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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