Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
His advocacy of the Popish question was one of his romances. Popery
was his "Jane Shore," fainting and feeble, wandering through the
highways with those delicate limbs which had once been arrayed in silk
and velvet, and soliciting the "charity of all good Christians" to her
fallen condition. His nature was chivalric, and he at once unsheathed
his sword for so affecting a specimen of penitence and pauperism; but
he soon recovered from this hazardous compassion, and left the pilgrim
to fitter protectors. But if he had lived till our day, what would
Burke have thought of his delusion now? with what self-ridicule must
he not have looked upon the burlesque grievances and the profitable
privations? what an instructive lesson must not his powerful scorn of
charlatanry have given to us, on the display of the whole system of
sleight-of-hand, the popular cups and balls, the low dexterity and the
rabble plunder? or, to sum all in one word, the reduction of all the
claims, the rights, and the efforts of a party pronouncing itself
national, to the collection of an annual tribute; the whole huge and
rattling machinery of popular agitation, grinding simply for the
"rint." How would this lion of the desert, shaking the forest with his
roar, have looked on Jackoo, going round, shaking the penny box! Woe
be to Jackoo if he had come within reach of his talons!
The volumes, of which we have given an account altogether too brief
and too rapid for their importance, deserve to be studied, as
containing some of the richest transcripts of the richest mind of
England. Letters from various eminent persons diversify them, but the
staple is Burke. If their style seldom rises to the elated ardour and
buoyant strength of his speeches and pamphlets, they exhibit all his
wisdom; they display the entire depth of that current which public
difficulties and obstructions swelled into a cataract. We have the
image of Burke reposing, but still we have all the proportion, all the
dignity, and all the colossal grandeur of the form, ruling senates,
and marshaling the mind of nations for the greatest of their fields.
Various notes illustrate the volumes, and the edition does every
credit to Lord Fitzwilliam and General Bourke.
MY COLLEGE FRIENDS.
NO. II.
JOHN BROWN.
A heavy snow-storm, which confined Chesterton and myself pretty much
to the walls of the college for the next few days, prevented us from
paying our friend Brown a visit in his new quarters so soon after his
installation as we intended. When we did succeed in wading there upon
the commencement of a thaw, we found him rather sulky. The sweets of
retirement had become somewhat doubtful; the Grange was certainly not
the place one would have deliberately chosen to be snowed up in; and
so far John was unfortunate in his first week of commencing hermit.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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