ut he looked
in vain for evidence that they paid heed to the lessons which he
preached. The year of revolutions, 1848, followed by the setting up of
the French Empire and the collapse of the Roman Republic, produced
nothing but disappointment, and he became louder and more bitter in his
judgements on democracy. 1849 saw the birth of the _Latter-Day
Pamphlets_ in which he outraged Mill and the Radicals by his scornful
words about Negro Emancipation, and by the savage delight with which he
shattered their idols. He loved to expose what seemed to him the
sophistries involved in the conventional praise of liberty. Of old the
mediaeval serf or the negro slave had some one who was responsible for
him, some one interested in his physical well-being. The new conditions
too often meant nothing but liberty to starve, liberty to be idle,
liberty to slip back into the worst indulgences, while those who might
have governed stood by regardless and lent no help. Such from an extreme
point of view appeared the policy of _laisser-faire_; and he was neither
moderate nor impartial in stating his case. 'An idle white gentleman is
not pleasant to me;... but what say you to an idle black gentleman, with
his rum bottle in his hand,... no breeches on his body, pumpkin at
discretion, and the fruitfullest region of the earth going back to
jungle round him?' In a similar vein he dealt with stump oratory, prison
reform, and other subjects, tilting in reckless fashion at the shields
of the reforming Radicals of the day; nor was he less outspoken when he
met in person the champions of these views. A letter to his wife in 1847
tells of a visit to the Brights at Rochdale; how 'John and I discorded
in our views not a little', and how 'I shook peaceable Brightdom as with
a passing earthquake'. From books he could learn: to human teachers he
proved refractory. Had he been more willing to listen to others, his
judgements on contemporary events might have been more valuable. All his
life he was, as George Meredith says, 'Titanic rather than Olympian, a
heaver of rocks, not a shaper'; and this fever of denunciation grew with
advancing years. But with these spurts of volcanic energy alternate
moods of the deepest depression. His journal for 1850 says, 'This seems
really the Nadir of my fortunes; and in hope, desire, or outlook, so far
as common mortals reckon such, I never was more bankrupt. Lonely, shut
up within my contemptible and yet _not_ deliberately ign