eminate spirit of the Oriental
the strength of the soldier and the ambition of universal conqueror,
had no sooner wrought its purpose than it passed away, leaving the
general mind still more exhausted than before. The Saracen warrior
sank into the peasant, and the Arab was again lost in his sands; the
Turk alone survived, exhibiting splendour without wealth, and pride
without power--a decaying image of Despotism, which nothing but the
jealousy of the European saved from falling under the first assault.
Such is the repressive strength of evil government; progress, the most
salient principle of our nature, dies before it. And man, of all
beings the most eager for acquirement, and the most restless under all
monotony of time, place, and position, becomes like the dog or the
mule, and generation after generation lives and dies with no more
consciousness of the capacities of his existence, than the root which
the animal devours, or the tree under which it was born.

In England, the eighteenth century was wholly political. It was a
continual struggle through all the difficulties belonging to a free
constitution, exposed to the full discussion of an intellectual
people. Without adopting the offensive prejudice, which places the
individual ability of the Englishmen in the first rank; or without
doubting that nature has distributed nearly an equal share of personal
ability among all European nations; we may, not unjustly, place the
national mind of England in the very highest rank of general
capacity--if that is the most intellectual nation, by which the public
intellect is most constantly employed, in which all the great
questions of society are most habitually referred to the decision of
the intellect, and in which that decision is the most irresistible in
its effects, no nation of Europe can stand upon equal ground with the
English. For, in what other nation is the public intellect in such
unwearied exercise, in such continual demand, and in such unanswerable
power?

In what other nation of the world (excepting, within those few years,
France; and that most imperfectly) has public opinion ever been
appealed to? But, in England, to what else is there any appeal? Or,
does not the foreign mind bear some resemblance to the foreign
landscape--exhibiting barren though noble elevations, spots of
singular though obscure beauty among its recesses, and even in its
wildest scenes a capacity of culture?--while, in the mind of England,