Qualis in aethereo felix Vertumnus Olympo
    Mille habet ornatus, mille decenter habet.

Yet, doing all justice to the sportive variability of these weekly, daily, or hourly speculators, shall I be pardoned, if I attempt a word on the part of us simple country folk?  It is not good for us, however it may be so for great statesmen, that we should be treated with variable politics.  I consider different relations as prescribing a different conduct.  I allow, that, in transactions with an enemy, a minister may, and often must, vary his demands with the day, possibly with the hour.  With an enemy, a fixed plan, variable arrangements.  This is the rule the nature of the transaction prescribes.  But all this belongs to treaty.  All these shiftings and changes are a sort of secret amongst the parties, till a definite settlement is brought about.  Such is the spirit of the proceedings in the doubtful and transitory state of things between enmity and friendship.  In this change the subjects of the transformation are by nature carefully wrapt up in their cocoons.  The gay ornament of summer is not seemly in his aurelia state.  This mutability is allowed to a foreign negotiator; but when a great politician condescends publicly to instruct his own countrymen on a matter which may fix their fate forever, his opinions ought not to be diurnal, or even weekly.  These ephemerides of politics are not made for our slow and coarse understandings.  Our appetite demands a piece of resistance.  We require some food that will stick to the ribs.  We call for sentiments to which we can attach ourselves,—­sentiments in which we can take an interest,—­sentiments on which we can warm, on which we can ground some confidence in ourselves or in others.  We do not want a largess of inconstancy.  Poor souls, we have enough of that sort of poverty at home.  There is a difference, too, between deliberation and doctrine:  a man ought to be decided in his opinions before he attempts to teach.  His fugitive lights may serve himself in some unknown region, but they cannot free us from the effects of the error into which we have been betrayed.  His active Will-o’-the-wisp may be gone nobody can guess where, whilst he leaves us bemired and benighted in the bog.

Having premised these few reflections upon this new mode of teaching a lesson, which whilst the scholar is getting by heart the master forgets, I come to the lesson itself.  On the fullest consideration of it, I am utterly incapable of saying with any great certainty what it is, in the detail, that the author means to affirm or deny, to dissuade or recommend.  His march is mostly oblique, and his doctrine rather in the way of insinuation than of dogmatic assertion.  It is not only fugitive in its duration, but is slippery in the extreme whilst it lasts.  Examining it part by part, it seems almost everywhere to contradict itself; and the author, who claims the privilege of varying his opinions, has exercised this privilege