ought to be also capable of clothing that thought in felicitous language.

Thinks that a torpid state of political life is unfavourable to
intellectual product in general.

I instanced the case of Louis XIV. as contradicting this. Not admitted by
Tocqueville. The civil wars of Louis XIV.'s reign had engendered
considerable activity in the minds of the educated class. This activity
generated speculation and scientific inquiry in all the departments of
human thoughts. Abstract ideas became the field on which thinkers
occupied themselves. No _practical_ outlet under despotism, but a certain
social fermentation nevertheless existing, and the want of making itself
a vent impelled intellectual life and writings. I instanced Louis XV. 'At
least,' I said, 'the torpor of political life was become yet more a
habit,' 'Yes,' said Alexis, 'but then there was the principle of
discontent very widely diffused, which was the germ of the revolution of
1789. This restless, disaffected state of the national mind gave birth to
some new forms of intellectual product, tending to rather more distinct
practical results, which filtered down among the middle classes, and
became the objects of their desires and projects.' Rousseau and Voltaire
eminently serviceable in leading the public sentiment towards the middle
of the eighteenth century.

English writers and statesmen having always enjoyed the power of applying
their minds to actual circumstances, and of appealing through a free
press and free speech also to the public of their day, have never
addressed themselves, as French philosophers did, to the cultivation of
abstract speculations and general theories. Here and there a writer has
been thrown, by his individual tastes and turn of thought, upon the study
of political philosophy; but the Englishman, taken as a public writer,