ey are
dismissed without any further comment. It must not be so, however,
with the following remarkable deliverances which occur on page 67 of
his too picturesque work:--"The commonplace intrudes upon the
imaginative. At moments one can fancy that the world is an enchanted
place after all, but then comes generally an absurd awakening. On the
first night of my arrival, before we went to bed, there came an
invitation to me to attend a political meeting which was to be held in
a few days on the Savannah.

[56] "Trinidad is a purely Crown colony, and has escaped hitherto the
introduction of the election virus. The newspapers and certain busy
gentlemen in Port of Spain had discovered that they were living under a
'degrading tyranny,' and they demanded a constitution. They did not
complain that their affairs had been ill-managed. On the contrary,
they insisted that they were the most prosperous of the West Indian
colonies, and alone had a surplus in their treasury. If this was so,
it seemed to me that they had better let well alone. The population,
all told, was but 170,000, less by thirty thousand than that of
Barbados. They were a mixed and motley assemblage of all races and
colours, busy each with their own affairs, and never hitherto troubling
themselves about politics. But it had pleased the Home Government to
set up the beginning of a constitution again in Jamaica; no one knew
why, but so it was; and Trinidad did not choose to be behindhand. The
official appointments were valuable, and had been hitherto given away
by the Crown. The local popularities very naturally wished to have
them for themselves. This was the [57] reality in the thing, so far as
there was a reality. It was dressed up in the phrases borrowed from
the great English masters of the art, about privileges of manhood,
moral dignity, the elevating influence of the suffrage, &c., intended
for home consumption among the believers in the orthodox radical faith."

The passages which we have signalized in the above quotation, and which
occur with more elaboration and heedless assurance on a later page,
will produce a feeling of wonder at the hardihood of him who not only
conceived, but penned and dared to publish them as well, against the
gentlemen whom we all know to be foremost in the political agitation at
which Mr. Froude so flippantly sneers. An emphatic denial may be
opposed to his pretence that "they did not complain that their affairs
had