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Untitled Article
they too , had equivocated , and compromised , and enunciated their opiij ions by halves , and kepi the great questions out of sight for fear of damaging the small ones , and on the . whole trimmed and truckled and played fast analoose with their convictions , as many would Have had them as many are even now counselling them , their opinions would have been
now , or probably at any time during their lives , in the state of triumphant progress and prosperity in which they now behold them ? At ail times , and in all circumstances , has this truth been found invariable : whoever , haying adopted his opinions on mature consideration , openly avows and publishes the full extent , of those opinions ( such things only excepted as , if unseasonably declared , might deprive him of hearing altogether )—
whoever , we say , does this will lose many a point which , by compromising some portion of his opinions , he might have carried ; but he wiU carry more points in the long run than the dissembler . He will not always have done well for his own reputation , for he will often be so far before his contemporaries as to be ( in the words of Coleridge ) dwarfed in the distance : he will often not have done well for the interest of this
or that particular truth ; but ( so far as it is possible for human wisdom to affirm anything Universally of the variable course of human affairl ) he will in ail cases have done well for the interests of truth on the whok We " have made the Foregoing quotation , not only on account of the justice it does Mr Fonblanque , and the reply it furnishes
to many unpalatable allegations of Whiggism recently brought against him—to which indeed , superficially speaking , he has latterly in some respects laid himself open—but also for it * Extensive applicability to all those whose advocacy of a general good has preceded even the coincidence and support pf a
sufficierit htiittber of contemporaries , to preserve the enuneiator frdrft general reprobation . To stand alone , or With few tebftljtttdfe& , ag&iiist a nost of evil , would not be so arduous aftd iiti * common an act , were it not for calumny and misrepresentalioft , which turn even the mass of sufferers against their defender * To
this fate MrFonblanque hah been subjected , though by no means to such a degree as some we could name ; but at all events he has weathered the storm marvellously well . If Mr Fonblanque ' s radicalism has got him into many a dangerous position , most certainly his Wit has always got him but of it . There is an
inherent advantage and impunity in fine wit which may be attributed to bbvibus causes : first , that it can give emblematic utterance to things for which reason would be immediately decapitated ; and secondly , that while the axe was being whetted for its intended execution , it would be exceedingly
likely to turn the edge upon the executioner and judges . : We take the following from an article in vol . u on c Mjs Magistracy . The author is analysing a nostrum put ( forth t > y the Edinburgh Review concerning the town and country magistrates , and the licensing 6 F ale-houses .
Untitled Article
England Under Seven Administrations . 803
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 1, 1837, page 303, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1831/page/48/
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