personal' government, were almost necessarily those of a retained
advocate, who expected his immediate reward, on the one hand; or of a
rebel, who stood to make his account with office if he succeeded, or
with savage punishment if he failed, on the other. A distant prospect
of impeachment, of the loss of ears, hands, or life if the tide turns,
is a stimulant to violence rather than to vigour. I do not think,
however, that this is the most important factor in the problem.
Parliamentary government, with a limited franchise of tolerably
intelligent voters, a party system, and newspapers comparatively
undeveloped, may not suit an ideally perfect _politeia_, but it is
the very hotbed in which to nourish the pamphlet. There is also a
style, as there is a time, for all things; and no style could be so
well suited for the pamphlet as the balanced, measured, pointed, and
polished style which Dryden and Tillotson and Temple brought in during
the third quarter of the seventeenth century, and which did not go out
of fashion till the second quarter of the nineteenth. We have indeed
seen pamphlets proper exercising considerable influence in quite
recent times; but in no instance that I can remember has this been due
to any literary merits, and I doubt whether even the bare fact will be
soon or often renewed in our days. The written word--the written word
of condensed, strengthened, spirited literature--has lost much, if not
all, of its force with an enormously increased electorate, and a
bewildering multiplicity of print and speech of all kinds.

Whatever justice these reasonings may have or may lack, the facts
speak for themselves, as facts intelligently regarded have a habit of
doing. The first pamphlets proper of great literary merit and great
political influence are those of Halifax in the first movement of real
party struggle during the reign of Charles the Second; the last which
unite the same requisites are those of Scott on the eve of the first
Reform Bill. The leaflet and circular war of the anti-Corn Law League
must be ruled out as much as Mr. Gladstone's _Bulgarian Horrors_.

This leaves us a period of almost exactly a hundred and fifty years,
during which the kind, whether in good or bad examples, was of
constant influence; while its best instances enriched literature with
permanent masterpieces in little. I do not think that any moderately
instructed person will find much difficulty in comprehending the
specimens here g