‘But that two-handed engine at the door Stands ready to smite once and smite no more.’
_Give a dog an ill name, and hang him_—so says the proverb. The courtiers say, ‘Give a _patriot_ an ill name, and ruin him’ alike with Whig and Tory—with the last, because he hates you as a friend to freedom; with the first, because he is afraid of being implicated in the same obloquy with you. This is the reason why the Magdalen Muse of Mr. Thomas Moore finds a taint in the _Liberal_; why Mr. Hobhouse visits Pisa, to dissuade Lord Byron from connecting himself with any but gentlemen-born, for the credit of the popular cause. Set about a false report or insinuation, and the effect is instantaneous and universally felt—prove that there is nothing in it, and you are just where you were. Something wrong somewhere, in reality or imagination, in public or in private, is necessary to the minds of the English people: bring a charge against any one, and they hug you to their breasts: attempt to take it from them, and they resist it as they would an attack upon their persons or property: a nickname is to their moody, splenetic humour a freehold estate, from which they will not be ejected by fair means or foul: they conceive they have a _vested right_ in calumny. No matter how base the lie, how senseless the jest, it _tells_—because the public appetite greedily swallows whatever is nauseous and disgusting, and refuses, through weakness or obstinacy, to disgorge it again. Therefore Mr. Croker plies his dirty task—and is a Privy-councillor; Mr. Theodore Hook calls Mr. Waithman ‘Lord Waithman’ once a week, and passes for a wit!
I had the good fortune to meet the other day at Paris with my old fellow-student Dr. E——, after a lapse of thirty years; he is older than I by a year or two, and makes it five-and-twenty. He had not been idle since we parted. He sometimes looked in, after having paid La Place a visit; and I told him it was almost as if he had called on a star in his way. It is wonderful how friendship, that has long lain unused, accumulates like money at compound interest. We had to settle a long account, and to compare old times and new. He was naturally anxious to learn the state of our politics and literature, and was not a little mortified to hear that England, ‘whose boast it was to give out reformation to the world,’ had changed her motto, and was now bent on propping up the continental despotisms, and on lashing herself to them. He was particularly mortified at the degraded state of our public press—at the systematic organization of a corps of government-critics to decry every liberal sentiment, and proscribe every liberal writer as an enemy to the person of the reigning sovereign, only because he did not avow the principles of the Stuarts. I had some difficulty in making him understand the full lengths of the malice, the lying, the hypocrisy, the sleek adulation, the meanness, equivocation, and skulking concealment, of a _Quarterly Reviewer_,[45]