he honestly put down his first thoughts, would be always contradicting himself. We get the appearance of consistency only because we take time to correct, and qualify, and compare, and extenuate, and very often we spoil our best thoughts in the process. What would not Mr. Ruskin lose if he cared for consistency? The price of suppressing first thoughts may be worth paying by a man whose strength lies in logic; but with a keen, rapid, impetuous observer like Arthur Young we would rather do the correcting for ourselves. His best phrases are impromptu ejaculations. 'Oh, if I were Legislator of France for a day,' he exclaims, at the sight of estates left waste for game-preserving, 'I would make such great lords skip again!' These sentiments, he assures the reader, were 'those of the moment,' and he was half inclined to strike out many such passages. It was because they were 'of the moment' that they are so impressive. Had he omitted them he would have taken off the edge of his best passages, though he might have expressed his later views more correctly.
This temperament, I need hardly argue, is not the ideal one for a political economist. His views should be expressible in columns of figures,
