5. Political, Etc

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_ Sir Robert Walpole, as to patriots, was like a man who has originally, from his nursery up, been thoroughly imbued with the terror of ghosts, which by education and example afterwards he has been encouraged to deny. Half he does disbelieve, and, under encouraging circumstances, he does disbelieve it stoutly. But at every fresh plausible alarm his early faith intrudes with bitter hatred against a class of appearances that, after all, he is upon system pledged to hold false. Nothing can be more ludicrous than his outcry, and his lashing of his own tail to excite his courage and his wrath and his denial--than his challenge of the lurking patriots in what he conceives the matter of frauds on the revenue. He assaults them as if he saw them standing in a row behind the door, and yet he pummels them for being mere men of the shades--horrible mockeries. Had there been any truth in their existence, surely, so strongly as they muster by their own report, some one or other of this fact should have given me warning--should have exposed the frauds. But no, all are silent as the grave. But here Sir Robert Walpole is as much wrong as if, doubting the value or power of Methodist preachers, he should make it the test of their useful existence that, as often as a highwayman, a footpad, started out of the wayside, from the other side should start a Methodist preacher to reason with him and to convert him.

Are the Whigs less aristocratic than the Tories? Not at all. In tendency by principle they are the same. The real difference is not in the creed, in the groundwork, but in certain points of practice and method.

'He took his stand upon the truth'--said by me of Sir Robert Peel--might seem to argue a lower use of '_the_ truth,' but in fact it is as happens to the article _the_ itself: you say _the_ guard, speaking of a coach; _the_ key, speaking of a trunk or watch, _i.e._, _the_ as by usage appropriated to every coach, watch, trunk. So here the truth, namely, of the particular perplexity.

The Sepoy mutiny will be best understood if you suppose the Roman emperors, from Romulus to Augustus, from the Alban Fathers down to the Ostrogoths--the whole line of a thousand years crowded into two.

Trunkmakers may be great men: they clearly have the upper hand of authors whom all the world admits to be great men. For the trunkmaker is the _principal_ in the concern--he makes the trunk, whereas the author, quite a secondary artist, furnishes only the linings.

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_Case of Casuistry._--Wraxall justly notices that errors like Prince Rupert's from excess of courage, however ruinous, are never resented by a country. _Ergo_ the inference that prudence would be, always if in Byng's or Lord St. German's cases, in a matter of doubt held to be bold fighting; and yet in morals is that an allowable position? _

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