I cannot at all enter into your feelings about the Bourbons, nor can I attend to so remote an evil as the encouragement to superstitious attachment to kings, when the proposed evil of a military ministry, or of thirty years more of war, is before my eyes. I want to get rid of this great disturber of human happiness, and I scarcely know any price too great to effect it. If you were sailing from Alicant to Aleppo in a storm, and, after the sailors had held up the image of a saint and prayed to it, the storm were to abate, you would be more sorry for the encouragement of superstition than rejoiced at the preservation of your life; and so would every other man born and bred in Edinburgh.
My views of the matter would be much shorter and coarser: I
should be so glad to find myself alive, that I should not care a farthing if
the storm had generated a thousand new, and revived as many old saints. How can
any man stop in the midst of the stupendous joy of getting rid of Buonaparte, and prophesy a thousand little
peddling evils that will result from restoring the Bourbons? The most important
of all objects is the independence of Europe: it has been twice very nearly
destroyed by the French; it is menaced from no other quarter; the people must
be identified with their sovereign. There is no help for it; it will teach them
in future to hang kings who set up for conquerors. I will not believe that the
Bourbons have no party in France. My only knowledge of politics is from the
York paper; yet nothing shall convince me
| MEMOIR OF THE REV. SYDNEY SMITH. | 117 |
I shall be in my house by the 25th of March, in spite of all the evils that are prophesied against me. I have had eleven fires burning night and day for these two months past.
I am glad to hear that the intention of raising a statue to Playfair and Stewart is now reported to have been only a joke. This is wut, not wit; by way of pleasantry, the oddest conceit I have heard of; but you gentlemen from the North are, you know, a little singular in your conceptions of the lepid. I quoted to Whishaw the behaviour of —— ——, under similar circumstances; I wonder if Stewart and Playfair would have behaved with as much modesty, had this joke dropped down into a matter of fact.
We are all well; but Douglas alarmed us the other night with the croup. I darted into him all the mineral and vegetable resources of the shops,—cravatted his throat with blisters, and fringed it with leeches, and set him in five or six hours to playing marbles, breathing gently and inaudibly.
Pray send me some news when there is any. It is very pleasant in these deserts to see the handwriting of an old friend; it is like the print in the sand seen by Robinson Crusoe.
I am reading Neale’s ‘History of the Puritans;’ read it if you have never read it, and make my Lady read it. Ever yours,
