re many
in number,--or that, after all, they are other than the little,
shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the
hour.

I almost venture to affirm that not one in a hundred amongst us
participates in the "triumph" of the Revolution Society. If the king and
queen of France and their children were to fall into our hands by the
chance of war, in the most acrimonious of all hostilities, (I deprecate
such an event, I deprecate such hostility,) they would be treated with
another sort of triumphal entry into London. We formerly have had a king
of France in that situation: you have read how he was treated by the
victor in the field, and in what manner he was afterwards received in
England. Four hundred years have gone over us; but I believe we are not
materially changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen resistance to
innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character,
we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive)
lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century;
nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the
converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius
has made no progress amongst us. Atheists are not our preachers; madmen
are not our lawgivers. We know that _we_ have made no discoveries, and
we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality,--nor many in
the great principles of government, nor in the ideas of liberty, which
were understood long before we were born altogether as well as they will
be after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the
silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England
we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails: we
still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate, those inbred
sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our
duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not
been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed
birds in a museum, with chaff and rags, and paltry, blurred shreds of
paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings
still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We
have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God;
we look up with awe to kings, with affection to Parliaments, with duty
to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and wi