" "Mirabeau
confronted him (Necker) like his evil genius; and being totally without
scruple in the employment of any expedient, was but too successful in
overthrowing all reasonable proposals, and conducting the people to that
state of anarchy out of which his own ambition was to be rewarded," etc.
Similarly the verdicts on Pitt, Chatham, Nelson, Park, Lady Montagu, etc.,
are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of conscientious research,
fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as
in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend
itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to
show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be
united with a coarse and ignoble heart."]
The resolves, sometimes the efforts, of celebrated Englishmen,--"nos manet
oceanus,"--as Cromwell, Burns, Coleridge, and Southey (allured, some
critic suggests, by the poetical sound of Susquehanna), Arthur Clough,
Richard Hengist Horne, and Browning's "Waring," to elude "the fever and
the fret" of an old civilisation, and take refuge in the fancied freedom
of wild lands--when more than dreams--have been failures.
[Footnote: Cf. the American Bryant himself, in his longing to leave his
New York Press and "plant him where the red deer feed, in the green
forest," to lead the life of Robin Hood and Shakespeare's banished Duke.
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