itings which
he suffered from his opponents.

Naturally his bitterness was extended to his reflections on mankind in
general. He felt as if the human race had wilfully deceived his sanguine
expectations, and he poured out his grievances against its refractoriness,
taking revenge for his public and his private wrongs, in a passage in
which high idealism is joined with personal spite, in which he has
revealed himself in all his strength and weakness, and involved his
enemies in a common ruin with himself. It concludes the essay "On the
Pleasure of Hating":

"Instead of patriots and friends of freedom, I see nothing but the tyrant
and the slave, the people linked with kings to rivet on the chains of
despotism and superstition. I see folly join with knavery, and together
make up public spirit and public opinions. I see the insolent Tory, the
blind Reformer, the coward Whig! If mankind had wished for what is right,
they might have had it long ago. The theory is plain enough; but they are
prone to mischief, 'to every good work reprobate.' I have seen all that
had been done by the mighty yearnings of the spirit and intellect of men,
'of whom the world was not worthy,' and that promised a proud opening to
truth and good through the vista of future years, undone by one man, with
just glimmering of understanding enough to feel that he was a king, but
not to comprehend how he could be king of a free people! I have seen this
triumph celebrated by poets, the friends of my youth and the friends of
man, but who were carried away by the infuriate tide that, setting in from
a throne, bore down every distinction of right reason before it; and I
have seen all those who did not join in applauding this insult and outrage
on humanity proscribed, hunted down (they and their friends made a
bye-word of), so that it has become an understood thing that no one can
live by his talents or knowledge who is not ready to prostitute those
talents and that knowledge to betray his species, and prey upon his
fellow-man.... In private life do we not see hypocrisy, servility,
selfishness, folly, and impudence succeed, while modesty shrinks from the
encounter, and merit is trodden under foot? How often is 'the rose plucked
from the forehead of a virtuous love to plant a blister there!' What
chance is there of the success of real passion? What certainty of its
continuance? Seeing all this as I do, and unravelling the web of human
life into its various threads