The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)Hazlitt, William
General
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 03 (of 12)
Hazlitt, William
English essays -- 19th century
triumph, as they had been in the agony of despair. This sudden
usurpation had so overpowered the imaginations of men, that they began
to consider it as the only evil that had ever existed in the world, and
that with it, all tyranny and ambition would cease. War was talked of as
if it had been an invention of the modern Charlemagne, and the Golden
age was to be restored with the Bourbons. But it is hard for the great
and mighty to learn in the school of adversity: emperors and kings bow
reluctantly to the yoke of necessity. When the panic is over, they will
be glad to drink of the cup of oblivion. The false idols which had been
set up to Liberty and Nature, to Genius and Fortune, are thrown down,
and they have once more ‘all power given them upon earth.’ How they are
likely to use it, whether for the benefit and happiness of mankind, or
to gratify their own prejudices and passions, we have, in one or two
instances, seen already. No one will in future look for ‘the milk of
human kindness’ in the Crown Prince of Sweden, who is a monarch of the
new school; nor for examples of romantic generosity and gratitude in
Ferdinand of Spain, who is one of the old. A jackal or baboon, dandled
in the paws of a royal Bengal tiger, may not be very formidable; but it
would be idle to suppose, if they should providentially escape, that
they would become tame, useful, domestic animals.
The King of Prussia has recovered the sword of the Great Frederick, his
humane, religious, moral, and unambitious predecessor, only, as it
appears, to unsheath it against the King of Saxony, his old companion in
arms. The Emperor of Austria seems eager to catch at the iron crown of
Italy, which has just fallen from the brows of his son-in-law. The King
of France, _our_ King of France, Louis the Desired, and who by the ‘all
hail hereafter,’ is to receive the addition of Louis the Wise, has
improved his reflections during a twenty years’ exile, into a humane and
amiable sanction of the renewal of the Slave Trade for five years only.
His Holiness the Pope, happy to have escaped from the clutches of the
arch-tyrant and impostor, employs his leisure hours in restoring the
order of the Jesuits, and persecuting the Freemasons. Ferdinand, the
grateful and the enlightened, who has passed through the same discipline
of humanity with the same effect, shuts up the doors of the Cortes, (as
it is scandalously asserted, at the instigation of Lord Wellington), and
throws open those of the Inquisition. At all this, the romantic admirers
of patriot kings, who fondly imagined that the hatred of the oppressor
was the same thing as the hatred of oppression, (among these we presume
we may reckon the poet-laureat,) hang their heads, and live in hope of
better times. To us it is all natural, and in order. From this grand
gaol-delivery of princes and potentates, we could expect nothing else
than a recurrence to their old habits and favourite principles. These
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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