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To make the phenomenon still more remarkable, the voice shaped itself into certain well-known words of Shakespeare: "Oh!" boomed this vox et præterea nihil in rather husky tones, "Oh! that a man should put an enemy in his mouth to steal away his brains!" And then through the mist and darkness came the unmistakable sound of sobs. "God bless me!" cried Lucian, leaping back, with shaken nerves.
Even in this favoured country, 'the envy of surrounding nations and admiration of the world, the multitude are anything but patterns of moral purity and intellectual excellence. They who assure us vox populi 'is the voice of God, are fairly open to the charge of ascribing to Him what orthodox pietists inform us exclusively belongs to the Father of Evil.
I was determined to be, what I thought, civil; I made fine low bows, and placed myself below everybody; but when I was spoken to, or attempted to speak myself, 'obstupui, steteruntque comae, et vox faucibus haesit'. If I saw people whisper, I was sure it was at me; and I thought myself the sole object of either the ridicule or the censure of the whole company, who, God knows, did not trouble their heads about me.
To put it quite frankly, I am willing to bow to the maxim, "Vox populi, vox Dei" as long as the "vox populi" is the genuine thing and not obtained by falsity or fraud, by corruption or coercion.
Are not majorities, confessedly, always in the right, even when smallest, and a show of hands a surer test of truth than any amount of wisdom, learning, or virtue? How much more, then, when a whole free people is arrayed, in the calm magnificence of self- confident conservatism, against a few innovating and perhaps sceptical philosophasters? Then surely, if ever, vox populi is vox coeli.
In all moral affairs the lower classes in Russia are very lenient in their judgments, and are strongly disposed, like the Americans, to admire what is called in Transatlantic phraseology "a smart man," though the smartness is known to contain a large admixture of dishonesty; and yet the vox populi in Russia emphatically declares that the merchants as a class are unscrupulous and dishonest.
Can that shallow-pated scribbler suppose that an oath taken by rulers to stand by a form of government, adopted by the people, can be of any force or consideration if the people choose to change that form of government for another more agreeable to their wishes? Vox Populi, when was you there? and did you really see the oath registered?
The vox humana of the great Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ of the Cambridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones for a human voice; but I think you never heard anything come so near the cry of a prima donna as the A string and the E string of this instrument. A single fact will illustrate the resemblance.
The taste for whiskey was universal, and large quantities were manufactured in rude stills, not only for shipment down the Mississippi, but for local consumption. Frequenters of the river-town taverns called for their favorite brands "Race Horse," "Moral Suasion," "Vox Populi," "Pig and Whistle," or "Split Ticket," as the case might be.
It is not to Vico or Wolfe that we refer, when we say that Homer is vox et praeterea nihil; as musical as the nightingale, and as invisible.... The "Remorse" and "Zapolya" strikingly illustrate the predominance of the meditative, pausing habit of Mr. Coleridge's mind. The first of these beautiful dramas was acted with success, although worse acting was never seen.
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