Happily the country need never despair of salvation, even should the cabinet prospective of farceurs fall to pieces, for there yet remain two species of a genus taking higher rank in the social system; species that really have a root, a name, and pretensions hereditary or legitimately acquired. These each affect philosophy, and represent it too; they of the caste hereditary in grande tenue, they of the new men with much pompous parade of words, and all the Delphic mystics of the schools. They are none of your journeymen—your everyday spouters—in the Commons or common places. They exhibit only on state occasions, after solemn midnight preparation made; their intended movements are duly heralded beforehand; their approach announced with a flourish of trumpets. They carry on a vast wordy traffic in "great principles;" they condescend upon nothing less than the overthrow or manufacture of "constitutions"—in talk. The big swagger about "great principles" eventuates, however, in denouncing by speech from the throne repeal as high treason, and O'Connell the repealer as a traitor to the state; and next, with cap in hand, and most mendicant meanness, supplicating the said traitor—denounced—repealing O'Connell, to deign acceptance of one of the highest offices in the realm. Their practice in the "constitution" line consists in annihilating rotten borough A because it is Tory; in conserving rotten borough B because it is Whig. The grand characteristic of each species is—vox et preterea nihil. Need I further proclaim them and their titles? In the order of Parisian organization they stand as faiseurs and phraseurs. You can make no mistake about the personality ranged under each banner; they are as perfectly distinguishable each from the other, though even knit in close and indissoluble alliance, as Grand Crosses of the Bath from Knights of the Garter. At the head of the faiseurs you have Lord John Russell, Lord Viscount Palmerston, and Lord Viscount Howick. You have only to see them rise in the House of Commons—Lord John, to wit—
"Pride in his port, defiance in his eye"—
to be led into the belief that
—"Now is the day
Big with the fate of Cato and of Rome."
The physical swell of conscious consequence—the eye-distended "wide awake" insinuation of the inconceivable, unutterable things—the grand sentiments about to be outpoured—hold you in silent wonderment and expectation. You conceive nothing less, than either that the world is about to come to an end, or the millennium declared to be the "order of the day." You imagine that the orator will lose self and party in his country. Nothing of all this follows, however. You have some common-places, perhaps common truisms, some undefined, mean-all-or-nothing, declamation about "constitution" and "principles," by way of exordium; for the rest, Rome is sunk as if it existed not, down to the peroration it is all about Cato himself, and his little Whig party about him.
—"Parturiunt montes,
Nascitur ridiculus mus."
Chief of the phraseurs stand Mr Babington Macaulay and Mr Lalor Shiel, the peculiarity of whose craft—a profitable craft of late years—consists in furbishing up old ideas into new and euphonious forms of speech. Of the one it may be said, that
—"He could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope."
The other more finished leader of the class mystifies you with metaphysics, half conned and unmastered by himself—more anxious still to make his points than to please his party; and, of the two, would rather sink his country than his climax. He is a rhetorician, a dealer in set phraseology, an ingenious gatherer and polisher of "other men's stuff." Of the faiseurs, may be repeated what Marshal Marmont, in his Voyage en Hongrie, en Transylvanie, &c., says of the faiseurs of Paris—"Subjugués par le gout et cette manie d'uniformité absolue, qui est la maladie de l'époque, et qui resulte de principes abstraits, dont l'application est presque toujours funeste aux peuples qui l'éprouvent, ils ignoraient combien il est dans la nature des choses et dans le bien des nations de modifier l'organization sociale suivant le temps, les lieux, suivant le plus on moins grana degré de civilization, et d'après mille circonstances, qui ne peuvent être prévues d'avance, mais que le legislateur capable apprecie au moment où il est appélé à fonder la société." On the cession of the Illyrian provinces, by Austria, after the battle of Wagram, the faiseurs, or abstract principle men, of Paris, were prompt with their plans, not for "constitutions"—Bonaparte had put an end to that branch of their métier—but for reorganizing the laws, administration, &c., of Transylvania de fond en comble, without knowing any thing of the people or country, without having seen either the one or the other. Marmont, appointed governor of the ceded provinces, who had studied on the spot the institutions established by Austria, found these so perfect and well adapted to the genius and inclination of the population, and the purposes of government, that he opposed the faiseurs with success, and, by his representations, induced Bonaparte to confirm and act upon what existed.
This immense agglomeration, this monstrous over-production of the tribes of farceurs, faiseurs, and phraseurs is a misfortune of the first magnitude—a pest worse than that of the locusts which lay waste the land of Egypt, as here the substance of the people is devoured. Conflagrations may, and do, occasionally diminish the number of cotton-mills, and lighten the warehoused accumulation of cottons, or other inert matter; but no lucky plague, pestilence, or cholera, comes to thin the crowded phalanx, and rid this empire of some portion of the interminable brood of mongers of all shapes and sizes. As Horace says—