POPULACE AND PEOPLE
Oh the profanation of the sacred word the People! Every brutal Burdett-led mob, assembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is the People forsooth, and each leprous ragamuffin, like a circle in geometry, is, at once, one and all, and calls its own brutal self, "us the People." And who are the friends of the People? Not those who would wish to elevate each of them, or, at least, the child who is to take his place in the flux of life and death, into something worthy of esteem and capable of freedom, but those who flatter and infuriate them, as they are. A contradiction in the very thought! For if, really, they are good and wise, virtuous and well-informed, how weak must be the motives of discontent to a truly moral being—but if the contrary, and the motives for discontent proportionably strong, how without guilt and absurdity appeal to them as judges and arbiters? He alone is entitled to a share in the government of all, who has learnt to govern himself. There is but one possible ground of a right of freedom—viz., to understand and revere its duties.
[Vide Life of S. T. C., by James Gillman, 1838, p. 223.]
FOR THE "SOOTHER IN ABSENCE." May 28, 1807 Bristol
How villainously these metallic pencils have degenerated, not only in the length and quantity, but what is far worse, in the quality of the metal! This one appears to have no superiority over the worst sort sold by the Maltese shopkeepers.
Blue sky through the glimmering interspaces of the dark elms at twilight rendered a lovely deep yellow-green—all the rest a delicate blue.
The hay-field in the close hard by the farm-house—babe, and totterer little more [than a babe]—old cat with her eyes blinking in the sun and little kittens leaping and frisking over the hay-lines.