Whatever the Papacy may have been on the Continent, it was always an unqualified evil to this country. It destroyed what was rising of good, and introduced a thousand evils of its own. The Papacy was and still is essentially extra-national;—it affects, temporally, to do that which the spiritual Church of Christ can alone do—to break down the natural distinctions of nations. Now, as the Roman Papacy is in itself local and peculiar, of course this attempt is nothing but a direct attack on the political independence of other nations.
The institution of Universities was the single check on the Papacy. The Pope always hated and maligned the Universities. The old coenobitic establishments of England were converted—perverted, rather—into monasteries and other monking receptacles. You see it was at Oxford that Wicliffe alone found protection and encouragement.
June 2. 1834.
SCHILLER'S VERSIFICATION.—GERMAN BLANK VERSE.
Schiller's blank verse is bad. He moves in it as a fly in a glue bottle.
His thoughts have their connection and variety, it is true, but there is no
sufficiently corresponding movement in the verse. How different from
Shakspeare's endless rhythms!
There is a nimiety—a too-muchness—in all Germans. It is the national fault. Leasing had the best notion of blank verse. The trochaic termination of German words renders blank verse in that language almost impracticable. We have it in our dramatic hendecasyllable; but then we have a power of interweaving the iambic close ad libitum.
June 14. 1834.
ROMAN CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION.—DUKE OF WELLINGTON.—CORONATION OATH.
The Roman Catholic Emancipation Act—carried in the violent, and, in fact, unprincipled manner it was—was in effect a Surinam toad;—and the Reform Bill, the Dissenters' admission to the Universities, and the attack on the Church, are so many toadlets, one after another detaching themselves from their parent brute.
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