My memory and observation of public affairs are about coeval with that event [the French Revolution<nowiki>]</nowiki>. I was in my ninth year when th… - John Wilson Croker

There is nothing for which one—at least I—should so much envy as Sir W. Scott as the bold facility with which he seized a subject and by the first glance determined all its properties. He was perpetually wrong in his details, but always right, luminous, and I had almost said exact, in his general view—but I am not of that power. I do nothing at all approaching to well but what I understand in its details. Would I could.

Even though the East Retford case had never happened, or even though it had been decided in a different way, there occurred subsequently other events, as we shall by and by show, which would inevitably have brought us to the present crisis; which, we repeat, has been produced by the state of parties, and not by any general desire for Reform in the public mind. It was the state of parties which waked the spirit of Reform, and not Reform which created the state of parties; and it was only as the Retford question happened to operate on the state of parties, that it had any immediate effect on the question of Reform.

The public mind of France had become so excited and perverted by a variety of causes great and small, and of grievances real and imaginary, that at the proclamation for assembling the States-General the whole nation went mad, and to this hour has never recovered from its insanity.