Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Savage Landor

Power, Landor suggests, is less a throne than a lighting trick. In his “enchanted chambers,” you don’t simply gain authority; you step into an atmosphere engineered to blur distinction. The line’s bite is in its quiet horror: even “the wise” - people we’d like to imagine as resistant to corruption - are made “as the unwise” once they enter the room where decisions harden into policy and ego is constantly affirmed.

Landor’s metaphor does double duty. “Enchanted” flatters Power as glamorous, even magical, while hinting at spellwork: a place where perception is altered and judgment goes soft. The “lamps” are the machinery of court life and statecraft - ceremony, access, titles, patronage, the constant hum of deference. Under that artificial glow, every face becomes “the same colour,” an image that lands like a moral X-ray. Individual conscience fades; what remains is the pallor of conformity. It’s not just that Power corrupts; it homogenizes, turning sharp minds into members of a single, self-protecting species.

The context matters: Landor lived through revolutions, Napoleonic upheaval, Restoration politics - eras when new regimes promised virtue and often delivered merely new uniforms. His suspicion is aristocratic in diction but democratic in implication: don’t romanticize leaders, and don’t overrate intelligence as a safeguard. Put anyone inside the chamber long enough and the lighting will do its work.