This page has been validated.
72
STUDIES OF A BIOGRAPHER

us how he started as a Stoic, and then became a Unitarian, and finally a devoted Anglican, by imperceptible degrees. At each stage, moreover, he was equally confident that he had possession of the whole truth, and that his complete satisfaction with the creed of the moment should be a conclusive proof of its validity to everybody else. He was content with any general principle which would serve for a war-cry. He was not a man, as he says, for half-measures. He was too vehement by nature not to like good round sweeping assertions, but he looked at the concrete embodiment of principles, not at the abstract justification. In his generous and impetuous youth he worshipped Rousseau, and was carried off his feet by the brilliant Coleridge. He did not ask how the cosmopolitan philanthropy was to be combined with the patriotic zeal which was equally ingrained in the youthful Briton. They simply lay side by side in his mind. When the Revolution led to the Terror in France, and to suppression of free speech in England, he inferred that Robespierre on one side and Pitt on the other were very bad men, and did not bother about more general causes. He indulged for the time in a little misanthropy in the humour of Swift;