Chapter XXVII: Book IV: Canto xi. st. 23 and 24

Note. _A striking description._ Burke’s _Reflections on the
Revolution in France_ (_Select Works_, ed. Payne, ii. 89).

Note. _The idea is in ‘Don Quixote.’_ Part II. Chap, xlviii. In
_The Examiner_ this note was concluded as follows: ‘Much the
same impression which the sight of the Queen of France made on
Mr. Burke’s brain sixteen years before the French Revolution,
did the reading of the New Eloise make on mine at the
commencement of it. “Such is the stuff of which our dreams are
made!”[103] This man (Burke), who was a half poet and a half
philosopher, has done more mischief than perhaps any other
person in the world. His understanding was not competent to the
discovery of any truth, but it was sufficient to palliate a
lie; his reasons, of little weight in themselves, thrown into
the scale of power, were dreadful. Without genius to adorn the
beautiful, he had the art to throw a dazzling veil over
the deformed and disgusting, and to strew the flowers of
imagination over the rotten carcase of corruption, not to
prevent, but to communicate the infection. His jealousy of
Rousseau[104] was one chief cause of his opposition to the
French Revolution. The writings of the one had changed the
institutions of a kingdom; while the speeches of the other,
with the intrigues of his whole party, had changed nothing but
the _turnspit of the King’s kitchen_.[105] He would have
blotted out the broad, pure light of Heaven, because it did not
first shine in upon the narrow, crooked passages of St.
Stephen’s Chapel. The genius of Rousseau had levelled the
towers of the Bastile with the dust; our zealous reformist, who
would rather be doing mischief than nothing, tried therefore to
patch them up again, by calling that loathsome dungeon the
King’s Castle, and by fulsome adulation of the virtues of a
Court Strumpet. This man had the impudence to say[106] that an
Elector of Hanover was raised to the throne of these kingdoms,
“in contempt of the will of the people,” while the hereditary
successor was still alive. He was at once a liar, a coward, and
a slave; a liar to his own heart, a coward to the success of
his own cause, a slave to the power he despised. See his Letter
about the Duke of Bedford, in which the man gets the better of
the sycophant, and he belabours the Duke in good earnest. It is
not a source of regret to reflect that he closed his eyes on
the ruin of liberty, which he had been the principal means of
effecting, and of his own projects, at the same time. He did
not live to see that deliverance of mankind, bound hand and
foot into the absolute, lasting, inexorable power of Kings
and Priests, which the author of Joan of Arc[107] has so
triumphantly celebrated. He did not live to see the sending of
the Liberales of Spain to the gallies, and the liberating the
Afrancesadoes from prison, for which our romantic Laureate, who
sees so much farther into futurity than the Edinburgh
Reviewers,[108] thanks God. He did not live to read that
Sonnet[109] to the King which Mr. Wordsworth has written, in
imitation of Milton’s Sonnet to Cromwell. There is a species of
literary prostitution which has sprung up and spread wide in
these days, more nauseous and despicable than any recorded in
Juvenal. It proves, however, one thing, that is, the force
which knowledge and opinion have acquired, and which makes it
worth while for power to court and pervert those faculties
which were intended to enlighten and reform the world, in order
to plunge it into a darkness that may be felt; and slavery,
that can only cease by putting a stop to the propagation of the
species.’ Hazlitt used a part of this passage as a note to his
essay ‘On Good-Nature.’ See _post_, p. 105 note.

72. _Mr. Burke_, _etc._ See his _Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful_,