"A high merit in Sir James Mackintosh was his real and unaffected philanthropy. He did not make the improvement of the great mass of mankind an engine of popularity, and a stepping-stone to power, but he had a genuine love of human happiness. Whatever might assuage the angry passions, and arrange the conflicting interests of nations; whatever could promote peace, increase knowledge, extend commerce, diminish crime, and encourage industry; whatever could exalt human character, and could enlarge human understanding, struck at once at the heart of your father, and roused all his faculties. I have seen him in a moment when this spirit came upon him--like a great ship of war--cut his cable, and spread his enormous canvass, and launch into a wide sea of reasoning eloquence."
For pure fun, one could not quote a better sample than the review of Waterton's[137] _Travels in South America_.--
"Snakes are certainly an annoyance; but the snake, though high-spirited, is not quarrelsome; he considers his fangs to be given for defence, and not for annoyance, and never inflicts a wound but to defend existence. If you tread upon him, he puts you to death for your clumsiness, merely because he does not understand what your clumsiness means; and certainly a snake, who feels fourteen or fifteen stone stamping upon his tail, has little time for reflection, and may be allowed to be poisonous and peevish. American tigers generally run away--from which several respectable gentlemen in Parliament inferred, in the American war, that American soldiers would run away also!
"The description of the birds is very animated and interesting; but how far does the gentle reader imagine the Campanero may be heard, whose size is that of a jay? Perhaps 300 yards. Poor innocent, ignorant reader! unconscious of what Nature has done in the forests of Cayenne, and measuring the force of tropical intonation by the sounds of a Scotch duck! The Campanero may be heard three miles!--this single little bird being more powerful than the belfry of a cathedral, ringing for a new dean--just appointed on account of shabby politics, small understanding, and good family!... It is impossible to contradict a gentleman who has been in the forests of Cayenne; but we are determined, as soon as a Campanero is brought to England, to make him toll in a public place, and have the distance measured.