< Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 003.djvu
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what charges were in circulation a-

gainst him. He knew it all before. Has he forgotten to whom he applied for explanation when Z.'s sharp essay on the Cockney Poetry cut him to the heart ? He knows what he said upon those occasions, and let him ponder upon it. But what could induce him to suspect the amiable Bill Hazlitt, " him, the immaculate," of being Z ? It was this, he imagined that none but that foundered artist could know the fact of his feverish importunities to be reviewed by him in the Edin- burgh Review. And therefore, hav- ing almost " as fine an intellectual txmch" as " Bill the painter" himself, he thought he saw Z. lurking beneath the elegant exterior of that highly ac- complished man.

" Dear Hazlitt, whose tact intellectual is
such,
That it seems to feel truth as one's fingers
do touch."

But, for the present, we have no- thing more to add. Leigh Hunt is delivered into our hands to do with him as we will. Our eye shall be up- on him, and unless he amend his ways, to wither and to blast him. The pages of the Edinburgh Review, we are confident, are henceforth shut against him. One wicked Cockney will not again be permitted to praise another in that journal, which, up to the moment when incest and adultery were defended in its pages, had, how- ever openly at war with religion, kept at least upon decent terras with the cause of morality. It was indeed a fatal day for Mr Jeffrey, when he de- graded both himself and his original coadjutors, by taking into pay such an unprincipled blunderer as Hazlitt. He is not a coadjutor, he is an accomplice. The day is perhaps not far distant, when the Charlatan shall be stripped to the naked skin, and made to swal- low his own vile prescriptions. He and Leigh Hunt are

" Arcades ambo
Et cantare -pares"
Shall we add,
" et respondere parati ?"

Z.

FOX AND PITT. [The following sketch is translated from a MS. letter of the Baron Von Lauerwinkel.] " I SHALL not easily forget the im- pression which was made upon me when I first found myself within the walls of the House of Commons. I was then a young man, and my tem- per was never a cold one. I had heard much of England. In the dearth of domestic freedom her great men had become ours ; for the human mind is formed for veneration, and every heart is an altar, undignified without its di- vinity, and useless without its sacri- fice. " A lover of England, and an ad- mirer of every thing which tends to her greatness, I contemplated, not- withstanding, with the impartiality of a foreigner, scenes of political de- bate and contention, which kindled into all the bigotries of wrath, the bosoms of those for whose benefit they were exhibited. Absurdities which found easy credence from the heated minds of the English, made small impression on the disinterested and, dispassionate German. While rival politicians were exhausting against each other every engine of oratorial conflict, their constituents eyed the combatants, as if every fear and every hope sat on the issue of the field, and prayed for their friends, and cursed their enemies, with all the fervour of a more fatal warfare ; but the calm spectator, whose optics were not blind- ed by the mists of prejudice, though his reason might make him wish the success of one party, was in no dan- ger of despising the honest zeal or the valour of those who were opposed to them. With whomsoever the victory of the day might be, the very existence of the combat was to him a sufficient proof, that the great issue was to be a good one that the spirit of England was entire that the system of suspi- cion, on which the confidence of her people is founded, was yet in all its vigour and that therefore, in spite of transient difficulties and petty disa- greements, her freedom would eventu- ally survive all the dangers to which, at that eventful period, by the mingled rage of despotism and democracy, its most sacred bulwarks were exposed. My eye formed acquaintance apace with the persons of all the eminent senators of England ; but their first and last attraction was in those of Pitt and Fox. The names of these illus- trious rivals had long been, even among foreigners, ' familiar as household words;' and I recognised them the moment I perceived them, from their

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