which, if he was once to turn round, would stare him in the face with self-conviction, and make his pen drop from his hands. It is this morbid conflict with his own feelings that many persons do not know what to make of, and which gives such a tragic, and at the same time, ludicrous air to his writings. He is obliged to wink and shut his apprehension up, so that he is blind, stupidly blind to all that makes against him, and all that makes for him. His understanding seems to labour under a quinsy; and instead of the little bonnet rouge of 1793, wears a huge pair of Bourbon blinkers for 1816. Hence the endless inconsistencies in which he involves himself; and as it is his self-will that makes him insensible to all objections, it is the same headstrong obstinacy which makes him regardless of contradictions, and proof against conviction.
In a word, to conclude this part of the subject, the writer of The Times is governed entirely by his will; and this faculty is strong, and bears sway in him, as all other principles are weak. He asserts a fact the louder, as he suspects it to be without proof: and defends a measure the more lustily, as he feels it to be mischievous. He listens only to his passions and his prejudices, not to truth or reason. Prove to him that any thing is the most idle fiction that ever was invented, and he will swear to it: prove to him that it is fraught with destruction to the liberties of mankind in all places and in all time to come, and he is your own for ever. Sed hæc hactenus. Goethe has given to one of his heroes this motto—‘Mad but wise.’ We would give the following to the hero of The Times—Mad but not wise.
ILLUSTRATIONS OF ‘THE TIMES’ NEWSPAPER
ON MODERN LAWYERS AND POETS
—— —— ——‘Facilis descensus Averni;
Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis;
Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est.’
December 22, 1816.
The meaning of which passage is, that it is easier to sail with the stream, than to strive against it. Our classical reformers should have known this passage in Virgil. They should have known themselves too; but they did not. ‘Let no man go about to cozen honesty,’ or to be a knave by halves. The man, as well as the woman, who deliberates between his principle and the price of its sacrifice, is lost. The same rule holds with respect to literary as to any other kind of prostitution. It is the first false step that always costs the most; and which is, for that reason, always fatal. It requires an effort of resolution, or at least obstinate prejudice, for a man to maintain his opinions at the expense of his interest. But it requires a much greater effort of resolution for a man to give up his interest to recover his independence; because, with the consistency of his character, he has lost the habitual energy of his mind, and the indirect aid of prejudice and obstinacy, which are sometimes as useful to virtue as they are to vice. A man, in adhering to his principles in contradiction to the decisions of the world, has many disadvantages. He has nothing to support him but the supposed sense of right; and any defect in the justice of his cause, or the force of his conviction, must prey on his mind, in proportion to the delicacy and sensitiveness of its texture: he is left alone in his opinions; and, like Sam Sharpset, in Mr. Morton’s new comedy (when he gets into solitary confinement in the spunging-house,) grows nervous, melancholy, fantastical, and would be glad of somebody or anybody to sympathize with him; but when he has once gone over to the strong side of the question (perhaps from these very scruples of conscience, suggested by weakness and melancholy, as ‘the Devil is very potent with such spirits, and abuses them to damn them’) our wavering sceptic no longer finds the same scruples troublesome; the air of a court promotes their digestion wonderfully; the load on his conscience falls off at the foot of the throne. The poet-laureate, standing with his laurel-wreath amidst ‘Britain’s warriors, her statesmen, and her fair,’ thinks no more or says no more about the patriots of Spain pining in dungeons or consigned to the torture, though it was his zeal, his virtuous, patriotic, romantic, disinterested zeal for them, which brought them there, and him to court. His Prince’s smile soothes the involuntary pang of sympathy rising in his breast; and Mr. Croker’s whispers drown their agonizing shrieks. When we are at Rome, we must do as the people at Rome do. A man in a crowd must go along with the crowd, and cannot stop to pick his way; nor need he be so particular about it. He has friends to back him: appearances are for him; the world is on his side; his interest becomes surety for his honour, his vanity makes him blind to objections, or overrules them, and he is not so much ashamed of being in the wrong in such good company. It requires some fortitude to oppose one’s opinion, however right, to that of all the world besides; none at all to agree with it, however wrong. Nothing but the strongest and clearest conviction can support a man in a losing minority: any excuse or quibble is sufficient to salve his conscience, when he has made sure of the main chance, and his understanding has become the stalking-horse of his ambition. It is this single circumstance of not being answerable for one’s opinions one’s-self, but being able to put them off to other men’s shoulders in all crowds and collections of men, that is the reason of the violence of mobs, the venality of courts, and the corruption of all corporate bodies. It is also the reason of the degeneracy of modern apostates and reformed Jacobins, who find the applause of their king and country doubly cheering after being so long without it, and who go all lengths in adulation and servility, to make up for their former awkward singularity.
Many of the persons we have known, who have deserted the cause of the people to take a high tone against those who did not chuse to desert it, have been lawyers or poets. The last took their leave of it by a poetic license; the first slunk out of it by some loop-hole of the law. We shall say a word of each.