But the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies whilst it stimulated.
It is felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the picture.

It is not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in lurid storm lights.

Every object attitudinises, to the very mountains and stars almost, under the refraction of this wonderful humorist; and instead of the common earth and sky, we have a Martin's Creation or Judgment Day.

A crisis has always arrived which requires a _deus ex machina._ One can hardly credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the world always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us--as of a failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to begin again and try to do a little business.

It was perhaps inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and imagination on English politics, that a certain local emphasis and love 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.