Passing by the kindred and usually accompanying influence of birth in a certain rank--and, where education has been pre-defined from childhood for the express purpose of future political power, the tendency of such education to warp (and therefore weaken) the intellect;--we may join at once, with the privation which I have been noticing, a delusion equally common.

It is this: that practical Statesmen assume too much credit to themselves for their ability to see into the motives and manage the selfish passions of their immediate agents and dependants; and for the skill with which they baffle or resist the aims of their opponents.

A promptness in looking through the most superficial part of the characters of those men--who, by the very circumstance of their contending ambitiously for the rewards and honours of government, are separated from the mass of the society to which they belong--is mistaken for a knowledge of human kind.

Hence, where higher knowledge is a prime requisite, they not only are unfurnished, but, being unconscious that they are so, they look down contemptuously upon those who endeavour to supply (in some degree) their want .-- The instincts of natural and social man; the deeper emotions; the simpler feelings; the spacious range of the disinterested imagination; the pride in country for country's sake, when to serve has not been a formal profession--and the mind is therefore left in a state of dignity only to be surpassed by having served nobly and generously; the instantaneous accomplishment in which they start up who, upon a searching call, stir for the Land which they love--not from personal motives, but for a reward which is undefined and cannot be missed; the solemn fraternity which a great Nation composes--gathered together, in a stormy season, under the shade of ancestral feeling; the delicacy of moral honour which pervades the minds of a people, when despair has been suddenly thrown off and expectations are lofty; the apprehensiveness to a touch unkindly or irreverent, where sympathy is at once exacted as a tribute and welcomed as a gift; the power of injustice and inordinate calamity to transmute, to invigorate, and to govern--to sweep away the barriers of opinion--to reduce under submission passions purely evil--to exalt the nature of indifferent qualities, and to render them fit companions for the absolute virtues with which they are summoned to associate--to consecrate passions which, if not bad in themselves, are of such temper that, in the calm of ordinary life, they are rightly deemed so--to correct and embody these passions--and, without weakening them (nay, with tenfold addition to their strength), to make them worthy of taking their place as the advanced guard of hope, when a sublime movement of deliverance is to be originated;--these arrangements and resources of nature, these ways and means of society, have so little connection with those others upon which a ruling minister of a long-established government is accustomed to depend; these--elements as it were of a universe, functions of a living body--are so opposite, in their mode of action, to the formal machine which it has been his pride to manage;--that he has but a faint perception of their immediate efficacy; knows not the facility with which they assimilate with other powers; nor the property by which such of them--as, from necessity of nature, must change or pass away--will, under wise and fearless management, surely generate lawful successors to fill their place when their appropriate work is performed.

Nay, of the majority of men, who are usually found in high stations under old governments, it may without injustice be said; that, when they look about them in times (alas! too rare) which present the glorious product of such agency to their eyes, they have not a right, to say--with a dejected man in the midst of the woods, the rivers, the mountains, the sunshine, and shadows of some transcendant landscape-- 'I see, not feel, how beautiful they are:' These spectators neither see nor feel.