The Spirit of the Age eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 291 pages of information about The Spirit of the Age.

The Spirit of the Age eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 291 pages of information about The Spirit of the Age.
turns plain knave.  The national gravity is against the first:  the national caution is against the last.  To a Scotchman if a thing is, it is; there is an end of the question with his opinion about it.  He is positive and abrupt, and is not in the habit of conciliating the feelings or soothing the follies of others.  His only way therefore to produce a popular effect is to sail with the stream of prejudice, and to vent common dogmas, “the total grist, unsifted, husks and all,” from some evangelical pulpit.  This may answer, and it has answered.  On the other hand, if a Scotchman, born or bred, comes to think at all of the feelings of others, it is not as they regard them, but as their opinion reacts on his own interest and safety.  He is therefore either pragmatical and offensive, or if he tries to please, he becomes cowardly and fawning.  His public spirit wants pliancy; his selfish compliances go all lengths.  He is as impracticable as a popular partisan, as he is mischievous as a tool of Government.  We do not wish to press this argument farther, and must leave it involved in some degree of obscurity, rather than bring the armed intellect of a whole nation on our heads.

Mr. Brougham speaks in a loud and unmitigated tone of voice, sometimes almost approaching to a scream.  He is fluent, rapid, vehement, full of his subject, with evidently a great deal to say, and very regardless of the manner of saying it.  As a lawyer, he has not hitherto been remarkably successful.  He is not profound in cases and reports, nor does he take much interest in the peculiar features of a particular cause, or shew much adroitness in the management of it.  He carries too much weight of metal for ordinary and petty occasions:  he must have a pretty large question to discuss, and must make thorough-stitch work of it.  He, however, had an encounter with Mr. Phillips the other day, and shook all his tender blossoms, so that they fell to the ground, and withered in an hour; but they soon bloomed again!  Mr. Brougham writes almost, if not quite, as well as he speaks.  In the midst of an Election contest he comes out to address the populace, and goes back to his study to finish an article for the Edinburgh Review; sometimes indeed wedging three or four articles (in the shape of refaccimentos of his own pamphlets or speeches in parliament) into a single number.  Such indeed is the activity of his mind that it appears to require neither repose, nor any other stimulus than a delight in its own exercise.  He can turn his hand to any thing, but he cannot be idle.  There are few intellectual accomplishments which he does not possess, and possess in a very high degree.  He speaks French (and, we believe, several other modern languages) fluently:  is a capital mathematician, and obtained an introduction to the celebrated Carnot in this latter character, when the conversation turned on squaring the circle, and not on the propriety of confining France within the natural boundary of the

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The Spirit of the Age from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.