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Untitled Article
few ; letters * which passed between him and his tried friend , Sir * John Eliot , during that illegal imprisonment of the latter , which ended in consigning his worn-out -frame to the grave \ and his cowardly oppressor to the block he so justly merited , we have no new light thrown upon it here ; but that which we had before to gather / from the often contradictory authorities of Clarendon ^
Denham , Hume , or Godwin , is sifted and arranged with impartiality and elegance . Lord Nugent ' s book will take its place among English classics . Would that the men of fortune of the present day , who share in the general and increasing taste for literature , would profit by his example , and employ their time on biography , that inexhaustible and always interesting subject , rather than on such ephemera as are most modern novels and even *
Personal Narratives !'—To collect materials , internal and external , to qualify for the editorship of a good biography , is an undertaking which requires much time and fortune ; and in no way could those advantages be more usefully employed . What work of fiction can ever interest our sympathies so deeply as the adventures of
those who , in good truth , have voluntarily suffered for the benefit bf their fellow-creatures ?—the names of Hampden , of Pym , of Sidney , of Vane , are indissolubly linked with our first boyish instinct of love of liberty : we pity him for whom those names do not awaken a host of associations , and bring back youthful dreams of high daring , and lofty purpose , and chivalrous honour , and
constancy unto the death . —There is a charm in these things which we never lose , because it has its origin in the principle , eternally fixed in humanity , of opposition to wrong . We love to look back to the old picturesque times of feudal domination , and popular discontent , while sincerely do we hope they may never again return : we look to them for lights on the motives and workings of the human mind ;—we see resolved in them the problem of the
effect of actions and passions , which effect the men who acted and felt could only surmise and doubtingly hope ; we are interested in them as in an important chapter in the chronicle of the world ' s history . And they were , for their purpose , fine and grand times , those , when the need of protection gave a species of devotion to the loyalty of the lowly , and the proud consciousness of protecting invested with a factitious nobility the grossness of self-interest . Then , as since , liberty and religion were banner-words , and
per-. haps by the mass have been in all times equally little understood . But , since those high and palmy feudal days , a great moral change has been steadily taking place . One of tyranny ' s strongest defences is founded in that blind belief of the many in the sacredness of whatever is in any way superior to them , arising from the principle of reverence , innate in every human mind , and which , if it be Enlightened , is the noblest , and if servile , the meanest , of human emotions * When John ' s victorious barons established an oligarchy more hateful than the tyranny which it curbed , because more in- *
Untitled Article
ti 4 Hampderl .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1832, page 444, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1816/page/12/
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