Microsoft Word Byron and Scott 1809-1824

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.
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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’,
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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.
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From the dismal denunciations which Lord Byron, acting more upon his feeling than his judgment, has 
made against our country, although