Microsoft Word Byron and Scott 1809-1824
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We have done with the poem; we have, however, yet a few words to say before we finally close our
strictures. To this canto, as to the former, notes are added, illustrative of the contents; and these, we are informed, are written by Mr. Hobhouse, the author of that facetious account of Buonaparte’s reign of an hundred days, which it was our office last year to review. 143 They are distinct and classical illustrations of the text, but contain of course many political sentiments of a class which have ceased to excite anger, or any feeling stronger than pity, and a sense of the weakness of humanity which, in all ages, has inclined even men of talents and cultivation to disgrace themselves, by the adoption of sentiments of which it is impossible they can have examined either the grounds or the consequences— whence the doctrines come, or whither they are tending. The mob of a corrupt metropolis, who vindicate the freedom of election by knocking out the brains of the candidate of whom they disapprove, act upon obvious and tangible principles; so do the Spenceans, Spar-fieldians and Nottingham conspirators. That ‘seven halfpenny loaves should be sold for a penny’, that ‘the three-hooped pot should have ten hoops’,—and that ‘the realm should be all in common’,—have been the watch-words of insurrection among the vulgar, from Jack Straw’s time to the present, and, if neither honest nor praiseworthy, are at least sufficiently plain and intelligible. But the frenzy which makes individuals of birth and education hold a language as if they could be willing to risk the destruction of their native country, and all the horrors of a civil war, is not so easily accounted for. To believe that these persons would accelerate a desolation in which they themselves directly, or through their nearest and dearest connections, must widely share, merely to remove an obnoxious minister, would be to form a hasty and perhaps a false judgement of them. The truth seems to be, that the English, even those from whom better things might be expected, are born to be the dupes of jugglers and mountebanks in all professions. It is not only in physic that [p.232] the names of our nobility and gentry decorate occasionally the list of cures to which the empiric appeals as attesting the force of his remedy. Religion, in the last age, and politics in the present, have had their quacks, who substituted words for sense, and theoretical dogmata for the practice of every duty.—But whether in religion, or politics, or physic, one general mark distinguishes the empiric; the patient is to be tired without interruption of business, or pleasure—the proselyte to be saved without reformation of the future, or repentance of the past—the country to be made happy by an alteration in its political system; and all the vice and misery which luxury and poor’s rates, a crouded population, and decayed morality can introduce into the community, to be removed by extending farther political rights to those who daily show that they require to be taught the purpose for which those they already enjoy were entrusted to them. That any one above the rank of an interested demagogue should teach this is wonderful—that any should believe it except the lowest of the vulgar is more so—but vanity makes as many dupes as folly. If, however, these gentlemen will needs identify their own cause with that of their country’s enemies, we can forgive them as losers, who have proverbial leave to pout. And when, in bitterness of spirit, they term the great, the glorious victory of Waterloo the ‘carnage of Saint Jean’, 144 we can forgive that too, since, trained in the school of revolutionary France, they must necessarily abhor those ——— whose art was of such power It could controul their dam’s God Setebos, And make a vassal of him. 145 From the dismal denunciations which Lord Byron, acting more upon his feeling than his judgment, has made against our country, although Download 1.07 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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