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
recommended the character of his accomplices, as spies and informers, to
the respect and gratitude of the country and the House; he lamented the
prejudice entertained against this species of patriotic service, as
hindering _gentlemen_ from resorting to it as a liberal and honourable
profession. One of these delicious protegés of ministerial gratitude,
was, it seems, at one time a distributor of forged notes, and gained the
reward promised by Act of Parliament, by hanging his accomplices. Could
not his Lordship’s nice notions of honour relax a little farther, and
recommend the legal traffic in bank notes and blood-money, as a new
opening to honourable ambition and profitable industry? Castles’s wife
was also the keeper of a house of ill fame. Could not his Lordship, with
the hand of a master, have drawn a veil of delicacy over this slight
stain in his character, and redeemed a profession, not without high
example to justify it, from the vulgar obloquy that attends it? We are
afraid his Lordship is but half an adept in these sort of lax paradoxes,
and that Peachum, Jonathan Wild, and Count Fathom, are much honester
teachers of that kind of transcendental morality than he. This kind of
revolutionary jargon must have sounded oddly in the ears of some of his
Lordship’s hearers. Mr. Wynne, who dreads all re-action so much, must
have looked particularly argute at this innovation in the parliamentary
theory of moral sentiments. What would the country gentlemen say to it?
One would think Lord Lascelles’s hat, that broad brimmed monument of
true old English respectability, must have cowered and doubled down in
dog’s ears at the sound! What will the ardent and superannuated zeal of
that _preux Chevalier_, the Editor of _The Day and New Times_, say to
this stain upon the innate honour and purity of legitimacy, to this new
proof that ‘the age of chivalry is gone for ever, and that of
sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded!’ What will John
Bull, who has been crammed these twenty-five years with the draff and
husks of concrete prejudices, unsifted, unbolted, in their rawest state,
say to the analytical distinctions, to the refined _police_-morality of
the Noble Lord? We might consider his harangue on the public services
and private virtues of spies and informers, according to the
utility-doctrine of modern philosophy, as forming an era in the history
of English loyalty and Parliamentary pliability. What! Is it meant,
after building up the present system of power and influence on the
accumulated pile of our political prejudices, to extend and strengthen
it, by undermining all our moral sentiments and national habits? Yet we
are told, that there is no imputation on the _moral_ character of
Oliver! We wonder Mr. Wilberforce did not suggest that his _religious_
character also remained unimpeached, except, indeed, that he had been
guilty of subornation of treason on the Sabbath-day. According to our
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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