POLITICAL ESSAYS
The title-page contained a motto from Twelfth Night (Act I. Scene 5): ‘Come, draw the curtain, shew the picture,’
29. John Hunt (1780?–1848), an elder brother of Leigh Hunt, was with him the joint founder of The Examiner in 1808. The two brothers were at first joint proprietors, John being printer and manager and Leigh Hunt editor. John Hunt was twice in prison, for two years (1813–5) for a libel on the Prince Regent, and again for one year (1821–2) for a libel on the House of Commons. For an account of his services to journalism see Fox Bourne’s English Newspapers (I. 335–51). [32]. ‘In contempt of the choice of the people.’ Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (Select Works, ed. Payne, II. 17). In his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791) Burke defends and elaborates the constitutional doctrines of the Reflections. [33]. ‘The envy of less happier lands.’ Richard II., Act II. Scene 1. Sworn brother to the Pope. Because the sworn enemy of Hazlitt’s hero, Napoleon, who abolished the Inquisition in Spain in 1808. Ferdinand VII. restored it in 1814. Arbuthnot. John Arbuthnot (1667–1735), whose famous pamphlet The History of John Bull (as it was afterwards called) appeared in 1712. Flocci, etc. These words are the beginning of a rule in the old Latin grammars which brings together a number of words meaning ‘of no account.’ See Letters of Charles Lamb (ed. Ainger), I. 62. [34]. ‘One fate attends,’ etc. Southey’s Carmen Nuptiale, Stanza 51. ‘At one fell swoop.’ Macbeth, Act IV. Scene 3. ‘That painted sepulchre,’ etc. ‘Whited sepulchres,’ etc. St. Matthew xxiii. 27. ‘Bogs, dens,’ etc. Paradise Lost, II. 621–2. [35]. ‘Awhile they stood abashed.’
‘abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is.’
Paradise Lost, IV. 846–7.
‘——that in quaternion run
Perpetual circle, multiform, and mix
And nourish all things,’ etc.
Paradise Lost, V. 181–3.
‘What though the radiance which was once so bright,’ etc.
‘——Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont!’
Othello, Act III. Scene 3.
“Why, Sir, you know no house,
Nor no such men as you have reckon’d up,
As Stephen Sly, and Old John Naps of Greece,
And Peter Turf, and Henry Pimpernel,
And twenty more such names and men as these,
Which never were, nor no man ever saw.”
“I’m glad thou set’st thy mercy and thy honour
At difference in thee: out of this I’ll work
Myself a former fortune.”
“Away, my disposition, and possess me
Some harlot’s spirit: the smiles of knaves
Tent in my cheeks, and school-boys’ tears take up
The glasses of my sight: a beggar’s tongue
Make motion through my lips.—I will not do it,
Lest I surcease to honour mine own truth,
And by my body’s action, teach my mind
A most inherent baseness.”
‘Whoe’er offends at some unlucky time
Slides into verse, and hitches in a rhyme.’
Pope, Imitations of Horace, Satire I. Book II.
‘Thus Phalaris Perillus taught to low,
And made him season first the brazen cow.
A rightful doom, the laws of nature cry,
’Tis, the artificers of death should die.’
Dryden, Ovid’s Art of Love, I. 737–40.
“In many a winding bout
Of linked dulness long drawn-out.”[[69]]
‘Of Britain’s Court ... a proud assemblage there,
Her Statesmen, and her Warriors, and her Fair.’
Southey, Carmen Nuptiale, The Dream, Stanza 16.
‘That Love will not submit to be controlled
By mastery.’
Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book VI.
‘To the bare trees, and mountains bare,
And grass in the green field.’
Wordsworth, To my Sister.
‘Thy letters have transported me beyond
This ignorant present.’
Macbeth, Act I. Scene 5.
‘Coleridge and Southey, Lloyd and Lamb and Co.,
Tune all your mystic harps to praise Lepaux.’
Canning’s The New Morality in The Anti-Jacobin.
‘When his periods hobble vilely
What “hear hims” burst from brother Hiley!’
‘—— or, if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault.’
Goldsmith, The Deserted Village, ll. 205–6.
‘Look to thy sire, and in his steady way,
As in his Father’s he, learn thou to tread.’
Southey’s Carmen Nuptiale, The Dream, Stanza 32.
‘But thou
Revisit’st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quenched their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veiled.’
Paradise Lost, III. 22–26.
‘And Noise and Norton, Brangling and Breval,
Dennis and Dissonance, and captious Art.’
Pope, The Dunciad, II. 238–9.
‘Enjoy your dear wit, and gay rhetoric,
That hath so well been taught her dazzling fence.’
Comus, ll. 790–1.