Page:The English Review vol 7 Mar-Jun 1847 FGgaAQAAIAAJ.pdf/306

Rh as little sensible of the pressure of the court atmosphere as we are of that of the common atmosphere. On the contrary, political entities, that is, despots, deserve their liberty on this account, if on no other, that they are so well able to feel and to appreciate its value. A republican in the higher sense of the word, ex. gr. the Emperor of Persia, whose cap of liberty is a turban, and his tree of liberty a throne, fights behind his military propaganda and his sans-culottes for liberty with an ardour such as the ancient authors require and represent in our colleges. Nay, we have no right whatever to deny to such enthroned republicans the magnanimity of a Brutus, until they shall have been put to the test; and if good rather than evil deeds were chronicled in history, we should, among so many shahs, chans, rajahs, and chalifs, have to point out by this time many a Harmodius, Aristogiton, Brutus, &c., who did not shrink from paying for his liberty (for slaves only fight for that of others) the dear price of the life of otherwise good men, and even of his own friends."—Hesperus, s. W., vol. iii. p. 196-198.

After rising so high as he did in Hesperus, we are disappointed to find our author descend to a composition so full of false sentiment, of doubtful morality, and of sporting with life, death, and eternity, as the "Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces; or, the Wedded Life, Death, and Espousals of the poor counsellor, F. St. Siebenkäs. " The foundation on which Jean Paul raised the superstructure of one of the strangest and wildest stories that ever entered the human brain, is a duplicate man, i.e. two men so perfectly alike, internally and externally, as to enable the one to take the place of the other without the possibility of discovery, merely by affecting lameness, that being the only point in which one differs from the other, and which prevents the exchange of individualities from becoming a matter of mutual accommodation. But the author shall himself introduce the pair to our readers:

"Such a royal alliance of two strange souls has not often occurred. The same contempt for the fashionable child's play of life; the same hatred of littleness is combined with tenderness to the little; the same