Whatever justice these reasonings may have or may lack, the facts
speak for themselves, as facts intelligently regarded have a habit of
doing. The first pamphlets proper of great literary merit and great
political influence are those of Halifax in the first movement of real
party struggle during the reign of Charles the Second; the last which
unite the same requisites are those of Scott on the eve of the first
Reform Bill. The leaflet and circular war of the anti-Corn Law League
must be ruled out as much as Mr. Gladstone's _Bulgarian Horrors_.
This leaves us a period of almost exactly a hundred and fifty years,
during which the kind, whether in good or bad examples, was of
constant influence; while its best instances enriched literature with
permanent masterpieces in little. I do not think that any moderately
instructed person will find much difficulty in comprehending the
specimens here given. I am sure that no moderately intelligent one
will fail, with a very little trouble, to take delight in them. I do
not know whether an artful generaliser could get anything out of the
circumstances in which the best of them grew; I should say myself that
nothing more than the system of government, the conditions of the
electorate and the legislature, and the existence from time to time of
a superheated state in political feeling, can or need be collected.
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