[11]. The style of Vetus bears the same relation to eloquence that gilded lead does to gold;—it glitters, and is heavy.
[12]. He who speaks two languages has no country. The French, when they made their language the common language of the courts of Europe, gained more than by all their other conquests put together.
[13]. See Mr. Canning’s speech on the Jaggernaut.—They manage these things better in the East (it is to be hoped we shall do so in time here); otherwise, if there had been any occasion, what pretty Anti-Jacobin sonnets might not Mr. Canning have written in praise of this Jaggernaut? Or Mr. Southey, after in vain attempting its overthrow, might have ‘spun his brains’ into a Carmen Annuum to celebrate his own defeat. Or Vetus might play off his discovery of the identity of the strumpet and the goddess Reason, against any disposition to disarm its power or arrest its progress.
[14]. Of the facility of realising this devout aspiration of the writer in The Times, we have no exact means of judging by his own statements, for he one day tells us that ‘there is nothing to hinder Lord Wellington from marching to Paris, and bringing the Usurper to the block,’ and the next endeavours to excite the panic fears of his readers, by telling them, in a tone of equal horror and dismay, ‘That the monster wields at will the force of forty millions of men.’ The assertions of these writers have no connection with the real state of things, but depend entirely on their variable passions, and the purpose they have in view.
[15]. We only wish to add one thing, which is, to protest against the self-importance of such expressions as the following, which occur often in Vetus’s letters:—‘The men I speak of were’ those, &c. ‘This sentiment never prevailed with the better sort.’ This is an affectation of the worst part of Burke’s style, his assumption of a parliamentary tone, and of the representation of the voice of some corporate body. It was bad enough in him; in Vetus it is intolerable.
[16]. Written originally for the Morning Chronicle.
[17]. The ignorant will suppose that these are two proper names.
[18]. ‘Carnage is her daughter.’—Mr. Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode.
[19]. This article falls somewhat short of its original destination, by our having been forced to omit two topics, the praise of Bonaparte, and the abuse of poetry. The former we leave to history: the latter we have been induced to omit from our regard to two poets of our acquaintance. We must say they have spoiled sport. One of them has tropical blood in his veins, which gives a gay, cordial, vinous spirit to his whole character. The other is a mad wag,—who ought to have lived at the Court of Horwendillus, with Yorick and Hamlet,—equally desperate in his mirth and his gravity, who would laugh at a funeral and weep at a wedding, who talks nonsense to prevent the headache, who would wag his finger at a skeleton, whose jests scald like tears, who makes a joke of a great man, and a hero of a cat’s paw. The last is more than Mr. Garrard or Mr. Turnerelli can do. The busts which these gentlemen have made of a celebrated General are very bad. His head is worth nothing unless it is put on his men’s shoulders.
[20]. See an article on this subject in Mr. Coleridge’s Friend.