a man of vaster
imagination and mightier nature,--compare him with Edmund Burke, in what
we call Burke's old age; and as you read one of Burke's immortal
pamphlets, composed just before his death, do you not feel your blood
kindle and your mind expand, as you come into communion with that bright
and broad intellect, competent to grapple with the most complicated
relations of European politics,--with that audacious will, whose
purposes glow with immortal life,--and especially with that large and
noble soul, rich in experience, rich in wisdom, but richer still in the
freshness, the ardor, the eloquence, the chivalrous daring of youth?
Byron is old at twenty-five; Burke is young at sixty-six.

The spirit of youth may thus, as in the case of Byron, be burnt out of
the young man by the egotism of passion; but it may also be frozen up in
his breast by the egotism of opinion. Woe to the young shoulders
afflicted with the conceit that they support old heads! When this mental
disease assumes the form of flippancy, it renders a young person happily
unconscious that Nature has any stores of wisdom which she has not
thought fit to deposit in his cranium, or that his mind can properly
assume any other attitude towards an opponent than that of placid and
pitying contempt.

But this intellectual presumption, ridiculous in its flippant or
pompous, becomes terrible in its malignant, expression. Thus, the
headstrong young men who pushed the French Revolution of 1789 into the
excesses of the Reign of Terror were well-intentioned reformers, driven
into crime by the fanaticism of mental conceit. This is especially true
of Robespierre and St. Just. Their hearts were hardened through their
heads. The abstract notions of freedom and philanthropy were imbedded in
their brains as truths, without being rooted in their characters as
sentiments; and into the form of these inexorable notions they aimed to
shape France. They were of course opposed by human nature. Opposition
made them personally cruel, because it made them intellectually
remorseless. With no instincts of humanity to guide their ideas of its
rights, it was but natural that offended pride of opinion should fester
into that malignant passion which puts relentlessness into the will.
Everything and everybody that opposed the onward movement of the great
cause ought, they conceived, to be removed. The readiest way to remove
them was by tyranny, terror, and murder; for the swiftest method