breath. So there is often a portion of willing credulity and
enthusiasm in the veneration which the most discerning men pay to
their political idols. From the very nature of man it must be so.
The faculty by which we inseparably associate ideas which have
often been presented to us in conjunction is not under the
absolute control of the will. It may be quickened into morbid
activity. It may be reasoned into sluggishness. But in a certain
degree it will always exist. The almost absolute mastery which
Mr. Hallam has obtained over feelings of this class is perfectly
astonishing to us, and will, we believe, be not only astonishing
but offensive to many of his readers. It must particularly
disgust those people who, in their speculations on politics, are
not reasoners but fanciers; whose opinions, even when sincere,
are not produced, according to the ordinary law of intellectual
births, by induction or inference, but are equivocally generated
by the heat of fervid tempers out of the overflowing of tumid
imaginations. A man of this class is always in extremes. He
cannot be a friend to liberty without calling for a community of
goods, or a friend to order without taking under his protection
the foulest excesses of tyranny. His admiration oscillates
between the most worthless of rebels and the most worthless of
oppressors, between Marten, the disgrace of the High Court of
justice, and Laud, the disgrace of the Star-Chamber. He can
forgive anything but temperance and impartiality. He has a
certain sympathy with the violence of his opponents, as well as
with that of his associates. In every furious partisan he sees
either his present self or his former self, the pensioner that
is, or the Jacobin that has been. But he is unable to comprehend
a writer who, steadily attached to principles, is indifferent
about names and badges, and who judges of characters with equable