perplex them. They wear themselves to the bone in the affairs of other people, to whom they can do no manner of service, to the neglect of their own business and pleasure. They teaze themselves to death about the morality of the Turks or the politics of the French. There are certain words that afflict their ears and things that lacerate their souls, and remain a plaguespot there for ever after. They have a fellow-feeling with all that has been done, said, or thought in the world. They have an interest in all science and in all art. They hate a lie as much as a wrong, for truth is the foundation of all justice. Truth is the first thing in their thoughts, then mankind, then their country, last themselves. They love excellence and bow to fame, which is the shadow of it. Above all, they are anxious to see justice done to the dead, as the best encouragement to the living and the lasting inheritance of future generations. They do not like to see a great principle undermined, or the fall of a great man. They would sooner forgive a blow in the face than a wanton attack on acknowledged reputation. The contempt in which the French hold Shakspeare is a serious evil to them; nor do they think the matter mended when they hear an Englishman, who would be thought a profound one, say that Voltaire was a man without wit. They are vexed to see genius playing at Tom Fool and honesty turned bawd. It gives them a cutting sensation to see a number of things which, as they are unpleasant to see, we shall not here repeat. In short, they have a passion for truth; they feel the same attachment to the idea of what is right that a knave does to his interest, or that a good-natured man does to his ease; and they have as many sources of uneasiness as there are actual or supposed deviations from this standard in the sum of things, or as there is a possibility of folly and mischief in the world.

Principle is a passion for truth—an incorrigible at tachment to a general proposition. Good-nature is humanity that costs nothing. No good-natured man was ever a martyr to a cause- -in religion or politics. He has no idea of striving against the stream. He may become a good courtier and a loyal subject; and it is hard if he does not, for he has nothing to do in that case but to consult his ease, interest, and outward appearances. The Vicar of Bray was a good-natured man. What a pity he was but a vicar! A good-natured man is utterly unfit for any situation or office in life that requires integrity, fortitude, or generosity-any sacrifice, except of opinion, or any exertion, but to please. A good-natured man will debauch his friend's mistress, if he has an opportunity, and betray his friend sooner than share disgrace or danger with him. He will not forego the smallest gratification to save the whole world. He makes his own convenience the standard of right and wrong. He avoids the feeling of pain in himself, and shuts his eyes to the sufferings of others. He will put a malefactor or an innocent person (no matter which) to the rack, and only laugh at the uncouthness of the gestures, or wonder that he is so unmannerly as to cry out. There is no villainy to which he will not lend a helping hand with great coolness and cordiality, for he sees only the pleasant and profitable side of things. He will assent to a falsehood with a leer of complacency, and applaud any atrocity that comes recommended in the garb of authority. He will betray his country to please a minister, and sign the death-warrant of thousands of wretches, rather than forfeit the congenial smile, the well-known squeeze of the hand. The shrieks of death, the torture of mangled limbs, the last groans of despair, are things that shock his smooth humanity too much ever to make an impression on it; his good-nature sympathises only with the smile, the bow, the gracious

salutation, the fawning answer:

vice loses its sting, and corruption its poison, in the oily gentleness of his disposition. He will not hear of anything wrong in Church or State. He will defend every abuse by which anything is to be got, every dirty job, every act of every minister. In an extreme case, a very good-natured man indeed may try to hang twelve honester men than himself to rise at the bar, and forge the seal of the realm to continue his colleagues a week longer in office. He is a slave to the will of others, a coward to their prejudices, a tool of their vices. A good-natured man is no more fit to be trusted in public affairs than a coward or a woman is to lead an army. Spleen is the soul of patriotism and of public good. Lord Castlereagh is a goodnatured men, Lord Eldon is a good-natured man, Charles Fox was a good-natured man. The last instance is the most decisive. The definition of a true patriot is a good hater.

A king who is a good-natured man is in a fair way of being a great tyrant. A king ought to feel concern for all to whom his power extends; but a good-natured man cares only about himself. If he has a good appetite, eats and sleeps well, nothing in the universe besides can disturb him. The destruction of the lives or liberties of his subjects will not stop him in the least of his caprices, but will concoct well with his bile, and "good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both." He will send out his mandate to kill and destroy with the same indifference or satisfaction that he performs any natural function of his body. The consequences are placed beyond the reach of his imagination, or would not affect him if they were not, for he is a fool and good-natured. A good-natured man hates more than any one else whatever thwarts his will or contradicts his prejudices; and if he has the power to prevent it, depend upon it, he will use it without remorse and without control.

There is a lower species of this character which is what is usually understood by a well-meaning man. A well-meaning man is one who often does a great deal of mischief without any kind of malice. He means no one any harm, if it is not for his interest. He is not a knave, nor perfectly honest. He does not easily resign a good place. Mr. Vansittart is a well-meaning man.

The Irish are a good-natured people; they have many virtues, but their virtues are those of the heart, not of the head. In their passions and affections they are sincere, but they are hypocrites in understanding. If they once begin to calculate the consequences, selfinterest prevails. An Irishman who trusts to his principles and a Scotchman who yields to his impulses are equally dangerous. The Irish have wit, genius, eloquence, imagination, affections; but they want coherence of understanding, and consequently have no standard of thought or action. Their strength of mind does not keep pace with the warmth of their feelings or the quickness of their conceptions. Their animal spirits run away with them; their reason is a jade. There is something crude, indigested, rash, and discordant in almost all that they do or say. They have no system, no abstract ideas. They are "everything by starts, and nothing long." They are a wild people. They hate whatever imposes a law on their understandings or a yoke on their wills. To betray the principles they are most bound by their own professions, and the expecta tions of others to maintain, is with them a reclamation of their original rights, and to fly in the face of their benefactors and friends, an assertion of their natural freedom of will. They want consistency and good faith. They unite fierceness with levity. In the midst of their headlong impulses they have an undercurrent of selfishness and cunning, which in the end gets the better of them. Their feelings, when no longer excited by novelty

or opposition, grow cold and stagnant. Their blood, if not heated by passion, turns to poison. The have a rancour in their hatred of any object they have abandoned proportioned to the attachment they have professed to it. Their zeal, converted against itself, is furious. The late Mr. Burke was an instance of an Irish patriot and philosopher. He abused metaphysics because he could make nothing out of them, and turned his back upon liberty when he found he could get nothing more by her. See to the same purpose the winding-up of the character of Judy in Miss Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent.'

No. XXVIII.

On the Character of Milton's Eve. 2

THE difference between the character of Eve in Milton and Shakspeare's female characters is very striking, and

1 This man (Burke), who was a half poet and a half philosopher, has done more mischief than perhaps any other person in the world. His understanding was not competent to the discovery of any truth, but it was sufficient to palliate a falsehood; his reasons, of little weight in themselves, thrown into the scale of power, were dreadful. Without genius to adorn the beautiful, he had the art to throw a dazzling veil over the deformed and disgusting; and to strew the flowers of imagination over the rotten carcase of corruption, not to prevent, but to communicate the infection. His jealousy of Rousseau was one chief cause of his opposition to the French Revolution. The writings of the one had changed the institutions of a kingdom; while the speeches of the other, with the intrigues of his whole party, had changed nothing but the turnspit of the king's kitchen. He would have blotted out the broad pure light of heaven, because it did not first shine in at the little Gothic windows of St. Stephen's Chapel. The genius of Rousseau had levelled the towers of the Bastille with the dust; our zealous reformist, who would rather be doing mischief than nothing, tried, therefore, to patch them up again by calling that loathsome dungeon the "king's castle," and by fulsome adulation of the virtues of a court strumpet. This man-but enough of him here.

2 See the Examiner newspaper for 1816, pp. 460, 475.-ED.

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