y to be distinguished, and are
not scrupulous as to the means of distinction. Jacobins or
Anti-Jacobins--outrageous advocates for anarchy and licentiousness, or
flaming apostles of political persecution--always violent and vulgar in
their opinions, they oscillate, with a giddy and sickening motion,
from one absurdity to another, and expiate the follies of youth by the
heartless vices of advancing age. None so ready as they to carry every
paradox to its most revolting and ridiculous excess--none so sure
to caricature, in their own persons, every feature of the prevailing
philosophy! In their days of blissful innovation, indeed, the
philosophers crept at their heels like hounds, while they darted on
their distant quarry like hawks; stooping always to the lowest game;
eagerly snuffing up the most tainted and rankest scents; feeding their
vanity with a notion of the strength of their digestion of poisons, and
most ostentatiously avowing whatever would most effectually startle
the prejudices of others.(2) Preposterously seeking for the stimulus
of novelty in abstract truth, and the eclat of theatrical exhibition in
pure reason, it is no wonder that these persons at last became disgusted
with their own pursuits, and that, in consequence of the violence of the
change, the most inveterate prejudices and uncharitable sentiments have
rushed in to fill up the void produced by the previous annihilation of
common sense, wisdom, and humanity!'

I have so far been a little hard on poets and reformers. Lest I should
be thought to have taken a particular spite to them, I will try to make
them the _amende honorable_ by turning to a passage in the writings of
one who neither is nor ever pretended to be a poet or a reformer, but
the antithesis of both, an accomplished man of the world, a courtier,
and a wit, and who has endeavoured to move the previous question on all
schemes of fanciful improvement, and all plans of practical reform, by
the following declaration. It is in itself a finished _common-place;_
and may serve as a test whether that sort of smooth, verbal reasoning
which passes current because it excites no one idea in the mind, is much
freer from inherent absurdity than the wildest paradox.

'My lot,' says Mr. Canning in the conclusion of his Liverpool speech,
'is cast under the British Monarchy. Under that I have lived; under that
I have seen my country flourish;(3) under that I have seen it enjoy as
great a share of prosperit