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He, who feels such strength within, durst aim at the very highest. Not in blind hatred of the existing order, would he destroy it: out of party-spirit, pride, or lust for dominion: a noble image of a father-land not split asunder, but made young again, reviving in fuller vigor under new forms, hovered before his soul.
When party-spirit runs high, and many party-men are disposed to be unscrupulous in the measures and artifices by which they win or retain place and power, such a position, occupied with judgment and fortified by modesty and good sense, is a most powerful and a most beneficent one; but it is useless when seized on by one whose obtrusive egotism and more than feminine vanity disqualify him for any serious or permanent influence on his fellow-men.
That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than their own? What has all this to do with the formation of the English language or with the first conditions and necessary foundation of speech itself? Is there nothing beyond the reach of prejudice and party-spirit?
There are few stranger and sadder sights than to see men judging of whole periods of the history of mankind with the blindness of party-spirit, never naming one century without expressions of contempt or abhorrence, never mentioning another but with extravagant and undistinguishing admiration. But the worst was yet to come. The period which Mr.
Display, pretension, conflict, are unpleasant to it. What then is to be thought of persons who are ever on the search after novelties to make religion interesting to them; who seem to find that Christian activity cannot be kept up without unchristian party-spirit, or Christian conversation without unchristian censoriousness?
This delusion has always characterized our politics; noisy politicians of the present day stigmatize their adversaries as disunionists; but during the first twenty years it was universal, and explains the fierce party-spirit which possessed the statesmen of that period, and likewise accounts for many of their errors.
He had formed few congenial ties with those who were the objects of persecution, and was disgusted alike by their narrow-minded and selfish party-spirit, their gloomy fanaticism, their abhorrent condemnation of all elegant studies or innocent exercises, and the envenomed rancour of their political hatred.
The disordered state of the Republic, in which party-spirit had banished patriotism and was itself surrendering to armed violence, called for a style of speaking commensurate with the turbulence of public life. Never in the world's history has fierce passion found such exponents in so great a sphere.
And so great is Shakspere's sympathy with Shylock even, in the hard and unjust doom that overtakes him, that he dismisses him with some of the spare sympathies of the more tender-hearted of his spectators. Nowhere is the justice of genius more plain than in Shakspere's utter freedom from party-spirit, even with regard to his own creations.
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