This
mutability is allowed to a foreign negotiator; but when a great
politician condescends publicly to instruct his own countrymen on a
matter which may fix their fate forever, his opinions ought not to be
diurnal, or even weekly. These ephemerides of politics are not made for
our slow and coarse understandings. Our appetite demands a _piece of
resistance_. We require some food that will stick to the ribs. We call
for sentiments to which we can attach ourselves,--sentiments in which we
can take an interest,--sentiments on which we can warm, on which we can
ground some confidence in ourselves or in others. We do not want a
largess of inconstancy. Poor souls, we have enough of that sort of
poverty at home. There is a difference, too, between deliberation and
doctrine: a man ought to be decided in his opinions before he attempts
to teach. His fugitive lights may serve himself in some unknown region,
but they cannot free us from the effects of the error into which we have
been betrayed. His active Will-o'-the-wisp may be gone nobody can guess
where, whilst he leaves us bemired and benighted in the bog.

Having premised these few reflections upon this new mode of teaching a
lesson, which whilst the scholar is getting by heart the master forgets,
I come to the lesson itself. On the fullest consideration of it, I am
utterly incapable of saying with any great certainty what it is, in the
detail, that the author means to affirm or deny, to dissuade or
recommend. His march is mostly oblique, and his doctrine rather in the
way of insinuation than of dogmatic assertion. It is not only fugitive
in its duration, but is slippery in the extreme whilst it lasts.
Examining it part by part, it seems almost everywhere to contradict
itself; and the author, who claims the privilege of varying his
opinions, has exercised this privilege in every section of his remarks.
For this reason, amongst others, I follow the advice which the able
writer gives in his last page, which is, "to consider the _impression_
of what he has urged, taken from the _whole_, and not from detached
paragraphs." That caution was not absolutely necessary. I should think
it unfair to the author and to myself to have proceeded otherwise. This
author's _whole_, however, like every other whole, cannot be so well
comprehended without some reference to the parts; but they shall be
again referred to the whole. Without this latter attention, several of
the passages would certain