["Dear Sir Walter Scott and myself were exact, but harmonious opposites in this--that every old ruin, hill, river or tree called up in his mind a host of historical or biographical associations; whereas, for myself, I believe I should walk over the plain of Marathon without taking more interest in it than in any other plain of similar features."--_Table Talk_, August 4, 1833, Bell & Co., 1834, p. 242.]
Why do we so very, very often see men pass from one extreme to the other? [Greek: stodkardia] [Stoddart, for instance]. Alas! they sought not the truth, but praise, self-importance, and above all [the sense of] something doing! Disappointed, they hate and persecute their former opinion, which no man will do who by meditation had adopted it, and in the course of unfeigned meditation gradually enlarged the circle and so get out of it. For in the perception of its falsehood he will form a perception of certain truths which had made the falsehood plausible, and can never cease to venerate his own sincerity of intention and Philalethie. For, perhaps, we never _hate_ any opinion, or can do so, till we have _impersonated_ it. We hate the persons because they oppose us, symbolise that opposition under the form and words of the opinion and then hate the person for the opinion and the opinion for the person.
[For some weeks after his arrival at Valetta Coleridge remained as the guest of Dr. John (afterwards Sir John) Stoddart, at that time H.M. Advocate at Malta.]
Facts! Never be weary of discussing and exposing the hollowness of these. [For, in the first place,] every man [is] an accomplice on one side or the other, [and, secondly, there is] _human testimony_. "You were in fault, I hear," said B to C, and B had heard it from A. [Now] A had said, "And C, God bless her, was perhaps the innocent occasion"! But what a trifle this to the generality of blunders!
[Sidenote: CANDOUR ANOTHER NAME FOR CANT]
[I have no pity or patience for that], blindness which comes from putting out your own eyes and in mock humility refusing to form an opinion on the right and the wrong of a question. "If we say so of the Sicilians, why may not Buonaparte say this of the Swiss?" and so forth. As if England and France, Swiss and Sicilian were the x y z of Algebra, naked names of unknown quantities. [What is this but] to fix morals without morality, and [to allow] general rules to supersede all particular thought? And though it be never acted on in reality, yet the opinion is pernicious. It kills public spirit and deadens national effort.