eace
capable of being kept,--the only peace that could then be kept is that
of the churchyard. Your Lordship may depend on it, whatever thing takes
upon it the name of Sovereign or Government in an English Nation such
as this will have to get out of that old routine; and set about keeping
something very different from the peace, in these days!

Truly it is high time that same beautiful notion of No-Government should
take itself away. The world is daily rushing towards wreck, while that
lasts. If your Government is to be a Constituted Anarchy, what issue can
it have? Our one interest in such Government is, that it would be kind
enough to cease and go its ways, _before_ the inevitable arrive. The
question, Who is to float atop no-whither upon the popular vertexes,
and act that sorry character, "carcass of the drowned ass upon the
mud-deluge"? is by no means an important one for almost anybody,--hardly
even for the drowned ass himself. Such drowned ass ought to ask himself,
If the function is a sublime one? For him too, though he looks sublime
to the vulgar and floats atop, a private situation, down out of sight in
his natural ooze, would be a luckier one.

Crabbe, speaking of constitutional philosophies, faith in the ballot-box
and such like, has this indignant passage: "If any voice of deliverance
or resuscitation reach us, in this our low and all but lost estate, sunk
almost beyond plummet's sounding in the mud of Lethe, and oblivious of
all noble objects, it will be an intimation that we must put away all
this abominable nonsense, and understand, once more, that Constituted
Anarchy, with however many ballot-boxes, caucuses, and hustings
beer-barrels, is a continual offence to gods and men. That to be
governed by small men is not only a misfortune, but it is a curse and
a sin; the effect, and alas the cause also, of all manner of curses and
sins. That to profess subjection to phantasms, and pretend to accept
guidance from fractional parts of tailors, is what Smelfungus in his
rude dialect calls it, 'a damned _lie_,' and nothing other. A lie which,
by long use and wont, we have grown accustomed to, and do not the least
feel to be a lie, having spoken and done it continually everywhere for
such a long time past;--but has Nature grown to accept it as a veracity,
think you, my friend? Have the Parcae fallen asleep, because you wanted
to make money in the City? Nature at all moments knows well that it is
a lie; and that,