The Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59,
No. 368, June 1846, by Various

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 368, June 1846

Author: Various

Release Date: October 4, 2010 [EBook #34026]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCLXVIII. JUNE, 1846. VOL. LIX.

THE LITERATURE OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.[1]

Lord Brougham has resumed his memoirs of the eminent writers of England;
and every lover of literature will feel gratified by this employment of
his active research and of his vigorous pen.

One of the most striking distinctions of English public life from that
of the Continent, is in the condition of statesmen after their casual
retirement from power. The Foreign statesman seems to exist only in
office. The moment that sees him "out of place," sees him extinguished.
He is lost as suddenly to the public eye, as if he were carried to the
tomb of his ancestors. He retires to his country-seat, and there
subsides into the garrulous complainant against the caprices of fortune,
or buries his calamities in the quiet indulgence of his appetites;
smokes away his term of years, subsides into the lean and slippered
pantaloon, occupies his studies with the _Court Gazette_, and his
faculties with cards; and is finally deposited in the family vault, to
continue the process of mouldering which had been begun in his
arm-chair, to be remembered only in an epitaph. France, at the present
day, alone seems to form an exception. Her legislature affords a new
element in which statesmanship in abeyance can still float: the little
vessel is there at least kept in view of mankind; if it makes no
progress, it at least keeps above water; and, however incapable of
reaching the port by its own means, the fluctuations of the national
surge, sometimes so powe