A Letter to William Smith, Esq. M. P.

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J. Murray, 1817 - 45 страница
Pamphlet in which Robert Southey addresses the attacks of William Smith against him. Rising to speak during the debate on the Seditious Meetings Bill on 14 March 1817, Smith had theatrically produced from one pocket a copy of Wat Tyler; from his other pocket, he pulled out the October 1816 Quarterly Review, with the page marked at Southey's article on parliamentary reform. After reading an excerpt from each, Smith then magisterially concluded: "It must remain with the government, and their legal advisers, to take what steps they might deem most advisable to repress this seditious work, and punish its author."

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Страница 24 - ... with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength, and therefore they loved him as truly and as fervently as he loved England.
Страница 1 - Review, and the opinions which were held by the author of Wat Tyler three and twenty years ago. It appears farther, according to the same authority, that the introduction of so strange a criticism, in so unfit a place, did not arise from the debate, but was a premeditated thing ; that you had prepared yourself for it by stowing the Quarterly Review in one pocket...
Страница 14 - In my youth, when my stock of knowledge consisted of such an acquaintance with Greek and Roman history as is acquired in the course of a regular scholastic education, when my heart was full of poetry and romance...
Страница 20 - Gibbon had, when he related how he had knelt at the feet of a confessor : for while I imbibed the republican opinions of the day, I escaped the Atheism, and the leprous immorality which generally accompanied them. I cannot, therefore, join with Beattie in blessing ' The hour when I escaped the wrangling crew, From Pyrrho's maze and Epicurus
Страница 15 - I should oppose to them more enlarged views of the nature of man and the progress of society. I should set forth with equal force the oppressions of the feudal system, the excesses of the insurgents, and the treachery of the government, and hold up the errors and crimes which were then committed, as a warning for this and for future ages. I should write as a man, not as a stripling; with the same heart, and the same desires, but with a ripened understanding and competent stores of knowledge.
Страница 27 - The one object to which I have ever been desirous of contributing according to my power, is the removal of those obstacles by which the improvement of mankind is impeded ; and to this the whole tenour of my writings, whether in prose, or verse, bears witness.
Страница 6 - And, knowing them as you did, I verily believe, that if it were possible to revoke what is irrevocable, you would at this moment be far more desirous of blotting from remembrance the disgraceful speech which stands upon record in your name, than I should be of cancelling the boyish composition which gave occasion to it.
Страница 23 - True it is that the events of the last five-and-twenty years have been lost upon you; perhaps you judge me by yourself ; and you may think that this is a fair criterion ;. .but I must protest against being measured by any such standard. Between you and me, Sir, there can be no sympathy, even though we should sometimes happen to think alike. We are as unlike in all things, as men of the same time, country, and rank in society, can be imagined to be ; and the difference is in our mind and mould as...
Страница 28 - I did not fall into the error of those who, having been the friends of France when they imagined that the cause of liberty was implicated in her success, transferred their attachment from the republic to the military tyranny in which it ended, and regarded with complacency the progress of oppression because France was the oppressor. " They had turned their faces toward the east in the morning to worship the rising sun, and in the evening they were looking eastward still, obstinately affirming that...
Страница 36 - ... numbers. Never, indeed, was there a more senseless cry than that which is at this time raised for retrenchment in the public expenditure as a means of alleviating the present distress. That distress arises from a great and sudden diminution of employment, occasioned by many coinciding causes, the chief of which is that the war-expenditure of from forty to fifty millions yearly has ceased.

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