John Bull does not aim so maliciously, or hit so hard at Whigs and Reformers, as Cobbett. The reason is, that a very large proportion of these Marplots and regenerators of the world are actuated by no love of their species or zeal for a general question, but by envy, malice, and all uncharitableness. They are discontented with themselves and with every thing about them. They object to, they dissent from every measure. Nothing pleases their fastidious tastes. For want of something to exercise their ill-humour and troublesome officiousness upon, they abuse the Government:—when they are baulked or tired of this they fall foul of one another. The slightest slip or difference of opinion is never forgiven, but gives birth to a deadly feud. Touch but their petty self-importance, and out comes a flaming denunciation of their own cabal, and all they know about the individuals composing it. This is not patriotism, but spleen—a want of something to do and to talk about—of sense, honesty, and feeling. To wreak their spite on an individual, they will ruin the cause, and serve up the friend and idol of the people sliced and carbonadoed, a delicious morsel to the other side. There is a strange want of keeping in this. They are true neither to themselves nor to their principles. The Reformers are in general, it must be confessed, an ill-conditioned set; and they should be told of this infirmity that most easily besets them. When they find their gall and bitterness overflowing on the very persons who take the lead, and deservedly take the lead, in their affairs, for some slight flaw or misunderstanding, they should be taught to hold their tongues, or be drummed out of the regiment as spies and informers.

Trimming, and want of spirit to declare the honest truth, arise in part from the same source. When a man is not thoroughly convinced of an opinion, or where he does not feel a deep interest in it, he does not like to make himself obnoxious by avowing it; is willing to make all the allowance he can for difference of sentiment, and consults his own safety by retiring from a sinking cause. This is the very time when the genuine partisan, who has a rooted attachment to a principle, and feels it as a part of himself, finds himself most called upon to come forward in its support. His anxiety for truth and justice leaves him in no fear for himself, and the sincerity of his motives makes him regardless of censure or obloquy. His profession of hearty devotion to freedom was not an ebullition called forth by the sunshine of prosperity, a lure for popularity and public favour; and when these desert it, he still maintains his post with his integrity. There is a natural timidity of mind, also, which can never go the whole length of any opinion, but is always interlarding its qualified assent with unmeaning buts and ifs; as there is a levity and discursiveness of imagination which cannot settle finally in any belief, and requires a succession of glancing views, topics, and opposite conclusions, to satisfy its appetite for intellectual variety. I have known persons leave the cause of independence and freedom, not because they found it unprofitable, but because they found it flat and stale for want of novelty. At the same time, interest is a great stimulator; and perhaps the success of their early principles might have reconciled them to their embarrassing monotony. Few persons have strength and simplicity of mind (without some additional inducement) to be always harping on the same string, or to put up with the legitimate variety to be found in an abstract principle, applicable to all emergencies. They like changeable silks better than lasting homespun. A sensible man once mentioned to me his having called on —— that morning, who entertained him with a tirade against the Bourbons for two hours; but he said he did not at all feel convinced that he might not have been writing Ultra-royalist paragraphs for the ——, just before he came, in their favour, and only shifted his side of the argument, as a man who is tired of lying too long on one side of his body is glad to turn to the other. There was much shrewdness, and equal probability in this conjecture.

I think the spirit of partisanship is of use in a point of view that has not been distinctly adverted to. It serves as a conductor to carry off our antipathies and ill-blood in a quarter and a manner that is least hurtful to the general weal. A thorough partisan is a good hater; but he hates only one side of a question, and that the outside. His bigotry throws human nature into strong light and shade; he has his sympathies as well as his antipathies; it is not all black or a dull drab-colour. He does not generalise in his contempt or disgust, or proceed from individuals to universals. He lays the faults and vices of mankind to the account of sects and parties, creeds and classes. Man in himself is a good sort of animal. It is the being a Tory or a Whig (as it may happen) that makes a man a knave or fool; but then we hardly look upon him as of the same species with ourselves. Kings are not arbitrary, nor priests hypocritical, because they are men, but because they are kings and priests. We form certain nominal abstractions of these classes, which the more we dislike them, the less natural do they seem, and leave the general character of the species untouched, or act as a foil to it. There is nothing that is a greater damper to party spirit than to suggest that the errors and enormities of both sides arise from certain inherent dispositions, common to the species. It shocks the liberal and enlightened among us, to suppose that under any circumstances they could become bigots, tools, persecutors. They wipe their hands clean of all such aspersions. There is a great gulph of prejudice and passion placed between us and our opponents; and this is interpreted into a natural barrier and separation of sentiment and feeling. ‘Our withers are unwrung.’ Burke represented modern revolutionists to himself, under the equivocal similitude of ‘green-eyed, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed philosophers, whether going on two legs or on four;’ and thus removed to a distance from his own person all the ill attributes with which he had complimented the thorough-bred metaphysician. By comparing the plausible qualities of a Minister of state to the sleekness of the panther, I myself seem to have no more affinity with that whole genus, than with the whiskers and claws of that formidable and spirited animal. Bishop Taylor used to reprimand his rising pride by saying, at the sight of a reprobate, ‘There goes my wicked self:’ we do not apply the same method politically, and say, ‘There goes my Tory or my Jacobin self.’ We suppose the two things incompatible. The Calvinist damns the Arminian, the Protestant the Papist, &c. but it is not for a difference of nature, but an opposition of opinion. The spirit of partizanship is not a spirit of our misanthropy. But for the vices and errors of example and institution, mankind are (on this principle) only a little lower than the angels: it is false doctrine and absurd prejudices that make demons of them. The only original sin is differing in opinion with us: of that they are curable like any occasional disorder, and the man comes out, from beneath the husk of his party and prejudices, pure and immaculate. Make proselytes of them, let them come over to our way of thinking, and they are a different race of beings quite. This is to be effected by the force of argument and the progress of knowledge. It is well, it is perfectly well. We cast the slough of our vices with the shibboleth of our party; a Reform in Parliament would banish all knavery and folly from the land. It is not the same wretched little mischievous animal, man, that is alike under all denominations and all systems, and in whom different situations and notions only bring out different inherent, incorrigible vices and propensities; but the professions and the theory being changed for the one, which we think the only true and infallible one, the whole world, by the mere removal of our arbitrary prejudices and modes of thinking, would become as sincere, as benevolent, as independent, and as worthy people as we are! To hate and proscribe half the species under various pretexts and nicknames, seems, therefore, the only way to entertain a good opinion of ourselves and mankind in general.

‘THE PIRATE’

The London Magazine.][January, 1822.

This is not the best, nor is it the worst (the worst is good enough for us) of the Scotch Novels. There is a story in it, an interest excited almost from the first, a clue which you get hold of and wish to follow out; a mystery to be developed, and which does not disappoint you at last. After you once get into the stream, you read on with eagerness, and have only to complain of the number of impediments and diversions thrown in your way. The author is evidently writing to gain time, to make up his complement of volumes, his six thousand guineas worth of matter; and to get to the end of your journey, and satisfy the curiosity he has raised, you must be content to travel with him, stop when he stops, and turn out of the road as often as he pleases. He dallies with your impatience, and smiles in your face, but you cannot, and dare not be angry with him, while with his giant-hand he plays at pushpin with the reader, and sweeps the rich stakes from the table. He has, they say, got a plum by his writings. What have not the public got by reading them? The course of exchange is, and will be, in our favour, as long as he gives us one volume for ourselves, and two for himself. Who is there that has not been the better, the wiser, and happier man for these fine and inexhaustible productions of genius? The more striking characters and situations are not quite so highly wrought up in the present, as in some former instances, nor are they so crowded, so thickly sown. But the genius of the author is not exhausted, nor can it be so till not a Scotch superstition, or popular tradition is left, or till the pen drops lifeless and regretted from its master’s hand. Ah! who will then call the mist from its hill? Who will make the circling eddies roar? Who, with his ‘so potent art,’ will dim the sun, or stop the winds, that wave the forest-heads, in their course? Who will summon the spirits of the northern air from their chill abodes, or make gleaming lake or hidden cavern teem with wizard, or with elfin forms? There is no one but the Scottish Prospero, but old Sir Walter, can do the trick aright. He is the very genius of the clime—mounts in her old grey clouds, dips in her usquebaugh and whiskey!—startles you with her antique Druid spells in the person of Elshie, or stirs up the fierce heat of her theological fires with Macbriar and Kettle-drumle: sweeps the country with a far war-cry to Lochiel, or sighs out the soul of love in the perfumed breath of the Lily of St. Leonard’s. Stand thou, then, Meg Merrilies, on the point of thy fated rock, with wild locks and words streaming to the wind; and sit thou there in thy narrow recess, Balfour of Burley, betwixt thy Bible and thy sword, thy arm of flesh and arm of the Spirit:—when the last words have passed the lips of the author of Waverley, there will be none to re-kindle your fires, or recall your spirit! Let him write on then to the last drop of ink in his ink-stand, even though it should not be made according to the model of that described by Mr. Coleridge, and we will not be afraid to read whatever he is not ashamed to publish. We are the true and liege subjects of his pen, and profess our ultra-fealty in this respect, like the old French leaguers, with a Quand même.

The Pirate is not what we expected, nor is it new. We had looked for a prodigious row—landing and boarding, cut and thrust, blowing up of ships, and sacking of sea-ports, with the very devil to pay, and a noise to deafen clamour,

‘Guns, drums, trumpets,

Blunderbusses and thunder.’

We supposed that for the time ‘Hell itself would be empty, and all the devils be here.’ There be land pirates and water pirates; and we thought Sir Walter would be for kicking up just such a dust by sea, in the Buccaneers, (as it was to be called) as he has done by land in Old Mortality. Multum abludit imago. There is nothing or little of the sort. There is here (bating a sprinkling of twenty pages of roaring lads, who come on shore for no use but to get themselves hanged in the Orkneys,) only a single Pirate, a peaking sort of gentleman, spiteful, but not enterprising; in love, and inclined to take up and reform, but very equivocal in the sentiments he professes, and in those he inspires in others. Cleveland is the Pirate, who is wrecked off the coast of Zetland, is saved from destruction by young Mordaunt Mertoun, who had been so far the hero of the piece, and jilts him with his mistress, Minna, a grave sentimentalist, and the elder of two sisters, to whom Mordaunt had felt a secret and undeclared passion. The interest of the novel hinges on this bizarre situation of the different parties. Sir Walter (for he has in the present work leisure on his hands to philosophize) here introduces a dissertation of some length, but not much depth, to show that the jilting of favoured, or half-favoured lovers, comes by the dispensation of Providence, and that the breed of honest men and bonny lasses would be spoiled if the fairest of the fair, the sentimental Miss, and the prude (contrary to all previous and common-place calculation), did not prefer the blackguard and the bravo, to the tender, meek, puny, unpretending, heartbroken lover. We do not think our novelist manages his argument well, or shines in his new Professor’s chair of morality. Miss Polly Peachum, we do indeed remember, the artless, soft, innocent Polly, fell in love with the bold Captain Macheath; but so did Miss Lucy Lockitt too, who was no chicken, and who, according to this new balance of power in the empire of love, ought to have tempered her fires with the phlegm of some young chaplain to the prison, or the soft insinuations of some dreaming poet. But as our author himself is not in a hurry to get on with his story, we will imitate him, and let him speak here in his superfluous character of a casuist, or commentator on his own narrative.