Conceive, for the fleeting instants permitted to such insufferable flights of fancy, our picked men ruling!  So despotic an oligarchy as would be there, is not a happy subject of contemplation.  It is not too much to say that a domination of the Intellect in England would at once and entirely alter the face of the country.  We should be governed by the head with a vengeance:  all the rest of the country being base members indeed; Spartans—­helots.  Criticism, now so helpful to us, would wither to the root:  fun would die out of Parliament, and outside of it:  we could never laugh at our masters, or command them:  and that good old-fashioned shouldering of separate interests, which, if it stops progress, like a block in the pit entrance to a theatre, proves us equal before the law, puts an end to the pretence of higher merit in the one or the other, and renders a stout build the safest assurance for coming through ultimately, would be transformed to a painful orderliness, like a City procession under the conduct of the police, and to classifications of things according to their public value:  decidedly no benefit to burly freedom.  None, if there were no shouldering and hustling, could tell whether actually the fittest survived; as is now the case among survivors delighting in a broad-chested fitness.

And consider the freezing isolation of a body of our quintessential elect, seeing below them none to resemble them!  Do you not hear in imagination the land’s regrets for that amiable nobility whose pretensions were comically built on birth, acres, tailoring, style, and an air?  Ah, that these unchallengeable new lords could be exchanged for those old ones!  These, with the traditions of how great people should look in our country, these would pass among us like bergs of ice—­a pure Polar aristocracy, inflicting the woes of wintriness upon us.  Keep them from concentrating!  At present I believe it to be their honest opinion, their wise opinion, and the sole opinion common to a majority of them, that it is more salutary, besides more diverting, to have the fools of the kingdom represented than not.  As professors of the sarcastic art they can easily take the dignity out of the fools’ representative at their pleasure, showing him at antics while he supposes he is exhibiting an honourable and a decent series of movements.  Generally, too, their archery can check him when he is for any of his measures; and if it does not check, there appears to be such a property in simple sneering, that it consoles even when it fails to right the balance of power.  Sarcasm, we well know, confers a title of aristocracy straightway and sharp on the sconce of the man who does but imagine that he is using it.  What, then, must be the elevation of these princes of the intellect in their own minds!  Hardly worth bartering for worldly commanderships, it is evident.