atriots, was like a man who has originally,
from his nursery up, been thoroughly imbued with the terror of ghosts,
which by education and example afterwards he has been encouraged to
deny. Half he does disbelieve, and, under encouraging circumstances, he
does disbelieve it stoutly. But at every fresh plausible alarm his early
faith intrudes with bitter hatred against a class of appearances that,
after all, he is upon system pledged to hold false. Nothing can be more
ludicrous than his outcry, and his lashing of his own tail to excite his
courage and his wrath and his denial--than his challenge of the lurking
patriots in what he conceives the matter of frauds on the revenue. He
assaults them as if he saw them standing in a row behind the door, and
yet he pummels them for being mere men of the shades--horrible
mockeries. Had there been any truth in their existence, surely, so
strongly as they muster by their own report, some one or other of this
fact should have given me warning--should have exposed the frauds. But
no, all are silent as the grave. But here Sir Robert Walpole is as much
wrong as if, doubting the value or power of Methodist preachers, he
should make it the test of their useful existence that, as often as a
highwayman, a footpad, started out of the wayside, from the other side
should start a Methodist preacher to reason with him and to convert
him.

Are the Whigs less aristocratic than the Tories? Not at all. In tendency
by principle they are the same. The real difference is not in the creed,
in the groundwork, but in certain points of practice and method.

'He took his stand upon the truth'--said by me of Sir Robert Peel--might
seem to argue a lower use of '_the_ truth,' but in fact it is as happens
to the article _the_ itself: you say _the_ guard, speaking of a coach;
_the_ key, speaking of a trunk or watch, _i.e._, _the_ as by usage
appropriated to every coach, watch, trunk. So here the truth, namely, of
the particular perplexity.

The Sepoy mutiny will be best understood if you suppose the Roman
emperors, from Romulus to Augustus, from the Alban Fathers down to the
Ostrogoths--the whole line of a thousand years crowded into two.

Trunkmakers may be great men: they clearly have the upper hand of
authors whom all the world admits to be great men. For the trunkmaker is
the _principal_ in the concern--he makes the trunk, whereas the author,
quite a secondary artist, furnishes only the linings.