Beauchamps Career | Page 6

agreeably, being all that the inside occupants could require of
a conveyance, until the report of horsemen crossing the heath at a
gallop sets it dishonourably creaking and complaining in rapid motion,
and the squire curses his miserly purse that would not hire a guard, and
his dame says, I told you so!--Foolhardy man, to suppose, because we
have constables in the streets of big cities, we have dismissed the
highwayman to limbo. And here he is, and he will cost you fifty times
the sum you would have laid out to keep him at a mile's respectful
distance! But see, the wretch is bowing: he smiles at our carriage, and
tells the coachman that he remembers he has been our guest, and really
thinks we need not go so fast. He leaves word for you, sir, on your peril
to denounce him on another occasion from the magisterial Bench, for
that albeit he is a gentleman of the road, he has a mission to right
society, and succeeds legitimately to that bold Good Robin Hood who
fed the poor.--Fresh from this polite encounter, the squire vows money
for his personal protection: and he determines to speak his opinion of
Sherwood's latest captain as loudly as ever. That he will, I do not say. It
might involve a large sum per annum.
Similes are very well in their way. None can be sufficient in this case
without levelling a finger at the taxpayer--nay, directly mentioning him.
He is the key of our ingenuity. He pays his dues; he will not pay the
additional penny or two wanted of him, that we may be a step or two
ahead of the day we live in, unless he is frightened. But scarcely

anything less than the wild alarum of a tocsin will frighten him.
Consequently the tocsin has to be sounded; and the effect is woeful past
measure: his hugging of his army, his kneeling on the shore to his navy,
his implorations of his yeomanry and his hedges, are sad to note. His
bursts of pot-valiancy (the male side of the maiden Panic within his
bosom) are awful to his friends. Particular care must be taken after he
has begun to cool and calculate his chances of security, that he do not
gather to him a curtain of volunteers and go to sleep again behind them;
for they cost little in proportion to the much they pretend to be to him.
Patriotic taxpayers doubtless exist: prophetic ones, provident ones, do
not. At least we show that we are wanting in them. The taxpayer of a
free land taxes himself, and his disinclination for the bitter task, save
under circumstances of screaming urgency--as when the night-gear and
bed- linen of old convulsed Panic are like the churned Channel sea in
the track of two hundred hostile steamboats, let me say--is of the kind
the gentle schoolboy feels when death or an expedition has relieved
him of his tyrant, and he is entreated notwithstanding to go to his
books.
Will you not own that the working of the system for scaring him and
bleeding is very ingenious? But whether the ingenuity comes of native
sagacity, as it is averred by some, or whether it shows an instinct
labouring to supply the deficiencies of stupidity, according to others, I
cannot express an opinion. I give you the position of the country
undisturbed by any moralizings of mine. The youth I introduce to you
will rarely let us escape from it; for the reason that he was born with so
extreme and passionate a love for his country, that he thought all things
else of mean importance in comparison: and our union is one in which,
following the counsel of a sage and seer, I must try to paint for you
what is, not that which I imagine. This day, this hour, this life, and even
politics, the centre and throbbing heart of it (enough, when
unburlesqued, to blow the down off the gossamer-stump of fiction at a
single breath, I have heard tell), must be treated of men, and the ideas
of men, which are--it is policy to be emphatic upon truisms--are
actually the motives of men in a greater degree than their appetites:
these are my theme; and may it be my fortune to keep them at
bloodheat, and myself calm as a statue of Memnon in prostrate Egypt!

He sits there waiting for the sunlight; I here, and readier to be musical
than you think. I can at any rate be impartial; and do but fix your eyes
on the sunlight striking him and swallowing the day in rounding him,
and you have an image of the passive receptivity of shine and shade I
hold it good to aim at, if at the same