ady was deep; it was complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms. Throughout it was full of contra-indicants. On one hand, government, daily growing more invidious from an apparent increase of the means of strength, was every day growing more contemptible by real weakness. Nor was this dissolution confined to government commonly so called. It extended to Parliament, which was losing not a little in its dignity and estimation, by an opinion of its not acting on worthy motives. On the other hand, the desires of the people (partly natural and partly infused into them by art) appeared in so wild and inconsiderate a manner, with regard to the economical object (for I set. aside for a moment the dreadful tampering with the body of the constitution itself), that, if their petitions had literally been complied with the state would have been convulsed, and a gate would have been opened through which all property might be sacked and ravaged. Nothing could have saved the public from the mischiefs of the false reform but its absurdity, which would soon have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into discredit. This would have left a rankling wound in the hearts of the people, who would know they had failed in the accomplishment of their wishes, but who, like the rest of mankind in all ages, would impute the blame to anything rather than to their own proceedings. But there were then persons in the world who nourished complaint, and would have been thoroughly disappointed if the people were ever satisfied. I was not of that humor. I wished that they should be satisfied. It was my aim to give to the people the substance of what I knew they desired, and what I thought was right, whether they desired it or not, before it had been modified for them into senseless petitions. I knew that there is a manifest marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. The former alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential good, as well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change is novelty; and whether it is to operate any one of the effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not contradict the very principle upon which reformation is desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform is not a change in the substance, or in the primary modification, of the object, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that is removed, all is sure. It stops there; and, if it fails, the substance which underwent the operation, at the very worst, is but where it was. All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said elsewhere. It cannot at this time be too often repeated, — line upon line, precept upon precept, — until it comes into the currency of a proverb: to innovate is not to reform. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all unchanged. The consequences are before us, not in remote history; not in future prognostication; they are about us; they are upon us. They shake the public security; they manace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted; our repose is troubled; our pleasures are saddened; our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance, by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation. The revolution harpies of France, sprung from Night and Hell, or from that chaotic Anarchy which generates equivocally "all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters), flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, un ravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal. . Does his Grace think that they who advised the Crown to make my retreat easy, considered me only as an economist? That, well understood, however, is a good deal. If I had not deemed it of some value, I should not have made political economy an object of my humble studies, from my very early youth to near the end of my service in Parliament, even before (at least to any knowledge of mine) it had employed the thoughts of speculative men in other parts of Europe. At that time it was still in its infancy in England, where, in the last century, it had its origin. Great and learned men thought my studies were not wholly thrown away, and deigned to communicate with me now and then on some particulars of their immortal works. Something of these studies may appear incidentally in some of the earliest things I published. The House has been witness to their effect, and has profited of them, more or less, for above eight-and-twenty years. I To their estimate I leave the matter. was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled into a legislator; "Nitor in adversum" is the motto of a man like me. I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that recommend men to the favor and protection of the great. I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning the hearts, by imposing on the understandings, of the people. At every step of my progress in life (for in every step was I traversed and opposed), and at every turnpike I met, was obliged to show my passport, and again and again to prove my sole title to the honour of being useful to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home. Otherwise no rank, no toleration even, for me. I had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and, please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand. I THE GEORGIAN POETS THE English poets from 1740 to the end of the century are the forerunners of the great romanticists of the early nineteenth century, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. The wits of Queen Anne had succeeded for the time being in silencing romantic utterance, but the spirit of romance is unquenchable, and no sooner had the Augustans reduced poetry to the cold correctness of satire and philosophic speculation in heroic verse than sensitive spirits began instinctively to recoil from it and to search, though timidly, for the picturesque, the fanciful, the mysterious, and the free. Johnson's Lives of the English Poets (1785) was in effect a futile protest against this growing wave of romance, but not even the authority of so autocratic a Dictator could crush it. If these Georgian poets seem rather tame, if their verse strikes us as pensive and listless, they are at least interesting historically, prophetic as they are of the poetry which was to follow. Singularly enough, they were all men who lacked physical vitality, and this anæmia is responsible for the flatness and paleness of their pastelle poetry. None of them had the physique to support genius. Thomson (1700-1748), the first of the tribe, was the victim of constitutional languor, fat and sleepy; Gray (1716-1771), who in his university days at least had the spirit to revolt against the deadness of the curriculum and to characterize the university as "that pretty collection of desolate animals," described himself at thirty as "lazy and listless, and old, and vexed, and perplexed"; at Oxford Collins (1721-1759) was "distinguished for genius and indolence," spent the major part of his life with insanity hanging over him and finally became hopelessly its victim, filling the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral with his shrieks; Cowper's (1731– 1800) delicate nervous system was permanently injured by the bullyings of a schoolboy and he was only reclaimed at intervals from insanity by the kind offices of friends; Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), the most astounding youthful literary genius that the world has known, too feverish and frail to fight it out with hunger and neglect, took arsenic at the age of seventeen; and Edward Young (1683-1765) only came into his own with his melancholy Night Thoughts, written after he was sixty. It is not surprising, then, that geniune passion is lacking in the poetry of this period, and that feeling hardly gets beyond pensiveness and melancholy, and that the return to nature stops short at picturesqueness of landscape and does not cleave through to the animating and revealing spirit of nature itself. Young, composing at night with a candle stuck in a skull, is a fairly good epitome of this school. Yet they were, indeed, a frail group of pioneers, poorly enough equipped; yet they opened something of a trail for the ardent spirits who were to follow. MATTHEW PRIOR TO A CHILD OF QUALITY FIVE THE AUTHOR FORTY LORDS, knights, and squires, the numerous, band That wear the fair Miss Mary's fetters, Were summoned, by her high command, To show their passions by their letters. My pen amongst the rest I took, Lest those bright eyes that cannot read Should dart their kindling fires, and look The power they have to be obeyed. Nor quality nor reputation Forbid me yet my flame to tell; For while she makes her silk-worms beds She may receive and own my flame; She'll pass for a most virtuous dame, And I for an unhappy poet. Then, too, alas! when she shall tear The lines some younger rival sends, She'll give me leave to write, I fear, And we shall still continue friends; For, as our different ages move, 'Tis so ordained (would fate but mend it!) That I shall be past making love When she begins to comprehend it. JAMES THOMSON RULE, BRITANNIA WHEN Britain first, at Heaven's command, The nations not so blest as thee, Must in their turns to tyrants fall, Whilst thou shalt flourish great and free, The dread and envy of them all. Rule, Britannia, etc. Still more majestic shalt thou rise, More dreadful from each foreign stroke As the loud blast that tears the skies, Serves but to root thy native oak. Rule, Britannia, etc. Thee haughty tyrants ne'er shall tame; All their attempts to bend thee down But work their woe and thy renown. To thee belongs the rural reign; Thy cities shall with commerce shine; All thine shall be the subject main, And every shore it circles thine. Faithful remembrancer of one so dear, O welcome guest, though unexpected here! Who bidst me honour with an artless song, Affectionate, a mother lost so long, I will obey, not willingly alone, Say, wast thou conscious of the tears I shed? Hovered thy spirit o'er thy sorrowing son, Wretch even then, life's journey just be gun? Perhaps thou gavest me, though unfelt, a kiss: Perhaps a tear, if souls can weep in bliss Yes. I heard the bell tolled on thy burial day, Thy maidens, grieved themselves at my concern, Oft gave me promise of thy quick return. Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more, Children not thine had trod my nursery floor; And where the gardener Robin, day by day, Drew me to school along the public way, Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapped In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet capped, 'Tis now become a history little known, That once we called the pastoral house our Ne'er roughened by those cataracts and brakes That humour interposed too often makes; Could Time, his flight reversed, restore the hours, When, playing with thy vesture's tissued flowers, The violet, the pink, and jassamine, I pricked them into paper with a pin (And thou wast happier than myself the while, Wouldst softly speak, and stroke my head and smile), Could those few pleasant days again ap |
