51. Shakespeare’s Cliff at Dover.

How strange that the description of Dover Cliff, in King Lear, should ever have been supposed to have been meant for a reality!  I know nothing that more forcibly shows the little reflection with which even men of sense read poetry.  The cliff cannot be more than 400 feet high; and yet, ‘how truly,’ exclaims the historian of Dover, ’has Shakespeare described the precipice!’ How much better would the historian have done, had he given us its actual elevation![86]

[86] Memoirs, ii. 116.

52. Of Affairs on the Continent, 1828.

LETTER TO A NEPHEW.

Rydal Mount, Nov. 27. 1828.

MY DEAR C——­,

It gives me much pleasure to learn that your residence in France has answered so well.  As I had recommended the step, I felt more especially anxious to be informed of the result.  I have only to regret that you did not tell me whether the interests of a foreign country and a brilliant metropolis had encroached more upon the time due to academical studies than was proper.

As to the revolution which Mr. D——­ calculates upon, I agree with him that a great change must take place, but not altogether, or even mainly, from the causes which he looks to, if I be right in conjecturing that he expects that the religionists who have at present such influence over the king’s mind will be predominant.  The extremes to which they wish to carry things are not sufficiently in the spirit of the age to suit their purpose.  The French monarchy must undergo a great change, or it will fall altogether.  A constitution of government so disproportioned cannot endure.  A monarchy, without a powerful aristocracy or nobility graduating into a gentry, and so downwards, cannot long subsist.  This is wanting in France, and must continue to be wanting till the restrictions imposed on the disposal of property by will, through the Code Napoleon, are done away with:  and it may be observed, by the by, that there is a bareness, some would call it a simplicity, in that code which unfits it for a complex state of society like that of France, so that evasions and stretchings of its provisions are already found necessary, to a degree which will ere long convince the French people of the necessity of disencumbering themselves of it.  But to return.  My apprehension is, that for the cause assigned, the French monarchy may fall before an aristocracy can be raised to give it necessary support.  The great monarchies of Russia, Prussia, and Austria, having not yet been subject to popular revolutions, are still able to maintain themselves, through the old feudal forces and qualities, with something, not much, of the feudal virtues.  This cannot be in France; popular inclinations are much too strong—­thanks, I will say so far, to the Revolution.  How is a government fit for her condition to be supported, but