It must be owned that it was not, as they say,
very good taste in the husband of Edith, but prosperity had developed in
Coningsby a native vein of sauciness which it required all the solemnity
of the senate to repress. Indeed, even there, upon the benches, with
a grave face, he often indulged in quips and cranks that convulsed
his neighbouring audience, who often, amid the long dreary nights of
statistical imposture, sought refuge in his gay sarcasms, his airy
personalities, and happy quotations.
'I do not see how there can be opinion without thought,' said Tancred;
'and I do not believe the public ever think. How can they? They have no
time. Certainly we live at present under the empire of general ideas,
which are extremely powerful. But the public have not invented those
ideas. They have adopted them from convenience. No one has confidence in
himself; on the contrary, every one has a mean idea of his own strength
and has no reliance on his own judgment. Men obey a general impulse,
they bow before an external necessity, whether for resistance or action.
Individuality is dead; there is a want of inward and personal energy
in man; and that is what people feel and mean when they go about
complaining there is no faith.'
'You would hold, then,' said Henry Sydney, 'that the progress of public
liberty marches with the decay of personal greatness?'
'It would seem so.
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