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In Milton's Creation , " pawing to get free , " one of the worst has been that , while every attempt was made to cherish and act upon the ignorance of the great mass , many of the superior minds which nature will produce , and which should enlighten and elevate the
re 9 t , have been subjected to an appropriate process of corruption , and rendered agents of yet worse degradation . In spirit-stirring times , such minds are naturally turned towards politics ; the aristocracy has ever courted young men of talent for its tools ; and , once enlisted , there is no conceivable baseness to which it has not
bowed them . Unhappy Burke ! how dearly he paid for hi * paltry secretaryship and paltrier pension . The Crokers and LyndhuTsts suffer less , because the coarser metal of their natures is , from its very coarseness and natural baseness , less capable of debasement by pollution . Runnymede perceives the kind of process to which we refer . When he says " there is a sublime sentiment in genius , even when uncontrolled by principles , that would make it recoil with nausea from what this man has to
undergo / ' he speaks a language which , if it come not now from his heart , may perhaps be the reminiscence of a prophetic feeling in the days when he was not yet in the trammels of faction . Can * ning was the most illustrious of these victims , because the power of self-redemption in him was unextinguished . Happy , could his life have been cut down to his first and last days , and all the
dreary interval be annihilated . Formed to be the generous leader of a generous people ; so fervent and yet so playful : so magnificent in conception and so brilliant in expression ; to what dirty jobs , and sophistical pleadings , and most ungracious deeds , was he not reduced . And when he dared rebel , how envenomed was
oligarchical vengeance . Runnymede has read the lesson . He has learned humility . " The ambition of Mr Canning deprived him of the ablest of his colleagues . " ( p . 101 ) . Ambition , indeed Is it thus that a man of talent records the assassination of a man
of genius b y the low pride of aristocracy that could not brook his superiority f Canning- knew his own proper position ; and to prevent mistakes , Runnymede gives a pledge beforehand to the mindless masters of the faction , that he knows his own position also . He has no forbidden aspirations .
For intellect to serve the cause of Toryism , it must needs lend itself to the distortion of historical facts , and the subversion of political principles . Numerous specimens of both may be found in this volume . But there are two false assumptions which most entirely pervade it , and on which we shall briefly comment .
The first is , that the spy dt of Whiggism is essentially oligarchical , and that of Toryism aristocratical . The truth is exactly the reverse . It is Toryism that only exists as an oligarchy ; Whiggistn is entirely aristocratical . The Tory peerage ia yet in its nonage . Pitt was its great creator . He could no mote
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Letters of Runnymedey S 4 &
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1836, page 543, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2661/page/19/
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