380 BULWEll AND HIS BOOK. 



only to the name. The word virtue is seldom heard with us ; the fa- 

 vourite word is " respectability." Not cultivating morality as a 

 science, all its rules are vague ; we proscribe one, we acquit another. 

 We court * * * *, Mr. imitates him, and is shunned like a 

 pestilence. 



And this is the English character, as it has been elaborately drawn 

 by Mr. Bulwer ! We contend that we have a perfect right to put all 

 these extracts together, and to condence them, to the end that the 

 spirit of his conclusions shall be more immediately brought under the 

 notice of the reader. We defy him to impugn the honesty with 

 which we have selected these specimens. We defy him to show that, 

 in any one instance, he has been speaking of a particular class, and 

 that we have given it a general application. That Mr. Bulwer has 

 arrived at general conclusions from a review of the vices or weak- 

 nesses of particular classes, we admit j but that is his fault, and not 

 ours. He must permit us to take them as they are presented to us, 

 namely, for conclusions affecting our national character. 



In truth, looking at the discordant and infinite elements of which 

 the several classes of this country are composed the conventional 

 wants, the artificial desires of the higher orders the real misery and 

 distress the abuse of good laws the framing of bad ones the 

 stimulants to crime, and the insufficient inducements to virtue which 

 operate upon the lower classes taking a general survey of all the ap- 

 parent phenomena which illumine, whether to purify or to destroy 

 our moral atmosphere, it will readily be conceded, that a philosopher 

 might well pause ere he put forth conclusions respecting our national 

 character, drawn from a sifting and contrasting of so multifarious an 

 assembly of qualifying causes. No wonder, therefore, that Mr. Bul- 

 wer has signally failed in the attempt, being, as by this time he must 

 feel himself to be,, endued with just as many faculties that go to the 

 formation of a philosopher, as his friend Mr. Disraeli enjoys in his 

 assumed character of historian. 



We shall take another opportunity of adverting to our author's 

 second-hand opinions respecting the Poor Laws, Education, and 

 Modern Philosophy. It may be sufficient to say, that he has urged 

 nothing with reference to the former two, that has not been advanced 

 many times before ; and that he knows nothing whatever of philo- 

 sophy neither its history, its objects, nor its employment. 



We shall select two instances of the very common-place order of 

 mind which it is Mr. Bulwer's misfortune to possess, and we have 

 done with him; on a future occasion, we may, perhaps, take the 

 trouble of exposing his insolence and pretension in matters upon 

 which he has, or ought to have, some power of discrimination. 



When Mr. Bulwer devotes a few pages to a review of our modern 

 polite literature, and barely mentions the name of a man who leaving 

 out of the question his merits as a philosopher, is a distinguished 

 ornament to it we mean Mr. Coleridge we know that there is some 

 private, personal and mean motive which has actuated him. But 

 when he affects the philosopher, it is another matter. We see, and 

 we despise his superficial coxcombry, and we laugh at his folly. We 

 know that there is no power on earth not even his power of conceit 



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