Various

“ The days have gone by when the dream of a free-trade millenium, in which a reciprocity of advantages is to extinguish all feelings of hostility, and war is to be looked back to as a relic of the pre-Adamite world, can with safety be indulged. It is rather too late to think of the termination of the angry passions of men, when Europe, in its length and breadth, is devastated alike by civil dissension and foreign warfare; when barricades have so recently been erected in all its chief capitals; when bloodshed is hourly expected in Paris and Berlin ”

“ Our own revolution was not one of drunken riot, and street-singing blouse-men: our constitution is not a mere poetical theory of liberty and equality, nor a socialist's dream of brotherhood. We now learn the secret of our strength, and of that comparative durability which has almost surprised ourselves. We are, after all, a transplanted slip of old England; nor are we so essentially changed, my Basil, as even you imagine. The spirit of our people is indeed democratic; but the spirit of our constitution is imbued with a stronger element. ”

“ The wind was gone, and the sun smiling on the still leaves and dewy grass—the flood torrent of the river dancing and laughing in its light, and the calm bright air breathing with the sweet perfume of the damp plants, and all the freshness and fragrance of the forest wilderness." We back it against the forest of Ardennes!
Every true hunter is humane. What! you say—do you call it humane to persecute the unfortunate stag, the monarch of the wilds, to the death?—to drive rifle-bullets into the target of the harmless roe? ”

“ Never did despot assert his right to dictate his autocratic will to serfs and slaves more authoritatively than does revolutionary and republican Paris to the provinces of France. No three-tailed Bashaw of old melodrams could be more imperative in his ordinances, more arrogant in the conviction of the indisputability of his will. The bare supposition that the provinces could have a will of their own would strike Paris dumb with astonishment. Paris has been accustomed to consider itself not only as the heart, but the head, and the arms and legs to boot, of the whole country. ”

“ Why does our government adhere so strongly, in the face of the clearest evidence of their ruinous tendency, to the present system of free trade and a fettered currency? Because it works well for the great capitalists, who desire to have money dear, and the great manufacturers, who wish to have labour cheap, and because a majority of the House of Commons has been placed by the Reform Bill under their influence. ”

“ For us, then, there is a legitimacy in our institutions which makes them durable, and dear to all classes of our people. But to be loyal to our own republic is by no means to be committed to universal republicanism, far less to be delighted with universal anarchy. You must pardon our tastes. We are young, and we think a jacket and shako becoming. We wear our appropriate costume as gracefully as we can. We are yet the growing, perhaps the awkward, but still the active boy. But when Europe befools itself, in its dotage, with republican attire, we lads have a right to laugh. ”

“ Many clear streams dashing over their pebbly beds intersect the country, from which, in the noonday's heat, the red-deer jump, shaking their wet sides, as the noise of approaching man disturbs them; and booming grouse rise from the tall luxuriant herbage at every step. Where the deep escarpments of the river banks exhibit the section of the earth, a rich alluvial soil of surprising depth appears to court the cultivation of civilised man; and in every feature it is evident that here nature has worked with kindliest and most bountiful hand. ”

“ That they, the people, had made the revolution in Paris, that they were the masters of Paris, that Paris was theirs, to work in it their work; that, as masters of Paris, they were not to be bid leave it; that leave it they would not; that if labour failed, money must be found them at all events, or they would find means of taking it; in short, that they would not be degraded by being sent into the provinces. The workmen of Paris claim, then, to be the masters of the capital, and still more, in their esteem, the masters of all France. The people of Paris, then, is the people; it owns no other. ”

“ Then he feels that he must put forth the whole resources of his art—that he must baffle the acutest of all instincts by the aid of human cunning—that he has a thousand difficulties to overcome before he can arrive within reach of his quarry, and that a single false step or miscalculation is sufficient to destroy the labour, the patience, and the vigilance of a day.
Great, fat fallow-deer, waxing into obesity in a park, do not seem to mind the approach of a human being, even were he an alderman redolent of black-currant jelly. ”

“ We are fond of Mr Scrope, and we have an excessive partiality for St John. Two finer fellows never shouldered a rifle; and our conscience does not accuse us of having used too superlative, in epithet in their praise. This was the more creditable on our part, because we knew them both to be Southrons; and while freely admitting the sportsman-like qualities of the one, and the strong picturesque style and spirit of the other, we felt a slight, passing, but pardonable pang of jealousy, that they should have stepped in, and pre-occupied the native field. ”

“ To the wild and half-savage trapper, who may be said to exhibit the energy, enterprise, and hardihood characteristic of the American people, divested of all the false and vicious glare with which a high state of civilisation, too rapidly attained, has obscured their real and genuine character, in which the above traits are eminently prominent—to these men alone is due the empire of the West—destined in a few short years to become the most important of those confederate states which compose the mighty union of North America. ”

“ On looking back for my men, I saw one beckoning me to return. He had observed two natives with spears and clubs hide themselves behind a bush in the direction in which I was advancing. On my halting, they stole away. The whole seemed to have been amusing themselves in the water during the noonday heat, which was excessive, and the cool shades round the lagoon looked most luxuriant. Our position, on the contrary, was any thing but enviable. Even there, in the heart of the interior, on a river utterly unheard of by white men, an iron tomahawk glittered in the hand of a chief. ”

“ In others, there are flashes of the deep national spirit which still survives—though our rulers do not seem to mark it—in Scotland: indignation at the neglect with which too many of our national institutions have been treated, and mournful lamentings over the misfortunes of a former age. But the impulse which leads to the composition of poetry does not always imply its accomplishment. Poetry, as an art in which excellence can only be obtained by a combination of the simple and the sublime, requires a study far more intense and serious than the mere critic is apt to allow. ”

“ The original purpose of civilisation is, to enable man to live in society; that is, in peace, with the advantages of mutual assistance. That those objects are powerfully aided by religion is true, and that science may be best cultivated in settled life, is equally true; but those are merely collateral. Civilisation means the work of law, of safe intercourse, of secure property, and of all the safeguards of society which ultimately enable man to polish the general manners, and to improve the general mind. Religion is not the consequence, but the origin of Civilisation. ”

“ Often we have gone out in a clear sapphire morning, when there was scarce a ripple on the pools, and the water on the ford was not over our 'glunachan,' and when we returned at evening, and approached through the dark veil of pines which descended to the river, have heard a roar as if the world was rolling together down the black trough before us, and as we came out on the bank, found a furious tempest of water, tumbling, and plunging, and leaping, over stock and rock twenty feet upon the clatach, where we had left it whimpering among the pebbles in the morning ”

“ The Reaction is, however, no less, men are told, the enemy of the republic, the adversary of all true republican principles, labouring ever to overthrow it; above all, the enemy of the people and the people's interests, their undermining serpent, their secret assassin. It is already sapping, unseen, the foundations of the republic, and it intends to pull down the ruins of that august structure upon the heads of the people, and crush it for ever beneath them. ”

“ What will then avail our manufacturers and our fabrics,—the forges of Birmingham, the power-looms of Manchester, the iron-works of Lanarkshire,—if the enemies' squadrons blockade the Thames, the Mersey, and the Clyde, and famished millions are deprived alike of food and employment, by the suicidal policy of preceding rulers? Our present strength will then be the measure of our weakness; our vast population, as in a beleaguered town, the useless multitude which must be fed, and cannot fight,—our wealth, the glittering prize which will attract the rapacity of the spoiler. ”

“ The blood of our forefathers ran in English veins, or flowed for British freedom and sovereignty. This fact is enough to make our educated and reflecting men speculatively conservative as to British politics. We know the past, and do not feel the party-heats of the present in England. Hence I am far from being alone among my countrymen, in looking at English matters with an English heart. Even our commercial class have a reason for wishing internal peace and prosperity to England; and I believe there is generally something better than selfishness in the prevalent good-will toward her. ”

“ Perhaps the keenest accumulators of wealth have not been those who have fixed their capital in a landed estate. The man of business habits and judicious speculation is drawn to make his fortune in obedience to a passion which is partly developed, and at all events fostered, by the pursuit of his life. It cannot be said to arise altogether from a notion of benefiting posterity, of being the founder of a house—the man of whom future Fitztomkynses shall be ashamed—that John Tomkins, merchant, sets at nought all the expostulations of self-indulgence ”