have been moulded into their image and superscription, spelt

backwards, or they differ as concave and convex, or they go together

like substantive and adjective, or like man and wife, they two have

become one flesh. A Tory is the indispensable prop to the doubtful sense

of self-importance, and peevish irritability of negative success, which

mark the life of a Whig leader or underling. They ‘are subdued even to

the very quality’ of the Lords of the Treasury Bench, and have

quarrelled so long that they would be quite at a loss without the

ordinary food of political contention. To interfere between them is as

dangerous as to interfere in a matrimonial squabble. To overturn the one

is to trip up the heels of the other. Their hostility is not directed

against things at all, nor to effectual and decisive opposition to men,

but to that sort of petty warfare and parliamentary _tracasserie_, of

which there is neither end nor use, except making the parties concerned

of consequence in their own eyes, and contemptible in those of the

nation. They will not allow Ministers to be severely handled by any one

but themselves, nor even that: but they say civil things of them in the

House of Commons, and whisper scandal against them at Holland House.

This shews gentlemanly refinement and good breeding; while my Lord

Erskine ‘calls us untaught knaves, unmannerly to come betwixt the wind

and his nobility.’ But the leaden bullets and steel bayonets, the

_ultima ratio regum_, by which these questions are practically decided,

do their business in another-guess manner; they do not stand on the same

ceremony. Soft words and hard blows are a losing game to play at: and

this, one would think, the Opposition, if they were sincere, must have

found out long ago. But they rather wish to screen the Ministry, as

their _locum tenens_ in the receipt of the perquisites of office and the

abuse of power, of which they themselves expect the reversion.

‘Strange that such difference should be

Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.’

The distinction between a great Whig and Tory Lord is laughable. For

Whigs to Tories ‘nearly are allied, and thin partitions do their bounds

divide.’ So I cannot find out the different drift (as far as politics

are concerned) of the ********* and ********* Reviews, which remind one

of Opposition coaches, that raise a great dust or spatter one another

with mud, but both travel the same road and arrive at the same

destination. When the Editor of a respectable Morning Paper reproached

me with having called Mr. Gifford a cat’s-paw, I did not tell him that

he was a glove upon that cat’s-paw. I might have done so. There is a

difference between a sword and a foil. The Whigs do not at all relish

that ugly thing, a knock-down blow; which is so different from their

endless see-saw way of going about a question. They are alarmed, ‘lest

the courtiers offended should be:’ for they are so afraid of their

adversaries, that they dread the re-action even of successful opposition

to them, and will neither attempt it themselves, nor stand by any one

that does. Any writer who is not agreeable to the Tories, becomes

obnoxious to the Whigs; he is disclaimed by them as a dangerous

colleague, merely for having ‘done the cause some service;’ is

considered as having the malicious design to make a breach of the peace,

and to interrupt with most admired disorder the harmony and mutual good

understanding which subsists between Ministers and the Opposition, and

on the adherence to which they are alone suffered to exist, or to have a

shadow of importance in the state. They are, in fact, a convenient

medium to break the force of popular feeling, and to transmit the rays

of popular indignation against the influence and power of the crown,

blunted and neutralized by as many qualifications and refractions as

possible. A Whig is properly what is called a Trimmer—that is, a coward

to both sides of a question, who dare not be a knave nor an honest man,

but is a sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible,

unmeaning negation of the two. He is a poor purblind creature, who halts

between two opinions, and complains that he cannot get any two people to

think alike. He is a cloak for corruption, and a mar-plot to freedom. He

will neither do any thing himself, nor let any one else do it. He is on

bad terms with the Government, and not on good ones with the people. He

is an impertinence and a contradiction in the state. If he has a casting

weight, for fear of overdoing the mark, he throws it into the wrong

scale. He is a person of equally feeble understanding and passions. He

has some notion of what is right, just enough to hinder him from

pursuing his own interest: he has selfish and worldly prudence enough,

not to let him embark in any bold or decided measure for the advancement

of truth and justice. He is afraid of his own conscience, which will not

let him lend his unqualified support to arbitrary measures; he stands in

awe of the opinion of the world, which will not let him express his

opposition to those measures with warmth and effect. His politics are a

strange mixture of cross-purposes. He is wedded to forms and

appearances, impeded by every petty obstacle and pretext of difficulty,

more tenacious of the means than the end—anxious to secure all

suffrages, by which he secures none—hampered not only by the ties of

friendship to his actual associates, but to all those that he thinks may

become so; and unwilling to offer arguments to convince the reason of

his opponents lest he should offend their prejudices, by shewing them

how much they are in the wrong; ‘letting I dare not wait upon I would,

like the poor cat in the adage;’ stickling for the letter of the

Constitution, with the affectation of a prude, and abandoning its

principles with the effrontery of a prostitute to any shabby Coalition

he can patch up with its deadly enemies. This is very pitiful work; and,

I believe, the public with me are tolerably sick of the character. At

the same time, he hurls up his cap with a foolish face of wonder and

incredulity at the restoration of the Bourbons, and affects to chuckle

with secret satisfaction over the last act of the Revolution, which

reduced him to perfect insignificance. We need not wonder at the

results, when it comes to the push between parties so differently

constituted and unequally matched. We have seen what those results are.

I cannot do justice to the picture, but I find it done to my hands in

those prophetic lines of Pope, where he describes the last Triumph of

Corruption:—

‘But ’tis the fall degrades her to a whore:

Let greatness own her, and she’s mean no more.

Her birth, her beauty, crowds and courts confess;

Chaste matrons praise her, and grave bishops bless:

In golden chains the willing world she draws,

And her’s the Gospel is, and her’s the Laws;

Mounts the tribunal, lifts her scarlet head,

And sees pale virtue carted in her stead.

Lo! at the wheels of her triumphal car,

Old England’s genius, rough with many a scar,

Dragg’d in the dust! his arms hang idly round,

His flag inverted trails along the ground:

Our youth, all liveried o’er with foreign gold,

Before her dance, behind her crawl the old!

See thronging millions to the Pagod run,

And offer country, parent, wife, or son!

Hear her black trumpet thro’ the land proclaim,

That _not to be corrupted, is the shame_.

In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in power,

’Tis avarice all, ambition is no more!

See all our nobles begging to be slaves!

See all our fools aspiring to be knaves!

All, all look up with reverential awe

At crimes that ‘scape or triumph o’er the law;

While truth, worth, wisdom daily they decry:

“Nothing is sacred now but villainy.”

Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)

Shew there was one who held it in disdain.’

POLITICAL ESSAYS, &c.

THE MARQUIS WELLESLEY

‘And such other gambol faculties he hath, as shew a weak mind, and

an able body.’

_April 13, 1813._

The Marquis Wellesley’s opening speech on India affairs was chiefly

remarkable for its length, and the manner in which it was delivered.

This nobleman seems to have formed himself on those lines in Pope:—

‘All hail him victor in both gifts of song,

Who sings so loudly, and who sings so long.’

He aspires with infinite alacrity to the character of a great orator;

and, if we were disposed to take the will for the deed, we should give

him full credit for it. We confess, those of his speeches which we have

heard, appear to us prodigies of physical prowess and intellectual

imbecility. The ardour of his natural temperament, stimulating and

irritating the ordinary faculties of his mind, the exuberance of his

animal spirits, contending with the barrenness of his genius, produce a

degree of dull vivacity, of pointed insignificance, and impotent energy,

which is without any parallel but itself. It is curious, though somewhat

painful, to see this lively little lord always in the full career of his

subject, and never advancing a jot the nearer; seeming to utter volumes

in every word, and yet saying nothing; retaining the same unabated

vehemence of voice and action without any thing to excite it; still

keeping alive the promise and the expectation of genius without once

satisfying it—soaring into mediocrity with adventurous enthusiasm,

harrowed up by some plain matter-of-fact, writhing with agony under a

truism, and launching a common-place with all the fury of a

thunderbolt![6]

MR. SOUTHEY, POET LAUREAT

_Sept. 18, 1813._

The laurel is at length destined, unexpectedly, to circle the brows of

this gentleman, where it will look almost like a civic crown. The

patriot and the poet (two venerable names, which we should wish never to

see disunited) is said to owe his intended elevation to the intercession

of Mr. Croker, to whom, it will be recollected, he has dedicated his

Life of Lord Nelson, with an appropriate motto in the title-page, from

the poem of Ulm and Trafalgar. Mr. Croker having applied to the Regent

in favour of his friend, the Prince is understood to have given his

ready assent, observing, that Mr. Southey’s efforts in the Spanish cause

alone, rendered him highly worthy of the situation. As Mr. Croker,

however, was taking his leave, he was met by Lord Liverpool and the

Marquis of Hertford, the latter of whom, as chamberlain, had, it seems,

made an offer of the place to Mr. Walter Scott, who had signified his

acceptance of it. Some little difficulty naturally arose on the

occasion, but it was agreed that the two poets should settle the point

of precedence between themselves. A friendly altercation, unlike that of

the shepherds in Virgil, now took place between Mr. Scott and Mr.

Southey, each waving his own pretensions, and giving the palm of victory

to the other. But it was finally determined, that as Mr. Scott, though

he would not allow himself to be the greatest, was at least the richest

poet of the two, Mr. Southey, who had most need of this post of honour

and of profit, should have it. So ends this important affair; and,

without any ill-will to Mr. Southey, we should not have been

disappointed if it had ended differently. Whatever may be the balance of

poetical merit, Mr. Scott, we are quite sure, has always been a much

better courtier than Mr. Southey; and we are of opinion that the honours

of a Court can nowhere be so gracefully or deservedly bestowed as on its

followers. His acceptance of this mark of court favour would not have

broken in upon that uniformity of character, which we think no less

beautiful and becoming in life than in a poem. But, perhaps, a passion

for new faces extends to the intrigues of politics as well as of love;

and a triumph over the scruples of delicacy enhances the value of the

conquest in both cases. To _have been_ the poet of the people, may not

render Mr. Southey less a court favourite; and one of his old Sonnets to

Liberty must give a peculiar zest to his new Birth-day Odes. His flaming

patriotism will easily subside into the gentle glow of grateful loyalty;

and the most extravagant of his plans of reform end in building castles

in Spain!

MR. SOUTHEY’S NEW-YEAR’S ODE

_Jan. 8, 1814._

Mr. Southey’s Ode has at length appeared—not as was announced, under the

title of ‘Carmen Annuum,’ but under that of ‘CARMEN TRIUMPHALE, _for the

Commencement of the Year 1814_.’ We see no reason why the author might

not have adopted the title of Horace’s Ode entire, and have called it

_Carmen Seculare_, which would have been the best account he could give

of it. We fear Mr. Southey will not form a splendid exception to the

numberless instances which prove that there is something in the air of a

court, not favourable to the genius of poetry. He has not deprived

himself of the excuse made by one of his predecessors, of versatile

memory, in extenuation of the degeneracy of his courtly lays,—‘That

poets succeed best in fiction.’ The Ode is in the ballad style, peculiar

to Mr. Southey and his poetical friends. It has something of the rustic

simplicity of a country virgin on her first introduction at Duke’s

Place, or of Pamela on the day of her marriage with Mr. B. Or rather it

resembles a _fancy_ birth-day suit, a fashionable livery worn inside

out, a prince’s feather with a sprig of the tree of liberty added to

it,—the academy of compliments turned into quaint Pindarics,—is a sort

of methodistical rhapsody, chaunted by a gentleman-usher, and exhibits

the irregular vigour of Jacobin enthusiasm suffering strange

emasculation under the hands of a finical lord-chamberlain. It is

romantic without interest, and tame without elegance. It is exactly such

an ode as we expected Mr. Southey to compose on this occasion. We say

this from our respect for the talents and character of this eminent

writer. He is the last man whom we should expect to see graceful in

fetters, or from whom we should look for the soul of freedom within the

_liberties of a court_!—The commencement of the Ode is as follows, and

it continues throughout much as it begins:—

‘In happy hour _doth_ he receive

The Laurel, meed of famous bards of _yore_,

Which Dryden and diviner Spenser wore,

_In happy hour_, and well may he rejoice,

Whose earliest task _must be_

To raise the _exultant_ hymn for _victory_,

And _join_ a nation’s _joy_ with harp and voice,

Pouring the strain of triumph on the wind,

Glory to God, his song—deliverance to mankind!

Wake, lute and harp! &c. &c.’

Mr. Southey has not exactly followed the suggestion of an ingenious

friend, to begin his poem with the appropriate allusion,

‘Awake, my sack-but!’

The following rhymes are the lamest we observed. He says, speaking of

the conflict between the Moors and Spaniards,

‘Age after age, from sire to _son_,

The hallowed sword was handed _down_;

Nor did they from that warfare cease,

And sheath that hallowed sword in peace,

Until the work was _done_.’

Indeed, if Mr. S. can do no better than this, in his drawing-room

verses, he should get some contributor to the Lady’s Magazine to polish

them for him.

We have turned over the Ode again, which extends to twenty pages, in the

hope of finding some one vigorous or striking passage for selection, but

in vain. The following is the most likely to please in a certain

quarter:—

‘Open thy gates, O Hanover! display

Thy loyal banners to the day!

Receive thy old illustrious line once more!

Beneath an upstart’s yoke oppress’d,

Long has it been thy fortune to deplore

That line, whose fostering and paternal sway

So many an age thy grateful children blest.

The yoke is broken now!—a mightier hand

Hath dash’d—in pieces dash’d—the iron rod.

To meet her princes, the delivered land

Pours her rejoicing multitudes abroad;

The happy bells, from every town and tower,

Roll their glad peals upon the joyful wind;

And from all hearts and tongues, with one consent,

The high thanksgiving strain is sent—

Glory to God! Deliverance to mankind!’

In various stanzas, Bonaparte is called an upstart, a ruffian, &c. We

confess, we wish to see Mr. Southey, like Virgil, in his Georgics,

‘scatter his dung with a grace.’

We do not intend to quarrel with our Laureat’s poetical politics, but

the conclusion is one which we did not anticipate from the author. We

have always understood that the Muses were the daughters of Memory!

‘And France, _restored_ and shaking off her chain,

Shall join the Avengers in the joyful strain—

Glory to God! Deliverance for mankind!’

The poem has a few notes added to it, the object of which seems to be to

criticise the political opinions of the Edinburgh Reviewers with respect

to Spain, and to prove that the author is wiser after the event than

they were before it, in which he has very nearly succeeded.

Mr. Southey announces a new volume of Inscriptions, which must furnish

some curious _parallelisms_.

DOTTREL-CATCHING

TO THE EDITOR OF THE MORNING CHRONICLE

_Jan. 27, 1814._

Sir, The method of taking this bird is somewhat singular, and is

described in an old book in the following terms:

‘The Dottrel is a foolish bird of the crane species, very tall, awkward,

and conceited. The Dottrel-catcher, when he has got near enough, turns

his head round sideways, and _makes a leg_ towards him: the bird, seeing

this, returns the civility, and makes the same sidelong movement. These

advances are repeated with mutual satisfaction, till the man approaches

near enough, and then the bird is taken.’

A poet-laureat or a treasury sophist is often taken much in the same

way. Your Opposionist, Sir, was ever a true _gull_. From the general

want of sympathy, he sets more store by it than it is worth; and for the

smallest concession, is prevailed upon to give up every principle, and

to surrender himself, bound hand and foot, the slave of a party, who get

all they want of him, and then—‘Spunge, you are dry again!’

A striking illustration of the common treatment of political drudges has

lately occurred in the instance of a celebrated writer, whose

lucubrations are withheld from the public, because he has declared

against the project of restoring the Bourbons. As the court and city

politicians have spoken out on this subject, permit me, Sir, to say a

word in behalf of the country. I have no dislike whatever, private or

public, to the Bourbons, except as they may be made the pretext for

mischievous and impracticable schemes. At the same time I have not the

slightest enthusiasm in their favour. I would not sacrifice the life or

limb of a single individual to restore them. I have very nearly the same

feelings towards them which Swift has expressed in his account of the

ancient and venerable race of the Struldbruggs. It is true, they might

in some respects present a direct contrast to Bonaparte. A tortoise

placed on the throne of France would do the same thing. The literary

sycophants of the day, Sir, are greatly enamoured (from some cause or

other) with hereditary imbecility and native want of talent. They are

angry, not without reason, that a Corsican upstart has made the princes

of Europe look like wax-work figures, and given a shock to the still

life of kings. They wish to punish this unpardonable presumption, by

establishing an artificial balance of _weakness_ throughout Europe, and

by reducing humanity to the level of thrones. We may perhaps in time

improve this principle of ricketty admiration to Eastern perfection,

where every changeling is held sacred, and that which is the disgrace of

human intellect is hailed as the image of the Divinity!

It is said that in France the old royalists and the revolutionary

republicans are agreed in the same point. Bonaparte is the point of

union between these opposite extremes, the common object of their hate

and fear. I can conceive this very possible from what I have observed

among ourselves. He has certainly done a great deal to mortify the pride

of birth in the one, and the vanity of personal talents in the others.

This is a very sufficient ground of private pique and resentment, but

not of national calamity or eternal war. I am, Sir, your humble servant,

EICONOCLASTES SATYRANE.

THE BOURBONS AND BONAPARTE

_Dec. 6, 1813._

The following paragraph in a daily paper is equally worthy of notice for

magnificence of expression and magnanimity of sentiment:—

‘When or under what circumstances the great Commander may think fit to

carry his forces against the large military or commercial depôts of the

south of France, we do not pretend to form conjectures. We are

confident, that as nothing will disturb the calm and meditative prudence

of his plans, so nothing will arrest the rapidity of their execution. We

trust alike in his caution and in his resolution: but, perhaps, there

may be in store for him a higher destination than the capture of a town

or the reduction of a province. What if the army opposed to him should

resolve to avenge the cause of humanity, and to exchange the bloody and

brutal tyranny of a Bonaparte for the mild paternal sway of a Bourbon?

Could a popular French general open to himself a more glorious career at

the present moment, than that which Providence seemed to have destined

to the virtuous Moreau? Or is it possible that any power now existing in

France could stop such a general and such an army, supported by the

unconquered Wellington and his formidable legions, if they were to

resolve boldly to march to Paris, and bring the usurper to the block!

Every disposable soldier in France is on the Adour, or on the Rhine. In

the case we are supposing, there would be no enemy to encounter, unless

the northern frontier were at once denuded of troops, and the road to

Paris on that side laid open to the allies. This is no question of the

attachment of the French nation to one dynasty or to another: it is a

question of military enterprise, in the minds of military adventurers.

The simple possibility, not to say the high moral probability, that in a

moment of general defection, an army which has so much in its hands may

run with the stream of popular feeling throughout Europe, is enough to

make the tyrant tremble on his throne. Lord Wellington is doubtless

prepared to take advantage of so desirable an occurrence, in case it

should happen without his previous interference: but we wish him to

interfere; we wish that he were authorised plainly and openly to offer

his mighty co-operation to any body of men who would shake off the

Tyrant’s yoke in France, as has been done in Italy, in Germany, and in

Holland!’

This is a fair specimen of that kind of declamation which has for a long

time swayed the affairs of Europe, and which, if the powers of Europe

are wise by experience, will not influence them much longer. It is this

spirit of treating the French people as of a different species from

ourselves—as a monster or a non-entity—of disposing of their government

at the will of every paragraph-monger—of arming our hatred against them

by ridiculous menaces and incessant reproaches—of supposing that their

power was either so tremendous as to threaten the existence of all

nations, or so contemptible that we could crush it by a word,—it is this

uniform system, practised by the incendiaries of the press, of inflaming

our prejudices and irritating our passions, that has so often made us

rush upon disaster, and submit to every extremity rather than forego the

rancorous and headstrong desire of revenge.

The writer of the paragraph talks familiarly of marching to Paris, and

bringing Bonaparte to the block. He seems to wonder at the delay which

has already taken place. This is the very style of ancient Pistol, ‘Bid

him prepare, for I will cut his throat.’ This high tone of impotent

menace and premature triumph always ‘reverbs its own hollowness.’ It is

the echo of fear. Instead of a proud repose on our own strength and

courage, these writers only feel secure in the destruction of an

adversary. The natural intoxication of success is heightened into a sort

of delirium by the recollection of the panic into which they had been

thrown. _The Times’_ editor thinks that nothing can be so easy as for an

army ‘to run with the stream of popular feeling’ from one end of Europe

to the other. Strange that these persons, like desperate adventurers,

are incorrigible to experience. They are always setting out on the same

forlorn hope. The tide of fortune, while it sets in strong against us,

they prove to be the most variable of all things; but it no sooner

changes in our favour, than it straight

‘Flows on to the Propontic,

And knows no ebb.’

To encourage themselves in the extravagance of their voluntary

delusions, they are as prodigal of titles of honour as the college of

heralds, and erect a standard of military fame, with all the authority,

but not with the impartiality of history. Lord Wellington is ‘the great

commander,’ and ‘the unconquered general,’ while ‘the little captain,’

and ‘the hero’ or ‘the deserter of Smorgonne,’ are the only

qualifications of Bonaparte. If such are the true denominations and

relative proportions of these two generals, then it is quite right to

give to each of them the honour due;—if they are not, then it is quite

wrong to stake the welfare of nations on a turn of expression—to put

little equivocal scraps of paper into false scales, and decide the fate

of Europe by nicknames. The scales in which Sir Humphrey Davy weighs the

500th part of a drachm, are not so slight nor insignificant as those in

which his vilifiers, _The Times_, balance the destinies of the world.

‘What,’ it is asked with a certain air of profundity and mystery, ‘What

if the army opposed to him [Lord Wellington] should resolve to exchange

the bloody tyranny of Bonaparte for the paternal sway of a Bourbon!’

Why, if the French wish to shake off the galling yoke of a military

Usurper, we say, let them do it in God’s name. Let them, whenever they

please, imitate us in our recal of the Stuarts; and, whenever they

please, in our banishment of them thirty years afterwards. But let them

not, in the name of honour or of manhood, receive the royal boon of

liberty at the point of the bayonet. It would be setting a bad

precedent—it would be breaking in upon a great principle—it would be

making a gap in the general feeling of national independence. For we are

to observe, that this rational, popular, patriotic preference of the

mild paternal sway of the Bourbons is to be enforced upon them by the

powerful co-operation of the unconquered Wellington and his formidable

legions. This is, in fact, returning to the original ground of the whole

quarrel, and the question for them to consider, is whether all the evils

and miseries which they may have endured in resisting these forcible

appeals from foreign powers, are the strongest reasons why they should

at length gratefully resign themselves to that tender concern for their

sufferings, which so much persevering kindness, and disinterested

preference of their interests to our own unequivocally proves. The

impression produced by these formidable emissaries of mild paternity

must, indeed, be only that of filial love and reverence. The constant

_role_ of these same Bourbons, now recognized, now disowned by the

surrounding states, now held up as bugbears to frighten, and now brought

forward as decoys to allure them, for awhile kept entirely in the

back-ground, and then again set over them like puppets, in every reverse

of fortune, must excite, one would suppose, some very pleasant

associations, and give them some little insight into the nature of the

machinery which is played off against them. In other nations, at least,

these sort of _tentatives_ would lead not to submission, but to

indignation. It cannot be denied, however, that the French character has

peculiar susceptibilities. France, like a modern coquet, may be

fascinated once more by the courtly graces of discarded royalty; or, on

the other hand, recollecting the malice and the impotence of which she

was so long the victim, like Hellenore, entertained by the jolly satyrs,

may wisely refuse to return to the cold and irksome embraces of the

drivelling Malbecco. But our politician wishes all this not to be left

to their own free will, but that we should interfere. We can easily

believe it; ‘it was ever the fault of our English nation’ to wish to

interfere with what did not concern them, for the very reason that they

could interfere with comparative impunity. What is sport to them is

death to others. The writer also draws a parallel, as if it were a

feasible case, between Holland, Spain, and Germany throwing off a

foreign yoke, and the French throwing off their own; in other words,

submitting to a foreign one. We beg pardon of these acute

discriminators. We know they have an answer. We leave them in possession

of the nice distinction—between a foreign yoke, and a yoke imposed by

foreigners!

‘This,’ says the writer in _The Times_, ‘is not a question of attachment

to one dynasty or another, but a question of military enterprize between

military adventurers.’ Does our speculator mean by this to confer the

privileges of military adventurers, _en plein droit_, on the Emperor

Alexander and the Crown Prince of Sweden? But whatever he means, it is

clear that he is not consistent in what he says; for he has said just

before, that the object of this so often repeated march to Paris is ‘to

bring the Usurper to the block!’ Here, then, it is a question, not

between contending generals, but between a usurper and a lawful monarch.

So true it is that those who have most need of their assistance have the

worst memories! ‘What,’ exclaims our enthusiast, ‘would there be to

oppose such a general and such an army, aided by the unconquered

Wellington,’ &c. First, ‘this is the very coinage of his brain.’ There’s

no such general and no such army.

But granting the supposition to be true, the patriotic general, who

should open to himself a glorious passage through the heart of his

country, and attempt to make it the vassal of England, under the

monstrous pretence of allegiance to his Sovereign, might perhaps meet

the fate which Providence destined for the virtuous Moreau. Perhaps the

French may think that as their affected loyalty could be only a cover

for the most dastardly submission, so their hypocrisy and treachery to

themselves might be justly retaliated upon them, by making the

restoration of thrones a mask for the dismemberment of kingdoms. They

may have acquired by experience some knowledge of that enlargement of

view and boldness of nerve, which is inspired by the elevation of

success. They may consider, that ‘when the wild and savage passions are

set afloat, they are not so easily regulated’ according to the dictates

of justice or generosity. Some of them may even go so far as to think

that all the respect of the Emperor of Russia for the talents and

virtues of Moreau might be insufficient to deter him from memorizing

another Warsaw at Paris! Of this we are tolerably certain, that there

are not wanting staunch friends of order and civilization in this

country who would advise and applaud such a catastrophe ‘to the very

echo,’ as a masterpiece of political justice, chaunt _Te Deum_ over the

ruins, and very seriously invite the good people of France to join in

the chorus! But we are not ‘the echo that shall applaud again.’ We shall

not hail such a catastrophe, nor such a triumph. For out of the

desolation would arise a poisoned stench that would choak almost the

breath of life, and one low, creeping fog of universal despotism, that

would confound the Eastern and the Western world together _in darkness

that might be felt_. We do not wish for this final consummation, because

we do not wish the pulse of liberty to be quite destroyed, or that the

mass of our common nature should become a lifeless corpse, unable to

rouse itself against never-ending wrongs, or that the last spark of

generous enthusiasm should be extinguished in that moral atheism, which

defaces and mangles the image of God in man. We do not wish that liberty

should ever have a deer’s heart given her, to live in constant fear of

the fatal, inevitable venal pack behind her; but that she may still have

the heart of a lioness, whose mighty roar keeps the hunters at bay, and

whose whelps revenge their parent’s death!

Rather than such an event should take place, if such an extremity were

possible, we should even wish that a general and an army of our own,

devoted by _The Times_ to a far different service, might be empowered to

make a firm stand against it: to stop the tide of barbarous despotism as

they had already rolled back that of ungovernable ambition, and to say,

Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further. Such an interference in such a

cause would indeed give to Great Britain the character which she claims

of being the Vindicator of the World. It would be to assume an attitude

and a port indeed, loftier than she ever yet presented to the admiration

of mankind; and would create a bulwark of strength round her, that would

encircle her as with ‘impaling fire’!

VETUS

_Nov. 19, 1813._

This patriot and logician in a letter in _The Times_ of Friday, labours

to stifle the most distant hope of peace in its birth. He lays down

certain general principles which must for ever render all attempts to

restore it vain and abortive. With the watchword of _Eternal war with

Bonaparte_ blazoned on his forehead, in the piety of his pacific zeal,

he challenges Bonaparte as the wanton, unprovoked, implacable enemy of

the peace of mankind. We will also venture to lay down a maxim, which

is—That from the moment that one party declares and acts upon the avowed

principle that peace can never be made with an enemy, it renders war on

the part of that enemy a matter of necessary self-defence, and holds out

a plea for every excess of ambition or revenge. If we are to limit our

hostility to others only with their destruction, we impose the adoption

of the same principle on them as their only means of safety. There is no

alternative. But this is probably the issue to which Vetus wishes to

bring the question. This writer not only outlaws Bonaparte, but in a

summary way, disfranchises the French nation at large of the right of

making peace or war. ‘Who,’ he exclaims in wanton defiance of common

sense, ‘are the French nation? To us a rank non-entity. We have only to

do with Napoleon Bonaparte—with his rights, his interests, his honour.

Who are to be the sole judges of his rights? We and our allies!’

Admirable politician!

The events which have lately taken place on the Continent, and the

moderate and manly tone in which those events have been received by

Ministers, have excited the utmost degree of uneasiness and alarm in the

minds of certain persons, who redouble the eagerness of their cries for

war. The cold blooded fury and mercenary malice of these panders to

mischief, can only be appeased by the prospect of lasting desolation.

They rave, foam at the mouth, and make frantic gestures at the name of

peace. These high-priests of Moloch daily offer up to their grim idol

the same nauseous banquet of abuse and lies. Round them ‘a cry of

hell-hounds never ceasing bark,’ that with greedy appetite devour the

offal. Every day they act over the same foul imposture, and repeat their

monstrous masque. These mighty soothsayers look forward to another

restoration of Europe after another twenty years of havoc and

destruction. After urging her to the very edge of the precipice from

which she has only just recovered, breathless and affrighted, they wish

to goad her on once more to the same mad career. The storm is for the

moment over-past, but they will not suffer the vessel of the state to

enter the harbour, in the hope that they may still plunder the wreck,

and prey upon the carcases. The serpent’s hiss, the assassin’s yell, the

mowing and chattering of apes, drown the voice of peace; and Vetus, like

the solemn owl, joins in the distance, and prolongs the dreary note of

death!

ON THE COURIER AND TIMES NEWSPAPERS

_Jan. 21, 1814._

The following passage, among others of the same _calibre_, has lately

appeared in _The Courier_:—

‘The party call upon us to speak out. We thought it not very easy

for any charge of not speaking out to be urged against us. However,

we obey their call most willingly. “Does _The Courier_, they ask,

mean to insinuate, that because the South of France is more inclined

to favour their pretensions, the Bourbons ought to have frigates

allotted them to traverse the Bay of Biscay, and join the standard

of Lord Wellington?” To this we reply, yes; decisively yes!—We say

we would have a Bourbon proceed to the South of France. We hope we

have spoken out on this point. One more remains;—Would we “set up

some new obstacle to the progress of the negociation that is on

foot?” _Yes, if we thought there was any negociation on foot with

Bonaparte. But we trust there is not—we trust there never will be._’

And this at a time when it has been formally signified from the throne

that there was no objection on the part of England to treat with the

French Ruler; when Lord Liverpool has said publicly that no conditions

of peace would be insisted on, which we, placed in the situation of

France, should not think it reasonable to grant; when we, in concert

with the Allies, have announced to France, that it is neither our

intention nor our wish to interfere with their internal government, but

to secure the independence and safety of the continent; and when Lord

Castlereagh has gone from this country for the purpose, avowed and

understood, of giving effect to that declaration, and of fixing the

basis of a peace to be recognized by the common powers of Europe. To

produce such a passage, at such a moment, required that union of

impudence and folly which has no parallel elsewhere. From the quarter

from which it comes, it could not surprize us; it is consistent; it is

in keeping; it is of a piece with the rest. It is worthy of those

harpies of the press, whose business is to scare away the approach of

peace by their obscene and dissonant noises, and to tear asunder the

olive-branch, whenever it is held out to us, with their well-practised

beaks; who fill their hearts with malice, and their mouths with

falsehood; who strive to soothe the dastard passion of their employers

by inflaming those of the multitude; creatures that would sell the lives

of millions for a nod of greatness, and make their country a by-word in

history, to please some punk of quality.

We are to understand from no less an authority than that of _The

Courier_, that Lord Castlereagh is sent out professedly to make peace,

but in reality to hinder it: and we learn from an authority equally

respectable (_The Times_) that nothing can prevent the destruction of

Bonaparte but this country’s untimely consenting to make peace with him.

And yet we are told in the same breath, that the charge of eternal war

which we bring against these writers, is the echo of the French

war-faction, who, at the commencement of every series of hostilities,

and at the conclusion of every treaty, have accused this country of a

want of good faith and sincere disposition to peace. We are told, that

if the French do not force Bonaparte to make peace now, which yet these

writers are determined to prevent him from doing, ‘they are sunk beneath

the worshippers of cats and onions.’ These ‘knavish but keen’

politicians tell the French people in so many words—‘We will not make

peace with your government, and yet, if it does not make peace with us,

we will force what Government we please upon you.’ What effect this

monstrous and palpable insult must have upon the French nation, will

depend upon the degree of sense and spirit they have left among them.

But with respect to ourselves, if the line of policy pointed out by

these juggling fiends is really meant to be pursued, if a pretended

proposal to treat for peace on certain grounds is only to be converted

into an insidious ground of renewed war for other purposes, if this

offensive and unmanly imposture is to be avowed and practised upon us in

the face of day, then we know what will be the duty of Parliament and of

the country. The wars, in which the Governments of Europe have been

engaged, have not succeeded the worse when the people took an effective

share in them. We should hope that the interference of the people will

not be necessary to effect the restoration of peace.

It is curious to hear these systematic opponents of peace, (with

infuriate and insensate looks scattering firebrands and death,) at the

same time affecting the most tender concern for the miseries of war; or

like that good-natured reconciler of differences, _Iago_, hypocritically

shifting the blame from themselves—‘What, stab men in the dark!’ They

ask with grave faces, with _very_ grave faces, ‘Who are the authors, the

propagators, and practisers of this dreadful war system? who the

aggressors? who the unrelenting persecutors of peace?’ War is their

everlasting cry, ‘one note day and night;’ during war, during peace,

during negociation, in success, in adversity; and yet they dare to tax

others as the _sole_ authors of the calamities which they would render

eternal, sooner than abate one jot of their rancorous prejudices. One of

these writers (the Editor of _The Times_) asserts with an air of great

confidence, while he himself is hallooing as loud as he can among the

indefatigable war-pack, that Bonaparte is the cause, the _sole author_

of all the calamities of Europe for the last fourteen years; and what is

remarkable, he brings as a proof of this sweeping assertion, a state

paper, written under the Pitt Administration of _pacific memory_,

deprecating _all_ conciliation with the French at the very period from

which the writer dates the wanton, unprovoked aggressions of Bonaparte,

and which paper he quotes at length, as an admirable description of the

mode by which we are to avert the calamities of Europe for the next

fourteen years, as we have done for the last. Better late than never. So

industrious an inquirer need not despair of effectually averting our

future miseries, and pacifying the world, if it is to be done by

referring back to state papers of this description, or by resuming the

principles of those good old anti-jacobin times, or by finishing the war

as it was begun. There would be no end of precedents and documents for

prosecuting the war with vigour under every variety of circumstances, in

order never to bring it to a conclusion. As a proof of the aggressions

and implacable hatred of France, he might cite that monument of romantic

and disinterested generosity ‘of heroic sentiment and manly enterprise,’

on the part of the Allies, the treaty of Pilnitz.[7] He might proceed to

those pacific manifestations—Lord Hawkesbury’s march to Paris—the

_Bellum internecinum_ of Mr. Windham, and his consistent phrenzy at the

treaty of Amiens—Mr. Pitt’s abstract impossibility of maintaining the

relations of peace and amity with the French Republic, or with the child

and champion of Jacobinism—Mr. Burke’s Regicide Peace—the project of

starving France in 1796—of hurling her down the gulph of bankruptcy in

1797—the coalitions of different periods in which England saved herself

and Europe _from peace_ by her energy, or her example—the contemptuous

rejection of every offer of negociation in every situation, the

unwearied prosecution of the war on the avowed principle that we were

never to leave it off as long as we could carry it on, or get any one to

carry it on for us, or till we had buried ourselves under the ruins of

the civilized world (a prediction which we narrowly escaped

verifying)—all these undeniable proofs and substantial demonstrations of

our fond desires, our longings after peace, and of the determination of

France to aggrandize herself by war and conquest, would, indeed, with

the ingenious glosses of our well-meaning commentator form a very

entertaining volume, and would at least teach us, if not what to follow,

what we ought to shun, in our future advances to this first of earthly

blessings, so long and studiously and systematically withheld from

us—only to render its attainment more certain and more precious!

To the other solid grounds of an indefinite prolongation of this war,

religious, moral, political, commercial, constitutional, continental,

Jacobinical, Revolutionary, Corsican, foreign or domestic—our apologist,

in the true spirit of the French _petit maitre_ in _Roderic Random_, has

now added a ground of his own, of equal efficacy and validity with the

former, viz. that we are to carry it on in the character of gentlemen

and men of honour. We are to fight for the restoration of the Bourbons,

say _The Times_, ‘that we may have gentlemen and men of honour to fight

with.’ There is some prudence in this resolution; it goes on the old

principle, that we are not to fight except with our _match_. Don

Quixote, after he had been soundly drubbed by the Yanguesian carriers,

recollected that he ought not to have engaged with plebeians. The writer

whom we have here quoted, told us, some time ago, from a greater

authority certainly than that of _The Times_, the true grounds of war,

or ‘that we might spill our blood for our country, for our liberty, for

our friends, for our kind;’ but we do not remember, among these

legitimate sources of the waste of human blood, that we were to shed it

for a punctilio. If war were to be decided by the breaking of white and

black sticks among gentlemen-ushers, or even by the effusion of courtly

phrases in _The Courier_ and _The Times_, we should have no objection to

this fastidious refinement; but we cannot consent to shed the best blood

of Europe, nor that of ‘the meanest peasant in this our native land,’ in

order that the delicate honour of the Carlton House Minority may not be

stained, nor the purity of their moral taste perverted, by an

intercourse with any but gentlemen and men of honour. And thou, Carl

John, what hast thou to say to this new plea of the old school?—Or why,

not being clad with the inherent right to ‘monarchize, be feared, and

kill with looks,’—dost thou insult over the King of Denmark, menace

Holstein, and seize upon Norway, and yet tellest thy little son, that

the time is coming, when conquerors shall be no more?—_The Times’_

editor scornfully rejects our practical opinion on the probability of

restoring the Bourbons, because it seems we always reject every

proposition that makes the continuance of war necessary. Be it so. But

do not these persons also attach the highest degree of probability, or,

when they are so inclined, moral certainty, to every thing that tends to

make peace unattainable? It is true we did not, as they say, anticipate

the reverses of the French Emperor before they happened. If we did not

anticipate them before, it was because we had nothing in past experience

to guide us to such a conclusion, except, indeed, the constant

unverified predictions of _The Times_ and _The Courier_. If these

inspired writers had the slightest intimation of them one moment before

they happened, we are willing to bow down to them, and they shall be our

Gods. But of this we are sure, from all experience, that the way to

render the fruits of those reverses uncertain, or to defeat them

altogether, is the very mode of proceeding recommended by the ceaseless

partizans of interminable hostilities. If the French are a nation of

men—if they have the common faculties of memory, of understanding, and

foresight; if they are, as they have been pronounced by one no ways

favourable to them, ‘the most civilized, and with one exception, the

most enlightened people in Europe,’ surely, if any thing can kindle in

their minds ‘the flame of sacred vehemence, and move the very stones to

mutiny,’ it is the letting loose upon them the mohawks of Europe, the

Cossacks, with General Blucher’s manifesto in their hands. It is

restoring to Bonaparte the very weapon which we had wrested from him,

the mighty plea of the independence of nations; it is reclothing his

power with those adamantine scales ‘which fear no discipline of human

hands,’ the hearts and wills of a whole people, threatened with

emasculation of their moral and physical powers, by half a dozen

libellers of the human species, and a horde of barbarians scarcely

human. Even the writer in _The Times_ acknowledges that the Cossacks

entering France as a sort of masters of the ceremonies to the Bourbons,

is only better, and less likely to excite horror and dismay, than their

entering it in their own rights and persons. It may be so. The bear

bringing in the monkey on his back may be more inviting than the bear

alone. But we should think that either portent must be fatal, that

neither hieroglyphic will be favourably interpreted.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

‘Those nauseous harlequins in farce may pass,

But there goes more to a substantial ass;

Our modern wits such monstrous fools have shewn,

They seem not of Heaven’s making but their own.’—DRYDEN.

_Dec. 2, 1813._

There is a degree of shameless effrontery which disarms and baffles

contempt by the shock which it gives to every feeling of moral rectitude

or common decency; as there is a daring extravagance in absurdity which

almost challenges our assent by confounding and setting at defiance

every principle of human reasoning. The ribald paragraphs, which fill

the columns of our daily papers, and disgrace the English language,

afford too many examples of the former assertion; the Letters of Vetus

are a striking instance of the latter.

It would have been some satisfaction to us, in the ungrateful task which

we had imposed upon ourselves, if, in combating the conclusions of

Vetus, we could have done justice to the ingenuity of his arguments, or

the force of his illustrations. But his extreme dogmatism is as

destitute of proofs, as it is violent in itself. His profound axioms are

in general flat contradictions; and he scarcely makes a single statement

in support of any proposition which does not subvert it. In the

Parliamentary phrase, he constantly _stultifies_ himself. The glaring

and almost deliberate incongruity of his conclusion is such as to imply

a morbid defect of comprehension, a warped or overstrained

understanding. Absorbed in an inveterate purpose, bent on expanding some

vapid sophism into a cumbrous system, he is insensible to the most

obvious consequences of things; and his reason is made the blind pander

to his prejudices.

We are not converts to this author’s style, any more than to his

reasoning. Indeed the defects of the one very much assist those of the

other, and both have the same character. There is a perpetual effort to

make something out of nothing, and to elevate a common-place into

sublimity. The style of Vetus is not very different from that of Don

Adriano de Armado; every word is as who should say, ‘I am Sir Oracle.’

Like the hero of Cervantes, haranguing the shepherds, he assaults the

very vault of Heaven with the arrogance of his tone, and the loudness of

his pretensions. Nothing can exceed the pompous quaintness, and

laborious foolery of many of his letters. He unfolds the book of fate,

assumes the prophet or historian, by virtue of alliteration and

antithesis;—sustains the balance of power by well-poised periods, or

crushes a people under a ponderous epithet. The set style of Vetus does

not conform easily to the march of human affairs; and he is often forced

to torture the sense to ‘hitch it’ in a metaphor. While he is

marshalling his words, he neglects his arguments, which require all his

attention to connect them together; and in his eagerness to give

additional significance to his sentences, he loses his own meaning.

We shall proceed to the task we at first proposed, viz. that of

supplying marginal notes to the voluminous effusions of Vetus, and shall

continue our comments as often as he furnishes us with the text.

We agree with the sentiment with which he commences his last Letter,

that it is ‘particularly desirable to follow up the question of peace’

at the present crisis, but not with the reason which he assigns for his

extreme anxiety to enter upon the question, ‘because this is just the

moment to dread the entertainment of a pacific overture.’ We can readily

believe that at no other moment than when he dreads its approach, would

Vetus ever breathe a syllable on the subject of peace, and then only to

avert it. Whenever ‘a spurious and mawkish beneficence’ gives an alarm

of peace, the dogs of war stand ready on the slip to hunt it down.

‘I have stated to you’ (_To the Editor of the Times_) ‘as the only

legitimate basis of a treaty, if not on the part of the continental

Allies, at least for England herself, that _she should conquer all she

can, and keep all she conquers_. This is not by way of retaliation,

_however just_, upon so obdurate and rapacious an enemy—but as an

indispensable condition of her own safety and existence.’

That which is here said to be the _only_ legitimate basis of a treaty is

one, which if admitted and acted upon, would make it impossible that any

treaty should ever be formed. It is a basis, not of lasting peace, but

of endless war. To call that the basis of a treaty which precludes the

possibility of any concession or compensation, of every consideration

either of the right or power of each party to retain its actual

acquisitions, is one of those misnomers which the gravity of Vetus’s

manner makes his readers overlook. After the imposing and guarded

exordium which ushers in the definition of our only legitimate basis of

a treaty, we are not prepared to expect Vetus’s burlesque solution of

the difficulty—‘that we are not to treat at all.’ The human mind is

naturally credulous of sounding professions, and reluctantly admits the

existence of what is very common, and common for that reason—_pompous

nonsense_. It seems, however, that this basis of a treaty is to apply

only to one of the contracting powers, namely, England, it is equivocal

as to the Allies, and with respect to France, it is, we suppose, meant

to be altogether null. For in a former letter, after asking, ‘Who are to

be the judges of his (Bonaparte’s) rights?’ he answers emphatically, ‘We

and our Allies!’ Bobadil did not come up to this exquisite pacificator

of the world! To make common sense of Vetus’s axiom with reference to

any state whatever, ‘that it should keep all it conquers,’ it seems

necessary to add this trifling condition, ‘if it can.’ And with respect

to Great Britain in particular, if from her peculiar situation she has

the power to keep all she conquers without being amenable to any other

tribunal than her own will, this very circumstance proves that the

exercise of that power is not _necessary to her safety and existence_.

Again, if England has an interest of her own, quite independent on and

separate from that of the continent, what has she to do with continental

Allies? If her interests may be and are interwoven with those of the

rest of Europe, is it too much to expect from her a common sacrifice to

the common cause? We quarrel with France on continental grounds; we

strip her of her colonies to support the quarrel; and yet we refuse to

restore any part of them, in order to secure peace. If so, we are only

ostensible parties in the contest, and in reality robbers.

‘The first policy of a wise people is to make rival nations afraid to

disturb them, to impress their enemies with a _terrific sense_,’ (how

magnificent is this epic mode of expression) ‘that to attack them is to

suffer not only transient defeats, but deep, grievous, and

_irrecoverable losses_; and to hold in abhorrence any peace which shall

not be a living record of _their own superiority_, and a monument worthy

of those warriors, through whose noble blood it was obtained.’

If the losses sustained in war were to be irrecoverable, it is easy to

foresee that the seat of empires would be very soon changed in almost

all cases whatever. But Vetus here, as is customary with him when it

tends to enforce the hyperbolical effect of his style, assumes as a

broad ground of national wisdom, a physical impossibility. It is not in

the nature of things that the losses of rival States should be

irrecoverable. Vetus would do better to decree at once that the

possessions of nations are _unassailable_ as well as _irrecoverable_,

which would prevent war altogether. But still more preposterous is the

madness or malice of the assertion, that no peace can be made by a wise

nation, which is not a living record of _their own superiority_. ‘This

is the key-stone which makes up the arch’ of Vetus’s indestructible

war-system. Can it have escaped even the short-sighted logic of this

writer, that to make superiority an indispensable condition of a wise

peace is to proscribe peace altogether, because certainly this

superiority cannot belong at the same time to both parties, and yet we

conceive that the consent of both parties is necessary to a peace? Any

other peace, we are told, than that which is at all times impracticable

between rival states, ought not only never to be made, but it ought to

be held in abhorrence, we ought to shudder at its approach as the last

of evils, and throw it to an immeasurable distance from us. This is

indeed closing up the avenues to peace, and shutting the gates of mercy

on mankind, in a most consummate and scientific manner. Our philosophic

rhetorician appears also to forget, in that high tone in which he speaks

of the _monuments raised by the noble blood of warriors_, that these

sort of monuments are cemented by the blood of others as well as by our

own, and tell the survivors a double story. His heated imagination seems

to have been worked up into a literal belief of his own assertion, that

the French nation are a rank non-entity; or he supposes that there is

some celestial ichor in our veins, which we alone shed for our country,

while other nations neither bleed nor suffer from war, nor have a right

to profit by peace. This may be very well in poetry, or on the stage,

but it will not pass current in diplomacy. Vetus, indeed, strains hard

to reconcile inconsistencies, and to found the laws of nations on the

sentiments of exclusive patriotism. But we should think that the common

rules of peace and war, which necessarily involve the rights, interests,

and feelings of different nations, cannot be dictated by the heroic

caprices of a few hair-brained egotists, on either side of the question.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

(CONTINUED)

‘He is indeed a person of great acquired follies.’

SIR FOPLING FLUTTER

_Dec. 10, 1813._

‘Nothing,’ continues Vetus, ‘can be more opposite to this great policy,

than to fight and to render back the fruits of our successes. We may be

assured, that those with whom we contend are ready enough to improve

_their_ victories. If we are not equally so, _we shall never be at

rest_. If the enemy beats us, he wins our provinces.—[_What provinces of

ours?_]—If we beat him, we restore all. What more profitable game could

he desire! Truly, at this rate, our neighbours must be arrant fools if

they leave us one week’s repose!’

There is a spirit of Machiavelian policy in this paragraph which is very

commendable. It reminds us of the satirist’s description of ‘fools

aspiring to be knaves.’ It is, in fact, this fear of being outwitted by

the French, that constantly makes us the dupes of our suspicions of

them, as it is a want of confidence in our own strength or firmness,

that leads us to shew our courage by defiance. True courage, as well as

true wisdom, is not distrustful of itself. Vetus recommends it to us to

act upon the maxims of the common disturbers of mankind, of ‘this

obdurate and rapacious foe,’ as the only means to secure general

tranquillity. He wishes to embody the pretended spirit and principles of

French diplomacy in a code,—the acknowledged basis of which should be

either universal conquest, or endless hostility. We have, it seems, no

chance of repelling the aggressions of the French, but by retaliating

them not only on themselves, but on other states. At least, the author

gives a pretty broad hint of what he means by the improvement of _our_

victories, when he talks of annexing Holland and Danish Zealand to

Hanover, as ‘her natural prey,’ _instead_ of their being the

dependencies of France. This is certainly one way of trimming the

balance of power in Europe, and placing the independence of nations in a

most happy dilemma. The inventor of this new and short way with foreign

states only laments that Hanover, ‘under British auspices,’ has not been

before-hand with France in imitating Prussia in her seizure of the

Austrian province on one side, and her partition of Poland on the other.

He can scarcely express his astonishment and regret, that Holland and

Denmark should so long have escaped falling into our grasp, after the

brilliant example of ‘rapacity and obduracy’ set to our phlegmatic,

plodding, insipid, _commercial_ spirit by Prussia and Russia. But now

that we have rescued ‘our natural prey’ from the French, it is to be

hoped, that we shall make sure of it. Vetus’s great principles of

morality seem to be borrowed from those of Peachum, and his

acknowledgements of merit to flow much in the same channel:—‘A good

clever lad, this Nimming Ned—there’s not a handier in the whole gang,

nor one more industrious to save goods from the fire!’—His chief

objection to that ‘revolutionist,’ Bonaparte, (Vetus too is a projector

of revolutions) is not, evidently, to his being a robber, but because he

is at the head of a different gang; and we are only required to bestir

ourselves as effectually as he does, _for the good of mankind_! But

Vetus, whose real defect is a contraction of intellectual vision, sees

no alternative between this rapacious and obdurate policy, and

unconditional submission, between ‘restoring all’ or none. This is not

sound logic. He wishes by a _coup sur_ to prevent an unfair and

dishonourable peace, by laying down such rules as must make peace

impossible, under any circumstances, or on any grounds that can enter

into human calculation. According to him, our only security against the

most wild and extravagant concessions, is the obstinate determination to

make none; our only defence against the fascinations of our own folly,

is to take refuge from the exercise of our discretion in his impregnable

paradoxes.—‘The same argument which goes to justify a war, prescribes

war measures of the most determined and active character.’ Good; because

the nature and essence of war is _a trial of strength_; and, therefore,

to make it as advantageous to ourselves as possible, we ought to exert

all the strength that we possess. ‘The very object,’ continues Vetus,

‘that of weakening the enemy, for which we pursue those vigorous

measures, and strip him of his possessions, renders it _necessary_ to

keep him in that state of weakness by which he will be deterred from

repeating his attack; and, _therefore, to hold inflexibly_ what we have

acquired.’ Here again Vetus confounds himself, and, involving a plain

principle in the mazes of a period, represents war not as a trial of

strength between contending states, each exerting himself to the utmost,

but as a voluntary assumption of superiority on the part of one of them.

He talks of stripping the enemy of his possessions, and holding them

inflexibly—as matters of course, as questions of will, and not of power.

It is neither the actual possession, nor _the will_ to keep certain

acquisitions, but the _power_ to keep them, and, _at the same time_, to

extort other concessions from an enemy, that must determine the basis of

all negociations, that are not founded on verbal chimeras.

‘We are taught, indeed, to take for granted, that a peace, whose

conditions bear hard on either party, will be the sooner broken by that

party; and, therefore, that we have an indirect interest in sacrificing

a portion of our conquests.’ The general principle here stated is

self-evident, and one would think indisputable. For the very ground of

war is a peace whose conditions are thought to _bear hard_ on one of the

parties, and yet, according to Vetus, the only way to make peace

durable, to prevent the recurrence of an appeal to force, is to impose

such hard conditions on an enemy, as it is his interest, and must be his

inclination, to break _by force_. An opinion of the disproportion

between our general strength, and our actual advantages, seems to be the

necessary ground of war, but it is here converted into the permanent

source of peace. The origin of the common prejudice is, however, very

satisfactorily illustrated in the remainder of the paragraph. ‘This

language is in favour with the two extremes of English faction. The

blind opponents of every minister _who happens to be engaged in

conducting a war_’ [_Is war then a mere affair of accident?_] ‘can see

no danger in national dishonour; and cry out for peace with double

vehemence, whenever it is least likely to be concluded well. The

dependents, on the other hand, of any feeble government, will strive to

lower the expectations of the country—to exclaim against _immoderate_

exertion—to depreciate her powers in war, and her pretensions at a

peace:—thus preparing an oblique defence for their employers, and

undermining the honest disappointment’ [_Quere expectations_] ‘of the

people when they reflect how little has been done by war, and how much’

[of that little] ‘undone by negociation. But besides being a factious

expedient, it is a principle of action equally false and absurd. I deny

that we affect any thing more by granting an enemy what are _called

favourable terms_, than convince him that he may go to war with England,

gratis. The conditions he obtains will encourage him to try the chance

of another war, in the hope of a still more advantageous treaty.’ Here

Vetus entirely shifts the state of the question. The terms of a peace,

if _not hard_, must be immediately _favourable_! Because we grant an

enemy such terms as he has a right to expect, it is made a conclusion

that we are also to grant him such as he has no right to expect, and

which will be so decidedly advantageous as to induce him to try his

fortune still farther against so generous an adversary. That is, Vetus

has no idea of the possibility of a just, fair, or honourable peace; his

mind refuses to dwell for a moment on any arrangement of terms, which,

by bearing hard on one party or another, will not be sure to end

speedily, from the desire on one side to retrieve its affairs, and on

the other to improve its advantages, in a renewal of war. ‘The only

valid security for peace is the accession to our own strength, and the

diminution of our rival’s, by the resources and dominions we have

wrested from him.’ First, this security can be good only on one side:

secondly, it is not good at all: the only security for peace is not in

the actual losses or distresses incurred by states, but in the settled

conviction that they cannot _better_ themselves by war. But all these

contradictions are nothing to Vetus, who alone does not fluctuate

between the extremes of faction, but is still true to war—and himself.

But there is, in our opinion, a third extreme of English faction (if

Vetus will spare us the anomaly) not less absurd, and more mischievous

than either of the others: we mean those who are the blind adherents of

every minister who happens to be engaged in a war, however unnecessarily

or wantonly it may have been begun, or however weakly and wickedly

carried on: who see no danger in repeated disgraces, and impending ruin,

provided we are obstinately bent on pursuing the same dreadful career

which has led to them; who, when our losses come thronging in upon us,

urge us to persist till we recover the advantages we have lost, and,

when we recover them, force us on till we lose all again: with whom

peace, in a time of adverse fortune, is dishonour, and in the pride of

success, madness: who only exaggerate ‘our pretensions at a peace,’ that

they may never be complied with: who assume a settled unrelenting

purpose in our adversary to destroy us, in order to inspire us with the

same principle of never-ending hostility against him: who leave us no

alternative but eternal war, or inevitable ruin: who irritate the hatred

and the fears of both parties, by spreading abroad incessantly a spirit

of defiance, suspicion, and the most galling contempt: who, adapting

every aspect of affairs to their own purposes, constantly return in the

same circle to the point from which they set out: with whom peace is

always unattainable, war always necessary!

We shall pass over Vetus’s historic researches, the wars of the Romans

and Carthaginians (the formal latitude of Vetus’s pen delights in these

great divisions of human affairs), and come to what is more to our

purpose.

In modern times he first comes to the treaty of 1763, only (as far as we

can find) to affix the epithet ‘American rebels’ as a sort of Pragmatic

Sanction to our colonists, with whom, he says, France joined a few years

afterwards, and, ‘in spite of her ruined finances and her peaceful king,

aimed a mortal blow at the British monarchy.’ Yet, notwithstanding this

long-standing and inveterate animosity of the French court to this

country, we find the same France, in the next paragraph but one,

stigmatized as _republican_ and _Corsican_, ‘with centric and eccentric

scribbled o’er,’ as if these were important distinctions, though Vetus

himself ‘would prefer for France the scourge of Bonaparte, to the

_healthier_, and to England _not less hostile_, sovereignty of the

banished house of Bourbon.’ Why then pertinaciously affix these

obnoxious epithets? They are bad ornaments of style—they are worse

interpreters of truth.

To prove his general axiom, that in order to be stable, ‘the conditions

of peace must bear hard on one of the parties,’ Vetus asks, ‘Were the

powers that partitioned unhappy Poland so conciliated by her

acquiescence in their first encroachments, as to abstain from offering

her any second wrong?’ Now this is an instance precisely in point to

prove the direct reverse of Vetus’s doctrine: for here was a treaty in

which the terms bore exceedingly hard on one of the parties, and yet

this only led to accumulated wrongs by a renewal of war. We say that

hard conditions of peace, in all cases, will lead to a rupture. If the

parties are nearly equal, they will lead to resistance to unfounded

claims; if quite unequal—to an aggravation of oppression. But would

Russia and Prussia have been more lenient or deterred from their

encroachments, if Poland had pretended to impose hard conditions of

peace on them? These governments partitioned Poland, not in consequence

of any treaty good or bad, but because they had the will and the power

to do so. Vetus would terrify the French into moderation by hard

conditions of peace, and yet he supposes us to be in the same relation

to France as Poland to its implacable enemies.

‘Did the wretched complaisance of the leading continental courts in

their several treaties with France, ensure their tranquillity even for a

moment?’ This is still altering the record. The question is not about

submitting to hard conditions, but about imposing them. Besides, ‘the

aggravated and multiplied molestations, injuries, and insults, which

these courts were doomed to suffer,’ might be accounted for from those

which they had in vain attempted to inflict on France, and from their

still more wretched complaisance in being made the tools of a court

which was not continental.

‘Then comes the peace of Amiens, our peace of Amiens—a peace born,

educated, nourished, and matured in this very philanthropic spirit of

gentleness and forgiveness. In the war which preceded _the truce_ of

which I am speaking, _the French government_ involved _us_ in

considerably more than two hundred millions of debt.’ Vetus then

proceeds to state that we made peace without any liquidation of this

claim, without satisfaction, without a bond, (_what else?_) without a

promise, without a single guinea! ‘I will have ransom, most egregious

ransom.’ Why was it ever heard of that one government paid the debts in

which another had involved itself in making war upon it?

‘The language of England,’ says our author, ‘was correctly what

follows:—You, Monsieur, have loaded _me_ with unspeakable distresses and

embarrassments,’ (_all this while, be it recollected, our affairs were

going on most prosperously and gloriously in the cant of The Times_)

‘you have robbed me of half my fortune, and reduced me to the brink of

beggary,’ (_the French by all accounts were in the gulph of bankruptcy_)

‘you have torn away and made slaves of my friends and kindred,’

(_indeed_) ‘you have dangerously wounded me, and murdered my beloved

children, who armed to defend their parent.’—This is too much, even for

the dupes of England. Stick, Vetus, to your statistics, and do not make

the pathetic ridiculous! Sophistry and affectation may confound common

sense to a certain degree, but there is a point at which our feelings

revolt against them.

We have already remarked on what Vetus says of Hanover; he probably will

not wish us to go farther into it. Of Bonaparte he says, of course, that

nothing short of unconditional submission will ever satisfy that

revolutionist, and that he will convert the smallest concession made to

him into a weapon for our destruction. That is, we have it in our power

to set him at defiance, to insult him, to ‘bring him to the block,’

etc., whenever we please; and yet we are so completely in his power, so

dependent on him, that the smallest concession must be fatal to us, will

be made the instrument of our inevitable destruction. Thus is the public

mind agitated and distracted by incredible contradictions, and made to

feel at once ‘the fierce extremes’ of terror and triumph, of rashness

and despair. ‘Our safety lies in his weakness, not in his will.’ If so,

or if it depends on either of the conditions here stated, we are in no

very pleasant situation. But our real safety depends on our own

strength, and steady reliance on it, and not on the arguments of Vetus.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

(CONTINUED)

‘Madmen’s epistles are no gospels.’

_Dec. 16, 1813._

The last Letter of Vetus begins with an allusion to the events which

have lately taken place in Holland. He then proceeds—‘What final effect

this popular movement by the Dutch may have upon the future interests

and prosperity of England is a question to be discussed with deliberate

caution—with extreme solicitude—and with the chance, I trust, the

distant chance, of its conducting us to no very gratifying conclusion!’

There is something in this passage truly characteristic, and well worthy

of our notice. Vetus is, it seems, already jealous of the Dutch. The

subtle venom of his officious zeal is instantly put in motion by the

prospect of their national independence and commercial prosperity; and

his pen is, no doubt, prepared, on the slightest provocation of

circumstances, to convert them from an ally to be saved, into a rival

and an enemy to be crushed. He, however, waives for the present the

solemn discussion, till he can find some farther grounds to confirm him

in his extreme solicitude and mysterious apprehensions. The perverse

readiness of Vetus to pick a quarrel out of everything, or out of

nothing, is exactly described in Spenser’s Allegory of _Furor_ and

_Occasion_, which if we thought him ‘made of penetrable stuff,’ we would

recommend to his perusal.

The introductory comment on the Revolution in Holland is a clue to the

whole of our author’s political system, which we shall here endeavour to

explain. He looks askance with ‘leer malign’ on the remotest prospect of

good to other nations. Every addition to the general stock of liberty or

happiness, is to him so much taken from our own. He sees nothing

gratifying in that prosperity or independence, which is shared (or any

part of it) with foreign nations. He trembles with needless apprehension

at the advantages in store for them, which he anticipates only to

prevent, and is indifferent to our own welfare, interests, honour—except

as they result from the privations, distress, and degradation of the

rest of the world. Hatred, suspicion, and contempt for other nations are

the first and last principles of the love which ‘an upright Englishman’

bears to his country. To prevent their enjoying a moment’s repose, or

indulging even in a dream of future comfort, he would involve his own

country in incessant distraction and wretchedness, and risk its final

ruin on the cast of a die!—Vetus professes, with some reason, not to be

enamoured of quotation: but he may, perhaps, allow us to refer to an

author, who, though not so deep read in Vattel and the writings of the

jurists, had just and penetrating views of human nature. ‘Think, there’s

livers out of England. What’s England in the world’s map? In a great

pool a swan’s nest.’ Now this ‘swan’s nest’ is indeed to us more than

all the world besides—to cherish, to protect, to love, and honour it.

But if we expect it to be so to the rest of the world—if we do not allow

them to cultivate their own affections, to improve their own advantages,

to respect their own rights, to maintain their own independence—if in

the blindness of our ignorance, our pride, and our presumption, we think

of setting up our partial and local attachments as the law of nature and

nations—if we practise, or so much as tolerate in theory that ‘exclusive

patriotism’ which is inconsistent with the common privileges of

humanity, and attempt to dictate our individual caprices, as paramount

and binding obligations on those, to whose exaction of the same claims

from us we should return only loud scorn, indignation, and defiance—if

we are ever so lost to reason, as Vetus would have us, who supposes that

we cannot serve our country truly and faithfully but by making others

the vassals of her avarice or insolence; we shall then indeed richly

deserve, if we do not meet with, the natural punishment of such

disgraceful and drivelling hypocrisy.

Vetus, who is extremely dissatisfied with our application of the term

‘exclusive patriotism’ to him, is nevertheless ‘at a loss to understand

the patriotism which is not exclusive. The word _implies_ a preference

of the rights and welfare of our own country to those of other (and

above all other) of rival countries. This is not indeed the philanthropy

of Anacharsis Cloots—it is not the dreary jargon of metaphysics, nor the

shop-boy philosophy of a printer’s devil—nor the _sans-culotterie_ of

scholastic virtue.’ We will tell Vetus what we mean by exclusive

patriotism, such as (we say) his is. We mean by it then, not that

patriotism which implies a preference of the rights and welfare of our

own country, but that which professes to annihilate and proscribe the

rights of others—not that patriotism which supposes us to be the

creatures of circumstance, habit, and affection, but that which divests

us of the character of reasonable beings—which fantastically makes our

interests or prejudices the sole measure of right and wrong to other

nations, and constitutes us sole arbiters of the empire of the world—in

short, which, under the affectation of an overweening anxiety for the

welfare of our own country, _excludes_ even the shadow of a pretension

to common sense, justice, and humanity. It is this wretched solecism

which Vetus would fain bolster up into a system, with all the logic and

rhetoric he is master of. It is true, this kind of patriotism is not the

philanthropy of Anacharsis Cloots; it has nothing to do with

philanthropy in any shape, but it is a vile compound of ‘the jargon of

metaphysics, with the vulgar notions of a printer’s devil.’ It is an

intense union of the grossness and narrowness of ignorance with the

dangerous refinement of the most abstracted speculation. It is passion

and prejudice, inflamed by philosophy, and philosophy distorted by

passion and prejudice.

Alter his cold exordium on the Revolution in Holland, our consistent

politician enters with warmth on Lord Castlereagh’s speech on the

subsidiary treaties, in which he finds a _But_ before the word _Peace_,

which has a most happy efficacy in healing the wounds inflicted on his

tortured apprehensions, by the explicit, unqualified declaration of Lord

Liverpool in the other House. ‘After describing the laudable solicitude

of Ministers for the attainment of that _first_ of earthly goods,

peace,’ (we thought it had ranked last in the mind of Vetus) ‘his

Lordship added _what was worth all the rest_—BUT we must have a _secure_

peace. We must not only recollect with whom we contend, but with whom we

negociate, and never grant to _such_ an enemy conditions, which under

the name of peace, would disarm this nation, and expose her to

_contingent_ dangers.’ (To place any nation out of the reach of

contingent dangers in peace or war is, we imagine, an undertaking beyond

even the _calibre_ of Lord Castlereagh’s talents as a statesman.)

‘These,’ proceeds Vetus, ‘were nearly the words; they certainly do not

compromise his meaning.’ (Our author cannot be much mistaken in

attributing to his Lordship any words which seeming to have some

meaning, in reality have none.) ’ Here then the noble Secretary has

_chased away every doubtful expression_ of his colleague.’ (‘Why

so,—this horrible shadow’ of peace ‘being gone,’ Vetus ‘is himself

again.’)

‘The sentiment delivered by the sovereign on the throne is now given to

us with a construction, at which we need no longer be alarmed. _I_ ask

only that _secure_ peace,—a peace consistent with English safety—_void

of the shadow of regard or indulgence to the pretensions and honour,

otherwise the ambition and arrogance of Bonaparte_, which, as compared

with _the relief of one day’s hunger to the meanest peasant in this our

native land_, are baubles not worth a name!’—This is undoubtedly one of

the most remarkable specimens we ever met with of that figure in

rhetoric, designated by an excellent writer as ‘the figure of

_encroachment_.’[8] Vetus, by a series of equations (certainly not

mathematical ones) at length arrives at a construction of peace at which

he is no longer alarmed; at the identical peace which he wants, and the

only one he will admit,—a peace preposterous in its very terms, and in

its nature impracticable,—a peace ‘void of the shadow of regard or

indulgence to the pretensions and honour’ of the enemy, which are to

pass with them as well as with us, for so much ‘arrogance and ambition.’

This is the only peace consistent with English safety—this is the secure

peace of Lord Castlereagh—the fair and honourable peace announced from

the throne—the very peace which Lord Liverpool meant to describe when he

startled Vetus by the doubtful expression of a peace ‘consistent with

the honour, rights, and interests of France’—‘of such a peace as we in

her situation should be disposed to grant.’ To the mind of Vetus, which

is indeed the very receptacle for contradictions ‘to knot and gender

in,’ these two sorts of peace appear to be perfectly compatible, and the

one a most happy explanation of the other, viz. a peace void of every

shadow of regard to the rights and honour of a rival nation, and a peace

consistent with those rights and that honour. If this is not ‘mere

midsummer madness,’ we do not know what is. Or if any thing can surpass

it (‘for in this lowest deep of absurdity a lower deep still opens to

receive us, gaping wide’) it is the forlorn piece of sentimental mummery

by which it is attempted to protract this endless war of proscription

against the pretensions of France, under the mask of relieving the wants

and distresses of the meanest peasant of this our native land! Compared

with the tears and blood of our countrymen, all the sophistries of Vetus

by which he would make them victims of his own vanity and egotism, not

less than of the arrogance and ambition of Bonaparte, are indeed

contemptible and mischievous baubles.

‘What means the impious cry raised by degenerate Englishmen against the

mere chance—nay, the remotest possibility of a peace, whose terms should

be honourable to their country? Whence arises this profligate and

abandoned yell with which these traitors insult us? _Are they still in

pay? Is their patron still rich enough to bribe them?_ When we demand

compensation for our _dreadful sufferings_, it is but what justice

grants. When we call for security, it is what our existence requires.

Yet, when these undoubted rights and essential safeguards of an injured

people are asserted, it is nothing less than blaspheming the holy

supremacy of Bonaparte!’

First, when Vetus demands compensation for our sufferings, it would

perhaps hardly be sufficient to refer him to the satisfaction which the

patriotic contributors to _The Times_, _The Courier_, _The Morning

Post_, _The Sun_, and _The Star_, must have had in writing, and their

admirers in reading the daily paragraphs, of which those sufferings were

the dreadful price, and the inevitable result. When we demand

compensation for what we have suffered, it is but _justice_, if we can

at the same time make compensation for what we have made others suffer;

but at all events, it is no compensation for past sufferings, to make

them perpetual. When we call for security, we are right; but when we

tell the enemy that our only security is in his destruction, and call

upon him for this pledge and safeguard of our undoubted rights, we shew,

by asking for what we know we cannot have, that not security, but

defiance is our object. As to the terms of abuse which are introduced in

this paragraph (we suppose, to vary the general gravity and decorum of

Vetus’s style) we shall answer them by a very short statement of what we

conceive to be the truth. Europe has been for the last twenty years

engaged in a desperate and (for some reason or other) an unequal

struggle against France;—by playing at double or quits, she has just

recovered from the very brink of destruction; and the keepers of our

political E.O. tables treat us as traitors and miscreants, who would

dissuade her from sitting down once more to finish the game, and ruin

her adversary.

‘—It is asked,—“Do we propose to humble France? Do we propose to destroy

her? If so, we breathe _eternal_ war; if so, we convert the aggressor

into the sufferer, and transfer all the dignity and authority of justice

to the enemy against whom we arm!”’ Yes, against whom we arm for the

avowed purpose of his destruction. From the moment that we make the

destruction of an enemy (be he who he may) the indispensable condition

of our safety, our destruction from that moment _becomes_ necessary to

his, and an act of self-defence. Not much liking this dilemma from which

our author has more than once ‘struggled to get free,’ he in the next

passage makes a wide career indeed, in order, no doubt, to return to the

charge with better effect hereafter. ‘The question of peace or eternal

war is not a _naked question_ of right and wrong. It is a question,

whose morality is determined by its reference to our preservation as a

people. To such interrogatories I answer without reserve, that we ought

to exact _precisely_ that measure of humiliation from France, and that

we do recommend _that critical advance towards her destruction_, that

may combine the utmost _attainable_ satisfaction for our past grievances

with a solid protection to our future interest and welfare. From France,

since the _fatal_ battle of Hastings, what has _this nation of Saxon

warriors_’—(We hardly know ourselves in the learned livery of Vetus’s

style. He himself is doubtless descended from some very old family

settled here before the Conquest)—‘What has this nation of Saxon

warriors ever yet endured from France but injury and affliction?’ Yet we

have made a shift to exist as a nation under all this load of calamity.

We still breathe and live notwithstanding some intervals of repose, some

short resting places afforded us, before this morbid inspector of

health, like another Doctor Pedro Positive, injoined his preposterous

regimen of incessant war as necessary to lasting peace, and to our

preservation as a people!

‘Modern France’ continues Vetus, rising in his argument, has no

principle so deeply rooted as that of everlasting enmity to England. ‘I

confess for this reason that in my uncorrupted judgment _the best

security_ for Great Britain, and therefore, _if practicable, her most

imperious duty_, would be _the absolute conquest of France_. But since

that, _unfortunately_, is an event which _at present_ we are not likely

to accomplish, _the second best security_ is’ (one would think not to

attempt it at all; no, but) ‘to reduce her, _if we can_, to a degree of

weakness consistent _with our immediate repose_.’ After thus modestly

postponing the absolute conquest of France to a more convenient

opportunity, he adds the following incredible sentence. ‘If the enemy

should be so far borne away by _his hatred_, as to command _his

emissaries_ in London to announce that he prefers waging eternal war to

the acceptance of conditions, which _his own persevering and atrocious

outrages_ have rendered in the mind of every Englishman indispensable to

the safety of these islands, the woeful alternative of perpetual war

very plainly originates not with Great Britain but with Bonaparte!’ That

is to say, _The Times_ not long ago laid it down as a fixed, unalterable

maxim, without reference to terms of one sort or another, that we were

never to make peace with Bonaparte; Vetus in this very letter enters

into an elaborate apology, for that multitude of wise, honest, and

virtuous persons who think his existence as a sovereign _at all times_

threatens our existence as a nation, and it is because we entered our

protest against this ‘frantic outcry raised by degenerate Englishmen,’

that Bonaparte is here made to charge his emissaries in London to

announce that he prefers eternal war to the acceptance of conditions,

the moderation of which conditions or of _our second best security_ may

be judged of when we are told that the best, and indeed only real

security for Great Britain, and therefore her most imperious duty, would

be the absolute conquest of France. Vetus is, however, contented with

such terms of peace as will imply only a _critical advance to her

destruction_, and if Bonaparte is not contented with the same terms, the

alternative of eternal war, it seems, originates with him and not with

Vetus.[9]

But we deny that though this best security for Great Britain, the

absolute conquest of France, were in her power, that it would be her

most imperious duty to effect it. And we deny it, because on the same

ground a better security still for Great Britain would be the conquest

or destruction of Europe and the world; and yet we do not think it her

imperious duty, even if she could, to accomplish the one, or to make a

_critical_ advance to the other. For if it is once laid down and acted

upon as a maxim in national morality, that the best and most desirable

security of a state is in the destruction of its neighbours, or that

there is to be an unrelenting ever watchful critical approximation to

this object as far as possible, there is an end of civil society. The

same principle of not stopping short of this _maximum_ of selfish

security will impose the same imperious duty of rankling jealousy, and

inexorable hostility on others. Our speculator’s ‘best possible

security’ for the independence of states, is nothing but a watchword for

mutual havoc, and wide-spreading desolation. Terrified with the phantom

of imaginary danger, he would have us rush headlong on the reality. We

are obstinately to refuse the enjoyment of a moment’s repose, and

proceed to commit wilful dilapidation on the estate of our happiness,

because it is not secured to us by an everlasting tenure. Placed at the

mercy of the malice or hypocrisy of every venal alarmist, our only

resource must be to seek a refuge from our fears in our own destruction,

or to find the gratification of our revenge in that of others. But a

whole nation is no more justified in obtaining this best of all possible

securities for itself, by the immediate subversion of other states, than

the assassin is justified in taking the life of another, to prevent the

possibility of any future attempt upon his own. For in proportion as a

state is weak and incapable of subjugating us, is the manifest injustice

of any such precaution;—and in proportion as a state is formidable, and

likely to excite serious apprehension for our own safety, is the danger

and folly of setting an example which may be retaliated with so much

greater effect, and ‘like a devilish engine, recoil upon ourselves.’

That exclusive patriotism which claims for our country an exemption from

‘contingent danger,’ which would place its wealth, its power, or even

its safety beyond the reach of chance and the fluctuation of human

affairs, claims for it an exemption from the common lot of human nature.

That exclusive patriotism which seeks to enforce this claim (equally

impious and unwise) by the absolute conquest of rival states, tempts the

very ruin it professes to avert.

But Vetus mistakes the nature of patriotism altogether. He would

transform that principle which was intended for the tutelary genius of

nations, into the destroying demon of the world. He ransacks past

history to revive old grudges; he anticipates the future to invent new

ones. In his whole system, there is not room for ‘so small a drop of

pity as a wren’s eye.’ His patriotism is the worm that dies not; a viper

gnawing at the heart. He would strip this feeling of everything but the

low cunning, and brutal ferocity of the savage state, and then arm it

with all the refinements of scholastic virtue, and the most rigid logic.

The diverging rays of human reason which should be diffused to cheer and

enlighten the moral world, are in him collected into a focus of raging

zeal to burn and destroy. It is well for mankind that in the order of

the universe, our passions naturally circumscribe themselves, and

contain their own antidote within them. The only justification of our

narrow, selfish passions, is their short-sightedness:—were it not for

this, the jealousies of individuals and of nations would not leave them

the smallest interval of rest. It is well that the ungovernable impulses

of fear and hatred are excited only by gross, palpable objects; and are

therefore transient, and limited in their operation. It is well that

those motives which do not owe their birth to reason, should not

afterwards receive their nourishment and support from it. If in their

present desultory state, they produce so many mischiefs, what would be

the case, if they were to be organized into systems, and elevated into

abstract principles of right and wrong?

The whole of Vetus’s reasoning is founded on the false notions of

patriotism which we have here pointed out, and which we conceive to be

totally inconsistent with ‘the just principles of negociation.’ The

remainder of his letter, which unfolds his motives for a pacific

arrangement with Bonaparte, is founded entirely on the same jaundiced

and distempered views. Many wise, many honest, many virtuous persons, he

says, have maintained, not without reason, ‘the incompetency of _this

Corsican_ under any circumstances to discharge the obligations of a

state of peace.’ But he, more wise, more honest, more virtuous, sees a

hope, a shadow of peace, rising like a cloudy speck out of a quarter

where it was least expected. ‘The stone which the builders rejected, is

become the corner-stone of his Temple of Peace.’—‘It does not appear to

Vetus, that a peace with Bonaparte is now unattainable on terms

sufficient for our safety.’ He thinks there is no man so proper to make

peace with as this Corsican, this Revolutionist,—no one so proper to

govern France—to the complete exclusion of the Bourbons, whose

pretensions he scouts analytically, logically, and chronologically, and

who, it seems, had always the same implacable animosity against this

country as Bonaparte, _without a tythe of his ability_. [Surely this

circumstance might plead a little in their favour with Vetus.] And why

so? Whence arises this unexpected partiality shewn to Bonaparte? Why it

is ‘from the strong conviction that by no other means so decisive as the

existence of this man, with his consuming, depressing and degrading

system of government, can we hope to see France _crushed and ground down

below the capacity of contending for ages to come_ with the force of the

British Empire, _moved by the spirit of freedom_! Regarding France under

every known form of government as the irreconcileable foe of England, _I

have beheld with almost unmingled joy the growth and accumulation of

this savage despotism_!’ To be sure ‘while there appeared to some

persons,’ [Vetus was not one of them] ‘a _chance_ of his enslaving the

Continent, and hurling the mass of subjugated nations against our

shores—then, indeed, those who entertained such fears were justified in

seeking his _personal_ and political destruction. But once released from

the terror of his arm, _what genuine Englishman_ can fail to rejoice in

the privilege of consigning Bonaparte and the French people, for better

for worse, to the paradise of each other’s embraces?’ Vetus then

proceeds to inveigh at great length against the persons and pretensions

of the Bourbons. Leaving them to the mercy of this good-natured

remembrancer, we shall only observe, that he decides the impolicy of

restoring the Bourbons, by asking, whether their restoration would not

be advantageous to France, and consequently (he infers very consistently

with himself) _injurious to this country_. Looking forward but half a

century, he sees France gradually regain under the old regime ‘her

natural ascendancy over Great Britain, from which she falls, and must

fall every hour more rapidly from the necessary operation of those

principles on which the Corsican dynasty is founded.’ Nay, looking on

farther than the expiration of the same half century, he sees ‘sloth,

weakness, and poverty, worse than ever sprung from Turkish policy,

proceeding from this odious, self-dissolving power, and a gulph of

irretrievable destruction, already yawning for our eternal foe.’

It is not long ago since Vetus drew an historical parallel between this

country and Carthage, encouraging us to expect the same fate from France

which Carthage received from Rome, and to act upon this fanciful

comparison as a solid ground of wisdom. Now all at once ‘this mendicant

in argument, this perfect juggler in politics,’ inverts the perspective,

takes a prophetic view of the events of the next fifty years, and France

is seen dwindling into another Turkey, which the genius of British

freedom grinds to powder, and crushes beneath her feet! These great

statesmen-like views of things, ‘this large discourse of reason, looking

before and after,’ are, we confess, beyond us. We recollect indeed a

similar prophecy to that of Vetus, couched in nearly the same terms,

when in the year 1797, the French were said to be ‘on the verge, nay, in

the very gulph of bankruptcy,’ and that their finances could not hold

out six months longer. Vetus however, taught by the failure of past

prognostics, constructs his political calculations for the ensuing

century, instead of the ensuing year, and puts off the day of reckoning

to a period when he and his predictions will be forgotten.

Such are the charitable grounds on which our author wishes to secure

Bonaparte on the throne of France, and thinks that peace may at present

be made with him, on terms consistent with our safety. He is not, like

others, ‘ready to shake hands with the Usurper over the tomb of the

murdered D’Enghien, provided he will _return to the paths of religion

and virtue_;’ but he will shake hands with him over the ruins of the

liberty and happiness of France, on the express condition that ‘he never

returns to the paths of religion and morality.’ Vetus is willing to

forget the injuries which Bonaparte may have done to England, for the

sake of the greater mischiefs he may do to France. These are the

‘obligations’ which Vetus owes to him—this the source of his gratitude,

the sacred pledge that reconciles him to ‘that monster whom England

detests.’ He is for making peace with the ‘tyrant,’ to give him an

opportunity to rivet on the chains of France, and fix her final doom.

But is Vetus sincere in all this? His reasoning comes in a very

questionable shape; and we the more doubt it, because he has no sooner

(under the auspices of Bonaparte) hurled France down the gulf of

irretrievable destruction, than he immediately resumes the old topic of

eternal war or perpetual bondage, as the only alternative which this

country can look to. Why, if he is in earnest, insist with Lord

Castlereagh on the caution with which we must grant terms to ‘such an

enemy,’ to this disabled and paralyzed foe? Why assert, as Vetus did in

his very last letter, that ‘nothing short of unconditional submission

will ever satisfy that revolutionist, and that any concession made to

him will be instantly converted into a weapon for our destruction?’ Why

not grant to him such terms as might be granted to the Bourbons, since

they would be granted to a much less dangerous and powerful rival? Why

not subsist, as we have hitherto done, without the fear of perpetual war

or perpetual bondage before our eyes, now that the crown of France has

lost its original brightness, and is shorn of those beams which would

again sparkle round it, if fixed on the head of a Bourbon? We suspect

that our author is not quite in earnest in his professions, because he

is not consistent with himself. Is it possible that his anxiety to keep

out the Bourbons arises from his fear that peace might creep in with

them, at least as a sort of compliment of the season? Is our veteran

politician aware, in his own mind, that the single epithets, Corsican,

republican, revolutionary, will have more effect in stirring up the

embers of war, than all the arguments which he might use to demonstrate

the accumulating dangers to be apprehended from the mild paternal sway

of the ancient dynasty?

We cannot help saying, however, that we think the elaborate attempt of

Vetus to prove the necessary extinction of the power of France under the

government of Bonaparte, a total failure. What is the amount of his

argument? That in a period when the French were to owe their existence

and their power to war, Bonaparte has made them a warlike people, and

that they did not sit down quietly to ‘the cultivation of arts,

luxuries, and letters,’ when the world was beleaguered against them. Is

it for Vetus, who reprobates the peace of Amiens, _that hollow truce_

(as he justly calls it), that intermission of war but for a moment, to

say of Bonaparte, ‘His application of public industry is only to the

arts of death—all other perishes for want of wholesome nourishment’?

What then becomes of the long-resounded charge against him on his

exclamation ‘for ships, colonies, and commerce’? We suspect, that energy

in war is not an absolute proof of weakness in peace. He lays down,

indeed, a general principle (true enough in itself) that a government,

in its nature and character at variance with the people, must be

comparatively weak and insecure; yet, in applying this maxim, he proves

not that the French people and government are at irreconcileable

variance, but that the one has become entirely subdued and assimilated

to the other. But hear him speak for himself. ‘The causes of the

overthrow of the old government are foreign to our present purpose. The

consequence has been the birth of _this bloody and scorching

despotism_,—this giant, armed from his mother’s womb with sweeping

scimitar and consuming fire. Can such a government be fit for such a

people? Can a tyranny, operating by direct violence and characteristic

of the earliest periods in the most barbarous condition of mankind, have

any quality adapted to the wants or feelings of a nation, grown _old in

arts_, luxuries, and letters? Is it not plain to the least acute

observer, that where the principles of such a government, and such a

stage of society, are so vehemently contrasted, there can be no

immediate alliance; but that an incessant counteraction must ensue—that

the government or the people must change their character before a just

harmony and co-operation can exist between them; _in other words, that

one of them must yield_!’

[Well, this is the very thing which, in the next sentence, he shews has

actually taken place.] ‘And _from whom_ are we to infer this ultimate

submission to its rival? Has the tyrant loosed his chains?—has he

relaxed his hold, or flung aside the whip of scorpions? No! it is

_France herself which has given way_. It is the French nation who

gradually recede from the rest of the civilized world.’ That is, it is

France who, contrary to Vetus’s argument, in receding gradually from the

rest of the civilized world, has been identified with the government,

and become that whip of scorpions in the hands of Bonaparte, which has

been the scourge and dread of all Europe. It is thus that our author

always defeats himself. He is fond of abstruse reasoning and deep

investigation in exact proportion to his incapacity for them—as eunuchs

are amorous through impotence!

But though he fails in his argument, the moral is not less instructive.

He teaches us on what grounds a genuine English patriot goes to war, and

on what terms he will make peace. A patriot of this exclusive stamp, who

is troubled with none of the symptoms of a ‘spurious and mawkish

beneficence,’ threatens France with the restoration of the Bourbons,

only to throw her into the convulsions of anarchy, and withdraws that

kindly interference, only that she may sink into the more fatal lethargy

of despotism. It is the same consistent patriot who kindles the fires of

La Vendée, and whenever it suits his purpose, is no longer borne away by

the ‘torrent of royal, flaming, unreflecting sympathies!’ It is the same

tried friend of his country, who carries on a twenty years’ war for the

preservation of our trade and manufactures, and when they are mentioned

as inducements for peace, disdains ‘all gross, commercial calculations.’

It is the same conscientious politician, who at one time makes war for

the support of social order, and the defence of our holy religion;—who,

at another, hails the disappearance of ‘the last glimmering of education

among a people grown old in arts and letters,’ and who rejoices ‘to see

the Christian religion made studiously contemptible by the poverty and

debasement of its professors!’ It is the same true patriot, the same

Vetus, who ‘beholds with unmingled joy, the growth and accumulation of a

savage despotism, which is to crush and bow down France under our

feet;’—who holds ‘the whip of scorpions over her head;’—who ‘arms a

scorching tyranny with sweeping scimitar and consuming fire’ against

her;—who pushes her headlong down ‘the yawning gulf of irretrievable

destruction;’ it is the same Vetus, who, suddenly recovering all the

severity of justice, and all the tenderness of humanity, makes a piteous

outcry about ‘the dreadful sufferings we have endured,’ in attempting to

heap coals of fire on our adversary, demands the payment of ‘two hundred

millions of debt, in which her government have wantonly involved us,’

complains of our being ‘driven to beggary and want’ in this unnatural

conflict, calls for the release of our countrymen, ‘sent into hopeless

captivity,’ and invokes the murdered names of those children of the

state, who ‘armed to defend a beloved parent, and an injured country!’

Even Vetus shrinks from the enormity of such inconsistencies, and

excuses himself by saying, ‘Do I feel the spontaneous and unprovoked

desire that such a mass of evil should be perpetuated for any portion of

mankind? _God forbid._ But it is, _I conscientiously_ believe, a

question, _which of these countries shall destroy the other_. In that

case, my part is taken—France must be ruined, to save our native country

from being ruined. If this be perpetual war, I cannot help it.

_Perpetual war has little terror, when perpetual bondage threatens us._’

Here then our bane and antidote are both before us: perpetual war or

perpetual bondage;—a pleasant alternative!—but it is an alternative of

Vetus’s making, and we shall not, _if we can help it_, submit to either

of his indispensable conditions. We shall not learn of him, for ‘his

yoke is not easy, nor his burden light.’ If this be our inevitable lot,

‘he cannot help it.’ No; but he can help laying the blame of his own

irritable and mischievous conclusions on Nature and Providence; or at

least we think it our duty to guard ourselves and others against the

fatal delusion.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

‘Take him, and cut him out in little stars.’

_Jan. 3, 1814._

We undertook, some time ago, the task of ascertaining the true value of

this writer’s reasoning, by removing the cumbrous load of words which

oppress his understanding, as well as that of his readers; and we find

that ‘our occupation is not yet gone.’ His last letter, indeed,

furnishes us with comparatively slender materials. His style is

considerably abated. With Bottom in the play, he may be said to

‘aggravate his voice so, that he roars you an ’twere any sucking dove.’

His swaggering paradoxes dwindle into unmeaning common-places; his

violent dogmas into tame equivocations. There is scarcely an attempt

made to defend his own extreme opinions, or to repel the charge of gross

and glaring inconsistency which we brought against them. He makes indeed

a faint effort to screen certain general positions from the odium and

contempt they deserve, by explaining them away, and to shift off the

responsibility of others, by directly denying them. Vetus has, in fact,

marched boldly on in a fog of splendid words, till he unexpectedly finds

himself on the edge of a precipice, and he seems willing to retreat from

it as well as his accustomed solemnity, and the incumbrances of his

style will permit. It may, perhaps, be some consolation, if we remind

him that he is not the first enthusiast on record, who mistook a cloud

for a goddess. His present situation is certainly no very pleasant one:

it a good deal resembles that of Parolles, when he undertook the

recovery of his drum.

The most striking part of Vetus’s last letter is his gratuitous _tirade_

against what has been called the modern philosophy, as if this were the

only alternative (whereas it is in truth the antithesis or converse) of

his system of exclusive patriotism. Our contradiction of his first

principle, that the basis of a peace with France is to be one which does

not leave a shadow of regard to her honour, rights, or interest, and

that the terms of peace to which she is in duty bound to accede, must be

such as to imply a _critical advance_ to her destruction—our utter

rejection of this new-fangled theory of negociation he considers as ‘a

sucker from the root of that poisonous vegetable, the doctrine of

universal benevolence,’ and deprecates our reasoning on the subject as

‘a blossom which threatens the desolation of the moral world!’ We really

cannot attribute to our opinions any such power or any such tendency as

the morbid imagination of our political hypochondriac lends to them. The

arguments of Vetus on this question seem a sort of transcript of Dr.

Parr’s Spital Sermon, or of one of Sir James Mackintosh’s lectures at

Lincoln’s Inn; and are very tolerable, dull, common-place declamation—a

little bordering on fustian. But, as is the invariable fate of Vetus’s

arguments, they contain a flat contradiction to the principle he is

aiming to establish. Though the passage has little to do with the

immediate question, we shall give it as a literary curiosity. It is an

instance of one of those lapses of thought, of that epilepsy of the

mind, which we have already pointed out as the distinguishing

characteristic of this author’s understanding. His object is to exclude

all general reasoning, or the seeds of what he absurdly calls

‘theo-philanthropy’ from the feelings of patriotism; and in his

eagerness to do this, he effectually explodes and laughs to scorn all

patriotism, as a branch of the same theo-philanthropy, as impracticable

and romantic folly. His words are these:—

‘One of these patriots enacts the part of a drawling hypocritical

projector, whom no natural affection can move, nor individual happiness

enliven. He is a regular brother of a well known sect, which we of this

generation have had the misfortune to behold in high activity—and which,

having seen, it is but wisdom to remember. The men I speak of were those

who in some degree precipitated the French revolution, and who entirely

perverted its possible uses, the mongrel race of metaphysical

enthusiasts, who undertook to change the objects of human feeling, that

they might disappoint more effectually the ends for which it was

bestowed. Such were the worshippers of the strumpet goddess Reason; a

deity, in herself, and in the prostitute who represented her,

convertible to purposes equally abandoned. The next step, after

acknowledging this divinity, was to make a display of her power. Mankind

were to be _reasoned_ out of _all_ human sensibilities; but the loss was

to be supplied by reasoning them into a new assortment of human

sensibilities, on a larger and nobler scale. Brotherly regard was a puny

sentiment; what was a single brother to him who felt that millions of

freemen were his brothers! Marriage, too, that holy and heavenly[10] and

heart-sustaining institution, what with its graceful and beautiful

assemblage of bland obligations and virtuous sympathies—how stood the

fixed relation of husband and wife? Why, treason to natural

liberty!—“exclusive tenderness”—a bar to the performance of those

unconfined embraces, which spoke the reign of universal love. Parental

affection, and filial piety, also, were still less worthy to escape the

blight of this ruthless philosophical reform. How narrow was the

father’s mansion! How diminutive the mind that could look with reverence

to the beings that gave it birth, when the republic, sole heiress of

philanthropy and freedom—the great republic, offered herself as the fond

and universal parent. Nor could the sire, who argued logically, bewail

the sacrifice of his devoted offspring. His children—not his, but their

country’s children—were to be educated by and for that country. His

paternal feelings were not to be extinguished—no, nothing more than

transferred to the state, and ennobled by the magnitude of the object.

This same republic was a perfect “Scrub.” She was to play the sister,

husband, wife, son, and mother—confiscating and appropriating the

individual duties, rights, and charities of mankind—ransacking the

deepest recesses of the heart, and seizing as prizes to her sovereign

will the royalties and wrecks of human nature.

‘_But the phrenzy did not terminate here._ It was not enough that all

the relations of life should merge in that of citizen: even “exclusive

patriotism” was a vulgar thought. In the paroxysms of disorder, it was

sometimes proposed, that the citizen himself should evaporate into a

citizen of the world. The universal republic—the vast family of

mankind—the deputations from the human race—became instruments with the

knaves who led, and visions for the dupes who admired. There can really

be no objection to this superfine theory, but that it is inconsistent

with the order of Providence, and destructive of the nature of man—that

it unfixes our moral land-marks—melts into air every practical virtue

and definite duty—substitutes words for salutary deeds—and by directing

our most natural and useful passions to objects indistinct or

unattainable, leaves these powerful agents afloat, and ends by abusing

them to the production of crime and misery. Such were the results of

that system of speculation, which assumed for its basis the existence of

a species of beings far above the pitch of humanity, and which, in its

application to human affairs, reduces them to the level of brutes.

‘A sucker from the root of this poisonous vegetable is again in blossom,

and threatens the desolation of the moral world. We are called upon to

abdicate the right and obligation of preferring and protecting our

native country, that is, of enjoying our proper advantages, and of

discharging our specific trusts—and for what? Why, that we may undertake

the preposterous office, and execute the factitious duty of handing over

to a mortal enemy the greatness to which we have waded through blood and

fire, and raising his empire on the ruins of our own. Beware, we are

warned, of neglecting the rights of the adversary. It is our peculiar

business to guard the rights of France.’[11]

The whole of this pompous episode is a mere diversion to the question.

Vetus, some time ago, asked, in a tone which could not be mistaken, ‘Who

are the French nation? A rank non-entity. Who are to be the sole judges

of the rights and pretensions of what once was France? We, and our

allies!’—and when we protest against this unheard-of basis of a

negociation between rival states, he answers with a tedious

prize-dissertation on the doctrine of universal benevolence, and the

perfectibility of man. Vetus insists on a peace (the only peace fit for

a wise nation) that shall remain a proud monument of its own

superiority,—that is, a peace which can never be made between any two

states, a peace that does not admit of the shadow of regard to the

rights, interests, or honour of the enemy, a peace that implies a

critical advance to the destruction of France. But it seems, that all

this proud display of pedantic phraseology, by which he attempted to

‘confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and

ears,’ now means nothing more than that we are to guard and protect our

native country, and not surrender our own rights to the enemy. There

needed no oracle to tell us that. But Vetus, having set out on the

forlorn hope of political paradox, is himself ashamed to turn back to a

trite truism, and contends that there is no safety for this country but

in the destruction of the enemy, and no patriotism which is not

inconsistent with the rights, liberties, and even existence of other

countries. We deny it. We say there is a patriotism consistent with the

claims of reason, justice, and humanity; and another _exclusive_ of

them. The latter is Vetus’s patriotism; the former is ours. This we have

stated before. We do not wonder that Vetus has not answered it; for it

does not admit of an answer.

It seems, however, that the view we have taken (in common with all

civilized nations) of this subject, is ‘a sucker from the poisonous root

of universal benevolence’; and Vetus’s prejudices, coupling with that

_strumpet_ Reason, beget in his mind a sort of ‘mongrel metaphysical

enthusiasm,’ in which he sees visions, and has revelations of the

general nature of man. He tells us, we are regular adepts in that school

which, under the direction of the goddess, or the strumpet, Reason, (for

with him they are both the same) trampled on all human sensibilities,

and the charities of private life, to offer them up as a sacrifice to

that _monstrous fiction_, their country, and then to that _more

monstrous fiction_, their kind. This is the most curious defence of

patriotism we ever met with, and a striking instance of the pains which

this laborious reasoner takes to confute himself. Our country, according

to this patriotic writer, is ‘a perfect Scrub,’ a kind of Sin and Death

business, a contradiction, and a dire chimera, ‘confiscating and

appropriating the individual duties, rights, and charities of

mankind—ransacking the deepest recesses of the heart, and seizing as

prizes to her sovereign will the royalties and wrecks of human nature.’

It is ‘a superfine theory, inconsistent with the order of Providence,

and destructive of the nature of man, and which, by pretending to raise

us far above the pitch of humanity, degrades us below the level of

brutes.’ But then ‘there is a phrenzy still greater’ than this, which is

the love of mankind. This is the consummation of enormity, and the

triumph of the strumpet-goddess. Vetus has here fallen into a more

desperate dilemma than any he has yet encountered in his perilous way.

We present him with the choice of a pair of alternatives: either he must

mean that the love of the republic, or our country, which he treats with

such profound contempt and abhorrence, is only bad when it destroys the

private and natural affections, or he must exclude at once every shadow

of regard to the rights, liberties, and happiness of mankind, and then

the same thing will follow of patriotism itself, which, as he says

truly, is an emanation from the same impure source, human reason, and so

to establish his favourite principle of _exclusive_ patriotism, he gets

rid of it altogether. ‘The latter end of this writer’s reasoning always

forgets the beginning.’ We will tell Vetus the hinge on which this whole

controversy turns, and what is the radical error of the system of

general philanthropy, which he has attempted to expose. It is, that it

is an _exclusive_ system, and is therefore unfitted for the nature of

man, who is a mixed being, made up of various principles, faculties, and

feelings. All these are good in their place and degree, as well as the

affections that spring from them—natural affection, patriotism,

benevolence: it is only _exclusive_ selfishness, _exclusive_ patriotism,

_exclusive_ philanthropy, that are inconsistent with the order of

Providence, and destructive of the nature of man: Vetus in avoiding one

extreme has fallen into another, for the extremes not only ‘of faction’

but of folly meet; though we should be loth to compare the splendid

dreams of the philosophical enthusiast, who wished to raise man above

the pitch of his common nature, to the groveling, sordid, shuffling

paradoxes of Vetus, who would degrade him below the level of the brutes,

and whose maxims are as repugnant to common sense, and the practical

rules of life, as they are devoid of every thing elegant in imagination,

or consistent in reasoning.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF VETUS

(CONCLUDED)

‘What do you read, my lord?—Words, words, words.

What is the matter?——_Nothing_.’

_Jan. 5, 1814._

We gave in our last article Vetus’s quaint denunciation of the

principles of patriotism and philanthropy. It appears by this, that the

same ‘jargon of metaphysics,’ and the same vapid rhetoric may be

employed against both these sacred and inviolable feelings, by any one

who is weak and vain enough to suppose that language was given us, not

to communicate truth to others, but to impose falsehood on ourselves.

Does Vetus mean to assert, that his _topics_ are fatal to all

patriotism, as well as all philanthropy? Or (which is the alternative)

that they are fatal to neither, properly understood,—that there is a

true and a false patriotism, a true and a false philanthropy? What will

‘the acknowledged saviours of Europe, the magnanimous defenders of the

commonwealth of nations, the liberators of Spain, the recreators of

Portugal, the regenerators of Germany,’ say to Vetus’s exclusive

patriotism? Or, we would ask, whether the abuse of reason, of which he

complains in certain moderns, is a sufficient cause that we should

explode it altogether? In the dialect of Don Quixote’s books of

chivalry, must ‘the unreasonableness of their reason so unreason our

reason,’ that we are to reject the faculty, both root and branch? Shall

we impiously renounce the goddess, because she has been personated by a

strumpet? Reason is the queen of the moral world, the soul of the

universe, the lamp of human life, the pillar of society, the foundation

of law, the beacon of nations, the golden chain, let down from heaven,

which links all animated and all intelligent natures in one common

system—and in the vain strife between fanatic innovation, and fanatic

prejudice we are exhorted to dethrone this queen of the world, to blot

out this light of the mind, to deface this fair column, to break in

pieces this golden chain! We are to discard and throw from us, with loud

taunts and bitter imprecations, that reason, which has been the lofty

theme of the philosopher, the poet, the moralist, and the divine, whose

name was not first named to be abused by the enthusiasts of the French

revolution, or to be blasphemed by the madder enthusiasts, their

opponents, but is coeval with, and inseparable from the nature and

faculties of man,—is the image of his Maker stamped upon him at his

birth, the understanding breathed into him with the breath of life, and

in the participation of which alone he is raised above the brute

creation, and his own physical nature!—Vetus labours hard to persuade

us, that the goddess and the strumpet are really one person, equally

‘convertible to the same abandoned purposes;’ that reason and sophistry

are the same thing. He may find his account in endeavouring to confound

them; but his indifference betrays the hollowness of his claims to true

reason, as the false mother was detected by her willingness to

compromise her own pretensions, only to be revenged on her rival.

Vetus has, however, without knowing it, stumbled on an important truth,

which is, that patriotism, in modern times, and in great states, is and

must be the creature of reason and reflection, rather than the offspring

of physical or local attachment. Our country is a complex abstract

existence, known only to the understanding. It is an immense riddle,

containing numberless modifications of reason and prejudice, of thought

and passion. Patriotism is not, in a strict or exclusive sense, a

natural or personal affection, but a law of our rational and moral

nature, strengthened and determined by particular circumstances and

associations, but not born of them, nor wholly nourished by them. It is

not possible that we should have an individual attachment to sixteen

millions of men, any more than to sixty millions. We cannot be attached,

except rationally and ‘logically,’ to places we never saw, and people we

never heard of. Is not the name of Englishman a general term, as well as

that of man? How many varieties does it not combine within it? Are the

opposite extremities of the globe our native place, because they are a

part of that geographical and political denomination, our country? Does

natural affection expand in circles of latitude and longitude? What

personal or instinctive sympathy has the English peasant with the

African slave-driver, or East India nabob? None but the most ‘drawling

hypocritical’ sophist will say that there is any. These wretched

bunglers in metaphysics would fain persuade us to discard all public

principle, and all sense of abstract justice, as a violation of natural

affection, and yet do not see that the love of our country is itself in

the order of our general affections, except, indeed, that exclusive sort

which consists in a mere negation of humanity and justice. The common

notions of patriotism are, in fact, transmitted to us from the savage

tribes, or from the states of Greece and Rome, where the fate and

condition of all was the same, or where the country of the citizen was

the town in which he was born. Where this is no longer the case, where

our country is no longer contained within the narrow circle of the same

walls, where we can no longer behold its glimmering horizon from the top

of our native mountains—beyond these limits it is not a natural but an

artificial idea, and our love of it either an habitual dictate of

reason, or a cant term. It was said by an acute observer, and eloquent

writer, that the love of mankind was nothing but the love of justice:

the same might be said, with considerable truth, of the love of our

country. It is little more than another name for the love of liberty, of

independence, of peace and social happiness. We do not say, that other

indirect and collateral circumstances do not go to the superstructure of

this sentiment, (as language,[12] literature, manners, national

customs,) but this is the broad and firm basis. All other patriotism,

not founded on, or not consistent with truth, justice, and humanity, is

a painted sepulchre, fair without, but full of ravening and all

uncleanness within. ‘It leaves our passions afloat, and ends with

abusing them to crime and misery.’ It is the watchword of faction, the

base pander of avarice and pride, the ready tool in the hands of those

who, having no sense of public duty, and disclaiming all pretensions to

common humanity, sacrifice the lives of millions to the madness of one,

and are eager to offer up their country a devoted victim at the shrine

of power, as the miserable slave is yoked to the foul Eastern idol,[13]

and crushed beneath its chariot wheels! Thus the hired scribbler of a

profligate newspaper sits secure and self-satisfied at his desk—with a

venomed word, or a lie that looks like truth, sends thousands of his

countrymen to death,—receives his pay, and scribbles on, regardless of

the dying and the dead!—And this is patriotism.

The _tempora mollia fandi_ do not belong to Vetus any more than to

ourselves. He is, like us, but an uncouth courtier, a rough, sturdy,

independent politician, who thinks and speaks for himself. He complains

of ‘the soft nonsense whispered in the higher circles,’ and gossipped in

_The Morning Post_, in favour of peace. Be it so, for once, that these

soft whispers are fraught with ruin, dishonour, and slavery to this

country. Yet, if the effeminate and dastard sound once floats through

the air, borne on the downy wing of fashion—if it is whispered from the

prince to the peer, and from lords to ladies, from ministers to their

clerks, from their clerks to the treasury-prints, and from the knaves

who write to the dupes who read—even the warning voice of Vetus will not

be able to prevent the Syren sound from spreading in gentle murmurs, and

‘smoothing the raven down of discord, till it smiles.’ And will Vetus

pretend such ignorance both of the court and of the country, as not to

know, that whether the word is war or peace, the same effect will

follow—that whether the breath of kings breathe ‘airs from heaven or

blasts from hell,’ the same well-attuned system of undulating sounds

will disperse them wide in eddying circles, and the same round of smiles

and whispers and significant shrugs will be repeated, whether the

country bleeds or starves, is enslaved within, or conquered without? All

those who do not catch the soft whisper, and mimic the gracious smile,

and join the magic circle, are no better than hypocrites, madmen, and

traitors to _their country_! We know it well.

Vetus in vain attempts to repel the charge which we brought against _The

Times_, whose profession of eternal war with Bonaparte we said was

incompatible with the possibility of his making peace with us, by

asserting that this doctrine is ‘an audacious plagiarism, from the

portfolio of the French Minister.’ We have not such near access to the

portfolio of the French Government as this writer; but we have access to

_The Times_, and there we find this audacious plagiarism written in

large letters in almost every page. We say that wherever the doctrine is

found (whoever invented or whoever adopted it), there is an insuperable

bar to peace. If it is found on one side, that is the responsible side;

if it is found on both, neither can reproach the other with the

continuance of hostilities. This statement is plain and unanswerable.

Does Vetus think to ‘thrust us from a level consideration by a confident

brow, and the throng of words which come with such affected gravity from

him’? He disclaims the doctrine for himself. Why then is he so eager to

justify it in _The Times_? They are caught in the fact; they are taken

with the _manner_; and Vetus would divert us from executing summary

justice on them, by offering himself as security that they are only the

receivers of the stolen goods; ‘the audacious plagiarists,’ instead of

the atrocious inventors of this mischievous doctrine. Besides, the

answer is a wretched evasion, and makes the assertion itself senseless

and nugatory. The principle of _The Times_ was and is (if they have not

retracted it) that we are never to make peace with Bonaparte at all,

that is, though he would make peace with us, (otherwise the words have

no meaning) and then comes the gloss of Vetus, which is, that we will

not make peace with him, only because he will not make peace with us.

Ridiculous!—Vetus asks, ‘Who has been the founder of this shocking

creed—who the aggressor—who the unrelenting enemies of peace?’ May we

not answer—‘The incessant war-faction of England’? Why would Vetus strip

‘these acknowledged saviours of Europe’ of the praise which is so justly

due to them, or degrade them from that proud eminence which they have

maintained with so much persevering fortitude? We cannot withhold from

these persons our sincere conscientious thanks for all the benefits

which this war has conferred on our country, on Europe, and the world.

While France strove insidiously to ruin us by peace, these firm patriots

have always been determined to save us by war—from ‘England’s greatest

and most magnanimous politician,’ down to the last desperate incendiary

of _The Times_, who is only willing to conclude ‘a Regicide Peace’ by

celebrating ‘the condign and solemn punishment of Bonaparte!’[14]

Vetus says, that ‘eternal war is no expression of his, and that it is a

deliberate falsehood in us who assert that he has used it, or that this

country has no alternative between eternal war and eternal bondage.’ ‘It

is not England,’ he says, ‘but France—not Vetus, but the French

government—who has broached the creed, and one of the two countries must

in the end destroy the other.’

If it is a falsehood, it is a deliberate one, for we do deliberately

assert that he uses these words, and inculcates this doctrine

incessantly. But instead of contradicting Vetus, it is better to let him

contradict himself; no one else can do it so effectually. In his last

letter but one he has these words:—‘It is, I conscientiously believe, a

question, _which of these two countries shall destroy the other_. In

that case my part is taken.—France must be ruined to save our native

country from being ruined.—If this be perpetual war, I cannot help

it.—Perpetual war has little terror, when perpetual bondage threatens

us.’ Either the interpretation of this passage is that which we have

given to it, or, as Vetus says, ‘the English language must be

constructed anew.’

He now, indeed, mitigates the dread sentence he had passed upon us, by

saying, not that we have no alternative but either war, or slavery, or

_peace_. We are glad that Vetus has introduced this new clause in our

favour into the codicil; it was not in the original will, or expressed

in such faint characters, that we, with the rest of the public, missed

the intended benefaction. Just in the same manner, that profound

politician and humane writer, the author of the Essay on Population,

found out that the only possible checks to excessive population, were

vice and misery, which were, therefore, to be considered as the greatest

blessings of mankind, and having gained a vast reputation by this

singular discovery, he then recollected what every one knew before, that

there was another check to this principle, viz. _moral restraint_, and

that consequently vice and misery were not the greatest blessings of

society.

We did not state it as an inconsistency in Vetus, that he held out

_France_ as an object of terror, and yet recommended a negociation with

Bonaparte, because his government tended to weaken France, but we did

state it as a rank inconsistency in Vetus to hold up _Bonaparte_ as an

object of peculiar terror to this country, and yet to represent his

government as tottering on the brink of deplorable weakness and

unavoidable ruin. Vetus could not meet the objection, and he has altered

the terms.

Vetus concludes his letter with the following note:—

‘_The stupid impertinence_’ (charged on the attacks made upon him) ‘has

no relation to _The Morning Chronicle_, with which I am disposed to part

in peace. One feels a tolerance towards that paper, for the talents

which once adorned it; and of the continuance of which I should rejoice

to see more proof in its late attacks on Vetus. We have little common

faith in politics, but we have, I trust, a common stake in the spirit

and dignity of the press.’

We are obliged to Vetus for this amicable offer, of the sincerity of

which we entertain no doubt. As to the talent shown in our attacks on

him, we are ready to admit that it is little enough; but we at the same

time think that if it had been greater, it would have been more than the

occasion required. We have no enmity to Vetus, but to his extravagance,

and if he will correct that, he will save us the trouble of correcting

it for him. We are ready to believe that this writer has talents and

acquirements which might be made useful to the public, if he would

forego his mistaken pretensions to extraordinary wisdom and eloquence.

The qualities of profound thought and splendid imagery are seldom found

singly in the same person, and the union of both together is an

undertaking much beyond the capacity of Vetus. And now we leave him to

return to his indigestions with ‘what appetite he may.’[15]

ON THE LATE WAR

_April 3, 1814._

The systematic patrons of eternal war are always returning, when they

dare, to the point from which they set out twenty years ago; the war

with them has not yet lost its original character: they have long

memories: they never lose sight of their objects and principles. We

cannot but admire their candour as well as their consistency, and would

wish to imitate it. It is deemed necessary by the everlasting

war-faction to prove in their own justification, ‘that the march to

Paris was not chimerical in 1793,’ by carrying it into effect now, and

to blot France out of the map of Europe, three-and-twenty years after

the event had been announced by that great prophet and politician, Mr.

Burke. This splendid reverie is not yet accomplished. The triumph of the

Pitt-school over the peace-faction is not yet complete; but we are put

in complete possession of what is required to make it so. As the war

with them was a war of extermination, so the peace, not to fix a lasting

stigma on their school and principles, must be a peace of extermination.

This is what we always said and thought of those principles and that

school. This is their triumph, their _only_ triumph—the true crown of

their hopes, the consummation of their utmost wishes, nothing short of

which can satisfy their proud pretensions, or finish this just and

necessary war, as it was begun. Otherwise, no peace for them; otherwise,

they will have failed in both branches of that happy dilemma, hit upon

by the beneficent genius of ‘the great statesman, now no more,’ the

necessity of destroying France, or being ourselves destroyed in the

attempt. If they succeed in neither experiment, all that they have done

is surely lost labour. They have then a right to their revenge, ‘their

pound of carrion-flesh’—‘’tis theirs, ’tis dearly bought, and they will

have it.’ Be it so. But we shall let them feast alone: we are not

_man-eaters_. We shall not join the barbarous yell of this worse than

Thracian rout, nor figure in at the close of their dance of death, nor

applaud the catastrophe of their twenty years’ tragedy. We did not

approve it in its commencement or progress; nor will we hail its

threatened conclusion. We have had, and we will have, no hand in the

plot, the execution, the scene-shifting, or the decoration. We leave the

full credit of it to the original authors; and, in spite of all the

puffing of the Bayes’s of the Pitt-school, the only answer they will get

from us is, ‘’Tis an indifferent piece of work: would ’twere done!’

Though the torch of _The Times_ blazes over Paris, ‘fierce as a comet’;

though _The Sun_ sees the lilied banner of the Bourbons floating before

Lord Wellington in the plains of Normandy; though _The Courier_ is

setting out post-haste to break up the negociations at Chatillon; and

_The Morning Herald_ sheds tears of joy over the fashionable virtues of

the rising generation, and finds that we shall make better

man-milliners, better lacqueys, and better courtiers than ever—we remain

sceptical as to the success, and more than sceptical as to the necessity

of this last cast of our political dicers, and desperate venture of our

licenced dealers and chapmen in morality and massacre. In our opinion,

lives enough have been thrown away to prove, that the survivors are only

born to _bear fardels_. This is the moral of the piece, if it succeeds

on the principles of the Pitt-school, and all short of that is mere

gratuitous mischief. The war, conducted on those principles and for

those purposes, ‘was not, and it cannot come to good.’ Its failure, or

its success, must be fatal.

The war, as it was carried on from the first by the Pitt-school, and as

they would now revive it, was not a national quarrel, but a question

about a political principle. It had no more to do with France or England

as geographical denominations, than the wars between the Guelphs and

Gibelines. It was not a war of mercantile advantage, or a trial of

strength between two countries, which must be decided by the turn of

events, by the probable calculation of loss and profit, but a war

against an opinion, which could, therefore, never cease, but with the

extirpation of that opinion. Hence there could be neither safety, nor

honour, nor justice, in any terms of peace with the French government,

because, by the supposition, it was not with its power or its conduct,

but with its existence, that we were at war. Hence the impossibility of

maintaining the relations of peace and amity with France. Hence Mr.

Burke’s regicide war. Hence the ridiculousness asserted by _The

Courier_, of even attempting negociation with this hated power. Hence

the various and contradictory aspects which the war assumed after its

first outset, and all of which answered the purpose equally well,

because there was another pivot on which the whole turned, the

sheet-anchor which never loosed its hold, and which enabled ‘the pilot

to weather the storm.’ It was not a temporary or local question of the

boundaries, the possessions, or particular rights of rival states, but a

question, in which all states are at all times equally interested, of

the internal right of any people to choose its own form of government.

Whether this was a just ground of war or not, is another question; but

it was the true one—that which gave its character to the war, and

accounts for all its consequences. It was a war of proscription against

a great and powerful state, for having set the example of a people

ridding itself of an odious and despicable tyranny. It was the question

of the balance of power between kings and people; a question, compared

with which the balance of power in Europe is petty and insignificant.

That what we have here stated, are the real and paramount grounds of

this bloody and inveterate contest in the minds of the war-faction is,

what we apprehend they will not, in their present state of frenzy, deny.

They are the only ones that always survive the shock of accident and the

fluctuation of circumstances, and which are always recurred to when all

others fail, and are constantly avowed in the face of day, whenever the

least probability of success attends them. It has been declared again

and again, month after month, and year after year, that no peace should

be made with France till the last remaining effort had been tried to

attain this object. We were to bury ourselves with our great

war-minister, under the ruins of the civilized world, sooner than relax

in our exertions, or recede from our object. No sacrifices were to be

held too dear—no sufferings too great in the prosecution of this sacred

cause. No other than the last extremity was to force peace from us.

Nothing short of the complete subjugation of France was to satisfy

us—nothing short of our own ruin was to drive us to despair. We were

like wrestlers, struggling on the edge of a precipice, one (or both) of

whom must be certain of destruction. Such were the mad, mischievous, and

unprincipled terms, on which a pampered crew of sycophants have played

away the welfare, the repose, the liberties, and happiness of mankind,

and on which they would now urge us to stake our all again, to realize

their favourite scheme of the march to Paris, and the annihilation of

the French people.

The consequences of the Pitt project were inevitable. From the moment

that the existence of France as a nation was declared to be incompatible

with that of the surrounding states—that she was denounced as a nuisance

which must be abated, and set up as a mark for the vengeance of the rest

of the world, the struggle necessarily became convulsive, and the

re-action terrible. Is it then a matter of wonder, that in this

unnatural strife, France, proscribed, hunted down, put out of the pale

of nations, endeavoured rather to reduce others to the last extremity

than to be reduced to it herself? Or are we entitled to wreak that

vengeance upon her which we could not at first execute, because the

engine which we had prepared to crush her has recoiled with the greatest

violence upon ourselves? It has been said that we less easily forgive

the injuries we do or meditate against others, than those we receive

from them. There are, we know, persons to whom the celebrated line of

the historian is, at all times, applicable: _Odia in longum jaciens, quæ

conderet, auctaque promeret_. We are not surprised to find that the good

intentions of these persons towards France, though she did not submit to

the original tender made to her of their kind interference and paternal

care, have not spoiled by keeping. If Titus complained with so much

bitterness, that he had lost a day to virtue, what must not some modern

friends to mankind feel, when they reflect that they have lost so many

years in the execution of their just and beneficent plans!—In spite of

Mr. Southey’s reasoning in his _Carmen Triumphale_, about joining ‘the

avengers of mankind,’ we conceive that the wheel has gone once round

already, ‘full circle home,’ and that now it had better stand still.

But it may be said, do we mean to apply these remarks to Bonaparte? As

far as relates to any merits of the war-faction. It was they who

implicated him with the cause of the French people, as ‘the child and

champion of Jacobinism.’ We cannot express our opinion better than in

the words of Mr. Whitebread, ‘that England had made Bonaparte, and he

had undone himself.’ He was the creature of the Pitt-school. Was the

iron scourge which he has held over Europe put into his hands by the

peace-party? Were the battles of Austerlitz and Jena—were the march to

Vienna, the possession of Berlin, the invasion of Spain, the expedition

to Russia, and the burning of Moscow, the consequences of the signing or

of the breaking of the treaty of Amiens?

The author of the letters of Vetus, (who we suppose is silenced by _The

Times_, for asserting that the Bourbons have no more a lawful right to

the throne of France, at this moment, than the Stuarts had to the throne

of England twenty years after the Revolution of 1688,) is of opinion,

that this war is merely national, merely the old grudge between the two

countries; and that the Bourbons, the Republic, and Bonaparte, are

equally hostile to England, and we to them. In this, as in most things

else, our opinion is the opposite of his. There is only one period of

the history of the two countries, which, reversed, furnishes an exact

counterpart to the present contest, both in its avowed principles and

secret motives—we mean the war waged by Louis XIV. against this country

and its allies, for nearly as long a period after the English

Revolution. The difference in the results of these two revolutions has

been this: that from the insular situation of this country, which

enables us to do either right or wrong, nearly with impunity, and which

makes our means of defence greater, and our means of offence

proportionably less—that from this collateral cause, the internal

struggle, in proportion to the danger, was less bloody in our own case,

and the re-action of our efforts to defend ourselves from the imposition

of a foreign yoke and of hereditary slavery, less violent and fatal to

other states. All the differences have arisen from the character of the

two nations, and from local and accidental circumstances: there was none

in the abstract political principle. We gave them the example of their

Revolution; we also gave them an example of ‘national fortitude’ in

maintaining it. We—the people of England, (not an upstart jacobite

faction in the Hanoverian line,) are proud of having imitators; and we

think it not unlikely that the French, if forced upon it, may behave on

this occasion as the English behaved, when an hereditary pretender came

over to us, backed by the aid of foreign arms, to assert his lawful

claim to the throne—that is, in other words, to be the natural

proprietor of a whole people. We twice sent him back again with all his

myrmidons; we would not be made a property of. We felt that in not doing

so we should be traitors, not only to our country, but to our kind—the

worst species of treason to our country. It is curious that the ‘deepest

enmity which the French people have drawn down upon them by their early

struggles in the same cause, should be shewn by that government who had

long insulted the slavery of Europe by the loudness of its boasts of

freedom.’ We do not know how it is, but so it has happened, that in the

thirty years of war which have graced the annals of the present reign,

there has been a considerable want of sympathy between the crown and the

people, as if the quarrel were merely the cause of kings, in which the

people had no concern. Has this circumstance arisen from any unpleasant

sense of obligation, or consciousness of a little irregularity and

deviation from the right line in the descent of the crown, no more

accounted for in Mr. Burke’s Reflections, than the declination of atoms

in Epicurus’s philosophy? The restoration of the Bourbons in France will

be the re-establishment of the principles of the Stuarts in this

country.[16]

PRINCE MAURICE’S PARROT

OR, FRENCH INSTRUCTIONS TO A BRITISH PLENIPOTENTIARY

_Sept. 18, 1814._

1. That the French people were so deeply implicated in the Slave trade,

as not even to know that it had been abolished by this country.

2. That the French press had been so long under the complete despotic

control of Bonaparte, that the present government must despair of making

any immediate impression on the independence of the political opinions,

or the energetic firmness of the individual feelings of the people,

lately consigned to their protection.

3. That such were their blind and rooted prejudices against the English,

that we could only hope to convince them of our entire sincerity and

disinterestedness in abolishing the Slave Trade ourselves, by lending a

helping hand to its revival by others.

4. That if we consented to give up our colonial conquests to the French,

on conditions dictated only by the general principles of humanity, this

would be a proof that we intended to keep them in our hands from the

most base and mercenary motives.

5. That the French government simply wished to begin the Slave Trade

again as the easiest way of leaving it off, that so they might combine

the experiment of its gradual restoration with that of its gradual

abolition, and, by giving the people an interest in it, more effectually

wean their affections from it.

6. That it is highly honourable in us to have proposed, and in the

French to have agreed to, the abolition of the Slave Trade, at the end

of five years, though it would have been insulting in us to have

proposed, and degrading in them to have submitted to, any stipulation on

the subject.

7. That to rob and murder on the coast of Africa is among the internal

rights of legislation and domestic privileges of every European and

Christian state.

8. That we are not to teach the French people religion and morality at

the point of the sword, though this is what we have been professing to

teach them for the last two and twenty years.

9. That his most Christian Majesty Louis XVIII. is so fully impressed

with the humane and benevolent sentiments of Great Britain and the

allies in favour of the abolition of the Slave Trade, that he was ready

to have plunged all Europe into a war for its continuance.

10. That we could not possibly make the abolition, (though the French

government would certainly have made the revival) of the Slave Trade a

_sine qua non_ in the treaty of peace, and that they would otherwise

have gone to war to recover by force of arms what they can only owe to

the credulity or complaisance of our negociators.

Lastly. That by consenting to the re-establishment of the Slave Trade in

France, we were most effectually preparing the way for its abolition all

over the world.

‘With so little a web as this will I ensnare so great a fly as

_Cassio_!’—Such were the formidable barriers, the intricate lines of

circumvallation, drawn by the French round the abolition of the Slave

Trade, as strong as those which they threw up to defend their capital:

yet we think, that after our political missionary had overleaped the

one, he might have broken through the other. Where there is a will,

there is a way. But there are some minds to which every flimsy pretext

presents an insurmountable obstacle, where only the interests of justice

and humanity are at stake. These persons are always impotent to

save—powerful only to oppress and to betray. Their torpid faculties and

amiable apathy are never roused but by the calculations of

self-interest, or the thirst of revenge. The glossy sleekness of the

panther’s skin does not blunt the sharpness of his fangs, and his

fawning eye dooms his victim while it glitters. But to come to Lord

Castlereagh. In the present instance, he appears to have been cajoled

into acquiescence from his well-known indifference to the object. His

speech contained nothing but a story of a cock and a bull, told by M.

Talleyrand with great grace and gravity, assented to by his Lordship

with equal affability and address, and repeated to the House of Commons

with hesitating volubility and plausible negligence of manner. It is

well to sacrifice to the graces; but it is too much to have sacrificed a

whole continent to the graces of M. Talleyrand’s person, or the purity

of his French accent. We can imagine how the scene took place. This

question of Africa, being considered as an idle question, in which

neither courts nor ministers were concerned, would be naturally left as

a sort of _carte-blanche_ for all the flourishes of national

_politesse_, as a kind of _no man’s ground_ for a trial of diplomatic

skill and complaisance. So Lord Castlereagh, drawing on his gloves,

hemmed once or twice, while the French minister carelessly took snuff:

he then introduced the question with a smile, which was answered by a

more gracious smile from M. Talleyrand: his Lordship then bowed, as if

to bespeak attention; but the Prince of Benevento bowing still lower,

prevented what he had to say; and the cries of Africa were lost amidst

the nods and smile and shrugs of these demi-puppets. The Ex-bishop of

Autun may in future hope to find a successful representative in the

English Ambassador from Paris; for the noble secretary _mistified_ the

house, as he had himself been _mistified_ by his highness of

Benevento.—Count Fathom, after his defeat by the French abbé, practised

in this his adopted country with great applause! We may take this

opportunity of remarking, that we do not think his Lordship at all

improved during his stay in France. He performs the arc of his

oscillation from the treasury bench to the table, and from the table

back again, in a second less time than he used to do. He commits dulness

with greater vivacity, and flounders more briskly in an argument. He has

enhanced the loose dangling slip-shod manner which so well accords with

his person and understanding, into something positive and dogmatical;

and is even grown tenacious of the immaculateness of his maiden treaty,

which he will not have so much as suspected: In this alteration of tone

we think him wrong. We have always looked upon Lord Castlereagh as an

excellent taffeta lining to a court dress; but he should leave the

buckram of office to his friend the secretary of the Admiralty.

WHETHER THE FRIENDS OF FREEDOM CAN ENTERTAIN ANY SANGUINE HOPES OF THE

FAVOURABLE RESULTS OF THE ENSUING CONGRESS?

_Oct. 23, 1814._

An excellent article appeared in the EXAMINER of last week, giving a

general outline of the views and principles which ought to actuate the

allied powers at the approaching Congress, and of the leading

arrangements with respect to the different subjects to be brought under

consideration, which ought to follow from those principles. Cordially as

we agree with this respectable writer in the several points which he has

stated, we are, we confess, far from feeling any strong assurances that

even any one of these points will be amicably adjusted. They are briefly

these:—1. That Poland should be restored to her independence. 2. That

the other powers of Europe should no longer co-operate with Sweden in

the subjugation of Norway. 3. That the Slave Trade should be immediately

and generally abolished. 4. That Saxony should not share a fate similar

to that of Poland. 5. That Austria should relinquish her views of unjust

aggrandisement in Italy. 6. and last, That some concessions should

probably be made by England as to her exclusive claims to maritime

supremacy, as far as those claims are found to be rather galling to the

feelings of other nations, than essential to her own security. All of

the objects here recommended are, we should imagine, every way

practicable as well as desirable, if there were any thing like a hearty

good-will to avail themselves of the present favourable situation of the

world in those who have the power to decide its fate. Armed with

sovereign authority, seconded by public opinion, with every obstacle

removed from their dread of the overwhelming power of France, they have

all the means at their disposal to rear a splendid, lofty, and lasting

monument to justice, liberty, and humanity. Are the views then of the

allied sovereigns solely directed to these objects? That is the simple

question; and we are afraid it would be great presumption to answer it

in the affirmative. It would be supposing that the late events have

purified the hearts of princes and nations; that they have been taught

wisdom by experience, and the love of justice from the sense of injury;

that mutual confidence and good-will have succeeded to narrow prejudices

and rankling jealousy; that the race of ambitious and unprincipled

monarchs, of crafty politicians, and self-interested speculators is at

an end; that the destructive rivalry between states has given way to

liberal and enlightened views of general safety and advantage; and that

the powers of Europe will in future unite with the same zeal and

magnanimity for the common good, as when they were bound in a common

cause against the common enemy. All this appears to us quite as Utopian

as any other scheme which supposes that the human mind can change. Happy

should we be, if instead of those magnificent and beneficial projects in

which some persons seem still to indulge their imaginations as the

results of this meeting, the whole should not turn out to be no better

than a compromise of petty interests, of shallow policy, and flagrant

injustice.

We forbore for a long time from saying any thing on this ungrateful

subject: but our forbearance has not hitherto, at least, been rewarded.

We shall therefore speak out plainly on the subject; as we should be

sorry to be thought accomplices in a delusion, which can only end in

disappointment. The professions of justice, moderation, and the love of

liberty, made by the powers of Europe at the end of the last, and at the

beginning of the present year, were certainly admirable: they were

called for at the time, and were possibly sincere. But we are all of us

apt to forego those good resolutions which are extorted from us by

circumstances rather than from reason or habit, and to recant ‘vows made

in pain as violent and void.’ Without meaning any indirect allusion to

the person into whose mouth these words are put, we believe this, that

princes are princes, and that men are men; and that to expect any great

sacrifices of interest or passion from either in consequence of certain

well-timed and well-sounding professions, drawn from them by necessity,

when that necessity no longer exists, is to belie all our experience of

human nature. We remember what modern courts and ministers were before

the dreaded power of Bonaparte arose; and we conceive this to be the

best and only ground to argue what they will be, now that that power has

ceased. ‘Why so, being gone, they are themselves again.’ It appears to

us, that some very romantic and extravagant expectations were

entertained from the destruction of the tyranny of Bonaparte. It is

true, his violence and ambition for a while suspended all other projects

of the same kind. ‘The right divine of kings to govern wrong’ was

wrested from the puny hands of its legitimate possessors, and strangely

monopolized by one man. The regular professors of the regal art were set

aside by the superior skill and prowess of an adventurer. They became in

turn the tools, or the victims of the machinations of the maker and

puller-down of kings. Instead of their customary employment of annoying

their neighbours, or harassing their subjects, they had enough to do to

defend their territories and their titles. The aggressions which they

had securely meditated against the independence of nations, and their

haughty contempt for the liberties of mankind, were retorted on their

own heads. The poisoned chalice was returned to their own lips. They

then first felt the sting of injustice, and the bitterness of scorn.

They saw how weak and little they were in themselves. They were roused

from the still life of courts, and forced to assume the rank of men.

They appealed to their people to defend their thrones; they called on

them to rally round the altar of their country; they invoked the name of

liberty, and in that name they conquered. Plans of national

aggrandisement or private revenge were forgotten in the intoxication of

triumph, as they had been in the agony of despair. This sudden

usurpation had so overpowered the imaginations of men, that they began

to consider it as the only evil that had ever existed in the world, and

that with it, all tyranny and ambition would cease. War was talked of as

if it had been an invention of the modern Charlemagne, and the Golden

age was to be restored with the Bourbons. But it is hard for the great

and mighty to learn in the school of adversity: emperors and kings bow

reluctantly to the yoke of necessity. When the panic is over, they will

be glad to drink of the cup of oblivion. The false idols which had been

set up to Liberty and Nature, to Genius and Fortune, are thrown down,

and they have once more ‘all power given them upon earth.’ How they are

likely to use it, whether for the benefit and happiness of mankind, or

to gratify their own prejudices and passions, we have, in one or two

instances, seen already. No one will in future look for ‘the milk of

human kindness’ in the Crown Prince of Sweden, who is a monarch of the

new school; nor for examples of romantic generosity and gratitude in

Ferdinand of Spain, who is one of the old. A jackal or baboon, dandled

in the paws of a royal Bengal tiger, may not be very formidable; but it

would be idle to suppose, if they should providentially escape, that

they would become tame, useful, domestic animals.

The King of Prussia has recovered the sword of the Great Frederick, his

humane, religious, moral, and unambitious predecessor, only, as it

appears, to unsheath it against the King of Saxony, his old companion in

arms. The Emperor of Austria seems eager to catch at the iron crown of

Italy, which has just fallen from the brows of his son-in-law. The King

of France, _our_ King of France, Louis the Desired, and who by the ‘all

hail hereafter,’ is to receive the addition of Louis the Wise, has

improved his reflections during a twenty years’ exile, into a humane and

amiable sanction of the renewal of the Slave Trade for five years only.

His Holiness the Pope, happy to have escaped from the clutches of the

arch-tyrant and impostor, employs his leisure hours in restoring the

order of the Jesuits, and persecuting the Freemasons. Ferdinand, the

grateful and the enlightened, who has passed through the same discipline

of humanity with the same effect, shuts up the doors of the Cortes, (as

it is scandalously asserted, at the instigation of Lord Wellington), and

throws open those of the Inquisition. At all this, the romantic admirers

of patriot kings, who fondly imagined that the hatred of the oppressor

was the same thing as the hatred of oppression, (among these we presume

we may reckon the poet-laureat,) hang their heads, and live in hope of

better times. To us it is all natural, and in order. From this grand

gaol-delivery of princes and potentates, we could expect nothing else

than a recurrence to their old habits and favourite principles. These

observations have not been hastily or gratuitously obtruded: they have

been provoked by a succession of disgusting and profligate acts of

inconsistency and treachery, unredeemed by a single effort of heroic

virtue or generous enthusiasm. Almost every principle, almost every

profession, almost every obligation, has been broken. If any proof is

wanting, look at Norway, look at Italy, look at Spain, look at the

Inquisition, look at the Slave Trade. The mask of liberty has been taken

off by most of the principal performers; the whining cant of humanity is

no longer heard in _The Courier_ and _The Times_. What then remains for

us to build a hope upon, but the Whig principles of the Prince Regent,

inherited from his ancestors, and the good nature of the Emperor of

Russia, the merit of which is entirely his own? Of the former of these

personages, our opinion is so well known, that we need not repeat it

here. Again, of the good intentions of the last-mentioned sovereign, we

declare that we have as full a persuasion. We believe him to be docile

to instruction, inquisitive after knowledge, and inclined to good. But

it has been said by those who have better means of information than

ourselves, that he is too open to the suggestions of those about him;

that, like other learners, he thinks the newest opinion the best, and

that his real good-nature and want of duplicity render him not

sufficiently proof against the selfish or sinister designs of others. He

has certainly a character for disinterestedness and magnanimity to

support in history: but history is a glass in which few minds fashion

themselves. If in his late conduct there was any additional impulse

given to the natural simplicity of his character, it probably arose from

an obvious desire to furnish a contrast to the character of Bonaparte,

and also to redeem the Russian character, hitherto almost another name

for barbarity and ferociousness, in the eyes of civilized Europe. In

this point of view, we should not despair that something may be

attempted, at least with respect to Poland, by the present autocrat of

all the Russias, to blot out certain stains on the reputation of his

grand-mother, the Empress Catherine.

With regard to Norway, the only hope of the suspension of its fate seems

to arise out of a very natural, if not laudable jealousy and distaste,

which have been conceived by some of the old-standing sovereigns of

Europe against the latest occupier and most forward pretender to

thrones. An adventurer who has made a fortune by gaining a prize in the

lottery, or by laying _qui tam_ informations against his accomplices,

cannot expect to be admitted, on an equality, into the company of

persons of regular character and family estates. The Emperor of Austria,

in particular, may have additional motives of dislike to Bernadotte,

connected with late events; and we agree with the _Examiner_, that he

may, in the end, ‘have to regret the length to which he was hurried

against a man, who was the key-stone of all the new power which had been

built on the ruin of thrones.’

As to any immediate adjustment of the maritime rights of this country,

on general principles, satisfactory to all parties, we see no reason to

expect it. We think the following paragraph justifies us in this

opinion. ‘We are told,’ says the _Morning Chronicle_, ‘that on the day

when the capture of the city of Washington, and the demolition of its

public buildings reached Paris, the Duke of Wellington had a ball: not

one public ambassador of the potentates of Europe, our good allies,

presented himself to congratulate his grace on the event.’ We here see,

on one side, the most absurd expectations of disinterested sympathy with

our national feelings, and as little disposition to enter into them on

the other. It is strange that the above paragraph should have found its

way into a paper which makes an almost exclusive profession of liberal

and comprehensive views.

Nor can we indulge in any serious expectations of ‘the immediate and

general abolition of the Slave Trade.’ Africa has little to hope from

‘the prevailing gentle arts’ of Lord Castlereagh. However sturdy he may

be in asserting our maritime rights, he will, we imagine, go to sleep

over those of humanity, and waking from his _doux sommeil_, find that

the dexterous prince of political jugglers has picked his pocket of his

African petitions, if, indeed, he chuses to carry the credentials of his

own disgrace about with him. There are two obstacles to the success of

this measure. In the first place, France has received such forcible

lessons from this country on the old virtues of patriotism and loyalty,

that she must feel particularly unwilling to be dictated to on the new

doctrines of liberality and humanity. Secondly, the abolition of the

Slave Trade, on our part, was itself the act of Mr. Fox’s

administration—an administration which we should suppose there is no

very strong inclination to relieve from any part of the contempt or

obloquy which it has been the fashion to pour upon it, by extending the

benefit of its measures, or recommending the adoption of its principles.

There is another point, on which, though our doubts are by no means

strong or lasting, we do not at all times feel the same absolute

confidence—the continuance of the present order of things in France. The

principles adhered to in the determination of some of the preceding

arrangements, and the permanent views which shall appear to actuate the

other powers of Europe, may have no inconsiderable influence on this

great question. Whatever tends to allay the ferment in men’s minds, and

to take away just causes of recrimination and complaint, must, of

course, lessen the pretexts for change. We should not, however, be more

disposed to augur such a change from the remaining attachment of

individuals, or of the army, to Bonaparte, than from the general

versatility and restlessness of the French character, and their total

want of settled opinion, which might oppose a check to military

enthusiasm. Even their present unqualified zeal, in the cause of the

Bourbons, is ominous. How long this sudden fit of gratitude, for

deliverance from evils certainly brought upon them by their slowness to

admit the remedy, may continue, it is impossible to say. A want of

_keeping_ is the distinguishing quality of the French character. A

people of this sort cannot be depended on for a moment. They are blown

about like a weathercock, with every breath of caprice or accident, and

would cry _vive l’empereur_ to-morrow, with as much vivacity and as

little feeling, as they do _vive le roi_ to-day. They have no fixed

principle of action. They are alike indifferent to every thing: their

self-complacency supplies the place of all other advantages—of virtue,

liberty, honour, and even of outward appearances. They are the only

people who are vain of being cuckolded and being conquered.—A people

who, after trampling over the face of Europe so long, fell down before

their assailants without striking a blow, and who boast of their

submission as a fine thing, are not a nation of men, but of women. The

spirit of liberty, at the Revolution, gave them an impulse common to

humanity; the genius of Bonaparte gave them the spirit of military

ambition. Both of these gave an energy and consistency to their

character, by concentrating their natural volatility on one great

object. But when both of these causes failed, the Allies found that

France consisted of nothing but ladies’ toilettes. The army are the

muscular part of the state; mere patriotism is a pasteboard visor, which

opposes no resistance to the sword. Whatever they determine will be

done; an effeminate public is a non-entity. They will not relish the

Bourbons long, if they remain at peace; and if they go to war, they will

want a monarch who is also a general.

THE LAY OF THE LAUREATE, CARMEN NUPTIALE, _by Robert Southey, Esq.,

Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal

Spanish Academy of History_.—London, Longmans, 1816.

_Examiner_, _July 7, 1816_.

The dog which his friend Launce brought as a present to Madam Silvia in

lieu of a lap-dog, was something like ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ which

Mr. Southey has here offered to the Princess Charlotte for a Nuptial

Song. It is ‘a very currish performance, and deserves none but currish

thanks.’ Launce thought his own dog, Crab, better than any other; and

Mr. Southey thinks his own praises the fittest compliment for a lady’s

ear. His Lay is ten times as long, and he thinks it is therefore ten

times better than an Ode of Mr. Pye’s.

Mr. Southey in this poem takes a tone which was never heard before in

a drawing-room. It is the first time that ever a Reformist was made a

Poet-laureate. Mr. Croker was wrong in introducing his old friend, the

author of ‘Joan of Arc,’ at Carlton-House. He might have known how it

would be. If we had doubted the good old adage before, ‘Once a Jacobin

and always a Jacobin,’ since reading ‘The Lay of the Laureate,’ we are

sure of it. A Jacobin is one who would have his single opinion govern

the world, and overturn every thing in it. Such a one is Mr. Southey.

Whether he is a Republican or a Royalist,—whether he hurls up the red

cap of liberty, or wears the lily, stained with the blood of all his

old acquaintance, at his breast,—whether he glories in Robespierre or

the Duke of Wellington—whether he pays a visit to Old Sarum, or makes

a pilgrimage to Waterloo,—whether he is praised by _The Courier_, or

parodied by Mr. Canning,—whether he thinks a King the best or the

worst man in his dominions,—whether he is a Theophilanthropist or a

Methodist of the church of England,—whether he is a friend of

Universal Suffrage and Catholic Emancipation, or a Quarterly

Reviewer,—whether he insists on an equal division of lands, or of

knowledge,—whether he is for converting infidels to Christianity, or

Christians to infidelity,—whether he is for pulling down the kings of

the East or those of the West,—whether he sharply sets his face

against all establishments, or maintains that whatever is, is

right,—whether he prefers what is old to what is new, or what is new

to what is old,—whether he believes that all human evil is remediable

by human means, or makes it out to himself that a Reformer is worse

than a housebreaker,—whether he is in the right or the wrong, poet or

prose-writer, courtier or patriot,—he is still the same pragmatical

person—every sentiment or feeling that he has is nothing but the

effervescence of incorrigible overweening self-opinion. He not only

thinks whatever opinion he may hold for the time infallible, but that

no other is even to be tolerated, and that none but knaves and fools

can differ with him. ‘The friendship of the good and wise is his.’ If

any one is so unfortunate as to hold the same opinions that he himself

formerly did, this but aggravates the offence by irritating the

jealousy of his self-love, and he vents upon them a double portion of

his spleen. Such is the constitutional slenderness of his

understanding, its ‘glassy essence,’ that the slightest collision of

sentiment gives an irrecoverable shock to him. He regards a Catholic

or a Presbyterian, a Deist or an Atheist, with equal repugnance, and

makes no difference between the Pope, the Turk, and the Devil. He

thinks a rival poet a bad man, and would suspect the principles,

moral, political, and religious, of any one who did not spell the word

_laureate_ with an _e_ at the end of it.—If Mr. Southey were a bigot,

it would be well; but he has only the intolerance of bigotry. His

violence is not the effect of attachment to any principles,

prejudices, or paradoxes of his own, but of antipathy to those of

others. It is an impatience of contradiction, an unwillingness to

share his opinions with others, a captious monopoly of wisdom,

candour, and common sense. He is not an enthusiast in religion, but he

is an enemy to philosophers; he does not respect old establishments,

but he hates new ones; he has no objection to regicides, but he is

inexorable against usurpers; he will tell you that ‘the re-risen cause

of evil’ in France yielded to ‘the Red Cross and Britain’s arm of

might,’ and shortly after he denounces this Red Cross as the scarlet

whore of Babylon, and warns Britain against her eternal malice and

poisoned cup; he calls on the Princess Charlotte in the name of the

souls of ten thousand little children, who are without knowledge in

_this age of light_, ‘SAVE OR WE PERISH,’ and yet sooner than they

should be saved by Joseph Fox or Joseph Lancaster, he would see them

damned; he would go himself into Egypt and pull down ‘the barbarous

kings’ of the East, and yet his having gone there on this very errand

is not among the least of Bonaparte’s crimes; he would ‘abate the

malice’ of the Pope and the Inquisition, and yet he cannot contain the

fulness of his satisfaction at the fall of the only person who had

both the will and the power to do this. Mr. Southey began with a

decent hatred of kings and priests, but it yielded to his greater

hatred of the man who trampled them in the dust. He does not feel much

affection to those who are born to thrones, but that any one should

gain a throne as he has gained the laureate-wreath, by superior merit

alone, was the unpardonable sin against Mr. Southey’s levelling Muse!

The poetry of the Lay is beneath criticism; it has all sorts of obvious

common-place defects, without any beauties either obvious or recondite.

It is the Namby-Pamby of the Tabernacle; a Methodist sermon turned into

doggrel verse. It is a gossipping confession of Mr. Southey’s political

faith—the ‘Practice of Piety’ or the ‘Whole Duty of Man’ mixed up with

the discordant slang of the metaphysical poets of the nineteenth

century. Not only do his sentiments every where betray the old

Jacobinical leaven, the same unimpaired desperate unprincipled spirit of

partisanship, regardless of time, place, and circumstance, and of every

thing but its own headstrong will; there is a gipsey jargon in the

expression of his sentiments which is equally indecorous. Does our

Laureate think it according to court-etiquette that he should be as

old-fashioned in his language as in the cut of his clothes?—On the

present occasion, when one might expect a truce with impertinence, he

addresses the Princess neither with the fancy of the poet, the

courtier’s grace, nor the manners of a gentleman, but with the air of an

inquisitor or father-confessor. Geo. Fox, the Quaker, did not wag his

tongue more saucily against the Lord’s Anointed in the person of Charles

II., than our Laureate here assures the daughter of his Prince, that so

shall she prosper in this world and the next, as she minds what he says

to her. Would it be believed (yet so it is) that, in the excess of his

unauthorized zeal, Mr. Southey in one place advises the Princess

conditionally to rebel against her father? Here is the passage. The

Angel of the English church thus addresses the Royal Bride:-

‘Bear thou that great Eliza in thy mind,

Who from a wreck this fabric edified;

And HER who to a nation’s voice resigned,

When Rome in hope its wiliest engines plied,

_By her own heart and righteous Heaven approved,

Stood up against the Father whom she loved_.’

This is going a good way. Is it meant, that if the Prince Regent, ‘to a

nation’s voice resigned,’ should grant Catholic Emancipation in defiance

of the ‘Quarterly Review,’ Mr. Southey would encourage the Princess in

standing up against her father, in imitation of the pious and patriotic

daughter of James II.?

This quaint effusion of poetical fanaticism is divided into four parts,

the Proem, the Dream, the Epilogue, and L’Envoy. The Proem opens thus:—

‘There was a time when all my youthful thought

Was of the Muse; and of the Poet’s fame,

How fair it flourisheth and fadeth not, ...

Alone enduring, when the Monarch’s name

Is but an empty sound, the Conqueror’s bust

Moulders and is forgotten in the dust.’

This may be very true, but not so proper to be spoken in this place. Mr.

Southey may think himself a greater man than the Prince Regent, but he

need not go to Carlton-House to tell him so. He endeavours to prove that

the Prince Regent and the Duke of Wellington (put together) are greater

than Bonaparte, but then he is by his own rule greater than all three of

them. We have here perhaps the true secret of Mr. Southey’s excessive

anger at the late Usurper. If all his youthful thought was of his own

inborn superiority to conquerors or kings, we can conceive that

Bonaparte’s fame must have appeared a very great injustice done to his

pretensions; it is not impossible that the uneasiness with which he

formerly heard the names of Marengo, of Austerlitz, of Jena, of Wagram,

of Friedland, and of Borodino, may account for the industrious

self-complacency with which he harps upon those of Busaco, Vimiera,

Salamanca, Vittoria, Thoulouse, and Waterloo; and that the Iron Crown of

Italy must have pressed upon his (Mr. Southey’s) brows, with a weight

most happily relieved by the light laureate-wreath! We are justified in

supposing Mr. Southey capable of envying others, for he supposes others

capable of envying him. Thus he sings of himself and his office:—

‘Yea in this now, while malice frets her hour,

Is foretaste given me of that meed divine;

Here undisturbed in this sequestered bower,

The friendship of the good and wise is mine;

And that green wreath which decks the Bard when dead,

That laureate garland crowns my living head.

That wreath which in Eliza’s golden days

My master dear, divinest Spenser, wore,

That which rewarded Drayton’s learned lays,

Which thoughtful Ben and gentle Daniel[17] bore ...

Grin, Envy, through thy ragged mask of scorn!

In honour it was given, with honour it is worn!’

Now we do assure Mr. Southey, that we do not envy him this honour. Many

people laugh at him, some may blush for him, but nobody envies him. As

to Spenser, whom he puts in the list of great men who have preceded him

in his office, his laureateship has been bestowed on him by Mr. Southey;

it did not ‘crown his living head.’ We all remember his being refused

the hundred pounds for his ‘Fairy Queen.’ Poets were not wanted in those

days to celebrate the triumphs of princes over the people. But why does

he not bring his list down nearer to his own time—to Pye and Whitehead

and Colley Cibber? Does Mr. Southey disdain to be considered as the

successor even of Dryden? That green wreath which decks our author’s

living head, is so far from being, as he would insinuate, an

anticipation of immortality, that it is no credit to any body, and least

of all to Mr. Southey. He might well have declined the reward of

exertions in a cause which throws a stigma of folly or something worse

on the best part of his life. Mr. Southey ought not to have received

what would not have been offered to the author of ‘Joan of Arc.’

Mr. Southey himself maintains that his song has still been ‘to Truth and

Freedom true’; that he has never changed his opinions; that it is the

cause of French liberty that has left him, not he the cause. That may be

so. But there is one person in the kingdom who has, we take it, been at

least as consistent in his conduct and sentiments as Mr. Southey, and

that person is the King. Thus the Laureate emphatically advises the

Princess:—

‘Look to thy Sire, and _in his steady way,

As in his Father’s he_, learn thou to tread.’

Now the question is, whether Mr. Southey agreed with his Majesty on the

subject of the French Revolution when he published ‘Joan of Arc.’ Though

Mr. Southey ‘as beseems him well’ congratulates the successes of the

son, we do not recollect that he condoled with the disappointments of

the father in the same cause. The King has not changed, therefore Mr.

Southey has. The sun does not turn to the sun-flower; but the sun-flower

follows the sun. Our poet has thoughtlessly committed himself in the

above lines. He may be right in applauding that one sole purpose of his

Majesty’s reign which he formerly condemned: that he can be consistent

in applauding what he formerly condemned, is impossible. That his

majesty King George III. should make a convert of Mr. Southey rather

than Mr. Southey of George III. is probable for many reasons. The King

by siding with the cause of the people could not, like King William,

have gained a crown: Mr. Southey, by deserting it, has got a hundred

pounds a-year. A certain English ambassador, who had a long time resided

at the court of Rome, was on his return introduced at the levee of Queen

Caroline. This lady, who was almost as great a prig as Mr. Southey,

asked him why in his absence he did not try to make a convert of the

Pope to the Protestant religion. He answered, ‘Madam, the reason was

that I had nothing better to offer his Holiness than what he already has

in his possession.’ The Pope would no doubt have been of the same way of

thinking. This is the reason why kings, from sire to son, pursue ‘their

steady way,’ and are less changeable than canting cosmopolites.

THE LAY OF THE LAUREATE, CARMEN NUPTIALE, _by Robert Southey, Esq.

Poet-Laureate, Member of the Royal Spanish Academy, and of the Royal

Spanish Academy of History_.—London: Longmans, 1816.

(CONCLUDED.)

‘_Queen._ Hamlet, thou hast thy Father much offended.

‘_Hamlet._ Madam, you have my Father much offended.’

_July 14, 1816._

Though we do not think Mr. Southey has been quite consistent, we do not

think him a hypocrite. This poem proves it. How should he maintain the

same opinion all his life, when he cannot maintain it for two stanzas

together? The weakness of his reasoning shews that he is the dupe of it.

He has not the faculty of perceiving contradictions. He is not

accountable for his mistakes. There is not a single sentiment advanced

in any part of the _Lay_, which is not flatly denied in some other part

of it. Let us see:—

‘Proudly I raised the high thanksgiving strain

Of victory in a rightful cause achieved:

For which _I long had looked and not in vain,

As one who with firm faith and undeceived,

In history and the heart of man could find

Sure presage of deliverance for mankind_.’

Mr. Southey does not inform us in what year he began to look for this

deliverance, but if he had looked for it long, he must have looked for

it long in vain. Does our poet then find no presage of deliverance for

‘conquered France’ in the same principles that he found it for ‘injured

Germany’? But he has no principles; or he does not himself know what

they are. He praises Providence in this particular instance for having

conformed to his hopes; and afterwards thus gives us the general results

of his reading in history and the human heart. In the Dream he says,

speaking of Charissa and Speranza—

‘This lovely pair unrolled before the throne

“Earth’s melancholy map,” whereon to sight

Two broad divisions at a glance were shown,

The empires these of darkness and of light.

Well might the thoughtful bosom sigh to mark

How wide a portion of the map was dark.

Behold, Charissa cried, how large a space

Of earth lies unredeemed! Oh grief to think

That countless myriads of immortal race

In error born, in ignorance must sink,

Trained up in customs which corrupt the heart

And following miserably the evil part!

Regard the expanded Orient from the shores

Of scorched Arabia and the Persian sea,

To where the inhospitable Ocean roars

Against the rocks of frozen Tartary;

Look next at those Australian isles which lie

Thick as the stars which stud the wintry sky.

Then let thy mind contemplative survey

That spacious region where in elder time

Earth’s unremembered conquerors held the sway

And Science trusting in her skill sublime,

With lore abstruse the sculptured walls o’erspread,

Its import now forgotten with the dead.

From Nile and Congo’s undiscovered springs

To the four seas which gird the unhappy land,

Behold it left a prey to barbarous Kings,

The Robber and the Trader’s ruthless hand;

Sinning and suffering, everywhere unblest,

Behold her wretched sons, oppressing and opprest!’

This is ‘a pretty picture’ to be drawn by one who finds in the past

history of the world the sure presage of deliverance for mankind. We

grant indeed that Mr. Southey was right in one thing, viz. in expecting

from it that sort of ‘deliverance of mankind,’ bound hand and foot, into

the power of Kings and Priests, which has actually come to pass, and

which he has celebrated with so much becoming pomp, both here and

elsewhere. The doctrine of ‘millions made for one’ has to be sure got a

tolerable footing in the East. It has attained a very venerable old age

there—it is mature even to rottenness, but without decay. ‘Old, old,

Master Shallow,’ but eternal. It is transmitted down in unimpaired

succession from sire to son. Snug’s the word. Legitimacy is not there

militant, but triumphant, as the Editor of _The Times_ would wish. It is

long since the people had any thing to do with the laws but to obey

them, or any laws to obey but the will of their taskmasters. This is the

necessary end of legitimacy. The Princes and Potentates cut one

another’s throats as they please, but the people have no hand in it.

They have no French Revolutions there, no rights of man to terrify

barbarous kings, no republicans or levellers, no weathercock deliverers

and re-deliverers of mankind, no Mr. Southeys nor Mr. Wordsworths. In

this they are happy. Things there are perfectly settled, in the state in

which they should be,—still as death, and likely to remain so. Mr.

Southey’s exquisite reason for supposing that a crusade to pull down

divine right would succeed in the East, is that a crusade to prop it up

has just succeeded in the West. That will never do. Besides, what

security can he give, if he goes on improving in wisdom for the next

five and twenty years as he has done for the last, that he would not in

the end be as glad to see these ‘barbarous kings’ restored to their

rightful thrones, as he is now anxious to see them tumbled from them?

The doctrine of ‘divine right’ is of longer standing and more firmly

established in the East than in the West, because the Eastern world is

older than ours. We might say of it,

‘The wars it well remembers of King Nine,

Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.’

It is fixed on the altar and the throne, safe, quite safe against Mr.

Southey’s enthusiasm in its second spring, his Missionary Societies, and

his Schools for All. It overlays that vast continent, like an ugly

incubus, sucking the blood and stopping up the breath of man’s life.

That detestable doctrine, which in England first tottered and fell

headless to the ground with the martyred Charles; which we kicked out

with his son James, and kicked twice back with two Pretenders, to make

room for ‘Brunswick’s fated line,’ a line of our own chusing, and for

that reason worth all Mr. Southey’s lines put together; that detestable

doctrine, which the French, in 1793, ousted from their soil,

thenceforward sacred in the eyes of humanity, which they ousted from it

again in 1815, making it doubly sacred; and which (oh grief, oh shame)

was borne into it once more on English shoulders, and thrust down their

throats with English bayonets; this detestable doctrine, which would, of

right and with all the sanctions of religion and morality, sacrifice the

blood of millions to the least of its prejudices; which would make the

rights, the happiness, and liberty of nations, from the beginning to the

end of time, dependent on the caprice of some of the lowest and vilest

of the species; which rears its bloated hideous form to brave the will

of a whole people; that claims mankind as its property, and allows human

nature to exist only upon sufferance; that haunts the understanding like

a frightful spectre, and oppresses the very air with a weight that is

not to be borne; this doctrine meets with no rubs, no reverses, no ups

and downs, in the East. It is there fixed, immutable. The Jaggernaut

there passes on with its ‘satiate’ scythe over the bleeding bodies of

its victims, who are all as loyal, as pious, and as thankful as Mr.

Southey. It meets with no opposition from any ‘re-risen cause of evil’

or of good. Mankind have there been delivered once for all!

In the passage above quoted, Mr. Southey founds his hope of the

emancipation of the Eastern world from ‘the Robber and the Trader’s

ruthless hand’ on our growing empire in India. This is a conclusion

which nobody would venture upon but himself. His last appeal is to

scripture, and still he is unfortunate:—

‘Speed thou the work, Redeemer of the World!

_That the long miseries of mankind may cease!_

Where’er the Red Cross banner is unfurled,

There let it carry truth, and light, and peace!

_Did not the Angels who announced thy birth,

Proclaim it with the sound of Peace on Earth?_’

From the length of time that this prediction has remained unfulfilled,

Mr. Southey thinks its accomplishment must be near. His Odes will not

hasten the event.

Again, we do not understand the use which Mr. Southey makes of Red Cross

in this poem. For speaking of himself he says,

‘And when that last and most momentous hour

Beheld the re-risen cause of evil yield

To the Red Cross and England’s arm of power,

I sung of Waterloo’s unrivalled field,

Paying the tribute of a soul embued

With deepest joy, devout and awful gratitude.’

This passage occurs in the Proem. In the Dream the Angel of the English

Church is made to warn the Princess—

‘Think not that lapse of ages shall abate

The inveterate malice of that Harlot old;

Fallen tho’ thou deemest her from her high estate,

She proffers still the envenomed cup of gold,

And her fierce Beast, whose names are blasphemy,

The same that was, is still, and still must be.’

It is extraordinary that both these passages relate to one and the same

thing, namely, Popery, which our author in the first identifies with the

Christian religion, thus invoking to his aid every pure feeling or pious

prejudice in the minds of his readers, and in the last denounces as that

Harlot old, ‘whose names are blasphemy,’ with all the fury of plenary

inspiration. This is a great effort of want of logic. Mr. Southey will

hardly sing or say that it was to establish Protestantism in France that

England’s arm of power was extended on this occasion. Nor was it simply

to establish Popery. That existed there already. It was to establish

‘the inveterate malice of that Harlot old,’ her ‘envenomed cup,’ to give

her back her daggers and her fires, her mummeries, her holy oil, her

power over the bodies and the minds of men, to restore her ‘the same

that she was, is still, and still must be,’ that that celebrated fight

was fought. The massacres of Nismes followed hard upon the triumph of

Mr. Southey’s Red Cross. The blood of French Protestants began to flow

almost before the wounds of the dying and the dead in that memorable

carnage had done festering. This was the most crying injustice, the most

outrageous violation of principle, that ever was submitted to. What! has

John Bull nothing better to do now-a-days than to turn bottle-holder to

the Pope of Rome, to whet his daggers for him, to light his fires, and

fill his poisoned bowl; and yet, out of pure complaisance (a quality

John has learnt from his new friends the Bourbons) not venture a

syllable to say that we did not mean him to use them? It seems Mr.

Southey did not think this a fit occasion for the interference of his

Red Cross Muse. Could he not trump up a speech either for ‘divine

Speranza,’ or ‘Charissa dear,’ to lay at the foot of the throne? Was the

Angel of the English Church dumb too—‘quite chopfallen?’ Yet though our

Laureate cannot muster resolution enough to advise the Prince to protect

Protestants in France, he plucks up spirit enough to urge him to

persecute Catholics in this country, and pretty broadly threatens him

with the consequences, if he does not. “’Tis much,” as Christopher Sly

says.

There is another subject on which Mr. Southey’s silence is still more

inexcusable. It was understood to be for his exertions in the cause of

Spanish liberty that he was made Poet-Laureate. It is then high time for

him to resign. Why has he not written a single ode to a single Spanish

patriot who has been hanged, banished, imprisoned, sent to the galleys,

assassinated, tortured? It must be pleasant to those who are suffering

under the thumb-screw to read Mr. Southey’s thoughts upon that ingenious

little instrument of royal gratitude. Has he discovered that the air of

a Court does not very well agree with remonstrances against acts of

oppression and tyranny, when exercised by those who are born for no

other purpose? Is his patriotism only a false cover, a Carlton-House

convenience? His silence on this subject is not equivocal. Whenever Mr.

Southey shews the sincerity of his former professions of zeal in behalf

of Spanish liberty, by writing an elegy on the death of Porlier, or a

review of the conduct of Ferdinand VII. (he is a subject worthy of Mr.

Southey’s prose style), or by making the lame tailor of Madrid (we

forget his name) the subject of an epic poem, we will retract all that

we have said in disparagement of his consistency—_But not till then_.

We meant to have quoted several other passages, such as that in which

old Praxis, that is, Experience, recommends it to the Princess to

maintain the laws by keeping all that is old, and adding all that is new

to them—that in which he regrets the piety and learning of former times,

and then promises us a release from barbarism and brutishness by the

modern invention of Sunday Schools—that in which he speaks of his own

virtues and the wisdom of his friends—that in which he undertakes to

write a martyrology.—But we are very tired of the subject, and the

verses are not worth quoting. There is a passage in Racine which is; and

with that, we take our leave of the Laureate, to whom it may convey some

useful hints in explanation of his ardent desire for the gibbeting of

Bonaparte and the burning of Paris:—

_Nabal._—Que peut vous inspirer une haine si forte?

Est-ce que de Baal le zèle vous transporte?

Pour moi, vous le savez, descendu d’Ismaël,

Je ne sers ni Baal ni le Dieu d’Israel.

_Mathan._—Ami, peux-tu penser que d’un zèle frivole

Je me laisse aveugler pour une vaine idole!

Né ministre du Dieu qu’en ce temple on adore,

Peut-être que Mathan le serviroit encore,

Si l’amour des grandeurs, la soif de commander,

Avec son joug étroit pouvoient s’accommoder.

Qu’est-il besoin, Nabal, qu’à tes yeux je rappelle

De Joad et de moi la fameuse querelle?

Vaincu par lui j’entrai dans une autre carrière,

Et mon âme à la cour s’attacha tout entière.

J’approchai par degrés l’oreille des rois;

Et bientôt en oracle on érigea ma voix.

J’étudiai leur cœur, je flattai leurs caprices,

Je leur semai de fleurs le bord des précipices:

Près de leurs passions rien ne me fut sacré;

De mesure et de poids je changeois à leur gré,

Autant que de Joad l’inflexible rudesse

De leur superbe oreille offensoit la mollesse;

Autant je les charmois par ma dextérité,

Dérobant à leurs yeux la triste vérité,

Prêtant à leur fureur des couleurs favorables,

Et prodigue surtout du sang des misérables.[18]

* * * * *

Déserteur de leur loi, j’approuvai l’entreprise,

Et par là de Baal méritai la prêtrise;

Par là je me rendis terrible à mon rival,

Je ceignis la tiare, et marchai son égal.

Toutefois, je l’avoue, en ce comble de gloire,

De Dieu que j’ai quitté l’importune mémoire

Jette encore en mon âme un reste de terreur;

Et c’est ce qui redouble et nourrit ma fureur.

Heureux, si sur son temple achevant ma vengeance,

Je puis convaincre enfin sa haine d’impuissance,

Et parmi les débris, les ravages, et les morts,

A force d’attentats perdre tous mes remords.[19]

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER

Sir,—I hope you will not omit to notice two passages in Mr. Southey’s

poem, in which, to try his talent at natural description, he gives an

account of two of ‘the fearfullest wild-fowl living’—a British Lion and

a Saxon one. Both are striking likenesses, and would do to hang on the

outside of Exeter-‘Change to invite the curious. The former (presumed

not to be indigenous) is described to be in excellent case, well-fed,

getting in years and corpulent, with a high collar buried in the fat of

the neck, false mane, large haunches (for which this breed is

remarkable), paws like a shin of beef, large rolling eyes, a lazy,

lounging animal, sleeping all day and roaring all night, a great

devourer of carcases and breaker of bones, pleased after a full meal,

and his keepers not then afraid of him. Inclined to be uxorious. Visited

by all persons of distinction, from the highest characters abroad down

to the lowest at home.—The other portrait of the Saxon Lion is a

contrast to this. It is a poor lean starved beast, lord neither of men

nor lands, galled with its chain, which it has broken, but has not got

off from its neck. This portrait is, we understand, to be dedicated to

Lord Castlereagh.—Your constant reader,

NE QUID NIMIS.

‘A NEW VIEW OF SOCIETY; or, _Essays on the Principle of the Formation of

the Human Character, and the Application of the Principle to Practice_.’

Murray, 1816.—‘AN ADDRESS TO THE INHABITANTS OF NEW LANARK, _on opening

an Institution for the Formation of Character.’ By_ Robert Owen, _one of

his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the County of

Lanark_.’—Hatchard, 1816.

[‘Dedicated to those who have no Private Ends to accomplish, who are

honestly in search of Truth, for the purpose of ameliorating the

Condition of Society, and who have the firmness to follow the

Truth wherever it may lead, without being turned aside from the

Pursuit by the Prepossessions or Prejudices of any part of

Mankind;—to Mr. Wilberforce, the Prince Regent,’ &c.]

_August 4, 1816._

‘A _New_ View of Society’—No, Mr. Owen, that we deny. It may be true,

but it is not new. It is not coeval, whatever the author and proprietor

may think, with the New Lanark mills, but it is as old as the royal

borough of Lanark, or as the county of Lanark itself. It is as old as

the ‘Political Justice’ of Mr. Godwin, as the ‘Oceana’ of Harrington, as

the ‘Utopia’ of Sir Thomas More, as the ‘Republic’ of Plato; it is as

old as society itself, and as the attempts to reform it by shewing what

it ought to be, or by teaching that the good of the whole is the good of

the individual—an opinion by which fools and honest men have been

sometimes deceived, but which has never yet taken in the knaves and

knowing ones. The doctrine of Universal Benevolence, the belief in the

Omnipotence of Truth, and in the Perfectibility of Human Nature, are not

new, but ‘Old, old,’ Master Robert Owen;—why then do you say that they

are new? They are not only old, they are superannuated, they are dead

and buried, they are reduced to mummy, they are put into the catacombs

at Paris, they are sealed up in patent coffins, they have been dug up

again and anatomised, they have been drawn, quartered and gibbetted,

they have become black, dry, parched in the sun, loose, and rotten, and

are dispersed to all the winds of Heaven! The chain in which they hung

up the murdered corse of human Liberty is all that remains of it, and my

Lord Shallow keeps the key of it! If Mr. Owen will get it out of his

hands, with the aid of Mr. Wilberforce and the recommendation of _The

Courier_, we will ‘applaud him to the very echo, which shall applaud

again.’ Till then, we must content ourselves with ‘chaunting remnants of

old lauds’ in the manner of Ophelia:—

‘No, no, he is gone, and we cast away moan,

And will he not come again,

And will he not come again?’

Perhaps, one of these days, he may ... ‘like a cloud over the Caspian’:

then if ever, and never till then, human nature will hold up its head

again, and the holy and Triple Alliance will be dissolved. But as to

this bald spectre of Liberty and Necessity conjured up by Mr. Owen from

the falls of the Clyde, with a primer in one hand, and a spinning-jenny

in the other, coming down from the Highlands in a Scotch mist, and

discoverable only by second-sight, we may fairly say to it—

‘Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold;

Thou hast no speculation in those eyes,

Which thou dost glare with.’

Why does Mr. Owen put the word ‘New,’ in black-letter at the head of the

advertisements of his plan of reform? In what does the New Lanark differ

from the old Utopia? Is Scotland, after all, the true Lubber-land? Or

must the whole world be converted into a cotton-factory? Does not Mr.

Owen know that the same scheme, the same principles, the same philosophy

of motives and actions, of causes and consequences, of knowledge and

virtue, of virtue and happiness, were rife in the year 1793, were noised

abroad then, were spoken on the house-tops, were whispered in secret,

were published in quarto and duodecimo, in political treatises, in

plays, poems, songs, and romances—made their way to the bar, crept into

the church, ascended the rostrum, thinned the classes of the

universities, and robbed ‘Durham’s golden stalls’ of their hoped-for

ornaments, by sending our aspiring youth up to town to learn philosophy

of the new teachers of philosophy; that these ‘New Views of Society’ got

into the hearts of poets and the brains of metaphysicians, took

possession of the fancies of boys and women, and turned the heads of

almost the whole kingdom: but that there was one head which they never

got possession of, that turned the heads of the whole kingdom round

again, stopped the progress of philosophy and necessity by wondrous

fortitude, and that ‘thus repelled, _philosophy_ fell into a sadness,

then into a fast, thence to a watching, then into a weakness, thence to

a lightness, and by this declension, to the lamentable state wherein it

now lies,’ hooted by the boys, laughed at by the women, spit at by

fools, trod upon by knaves, damned by poet-laureates, whined over by

maudlin metaphysicians, rhymed upon by mincing ballad-makers, ridiculed

in romances, belied in histories and travels, pelted by the mob, sneered

at by the court, driven from the country, kicked out of society, and

forced to take refuge and to lie snug for twenty years in the New Lanark

mills, with the connivance of the worthy proprietor, among the tow and

spindles; from whence he lets us understand that it is coming up again

to Whitehall-stairs, like a spring-tide with the full of the moon, and

floating on the blood that has flowed for the restoration of the

Bourbons, under the patronage of the nobility, the gentry, Mr.

Wilberforce, and the Prince Regent, and all those who are governed, like

these great personages, by no other principle than truth, and no other

wish than the good of mankind! This puff will not take with us: we are

old birds, not to be caught with chaff: we shall not purchase in this

new lottery, where there are all prizes and no blanks! We are inclined

to throw Mr. Owen’s ‘New View,’ behind the fire-place, as we believe

most people do the letter they receive from the proprietors of the lucky

lottery-office, informing them that their ticket was drawn a blank the

first day, and in the postscript soliciting their future favours!

Mr. Owen may think that we have all this while been jesting, when we

have been in sad and serious earnest. Well, then, we will give him the

reason why we differ with him, out of ‘an old saw,’ as good as most

‘modern instances.’ It is contained in this sentence:—‘If to do were as

easy as to teach others what were good to be done, chapels had been

churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.’ Our author has

discovered no new theory; he has advanced no new reasons. The former

reasons were never answered, but the plan did not succeed. Why then does

he think _his_ must? All that he has done has been to leave out the

reasons for his paradoxes, and to give his conclusions in capitals. This

may take for a time with Mr. Wilberforce and the Methodists, who like

hieroglyphics, but it cannot last. Here is a plan, strange as it may

seem, ‘a new View of Society,’ published by two of our most loyal

booksellers, and what is still more extraordinary, puffed in _The

Courier_ as an extremely practical, practicable, solid, useful, and good

sort of work, which proposes no less than to govern the world without

religion and without law, by the force of reason alone! This project is

in one of its branches dedicated to the Prince Regent, by which (if

carried into effect) he would be stuck up in his life-time as ‘a useless

piece of antiquity’; and in another part is dedicated to Mr.

Wilberforce, though it would by the same rule convert that little vital

member of the community into ‘a monkey preacher,’ crying in the

wilderness with no one to hear him, and sneaking about between his

character and his conscience, in a state of ludicrous perplexity, as

indeed he always appears to be at present! What is most remarkable is,

that Mr. Owen is the first philosopher we ever heard of, who recommended

himself to the great by telling them disagreeable truths. A man that

comes all the way from the banks of the Clyde acquires a projectile

force that renders him irresistible. He has access, we understand, to

the men in office, to the members of parliament, to lords and gentlemen.

He comes to ‘pull an old house about their ears,’ to batter down all

their establishments, new or old, in church or in state, civil,

political, and military, and he quietly walks into their houses with his

credentials in his pocket, and reconciles them to the prospect of the

innumerable Houses of Industry he is about to erect on the site of their

present sinecures, by assuring them of the certainty of his principles

and the infallibility of his practice, in building up and pulling down.

His predecessors were clumsy fellows; but he is an engineer, who will be

sure to do their business for them. He is not the man to set the Thames

on fire, but he will move the world, and New Lanark is the place he has

fixed his lever upon for this purpose. To shew that he goes roundly to

work with great people in developing his formidable system of the

formation of character, he asks, p. 7 of the second Essay,—

‘How much longer shall we continue to allow generation after generation

to be taught crime from their infancy, and when so taught, hunt them

like beasts of the forest, until they are entangled beyond escape in the

toils and nets of the law? When, if the circumstances from youth of

these poor unpitied sufferers had been reversed with those who are even

surrounded with the pomp and dignity of justice, these latter would have

been at the bar of the culprit, and the former would have been in the

judgment-seat.

‘Had the present Judges of these realms, whose conduct compels the

admiration of surrounding states, been born and educated in St. Giles’s,

or some similar situation, is it not reasonable to conclude, as they

possess native energies and abilities, that ere this they would have

been at the head of their _then_ profession, and in consequence of that

superiority and proficiency, have already suffered imprisonment,

transportation, or death? Or can we for a moment hesitate to decide,

that if some of those men whom our laws, dispensed by the present

Judges, have doomed to suffer capital punishment, had been born,

trained, and surrounded as these Judges were born, trained, and

surrounded; that some of those so imprisoned, transported, or hanged,

would have been the identical individuals who would have passed the same

awful sentences _on our present highly esteemed dignitaries of the

law_?’

This is a delicate passage. So then according to the author of the ‘New

View of Society,’ the Prince Regent of these realms, instead of being at

the head of the allied sovereigns of Europe, might, in other

circumstances, have been at the head of a gang of bravoes and assassins;

Lord Castlereagh, on the same principle, and by parity of reasoning,

without any alteration in his nature or understanding, but by the mere

difference of situation, might have been a second _Count Fathom_; Mr.

Vansittart, the chancellor of the exchequer, might, if he had turned his

hand that way in time, have succeeded on _the snaffling lay_, or as a

pickpocket; Lord Wellington might have entered houses, instead of

entering kingdoms, by force; the Lord-chancellor might have been a

Jew-broker; the Marquis of —— or Lord —— a bawd, and their sons,

tapsters and bullies at bagnios; the Queen (God bless her) might have

been an old washer-woman, taking her snuff and gin among her gossips,

and her daughters, if they had not been princesses, might have turned

out no better than they should be! Here’s a levelling rogue for you! The

world turned inside out, with a witness!—Such are Mr. Owen’s general

principles, to which we have nothing to say, and such his mode of

illustrating them in his prefaces and dedications, which we do not think

the most flattering to persons in power. We do not, however, wish him to

alter his tone: he goes swimmingly on at present, ‘with cheerful and

confident thoughts.’ His schemes thus far are tolerated, because they

are remote, visionary, inapplicable. Neither the great world nor the

world in general care any thing about New Lanark, nor trouble themselves

whether the workmen there go to bed drunk or sober, or whether the

wenches are got with child before or after the marriage ceremony. Lanark

is distant, Lanark is insignificant. Our statesmen are not afraid of the

perfect system of reform he talks of, and, in the meantime, his cant

against reform in parliament, and about Bonaparte, serves as a practical

diversion in their favour. But let the good which Mr. Owen says he has

done in one poor village be in danger of becoming general,—let his plan

for governing men by reason, without the assistance of the dignitaries

of the church and the dignitaries of the law, but once get wind and be

likely to be put in practice, and his dreams of elevated patronage will

vanish. Long before he has done as much to overturn bigotry and

superstition in this country, as he says Bonaparte did on the continent,

(though he thinks the restoration of what was thus overturned also a

great blessing) Mr. Wilberforce will have cut his connection. When we

see Mr. Owen brought up for judgment before Lord Ellenborough, or

standing in the pillory, we shall begin to think there is something in

this _New Lanark Scheme_ of his. On the other hand, if he confines

himself to general principles, steering clear of practice, the result

will be the same, if ever his principles become sufficiently known and

admired. Let his ‘New View of Society’ but make as many disciples as the

‘Enquiry concerning Political Justice,’ and we shall soon see how the

tide will turn about. There will be a fine hue and cry raised by all

_the good and wise_, by all ‘those acute minds’ who, Mr. Owen tells us,

have not been able to find a flaw in his reasonings, but who will soon

discover a flaw in his reputation. Dr. Parr will preach a Spital sermon

against him; lectures will be delivered in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, to prove

that a perfect man is such another chimera as a golden mountain; Mr.

Malthus will set up his two checks of vice and misery as insuperable

bars against him; Mr. Southey will put him into the ‘Quarterly Review’;

his name will be up in the newspapers, _The Times_, _The Courier_, and

_The Morning Post_; the three estates will set their faces against him;

he will be marked as a Jacobin, a leveller, an incendiary, in all parts

of the three kingdoms; he will be avoided by his friends, and become a

bye-word to his enemies; his brother magistrates of the county of Lanark

will refuse to sit on the bench with him; the spindles of his

spinning-jennies will no longer turn on their soft axles; he will have

gone out for wool, and will go home shorn; and he will find that it is

not so easy or safe a task as he imagined to make fools wise, and knaves

honest; in short, to make mankind understand their own interests, or

those who govern them care for any interest but their own. Otherwise,

all this matter would have been settled long ago. As it is, things will

most probably go on as they have done, till some comet comes with its

tail; and on the eve of some grand and radical reform, puts an end to

the question.

THE SPEECH OF CHARLES C. WESTERN, Esq. M.P. _on the Distressed State of

the Agriculture of the Country, delivered in the House of Commons, March

7, 1816_.

THE SPEECH OF HENRY BROUGHAM, Esq. M.P. _on the same subject, delivered

in the same place, April 9, 1816_.

This is a sore subject; and it is here handled with much tenderness and

delicacy. It puts one in mind of the traveller’s nose, and the nuns of

Strasburgh, in the tale of Slaukenbergius. ‘I will touch it, said one; I

dare not touch it, said another; I wish I had touched it, said a third;

let me touch it, said a fourth.’ While the gentlewomen were debating the

point, the traveller with the great nose rode on. It would be no

ungracious task to treat of the distresses of the country, if all were

distressed alike; but that is not the case; nor is it possible to trace

the necessities of one part of the community to their source, or to hint

at a remedy, without glancing invidiously at the superfluities of

others. ‘Aye, there’s the rub, that makes calamity of so long life.’ The

speeches before us are to the subject what a veil is to a lady’s face,

or a blind to a window. Almost all that has been said or written upon it

is a palpable delusion—an attempt to speak out and say nothing; to

oppose something that might be done, and propose something that cannot

be done; to direct attention to the subject, and divert it from it; to

do something and nothing; and to come to this potent conclusion, that

while nothing _is done_, nothing _can be done_. ‘But have you then any

remedy to propose instead?’ What sort of a remedy do you mean? ‘Oh, one

equally safe and efficacious, that shall set every thing to rights, and

leave every thing just as it is, that does not touch either the tythes

or the national debt, nor places and pensions, nor property of any kind,

except the poor’s fund; _that_ you may take from them to make them

independent of the rich, as you leave Lord Camden in possession of

thirty thousand a year to make him independent of the poor.’—Why, then,

what if the Lord Chancellor and the Chancellor of the Exchequer were to

play a game at push-pin on the top of St. Paul’s; or if Mr. Brougham and

Mr. Horner were to play at cat’s-cradle on the top of the Monument; or

if the little garden between the Speaker’s house and the river-side were

to be sown with pearls and cockle-shells? Or if——Pshaw! Patience, and

shuffle the cards.

The great problem of our great problem-finders appears to be, _to take

nothing from the rich, and give it to the poor_. That will never do. We

find them and their schemes of diversion well described in Rabelais,

book v. chap. xxii.

‘_How Queen Whim’s Officers were employed, and how the said Lady

retained us among her Abstractors._

‘I then saw a great number of the Queen’s officers, who made

blackamoors white, as fast as hops, just rubbing their bellies with

the bottom of a pannier.

‘Others, with three couples of foxes in one yoke, ploughed a sandy

shore, and did not lose their seed.

‘Others washed burnt tiles, and made them lose their colour.

‘Others extracted water out of pumice-stones, braying them a good

while in a mortar, and changed their substance.

‘Others sheered asses, and thus got long fleece wool.

‘Others gathered off of thorns grapes, and figs off of thistles.

‘Others stroked he-goats by the dugs, and saved their milk, and much

they got by it.

‘Others washed asses’ heads, without losing their soap.

‘Others taught cows to dance, and did not lose their fiddling.

‘Others pitched nets to catch the wind, and took cock lobsters in

them.

‘Others out of nothing made great things, and made great things

return to nothing.

‘Others made a virtue of necessity, and the best of a bad market;

which seemed to me a very good piece of work.

‘I saw two Gibroins by themselves, keeping watch on the top of a

tower; and we were told they guarded the moon from the wolves.’

The war has cost the country five or six hundred millions of money. This

has not been a nominal expense, a playing at ducks and drakes with the

King’s picture on the water, or a manufacturing of bank-notes, and then

lighting our pipes with them, but a real _bonâ fide_ waste of the means,

wealth, labour, produce, or resources of the country, in the carrying on

of the war. About one hundred of these five or six hundred millions have

been sent directly out of the country in loans to our Allies, from the

year 1793 to the year 1815, inclusive, during which period there is not

a single year in which we did not (from our desire of peace with the

legitimate government of that country) subsidise one or all of the

powers of Europe, to carry on war against the rebels, regicides,

republicans, and usurpers of France. Now the interest of this money

alone would be five millions yearly, which would be nearly enough to pay

the amount of the poor-rates of the whole country, which is seven

millions of our yearly taxes, or might at least be applied to mitigate

the mild severity of Mr. Malthus’s sweeping clauses on that defenceless

part of the subject. Here is a hundred millions then gone clean out of

the country: there are four or five hundred millions more which have

been sunk in the expenses of the war, and which might as well have been

sunk in the sea; or what has been saved out of the wreck by those who

have been most active in running the vessel aground, is in the hands of

persons who are in no hurry that the public should go snacks with them

in their excessive good fortune. In all three cases, and under each

several head of loans, waste, or monopoly, John Bull pays the piper, or

the interest of the whole money in taxes. He is just so many hundred

millions the worse for the war, (whoever may be the better for it) not

merely in paper, which would be nothing, nor in golden guineas, which

would be something; but in what is better and more substantial than

either, in goods and chattels, in the produce of the soil, and the work

of his hands—in the difference between what the industry of man, left to

itself, produces in time of peace for the benefit of man, and what the

same industry, under the direction of government, produces in time of

war for the destruction of others, without any benefit to himself, real,

imaginary, or pretended; we mean in a physical and economical point of

view, which is here the question—a question, which seems to last when

the religion, politics, and morality of the affair are over. We have

said that the expenses of the war might as well have been sunk in the

sea; and so they might, for they have been sunk in unproductive labour,

that is, in maintaining large establishments, and employing great

numbers of men in doing nothing or mischief; for example, in making

ships to destroy other ships, guns and gunpowder to blow out men’s

brains, pikes and swords to run them through the body, drums and fifes

to drown the noise of cannon and the whizzing of bullets; in making caps

and coats to deck the bodies of those who live by killing others; in

buying up pork and beef, butter and cheese, to enable them to do this

with more effect: in barracks, in transport-ships, in baggage and

baggage-waggons, in horses, bridles and saddles, in suttlers and

followers of the camp, in chaplains of the regiment, in common trulls,

and the mistresses of generals and commanders in chief; in contractors,

in army and navy agents, their partners, clerks, relations, dependants,

wives, families, servants in and out of livery, their town and country

houses, coaches, curricles, parks, gardens, grottos, hot-houses,

green-houses, pictures, statues, libraries; in treasury scribes, in

secretaries and under-secretaries of state, of the foreign, colonial,

and war departments, with their swarms of underlings, all of whom are

maintained out of the labour and sweat of the country, and for all of

whom, and for all that they do (put together) the country is not one pin

the better, or at least, one penny more in pocket, than if they were at

the bottom of the Channel. The present may have been the most just and

necessary war, in a political, moral, and religious point of view, that

ever was engaged in; but it has also been the most expensive; and what

is worse, the expense remains just the same, though it may have been the

most unjust and unnecessary in the world. We have paid for it, and we

must pay for it equally in either case, and wholly out of our own

pockets. The price of restoring the Pope, the Inquisition, the Bourbons,

and the doctrine of Divine Right, is half of our nine hundred millions

of debt. That is the amount of the government bill of costs, presented

to John Bull for payment, not of the principal but the interest; that is

what he has got by the war; the load of taxes at his back, with which he

comes out of his glorious five and twenty years’ struggle, like

Christian’s load of sins, which whether it will not fall off from his

back like Christian’s, into the Slough of Despond, will be seen before

long. The difference between the expense of a war or a peace

establishment is just the difference between a state of productive and

unproductive labour. Now this whole question, which from its complexity

puzzles many people, and has given rise to a great deal of partly wilful

and partly shallow sophistry,[20] may be explained in two words.—Suppose

I give a man five shillings a day for going out in a boat and catching

fish for me. This is paying for productive labour: that is, I give him

so much for what he does, or a claim upon so much of the public stock:

but in taking so much from the stock by laying out his five shillings,

he adds so much to it by his labour, or the disposal of his time in

catching fish. But if I, having the money to do what I please with, give

him five shillings a day for shooting at crows, he is paid equally for

his trouble, and accordingly takes so much from the public stock, while

he adds nothing to it but so much carrion. So if the government pay him

so much a-day for shooting at Frenchmen and Republicans, this is a tax,

a loss, a burthen to the country, without any thing got by it; for we

cannot, after all, eat Frenchmen and Republicans when we have killed

them. War in itself is a thriving, sensible traffic only to cannibals!

Again—if I give a man five shillings for making a pair of shoes, this is

paying for productive labour, viz. for labour that is useful, and that

must be performed by some one; but if I give the same man five shillings

for standing on his head or behind my chair while I am picking my teeth,

or for running up a hill and down again for a wager—this is unproductive

labour, nothing comes of it, and though the man who is thus idly

employed lives by it, others starve, upon whose pittance and whose

labour he lives through me. Such is the nature and effect of war; all

the energies of which tend to waste, and to throw an additional and

heavy burthen upon the country, in proportion to the extent and length

of time that it is carried on. It creates so many useless members of the

community: every man paid by the war out of the taxes paid by the

people, is, in fact, a dead body fastened to a living one, that by its

weight drags it to the earth. A five and twenty years’ war, and nine

hundred millions of debt, are really a couple of millstones round the

neck of a country, that must naturally press her down a little in the

scale of prosperity. That seems to be no riddle. We defy any sophist to

answer this statement of the necessary tendency of war in its general

principle to ruin and impoverish a country. We are not to wonder, when

it does so; but when other causes operate to counteract or retard this

tendency. What is extraordinary in our own case is, that the pernicious

effects of war have been delayed so long, not that they have come upon

us at last.[21]—That money laid out in war is thrown away is

self-evident from this single circumstance, that government never

refund. The reason is, because they never do any thing with their money

that produces money again. They are the worst bankers in the world. The

Exchequer is a true Sinking Fund. If you lend money to a farmer, a

manufacturer, a merchant, he employs it in getting something done, for

which others will pay, because it is useful; as in raising corn, in

weaving cotton, in bringing home sugar or tobacco. But money sunk in a

war brings in no returns—except of killed and wounded. What will any one

give the government for the rotten bones that lie buried at Walcheren,

or the dry ones at Waterloo? Not a six-pence. They cannot make a

collection of wooden legs or dangling sleeves from the hospitals at

Greenwich or Chelsea to set up a raffle or a lottery. They cannot bring

the fruits of the war to auction, or put up the tottering throne of the

Bourbons to the best bidder. They can neither bring back a drop of the

blood that has been shed, nor recover a shilling of the treasure that

has been wasted. If the expenses of the war are not a burden to the

people, which must sink it according to their weight, why do not

government take the whole of this thriving concern into their own hands,

and pay the national debt out of the Droits of Admiralty? In short, the

way to ascertain this point is, by the old method of _reductio ad

absurdum_: Suppose we had to pay the expenses of such another

peace-establishment and such another war. Who does not see that they

would eat up the whole resources of the country, as the present

peace-establishment and actual debt do just one half?

SPEECHES IN PARLIAMENT ON THE DISTRESSES OF THE COUNTRY, _by_ MR.

WESTERN _and_ MR. BROUGHAM.

(CONCLUDED)

‘Come, let us leave off children’s play, and go to push-pin.’

_Polite Conversation._

_Aug. 18, 1816._

The war has wasted the resources of the country in foolery, which the

country has now to pay for in a load of taxes on its remaining

resources, its actual produce and labour. The tax-gatherer is a

government-machine that takes sixty-five millions a-year from the

bankrupt pockets of the nation, to give to those who have brought it

into that situation; who takes so much from the necessaries of life

belonging to the poor, to add to the superfluities of the rich; who adds

so much to the hard labour of the working part of the community, to

‘relieve the killing languor and over-laboured lassitude of those who

have nothing to do’; who, in short, out of the grinding poverty and

ceaseless toil of those who pay the taxes, enables those who receive

them to live in luxury and idleness.

Mr. Burke, whom we have just quoted, has said, that ‘if the poor were to

cut the throats of the rich, they would not have a meal the more for

it.’ First, (for truth is the first thing in our thoughts, and not to

give offence the second) this is a falsehood; a greater one than the

answer of a Bond-street lounger, who coming out of a confectioner’s

shop, where he has had a couple of basons of turtle-soup, an ice, some

jellies, and a quantity of pastry, as he saunters out picking his teeth

and putting the change into his pocket, says to a beggar at the door, ‘I

have nothing for you.’ We confess, we have always felt it an aukward

circumstance to be accosted in this manner, when we have been caught in

the act of indulging a sweet tooth, and it costs us an additional penny.

The rich and poor may at present be compared to the two classes of

frequenters of pastry-cooks’ shops, those on the outside and those on

the in. We would seriously advise the latter, who see the gaunt faces

staring at them through the glass-door, to recollect, that though

custard is nicer than bread, bread is the greatest necessary of the

two.—We had forgot Mr. Burke’s sophism, to which we reply in the second

place, that the cutting of throats is a figure of speech, like the

dagger which he produced in the House of Commons, not necessary to the

speculative decision of the question. The most civil, peaceable, and

complaisant way of putting it is this—whether if the rich were to give

all that they are worth to the poor, the latter would be none the richer

for it? If so, the rich would be none the poorer, and so far could be no

losers on Mr. Burke’s own hypothesis, which supposes, with that

magnanimity of contempt for plain matter of fact which distinguished the

author’s theories, that the rich have nothing, and the poor have every

thing? Had not Mr. Burke a pension of 4000_l._ a-year? Was this nothing?

But even this is not the question neither. It is not, whether if the

rich were to part with all they have to the poor (which is a mere

absurdity) but whether if the rich do not take all they have left from

the poor (which we humbly hope is a proposition that has common sense in

it) the latter may not be the better off with something to live upon

than with nothing? Whether, if the whole load of taxes could be taken

off from them, it would not be a relief to them? Whether, if half the

load of taxes were taken off from them, it would not be a relief to

them? Whether, if any part of the load of taxes that can be taken off

from them were taken off, it would not in the same proportion be a

relief to them? We will venture to say, that no one will deny these

propositions who does not receive so much a year for falsehood and

impudence. The resistance which is made to the general or abstract

principle is not intended to prevent the extreme sweeping application of

that principle to the plundering or (as Mr. Burke will have it) to the

cutting the throats of the rich, but it is a manœuvre, by getting rid of

the general principle altogether, viz. that the extravagance and luxury

of the rich, war, taxes, &c., have a tendency to increase the distresses

of the poor, or measures of retrenchment and reform to lighten those

distresses—to give _carte-blanche_ to the government to squander the

wealth, the blood, the happiness of the nation at pleasure; to grant

jobs, places, pensions, sinecures, reversions without end, to grind

down, to starve and impoverish the country with systematic impunity. It

is a legerdemain trick played off by hireling politicians, to enable

their patrons and employers to pick our pockets and laugh in our faces

at the same time.

It has been said by such persons that taxes are not a burthen to the

country; that the wealth collected in taxes returns through those who

receive to those who pay them, only divided more equally and

beneficially among all parties, just (they say) as the vapours and

moisture of the earth collected in the clouds return to enrich the soil

in soft and fertilizing showers. We shall set ourselves to shew that

this is not true.

Suppose a society of ten persons, without taxes to pay, and who live on

their own labour, on the produce of the ground, and the exchange of one

commodity among themselves for another. Some of these persons will be

naturally employed in tilling the ground, others in tending cattle,

others, in making instruments of husbandry, others in weaving cloth,

others in making shoes, others in building houses, others in making

roads, others in buying and selling, others in fetching and carrying

what the others want. All will be employed in something that they want

themselves, or that others want. In such a state of society, nothing

will be given for nothing. If a man has a bushel of wheat, and only

wants half of it, he will give the other half to some one, for making

him a coat or a pair of shoes. As every one will be paid for what he

does out of the earnings of the labour of others, no one will waste his

time or his strength in doing any thing that is not wanted by some one

else, that is not as useful and necessary, to his subsistence and

comfort, and more so, than the commodity which he gives in exchange for

it. There will be no unproductive labour. What each person gets will be

either in proportion to what he has done for himself, or what he has

added to the comforts of others. Exchange there will be no robbery. The

wealth of all will be the result of the exertions of each individual,

and will circulate equally and beneficially, because those who produce

that wealth will share it among themselves. This is an untaxed state of

society, where wealth changes hands indeed, but finds its level,

notwithstanding.—Now suppose two other individuals to be fastened upon

this society of ten persons—a government-man and a fund-holder. They

change the face of it in an instant. The equilibrium, the balance is

upset. The amount of the wealth of the society before was a thousand

pounds a-year, suppose. The two new-comers take a writ out of their

pockets, by which they quietly lay hands on five hundred of it as their

fair portion. Where are the ten persons now? Mr. Burke, Mr. Coleridge,

Mr. Vansittart, _The Courier_, say—Just where they were before! We say,

No such thing. For three reasons: 1. It cannot be denied that the

interlopers, the government-man and his friend, the fund-holder, who has

lent him money to sport with on all occasions, are substantial _bonâ

fide_ persons, like other men, who live by eating, drinking, &c., and

who, if they only shared equally with the other ten what they had got

amongst them, (for they add nothing to the common stock) must be a

sufficient burthen upon the rest, that is, must diminish the comforts or

increase the labour of each person one-fifth. To hear the other side

talk, one would suppose that those who raise and are paid out of the

taxes never touch a farthing of them, that they have no occasion for

them, that they neither eat nor drink, nor buy clothing, or build houses

with them; that they live upon air, or that harmless food, bank notes (a

thing not to speak of), and that all the money they are so anxious to

collect is distributed by them again for the sole benefit of others, or

passes back through the Exchequer, as if it were a conduit-pipe or empty

tunnel, into the hands of the original proprietors, without diminution

or diversion. Now this is not so. 2. Not only do our government-man and

his friend live like other people upon their means, but they live better

than other people, for they have better means, that is, these two take

half of what the other ten get. They would be fools if they gave it back

to them; no, depend upon it, they lay out their five hundred a-year upon

themselves, for their own sole use, benefit, pleasure, mirth, and

pastime. For each of these gentlemen has just five times as much to

spend as any of those that he lives upon at free cost, and he has

nothing to do but to think how he shall spend it. He eats and drinks as

much as he can, and always of the best and most costly. It is pretended

that the difference in the consumption of the produce of the soil is

little or nothing, for a poor man’s belly will hold as much as a rich

man’s. But not if the one is full and the other empty. The man who lives

upon the taxes, feasts upon venison and turtle, and crams himself to the

throat with fish, flesh, and fowl; the man who pays the taxes, upon a

crust of mouldy bread, and fat rusty bacon: the man who receives the

taxes drinks rich and sparkling wines, hock and canary; the man who pays

them, sour small beer. If the poor man gets drunk and leads an idle

life, his family starve: the rich man drinks his three bottles a day and

does nothing, while his family live on the fat of the land. If the poor

man dies of hard labour and poor living, his family comes to the parish;

if the rich man dies of hard living and want of exercise, he leaves his

family to be provided for by the state. But, 3. All that the

government-man and the fund-holder do not spend upon their bellies, in

revelling and gormandising, they lay out upon their backs, their houses,

their carriages, &c., in inordinate demands upon the labour of the

former ten persons, who are now employed, not in working for one

another, but in pampering the pride, ostentation, vanity, folly, or

vices, of our two gentlemen comers. After glutting their physical

appetites, they take care to apply all the rest to the gratification of

their factitious, arbitrary, and fantastic wants, which are unlimited,

and which the universe could not supply. ‘They toil not, neither do they

spin, and yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of

these:’—while the poor are clothed in rags, and the dogs lick up their

sores. The money that is taken from you and me, or the more industrious

members of the community, and that we should have laid out in having

snug, comfortable houses built for us all, or two bed-rooms for our

families instead of one, is employed, now that it has got into the

tax-gatherer’s hands, in hiring the same persons to build two enormous

houses for the government-man and the fund-holder, who live in palaces

while we live in hovels. What are we, the people, the original ten men,

the better for that? The taxes enable those who receive them to pay our

masons, carpenters, &c., for working for them. If we had not been forced

to pay the money in taxes, the same persons would have been employed by

us for our common benefit. Suppose the government-man takes it into his

head to build a colossus, a rotunda, a pyramid, or anything else equally

absurd and gigantic, it would, we say, be a nuisance in proportion to

its size. It would be ten times as great a nuisance if it was ten times

bigger. If it covered a whole county, it would ruin the landed interest.

If it was spread over the whole country, the country must starve. When

the government-man and the fund-holder have got their great houses

built, they must next have them furnished with proportionable

magnificence, and by the same means; with Persian and Turkey carpets,

with Egyptian sofas, down beds, silk curtains, china vases, services of

plate, tables, chairs, stoves, glasses, mirrors, chandeliers, paper

hangings, pictures, busts, ornaments, kickshaws without number, while

you and I live on a mud floor, with bare walls, stuck with a penny

ballad, with a joint-stool to sit upon, a tea-pot without a tea-spout to

drink out of, a truckle-bed or some straw and a blanket to lie upon! Yet

Mr. Burke says, that if we were suddenly converted into state-pensioners

with thirty-thousand a year, we could not furnish our houses a bit the

better for it. This is like Lord Peter, in the Tale of a Tub. Then the

government-man and his friend must have their train of coaches, horses,

dogs, footmen dressed in blue, green, yellow, and red, lazy rascals,

making work for the taylor, the hatter, the shoemaker, the button-maker,

the hair-dresser, the gold and silver laceman, to powder, dress, and

trick them out, that they may lounge behind their mistresses’ coaches,

walk before their sedan chairs, help on their master’s stockings, block

up his doors, and perform a variety of little nameless offices, much to

the ease and satisfaction of the great, but not of the smallest benefit

to any one else. With respect to the article of dogs and horses, a word

in Mr. Malthus’s ear. They come under the head of consumption, and a

swinging item they are. They eat up the food of the children of the

poor. The pleasure and coach-horses kept in this kingdom consume as much

of the produce of the soil as would maintain all the paupers in it. Let

a tax be laid upon them directly, to defray the expense of the

poor-rates, and to suspend the operation of Mr. Malthus’s geometrical

and arithmetical ratios. We see no physical necessity why that ingenious

divine should put a stop to the propagation of the species, that he may

keep two sleek geldings in his stable. We have lately read Swift’s

account of the Houynhyms and Yahoos. There is some truth in it; but

still it has not reconciled us to Mr. Malthus’s proposal of starving the

children of the poor to feed the horses of the rich. But no more of

that! We have said enough at present to shew how the taxes fly away with

the money of a nation; how they go into the hands of the government-man

and the fund-holder, and do not return into the pockets of the people,

who pay them. For the future, Mr. Burke’s assertion, that the taxes are

like the vapours that ascend into the clouds and return to the earth in

fertilizing showers, may pass for an agreeable metaphor, but for nothing

more. A pretty joke truly, this, of the people’s receiving their taxes

back again in payment for what the rich want of them. It is as if I

should buy a pound of beef in a butcher’s shop, and take the money out

of his own till to pay him! It is as if a bill is presented to me for

payment, and I ask the notary for the money to take it up with! It is as

if a Noble Earl was to win 50,000_l._ of a Noble Duke over-night, and

offer to return it to him the next morning, for one of his estates! It

is as if Mr. Burke had been robbed of a bond for 4000_l._ and the

fortunate possessor had offered to restore it, on receiving in lieu his

house and gardens at Beaconsfield! Having thus pointed out the nature of

the distress, we need not inquire far for the remedy.

A LAY-SERMON ON THE DISTRESSES OF THE COUNTRY, _addressed to the Middle

and Higher Orders_. _By_ S. T. Coleridge, _Esq._ Printed for Gale and

Fenner, price 1_s._[22]

——‘Function

Is smother’d in surmise, and nothing is

But what is not.’

‘Or in Franciscan think to pass disguis’d.’

_Sept. 8, 1816._

This Lay-Sermon puts us in mind of Mahomet’s coffin, which was suspended

between heaven and earth, or of the flying island at Laputa, which

hovered over the head of Gulliver. The ingenious author, in a preface,

which is a masterpiece in its kind, having neither beginning, middle,

nor end, apologizes for having published a work, not a line of which is

written, or ever likely to be written. He has, it seems, resorted to

this expedient as the only way of appearing before the public in a

manner worthy of himself and his genius, and descants on the several

advantages to be derived from this original mode of composition;—That as

long as he does not put pen to paper, the first sentence cannot

contradict the second; that neither his reasonings nor his conclusions

can be liable to objection, _in the abstract_; that _omne ignotum pro

magnifico est_, is an axiom laid down by some of the best and wisest men

of antiquity; that hitherto his performance, in the opinion of his

readers, has fallen short of the vastness of his designs, but that no

one can find fault with what he does not write; that while he merely

haunts the public imagination with obscure noises, or by announcing his

spiritual appearance for the next week, and does not venture out _in

propria persona_ with his shroud and surplice on, the Cock-lane Ghost of

mid-day, he may escape in a whole skin without being handled by the mob,

or uncased by the critics; and he considers it the safest way to keep up

the importance of his oracular communications, by letting them remain a

profound secret both to himself and the world.

In this instance, we think the writer’s modesty has led him into a

degree of unnecessary precaution. We see no sort of difference between

his published and his unpublished compositions. It is just as impossible

to get at the meaning of the one as the other. No man ever yet gave Mr.

Coleridge ‘a penny for his thoughts.’ His are all maiden ideas;

immaculate conceptions. He is the ‘Secret Tattle’ of the press. Each

several work exists only in the imagination of the author, and is quite

inaccessible to the understandings of his readers—‘Yet virgin of

Proserpina from Jove.’—We can give just as good a guess at the design of

this Lay-Sermon, which is not published, as of _the Friend_, the

Preliminary Articles in _the Courier_, _the Watchman_, _the Conciones ad

Populum_, or any of the other courtly or popular publications of the

same author. Let the experiment be tried, and if, on committing the

manuscript to the press, the author is caught in the fact of a single

intelligible passage, we will be answerable for Mr. Coleridge’s loss of

character. But we know the force of his genius too well. What is his

_Friend_ itself but an enormous title-page; the longest and most

tiresome prospectus that ever was written; an endless preface to an

imaginary work; a table of contents that fills the whole volume; a huge

bill of fare of all possible subjects, with not an idea to be had for

love or money? One number consists of a grave-faced promise to perform

something impossible in the next; and the next is taken up with a

long-faced apology for not having done it. Through the whole of this

work, Mr. Coleridge appears in the character of the Unborn Doctor; the

very Barmecide of knowledge; the Prince of preparatory authors!

‘He never is—but always to be _wise_.’

He is the Dog in the Manger of literature, an intellectual Mar-Plot, who

will neither let any body else come to a conclusion, nor come to one

himself.[23] This gentleman belongs to the class of eclectic

philosophers; but whereas they professed to examine different systems,

in order to select what was good in each, our perverse critic ransacks

all past or present theories, to pick out their absurdities, and to

abuse whatever is good in them. He takes his notions of religion from

the ‘sublime piety’ of Jordano Bruno, and considers a belief in a God as

a very subordinate question to the worship of the Three Persons of the

Trinity. The thirty-nine articles and St. Athanasius’s creed are, upon

the same principle, much more fundamental parts of the Christian

religion than the miracles or gospel of Christ. He makes the essence of

devotion to consist in Atheism, the perfection of morality in a total

disregard of consequences. He refers the great excellence of the British

Constitution to the prerogative of the Crown, and conceives that the old

French Constitution must have been admirably defended by the

States-General, which never met, from the abuses of arbitrary power. He

highly approves of _ex officio_ informations and special juries, as the

great bulwarks of the liberty of the press; taxes he holds to be a

providential relief to the distresses of the people, and war to be a

state of greater security than peace. He defines Jacobinism to be an

abstract attachment to liberty, truth, and justice; and finding that

this principle has been abused or carried to excess, he argues that

Anti-jacobinism, or the abstract principles of despotism, superstition,

and oppression, are the safe, sure, and undeniable remedy for the

former, and the only means of restoring liberty, truth, and justice in

the world. Again, he places the seat of truth in _the heart_, of virtue

in _the head_; damns a tragedy as shocking that draws tears from the

audience, and pronounces a comedy to be inimitable, if nobody laughs at

it; labours to unsettle the plainest things by far-fetched sophistry,

and makes up for the want of proof in matters of fact by the mechanical

operations of the spirit. He judges of men as he does of things. He

would persuade you that Sir Isaac Newton was a money-scrivener, Voltaire

dull, Bonaparte a poor creature, and the late Mr. Howard a misanthrope;

while he pays a willing homage to the Illustrious Obscure, of whom he

always carries a list in his pocket. His creed is formed not from a

distrust and disavowal of the exploded errors of other systems, but from

a determined rejection of their acknowledged excellences. It is a

transposition of reason and common sense. He adopts all the vulnerable

points of belief as the triumphs of his fastidious philosophy, and holds

a general retainer for the defence of all contradictions in terms and

impossibilities in practice. He is at cross-purposes with himself as

well as others, and discards his own caprices if ever he suspects there

is the least ground for them. Doubt succeeds to doubt, cloud rolls over

cloud, one paradox is driven out by another still greater, in endless

succession. He is equally averse to the prejudices of the vulgar, the

paradoxes of the learned, or the habitual convictions of his own mind.

He moves in an unaccountable diagonal between truth and falsehood, sense

and nonsense, sophistry and common-place, and only assents to any

opinion when he knows that all the reasons are against it. A matter of

fact is abhorrent to his nature: the very _air_ of truth repels him. He

is only saved from the extremities of absurdity by combining them all in

his own person. Two things are indispensable to him—to set out from no

premises, and to arrive at no conclusion. The consciousness of a single

certainty would be an insupportable weight upon his mind. He slides out

of a logical deduction by the help of metaphysics: and if the labyrinths

of metaphysics did not afford him ‘ample scope and verge enough,’ he

would resort to necromancy and the cabbala. He only tolerates the

science of astronomy for the sake of its connection with the dreams of

judicial astrology, and escapes from the _Principia_ of Newton to the

jargon of Lily and Ashmole. All his notions are floating and unfixed,

like what is feigned of the first forms of things flying about in search

of bodies to attach themselves to; but _his_ ideas seek to avoid all

contact with solid substances. Innumerable evanescent thoughts dance

before him, and dazzle his sight, like insects in the evening sun. Truth

is to him a ceaseless round of contradictions: he lives in the belief of

a perpetual lie, and in affecting to think what he pretends to say. His

mind is in a constant estate of flux and reflux: he is like the

Sea-horse in the Ocean; he is the Man in the Moon, the Wandering

Jew.—The reason of all this is, that Mr. Coleridge has great powers of

thought and fancy, without will or sense. He is without a strong feeling

of the existence of any thing out of himself; and he has neither

purposes nor passions of his own to make him wish it to be. All that he

does or thinks is involuntary; even his perversity and self-will are so.

They are nothing but a necessity of yielding to the slightest motive.

Everlasting inconsequentiality marks all that he attempts. All his

impulses are loose, airy, devious, casual. The strongest of his purposes

is lighter than the gossamer, ‘that wantons in the idle summer-air’: the

brightest of his schemes a bubble blown by an infant’s breath, that

rises, glitters, bursts in the same instant:—

‘Or like the Borealis race,

That flit ere you can mark their place:

Or like the snow falls in the river,

A moment white, then gone for ever.’

His mind has infinite activity, which only leads him into numberless

chimeras; and infinite resources, which not being under the guidance of

his will, only distract and perplex him. His genius has angel’s wings;

but neither hands nor feet. He soars up to heaven, circles the empyrean,

or dives to the centre of the earth, but he neither lays his hands upon

the treasures of the one, nor can find a resting place for his feet in

the other. He is no sooner borne to the utmost point of his ambition,

than he is hurried away from it again by the same fantastic impulse, or

his own specific levity. He has all the faculties of the human mind but

one, and yet without that one, the rest only impede and interfere with

each other—‘Like to a man on double business bound who both neglects.’

He would have done better if he had known less. His imagination thus

becomes metaphysical, his metaphysics fantastical, his wit heavy, his

arguments light, his poetry prose, his prose poetry, his politics

turned—but not to account. He belongs to all parties and is of service

to none. He gives up his independence of mind, and yet does not acquire

independence of fortune. He offends others without satisfying himself,

and equally by his servility and singularity, shocks the prejudices of

all about him. If he had had but common moral principle, that is,

sincerity, he would have been a great man; nor hardly, as it is, appears

to us—

‘Less than arch-angel ruined, and the excess

Of glory obscur’d.’

We lose our patience when we think of the powers that he has wasted, and

compare them and their success with those, for instance, of such a

fellow as the ——, all whose ideas, notions, apprehensions,

comprehensions, feelings, virtues, genius, skill, are comprised in the

two words which _Peachum_ describes as necessary qualifications in his

gang, ‘To stand himself and bid others stand!’

When his six Irish friends, the six Irish gentlemen, Mr. Makins, Mr.

Dunkley, Mr. Monaghan, Mr. Gollogher, Mr. Gallaspy, and Mr. O’Keeffe,

after an absence of several years, discovered their old acquaintance

John Buncle, sitting in a mixed company at Harrowgate Wells, they

exclaimed with one accord—‘There he is—making love to the finest woman

in the universe!’ So we may say at a venture of Mr. Coleridge—‘There he

is, at this instant (no matter where) talking away among his gossips, as

if he were at the Court of Semiramis, with the Sophi or Prestor John.’

The place can never reach the height of his argument. He should live in

a world of enchantment, that things might answer to his descriptions.

His talk would suit the miracle of the Conversion of Constantine, or

Raphael’s Assembly of the Just. It is not short of that. His face would

cut no figure there, but his tongue would wag to some purpose. He is fit

to take up the deep pauses of conversation between Cardinals and

Angels—his cue would not be wanting in presence of the beatific vision.

Let him talk on for ever in this world and the next; and both worlds

will be the better for it. But let him not write, or pretend to write,

nonsense. Nobody is the better for it. It was a fine thought in Mr.

Wordsworth to represent Cervantes at the day of judgment and

conflagration of the world carrying off the romance of Don Quixote under

his arm. We hope that Mr. Coleridge, on the same occasion, will leave

‘the Friend’ to take its chance, and his ‘Lay Sermon’ to get up into the

Limbo of Vanity, how it can.

THE STATESMAN’S MANUAL; _or the Bible the best Guide to Political Skill

and Foresight_. _A Lay Sermon, addressed to the Higher Classes of

Society._ _By_ S. T. Coleridge, _Esq._ Gale and Fenner.

_Dec. 29, 1816._

Here is the true Simon Pure. We have by anticipation given some account

of this Sermon. We have only to proceed to specimens in illustration of

what we have said.

It sets out with the following sentence:—

‘If our own knowledge and information concerning the Bible had been

confined to the one fact of its immediate derivation from God, we should

still presume that it contained rules and assistances for all conditions

of men under all circumstances; and therefore for communities no less

than for individuals.’

Now this is well said; ‘and ’tis a kind of good deed to say well.’ But

why did not Mr. Coleridge keep on in the same strain to the end of the

chapter, instead of himself disturbing the harmony and unanimity which

he here very properly supposes to exist on this subject, or questioning

the motives of its existence by such passages as the following, p. 23 of

the Appendix:

‘Thank heaven! notwithstanding the attempts of Mr. Thomas Paine and his

compeers, it is not so bad with us. _Open infidelity_ has ceased to be a

means even of gratifying vanity; for the leaders of the gang themselves

turned apostates to Satan, as soon as the number of their proselytes

became _so large_, that Atheism ceased to give distinction. Nay, it

became a mark of original thinking to defend the Belief and the Ten

Commandments; so the _strong minds_ veered round, and religion came

again into fashion.’

Now we confess we do not find in this statement much to thank heaven

for; if religion has only come into fashion again with the strong

minds—(it will hardly be denied that Mr. Coleridge is one of the

number)—as a better mode of gratifying their vanity than ‘open

infidelity.’ Be this as it may, Mr. Coleridge has here given a true and

masterly delineation of that large class of Proselytes or their

teachers, who believe any thing or nothing, just as their vanity prompts

them. All that we have ever said of modern apostates is poor and feeble

to it. There is however one error in his statement, inasmuch as Mr.

Thomas Paine never openly professed Atheism, whatever some of his

compeers might do.

It is a pity that with all that fund of ‘rules and assistances’ which

the Bible contains for our instruction and reproof, and which the author

in this work proposes to recommend as the Statesman’s Manual, or the

best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight, in times like these, he has

not brought forward a single illustration of his doctrine, nor referred

to a single example in the Jewish history that bears at all, in the

circumstances, or the inference, on our own, but one, and that one he

has purposely omitted. Is this to be credited? Not without quoting the

passage.

‘But do you require some one or more particular passage from the Bible

that may at once illustrate and exemplify its application to the changes

and fortunes of empires? Of the numerous chapters that relate to the

Jewish tribes, their enemies and allies, before and after their division

into two kingdoms, it would be more difficult to state a single one,

from which some guiding light might _not_ be struck.’ [Oh, very well, we

shall have a few of them. The passage goes on.] ‘And in nothing is

Scriptural history more strongly contrasted with the histories of

highest note in the present age, than in its freedom from the hollowness

of abstractions.’ [Mr. Coleridge’s admiration of the inspired writers

seems to be very much mixed with a dislike of Hume and Gibbon.]—‘While

the latter present a shadow-fight of Things and Quantities, the former

gives us the history of Men, and balances the important influence of

individual minds with the previous state of national morals and manners,

in which, as constituting a specific susceptibility, it presents to us

the true cause, both of the influence itself, and of the Weal or Woe

that were its consequents. _How should it be otherwise?_ The histories

and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in

the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy.’ [“still harping on my

daughter”] ‘and are the _product_ of an unenlivened generalizing

understanding. In the Scriptures they are the living _educts_ of the

Imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which

incorporating the reason in Images of the Sense, and organising (as it

were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling

energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious

in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the

_conductors_. These are the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld when the hand of

the Lord was upon him, and he saw visions of God as he sat among the

captives by the river of Chebar. _Whither soever the Spirit was to go,

the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go; for the spirit of

the living creature was in the wheels also._ The truths and the symbols

that represent them move in conjunction, and form the living chariot

that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity. _Hence by a

derivative, indeed, but not a divided influence, and though in a

secondary, yet in more than a metaphorical sense, the Sacred Book_ is

worthily entitled the Word of God,’ p. 36.

So that, after all, the Bible is not the immediate word of God, except

according to the German philosophy, and _in something between a literal

and metaphorical sense_. Of all the cants that ever were canted in this

canting world, this is the worst! The author goes on to add, that ‘it is

among the miseries of the present age that it recognises no medium

between _literal_ and _metaphorical_,’ and laments that ‘the mechanical

understanding, in the blindness of its self-complacency, confounds

SYMBOLS with ALLEGORIES.’—This is certainly a sad mistake, which he

labours very learnedly to set right, ‘in a diagonal sidelong movement

between truth and falsehood.’—We assure the reader that the passages

which we have given above are given in the order in which they are

strung together in the Sermon; and so he goes on for several pages,

concluding his career where the Allies have concluded theirs, with the

doctrine of Divine Right; which he does not however establish quite so

successfully with the pen, as they have done with the sword. ‘Herein’

(says this profound writer) ‘the Bible differs from all the books of

Greek philosophy, and in a two-fold manner. It doth not affirm a Divine

Nature only, but a God; and not a God only, but the living God. _Hence

in the Scriptures alone is the_ JUS DIVINUM _or direct Relation of the

State and its Magistracy to the Supreme Being, taught as a vital and

indispensable part of_ ALL MORAL AND ALL POLITICAL WISDOM, _even as the

Jewish alone was a true theocracy!_’

Now it does appear to us, that as the reason why the _Jus Divinum_ was

taught in the Jewish state was, that that alone was a true theocracy,

this is so far from proving this doctrine to be a _part of all moral and

all political wisdom_, that it proves just the contrary. This may

perhaps be owing to our mechanical understanding. Wherever Mr. C. will

shew us the theocracy, we will grant him the _Jus Divinum_. Where God

really pulls down and sets up kings, the people need not do it. Under

the true Jewish theocracy, the priests and prophets cashiered kings; but

our lay-preacher will hardly take this office upon himself as a part of

the _Jus Divinum_, without having any thing better to shew for it than

his profound moral and political wisdom. Mr. Southey hints at something

of the kind in verse, and we are not sure that Mr. Coleridge does not

hint at it in prose. For after his extraordinary career and interminable

circumnavigation through the heaven of heavens, after being wrapt in the

wheels of Ezekiel, and sitting with the captives by the river of Chebar,

he lights once more on English ground, and you think you have him.

‘But I refer to the demand. Were it my object to touch on the present

state of public affairs in this kingdom, or on the prospective measures

in agitation respecting our Sister Island, I would direct your most

serious meditations to the latter period of the reign of Solomon, and

the revolutions in the reign of Rehoboam his son. _But I tread on

glowing embers._ I will turn to a subject on which all men of reflection

are at length in agreement—the causes of the Revolution and fearful

chastisement of France.’—Here Mr. Coleridge is off again on the wings of

fear as he was before on those of fancy.—This trifling can only be

compared to that of the impertinent barber of Bagdad, who being sent for

to shave the prince, spent the whole morning in preparing his razors,

took the height of the sun with an astrolabe, sung the song of Zimri,

and danced the dance of Zamtout, and concluded by declining to perform

the operation at all, because the day was unfavourable to its success.

As we are not so squeamish as Mr. Coleridge, and do not agree with him

and all other men of reflection on the subject of the French Revolution,

we shall turn back to the latter end of the reign of Solomon, and that

of his successor Rehoboam, to find out the parallel to the present reign

and regency which so particularly strikes and startles Mr.

Coleridge.—Here it is for the edification of the curious, from the First

Book of Kings:—

‘And the time that Solomon reigned over all Israel was forty years. And

Solomon slept with his fathers, and was buried in the city of David his

father: and Rehoboam his son reigned in his stead. And Rehoboam went to

Shechem: _for all Israel were come to Shechem to make him king_.[24] And

Jeroboam and all the congregation of Israel came and spake unto

Rehoboam, saying, Thy father (Solomon) made our yoke grievous; now,

therefore, make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy

yoke which he put upon us, lighter, _and we will serve thee_. And he

said unto them, Depart yet for three days, then come again to me. And

the people departed. And King Rehoboam consulted with the old men that

stood before Solomon his father while he yet lived, and said, How do ye

advise, that I may answer this people? And they spake unto him, saying,

_If thou wilt be a servant unto this people_ this day, and wilt serve

them, and answer them, and speak good words unto them, _then_ they will

be thy servants for ever. But he forsook the counsel of the old men,

which they had given him, _and consulted with the young men that were

grown up with him, and which stood before him_: And he said unto them,

What counsel give ye, that we may answer this people, who have spoken to

me, saying, Make the yoke which thy father did put upon us lighter? And

the young men that were grown up with him spake unto him, saying, Thus

shalt thou speak unto this people that spake unto thee, saying, Thy

father made our yoke heavy, but make thou it lighter unto us; thus shalt

thou say unto them, _My little finger shall be thicker than my father’s

loins. And now, whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will

add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips: but I will

chastise you with scorpions._ So Jeroboam and all the people came to

Rehoboam the third day, as the king had appointed, saying, come to me

again the third day. And the king _answered the people roughly_, and

forsook the old men’s counsel that they gave him: And spake to them

after the counsel of the young men, saying, _My father made your yoke

heavy, and I will add to your yoke; my father also chastised you with

whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions._ Wherefore the king

hearkened not unto the people; _for the cause was from the Lord_, that

he might perform his saying which the Lord spake by Ahijah, the

Shilonite, unto Jeroboam the son of Nebat.’ [We here see pretty plainly

how the principle of ‘a true theocracy’ qualified the doctrine of _Jus

Divinum_ among the Jews; but let us mark the sequel.] ‘_So when all

Israel saw that the King hearkened not unto them, the people answered

the king, saying, What portion have we in David: neither have we

inheritance in the son of Jesse: to your tents, O Israel: now see to

thine own house, David. So Israel departed unto their tents._ Then king

Rehoboam sent Adoram, who was over the tribute; and all Israel stoned

him with stones that he died; therefore king Rehoboam made speed to get

him up to his chariot to flee to Jerusalem. So Israel rebelled against

the house of David unto this day. And it came to pass when all Israel

heard that Jeroboam was come again, that they sent and called him unto

the congregation, and made him king over all Israel.’

Here is the doctrine and practice of divine right, with a vengeance. We

do not wonder Mr. Coleridge was shy of instances from his Statesman’s

Manual, as the rest are like this. He does not say (neither shall we,

for we are not salamanders any more than he, _to tread on glowing

embers_) whether he approves of the conduct of all Israel in this case,

or of the _grand_, _magnificent_, _and gracious_ answer of the son of

Solomon; but this we will say, that his bringing or alluding to a

passage like this immediately after his _inuendo_ (addressed to the

higher classes) that the doctrine of divine right is contained _par

excellence_ in the Scriptures alone, is we should suppose, an instance

of a power of voluntary self-delusion, and of a delight in exercising it

on the most ticklish topics, greater than ever was or ever will be

possessed by any other individual that ever did or ever will live upon

the face of the earth. ‘Imposture, organised into a comprehensive and

self-consistent whole, forms a world of its own, in which inversion

becomes the order of nature.’ Compared with such powers of inconceivable

mental refinement, hypocrisy is a great baby, a shallow dolt, a gross

dunce, a clumsy devil!

Among other passages, unrivalled in style and matter by any other

author, take the following:—

‘When I named this Essay a Sermon, I sought to prepare the inquirers

after it for the absence of all the usual softenings _suggested by

worldly prudence_, of all compromise between truth and courtesy. But not

even as a Sermon would I have addressed the present Discourse to a

promiscuous audience: and for this reason I likewise announced it in the

title-page, as exclusively _ad clerum_, i.e. (in the old and wide sense

of the word[25]) to men of _clerkly_ acquirements, of whatever

profession.’ [All that we know is, that there is no such title-page to

our copy.] ‘I would that the greater part of our publications could be

thus _directed_, each to its appropriate class of readers. But this

cannot be! For among other odd burs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our

luxuriant activity, we have a READING PUBLIC, as strange _a phrase_,

methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of

meditation; and yet _no fiction_! For our readers have, in good truth,

multiplied exceedingly, and have waxed proud. It would require the

_intrepid accuracy_ of a Colquhoun’—[Intrepid and accurate applied to a

Colquhoun! It seems that whenever an objection in matter of fact occurs

to our author’s mind, he instinctively applies the flattering unction of

words to smooth it over to his conscience, as you apply a salve to a

sore]—‘to venture at the precise number of that vast company only, whose

heads and hearts are dieted at the two public _ordinaries_ of

literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press. But what

is the result? Does the _inward man_ thrive on this regimen? Alas! if

the average health of the consumers may be judged of by the articles of

largest consumption’—[Is not this a side-blow at the _Times_ and

_Courier_?]—‘if the secretions may be conjectured from the ingredients

of the dishes that are found best suited to their palates; from all that

I have seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my

_profaccia_’—[‘Oh thou particular fellow!‘]—‘with a desponding sigh:

From a popular philosophy, and philosophic populace, good sense deliver

us!’

Why so, any more than from a popular religion or a religious populace,

on Mr. Coleridge’s own principle, p. 12, ‘Reason and religion are their

own evidence’? We should suspect that our unread author, the ‘Secret

Tattle’ of the Press, is thus fastidious, because he keeps an ordinary

himself which is not frequented. He professes to be select: but we all

know the secret of ‘seminaries for a limited number of pupils.’ Mr.

Coleridge addresses his Lay-Sermon ‘to the higher classes,’ in his

printed title-page: in that which is not printed he has announced it to

be _directed ad clerum_, which might imply the clergy, but no: he issues

another EXTENT for the benefit of the Reading Public, and says he means

by the annunciation _ad clerum_, all persons of clerkly acquirements,

that is, who can read and write. What wretched stuff is all this! We

well remember a friend of his and ours saying, many years ago, on seeing

a little shabby volume of _Thomson’s Seasons_ lying in the window of a

solitary ale-house, at the top of a rock hanging over the British

Channel,—‘_That is true fame!_’ If he were to write fifty Lay-Sermons,

he could not answer the inference from this one sentence, which is, that

there are books that make their way wherever there are readers, and that

there ought every where to be readers for such books!

To the words READING PUBLIC, in the above passage, is the following

note, which in wit and humour does not fall short of Mr. Southey’s

‘Tract on the Madras System’:—

‘Some participle passive in the diminutive form, _eruditorum natio_ for

instance, might seem at first sight a fuller and more exact designation:

but the superior force and humour of the former become evident whenever

the phrase occurs, as a step or stair in the climax of irony.... Among

the revolutions worthy of notice, the change in the introductory

sentences and prefatory matter in serious books is not the least

striking. The same gross flattery, which disgusts us in the dedications

to individuals, in the elder writers, is now transferred to the nation

at large, or the READING PUBLIC; while the Jeremiads of our old

moralists, and their angry denunciations against the ignorance,

immorality, and irreligion of the _people_ appear (_mutatis mutandis_,

and with an appeal to the worst passions, envy, discontent, scorn,

vindictiveness,[26] &c.) in the shape of bitter libels on ministers,

parliament, the clergy; in short, on the state and church, and all

persons employed in them. Likewise, I would point out to the reader’s

attention the marvellous predominance at present of the words, _Idea_

and Demonstration. Every talker now-a-days has an Idea; aye, and he will

demonstrate it too! A few days ago, I heard one of the READING PUBLIC, a

thinking and independent smuggler, euphonise the latter word with much

significance, in a tirade against the planners of the late African

expedition: “_As to Algiers, any man that has half an_ IDEA _in his

skull must know, that it has been long ago dey-monstered, I should say,

dey-monstrified_,” _&c._ But the phrase, which occasioned this note,

brings to my mind the mistake of a lethargic Dutch traveller, who,

returning highly gratified from a showman’s caravan, which he had been

tempted to enter by the words LEARNED PIG, gilt on the pannels, met

another caravan of a similar shape, with the READING FLY on it, in

letters of the same size and splendour. “Why, dis is voonders above

voonders,” exclaims the Dutchman, takes his seat as first comer, and

soon fatigued by waiting, and by the very hush and intensity of his

expectation, gives way to his constitutional somnolence, from which he

is roused by the supposed showman at Hounslow, with a “_In what name,

Sir, was your place taken? are you booked all the way for Reading?_” Now

a Reading Public is (to my mind) more marvellous still, and in the third

tier of “Voonders above voonders.“‘

A public that could read such stuff as this with any patience would

indeed be so. We do not understand how, with this systematic antipathy

to the Reading Public, it is consistent in Mr. Coleridge to declare of

‘Dr. Bell’s original and unsophisticated plan,’ that he ‘himself regards

it as an especial gift of Providence to the human race, as an

incomparable machine, a vast moral steam-engine.’ Learning is an old

University mistress, that he is not willing to part with, except for the

use of the church of England; and he is sadly afraid she should be

debauched by the ‘liberal ideas’ of Joseph Lancaster! As to his aversion

to the prostitution of the word _Idea_ to common uses and in common

minds, it is no wonder, from the very exalted _idea_ which he has given

us of this term.

‘What other measures I had in contemplation it has been my endeavour to

explain elsewhere.... O what treasures of practical wisdom would be once

more brought into open day by the solution of this problem,’ to wit, ‘a

thorough recasting of the moulds in which the minds of our gentry, the

characters of our future land-owners, magistrates, and senators, are to

receive their shape and fashion. Suffice it for the present to hint the

master-thought. _The first man, on whom the light of an IDEA dawned did

in that same moment receive the spirit and the credentials of a

Lawgiver_; and as long as man shall exist, so long will the possession

of that antecedent knowledge which exists only in the power of an

_idea_, be the one lawful qualification for all dominion in the world of

the senses,’ p. 52. Now we do think this a shorter cut towards the

undermining of the rotten boroughs, and ousting the present ministry,

than any we have yet heard of. One of the most extraordinary ideas in

this work is where the Author proves the doctrine of free will from the

existence of property; and again, when he recommends the study of the

Scriptures, from the example of Heraclitus and Horace. To conclude this

most inconclusive piece of work, we find the distant hopes and doubtful

expectations of the writer’s mind summed up in the following rare

rhapsody. ‘Oh what a mine of undiscovered treasures, what a new world of

power and truth would the Bible promise to our future meditation, if _in

some gracious moment one solitary text of all its inspired contents_

should but dawn upon us in the pure untroubled brightness of an IDEA,

that most glorious birth of the godlike within us, which even as the

light, its material symbol, reflects itself from a thousand surfaces,

and flies homeward to its parent mind, enriched with a thousand forms,

itself above form, and still remaining in its own simplicity and

identity! O for a flash of that same light, in which the first position

of geometric science that ever loosed itself from the generalizations of

a groping and insecure experience, did for the first time reveal itself

to a human intellect in all its evidence and in all its fruitfulness,

Transparence without Vacuum, and Plenitude without Opacity! O! that a

single gleam of our own inward experience would make comprehensible to

us the rapturous EUREKA, and the grateful hecatomb of the philosopher of

Samos: or that vision which, from the contemplation of an arithmetical

harmony, rose to the eye of Kepler, presenting the planetary world, and

all their orbits in the divine order of their ranks and distances; or

which, in the falling of an apple, revealed to the ethereal intuition of

our own Newton the constructive principle of the material universe. The

promises which I have ventured to hold forth concerning the hidden

treasures of the Law and the Prophets will neither be condemned as

paradox, or as exaggeration, by the mind that has learnt to understand

the possibility that the reduction of the sands of the sea to number

should be found a less stupendous problem by Archimedes than the simple

conception of the Parmenidean ONE. What, however, is achievable by the

human understanding without this light may be comprised in the epithet

κενόσπουδοι and _a melancholy comment on that phrase would the history

of the human Cabinets and Legislatures for the last thirty years

furnish_! The excellent Barrow, the last of the disciples of Plato and

Archimedes among our modern mathematicians, shall give the description

and state the value; and, in his words, I shall conclude:—

‘_Aliud agere, to be impertinently busy, doing that which conduceth to

no good purpose, is, in some respect, worse than to do nothing. Of such

industry we may understand that of the Preacher, “The labour of the

foolish wearieth every one of them.”_’

A better conclusion could not be found for this Lay-Sermon: for greater

nonsense the author could not write, even though he were inspired

expressly for the purpose.

MR. COLERIDGE’S LAY-SERMON

TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER

_Jan. 12, 1817._

Sir,

Your last Sunday’s ‘Literary Notice’ has given me some uneasiness on two

points.

It was in January, 1798, just 19 years ago, that I got up one morning

before day-light to walk 10 miles in the mud, and went to hear a poet

and a philosopher preach. It was the author of the ‘Lay-Sermon.’ Never,

Sir, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such another walk as

this cold, raw, comfortless one in the winter of the year 1798. Mr.

Examiner, _Il y a des impressions que ni le tems ni les circonstances

peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siècles entiers, le doux tems de ma

jeunesse ne peut renaître pour moi, ni s’effacer jamais dans ma

mémoire._ When I got there, Sir, the organ was playing the 100th psalm,

and when it was done, Mr. C. rose and gave out his text, ‘And he went up

into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF, ALONE. As he gave out this text, his

voice ‘rose like a steam of rich distill’d perfumes,’ and when he came

to the last two words, which he pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it

seemed to me, Sir, who was then young, as if the sounds had echoed from

the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated

in solemn silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into

my mind, ‘of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about,

and whose food was locusts and wild honey.’ The preacher then launched

into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. _That_ sermon,

like _this_ Sermon, was upon peace and war; upon church and state—not

their alliance, but their separation—on the spirit of the world and the

spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed to one another.

He talked of those who had ‘inscribed the cross of Christ on banners

dripping with human gore.’ He made a poetical and pastoral

excursion,—and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a striking

contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team afield, or

sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though he should

never be old, and the same poor country-lad, crimped, kidnapped, brought

into town, made drunk at an ale-house, turned into a wretched

drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with powder and pomatum, a

long cue at his back, and tricked out in the loathsome finery of the

profession of blood.

‘Such were the notes our once-lov’d poet sung.’

And for myself, Sir, I could not have been more delighted if I had heard

the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met together, Truth

and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with the sanction of

Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned home well satisfied.

The sun that was still labouring pale and wan through the sky, obscured

by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the _good cause_: and the cold dank

drops of dew that hung half melted on the beard of the thistle, had

something genial and refreshing in them; for there was a spirit of hope

and youth in all nature, that turned everything into good. The face of

nature had not then the brand of JUS DIVINUM on it;

‘Like to that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.’

Now, Sir, what I have to complain of is this, that from reading your

account of the ‘Lay-Sermon,’ I begin to suspect that my notions formerly

must have been little better than a deception: that my faith in Mr.

Coleridge’s great powers must have been a vision of my youth, that, like

other such visions, must pass away from me; and that all his genius and

eloquence is _vox et preterea nihil_: for otherwise how is it so lost to

all common sense upon paper?

Again, Sir, I ask Mr. Coleridge, why, having preached such a sermon as I

have described, he has published such a sermon as you have described?

What right, Sir, has he or any man to make a fool of me or any man? I am

naturally, Sir, a man of a plain, dull, dry understanding, without

flights or fancies, and can just contrive to plod on, if left to myself:

what right, then has Mr. C., who is just going to ascend in a balloon,

to offer me a seat in the parachute, only to throw me from the height of

his career upon the ground, and dash me to pieces? Or again, what right

has he to invite me to a feast of poets and philosophers, fruits and

flowers intermixed,—immortal fruits and amaranthine flowers,—and then to

tell me it is all vapour, and, like _Timon_, to throw his empty dishes

in my face? No, Sir, I must and will say it is hard. I hope, between

ourselves, there is no breach of confidence in all this; nor do I well

understand how men’s opinions on moral, political, or religious subjects

can be kept a secret, except by putting them in _The Correspondent_.[27]

SEMPER EGO AUDITOR.

BONAPARTE AND MULLER

THE CELEBRATED HISTORIAN OF SWITZERLAND

[_From Müller’s Posthumous Works._]

‘On the 19th May I was informed by the Minister Secretary of State,

Maret, that at seven o’clock of the evening of the following day I must

wait on the Emperor Napoleon. I waited accordingly on this Minister at

the appointed hour, and was presented. The Emperor sat on a sofa: a few

persons whom I did not know stood at some distance in the apartment. The

Emperor began to speak of the History of Switzerland; told me that I

ought to complete it; that even the more recent times had their

interest. He came to the work of mediation, discovered a very good will,

if we do not meddle with any thing foreign, and remain quietly in the

interior. He proceeded from the Swiss to the old Greek Constitution and

History, to the Theory of Constitutions, to the complete diversity of

those of Asia, (and the causes of this diversity in the climate,

polygamy, &c.) the opposite characters of the Arabian (which the Emperor

highly extolled), and the Tartarian Races (which led to the irruptions

that all civilization had always to dread from that quarter, and the

necessity of a bulwark): the peculiar value of European culture (never

greater freedom, security of property, humanity, and better laws in

general, than since the 15th century); then how every thing was linked

together, and in the inscrutable guidance of an invisible hand; and how

he himself had become great through his enemies: the great confederation

of nations, the idea of which Henry the Fourth never had: the foundation

of all religion and its necessity; that man could not well bear

completely clear truth, and required to be kept in order; the

possibility, however, of a more happy condition, if the numerous feuds

ceased, which were occasioned by too complicated constitutions (such as

the German), and the intolerable burden suffered by States from

excessive armies. A great deal more besides was said, and indeed we

spoke of almost every country and nation. The Emperor spoke at first in

his usual manner; but the more interesting our conversation became, he

spoke in a lower and lower tone, so that I was obliged to bend myself

quite down to his face; and no man can have understood what he said (and

therefore many things I will not repeat).—I opposed him occasionally,

and he entered into discussion. Quite impartially and truly, as before

God, I must say, that the variety of his knowledge, the acuteness of his

observations, the solidity of his understanding (not dazzling wit), his

grand and comprehensive views, filled me with astonishment, and his

manner of speaking to me, with love for him. A couple of Marshals, and

also the Duke of Benevento, had entered in the mean time; he did not

break off. After five quarters, or an hour, and an half, he allowed the

concert to begin; and I know not, whether accidentally or from goodness,

he desired pieces, which, one of them especially, had reference to

pastoral life and the Swiss (_Rans des Vaches_). After this, he bowed in

a friendly manner and left the room.—Since the audience with Frederick

(1782), I never had a conversation on such a variety of subjects, at

least with any Prince: if I can judge correctly from recollection, I

must give the Emperor the preference in point of solidity and

comprehension; Frederick was somewhat Voltairian. Besides, there is in

his tone much firmness and vigour, but in his mouth something as

attractive and fascinating as in Frederick. It was one of the most

remarkable days of my life. By his genius and his disinterested goodness

he has also conquered me.’

ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TIMES NEWSPAPER

ON MODERN APOSTATES

—— —— ——‘Out of these convertites

There is much matter to be heard and learnt.’—_As you like it._

_Dec. 15, 1816._

This is an age in which, to hear some people talk, you would suppose

there is no such thing as literary prostitution or political apostacy,

in the sense in which those vices used formerly to be practised and

condemned. We live in a liberal age; and a very different and much more

liberal turn has been given to the whole matter. Men do indeed change

sides, but then it is proper at present that they should. They go from

one extreme to another, they proceed to the utmost lengths of violence

and abuse, both against the principles they formerly held and the

persons they formerly agreed with; but then this is entirely owing to

the force of reason and honest conviction. ‘All honourable men’—no

hypocrites amongst them—

‘But all is conscience and tender heart.’

They have deserted the cause of liberty in as far as it deserted them;

but no farther. No sinister motives, no disappointed expectations from a

new order of things, no places to be got under the old, no laureatships,

no editorships, no popular odium to contend with, no court-smiles to

inveigle, have had any weight with them, or can be supposed to have had

any. They could not tolerate wrong on any side, on the side of kings, or

of the people. That’s all. They have changed sides to preserve the

integrity of their principles and the consistency of their characters.

They have gone over to the strong side of the question, merely to shew

the conscious purity of their motives; and they chose the moment of the

total failure of all hopes from the weaker side to desert to the

stronger, to put the matter out of all doubt. They are not only above

corruption, but above suspicion. They have never once been at fault,

have neither sneaked nor shuffled, botched or boggled, in their

politics. They who were loud against the abuses of a principle which

they set out with considering as sacred, the right of a people to chuse

their own form of government, have not turned round to flatter and to

screen, with the closeness of their fulsome embraces, the abuses of a

power which they set out with treating as monstrous, the right of a

discarded family to reign over a nation in perpetuity by the grace of

God. They ‘whose love of liberty was of that dignity that it went hand

in hand even with the vow they made this virgin bride,’ have not stooped

to ‘commit whoredom greedily’ with that old harlot, Despotism. They ‘who

struck the foremost man of all this world but for supporting robbers,’

have not contaminated their fingers with base bribes, nor turned

receivers of stolen goods for paltry knaves and licensed freebooters.

Nice, scrupulous, firm, inflexible, uncorrupted, incapable of injustice

or disguise; patriots in 1793, and royalists in 1816; at all times

extreme and at all times consistent in their opinions; converts to the

cause of kings, only because kings were converts (unaccountable

converts) to the cause of the people: they have not become, nor are they

in danger of becoming, thorough-paced time-servers, regular-bred

courtiers, trammelled tools of despotism, hired pimps and panders of

power. Nothing of the sort. They have not been made (not they) the

overweening dupes of their own conceit and cunning. These political

innocents have not, like the two poor devils in the _Recruiting

Officer_, been laid hold of, entrapped, kidnapped, by that fell

serjeant, Necessity, and then, in the height of their admiration of ‘the

wonderful works of nature’ and the King’s picture, been enlisted for

life in his Majesty’s service, by some Court crimp, some Treasury scout

in the shape of a well-bred baronet or booby Lord. Our maiden poets,

patriots, and philanthropists, have not, it is to be hoped, like _Miss

Lucy Lockitt_, been bilked of their virtue, ‘bamboozled and bit.’ They

have got into a house of ill fame in the neighbourhood of Pall-Mall,

like _Miss Clarissa Harlowe_, but they will defend their honour to the

last gasp with their pens against that old bawd, Legitimacy, as she did

hers with a pen-knife against the old Lady in Duke’s place; or if the

opiates and provocatives unfairly administered, and almost unavoidable

when people get into such company and such situations, should for an

instant rob them of what they hold most dear, their immaculate purity,

they will, like Richardson’s heroine, die a lingering death of grief and

shame for the trick that has been played upon their unsuspecting

credulity!—See, here comes one of them to answer for himself. It is the

same person who in the year 1800 was for making an example of the whole

House of Commons (in spite of the humble petition and remonstrance of

the writer of this article in favour of a small minority), for being the

echoes of the King’s speeches for carrying on the war against the French

Revolution. What is that _thing_ he has in his hand? It is not, nor it

cannot be, a sonnet to the King, celebrating his ‘royal fortitude,’ in

having brought that war to a successful close fourteen years after!

‘Such recantation had no charms for him,

‘Nor could he brook it.’

Nor is it the same consistent person whose deep-toned voice rebellows

among the mountain echoes with peals of ideot rage and demon laughter—

‘Proud Glaramara northward caught the sound,

‘And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head,

‘That there was strange commotion in the hills,’—

at the infamy and madness of Sir Robert Wilson’s gallant conduct in

having rescued one of its victims from the fangs of that Bourbon

despotism which that royal fortitude had restored.—Is not _that_ Mr.

Southey, with something of the glow on his cheek which he had in writing

_Joan of Arc_, and with the beaked curl of his nose which provoked him

to write the _Inscription on Old Sarum_, returning in disgrace from the

Prince’s Levee, for having indignantly noticed in one of his Birth-day

Odes, Ferdinand’s treatment of the Spanish Patriots?—Just yonder, at the

corner of Paternoster-row, you may see Mr. Coleridge, the author of the

eclogue called FIRE, FAMINE, AND SLAUGHTER, who has been to his

bookseller’s to withdraw his ‘Lay Sermon,’ or Statesman’s Manual in

praise of Fire, Slaughter, and Famine! But who is he ‘whose grief

‘Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow

‘Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand

‘Like wonder-wounded hearers?’

’Tis the editor of _The Times_, (poor man, his virtuous indignation must

cost him a great deal of pains and trouble!) as hard at it as ever,

about liberty and independence without respect of persons; in a most

_woundy_ passion, we warrant now, at finding legitimacy at some of its

old tricks, caught _flagranti delicto_, so that the poor gentleman could

not hush the matter up, if he would, and would not, if he could, he is a

man of such a nice morality, and such high notions of honour;—thrown

into daily and hourly cold sweats and convulsions at the mention of

daily and hourly acts of tyranny and base submission to it; flying into

the same heats and hysterics as ever, for he has all the reason now,

that he used to say he had; laying it on, thick and threefold, upon the

magnanimous deliverers of Europe; still in the old King Cambyses’ vein,

‘horrors on horror’s head accumulating’; heaping up epithets and

compound epithets of abuse against his new friends, as he used to do

against his old ones, till Mr. Koenig’s new press groans under the

weight of both together; ordering in a new set of types with a new set

of unheard-of nicknames to be applied everlastingly to the present

candidates for newspaper fame, as the worn-out, feeble, and now

insignificant ones of Monster, Tyrant, Fiend, Upstart, Usurper, Rebel,

Regicide, Traitor, Wretch, Villain, Knave, Fool, Madman, Coward,

Impostor, Unnatural Monster, Bloody Tyrant, Hellish Fiend, Corsican

Upstart, Military Usurper, Wicked Rebel, Impious Regicide, Perfidious

Traitor, Vile Wretch, Base Villain, Low-born Knave, Rank Fool, Egregious

Madman, Notorious Coward, Detestable Impostor, were applied to the old;

swearing as he picks his way to court along the streets, (so that the

people ask who the honest, angry gentleman is) that Ferdinand alone has

done more acts of baseness, treachery, cruelty, oppression, infamy, and

ingratitude, in one year, than Napoleon did in his whole reign; teaching

a parrot to call jade and rogue to all legitimate princes and princesses

that deserve it, as he used himself to rail at all the illegitimate

ones, whether they deserved it or not; repeating over and over, till he

is black in the face, Dr. Slop’s curse upon the Allies and their

proceedings; cursing them in Spain, cursing them in Italy, cursing them

in Genoa, cursing them in Saxony, cursing them in Norway, cursing them

in Finland, cursing them in Poland, cursing them in France, cursing them

every where as they deserve, and as the people every where curse them;

sending the Pope and the Inquisition to the Devil; swooning at the

extinction of Spanish liberty under the beloved Ferdinand; going into a

shivering fit at the roasting of Protestants under Louis the Desired;

biting his lips at Lord Castlereagh’s Letter to _Mon Prince_;

horror-struck at the transfer of so many thousand souls, like so many

head of horned cattle, from one legitimate proprietor of the species to

another, after all his vapouring about the liberties of the people and

the independence of states; learned and lofty, sad and solemn, on the

Convention of Paris; looking big at the imposing attitude of Russia, and

going stark staring mad at the application of the torture and the

thumb-screw to the brave Cortes; gnashing his teeth, rolling his eyes,

and dashing his head against the wall, at the total falsification, and

overthrow of every one of his hopes and his prognostics in every corner

of Europe where the Allies have got footing, and there is no corner

which they have not got under their feet, like a toad under a harrow;

and roaring out like Perillus’s bull against the partitions and

repartitions of the coalesced Sovereigns, their invasions, conquests,

seizures, transfers of men and lands; the murders, massacres,

imprisonments, pillagings, frauds, treacheries, breaches of written

treaties and of verbal promises; usurpations, pretensions, and overt

acts of legitimacy, since it was restored to itself, to one and the

self-same tune that he used to lift up his voice, ‘his most sweet

voice,’ against Bonaparte’s wars and conquests, till the Stock Exchange

was stunned with the clamour, and Mr. Walter well-nigh fainted! The only

fault of this account is, that not one word of it is true.

‘Thy stone, oh Sisyphus, stands still:

‘Ixion rests upon his wheel!’

_Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin_, is a maxim, which,

notwithstanding Mr. Coleridge’s see-saw reasoning to the contrary, we

hold to be true, even of him to this day. _Once an Apostate and always

an Apostate_, we hold to be equally true; and the reason why the last is

true, is that the first is so. A person who is what is called a Jacobin

(and we apply this term in its vulgarest sense to the persons here

meant) that is, who has shaken off certain well known prejudices with

respect to kings or priests, or nobles, cannot so easily resume them

again, whenever his pleasure or his convenience may prompt him to

attempt it. And it is because he cannot resume them again in good

earnest, that he endeavours to make up for his want of sincerity by

violence, either by canting till he makes your soul sicken, like the

author of _The Friend_, or by raving like a Bedlamite, as does the

Editor of _The Times_. Why does he abuse Bonaparte and call him an

upstart? Because he is himself, if he is any thing at all, an upstart;

and because Bonaparte having got the start of him one way, he turned

back to gain the race another, by trying for a court-livery, and to

recommend himself to the house of Brunswick, by proclaiming the

principles of the house of Stuart. Why does he make such a route about

Kings and Queens, and Dukes and Duchesses, and old women of all ages and

both sexes? Because he cares no more for them in his heart than we do.

How should he? ‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba?’ What motive has

he, or what ground of passion, that he should

‘Cleave the general ear with horrid speech,

‘And, like a whore, unpack his heart with words!’

None in the world, any more than the poor player in _Hamlet_, who tried

to ‘work his soul to his conceit, tears in his eyes, distraction in his

looks,’ because it was his cue to do so. He blusters and hectors, and

makes a noise to hide his want of consistency, as cowards turn bullies

to hide their want of courage. He is virulent and vulgar in proportion

as he is insincere; and yet it is the only way in which he can seem

himself not to be a hypocrite. He has no blind prejudices to repose on;

no unshaken principles to refer to; no hearty attachment to altars or to

thrones. You see the Jacobinical leaven working in every line that he

writes, and making strange havoc with his present professions. He would

cashier Louis and Ferdinand, Alexander and Frederick, to-morrow, and

hurl them headlong from their thrones with a stroke of his pen, for not

complying with any one of his favourite dogmas. He has no regard for any

thing but his own will; no feeling of any thing but of hatred to the

cause he has deserted, and of the necessity of keeping from his mind, by

every demonstration of outward scorn and horror, whatever might recal

his old, unprofitable, exploded errors. His hatred and dread of the

principles of others, proceeds from his greater hatred and dread of his

own. The spectre of his former opinions glares perpetually near him, and

provokes his frantic zeal. For close behind him stalks the ghost of the

French Revolution, _that unfortunate Miss Bailey_ of modern politicians,

their mistress and their saint, what time

——‘Society became their glittering bride

‘And airy hopes their children,’—

which, if he was once to turn round, would stare him in the face with

self-conviction, and make his pen drop from his hands. It is this morbid

conflict with his own feelings that many persons do not know what to

make of, and which gives such a tragic, and at the same time, ludicrous

air to his writings. He is obliged to wink and shut his apprehension up,

so that he is blind, stupidly blind to all that makes against him, and

all that makes for him. His understanding seems to labour under a

quinsy; and instead of the little _bonnet rouge_ of 1793, wears a huge

pair of Bourbon blinkers for 1816. Hence the endless inconsistencies in

which he involves himself; and as it is his self-will that makes him

insensible to all objections, it is the same headstrong obstinacy which

makes him regardless of contradictions, and proof against conviction.

In a word, to conclude this part of the subject, the writer of _The

Times_ is governed entirely by his will; and this faculty is strong, and

bears sway in him, as all other principles are weak. He asserts a fact

the louder, as he suspects it to be without proof: and defends a measure

the more lustily, as he feels it to be mischievous. He listens only to

his passions and his prejudices, not to truth or reason. Prove to him

that any thing is the most idle fiction that ever was invented, and he

will swear to it: prove to him that it is fraught with destruction to

the liberties of mankind in all places and in all time to come, and he

is your own for ever. _Sed hæc hactenus._ Goethe has given to one of his

heroes this motto—‘Mad but wise.’ We would give the following to the

hero of _The Times_—Mad but not wise.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF ‘THE TIMES’ NEWSPAPER

ON MODERN LAWYERS AND POETS

—— —— ——‘Facilis descensus Averni;

Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis;

Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,

Hoc opus, hic labor est.’

_December 22, 1816._

The meaning of which passage is, that it is easier to sail with the

stream, than to strive against it. Our classical reformers should have

known this passage in Virgil. They should have known themselves too; but

they did not. ‘Let no man go about to cozen honesty,’ or to be a knave

by halves. The man, as well as the woman, who deliberates between his

principle and the price of its sacrifice, is lost. The same rule holds

with respect to literary as to any other kind of prostitution. It is the

first false step that always costs the most; and which is, for that

reason, always fatal. It requires an effort of resolution, or at least

obstinate prejudice, for a man to maintain his opinions at the expense

of his interest. But it requires a much greater effort of resolution for

a man to give up his interest to recover his independence; because, with

the consistency of his character, he has lost the habitual energy of his

mind, and the indirect aid of prejudice and obstinacy, which are

sometimes as useful to virtue as they are to vice. A man, in adhering to

his principles in contradiction to the decisions of the world, has many

disadvantages. He has nothing to support him but the supposed sense of

right; and any defect in the justice of his cause, or the force of his

conviction, must prey on his mind, in proportion to the delicacy and

sensitiveness of its texture: he is left alone in his opinions; and,

like _Sam Sharpset_, in Mr. Morton’s new comedy (when he gets into

solitary confinement in the spunging-house,) grows nervous, melancholy,

fantastical, and would be glad of _somebody_ or _anybody_ to sympathize

with him; but when he has once gone over to the strong side of the

question (perhaps from these very scruples of conscience, suggested by

weakness and melancholy, as ‘the Devil is very potent with such spirits,

and abuses them to damn them’) our wavering sceptic no longer finds the

same scruples troublesome; the air of a court promotes their digestion

wonderfully; the load on his conscience falls off at the foot of the

throne. The poet-laureate, standing with his laurel-wreath amidst

‘Britain’s warriors, her statesmen, and her fair,’ thinks no more or

says no more about the patriots of Spain pining in dungeons or consigned

to the torture, though it was his zeal, his virtuous, patriotic,

romantic, disinterested zeal for them, which brought _them_ there, and

him to court. His Prince’s smile soothes the involuntary pang of

sympathy rising in his breast; and Mr. Croker’s whispers drown their

agonizing shrieks. When we are at Rome, we must do as the people at Rome

do. A man in a crowd must go along with the crowd, and cannot stop to

pick his way; nor need he be so particular about it. He has friends to

back him: appearances are for him; the world is on his side; his

interest becomes surety for his honour, his vanity makes him blind to

objections, or overrules them, and he is not so much ashamed of being in

the wrong in such good company. It requires some fortitude to oppose

one’s opinion, however right, to that of all the world besides; none at

all to agree with it, however wrong. Nothing but the strongest and

clearest conviction can support a man in a losing minority: any excuse

or quibble is sufficient to salve his conscience, when he has made sure

of the main chance, and his understanding has become the stalking-horse

of his ambition. It is this single circumstance of not being answerable

for one’s opinions one’s-self, but being able to put them off to other

men’s shoulders in all crowds and collections of men, that is the reason

of the violence of mobs, the venality of courts, and the corruption of

all corporate bodies. It is also the reason of the degeneracy of modern

apostates and reformed Jacobins, who find the applause of their king and

country doubly cheering after being so long without it, and who go all

lengths in adulation and servility, to make up for their former awkward

singularity.

Many of the persons we have known, who have deserted the cause of the

people to take a high tone against those who did not chuse to desert it,

have been lawyers or poets. The last took their leave of it by a poetic

license; the first slunk out of it by some loop-hole of the law. We

shall say a word of each.

‘Our’s is an honest employment,’ says _Peachum_; ‘and so is a lawyer’s.’

It is a lawyer’s business to confound truth and falsehood in the minds

of his hearers; and the natural consequence is, that he confounds them

in his own. He takes his opinion of right and wrong from his brief: his

soul is in his fee. His understanding is _upon the town_, and at the

service of any cause that is paid for before-hand. He is not a hired

suborner of _facts_, but of _reasons_; and though he would not violate

the sacred obligation of an oath, as Lord Ellenborough calls it, by

swearing that black is white, he holds himself at all times in readiness

and bound in duty, to prove it so. He will not swear to an untruth to

get himself hanged, but he will assert it roundly by the hour together

to hang other persons, however innocent,—if he finds it in his retainer.

We do not wish to say any thing illiberal of any profession or set of

men in the abstract. But we think it possible, that they who are

employed to argue away men’s lives at a venture in a court of justice,

may be tempted to write them away deliberately in a newspaper. They who

find it consistent with their honour to do this under the sanction of

the court, may find it to their interest to do the same thing at the

suggestion of a court. A lawyer is a sophist by profession; that is, a

person who barters his opinion, and speaks what he knows to be false in

defence of wrong, and to the prejudice of right. Not only the confirmed

habit of looking at any side of a question with a view to make the worse

appear the better reason, from a motive always foreign to the question

itself, must make truth and falsehood sit loose upon him, and lead him

to ‘look on both indifferently,’ as his convenience prompts; but the

quibbles and quillets of the law give a handle to all that is petty and

perverse in his understanding, and enable him to tamper with his

principles with impunity. Thus the intricacy and verbal distinctions of

the profession promote the practical duplicity of its professors; and

folly and knavery become joint securities for one another. The bent of a

lawyer’s mind is to pervert his talents, if he has any, and to keep down

his feelings, if they are at all in his way. He lives by forging and

uttering counterfeit pretexts; he says not what he believes to be true,

but any thing that by any trick or sleight he can make others believe;

and the more petty, artificial, and far-fetched the contrivance, the

more low, contemptible, and desperate the shift, the more is he admired

and cried up in his profession. A perfect lawyer is one whose

understanding always keeps pace with the inability of words to keep pace

with ideas: who by natural conformation of mind cannot get beyond the

letter to the spirit of any thing; who, by a happy infirmity of soul, is

sure never to lose the form in grasping at the substance. Such a one is

sure to arrive at the head of his profession! Look at the lawyers in the

House of Commons (of course at the head of their profession)—look at

Garrow. We have heard him stringing contradictions there with the

fluency of water, every third sentence giving the lie to the two former;

gabbling folly as if it were the last opportunity he might ever have,

and as regularly put down as he rose up—not for false statements, not

for false reasoning, not for common-place absurdities or vulgar

prejudices, (there is enough of these to be found there without going to

the bar), but for such things as nobody but a lawyer could utter, and as

nobody (not even a lawyer) could believe. The only thing that ever gave

us a good opinion of the House of Commons was to see the contempt with

which they treat lawyers there. The reason is, that no one there but a

lawyer fancies himself holding a brief in his hand as a _carte-blanche_

for vanity and impertinence—no one else thinks he has got an _ad

libitum_ right to express any absurd or nonsensical opinions he pleases,

because he is not supposed to hold the opinions he expresses—no one else

thinks it necessary to confound the distinctions of common-sense to

subject them to those of the law (even Lord Castlereagh would never

think of maintaining it to be lawful to detain a person kidnapped from

France, on the special plea, that the law in that case _not provided_

had _not declared_ it lawful to detain persons so kidnapped, if not

reclaimed by their own country)—no one else thinks of huddling

contradictions into self-evident truths by legal volubility, or of

sharpening nonsense into sense by legal acuteness, or of covering

shallow assumptions under the solemn disguises of the long robe. The

opinions of the gentlemen of the bar go for nothing in the House of

Commons: but their votes tell; and are always sure—in the end! The want

of principle makes up for the want of talent. What a tool in the hands

of a minister is a whole profession, habitually callous to the

distinctions of right and wrong, but perfectly alive to their own

interest, with just ingenuity enough to be able to trump up some fib or

sophistry for or against any measure, and with just understanding enough

to see no more of the real nature or consequences of any measure than

suits their own or their employer’s convenience! What an acquisition to

‘the tried wisdom of parliament’ in the approaching hard season!

But all this, though true, seems to fall short of the subject before us.

The weak side of the professional character is rather an indifference to

truth and justice, than an outrageous and inveterate hatred to them.

They are chargeable, as a general class of men, with levity, servility,

and selfishness; but it seems to be quite out of their character to

commence furious and illiberal fanatics against those who have more

principle than themselves. But not when this character is ingrafted on

that of a true Jacobin renegado. Such a person (and no one else) would

be fit to write the leading article in _The Times_. It is this union of

rare accomplishments (there seems, after all, to be nothing

contradictory in the coalition of the vices) that enables that

nondescript person to blend the violence of the bravo with the subtlety

of a pettifogging attorney—to interlard his furious appeals to the

lowest passions of the middle and upper classes, with nice points of

law, reserved for the opinion of the adepts in the profession—to appeal

to the passions of his city readers when any thing wrong is to be done,

and to their cooler and dispassionate judgments when any thing right is

to be done—that makes him stick (spell-bound) to the letter of the law

when it is in his favour, and set every principle of justice and

humanity at defiance when it interferes with his pragmatical

opinion—that makes him disregard all decency as well as reason out of

‘the lodged hatred’ he bears to the cause he has deserted, and to all

who have not, like himself, deserted it—that made him urge the foul

death of the brave Marshal Ney, by putting a legal interpretation on a

military convention—that tempted him to make out his sanguinary list of

proscribed rebels and regicides (he was not for making out any such list

in the year 1793, nor long after the event he now deplores with such

well-timed indignation)—that makes him desperately bent on hanging

wretches at home in cobweb chains spun from his own brains—that makes

him stake the liberty of nations or the independence of states on a

nickname or a law-quillet, as his irritable humour or professional

habits prevail—that sets him free from all restraints or deference to

others in forming his own opinions, and which would induce him to

subject all the rest of the world to his unprincipled and frantic

dogmas, by entangling them in the quirks and technicalities of the law!

No one else would heroically consign a whole continent to the most

odious and despicable slavery in the world, on the strength of a flaw in

a proclamation: or call that piece of diplomatic atrocity, the

declaration of the 25th of March, a _delicious_ declaration. Such a man

might sell his country, or enslave his species, and justify it to his

conscience and the world by some law-term! Such men are very dangerous,

unless when they are tied up in the forms of a profession, where form is

opposed to form, where no-meaning baffles want of sense, and where no

great harm is done, because there is not much to do: but when chicane

and want of principle are let loose upon the world, ‘with famine, sword,

and fire at their heels, leashed in like hounds,’ when they have their

prey marked out for them by the passions, when they are backed by

force—when the pen of the Editor of _The Times_ is seconded by eleven

hundred thousand bayonets—then such men are very mischievous.

‘My soul, turn from them: turn we to survey’ where poetry, joined hand

in hand with liberty, renews the golden age in 1793, during the reign of

Robespierre, which was hardly thought a blot in their escutcheon, by

those who said and said truly, for what we know, that he destroyed the

lives of hundreds, to save the lives of thousands: (Mark; then, as now,

‘Carnage was the daughter of Humanity.’ It is true, these men have

changed sides, but not parted with their principles, that is, with their

presumption and egotism)—let us turn where Pantisocracy’s equal hills

and vales arise in visionary pomp, where Peace and Truth have kissed

each other ‘in Philarmonia’s undivided dale’; and let us see whether the

fictions and the forms of poetry give any better assurance of political

consistency than the fictions and forms of law.

The spirit of poetry is in itself favourable to humanity and liberty:

but, we suspect, not in times like these—not in the present reign. The

spirit of poetry is not the spirit of mortification or of martyrdom.

Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own, and is, for that reason,

very ill calculated to make a Paradise upon earth, by encountering the

shocks and disappointments of the world. Poetry, like the law, is a

fiction; only a more agreeable one. It does not create difficulties

where they do not exist; but contrives to get rid of them, whether they

exist or not. It is not entangled in cobwebs of its own making, but

soars above all obstacles. It cannot be ‘constrained by mastery.’ It has

the range of the universe; it traverses the empyreum, and looks down on

nature from a higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth, it loses

some of its dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its

element the air. Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is

liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are of

a dazzling brightness, ‘heaven’s own tinct,’ and the least soil upon

them shews to disadvantage. Sunk, degraded as we have seen it, we shall

not insult over it, but leave it to time to take out the stains, seeing

it is a thing immortal as itself. ‘Being so majestical, we should do it

wrong to offer it but the shew of violence.’ But the best things, in

their abuse, often become the worst; and so it is with poetry when it is

diverted from its proper end. Poets live in an ideal world, where they

make every thing out according to their wishes and fancies. They either

find things delightful, or make them so. They feign the beautiful and

grand out of their own minds, and imagine all things to be, not what

they are, but what they ought to be. They are naturally inventors,

creators not of truth but beauty: and while they speak to us from the

sacred shrine of their own hearts, while they pour out the pure

treasures of thought to the world, they cannot be too much admired and

applauded: but when, forgetting their high calling, and becoming tools

and puppets in the hands of others, they would pass off the gewgaws of

corruption and love-tokens of self-interest, as the gifts of the Muse,

they cannot be too much despised and shunned. We do not like novels

founded on facts, nor do we like poets turned courtiers. Poets, it has

been said, succeed best in fiction: and they should for the most part

stick to it. Invention, not upon an imaginary subject, is a lie: the

varnishing over the vices or deformity of actual objects, is hypocrisy.

Players leave their finery at the stage-door, or they would be hooted:

poets come out into the world with all their bravery on, and yet they

would pass for _bonâ fide_ persons. They lend the colours of fancy to

whatever they see: whatever they touch becomes gold, though it were

lead. With them every Joan is a lady: and kings and queens are human.

Matters of fact they embellish at their will, and reason is the

plaything of their passions, their caprice, or interest. There is no

practice so base of which they will not become the panders: no sophistry

of which their understanding may not be made the voluntary dupe. Their

only object is to please their fancy. Their souls are effeminate, half

man and half woman: they want fortitude, and are without principle. If

things do not turn out according to their wishes, they will make their

wishes turn round to things. They can easily overlook whatever they do

not approve, and make an idol of any thing they please. The object of

poetry is to please: this art naturally gives pleasure, and excites

admiration. Poets, therefore, cannot do well without sympathy and

flattery. It is, accordingly, very much against the grain that they

remain long on the unpopular side of the question. They do not like to

be shut out when laurels are to be given away at court—or places under

government to be disposed of, in romantic situations in the country.

They are happy to be reconciled on the first opportunity to prince and

people, and to exchange their principles for a pension. They have not

always strength of mind to think for themselves; nor honesty enough to

bear the unjust stigma of the opinions they have taken upon trust from

others. Truth alone does not satisfy their pampered appetites, without

the sauce of praise. To prefer truth to all other things, it requires

that the mind should have been at some pains in finding it out, and that

it should feel a severe delight in the contemplation of truth, seen by

its own clear light, and not as it is reflected in the admiring eyes of

the world. A philosopher may perhaps make a shift to be contented with

the sober draughts of reason: a poet must have the applause of the world

to intoxicate him. Milton was however a poet, and an honest man; he was

Cromwell’s secretary.

We have here described the spirit of poetry when it comes in contact

with the spirit of the world. Let us see what results from it when it

comes in contact with the spirit of Jacobinism. The spirit of Jacobinism

is essentially at variance with the spirit of poetry: it has ‘no figures

nor no fantasies,’ which the prejudices of superstition or the world

draw in the brains of men: ‘no trivial fond records’: it levels all

distinctions of art and nature: it has no pride, pomp, or circumstance,

belonging to it; it converts the whole principle of admiration in the

poet (which is the essence of poetry) into admiration of himself. The

spirit of Jacobin poetry is rank egotism. We know an instance. It is of

a person who founded a school of poetry on sheer humanity, on ideot boys

and mad mothers, and on Simon Lee, the old huntsman. The secret of the

Jacobin poetry and the anti-jacobin politics of this writer is the same.

His lyrical poetry was a cant of humanity about the commonest people to

level the great with the small; and his political poetry is a cant of

loyalty to level Bonaparte with kings and hereditary imbecility. As he

would put up the commonest of men against kings and nobles, to satisfy

his levelling notions, so for the same reason, he would set up the

meanest of kings against the greatest of men, reposing once more on the

mediocrity of royalty. This person admires nothing that is admirable,

feels no interest in any thing interesting, no grandeur in any thing

grand, no beauty in any thing beautiful. He tolerates nothing but what

he himself creates; he sympathizes only with what can enter into no

competition with him, with ‘the bare earth and mountains bare, and grass

in the green field.’ He sees nothing but himself and the universe. He

hates all greatness, and all pretensions to it but his own. His egotism

is in this respect a madness; for he scorns even the admiration of

himself, thinking it a presumption in any one to suppose that he has

taste or sense enough to understand him. He hates all science and all

art; he hates chemistry, he hates conchology; he hates Sir Isaac Newton;

he hates logic, he hates metaphysics, which he says are unintelligible,

and yet he would be thought to understand them; he hates prose, he hates

all poetry but his own; he hates Shakespeare, or what he calls ‘those

interlocutions between Lucius and Caius,’ because he would have all the

talk to himself, and considers the movements of passion in _Lear_,

_Othello_, or _Macbeth_, as impertinent, compared with the Moods of his

own Mind; he thinks every thing good is contained in the ‘Lyrical

Ballads,’ or, if it is not contained there, it is good for nothing; he

hates music, dancing, and painting; he hates Rubens, he hates Rembrandt,

he hates Raphael, he hates Titian, he hates Vandyke; he hates the

antique; he hates the Apollo Belvidere; he hates the Venus de Medicis.

He hates all that others love and admire but himself. He is glad that

Bonaparte is sent to St. Helena, and that the Louvre is dispersed for

the same reason—to get rid of the idea of any thing greater, or thought

greater than himself. The Bourbons, and their processions of the Holy

Ghost, give no disturbance to his vanity; and he therefore gives them

none.

THE TIMES NEWSPAPER

ON THE CONNEXION BETWEEN TOAD-EATERS AND TYRANTS

‘Doubtless, the pleasure is as great

‘In being cheated as to cheat.’

_Jan. 12, 1817._

We some time ago promised our friend, Mr. Robert Owen, an explanation of

some of the causes which impede the natural progress of liberty and

human happiness. We have in part redeemed this pledge in what we said

about _Coriolanus_, and we shall try in this article to redeem it still

more. We grant to our ingenious and romantic friend, that the progress

of knowledge and civilization is in itself favourable to liberty and

equality, and that the general stream of thought and opinion constantly

sets in this way, till power finds the tide of public feeling becoming

too strong for it, ready to sap its rotten foundations, and ‘bore

through its castle-walls’; and then it contrives to turn the tide of

knowledge and sentiment clean the contrary way, and either bribes human

reason to take part against human nature, or knocks it on the head by a

more summary process. Thus, in the year 1792, Mr. Burke became a

pensioner for writing his book against the French Revolution, and Mr.

Thomas Paine was outlawed for his _Rights of Man_. Since that period,

the press has been the great enemy of freedom, the whole weight of that

immense engine (for the purposes of good or ill) having a fatal bias

given to it by the two main springs of fear and favour.

The weak sides of human intellect, by which power effects its conversion

to the worst purposes, when it finds the exercise of free opinion

inconsistent with the existence and uncontrouled exercise of arbitrary

power, are these four, viz. the grossness of the imagination, which is

seduced by outward appearances from the pursuit of real ultimate good;

the subtlety of the understanding itself, which palliates by flimsy

sophistry the most flagrant abuses; interest and advancement in the

world; and lastly, the feuds and jealousies of literary men among one

another. There is no class of persons so little calculated to act in

_corps_ as literary men. All their views are recluse and separate (for

the mind acts by individual energy, and not by numbers): their motives,

whether good or bad, are personal to themselves, their vanity exclusive,

their love of truth independent; they exist not by the preservation, but

the destruction of their own species; they are governed not by the

spirit of unanimity, but of contradiction. They will hardly allow any

thing to be right or any thing to be wrong, unless they are the first to

find out that it is so; and are ready to prove the best things in the

world the worst, and the worst the best, from the pure impulse of

splenetic overweening self-opinion, much more if they are likely to be

well paid for it—not that interest is their ruling passion, but still it

operates, silent and unseen, with them as with other men, when it can

make a compromise with their vanity. This part of the character of men

of letters is so well known, that Shakespear makes _Brutus_ protest

against the fitness of _Cicero_ to be included in their enterprize on

this very principle:—

‘Oh, name him not: let us not break with him;

For he will never follow any thing,

That other men begin.’

The whole of Mr. Burke’s _Reflections on the French Revolution_[28] is

but an elaborate and damning comment on this short text. He quarrelled

with the French Revolution out of spite to Rousseau, the spark of whose

genius had kindled the flame of liberty in a nation. He therefore

endeavoured to extinguish the flame—to put out the light; and he

succeeded, because there were others like himself, ready to sacrifice

every manly and generous principle to the morbid, sickly, effeminate,

little, selfish, irritable, dirty spirit of authorship. Not only did

such persons, according to Mr. Coleridge’s valuable and competent

testimony (see his _Lay Sermon_) make the distinction between Atheism

and Religion a mere stalking-horse for the indulgence of their idle

vanity, but they made the other questions of Liberty and Slavery, of the

Rights of Man, or the Divine Right of Kings to rule millions of men as

their Slaves for ever, they made these vital and paramount questions

(which whoever wilfully and knowingly compromises, is a traitor to

himself and his species), subordinate to the low, whiffling,

contemptible gratification of their literary jealousy. We shall not go

over the painful list of instances; neither can we forget them. But they

all or almost all contrived to sneak over one by one to the side on

which ‘empty praise or solid pudding’ was to be got; they could not live

without the smiles of the great (not they), nor provide for an

increasing establishment without a loss of character; instead of going

into some profitable business and exchanging their lyres for ledgers,

their pens for the plough (the honest road to riches), they chose rather

to prostitute their pens to the mock-heroic defence of the most

barefaced of all mummeries, the pretended alliance of kings and people!

We told them how it would be, if they succeeded; it has turned out just

as we said; and a pretty figure do these companions of Ulysses

(_Compagnons du Lys_), these gaping converts to despotism, these

well-fed victims of the charms of the Bourbons, now make, nestling under

their laurels in the stye of Corruption, and sunk in torpid repose (from

which they do not like to be disturbed by calling on their former names

or professions), in lazy sinecures and good warm berths! Such is the

history and mystery of literary patriotism and prostitution for the last

twenty years.—Power is subject to none of these disadvantages. It is one

and indivisible; it is self-centered, self-willed, incorrigible,

inaccessible to temptation or entreaty; interest is on its side, passion

is on its side, prejudice is on its side, the name of religion is on its

side; the qualms of conscience it is not subject to, for it is

iron-nerved; humanity it is proof against, for it sets itself up above

humanity; reason it does not hearken to, except that reason which

panders to its will and flatters its pride. It pursues its steady way,

its undeviating everlasting course, ‘unslacked of motion,’ like that

foul Indian idol, the Jaggernaut, and crushes poor upstart poets,

patriots, and philosophers (the beings of an hour) and the successive

never-ending generations of fools and knaves, beneath its feet; and

mankind bow their willing necks to the yoke, and eagerly consign their

children and their children’s children to be torn in pieces by its

scythe, or trampled to death by the gay, gaudy, painted, bloodstained

wheels of the grim idol of power!

Such is the state of the Eastern world, where the inherent baseness of

man’s nature, and his tendency to social order, to tyrannize and to be

tyrannized over, has had full time to develope itself. Our turn seems

next. We are but just setting out, it is true, in this bye-nook and

corner of the world—but just recovering from the effects of the

Revolution of 1688, and the defeated Rebellions of the years 1715 and

1745, but we need hardly despair under the auspices of the Editor of

_The Times_, and with the example of the defeat ‘of the last successful

instance of a democratic rebellion,’ by the second restoration of the

Bourbons, before our eyes and close under our noses. Mr. Owen may think

the example of New Lanark more inviting, but the persons to whom he has

dedicated his work turn their eyes another way![29]

Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is as

common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a tyrant,

the other a slave. It is not he alone, who wears the golden crown, that

is proud of it: the wretch who pines in a dungeon, and in chains, is

dazzled with it; and if he could but shake off his own fetters, would

care little about the wretches whom he left behind him, so that he might

have an opportunity, on being set free himself, of gazing at this

glittering gewgaw ‘on some high holiday of once a year.’ The slave, who

has no other hope or consolation, clings to the apparition of royal

magnificence, which insults his misery and his despair; stares through

the hollow eyes of famine at the insolence of pride and luxury which has

occasioned it, and hugs his chains the closer, because he has nothing

else left. The French, under the old regime, made the glory of their

_Grand Monarque_ a set-off against rags and hunger, equally satisfied

with _shows or bread_; and the poor Spaniard, delivered from temporary

to permanent oppression, looks up once more with pious awe, to the

time-hallowed towers of the Holy Inquisition. As the herd of mankind are

stripped of every thing, in body and mind, so are they thankful for what

is left; as is the desolation of their hearts and the wreck of their

little all, so is the pomp and pride which is built upon their ruin, and

their fawning admiration of it.

‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds

With coldness still returning:

Alas! the gratitude of men

Has oftener set me mourning.’[30]

There is something in the human mind, which requires an object for it to

repose on; and, driven from all other sources of pride or pleasure, it

falls in love with misery, and grows enamoured of oppression. It gazes

after the liberty, the happiness, the comfort, the knowledge, which have

been torn from it by the unfeeling gripe of wealth and power, as the

poor debtor gazes with envy and wonder at the Lord Mayor’s show. Thus is

the world by degrees reduced to a spital or lazar-house, where the

people waste away with want and disease, and are thankful if they are

only suffered to crawl forgotten to their graves. Just in proportion to

the systematic tyranny exercised over a nation, to its loss of a sense

of freedom and the spirit of resistance, will be its loyalty; the most

abject submission will always be rendered to the most confirmed

despotism. The most wretched slaves are the veriest sycophants. The

lacquey, mounted behind his master’s coach, looks down with contempt

upon the mob, forgetting his own origin and his actual situation, and

comparing them only with that standard of gentility which he has

perpetually in his eye. The hireling of the press (a still meaner slave)

wears his livery, and is proud of it. He measures the greatness of

others by his own meanness; their lofty pretensions indemnify him for

his servility; he magnifies the sacredness of their persons to cover the

laxity of his own principles. He offers up his own humanity, and that of

all men, at the shrine of royalty. He sneaks to court; and the bland

accents of power close his ears to the voice of freedom ever after; its

velvet touch makes his heart marble to a people’s sufferings. He is the

intellectual pimp of power, as others are the practical ones of the

pleasures of the great, and often on the same disinterested principle.

For one tyrant, there are a thousand ready slaves. Man is naturally a

worshipper of idols and a lover of kings. It is the excess of individual

power, that strikes and gains over his imagination: the general misery

and degradation which are the necessary consequences of it, are spread

too wide, they lie too deep, their weight and import are too great, to

appeal to any but the slow, inert, speculative, imperfect faculty of

reason. The cause of liberty is lost in its own truth and magnitude;

while the cause of despotism flourishes, triumphs, and is irresistible

in the gross mixture, the _Belle Alliance_, of pride and ignorance.

Power is the grim idol that the world adore; that arms itself with

destruction, and reigns by terror in the coward heart of man; that

dazzles the senses, haunts the imagination, confounds the understanding,

and tames the will, by the vastness of its pretensions, and the very

hopelessness of resistance to them. Nay more, the more mischievous and

extensive the tyranny—the longer it has lasted, and the longer it is

likely to last—the stronger is the hold it takes of the minds of its

victims, the devotion to it increasing with the dread. It does not

satisfy the enormity of the appetite for servility, till it has slain

the mind of a nation, and becomes like the evil principle of the

universe, from which there is no escape. So in some countries, the most

destructive animals are held sacred, despair and terror completely

overpowering reason. The prejudices of superstition (religion is another

name for fear) are always the strongest in favour of those forms of

worship which require the most bloody sacrifices; the foulest idols are

those which are approached with the greatest awe; for it should seem

that those objects are the most sacred to passion and imagination, which

are the most revolting to reason and common sense. No wonder that the

Editor of _The Times_ bows his head before the idol of Divine Right, or

of Legitimacy, (as he calls it) which has had more lives sacrificed to

its ridiculous and unintelligible pretensions, in the last twenty-five

years, than were ever sacrificed to any other idol in all preceding

ages. Never was there any thing so well contrived as this fiction of

Legitimacy, to suit the fastidious delicacy of modern sycophants. It

hits their grovelling servility and petulant egotism exactly between

wind and water. The contrivers or re-modellers of this idol, beat all

other idol-mongers, whether Jews, Gentiles or Christians, hollow. The

principle of an idolatry is the same: it is the want of something to

admire, without knowing what or why: it is the love of an effect without

a cause; it is a voluntary tribute of admiration which does not

compromise our vanity: it is setting something up over all the rest of

the world, to which we feel ourselves to be superior, for it is our own

handy-work; so that the more perverse the homage we pay to it, the more

it pampers our self-will: the meaner the object, the more magnificent

and pompous the attributes we bestow upon it; the greater the lie, the

more enthusiastically it is believed and greedily swallowed:—

‘Of whatsoever race his godhead be,

Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,

In his defence his servants are as bold

As if he had been made of beaten gold.’

In this inverted ratio, the bungling impostors of former times, and less

refined countries, got no further than stocks and stones: their utmost

stretch of refinement in absurdity went no further than to select the

most mischievous animals or the most worthless objects for the adoration

of their besotted votaries: but the framers of the new law-fiction of

legitimacy have started a non-entity. The ancients sometimes worshipped

the sun or stars, or deified heroes and great men: the moderns have

found out the image of the divinity in Louis XVIII.! They have set up an

object for their idolatry, which they themselves must laugh at, if

hypocrisy were not with them the most serious thing in the world. They

offer up thirty millions of men to it as its victims, and yet they know

that it is nothing but a scare-crow to keep the world in subjection to

their renegado whimsies and preposterous hatred of the liberty and

happiness of mankind. They do not think kings gods, but they make

believe that they do so, to degrade their fellows to the rank of brutes.

Legitimacy answers every object of their meanness and malice—_omne tulit

punctum_.—This mock-doctrine, this little Hunchback, which our

resurrection-men, the Humane Society of Divine Right, have foisted on

the altar of Liberty, is not only a phantom of the imagination, but a

contradiction in terms; it is a prejudice, but an exploded prejudice; it

is an imposture, that imposes on nobody; it is powerful only in

impotence, safe in absurdity, courted from fear and hatred, a dead

prejudice linked to the living mind; the sink of honour, the grave of

liberty, a palsy in the heart of a nation; it claims the species as its

property, and derives its right neither from God nor man; not from the

authority of the Church, which it treats cavalierly, and yet in contempt

of the will of the people, which it scouts as opposed to its own: its

two chief supporters are, the sword of the Duke of Wellington and the

pen of the Editor of _The Times_! The last of these props has, we

understand, just failed it.

We formerly gave the Editor of _The Times_ a definition of a true

Jacobin, as one ‘who had seen the evening star set over a poor man’s

cottage, and connected it with the hope of human happiness.’ The

city-politician laughed this pastoral definition to scorn, and nicknamed

the person who had very innocently laid it down, ‘the true Jacobin who

writes in the Chronicle,’—a nickname by which we profited as little as

he has by our Illustrations. Since that time our imagination has grown a

little less romantic: so we will give him another, which he may chew the

cud upon at his leisure. A true Jacobin, then, is one who does not

believe in the divine right of kings, or in any other _alias_ for it,

which implies that they reign ‘in contempt of the will of the people’;

and he holds all such kings to be tyrants, and their subjects slaves. To

be a true Jacobin, a man must be a good hater; but this is the most

difficult and the least amiable of all the virtues: the most trying and

the most thankless of all tasks. The love of liberty consists in the

hatred of tyrants. The true Jacobin hates the enemies of liberty as they

hate liberty, with all his strength and with all his might, and with all

his heart and with all his soul. His memory is as long, and his will as

strong as theirs, though his hands are shorter. He never forgets or

forgives an injury done to the people, for tyrants never forget or

forgive one done to themselves. There is no love lost between them. He

does not leave them the sole benefit of their old motto, _Odia in longum

jaciens quæ conderet auctaque promeret_. He makes neither peace nor

truce with them. His hatred of wrong only ceases with the wrong. The

sense of it, and of the barefaced assumption of the right to inflict it,

deprives him of his rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart

with aspics’ tongues, deadly to venal pens. It settles in his brain—it

puts him beside himself. Who will not feel all this for a girl, a toy, a

turn of the dice, a word, a blow, for any thing relating to himself; and

will not the friend of liberty feel as much for mankind? The love of

truth is a passion in his mind, as the love of power is a passion in the

minds of others. Abstract reason, unassisted by passion, is no match for

power and prejudice, armed with force and cunning. The love of liberty

is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. The

one is real; the other often but an empty dream. Hence the defection of

modern apostates. While they are looking about, wavering and distracted,

in pursuit of universal good or universal fame, the eye of power is upon

them, like the eye of Providence, that neither slumbers nor sleeps, and

that watches but for one object, its own good. They take no notice of it

at first, but it is still upon them, and never off them. It at length

catches theirs, and they bow to its sacred light; and like the poor

fluttering bird, quail beneath it, are seized with a vertigo, and drop

senseless into its jaws, that close upon them for ever, and so we see no

more of them, which is well.

‘And we saw three poets in a dream, walking up and down on the face of

the earth, and holding in their hands a human heart, which, as they

raised their eyes to heaven, they kissed and worshipped; and a mighty

shout arose and shook the air, for the towers of the Bastile had fallen,

and a nation had become, of slaves, freemen; and the three poets, as

they heard the sound, leaped and shouted, and made merry, and their

voice was choked with tears of joy, which they shed over the human

heart, which they kissed and worshipped. And not long after, we saw the

same three poets, the one with a receipt-stamp in his hand, the other

with a laurel on his head, and the third with a symbol which we could

make nothing of, for it was neither literal nor allegorical, following

in the train of the Pope and the Inquisition and the Bourbons, and

worshipping the mark of the Beast, with the emblem of the human heart

thrown beneath their feet, which they trampled and spit upon!’—This

apologue is not worth finishing, nor are the people to whom it relates

worth talking of. We have done with them.

INTERESTING FACTS _relating to the Fall and Death of Joachim Murat, King

of Naples; the Capitulation of Paris in 1815; and the Second Restoration

of the Bourbons: Original Letters from King Joachim to the Author, with

some Account of the Author, and of his Persecution by the French

Government_. _By_ Francis Macirone, _late Aid-de-camp to King Joachim;

Knight of the Order of the Two Sicilies_, &c. &c. London: Ridgways,

1817.

‘Come, draw the curtain; shew the picture.’

_February 2, 1817._

We have here a pretty peep behind ‘the dark blanket’ of Legitimacy. We

thank Mr. Macirone for having introduced us once more to the old lady of

that name in her dressing-room. What a tissue of patches and of paint!

What a quantity of wrinkles and of proud flesh! What a collection of

sickly perfumes and slow poisons, with her love-powders and the

assassin’s knife placed side by side! What treacheries and lies upon her

tongue! What meanness and malice in her heart! What an old hypocritical

hag it is! What a vile canting, mumbling, mischievous witch! ‘Pah! and

smells so.’ The very wind that kisses all it meets, stops the nose at

her. We wonder how any prince should take a fancy to such an old rotten

demirep! Yet this is the heroine of all heroines (Mr. Southey will tell

you in hobbling illegitimate verse), a greater heroine than even _his_

Joan of Arc—the heroine of Leipsic, of Saragossa, and of Waterloo! It is

indeed the same. Look at her again, look at her well, look at her

closely, and you will find that it is ‘that harlot old,’

‘The same that was, that is, and is to be;’—

the mother of abominations, the daughter of lies. Dig up the bones of a

few of her wretched favourites you may, in Carmelite dresses or any

other trumpery; but can you dig up the bones of the men that she has

murdered, from the earliest time? can you collect the blood of the

millions of men that she has sacrificed in the last twenty-five years

alone, and pour it into the Thames, while our merchant-men ride

freighted with gold upon the gory stream, and the Editor of _The Times_

(without being called to account for it) applauds with the ‘sweet

thunder’ of his pen the proud balance of our exports and our imports,

blood and gold? or can you collect the sighs and dried-up tears of

wretches that she, Legitimacy, has doomed to pine without a cause in

dungeons, to prove that she is the dread sovereign of the human heart?

or the groans and shrieks of victims stretched on the rack, or consumed

by slow fire, to prove that the minds of men belong to her? or the cries

of hunger and pinching cold, the sweat, the rags, the diseases, the

emaciated wan looks, by which she proves that the bodies of men are

her’s? or can you conjure up the wide spreading desolation which she

breathes from her nostrils, the famine and pestilence which she scatters

before her for her sport and wantonness, the ruins of cities and of

countries which she makes her throne, and from which, amidst the groans

of the dying and the dead, she utters, laughing, the sacred doctrine of

‘millions made for one!’—One thing contents us, and sits light upon our

hearts, that we have always seen through her disguises: we have known

her from first to last, though ‘she has changed shapes with Proteus,’

and now gone by the name of Religion, now of Social Order, now of

Morality, now been personified at Guildhall as Trade and Commerce, or

sat in the Speaker’s chair as the English Constitution (the most

impudent trick of all)—under none of these respectable alias’s and

swindling characters, nor when she towered above the conflagration of

Moscow, _dressed in a robe of flame-coloured taffeta_, or sat perched as

Victory on the crests of British soldiers, nor when she hovered over the

frightened country as the harpy of Invasion; no, nor at any other time

did we ever take her for any thing but what we knew she was, the

patron-saint of tyrants and of slaves; an adulteress, an impostor, and a

murderess. The world, whom she has juggled, begin to find her out too:

it will hardly ‘stand now with her sorceries and her lies, and the blood

of men, with which she has made herself drunk’; and we may yet live to

see her carted for a bawd.

Having thus vented the overflowings of our gall against the old lady

above-mentioned, we shall proceed to a detail of some of her fraudulent

transactions, as they are stated with great clearness and command of

temper, in Mr. Macirone’s ‘Interesting Facts.’ Interesting indeed! But

no more comments for the present. We have not time to grace our

narrative or confirm our doctrine of ‘the uses of _legitimacy_,’ by

giving Mr. Macirone’s history of the treatment of his family by the Holy

See, which brought his father to this country, and eventually led to his

connexion with Murat. It appears that his grandfather, the head of a

noble and wealthy family at Rome, was ruined in a large concern, and

then robbed of his right by Monsignore Banchieri, treasurer to the Pope,

a ‘gentleman and man of honour’ in those times; and that, though the

tribunals awarded him reparation, the decisions in his favour were

constantly defeated by the interposition of the papal power. The

consequence was, that the elder Macirone, after a fruitless struggle of

several years with legitimate power and injustice, died of grief and

chagrin, and his family were dispersed in various directions: his eldest

son came to England and married an English lady, of which union our

author was the issue. This short episode shews what Legitimacy, that is,

_a power above the law, and accountable only to heaven for its exercise,

its use or its abuse_, always was, and always will be. These tricks were

played long before the French revolution, and with a million other

tricks of the same legitimate, that is, lawless kind, produced it.—We

have here an account of some of the tricks resorted to by the wielders

and abettors of mild paternal sway to restore the old right to do wrong

with impunity, and to put down the principles and partizans of the

revolution, as an example of successful rebellion against power held in

contempt of the people, and exercised in disregard of law. Mr. Macirone,

a native of England, went to Italy at the age of fifteen, and remained

there from 1803 till 1812. Part of this time he was detained as an

English prisoner. He was afterwards employed as an _aid-de-camp_ to

Murat, and gives the following narrative of his transactions with the

Allies:—

1. A Treaty of Alliance, offensive and defensive, was signed between

Austria and Naples, on the 11th of Jan. 1814, and the Austrian

Plenipotentiary declared that England was ready to accede to a similar

Treaty with King Joachim.—2. A Convention was signed by Lord William

Bentinck with the Neapolitan Government, which opened the ports of Italy

to the British fleet, and placed affairs on a footing of perfect

peace.—3. Murat, on the strength of these engagements, opened the

campaign in concert with the Allies, when instantly objections were made

to the ratification of the Treaty with Austria, not by Austria, but by

England, on some pretence of the territorial indemnifications to be

granted to Murat at the expense of the Pope.—4. Murat assented to the

proposed modifications, and Lord W. Bentinck declared, that the English

Government now agreed entirely to the Treaty between Austria and

Naples.—5. This declaration of Lord W. Bentinck was confirmed by a

declaration of Lord Castlereagh, that it was only from motives of

delicacy to the King of Sicily that the English Government delayed the

conclusion of a special and separate Treaty with Naples, _that a Treaty

of Indemnities to the King of Sicily and of Peace with King Joachim

might go hand in hand_.—6. Murat now joined the campaign of 1814, and

turned the scale against France and Napoleon.—In this state of things,

Mr. Macirone observes,—

‘A variety of circumstances had now combined to induce the King to doubt

the sincerity of the Allies. _The Emperor of Austria had delayed for

many days the transmission of the ratification of the Treaty of the 11th

January. Ferdinand of Sicily had published an order of the day to some

Sicilian troops about to land at Leghorn, in which they were informed

that they were going to recover his kingdom of Naples, which he had

never ceded, and never would cede. The English general, Lord William

Bentinck, had landed with these troops, under instructions to excite a

revolution in Italy, and had insisted on the maintenance of a position

(Tuscany) which intercepted the communication between the Neapolitan

army and Naples; propositions at the same time were made in a foreign

camp to Neapolitan generals and other officers, for the expulsion of the

then reigning dynasty from the throne of Naples._ The doubts which these

circumstances had excited were removed by a declaration of General Sir

Robert Wilson, at Bologna; _that he considered the letter of Lord

Castlereagh, containing the promise of a formal treaty, as of equal

value and force with a treaty already signed. And that neither the

executive authority, nor the parliament, would hesitate to recognize the

validity of such an engagement_. Indeed, it was in his opinion more

imperative, if possible, than a regular treaty, _because it connected an

appeal to honour with an obligation on good faith_. From that moment the

King again made the most zealous efforts in the common cause.’—p. 20.

Alas! Sir Robert, ‘How little knew’st thou of Calista!’ as a body may

say. But you have in part redeemed your errors, and revenged the trick

that was thus put upon your _preux chevalier_ notions of honour!—One

would think there was shuffling and paltering and evasion and cant and

cunning enough in the foregoing part of this transaction. What follows

is worse. After the campaigns which so providentially delivered France

and Europe from the hands of illegitimate into those of legitimate power

_en plein droit_, and while the immortal congress was yet assembled at

Vienna, ‘Prince Talleyrand, on the part of King Louis,’ says Mr.

Macirone, ‘was indefatigable in his exertions to induce the Austrian

government to withdraw their alliance from the King of Naples, from whom

the allied powers had so recently received the most efficient support.

The Austrian government being warmly urged to undertake the _holy war_

of legitimacy against its ally, the King of Naples, at length expressed

its willingness to comply, but alleged the exhausted state of the

finances of the country. _This difficulty was, it is said, immediately

removed by the British ministers, who offered to defray all the expense

of the expedition_, and moreover to furnish a British fleet, in

preference to a French fleet, as proposed by Talleyrand in his famous

note, which fleet should act in concert with and assist the movements of

the Austrian forces.’

One would think that after this open and profligate breach of faith, the

legitimates had made up their minds to keep no terms with illegitimacy.

But, no: expediency turns round once more, and British honour,

simplicity, and good faith, with it! Murat, in consequence of the

preparations against him, attacked the Austrians ‘at the very moment, as

it afterwards turned out, that the apprehensions of his union with

Napoleon, who had just returned to France from Elba, had determined the

British Cabinet to attend to the invocations of justice in his favour.

Lord Castlereagh had written to the Duke of Wellington, who was at that

time the plenipotentiary of the British court at Vienna, and informed

him, that _in consequence of the reappearance of Napoleon at the head of

the French nation_, the British ministers thought it adviseable to unite

all the force they could collect, and had consequently come to a

determination immediately to conclude a treaty of alliance with the King

of Naples.’

Bravo, my Lord Castlereagh! you may one day find, after all, that

honesty is the best policy; and we hope the Editor of _The Times_, in

the next number of _The Correspondent_, will relieve his praises of the

allies and his compliments to the Duke of Levis, by a criticism to prove

that Jonathan Wild and Count Fathom were ‘gentlemen and men of honour!’

But the tale of blushing British honour is not ended. At the time when

Murat was at the height of his success against the Austrians, ‘Colonel

Dalrymple arrived at Bologna, King Joachim’s head-quarters, commissioned

by Lord William Bentinck, _to request that the territory of his

Britannic majesty’s ally, the King of Sardinia, might not be violated by

the Neapolitan army_.’—In consequence of Murat’s polite attention to

this delicate request, he lost his campaign, his crown, and his life;

for no sooner was he defeated in his attempts to force the passage of

the Po, which he might easily have effected, by infringing upon a small

corner of the Piedmontese territory, than ‘he was surprized at receiving

a notification from Lord William Bentinck, _that his instructions were

to join the Austrians against him_.’—We know the consequences of this

exquisite simplicity of proceeding on both sides. Poor Murat! he well

deserved his fate, but not at the hands from which he received it.

Foolish fellow! He did not know that legitimacy keeps no faith with

illegitimacy. At present, we suppose that point is pretty well settled.

Murat was senseless enough to believe that he, who had been made a king

by Bonaparte, would be cordially received in the list of kings by those

who were so _by divine right_; and he was base enough to turn against

his benefactor, his country, and the human race; but in himself he

appears to have been a gallant, generous, and heroic-minded man. The

account of his escape from the Austrians, and of his landing in France,

is interesting:—

‘On the king’s approach to Naples with a small remnant of his army, six

thousand of the national guard, with General Macdonald, minister of war,

at their head, marched forth to meet him. They greeted his return in the

most loyal and affectionate manner, exhorting him still to hope for

success in the love and devotedness of his subjects, swearing that they

were all ready to perish in defence of their king and country; but in

consequence of the part England had taken against him, he declined

making any further efforts, which would only tend to involve the brave

and loyal in his own catastrophe.

‘He entered Naples unknown, in the evening of the 19th May, accompanied

by his nephew, who was colonel of the 9th regiment of lancers, and four

privates. He immediately proceeded to his palace, where he appeared

before the queen, pale and emaciated, in the habit of a lancer; tenderly

embracing her, he said, “All is lost, madam, but my life; that I have

not been able to lose.”[31]

‘Having taken farewell of his children, he caused his hair, which he had

hitherto worn in long ringlets, to be cut short, and habited in a plain

grey suit, accompanied by his nephew, the colonel, he proceeded on foot

to the sea-shore, opposite to the island of Nisida. He there embarked in

a little boat, and proceeded to the neighbouring island of Ischia. There

he remained three days without being known, and on the fourth, as he was

walking on the sea-shore on the southern side of the island, in company

with the colonel, consulting about the means of effecting their escape

to France, they discovered a small vessel to the east, in full sail,

approaching the spot where they were standing.

‘The king immediately hailed the vessel, and getting into a fishing-boat

which was on the shore, ordered the crew to row towards it, and, as soon

as they were perceived, a boat was sent from the vessel to meet them.

The feelings of all parties may easily be imagined, when, in one of the

persons on board, the king recognized his attached and faithful servant

the Duke of Roccaromana, to whom the vessel belonged, and who, in

company with the Marquis Giuliano, the king’s aid-de-camp, had escaped

from Naples, and was proceeding in this vessel in search of the king,

under the greatest anxiety and apprehension, lest some accident might

have befallen him, although, previously to quitting the palace, the king

had divided with the duke and marquis a considerable sum in gold, and

acquainted them with his plan of going to Ischia, accompanied only by

his nephew, and of embarking from thence to France.

‘The duke could not succeed in effecting his escape from Naples until

three days after the departure of the king. The enemy’s flag had been

hoisted in Ischia; and it appeared highly improbable, under all

circumstances, that the king could have remained there concealed for

those three days. It was unsafe for the duke to attempt landing on the

island, and yet there appeared no other means of ascertaining whether

the king was there or had proceeded on his voyage. In this

embarrassment, it happened that the duke, who was most anxiously

examining the shore of the island with a glass, perceived and recognized

the king. The rest of their voyage proved most prosperous and

expeditious. They landed at Cannes the 27th or 28th of May.’—p. 30.

We shall in our next give the particulars of Mr. Macirone’s interviews

with the Duke of Wellington, relating to the convention of Paris; and we

shall be cautious what we say of his Grace’s observations and conduct on

that occasion; for if we were to say what we think of that noble person,

there might be some offence in it. But we cannot help having an opinion

of him, which all that we hear of him confirms.

INTERESTING FACTS _relating to the Fall of Murat, &c._

_By_ F. Macirone, _&c._

(CONCLUDED.)

Sta viator, heroem calcas.

_Feb. 9, 1817._

We proceed to Mr. Macirone’s account of the surrender of Paris. Let it

speak for itself:—

‘Immediately after the battle of Waterloo, Napoleon returned to Paris,

and abdicated the throne in _favour of his son, who would have been

accepted and proclaimed by the French people_, but for the opposition of

two celebrated individuals.

‘On this abdication, a commission of government, as it was called, was

formed, consisting of Fouché, the president, Caulincourt, Carnot,

Quinette, and Grenier.

‘On the 26th of June, I believe, the Duke of Wellington, at the head of

his victorious army, reached Compeigne. In the course of the following

night, a deputation of five persons was sent to him from Paris by the

two Chambers, to solicit an armistice for a few days. The avowed purpose

of this mission was to afford time for the return of another deputation,

which had been despatched to the Allied Sovereigns, to assert the right

of the French people to choose their own government, in conformity to

the Declaration of the Allies, _that they warred against the person of

Napoleon only, and not against the French people, or to force upon them

any particular government_.

‘The Chamber of Deputies, the majority of the Commissioners of

Government, and the Army, now in great strength in Paris, were

_determined to resist any attempt to force the Bourbons upon them_;

while the avowed opinion of Fouché and Caulincourt was, that such a

determination could only lead to the destruction of Paris, and the loss

of thousands of lives. They therefore sought the means of opening a

communication with the Duke of Wellington, in which they might impart to

him their views, and avert the calamity which they apprehended from the

projects of the other parties. In the expediency of procuring an

armistice for a few days, _all_ parties concurred; and Fouché, who had

become acquainted with me in my interviews with him respecting King

Joachim, solicited me to undertake the task of carrying on a

communication between him and the Duke of Wellington. It was sufficient

for me to know that the service in which I was to be engaged had for its

object the prevention of a sanguinary conflict, which an attempt to take

Paris by force would have occasioned, and I therefore consented to be

the bearer of Fouché’s message to the Duke.

‘My feelings as an Englishman entirely influenced my conduct in this

instance. I exulted in the success of our army, and in the military

glory which the English name had acquired; and it appeared to me, that

whatever might tend to prevent the further effusion of blood, must be

highly acceptable to my country; and to be selected as an instrument, by

which so humane and desirable an object might be accomplished, was

highly gratifying to my mind, and I should not have thought myself at

liberty to refuse to engage in it, from any opinion I might entertain of

the private views of the persons by whom I should be employed. Impressed

with these sentiments, I left Paris at midnight. I proceeded to the

Barriere de la Villette, where I found some difficulty in getting my

carriage over the different entrenchments and _abattis_, but still more

from the French officers, who evinced the greatest reluctance in

permitting me to pass, observing that I was probably a person sent out

to treat with the enemy, and to betray them; but on my assuring them

that the purport of my mission was entirely analogous to their views and

interests, I was suffered to proceed without a trumpet. Before I had got

beyond the French lines, I was again stopped by a picquet of

cuirassiers, who refused to let me pass without an order from the

officer commanding the inner posts; and while I was asserting my right

to proceed, a cuirassier fortunately happened to hold a light to my

face, and very respectfully accosted me with the salutation of “bon

voyage Major”: his comrades immediately asked him who I was? he

answered, “it’s the Major of the 9th Hussars,” for whom I suppose he had

mistaken me. This was instantly believed; and, greeted by the

salutations and good wishes of the whole troop, I was allowed to

continue my journey.

‘The Prussian advanced posts were at less than two miles distant, and I

was consequently very soon stopped by a Prussian lancer, who, upon my

telling him that I was an English officer, proceeding with dispatches to

the Duke of Wellington, immediately accompanied me to the next post.

Here I learnt with great pleasure, that this advanced guard of cavalry

was commanded by Prince William of Prussia, whose first Aid-de-camp,

Baron Rochow, was my particular friend.

‘I soon arrived at the spot where Prince William and his Staff were

sleeping in a field, before a large fire, under some trees. I inquired

for my friend, Baron Rochow. His name was called, and I immediately had

the pleasure of seeing him. After a few urgent questions, he proposed to

introduce me to Prince William, who by this time had raised himself upon

his mattrass. The Prince received me with the greatest politeness, and

directed that I should be presented with refreshments. On my taking

leave, he ordered me to be furnished with an escort to General Baron

Bulow. I arrived at this General’s quarters at break of day, and was

soon after introduced to him. While I was at breakfast with him, he told

me that he wished me to see Prince Blucher on my way to the Duke of

Wellington; and added, that he would send his Aid-de-camp with me. He

then ordered his servant to call his Aid-de-camp, Baron Echardstein, to

whom I was also particularly known.

‘On our arrival at Prince Blucher’s, my companion, Baron Echardstein

informed him that I was going on a mission from the French Government to

the Duke of Wellington; this did not seem to please the Prince, who

immediately retired to rest, and left me to converse with his

Chef-d’etat-Major. This gentleman, whose name I believe was Gneisenau,

was very indignant on being informed of the desire of the French to

treat with the Duke of Wellington; and he completely lost his temper

when he observed the coolness with which I listened to his indiscreet

and authoritative language.

‘On my quitting this choleric soldier, my friend Echardstein thought it

necessary to apologise to me for the indelicate behaviour of his

countryman. I proceeded on my journey, and soon met numerous columns of

English cavalry, and found the five French Deputies, waiting for the

Duke’s arrival, at a village called Fresnoy. I thought it expedient to

endeavour to see the Duke before the Deputies, and therefore passed them

on the road. I shortly after met the Duke, and imparted to him the

purport of my mission, and delivered to him also a sealed dispatch from

Fouché, upon which he desired me to accompany him to the village where

the Deputies were. He asked me if I was acquainted with the nature of

the mission. I told him that I knew that one part of it, at least, was

to request an armistice of some days, until news could arrive from other

Deputies, who had been sent to treat with the united Sovereigns.

‘On the Duke’s arrival at the village of Fresnoy, he conferred with the

Deputies for five hours. They adduced, in support of their missions, the

solemn declaration of the British Ministers, “that it was not the

intention of the Allies to force the Bourbons, or any other government,

on the French people; that they had made war against Napoleon only, and

not against the nation,” &c. Their mission failed. They received for

answer, that the only thing left for the Chambers to do was to proclaim

Louis 18th.

‘The Duke then proceeded to Plessis, the head-quarters for that day. The

Deputies remained behind. I was desired by the Duke to accompany him to

Plessis, where I dined with him, and during dinner conversed with him on

the object I had to propose respecting an armistice. Before I took my

leave of the Duke, I requested that he would give me some answer to the

remonstrances of the Commission of Government, which stated, “_that as

the Allies had declared their hostility to be directed against the

person of Napoleon only, it would be but just to await the result of the

mission to the Sovereigns, before his Grace undertook to replace Louis

18th on the throne_.” The Duke, in the presence of Lord March, Colonels

Hervey, Freemantle, Abercromby, and several other officers, replied,—“I

can give no other answer than that which you know _I have just given_ to

the Deputies. _Tell them (the Commission of Government) that they had

better immediately proclaim the King (Louis 18th). I cannot treat till

then, nor upon any other condition. Their King is here at hand: let them

send their submission to him._”

We are glad the Duke is not an Englishman?[32]

‘The Duke was at this time in constant communication with King Louis and

Talleyrand, who were together in the rear of the army; and I saw one of

the messengers of Louis 18th at the Duke’s head-quarters.—I returned to

Paris the next morning. Davoust had taken the chief command of the

French army, and had fixed his head-quarters at the Barriere de la

Villette, by which I entered Paris. On my being introduced to him, he

demanded to know the object of my mission to the enemy, and said, that

as he then held the supreme command, I must communicate to him any

dispatches of which I might be the bearer? I answered him, that I had no

written message; that my mission had been nearly similar to that of the

Deputies; that I had been sent out by the Commission, and therefore

thought it my duty to account with its members only for my proceedings.

I could, however, inform him of the declaration, which, in common with

the Deputies, I had received from the Duke of Wellington. Hereupon I

reported to him the Duke’s _sine qua non_. He immediately declared that

my intelligence was incredible, and expressed his disbelief of it in the

strongest terms. Then, with the greatest emotion, and with uplifted

hands and eyes, _he called heaven to witness the perfidy and arrogant

injustice of the English Ministry, and of the Allies_. “_The Duke of

Wellington_,” said he, “_surely could never dare to make a declaration

so directly contrary to the avowed and solemnly protested intentions of

the British Ministry, and of the other Allies_. _Have not they sworn

that they would not impose a sovereign on the French people? However,

they will find to their cost, that we are unanimous in our resolution.

Napoleon can no longer be the pretext for their hostilities. We will all

perish rather than submit to the hateful yoke that Lord Castlereagh

would impose upon us! —— is a traitor! he was about to compromise with

the enemy—I have taken his command from him—he shall never again command

a corporal’s guard—we are an independent nation—England should be the

last power to tyrannize over us in our choice of a government._”—He then

desired me to proceed to lay before the Commission at the Thuilleries

the result of my mission, adding, “they know very well that I have now

with me more than 100,000 men, with 500 pieces of cannon, and 25,000

cavalry.”

‘I proceeded to the palace of the Thuilleries, where I was introduced to

the Commission. Carnot immediately asked, what my errand to the enemy

had been? Fouché quickly answered, that he had sent me. Quinette and

Grenier looked as if they were not satisfied with this answer. Carnot

continued to address me, and asked whether I had seen the Deputies at

the Duke of Wellington’s head-quarters? I answered in the affirmative,

and that I could give him an account of the result of their mission:

upon this they became attentive, and heard my account with dismay and

indignation. Carnot expressed the same sentiments that Davoust had

recently done; and added, rather roughly, that he could by no means give

credit to my account, either as to the Duke of Wellington’s _sine qua

non_, or as to the force of the enemy in the vicinity of Paris: he

further said, with a sneer, “we shall have, I hope, a very different

account on the return of the Deputies.” Fouché defended me, and reproved

him for so uncivilly questioning my veracity, and assured him that he

might put implicit confidence in me. Carnot and Grenier then took me to

a topographical map, and questioned me as to the movements of the Duke

of Wellington? I answered their interrogatories to the extent to which I

thought myself warranted: and it appeared that I informed them of

nothing with which they were not already acquainted. Carnot then, in a

polite manner, told me I might retire.

‘It would appear, that in consequence of having learned from me the

nature of the communication which the Deputies would have to make to the

Chambers, and dreading its discouraging effects on the members, and on

the people at large, their return to Paris had been prevented. Some

private orders seem to have been given to that effect; for on the same

day that I entered Paris by the Barriere de la Villette, the Deputies

approached that part, preceded by Colonel Latour Maubourg, who was

attached to their mission, when the French out-posts fired, killed the

Prussian trumpeter’s horse, and a ball grazed the epaulette of the

Colonel. The Deputies turned back, and attempted to enter by the

Barriere de St. Dennis, but were refused. They there received fresh

instructions to treat, and it was so managed, that they did not return

to Paris till after the capitulation.

‘In the mean time Fouché and his coadjutors, who opposed the views of

the other parties, were in great personal danger. The three other

Members of the Commission more than suspected them of duplicity and

treachery; and in consequence impeached them before the Chamber of

Deputies. The Duke of Wellington being acquainted with these

proceedings, sent a message to the Members of the Commission, as I was

informed, assuring them that if any harm befel Fouché or Caulincourt, he

would infallibly _hang up the other three on his arrival in Paris_.[33]

‘It was proposed in the Chamber of Deputies, that its Members should

quit Paris with the army, and rally round them all those who would

oppose the enemy and the Bourbons. But this measure Fouché was

particularly anxious to thwart, whilst Davoust feeling himself confident

in the strength of his army, insisted on attacking Blucher and the Duke

of Wellington before other reinforcements should arrive; but as I

understood at the time, Fouché succeeded in somewhat softening and in

giving a new direction to the policy of Carnot: and it is certain that

he managed to gain over Davoust by urging the force of the enemy, and

the dreadful consequences that would ensue if Paris should be taken by

assault. He pleaded the reliance which might be placed _on the faith of

the English_ (for with the Prussians the French would not have treated

on any terms). He therefore recommended Davoust to evacuate Paris, and

not to listen to the desperate suggestions of the Chambers, observing,

that so long as his army remained entire, he might obtain favourable

terms for all parties.

‘The day before the capitulation of Paris (2d July), I repaired to the

British camp with the following memorandum, as my instructions, from

Fouché to the Duke of Wellington:—

‘“The army opposes, because uneasy—assure it, it will even become

devoted.

‘“The Chambers are counter for the same reason. _Assure every body you

will have every body._

‘“The army sent away, the Chambers will agree, on according them the

guarantee, as added to the charter and promised by the king. In order to

be well understood, it is necessary to explain; therefore not to enter

Paris before three days, and in the meantime every thing may be

arranged.

‘“The Chambers will be gained, will believe in their independence, and

will agree to every thing. Persuasion, not force, must be used with the

Chambers.”

‘On my arrival at the British advanced posts, which, owing to the

obstructions I met with from the French, I was not able to effect till

early in the morning of the 3d July, I was informed that the most

positive orders had been given by the duke, not to allow any messenger

to pass from Paris without his special permission. I was therefore

detained at the English advanced post of guards, commanded by Lord

Saltown. I dined with the officers of the advanced piquet, among whom I

well remember Captain Fairfield, of the foot guards. These gentlemen

informed me that the Duke of Wellington was at Gonnesse, with Sir C.

Stuart, Pozzo di Borgo, and Talleyrand. I wrote a letter to the duke,

which was forwarded by Lord Saltown. In my letter, I entered into a

detail of the line of conduct recommended by Fouché, and contained in

the foregoing memorandum. On the receipt of my dispatch, the duke

immediately proceeded to St. Cloud, General Blucher’s head-quarters;

there the capitulation of Paris was signed. The duke returned to

Gonnesse and dispatched Lord March to bring me to him: I arrived very

early on the morning of the 4th, and found Sir C. Stuart, Talleyrand,

and Pozzo di Borgo; they assembled in council, and my presence was

required by the duke. Talleyrand observed to me, that _this was already

settled_, and, turning to the Duke of Wellington, requested him to read

to me _the capitulation that they had just concluded_. On my urging the

adoption of the line of conduct which Fouché recommended towards the

Chambers, the Duke of Wellington proceeded to give me his sentiments in

writing, which were as follow:—

‘“_Je pense, que les Allies ayant déclaré le Gouvernment de Napoleon une

Usurpation et nonlégitime, toute autorité qui émane de lui, doit être

regardée comme nulle et d’aucun pouvoir.[34] Ainsi, ce qui reste à faire

aux Chambres et à la commission, est, de donner de suite leur démission

et de déclarer qu’ils n’ont pris sur eux les responsibilités de

gouvernement, que pour assurer la tranquilité publique, et l’intégrité

du royaume de S. M. Louis XVIII._”

‘Talleyrand, Sir Charles Stuart, and Pozzo di Borgo, each took a copy of

this document, and each, by way of memorandum, put their names and mine

to the paper, by way of recording, as I suppose, the parties present at

the discussion.

‘I forthwith mounted my horse and returned to Paris; Lord March was

appointed by the duke to accompany me. On our arrival at the Barriere de

la Villette, we found the French soldiery perfectly frantic, and

vociferating “_Vive l’Empereur!_” “_A bas les Anglais!_” “_A bas les

Bourbons!_” They were on the point of firing at the Belgian trumpeter

who preceded us: it was with the greatest difficulty that some French

hussars, under whose escort we had approached the barriers, could

prevent the soldiers from firing at Lord March as he was riding off.

They were also obliged to exert themselves strenuously in my defence, as

many of the infantry pointed their muskets at me, vociferating “_Vive

l’Empereur!_” “_Vive Napoleon!_” “We are betrayed!” “We have been sold!”

“We will fight to the last drop of our blood!” “Down with the Bourbons!”

“Let us kill this traitor!” “He has assisted in selling us!” “We have

seen him pass before!” The hussars took me between them, some of the

infantry also assisted in parrying off the blows aimed at me, and

turning aside the muzzles of the muskets. Thus, after great peril, I was

fortunate enough to gain the quarters of a general officer, with only a

sabre cut on my left leg. The general dispersed the men, and gave me a

strong escort to conduct me to the Thuilleries.

‘In consequence of my communicating the documents and assurances I had

received from Talleyrand and the Duke of Wellington, the commission of

government abdicated its powers that evening; but the Chambers still

refused to comply; they continued their sittings, which they declared

should be permanent, till the morning of the 6th, when the doors of the

Chamber were closed, and guarded by a party of the national guards.

‘On this, above one hundred and fifty of the deputies proceeded to the

house of M. Lanjuinais, their president, and there framed a solemn

protest against the arbitrary and illegal violence which had been used

towards them, _in violation of the most solemn declarations_.

‘I have now no doubt that some extraordinary scheme had been contrived

to seduce Napoleon into the measure of abdicating the throne in favour

of his son. His resources were at that moment immense. The regular army

in Paris alone, amounted to more than 80,000 men, every individual of

which was animated with the most enthusiastic ardour. The national

guard, above 30,000 strong, displayed the firmest resolution to obey the

directions of the constituted authorities; numerous volunteers of all

classes had taken up arms in the defence of their country. In the

departments, the spirit of opposition to the invaders was still greater,

particularly in the north, west, and east: in fine, Napoleon, who could

not possibly be ignorant of the state of his resources, would never, I

am convinced, have sheathed his sword, and abdicated the crown _even in

favour of his son_, had he not been most confidently assured of the

validity of the measure, and its being approved and supported by the

French senate and people, and by at least _some part_ of the coalition.

‘What were the precise representations by which Napoleon was influenced

to take this step, is perhaps known only to its contrivers, and their

victim. Some future historian may probably unfold this mystery. As far

as regards the share I had in the negociations between the provisional

government, the allied armies, and Talleyrand, as minister of Louis

XVIII., I feel it due to myself to declare, that _I had no suspicion of

any deception or intended breach of engagements._ I was requested to

open a communication between Fouché and the Duke of Wellington, for the

avowed purpose of negociating an armistice, as a preliminary measure to

the capitulation of Paris; and it was obvious that such a negociation

might save the lives of thousands of my countrymen.’

THE PLAY IS OVER, NOW LET US GO TO SUPPER.

John Bull, John Bull, John Bull, read the above account twice over,

think well of it, and then say why you should not wear the yoke, which

you have put round the neck of others, round your own. Ah! John, thou

art not a metaphysician: thou dost lack a concatenation of ideas!—We are

not proud of the share which as Englishmen we had in the proceedings

recorded by Mr. Macirone: but we have one consolation for our national

pride, Fouché and Talleyrand are Frenchmen. These two pettifogging

miscreants seem to have made themselves perfect in the advice of the

fool in _Lear_: ‘Let go thy hold, when a great wheel runs down hill,

lest it should break thy neck with following it: but the great one that

goes upwards, let it draw thee after. When a wise man gives thee better

counsel, give me mine again: I would have none but knaves follow it.’

The great wheel, however, in this instance, kicked off the two knaves,

that followed the fool’s advice. One of these famous persons now writes

letters of apology to the Duke of Wellington, and the other to Lord

Castlereagh. They are not so well off as Murat and Berthier, one of whom

was legitimately shot through the head, and the other legitimately

thrown out of a window, if we are to believe Mr. Macirone, that he might

die in _the good cause_—‘a master-leaver, and a fugitive.’

WAT TYLER; A DRAMATIC POEM.

THE QUARTERLY REVIEW: _Article_, ‘ON PARLIAMENTARY REFORM.’

‘So was it when my life began,

So is it now I am a man:

So shall it be when I grow old and die.

The child’s the father of the man:

Our years flow on

Link’d each to each by natural piety.’—WORDSWORTH.

_March 9, 1817._

According to this theory of personal continuity, the author of the

Dramatic Poem, to be here noticed, is the father of Parliamentary Reform

in the Quarterly Review. It is said to be a wise child that knows its

own father: and we understand Mr. Southey (who is in this case reputed

father and son) utterly disclaims the hypostatical union between the

Quarterly Reviewer and the Dramatic Poet, and means to enter an

injunction against the latter, as a bastard and impostor. Appearances

are somewhat staggering against the legitimacy of the descent, yet we

perceive a strong family-likeness remaining, in spite of the lapse of

years and alteration of circumstances. We should not, indeed, be able to

predict that the author of _Wat Tyler_ would ever write the article on

Parliamentary Reform; nor should we, either at first or second sight,

perceive that the Quarterly Reviewer had ever written a poem like that

which is before us: but if we were told that both performances were

literally and _bonâ fide_ by the same person, we should have little

hesitation in saying to Mr. Southey, ‘Thou art the man.’ We know no

other person in whom ‘fierce extremes’ meet with such mutual

self-complacency: whose opinions change so much without any change in

the author’s mind; who lives so entirely in the ‘present ignorant

thought,’ without the smallest ‘discourse of reason looking before or

after.’ Mr. Southey is a man incapable of reasoning connectedly on any

subject. He has not strength of mind to see the whole of any question;

he has not modesty to suspend his judgment till he has examined the

grounds of it. He can comprehend but one idea at a time, and that is

always an extreme one; because he will neither listen to, nor tolerate

any thing that can disturb or moderate the petulance of his

self-opinion. _The woman that deliberates is lost._ So it is with the

effeminate soul of Mr. Southey. Any concession is fatal to his

consistency; and he can only keep out of one absurdity by the

tenaciousness with which he stickles for another. He calls to the aid of

his disjointed opinions a proportionate quantity of spleen; and

regularly makes up for the weakness of his own _reasons_, by charging

others with _bad motives_. The terms _knave and fool_, _wise and good_,

have undergone a total change in the last twenty years: the former he

applies to all those who agreed with him formerly—the latter to all

those who agree with him now. His public spirit was then a prude and a

scold; and ‘his poor virtue,’ turned into a literary prostitute, is

grown more abusive than ever. Wat Tyler and the Quarterly Review are an

illustration of these remarks. The author of Wat Tyler was an

Ultra-jacobin; the author of Parliamentary Reform is an Ultra-royalist;

the one was a frantic demagogue; the other is a servile court-tool: the

one maintained second-hand paradoxes; the other repeats second-hand

common-places: the one vented those opinions which gratified the vanity

of youth; the other adopts those prejudices which are most conducive to

the convenience of age: the one saw nothing but the abuses of power; the

other sees nothing but the horrors of resistance to those abuses: the

one did not stop short of general anarchy; the other goes the whole

length of despotism; the one vilified kings, priests, and nobles; the

other vilifies the people: the one was for universal suffrage and

perfect equality; the other is for seat-selling, and the increasing

influence of the Crown: the one admired the preaching of John Ball; the

other recommends the Suspension of the Habeas Corpus, and the putting

down of the _Examiner_ by the sword, the dagger, or the thumb-screw; for

the pen, Mr. Southey tells us, is not sufficient. We wonder that in all

this contempt which our prose-poet has felt at different times for

different persons and things, he has never felt any dissatisfaction with

himself, or distrust of his own infallibility. Our differing from others

sometimes staggers our confidence in our own conclusions: if we had been

chargeable with as many contradictions as Mr. Southey, we suppose we

should have had the same senseless self-sufficiency. A changeling is

your only oracle. Those who have undergone a total change of sentiment

on important questions, ought certainly to learn modesty in themselves,

and moderation towards others; on the contrary, they are generally the

most violent in their own opinions, and the most intolerant towards

others; the reason of which we have shewn elsewhere, to the satisfaction

of the proprietor of the _Old Times_. Before we have done, we shall,

perhaps, do the same thing to the satisfaction of the publisher of the

Quarterly Review; for the Mr. Murrays and the Mr. Walters, the patrons

of the band of gentlemen-pensioners and servile authors, have ‘a sort of

squint’ in their understanding, and look less to the dirty sacrifices of

their drudges, or the dirtier they are ready to make, than to their

standing well with that great keeper, the public, for purity and

innocence. The band of gentlemen-pensioners and servile authors do not

know what to make of this, and hardly believe it: we shall in time

convince them.

But to proceed to our extracts:—

MORCEAU I.

_Wat Tyler._ Hob—I have only six groats in the world,

And they must soon by law be taken from me.

_Hob._ Curse on these taxes—one succeeds another—

Our ministers—panders of a king’s will—

Drain all our wealth away—waste it in revels—

And lure or force away our boys, who should be

The props of our old age!—to fill their armies,

And feed the crows of France! Year follows year,

And still we madly prosecute the war;—

Draining our wealth—distressing our poor peasants—

Slaughtering our youths—and all to crown our Chiefs

With glory!—I detest the hell-sprung name.

_Tyler._ What matters me who wears the crown of France?

Whether a Richard or a Charles possess it?

They reap the glory—they enjoy the spoil—

We pay—we bleed! The sun would shine as cheerly,

The rains of heaven as seasonably fall,

Tho’ neither of these royal pests existed.

_Hob._ Nay—as for that, we poor men should fare better!

No legal robbers then should force away

The hard-earn’d wages of our honest toil.

The Parliament for ever cries _more money,

The service of the State demands more money_.

Just heaven! of what service is the State?

_Tyler._ Oh! ’tis of vast importance! Who should pay for

The luxuries and riots of the court?

Who should support the flaunting courtier’s pride,

Pay for their midnight revels, their rich garments,

Did not the State enforce?—Think ye, my friend,

That I—a humble blacksmith, here at Deptford,

Would part with these six groats—earn’d by hard toil,

All that I have! to massacre the Frenchmen;

Murder as enemies men I never saw,

Did not the State compel me!

(_Tax-gatherers pass by._) There they go,

Privileg’d r——s!

MORCEAU II.

_Piers._ Fare not the birds well, as from spray to spray

Blithsome they bound—yet find their simple food

Scattered abundantly?

_Tyler._ _No fancied boundaries of mine and thine

Restrain their wanderings_: Nature gives enough

For all; but Man, with arrogant selfishness,

Proud of his heaps, hoards up superfluous stores

Robb’d from his weaker fellows, starves the poor,

Or gives to pity what he owes to justice!

_Piers._ So I have heard our good friend John Ball preach.

_Alice._ My father, wherefore was John Ball imprisoned?

Was he not charitable, good, and pious?

I have heard him say that all mankind are brethren,

And that like brethren they should love each other;—

Was not that doctrine pious?

_Tyler._ Rank sedition—

High treason, every syllable, my child!

The priests cry out on him for heresy;

The nobles all detest him as a rebel;

And this good man, this minister of Christ,

This man, the friend and brother of mankind,

Lingers in the dark dungeon!

MORCEAU III.

_Tyler._ Piers, I have not been idle,

I never ate the bread of indolence—

Could Alice be more thrifty than her mother?

Yet but with one child, and that one, how good

Thou knowest; I scarcely can provide the wants

Of nature: look at these wolves of the law,

They come to drain me of my hard-earn’d wages.

I have already paid the heavy tax

Laid on the wool that clothes me—on my leather—

On all the needful articles of life!

And now three groats (and I work’d hard to earn them)

The Parliament demands—and I must pay them,

Forsooth, for liberty to wear my head.

_Enter Tax-gatherers._

_Collector._ Three groats a-head for all your family.

_Piers._ Why is this money gathered?—’tis a hard tax

On the poor labourer!—it can never be

That government should thus distress the people.

Go to the rich for money—honest labour

Ought to enjoy its fruits.

_Col._ The State wants money.

War is expensive—’tis a glorious war,

A war of honour, and must be supported.—

Three groats a-head.

_Tyler._ There, three for my own head,

Three for my wife’s!—What will the State tax next?

_Col._ You have a daughter.

_Tyler._ She is below the age—not yet fifteen.

_Col._ You would evade the tax.—

_Tyler._ Sir Officer,

I have paid you fairly what the law demands.

[_Alice and her Mother enter the Shop. The Tax-gatherers go to

her. One of them lays hold of her. She screams. Tyler goes

in._]

_Col._ You say she’s under age.

[_Alice screams again. Tyler knocks out the Tax-gatherer’s

brains. His Companions fly._]

_Piers._ A just revenge.

_Tyler._ Most just indeed; but in the eye of the law

’Tis murder—and the murderer’s lot is mine.

MORCEAU IV.—SONG.

‘When Adam delv’d and Eve span,

‘Who was then the gentleman?’

Wretched is the infant’s lot,

Born within the straw-roof’d cot!

Be he generous, wise, or brave,

He must only be a slave,

Long, long labour, little rest,

Still to toil to be oppress’d;

Drain’d by taxes of his store,

Punish’d next for being poor;

That is the poor wretch’s lot,

Born within the straw-roof’d cot.

While the peasant works—to sleep;

What the peasant sows—to reap;

On the couch of ease to lie,

Rioting in revelry:

Be he villain, be he fool,

Still to hold despotic rule,

Trampling on his slaves with scorn;

This is to be nobly born.

‘When Adam delv’d and Eve span,

‘Who was then the gentleman?’

MORCEAU V.

_John Ball._ Friends! Brethren! for ye are my brethren all;

Englishmen met in arms to advocate

The cause of freedom! hear me! pause awhile

In the career of vengeance; it is true

I am a priest; but, as these rags may speak,

Not one who riots in the poor man’s spoil,

Or trades with his religion. I am one

Who preach the law of Christ, and in my life

Would practise what he taught. The Son of God

Came not to you in power:—humble in mien,

Lowly in heart, the man of Nazareth

Preach’d mercy, justice, love: ‘Woe unto ye,

Ye that are rich:—if that ye would be saved,

Sell that ye have, and give unto the poor.’

So taught the Saviour: oh, my honest friends!

Have ye not felt the strong indignant throb

Of justice in your bosoms, to behold

The lordly baron feasting on your spoils?

Have you not in your hearts arraign’d the lot

That gave him on the couch of luxury

To pillow his head, and pass the festive day

In sportive feasts, and ease, and revelry?

Have you not often in your conscience ask’d

Why is the difference, wherefore should that man

No worthier than myself, thus lord it over me,

And bid me labour, and enjoy the fruits?

The God within your breasts has argued thus!

The voice of truth has murmur’d; came he not

As helpless to the world?—shines not the sun

With equal ray on both?—do ye not feel

The self-same winds of heaven as keenly parch ye?

Abundant is the earth—the Sire of all

Saw and pronounced that it was very good.

Look round: the vernal fields smile with new flowers,

The budding orchard perfumes the soft breeze,

And the green corn waves to the passing gale.

There is enough for all, but your proud baron

Stands up, and, arrogant of strength, exclaims,

‘I am a lord—by nature I am noble:

These fields are mine, for I was born to them,

I was born in the castle—you, poor wretches,

Whelp’d in the cottage, are by birth my slaves.’

Almighty God! such blasphemies are uttered!

Almighty God! such blasphemies believ’d!

_Tom Miller._ This is something like a sermon.

_Jack Straw._ Where’s the bishop

Would tell you truths like these?

_Hob._ There was never a bishop among all the apostles.

_John Ball._ My brethren!

_Piers._ Silence, the good priest speaks.

_John Ball._ My brethren, these are truths, and weighty ones

Ye are all equal; nature made ye so.

Equality is your birthright;—when I gaze

On the proud palace, and behold one man

In the blood-purpled robes of royalty,

Feasting at ease, and lording over millions;

Then turn me to the hut of poverty,

And see the wretched labourer, worn with toil,

Divide his scanty morsel with his infants;

I sicken, and, indignant at the sight,

‘Blush for the patience of humanity.’

_Jack Straw._ We will assert our rights.

MORCEAU VI.

_Tyler._ King of England,

_Petitioning for pity_ is most weak,

The sovereign people ought to _demand justice_.

I killed your officer, for his lewd hand

Insulted a maid’s modesty; your subjects

I lead to rebel against the Lord’s anointed,

Because his ministers have made him odious:

His yoke is heavy, and his burden grievous.

Why do we carry on this fatal war,

To force upon the French a king they hate;

Tearing our young men from their peaceful homes;

Forcing his hard-earn’d fruits from the honest peasant;

Distressing us to desolate our neighbours?

Why is this ruinous poll-tax imposed,

But to support your court’s extravagance,

And your mad title to the crown of France?

Shall we sit tamely down beneath these evils,

Petitioning for pity?

King of England!

Why are we sold like cattle in your markets—

Deprived of every privilege of man?

Must we lie tamely at our tyrant’s feet,

And, like your spaniels, lick the hand that beats us?

You sit at ease in your gay palaces,

The costly banquet courts your appetite,

Sweet music sooths your slumbers; we the while,

Scarce by hard toil can earn a little food,

And sleep scarce shelter’d from the cold night wind:

While your wild projects wrest the little from us

Which might have cheered the wintry hour of age:

The parliament for ever asks more money:

We toil and sweat for money for your taxes;

Where is the benefit, what food reap we

From all the councils of your government?

Think you that we should quarrel with the French?

What boots to us your victories, your glory?

We pay, we fight, you profit at your ease.

Do you not claim the country as your own?

Do you not call the venison of the forest,

The birds of heaven your own?—prohibiting us,

Even tho’ in want of food, to seize the prey

Which nature offers?—King! is all this just?

Think you we do not feel the wrongs we suffer?

The hour of retribution is at hand,

And tyrants tremble—mark me, King of England.

MORCEAU VII.

_Hob._ ’Twas well order’d,

I place but little trust in courtly faith.

_John Ball._ We must remain embodied; else the king

Will plunge again in royal luxury;

And when the storm of danger is past over,

Forget his promises.

_Hob._ Aye, like an aguish sinner,

He’ll promise to repent when the fit’s on him;

When well recover’d, laugh at his own terrors.

_Piers._ Oh! I am griev’d that we must gain so little!

Why are not all these empty ranks abolish’d,

King, slave, and lord, ‘ennobl’d into MAN?’

Are we not equal all?—have you not told me,

Equality is the sacred right of man,

Inalienable, tho’ by force withheld?

_John Ball._ Even so; but Piers, my frail and fallible judgment

Knows hardly to decide if it be right,

Peaceably to return, content with little,

With this half restitution of our rights,

Or boldly to proceed thro’ blood and slaughter,

Till we should all be equal and all happy.

I chose the milder way:—perhaps I erred.

_Piers._ I fear me—by the mass, the unsteady people

Are flocking homewards! how the multitude

Diminishes!

MORCEAU THE LAST.

_John Ball._ Why, be it so. I can smile at your vengeance:

For I am arm’d with rectitude of soul.

The truth, which all my life I have divulg’d,

And am now doom’d in torment to expire for,

Shall still survive—the destin’d hour must come,

When it shall blaze with sun-surpassing splendor,

And the dark mists of prejudice and falsehood

Fade in its strong effulgence. Flattery’s incense

No more shall shadow round the gore-dyed throne;

That altar of oppression, fed with rites

More savage than the priests of Moloch taught,

Shall be consumed amid the fire of Justice:

The ray of truth shall emanate around,

And the whole world be lighted!

This will do.

THE COURIER AND ‘THE WAT TYLER.’

Doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth, that

he cannot endure in his age. Shall quips and sentences, and these

paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his

humour?—_Much Ado about Nothing._

_March 30, 1817._

Instead of applying for an injunction against _Wat Tyler_, Mr. Southey

would do well to apply for an injunction against Mr. Coleridge, who has

undertaken his defence in _The Courier_. If he can escape from the

ominous patronage of that gentleman’s pen, he has nothing to fear from

his own. ‘The _Wat Tyler_,’ as Mr. Coleridge has personified it, can do

the author no great harm: it only proves that he was once a wild

enthusiast: of the two characters, for which Mr. Southey is a candidate

with the public, this is the most creditable for him to appear in. At

present his reputation ‘somewhat smacks.’ A strong dose of the Jacobin

spirit of _Wat Tyler_ may be of use to get the sickly taste of the

Poet-laureate and the Quarterly Reviewer out of our mouths.

The best thing for Mr. Southey (if we might be allowed to advise) would

be for his friends to say nothing about him, and for him to say nothing

about other people. We have nothing to do with Mr. Southey ‘the man,’ or

even with Mr. Southey the apostate; but we have something to do with Mr.

Southey the spy and informer. Is it not a little strange, that while

this gentleman is getting an injunction against himself as the author of

_Wat Tyler_, he is recommending gagging bills against us, and the making

up by force for his deficiency in argument! There is a want of keeping

in this; but Mr. Southey and his friends delight in practical and

speculative contradictions. What are we to think of a man who is ‘now a

flagitious incendiary,’ (to use the epithets which Mr. Southey applies

to the Editor of the _Examiner_) ‘a palliater of murder, insurrection,

and treason,’ and anon a pensioned scribbler of court poetry and court

politics? If the writer of the article on Parliamentary Reform thinks

the Editor of this Paper ‘a flagitious incendiary,’ ‘a palliater of

murder, insurrection, and treason,’ what does the Quarterly Reviewer

think of the author of _Wat Tyler_? What, on the other hand, does the

author of _Wat Tyler_ think of the Quarterly Reviewer? What does Mr.

Southey, who certainly makes a very aukward figure between the two,

think of himself? Mr. Coleridge indeed steps in to the assistance of his

friend in this dilemma, and says (unsaying all that he says besides)

that the ultra-jacobinical opinions advanced in _Wat Tyler_ were ‘more

an honour to the writer’s heart than an imputation on his

understanding?’ Be it so. The Editor of this Paper will, we dare say,

agree to this statement from disinterested motives, (for he is not

answerable for any ultra-jacobinical opinions) as we suppose Mr. Southey

will accede to it from pure self-love. He hardly thinks that he was ‘a

knave and fool’ formerly, as he calls all those who formerly agreed or

now differ with him: he only thinks with Mr. Coleridge and _The

Courier_, that he was not quite so ‘wise and virtuous’ then, as he is at

present! Why then not extend the same charitable interpretation to those

who have held a middle course between his opposite extravagances? We are

sure, that to be thought _a little less wise and virtuous_ than that

celebrated person thinks himself, would content the ambition of any

moderate man. Will he allow of nothing short of the utmost intolerance

of jacobinism or anti-jacobinism? Or will he tolerate this intolerance

in nobody but himself? This seems to be his feeling: and it also seems

to be Mr. Coleridge’s opinion, whose maudlin methodistical casuistry

leads him to clothe Mr. Southey’s political sins with apostacy as with a

garment, and to plead one excess of folly and indecency as a competent

set-off against another. To be a renegado, is, with him, to be virtuous.

The greater the sinner the greater the saint, says _The Courier_. Mr.

Southey’s Muse is confessedly not a vestal; but then she is what is much

better, a Magdalen. Now a Magdalen is a person who has returned to her

first habits and notions of virtue: but Mr. Southey’s laurelled Muse is

at present in high court-keeping, and tosses up her nose at the very

mention of reform. Nor do we think Mr. Southey has a fairer claim to the

degree of respectability good-naturedly assigned him by his friends,

that of a pickpocket or highwayman turned thief-taker or king’s

evidence; for he in fact belies his own character to blacken every

honest principle, and takes the government reward for betraying better

men than himself. There are, as _The Courier_ observes, youthful

indiscretions; but there are also riper and more deliberate errors. A

woman is more liable to prostitute her person at nineteen—a man is more

likely to prostitute his understanding at forty. We do not see the exact

parallel which _The Courier_ sets up between moral repentance and

political profligacy. A man, says _The Courier_, may surely express an

abhorrence of his past vices, as of drunkenness. Yes; and he may also

express a great abhorrence of his present vices, because his own

opinion, as well as that of all impartial persons, condemns his conduct;

but it would be curious if a man were to express a great abhorrence of

his present opinions, and it is only a less degree of absurdity for a

man to express a great abhorrence of his past opinions; for if he was

not a hypocrite, he must have held those opinions, as he holds his

present ones, because he thought them right. A man is at liberty to

condemn his errors in practice as much as he pleases: it is a point

agreed upon. But he is not at liberty to condemn his errors in theory at

the same unmerciful rate, because many people still think them right;

because it is the height of arrogance in him to assume his own forfeited

opinion as the invariable standard of right and wrong, and the height of

indecency to ascribe the conclusions of others to bad motives, by which

he can only arraign his own. Certainly, all the presumption of indirect

and dishonest motives lies against Mr. Southey’s unlooked-for

conversion, and not against his original principles. Will he deny this

himself? He must then retract what he says in the Quarterly Review; for

he there says, that ‘the late war was so popular for three and twenty

years together, that for any one to be against it,’ (and much more, to

be a Jacobin, as he was, half that time,) ‘exposed him to contempt,

insult, persecution, the loss of property, and even of life.’ The odds,

we grant, were against Mr. Southey’s pure reason; they proved too much

for it. According, however, to the new theory of political integrity, to

be a steady, consistent, conscientious Whig or Tory, is nothing. It is

the change of opinion that stamps its value on it; and the more

outrageous the change, the more meritorious the stigma attached to it.

It is the sacrifice of all principle, that is the triumph of corruption;

it is the shameless effrontery of a desertion of the people, that is the

chief recommendation to the panders of a court; it is the contempt, the

grinning scorn and infamy, which is poured on all patriotism and

independence, by shewing the radical baseness and fickleness of its

professors in the most startling point of view, that strengthens the

rotten foundations of power, by degrading human nature. Poor Bob

Southey! how they laugh at him! What are the abuse and contumely which

we are in the habit of bestowing upon him, compared with the cordial

contempt, the flickering sneers, that play round the lips of his

new-fangled friends, when they see ‘the Man of Humanity’ decked out in

the trappings of his prostitution, and feel the rankling venom of their

hearts soothed by the flattering reflection that virtue and genius are

mere marketable commodities! What a squeeze must that be which Mr.

Canning gives the hand that wrote the Sonnet to Old Sarum, and the

Defence of Rotten Boroughs in the Quarterly Review! Mr. Canning was at

first suspected of being the author of this last article: no one has

attributed _Wat Tyler_ to the classical pen of that glib orator and

consistent anti-jacobin. Yet what are the pretensions of that

gentleman’s profligate consistency opposed to Mr. Southey’s profligate

versatility; what a pitiful spectacle does his sneaking, servile

adherence to a party make, compared with Mr. Southey’s barefaced and

magnanimous desertion of one! Mr. Canning has indeed served a cause; Mr.

Southey has betrayed one. Mr. Canning threw contempt on the cause of

liberty by his wit; Mr. Southey has done it by his want of principle.

‘This, this is the unkindest blow of all.’ We should not mind any thing

but that;—that is the reflection that stabs us:

—— —— —— ——‘That the law

By which mankind now suffers, is most just.

For by superior energies; more strict

Affiance with each other; faith more firm

In their unhallow’d principles; the bad

Have fairly earned a victory o’er the weak,

The vacillating, inconsistent good.’

Mr. Coleridge thinks that this triumph over himself and the

Poet-laureate is a triumph to us. God forbid! It shews that he knows as

little about us as he does about himself. This question of apostacy may

be summed up in a very few words:—First, if Mr. Southey is not an

apostate, we should like to know who ever was? Secondly, whether the

term, apostate, is a term of reproach? If it has ceased to be so, it is

another among the triumphs of the present king’s reign, and a greater

proof than any brought forward in the Quarterly Review, of the progress

of public spirit and political independence among us of late years! A

man may change his opinion. Good. But if he changes his opinion as his

interest or vanity would prompt, if he deserts the weak to go to the

stronger side, the change is a suspicious one! and we shall have a right

to impute it rather to a defect of moral principle than to an accession

of intellectual strength. Again, no man, be he who he may, has a right

to change his opinion, and to be violent on opposite sides of a

question. For the only excuse for dogmatical intolerance is, that the

person who holds an opinion is totally blinded by habit to all

objections against it, so that he can see nothing wrong on his own side,

and nothing right on the other; which cannot be the case with any person

who has been sincere in the opposite opinion. No one, therefore, has a

right to call another ‘the greatest of scoundrels’ for holding the

opinions which he himself once held, without first formally

acknowledging that he himself was the greatest of hypocrites when he

maintained those opinions. When Mr. Southey subscribes to these

conditions, we will give him a license to rail on whom and as long as he

pleases: but not—_till then_! Apostates are violent in their opinions,

because they suspect their truth, even when they are most sincere: they

are forward to vilify the motives of those who differ from them, because

their own are more than suspected by the world! We proceed to notice the

flabby defence of ‘the _Wat Tyler_,’ from the well-known pen of Mr.

Coleridge, which, as far as we can understand it, proceeds upon the

following assumptions:—

1. _That Mr. Southey was only 19 when he wrote it, and had forgotten,

from that time to this, all the principles and sentiments contained in

it._

_Answer._ A person who forgets all the sentiments and principles to

which he was most attached at nineteen, can have no sentiments ever

after worth being attached to. Further, it is not true that Mr. Southey

gave up the general principles of _Wat Tyler_, which he wrote at

nineteen, till almost as many years after. He did not give them up till

many years after he had received his Irish pension in 1800. He did not

give them up till with this _leaning_ to something beyond ‘the slides of

his magic lanthorn,’ and ‘the pleasing fervour of his imagination,’ he

was canted out of them by the misty metaphysics of Mr. Coleridge, Mr.

Southey being no conjurer in such matters, and Mr. Coleridge being a

great quack. The dates of his works will shew this: as it was indeed

excellently well shewn in _The Morning Chronicle_ the other day. His

Joan of Arc, his Sonnets and Inscriptions, his Letters from Spain and

Portugal, his Annual Anthology, in which was published Mr. Coleridge’s

‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,’ are a series of invectives against Kings,

Priests, and Nobles, in favour of the French Revolution, and against war

and taxes up to the year 1803. Why does he not get an injunction against

all these? To set aside all Mr. Southey’s jacobin publications, it would

be necessary to erect a new court of Chancery. Mr. Coleridge’s

insinuation, that he had changed all his opinions the year after, when

Mr. S. and Mr. C., in conjunction, wrote the Fall of Robespierre, is,

therefore, not true. But Mr. Coleridge never troubles himself about

facts or dates; he is only ‘watching the slides of his magic lanthorn,’

and indulging in ‘the pleasing fervour of poetical inspiration.’

2. _That Mr. Southey was a mere boy when he wrote Wat Tyler, and

entertained Jacobin opinions: that being a child, he felt as a child,

and thought slavery, superstition, war, famine, bloodshed, taxes,

bribery and corruption, rotten boroughs, places, and pensions, shocking

things; but that now he is become a man, he has put away childish

things, and thinks there is nothing so delightful as slavery,

superstition, war, famine, bloodshed, taxes, bribery and corruption,

rotten boroughs, places and pensions, and particularly, his own._

_Answer._ Yet Mr. Coleridge tells us that when he wrote _Wat Tyler_, he

was a man of genius and learning. That Mr. Southey was a wise man when

he wrote this poem, we do not pretend: that he has ever been so, is more

than we know. This we do know, and it is worth attending to; that all

that Mr. Southey has done best in poetry, he did before he changed his

political creed; that _all_ that Mr. Coleridge ever did in poetry, as

the _Ancient Mariner_, _Christabel_, the _Three Graves_, his Poems and