effervescence of sentiment in the first period of the French Revolution. Extremes meet: and the most furious anarchists have since become the most barefaced apostates. Among the foremost of these I might mention the present poet-laureate and some of his friends. The prose-writers on that side of the question, Mr. Godwin, Mr. Bentham, &c. have not turned round in this extraordinary manner: they seem to have felt their ground (however mistaken in some points), and have in general adhered to their first principles. But “poets (as it has been said) have such seething brains, that they are disposed to meddle with everything, and mar all. They make bad philosophers and worse politicians[1]. They live, for the most part, in an ideal world of their own; and it would perhaps be as well
- ↑ “As for politics, I think poets are tories by nature, supposing them to be by nature poets. The love of an individual person or family, that has worn a crown for many successions, is an inclination greatly adapted to the fanciful tribe. On the other hand, mathematicians, abstract reasoners, of no manner of attachment to persons, at least to the visible part of them, but prodigiously devoted to the ideas of virtue, liberty, and so forth, are generally whigs. It happens agreeably enough to this maxim, thatthe whigs are friends to that wise, plodding, unpoetical people, the Dutch.”—Shenstone's Letters, 1746, p. 105.
