1831.] Parliamentary Reform. 365 



the colouring of romance, but those are things that have passed before 

 the living eye, and are yet sounding in the living ear. We may say, if 

 we will, that things which happened on the other side of a straight 

 fifteen miles wide cannot by possibility happen on this side ; that the pas- 

 sions of a Frenchman for plunder, power and revenge, are on a different 

 construction from those of an Englishman that if a French mob is all 

 extravagance, an English one is all gravity, wisdom, and respect for 

 property, law and religion"; that we have no Captain Swing among us, 

 and that our assizes do not present the most formidable instances of sul- 

 len excess, stubborn depravity, and ferocious violence, to be found in 

 any country of Europe. But until all this can be proved, we must be 

 suffered to shrink from a system altogether incoherent, rash and uncon- 

 stitutional, palpably contemptuous of experience, mistaking hazard for 

 security, and in the guise of renovation forcing on us REVOLUTION. 



APHORISMS ON MAN, BY THE LATE WILLIAM HAZLITT. 

 [Continued from page 632, Vol. X.} 



XL VIII. 



The world does not start fair in the race of time : one country has run 

 its course before another has set out or even been heard of. Riches, 

 luxury, and the arts, reach their utmost height in one place, while the 

 rest of the globe is in a crude and barbarous state ; decline thence- 

 forward, and can no more be resuscitated than the dead. The twelve 

 old Etruscan cities are stone walls, surrounded with heaps of cinders: 

 Rome is but the tomb of its ancient greatness. Venice, Genoa, are 

 extinct ; and there are those who think that England has had her day. 

 She may exclaim in the words of Gray's Bard " To triumph and to 

 die are mine." America is just setting out in the path of history, on the 

 model of England, without a language of its own, and with a continent 

 instead of an island to run its career in like a novice in the art, who 

 gets a larger canvas than his master ever had to cover with his second- 

 hand designs. 



XLIX. 



It was shrewdly observed that the ruin of states commences with the 

 accumulation of people in great cities, which conceal and foster vice and 

 profligacy. 



L. 



The world, said a sensible man, does not on the whole grow much 

 worse, nor abandon itself to absolute licentiousness, because as people 

 have children growing up, they do not wish them to be reprobates ; but 

 give them good advice and conceal their failings from them. This in 

 each successive generation brings morality on its legs again, however 

 sceptical in virtue or hardened in vice the old may become through 

 habit or bad example. 



LI. 



As children puzzle you by asking explanations of what they do not 

 understand, many grown people shine in company and triumph over 

 their antagonists by dint of ignorance and conceit. 



