It was perhaps inseparable from the attempt to
write a book of wit and imagination on English politics that a
certain local emphasis and of effect, such as is the vice of
preaching, should appear, producing on the reader a feeling of
forlornness by the excess of value attributed to circumstances. But
the splendor of wit cannot outdazzle the calm daylight, which always
shows every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work
out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such
glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this. Each age has its
own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young people; its
superstitions appear no superstitions to itself; and if you should
ask the contemporary, he would tell you with pride or with regret
(according as he was practical or poetic) that it had none. But
after a short time, down go its follies and weakness, and the memory
of them; its virtues alone remain, and its limitation assumes the
poetic form of a beautiful superstition, as the dimness of our sight
clothes the objects in the horizon with mist and color.
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