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Introduction to C# Programming
for the Microsoft .NET Platform ®

(Prerelease)
Workbook
Course Number: 2124A

This course is based on the prerelease Beta 1 version of Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET.
Content in the final release of the course may be different from the content included in this
prerelease version. All labs in the course are to be completed with the Beta 1 version of
Visual Studio .NET.

Part Number: X08-16666

Released: 03/2001
Information in this document is subject to change without notice. The names of companie s,
products, people, characters, and/or data mentioned herein are fictitious and are in no way intended
to represent any real individual, company, product, or event, unless otherwise noted. Complying
with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. No part of this document may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any
purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. If, however, your only
means of access is elect ronic, permission to print one copy is hereby granted.

Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual
property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any
written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any
license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.

 2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Microsoft, ActiveX, BackOffice, BizTalk, IntelliSense, JScript, MSDN, MS-DOS, PowerPoint,

Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows NT, and Windows
Media are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S.A.
and/or other countries.

Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective
owners.

Course Number: 2124A

Part Number: X08-16666
Released: 03/2001
 Introduction to C# Programming for the Microsoft® .NET Platform (Prerelease) iii

Contents
Introduction
Course Materials.......................................................................................... 2
Prerequisites................................................................................................ 3
Course Outline ................................ ................................ ............................ 4
Course Outline (continued) ........................................................................... 5
Course Outline (continued) ........................................................................... 6
Microsoft Certified Professional Program ....................................................... 7
Facilities..................................................................................................... 9
Module 1: Overview of the Microsoft .NET Platform
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Introduction to the .NET Platform.................................................................. 2
Overview of the .NET Framework ................................................................. 4
Benefits of the .NET Framework ................................................................... 5
The .NET Framework Components ................................................................ 7
Languages in the .NET Framework.............................................................. 13
Review ..................................................................................................... 14
Module 2: Overview of C#
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Structure of a C# Program............................................................................. 2
Basic Input/Output Operations....................................................................... 9
Recommended Practices ............................................................................. 15
Compiling, Running, and Debugging............................................................ 22
Lab 2: Creating a Simple C# Program........................................................... 36
Review ..................................................................................................... 45
Module 3: Using Value-Type Variables
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Common Type System ................................................................................. 2
Naming Variables ........................................................................................ 9
Using Built- in Data Types........................................................................... 15
Compound Assignment .............................................................................. 18
Increment and Decrement........................................................................... 20
Creating User-Defined Data Types............................................................... 24
Converting Data Types ............................................................................... 28
Lab 3: Creating and Using Types ................................................................. 32
Review ..................................................................................................... 36
Module 4: Statements and Exceptions
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Introduction to Statements................................ ................................ ............ 2
Using Selection Statements ........................................................................... 6
Using Iteration Statements ................................ ................................ .......... 17
Using Jump Statements............................................................................... 29
Lab 4.1: Using Statements ................................ ................................ .......... 32
Handling Basic Exceptions ......................................................................... 41
Raising Exceptions .................................................................................... 51
iv Introduction to C# Programming for the Microsoft® .NET Platform (Prerelease)

Lab 4.2: Using Exceptions ................................ ................................ .......... 62

Review ..................................................................................................... 72
Module 5: Methods and Parameters
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Using Methods ................................ ................................ ............................ 2
Using Parameters....................................................................................... 16
Using Overloaded Methods ......................................................................... 30
Lab 5: Creating and Using Methods ............................................................. 38
Review ..................................................................................................... 50
Module 6: Arrays
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Overview of Arrays...................................................................................... 2
Creating Arrays ......................................................................................... 11
Using Arrays ............................................................................................. 18
Lab 6: Creating and Using Arrays ................................................................ 31
Review ..................................................................................................... 42
Module 7: Essentials of Object-Oriented Programming
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Classes and Objects...................................................................................... 2
Using Encapsulation................................................................................... 10
C# and Object Orientation........................................................................... 21
Lab 7: Creating and Using Classes ............................................................... 39
Defining Object-Oriented Systems............................................................... 53
Review ..................................................................................................... 62
Module 8: Using Reference-Type Variables
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Using Reference-Type Variables................................ ................................ .... 2
Using Common Reference Types ................................................................. 15
The Object Hierarchy ................................................................................. 23
Namespaces in the .NET Framework............................................................ 29
Lab 8.1: Defining And Using Reference-Type Variables ................................. 35
Data Conversions....................................................................................... 43
Multimedia: Type-Safe Casting ................................................................... 56
Lab 8.2 Converting Data............................................................................. 57
Review ..................................................................................................... 63
Module 9: Creating and Destroying Objects
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Using Constructors ...................................................................................... 2
Initializing Data ......................................................................................... 13
Lab 9.1: Creating Objects ........................................................................... 31
Objects and Memory................................ ................................ .................. 39
Using Destructors...................................................................................... 45
Lab 9.2: Destroying Objects........................................................................ 60
Review ..................................................................................................... 65
Module 10: Inheritance in C#
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Deriving Classes.......................................................................................... 2
Implementing Methods ............................................................................... 10
 Introduction to C# Programming for the Microsoft® .NET Platform (Prerelease) v

Using Sealed Classes................................ ................................ .................. 26

Using Interfaces......................................................................................... 28
Using Abstract Classes ............................................................................... 42
Lab 10: Using Inheritance to Implement an Interface...................................... 53
Review ..................................................................................................... 71
Module 11: Aggregation, Namespaces, and Advanced Scope
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Using Internal Classes, Methods, and Data...................................................... 2
Using Aggregation ..................................................................................... 11
Lab 11.1: Specifying Internal Access............................................................ 22
Using Namespaces ..................................................................................... 28
Using Modules and Assemblies ................................................................... 49
Lab 11.2: Using Namespaces and Assemblies................................................ 63
Review ..................................................................................................... 69
Module 12: Operators, Delegates, and Events
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Introduction to Operators .............................................................................. 2
Operator Overloading ................................................................................... 8
Lab 12.1: Defining Operators ...................................................................... 21
Creating and Using Delegates ...................................................................... 40
Defining and Using Events................................ ................................ .......... 50
Demonstration: Handling Events................................ ................................ .. 56
Lab 12.2: Defining and Using Events ........................................................... 57
Module 13: Properties and Indexers
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Using Properties .......................................................................................... 2
Using Indexers ................................ ................................ .......................... 17
Lab 13: Using Properties and Indexers................................ .......................... 33
Review ..................................................................................................... 42
Module 14: Attributes
Overview................................ ................................ ................................ .... 1
Overview of Attributes ................................................................................. 2
Defining Custom Attributes ......................................................................... 13
Retrieving Attribute Values ......................................................................... 22
Lab 14: Defining and Using Attributes ......................................................... 26
Review ..................................................................................................... 34
Appendix A: Resources for Further Study
Resources for C# ......................................................................................... 1
 Introduction to C# Programming for the Microsoft® .NET Platform (Prerelease) vii

About This Course

This section provides you with a brief description of the course, audience,
suggested prerequisites, and course objectives.

Description
This five-day instructor-led course provides students with the knowledge and
skills needed to develop C# applications for the Microsoft® .NET platform. The
course focuses on C# program structure, language syntax, and implementation
details.

Audience
This course is intended for experienced developers who already have
programming experience in C, C++, Microsoft Visual Basic ®, or Java. These
developers will be likely to develop enterprise business solutions.

Student Prerequisites
This course requires that students meet the following prerequisites:
n Experience programming in C, C++, Visual Basic, Java, or another
programming language
n Familiarity with Microsoft’s .NET strategy as described on
Microsoft’s .NET Web site: http://www.microsoft.com/net/
n Familiarity with the .NET Framework as described in Microsoft MSDN®
Magazine:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/0900/Framework/
Framework. asp
and
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/1000/Framework2/
Framework2.asp
viii Introduction to C# Programming for the Microsoft® .NET Platform (Prerelease)

Course Objectives
After completing this course, the student will be able to:
n List the major elements of the .NET Framew ork and explain how C# fits
into the .NET platform.
n Analyze the basic structure of a C# application and be able to debug,
compile, and run a simple application.
n Create, name, and assign values to variables.
n Use common statements to implement flow control, looping, and exception
handling.
n Create methods (functions and subroutines) that can return values and take
parameters.
n Create, initialize, and use arrays.
n Explain the basic concepts and terminology of object-oriented programming.
n Use common objects and references types.
n Create, initialize, and destroy objects in a C# application.
n Build new C# classes from existing classes.
n Create self-contained classes and frameworks in a C# application.
n Define operators and add event specifications.
n Implement properties and indexers.
n Use predefined and custom attributes.
 Introduction to C# Programming for the Microsoft® .NET Platform (Prerelease) ix

Student Materials Compact Disc Contents

The Student Materials compact disc contains the following files and folders:
n Autorun.exe. When the CD is inserted into the CD-ROM drive, or when you
double -click the autorun.exe file, this file opens the CD and allows you to
browse the Student Materials CD or install Internet Explorer.
n Default.htm. This file opens the Student Materials Web page. It provides
you with resources pertaining to this course, including add itional reading,
review and lab answers, lab files, multimedia presentations, and course-
related Web sites.
n Readme.txt. This file contains a description of the compact disc contents and
setup instructions in ASCII format (non-Microsoft Word document).
n 2124a_sg.doc. This file is the Classroom Setup Guide. It contains a
description of classroom requirements, classroom setup instructions, and the
classroom configuration.
n AddRead. This folder contains additional reading pertaining to this course.
If there are no additional reading files, this folder does not appear.
n Appendix. This folder contains appendix files for this course. If there are no
appendix files, this folder does not appear.
n Democode. This folder contains demonstration code. If there is no
demonstration code, the Democode folder does not appear.
n Fonts. This folder contains fonts that are required to view the PowerPoint
presentation and Web-based materials.
n Ie5. This folder contains Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5.
n Labs. This folder contains files that are used in the hands-on labs. These
files may be used to prepare the student computers for the hands-on labs.
n Media. This folder contains files that are used in multimedia presentations
for this course. If this course does not include any multimedia presentations,
this folder does not appear.
n Menu. This folder contains elements for autorun.exe.
n Mplayer. This folder contains files that are required to install Windows
Media Player.
n Practices. This folder contains files that are used in the hands-on practices.
If there are no practices, the Practices folder does not appear.
n Sampapps. This folder contains the sample applications associated with this
course. If there are no associated sample applications, the Sampapps folder
does not appear.
n Sampcode. This folder contains sample code that is accessible through the
Web pages on the Student Materials CD. If there is no sample code, the
Sampcode folder does not appear.
n Sampsite. This folder contains files that create the sample site associated
with this course. I f there is no sample site, the Sampsite folder does not
appear.
n Setup. This folder contains additional files that may be required for lab setup.
If no additional files are required, the Setup folder does not appear.
x Introduction to C# Programming for the Microsoft® .NET Platform (Prerelease)

n Webfiles. This folder contains the files that are required to view the course
Web page. To open the Web page, open Windows Explorer, and in the root
directory of the compact disc, double-click Default.htm or Autorun.exe.
n Wordview. This folder contains the Word Viewer that is used to view any
Word document (.doc) files that are included on the compact disc. If no
Word documents are included, this folder does not appear.
 Introduction to C# Programming for the Microsoft® .NET Platform (Prerelease) xi

Document Conventions
The following conventions are used in course materials to distinguish elements
of the text.
Convention Use
u Indicates an introductory page. This symbol appears next
to a topic heading when additional information on the topic
is covered on the page or pages that follow it.
bold Represents commands, command options, and syntax that
must be typed exactly as shown. It also indicates
commands on menus and buttons, dialog box titles and
options, and icon and menu names.
italic In syntax statements or descriptive text, indicates argument
names or placeholders for variable information.
Title Capitals Indicate d omain names, user names, computer names,
directory names, and folder and file names, except when
specifically referring to case-sensitive names. Unless
otherwise indicated, you can use lowercase letters when
you type a directory name or file name in a dialog box or
at a command prompt.
ALL CAPITALS Indicate the names of keys, key sequences, and key
combinations — for example, ALT+SPACEBAR.
monospace Represents code samples or examples of screen text.
[] In syntax statements, enclose optional items. For example,
[filename] in command syntax indicates that you can
choose to type a file name with the command. Type only
the information within the brackets, not the brackets
themselves.
{} In syntax statements, enclose required items. Type only the
information within the braces, not the braces themselves.
| In syntax statements, separates an either/or choice.
å Indicates a procedure with sequential steps.
... In syntax statements, specifies that the preceding item may
be repeated.
. Represents an omitted portion of a code sample.
.
.
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
 Introduction

Contents

Introduction 1
Course Materials 2
Prerequisites 3
Course Outline 4
Microsoft Certified Professional Program 7
Facilities 9

This course is based on the prerelease Beta 1 version of Microsoft® Visual Studio .NET.
Content in the final release of the course may be different from the content included in
this prerelease version. All labs in the course are to be completed with the Beta 1
version of Visual Studio .NET.
Information in this document is subject to change without notice. The names of companies,
products, people, characters, and/or data mentioned herein are fictitious and are in no way intended
to represent any real individual, company, product, or event, unless otherwise noted. Complying
with all applicable copyright laws is the responsibility of the user. No part of this document may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, for any
purpose, without the express written permission of Microsoft Corporation. If, however, your only
means of access is electronic, permission to print one copy is hereby granted.

Microsoft may have patents, patent applications, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual
property rights covering subject matter in this document. Except as expressly provided in any
written license agreement from Microsoft, the furnishing of this document does not give you any
license to these patents, trademarks, copyrights, or other intellectual property.

 2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Microsoft, ActiveX, BizTalk, IntelliSense, JScript, Microsoft Press, MSDN, PowerPoint, Visual
Basic, Visual C++, Visual #, Visual Studio, Windows, and Windows Media are either registered
trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U.S.A. and/or other countries.

Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective
owners.
 Introduction 1

Introduction

n Name
n Company Affiliation
n Title/Function
n Job Responsibility
n Programming Experience
n C, C++, Visual Basic, or Java Experience
n Expectations for the Course
Other documents randomly have
different content
and Archimedes among our modern mathematicians, shall give the
description and state the value; and, in his words, I shall conclude:—
‘Aliud agere, to be impertinently busy, doing that which
conduceth to no good purpose, is, in some respect, worse than to do
nothing. Of such industry we may understand that of the Preacher,
“The labour of the foolish wearieth every one of them.”’
A better conclusion could not be found for this Lay-Sermon: for
greater nonsense the author could not write, even though he were
inspired expressly for the purpose.
MR. COLERIDGE’S LAY-SERMON
TO THE EDITOR OF THE EXAMINER
 Jan. 12, 1817.

Sir,

Your last Sunday’s ‘Literary Notice’ has given me some uneasiness

on two points.
It was in January, 1798, just 19 years ago, that I got up one
morning before day-light to walk 10 miles in the mud, and went to
hear a poet and a philosopher preach. It was the author of the ‘Lay-
Sermon.’ Never, Sir, the longest day I have to live, shall I have such
another walk as this cold, raw, comfortless one in the winter of the
year 1798. Mr. Examiner, Il y a des impressions que ni le tems ni les
circonstances peuvent effacer. Dusse-je vivre des siècles entiers, le
doux tems de ma jeunesse ne peut renaître pour moi, ni s’effacer
jamais dans ma mémoire. When I got there, Sir, the organ was
playing the 100th psalm, and when it was done, Mr. C. rose and gave
out his text, ‘And he went up into the mountain to pray, HIMSELF,
ALONE. As he gave out this text, his voice ‘rose like a steam of rich
distill’d perfumes,’ and when he came to the last two words, which he
pronounced loud, deep, and distinct, it seemed to me, Sir, who was
then young, as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the
human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn
silence through the universe. The idea of St. John came into my
mind, ‘of one crying in the wilderness, who had his loins girt about,
and whose food was locusts and wild honey.’ The preacher then
launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind. That
sermon, like this Sermon, was upon peace and war; upon church and
state—not their alliance, but their separation—on the spirit of the
world and the spirit of Christianity, not as the same, but as opposed
to one another. He talked of those who had ‘inscribed the cross of
Christ on banners dripping with human gore.’ He made a poetical
and pastoral excursion,—and to shew the fatal effects of war, drew a
striking contrast between the simple shepherd boy, driving his team
afield, or sitting under the hawthorn, piping to his flock, as though
he should never be old, and the same poor country-lad, crimped,
kidnapped, brought into town, made drunk at an ale-house, turned
into a wretched drummer-boy, with his hair sticking on end with
powder and pomatum, a long cue at his back, and tricked out in the
loathsome finery of the profession of blood.
‘Such were the notes our once-lov’d poet sung.’

And for myself, Sir, I could not have been more delighted if I had
heard the music of the spheres. Poetry and Philosophy had met
together, Truth and Genius had embraced, under the eye and with
the sanction of Religion. This was even beyond my hopes. I returned
home well satisfied. The sun that was still labouring pale and wan
through the sky, obscured by thick mists, seemed an emblem of the
good cause: and the cold dank drops of dew that hung half melted on
the beard of the thistle, had something genial and refreshing in
them; for there was a spirit of hope and youth in all nature, that
turned everything into good. The face of nature had not then the
brand of Jus Divinum on it;
‘Like to that sanguine flower inscrib’d with woe.’

Now, Sir, what I have to complain of is this, that from reading your
account of the ‘Lay-Sermon,’ I begin to suspect that my notions
formerly must have been little better than a deception: that my faith
in Mr. Coleridge’s great powers must have been a vision of my youth,
that, like other such visions, must pass away from me; and that all
his genius and eloquence is vox et preterea nihil: for otherwise how
is it so lost to all common sense upon paper?
Again, Sir, I ask Mr. Coleridge, why, having preached such a
sermon as I have described, he has published such a sermon as you
have described? What right, Sir, has he or any man to make a fool of
me or any man? I am naturally, Sir, a man of a plain, dull, dry
understanding, without flights or fancies, and can just contrive to
plod on, if left to myself: what right, then has Mr. C., who is just
going to ascend in a balloon, to offer me a seat in the parachute, only
to throw me from the height of his career upon the ground, and dash
me to pieces? Or again, what right has he to invite me to a feast of
poets and philosophers, fruits and flowers intermixed,—immortal
fruits and amaranthine flowers,—and then to tell me it is all vapour,
and, like Timon, to throw his empty dishes in my face? No, Sir, I
must and will say it is hard. I hope, between ourselves, there is no
breach of confidence in all this; nor do I well understand how men’s
opinions on moral, political, or religious subjects can be kept a
secret, except by putting them in The Correspondent.[27]
Semper Ego Auditor.
 BONAPARTE AND MULLER
THE CELEBRATED HISTORIAN OF SWITZERLAND

[From Müller’s Posthumous Works.]

‘On the 19th May I was informed by the Minister Secretary of

State, Maret, that at seven o’clock of the evening of the following day
I must wait on the Emperor Napoleon. I waited accordingly on this
Minister at the appointed hour, and was presented. The Emperor sat
on a sofa: a few persons whom I did not know stood at some distance
in the apartment. The Emperor began to speak of the History of
Switzerland; told me that I ought to complete it; that even the more
recent times had their interest. He came to the work of mediation,
discovered a very good will, if we do not meddle with any thing
foreign, and remain quietly in the interior. He proceeded from the
Swiss to the old Greek Constitution and History, to the Theory of
Constitutions, to the complete diversity of those of Asia, (and the
causes of this diversity in the climate, polygamy, &c.) the opposite
characters of the Arabian (which the Emperor highly extolled), and
the Tartarian Races (which led to the irruptions that all civilization
had always to dread from that quarter, and the necessity of a
bulwark): the peculiar value of European culture (never greater
freedom, security of property, humanity, and better laws in general,
than since the 15th century); then how every thing was linked
together, and in the inscrutable guidance of an invisible hand; and
how he himself had become great through his enemies: the great
confederation of nations, the idea of which Henry the Fourth never
had: the foundation of all religion and its necessity; that man could
not well bear completely clear truth, and required to be kept in
order; the possibility, however, of a more happy condition, if the
numerous feuds ceased, which were occasioned by too complicated
constitutions (such as the German), and the intolerable burden
suffered by States from excessive armies. A great deal more besides
was said, and indeed we spoke of almost every country and nation.
The Emperor spoke at first in his usual manner; but the more
interesting our conversation became, he spoke in a lower and lower
tone, so that I was obliged to bend myself quite down to his face; and
no man can have understood what he said (and therefore many
things I will not repeat).—I opposed him occasionally, and he entered
into discussion. Quite impartially and truly, as before God, I must
say, that the variety of his knowledge, the acuteness of his
observations, the solidity of his understanding (not dazzling wit), his
grand and comprehensive views, filled me with astonishment, and
his manner of speaking to me, with love for him. A couple of
Marshals, and also the Duke of Benevento, had entered in the mean
time; he did not break off. After five quarters, or an hour, and an
half, he allowed the concert to begin; and I know not, whether
accidentally or from goodness, he desired pieces, which, one of them
especially, had reference to pastoral life and the Swiss (Rans des
Vaches). After this, he bowed in a friendly manner and left the room.
—Since the audience with Frederick (1782), I never had a
conversation on such a variety of subjects, at least with any Prince: if
I can judge correctly from recollection, I must give the Emperor the
preference in point of solidity and comprehension; Frederick was
somewhat Voltairian. Besides, there is in his tone much firmness and
vigour, but in his mouth something as attractive and fascinating as in
Frederick. It was one of the most remarkable days of my life. By his
genius and his disinterested goodness he has also conquered me.’
 ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE TIMES
NEWSPAPER
ON MODERN APOSTATES

—— —— ——‘Out of these convertites

There is much matter to be heard and learnt.’—As you like it.

Dec. 15, 1816.

This is an age in which, to hear some people talk, you would

suppose there is no such thing as literary prostitution or political
apostacy, in the sense in which those vices used formerly to be
practised and condemned. We live in a liberal age; and a very
different and much more liberal turn has been given to the whole
matter. Men do indeed change sides, but then it is proper at present
that they should. They go from one extreme to another, they proceed
to the utmost lengths of violence and abuse, both against the
principles they formerly held and the persons they formerly agreed
with; but then this is entirely owing to the force of reason and honest
conviction. ‘All honourable men’—no hypocrites amongst them—
‘But all is conscience and tender heart.’

They have deserted the cause of liberty in as far as it deserted them;

but no farther. No sinister motives, no disappointed expectations
from a new order of things, no places to be got under the old, no
laureatships, no editorships, no popular odium to contend with, no
court-smiles to inveigle, have had any weight with them, or can be
supposed to have had any. They could not tolerate wrong on any
side, on the side of kings, or of the people. That’s all. They have
changed sides to preserve the integrity of their principles and the
consistency of their characters. They have gone over to the strong
side of the question, merely to shew the conscious purity of their
motives; and they chose the moment of the total failure of all hopes
from the weaker side to desert to the stronger, to put the matter out
of all doubt. They are not only above corruption, but above suspicion.
They have never once been at fault, have neither sneaked nor
shuffled, botched or boggled, in their politics. They who were loud
against the abuses of a principle which they set out with considering
as sacred, the right of a people to chuse their own form of
government, have not turned round to flatter and to screen, with the
closeness of their fulsome embraces, the abuses of a power which
they set out with treating as monstrous, the right of a discarded
family to reign over a nation in perpetuity by the grace of God. They
‘whose love of liberty was of that dignity that it went hand in hand
even with the vow they made this virgin bride,’ have not stooped to
‘commit whoredom greedily’ with that old harlot, Despotism. They
‘who struck the foremost man of all this world but for supporting
robbers,’ have not contaminated their fingers with base bribes, nor
turned receivers of stolen goods for paltry knaves and licensed
freebooters. Nice, scrupulous, firm, inflexible, uncorrupted,
incapable of injustice or disguise; patriots in 1793, and royalists in
1816; at all times extreme and at all times consistent in their
opinions; converts to the cause of kings, only because kings were
converts (unaccountable converts) to the cause of the people: they
have not become, nor are they in danger of becoming, thorough-
paced time-servers, regular-bred courtiers, trammelled tools of
despotism, hired pimps and panders of power. Nothing of the sort.
They have not been made (not they) the overweening dupes of their
own conceit and cunning. These political innocents have not, like the
two poor devils in the Recruiting Officer, been laid hold of,
entrapped, kidnapped, by that fell serjeant, Necessity, and then, in
the height of their admiration of ‘the wonderful works of nature’ and
the King’s picture, been enlisted for life in his Majesty’s service, by
some Court crimp, some Treasury scout in the shape of a well-bred
baronet or booby Lord. Our maiden poets, patriots, and
philanthropists, have not, it is to be hoped, like Miss Lucy Lockitt,
been bilked of their virtue, ‘bamboozled and bit.’ They have got into a
house of ill fame in the neighbourhood of Pall-Mall, like Miss
Clarissa Harlowe, but they will defend their honour to the last gasp
with their pens against that old bawd, Legitimacy, as she did hers
with a pen-knife against the old Lady in Duke’s place; or if the
opiates and provocatives unfairly administered, and almost
unavoidable when people get into such company and such situations,
should for an instant rob them of what they hold most dear, their
immaculate purity, they will, like Richardson’s heroine, die a
lingering death of grief and shame for the trick that has been played
upon their unsuspecting credulity!—See, here comes one of them to
answer for himself. It is the same person who in the year 1800 was
for making an example of the whole House of Commons (in spite of
the humble petition and remonstrance of the writer of this article in
favour of a small minority), for being the echoes of the King’s
speeches for carrying on the war against the French Revolution.
What is that thing he has in his hand? It is not, nor it cannot be, a
sonnet to the King, celebrating his ‘royal fortitude,’ in having brought
that war to a successful close fourteen years after!
‘Such recantation had no charms for him,
‘Nor could he brook it.’

Nor is it the same consistent person whose deep-toned voice

rebellows among the mountain echoes with peals of ideot rage and
demon laughter—
‘Proud Glaramara northward caught the sound,
‘And Kirkstone tossed it from his misty head,
‘That there was strange commotion in the hills,’—

at the infamy and madness of Sir Robert Wilson’s gallant conduct in

having rescued one of its victims from the fangs of that Bourbon
despotism which that royal fortitude had restored.—Is not that Mr.
Southey, with something of the glow on his cheek which he had in
writing Joan of Arc, and with the beaked curl of his nose which
provoked him to write the Inscription on Old Sarum, returning in
disgrace from the Prince’s Levee, for having indignantly noticed in
one of his Birth-day Odes, Ferdinand’s treatment of the Spanish
Patriots?—Just yonder, at the corner of Paternoster-row, you may
see Mr. Coleridge, the author of the eclogue called Fire, Famine, and
Slaughter, who has been to his bookseller’s to withdraw his ‘Lay
Sermon,’ or Statesman’s Manual in praise of Fire, Slaughter, and
Famine! But who is he ‘whose grief
 ‘Bears such an emphasis, whose phrase of sorrow
‘Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand
‘Like wonder-wounded hearers?’

’Tis the editor of The Times, (poor man, his virtuous indignation
must cost him a great deal of pains and trouble!) as hard at it as ever,
about liberty and independence without respect of persons; in a most
woundy passion, we warrant now, at finding legitimacy at some of its
old tricks, caught flagranti delicto, so that the poor gentleman could
not hush the matter up, if he would, and would not, if he could, he is
a man of such a nice morality, and such high notions of honour;—
thrown into daily and hourly cold sweats and convulsions at the
mention of daily and hourly acts of tyranny and base submission to
it; flying into the same heats and hysterics as ever, for he has all the
reason now, that he used to say he had; laying it on, thick and
threefold, upon the magnanimous deliverers of Europe; still in the
old King Cambyses’ vein, ‘horrors on horror’s head accumulating’;
heaping up epithets and compound epithets of abuse against his new
friends, as he used to do against his old ones, till Mr. Koenig’s new
press groans under the weight of both together; ordering in a new set
of types with a new set of unheard-of nicknames to be applied
everlastingly to the present candidates for newspaper fame, as the
worn-out, feeble, and now insignificant ones of Monster, Tyrant,
Fiend, Upstart, Usurper, Rebel, Regicide, Traitor, Wretch, Villain,
Knave, Fool, Madman, Coward, Impostor, Unnatural Monster,
Bloody Tyrant, Hellish Fiend, Corsican Upstart, Military Usurper,
Wicked Rebel, Impious Regicide, Perfidious Traitor, Vile Wretch,
Base Villain, Low-born Knave, Rank Fool, Egregious Madman,
Notorious Coward, Detestable Impostor, were applied to the old;
swearing as he picks his way to court along the streets, (so that the
people ask who the honest, angry gentleman is) that Ferdinand alone
has done more acts of baseness, treachery, cruelty, oppression,
infamy, and ingratitude, in one year, than Napoleon did in his whole
reign; teaching a parrot to call jade and rogue to all legitimate
princes and princesses that deserve it, as he used himself to rail at all
the illegitimate ones, whether they deserved it or not; repeating over
and over, till he is black in the face, Dr. Slop’s curse upon the Allies
and their proceedings; cursing them in Spain, cursing them in Italy,
cursing them in Genoa, cursing them in Saxony, cursing them in
Norway, cursing them in Finland, cursing them in Poland, cursing
them in France, cursing them every where as they deserve, and as the
people every where curse them; sending the Pope and the Inquisition
to the Devil; swooning at the extinction of Spanish liberty under the
beloved Ferdinand; going into a shivering fit at the roasting of
Protestants under Louis the Desired; biting his lips at Lord
Castlereagh’s Letter to Mon Prince; horror-struck at the transfer of
so many thousand souls, like so many head of horned cattle, from
one legitimate proprietor of the species to another, after all his
vapouring about the liberties of the people and the independence of
states; learned and lofty, sad and solemn, on the Convention of Paris;
looking big at the imposing attitude of Russia, and going stark
staring mad at the application of the torture and the thumb-screw to
the brave Cortes; gnashing his teeth, rolling his eyes, and dashing his
head against the wall, at the total falsification, and overthrow of
every one of his hopes and his prognostics in every corner of Europe
where the Allies have got footing, and there is no corner which they
have not got under their feet, like a toad under a harrow; and roaring
out like Perillus’s bull against the partitions and repartitions of the
coalesced Sovereigns, their invasions, conquests, seizures, transfers
of men and lands; the murders, massacres, imprisonments,
pillagings, frauds, treacheries, breaches of written treaties and of
verbal promises; usurpations, pretensions, and overt acts of
legitimacy, since it was restored to itself, to one and the self-same
tune that he used to lift up his voice, ‘his most sweet voice,’ against
Bonaparte’s wars and conquests, till the Stock Exchange was stunned
with the clamour, and Mr. Walter well-nigh fainted! The only fault of
this account is, that not one word of it is true.
‘Thy stone, oh Sisyphus, stands still:
‘Ixion rests upon his wheel!’

Once a Jacobin and always a Jacobin, is a maxim, which,

notwithstanding Mr. Coleridge’s see-saw reasoning to the contrary,
we hold to be true, even of him to this day. Once an Apostate and
always an Apostate, we hold to be equally true; and the reason why
the last is true, is that the first is so. A person who is what is called a
Jacobin (and we apply this term in its vulgarest sense to the persons
here meant) that is, who has shaken off certain well known
prejudices with respect to kings or priests, or nobles, cannot so easily
resume them again, whenever his pleasure or his convenience may
prompt him to attempt it. And it is because he cannot resume them
again in good earnest, that he endeavours to make up for his want of
sincerity by violence, either by canting till he makes your soul sicken,
like the author of The Friend, or by raving like a Bedlamite, as does
the Editor of The Times. Why does he abuse Bonaparte and call him
an upstart? Because he is himself, if he is any thing at all, an upstart;
and because Bonaparte having got the start of him one way, he
turned back to gain the race another, by trying for a court-livery, and
to recommend himself to the house of Brunswick, by proclaiming the
principles of the house of Stuart. Why does he make such a route
about Kings and Queens, and Dukes and Duchesses, and old women
of all ages and both sexes? Because he cares no more for them in his
heart than we do. How should he? ‘What’s Hecuba to him or he to
Hecuba?’ What motive has he, or what ground of passion, that he
should
‘Cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
‘And, like a whore, unpack his heart with words!’

None in the world, any more than the poor player in Hamlet, who
tried to ‘work his soul to his conceit, tears in his eyes, distraction in
his looks,’ because it was his cue to do so. He blusters and hectors,
and makes a noise to hide his want of consistency, as cowards turn
bullies to hide their want of courage. He is virulent and vulgar in
proportion as he is insincere; and yet it is the only way in which he
can seem himself not to be a hypocrite. He has no blind prejudices to
repose on; no unshaken principles to refer to; no hearty attachment
to altars or to thrones. You see the Jacobinical leaven working in
every line that he writes, and making strange havoc with his present
professions. He would cashier Louis and Ferdinand, Alexander and
Frederick, to-morrow, and hurl them headlong from their thrones
with a stroke of his pen, for not complying with any one of his
favourite dogmas. He has no regard for any thing but his own will; no
feeling of any thing but of hatred to the cause he has deserted, and of
the necessity of keeping from his mind, by every demonstration of
outward scorn and horror, whatever might recal his old,
unprofitable, exploded errors. His hatred and dread of the principles
of others, proceeds from his greater hatred and dread of his own. The
spectre of his former opinions glares perpetually near him, and
provokes his frantic zeal. For close behind him stalks the ghost of the
French Revolution, that unfortunate Miss Bailey of modern
politicians, their mistress and their saint, what time
——‘Society became their glittering bride
‘And airy hopes their children,’—

which, if he was once to turn round, would stare him in the face with
self-conviction, and make his pen drop from his hands. It is this
morbid conflict with his own feelings that many persons do not know
what to make of, and which gives such a tragic, and at the same time,
ludicrous air to his writings. He is obliged to wink and shut his
apprehension up, so that he is blind, stupidly blind to all that makes
against him, and all that makes for him. His understanding seems to
labour under a quinsy; and instead of the little bonnet rouge of 1793,
wears a huge pair of Bourbon blinkers for 1816. Hence the endless
inconsistencies in which he involves himself; and as it is his self-will
that makes him insensible to all objections, it is the same headstrong
obstinacy which makes him regardless of contradictions, and proof
against conviction.
In a word, to conclude this part of the subject, the writer of The
Times is governed entirely by his will; and this faculty is strong, and
bears sway in him, as all other principles are weak. He asserts a fact
the louder, as he suspects it to be without proof: and defends a
measure the more lustily, as he feels it to be mischievous. He listens
only to his passions and his prejudices, not to truth or reason. Prove
to him that any thing is the most idle fiction that ever was invented,
and he will swear to it: prove to him that it is fraught with
destruction to the liberties of mankind in all places and in all time to
come, and he is your own for ever. Sed hæc hactenus. Goethe has
given to one of his heroes this motto—‘Mad but wise.’ We would give
the following to the hero of The Times—Mad but not wise.

ILLUSTRATIONS OF ‘THE TIMES’ NEWSPAPER

ON MODERN LAWYERS AND POETS
 —— —— ——‘Facilis descensus Averni;
Noctes atque dies patet atri janua Ditis;
Sed revocare gradum superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est.’

December 22, 1816.

The meaning of which passage is, that it is easier to sail with the
stream, than to strive against it. Our classical reformers should have
known this passage in Virgil. They should have known themselves
too; but they did not. ‘Let no man go about to cozen honesty,’ or to be
a knave by halves. The man, as well as the woman, who deliberates
between his principle and the price of its sacrifice, is lost. The same
rule holds with respect to literary as to any other kind of prostitution.
It is the first false step that always costs the most; and which is, for
that reason, always fatal. It requires an effort of resolution, or at least
obstinate prejudice, for a man to maintain his opinions at the
expense of his interest. But it requires a much greater effort of
resolution for a man to give up his interest to recover his
independence; because, with the consistency of his character, he has
lost the habitual energy of his mind, and the indirect aid of prejudice
and obstinacy, which are sometimes as useful to virtue as they are to
vice. A man, in adhering to his principles in contradiction to the
decisions of the world, has many disadvantages. He has nothing to
support him but the supposed sense of right; and any defect in the
justice of his cause, or the force of his conviction, must prey on his
mind, in proportion to the delicacy and sensitiveness of its texture:
he is left alone in his opinions; and, like Sam Sharpset, in Mr.
Morton’s new comedy (when he gets into solitary confinement in the
spunging-house,) grows nervous, melancholy, fantastical, and would
be glad of somebody or anybody to sympathize with him; but when
he has once gone over to the strong side of the question (perhaps
from these very scruples of conscience, suggested by weakness and
melancholy, as ‘the Devil is very potent with such spirits, and abuses
them to damn them’) our wavering sceptic no longer finds the same
scruples troublesome; the air of a court promotes their digestion
wonderfully; the load on his conscience falls off at the foot of the
throne. The poet-laureate, standing with his laurel-wreath amidst
‘Britain’s warriors, her statesmen, and her fair,’ thinks no more or
says no more about the patriots of Spain pining in dungeons or
consigned to the torture, though it was his zeal, his virtuous,
patriotic, romantic, disinterested zeal for them, which brought them
there, and him to court. His Prince’s smile soothes the involuntary
pang of sympathy rising in his breast; and Mr. Croker’s whispers
drown their agonizing shrieks. When we are at Rome, we must do as
the people at Rome do. A man in a crowd must go along with the
crowd, and cannot stop to pick his way; nor need he be so particular
about it. He has friends to back him: appearances are for him; the
world is on his side; his interest becomes surety for his honour, his
vanity makes him blind to objections, or overrules them, and he is
not so much ashamed of being in the wrong in such good company.
It requires some fortitude to oppose one’s opinion, however right, to
that of all the world besides; none at all to agree with it, however
wrong. Nothing but the strongest and clearest conviction can support
a man in a losing minority: any excuse or quibble is sufficient to salve
his conscience, when he has made sure of the main chance, and his
understanding has become the stalking-horse of his ambition. It is
this single circumstance of not being answerable for one’s opinions
one’s-self, but being able to put them off to other men’s shoulders in
all crowds and collections of men, that is the reason of the violence of
mobs, the venality of courts, and the corruption of all corporate
bodies. It is also the reason of the degeneracy of modern apostates
and reformed Jacobins, who find the applause of their king and
country doubly cheering after being so long without it, and who go all
lengths in adulation and servility, to make up for their former
awkward singularity.
Many of the persons we have known, who have deserted the cause
of the people to take a high tone against those who did not chuse to
desert it, have been lawyers or poets. The last took their leave of it by
a poetic license; the first slunk out of it by some loop-hole of the law.
We shall say a word of each.
‘Our’s is an honest employment,’ says Peachum; ‘and so is a
lawyer’s.’ It is a lawyer’s business to confound truth and falsehood in
the minds of his hearers; and the natural consequence is, that he
confounds them in his own. He takes his opinion of right and wrong
from his brief: his soul is in his fee. His understanding is upon the
town, and at the service of any cause that is paid for before-hand. He
is not a hired suborner of facts, but of reasons; and though he would
not violate the sacred obligation of an oath, as Lord Ellenborough
calls it, by swearing that black is white, he holds himself at all times
in readiness and bound in duty, to prove it so. He will not swear to
an untruth to get himself hanged, but he will assert it roundly by the
hour together to hang other persons, however innocent,—if he finds
it in his retainer. We do not wish to say any thing illiberal of any
profession or set of men in the abstract. But we think it possible, that
they who are employed to argue away men’s lives at a venture in a
court of justice, may be tempted to write them away deliberately in a
newspaper. They who find it consistent with their honour to do this
under the sanction of the court, may find it to their interest to do the
same thing at the suggestion of a court. A lawyer is a sophist by
profession; that is, a person who barters his opinion, and speaks
what he knows to be false in defence of wrong, and to the prejudice
of right. Not only the confirmed habit of looking at any side of a
question with a view to make the worse appear the better reason,
from a motive always foreign to the question itself, must make truth
and falsehood sit loose upon him, and lead him to ‘look on both
indifferently,’ as his convenience prompts; but the quibbles and
quillets of the law give a handle to all that is petty and perverse in his
understanding, and enable him to tamper with his principles with
impunity. Thus the intricacy and verbal distinctions of the profession
promote the practical duplicity of its professors; and folly and
knavery become joint securities for one another. The bent of a
lawyer’s mind is to pervert his talents, if he has any, and to keep
down his feelings, if they are at all in his way. He lives by forging and
uttering counterfeit pretexts; he says not what he believes to be true,
but any thing that by any trick or sleight he can make others believe;
and the more petty, artificial, and far-fetched the contrivance, the
more low, contemptible, and desperate the shift, the more is he
admired and cried up in his profession. A perfect lawyer is one whose
understanding always keeps pace with the inability of words to keep
pace with ideas: who by natural conformation of mind cannot get
beyond the letter to the spirit of any thing; who, by a happy infirmity
of soul, is sure never to lose the form in grasping at the substance.
Such a one is sure to arrive at the head of his profession! Look at the
lawyers in the House of Commons (of course at the head of their
profession)—look at Garrow. We have heard him stringing
contradictions there with the fluency of water, every third sentence
giving the lie to the two former; gabbling folly as if it were the last
opportunity he might ever have, and as regularly put down as he rose
up—not for false statements, not for false reasoning, not for
common-place absurdities or vulgar prejudices, (there is enough of
these to be found there without going to the bar), but for such things
as nobody but a lawyer could utter, and as nobody (not even a
lawyer) could believe. The only thing that ever gave us a good
opinion of the House of Commons was to see the contempt with
which they treat lawyers there. The reason is, that no one there but a
lawyer fancies himself holding a brief in his hand as a carte-blanche
for vanity and impertinence—no one else thinks he has got an ad
libitum right to express any absurd or nonsensical opinions he
pleases, because he is not supposed to hold the opinions he expresses
—no one else thinks it necessary to confound the distinctions of
common-sense to subject them to those of the law (even Lord
Castlereagh would never think of maintaining it to be lawful to
detain a person kidnapped from France, on the special plea, that the
law in that case not provided had not declared it lawful to detain
persons so kidnapped, if not reclaimed by their own country)—no
one else thinks of huddling contradictions into self-evident truths by
legal volubility, or of sharpening nonsense into sense by legal
acuteness, or of covering shallow assumptions under the solemn
disguises of the long robe. The opinions of the gentlemen of the bar
go for nothing in the House of Commons: but their votes tell; and are
always sure—in the end! The want of principle makes up for the want
of talent. What a tool in the hands of a minister is a whole profession,
habitually callous to the distinctions of right and wrong, but perfectly
alive to their own interest, with just ingenuity enough to be able to
trump up some fib or sophistry for or against any measure, and with
just understanding enough to see no more of the real nature or
consequences of any measure than suits their own or their
employer’s convenience! What an acquisition to ‘the tried wisdom of
parliament’ in the approaching hard season!
But all this, though true, seems to fall short of the subject before
us. The weak side of the professional character is rather an
indifference to truth and justice, than an outrageous and inveterate
hatred to them. They are chargeable, as a general class of men, with
levity, servility, and selfishness; but it seems to be quite out of their
character to commence furious and illiberal fanatics against those
who have more principle than themselves. But not when this
character is ingrafted on that of a true Jacobin renegado. Such a
person (and no one else) would be fit to write the leading article in
The Times. It is this union of rare accomplishments (there seems,
after all, to be nothing contradictory in the coalition of the vices) that
enables that nondescript person to blend the violence of the bravo
with the subtlety of a pettifogging attorney—to interlard his furious
appeals to the lowest passions of the middle and upper classes, with
nice points of law, reserved for the opinion of the adepts in the
profession—to appeal to the passions of his city readers when any
thing wrong is to be done, and to their cooler and dispassionate
judgments when any thing right is to be done—that makes him stick
(spell-bound) to the letter of the law when it is in his favour, and set
every principle of justice and humanity at defiance when it interferes
with his pragmatical opinion—that makes him disregard all decency
as well as reason out of ‘the lodged hatred’ he bears to the cause he
has deserted, and to all who have not, like himself, deserted it—that
made him urge the foul death of the brave Marshal Ney, by putting a
legal interpretation on a military convention—that tempted him to
make out his sanguinary list of proscribed rebels and regicides (he
was not for making out any such list in the year 1793, nor long after
the event he now deplores with such well-timed indignation)—that
makes him desperately bent on hanging wretches at home in cobweb
chains spun from his own brains—that makes him stake the liberty of
nations or the independence of states on a nickname or a law-quillet,
as his irritable humour or professional habits prevail—that sets him
free from all restraints or deference to others in forming his own
opinions, and which would induce him to subject all the rest of the
world to his unprincipled and frantic dogmas, by entangling them in
the quirks and technicalities of the law! No one else would heroically
consign a whole continent to the most odious and despicable slavery
in the world, on the strength of a flaw in a proclamation: or call that
piece of diplomatic atrocity, the declaration of the 25th of March, a
delicious declaration. Such a man might sell his country, or enslave
his species, and justify it to his conscience and the world by some
law-term! Such men are very dangerous, unless when they are tied
up in the forms of a profession, where form is opposed to form,
where no-meaning baffles want of sense, and where no great harm is
done, because there is not much to do: but when chicane and want of
principle are let loose upon the world, ‘with famine, sword, and fire
at their heels, leashed in like hounds,’ when they have their prey
marked out for them by the passions, when they are backed by force
—when the pen of the Editor of The Times is seconded by eleven
hundred thousand bayonets—then such men are very mischievous.
‘My soul, turn from them: turn we to survey’ where poetry, joined
hand in hand with liberty, renews the golden age in 1793, during the
reign of Robespierre, which was hardly thought a blot in their
escutcheon, by those who said and said truly, for what we know, that
he destroyed the lives of hundreds, to save the lives of thousands:
(Mark; then, as now, ‘Carnage was the daughter of Humanity.’ It is
true, these men have changed sides, but not parted with their
principles, that is, with their presumption and egotism)—let us turn
where Pantisocracy’s equal hills and vales arise in visionary pomp,
where Peace and Truth have kissed each other ‘in Philarmonia’s
undivided dale’; and let us see whether the fictions and the forms of
poetry give any better assurance of political consistency than the
fictions and forms of law.
The spirit of poetry is in itself favourable to humanity and liberty:
but, we suspect, not in times like these—not in the present reign. The
spirit of poetry is not the spirit of mortification or of martyrdom.
Poetry dwells in a perpetual Utopia of its own, and is, for that reason,
very ill calculated to make a Paradise upon earth, by encountering
the shocks and disappointments of the world. Poetry, like the law, is
a fiction; only a more agreeable one. It does not create difficulties
where they do not exist; but contrives to get rid of them, whether
they exist or not. It is not entangled in cobwebs of its own making,
but soars above all obstacles. It cannot be ‘constrained by mastery.’ It
has the range of the universe; it traverses the empyreum, and looks
down on nature from a higher sphere. When it lights upon the earth,
it loses some of its dignity and its use. Its strength is in its wings; its
element the air. Standing on its feet, jostling with the crowd, it is
liable to be overthrown, trampled on, and defaced; for its wings are
of a dazzling brightness, ‘heaven’s own tinct,’ and the least soil upon
them shews to disadvantage. Sunk, degraded as we have seen it, we
shall not insult over it, but leave it to time to take out the stains,
seeing it is a thing immortal as itself. ‘Being so majestical, we should
do it wrong to offer it but the shew of violence.’ But the best things,
in their abuse, often become the worst; and so it is with poetry when
it is diverted from its proper end. Poets live in an ideal world, where
they make every thing out according to their wishes and fancies.
They either find things delightful, or make them so. They feign the
beautiful and grand out of their own minds, and imagine all things to
be, not what they are, but what they ought to be. They are naturally
inventors, creators not of truth but beauty: and while they speak to
us from the sacred shrine of their own hearts, while they pour out the
pure treasures of thought to the world, they cannot be too much
admired and applauded: but when, forgetting their high calling, and
becoming tools and puppets in the hands of others, they would pass
off the gewgaws of corruption and love-tokens of self-interest, as the
gifts of the Muse, they cannot be too much despised and shunned.
We do not like novels founded on facts, nor do we like poets turned
courtiers. Poets, it has been said, succeed best in fiction: and they
should for the most part stick to it. Invention, not upon an imaginary
subject, is a lie: the varnishing over the vices or deformity of actual
objects, is hypocrisy. Players leave their finery at the stage-door, or
they would be hooted: poets come out into the world with all their
bravery on, and yet they would pass for bonâ fide persons. They lend
the colours of fancy to whatever they see: whatever they touch
becomes gold, though it were lead. With them every Joan is a lady:
and kings and queens are human. Matters of fact they embellish at
their will, and reason is the plaything of their passions, their caprice,
or interest. There is no practice so base of which they will not become
the panders: no sophistry of which their understanding may not be
made the voluntary dupe. Their only object is to please their fancy.
Their souls are effeminate, half man and half woman: they want
fortitude, and are without principle. If things do not turn out
according to their wishes, they will make their wishes turn round to
things. They can easily overlook whatever they do not approve, and
make an idol of any thing they please. The object of poetry is to
please: this art naturally gives pleasure, and excites admiration.
Poets, therefore, cannot do well without sympathy and flattery. It is,
accordingly, very much against the grain that they remain long on
the unpopular side of the question. They do not like to be shut out
when laurels are to be given away at court—or places under
government to be disposed of, in romantic situations in the country.
They are happy to be reconciled on the first opportunity to prince
and people, and to exchange their principles for a pension. They have
not always strength of mind to think for themselves; nor honesty
enough to bear the unjust stigma of the opinions they have taken
upon trust from others. Truth alone does not satisfy their pampered
appetites, without the sauce of praise. To prefer truth to all other
things, it requires that the mind should have been at some pains in
finding it out, and that it should feel a severe delight in the
contemplation of truth, seen by its own clear light, and not as it is
reflected in the admiring eyes of the world. A philosopher may
perhaps make a shift to be contented with the sober draughts of
reason: a poet must have the applause of the world to intoxicate him.
Milton was however a poet, and an honest man; he was Cromwell’s
secretary.
We have here described the spirit of poetry when it comes in
contact with the spirit of the world. Let us see what results from it
when it comes in contact with the spirit of Jacobinism. The spirit of
Jacobinism is essentially at variance with the spirit of poetry: it has
‘no figures nor no fantasies,’ which the prejudices of superstition or
the world draw in the brains of men: ‘no trivial fond records’: it levels
all distinctions of art and nature: it has no pride, pomp, or
circumstance, belonging to it; it converts the whole principle of
admiration in the poet (which is the essence of poetry) into
admiration of himself. The spirit of Jacobin poetry is rank egotism.
We know an instance. It is of a person who founded a school of
poetry on sheer humanity, on ideot boys and mad mothers, and on
Simon Lee, the old huntsman. The secret of the Jacobin poetry and
the anti-jacobin politics of this writer is the same. His lyrical poetry
was a cant of humanity about the commonest people to level the
great with the small; and his political poetry is a cant of loyalty to
level Bonaparte with kings and hereditary imbecility. As he would
put up the commonest of men against kings and nobles, to satisfy his
levelling notions, so for the same reason, he would set up the
meanest of kings against the greatest of men, reposing once more on
the mediocrity of royalty. This person admires nothing that is
admirable, feels no interest in any thing interesting, no grandeur in
any thing grand, no beauty in any thing beautiful. He tolerates
nothing but what he himself creates; he sympathizes only with what
can enter into no competition with him, with ‘the bare earth and
mountains bare, and grass in the green field.’ He sees nothing but
himself and the universe. He hates all greatness, and all pretensions
to it but his own. His egotism is in this respect a madness; for he
scorns even the admiration of himself, thinking it a presumption in
any one to suppose that he has taste or sense enough to understand
him. He hates all science and all art; he hates chemistry, he hates
conchology; he hates Sir Isaac Newton; he hates logic, he hates
metaphysics, which he says are unintelligible, and yet he would be
thought to understand them; he hates prose, he hates all poetry but
his own; he hates Shakespeare, or what he calls ‘those interlocutions
between Lucius and Caius,’ because he would have all the talk to
himself, and considers the movements of passion in Lear, Othello, or
Macbeth, as impertinent, compared with the Moods of his own
Mind; he thinks every thing good is contained in the ‘Lyrical Ballads,’
or, if it is not contained there, it is good for nothing; he hates music,
dancing, and painting; he hates Rubens, he hates Rembrandt, he
hates Raphael, he hates Titian, he hates Vandyke; he hates the
antique; he hates the Apollo Belvidere; he hates the Venus de
Medicis. He hates all that others love and admire but himself. He is
glad that Bonaparte is sent to St. Helena, and that the Louvre is
dispersed for the same reason—to get rid of the idea of any thing
greater, or thought greater than himself. The Bourbons, and their
processions of the Holy Ghost, give no disturbance to his vanity; and
he therefore gives them none.

THE TIMES NEWSPAPER

ON THE CONNEXION BETWEEN TOAD-EATERS AND
TYRANTS

‘Doubtless, the pleasure is as great

‘In being cheated as to cheat.’

Jan. 12, 1817.

We some time ago promised our friend, Mr. Robert Owen, an

explanation of some of the causes which impede the natural progress
of liberty and human happiness. We have in part redeemed this
pledge in what we said about Coriolanus, and we shall try in this
article to redeem it still more. We grant to our ingenious and
romantic friend, that the progress of knowledge and civilization is in
itself favourable to liberty and equality, and that the general stream
of thought and opinion constantly sets in this way, till power finds
the tide of public feeling becoming too strong for it, ready to sap its
rotten foundations, and ‘bore through its castle-walls’; and then it
contrives to turn the tide of knowledge and sentiment clean the
contrary way, and either bribes human reason to take part against
human nature, or knocks it on the head by a more summary process.
Thus, in the year 1792, Mr. Burke became a pensioner for writing his
book against the French Revolution, and Mr. Thomas Paine was
outlawed for his Rights of Man. Since that period, the press has been
the great enemy of freedom, the whole weight of that immense
engine (for the purposes of good or ill) having a fatal bias given to it
by the two main springs of fear and favour.
The weak sides of human intellect, by which power effects its
conversion to the worst purposes, when it finds the exercise of free
opinion inconsistent with the existence and uncontrouled exercise of
arbitrary power, are these four, viz. the grossness of the imagination,
which is seduced by outward appearances from the pursuit of real
ultimate good; the subtlety of the understanding itself, which
palliates by flimsy sophistry the most flagrant abuses; interest and
advancement in the world; and lastly, the feuds and jealousies of
literary men among one another. There is no class of persons so little
calculated to act in corps as literary men. All their views are recluse
and separate (for the mind acts by individual energy, and not by
numbers): their motives, whether good or bad, are personal to
themselves, their vanity exclusive, their love of truth independent;
they exist not by the preservation, but the destruction of their own
species; they are governed not by the spirit of unanimity, but of
contradiction. They will hardly allow any thing to be right or any
thing to be wrong, unless they are the first to find out that it is so;
and are ready to prove the best things in the world the worst, and the
worst the best, from the pure impulse of splenetic overweening self-
opinion, much more if they are likely to be well paid for it—not that
interest is their ruling passion, but still it operates, silent and unseen,
with them as with other men, when it can make a compromise with
their vanity. This part of the character of men of letters is so well
known, that Shakespear makes Brutus protest against the fitness of
Cicero to be included in their enterprize on this very principle:—
‘Oh, name him not: let us not break with him;
For he will never follow any thing,
That other men begin.’

The whole of Mr. Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution[28] is

but an elaborate and damning comment on this short text. He
quarrelled with the French Revolution out of spite to Rousseau, the
spark of whose genius had kindled the flame of liberty in a nation.
He therefore endeavoured to extinguish the flame—to put out the
light; and he succeeded, because there were others like himself,
ready to sacrifice every manly and generous principle to the morbid,
sickly, effeminate, little, selfish, irritable, dirty spirit of authorship.
Not only did such persons, according to Mr. Coleridge’s valuable and
competent testimony (see his Lay Sermon) make the distinction
between Atheism and Religion a mere stalking-horse for the
indulgence of their idle vanity, but they made the other questions of
Liberty and Slavery, of the Rights of Man, or the Divine Right of
Kings to rule millions of men as their Slaves for ever, they made
these vital and paramount questions (which whoever wilfully and
knowingly compromises, is a traitor to himself and his species),
subordinate to the low, whiffling, contemptible gratification of their
literary jealousy. We shall not go over the painful list of instances;
neither can we forget them. But they all or almost all contrived to
sneak over one by one to the side on which ‘empty praise or solid
pudding’ was to be got; they could not live without the smiles of the
great (not they), nor provide for an increasing establishment without
a loss of character; instead of going into some profitable business
and exchanging their lyres for ledgers, their pens for the plough (the
honest road to riches), they chose rather to prostitute their pens to
the mock-heroic defence of the most barefaced of all mummeries, the
pretended alliance of kings and people! We told them how it would
be, if they succeeded; it has turned out just as we said; and a pretty
figure do these companions of Ulysses (Compagnons du Lys), these
gaping converts to despotism, these well-fed victims of the charms of
the Bourbons, now make, nestling under their laurels in the stye of
Corruption, and sunk in torpid repose (from which they do not like
to be disturbed by calling on their former names or professions), in
lazy sinecures and good warm berths! Such is the history and
mystery of literary patriotism and prostitution for the last twenty
years.—Power is subject to none of these disadvantages. It is one and
indivisible; it is self-centered, self-willed, incorrigible, inaccessible to
temptation or entreaty; interest is on its side, passion is on its side,
prejudice is on its side, the name of religion is on its side; the qualms
of conscience it is not subject to, for it is iron-nerved; humanity it is
proof against, for it sets itself up above humanity; reason it does not
hearken to, except that reason which panders to its will and flatters
its pride. It pursues its steady way, its undeviating everlasting course,
‘unslacked of motion,’ like that foul Indian idol, the Jaggernaut, and
crushes poor upstart poets, patriots, and philosophers (the beings of
an hour) and the successive never-ending generations of fools and
knaves, beneath its feet; and mankind bow their willing necks to the
yoke, and eagerly consign their children and their children’s children
to be torn in pieces by its scythe, or trampled to death by the gay,
gaudy, painted, bloodstained wheels of the grim idol of power!
Such is the state of the Eastern world, where the inherent baseness
of man’s nature, and his tendency to social order, to tyrannize and to
be tyrannized over, has had full time to develope itself. Our turn
seems next. We are but just setting out, it is true, in this bye-nook
and corner of the world—but just recovering from the effects of the
Revolution of 1688, and the defeated Rebellions of the years 1715 and
1745, but we need hardly despair under the auspices of the Editor of
The Times, and with the example of the defeat ‘of the last successful
instance of a democratic rebellion,’ by the second restoration of the
Bourbons, before our eyes and close under our noses. Mr. Owen may
think the example of New Lanark more inviting, but the persons to
whom he has dedicated his work turn their eyes another way![29]
Man is a toad-eating animal. The admiration of power in others is
as common to man as the love of it in himself: the one makes him a
tyrant, the other a slave. It is not he alone, who wears the golden
crown, that is proud of it: the wretch who pines in a dungeon, and in
chains, is dazzled with it; and if he could but shake off his own
fetters, would care little about the wretches whom he left behind
him, so that he might have an opportunity, on being set free himself,
of gazing at this glittering gewgaw ‘on some high holiday of once a
year.’ The slave, who has no other hope or consolation, clings to the
apparition of royal magnificence, which insults his misery and his
despair; stares through the hollow eyes of famine at the insolence of
pride and luxury which has occasioned it, and hugs his chains the
closer, because he has nothing else left. The French, under the old
regime, made the glory of their Grand Monarque a set-off against
rags and hunger, equally satisfied with shows or bread; and the poor
Spaniard, delivered from temporary to permanent oppression, looks
up once more with pious awe, to the time-hallowed towers of the
Holy Inquisition. As the herd of mankind are stripped of every thing,
in body and mind, so are they thankful for what is left; as is the
desolation of their hearts and the wreck of their little all, so is the
pomp and pride which is built upon their ruin, and their fawning
admiration of it.
‘I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning:
Alas! the gratitude of men
Has oftener set me mourning.’[30]

There is something in the human mind, which requires an object

for it to repose on; and, driven from all other sources of pride or
pleasure, it falls in love with misery, and grows enamoured of
oppression. It gazes after the liberty, the happiness, the comfort, the
knowledge, which have been torn from it by the unfeeling gripe of
wealth and power, as the poor debtor gazes with envy and wonder at
the Lord Mayor’s show. Thus is the world by degrees reduced to a
spital or lazar-house, where the people waste away with want and
disease, and are thankful if they are only suffered to crawl forgotten
to their graves. Just in proportion to the systematic tyranny
exercised over a nation, to its loss of a sense of freedom and the spirit
of resistance, will be its loyalty; the most abject submission will
always be rendered to the most confirmed despotism. The most
wretched slaves are the veriest sycophants. The lacquey, mounted
behind his master’s coach, looks down with contempt upon the mob,
forgetting his own origin and his actual situation, and comparing
them only with that standard of gentility which he has perpetually in
his eye. The hireling of the press (a still meaner slave) wears his
livery, and is proud of it. He measures the greatness of others by his
own meanness; their lofty pretensions indemnify him for his
servility; he magnifies the sacredness of their persons to cover the
laxity of his own principles. He offers up his own humanity, and that
of all men, at the shrine of royalty. He sneaks to court; and the bland
accents of power close his ears to the voice of freedom ever after; its
velvet touch makes his heart marble to a people’s sufferings. He is
the intellectual pimp of power, as others are the practical ones of the
pleasures of the great, and often on the same disinterested principle.
For one tyrant, there are a thousand ready slaves. Man is naturally a
worshipper of idols and a lover of kings. It is the excess of individual
power, that strikes and gains over his imagination: the general
misery and degradation which are the necessary consequences of it,
are spread too wide, they lie too deep, their weight and import are
too great, to appeal to any but the slow, inert, speculative, imperfect
faculty of reason. The cause of liberty is lost in its own truth and
magnitude; while the cause of despotism flourishes, triumphs, and is
irresistible in the gross mixture, the Belle Alliance, of pride and
ignorance.
Power is the grim idol that the world adore; that arms itself with
destruction, and reigns by terror in the coward heart of man; that
dazzles the senses, haunts the imagination, confounds the
understanding, and tames the will, by the vastness of its pretensions,
and the very hopelessness of resistance to them. Nay more, the more
mischievous and extensive the tyranny—the longer it has lasted, and
the longer it is likely to last—the stronger is the hold it takes of the
minds of its victims, the devotion to it increasing with the dread. It
does not satisfy the enormity of the appetite for servility, till it has
slain the mind of a nation, and becomes like the evil principle of the
universe, from which there is no escape. So in some countries, the
most destructive animals are held sacred, despair and terror
completely overpowering reason. The prejudices of superstition
(religion is another name for fear) are always the strongest in favour
of those forms of worship which require the most bloody sacrifices;
the foulest idols are those which are approached with the greatest
awe; for it should seem that those objects are the most sacred to
passion and imagination, which are the most revolting to reason and
common sense. No wonder that the Editor of The Times bows his
head before the idol of Divine Right, or of Legitimacy, (as he calls it)
which has had more lives sacrificed to its ridiculous and
unintelligible pretensions, in the last twenty-five years, than were
ever sacrificed to any other idol in all preceding ages. Never was
there any thing so well contrived as this fiction of Legitimacy, to suit
the fastidious delicacy of modern sycophants. It hits their grovelling
servility and petulant egotism exactly between wind and water. The
contrivers or re-modellers of this idol, beat all other idol-mongers,
whether Jews, Gentiles or Christians, hollow. The principle of an
idolatry is the same: it is the want of something to admire, without
knowing what or why: it is the love of an effect without a cause; it is a
voluntary tribute of admiration which does not compromise our
vanity: it is setting something up over all the rest of the world, to
which we feel ourselves to be superior, for it is our own handy-work;
so that the more perverse the homage we pay to it, the more it
pampers our self-will: the meaner the object, the more magnificent
and pompous the attributes we bestow upon it; the greater the lie,
the more enthusiastically it is believed and greedily swallowed:—
‘Of whatsoever race his godhead be,
Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,
In his defence his servants are as bold
As if he had been made of beaten gold.’

In this inverted ratio, the bungling impostors of former times, and

less refined countries, got no further than stocks and stones: their
utmost stretch of refinement in absurdity went no further than to
select the most mischievous animals or the most worthless objects
for the adoration of their besotted votaries: but the framers of the
new law-fiction of legitimacy have started a non-entity. The ancients
sometimes worshipped the sun or stars, or deified heroes and great
men: the moderns have found out the image of the divinity in Louis
XVIII.! They have set up an object for their idolatry, which they
themselves must laugh at, if hypocrisy were not with them the most
serious thing in the world. They offer up thirty millions of men to it
as its victims, and yet they know that it is nothing but a scare-crow to
keep the world in subjection to their renegado whimsies and
preposterous hatred of the liberty and happiness of mankind. They
do not think kings gods, but they make believe that they do so, to
degrade their fellows to the rank of brutes. Legitimacy answers every
object of their meanness and malice—omne tulit punctum.—This
mock-doctrine, this little Hunchback, which our resurrection-men,
the Humane Society of Divine Right, have foisted on the altar of
Liberty, is not only a phantom of the imagination, but a
contradiction in terms; it is a prejudice, but an exploded prejudice; it
is an imposture, that imposes on nobody; it is powerful only in
impotence, safe in absurdity, courted from fear and hatred, a dead
prejudice linked to the living mind; the sink of honour, the grave of
liberty, a palsy in the heart of a nation; it claims the species as its
property, and derives its right neither from God nor man; not from
the authority of the Church, which it treats cavalierly, and yet in
contempt of the will of the people, which it scouts as opposed to its
own: its two chief supporters are, the sword of the Duke of
Wellington and the pen of the Editor of The Times! The last of these
props has, we understand, just failed it.
We formerly gave the Editor of The Times a definition of a true
Jacobin, as one ‘who had seen the evening star set over a poor man’s
cottage, and connected it with the hope of human happiness.’ The
city-politician laughed this pastoral definition to scorn, and
nicknamed the person who had very innocently laid it down, ‘the true
Jacobin who writes in the Chronicle,’—a nickname by which we
profited as little as he has by our Illustrations. Since that time our
imagination has grown a little less romantic: so we will give him
another, which he may chew the cud upon at his leisure. A true
Jacobin, then, is one who does not believe in the divine right of
kings, or in any other alias for it, which implies that they reign ‘in
contempt of the will of the people’; and he holds all such kings to be
tyrants, and their subjects slaves. To be a true Jacobin, a man must
be a good hater; but this is the most difficult and the least amiable of
all the virtues: the most trying and the most thankless of all tasks.
The love of liberty consists in the hatred of tyrants. The true Jacobin
hates the enemies of liberty as they hate liberty, with all his strength
and with all his might, and with all his heart and with all his soul. His
memory is as long, and his will as strong as theirs, though his hands
are shorter. He never forgets or forgives an injury done to the people,
for tyrants never forget or forgive one done to themselves. There is
no love lost between them. He does not leave them the sole benefit of
their old motto, Odia in longum jaciens quæ conderet auctaque
promeret. He makes neither peace nor truce with them. His hatred
of wrong only ceases with the wrong. The sense of it, and of the
barefaced assumption of the right to inflict it, deprives him of his
rest. It stagnates in his blood. It loads his heart with aspics’ tongues,
deadly to venal pens. It settles in his brain—it puts him beside
himself. Who will not feel all this for a girl, a toy, a turn of the dice, a
word, a blow, for any thing relating to himself; and will not the friend
of liberty feel as much for mankind? The love of truth is a passion in
his mind, as the love of power is a passion in the minds of others.
Abstract reason, unassisted by passion, is no match for power and
prejudice, armed with force and cunning. The love of liberty is the
love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves. The one is
real; the other often but an empty dream. Hence the defection of
modern apostates. While they are looking about, wavering and
distracted, in pursuit of universal good or universal fame, the eye of
power is upon them, like the eye of Providence, that neither slumbers
nor sleeps, and that watches but for one object, its own good. They
take no notice of it at first, but it is still upon them, and never off
them. It at length catches theirs, and they bow to its sacred light; and
like the poor fluttering bird, quail beneath it, are seized with a
vertigo, and drop senseless into its jaws, that close upon them for
ever, and so we see no more of them, which is well.
‘And we saw three poets in a dream, walking up and down on the
face of the earth, and holding in their hands a human heart, which,
as they raised their eyes to heaven, they kissed and worshipped; and
a mighty shout arose and shook the air, for the towers of the Bastile
had fallen, and a nation had become, of slaves, freemen; and the
three poets, as they heard the sound, leaped and shouted, and made
merry, and their voice was choked with tears of joy, which they shed
over the human heart, which they kissed and worshipped. And not
long after, we saw the same three poets, the one with a receipt-stamp
in his hand, the other with a laurel on his head, and the third with a
symbol which we could make nothing of, for it was neither literal nor
allegorical, following in the train of the Pope and the Inquisition and
the Bourbons, and worshipping the mark of the Beast, with the
emblem of the human heart thrown beneath their feet, which they
trampled and spit upon!’—This apologue is not worth finishing, nor
are the people to whom it relates worth talking of. We have done
with them.
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