Temeritas est videlicet florentis ætatis, prudentia senescentis.Adolescentia sola est invalida viribus, infirma consiliis, vitio calens, fastidiosa monitoribus, illecebrosa deliciis.CHAPTER III.
Temeritas est videlicet florentis ætatis, prudentia senescentis.
Adolescentia sola est invalida viribus, infirma consiliis, vitio calens, fastidiosa monitoribus, illecebrosa deliciis.
A literary life, like adversity, introduces a man to strange and opposite acquaintance. Genius, talent, and learning, are not limited to rank or station, and the ingenuous desire of receiving, as well as of communicating information, induces an individual of such propensities to put aside those prejudices, which marked differences of opinion in creeds and in politics, have an inavoidable tendency to excite. That such were the feelings, and such the circumstances of our venerable friend, at a certain period of his life, appear from the following loose memoranda, which he evidently intended, at some period or other, to arrange and methodize.
What shall that individual alledge, to ward off and repel the charge of inconsistency, who beganhis career in life under the auspices of James Townsend, of Bruce Castle, of the patriotic Aldermen Sawbridge and Oliver; who confesses that he spent agreeable hours with Price and Priestley, and Horne Tooke, and Major Cartwright; and Kippis; and afterwards with a well known popular Baronet, and Dr. Disney, and Walker of Liverpool, and very many others of this description. The same person in the decline of life, had no friends, associates, or indeed acquaintance, but with individuals whose principles, sentiments, and conduct, were as diametrically opposite, to those of the characters above named, as light to darkness.
The fact is to be thus explained:—The first entrance into life must be incidental altogether; our first connexions are unavoidably those of our relatives, and their friends and associates; principles are unfolded only by time and experience, and then it is, that intimacies and attachments are formed and confirmed by similarity of taste, sentiments, and pursuits. Our Sexagenarian, as appears from his notes, first lived, where almost the whole of what might properly be denominated taste and learning, was confined to the Dissenters. Mark, reader, not Methodists; never was much taste or learning visible among these sectaries, but among the old Presbyterians, who constituted, in the place alluded to, both a numerous and respectable class.Neither did the word Presbyterian by any means imply “an immoral man, a pestilent citizen, or a disloyal subject.” He was therefore and of necessity compelled, though firm and immoveable in his own religious tenets, to associate much and familiarly with them in order to participate in common in the literary barter, which was carried on with much fairness and liberality on all sides.
Afterwards having formed a tender domestic connection, the ramification from which, drew him not unwilling to the metropolis; his family engagements threw him abruptly, and in the heat of the American war, amidst “a croud of patriots,” many of whose names have before been mentioned. Young and inexperienced, dazzled with the name of liberty, confounded by subtleties of argument, which, if he could not accurately analyze, he was still unable to confute; and lastly, with the prospect placed before him of ease and independence, can it excite surprise, that he should get entangled in a net, of which the meshes were at the same time so fine, as to elude detection, and too strong to allow of escape?
Politics, however, was not the subject for which he was best qualified, nor did they ever interest his affections, or exercise the better powers of his mind. He was rather the instrument than the operator, and he confesses that he has often looked back witha sort of shame and compunction, at having been, sometimes, the means of circulating ingredients, of the full tendency of which he was then unconscious, but which he has since ascertained to have developed some of those poisonous seeds, the pernicious effects of which, Europe, nay the whole world, has for the last five and twenty years experienced.
He derives, however, some consolation from the hope, indeed the confident belief, that many of those individuals, to whom a chain of fortuitous circumstances thus introduced him, were not themselves aware of the ultimate consequences of their conduct. The spirit of distrust and suspicion, which, in our free country, always follows with unremitting vigilance, the measures and the ministers of government, the emotions of wounded pride, of disappointed ambition, and, in some instances of personal enmity, combined to form the stimulus which actuated the conduct of many of the best and ablest characters among them. Many also, it is apprehended, discovered the illusion in time, and retracted their errors, before they had operated to the injury of their country.
Be the above as it may, the whole of the junta has disappeared like “the baseless fabric of a vision,” and of the individuals more particularly alluded to, the writer of these pages was, whenthis was recorded, the “only rack which was left behind.”
It may not be altogether unentertaining to say a little on some of these worthies, the result of personal knowledge.