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her have a king do something that no one else has the power or magnanimity to do, or say something that no one else has the wisdom to say, or look more handsome, more thoughtful, or benign than any one else in his dominions. But I see nothing to raise one's idea of him in his being made a show of: if the pageant would do as well without the man, the man would do as well without the pageant! Kings have been declared to be 'lovers of low company'; and this maxim, besides the reason sometimes assigned for it, viz. that they meet with less opposition to their wills from such persons, will I suspect be found to turn at last on the consideration I am here stating, that they also meet with more sympathy in their tastes. The most ignorant and thoughtless have the greatest admiration of the baubles, the outward symbols of pomp and power, the sound and show, which are the habitual delight and mighty prerogative of kings. The stupidest slave worships the gaudiest tyrant. The same gross motives appeal to the same gross capacities, flatter the pride of the superior and excite the servility of the dependant; whereas a higher reach of moral and intellectual refinement might seek in vain for higher proofs of internal worth and inherent majesty in the object of its idolatry, and not finding the divinity lodged within, the unreasonable expectation raised would probably end in mortification on both sides!--There is little to distinguish a king from his subjects but the rabble's shout--if he loses that and is reduced to the forlorn hope of gaining the suffrages of the wise and good, he is of all men the most miserable.--But enough of this. 'I like it,' says Miss Branghton(2) in _Evelina_ (meaning the opera), 'because it is not vulgar.' That is, she likes it, not because there is anything to like in it, but because other people are prevented from liking or knowing anything about it. Janus Weathercock, Esq., laugheth to scorn and spitefully entreateth and hugely condemneth my dramatic criticisms in the _London,_ for a like exquisite reason. I must therefore make an example of him _in terrorem_ to all such hypercritics. He finds fault with me and calls my taste vulgar, because I go to Sadler's Wells ('a place he has heard of'--0 Lord, sir!)--because I notice the Miss Dennetts, 'great favourites with the Whitechapel orders'--praise Miss Valancy, 'a bouncing Columbine at Ashley's and them there places, as his barber informs him' (has he no way
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