This is a subject exceedingly curious, and worth explaining. In writing a criticism, we hope we shall not be accused of intending a libel.

Kings are remarkable for long memories, in the merest trifles. They never forget a face or person they have once seen, nor an anecdote they have been told of any one they know. Whatever differences of character or understanding they manifest in other respects, they all possess what Dr. Spurzheim would call the organ of individuality, or the power of recollecting particular local circumstances, nearly in the same degree; though we shall attempt to account for it without recurring to his system. This kind of personal memory is the natural effect of that self-importance which makes them attach a corresponding importance to all that comes in contact with themselves. Nothing can be a matter of indifference to a King, that happens to a King. That intense consciousness of their personal identity, which never quits them, extends to whatever falls under their immediate cognisance. It is the glare of Majesty reflected from their own persons on the persons of those about them that fixes their attention; and it is the same false glare that makes them blind and insensible to all that lies beyond that narrow sphere. ‘My Lord,’ said an English King to one of his courtiers, ‘I have seen you in that coat before with different buttons’—to the astonishment of the Noble Peer. There was nothing wonderful in it. It was the habitual jealousy of the Sovereign of the respect due to him, that made him regard with lynx-eyed watchfulness even the accidental change of dress in one of his favourites. The least diminution of glossy splendour in a birth-day suit, considered as a mark of slackened duty, or waning loyalty, would expose it, tarnished and thread-bare, to the keen glance of dormant pride, waked to suspicion. A God does not penetrate into the hearts of his worshippers with surer insight, than a King, fond of the attributes of awe and sovereignty, detects the different degrees of hollow adulation in those around him. Every thing relating to external appearance and deportment is scanned with the utmost nicety, as compromising the dignity of the royal presence. Involuntary gestures become overt acts; a look is construed into high treason; an inconsiderate word is magnified into a crime against the State. To suggest advice, or offer information unasked, is to arraign the fallibility of the throne: to hint a difference of opinion to a King, would create as great a shock, as if you were to present a pistol to the breast of any other man. ‘Never touch a King,’ was the answer of an infirm Monarch to one who had saved him from a dangerous fall. When a glass of wine was presented to the Emperor Alexander by a servant in livery, he started, as if he had trod upon a serpent. Such is their respect for themselves! Such is their contempt for human nature!—‘There’s a divinity doth hedge a King,’ that keeps their bodies and their minds sacred within the magic circle of a name; and it is their fear lest this circle should be violated or approached without sufficient awe, that makes them observe and remember the countenances and demeanour of others with such infinite circumspection and exactness.

As Kings have the sagacity of pride, courtiers have the cunning of fear. They watch their own behaviour and that of others with breathless apprehension, and move amidst the artificial forms of court-etiquette, as if the least error must be fatal to them. Their sense of personal propriety is heightened by servility: every faculty is wound up to flatter the vanity and prejudices of their superiors. When Coates painted a portrait in crayons of the Queen, on her first arrival in this country, the King, followed by a train of attendants, went to look at it. The trembling artist stood by. ‘Well, what do you think?’ said the King to those in waiting. Not a word in reply. ‘Do you think it like?’ Still all was hushed as death. ‘Why, yes, I think it is like, very like.’ A buzz of admiration instantly filled the room; and the old Duchess of Northumberland, going up to the artist, and tapping him familiarly on the shoulder, said, ‘Remember, Mr. Coates, I am to have the first copy.’ On another occasion, when the Queen had sat for her portrait, one of the Maids of Honour coming into the room, curtsied to the reflection in the glass, affecting to mistake it for the Queen. The picture was, you may be sure, a flattering likeness. In the ‘Memoirs of Count Grammont,’ it is related of Louis XIV. that having a dispute at chess with one of his courtiers, no one present would give an opinion. ‘Oh!’ said he, ‘here comes Count Hamilton, he shall decide which of us is in the right.’ ‘Your Majesty is in the wrong,’ replied the Count, without looking at the board. On which, the King remonstrating with him on the impossibility of his judging till he saw the state of the game, he answered, ‘Does your Majesty suppose that if you were in the right, all these noblemen would stand by and say nothing?’ A King was once curious to know, which was the tallest, himself or a certain courtier. ‘Let us measure,’ said the King. The King stood up to be measured first; but when the person who was fixed upon to take their height came to measure the Nobleman, he found it quite impossible, as he first rose on tip-toe, then crouched down, now shrugged up his shoulders to the right, then twisted his body to the left. Afterwards his friend asking him the reason of these unaccountable gesticulations, he replied, ‘I could not tell whether the King wished me to be taller or shorter than himself; and all the time I was making those odd movements, I was watching his countenance to see what I ought to do.’ If such is the exquisite pliability of the inmates of a court in trifles like these, what must be their independence of spirit and disinterested integrity in questions of peace and war, that involve the rights of Sovereigns or the liberties of the people! It has been suggested (and not without reason), that the difficulty of trusting to the professions of those who surround them, is one circumstance that renders Kings such expert physiognomists, the language of the countenance being the only one they have left to decypher the thoughts of others; and the very disguises which are practised to prevent the emotions of the mind from appearing in the face, only rendering them more acute and discriminating observers. It is the same insincerity and fear of giving offence by candour and plain-speaking in their immediate dependents, that makes Kings gossips and inquisitive. They have no way of ascertaining the opinions of others, but by getting them up into a corner, and extorting the commonest information from them, piecemeal, by endless teasing tiresome questions, and cross-examination. The walls of a palace, like those of a nunnery, are the favoured abode of scandal and tittle-tattle. The inhabitants of both are equally shut out from the common privileges and common incidents of humanity, and whatever relates to the every-day world about us, has to them the air of a romance. The desire which the most meritorious Princes have shewn to acquire information on matters of fact rather than of opinion, is partly because their prejudices will not suffer them to exercise their understandings freely on the most important speculative questions, partly from their jealousy of being dictated to on any point that admits of a question;—as, on the other hand, the desire which the Sovereigns of northern and uncultivated kingdoms have shewn to become acquainted with the arts and elegances of life in southern nations, is evidently owing to their natural jealousy of the advantages of civilization over barbarism. From the principle last stated, Peter the Great visited this country, and worked in our dock-yards as a common shipwright. To the same source may be traced the curiosity of the Duchess of Oldenburgh to see a beef-steak cooked, to take a peep into Mr. Meux’s great brewing-vat, and to hear Mr. Whitbread speak!

The common regal character is then the reverse of what it ought to be. It is the purely personal, occupied with its own petty feelings, prejudices, and pursuits; whereas it ought to be the purely philosophical, exempt from all personal considerations, and contemplating itself only in its general and paramount relation to the State. This is the reason why there have been so few great Kings. They want the power of abstraction: and their situations are necessarily at variance with their duties, in this respect; for every thing forces them to concentrate their attention upon themselves, and to consider their rank and privileges in connexion with their private advantage, rather than with public good. This is but natural. It is easier to employ the power they possess in pampering their own appetites and passions, than to wield it for the benefit of a great empire. They see well enough how the community is made for them, not so well how they are made for the community. Not knowing how to act as stewards for their trust, they set up for heirs to the estate, and waste it at their pleasure:—without aspiring to reign as Kings, they are contented to live as spunges upon royalty. A great King ought to be the greatest philosopher and the truest patriot in his dominions: hereditary Kings can be but common mortals. It is not that they are not equal to other men, but to be equal to their rank as Kings, they ought to be more than men. Their power is equal to that of the whole community: their wisdom and virtue ought to keep pace with their power. But in ordinary cases, the height to which they are raised, instead of enlarging their views or ennobling their sentiments, makes them giddy with vanity, and ready to look down on the world which is subjected to their power, as the plaything of their will. They regard men crawling on the face of the earth, as we do insects that cross our path, and survey the common drama of human life, as a fantoccini exhibition got up for their amusement. There is no sympathy between Kings and their subjects—except in a constitutional monarchy like ours, through the medium of Lords and Commons! Take away that check upon their ambition and rapacity, and their pretensions become as monstrous as they are ridiculous. Without the common feelings of humanity in their own breasts, they have no regard for them in their aggregate amount and accumulating force. Reigning in contempt of the people, they would crush and trample upon all power but their own. They consider the claims of justice and compassion as so many impertinent interferences with the royal prerogative. They despise the millions of slaves whom they see linked to the foot of the throne; and they soon hate what they despise. They will sacrifice a kingdom for a caprice, and mankind for a bauble. Weighed in the scales of their pride, the meanest things become of the greatest importance: weighed in the balance of reason, the universe is nothing to them. It is this overweening, aggravated, intolerable sense of swelling pride and ungovernable self-will, that so often drives them mad; as it is their blind fatuity and insensibility to all beyond themselves, that, transmitted through successive generations and confirmed by regal intermarriages, in time makes them idiots. When we see a poor creature like Ferdinand VII., who can hardly gabble out his words like a human being, more imbecile than a woman, more hypocritical than a priest, decked and dandled in the long robes and swaddling-clothes of legitimacy, lullabied to rest with the dreams of superstition, drunk with the patriot blood of his country, and launching the thunders of his coward-arm against the rising liberties of a new world, while he claims the style and title of Image of the Divinity, we may laugh or weep, but there is nothing to wonder at. Tyrants lose all respect for humanity in proportion as they are sunk beneath it;—taught to believe themselves of a different species, they really become so; lose their participation with their kind; and, in mimicking the God, dwindle into the brute! Blind with prejudices as a mole, stung with truth as with scorpions, sore all over with wounded pride like a boil, their minds a heap of morbid proud flesh and bloated humours, a disease and gangrene in the State, instead of its life-blood and vital principle;—foreign despots claim mankind as their property, ‘independently of their conduct or merits,’ and there is one Englishman found base enough to echo the foul calumny against his country and his kind.

We might, in the same manner, account for the disparity between the public and private character of Kings. It is the misfortune of most Kings (not their fault) to be born to thrones, a situation which ordinary talents or virtue cannot fill with impunity. We often find a very respectable man make but a very sorry figure as a Sovereign. Nay, a Prince may be possessed of extraordinary virtues and accomplishments, and not be the more thought of for them. He may, for instance, be a man of good nature and good manners, graceful in his person, the idol of the other sex, the model of his own; every word or look may be marked with the utmost sense of propriety and delicate attention to the feelings of others; he may be a good classic, well versed in history,—may speak Italian, French, Spanish, and German fluently; he may be an excellent mimic; he may say good things, and do friendly ones; he may be able to join in a catch, or utter a repartee, or dictate a billet-doux; he may be master of Hoyle, and deep in the rules of the Jockey club; he may have an equal taste in ragouts and poetry, in dancing and in dress; he may adjust a toupee with the dexterity of a friseur, or tie a cravat with the hand and eye of a man-milliner: he may have all these graces and accomplishments, and as many more, and yet he may be nothing; as without any one of them he may be a great Prince. They are not the graces and accomplishments of a Sovereign, but of a lord of the bed-chamber. They do not shew a great mind, bent on great objects, and swayed by lofty views. They are rather foibles and blemishes in the character of a ruler, for they imply that his attention has been turned as much upon adorning his own person as upon advancing the State. Charles II. was a King, such as we have here described; amiable, witty, and accomplished, and yet his memory is equally despised and detested. Charles was without strength of mind, or public principle. He could not arrive at the comprehension of that mixed mass of thought and feeling, a kingdom—he thought merely of the throne. He was as unlike Cromwell in the manner in which he came by the sovereignty of the realm as in the use he made of it. He saw himself, not in the glass of history, but in the glass on his toilette; not in the eyes of posterity, but in those of his courtiers and mistresses. Instead of regulating his conduct by public opinion and abstract reason, he did every thing from a feeling of personal vanity. Charles would have been more annoyed with the rejection of a licentious overture than with the rebellion of a province; and poured out the blood of his subjects with the same gaiety and indifference as he did a glass of wine. He had no idea of his obligations to the State, and only laid aside the private gentleman, to become the tyrant of his people. Charles was popular in his life-time, Cibber tells us, because he used to walk out with his spaniels and feed his ducks in St. James’s park. History has consigned his name to infamy for the executions under Jefferies, and for his league with a legitimate despot (Louis XIV.), to undermine the liberties of his country.

What is it, then, that makes a great Prince? Not the understanding Purcell or Mozart, but the having an ear open to the voice of truth and justice! Not a taste in made dishes, or French wines, or court-dresses, but a fellow-feeling with the calamities of hunger, of cold, of disease, and nakedness! Not a knowledge of the elegances of fashionable life, but a heart that feels for the millions of its fellow-beings in want of the common necessaries of life! Not a set of brilliant frivolous accomplishments, but a manly strength of character, proof against the seductions of a throne! He, in short, is a patriot King, who without any other faculty usually possessed by Sovereigns, has one which they seldom possess,—the power in imagination of changing places with his people. Such a King may indeed aspire to the character of a ruling providence over a nation; any other is but the head-cypher of a court.

THE FUDGE FAMILY IN PARIS

The spirit of poetry in Mr. Moore is not a lying spirit. ‘Set it down, my tables’—we have still, in the year 1818, three years after the date of Mr. Southey’s laureateship, one poet, who is an honest man. We are glad of it: nor does it spoil our theory, for the exception proves the rule. Mr. Moore unites in himself two names that were sacred, till they were prostituted by our modern mountebanks, the Poet and the Patriot. He is neither a coxcomb nor a catspaw,—a whiffling turncoat, nor a thorough-paced tool, a mouthing sycophant, ‘a full solempne man,’ like Mr. Wordsworth,—a whining monk, like Mr. Southey,—a maudlin Methodistical lay-preacher, like Mr. Coleridge,—a merry Andrew, like the fellow that plays on the salt-box at Bartlemy Fair,—or the more pitiful jack-pudding, that makes a jest of humanity in St. Stephen’s Chapel. Thank God, he is like none of these—he is not one of the Fudge Family. He is neither a bubble nor a cheat. He makes it his business neither to hoodwink his own understanding, nor to blind or gag others. He is a man of wit and fancy, but he does not sharpen his wit on the edge of human agony, like the House of Commons’ jester, nor strew the flowers of fancy, like the Jesuit Burke, over the carcase of corruption, for he is a man not only of wit and fancy, but of common sense and common humanity. He sees for himself, and he feels for others. He employs the arts of fiction, not to adorn the deformed, or disguise the false, but to make truth shine out the clearer, and beauty look more beautiful. He does not make verse, ‘immortal verse,’ the vehicle of lies, the bawd of Legitimacy, the pander of antiquated prejudices, and of vamped-up sophistry; but of truths, of home, heartfelt truths, as old as human nature and its wrongs. Mr. Moore calls things by their right names: he shews us kings as kings, priests as priests, knaves as knaves, and fools as fools. He makes us laugh at the ridiculous, and hate the odious. He also speaks with authority, and not as certain scribes that we could mention. He has been at Court, and has seen what passes there.

But he was a man before he became a courtier, and has continued to be one afterwards; nor has he forgotten what passes in the human heart. From what he says of the Prince, it is evident that he speaks from habits of personal intimacy: he speaks of Lord Castlereagh as his countryman. In the Epistles of the Fudge Family, we see, as in a glass without a wrinkle, the mind and person of Royalty in full dress, up to the very throat, and we have a whole-length figure of his Lordship, in the sweeping, serpentine line of beauty, down to his very feet.^[50]—We have heard it said of our poet, by a late celebrated wit and orator, that ‘there was no man who put so much of his heart into his fancy as Tom Moore; that his soul seemed as if it were a particle of fire separated from the sun, and were always fluttering to get back to that source of light and heat.’ We think this criticism as happy as it is just: but it will be evident to the readers of the Fudge Family, that the soul of ‘a certain little gentleman’ is not attracted with the same lively or kindly symptoms to the Bourbons, or to their benefactors and restorers ‘under Providence!’ The title of this delightful little collection of sweets and bitters, of honey and gall, is, we suppose, an allusion to the short ejaculation which honest Burchell, in the ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ uttered at the end of every sentence, in the conversation of Miss Amelia Carolina Wilhelmina Skeggs and her friend, on the Court and Fashionables; and which word, ‘Fudge,’ our malicious Editor thinks equally applicable to the cant upon the same subjects at the present day,—to the fade politesse of the ancient regime,—to ‘the damnable face-making’ of Holy Alliances, and ‘the flocci-nauci-pili-nihili-fication’ of Legitimacy. He may be wrong in this; but if so, we are most assuredly in the wrong with him: and we confess, it gives us as much pleasure to agree with this writer, as it does to differ with some others that we could mention, but that they are not worth mentioning.—The Correspondents of the Fudge Family in Paris are much of the same stamp (with one exception) as the Correspondents of Dr. S——, in his work of that name, which was lately put a stop to by that sort of censorship of the press which is exercised by the reading public; only the Correspondents in the present volume have a very different Editor from him of ‘The Day and New Times,’ or, as it is at present called, The New Times alone, the Day having been left out as an anomaly, ‘ut lucus a non lucendo‘: for the readers of that paper roll their eyes in vain, and ‘find no dawn; but, in its stead, total eclipse and ever-during dark surrounds them.’—But to return from ‘the professional gentleman,’ as he calls himself, his scavenger’s bell, his mud-cart of liberal phraseologies, and go-cart of slavery and superstition, to something as different as genius from dulness, as wit from malice, as sense from moon-struck madness, as independence from servility, as the belles-lettres from law-stationery, as Parnassus from Grub-street, or as the grub from the butterfly,—as the man who winged his airy way from a Court which was unworthy of him, and which would have made him unworthy of himself, ‘as light as bird from brake,’ is from the man (if so he can be called) who would grope his way there on all fours, bringing, as the sacrifice best worthy of himself and of the place, his own dignity of spirit and the rights of his fellow-creatures, to be trampled down by the obscene hoofs of a base oligarchy. But we have already in another place spoken our minds of that person, in a way to cut off the communication between his ‘blind mouth’ and the Midas ears of the Stock Exchange; and we do not wish to deprive him of a livelihood. He may receive his Treasury wages for us, so that he no longer levies them on public credulity, and we no longer confound ‘his sweet voice’ with that of the country or city, though it may echo the Court. The New Times is a nuisance; but it is not one that requires to be abated. It speaks a plain, intelligible language. Its principles are as palpable as they are base. Its pettifogging pedantry and its Billingsgate slang can deceive nobody that is worth undeceiving. It is the avowed organ of the deliberate, detestable system which has long been covertly pursued in a certain quarter. This paper raves aloud, under the ambiguous garb of phrenzy, what its patrons think in secret. It proclaims on the house-tops what is whispered in the high places. It soothes the ears of flatterers, of tyrants, and of slaves,—but it sounds the alarm to free men. It is so far a great public good. It tells the people of England what is prepared for them, and what they have to expect. ‘Nothing is sacred in its pages but tyranny.’ It links this country in chains of vassalage to the legitimate despotisms of the Continent, which have been a bye-word with us for ages. It binds this nation, hand and foot, in the trammels of lasting servitude,—it puts the yoke upon our necks as we put pack-saddles upon asses,—marks the brand upon our foreheads as we ruddle over sheep,—binds us in ‘with shame, with rotten parchments, and vile inky blots,’—makes England, that threw off the yoke of a race of hereditary pretenders, shew ‘like a rebel’s whore,’ and every morning illegitimates the House of Brunswick, and strikes at the title of the Prince Regent to the succession of the Crown, to which his ancestors had no just claim but the choice of the people. It is not a paper for a free people to endure, if a people that has oppressed the struggling liberties of another nation can dare to call itself free; or for the Sovereign of a free people to look at, if a Prince who had restored a despot to a throne, in contempt of the voice of the people, could be supposed to respect the rights of human nature more than his own power. It reverses the Revolution of 1688, by justifying the claims of the Bourbons,—brings back Popery and slavery here, by parity of reasoning,—and sends the illustrious members of the present Royal Family a packing, as vagabonds and outlaws—by RIGHT DIVINE. If this is not a legitimate conclusion from the Doctor’s reasoning,—from his ‘brangle and brave-all, discord and debate,’—why then

The chief Dramatis Personæ: in the Fudge Family are,—Comic Personages, Miss Biddy Fudge and Mr. Bob Fudge, her brother: Mr. Philip Fudge, their father, and a friend of Lord Castlereagh, a grave gentleman; and a Mr. Phelim Connor, who is a patriotic, or, which is the same thing, a tragic writer. Miss Biddy Fudge takes the account of poke-bonnets and love-adventures upon herself; Mr. Bob, the patés, jockey-boots, and high collars: Mr. Phil. Fudge addresses himself to the Lord Viscount Castlereagh; and Mr. Phelim, ‘the sad historian of pensive Europe,’ appeals, we confess, more effectually to us, in words

Take for example the following magnanimous and most heroical Epistle:—

Indignatio facit versus. Mr. Moore’s better genius is here his spleen. The politician sharpens the poet’s pen. Poor Phelim resumes this subject twice afterwards, and the last time with such force and spirit, that he is compelled to break off in the middle, for fear of consequences. But as far as he goes, we will accompany him.

All is not in this high-wrought strain, which we like as well as the War Eclogues of Tyrtæus, or the Birth-day Odes (which seem also to have broke off in the middle) of Mr. Southey. Mr. Thomas Brown the Younger, is a man of humanity, as Mr. Southey formerly was: he is also a man of wit, which Mr. Southey is not. For instance, Miss Biddy Fudge, in her first letter, writes as follows:—

Mr. Phil. Fudge, in his dreams, thinks of a plan for changing heads.

Or here is another proposal for weighing the head of the State;

But we stop here, or we shall quote the whole work. We like the political part of this jeu d’esprit better, on the whole, than the merely comic and familiar. Bob Fudge is almost too suffocating a coxcomb, even in description, with his stays and patés; and Miss Biddy Fudge, with her poke bonnet and her princely lover, who turned out to be no better than a man-milliner, is not half so interesting as a certain Marchioness in the Twopenny Post Bag, with curls ‘in the manner of Ackermann’s dresses for May, and her yellow charioteer.’ Besides, Miss Biddy’s amour ends in nothing. In short, the Fudges abroad are not such fat subjects for ridicule as the Fudges at home. ‘They do not cut up so well in the cawl; they do not tallow so in the kidneys:’ but as far as they go, Mr. Brown, Junior, uses the dissecting knife with equal dexterity, and equally to the delight and edification of the byestanders.

CHARACTER OF LORD CHATHAM

Lord Chatham’s genius burnt brightest at the last. The spark of liberty, which had lain concealed and dormant, buried under the dirt and rubbish of state intrigue and vulgar faction, now met with congenial matter, and kindled up ‘a flame of sacred vehemence’ in his breast. It burst forth with a fury and a splendour that might have awed the world, and made kings tremble. He spoke as a man should speak, because he felt as a man should feel, in such circumstances. He came forward as the advocate of liberty, as the defender of the rights of his fellow-citizens, as the enemy of tyranny, as the friend of his country, and of mankind. He did not stand up to make a vain display of his talents, but to discharge a duty, to maintain that cause which lay nearest to his heart, to preserve the ark of the British constitution from every sacrilegious touch, as the high-priest of his calling, with a pious zeal. The feelings and the rights of Englishmen were enshrined in his heart; and with their united force braced every nerve, possessed every faculty, and communicated warmth and vital energy to every part of his being. The whole man moved under this impulse. He felt the cause of liberty as his own. He resented every injury done to her as an injury to himself, and every attempt to defend it as an insult upon his understanding. He did not stay to dispute about words, about nice distinctions, about trifling forms. He laughed at the little attempts of little retailers of logic to entangle him in senseless argument. He did not come there as to a debating club, or law court, to start questions and hunt them down; to wind and unwind the web of sophistry; to pick out the threads, and untie every knot with scrupulous exactness; to bandy logic with every pretender to a paradox; to examine, to sift evidence; to dissect a doubt and halve a scruple; to weigh folly and knavery in scales together, and see on which side the balance preponderated; to prove that liberty, truth, virtue, and justice were good things, or that slavery and corruption were bad things. He did not try to prove those truths which did not require any proof, but to make others feel them with the same force that he did; and to tear off the flimsy disguises with which the sycophants of power attempted to cover them.—The business of an orator is not to convince, but persuade; not to inform, but to rouse the mind; to build upon the habitual prejudices of mankind, (for reason of itself will do nothing,) and to add feeling to prejudice, and action to feeling. There is nothing new or curious or profound in Lord Chatham’s speeches. All is obvious and common; there is nothing but what we already knew, or might have found out for ourselves. We see nothing but the familiar every-day face of nature. We are always in broad day-light. But then there is the same difference between our own conceptions of things and his representation of them, as there is between the same objects seen on a dull cloudy day, or in the blaze of sunshine. His common sense has the effect of inspiration. He electrifies his hearers, not by the novelty of his ideas, but by their force and intensity. He has the same ideas as other men, but he has them in a thousand times greater clearness and strength and vividness. Perhaps there is no man so poorly furnished with thoughts and feelings but that if he could recollect all that he knew, and had all his ideas at perfect command, he would be able to confound the puny arts of the most dexterous sophist that pretended to make a dupe of his understanding. But in the mind of Chatham, the great substantial truths of common sense, the leading maxims of the Constitution, the real interests and general feelings of mankind, were in a manner embodied. He comprehended the whole of his subject at a single glance—every thing was firmly rivetted to its place; there was no feebleness, no forgetfulness, no pause, no distraction; the ardour of his mind overcame every obstacle, and he crushed the objections of his adversaries as we crush an insect under our feet.—His imagination was of the same character with his understanding, and was under the same guidance. Whenever he gave way to it, it ‘flew an eagle flight, forth and right on’; but it did not become enamoured of its own motion, wantoning in giddy circles, or ‘sailing with supreme dominion through the azure deep of air.’ It never forgot its errand, but went strait forward, like an arrow to its mark, with an unerring aim. It was his servant, not his master.

To be a great orator does not require the highest faculties of the human mind, but it requires the highest exertion of the common faculties of our nature. He has no occasion to dive into the depths of science, or to soar aloft on angels’ wings. He keeps upon the surface, he stands firm upon the ground, but his form is majestic, and his eye sees far and near: he moves among his fellows, but he moves among them as a giant among common men. He has no need to read the heavens, to unfold the system of the universe, or create new worlds for the delighted fancy to dwell in; it is enough that he sees things as they are; that he knows and feels and remembers the common circumstances and daily transactions that are passing in the world around him. He is not raised above others by being superior to the common interests, prejudices, and passions of mankind, but by feeling them in a more intense degree than they do. Force then is the sole characteristic excellence of an orator; it is almost the only one that can be of any service to him. Refinement, depth, elevation, delicacy, originality, ingenuity, invention, are not wanted: he must appeal to the sympathies of human nature, and whatever is not founded in these, is foreign to his purpose. He does not create, he can only imitate or echo back the public sentiment. His object is to call up the feelings of the human breast; but he cannot call up what is not already there. The first duty of an orator is to be understood by every one; but it is evident that what all can understand, is not in itself difficult of comprehension. He cannot add any thing to the materials afforded him by the knowledge and experience of others.

Lord Chatham, in his speeches, was neither philosopher nor poet. As to the latter, the difference between poetry and eloquence I take to be this: that the object of the one is to delight the imagination, that of the other to impel the will. The one ought to enrich and feed the mind itself with tenderness and beauty, the other furnishes it with motives of action. The one seeks to give immediate pleasure, to make the mind dwell with rapture on its own workings—it is to itself ‘both end and use’: the other endeavours to call up such images as will produce the strongest effect upon the mind, and makes use of the passions only as instruments to attain a particular purpose. The poet lulls and soothes the mind into a forgetfulness of itself, and ‘laps it in Elysium’: the orator strives to awaken it to a sense of its real interests, and to make it feel the necessity of taking the most effectual means for securing them. The one dwells in an ideal world; the other is only conversant about realities. Hence poetry must be more ornamented, must be richer and fuller and more delicate, because it is at liberty to select whatever images are naturally most beautiful, and likely to give most pleasure; whereas the orator is confined to particular facts, which he may adorn as well as he can, and make the most of, but which he cannot strain beyond a certain point without running into extravagance and affectation, and losing his end. However, from the very nature of the case, the orator is allowed a greater latitude, and is compelled to make use of harsher and more abrupt combinations in the decoration of his subject; for his art is an attempt to reconcile beauty and deformity together: on the contrary, the materials of poetry, which are chosen at pleasure, are in themselves beautiful, and naturally combine with whatever else is beautiful. Grace and harmony are therefore essential to poetry, because they naturally arise out of the subject; but whatever adds to the effect, whatever tends to strengthen the idea or give energy to the mind, is of the nature of eloquence. The orator is only concerned to give a tone of masculine firmness to the will, to brace the sinews and muscles of the mind; not to delight our nervous sensibilities, or soften the mind into voluptuous indolence. The flowery and sentimental style is of all others the most intolerable in a speaker.—I shall only add on this subject, that modesty, impartiality, and candour, are not the virtues of a public speaker. He must be confident, inflexible, uncontrolable, overcoming all opposition by his ardour and impetuosity. We do not command others by sympathy with them, but by power, by passion, by will. Calm inquiry, sober truth, and speculative indifference will never carry any point. The passions are contagious; and we cannot contend against opposite passions with nothing but naked reason. Concessions to an enemy are clear loss: he will take advantage of them, but make us none in return. He will magnify the weak sides of our argument, but will be blind to whatever makes against himself. The multitude will always be inclined to side with that party, whose passions are the most inflamed, and whose prejudices are the most inveterate. Passion should therefore never be sacrificed to punctilio. It should indeed be governed by prudence, but it should itself govern and lend its impulse and direction to abstract reason. Fox was a reasoner, Lord Chatham was an orator. Burke was both a reasoner and a poet; and was therefore still farther removed from that conformity with the vulgar notions and mechanical feelings of mankind, which will always be necessary to give a man the chief sway in a popular assembly.