PREFACE.

ALTHOUGH I have always intended to reprint those few writings of mine in periodical works, which are not necessarily and by the nature of the subjects ephemeral, I should not have chosen for the republication this time of political excitement, were it not that there is to be found in one of these Essaysthe second of the series-an exposition of the views taken by our greatest Poets of the nature of liberty; which exposition, if it justly represent those views, will not be unaptly put forward for present consideration. Our great Poets have been, perhaps, our best political philosophers; and if the reading and study of poetry be put aside by political commotions,

it is because men lack time to be studious, or because the temper of their minds is rendered averse from contemplation, not because our poetry is wanting in applicability to such seasons; for unless I err greatly through partiality and partial knowledge, the poetry of this country (a country pre-eminently poetical), is its chief storehouse of civil wisdom; whilst it is in that other country whose poetry has ever been of an inferior order and beyond its own territories in the least estimation, that political wisdom has been most at fault, supplanted from time to time by the crudest theories and the most barbarous practice-in so much that despite the scientific attainments, the many dexterities and the colloquial cleverness of that people, any instructed man who should adventure to visit them at this time, might suppose himself, like the suitor in Beaumont and Fletcher's Play, "arrived amongst a nation

of new-found fools, on a land where no navigator had yet planted wit." Such would be the appearance; and though in reality there is no such thing as a nation of fools, yet there is unhappily a nation in which at particular conjunctures, and (let us hope) only for a season, the fools are so much the most active and energetic as to be the only parties apparent, and through defect of sober intrepidity on the part of those who are rational, foolhardihood is triumphant.

The Good want power, but to weep barren tears.
The Powerful goodness want: worse need for them.
The Wise want love; and those who love want wisdom;
And all best things are thus confused to ill."*

I do not mean of course to imply that it is for want of written poetry that the French nation cannot see it's way; nor that it is by virtue of written poetry that our way lies more in the light: but out of that imagi