Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/305

288 refreshment; in His presence stands no grave."—Hesperus, s. W., vol. viii. pp. 274, 275.

Besides the higher philosophy of life, pointing to another and an eternal world, there is in Hesperus an undercurrent of political feeling, an advocacy of civil liberty, in opposition to the miserable despotism under which at that period the petty states of Germany were groaning, which, no doubt, had its share in rendering the work as popular as it was from the very first. Of the keenness of Jean Paul's tone on this subject our readers may judge by the following extract:

"Not in colleges and republics only, but in monarchies too, speeches enough are made—not to the people, but to its curatores absentis. And in like manner there is in monarchies liberty enough, though in despotic states there is perhaps more of it than in them and in republics. In a truly despotic state, as in the frozen cask of wine, the spirit (of liberty) is not lost, but only concentrated from the watery mass around into one fiery point. In such a happy state liberty is only divided among the few who are ripe for it, that is, the sultan and his bashaws; and this goddess (which is more frequently to be seen in effigy than even the bird phoenix) indemnifies herself for the smaller number by the greater value and zeal of her worshippers; and that the more easily, as the few epopts and mystagogues which she has in such states enjoy her influence to a degree far beyond what a whole people can ever attain unto. Like inheritances, liberty is reduced by the number of participants; and, for my part, I am convinced that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an oil-painting can be placed only on a canvas in which there are no knots or uneven places; but a despotic state is a piece done in relief,—or, stranger still, despotic liberty lives, like canary-birds, only in high cages; republican liberty, like linnets, only in low and long ones.

"A despot is the practical reason of a whole country; his subjects are so many instincts which rebel against it, and must be subdued. To him alone, therefore, the legislative power belongs (the executive to his favourites). Even men who had no higher pretensions than that they were men of sense, like Solon or Lycurgus, had the legislative power all to themselves, and were the magnetic needles which guided the vessel of the state; but a regular despot, the enthroned successor of such men, is almost entirely made up of laws, both his own and other people's; and, like a magnetic mountain, he draws the state vessel after him. 'To be one's own slave is the hardest of slaveries' says some ancient, at least some Latin, writer; but the despot imposes upon others the easier form of slavery only, and the harder one he takes upon himself. Another author says, Parere scire, par imperio gloria est; so that a negro slave acquires as much glory and honour as a negro king. Servi pro nullis habentur; which is the reason why political ciphers are