They have deserted the cause of liberty in as far as it deserted them; but no farther. No sinister motives, no disappointed expectations from a new order of things, no places to be got under the old, no laureatships, no editorships, no popular odium to contend with, no court-smiles to inveigle, have had any weight with them, or can be supposed to have had any. They could not tolerate wrong on any side, on the side of kings, or of the people. That’s all. They have changed sides to preserve the integrity of their principles and the consistency of their characters. They have gone over to the strong side of the question, merely to shew the conscious purity of their motives; and they chose the moment of the total failure of all hopes from the weaker side to desert to the stronger, to put the matter out of all doubt. They are not only above corruption, but above suspicion. They have never once been at fault, have neither sneaked nor shuffled, botched or boggled, in their politics. They who were loud against the abuses of a principle which they set out with considering as sacred, the right of a people to chuse their own form of government, have not turned round to flatter and to screen, with the closeness of their fulsome embraces, the abuses of a power which they set out with treating as monstrous, the right of a discarded family to reign over a nation in perpetuity by the grace of God. They ‘whose love of liberty was of that dignity that it went hand in hand even with the vow they made this virgin bride,’ have not stooped to ‘commit whoredom greedily’ with that old harlot, Despotism. They ‘who struck the foremost man of all this world but for supporting robbers,’ have not contaminated their fingers with base bribes, nor turned receivers of stolen goods for paltry knaves and licensed freebooters. Nice, scrupulous, firm, inflexible, uncorrupted, incapable of injustice or disguise; patriots in 1793, and royalists in 1816; at all times extreme and at all times consistent in their opinions; converts to the cause of kings, only because kings were converts (unaccountable converts) to the cause of the people: they have not become, nor are they in danger of becoming, thorough-paced time-servers, regular-bred courtiers, trammelled tools of despotism, hired pimps and panders of power. Nothing of the sort. They have not been made (not they) the overweening dupes of their own conceit and cunning. These political innocents have not, like the two poor devils in the Recruiting Officer, been laid hold of, entrapped, kidnapped, by that fell serjeant, Necessity, and then, in the height of their admiration of ‘the wonderful works of nature’ and the King’s picture, been enlisted for life in his Majesty’s service, by some Court crimp, some Treasury scout in the shape of a well-bred baronet or booby Lord. Our maiden poets, patriots, and philanthropists, have not, it is to be hoped, like Miss Lucy Lockitt, been bilked of their virtue, ‘bamboozled and bit.’ They have got into a house of ill fame in the neighbourhood of Pall-Mall, like Miss Clarissa Harlowe, but they will defend their honour to the last gasp with their pens against that old bawd, Legitimacy, as she did hers with a pen-knife against the old Lady in Duke’s place; or if the opiates and provocatives unfairly administered, and almost unavoidable when people get into such company and such situations, should for an instant rob them of what they hold most dear, their immaculate purity, they will, like Richardson’s heroine, die a lingering death of grief and shame for the trick that has been played upon their unsuspecting credulity!—See, here comes one of them to answer for himself. It is the same person who in the year 1800 was for making an example of the whole House of Commons (in spite of the humble petition and remonstrance of the writer of this article in favour of a small minority), for being the echoes of the King’s speeches for carrying on the war against the French Revolution. What is that thing he has in his hand? It is not, nor it cannot be, a sonnet to the King, celebrating his ‘royal fortitude,’ in having brought that war to a successful close fourteen years after!
‘Such recantation had no charms for him,
‘Nor could he brook it.’
Nor is it the same consistent person whose deep-toned voice rebellows among the mountain echoes with peals of ideot rage and demon laughter—
‘Proud Glaramara northward caught the sound,
‘And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head,
‘That there was strange commotion in the hills,’—
at the infamy and madness of Sir Robert Wilson’s gallant conduct in having rescued one of its victims from the fangs of that Bourbon despotism which that royal fortitude had restored.—Is not that Mr. Southey, with something of the glow on his cheek which he had in writing Joan of Arc, and with the beaked curl of his nose which provoked him to write the Inscription on Old Sarum, returning in disgrace from the Prince’s Levee, for having indignantly noticed in one of his Birth-day Odes, Ferdinand’s treatment of the Spanish Patriots?—Just yonder, at the corner of Paternoster-row, you may see Mr. Coleridge, the author of the eclogue called Fire, Famine, and Slaughter, who has been to his bookseller’s to withdraw his ‘Lay Sermon,’ or Statesman’s Manual in praise of Fire, Slaughter, and Famine! But who is he ‘whose grief
‘Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
‘Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand