The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 07 (of 12)Hazlitt, William
General
The collected works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 07 (of 12)
Hazlitt, William
English essays -- 19th century
Yet Burke has knit the two ideas together, and no man can put them
asunder. No matter how slight and precarious the connection, the length
of line it is necessary for the fancy to give out in keeping hold of the
object on which it has fastened, he seems to have ‘put his hook in the
nostrils’ of this enormous creature of the crown, that empurples all its
track through the glittering expanse of a profound and restless
imagination!
In looking into the IRIS of last week, I find the following passages, in
an article on the death of Lord Castlereagh.
‘The splendour of Majesty leaving the British metropolis, careering
along the ocean, and landing in the capital of the North, is
distinguished only by glimpses through the dense array of clouds in
which Death hid himself, while he struck down to the dust the
stateliest courtier near the throne, and the broken train of which
pursues and crosses the Royal progress wherever its glories are
presented to the eye of imagination....
‘The same indefatigable mind—a mind of all work—which thus ruled the
Continent with a rod of iron, the sword—within the walls of the
House of Commons ruled a more distracted region with a more subtle
and finely-tempered weapon, the tongue; and truly, if this _was_ the
only weapon his Lordship wielded there, where he had daily to
encounter, and frequently almost alone, enemies more formidable than
Buonaparte, it must be acknowledged that he achieved greater
victories than Demosthenes or Cicero ever gained in far more easy
fields of strife; nay, he wrought miracles of speech, outvying those
miracles of song, which Orpheus is said to have performed, when not
only men and brutes, but rocks, woods, and mountains, followed the
sound of his voice and lyre....
‘But there was a worm at the root of the gourd that flourished over
his head in the brightest sunshine of a court; both perished in a
night, and in the morning, that which had been his glory and his
shadow, covered him like a shroud; while the corpse, notwithstanding
all his honours, and titles, and offices, lay unmoved in the place
where it fell, till a judgment had been passed upon him, which the
poorest peasant escapes when he dies in the ordinary course of
nature.’
SHEFFIELD ADVERTISER, Aug. 20, 1822.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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