Puslapio vaizdai
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constitutional independence of the House of Lords; you are for ever displacing it from its supremacy as a co-ordinate estate of the realm; and whether you suceeed in passing your bill by actually swamping our votes by a batch of new peers, or by frightening a sufficient number of us out of our opinions by the threat of one,-equally you will have superseded the triple assent which the constitution requires to the enactment of a valid law, and have left the king alone with the delegates of the populace!"

March 3. 1832.

DISFRANCHISEMENT.

I AM afraid the Conservative party see but one half of the truth. The mere extension of the franchise is not the evil; I should be glad to see it greatly extended;-there is no harm in that per se; the mischief is that the franchise is nominally extended, but to such

classes, and in such a manner, that a practical disfranchisement of all above, and a discontenting of all below, a favoured class are the unavoidable results.

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's face is almost the only exception I know to the observation, that something feminine-not effeminate, mind-is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius. Look at that face of old Dampier, a rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind. How soft is the air of his countenance, how delicate the shape of his temples !

I think it very absurd and misplaced to call Raleigh and Drake, and others of our naval heroes of Elizabeth's age, pirates. No man is a pirate, unless his contemporaries agree to call him so. Drake said, "The

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subjects of the king of Spain have done their best to ruin my country: ergo, I will try to ruin the king of Spain's country." Would it not be silly to call the Argonauts pirates in our sense of the word?

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It is curious to mark how instinctively the reason has always pointed out to men the ultimate end of the various sciences, and how immediately afterwards they have set to work, like children, to realize that end by inadequate means. Now they applied to their appetites, now to their passions, now to their fancy, now to the understanding, and lastly, to the intuitive reason again. There is no doubt but that astrology of some sort or other would be the last achievement of astronomy: there must be chemical relations between the planets; the difference of their magnitudes

compared with that of their distances, is not explicable otherwise; but this, though, as it were, blindly and unconsciously seen, led immediately to fortune-telling and other nonsense. So alchemy is the theoretic end of chemistry: there must be a common law, upon which all can become each and each all; but then the idea was turned to the coining of gold and silver.

March 20. 1832.

REFORM BILL. CRISIS.

I HAVE heard but two arguments of any weight adduced in favour of passing this Reform Bill, and they are in substance these:

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1. We will blow your brains out if you don't pass it. 2. We will drag you through a horsepond if you don't pass it; and there is a good deal of force in both.

Talk to me of your pretended crisis ! Stuff! A vigorous government would in one month change all the data for your reasoning. Would you have me believe that the events of this world are fastened to a revolving cycle with God at one end and the Devil at the other, and that the Devil is now uppermost! Are you a Christian, and talk about a crisis in that fatalistic sense!

March 31. 1832.

JOHN, CHAP. III. VER. 4.- DICTATION AND INSPIRATION. - GNOSIS. - NEW TESTA

MENT CANON.

I CERTAINLY understand the τί ἐμοὶ κα σο yúval; in the second chapter* of St. John's Gospel, as having aliquid increpationis in it— a mild reproof from Jesus to Mary for interfering in his ministerial acts by requests on her own account. I do not think mat yuva was

* Verse 4.

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