Various

“ BULLER.
What think you of the thunder in Thomson's Seasons?
NORTH.
What all the world thinks—that it is our very best British Thunder. He gives the Gathering, the General engagement, and the Retreat. In the Gathering there are touches and strokes that make all mankind shudder—the foreboding—the ominous! And the terror, when it comes, aggrandises the premonitory symptoms. "Follows the loosened aggravated roar" is a line of power to bring the voice of thunder upon your soul on the most peaceable day. He, too—prevailing poet—feels the grandeur of the Rain. ”

“ I repeat and maintain, that to make a magistrate personally responsible for his judgments, be they just or unjust, so long as he has kept within the line of his duty, and acted according to his conscience, is revenge of the basest and most criminal description."
"Bear in mind," replied Henry la Chapelle, "that I attempt not to justify the unhappy Gaudry. All I assert is, that injustice excites in the breast of every man, even of the gentlest, hatred against him by whom the injustice is done. ”

“ Yet the moment chosen for carrying this principle into effect was precisely that, when the good effects of the opposite system had been most decisively demonstrated, and an empire unprecedented in magnitude and magnificence had reached its acme under its shadow. It would be impossible to explain so strange an anomaly, if we did not recollect how wayward and irreconcilable are the changes of the human mind: that action and reaction is the law not less of the moral than of the material world; that nations become tired of hearing a policy called wise, not less than an individual called the just ”

“ BULLER.
I love you, sir, better and better every day.
NORTH.
We step the earth—we look abroad over it, and it seems immense—so does the sea. What ages had men lived—and knew but a small portion. They circumnavigate it now with a speed under which its vast bulk shrinks. But let the astronomer lift up his glass and he learns to believe in a total mass of matter, compared with which this great globe itself becomes an imponderable grain of dust. And so to each of us walking along the road of life, a year, a day, or an hour shall seem long. As we grow older, the time shortens ”

“ Now, in the year 1847, though we imported nearly thirty millions' worth of grain, our exports were £1,200,000 less than in 1845, when we only received three millions and a half of subsistence from foreign states. Can there be a more decisive proof that the greatest possible addition to our importation of grain is not likely to be attended with any increase to our export of manufactures?
But if the great importation of grain which free-trade induces into the British empire is not attended with any increase of our exports, in the name of heaven, what good does it do? Feed the people cheap. ”

“ It was the system under which England had become free, and great, and powerful; under which, in her alone of all modern states, liberty had been found to coexist with law, and progress with order; under which wealth had increased without producing divisions, and power grown up without inducing corruption; the system which had withstood the shocks of two centuries, and created an empire unsurpassed since the beginning of the world in extent and magnificence. ”

“ All the abolition orators begin by telling us that game laws are a remnant of the feudal system—that they originated in the tyranny and oppression of the middle ages, and are, therefore, wholly unsuited to our improved state of society. Such an origin, of course, condemns them at once; for, in the popular mind, feudal law is somehow synonymous with slavery, rape, robbery, and all that is damnable. The truth is, however, that the game law of Scotland has no more connexion with the feudal law than with the code of Lycurgus. ”

“ Every day a free-trading merchant or shopkeeper is swept into the Gazette, and his family cast down to the humblest ranks in society. They go down like the Fifth Monarchy men when expelled from the House of Commons by the bayonets of Cromwell, or the Girondists when led to the scaffold by the Jacobins, chanting hymns in honour of their principles when perishing from their effects:—
"They are true to the last of their blood and their breath,
And, like reapers, descend to the harvest of death." ”

“ There is a provision, and a most stringent and effectual one, made for the contraction of the currency at the very moment when its expansion is most required, and when the national industry is threatened with starvation in consequence of the vast and ceaseless abstraction of the precious metals which free trade in grain necessarily establishes. When free trade is sending gold headlong out of the country, to buy food, Sir Robert Peel's law sends the bank-notes, public and private, back into the banker's coffers, and leaves the industry of the country without either of its necessary supports! ”

“ But it is time now to turn to those alleged evils, and to form some judgment as to whether they are in reality so weighty and numerous, that nothing short of the total abolition of the game laws can effectually check them. The abrogation of a law is no doubt an easy way of overcoming the difficulty of amending it—in the same way that the expedient of wearing no breeches will unquestionably save you the cost of patching them; and as a device for diminishing game-law offences, the total repeal of all game laws is perhaps as simple and efficacious a recipe as could well be conceived. ”

“ Now, woful experience has taught the English people that the turning of the balance of trade is a most formidable thing against a commercial nation, and that the practical experience of mankind, which has always regarded it as one of the greatest of calamities, is more to be regarded than the theory of Adam Smith, that it was a matter of no sort of consequence. When coupled with a sliding currency scale, which contracts the circulation of bank-notes in proportion as the specie is withdrawn, it is one of the most terrible calamities which can befall a commercial and manufacturing state. ”

“ I read Historian, Poet, Orator, Voyager—a life that slid silently away in shades, or that bounded like a bark over the billows. I lift up the curtain of all ages—I stand under all skies—on the Capitol—on the Acropolis. Like that magician whose spirit, with a magical word, could leave his own bosom to inhabit another, I take upon myself every mode of existence. I read Thucydides, and I would be a Historian—Demosthenes, and I would be an Orator—Homer, and I dread to believe myself called to be, in some shape or other, a servant of the Muse. ”

“ We have, as it were, from some dark and cold edge of a bright world, just looked in and been plucked away again! Have we come to experience pleasure by fits and glimpses; but intertwined with pain, burdensome labour, with weariness, and with indifference? Have we come to try the solace and joy of a warm, fearless, and confiding affection, to be then chilled or blighted by bitterness, by separation, by change of heart, or by the dread sunderer of loves—Death? ”

“ Thus the system of entails—the freedom of real property from legacy and probate duty—the landlord's preferable lien for the rent of his land, figure in the debates of the abolitionist orators, along with other topics equally relevant to the game laws, as oppressive burdens on the industry of the country. The system of the tenure of land, also, is pronounced to be a crying injustice; and one gentleman modestly insists on the necessity of a law for compelling the landlord to make payment to his tenant at the expiry of every lease for any increase in the value of the farm during his occupation. ”

“ I struck at random in the dark, and with effect, for my blow was followed by a groan and a curse.
Roland, meanwhile, had detected a ray through the chinks of a door in the hall, and, guided by it, found his way into the room at the window of which we had seen the light pass and go, while without. As he threw the door open, I bounded after him; and saw in a kind of parlour, two females—the one a stranger, no doubt the hostess, the other the treacherous Abigail. Their faces evinced their terror.
"Woman," I said, seizing the last, "where is Miss Trevanion?" ”

“ Books that, from age to age, and all the sections of mankind helping, build up the pile of Knowledge—a trophied Citadel. He who can read Books as they should be read, peruses the operation of the Creator in his conscious, and in his unconscious Works, which yet we call upon to join, as if conscious, in our worship. Yet why—oh! why all this pains to attain that, through the labour of ages, which in the dewy, sunny prime of morn, one thrill of transport gives to me and to the Lark alike, summoning, lifting both heavenwards? ”

“ That the revolutions on the continent of Europe have materially affected the market for the produce of British industry, in the countries where they have occurred, is indeed certain; but are the Liberals entitled to shake themselves free from the consequences of these convulsions? Have we not, for the last thirty years, been labouring incessantly to encourage and extend revolution in all the adjoining states? Did we not insidiously and basely support the revolutions in South America, and call a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old? ”

“ And if the Thing signified, Talboys, by the Word, be some profound, solemn, and moral affection—or if it be some wild, fanciful impression—or if it be some delicate shade or tinge of a tender sensibility—can anything be more evident than that the Scholar must have experienced in himself the solemn, or the wild, or the tenderly delicate feeling before he is in the condition of affixing the right and true sense to the Word that expresses it?
TALBOYS.
I should think so, sir.
SEWARD.
The Words of Man paint the spirit of Man. The Words of a People depicture the Spirit of a People. ”

“ Crippled, discredited, ruined, beat down by foreign competition, exhausted by the failure of domestic supplies, the once powerful mercantile body of England will be prostrate in the dust. All other classes, of course, will be suffering from their fall, but none in the same degree as themselves. It is not improbable that the land may regain its appropriate influence in the state, by the ruin which their own insane measures have brought upon its oppressors. ”

“ The virtues of Job are rare; and rancour, the vile weed, chokes, in our corrupt age, the meek flower, resignation."
"A man to whom injustice is really done," said Dominique, "may console himself with the consciousness of his innocence, which an act of rancorous revenge would induce many to doubt. The suffering victim finds sympathy; the fierce avenger excites horror and reprobation." ”

“ No gigantic system of beggar my neighbour had then come to be considered as a shorthand mode of gaining wealth. The nation had not then embraced the doctrine, that to buy cheap and sell dear constituted the sum total of political science. On the contrary, protection to industry in all its branches was considered as the great principle of policy, the undisputed dictate of wisdom, the obvious rule of justice. ”

“ Reader, hast thou not, in the easy, careless sociability of youth, formed acquaintance with some one, in whose more engaging or brilliant qualities thou hast—not lost that dislike to defects or vices which is natural to an age when, even while we err, we adore what is good, and glow with enthusiasm for the ennobling sentiment and the virtuous deed—no, happily, not lost dislike to what is bad, nor thy quick sense of it,—but conceived a keen interest in the struggle between the bad that revolted, and the good that attracted thee, in thy companion? ”

“ SEWARD.
We are made better, nobler, sir, by the society of the good and the noble. Perhaps of ourselves unable to think high thoughts, and without the bold warmth that dares generously, we catch by degrees something of the mounting spirit, and of the ardour proper to the stronger souls with whom we live familiarly, and become sharers and imitators of virtues to which we could not have given birth. The devoted courage of a leader turns his followers into heroes—the patient death of one martyr inflames in a thousand slumbering bosoms a zeal answerable to his own. ”

“ Is it that pauperism has disappeared, industry flourished, divisions died away, prosperity become general? So far from it, divisions never have been so bitter, dissension never so general, misery so grinding, suffering so universal, since the British standards, under Henry II., seven centuries ago, first approached their shores. A rebellion has broken out; anarchy and agitation, by turning the people aside from industry, have terminated in famine ”

“ If we make allowance for the supplies sent directly to the smaller poulterers, for the consumption in the other great towns throughout the kingdom, and for the probably still larger quantity that never comes into market at all, it is impossible to deny that game has now become an important part of the food of the people, and that, as an article of commerce, it deserves the attention of the legislature. Any attempt to check the production and sale of a commodity for which there is so general a demand, must prove both useless and mischievous. ”

“ Rank looked anxiously for talent, because it added to its influence. Genius did not disdain the entrance, because it was not obstructed by numbers, or galled by conceit. No human wisdom could have devised such a system; it rose gradually, and without being observed, from the influence of a vast body of great and prosperous interests, feeling the necessity of obtaining a voice in the legislature, and enjoying the means of doing so by the variety of election privileges which time had established in the House of Commons. The reality of this representation of interests is matter of history. ”

“ The secret of the long duration and unexampled success of the British national policy is to be found in the protection which it afforded to all the national interests. But for this, it must long since have been overthrown, and with it the empire which was growing up under its shadow. No institutions or frames of government can long exist which are not held together by that firmest of bonds, experienced benefits. ”