Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/269

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last Quarterly: we thought there were some shrewd hits there, and we suspect Sir Richard Phillips, whom he laughs at for his dislike of war and of animal food, for pages together, will be of our opinion. He says that "he has been lately employed, while among the mountains of Cumberland, upon the Mines of Brazil and the War in the Peninsula."

"Why man, he doth bestride the world
Like a Colossus, and we, petty men, peep
Under his huge legs."

"His name, in the mean time, has served in London for the very shuttlecock of discussion." Why should not his name be a shuttlecock, when he himself is no better?—"He has impeded the rising reputation of Toby, the Sapient Pig;"—has overlaid the posthumous birth of the young Shiloh, and perhaps prevented Mr. Coleridge's premature deliverance of his last Lay Sermon. After all these misfortunes, the author makes merry with Bonaparte's having been exposed, like Bishop Hatto, to be devoured by the rats! The levelling rogue cares neither for Bishops nor Emperors, but growls grave again in recounting the retrograde progress of his own mind.

"In my youth, when my stock of knowledge consisted of such an acquaintance with Greek and Roman history, as is acquired in the course of a regular scholastic education,"—[The Greek and Roman history is as good as the history of rotten boroughs or the reign of George III.]—"when my heart was full of poetry and romance,"—[Is it so no longer?]—" and Lucan and Akenside were at my tongue's end."—[Instead of the red book and the court calendar]—"I fell into the political opinions which the French Revolution was then scattering throughout Europe:" [We have here a pretty fair account of the origin and genealogy of the opinions of the French Revolution, which opinions of liberty, truth, and justice, neither the French Revolution shall destroy, nor those who destroyed it, because it was produced by and gave birth to those opinions; and does Mr. Southey suppose