Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/29

 Republic, and if he cannot have that, is indifferent about the rest. So (to compare great things with small) Mr. Place, of Charing-Cross, chose rather that Mr. Hobhouse should lose his Election than that it should not be accompanied with his Resolutions; so he published his Resolutions, and lost Mr. Hobhouse his Election. That is, a patriot of this stamp is really indifferent about every thing but what he cannot have; instead of making his option between two things, a good or an evil, within his reach, our exquisite Sir sets up a third thing as the object of his choice, with some impossible condition annexed to it,—to dream, to talk, to write, to be meddlesome and troublesome about, to serve him for a topic of captious discontent or vague declamation, and which if he saw any hopes of cordial agreement or practical co-operation to carry it into effect, he would instantly contrive to mar, and split it into a thousand fractions, doubts, and scruples, to make it an impossibility for any thing ever to be done for the good of mankind, which is merely the plaything of his theoretical imbecility and active impertinence! The Goddess of his idolatry is and will always remain a cloud, instead of a Juno. One of these virtuosos, these Nicolas Gimcracks of Reform, full of intolerable and vain conceit, sits smiling in the baby-house of his imagination, "pleased with a feather, tickled with a straw," trimming the balance of power in the looking-glass of his own self-complacency, having every thing his own way at a word's speaking, making