s was the
case there must be the greatest possible variety instead of a want of
it.' And having said this, this expert and sweeping orator takes up his
hat and walks downstairs after reading his lecture of truisms like a
playbill or an apothecary's advertisement; and should you stop him at
the door to say, by way of putting in a word in common, that Mr. Southey
seems somewhat favourable to his plan in his late Letter to Mr. William
Smith, he looks at you with a smile of pity at the futility of all
opposition and the idleness of all encouragement. People who thus swell
out some vapid scheme of their own into undue importance seem to me to
labour under water in the head--to exhibit a huge hydrocephalus! They
may be very worthy people for all that, but they are bad companions and
very indifferent reasoners. Tom Moore says of some one somewhere, 'that
he puts his hand in his breeches pocket like a crocodile.' The phrase is
hieroglyphical; but Mr. Owen and others might be said to put their
foot in the question of social improvement and reform much in the same
unaccountable manner.

I hate to be surfeited with anything, however sweet. I do not want to
be always tied to the same question, as if there were no other in the
world. I like a mind more Catholic.

I love to talk with mariners,
That come from a far countree.

I am not for 'a collusion' but 'an exchange' of ideas. It is well to
hear what other people have to say on a number of subjects. I do not
wish to be always respiring the same confined atmosphere, but to vary
the scene, and get a little relief and fresh air out of doors. Do all
we can to shake it off, there is always enough pedantry, egotism,
and self-conceit left lurking behind; we need not seal ourselves up
hermetically in these precious qualities, so as to think of nothing but
our own wonderful discoveries, and hear nothing but the sound of our own
voice. Scholars, like princes, may learn something by being incognito.
Yet we see those who cannot go into a bookseller's shop, or bear to be
five minutes in a stage-coach, without letting you know who they are.
They carry their reputation about with them as the snail does its
shell, and sit under its canopy, like the lady in the lobster. I cannot
understand this at all. What is the use of a man's always revolving
round his own little circle? He must, one should think, be tired of it
himself, as well as tire other people. A well-known writer says with
much bo