Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/285

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
243

delicious protegés of ministerial gratitude, was, it seems, at one time a distributor of forged notes, and gained the reward promised by act of Parliament, by hanging his accomplices. Could not his Lordship's nice notions of honour relax a little farther, and recommend the legal traffic in bank notes and blood-money, as a new opening to honourable ambition and profitable industry? Castles's wife was also the keeper of a house of ill fame. Could not his Lordship, with the hand of a master, have drawn a veil of delicacy over this slight stain in his character, and redeemed a profession, not without high example to justify it, from the vulgar obloquy that attends it? We are afraid his Lordship is but half an adept in these sort of lax paradoxes, and that Peachum, Jonathan Wild, and Count Fathom, are much honester teachers of that kind of transcendental morality than he. This kind of revolutionary jargon must have sounded oddly in the ears of some of his Lordship's hearers. Mr. Wynne, who dreads all re-action so much, must have looked particularly argute at this innovation in the parliamentary theory of moral sentiments. What would the country gentlemen say to it? One would think Lord Lascelles's hat, that broad brimmed monument of true old English respectability, must have cowered and doubled down in dog's ears at the sound! What will the ardent and superannuated zeal of that preux Chevalier, the Editor of The Day and New Times, say to this stain upon the innate honour and purity of legitimacy, to this new proof that "the age of chivalry is gone for ever, and that of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded!" What will John Bull, who has been crammed these twenty five years with the draff and husks of concrete prejudices, unsifted, unbolted, in their rawest state, say to the analytical distinctions, to the refined police-morality of the Noble Lord? We might consider his harangue on the public services and private virtues of spies and informers, according to the utility-doctrine of modern philosophy, as forming an era in the history of English loyalty and Parliamentary pliability. What! Is it meant, after building up the present system of power and influ-