Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/268

 the doctrine of Divine Right, Rebels and Regicides: he, the author of Wat Tyler, calls those persons who think taxes, wars, the wanton waste of the resources of a country, and the unfeeling profligacy of the rich, likely to aggravate and rouse to madness the intolerable sufferings of the poor, "flagitious incendiaries, panders to insurrection, murder, and treason, and the worst of scoundrels"; he, the equalizer of all property and of popular representation, would protect the holders of rotten boroughs and of entailed sinecures, by shutting up all those who write against them in solitary confinement, without pen, ink, or paper, to answer the unanswerable arguments of Mr. Southey—in short, the author of the articles in the Quarterly Review, if he was not always a base and malignant sycophant, shews himself to be a base and malignant Renegade, by defending all the rotten, and undermining all the sound parts of the system to which he professes to be a convert, and by consigning over to a "vigour beyond the law" all those who expose his unprincipled, pragmatical tergiversations, or would maintain the system itself, without maintaining those corruptions and abuses, which were all that Mr. Southey at one time saw to hold up to execration in the English Constitution, and are all that he now sees to admire and revere in it. This is as natural in a Renegado, as it would be unaccountable in any one else.

We must get on a little faster, for to expose the absurdities of this Letter one by one would fill "a nice little book." In the pages immediately following, Mr. Southey glances at the Editor of the Edinburgh Review, whom he condemns "to bear a gore sinister tenné in his escutcheon," for saying that Mr. Southey does not form an exception to the irritabile genus vatum. He says, that he has often refrained from exposing the ignorance and inconsistency of his opponents, as well as "that moral turpitude," which, our readers must by this time perceive, can hardly fail to accompany any difference of opinion with him. He says that "he has a talent for satire, but that (good soul!) he has long since subdued the disposition." This must be since writing the