What can be more remote, for instance, and at the same time more apposite, more the same, than the following comparison of the English Constitution to ‘the proud Keep of Windsor,’ in the celebrated Letter to a Noble Lord?
‘Such are their ideas; such their religion, and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the well-compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power—a fortress at once and a temple[[6]]—shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion; as long as the British Monarchy—not more limited than fenced by the orders of the State—shall, like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers; as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our Sovereign Lord the King, and his faithful subjects, the Lords and Commons of this realm—the triple cord which no man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitutional frank-pledge of this nation; the firm guarantees of each other’s being, and each other’s rights; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order, for every kind and every quality of property and of dignity—As long as these endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe: and we are all safe together—the high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it: and so it will be,
“Dum domus Æneæ Capitoli immobile saxum
Accolet; imperiumque pater Romanus habebit.”’
Nothing can well be more impracticable to a simile than the vague and complicated idea which is here embodied in one; yet how finely, how nobly it stands out, in natural grandeur, in royal state, with double barriers round it to answer for its identity, with ‘buttress, frieze, and coigne of ‘vantage’ for the imagination to ‘make its pendant bed and procreant cradle,’ till the idea is confounded with the object representing it—the wonder of a kingdom; and then how striking, how determined the descent, ‘at one fell swoop,’ to the ‘low, fat, Bedford level!’ Poetry would have been bound to maintain a certain decorum, a regular balance between these two ideas; sterling prose throws aside all such idle respect to appearances, and with its pen, like a sword, ‘sharp and sweet,’ lays open the naked truth! The poet’s Muse is like a mistress, whom we keep only while she is young and beautiful, durante bene placito; the Muse of prose is like a wife, whom we take during life, for better for worse. Burke’s execution, like that of all good prose, savours of the texture of what he describes, and his pen slides or drags over the ground of his subject, like the painter’s pencil. The most rigid fidelity and the most fanciful extravagance meet, and are reconciled in his pages. I never pass Windsor but I think of this passage in Burke, and hardly know to which I am indebted most for enriching my moral sense, that or the fine picturesque stanza, in Gray,
‘From Windsor’s heights the expanse below
Of mead, of lawn, of wood survey,’ &c.
I might mention that the so much admired description in one of the India speeches, of Hyder Ally’s army (I think it is) which ‘now hung like a cloud upon the mountain, and now burst upon the plain like a thunder bolt,’ would do equally well for poetry or prose. It is a bold and striking illustration of a naturally impressive object. This is not the case with the Abbe Sieyes’s far-famed ‘pigeon-holes,’ nor with the comparison of the Duke of Bedford to ‘the Leviathan, tumbling about his unwieldy bulk in the ocean of royal bounty.’ Nothing here saves the description but the force of the invective; the startling truth, the vehemence, the remoteness, the aptitude, the perfect peculiarity and coincidence of the allusion. No writer would ever have thought of it but himself; no reader can ever forget it. What is there in common, one might say, between a Peer of the Realm, and ‘that sea-beast,’ of those
‘Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream?’
Yet Burke has knit the two ideas together, and no man can put them asunder. No matter how slight and precarious the connection, the length of line it is necessary for the fancy to give out in keeping hold of the object on which it has fastened, he seems to have ‘put his hook in the nostrils’ of this enormous creature of the crown, that empurples all its track through the glittering expanse of a profound and restless imagination!