Look for a moment at the effects of your system. The Caraccis, we are
told, spent their boyish years drawing rude figures with chalk on the
doors and even the walls of the palaces of Rome: here the first germs of
their early talent displayed themselves; and in those bold conceptions
of youthful genius were seen the first dawnings of a power that
gave glory to the age they lived in. Had Sir Peter Laurie been their
cotemporary, had 964 been loose in those days, they would have been
treated with a trip to the mill, and their taste for design cultivated
by the low diet of a penitentiary. You know not what budding genius
you have nipped with this abominable system: you think not of the early
indications of mind and intellect you may be consigning to prison: or is
it after all, that the matter-of-fact spirit of the age has sapped the
very vital? of our law-code, and that in your utilitarian zeal you have
doomed to death all that bears the stamp of imagination? if this be
indeed your object, have a good heart, encourage 964, and you 'll not
leave a novelist in the land.
Good reader, I ask your pardon for all this honest indignation; I know
it is in vain: I cannot reform our jurisprudence; and our laws, like the
Belgian revolution, must be regarded “_comme un fait accompli_;” in other
words, what can't be cured must be endured. Let us leave then our friend
the Pole to perform his penance; let us say adieu to Barney, who is at
this moment occupying a suite of apartments in the Penitentiary, and let
us turn to the reverse of the medal, I mean to those who would wile us
away by false promises and flattering speeches to entertain such views
of life as are not only impossible but inconsistent, thus rendering our
path here devoid of interest and of pleasure, while compared with the
extravagant creations of their own erring fancies. Yes, princes may
be trusted, but put not your faith in periodicals. Let no pictorial
representations of Alpine scenery, under the auspices of Colburn or
Bentley, seduce you from the comforts of your hearth and home: let no
enthusiastic accounts of military greatness, no peninsular pleasures,
no charms of campaigning life, induce you to change your garb of country
gentleman for the livery of the Horse-Guards,--“making the green one
red.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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