of a failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to
begin again and try to do a little business. It was perhaps
inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and
imagination on English politics, that a certain local emphasis
and love of effect, such as is the vice of preaching, should
appear, producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by the
excess of value attributed to circumstances. But the splendour
of wit cannot out--dazzle the calm daylight, which always shows
every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work
out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such
glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each age has
its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young
people; its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself;
and if you should ask the contemporary, he would tell you, with
pride or with regret (according as he was practical or poetic),
that he had none. But after a short time, down go its follies
and weakness and the memory of them; its virtues alone remain,
and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful
superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in
the horizon with mist and colour. The revelation of Reason is
this of the un-changeableness of the fate of humanity under all
its subjective aspects; that to the cowering it always cowers,
to the daring it opens great avenues. The ancients are only
venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial;
as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot
reach to their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?

And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing
dangers of the English State, may easily excuse some over-
colouring of the picture; and we at this distance are not so far