he is in America, he grows impatient of freedom and a republic. If he had
staid there a little longer, he would have become a loyal and a loving
subject of his Majesty King George IV. He lampooned the French Revolution
when it was hailed as the dawn of liberty by millions: by the time it was
brought into almost universal ill-odour by some means or other (partly no
doubt by himself) he had turned, with one or two or three others, staunch
Bonapartist. He is always of the militant, not of the triumphant party: so
far he bears a gallant show of magnanimity; but his gallantry is hardly of
the right stamp: it wants principle. For though he is not servile or
mercenary, he is the victim of self-will. He must pull down and pull in
pieces: it is not in his disposition to do otherwise. It is a pity; for
with his great talents he might do great things, if he would go right
forward to any useful object, make thorough-stitch work of any question,
or join hand and heart with any principle. He changes his opinions as he
does his friends, and much on the same account. He has no comfort in fixed
principles: as soon as anything is settled in his own mind, he quarrels
with it. He has no satisfaction but in the chase after truth, runs a
question down, worries and kills it, then quits it like vermin, and starts
some new game, to lead him a new dance, and give him a fresh breathing
through bog and brake, with the rabble yelping at his heels and the
leaders perpetually at fault."[101]

In the other passage the clauses and phrases follow in their natural
order, but they are united by the simplest kind of connective device in an
undistinguishable stream over which the reader is driven with a steady
swell and fall, sometimes made breathlessly rapid by the succession of its
uniformly measured word-groups, but delicately modulated here and there to
provide restful pauses in the long onward career:

"Next, he was engaged with Hartley's tribes of mind, 'etherial braid,
thought-woven,'--and he busied himself for a year or two with vibrations
and vibratiuncles and the great law of association that binds all things
in its mystic chain, and the doctrine of Necessity (the mild teacher of
Charity) and the Millennium, anticipative of a life to come--and he
plunged deep into the controversy on Matter and Spirit, and, as an escape
from Dr. Priestley's Materialism, where he felt himself imprisoned by the
logician's spell, like Ariel in the cloven pine-tree, h