r 'The town is full,' it is considered as a
temporary compromise of the question; you are suspected of not going
the whole length of the principle. As Sancho, when reprimanded for
mentioning his homely favourite in the Duke's kitchen, defended himself
by saying, 'There I thought of Dapple, and there I spoke of him,' so
the true stickler for Reform neglects no opportunity of introducing
the subject wherever he is. Place its veteran champion under the frozen
north, and he will celebrate sweet smiling Reform; place him under the
mid-day Afric suns, and he will talk of nothing but Reform--Reform so
sweetly smiling and so sweetly promising for the last forty years--

Dulce ridentem Lalagen,
Dulce loquentem!

A topic of this sort of which the person himself may be considered as
almost sole proprietor and patentee is an estate for life, free from
all encumbrance of wit, thought, or study, you live upon it as a settled
income; and others might as well think to eject you out of a capital
freehold house and estate as think to drive you out of it into the wide
world of common sense and argument. Every man's house is his castle; and
every man's common-place is his stronghold, from which he looks out
and smiles at the dust and heat of controversy, raised by a number of
frivolous and vexatious questions--'Rings the world with the vain stir!'
A cure for this and every other evil would be a Parliamentary Reform;
and so we return in a perpetual circle to the point from which we set
out. Is not this a species of sober madness more provoking than the
real? Has not the theoretical enthusiast his mind as much warped, as
much enslaved by one idea as the acknowledged lunatic, only that the
former has no lucid intervals? If you see a visionary of this class
going along the street, you can tell as well what he is thinking of and
will say next as the man that fancies himself a teapot or the Czar of
Muscovy. The one is as inaccessible to reason as the other: if the one
raves, the other dotes!

There are some who fancy the Corn Bill the root of all evil, and others
who trace all the miseries of life to the practice of muffling up
children in night-clothes when they sleep or travel. They will declaim
by the hour together on the first, and argue themselves black in the
face on the last. It is in vain that you give up the point. They persist
in the debate, and begin again--'But don't you see--?' These sort of
partial obliquities, as they are mor