goes, ‘personal’ government, were almost
necessarily those of a retained advocate, who expected
his immediate reward, on the one hand; or of a rebel,
who stood to make his account with office if he succeeded,
or with savage punishment if he failed, on the other.
A distant prospect of impeachment, of the loss of
ears, hands, or life if the tide turns, is a stimulant
to violence rather than to vigour. I do not think,
however, that this is the most important factor in
the problem. Parliamentary government, with a
limited franchise of tolerably intelligent voters,
a party system, and newspapers comparatively undeveloped,
may not suit an ideally perfect
politeia, but
it is the very hotbed in which to nourish the pamphlet.
There is also a style, as there is a time, for all
things; and no style could be so well suited for the
pamphlet as the balanced, measured, pointed, and polished
style which Dryden and Tillotson and Temple brought
in during the third quarter of the seventeenth century,
and which did not go out of fashion till the second
quarter of the nineteenth. We have indeed seen
pamphlets proper exercising considerable influence
in quite recent times; but in no instance that I can
remember has this been due to any literary merits,
and I doubt whether even the bare fact will be soon
or often renewed in our days. The written word—the
written word of condensed, strengthened, spirited
literature—has lost much, if not all, of
its force with an enormously increased electorate,
and a bewildering multiplicity of print and speech
of all kinds.
Whatever justice these reasonings may have or may
lack, the facts speak for themselves, as facts intelligently
regarded have a habit of doing. The first pamphlets
proper of great literary merit and great political
influence are those of Halifax in the first movement
of real party struggle during the reign of Charles
the Second; the last which unite the same requisites
are those of Scott on the eve of the first Reform
Bill. The leaflet and circular war of the anti-Corn
Law League must be ruled out as much as Mr. Gladstone’s
Bulgarian Horrors.
This leaves us a period of almost exactly a hundred
and fifty years, during which the kind, whether in
good or bad examples, was of constant influence; while
its best instances enriched literature with permanent
masterpieces in little. I do not think that any
moderately instructed person will find much difficulty
in comprehending the specimens here given. I
am sure that no moderately intelligent one will fail,
with a very little trouble, to take delight in them.
I do not know whether an artful generaliser could
get anything out of the circumstances in which the
best of them grew; I should say myself that nothing
more than the system of government, the conditions
of the electorate and the legislature, and the existence
from time to time of a superheated state in political
feeling, can or need be collected. In some respects,
to my own taste, the first of these examples is also