. He has also a knowledge of mankind, and of the
composition of the House. He takes a thrust which he cannot parry on his
shield--is 'all tranquillity and smiles' under a volley of abuse, sees
when to pay a compliment to a wavering antagonist, soothes the melting
mood of his hearers, or gets up a speech full of indignation, and knows
how to bestow his attentions on that great public body, whether he
wheedles or bullies, so as to bring it to compliance. With a long reach
of undefined purposes (the result of a temper too indolent for thought,
too violent for repose) he has equal perseverance and pliancy in
bringing his objects to pass. I would rather be Lord Castlereagh, as far
as a sense of power is concerned (principle is out of the question),
than such a man as Mr. Canning, who is a mere fluent sophist, and never
knows the limit of discretion, or the effect which will be produced by
what he says, except as far as florid common-places may be depended on.
Buonaparte is referred by Mr. Coleridge to the class of active rather
than of intellectual characters; and Cowley has left an invidious but
splendid eulogy on Oliver Cromwell, which sets out on much the same
principle. 'What,' he says, 'can be more extraordinary than that a
person of mean birth, no fortune, no eminent qualities of body, which
have sometimes, or of mind, which have often, raised men to the highest
dignities, should have the courage to attempt, and the happiness to
succeed in, so improbable a design as the destruction of one of the most
ancient and most solidly-founded monarchies upon the earth? That he
should have the power or boldness to put his prince and master to an
open and infamous death; to banish that numerous and strongly-allied
family; to do all this under the name and wages of a Parliament; to
trample upon them too as he pleased, and spurn them out of doors when he
grow weary of them; to raise up a new and unheard-of monster out of
their ashes; to stifle that in the very infancy, and set up himself
above all things that ever were called sovereign in England; to oppress
all his enemies by arms, and all his friends afterwards by artifice; to
serve all parties patiently for a while, and to command them
victoriously at last; to overrun each corner of the three nations, and
overcome with equal facility both the riches of the south and the
poverty of the north; to be feared and courted by all foreign princes,
and adopted a brother to the Gods of the