Various

“ Captain Wallis said no more than to bid the first lieutenant make the brig's number at her mast-head, while she still bore in direct upon the breast of the land, as much out of soundings as the day before; the smooth heavy swell seeming to float the island up in one huge lump ahead of us, till you saw it rolling in to the very foot, with a line of surf, as if it all rose sheer out of the bottom of the sea; as grim and hard as a block of iron, too, and a good deal the same colour. ”

“ Scarce had I time to feel some one beside me as wet as myself, whether the reefer or the Frenchman I didn't know, when crash came another boat with her bows fairly down upon our gunwale, out of the dark. The spray splashed up betwixt us, I saw the glitter of the oar-blades, and heard Snelling's shrill voice singing out to "sink the villans, my lads—down with 'em—remember the second lieutenant!" The lantern in the French boat flared, floating out for a single instant amongst a wreck of staves and heads, bobbing wildly together on the side of a wave. ”

“ We have come to town at great expense and inconvenience to ourselves. I myself am deputed from a locality which is distinguished in every respect, alike for the richness of its soil, and the industry, the virtuous habits, and the loyalty of its people—the Isle of Ely. That district comprises 300,000 acres of the most fertile and productive land in the United Kingdom, and yet, with all these advantages, we have been plunged into difficulties; and unless we have the powerful aid and co-operation of men like your lordship, we must inevitably be ruined. ”

“ I consider that the colonists have a right to demand that some protection should be given to them, seeing the difficulties that have been thrown in their way in obtaining labour. Those duties are to be again reduced in July next, and go off entirely in the following July; but I consider that some measure ought to be introduced to put the produce of the colonies on an equal footing with the produce of slave countries. Immense sums have been spent by this country to put a stop to the slave trade, while every encouragement is given to the produce of slave-holding countries. ”

“ Every man in this nation, from the lowest to the highest, has, I conceive, a distinct stake in this question. Every man, whatever be his occupation or his calling, is entitled to come forward here and declare his opinion upon those measures which have been thrust on the nation by an act of perfidy and treachery, to find a parallel for which we shall search the pages of history in vain. (Hear, hear.) I do not exaggerate our case when I say that Scotland is, if possible, more interested than England in the maintenance or the restoration of protection to native industry. ”

“ It was the opinion of one whose opinion, and whose memory too, ought to be an object of veneration with every Free-trader, as unquestionably they are of respect, from the sterling, amiable, pains-taking qualities of the man—I allude to the late Mr Huskisson—it was his opinion, and he delivered it in his place in the House of Commons so long ago as the year 1815—it was his opinion that nothing could be more delusive than the proposition that cheapness in the price of provisions is always a benefit. On the contrary, cheapness, without a demand for labour, is a symptom of distress. ”

“ The vocation of a poet is, we presume, to sing; to pour forth his heart in noble, animating, or touching strains; not to discuss questions of policy, or to muddle his brains over Blue Books, or the interminable compilations of Mr Porter. Not so thinks Carlyle. He would have shut up Burns in Downing Street, debarred him from the indulgence of verse, and clapped him at the head of a Board of Poor-law Commissioners. ”

“ That instant the whole wild lump of St Helena, with its ragged brim, the clear blue sky and the sea, swung round about the dwindled figures above the crag, till they were nothing but so many people together against the slope beyond.
'Twas a strange scene to witness, let me tell you; never can I forget the sightless, thinking sort of gaze from that head of his, after the telescope sank from his eye, when the Conqueror must have shot back with all her stately hamper into the floor of the Atlantic again! ”

“ The young lady of the house we were in was one of the St Helena beauties, called "the Rosebud," from her colour. A lovely creature she was, certainly, as it was plain our Hebe's first lieutenant thought, with several more to boot: every sight of her figure gliding about through the rest, the white muslin floating round her like haze, different as her face was, made one think of the Seringapatam's deck at sea, with the men walking the forecastle in the middle watch, and the poop quiet over the Judge's cabins. ”

“ To say the truth, when we first heard of Madame Sontag's expected return to the stage, it was with no pleasurable feeling. The reappearance of a singer after twenty years' absence can in few instances be other than a melancholy sight. It is mournful to listen to the efforts of a deteriorated voice that one has known in its melodious freshness. But an agreeable disappointment awaited all who ventured such unpleasant anticipations with respect to Madame Sontag. ”

“ I rejoice to see the energy, I rejoice to see the zeal, I rejoice to see the courage and the perseverance with which the agricultural body of England are exerting themselves, and that throughout the length and breadth of the land, in every corner, in every agricultural district—ay, and in the great towns they are working upon public opinion, and compelling the country to look this question in the face, and to judge of the effects which have resulted from our present course. ”

“ At Constantinople, as at Smyrna, Mr Smith visited the slave market. There is a volume in the word, and we all know the sort of phantasmagoria it summons up for the benefit of English ladies and gentlemen, as they sit at home at ease, dandling their fancies by the chimney corner. Exeter Hall and the picture shops have made slave-markets of their own, compared to which the reality is a tame and spiritless affair. ”

“ Mr Carlyle, though he may not be aware of it, is even such a political doctor. He despises De Lolme on the British Constitution, and peremptorily forbids his patient to have anything to do with that exploded system. "I should like to have," says the pupil placed under his charge, "in the first place, a well-regulated constituted monarchy." "'Tis a sham!" cries Signor Doctor Thomas Carlyle—"Are solemnly constituted Impostors the proper kings of men? Do you think the life of man is a grimacing dance of apes? To be led always by the squeak of a paltry fiddle? ”

“ She is a mark for applause and adulation, for gold and flowers; she is intoxicated with incense and persecuted by lovers; the gravest personages enact follies for her sake; men unharness her horses, and carry her in triumph; the crowns refused to great poets are thrown to her in profusion; the homage that would be servile, done to a queen, seems quite natural when offered to a prima donna. Only, she must not cross the row of lamps which flame at her feet like a magic circle. From the ivory or golden throne of her lyric empire she may demand what she pleases ”

“ The haze was too bright, however, to make sure either way; though, dead to windward, there were some streaks of cloud risen with the breeze, where I once or twice fancied I could catch the gleam of a speck in it. The Podargus was to be seen through a notch in the rocks, too, beating out in a different direction, as if the telegraph had signalled her elsewhere; after which you heard the dull rumble of the forts saluting the Conqueror down at James Town as she came in: and being late in the afternoon, it was high time for me to crowd sail downward, to fall in with my shipmates. ”

“ The system is older even than the days of Adam Smith; for about a century ago there went forth from Edinburgh a man of the name of John Law, the founder of the famous Mississippi scheme—a scheme for enriching men by foreign trade and for conferring on them fortunes at once, while it did away with native industry. History has its cycles, and we have again arrived at a period when quackery and imposture have usurped the place of sound common-sense, of wise policy, and I fear not to add, of truthful and Christian legislation. ”

“ It considers the ancient system of commercial law to have been based on the most just principles, and dictated by the soundest views of national policy. It cannot forget that, under that system, Great Britain attained an unexampled state of prosperity and a proud pre-eminence in the scale of nations; and it is its firm conviction that if the principle of fostering and protecting British industry and British capital be abandoned, many of the most important interests of the State will be utterly and cruelly sacrificed, and the national prosperity and greatness be ruinously impaired. ”

“ Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty—O Heaven! one of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and psalmody from the universal human throat; drowning for the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and must resignedly bear your part in the same. ”

“ I am called on in Parliament not to legislate for one class, but to legislate for all classes, and I therefore have not pledged myself to the maintenance of the principle of protection without an earnest inquiry into the whole subject. I have, however, thought it my duty to give a pledge, and, with God's help, I will never violate it. (Cheers.) I am not made of that stuff which would permit me to veer about like the wind, and to flatter every popular demagogue. (Hear, hear.) I have one English quality in me, which is, that I will not be bullied into any course of which my judgment disapproves. ”

“ Not many months have elapsed since the Free-traders were wont to aver, with undaunted effrontery, that all idea of a return to the principles of Protection to native industry was eradicated from the minds of the British public; that, saving some elderly peers and a few bigoted enthusiasts like ourselves, no sane man would attempt to overturn a system which placed the untaxed foreigner on a level with the home-producer; and that cheapness, superinduced by exorbitant competition, was in reality the greatest blessing which could be vouchsafed to an industrious people. ”

“ It is painful for us to declare, but it is our duty not to disguise, that the pertinacious adherence of the Cabinet, of which your lordship is at the head, to the policy of miscalled Free Trade, and its determined rejection of the appeals of the people for a reversal of that policy, have extended to the executive government of the country the same feelings of distrust and discontent which are widely diffused with respect to the representative branch of the Legislature. We solemnly adjure your lordship to remember that discontent unattended to may ripen into disaffection. ”

“ We not only deny the moral right of any government or of any legislature to have involved in certain loss and suffering large masses of a flourishing community, for the sake of giving trial to a mere experiment; but we assert that the experiment has been tried, and has signally and disastrously failed, and we demand therefore, as the right of those we represent, the prompt restoration of that protection from unrestricted foreign import which can alone rescue them from impending destruction. ”

“ Save for the colour of it all, in fact, St Helena reminds one more of a tremendous iceberg than an island, and not the less that it looks ready in some parts to topple over and show a new face; while the sea working round it, surging into the hollows below water-mark, and making the air groan inside of them, keeps up a noise the like of which you wouldn't wish to cruise alongside of every day. ”