g, is
French; the talk (I had almost said the chatter) about virtue and
sympathy, and so forth, is French; the Whig recognition of the rights
of man, joined to a kind of bureaucratical distrust and terror of the
common people (a combination almost unknown in England), is French.
Everybody remembers the ingenious argument in _Peter Simple_ that the
French were quite as brave as the English, indeed more so, but that they
were extraordinarily ticklish. Jeffrey, we have seen, was very far from
being a coward, but he was very ticklish indeed. His private letters
throw the most curious light possible on the secret, as far as he was
concerned, of the earlier Whig opposition to the war, and of the later
Whig advocacy of reform. Jeffrey by no means thought the cause of the
Revolution divine, like the Friends of Liberty, or admired Napoleon like
Hazlitt, or believed in the inherent right of Manchester and Birmingham
to representation like the zealots of 1830. But he was always dreadfully
afraid of invasion in the first place, and of popular insurrection in
the second; and he wanted peace and reform to calm his fears. As a young
man he was, with a lack of confidence in his countrymen probably
unparalleled in a Scotchman, sure that a French corporal's guard might
march from end to end of Scotland, and a French privateer's boat's crew
carry off "the fattest cattle and the fairest women" (these are his very
words) "of any Scotch seaboard county." The famous, or infamous,
Cevallos article--an ungenerous and pusillanimous attack on the Spanish
patriots, which practically founded the _Quarterly Review_, by finally
disgusting all Tories and many Whigs with the _Edinburgh_--was, it
seems, prompted merely by the conviction that the Spanish cause was
hopeless, and that maintaining it, or assisting it, must lead to mere
useless bloodshed. He felt profoundly the crime of Napoleon's rule; but
he thought Napoleon unconquerable, and so did his best to prevent him
being conquered. He was sure that the multitude would revolt if reform
was not granted; and he was, therefore, eager for reform. Later, he got
into his head the oddest crotchet of all his life, which was that a
Conservative government, with a sort of approval from the people
generally, and especially from the English peasantry, would scheme for a
_coup d'etat_, and (his own words again) "make mincemeat of their
opponents in a single year." He may be said almost to have left the
world in