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
This is ‘a pretty picture’ to be drawn by one who finds in the past
history of the world the sure presage of deliverance for mankind. We
grant indeed that Mr. Southey was right in one thing, viz. in expecting
from it that sort of ‘deliverance of mankind,’ bound hand and foot, into
the power of Kings and Priests, which has actually come to pass, and
which he has celebrated with so much becoming pomp, both here and
elsewhere. The doctrine of ‘millions made for one’ has to be sure got a
tolerable footing in the East. It has attained a very venerable old age
there—it is mature even to rottenness, but without decay. ‘Old, old,
Master Shallow,’ but eternal. It is transmitted down in unimpaired
succession from sire to son. Snug’s the word. Legitimacy is not there
militant, but triumphant, as the Editor of _The Times_ would wish. It is
long since the people had any thing to do with the laws but to obey
them, or any laws to obey but the will of their taskmasters. This is the
necessary end of legitimacy. The Princes and Potentates cut one
another’s throats as they please, but the people have no hand in it.
They have no French Revolutions there, no rights of man to terrify
barbarous kings, no republicans or levellers, no weathercock deliverers
and re-deliverers of mankind, no Mr. Southeys nor Mr. Wordsworths. In
this they are happy. Things there are perfectly settled, in the state in
which they should be,—still as death, and likely to remain so. Mr.
Southey’s exquisite reason for supposing that a crusade to pull down
divine right would succeed in the East, is that a crusade to prop it up
has just succeeded in the West. That will never do. Besides, what
security can he give, if he goes on improving in wisdom for the next
five and twenty years as he has done for the last, that he would not in
the end be as glad to see these ‘barbarous kings’ restored to their
rightful thrones, as he is now anxious to see them tumbled from them?
The doctrine of ‘divine right’ is of longer standing and more firmly
established in the East than in the West, because the Eastern world is
older than ours. We might say of it,
‘The wars it well remembers of King Nine,
Of old Assaracus and Inachus divine.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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