The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain: Described in a series of letters, with illustrations representing Moorish palaces, cathedrals, and other monuments of art, contained in the cities of Burgos, Valladolid, Toledo, and Seville.Wells, Nathaniel Armstrong
Islamic
The Picturesque Antiquities of Spain: Described in a series of letters, with illustrations representing Moorish palaces, cathedrals, and other monuments of art, contained in the cities of Burgos, Valladolid, Toledo, and Seville.
highly gifted sovereign of their neighbours, to stifle it, and to
administrate in spite of it; until, either wanting the talent and energy
necessary for the maintenance of this false position, or their subjects,
as may be expected, getting impatient at finding themselves mystified,
a total overthrow will terminate the experiment.
I am aware of the criticism to which this opinion would be exposed in
many quarters; I already hear the contemptuous upbraidings, similar to
those with which the "exquisite," exulting in an unexceptionable
wardrobe, lashes the culprit whose shoulders are guilty of a coat of the
previous year's fashion. We are told that the tendency of minds, the
progress of intellect, the spirit of the age,--all which, translated
into plain language, mean (if they mean anything) the fashion,--require
that nations should provide themselves each with a new Liberal
government; claiming, in consideration of the fashionable vogue and the
expensive nature of the article, its introduction (unlike other British
manufactures) duty-free. But it ought first to be established, whether
these larger interests of humanity are amenable to the sceptre of so
capricious a ruler as the fashion. It appears to me, that nations should
be allowed to adapt their government to their respective characters,
dispositions, habits of life, and traditions. All these are more
dependant than is supposed by those who possess not the habit of
reflection, on the race, the position, the soil and climate each has
received from nature, which, by the influence they have exercised on
their habits and dispositions, have fitted them each for a form of
constitution equally appropriate to no other people; since no two
nations are similarly circumstanced, not only in all these respects, but
even in any one of them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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