ada there are
both), or great hurricanes, as in the West Indian latitudes, recall us
continually to the sense of a powerful presence, investing our paths
on every side; whereas, in England, it is possible to forget that we
live amongst greater agencies than those of men and human
institutions. Man, in fact, 'too much man,' as Timon complained most
reasonably in Athens, was then, and is now, our greatest grievance in
England. Man is a weed everywhere too rank. A strange place must that
be with us, from which the sight of a hundred men is not before us, or
the sound of a thousand about us.

Nevertheless, being in this hotbed of man inevitably for some years,
no sooner had I dismissed my German philosophy than I relaxed a little
that spirit of German abstraction which it had prompted; and, though
never mixing freely with society, I began to look a little abroad. It
may interest the reader, more than anything else which I can record of
this period, to recall what I saw within the ten first years of the
century, that was at all noticeable or worthy of remembrance amongst
the literati, the philosophers, or the poets of the time. For, though
I am not in my academic period from 1804 to 1808, my knowledge of
literary men--or men distinguished in some way or other, either by
their opinions, their accomplishments, or their position and the
accidents of their lives--began from the first year of the century,
or, more accurately, from the year 1800; which, with some difficulty
and demurs, and with some arguments from the Laureate Pye, the world
was at length persuaded to consider the last year of the eighteenth
century.[23]

[Footnote 23: Those who look back to the newspapers of 1799 and 1800,
will see that considerable discussion went on at that time upon the
question, whether the year 1800 was entitled to open the 19th century,
or to close the 18th. Mr. Laureate Pye wrote a poem, with a long and
argumentative preface on the point.]

MORAL EFFECTS OF REVOLUTIONS.

(_May, 1822._)

In revolutionary times, as when a civil war prevails in a country, men
are much worse, as moral beings, than in quiet and untroubled states
of peace. So much is matter of history. The English, under Charles
II., after twenty years' agitation and civil tumults; the Romans after
Sylla and Marius, and the still more bloody proscriptions of the
Triumvirates; the French, after the Wars of the League and the storms
of the Revolution--were much chan