CRITICAL, HISTORICAL, and MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS

By Lord Macaulay

With A Memoir And Index

In Six Volumes. Vol. I.

New York: Sheldon and Company

1860

THE SIX VOLUMES

CONTENTS

PUBLISHER’S ADVERTISEMENT.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF MACAULAY.

ESSAYS

FRAGMENTS OF A ROMAN TALE

ON THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE.

SCENES FROM “ATHENIAN REVELS.”

CRITICISMS ON THE PRINCIPAL ITALIAN WRITERS.

SOME ACCOUNT OF THE GREAT LAWSUIT BETWEEN THE PARISHES OF ST. DENNIS AND ST. GEORGE IN THE WATER.ST. GEORGE IN THE WATER.

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MR. ABRAHAM COWLEY AND MR. JOHN MILTON, TOUCHING THE GREAT CIVIL WAR. SET DOWN BY A GENTLEMAN OF THE MIDDLE TEMPLE.

ON THE ATHENIAN ORATORS.

A PROPHETIC ACCOUNT OF A GRAND NATIONAL EPIC POEM, TO BE ENTITLED “THE WELLINGTONIAD,” AND TO BE PUBLISHED A.D. 2824.

ON MITFORD’S HISTORY OF GREECE

MILTON

MACHIAVELLI

JOHN DRYDEN

HISTORY

HALLAM

INDEX

PUBLISHER’S ADVERTISEMENT.

This edition of Lord Macaulay’s Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays, contains all the articles published with the author’s correction and revision (3 vols., London: Longman, Green, & Co.) during his lifetime, and all the articles published by his friends (2 vols., London: Longman, Green & Co.) since his death. An Appendix contains several essays attributed to Lord Macaulay, and unquestionably his, not found in any other edition of his miscellaneous writings.

In this edition the Essays have been arranged in chronological order, so that their perusal affords, so to speak, a complete biographical portraiture of the brilliant author’s mind. No other edition possesses the same advantage.

A very full Index has been especially prepared for this edition,—without which the vast stores of historical learning and pertinent anecdote contained in the Essays can be referred to only by the fortunate man who possesses a memory as great as that of Macaulay himself. In this respect it is superior to the English editions, and wholly unlike any other American edition.

This edition also contains the pure text of Macaulay’s Essays. The exact punctuation, orthography, etc. of the English editions have been followed.

The portrait is from a photograph by Claudet, and represents the great historian as he appeared in the latter years of his life.

The biographical and critical Introduction is from the well-known pen of Mr. E. P. Whipple, who is fully entitled to speak with authority in regard to the most brilliant essayist of the age.

The typographical excellence of the publication places it among the best that have issued from the “Riverside” Press. We trust the public will appreciate what has long been needed,—a complete and correct edition, in handsome library style, of Lord Macaulay’s Essays.

Sheldon And Company.

New York, Oct 1860.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF MACAULAY.

The materials for the biography of Lord Macaulay are scanty, and the writer of the present sketch has been able to glean few facts regarding his career which are not generally known. His life was comparatively barren in events, and though he rose to conspicuous social, literary, and political station, he had neither to struggle nor scramble for advancement. Almost as soon as his talents were displayed they were recognized and rewarded, and he attained fortune and power without using any means which required the least sacrifice, either of the integrity or the pride of his character.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, the son of a Scotch Presbyterian clergyman, was one of the worthiest and ablest antislavery philanthropists and politicians of his time, distinguished, even among such men as Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Stephen, for courage, sagacity, integrity, and religious principle. His mother was the daughter of Thomas Mills, a bookseller in Bristol, and belonged to the Society of Friends. Under her loving care he received his early education, and was not sent from home until his thirteenth year, when he was placed in a private academy. As a boy, he astonished all who knew him, by the brightness and eagerness of his mind, and the extent and variety of his acquisitions. Two lately published letters, written by Hannah More to his father, afford a pleasing glimpse of him, as he appeared to a shrewd and affectionate observer of his early years. She speaks of his “great superiority of intellect and quickness of passion,” at the age of eleven. He ought, she thinks, to have competitors, for “he is like the prince who refused to play with anything but kings.”

“I never,” she says, “saw any one bad propensity in him; nothing except natural frailty and ambition, inseparable perhaps from such talents and so lively an imagination; he appears sincere, veracious, tender-hearted, and affectionate.” He was a fertile versifier, even at that tender age, but she “observed with pleasure that though he was quite wild till the ebullitions of his muse were discharged, he thought no more of them afterwards than the ostrich is said to do of her eggs after she has laid them.” In another letter, written about two years afterwards, when the bright lad was nearly fourteen, she says, “the quantity of reading Tom has poured in, and the quantity of writing he has poured out, is astonishing.” Poetry continued to be his passion, but his venerable friend still testifies to his promising habit of throwing his verses away as soon as he had read them to her. “We have poetry,” she writes, “for breakfast, dinner, and supper. He recited all Palestine, while we breakfasted, to our pious friend, Mr. Whalley, at my desire, and did it incomparably.” She refers to his loquacity, but that quality seems not, in her presence, to have been connected with dogmatism, for she calls him very docile. At that early age he appears to have been sufficiently master of his stores of information to play with them, and his wit kept pace with his understanding. “Several men of sense and learning,” she says, “have been struck with the union of gayety and rationality in his conversation.” Accuracy of expression seems also to have been as striking a trait of the boy’s mind as volubility of utterance. One fault is mentioned, which was probably the result of his absorption in study and composition. Incessantly occupied, mentally, he paid but little attention to his personal appearance, and in dress was something of a sloven. Neither his father nor Hannah More could cure him of this fault, and, up to the time he became a peer, this neglect of externals seems to have been a characteristic trait. A fellow-pupil at the academy to which he was sent, describes him as “rather largely-built than otherwise, but not fond of any of the ordinary physical sports of boys; with a disproportionately large head, slouching or stooping shoulders, and a whitish or pallid complexion; incessantly reading or writing, and often reading or repeating poetry in his walks with his companions.” In October, 1818, the precocious youth entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and during the whole period of his residence at the University his special studies did not divert him from gratifying his thirst for general knowledge, and taste for general literature. In 1819 he gained the chancellor’s medal for a poem on the subject of Pompeii, and in 1821 the same prize for one on Evening. For these, and for all compositions of the kind, he afterwards professed to feel the utmost scorn. Two years after his second success as a prize poet, we find him comparing prize poems to prize sheep. “The object,” he says, “of the competitor for the agricultural premium is to produce an animal fit, not to be eaten, but to be weighed. The object of the poetical candidate is to produce, not a good poem, but a poem of the exact degree of frigidity and bombast which may appear to his censors to be correct or sublime. In general prize sheep are good for nothing but to make tallow candles, and prize poems are good for nothing but to light them.”

In 1821 he was elected Craven University Scholar; and in 1822 he graduated, and received his degree of B. A.; though he did not compete for honors, owing, it is said, to his dislike for mathematics. Between this period and 1824, when he was elected Fellow of his College, he contributed to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine the poems and essays, in which, for the first time, we detect the leading traits of his intellectual character. He possessed the feeling and the faculty of the poet only so far as they are necessary for the interpretative and representative requirements of the historian. He possessed the understanding of the philosopher only so far as it is necessary to throw into relations the vividly conceived facts derived from the records of the annalist. He could not create, but he could reproduce; he could not vitally combine, but he could logically dispose. The fair operation of these mental qualities was disturbed by the peculiarities of his disposition. He had boundless self-confidence, which had been consciously or unconsciously pampered by friends who admired the remarkable brilliancy of his powers. Independence of thought was thus early connected with imperiousness of will and petulant disrespect for other minds. Having no self-distrust, there was nothing to check the positiveness of his judgments. Where more cautious thinkers doubted he dogmatized; their probabilities were his certainties; and generally the tone of his judgments seemed to imply his inward belief in the maxim of the egotist—“difference from me is the measure of absurdity.” Lord Melbourne afterwards acutely touched upon this foible, when he lazily expressed his wish that he “was as sure of anything as Tom Macaulay was of everything.”

A portion of this positiveness is perhaps to be referred as much to the vividness of his perceptions as to the autocracy of his disposition. All that he read he remembered; and his memory, being indissolubly connected with his feelings and his imagination, vitalized all that it retained. Facts and persons of a past age were not to him hidden in the words which pretended to convey them to the mind, but were perceived as actual events and living beings. He could recollect because he could realize and reproduce. To his mental eye the past was present, and he had the delight of the poet in viewing as things what the historian had recorded in words. All men are more positive in regard to what they have seen than in regard to what they have heard. If what they have seen awakens in them joy and enthusiasm, their expression is instinctively dogmatic, especially if they come into collision with persons of fainter and colder perceptions, whose understandings are sceptical because their sensibilities are dull. Such, to some degree, at least, was the dogmatism of Macaulay in his statements of facts. In respect to his positiveness in opinion, it may be said that his leading opinions were blended with his moral passions, and an unmistakable love of truth animates even his fiercest, haughtiest and most disdainful treatment of the opinions of opponents. These qualities do not of course wholly explain or extenuate the leading defect of his character; for behind them, it must be admitted, were the triumphant consciousness of personal vigor, the insolent sense of personal superiority, and the relentlessness of temper which so often accompanies strength of intellectual conviction.

Among his contributions to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, the Fragment of a Roman Tale and The Athenian Revels, indicate that at college he had studied the ancient classics so thoroughly as to gain no little insight into Greek and Roman life. Alcibiades, Cæsar, and Catiline, seem as real to him as Canning and Wellington. In the papers on Mitford’s History of Greece and The Athenian Orators, the same tendency of mind is displayed in a critical direction. His intellect penetrates to the realities of the society and the individuals he assumes to judge, and the independence, originality, and decision of his thinking, correspond to the clearness of his perceptions. The Conversation between Cowley and Milton is an example of the same sympathetic historic imagination exercised in the discussion of great historical questions, yet angrily debated; and in the poem of The Battle of Naseby, which purports to be written by Obadiah Bind-their-Kings-in-Chains-and-their-Nobles-with- links-of-Iron, Serjeant in Ireton’s Regiment, an attempt is made to reproduce the fiercest and gloomiest religious passions which raged in the breasts of the military fanatics among the Puritans. The critical papers on Dante and Petrarch exhibit the general characteristic of the writer’s later literary criticism—intellectual sympathy superior to rules, but submissive to laws; praising warmly, but at the same time, judging keenly; and as intolerant of faults as sensitive to merits. The style, both of the historical and critical articles, is substantially the style of Macaulay’s more celebrated essays. There is less energy and freedom of movement, a larger use of ornament for the sake of ornament, and a more obvious rhetorical artifice in the declamatory passages, but in essential elements it is the same.

In the choice of a profession, Macaulay fixed upon the law. He was called to the bar in February, 1826, but we hear of no clients; and it is doubtful if he ever mastered the details of his profession. Sydney Smith, who knew him at this time, said afterwards—“I always prophesied his greatness from the first moment I saw him, then a very young and unknown man, on the Northern Circuit. There are no limits to his knowledge, on small subjects as well as great: he is like a book in breeches.” Indeed, politics and literature had, from the first, attractions too strong for him to resist; and before he entered on the practice of his profession, he had, by one article in a review, passed at a bound to a conspicuous place among the writers of the time.

It might have been expected, from his family connections, that he would be a zealous whig and abolitionist, and his first contribution to the Edinburgh Review was on the subject of West India Slavery. It was published in the number for January, 1825, and in extent of information, force and acuteness of argument, severity of denunciation and sarcasm, and fervor and brilliancy of style, it ranks high among the many vigorous productions in which Macaulay has recorded his love of freedom and hatred of oppression, and exhibited his power of making tyranny ridiculous as well as odious. It is curious that this paper, so full of the peculiar traits of his character and style, should not have been generally recognized as his, after his subsequent articles had familiarized the public with his manner of expression. But the date of his first contribution to the Review is still commonly considered to be the month of August, 1825, when his article on Milton appeared, and at once attained a wide popularity. Though when, in 1848, the author collected his Essays, he declared that this article “hardly contained a paragraph that his matured judgment approved,” and regretted that he had to leave it unpruned of the “gaudy and ungraceful ornament” with which it was overloaded, its popularity has survived its author’s harsh judgment.

Whatever were its youthful faults of taste, impertinences of statement, and errors of theory, few articles which had ever before appeared in a British journal contained so much solid matter in so compact and readable a form. If it did not touch the depths of the various topics it so confidently discussed, it certainly contained a sufficient number of strong and striking thoughts to rescue its brilliancy from the charge of superficiality. If the splendor of its rhetoric seemed consciously designed for display, this defect applies in great measure to Macaulay’s rhetoric in general. He popularizes everything. He converts his acquirements into accomplishments, and contrives that their show shall always equal their substance; but in this essay, as in the dazzling-series of essays which succeeded it, a discerning eye can hardly fail to perceive beneath the external glitter of the periods, the presence of two qualities which are sound and wholesome, namely, broad common sense, and earnest enthusiasm.

Following the article on Milton, came, in the Edin burgh Review for February, 1826, the month in which he was called to the bar, a paper on the London University. This was succeeded in March, 1827, by a powerful and well-reasoned, but exceedingly bitter and sarcastic antislavery article on the Social and Industrial Capacities of Negroes. In June of the same year, appeared a paper, evidently written by him, entitled “The Present Administration,” one of the most acrimonious and audacious political articles ever published in the Edinburgh Review. Its tone was so violent and virulent, and excited so much opposition, that, in the next number of the Review, a kind of apology was offered for it under the form of explaining its real meaning. Macaulay’s real meaning is evident; he “meant mischief;” but in the confused sentences of his apologist hardly any meaning is perceptible; and there is something ludicrous in the very supposition that the meaning of the clearest and most decisive of writers could be mistaken by the public he addressed, and especially by the Tories he assailed.

In all editions of his Essays, the admirable article on Machiavelli, one of the ablest, most elaborate, and most thoughtful productions of his mind, succeeds the article on Milton. It was published in the number of the Review for March, 1827. Between 1827 and 1830 appeared the articles on Dryden, History, Hallam’s Constitutional History, Southey’s Colloquies on Society, and the three articles on the Utilitarian Theory of Government. These proved the capacity of the author to discuss both political and literary questions with a boldness, brilliancy, and effectiveness, hardly known before in periodical literature. Each essay included an amount of digested and generalized knowledge which might easily have been expanded into a volume, but which, in its condensed form and sparkling positiveness of expression, was all the more efficient. To the Whig party as well as to the Whig Review, such an ally had claims which could not be disregarded; and in 1830, through the interest of Lord Lansdowne, he was elected a member of Parliament for the borough of Caine. His reputation was so well established that no idea of patronage entered into this arrangement; and he could afterwards boast, with honest pride, that he was as independent when he sat in Parliament as the nominee of Lord Lansdowne as when he represented the popular constituencies of Leeds and Edinburgh.

As an orator, he won a reputation second only to his reputation as a man of letters. From all accounts he owed little to his manner of speaking. “His head,” we are told, “was set stiff on his shoulders, and his feet were planted immovable on the floor. One hand was fixed behind him across his back, and in this rigid attitude, with only a slight movement of his right hand, he poured forth, with inconceivable velocity, his sentences.” His first speech was on the Jews’ Disabilities Bill, on the fifth of April, 1830, followed in December by one on Slavery in the West Indies. Both evinced the broad views of the statesman as well as the generous warmth of the reformer. He threw himself with characteristic ardor into the great struggle for Parliamentary Reform, and his speeches on that measure, not only drew forth unbounded applause from his party and unwilling admiration from his opponents, but, as read now, after the excitement of the occasion has subsided, justify in a great degree the enthusiastic praise of those who heard them delivered. Clear and logical in arrangement, abundant in precedents and arguments, fearless in tone, and animated in movement, they are particularly marked by that fusion of intelligence and sensibility which makes passion intelligent and reason impassioned. The rush of the declamation is kept carefully within the channels of the argument; they convince through the very process by which they kindle. Their style is that of splendid and animated conversation; though carefully premeditated they have the appearance of being spontaneous; and indeed were not, as is commonly supposed, originally written out and committed to memory, but thought out and committed to memory. Without writing a word, he could prepare an hour’s speech, in his mind, carefully attending even to the most minute felicities of expression, and then deliver it with a rapidity so great that no reporter could follow him. The effect on the House of these declaimed disquisitions can perhaps be best estimated by quoting a passage from one of his political opponents, whose pen, in the heat of faction, was unrestrained by any of the proprieties of controversy. In the number of the Noctes Ambrosiano, for August, 1831, Macaulay is sneered at as a person whom it is the fashion among a small coterie to call “the Burke of the age.” After admitting him to be “the cleverest declaimer on the Whig side of the House,” the account thus proceeds: “He is an ugly, cross-made, splay-footed, shapeless little dumpling of a fellow, with a featureless face, too—except indeed a good expansive forehead—sleek, puritanical, sandy hair, large glimmering eyes—and a mouth from ear to ear. He has a lisp and burr, moreover, and speaks thickly and huskily for several minutes before he gets into the swing of his discourse; but after that nothing can be more dazzling than his whole execution. What he says is substantially, of course, stuff and nonsense; but it is so well-worded, and so volubly and forcibly delivered—there is such an endless string of epigram and antithesis—such a flashing of epithets—such an accumulation of images—and the voice is so trumpetlike, and the action so grotesquely emphatic, that you might hear a pin drop in the House. Even Manners Sutton himself listens.”

In the Reformed Parliament, which met in January, 1833, Macaulay took his seat as member for Leeds. He was soon after made Secretary of the Board of Control. An economist of his reputation, he did not speak often, but reserved himself for those occasions when he could speak with effect. Throughout his parliamentary career he showed no inclination to mingle in strictly extemporaneous debate, though it seems difficult to conceive that a man of such intellectual hardihood as well as intellectual capacity, and who in conversation was one of the most fluent and well-informed of human beings, lacked the power of thinking on his legs. It is probable that he disliked the drudgery of practical political life, and was incapable of the continuous party passion which sustains the professional politician. An ardent Whig partisan, his partisanship was still roused by the principles of his party rather than by its expedients. Literature and the philosophy of politics had more fascination for him than the contentions of the House of Commons; and he has repeatedly expressed contempt for the sophisms and misstatements which, though they will not bear the test of careful perusal, pass in the House for facts and arguments when volubly delivered in excited debate. Indeed, from 1830 to 1834, the period when he was most ambitious for political distinction and preferment, his contributions to the Edinburgh Review indicate that while in Parliament he gave as much time and thought to literature as he did before he became a member. To this period belong his articles on Saddler’s Law of Population, Bunyan, Byron, Hampden, Lord Burleigh, Mirabeau, Horace Walpole, the elder Pitt, Croker’s Edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the Civil Disabilities of the Jews, and the War of the Succession in Spain. Only one of his speeches can perhaps compare with the best of these articles In range of thought and knowledge, and richness of diction. This was the speech which he delivered as Secretary of the Board of Control, in July 1833, on the new India Bill of the Whig government. Few persons were in the house; but Jeffrey, who was in London, wrote to one of his correspondents in regard to it:—“Mac is a marvellous person. He made the very best speech that has been made this session on India. The Speaker, who is a severe judge, says he rather thinks it the best speech he ever heard.”

Since the time of Burke, no speech in Parliament on the subject of India had equalled this in comprehensiveness of thought and knowledge. It justified his appointment, made a few months after, of member and legal adviser of the Supreme Council of India. Shiel, in a mocking defence of Macaulay from the sneers of some person who questioned his abilities, thus alluded to this appointment:—“Nonsense, sir! Don’t attempt to run down Macaulay. He’s the cleverest man in Christendom. Didn’t he make four speeches on the Reform Bill, and get £10,000 a year? Think of that, and be dumb!” The largeness of the salary, nearly twice that of the President of the United States, was probably Macaulay’s principal inducement to accept the office. His means were small; the gains of the office would in a few years make him independent of the world; and though he seemed, in accepting it, to abandon the objects of his political ambition, he really chose the right course to advance them. Pecuniary independence would relieve him from all imputations of being a political adventurer; and he had every reason to suppose that he might reach, in England, high political office all the more surely if it were understood that the emoluments of high political office were not the primary objects of his ambition. Apart from such considerations as these, there was something in the terms of his appointment eminently calculated to induce him to accept it. The special object of his mission was to prepare a new code of Indian law; and it is impossible to read his articles on the Utilitarian Theory of Government, and Dumont’s Recollections of Mirabeau, without perceiving that he had studied jurisprudence as a science, and that he considered the province of the jurist as even superior to that of the statesman. He went to India in 1834, with the feeling that he could prepare a code at once practical and just. For four years he labored to solve this problem, and the decision of his countrymen appeared to be that, though his solution might be just, it was not practical. In the opinion, especially of those East Indians whose interests were affected by its justice, it was a “Black Code.” When it was published, on his return from India in 1838, it was mercilessly denounced and ridiculed. Alarmists prophesied that, if adopted, it would lead to the downfall of the British power in India. Wits calculated, with malicious accuracy, the number of guineas which each word cost the British people. Between alarmists and wits the whole project fell through. There was a general impression that the code would not work, and, while its ability was admitted, its practicability was denied.

During his absence in India only two of his articles, the review of Mackintosh’s History of the Revolution in England in 1688, and the paper on Bacon, were published in the Edinburgh Review. The sketch of Bacon’s life and philosophy is one of the most elaborate, ingenious and brilliant products of his mind, but it is full of extravagant overstatements. It is biography and criticism in a series of dazzling epigrams; the exaggeration of epigram taints both the account of Bacon’s life and the estimate of Bacon’s philosophy; but the charm of the style is so great that, for a long time yet to come, it will probably influence the opinion which even educated men form of Bacon, though to thoughtful students of the age of Elizabeth and James, and to thoughtful students of the history of scientific and metaphysical speculation, it may seem as inaccurate in its disposition of facts as it is superficial in philosophy.

Soon after his return from India, in June, 1838, Macaulay was offered the office of Judge Advocate, which he declined. In 1839 the whigs of Edinburgh invited him to offer himself as a candidate for the representation of that city in Parliament. In a private letter to Adam Black, he gave the reasons why, if elected, the position would be agreeable to him. “I should,” he wrote, “be able to take part in politics, as an independent Member of Parliament, with the weight and authority which belongs to a man who speaks in the name of a great and intelligent body of constituents. I should, during half the year, be at leisure for other pursuits to which I am more inclined, and for which I am perhaps better fitted; and I should be able to complete an extensive literary work which I have long meditated.” He expressed an unwillingness to accept office under the government he intended to support, on the ground that he disliked the restraints of official life. “I love,” he says, “freedom, leisure, and letters. Salary is no object to me, for my income, though small, is sufficient for a man who has no ostentatious tastes.” In regard to the expenses of the election, he makes one condition which may surprise those American readers, who suppose that none but English politicians who are corrupt, pay money to get into Parliament. “I cannot,” he says, “spend more than £500 on the election. If, therefore, there be any probability that the candidate will be required to pay more than this, I hope you will look round for another person.” On the 29th of May, 1839, he made a speech to the electors, which for clearness and pungency of statement and argument is a model for all orators who are called upon to address a popular audience. It was probably this speech which drew forth the unintentional compliment from the Edinburgh artisan, that he thought he could have made it himself. “Ou! it was a wise-like speech, an’ no that defecshunt in airgument; but, eh! man”—with a pause of intense disappointment—“I’m thinkin’ I could ha’ said the haill o’ it mysel’!”

After some inefficient radical opposition, Macaulay, on the fourth of June, was declared duly elected. In September of the same year he was induced to accept the office of Secretary at War, in Lord Melbourne’s administration. In 1841, when Sir Robert Peel came into power, he went into opposition, and some of his ablest speeches were made during the five years the tories were in office. In 1842, his “Lays of Ancient Rome,” were published, and attained a wide popularity. In 1843 he published a collection of his Essays, contributed to the Edinburgh Review, including the masterly biographies of Temple, Clive, Hastings, Frederic the Great, and Addison, and the papers on Church and State, Ranke’s History of the Popes, and the Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, written since his return from India. In July, 1846, on the return of the Whigs to power, he was made Paymaster-General of the Forces. Though his speech and vote on the Maynooth College Bill, in 1845, had roused a serious opposition to him among the dissenters of Edinburgh, he was still reelected to Parliament, though not without a severe struggle, on his acceptance of office. In 1847 Parliament was dissolved. By this time his offences against the theological opinions of his constituents had been increased by his support of what they called the system of “godless education,” which the government to which he belonged had patronized. The publicans and spirit dealers of the city were also in ill-humor with the Whig government, on account of the continuance of “undue restrictions in regard to their licenses.” From the state of the mob that yelled and hissed round the hustings, there would have seemed to be no “undue restriction” on the disposal of spirituous liquors to carry the election. Adam Black sums up the opposition to Macaulay as consisting of “the no-popery men, the godless-education men, the crotchety coteries, and the dealers in spirits.” To all these Macaulay was blunt and unconciliating, strong in the feeling that he had excited their hatred by acts which his conscience prompted and his reason approved. He would not recant a single expression, much less a single opinion.

“The bray of Exeter Hall,” a phrase in his Maynooth speech particularly obnoxious to the dissenters, he would not take back, and it was used against him with great effect. A Mr. Cowan, a man of no note, was selected as the opposing candidate, as if his enemies had determined to mortify his pride as well as deprive him of his seat. His speeches from the hustings were continually interrupted by a mob who, infuriated by fanaticism or whiskey, received his statements with insults, and answered his arguments by jeers. “If,” exclaimed Macaulay in one of his speeches, “your representative be an honest man”—“Ay! but he’s no that!” was a cry that came back from the crowd. To interruptions and to insults, however, he presented a bold front, and met outrage with defiance. He would not condescend to humor at the hustings the prejudices he had offended in Parliament, but reaffirmed his opinions in the most pointed and explicit language. One of his arguments was that, in regal’d to the Maynooth grant, no principle was involved. A sum had always been yearly voted to support that Roman Catholic College; the only cause of complaint against him was that he had spoken and voted for an additional sum. He was therefore opposed, not on a principle, but on a quibble. “And,” he exclaimed, “if you want a representative who will peril the peace of the empire for a mere quibble, that representative I will not be.”

He was defeated, and after it was known that he was defeated, he was hissed. In his speech to the crowd, announcing that his political connection with Edinburgh was dissolved forever, he alluded to this last circumstance as unprecedented in political warfare. To hiss a defeated candidate, he reminded them, was below the ordinary magnanimity of the most factious mob. In his farewell address to the electors, written after he had returned to London, he indicated that, to an honest, honorable, and patriotic statesman, there might be solid consolations, even to personal pride, in the circumstances of his defeat. “I shall always be proud,” he writes, “to think that I once enjoyed your favor, but permit me to say I shall remember, not less proudly, how I risked and how I lost it.” The following noble poem, published since his death, contains, perhaps, the most authentic record of his feelings on the occasion:—

Lines Written In August, 1847.

The day of tumult, strife, defeat, was o’er;
Worn out with toil and noise and scorn and spleen,
I slumbered, and in slumber saw once more
A room in an old mansion, long unseen.

That room, methought, was curtained from the light;
Yet through the curtains shone the moon’s cold ray
Full on a cradle, where, in linen white,
Sleeping life’s first soft sleep, an infant lay.

Pale flickered on the hearth the dying flame,
And all was silent in that ancient hall,
Save when by fits on the low night-wind came
The murmur of the distant water-fall.

And lo! the fairy queens who rule our birth
Drew nigh to speak the new-born baby’s doom:
With noiseless step, which left no trace on earth,
From gloom they came, and vanished into gloom.

Not deigning on the boy a glance to cast,
Swept careless by the gorgeous Queen of Gain;
More scornful still, the Queen of Fashion passed,
With mincing gait and sneer of cold disdain.

The Queen of Power tossed high her jewelled head,
And o’er her shoulder threw a wrathful frown:
The Queen of Pleasure on the pillow shed
Scarce one stray rose-leaf from her fragrant crown.

Still Fay in long procession followed Fay;
And still the little couch remained unblest;
But, when those wayward sprites had passed away,
Came One, the last, the mightiest, and the best.

Oh, glorious lady, with the eyes of light
And laurels clustering round thy lofty brow,
Who by the cradle’s side didst watch that night,
Warbling a sweet strange music, who wast thou?

“Yes, darling; let them go;” so ran the strain:
“Yes; let them go, gain, fashion, pleasure, power,
And all the busy elves to whose domain
Belongs the nether sphere, the fleeting hour.

“Without one envious sigh, one anxious scheme,
The nether sphere, the fleeting hour resign.
Mine is the world of thought, the world of dream,
Mine all the past, and all the future mine.

“Fortune, that lays in sport the mighty low,
Age, that to penance turns the joys of youth,
Shall leave untouched the gifts which I bestow,
The sense of beauty and the thirst of truth.

“Of the fair brotherhood who share my grace,
I, from thy natal day, pronounce thee free;
And, if for some I keep a nobler place,
I keep for none a happier than for thee.

“There are who, while to vulgar eyes they seem
Of all my bounties largely to partake,
Of me as of some rival’s handmaid deem,
And court me but for gain’s, power’s, fashion’s sake.

“To such, though deep their lore, though wide their fame,
Shall my great mysteries be all unknown:
But thou, through good and evil, praise and blame,
Wilt not thou love me for myself alone?

“Yes; thou wilt love me with exceeding love;
And I will tenfold all that love repay,
Still smiling, though the tender may reprove,
Still faithful, though the trusted may betray.

“For aye mine emblem was, and aye shall be,
The ever-during plant whose bough I wear,
Brightest and greenest then, when every tree
That blossoms in the light of Time is bare.

“In the dark hour of shame, I deigned to stand
Before the frowning peers at Bacon’s side:
On a far shore I smoothed with tender hand,
Through months of pain, the sleepless bed of Hyde:

“I brought the wise and brave of ancient days
To cheer the cell where Raleigh pined alone:
I lighted Milton’s darkness with the blaze
Of the bright ranks that guard the eternal throne.

“And even so, my child, it is my pleasure
That thou not then alone shouldst feel me nigh,
When, in domestic bliss and studious leisure,
Thy weeks uncounted come, uncounted fly;

“Not then alone, when myriads, closely pressed
Around thy car, the shout of triumph raise;
Nor when, in gilded drawing-rooms, thy breast
Swells at the sweeter sound of woman’s praise.

No: when on restless night dawns cheerless morrow,
When weary soul and wasting body pine,
Thine am I still, in danger, sickness, sorrow’,
In conflict, obloquy, want, exile, thine;

“Thine, where on mountain waves the snow-birds scream.
Where more than Thule’s winter barbs the breeze,
Where scarce, through lowering clouds, one sickly gleam
Lights the drear May-day of Antarctic seas;

“Thine, when around thy litter’s track all day
White sand-hills shall reflect the blinding glare;
Thine, when, through forests breathing death, thy way
All night shall wind by many a tiger’s lair;

“Thine most, when friends turn pale, when traitors fly,
When, hard beset, thy spirit, justly proud,
For truth, peace, freedom, mercy, dares defy
A sullen priesthood and a raving crowd.

“Amidst the din of all things fell and vile,
Hate’s yell and envy’s hiss and folly’s bray,
Remember me; and with an unforced smile
See riches, baubles, flatterers, pass away.

“Yes: they will pass away; nor deem it strange:
They come and go, as comes and goes the sea:
And let them come and go: thou, through all change,
Fix thy firm gaze on virtue and on me.”

He now devoted his time to a work he had long meditated, and for which he had not only collected a considerable portion of the materials, but had probably written some portion of the text,—the History of England, from the Accession of James II. The first two volumes of this were published in the autumn of 1848, and gave him a literary reputation far beyond what he had acquired by his historical essays. The book was as popular as any of Scott’s or Dickens’s novels, while its solid merits of research and generalization placed it among the great historical works of the century. Its circulation, large in England, was immense in the United States; and in every portion of the world where English literature is esteemed, it was widely read, either in the original text or in carefully prepared translations.

In 1852, the city of Edinburgh, desirous of repairing the injustice it had done to Macaulay in 1847, elected him its representative without his appearing as a candidate. He accepted the trust, though his health had begun to fail, and he was already visited with the symptoms of the disease which eventually caused his death. He wrote to Adam Black, in August, 1852, that “any excitement, or any violent exertion, instantly brings on a derangement of the circulation, and an uneasy feeling of the heart.” He was unable to perform his parliamentary duties to his own satisfaction from the first, and repeatedly expressed his desire to resign. He was withheld from so doing by the assurances he received from Edinburgh that his constituents were satisfied with his partial attendance on the duties of his post. At length, in January, 1856, he became aware of his incapacity to serve any longer without serious prejudice to his health, and resigned his seat. Meanwhile, two more volumes of his History had been completed and published, evincing that the energy of his mind was not affected by the ills of his body. He also had devoted some time to preparing a volume of his speeches for the press, and published them in 1854. In 1857, without any solicitation on his part, and entirely to his own surprise, he was elevated to the peerage. Though it was known that his health was infirm, there was no apprehension on the part of the public that he would not live to complete a large portion of the immense work he had contemplated. His delightful biographies of Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Pitt, contributed to the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, proved that his faculties were in their full vigor and splendor. It was therefore with a shock of painful surprise that all readers of the English race heard of his sudden death, by disease of the heart, on the 28th of December, 1859. It was felt, even by those who most vehemently disagreed with him in opinion, that in losing him England lost the man who, beyond all other men, carried in his brain the facts of her history. He was buried, with great pomp, in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, “at the foot of Addison’s monument and beside the remains of Sheridan.”

The first and strongest impression we derive from a consideration of Macaulay’s life and writings is that of the robust and masculine qualities of his intellect and character. Since his death it has become generally known that he was by no means deficient in those tender and benevolent feelings which found little expression in his works. Among his intimate friends and relations he passed as one of the most affectionate of men, and his benevolence to unsuccessful artists and men of letters, absorbed no inconsiderable portion of his income. But in his speeches in parliament, in his essays, and in his history, he makes the impression of a stout, strong, and tough polemic, who is thoroughly well furnished for combat, and who neither gives nor expects quarter. No tenderness to frailty interferes with the merciless severity of his judgments. His own political and personal integrity was without a stain. “You might,” said Sydney Smith, in testifying to his incorruptibility and his patriotism, “lay ribbons, stars, garters, wealth, titles, before him in vain. He has an honest, genuine love of his country, and the world could not bribe him to neglect her interests.” This integrity of character gave a certain puritan relentlessness of tone to his intellectual and moral judgments. He had a warm love for what was beautiful and true, but, in his writings, it generally took the negative form of hatred for what was deformed and false. He abhorred meanness, baseness, fraud, falsehood, conniption, and oppression, with his whole heart and soul, and found a grim delight in holding them up to public execration. His talent for this work, and his enjoyment of it, were so great, that he was tempted at times to hunt after criminality for the pleasure of punishing it. He acquired a diseased taste for character that was morally tainted, in order that he might exercise on its condemnation the rich resources of his scorn and invective. His progress through a tract of history was marked by the erection of the gallows, the gibbet, and the stake, and he was almost as insensible to mitigating circumstances as Judge Jeffreys himself. He seemed to consider that the glory of the judge rested on the number of the executions; and he has hanged, drawn, and quartered many individuals, whose cases are now at the bar of public opinion, in the course of being reheard.

The last and finest result of personal integrity is intellectual conscientiousness, and this Macaulay cannot be said to have attained. His intellect, bright and broad as it was, was the instrument of his individuality. His sympathies and antipathies colored his statements, and he rarely exhibited anything in “dry light.” In this respect, he is inferior to Hallam and Mackintosh, who are inferior to him in extent of information, and genius for narrative. The vividness of his perceptions confirmed the autocracy of his disposition, and his convictions had to him the certainty of facts. It must be admitted that he had some reason for his dogmatism. He excelled all Englishmen of his time in his knowledge of English history. There was no drudgery he would not endure in order to obtain the most trivial fact which illustrated the opinions or the manners of any particular age. Indeed, the minuteness of his information astonished even antiquaries, and in society was sometimes thought “to be erected into a colossal engine of colloquial oppression.” And this information was not a mere assemblage of dead facts. It was vitalized by his passions and imagination; it was all alive in the many-peopled domain of his “vast and joyous memory;” and it was so completely possessed as to be always in readiness to sustain an argument or illustrate a principle. The songs, ballads, satires, lampoons, plays, private correspondence of a period, were as familiar to him as the graver records of its annalists. But in disposing his immense materials he followed the law of his own mind rather than the law inherent in the facts. Instead of viewing things in their relations to each other, he viewed things in their relation to himself. His representation of them, therefore, partook of the limitations of his character. That character was broad, but it would be absurd to say that it was as broad as the English race. He Macaulayized English history as a distinguished poet of the century was said to have Byronized human life. Even in some of his most seemingly triumphant statements it will be found that a different disposition of the facts will result in establishing an opposite opinion. Take the article on Bacon, the most glaring of all the instances in which he has refused to assume the point of view of the person he has resolved to condemn; and any intellect, resolute enough to resist the marvellous fascination of the narrative, can easily redispose the facts so as to arrive at an opposite conclusion.

A prominent cause of Macaulay’s popularity is to be found in the definiteness of his mind. He always aspired to present his matter in such a form as to exclude the possibility of doubt, either in his statement or argument. Of all great English writers he is therefore the least suggestive. All that he demands of a reader is simple receptiveness. Selection, arrangement, reasoning, pictorial representation, are all done by himself. This explicitness, too, is purchased at some sacrifice of truth. His comprehensiveness is apt to be of that kind which arrives at broad generalizations by excluding a number of the facts and principles it ought to include. Real comprehensiveness of mind is impossible unless the interior life of the separate facts included in the sweeping generalization is adequately comprehended. Shakspeare, of all English minds, is the most comprehensive; and Shakspeare, in virtue of his comprehensiveness, would doubt in many instances where Macaulay is most certain. The most perfect exhibition of Macaulay’s talent is his analysis and representation of the character of James II., from a hostile point of view. He catches his victim in a series of cunningly contrived traps, and the poor creature, in Macaulay’s narrative, cannot move a step without falling into the trap marked folly or the trap marked wickedness. Shakspeare’s method of dealing with character was entirely different.

As an artist Macaulay is greater in his Essays than in his History of England. Each of his essays is a unit. The results of analysis are diffused through the veins of narration, and details are strictly subordinated to leading conceptions. In his History details are so numerous as to confuse the mind. Events succeed each other in their chronological rather than their intellectual order; and his readers gain an intense perception of particular facts without any general view of the whole field. The power of the author to interest us is as evident in his account of the Bank of England as in his account of the Massacre of Glencoe. We pass from one topic to another without any sense of the connection of topics. Picture succeeds picture as in the anarchy of a panorama. It seems as if we were reading the work of a poet who had turned annalist. By emphasizing everything, interest in particulars is obtained at the expense of general effect. It is only by turning to the table of contents that we are able to generalize the events of a reign. There are scores of pages in the third and fourth volumes which we read as we read a newspaper, where an account of a murder may be succeeded immediately by an account of a masquerade. Prescott, who cannot be named with Macaulay in respect to fulness of matter, fertility of thought, originality of style, and unwearied energy of mind, is still superior to him in the artistic disposition of his materials. In reading Prescott, we have but a faint impression of the author and no feeling at all of the felicity of the style, but the real business of the historian is none the less performed, for we get a large view of facts in their true relations, and are enabled to take in the subject he treats of as a whole. In Macaulay the narrative of particular facts and incidents is incomparably bright and stimulating, but the facts and incidents are not seen from a commanding point.

In his essays, especially his biographical and historical essays, this defect is not observable. They rank among the finest artistic products of the century. They partake of the imperfections of his thinking and the limitations of his character, but they are still perfect of their kind. The articles on Machiavelli, Banyan, Clive, Hastings, Frederic the Great, Barere, Chatham, not to mention others, are eminent specimens of that critical and interpretative biography, in which the character of the biographer appears chiefly to give unity to the representation of facts and the application of principles. The amount of knowledge each of them includes can only be estimated by those who have patiently read the many volumes they so brilliantly condense. In style they show a mastery of English which has been attained by no other English author who did not possess a creative imagination. The art of the writer is shown as much in his deliberate choice of common and colloquial phrases as in those splendid passages in which he almost seems to exhaust the resources of the English tongue. As a narrator, in his own province, it would be difficult to name his equal among English writers; to his narrative, all his talents and accomplishments combined to lend fascination; and in it he exhibited the understanding of Hallam, and the knowledge of Mackintosh, joined to the picturesqueness of Southey, and the wit of Pope.

E. P. W.

ESSAYS

FRAGMENTS OF A ROMAN TALE

1(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, June 1823.)
I
t was an hour after noon. Ligarius was returning from the Campus Martins. He strolled through one of the streets which led to the forum, settling his gown, and calculating the odds on the gladiators who were to fence at the approaching Saturnalia. While thus occupied, he overtook Flaminius, who, with a heavy-step and a melancholy face, was sauntering in the same direction. The light-hearted young man plucked him by the sleeve.

“Good day, Flaminius. Are you to be of Catiline’s party this evening?”

“Not I.”

“Why so? Your little Tarentine girl will break her heart.”

“No matter. Catiline has the best cooks and the finest wine in Rome. There are charming women at his parties. But the twelve-line board and the dice-box pay for all. The Gods confound me if I did not lose two millions of sesterces last night. My villa at Tibur, and all the statues that my father the prætor 2brought from Ephesus, must go to the auctioneer. That is a high price, you will acknowledge, even for Phonicopters, Chian, and Callinice.”

“High indeed, by Pollux.”

“And that is not the worst. I saw several of the leading senators this morning. Strange things are whispered in the higher political circles.”

“The Gods confound the political circles. I have hated the name of politician ever since Sylla’s proscription, when I was within a moment of having my throat cut by a politician, who took me for another politician. While there is a cask of Falernian in Campania, or a girl in the Suburra, I shall be too well employed to think on the subject.”

“You will do well,” said Flaminius gravely, “to bestow some little consideration upon it at present. Otherwise, I fear, you will soon renew your acquaintance with politicians, in a manner quite as unpleasant as that to which you allude.”

“Averting Gods! what do you mean?”

“I will tell you. There are rumors of conspiracy. The order of things established by Lucius Sylla has excited the disgust of the people, and of a large party of the nobles. Some violent convulsion is expected.”

“What is that to me? I suppose that they will hardly proscribe the vintners and gladiators, or pass a law compelling every citizen to take a wife.”

“You do not understand. Catiline is supposed to be the author of the revolutionary schemes. You must have heard bold opinions at his table repeatedly.”

“I never listen to any opinions upon such subjects, bold or timid.”

“Look to it. Your name has been mentioned.” 3“Mine! good Gods! I call heaven to witness that I never so much as mentioned Senate, Consul, or Comitia, in Catiline’s house.”

“Nobody suspects you of any participation in the inmost counsels of the party. But our great men surmise that you are among those whom he has bribed so high with beauty, or entangled so deeply in distress, that they are no longer their own masters. I shall never set foot within his threshold again. I have been solemnly warned by men who understand public affairs; and I advise you to be cautious.”

The friends had now turned into the forum, which was thronged with the gay and elegant youth of Rome. “I can tell you more,” continued Flaminius; “somebody was remarking to the Consul yesterday how loosely a certain acquaintance of ours tied his girdle. ‘Let him look to himself,’ said Cicero, ‘or the state may find a tighter girdle for his neck.’”

“Good Gods! who is it? You cannot surely mean—”

“There he is.”

Flaminius pointed to a man who was pacing up and down the forum at a little distance from them. He was in the prime of manhood. His personal advantages were extremely striking, and were displayed with an extravagant but not ungraceful foppery. His gown waved in loose folds; his long dark curls were dressed with exquisite art, and shone and steamed with odours; his step and gesture exhibited an elegant and commanding figure in every posture of polite languor. But his countenance formed a singular contrast to the general appearance of his person. The high and imperial brow, the keen aquiline features, 4the compressed mouth, the penetrating eye, indicated the highest degree of ability and decision. He seemed absorbed in intense meditation. With eyes fixed on the ground, and lips working in thought, he sauntered round the area, apparently unconscious how many of the young gallants of Rome were envying the taste of his dress, and the ease of his fashionable stagger.

“Good Heaven!” said Ligarius, “Caius Caesar is as unlikely to be in a plot as I am.”

“Not at all.”

“He does nothing but game, feast, intrigue, read Greek, and write verses.”

“You know nothing of Caesar. Though he rarely addresses the Senate, he is considered as the finest speaker there, after the Consul. His influence with the multitude is immense. He will serve his rivals in public life as he served me last night at Catiline’s. We were playing at the twelve lines.(1)—Immense stakes. He laughed all the time, chatted with Valeria over his shoulder, kissed her hand between every two moves, and scarcely looked at the board. I thought that I had him. All at once I found my counters driven into the corner. Not a piece to move, by Hercules. It cost me two millions of Sesterces. All the Gods and Goddesses confound him for it!”

“As to Valeria,” said Ligarius, “I forgot to ask whether you have heard the news.”

“Not a word. What?”

     (1) Duodecim scripta, a game of mixed chance and skill,
     which seems to have been very fashionable in the higher
     circles of Rome. The famous lawyer Mucius was renowned for
     his skill in it.—( Cic. Oral. i. 50.)

“I was told at the baths to-day that Cæsar escorted 5the lady home. Unfortunately old Quintus Lutatius had come hack from his villa in Campania, in a whim of jealousy. He was not expected for three days. There was a fine tumidt. The old fool called for his sword and his slaves, cursed his wife, and swore that he would cut Cæsar’s throat.”

“And Cæsar?”

“He laughed, quoted Anacreon, trussed his gown round his left arm, closed with Quintus, flung him down, twisted his sword out of his hand, burst through the attendants, ran a freed-man through the shoulder, and was in the street in an instant.”

“Well done! Here he comes. Good day, Caius.” Cæsar lifted his head at the salutation. His air of deep abstraction vanished; and he extended a hand to each of the friends.

“How are you after your last night’s exploit?”

“As well as possible,” said Cæsar laughing.

“In truth we should rather ask how Quintus Lutatius is.”

“He, I understand, is as well as can be expected of a man with a faithless spouse and a broken head. His freed-man is most seriously hurt. Poor fellow! he shall have half of whatever I win to-night. Flaminius, you shall have your revenge at Catiline’s.”

“You are very kind. I do not intend to be at Catiline’s till I wish to part with my town-house. My villa is gone already.”

“Not at Catiline’s, base spirit! You are not of his mind, my gallant Ligarius. Dice, Chian, and the loveliest Greek singing-girl that was ever seen. Think of that, Ligarius. By Venus, she almost made me adore her, by telling me that I talked Greek with the most Attic accent that she had heard in Italy.” 6“I doubt she will not say the same of me,” replied Ligarius. “I am just as able to decipher an obelisk as to read a line of Homer.”

“You barbarous Scythian, who had the care of your education?”

“An old fool,—a Greek pedant,—a Stoic. He told me that pain was no evil, and flogged me as if he thought so. At last one day, in the middle of a lecture, I set fire to his enormous filthy beard, singed his face, and sent him roaring out of the house. There ended my studies. From that time to this I have had as little to do with Greece as the wine that your poor old friend Lutatius calls his delicious Samian.”

“Well done, Ligarius. I hate a Stoic. I wish Marcus Cato had a beard that you might singe it for him. The fool talked his two hours in the Senate, yesterday, without changing a muscle of his face. He looked as savage and as motionless as the mask in which Roscius acted Alecto. I detest everything connected with him.”

“Except his sister, Servilia.”

“True. She is a lovely woman.”

“They say that you have told her so, Caius.”

“So I have.”

“And that she was not angry.”

“What woman is?”

“Aye,—but they say—”

“No matter what they say. Common fame lies like a Greek rhetorician. You might know so much, Ligarius, without reading the philosophers. But come, I will introduce you to little dark-eyed Zoe.”

“I tell you I can speak no Greek.”

“More shame for you. It is high time that you should begin. You will never have such a charming* 7instructress. Of what was your father thinking when he sent for an old Stoic with a long beard to teach you? There is no language-mistress like a handsome woman. When I was at Athens, I learnt more Greek from a pretty flower-girl in the Peiræus than from all the Portico and the Academy. She was no Stoic, Heaven knows. But come along to Zoe. I will be your interpreter. Woo her in honest Latin, and I will turn it into elegant Greek between the throws of dice. I can make love and mind my game at once, as Flaminius can tell you.”

“Well, then, to be plain, Cæsar, Flaminius has been talking to me about plots, and suspicions, and politicians. I never plagued myself with such things since Sylla’s and Marius’s days; and then I never could see much difference between the parties. All that I am sure of is, that those who meddle with such affairs are generally stabbed or strangled. And, though I like Greek wine and handsome women, I do not wish to risk my neck for them. Now, tell me as a friend, Caius;—is there no danger?”

“Danger!” repeated Cæsar, with a short, fierce, disdainful laugh: “what danger do you apprehend?”

“That you should best know,” said Flaminius; “you are far more intimate with Catiline than I. But I advise you to be cautious. The leading men entertain strong suspicions.”

Cæsar drew up his figure from its ordinary state of graceful relaxation into an attitude of commanding dignity, and replied in a voice of which the deep and impassioned melody formed a strange contrast to the humorous and affected tone of his ordinary conversation. “Let them suspect. They suspect because they know what they have deserved. What have they done 8for Rome?—What for mankind?—Ask the citizens. Ask the provinces. Have they had any other object than to perpetuate their own exclusive power, and to keep us under the yoke of an oligarchical tyranny, which unites in itself the worst evils of every other system, and combines more than Athenian turbulence with more than Persian despotism?”

“Good Gods! Cæsar. It is not safe for you to speak, or for us to listen to, such things, at such a crisis.”

“Judge for yourselves what you will hear. I will judge for myself what I will speak. I was not twenty years old, when I defied Lucius Sylla, surrounded by the spears of legionaries and the daggers of assassins. Do you suppose that I stand in awe of his paltry successors, who have inherited a power which they never could have acquired; who would imitate his proscriptions, though they have never equalled his conquests?”

“Pompey is almost as little to be trifled with as Sylla. I heard a consular senator say that, in consequence of the present alarming state of affairs, he would probably be recalled from the command assigned to him by the Manilian law.”

“Let him come,—the pupil of Sylla’s butcheries,—the gleaner of Lucullus’s trophies,—the thief-taker of the Senate.”

“For heaven’s sake, Caius!—if you knew what the Consul said—”

“Something about himself, no doubt. Pity that such talents should be coupled with such cowardice and coxcombry. He is the finest speaker living,—infinitely superior to what Horten sins was, in his best days;—a charming companion, except when he tells over for the twentieth time all the jokes that he made at 9Verres’s trial. But he is the despicable tool of a despicable party.”

“Your language, Caius, convinces me that the reports which have been circulated are not without foundation. I will venture to prophecy that within a few months the republic will pass through a whole Odyssey of strange adventures.”

“I believe so; an Odyssey of which Pompey will be the Polyphemus, and Cicero the Siren. I would have the state imitate Ulysses: show no mercy to the former; but contrive, if it can be done, to listen to the enchanting voice of the other, without being seduced by it to destruction.”

“But whom can your party produce as rivals to these two famous leaders?”

“Time will show. I would hope that there may arise a man, whose genius to conquer, to conciliate, and to govern, may unite in one cause an oppressed and divided people;—may do all that Sylla should have done, and exhibit the magnificent spectacle of a great nation directed by a great mind.”

“And where is such a man to be found?”

“Perhaps where you would least expect to find him. Perhaps he may be one whose powers have hitherto been concealed in domestic or literary retirement. Perhaps he may be one, who, while waiting for some adequate excitement, for some worthy opportunity, squanders on trifles a genius before which may yet be humbled the sword of Pompey and the gown of Cicero. Perhaps he may now be disputing with a sophist; perhaps prattling with a mistress; perhaps——-” and, as he spoke, he turned away, and resumed his lounge, “strolling in the Forum.” 10It was almost midnight. The party had separated. Catiline and Cethegus were still conferring in the supper-room, which was, as usual, the highest apartment of the house. It formed a cupola, from which windows opened on the flat roof that surrounded it. To this terrace Zoe had retired. With eyes dimmed with fond and melancholy tears, she leaned over the balustrade, to catch the last glimpse of the departing form of Cæsar, as it grew more and more indistinct in the moonlight. Had he any thought of her? Any love for her? He, the favourite of the high-born beauties of Rome, the most splendid, the most graceful, the most eloquent of its nobles? It could not be. His voice had, indeed, been touchingly soft whenever he addressed her. There had been a fascinating tenderness even in the vivacity of his look and conversation. But such were always the manners of Cæsar towards women. He had wreathed a sprig of myrtle in her hair as she was singing. She took it from her dark ringlets, and kissed it, and wept over it, and thought of the sweet legends of her own dear Greece,—of youths and girls, who, pining away in hopeless love, had been transformed into flowers by the compassion of the Gods; and she wished to become a flower, which Cæsar might sometimes touch, though he should touch it only to weave a crown for some prouder and happier mistress.

She was roused from her musings by the loud step and voice of Cethegus, who was pacing furiously up and down the supper-room.

“May all the gods confound me, if Cæsar be not the deepest traitor, or the most miserable idiot, that ever intermeddled with a plot!”

Zoe shuddered. She drew nearer to the window. She stood concealed from observation by the curtain 11of fine network which hung over the aperture, to exclude the annoying insects of the climate.

“And you, too!” continued Cethegus, turning fiercely on his accomplice; “you to take his part against me!—you, who proposed the scheme yourself!”

“My dear Caius Cethegus, you will not understand me. I proposed the scheme; and I will join in executing it. But policy is as necessary to our plans as boldness. I did not wish to startle Cæsar—to lose his co-operation—perhaps to send him off with an information against us to Cicero and Catulus. He was so indignant at your suggestion, that all my dissimulation was scarcely sufficient to prevent a total rupture.”

“Indignant! The gods confound him!—He prated about humanity, and generosity, and moderation. By Hercules, I have not heard such a lecture since I was with Xenochares at Rhodes.”

“Cæsar is made up of inconsistencies. He has boundless ambition, unquestioned courage, admirable sagacity. Yet I have frequently observed in him a womanish weakness at the sight of pain. I remember that once one of his slaves was taken ill while carrying his litter. He alighted, put the fellow in his place, and walked home in a fall of snow. I wonder that you could be so ill-advised as to talk to him of massacre, and pillage, and conflagration. You might have foreseen that such propositions would disgust a man of his temper.”

“I do not know. I have not your self-command, Lucius. I hate such conspirators. What is the use of them? We must have blood—blood,—hacking and tearing work—bloody work!”

“Do not grind your teeth, my dear Caius; and lay 12down the carving-knife. By Hercules, you have cut up all the stuffing of the couch.”

“No matter; we shall have couches enough soon,—and down to stuff them with,—and purple to cover them,—and pretty women to loll on them,—unless this fool, and such as he, spoil our plans. I had something else to say. The essenced fop wishes to seduce Zoe from me.”

“Impossible! you misconstrue the ordinary gallantries which he is in the habit of paying to every handsome face.”

“Curse on his ordinary gallantries, and his Akerses, and his compliments, and his sprigs of myrtle! If Cæsar should dare—by Hercules, I will tear him to pieces in the middle of the Forum.”

“Trust his destruction to me. We must use his talents and influence—thrust him upon every danger—make him our instrument while we are contending—our peace-offering to the Senate if we fail—our first victim if we succeed.”

“Hark! what noise was that?”

“Somebody in the terrace!—lend me your dagger.” Catiline rushed to the window. Zoe was standing in the shade. He stepped out. She darted into the room—passed like a flash of lightning by the startled Cethegus—flew down the stairs—through the court—through the vestibule—through the street. Steps, voices, lights, came fast and confusedly behind her;—but with the speed of love and terror she gained upon her pursuers. She fled through the wilderness of unknown and dusky streets, till she found herself, breathless and exhausted, in the midst of a crowd of gallants, who, with chaplets on their heads, and torches in their hands, were reeling from the portico of a stately mansion. 13The foremost of the throng was a youth whose slender figure and beautiful countenance seemed hardly consistent with his sex. But the feminine delicacy of his features rendered more frightful the mingled sensuality and ferocity of their expression. The libertine audacity of his stare, and the grotesque foppery of his apparel, seemed to indicate at least a partial insanity. Flinging one arm round Zoe, and tearing away her veil with the other, he disclosed to the gaze of his thronging companions the regular features and large dark eyes which characterise Athenian beauty.

“Clodius has all the luck to-night,” cried Ligarius. “Not so, by Hercules,” said Marcus Colius; “the girl is fairly our common prize: we will fling dice for her. The Venus (1) throw, as it ought to do, shall decide.”

“Let me go—let me go, for Heaven’s sake,” cried Zoe, struggling with Clodius.

“What a charming Greek accent she has. Come into the house, my little Athenian nightingale.”

“Oh! what will become of me? If you have mothers—if you have sisters——”

“Clodius has a sister,” muttered Ligarius, “or he is much belied.”

“By Heaven, she is weeping,” said Clodius.

“If she were not evidently a Greek,” said Colius, “I should take her for a vestal virgin.”

“And if she were a vestal virgin,” cried Clodius fiercely, “it should not deter me. This way;—no struggling—no screaming.”

“Struggling! screaming!” exclaimed a gay and commanding voice; “You are making very ungentle love, Clodius.”

     (1) Venus was the Roman term for the highest throw on the
     dice. 14The whole party started. Cæsar had mingled with
     them unperceived.

The sound of his voice thrilled through the very heart of Zoe. With a convulsive effort she burst from the grasp of her insolent admirer, flung herself at the feet of Cæsar, and clasped his knees. The moon shone full on her agitated and imploring face: her lips moved; but she uttered no sound. He gazed at her for an instant—raised her—clasped her to his bosom. “Fear nothing, my sweet Zoe.” Then, with folded arms, and a smile of placid defiance, he placed himself between her and Clodius.

Clodius staggered forward, flushed with wine and rage, and uttering alternately a curse and a hiccup.

“By Pollux, this passes a jest. Cæsar, how dare you insult me thus?”

“A jest! I am as serious as a Jew on the Sabbath. Insult you; For such a pair of eyes I would insult the whole consular bench, or I should be as insensible as King Psammis’s mummy.”

“Good Gods, Cæsar!” said Marcus Colius, interposing; “you cannot think it worth while to get into a brawl for a little Greek girl!”

“Why not? The Greek girls have used me as well as those of Rome. Besides, the whole reputation of my gallantry is at stake. Give up such a lovely woman to that drunken boy! My character would be gone for ever. No more perfumed tablets, full of vows and raptures? No more toying with fingers at the Circus. No more evening walks along the Tiber. No more hiding in chests, or jumping from windows. I, the favoured suitor of half the white stoles in Rome, could never again aspire above a freed-woman. You a man of gallantry, and think of such 14a thin, lovely woman to that drunken boy! My character would be gone for ever. No more perfumed tablets, full of vows and raptures? No more toying with fingers at the Circus. No more evening walks along the Tiber. No more hiding in chests, or jumping from windows. I, the favoured suitor of half the white stoles in Rome, could never again aspire above a freed-woman. You a man of gallantry, and think of such 15a thing! For shame, my dear Colius! Do not let Clodia hear of it.”

While Cæsar spoke he had been engaged in keeping Clodius at arm’s length. The rage of the frantic libertine increased as the struggle continued. “Stand back, as you value your life,” he cried; “I will pass.”

“Not this way, sweet Clodius. I have too much regard for you to suffer you to make love at such disadvantage. You smell too much of Falernian at present. Would you stifle your mistress? By Hercules, you are fit to kiss nobody now, except old Piso, when he is tumbling home in the morning from the vintners.” (1)

Clodius plunged his hand into his bosom, and drew a little dagger, the faithful companion of many desperate adventures.

“Oh, Gods! he will be murdered!” cried Zoe.

The whole throng of revellers was in agitation. The street fluctuated with torches and lifted hands. It was but for a moment. Cæsar watched with a steady eye the descending hand of Clodius, arrested the blow, seized his antagonist by the throat, and flung him against one of the pillars of the portico with such violence that he rolled, stunned and senseless, on the ground.

“He is killed,” cried several voices.

“Fair self-defence, by Hercules!” said Marcus Colius. “Bear witness, you all saw him draw his dagger.”

“He is not dead—he breathes,” said Ligarius. “Carry him into the house; he is dreadfully bruised.”

The rest of the party retired with Clodius. Colius turned to Cæsar.

“By all the Gods, Caius! you have won your (1) Cic. in Pis. 16lady fairly. A splendid victory! You deserve a triumph.”

“What a madman Clodius has become!”

“Intolerable. But come and sup with me on the Nones. You have no objection to meet the Consul?”

“Cicero? None at all. We need not talk politics. Our old dispute about Plato and Epicurus will furnish us with plenty of conversation. So reckon upon me, my dear Marcus, and farewell.”

Caesar and Zoe turned away. As soon as they were beyond hearing, she began in great agitation:—

“Cæsar, you are in danger. I know all. I overheard Catiline and Cethegus. You are engaged in a project which must lead to certain destruction.”

“My beautiful Zoe, I live only for glory and pleasure. For these I have never hesitated to hazard an existence which they alone render valuable to me. In the present case, I can assure you that our scheme presents the fairest hopes of success.”

“So much the worse. You do not know—you do not understand me. I speak not of open peril, but of secret treachery. Catiline hates you;—Cethegus hates you;—your destruction is resolved. If you survive the contest, you perish in the first hour of victory. They detest you for your moderation;—they are eager for blood and plunder. I have risked my life to bring you this warning; but that is of little moment. Farewell!—Be happy——”

Cæsar stopped her. “Do you fly from my thanks, dear Zoe?”

“I wish not for your thanks, but for your safety;—I desire not to defraud Valeria or Servilia of one caress, extorted from gratitude or pity. Be my feelings what they may, I have learnt in a fearful school 17to endure and to suppress them. I have been taught to abase a proud spirit to the claps and hisses of the vulgar:—to smile on suitors who united the insults of a despicable pride to the endearments of a loathsome fondness;—to affect sprightliness with an aching head, and eyes from which tears were ready to gush;—to feign love with curses on my lips, and madness in my brain. Who feels for me any esteem,—any tenderness? Who will shed a tear over the nameless grave which will soon shelter from cruelty and scorn the broken heart of the poor Athenian girl? But you, who alone have addressed her in her degradation with a voice of kindness and respect, farewell. Sometimes think of me,—not with sorrow;—no; I could bear your ingratitude, but not your distress. Yet, if it will not pain you too much, in distant days, when your lofty hopes and destinies are accomplished,—on the evening of some mighty victory,—in the chariot of some magnificent triumph,—think on one who loved you with that exceeding love which only the miserable can feel. Think that, wherever her exhausted frame may have sunk beneath the sensibilities of a tortured spirit,—in whatever hovel or whatever vault she may have closed her eyes,—whatever strange scenes of horror and pollution may have surrounded her dying bed, your shape was the last that swam before her sight—your voice the last sound that was ringing in her ears. Yet turn your face to me, Cæsar. Let me carry away one last look of those features, and then——” He turned round. He looked at her. He hid his face on her bosom, and burst into tears. With sobs long and loud, and convulsive as those of a terrified child, he poured forth on her bosom the tribute of impetuous and uncontrollable emotion. He raised his head; but 18he in vain struggled to restore composure to the brow which had confronted the frown of Sylla, and the lips which had rivalled the eloquence of Cicero. He several times attempted to speak, but in vain; and his voice still faltered with tenderness, when, after a pause of several minutes, he thus addressed her:

“My own dear Zoe, your love has been bestowed on one who, if he cannot merit, can at least appreciate and adore you. Beings of similar loveliness, and similar devotedness of affection, mingled, in all my boyish dreams of greatness, with visions of curule chairs and ivory cars, marshalled legions and laurelled fasces. Such I have endeavored to find in the world; and, in their stead, I have met with selfishness, with vanity, with frivolity, with falsehood. The life which you have preserved is a boon less valuable than the affection——”

“Oh! Cæsar,” interrupted the blushing Zoe, “think only on your own security at present. If you feel as you speak,—but you are only mocking me,—or perhaps your compassion———”

“By Heaven!:—by every oath that is binding——”

“Alas! alas! Cæsar, were not all the same oaths sworn yesterday to Valeria? But I will trust you, at least so far as to partake your present dangers. Flight may be necessary:—form your plans. Be they what they may, there is one who, in exile, in poverty, in peril, asks only to wander, to beg, to die with you.”

“My Zoe, I do not anticipate any such necessity. To renounce the conspiracy without renouncing the principles on which it was originally undertaken,—to elude the vengeance of the Senate without losing the confidence of the people,—is, indeed, an arduous, but not an impossible, task. I owe it to myself and to my 19country to make the attempt. There is still ample time for consideration. At present I am too happy in love to think of ambition or danger.”

They had reached the door of a stately palace. Cæsar struck it. It was instantly opened by a slave. Zoe found herself in a magnificent hall, surrounded by pillars of green marble, between which were ranged the statues of the long line of Julian nobles.

“Call Endymion,” said Cæsar.

The confidential freed-man made his appearance, not without a slight smile, which his patron’s good nature emboldened him to hazard, at perceiving the beautiful Athenian.

“Arm my slaves, Endymion; there are reasons for precaution. Let them relieve each other on guard during the night. Zoe, my love, my preserver, why are your cheeks so pale? Let me kiss some bloom into them. How you tremble! Endymion, a flask of Samian and some fruit. Bring them to my apartments. This way, my sweet Zoe.”

ON THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE.

20(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, June 1823.)
T
his is the age of societies. There is scarcely one Englishman in ten who has not belonged to some association for distributing books, or for prosecuting them; for sending invalids to the hospital, or beggars to the treadmill; for giving plate to the rich or blankets to the poor. To be the most absurd institution among so many institutions is no small distinction; it seems, however, to belong indisputably to the Royal Society of Literature. At the first establishment of that ridiculous academy, every sensible man predicted that, in spite of regal patronage and episcopal management, it would do nothing, or do harm. And it will scarcely be denied that those expectations have hitherto been fulfilled.

I do not attack the founders of the association. Their characters are respectable; their motives, I am willing to believe, were laudable. But I feel, and it is the duty of every literary man to feel, a strong jealousy of their proceedings. Their society can be innocent only while it continues to be despicable. Should they ever possess the power to encourage merit, they must also possess the power to depress it. Which power will be more frequently exercised, let every one who has studied literary history, let every one who has studied human nature, declare. 21Envy and faction insinuate themselves into all communities. They often disturb the peace, and pervert the decisions, of benevolent and scientific associations. But it is in literary academies that they exert the most extensive and pernicious influence. In the first place, the principles of literary criticism, though equally fixed with those on which the chemist and the surgeon proceed, are by no means equally recognised. Men are rarely able to assign a reason for their approbation or dislike on questions of taste; and therefore they willingly submit to any guide who boldly asserts his claim to superior discernment. It is more difficult to ascertain and establish the merits of a poem than the powers of a machine or the benefits of a new remedy. Hence it is in literature, that quackery is most easily puffed, and excellence most easily decried.

In some degree this argument applies to academies of the fine arts; and it is fully confirmed by all that I have ever heard of that institution which annually disfigures the walls of Somerset-House with an acre of spoiled canvass. But a literary tribunal is incomparably more dangerous. Other societies, at least, have no tendency to call forth any opinions on those subjects which most agitate and inflame the minds of men. The sceptic and the zealot, the revolutionist and the placeman, meet on common ground in a gallery of paintings or a laboratory of science. They can praise or censure without reference to the differences which exist between them. In a literary body this can never be the case. Literature is, and always must be, inseparably blended with politics and theology; it is the great engine which moves the feelings of a people on the most momentous questions. It is, therefore, impossible that any society can be formed so impartial as to 22consider the literary character of an individual abstracted from the opinions which his writings inculcate. It is not to be hoped, perhaps it is not to be wished, that the feelings of the man should be so completely forgotten in the duties of the academician. The consequences are evident. The honours and censures of this Star-chamber of the Muses will be awarded according to the prejudices of the particular sect or faction which may at the time predominate. Whigs would canvass against a Southey, Tories against a Byron. Those who might at first protest against such conduct as unjust would soon adopt it on the plea of retaliation; and the general good of literature, for which the society was professedly instituted, would be forgotten in the stronger claims of political and religious partiality.

Yet even this is not the worst. Should the institution ever acquire any influence, it will afford most pernicious facilities to every malignant coward who may desire to blast a reputation which he envies. It will furnish a secure ambuscade, behind which the Maroons of literature may take a certain and deadly aim. The editorial we has often been fatal to rising genius; though all the world knows that it is only a form of speech, very often employed by a single needy blockhead. The academic we would have a far greater and more ruinous influence. Numbers, while they increased the effect, would diminish the shame, of injustice. The advantages of an open and those of an anonymous attack would be combined; and the authority of avowal would be united to the security of concealment. The serpents in Virgil, after they had destroyed Laocoön, found an asylum from the vengeance of the enraged people behind the shield of the statue of Minerva. And, in the same manner, every 23thing that is grovelling and venomous, every thing that can hiss, and every thing that can sting, would take sanctuary in the recesses of this new temple of wisdom.

The French academy was, of all such associations, the most widely and the most justly celebrated. It was founded by the greatest of ministers; it was patronised by successive kings; it numbered in its lists most of the eminent French writers. Yet what benefit has literature derived from its labours? What is its history but an uninterrupted record of servile compliances—of paltry artifices—of deadly quarrels—of perfidious friendships? Whether governed by the Court, by the Sorbonne, or by the Philosophers, it was always equally powerful for evil, and equally impotent for good. I might speak of the attacks by which it attempted to depress the rising fame of Corneille; I might speak of the reluctance with which it gave its tardy confirmation to the applauses which the whole civilised world had bestowed on the genius of Voltaire. I might prove by overwhelming evidence that, to the latest period of its existence, even under the superintendence of the all-accomplished D’Alembert, it continued to be a scene of the fiercest animosities and the basest intrigues. I might cite Piron’s epigrams, and Marmontel’s memoirs, and Montesquieu’s letters. But I hasten on to another topic.

One of the modes by which our Society proposes to encourage merit is the distribution of prizes. The munificence of the king has enabled it to offer an annual premium of a hundred guineas for the best essay in prose, and another of fifty guineas for the best poem, which may be transmitted to it. This is very laughable. In the first place the judges may err. Those imperfections of human intellect to which, as 24the articles of the church tell us, even general councils are subject may possibly be found even in the Royal Society of Literature. The French academy, as I have already said, was the most illustrious assembly of the kind, and numbered among its associates men much more distinguished than ever will assemble at Mr. Hatchard’s to rummage the box of the English Society. Yet this famous body gave a poetical prize, for which Voltaire was a candidate, to a fellow who wrote some verses about the frozen and the burning pole.

Yet, granting that the prizes were always awarded to the best composition, that composition, I say without hesitation, will always be bad. A prize poem is like a prize sheep. The object of the competitor for the agricultural premium is to produce an animal fit, not to be eaten, but to be weighed. Accordingly he pampers his victim into morbid and unnatural fitness; and, when it is in such a state that it would be sent away in disgust from any table, he offers it to the judges. The object of the poetical candidate, in like manner, is to produce, not a good poem, but a poem of that exact degree of frigidity or bombast which may appear to his censors to be correct or sublime. Compositions thus constructed will always be worthless. The few excellences which they may contain will have an exotic aspect and flavour. In general, prize sheep are good for nothing but to make tallow candles, and prize poems are good for nothing but to light them.

The first subject proposed by the Society to the poets of England was Dartmoor. I thought that they intended a covert sarcasm at their own projects. Their institution was a literary Dartmoor scheme;—a plan for forcing into cultivation the waste lands of intellect,—for raising poetical produce, by means of bounties. 25from soil too meagre to have yielded any returns in the natural course of things. The plan for the cultivation of Dartmoor has, I hear, been abandoned. I hope that this may be an omen of the fate of the Society.

In truth, this seems by no means improbable. They have been offering for several years the rewards which the king placed at their disposal, and have not, as far as I can learn, been able to find in their box one composition which they have deemed worthy of publication. At least no publication has taken place. The associates may perhaps be astonished at this. But I will attempt to explain it, after the manner of ancient times, by means of an apologue.

About four hundred years after the deluge, King Gomer Chephoraod reigned in Babylon. He united all the characteristics of an excellent sovereign. He made good laws, won great battles, and white-washed long streets. He was, in consequence, idolised by his people, and panegyrised by many poets and orators. A book was then a serious undertaking; Neither paper nor any similar material had been invented. Authors were therefore under the necessity of inscribing their compositions on massive bricks. Some of these Babylonian records are still preserved in European museums; but the language in which they are written has never been deciphered. Gomer Chephoraod was so popular that the clay of all the plains round the Euphrates could scarcely furnish brick-kilns enough for his eulogists. It is recorded in particular that Pharonezzar, the Assyrian Pindar, published a bridge and four walls in his praise.

One day the king was going in state from his palace to the temple of Belus. During this procession it was lawful for any Babylonian to offer any petition or suggestion 26to his sovereign. As the chariot passed before a vintner’s shop, a large company, apparently half-drunk, sallied forth into the street; and one of them thus addressed the king:

“Gomer Chephoraod, live for ever! It appears to thy servants that of all the productions of the earth good wine is the best, and bad wine is the worst. Good wine makes the heart cheerful, the eyes bright, the speech ready. Bad wine confuses the head, disorders the stomach, makes us quarrelsome at night, and sick the next morning. Now therefore let my lord the king take order that thy servants may drink good wine.”

“And how is this to be done?” said the good-natured prince.

“Oh, King,” said his monitor, “this is most easy. Let the king make a decree, and seal it with his royal signet: and let it be proclaimed that the king will give ten she-asses, and ten slaves, and ten changes of raiment, every year, unto the man who shall make ten measures of the best wine. And whosoever wishes for the she-asses, and the slaves, and the raiment, let him send the ten measures of wine to thy servants, and we will drink thereof and judge. So shall there be much good wine in Assyria.”

The project pleased Gomer Chephoraod. “Be it so,” said he. The people shouted. The petitioners prostrated themselves in gratitude. The same night heralds were despatched to bear the intelligence to the remotest districts of Assyria.

After a due interval the wines began to come in; and the examiners assembled to adjudge the prize. The first vessel was unsealed. Its odour was such that the judges, without tasting it, pronounced unanimous 27condemnation. The next was opened: it had a villainous taste of clay. The third was sour and vapid. They proceeded from one cask of execrable liquor to another, till at length, in absolute nausea, they gave up the investigation.

The next morning they all assembled at the gate of the king, with pale faces and aching heads. They owned that they could not recommend any competitor as worthy of the rewards. They swore that the wine was little better than poison, and intreated permission to resign the office of deciding between such detestable potions.

“In the name of Belus, how can this have happened?” said the king.

Merolchazzar, the high-priest, muttered something about the anger of the Gods at the toleration shown to a sect of impious heretics who ate pigeons broiled, “whereas,” said he, “our religion commands us to eat them roasted. Now therefore, oh King,” continued this respectable divine, “give command to thy men of war, and let them smite the disobedient people with the sword, them, and their wives, and their children, and let their houses, and their flocks, and their herds, be given to thy servants the priests. Then shall the land yield its increase, and the fruits of the earth shall be no more blasted by the vengeance of heaven.”

“Nay,” said the King, “the ground lies under no general curse from heaven. The season has been singularly good. The wine which thou didst thyself drink at the banquet a few nights ago, oh venerable Merolchazzar, was of this year’s vintage. Dost thou not remember how thou didst praise it? It was the same night that thou wast inspired by Belus, and didst reel to and fro, and discourse sacred mysteries. These 28things are too hard for me. I comprehend them not. The only wine which is had is that which is sent to my judges. Who can expound this to us?”

The king scratched his head. Upon which all the courtiers scratched their heads.

He then ordered proclamation to be made, that a purple robe and a golden chain should be given to the man who could solve this difficulty.

An old philosopher, who had been observed to smile rather disdainfully when the prize had first been instituted, came forward and spoke thus:—

“Gomer Chephoraod, live for ever! Marvel not at that which has happened. It was no miracle, but a natural event. How could it be otherwise? It is true that much good wine has been made this year. But who would send it in for thy rewards? Thou know-est Ascobaruch who hath the great vineyards in the north, and Cohahiroth who sendeth wine every year from the south over the Persian gulf. Their wines are so delicious that ten measures thereof are sold for an hundred talents of silver. Thinkest thou that they will exchange them for thy slaves and thine asses? What would thy prize profit any who have vineyards in rich soils?”

“Who then,” said one of the judges, “are the wretches who sent us this poison?”

“Blame them not,” said the sage, “seeing that you have been the authors of the evil. They are men whose lands are poor, and have never yielded them any returns equal to the prizes which the king proposed. Wherefore, knowing that the lords of the fruitful vineyards would not enter into competition with them, they planted vines, some on rocks, and some in light sandy soil, and some in deep clay. Hence 29their wines are bad. For no culture or reward will make barren land bear good vines. Know therefore, assuredly, that your prizes have increased the quantity of bad but not of good wine.”

There was a long silence. At length the king spoke. “Give him the purple robe and the chain of gold. Throw the wines into the Euphrates; and proclaim that the Royal Society of Wines is dissolved.”

SCENES FROM “ATHENIAN REVELS.”

30(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, January 1824.)

A DRAMA.

I.

Scene—A Street in Athens.

Enter Callidemus and Speusippus.

CALLIDEMUS.

So, you young reprobate! You must be a man of wit, forsooth, and a man of quality! You must spend as if you were as rich as Nicias, and prate as if you were as wise as Pericles! You must dangle after sophists and pretty women! And I must pay for all! I must sup on thyme and onions, while you are swallowing thrushes and hares! I must drink water, that you may play the cottabus (1) with Chian wine! I must wander about as ragged as Pauson,(2) that you may be as fine as Alcibiades! I must lie on bare boards, with a stone (3) for my pillow, and a rotten mat for my coverlid, by the light of a wretched winking lamp, while you are marching in state, with as many torches as one sees at the feast of Ceres, to thunder with your hatchet(4) at the doors of half the Ionian ladies in Peiræus.(5)

     (1) This game consisted in projecting wine out of cups; it
     was a diversion extremely fashionable at Athenian
     entertainments.

     (2) Pauson was an Athenian painter, whose name was
     synonymous with beggary. See Aristophanes; Plutus, 602. From
     his poverty, I am inclined to suppose that he painted
     historical pictures.

     (3) See Aristophanes; Plutus, 542. 31

     (4)See Theocritus; Idyll ii. 128.

     (5) This was the most disreputable part of Athens. See
     Aristophanes; Pax, 165.

SPEUSIPPUS.

Why, thou unreasonable old man! Thou most shameless of fathers!——

CALLIDEMUS.

Ungrateful wretch; dare you talk so? Are you not afraid of the thunders of Jupiter?

SPEUSIPPUS.

Jupiter thunder! nonsense! Anaxagoras says, that thunder is only an explosion produced by——

CALLIDEMUS.

He does! Would that it had fallen on his head for his pains!

SPEUSIPPUS.

Nay: talk rationally.

CALLIDEMUS.

Rationally! You audacious young sophist! I will talk rationally. Do you know that I am your father? What quibble can you make upon that?

SPEUSIPPUS.

Do I know that you are my father? Let us take the question to pieces, as Melesigenes would say. First, then, we must inquire what is knowledge? Secondly, what is a father? Now, knowledge, as Socrates said the other day to Theætetus,—-(1)

     (1) See Plato’s Theætetus.

CALLIDEMUS.

32Socrates! what! the ragged flat-nosed old dotard, who walks about all day barefoot, and filches cloaks, and dissects gnats, and shoes(1) fleas with wax?

SPEUSIPPUS.

All fiction! All trumped up by Aristophanes!

CALLIDEMUS.

By Pallas, if he is in the habit of putting shoes on his fleas, he is kinder to them than to himself. But listen to me, boy; if you go on in this way, you will be ruined. There is an argument for you. Go to your Socrates and your Melesigenes, and tell them to refute that. Ruined! Do you hear?

SPEUSIPPUS.

Ruined!

CALLIDEMUS.

Ay, by Jupiter! Is such a show as you make to be supported on nothing? During all the last war, I made not an obol from my farm; the Peloponnesian locusts came almost as regularly as the Pleiades;—corn burnt;—olives stripped;—fruit trees cut down;—wells stopped up;—and, just when peace came, and I hoped that all would turn out well, you must begin to spend as if you had all the mines of Thasus at command.

SPEUSIPPUS.

Now, by Neptune, who delights in horses——

CALLIDEMUS.

If Neptune delights in horses, he does not resemble

     (1) See Aristophanes; Nubes, 150. 33me. You must ride at
     the Panathenæa on a horse fit for the great king: four acres
     of my best vines went for that folly. You must retrench, or
     you will have nothing to eat. Does not Anaxagoras mention,
     among his other discoveries, that when a man has nothing to
     eat he dies?

SPEUSIPPUS.

You are deceived. My friends—————-

CALLIDEMUS.

Oh, yes! your friends will notice you, doubtless, when you are squeezing through the crowd, on a winter’s day, to warm yourself at the fire of the baths;—or when you are fighting with beggars and beggars’ dogs for the scraps of a sacrifice;—or when you are glad to earn three wretched obols(1) by listening all day to lying speeches and crying children.

SPEUSIPPUS.

There are other means of support.

CALLIDEMUS.

What! I suppose you will wander from house to house, like that wretched buffoon Philippus(2), and beg every body who has asked a supper-party to be so kind as to feed you and laugh at you; or you will turn sycophant; you will get a bunch of grapes, or a pair of shoes, now and then, by frightening some rich coward with a mock prosecution. Well! that is a task for which your studies under the sophists may have fitted you.

     (1) The stipend of an Athenian juryman.

     (2) Xenophon, Convivium

SPEUSIPPUS.

You are wide of the mark.

CALLIDEMOS. 34

Then what, in the name of Juno, is your scheme? Do you intend to join Orestes,(1) and rob on the highway? Take care; beware of the eleven; (2) beware of the hemlock. It may be very pleasant to live at other people’s expense; but not very pleasant, I should think, to hear the pestle give its last hang against the mortar, when the cold dose is ready. Pah!————-

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Hemlock! Orestes! folly!—I aim at nobler objects. What say you to politics,—the general assembly?

CALLIDEMUS.

You an orator!—oh no! no! Cleon was worth twenty such fools as you. You have succeeded, I grant, to his impudence, for which, if there be justice in Tartarus, he is now soaking up to the eyes in his own tan-pickle. But the Paphlagonian had parts.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

And you mean to imply—————-

CALLIDEMUS.

Not I. You are a Pericles in embryo, doubtless. Well: and when are you to make your first speech? oh Pallas!

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

I thought of speaking, the other day, on the Sicilian expedition; but Nicias (3) got up before me.

     (1) A celebrated highwayman of Attica. See Aristophanes;
     Aves, 711: and in several other passages.

     (2) The police officers of Athens.

     (3) See Thucydides, vi. 8.

CALLIDEMUS.

35Nicias, poor honest man, might just as well have sate still; his speaking did but little good. The loss of your oration is, doubtless, an irreparable public calamity.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Why, not so; I intend to introduce it at the next assembly; it will suit any subject.

CALLIDEMUS.

That is to say, it will suit none. But pray, if it be not too presumptuous a request, indulge me with a specimen.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Well; suppose the agora crowded;—an important subject under discussion;—an ambassador from Argos, or from the great king;—the tributes from the islands;—an impeachment;—in short, anything you please. The crier makes proclamation.—“Any citizen above fifty years old may speak—any citizen not disqualified may speak.” Then I rise:—a great murmur of curiosity while I am mounting the stand.

CALLIDEMUS.

Of curiosity! yes, and of something else too. You will infallibly be dragged down by main force, like poor Glaucon (1) last year.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Never fear. I shall begin in this style:

“When I consider, Athenians, the importance of our city;—when I consider the extent of its power,

     (1) See Xenophon; Memorabilia, iii.

36the wisdom of its laws, the elegance of its decorations—when I consider by what names and by what exploits its annals are adorned;—when I think on Harmodius and Aristogiton, on Themistocles and Miltiades, on Cimon and Pericles;—when I contemplate our pre-eminence in arts and letters;—when I observe so many flourishing states and islands compelled to own the dominion, and purchase the protection, of the City of the Violet Crown(1)—

CALLIDEMUS.

I shall choke with rage. Oh, all ye gods and goddesses, what sacrilege, what perjury have I ever committed, that I should be singled out from among all the citizens of Athens to be the father of this fool?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

What now? By Bacchus, old man, I would not advise you to give way to such fits of passion in the streets. If Aristophanes were to see you, you would infallibly be in a comedy next spring.

CALLIDEMUS.

You have more reason to fear Aristophanes than any fool living. Oh, that he could but hear you trying to imitate the slang of Straton(2) and the lisp of Alcibiades!(3) You would be an inexhaustible subject. You would console him for the loss of Cleon.

SPEÜSIPPÜS

No, no. I may perhaps figure at the dramatic representations before long; but in a very different way.

     (1) A favourite epithet of Athens. See Aristophanes; Acharn.
     637.

     (2) See Aristophanes; Equités, 1375.

     (3) See Aristophanes; Vespæ, 44.

CALLIDEMUS.

37What do you mean?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

What say you to a tragedy?

CALLIDEMUS.

A tragedy of yours?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Even so.

CALLIDEMUS.

Oh Hercules! Oh Bacchus! This is too much. Here is an universal genius; sophist,—orator,—poet. To what a three-headed monster have I given birth! a perfect Cerberus of intellect! And pray what may your piece be about? Or will your tragedy, like your speech, serve equally for any subject?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

I thought of several plots;—Odipus,—Eteocles and Polynices,—the war of Troy, the murder of Agamemnon.

CALLIDEMUS.

And what have you chosen?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

You know there is a law which permits any modern poet to retouch a play of Æschylus, and bring it forward as his own composition. And, as there is an absurd prejudice, among the vulgar, in favour of his extravagant pieces, I have selected one of them, and altered it.

CALLIDEMUS.

38Which of them?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Oh! that mass of barbarous absurdities, the Prometheus. But I have framed it anew upon the model of Euripides. By Bacchus, I shall make Sophocles and Agathon look about them. You would not know the play again.

CALLIDEMUS.

By Jupiter, I believe not.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

I have omitted the whole of the absurd dialogue between Vulcan and Strength, at the beginning.

CALLIDEMUS.

That may be, on the whole, an improvement. The play will then open with that grand soliloquy of Prometheus, when he is chained to the rock.

“Oh! ye eternal heavens! Ye rushing winds!
Ye fountains of great streams! Ye ocean waves,
That in ten thousand sparkling dimples wreathe
Your azure smiles! All-generating earth!
All-seeing sun! On you, on you, I call.” (1)

Well, I allow that will be striking; I did not think you capable of that idea. Why do you laugh?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Do you seriously suppose that one who has studied the plays of that great man, Euripides, would ever begin a tragedy in such a ranting style?

     (1) See Æschylus; Prometheus, 88.

CALLIDEMUS.

39What, does not your play open with the speech of Prometheus?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

No doubt.

CALLIDEMUS.

Then what, in the name of Bacchus, do you make him say?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

You shall hear; and, if it be not in the very style of Euripides, call me a fool.

CALLIDEMUS.

That is a liberty which I shall venture to take, whether it be or no. But go on.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Prometheus begins thus:

“Coelus begat Saturn and Briareus,
Cottus and Creius and Iapetus,
Gyges and Hyperion, Phoebe, Tethys,
Thea and Rhea and Mnemosyne.
Then Saturn wedded Rhea, and begat
Pluto and Neptune, Jupiter and Juno.”

CALLIDEMUS.

Very beautiful, and very natural; and, as you say, very like Euripides.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

You are sneering. Really, father, you do not understand these things. You had not those advantages in your youth—

CALLIDEMUS.

Which I have been fool enough to let you have. No; in my early days, lying had not been dignified into a science, nor politics degraded into a trade. 40wrestled, and read Homer’s battles, instead of dressing my hair, and reciting lectures in verse out of Euripides. But I have some notion of what a play should be; I have seen Phrynichus, and lived with Æschylus. I saw the representation of the Persians.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

A wretched play; it may amuse the fools who row the triremes; but it is utterly unworthy to be read by any man of taste.

CALLIDEMUS.

If you had seen it acted;—the whole theatre frantic with joy, stamping, shouting, laughing, crying. There was Cynaegeirus, the brother of Æschylus, who lost both his arms at Marathon, beating the stumps against his sides with rapture. When the crowd remarked him—But where are you going?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

To sup with Alcibiades; he sails with the expedition for Sicily in a few days; this is his farewell entertainment.

CALLIDEMUS.

So much the better; I should say, so much the worse. That cursed Sicilian expedition! And you were one of the young fools(1) who stood clapping and shouting while he was gulling the rabble, and who drowned poor Nicias’s voice with your uproar. Look to it; a day of reckoning will come. As to Alcibiades himself—

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

What can you say against him? His enemies themselves acknowledge his merit.

     (1) See Thucydides, vi. 13.

CALLIDEMUS.

41They acknowledge that he is clever, and handsome, and that he was crowned at the Olympic games. And what other merits do his friends claim for him? A. precious assembly you will meet at his house, no doubt.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

The first men in Athens, probably.

CALLIDEMUS.

Whom do you mean by the first men in Athens?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Callicles.(1)

CALLIDEMUS.

A sacrilegious, impious, unfeeling ruffian!

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Hippomachus.

CALLIDEMUS.

A fool, who can talk of nothing but his travels through Persia and Egypt. Go, go. The gods fordid that I should detain you from such choice society.

[Exeunt severally.

     (1) Callicles plays a conspicuous part in the Gorgias of
     Plato.

II.

Scene—A Hall in the House of Alcibiades,

Alcibiades, Speusippus, Callicles, Hippomachus, Chariclea, and others, seated round a table, feasting.

ALCIBIADES.

42Bring larger cups. This shall be our gayest revel. It is probably the last—for some of us at least.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

At all events, it ‘will be long before you taste such wine again, Alcibiades.

CALLICLES.

Nay, there is excellent wine in Sicily. When I was there with Eurymedon’s squadron, I had many a long carouse. You never saw finer grapes than those of Ætna.

HIPPOMACHUS.

The Greeks do not understand the art of making wine. Your Persian is the man. So rich, so fragrant, so sparkling. I will tell you what the Satrap of Caria said to me about that when I supped with him.

ALCIBIADES.

Nay, sweet Hippomachus; not a word to-night about satraps, or the great king, or the walls of Babylon, or the Pyramids, or the mummies. Chariclea, why do you look so sad?

CHARICLEA.

Can I be cheerful when you are going to leave me, Alcibiades?

ALCIBIADES.

My life, my sweet soul, it is but for a short time. In 43a year we conquer Sicily. In another, we humble Carthage. (1) I will bring back such robes, such necklaces, elephants’ teeth by thousands, ay, and the elephants themselves, if you wish to see them. Nay, smile, my Chariclea, or I shall talk nonsense to no purpose.

HIPPOMACHUS.

The largest elephant that I ever saw was in the grounds of Teribazus, near Susa. I wish that I had measured him.

ALCIBIADES.

I wish that he had trod upon you. Come, come, Chariclea, we shall soon return, and then——

CHARICLEA.

Yes; then, indeed.

ALCIBIADES.

Yes, then—

Then for revels; then for dances,
Tender whispers, melting glances.
Peasants, pluck your richest fruits:
Minstrels, sound your sweetest flutes:
Come in laughing crowds to greet us,
Dark-eyed daughters of Miletus;
Bring the myrtles, bring the dice,
Floods of Chian, hills of spice.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Whose lines are those, Alcibiades?

ALCIBIADES.

My own. Think you, because I do not shut myself up to meditate, and drink water, and eat herbs, that I cannot write verses? By Apollo, if I did not spend

     (1) See Thucydides, vi. 90.

44my days in politics, and my nights in revelry, I should have made Sophocles tremble. But now I never go beyond a little song like this, and never invoke any Muse but Chariclea. But come, Speusippus, sing. You are a professed poet. Let us have some of your verses.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

My verses! How can you talk so? I a professed poet.

ALCIBIADES.

Oh, content you, sweet Speusippus. We all know your designs upon the tragic honours. Come, sing. A chorus of your new play.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Nay, nay—

HIPPOMACHUS.

When a guest who is asked to sing at a Persian banquet refuses——

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

In the name of Bacchus——

ALCIBIADES.

I am absolute. Sing.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Well, then, I will sing you a chorus, which, I think, is a tolerable imitation of Euripides.

CHARICLEA.

Of Euripides?—Not a word!

ALCIBIADES.

Why so, sweet Chariclea?

CHARICLEA.

45Would you have me betray my sex? Would you have me forget his Phædras and Sthenoboas? No: if I ever suffer any lines of that woman-hater, or his imitators, to be sung in my presence, may I (1) sell herbs like his mother, and wear rags like his Telephus. (2)

ALCIBIADES.

Then, sweet Chariclea, since you have silenced Speusippus, you shall sing yourself.

CHARICLEA.

What shall I sing?

ALCIBIADES.

Nay, choose for yourself.

CHARICLEA.

Then I will sing an old Ionian hymn, which is chanted every spring at the feast of Venus, near Miletus. I used to sing it in my own country when I was a child; and—Ah, Alcibiades!

ALCIBIADES.

Dear Chariclea, you shall sing something else. This distresses you.

CHARICLEA.

No: hand me the lyre:—no matter. You will hear the song to disadvantage. But if it were sung as I have heard it sung;—if this were a beautiful morning

     (1) The mother of Euripides was a herb-woman. This was a
     favourite topic of Aristophanes.

     (2) The hero of one of the lost plays of Euripides, who
     appears to have been brought upon the stage in the garb of a
     beggar. See Aristophanes; Acham. 430; and in other places.

46in spring, and if we were standing on a woody promontory, with the sea, and the white sails, and the blue Cyclades beneath us,—and the portico of a temple peeping through the trees on a huge peak above our heads,—and thousands of people, with myrtles in their hands, thronging up the winding path, their gay dresses and garlands disappearing and emerging by turns as they passed round the angles of the rock,—then perhaps—

ALCIBIADES.

Now, by Venus herself, sweet lady, where you are we shall lack neither sun, nor flowers, nor spring, nor temple, nor goddess.

CHARICLEA. (Sings.)

Let this sunny hour be given,
Venus, unto love and mirth:
Smiles like thine are in the heaven;
Bloom like thine is on the earth;
And the tinkling of the fountains,
And the murmurs of the sea,
And the echoes from the mountains,
Speak of youth, and hope, and thee.

By whate’er of soft expression
Thou hast taught to lovers’ eyes
Faint denial, slow confession,
Glowing cheeks and stifled sighs;
By the pleasure and the pain,
By the follies and the wiles,
Routing fondness, sweet disdain,
Happy tears and mournful smiles;

Come with music floating o’er thee;
Come with violets springing round:
Let the Graces dance before thee,
All their golden zones unbound;
Now in sport their faces hiding,
Now, with slender fingers fair,
From their laughing eyes dividing
The long curls of rose-crowned hair.

ALCIBIADES.

47Sweetly sung; but mournfully, Chariclea; for which I would chide you, but that I am sad myself. More wine there. I wish to all the gods that I had fairly sailed from Athens.

CHARICLEA.

And from me, Alcibiades?

ALCIBIADES.

Yes, from you, dear lady. The days which immediately precede separation are the most melancholy of our lives.

CHARICLEA.

Except those which immediately follow it.

ALCIBIADES.

No; when I cease to see you, other objects may compel my attention; but can I be near you without thinking how lovely you are, and how soon I must leave you?

HIPPOMACHUS.

Ay; travelling soon puts such thoughts out of men’s heads.

CALLICLES.

A battle is the best remedy for them.

CHARICLEA.

A battle, I should think, might supply their place with others as unpleasant.

CALLICLES.

No. The preparations are rather disagreeable to a novice. But as soon as the fighting begins, by Jupiter, it is a noble time;—men trampling,—shields 48clashing,—spears breaking,—and the poan roaring louder than all.

CHARICLEA.

But what if you are killed?

CALLICLES.

What indeed? You must ask Speusippus that question. He is a philosopher.

ALCIBIADES.

Yes, and the greatest of philosophers, if he can answer it.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Pythagoras is of opinion—

HIPPOSIACHUS.

Pythagoras stole that and all his other opinions from Asia and Egypt. The transmigration of the soul and the vegetable diet are derived from India. I met a Brachman in Sogdiana—

CALLICLES.

All nonsense!

CHARICLEA.

What think you, Alcibiades?

ALCIBIADES.

I think that, if the doctrine be true, your spirit will be transfused into one of the doves who carry (1) ambrosia to the gods or verses to the mistresses of poets. Do you remember Anacreon’s lines? How should you like such an office?

     (1) Homer’s Odyssey, xii. 63.

CHARICLEA.

49If I were to be your dove, Alcibiades, and you would treat me as Anacreon treated his, and let me nestle in your breast and drink from your cup, I would submit even to carry your love-letters to other ladies.

CALLICLES.

What, in the name of Jupiter, is the use of all these speculations about death? Socrates once (1) lectured me upon it the best part of a day. I have hated the sight of him ever since. Such things may suit an old sophist when he is fasting; but in the midst of wine and music—

HIPPOMACHUS.

I differ from you. The enlightened Egyptians bring skeletons into their banquets, in order to remind their guests to make the most of their life while they have it.

CALLICLES.

I want neither skeleton nor sophist to teach me that lesson. More wine, I pray you, and less wisdom. If you must believe something which you never can know why not be contented with the long stories about the other world which are told us when we are initiated at the (2 ) Eleusinian mysteries.

CHARICLEA.

And what are those stories?

     (1)See the close of Plato’s Gorgias.

     (2) The scene which follows is founded upon history.
     Thucydides tells us, in his sixth book, that about this time
     Alcibiades was suspected of having assisted at a mock
     celebration of these famous mysteries. It was the opinion of
     the vulgar among the Athenians that extraordinary privileges
     were granted in the other world to all who had been
     initiated.

ALCIBIADES.

50Are not you initiated, Chariclea?

CHARICLEA.

No; My mother was a Lydian, a barbarian; and therefore—

ALCIBIADES.

I understand. Now the curse of Venus on the fools who made so hateful a law. Speusippus, does not your friend Euripides (1) say—

“The land where thou art prosperous is thy country?”

Surely we ought to say to every lady

“The land where thou art pretty is thy country.”

Besides, to exclude foreign beauties from the chorus of the initiated in the Elysian fields is less cruel to them than to ourselves. Chariclea, you shall be initiated.

CHARICLEA.

When?

ALCIBIADES.

Now.

CHARICLEA.

Where?

ALCIBIADES.

Here.

CHARICLEA.

Delightful!

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

But there must be an interval of a year between the purification and the initiation.

ALCIBIADES.

We will suppose all that.

     (1) The right of Euripides to this line is somewhat
     disputable. See Aristophanes; Plutus, 1152.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

51And nine days of rigid mortification of the senses.

ALCIBIADES.

We will suppose that too. I am sure it was supposed, with as little reason, when I was initiated.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

But you are sworn to secrecy.

ALCIBIADES.

You a sophist, and talk of oaths! You a pupil of Euripides, and forget his maxims!

“My lips have sworn it; but my mind is free.” (1)

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

But Alcibiades——

ALCIBIADES.

What! Are you afraid of Ceres and Proserpine?

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

No—but—but—I—that is I—but it is best to be safe—I mean—Suppose there should be something in it.

ALCIBIADES.

Now, by Mercury, I shall die with laughing. Oh Speusippus, Speusippus! Go back to your old father. Dig vineyards, and judge causes, and be a respectable citizen. But never, while you live, again dream of being a philosopher.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Nay, I was only——

     (1)See Euripides; Hyppolytus, 606. For the jesuitical
     morality of this line Euripides is bitterly attacked by the
     comic poet.

ALCIBIADES.

52A pupil of Gorgias and Melesigenes afraid of Tartarus! In what region of the infernal world do you expect your domicile to be fixed? Shall you roll a stone like Sisyphus? Hard exercise, Speusippus!

SPEUSIFPUS.

In the name of all the gods—

ALCIBIADES.

Or shall you sit starved and thirsty in the midst of fruit and wine like Tantalus? Poor fellow! I think I see your face as you are springing up to the branches and missing your aim. Oh Bacchus! Oh Mercury!

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Alcibiades!

ALCIBIADES.

Or perhaps you will be food for a vulture, like the huge fellow who was rude to Latona.

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

Alcibiades!

ALCIBIADES.

Never fear. Minos will not be so cruel. Your eloquence will triumph over all accusations. The furies will skulk away like disappointed sycophants. Only address the judges of hell in the speech which you were prevented from speaking last assembly. When I consider—is not that the beginning of it? Come, man, do not be angry. Why do you pace up and down with such long steps? You are not in Tartarus yet. You seem to think that you are already stalking like poor Achilles,

“With stride
“Majestic through the plain of Asphodel.” (1)

SPEÜSIPPÜS.

53How can you talk so, when you know that I believe all that foolery as little as you do?

ALCIBIADES.

Then march. You shall be the crier. (2) Callicles, you shall carry the torch. Why do you stare?

CALLICLES.

I do not much like the frolic.

ALCIBIADES.

Nay, surely you are not taken with a fit of piety. If all be true that is told of you, you have as little reason to think the gods vindictive as any man breathing. If you be not belied, a certain golden goblet which I have seen at your house was once in the temple of Juno at Corcyra. And men say that there was a priestess at Tarentum——

CALLICLES.

A fig for the gods! I was thinking about the Archons. You will have an accusation laid against you to-morrow. It is not very pleasant to be tried before the king. (3)

     (1) See Homer’s Odyssey, xi. 538.

     (2) The crier and torch-hearer were important functionaries
     at the celebration of the Kleusinian mysteries.

     (3) The name of king was given in the Athenian democracy to
     the magistrate who exercised those spiritual functions which
     in the monarchical times had belonged to the sovereign. His
     court took cognisance of offences against the religion of
     the state.

ALCIBIADES.

54Never fear: there is not a sycophant in Attica who would dare to breathe a word against me, for the golden (1) plane-tree of the great king.

HIPPOMACHUS.

That plane-tree——

ALCIBIADES.

Never mind the plane-tree. Come, Callicles, you were not so timid when you plundered the merchantman off Cape Malea. Take up the torch and move. Hippomachus, tell one of the slaves to bring a sow. (2)

CALLICLES.

And what part are you to play?

ALCIBIADES.

I shall be hierophant. Herald, to your office. Torch-bearer, advance with the lights. Come forward, fair novice. We will celebrate the rite within. (Exeunt.)

     (1) See Herodotus, viii. 28.

     (2) A sow was sacrificed to Ceres at the admission to the
     greater mysteries.

CRITICISMS ON THE PRINCIPAL ITALIAN WRITERS.

55(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine), January 1824.

No. I. DANTE.

“Fairest of stars, last in the train of night
If better thou belong not to the dawn,
Sure pledge of day, that crown’st the smiling morn
With thy bright circlet.”
Milton.
I
n a review of Italian literature, Dante has a double claim to precedency. He was the earliest and the greatest writer of his country. He was the first man who fully descried and exhibited the powers of his native dialect. The Latin tongue, which, under the most favourable circumstances, and in the hands of the greatest masters, had still been poor, feeble, and singularly unpoetical, and which had, in the age of Dante, been debased by the admixture of innumerable barbarous words and idioms, was still cultivated with superstitious veneration, and received, in the last stage of corruption, more honours than it had deserved in the period of its life and vigour. It was the language of the cabinet, of the university, of the church. It was employed by all who aspired to distinction in the higher walks of poetry. In compassion to the ignorance of his mistress, a cavalier might now and then proclaim his passion in Tuscan or Provençal rhymes. The vulgar might occasionally be edified by a pious 56allegory in the popular jargon. But no writer had conceived it possible that the dialect of peasants and market-women should possess sufficient energy and precision for a majestic and durable work. Dante adventured first. He detected the rich treasures of thought and diction which still lay latent in their ore. He refined them into purity. He burnished them into splendour. He fitted them for every purpose of use and magnificence. And he has thus acquired the glory, not only of producing the finest narrative poem of modern times, but also of creating a language, distinguished by unrivalled melody, and peculiarly capable of furnishing to lofty and passionate thoughts their appropriate garb of severe and concise expression.

To many this may appear a singular panegyric on the Italian tongue. Indeed the great majority of the young gentlemen and young ladies, who, when they are asked whether they read Italian, answer “Yes,” never go beyond the stories at the end of their grammar,—The Pastor Fido,—or an act of Artaserse. They could as soon read a Babylonian brick as a canto of Dante. Hence it is a general opinion, among those who know little or nothing of the subject, that this admirable language is adapted only to the effeminate cant of sonnetteers, musicians, and connoisseurs.

The fact is that Dante and Petrarch have been the Oromasdes and Arimanes of Italian literature. I wish not to detract from the merits of Petrarch. No one can doubt that his poems exhibit, amidst some imbecility and more affectation, much elegance, ingenuity, and tenderness. They present us with a mixture which can only be compared to the whimsical concert described by the humorous poet of Modena:

“S’udian gli usignuoli, al primo albore,
E gli asiui eantar versi d’ amore.” (1)

57I am not, however, at present speaking of the intrinsic excellencies of his writings, which I shall take another opportunity to examine, hut of the effect which they produce on the literature of Italy. The florid and luxurious charms of his style enticed the poets and the public from the contemplation of nobler and sterner models. In truth, though a rude state of society is that in which great original works are most frequently produced, it is also that in which they are worst appreciated. This may appear paradoxical, but it is proved by experience, and is consistent with reason. To be without any received canons of taste is good for the few who can create, but bad for the many who can only imitate and judge. Great and active minds cannot remain at rest. In a cultivated age they are too often contented to move on in the beaten path. But where no path exists they will make one. Thus the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Divine Comedy, appeared in dark and half barbarous times: and thus of the few original works which have been produced in more polished ages, we owe a large proportion to men in low stations and of uninformed minds. I will instance, in our own language, the Pilgrim’s Progress and Robinson Crusoe. Of all the prose works of fiction which we possess, these are, I will not say the best, but the most peculiar, the most unprecedented, the most inimitable. Had Bunyan and Defoe been educated gentlemen, they would probably have published translations and imitations of French romances “by a person of quality.” I am not sure that we should have had Lear if Shakspeare had been able to read Sophocles.

     (1) Tassoni; Seccliia Rapita, canto i. stanza G.

58But these circumstances, while they foster genius, are unfavourable to the science of criticism. Men judge by comparison. They are unable to estimate the grandeur of an object when there is no standard by which they can measure it. One of the French philosophers (I beg Gerard’s pardon), who accompanied Napoleon to Egypt, tells us that, when he first visited the great Pyramid, he was surprised to see it so diminutive. It stood alone in a boundless plain. There was nothing near it from which he could calculate its magnitude. But when the camp was pitched beside it, and the tents appeared like diminutive specks around its base, he then perceived the immensity of this mightiest work of man. In the same manner, it is not till a crowd of petty writers has sprung up that the merit of the great master-spirits of literature is understood.

We have indeed ample proof that Dante was highly admired in his own and the following age. I wish that we had equal proof that he was admired for his excellencies. But it is a remarkable corroboration of what has been said, that this great man seems to have been utterly unable to appreciate himself. In his treatise De Vulgari Eloquentia, he talks with satisfaction of what he has done for Italian literature, of the purity and correctness of his style. “Cependant,” says a favourite (1) writer of mine, “il ri est ni pur, ni correct, mais il est créateur.”Considering the difficulties with which Dante had to struggle, we may perhaps be more inclined than the French critic to allow him this praise. Still it is by no means his highest or most peculiar title to applause. It is scarcely necessary to say that those qualities which escaped the notice of the poet himself were not likely to attract the attention of the commentators. The fact is, that, while the

     (1) Sismondi; Littérature du Midi de l’ Europe.

59public homage was paid to some absurdities with which his works may be justly charged, and to many more which were falsely imputed to them,—while lecturers were paid to expound and eulogise his physics, his metaphysics, his theology, all bad of their kind,—while annotators laboured to detect allegorical meanings of which the author never dreamed, the great powers of his imagination, and the incomparable force of his style, were neither admired nor imitated. Arimanes had prevailed. The Divine Comedy was to that age what St. Paul’s Cathedral was to Omai. The poor Otaheitean stared listlessly for a moment at the huge cupola, and ran into a toyshop to play with beads. Italy, too, was charmed with literary trinkets, and played with them for four centuries.

From the time of Petrarch to the appearance of Alfieri’s tragedies, we may trace in almost every page of Italian literature the influence of those celebrated sonnets which, from the nature both of their beauties and their faults, were peculiarly unfit to be models for general imitation. Almost all the poets of that period, however different in the degree and quality of their talents, are characterised by great exaggeration, and, as a necessary consequence, great coldness of sentiment; by a passion for frivolous and tawdry ornament; and, above all, by an extreme feebleness and diffuseness of style. Tasso, Marino, Guarini, Metastasio, and a crowd of writers of inferior merit and celebrity, were spell-bound in the enchanted gardens of a gaudy and meretricious Alcina, who concealed debility and deformity beneath the deceitful semblance of loveliness and health. Ariosto, the great Ariosto himself, like his own Ruggiero, stooped for a time to linger amidst the magic flowers and fountains, and to caress the gay 60and painted sorceress. But to him, as to his own Ruggiero, had been given the omnipotent ring and the winged courser, which bore him from the paradise of deception to the regions of light and nature.

The evil of which I speak was not confined to the graver poets. It infected satire, comedy, burlesque. No person can admire more than I do the great masterpieces of wit and humour which Italy has produced. Still I cannot but discern and lament a great deficiency, which is common to them all. I find in them abundance of ingenuity, of droll naïveté, of profound and just reflection, of happy expression. Manners, characters, opinions, are treated with “a most learned spirit of human dealing.” But something is still wanting. We read, and we admire, and we yawn. We look in vain for the bacchanalian fury which inspired the comedy of Athens, for the fierce and withering scorn which animates the invectives of Juvenal and Dryden, or even for the compact and pointed diction which adds zest to the verses of Pope and Boileau. There is no enthusiasm, no energy, no condensation, nothing which springs from strong feeling, nothing which tends to excite it. Many fine thoughts and fine expressions reward the toil of reading. Still it is a toil. The Secchia Rapita, in some points the best poem of its kind, is painfully diffuse and languid. The Animali Parlanti of Casti is perfectly intolerable. I admire the dexterity of the plot, and the liberality of the opinions. I admit that it is impossible to turn to a page which does not contain something that deserves to be remembered; but it is at least six times as long as it ought to be. And the garrulous feebleness of the style is a still greater fault than the length of the work.

It may be thought that I have gone too far in attributing 61 these evils to the influence of the works and the fame of Petrarch. It cannot, however, be doubted that they have arisen, in a great measure, from a neglect of the style of Dante. This is not more proved by the decline of Italian poetry than by its resuscitation. After the lapse of four hundred and fifty years, there appeared a man capable of appreciating and imitating the father of Tuscan literature—Vittorio Alfieri. Like the prince in the nursery tale, he sought and found the Sleeping Beauty within the recesses which had so long concealed her from mankind. The portal was indeed rusted by time;—the dust of ages had accumulated on the banonnors;—the furniture was of antique fashion;—and the gorgeous colour of the embroidery had faded. But the living charms which were well worth all the rest remained in the bloom of eternal youth, and well rewarded the bold adventurer who roused them from their long slumber. In every line of the Philip and the Saul, the greatest poems, I think, of the eighteenth century, we may trace the influence of that mighty genius which has immortalised the ill-starred love of Francesca, and the paternal agonies of Ugolino. Alfieri bequeathed the sovereignty of Italian literature to the author of the Aristodemus—a man of genius scarcely inferior to his own, and a still more devoted disciple of the great Florentine. It must be acknowledged that this eminent writer has sometimes pushed too far his idolatry of Dante. To borrow a sprightly illustration from Sir John Denham, he has not only imitated his garb, but borrowed his clothes. He often quotes his phrases; and he has, not very judiciously as it appears to me, imitated his versification. Nevertheless, he has displayed many of the higher excellencies of his master; 62and his works may justly inspire us with a hope that Italian language will long flourish under a new literary dynasty, or rather under the legitimate line, which has at length been restored to a throne long occupied by specious usurpers.

The man to whom the literature of his country owes its origin and its revival was horn in times singularly adapted to call forth his extraordinary powers. Religious zeal, chivalrous love and honour, democratic liberty, are the three most powerful principles that have ever influenced the character of large masses of men. Each of them singly has often excited the greatest enthusiasm, and produced the most important changes. In the time of Dante all the three, often in amalgamation, generally in conflict, agitated the public mind. The preceding generation had witnessed the wrongs and the revenge of the brave, the accomplished, the unfortunate Emperor Frederic the Second,—a poet in an age of schoolmen,—a philosopher in an age of monks,—a statesman in an age of crusaders. During the whole life of the poet, Italy was experiencing the consequences of the memorable struggle which he had maintained against the Church. The finest works of imagination have always been produced in times of political convulsion, as the richest vineyards and the sweetest flowers always grow on the soil which has been fertilised by the fiery deluge of a volcano. To look no further than the literary history of our own country, can we doubt that Shakspeare was in a great measure produced by the Reformation, and Wordsworth by the French Revolution? Poets often avoid political transactions; they often affect to despise them. But, whether they perceive it or not, they must be influenced by them. As long as their minds have any 63point of contact with those of their fellow-men, the electric impulse, at whatever distance it may originate, will he circuitously communicated to them.

This will be the case even in large societies, where the division of labour enables many speculative men to observe the face of nature, or to analyse their own minds, at a distance from the seat of political transactions. In the little republic of which Dante was a member the state of things was very different. These small communities are most unmercifully abused by most of our modern professors of the science of government. In such states, they tell us, factions are always most violent: where both parties are cooped up within a narrow space, political difference necessarily produces personal malignity. Every man must be a soldier; every moment may produce a war. No citizen can lie down secure that he shall not be roused by the alarum-bell, to repel or avenge an injury. In such petty quarrels Greece squandered the blood which might have purchased for her the permanent empire of the world, and Italy wasted the energy and the abilities which would have enabled her to defend her independence against the Pontiffs and the Cæsars.

All this is true: yet there is still a compensation. Mankind has not derived so much benefit from the empire of Rome as from the city of Athens, nor from the kingdom of France as from the city of Florence. The violence of party feeling may be an evil; but it calls forth that activity of mind which in some states of society it is desirable to produce at any expense. Universal soldiership may be an evil; but where every man is a soldier there will be no standing army. And is it no evil that one man in every fifty should be bred to the trade of slaughter; should live only by destroying 64and by exposing himself to be destroyed; should fight without enthusiasm and conquer without glory; be sent to a hospital when wounded, and rot on a dunghill when old? Such, over more than two-thirds of Europe, is the fate of soldiers. It was something that the citizen of Milan or Florence fought, not merely in the vague and rhetorical sense in which the words are often used, but in sober truth, for his parents, his children, his lands, his house, his altars. It was something that he marched forth to battle beneath the Carroccio, which had been the object of his childish veneration; that his aged father looked down from the battlements on his exploits; that his friends and his rivals were the witnesses of his glory. If he fell, he was consigned to no venal or heedless guardians. The same day saw him conveyed within the walls which he had defended. His wounds were dressed by his mother; his confession was whispered to the friendly priest who had heard and absolved the follies of his youth; his last sigh was breathed upon the lips of the lady of his love. Surely there is no sword like that which is beaten out of a ploughshare. Surely this state of things was not unmixedly bad: its evils were alleviated by enthusiasm and by tenderness; and it will at least be acknowledged that it was well fitted to nurse poetical genius in an imaginative and observant mind.

Nor did the religious spirit of the age tend less to this result than its political circumstances. Fanaticism is an evil, but it is not the greatest of evils. It is good that a people should be roused by any means from a state of utter torpor;—that their minds should be diverted from objects merely sensual, to meditations, however erroneous, on the mysteries of the moral and intellectual world; and from interests which are immediately 65selfish to those which relate to the past, the future, and the remote. These effects have sometimes been produced by the worst superstitions that ever existed; but the Catholic religion, even in the time of its utmost extravagance and atrocity, never wholly lost the spirit of the Great Teacher, whose precepts form the noblest code, as his conduct furnished the purest example, of moral excellence. It is of all religions the most poetical. The ancient superstitions furnished the fancy with beautiful images, but took no hold on the heart. The doctrines of the Reformed Churches have most powerfully influenced the feelings and the conduct of men, but have not presented them with visions of sensible beauty and grandeur. The Roman Catholic Church has united to the awful doctrines of the one what Mr. Coleridge calls the “fair humanities” of the other. It has enriched sculpture and painting with the loveliest and most majestic forms. To the Phidian Jupiter it can oppose the Moses of Michael Angelo; and to the voluptuous beauty of the Queen of Cyprus, the serene and pensive loveliness of the Virgin Mother. The legends of its martyrs and its saints may vie in ingenuity and interest with the mythological fables of Greece; its ceremonies and processions were the delight of the vulgar; the huge fabric of secular power with which it was connected attracted the admiration of the statesman. At the same time, it never lost sight of the most solemn and tremendous doctrines of Christianity,—the incarnate God,—the judgment,—the retribution,—the eternity of happiness or torment. Thus, while, like the ancient religions, it received incalculable support from policy and ceremony, it never wholly became, like those religions, a merely political and ceremonial institution.

66The beginning of the thirteenth century was, as Machiarelli has remarked, the era of a great revival of this extraordinary system. The policy of Innocent,—the growth of the inquisition and the mendicant orders,—the wars against the Albigenses, the Pagans of the East, and the unfortunate princes of the house of Swabia, agitated Italy during the two following generations. In this point Dante was completely under the influence of his age. He was a man of a turbid and melancholy spirit. In early youth he had entertained a strong and unfortunate passion, which, long after the death of her whom he loved, continued to haunt him. Dissipation, ambition, misfortunes had not effaced it. He was not only a sincere, but a passionate, believer. The crimes and abuses of the Church of Pome were indeed loathsome to him; but to all its doctrines and all its rites he adhered with enthusiastic fondness and veneration; and, at length, driven from nis native country, reduced to a situation the most painful to a man of his disposition, condemned to learn by experience that no (1) food is so bitter as the bread of dependence, and no ascent so painful as the staircase of a patron,—his wounded spirit took refuge in visionary devotion. Beatrice, the unforgotten object of his early tenderness, was invested by his imagination with glorious and mysterious attributes; she was enthroned among the highest of the celestial hierarchy: Almighty Wisdom had assigned to her the care of the sinful and unhappy wanderer who had loved her with such a perfect love. (2) By a confusion, like that which often

(1)"Tu proverai si come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
Lo scendere c’l salir per l’ altrui scale.”
Parndiso, canto xvii.

     (2) “L’ amico mio, e non della ventura.”—Inferno, canto
     ii.

67takes place in dreams, he has sometimes lost sight of her human nature, and even of her personal existence, and seems to consider her as one of the attributes of the Deity.

But those religious hopes which had released the mind of the sublime enthusiast from the terrors of death had not rendered his speculations on human life more cheerful. This is an inconsistency which may often be observed in men of a similar temperament. He hoped for happiness beyond the grave: but he felt none on earth. It is from this cause, more than from any other, that his description of Heaven is so far inferior to the Hell or the Purgatory. With the passions and miseries of the suffering spirits he feels a strong sympathy. But among the beatified he appears as one who has nothing in common with them,—as one who is incapable of comprehending, not only the degree, but the nature of their enjoyment. We think that we see him standing; amidst those smiling; and radiant spirits with that scowl of unutterable misery on his brow, and that curl of bitter disdain on his lips, which all his portraits have preserved and which might furnish Chantrey with hints for the head of his projected Satan.

There is no poet whose intellectual and moral character are so closely connected. The great source, as it appears to me, of the power of the Divine Comedy is the strong belief with which the story seems to be told. In this respect, the only books which approach to its excellence are Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe. The solemnity of his asseverations, the consistency and minuteness of his details, the earnestness with which he labors to make the reader understand the exact shape and size of every thing that he describes, give an air of reality to his wildest fictions. 68I should only weaken this statement by quoting instances of a feeling which pervades the whole work, and to which it owes much of its fascination. This is the real justification of the many passages in his poem which had critics have condemned as grotesque. I am concerned to see that Mr. Cary, to whom Dante owes more than ever poet owed to translator, has sanctioned an accusation utterly unworthy of his abilities. “His solicitude,” says that gentleman, “to define all his images in such a manner as to bring them within the circle of our vision, and to subject them to the power of the pencil, renders him little better than grotesque, where Milton has since taught us to expect sublimity.” It is true that Dante has never shrunk from embodying his conceptions in determinate words, that he has even given measures and numbers, where Milton would have left his images to float undefined in a gorgeous haze of language. Both were right. Milton did not profess to have been in heaven or hell. He might therefore reasonably confine himself to magnificent generalities. Far different was the office of the lonely traveller, who had wandered through the nations of the dead. Had he described the abode of the rejected spirits in language resembling the splendid lines of the English poet,—had he told us of

“An universe of death, which God by curse
Created evil, for evil only good,
Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds
Perverse all monstrous, all prodigious tilings,
Abominable, unutterable, and worse
Than fables yet have feigned, or fear conceived,
Gorgons, and hydras, and chimæras dire,”—

this would doubtless have been noble writing. But where would have been that strong impression of 69reality, which, in accordance with his plan, it should have been his great object to produce? It was absolutely necessary for him to delineate accurately “all monstrous, all prodigious things,”—to utter what might to others appear “unutterable,”—to relate with the air of truth what fables had never feigned,—to embody what fear had never conceived. And I will frankly confess that the vague sublimity of Milton affects me less than these reviled details of Dante. We read Milton; and we know that we are reading a great poet. When we read Dante, the poet vanishes. We are listening to the man who has returned from the valley of the “dolorous abyss;” (1)—we seem to see the dilated eye of horror, to hear the shuddering accents with which he tells his fearful tale. Considered in this light, the narratives are exactly what they should be,—definite in themselves, but suggesting to the mind ideas of awful and indefinite wonder. They are made up of the images of the earth:—they are told in the language of the earth.—Yet the whole effect is, beyond expression, wild and unearthly. The fact is, that supernatural beings, as long as they are considered merely with reference to their own nature, excite our feelings very feebly. It is when the great gulf which separates them from us is passed, when we suspect some strange and un definable relation between the laws of the visible and the invisible world, that they rouse, perhaps, the strongest emotions of which our nature is capable. How many children, and how many men, are afraid of ghosts, who are not afraid of God! And this, because, though they entertain a much stronger conviction of the existence of a Deity than of the reality of apparitions, they have no

     (1) “La valle d’ abisso doloroso.”—Inferno, canto iv.

70apprehension that he will manifest himself to them in any sensible manner. While this is the case, to describe super-human beings in the language, and to attribute to them the actions, of humanity may be grotesque, unphilosophical, inconsistent; but it will be the only mode of working upon the feelings of men, and, therefore, the only mode suited for poetry. Shakspeare understood this well, as he understood every thing that belonged to his art. Who does not sympathise with the rapture of Ariel, flying after sunset on the wings of the bat, or sucking in the cups of flowers with the bee? Who does not shudder at the caldron of Macbeth? Where is the philosopher who is not moved when he thinks of the strange connection between the infernal spirits and “the sow’s blood that hath eaten her nine farrow?” But this difficult task of representing supernatural beings to our minds, in a manner which shall be neither unintelligible to our intellects, nor wholly inconsistent with our ideas of their nature, has never been so well performed as by Dante. I will refer to three instances, which are, perhaps, the most striking—-the description of the transformations of the serpents and the robbers, in the twenty-fifth canto of the Inferno,—the passage concerning Nimrod, in the thirty-first canto of the same part,—and the magnificent procession in the twenty-ninth canto of the Purgatorio.

The metaphors and comparisons of Dante harmonise admirably with that air of strong reality of which I have spoken. They have a very peculiar character. He is perhaps the only poet whose writings would become much less intelligible if all illustrations of this sort were expunged. His similes are frequently rather those of a traveller than of a poet. He employs them 71not to display his ingenuity by fanciful analogies,—not to delight the reader by affording him a distant and passing glimpse of beautiful images remote from the path in which he is proceeding,—but to give an exact idea of the objects which he is describing, by comparing them with others generally known. The boiling pitch in Malebolge was like that in the Venetian arsenal:—the mound on which he travelled along the banks of Phlegethon was like that between Ghent and Bruges, but not so large:—the cavities where the Simoniacal prelates are confined resembled the fonts in the Church of John at Florence. Every reader of Dante will recall many other illustrations of this description, which add to the appearance of sincerity and earnestness from winch the narrative derives so much of its interest.

Many of his comparisons, again, are intended to give an exact idea of his feelings under particular circumstances. The delicate shades of grief, of fear, of anger, are rarely discriminated with sufficient accuracy in the language of the most refined nations. A rude dialect never abounds in nice distinctions of this kind. Dante therefore employs the most accurate and infinitely the most poetical mode of marking the precise state of his mind. Every person who has experienced the bewildering effect of sudden bad tidings,—the stupefaction,—the vague doubt of the truth of our own perceptions which they produce,—will understand the following simile:—“I was as he is who dreameth his own harm,—who, dreaming, wishes that it may be all a dream, so that he desires that which is as though it were not.” This is only one out of a hundred equally striking and expressive similitudes. The comparisons of Homer and Milton are magnificent digressions. It scarcely injures their effect to detach 72them from the work. Those of Dante are very different. They derive their beauty from the context, and reflect beauty upon it. His embroidery cannot be taken out without spoiling the whole web. I cannot dismiss this part of the subject without advising every person who can muster sufficient Italian to read the smile of the sheep, in the third canto of the Purgatorio. I think it the most perfect passage of the kind in the world, the most imaginative, the most picturesque, and the most sweetly expressed.

No person can have attended to the Divine Comedy without observing how little impression the forms of the external world appear to have made on the mind of Dante. His temper and his situation had led him to fix his observation almost exclusively on human nature. The exquisite opening of the eighth (1) canto of the Purgatorio affords a strong instance of this. He leaves to others the earth, the ocean, and the sky. His business is with man. To other writers, evening may be the season of dews and stars and radiant clouds. To Dante it is the hour of fond recollection and passionate devotion,—the hour which melts the heart of the mariner and kindles the love of the pilgrim,—the hour when the toll of the bell seems to mourn for another day which is gone and will return no more.

     (1) I cannot help observing that Gray’s imitation of that
     noble line “Che paia’l giorno pianger che si muore,” is one
     of the most striking instances of injudicious plagiarism
     with which I am acquainted. Dante did not put this strong
     personification at the beginning of his description. The
     imagination of the reader is so well prepared for it by the
     previous lines, that it appears perfectly natural and
     pathetic. Placed as Gray has placed it, neither preceded nor
     followed by any thing that harmonises with it, it becomes a
     frigid conceit. Woe to the unskilful rider who ventures on
     the horses of Achilles.

73The feeling of the present age has taken a direction diametrically opposite. The magnificence of the physical world, and its influence upon the human mind, have been the favourite themes of our most eminent poets. The herd of blue-stocking ladies and sonneteering gentlemen seem to consider a strong sensibility to the “splendour of the grass, the glory of the flower,” as an ingredient absolutely indispensable in the formation of a poetical mind. They treat with contempt all writers who are unfortunately

nec ponere lucurn
Artifices, nec rus saturum laudare.

The orthodox poetical creed is more Catholic. The noblest earthly object of the contemplation of man is man himself. The universe, and all its fair and glorious forais, are indeed included in the wide empire of the imagination; but she has placed her home and her sanctuary amidst the inexhaustible varieties and the impenetrable mysteries of the mind.

In tutte parti impera, e quivi regge;
Quivi è la sua cittade, e l’ alto seggio. (1)

Othello is perhaps the greatest work in the world. From what does it derive its power? From the clouds? From the ocean? From the mountains? Or from love strong as death, and jealousy cruel as the grave! What is it that we go forth to see in Hamlet? Is it a reed shaken with the wind? A small celandine? A bed of daffodils? Or is it to contemplate a mighty and wayward mind laid bare before us to the inmost recesses? It may perhaps be doubted whether the lakes and the hills are better fitted for the education of a poet than the dusky streets of a huge capital. Indeed who is not tired to death with pure description of

     (1) Inferno, canto i.

74scenery? Is it not the fact, that external objects never strongly excite our feelings but when they are contemplated in reference to man, as illustrating his destiny, or as influencing his character? The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman. But who that can analyse his feelings is not sensible that she owes her fascination less to grace of outline and delicacy of colour, than to a thousand associations which, often unperceived by ourselves, connect those qualities with the source of our existence, with the nourishment of our infancy, with the passions of our youth, with the hopes of our age, with elegance, with vivacity, with tenderness, with the strongest of natural instincts, with the dearest of social ties?

To those who think thus, the insensibility of the Florentine poet to the beauties of nature will not appear an unpardonable deficiency. On mankind no writer, with the exception of Shakspeare, has looked with a more penetrating eye. I have said that his poetical character had derived a tinge from his peculiar temper. It is on the sterner and darker passions that he delights to dwell. All love, excepting the half mystic passion which he still felt for his buried Beatrice, had palled on the fierce and restless exile. The sad story of Rimini is almost a single exception. I know not whether it has been remarked, that, in one point, misanthropy seems to have affected his mind as it did that of Swift. Nauseous and revolting images seem to have had a fascination for his mind; and he repeatedly places before his readers, with all the energy of his incomparable style, the most loathsome objects of the sewer and the dissecting-room.

There is another peculiarity in the poem of Dante, which, I think, deserves notice. Ancient mythology 75has hardly ever been successfully interwoven with modern poetry. One class of writers have introduced the fabulous deities merely as allegorical representatives of love, wine, or wisdom. This necessarily renders their works tame and cold. We may sometimes admire their ingenuity; but with what interest can we read of beings of whose personal existence the writer does not suffer us to entertain, for a moment, even a conventional belief? Even Spenser’s allegory is scarcely tolerable, till we contrive to forget that Una signifies innocence, and consider her merely as an oppressed lady under the protection of a generous knight.

Those writers who have, more judiciously, attempted to preserve the personality of the classical divinities have failed from a different cause. They have been imitators, and imitators at a disadvantage; Euripides and Catullus believed in Bacchus and Cybele as little as we do. But they lived among men who did. Their imaginations, if not their opinions, took the colour of the age. Hence the glorious inspiration of the Bacchæ and the Atys. Our minds are formed by circumstances: and I do not believe that it would be in the power of the greatest modern poet to lash himself up to a degree of enthusiasm adequate to the production of such works.

Dante alone, among the poets of later times, has been, in this respect, neither an allegorist nor an imitator; and, consequently, he alone has introduced the ancient fictions with effect. His Minos, his Charon, his Pluto, are absolutely terrific. Nothing can be more beautiful or original than the use which lie has made of the river of Lethe. He has never assigned to his mythological characters any functions inconsistent with the creed of the Catholic Church. He has 76related nothing concerning them which a good Christian of that age might not believe possible. On this account, there is nothing in these passages that appears puerile or pedantic. On the contrary, this singular use of classical names suggests to the mind a vague and awful idea of some mysterious revelation, anterior to all recorded history, of which the dispersed fragments might have been retained amidst the impostures and superstitions of later religions. Indeed the mythology of the Divine Comedy is of the elder and more colossal mould. It breathes the spirit of Homer and Æschylus, not of Ovid and Claudian.

This is the more extraordinary, since Dante seems to have been utterly ignorant of the Greek language; and his favorite Latin models could only have served to mislead him. Indeed, it is impossible not to remark his admiration of writers far inferior to himself; and, in particular, his idolatry of Virgil, who, elegant and splendid as he is, has no pretensions to the depth and originality of mind which characterise his Tuscan worshipper. In truth, it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics. Their minds are under the tyranny of ten thousand associations imperceptible to others. The worst writer may easily happen to touch a spring which is connected in their minds with a long succession of beautiful images. They are like the gigantic slaves of Aladdin, gifted with matchless power, but bound by spells so mighty that when a child whom they could have crushed touched a talisman, of whose secret he was ignorant, they immediately became his vassals. It has more than once happened to me to see minds, graceful and majestic as the Titania of Shakspeare, bewitched by the charms of an ass’s head, bestowing on it the fondest 77caresses, and crowning it with the sweetest flowers. I need only mention the poems attributed to Ossian. They are utterly worthless, except as an edifying instance of the success of a story without evidence, and of a book without merit. They are a chaos of words which present no image, of images which have no archetype:—they are without form and void; and darkness is upon the face of them. Yet how many men of genius have panegyrised and imitated them!

The style of Dante is, if not his highest, perhaps his most peculiar excellence. I know nothing with which it can be compared. The noblest models of Greek composition must yield to it. His words are the fewest and the best which it is possible to use. The first expression in which he clothes his thoughts is always so energetic and comprehensive that amplification would only injure the effect. There is probably no writer in any language who has presented so many strong pictures to the mind. Yet there is probably no writer equally concise. This perfection of style is the principal merit of the Paradiso, which, as I have already remarked, is by no means equal in other respects to the two preceding parts of the poem. The force and felicity of the diction, however, irresistibly attract the reader through the theological lectures and the sketches of ecclesiastical biography, with which this division of the work too much abounds. It may seem almost absurd to quote particular specimens of an excellence which is diffused over all his hundred cantos. I will, however, instance the third canto of the Inferno, and the sixth of the Purgatorio, as passages incomparable in their kind. The merit of the latter is, perhaps, rather oratorical than poetical; nor can I recollect any thing in the great Athenian speeches 78which equals it in force of invective and bitterness of sarcasm. I have heard the most eloquent statesman of the age remark that, next to Demosthenes, Dante is the writer who ought to be most attentively studied by every man who desires to attain oratorical eminence.

But it is time to close this feeble and rambling critique. I cannot refrain, however, from saying a few words upon the translations of the divine comedy. Boyd’s is as tedious and languid as the original is rapid and forcible. The strange measure which he has chosen, and, for ought I know, invented, is most unfit for such a work. Translations ought never to be written in a verse which requires much command of rhyme. The stanza becomes a bed of Procrustes; and the thoughts of the unfortunate author are alternately racked and curtailed to fit their new receptacle. The abrupt and yet consecutive style of Dante suffers more than that of any other poet by a version diffuse in style, and divided into paragraphs, for they deserve no other name, of equal length.

Nothing can be said in favour of Hayley’s attempt, but that it is better than Boyd’s. His mind was a tolerable specimen of filagree work,—rather elegant, and very feeble. All that can be said for his best works is that they are neat. All that can be said against his worst is that they are stupid. He might have translated Metastasio tolerably. But he was utterly unable to do justice to the

“rime e aspre e chioce,
Come si converrebbe al tristo buco.” (1)

I turn with pleasure from these wretched performances to Mr. Cary’s translation. It is a work which well deserves a separate discussion, and on which, if

     (1)Inferno, canto xxxii.

79this article were not already too long, I could dwell with great pleasure. At present I will only say that there is no other version in the world, as far as I know, so faithful, yet that there is no other version which so fully proves that the translator is himself a man of poetical genius. Those who are ignorant of the Italian language should read it to become acquainted with the Divine Comedy. Those who are most intimate with Italian literature should read it for its original merits: and I believe that they will find it difficult to determine whether the author deserves most praise for his intimacy with the language of Dante, or for his extraordinary mastery over his own.

80(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, April 1824.)

No. II. PETRARCH.

Et vos, o lauri, carpam, et te, proxima myrte,
Sic positæ quoniam suaves miscetis odores. Virgil.
I
t would not be easy to name a writer whose celebrity, when both its extent and its duration are taken into the account, can be considered as equal to that of Petrarch. Four centuries and a half have elapsed since his death. Yet still the inhabitants of every nation throughout the western world are as familiar with his character and his adventures as with the most illustrious names, and the most recent anecdotes, of their own literary history. This is indeed a rare distinction. His detractors must acknowledge that it could not have been acquired by a poet destitute of merit. His admirers will scarcely maintain that the unassisted merit of Petrarch could have raised him to that eminence which has not yet been attained by Shakspeare, Milton, or Dante,—that eminence, of which perhaps no modern writer, excepting himself and Cervantes, has long retained possession,—an European reputation.

It is not difficult to discover some of the causes to which this great man has owed a celebrity, which I 81cannot but think disproportioned to his real claims on the admiration of mankind. In the first place, he is an egotist. Egotism in conversation is universally abhorred. Lovers, and, I believe, lovers alone, pardon it in each other. No services, no talents, no powers of pleasing, render it endurable. Gratitude, admiration, interest, fear, scarcely prevent those who are condemned to listen to it from indicating their disgust and fatigue. The childless uncle, the powerful patron, can scarcely extort this compliance. We leave the inside of the mail in a storm, and mount the box, rather than hear the history of our companion. The chaplain bites his lips in the presence of the archbishop. The midshipman yawns at the table of the First Lord. Yet, from whatever cause, this practice, the pest of conversation, gives to writing a zest which nothing else can impart. Rousseau made the boldest experiment of this kind; and it fully succeeded. In our own time Lord Byron, by a series of attempts of the same nature, made himself the object of general interest and admiration. Wordsworth wrote with egotism more intense, but less obvious; and he has been rewarded with a sect of worshippers, comparatively small in number, but far more enthusiastic in their devotion. It is needless to multiply instances. Even now all the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects, and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings. Nor are there wanting many who push their imitation of the beggars whom they resemble a step further, and who find it easier to extort a pittance from the spectator, by simulating deformity and debility from which they are exempt, than by such 82honest labour as their health and strength enable them to perform. In the mean time the credulous public pities and pampers a nuisance which requires only the tread-mill and the whip. This art, often successful when employed by dunces, gives irresistible fascination to works which possess intrinsic merit. We are always desirous to know something of the character and situation of those whose writings we have perused with pleasure. The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems. It is amusing to observe with what labour critics have attempted to glean from the poems of Homer some hints as to his situation and feelings. According to one hypothesis, he intended to describe himself under the name of Demodocus. Others maintain that he was the identical Phemius whose life Ulysses spared. This propensity of the human mind explains, I think, in a great degree, the extensive popularity of a poet whose works are little else than the expression of his personal feelings.

In the second place, Petrarch was not only an egotist, but an amatory egotist. The hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows, which he described, were derived from the passion which of all passions exerts the widest influence, and which of all passions borrows most from the imagination. He had also another immense advantage. He was the first eminent amatory poet who appeared after the great convulsion which had changed, not only the political, but the moral, state of the world. The Greeks, who, in their public institutions and their literary tastes, were diametrically opposed to the oriental nations, bore a considerable resemblance to those nations in their domestic habits. Like them, they 83despised the intellects and immured the persons of their women; and it was among the least of the fright-fid evils to which this pernicious system gave birth, that all the accomplishments of mind, and all the fascinations of manner, which, in a highly-cultivated age, will generally be necessary to attach men to their female associates, were monopolised by the Phrynes and the Lamias. The indispensable ingredients of honourable and chivalrous love were nowhere to be found united. The matrons and their daughters, confined in the harem,—insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but the mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were married,—could rarely excite interest; while their brilliant rivals, half graces, half harpies, elegant and informed, but fickle and rapacious, could never inspire respect.

The state of society in Rome was, in this point, far happier; and the Latin literature partook of the superiority. The Roman poets have decidedly surpassed those of Greece in the delineation of the passion of love. There is no subject which they have treated with so much success. Ovid, Catullus, Tibullus, Horace, and Propertius, in spite of all their faults, must be allowed to rank high in this department of the art. To these I would add my favourite Plautus; who, though he took his plots from Greece, found, I suspect, the originals of his enchanting female characters at Rome.

Still many evils remained: and, in the decline of the great empire, all that was pernicious in its domestic institutions appeared more strongly. Under the influence of governments at once dependent and tyrannical, which purchased, by cringing to their enemies, the power of trampling on their subjects, the Romans sunk 84into the lowest state of effeminacy and debasement. Falsehood, cowardice, sloth, conscious and unrepining degradation, formed the national character. Such a character is totally incompatible with the stronger passions. Love, in particular, which, in the modern sense of the word, implies protection and devotion on the one side, confidence on the other, respect and fidelity on both, could not exist among the sluggish and heartless slaves who cringed around the thrones of Honorius and Augustulus. At this period the great renovation commenced. The warriors of the north, destitute as they were of knowledge and humanity, brought with them, from their forests and marshes, those qualities without which humanity is a weakness, and knowledge a curse,—energy—independence—the dread of shame—the contempt of danger. It would be most interesting to examine the manner in which the admixture of the savage conquerors and the effeminate slaves, after many generations of darkness and agitation, produced the modern European character;—to trace back, from the first conflict to the final amalgamation, the operation of that mysterious alchemy, which, from hostile and worthless elements, has extracted the pure gold of human nature—to analyse the mass, and to determine the proportions in which the ingredients are mingled. But I will confine myself to the subject to which I have more particularly referred. The nature of the passion of love had undergone a complete change. It still retained, indeed, the fanciful and voluptuous character which it had possessed among the southern nations of antiquity. But it was tinged with the superstitious veneration with which the northern warriors had been accustomed to regard women. Devotion and war had 85imparted to it their most solemn and animating feelings. It was sanctified by the blessings of the Church, and decorated with the wreaths of the tournament. Venus, as in the ancient fable, was again rising above the dark and tempestuous waves which had so long covered her beauty. But she rose not now, as of old, in exposed and luxurious loveliness. She still wore the eestus of her ancient witchcraft; but the diadem of Juno was on her brow, and the ægis of Pallas in her hand. Love might, in fact, be called a new passion; and it is not astonishing that the first poet of eminence who wholly devoted his genius to this theme should have excited an extraordinary sensation. He may be compared to an adventurer who accidentally lands in a rich and unknown island; and who, though he may only set up an ill-shaped cross upon the shore, acquires possession of its treasures, and gives it his name. The claim of Petrarch was indeed somewhat like that of Amerigo Vespucci to the continent which should have derived its appellation from Columbus. The Provençal poets were unquestionably the masters of the Florentine. But they wrote in an age which could not appreciate their merits; and their imitator lived at the very period when composition in the vernacular language began to attract general attention. Petrarch was in literature what a Valentine is in love. The public preferred him, not because his merits were of a transcendent order, but because he was the first person whom they saw after they awoke from their long sleep.

Nor did Petrarch gain less by comparison with his immediate successors than with those who had preceded him. Till more than a century after his death Italy produced no poet who could be compared to him. This decay of genius is doubtless to be ascribed, in a 86great measure, to the influence which his own works had exercised upon the literature of his country. Yet it has conduced much to his fame. Nothing is more favourable to the reputation of a writer than to be succeeded by a race inferior to himself; and it is an advantage, from obvious causes, much more frequently enjoyed by those who corrupt the national taste than by those who improve it.

Another cause has co-operated with those which I have mentioned to spread the renown of Petrarch. I mean the interest which is inspired by the events of his life—an interest which must have been strongly felt by his contemporaries, since, after an interval of five hundred years, no critic can be wholly exempt from its influence. Among the great men to whom we owe the resuscitation of science he deserves the foremost place; and his enthusiastic attachment to this great cause constitutes his most just and splendid title to the gratitude of posterity. He was the votary of literature. He loved it with a perfect love. He worshipped it with an almost fanatical devotion. He was the missionary, who proclaimed its discoveries to distant countries—the pilgrim, who travelled far and wide to collect its reliques—the hermit, who retired to seclusion to meditate on its beauties—the champion, who fought its battles—the conqueror, who, in more than a metaphorical sense, led barbarism and ignorance in triumph, and received in the capitol the laurel which his magnificent victory had earned.

Nothing can be conceived more noble or affecting than that ceremony. The superb palaces and porticoes, by which had rolled the ivory chariots of Marius and Cæsar, had long mouldered into dust. The laurelled fasces—the golden eagles—the shouting legions—87the captives and the pictured cities—were indeed wanting to his victorious procession. The sceptre had passed away from Rome. But she still retained the mightier influence of an intellectual empire, and was now to confer the prouder reward of an intellectual triumph. To the man who had extended the dominion of her ancient language—who had erected the trophies of philosophy and imagination in the haunts of ignorance and ferocity—whose captives were the hearts of admiring nations enchained by the influence of his song—whose spoils were the treasures of ancient genius rescued from obscurity and decay—the Eternal City offered the just and glorious tribute of her gratitude. Amidst the ruined monuments of ancient and the infant erections of modern art, he who had restored the broken link between the two ages of human civilization was crowned with the wreath which he had deserved from the moderns who owed to him their refinement—from the ancients who owed to him their fame. Never was a coronation so august witnessed by Westminster or by Rheims.

When we turn from this glorious spectacle to the private chamber of the poet,—when we contemplate the struggle of passion and virtue,—the eye dimmed, the cheek furrowed, by the tears of sinful and hopeless desire,—when we reflect on the whole history of his attachment, from the gay fantasy of his youth to the lingering despair of his age, pity and affection mingle with our admiration. Even after death had placed the last seal on his misery, we see him devoting to the cause of the human mind all the strength and energy which love and sorrow had spared. He lived the apostle of literature;—he fell its martyr:—he was found dead with his head reclined on a book. 88Those who have studied the life and writings of Petrarch with attention, will perhaps be inclined to make some deductions from this panegyric. It cannot be denied that his merits were disfigured by a most unpleasant affectation. His zeal for literature communicated a tinge of pedantry to all his feelings and opinions. His love was the love of a sonnetteer:—his patriotism was the patriotism of an antiquarian. The interest with which we contemplate the works, and study the history, of those who, in former ages, have occupied our country, arises from the associations which connect them with the community in which are comprised all the objects of our affection and our hope. In the mind of Petrarch these feelings were reversed. He loved Italy, because it abounded with the monuments of the ancient masters of the world. His native city—the fair and glorious Florence—the modern Athens, then in all the bloom and strength of its youth, could not obtain, from the most distinguished of its citizens, any portion of that passionate homage which he paid to the decrepitude of Rome. These and many other blemishes, though they must in candour be acknowledged, can but in a very slight degree diminish the glory of his career. For my own part, I look upon it with so much fondness and pleasure that I feel reluctant to turn from it to the consideration of his works, which I by no means contemplate with equal admiration.

Nevertheless, I think highly of the poetical powers of Petrarch. He did not possess, indeed, the art of strongly presenting sensible objects to the imagination;—and this is the more remarkable, because the talent of which I speak is that which peculiarly distinguishes the Italian poets. In the Divine Comedy it is displayed 89in its highest perfection. It characterises almost every celebrated poem in the language. Perhaps this is to be attributed to the circumstance, that painting and sculpture had attained a high degree of excellence in Italy before poetry had been extensively cultivated. Men were debarred from books, but accustomed from childhood to contemplate the admirable works of art, which, even in the thirteenth century, Italy began to produce. Hence their imaginations received so strong a bias that, even in their writings, a taste for graphic delineation is discernible. The progress of things in England has been in all respects different. The consequence is, that English historical pictures are poems on canvass; while Italian poems are pictures painted to the mind by means of words. Of this national characteristic the writings of Petrarch are almost totally destitute. His sonnets indeed, from their subject and nature, and his Latin poems, from the restraints which always shackle one who writes in a dead language, cannot fairly be received in evidence. But his Triumphs absolutely required the exercise of this talent, and exhibit no indications of it.

Genius, however, he certainly possessed, and genius of a high order. His ardent, tender, and magnificent turn of thought, his brilliant fancy, his command of expression, at once forcible and elegant, must be acknowledged. Nature meant him for the prince of lyric writers. But by one fatal present she deprived her other gifts of half their value. He would have been a much greater poet had he been a less clever man. His ingenuity was the bane of his mind. He abandoned the noble and natural style, in which he might have excelled, for the conceits which he produced with a facility at once admirable and disgusting. His muse 90like the Roman lady in Livy, was tempted by gaudy ornaments to betray the fastnesses of her strength, and, like her, was crushed beneath the glittering bribes which had seduced her.

The paucity of his thoughts is very remarkable. It is impossible to look without amazement on a mind so fertile in combinations, yet so barren of images. His amatory poetry is wholly made up of a very few topics, disposed in so many orders, and exhibited in so many lights, that it reminds us of those arithmetical problems about permutations, which so much astonish the unlearned. The French cook, who boasted that he could make fifteen different dishes out of a nettle-top, was not a greater master of his art. The mind of Petrarch was a kaleidoscope. At every turn it presents us with new forms, always fantastic, occasionally beautiful; and we can scarcely believe that all these varieties have been produced by the same worthless fragments of glass. The sameness of his images is, indeed, in some degree, to be attributed to the sameness of his subject. It would be unreasonable to expect perpetual variety from so many hundred compositions, all of the same length, all in the same measure, and all addressed to the same insipid and heartless coquette. I cannot but suspect also that the perverted taste, which is the blemish of his amatory verses, was to be attributed to the influence of Laura, who probably, like most critics of her sex, preferred a gaudy to a majestic style. Be this as it may, he no sooner changes his subject than he changes his manner. When he speaks of the wrongs and degradation of Italy, devastated by foreign invaders, and but feebly defended by her pusillanimous children, the effeminate lisp of the sonnetteer is exchanged for a cry, wild, and solemn, and piercing as 91that which proclaimed “Sleep no more” to the bloody house of Cawdor. “Italy seems not to feel her sufferings,” exclaims her impassioned poet; “decrepit, sluggish, and languid, will she sleep for ever? Will there be none to awake her? Oh that I had my hands twisted in her hair!” (1)

Nor is it with less energy that he denounces against the Mahometan Babylon the vengeance of Europe and of Christ. His magnificent enumeration of the ancient exploits of the Greeks must always excite admiration, and cannot be perused without the deepest interest, at a time when the wise and good, bitterly disappointed in so many other countries, are looking with breathless anxiety towards the natal land of liberty,—the field of Marathon,—and the deadly pass where the Lion of Lacedæmon turned to bay. (2)

His poems on religious subjects also deserve the highest commendation. At the head of these must be placed the Ode to the Virgin. It is, perhaps, the finest hymn in the world. His devout veneration receives an exquisitely poetical character from the delicate perception of the sex and the loveliness of his idol, which we may easily trace throughout the whole composition.

I could dwell with pleasure on these and similar parts of the writings of Petrarch; but I must return to his amatory poetry: to that he entrusted his fame; and to that he has principally owed it.

The prevailing defect of his best compositions on this subject is the universal brilliancy with which they

(1)

Clie suoi guai non par che senta;
Vecchia, oziosa, e lenta.
Dormira sempre, e non fia chi la svegli?
Le man l’avess’ io avvolte entro e capegli.—Canzone xi.

(2)

Maratona, e le mortali strette
Che difese il Leon con poca gente.—Canzone v.

92are lighted up. The natural language of the passions is, indeed, often figurative and fantastic; and with none is this more the case than with that of love. Still there is a limit. The feelings should, indeed, have their ornamental garb; but, like an elegant woman, they should be neither muffled nor exposed. The drapery should be so arranged, as at once to answer the purposes of modest concealment and judicious display. The decorations should sometimes be employed to hide a defect, and sometimes to heighten a beauty; but never to conceal, much less to distort, the charms to which they are subsidiary. The love of Petrarch, on the contrary, arrays itself like a foppish savage, whose nose is bored with a golden ring, whose skin is painted with grotesque forms and dazzling colours, and whose ears are drawn down his shoulders by the weight of jewels. It is a rule, without any exception, in all kinds of composition, that the principal idea, the predominant feeling, should never be confounded with the accompanying decorations. It should generally be distinguished from them by greater simplicity of expression; as we recognise Napoleon in the pictures of his battles, amidst a crowd of embroidered coats and plumes, by his grey cloak and his hat without a feather. In the verses of Petrarch it is generally impossible to say what thought is meant to be prominent. All is equally elaborate. The chief wears the same gorgeous and degrading livery with his retinue, and obtains only his share of the indifferent stare which we bestow upon them in common. The poems have no strong lights and shades, no background, no foreground;—they are like the illuminated figures in an oriental manuscript,—plenty of rich tints and no perspective. Such are the fruits of the most celebrated of these compositions. 93Of those which are universally acknowledged to be bad it is scarcely possible to speak with patience. Yet they have much in common with their splendid companions. They differ from them, as a May-day procession of chimney-sweepers differs from the Field of Cloth of Gold. They have the gaudiness but not the wealth. His muse belongs to that numerous class of females who have no objection to be dirty, while they can be tawdry. When his brilliant conceits are exhausted, he supplies their place with metaphysical quibbles, forced antitheses, bad puns, and execrable charades. In his fifth sonnet he may, I think, be said to have sounded the lowest chasm of the Bathos. Upon the whole, that piece may be safely pronounced to be the worst attempt at poetry, and the worst attempt at wit, in the world.

A strong proof of the truth of these criticisms is, that almost all the sonnets produce exactly the same effect on the mind of the reader. They relate to all the various moods of a lover, from joy to despair:—yet they are perused, as far as my experience and observation have gone, with exactly the same feeling. The fact is, that in none of them are the passion and the ingenuity mixed in just proportions. There is not enough sentiment to dilute the condiments which are employed to season it. The repast which he sets before us resembles the Spanish entertainment in Dry-den’s Mock Astrologer, at which the relish of all the dishes and sauces was overpowered by the common flavour of spice. Fish,—flesh,—fowl,—everything at table tasted of nothing but red pepper.

The writings of Petrarch may indeed suffer undeservedly from one cause to which I must allude. His imitators have so much familiarised the ear of Italy 94and of Europe to the favourite topics of amorous flattery and lamentation, that we can scarcely think them original when we find them in the first author; and, even when our understandings have convinced us that they were new to him, they are still old to us. This has been the fate of many of the finest passages of the most eminent writers. It is melancholy to trace a noble thought from stage to stage of its profanation; to see it transferred from the first illustrious wearer to his lacqueys, turned, and turned again, and at last hung on a scare-crow. Petrarch has really suffered much from this cause. Yet that he should have so suffered is a sufficient proof that his excellences were not of the highest order. A line may be stolen; but the pervading spirit of a great poet is not to be sureptitiously obtained by a plagiarist. The continued imitation of twenty-five centuries has left Homer as it found him. If every simile and every turn of Dante had been copied ten thousand times, the Divine Comedy would have retained all its freshness. It was easy for the porter in Farquhar to pass for Beau Clincher, by borrowing his lace and his pulvilio. It would have been more difficult to enact Sir Harry Wildair.

Before I quit this subject I must defend Petrarch from one accusation, which is in the present day frequently brought against him. His sonnets are pronounced by a large sect of critics not to possess certain qualities which they maintain to be indispensable to sonnets, with as much confidence, and as much reason, as their prototypes of old insisted on the unities of the drama. I am an exoteric—utterly unable to explain the mysteries of this new poetical faith. I only know that it is a faith, which except a man do keep pure and undefiled, without doubt he shall be called a 95blockhead. I cannot, however, refrain from asking what is the particular virtue which belongs to fourteen as distinguished from all other numbers. Does it arise from its being a multiple of seven? Has this principle any reference to the sabbatical ordinance? Or is it to the order of rhymes that these singular properties are attached? Unhappily the sonnets of Shakspeare differ as much in this respect from those of Petrarch, as from a Spenserian or an octave stanza. Away with this unmeaning jargon! We have pulled down the old regime of criticism. I trust that we shall never tolerate the equally pedantic and irrational despotism, which some of the revolutionary leaders would erect upon its ruins. We have not dethroned Aristotle and Bossu for this.

These sonnet-fanciers would do well to reflect that, though the style of Petrarch may not suit the standard of perfection which they have chosen, they lie under great obligations to these very poems,—that, but for Petrarch, the measure, concerning which they legislate so judiciously, would probably never have attracted notice;—and that to him they owe the pleasure of admiring, and the glory of composing, pieces, which seem to have been produced by Master Slender, with the assistance of his man Simple.

I cannot conclude these remarks without making a few observations on the Latin writings of Petrarch. It appears that, both by himself and by his contemporaries, these were far more highly valued than his compositions in the vernacular language. Posterity, the supreme court of literary appeal, has not only reversed the judgment, but, according to its general practice, reversed it with costs, and condemned the unfortunate works to pay, not only for their own inferiority, but 96also for the injustice of those who had given them an unmerited preference. And it must be owned that, without making large allowances for the circumstances under which they were produced, we cannot pronounce a very favourable judgment. They must be considered as exotics, transplanted to a foreign climate, and reared in an unfavourable situation; and it would be unreasonable to expect from them the health and the vigour which we find in the indigenous plants around them, or which they might themselves have possessed in their native soil. He has but very imperfectly imitated the style of the Latin authors, and has not compensated for the deficiency by enriching the ancient language with the graces of modern poetry. The splendour and ingenuity, which we admire, even when we condemn it, in his Italian works, is almost totally wanting, and only illuminates with rare and occasional glimpses the dreary obscurity of the Africa. The eclogues have more animation; but they can only be called poems by courtesy. They have nothing in common with his writings in his native language, except the eternal pun about Laura and Daphne. None of these works would have placed him on a level with Vida or Buchanan. Yet, when we compare him with those who preceded him, when we consider that he went on the forlorn hope of literature, that he was the first who perceived, and the first who attempted to revive, the finer elegancies of the ancient language of the world, we shall perhaps think more highly of him than of those who could never have surpassed his beauties if they had not inherited them.

He has aspired to emulate the philosophical eloquence of Cicero, as well as the poetical majesty of 97Virgil. His essay on the Remedies of Good and Evil Fortune is a singular work, in a colloquial form, and a most scholastic style. It seems to be framed upon the model of the Tusculan Questions,—with what success those who have read it may easily determine. It consists of a series of dialogues: in each of these a person is introduced who has experienced some happy or some adverse event: he gravely states his case; and a reasoner, or rather Reason personified, confutes him; a task not very difficult, since the disciple defends his position only by pertinaciously repeating it, in almost the same words, at the end of every argument of his antagonist. In this manner Petrarch solves an immense variety of cases. Indeed, I doubt whether it would be possible to name any pleasure or any calamity which does not find a place in this dissertation. He gives excellent advice to a man who is in expectation of discovering the philosopher’s stone;—to another, who has formed a fine aviary;—to a third, who is delighted with the tricks of a favourite monkey. His lectures to the unfortunate are equally singular. He seems to imagine that a precedent in point is a sufficient consolation for every form of suffering. “Our town is taken,” says one complainant;” “So was Troy,” replies his comforter. “My wife has eloped,” says another; “If it has happened to you once, it happened to Menelaus twice.” One poor fellow is in great distress at having discovered that his wife’s son is none of his. “It is hard,” says he, “that I should have had the expense of bringing up one who is indifferent to me.”

“You are a man,” returns his monitor, quoting the famous line of Terence; “and nothing that belongs to any other man ought to be indifferent to you.” The physical calamities of life are not omitted; 98and there is in particular a disquisition on the advantages of having the itch, which, if not convincing, is certainly very amusing.

The invectives on an unfortunate physician, or rather upon the medical science, have more spirit. Petrarch was thoroughly in earnest on this subject. And the bitterness of his feelings occasionally produces, in the midst of his classical and scholastic pedantry, a sentence worthy of the second Philippic. Swift himself might have envied the chapter on the causes of the paleness of physicians.

Of his Latin works the Epistles are the most generally known and admired. As compositions they are certainly superior to his essays. But their excellence is only comparative. From so large a collection of letters, written by so eminent a man, during so varied and eventful a life, we should have expected a complete and spirited view of the literature, the manners, and the politics of the age. A traveller—a poet—a scholar—a lover—a courtier—a recluse—he might have perpetuated, in an imperishable record, the form and pressure of the age and body of the time. Those who read his correspondence, in the hope of finding such information as this, will be utterly disappointed. It contains nothing characteristic of the period or of the individual. It is a series, not of letters, but of themes; and, as it is not generally known, might be very safely employed at public schools as a magazine of common-places. Whether he write on politics to the Emperor and the Doge, or send advice and consolation to a private friend, every line is crowded with examples and quotations, and sounds big with Anaxagoras and Scipio. Such was the interest excited by the character of Petrarch, and such the admiration 99which was felt for his epistolary style, that it was with difficulty that his letters reached the place of their destination. The poet describes, with pretended regret and real complacency, the importunity of the curious, who often opened, and sometimes stole, these favourite compositions. It is a remarkable fact that, of all his epistles, the least affected are those which are addressed to the dead and the unborn. Nothing can be more absurd than his whim of composing grave letters of expostulation and commendation to Cicero and Seneca; yet these strange performances are written in a far more natural manner than his communications to his living correspondents. But of all his Latin works the preference must be given to the Epistle to Posterity; a simple, noble, and pathetic composition, most honourable both to his taste and his heart. If we can make allowance for some of the affected humility of an author, we shall perhaps think that no literary man has left a more pleasing memorial of himself.

In conclusion, we may pronounce that the works of Petrarch were below both his genius and his celebrity; and that the circumstances under which he wrote were as adverse to the development of his powers as they were favourable to the extension of his fame.

SOME ACCOUNT OF THE GREAT LAWSUIT BETWEEN THE PARISHES OF ST. DENNIS AND ST. GEORGE IN THE WATER.

100(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, April 1824.)

I.

The parish of St. Dennis is one of the most pleasant parts of the country in which it is situated. It is fertile, well wooded, well watered, and of an excellent air. For many generations the manor had been holden in tail-male by a worshipful family, who have always taken precedence of their neighbor’s at the races and the sessions.

In ancient times the affairs of this parish were administered by a Court-Baron, in which the freeholders were judges; and the rates were levied by select vestries of the inhabitant householders. But at length these good customs fell into disuse. The Lords of the Manor, indeed, still held courts for form’s sake; but they or their stewards had the whole management of affairs. They demanded services, duties, and customs to which they had no just title. Nay, they would often bring actions against their neighbours for their own private advantage, and then send in the bill to the parish. No objection was made, during many years, to these proceedings, so that the rates became heavier 101and heavier: nor was any person exempted from these demands, except the footmen and gamekeepers of the squire and the rector of the parish. They indeed were never checked in any excess. They would come to an honest labourer’s cottage, eat his pancakes, tuck his fowls into their pockets, and cane the poor man himself. If he went up to the great house to complain, it was hard to get the speech of Sir Lewis; and, indeed, his only chance of being righted was to coax the squire’s pretty housekeeper, who could do what she pleased with her master. If he ventured to intrude upon the Lord of the Manor without this precaution, he gained nothing by his pains. Sir Lewis, indeed, would at first receive him with a civil face; for, to give him his due, he could be a fine gentleman when he pleased. “Good day, my friend,” he would say “what situation have you in my family?”

“Bless your honour!” says the poor fellow, “I am not one of your honour’s servants; I rent a small piece of ground, your honour.”

“Then, you dog,” quoth the squire, “what do you mean by coming here? Has a gentleman nothing to do but to hear the complaints of clowns? Here! Philip, James, Dick, toss this fellow in a blanket; or duck him, and set him in the stocks to dry.”

One of these precious Lords of the Manor enclosed a deer-park; and, in order to stock it, he seized all the pretty pet fawns that his tenants had brought up, without paying them a farthing, or asking their leave. It was a sad day for the parish of St. Dennis. Indeed, I do not believe that all his oppressive exactions and long bills enraged the poor tenants so much as this cruel measure.

Yet for a long time, in spite of all these inconveniences, 102St. Dennis’s was a very pleasant place. The people could not refrain from capering if they heard the sound of a fiddle. And, if they were inclined to be riotous, Sir Lewis had only to send for Punch, or the dancing dogs, and all was quiet again. But this could not last for ever; they began to think more and more of their condition; and, at last, a club of foulmouthed, good-for-nothing rascals was held at the sign of the Devil, for the purpose of abusing the squire and the parson. The doctor, to own the truth, was old and indolent, extremely fat and greedy. He had not preached a tolerable sermon for a long time. The squire was still worse: so that, partly by truth and partly by falsehood, the club set the whole parish against their superiors. The boys scrawled caricatures of the clergyman upon the church-door, and shot at the landlord with pop-guns as he rode a hunting. It was even whispered about that the Lord of the Manor had no right to his estate, and that, if he were compelled to produce the original title-deeds, it would be found that he only held the estate in trust for the inhabitants of the parish.

In the mean time the squire was pressed more and more for money. The parish could pay no more. The rector refused to lend a farthing. The Jews were clamorous for their money; and the landlord had no other resource than to call together the inhabitants of the parish, and to request their assistance. They now attacked him furiously about their grievances, and insisted that he should relinquish his oppressive powers. They insisted that his footmen should be kept in order, that the parson should pay his share of the rates, that the children of the parish should be allowed to fish in the trout-stream, and to gather blackberries in the 103hedges. They at last went so far as to demand that he should acknowledge that he held his estate only in trust for them. His distress compelled him to submit. They, in return, agreed to set him free from his pecuniary difficulties, and to suffer him to inhabit the manor-house; and only annoyed him from time to time by singing impudent ballads under his window.

The neighbouring gentlefolks did not look on these proceedings with much complacency. It is true that Sir Lewis and his ancestors had plagued them with law-suits, and affronted them at county-meetings. Still they preferred the insolence of a gentleman to that of the rabble, and felt some uneasiness lest the example should infect their own tenants.

A large party of them met at the house of Lord Cæsar Germain. Lord Cæsar was the proudest man in the country. His family was very ancient and illustrius ones, though not particularly opulent. He had invited most of his wealthy neighbours. There was Mrs. Kitty North, the relict of poor Squire Peter, respecting whom the coroner’s jury had found a verdict of accidental death, but whose fate had nevertheless excited strange whispers in the neighbourhood. There was Squire Don, the owner of the great West Indian property, who was not so rich as he had formerly been, but still retained his pride, and kept up his customary pomp; so that he had plenty of plate but no breeches. There was Squire Von Blunderbussen, who had succeeded to the estates of his uncle, old Colonel Frederic Von Blunderbussen, of the hussar’s. The colonel was a very singular old fellow; he used to learn a page of Chambaud’s grammar, and to translate Telemaque, every morning, and he kept six French masters to teach him to parleyvoo. Nevertheless, he was a 104shrewd clever man, and improved his estate with so much care, sometimes by honest and sometimes by dishonest means, that he left a very pretty property to his nephew.

Lord Cæsar poured out a glass of Tokay for Mrs. Kitty. “Your health, my dear madam, I never saw you look more charming. Pray, what think you of these doings at St. Dennis’s?”

“Fine doings! indeed!” interrupted Von Blunderbussen;

“I wish that we had my old uncle alive, he would have had some of them up to the halberts. He knew how to use a cat-o’-nine-tails. If things go on in this way, a gentleman will not be able to horsewhip an impudent farmer, or to say a civil word to a milkmaid.”

“Indeed, it’s very true, Sir,” said Mrs. Kitty; “their insolence is intolerable. Look at me, for instance:—a poor lone woman!—My dear Peter dead! I loved him:—so I did; and, when he died, I was so hysterical you cannot think. And now I cannot lean on the arm of a decent footman, or take a walk with a tall grenadier behind me, just to protect me from audacious vagabonds, but they must have their nauseous suspicions;—odious creatures!”—

“This must be stopped,” replied Lord Cæsar. “We ought to contribute to support my poor brother-in-law against these rascals. I will write to Squire Guelf on this subject by this night’s post. His name is always at the head of our county subscriptions.”

If the people of St. Dennis’s had been angry before, they were well nigh mad when they heard of this conversation. The whole parish ran to the manor-house. Sir Lewis’s Swiss porter shut the door against them; but they broke in and knocked him on the head for his 105impudence. They then seized the squire, hooted at him, pelted him, ducked him, and carried him to the watch-house. They turned the rector into the street, burnt his wig and band, and sold the church-plate by auction. They put up a painted Jezebel in the pulpit to preach. They scratched out the texts which were written round the church, and scribbled profane scraps of songs and plays in their place. They set the organ playing to pot-house tune. Instead of being decently asked in church, they were married over a broomstick. But, of all their whims, the use of the new patent steel-traps was the most remarkable.

This trap was constructed on a completely new principle. It consisted of a cleaver hung in a frame like a window; when any poor wretch got in, down it came with a tremendous din, and took off his head in a twinkling. They got the squire into one of these machines. In order to prevent any of his partisans from getting footing in the parish, they placed traps at every corner. It was impossible to walk through the highway at broad noon without tumbling into one or other of them. No man could go about his business in security. Yet so great was the hatred which the inhabitants entertained for the old family, that a few decent honest people, who begged them to take down the steel-traps, and to put up humane man-traps in their room, were very roughly handled for their good nature.

In the mean time the neighbouring gentry undertook a suit against the parish on the behalf of Sir Lewis’s heir, and applied to Squire Guelf for his assistance.

Everybody knows that Squire Guelf is more closely tied up than any gentleman in the shire. He could, therefore, lend them no help; but he referred them to 106the Vestry of the Parish of St. George in the Water. These good people had long borne a grudge against their neighbours on the other side of the stream; and some mutual trespasses had lately occurred which increased their hostility.

There was an honest Irishman, a great favourite among them, who used to entertain them with raree-shows, and to exhibit a magic lantern to the children on winter evenings. He had gone quite mad upon this subject. Sometimes he would call out in the middle of the street—“Take care of that corner, neighbours; for the love of Heaven, keep clear of that post, there is a patent steel-trap concealed thereabouts.” Sometimes he would be disturbed by frightful dreams; then he would get up at dead of night, open his window and cry “fire,” till the parish was roused, and the engines sent for. The pulpit of the Parish of St. George seemed likely to fall; I believe that the only reason was that the parson had grown too fat and heavy; but nothing would persuade this honest man but that it was a scheme of the people at St. Dennis’s, and that they had sawed through the pillars in order to break the rector’s neck. Once he went about with a knife in his pocket, and told all the persons whom he met that it had been sharpened by the knife-grinder of the next parish to cut their throats. These extravagancies had a great effect on the people; and the more so because they were espoused by Squire Guelf’s steward, who was the most influential person in the parish. He was a very fair-spoken man, very attentive to the main chance, and the idol of the old women, because he never played at skittles or danced with the girls; and, indeed, never took any recreation but that of drinking on Saturday nights with his friend Harry, the Scotch 107pedlar. His supporters called him Sweet William; his enemies the Bottomless Pit.

The people of St. Dennis’s, however, had their advocates. There was Frank, the richest farmer in the parish, whose great grandfather had been knocked oil the head many years before, in a squabble between the parish and a former landlord. There was Dick, the merry-andrew, rather light-fingered and riotous, but a clever droll fellow. Above all, there was Charley, the publican, a jolly, fat, honest lad, a great favourite with the women, who, if he had not been rather too fond of ale and chuck-farthing, would have been the best fellow in the neighbourhood.

“My boys,” said Charley, “this is exceedingly well for Madam North;—not that I would speak uncivilly of her; she put up my picture in her best room, bless her for it! But, I say, this is very well for her, and for Lord Cæsar, and Squire Don, and Colonel Von;—but what affair is it of yours or mine? It is not to be wondered at, that gentlemen should wish to keep poor people out of their own. But it is strange, indeed, that they should expect the poor themselves to combine against their own interests. If the folks at St. Dennis’s should attack us we have the law and our cudgels to protect us. But why, in the name of wonder, are we to attack them? When old Sir Charles, who was Lord of the Manor formerly, and the parson, who was presented by him to the living, tried to bully the vestry, did not we knock their heads together, and go to meeting to hear Jeremiah Ringletub preach? And did the Squire Don, or the great Sir Lewis, that lived at that time, or the Germains, say a word against us for it? Mind your own business, my lads: law is not to 108be had for nothing; and we, you may be sure, shall have to pay the whole bill.”

Nevertheless the people of St. George’s were resolved on law. They cried out most lustily, “Squire Guelf for ever! Sweet William for ever! No steel traps!” Squire Guelf took all the rascally footmen who had worn old Sir Lewis’s livery into his service. They were fed in the kitchen on the very best of every thing, though they had no settlement. Many people, and the paupers in particular, grumbled at these proceedings. The steward, however, devised a way to keep them quiet.

There had lived in this parish for many years an old gentleman, named Sir Habeas Corpus. He was said by some to be of Saxon, by some of Norman, extraction. Some maintained that he was not born till after the time of Sir Charles, to whom we have before alluded. Others are of opinion that he was a legitimate son of old Lady Magna Charta, although he was long concealed and kept out of his birthright. Certain it is that he was a very benevolent person. Whenever any poor fellow was taken up on grounds which he thought insufficient, he used to attend on his behalf and bail him; and thus he had become so popular, that to take direct measures against him was out of the question.

The steward, accordingly, brought a dozen physicians to examine Sir Habeas. After consultation, they reported that he was in a very bad way, and ought not, on any account, to be allowed to stir out for several months. Fortified with this authority, the parish officers put him to bed, closed his windows, and barred his doors. They paid him every attention, and from 109time to time issued bulletins of his health. The steward never spoke of him without declaring that he was the best gentleman in the world; but excellent care was taken that he should never stir out of doors.

When this obstacle was removed, the Squire and the steward kept the parish in excellent order; flogged this man, sent that man to the stocks, and pushed forward the law-suit with a noble disregard of expense. They were, however, wanting either in skill or in fortune. And every thing went against them after their antagonists had begun to employ Solicitor Nap.

Who does not know the name of Solicitor Nap? At what alehouse is not his behaviour discussed? In what print-shop is not his picture seen? Yet how little truth has been said about him! Some people hold that he used to give laudanum by pints to his sick clerks for his amusement. Others, whose number has very much increased since he was killed by the gaol distemper, conceive that he was the very model of honour and good-nature. I shall try to tell the truth about him.

He was assuredly an excellent solicitor. In his way he never was surpassed. As soon as the parish began to employ him, their cause took a turn. In a very little time they were successful; and Nap became rich. He now set up for a gentleman; took possession of the old manor-house; got into the commission of the peace, and affected to be on a par with the best of the county. He governed the vestries as absolutely as the old family had done. Yet, to give him his due, he managed things with far more discretion than either Sir Lewis or the rioters who had pulled the Lords of the Manor down. He kept his servants in tolerable order. He 110removed the steel traps from the highways and the corners of the streets. He still left a few indeed In the more exposed parts of his premises; and set up a board announcing that traps and spring guns were set in his grounds. He brought the poor parson hack to the parish; and, though he did not enable him to keep a fine house and a coach as formerly, he settled him in a snug little cottage, and allowed him a pleasant pad-nag. He whitewashed the church again; and put the stocks, which had been much wanted of late, into good repair.

With the neighbouring gentry, however, he was no favourite. He was crafty and litigious. He cared nothing for right, if he could raise a point of law against them. He pounded their cattle, broke their hedges, and seduced their tenants from them. He almost ruined Lord Caesar with actions, in every one of which he was successful. Von Blunderbussen went to law with him for an alleged trespass, but was cast, and almost ruined by the costs of suit. He next took a fancy to the seat of Squire Don, who was, to say the truth, little better than an idiot. He asked the poor dupe to dinner, and then threatened to have him tossed in a blanket unless he would make over his estates to him. The poor Squire signed and sealed a deed by which the property was assigned to Joe, a brother of Nap’s, in trust for and to the use of Nap himself. The tenants, however, stood out. They maintained that the estate was entailed, and refused to pay rents to the new landlord; and in this refusal they were stoutly supported by the people in St. George’s.

About the same time Nap took it into his head to match with quality, and nothing would serve him but one of the Miss Germains. Lord Cæsar swore like 111a trooper; but there was no help for it. Nap had twice put executions in his principal residence, and had refused to discharge the latter of the two, till he had extorted a bond from his Lordship, which compelled him to comply.

THE END OF THE FIRST PAST.

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN MR. ABRAHAM COWLEY AND MR. JOHN MILTON, TOUCHING THE GREAT CIVIL WAR. SET DOWN BY A GENTLEMAN OF THE MIDDLE TEMPLE.

112(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, August 1824.)

“Referre sermones Deorum efe
Magna modis tenuare parvis.”—Horace.

I
have thought it good to set down in writing a memorable debate, wherein I was a listener, and two men of pregnant parts and great reputation discoursers; hoping that my friends will not be displeased to have a record both of the strange times through which I have lived, and of the famous men with whom I have conversed. It chanced, in the warm and beautiful spring of the year 1665, a little before the saddest summer that ever London saw, that I went to the Bowling-Green at Piccadilly, whither, at that time, the best gentry made continual resort. There I met Mr. Cowley, who had lately left Barnelms. There was then a house preparing for him at Chertsey; and, till it should be finished, he had come up for a short time to London, that he might urge a suit to his Grace of Buckingham touching certain lands of her Majesty’s, whereof he requested a lease. I had the honour to be familiarly acquainted with that worthy gentleman 113and most excellent poet, whose death hath been deplored with as general a consent of all Powers that delight in the woods, or in verse, or in love, as was of old that of Daphnis or of Gallus.

After some talk, which it is not material to set down at large, concerning his suit and his vexations at the court, where indeed his honesty did him more harm than his parts could do him good, I entreated him to dine with me at my lodging in the Temple, which he most courteously promised. And, that so eminent a guest might not lack a better entertainment than cooks or vintners can provide, I sent to the house of Mr. John Milton, in the Artillery-Walk, to beg that he would also be my guest. For, though he had been secretary, first to the Council of State, and, after that, to the Protector, and Mr. Cowley had held the same post under the Lord St. Albans in his banishment, I hoped, notwithstanding, that they would think themselves rather united by their common art than divided by their different factions. And so indeed it proved. For, while we sat at table, they talked freely of many men and things, as well ancient as modern, with much civility. Nay, Mr. Milton, who seldom tasted wine, both because of his singular temperance and because of his gout, did more than once pledge. Mr. Cowley, who was indeed no hermit in diet. At last, being heated, Mr. Milton begged that I would open the windows. “Nay,” said I, “if you desire fresh air and coolness, what should hinder us, as the evening is fair, from sailing for an hour on the river?” To this they both cheerfully consented; and forth we walked, Mr. Cowley and I leading Mr. Milton between us, to the Temple Stairs. There we took a boat; and thence we were rowed up the river. 114The wind was pleasant; the evening fine; the sky, the earth, and the water beautiful to look Upon. But Mr. Cowley and I held our peace, and said nothing of the gay sights around us, lest we should too feelingly remind Mr. Milton of his calamity; whereof, however, he needed no monitor: for soon he said sadly, “Ah, Mr. Cowley, you are a happy man. What would I now give but for one more look at the sun, and the waters, and the gardens of this fair city!”

“I know not,” said Mr. Cowley, “whether we ought not rather to envy you for that which makes you to envy others: and that specially in this place, where all eyes which are not closed in blindness ought to become fountains of tears. What can we look upon which is not a memorial of change and sorrow, of fair things vanished, and evil things done? When I see the gate of Whitehall, and the stately pillars of the Banqueting House, I cannot choose but think of what I have there seen in former days, masques, and pageants, and dances, and smiles, and the waving of graceful heads, and the bounding of delicate feet. And then I turn to thoughts of other things, which even to remember makes me to blush and weep;—of the great black scaffold, and the axe and block, which were placed before those very windows; and the voice seems to sound in mine ears, the lawless and terrible voice, which cried out that the head of a king was the head of a traitor. There stands Westminster Hall, which who can look upon, and not tremble to think how time, and change, and death confound the councils of the wise, and beat down the weapons of the mighty? How have I seen it surrounded with tens of thousands of petitioners crying for justice and privilege! How have I heard it shake 115with fierce and proud words, which made the hearts of the people burn within them! Then it is blockaded by dragoons, and cleared by pikemen. And they who have conquered their master go forth trembling at the word of their servant. And yet a little while, and the usurper comes forth from it, in his robe of ermine, with the golden staff in one hand and the Bible in the other, amidst the roaring of the guns and the shouting of the people. And yet again a little while, and the doors are thronged with multitudes in black, and the hearse and the plumes come forth; and the tyrant is borne, in more than royal pomp, to a royal sepulchre. A few days more, and his head is fixed to rot on the pinnacles of that very hall where he sat on a throne in his life, and lay in state after his death. When I think on all these things, to look round me makes me sad at heart. True it is that God hath restored to us our old laws, and the rightful line of our kings. Yet, how I know not, but it seems to me that something is wanting—that our court hath not the old gravity, nor our people the old loyalty. These evil times, like the great deluge, have overwhelmed and confused all earthly things. And, even as those waters, though at last they abated, yet, as the learned write, destroyed all trace of the garden of Eden, so that its place hath never since been found, so hath this opening of all the flood-gates of political evil effaced all marks of the ancient political paradise.”

“Sir, by your favour,” said Mr. Milton, “though, from many circumstances both of body and of fortune, I might plead fairer excuses for despondency than yourself, I yet look not so sadly either on the past or on the future. That a deluge hath passed over this our nation, I deny not. But I hold it not to be 116such a deluge as that of which you speak; but rather a blessed flood, like those of the Nile, which in its overflow doth indeed wash away ancient landmarks, and confound boundaries, and sweep away dwellings, yea, doth give birth to many foul and dangerous reptiles. Yet hence is the fulness of the granary, the beauty of the garden, the nurture of all living things.

“I remember well, Mr. Cowley, what you have said concerning these things in your Discourse of the Government of Oliver Cromwell, which my friend Elwood read to me last year. Truly, for elegance and rhetoric, that essay is to be compared with the finest tractates of Isocrates and Cicero. But neither that nor any other book, nor any events, which with most men have, more than any book, weight and authority, have altered my opinion, that, of all assemblies that ever were in this world, the best and the most useful was our Long Parliament. I speak not this as wishing to provoke debate; which neither yet do I decline.”

Mr. Cowley was, as I could see, a little nettled. Yet, as he was a man of a kind disposition and a most refined courtesy, he put a force upon himself, and answered with more vehemence and quickness indeed than was his wont, yet not uncivilly. “Surely, Mr. Milton, you speak not as you think. I am indeed one of those who believe that God hath reserved to himself the censure of kings, and that their crimes and oppressions are not to be resisted by the hands of their subjects. Yet can I easily find excuse for the violence of such as are stung to madness by grievous tyranny. But what shall we say for these men? Which of their just demands was not granted? Which even of their cruel and unreasonable requisitions, so as it 117were not inconsistent with all law and order, was refused? Had they not sent Strafford to the block and Laud to the Tower? Had they not destroyed the Courts of the High Commission and the Star Chamber? Had they not reversed the proceedings confirmed by the voices of the judges of England, in the matter of ship-money? Had they not taken from the king his ancient and most lawful power touching the order of knighthood? Had they not provided that, after their dissolution, triennial parliaments should be holden, and that their own power should continue till of their great condescension they should be pleased to resign it themselves? What more could they ask? Was it not enough that they had taken from their king all his oppressive powers, and many that were most salutary? Was it not enough that they had filled his council-board with his enemies, and his prisons with his adherents? Was it not enough that they had raised a furious multitude, to shout and swagger daily under the very windows of his royal palace? Was it not enough that they had taken from him the most blessed prerogative of princely mercy; that, complaining of intolerance themselves, they had denied all toleration to others; that they had urged, against forms, scruples childish as those of any formalist; that they had persecuted the least remnant of the popish rites with the fiercest bitterness of the popish spirit? Must they besides all this have full power to command his armies, and to massacre his friends?

“For military command, it was never known in any monarchy, nay, in any well ordered republic, that it was committed to the debates of a large and unsettled assembly. For their other requisition, that he should give up to their vengeance all who had defended the 118rights of his crown, his honour must have been ruined if he had complied. Is it not therefore plain that they desired these things only in order that, by refusing, his Majesty might give them a pretence for war?

“Men have often risen up against fraud, against cruelty, against rapine. But when before was it known that concessions were met with importunities, graciousness with insults, the open palm of bounty with the clenched fist of malice? Was it like trusty delegates of the Commons of England, and faithful stewards of their liberty and their wealth, to engage them for such causes in civil war, which both to liberty and to wealth is of all things the most hostile. Evil indeed must be the disease which is not more tolerable than such a medicine. Those who, even to save a nation from tyrants, excite it to civil war do in general but minister to it the same miserable kind of relief wherewith the wizards of Pharaoh mocked the Egyptian. We read that, when Moses had turned their waters into blood, those impious magicians, intending, not benefit to the thirsting people, but vain and emulous ostentation of their own art, did themselves also change into blood the water which the plague had spared. Such sad comfort do those who stir up war minister to the oppressed. But here where was the oppression? What was the favour which had not been granted? What was the evil which had not been removed? What further could they desire?”

“These questions,” said Mr. Milton, austerely, “have indeed often deceived the ignorant; but that Mr. Cowley should have been so beguiled, I marvel. You ask what more the Parliament could desire? I will answer you in one word, security. What are votes, and statutes, and resolutions? They have no 119eyes to see, no hands to strike and avenge. They must have some safeguard from without. Many things, therefore, which in themselves were peradventure hurtful, was this Parliament constrained to ask, lest otherwise good laws and precious rights should be without defence. Nor did they want a great and signal example of this danger. I need not remind you that, many years before, the two Houses had presented to the king the Petition of Right, wherein were set down all the most valuable privileges of the people of this realm. Did not Charles accept it? Did he not declare it to be law? Was it not as fully enacted as ever were any of those bills of the Long Parliament concerning which you spoke? And were those privileges therefore enjoyed more fully by the people? No: the king did from that time redouble his oppressions as if to avenge himself for the shame of having been compelled to renounce them. Then were our estates laid under shameful impositions, our houses ransacked, our bodies imprisoned. Then was the steel of the hangman blunted with mangling the ears of harmless men. Then our very minds were fettered, and the iron entered into our souls. Then we mere compelled to hide our hatred, our sorrow, and our scorn, to laugh with hidden faces at the mummery of Laud, to curse under our breath the tyranny of Wentworth. Of old time it was well and nobly said, by one of our kings, that an Englishman ought to be free as his thoughts. Our prince reversed the maxim; he strove to make our thoughts as much slaves as ourselves. To sneer at a Romish pageant, to miscall a lord’s crest, were crimes for which there was no mercy. These were all the fruits which we gathered from those excellent laws of the former Parliament, from these solemn promises of 120the king. Were we to be deceived again? Were we again to give subsidies, and receive nothing but promises? Were we again to make wholesome statutes, and then leave them to be broken daily and hourly, until the oppressor should have squandered another supply, and should be ready for another perjury? You ask what they could desire which he had not already granted. Let me ask of you another question. What pledge could he give which he had not already violated? From the first year of his reign, whenever he had need of the purses of his Commons to support the revels of Buckingham or the processions of Laud, he had assured them that, as he was a gentleman and a king, he would sacredly preserve their rights. He had pawned those solemn pledges, and pawned them again and again; but when had he redeemed them? ‘Upon my faith,’—‘Upon my sacred word,’—Upon the honour of a prince,’—came so easily from his lips, and dwelt so short a time on his mind, that they were as little to be trusted as the ‘By these hilts’ of an Alsatian dicer.

“Therefore it is that I praise this Parliament for what else I might have condemned. If what he had granted had been granted graciously and readily, if what he had before promised had been faithfully observed, they could not be defended. It was because he had never yielded the worst abuse without a long struggle, and seldom without a large bribe: it was because he had no sooner disentangled himself from his troubles than he forgot his promises; and, more like a villainous huckster than a great king, kept both the prerogative and the large price which had been paid to him to forego it; it was because of these things that it was necessary and just to bind with forcible restraints 121one who could be bound neither by law nor honour. Nay, even while he was making those very concessions of which you speak, he betrayed his deadly hatred against the people and their friends. Not only did he, contrary to all that ever was deemed lawful in England, order that members of the Commons House of Parliament should be impeached of high treason at the bar of the Lords; thereby violating both the trial by jury and the privileges of the House; but, not content with breaking the law by his ministers, he went himself armed to assail it. In the birth-place and sanctuary of freedom, in the House itself, nay, in the very chair of the speaker, placed for the protection of free speech and privilege, he sat, rolling his eyes round the benches, searching for those whose blood he desired, and singling out his opposers to the slaughter. This most foul outrage fails. Then again for the old arts. Then come gracious messages. Then come courteous speeches. Then is again mortgaged his often forfeited honour. He will never again violate the laws. He will respect their rights as if they were his own. He pledges the dignity of his crown; that crown which had been committed to him for the weal of his people, and which he never named, but that he might the more easily delude and oppress them.

“The power of the sword, I grant you, was not one to be permanently possessed by parliament. Neither did that parliament demand it as a permanent possession. They asked it only for temporary security. Nor can I see on what conditions they could safely make peace with that false and wicked king, save such as would deprive him of all power to injure.

“For civil war, that it is an evil I dispute not. But that it is the greatest of evils, that I stoutly deny. It 122doth indeed appear to the misjudging to be a worse calamity than bad government, because its miseries are collected together within a short space and time, and may easily at one view be taken in and perceived. But the misfortunes of nations ruled by tyrants, being distributed over many centuries and many places, as they are of greater weight and number, so are they of less display. When the Devil of tyranny hath gone into the body politic he departs not but with struggles, and foaming, and great convulsions. Shall he, therefore, vex it for ever, lest, in going out, he for a moment tear and rend it? Truly this argument touching the evils of war would better become my friend Elwood, or some other of the people called Quakers, than a courtier and a cavalier. It applies no more to this war than to all others, as well foreign as domestic, and, in this war, no more to the Houses than to the king; nay not so much, since he by a little sincerity and moderation might have rendered that needless which their duty to God and man then enforced them to do.”

“Pardon me, Mr. Milton,” said Mr. Cowley; “I grieve to hear you speak thus of that good king. Most unhappy indeed he was, in that he reigned at a time when the spirit of the then living generation was for freedom, and the precedents of former ages for prerogative. His case was like to that of Christopher Columbus, when he sailed forth on an unknown ocean, and found that the compass, whereby he shaped his course, had shifted from the north pole whereto before it had constantly pointed. So it was with Charles. His compass varied; and therefore he could not tack aright. If he had been an absolute king he would doubtless, like Titus Vespasian, have been called the 123delight of the human race. If he had been a Doge of Venice, or a Stadtholder of Holland, he would never have outstepped the laws. But he lived when our government had neither clear definitions nor strong sanctions. Let, therefore, his faults be ascribed to the time. Of his virtues the praise is his own.

“Never was there a more gracious prince, or a more proper gentleman. In every pleasure he was temperate, in conversation mild and grave, in friendship constant, to his servants liberal, to his queen faithful and loving, in battle brave, in sorrow and captivity resolved, in death most Christian and forgiving.

“For his oppressions, let us look at the former history of this realm. James was never accounted a tyrant. Elizabeth is esteemed to have been the mother of her people. Were they less arbitrary? Did they never lay hands on the purses of their subjects but by Act of Parliament? Did they never confine insolent and disobedient men but in due course of law? Was the court of Star Chamber less active? Were the ears of libellers more safe? I pray you, let not king Charles be thus dealt with. It was enough that in his life he was tried for an alleged breach of laws which none ever heard named till they were discovered for his destruction. Let not his fame be treated as was his sacred and anointed body. Let not his memory be tried by principles found out ex post facto. Let us not judge by the spirit of one generation a man whose disposition had been formed by the temper and fashion of another.”

“Nay, but conceive me, Mr. Cowley,” said Mr. Milton; “inasmuch as, at the beginning of his reign, he imitated those who had governed before him, I blame him not. To expect that kings will, of their 124own free choice, abridge their prerogative, were argument of but slender wisdom. Whatever, therefore, lawless, unjust, or cruel, he either did or permitted during the first years of his reign, I pass by. But for what was done after that he had solemnly given his consent to the Petition of Right, where shall we find defence? Let it be supposed, which yet I concede not, that the tyranny of his father and of Queen Elizabeth had been no less rigorous than was his. But had his father, had that queen, sworn, like him, to abstain from those rigours. Had they, like him, for good and valuable consideration, aliened their hurtful prerogatives? Surely not: from whatever excuse you can plead for him he had wholly excluded himself. The borders of countries, we know, are mostly the seats of perpetual wars and tumults. It was the same with the undefined frontiers, which of old separated privilege and prerogative. They were the debatable land of our polity. It was no marvel if, both on the one side and on the other, inroads were often made. But, when treaties have been concluded, spaces measured, lines drawn, landmarks set up, that which before might pass for innocent error or just reprisal becomes robbery, perjury, deadly sin. He knew not, you say, which of his powers were founded on ancient law, and which only on vicious example. But had he not read the Petition of Right? Had not proclamation been made from his throne; Soit fait comme il est desiré?

“For his private virtues they are beside the question. Remember you not,” and Mr. Milton smiled, but somewhat sternly, “what Dr. Caius saith in the Merry Wives of Shakspeare? ‘What shall the honest man do in my closet? There is no honest man that shall come in my closet.’ Even so say I. There is no good 125man who shall make us his slaves. If he break his word to his people, is it a sufficient defence that he keeps it to his companions? If he oppress and extort all day, shall he be held blameless because he prayeth at night and morning? If he be insatiable in plunder and revenge, shall we pass it by because in meat and drink he is temperate? If he have lived like a tyrant, shall all be forgotten because he hath died like a martyr?

“He was a man, as I think, who had so much semblance of virtues as might make his vices most dangerous. He was not a tyrant after our wonted English model. The second Richard, the second and fourth Edwards, and the eighth Harry, were men profuse, gay, boisterous; lovers of women and of wine, of no outward sanctity or gravity. Charles was a ruler after the Italian fashion; grave, demure, of a solemn carriage, and a sober diet; as constant at prayers as a priest, as heedless of oaths as an atheist.”

Mr. Cowley answered somewhat sharply: “I am sorry, Sir, to hear you speak thus. I had hoped that the vehemence of spirit which was caused by these violent times had now abated. Yet, sure, Mr. Milton, whatever you may think of the character of King Charles, you will not still justify his murder.”

“Sir,” said Mr. Milton, “I must have been of a hard and strange nature, if the vehemence which was imputed to me in my younger days had not been diminished by the afflictions wherewith it hath pleased Almighty God to chasten my age. I will not now defend all that I may heretofore have written. But this I say, that I perceive not wherefore a king should be exempted from all punishment. Is it just that where most is given least should be required? Or 126politic that where there is the greatest power to injure there should be no danger to restrain? But, you will say, there is no such law. Such a law there is. There is the law of self-preservation written by God himself on our hearts. There is the primal compact and bond of society, not graven on stone, nor sealed with wax, nor put down on parchment, nor set forth in any express form of words by men when of old they came together; but implied in the very act that they so came together, pre-supposed in all subsequent law, not to be repealed by any authority, not invalidated by being omitted in any code; inasmuch as from thence are all codes and all authority.

“Neither do I well see wherefore you cavaliers, and, indeed, many of us whom you merrily call Roundheads, distinguish between those who fought against King Charles, and specially after the second commission given to Sir Thomas Fairfax, and those who condemned him to death. Sure, if his person were inviolable, it was as wicked to lift the sword against it at Naseby as the axe at Whitehall. If his life might justly be taken, why not in course of trial as well as by right of war?

“Thus much in general as touching the right. But, for the execution of King Charles in particular, I will not now undertake to defend it. Death is inflicted, not that the culprit may die, but that the state may be thereby advantaged. And, from all that I know, I think that the death of King Charles hath more hindered than advanced the liberties of England.

“First, he left an heir. He was in captivity. The heir was in freedom. He was odious to the Scots. The heir was favoured by them. To kill the captive therefore, whereby the heir, in the apprehension of all 127royalists, became forthwith king—what was it, in truth, but to set their captive free, and to give him besides other great advantages?

“Next, it was a deed most odious to the people, and not only to your party, but to many among ourselves; and, as it is perilous for any government to outrage the public opinion, so most was it perilous for a government which had from that opinion alone its birth, its nurture, and its defence.

“Yet doth not this properly belong to our dispute; nor can these faults be justly charged upon that most renowned parliament. For, as you know, the high court of justice was not established until the house had been purged of such members as were adverse to the army, and brought wholly under the control of the chief officers.”

“And who,” said Mr. Cowley, “levied that army? Who commissioned those officers? Was not the fate of the Commons as justly deserved as was that of Diomedes, who was devoured by those horses whom he had himself taught to feed on the flesh and blood of men? How could they hope that others would respect laws which they had themselves insulted; that swords which had been drawn against the prerogatives of the king would be put up at an ordinance of the Commons? It was believed, of old, that there were some devils easily raised but never to be laid; insomuch that, if a magician called them up, he should be forced to find them always some employment; for, though they would do all his bidding, yet, if he left them but for one moment without some work of evil to perform, they would turn their claws against himself. Such a fiend is an army. They who evoke it cannot dismiss it. They are at once its masters and its slaves. Let 128them not fail to find for it task after task of blood and rapine. Let them not leave it for a moment in repose, lest it tear them in pieces.

“Thus was it with that famous assembly. They formed a force which they could neither govern nor resist. They made it powerful. They made it fanatical. As if military insolence were not of itself sufficiently dangerous, they heightened it with spiritual pride,—they encouraged their soldiers to rave from the tops of tubs against the men of Belial, till every trooper thought himself a prophet. They taught them to abuse popery, till every drummer fancied that he was as infallible as a pope.

“Then it was that religion changed her nature. She was no longer the parent of arts and letters, of wholesome knowledge, of innocent pleasures, of blessed household smiles. In their place came sour faces, whining voices, the chattering of fools, the yells of madmen. Then men fasted from meat and drink, who fasted not from bribes and blood. Then men frowned at stage-plays, who smiled at massacres. Then men preached against painted faces, who felt no remorse for their own most painted lives. Religion had been a pole-star to light and to guide. It was now more like to that ominous star in the book of the Apocalypse, which fell from heaven upon the fountains and rivers and changed them into wormwood; for even so did it descend from its high and celestial dwelling-place to plague this earth, and to turn into bitterness all that was sweet, and into poison all that was nourishing.

“Therefore it was not strange that such things should follow. They who had closed the barriers of London against the king could not defend them against their own creatures. They who had so stoutly cried 129for privilege, when that prince, most unadvisedly no doubt, came among them to demand their members, durst not wag their fingers when Oliver filled their hall with soldiers, gave their mace to a corporal, put their keys in his pocket, and drove them forth with base terms, borrowed half from the conventicle and half from the ale-house. Then were we, like the trees of the forest in holy writ, given over to the rule of the bramble; then from the basest of the shrubs came forth the fire which devoured the cedars of Lebanon. We bowed down before a man of mean birth, of ungraceful demeanour, of stammering and most vulgar utterance, of scandalous and notorious hypocrisy. Our laws were made and unmade at his pleasure; the constitution of our parliaments changed by his writ and proclamation; our persons imprisoned; our property plundered; our lands and houses overrun with soldiers; and the great charter itself was but argument for a scurrilous jest; and for all this we may thank that parliament: for never, unless they had so violently shaken the vessel, could such foul dregs have risen to the top.”

Then answered Mr. Milton: “What you have now said comprehends so great a number of subjects, that it would require, not an evening’s sail on the Thames, but rather a voyage to the Indies, accurately to treat of all: yet, in as few words as I may, I will explain my sense of these matters.

“First, as to the army. An army, as you have well set forth, is always a weapon dangerous to those who use it; yet he who falls among thieves spares not to fire his musquetoon, because he may be slain if it burst in his hand. Nor must states refrain from defending themselves, lest their defenders should at last turn 130against them. Nevertheless, against this danger statesmen should carefully provide; and, that they may do so, they should take especial care that neither the officers nor the soldiers do forget that they are also citizens. I do believe that the English army would have continued to obey the parliament with all duty, but for one act, which, as it was in intention, in seeming, and in immediate effect, worthy to be compared with the most famous in history, so was it, in its final consequence, most injurious. I speak of that ordinance called the self-denying, and of the new model of the army. By those measures the Commons gave up the command of their forces into the hands of men who were not of themselves. Hence, doubtless, derived no small honour to that noble assembly, which sacrificed to the hope of public good the assurance of private advantage. And, as to the conduct of the war, the scheme prospered. Witness the battle of Naseby, and the memorable exploits of Fairfaix in the west. But thereby the Parliament lost that hold on the soldiers and that power to control them, which they retained while every regiment was commanded by their own members. Politicians there be, who would wholly divide the legislative from the executive power. In the golden age this may have succeeded; in the millennium it may succeed again. But, where great armies and great taxes are required, there the executive government must always hold a great authority, which authority, that it may not oppress and destroy the legislature, must be in some manner blended with it. The leaders of foreign mercenaries have always been most dangerous to a country. The officers of native armies, deprived of the civil privileges of other men, are as much to be feared. This was the great 131error of that Parliament; and, though an error it were, it was an error generous, virtuous, and more to be deplored than censured.

“Hence came the power of the army and its leaders, and especially of that most famous leader, whom both in our conversation to-day, and in that discourse, whereon I before touched, you have, in my poor opinion, far too roughly handled. Wherefore you speak contemptibly of his parts I know not; but I suspect that you are not free from the error common to studious and speculative men. Because Oliver was an ungraceful orator, and never said, either in public or private, anything memorable, you will have it that he was of a mean capacity. Sure this is unjust. Many men have there been ignorant of letters, without wit, without eloquence, who yet had the wisdom to devise, and the courage to perform, that which they lacked language to explain. Such men often, in troubled times, have worked out the deliverance of nations and their own greatness, not by logic, not by rhetoric, but by wariness in success, by calmness in danger, by fierce and stubborn resolution in all adversity. The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence: and such an one, in my judgment, was his late Highness, who, if none were to treat his name scornfully now who shook not at the sound of it while he lived, would, by very few, be mentioned otherwise than with reverence. His own deeds shall avouch him for a great statesman, a great soldier, a true lover of his country, a merciful and generous conqueror.

“For his faults, let us reflect that they who seem to lead are oftentimes most constrained to follow. They who will mix with men, and specially they who will 132govern them, must, in many things, obey them. They who will yield to no such conditions may be hermits, but cannot be generals and statesmen. If a man will walk straight forward without turning to the right or the left, he must walk in a desert, and not in Cheapside.

“Thus was he enforced to do many things which jumped not with his inclination nor made for his honour; because the army, on which alone he could depend for power and life, might not otherwise be contented. And I, for mine own part, marvel less that he sometimes was fain to indulge their violence than that he could so often restrain it.

“In that he dissolved the Parliament, I praise him It then was so diminished in numbers, as well by the death as by the exclusion of members, that it was no longer the same assembly; and, if at that time it had made itself perpetual, we should have been governed, not by an English House of Commons, but by a Venetian Council.

“If in his following rule he overstepped the laws, I pity rather than condemn him. He may be compared to that Mæandrius of Samos, of whom Herodotus saith, in his Thalia, that, wishing to be of all men the most just, he was not able; for after the death of Polycrates he offered freedom to the people; and not till certain of them threatened to call him to a reckoning for what he had formerly done, did he change his purpose, and make himself a tyrant, lest he should be treated as a criminal.

“Such was the case of Oliver. He gave to his country a form of government so free and admirable that, in near six thousand years, human wisdom hath never devised any more excellent contrivance for human happiness. To himself he reserved so little power 133that it would scarcely have sufficed for his safety, and it is a marvel that it could suffice for his ambition. When, after that, he found that the members of his parliament disputed his right even to that small authority which he had kept, when he might have kept all, then indeed I own that he began to govern by the sword those who would not suffer him to govern by the law.

“But, for the rest, what sovereign was ever more princely in pardoning injuries, in conquering enemies, in extending the dominions and the renown of his people? What sea, what shore did he not mark with imperishable memorials of his friendship or his vengeance? The gold of Spain, the steel of Sweden, the ten thousand sails of Holland, availed nothing against him. While every foreign state trembled at our arms, we sat secure from all assault. War, which often so strangely troubles both husbandry and commerce, never silenced the song of our reapers, or the sound of our looms. Justice was equally administered; God was freely worshipped.

“Now look at that which we have taken in exchange. With the restored king have come over to us vices of every sort, and most the basest and most shameful,—lust without love—servitude, without loyalty—foulness of speech—dishonesty of dealing—grinning contempt of all things good and generous. The throne is surrounded by men whom the former Charles would have spurned from his footstool. The altar is served by slaves whose knees are supple to every being but God. Rhymers, whose books the hangman should burn, pandars actors, and buffoons, these drink a health and throw a main with the King; these have stars on their breasts and gold sticks in 134their hands; these shut out from his presence the best and bravest of those who bled for his house. Even so doth God visit those who know not how to value freedom. He gives them over to the tyranny which they have desired.”

“I will not,” said Mr. Cowley, “dispute with you on this argument. But, if it be as you say, how can you maintain that England hath been so greatly advantaged by the rebellion?”

“Understand me rightly, Sir,” said Mr. Milton. “This nation is not given over to slavery and vice. We tasted indeed the fruits of liberty before they had well ripened. Their flavour was harsh and bitter; and we turned from them with loathing to the sweeter poisons of servitude. This is but for a time. England is sleeping on the lap of Dalilah, traitorously chained, but not yet shorn of strength. Let the cry be once heard—the Philistines be upon thee; and at once that sleep will be broken, and those chains will be as flax in the fire. The great Parliament hath left behind it in our hearts and minds a hatred of tyrants, a just knowledge of our rights, a scorn of vain and deluding names; and that the revellers of Whitehall shall surely find. The sun is darkened; but it is only for a moment: it is but an eclipse; though all birds of evil omen have begun to scream, and all ravenous beasts have gone forth to prey, thinking it to be midnight. Woe to them if they be abroad when the rays again shine forth!

“The king hath judged ill. Had he been wise he would have remembered that he owed his restoration only to confusions which had wearied us out, and made us eager for repose. He would have known that the folly and perfidy of a prince would restore to the good 135old cause many hearts which had been alienated thence by the turbulence of factions; for, if I know aught of history, or of the heart of man, he will soon learn that the last champion of the people was not destroyed when he murdered Vane, nor seduced when he beguiled Fairfax.”

Mr. Cowley seemed to me not to take much amiss what Mr. Milton had said touching that thankless court, which had indeed but poorly requited his own good service. He only said, therefore, “Another rebellion! Alas! alas! Mr. Milton! If there be no choice but between despotism and anarchy, I prefer despotism.”

“Many men,” said Mr. Milton, “have floridly and ingeniously compared anarchy and despotism; but they who so amuse themselves do but look at separate parts of that which is truly one great whole. Each is the cause and the effect of the other; the evils of either are the evils of both. Thus do states move on in the same eternal cycle, which, from the remotest point, brings them back again to the same sad starting-post: and, till both those who govern and those who obey shall learn and mark this great truth, men can expect little through the future, as they have known little through the past, save vicissitudes of extreme evils, alternately producing and produced.

“When will rulers learn that, where liberty is not security and order can never be? We talk of absolute power; but all power hath limits, which, if not fixed by the moderation of the governors, will be fixed by the force of the governed. Sovereigns may send their opposers to dungeons; they may clear out a senate-house with soldiers; they may enlist armies of spies; they may hang scores of the disaffected in chains at every cross road; but what power shall stand in that 136frightful time when rebellion hath become a less evil than endurance? Who shall dissolve that terrible tribunal, which, in the hearts of the oppressed, denounces against the oppressor the doom of its wild justice? Who shall repeal the law of self-defence? What arms or discipline shall resist the strength of famine and despair? How often were the ancient Cæsars dragged from their golden palaces, stripped of their purple robes, mangled, stoned, defiled with filth, pierced with hooks, hurled into Tiber? How often have the Eastern Sultans perished by the sabres of their own janissaries, or the bow-strings of their own mutes! For no power which is not limited by laws can ever be protected by them. Small, therefore, is the wisdom of those who would fly to servitude as if it were a refuge from commotion; for anarchy is the sure consequence of tyranny. That governments may be safe, nations must be free. Their passions must have an outlet provided, lest they make one.

“When I was at Naples, I went with Signor Manso, a gentleman of excellent parts and breeding, who had been the familiar friend of that famous poet Torquato Tasso, to see the burning mountain Vesuvius. I wondered how the peasants could venture to dwell so fearlessly and cheerfully on its sides, when the lava was flowing from its summit; but Manso smiled, and told me that when the fire descends freely they retreat before it without haste or fear. They can tell how fast it will move, and how far; and they know, moreover, that, though it may work some little damage, it will soon cover the fields over which it hath passed with rich vineyards and sweet flowers. But, when the flames are pent up in the mountain, then it is that they have reason to fear; then it is that the earth sinks and the 137sea swells; then cities are swallowed up; and their place knoweth them no more. So it is in politics: where the people is most closely restrained, there it gives the greatest shocks to peace and order; therefore would I say to all kings, let your demagogues lead crowds, lest they lead armies; let them bluster, lest they massacre; a little turbulence is, as it were, the rainbow of the state; it shows indeed that there is a passing shower; but it is a pledge that there shall be no deluge.”

“This is true,” said Mr. Cowley: “yet these admonitions are not less needful to subjects than to sovereigns.”

“Surely,” said Mr. Milton; “and, that I may end this long debate with a few words in which we shall both agree, I hold that, as freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom. Even the vainest opinions of men are not to be outraged by those who propose to themselves the happiness of men for their end, and who must work with the passions of men for their means. The blind reverence for things ancient is indeed so foolish that it might make a wise man laugh, if it were not also sometimes so mischievous that it would rather make a good man weep. Yet, since it may not be wholly cured, it must be discreetly indulged; and therefore those who would amend evil laws should consider rather how much it may be safe to spare, than how much it may be possible to change. Have you not heard that men who have been shut up for many years in dungeons shrink if they see the light, and fall down if their irons be struck off. And so, when nations have long been in the house of bondage, the chains which have crippled them are necessary to 138support them, the darkness which hath weakened their sight is necessary to preserve it. Therefore release them not too rashly, lest they curse their freedom and pine for their prison.

“I think indeed that the renowned Parliament, of which we have talked so much, did show, until it became subject to the soldiers, a singular and admirable moderation, in such times scarcely to be hoped, and most worthy to be an example to all that shall come after. But on this argument I have said enough: and I will therefore only pray to Almighty God that those who shall, in future times, stand forth in defence of our liberties, as well civil as religious, may adorn the good cause by mercy, prudence, and soberness, to the glory of his name and the happiness and honour of the English people.”

And so ended that discourse; and not long after we were set on shore again at the Temple-gardens, and there parted company: and the same evening I took notes of what had been said, which I have here more fully set down, from regard both to the fame of the men, and the importance of the subject-matter.

ON THE ATHENIAN ORATORS.

139(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, August 1824.)

“To the famous orators repair,
Those ancient, whose resistless eloquence
Wielded at will that fierce démocratie,
Shook the arsenal, and fulmined over Greece
To Macedon and Artaxerxes’ throne.”—Milton.

T
he celebrity of the great classical writers is confined within no limits, except those which separate civilized from savage man. Their works are the common property of every polished nation. They have furnished subjects for the painter, and models for the poet. In the minds of the educated classes throughout Europe, their names are indissolubly associated with the endearing recollections of childhood,—the old school room,—the dog-eared grammar,—the first prize,—the tears so often shed and so quickly dried. So great is the veneration with which they are regarded, that even the editors and commentators who perform the lowest menial offices to their memory, are considered, like the equerries and chamberlains of sovereign princes, as entitled to a high rank in the table of literary precedence. It is, therefore, somewhat singular that their productions should so rarely have been examined on just and philosophical principles of criticism.

The ancient writers themselves afford us but little 140assistance. When they particularise, they are commonly trivial: when they would generalise, they become indistinct. An exception must, indeed, be made in favour of Aristotle. Both in analysis and in combination, that great man was without a rival. No philosopher has ever possessed, in an equal degree, the talent either of separating established systems into their primary elements, or of connecting detached phenomena in harmonious systems. He was the great fashioner of the intellectual chaos; he changed its darkness into light, and its discord into order. He brought to literary researches the same vigor and amplitude of mind to which both physical and metaphysical science are so greatly indebted. His fundamental principles of criticism are excellent. To cite only a single instance;—the doctrine which he established, that poetry is an imitative art, when justly understood, is to the critic what the compass is to the navigator. With it he may venture upon the most extensive excursions. Without it he must creep cautiously along the coast, or lose himself in a trackless expanse, and trust, at best, to the guidance of an occasional star. It is a discovery which changes a caprice into a science.

The general propositions of Aristotle are valuable. But the merit of the superstructure bears no proportion to that of the foundation. This is partly to be ascribed to the character of the philosopher, who, though qualified to do all that could be done by the resolving and combining powers of the understanding, seems not to have possessed much of sensibility or imagination. Partly, also, it may be attributed to the deficiency of materials. The great works of genius which then existed were not either sufficiently numerous 141or sufficiently varied to enable any man to form a perfect code of literature. To require that a critic should conceive classes of composition which had never existed, and then investigate their principles, would be as unreasonable as the demand of Nebuchadnezzar, who expected his magicians first to tell him his dream and then to interpret it.

With all his deficiencies, Aristotle was the most enlightened and profound critic of antiquity. Dionysius was far from possessing the same exquisite subtilty, or the same vast comprehension. But he had access to a much greater number of specimens; and he had devoted himself, as it appears, more exclusively to the study of elegant literature. His peculiar judgments are of more value than his general principles. He is only the historian of literature. Aristotle is its philosopher.

Quintilian applied to general literature the same principles by which he had been accustomed to judge of the declamations of his pupils. He looks for nothing but rhetoric, and rhetoric not of the highest order. He speaks coldly of the incomparable works of Æschylus. He admires, beyond expression, those inexhaustible mines of common-places, the plays of Euripides. He bestows a few vague words on the poetical character of Homer. He then proceeds to consider him merely as an orator. An orator Homer doubtless was, and a great orator. But surely nothing is more remarkable, in his admirable works, than the art with which his oratorical powers are made subservient to the purposes of poetry. Nor can I think Quintilian a great critic in his own province. Just as are many of his remarks, beautiful as are many of his illustrations, we can perpetually detect in his thoughts 142that flavour which the soil of despotism generally communicates to all the fruits of genius. Eloquence was, in his time, little more than a condiment which served to stimulate in a despot the jaded appetite for panegyric, an amusement for the travelled nobles and the blue-stocking matrons of Rome. It is, therefore, with him, rather a sport than a war; it is a contest of foils, not of swords. He appears to think more of the grace of the attitude than of the direction and vigour of the thrust. It must be acknowledged, in justice to Quintilian, that this is an error to which Cicero has too often given the sanction, both of his precept and of his example.

Longinus seems to have had great sensibility, but little discrimination. He gives us eloquent sentences, but no principles. It was happily said that Montesquieu ought to have changed the name of his book from L’Esprit des Lois to L’Esprit sur les Lois. In the same manner the philosopher of Palmyra ought to have entitled his famous work, not “Longinus on the Sublime,” but “The Sublimities of Longinus.” The origin of the sublime is one of the most curious and interesting subjects of inquiry that can occupy the attention of a critic. In our own country it has been discussed, with great ability, and, I think, with very little success, by Burke and Dugald Stuart. Longinus dispenses himself from all investigations of this nature, by telling his friend Terentianus that he already knows every thing than can be said upon the question. It is to be regretted that Terentianus did not impart some of his knowledge to his instructor: for from Longinus we learn only that sublimity means height—or elevation. This name, so commodiously vague, is applied 143indifferently to the noble prayer of Ajax in the Iliad, and to a passage of Plato about the human body, as full of conceits as an ode of Cowley. Having no fixed standard, Longinus is right only by accident. He is rather a fancier than a critic.

Modern writers have been prevented by many causes from supplying the deficiencies of their classical predecessors. At the time of the revival of literature, no man could, without great and painful labour, acquire an accurate and elegant knowledge of the ancient languages. And, unfortunately, those grammatical and philological studies, without which it was impossible to understand the great works of Athenian and Roman genius, have a tendency to contract the views and deaden the sensibility of those who follow them with extreme assiduity. A powerful mind, which has been long employed in such studies, may be compared to the gigantic spirit in the Arabian tale, who was persuaded to contract himself to small dimensions in order to enter within the enchanted vessel, and when his prison had been closed upon him, found himself unable to escape from the narrow boundaries to the measure of which he had reduced his stature. When the means have long been the objects of application, they are naturally substituted for the end. It was said, by Eugene of Savoy, that the greatest generals have commonly been those who have been at once raised to command, and introduced to the great operations of war, without being employed in the petty calculations and manoeuvres which employ the time of an inferior officer. In literature the principle is equally sound. The great tactics of criticism will, in general, be best understood by those who have not had much practice in drilling syllables and particles. 144I remember to have observed among the French Anas a ludicrous instance of this. A scholar, doubtless of great learning, recommends the study of some long Latin treatise, of which I now forget the name, on the religion, manners, government, and language of the early Greeks. “For there,” says he, “you will learn every thing of importance that is contained in the Iliad and Odyssey, without the trouble of reading two such tedious books.” Alas! it had not occurred to the poor gentleman that all the knowledge to which he attached so much value was useful only as it illustrated the great poems which he despised, and would be as worthless for any other purpose as the mythology of Caffraria, or the vocabulary of Otaheite.

Of those scholars who have disdained to confine themselves to verbal criticism few have been successful. The ancient languages have, generally, a magical influence on their faculties. They were “fools called into a circle by Greek invocations.” The Iliad and Æneid were to them not books, but curiosities, or rather reliques. They no more admired those works for their merits than a good Catholic venerates the house of the Virgin at Loretto for its architecture. Whatever was classical was good. Homer was a great poet; and so was Callimachus. The epistles of Cicero were fine; and so were those of Phalaris. Even with respect to questions of evidence they fell into the same error. The authority of all narrations, written in Greek or Latin, was the same with them. It never crossed their minds that the lapse of five hundred years, or the distance of five hundred leagues, could affect the accuracy of a narration;—that Livy could be a less veracious historian than Polybius;—or that Plutarch could know less about the friends of Xenophon 145than Xenophon himself. Deceived by the distance of time, they seem to consider all the Classics as contemporaries; just as I have known people in England, deceived by the distance of place, take it for granted that all persons who live in India are neighbours, and ask an inhabitant of Bombay about the health of an acquaintance at Calcutta. It is to be hoped that no barbarian deluge will ever again pass over Europe. But, should such a calamity happen, it seems not improbable that some future Rollin or Gillies will compile a history of England from Miss Porter’s Scottish Chiefs, Miss Lee’s Recess, and Sir Nathaniel Wraxall’s Memoirs.

It is surely time that ancient literature should be examined in a different manner, without pedantical prepossessions, but with a just allowance, at the same time, for the difference of circumstances and manners. I am far from pretending to the knowledge or ability which such a task would require. All that I mean to offer is a collection of desultory remarks upon a most interesting portion of Greek literature.

It may be doubted-whether any compositions which have ever been produced in the world are equally perfect in their kind with the great Athenian orations. Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses. The supply adjusts itself to the demand. The quantity may be diminished by restrictions, and multiplied by bounties. The singular excellence to which eloquence attained at Athens is to be mainly attributed to the influence which it exerted there. In turbulent times, under a constitution purely democratic, among a people educated exactly to that point at which men are most susceptible of strong and sudden impressions, acute, but 146not sound reasoners, warm in their feelings, unfixed in their principles, and passionate admirers of fine composition, oratory received such encouragement as it has never since obtained.

The taste and knowledge of the Athenian people was a favourite object of the contemptuous derision of Samuel Johnson; a man who knew nothing of Greek literature beyond the common school-books, and who seems to have brought to what he had read scarcely more than the discernment of a common school-boy. He used to assert, with that arrogant absurdity which, in spite of his great abilities and virtues, renders him, perhaps the most ridiculous character in literary history, that Demosthenes spoke to a people of brutes;—to a barbarous people;—that there could have been no civilisation before the invention of printing. Johnson was a keen but a very narrow-minded observer of mankind. He perpetually confounded their general nature with their particular circumstances. He knew London intimately. The sagacity of his remarks on its society is perfectly astonishing. But Fleet-street was the world to him. He saw that Londoners who did not read were profoundly ignorant; and he inferred that a Greek, who had few or no books, must have been as uninformed as one of Mr. Thrale’s draymen.

There seems to be, on the contrary, every reason to believe that, in general intelligence, the Athenian populace far surpassed the lower orders of any community that has ever existed. It must be considered, that to be a citizen was to be a legislator,—a soldier,—a judge,—one upon whose voice might depend the fate of the wealthiest tributary state, of the most eminent public man. The lowest offices, both of agriculture 147and of trade, were, in common, performed by slaves. The commonwealth supplied its meanest members with the support of life, the opportunity of leisure, and the means of amusement. Books were indeed few: but they were excellent; and they were accurately known. It is not by turning over libraries, but by repeatedly perusing and intently contemplating a few great models, that the mind is best disciplined. A man of letters must now read much that he soon forgets, and much from which he learns nothing worthy to be remembered. The best works employ, in general, but a small portion of his time. Demosthenes is said to have transcribed six times the history of Thucydides. If he had been a young politician of the present age, he might in the same space of time have skimmed innumerable newspapers and pamphlets. I do not condemn that desultory mode of study which the state of things, in our day, renders a matter of necessity. But I may be allowed to doubt whether the changes on which the admirers of modern institutions delight to dwell have improved our condition so much in reality as in appearance. Rumford, it is said, proposed to the elector of Bavaria a scheme for feeding his soldiers at a much cheaper rate than formerly. His plan was simply to compel them to masticate their food thoroughly. A small quantity, thus eaten, would, according to that famous projector, afford more sustenance than a large meal hastily devoured. I do not know how Rumford’s proposition was received; but to the mind, I believe, it will be found more nutritious to digest a page than to devour a volume.

Books, however, were the least part of the education of an Athenian citizen. Let us, for a moment, transport ourselves, in thought, to that glorious city. Let 148us imagine that we are entering its gates, in the time of its power and glory. A crowd is assembled round a portico. All are gazing with delight at the entablature; for Phidias is putting up the frieze. We turn into another street; a rhapsodist is reciting there: men, women, children are thronging round him: the tears are running down their cheeks: their eyes are fixed: their very breath is still; for he is telling how Priam fell at the feet of Achilles, and kissed those hands,—the terrible,—the murderous,—which had slain so many of his sons. (1) We enter the public place; there is a ring of youths, all leaning forward, with sparkling eyes, and gestures of expectation. Socrates is pitted against the famous atheist, from Ionia, and has just brought him to a contradiction in terms. But we are interrupted. The herald is crying—“Room for the Prytanes.” The general assembly is to meet. The people are swarming in on every side. Proclamation is made—“Who wishes to speak.” There is a shout, and a clapping of hands; Pericles is mounting the stand. Then for a play of Sophocles; and away to sup with Aspasia. I know of no modern university which has so excellent a system of education.

Knowledge thus acquired and opinions thus formed were, indeed, likely to be, in some respects, defective. Propositions which are advanced in discourse generally result from a partial view of the question, and cannot be kept under examination long enough to be corrected. Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration, which deceives, for the moment, both themselves 149and their auditors. Thus we see doctrines, which cannot bear a close inspection, triumph perpetually in drawing-rooms, in debating societies, and even in legislative or judicial assemblies. To the conversational education of the Athenians I am inclined to attribute the great looseness of reasoning which is remarkable in most of their scientific writings. Even the most illogical of modern writers would stand perfectly aghast at the puerile fallacies which seem to have deluded some of the greatest men of antiquity. Sir Thomas Lethbridge would stare at the political economy of Xenophon; and the author of Soirées de Pétersbourg would be ashamed of some of the metaphysical arguments of Plato. But the very circumstances which retarded the growth of science were peculiarly favourable to the cultivation of eloquence. From the early habit of taking a share in animated discussion the intelligent student would derive that readiness of resource, that copiousness of language, and that knowledge of the temper and understanding of an audience, which are far more valuable to an orator than the greatest logical powers.

Horace has prettily compared poems to those paintings of which the effect varies as the spectator changes his stand. The same remark applies with at least equal justice to speeches. They must be read with the temper of those to whom they were addressed, or they must necessarily appear to offend against the laws of taste and reason; as the finest picture, seen in a light different from that for which it was designed, will appear fit only for a sign. This is perpetually forgotten by those who criticise oratory. Because they are reading at leisure, pausing at every line, reconsidering every argument, they forget that 150the hearers were hurried from point to point too rapidly to detect the fallacies through which they were conducted; that they had no time to disentangle sophisms, or to notice slight inaccuracies of expression; that elaborate excellence, either of reasoning or of language, would have been absolutely thrown away. To recur to the analogy of the sister art, these connoisseurs examine a panorama through a microscope, and quarrel with a scene-painter because he does not give to his work the exquisite finish of Gerard Dow.

Oratory is to be estimated on principles different from those which are applied to other productions. Truth is the object of philosophy and history. Truth is the object even of those works which are peculiarly called works of fiction, but which, in fact, bear the same relation to history which algebra bears to arithmetic. The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth,—truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors. The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion. The admiration of the multitude does not make Moore a greater poet, than Coleridge, or Beattie a greater philosoper than Berkeley. But the criterion of eloquence is different. A speaker who exhausts the whole philosophy of a question, who displays every grace of style, yet produces no effect on his audience, may be a great essayist, a great statesman, a great master of composition; but he is not an orator. If he miss the mark, it makes no difference whether he have taken aim too high or too low.

The effect of the great freedom of the press in England has been, in a great measure, to destroy this distinction, 151and to leave among us little of what I call Oratory Proper. Our legislators, our candidates, on great occasions even our advocates, address themselves less to the audience than to the reporters. They think less of the few hearers than of the innumerable readers. At Athens the case was different; there the only object of the speaker was immediate conviction and persuasion. He, therefore, who would justly appreciate the merit of the Grecian orators should place himself, as nearly as possible, in the situation of their auditors: he should divest himself of his modern feelings and acquirements, and make the prejudices and interests of the Athenian citizen his own. He who studies their works in this spirit will find that many of those things which, to an English reader, appear to be blemishes,—the frequent violation of those excellent rules of evidence by which our courts of law are regulated,—the introduction of extraneous matter,—the reference to considerations of political expediency in judicial investigations,—the assertions, without proof,—the passionate entreaties,—the furious invectives,—are really proofs of the prudence and address of the speakers. He must not dwell maliciously on arguments or phrases, but acquiesce in his first impressions. It requires repeated perusal and reflection to decide rightly on any other portion of literature. But with respect to works of which the merit depends on their instantaneous effect the most hasty judgment is likely to be best.

The history of eloquence at Athens is remarkable. From a very early period great speakers had flourished there. Pisistratus and Themistocles are said to have owed much of their influence to their talents for debate. We learn, with more certainty, that Pericles was distinguished by extraordinary oratorical powers. 152The substance of some of his speeches is transmitted to us by Thucydides; and that excellent writer has doubtless faithfully reported the general line of his arguments. But the manner, which in oratory is of at least as much consequence as the matter, was of no importance to his narration. It is evident that he has not attempted to preserve it. Throughout his work, every speech on every subject, whatever may have been the character or the dialect of the speaker, is in exactly the same form. The grave king of Sparta, the furious demagogue of Athens, the general encouraging his army, the captive supplicating for his life, all are represented as speakers in one unvaried style,—a style moreover wholly unfit for oratorical purposes. His mode of reasoning is singularly elliptical,—in reality most consecutive,—yet in appearance often incoherent. His meaning, in itself sufficiently perplexing, is compressed into the fewest possible words. His great fondness for antithetical expression has not a little conduced to’ this effect. Every one must have observed how much more the sense is condensed in the verses of Pope and his imitators, who never ventured to continue the same clause from couplet to couplet, than in those of poets who allow themselves that license. Every artificial division, which is strongly marked, and which frequently recurs, has the same tendency. The natural and perspicuous expression which spontaneously rises to the mind will often refuse to accommodate itself to such a form. It is necessary either to expand it into weakness, or to compress it into almost impenetrable density. The latter is generally the choice of an able man, and was assuredly the choice of Thucydides.

It is scarcely necessary to say that such speeches could never have been delivered. They are perhaps 153among the most difficult passages in the Greek language, and would probably have been scarcely more intelligible to an Athenian auditor than to a modern reader. Their obscurity was acknowledged by Cicero, who was as intimate with the literature and language of Greece as the most accomplished of its natives, and who seems to have held a respectable rank among the Greek authors. Their difficulty to a modern reader lies, not in the words, but in the reasoning. A dictionary is of far less use in studying them than a clear head and a close attention to the context. They are valuable to the scholar as displaying, beyond almost any other compositions, the powers of the finest of languages: they are valuable to the philosopher as illustrating the morals and manners of a most interesting age: they abound in just thought and energetic expression. But they do not enable us to form any accurate opinion on the merits of the early Greek orators.

Though it cannot be doubted that, before the Persian wars, Athens had produced eminent speakers, yet the period during which eloquence most flourished among her citizens was by no means that of her greatest power and glory. It commenced at the close of the Peloponnesian war. In fact, the steps by which Athenian oratory approached to its finished excellence seem to have been almost contemporaneous with those by which the Athenian character and the Athenian empire sunk to degradation. At the time when the little commonwealth achieved those victories which twenty-five eventful centuries have left unequalled, eloquence was in its infancy. The deliverers of Greece became its plunderers and oppressors. Unmeasured exaction, atrocious vengeance, the madness of the multitude, the tyranny 154of the great, filled the Cyclades with tears, and blood, and mourning. The sword unpeopled whole islands in a day. The plough passed over the ruins of famous cities. The imperial republic sent forth her children by thousands to pine in the quarries of Syracuse, or to feed the vultures of Ægospotami. She was at length reduced by famine and slaughter to humble herself before her enemies, and to purchase existence by the sacrifice of her empire and her laws. During these disastrous and gloomy years, oratory was advancing towards its highest excellence. And it was when the moral, the political, and the military character of the people was most utterly degraded, it was when the viceroy of a Macedonian sovereign gave law to Greece, that the courts of Athens witnessed the most splendid contest of eloquence that the world has ever known.

The causes of this phenomenon it is not, I think, difficult to assign. The division of labour operates on the productions of the orator as it does on those of the mechanic. It was remarked by the ancients that the Pentathlete, who divided his attention between several exercises, though he could not vie with a boxer in the use of the cestus, or with one who had confined his attention to running in the contest of the stadium, yet enjoyed far greater general vigour and health than either. It is the same with the mind. The superiority in technical skill is often more than compensated by the inferiority in general intelligence. And this is peculiarly the case in politics. States have always been best governed by men who have taken a wide view of public affairs, and who have rather a general acquaintance with many sciences than a perfect mastery of one. The union of the political and military departments in Greece contributed not a little to the splendour of its 155early history. After their separation more skilful generals and greater speakers appeared; but the breed of statesmen dwindled and became almost extinct. Themistocles or Pericles would have been no match for Demosthenes in the assembly, or for Iphicrates in the field. But surely they were incomparably better fitted than either for the supreme direction of affairs.

There is indeed a remarkable coincidence between the progress of the art of war, and that of the art of oratory, among the Greeks. They both advanced to perfection by contemporaneous steps, and from similar causes. The early speakers, like the early warriors of Greece, were merely a militia. It was found that in both employments practice and discipline gave superiority. (1) Each pursuit therefore became first an art, and then a trade. In proportion as the professors of each became more expert in their particular craft, they became less respectable in their general character.

     (1) It has often occurred to me, that to the circumstances
     mentioned in the text is to be referred one of the most
     remarkable events in Grecian history; I mean the silent but
     rapid downfall of the Lacedæmonian power. Soon after the
     termination of the Peloponnesian war, the strength of
     Lacedaemon began to decline. Its military discipline, its
     social institutions, were the same. Agesilaus, during whose
     reign the change took place, was the ablest of its kings.
     Yet the Spartan armies were frequently defeated in pitched
     battles,—an occurrence considered impossible in the earlier
     ages of Greece. They are allowed to have fought most
     bravely; yet they were no longer attended by the success to
     which they had formerly been accustomed. No solution of
     these circumstances is offered, as far as I know, by any
     ancient author. The real cause, I conceive, was this. The
     Lacedæmonians, alone among the Greeks, formed a permanent
     standing army. While the citizens of other commonwealths
     were engaged in agriculture and trade, they had no
     employment whatever but the study of military discipline.
     Hence, during the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, they had
     that advantage over their neighbours which regular troops
     always possess over militia. This advantage they lost, when
     other states began, at a later period, to employ mercenary
     forces, who were probably as superior to them in the art of
     war as they had hitherto been to their antagonists.
     156Their skill had been obtained at too great expense to
     be employed only from disinterested views. Thus, the
     soldiers forgot that they were citizens, and the orators
     that they were statesmen. I know not to what Demosthenes and
     his famous contemporaries can be so justly compared as to
     those mercenary troops who, in their time, overran Greece;
     or those who, from similar causes, were some centuries ago
     the scourge of the Italian republics,—perfectly acquainted
     with every part of their profession, irresistible in the
     field, powerful to defend or to destroy, but defending
     without love, and destroying without hatred. We may despise
     the characters of these political Condottieri; but it is
     impossible to examine the system of their tactics without
     being amazed at its perfection.

I had intended to proceed to this examination, and to consider separately the remains of Lysias, of Æschines, of Demosthenes, and of Isocrates, who, though strictly speaking he was rather a pamphleteer than an orator, deserves, on many accounts, a place in such a disquisition. The length of my prolegomena and digressions compels me to postpone this part of the subject to another occasion. A Magazine is certainly a delightful invention for a very idle or a very busy man. He is not compelled to complete his plan or to adhere to his subject. He may ramble as far as lie is inclined, and stop as soon as he is tired. No one takes the trouble to recollect his contradictory opinions or his unredeemed pledges. He may be as superficial, as inconsistent, and as careless as he chooses. Magazines resemble those little angels, who, according to the pretty Rabbinical tradition, are generated every morning by the brook which rolls over the flowers of Paradise,—whose life is a song,—who 157warble till sunset, and then sink back without regret into nothingness. Such spirits have nothing to do with the detecting spear of Ithuriel or the victorious sword of Michael. It is enough for them to please and be forgotten.

A PROPHETIC ACCOUNT OF A GRAND NATIONAL EPIC POEM, TO BE ENTITLED “THE WELLINGTONIAD,” AND TO BE PUBLISHED A.D. 2824.

158(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, November 1824.)
H
ow I became a prophet it is not very important to the reader to know. Nevertheless I feel all the anxiety which, under similar circumstances, troubled the sensitive mind of Sidrophel; and, like him, am eager to vindicate myself from the suspicion of having practised forbidden arts, or held intercourse with beings of another world. I solemnly declare, therefore, that I never saw a ghost, like Lord Lyttleton; consulted a gypsy, like Josephine; or heard my name pronounced by an absent person, like Dr. Johnson. Though it is now almost as usual for gentlemen to appear at the moment of their death to their friends as to call on them during their life, none of my acquaintance have been so polite as to pay me that customary attention. I have derived my knowledge neither from the dead nor from the living; neither from the lines of a hand, nor from the grounds of a tea-cup; neither from the stars of the firmament, nor from the fiends of the abyss. I have never, like the Wesley family, heard “that mighty leading angel,” who “drew after him the third part of heaven’s sons,” 159scratching in my cupboard. I have never been enticed to sign any of those delusive bonds which have been the ruin of so many poor creatures; and, having always been an indifferent horseman, I have been careful not to venture myself on a broomstick.

My insight into futurity, like that of George Fox the quaker, and that of our great and philosophic poet, Lord Byron, is derived from simple presentiment. This is a far less artificial process than those which are employed by some others. Yet my predictions will, I believe, be found more correct than their’s, or, at all events, as Sir Benjamin Backbite says in the play, “more circumstantial.”

I prophecy, then, that, in the year 2824, according to our present reckoning, a grand national Epic Poem, worthy to be compared with the Iliad, the Æneid, or the Jerusalem, will be published in London.

Men naturally take an interest in the adventures of every eminent writer. I will, therefore, gratify the laudable curiosity, which, on this occasion, will doubtless be universal, by prefixing to my account of the poem a concise memoir of the poet.

Richard Quongti will be born at Westminster on the 1st of July, 2786. He will be the younger son of the younger branch of one of the most respectable families in England. He will be lineally descended from Quongti, the famous Chinese liberal, who, after the failure of the heroic attempt of his party to obtain a constitution from the Emperor Fim Fam, will take refuge in England, in the twenty-third century. Here his descendants will obtain considerable note; and one branch of the family will be raised to the peerage.

Richard, however, though destined to exalt his family to distinction far nobler than any which wealth or 160titles can bestow, will be born to a very scanty fortune He will display in his early youth such striking talents as will attract the notice of Viscount Quongti, his third cousin, then secretary of state for the Steam Department. At the expense of this eminent nobleman, he will be sent to prosecute his studies at the university of Tombuctoo. To that illustrious seat of the muses all the ingenuous youth of every country will then be attracted by the high scientific character of Professor Quashaboo, and the eminent literary attainments of Professor Kissey Kickey. In spite of this formidable competition, however, Quongti will acquire the highest honours in every department of knowledge, and will obtain the esteem of his associates by his amiable and unaffected manners. The guardians of the young Duke of Carrington, premier peer of England, and the last remaining scion of the ancient and illustrious house of Smith, will be desirous to secure so able an instructor for their ward. With the Duke, Quongti will perform the grand tour, and visit the polished courts of Sydney and Capetown. After prevailing on his pupil, with great difficulty, to subdue a violent and imprudent passion which he had conceived for a Hottentot lady, of great beauty and accomplishments indeed, but of dubious character, he will travel with him to the United States of America. But that tremendous war which will be fatal to American liberty will at that time be raging through the whole federation. At New York the travellers will hear of the final defeat and death of the illustrious champion of freedom, Jonathan Hioffinbottom, and of the elevation of Ebenezer Hogsflesh to the perpetual Presidency. They will not choose to proceed in a journey which would expose 161them to the insults of that brutal soldiery, whose cruelty and rapacity will have devastated Mexico and Colombia, and now, at length, enslaved their own country.

On their return to England, a.d. 2810, the death of the Duke will compel his preceptor to seek for a subsistence by literary labours. His fame will be raised by many small productions of considerable merit; and he will at last obtain a permanent place in the highest class of writers by his great epic poem.

This celebrated work will become, with unexampled rapidity, a popular favourite. The sale will be so beneficial to the author that, instead of going; about the dirty streets on his velocipede, he will be enabled to set up his balloon.

The character of this noble poem will be so finely and justly given in the Tombuctoo Review for April, 2825, that I cannot refrain from translating the passage. The author will be our poet’s old preceptor, Professor Kissey Kickey.

“In pathos, in splendour of language, in sweetness of versification, Mr. Quongti has long been considered as unrivalled. In his exquisite poem on the Omithorynchus Paradoxus all these qualities are displayed in their greatest perfection. How exquisitely does that work arrest and embody the undefined and vague shadows which flit over an imaginative mind. The cold worldling may not comprehend it; but it will find a response in the bosom of every youthful poet, of every enthusiastic lover who has seen an Ornithorynchus Paradoxus by moonlight. But we were yet to learn that he possessed the comprehension, the judgment, and the fertility of mind indispensable to the epic poet.

“It is difficult to conceive a plot more perfect than that of the ‘Wellingtoniad.’ It is most faithful to the 162manners of the age to which it relates. It preserves exactly all the historical circumstances, and interweaves them most artfully with all the speciosa miracula of supernatural agency.”

Thus far the learned Professor of Humanity in the university of Tombuctoo. I fear that the critics of our time will form an opinion diametrically opposite as to these very points. Some will, I fear, be disgusted by the machinery, which is derived from the mythology of ancient Greece. I can only say that in the twenty-ninth century, that machinery will be universally in use among poets; and that Quongti will use it, partly in conformity with the general practice, and partly from a veneration, perhaps excessive, for the great remains of classical antiquity, which will then, as now, be assiduously read by every man of education; though Tom Moore’s songs will be forgotten, and only three copies of Lord Byron’s works will exist: one in the possession of King George the Nineteenth, one in the Duke of Carrington’s collection, and one in the library of the British Museum. Finally, should any good people be concerned to hear that Pagan fictions will so long retain their influence over literature, let them reflect that, as the Bishop of St. David’s says, in his “Proofs of the Inspiration of the Sibylline Verses,” read at the last meeting of the Royal Society of Literature, “at all events, a Pagan is not a Papist.”

Some readers of the present day may think that Quongti is by no means entitled to the compliments which his Negro critic pays him on his adherence to the historical circumstances of the time in which he has chosen his subject; that, where he introduces any trait of our manners, it is in the wrong place, and that he confounds the customs of our age with those of 163much more remote periods. I can only say that the charge is infinitely more applicable to Homer, Virgil, and Tasso. If, therefore, the reader should detect, in the following abstract of the plot, any little deviation from strict historical accuracy, let him reflect, for a moment, whether Agamemnon would not have found as much to censure in the Iliad,—Dido in the Æneid,—or Godfrey in the Jerusalem. Let him not suffer his opinions to depend on circumstances which cannot possibly affect the truth or falsehood of the representation. If it be impossible for a single man to kill hundreds in battle, the impossibility is not diminished by distance of time. If it be as certain that Rinaldo never disenchanted a forest in Palestine as it is that the Duke of Wellington never disenchanted the forest of Soignies, can we, as rational men, tolerate the one story and ridicule the other? Of this, at least, I am certain, that whatever excuse we have for admiring the plots of those famous poems our children will have for extolling that of the “Wellingtoniad.”

I shall proceed to give a sketch of the narrative. The subject is “The Reign of the Hundred Days.”

BOOK I.

T
he poem commences, in form, with a solemn proposition of the subject. Then the muse is invoked to give the poet accurate information as to the causes of so terrible a commotion. The answer to this question, being, it is to be supposed, the joint production of the poet and the muse, ascribes the event to circumstances which have hitherto eluded all the research of political writers, namely, the influence of the god Mars, who, we are told had some forty years before usurped the 164conjugal rights of old Carlo Buonaparte, and given birth to Napoleon. By his incitement it was that the emperor with his devoted companions was now on the sea, returning to his ancient dominions. The gods were at present, fortunately for the adventurer, feasting with the Ethiopians, whose entertainments, according to the ancient custom described by Homer, they annually attended, with the same sort of condescending gluttony which now carries the cabinet to Guildhall on the 9th of November. Neptune, was, in consequence, absent, and unable to prevent the enemy of his favourite island from crossing his element. Boreas, however, who had his abode on the banks of the Russian ocean, and who, like Thetis in the Iliad, was not of sufficient quality to have an invitation to Ethiopia, resolves to destroy the armament which brings war and danger to his beloved Alexander. He accordingly raises a storm which is most powerfully described. Napoleon bewails the inglorious fate for which he seems to be reserved. “Oh! thrice happy,” says he, “those who were frozen to death at Krasnoi, or slaughtered at Leipzic. Oh, Kutusoff, bravest of the Russians, wherefore was I not permitted to fall by thy victorious sword?” He then offers a prayer to Æolus, and vows to him a sacrifice of a black ram. In consequence, the god recalls his turbulent subject; the sea is calmed; and the ship anchors in the port of Frejus. Napoleon and Bertrand, who is always called the faithful Bertrand, land to explore the country; Mars meets them disguised as a lancer of the guard, wearing the cross of the legion of honour. He advises them to apply for necessaries of all kinds to the governor, shows them the way, and disappears with a strong smell of gunpowder. Napoleon makes a pathetic 165speech, and enters the governor’s house. Here he sees hanging up a fine print of the battle of Austerlitz, himself in the foreground giving his orders. This puts him in high spirits; he advances and salutes the governor, who receives him most loyally, gives him an entertainment, and, according to the usage of all epic hosts, insists after dinner on a full narration of all that has happened to him since the battle of Leipzic.

BOOK II.

N
apoleon carries his narrative from the battle of Leipsic to his abdication. But, as we shall have a great quantity of fighting on our hands, I think it best to omit the details.

BOOK III.

N
apoleon describes his sojourn at Elba, and his return; how he was driven by stress of weather to Sardinia, and fought with the harpies there; how he was then carried southward to Sicily, where he generously took on board an English sailor, whom a man of war had unhappily left there, and who was in imminent danger of being devoured by the Cyclops; how he landed in the bay of Naples, saw the Sibyl, and descended to Tartarus; how he held a long and pathetic conversation with Poniatowski, whom he found wandering unburied on the banks of Styx; how he swore to give him a splendid funeral; how he had also an affectionate interview with Desaix; how Moreau and Sir Ralph Abercrombie fled at the sight of him. He relates that he then re-embarked, and met with nothing of importance till the commencement of the storm with which the poem opens.

BOOK IV.

T
he 166scene changes to Paris. Fame, in the garb of an express, brings intelligence of the landing of Napoleon. The king performs a sacrifice: but the entrails are unfavourable; and the victim is without a heart. He prepares to encounter the invader. A young captain of the guard,—the son of Marie Antoinette by Apollo,—in the shape of a fiddler, rushes in to tell him that Napoleon is approaching with a vast army. The royal forces are drawn out for battle. Full catalogues are given of the regiments on both sides: their colonels, lieutenant-colonels, and uniform.

BOOK V.

T
he king comes forward and defies Napoleon to single combat. Napoleon accepts it. Sacrifices are offered. The ground is measured by Ney and Macdonald. The combatants advance. Louis snaps his pistol in vain. The bullet of Napoleon, on the contrary, cax-ries off the tip of the king’s ear. Napoleon then rushes on him sword in hand. But Louis snatches up a stone, such as ten men of those degenerate days will be unable to move, and hurls it at his antagonist. Mars averts it. Napoleon then seizes Louis, and is about to strike a fatal blow, when Bacchus intervenes, like Venus in the third book of the Iliad, bears off the king in a thick cloud, and seats him in an hotel at Lille, with a bottle of Maraschino and a basin of soup before him. Both armies instantly proclaim Napoleon emperor.

BOOK VI.

N
eptune, 167returned from his Ethiopian revels, sees with rage the events which have taken place in Europe. He flies to the cave of Alecto, and drags out the fiend, commanding her to excite universal hostility against Napoleon. The Fury repairs to Lord Castlereagli; and, as, when she visited Tumus, she assumed the form of an old woman, she here appears in the kindred shape of Mr. Vansittart, and in an impassioned address exhorts his lordship to war. His lordship, like Tumus, treats this unwonted monitor with great disrespect, tells him that he is an old doting fool, and advises him to look after the ways and means, and leave questions of peace and war to his betters. The Fury then displays all her terrors. The neat powdered hair bristles up into snakes; the black stockings appear clotted with blood; and, brandishing a torch, she announces her name and mission. Lord Castlereagh, seized with fury, flies instantly to the Parliament, and recommends war with a torrent of eloquent invective. All the members instantly clamour for vengeance, seize their arms which are hanging round the walls of the house, and rash forth to prepare for instant hostilities.

BOOK VII.

I
n this book intelligence arrives at London of the flight of the Duchess d’Angoulême from France. It is stated that this heroine, armed from head to foot, defended Bordeaux against the adherents of Napoleon, and that she fought hand to hand with Clausel, and beat him down with an enormous stone. Deserted by her followers, she at last, like Tumus, plunged, armed 168as she was, into the Garonne, and swam to an English ship which lay off the coast. This intelligence yet more inflames the English to war.

A yet holder flight than any which has been mentioned follows. The Duke of Wellington goes to take leave of the duchess; and a scene passes quite equal to the famous interview of Hector and Andromache. Lord Douro is frightened at his father’s feather, but begs for his epaulette.

BOOK VIII.

N
eptune, trembling for the event of the war, implores Venus, who, as the offspring of his element, naturally venerates him, to procure from Vulcan a deadly sword and a pair of unerring pistols for the duke. They are accordingly made, and superbly decorated. The sheath of the sword, like the shield of Achilles, is carved, in exquisitely fine miniature, with scenes from the common life of the period; a dance at Almack’s, a boxing match at the Fives-court, a lord mayor’s procession, and a man hanging. All these are fully and elegantly described. The Duke thus armed hastens to Brussels.

BOOK IX.

T
he Duke is received at Brussels by the King of the Netherlands with great magnificence. He is informed of the approach of the armies of all the confederate kings. The poet, however, with a laudable zeal for the glory of his country, completely passes over the exploits of the Austrians in Italy, and the discussions of the congress. England and France, Wellington and Napoleon, almost exclusively occupy his 169attention. Several days are spent at Brussels in revelry. The English heroes astonish their allies by exhibiting splendid games, similar to those which draw the flower of the British aristocracy to Newmarket and Moulsey Hurst, and which will be considered by our descendants with as much veneration as the Olympian and Isthmian contests by classical students of the present time. In the combat of the cestus, Shaw, the life-guardsman, vanquishes the Prince of Orange, and obtains a bull as a prize. In the horse-race, the Duke of Wellington and Lord Uxbridge ride against each other; the Duke is victorious, and is rewarded with twelve opera-girls. On the last day of the festivities, a splendid dance takes place, at which all the heroes attend.

BOOK X.

M
ars, seeing the English army thus inactive, hastens to rouse Napoleon, who, conducted by Night and Silence, unexpectedly attacks the Prussians. The slaughter is immense. Napoleon kills many whose histories and families are happily particularised. He slays Herman, the craniologist, who dwelt by the linden-shadowed Elbe, and measured with his eye the skulls of all who walked through the streets of Berlin. Alas! his own skull is now cleft by the Corsican sword. Four pupils of the University of Jena advance together to encounter the Emperor; at four blows he destroys them all. Blucher rushes to arrest the devastation; Napoleon strikes him to the ground, and is on the point of killing him, but Gneisenau, Ziethen, Billow, and all the other heroes of the Prussian army, gather round him, and bear the venerable chief to a distance from the field. The slaughter is continued till night. In 170the meantime Neptune has despatched Fame to bear the intelligence to the Duke, who is dancing at Brussels. The whole army is put in motion. The Duke of Brunswick’s horse speaks to admonish him of his danger, but in vain.

BOOK XI.

P
icton, the Duke of Brunswick, and the Prince of Orange, engage Ney at Quatre Bras. Ney kills the Duke of Brunswick, and strips him, sending his belt to Napoleon. The English fall back on Waterloo. Jupiter calls a council of the gods, and commands that none shall interfere on either side. Mars and Neptune make very eloquent speeches. The battle of Waterloo commences. Napoleon kills Picton and Delaney. Ney engages Ponsonby and kills him. The Prince of Orange is wounded by Soult. Lord Uxbridge flies to check the carnage. He is severely wounded by Napoleon, and only saved by the assistance of Lord Hill. In the mean time the Duke makes a tremendous carnage among the French. He encounters General Duhesme and vanquishes him, but spares his life. He kills Toubert, who kept the gaming-house in the Palais Royal, and Maronet, who loved to spend whole nights in drinking champagne. Clerval, who had been hooted from the stage, and had then become a captain in the Imperial Guard, wished that he had still continued to face the more harmless enmity of the Parisian pit. But Larrey, the son of Esculapius, whom his father had instructed in all the secrets of his art, and who was surgeon-general of the French army, embraced the knees of the destroyer, and conjured him not to give death to one whose office it was to give life. The Duke raised him, and bade him live. 171But we must hasten to the close. Napoleon rushes to encounter Wellington. Both armies stand in mute amaze. The heroes fire their pistols; that of Napoleon misses, but that of Wellington, formed by the hand of Vulcan, and primed by the Cyclops, wounds the Emperor in the thigh. He flies, and takes refuge among his troops. The flight becomes promiscuous. The arrival of the Prussians, from a motive of patriotism, the poet completely passes over.

BOOK XII.

T
hings are now hastening to the catastrophe. Napoleon flies to London, and, seating himself on the hearth of the Regent, embraces the household gods, and conjures him, by the venerable age of George III., and by the opening perfections of the Princess Charlotte, to spare him. The Prince is inclined to do so; when, looking on his breast, he sees there the belt of the Duke of Brunswick. He instantly draws his sword, and is about to stab the destroyer of his kinsman. Piety and hospitality, however, restrain his hand. He takes a middle course, and condemns Napoleon to be exposed on a desert island. The King of France re-enters Paris; and the poem concludes.

ON MITFORD’S HISTORY OF GREECE.

(Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, November 1824.) 172
T
his is a book which enjoys a great and increasing popularity: but, while it has attracted a considerable share of the public attention, it has been little noticed by the critics. Mr. Mitford has almost succeeded in mounting, unperceived by those whose office it is to watch such aspirants, to a high place among historians. He has taken a seat on the dais without being challenged by a single seneschal. To oppose the progress of his fame is now almost a hopeless enterprise. Had he been reviewed with candid severity, when he had published only his first volume, his work would either have deserved its reputation, or would never have obtained it. “Then,” as Indra says of Kehama, “then was the time to strike.” The time was neglected; and the consequence is that Mr. Mitford, like Kehama, has laid his victorious hand on the literary Amreeta, and seems about to taste the precious elixir of immortality. I shall venture to emulate the courage of the honest Glendoveer—

“When now
He saw the Amreeta in Kehama’s hand,
An impulse that defied all self-command,
In that extremity,
Stung him, and he resolved to seize the cup,
And dare the Rajah’s force in Seeva’s sight.
Forward he sprung to tempt the unequal fray.”

In plain words, I shall offer a few considerations, 173which may tend to reduce an overpraised writer to his proper level.

The principal characteristic of this historian, the origin of his excellencies and his defects, is a love of singularity. He has no notion of going with a multitude to do either good or evil. An exploded opinion, or an unpopular person, has an irresistible charm for him. The same perverseness may be traced in his diction. His style would never have been elegant; but it might at least have been manly and perspicuous; and nothing but the most elaborate care could possibly have made it so bad as it is. It is distinguished by harsh phrases, strange collocations, occasional solecisms, frequent obscurity, and, above all, by a peculiar oddity, which can no more be described than it can be overlooked. Nor is this all. Mr. Mitford piques himself on spelling better than any of his neighbours; and this not only in ancient names, which he mangles in defiance both of custom and of reason, but in the most ordinary words of the English language. It is, in itself, a matter perfectly indifferent whether we call a foreigner by the name which he bears in his own language, or by that which corresponds to it in ours; whether we say Lorenzo de Medici, or Lawrence de Medici, Jean Chauvin, or John Calvin. In such cases established usage is considered as law by all writers except Mr. Mitford. If he were always consistent with himself, he might be excused for sometimes disagreeing with his neighbours; but he proceeds on no principle but that of being unlike the rest of the world. Every child has heard of Linnæus; therefore Mr. Mitford calls him Linné: Rousseau is known all over Europe as Jean Jacques; therefore Mr. Mitford bestows on him the strange appellation of John James. 174Had Mr. Mitford undertaken a history of any other country than Greece, this propensity would have rendered his work useless and absurd. His occasional remarks on the affairs of ancient Rome and of modern Europe are full of errors: but he writes of times with respect to which almost every other writer has been in the wrong; and, therefore, by resolutely deviating from his predecessors, he is often in the right.

Almost all the modern historians of Greece have shown the grossest ignorance of the most obvious phenomena of human nature. In their representations the generals and statesmen of antiquity are absolutely divested of all individuality. They are personifications; they are passions, talents, opinions, virtues, vices, but not men. Inconsistency is a thing of which these writers have no notion. That a man may have been liberal in his youth and avaricious in his age, cruel to one enemy and merciful to another, is to them utterly inconceivable. If the facts be undeniable, they suppose some, strange and deep design, in order to explain what, as every one who has observed his own mind knows, needs no explanation at all. This is a mode of writing very acceptable to the multitude who have always been accustomed to make gods and daemons out of men very little better or worse than themselves; but it appears contemptible to all who have watched the changes of human character—to all who have observed the influence of time, of circumstances, and of associates, on mankind—to all who have seen a hero in the gout, a democrat in the church, a pedant in love, or a philosopher in liquor. This practice of painting in nothing but black and white is unpardonable even in the drama. It is the great fault of Alfieri; 175and how much it injures the effect of his compositions will be obvious to every one who will compare his Rosmunda with the Lady Macbeth of Shakspeare. The one is a wicked woman; the other is a fiend. Her only feeling is hatred; all her words are curses. We are at once shocked and fatigued by the spectacle of such raving cruelty, excited by no provocation, repeatedly changing its object, and constant in nothing but in its inextinguishable thirst for blood.

In history this error is far more disgraceful. Indeed, there is no fault which so completely ruins a narrative in the opinion of a judicious reader. We know that the line of demarcation between good and bad men is so faintly marked as often to elude the most careful investigation of those who have the best opportunities for judging. Public men, above all, are surrounded with so many temptations and difficulties that some doubt must almost always hang over their real dispositions and intentions. The lives of Pym, Cromwell, Monk, Clarendon, Marlborough, Burnet, Walpole, are well known to us. We are acquainted with their actions, their speeches, their writings; we have abundance of letters and well-authenticated anecdotes relating to them: yet what candid man will venture very positively to say which of them were honest and which of them were dishonest men. It appears easier to pronounce decidedly upon the great characters of antiquity, not because we have greater means of discovering truth, but simply because we have less means of detecting error. The modern historians of Greece have forgotten this. Their heroes and villains are as consistent in all their sayings and doings as the cardinal virtues and the deadly sins in an allegory. We should as soon expect a good action from giant Slaygood 176in Bunyan as from Dionysius; and a crime of Epaminondas would seem as incongruous as a faux-pas of the grave and comely damsel, called Discretion, who answered the bell at the door of the house Beautiful.

This error was partly the cause and partly the effect of the high estimation in which the later ancient writers have been held by modern scholars. Those French and English authors who have treated of the affairs of Greece have generally turned with contempt from the simple and natural narrations of Thucydides and Xenophon to the extravagant representations of Plutarch, Diodorus, Curtius, and other romancers of the same class,—men who described military operations without ever having handled a sword, and applied to the seditions of little republics speculations formed by observation on an empire which covered half the known world. Of liberty they knew nothing. It was to them a great mystery,—a superhuman enjoyment. They ranted about liberty and patriotism, from the same cause which leads monks to talk more ardently than other men about love and women. A wise man values political liberty, because it secures the persons and the possessions of citizens; because it tends to prevent the extravagance of rulers, and the corruption of judges; because it gives birth to useful sciences and elegant arts; because it excites the industry and increases the comforts of all classes of society. These theorists imagined that it possessed something eternally and intrinsically good, distinct from the blessings which it generally produced. They considered it not as a means but as an end; an end to be attained at any cost. Their favourite heroes are those who have sacrificed, for the mere name of freedom, the prosperity 177—the security—the justice—from which freedom derives its value.

There is another remarkable characteristic of these writers, in which their modern worshippers have carefully imitated them,—a great fondness for good stories. The most established facts, dates, and characters are never suffered to come into competition with a splendid saying, or a romantic exploit. The early historians have left us natural and simple descriptions of the great events which they witnessed, and the great men with whom they associated. When we read the account which Plutarch and Rollin have given of the same period, we scarcely know our old acquaintance again; we are utterly confounded by the melo-dra-matic effect of the narration, and the sublime coxcombry of the characters. .

These are the principal errors into which the predecessors of Mr. Mitford have fallen; and from most of these he is free. His faults are of a completely different description. It is to be hoped that the students of history may now be saved, like Dorax in Dryden’s play, by swallowing two conflicting poisons, each of which may serve as an antidote to the other.

The first and most important difference between Mr. Mitford and those who have preceded him is in his narration. Here the advantage lies, for the most part, on his side. His principle is to follow the contemporary historians, to look with doubt on all statements which are not in some degree confirmed by them, and absolutely to reject all which are contradicted by them. While he retains the guidance of some writer in whom he can place confidence, he goes on excellently. When he loses it, he falls to the level, or perhaps below the level, of the writers whom he so much despises: he is 178as absurd as they, and very much duller. It is really amusing to observe how be proceeds with his narration when he has no better authority than poor Diodorus. He is compelled to relate something; yet he believes nothing. He accompanies every fact with a long statement of objections. His account of the administration of Dionysius is in no sense a history. It ought to be entitled—“Historic doubts as to certain events, alleged to have taken place in Sicily.”

This scepticism, however, like that of some great legal characters almost as sceptical as himself, vanishes whenever his political partialities interfere. He is a vehement admirer of tyranny and oligarchy, and considers no evidence as feeble which can be brought forward in favour of those forms of government. Democracy he hates with a perfect hatred, a hatred which, in the first volume of his history, appears only in his episodes and reflections, but which, in those parts where he has less reverence for his guides, and can venture to take his own way, completely distorts even his narration.

In taking up these opinions, I have no doubt that Mr. Mitford was influenced by the same love of singularity which led him to spell island without an s, and to place two dots over the last letter of idea. In truth, preceding historians have erred so monstrously on the other side that even the worst parts of Mr. Mitford’s book may be useful as a corrective. For a young gentleman who talks much about his country, tyrannicide, and Epaminondas, this work, diluted in a sufficient quantity of Rollin and Barthelemi, maybe a very useful remedy.

The errors of both parties arise from an ignorance or a neglect of the fundamental principles of political science. The writers on one side imagine popular government 170to be always a blessing; Mr. Mitford omits no opportunity of assuring us that it is always a curse. The fact is, that a good government, like a good coat, is that which fits the body for which it is designed, A man who, upon abstract principles, pronounces a constitution to be good, without an exact knowledge of the people who are to be governed by it, judges as absurdly as a tailor who should measime the Belvidere Apollo for the clothes of all his customers. The demagogues who wished to see Portugal a republic, and the wise critics who revile the Virginians for not having instituted a peerage, appear equally ridiculous to all men of sense and candour.

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy. Neither the inclination nor the knowledge will suffice alone; and it is difficult to find them together!

Pure democracy, and pure democracy alone, satisfies the former condition of this great problem. That the governors may be solicitous only for the interests of the governed, it is necessary that the interests of the governors and the governed should be the same. This cannot be often the case where power is intrusted to one or to a few. The privileged part of the community will doubtless derive a certain degree of advantage from the general prosperity of the state; but they will derive a greater from oppression and exaction. The king will desire an useless war for his glory, or a parc-aux-cerfs for his pleasure. The nobles will demand monopolies and lettres-de-câchet. In proportion as the number of governors is increased the evil is diminished. There are fewer to contribute, and more to receive. The dividend which each can obtain of the public plunder becomes less and less tempting. But the interests 180of the subjects and the rulers never absolutely coincide till the subjects themselves become the rulers, that is, till the government be either immediately or mediately democratical.

But this is not enough. “Will without power,” said the sagacious Casimir to Milor Beefington, “is like children playing at soldiers.” The people will always be desirous to promote their own interests; but it may be doubted, whether, in any community, they were ever sufficiently educated to understand them. Even in this island, where the multitude have long been better informed than in any other part of Europe, the rights of the many have generally been asserted against themselves by the patriotism of the few. Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular. It may be well doubted, whether a liberal policy with regard to our commercial relations would find any support from a parliament elected by universal suffrage. The republicans on the other side of the Atlantic have recently adopted regulations of which the consequences will, before long, show us,

“How nations sink, by darling schemes oppressed,
When vengeance listens to the fool’s request.”

The people are to be governed for their own good; and, that they may be governed for their own good, they must not be governed by their own ignorance. There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular government as to abolish all the restraints in a school, or to untie all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.

Hence it may be concluded that the happiest state of society is that in which supreme power resides in 181the whole body of a well-informed people. This is an imaginary, perhaps an unattainable, state of things. Yet, in some measure, we may approximate to it; and he alone deserves the name of a great statesman, whose principle it is to extend the power of the people in proportion to the extent of their knowledge, and to give them every facility for obtaining such a degree of knowledge as may render it safe to trust them with absolute power. In the mean time, it is dangerous to praise or condemn constitutions in the abstract; since, from the despotism of St. Petersburg to the democracy of Washington, there is scarcely a form of government which might not, at least in some hypothetical case, be the best possible.

If, however, there be any form of government which in all ages and all nations has always been, and must always be, pernicious, it is certainly that which Mr. Mitford, on his usual principle of being wiser than all the rest of the world, has taken under his especial patronage—pure oligarchy. This is closely, and indeed inseparably, connected with another of his eccentric tastes, a marked partiality for Lacedæmon, and a dislike of Athens. Mr. Mitford’s book has, I suspect, rendered these sentiments in some degree popular; and I shall, therefore, examine them at some length.

The shades in the Athenian character strike the eye more rapidly than those in the Lacedaemonian: not because they are darker, but because they are on a brighter ground. The law of ostracism is an instance of this. Nothing can be conceived more odious than the practice of punishing a citizen, simply and professedly, for his eminence;—and nothing in the institutions of Athens is more frequently or more justly censured. Lacedaemon; was free from this. And why? Lacedæmon 182did not need it. Oligarchy is an ostracism of itself,—an ostracism not occasional, but permanent,—not dubious, but certain. Her laws prevented the development of merit, instead of attacking its maturity. They did not cut down the plant in its high and palmy state, but cursed the soil with eternal sterility. In spite of the law of ostracism, Athens produced, within a hundred and fifty years, the greatest public men that ever existed. Whom had Sparta to ostracise? She produced, at most, four eminent men, Brasidas, Gylip-pus, Lysander, and Agesilaus. Of these, not one rose to distinction within her jurisdiction. It was only when they escaped from the region within which the influence of aristocracy withered everything good and noble, it was only when they ceased to be Lacedæmonians, that they became great men. Brasidas, among the cities of Thrace, was strictly a democratical leader, the favourite minister and general of the people. The same may be said of Gylippus, at Syracuse. Lysander, in the Hellespont, and Agesilaus, in Asia, were liberated for a time from the hateful restraints imposed by the constitution of Lycurgus. Both acquired feme abroad; and both returned to be watched and depressed at home. This is not peculiar to Sparta. Oligarchy, wherever it has existed, has always stunted the growth of genius. Thus it was at Rome, till about a century before the Christian era: we read of abundance of consuls and dictators who won battles, and enjoyed triumphs; but we look in vain for a single man of the first order of intellect,—for a Pericles, a Demosthenes, or a Hannibal. The Gracchi formed a strong democratical party; Marius revived it; the foundations of the old aristocracy were shaken; and two generations fertile in really great men appeared. 183Venice is a still more remarkable instance: in her history we see nothing but the state; aristocracy had destroyed every seed of genius and virtue. Her dominion was like herself, lofty and magnificent, but founded on filth and weeds. God forbid that there should ever again exist a powerful and civilised state, which, after existing through thirteen hundred eventful years, shall not bequeath to mankind the memory of one great name or one generous action.

Many writers, and Mr. Mitford among the number, have admired the stability of the Spartan institutions; in fact, there is little to admire, and less to approve. Oligarchy is the weakest and most stable of governments; and it is stable because it is weak. It has a sort of valetudinarian longevity; it lives in the balance of Sanctorius; it takes no exercise; it exposes itself to no accident; it is seized with an hypochondriac alarm at every new sensation; it trembles at every breath; it lets blood for every inflammation: and thus, without ever enjoying a day of health or pleasure, drags on its existence to a doting and debilitated old age.

The Spartans purchased for their government a prolongation of its existence by the sacrifice of happiness at home and dignity abroad. They cringed to the powerful; they trampled on the weak; they massacred their Helots; they betrayed their allies; they contrived to be a day too late for the battle of Marathon; they attempted to avoid the battle of Salamis; they suffered the Athenians, to whom they owed then-lives and liberties, to be a second time driven from their country by the Persians, that they might finish their own fortifications on the Isthmus; they attempted to take advantage of the distress to which exertions 184in their cause had reduced their preservers, in order to make them their slaves; they strove to prevent those who had abandoned their walls to defend them, from rebuilding them to defend themselves; they commenced the Peloponnesian war in violation of their engagements with Athens; they abandoned it in violation of their engagements with their allies; they gave up to the sword whole cities which had placed themselves under their protection; they bartered, for advantages confined to themselves, the interest, the freedom, and the lives of those who had served them most faithfully; they took with equal complacency, and equal infamy, the stripes of Elis and the bribes of Persia; they never showed either resentment or gratitude; they abstained from no injury; and they revenged none. Above all, they looked on a citizen who served them well as their deadliest enemy. These are the arts which protract the existence of governments.

Nor were the domestic institutions of Lacedæmon less hateful or less contemptible than her foreign policy. A perpetual interference with every part of the system of human life, a constant struggle against nature and reason, characterised all her laws. To violate even prejudices which have taken deep root in the minds of a people is scarcely expedient; to think of extirpating natural appetites and passions is frantic: the external symptoms may be occasionally repressed; but the feeling still exists, and, debarred from its natural objects, preys on the disordered mind and body of its victim. Thus it is in convents—thus it is among ascetic sects—thus it was among the Lacedæmonians.

Hence arose that madness, or violence approaching to madness, which, in spite of every external 185restraint, often appeared among the most distinguished citizens of Sparta. Cleomenes terminated his career of raving cruelty by cutting himself to pieces. Pausanias seems to have been absolutely insane: he formed a hopeless and profligate scheme; he betrayed it by the ostentation of his behaviour, and the imprudence of his measures; and he alienated, by his insolence, all who might have served or protected him. Xenophon, a warm admirer of Lacedaemon, furnishes us with the strongest evidence to this effect. It is impossible not to observe the brutal and senseless fury which characterises almost every Spartan with whom he was connected. Clearchus nearly lost his life by his cruelty. Chirisophus deprived his army of the services of a faithful guide by his unreasonable and ferocious severity. But it is needless to multiply instances. Lycurgus, Mr. Mitford’s favourite legislator, founded his whole system on a mistaken principle. He never considered that governments were made for men, and not men for governments. Instead of adapting the constitution to the people, he distorted the minds of the people to suit the constitution, a scheme worthy of the Laputan Academy of Projectors. And this appears to Mr. Mitford to constitute his peculiar title to admiration. Hear himself: “What to modern eyes most strikingly sets that extraordinary man above all other legislators is, that in so many circumstances, apparently out of the reach of law, he controlled and formed to his own mind the wills and habits of his people.” I should suppose that this gentleman had the advantage of receiving his education under the ferula of Dr. Pangloss; for his metaphysics are clearly those of the castle of Thunder-ten-tronckh: “Remarquez bien epie les nez ont été faits pour porter des lunettes, 186aussi avons nous des lunettes. Les jambes sont visiblement instituées pour être chaussées, et nous avons des chausses. Les cochons étant faits pour être mangés, nous mangeons du porc toute l’année.”

At Athens the laws did not constantly interfere with the tastes of the people. The children were not taken from their parents by that universal step-mother, the state. They were not starved into thieves, or tortured into bullies; there was no established table at which every one must dine, no established style in which every one must converse. An Athenian might eat whatever he could afford to buy, and talk as long as he could find people to listen. The government did not tell the people what opinions they were to hold, or what songs they were to sing. Freedom produced excellence. Thus philosophy took its origin. Thus were produced those models of poetry, of oratory, and of the arts, which scarcely fall short of the standard of ideal excellence. Nothing is more conducive to happiness than the free exercise of the mind in pursuits congenial to it. This happiness, assuredly, was enjoyed far more at Athens than at Sparta. The Athenians are acknowledged even by their enemies to have been distinguished, in private life, by their courteous and amiable demeanour. Their levity, at least, was better then Spartan sullenness, and their impertinence, than Spartan insolence. Even in courage it may be questioned whether they were inferior to the Lacedæmonians. The great Athenian historian has reported a remarkable observation of the great Athenian minister. Pericles maintained that his countrymen, without submitting to the hardships of a Spartan education, rivalled all the achievements of Spartan valour, and that therefore the pleasures and 187amusements which they enjoyed were to be considered as so much clear gain. The infantry of Athens was certainly not equal to that of Lacedæmon; but this seems to have been caused merely by want of practice; the attention of the Athenians was diverted from the discipline of the phalanx to that of the trireme. The Lacedæinonians, in spite of all their boasted valour, were, from the same cause, timid and disorderly in naval action.

But we are told that crimes of great enormity were perpetrated by the Athenian Government, and the democracies under its protection. It is true that Athens too often acted up to the full extent of the laws of war, in an age when those laws had not been mitigated by causes which have operated in later times. This accusation is, in fact, common to Athens, to Lacedæmon, to all the states of Greece, and to all states similarly situated. Where communities are very large, the heavier evils of war are felt but by few. The plough-boy sings, the spinning-wheel turns round, the wedding-day is fixed, whether the last battle were lost or won. In little states it cannot be thus; every man feels in his own property and person the effect of a war. Every man is a soldier, and a soldier fighting for his nearest interests. His own trees have been cut down—his own corn has been burnt—his own house has been pillaged—his own relations have been killed. How can he entertain towards the enemies of his country the same feelings with one who has suffered nothing; from them, except perhaps the addition of a small sum to the taxes which he pays. Men in such circumstances cannot be generous. They have too much at stake. It is when they are, if I may so express myself, playing for love, it is when war is a mere game at chess, it is when they are contending for a remote colony, a frontier town, 188the honours of a flag, a salute, or a title, that they can make fine speeches, and do good offices to their enemies. The Black Prince waited behind the chair of his captive; Villars interchanged repartees with Eugene: George II. sent congratulations to Louis XV., during a war, upon occasion of his escape from the attempt of Damien: and these things are fine and generous, and very gratifying to the author of the Broad Stone of Honour, and all the other wise men who think, like him, that God made the world only for the use of gentlemen. But they spring in general from utter heartlessness. No war ought ever to be undertaken but under circumstances which render all interchange of courtesy between the combatants impossible. It is a bad thing that men should hate each other; but it is far worse that they should contract the habit of cutting one another’s throats without hatred. War is never lenient, but where it is wanton; when men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge: this may be bad; but it is human nature: it is the clay as it came from the hand of the potter.

It is true that among the dependencies of Athens seditions assumed a character more ferocious than even in France, during the reign of terror—the accursed Saturnalia of an accursed bondage. It is true that in Athens itself, where such convulsions were scarcely known, the condition of the higher orders was dis agreeable; that they were compelled to contribute large sums for the service or the amusement of the public; and that they were sometimes harassed by vexatious informers. Whenever such cases occur, Mr. Mitford’s scepticism vanishes. The “if,” the “but,” the “it is said,” the “if we may believe,” with which he qualifies every charge against a tyrant or an aristocracy, are at 189once abandoned. The blacker the story, the firmer is his belief; and he never fails to inveigh with hearty bitterness against democracy as the source of every species of crime.

The Athenians, I believe, possessed more liberty than was good for them. Yet I will venture to assert that, while the splendour, the intelligence, and the energy of that great people were peculiar to themselves, the crimes with which they are charged arose from causes which were common to them with every other state which then existed. The violence of faction in that age sprung from a cause which has always been fertile in every political and moral evil, domestic slavery.

The effect of slavery is completely to dissolve the connection which naturally exists between the higher and lower classes of free citizens. The rich spend their wealth in purchasing and maintaining slaves. There is no demand for the labour of the poor; the fable of Menenius ceases to be applicable; the belly communicates no nutriment to the members; there is an atrophy in the body politic. The two parties, therefore, proceed to extremities utterly unknown in countries where they have mutually need of each other. In Rome the oligarchy was too powerful to be subverted by force; and neither the tribunes nor the popular assemblies, though constitutionally omnipotent, could maintain a successful contest against men who possessed the whole property of the state. Hence the necessity for measures tending; to unsettle the whole frame of society, and to take away every motive of industry; the abolition of debts, and the agrarian laws—propositions absurdly condemned by men who do not consider the circumstances from which they sprung. They were the desperate remedies of a desperate disease. In 190Greece the oligarchical interest was not in general so deeply rooted as at Rome. The multitude, therefore, often redressed by force grievances which, at Rome, were commonly attacked under the forais of the constitution. They drove out or massacred the rich, and divided their property. If the superior union or military skill of the rich rendered them victorious, they took measures equally violent, disarmed all in whom they could not confide, often slaughtered great numbers and occasionally expelled the whole commonalty from the city, and remained, with their slaves, the sole inhabitants.

From such calamities Athens and Laeedæmon alone were almost completely free. At Athens the purses of the rich were laid under regular contribution for the support of the poor; and this, rightly considered, was as much a favour to the givers as to the receivers, since no other measure could possibly have saved their houses from pillage and their persons from violence. It is singular that Mr. Mitford should perpetually reprobate a policy which was the best that could be pursued in such a state of things, and which alone saved Athens from the frightful outrages which were perpetrated at Coreyra.

Lacedæmon, cursed with a system of slavery more odious than has ever existed in any other country, avoided this evil by almost totally annihilating private property. Lycurgus began by an agrarian law. He abolished all professions except that of arms; he made the whole of his community a standing army, every member of which had a common right to the services of a crowd of miserable bondmen; he secured the state from sedition at the expense of the Helots. Of all the parts of his system this is the most creditable to his head, and the most disgraceful to his heart. 191These considerations, and many others of equal importance, Mr. Mitford lias neglected; but he has yet a heavier charge to answer. He has made not only illogical inferences, but false statements. While he never states, without qualifications and objections, the charges which the earliest and best historians have brought against his favourite tyrants, Pisistratus, Hip-pias, and Gelon, he transcribes, without any hesitation, the grossest abuse of the least authoritative writers against every democracy and every demagogue. Such an accusation should not be made without being supported; and I will therefore select one out of many passages which will fully substantiate the charge, and convict Mr. Mitford of wilful misrepresentation, or of negligence scarcely less culpable. Mr. Mitford is speaking of one of the greatest men that ever lived, Demosthenes, and comparing him with his rival, Æschines. Let him speak for himself.

“In earliest youth Demosthenes earned an opprobrious nickname by the effeminacy of his dress and manner.” Does Mr. Mitford know that Demosthenes denied this charge, and explained the nickname in a perfectly different manner? (1) And if he knew it, should he not have stated it? He proceeds thus:—“On emerging from minority, by the Athenian law, at five-and-twenty, he earned another opprobrious nickname by a prosecution of his guardians, which was considered as a dishonourable attempt to extort money from them.” In the first place, Demosthenes was not five-and-twenty years of age. Mr. Mitford might have learned, from so common a book as the Archæologia of Archbishop Potter, that at twenty Athenian citizens were freed from the control of their guardians,

     (1) See the speech of Æschines against Timarchus.

192and began to manage their own property. The very speech of Demosthenes against his guardians proves most satisfactorily that he was under twenty. In his speech against Midias, he says that when he undertook that prosecution he was quite a boy. His youth might, therefore, excuse the step, even if it had been considered, as Mr. Mitford says, a dishonourable attempt to extort money. But who considered it as such? «Not the judges, who condemned the guardians. The Athenian courts of justice were not the purest in the world; but their decisions were at least as likely to be just as the abuse of a deadly enemy. Mr. Mitford refers for confirmation of his statement to Æschines and Plutarch..Æschines by no means beat’s him out; and Plutarch directly contradicts him. “Hot long after,” says Mr. Mitford, “he took blows publicly in the theater” (I preserve the orthography, if it can be so called, of this historian) “from a petulant youth of rank, named Meidias.” Here are two disgraceful mistakes. In the first place, it was long after; eight years at the very least, probably much more. In the next place, the petulant youth, of whom Mr. Mitford speaks, was fifty years old. (2) Really Mr. Mitford has less reason to censure the carelessness of his predecessors than to reform his own. After this monstrous inaccuracy, with regard to facts, we may be able to judge what degree of credit ought to be given to the vague abuse of such a writer. “The cowardice of Demosthenes in the field afterwards became notorious.” Demosthenes was a civil character; war was

     (2)Whoever will read the speech of Demosthenes against
     Midias will find the statements in the text confirmed, and
     will have, moreover, the pleasure of becoming acquainted
     with one of the finest compositions in the world.

193not his business. In his time the division between military and political offices was beginning to be strongly marked; yet the recollection of the days when every citizen was a soldier was still recent. In such states of society a certain degree of disrepute always attaches to sedentary men; but that any leader of the Athenian democracy could have been, as Mr. Mitford says of Demosthenes, a few lines before, remarkable for “an extraordinary deficiency of personal courage,” is absolutely impossible. What mercenary warrior of the time exposed his life to greater or more constant perils? Was there a single soldier at Chæronea who had more cause to tremble for his safety than the orator, who, in case of defeat, could scarcely hope for mercy from the people whom he had misled or the prince whom lie had opposed? Were not the ordinary fluctuations of popular feeling enough to deter any coward from engaging in political conflicts? Isocrates, whom Mr. Mitford extols, because he constantly employed all the flowers of his school-boy rhetoric to decorate oligarchy and tyranny, avoided the judicial and political meetings of Athens from mere timidity, and seems to have hated democracy only because he durst not look a popular assembly in the face. Demosthenes was a man of a feeble constitution: his nerves were weak; but his spirit was high: and the energy and enthusiasm of his feelings supported him through life and in death.

So much for Demosthenes. Now for the orator of aristocracy. I do not wish to abuse Æschines. He may have been an honest man. He was certainly a great man; and I feel a reverence, of which Mr. Mitford seems to have no notion, for great men of every party. But, when Mr. Mitford says that the private character 194of Æscliines was without stain, does he remember what Æschines has himself confessed in his speech against Timarchus? I can make allowances, as well as Mr. Mitford, for persons who lived under a different system of laws and morals; but let them be made impartially. If Demosthenes is to be attacked on account of some childish improprieties, proved only by the assertion of an antagonist, what shall we say of those maturer vices which that antagonist has himself acknowledged? “Against the private character of Æschines,” says Mr. Mitford, “Demosthenes seems not to have had an insinuation to oppose.” Has Mr. Mitford ever read the speech of Demosthenes on the Embassy? Or can he have forgotten, what was never forgotten by any one else who ever read it, the story which Demosthenes relates with such terrible energy of language concerning the drunken brutality of his rival? True or false, here is something more than an insinuation; and nothing can vindicate the historian, who has overlooked it, from the charge of negligence or of partiality. But Æschines denied the story. And did not Demosthenes also deny the story respecting his childish nickname, which Mr. Mitford has nevertheless told without any qualification? But the judges, or some part of them, showed, by their clamour, their disbelief of the relation of Demosthenes. And did not the judges, who tried the cause between Demosthenes and his guardians, indicate, in a much clearer manner, their approbation of the prosecution? But Demosthenes was a demagogue, and is to be slandered. Æscliines was an aristocrat, and is to be panegyrised. Is this a history, or a party pamphlet?

These passages, all selected from a single page of Mr. Mitford’s work, may give some notion to those 195readers, who have not the means of comparing his statements with the original authorities, of his extreme partiality and carelessness. Indeed, whenever this historian mentions Demosthenes, he violates all the laws of candour and even of decency; he weighs no authorities; he makes no allowances; he forgets the best authenticated facts in the history of the times, and the most generally recognised principles of human nature. The opposition of the great orator to the policy of Philip he represents as neither more nor less than deliberate villainy. I hold almost the same opinion with Mr. Mitford respecting the character and the views of that great and accomplished prince. But am I, therefore, to pronounce Demosthenes profligate and insincere? Surely not. Do we not perpetually see men of the greatest talents and the purest intentions misled by national or factious prejudices? The most respectable people in England were, little more than forty years ago, in the habit of uttering the bitterest abuse against Washington and Franklin. It is certainly to be regretted that men should err so grossly in their estimate of character. But no person who knows anything of human nature will impute such errors to depravity.

Mr. Mitford is not more consistent with himself than with reason. Though he is the advocate of all oligarchies, he is also a warm admirer of all kings, and of all citizens who raised themselves to that species of sovereignty which the Greeks denominated tyranny. If monarchy, as Mr. Mitford holds, be in itself a blessing, democracy must be a better form of government than aristocracy, which is always opposed to the supremacy, and even to the eminence, of individuals. On the other hand, it is 196but one step that separates the demagogue and the sovereign.

If this article had not extended itself to so great a length, I should offer a few observations on some other peculiarities of this writer,—his general preference of the Barbarians to the Greeks,—his predilection for Persians, Carthaginians, Thracians, for all nations, in short, except that great and enlightened nation of which he is the historian. But I will confine myself to a single topic.

Mr. Mitford has remarked, with truth and spirit, that “any history perfectly written, but especially a Grecian history perfectly written, should be a political institute for all nations.” It has not occurred to him that a Grecian history, perfectly written, should also be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts. Here his work is extremely deficient. Indeed, though it may seem a strange thing to say of a gentleman who has published so many quartos, Mr. Mitford seems to entertain a feeling, bordering on contempt, for literary and speculative pursuits. The talents of action almost exclusively attract his notice; and he talks with very complacent disdain of “the idle learned.” Homer, indeed, he admires; but principally, I am afraid, because he is convinced that Homer could neither read nor write. He could not avoid speaking of Socrates; but he has been far more solicitous to trace his death to political causes, and to deduce from it consequences unfavourable to Athens, and to popular governments, than to throw light on the character and doctrines of the wonderful man,

“From whose mouth issued forth
Mellifluous streams that watered all the schools
Of Academics, old and new, with those
Surnamed Peripatetics, and the sect
Epicurean, and the Stoic severe.”

197He does not seem to be aware that Demosthenes was a great orator; he represents him sometimes as an aspiring demagogue, sometimes as an adroit negotiator, and always as a great rogue. But that in which the Athenian excelled all men of all ages, that irresistible eloquence, which at the distance of more than two thousand years stirs our blood, and brings tears into our eyes, he passes by with a few phrases of commonplace commendation. The origin of the drama, the doctrines of the sophists, the course of Athenian education, the state of the arts and sciences, the whole domestic system of the Greeks, he lias almost completely neglected. Yet these things will appear, to a reflecting man, scarcely less worthy of attention than the taking of Sphaeteria or the discipline of the targeteers of Iphierates.

This, indeed, is a deficiency by no means peculiar to Mr. Mitford. Most people seem to imagine that a detail of public occurrences—the operations of sieges—the changes of administrations—the treaties—the conspiracies—the rebellions—is a complete history. Differences of definition are logically unimportant; but practically they sometimes produce the most momentous effects. Thus it has been in the present ease. Historians have, almost without exception, confined themselves to the public transactions of states, and have left to the negligent administration of writers of fiction a province at least equally extensive and valuable.

All wise statesmen have agreed to consider the prosperity or adversity of nations as made up of the happiness or misery of individuals, and to reject as chimerical all notions of a public interest of the community, distinct from the interest of the component parts. It 198is therefore strange that those whose office it is to supply statesmen with examples and warnings should omit, as too mean for the dignity of history, circumstances which exert the most extensive influence on the state of society. In general, the under current of human life flows steadily on, unruffled by the storms which agitate the surface. The happiness of the many commonly depends on causes independent of victories or defeats, of revolutions or restorations,—causes which can be regulated by no laws, and which are recorded in no archives. These causes are the things which it is of main importance to us to know, not how the Lacedæmonian phalanx was broken at Leuctra—not whether Alexander died of poison or by diseased History, without these, is a shell without a kernel; and such is almost all the history which is extant in the world. Paltry skirmishes and plots are reported with absurd and useless minuteness; but improvements the most essential to the comfort of human life extend themselves over the world, and introduce themselves into every cottage, before any annalist can condescend, from the dignity of writing about generals and ambassadors, to take the least notice of them. Thus the progress of the most salutary inventions and discoveries is buried in impenetrable mystery; mankind are deprived of a most useful species of knowledge, and their benefactors of their honest fame. In the meantime every child knows by heart the dates and adventures of a long line of barbarian kings. The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical. Thucydides, as far as he goes, is an excellent writer; yet he affords ns far less knowledge of the most important particulars relating 199to Athens than Plato or Aristophanes. The little treatise of Xenophon on Domestic Economy contains more historical information than all the seven hooks of his Hellenics. The same may be said of the Satires of Horace, of the Letters of Cicero, of the novels of Le Sage, of the memoirs of Marin on tel. Many others might be mentioned; but these sufficiently illustrate my meaning.

I would hope that there may yet appear a writer who may despise the present narrow limits, and assert the ‘rights of history over every part of her natural domain. Should such a writer engage in that enterprise, in which I cannot but consider Mr. Mitford as having failed, he will record, indeed, all that is interesting and important in military and political transactions; but he will not think anything too trivial for the gravity of history which is not too trivial to promote or diminish the happiness of man. He will portray in vivid colours the domestic society, the manners, the amusements, the conversation of the Greeks. He will not disdain to discuss the state of agriculture, of the mechanical arts, and of the conveniences of life. The progress of painting, of sculpture, and of architecture, will form an important part of his plan. But, above all, his attention will be given to the history of that splendid literature from which has sprung all the strength, the wisdom, the freedom, and the glory, of the western world.

Of the indifference which Mr. Mitford shows on this subject I will not speak; for I cannot speak with fairness. It is a subject on which I love to forget the accuracy of a judge, in the veneration of a worshipper and the gratitude of a child. If we consider merely the subtlety of disquisition, the force of imagination, 200the perfect energy and elegance of expression, which characterise the great works of Athenian genius, we must pronounce them intrinsically most valuable; but what shall we say when we reflect that from hence have sprung, directly or indirectly, all the noblest creations of the human intellect; that from hence were the vast accomplishments, and the brilliant fancy of Cicero; the withering fire of Juvenal; the plastic imagination of Dante; the humour of Cervantes; the comprehension of Bacon; the wit of Butler; the supreme and universal excellence of Shakspeare? All the triumphs of truth and genius over prejudice and power, in every country and in every age, have been the triumphs of Athens. Wherever a few great minds have made a stand against violence and fraud, in the cause of liberty and reason, there has been her spirit in the midst of them; inspiring, encouraging, consoling;—by the lonely lamp of Erasmus; by the restless bed of Pascal; in the tribune of Mirabeau; in the cell of Galileo; on the scaffold of Sidney. But who shall estimate her influence on private happiness? Who shall say how many thousands have been made wiser, happier, and better, by those pursuits in which she has taught mankind to engage; to how many the studies which took their rise from her have been wealth in poverty,—liberty in bondage,—health in sickness, —society in solitude? Her power is indeed manifested at the bar, in the senate, in the field of battle, in the schools of philosophy. But these are not her glory. Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,—wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,—there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal influence of Athens. 201The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did not hesitate to abandon to his comrade the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained the casket of that mysterious juice which enabled him to behold at one glance all the hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored mines. This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power have for more than twenty centuries been annihilated; her people have degenerated into timid slaves: her language into a barbarous jargon; her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans, Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. And when those who have rivalled her greatness shall have shared her fate; when civilisation and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England; when, perhaps, travellers from distant regions shall in vain labour to decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief; shall hear savage hymns chaunted to some misshapen idol, over the ruined dome of our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts;—her influence and her glory will still survive,—fresh in eternal youth, exempt from mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control.

MILTON.(1)

202(Edinburgh Review, August 1825.)
T
owards the close of the year 1823, Mr. Lemon, deputy keeper of the state papers, in the course of his researches among the presses of his office, met with a large Latin manuscript. With it were found corrected copies of the foreign despatches written by Milton, while he filled the office of Secretary, and several papers relating to the Popish Trials and the Rye-house Plot. The whole was wrapped up in an envelope, superscribed To Mr. Skinner, Merchant. On examination, the large manuscript proved to be the long lost Essay on the Doctrines of Christianity, which, according to Wood and Toland, Milton finished after the Restoration, and deposited with Cyriac Skinner. Skinner, it is well known, held the same political opinions with his illustrious friend. It is therefore probable, as Mr. Lemon conjectures, that he may have fallen under the suspicions of the government during that persecution of the Whigs which followed the dissolution of the Oxford parliament, and that, in consequence of a general seizure of his papers, this work may have been

     (1) Jonnis Miltoni, Angli, de Doctrinâ Cliristicinâ libri
     duo posthumi. A Treatise on Christian Doctrine, compiled
     from the Holy Scriptures alone, by John Milton, translated
     from the Original by Charles R. Sumner, M.A. &c. &c. 1825.

203brought to the office in which it has been found. But whatever the adventures of the manuscript may have been, no doubt can exist that it is a genuine relic of the great poet.

Mr. Sumner, who was commanded by his Majesty to edite and translate the treatise, has acquitted himself of his task in a manner honourable to his talents and to his character. His version is not indeed very easy or elegant; but it is entitled to the praise of clearness and fidelity. His notes abound with interesting quotations, and have the rare merit of really elucidating the text. The preface is evidently the work of a sensible and candid man, firm in his own religious opinions, and tolerant towards those of others.

The book itself will not add much to the fame of Milton. It is, like all his Latin works, well written, though not exactly in the style of the prize essays of Oxford and Cambridge. There is no elaborate imitation of classical antiquity, no scrupulous purity, none of the ceremonial cleanness which characterizes the diction of our academical Pharisees. The author does not attempt to polish and brighten his composition into the Ciceronian gloss and brilliancy. He does not in short sacrifice sense and spirit to pedantic refinements. The nature of his subject compelled him to use many words

“That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp.”

But he writes with as much ease and freedom as if Latin were his mother tongue; and, where he is least happy, his failure seems to arise from the carelessness of a native, not from the ignorance of a foreigner. We may apply to him what Denham with great felicity says of Cowley. He wears the garb, but not the clothes of the ancients. 204Throughout the volume are discernible the traces of a powerful and independent mind, emancipated from the influence of authority, and devoted to the search of truth. Milton professes to form his system from the Bible alone; and his digest of scriptural texts is certainly among the best that have appeared. But he is not always so happy in his inferences as in his citations.

Some of the heterodox doctrines which he avows seemed to have excited considerable amazement, particularly his Arianism, and his theory on the subject of polygamy. Yet we can scarcely conceive that any person could have read the Paradise Lost without suspecting him of the former; nor do we think that any reader, acquainted with the history of his life, ought to be much startled at the latter. The opinions which he has expressed respecting the nature of the Deity, the eternity of matter, and the observation of the Sabbath, might, we think, have caused more just surprise.

But we will not go into the discussion of these points. The book, were it far more orthodox or far more heretical than it is, would not much edify or corrupt the present generation. The men of our time are not to be converted or perverted by quartos. A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi, to the dust and silence of the upper shelf. The name of its author, and the remarkable circumstances attending its publication, will secure to it a certain degree of attention. For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then, to borrow the elegant language of the play-bills, be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties. 205We wish however to avail ourselves of the interest, transient as it may he, which this work has excited. The dexterous Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a saint, till they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some relic of him, a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood. On the same principle, we intend to take advantage of the late interesting discovery, and, while this memorial of a great and good man is still in the hands of all, to say something of his moral and intellectual qualities. Nor, we are convinced, will the severest of our readers blame us if, on an occasion like the present, we turn for a short time from the topics of the day, to commemorate, in all love and reverence, the genius and virtues of John Milton, the poet, the statesman, the philosopher, the glory of English literature, the champion and the martyr of English liberty.

It is by his poetry that Milton is best known; and it is of his poetry that we wish first to speak. By the general suffrage of the civilised world, his place has been assigned among the greatest masters of the art. His detractors, however, though outvoted, have not been silenced. There are many critics, and some of great name, who contrive in the same breath to extol the poems and to decry the poet. The works they acknowledge, considered in themselves, may be classed among the noblest productions of the human mind. But they will not allow the author to rank with those great men who, born in the infancy of civilisation, supplied, by their own powers, the want of instruction, and, though destitute of models themselves, bequeathed to posterity models which defy imitation. Milton, it is said, inherited what his predecessors created: he lived 206in an enlightened age; he received a finished education; and we must therefore, if we would form a just estimate of his powers, make large deductions in consideration of these advantages.

We venture to say, on the contrary, paradoxical as the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had to struggle with more unfavourable circumstances than Milton. He doubted, as he has himself owned, whether he had not been born “an age too late.” For this notion Johnson has thought fit to make him the butt of much clumsy ridicule. The poet, we believe, understood the nature of his art better than the critic. He knew that his poetical genius derived no advantage from the civilisation which surrounded him, or from the learning which he had acquired; and he looked back with something like regret to the ruder age of simple words and vivid impressions.

We think that, as civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines. Therefore, though we fervently admire those great works of imagination which have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire them the more because they have appeared in dark ages. On the contrary, we hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilised age. We cannot understand why those who believe in that most orthodox article of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the exception. Surely the uniformity of the phænomenon indicates a corresponding uniformity in the cause.

The fact is, that common observers reason from the progress of the experimental sciences to that of the imitative arts. The improvement of the former is gradual and slow. Ages are spent in collecting materiales 207more in separating and combining them. Even when a system has been formed, there is still something to add, to alter, or to reject. Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages. In these pursuits, therefore, the first speculators lie under great disadvantages, and, even when they fail, are entitled to praise. Their pupils, with far inferior intellectual powers, speedily surpass them in actual attainments. Every girl who has read Mrs. Marcet’s little dialogues on Political Economy could teach Montague or Walpole many lessons in finance. Any intelligent man may now, by resolutely applying himself for a few years to mathematics, learn more than the great Newton knew after half a century of study and meditation.

But it is not thus with music, with painting, or with sculpture. Still less is it thus with poetry. The progress of refinement rarely supplies these arts with better objects of imitation. It may indeed improve the instruments which are necessary to the mechanical operations of the musician, the sculptor, and the painter. But language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilised people is poetical.

This change in the language of men is partly the cause and partly the effect of a corresponding change in the nature of their intellectual operations, of a change by which science gains and poetry loses. Generalisation is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations 208of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more, they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems. They give us vague phrases instead of images, and personified qualities instead of men. They may be better able to analyse human nature than their predecessors. But analysis is not the business of the poet. His office is to portray, not to dissect. He may believe in a moral sense, like Shaftesbury; he may refer all human actions to self-interest, like Helvetius; or he may never think about the matter at all. His creed on such subjects will no more influence his poetry, properly so called, than the notions which a painter may have conceived respecting the lacrymal glands, or the circulation of the blood, will affect the tears of his Niobe, or the blushes of his Aurora. If Shakespeare had written a book on the motives of human actions, it is by no means certain that it would have been a good one. It is extremely improbable that it would have contained half so much able reasoning on the sulbject as is to be found in the Fable of the Bees. But could Mandeville have created an Iago? Well as he knew how to resolve characters into their elements, would he have been able to combine those elements in such a manner as to make up a man, a real, living, individual man?

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind, if any thing which gives so much pleasure ought to be called unsoundness. By poetry we mean not all writing in verse, nor even all good writing in verse. Our definition excludes many metrical compositions which, on other grounds, deserve the highest praise. By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner 209as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours. Thus the greatest of poets has described it, in lines universally admired for the vigour and felicity of their diction, and still more valuable on account of the just notion which they convey of the art in which he excelled:

“As imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”

These are the fruits of the “fine frenzy” which he ascribes to the poet,—a fine frenzy doubtless, but still a frenzy. Truth, indeed, is essential to poetry; but it is the truth of madness. The reasonings are just; but the premises are false. After the first suppositions have been made, every thing ought to be consistent; but those first suppositions require a degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial and temporary derangement of the intellect. Hence of all people children are the most imaginative. They abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. Every image which is strongly presented to their mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. No man, whatever his sensibility may be, is ever affected by Hamlet or Lear, as a little girl is affected by the story of poor Red Riding-hood. She knows that it is all false, that wolves cannot speak, that there are no wolves in England. Yet in spite of her knowledge she believes; she weeps; she trembles; she dares not go into a dark room lest she should feel the teeth of the monster at her throat. Such is the despotism of the imagination over uncultivated minds.

In a rude state of society men are children with a 210greater variety of ideas. It is therefore in such a state of society that we may expect to find the poetical temperament in its highest perfection. In an enlightened age there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy, abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and eloquence, abundance of verses, and even of good ones; but little poetry. Men will judge and compare; but they will not create. They will talk about the old poets, and comment on them, and to a certain degree enjoy them. But they will scarcely be able to conceive the effect which poetry produced on their ruder ancestors, the agony, the ecstasy, the plenitude of belief. The Greek Rhapsodists, according to Plato, could scarce recite Homer without falling into convulsions. The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping knife while he shouts his death-song. The power which the ancient bards of Wales and Germany exercised over their auditors seems to modern readers almost miraculous. Such feelings are very rare in a civilised community, and most rare among those who participate most in its improvements. They linger longest among the peasantry.

Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind, as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye of the body. And, as the magic lantern acts best in a dark room, poetry effects its purpose most completely in a dark age. As the light of knowledge breaks in upon its exhibitions, as the outlines of certainty become more and more definite and the shades of probability more and more distinct, the hues and lineaments’ of the phantoms which the poet calls up grow fainter and fainter. We cannot unite the incompatible advantages of reality and deception, the clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoyment of fiction. 211He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance to him. His difficulties will be proportioned to his proficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable among his contemporaries; and that proficiency will in general be proportioned to the vigour and activity of his mind. And it is well if, after all his. sacrifices and exertions, his works do not resemble a lisping man or a modern ruin. We have seen in our own time great talents, intense labour, and long meditation, employed in this struggle against the spirit of the age, and employed, we will not say absolutely in vain, but with dubious success and feeble applause.

If these reasonings be just, no poet has ever triumphed over greater difficulties than Milton. He received a learned education: he was a profound and elegant classical scholar: he had studied all the mysteries of Rabbinical literature: he was intimately acquainted with every language of modern Europe, from which either pleasure or information was then to be derived. He was perhaps the only great poet of later times who has been distinguished by the excellence of his Latin verse. The genius of Petrarch was scarcely of the first order; and his poems in the ancient language, though much praised by those who have never read them, are wretched compositions. Cowley, with all his admirable wit and ingenuity, had little imagination: nor indeed do we think his classical diction comparable to that of Milton. The authority of Johnson is against us on this point. But Johnson had studied 212the bad writers of the middle ages till he had become utterly insensible to the Augustan elegance, and was as ill qualified to judge between two Latin styles as a habitual drunkard to set up for a wine-taster.

Versification in a dead language is an exotic, a farfetched, costly, sickly, imitation of that which elsewhere may be found in healthful and spontaneous perfection. The soils on which this rarity flourishes are in general as ill suited to the production of vigorous native poetry as the flower-pots of a hot-house to the growth of oaks. That the author of the Paradise Lost should have written the Epistle to Manso was truly wonderful. Never before were such marked originality and such exquisite mimicry found together. Indeed in all the Latin poems of Milton the artificial manner indispensable to such works is admirably preserved, while, at the same time, his genius gives to them a peculiar charm, an air of nobleness and freedom, which distinguishes them from all other writings of the same class. They remind us of the amusements of those angelic warriors who composed the cohort of Gabriel:

“About him exercised heroic games
The unarmed youth of heaven. But o’er their heads
Celestial armoury, shield, helm, and spear,
Hung high, with diamond flaming and with gold.”

We cannot look upon the sportive exercises for which the genius of Milton ungirds itself, without catching la glimpse of the gorgeous and terrible panoply which it is accustomed to wear. The strength of his imagination triumphed over every obstacle. So intense and ardent was the fire of his mind, that it not only was not suffocated beneath the weight of fuel, but penetrated the whole superincumbent mass with its own heat and radiance. 213It is not our intention to attempt any thing like a complete examination of the poetry of Milton. The public has long been agreed as to the merit of the most remarkable passages, the incomparable harmony of the numbers, and the excellence of that style, which no rival has been able to equal, and no parodist to degrade, which displays In their highest perfection the idiomatic powers of the English tongue, and to which every ancient and every modern language has contributed something of grace, of energy, or of music. In the vast field of criticism on which we are entering, innumerable reapers have already put their sickles. Yet the harvest is so abundant that the negligent search of a straggling gleaner may be rewarded with a sheaf.

The most striking characteristic of the poetry of Milton is the extreme remoteness of the associations by means of which it acts on the reader. Its effect is produced, not so much by what it expresses, as by what it suggests; not so much by the ideas which it directly conveys, as by other ideas which are connected with them. He electrifies the mind through conductors. The most unimaginative man must understand the Iliad. Homer gives him no choice, and requires from him no exertion, but takes the whole upon himself, and sets the images in so clear a light, that it is impossible to be blind to them. The works of Milton cannot be comprehended or enjoyed, unless the mind of the reader co-operate with that of the writer. He does not paint a finished picture, or play for a mere passive listener. He sketches, and leaves others to fill up the outline. He strikes the key-note, and expects his hearer to make out the melody.

We often hear of the magical influence of poetry. The expression in general means nothing: but applied 214to the writings of Milton, it is most appropriate. His poetry acts like an incantation. Its merit lies less in its obvious meaning than in its occult power. There would seem, at first sight, to be no more in his words than in other words. But they are words of enchantment. No sooner are they pronounced, than the past is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty start at once into existence, and all the burial-places of the memory give up their dead. Change the structure of the sentence; substitute one synonyme for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The spell loses its power; and he who should then hope to conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken as Cassim in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying, “Open Wheat,” “Open Barley,” to the door which obeyed no sound but “Open Sesame.” The miserable failure of Dryden in his attempt to translate into his own diction some parts of the Paradise Lost, is a remarkable instance of this.

In support of these observations we may remark, that scarcely any passages in the poems of Milton are more generally known or more frequently repeated than those which are little more than muster-rolls of names. They are not always more appropriate or more melodious than other names. But they are charmed names. Every one of them is the first link in a long chain of associated ideas. Like the dwelling-place of our infancy revisited in manhood, like the song of our country heard in a strange land, they produce upon us an effect wholly independent of their intrinsic value. One transports us back to a remote period of history. Another places us among the novel scenes and manners of a distant region. A third evokes all the dear classical recollection of childhood, the school-room, 215the dog-eared Virgil, the holiday, and the prize. A fourth brings before us the splendid phantoms of chivalrous romance, the trophied lists, the embroidered housings, the quaint devices, the haunted forests, the enchanted gardens, the achievements of enamoured knights, and the smiles of rescued princesses.

In none of the works of Milton is his peculiar manner more happily displayed than in the Allegro and the Penseroso. It is impossible to conceive that the mechanism of language can be brought to a more exquisite degree of perfection. These poems differ from others, as atar of roses differs from ordinary rose water, the close packed essence from the thin diluted mixture. They are indeed not so much poems, as collections of hints, from each of which the reader is to make out a poem for himself. Every epithet is a text for a stanza.

The Comus and the Sampson Agonistes are works which, though of very different merit, offer some marked points of resemblance. Both are lyric poems in the form of plays. There are perhaps no two kinds of composition so essentially dissimilar as the drama and the ode. The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken. The effect is as unpleasant as that which is produced on the stage by the voice of a prompter or the entrance of a scene-shifter. Hence it was, that the tragedies of Byron were his least successful performances. They resemble those pasteboard pictures invented by the friend of children, Mr. Newbery, in which a single moveable head goes round twenty different bodies, so that the same face looks out upon us successively, from the uniform of a hussar, the furs of a judge, and the rags of a beggar. 216In all the characters, patriots and tyrants, haters and lovers, the frown and sneer of Harold were discernible in an instant. But this species of egotism, though fatal to the drama, is the inspiration of the ode. It is the part of the lyric poet to abandon himself, without reserve, to his own emotions.

Between these hostile elements many great men have endeavoured to effect an amalgamation, but never with complete success. The Greek Drama, on the model of which the Samson was written, sprang from the Ode. The dialogue was ingrafted on the chorus, and naturally partook of its character. The genius of the greatest of the Athenian dramatists co-operated with the circumstances under which tragedy made its first appearance. Æschylus was, head and heart, a lyric poet. In his time, the Greeks had far more intercourse with the East than in the days of Homer; and they had not yet acquired that immense superiority in war, in science, and in the arts, which, in the following generation, led them to treat the Asiatics with contempt. From the narrative of Herodotus it should seem that they still looked up, with the veneration of disciples, to Egypt and Assyria. At this period, accordingly, it was natural that the literature of Greece should be tinctured with the Oriental style. And that style, we think, is discernible in the works of Pindar and Æschylus. The latter often reminds us of the Hebrew writers. The book of Job, indeed, in conduct and diction, bears a considerable resemblance to some of his dramas. Considered as plays, his works are absurd; considered as choruses, they are above all praise. If, for instance, we examine the address of Clytemnestra to Agamemnon on his return, or the description of the seven Argive chiefs, by the principles of dramatic 217writing, we shall instantly condemn them as monstrous. But if we forget the characters, and think only of the poetry, we shall admit that it has never been surpassed in energy and magnificence. Sophocles made the Greek drama as dramatic as was consistent with its original form. His portraits of men have a sort of similarity; but it is the similarity not of a painting, but of a bas-relief. It suggests a resemblance; but it does not produce an illusion. Euripides attempted to carry the reform further. But it was a task far beyond his powers, perhaps beyond any powers. Instead of correcting what was bad, he destroyed what was excellent. He substituted crutches for stilts, bad sermons for good odes.

Milton, it is well known, admired Euripides highly, much more highly than, in our opinion, Euripides deserved. Indeed the caresses which this partiality leads our countryman to bestow on “sad Electra’s poet,” sometimes remind us of the beautiful Queen of Fairy-land kissing the long ears of Bottom. At all events, there can be no doubt that this veneration for the Athenian, whether just or not, was injurious to the Samson Agonistes. Had Milton taken Æschylus for his model, he would have given himself up to the lyric inspiration, and poured out profusely all the treasures of his mind, without bestowing a thought on those dramatic proprieties which the nature of the work rendered it impossible to preserve. In the attempt to reconcile things in their own nature inconsistent, he has failed, as every one else must have failed. We cannot identify ourselves with the characters, as in a good play. We cannot identify ourselves with the poet, as in a good ode. The conflicting ingredients, like an acid and an alkali mixed, neutralise each other. 218We are by no means insensible to the merits of this celebrated piece, to the severe dignity of the style, the graceful and pathetic solemnity of the opening speech, or the wild and barbaric melody which gives so striking an effect to the choral passages. But we think it, we confess, the least successful effort of the genius of Milton.

The Comus is framed on the model of the Italian Masque, as the Samson is framed on the model of the Greek Tragedy. It is certainly the noblest performance of the kind which exists in any language. It is as far superior to the Faithful Shepherdess, as the Faithful Shepherdess is to the Aminta, or the Aminta to the Pastor Fido. It was well for Milton that he had here no Euripides to mislead him. He understood and loved the literature of modern Italy. But he did not feel for it the same veneration which he entertained for the remains of Athenian and Roman poetry, consecrated by so many lofty and endearing recollections. The faults, moreover, of his Italian predecessors were of a kind to which his mind had a deadly antipathy. He could stoop to a plain style, sometimes even to a bald style; but false brilliancy was his utter aversion. His muse had no objection to a russet attire; but she turned with disgust from the finery of Guarini, as tawdry and as paltry as the rags of a chimney-sweeper on May-day. Whatever ornaments she wears are of massive gold, not only dazzling to the sight, but capable of standing the severest test of the crucible.

Milton attended in the Comus to the distinction which he afterwards neglected in the Samson. He made his Masque what it ought to be, essentially lyrical, and dramatic only in semblance. He has not 219attempted a fruitless struggle against a defect inherent In the nature of that species of composition; and he has therefore succeeded, wherever success was not impossible. The speeches must be read as majestic soliloquies; and he who so reads them will be enraptured with their eloquence, their sublimity, and their music. The interruptions of the dialogue, however, impose a constraint upon the writer, and break the illusion of the reader. The finest passages are those which are lyric in form as well as in spirit. “I should much commend,” says the excellent Sir Henry Wotton in a letter to Milton, “the tragical part if the lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto, I must plainly confess to you, I have seen yet nothing parallel in our language.” The criticism was just. It is when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dialogue, when he is discharged from the labour of uniting two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises even above himself. Then, like his own good Genius bursting from the earthly form and weeds of Thyrsis, he stands forth in celestial freedom and beauty; he seems to cry exultingly,

“Now my task is smoothly done,
I can fly or I can run,”

to skim the earth, to soar above the clouds, to bathe in the Elysian dew of the rainbow, and to inhale the balmy smells of nard and cassia, which the musky winds of the zephyr scatter through the cedared alleys of the Hesperides.

There are several of the minor poems of Milton on which we would willingly make a few remarks. Still more willingly would we enter into a detailed examination 220of that admirable poem, the Paradise Regained, which, strangely enough, is scarcely ever mentioned except as an instance of the blindness of the parental affection which men of letters bear towards the offspring of their intellects. That Milton was mistaken in preferring this work, excellent as it is, to the Paradise Lost, we readily admit. But we are sure that the superiority of the Paradise Lost to the Paradise Regained is not more decided, than the superiority of the Paradise Regained to every poem which has since made its appearance. Our limits, however, prevent us from discussing the point at length. We hasten on to that extraordinary production which the general suffrage of critics has placed in the highest class of human compositions.

The only poem of modern times which can be compared with the Paradise Lost is the Divine Comedy. The subject of Milton, in some points, resembled that of Dante; but he has treated it in a widely different manner. We cannot, we think, better illustrate our opinion respecting our own great poet, than by contrasting him with the father of Tuscan literature.

The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante, as the hieroglyphics of Egypt differed from the picturewriting of Mexico. The images which Dante employs speak for themselves; they stand simply for what they are. Those of Milton have a signification which is often discernible only to the initiated. Their value depends less on what they directly represent than on what they remotely suggest. However strange, however grotesque, may be the appearance which Dante undertakes to describe, he never shrinks from describing it. He gives us the shape, the colour, the sound, the smell, the taste; he counts the numbers; he measares 221the size. His similes are the illustrations of a traveller. Unlike those of other poets, and especially of Milton, they are introduced in a plain, business-like manner; not for the sake of any beauty in the objects from which they are drawn; not for the sake of any ornament which they may impart to the poem; but simply in order to make the meaning of the writer as clear to the reader as it is to himself. The ruins of the precipice which led from the sixth to the seventh circle of hell were like those of the rock which fell into the Adige on the south of Trent. The cataract of Phlegethon was like that of Aqua Cheta at the monastery of St. Benedict. The place where the heretics were confined in burning tombs resembled the vast cemetery of Arles.

Now let us compare with the exact details of Dante the dim intimations of Milton. We will cite a few examples. The English poet has never thought of taking the measure of Satan. He gives us merely a vague idea of vast bulk. In one passage the fiend lies stretched out huge in length, floating many a rood, equal in size to the earth-born enemies of Jove, or to the sea-monster which the mariner mistakes for an island. When he addresses himself to battle against the guardian angels, he stands like Teneriffe or Atlas: his stature reaches the sky. Contrast with these descriptions the lines in which Dante has described the gigantic spectre of Nimrod. “His face seemed to me as long and as broad as the ball of St. Peter’s at Rome; and his other limbs were in proportion; so that the bank, which concealed him from the waist downwards, nevertheless showed so much of him, that three tall Germans would in vain have attempted to reach to his hair.” We are sensible that we do no 222justice to the admirable style of the Florentine poet. But Mr. Cary’s translation is not at hand; and our version, however rude, is sufficient to illustrate our meaning.

Once more, compare the lazar-house in the eleventh book of the Paradise Lost with the last ward of Malebolge in Dante. Milton avoids the loathsome details, and takes refuge in indistinct but solemn and tremendous imagery, Despair hurrying from couch to couch to mock the wretches with his attendance, Death shaking his dart over them, but, in spite of supplications, delaying to strike. What says Dante? “There was such a moan there as there would be if all the sick who, between July and September, are in the hospitals of Valdichiana, and of the Tuscan swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit together; and such a stench was issuing forth as is wont to issue from decayed limbs.”

We will not take upon ourselves the invidious office of settling precedency between two such writers. Each in his own department is incomparable; and each, we may remark, has wisely, or fortunately, taken a subject adapted to exhibit his peculiar talent to the greatest advantage. The Divine Comedy is a personal narrative. Dante is the eye-witness and ear-witness of that which he relates. He is the very man who has heard the tormented spirits crying out for the second death, who has read the dusky characters on the portal within which there is no hope, who has hidden his face from the terrors of the Gorgon, who has fled from the hooks and the seething pitch of Barbariccia and Drag-hignazzo. His own hands have grasped the shaggy sides of Lucifer. His own feet have climbed the mountain of expiation. His own brow has been 223marked by the purifying angel. The reader would throw aside such a tale in incredulous disgust, unless it were told with the strongest air of veracity, with a sobriety even in its horrors, with the greatest precision and multiplicity in its details. The narrative of Milton in this respect differs from that of Dante, as the adventures of Amadis differ from those of Gulliver. The author of Amadis would have made his book ridiculous if he had introduced those minute particulars which give such a charm to the work of Swift, the nautical observations, the affected delicacy about names, the official documents transcribed at foil length, and all the unmeaning gossip and scandal of the court, springing out of nothing, and tending to nothing. We are not shocked at being told that a man who lived, nobody knows when, saw many very strange sights, and we can easily abandon ourselves to the illusion of the romance. But when Lemuel Gulliver, surgeon, resident at Rotherhithe, tells us of pygmies and giants, flying islands, and philosophising horses, nothing but such circumstantial touches could produce for a single moment a deception on the imagination.

Of all the poets who have introduced into their works the agency of supernatural beings, Milton has succeeded best. Here Dante decidedly yields to him: and as this is a point on which many rash and ill-considered judgments have been pronounced, we feel inclined to dwell on it a little longer. The most fatal error which a poet can possibly commit in the management of his machinery, is that of attempting to philosophise too much. Milton has been often censured for ascribing to spirits many functions of which spirits must be incapable. But these objections, though sanctioned by eminent names, originate, we venture to say, in profound ignorance of the art of poetry. 224What is spirit? What are our own minds, the portion of spirit with which we are best acquainted? We observe certain phænomena. We cannot explain them into material causes. We therefore infer that there exists something which is not material. But of this something we have no idea. We can define it only in negatives. We can reason about it only by symbols. We use the word: but we have no more of the things; and the business of poetry is with images, and not with words. The poet uses words indeed; but they are merely the instruments of his art, not its objects. They are the materials which he is to dispose in such a manner as to present a picture to the mental eye. And if they are not so disposed, they are no more entitled to be called poetry than a bale of canvas and a box of colours to be called a painting.

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all a^es and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle. The first inhabitants of Greece, there is reason to believe, worshipped one invisible Deity. But the necessity of having something more definite to adore produced, in a few centuries, the innumerable crowd of Gods and Goddesses. In like manner the ancient Persians thought it impious to exhibit the Creator under a human form. Yet even these transferred to the Sun the worship which, in speculation, they considered due only to the Supreme Mind. The History of the Jews is the record of a continued struggle between pure Theism, supported by the most terrible sanctions, and the strangely fascinating desire of having some visible and tangible object of adoration. Perhaps none of the secondary causes which Gibbon has assigned for the rapidity with which Christianity spread over the world, 225while Judaism scarcely ever acquired a proselyte, operated more powerfully than this feeling. God, the uncreated, the incomprehensible, the invisible, attracted few worshippers. A philosopher might admire so noble a conception: but the crowd turned away in disgust from words which presented no image to their minds. It was before Deity embodied in a human form, walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the Synagogue, and the doubts of the Academy, and the pride of the portico, and the fasces of the Lictor, and the swords of thirty legions, were humbled in the dust. Soon after Christianity had achieved its triumph, the principle which had assisted it began to corrupt it. It became a new Paganism. Patron saints assumed the offices of household gods. St. George took the place of Mars. St. Elmo consoled the mariner for the loss of Castor and Pollux. The Virgin Mother and Cecilia succeeded to Venus and the Muses. The fascination of sex and loveliness was again joined to that of celestial dignity; and the homage of chivalry was blended with that of religion. Reformers have often made a stand against these feelings; but never with more than apparent and partial success. The men who demolished the images in Cathedrals have not always been able to demolish those which were enshrined in their minds. It would not be difficult to show that in politics the same rule holds good. Doctrines, we are afraid, must generally be embodied before they can excite a strong public feeling. The multitude is more easily interested for the most unmeaning badge, or the most insignificant name, than for the most important principle. 226From these considerations, we infer that no poet, who should affect that metaphysical accuracy for the want of which Milton has been blamed, would escape a disgraceful failure. Still, however, there was another extreme, which, though far less dangerous, was also to be avoided. The imaginations of men are in a groat measure under the control of their opinions. The most exquisite art of poetical colouring can produce no illusion, when it is employed to represent that which is at once perceived to be incongruous and absurd. Milton wrote in an age of philosophers and theologians. It was necessary, therefore, for him to abstain from giving such a shock to their understandings as might break the charm which it was his object to throw over their imaginations. This is the real explanation of the indistinctness and inconsistency with which he has often been reproached. Dr. Johnson acknowledges that it was absolutely necessary that the spirit should be clothed with material forms. “But,” says he, “the poet should have secured the consistency of his system by keeping immateriality out of sight, and seducing the reader to drop it from his thoughts.” This is easily said; but what if Milton could not seduce his readers to drop immateriality from their thoughts? What if the contrary opinion had taken so full a possession of the minds of men as to leave no room even for the half belief which poetry requires? Such we suspect to have been the case. It was impossible for the poet to adopt altogether the material or the immaterial system. He therefore took his stand on the debatable ground. He left the whole in ambiguity. He has, doubtless, by so doing, laid himself open to the charge of inconsistency. But, though philosophically in the wrong, we cannot but believe that he was poetically 227in the right. This task, which almost any other writer would have found impracticable, was easy to him. The peculiar art which he possessed of communicating his meaning circuitously through a long succession of associated ideas, and of intimating more than he expressed, enabled him to disguise those incongruities which he could not avoid.

Poetry which relates to the beings of another world ought to be at once mysterious and picturesque. That of Milton is so. That of Dante is picturesque indeed beyond any that ever was written. Its effect approaches to that produced by the pencil or the chisel. But it is picturesque to the exclusion of all mystery. This is a fault on the right side, a fault inseparable from the plan of Dante’s poem, which, as we have already observed, rendered the utmost accuracy of description necessary. Still it is a fault. The supernatural agents excite an interest; but it is not the interest which is proper to supernatural agents. We feel that we could talk to the ghosts and dæmons without any emotion of unearthly awe. We could, like Don Juan, ask them to supper, and eat heartily in their company. Dante’s angels are good men with wings. His devils are spiteful ugly executioners. His dead men are merely living men in strange situations. The scene which passes between the poet and Farinata is justly celebrated. Still, Farinata in the burning tomb is exactly what Farinata would have been at an auto da fe. Nothing can be more touching than the first interview of Dante and Beatrice. Yet what is it, but a lovely woman chiding, with sweet austere composure, the lover for whose affection she is grateful, but whose vices she reprobates? The feelings which give the passage its charm would suit the streets of 228Florence as well as the summit of the Mount of Purgatory.

The spirits of Milton are unlike those of almost all other writers. His fiends, in particular, are wonderful creations. They are not metaphysical abstractions. They are not wicked men. They are not ugly beasts. They have no horns, no tails, none of the fee-faw-fum of Tasso and Klopstock. They have just enough in common with human nature to be intelligible to human beings. Their characters are, like their forms, marked by a certain dim resemblance to those of men, but exaggerated to gigantic dimensions, and veiled in mysterious gloom.

Perhaps the gods and dæmons of Æschylus may best bear a comparison with the angels and devils of Milton. The style of the Athenian had, as we have remarked, something of the Oriental character; and the same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology. It has nothing of the amenity and elegance which we generally find in the superstitions of Greece. All is rugged, barbaric, and colossal. The legends of Æschylus seem to harmonize less with the fragrant groves and graceful porticoes in which his countrymen paid their vows to the God of Light and Goddess of Desire, than with those huge and grotesque labyrinths of eternal granite in which Egypt enshrined her mystic Osiris, or in which Hindostan still bows down to her seven-headed idols. His favourite gods are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was a stripling and an upstart, the gigantic Titans, and the inexorable Furies. Foremost among his creations of this class stands Prometheus, half fiend, half redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and implacable enemy of heaven. Prometheus 229bears undoubtedly a considerable resemblance, to the Satan of Milton. In both we find the same impatience of control, the same ferocity, the same unconquerable pride. In both characters also are mingled, though in very different proportions, some kind and generous feelings. Prometheus, however, is hardly superhuman enough. He talks too much of his chains and his uneasy posture: he is rather too much depressed and agitated. His resolution seems to depend on the knowledge which he possesses that he holds the fate of his torturer in his hands, and that the hour of his release will surely come. But Satan is a creature of another sphere. The might of his intellectual nature is victorious over the extremity of pain. Amidst agonies which cannot be conceived without horror, he deliberates, resolves, and even exults. Against the sword of Michael, against the thunder of Jehovah, against the flaming lake, and the marl burning with solid fire, against the prospect of an eternity of unintermitted misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, resting on its own innate energies, requiring no support from any thing external, nor even from hope itself.

To return for a moment to the parallel which we have been attempting to draw between Milton and Dante, we would add that the poetry of these great men has in a considerable degree taken its character from their moral qualities. They are not egotists. They rarely obtrude their idiosyncrasies on their readers. They have, nothing in common with those modern beggars for fame, who extort a pittance from the compassion of the inexperienced by exposing the nakedness and sores of their minds. Yet it would be difficult to name two writers whose works have been more completely, though undesignedly, coloured by their personal feelings. 230The character of Milton was peculiarly distinguished by loftiness of spirit; that of Dante by intensity of feeling. In every line of the Divine Comedy we discern the asperity which is produced by pride struggling with misery. There is perhaps no work in the world so deeply and uniformly sorrowful. The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic caprice. It was not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged, the effect of external circumstances. It was from within. Neither love nor glory, neither the conflicts of earth nor the hope of heaven could dispel it. It turned every consolation and every pleasure into its own nature. It resembled that noxious Sardinian soil of which the intense bitterness is said to have been perceptible even in its honey. His mind was, in the noble language of the Hebrew poet, “a land of darkness, as darkness itself, and where the light was as darkness.” The gloom of his character discolours all the passions of men, and all the face of nature, and tinges with its own livid hue the flowers of Paradise and the glories of the eternal throne. All the portraits of him are singularly characteristic. No person can look on the features, noble even to ruggedness, the dark furrows of the cheek, the haggard and woful stare of the eye, the sullen and contemptuous curve of the lip, and doubt that they belong to a man too proud and too sensitive to be happy.

Milton was, like Dante, a statesman and a lover; and, like Dante, he had been unfortunate in ambition and in love. He had survived his health and his sight, the comforts of his home, and the prosperity of his party. Of the great men by whom he had been distinguished at his entrance into life, some had been taken away from the evil to come; some had carried into foreign climates their unconquerable hatred of oppression; 231some were pining in dungeons; and some had poured forth their blood on scaffolds. Venal and licentious scribblers, with just sufficient talent to clothe the thoughts of a pandar in the style of a bellman, were now the favourite writers of the Sovereign and of the public. It was a loathsome herd, which could be compared to nothing so fitly as to the rabble of Cornus, grotesque monsters, half bestial half human, dropping with wine, bloated with gluttony, and reeling in obscene dances. Amidst these that fair Muse was placed, like the chaste lady of the Masque, lofty, spotless, and serene, to be chattered at, and pointed at, and grinned at, by the whole rout of Satyrs and Goblins. If ever despondency and asperity could be excused in any man, they might have been excused in Milton. But the strength of his mind overcame every calamity. Neither blindness, nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience. His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were singularly equable. His temper was serious, perhaps stern; but it was a temper which no sufferings could render sullen or fretful. Such as it was when, on the eve of great events, he returned from his travels, in the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinctions, and glowing with patriotic hopes, such it continued to be when, after having experienced every calamity which is incident to our nature, old, poor, sightless and disgraced, he retired to his hovel to die.

Hence it was that, though he wrote the Paradise Lost at a time of life when images of beauty and tenderness are in general beginning to fade, even from those minds in which they have not been effaced by 232anxiety and disappointment, he adorned it with all that is most lovely and delightful in the physical and in the moral world. Neither Theocritus nor Ariosto had a finer or a more healthful sense of the pleasantness of external objects, or loved better to luxuriate amidst sunbeams and flowers, the songs of nightingales, the juice of summer fruits, and the coolness of shady fountains. His conception of love unites all the voluptuousness of the Oriental harem, and all the gallantry of the chivalric tournament, with all the pure and quiet affection of an English fireside. His poetry reminds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery. Nooks and dells, beautiful as fairy land, are embosomed in its most rugged and gigantic elevations. The roses and myrtles bloom unchilled on the verge of the avalanche.

Traces, indeed, of the peculiar character of Milton may be found in all his works; but it is most strongly displayed in the Sonnets. Those remarkable poems have been undervalued by critics who have not understood their nature. They have no epigrammatic point. There is none of the ingenuity of Filicaja in the thought, none of the hard and brilliant enamel of Petrarch in the style. They are simple but majestic records of the feelings of the poet; as little tricked out for the public eye as his diary would have been. A victory, an expected attack upon the city, a momentary fit of depression or exultation, a jest thrown out against one of his books, a dream which for a short time restored to him that beautiful face over which the grave had closed for ever, led him to musings, which, without effort, shaped themselves into verse. The unity of sentiment and severity of style which characterise these little pieces remind us of the Greek Anthology, or perhaps still more of the Collects of the 233English Liturgy. The noble poem on the Massacres of Piedmont is strictly a Collect in verse.

The Sonnets are more or less striking, according as the occasions which gave birth to them are more or less interesting. But they are, almost without exception, dignified by a sobriety and greatness of mind to which we know not where to look for a parallel. It would, indeed, be scarcely safe to draw any decided inferences as to the character of a writer from passages directly egotistical. But the qualities which we have ascribed to Milton, though perhaps most strongly marked in those parts of his works which treat of his personal feelings, are distinguishable in every page, and impart to all his writings, prose and poetry, English, Latin, and Italian, a strong family likeness.

His public conduct was such as was to be expected from a man of a spirit so high and of an intellect so powerful. He lived at one of the most memorable eras in the history of mankind, at the very crisis of the great conflict between Oromasdes and Arimanes, liberty and despotism, reason and prejudice. That great battle was fought for no single generation, for no single land. The destinies of the human race were staked on the same cast with the freedom of the English people. Then were first proclaimed those mighty principles which have since worked their way into the depths of the American forests, which have roused Greece from the slavery and degradation of two thousand years, and which, from one end of Europe to the other, have kindled an unquenchable fire in the hearts of the oppressed, and loosed the knees of the oppressors with an unwonted fear.

Of those principles, then struggling for their infant existence, Milton was the most devoted and eloquent literary 234champion. We need not say how much we admire his public conduct. But we cannot disguise from ourselves that a large portion of his countrymen still think it unjustifiable. The civil war, indeed, has been more discussed, and is less understood, than any event in English history. The friends of liberty laboured under the disadvantage of which the lion in the fable complained so bitterly. Though they were the conquerors, their enemies were the painters. As a body, the Roundheads had done their utmost to decry and ruin literature; and literature was even with them, as, in the long run, it always is with its enemies. The best book on their side of the question is the charming narrative of Mrs. Hutchinson. May’s History of the Parliament is good; but it breaks off at the most interesting crisis of the struggle. The performance of Ludlow is foolish and violent; and most of the later writers who have espoused the same cause, Oldmixon for instance, and Catherine Macaulay, have, to say the least, been more distinguished by zeal than either by candour or by skill. On the other side are the most authoritative and the most popular historical works in our language, that of Clarendon, and that of Hume. The former is not only ably written and full of valuable information, but has also an air of dignity and sincerity which makes even the prejudices and errors with which it abounds respectable. Hume, from whose fascinating narrative the great mass of the reading public are still contented to take their opinions, hated religion so much that he hated liberty for having been allied with religion, and has pleaded the cause of tyranny with the dexterity of an advocate while affecting the impartiality of a judge.

The public conduct of Milton must be approved or 235condemned according as the resistance of the people to Charles the First shall appear to be justifiable or criminal. We shall therefore make no apology for dedicating a few pages to the discussion of that interesting and most important question. We shall not argue it on general grounds. We shall not recur to those primary principles from which the claim of any government to the obedience of its subjects is to be deduced. We are entitled to that vantage ground; but we will relinquish it. We are, on this point, so confident of superiority, that we are not unwilling to imitate the ostentatious generosity of those ancient knights, who vowed to joust without helmet or shield against all enemies, and to give their antagonists the advantage of sun and wind. We will take the naked constitutional question. We confidently affirm, that every reason which can be urged in favour of the Revolution of 1688 may be urged with at least equal force in favour of what is called the Great Rebellion.

In one respect, only, we think, can the warmest admirers of Charles venture to say that he was a better sovereign than his son. He was not, in name and profession, a Papist; we say in name and profession, because both Charles himself and his creature Laud, while they abjured the innocent badges of Popery, retained all its worst vices, a complete subjection of reason to authority, a weak preference of form to substance, a childish passion for mummeries, an idolatrous veneration for the priestly character, and, above all, a merciless intolerance. This, however, we waive. We will concede that Charles was a good Protestant; but we say that his Protestantism does not make the slightest distinction between his case and that of James.

The principles of the Revolution have often been 236grossly misrepresented, and never more than in the course of the present year. There is a certain class of men, who, while they profess to hold in reverence the great names and great actions of former times never look at them for any other purpose than in order to find in them some excuse for existing abuses. In every venerable precedent they pass by what is essential, and take only what is accidental: they keep out of sight what is beneficial, and hold up to public imitation all that is defective. If, in any part of any great example, there be any thing unsound, these flesh-flies detect it with an unerring instinct, and dart upon it with a ravenous delight. If some good end has been attained in spite of them, they feel, with their prototype, that

“Their labour must be to pervert that end,
And out of good still to find means of evil.”

To the blessings which England has derived from the Revolution these people are utterly insensible. The expulsion of a tyrant, the solemn recognition of popular rights, liberty, security, toleration, all go for nothing with them. One sect there was, which, from unfortunate temporary causes, it was thought necessary to keep under close restraint. One part of the empire there was so unhappily circumstanced, that at that time its misery was necessary to our happiness, and its slavery to our freedom. These are the parts of the Revolution which the politicians of whom we speak, love to contemplate, and which seem to them not indeed to vindicate, but in some degree to palliate, the good which it has produced. Talk to them of Naples, of Spain, or of South America. They stand forth zealots for the doctrine of Divine Right which has now come back to us, like a thief from transportation, 237under the alias of Legitimacy. But mention the miseries of Ireland. Then William is a hero. Then Somers and Shrewsbury are great men. Then the Revolution is a glorious era. The very same persons who, in this country, never omit an opportunity of reviving every wretched Jacobite slander respecting the Whigs of that period, have no sooner crossed St. George’s Channel, than they begin to fill their bumpers to the glorious and immortal memory. They may truly boast that they look not at men, but at measures. So that evil be done, they care not who does it; the arbitrary Charles, or the liberal William, Ferdinand the Catholic, or Frederic the Protestant. On such occasions their deadliest opponents may reckon upon their candid construction. The bold assertions of these people have of late impressed a large portion of the public with an opinion that James the Second was expelled simply because he was a Catholic, and that the Revolution was essentially a Protestant Revolution.

But this certainly was not the case; nor can any person who has acquired more knowledge of the history of those times than is to be found in Goldsmith’s Abridgment believe that, if James had held his own religious opinions without wishing to make proselytes, or if, wishing even to make proselytes, he had contented himself with exerting only his constitutional influence for that purpose, the Prince of Orange would ever have been invited over. Our ancestors, we suppose, knew their own meaning; and, if we may believe them, their hostility was primarily not to popery, but to tyranny. They did not drive out a tyrant because he was a Catholic; but they excluded Catholics from the crown, because they thought them likely 238to be tyrants. The ground on which they, in their famous resolution, declared the throne vacant, was this, “that James had broken the fundamental laws of the kingdom.” Every man, therefore, who approves of the Revolution of 1688 must hold that the breach of fundamental laws on the part of the sovereign justifies resistance. The question, then, is this; Had Charles the First broken the fundamental laws of England?

No person can answer in the negative, unless he refuses credit, not merely to all the accusations brought against Charles by his opponents, but to the narratives of the warmest Royalists, and to the confessions of the King himself. If there be any truth in any historian of any party who has related the events of that reign, the conduct of Charles, from his accession to the meeting of the Long Parliament, had been a continued course of oppression and treachery. Let those who applaud the Revolution, and condemn the Rebellion, mention one act of James the Second to which a parallel is not to be found in the history of his father. Let them lay their fingers on a single article in the Declaration of Right, presented by the two Houses to William and Mary, which Charles is not acknowledged to have violated. He had, according to the testimony of his own friends, usurped the functions of the legislature, raised taxes without the consent of parliament, and quartered troops on the people in the most illegal and vexatious manner. Not a single session of parliament had passed without some unconstitutional attack on the freedom of debate; the right of petition was grossly violated; arbitrary judgments, exorbitant fines, and unwarranted imprisonments, were grievances of daily occurrence. If these things do not justify resistance, 239the Revolution was treason; if they do, the Great Rebellion was laudable.

But, it is said, why not adopt milder measures? Why, after the King had consented to so many reforms, and renounced so many oppressive prerogatives, did the parliament continue to rise in their demands at the risk of provoking a civil war? The ship-money had been given up. The Star Chamber had been abolished. Provision had been made for the frequent, convocation and secure deliberation of parliaments. Why not pursue an end confessedly good by peaceable and regular means? We recur again to the analogy of the Revolution. Why was James driven from the throne? Why was he not retained upon conditions? He too had offered to call a free parliament and to submit to its decision all the matters in dispute. Yet we are in the habit of praising our forefathers, who preferred a revolution, a disputed succession, a dynasty of strangers, twenty years of foreign and intestine war, a standing army, and a national debt, to the rule, however restricted, of a tried and proved tyrant. The Long Parliament acted on the same principle, and is entitled to the same praise. They could not trust the King. He had no doubt passed salutary laws; but what assurance was there that he would not break them? He had renounced oppressive prerogatives; but where was the security that he would not resume them? The nation had to deal with a man whom no tie could bind, a man who made and broke promises with equal facility, a man whose honour had been a hundred times pawned, and never redeemed.

Here, indeed, the Long Parliament stands on still stronger ground than the Convention of 1688. No action of James can be compared to the conduct of 240Charles with respect to the Petition of Right. The Lords and Commons present him with a bill in which the constitutional limits of his power are marked out. He hesitates; he evades; at last he bargains to give his assent for five subsidies. The bill receives his solemn assent; the subsidies are voted; but no sooner is the tyrant relieved, than he returns at once to all the arbitrary measures which he had bound himself to abandon, and violates all the clauses of the very Act which he had been paid to pass.

For more than ten years the people had seen the rights which were theirs by a double claim, by immemorial inheritance and by recent purchase, infringed by the perfidious king who had recognised them. At length circumstances compelled Charles to summon another parliament: another chance was given to our fathers: were they to throw it away as they had thrown away the former? Were they again to be cozened by le Roi le vent? Were they again to advance their money on pledges which had been forfeited over and over again? Were they to lay a second Petition of Right at the foot of the throne, to grant another lavish aid in exchange for another unmeaning ceremony, and then to take their departure, till, after ten years more of fraud and oppression, their prince should again require a supply, and again repay it with a perjury? They were compelled to choose whether they would trust a tyrant or conquer him. We think that they chose wisely and nobly.

The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of other malefactors against whom overwhelming evidence is produced, generally decline all controversy about the facts, and content themselves with calling testimony to character. He had so many private virtues! And 241had James the Second no private virtues? Was Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest enemies themselves being judges, destitute of private virtues? And what, after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles? A religious zeal, not more sincere than that of his son, and fully as weak and narrow-minded, and a few of the ordinary household decencies which half the tombstones in England claim for those who lie beneath them. A good father! A good husband! Ample apologies indeed for fifteen years of persecution, tyranny and falsehood!

We charge him with having broken his coronation oath; and we are told that he kept his marriage vow! We accuse him of having given up his people to the merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard-hearted of prelates; and the defence is, that he took his little son on his knee and kissed him! We censure him for having violated the articles of the Petition of Right, after having, for good and valuable consideration, promised to observe them; and we are informed that he was accustomed to hear prayers at six o’clock in the morning! It is to such considerations as these, together with his Vandyke dress, his handsome face, and his peaked beard, that he owes, we verily believe, most of his popularity with the present generation.

For ourselves, we own that we do not understand the common phrase, a good man, but a bad king. We can as easily conceive a good man and an unnatural father, or a good man and a treacherous friend. We cannot, in estimating the character of an individual, leave out of our consideration his conduct in the most important of all human relations; and if in that relation we find him to have been selfish, cruel, and deceitful, we shall take the liberty to call him a bad 242man, in spite of all his temperance at table, and all his regularity at chapel.

We cannot refrain from adding a few words respecting a topic on which the defenders of Charles are fond of dwelling. If, they say, he governed his people ill, he at least governed them after the example of his predecessors. If he violated their privileges, it was because those privileges had not been accurately defined. No act of oppression has ever been imputed to him which has not a parallel in the annals of the Tudors. This point Hume has laboured, with an art which is as discreditable in a historical work as it would be admirable in a forensic address. The answer is short, clear, and decisive. Charles had assented to the Petition of Right. He had renounced the oppressive powers said to have been exercised by his predecessors, and he had renounced them for money He was not entitled to set up his antiquated claims against his own recent release.

These arguments are so obvious, that it may seem superfluous to dwell upon them. But those who have observed how much the events of that time are misrepresented and misunderstood will not blame us for stating the case simply. It is a case of which the simplest statement is the strongest.

The enemies of the Parliament, indeed, rarely choose to take issue on the great points of the question. They content themselves with exposing some of the crimes and follies to which public commotions necessarily give birth. They bewail the unmerited fate of Stafford. They execrate the lawless violence of the army. They laugh at the Scripitural names of the preachers. Major-generals fleecing their districts; soldiers revelling on the spoils of a ruined peasantry; upstarts, enriched by 243the public plunder, taking possession of the hospitable firesides and hereditary trees of the old gentry; boys smashing the beautiful windows of cathedrals; Quakers riding naked through the market-place; Fifth-monarchy men shouting for King Jesus; agitators lecturing from the tops of tubs on the fate of Agag; all these, they tell us, were the offspring of the Great Rebellion.

Be it so. We are not careful to answer in this matter. These charges, were they infinitely more important, would not alter our opinion of an event which alone has made us to differ from the slaves who crouch beneath despotic sceptres. Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war. They were the price of our liberty. Has the acquisition been worth the sacrifice? It is the nature of the Devil of tyranny to tear and rend the body which he leaves. Are the miseries of continued possession less horrible than the struggles of the tremendous exorcism?

If it were possible that a people brought up under an intolerant and arbitrary system could subvert that system without acts of cruelty and folly, half the objections to despotic power would be removed. We should, in that case, be compelled to acknowledge that it at least produces no pernicious effects on the intellectual and moral character of a nation. We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary. The violence of those outrages will always be proportioned to the ferocity and ignorance of the people; and the ferocity and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to the oppression and degradation under which they have been accustomed to live. Thus it was in our civil war. The heads of the church and state reaped only that 244which they had sown. The government had prohibited free discussion: it had done its best to keep the people unacquainted with their duties and their rights. The retribution was just and natural. If our rulers suffered from popular ignorance, it was because they had themselves taken away the key of knowledge. If they were assailed with blind fury, it was because they had exacted an equally blind submission.

It is the character of such revolutions that we always see the worst of them at first. Till men have been some time free, they know not how to use their freedom. The natives of wine countries are generally sober. In climates where wine is a rarity intemperance abounds. A newly liberated people may be compared to a northern army encamped on the Rhine or the Xeres. It is said that, when soldiers in such a situation first find themselves able to indulge without restraint in such a rare and expensive luxury, nothing is to be seen but intoxication. Soon, however, plenty teaches discretion; and, after wine has been for a few months their daily fare, they become more temperate than they had ever been in their own country. In the same manner, the final and permanent fruits of liberty are wisdom, moderation, and mercy. Its immediate effects are often atrocious crimes, conflicting errors, scepticism on points the most clear, dogmatism on points the most mysterious. It is just at this crisis that its enemies love to exhibit it. They pull down the scaffolding from the half-finished edifice: they point to the flying dust, the falling bricks, the comfortless rooms, the frightful irregularity of the whole appearance; and then ask in scorn where the promised splendour and comfort is to be found. If such miserable sophisms were to prevail there would never be a good house or a good government in the world. 245Ariosto tells a pretty story of a fairy, who, by some mysterious law of her nature, was condemned to appear at certain seasons in the form of a foul and poisonous snake. Those who injured her during the period of her disguise were for ever excluded from participation in the blessings which she bestowed. But to those who, in spite of her loathsome aspect, pitied and protected her, she afterwards revealed herself in the beautiful and celestial form which was natural to her, accompanied their steps, granted all their wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made them happy in love and victorious in war. Such a spirit is Liberty. At times she takes the form of a hateful reptile. She grovels, she hisses, she stings. But woe to those who in disgust shall venture to crush her! And happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her beauty and her glory!

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces; and that cure is freedom. When a prisoner first leaves his cell he cannot bear the light of day: he is unable to discriminate colours, or recognise faces. But the remedy is, not to remand him into his dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays of the sun. The blaze of truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half blind in the house of bondage. But let them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it. In a few years men learn to reason. The extreme violence of opinions subsides. Hostile theories correct each other. The scattered elements of truth cease to contend, and begin to coalesce. And at length a system of justice and order is educed out of the chaos.

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying 246it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom? The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.

Therefore it is that we decidedly approve of the conduct of Milton and the other wise and good men who, in spite of much that was ridiculous and hateful in the conduct of their associates, stood firmly by the cause of Public Liberty. We are not aware that the poet has been charged with personal participation in any of the blameable excesses of that time. The favourite topic of his enemies is the line of conduct which he pursued with regard to the execution of the King. Of that celebrated proceeding we by no means approve. Still we must say, in justice to the many eminent persons who concurred in it, and in justice more particularly to the eminent person who defended it, that nothing can be more absurd than the imputations which, for the last hundred and sixty years, it has been the fashion to cast upon the Regicides. We have, throughout, abstained from appealing to first principles. We will not appeal to them now. We recur again to the parallel case of the Revolution. What essential distinction can be drawn between the execution of the father and the deposition of the son? What constitutional maxim is there which applies to the former and not to the latter? The King can do no wrong. If so, James was as innocent as Charles could have been. The minister only ought to be responsible for the acts of the Sovereign. If so, why not impeach Jefferies and retain James? The person of a King is sacred. Was the person of 247James considered sacred at the Boyne? To discharge cannon against an army in which a King is known to be posted is to approach pretty near to regicide. Charles, too, it should always be remembered, was put to death by men who had been exasperated by the hostilities of several years, and who had never been bound to him by any other tie than that which was common to them with all their fellow-citizens. Those who drove James from his throne, who seduced his army, who alienated his friends, who first imprisoned him in his palace, and then turned him out of it, who broke in upon his very slumbers by imperious messages, who pursued him with fire and sword from one part of the empire to another, who hanged, drew, and quartered his adherents, and attainted his innocent heir, were his nephew and his two daughters. When we reflect on all these things, we are at a loss to conceive how the same persons who, on the fifth of November, thank God for wonderfully conducting his servant William, and for making all opposition fall before him until he became our King and Governor, can, on the thirtieth of January, contrive to be afraid that the blood of the Royal Martyr may be visited on themselves and their children.

We disapprove, we repeat, of the execution of Charles; not because the constitution exempts the King from responsibility, for we know that all such maxims, however excellent, have their exceptions; nor because we feel any peculiar interest in his character, for we think that his sentence describes him with perfect justice as “a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer, and a public enemy;” but because we are convinced that the measure was most injurious to the cause of freedom, He whom it removed was a captive and a hostage: his 248heir, to whom the allegiance of every Royalist was instantly transferred, was at large. The Presbyterians could never have been perfectly reconciled to the father: they had no such rooted enmity to the son. The great body of the people, also, contemplated that proceeding with feelings which, however unreasonable, no government could safely venture to outrage.

But though we think the conduct of the Regicides blameable, that of Milton appears to us in a very different light. The deed was done. It could not be undone. The evil was incurred; and the object was to render it as small as possible. We censure the chiefs of the army for not yielding to the popular opinion; but we cannot censure Milton for wishing to change that opinion. The very feeling which would have restrained us from committing the act would have led us, after it had been committed, to defend it against the ravings of servility and superstition. For the sake of public liberty, we wish that the thing had not been done, while the people disapproved of it. But, for the sake of public liberty, we should also have wished the people to approve of it when it was done. If any thing more were wanting to the justification of Milton, the book of Salmasius would furnish it. That miserable performance is now with justice considered only as a beacon to word-catchers, who wish to become statesmen. The celebrity of the man who refuted it, the “Æneæ magni dextra,” gives it all its fame with the present generation. In that age the state of things was different. It was not then fully understood how vast an interval separates the mere classical scholar from the political philosopher. Nor can it be doubted that a treatise which, bearing the name of so eminent a critic, attacked the fundamental principles of all free 249governments, must, if suffered to remain unanswered, have produced a most pernicious effect on the public mind.

We wish to add a few words relative to another subject, on which the enemies of Milton delight to dwell, his conduct during the administration of the Protector. That an enthusiastic votary of liberty should accept office under a military usurper seems, no doubt, at first sight, extraordinary. But all the circumstances in which the country was then placed were extraordinary. The ambition of Oliver was of no vulgar kind. He never seems to have coveted despotic power. He at first fought sincerely and manfully for the Parliament, and never deserted it, till it had deserted its duty. If he dissolved it by force, it was not till he found that the few members who remained after so many deaths, secessions, and expulsions, were desirous to appropriate to themselves a power which they held only in trust, and to inflict upon England the curse of a Venetian oligarchy. But even when thus placed by violence at the head of affairs, he did not assume unlimited power. He gave the country a constitution far more perfect than any which had at that time been known in the world. He reformed the representative system in a manner which has extorted praise even from Lord Clarendon. For himself he demanded indeed the first place in the commonwealth; but with powers scarcely so great as those of a Dutch stadtholder, or an American president. He gave the Parliament a voice in the appointment of ministers, and left to it the whole legislative authority, not even reserving; to himself a veto on its enactments; and he did not require that the chief magistracy should be hereditary in his family. Thus far, we think, if the circumstances of the time 250and the opportunities which he had of aggrandizing himself he fairly considered, he will not lose by comparison with Washington or Bolivar. Had his moderation been met by corresponding moderation, there is no reason to think that he would have overstepped the line which he had traced for himself. But when he found that his parliaments questioned the authority under which they met, and that he was in danger of being deprived of the restricted power which was absolutely necessary to his personal safety, then, it must be acknowledged, he adopted a more arbitrary policy.

Yet, though we believe that the intentions of Cromwell were at first honest, though we believe that he was driven from the noble course which he had marked out for himself by the almost irresistible force of circumstances, though we admire, in common with all men of all parties, the ability and energy of his splendid administration, we are not pleading for arbitrary and lawless power, even in his hands. We know that a good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot. But we suspect, that at the time of which we speak, the violence of religious and political enmities rendered a stable and happy settlement next to impossible. The choice lay, not between Cromwell and liberty, but between Cromwell and the Stuarts. That Milton chose well, no man can doubt who fairly compares the events of the protectorate with those of the thirty years which succeeded it, the darkest and most disgraceful in the English annals. Cromwell was evidently laying, though in an irregular manner, the foundations of an admirable system. Never before had religious liberty and the freedom of discussion been enjoyed in a greater degree. Never had the national honour been better upheld abroad, or the seat of justice 251better filled at home. And it was rarely that any opposition which stopped short of open rebellion provoked the resentment of the liberal and magnanimous usurper. The institutions which he had established, as set down in the Instrument of Government, and the Humble Petition and Advice, were excellent. His practice, it is true, too often departed from the theory of these institutions. But, had he lived a few years longer, it is probable that his institutions would have survived him, and that his arbitrary practice would have died with him. His power had not been consecrated by ancient prejudices. It was upheld only by his great personal qualities. Little, therefore, was to be dreaded from a second protector, unless he were also a second Oliver Cromwell. The events which followed his decease are the most complete vindication of those who exerted themselves to uphold his authority. His death dissolved the whole frame of society. The army rose against the parliament, the different corps of the army against each other. Sect raved against sect. Party plotted against party. The Presbyterians, in their eagerness to be revenged on the Independents, sacrificed their own liberty, and deserted all their old principles. Without casting one glance on the past, or requiring one stipulation for the future, they threw down their freedom at the feet of the most frivolous and heartless of tyrants.

Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The King cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a viceroy of France, and pocketed, 252with complacent infamy, her degrading insults, and her more degrading gold. The caresses of harlots, and the jests of buffoons, regulated the policy of the state. The government had just ability enough to deceive, and just religion enough to persecute. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place, worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch; and England propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the race accursed of God and man was a second time driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and to be a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations.

Most of the remarks which we have hitherto made on the public character of Milton, apply to him only as one of a large body. We shall proceed to notice some of the peculiarities which distinguished him from his contemporaries. And, for that purpose, it is necessary to take a short survey of the parties into which the political world was at that time divided. We must premise, that our observations are intended to apply only to those who adhered, from a sincere preference, to one or to the other side. In days of public commotion, every fiction, like an Oriental army, is attended by a crowd of camp-followers, an useless and heartless rabble, who prowl round its line of march in the hope of picking up something under its protection, but desert it in the day of battle, and often join to exterminate it after a defeat. England, at the time of which we are treating, abounded with fickle and selfish politicians, who transferred their support to every government as it rose, who kissed the hand of the King in 1640, and 253spat in his face in 1649, who shouted with equal glee when Cromwell was inaugurated in Westminster Hall, and when he was dug up to be hanged at Tyburn, who dined on calves’ heads, or stuck up oak-branches, as circumstances altered, without the slightest shame or repugnance. These we leave out of the account. We take our estimate of parties from those who really deserve to be called partisans.

We would speak first of the Puritans, the most remarkable body of men, perhaps, which the world has ever produced. The odious and ridiculous parts of their character lie on the surface. He that runs may read them; nor have there been wanting attentive and malicious observers to point them out. For many years after the Restoration, they were the theme of unmeasured invective and derision. They were exposed to the utmost licentiousness of the press and of the stage, at the time when the press and the stage were most licentious. They were not men of letters; they were, as a body, unpopular; they could not defend themselves; and the public would not take them under its protection. They were therefore abandoned, without reserve, to the tender mercies of the satirists and dramatists. The ostentatious simplicity of their dress, their sour aspect, their nasal twang, their stiff posture, their long graces, their Hebrew names, the Scriptural phrases which they introduced on every occasion, their contempt of human learning, their detestation of polite amusements, were indeed fair game for the laughers. But it is not from the laughers alone that the philosophy of history is to be learnt. And he who approaches this subject should carefully guard against the influence of that potent ridicule which has already misled so many excellent writers.

“Ecco 254il fonte del riso, ed ecco il rio
Che mortali perigli in se contiene:
Hor qui teuer a fren nostro desio,
Ed esser cauti niolto a noi conviene.”

Those who roused the people to resistance, who directed their measures through a long series of eventful years, who formed, out of the most unpromising materials, the finest army that Europe had ever seen, who trampled down King, Church, and Aristocracy, who, in the short intervals of domestic sedition and rebellion, made the name of England terrible to every nation on the face of the earth, were no vulgar fanatics. Most of their absurdities were mere external badges, like the signs of freemasonry, or the dresses of friars. We regret that these badges were not more attractive. We regret that a body to whose courage and talents mankind has owed inestimable obligations had not the lofty elegance which distinguished some of the adherents of Charles the First, or the easy good-breeding for which the court of Charles the Second was celebrated. But, if we must make our choice, we shall, like Bassanio in the play, turn from the specious caskets which contain only the Death’s head and the Fool’s head, and fix on the plain leaden chest which conceals the treasure.

The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was with them the great end of existence. They rejected with contempt the ceremonious homage which other sects substituted 255for the pure worship of the soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the Deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on his intolerable brightness, and to commune with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt for terrestrial distinctions. The difference between the greatest and the meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from him on whom their own eyes were constantly fixed. They recognised no title to superiority but his favour; and, confident of that favour, they despised all the accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the registers of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of ministering angels had charge over them. Their palaces were houses not made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests they looked down with contempt: for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language, nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. The very meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged, on whose slightest action the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest, who had been destined, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes, had been ordained on his 256account. For his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his will by the pen of the Evangelist, and the harp of the prophet. He had been wrested by no common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had risen, that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring God.

Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men, the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion, the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker: but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was half-maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision, or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from him. But when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword for war, these impestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, yet laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate or in the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought 257inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them Stoics, had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world, like Sir Artegal’s iron man Talus with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood by any barrier.

Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their manners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their minds was often injured by straining after things too high for mortal reach: and we know that, in spite of their hatred of Popery, they too often fell into the worst vices of that bad system, intolerance and extravagant austerity, that they had their anchorites and their crusades, their Dunstans and their De Monforts, their Dominies and their Escobars. Yet, when all circumstances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and an useful body.

The Puritans espoused the cause of civil liberty 258mainly because it was the cause of religion. There was another party, by no means numerous, but distinguished by learning and ability, which acted with them on very different principles. We speak of those whom Cromwell was accustomed to call the Heathens, men who were, in the phraseology of that time, doubting; Thomases or careless Gallios with regard to religious subjects, but passionate worshippers of freedom. Heated by the study of ancient literature, they set up their country as their idol, and proposed to themselves the heroes of Plutarch as their examples. They seem to have borne some resemblance to the Brissotines of the French Revolution. But it is not very easy to draw the line of distinction between them and their devout associates, whose tone and manner they sometimes found it convenient to affect, and sometimes, it is probable, imperceptibly adopted.

We now come to the Royalists. We shall attempt to speak of them, as we have spoken of their antagonists, with perfect candour. We shall not charge upon a whole party the profligacy and baseness of the horseboys, gamblers and bravoes, whom the hope of license and plunder attracted from all the dens of Whitefriars to the standard of Charles, and who disgraced their associates by excesses which, under the stricter discipline of the Parliamentary armies, were never tolerated. We will select a more favourable specimen. Thinking as we do that the cause of the King was the cause of bigotry and tyranny, we yet cannot refrain from looking with complacency on the character of the honest old Cavaliers. We feel a national pride in comparing them with the instruments which the despots of other countries are compelled to employ, with the mutes who throng their antechambers, and the Janissaries who 259mount guard at their gates. Our royalist countrymen were not heartless, dangling courtiers, bowing at every step, and simpering at every word. They were not mere machines for destruction, dressed up in uniforms, caned into skill, intoxicated into valour, defending without love, destroying without hatred. There was a freedom in them subserviency, a nobleness in their very degradation. The sentiment of individual independence was strong within them. They were indeed misled, but by no base or selfish motive. Compassion and romantic honour, the prejudices of childhood, and the venerable names of history, threw over them a spell potent as that of Duessa; and, like the Red-Cross Knight, they thought that they were doing battle for an injured beauty, while they defended a false and loathsome sorceress. In truth they scarcely entered at all into the merits of the political question. It was not for a treacherous king or an intolerant church that they fought, but for the old banner which had waved in so many battles over the heads of their fathers, and for the altars at which they had received the hands of their brides. Though nothing could be more erroneous than their political opinions, they possessed, in a far greater degree than their adversaries, those qualities which are the grace of private life. With many of the vices of the Round Table, they had also many of its virtues, courtesy, generosity, veracity, tenderness, and respect for women. They had far more both of profound and of polite learning than the Puritans. Their manners were more engaging, their tempers more amiable, their tastes more elegant, and their households more cheerful.

Milton did not strictly belong to any of the classes which we have described. He was not a Puritan. He 260was not a freethinker. He was not a Royalist. In his character the noblest qualities of every party were combinée! in harmonious union. From the Parliament and from the Court, from the conventicle and from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepulchral circles of the Roundheads, and from the Christmas revel of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature selected and drew to itself whatever was great and good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious ingredients by which those finer elements were defiled. Like the Puritans, he lived

“As ever in his great task-master’s eye.”

Like them, he kept his mind continually fixed on an Almighty Judge and an eternal reward. And hence he acquired their contempt of external circumstances, their fortitude, their tranquillity, their inflexible resolution. But not the coolest sceptic or the most profane scoffer was more perfectly free from the contagion of their frantic delusions, their savage manners, their ludicrous jargon, their scorn of science, and their aversion to pleasure. Hating tyranny with a perfect hatred, he had nevertheless all the estimable and ornamental qualities which were almost entirely monopolised by the party of the tyrant. There was none who had a stronger sense of the value of literature, a finer relish for every elegant amusement, or a more chivalrous delicacy of honour and love. Though his opinions were democratic, his tastes and his associations were such as harmonise best with monarchy and aristocracy. He was under the influence of all the feelings by which the gallant Cavaliers were misled. But of those feelings he was the master and not the slave. Like the hero of Homer, he enjoyed all the pleasures of fascination; but he was not fascinated. 261He listened to the song of the Syrens; yet he glided by without being seduced to their fatal shore. He tasted the cup of Circe; but he bore about him a sure antidote against the effects of its bewitching sweetness. The allusions which captivated his imagination never impaired his reasoning powers. The statesman was proof against the splendour, the solemnity, and the romance which enchanted the poet. Any person who will contrast the sentiments expressed in his treatises on Prelacy with the exquisite lines on ecclesiastical architecture and music in the Penseroso, which was published about the same time, will understand our meaning. This is an inconsistency which, more than any thing else, raises his character in our estimation, because it shows how many private tastes and feelings he sacrificed, in order to do what he considered his duty to mankind. It is the very struggle of the noble Othello. His heart relents; but his hand is firm. He does nought in hate, but all in honour. He kisses the beautiful deceiver before he destroys her.

That from which the public character of Milton derives its great and peculiar splendour, still remains to be mentioned. If he exerted himself to overthrow a forsworn king and a persecuting hierarchy, he exerted himself in conjunction with others. But the glory of the battle which he fought for the species of freedom which is the most valuable, and which was then the least understood, the freedom of the human mind, is all his own. Thousands and tens of thousands among his contemporaries raised their voices against Ship-money and the Star-chamber. But there were few indeed who discerned the more fearful evils of moral and intellectual slavery, and the benefits which would result from the liberty of the press and the unfettered 262exercise of private judgment. These were the objects which Milton justly conceived to be the most important. He was desirous that the people should think for themselves as well as tax themselves, and should be emancipated from the dominion of prejudice as well as from that of Charles. He knew that those who, with the best intentions, overlooked these schemes of reform, and contented themselves with pulling down the King and imprisoning the malignants, acted like the heedless brothers in his own poem, who, in their eagerness to disperse the train of the sorcerer, neglected the means of liberating the captive. They thought only of conquering when they should have thought of disenchanting.

“Oh, ye mistook! Ye should have snatched his wand
And bound him fast. Without the rod reversed,
And backward mutters of dissevering power,
We cannot free the lady that sits here
Bound in strong fetters fixed and motionless.”

To reverse the rod, to spell the charm backward, to break the ties which bound a stupefied people to the seat of enchantment, was the noble aim of Milton. To this all his public conduct was directed. For this he joined the Presbyterians; for this he forsook them. He fought their perilous battle; but he turned away with disdain from their insolent triumph. He saw that they, like those whom they had vanquished, were hostile to the liberty of thought. He therefore joined the Independents, and called upon Cromwell to break the secular chain, and to save free conscience from the paw of the Presbyterian wolf. With a view to the same great object, he attacked the licensing system, in that sublime treatise which every statesman should wear as a sign upon his hand and as frontlets between his eyes. His attacks were, in general, directed less 263against particular abuses than against those deeply-seated errors on which almost all abuses are founded, the servile worship of eminent men and the irrational dread of innovation.

That he might shake the foundations of these debasing sentiments more effectually, he always selected for himself the boldest literary services. He never came up in the rear, when the outworks had been carried and the breach entered. He pressed into the forlorn hope. At the beginning of the changes, he wrote with incomparable energy and eloquence against the bishops. But, when his opinion seemed likely to prevail, he passed on to other subjects, and abandoned prelacy to the crowd of writers who now hastened to insult a falling party. There is no more hazardous enterprise than that of bearing the torch of truth into those dark and infected recesses in which no light has ever shone. But it was the choice and the pleasure of Milton to penetrate the noisome vapours, and to brave the terrible explosion. Those who most disapprove of his opinions must respect the hardihood with which he maintained them. He, in general, left to others the credit of expounding and defending the popular parts of his religious and political creed. He took his own stand upon those which the great body of his countrymen reprobated as criminal, or derided as paradoxical. He stood up for divorce and regicide. He attacked the prevailing systems of education. His radiant and beneficent career resembled that of the god of light and fertility.

” Nitor in adversum; nec me, qui caetera, vincit
Impetus, et rapido contrarius evehor orbi.”

It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Milton should, in our time, be so little read. As compositions, 264they deserve the attention of every man who wishes to become acquainted with the full power of the English language. They abound with passages compared with which the finest declamations of Burke sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous embroidery. Not even in the earlier hooks of the Paradise Lost has the great poet ever risen higher than in those parts of his controversial works in which his feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his own majestic language, “a sevenfold chorus of hallelujahs and harping symphonies.”

We had intended to look more closely at these performances, to analyse the peculiarities of the diction, to dwell at some length on the sublime wisdom of the Areopagitica and the nervous rhetoric of the Iconoclast, and to point out some of those magnificent passages which occur in the Treatise of Reformation, and the Animadversions on the Remonstrant. But the length to which our remarks have already extended renders this impossible.

We must conclude. And yet we can scarcely tear ourselves away from the subject. The days immediately following the publication of this relic of Milton appear to be peculiarly set apart, and consecrated to his memory. And we shall scarcely be censured if, on this his festival, we be found lingering near his shrine, how worthless soever may be the offering which we bring to it. While this book lies on our table, we seem to be contemporaries of the writer. We are transported a hundred and fifty years back. We can almost fancy that we are visiting him in his small lodging; that we see him sitting at the old organ beneath 265the faded green hangings; that we can catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to find the day; that we are reading in the lines of his noble countenance the proud and mournful history of his glory and his affliction. We image to ourselves the breathless silence in which we should listen to his slightest word, the passionate veneration with which we should kneel to kiss his hand and weep upon it, the earnestness with which we should endeavour to console him, if indeed such a spirit could need consolation, for the neglect of an age unworthy of his talents and his virtues, the eagerness with which we should contest with his daughters, or with his Quaker friend Elwood, the privilege of reading Homer to him, or of taking down the immortal accents which flowed from his lips.

These are perhaps foolish feelings. Yet we cannot be ashamed of them; nor shall we be sorry if what we have written shall in any degree excite them in other minds. We are not much in the habit of idolizing either the living or the dead. And we think that there is no more certain indication of a weak and ill-regulated intellect than that propensity which, for want of a better name, we will venture to christen Boswellism. But there are a few characters which have stood the closest scrutiny and the severest tests, which have been tried in the furnace and have proved pure, which have been weighed in the balance and have not been found wanting, which have been declared sterling by the general consent of mankind, and which are visibly stamped with the image and superscription of the Most High. These great men we trust that we know how to prize; and of these was Milton. The sight of his books, the sound of his name, are pleasant to us. His thoughts resemble 266those celestial fruits and flowers which the Virgin Martyr of Massinger sent down from the gardens of Paradise to the earth, and which were distinguished from the productions of other soils, not only by superior bloom and sweetness, but by miraculous efficacy to invigorate and to heal. They are powerful, not only to delight, but to elevate and purify. Nor do we envy the man who can study either the life or the writings of the great poet and patriot, without aspiring to emulate, not indeed the sublime works with which his genius has enriched our literature, but the zeal with which he laboured for the public good, the fortitude with which he endured every private calamity, the lofty disdain with which he looked down on temptations and dangers, the deadly hatred which he bore to bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he so sternly kept with his country and with his fame.

MACHIAVELLI. (1)

267(Edinburgh Review, March 1827.)
T
hose who have attended to this practice of our literary tribunal are well aware that, by means of certain legal fictions similar to those of Westminster Hall, we are frequently enabled to take cognisance of cases lying beyond the sphere of our original jurisdiction. We need hardly say, therefore, that in the present instance M. Périer is merely a Richard Roe, who will not be mentioned in any subsequent stage of the proceedings, and whose name is used for the sole purpose of bringing Machiavelli into court.

We doubt whether any name in literary history be so generally odious as that of the man whose character and writings we now propose to consider. The terms in which he is commonly described would seem to import that he was the Tempter, the Evil Principle, the discoverer of ambition and revenge, the original inventor of perjury, and that, before the publication of his fatal Prince, there had never been a hypocrite, a tyrant, or a traitor, a simulated virtue, or a convenient crime. One writer gravely assures us that Maurice of Saxony learned all his fraudulent policy from that execrable volume. Another remarks that since it was

     (1) Ouvres completes de Machiavel, traduites par J. V.
     Perier. Paris: 1825.

268translated into Turkish, the Sultans have been more addicted than formerly to the custom of strangling their brothers. Lord Lyttelton charges the poor Florentine with the manifold treasons of the house of Guise, and with the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Several authors have hinted that the Gunpowder Plot is to be primarily attributed to his doctrines, and seem to think that his effigy ought to be substituted for that of Guy Faux, in those processions by which the ingenious youth of England annually commemorate the preservation of the Three Estates. The Church of Rome has pronounced his works accursed things. Nor have our own countrymen been backward in testifying their opinion of his merits. Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonyme for the Devil. (1)

It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well acquainted with the history and literature of Italy, to read without horror and amazement the celebrated treatise winch has brought so much obloquy on the name of Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked yet not ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which the most hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted accomplice, or avow, without the disguise of some palliating sophism, even to his own mind, are professed without the slightest circumlocution, and assumed as the fundamental axioms of all political science.

It is not strange that ordinary readers should regard
(1) Nick Machiavel had ne’er a trick,
Tho’ he gave his name to our old Nick.
Hudibras, Part III. Canto I.

But, we believe, there is a schism on this subject among the antiquarians. 269the author of such a book as the most depraved and shameless of human beings. Wise men, however, have always been inclined to look with great suspicion on the angels and dæmons of the multitude: and in the present instance, several circumstances have led even superficial observers to question the justice of the vulgar decision. It is notorious that Machiavelli was, through life, a zealous republican. In the same year in which he composed his manual of King-craft, he suffered imprisonment and torture in the cause of public liberty. It seems inconceivable that the martyr of freedom should have designedly acted as the apostle of tyranny. Several eminent writers have, therefore, endeavoured to detect in this unfortunate performance some concealed meaning, more consistent with the character and conduct of the author than that which appears at the first glance.

One hypothesis is that Machiavelli intended to practise on the young Lorenzo de Medici a fraud similar to that which Sunderland is said to have employed against our James the Second, and that he urged his pupil to violent and perfidious measures, as the surest means of accelerating the moment of deliverance and revenge. Another supposition which Lord Bacon seems to countenance, is that the treatise was merely a piece of grave irony, intended to warn nations against the arts of ambitious men. It would be easy to show that neither of these solutions is consistent with many passages in The Prince itself. But the most decisive refutation is that which is furnished by the other works of Machiavelli. In all the writings which he gave to the public, and in all those which the research of editors has, in the course of three centuries, discovered, in his Comedies, designed for the entertainment of the 270multitude, in his Comments on Livy, intended for the perusal of the most enthusiastic patriots of Florence, in his History, inscribed to one of the most amiable and estimable of the Popes, in his public dispatches, in his private memoranda, the same obliquity of moral principle for which The Prince is so severely censured is more or less discernible. We doubt whether it would be possible to find, in all the many volumes of his compositions, a single expression indicating that dissimulation and treachery had ever struck him as discreditable.

After this, it may seem ridiculous to say that we are acquainted with few writings which exhibit so much elevation of sentiment, so pure and warm a zeal for the public good, or so just a view of the duties and rights of citizens, as those of Machiavelli. Yet so it is. And even from The Prince itself we could select many passages in support of this remark. To a reader of our age and country this inconsistency is, at first, perfectly bewildering. The whole man seems to be an enigma, a grotesque assemblage of incongruous qualities, selfishness and generosity, cruelty and benevolence, craft and simplicity, abject villany and romantic heroism. One sentence is such as a veteran diplomatist would scarcely write in cipher for the direction of his most confidential spy; the next seems to be extracted from a theme composed by an ardent schoolboy on the death of Leonidas. An act of dexterous perfidy, and an act of patriotic self-devotion, call forth the same kind and the same degree of respectful admiration. The moral sensibility of the writer seems at once to be morbidly obtuse and morbidly acute. Two characters altogether dissimilar are united in him. They are not merely joined, but interwoven. They 271are the warp and the woof of his mind; and their combination, like that of the variegated threads in shot silk, gives to the whole texture a glancing and ever-changing appearance. The explanation might have been easy, if he had been a very weak or a very affected man. But he was evidently neither the one nor the other. His works prove, beyond all contradiction, that his understanding was strong, his taste pure, and his sense of the ridiculous exquisitely keen.

This is strange: and yet the strangest is behind. There is no reason whatever to think, that those amongst whom he lived saw any thing shocking or incongruous in his writings. Abundant proofs remain of the high estimation in which both his works and his person were held by the most respectable among his contemporaries. Clement the Seventh patronised the publication of those very books which the Council of Trent, in the following generation, pronounced unfit for the perusal of Christians. Some members of the democratical party censured the Secretary for dedicating The Prince to a patron who bore the unpopular name of Medici. But to those immoral doctrines which have since called forth such severe reprehensions no exception appears to have been taken. The cry against them was first raised beyond the Alps, and seems to have been heard with amazement in Italy. The earliest assailant, as far as we are aware, was a countryman of our own, Cardinal Pole. The author of the Anti-Machiavelli was a French Protestant.

It is, therefore, in the state of moral feeling among the Italians of those times that we must seek for the real explanation of what seems most mysterious in the life and writings of this remarkable man. As this is a subject which suggests many interesting considerations, 272both political and metaphysical, we shall make no apology for discussing it at some length.

During the gloomy and disastrous centuries which followed the downfall of the Roman Empire, Italy had preserved, in a far greater degree than any other part of Western Europe, the traces of ancient civilisation. The night which descended upon her was the night of an Arctic summer. The dawn began to reappear before the last reflection of the preceding sunset had faded from the horizon. It was in the time of the French Merovingians and of the Saxon Heptarchy that ignorance and ferocity seemed to have done their worst. Yet even then the Neapolitan provinces, recognising the authority of the Eastern Empire, preserved something of Eastern knowledge and refinement. Rome, protected by the sacred character of her Pontiffs, enjoyed at least comparative security and repose. Even in those regions where the sanguinary Lombards had fixed their monarchy, there was incomparably more of wealth, of information, of physical comfort, and of social order, than could be found in Gaul, Britain, or Germany.

That which most distinguished Italy from the neighbouring countries was the importance which the population of the towns, at a very early period, began to acquire. Some cities had been founded in wild and remote situations, by fugitives who had escaped from the rage of the barbarians. Such were Venice and Genoa, which preserved their freedom by their obscurity, till they became able to preserve it by their power. Other cities seem to have retained, under all the changing dynasties of invaders, under Odoacer and Theodoric, Narses and Alboin, the municipal institutions which had been conferred on them by the liberal policy of the 273Great Republic. In provinces which the central government was too feeble either to protect or to oppress, these institutions gradually acquired stability and vigour. The citizens, defended by their walls, and governed by their own magistrates and their own by-laws, enjoyed a considerable share of republican independence. Thus a strong democratic spirit was called into action. The Carlovingian sovereigns were too imbecile to subdue it. The generous policy of Otlio encouraged it. It might perhaps have been suppressed by a close coalition between the Church and the Empire. It was fostered and invigorated by their disputes. In the twelfth century it attained its full vigour, and, after a long and doubtful conflict, triumphed over the abilities and courage of the Swabian Princes.

The assistance of the Ecclesiastical power had greatly contributed to the success of the Guelfs. That success would, however, have been a doubtful good, if its only effect had been to substitute a moral for a political servitude, and to exalt the Popes at the expense of the Cæsars. Happily the public mind of Italy had long contained the seeds of free opinions, which were now rapidly developed by the genial influence of free institutions. The people of that country had observed the whole machinery of the church, its saints and its miracles, its lofty pretensions and its splendid ceremonial, its worthless blessings and its harmless curses, too long and too closely to be duped. They stood behind the scenes on which others were gazing with childish awe and interest. They witnessed the arrangement of the pullies, and the manufacture of the thunders. They saw the natural faces and heard the natural voices of the actors. Distant nations looked on the Pope as the vicegerent of the Almighty, the oracle of 274the All-wise, the umpire from whose decisions, in the disputes either of theologians or of kings, no Christian ought to appeal. The Italians were acquainted with all the follies of his youth, and with all the dishonest arts by which he had attained power. They knew how often he had employed the keys of the Church to release himself from the most sacred engagements, and its wealth to pamper his mistresses and nephews. The doctrines and rites of the established religion they treated with decent reverence. But though they still called themselves Catholics, they had ceased to be Papists. Those spiritual arms which carried terror into the palaces and camps of the proudest sovereigns excited only contempt in the immediate neighbourhood of the Vatican. Alexander, when he commanded our Henry the Second to submit to the lash before the tomb of a rebellious subject, was himself an exile. The Romans, apprehending that he entertained designs against their liberties, had driven him from their city; and, though he solemnly promised to confine himself for the future to his spiritual functions, they still refused to readmit him.

In every other part of Europe, a large and powerful privileged class trampled on the people and defied the government. But, in the most flourishing parts of Italy, the feudal nobles were reduced to comparative insignificance. In some districts they took shelter under the protection of the powerful commonwealths which they were unable to oppose, and gradually sank into the mass of burghers. In other places they possessed great influence; but it was an influence widely different from that which was exercised by the aristocracy of any Transalpine kingdom. They were not petty princes, but eminent citizens. Instead of strengthening 275their fastnesses among the mountains, they embellished their palaces in the market-place. The state of society in the Neapolitan dominions, and in some parts of the Ecclesiastical State, more nearly resembled that which existed in the great monarchies of Europe. But the governments of Lombardy and Tuscany, through all their revolutions, preserved a different character. A people, when assembled in a town, is far more formidable to its rulers than when dispersed over a wide extent of country. The most arbitrary of the Cæsars found it necessary to feed and divert the inhabitants of their unwieldly capital at the expense of the provinces. The citizens of Madrid have more than once besieged their sovereign in his own palace, and extorted from him the most humiliating concessions. The Sultans have often been compelled to propitiate the furious rabble of Constantinople with the head of an unpopular Vizier. From the same cause there was a certain tinge of democracy in the monarchies and aristocracies of Northern Italy.

Thus liberty, partially indeed and transiently, revisited Italy; and with liberty came commerce and empire, science and taste, all the comforts and all the ornaments of life. The Crusades, from which the inhabitants of other countries gained nothing but relics and wounds, brought to the rising commonwealths of the Adriatic and Tyrrhene seas a large increase of wealth, dominion, and knowledge. The moral and the geographical position of those commonwealths enabled them to profit alike by the barbarism of the West and by the civilisation of the East. Italian ships covered every sea. Italian factories rose on every shore. The tables of Italian money-changers were set in every city. Manufactures flourished. Banks were established. 276The operations of the commercial machine were facilitated by many useful and beautiful inventions. We doubt whether any country of Europe, our own excepted, have at the present time reached so high a point of wealth and civilisation as some parts of Italy had attained four hundred years ago. Historians rarely descend to those details from which alone the real state of a community can be collected. Hence posterity is too often deceived by the vague hyperboles of poets and rhetoricians, who mistake the splendour of a court for the happiness of a people. Fortunately, John Villani has given us an ample and precise account of the state of Florence in the early part of the fourteenth century. The revenue of the Republic amounted to three hundred thousand florins; a sum which, allowing for the depreciation of the precious metals, was at least equivalent to six hundred thousand pounds sterling; a larger sum than England and Ireland, two centuries ago, yielded annually to Elizabeth. The manufacture of wool alone employed two hundred factories and thirty thousand workmen. The cloth annually produced sold, at an average, for twelve hundred thousand florins; a sum fully equal, in exchangeable value, to two millions and a half of our money. Four hundred thousand florins were annually coined. Eighty banks conducted the commercial operations, not of Florence only, but of all Europe. The transactions of these establishments were sometimes of a magnitude which may surprise even the contemporaries of the Barings and the Rothschilds. Two houses advanced to Edward the Third of England upwards of three hundred thousand marks, at a time when the mark contained more silver than fifty shillings of the present day, and when the value of silver was more 277than quadruple of what it now is. The city and its environs contained a hundred and seventy thousand inhabitants. In the various schools about ten thousand children were taught to read: twelve hundred studied arithmetic; six hundred received a learned education.

The progress of elegant literature and of the fine arts was proportioned to that of the public prosperity. Under the despotic successors of Augustus, all the fields of the intellect had been turned into arid wastes, still marked out by formal boundaries, still retaining the traces of old cultivation, but yielding neither flowers nor fruit. The deluge of barbarism came. It swept away all the landmarks. It obliterated all the signs of former tillage. But it fertilised while it devastated. When it receded, the wilderness was as the garden of God, rejoicing on every side, laughing, clapping its hands, pouring forth, in spontaneous abundance, every thing brilliant, or fragrant, or nourishing. A new language, characterised by simple sweetness and simple energy, had attained perfection. No tongue ever furnished more gorgeous and vivid tints to poetry; nor was it long before a poet appeared, who knew how to employ them. Early in the fourteenth century came forth the Divine Comedy, beyond comparison the greatest work of imagination which had appeared since the poems of Homer. The following generation produced indeed no second Dante: but it was eminently distinguished by general intellectual activity. The study of the Latin writers had never been wholly neglected in Italy. But Petrarch introduced a more profound, liberal, and elegant scholarship, had communicated to his countrymen that enthusiasm for the literature, the history, and the antiquities of Rome, which divided his own heart with a frigid mistress and a more frigid 278Muse. Boccaccio turned their attention to the more sublime and graceful models of Greece.

From this time, the admiration of learning and genius became almost an idolatry among the people of Italy. Kings and republics, cardinals and doges, vied with each other in honouring and flattering Petrarch. Embassies from rival states solicited the honour of his instructions. His coronation agitated the Court of Naples and the people of Rome as much as the most important political transaction could have done. To collect books and antiques, to found professorships, to patronise men of learning, became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit of literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise. Every place to which the merchant princes of Florence extended their gigantic traffic, from the bazars of the Tigris to the monasteries of the Clyde, was ransacked for medals and manuscripts. Architecture, painting, and sculpture, were munificently encouraged. Indeed it would be difficult to name an Italian of eminence, during the period of which we speak, who, whatever may have been his general character, did not at least affect a love of letters and of the arts.

Knowledge and public prosperity continued to advance together. Both attained their meridian in the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent. We cannot refrain from quoting the splendid passage, in which the Tuscan Thucydides describes the state of Italy at that period. “Ridotta tutta in somma pace e tranquillità, coltivata non meno ne’ luoghi più montuosi e pin sterili che nelle pianure e regîoni più fertili, ne sottoposta ad altro imperio che de’ suoi medesimi, non solo era abbon-dantissima d’ abitatori c di ricchezze; ma illustrata, sommamente dalla magnificenza di molti principi, dallo 279splendore cli moite nobilissime e bellissime città, dalla sedia e maestà della religione, fioriva d’ nomini prestantissimi ela amministrazione delle cose publiche, e d’ ingegni molto nobili in tutte le scienze, ed in qua-lunque arte preelara ed industriosa.” When we peruse this just and splendid description, we can scarcely persuade ourselves that we are reading of times in which the annals of England and France present us only with a frightful spectacle of poverty, barbarity, and ignorance. From the oppressions of illiterate masters, and the sufferings of a degraded peasantry, it is delightful to turn to the opulent and enlightened States of Italy, to the vast and magnificent cities, the ports, the arsenals, the villas, the museums, the libraries, the marts filled with every article of comfort or luxury, the factories swarming with artisans, the Apennines covered with rich cultivation up to their very summits, the Po wafting the harvests of Lombardy to the granaries of Venice, and carrying back the silks of Bengal and the furs of Siberia to the palaces of Milan. With peculiar pleasure, every cultivated mind must repose on the fair, the happy, the glorious Florence, the halls which rang with the mirth of Pulci, the cell where twinkled the midnight lamp of Politian, the statues on which the young eye of Michael Angelo glared with the frenzy of a kindred inspiration, the gardens in which Lorenzo meditated some sparkling song for the May-day dance of the Etrurian virgins. Alas for the beautiful city! Alas, for the wit and the learning, the genius and the love!

“Le donne, e i cavalier, gli affanni, e gli agi,
Clie ne’nvogliava amore e cortesia
Là dove i cuor son fatti si malvagi.”

A time was at hand, when all the seven vials of the 280Apocalypse were to be poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant countries, a time of slaughter, famine, beggary, infamy, slavery, despair.

In the Italian States, as in many natural bodies, untimely decrepitude was the penalty of precocious maturity. Their early greatness, and their early decline, are principally to be attributed to the same cause, the preponderance which the towns acquired in the political system.

In a community of hunters or of shepherds, every man easily and necessarily becomes a soldier. His ordinary avocations are perfectly compatible with all the duties of military service. However remote may be the expedition on which he is bound, he finds it easy to transport with him the stock from which he derives his subsistence. The whole people is an army; the whole year a march. Such was the state of society which facilitated the gigantic conquests of Attila and Tamerlane.

But a people which subsists by the cultivation of the earth is in a very different situation. The husbandman is bound to the soil on which he labours. A long campaign would be ruinous to him. Still his pursuits are such as give to his frame both the active and the passive strength necessary to a soldier. Nor do they, at least in the infancy of agricultural science, demand his uninterrupted attention. At particular times of the year he is almost wholly unemployed, and can, without injury to himself, afford the time necessary for a short expedition. Thus the legions of Rome were supplied during its earlier wars. The season during which the fields did not require the presence of the cultivators sufficed for a short inroad and a battle. These operations, too frequently interrupted to produce 281decisive results, yet served to keep up among the people a degree of discipline and courage which rendered them, not only secure, but formidable. The archers and billmen of the middle ages, who, with provisions for forty days at their backs, left the fields for the camp, were troops of the same description.

But when commerce and manufactures begin to flourish a great change takes place. The sedentary habits of the desk and the loom render the exertions and hardships of war insupportable. The business of traders and artisans requires their constant presence and attention. In such a community there is little superfluous time; but there is generally much superfluous money. Some members of the society are, therefore, hired to relieve the rest from a task inconsistent with their habits and engagements.

The history of Greece is, in this, as in many other respects, the best commentary on the history of Italy. Five hundred years before the Christian era, the citizens of the republics round the Ægean Sea formed perhaps the finest militia that ever existed. As wealth and refinement advanced, the system underwent a gradual alteration. The Ionian States were the first in which commerce and the arts were cultivated, and the first in which the ancient discipline decayed. Within eighty years after the battle of Platæa, mercenary troops were every where plying for battles and sieges. In the time of Demosthenes, it was scarcely possible to persuade or compel the Athenians to enlist for foreign service. The laws of Lycurgus prohibited trade and manufactures. The Spartans, therefore, continued to form a national force long after their neighbours had begun to hire soldiers. But their military spirit declined with their singular institutions. In 282the second century before Christ, Greece contained only one nation of warriors, the savage highlanders of Ætolia, who were some generations behind their countrymen in civilisation and intelligence.

All the causes which produced these effects among the Greeks acted still more strongly on the modern Italians. Instead of a power like Sparta, in its nature warlike, they had amongst them an ecclesiastical state, in its nature pacific. Where there are numerous slaves, every freeman is induced by the strongest motives to familiarise himself with the use of arms. The commonwealths of Italy did not, like those of Greece, swarm with thousands of these household enemies. Lastly, the mode in which military operations were conducted during the prosperous times of Italy was peculiarly unfavourable to the formation of an efficient militia. Men covered with iron from head to foot, armed with ponderous lances, and mounted on horses of the largest breed, were considered as composing the strength of an army. The infantry was regarded as comparatively worthless, and was neglected till it became really so. These tactics maintained their ground for centuries in most parts of Europe. That foot soldiers could withstand the charge of heavy cavalry was thought utterly impossible, till, towards the close of the fifteenth century, the rude mountaineers of Switzerland dissolved the spell, and astounded the most experienced generals by receiving the dreaded shock on an impenetrable forest of pikes.

The use of the Grecian spear, the Roman sword, or the modern bayonet, might be acquired with comparative ease. But nothing short of the daily exercise of years could train the man at arms to support his ponderous panoply, and manage his unwieldy weapon. Throughout 283Europe this most important branch of war became a separate profession. Beyond the Alps, indeed, though a profession, it was not generally a trade. It was the duty and the amusement of a large class of country gentlemen. It was the service by which they held their lands, and the diversion by which, in the absence of mental resources, they beguiled their leisure. But in the Northern States of Italy, as we have already remarked, the growing power of the cities, where it had not exterminated this order of men, had completely changed their habits. Here, therefore, the practice of employing mercenaries became universal, at a time when it was almost unknown in other countries.

When war becomes the trade of a separate class, the least dangerous course left to a government is to form that class into a standing army. It is scarcely possible, that men can pass their lives in the service of one state, without feeling some interest in its greatness. Its victories are their victories. Its defeats are their defeats. The contract loses something of its mercantile character. The services of the soldier are considered as the effects of patriotic zeal, his pay as the tribute of national gratitude. To betray the power which employs him, to be even remiss in its service, are in his eyes the most atrocious and degrading of crimes.

When the princes and commonwealths of Italy began to use hired troops, their wisest course would have been to form separate military establishments. Unhappily this was not done. The mercenary warriors of the Peninsula, instead of being attached to the service of different powers, were regarded as the common property of all. The connection between the state and its defenders was reduced to the most simple and naked traffic. The adventurer brought his horse, 284his weapons, his strength, and his experience, into the market. Whether the King of Naples or the Duke of Milan, the Pope or the Signory of Florence, struck the bargain, was to him a matter of perfect indifference. He was for the highest wages and the longest term. When the campaign for which he had contracted was finished, there was neither law nor punctilio to prevent him from instantly turning his arms against his late masters. The soldier was altogether disjoined from the citizen and from the subject.

The natural consequences followed. Left to the conduct of men who neither loved those whom they defended, nor hated those whom they opposed, who were often bound by stronger ties to the army against which they fought than to the state which they served, who lost by the termination of the conflict, and gained by its prolongation, war completely changed its character. Every man came into the field of battle impressed with the knowledge that, in a few days, he might be taking the pay of the power against which he was then employed, and fighting by the side of his enemies against his associates. The strongest interests and the strongest feelings concurred to mitigate the hostility of those who had lately been brethren in arms, and who might soon be brethren in arms once more. Their common profession was a bond of union not to be forgotten even when they were engaged in the service of contending parties. Hence it was that operations, languid and indecisive beyond any recorded in history, marches and countermarches, pillaging expeditions and blockades, bloodless capitulations and equally bloodless combats, make up the military history of Italy during the course of nearly two centuries. Mighty armies fight from sunrise to sunset. A great 285victory is won. Thousands of prisoners are taken; and hardly a life is lost. A pitched battle seems to have been really less dangerous than an ordinary civil tumult.

Courage was now no longer necessary even to the military character. Men grew old in camps, and acquired the highest renown by their warlike achievements, without being once required to face serious danger. The political consequences are too well known. The richest and most enlightened part of the world was left undefended to the assaults of every barbarous invader, to the brutality of Switzerland, the insolence of France, and the fierce rapacity of Arragon. The moral effects which followed from this state of things were still more remarkable.

Among the rude nations which lay beyond the Alps, valour was absolutely indispensable. Without it none could be eminent; few could be secure. Cowardice was, therefore, naturally considered as the foulest reproach. Among the polished Italians, enriched by commerce, governed by law, and passionately attached to literature, every thing was done by superiority of intelligence. Their very wars, more pacific than the peace of their neighbours, required rather civil than military qualifications. Hence, while courage was the point of honour in other countries, ingenuity became the point of honour in Italy.

From these principles were deduced, by processes strictly analogous, two opposite systems of fashionable morality. Through the greater part of Europe, the vices which peculiarly belong to timid dispositions, and which are the natural defence of weakness, fraud, and hypocrisy, have always been most disreputable. On the other hand, the excesses of haughty and daring 286spirits have been treated with indulgence, and even with respect. The Italians regarded with corresponding lenity those crimes which require self-command, address, quick observation, fertile invention, and profound knowledge of human nature.

Such a prince as our Henry the Fifth would have been the idol of the North. The follies of his youth, the selfish ambition of his manhood, the Lollards roasted at slow fires, the prisoners massacred on the field of battle, the expiring lease of priestcraft renewed for another century, the dreadful legacy of a causeless and hopeless war bequeathed to a people who had no interest in its event, every thing is forgotten but the victory of Agincourt. Francis Sforza, on the other hand, was the model of Italian heroes. He made his employers and his rivals alike his tools. He first overpowered his open enemies by the help of faithless allies; he then armed himself against his allies with the spoils taken from his enemies. By his incomparable dexterity, he raised himself from the precarious and dependent situation of a military adventurer to the first throne of Italy. To such a man much was forgiven, hollow friendship, ungenerous enmity, violated faith. Such are the opposite errors which men commit, when their morality is not a science but a taste, when they abandon eternal principles for accidental associations.

We have illustrated our meaning by an instance taken from history. We will select another from fiction. Othello murders his wife; he gives orders for the murder of his lieutenant; he ends by murdering himself. Yet he never loses the esteem and affection of Northern readers. His intrepid and ardent spirit redeems every thing. The unsuspecting confidence 287with which he listens to his adviser, the agony with which he shrinks from the thought of shame, the tempest of passion with which he commits his crimes, and the haughty fearlessness with which he avows them, give an extraordinary interest to his character. Iago, on the contrary, is the object of universal loathing. Many are inclined to suspect that Shakspeare has been seduced into an exaggeration unusual with him, and has drawn a monster who has no archetype in human nature. Now we suspect that an Italian audience in the fifteenth century would have felt very differently. Othello would have inspired nothing but detestation and contempt. The folly with which he trusts the friendly professions of a man whose promotion he had obstructed, the credulity with which he takes unsupported assertions, and trivial circumstances, for unanswerable proofs, the violence with which he silences the exculpation till the exculpation can only aggravate his misery, would have excited the abhorrence and disgust of the spectators. The conduct of Iago they would assuredly have condemned; but they would have condemned it as we condemn that of his victim. Something of interest and respect would have mingled with their disapprobation. The readiness of the traitor’s wit, the clearness of his judgment, the skill with which he penetrates the dispositions of others and conceals his own, would have insured to him a certain portion of their esteem.

So wide was the difference between the Italians and their neighbours. A similar difference existed between the Greeks of the second century before Christ, and their masters the Romans. The conquerors, brave and resolute, faithful to their engagements, and strongly influenced by religious feelings, were, at the same time. 288ignorant, arbitrary, and cruel. With the vanquished people were deposited all the art, the science, and the literature of the Western world. In poetry, in philosophy, in painting, in architecture, in sculpture, they had no rivals. Their manners were polished, their perceptions acute, their invention ready; they were tolerant, affable, humane; but of courage and sincerity they were almost utterly destitute. Every rude centurion consoled himself for his intellectual inferiority, by remarking that knowledge and taste seemed only to make men atheists, cowards, and slaves. The distinction long continued to be strongly marked, and furnished an admirable subject for the fierce sarcasms of Juvenal.

The citizen of an Italian commonwealth was the Greek of the time of Juvenal and the Greek of the time of Pericles, joined in one. Like the former, he was timid and pliable, artful and mean. But, like the latter, he had a country. Its independence and prosperity were dear to him. If his character were degraded by some base crimes, it was, on the other hand, ennobled by public spirit and by an honourable ambition.

A vice sanctioned by the general opinion is merely a vice. The evil terminates in itself. A vice condemned by the general opinion produces a pernicious effect on the whole character. The former is a local malady, the latter a constitutional taint. When the reputation of the offender is lost, he too often flings the remains of his virtue after it in despair. The Highland gentleman who, a century ago, lived by taking black mail from his neighbours, committed the same crime for which Wild was accompanied to Tyburn by the huzzas of two hundred thousand people. 289But there can be no doubt that he was a much less depraved man than Wild. The deed for which Mrs. Brownrigg was hanged sinks into nothing, when compared with the conduct of the Roman who treated the public to a hundred pair of gladiators. Yet we should greatly wrong such a Roman if we supposed that his disposition was as cruel as that of Mrs. Brownrigg.

In our own country, a woman forfeits her place in society by what, in a man, is too commonly considered as an honourable distinction, and, at worst, as a venial error. The consequence is notorious. The moral principle of a woman is frequently more impaired by a single lapse from virtue than that of a man by twenty years of intrigues. Classical antiquity would furnish us with instances stronger, if possible, than those to which we have referred.

We must apply this principle to the case before us. Habits of dissimulation and falsehood, no doubt, mark a man of our age and country as utterly worthless and abandoned. But it by no means follows that a similar judgment would be just in the case of an Italian in the middle ages. On the contrary, we frequently find those faults which we are accustomed to consider as certain indications of a mind altogether depraved, in company with great and good qualities, with generosity, with benevolence, with disinterestedness. From such a state of society, Palamedes, in the admirable dialogue of Hume, might have drawn illustrations of his theory as striking as any of those with which Fourli furnished him. These are not, we well know, the lessons which historians are generally most careful to teach, or readers most willing to learn. But they are not therefore useless. How Philip disposed his troops at Cheronea, where Hannibal crossed the Alps, whether Mary blew 290up Darnley, or Siquier shot Charles the Twelfth, and ten thousand other questions of the same description, are in themselves unimportant. The inquiry may amuse us, but the decision leaves us no wiser. He alone reads history aright who, observing how powerfully circumstances influence the feelings and opinions of men, how often vices pass into virtues and paradoxes into axioms, learns to distinguish what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.

In this respect no history suggests more important reflections than that of the Tuscan and Lombard commonwealths. The character of the Italian statesman seems, at first sight, a collection of contradictions, a phantom as monstrous as the portress of hell in Milton, half divinity, half snake, majestic and beautiful above, grovelling and poisonous below. We see a man whose thoughts and words have no connection with each other, who never hesitates at an oath when he wishes to seduce, who never wants a pretext when he is inclined to betray. His cruelties spring, not from the heat of blood, or the insanity of uncontrolled power, but from deep and cool meditation. His passions, like well-trained troops, are impetuous by rule, and in their most headstrong fury never forget the discipline to which they have been accustomed. His whole soul is occupied with vast and complicated schemes of ambition: yet his aspect and language exhibit nothing but philosophical moderation. Hatred and revenge eat into his heart: yet every look is a cordial smile, every gesture a familiar caress. He never excites the suspicion of his adversaries by petty provocations. His purpose is disclosed only when it is accomplished. His face is unruffled, his speech is courteous, till vigilance is laid 291asleep, till a vital point is exposed, till a sure aim is taken; and then he strikes for the first and last time. Military courage, the boast of the sottish German, of the frivolous and prating Frenchman, of the romantic and arrogant Spaniard, he neither possesses nor values. He shuns danger, not because he is insensible to shame, but because, in the society in which he lives, timidity has ceased to be shameful. To do an injury openly is, in his estimation, as wicked as to do it secretly, and far less profitable. With him the most honourable means are those which are the surest, the speediest, and the darkest. He cannot comprehend how a man should scruple to deceive those whom he does not scruple to destroy. He would think it madness to declare open hostilities against rivals whom he might stab in a friendly embrace, or poison in a consecrated wafer.

Yet this man, black with the vices which we consider as most loathsome, traitor, hypocrite, coward, assassin, was by no means destitute even of those virtues which we generally consider as indicating superior elevation of character. In civil courage, in perseverance, in presence of mind, those barbarous warriors, who were foremost in the battle or the breach, were far his inferiors. Even the dangers which he avoided with a caution almost pusillanimous never confused his perceptions, never paralysed his inventive faculties, never wrung out one secret from his smooth tongue, and his inscrutable brow. Though a dangerous enemy, and a still more dangerous accomplice, he could be a just and beneficent ruler. With so much unfairness in his policy, there was an extraordinary degree of fairness in his intellect. Indifferent to truth in the transactions of life, he was honestly devoted to truth in the researches of speculation. Wanton cruelty was not in his nature. 292On the contrary, where no political object was at stake, his disposition was soft and humane. The susceptibility of his nerves and the activity of his imagination inclined him to sympathise with the feelings of others, and to delight in the charities and courtesies of social life. Perpetually descending to actions which might seem to mark a mind diseased through all its faculties, he had nevertheless an exquisite sensibility, both for the natural and the moral sublime, for every graceful and every lofty conception. Habits of petty intrigue and dissimulation might have rendered him incapable of great general views, but that the expanding effect of his philosophical studies counteracted the narrowing tendency. He had the keenest enjoyment of wit, eloquence, and poetry. The fine arts profited alike by the severity of his judgment, and by the liberality of his patronage. The portraits of some of the remarkable Italians of those times are perfectly in harmony with this description. Ample and majestic ^ foreheads, brows strong and dark, but not frowning, eyes of which the calm full gaze, while it expresses nothing, seems to discern every thing, cheeks pale with thought and sedentary habits, lips formed with feminine delicacy, but compressed with more than masculine decision, mark out men at once enterprising and timid, men equally skilled in detecting the purposes of others, and in concealing their own, men who must have been formidable enemies and unsafe allies, but men, at the same time, whose tempers were mild and equable, and who possessed an amplitude and subtlety of intellect which would have rendered them eminent either in active or in contemplative life, and fitted them either to govern or to instruct mankind.

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic 293vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals, with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors. Nor is this all. Posterity, that high court of appeal which is never tired of eulogising its own justice and discernment, acts on such occasions like a Roman dictator after a general mutiny. Finding the delinquents too numerous to be all punished, it selects some of them at hazard, to hear the whole penalty of an offence in which they are not more deeply implicated than those who escape. Whether decimation be a convenient mode of military execution, we know not; but we solemnly protest against the introduction of such a principle into the philosophy of history.

In the present instance, the lot has fallen on Machavelli, a man whose public conduct was upright and honourable, whose views of morality, where they differed from those of the persons around him, seemed to have differed for the better, and whose only fault was, that, having adopted some of the maxims then generally received, he arranged them more luminously, and expressed them more forcibly, than any other writer.

Having now, we hope, in some degree cleared the personal character of Machiavelli, we come to the consideration of his works. As a poet he is not entitled to a high place; but his comedies deserve attention.

The Mandragola, in particular, is superior to the best of Goldoni, and inferior only to the best of Molière. It is the work of a man who, if he had devoted himself to the drama, would probably have attained 294the highest eminence, and produced a permanent and salutary effect on the national taste. This we infer, not so much from the degree, as from the kind of its excellence. There are compositions which indicate still greater talent, and which are perused with still greater delight, from which we should have drawn very different conclusions. Books quite worthless are quite harmless. The sure sign of the general decline of an art is the frequent occurrence, not of deformity, but of misplaced beauty. In general, Tragedy is corrupted by eloquence, and Comedy by wit.

The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character. This, we conceive, is no arbitrary canon, originating in local and temporary associations, like those canons which regulate the number of acts in a play, or of syllables in a line. To this fundamental law every other regulation is subordinate. The situations which most signally develop character form the best plot. The mother tongue of the passions is the best style.

This principle, rightly understood, does not debar the poet from any grace of composition. There is no style in which some man may not, under some circumstances, express himself. There is therefore no style which the drama rejects, none which it does not occasionally require. It is in the discernment of place, of time, and of person, that the inferior artists fail. The fantastic rhapsody of Mercutio, the elaborate declamation of Antony, are, where Shakspeare has placed them, natural and pleasing. But Dryden would have made Mer-cutio challenge Tybalt in hyperboles as fanciful as those in which he describes the chariot of Mab. Corneille would have represented Antony as scolding and coaxing Cleopatra with all the measured rhetoric of a funeral oration. 295No writers have injured the Comedy of England so deeply as Congreve and Sheridan. Both were men of splendid wit and polished taste. Unhappily, they made all their characters in their own likeness. Their works bear the same relation to the legitimate drama, which a transparency bears to a painting. There are no delicate touches, no hues imperceptibly fading into each other: the whole is lighted up with an universal glare. Outlines and tints are forgotten in the common blaze whicli illuminates all. The flowers and fruits of the intellect abound; but it is the abundance of a jungle, not of a garden, unwholesome, bewildering, unprofitable from its very plenty, rank from its very fragrance. Every fop, every boor, every valet, is a man of wit. The very butts and dupes, Tattle, Witwould, Puff, Acres, outshine the whole Hotel of Rambouillet. To prove the whole system of this school erroneous, it is only necessary to apply the test which dissolved the enchanted Florimel, to place the true by the false Thalia, to contrast the most celebrated characters which have been drawn by the writers of whom we speak with the Bastard in King John, or the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. It was not surely from want of wit that Shakspeare adopted so different a manner. Benedick and Beatrice throw Mirabel and Millamant into the shade. All the good sayings of the facetious houses of Absolute and Surface might have been clipped from the single character of Falstaff without being missed. It would have been easy for that fertile mind to have given Bardolph and Shallow as much wit as Prince Hal, and to have made Dogberry and Verges retort on each other in sparkling epigrams. But he knew that such indiscriminate prodigality was, to use his own admirable language, “from the purpose of playing, whose end, 296both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as it were, the mirror up to Nature.”

This digression will enable our readers to understand what we mean when we say that in the Mandragola, Machiavelli has proved that he completely understood the nature of the dramatic art, and possessed talents which would have enabled him to excel in it. By the correct and vigorous delineation of human nature, it produces interest without a pleasing or skilful plot, and laughter without the least ambition of wit. The lover, not a very delicate or generous lover, and his adviser the parasite, are drawn with spirit. The hypocritical confessor is an admirable portrait. He is, if we mistake not, the original of Father Dominic, the best comic character of Dryden. But old Nicias is the glory of the piece. We cannot call to mind any thing that resembles him. The follies which Molière ridicules are those of affectation, not those of fatuity. Coxcombs and pedants, not absolute simpletons, are his game. Shakspeare has indeed a vast assortment of fools; but the precise species of which we speak is not, if we remember right, to be found there. Shallow is a fool. But his animal spirits supply, to a certain degree, the place of cleverness. His talk is to that of Sir John what soda water is to champagne. It has the effervescence though not the body or the flavour. Slender and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are fools, troubled with an uneasy consciousness of their folly, which, in the latter produces meekness and docility, and in the former, awkwardness, obstinacy, and confusion. Cloten is an arrogant fool, Osric a foppish fool, Ajax a savage fool; but Nicias is, as Thersites says of Patroclus, a fool positive. His mind is occupied by no strong feeling; it takes every character, and retains none; its aspect is 297diversified, not by passions, but by faint and transitory semblances of passion, a mock joy, a mock fear, a mock love, a mock pride, which chase each other like shadows over its surface, and vanish as soon as they appear. He is just idiot enough to be an object, not of pity or horror, but of ridicule. He bears some resemblance to poor Calandrino, whose mishaps, as recounted by Boccaccio, have made all Europe merry for more than four centuries. He perhaps resembles still more closely Simon da Villa, to whom Bruno and Buffalmacco promised the love of the Countess Civilian. Nicias is, like Simon, of a learned profession; and the dignity with which he wears the doctoral fur, renders his absurdities infinitely more grotesque. The old Tuscan is the very language for such a being. Its peculiar simplicity gives even to the most forcible reasoning and the most brilliant wit an infantine air, generally delightful, but to a foreign reader sometimes a little ludicrous. Heroes and statesmen seem to lisp when they use it. It becomes Nicias incomparably, and renders all his silliness infinitely more silly.

We may add, that the verses with which the Man-dragola is interspersed, appear to us to be the most spirited and correct of all that Machiavelli has written in metre. He seems to have entertained the same opinion; for he has introduced some of them in other places. The contemporaries of the author were not blind to the merits of this striking piece. It was acted at Florence with the greatest success. Leo the Tenth was among its admirers, and by his order it was represented at Rome. (1)

     (1) Nothing can be more evident than that Paulus Jovius
     designates the Mandragola under the name of the Nicias. We
     should not have noticed what is so perfectly obvious, were
     it not that this natural and palpable misnomer has led the
     sagacious and industrious Bayle into a gross error.

298The Clizia is an imitation of the Casina of Plautus, which is itself an imitation of the lost (work) of Diphilus. Plautus was, unquestionably, one of the best Latin writers; but the Casina is by no means one of his best plays; nor is it one which offers great facilities to an imitator. The story is as alien from modern habits of life, as the manner in which it is developed from the modern fashion of composition. The lover remains in the country and the heroine in her chamber during the whole action, leaving; their fate to be decided by a foolish father, a cunning mother, and two knavish servants. Machiavelli has executed his task with judgment and taste. He has accommodated the plot to a different state of society, and has very dexterously connected it with the history of his own times. The relation of the trick put on the doting old lover is exquisitely humorous. It is far superior to the corresponding passage in the Latin comedy, and scarcely yields to the account which Falstaff gives of his ducking.

Two other comedies without titles, the one in prose, the other in verse, appear among the works of Machiavelli. The former is very short, lively enough, but of no great value. The latter we can scarcely believe to be genuine. Neither its merits nor its defects remind us of the reputed author. It was first printed in 1796, from a manuscript discovered in the celebrated library of the Strozzi. Its genuineness, if we have been rightly informed, is established solely by the comparison of hands. Our suspicions are strengthened by the circumstance, that the same manuscript contained a description of the plague of 1527, which has also, in consequence, been added to the works of Machiavelli. Of this last composition, the strongest 299external evidence would scarcely induce us to believe him guilty. Nothing was ever written more detestable in matter and manner. The narrations, the reflections, the jokes, the lamentations, are all the very worst of their respective kinds, at once trite and affected, threadbare tinsel from the Rag Fairs and Monmouth Streets of literature. A foolish schoolboy might write such a piece, and, after he had written it, think it much finer than the incomparable introduction of the Decameron. But that a shrewd statesman, whose earliest works are characterised by manliness of thought and language, should, at near sixty years of age, descend to such puerility, is utterly inconceivable.

The little novel of Belphegor is pleasantly conceived, and pleasantly told. But the extravagance of the satire in some measure injures its effect. Machiavelli was unhappily married; and his wish to avenge his own cause and that of his brethren in misfortune, carried him beyond even the licence of fiction. Jonson seems to have combined some hints taken from this tale, with others from Boccaccio, in the plot of The Devil is an Ass, a play which, though not the most highly finished of his compositions, is perhaps that which exhibits the strongest proofs of genius.

The political correspondence of Machiavelli, first published in 1767, is unquestionably genuine, and highly valuable. The unhappy circumstances in which his country was placed during the greater part of his public life gave extraordinary encouragement to diplomatic talents. From the moment that Charles the Eighth descended from the Alps, the whole character of Italian politics was changed. The governments of the Peninsula ceased to form an independent system. Drawn from their old orbit by the attraction of the 300larger bodies which now approached them, they became mere satellites of France and Spain. All their disputes, internal and external, were decided by foreign influence. The contests of opposite factions were carried on, not as formerly in the senate-house or in the market-place, but in the antechambers of Louis and Ferdinand. Under these circumstances, the prosperity of the Italian States depended far more on the ability of their foreign agents, than on the conduct of those who were intrusted with the domestic administration. The ambassador had to discharge functions far more delicate than transmitting orders of knighthood, introducing tourists, or presenting his brethren with the homage of his high consideration. He was an advocate to whose management the dearest interests of his clients were intrusted, a spy clothed with an inviolable character. Instead of consulting, by a reserved manner and ambiguous style, the dignity of those whom he represented, he was to plunge into all the intrigues of the court at which he resided, to discover and flatter every weakness of the prince, and of the favourite who governed the prince, and of the lacquey who governed the favourite. He was to compliment the mistress and bribe the confessor, to panegyrize or supplicate, to laugh or weep, to accommodate himself to every caprice, to lull every suspicion, to treasure every hint, to be every thing, to observe every thing, to endure every thing. High as the art of political intrigue had been carried in Italy, these were times which required it all.

On these arduous errands Machiavelli was frequently employed. He was sent to treat with the King of the Romans and with the Duke of Valentinois. He was twice ambassador at the Court of Rome, and thrice at 301that of France. In these missions, and in several others of inferior importance, he acquitted himself with great dexterity. His despatches form one of the most amusing and instructive collections extant. The narratives are clear and agreeably written; the remarks on men and things clever and judicious. The conversations are reported in a spirited and characteristic manner. We find ourselves introduced into the presence of the men who, during twenty eventful years, swayed the destinies of Europe. Their wit and their folly, their fretfulness and their merriment, are exposed to us. We are admitted to overhear their chat, and to watch their familiar gestures. It is interesting and curious to recognise, in circumstances which elude the notice of historians, the feeble violence and shallow cunning of Louis the Twelfth; the bustling insignificance of Maximilian, cursed with an impotent pruriency for renown, rash yet timid, obstinate yet fickle, always in a hurry, yet always too late; the fierce and haughty energy which gave dignity to the eccentricities of Julius; the soft and graceful manners which masked the insatiable ambition and the implacable hatred of Cæsar Borgia.

We have mentioned Cæsar Borgia. It is impossible not to pause for a moment on the name of a man in whom the political morality of Italy was so strongly personified, partially blended with the sterner lineaments of the Spanish character. On two important occasions Machiavelli was admitted to his society; once, at the moment when Cæsar’s splendid villany achieved its most signal triumph, when he caught in one snare and crushed at one blow all his most formidable rivals; and again when, exhausted by disease and overwhelmed by misfortunes, which no human prudence 302could have averted, he was the prisoner of the deadliest enemy of his house. These interviews between the greatest speculative and the greatest practical statesmen of the age are folly described in the Correspondence, and form perhaps the most interesting part of it. From some passages in The Prince, and perhaps also from some indistinct traditions, several writers have supposed a connection between those remarkable men much closer than ever existed. The Envoy has even been accused of prompting the crimes of the artful and merciless tyrant. But from the official documents it is clear that their intercourse, though ostensibly amicable, was in reality hostile. It cannot be doubted, however, that the imagination of Machiavelli was strongly impressed, and his speculations on government coloured, by the observations which he made on the singular character and equally singular fortunes of a man who under such disadvantages had achieved such exploits; who, when sensuality, varied through innumerable forms, could no longer stimulate his sated mind, found a more powerful and durable excitement in the intense thirst of empire and revenge; who emerged from the sloth and luxury of the Roman purple the first prince and general of the age; who, trained in an unwarlike profession, formed a gallant army out of the dregs of an unwarlike people; who, after acquiring sovereignty by destroying his enemies, acquired popularity by destroying his tools; who had begun to employ for the most salutary ends the power which he had attained by the most atrocious means; who tolerated within the sphere of his iron despotism no plunderer or oppressor but himself; and who fell at last amidst the mingled curses and regrets of a people of whom his genius had been the wonder, and might 303have been the salvation. Some of those crimes of Borgia which to ns appear the most odious would not, from causes which we have already considered, have struck an Italian of the fifteenth century with equal horror. Patriotic feeling also might induce Machiavelli to look with some indulgence and regret on the o o memory of the only leader who could have defended the independence of Italy against the confederate spoilers of Cambray.

On this subject Machiavelli felt most strongly. Indeed the expulsion of the foreign tyrants, and the restoration of that golden age which had preceded the irruption of Charles the Eighth, were projects which, at that time, fascinated all the master-spirits of Italy. The magnificent vision delighted the great but ill-regulated mind of Julius. It divided with manuscripts and sauces, painters and falcons, the attention of the frivolous Leo. It prompted the generous treason of Morone. It imparted a transient energy to the feeble mind and body of the last Sforza. It excited for one moment an honest ambition in the false heart of Pescara. Ferocity and insolence were not among the vices of the national character. To the discriminating Cruelties of politicians, committed for great ends on select victims, the moral code of the Italians was too indulgent. But though they might have recourse to barbarity as an expedient, they did not require it as a stimulant. They turned with loathing from the atrocity of the strangers who seemed to love blood for its own sake, who, not content with subjugating, were impatient to destroy, who found a fiendish pleasure in razing magnificent cities, cutting the throats of enemies who cried for quarter, or suffocating an unarmed population by thousands in the caverns to which it had fled 304for safety. Such were the cruelties which daily excited the terror and disgust of a people among whom, till lately, the worst that a soldier had to fear in a pitched battle was the loss of his horse and the expense of his ransom. The swinish intemperance of Switzerland, the wolfish avarice of Spain, the gross licentiousness of the French, indulged in violation of hospitality, of decency, of love itself, the wanton inhumanity which was common to all the invaders, had made them objects of deadly hatred to the inhabitants of the Peninsula. The wealth which had been accumulated during centuries of prosperity and repose was rapidly melting away. The intellectual superiority of the oppressed people only rendered them more keenly sensible of their political degradation. Literature and taste, indeed, still disguised with a flush of hectic loveliness and brilliancy the ravages of an incurable decay. The iron had not yet entered into the soul. The time was not yet come when eloquence was to be gagged, and reason to be hoodwinked, when the harp of the poet was to be hung on the willows of Arno, and the right hand of the painter to forget its cunning. Yet a discerning eye might even then have seen that genius and learning would not long survive the state of things from which they had sprung, and that the great men whose talents gave lustre to that melancholy period had been formed under the influence of happier days, and would leave no successors behind them. The times which shine with the greatest splendour in literary history are not always those to which the human mind is most indebted. Of this we may be convinced, by comparing the generation which follows them with that which had preceded them. The first fruits which are reaped under a bad system often spring from seed 305sown under a good one. Thus it was, in some measure, with the Augustan age. Thus it was with the age of Raphael and Ariosto, of Aldus and Vida.

Machiavelli deeply regretted the misfortunes of his country, and clearly discerned the cause and the remedy. It was the military system of the Italian people which had extinguished their valor and discipline, and left their wealth an easy prey to every foreign plunderer. The Secretary projected a scheme alike honourable to his heart and to his intellect, for abolishing the use of mercenary troops, and for organizing a national militia.

The exertions which he made to effect this great object ought alone to rescue his name from obloquy. Though his situation and his habits were pacific, he studied with intense assiduity the theory of war. He made himself master of all its details. The Florentine government entered into his views. A council of war was appointed. Levies were decreed. The indefatigable minister flew from place to place in order to superintend the execution of his design. The times were, in some respects, favourable to the experiment. The system of military tactics had undergone a great revolution. The cavalry was no longer considered as forming the strength of an army. The hours which a citizen could spare from his ordinary employments, though by no means sufficient to familiarise him with the exercise of a man-at-arms, might render him an useful foot-soldier. The dread of a foreign yoke, of plunder, massacre, and conflagration, might have conquered that repugnance to military pursuits which both the industry and the idleness of great towns commonly generate. For a time the scheme promised well. The new troops acquitted themselves respectably in the 306field. Machiavelli looked with parental rapture on the success of his plan, and began to hope that the arms of Italy might once more be formidable to the barbarians of the Tagus and the Rhine. But the tide of misfortune came on before the barriers which should have withstood it were prepared. For a time, indeed, Florence might be considered as peculiarly fortunate. Famine and sword and pestilence had devastated the fertile plains and stately cities of the Po. All the curses denounced of old against Tyre seemed to have fallen on Venice. Her merchants already stood afar off, lamenting for their great city. The time seemed near when the sea-weed should overgrow her silent Rialto, and the fisherman wash his nets in her deserted arsenal. Naples had been four times conquered and reconquered by tyrants equally indifferent to its welfare, and equally greedy for its spoils. Florence, as yet, had only to endure degradation and extortion, to submit to the mandates of foreign powers, to buy over and over again, at an enormous price, what was already justly her own, to return thanks for being wronged, and to ask pardon for being in the right. She was at length deprived of the blessings even of this infamous and servile repose. Her military and political institutions were swept away together. The Medici returned, in the train of foreign invaders, from their long exile. The policy of Machiavelli was abandoned; and his public services were requited with poverty, imprisonment, and torture.

The fallen statesman still clung to his project with unabated ardour. With the view of vindicating it from some popular objections and of refuting some prevailing errors on the subject of military science, he wrote his seven books on the Art of War. This excellent 307work is in the form of a dialogue. The opinions of the writer are put into the mouth of Fabrizio Colonna, a powerful nobleman of the Ecclesiastical State, and an officer of distinguished merit in the service of the King of Spain. Colonna visits Florence on his way from Lombardy to his own domains. He is invited to meet some friends at the house of Cosimo Rucellai, an amiable and accomplished young man, whose early death Machiavelli feelingly deplores. After partaking of an elegant entertainment, they retire from the heat into the most shady recesses of the garden. Fabrizio is struck by the sight of some uncommon plants. Cosimo says that, though rare, in modern days, they are frequently mentioned by the classical authors, and that his grandfather, like many other Italians, amused himself with practising the ancient methods of gardening. Fabrizio expresses his regret that those who, in later times, affected the manners of the old Romans should select for imitation the most trifling pursuits. This leads to a conversation on the decline of military discipline and on the best means of restoring it. The institution of the Florentine militia is ably defended; and several improvements are suggested in the details.

The Swiss and the Spaniards were, at that time, regarded as the best soldiers in Europe. The Swiss battalion consisted of pikemen, and bore a close resemblance to the Greek phalanx. The Spaniards, like the soldiers of Rome, were armed with the sword and the shield. The victories of Flamininus and Æmilius over the Macedonian kings seem to prove the superiority of the weapons used by the legions. The same experiment had been recently tried with the same result at the battle of Ravenna, one of those 308tremendous days into which human folly and wickedness compress the whole devastation of a famine or a plague. In that memorable conflict, the infantry of Arragon, the old companions of Gonsalvo, deserted by all their allies, hewed a passage through the thickest of the imperial pikes, and effected an unbroken retreat, in the face of the gendarmerie of De Foix, and the renowned artillery of Este. Fabrizio, or rather Machiavelli, proposes to combine the two systems, to arm the foremost lines with the pike for the purpose of repulsing cavalry, and those in the rear with the sword, as being a weapon better adapted for every other purpose. Throughout the work, the author expresses the highest admiration of the military science of the ancient Romans, and the greatest contempt for the maxims which had been in vogue amongst the Italian commanders of the preceding generation. He prefers infantry to cavalry, and fortified camps to fortified towns. He is inclined to substitute rapid movements and decisive engagements for the languid and dilatory operations of his countrymen. He attaches very little importance to the invention of gunpowder. Indeed he seems to think that it ought scarcely to produce any change in the mode of arming or of disposing troops. The general testimony of historians, it must be allowed, seems to prove that the ill-constructed and ill-served artillery of those times, though useful in a siege, was of little value on the field of battle.

Of the tactics of Machiavelli we will not venture to give an opinion: but we are certain that his book is most able and interesting. As a commentary on the history of his times, it is invaluable. The ingenuity, the grace, and the perspicuity of the style, and the 309eloquence and animation of particular passages, must give pleasure even to readers who take no interest in the subject.

The Prince and the Discourses on Livy were written after the fall of the Republican Government. The former was dedicated to the Young Lorenzo de’ Medici. This circumstance seems to have disgusted the contemporaries of the writer far more than the doctrines which have rendered the name of the work odious in later times. It was considered as an indication of political apostasy. The fact however seems to have been that Machiavelli, despairing of the liberty of Florence, was inclined to support any government which might preserve her independence. The interval which separated a democracy and a despotism, Soderini and Lorenzo, seemed to vanish when compared with the difference between the former and the present state of Italy, between the security, the opulence, and the repose which she had enjoyed under its native rulers, and the misery in which she had been plunged since the fatal year in which the first foreign tyrant had descended from the Alps. The noble and pathetic exhortation with which The Prince concludes shows how strongly the writer felt upon this subject.

The Prince traces the progress of an ambitious man, the Discourses the progress of an ambitious people. The same principles on which, in the former work, the elevation of an individual is explained, are applied in the latter, to the longer duration and more complex interest of a society. To a modern statesman the form of the Discourses may appear to be puerile. In truth Livy is not an historian on whom implicit reliance can be placed, even in cases where he must have possessed considerable means of 310information. And the first Decade, to which Machiavelli has confined himself, is scarcely entitled to more credit than our Chronicle of British Kings who reigned before the Roman invasion. But the commentator is indebted to Livy for little more than a few texts which he might as easily have extracted from the Vulgate or the Decameron. The whole train of thought is original.

On the peculiar immorality which has rendered The Prince unpopular, and which is almost equally discernible in the Discourses, we have already given our opinion at length. We have attempted to show that it belonged rather to the age than to the man, that it was a partial taint, and by no means implied general depravity. We cannot however deny that it is a great blemish, and that it considerably diminishes the pleasure which, in other respects, those works must afford to every intelligent mind.

It is, indeed, impossible to conceive a more healthful and vigorous constitution of the understanding than that which these works indicate. The qualities of the active and the contemplative statesman appear to have been blended in the mind of the writer into a rare and exquisite harmony. His skill in the details of business had not been acquired at the expense of his general powers. It had not rendered his mind less comprehensive; but it had served to correct his speculations, and to impart to them that vivid and practical character which so widely distinguishes them from the vague theories of most political philosophers.

Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so useless as a general maxim. If it be very moral and very true, it may serve for a copy to a charity-boy. If, like those of Rochefoucault, it be sparkling and whimsical, it may make an excellent 311motto for an essay. But few indeed of the many wise apophthegms which have been uttered, from the time of the Seven Sages of Greece to that of Poor Richard, have prevented a single foolish action. We give the highest and the most peculiar praise to the precepts of Machiavelli when we say that they may frequently be of real use in regulating conduct, not so much because they are more just or more profound than those which might be culled from other authors, as because they can be more readily applied to the problems of real life.

There are errors in these works. But they are errors which a writer, situated like Machiavelli, could scarcely avoid. They arise, for the most part, from a single defect which appears to us to pervade his whole system. In his political scheme, the means had been more deeply considered than the ends. The great principle, that societies and laws exist only for the purpose of increasing the sum of private happiness, is not recognised with sufficient clearness. The good of the body, distinct from the good of the members, and sometimes hardly compatible with the good of the members, seems to be the object which he proposes to himself. Of all political fallacies, this has perhaps had the widest and the most mischievous operation. The state of society in the little commonwealths of Greece, the close connection and mutual dependence of the citizens, and the severity of the laws of war, tended to encourage an opinion which, under such circumstances, could hardly be called erroneous. The interests of every individual were inseparably bound up with those of the state. An invasion destroyed his corn-fields and vineyards, drove him from his home, and compelled him to encounter all the hardships of a military 312life. A treaty of peace restored him to security and comfort. A victory doubled the number of his slaves. A defeat perhaps made him a slave himself. When Pericles, in the Peloponnesian war, told the Athenians, that, if their country triumphed, their private losses would speedily be repaired, but that, if their arms failed of success, every individual amongst them would probably be ruined, he spoke no more than the truth. He spoke to men whom the tribute of vanquished cities supplied with food and clothing, with the luxury of the bath and the amusements of the theatre, on whom the greatness of their country conferred rank, and before whom the members of less prosperous communities trembled; to men who, in case of a change in the public fortunes, would, at least, be deprived of every comfort and every distinction which they enjoyed. To be butchered on the smoking ruins of their city, to be dragged in chains to a slave-market, to see one child torn from them to dig in the quarries of Sicily, and another to guard the harems of Per-sepolis, these were the frequent and probable consequences of national calamities. Hence, among the Greeks, patriotism became a governing principle, or rather an ungovernable passion. Their legislators and their philosophers took it for granted that, in providing for the strength and greatness of the state, they sufficiently provided for the happiness of the people. The writers of the Roman empire lived under despots, into whose dominion a hundred nations were melted down, and whose gardens would have covered the little commonwealths of Plilius and Platæa. Yet they continued to employ the same language, and to cant about the duty of sacrificing every thing to a country to which they owed nothing. 313Causes similar to those which had influenced the disposition of the Greeks operated powerfully on the less vigorous and daring character of the Italians. The Italians, like the Greeks, were members of small communities. Every man was deeply interested in the welfare of the society to which he belonged, a partaker in its wealth and its poverty, in its glory and its shame. In the age of Machiavelli this was peculiarly the case. Public events had produced an immense sum of misery to private citizens. The Northern invaders had brought want to their boards, infamy to their beds, fire to their roofs, and the knife to their throats. It was natural that a man who lived in times like these should overrate the importance of those measures by which a nation is rendered formidable to its neighbours, and undervalue those which make it prosperous within itself.

Nothing is more remarkable in the political treatises of Machiavelli than the fairness of mind which they indicate. It appears where the author is in the wrong, almost as strongly as where he is in the right. He never advances a false opinion because it is new or splendid, because he can clothe it in a happy phrase, or defend it by an ingenious sophism. His errors are at once explained by a reference to the circumstances in which he was placed. They evidently were not sought out; they lay in his way, and could scarcely be avoided. Such mistakes must necessarily be committed by early speculators in every science.

In this respect it is amusing to compare The Prince and the Discourses with the Spirit of Laws. Montesquieu enjoys, perhaps, a wider celebrity than any political writer of modern Europe. Something he doubtless owes to his merit, but much more to his fortune. 314He had the good luck of a Valentine. He caught the eye of the French nation, at the moment when it was waking from the long sleep of political and religious bigotry; and, in consequence, he became a favourite. The English, at that time, considered a Frenchman who talked about constitutional checks and fundamental laws as a prodigy not less astonishing than the learned pig or the musical infant. Specious but shallow, studious of effect, indifferent to truth, eager to build a system, but careless of collecting those materials out of which alone a sound and durable system can be built, the lively President constructed theories as rapidly and as slightly as card-houses, no sooner projected than completed, no sooner completed than blown away, no sooner blown away than forgotten. Machiavelli errs only because his experience, acquired in a very peculiar state of society, could not always enable him to calculate the effect of institutions differing from those of which he had observed the operation. Montesquieu errs, because he has a fine thing to say, and is resolved to say it. If the phænomena which lie before him will not suit his purpose, all history must be ransacked. If nothing established by authentic testimony can be racked or chipped to suit his Procrustean hypothesis, he puts up with some monstrous fable about Siam, or Bantam, or Japan, told by writers compared with whom Lucian and Gulliver were veracious, liars by a double right, as travellers and as Jesuits.

Propriety of thought, and propriety of diction, are commonly found together. Obscurity and affectation are the two greatest faults of style. Obscurity of expression generally springs from confusion of ideas; and the same wish to dazzle at any cost which produces affectation in the manner of a writer, is likely to produce 315sophistry in his reasonings. The judicious and candid mind of Machiavelli shows itself in his luminous, manly, and polished language. The style of Montesquieu, on the other hand, indicates in every page a lively and ingenious, but an unsound mind. Every trick of expression, from the mysterious conciseness of an oracle to the flippancy of a Parisian coxcomb, is employed to disguise the fallacy of some positions, and the triteness of others. Absurdities are brightened into epigrams; truisms are darkened into enigmas. It is with difficulty that the strongest eye can sustain the glare with which some parts are illuminated, or penetrate the shade in which others are concealed.

The political works of Machiavelli derive a peculiar interest from the mournful earnestness which he manifests whenever he touches on topics connected with the calamities of his native land. It is difficult to conceive any situation more painful than that of a great man, condemned to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its dissolution, and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one, till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption. To this joyless and thankless duty was Machiavelli called. In the energetic language of the prophet, he was “mad for the sight of his eyes which he saw,” disunion in the council, effeminacy in the camp, liberty extinguished, commerce decaying, national honour sullied, an enlightened and flourishing people given over to the ferocity of ignorant savages. Though his opinions had not escaped the contagion of that political immorality which was common among his: countrymen, his natural disposition seems to have been 316rather stern and impetuous than pliant and artful. When the misery and degradation of Florence and the foul outrage which he had himself sustained recur to his mind the smooth craft of his profession and his nation is exchanged for the honest bitterness of scorn and anger. He speaks like one sick of the calamitous times and abject people among whom his lot is cast. He pines for the strength and glory of ancient Rome, for the fasces of Brutus and the sword of Scipio, the gravity of the curule chair, and the bloody pomp of the triumphal sacrifice. He seems to be transported back to the days when eight hundred thousand Italian warriors sprung to arms at the rumor of a Gallic invasion. He breathes all the spirit of those intrepid and haughty senators who forgot the dearest ties of nature in the claims of public duty, who looked with disdain on the elephants and on the gold of Pyrrhus, and listened with unaltered composure to the tremendous tidings of Cannae. Like an ancient temple deformed by the barbarous architecture of a later age, his character acquires an interest from the very circumstances which debase it. The original proportions are rendered more striking by the contrast which they present to the mean and incongruous additions.

The influence of the sentiments which we have described was not apparent in his writings alone. His enthusiasm, barred from the career which it would have selected for itself, seems to have found a vent in desperate levity. He enjoyed a vindictive pleasure in outraging the opinions of a society which he despised. He became careless of the decencies which were expected from a man so highly distinguished in the literary and political world. The sarcastic bitterness 317of his conversation disgusted those who were more inclined to accuse his licentiousness than their own degeneracy, and who were unable to conceive the strength of those emotions which are concealed by the jests of the wretched, and by the follies of the wise.

The historical works of Machiavelli still remain to be considered. The life of Castruccio Castracani will occupy us for a very short time, and would scarcely have demanded our notice, had it not attracted a much greater share of public attention than it deserves. Few books, indeed, could be more interesting than a careful and judicious account, from such a pen, of the illustrious Prince of Lucca, the most eminent of those Italian chiefs, who like Pisistratus and Gelon, acquired a power felt rather than seen, and resting, not on law or on prescription, but on the public favour and on their great personal qualities. Such a work would exhibit to us the real nature of that species of sovereignty, so singular and so often misunderstood, which the Greeks denominated tyranny, and which, modified in some degree by the feudal system, reappeared in the commonwealths of Lombardy and Tuscany. But this little composition of Machiavelli is in no sense a history. It has no pretensions to fidelity. It is a trifle, and not a very successful trifle. It is scarcely more authentic than the novel of Belphegor, and is very much duller.

The last great work of this illustrious man was the history of his native city. It was written by command of the Pope, who, as chief of the house of Medici, was at that time sovereign of Florence. The characters of Cosmo, of Piero, and of Lorenzo, are, however, treated with a freedom and impartiality equally honourable 318to the writer and to the patron. The miseries and humiliations of dependence, the bread which is more bitter than every other food, the stairs which are more painful than every other ascent, had not broken the spirit of Machiavelli. The most corrupting post in a corrupting profession had not depraved the generous heart of Clement.

The History does not appear to be the fruit of much industry or research. It is unquestionably inaccurate. But it is elegant, lively, and picturesque, beyond any other in the Italian language. The reader, we believe, carries away from it a more vivid and a more faithful impression of the national character and manners than from more correct accounts. The truth is, that the book belongs rather to ancient than to modern literature. It is in the style, not of Davila and Clarendon, but of Herodotus and Tacitus. The classical histories may almost be called romances founded in fact. The relation is, no doubt, in all its principal points, strictly true. But the numerous little incidents which heighten the interest, the words, the gestures, the looks, are evidently furnished by the imagination of the author. The fashion of later times is different. A more exact narrative is given by the writer. It may be doubted whether more exact notions are conveyed to the reader. The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature, and we are not certain, that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind for ever.

The History terminates with the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici. 319Machiavelli had, it seems, intended to continue his narrative to a later period. But his death prevented the execution of his design; and the melancholy task of recording the desolation and shame of Italy devolved on Guicciardini.

Machiavelli lived long enough to see the commencement of the last struggle for Florentine liberty. Soon after his death monarchy was finally established, not such a monarchy as that of which Cosmo had laid the foundations deep in the institutions and feelings of his countrymen, and which Lorenzo had embellished with the trophies of every science and every art; but a loathsome tyranny, proud and mean, cruel and feeble, bigotted and lascivious. The character of Machiavelli was hateful to the new masters of Italy; and those parts of his theory which were in strict accordance with their own daily practice afforded a pretext for blackening his memory. His works were misrepresented by the learned, misconstrued by the ignorant, censured by the church, abused with all the rancour of simulated virtue, by the tools of a base government, and the priests of a baser superstition. The name of the man whose genius had illuminated all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic wisdom an oppressed people had owed their last chance of emancipation and revenge, passed into a proverb of infamy. For more than two hundred years his bones lay undistinguished. At length, an English nobleman paid the last honours to the greatest statesman of Florence. In the church of Santa Croce a monument was erected to his memory, which is contemplated with reverence by all who can distinguish the virtues of a great mind through the corruptions of a degenerate age, and which will be approached with still deeper homage when the object to 320which his public life was devoted shall be attained, when the foreign yoke shall be broken, when a second Procida shall avenge the wrongs of Naples, when a happier Rienzi shall restore the good estate of Rome, when the streets of Florence and Bologna shall again resound with their ancient war-cry, Popolo; popolo; muoano i tiranni!

JOHN DRYDEN. (1)

321(Edinburgh Review, January 1828.)
T
he public voice has assigned to Dryden the first place in the second rank of our poets,—no mean station in a table of intellectual precedency so rich in illustrious names. It is allowed that, even of the few who were his superiors in genius, none has exercised a more extensive or permanent influence on the national habits of thought and expression. His life was commensurate with the period during which a great revolution in the public taste was effected; and in that revolution he played the part of Cromwell. By unscrupulously taking the lead in its wildest excesses, he obtained the absolute guidance of it. By trampling on laws, he acquired the authority of a legislator. By signalising himself as the most daring and irreverent of rebels, he raised himself to the dignity of a recognised prince. He commenced his career by the most frantic outrages. He terminated it in the repose of established sovereignty,—the author of a new code, the root of a new dynasty.

Of Dryden, however, as of almost every man who has been distinguished either in the literary or in the political world, it may be said that the course which he

     (1) The Poetical Works of John Dryden. In 2 volumes.
     University Edition. London, 1826.

322pursued, and the effect which he produced, depended less on his personal qualities than on the circumstances in which he was placed. Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd supposes. But the same feelings which in ancient Rome produced the apotheosis of a popular emperor, and in modern Rome the canonisation of a devout prelate, led men to cherish an illusion which furnishes them with something to adore. By a law of association, from the operation of which even minds the most strictly regulated by reason are not wholly exempt, misery disposes us to hatred, and happiness to love, although there may be no person to whom our misery or our happiness can be ascribed. The peevishness of an invalid vents itself even on those who alleviate his pain. The good humour of a man elated by success often displays itself towards enemies. In the same manner, the feelings of pleasure and admiration, to which the contemplation of great events gives birth, make an object where they do not find it. Thus, nations descend to the absurdities of Egyptian idolatry, and worship stocks and reptiles—Sacheverells and Wilkeses. They even fall prostrate before a deity to which they have themselves given the form which commands their veneration, and which, unless fashioned by them, would have remained a shapeless block. They persuade themselves that they are the creatures of what they have themselves created. For, in fact, it is the age that forms the man, not the man that 323forms the age. Great minds do indeed only pay with interest what they have received. We extol Bacon and sneer at Aquinas. But, if their situations had been changed, Bacon might have been the Angelical Doctor, the most subtle Aristotelian of the schools; the Dominican might have led forth the sciences from their house of bondage. If Luther had been born in the tenth century, he would have effected no reformation. If he had never been born at all, it is evident that the sixteenth century could not have elapsed without a great schism in the church. Voltaire, in the days of Louis the Fourteenth, would probably have been, like most of the literary men of that time, a zealous Jansenist, eminent among the defenders of efficacious grace, a bitter assailant of the lax morality of the Jesuits and the unreasonable decisions of the Sorbonne. If Pascal had entered on his literary career when intelligence was more general, and abuses at the same time more flagrant, when the church was polluted by the Iscariot Dubois, the court disgraced by the orgies of Canillac, and the nation sacrificed to the juggles of Law, if he had lived to see a dynasty of harlots, an empty treasury and a crowded harem, an army formidable only to those whom it should have protected, a priesthood just religious enough to be intolerant, he might possibly, like every man of genius in France, have imbibed extravagant prejudices against monarchy and Christianity. The wit which blasted the sophisms of Escobar—the impassioned eloquence which defended the sisters of Port Royal—the intellectual hardihood which was not beaten down even by Papal authority—might have raised him to the Patriarchate of the Philosophical 324Church. It was long disputed whether the honour of inventing the method of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to Leibnitz. It is now generally allowed that these great men made the same discovery at the same time. Mathematical science, indeed, had then reached such a point that, if neither of them had ever existed, the principle must inevitably have occurred to some person within a few years. So in our own time the doctrine of rent, now universally received by political economists, was propounded, almost at the same moment, by two writers unconnected with each other. Preceding speculators had long been blundering round about it; and it could not possibly have been missed much longer by the most heedless inquirer. We are inclined to think that, with respect to every great addition which has been made to the stock of human knowledge, the case has been similar; that without Copernicus we should have been Copernicans,—that without Columbus America would have been discovered,—that without Locke we should have possessed a just theory of the origin of human ideas. Society indeed has its great men and its little men, as the earth has its mountains and its valleys. But the inequalities of intellect, like the inequalities of the surface of our globe, bear so small a proportion to the mass, that, in calculating its great revolutions, they may safely be neglected. The sun illuminates the hills, while it is still below the horizon; and truth is discovered by the highest minds a little before it becomes manifest to the multitude. This is the extent of their superiority. They are the first to catch and reflect a light, which, without their assistance, must, in a short time, be visible to those who lie far beneath them. 325The same remark will apply equally to the fine arts. The laws on which depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and sculpture, operate with little less certainty than those which regulate the periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness. Those who seem to lead the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing. Without a just apprehension of the laws to which we have alluded, the merits and defects of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state what we conceive them to be.

The ages in which the master-pieces of imagination have been produced have by no means been those in which taste has been most correct. It seems that the creative faculty, and the critical faculty, cannot exist together in their highest perfection. The causes of this phenomenon it is not difficult to assign.

It is true that the man who is best able to take a machine to pieces, and who most clearly comprehends the manner in which all its wheels and springs conduce to its general effect, will be the man most competent to form another machine of similar power. In all the branches of physical and moral science which admit of perfect analysis, he who can resolve will be able to combine. But the analysis which criticism can effect of poetry is necessarily imperfect. One element must for ever elude its researches; and that is the very element by which poetry is poetry. In the description of nature, for example, a judicious reader will easily detect an incongruous image. But he will find it impossible to explain in what consists the art of a writer who, in a few words, brings some spot before him so vividly that he shall know it as if he had lived there from childhood; while another, employing the 326same materials, the same verdure, the same water, and the same flowers, committing no inaccuracy, introducing nothing which can be positively pronounced superfluous, omitting nothing which can be positively pronounced necessary, shall produce no more effect than an advertisement of a capital residence and a desirable pleasure-ground. To take another example: the great features of the character of Hotspur are obvious to the most superficial reader. We at once perceive that his courage is splendid, his thirst of glory intense, his animal spirits high, his temper careless, arbitrary, and petulant; that he indulges his own humour without caring whose feelings he may wound, or whose enmity he may provoke, by his levity. Thus far criticism will go. But something is still wanting. A man might have all those qualities, and every other quality which the most minute examiner can introduce into his catalogue of the virtues and faults of Hotspur, and yet he would not be Hotspur. Almost everything that we have said of him applies equally to Falcon bridge. Yet in the mouth of Falconbridge most of his speeches would seem out of place. In real life this perpetually occurs. We are sensible of nude differences between men whom, if we were required to describe them, we should describe in almost the same terms. If we were attempting to draw elaborate characters of them, we should scarcely be able to point out any strong distinction; yet we approach them with feelings altogether dissimilar. We cannot conceive of them as using the expressions or the gestures of each other. Let us suppose that a zoologist should attempt to give an account of some animal, a porcupine for instance, to people who had never seen it. The porcupine, he might say, is of the genus mammalia, and the order 327glires. There are whiskers on its face; it is two feet long; it has four toes before, five behind, two fore teeth, and eight grinders. Its body is covered with hair and quills. And, when all this had been said, would any one of the auditors have formed a just idea of a porcupine? Would any two of them have formed the same idea? There might exist innumerable races of animals, possessing all the characteristics which have been mentioned, yet altogether unlike to each other. What the description of our naturalist is to a real porcupine, the remarks of criticism are to the images of poetry. What it so imperfectly decomposes it cannot perfectly re-construct. It is evidently as impossible to produce an Othello or a Macbeth by reversing an analytical process so defective, as it would be for an anatomist to form a living man out of the fragments of his dissecting-room. In both cases the vital principle eludes the finest instruments, and vanishes in the very instant in which its seat is touched. Hence those who, trusting to their critical skill, attempt to write poems give us, not images of things, but catalogues of qualities. Their characters are allegories; not good men and bad men, but cardinal virtues and deadly sins. We seem to have fallen among the acquaintances of our old friend Christian: sometimes we meet Mistrust and Timorous; sometimes Mr. Hate-good and Mr. Love-lust; and then again Prudence, Piety, and Charity.

That critical discernment is not sufficient to make men poets, is generally allowed. Why it should keep them from becoming poets, is not perhaps equally evident: but the fact is, that poetry requires not an examining but a believing frame of mind. Those feel it most, and write it best, who forget that it is a work 328of art; to whom its imitations, like the realities from which they are taken, are subjects, not for connoisseur-ship, but for tears and laughter, resentment and affection; who are too much under the influence of the illusion to admire the genius which has produced it; who are too much frightened for Ulysses in the cave of Polyphemus to care whether the pun about Outis be good or bad; who forget that such a person as Shakspeare ever existed, while they weep and curse with Lear. It is by giving faith to the creations of the imagination that a man becomes a poet. It is by treating those creations as deceptions, and by resolving them, as nearly as possible, into their elements, that he becomes a critic. In the moment in which the skill of the artist is perceived, the spell of the art is broken.

These considerations account for the absurdities into which the greatest writers have fallen, when they have attempted to give general rules for composition, or to pronounce judgment on the works of others. They are unaccustomed to analyse what they feel; they, therefore, perpetually refer their emotions to causes which have not in the slightest degree tended to produce them. They feel pleasure in reading a book. They never consider that this pleasure may be the effect of ideas which some unmeaning expression, striking on the first link of a chain of associations, may have called up in their own minds—that they have themselves furnished to the author the beauties which they admire.

Cervantes is the delight of all classes of readers. Every school-boy thumbs to pieces the most wretched translations of his romance, and knows the lantern jaws of the Knight Errant, and the broad cheeks of the Squire, as well as the faces of his own playfellow’s. 329The most experienced and fastidious judges are amazed at the perfection of that art which extracts inextinguishable laughter from the greatest of human calamities without once violating the reverence due to it; at that discriminating delicacy of touch which makes a character exquisitely ridiculous, without impairing its worth, its grace, or its dignity. In Don Quixote are several dissertations on the principles of poetic and dramatic writing. No passages in the whole work exhibit stronger marks of labour and attention; and no passages in any work with which we are acquainted are more worthless and puerile. In our time they would scarcely obtain admittance into the literary department of the Morning Post. Every reader of the Divine Comedy must be struck by the veneration which Dante expresses for writers far inferior to himself. He will not lift up his eyes from the ground in the presence of Brunetto, all whose works are not worth the worst of his own hundred cantos. He does not venture to walk in the same line with the bombastic Statius. His admiration of Virgil is absolute idolatry. If indeed it had been excited by the elegant, splendid, and harmonious diction of the Roman poet, it would not have been altogether unreasonable; but it is rather as an authority on all points of philosophy, than as a work of imagination, that he values the Æneid. The most trivial passages he regards as oracles of the highest authority, and of the most recondite meaning. He describes his conductor as the sea of all wisdom—the sun which heals every disordered sight. As he judged of Virgil, the Italians of the fourteenth century judged of him; they were proud of him; they praised him; they struck medals bearing his head; they quarrelled 330for the honour of possessing his remains; they maintained professors to expound his writings. But what they admired was not that mighty imagination which called a new world into existence, and made all its sights and sounds familiar to the eye and ear of the mind. They said little of those awful and lovely creations on which later critics delight to dwell—Farinata lifting his haughty and tranquil brow from his couch of everlasting fire—the lion-like repose of Sordello—or the light which shone from the celestial smile of Beatrice. They extolled their great poet for his smattering of ancient literature and history; for his logic and his divinity; for his absurd physics, and his more absurd metaphysics; for everything but that in which he preeminently excelled. Like the fool in the story, who ruined his dwelling by digging for gold, which, as he had dreamed, was concealed under its foundations, they laid waste one of the noblest works of human genius, by seeking in it for buried treasures of wisdom which existed only in their own wild reveries. The finest passages were little valued till they had been debased into some monstrous allegory. Louder applause was given to the lecture on fate and free-will, or to the ridiculous astronomical theories, than to those tremendous lines which disclose the secrets of the tower of hunger, or to that half-told tale of guilty love, so passionate and so full of tears.

We do not mean to say that the contemporaries of Dante read with less emotion than their descendants of Ugolino groping among the wasted corpses of his children, or of Francesca starting at the tremulous kiss and dropping the fatal volume. Far from it. We believe that they admired these things less than ourselves, but that they felt them more. We should perhaps 331say that they felt them too much to admire them. The progress of a nation from barbarism to civilisation produces a change similar to that which takes place during the progress of an individual from infancy to mature age. What man does not remember with regret the first time that he read Robinson Crusoe? Then, indeed, he was unable to appreciate the powers of the writer; or, rather, he neither knew nor cared whether the book had a writer at all. He probably thought it not half so fine as some rant of Macpherson about dark-browed Foldath, and white-bosomed Strinadona.

He now values Fingal and Temora only as showing with how little evidence a story may be believed, and with how little merit a book may be popular. Of the romance of Defoe he entertains the highest opinion. He perceives the hand of a master in ten thousand touches which formerly he passed by without notice. But, though he understands the merits of the narrative better than formerly, he is far less interested by it. Xury and Friday, and pretty Poll, the boat with the shoulder-of-mutton sail, and the canoe which could not be brought down to the water edge, the tent with its hedge and ladders, the preserve of kids, and the den where the old goat died, can never again be to him the realities which they were. The days when his favourite volume set him upon making wheel-barrows and chairs, upon digging caves and fencing huts in the garden, can never return. Such is the law of our nature. Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the spring of life and the fruits of its autumn, the pleasures of close investigation and those of agreeable error. We cannot sit at once in the front of the stage and behind the scenes. We cannot be under the illusion of the 332spectacle, while we are watching the movements of the ropes and pulleys which dispose it.

The chapter in which Fielding describes the behaviour of Partridge at the theatre affords so complete an illustration of our proposition, that we cannot refrain from quoting some parts of it.

“Partridge gave that credit to Mr. Garrick which he had denied to Jones, and fell into so violent a trembling that his knees knocked against each other. Jones asked him what was the matter, and whether he was afraid of the warrior npon the stage?—‘O, la, sir,’ said he, ‘I perceive now it is what you told me. I am not afraid of anything, for I know it is but a play; and if it was really a ghost, it could do one no harm at such a distance and in so much company; and yet, if I was frightened, I am not the only person.’—‘Why, who,’ cries Jones, ‘dost thou take to be such a coward here besides thyself?’—‘Nay, you may call me a coward if you will; but if that little man there npon the stage is not frightened, I never saw any man frightened in my life.’.... He sat with his eyes fixed partly on the ghost and partly on Hamlet, and with his mouth open; the same passions which succeeded each other in Hamlet, succeeding likewise in him.......

“Little more worth remembering occurred during the play, at the end of which Jones asked him which of the players he liked best. To this he answered, with some appearance of indignation at the question, ‘The King, without doubt.’—‘Indeed, Mr. Partridge,’ says Mrs. Miller, ‘you are not of the same opinion with the town; for they are all agreed that Hamlet is acted by the best player who was ever on the stage.’ ‘He the best player!’ cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer; ‘why I could act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where you told me he acted so fine, why, any man, that is, any good man, that had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are only joking with me; but indeed, madam, though I never was at a play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the country, and the King, for my money, he speaks all his words distinctly, and half as loud again as the other. Anybody may see he is an actor.’” 333In this excellent passage Partridge is represented as a very bad theatrical critic. But none of those who laugh at him possess the tithe of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. He admires in the wrong place; but he trembles in the right place. It is indeed because he is so much excited by the acting of Garrick, that he ranks him below the strutting, mouthing performer, who personates the King. So, we have heard it said that, in some parts of Spain and Portugal, an actor who should represent a depraved character finely, instead of calling down the applauses of the audience, is hissed and pelted without mercy. It would be the same in England, if we, for one moment, thought that Shylock or Iago was standing before us. While the dramatic art was in its infancy at Athens, it produced similar effects on the ardent and imaginative spectators. It is said that they blamed Æschylus for frightening them into fits with his Furies. Herodotus tells us that, when Phrynichus produced his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined him in a penalty of a thousand drachmas for torturing their feelings by so pathetic an exhibition. They did not regard him as a great artist, but merely as a man who had given them pain. When they woke from the distressing illusion, they treated the author of it as they would have treated a messenger who should have brought them fatal and alarming tidings which turned out to be false. In the same manner, a child screams with terror at the sight of a person in an ugly mask. He has perhaps seen the mask put on. But his imagination is too strong for his reason; and he intreats that it may be taken off.

We should act in the same manner if the grief and horror produced in us by works of the imagination amounted to real torture. But in us these emotions are 334comparatively languid. They rarely affect our appetite or our sleep. They leave us sufficiently at ease to trace them to their causes, and to estimate the powers which produce them. Our attention is speedily diverted from the images which call forth our tears to the art by which those images have been selected and combined. We applaud the genius of the writer. We applaud our own sagacity and sensibility; and we are comforted.

Yet, though, we think that in the progress of nations towards refinement the reasoning powers are improved at the expense of the imagination, we acknowledge that to this rule there are many apparent exceptions. We are not, however, quite satisfied that they are more than apparent. Men reasoned better, for example, in the time of Elizabeth than in the time of Egbert; and they also wrote better poetry. But we must distinguish between poetry as a mental act, and poetry as a species of composition. If we take it in the latter sense, its excellence depends, not solely on the vigour of the imagination, but partly also on the instruments which the imagination employs. Within certain limits, therefore, poetry may he improving while the poetical faculty is decaying. The vividness of the picture presented to the reader is not necessarily proportioned to the vividness of the prototype which exists in the mind of the writer. In the other arts we see this clearly. Should a man, gifted by nature with all the genius of Canova, attempt to carve a statue without instruction as to the management of his chisel, or attention to the anatomy of the human body, he would produce something compared with which the Highlander at the door of a snuff shop would deserve admiration. If an uninitiated Raphael were to attempt 335a painting, it would be a mere daub; indeed, the connoisseurs say that the early works of Raphael are little better. Yet, who can attribute this to want of imagination? Who can doubt that the youth of that great artist was passed amidst an ideal world of beautiful and majestic forms? Or, who will attribute the difference which appears between his first rude essays and his magnificent Transfiguration to a change in the constitution of his mind? In poetry, as in painting and sculpture, it is necessary that the imitator should be well acquainted with that which he undertakes to imitate, and expert in the mechanical part of his art. Genius will not furnish him with a vocabulary: it will not teach him what word most exactly corresponds to his idea, and will most fully convey it to others: it will not make him a great descriptive poet, till he has looked with attention on the face of nature; or a great dramatist, till he has felt and witnessed much of the influence of the passions. Information and experience are, therefore, necessary; not for the purpose of strengthening the imagination, which is never so strong as in people incapable of reasoning—savages, children, madmen, and dreamers; but for the purpose of enabling the artist to communicate his conceptions to others.

In a barbarous age the imagination exercises a despotic power. So strong is the perception of what is unreal that it often overpowers all the passions of the mind and all the sensations of the body. At first, indeed, the phantasm remains undivulged, a hidden treasure, a wordless poetry, an invisible painting, a silent music, a dream of which the pains and pleasures exist to the dreamer alone, a bitterness which the heart only knoweth, a joy with which a stranger intermeddleth not. The machinery, by which ideas are to be conveyed 336from one person to another, is as yet rude and defective. Between mind and mind there is a great gulf. The imitative arts do not exist, or are in their lowest state. But the actions of men amply prove that the faculty which gives birth to those arts is morbidly active. It is not yet the inspiration of poets and sculptors; but it is the amusement of the day, the terror of the night, the fertile source of wild superstitions. It turns the clouds into gigantic shapes, and the winds into doleful voices. The belief which springs from it is more absolute and undoubting than any which can be derived from evidence. It resembles the faith which we repose in our own sensations. Thus, the Arab, when covered with wounds, saw nothing but the dark eyes and the green kerchief of a beckoning Houri. The Northern warrior laughed in the pangs of death when he thought of the mead of Valhalla.

The first works of the imagination are, as we have said, poor and rude, not from the want of genius, but from the want of materials. Phidias could have done nothing with an old tree and a fish-bone, or Homer with the language of New Holland.

Yet the effect of these early performances, imperfect as they must necessarily be, is immense. All deficiencies are supplied by the susceptibility of those to whom they are addressed. We all know what pleasure a wooden doll, which may be bought for sixpence, will afford to a little girl. She will require no other company. She will nurse it, dress it, and talk to it all day. No grown-up man takes half so much delight in one of the incomparable babies of Chantrey. In the same manner, savages are more affected by the rude compositions of their bards than nations more advanced in civilisation by the greatest master-pieces of poetry. 337In process of time, the instruments by which the imagination works are brought to perfection. Men have not more imagination than their rude ancestors. We strongly suspect that they have much less. But they produce better works of imagination. Thus, up to a certain period, the diminution of the poetical powers is far more than compensated by the improvement of all the appliances and means of which those powers stand in need. Then comes the short period of splendid and consummate excellence. And then, from causes against which it is vain to struggle, poetry begins to decline. The progress of language, which was at first favourable, becomes fatal to it, and, instead of compensating for the decay of the imagination, accelerates that decay, and renders it more obvious. When the adventurer in the Arabian tale anointed one of his eyes with the contents of the magical box, all the riches of the earth, however widely dispersed, however sacredly concealed, became visible to him. But, when he tried the experiment on both eyes, he was struck with blindness. What the enchanted elixir was to the sight of the body, language is to the sight of the imagination. At first it calls up a world of glorious illusions; but, when it becomes too copious, it altogether destroys the visual power.

As the development of the mind proceeds, symbols, instead of being employed to convey images, are substituted for them. Civilised men think as they trade, not in kind, but by means of a circulating medium. In these circumstances, the sciences improve rapidly, and criticism among the rest; but poetry, in the highest sense of the word, disappears. Then comes the dotage of the fine arts, a second childhood, as feeble as the former, and far more, hopeless. This is the age of 338critical poetry, of poetry by courtesy, of poetry to which the memory, the judgment, and the wit contribute far more than the imagination. We readily allow that many works of this description are excellent: we will not contend with those who think them more valuable than the great poems of an earlier period. We only maintain that they belong to a different species of composition, and are produced by a different faculty.

It is some consolation to reflect that this critical school of poetry improves as the science of criticism improves; and that the science of criticism, like every other science, is constantly tending towards perfection. As experiments are multiplied, principles are better understood.

In some countries, in our own, for example, there has been an interval between the downfall of the creative school and the rise of the critical, a period during which imagination has been in its decrepitude, and taste in its infancy. Such a revolutionary interregnum as this will be deformed by every species of extravagance.

The first victory of good taste is over the bombast and conceits which deform such times as these. But criticism is still in a very imperfect state. What is accidental is for a long time confounded with what is essential. General theories are drawn from detached facts. How many hours the action of a play may be allowed to occupy,—how many similes an Epic Poet may introduce into his first book,—whether a piece, which is acknowledged to have a beginning and an end, may not be without a middle, and other questions as puerile as these, formerly occupied the attention of men of letters in France, and even in this country. Poets, in such circumstances as these, exhibit all the 339narrowness and feebleness of the criticism by which their manner has been fashioned. From outrageous absurdity they are preserved indeed by their timidity. But they perpetually sacrifice nature and reason to arbitrary canons of taste. In their eagerness to avoid the mala prohibita of a foolish code, they are perpetually rushing on the mala in se. Their great predecessors, it is true, were as bad critics as themselves, or perhaps worse: but those predecessors, as we have attempted to show, were inspired by a faculty independent of criticism, and, therefore, wrote well while they judged ill.

In time men begin to take more rational and comprehensive views of literature. The analysis of poetry, which, as we have remarked, must at best be imperfect, approaches nearer and nearer to exactness. The merits of the wonderful models of former times are justly appreciated. The frigid productions of a later age are rated at no more than their proper value. Pleasing and ingenious imitations of the manner of the great masters appear. Poetry has a partial revival, a Saint Martin’s Summer, which, after a period of dreariness and decay, agreeably reminds us of the splendour of its June. A second harvest is gathered in; though, growing on a spent soil, it has not the heart of the former. Thus, in the present age, Monti has successfully imitated the style of Dante; and something of the Elizabethan inspiration has been caught by several eminent countrymen of our own. But never will Italy produce another Inferno, or England another Hamlet. We look on the beauties of the modern imitations with feelings similar to those with which we see flowers disposed in vases, to ornament the drawing-rooms of a capital. We doubtless regard 340them with pleasure, with greater pleasure, perhaps, because, in the midst of a place ungenial to them, they remind us of the distant spots on which they flourish in spontaneous exuberance. But we miss the sap, the freshness and the bloom. Or, if we may borrow another illustration from Queen Scheherezade, we would compare the writers of this school to the jewellers who were employed to complete the unfinished window of the palace of Aladdin. Whatever skill or-cost could do was done. Palace and bazaar were ransacked for precious stones. Yet the artists, with all their dexterity, with all their assiduity, and with all their vast means, were unable to produce anything comparable to the wonders which a spirit of a higher order had wrought in a single night.

The history of every literature with which we are acquainted confirms, we think, the principles which we have laid down. In Greece we see the imaginative school of poetry gradually fading into the critical. Æschylus and Pindar were succeeded by Sophocles, Sophocles by Euripides, Euripides by the Alexandrian versifiers. Of these last, Theocritus alone has left compositions which deserve to be read. The splendour and grotesque fairyland of the Old Comedy, rich with such gorgeous hues, peopled with such fantastic shapes, and vocal alternately with the sweetest peals of music and the loudest bursts of elvish laughter, disappeared for ever. The master-pieces of the New Comedy are known to us by Latin translations of extraordinary merit. From these translations, and from the expressions of the ancient critics, it is clear that the original compositions were distinguished by grace and sweetness, that they sparkled with wit, and abounded with pleading sentiment; but that the creative power was 341gone. Julius Cæsar called Terence a half Menander,—a sure proof that Menander was not a quarter Aristophanes.

The literature of the Romans was merely a continuation of the literature of the Greeks. The pupils started from the point at which their masters had, in the course of many generations, arrived. They thus almost wholly missed the period of original invention. The only Latin poets whose writings exhibit much vigour of imagination are Lucretius and Catullus. The Augustan age produced nothing equal to their finer passages.

In France, that licensed jester, whose jingling cap and motley coat concealed more genius than ever mustered in the saloon of Ninon or of Madame Géoffrin, was succeeded by writers as decorous and as tiresome as gentlemen-ushers.

The poetry of Italy and of Spain has undergone the same change. But nowhere has the revolution been more complete and violent than in England. The same person, who, when a boy, had clapped his thrilling hands at the first representation of the Tempest might, without attaining to a marvellous longevity, have lived to read the earlier works of Prior and Addison. The change, we believe, must, sooner or later, have taken place. But its progress was accelerated, and its character modified, by the political occurrences of the times, and particularly by two events, the closing of the theatres under the commonwealth, and the restoration of the House of Stuart.

We have said that the critical and poetical faculties are not only distinct, but almost incompatible. The state of our literature during the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First is a strong confirmation of this 342remark. The greatest works of imagination that the world has ever seen were produced at that period. The national taste, in the meantime, was to the last degree detestable. Alliterations, puns, antithetical forms of expression lavishly employed where no corresponding opposition existed between the thoughts expressed, strained allegories, pedantic allusions, everything, in short, quaint and affected, in matter and manner, made up what was then considered as fine writing. The eloquence of the bar, the pulpit, and the council-board, was deformed by conceits which would have disgraced the rhyming shepherds of an Italian academy. The king quibbled on the throne. We might, indeed, console ourselves by reflecting that his majesty was a fool. But the chancellor quibbled in concert from the wool-sack: and the chancellor was Francis Bacon. It is needless to mention Sidney and the whole tribe of Euphuists; for Shakspeare himself, the greatest poet that ever lived, falls into the same fault whenever he means to be particularly fine. While he abandons himself to the impulse of his imagination, his compositions are not only the sweetest and the most sublime, but also the most faultless, that the world has ever seen. But, as soon as his critical powers come into play, he sinks to the level of Cowley; or rather he does ill what Cowley did well. All that is bad in his works is bad elaborately, and of malice aforethought. The only thing wanting to make them perfect was, that he should never have troubled himself with thinking whether they were good or not. Like the angels in Milton, he sinks “with compulsion and laborious flight.” His natural tendency is upwards. That he may soar, it is only necessary that he should not struggle to fall. He resembles an American 343Cacique, who, possessing in unmeasured abundance the metals which in polished societies are esteemed the most precious, was utterly unconscious of their value, and gave up treasures more valuable than the imperial crowns of other countries, to secure some gaudy and far-fetched but worthless bauble, a plated button, or a necklace of coloured glass.

We have attempted to show that, as knowledge is extended and as the reason developes itself, the imitative arts decay. We should, therefore, expect that the corruption of poetry would commence in the educated classes of society. And this, in fact, is almost constantly the case. The few great works of imagination which appear in a critical age are, almost without exception, the works of uneducated men. Thus, at a time when persons of quality translated French romances, and when the universities celebrated royal deaths in verses about tritons and fauns, a preaching tinker produced the Pilgrim’s Progress. And thus a ploughman startled a generation which had thought Hayley and Beattie great poets, with the adventures of Tam O’Shanter. Even in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth the fashionable poetry had degenerated. It retained few vestiges of the imagination of earlier times. It had not yet been subjected to the rules of good taste. Affectation had completely tainted madrigals and sonnets. The grotesque conceits and the tuneless numbers of Donne were, in the time of James, the favourite models of composition at Whitehall and at the Temple. But, though the literature of the Court was in its decay, the literature of the people was in its perfection. The Muses had taken sanctuary in the theatres, the haunts of a class whose taste was not better than that of the Right Honourables and 344singular good Lords who admired metaphysical love-verses, but whose imagination retained all its freshness and vigour; whose censure and approbation might be erroneously bestowed, but whose tears and laughter were never in the wrong. The infection which had tainted lyric and didactic poetry had but slightly and partially touched the drama. While the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burning-glasses, and tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence to a pair of compasses, and an unrequited passion to the fortieth remainder-man in an entail, Juliet leaning from the balcony, and Miranda smiling over the chess-board, sent home many spectators, as kind and simple-hearted as the master and mistress of Fletcher’s Ralpho, to cry themselves to sleep.

No species of fiction is so delightful to us as the old English drama. Even its inferior productions possess a charm not to be found in any other kind of poetry. It is the most lucid mirror that ever was held up to nature. The creations of the great dramatists of Athens produce the effect of magnificent sculptures, conceived by a mighty imagination, polished with the utmost delicacy, embodying ideas of ineffable majesty and beauty, but cold, pale, and rigid, with no bloom on the check, and no speculation in the eye. In all the draperies, the figures, and the faces, in the lovers and the tyrants, the Bacchanals and the Furies, there is the same marble chillness and deadness. Most of the characters of the French stage resemble the waxen gentlemen and ladies in the window of a perfumer, rouged, curled, and bedizened, but fixed in such stiff attitudes, and staring with eyes expressive of such utter unmeaningness, that they cannot produce an illusion for a single moment. In the English plays alone is to 345be found the warmth, the mellowness, and the reality of painting. We know the minds of the men and women, as we know the faces of the men and women of Vandyke.

The excellence of these works is in a great measure the result of two peculiarities, which the critics of the French school consider as defects,—from the mixture of tragedy and comedy, and from the length and extent of the action. The former is necessary to render the drama a just representation of a world in which the laughers and the weepers are perpetually jostling each other,—in which every event has its serious and ludicrous side. The latter enables us to form an intimate acquaintance with characters with which we could not possibly become familiar during the few hours to which the unities restrict the poet. In this respect, the works of Shakspeare, in particular, are miracles of art. In a piece, which may be read aloud in three hours, we see a character gradually unfold all its recesses to us. We see it change with the change of circumstances. The petulant youth rises into the politic and warlike sovereign. The profuse and courteous philanthropist sours into a hater and scorn er of his kind. The tyrant is altered, by the chastening of affliction, into a pensive moralist. The veteran general, distinguished by coolness, sagacity, and self-command, sinks under a conflict between love strong as death, and jealousy cruel as the grave. The brave and loyal subject passes, step by step, to the extremities of human depravity. We trace his progress, from the first dawnings of unlawful ambition to the cynical melancholy of his impenitent remorse. Yet, in these pieces, there are no unnatural transitions. Nothing is omitted: nothing is crowded. Great as are the changes, narrow as is 346the compass within which they are exhibited, they shock us as little as the gradual alterations of those familiar faces which we see every evening and every morning. The magical skill of the poet resembles that of the Dervise in the Spectator, who condensed all the events of seven years into the single moment during which the king held his head under the water.

It is deserving of remark, that, at the time of which we speak, the plays even of men not eminently distinguished by genius,—such, for example, as Jonson,—were far superior to the best works of imagination in other departments. Therefore, though we conceive that, from causes which we have already investigated, our poetry must necessarily have declined, we think that, unless its fate had been accelerated by external attacks, it might have enjoyed an euthanasia, that genius might have been kept alive by the drama till its place could, in some degree, be supplied by taste,—that there would have been scarcely any interval between the age of sublime invention and that of agreeable imitation. The works of Shakspeare, which were not appreciated with any degree of justice before the middle of the eighteenth century, might then have been the recognized standards of excellence during the latter part of the seventeenth; and he and the great Elizabethan writers might have been almost immediately succeeded by a generation of poets similar to those who adorn our own times.

But the Puritans drove imagination from its last asylum. They prohibited theatrical representations, and stigmatised the whole race of dramatists as enemies of morality and religion. Much that is objectionable may be found in the writers whom they reprobated; but whether they took the best measures for stopping 347the evil appears to us very doubtful, and must, we think, have appeared doubtful to themselves, when, after the lapse of a few years, they saw the unclean spirit whom they had cast out return to his old haunts, with seven others fouler than himself.

By the extinction of the drama, the fashionable school of poetry,—a school without truth of sentiment or harmony of versification,—without the powers of an earlier, or the correctness of a later age,—was left to enjoy undisputed ascendency. A vicious ingenuity, a morbid quickness to perceive resemblances and analogies between things apparently heterogeneous, constituted almost its only claim to admiration. Suckling was dead. Milton was absorbed in political and theological controversy. If Waller differed from the Cow-lei an sect of writers, he differed for the worse. He had as little poetry as they, and much less wit; nor is the languor of his verses less offensive than the ruggeedness of theirs. In Dedham alone the faint dawn of a better manner was discernible.

But, low as was the state of our poetry during the civil war and the Protectorate, a still deeper fall was at hand. Hitherto our literature had been idiomatic. In mind as in situation we had been islanders. The revolutions in our taste, like the revolutions in our government, had been settled without the interference of strangers. Had this state of things continued, the same just principles of reasoning which, about this time, were applied with unprecedented success to every part of philosophy would soon have conducted our ancestors to a sounder code of criticism. There were already strong signs of improvement. Our prose had at length worked itself clear from those quaint conceits which still deformed almost every metrical composition. 348The parliamentary debates, and the diplomatic correspondence of that eventful period, had contributed much to this reform. In such bustling times, it was absolutely necessary to speak and write to the purpose. The absurdities of Puritanism had, perhaps, done more. At the time when that odious style, which deforms the writings of Hall and of Lord Bacon, was almost universal, had appeared that stupendous work, the English Bible,—a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. The respect which the translators felt for the original prevented them from adding any of the hideous decorations then in fashion. The ground-work of the version, indeed, was of an earlier age. The familiarity with which the Puritans, on almost every occasion, used the Scriptural phrases was no doubt very ridiculous; but it produced good effects. It was a cant; but it drove out a cant far more offensive.

The highest kind of poetry is, in a great measure, independent of those circumstances which regulate the style of composition in prose. But with that inferior species of poetry which succeeds to it the case is widely different. In a few years, the good sense and good taste which had weeded out affectation from moral and political treatises would, in the natural course of things, have effected a similar reform in the sonnet and the ode. The rigour of the victorious sectaries had relaxed.

A dominant religion is never ascetic. The Government connived at theatrical representations. The influence of Shakspeare was once more felt. But darker days were approaching. A foreign yoke was to be imposed on our literature. Charles, surrounded by the companions of his long exile, returned to govern 349a nation which ought never to have cast him out or never to have received him back. Every year which he had passed among strangers had rendered him more unfit to rule his countrymen. In France he had seen the refractory magistracy humbled, and royal prerogative, though exercised by a foreign priest in the name of a child, victorious over all opposition. This spectacle naturally gratified a prince to whose family the opposition of Parliaments had been so fatal. Politeness was his solitary good quality. The insults which he had suffered in Scotland had taught him to prize it. The effeminacy and apathy of his disposition fitted him to excel in it. The elegance and vivacity of the French manners fascinated him. With the political maxims and the social habits of his favourite people, he adopted their taste in composition, and, when seated on the throne, soon rendered it fashionable, partly by direct patronage, but still more by that contemptible policy which, for a time, made England the last of the nations, and raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and fame, such as no French sovereign had ever before attained.

It was to please Charles that rhyme was first introduced into our plays. Thus, a rising blow, which would at any time have been mortal, was dealt to the English Drama, then just recovering from its languishing condition. Two detestable manners, the indigenous and the imported, were now in a state of alternate conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic meanness of the new style was blended with the ingenious absurdity of the old; and the mixture produced something which the world had never before seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again,—something, by the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages 350appears to advantage,—something, which those who have attempted to caricature it have, against their will, been forced to flatter,—of which the tragedy of Bayes is a very favourable specimen. What Lord Dorset observed to Edward Howard might have been addressed to almost all his contemporaries:—

“As skilful divers to the bottom fall
Swifter than those who cannot swim at all;
So, in this way of writing without thinking,
Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking.”

From this reproach some clever men of the world must be excepted, and among them Dorset himself. Though by no means great poets, or even good versifiers, they always wrote with meaning, and sometimes with wit. Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what a miserable state literature had fallen, than the immense superiority which the occasional rhymes, carelessly thrown on paper by men of this class, possess over the elaborate productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse proportion to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An exception must be made for Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great command of good homely English distinguishes him still more from the other writers of the time. As for Gondibert, those may criticise it who can read it. Imagination was extinct. Taste was depraved. Poetry, driven from palaces, colleges, and theatres, had found an asylum in the obscure dwelling where a Great Man, born out of due season, in disgrace, penury, pain, and blindness, still kept uncontaminated a character and a genius worthy of a better age. 351Everything about Milton is wonderful; but nothing is so wonderful as that, in an age so unfavourable to poetry, he should have produced the greatest of modern epic poems. We are not sure that this is not in some degree to be attributed to his want of sight. The imagination is notoriously most active when the external world is shut out. In sleep its illusions are perfect. They produce all the effect of realities. In darkness its visions are always more distinct than in the light. Every person who amuses himself with what is called building castles in the air must have experienced this. We know artists who, before they attempt to draw a face from memory, close their eyes, that they may recall a more perfect image of the features and the expression. We are therefore inclined to believe that the genius of Milton may have been preserved from the influence of times so unfavourable to it by his infirmity. Be this as it may, his works at first enjoyed a very small share of popularity. To be neglected by his contemporaries was the penalty which he paid for surpassing them. His great poem was not generally studied or admired till writers far inferior to him had, by obsequiously cringing to the public taste, acquired sufficient favour to reform it.

Of these, Dryden was the most eminent. Amidst the crowd of authors who, during the earlier years of Charles the Second, courted notoriety by every species of absurdity and affectation, he speedily became conspicuous. No man exercised so much influence on the age. The reason is obvious. On no man did the age exercise so much influence. He was perhaps the greatest of those whom we have designated as the critical poets; and his literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the whole history of the school to which 352he belonged,—the rudeness and extravagance of its infancy,—the propriety, the grace, the dignified good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet. The revolution through which English literature has been passing, from the time of Cowley to that of Scott, may be seen in miniature within the compass of his volumes.

His life divides itself into two parts. There is some debatable ground on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with tolerable accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be inclined to fix as the date of a great change in his manner. During the preceding period appeared some of his courtly panegyrics,—his Annus Mirabilis, and most of his plays; indeed, all his rhyming tragedies. To the subsequent period belong his best dramas,—All for Love, The Spanish Friar, and Sebastian,—his satires, his translations, his didactic poems, his fables, and his odes.

Of the small pieces which were presented to chancellors and princes it would scarcely be fair to speak. The greatest advantage which the Fine Arts derive from the extension of knowledge is, that the patronage of individuals becomes unnecessary. Some writers still affect to regret the age of patronage. None but bad writers have reason to regret it. It is always an age of general ignorance. Where ten thousand readers are eager for the appearance of a book, a small contribution from each makes up a splendid remuneration for the author. Where literature is a luxury, confined to few, each of them must pay high. If the Empress 353Catherine, for example, wanted an epic poem, she must have wholly supported the poet;—just as, in a remote country village, a man who wants a mutton-chop is sometimes forced to take the whole sheep;—a thing which never happens where the demand is large. But men who pay largely for the gratification of their taste will expect to have it united with some gratification to their vanity. Flattery is carried to a shameless extent; and the habit of flattery almost inevitably introduces a false taste into composition. Its language is made up of hyperbolical common-places,—offensive from their triteness,—still more offensive from their extravagance. In no school is the trick of overstepping the modesty of nature so speedily acquired. The writer, accustomed to find exaggeration acceptable and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. It is not strange, therefore, that the early panegyrical verses of Dryden should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound with the conceits which his immediate predecessors had brought into fashion. But his language and his versification were already far superior to their’s.

The Annus Mirabilis shows great command of expression, and a fine ear for heroic rhyme. Here its merits end. Not only has it no claim to be called poetry, but it seems to be the work of a man who could never, by any possibility, write poetry. Its affected similes are the best part of it. Gaudy weeds present a more encouraging spectacle than utter barrenness. There is scarcely a single stanza in this long work to which the imagination seems to have contributed anything. It is produced, not by creation, but by construction. It is made up, not of pictures, but of inferences. We will give a single instance, and 354certainly a favourable instance,—a quatrain which Johnson has praised. Dryden is describing the sea-fight with the Dutch.—

“Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball;
And now their odours armed against them fly.
Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall.
And some by aromatic splinters die.”

The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the situation of the sufferers or the spectators. His narration ought to produce feelings similar to those which would be excited by the event itself. Is this the case here? Who, in a sea-fight, ever thought of the price of the china which beats out the brains of a sailor; or of the odour of the splinter which shatters his leg? It is not by an act of the imagination, at once calling up the scene before the interior eye, but by painful meditation,—by turning the subject round and round,—by tracing out facts into remote consequences,—that these incongruous topics are introduced into the description. Homer, it is true, perpetually uses epithets which are not peculiarly appropriate. Achilles is the-swift-footed, when he is sitting still. Ulysses is the much-enduring, when he has nothing to endure. Every spear casts a long shadow, every ox has crooked horns, and every woman a high bosom, though these particulars may be quite beside the purpose. In our old ballads a similar practice prevails. The gold is always red, and the ladies always gay, though nothing whatever may depend on the hue of the gold, or the temper of the ladies. But these adjectives are mere customary additions. They merge in the substantives to which they are attached. If they at all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so slight as in no respect to alter the general effect. In the 355passage which we have quoted from Dryden the case is very different..Preciously and aromatic divert our whole attention to themselves, and dissolve the image of the battle in a moment. The whole poem reminds us of Lucan, and of the worst parts of Lucan,—the sea-fight in the Bay of Marseilles, for example. The description of the two fleets during the night is perhaps the only passage which ought to be exempted from this censure. If it was from the Annus Mirabilis that Milton formed his opinion, when he pronounced Dryden a good rhymer but no poet, he certainly judged correctly. But Dryden was, as we have said, one of those writers in whom the period of imagination does not precede, but follow, the period of observation and reflection.

His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, are admirable subjects for those who wish to study the morbid anatomy of the drama. He was utterly destitute of the power of exhibiting real human beings. Even in the far inferior talent of composing characters out of those elements into which the imperfect process of our reason can resolve them, he was very deficient. His men are not even good personifications; they are not well-assorted assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes a very coarse and marked distinction, and gives us, not a likeness, but a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded, and everything else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an inn-door, whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only in his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill. For most of his pictures seem, like Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed not to resemble anything in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth. 356The latter manner he practises most frequently in his tragedies, the former in his comedies. The comic characters are, without mixture, loathsome and despicable. The men of Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad enough. Those of Smollett are perhaps worse. But they do not approach to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of Dryden. The vices of these last are set off by a certain fierce hard impudence, to which we know nothing comparable. Their love is the appetite of beasts; their friendship the confederacy of knaves. The ladies seem to have been expressly created to form helps meet for such gentlemen. In deceiving and insulting their old fathers they do not perhaps exceed the license which, by im memorial prescription, has been allowed to heroines. But they also cheat at cards, rob strong boxes, put up their favours to auction, betray their friends, abuse their rivals in the style of Billingsgate, and invite their lovers in the language of the Piazza. These, it must be remembered, are not the valets and waiting-women, the Mascarilles and Nerines, but the recognised heroes and heroines, who appear as the representatives of good society, and who, at the end of the fifth act, marry and live very happily ever after. The sensuality, baseness, and malice of their natures is unredeemed by any quality of a different description,—by any touch of kindness,—or even by any honest burst of hearty hatred and revenge. We are in a world where there is no humanity, no veracity, no sense of shame,—a world for which any good-natured man would gladly take in exchange the society of Milton’s devils. But, as soon as we enter the regions of Tragedy, we find a great change. There is no lack of fine sentiment there. Metastasio is surpassed 357in his own department. Scuderi is out-scuderied. We are introduced to people whose proceedings we can trace to no motive,—of whose feelings we can form no more idea than of a sixth sense. We have left a race of creatures, whose love is as delicate and affectionate as the passion which an alderman feels for a turtle. We find ourselves among being’s, whose love is a purely disinterested emotion,—a loyalty extending to passive obedience,—a religion, like that of the Quietists, unsupported by any sanction of hope or fear. We see nothing but despotism without power, and sacrifices without compensation.

We will give a few instances. In Aurengzebe, Arimant, governor of Agra, falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects his suit with scorn; but assures him that she shall make great use of her power over him. He threatens to be angry. She answers, very coolly:

“Do not: your anger, like your love, is vain:
Whene’er I please, you must be pleased again.
Knowing what power I have your will to bend,
I’ll use it; for I need just such a friend.”

This is no idle menace. She soon brings a letter addressed to his rival,—orders him to read it,—asks him whether he thinks it sufficiently tender,—and finally commands him to carry it himself. Such tyranny as this, it may be thought, would justify resistance. Arimant does indeed venture to remonstrate:—

“This fatal paper rather let me tear,
Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear.”

The answer of the lady is incomparable:—

“You may; but ’twill not be your best advice;
Twill only give me pains of writing twice.
You know you must obey me, soon or late.
Why should you vainly struggle with your fate?”

358Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something about fate and free-will, and walks off with the billet-doux.

In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Alméria with a garland as a token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies:—

“I take this garland, not as given by you;
But as my merit’s and my beauty’s due;
As for the crown which you, my slave, possess,
To share it with you would but make me less.”

In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents to murder his two sons and a benefactor to whom he feels the warmest gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that she smiles upon his rival.

“Lynd. And when did I my power so far resign,
That you should regulate each look of mine?
Abdel. Then, when you gave your love, you gave that power.
Lynd.’Twas during pleasure— ’tis revoked this hour.
Abdel. I’ll hate you, and this visit is my last.
Lynd. Do, if you can: you know I hold you fast.”

That these passages violate all historical propriety, that sentiments to which nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra, is a light accusation. We have no objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian puritan, or a Bohemian sea-port. While the faces are good, we care little about the back-ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says that the curtains and hangings in a historical painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely drapery. The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The truth of character is the first object; the truth of place and time is to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself could tell the actor to turn out his toes, and remind him that 359Keeper Hatton was a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time, a writer of a very different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery.

We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and women;—not because love, such as he represents it, could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, but because it could not exist anywhere. As is the love of his heroes, such are all their other emotions. All their qualities, their courage, their generosity, their pride, are on the same colossal scale. Justice and prudence are virtues which can exist only in a moderate degree, and which change their nature and their name if pushed to excess. Of justice and prudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favourites destitute. He did not care to give them what he could not give without measure. The tyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes altered by a few touches, similar to those which transformed the honest face of Sir Roger de Coverley into the Saracen’s head. Through the grin and frown the original features are still perceptible.

It is in the tragi-comedies that these absurdities strike us most. The two races of men, or rather the angels and the baboons, are there presented to us together. We meet in one scene with nothing but gross, selfish, unblushing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as a punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, are condemned to talk nothing but prose. But, as soon as we meet with people who speak in verse, we know that we are in society which would have enraptured the Cathos and Madelon of Moliere, in society for which Croondates would have too little of the lover, and Clelia too much of the coquette. 360As Dryden was unable to render his plays interesting by means of that which is the peculiar and appropriate excellence of the drama, it was necessary that he should find some substitute for it. In his comedies he supplied its place, sometimes by wit, but more frequently by intrigue, by disguises, mistakes of persons, dialogues at cross purposes, hair-breadth escapes, perplexing concealments, and surprising disclosures. He thus succeeded at least in making these pieces very amusing.

In his tragedies he trusted, and not altogether without reason, to his diction and his versification. It was on this account, in all probability, that he so eagerly adopted, and so reluctantly abandoned, the practice of rhyming in his plays. What is unnatural appears less unnatural in that species of verse than in fines which approach more nearly to common conversation; and in the management of the heroic couplet Dryden has never been equalled. It is unnecessary to urge any arguments against a fashion now universally condemned. But it is worthy of observation, that, though Dryden was deficient in that talent which blank verse exhibits to the greatest advantage, and was certainly the best writer of heroic rhyme in our language, yet the plays which have, from the time of their first appearance, been considered as his best, are in blank verse. No experiment can be more decisive.

It must be allowed that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies contains good description and magnificent rhetoric. But, even when we forget that they are plays, and, passing by their dramatic improprieties, consider them with reference to the language, we are perpetually disgusted by passages which it is difficult to conceive how any author could have written, or any 361audience have tolerated, rants in which the raving violence of the manner forms a strange contrast with the abject tameness of the thought. The author laid the whole fault on the audience, and declared that, when he wrote them, he considered them bad enough to please. This defence is unworthy of a man of genius, and, after all, is no defence. Otway pleased without rant; and so might Dryden have done, if he had possessed the powers of Otway. The fact is, that he had a tendency to bombast, which, though subsequently corrected by time and thought, was never wholly removed, and which showed itself in performances not designed to please the rude mob of the theatre.

Some indulgent critics have represented this failing as an indication of genius, as the profusion of unlimited wealth, the wantonness of exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear a nearer affinity to the tawdriness of poverty, or the spasms and convulsions of weakness. Dryden surely had not more imagination than Homer, Dante, or Milton, who never fall into this vice. The swelling diction of Æschylus and Isaiah resembles that of Almanzor and Maximin no more than the tumidity of a muscle resembles the tumidity of a boil. The former is symptomatic of health and strength, the latter of debility and disease. If ever Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along,—when his mind is for a moment jaded,—when, as was said of Euripides, he resembles a lion, who excites his own fury by lashing himself with his tail. What happened to Shakspeare from the occasional suspension of his powers happened to Dryden from constant impotence. He, like his confederate Lee, had judgment enough to appreciate the great poets of the preceding age, but not 362judgment enough to shun competition with them. He felt and admired their wild and daring sublimity. That it belonged to another age than that in which he lived and required other talents than those which he possessed, that, in aspiring to emulate it, he was wasting, in a hopeless attempt, powers which might render him pre-eminent in a different career, was a lesson which he did not learn till late. As those knavish enthusiasts, the French prophets, courted inspiration by mimicking the writhings, swoonings, and gaspings which they considered as its symptoms, he attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury, to bring on a real paroxysm; and, like them, he got nothing but his distortions for his pains.

Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated Pindar to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen wings, and who experienced so fatal and ignominious a fall. His own admirable good sense preserved him from this error, and taught him to cultivate a style in which excellence was within his reach. Dryden had not the same self-knowledge. He saw that the greatest poets were never so successful as when they rushed beyond the ordinary bounds, and that some inexplicable good fortune preserved them from tripping even when they staggered on the brink of nonsense. He did not perceive that they were guided and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from the dictation of the imagination; and they found a response in the imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work himself, by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness, a rational frenzy.

In looking over the admirable designs which accompany the Faust, we have always been much struck by 363one which represents the wizard and the tempter riding at full speed. The demon sits on his furious horse as heedlessly as if he were reposing on a chair. That he should keep his saddle in such a posture, would seem impossible to any who did not know that he was secure in the privileges of a superhuman nature. The attitude of Faust, on the contrary, is the perfection of horsemanship. Poets of the first order might safely write as desperately as Mephistophiles rode. But Dryden, though admitted to communion with higher spirits, though armed with a portion of their power, and intrusted with some of their secrets, was of another race. What they might securely venture to do, it was madness in him to attempt. It was necessary that taste and critical science should supply his deficiencies.

We will give a few examples. Nothing can be finer than the description of Hector at the Grecian wall:—

What daring expressions! Yet how significant! How picturesque! Hector seems to rise up in his strength and fury. The gloom of night in his frown,—the fire burning in his eyes,—the javelins and the blazing armour,—the mighty rush through the gates and down the battlements,—the trampling and the infinite roar of the multitude,—everything is with us; everything is real. 364Dryden has described a very similar event in Maximin, and has done his best to he sublime, as follows:—

“There with a forest of their darts he strove,
And stood like Capaneus defying Jove;
With his broad sword the boldest beating down,
Till Fate grew pale, lest he should win the town,
And turned the iron leaves of its dark book
To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook.”

How exquisite is the imagery of the fairy songs in the Tempest and in the Midsummer Night’s Dream; Ariel riding through the twilight on the bat, or sucking in the bells of flowers with the bee; or the little bower-women of Titania, driving the spiders from the couch of the Queen! Dryden truly said, that

“Shakspeare’s magic could not copied be:
Within that circle none durst walk but he.”

It would have been well if he had not himself dared to step within the enchanted line, and drawn on himself a fate similar to that which, according to the old superstition, punished such presumptuous interference. The following lines are parts of the song of his fairies:—

“Merry, merry, merry, we sail from the East,
Half-tippled at a rainbow feast.
In the bright moonshine, while winds whistle loud,
Tivv, tivy, tivy, we mount and we fly,
All racking along in a downy white cloud;
And lest our leap from the sky prove too far,
We slide on the back of a new falling star,
And drop from above
In a jelly of love.”

These are very favourable instances. Those who wish for a bad one may read the dying speeches of Maximin, and may compare them with the last scenes of Othello and Lear.

If Dryden had died before the expiration of the first of the periods into which we have divided his literary 365life, he would have left a reputation, at best, little higher than that of Lee or Davenant. He would have been known only to men of letters; and by them he would have been mentioned as a writer who threw away, on subjects which he was incompetent to treat, powers which, judiciously employed, might have raised him to eminence; whose diction and whose numbers had sometimes very high merit; but all whose works were blemished by a false taste, and by errors of gross negligence. A few of his prologues and epilogues might perhaps still have been remembered and quoted. In these little pieces he early showed all the powers which afterwards rendered him the greatest of modern satirists. But, during the latter part of his life, he gradually abandoned the drama. His plays appeared at longer intervals. He renounced rhyme in tragedy. His language became less turgid—his characters less exaggerated. He did not indeed produce correct representations of human nature; but he ceased to daub such monstrous chimeras as those which abound in his earlier pieces. Here and there passages occur worthy of the best ages of the British stage. The style which the drama requires changes with every change of character and situation. He who can vary his manner to suit the variation is the great dramatist; but he who excels in one manner only will, when that manner happens to be appropriate, appear to be a great dramatist; as the hands of a watch which does not go point right once in the twelve hours. Sometimes there is a scene of solemn debate. This a mere rhetorician may write as well as the greatest tragedian that ever lived. We confess that to us the speech of Sempronius in Cato seems very nearly as good as Shakspeare could have made it. But when the senate breaks up, and 366we find that the lovers and their mistresses, the hero, the villain, and the deputy-villain, all continue to harangue in the same style, we perceive the difference between a man who can write a play and a man who can write a speech. In the same manner, wit, a talent for description, or a talent for narration, may, for a time, pass for dramatic genius. Dryden was an incomparable reasoned in verse. He was conscious of his power; he was proud of it; and the authors of the Rehearsal justly charged him with abusing it. His warriors and princesses are fond of discussing points of amorous casuistry, such as would have delighted a Parliament of Love. They frequently go still deeper, and speculate on philosophical necessity and the origin of evil.

There were, however, some occasions which absolutely required this peculiar talent. Then Dryden was indeed at home. All his best scenes are of this description. They are all between men; for the heroes of Dryden, like many other gentlemen, can never talk sense when ladies are in company. They are all intended to exhibit the empire of reason over violent passion. We have two interlocutors, the one eager and impassioned, the other high, cool, and judicious. The composed and rational character gradually acquires the ascendency. His fierce companion is first inflamed to rage by his reproaches, then overawed by his equanimity, convinced by his arguments, and soothed by his persuasions. This is the case in the scene between Hector and Troilus, in that between Antony and Ventidius, and in that between Sebastian and Dorax. Nothing of the same kind in Shakspeare is equal to them, except the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which is worth them all three. 367Some years before his death, Dryden altogether ceased to write for the stage. He had turned his powers in a new direction, with success the most splendid and decisive. His taste had gradually awakened his creative faculties. The first rank in poetry was beyond his reach; but he challenged and secured the most honorable place in the second. His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar. When he attempted the highest flights, he became ridiculous; but, while he remained in a lower region, he outstripped all competitors.

All his natural and all his acquired powers fitted him to found a good critical school of poetry. Indeed he carried his reforms too far for his age. After his death, our literature retrograded: and a century was necessary to bring it back to the point at which he left it. The general soundness and healthfulness of his mental constitution, his information of vast superficies though of small volume, his wit scarcely inferior to that of the most distinguished followers of Donne, his eloquence, grave, deliberate, and commanding, could not save him from disgraceful failure as a rival of Shakspeare, but raised him far above the level of Boileau. His command of language was immense. With him died the secret of the old poetical diction of England,—the art of producing rich effects by familiar words. In the following century, it was as completely lost as the Gothic method of painting glass, and was but poorly supplied by the laborious and tesselated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the other hand, he was the first writer under whose skilful management the scientific vocabulary fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this department, he succeeded as completely as his contemporary Gibbons succeeded in the similar 368enterprise of carving the most delicate flowers from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became ductile at his touch. His versification in the same manner, while it gave the first model of that neatness and precision which the following generation esteemed so highly, exhibited, at the same time, the last examples of nobleness, freedom, variety of pause, and cadence. His tragedies in rhyme, however worthless in themselves, had at least served the purpose of nonsense-verses; they had taught him all the arts of melody which the heroic couplet admits. For bombast, his prevailing vice, his new subjects gave little opportunity; his better taste gradually discarded it.

He possessed, as we have said, in a pre-eminent degree, the power of reasoning in verse; and this power was now peculiarly useful to him. His logic is by no means uniformly sound. On points of criticism, he always reasons ingeniously; and, when he is disposed to be honest, correctly. But the theological and political questions which he undertook to treat in verse were precisely those which he understood least. His arguments, therefore, are often worthless. But the manner in which they are stated is beyond all praise. The style is transparent. The topics follow each other in the happiest order. The objections are drawn up in such a manner that the whole fire of the reply may be brought to bear on them. The circumlocutions which are substituted for technical phrases are clear, neat, and exact. The illustrations at once adorn and elucidate the reasoning. The sparkling epigrams of Cowley, and the simple garrulity of the buidesque poets of Italy, are alternately employed, in the happiest manner, to give effect to what is obvious, or clearness to what is obscure. 369His literary creed was catholic, even to latitudinarianism; not from any want of acuteness, but from a disposition to be easily satisfied. He was quick to discern the smallest glimpse of merit; he was indulgent even to gross improprieties, when accompanied by any redeeming talent. When he said a severe thing, it was to serve a temporary purpose,—to support an argument, or to tease a rival. Never was so able a critic so free from fastidiousness. He loved the old poets, especially Shakspeare. He admired the ingenuity which Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He did justice, amidst the general silence, to the memory of Milton. He praised to the skies the school-boy lines of Addison. Always looking on the fair side of every object, he admired extravagance on account of the invention which he supposed it to indicate; he excused affectation in favour of wit; he tolerated even tameness for the sake of the correctness which was its concomitant.

It was probably to this turn of mind, rather than to the more disgraceful causes which Johnson has assigned, that we are to attribute the exaggeration which dis-’figures the panegyrics of Dryden. No writer, it must be owned, has carried the flattery of dedication to a greater length. But this was not, we suspect, merely interested servility: it was the overflowing of a mind singularly disposed to admiration,—of a mind which diminished vices, and magnified virtues and obligations. The most adulatory of his addresses is that in which he dedicates the State of Innocence to Mary of Modena. Johnson thinks it strange that any man should use such language without self-detestation. But he has not remarked that to the very same work is prefixed an eulogium on Milton, which certainly could not have 370been acceptable at the court of Charles the Second. Many years later, when Whig principles were in a great measure triumphant, Sprat refused to admit a monument of John Philips into Westminster Abbey—because, in the epitaph, the name of Milton incidently occurred. The walls of his church, he declared, should not be polluted by the name of a republican! Dryden was attached, both by principle and interest, to the Court. But nothing could deaden his sensibility to excellence. We are unwilling to accuse him severely, because the same disposition, which prompted him to pay so generous a tribute to the memory of a poet whom his patrons detested, hurried him into extravagance when he described a princess distinguished by the splendour of her beauty and the graciousness of her manners.

This is an amiable temper; but it is not the temper of great men. Where there is elevation of character, there will be fastidiousness. It is only in novels and on tombstones that we meet with people who are indulgent to the faults of others, and unmerciful to their own; and Dry den, at all events, was not one of these paragons. His charity was extended most liberally to » others; but it certainly began at home. In taste he was by no means deficient. His critical work! are, beyond all comparison, superior to any which had, till then, appeared in England. They were generally intended as apologies for his own poems, rather than as expositions of general principles; he, therefore, often attempts to deceive the reader by sophistry which could scarcely have deceived himself. His dicta are the dicta, not of a judge, but of an advocate;—often of an advocate in an unsound cause. Yet, in the very act of misrepresenting the laws of composition, he shows how 371well he understands them. But he was perpetually acting against his better knowledge. His sins were sins against light. He trusted that what was bad would be pardoned for the sake of what was good. What was good, he took no pains to make better. He was not, like most persons who rise to eminence, dissatisfied even with his best productions. He had set up no unattainable standard of perfection, the contemplation of which might at once improve and mortify him. His path was not attended by an unapproachable mirage of excellence, for ever receding, and for ever pursued. He was not disgusted by the negligence of others; and he extended the same toleration to himself. His mind was of a slovenly character,—fond of splendour, but indifferent to neatness. Hence most of his writings exhibit the sluttish magnificence of a Russian noble, all vermin and diamonds, dirty linen and inestimable sables. Those faults which spring from affectation, time and thought in a great measure removed from his poems. But his carelessness he retained to the last. If towards the close of his life he less frequently went wrong from negligence, it was only because long habits of composition rendered it more easy to go right. In his best pieces we find false rhymes,—triplets, in which the third line appears to be a mere intruder, and, while it breaks the music, adds nothing to the meaning,—gigantic Alexandrines of fourteen and sixteen syllables, and truncated verses for which he never troubled himself to find a termination or a partner.

Such are the beauties and the faults which may be found in profusion throughout the later works of Dry-den. A more just and complete estimate of his natural and acquired powers,—of the merits of his style and of its blemishes,—may be formed from the Hind and 372Panther, than from any of his other writings. As a didactic poem, it is far superior to the Religio Laici. The satirical parts, particularly the character of Burnet, are scarcely inferior to the best passages in Absalom and Achitophel. There are, moreover, occasional touches of a tenderness which effects us more, because it is decent, rational, and manly, and reminds us of the best scenes in his tragedies. His versification sinks and swells in happy unison with the subject; and his wealth of language seems to be unlimited. Yet, the carelessness with which he has constructed his plot, and the innumerable inconsistencies into which he is every moment falling, detract much from the pleasure which such various excellence affords.

In Absalom and Achitophel he hit upon a new and rich vein, which he worked with signal success. The ancient satirists were the subjects of a despotic government. They were compelled to abstain from political topics, and to confine their attention to the frailties of private life. They might, indeed, sometimes venture to take liberties with public men, “Quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina.”

Thus Juvenal immortalised the obsequious senators who met to decide the fate of the memorable turbot. His fourth satire frequently reminds us of the great political poem of Dryden; but it was not written till Domitian had fallen: and it wants something of the peculiar flavour which belongs to contemporary invective alone. His anger has stood so long that, though the body is not impaired, the effervescence, the first cream, is gone. Boileau lay under similar restraints; and, if he had been free from all restraint, would have been no match for our countryman.

The advantages which Dryden derived from the nature 373of his subject he improved to the very utmost. His maimer is almost perfect. The style of Horace and Boileau is fit only for light subjects. The Frenchman did indeed attempt to turn the theological reasonings of the Provincial Letters into verse, but with very indifferent success. The glitter of Pope is cold. The ardour of Persius is without brilliancy. Magnificent versification and ingenious combinations rarely harmonise with the expression of deep feeling. In Juvenal and Dryden alone we have the sparkle and the heat together. Those great satirists succeeded in communicating; the fervour of their feelings to materials the most incombustible, and kindled the whole mass into a blaze, at once dazzling and destructive. We cannot, indeed, think, without regret, of the part which so eminent a writer as Dryden took in the disputes of that period. There was, no doubt, madness and wickedness on both sides. But there was liberty on the one, and despotism on the other. On this point, however, we will not dwell. At Talavera the English and French troops for a moment suspended their conflict, to drink of a stream which flowed between them. The shells were passed across from enemy to enemy without apprehension or molestation. We, in the same manner, would rather assist our political adversaries to drink with us of that fountain of intellectual pleasure, which should be the common refreshment of both parties, than disturb and pollute it with the havock of unseasonable hostilities.

Macflenoe is inferior to Absalom and Achitophel, only in the subject. In the execution it is even superior. But the greatest work of Dryden was the last, the Ode on Saint Cecilia’s day. It is the master-piece of the second class of poetry, and ranks but just below 374the great models of the first. It reminds us of the Pedasus of Achilles.

By comparing it with the impotent ravings of the heroic tragedies, we may measure the progress which the mind of Dryden had made. He had learned to avoid a too audacious competition with higher natures, to keep at a distance from the verge of bombast or nonsense, to venture on no expression which did not convey a distinct idea to his own mind. There is none of that “darkness visible” of style which he had formerly affected, and in which the greatest poets only can succeed. Everything is definite, significant, and picturesque. His early writings resembled the gigantic works of those Chinese gardeners who attempt to rival nature herself, to form cataracts of terrific height and sound, to raise precipitous ridges of mountains, and to imitate in artificial plantations the vastness and the gloom of some primeval forest. This manner he abandoned; nor did he ever adopt the Dutch taste which Pope affected, the trim parterres, and the rectangular walks. He rather resembled our Kents and Browns, who, imitating the great features of landscape without emulating them, consulting the genius of the place, assisting nature and carefully disguising their art, produced, not a Chainouni or a Niagara, but a Stowe or a Hagley.

We are, on the whole, inclined to regret that Dryden did not accomplish his purpose of writing an epic poem. It certainly would not have been a work of the highest rank. It would not have rivalled the Iliad, the Odyssey, or the Paradise Lost; but it would have been superior to the productions of Apollonius, Lucan, or Statius, and not inferior to the Jerusalem Delivered. 375It would probably have been a vigorous narrative, animated with something of the spirit of the old romances, enriched with much splendid description, and interspersed with fine declamations and disquisitions. The danger of Dryden would have been from aiming too high; from dwelling too much, for example, on his angels of kingdoms, and attempting a competition with that great writer who in his own time had so incomparably succeeded in representing to us the sights and sounds of another world. To Milton, and to Milton alone, belonged the secrets of the great deep, the beach of sulphur, the ocean of fire, the palaces of the fallen dominations, glimmering through the everlasting shade, the silent wilderness of verdure and fragrance where armed angels kept watch over the sleep of the first lovers, the portico of diamond, the sea of jasper, the sapphire pavement empurpled with celestial roses, and the infinite ranks of the Cherubim, blazing with adamant and gold. The council, the tournament, the procession, the crowded cathedral, the camp, the guardroom, the chase, were the proper scenes for Dryden.

But we have not space to pass in review all the works which Dryden wrote. We, therefore, will not speculate longer on those which he might possibly have written. He may, on the whole, be pronounced to have been a man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who, in that department, succeeded pre-eminently; and who, with a more independent spirit, a more anxious desire of excellence, and more respect for himself, would, in his own walk, have attained to absolute perfection.

HISTORY. (1)

376(Edinburgh Review, May 1828.)
T
o write history respectably—that is, to abbreviate despatches, and make extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united, and abounding in withs and withouts—all this is very easy. But to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions. Many scientific works are, in their kind, absolutely perfect. There are poems which we should be inclined to designate as faultless, or as disfigured only by blemishes which pass unnoticed in the general blaze of excellence. There are speeches, some speeches of Demosthenes particularly, in which it would be impossible to alter a word without altering it for the worse. But we are acquainted with no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to be—with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right hand or on the left, from the exact line.

The cause may easily be assigned. This province of literature is a debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories. It is under the

     (1) The Romance of History. England. By Henry Neete.
     London, 1828.

jurisdiction 377of two hostile powers; and, like other districts similarly situated, it is ill-defined, ill cultivated, and ill regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes theory.

History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples. Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis. Those who can justly estimate these almost insuperable difficulties will not think it strange that every writer should have failed, either in the narrative or in the speculative department of history.

It may be laid down as a general rule, though subject to considerable qualifications and exceptions, that history begins in novel and ends in essay. Of the romantic historians Herodotus is the earliest and the best. His animation, his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful talent for description and dialogue, and the pure sweet flow of his language, place him at the head of narrators. He reminds us of a delightful child. There is a grace beyond the reach of affectation in his awkwardness, a malice in his innocence, an intelligence in his nonsense, an insinuating eloquence in his lisp. We know of no writer who makes such 378interest for himself and his hook in the heart of the reader. At the distance of three-and-twenty centuries, we feel for him the same sort of pitying fondness which Fontaine and Gay are said to have inspired in society. He has written an incomparable book. He has written something better perhaps than the best history; but he has not written a good history; he is, from the first to the last chapter, an inventor. We do not here refer merely to those gross fictions with which he has been reproached by the critics of later times. We speak of that colouring which is equally diffused over his whole narrative, and which perpetually leaves the most sagacious reader in doubt what to reject and what to receive. The most authentic parts of his work bear the same relation to his wildest legends which Henry the Fifth bears to the Tempest. There was an expedition undertaken by Xerxes against Greece; and there was an invasion of France. There was a battle at Platæa; and there was a battle at Agincourt. Cambridge and Exeter, the Constable and the Dauphin, were persons as real as Demaratus and Pausa-nias. The harangue of the Archbishop on the Salic Law and the Book of Numbers differs much less from the orations which have in all ages proceeded from the right reverend bench than the speeches of Mardonius and Artabanus from those which were delivered at the council-board of Susa. Shakspeare gives us enumerations of armies, and returns of killed and wounded, which are not, we suspect, much less accurate than those of Herodotus. There are passages in Herodotus nearly as long as acts of Shakspeare, in which everything is told dramatically, and in which the narrative serves only the purpose of stage-directions. It is possible, no doubt, that the substance of some real conversations379 may have been reported to the historian. But events, which, if they ever happened, happened in ages and nations so remote that the particulars could never have been known to him, are related with the greatest minuteness of detail. We have all that Candaules said to Gyges, and all that passed between Astyages and Harpagus. We are, therefore, unable to judge whether, in the account which he gives of transactions respecting which he might possibly have been well informed, we can trust to anything beyond the naked outline; whether, for example, the answer of Gelon to the ambassadors of the Grecian confederacy, or the expressions which passed between Aristides and Themistocles at their famous interview, have been correctly transmitted to us. The great events, are, no doubt, faithfully related. So, probably, are many of the slighter circumstances; but which of them it is impossible to ascertain. The fictions are so much like the facts, and the facts so much like the fictions, that, with respect to many most interesting particulars, our belief is neither given nor withheld, but remains in an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. We know that there is truth; but we cannot exactly decide where it lies.

The faults of Herodotus are the faults of a simple and imaginative mind. Children and servants are remarkably Herodotean in their style of narration. They tell everything dramatically. Their says hes and says shes are proverbial. Every person who has had to settle their disputes knows that, even when they have no intention to deceive, their reports of conversation always require to be carefully sifted. If an educated man were giving an account of the late change of administration, he would say—“Lord Goderich resigned; 380and the King, in consequence, sent for the Duke of Wellington.” A porter tells the story as if he had been hid behind the curtains of the royal bed at Windsor: “So Lord Goderich says, ‘I cannot manage this business; I must go out.’ So the King says,—says he, ‘Well, then, I must send for the Duke of Wellington—that’s all.’” This is in the very manner of the father of history.

Herodotus wrote as it was natural that he should write. He wrote for a nation susceptible, curious, lively, insatiably desirous of novelty and excitement; for a nation in which the fine arts had attained their highest excellence, but in which philosophy was still in its infancy. His countrymen had but recently begun to cultivate prose composition. Public transactions had generally been recorded in verse. The first historians might, therefore, indulge without fear of censure in the license allowed to their predecessors the bards. Books were few. The events of former times were learned from tradition and from popular ballads; the manners of foreign countries from the reports of travellers. It is well known that the mystery which overhangs what is distant, either in space or time, frequently prevents us from censuring as unnatural what we perceive to be impossible. We stare at a dragoon who has killed three French cuirassiers, as a prodigy; yet we read, without the least disgust, how Godfrey slew his thousands, and Rinaldo his ten thousands. Within the last hundred years, stories about China and Bantam, which ought not to have imposed on an old nurse, were gravely laid down as foundations of political theories by eminent philosophers. What the time of the Crusades is to us, the generation of Croesus and Solon was to the Greeks of the time of Herodotus. Babylon 381was to them what Pekin was to the French academicians of the last century.

For such a people was the book of Herodotus composed; and, if we may trust to a report, not sanctioned indeed by writers of high authority, but in itself not improbable, it was composed, not to be read, but to be heard. It was not to the slow circulation of a few copies, which the rich only could possess, that the aspiring author looked for his reward. The great Olympian festival,—the solemnity which collected multitudes, proud of the Grecian name, from the wildest mountains of Doris, and the remotest colonies of Italy and Libya,—was to witness his triumph. The interest of the narrative, and the beauty of the style, were aided by the imposing effect of recitation,—by the splendour of the spectacle,—by the powerful influence of sympathy. A critic who could have asked for authorities in the midst of such a scene must have been of a cold and sceptical nature; and few such critics were there: As was the historian, such were the auditors,—inquisitive, credulous, easily moved by religious awe or patriotic enthusiasm. They were the very men to hear with delight of strange beasts, and birds, and trees,—of dwarfs, and giants, and cannibals,—of gods, whose very names it was impiety to utter,—of ancient dynasties, which had left behind them monuments surpassing all the works of later times,—of towns like provinces,—of rivers like seas,—of stupendous walls, and temples, and pyramids,—of the rites which the Magi performed at daybreak on the tops of the mountains,—of the secrets inscribed on the eternal obelisks of Memphis. With equal delight they would have listened to the graceful romances of their own country. They now heard of the exact 382accomplishment of obscure predictions, of the punishment of crimes over which the justice of heaven had seemed to slumber,—of dreams, omens, warnings from the dead,—of princesses, for whom noble suitors contended in every generous exercise of strength and skill,—of infants, strangely preserved from the dagger of the assassin, to fulfil high destinies.

As the narrative approached their own times, the interest became still more absorbing. The chronicler had now to tell the story of that great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political supremacy,—a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race,—a story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is pathetic and animating; with the gigantic caprices of infinite wealth and despotic power—with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue, and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day,—of provinces famished for a meal,—of a passage for ships hewn through the mountains,—of a road for armies spread upon the waves,—of monarchies and commonwealths swept away,—of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of despair!—and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity of evil, and not found wanting,—of resistance long maintained against desperate odds,—of lives dearly sold, when resistance could be maintained no more,—of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge. Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well calculated to inflame the passions, and to flatter national pride, was certain to be favourably received.

Between the time at which Herodotus is said to have composed his history, and the close of the Peloponnesian 383war, about forty years elapsed,—forty years, crowded with great military and political events. The circumstances of that period produced a great effect on the Grecian character; and nowhere was this effect so remarkable as in the illustrious democracy of Athens. An Athenian, indeed, even in the time of Herodotus, would scarcely have written a book so romantic and garrulous as that of Herodotus. As civilisation advanced, the citizens of that famous republic became still less visionary, and still less simple-hearted. They aspired to know where their ancestors had been content to doubt; they began to doubt where their ancestors had thought it their duty to believe. Aristophanes is fond of alluding to this change in the temper of his countrymen. The father and son, in the Clouds, are evidently representatives of the generations to which they respectively belonged. Nothing more clearly illustrates the nature of this moral revolution than the change which passed upon tragedy. The wild sublimity of Æschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides. Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which had characterised it. It became less like the ancient Tuscan, and more like the modern French.

The fashionable logic of the Greeks, was, indeed, far from strict. Logic never can be strict where books are scarce, and where information is conveyed orally. We are all aware how frequently fallacies, which, when set down on paper, are at once detected, pass for unanswerable arguments when dexterously and volubly urged in Parliament, at the bar, or in private conversation. The reason is evident. We cannot inspect 384them closely enough to perceive their inaccuracy. We cannot readily compare them with each other. We lose sight of one part of the subject before another, which ought to be received in connection with it, comes before us; and, as there is no immutable record of what has been admitted and of what has been denied, direct contradictions pass muster with little difficulty. Almost all the education of a Greek consisted in talking and listening. His opinions on government were picked up in the debates of the assembly. If he wished to study metaphysics, instead of shutting himself up with a book, he walked down to the market-place to look for a sophist. So completely were men formed to these habits, that even writing acquired a conversational air. The philosophers adopted the form of dialogue, as the most natural mode of communicating knowledge. Their reasonings have the merits and the defects which belong to that species of composition, and are characterised rather by quickness and subtilty than by depth and precision. Truth is exhibited in parts, and by glimpses. Innumerable clever hints are given; but no sound and durable system is erected. The argumentum ad hominem, a kind of argument most efficacious in debate, but utterly useless for the investigation of general principles, is among their favourite resources. Hence, though nothing can be more admirable than the skill which Socrates displays in the conversations which Plato has reported or invented, his victories, for the most part, seem to us unprofitable. A trophy is set up; but no new province is added to the dominions of the human mind.

Still, where thousands of keen and ready intellects were constantly employed in speculating on the qualities 385of actions and on the principles of government, it was impossible that history should retain its old character. It became less gossiping and less picturesque; but much more accurate, and somewhat more scientific.

The history of Thucydides differs from that of Herodotus as a portrait differs from the representation of an imaginary scene; as the Burke or Fox of Reynolds differs from his Ugolino or his Beaufort. In the former ease, the archetype is given: in the latter, it is created. The faculties which are required for the latter purpose are of a higher and rarer order than those which suffice for the former, and indeed necessarily comprise them. He who is able to paint what he sees with the eye of the mind will surely be able to paint what he sees with the eye of the body. He who can invent a story, and tell it well, will also be able to tell, in an interesting manner, a story which he has not invented. If, in practice, some of the best writers of fiction have been among the worst writers of history, it has been because one of their talents had merged in another so completely that it could not be severed; because, having long been habituated to invent and narrate at the same time, they found it impossible to narrate without inventing.

Some capricious and discontented artists have affected to consider portrait-painting as unworthy of a man of genius. Some critics have spoken in the same contemptuous manner of history. Johnson puts the case thus: The historian tells either what is false or what is true: in the former case he is no historian: in the latter he has no opportunity for displaying his abilities: for truth is one: and all who tell the truth must tell it alike.

It is not difficult to elude both the horns of this 386dilemma. We will recur to the analogous art of portrait-painting. Any man with eyes and hands may be taught to take a likeness. The process, up to a certain point, is merely mechanical. If this were all, a man of talents might justly despise the occupation. But we could mention portraits which are resemblances,—but not mere resemblances; faithful,—but much more than faithful; portraits which condense into one point of time, and exhibit, at a single glance, the whole history of turbid and eventful lives—in which the eye seems to scrutinise us, and the mouth to command us—in which the brow menaces, and the lip almost quivers with scorn—in which every wrinkle is a comment on some important transaction. The account which Thucydides has given of the retreat from Syracuse is, among narratives, what Vandyk’s Lord Strafford is among paintings.

Diversity, it is said, implies error: truth is one, and admits of no degrees. We answer, that this principle holds good only in abstract reasonings. When we talk of the truth of imitation in the fine arts, we mean an imperfect and a graduated truth. No picture is exactly like the original; nor is a picture good in proportion as it is like the original. When Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome peeress, he does not contemplate her through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the canvas the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels of the eye, and all the other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdignaggian maids of honour. If he were to do this, the effect would not merely be unpleasant, but, unless the scale of the picture were proportionably enlarged, would be absolutely false. And, after all, a microscope of greater power than that which he had employed would convict him of innumerable 387omissions. The same may be said of history. Perfectly and absolutely true it cannot be: for, to be perfectly and absolutely true, it ought to record all the slightest particulars of the slightest transactions—all the things done and all the words uttered during the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance, however insignificant, would be a defect. If history were written thus, the Bodleian library would not contain the occurrences of a week. What is told in the fullest and most accurate annals bears an infinitely small proportion to what is suppressed. The difference between the copious work of Clarendon and the account of the civil wars in the abridgment of Goldsmith vanishes when compared with the immense mass of facts respecting which both are equally silent.

No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth: but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole. He who is deficient in the art of selection may, by showing nothing but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest falsehood. It perpetually happens that one writer tells less truth than another, merely because he tells more truths. In the imitative arts we constantly see this. There are lines in the human face, and objects in landscape, which stand in such relations to each other, that they ought either to be all introduced into a painting together or all omitted together. A sketch into which none of them enters may be excellent; but, if some are given and others left out, though there are more points of likeness, there is less likeness. An outline scrawled with a pen, which seizes the marked features of a countenance, will give a much stronger idea of it than a bad painting in oils. Yet 388the worst painting in oils that ever hung at Somerset House resembles the original in many more particulars. A bust of white marble may give an excellent idea of a blooming face. Colour the lips and cheeks of the bust, leaving the hair and eyes unaltered, and the similarity, instead of being; more striking, will be less so.

History has its foreground and its background: and it is principally in the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another. Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon; and a general idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight touches.

In this respect no writer has ever equalled Thucydides. He was a perfect master of the art of gradual diminution. His history is sometimes as concise as a chronological chart; yet it is always perspicuous. It is sometimes as minute as one of Lovelace’s letters; yet it is never prolix. He never fails to contract and to expand it in the right place.

Thucydides borrowed from Herodotus the practice of putting speeches of his own into the mouths of his characters. In Herodotus this usage is scarcely censurable. It is of a piece with his whole manner. But it is altogether incongruous in the work of his successor, and violates, not only the accuracy of history, but the decencies of fiction. When once we enter into the spirit of Herodotus, we find no inconsistency. The conventional probability of his drama is preserved from the beginning to the end. The deliberate orations, and the familiar dialogues are in strict keeping with each other. But the speeches of Thucydides are neither preceded nor followed by anything with which they harmonise. They give to the whole book something 389of the grotesque character of those Chinese pleasure-grounds in which perpendicular rocks of granite start up in the midst of a soft green plain. Invention is shocking where truth is in such close juxtaposition with it.

Thucydides honestly tells us that some of these discourses are purely fictitious. He may have reported the substance of others correctly. But it is clear from the internal evidence that he has preserved no more than the substance. His own peculiar habits of thought and expression are everywhere discernible. Individual and national peculiarities are seldom to be traced in the sentiments, and never in the diction. The oratory of the Corinthians and Thebans is not less Attic, either in matter or in manner, than that of the Athenians. The style of Cleon is as pure, as austere, as terse, and as significant, as that of Pericles.

In spite of this great fault, it must be allowed that Thucydides has surpassed all his rivals in the art of historical narration, in the art of producing an effect on the imagination, by skilful selection and disposition, without indulging in the license of invention. But narration, though an important part of the business of a historian, is not the whole. To append a moral to a work of fiction is either useless or superfluous. A fiction may give a more impressive effect to what is already known; but it can teach nothing new. If it presents to us characters and trains of events to which our experience furnishes us with nothing similar, instead of deriving instruction from it, we pronounce it unnatural. We do not form our opinions from it; but we try it by our preconceived opinions. Fiction, therefore, is essentially imitative. Its merit consists in its resemblance to a model with which we are al ready 390familiar, or to which at least we can instantly refer. Hence it is that the anecdotes which interest us most strongly in authentic narrative are offensive when introduced into novels; that what is called the romantic part of history is in fact the least romantic. It is delightful as history, because it contradicts our previous notions of human nature, and of the connection of causes and effects. It is, on that very account, shocking and incongruous in fiction. In fiction, the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the phenomena as well as state them performs only one half of his office. Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value: and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty.

Here Thucydides is deficient: the deficiency, indeed, is not discreditable to him. It was the inevitable effect of circumstances. It was in the nature of things necessary that, in some part of its progress through political science, the human mind should reach that point which it attained in his time. Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps. The axioms of an English debating club would have been startling and mysterious paradoxes to the most enlightened statesmen of Athens. But it would be as absurd to speak contemptuously of the Athenian on this account as to ridicule Strabo for not having given us an account of Chili, or to talk of Ptolemy as we talk of Sir Richard Phillips. Still, when we wish for solid geographical information, we must prefer the solemn coxcombry of 391Pinkerton to the noble work of Strabo. If we wanted instruction respecting the solar system, we should consult the silliest girl from a boarding school, rather than Ptolemy.

Thucydides was undoubtedly a sagacious and reflecting man. This clearly appears from the ability with which he discusses practical questions. But the talent of deciding on the circumstances of a particular case is often possessed in the highest perfection by persons destitute of the power of generalisation. Men skilled in the military tactics of civilised nations have been amazed at the far-sightedness and penetration which a Mohawk displays in concerting his stratagems, or in discerning those of his enemies. In England, no class possesses so much of that peculiar ability which is required for constructing ingenious schemes, and for obviating remote difficulties, as the thieves and the thief-takers. Women have more of this dexterity than men. Lawyers have more of it than statesmen: statesmen have more of it than philosophers. Monk had more of it than Harrington and all his club. Walpole had more of it than Adam Smith or Beccaria. Indeed, the species of discipline by which this dexterity is acquired tends to contract the mind, and to render it incapable of abstract reasoning.

The Grecian statesmen of the age of Thucydides were distinguished by their practical sagacity, their insight into motives, their skill in devising means for the attainment of their ends. A state of society in winch the rich were constantly planning the oppression of the poor, and the poor the spoliation of the rich, in which the ties of party had superseded those of country, in which revolutions and counter revolutions were events of daily occurrence, was naturally prolific 392in desperate and crafty political adventurers. This was the very school in which men were likely to acquire the dissimulation of Mazarin, the judicious temerity of Richelieu, the penetration, the exquisite tact, the almost instinctive presentiment of approaching events which gave so much authority to the counsel of Shaftesbury that “it was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God.” In this school Thucydides studied; and his wisdom is that which such a school would naturally afford. He judges better of circumstances than of principles. The more a question is narrowed, the better he reasons upon it. His work suggests many most important considerations respecting the first principles of government and morals, the growth of factions, the organisation of armies, and the mutual relations of communities. Yet all his general observations on these subjects are very superficial. His most judicious remarks differ from the remarks of a really philosophical historian, as a sum correctly cast up by a book-keeper from a general expression discovered by an algebraist. The former is useful only in a single transaction; the latter may be applied to an infinite number of cases.

This opinion will, we fear, be considered as heterodox. For, not to speak of the illusion which the sight of a Greek type, or the sound of a Greek dip-thong, often produces, there are some peculiarities in the manner of Thucydides which in no small degree have tended to secure to him the reputation of profundity. His book is evidently the book of a man and a statesman; and in this respect presents a remarkable contrast to the delightful childishness of Herodotus. Throughout it there is an air of matured power, of grave and melancholy reflection, of impartiality and 393habitual self-command. His feelings are rarely indulged, and speedily repressed. Vulgar prejudices of every kind, and particularly vulgar superstitions, he treats with a cold and sober disdain peculiar to himself. His style is weighty, condensed, antithetical, and not unfrequently obscure. But, when we look at his political philosophy, without regard to these circumstances, we find him to have been, what indeed it would have been a miracle if he had not been, simply an Athenian of the fifth century before Christ.

Xenophon is commonly placed, but we think without much reason, in the same rank with Herodotus and Thucydides. He resembles them, indeed, in the purity and sweetness of his style; but, in spirit, he rather resembles that later school of historians, whose works seem to be fables composed for a moral, and who, In their eagerness to give us warnings and examples, forget to give us men and women. The Life of Cyrus, whether we look upon it as a history or as a romance, seems to us a very wretched performance. The expedition of the Ten Thousand, and the History of Grecian Affairs, are certainly pleasant reading; but they indicate no great power of mind. In truth, Xenophon, though his taste was elegant, his disposition amiable, and his intercourse with the world extensive, had, we suspect, rather a weak head. Such was evidently the opinion of that extraordinary man to whom he early attached himself, and for whose memory he entertained an idolatrous veneration. He came in only for the milk with which Socrates nourished his babes in philosophy. A few saws of morality, and a few of the simplest doctrines of natural religion, were enough for the good young man. The strong meat, the bold speculations on physical and metaphysical science, were 394reserved for auditors of a different description. Even the lawless habits of a captain of mercenary troops could not change the tendency which the character of Xenophon early acquired. To the last, he seems to have retained a sort of heathen Puritanism. The sentiments of piety and virtue which abound in his works are those of a well-meaning man, somewhat timid and narrow-minded, devout from constitution rather than from rational conviction. He was as superstitious as Herodotus, but in a way far more offensive. The very peculiarities which charm us in an infant, the toothless mumbling, the stammering, the tottering, the helplessness, the causeless tears and laughter, are disgusting in old age. In the same manner, the absurdity which precedes a period of general intelligence is often pleasing; that which follows it is contemptible. The nonsense of Herodotus is that of a baby. The nonsense of Xenophon is that of a dotard. His stories about dreams, omens, and prophecies, present a strange contrast to the passages in which the shrewd and incredulous Thucydides mentions the popular superstitions. It is not quite clear that Xenophon was honest in his credulity;’ his fanaticism was in some degree politic. He would have made an excellent member of the Apostolic Camarilla. An alarmist by nature, an aristocrat by party, he carried to an unreasonable excess his horror of popular turbulence. The quiet atrocity of Sparta did not shock him in the same manner; for he hated tumult more than crimes. He was desirous to find restraints which might curb the passions of the multitude; and he absurdly fancied that he had found them in a religion without evidences or sanction, precepts or example, in a frigid system of rheophilanthropy, supported by nursery tales. 395Polybius and Arrian have given us authentic accounts of facts; and here their merit ends. They were not men of comprehensive minds; they had not the art of telling a story in an interesting manner. They have in consequence been thrown into the shade by writers who, though less studious of truth than themselves, understood far better the art of producing effect,—by Livy and Quintus Curtius.

Yet Polybius and Arrian deserve high praise when compared with the writers of that school of which Plutarch may be considered as the head. For the historians of this class we must confess that we entertain a peculiar aversion. They seem to have been pedants, who, though destitute of those valuable qualities which are frequently found in conjunction with pedantry, thought themselves great philosophers and great politicians. They not only mislead their readers in every page, as to particular facts, but they appear to have altogether misconceived the whole character of the times of which they write. They were inhabitants of an empire bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Euphrates, by the ice of Scythia and the sands of Mauritania; composed of nations whose manners, whose languages, whose religion, whose countenances and complexions, were widely different; governed by one mighty despotism, which had risen on the ruins of a thousand commonwealths and kingdoms. Of liberty, such as it is in small democracies, of patriotism, such as it is in small independent communities of any kind, they had, and they could have, no experimental knowledge. But they had read of men who exerted themselves in the cause of their country with an energy unknown in later times, who had violated the dearest of domestic charities, or voluntarily devoted themselves to death, 396for the public good; and they wondered at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It never occurred to them that the feelings which they so greatly admired sprung from local and occasional causes; that they will always grow up spontaneously in small societies; and that, in large empires, though they may be forced into existence for a short time by peculiar circumstances, they cannot be general or permanent. It is impossible that any man should feel for a fortress on a remote frontier as he feels for his own house; that he should grieve for a defeat in which ten thousand people whom he never saw have fallen as he grieves for a defeat which has half unpeopled the street in which he lives; that he should leave his home for a military expedition in order to preserve the balance of power, as cheerfully as he would leave it to repel invaders who had begun to burn all the corn fields in his neighbourhood.

The writers of whom we speak should have considered this. They should have considered that in patriotism, such as it existed amongst the Greeks, there was nothing essentially and eternally good; that an exclusive attachment to a particular society, though a natural, and, under certain restrictions, a most useful sentiment, implies no extraordinary attainments in wisdom or virtue; that, where it has existed in an intense degree, it has turned states into gangs of robbers whom their mutual fidelity has rendered more dangerous, has given a character of peculiar atrocity to war, and has generated that worst of all political evils, the tyranny of nations over nations.

Enthusiastically attached to the name of liberty, these historians troubled themselves little about its definition. The Spartans, tormented by ten thousand absurd restraints, unable to please themselves in the 397choice of their wives, their suppers, or their company, compelled to assume a peculiar manner, and to talk in a peculiar style, gloried in their liberty. The aristocracy of Rome repeatedly made liberty a plea for cutting off the favourites of the people. In almost all the little commonwealths of antiquity, liberty was used as a pretext for measures directed against everything which makes liberty valuable, for measures which stifled discussion, corrupted the administration of justice, and discouraged the accumulation of property. The writers, whose works we are considering, confounded the sound with the substance, and the means with the end. Their imaginations were inflamed by mystery. They conceived of liberty as monks conceive of love, as cockneys conceive of the happiness and innocence of rural life, as novel-reading sempstresses conceive of Almack’s and Grosvenor Square, accomplished Marquesses and handsome Colonels of the Guards. In the relation of events, and the delineation of characters, they have paid little attention to facts, to the costume of the times of which they pretend to treat, or to the general principles of human nature. They have been faithful only to their own puerile and extravagant doctrines. Generals and statesmen are metamorphosed into magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome virtues we turn away with disgust. The fine sayings and exploits of their heroes remind us of the insufferable perfections of Sir Charles Grandison, and affect us with a nausea similar to that which we feel when an actor, in one of Morton’s or Kotzebue’s plays, lays his hand on his heart, advances to the ground-lights, and mouths a moral sentence for the edification of the gods.

These writers, men who knew not what it was to have a country, men who had never enjoyed political 398rights, brought into fashion an offensive cant about patriotism and zeal for freedom. What the English Puritans did for the language of Christianity, what Scuderi did for the language of love, they did for the language of public spirit. By habitual exaggeration they made it mean. By monotonous emphasis they made it feeble. They abused it till it became scarcely possible to use it with effect.

Their ordinary rules of morality are deduced from extreme cases. The common regimen which they prescribe for society is made up of those desperate remedies which only its most desperate distempers require. They look with peculiar complacency on actions which even those who approve them consider as exceptions to laws of almost universal application—which bear so close an affinity to the most atrocious crimes that, even where it may be unjust to censure them, it is unsafe to praise them. It is not strange, therefore, that some flagitious instances of perfidy and cruelty should have been passed unchallenged in such company, that grave moralists, with no personal interest at stake, should have extolled, in the highest terms, deeds of which the atrocity appalled even the infuriated factions in whose cause they were perpetrated. The part which Timoleon took in the assassination of his brother shocked many of his own partisans. The recollection of it preyed long on his own mind. But it was reserved for historians who lived some centuries later to discover that his conduct was a glorious display of virtue, and to lament that, from the frailty of human nature, a man who could perform so great an exploit could repent of it.

The writings of these men, and of their modern imitators, have produced effects which deserve some notice. 399The English have been so long accustomed to political speculation, and have enjoyed so large a measure of practical liberty, that such works have produced little effect on their minds. We have classical associations and great names of our own which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey, the place where the great men of twenty generations have contended, the place where they sleep together! The list of warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sydney is as noble as the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death was past. Even those parts of our history over which, on some accounts, we would gladly throw a veil may be proudly opposed to those on which the moralists of antiquity loved most to dwell. The enemy of English liberty was not murdered by men whom he had pardoned and loaded with benefits. He was not stabbed in the back by those who smiled and cringed before his face. He was vanquished on fields of stricken battle; he was arraigned, sentenced, and executed in the face of heaven and earth. Our liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has a character of its own,—a character which has taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with 400the peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of meaning to ourselves, scarcely intelligible to strangers.

Here, therefore, the effect of books such as those which we have been considering has been harmless. They have, indeed, given currency to many very erroneous opinions with respect to ancient history. They have heated the imaginations of boys. They have misled the judgment and corrupted the taste of some men of letters, such as Akenside and Sir William Jones. But on persons engaged in public affairs they have had very little influence. The foundations of our constitution were laid by men who knew nothing of the Greeks but that they denied the orthodox procession and cheated the Crusaders; and nothing of Rome, but that the Pope lived there. Those who followed, contented themselves with improving on the original plan. They found models at home; and therefore they did not look for them abroad. But, when enlightened men on the Continent began to think about political reformation, having no patterns before their eyes in their domestic history, they naturally had recourse to those remains of antiquity, the study of which is considered throughout Europe as an important part of education. The historians of whom we have been speaking had been members of large communities, and subjects of absolute sovereigns. Hence it is, as we have already said, that they commit such gross errors in speaking of the little republics of antiquity. Their works were now read in the spirit in which they had been written. They were read by men placed in circumstances closely resembling their own, unacquainted with the real nature of liberty, but 401inclined to believe everything good which could be told respecting it. How powerfully these books impressed these speculative reformers, is well known to all who have paid any attention to the French literature of the last century. But, perhaps, the writer on whom they produced the greatest effect was Vittorio Alfieri. In some of his plays, particularly in Virginia, Timoleon, and Brutus the Younger, he has even caricatured the extravagance of his masters.

It was not strange that the blind, thus led by the blind, should stumble. The transactions of the French Revolution, in some measure, took their character from these works. Without the assistance of these works, indeed, a revolution would have taken place,—a revolution productive of much good and much evil, tremendous but shortlived, evil dearly purchased, but durable good. But it would not have been exactly such a revolution. The style, the accessories, would have been in many respects different. There would have been less of bombast in language, less of affectation in manner, less of solemn trifling and ostentatious simplicity. The acts of legislative assemblies, and the correspondence of diplomatists, would not have been disgraced by rants worthy only of a college declamation. The government of a great and polished nation would not have rendered itself ridiculous by attempting to revive the usages of a world which had long passed away, or rather of a world which had never existed except in the description of a fantastic school of writers. These second-hand imitations resembled the originals about as much as the classical feast with which the Doctor in Peregrine Pickle turned the stomachs of all his guests resembled one of the suppers of Lucullus in the Hall of Apollo. 402These were mere follies. But the spirit excited by these writers produced more serious effects. The greater part of the crimes which disgraced the revolution sprung indeed from the relaxation of law, from popular ignorance, from the remembrance of past oppression, from the fear of foreign conquest, from rapacity, from ambition, from party-spirit. But many atrocious proceedings must, doubtless, be ascribed to heated imagination, to perverted principle, to a distaste for what was vulgar in morals, and a passion for what was startling and dubious. Mr. Burke has touched on this subject with great felicity of expression: “The gradation of their republic,” says he, “is laid in moral paradoxes. All those instances to be found in history, whether real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted nature recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction of their youth.” This evil, we believe, is to be directly ascribed to the influence of the historians whom we have mentioned, and their modern imitators.

Livy had some faults in common with these writers. But on the whole he must be considered as forming a class by himself: no historian with whom we are acquainted has shown so complete an indifference to truth. He seems to have cared only about the picturesque effect of his book, and the honour of his country. On the other hand, we do not know, in the whole range of literature, an instance of a bad thing so well done. The painting of the narrative is beyond description vivid and graceful. The abundance of interesting sentiments and splendid imagery in the speeches is almost miraculous. His mind is a soil which is never overturned, a fountain which never seems to trickle. 403It pours forth profusely; yet it gives no sign of exhaustion. It was probably to this exuberance of thought and language, always fresh, always sweet, always pure, no sooner yielded than repaired, that the critics applied that expression which has been so much discussed, lactea ubertas.

All the merits and all the defects of Livy take a colouring from the character of his nation. He was a writer peculiarly Roman; the proud citizen of a commonwealth which had indeed lost the reality of liberty, but which still sacredly preserved its forms—in fact the subject of an arbitrary prince, but in his own estimation one of the masters of the world, with a hundred kings below him, and only the gods above him. He, therefore, looked back on former times with feelings far different from those which were naturally entertained by his Greek contemporaries, and which at a later period became general among men of letters throughout the Roman Empire. He contemplated the past with interest and delight, not because it furnished a contrast to the present, but because it had led to the present. He recurred to it, not to lose in proud recollections the sense of national degradation, but to trace the progress of national glory. It is true that his veneration for antiquity produced on him some of the effects which it produced on those who arrived at it by a very different road. He has something of their exaggeration, something of their cant, something of their fondness for anomalies and lusus naturo in morality. Yet even here we perceive a difference. They talk rapturously of patriotism and liberty in the abstract. He does not seem to think any country but Rome deserving of love: nor is it for liberty as liberty, but for liberty as a part of the Roman institutions, that he is zealous. 404Of the concise and elegant accounts of the campaigns of Caesar little can be said. They are incomparable models for military despatches. But histories they are not, and do not pretend to be.

The ancient critics placed Sallust in the same rank with Livy; and unquestionably the small portion of his works which has come down to us is calculated to give a high opinion of his talents. But his style is not very pleasant: and his most powerful work, the account of the Conspiracy of Catiline, has rather the air of a clever party pamphlet than that of a history. It abounds with strange inconsistencies, which, unexplained as they are, necessarily excite doubts as to the fairness of the narrative. It is true, that many circumstances now forgotten may have been familiar to his contemporaries, and may have rendered passages clear to them which to us appear dubious and perplexing. But a great historian should remember that he writes for distant generations, for men who will perceive the apparent contradictions, and will possess no means of reconciling them. We can only vindicate the fidelity of Sallust at the expense of his skill. But in fact all the information which we have from contemporaries respecting this famous plot is liable to the same objection, and is read by discerning men with the same incredulity. It is all on one side. No answer has reached our times. Yet, on the showing of the accusers, the accused seem entitled to acquittal. Catiline, we are told, intrigued with a Vestal virgin, and murdered his own son. His house was a den of gamblers and debauchees. No young man could cross his threshold without danger to his fortune and reputation. Yet this is the man with whom Cicero was willing to coalesce in a contest for the first magistracy of the republic; 405and whom he described, long after the fatal termination of the conspiracy, as an accomplished hypocrite, by whom he had himself been deceived, and who had acted with consummate skill the character of a good citizen and a good friend. We are told that the plot was the most wicked and desperate ever known, and, almost in the same breath, that the great body of the people, and many of the nobles, favoured it; that the richest citizens of Rome were eager for the spoliation of all property, and its highest functionaries for the destruction of all order; that Crassus, Cæsar, the Praetor Lentulus, one of the consuls of the year, one of the consuls elect, were proved or suspected to be engaged in a scheme for subverting institutions to which they owed the highest honours, and introducing universal anarchy. We are told that a government, which knew all this, suffered the conspirator, whose rank, talents, and courage, rendered him most dangerous, to quit Rome without molestation. We are told that bondmen and gladiators were to be armed against the citizens. Yet we find that Catiline rejected the slaves who crowded to enlist in his army, lest, as Sallust himself expresses it, “he should seem to identify their cause until that of the citizens.” Finally, we are told that the magistrate, who was universally allowed to have saved all classes of his countrymen from conflagration and massacre, rendered himself so unpopular by his conduct that a marked insult was offered to him at the expiration of his office, and a severe punishment inflicted on him shortly after.

Sallust tells us, what, indeed, the letters and speeches of Cicero sufficiently prove, that some persons considered the shocking and atrocious part of the plot as mere inventions of the government, designed to excuse 406its unconstitutional measures. We must confess ourselves to be of that opinion. There was, undoubtedly, a strong party desirous to change the administration. While Pompey held the command of an army, they could not effect their purpose without preparing means for repelling force, if necessary, by force. In all this there is nothing different from the ordinary practice of Roman factions. The other charges brought against the conspirators are so inconsistent and improbable, that we give no credit whatever to them. If our readers think this scepticism unreasonable, let them turn to the contemporary accounts of the Popish plot. Let them look over the votes of Parliament, and the speeches of the king; the charges of Scroggs, and the harangues of the managers employed against Strafford. A person who should form his judgment from these pieces alone would believe that London was set on fire by the Papists, and that Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was murdered for his religion. Yet these stories are now altogether exploded. They have been abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by clergymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees.

Of the Latin historians, Tacitus was certainly the greatest. His style, indeed, is not only faulty in itself, but is, in some respects, peculiarly unfit for historical composition. He carries his love of effect far beyond the limits of moderation. He tells a fine story finely: but he cannot tell a plain story plainly. He stimulates till stimulants lose their power. Thucydides, as we have already observed, relates ordinary transactions with the unpretending clearness and succinctness of a gazette. His great powers of painting he reserves for events of which the slightest details are interesting. 407The simplicity of the setting gives additional lustre to the brilliants. There are passages in the narrative of Tacitus superior to the best which can be quoted from Thucydides. But they are not enchased and relieved with the same skill. They are far more striking when extracted from the body of the work to which they belong than when they occur in their place, and are read in connection with what precedes and follows.

In the delineation of character, Tacitus is unrivalled among historians, and has very few superiors among dramatists and novelists. By the delineation of character, we do not mean the practice of drawing up epigrammatic catalogues of good and had qualities, and appending them to the names of eminent men. No writer, indeed, has done this more skilfully than Tacitus; but this is not his peculiar glory. All the persons who occupy a large space in his works have an individuality of character which seems to pervade all their words and actions. We know them as if we had lived with them. Claudius, Nero, Otho, both the Agrippinas, are master-pieces. But Tiberius is a still higher miracle of art. The historian undertook to make us intimately acquainted with a man singularly dark and inscrutable,—with a man whose real disposition long remained swathed up in intricate folds of factitious virtues, and over whose actions the hypocrisy of his youth, and the seclusion of his old age, threw a singular my story. He was to exhibit the specious qualities of the tyrant in a light which might render them transparent, and enable us at once to perceive the covering and the vices which it concealed. He was to trace the gradations by which the first magistrate of a republic, a senator mingling freely in debate, a noble associating with his brother nobles, was transformed into an 408Asiatic sultan; he was to exhibit a character, distinguished by courage, self-command, and profound policy, yet defiled by all

“th’ extravagancy
And crazy ribaldry of fancy.”

He was to mark the gradual effect of advancing age and approaching death on this strange compound of strength and weakness; to exhibit the old sovereign of the world sinking into a dotage which, though it rendered his appetites eccentric, and his temper savage, never impaired the powers of his stern and penetrating mind—conscious of failing strength, raging with capricious sensuality, yet to the last the keenest of observers, the most artful of dissemblers, and the most terrible of masters. The task was one of extreme difficulty. The execution is almost perfect.

The talent which is required to write history thus bears a considerable affinity to the talent of a great dramatist. There is one obvious distinction. The dramatist creates; the historian only disposes. The difference is not in the mode of execution, but in the mode of conception.. Shakspeare is guided by a model which exists in his imagination; Tacitus, by a model furnished from without. Hamlet is to Tiberius what the Laocoon is to the Newton of Roubilliac.

In this part of his art Tacitus certainly had neither equal nor second among the ancient historians. Herodotus, though he wrote in a dramatic form, had little of dramatic genius. The frequent dialogues which he introduces give vivacity and movement to the narrative, but are not strikingly characteristic. Xenophon is fond of telling his readers, at considerable length, what he thought of the persons whose adventures he relates. But he does not show them the men, and 409enable them to judge for themselves. The heroes of Livy are the most insipid of all beings, real or imaginary, the heroes of Plutarch always excepted. Indeed, the manner of Plutarch in this respect reminds us of the cookery of those continental inns, the horror of English travellers, in which a certain nondescript broth is kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured, without distinction, over every dish as it comes up to table. Thucydides, though at a wide interval, comes next to Tacitus. His Pericles, his Nieias, his Cleon, his Brasidas, are happily discriminated. The lines are few, the colouring faint; but the general air and expression is caught.

We begin, like the priest in Don Quixote’s library, to be tired with taking down books one after another for separate judgment, and feel inclined to pass sentence on them in masses. We shall therefore, instead of pointing out the defects and merits of the different modern historians, state generally in what particulars they have surpassed their predecessors, and in what we conceive them to have failed.

They have certainly been, in one sense, far more strict in their adherence to truth than most of the Greek and Roman writers. They do not think themselves entitled to render their narrative interesting by introducing descriptions, conversations, and harangues which have no existence but in their own imagination. This improvement was gradually introduced. History commenced among the modern nations of Europe, as it had commenced among the Greeks, in romance. Froissart was our Herodotus. Italy was to Europe what Athens was to Greece. In Italy, therefore, a more accurate and manly mode of narration was early introduced. Machiavelli and Guicciardini, in imitation 410of Livy and Thucydides, composed speeches for their historical personages. But, as the classical enthusiasm which distinguished the age of Lorenzo and Leo gradually subsided, this absurd practice was abandoned. In France, we fear, it still, In some degree, keeps its ground. In our own country, a writer who should venture on it would be laughed to scorn. Whether the historians of the last two centuries tell more truth than those of antiquity, may perhaps be doubted. But it is quite certain that they tell fewer falsehoods.

In the philosophy of history, the moderns have very far surpassed the ancients. It is not, indeed, strange that the Greeks and Romans should not have carried the science of government, or any other experimental science, so far as it has been carried in our time; for the experimental sciences are generally in a state of progression. They were better understood in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and in the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth. But this constant improvement, this natural growth of knowledge, will not altogether account for the immense superiority of the modern writers. The difference is a difference not in degree but of kind. It is not merely that new principles have been discovered, but that new faculties seem to be exerted. It is not that at one time the human intellect should have made but small progress, and at another time have advanced far; but that at one time it should have been stationary, and at another time constantly proceeding. In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals. They reasoned as justly as ourselves on subjects which required pure demonstration. But in the moral sciences they made scarcely 411any advance. During the long period which elapsed between the fifth century before the Christian era and the fifth century after it little perceptible progress was made. All the metaphysical discoveries of all the philosophers, from the time of Socrates to the northern invasion, are not to be compared in importance with those which have been made in England every fifty years since the time of Elizabeth. There is not the least reason to believe that the principles of government, legislation, and political economy, were better understood in the time of Augustus Cæsar than in the time of Pericles. In our own country, the sound doctrines of trade and jurisprudence have been, within the lifetime of a single generation, dimly hinted, boldly propounded, defended, systematised, adopted by all reflecting men of all parties, quoted in legislative assemblies, incorporated into laws and treaties.

To what is this change to be attributed? Partly, no doubt, to the discovery of printing, a discovery which has not only diffused knowledge widely, but, as we have already observed, has also introduced into reasoning a precision unknown in those ancient communities, in which information was, for the most part, conveyed orally. There was, we suspect, another cause, less obvious, but still more powerful.

The spirit of the two most famous nations of antiquity was remarkably exclusive. In the time of Homer the Greeks had not begun to consider themselves as a distinct race. They still looked with something of childish wonder and awe on the riches and wisdom of Sidon and Egypt. From what causes, and by what gradations, their feelings underwent a change, it is not easy to determine. Their history, from the Trojan to the Persian war, is covered with an obscurity broken 412only by dim and scattered gleams of truth. But it is certain that a great alteration took place. They regarded themselves as a separate people. They had common religious rites, and common principles of public law, in which foreigners had no part. In all their political systems, monarchical, aristocratical, and demo-cratical, there was a strong family likeness. After the retreat of Xerxes and the fall of Mardonius, national pride rendered the separation between the Greeks and the barbarians complete. The conquerors considered themselves men of a superior breed, men who, in them intercourse with neighbouring nations, were to teach, and not to learn. They looked for nothing out of themselves. They borrowed nothing. They translated nothing. We cannot call to mind a single expression of any Greek writer earlier than the age of Augustus, indicating an opinion that anything worth reading could be written in any language except his own. The feelings which sprung from national glory were not altogether extinguished by national degradation. They were fondly cherished through ages of slavery and shame. The literature of Rome herself was regarded with contempt by those who had fled before her arms, and who bowed beneath her fasces. Voltaire says, in one of his six thousand pamphlets, that lu was the first person who told the French that England had produced eminent men besides the Duke of Marlborough. Down to a very late period, the Greeks seem to have stood in need of similar information with respect to their masters. With Paulus Æmilius, Sylla, and Cæsar they were well acquainted. But the notions which they entertained respecting Cicero and Virgil were, probably, not unlike those which Boileau may have formed about Shakspeare. Dionysius lived 413in the most splendid age of Latin poetry and eloquence. He was a critic, and, after the manner of his age, an able critic. He studied the language of Rome, associated with its learned men, and compiled its history. Yet he seems to have thought its literature valuable only for the purpose of illustrating its antiquities. His reading appears to have been confined to its public records, and to a few old annalists. Once, and but once, if we remember rightly, he quotes Ennius, to solve a question of etymology. He has written much on the art of oratory: yet he has not mentioned the name of Cicero.

The Romans submitted to the pretensions of a race which they despised. Their epic poet, while he claimed for them pre-eminence in the arts of government and war, acknowledged their inferiority in taste, eloquence, and science. Men of letters affected to understand the Greek language better than their own. Pomponius preferred the honour of becoming an Athenian, by intellectual naturalisation, to all the distinctions which were to be acquired in the political contests of Rome. His great friend composed Greek poems and memoirs. It is well known that Petrarch considered that beautiful language in which his sonnets are written, as a barbarous jargon, and intrusted his fame to those wretched Latin hexameters which, during the last four centuries, have scarcely found four readers. Many eminent Romans appear to have felt the same contempt for their native tongue as compared with the Greek. The prejudice continued to a very late period. Julian was as partial to the Greek language as Frederic the Great to the French: and it seems that he could not express himself with elegance in the dialect of the state which he ruled. 414Even those Latin writers who did not carry this affectation so far looked on Greece as the only fount of knowledge. From Greece they derived the measures of their poetry, and, indeed, all of poetry that can be imported. From Greece they borrowed the principles and the vocabulary of their philosophy. To the literature of other nations they do not seem to have paid the slightest attention. The sacred books of the Hebrews, for example, books which, considered merely as human compositions, are invaluable to the critic, the antiquarian, and the philosopher, seem to have been utterly unnoticed by them. The peculiarities of Judaism, and the rapid growth of Christianity, attracted their notice. They made war against the Jews. They made laws against the Christians. But they never opened the books of Moses. Juvenal quotes the Pentateuch with censure. The author of the treatise on “the Sublime” quotes it with praise: but both of them quote it erroneously. When we consider what sublime poetry, what curious history, what striking and peculiar views of the Divine nature and of the social duties of men, are to be found in the Jewish scriptures, when we consider that two sects on which the attention of the government was constantly fixed appealed to those scriptures as the rule of their faith and practice, this indifference is astonishing. The fact seems to be, that the Greeks admired only themselves, and that the Romans admired only themselves and the Greeks. Literary men turned away with disgust from modes of thought and expression so widely different from all that they had been accustomed to admire. The effect was narrowness and sameness of thought. Their minds, if we may so express ourselves, bred in and in, and were accordingly cursed with barrenness 415and degeneracy. No extraneous beauty or vigour was engrafted on the decaying stock. By an exclusive attention to one class of phenomena, by an exclusive taste for one species of excellence, the human intellect was stunted. Occasional coincidences were turned into general rules. Prejudices were confounded with instincts. On man, as he was found in a particular state of society—on government, as it had existed in a particular corner of the world, many just observations were made; but of man as man, or government as government, little was known. Philosophy remained stationary. Slight changes, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for the better, were made in the superstructure. But nobody thought of examining the foundations.

The vast despotism of the Cæsars, gradually effacing all national peculiarities, and assimilating the remotest provinces of the empire to each other, augmented the evil. At the close of the third century after Christ, the prospects of mankind were fearfully dreary. A system of etiquette, as pompously frivolous as that of the Escurial, had been established. A sovereign almost invisible; a crowd of dignitaries minutely distinguished by badges and titles; rhetoricians who said nothing but what had been said ten thousand times; schools in ‘which nothing was taught but what had been known for ages: such was the machinery provided for the government and instruction of the most enlightened part of the human race. That great community was then in danger of experiencing a calamity far more terrible than any of the quick, inflammatory, destroying maladies, to which nations are liable,—a tottering, drivelling, paralytic longevity, the immortality of the Struldbrugs, a Chinese civilisation. It would be easy to indicate many points of resemblance 416between the subjects of Diocletian and the people of that Celestial Empire, where, during many centuries, nothing has been learned or unlearned: where government, where education, where the whole system of life, is a ceremony; where knowledge forgets to increase and multiply, and, like the talent buried in the earth, or the pound wrapped up in the napkin, experiences neither waste nor augmentation.

The torpor was broken by two great revolutions, the one moral, the other political, the one from within, the other from without. The victory of Christianity over Paganism, considered with relation to this subject only, was of great importance. It overthrew the old system of morals; and with it much of the old system of metaphysics. It furnished the orator with new topics of declamation, and the logician with new points of controversy. Above all, it introduced a new principle, of which the operation was constantly felt in every part of society. It stirred the stagnant mass from the inmost depths. It excited all the passions of a stormy democracy in the quiet and listless population of an overgrown empire. The fear of heresy did what the sense of oppression could not do; it changed men, accustomed to be turned over like sheep from tyrant to tyrant, into devoted partisans and obstinate rebels. The tones of an eloquence which had been silent for ages resounded from the pulpit of Gregory. A spirit which had been extinguished on the plains of Philippi revived in Athanasius and Ambrose.

Yet even this remedy was not sufficiently violent for the disease. It did not prevent the empire of Constantinople from relapsing, after a short paroxysm of excitement, into a state of stupefaction, to which history furnishes scarcely any parallel. We there find that a 417polished society, a society in which a most intricate and elaborate system of jurisprudence was established, in which the arts of luxury were well understood, in which the works of the great ancient writers were preserved and studied, existed for nearly a thousand years without making one great discovery in science, or producing one book which is read by any but curious inquirers. There were tumults, too, and controversies, and wars in abundance: and these things, bad as they are in themselves, have generally been favourable to the progress of the intellect. But here they tormented without stimulating. The waters were troubled; but no healing influence descended. The agitations resembled the grinnings and writhings of a galvanised corpse, not the struggles of an athletic man.

From this miserable state the Western Empire was saved by the fiercest and most destroying visitation with which God has ever chastened his creatures—the invasion of the Northern nations. Such a cure was required for such a distemper. The fire of London, it has been observed, was a blessing. It burned down the city; but it burned out the plague. The same may be said of the tremendous devastation of the Roman dominions. It annihilated the noisome recesses in which lurked the seeds of great moral maladies; it cleared an atmosphere fatal to the health and vigour of the human mind. It cost Europe a thousand years of barbarianism to escape the fate of China.

At length the terrible purification was accomplished; and the second civilisation of mankind commenced, under circumstances which afforded a strong security that it would never retrograde and never pause. Europe was now a great federal community. Her numerous states were united by the easy ties of international law 418and a common religion. Their institutions, their languages, their manners, their tastes in literature, their modes of education, were widely different. Their connection was close enough to allow of mutual observation and improvement, yet not so close as to destroy the idioms of national opinion and feeling.

The balance of moral and intellectual influence thus established between the nations of Europe is far more important than the balance of political power. Indeed, we are inclined to think that the latter is valuable principally because it tends to maintain the former. The civilised world has thus been preserved from an uniformity of character fatal to all improvement. Every part of it has been illuminated with light reflected from every other. Competition has produced activity where monopoly would have produced sluggishness. The number of experiments in moral science which the speculator has an opportunity of witnessing has been increased beyond all calculation. Society and human nature, instead of being seen in a single point of view, are presented to him under ten thousand different aspects. By observing the manners of surrounding nations, by studying their literature, by comparing it with that of his own country and of the ancient republics, he is enabled to correct those errors into which the most acute men must fall when they reason from a single species to a genus. He learns to distinguish what is local from what is universal; what is transitory from what is eternal; to discriminate between exceptions and rules; to trace the operation of disturbing causes; to separate those general principles which are always true and everywhere applicable from the accidental circumstances with which, in every community, they are blended, and with which, in an isolated community, 419they are confounded by the most philosophical mind.

Hence it is that, in generalisation, the writers of modern times have far surpassed those of antiquity. The historians of our own country are unequalled in depth and precision of reason; and, even in the works of our mere compilers, we often meet with speculations beyond the reach of Thucydides or Tacitus.

But it must, at the same time, be admitted that they have characteristic faults, so closely connected with their characteristic merits, and of such magnitude, that it may well be doubted whether, on the whole, this department of literature has gained or lost during the last two-and-twenty centuries.

The best historians of later times have been seduced from truth, not by their imagination, but by their reason. They far excel their predecessors in the art of deducing general principles from facts. But unhappily they have fallen into the error of distorting facts to suit general principles. They arrive at a theory from looking at some of the phenomena; and the remaining phenomena they strain or curtail to suit the theory. For this purpose it is not necessary that they should assert what is absolutely false; for all questions in morals and politics are questions of comparison and degree. Any proposition which does not involve a contradiction in terms may by possibility be true; and, if all the circumstances which raise a probability in its favour be stated and enforced, and those which lead to an opposite conclusion be omitted or lightly passed over, it may appear to be demonstrated. In every human character and transaction there is a mixture of good and evil: a little exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a watchful and searching 420scepticism with respect to the evidence on one side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the Fourth.

This species of misrepresentation abounds in the most valuable works of modern historians. Herodotus tells his story like a slovenly witness, who, heated by partialities and prejudices, unacquainted with the established rules of evidence, and uninstructed as to the obligations of his oath, confounds what he imagines with what he has seen and heard, and brings out facts, reports, conjectures, and fancies, in one mass. Hume is an accomplished advocate. Without positively asserting much more than he can prove, he gives prominence to all the circumstances which support his case; he glides lightly over those which are unfavourable to it; his own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract of their evidence is given. Everything that is offered on the other side is scrutinised with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is extenuated, or passed by without notice; concessions even are sometimes made: but this insidious candour only increases the effect of the vast mass of sophistry.

We have mentioned Hume as the ablest and most popular writer of his class; but the charge which we have brought against him is one to which all our most distinguished historians are in some degree obnoxious. Gibbon, in particular, deserves very severe censure. Of all the numerous culprits, however, none is more deeply guilty than Mr. Mitford. We willingly acknowledge 421the obligations which are due to his talents and industry. The modern historians of Greece had been in the habit of writing as if the world had learned nothing new during the last sixteen hundred years. Instead of illustrating the events which they narrated by the philosophy of a more enlightened age, they judged of antiquity by itself alone. They seemed to think that notions, long driven from every other corner of literature, had a prescriptive right to occupy this last fastness. They considered all the ancient historians as equally authentic. They scarcely made any distinction between him who related events at which he had himself been present and him who five hundred years after composed a philosophic romance for a society which had in the interval undergone a complete change. It was all Greek, and all true! The centuries which separated Plutarch from Thucydides seemed as nothing to men who lived in an age so remote. The distance of time produced an error similar to that which is sometimes produced by distance of place. There are many good ladies who think that all the people in India live together, and who charge a friend setting out for Calcutta with kind messages to Bombay. To Rollin and Barthelemi, in the same manner, all the classics were contemporaries.

Mr. Mitford certainly introduced great improvements; he showed us that men who wrote in Greek and Latin sometimes told lies; he showed us that ancient history might be related in such a manner as to furnish not only allusions to school boys, but important lessons to statesmen. From that love of theatrical effect and high-flown sentiment which had poisoned almost every other work on the same subject his book is perfectly free. But his passion for a theory as false, and far 422more ungenerous, led him substantially to violate truth in every page. Statements unfavourable to democracy are made with unhesitating confidence, and with the utmost bitterness of language. Every charge brought against a monarch or an aristocracy is sifted with the utmost care. If it cannot be denied, some palliating supposition is suggested; or we are at least reminded that some circumstances now unknown may have justified what at present appears unjustifiable. Two events are reported by the same author in the same sentence; their truth rests on the same testimony; but the one supports the darling hypothesis, and the other seems inconsistent with it. The one is taken and the other is left.

The practice of distorting narrative into a conformity with theory is a vice not so unfavourable as at first sight it may appear to the interests of political science. We have compared the writers who indulge in it to advocates; and we may add, that their conflicting fallacies, like those of advocates, correct each other. It has always been held, in the most enlightened nations, that a tribunal will decide a judicial question most fairly when it has heard two able men argue, as unfairly as possible, on the two opposite sides of it; and we are inclined to think that this opinion is just. Sometimes, it is true, superior eloquence and dexterity will make the worse appear the better reason; but it is at least certain that the judge will be compelled to contemplate the case under two different aspects. It is certain that no important consideration will altogether escape notice.

This is at present the state of history. The poet laureate appears for the Church of England, Lingard for the Church of Rome. Brodie has moved to set 423aside the verdicts obtained by Hume; and the cause in which Mitford succeeded is, we understand, about to be reheard. In the midst of these disputes, however, history proper, if we may use the term, is disappearing. The high, grave, impartial summing up of Thucydides is nowhere to be found.

While our historians are practising all the arts of controversy, they miserably neglect the art of narration, the art of interesting the affections and presenting pictures to the imagination. That a writer may produce these effects without violating truth is sufficiently proved by many excellent biographical works. The immense popularity which well-written books of this kind have acquired deserves the serious consideration of historians. Voltaire’s Charles the Twelfth, Marmontel’s Memoirs, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Southey’s account of Nelson, are perused with delight by the most frivolous and indolent. Whenever any tolerable book of the same description makes its appearance, the circulating libraries are mobbed; the book societies are in commotion; the new novel lies uncut; the magazines and newspapers fill their columns with extracts. In the meantime histories of great empires, written by men of eminent ability, lie unread on the shelves of ostentatious libraries.

The writers of history seem to entertain an aristocratical contempt for the writers of memoirs. They think it beneath the dignity of men who describe the revolutions of nations to dwell on the details which constitute the charm of biography. They have imposed on themselves a code of conventional decencies as absurd as that which has been the banc of the French drama. The most characteristic and interesting circumstances are omitted or softened down, because, 424as we are told, they are too trivial for the majesty of history. The majesty of history seems to resemble the majesty of the poor King of Spain, who died a martyr to ceremony because the proper dignitaries were not at hand to render him assistance.

That history would be more amusing if this etiquette were relaxed will, we suppose, be acknowledged. But would it be less dignified or less useful? What do we mean when we say that one past event is important and another insignificant? No past event has any intrinsic importance. The knowledge of it is valuable only as it leads us to form just calculations with respect to the future. A history which does not serve this purpose, though it may be filled with battles, treaties, and commotions, is as useless as the series of turnpike tickets collected by Sir Matthew Mite.

Let us suppose that Lord Clarendon, instead of filling hundreds of folio pages with copies of state papers, in which the same assertions and contradictions are repeated till the reader is overpowered with weariness, had condescended to be the Boswell of the Long Parliament. Let us suppose that he had exhibited to us the wise and lofty self-government of Hampden, leading while he seemed to follow, and propounding unanswerable arguments in the strongest forms with the modest air of an inquirer anxious for information; the delusions which misled the noble spirit of Vane; the coarse fanaticism which concealed the yet loftier genius of Cromwell, destined to control a mutinous army and a factious people, to abase the flag of Holland, to arrest the victorious arms of Sweden, and to hold the balance firm between the rival monarchies of France and Spain. Let us suppose that he had made his Cavaliers and Roundheads talk in their own 425style; that he had reported some of the ribaldry of Rupert’s pages, and some of the cant of Harrison and Fleetwood. Would not his work in that ease have been more interesting? Would it not have been more accurate?

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false. The circumstances which have most influence on the happiness of mankind, the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity—these are, for the most part, noiseless revolutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by armies, or enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no treaties and recorded in no archives. They are carried on in every school, in every church, behind ten thousand counters, at ten thousand firesides. The upper current of society presents no certain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows. We read of defeats and victories. But we know that nations may be miserable amidst victories and prosperous amidst defeats. We read of the fall of wise ministers and of the rise of profligate favourites. But we must remember how small a proportion the good or evil effected by a single statesman can bear to the good or evil of a great social system.

Bishop Watson compares a geologist to a gnat mounted on an elephant, and laying down theories as to the whole internal structure of the vast animal, from the phenomena of the hide. The comparison is unjust to the geologists; but it is very applicable to those historians who write as if the body politic were homogeneous, 426who look only on the surface of affairs, and never think of the mighty and various organisation which lies deep below.

In the works of such writers as these, England, at the close of the Seven Years’ War, is in the highest state of prosperity: at the close of the American war she is in a miserable and degraded condition; as if the people were not on the whole as rich, as well governed, and as well educated at the latter period as at the former. We have read books called Histories of England, under the reign of George the Second, in which the rise of Methodism is not even mentioned. A hundred years hence this breed of authors will, we hope, be extinct. If it should still exist, the late ministerial interregnum will be described in terms which will seem to imply that all government was at an end; that the social contract was annulled; and that the hand of every man was against his neighbour, until the wisdom and virtue of the new cabinet educed order out of the chaos of anarchy. We are quite certain that misconceptions as gross prevail at this moment respecting many important parts of our annals.

The effect of historical reading is analogous, In many respects, to that produced by foreign travel. The student, like the tourist, is transported into a new state of society. He sees new fashions. He hears new modes of expression. His mind is enlarged by contemplating the wide diversities of laws, of morals, and of manners. But men may travel far, and return with minds as contracted as if they had never stirred from their own market-town. In the same manner, men may know the dates of many battles and the genealogies of many royal houses, and yet be no wiser. Most people look at past times as princes look at foreign 427countries. More than one illustrious stranger has landed on our island amidst the shouts of a mob, has dined with the king, has hinted with the master of the stag-hounds, has seen the guards reviewed, and a knight of the garter installed, has cantered along Regent Street, has visited St. Paul’s, and noted down its dimensions; and has then departed, thinking that he has seen England. He has, in faet, seen a few public buildings, public men, and public ceremonies. But of the vast and complex system of society, of the fine shades of national charaeter, of the practical operation of government and laws, he knows nothing. He who would understand these things rightly must not confine his observations to palaces and solemn days. He must see ordinary men as they appear in their ordinary business and in their ordinary pleasures. He must mingle in the crowds of the exchange and the coffeehouse. He must obtain admittance to the convivial table and the domestic hearth. He must bear with vulgar expressions. He must not shrink from exploring even the retreats of misery. He who wishes to understand the condition of mankind in former ages must proceed on the same principle. If he attends only to public transactions, to wars, congresses, and debates, his studies will be as unprofitable as the travels of those imperial, royal, and serene sovereigns who form their judgment of our island from having gone in state to a few fine sights, and from having held formal conferences with a few great officers.

The perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature. He relates no faet, he attributes no expression to his characters, which is not authenticated by sufficient testimony. But, by judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, 428he gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction. In his narrative a due subordination is observed: some transactions are prominent; others retire. But the scale on which he represents them is increased or diminished, not according to the dignity of the persons concerned in them, but according to the degree in which they elucidate the condition of society and the nature of man. He shows us the court, the camp, and the senate. But he shows ns also the nation. He considers no anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no familiar saying, as too insignificant for his notice which is not too insignificant to illustrate the operation of laws, of religion, and of education, and to mark the progress of the human mind. Men will not merely be described, but will be made intimately known to us. The changes of manners will be indicated, not merely by a few general phrases or a few extracts from statistical documents, but by appropriate images presented in every line.

If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the history of England, he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges, the negotiations, the seditions, the ministerial changes. But with these he would intersperse the details which are the charm of historical romances. At Lincoln Cathedral there is a beautiful painted window, which was made by an apprentice out of the pieces of glass which had been rejected by his master. It is so far superior to every other in the church, that, according to the tradition, the vanquished artist killed himself from mortification. Sir Walter Scott, in the same manner, has used those fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them in a manner which may well excite their envy. He has constructed out of their gleanings works which, 429even considered as histories, are scarcely less valuable than their’s. But a truly great historian would reclaim those materials which the novelist has appropriated. The history of the government, and the history of the people, would be exhibited in that mode in which alone they can be exhibited justly, in inseparable conjunction and intermixture. We should not then have to look for the wars of the Puritans in Clarendon, and for their phraseology in Old Mortality; for one half of King James in Hume, and for the other half in the Fortunes of Nigel.

The early part of our imaginary history would be rich witli colouring from romance, ballad, and chronicle. We should find ourselves in the company of knights such as those of Froissart, and of pilgrims such as those who rode witli Chaucer from the Tabard. Society would be shown from the highest to the lowest,—from the royal cloth of state to the den of the outlaw; from the throne of the legate, to the chimney-corner where the begging friar regaled himself. Palmers, minstrels, crusaders,—the stately monastery, with the good cheer in its refectory and the high-mass in its chapel,—the manor-house, witli its hunting and hawking,—the tournament, with the heralds and ladies, the trumpets and the cloth of gold,—would give truth and life to the representation. We should perceive, in a thousand slight touches, the importance of the privileged burgher, and the fierce and haughty spirit which swelled under the collar of the degraded villain. The revival of letters would not merely be described in a few magnificent periods. We should discern, in innumerable particulars, the fermentation of mind, the eager appetite for knowledge, which distinguished the sixteenth from the fifteenth century. In the Reformation 430we should see, not merely a schism which changed the ecclesiastical constitution of England and the mutual relations of the European powers, but a moral war which raged in every family, which set the father against the son, and the son against the father, the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother. Henry would be painted with the skill of Tacitus. We should have the change of his character from his profuse and joyous youth to his savage and imperious old age. We should perceive the gradual progress of selfish and tyrannical passions in a mind not naturally insensible or ungenerous; and to the last we should detect some remains of that open and noble temper which endeared him to a people whom he oppressed, struggling with the hardness of despotism and the irritability of disease. We should see Elizabeth in all her weakness and in all her strength, surrounded by the handsome favourites whom she never trusted, and the wise old statesmen whom she never dismissed, uniting in herself the most contradictory qualities of both her parents,—the coquetry, the caprice, the petty malice of Anne,—the haughty and resolute spirit of Henry. We have no hesitation in saying that a great artist might produce a portrait of this remarkable woman at least as striking as that in the novel of Kenilworth, without employing a single trait not authenticated by ample testimony. In the meantime, we should see arts cultivated, wealth accumulated, the conveniences of life improved. We should see the keeps, where nobles, insecure themselves, spread insecurity around them, gradually giving place to the halls of peaceful opulence, to the oriels of Longleat, and the stately pinnacles of Burleigh. We should see towns extended, deserts cultivated, the hamlets of fishermen 431turned into wealthy havens, the meal of the peasant improved, and his but more commodiously furnished. We should see those opinions and feelings which produced the great struggle against the house of Stuart slowly growing up in the bosom of private families, before they manifested themselves in parliamentary debates. Then would come the civil war. Those skirmishes on which Clarendon dwells so minutely would be told, as Thucydides would have told them, with perspicuous conciseness. They are merely connecting links. But the great characteristics of the age, the loyal enthusiasm of the brave English gentry, the fierce licentiousness of the swearing, dicing, drunken reprobates, whose excesses disgrace the royal cause,—the austerity of the Presbyterian Sabbaths in the city, the extravagance of the independent preachers in the camp, the precise garb, the severe countenance, the petty scruples, the affected accent, the absurd names and phrases which marked the Puritans,—the valour, the policy, the public spirit, which lurked beneath these ungraceful disguises,—the dreams of the raving Fifth-monarchy-man, the dreams, scarcely less wild, of the philosophic republican,—all these would enter into the representation, and render it at once more exact and more striking.

The instruction derived from history thus written would be of a vivid and practical character. It would be received by the imagination as well as by the reason. It would be not merely traced on the mind, but branded into it. Many truths, too, would be learned, which can be learned in no other manner. As the history of states is generally written, the greatest and most momentous revolutions seem to come upon them like supernatural inflictions, without warning 432or cause. But the fact is, that such revolutions are almost always the consequences of moral changes, which have gradually passed on the mass of the community, and which ordinarily proceed far before their progress is indicated by any public measure. An intimate knowledge of the domestic history of nations is therefore absolutely necessary to the prognosis of political events. A narrative, defective in this respect, is as useless as a medical treatise which should pass by all the symptoms attendant on the early stage of a disease and mention only what occurs when the patient is beyond the reach of remedies.

A historian, such as we have been attempting to describe, would indeed be an intellectual prodigy. In his mind, powers scarcely compatible with each other must be tempered into an exquisite harmony. We shall sooner see another Shakspeare or another Homer. The highest excellence to which any single faculty can be brought would be less surprising than such a happy and delicate combination of qualities. Yet the contemplation of imaginary models is not an unpleasant or useless employment of the mind. It cannot indeed produce perfection; but it produces improvement, and nourishes that generous and liberal fastidiousness which is not inconsistent with the strongest sensibility to merit, and which, while it exalts our conceptions of the art, does not render us unjust to the artist.

HALLAM. (1)

433(Edinburgh Review, September 1828.)
H
istory, at least in its state of ideal perfection, is a compound of poetry and philosophy. It impresses general truths on the mind by a vivid representation of particular characters and incidents. But, in fact, the two hostile elements of which it consists have never been known to form a perfect amalgamation; and at length, in our own time, they have been completely and professedly separated. Good histories, in the proper sense of the word, we have not. But we have good historical romances, and good historical essays. The imagination and the reason, if we may use a legal metaphor, have made partition of a province of literature of which they were formerly seised per my et per tout; and now they hold their respective portions in severalty, instead of holding the whole in common.

To make the past present, to bring the distant near, to place us in the society of a great man or on the eminence which overlooks the field of a mighty battle, to invest with the reality of human flesh and blood beings whom we are too much inclined to consider as personified qualities in an allegory, to call up our ancestors before us with all their peculiarities of language,

     (1) The Constitutional History of England, from the
     Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II. By Henry
     Hallam. In 2 vols. 1827.

434manners, and garb, to show us over their houses, to scat us at their tables, to rummage their old-fashioned wardrobes, to explain the uses of their ponderous furniture, these parts of the duty which properly belongs to the historian have been appropriated by the historical novelist. On the other hand, to extract the philosophy of history, to direct our judgment of events and men, to trace the connection of causes and effects, and to draw from the occurrences of former times general lessons of moral and political wisdom, has become the business of a distinct class of writers.

Of the two kinds of composition into which history has been thus divided, the one may be compared to a map, the other to a painted landscape. The picture, though it places the country before us, does not enable us to ascertain with accuracy the dimensions, the distances, and the angles. The map is not a work of imitative art. It presents no scene to the imagination; but it gives us exact information as to the bearings of the various points, and is a more useful companion to the traveller or the general than the painted landscape could be, though it were the grandest that ever Rosa peopled with outlaws, or the sweetest over which Claude ever poured the mellow effulgence of a setting sun.

It is remarkable that the practice of separating the two ingredients of which history is composed has become prevalent on the Continent as well as in this country. Italy has already produced a historical novel, of high merit and of still higher promise. In France, the practice has been carried to a length somewhat whimsical. M. Sismondi publishes a grave and stately history of the Merovingian Kings, very valuable, and a little tedious. He then sends forth as a companion to 435it a novel, in which he attempts to give a lively representation of characters and manners. This course, as it seems to us, has all the disadvantages of a division of labour, and none of its advantages. We understand the expediency of keeping the functions of cook and coachman distinct. The dinner will be better dressed, and the horses better managed. But where the two situations are united, as in the Maître Jacques of Molière, we do not see that the matter is much mended by the solemn form with which the pluralist passes from one of his employments to the other.

We manage these things better in England. Sir Walter Scott gives us a novel; Mr. Hallam a critical and argumentative history. Both are occupied with the same matter. But the former looks at it with the eye of a sculptor. His intention is to give an express and lively image of its external form. The latter is an anatomist. His task is to dissect the subject to its inmost recesses, and to lay bare before us all the springs of motion and all the causes of decay.

Mr. Hallam is, on the whole, far better qualified than any other writer of our time for the office which he has undertaken. He has great industry and great acuteness. His knowledge is extensive, various, and profound. His mind is equally distinguished by the amplitude of its grasp, and by the delicacy of its tact. His speculations have none of that vagueness which is the common fault of political philosophy. On the contrary, they are strikingly practical, and teach us not only the general rule, but the mode of applying it to solve particular cases. In this respect they often remind us of the Discourses of Machiavelli.

The style is sometimes open to the charge of harshness. We have also here and there remarked a little 436of that unpleasant trick, which Gibbon brought into fashion, the trick, we mean, of telling a story by implication and allusion. Mr. Hallam, however, has an excuse which Gibbon had not. His work is designed for readers who are already acquainted with the ordinary books on English history, and who can therefore unriddle these little enigmas without difficulty. The manner of the book is, on the whole, not unworthy of the matter. The language, even where most faulty, is weighty and massive, and indicates strong sense in every line. It often rises to an eloquence, not florid or impassioned, but high, grave, and sober; such as would become a state paper, or a judgment delivered by a great magistrate, a Somers or a D’Agnessean.

In this respect the character of Mr. Hallam’s mind corresponds strikingly with that of his style. His work is eminently judicial. Its whole spirit is that of the bench, not that of the bar. He sums up with a calm, steady impartiality, turning neither to the right nor to the left, glossing over nothing, exaggerating nothing, while the advocates on both sides are alternately biting their lips to hear their conflicting misstatements and sophisms exposed. On a general survey, we do not scruple to pronounce the Constitutional History the most impartial book that we ever read. We think it the more incumbent on us to bear this testimony strongly at first setting out, because, in the course of our remarks, we shall think it right to dwell principally on those parts of it from which we dissent.

There is one peculiarity about Mr. Hallam which, while it adds to the value of his writings, will, we fear, take away something from their popularity. He is less of a worshipper than any historian whom we can 437call to mind. Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school, its abstract doctrines for the initiated, its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables for the vulgar. It assists the devotion of those who are unable to raise themselves to the contemplation of pure truth by all the devices of Pagan or Papal superstition. It has its altars and its deified heroes, its relics and pilgrimages, its canonized martyrs and confessors, its festivals and its legendary miracles. Our pious ancestors, we are told, deserted the High * Altar of Canterbury, to lay all their obligations on the shrine of St. Thomas. In the same manner the great and comfortable doctrines of the Tory creed, those particularly which relate to restrictions on worship and on trade, are adored by squires and rectors in Pitt Clubs, under the name of a minister who was as bad a representative of the system which has been christened after him as Bechet of the spirit of the Gospel. On the other hand, the cause for which Hampden bled on the field and Sydney on the scaffold is enthusiastically toasted by many an honest radical who would be puzzled to explain the difference between Ship-money and the Habeas Corpus Act. It may be added that, as in religion, so in politics, few even of those who are enlightened enough to comprehend the meaning latent under the emblems of their faith can resist the contagion of the popular superstition. Often, when they flatter themselves that they are merely feigning a compliance with the prejudices of the vulgar, they are themselves under the influence of those very prejudices. It probably was not altogether on grounds of expediency that Socrates taught his followers to honour the gods whom the state honoured, and bequeathed a cock to Esculapius with his dying breath. So there is often 438a portion of willing credulity and enthusiasm in the veneration which the most discerning men pay to their political idols. From the very nature of man it must be so. The faculty by which we inseparably associate ideas which have often been presented to us in conjunction is not under the absolute control of the will. It may be quickened into morbid activity. It may be reasoned into shamelessness. But in a certain decree it will always exist. The almost absolute mastery which Mr. Hallam has obtained over feelings of this class is perfectly astonishing to us, and will, we believe, be not only astonishing but offensive to many of his readers. It must particularly disgust those people who, in their speculations on politics, are not reasoners but fanciers; whose opinions, even when sincere, are not produced, according to the ordinary law of intellectual births, by induction or inference, but are equivocally generated by the heat of fervid tempers out of the overflowing of tumid imaginations. A man of this class is always in extremes. He cannot be a friend to liberty without calling for a community of goods, or a friend to order without taking under his protection the foulest excesses of tyranny. His admiration oscillates between the most worthless of rebels and the most worthless of oppressors, between Marten, the disgrace of the High Court of Justice, and Laud, the disgrace of the Star Chamber. He can forgive any thing but temperance and impartiality. He has a certain sympathy with the violence of his opponents, as well as with that of his associates. In every furious partisan he sees either his present self or his former self, the pensioner that is, or the Jacobin that has been. But he is unable to comprehend a writer who, steadily attached to principles, is indifferent about names and badges, and who judges 439of characters with equable severity, not altogether untinctured with cynicism, but free from the slightest touch of passion, party spirit, or caprice.

We should probably like Mr. Hallam’s book more if, instead of pointing out with strict fidelity the bright points and the dark spots of both parties, he had exerted himself to whitewash the one and to blacken the other. But we should certainly prize it far less. Eulogy and invective may be had for the asking. But for cold rigid justice, the one weight and the one measure, we know not where else we can look.

No portion of our annals has been more perplexed and misrepresented by writers of different parties than the history of the Reformation. In this labyrinth of falsehood and sophistry, the guidance of Mr. Hallam is peculiarly valuable. It is impossible not to admire the even-handed justice with which he deals out castigation to right and left on the rival persecutors.

It is vehemently maintained by some writers of the present day that Elizabeth persecuted neither Papists nor Puritans as such, and that the severe measures which she occasionally adopted were dictated, not by religious intolerance, but by political necessity. Even the excellent account of those times which Mr. Hallam has given has not altogether imposed silence on the authors of this fallacy. The title of the Queen, they say, was annulled by the Pope; her throne was given to another; her subjects were incited to rebellion; her life was menaced; every Catholic was bound in conscience to be a traitor; it was therefore against traitors, not against Catholics, that the penal laws were enacted.

In order that our readers may be fully competent to appreciate the merits of this defence, we will state. 440as concisely as possible, the substance of some of these laws.

As soon as Elizabeth ascended the throne, and before the least hostility to her government had been shown by the Catholic population, an act passed prohibiting the celebration of the rites of the Romish Church, on pain of forfeiture for the first offence, of a year’s imprisonment for the second, and of perpetual imprisonment for the third.

A law was next made in 1562, enacting, that all who had ever graduated at the Universities or received holy orders, all lawyers, and all magistrates, should take the oath of supremacy when tendered to them, on pain of forfeiture and imprisonment during the royal pleasure. After the lapse of three months, the oath might again be tendered to them; and, if it were again refused, the recusant was guilty of high treason. A prospective law, however severe, framed to exclude Catholics from the liberal professions, would have been mercy itself compared with this odious act. It is a retrospective statute; it is a retrospective penal statute; it is a retrospective penal statute against a large class. We will not positively affirm that a law of this description must always, and under all circumstances, be unjustifiable. But the presumption against it is most violent; nor do we remember any crisis, either in our own history, or in the history of any other country, which would have rendered such a provision necessary. In the present case, what circumstances called for extraordinary rigour? There might be disaffection among the Catholics. The prohibition of their worship would naturally produce it. But it is from their situation, not from their conduct, from the wrongs which they had suffered, not from those which they 441had committed, that the existence of discontent among them must be inferred. There were libels, no doubt, and prophecies, and rumours, and suspicions, strange grounds for a law inflicting capital penalties, ex post facto, on a large body of men.

Eight years later, the bull of Pius deposing Elizabeth produced a third law. This law, to which alone, as we conceive, the defence now under our consideration can apply, provides that, if any Catholic shall convert a Protestant to the Romish Church, they shall both suffer death as for high treason.

We believe that we might safely content ourselves with stating the fact, and leaving it to the judgment of every plain Englishman. Recent controversies have, however, given so much importance to this subject, that we will offer a few remarks on it.

In the first place, the arguments which are urged in favour of Elizabeth apply with much greater force to the case of her sister Mary. The Catholics did not, at the time of Elizabeth’s accession, rise in arms to seat a Pretender on her throne. But before Mary had given, or could give, provocation, the most distinguished Protestants attempted to set aside her rights in favour of the Lady Jane. That attempt, and the subsequent insurrection of Wyatt, furnished at least as good a plea for the burning of Protestants, as the conspiracies against Elizabeth furnish for the hanging and embowelling of Papists.

The fact is that both pleas are worthless alike. If such arguments are to pass current, it will be easy to prove that there was never such a thing as religious persecution since the creation. For there never was a religious persecution in which some odious crime was not, justly or unjustly, said to be obviously deducible 442from the doctrines of the persecuted party. We might say that the Cæsars did not persecute the Christians; that they only punished men who were charged, rightly or wrongly, with burning Rome, and with committing the foulest abominations in secret assemblies; and that the refusal to throw frankincense on the altar of Jupiter was not the crime but only evidence of the crime. We might say, that the massacre of St. Bartholomew was intended to extirpate, not a religious sect, but a political party. For, beyond all doubt, the proceedings of the Huguenots, from the conspiracy of Amboise to the battle of Moncontour, had given much more trouble to the French monarchy than the Catholics have ever given to the English monarchy since the Reformation; and that too with much less excuse.

The true distinction is perfectly obvious. To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. To punish a man, because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.

When Elizabeth put Ballard and Babington to death, she was not persecuting. Nor should we have accused her government of persecution for passing any law, however severe, against overt acts of sedition. But to argue that, because a man is a Catholic, he must think it right to murder a heretical sovereign, and that because he thinks it right he will attempt to do it, and then, to found on this conclusion a law for punishing him as if he had done it, is plain persecution.

If, indeed, all men reasoned in the same manner on 443the same data, and always did what they thought it their duty to do, this mode of dispensing punishment might be extremely judicious. But as people who agree about premises often disagree about conclusions, and as no man in the world acts up to his own standard of right, there are two enormous gaps in the logic by which alone penalties for opinions can be defended. The doctrine of reprobation, in the judgment of many very able men, follows by syllogistic necessity from the doctrine of election. Others conceive that the Antinomian heresy directly follows from the doctrine of reprobation; and it is very generally thought that licentiousness and cruelty of the worst description are likely to be the fruits, as they often have been the fruits, of Antinomian opinions. This chain of reasoning, we think, is as perfect in all its parts as that which makes out a Papist to be necessarily a traitor. Yet it would be rather a strong measure to hang all the Calvinists, on the ground that, if they were spared, they would infallibly commit all the atrocities of Matthias and Knipperdoling. For, reason the matter as we may, experience shows us that a man may believe in election without believing in reprobation, that he may believe in reprobation without being an Antinomian, and that he may be an Antinomian without being a bad citizen. Man, in short, is so inconsistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his belief to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another.

We do not believe that every Englishman who was reconciled to the Catholic Church would, as a necessary consequence, have thought himself justified in deposing or assassinating Elizabeth. It is not sufficient to say that the convert must have acknowledged the authority of the Pope, and that the Pope had issued a 444bull against the Queen. We know through what strange loopholes the human mind contrives to escape, when it wishes to avoid a disagreeable inference from an admitted proposition. We know how long the Jansenists contrived to believe the Pope infallible in matters of doctrine, and at the same time to believe doctrines which he pronounced to be heretical. Let it pass, however, that every Catholic in the kingdom thought that Elizabeth might be lawfully murdered. Still the old maxim, that what is the business of everybody is the business of nobody, is particularly likely to hold good in a case in which a cruel death is the almost inevitable consequence of making any attempt.

Of the ten thousand clergymen of the Church of England, there is scarcely one who would not say that a man who should leave his country and friends to preach the Gospel among savages, and who should, after labouring indefatigably without any hope of reward, terminate his life by martyrdom, would deserve the warmest admiration. Yet we doubt whether ten of the ten thousand ever thought of going on such an expedition. Why should we suppose that conscientious motives, feeble as they are constantly found to be in a good cause, should be omnipotent for evil? Doubtless there was many a jolly Popish priest in the old manor-houses of the northern counties, who would have admitted, in theory, the deposing power of the Pope, but who would not have been ambitious to be stretched on the rack, even though it were to be used, according to the benevolent proviso of Lord Burleigh, “as charitably as such a thing can be,” or to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, even though, by that rare indulgence which the Queen, of her special grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion, sometimes extended to very mitigated cases, he 445were allowed a fair time to choke before the hangman began to grabble in his entrails.

But the laws passed against the Puritans had not even the wretched excuse which we have been considering. In this case, the cruelty was equal, the danger infinitely less. In fact, the danger was created solely by the cruelty. But it is superfluous to press the argument. By no artifice of ingenuity can the stigma of persecution, the worst blemish of the English Church, be effaced or patched over. Her doctrines, we well know, do not tend to intolerance. She admits the possibility of salvation out of her own pale. But this circumstance, in itself honourable to her, aggravates the sin and the shame of those who persecuted in her name. Dominic and De Montfort did not, at least, murder and torture for differences of opinion which they considered as trifling. It was to stop an infection which, as they believed, hurried to certain perdition every soul which it seized, that they employed their fire and steel. The measures of the English government with respect to the Papists and Puritans sprang from a widely different principle. If those who deny that the founders of the Church were guilty of religious persecution mean only that the founders of the Church were not influenced by any religious motive, we perfectly agree with them. Neither the penal code of Elizabeth, nor the more hateful system by which Charles the Second attempted to force Episcopacy on the Scotch, had an origin so noble. The cause is to be sought in some circumstances which attended the Reformation in England, circumstances of which the effects long continued to be felt, and may in some degree be traced even at the present day.

In Germany, in France, in Switzerland, and in Scotland, 446the contest against the Papal power was essentially a religions contest. In all those countries, indeed, the cause of the Reformation, like every other great cause, attracted to itself many supporters influenced by no conscientious principle, many who quitted the Established Church only because they thought her in danger, many who were weary of her restraints, and many who were greedy for her spoils. But it was not by these adherents that the separation was there conducted. They were welcome auxiliaries; their support was too often purchased by unworthy compliances; but, however exalted in rank or power, they were not the leaders in the enterprise. Men of a widely different description, men who redeemed great infirmities and errors by sincerity, disinterestedness, energy, and courage, men who, with many of the vices of revolutionary chiefs and of polemic divines, united some of the highest qualities of apostles, were the real directors. They might be violent in innovation and scurrilous in controversy. They might sometimes act with inexcusable severity towards opponents, and sometimes connive disreputably at the vices of powerful allies. But fear was not in them, nor hypocrisy, nor avarice, nor any petty selfishness. Their one great object was the demolition of the idols and the purification of the sanctuary. If they were too indulgent to the failings of eminent men from whose patronage they expected advantage to the church, they never flinched before persecuting tyrants and hostile armies. For that theological system to which they sacrificed the lives of others without scruple, they were ready to throw away their own lives without fear. Such were the authors of the great schism on the Continent and in the northern part of this island. The Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse, the 447Prince of Condé and the King of Navarre, the Earl of Moray and the Earl of Morton, might espouse the Protestant opinions, or might pretend to espouse them; but it was from Luther, from Calvin, from Knox, that the Reformation took its character.

England has no such names to show: not that she wanted men of sincere piety, of deep learning, of steady and adventurous courage. But these were thrown into the back ground. Elsewhere men of this character were the principals. Here they acted a secondary part. Elsewhere worldliness was the tool of zeal. Here zeal was the tool of worldliness. A King, whose character may be best described by saying that he was despotism itself personified, unprincipled ministers, a rapacious aristocracy, a servile Parliament, such were the instruments by which England was delivered from the yoke of Rome. The work which had been begun by Henry, the murderer of his wives, was continued by Somerset, the murderer of his brother, and completed by Elizabeth, the murderer of her guest. Sprung from brutal passion, nurtured by selfish policy, the Reformation in England displayed little of what had, in other countries, distinguished it, unflinching and unsparing devotion, boldness of speech, and singleness of eye. These were indeed to be found; but it was in the lower ranks of the party which opposed the authority of Rome, in such men as Hooper, Latimer, Rogers, and Taylor. Of those who had any important share in bringing the Reformation about, Ridley was perhaps the only person who did not consider it as a mere political job. Even Ridley did not play a very prominent part. Among the statesmen and prelates who principally gave the tone to the religious changes, there is one, and one only, whose conduct partiality 448itself can attribute to any other than interested motives. It is not strange, therefore, that his character should have been the subject of fierce controversy. We need not say that we speak of Cranmer.

Mr. Hallam has been severely censured for saying, with his usual placid severity, that, “if we weigh the character of this prelate in an equal balance, he will appear far indeed removed from the turpitude imputed to him by his enemies; yet not entitled to any extraordinary veneration.” We will venture to expand the sense of Mr. Hallam, and to comment on it thus:—If we consider Cranmer merely as a statesman, he will not appear a much worse man than Wolsey, Gardiner, Cromwell, or Somerset. But, when an attempt is made to set him up as a saint, it is scarcely possible for any man of sense who knows the history of the times to preserve his gravity. If the memory of the archbishop had been left to find its own place, he would have soon been lost among the crowd which is mingled

“A quel cattivo coro
Degli angeli, che non furon ribelli,
Nè fur fedcli a Dio, nia per se foro.”

And the only notice which it would have been necessary to take of his name would have been

“Non ragioniam di lui; ma guarda, e passa.”

But, since his admirers challenge for him a place in the noble army of martyrs, his claims require fuller discussion.

The origin of his greatness, common enough in the scandalous chronicles of courts, seems strangely out of place in a hagiology. Cranmer rose into favour by serving Henry in the disgraceful affair of his first divorce. He promoted the marriage of Anne 449Boleyn with the King. On a frivolous pretence he pronounced that marriage null and void. On a pretence, if possible, still more frivolous, he dissolved the ties which bound the shameless tyrant to Anne of Cleves. He attached himself to Cromwell while the fortunes of Cromwell flourished. He voted for cutting off Cromwell’s head without a trial, when the tide of royal favour turned. He conformed backwards and forwards as the King changed his mind. He assisted, while Henry lived, in condemning to the flames those who denied the doctrine of transubstantiation. He found out, as soon as Henry was dead, that the doctrine was false. He was, however, not at a loss for people to burn. The authority of his station and of his grey hairs was employed to overcome the disgust with which an intelligent and virtuous child regarded persecution. Intolerance is always bad. But the sanguinary intolerance of a man who thus wavered in his creed excites a loathing, to which it is difficult to give vent without calling foul names. Equally false to political and to religious obligations, the primate was first the tool of Somerset, and then the tool of Northumberland. When the Protector wished to put his own brother to death, without even the semblance of a trial, he found a ready instrument in Cranmer. In spite of the canon law, which forbade a churchman to take any part in matters of blood, the archbishop signed the warrant for the atrocious sentence. When Somerset had been in his turn destroyed, his destroyer received the support of Cranmer in a wicked attempt to change the course of the succession.

The apology made for him by his admirers only renders his conduct more contemptible. He complied, it is said, against his better judgment, because he could 450not resist the entreaties of Edward. A holy prelate of sixty, one would think, might be better employed by the bedside of a dying child, than in committing crimes at the request of the young disciple. If Cranmer had shown half as much firmness when Edward requested him to commit treason as he had before shown when Edward requested him not to commit murder, he might have saved the country from one of the greatest misfortunes that it ever underwent. He became, from whatever motive, the accomplice of the worthless Dudley. The virtuous scruples of another young and amiable mind were to be overcome. As Edward had been forced into persecution, Jane was to be seduced into treason. No transaction in our annals is more unjustifiable than this. If a hereditary title were to be respected, Mary possessed it. If a parliamentary title were preferable, Mary possessed that also. If the interest of the Protestant religion required a departure from the ordinary rule of succession, that interest would have been best served by raising Elizabeth to the throne. If the foreign relations of the kingdom were considered, still stronger reasons might be found for preferring Elizabeth to Jane. There was great doubt whether Jane or the Queen of Scotland had the better claim; and that doubt would, in all probability, have produced a war both with Scotland and with France, if the project of Northumberland had not been blasted in its infancy. That Elizabeth had a better claim than the Queen of Scotland was indisputable. To the part which Cranmer, and unfortunately some better men than Cranmer, took in this most reprehensible scheme, much of the severity with which the Protestants were afterwards treated must in fairness be ascribed. 451The plot failed; Popery triumphed; and Cranmer recanted. Most people look on his recantation as a single blemish on an honourable life, the frailty of an unguarded moment. But, in fact, his recantation was in strict accordance with the system on which he had constantly acted. It was part of a regular habit. It was not the first recantation that he had made; and, in all probability, if it had answered its purpose, it would not have been the last. We do not blame him for not choosing to be burned alive. It is no very severe reproach to any person that he does not possess heroic fortitude. But surely a man who liked the fire so little should have had some sympathy for others. A persecutor who inflicts nothing which he is not ready to endure deserves some respect. But when a man who loves his doctrines more than the lives of his neighbours loves his own little finger better than his doctrines, a very simple argument a fortiori will enable us to estimate the amount of his benevolence.

But his martyrdom, it is said, redeemed every thing. It is extraordinary that so much ignorance should exist on this subject. The fact is that, if a martyr be a man who chooses to die rather than to renounce his opinions, Cranmer was no more a martyr than Dr. Dodd. He died, solely because he could not help it. He never retracted his recantation till he found he had made it in vain. The Queen was fully resolved that, Catholic or Protestant, he should burn. Then he spoke out, as people generally speak out when they are at the point of death and have nothing to hope or to fear on earth. If Mary had suffered him to live, we suspect that he would have heard mass and received absolution, like a good Catholic, till the accession of Elizabeth, and that he would then have purchased, by 452another apostasy, the power of burning men better and braver than himself.

We do not mean, however, to represent him as a monster of wickedness. He was not wantonly cruel or treacherous. He was merely a supple, timid, interested courtier, in times of frequent and violent change. That which has always been represented as his distinguishing virtue, the facility with which he forgave his enemies, belongs to the character. Slaves of his class are never vindictive, and never grateful. A present interest effaces past services and past injuries from their minds together. Their only object is self-preservation; and for this they conciliate those who wrong them, just as they abandon those who serve them. Before we extol a man for his forgiving temper, we should inquire whether he is above revenge, or below it.

Somerset had as little principle as his coadjutor. Of Henry, an orthodox Catholic, except that he chose to be his own Pope, and of Elizabeth, who certainly had no objection to the theology of Rome, we need say nothing. These four persons were the great authors of the English Reformation. Three of them had a direct interest in the extension of the royal prerogative. The fourth was the ready tool of any who could frighten him. It is not difficult to see from what motives, and on what plan, such persons would be inclined to remodel the Church. The scheme was merely to transfer the full cup of sorceries from the Babylonian enchantress to other hands, spilling as little as possible by the way. The Catholic doctrines and rites were to be retained in the Church of England. But the King was to exercise the control which had formerly belonged to the Roman Pontiff. In this 453Henry for a time succeeded. The extraordinary force of his character, the fortunate situation in which he stood with respect to foreign powers, and the vast resources which the suppression of the monasteries placed at his disposal, enabled him to oppress both the religious factions equally. He punished with impartial severity those who renounced the doctrines of Rome, and those who acknowledged her jurisdiction. The basis, however, on which he attempted to establish his power was too narrow to be durable. It would have been impossible even for him long to persecute both persuasions. Even under his reign there had been insurrections on the part of the Catholics, and signs of a spirit which was likely soon to produce insurrection on the part of the Protestants. It was plainly necessary, therefore, that the Crown should form an alliance with one or with the other side. To recognise the Papal supremacy, would have been to abandon the whole design. Reluctantly and sullenly the government at last joined the Protestants. In forming this junction, its object was to procure as much aid as possible for its selfish undertaking, and to make the smallest possible concessions to the spirit of religious innovation.

From this compromise the Church of England sprang. In many respects, indeed, it has been well for her that, in an age of exuberant zeal, her principal founders were mere politicians. To this circumstance she owes her moderate articles, her decent ceremonies, her noble and pathetic liturgy. Her worship is not disfigured by mummery. Yet she has preserved, in a far greater degree than any of her Protestant sisters, that art of striking the senses and filling the imagination in which the Catholic Church so eminently excels. But, on the 454other hand, she continued, to be, for more than a hundred and fifty years, the servile handmaid of monarchy, the steady enemy of public liberty. The divine right of kings, and the duty of passively obeying all their commands, were her favourite tenets. She held those tenets firmly through times of oppression, persecution, and licentiousness; while law was trampled down; while judgment was perverted; while the people were eaten as though they were bread. Once, and but once, for a moment, and but for a moment, when her own dignity and property were touched, she forgot to practise the submission which she had taught.

Elizabeth clearly discerned the advantages which were to be derived from a close connection between the monarchy and the priesthood. At the time of her accession, indeed, she evidently meditated a partial reconciliation with Rome; and, throughout her whole life, she leaned strongly to some of the most obnoxious parts of the Catholic system. But her imperious temper, her keen sagacity, and her peculiar situation, soon led her to attach herself completely to a church which was all her own. On the same principle on which she joined it, she attempted to drive all her people within its pale by persecution. She supported it by severe penal laws, not because she thought conformity to its discipline necessary to salvation; but because it was the fastness which arbitrary power was making strong for itself; because she expected a more profound obedience from those who saw in her both their civil and their ecclesiastical chief, than from those who, like the Papists, ascribe spiritual authority to the Pope, or from those who, like some of the Puritans, ascribed it only to Heaven. To dissent from her establishment was to dissent from an institution founded with 455an express view to the maintenance and extension of the royal prerogative.

This great Queen and her successors, by considering conformity and loyalty as identical, at length made them so. With respect to the Catholics, indeed, the rigour of persecution abated after her death. James soon found that they were unable to injure him, and that the animosity which the Puritan party felt towards them drove them of necessity to take refuge under his throne. During the subsequent conflict, their fault was anything but disloyalty. On the other hand, James hated the Puritans with more than the hatred of Elizabeth. Her aversion to them was political; his was personal. The sect had plagued him in Scotland, where he was weak; and he was determined to be even with them in England, where he was powerful. Persecution gradually changed a sect into a faction. That there was anything in the religious opinions of the Puritans which rendered them hostile to monarchy has never been proved to our satisfaction. After our civil contests, it became the fashion to say that Presbyterianism was connected with Republicanism; just as it has been the fashion to say, since the time of the French Revolution, that Infidelity is connected with Republicanism. It is perfectly true that a church, constituted on the Calvinistic model, will not strengthen the hands of the sovereign so much as a hierarchy which consists of several ranks, differing in dignity and emolument, and of which all the members are constantly looking to the government for promotion. But experience has clearly shown that a Calvinistic church, like every other church, is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favoured and cherished. Scotland has had a Presbyterian 456establishment during a century and a half. Yet her General Assembly has not, during that period, given half so much trouble to the government as the Convocation of the Church of England gave during the thirty years which followed the Revolution. That James and Charles should have been mistaken in this point is not surprising. But we are astonished, we must confess, that men of our own time, men who have before them the proof of what toleration can effect, men who may see with their own eyes that the Presbyterians are no such monsters when government is wise enough to let them alone, should defend the persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as indispensable to the safety of the church and the throne.

How persecution protects churches and thrones was soon made manifest. A systematic political opposition, vehement, daring, and inflexible, sprang from a schism about trifles, altogether unconnected with the real interests of religion or of the state. Before the close of the reign of Elizabeth this opposition began to show itself It broke forth on the question of the monopolies. Even the imperial Lioness was compelled to abandon her prey, and slowly and fiercely to recede before the assailants. The spirit of liberty grew with the growing wealth and intelligence of the people. The feeble struggles and insults of James irritated instead of suppressing it; and the events which immediately followed the accession of his son portended a contest of no common severity, between a king resolved to be absolute, and a people resolved to be free.

The famous proceedings of the third Parliament of Charles, and the tyrannical measures which followed its dissolution, are extremely well described by Mr. Hal-lam. No writer, we think, has shown, in so clear and 457satisfactory a manner, that the Government then entertained a fixed purpose of destroying the old parliamentary constitution of England, or at least of reducing it to a mere shadow. We hasten, however, to a part of his work which, though it abounds in valuable information and in remarks well deserving to be attentively considered, and though it is, like the rest, evidently written in a spirit of perfect impartiality, appears to us, in many points, objectionable.

We pass to the year 1640. The fate of the short Parliament held in that year clearly indicated the views of the King. That a parliament so moderate in feeling should have met after so many years of oppression is truly wonderful. Hyde extols its loyal and conciliatory spirit. Its conduct, we are told, made the excellent Falkland in love with the very name of Parliament. We think, indeed, with Oliver St. John, that its moderation was carried too far, and that the times required sharper and more decided councils. It was fortunate, however, that the King had another opportunity of showing that hatred of the liberties of his subjects which was the ruling principle of all his conduct. The sole crime of the Commons was that, meeting after a long intermission of parliaments, and after a long series of cruelties and illegal imposts, they seemed inclined to examine grievances before they would vote supplies. For this insolence they were dissolved almost as soon as they met.

Defeat, universal agitation, financial embarrassments, disorganization in every part of the government, compelled Charles again to convene the Houses before the close of the same year. Their meeting was one of the great eras in the history of the civilised world. Whatever of political freedom exists either in Europe or in 458America, has sprung, directly or indirectly, from those institutions which they secured and reformed. We never turn to the annals of those times without feeling increased admiration of the patriotism, the energy, the decision, the consummate wisdom, which marked the measures of that great Parliament, from the day on which it met to the commencement of civil hostilities.

The impeachment of Strafford was the first, and perhaps the greatest blow. The whole conduct of that celebrated man proved that he had formed a deliberate scheme to subvert the fundamental laws of England. Those parts of his correspondence which have been brought to light since his death place the matter beyond a doubt. One of his admirers has, indeed, offered to show “that the passages which Mr. Hallam has invidiously extracted from the correspondence between Laud and Strafford, as proving their design to introduce a thorough tyranny, refer not to any such design, but to a thorough reform in the affairs of state, and the thorough maintenance of just authority.” We will recommend two or three of these passages to the especial notice of our readers.

All who know anything of those times, know that the conduct of Hampden in the affair of the ship-money met with the warm approbation of every respectable Royalist in England. It drew forth the ardent eulogies of the champions of the prerogative and even of the Crown lawyers themselves. Clarendon allows Hampden’s demeanour through the whole proceeding to have been such, that even those who watched for an occasion against the defender of the people, were compelled to acknowledge themselves unable to find any fault in him. That he was right in the point of law is now universally admitted. Even 459had it been otherwise, he had a fair case. Five of the Judges, servile as our Courts then were, pronounced in his favour. The majority against him was the smallest possible. In no country retaining the slightest vestige of constitutional liberty can a modest and decent appeal to the laws be treated as a crime. Stratford, however, recommends that, for taking the sense of a legal tribunal on a legal question, Hampden should be punished, and punished severely, “whipt,” says the insolent apostate, “whipt into his senses. If the rod,” he adds, “be so used that it smarts not, I am the more sorry.” This is the maintenance of just authority.

In civilised nations, the most arbitrary governments have generally suffered justice to have a free course in private suits. Strafford wished to make every cause in every court subject to the royal prerogative. He complained that in Ireland he was not permitted to meddle in cases between party and party. “I know very well,” says he, “that the common lawyers will be passionately against it, who are wont to put such a prejudice upon all other professions, as if none were to be trusted, or capable to administer justice, but themselves; yet how well this suits with monarchy, when they monopolise all to be governed by their yearbooks, you in England have a costly example.” We are really curious to know by what arguments it is to be proved, that the power of interfering in the lawsuits of individuals is part of the just authority of the executive government.

It is not strange that a man so careless of the common civil rights, which even despots have generally respected, should treat with scorn the limitations which the constitution imposes on the royal prerogative. We might quote pages: but we will content ourselves with 460a single specimen:—“The debts of the Crown being taken off, you may govern as you please: and most resolute I am that may be done without borrowing any help forth of the King’s lodgings.”

Such was the theory of that thorough reform in the state which Strafford meditated. His whole practice, from the day on which he sold himself to the court, was in strict conformity to his theory. For his accomplices various excuses may be urged, ignorance, imbecility, religious bigotry. But Wentworth had no such plea. His intellect was capacious. His early prepossessions were on the side of popular rights. He knew the whole beauty and value of the system which he attempted to deface. He was the first of the Rats, the first of those statesmen whose patriotism has been only the coquetry of political prostitution, and whose profligacy has taught governments to adopt the old maxim of the slave-market, that it is cheaper to buy than to breed, to import defenders from an Opposition than to rear them in a Ministry. He was the first Englishman to whom a peerage was a sacrament of infamy, a baptism into the communion of corruption. As he was the earliest of the hateful list, so was he also by far the greatest; eloquent, sagacious, adventurous, intrepid, ready of invention, immutable of purpose, in every talent which exalts or destroys nations preeminent, the lost Archangel, the Satan of the apostasy. The title for which, at the time of his desertion, he exchanged a name honourably distinguished in the cause of the people, reminds us of the appellation which, from the moment of the first treason, fixed itself on the fallen Son of the Morning,

Satan;—so call him now.—His former name
Is heard no more in heaven."= 461The defection of Strafford from the popular party contributed mainly to draw on him the hatred of his contemporaries. It has since made him an object of peculiar interest to those whose lives have been spent, like his, in proving that there is no malice like the malice of a renegade. Nothing can be more natural or becoming than that one turncoat should eulogize another.

Many enemies of public liberty have been distinguished by their private virtues. But Strafford was the same throughout. As was the statesman, such was the kinsman, and such the lover. His conduct towards Lord Mountmorris is recorded by Clarendon. For a word which can scarcely be called rash, which could not have been made the subject of an ordinary civil action, the Lord Lieutenant dragged a man of high rank, married to a relative of that saint about whom he whimpered to the Peers, before a tribunal of slaves. Sentence of death was passed. Every thing but death was inflicted. Yet the treatment which Lord Ely experienced was still more scandalous. That nobleman was thrown into prison, in order to compel him to settle his estate in a manner agreeable to his daughter-in-law, whom, as there is every reason to believe, Strafford had debauched. These stories do not rest on vague report. The historians most partial to the minister admit their truth, and censure them in terms which, though too lenient for the occasion, are still severe. These facts are alone sufficient to justify the appellation with which Pym branded him, “the wicked Earl.”

In spite of all Strafford’s vices, in spite of all his dangerous projects, he was certainly entitled to the benefit of the law; but of the law in all its rigour; of 462the law according to the utmost strictness of the letter, which killeth. He was not to be torn in pieces by a mob, or stabbed in the back by an assassin. He was not to have punishment meted out to him from his own iniquitous measure. But if justice, in the whole range of its wide armoury, contained one weapon which could pierce him, that weapon his pursuers were bound, before God and man, to employ.

——“If he may
Find mercy in the law, ’tis his: if none,
Let him not seek’t of us.”

Such was the language which the Commons might o o o justly use.

Did then the articles against Strafford strictly amount to high treason? Many people, who know neither what the articles were, nor what high treason is, will answer in the negative, simply because the accused person, speaking for his life, took that ground of defence. The Journals of the Lords show that the Judges were consulted. They answered, with one accord, that the articles on which the Earl was convicted, amounted to high treason. This judicial opinion, even if we suppose it to have been erroneous, goes far to justify the Parliament. The judgment pronounced in the Exchequer Chamber has always been urged by the apologists of Charles in defence of his conduct respecting ship-money. Yet on that occasion there was but a bare majority in favour of the party at whose pleasure all the magistrates composing the tribunal were removable. The decision in the case of Strafford was unanimous; as far as we can judge, it was unbiassed; and, though there may be room for hesitation, we think on the whole that it was reasonable. “It may be remarked,” says Mr. Hallam, “that the fifteenth article 463of the impeachment, charging Strafford with raising money by his own authority, and quartering troops on the people of Ireland, in order to compel their obedience to his unlawful requisitions, upon which, and upon one other article, not upon the whole matter, the Peers voted him guilty, does, at least, approach very nearly, if we may not say more, to a substantive treason within the statute of Edward the Third, as a levying of war against the king.” This most sound and just exposition has provoked a very ridiculous reply. “It should seem to be an Irish construction this,” says an assailant of Mr. Hallam, “which makes the raising money for the King’s service, with his knowledge, and by his approbation, to come under the head of levying war on the King, and therefore to be high treason.” Now, people who undertake to write on points of constitutional law should know, what every attorney’s clerk and every forward schoolboy on an upper form knows, that, by a fundamental maxim of our polity, the King can do no wrong; that every court is bound to suppose his conduct and his sentiments to be, on every occasion, such as they ought to be; and that no evidence can be received for the purpose of setting aside this loyal and salutary presumption. The Lords, therefore, were bound to take it for granted that the King considered arms which were unlawfully directed against his people as directed against his own throne.

The remarks of Mr. Hallam on the bill of attainder, though, as usual, weighty and acute, do not perfectly satisfy us. He defends the principle, but objects to the severity of the punishment. That, on great emergencies, the State may justifiably pass a retrospective act against an offender, we have no doubt whatever. We are acquainted with only one argument on the other side, 464which lias in it enough of reason to hear an answer. Warning, it is said, is the end of punishment. But a punishment inflicted, not by a general rule, but by an arbitrary discretion, cannot serve the purpose of a warning. It is therefore useless; and useless pain ought not to be inflicted. This sophism has found its way into several books on penal legislation. It admits, however, of a very simple refutation. In the first place, punishments ex post facto are not altogether useless even as warnings. They are warnings to a particular class which stand in great need of warnings, to favourites and ministers. They remind persons of this description that there may be a day of reckoning for those who ruin and enslave their country in all the forms of law. But this is not all. Warning is, in ordinary cases, the principal end of punishment; but it is not the only end. To remove the offender, to preserve society from those dangers which are to be apprehended from his incorrigible depravity is often one of the ends. In the case of such a knave as Wild, or such a ruffian as Thurtell, it is a very important end. In the case of a powerful and wicked statesman, it is infinitely more important; so important, as alone to justify the utmost severity, even though it were certain that his fate would not deter others from imitating his example. At present, indeed, we should think it extremely pernicious to take such a course, even with a worse minister than Strafford, if a worse could exist; for, at present, Parliament has only to withhold its support from a Cabinet to produce an immediate change of hands. The case was widely different in the reign of Charles the First. That Prince had governed during eleven years without any Parliament; and, even when Parliament was sitting, had supported Buckingham against its most violent remonstrances. 465Mr. Hallam is of opinion that a bill of pains and penalties ought to have been passed; but he draws a distinction less just, we think, than his distinctions usually are. His opinion, so far as we can collect it, is this, that there are almost insurmountable objections to retrospective laws for capital punishment, but that, where the punishment stops short of death, the objections are comparatively trifling. Now the practice of taking the severity of the penalty into consideration, when the question is about the mode of procedure and the rules of evidence, is no doubt sufficiently common. We often see a man convicted of a simple larceny on evidence on which he would not be convicted of a burglary. It sometimes happens that a jury, when there is strong suspicion, but not absolute demonstration, that an act, unquestionably amounting to murder, was committed by the prisoner before them, will find him guilty of manslaughter. But this is surely very irrational. The rules of evidence no more depend on the magnitude of the interests at stake than the rules of arithmetic. We might as well say that we have a greater chance of throwing a size when we are playing for a penny than when we are playing for a thousand pounds, as that a form of trial which is sufficient for the purposes of justice, in a matter affecting liberty and property, is insufficient in a matter affecting life. Nay, if a mode of proceeding be too lax for capital cases, it is, à fortiori, too lax for all others; for, in capital cases, the principles of human nature will always afford considerable security. No judge is so cruel as he who indemnifies himself for scrupulosity in cases of blood, by license in affairs of smaller importance. The difference in tale on the one side far more than makes up for the difference in weight on the other. 466If there be any universal objection to retrospective punishment, there is no more to be said. But such is not the opinion of Mr. Hallam. He approves of the mode of proceeding. He thinks that a punishment, not previously affixed by law to the offences of Strafford, should have been inflicted; that Strafford should have been, by act of Parliament, degraded from his rank, and condemned to perpetual banishment. Our difficulty would have been at the first step, and there only. Indeed we can scarcely conceive that any case which does not call for capital punishment can call for punishment by a retrospective act. We can scarcely conceive a man so wicked and so dangerous that the whole course of law must be disturbed in order to reach him, yet not so wicked as to deserve the severest sentence, nor so dangerous as to require the last and surest custody, that of the grave. If we had thought that Strafford might be safely suffered to live in France, we should have thought it better that he should continue to live in England, than that he should be exiled by a special act. As to degradation, it was not the Earl, but the general and the statesman, whom the people had to fear. Essex said, on that occasion, with more truth than elegance, “Stone dead hath no fellow.” And often during the civil wars the Parliament had reason to rejoice that an irreversible law and an impassable barrier protected them from the valour and capacity of Wentworth.

It is remarkable that neither Hyde nor Falkland voted against the bill of attainder. There is, indeed, reason to believe that Falkland spoke in favour of it. In one respect, as Mr. Hallam has observed, the proceeding was honourably distinguished from others of the same kind. An act was passed to relieve the children 467of Strafford from the forfeiture and corruption of blood which were the legal consequences of the sentence. The Crown had never shown equal generosity in a case of treason. The liberal conduct of the Commons has been fully and most appropriately repaid. The House of Wentworth has since that time been as much distinguished by public spirit as by power and splendour, and may at the present moment boast of members with whom Say and Hampden would have been proud to act.

It is somewhat curious that the admirers of Strafford should also be, without a single exception, the admirers of Charles; for, whatever we may think of the conduct of the Parliament towards the unhappy favourite, there can be no doubt that the treatment which he received from his master was disgraceful. Faithless alike to his people and to his tools, the King did not scruple to play the part of the cowardly approver, who hangs his accomplice. It is good that there should be such men as Charles in every league of villany. It is for such men that the offer of pardon and reward which appears after a murder is intended. They are indemnified, remunerated, and despised. The very magistrate who avails himself of their assistance looks on them as more contemptible than the criminal whom they betray. Was Strafford innocent? Was he a meritorious servant of the Crown? If so, what shall we think of the Prince, who having solemnly promised him that not a hair of his head should be hurt, and possessing an unquestioned constitutional right to save him, gave him up to the vengeance of his enemies? There were some points which we know that Charles would not concede, and for which he was willing to risk the chances of civil war. Ought o 468not a King, who will make a stand for any thing, to make a stand for the innocent blood? Was Strafford guilty? Even on this supposition, it is difficult not to feel disdain for the partner of his guilt, the tempter turned punisher. If, indeed, from that time forth, the conduct of Charles had been blameless, it might have been said that his eyes were at last opened to the errors of his former conduct, and that, in sacrificing to the wishes of his Parliament a minister whose crime had been a devotion too zealous to the interests of his prerogative, he gave a painful and deeply humiliating proof of the sincerity of his repentance. We may describe the King’s behaviour on this occasion in terms resembling those which Hume has employed when speaking of the conduct of Churchill at the Revolution. It required ever after the most rigid justice and sincerity in the dealings of Charles with his people to vindicate his conduct towards his friend. His subsequent dealings with his people, however, clearly showed, that it was not from any respect for the Constitution, or from any sense of the deep criminality of the plans in which Strafford and himself had been engaged, that he gave up his minister to the axe. It became evident that he had abandoned a servant who, deeply guilty as to all others, was guiltless to him alone, solely in order to gain time for maturing other schemes of tyranny, and purchasing the aid of other Wentworths. He, who would not avail himself of the power which the laws gave him to save an adherent to whom his honour was pledged, soon showed that he did not scruple to break every law and forfeit every pledge, in order to work the ruin of his opponents.

“Put not your trust in princes!” was the expression of the fallen minister, when he heard that Charles 469had consented to his death. The whole history of the times is a sermon on that bitter text. The defence of the Long Parliament is comprised in the dying words of its victim.

The early measures of that Parliament Mr. Hallam in general approves. But he considers the proceedings which took place after the recess in the summer of 1641 as mischievous and violent. He thinks that, from that time, the demands of the Houses were not warranted by any imminent danger to the Constitution, and that in the war which ensued they were clearly the aggressors. As this is one of the most interesting questions in our history, we will venture to state, at some length, the reasons which have led us to form an opinion on it contrary to that of a writer whose judgment we so highly respect.

We will premise that we think worse of King Charles the First than even Mr. Hallam appears to do. The fixed hatred of liberty which was the principle of the King’s public conduct, the unscrupulousness with which he adopted any means which might enable him to attain his ends, the readiness with which he gave promises, the impudence with which he broke them, the cruel indifference with which he threw away his useless or damaged tools, made him, at least till his character was fully exposed and his power shaken to its foundations, a more dangerous enemy to the Constitution than a man of far greater talents and resolution might have been. Such princes may still be seen, the scandals of the southern thrones of Europe, princes false alike to the accomplices who have served them and to the opponents who have spared them, princes who, in the hour of danger, concede every thing, swear every thing, hold out their cheeks to every smiter, give 470up to punishment every instrument of their tyranny, and await with meek and smiling implacability the blessed day of perjury and revenge.

We will pass by the instances of oppression and falsehood which disgraced the early part of the reign of Charles. We will leave out of the question the whole history of his third Parliament, the price which he exacted for assenting to the Petition of Right, the perfidy with which he violated his engagements, the death of Eliot, the barbarous punishments inflicted by the Star-Chamber, the ship-money, and all the measures now universally condemned, which disgraced his administration from 1630 to 1640. We will admit that it might be the duty of the Parliament, after punishing the most guilty of his creatures, after abolishing the inquisitorial tribunals which had been the instruments of his tyranny, after reversing the unjust sentences of his victims, to pause in its course. The concessions which had been made were great, the evils of civil war obvious, the advantages even of victory doubtful. The former errors of the King might be imputed to youth, to the pressure of circumstances, to the influence of evil counsel, to the undefined state of the law. We firmly believe that if, even at this eleventh hour, Charles had acted fairly towards his people, if he had even acted fairly towards his own partisans, the House of Commons would have given him a fair chance of retrieving the public confidence. Such was the opinion of Clarendon. He distinctly states that the fury of opposition had abated, that a reaction had begun to take place, that the majority of those who had taken part against the King were desirous of an honourable and complete reconciliation, and that the more violent, or, as it soon appeared, the more judicious members of 471the popular party were fast declining in credit. The Remonstrance had been carried with great difficulty. The uncompromising antagonists of the court, such as Cromwell, had begun to talk of selling their estates and leaving England. The event soon showed, that they were the only men who really understood how much inhumanity and fraud lay hid under the constitutional language and gracious demeanour of the King.

The attempt to seize the five members was undoubtedly the real cause of the war. From that moment, the loyal confidence with which most of the popular party were beginning to regard the King was turned into hatred and incurable suspicion. From that moment, the Parliament was compelled to surround itself with defensive arms. From that moment, the city assumed the appearance of a garrison. From that moment, in the phrase of Clarendon, the carriage of Hampden became fiercer, that he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard. For, from that moment, it must have been evident to every impartial observer that, in the midst of professions, oaths, and smiles, the tyrant was constantly looking forward to an absolute sway and to a bloody revenge.

The advocates of Charles have very dexterously contrived to conceal from their readers the real nature of this transaction. By making concessions apparently candid and ample, they elude the great accusation. They allow that the measure was weak and even frantic, an absurd caprice of Lord Digby, absurdly adopted by the King. And thus they save their client from the full penalty of his transgression, by entering a plea of guilty to the minor offence. To us his conduct appears at this day as at the time it appeared to the Parliament and the city. We think it by no means so foolish 472as it pleases his friends to represent it, and far more wicked.

In the first place, the transaction was illegal from beginning to end. The impeachment was illegal. The process was illegal. The service was illegal. If Charles wished to prosecute the five members for treason, a hill against them should have been sent to a grand jury. That a commoner cannot be tried for high treason by the Lords, at the suit of the Crown, is part of the very alphabet of our law. That no man can be arrested by the King in person is equally clear. This was an established maxim of our jurisprudence even in the time of Edward the Fourth. “A subject,” said Chief Justice Markham to that Prince, “may arrest for treason: the King cannot; for, if the arrest be illegal, the party has no remedy against the King.”

The time at which Charles took this step also deserves consideration. We have already said that the ardour which the Parliament had displayed at the time of its first meeting had considerably abated, that the leading opponents of the court were desponding, and that their followers were in general inclined to milder and more temper» measures than those which had hitherto been pursued. In every country, and in none more than in England, there is a disposition to take the part of those who are unmercifully run down and who seem destitute of all means of defence. Every man who has observed the ebb and flow of public feeling in our own time will easily recall examples to illustrate this remark. An English statesman ought to pay assiduous worship to Nemesis, to be most apprehensive of ruin when he is at the height of power and popularity, and to dread his enemy most when most completely prostrated. The fate of the Coalition Ministry in 1784 473is perhaps the strongest instance in our history of the operation of this principle. A few weeks turned the ablest and most extended Ministry that ever existed into a feeble Opposition, and raised a King who was talking of retiring to Hanover to a height of power which none of his predecessors had enjoyed since the Revolution. A crisis of this description was evidently approaching in 1642. At such a crisis, a Prince of a really honest and generous nature, who had erred, who had seen his error, who had regretted the lost affections of his people, who rejoiced in the dawning hope of regaining them, would be peculiarly careful to take no step which could give occasion of offence, even to the unreasonable. On the other hand, a tyrant, whose whole life was a lie, who hated the Constitution the more because he had been compelled to feign respect for it, and to whom his own honour and the love of his people were as nothing, would select such a crisis for some appalling violation of law, for some stroke which might remove the chiefs of an Opposition, and intimidate the herd. This Charles attempted. He missed his blow; but so narrowly, that it would have been mere madness in those at whom it was aimed to trust him again.

It deserves to be remarked that the King had, a short time before, promised the most respectable Royalists in the House of Commons, Falkland, Colepepper, and Hyde, that he would take no measure in which that House was concerned, without consulting them. On this occasion he did not consult them. His conduct astonished them more than any other members of the assembly. Clarendon says that they were deeply hurt by this want of confidence, and the more hurt, because, if they had been consulted, they would have 474done their utmost to dissuade Charles from so improper a proceeding. Did it never occur to Clarendon, will it not at least occur to men less partial, that there was good reason for this? When the danger to the throne seemed imminent, the King was ready to put himself for a time into the hands of those who, though they disapproved of his past conduct, thought that the remedies had now become worse than the distempers. But we believe that In his heart he regarded both the parties in the Parliament with feelings of aversion which differed only in the degree of their intensity, and that the awful warning which he proposed to give, by immolating the principal supporters of the Remonstrance, was partly intended for the instruction of those who had concurred in censuring the ship-money and in abolishing the Star-Chamber.

The Commons informed the King that their members should be forthcoming to answer any charge legally brought against them. The Lords refused to assume the unconstitutional office with which he attempted to invest them. And what was then his conduct? He went, attended by hundreds of armed men, to seize the objects of his hatred in the House itself. The party opposed to him more than insinuated that his purpose was of the most atrocious kind. We will not condemn him merely on their suspicions. We will not hold him answerable for the sanguinary expressions of the loose brawlers who composed his train. We will judge of his act by itself alone. And we say, without hesitation, that it is impossible to acquit him of having meditated violence, and violence which might probably end in blood. He knew that the legality of his proceedings was denied. He must have known that some of the accused members were men not likely to submit 475peaceably to an illegal arrest. There was every îeason to expect that he would find them in their places, that they would refuse to obey his summons, and that the House would support them in their refusal. What course would then have been left to him? Unless we suppose that he went on this expedition for the sole purpose of making himself ridiculous, we must believe that he would have had recourse to force. There would have been a scuffle; and it might not, under such circumstances, have been in his power, even if it had been in his inclination, to prevent a scuffle from ending in a massacre. Fortunately for his fame, unfortunately perhaps for what he prized far more, the interests of his hatred and his ambition, the affair ended differently. The birds, as he said, were flown, and his plan was disconcerted. Posterity is not extreme to mark abortive crimes; and thus the King’s advocates have found it easy to represent a step which, but for a trivial accident, might have filled England with mourning and dismay, as a mere error of judgment, wild and foolish, but perfectly innocent. Such was not, however, at the time, the opinion of any party. The most zealous Royalists were so much disgusted and ashamed that they suspended their opposition to the popular party, and, silently at least, concurred in measures of precaution so strong as almost to amount to resistance.

From that day, whatever of confidence and loyal attachment had survived the misrule of seventeen years was, in the great body of the people, extinguished, and extinguished for ever. As soon as the outrage had failed, the hypocrisy recommenced. Down to the very eve of this flagitious attempt, Charles had been talking of his respect for the privileges of Parliament 476and the liberties of his people. He began again in the same style on the morrow; but it was too late. To trust him now would have been, not moderation, but insanity. What common security would suffice against a Prince who was evidently watching his season with that cold and patient hatred which, in the long run, tires out every other passion?

It is certainly from no admiration of Charles that Mr. Hallam disapproves of the conduct of the Houses in resorting to arms. But he thinks that any attempt on the part of that Prince to establish a despotism would have been as strongly opposed by his adherents as by his enemies, and that therefore the Constitution might be considered as out of danger, or, at least, that it had more to apprehend from the war than from the King. On this subject Mr. Hallam dilates at length, and with conspicuous ability. We will offer a few considerations which lead us to incline to a different opinion.

The Constitution of England was only one of a large family. In all the monarchies of Western Europe, during the middle ages, there existed restraints on the royal authority, fundamental laws, and representative assemblies. In the fifteenth century, the government of Castile seems to have been as free as that of our own country. That of Arragon was beyond all question more so. In France, the sovereign was more absolute. Yet, even in France, the States-General alone could constitutionally impose taxes; and, at the very time when the authority of those assemblies was beginning to languish, the Parliament of Paris received such an accession of strength as enabled it, in some measure, to perform the functions of a legislative assembly. Sweden and Denmark had constitutions of a similar description. 477Let us overleap two or three hundred years, and contemplate Europe at the commencement of the eighteenth century. Every free constitution, save one, had gone down. That of England had weathered the danger, and was riding in full security. In Denmark and Sweden, the kings had availed themselves of the disputes which raged between the nobles and the commons, to unite all the powers of government in their own hands. In France the institution of the States was only mentioned by lawyers as a part of the ancient theory of their government. It slept a deep sleep, destined to be broken by a tremendous waking. No person remembered the sittings of the three orders, or expected ever to see them renewed. Louis the Fourteenth had imposed on his parliament a patient silence of sixty years. His grandson, after the War of the Spanish Succession, assimilated the constitution of Arragon to that of Castile, and extinguished the last feeble remains of liberty in the Peninsula. In England, on the other hand, the Parliament was infinitely more powerful than it had ever been. Not only was its legislative authority fully established; but its right to interfere, by advice almost equivalent to command, in every department of the executive government, was recognised. The appointment of ministers, the relations with foreign powers, the conduct of a war or a negotiation, depended less on the pleasure of the Prince than on that of the two Houses.

What then made us to differ? Why was it that, in that epidemic malady of constitutions, ours escaped the destroying influence; or rather that, at the very crisis of the disease, a favourable turn took place in England, and in England alone? It was not surely without a cause that so many kindred systems of government, 478having flourished together so long, languished and expired at almost the same time.

It is the fashion to say, that the progress of civilisation is favourable to liberty. The maxim, though in some sense true, must be limited by many qualifications and exceptions. Wherever a poor and rude nation, in which the form of government is a limited monarchy, receives a great accession of wealth and knowledge, it is in imminent danger of falling under arbitrary power.

In such a state of society as that which existed all over Europe during the middle ages, very slight checks sufficed to keep the sovereign in order. His means of corruption and intimidation were very scanty. He had little money, little patronage, no military establishment. His armies resembled juries. They were drawn out of the mass of the people: they soon returned to it again: and the character which was habitual, prevailed over that which was occasional. A campaign of forty days was too short, the discipline of a national militia too lax, to efface from their minds the feelings of civil life. As they carried to the camp the sentiments and interests of the farm and the shop, so they carried back to the farm and the shop the military accomplishments which they had acquired in the camp. At home the soldier learned how to value his rights, abroad how to defend them.

Such a military force as this was a far stronger restraint on the regal power than any legislative assembly. The army, now the most formidable instrument of the executive power, was then the most formidable check on that power. Resistance to an established government, in modern times so difficult and perilous an enterprise, was, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, 479the simplest and easiest matter in the world. Indeed, it was far too simple and easy. An insurrection was got up then almost as easily as a petition is got up now. In a popular cause, or even in an unpopular cause favoured by a few great nobles, a force of ten thousand armed men was raised in a week. If the King were, like our Edward the Second and Richard the Second, generally odious, he could not procure a bow or halbert. He fell at once and without an effort. In such times a sovereign like Louis the Fifteenth or the Emperor Paul, would have been pulled down before his misgovernment had lasted for a month. We find that all the fame and influence of our Edward the Third could not save his Madame de Pompadour from the effects of the public hatred.

Hume and many other writers have hastily concluded that, in the fifteenth century, the English Parliament was altogether servile, because it recognised, without opposition, every successful usurper. That it was not servile its conduct on many occasions of inferior importance is sufficient to prove. But surely it was not strange that the majority of the nobles, and of the deputies chosen by the commons, should approve of revolutions which the nobles and commons had effected. The Parliament did not blindly follow the event of war, but participated in those changes of public sentiment on which the event of war depended. The legal check was secondary and auxiliary to that which the nation held in its own hands. There have always been monarchies in Asia, in which the royal authority has been tempered by fundamental laws, though no legislative body exists to watch over them. The guarantee is the opinion of a community of which every individual is a soldier. Thus, the king of Cabul, 480as Mr. Elplunstone informs us, cannot augment the land revenue, or interfere with the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals.

In the European kingdoms of this description there were representative assemblies. But it was not necessary, that those assemblies should meet very frequently, that they should interfere with all the operations of the executive government, that they should watch with jealousy, and resent with prompt indignation, every violation of the laws which the sovereign might commit. They were so strong that they might safely be careless. He was so feeble that he might safely be suffered to encroach. If he ventured too far, chastisement and ruin were at hand. In fact, the people generally suffered more from his weakness than from his authority. The tyranny of wealthy and powerful subjects was the characteristic evil of the times. The royal prerogatives were not even sufficient for the defence of property and the maintenance of police.

The progress of civilisation introduced a great change. War became a science, and, as a necessary consequence, a trade. The great body of the people grew every day more reluctant to undergo the inconveniences of military service, and better able to pay others for undergoing them. A new class of men, therefore, dependent on the Crown alone, natural enemies of those popular rights which are to them as the dew to the fleece of Gideon, slaves among freemen, freemen among slaves, grew into importance. That physical force which, in the dark ages, had belonged to the nobles and the commons, and had, far more than any charter or any assembly, been the safeguard of their privileges, was transferred entire to the King. 481Monarchy gained in two ways. The sovereign was strengthened, the subjects weakened. The great mass of the population, destitute of all military discipline and organization, ceased to exercise any influence by force on political transactions. There have, indeed, during the last hundred and fifty years, been many popular insurrections in Europe: but all have failed, except those in which the regular army has been induced to join the disaffected.

Those legal checks which, while the sovereign remained dependent on his subjects, had been adequate to the purpose for which they were designed, were now found wanting. The dikes which had been sufficient while the waters were low were not high enough to keep out the spring-tide. The deluge passed over them; and, according to the exquisite illustration of Butler, the formal boundaries which had excluded it, now held it in. The old constitutions fared like the old shields and coats of mail. They were the defences of a rude age: and they did well enough against the weapons of a rude age. But new and more formidable means of destruction were invented. The ancient panoply became useless; and it was thrown aside to rust in lumber-rooms, or exhibited only as part of an idle pageant.

Thus absolute monarchy was established on the Continent. England escaped; but she escaped very narrowly. Happily our insular situation, and the pacific policy of James, rendered standing armies unnecessary here, till they had been for some time kept up in the neighbouring kingdoms. Our public men had therefore an opportunity of watching the effects produced by this momentous change on governments which bore a close analogy to that established in England. Every where 482they saw the power of the monarch increasing, the resistance of assemblies which were no longer supported by a national force gradually becoming more and more feeble, and at length altogether ceasing. The friends and the enemies of liberty perceived with equal clearness the causes of this general decay. It is the favourite theme of Strafford. He advises the King to procure from the Judges a recognition of his right to raise an army at his pleasure. “This place well fortified,” says he, “for ever vindicates the monarchy at home from under the conditions and restraints of subjects.” We firmly believe that he was in the right. Nay; we believe that, even if no deliberate scheme of arbitrary government had been formed by the sovereign and his ministers, there was great reason to apprehend a natural extinction of the Constitution. If, for example, Charles had played the part of Gustavus Adolphus, if he had carried on a popular war for the defence of the Protestant cause in Germany, if he had gratified the national pride by a series of victories, if he had formed an army of forty or fifty thousand devoted soldiers, we do not see what chance the nation would have had of escaping from despotism. The Judges would have given as strong a decision in favour of camp-money as they gave in favour of ship-money. If they had been scrupulous, it would have made little difference. An individual who resisted would have been treated as Charles treated Eliot, and as Strafford wished to treat Hampden. The Parliament might have been summoned once in twenty years, to congratulate a King on his accession, or to give solemnity to some great measure of state. Such had been the fate of legislative assemblies as powerful, as much respected, as high-spirited, as the English Lords and Commons. 483The two Houses, surrounded by the ruins of so many free constitutions overthrown or sapped by the new military system, were required to intrust the command of an army and the conduct of the Irish war to a King who had proposed to himself the destruction of liberty as the great end of his policy. We are decidedly of opinion that it would have been fatal to comply. Many of those who took the side of the King on this question would have cursed their own loyalty, if they had seen him return from war at the head of twenty thousand troops, accustomed to carnage and free quarters in Ireland.

We think, with Mr. Hallam, that many of the Royalist nobility and gentry were true friends to the Constitution, and that, but for the solemn protestations by which the King bound himself to govern according to the law for the future, they never would have joined his standard. But surely they underrated the public danger. Falkland is commonly selected as the most respectable specimen of this class. He was indeed a man of great talents and of great virtues, but, we apprehend, infinitely too fastidious for public life. He did not perceive that, in such times as those on which his lot had fallen, the duty of a statesman is to choose the better cause and to stand by it, in spite of those excesses by which every cause, however good in itself, will be disgraced. The present evil always seemed to him the worst. He was always going backward and forward; but it should be remembered to his honour that it was always from the stronger to the weaker side that he deserted. While Charles was oppressing the people, Falkland was a resolute champion of liberty. He attacked Strafford. He even concurred in strong measures against Episcopacy. But the violence of his party 484annoyed him, and drove him to the other party, to be equally annoyed there. Dreading the success of the cause which he had espoused, disgusted by the courtiers of Oxford, as he had been disgusted by the patriots of Westminster, yet bound by honour not to abandon the cause for which he was in arms, he pined away, neglected his person, went about moaning for peace, and at last rushed desperately on death, as the best refuge in such miserable times. If he had lived through the scenes that followed, we have little doubt that he would have condemned himself to share the exile and beggary of the royal family; that he would then have returned to oppose all their measures; that he would have been sent to the Tower by the Commons as a stiller of the Popish Plot, and by the King as an accomplice in the Rye-House Plot; and that, if he had escaped being hanged, first by Scroggs, and then by Jefferies, he would, after manfully opposing James the Second through years of tyranny, have been seized with a fit of compassion at the very moment of the Revolution, have voted for a regency, and died a nonjuror.

We do not dispute that the royal party contained many excellent men and excellent citizens. But this we say, that they did not discern those times. The peculiar glory of the Houses of Parliament is that, in the great plague and mortality of constitutions, they took their stand between the living and the dead. At the very crisis of our destiny, at the very moment when the fate which had passed on every other nation was about to pass on England, they arrested the danger.

Those who conceive that the parliamentary leaders were desirous merely to maintain the old constitution, and those who represent them as conspiring to subvert 485it, are equally in error. The old constitution, as we have attempted to show, could not be maintained. The progress of time, the increase of wealth, the diffusion of knowledge, the great change in the European system of war, rendered it impossible that any of the monarchies of the middle ages should continue to exist on the old footing. The prerogative of the crown was constantly advancing. If the privileges of the people were to remain absolutely stationary, they would relatively retrograde. The monarchical and democratical parts of the government were placed in a situation not unlike that of the two brothers in the Fairy Queen, one of whom saw the soil of his inheritance daily washed away by the tide and joined to that of his rival. The portions had at first been fairly meted out. By a natural and constant transfer, the one had been extended; the other had dwindled to nothing. A new partition, or a compensation, was necessary to restore the original equality.

It was now, therefore, absolutely necessary to violate the formal part of the constitution, in order to preserve its spirit. This might have been done, as it was done at the Revolution, by expelling the reigning family, and calling to the throne princes who, relying solely on an elective title, would find it necessary to respect the privileges and follow the advice of the assemblies to which they owed every thing, to pass every bill which the Legislature strongly pressed upon them, and to fill the offices of state with men in whom the Legislature confided. But, as the two Houses did not choose to change the dynasty, it was necessary that they should do directly what at the Revolution was done indirectly. Nothing is more usual than to hear it said that, if the Houses had contented themselves 486with making such a reform in the government under Charles as was afterwards made under William, they would have had the highest claim to national gratitude: and that in their violence they overshot the mark. But how was it possible to make such a settlement under Charles? Charles was not, like William and the princes of the Hanoverian line, bound by community of interests and dangers to the Parliament. It was therefore necessary that he should be bound by treaty and statute.

Mr. Hallam reprobates, in language which has a little surprised us, the nineteen propositions into which the Parliament digested its scheme. Is it possible to doubt that, if James the Second had remained in the island, and had been suffered, as he probably would in that case have been suffered, to keep his crown, conditions to the full as hard would have been imposed on him? On the other hand, we fully admit that, if the Long Parliament had pronounced the departure of Charles from London an abdication, and had called Essex or Northumberland to the throne, the new prince might have safely been suffered to reign without such restrictions. His situation would have been a sufficient guarantee.

In the nineteen propositions we see very little to blame except the articles against the Catholics. These, however, were in the spirit of that age; and to some sturdy churchmen in our own, they may seem to palliate even the good which the Long Parliament effected. The regulation with respect to new creations of Peers is the only other article about which we entertain any doubt. One of the propositions is that the judges shall hold their offices during good behaviour. To this surely no exception will be taken. The right of directing the 487education and marriage of the princes was most properly claimed by the Parliament, on the same ground on which, after the Revolution, it was enacted, that no king, on pain of forfeiting his throne, should espouse a Papist. Unless we condemn the statesmen of the Revolution, who conceived that England could not safely be governed by a sovereign married to a Catholic queen, we can scarcely condemn the Long Parliament because, having a sovereign so situated, they thought it necessary to place him under strict restraints. The influence of Henrietta Maria had already been deeply felt in political affairs. In the regulation of her family, in the education and marriage of her children, it was still more likely to be felt. There might be another Catholic queen; possibly, a Catholic king. Little as we are disposed to join in the vulgar clamour on this subject, we think that such an event ought to be, if possible, averted; and this could only be done, if Charles was to be left on the throne, by placing his domestic arrangements under the control of Parliament.

A veto on the appointment of ministers was demanded. But this veto Parliament has virtually possessed ever since the Revolution. It is no doubt very far better that this power of the Legislature should be exercised as it is now exercised, when any great occasion calls for interference, than that at every change the Commons should have to signify their approbation or disapprobation in form. But, unless a new family had been placed on the throne, we do not see how this power could have been exercised as it is now exercised. We again repeat, that no restraints which could be imposed on the princes who reigned after the Revolution could have added to the security which their title afforded. They were compelled to court their parliaments. But 488from Charles nothing was to be expected whicli was not set down in the bond.

It was not stipulated that the King should give up his negative on acts of Parliament. But the Commons had certainly shown a strong disposition to exact this security also. “Such a doctrine,” says Mr. Hallam, “was in this country as repugnant to the whole history of our laws, as it was incompatible with the subsistence of the monarchy in any thing more than a nominal preeminence.” Now this article has been as completely carried into effect by the Revolution as if it had been formally inserted in the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. We are surprised, we confess, that Mr. Hallam should attach so much importance to a prerogative which has not been exercised for a hundred and thirty years, which probably will never be exercised again, and which can scarcely, in any conceivable case, be exercised for a salutary purpose.

But the great security, the security without which every other would have been insufficient, was the power of the sword. This both parties thoroughly understood. The Parliament insisted on having the command of the militia and the direction of the Irish war. “By God, not for an hour!” exclaimed the King. “Keep the militia,” said the Queen, after the defeat of the royal party: “Keep the militia; that will bring back every thing.” That, by the old constitution, no military authority was lodged in the Parliament, Mr. Hallam has clearly shown. That it is a species of authority which ought not to be permanently lodged in large and divided assemblies, must, we think, in fairness be conceded. Opposition, publicity, long discussion, frequent compromise; these are the characteristics of the proceedings of such assemblies. Unity. 489secrecy, decision, are the qualities which military arrangements require. There were, therefore, serious objections to the proposition of the Houses on this subject. But, on the other hand, to trust such a king, at such a crisis, with the very weapon which, in hands less dangerous, had destroyed so many free constitutions, would have been the extreme of rashness. The jealousy with which the oligarchy of Venice and the States of Holland regarded their generals and armies induced them perpetually to interfere in matters of which they were incompetent to judge. This policy secured them against military usurpation, but placed them under great disadvantages in war. The uncontrolled power which the King of France exercised over his troops enabled him to conquer his enemies, but enabled him also to oppress his people. Was there any intermediate course? None, we confess, altogether free from objection. But on the whole, we conceive that the best measure would have been that which the Parliament over and over proposed, namely, that for a limited time the power of the sword should be left to the two Houses, and that it should revert to the Crown when the constitution should be firmly established, and when the new securities of freedom should be so far strengthened by prescription that it would be difficult to employ even a standing army for the purpose of subverting them.

Mr. Hallam thinks that the dispute might easily have been compromised, by enacting that the King should have no power to keep a standing army on foot without the consent of Parliament. He reasons as if the question had been merely theoretical, and as if at that time no army had been wanted. “The kingdom,” he says, “might have well dispensed, in that 490age, with any military organization.” Now, we think that Mr. Hallam overlooks the most important circumstance in the whole case. Ireland was actually in rebellion; and a great expedition would obviously he necessary to reduce that kingdom to obedience. The Houses had therefore to consider, not an abstract question of law, but an urgent practical question, directly involving the safety of the state. They had to consider the expediency of immediately giving a great army to a King who was at least as desirous to put down the Parliament of England as to conquer the insurgents of Ireland.

Of course we do not mean to defend all the measures of the Houses. Far from it. There never was a perfect man. It would, therefore, be the height of absurdity to expect a perfect party or a perfect assembly. For large bodies are far more likely to err than individuals. The passions are inflamed by sympathy; the fear of punishment and the sense of shame are diminished by partition. Every day we see men do for their faction what they would die rather than do for themselves.

Scarcely any private quarrel ever happens, in which the right and wrong are so exquisitely divided that all the right lies on one side, and all the wrong on the other. But here was a schism which separated a great nation into two parties. Of these parties, each was composed of many smaller parties. Each contained many members, who differed far less from their moderate opponents than from their violent allies. Each reckoned among its supporters many who were determined in their choice by some accident of birth, of connection, or of local situation. Each of them attracted to itself in multitudes those fierce and turbid 491spirits, to whom the clouds and whirlwinds of the political hurricane are the atmosphere of life. A party, like a camp, has its sutlers and camp-followers, as well as its soldiers. In its progress it collects round it a vast retinue, composed of people who thrive by its custom or are amused by its display, who may be sometimes reckoned, in an ostentatious enumeration, as forming a part of it, but who give no aid to its operations, and take but a languid interest in its success, who relax its discipline and dishonour its flag by their irregularities, and who, after a disaster, are perfectly ready to cut the throats and rifle the baggage of their companions.

Thus it is in every great division; and thus it was in our civil war. On both sides there was, undoubtedly, enough of crime and enough of error to disgust any man who did not reflect that the whole history of the species is made up of little except crimes and errors. Misanthropy is not the temper which qualifies a man to act in great affairs, or to judge of them.

“Of the Parliament,” says Mr. Hallam, “it may be said, I think, with not greater severity than truth, that scarce two or three public acts of justice, humanity, or generosity, and very few of political wisdom or courage, are recorded of them, from their quarrel with the King, to their expulsion by Cromwell.” Those who may agree with us in the opinion which we have expressed as to the original demands of the Parliament will scarcely concur in this strong censure. The propositions which the Houses made at Oxford, at Uxbridge, and at Newcastle, were in strict accordance with these demands. In the darkest period of the war, they showed no disposition to concede any vital principle. In the fulness of their success, they showed 492no disposition to encroach beyond these limits. In this respect we cannot but think that they showed justice and generosity, as well as political wisdom and courage.

The Parliament was certainly far from faultless. We fully agree with Mr. Hallam in reprobating their treatment of Laud. For the individual, indeed, we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than for any other character in our history. The fondness with which a portion of the church regards his memory, can be compared only to that perversity of affection which sometimes leads a mother to select the monster or the idiot of the family as the object of her especial favour. Mr. Hallam has incidentally observed, that, in the correspondence of Laud with Strafford, there are no indications of a sense of duty towards God or man. The admirers of the Archbishop have, in consequence, inflicted upon the public a crowd of extracts designed to prove the contrary. Now, in all those passages, we see nothing which a prelate as wicked as Pope Alexander or Cardinal Dubois might not have written. Those passages indicate no sense of duty to God or man, but simply a strong interest in the prosperity and dignity of the order to which the writer belonged; an interest which, when kept within certain limits, does not deserve censure, but which can never be considered as a virtue. Laud is anxious to accommodate satisfactorily the disputes in the University of Dublin. He regrets to hear that a church is used as a stable, and that the benefices of Ireland are very poor. He is desirous that, however small a congregation may be, service should be regularly performed. He expresses a wish that the judges of the court before which questions of tithe are generally brought should be selected 493with a view to the interest of the clergy. All this may be very proper; and it may be very proper that an alderman should stand up for the tolls of his borough; and an East India director for the charter of his Company. But it is ridiculous to say that these things indicate piety and benevolence. No primate, though he were the most abandoned of mankind, could wish to see the body, with the influence of which his own influence was identical, degraded in the public estimation by internal dissensions, by the ruinous state of its edifices, and by the slovenly performance of its rites. We willingly acknowledge that the particular letters in question have very little harm in them; a compliment which cannot often be paid either to the writings or to the actions of Laud.

Bad as the Archbishop was, however, he was not a traitor within the statute. Nor was he by any means so formidable as to be a proper subject for a retrospective ordinance of the legislature. His mind had not expansion enough to comprehend a great scheme, good or bad. His oppressive acts were not, like those of the Earl of Strafford, parts of an extensive system. They were the luxuries in which a mean and irritable disposition indulges itself from day to day, the excesses natural to a little mind in a great place. The severest punishment which the two Houses could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at liberty and send him to Oxford. There he might have staid, tortured by his own diabolical temper, hungering for Puritans to pillory and mangle, plaguing the Cavaliers, for want of somebody else to plague, with his peevishness and absurdity, performing grimaces and antics in the cathedral, continuing that incomparable diary, which we never sec without forgetting the vices of his heart 494in the imbecility of his intellect, minuting down his dreams, counting the drops of blood which fell from his nose, watching the direction of the salt, and listening for the note of the screech-owls. Contemptuous mercy was the only vengeance which it became the Parliament to take on such a ridiculous old bigot.

The Houses, it must be acknowledged, committed great errors In the conduct of the war, or rather one great error, which brought their affairs into a condition requiring the most perilous expedients. The parliamentary leaders of what may be called the first generation, Essex, Manchester, Northumberland, Hollis, even Pym, all the most eminent men, in short, Hampden excepted, were inclined to half measures. They dreaded a decisive victory almost as much as a decisive overthrow. They wished to bring the King into a situation which might render it necessary for him to grant their just and wise demands, but not to subvert the constitution or to change the dynasty. They were afraid of serving the purposes of those fierce and determined enemies of monarchy, who now began to show themselves in the lower ranks of the party. The war was, therefore, conducted in a languid and inefficient manner. A resolute leader might have brought it to a close in a month. At the end of three campaigns, however, the event was still dubious; and that it had not been decidedly unfavourable to the cause of liberty was principally Owing to the skill and energy which the more violent Roundheads had displayed in subordinate situations. The conduct of Fairfax and Cromwell at Mars-ton had exhibited a remarkable contrast to that of Essex at Edgehill, and to that of Waller at Lansdowne.

If there be any truth established by the universal experience of nations, it is this, that to carry the spirit of 495peace into war is a weak and cruel policy. The time of negotiation is the time for deliberation and delay. But when an extreme case calls for that remedy which is in its own nature most violent, and which, in such cases, is a remedy only because it is violent, it is idle to think of mitigating and diluting. Languid war can do nothing which negotiation or submission will not do better: and to act on any other principle is, not to save blood and money, but to squander them.

This the parliamentary leaders found. The third year of hostilities was drawing to a close; and they had not conquered the King. They had not obtained even those advantages which they had expected from a policy obviously erroneous in a military point of view. They had wished to husband their resources. They now found that in enterprises like theirs, parsimony is the worst profusion. They had hoped to effect a reconciliation. The event taught them that the best way to conciliate is to bring the work of destruction to a speedy termination. By their moderation many lives and much property had been wasted. The angry passions which, if the contest had been short, would have died away almost as soon as they appeared, had fixed themselves in the form of deep and lasting hatred. A military caste had grown up. Those who had been induced to take up arms by the patriotic feelings of citizens had begun to entertain the professional feelings of soldiers. Above all, the leaders of the party had forfeited its confidence. If they had, by their valour and abilities, gained a complete victory, their influence might have been sufficient to prevent their associates from abusing it. It was now necessary to choose more resolute and uncompromising commanders. Unhappily the illustrious man who alone united in himself all the 496talents and virtues which the crisis required, who alone could have saved his country from the present dangers without plunging her into others, who alone could have united all the friends of liberty in obedience to his commanding genius and his venerable name, was no more. Something might still be done. The Houses might still avert that worst of all evils, the triumphant return of an imperious and unprincipled master. They might still preserve London from all the horrors of rapine, massacre, and lust. But their hopes of a victory as spotless as their cause, of a reconciliation which might knit together the hearts of all honest Englishmen for the defence of the public good, of durable tranquillity, of temperate freedom, were buried in the grave of Hampden.

The self-denying ordinance was passed, and the army was remodelled. These measures were undoubtedly full of danger. But all that was left to the Parliament was to take the less of two dangers. And we think that, even if they could have accurately foreseen all that followed, their decision ought to have been the same. Under any circumstances, we should have preferred Cromwell to Charles. But there could be no comparison between Cromwell and Charles victorious, Charles restored, Charles enabled to feed fat all the hungry grudges of his smiling rancour and his cringing pride. The next visit of his Majesty to his faithful Commons would have been more serious than that with which he last honoured them; more serious than that which their own General paid them some years after. The King would scarce have been content with praying that the Lord would deliver him from Vane, or with pulling Marten by the cloak. If, by fatal mismanagement, nothing was left to England but a choice of 497tyrants, the last tyrant whom she should have chosen was Charles.

From the apprehension of this worst evil the Houses were soon delivered by their new leaders. The armies of Charles were every where routed, his fastnesses stormed, his party humbled and subjugated. The King himself fell into the hands of the Parliament; and both the King and the Parliament soon fell into the hands of the army. The fate of both the captives was the same. Both were treated alternately with respect and with insult. At length the natural life of one, and the political life of the other, were terminated by violence; and the power for which both had struggled was united in a single hand. Men naturally sympathize with the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen party with contempt rather than with pity. Thus misfortune turned the greatest of Parliaments into the despised Rump, and the worst of Kings into the Blessed Martyr.

Mr. Hallam decidedly condemns the execution of Charles; and in all that he says on that subject we heartily agree. We fully concur with him in thinking that a great social schism, such as the civil war, is not to be confounded with an ordinary treason, and that the vanquished ought to be treated according to the rules, not of municipal, but of international law. In this case the distinction is of the less importance, because both international and municipal law were in favour of Charles. He was a prisoner of war by the former, a King by the latter. By neither was he a traitor. If he had been successful, and had put his leading opponents to death, he would have deserved severe censure; and this without reference to the justice or injustice of his cause. Yet the opponents of 498Charles, it must be admitted, were technically guilty of treason. He might have sent them to the scaffold without violating any established principle of jurisprudence. He would not have been compelled to overturn the whole constitution in order to reach them. Here his own case differed widely from theirs. Not only was his condemnation in itself a measure which only the strongest necessity could vindicate; but it could not be procured without taking several previous steps, every one of which would have required the strongest necessity to vindicate it. It could not be procured without dissolving the government by military force, without establishing precedents of the most dangerous description, without creating difficulties which the next ten years were spent in removing, without pulling down institutions which it soon became necessary to reconstruct, and setting up others which almost every man was soon impatient to destroy. It was necessary to strike the House of Lords out of the constitution, to exclude members of the House of Commons by force, to make a new crime, a new tribunal, a new mode of procedure: The whole legislative and judicial systems were trampled down for the purpose of taking a single head. Not only those parts of the constitution which the republicans were desirous to destroy, but those which they wished to retain and exalt, were deeply injured by these transactions. High Courts of Justice began to usurp the functions of juries. The remaining delegates of the people were soon driven from their seats by the same military violence which had enabled them to exclude their colleagues.

If Charles had been the last of his line, there would have been an intelligible reason for putting him to death. But the blow which terminated his life at once 499transferred the allegiance of every Royalist to an heir, and an heir who was at liberty. To kill the individual was, under such circumstances, not to destroy, but to release the King.

We detest the character of Charles; but a man ought not to be removed by a law ex post facto, even constitutionally procured, merely because he is detestable. He must also be very dangerous. We can scarcely conceive that any danger which a state can apprehend from any individual could justify the violent measures which were necessary to procure a sentence against Charles. But in fact the danger amounted to nothing. There was indeed danger from the attachment of a large party to his office. But this danger his execution only increased. His personal influence was little indeed. He had lost the confidence of every party. Churchmen, Catholics, Presbyterians, Independents, his enemies, his friends, his tools, English, Scotch, Irish, all divisions and subdivisions of his people had been deceived by him. His most attached councillors turned away with shame and anguish from his false and hollow policy, plot intertwined with plot, mine sprung beneath mine, agents disowned, promises evaded, one pledge given in private, another in public. “Oh, Mr. Secretary,” says Clarendon, in a letter to Nicholas, “those stratagems have given me more sad hours than all the misfortunes in war which have befallen the King, and look like the effects of God’s anger towards us.”

The abilities of Charles were not formidable. His taste in the fine arts was indeed exquisite; and few modern sovereigns have written or spoken better. But he was not fit for active life. In negotiation he was always trying to dupe others, and duping only himself. 500As a soldier, he was feeble, dilatory, and miserably wanting, not in personal courage, but in the presence of mind which his station required. His delay at Gloucester saved the parliamentary party from destruction. At Naseby, in the very crisis of his fortune, his want of self-possession spread a fatal panic through his army. The story which Clarendon tells of that affair reminds us of the excuses by which Bessus and Bobadil explain their cudgellings. A Scotch nobleman, it seems, begged the King not to run upon his death, took hold of his bridle, and turned his horse round. No man who had much value for his life would have tried to perform the same friendly office on that day for Oliver Cromwell.

One thing, and one alone, could make Charles dangerous, a violent death. His tyranny could not break the high spirit of the English people. His arms could not conquer, his arts could not deceive them; but his humiliation and his execution melted them into a generous compassion. Men who die on a scaffold for political offences almost always die well. The eyes of thousands are fixed upon them. Enemies and admirers are watching their demeanour. Every tone of voice, every change of colour, is to go down to posterity. Escape is impossible. Supplication is vain. In such a situation, pride and despair have often been known to nerve the weakest minds with fortitude adequate to the occasion. Charles died patiently and bravely; not more patiently or bravely, indeed, than many other victims of political rage; not more patiently or bravely than his own Judges, who were not only killed, but tortured; or than Vane, who had always been considered as a timid man. However, the King’s conduct during his trial and at his execution made a prodigious 501impression. His subjects began to love his memory as heartily as they had hated his person; and posterity has estimated his character from his death rather than from his life.

To represent Charles as a martyr in the cause of Episcopacy is absurd. Those who put him to death cared as little for the Assembly of Divines as for the Convocation, and would, in all probability, only have hated him the more if he had agreed to set up the Presbyterian discipline. Indeed, in spite of the opinion of Mr. Hallam, we are inclined to think that the attachment of Charles to the Church of England was altogether political. Human nature is, we admit, so capricious that there may be a single sensitive point in a conscience which every where else is callous. A man without truth or humanity may have some strange scruples about a trifle. There was one devout warrior in the royal camp whose piety bore a great resemblance to that which is ascribed to the King. We mean Colonel Turner. That gallant Cavalier was hanged, after the Restoration, for a flagitious burglary. At the gallows he told the crowd that his mind received great consolation from one reflection: he had always taken off his hat when he went into a church. The character of Charles would scarcely rise in our estimation, if we believed that he was pricked in conscience after the manner of this worthy loyalist, and that while violating all the first rules of Christian morality, he was sincerely scrupulous about church-government. But we acquit him of such weakness. In 1641, he deliberately confirmed the Scotch Declaration which stated that the government of the church by archbishops and bishops was contrary to the word of God. In 1645, he appears to have offered to set up Popery in Ireland. That a 502King who had established the Presbyterian religion in one kingdom, and who was willing to establish the Catholic religion in another, should have insurmountable scruples about the ecclesiastical constitution of the third, is altogether incredible. He himself says in his letters that he looks on Episcopacy as a stronger support of monarchical power than even the army. From causes which we have already considered, the Established Church had been, since the Reformation, the great bulwark of the prerogative. Charles wished, therefore, to preserve it. He thought himself necessary both to the Parliament and to the army. He did not foresee, till too late, that, by paltering with the Presbyterians, he should put both them and himself into the power of a fiercer and more daring party. If he had foreseen it, we suspect that the royal blood which still cries to Heaven, every thirtieth of January, for judgments only to be averted by salt-fish and egg-sauce, would never have been shed. One who had swallowed the Scotch Declaration would scarcely strain at the Covenant.

The death of Charles and the strong measures which led to it raised Cromwell to a height of power fatal to the infant Commonwealth. No men occupy so splendid a place in history as those who have founded monarchies on the ruins of republican institutions. Their glory, if not of the purest, is assuredly of the most seductive and dazzling kind. In nations broken to the curb, in nations long accustomed to be transferred from one tyrant to another, a man without eminent qualities may easily gain supreme power. The defection of a troop of guards, a conspiracy of eunuchs, a popular tumult, might place an indolent senator or a brutal soldier on the throne of the Roman world. Similar 503revolutions have often occurred in the despotic states of Asia. But a community which has heard the voice of truth and experienced the pleasures of liberty, in which the merits of statesmen and of systems are freely canvassed, in which obedience is paid, not to persons but to laws, in which magistrates are regarded, not as the lords, but as the servants of the public, in which the excitement of party is a necessary of life, in which political warfare is reduced to a system of tactics; such a community is not easily reduced to servitude. Beasts of burden may easily be managed by a new master. But will the wild ass submit to the bonds? Will the unicorn serve and abide by the crib? Will leviathan hold out his nostrils to the hook? The mythological conqueror of the East, whose enchantments reduced wild beasts to the tameness of domestic cattle, and who harnessed lions and tigers to his chariot, is but an imperfect type of those extraordinary minds which have thrown a spell on the fierce spirits of nations unaccustomed to control, and have compelled raging factions to obey their reins and swell their triumph. The enterprise, be it good or bad, is one which requires a truly great man. It demands courage, activity, energy, wisdom, firmness, conspicuous virtues, or vices so splendid and alluring as to resemble virtues.

Those who have succeeded in this arduous undertaking form a very small and a very remarkable class. Parents of tyranny, heirs of freedom, kings among citizens, citizens among kings, they unite in themselves the characteristics of the system which springs from them, and those of the system from which they have sprung. Their reigns shine with a double light, the last and dearest rays of departing freedom mingled with the first and brightest glories of empire in its 504dawn. The high qualities of such a prince lend to despotism itself a charm drawn from the liberty under which they were formed, and which they have destroyed. He resembles an European who settles within the Tropics, and carries thither the strength and the energetic habits acquired in regions more propitious to the constitution. He differs as widely from princes nursed in the purple of imperial cradles, as the companions of Gama from their dwarfish and imbecile progeny which, born in a climate unfavourable to its growth and beauty, degenerates more and more, at every descent, from the qualities of the original conquerors.

In this class three men stand preeminent, Cæsar, Cromwell, and Bonaparte. The highest place in this remarkable triumvirate belongs undoubtedly to Cæsar. He united the talents of Bonaparte to those of Cromwell; and he possessed also, what neither Cromwell nor Bonaparte possessed, learning, taste, wit, eloquence, the sentiments and the manners of an accomplished gentleman.

Between Cromwell and Napoleon Mr. Hallam has instituted a parallel, scarcely less ingenious than that which Burke has drawn between Richard Cour de Lion and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden. In this parallel, however, and indeed throughout his work, we think that he hardly gives Cromwell fair measure.

“Cromwell,” says he, “far unlike his antitype, never showed any signs of a legislative mind, or any desire to place his renown on that noblest basis, the amelioration of social institutions.” The difference in this respect, we conceive, was not in the character of the men, but in the characters of the revolutions by means of which they rose to power. The civil war in England 505had been undertaken to defend and restore; the republicans of France set themselves to destroy. In England, the principles of the common law had never been disturbed, and most even of its forms had been held sacred. In France, the law and its ministers had been swept away together. In France, therefore, legislation necessarily became the first business of the first settled government which rose on the ruins of the old system. The admirers of Inigo Jones have always maintained that his works are inferior to those of Sir Christopher Wren, only because the great fire of London gave Wren such a field for the display of his powers as no architect in the history of the world ever possessed. Similar allowance must be made for Cromwell. If he erected little that was new, it was because there had been no general devastation to clear a space for him. As it was, he reformed the representative system in a most judicious manner. He rendered the administration of justice uniform throughout the island. We will quote a passage from his speech to the Parliament in September, 1656, which contains, we think, simple and rude as the diction is, stronger indications of a legislative mind, than are to be found in the whole range of orations delivered on such occasions before or since.

“There is one general grievance in the nation. It is the law. I think, I may say it, I have as eminent judges in this land as have been had, or that the nation has had for these many years. Truly, I could be particular as to the executive part, to the administration; but that would trouble you. But the truth of it is, there are wicked and abominable laws that will be in your power to alter. To hang a man for sixpence, threepence, I know not what,—to hang for a 506trifle, and pardon murder, is in the ministration of the law through the ill framing of it. I have known in my experience abominable murders quitted; and to see men lose their lives for petty matters! This is a thing that God will reckon for; and I wish it may not lie upon this nation a day longer than you have an opportunity to give a remedy; and I hope I shall cheerfully join with you in it.”

Mr. Hallam truly says that, though it is impossible to rank Cromwell with Napoleon as a general, yet “his exploits were as much above the level of his contemporaries, and more the effects of an original uneducated capacity.” Bonaparte was trained in the best military schools; the army which he led to Italy was one of the finest that ever existed. Cromwell passed his youth and the prime of his manhood in a civil situation. He never looked on war till he was more than forty years old. He had first to form himself, and then to form his troops. Out of raw levies he created an army, the bravest and the best disciplined, the most orderly in peace, and the most terrible in war, that Europe had seen. He called this body into existence. He led it to conquest. He never fought a battle without gaining it. He never gained a battle without annihilating the force opposed to him. Yet his victories were not the highest glory of his military system. The respect which his troops paid to property, their attachment to the laws and religion of their country, their submission to the civil power, their temperance, their intelligence, their industry, are without parallel. It was after the Restoration that the spirit which their great leader had infused into them was most signally displayed. At the command of the established government, an established government which 507had no means of enforcing obedience, fifty thousand soldiers, whose backs no enemy had ever seen, either in domestic or in continental war, laid down their arms, and retired into the mass of the people, thenceforward to be distinguished only by superior diligence, sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits of peace, from the other members of the community which they had saved.

In the general spirit and character of his administration, we think Cromwell far superior to Napoleon. “In civil government,” says Mr. Hallam, “there can be no adequate parallel between one who had sucked only the dregs of a besotted fanaticism, and one to whom the stores of reason and philosophy were open.” These expressions, it seems to us, convey the highest eulogium on our great countryman. Reason and philosophy did not teach the conqueror of Europe to command his passions, or to pursue, as a first object, the happiness of his people. They did not prevent him from risking his fame and his power in a frantic contest against the principles of human nature and the laws of the physical world, against the rage of the winter and the liberty of the sea. They did not exempt him from the influence of that most pernicious of superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism. They did not preserve him from the inebriation of prosperity, or restrain him from indecent querulousness in adversity. On the other hand, the fanaticism of Cromwell never urged him on impracticable undertakings, or confused his perception of the public good. Our countryman, inferior to Bonaparte in invention, was far superior to him in wisdom. The French Emperor is among conquerors what Voltaire is among writers, a miraculous child. His splendid genius was frequently clouded by fits of humour as absurdly perverse as those of the pet 508of the nursery, who quarrels with his food, and dashes his playthings to pieces. Cromwell was emphatically a man. He possessed, in an eminent degree, that masculine and full-grown robustness of mind, that equally diffused intellectual health, which, if our national partiality does not mislead us, has peculiarly characterised the great men of England. Never was any ruler so conspicuously born for sovereignty. The cup which has intoxicated almost all others sobered him. His spirit, restless from its own buoyancy in a lower sphere, reposed in majestic placidity as soon as it had reached the level congenial to it. He had nothing in common with that large class of men who distinguish themselves in subordinate posts, and whose incapacity becomes obvious as soon as the public voice summons them to take the lead. Rapidly as his fortunes grew, his mind expanded more rapidly still. Insignificant as a private citizen, he was a great general; he was a still greater prince. Napoleon had a theatrical manner, in which the coarseness of a revolutionary guard-room was blended with the ceremony of the old Court of Versailles. Cromwell, by the confession even of his enemies, exhibited in his demeanour the simple and natural nobleness of a man neither ashamed of his origin nor vain of his elevation, of a man who had found his proper place in society, and who felt secure that he was competent to fill it. Easy, even to familiarity, where his own dignity was concerned, he was punctilious only for his country. His own character he left to take care of itself; he left it to be defended by his victories in war, and his reforms in peace. But he was a jealous and implacable guardian of the public honour. He suffered a crazy Quaker to insult him in the gallery of Whitehall, and 509revenged himself only by liberating him and giving him a dinner. But he was prepared to risk the chancel of war to avenge the blood of a private Englishman.

No sovereign ever carried to the throne so large a portion of the best qualities of the middling orders, so strong a sympathy with the feelings and interests of his people. He was sometimes driven to arbitrary measures; but he had a high, stout, honest, English heart. Hence it was that he loved to surround his throne with such men as Hale and Blake. Hence it was that he allowed so large a share of political liberty to his subjects, and that, even when an opposition dangerous to his power and to his person almost compelled him to govern by the sword, he was still anxious to leave a germ from which, at a more favourable season, free institutions might spring. We firmly believe that, if his first Parliament had not commenced its debates by disputing his title, his government would have been as mild at home as it was energetic and able abroad. He was a soldier; he had risen by war. Had his ambition been of an impure or selfish kind, it would have been easy for him to plunge his country into continental hostilities on a large scale, and to dazzle the restless factions which he ruled, by the splendour of his victories. Some of his enemies have sneeringly remarked, that in the successes obtained under his administration he had no personal share; as if a man who had raised himself from obscurity to empire solely by his military talents could have any unworthy reason for shrinking from military enterprise. This reproach is his highest glory. In the success of the English navy he could have no selfish interest. Its triumphs added nothing to his fame; its increase added nothing to his means of overawing his enemies; its 510great leader was not his friend. Yet he took a peculiar pleasure in encouraging that noble service which, of all the instruments employed by an English government, is the most impotent for mischief, and the most powerful for good. His administration was glorious, but with no vulgar glory. It was not one of those periods of overstrained and convulsive exertion which necessarily produce debility and langour. Its energy was natural, healthful, temperate. He placed England at the head of the Protestant interest, and in the first rank of Christian powers. He taught every nation to value her friendship and to dread her enmity. But he did not squander her resources in a vain attempt to invest her with that supremacy which no power, in the modern system of Europe, can safely affect, or can long retain.

This noble and sober wisdom had its reward. If he did not carry the banners of the Commonwealth in triumph to distant capitals, if he did not adorn Whitehall with the spoils of the Stadthouse and the Louvre, if he did not portion out Flanders and Germany into principalities for his kinsmen and his generals, he did not, on the other hand, see his country overrun by the armies of nations which his ambition had provoked. He did not drag out the last years of his life an exile and a prisoner, in an unhealthy climate and under an ungenerous gaoler, raging with the impotent desire of vengeance, and brooding over visions of departed glory. He went down to his grave in the fulness of power and fame; and he left to his son an authority which any man of ordinary firmness and prudence would have retained.

But for the weakness of that foolish Ishbosheth, the opinions which we have been expressing would, we 511believe, now have formed the orthodox creed of good Englishmen. We might now be writing under the government of his Highness Oliver the Fifth or Richard the Fourth, Protector, by the grace of God, of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the dominions thereto belonging. The form of the great founder of the dynasty, on horseback, as when he led the charge at Naseby, or on foot, as when he took the mace from the table of the Commons, would adorn our squares and overlook our public offices from Charing-Cross; and sermons in his praise would be duly preached on his lucky day, the third of September, by court-chaplains, guiltless of the abomination of the surplice.

But, though his memory has not been taken under the patronage of any party, though every device has been used to blacken it, though to praise him would long have been a punishable crime, truth and merit at last prevail. Cowards who had trembled at the very sound of his name, tools of office who, like Downing, had been proud of the honour of lacqueying his coach, might insult him in loyal speeches and addresses. Venal poets might transfer to the King the same eulogies, little the worse for wear, which they had bestowed on the Protector. A fickle multitude might crowd to shout and scoff round the gibbeted remains of the greatest Prince and Soldier of the age. But when the Dutch cannon startled an effeminate tyrant in his own palace, when the conquests which had been won by the armies of Cromwell were sold to pamper the harlots of Charles, when Englishmen were sent to fight under foreign banners, against the independence of Europe and the Protestant religion, many honest hearts swelled in secret at the thought of one who had never 512suffered his country to be ill used by any but himself. It must indeed have been difficult for any Englishman to see the salaried Viceroy of France, at the most important crisis of his fate, sauntering through his harem, yawning and talking nonsense over a dispatch, or beslobbering his brother and his courtiers in a fit of maudlin affection, without a respectful and tender remembrance of him before whose genius the young-pride of Lewis and the veteran craft of Mazarin had stood rebuked, who had humbled Spain on the land and Holland on the sea, and whose imperial voice had arrested the sails of the Lybian pirates and the persecuting fires of Rome. Even to the present day his character, though constantly attacked, and scarcely ever defended, is popular with the great body of our countrymen.

The most blameable act of his life was the execution of Charles. We have already strongly condemned that proceeding; but we by no means consider it as one which attaches any peculiar stigma of infamy to the names of those who participated in it. It was an unjust and injudicious display of violent party spirit; but it was not a cruel or perfidious measure. It had all those features which distinguish the errors of magnanimous and intrepid spirits from base and malignant crimes.

From the moment that Cromwell is dead and buried, we go on in almost perfect harmony with Mr. Hallam to the end of his book. The times which followed the Restoration peculiarly require that unsparing impartiality which is his most distinguishing virtue. No part of our history, during the last three centuries, presents a spectacle of such general dreariness. The whole breed of our statesmen seems to have degenerated; 513and their moral and intellectual littleness strikes us with the more disgust, because we sec it placed in immediate contrast with the high and majestic qualities of the race which they succeeded. In the great civil war, even the bad cause had been rendered respectable and amiable by the purity and elevation of mind which many of its friends displayed. Under Charles the Second, the best and noblest of ends was disgraced by means the most cruel and sordid. The rage of faction succeeded to the love of liberty. Loyalty died away into servility. We look in vain among the leading politicians of either side for steadiness of principle, or even for that vulgar fidelity to party which, in our time, it is esteemed infamous to violate. The inconsistency, perfidy, and baseness, which the leaders constantly practised, which their followers defended, and which the great body of the people regarded, as it seems, with little disapprobation, appear in the present age almost incredible. In the age of Charles the First, they would, we believe, have excited as much astonishment.

Man, however, is always the same. And when so marked a difference appears between two generations, it is certain that the solution may be found in their respective circumstances. The principal statesmen of the reign of Charles the Second were trained during the civil war and the revolutions which followed it. Such a period is eminently favourable to the growth of quick and active talents. It forms a class of men, shrewd, vigilant, inventive; of men whose dexterity triumphs over the most perplexing combinations of circumstances, whose presaging instinct no sign of the times can elude. But it is an unpropitious season for the firm and masculine virtues. The statesman who enters on his career at such a time, can form no permanent 514connections, can make no accurate observations on the higher parts of political science. Before he can attach himself to a party, it is scattered. Before he can study the nature of a government, it is overturned. The oath of abjuration comes close on the oath of allegiance. The association which was subscribed yesterday is burned by the hangman to-day. In the midst of the constant eddy and change, self-preservation becomes the first object of the adventurer. It is a task too hard for the strongest head to keep itself from becoming giddy in the eternal whirl. Public spirit is out of the question. A laxity of principle, without which no public man can be eminent or even safe, becomes too common to be scandalous; and the whole nation looks coolly on Instances of apostacy which would startle the foulest turncoat of more settled times.

The history of France since the Revolution affords some striking illustrations of these remarks. The same man was a servant of the Republic, of Bonaparte, of Lewis the Eighteenth, of Bonaparte again after his return from Elba, of Lewis again after his return from Ghent. Yet all these manifold treasons by no means seemed to destroy his influence, or even to fix any peculiar stain of infamy on his character. We, to be sure, did not know what to make of him; but his countrymen did not seem to be shocked; and in truth they had little right to be shocked: for there was scarcely one Frenchman distinguished in the state or in the army, who had not, according to the best of his talents and opportunities, emulated the example. It was natural, too, that this should be the case. The rapidity and violence with which change followed change in the affairs of France towards the close of the last century had taken away the reproach of inconsistency, unfixed 515the principles of public men, and produced in many minds a general scepticism and indifference about principles of government.

No Englishman who has studied attentively the reign of Charles the Second will think himself entitled to indulge in any feelings of national superiority over the Dictionnaire des Girouettes. Shaftesbury was surely a far less respectable man than Talleyrand; and it would be injustice even to Fouché to compare him with Lauderdale. Nothing, indeed, can more clearly show how low the standard of political morality had fallen in this country than the fortunes of the two British statesmen whom we have named. The government wanted a ruffian to carry on the most atrocious system of mis-government with which any nation was ever cursed, to extirpate Presbyterianism by fire and sword, by the drowning of women, by the frightful torture of the boot. And they found him among the chiefs of the rebellion and the subscribers of the Covenant. The opposition looked for a chief to head them in the most desperate attacks ever made, under the forms of the Constitution, on any English administration: and they selected the minister who had the deepest share in the worst acts of the Court, the soul of the Cabal, the counsellor who had shut up the Exchequer and urged on the Dutch war. The whole political drama was of the same cast. No unity of plan, no decent propriety of character and costume, could be found in that wild and monstrous harlequinade. The whole was made up of extravagant transformations and burlesque contrasts; Atheists turned Puritans; Puritans turned Atheists; republicans defending the divine right of Kings; prostitute courtiers clamouring for the liberties of the people; judges inflaming the rage of mobs; patriots pocketing 516bribes from foreign powers; a Popish prince torturing Presbyterians into Episcopacy in one part of the island; Presbyterians cutting off the heads of Popish noblemen and gentlemen in the other. Public opinion has its natural flux and reflux. After a violent burst, there is commonly a reaction. But vicissitudes so extraordinary as those which marked the reign of Charles the Second can only be explained by supposing an utter want of principle in the political world. On neither side was there fidelity enough to face a reverse. Those honourable retreats from power which, in later days, parties have often made, with loss, but still in good order, in firm union, with unbroken spirit and formidable means of annoyance, were utterly unknown. As soon as a check took place a total rout followed: arms and colours were thrown away. The vanquished troops, like the Italian mercenaries of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, enlisted on the very field of battle, in the service of the conquerors. In a nation proud of its sturdy justice and plain good sense, no party could be found to take a firm middle stand between the worst of oppositions and the worst of courts. When, on charges as wild as Mother Goose’s tales, on the testimony of wretches who proclaimed themselves to be spies and traitors, and whom everybody now believes to have been also liars and murderers, the offal of gaols and brothels, the leavings of the hangman’s whip and shears, Catholics guilty of nothing but their religion were led like sheep to the Protestant shambles, where were the loyal Tory gentry and the passively obedient clergy? And where, when the time of retribution came, when laws were strained and juries packed to destroy the leaders of the Whigs, when charters were invaded, when Jefferies and Kirke were making 517Somersetshire what Lauderdale and Graham had made Scotland, where were the ten thousand brisk boys of Shaftesbury, the members of ignoramus juries, the wearers of the Polish medal? All-powerful to destroy others, unable to save themselves, the members of the two parties oppressed and were oppressed, murdered and were murdered, in their turn. No lucid interval occurred between the frantic paroxysms of two contradictory illusions.

To the frequent changes of the government during the twenty years which had preceded the Restoration, this unsteadiness is in a great measure to be attributed. Other causes had also been at work. Even if the country had been governed by the house of Cromwell or by the remains of the Long Parliament, the extreme austerity of the Puritans would necessarily have produced a revulsion. Towards the close of the Protectorate many signs indicated that a time of license was at hand. But the restoration of Charles the Second rendered the change wonderfully rapid and violent. Profligacy became a test of orthodoxy and loyalty, a qualification for rank and office. A deep and general taint infected the morals of the most influential classes, and spread itself through every province of letters. Poetry inflamed the passions; philosophy undermined the principles; divinity itself, inculcating an abject reverence for the Court, gave additional effect to the licentious example of the Court. We look in vain for those qualities which lend a charm to the errors of high and ardent natures, for the generosity, the tenderness, the chivalrous delicacy, which ennoble appetites into passions, and impart to vice itself a portion of the majesty of virtue. The excesses of that age remind us of the humours of a gang of footpads, revelling with their 518favourite beauties at a flash-house. In the fashionable libertinism there is a hard, cold ferocity, an impudence, a lowness, a dirtiness, which can be paralleled only among the heroes and heroines of that filthy and heartless literature which encouraged it. One nobleman of great abilities wanders about as a Merry-Andrew. Another harangues the mob stark naked from a window. A third lays an ambush to cudgel a man who has offended him. A knot of gentlemen of high rank and influence combine to push their fortunes at court by circulating stories intended to ruin an innocent girl, stories which had no foundation, and which, if they had been true, would never have passed the lips of a man of honour. A dead child is found in the palace, the offspring of some maid of honour by some courtier, or perhaps by Charles himself. The whole flight of pandars and buffoons pounce upon it, and carry it in triumph to the royal laboratory, where his Majesty, after a brutal jest, dissects it for the amusement of the assembly, and probably of its father among the rest. The favourite Duchess stamps about Whitehall, cursing and swearing. The ministers employ their time at the council-board in making mouths at each other and taking off each other’s gestures for the amusement of the King. The Peers at a conference begin to pommel each other and to tear collars and periwigs. A speaker in the House of Commons gives offence to the Court. He is waylaid by a gang of bullies, and his nose is cut to the bone. This ignominous dissoluteness, or rather, if we may venture to designate it by the only proper word, blackguardism of feeling and manners, could not but spread from private to public life. The cynical sneers, the epicurean sophistry, which had driven honour and virtue from one part of the character, extended 519their influence over every other. The second generation of the statesmen of this reign were worthy pupils of the schools in which they had been trained, of the gaming-table of Grammont, and the tiring-room of Nell. In no other age could such a trifler as Buckingham have exercised any political influence. In no other age could the path to power and glory have been thrown open to the manifold infamies of Churchill.

The history of Churchill shows, more clearly per haps than that of any other individual, the malignity and extent of the corruption which had eaten into the heart of the public morality. An English gentleman of good family attaches himself to a Prince who has seduced his sister, and accepts rank and wealth as the price of her shame and his own. He then repays by ingratitude the benefits which he has purchased by ignominy, betrays his patron in a manner which the best cause cannot excuse, and commits an act, not only of private treachery, but of distinct military desertion. To his conduct at the crisis of the fate of James, no service in modern times has, as far as we remember, furnished any parallel. The conduct of Ney, scandalous enough no doubt, is the very fastidiousness of honour in comparison of it. The perfidy of Arnold approaches it most nearly. In our age and country no talents, no services, no party attachments, could bear any man up under such mountains of infamy. Yet, even before Churchill had performed those great actions which in some degree redeem his character with posterity, the load lay very lightly on him. He had others in abundance to keep him in countenance. Godolphin, Orford, Dauby, the trimmer Halifax, the renegade Sunderland, were all men of the same class.

Where such was the political morality of the noble 520and the wealthy, it may easily be conceived that those professions which, even in the best times, are peculiarly liable to corruption, were in a frightful state. Such a bench and such a bar England has never seen. Jones, Scroggs, Jefferies, North, Wright, Sawyer, Williams, are to this day the spots and blemishes of our legal chronicles. Differing in constitution and in situation, whether blustering or cringing, whether persecuting Protestants or Catholics, they were equally unprincipled and inhuman. The part which the Church played was not equally atrocious; but it must have been exquisitely diverting to a scoffer. Never were principles so loudly professed, and so shamelessly abandoned. The Royal prerogative had been magnified to the skies in theological works. The doctrine of passive obedience had been preached from innumerable pulpits. The University of Oxford had sentenced the works of the most moderate constitutionalists to the flames. The accession of a Catholic King, the frightful cruelties committed in the west of England, never shook the steady loyalty of the clergy. But did they serve the Kino; for nought? He laid his hand on them, and they cursed him to his face. He touched the revenue of a college and the liberty of some prelates; and the whole profession set up a yell worthy of Hugh Peters himself. Oxford sent her plate to an invader with more alacrity than she had shown when Charles the First requested it. Nothing was said about the wickedness of resistance till resistance had done its work, till the anointed vicegerent of Heaven had been driven away, and till it had become plain that he would never be restored, or would be restored at least under strict limitations. The clergy went back, it must be owned, to their old theory, as soon as they found that it would do them no harm. 521It is principally to the general baseness and profligacy of the times that Clarendon is indebted for his high reputation. He was, in every respect, a man unfit for his age, at once too good for it and too bad for it. He seemed to be one of the ministers of Elizabeth, transplanted at once to a state of society widely different from that in which the abilities of such ministers had been serviceable. In the sixteenth century, the Royal prerogative had scarcely been called in question. A Minister who held it high was in no danger, so long as he used it well. That attachment to the Crown, that extreme jealousy of popular encroachments, that love, half religious half political, for the Church, which, from the beginning of the second session of the Long Parliament, showed itself in Clarendon, and which his sufferings, his long residence in France, and his high station in the government, served to strengthen, would, a hundred years earlier, have secured to him the favour of his sovereign without rendering him odious to the people. His probity, his correctness in private life, his decency of deportment, and his general ability, would not have misbecome a colleague of Walsingham and Burleigh. But, in the times on which he was cast, his errors and his virtues were alike out of place. He imprisoned men without trial. He was accused of raising unlawful contributions on the people for the support of the army. The abolition of the act which ensured the frequent holding of Parliaments was one of his favourite objects. He seems to have meditated the revival of the Star Chamber and the High Commission Court. His zeal for the prerogative made him unpopular; but it could not secure to him the favour of a master far more desirous of ease and pleasure than of power. 522Charles would rather have lived in exile and privacy, with abundance of money, a crowd of mimics to amuse him, and a score of mistresses, than have purchased the absolute dominion of the world by the privations and exertions to which Clarendon was constantly urging him. A councillor who was always bringing him papers and giving him advice, and who stoutly refused to compliment Lady Castlemaine and to carry messages to Mistress Stewart, soon became more hateful to him than ever Cromwell had been. Thus, considered by the people as an oppressor, by the Court as a censor, the Minister fell from his high office with a ruin more violent and destructive than could ever have been his fate, if he had either respected the principles of the Constitution or flattered the vices of the King.

Mr. Hallam has formed, we think, a most correct estimate of the character and administration of Clarendon. But he scarcely makes a sufficient allowance for the wear and tear which honesty almost necessarily sustains in the friction of political life, and which, in times so rough as those through which Clarendon passed, must be very considerable. When these are fairly estimated, we think that his integrity may be allowed to pass muster. A high-minded man he certainly was not, either in public or in private affairs. His own account of his conduct in the affair of his daughter is the most extraordinary passage in autobiography. We except nothing even in the Confessions of Rousseau. Several writers have taken a perverted and absurd pride in representing themselves as detestable; but no other ever laboured hard to make himself despicable and ridiculous. In one important particular Clarendon showed as little regard to the 523honour of his country as he had shown to that of his family. He accepted a subsidy from France for the relief of Portugal. But this method of obtaining money was afterwards practised to a much greater extent, and for objects much less respectable, both by the Court and by the Opposition.

These pecuniary transactions are commonly considered as the most disgraceful part of the history of those times; and they were no doubt highly reprehensible. Yet, in justice to the Whigs and to Charles himself, we must admit that they were not so shameful or atrocious as at the present day they appear. The effect of violent animosities between parties has always been an indifference to the general welfare and honour of the State. A politician, where factions run high, is interested not for the whole people, but for his own section of it. The rest are, in his view, strangers, enemies, or rather pirates. The strongest aversion which he can feel to any foreign power is the ardour of friendship, when compared with the loathing which he entertains towards those domestic foes with whom he is cooped up in a narrow space, with whom he lives in a constant interchange of petty injuries and insults, and from whom, in the day of their success, he has to expect severities far beyond any that a conqueror from a distant country would inflict. Thus, in Greece, it was a point of honour for a man to cleave to his party against his country. No aristocratical citizen of Samos or Corcyra would have hesitated to call in the aid of Lacedæmon. The multitude, on the contrary, looked every where to Athens. In the Italian states of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from the same cause, no man was so much a Pisan or a Florentine as a Ghibeline or a Guelf. It may be doubted whether 524there was a single individual who would have scrupled to raise his party from a state of depression, by opening the gates of his native city to a French or an Arragonese force. The Reformation, dividing; almost every European country into’ two parts, produced similar effects. The Catholic was too strong for the Englishman, the Huguenot for the Frenchman. The Protestant statesmen of Scotland and France called in the aid of Elizabeth; and the Papists of the League brought a Spanish army into the very heart of France. ‘The commotions to which the French Revolution gave rise were followed by the same consequences. The Republicans in every part of Europe were eager to see the armies of the National Convention and the Directory appear among them, and exulted in defeats which distressed and humbled those whom they considered as their worst enemies, their own rulers. The princes and nobles of France, on the other hand, did their utmost to bring foreign invaders to Paris. A very short time has elapsed since the Apostolical party in Spain invoked, too successfully, the support of strangers.

The great contest which raged in England during the seventeenth century extinguished, not indeed in the body of the people, but in those classes which were most actively engaged in politics, almost all national feelings. Charles the Second and many of his courtiers had passed a large part of their lives in banishment, living on the bounty of foreign treasuries, soliciting foreign aid to reestablish monarchy in their native country. The King’s own brother had fought in Flanders, under the banners of Spain, against the English armies. The oppressed Cavaliers in England constantly looked to the Louvre and the Escurial for 525deliverance and revenge. Clarendon censures the continental governments with great bitterness for not interfering in our internal dissensions. It is not strange, therefore, that, amidst the furious contests which followed the Restoration, the violence of party feeling should produce effects which would probably have attended it even in an age less distinguished by laxity of principle and indelicacy of sentiment. It was not till a natural death had terminated the paralytic old age of the Jacobite party that the evil was completely at an end. The Whigs long looked to Holland, the High Tories to France. The former concluded the Barrier Treaty; the latter entreated the Court of Versailles to send an expedition to England. Many men who, however erroneous their political notions might be, were unquestionably honourable in private life, accepted money without scruple from the foreign powers favourable to the Pretender.

Never was there less of national feeling among the higher orders than during the reign of Charles the Second. That Prince, on the one side, thought it better to be the deputy of an absolute king than the King of a free people. Algernon Sydney, on the other hand, would gladly have aided France in all her ambitious schemes, and have seen England reduced to the condition of a province, in the wild hope that a foreign despot would assist him to establish his darling republic. The King took the money of France to assist him in the enterprise which he meditated against the liberty of his subjects, with as little scruple as Frederic of Prussia or Alexander of Russia accepted our subsidies in time of war. The leaders of the Opposition no more thought themselves disgraced by the presents of Lewis, than a gentleman of our own time 526thinks himself disgraced by the liberality of powerful and wealthy members of his party who pay his election bill. The money which the King received from France had been largely employed to corrupt members of Parliament. The enemies of the court might think it fair, or even absolutely necessary, to encounter bribery with bribery. Thus they took the French gratuities, the needy among them for their own use, the rich probably for the general purposes of the party, without any scruple. If we compare their conduct not with that of English statesmen in our own time, but with that of persons in those foreign countries which are now situated as England then was, we shall probably see reason to abate something of the severity of censure with which it has been the fashion to visit those proceedings. Yet, when every allowance is made, the transaction is sufficiently offensive. It is satisfactory to find that Lord Russell stands free from any imputation of personal participation in the spoil. An age so miserably poor in all the moral qualities which render public characters respectable can ill spare the credit which it derives from a man, not indeed conspicuous for talents or knowledge, but honest even in his errors, respectable in every relation of life, rationally pious, steadily and placidly brave.

The great improvement which took place in our breed of public men is principally to be ascribed to the Revolution. Yet that memorable event, in a great measure, took its character from the very vices which it was the means of reforming. It was assuredly a happy revolution, and a useful revolution; but it was not, what it has often been called, a glorious revolution. William, and William alone, derived glory from it. 527The transaction was, in almost every part, discreditable to England. That a tyrant who had violated the fundamental laws of the country, who had attacked the rights of its greatest corporations, who had begun to persecute the established religion of the state, who had never respected the law either in his superstition or in his revenge, could not be pulled down without the aid of a foreign army, is a circumstance not very grateful to our national pride. Yet this is the least degrading part of the story. The shameless insincerity of the great and noble, the warm assurances of general support which James received, down to the moment of general desertion, indicate a meanness of spirit and a looseness of morality most disgraceful to the age. That the enterprise succeeded, at least that it succeeded without bloodshed or commotion, was principally owing to an act of ungrateful perfidy, such as no soldier had ever before committed, and to those monstrous fictions respecting the birth of the Prince of Wales which persons of the highest rank were not ashamed to circulate. In all the proceedings of the Convention, in the conference particularly, we see that littleness of mind which is the chief characteristic of the times. The resolutions on which the two Houses at last agreed were as bad as any resolutions for so excellent a purpose could be. Their feeble and contradictory language was evidently intended to save the credit of the Tories, who were ashamed to name what they were not ashamed to do. Through the whole transaction no commanding talents were displayed by any Englishman; no extraordinary risks were run; no sacrifices were made for the deliverance of the nation, except the sacrifice which Churchill made of honour, and Anne of natural affection. 528It was in some sense fortunate, as we have already said, for the Church of England, that the Reformation in this country was effected by men who cared little about religion. And, in the same manner, it was fortunate for our civil government that the Revolution was in a great measure effected by men who cared little about their political principles. At such a crisis, splendid talents and strong passions might have done more harm than good. There was far greater reason to fear that too much would be attempted, and that violent movements would produce an equally violent reaction, than that too little would be done in the way of change. But narrowness of intellect and flexibility of principle, though they may be serviceable, can never be respectable.

If in the Revolution itself there was little that can properly be called glorious, there was still less in the events which followed. In a church which had as one man declared the doctrine of resistance unchristian, only four hundred persons refused to take the oath of allegiance to a government founded on resistance. In the preceding generation, both the Episcopal and the Presbyterian clergy, rather than concede points of conscience not more important, had resigned their livings by thousands.

The churchmen, at the time of the Revolution, justified their conduct by all those profligate sophisms which are called Jesuitical, and which are commonly reckoned among the peculiar sins of Popery, but which in fact are every where the anodynes employed by minds rather subtle than strong, to quiet those internal twinges which they cannot but feel and which they will not obey. As the oath taken by the clergy was in the teeth of their principles, so was their conduct 529in the teeth of their oath. Their constant machinations against the Government to which they had sworn fidelity brought a reproach on their order and on Christianity itself. A distinguished prelate has not scrupled to say that the rapid increase of infidelity at that time was principally produced by the disgust which the faithless conduct of his brethren excited in men not sufficiently candid or judicious to discern the beauties of the system amidst the vices of its ministers.

But the reproach was not confined to the Church. In every political party, in the Cabinet itself, duplicity and perfidy abounded. The very men whom William loaded with benefits and in whom he reposed most confidence, with his seals of office in their hands, kept up a correspondence with the exiled family. Orford, Leeds, and Shrewsbury were guilty of this odious treachery. Even Devonshire is not altogether free from suspicion. It may well be conceived that, at such a time, such a nature as that of Marlborough would riot in the very luxury of baseness. His former treason, thoroughly furnished with all that makes infamy exquisite, placed him under the disadvantage which attends every artist from the time that he produces a masterpiece. Yet his second great stroke may excite wonder, even in those who appreciate all the merit of the first. Lest his admirers should be able to say that at the time of the Revolution he had betrayed his King from any other than selfish motives, he proceeded to betray his country. He sent intelligence to the French court of a secret expedition intended to attack Brest. The consequence was that the expedition failed, and that eight hundred British soldiers lost their lives from the abandoned villany of a British general. Yet this man has been canonized by so many eminent writers that 530to speak of him as he deserves may seem scarcely decent.

The reign of William the Third, as Mr. Hallam happily says, was the Nadir of the national prosperity. It was also the Nadir of the national character. It was the time when the rank harvest of vices sown during thirty years of licentiousness and confusion was gathered in; but it was also the seed-time of great virtues.

The press was emancipated from the censorship soon after the Revolution; and the Government immediately fell under the censorship of the press. Statesmen had a scrutiny to endure which was every day becoming more and more severe. The extreme violence of opinions abated. The Whigs learned moderation in office; the Tories learned the principles of liberty in opposition. The parties almost constantly approximated, often met, sometimes crossed each other. There were occasional bursts of violence; but, from the time of the Revolution, those bursts were constantly becoming less and less terrible. The severity with which the Tories, at the close of the reign of Anne, treated some of those who had directed public affairs during the war of the Grand Alliance, and the retaliatory measures of the Whigs, after the accession of the House of Hanover, cannot be justified; but they were by no means in the style of the infuriated parties, whose alternate murders had disgraced our history towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second. At the fall of Walpole far greater moderation was displayed. And from that time it has been the practice, a practice not strictly according to the theory of our Constitution, but still most salutary, to consider the loss of office, and the public disapprobation, as punishments sufficient for errors in the administration not imputable to personal 531corruption. Nothing, we believe, has contributed more than this lenity to raise the character of public men. Ambition is of itself a game sufficiently hazardous and sufficiently deep to inflame the passions without adding property, life, and liberty to the stake. Where the play runs so desperately high as in the seventeenth century, honour is at an end. Statesmen, instead of being as they should be, at once mild and steady, are at once ferocious and inconsistent. The axe is for ever before their eyes. A popular outcry sometimes unnerves them, and sometimes makes them desperate; it drives them to unworthy compliances, or to measures of vengeance as cruel as those which they have reason to expect. A Minister in our times need not fear either to be firm or to be merciful. Our old policy in this respect was as absurd as that of the king in the Eastern tale who proclaimed that any physician who pleased might come to court and prescribe for his diseases, but that if the remedies failed the adventurer should lose his head. It is easy to conceive how many able men would refuse to undertake the cure on such conditions; how much the sense of extreme danger would confuse the perceptions, and cloud the intellect, of the practitioner, at the very crisis which most called for self-possession, and how strong his temptation would be, if he found that he had committed a blunder, to escape the consequences of it by poisoning his patient.

But in fact it would have been impossible, since the Revolution, to punish any Minister for the general course of his policy, with the slightest semblance of justice; for since that time no Minister has been able to pursue any general course of policy without the approbation of the Parliament. The most important effects of that great change were, as Mr. Hallam has 532most truly said and most ably shown, those which it indirectly produced. Thenceforward it became the interest of the executive government to protect those very doctrines which an executive government is in general inclined to persecute. The sovereign, the ministers, the courtiers, at last even the universities and the clergy, were changed into advocates of the right of resistance. In the theory of the Whigs, in the situation of the Tories, in the common interest of all public men, the Parliamentary constitution of the country found perfect security. The power of the House of Commons, in particular, has been steadily on the increase. Since supplies have been granted for short terms and appropriated to particular services, the approbation of that House has been as necessary in practice to the executive administration as it has al-ways been in theory to taxes and to laws.

Mr. Hallam appears to have begun with the reign of Henry the Seventh, as the period at which what is called modern history, in contradistinction to the history of the middle ages, is generally supposed to commence. He has stopped at the accession of George the Third, “from unwillingness,” as he says, “to excite the prejudices of modern politics, especially those connected with personal character.” These two eras, we think, deserved the distinction on other grounds. Our remote posterity, when looking back on our history in that comprehensive manner in which remote posterity alone can, without much danger of error, look back on it, will probably observe those points with peculiar interest. They are, if we mistake not, the beginning and the end of an entire and separate chapter in our annals. The period which lies between them is a perfect cycle, a great year of the public mind. 533In the reign of Henry the Seventh, all the political differences which had agitated England since the Norman conquest seemed to be set at rest. The long and fierce struggle between the Crown and the Barons had terminated. The grievances which had produced the rebellions of Tyler and Cade had disappeared. Vilanage was scarcely known. The two royal houses, whose conflicting claims had long convulsed the kingdom, were at length united. The claimants whose pretensions, just or unjust, had disturbed the new settlement, were overthrown. In religion there was no open dissent, and probably very little secret heresy. The old subjects of contention, in short, had vanished; those which were to succeed had not yet appeared.

Soon, however, new principles were announced; principles which were destined to keep England during two centuries and a half in a state of commotion. The Reformation divided the people into two great parties. The Protestants were victorious. They again subdivided themselves. Political factions were engrafted on theological sects. The mutual animosities of the two parties gradually emerged into the light of public life. First came conflicts in Parliament; then civil war; then revolutions upon revolutions, each attended by its appurtenance of proscriptions, and persecutions, and tests; each followed by severe measures on the part of the conquerors; each exciting a deadly and festering hatred in the conquered. During the reign of George the Second, things were evidently tending to repose. At the close of that reign, the nation had completed the great revolution which commenced in the early part of the sixteenth century, and was again at rest. The fury of sects had died away. The Catholics themselves practically enjoyed toleration; and more 534than toleration they did not yet venture even to desire. Jacobitism was a mere name. Nobody was left to fight for that wretched cause, and very few to drink for it. The Constitution, purchased so dearly, was on every side extolled and worshipped. Even those distinctions of party which must almost always be found in a free state could scarcely be traced. The two great bodies which, from the time of the Revolution, had been gradually tending to approximation, were now united in emulous support of that splendid Administration which smote to the dust both the branches of the House of Bourbon. The great battle for our ecclesiastical and civil polity had been fought and won. The wounds had been healed. The victors and the vanquished were rejoicing together. Every person acquainted with the political writers of the last generation will recollect the terms in which they generally speak of that time. It was a glimpse of a golden age of union and glory, a short interval of rest, which had been preceded by centuries of agitation, and which centuries of agitation were destined to follow.

How soon faction again began to ferment is well known. In the Letters of Junius, in Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Discontents, and in many other writings of less merit, the violent dissensions which speedily convulsed the country are imputed to the system of favouritism which George the Third introduced, to the influence of Bute, or to the profligacy of those who called themselves the King’s friends. With all deference to the eminent writers to whom we have referred, we may venture to say that they lived too near the events of which they treated to judge correctly. The schism which was then appearing in the nation, and which has been from that time almost constantly 535widening, had little in common with those schisms which had divided it during the reigns of the Tudors and the Stuarts. The symptoms of popular feeling, indeed, will always be in a great measure the same; but the principle which excited that feeling was here new. The support which was given to Wilkes, the clamour for reform during the American war, the disaffected conduct of large classes of people at the time of the French Revolution, no more resembled the opposition which had been offered to the government of Charles the Second, than that opposition resembled the contest between the Roses.

In the political as in the natural body, a sensation is often referred to a part widely different from that in which it really resides. A man whose leg is cut off fancies that he feels a pain in his toe. And in the same manner the people, in the earlier part of the late reign, sincerely attributed their discontent to grievances which had been effectually lopped off. They imagined that the prerogative was too strong for the Constitution, that the principles of the Revolution were abandoned, that the system of the Stuarts was restored. Every impartial man must now acknowledge that these charges were groundless. The conduct of the Government with respect to the Middlesex election would have been contemplated with delight by the first generation of Whigs. They would have thought it a splendid triumph of the cause of liberty that the King and the Lords should resign to the lower House a portion of the legislative power, and allow it to incapacitate without their consent. This, indeed, Mr. Burke clearly perceived. “When the House of Commons,” says he, “in an endeavour to obtain new advantages at the expense of the other orders of the 536state, for the benefit of the commons at large, have pursued strong measures, if it were not just, it was at least natural, that the constituents should connive at all their proceedings; because we ourselves were ultimately to profit. But when this submission is urged to us in a contest between the representatives and ourselves, and where nothing can be put into their scale which is not taken from ours, they fancy us to be children when they tell us that they are our representatives, our own flesh and blood, and that all the stripes they give us are for our good.” These sentences contain, in fact, the whole explanation of the mystery. The conflict of the seventeenth century was maintained by the Parliament against the Crown. The conflict which commenced in the middle of the eighteenth century, which still remains undecided, and in which our children and grandchildren will probably be called to act or to suffer, is between a large portion of the people on the one side, and the Crown and the Parliament united on the other.

The privileges of the House of Commons, those privileges which, in 1642, all London rose in arms to defend, which the people considered as synonymous with their own liberties, and in comparison of which they took no account of the most precious and sacred principles of English jurisprudence, have now become nearly as odious as the rigours of martial law. That power of committing which the people anciently loved to see the House of Commons exercise, is now, at least when employed against libellers, the most unpopular power in the Constitution. If the Commons were to suffer the Lords to amend money-bills, we do not believe that the people would care one straw about the matter. If they were to suffer the Lords even to originate 537money-bills, we doubt whether such a surrender of their constitutional rights would excite half so much dissatisfaction as the exclusion of strangers from a single important discussion. The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm. The publication of the debates, a practice which seemed to the most liberal statesman of the old school full of danger to the great safeguards of public liberty, is now regarded by many persons as a safeguard tantamount, and more than tantamount, to all the rest together.

Burke, in a speech on parliamentary reform which is the more remarkable because it was delivered long before the French Revolution, has described, in striking language, the change in public feeling of which we speak. “It suggests melancholy reflections,” says he, “in consequence of the strange course we have long held, that we are now no longer quarreling about the character, or about the conduct of men, or the tenour of measures; but we are grown out of humour with the English Constitution itself; this is become the object of the animosity of Englishmen. This constitution in former days used to be the envy of the world; it was the pattern for politicians; the theme of the eloquent; the meditation of the philosopher in every part of the world. As to Englishmen, it was their pride, their consolation. By it they lived, and for it they were ready to die. Its defects, if it had any, were partly covered by partiality, and partly borne by prudence. Now all its excellencies are forgot, its faults are forcibly dragged into day, exaggerated by every artifice of misrepresentation. It is despised and rejected of men; and every device and invention of ingenuity or idleness is set up in opposition, or in preference to it.” We neither adopt nor condemn the 538language of reprobation which the great orator here employs. We call him only as a witness to the fact. That the revolution of public feeling which he described was then in progress is indisputable; and it is equally indisputable, we think, that it is in progress still.

To investigate and classify the causes of so great a change would require far more thought, and far more space, than we at present have to bestow. But some of them are obvious. During the contest which the Parliament carried on against the Stuarts, it had only to check and complain. It has since had to govern. As an attacking body, it could select its points of attack, and it naturally chose those on which it was likely to receive public support. As a ruling body, it has neither the same liberty of choice, nor the same motives to gratify the people. With the power of an executive government, it has drawn to itself some of the vices, and all the unpopularity of an executive government. On the House of Commons above all, possessed as it is of the public purse, and consequently of the public sword, the nation throws all the blame of an ill conducted war, of a blundering negotiation, of a disgraceful treaty, of an embarrassing commercial crisis. The delays of the Court of Chancery, the misconduct of a judge at Van Diemen’s Land, any thing, in short, which in any part of the administration any person feels as a grievance, is attributed to the tyranny! or at least to the negligence, of that all-powerful body. Private individuals pester it with their wrongs and claims. A merchant appeals to it from the Courts of Rio Janeiro or St. Petersburgh. A historical painter complains to it that his department of art finds no encouragement. Anciently the Parliament resembled a 539member of opposition, from whom no places are expected, who is not expected to confer favours and propose measures, but merely to watch and censure, and who may, therefore, unless he is grossly injudicious, be popular with the great body of the community. The Parliament now resembles the same person put into office, surrounded by petitioners whom twenty times his patronage would not satisfy, stunned with complaints, buried in memorials, compelled by the duties of his station to bring forward measures similar to those which he was formerly accustomed to observe and to check, and perpetually encountered by objections similar to those which it was formerly his business to raise.

Perhaps it may be laid down as a general rule that a legislative assembly, not constituted on democratical principles, cannot be popular long after it ceases to be weak. Its zeal for what the people, rightly or wrongly, conceive to be their interests, its sympathy with their mutable and violent passions, are merely the effects of the particular circumstances in which it is placed. As long as it depends for existence on the public favour, it will employ all the means in its power to conciliate that favour. While this is the case, defects in its constitution are of little consequence. But, as the close union of such a body with the nation is the effect of an identity of interests not essential but accidental, it is in some measure dissolved from the time at which the danger which produced it ceases to exist.

Hence, before the Revolution, the question of Parliamentary reform was of very little importance. The friends of liberty had no very ardent wish for reform. The strongest Tories saw no objections to it. It is remarkable that Clarendon loudly applauds the changes which Cromwell introduced, changes far stronger than 540the Whigs of the present day would in general approve. There is no reason to think, however, that the reform effected by Cromwell made any great difference in the conduct of the Parliament. Indeed, if the House of Commons had, during the reign of Charles the Second, been elected by universal suffrage, or if all the seats had been put up to sale, as in the French Parliaments, it would, we suspect, have acted very much as it did. We know how strongly the Parliament of Paris exerted itself in favour of the people on many important occasions; and the reason is evident. Though it did not emanate from the people, its whole consequence depended on the support of the people.

From the time of the Revolution the House of Commons has been gradually becoming what it now is, a great council of state, containing many members chosen freely by the people, and many others anxious to acquire the favour of the people; but, on the whole, aristocratical in its temper and interest. It is very far from being an illiberal and stupid oligarchy; but it is equally far from being an express image of the general feeling. It is influenced by the opinion of the people, and influenced powerfully, but slowly and circuitously. Instead of outrunning the public mind; as before the Revolution it frequently did, it now follows with slow steps and at a wide distance. It is therefore necessarily unpopular; and the more so because the good which it produces is much less evident to common perception than the evil which it inflicts. It bears the blame of all the mischief which is done, or supposed to be done, by its authority or by its connivance. It does not get the credit, on the other hand, of having prevented those innumerable abuses which do not exist solely because the House of Commons exists. 541A large part of the nation is certainly desirous of a reform in the representative system. How large that part may be, and how strong its desires on the subject may be, it is difficult to say. It is only at intervals that the clamour on the subject is loud and vehement. But it seems to us that, during the remissions, the feeling gathers strength, and that every successive burst is more violent than that which preceded it. The public attention may be for a time diverted to the Catholic claims or the Mercantile code; but it is probable that at no very distant period, perhaps in the lifetime of the present generation, all other questions will merge in that which is, in a certain degree, connected with them all.

Already we seem to ourselves to perceive the signs of unquiet times, the vague presentiment of something great and strange which pervades the community, the restless and turbid hopes of those who have every thing to gain, the dimly hinted forebodings of those who have every thing to lose. Many indications might be mentioned, in themselves indeed as insignificant as straws; but even the direction of a straw, to borrow the illustration of Bacon, will show from what quarter the storm is setting in.

A great statesman might, by judicious and timely reformations, by reconciling the two great branches of the natural aristocracy, the capitalists and the landowners, and by so widening the base of the government as to interest in its defence the whole of the middle class, that brave, honest, and sound-hearted class, which is as anxious for the maintenance of order and the security of property, as it is hostile to corruption and oppression, succeed in averting a struggle to which no rational friend of liberty or of law can look forward without 542great apprehensions. There are those who will be contented with nothing but demolition; and there are those who shrink from all repair. There are innovators who long for a President and a National Convention; and there are bigots who, while cities larger and richer than the capitals of many great kingdoms are calling out for representatives to watch over their interests, select some hackneyed jobber in boroughs, some peer of the narrowest and smallest mind, as the fittest depositary of a forfeited franchise. Between these extremes there lies a more excellent way. Time is bringing round another crisis analogous to that which occurred in the seventeenth century. We stand in a situation similar to that in which our ancestors stood under the reign of James the First. It will soon again be necessary to reform that we may preserve, to save the fundamental principles of the Constitution by alterations in the subordinate parts. It will then be possible, as it was possible two hundred years ago, to protect vested rights, to secure every useful institution, every institution endeared by antiquity and noble associations, and, at the same time, to introduce into the system improvements harmonizing with the original plan. It remains to be seen whether two hundred years have made us wiser.

We know of no great revolution which might not have been prevented by compromise early and graciously made. Firmness is a great virtue in public affairs; but it has its proper sphere. Conspiracies and insurrections in which small minorities are engaged, the outbreakings of popular violence unconnected with any extensive project or any durable principle, are best repressed by vigour and decision. To shrink from them is to make them formidable. But no wise ruler will 543confound the pervading taint with the slight local irritation. No wise ruler will treat the deeply seated discontents of a great party, as he treats the fury of a mob which destroys mills and power-looms. The neglect of this distinction has been fatal even to governments strong in the power of the sword. The present time is indeed a time of peace and order. But it is at such a time that fools are most thoughtless and wise men most thoughtful. That the discontents which have agitated the country during the late and the present reign, and which, though not always noisy, are never wholly dormant, will again break forth with aggravated symptoms, is almost as certain as that the tides and seasons will follow their appointed course. But in all movements of the human mind which tend to great revolutions there is a crisis at which moderate concession may amend, conciliate, and preserve. Happy will it be for England if, at that crisis, her interests be confided to men for whom history has not recorded the long series of human crimes and follies in vain.

END OF VOL. 1.

INDEX

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE: The 1860 six volume print set had the index for all six volumes at the end to volume six. This PG edition has the complete index for all volumes at the end of each volume.

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A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

XYZ

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A.

A priori reasoning, 8 9 10 20 21 59

Abbt and abbot, difference between, 76

Academy, character of its doctrines, 411

Academy, French, (the), 2 3 ; has been of no benefit to literature, 23 ; its treatment of Corneille and Voltaire, 23 21 ; the scene of the fiercest animosities, 23

Academy of the Floral Games, at Toulouse, 136 137 ; Acting, Garrick's, quotation from Fielding illustrative of, i. 332; the true test of excellence in,133

Adam, Robert, court architect to George III., 11

Addington, Henry, speaker of the House of Commons, 282 ; made First Lord of the Treasury, 282 ; his administration, 282 281 ; coolness between him and Pitt, 285 286 ; their quarrel, 287 ; his resignation, 290 112 ; raised to the Peerage, 112 ; raised to the Peerage, 293

Addison, Joseph, review of Miss Aikin's life of, 321 122 ; his character, 323 321 ; sketch of his father's life, 321 325 ; his birth and early life, 325 327 ; appointed to a scholarship in Magdalene College, Oxford, 327 ; his classical attainments, 327 330 ; his Essay on the Evidences of Christianity, 330 ; his Latin poems, 331 332 ; contributes a preface to Dryden's Georgies, 335 ; his intention to take orders frustrated. 335 ; sent by the government to the Continent, 333 ; his introduction to Boileau, 310 ; leaves Paris and proceeds to Venice, 311 315 ; his residence in Italy, 315 350 ; composes his Epistle to Montague (then Lord Halifax), 350 ; his prospects clouded by the death of William III., 351 ; becomes tutor to a young English traveller, 351 ; writes his Treatise on Medals, 351 ; repairs to Holland, 351 ; returns to England, 351 ; his cordial reception and introduction into the Kit Cat Club, 351 ; his pecuniary difficulties, 352 ; engaged by Godolphin to write a poem in honour of Marlborough's exploits, 351 355 ; is appointed to a Commissionership, 355 ; merits of his "Campaign," 356 ; criticism of his Travels in Italy, 329 359 ; his opera of Rosamond, 361 ; is made Undersecretary of State, and accompanies the Earl of Halifax to Hanover, 361 302 ; his election to the House of Commons, 362 ; his failure as a speaker, 362 ; his popularity and talents for conversation, 365 367 ; his timidity and constraint among strangers, 367 ; his favorite associates, 368 371 ; becomes Chief Secretary for Ireland under Wharton, 371 ; origination of the Tatler, 373 371 ; his characteristics as a writer, 373 378 ; compared with Swift and Voltaire as a master of the art of ridicule, 377 379 ; his pecuniary losses, 382 383 ; loss of his Secretaryship, 382 ; resignation of his Fellowship, 383 ; encouragement and disappointment of his advances towards a great lad 383 ; returned to Parliament without a contest, 383 ; his Whig Examiner, 384 ; intercedes with the Tories on behalf of Ambrose Phillipps and Steele, 384 ; his discontinuance of the Tatler and commencement of the Spectator, 384 ; his part in the Spectator, 385 ; his commencement and discontinuance of the Guardian, 389 ; his Cato, 345 390 394 365 366 ; his intercourse with Pope, 394 395 ; his concern for Steele, 396 ; begins a new series of the Spectator, 397 ; appointed secretary to the Lords Justices of the Council on the death of Queen Anne. 397 ; again appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, 399 ; his relations with Swift and Tickell, 399 400 ; removed to the Board of Trade, 401 ; production of his Drummer, 401 ; his Freeholder, 402 ; his estrangement from Pope, 403 404 ; his long courtship of the Countess Dowager of Warwick and union with her, 411 412 ; takes up his abode at Holland House, 412 ; appointed Secretary of State bv Sunderland, 413 ; failure of his health, 413 418 ; resigns his post, 413 ; receives a pension, 414 ; his estrangement from Steele and other friends, 414 415 ; advocates the bill for limiting the number of Peers, 415 ; refutation of a calumny upon him, 417 ; intrusts his works to Tickell, and dedicates them to Greggs, 418 ; sends for Gay on his death-bed to ask his forgiveness, 418 419 ; his death and funeral, 420 ; Tickell's eulogy on his death, 421 ; superb edition of his works, 421 ; his monument in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, 422 ; praised by Dryden, 369

Addison, Dr. Lancelot, sketch of his life, 325 325

Adiaphorists, a sect of German Protestants, 7 8

Adultery, how represented by the Dramatists of the Restoration, 357

Advancement of Learning, by Bacon, its publication, 383

Æschines, his character, 193 194

Æschylus and the Greek Drama, 210 229

Afghanistan, the monarchy of, analogous to that of England in the 10th century, 29 ; bravery of its inhabitants, 23 ; the English the only army in India which could compete with them, 30 ; their devastation in India, 207

Agricultural and manufacturing laborers, comparison of their condition, 145 148

Agitjari, the singer, 256

Aiken, Miss, review of her Life of Addison, 321 422

Aix, its capture, 244

Akenside, his epistle to Curio, 183

Albigenses, 310 311

Alcibiades, suspected of assisting at a mock celebration of the Eleusinian mysteries, 49

Aldrich, Dean, 113

Alexander the Great compared with Clive, 297

Altieri, his greatness, 61 ; influence of Dante upon his style, 61 62 ; comparison between him and Cowper, 350 ; his Rosmunda contrasted with Shakspere's Lady Macbeth, 175 ; influence of Plutarch and the writers of his school upon, i. 401. 401

Allahabad, 27

Allegories of Johnson and Addison, 252

Allegory, difficulty of making it interesting, 252

Allegro and Penseroso, 215

Alphabetical writing, the greatest of human inventions, 453 ; comparative views of its value by Plato and Bacon, 453 454

America, acquisitions of the Catholic Church in, 300 ; its capabilities, 301

American Colonies, British, war with them, 57 59 ; act for imposing stamp duties upon them, 58 65 ; their disaffection, 76 ; revival of the dispute with them, 105 ; progress of their resistance, 106

Anabaptists, their origin, 12

Anacharsis, reputed contriver of the potter's wheel, 438

Analysis, critical not applicable with exactness to poetry, 325 ; but grows more accurate as criticism improves, 321

Anaverdy Khan, governor of tlie Carnatic, 211

Angria, his fortress of Gheriah reduced by Clive, 228

Anne, Queen, her political and religious inclinations, 130 ; changes in her government in 1710, 130 ; relative estimation bv the Whigs and the Tories of her reign, 133 140 ; state of parties at her accession, v. 352, 352 353 ; dismisses the Whigs, 381 382 ; change in the conduct of public affairs consequent on her death, 397 ; touches Johnson for the king's evil, 173 ; her cabinet during the Seven Years' War, 410

Antijacobin Review, (the new), vi. 405; contrasted with the Antijacobin, 400 407

Antioch, Grecian eloquence at, 301

Anytus, 420

Apostolical succession, Mr. Gladstone claims it for the Church of England, 100 ; to 178. 178

Apprentices, negro, in the West Indies, 307 374 370 378 383

Aquinas, Thomas, 478

Arab fable of the Great Pyramid, 347

Arbuthnot's Satirical Works, 377

Archimedes, his slight estimate of his inventions, 450

Archytas, rebuked by Plato, 449

Arcot, Nabob of, his relations with England, 211 219 ; his claims recognized by the English, 213

Areopagitiea, Milton's allusion to, 204

Argyle, Duke of, secedes from Walpole's administration, 204

Arimant, Dryden's, 357

Ariosto, 60

Aristodemus, 2 303

Aristophanes, 352 ; his clouds a true picture of the change in his countrymen's character, 383

Aristotle, his authority impaired by the Reformation, 440 ; the most profound critic of antiquity, 140 141 ; his doctrine in regard to poetry, 40 ; the superstructure of his treatise on poetry not equal to its plan, 140

Arithmetic, comparative estimate of, by Plato and by Bacon, 448

Arlington, Lord, his character, 30 ; his coldness for the Triple Alliance, 37 ; his impeachment, 50

Armies in the middle ages, how constituted, 282 478

a powerful restraint on the regal power, 478 ; subsequent change in this respect, 479

Arms, British, successes of, against the French in 1758, 244 247

Army, (the) control of, by Charles I., or by the Parliament, 489 ; its triumph over both, 497 ; danger of a standing army becoming an instrument of despotism, 487

Arne, Dr., set to music Addison's opera of Rosamund, 361

Arragon and Castile, their old institutions favorable to public liberty iii. 80. 80

Arrian, 395

Art of War, Machiavelli's, 306

Arundel, Earl of, iii. 434

Asia, Central, its people, 28

Asiatic Society, commencement of its career under Warren Hastings, 98

Assemblies, deliberative, 2 40

Assembly, National, the French, 46 48 68 71 443 446

Astronomy, comparative estimate of by Socrates and by Bacon, 452

Athenian jurymen, stipend of, 33 ; note; police, name of, i. 34, 34 ; note; magistrates, name of, who took cognisance of offences against religion, i. 53, 139 ; note.; orators, essay on, 139 157 ; oratory unequalled, 145 ; causes of its excellence, 145 ; its quality, 151 153 156

Johnson's ignorance of Athenian character, 146 418 ; intelligence of the populace, and its causes, 140 149 ; books the least part of their education, 147 ; what it consisted in, 148 ; their knowledge necessarily defective, 148 ; and illogical from its conversational character, 149 ; eloquence, history of, 151 153 ; when at its height, 153 154 ; coincidence between their progress in the art of war and the art of oratory, 155 ; steps by which Athenian oratory approached to finished excellence extemporaneous with those by which its character sank, 153 ; causes of this phenomenon, 154 ; orators, in proportion as they became more expert, grew less respectable in general character, 155 ; their vast abilities, 151 ; statesmen, their decline and its causes, 155 ; ostracism, 182 ; comedies, impurity of, 182 2 ; reprinted at the two Universities, 182 ; iii. 2. 2

"Athenian Revels," Scenes from, 30 ; to: 54

Athenians (the) grew more sceptical with the progress of their civilization, 383 ; the causes of their deficiencies in logical accuracy, 383 384

Johnson's opinion of them, 384 418

Athens, the most disreputable part of, i. 31, note ; favorite epithet of, i. 30, 30 ; note; her decline and its characteristics, 153 154 Mr. Clifford's preference of Sparta over, 181 ; contrasted with Sparta, 185 187 ; seditions in, 188 ; effect of slavery in, 181 ; her liturgic system, 190 ; period of minority in, 191 192 ; influence of her genius upon the world, 200 201

Attainder, an act of, warrantable, 471

Atterbury, Francis, life of, vi. 112 131 ; his youth, 112 ; his defence of Luther, 113 ; appointed a royal chaplain, 113 ; his share in the controversy about the Letters of Phalaris, 115 119 110 ; prominent as a high-churchman, 119 120 ; made Dean of Carlisle, 120 ; defends Sacheverell, 121 ; made Dean of Christ Church, 121 ; desires to proclaim James II., 122 ; joins the opposition, 123 ; refuses to declare for the Protestant succession, 123 ; corresponds with the Pretender, 123 124 ; his private life, 124 125 129 ; reads the funeral service over the body of Addison, 124 420 ; imprisoned for his part in the Jacobite conspiracy, 125 ; his trial and sentence, 120 127 ; his exile, 128 129 ; his favor with the Pretender, 129 130 ; vindicates himself from the charge of having garbled Clarendon's history, 130 ; his death and burial, 131

Attila, 300

Attributes of God,subtle speculations touching them imply no high degree of intellectual culture, 303 304 "

Aubrey, his charge of corruption against Bacon, 413

Bacon's decision against him after his present, 430

Augsburg, Confession of, its adoption in Sweden, 329

Augustin, St., iv. 300. 300

Attrungzebe, his policy, 205 206

Austen, Jane, notice of, 307 308

Austin, Sarah, her character as a translator, 299 349

Austria, success of her armies in the Catholic cause, 337

Authors, their present position, 190 ; to: 197

Avignon, the Papal Court transferred from Rome to, 312

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B.

Baber, founder of the Mogul empire, 202

Bacon, Lady, mother of Lord Bacon, 349

Bacon, Lord, review of Basil Montagu's new edition of the works of, 336 495 ; his mother distinguished as a linguist, 349 ; his early years, 352 355 ; his services refused by government, 355 356 ; his admission at Gray's Inn, 357 ; his legal attainments, 358 ; sat in Parliament in 1593, 359 ; part he took in politics, 360 ; his friendship with the Earl of Essex, 305 372 ; examination of his conduct to Essex, 373 384 ; influence of King James on his fortunes, 383 ; his servility to Lord Southampton, 384 ; influence his talents had with the public, 386 ; his distinction in Parliament and in the courts of law, 388 ; his literary and philosophical works, 388 ; his "Novum Organum," and the admiration it excited, 388 ; his work of reducing and recompiling the laws of England, 389 ; his tampering with the judges on the trial of Peacham, 389 394 ; attaches himself to Buckingham, 390 ; his appointment as Lord Keeper, 399 ; his share in the vices of the administration, 400 ; his animosity towards Sir Edward Coke, 405 407 ; his town and country residences, 408 409 ; his titles of Baron Verulam and Viscount St. Albans, report against him of the Committee on the Courts of Justice, 413 ; nature of the charges, 413 414 ; overwhelming evidence to them, 414 410 ; his admission of his guilt, 410 ; his sentence, 417 ; examination of Mr. Montagu's arguments in his defence, 417 430 ; mode in which he spent the last years of his life, 431 432 ; chief peculiarity of his philosophy, 435 447 ; his views compared with those of Plato, 448 455 ; to what his wide and durable fame is chiefly owing, 403 ; his frequent treatment of moral subjects, 407 ; his views as a theologian, 409 ; vulgar notion of him as inventor of the inductive method, 470 ; estimate of his analysis of that method, 471 479 ; union of audacity and sobriety in his temper, 480 ; his amplitude of comprehension, 481 482 ; his freedom from the spirit of controversy, 484 ; his eloquence, wit, and similitudes, 484 ; his disciplined imagination. 487 ; his boldness and originality, 488 ; unusual development in the order of his faculties, 489 ; his resemblance to the mind of Burke, 489 ; specimens of his two styles, 490 491 ; value of his Essays, 491 ; his greatest performance the first book of the Novum Organum, 492 ; contemplation of his life, 492 495 ; his reasoning upon the principle of heat, 90 ; his system generally as opposed to the schoolmen, 78 79 103 ; his objections to the system of education at the Universities, 445

Bacon, Sir Nicholas, his character, 342 448

Baconian philosophy, its chief peculiarity, 435 ; its essential spirit, 439 ; its method and object differed from the ancient, 448 ; comparative views of Bacon and Plato, 448 159 ; its beneficent spirit, 455 458 403 ; its value compared with ancient philosophy, 459 471

Baillie, Gen., destruction of his detachment by Hyder Ali, 72

Balance of power, interest of the Popes in preserving it, 338

Banim, Mr., his defence of James II. as a supporter of toleration, 304

Banking operations of Italy ill the 14 ; century, 270

Baptists, (the) Bunyan's position among, 140 147

Bar (the) its degraded condition in the time of James II., 520

Barbary, work on, by Rev. Dr. Addison, 325

Barbarians, Mitford's preference of Greeks, 190

Barcelona, capture of, by Peterborough, 110

Barère, Bertrand, Memoirs of, reviewed, 423 539 ; opinions of the editors as to his character, 424 ; his real character, 425 427 429 407 ; has hitherto found no apologist, 420 ; compared with Danton and Robespierre, 420 ; his natural disposition, 427 ; character of his memoirs, 429 430 ; their mendacity, 431 430 445 ; their literary value, 430 ; his birth and education, 430 437 ; his marriage, 438 ; first visit to Paris, 439 ; his journal, 439 ; elected a representative of the Third Estate, 440 ; his character as a legislator, 441 ; his oratory, 442 471 472 ; his early political opinions, 442 ; draws a report on the Woods and Forests, 443 ; becomes more republican, 443 ; on the dissolution of the National Assembly he is made a judge, 440 ; chosen to the Convention, 449 ; belongs to the Girondists, 455 ; sides with the Mountain in condemnation of the king, 450 457 ; was really a federalist, 400 ; continues with the Girondists, 401 ; appointed upon the Committee of Public Safety, 403 ; made its Secretary, 403 ; wavers between the Girondists and the Mountain, 404 ; joins with the Mountain, 405 ; remains upon the Committee of Public Safety, 460 ; his relation to the Mountain, 400-408; takes the initiative against the Girondists, 408 409 ; moves the execution of Marie Antoinette, 409 ; speaks against the Girondists, 434 435 474 ; one of the Committee of Safety, 475 ; his part (luring the Reign of Terror. 482 485 487 ; his cruelties, 485, 480 ; life's pleasantries, 487 488 ; his proposition to murder English prisoners, 490 492 ; his murders, 495 497 ; his part in the quarrels of the Committee, 497 590 ; moves that Robespierre be put to death, 499 500 ; cries raised against him, 504 ; a committee appointed to examine into his conduct, 505 ; his defence, 505 50 ; condemned to imprisonment, 507 ; his journey to Orleans and confinement there, 507509; removed to Saintes, 510 ; his escape, 510 ; elected a member of the Council of Five Hundred, 511 ; indignation of the members and annulling of the election, 511 512 ; writes a work on the Liberty of the Seas. 512 ; threatened by the mob, 512 513 ; his relations with Napoleon, 514 518 521 527 ; a journalist and pamphleteer, 523 524 ; his literary style, 525 ; his degradation, 527 ; his treachery, 528 ; becomes a royalist, 529 ; elected to the Chamber of Representatives, 529 ; banished from France, 531 ; his return, 531 ; involved in lawsuits with his family, 531 ; pensioned, 532 ; his death, 532 ; his character, 534 535 537 539 ; his ignorance of England and her his, 530 ; his religious hypocrisy,

Baretti, his admiration for Miss Burney, 271

Barilion, M. his pithy words on the new council proposed by Temple, 7 70

Barlow, Bishop, 370

Barrére, Col., 233 248

Barrington, Lord, 13

Harwell, Mr., 35 ; his support of Hastings, 40 54 55 2

Baltic, Burke's declamations on its capture, 113

Bathos, perfect instance of, to be found in Petrarch's 5th sonnet, 93

Battle of the Cranes and Pygmies, Addison's, 331

Bavaria, its contest between Protestantism and Catholicism, 326

Baxter's testimony to Hampden's excellence, 430

Bayle, Peter, 300

Beatrice, Dante's, 1

Beanclerk, Topliam, 204

Beaumarchais, his suit before the parliament of Paris, 430 431

Beckford, Alderman, 90

Bedford, Duke of, 11 ; his views of the policy of Chatham, 20 41 ; presents remonstrance to George II 71

Bedford, Earl of. invited by Charles I. to form an administration, 472

Bedfords (the), 11 ; parallel between them and the Buckinghams, 73 ; their opposition to the Buckingham ministry on the Stamp Act, 79 ; their willingness to break with Grenville on Chatham's accession to office, 89 ; deserted Grenville and admitted to office, 110

Bedford House assailed by a rabble, 70

Begums of Oude, their domains and treasures, 80 ; disturbances in Oude imputed to them, 87 ; their protestations, 88 ; their spoliation charged against Hastings, 121

Belgium, its contest between Protestantism and Catholicism, 326 330

Belial, 355

Bell, Peter, Byron's spleen against, 353

Bellasys, the English general, 107

Bellingham, his malevolence, 309

Belphegor (the), of Machiavelli, 299

Benares, its grandeur, 74 ; its annexation to the British dominions, 84

"Benefits of the death of Christ," 325

Benevolences, Oliver St. John's opposition to, and Bacon's support of, 389

Bengal, its resources, 228

Bentham and Dumont, 38 40 153

Bentham and his system, 53 54 59 80, 87 91 115 116, 121 122 ; his language on the French revolution, 204 ; his greatness, 38 40

Benthamites, 5 89 90

Bentinck, Lord William, his memory cherished by the Hindoos, 298

Bentivoglio, Cardinal, on the state of religion in England in the 16th century, 25

Bentley, Richard, his quarrel with Boyle, and remarks on Temple's Essay on the Letters of Phalaris, 109 111 115 119 ; his edition of Milton, 111 ; his notes on Horace, 111 ; his reconciliation with Boyle and Atterbury, 113 ; his apothegm about criticism, 119 212

Berar, occupied by the Bonslas, 59

Berwick, Duke of, held the Allies in check, 109 ; his retreat before Galway, 119

Bible (the), English, its literary style, 348

Bickell, R. Rev., his work on Slavery in the West Indies, 330

Bickerstaff, Isaac, astrologer, 374

Billaud, 405 475 498 499 501 504 506 508 510

Biographia Britannica, refutation of a calumny on Addison in, 417

Biography, writers of contrasted with historians, 423 ; tenure by which they are bound to their subject, 103

Bishops, claims of those of the Church of England to apostolical succession, 160-174.

Black Hole of Calcutta described, 233 234 ; retribution of the English for its horrors, 235 239 242 245

Blackmore, Sir Richard, his attainments in the ancient languages, 331

Blackstone, 334

Blasphemous publications, policy of Government in respect to, 171

Blenheim, battle of, 354 Addison employed to write a poem in its honor, 355

Blois, Addison's retirement to, 339

"Bloombury Gang," the denomination of the Bedfords, 11

Bodley, Sir Thomas, founder of the Bodleian Library, 388 433

Bohemia, influence of the doctrines of Wickliffe in, 313

Boileau, Addison's intercourse with, 340 341 ; his opinion of modern Latin, 341 ; his literary qualities, 343 ; his resemblance to Dryden, 373

Bolingbroke, Lord, the liberal patron of literature, 400 ; proposed to strengthen the royal prerogative, 171 ; his jest on the occasion of the tirst representation of Cato, 392 Pope's perfidy towards him, 408 ; his remedy for the disease of the state, 23 24

Bombast, Dryden's, 361 362 Shakspeare's, 361

Bombay, its affairs thrown into confusion by the new council at Calcutta, 40

Book of the Church, Southey's, 137

Books, puffing of, 192 198

Booth played the hero in Addison's Cato on its tirst representation, 392

Borgia, Cæsar, 301

Boroughs, rotten, the abolition of, a necessary reform in the time of George I., 180

Boswell, James, his character, 391 397 204 205

Boswell's Life of Johnson, by Crocker, review of, 368 426 ; character of the work, 387

Boswellism, 265

Bourbon, the House of, their vicissitudes in Spain, 106 130

Bourne, Vincent, 5 342 ; his Latin verses in celebration of Addison's restoration to health, 413

Boyd, his translation of Dante, 78

Boyer, President, 390-392.

Boyle, Charles, his nominal editorship of the Letters of Phalaris, 108 113 119 ; his book on Greek history and philology, v.331.

Boyle, Rt. Hon. Henry, 355

"Boys" (the) in opposition to Sir R. Walpole, 176

Bracegirdle, Mis., her celebrity as an actress, 407 ; her intimacy with Congreve, 407

Brahmins, 306

"Breakneck Steps," Fleet Street, 157 ; note.

Breda, treaty of, 34

Bribery, foreign, in the time of Charles II., 525

Brihuega, siege of, 128

"Broad Bottom Administration" (the), 220

Brothers, his prophecies as a test of faith, 305 306

Brown, Launcelot, 284

Brown's Estimate, 233

Bruce, his appearance at Mr. Burney's concerts, 257

Brunswick, the House of, 14

Brussels, its importance as the seat of a vice-regal Court, 34

Bridges, Sir Egerton, 303

Buchanan, character of his writings, 447

Buckhurst, 353

Buckingham, Duke of, the "Steenie" of James 1 , 44 Bacon's early discernment of his influence, 330 337 ; his expedition to Spain, 308; his return for Bacon's patronage, 333 ; his corruption, 402 ; his character and position, 402 408 ; his marriage, 411 412 ; his visit to Bacon, and report of his condition, 414

Buckingham, Duke of, one of the Cabal ministry, 374 ; his fondness for Wycherley, 374 ; anecdote of, 374

Budgell Eustace, one of Addison's friends, 308 303 371

Bunyan, John, Life of, 132 150 252 204 ; his birth and early life, 132 ; mistakes of his biographers in regard to his moral character, 133 134 ; enlists in the Parliamentary army, 135 ; his marriage, 135 ; his religious experiences, 130-138; begins to preach, 133 ; his imprisonment, 133 141 ; his early writings, 141 142 ; his liberation and gratitude to Charles II., 142 143 ; his Pilgrim's Progress, 143 140 ; the product of an uneducated genius, 57 343 ; his subsequent writings, 14 ; his position among the Baptists, 140 147 ; his second persecution, and the overtures made to him, 147 148 ; his death and burial-place, 148 ; his fame, 14 143 ; his imitators, 143 150 ; his style, 200 ; his religious enthusiasm and imagery, 333 Southey's edition of his Pilgrim's Progress reviewed, 253 207 ; peculiarities of the work, 200 ; not a perfect allegory, 257 258 ; its publication, and the number of its editions, 145 140

Buonaparte. See Napoleon.

Burgoyne, Gen., chairman of the committee of inquiry on Lord Clive, 232

Burgundy, Louis, Duke of, grandson of Louis XIV., iii. 02, 03.

Burke, Edmund, his characteristics, 133 ; his opinion of the war with Spain on the question of maritime right, 210 ; resembles Bacon, 483 ; effect of his speeches on the House of Commons, 118 ; not the author of the Letters of Junius, 37 ; his charges against Hastings, 104 137 ; his kindness to Alisa Burney, 288 ; her incivility to him at Hastings' trial, 28 ; his early political career, 75 ; his first speech in the House of Commons, 82 ; his opposition to Chatham's measures relating to India, 30 ; his defence of his party against Grenville's attacks, 102 ; his feeling towards Chatham, 103 ; his treatise on "The Sublime," 142 ; his character of the French Republic, 402 ; his views of the French and American revolutions, 51 208 ; his admiration of Pitt's maiden speech, 233 ; his opposition to Fox's India bill, 245 ; in the opposition to Pitt, 247 243 ; deserts Fox, 273

Burleigh and his Times, review of Lev. Dr. Xarea's, 1 30 ; his early life and character, 3 10 ; his death, 10 ; importance of the times in which he lived, 10 ; the great stain on his character, 31 ; character of the class of statesmen he belonged to, 343 ; his conduct towards Bacon, 355 305 ; his apology for having resorted to torture, 333 Bacon's letter to him upon the department of knowledge he had chosen, 483

Burnet, Bishop, 114

Burney, Dr., his social position, 251 255 ; his conduct relative to his daughter's first publication. 207 ; his daughter's engagement at Court, 281

Burney, Frances. See D'Arblay, Madame.

Burns, Robert, 201

Bussy, his eminent merit and conduct in India, 222

Bute, Earl of, his character and education, 13 20 ; appointed Secretary of State, 24 ; opposes the proposal of war with Spain on account of the family compact, 30 ; his unpopularity on Chatham's resignation, 31 ; becomes Prime Minister, 30 ; his first speech in the House of Lords, 33 ; induces the retirement of the Duke of Newcastle, 35 ; becomes first Lord of the Treasury, 35 ; his foreign and domestic policy, 37 52 ; his resignation, 52 ; continues to advise the King privately, 57 70 79 ; pensions Johnson, 198 199

Butler, 350 Addison not inferior to him in wit, 375

Byng, Admiral, his failure at Minorca. 232 ; his trial, 236 ; opinion of his conduct, 236 Chatham's defence of him, 237

Byron, Lord, his epistolary style, 325 ; his character, 326 327 ; his early life, 327 ; his quarrel with, and separation from, his wife, 329331; his expatriation, 332 ; decline of his intellectual powers, 333 ; his attachment to Italy and Greece, 335 ; his sickness and death, 336 ; general grief for his fate, 336 ; remarks on his poetry, 336 ; his admiration of the Hope school of poetry, 337 : his opinion of Wordsworth and Coleridge, 352 ; of Deter Bell, 353 ; his estimate of the poetry of the 18th and 19th centuries, 353 ; his sensitiveness to criticism, 354 ; the interpreter between Wordsworth and the multitude, 356 ; the founder of an exoteric Lake, school, 356 ; remarks on his dramatic works, 357 363 ; his egotism, 365 ; cause of his influence, 336 337

---

C.

Cabal (the), their proceedings and designs, 46 54 59

Cabinets, in modern times, 65 235

Cadiz, exploit of Essex at the siege of, 107 367 ; its pillage by the English expedition in 170 108

Cæsar Borgia, 307

Cæsar, Claudius, resemblance of James I. to, 440

Cæsar compared with Cromwell, 504 ; his Commentaries an incomparable model for military despatches, 404

Cæsars (the), parallel between them and the Tudors, not applicable, 21

Calcutta, its position on the Hoogley, 230 ; scene of the Black Hole of, 232 233 ; resentment of the English at its fall, 235 ; again threatened by Surajah Dow lab, 239 ; revival of its prosperity, 251 ; its sufferings during the famine, 285 ; its capture, 8 ; its suburbs infested by robbers, 41 ; its festivities on Hastings's marriage, 56

Callicles, 41 ; note.

Calvinism, moderation of Bunyan's, 263 ; held by the Church of England at the end of the 16 ; century, 175 ; many of its doctrines contained in the Paulieian theology, 309

Cambon, 455

Cambridge, University of, favored by George I. and George II., 36 37 ; its superiority to Oxford in intellectual activity, 344 ; disturbances produced in, by the Civil War, 15

Cambyses, story of his punishment of the corrupt judge, 423

Camden, Lord, v 233 247

Camilla, Madame D'Arblay's, 314

Campaign (the), by Addison, 355

Canada, subjugation of, by the British in 176 244

Canning, Mr., 45 46 286 411 414 419

Cape Breton, reduction of, 244

Carafla, Gian Pietro, afterwards Pope Paul, IV. his zeal and devotion, 318 324

Carlisle, Lady, 478

Carmagnoles, Bariere's, 471 472 490 491 498 499 502 505 529

Carnatic, (the), its resources, 211 212 ; its invasion by Hvder Ali, 71 72

Carnot, 455 505

Carnot, Hippolyte, his memoirs of Barrere reviewed, 423 539 ; failed to notice the falsehoods of his author, 430 431 435 557 ; his charitableness to him, 445 485 ; defends his proposition for murdering prisoners, 490 ; blinded by party spirit, 523 ; defends the Jacobin administration, 534 ; his general characteristics, 53 539

Carrier, 404

Carteret, Lord, his ascendency at the fall of Walpole, 184 Sir Horatio Walpole's stories about him, 187 ; his detection from Sir Robert Walpole, 202 ; succeeds Walpole, 210 ; his character as a statesman, 218 220

Carthagena, surrender of the arsenal and ship of, to the Allies, 111

Cary's translation of Dante, 68 78 70

Casiua (the), of Ilautus, 298

Castile. Admiral of, 100

Castile and Arragon, their old institutions favorable to public liberty, 86

Castilians, their character in the 16th century, 81 ; their conduct in the war of the Succession, 121 ; attachment to the faith of their ancestors, 316

Castracani, Castruccio, Life of, by Machiavelli, 317

Cathedral, Lincoln, painted window in, 428

Catholic Association, attempt of the Tories to put it down, 413

Catholic Church. See Church of Home.

Catholicism, causes of its success, 301 307 318, 331 336 ; the most poetical of all religions, 65

Catholics, Roman, Pitt's policy respecting, 280 281

Catholics and dews, the same reasoning employed against both, 312

Catholics and Protestants, their relative numbers in the 16th century, 26

Catholic Queen (a), precautions against, 487

Catholic Question (the), 413 410

Catiline, his conspiracy doubted, 405 ; compared to the Popish Plot, 406

"Cato," Addison's play of, its merits, and the contest it occasioned, 333 ; its first representation, 391 ; its performance at Oxford, 392 ; its deficiencies, 365 366

Cato, the censor, anecdote of, 354

Catullus, his mythology, 75

Cavaliers, their successors in the reign of George I. turned demagogues, 4

Cavendish, Lord, his conduct in the new council of Temple, 96 ; his merits, 73

Cecil. See Burleigh.

Cecil, Robert, his rivalry with Francis Bacon, 356 365 ; his fear and envy of Essex, 362 ; increase of his dislike for Bacon, 365 ; his conversation with Essex, 365 ; his interference to obtain knighthood for Bacon, 384

Cecilia, Madame D'Arblay's, 369 311 ; specimen of its style, 315 316

Censorship, existed in some form from Henry VIII. to the Revolution, 329

Ceres, 54 ; note.

Cervantes, 81 ; his celebrity, 80 the perfection of his art, 328 329 ; fails as a critic, 329

Chalmers, Dr., Mr. Gladstone's opinion of his defence of the Church, 122

Champion, Colonel, commander of the Bengal army, 32

Chandemagore, French settlement, on the Hoogley, 230 ; captured by the English, 239

Charlemagne, imbecility of his successors, 205

Charles, Archduke, his claim to the Spanish crown, 90 ; takes the field in support of it, 10 ; accompanies Peterborough in his expedition, 112 ; his success in the north-east of Spain, 117 ; is proclaimed king at Madrid, 119 ; his reverses and retreat, 123 ; his re-entry into Madrid, 126 ; his unpopularity, 127 ; concludes a peace, 131 ; forms an alliance with Philip of Spain, 138

Charles I., lawfulness of the resistance to, 235 243 Milton's defence of his execution, 246 249 ; his treatment of the Parliament of 164 457 ; his treatment of Stratford, 468 ; estimate of his character, 469 498 500 443 ; his tall, 497 ; his condemnation and its consequences, 500 501 Hampden's opposition to him, and its consequences, 443 459 ; resistance of the Scots to him, 460 ; his increasing difficulties, 461 ; his conduct towards the House of Commons, 477 482 ; his flight, 488 ; review of his conduct and treatment, 484 488 ; reaction in his favor during the Long Parliament, 410 ; effect of the victory over him on the national character, 7 8

Charles I. and Cromwell, choice between, 490

Charles II., character of his reign, 251 ; his foreign subsidies, 528 ; his situation in 1000 contrasted with that of Lewis XVIII., 282 283 ; his character, 290 30 80 ; his position towards the king of France, 290 ; consequences of his levity and apathy, 299 300 ; his court compared with that of his father, 29 ; his extravagance, 34 ; his subserviency to France, 37 44 46 ; his renunciation of the dispensing power, 55 ; his relations with Temple, 58 60 63 97 ; his system of bribery of the Commons, 71 ; his dislike of Halifax, 90 ; his dismissal of Temple, 97 ; his characteristics, 349 ; his influence upon English literature, 349 350 ; compared with Philip of Orleans, Regent of France, 64 65 Banyan's gratitude to him, 143 ; his social disposition, 374

Charles II. of Spain, his unhappy condition, 88 93 100 ; his difficulties in respect to the succession, 88 93

Charles III. of Spain, his hatred of England, 29

Charles V., 316 350

Charles VIII., 483

Charles XII., compared with Clive, 297

Charlotte, Queen, obtains the attendance of Miss Burney, 279 ; her partisanship for Hastings, 288 290 ; her treatment of Miss Burney, 298 297

Chateaubriand, his remark about the person of Louis XIV., 58 ; note.

Chatham, Earl of, character of his public life, 196 197 ; his early life, 198 ; his travels, 199 ; enters the army 199 ; obtains a seat in Parliament, 200 ; attaches himself to the Whigs in opposition, 207 ; his qualities as an orator, 211 213 ; dismissed from the army, 215 ; is made Groom of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales, 161 ; declaims against the ministers, 218 ; his opposition to Carteret, 219 ; legacy left him by the Duchess of Marlborough, 219 ; supports the Pelham ministry, 220 ; appointed Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, 221 ; overtures made to him by Newcastle, 280 ; made Secretary of State, 235 ; defends Admiral Byng, 237 ; coalesces with the Duke of Newcastle, 230 ; success of his administration, 230-250; his appreciation of Clive, 260 289 ; breach between him and the great Whig connection, 289 ; review of his correspondence, 1 ; in the zenith of prosperity and glory, 221 222 ; his coalition with Newcastle, 7 ; his strength in Parliament, 13 ; jealousies in his cabinet, 25 ; his defects, 26 ; proposes to declare war against Spain oil account of the family compact, 29 ; rejection of his counsel, 30 ; his resignation, 30 ; the king's gracious behavior to him, 30 ; public enthusiasm towards him, 31 ; his conduct in opposition, 33 46 ; his speech against peace with France and Spain, 49 ; his unsuccessful audiences with George III. to form an administration, 58 Sir William Pynsent bequeaths his whole property to him, 63 ; bad state of his health, 64 ; is twice visited by the Duke of Cumberland with propositions from the king, 68 72 ; his condemnation of the American Stamp Act, 77 78 ; is induced by the king to assist in ousting Rockingham, 86 ; morbid state of his mind, 87 88 95 99 ; undertakes to form an administration, 89 ; is created Earl of Chatham, 91 ; failure of his ministerial arrangements, 91 99 ; loss of his popularity, and of his foreign influence, 99 ; his despotic manners, 89 93 ; lays an embargo on the exportation of corn, 95 ; his first speech in the Mouse of Lords, 95 ; his supercilious conduct towards the Peers, 95 ; his retirement from office, 100 ; his policy violated, 101 ; resigns the privy seal, 100 ; stale of parties and of public affairs on his recovery, 100 301 ; his political relations, 101 ; his eloquence not suited to the House of Lords, 104 ; opposed the recognition of the independence of the United States, 107 ; his last appearance in the House of Lords, 108 22 ; his death, 100 230 ; reflections on his fall, 100 ; his funeral in Westminster Abbey, lit.; compared with Mirabeau, 72 73

Chatham, Earl of, (the second), 230 ; made First Lord of the Admiralty, 270

Cherbourg, guns taken from, 245

Chesterfield, Lord, his dismissal by Walpole, 204 ; prospectus of Johnson's Dictionary addressed to him, 187 188 ; pulls it in the World, 194

Cheyte Sing, a vassal of the government of Cennigal, 75 ; his large revenue and suspected treasure, 79 Hastings's policy in desiring to punish him. 80 ; to 85 ; his treatment made the successful charge against Hastings, 118

Chillingworth, his opinion on apostolical succession, 172 ; became a Catholic from conviction, 306

Chinese (the) compared to the Homans under Diocletian, 415 416

Chinsurab, Dutch settlement on the Hoogley, 230 ; its siege by the English and capitulation. 259

Chivalry, its form in Languedoc in the 12th century, 308 309

Cholmondeley, Mrs., 271

Christchurch College. Oxford, its repute after the Revolution, 108 ; issues a new edition of the Letters of Phalaris, 108 116 118 ; its condition under Atterbury, 121 122

Christianity, its alliance with the ancient philosophy, 444 ; light in which it was regarded hv the Italians at the Reformation, 316 ; its effect upon mental activity; 416

Christophe, 390 391

Church (the), in the time of James II., 520

Church (the), Southey's Hook of, 137

Church, the English, persecutions in her name, 443 High and Low Church parties, 362 119 120

Church of England, its origin and connection with the state, 452 453 190 ; its condition in the time of Charles 1 , 166 ; endeavor of the leading Whigs at the Revolution to alter its Liturgy and Articles, 321 178 ; its contest with the Scotch nation, 322 Mr. Gladstone's work in defence of it, 116 ; his arguments for its being the pure Catholic Church of Christ, 161 166 ; its claims to apostolical succession discussed, 166 178 ; views respecting its alliance with the state, 183 193 ; contrast of its operations during the two generations succeeding the Reformation, with those of the Church of Rome, 331 332

Church of Rome, its alliance with ancient philosophy, 444 ; causes of its success and vitality, 300 301 ; sketch of its history, 307 349

Churchill, Charles, 519 42 200

Cicero, partiality of Dr. Middleton towards, 340 ; the most eloquent and skilful of advocates, 340 ; his epistles in his banishment, 361 ; his opinion of the study of rhetoric, 472 ; as a critic, 142

Cider, proposal of a tax on, by the Bute administration, 50

Circumstances, effect of, upon character, 322 323 325

"City of the Violet Crown," a favorite epithet of Athens, 36 ; note.

Civil privileges and political power identical, 311

Civil War (the), Cowley and Milton's imaginary conversation about, 112 138 ; its evils the price of our liberty, 243 ; conduct of the Long Parliament in reference to it, 470 495 496

Civilization, only peril to can arise from misgovernment, 41 42 England's progress in, due to the people, 187 ; modern, its influence upon philosophical speculation, 417 418

Clarendon, Lord, his history, 424 ; his character, 521 ; his testimony in favor of Hampden, 448 468 472 41 493 ; his literary merit, 338 ; his position at the head of affairs, 29 31 37 38 ; his faulty style, 50 ; his opposition to the growing power of the Commons, 73 ; his temper, 74 ; the charge against Christ-Churchmen of garbling his history, 130

Clarke, Dr. Samuel, 303

Clarkson, Thomas, 309

Classics, ancient, celebrity of, 139 ; rarely examined on just principles of criticism, 139 ; love of, in Italy in the 14th century, 278

Classical studies, their advantages and defects considered, 347 354

Clavering, General, 35 ; his opposition to Hastings, 40 47 ; his appointment as Governor General, 54 ; his defeat, 56 ; his death, 57

Cleveland, Duchess of, her favor to Wycherly and Churchill, 372 373

Clifford, Lord, his character, 47 ; his retirement, 55 56 ; his talent for debate, 72

Clive, Lord, review of Sir John Malcolm's Life of, 194 298 ; his family and boyhood, 196 197 ; his shipment to India, 198 ; his arrival at Madras and position there, 200 ; obtains an ensign's commission in the Company's service, 203 ; his attack, capture, and defence of Arcot, 215 219 ; his subsequent proceedings, 220 221 223 ; his marriage and return to England,224; his reception, 225 ; enters Parliament, 226 ; return to India, 228 ; his subsequent proceedings, 228 236 ; his conduct towards Ormichund, 238 241 247, 248 ; his pecuniary acquisitions, 251 ; his transactions with Meer Jaffier, 240 246 254 ; appointed Governor of the Company's possessions in Bengal, 255 ; his dispersion of Shah Alum's army, 256 257 ; responsibility of his position, 259 ; his return to England, 260 ; his reception, 260 261 ; his proceedings at the India House, 263 265 269 ; nominated Governor of the British possessions in Bengal. 270 ; his arrival at Calcutta, 270 ; suppresses a conspiracy, 275 276 ; success of his foreign policy, 276 ; his return to England, 279 ; his unpopularity and its causes, 279 285 ; invested with the Grand Cross of the Bath, 292 ; his speech in his defence, and its consequence, 289 290 292 ; his life in retirement, 291 ; reflections on his career, 296 ; failing of his mind, and death by his own hand, 296

Clizia, Machiavelli's, 298

Clodius, extensive bribery at the trial of, 421

"Clouds" (the), of Aristophanes, 383

Club-room, Johnson's, 425 159

Coalition of Chatham and Newcastle, 243

Cobham, Lord, his malignity towards Essex, 380

Coke, Sir E., his conduct towards Bacon, 357 406 ; his opposition to Bacon in Peacham's case, 389 390 ; his experience in conducting state prosecutions, 392 ; his removal from the Bench, 406 ; his reconciliation with Buckingham, and agreement to marry his daughter to Buckingham's brother, 406 ; his reconciliation with Bacon, 408 ; his behavior to Bacon at his trial, 427

Coleridge, relative "correctness" of his poetry, 339 Byron's opinion of him, 352 ; his satire upon Pitt, 271

Coligni, Caspar de, reference to, 67

Collier, Teremy, sketch of his life, 393 396 ; his publication on the profaneness of the English stage, 396 399 ; his controversy with Congreve, 401

Colloquies on Society, Southey's, 132 ; plan of the work. 141 142

Collot, D'llerbois, 475 489 49S, 501 504 506 508 510

Colonies, 83 ; question of the competency of Parliament to tax them, 77 78

Comedy (the), of England, effect of the writings of Congreve and Sheridan upon, 295

Comedies, Dryden's, 360

Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, 350-411; how he exercised a great influence on the human mind, 351

Conimes, his testimony to the good government of England, 434

Commerce and manufactures, their extent in Italy in the 14th century, 270 ; condition of, during the war at the latter part of the reign of George II., 247

Committee of Public Safety, the French, 403 475 503

Commons, House of, increase of its power, 532 ; increase of its power by and since the Revolution, 325

Commonwealth, 335

Cornus, Milton's, 215 218

Conceits of Petrarch, 89 90 ; of Shakspeare and the writers of his age, 342 344 347

Coudé, Marshal, compared with Clive, 237

Condensation, had effect of enforced upon composition, 152

Condorcet, 452 475

Contians, Admiral, his defeat by Hawke, 245

Congreve, his birth and early life, 387 ; sketch of his career at the Temple, 388 ; his "Old Bachelor," 389 "Double Dealer," 39 ; success of his "Love for Love," 391 ; his "Mourning Bride," 392 ; his controversy with Collier, 397 400 403 ; his "Way of the World," 403 ; his later years, 404 405 ; his position among mem of letters, 400 ; his attachment to Mrs. Bracegirdle, 407 ; his friendship with the Duchess of Marlborough, 408 ; hi; death and capricious will, 408 ; his funeral in Westminster Abbey, 409 ; cenotaph to his memory at Stowe, 409 ; analogy between him and Wycherley, 410

Congreve and Sheridan, effect of their works upon the comedy of England, 295 ; contrasted with Shakspeare, 295

Conquests of the British arms in 175 244 245

Constance, council of, put an end to the Wickliffe schism, 313

Constantinople, mental stagnation in, 417

Constitution (the), of England, in the 15th and 18th centuries, compared with those of other European states, 470 477 ; the argument that it would he destroyed by admitting the dews to power, 307, 308 ; its theory in respect to the three branches of the legislature, 25 20 410

Constitutional government, decline of. on the Continent, early in the 17th century, 481

Constitutional History of England, review of llaltam's, 433 543

Constitutional Royalists in the reign of Charles L, 474 483

Convention, the French, 449 475

Conversation, the source of logical inaccuracy, 148 383 384 ; imaginary, between Cowley and Milton touching the great Civil War, 112 138

Conway, Henry, vi. 02; Secretary of State under Lord Rockingham, 74 ; returns to his position under Chatham, 91 95 ; sank into insignificance 100

Conway, Marshal, his character, 200

Cooke, Sir Anthony, his learning, 349

Cooperation, advantages of. 184

Coote, Sir Eyre, 1 ; his character and conduct in council, 62 ; his great victory of Porto Novo, 74

Corah, ceded to the Mogul, 27

Corday, Charlotte, 400

Corneille, his treatment by the French Academy, 23

"Correctness" in the fine arts and in the sciences, 339 343 ; in painting. 343 ; what is meant by it in poetry, 339 343

Corruption, parliamentary, not necessary to the Tudors, 108 ; its extent in the reigns of George I. and II. 21 23

Corsica given up to France, 100

Cossimbazar, its situation and importance, 7

Cottabus, a Greek game, 30 ; note.

Council of York, its abolition, 409

Country Wife of Wycherley, its character and merits, 370 ; whence borrowed, 385

Courtenay, Rt. Hon. T. P., review of his Memoirs of Sir William Temple, 115 ; his concessions to Dr. Lingard in regard to the Triple Alliance, 41 ; his opinion of Temple's proposed new council, 65 ; his error as to Temple's residence, 100

Cousinhood, nickname of the official members of the Temple family, 13

Coutlion, 466 475 498

Covenant, the Scotch, 460

Covenanters, (the), their conclusion of treaty with Charles I., 460

Coventry, Lady, 262

Cowley, dictum of Denham concerning him, 203 ; deficient in imagination, 211 ; his wit, 162 375 ; his admiration of Bacon, 492 493 ; imaginary conversation between him and 21 ; about the Civil War, 112 138

Cowper, Earl, keeper of the Great Seal, 361

Cowper, William, 349 ; his praise of Pope, 351 ; his friendship with Warren Hastings, 5 ; neglected, 261

Cox, Archdeacon, his eulogium on Sir Robert Walpole, 173

Coyer, Abbé, his imitation of Voltaire, 377

Crabbe, George, 261

Craggs, Secretary, 227 ; succeeds Addison, 413 Addison dedicates his works to him, 418

Cranmer, Archbishop, estimate of his character, 448 449

Crebillon, the younger, 155

Crisis, Steele's, 403

Crisp, Samuel, his early career, 259 ; his tragedy of Virginia, 261 ; his retirement and seclusion, 264 ; his friendship with the Burneys, 265 ; his gratification at the success of Miss Burney's first work, 269 ; his advice to her upon her comedy, 273 ; his applause of her "Cecilia," 275

Criticism, Literary, principles of, not universally recognized, 21 ; rarely applied to the examination of the ancient classics, 139 ; causes of its failure when so applied, 143 ; success in, of Aristotle, 140 Dionysius, 141 Quintilian, 141 142 Longinus, 142 143 Cicero, 142 ; ludicrous instance of French criticism, 144 ; ill success of classical scholars who have risen above verbal criticism, 144 ; their lack of taste and judgment, 144 ; manner in which criticism is to be exercised upon oratorical efforts, 149 151 ; criticism upon Dante, 55 79 Petrarch, 80-99; a rude state of society, favorable to genius, but not to criticism, 57 58 325 ; great writers are bad critics, 76 328 ; effect of upon poetry, 338 ; its earlier stages, 338 339 ; remarks on Johnson's code of, 417

Critics professional, their influence over the reading public, 196

Croker, Mr., his edition of Boswell's Life of Dr. Johnson, reviewed, 368 426

Cromwell and Charles, choice between, 496

Cromwell and Napoleon, remarks on Mr. Hallam's parallel between, 504 510

Cromwell, Henry, description of, 17

Cromwell, Oliver, his elevation to power, 502 ; his character as a legislator, 504 ; as a general, 504 ; his administration and its results, 509 510 ; embarked with Hampden for America, but not suffered to proceed, 459 ; his qualities, 496 ; his administration, 286 292 ; treatment of his remains, 289 ; his ability displayed in Ireland, 25 27 ; anecdote of his sitting for his portrait, 2

Cromwell, Richard, 15

Crown (the) veto by, on Acts of Parliament, 487 488 ; its control over the army, 489 ; its power in the 16th century, 15 ; curtailment of its prerogatives, 169 171 ; its power predominant at beginning of the 17th century, 70 ; decline of its power during the Pensionary Parliament, 71 ; its long contest with the Parliament put an end to by the Revolution, 78 ; see also Prerogative.

Crusades (the), their beneficial effect upon Italy, 275

Crusoe, Robinson, the work of an uneducated genius, 57 ; its effect upon the imaginations of children, 331

Culpeper, Mr., 474

Cumberland, the dramatist, his manner of acknowledging literary merit, 270

Cumberland, Duke of, 260 ; the confidential friend rif Henry Fox, 44 ; confided in by George II., 67 ; his character, * 67 ; mediated between the King and the Whigs, 68

---

D.

Dacier, Madame, 338

D'Alembert, 23 Horace Walpole's opinion of him, 156

Dallas, Chief Justice, one of the counsel for Hastings on his trial, 27

Dauby, Earl, His connection with Temple, abilities and character, 57 ; impeached and sent to the Tower; owed his office and dukedom to his talent in debate, 72

Danger, public, a certain amount of, will warrant a retrospective law, 470

Dante, criticism upon, 55 79 ; the earliest and greatest writer of his country, 55 ; first to attempt composition in the Italian language, 56 ; admired in his own and the following age, 58 ; but without due appreciation, 59 329 330 ; unable to appreciate himself, 58 Simon's remark about him, 58 ; his own age unable to comprehend the Divine Comedy, 59 ; bad consequence to Italian literature of the neglect of his style down to the time of Alfieri, 60 61 ; period of his birth, 62 ; characteristics of his native city, 63 64 ; his relations to his age, 66 ; his personal history, 60 ; his religious fervor, his gloomy temperament, 67 ; his Divine Comedy, 67 220 277 ; his description of Heaven inferior to those of Hell or Purgatory, 67 ; his reality, the source of his power, 68 69 ; compared with Milton, 68 69 220 ; his metaphors and comparisons, 70 72 ; little impressed by the forms of the external world, 72 74 ; dealt mostly with the sterner passions, 74 ; his use of the ancient mythology, 75 76 ; ignorant of the Greek language, 76 ; his style, 77 78 ; his translators, 78 ; his admiration of writers inferior to himself, 329 ; of Virgil, 329 "correctness," of his poetry, 338 ; story from, 3

Danton, compared with Barere, 426 ; his death, 481 482

D'Arblay, Madame, review of her Diary and Letters, 248 320 ; wide celebrity of her name, 248 ; her Diary, 250 ; her family, 250 251 ; her birth and education, 252 254 ; her father's social position, 254- 257 ; her first literary efforts, 258 ; her friendship with Mr. Crisp, 259 265 ; publication of her "Evelina," 266 268 ; her comedy, "The Witlings," 273 274 ; her second novel, "Cecilia," 275 ; death of her friends Crisp and Johnson, 275 276 ; her regard for Mrs. Dernny. 276 ; her interview with the king and queen, 277 278 ; accepts the situation of keeper of the robes, 279 ; sketch of her life in this position, 279 287 ; attends at Warren Hastings' trial, 288 ; her espousal of the cause of Hastings, 288 ; her incivility to Windham and Burke, 288 289 ; her sufferings during her keepership, 290 294 300 ; her marriage, and close of the Diary, 301 ; publication of "Camilla," 302 ; subsequent events in her life, 302 303 ; publication of "The Wanderer," 303 ; her death, 303 ; character of her writings, 303 318 ; change in her style, 311 314 ; specimens of her three styles, 315 316 ; failure of her later works, 318 ; service she rendered to the English novel, 319 320

Dashwood, Sir Francis, Chancellor of the Exchequer under Bute, 36 ; his inefficiency, 51

David, d'Angers, his memoirs of Barère reviewed, 423 539

Davies, Tom, 384

Davila, one of Hampden's favorite authors, 450

Davlesford, site of the estate of the Hastings family, 5 ; its purchase and adornment by Hastings, 142

De Angmentis Scientiarium, by Bacon, 388 433

Debates in Parliament, effects of their publication, 538

Debt, the national, effect of its abrogation, 153 England's capabilities in respect to it, 186

Declaration of Bight, 317 "Declaration of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert Earl of Essex," by Lord Macon, 373

Dedications, literary, more honest than formerly, 191

Defoe, Daniel, 57

De. Guignes, 256

Delany, Dr., his connection with Swift, 276 ; his widow, and her favor with the royal family, 276 277

Delhi, its splendor during the Mogul empire, 204

Delium. battle of, 21

Demerville, 521

Democracy, violence in its advocates induces reaction, 11 ; pure, characteristics of, 513 514

Democritus the reputed inventor of the arch, 438 Macon's estimate of him, 439

Demosthenes, Johnson's remark, that he spoke to a people of brutes, 146 ; transcribed Thucydides six times, 147 ; he and his contemporary orators compared to the Italian Condottieri, 156 Mitford's misrepresentation of him, 191 193 195 197; perfection of his speeches, 376 ; his remark about bribery, 428

Denham, dictum of, concerning Cowley, 203 ; illustration from, 61

Denmark, contrast of its progress to the retrogression of Portugal, 340

Dennis, John, his attack upon Addison's "Plato", 393 Pope's narrative of his Frenzy, 394 395

"Deserted Village" (the), Goldsmith's, 162 163

Desmoulin's Camille, 483

Devonshire, Duchess of, 126

Devonshire, Duke of, forms an administration after the resignation of Newcastle, 235 Lord Chamberlain under Bute, 38 ; dismissed from his lord-lieutenancy, 47 ; his son invited to court by the king, 71

Dewey, Dr., his views upon slavery in the West Indies, 393 401

Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay, reviewed, 248 320

Dice, 13 ; note.

Dionvsius, of Halicarnassus, 141 413

Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, 178 143

Discussion, free, its tendency, 167

Dissent, its extent in the time of Charles I., 168 ; cause of, in England, 333 ; avoidance of in the Church of Rome, 334 ; see also Church of England.

Dissenters (the), examination of the reasoning of Mr. Gladstone for their exclusion from civil offices, 147 155

Disturbances, public, during Grenville's administration, 70

Divine Right, 236

Division of labor, its necessity, 123 ; illustration of the effects of disregarding it, 123

Dodington, Mubb, 13 ; his kindness to Johnson, 191

Donne, John, comparison of his wit with Horace Walpole's, 163

Dorset, the Earl of, 350 ; the patron of literature in the reign of Charles IL, 400 376

Double Dealer, by Congreve, its reception, 390 ; his defence of its profaneness, 401

Dougan, John, his report on the captured negroes, 362 ; his humanity, 363 ; his return home and death, 363 Major Morly's charges against him.

Dover, Lord, review of his edition of Horace Walpole's Letters to Sir Horace Maim, 143 193 ; see Walpole, Sir Horace.

Dowdeswell, Mr., Chancellor of the Exchequer under Lord Rockingham, 74

Drama (the), its origin in Greece, 216 ; causes of its dissolute character soon after the Restoration, 366 ; changes of style which it requires, 365

Dramas, Greek, compared with the English plays of the age of Elizabeth, 339

Dramatic art, the unities violated in all the great masterpieces of, 341

Dramatic literature shows the state of contemporary religious opinion, 29

Dramatic Works (the), of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, review of Leigh Hunt's edition of, 350, 411

Dramatists of the Elizabethan age, characteristics of, 344 346 ; manner in which they treat religious subjects, 211

Drogheda, Countess of, her character, acquaintance with Wycherley, and marriage, 370 ; its consequences, 377

Dryden, John, review of his works, 321 370 ; his rank among poets, 321 ; highest in the second rank of poets, 317; his characteristics, 821 ; his relations to his times, 321 322 351 ; greatest of the critical poets, 351 317 ; characteristics of the different stages in his literary career, 352 ; the year 1078 the date of the change in his manner, 352 ; his Annus Mirabilis, 353 355 ; he resembles Lucan. 355 ; characteristics of his rhyming plays, 355 301 308; his comic characters, 350 ; the women of his comedies, 350 ; of his tragedies, 357 358; his tragic characters, 350 357 ; his violations of historical propriety, 358 ; and of nature, 351 ; his tragicomedies, 351 ; his skill in the management of the heroic couplets, 300 ; his comedies, 300 ; his tragedies, 300 301; his bombast, 301 302 ; his imitations of the earlier dramatists unsuccessful, 302 304 ; his Song of the Fairies. 304 ; his second manner, 305 307 ; the improvement in his plays, 305 ; his power of reasoning in verse, 300 308 ; ceased to write for the stage, 307 ; after his death English literature retrograded, 307 ; his command of language, 307 ; excellences of his style, 308 ; his appreciation of his contemporaries, 309 ; and others, 381 ; of Addison and of Milton, 309 370 ; his dedications, 309 370 ; his taste, 370 371 ; his carelessness, 371 ; the Hind and the Panther, 371 372 Absalom and Ahithophel, 372 83 85 ; his resemblance to Juvenal and to Boileau, 372 373 ; his part in the political disputes of his times, 373 ; the Ode on St. Cecilia's Day, 374 ; general characteristics of his style, 374 375 ; his merits not adequately appreciated in his own day, 191 ; alleged improvement in English poetry since his time, 347 ; the connecting link of the literary schools of James I. and Anne, 355 ; his excuse for the indecency and immorality of his writings, 355 ; his friendship for Congreve and lines upon his Double Dealer, 390 ; censured by Collier, 398 400 Addison's complimentary verses to him, 322 ; and critical preface to his translation of the Georgies, 335 ; the original of his Father Dominic, 290

Dublin, Archbishop of, his work on Logic, 477

Dumont, 51 , his Recollections of Mirabeau reviewed, 37 74 ; his general characteristics, 37 41 ; his view's upon the French Revolution, 41 43 44 40 ; his services in it, 47 ; his personal character, 74 ; his style, 73 74 ; his opinion that Burke's work on the French Revolution had saved Europe, 44 204 ; as the interpreter of Ilentham, 38 40 153

Dunourier, 453 402 481

Dundas, Sir., his character, and hostility to Hastings, 108 120 ; eulogizes Pitt, 234 ; becomes his most useful assistant in the House of Commons, 247 ; patronizes Burns, 231

"Duodecim Seriptre," a Roman game, 4 ; note.

Dupleix, governor of Pondicherry, his gigantic schemes for establishing French influence in India, 202 209 212 220 222 228 ; his death, 228 294

Duroc, 522

---

E.

East India Companv, its absolute authority in India, 240 ; its condition when Clive lirst went to India, 198 200 ; its war with the French East India Companv, 202 ; increase of its power, 220 ; its factories in Bengal, 230 ; fortunes made by its servants in Bengal, 205 200 ; its servants transferred into diplomatists and generals, 8 ; nature of its government and power, 10 17 ; rights of the Nabob of Oude over Benares ceded to it 75 ; its financial embarrassments, 80 Fox's proposed alteration in its charter, 244 247

Ecclesiastical commission (the), 100

Ecclesiastics, fondness of the old dramatists for the character of, 29

Eden, pictures of, in old Bibles, 343 ; painting of, by a gifted master, 343

Edinburgh, comparison of with Florence, 340

Education in England in the 18th century, 354 ; duty of the government in promoting it, 182 183 ; principles of should be progressive, 343 344 ; characteristics of in the Universities, 344 345 355 300 ; classical, its advantages and defects discussed, 340 ; to: 354

Education in Italy in the 14th century, 277

Egerton, his charge of corruption against Bacon, 413 Bacon's decision against him after receiving his present, 430

Egotism, why so unpopular in conversation, and so popular in writing, 81 82 305

Eldon, Lord, 422 420

Elephants, use of, in war in India, 218

Eleusinian mysteries, 49 54 Alcibiades suspected of having assisted at a mock celebration of, 49 ; note; crier and torch-bearer important functionaries at celebration of, 53 ; note.

"Eleven" (the), police of Athens, 34 ; note.

Eliot, Sir John, 440-448; his treatise oil Government, 449 ; died a martyr to liberty, 451

Elizabeth (Queen), fallacy entertained respecting the persecutions under her, 439 441 ; her penal laws, 441 ; arguments in favor of, on the head of persecution, apply with more force to Mary, 450 ; to: 452 ; condition of the working classes in her reign, 175 437 ; her rapid advance of Cecil, 8 ; character of her government, 10 18 22 32 ; a persecutor though herself indifferent, 31 32 ; her early notice of Lord Bacon, 353 ; her favor towards Essex, 301 ; factions at the close of her reign, 302 363 382 ; her pride and temper, 370 397 ; and death, 383 ; progress ill knowledge since her days, 302 ; her Protestantism, 328 29

Ellenborough, Lord, one of the counsel for Hastings on his trial, 127 ; his proclamations, 472

Ellis, W., 235

Elphinstone, Lord, 298

Elwood, Milton's Quaker friend, allusion to, 205

Emigration of Puritans to America, 459

Emigration from England to Ireland under Cromwell, 20

Empires, extensive, often more flourishing alter a little pruning, 83

England, her progress in civilization due to the people, 190 ; her physical and moral condition in the 15th century, 434 435 ; never so rich and powerful as since the loss of her American colonies, 83 ; conduct of, in reference to the Spanish succession, 103 104 ; successive steps of her progress, 279 281 ; influence of her revolution on the human race, 281 321 ; her situation at the Restoration compared with France at the restoration of Louis XVIII., 282 284 ; her early situation, 290 293 301 ; character of her public men at the latter part of the 17th century, 11 ; difference in her situation under Charles II., and under the Protectorate, 32 ; her fertility in heroes and statesmen, 170 ; how her history should be written by a perfect historian, 428 432 ; characteristics of her liberty, 399 ; her strength contrasted with that of France, 24 ; condition of her middle classes, 423 424

English (the), in the 10th century a free people, 18 19 ; their character, 292 300

English language, 308

English literature of that age, 341 342 ; effect of foreign influences upon, 349 350

English plays of the ago of Elizabeth, 344 340 339 "Englishman," Steele's, 403

Enlightenment, its increase in the world not necessarily unfavorable to Catholicism, 301

Enthusiasts, dealings of the Church of Rome and the Church of England with them, 331 330

Epicureans, their peculiar doctrines, 443

Epicurus, the lines on his pedestal, 444

Epistles, Petrarch's, i. 08, 99 ; addressed to the dead and the unborn, 99

Epitaphs, Latin, 417

Epithets, use of by Homer, 354 ; by the old ballad-writers, 354

Ereilla, Alonzo de, a soldier as well as a poet, 81

Essay on Government, by Sir William Temple, 50 ; by James Mills, 5 51

Essays, Bacon's, value of them, 311 7 388 433 481 491

Essex, Earl of, 30 ; his character, popularity and favor with Elizabeth, 301 304 373 ; his political conduct, 304 ; his friendship for Bacon, 305 300 373 397 ; his conversation with Robert Cecil, 305 ; pleads for Bacon's marriage with Lady Hatton, 308 400 ; his expedition to Spain, 307 ; his faults, 308 309 397 ; decline of his fortunes, 308 ; his administration in Ireland, 309 Bacon's faithlessness to him, 309 371 ; his trial and execution, 371 373 ; ingratitude of Bacon towards him, 309 380 398 ; feeling of King James towards him, 384 ; his resemblance to Buckingham, 397

Essex, Earl of, (Ch. I.,) 489 491

Etherege. Sir George, 353

Eugene of Savoy, 143

Euripides, his mother an herb-woman, 45 ; note; his lost plays, 45 ; quotation from, 50 51 ; attacked for the immorality of one of his verses, 51 ; note; his mythology, 75 Quintilian's admiration of him, 141 Milton's, 217 ; emendation of a passage of, 381 ; note; his characteristics, 352

Europe, state of, at the peace of Utrecht, 135 ; want of union in, to arrest the designs of Lewis XIX., 35 ; the distractions of, suspended for a short time by the treaty of Nimeguen, 60 ; its progress during the last seven centuries, 307

Evelina, Madame D'Arblay's, specimen of her style from, 315 310

Evelyn, 31 48

Evils, natural and national, 158

Exchequer, fraud of the Cabal ministry in closing it, 53

Exclusiveness of the Greeks, 411 412 ; of the Romans, 413 410

---

F.

Fable (a), of Pilpay, 188

Fairfax, reserved for him and Cromwell to terminate the civil war, 491

Falkland, Lord, his conduct in respect to the bill of attainder against Strafford, 400 ; his character as a politician, 483 ; at the head of the constitutional Royalists, 474

Family Compact (the), between France and Spain, 138 29

Fanaticism, not altogether evil, 64

Faust, 303

Favorites, royal, always odious, 38

Female Quixote (the), 319

Fenelon, the nature of and standard of morality in his Telemachus, 359

Ferdinand II., his devotion to Catholicism, 329

Ferdinand VII., resemblance between him and Charles I. of England, 488

Fictions, literary, 267

Fidelity, touching instance of, in the Sepoys towards Clive, 210

Fielding, his contempt for Richardson, 201 ; case from his "Amelia," analogous to Addison's treatment of Steele, 370 ; quotation from, illustrative of the effect of Garrick's acting, 332

Filieaja Vincenzio, 300

Finance, Southev's theory of, 150- 155

Finch, Chief Justice to Charles I., 450 ; tied to Holland, 409

Fine Arts (the), encouragement of, in Italy, in the 14th century, 277 ; causes of their decline in England after the civil war, 157 ; government should promote them, 184

Fletcher, the dramatist, 350 308 352

Fletcher, of Saltona, 388 389

Fleury, 170 172

Florence, 63 64 ; difference between a soldier of, and one belonging to a standing army, 61 ; state of, in the 14th century, 276-277; its History, by Maehiavelli, 317 ; compared with Edinburgh, 340

Fluxions, 324

Foote, Charles, his stage character of an Anglo-Indian grandee, 282 ; his mimicry, 305 ; his inferiority to Garrick, 306

Forde, Colonel, 256 259

Forms of government, 412 413

Fox, the family of, 414 415

Fox, Henry, sketch of his political character, 224 229 415 ; directed to form an administration in concert with Chatham, 235 ; applied to by Bute to manage the House of Commons, 43 44 ; his private and public qualities, 45 ; became leader of the House of Commons, 46 ; obtains his promised peerage, 54 ; his unpopularity, 417

Fox, Charles James, comparison of his History of James II. with Mackintosh's History of the Revolution, 252 ; his style, 254 ; characteristic of his oratory, 25G; contrasted with that of Pitt, 25G; his bodily and mental constitution, 415 417 232 ; his championship of arbitrary measures, and defiance of public opinion, 418 ; his change after the death of his father, 418 ; clamor raised against his India Bill, and his defence of it, 107 244 246; his alliance with Burke, and call for peace with the American republic, 110 ; his powerful party, 114 ; his conflicts with Pitt, 115 ; his motion on the charge against Hastings respecting his treatment of Cheyte Sing, 117 ; his appearance on the trial of Hastings, 127 128 ; his rupture with Burke, 136 ; introduces Pitt, when a youth, in the House of Lords, and is struck with his precocity, 229 ; his admiration of Pitt's maiden speech, 233 ; puts up his name at Brookes's, 233 ; becomes Secretary of State, 235 ; resigns, 237 ; forms a coalition with North, 238 241 Secretary of State, but in reality Prime Minister, 241 ; loses popularity, 243 ; resigns, 246 ; leads the opposition, 247 ; maintains the constitutional doctrine in regard to impeachments, 269, 270 ; fails to lead his party to favor the French Revolution, 273 ; his retirement from political life, 278 284 ; opposes Pitt in regard to declaring war against France, 288 ; combines with him against Addington, 290 ; the king refuses to take him as a minister, 291 ; his generous feeling towards Pitt, 296 ; opposes the motion for a public funeral to Pitt, 297

Fragments of a Roman 'Pale, 1 19

France, her history from the time of Louis XIV. to the Revolution, 63 68 ; from the dissolution of the National Assembly to the meeting of the Convention, 446 449 ; from the meeting of the Convention to the Reign of Terror, 449475; during the Reign of Terror, 475 500 ; from the Revolution of the ninth of Thermidor to the Consulate, 500-513; under Napoleon, 513 528 ; illustration from her history since the revolution, 514 ; her condition in 1712 and 183 134 ; her state at the restoration of Louis XVIII., 283 ; enters into a compact with Spain against England, 29 ; recognizes the independence of the United States, 105 ; her strength contrasted with that of England, 24 ; her history during the hundred days, 529 530 ; after the Restoration, 429

Francis, Sir Philip, councillor under the Regulating Act for India, 35 ; his character and talents, 35 36; probability of his being the author of the Letters of Junius, 36 ; to: 39 ; his opposition to Hastings, 40 56 ; his patriotic feeling, and reconciliation with Hastings, 62 ; his opposition to the arrangement with Sir Elijah Impey, 69 ; renewal of his quarrel with Hastings, 69 ; duel with Hastings, 70 ; his return to England, 74 ; his entrance into the House of Commons and character there, 109 117 ; his speech on Mr. Fox's motion relating to Cheyte Sing, 118 ; his exclusion from the committee on the impeachment of Hastings, 123 124

Francis, the Emperor, 14

Franklin, Benjamin, Dr., his admiration for Miss Burney, 211

Franks, rapid fall after the death of Charlemagne, 205 200

Frederic I., 150

Frederic II., iv. 011.

Frederic the Great, review of his Life and Times, by Thomas Campbell, 148 248 ; notice of the House of Brandenburgh, 140 ; birth of Frederic, 152 ; his lather's conduct to him, 153 ; his taste for music, 153 ; his desertion from his regiment. 155 ; his imprisonment, 155 ; his release, 155 ; his favorite abode, 150 ; his amusements, 150 ; his education, 157 ; his exclusive admiration for French writers, 158 ; his veneration for the genius of Voltaire, 100 ; his correspondence with Voltaire, 101 ; his accession to the throne, 102 ; his character little understood, 103 ; his true character, 103 104 ; he determines to invade Silesia, 100 ; prepares for war, 108 ; commences hostilities, 108 105 ; his perfidy, 109 ; occupies Silesia, 171 ; his first battle, 171 ; his change of policy, 174 ; gains the battle of Chotusitz, 174 Silesia ceded to him, 175 ; his whimsical conferences with Voltaire, 170 ; recommences hostilities, 177 ; his retreat from Bohemia, 177 ; his victory at Hohenlfiedberg, 178 ; his part in the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 179 ; public opinion respecting his political character, 179 ; his application to business, 179 ; his bodily exertions, 180 181 ; general principles of his government, 182 ; his economy, 183 ; his character as an administrator, 184 ; his labors to secure to his people cheap and speedy justice, 185 ; religious persecution unknown under his government, 180 ; vices of his administration, 180 ; his commercial policy, 187 ; his passion for directing and regulating, 187 ; his contempt for the German language, 188 ; his associates at Potsdam, 189 190 ; his talent for sarcasm, 192 ; invites Voltaire to Berlin, 190 ; their singular friendship, 197 ; seq.; union of France, Vustna and Saxony, against him, 212 ; he anticipates his ruin, 213 ; extent of his peril, 217 ; he occupies Saxony, 217 ; defeats Marshal Bruwn at Lowositz, 218 ; gains the battle of Prague, 219 ; loses the battle of Kolin, 220 ; his victory, 229 ; its effects, 231 ; his subsequent victories, 232 248

Frederic William I., 150 ; his character, 150 ; his ill-regululated mind, 151 ; his ambition to form a brigade of giants, 151 ; his feeling about his troops, 152 ; his hard and savage temper, 152 ; his conduct to his son Frederic, 153 155 ; his illness and death, 102

Free inquiry, right of, in religious matters, 102 103

French Academy (the), 23 ; seq.

French Republic, Burke's character of, 402

French Revolution (the). See Revolution, the French.

Funds, national. See National Debt.

---

G.

Gabrielli, the singer, 256

Galileo, 305

Galway, Lord, commander of the allies in Spain in 170 109 119 ; defeated by the Bourbons at Almanza, 124

Game, (a) Roman, 4 ; noie; (a) Greek, 30 ; note.

Ganges, the chief highway of Eastern commerce, 229

Garden of Eden, pictures of, in oil Bibles, 343 ; painting of, by a gifted master, 343

Garrick, David, a pupil of Johnson, 179 ; their relations to each other, 189 190 203 398 ; his power of amusing children, 255 ; his friendship lor Crisp, 261 202 ; his advice as to Crisp's tragedy of Virginia, 202 ; his power of imitation, 300 ; quotation from Fielding illustrative of the effect of his acting, 332

Garth, his epilogue to Cato, 392 ; his verses upon the controversy in regard to the Letters of Phalaris, 118

Gascons, 430 487 511 525

Gay, sent for by Addison on his death-bed to ask his forgiveness, 418

Generalization, superiority in, of modern to ancient historians, 410 414

Geneva, Addison's visit to, 350

Genius, creative, a rude state of society favorable to, 57 325 ; requires discipline to enable it to perfect anything. 334 335

Genoa, its decay owing to Catholicism, 330 Addison's admiration of, 345

Gensonnd, his ability, 452 ; his impeachment, 409 ; his defence, 473 ; his death, 474

"Gentleman Dancing-Master," its production on the stage, 375 ; its best scenes suggested by Calderon, 385

"Gentleman's Magazine" (the), 182 184

Geologist, Bishop Watson's comparison of, 425

Geometry, comparative estimate of, by Plato and by Bacon, 450

George I., his accession, 136

George II., political state of the nation in his time. 533 ; his resentment against Chatham for his opposition to the payment of Hanoverian troops, 220 ; compelled to admit him to office, 221 ; his efforts for the protection of Hanover, 230 ; his relations towards his ministers, 241 244 ; reconciled to Chatham's possession of power, 14 ; his death, 14 ; his character, 16

George III., his accession the commencement of a new historic era, 532 ; cause of the discontents in the early part of his reign, 534 ; his partiality to Clive, 292 ; bright prospects at his accession, 58 1 ; his interview with Miss Burney, 277 ; his opinions of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Shakespeare, 277 278 ; his partisanship for Hastings, 291 ; his illness, and the view taken of it in the palace, 291 292 ; the history of the first ten years of his reign but imperfectly known, 1 ; his characteristics, 16 17 ; his favor to Lord Bute, 19 ; his notions of government, 21 ; slighted for Chatham at the Lord Mayor's dinner, 31 ; receives the resignation of Bute, and appoints George Grenville his successor, 54 ; his treatment by Grenville, 59 ; increase of his aversion to his ministers, 62 63 ; his illness, 06; disputes between him and his ministry on the regency question, 66 ; inclined to enforce the American Stamp Act by the sword, 76 ; the faction of the "King's friends," 79 89 ; his unwilling consent to the repeal of the Stamp Act, 82 ; dismisses Rockingham, and appoints Chatham, 88 ; his character and late popularity, 263 265 ; his insanity and the question of the regency, 265 267 ; his opposition to Catholic emancipation, 281 282 ; his opposition to Fox, 291 293

George IV., 125 265 266

Georgies (the), Addison's translation of a portion of, 332 333

Germany, the literature of, little known in England sixty or seventy years ago, 340 341

Germany and Switzerland, Addison's ramble in, 351

Ghizni, peculiarity of the campaign of, 29

Ghosts, Johnson's belief in, 410

Gibbon, his alleged conversion to Mahommedanism, 375 ; his success as a historian, 252 ; his presence at Westminster Hall at the trial of Hastings, 126 ; unlearned his native English during his exile, 314 260

Gibbons, Gruiling, 367 368

Gibraltar, capture of, by Sir George Booke, 110

Gittard, Lady, sister of Sir William Temple, 35 39 101 ; her death, 113

Gifford, Byron's admiration of, 352

Girondists, Barère's share in their destruction, 434 435 468 469 474 ; description of their party and principles, 452 454 ; at first in the majority, 455 ; their intentions towards the king, 455 456 ; their contest with the Mountain, 458 459 460 ; their trial, 473 ; and death, 474 475 ; their character, 474

Gladstone, W. E., review of "The State in its Relations with the Church," 110 ; quality of his mind, 111 120 ; grounds on which he rests his case for the defence of the Church, 122 ; his doctrine that the duties of government are paternal, 125 ; specimen of his arguments, 127 129 ; his argument that the profession of a national religion is imperative, 120 131 135 ; inconsequence of his reasoning, 138 ; to: 148

Gleig, Kev. review of his Life of Warren Hastings, 114

Godfrey, Sir E., 297

Godolphin, Lord, his conversion to Whiggism, 130 ; engages Addison to write a poem on the battle of Illenheim, 355

Godolphin and Marlborough, their policy soon after the accession of Queen Anne, 353

Goëzman, his bribery as a member of the parliament of Lewis by Betmarchais, 430 431

Goldsmith, Oliver, Life of, 151 171 ; his birth and parentage, 151 ; his school days, 152 153 ; enters Trinity College, Dublin, 153 ; his university life, 154 ; his autograph upon a pane of glass, 154 ; note; his recklessness and instability, 154 155 ; his travels, 155 ; his carelessness of the truth, 150 ; his life in London, 156 157 ; his residence, 157 ; note; his hack writings, 157 158 ; his style, 158 ; becomes known to literary men, 158 ; one of the original members of The Club, 159 Johnson's friendship for him, 159 170 ; his "Vicar of Wakefield," 159 161 ; his "Traveller." 160 ; his comedies. 161 163 ; his "Deserted Village," 162 163 ; his histories, 164 ; his amusing blunders, 164 ; his literary merits, 165, 170 ; his social position, 165 ; his inferiority in conversation, 165 166, 393 ; his "Retaliation," 170 ; his character, 167 168 407 ; his prodigality, 168 ; his sickness and death, 169 ; his burial and cenotaph in Westminster Abbey, 169 170 ; his biographers, 171

Goordas, son of Nuneomar, his appointment as treasurer of the household, 24

Gorhamlery, the country residence of Lord Bacon, 409

Government, doctrines of Southey on the duties and ends of, stated and examined, 157 168 ; its eon-duet in relation to infidel publications, 170 ; various forms of, 413 414 ; changes in its form sometimes not felt till long alter, 86 ; the science of, experimental and progressive, 132 272 273 ; examination of Mr. Gladstone's treatise on the Philosophy of, 116 176 ; its proper functions, 362 ; different forms of, 108 111 ; their advantages, 179 181 Mr. Hill's Essay on, reviewed, 5 51

Grace Abounding, Runyan's, 259

Grafton, Duke of, Secretary of State under Lord Rockingham, 74 ; first Lord of the Treasury under Chatham, 91 ; joined the Bedfords, 100

Granby, Marquis of, his character, 261

Grand Alliance (the), against the Bourbons, 103

Grand Remonstrance, debate on, and passing of it, 475

Granville, Lord. See Carteret, Lord. Gray, his want of appreciation of Johnson, 261 ; his Latin verses, 342 ; his unsuccessful application for a professorship, 41 ; his injudicious plagiarisms from Dante, 72 ; note.

"Great Commoner." the designation of Lord Chatham, 250 10

Greece, its history compared with that of Italy, 281 ; its degradation and rise in modern times, 334 ; instances of the corruption of judges in the ancient commonwealths of, 420 ; its literature, 547 340 349 352 ; history of, by Mitford, reviewed, 172 201 ; historians of, modern, their characteristics, 174 177 ; civil convulsions in, contrasted with those in Rome, 189 190

Greek Drama, its origin, 216 ; compared with the English plays of the age of Elizabeth, 338

Greeks, difference between them and the Romans, 237 ; in their treatment of woman. 83 84 ; their social condition compared with that of the Italians of the middle ages, 312 ; their position and character in the 12th century, 300 ; their exclusiveness, 411 412

Gregory XI., his austerity and zeal, 324

Grenvilles (the), 11 Richard Lord Temple at their head, 11

Grenville, George, his character, 27 23 ; intrusted with the lead in the Commons under the Bute administration, 33 ; his support of the proposed tax on cider, 51 ; his nickname of "Gentle Shepherd," 51 ; appointed prime minister, 54 ; his opinions, 54 55 ; character of his public acts, 55 50 ; his treatment of the king, 59 ; his deprivation of Henry Conway of his regiment, 62 ; proposed the imposition of stamp duties on the North American colonies, 05; his embarrassment on the question of a regency; his triumph over the king, 70 ; superseded by Lord Rockingham and his friends, 74 ; popular demonstration against him on the repeal of the Stamp Act, 83 ; deserted by the Bedfords, 109 ; his pamphlet against the Rocking-hams, 102 ; his reconciliation with Chatham, 103 ; his death, 104

Grenville, Lord, 291 292 290

Greville, Eulke, patron of Dr. Burney, his character, 251

Grey, Earl, 129 130 209

Grey, Lady Jane, her high classical acquirements, 349

"Grievances," popular, on occasion of Walpole's fall, 181

Grub Street, 405

Guadaloupe, of, 244

Guardian (the), its birth, 389 390 ; its discontinuance, 390

Guelfs (the), their success greatly promoted by the ecclesiastical power, 273

Guicciardini, 2

Guiciwar, its interpretation, 59

Guise, Henry, Duke of, his conduct on the day of the barricades at Paris, 372 ; his resemblance to Essex. 372

Gunpowder, its inventor and the date of its discovery unknown, 444

Gustavus Adolphus, 338

Gypsies (the), 380

---

H.

Habeas Corpus Act, 83 92

Hale, Sir Matthew, his integrity, u. 490 391

Halifax, Lord, a trimmer both by intellect and by constitution, 87 ; compared with Shaftesbury, 87 ; his political tracts, 88 ; his oratorical powers, 89 90 ; the king's dislike to him, 90 ; his recommendation of Addison to Godolphin, 354 355 ; sworn of the Privy Council of Queen Anne, 301

Hallam, Mr., review of his Constitutional History of England, 433 543; his qualifications as an historian, 435 ; his style, 435 430 ; character of his Constitutional History, 430 ; his impartiality, 430 439 512 ; his description of the proceedings of the third parliament of Charles I., and the measures which followed its dissolution, 450 457 ; his remarks on tlie impeachment of Stratford, 458 405 ; on the proceedings of the Long Parliament, and on the question of the justice of the civil war, 409 495 ; his opinion on the nineteen propositions of the Long Parliament, 480 ; on the veto of the crown on acts of parliament, 487 ; on the control over tlie army, 489 ; on the treatment of Laud, and on his correspondence with Strafford, 492 493 ; on tlie execution of Charles I., 497 ; his parallel between Cromwell and Napoleon, 504 510 ; his character of Clarendon, 522

Hamilton, Gerard, his celebrated single speech, 231 ; his effective speaking in the Irish Parliament, 372

Hammond, Henry, uncle of Sir William Temple, his designation by the new Oxonian sectaries, 14

Hampden, John, his conduct in tlie ship-money attender approved by the Royalists, effect of his loss on the Parliamentary cause, 496 ; review of Lord Nugent's Memorial of him, 427 ; his public and private character, 428 429 Baxtor's testimony to his excellence, his origin and early history, 431 ; took his seat in the House of Commons, 432 ; joined the opposition to the Court; his first appearance as a public man, 441 ; his first stand for the fundamentals of the Constitution, 444 ; committed to prison. 444 ; set at liberty, and reelected for Wendover, 445 ; his retirement, 445 ; his remembrance of his persecuted friends, 447 ; his letters to Sir John Eliot, 447 Clarendon's character of him as a debater, 447 ; letter from him to Sir John Eliot, 448 ; his acquirements, 228 450 ; death of his wife, 451 ; his resistance to the assessment for ship-money, 458 Stratford's hatred of him, 458 ; his intention to leave England, 458 ; his return tor Buckinghamshire in the fifth parliament of Charles I., 401 ; his motion on the subject of the king's message, 403 ; his election by two constituencies to the Long Parliament, 407 ; character of his speaking, 407 408 ; his opinion on the bill for the attainder of Strafford, 471 Lord Clarendon's testimony to his moderation, 472 ; his mission to Scotland, 472 ; his conduct in the House of Commons on the passing of the Grand Remonstrance, 475 ; his impeachment ordered by the king, 477 483 ; returns in triumph to the House, 482 ; his resolution, 489 ; raised a regiment in Buckinghamshire, 48 1; contrasted with Essex, 491 ; his encounter with Rupert at Chalgrove, 493 ; his death and burial, 494 495 ; effect of his death on his party, 490

Hanover, Chatham's invective against the favor shown to, by George II., 219

Harcourt, French ambassador to the Court of Charles II. of Spain, 94

Hardwicke, Earl of, 13 ; his views of the policy of Chatham, 20 High Steward of the University of Cambridge, 37

Harley, Robert, 400 ; his accession to power, 130 ; censure on him by Lord Mahon, 132 ; his kindness for men of genius, 405 ; his unsuccessful attempt to rally the Tories in 170 3 ; his advice to the queen to dismiss the Whigs, 381

Harrison, on the condition of the working classes in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, 175

Hastings, Warren, review of Mr. Greig's Memoirs of his Life, 114 7 ; his pedigree, 2 ; his birth, and the death of his father and mother, 3 ; taken charge of by his uncle and sent to Westminster school, 5 ; sent as a writer to Bengal, his position there, 7 ; events which originated his greatness, 8 ; becomes a member of council at Calcutta, 9 ; his character in pecuniary transactions, 11 101 ; his return to England, generosity to his relations, and loss of his moderate fortune, 11 ; his plan for the cultivation of Persian literature at Oxford, 12 ; his interview with Johnson, 12 ; his appointment as member of council at Madras, and voyage to India, 13 ; his attachment to the Baroness Imhoff, 13 ; his judgment and vigor at-Madras, 15 ; his nomination to the head of the government at Bengal, 15 ; his relation with Nucomar, 19 22 24 ; his embarrassed finances and means to relieve them, 25 74 ; his principle of dealing with his neighbors and the excuse for him, 25 ; his proceedings towards the Nabob and the Great Mogul, 27 ; his sale of territory to the Nabob of Oude, 28 ; his refusal to interfere to stop the barbarities of Sujah Dowlah, 33 ; his great talents for administration, 34 ; his disputes with the members of the new council, 40 ; his measures reversed, and the powers of government taken from him, 40 ; charges preferred against him, 42 43 ; his painful situation, and appeal to England, 44 ; examination of his conduct, 49 51 ; his letter to Dr. Johnson, 52 ; his condemnation by the directors, 52 ; his resignation tendered by his agent and accepted, 54 ; his marriage and reappointment, 50 ; his importance to England at that conjuncture, 57 70 ; his duel with Francis, 70 ; his great influence, 73 74 ; his financial embarrassment and designs for relief, 74 ; his transactions with and measures against Cheyte Sing, 71 ; seq.: his perilous situation in Benares, 82 83 ; his treatment of the Nabob vizier, 85 80 ; his treatment of the Begums, 8792; close of his administration, 93 ; remarks on his system, 93 102 ; his reception in England, 103 ; preparations for his impeachment, 104 110 ; his defence at the bar of the House, 110 ; brought to the bar of the Peers, 123 ; scq.; his appearance on his trial, his counsel and his accusers, 120 ; his arraignment by Burke, 129 130 ; narrative of the proceedings against him, 131 139 ; expenses of his trial, 139 ; his last interference in politics, 141 142 ; his pursuits and amusements at Daylesford, 142 ; his appearance and reception at the bar of the House of Commons, 144 ; his reception at Oxford. 145 ; sworn of the Privy Council and gracious reception by the Prince Regent, 145 ; his presentation to the Emperor of Russia and King of Prussia, 145 ; his death, 145 ; summary of his character, 145 147

Hatton, Lady, 308 ; her manners and temper, 308 ; her marriage with Sir Edward Coke, 368

Havanna, capture of, 32

Hawk, Admiral, his victory over the French fleet under Conflans, 245

Hayley, William, 223 ; his translation of Dante, 78

Hayti, its cultivation, 305 306 ; its history and improvement, 390 400 ; its production,395, 398 ; emigration to, from the United States, 398 401

Heat, the principle of, Bacon's reasoning upon, 90

"Heathens" (the), of Cromwell's time, 258

Heathfield, Lord, 125

Hebert, 459 409 470 473 481

Hebrew writers (the), resemblance of Æschylus to, 210 ; neglect of, by the Romans, 414

Hebrides (the), Johnson's visit to, 420 ; his letters from, 423

Hecatare, its derivation and definition, 281

Hector, Homer's description of, 303

Hedges, Sir Charles, Secretary of State, 302

Helvetius, allusion to, 208

Henry IV. of France, 139 ; twice abjured Protestantism from interested motives, 328

Henry VIII., 452 ; his position between the Catholic and Protestant parties, 27

Hephzibah, an allegory so called, 203

Heresy, remarks on, 143 153

Herodotus, his characteristics, 377 382; his naivete, 378 ; his imaginative coloring of facts, 378 379 420 ; his faults, 379 ; his style adapted to his times, 380 ; his history read at the Olympian festival, 381 ; its vividness, 381 382 ; contrasted with Thucydides, 385 ; with Xenophon, 394 ; with Tacitus, 408 ; the speeches introduced into his narrative, 388 ; his anecdote about Mæandrius of Samos, 132 ; tragedy on the fall of Miletus, 333

Heroic couplet (the), Drvden's unrivalled management of, 300 ; its mechanical nature, 333 334 ; specimen from Ben Jonson, 334 ; from Hoole, 334 ; its rarity before the time of Pope, 334

Heron, Robert, 208

Hesiod, his complaint of the corruption of the judges of Asera, 420

Hesse Darmstadt, Prince of, commanded the land forces sent against Gibraltar in 170 110 ; accompanies Peterborough on his expedition, 112 ; his death at the capture of Monjuieh, 110

High Commission Court, its abolition, 409

Highgate, death of Lord Bacon at, 434

Hindoo Mythology, 306

Hindoos, their character compared with other nations, 19 20 ; their position and feeling towards the people of Central Asia, 28 ; their mendacity and perjury, 42 ; their view of forgery, 47 ; importance attached by them to ceremonial practices, 47 ; their poverty compared with the people of England, 64 ; their feelings against English law, 65 67

Historical romance, as distinguished from true history, 444 445

History, Essay upon, 470 442; in what spirit it should be written, 197 199 ; true sources of, 100 ; complete success in, achieved by no one. 470 ; province of, 470 477 ; its uses, 422 ; writer of a perfect, 377 427 442 2 52, 2 50, 201 ; begins in romance, and ends in essay, 377 400 Herodotus, as a writer of, 377 482 ; grows more sceptical with the progress of civilization, 385; writers of, contrast between, and writers of fiction, 38 5 480 38 300 444 44 ; comparison of, with portrait-painting, 380 488 Thucydides, as a writer of, 385 303 Xenophon, as a writer of, 304 304 Eulybius and Arrian, as writers of, 355; Plutarch and his school, as writers of, 305 402 Livy, as a writer of, 402 404 404 400 Tacitus, as a writer of, 400 ; writers of, contrast between, and the dramatists, 40 ; writers of, modern, superior to the ancient in truthfulness, 400 410 ; and in philosophic generalizations, 410 411 410 ; how affected by the discovery of printing, 411 ; writers of, ancient, how Directed by their national exclusiveness, 410 ; modern, how affected by the triumph of Christianity, 410 417 ; by the Northern invasions, 417 ; by the modern civilization, 417 418 ; their faults, 410 ; to: 421 ; their straining of facts to suit theories; their misrepresentations, 420 ; their ill success in writing ancient history, 421 ; their distortions of truth not unfavorable to correct views in political science, 422 ; but destructive to history proper, 423 ; contracted with biographers, 423 ; their contempt for the writers of memoirs, 423 ; the majesty of, nothing too trivial for, 424 192 2 ; what circumstantial details of the life of the people history needs, 424 428 ; most writers of, look only on the surface of affairs, 426 ; their errors in consequence, 420 ; reading of history compared in its effects with foreign travel, 420 427 ; writer of, a truly great, will exhibit the spirit of the age in miniature, 427 428 ; must possess an intimate knowledge of domestic history of nations, 432 Johnson's contempt for it, 421

History of the Popes of Rome during the 16th and 17th centuries, review of Ranke's, 299 350

History of Greece, Clifford's, reviewed, 172 201

Hobbes, Thomas, his influence on the two Succeeding generations, 409 Malbranche's opinion of him, 340

Hohenfriedberg, victory of, 178

Hohenlohe, Prince, 301

Holbach, Baron, his supper parties, 348

Holderness, Earl of, his resignation of office, 24

Holkar, origin of the House of, 59

Holland, allusion to the rise of, 87 ; governed with almost regal power by John de Witt, 32 ; its apprehensions of the designs of France, 35 ; its defensive alliance with England and Sweden, 40 44

Holland House, beautiful lines addressed to it by Tickell, 423 ; its interesting associations, Addison's abode and death there, 424 412

Holland, Lord, review of his opinions as recorded in the journals of the House of Lords, 412 426 ; his family, 414 417 419 ; his public life, 419 422 ; his philanthropy, 64 65 422 423 ; feelings with which his memory is cherished, 423 ; his hospitality at Holland House, 425 ; his winning manners and uprightness, 425 ; his last lines, 425 426

Hollis, Mr., committed to prison by Charles I., 447 ; his impeachment, 477

Hollwell, Mr., his presence of mind in the Black Hole, 233 ; cruelty of the Nabob towards him, 234

Home, John, patronage of by Bute, 41

Homer, difference between his poetry and Milton's, 213 ; one of the most "correct" poets, 338 Pope's translation of his description of a moonlight night, 331 ; his descriptions of war. 356 358 ; his egotism, 82 ; his oratorical power, 141 ; his use of epithets, 354 ; his description of Hector, 363

Hooker, his faulty style, 50

Hoole, specimen of his heroic couplets, 334

Horace, Bentley's notes on, 111 ; compared poems to paintings whose effect varies as the spectator changes his stand, 141 ; his comparison of the imitators of Pindar, 362 ; his philosophy, 125

Hosein, son of Ali, festival to his memory, 217 ; legend of his death, 218

Hospitals, objects for which they are built, 183

Hotspur, character of, 326

Hough, Bishop, 338

House of Commons (the), increase of its power, 532 536 540 ; change in public feeling in respect to its privileges, 537 ; its responsibility, 531 ; commencement of the practice of buying votes in, 168 ; corruption in, not necessary to the Tudors, 168 ; increase of its influence after the Devolution, 170 ; how to be kept in order, 170

Huggins, Edward, 318 311

Hume, David, his characteristics as a historian, 420 ; his description of the violence of parties before the Devolution, 328

Humor, that of Addison compared with that of Swift and Voltaire, 377 378

Hungarians, their incursions into Lombardy, 206

Hunt, Leigh, review of his edition of the Dramatic works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Karquhar, 350-411; his merits and faults, 350 351 ; his qualifications as an editor, 350 ; his appreciation of Shakspeare, Spenser, Dryden, and Addison, 351

Huntingdon, Countess of, 336

Huntingdon, William, 285

Hutchinson, Mrs., 24

Hyde, Mr., his conduct in the House of Commons, 463 ; voted for Strafford's attainder, 471 ; at the head of the Constitutional Loyalists, 474 ; see also Clarendon, Lord.

Hyder Ali, his origin and character, 71 ; his invasion of the Carnatic, and triumphant success, 71 ; his progress arrested by Sir Eyre Coote, 74

---

I.

Iconoclast, Milton's allusion to, 264

"Idler" (the), 105

Idolatry, 225 Illiad (the), Pope's and Tickell's translations, 405 408

Bunyan and Milton by Martin, Illustrations of 251 Imagination, effect upon, of works of art, 80 333 334 ; difference in this respect between the English and the Italians, 80 ; its strength in childhood, 331 ; in a barbarous age, 335 336 ; works of, early, their effect, 336 ; highest quality of, 37 ; master-pieces of, products of an uncritical age, 325 ; or of uncultivated minds, 343 ; hostility of Puritans to works of, 346 347 ; great strength of Milton's, 213 ; and power of Bunyan's, 256 267

Imhotf, Baron, his position and circumstances, 13 ; character and attractions of his wife and attachment between her and Hastings, 14 15 56 102

Impeachment of Lord Kimbolton, Hampden, Pym and Hollis, 477 ; of Hastings, 116 ; of Melville, 202 ; constitutional doctrine in regard to, 260 270

Impey, Sir Elijah, 6 Chief Justice of the Supreme Court at Calcutta, 30 ; his hostility to the Council, 45 ; remarks on his trial of Nuncomar, 45 40 66 ; dissolution of his friendship with Hastings, 67 ; his interference in the proceedings against the Begums, 91 ; ignorance of the native dialects, 91 ; condemnation in Parliament of the arrangement made with him by Hastings, 92

Impostors, fertile in a reforming age, 340

Indemnity, bill of, to protect witnesses against Walpole, 218

India, foundation of the English empire in, 24 248

Indies, the West. West Indies.

Induction, method of, not invented by Bacon, 470 ; utility of its analysis greatly overrated by Bacon, 471 ; example of its leading to absurdity, 471 ; contrasted with it priori reasoning, 8 9 ; the only true method of reasoning upon political questions, 481 70 74 72 70 ; to: 78

Indulgences, 814

Infidelity, on the treatment of, 171 ; its powerlessness to disturb the peace of the world, 341

Informer, character of, 519

Inquisition, instituted on the suppression of the Albigensian heresy, 310 ; armed with powers to suppress the Reformation, 323

Interest, effect of attempts by government to limit the rate of, 352

Intolerance, religious, effects of, 170

Ireland, rebellion in, in 164 473 ; in 175 280 Essex's administration in its condition under Cromwell's government, 25 27 ; its state contrasted with that of Scotland, 101 ; its union with England compared with the Persian table of King Zolmk, 101 ; reason of its not joining in favor of the Reformation, 314 330 ; danger to England from its discontents, Pitt's admirable policy towards, 280 281

Isocrates, 103

Italian Language, Dante the first to compose in, 50 ; its characteristics, 50

Italian Masque (the), 218

Italians, their character in the middle ages, 287 ; their social condition compared with that of the ancient Greeks, 312

Italy, state of, in the dark ages, 272 ; progress of civilization and refinement in, 274 275 ; seq; its condition under Cæsar Borgia, 303 ; its temper at the Reformation, 315 ; seq; its slow progress owing to Catholicism, 340 ; its subjugation, 345 ; revival of the power of the Church in, 347

---

J.

"Jackboot," a popular pun on Bute's name, 41 151

Jacobins, their origin, 11 ; their policy, 458 450 ; had effects of their administration, 532 534

Jacobin Club, its excesses, 345 402 400 473 475 481 488 401 ; its suppression, 502 ; its final struggle for ascendency, 500

James I. 455 ; his folly and weakness, 431 ; resembled Claudius Caesar, 440 ; court paid to him by the English courtiers before the death of Elizabeth, 382 ; his twofold character, 383 ; his favorable reception of Bacon, 383 380 ; his anxiety for the union of England and Scotland, 387 ; his employment of Bacon in perverting the laws, 538 ; his favors and attachment to Buckingham, 396 308 ; absoluteness of his government, 404 ; his summons of a Parliament, 410 ; his political blunders, 410 411 ; his message to the Commons on the misconduct of Bacon, 414 ; his readiness to make concessions to Rome, 328

James II., the cause of his expulsion, 237 ; administration of the law in his time, 520 Vareist's portrait of him, 251 ; his death, and acknowledgment by Louis XIV. of his son as his successor, 102 ; favor towards him of the High Church party, 303 122 ; his misgovernment, 304 ; his claims as a supporter of toleration, 304 308 ; his conduct towards Lord Rochester, 307 ; lus union with Lewis XI V., 303 ; his confidential advisers, 301 ; his kindness and munificence to Wycherley, 378

Jardine,.Mr., his work on the use of torture in England, 304 ; note.

Jeffreys, Judge, his cruelty, 303

Jenyns, Soanie, his notion of happiness in heaven, 378 ; his work on the "Origin of Evil" reviewed by Johnson, 270 152 195

Jerningham, Mr. his verses, 271

Jesuitism, its theory and practice towards heretics, 310 ; its rise, 320 ; destruction, 343 ; its fall and consequences', 344 ; its doctrines, 348 340

Jesuits, order of, instituted by Loyola, 320 ; their character, 320 321 ; their policy and proceedings, 322 323 ; their doctrines, 321 322 ; their conduct in the confessional, 322 ; their missionary activity, 322

Jews (the), review of the Civil Disabilities of, 307 323 ; argument that the Constitution would be destroyed by admitting them to power, 307 310 ; the argument that they are aliens, 313 ; inconsistency of the law in respect to them, 309 313 ; their exclusive spirit a natural consequence of their treatment, 315 ; argument against them, that they look forward to their restoration to their own country, 317 323

Job, the Book of, 216

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, life of, 172 220; review of Croker's edition of Boswell's life of, 368 425 ; his birth and parentage, 172 ; his physical and mental peculiarities, 172 173 170 307 408 ; his youth, 173 174 253 ; entered at Pembroke College, Oxford, 174 ; his life there, 175 ; translates Pope's "Messiah" into Latin verse, 175 ; quits the university without a degree, 175 ; his religious sentiments, 177 411 ; his early struggles, 177 178 ; his marriage, 178 ; opens a school and has Garrick for a pupil, 179 ; settles in London, 179 ; condition of men of letters at that time, 179 180 398 404 ; his privations, 404 181 ; his manners, 181 271 ; his connection with the "Gentleman's Magazine," 182 ; his political bigotry, 183 184 213 412 413 333 ; his "London," 184 185 ; his associates, 185 180 ; his life of Savage, 187 214 ; undertakes the Dictionary, 187 ; completes it, 193 194 ; his "Vanity of Human Wishes," 188 189 ; his "Irene," 179 190 ; his "Tatler," 190-192; Mrs. Johnson dies, 193 ; his poverty, 195 ; his review of Jenyns' "Nature and Origin of Evil," 195 270 ; his "Idler," 195 ; his "Basselas," 190 197 ; his elevation and pension, 198 405 ; his edition of Shakspeare, 199 202 ; made Doctor of Laws, 202 ; his conversational powers, 202 ; his "Chib," 203 200 425 ; his connection with the Thrales, 200 207 270 ; broken by Mrs. Thrale's marriage with Piozzi, 210 217; his benevolence, 207 208 271 ; his visit to the Hebrides, 209 210 420 ; his literary style, 187 192 211 213 215 219 423 313 ; his "Taxation no Tyranny," 212 ; his Lives of the Poets, 213 215 219 ; his want of financial skill, 215 ; peculiarity of his intellect, 408 ; his credulity, 409 200 ; narrowness of his views of society, 140 418 ; his ignorance of the Athenian character, 140 ; his contempt for history, 421 ; his judgments on books, 414 410 ; his objection to Juvenal's Satires, 379 ; his definitions of Excise and Pensioner, 333 198 ; his admiration of the Pilgrim's Progress, 253 ; his friendship for Goldsmith, 159 170 ; comparison of his political writings with those of Swift, 102 ; his language about Clive, 284 ; his praise of Congreve's "Mourning Bride," 391 392 400 ; his interview with Hastings, 12 ; his friendship with Dr. Burney, 254 ; his ignorance of music, 255 ; his want of appreciation of Gray, 201 214 ; his fondness for Miss Burney and approbation of her book. 271 219 ; his injustice to Fielding, 271 ; his sickness and death, 275 218 219 ; his character, 219 220 ; singularity of his destiny, 426 ; neglected by Pitt's administration in his illness and old age, 218 200

Johnsonese, 314 423

Jones, Inigo, 318

Jones, Sir William, 383

Jonson, Ben, 299 ; his "Hermogenes," 358 ; his description of Lord Bacon's eloquence, 859 ; his verses on the celebration of Bacon's sixtieth year, 408 409 ; his tribute to Bacon, 433 ; his description of humors in character, 303 ; specimen of his heroic couplets, 334

Joseph II., his reforms, 344

Judges (the), condition of their tenure of office, 480 ; formerly accustomed to receive gifts from suitors, 420 425; how their corruption is generally detected, 430 ; integrity required from them, 50

Judgment, private, Milton's defence of the right of, 262

Judicial arguments, nature of, 422 ; bench, its character in the time of James II., 520

Junius, Letters of, arguments in favor of their having been written by Sir Philip Francis, 36 ; seq.; their effects, 101

Jurymen, Athenian, 33 ; note.

Juvenal's Satires, Johnson's objection to them, 379 ; their impurity, 352 ; his resemblance to lin'd en, 372 ; quotes the Pentateuch, 414 ; quotation from, applied to Louis XIV., 59

---

K.

Keith, Marshall, 235

Kenrick, William, 269

Kimbolton, Lord, his impeachment, 477

King, the name of an Athenian magistrate, 53 ; note.

"King's Friends," the faction of the, 79 82

Kit-Cat Club, Addison's introduction to the, 351

Kneller, Sir Godfrey, Addison's lines to him, 375

"Knights," comedy of the. 21

Kniperdoling and Robespierre, analogy between their followers, 12

Knowledge, advancement of society in, 390 391 132

---

L.

Labor, division of, 123 ; effect of attempts by government to limit the hours of, 362 Major Moody's new philosophy of, and its refutation, 373 398

Laboring classes (the), their condition in England and on the Continent, 178 ; in the United States, 180

Labourdonnais, his talents, 202 ; his treatment by the French government, 294

Laedaunon. See Sparta.

La Fontaine, allusion to, 393

Lalla Kookli, 485

Lally, Governor, his treatment by the French government, 294

Lamb, Charles, his defence cf the dramatists of the Restoration, 357 ; his kind nature, 358

Lampoons, Pope's, 408

Lancaster, Dr., his patronage of Addison, 326

Landscape gardening, 374 389

Langton, Mr., his friendship with Johnson, 204 219 ; his admiration of Miss Burney, 271

Language, Drvden's command of, 367 ; effect of its cultivation upon poetry, 337 338 Latin, its decadence, 55 ; its characteristics, 55 Italian, Dante the first to compose in, 56

Languedoc, description of it in the twelfth century, 308 309 ; destruction of its prosperity and literature by the Normans, 310

Lansdowne, Lord, his friendship for Hastings, 106

Latimer, Hugh, his popularity in London, 423 428

Latin poems, excellence of Milton's, 211 Boileau's praise of, 342 343 Petrarch's, 96 ; language, its character and literature, 347 349

Latinity, Croker's criticisms on, 381

Laud, Archbishop, his treatment by the Parliament, 492 493 ; his correspondence with Strafford, 492 ; his character, 452 453 ; his diary, 453 ; his impeachment and imprisonment, 468 ; his rigor against the Puritans, and tenderness towards the Catholics, 473

Lauderdale, Lord, 417

Laudohn, 235, 241

Law, its administration in the time of James II., 520 ; its monstrous grievances in India, 64 69

Lawrence, Major, his early notice of Clive, 203, 241, ; his abilities, 203

Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 305

Laws, penal, of Elizabeth, 439 440

Lawsuit, imaginary, between the parishes of St. Dennis and St. George-in-the-water, 100, 111

Lawyers, their inconsistencies as advocates and legislators, 414 415

Learning in Italy, revival of, 275 ; causes of its decline, 278

Lebon, 483 484 503

Lee, Nathaniel, 361 362

Legerdemain, 353

Legge, Et. lion. H. B., 230 ; his return to the Exchequer, 38 13 ; his dismissal, 28

Legislation, comparative views on, by Plato and by Bacon, 456

Legitimacy, 237

Leibnitz, 324

Lemon, Mr., his discovery of Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine, 202

Lennox, Charlotte, 24

Leo X., his character, 324 ; nature of the war between him and Luther, 327 328

Lessing, 341

Letters of Phalaris, controversy between Sir William Temple and Christ Church College and Bentley upon their merits and genuineness, 108 112 114 119

Libels on the court of George III., in Bute's time, 42

Libertinism in the time of Charles II., 517

Liberty, public, Milton's support of, 246 ; its rise and progress in Italy, 274 ; its real nature, 395 397 ; characteristics of English, 399 68 71 ; of the Seas, Barrere's work upon, 512

Life, human, increase in the time of, 177

Lincoln Cathedral, painted window in, 428

Lingard, Dr., his account of the conduct of James II. towards Lord Rochester, 307 ; his ability as a historian, 41 ; his strictures on the Triple Alliance, 42

Literary men more independent than formerly, 190-192; their influence, 193 194 ; abjectness of their condition during the reign of George IL, 400 401 ; their importance to contending parties in the reign of Queen Anne, 304 ; encouragement afforded to, by the Revolution, 336 ; see also Criticism, literary.

Literature of the Roundheads, 234 ; of the Royalists, 234 ; of the Elizabethan age, 341 346 ; of Spain in the 16th century, 80 ; splendid patronage of, at the close of the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries, 98 ; discouragement of, on the accession of the House of Hanover, 98 ; importance of classical in the 16th century, 350 Petrarch, its votary, 86 ; what its history displays in all languages 340 341 ; not benefited by the French Academy, 23

Literature, German, little known in England sixty or seventy years ago, 341

Literature, Greek, 349 353

Literature, Italian, unfavorable influence of Petrarch upon, 59 60 ; characteristics of, in the 14th century, 278 ; and generally, down to Alfieri, 60

Literature, Roman, 347 349

Literature, Royal Society of, 202, 9

"Little Dickey," a nickname for Norris, the actor, 417

Livy, Discourses on, by Machiavelli, 309 ; compared with Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, 313 314 ; his characteristics as an historian, 402 403 ; meaning of the expression lactece ubertus, as applied to him, 403

Locke, 303 352

Logan, Mr., his ability in defending Hastings, 139

Lollardism in England, 27

London, in the 17th century, 479 ; devoted to the national cause, 480 481 ; its public spirit, 18 ; its prosperity during the ministry of Lord Chatham, 247 ; conduct of, at the Restoration, 289 ; effects of the Great Plague upon, 32 ; its excitement on occasion of the tax on cider proposed by Bute's ministry, 50 University of, see University.

Long Parliament (the), controversy on its merits, 239 240 ; its first meeting, 457 ; ii.406; its early proceedings, 469 470 ; its conduct in reference to the civil war, 471 ; its nineteen propositions, 486 ; its faults, 490 494 ; censured by Mr. Hallam, 491 ; its errors in the conduct of the war, 494 ; treatment of it by the army, 497 ; recapitulation of its acts, 408 ; its attainder of Stratford defended, 471 ; sent Hampden to Edinburgh to watch the king, 479 ; refuses to surrender the members ordered to be impeached, 477 ; openly denies the king, 489 ; its conditions of reconciliation, 480

Longinus, 149 148

Lope, his distinction as a writer and a soldier, 81

Lords, the House of, its position previous to the Restoration, 287 ; its condition as a debating assembly in 177 420

Lorenzo de Medici, state of Italy in his time, 278

Lorenzo de Medici (the younger), dedication of Machiavelli's Prince to him, 309

Loretto, plunder of, 346

Louis XI., his conduct in respect to the Spanish succession, 80 99 ; his acknowledgment, on the death of James II., of the Prince of Wales as King of England, and its consequences, 102 ; sent an army into Spain to the assistance of his grandson, 109 ; his proceedings in support of his grandson Philip, 109 127 ; his reverses in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands, 129 ; his policy, 309 ; character of his government, 308 311 ; his military exploits, 5 ; his projects and affected moderation, 36 ; his ill-humor at the Triple Alliance, 41 ; his conquest of Franche Comte, 42 ; his treaty with Charles, 53 ; the early part of his reign a time of license, 364 ; his devotion, 339 ; his late regret for his extravagance, 39 ; his character and person, 576 ; his injurious influence upon religion, 64

Louis XV., his government, 646 6 293

Louis XVI., 441 ; to: 449 455 150 67

Louis XVIII., restoration of, compared with that of Charles II., 282 ; seq.

Louisburg, fall of, 244

L'Ouverture, Toussaint, 366 390 392

Love, superiority of the. Romans over the Greeks in their delineations of, 83 ; change in the nature of the passion of, 84 ; earned by the introduction of the Northern element, 83

"Love for Love," by Congreve, 392 ; its moral, 402

"Love in a Wood," when acted, 371

Loyola, his energy, 320 336

Lucan, Dryden's resemblance to, 355

Lucian, 387

Luther, his declaration against the ancient philosophy, 446 ; sketch of the contest which began with his preaching against the Indulgences and terminated with the treaty of Westphalia, 314 338 ; was the product of his age, 323 ; defence of, by Atterbury, 113

Lysurgus, 185

Lysias, anecdote by Plutarch of his "speech for the Athenian tribunals," 117

Lyttleton, Lord, 54

---

M.

Maebomey, original name of the Burney family, 250 Machiavelli, his works, by Périer, 267 ; general odiousness of his name and works, 268 269 ; suffered for public liberty, 269 ; his elevated sentiments and just views, 270 ; held in high estimation by his contemporaries. 271 ; state of moral feeling ill Italy in his time, 272 ; his character as a man, 291 ; as a poet, 293 ; as a dramatist, 296 ; as a statesman, 291 300 309 313 309 ; excellence of his precepts, 311 ; his candor, 313 ; comparison between him and Montesquieu, 314 ; his style, 314 ; his levity, 316 ; his historical works, 316 ; lived to witness the last struggle for Florentine liberty, 319 ; his works and character misrepresented, 319 ; his remains dishonored till long after his death, 319 ; monument erected to his memory by an English nobleman, 319

Mackenzie, Henry, his ridicule of the Nabob class, 283

Mackenzie, Mr., his dismissal insisted on by Grenville, 70

Mackintosh, Sir James, review of his History of the Revolution in England, 251 335 ; comparison with Fox's History of James II., 252 ; character of his oratory, 253 ; his conversational powers, 256 ; his qualities as an historian, 250 ; his vindication from the imputations of the editor, 262 270-278; change in his opinions produced by the French Revolution, 263 ; his moderation, 268 270 ; his historical justice, 277 278 ; remembrance of him at Holland House, 425

Macleane, Colonel, agent in England for Warren Hastings, 44 53

Macpherson, James, 77 331 210 ; a favorite author with Napoleon, 515 ; despised by Johnson, 116

Madras, description of it, 199 ; its capitulation to the French, 202 ; restored to the English, 203

Maand, capture of, by the English army in 470 119

Mæandnus, of Samos, 132

Magazine, delightful invention for a very idle or a very busy man, 156 ; resembles the little angels of the Rabbinical tradition, 156 157

Magdalen College, treatment of, by James II., 413 Addison's connection with it, 327

Mahon, Lord, Review of his History of the War of the Succession in Spain, 75 142 ; his qualities as an historian, 75 77 ; his explanation of the financial condition of Spain, 85 ; his opinions on the Partition Treaty, 90-92; his representations of Cardinal Porto Carrero, 104 ; his opinion of the peace on the conclusion of the War of the Spanish Succession, 131 ; his censure of Harley, 132 ; and view of the resemblance of the Tories of the present day to the Whigs of the Revolution, 132 135

Mahrattas, sketch of their history, 207 58 ; expedition against them, 60

Maintenon, Madame de, 364 30

Malaga, naval battle near, in 170 110

Malcolm, Sir John, review of his Life of Lord Clive, 194 299 ; value of his work, 190 ; his partiality for Clive, 237 ; his defence of Clive's conduct towards Ornichaud, 248

Mallet, David, patronage of by Bute, 41

Malthus, Mr., his theory of population, and Sadler's objections to it, 217 218 222 223 228 244 271 272

Manchester, Countess of, 339

Manchester, Earl of, his patronage of Addison, 338 350

Mandeville, his metaphysical powers, 208

Mandragola (the), of Maehiavelli, 293

Manilla, capitulation of, 32

Mannerism of Johnson, ii 423

Mansfield, Lord, his character and talents, 223 ; his rejection of the overtures of Newcastle, 234 ; his elevation, 234 12 ; his friendship for Hastings, 106 ; character of his speeches, 104

Manso, Milton's Epistle to, 212

Manufactures and commerce of Italy in the 14th century, 275 277

Manufacturing and agricultural laborers, comparison of their condition, 147 149

Manufacturing system (the), Southey's opinion upon, 145 ; its effect on the health, 147

Marat, his bust substituted for the statues of the Martyrs of Christianity, 345 ; his language about Barère, 458 466 ; his bust torn down, 502

Mareet, Mrs., her Dialogues on Political Economy, 207

March, Lord, one of the persecutors of Wilkes, 60

Maria Theresa, her accession to the throne, 164 ; her situation and personal qualities, 165 166 ; her unbroken spirit, 173 ; gives birth to the future emperor, Joseph II., 173 ; her coronation, 173 ; enthusiastic loyalty and war-cry of Hungary, 174 ; her brother-in-law, Prince Charles of Lorraine, defeated by Frederic the Great, at Chotusitz, 174 ; she cedes Silesia, 175 ; her husband, Francis, raised to the Imperial Throne, 179 ; she resolves to humble Frederic, 200 ; succeeds in obtaining the adhesion of Russia, 200 ; her letter to Madame Pompadour, 211 ; signs the peace of Hubertsburg, 245

Marie Antoinette, Barère's share in her death, 401 434 409 470

Marino, San, visited by Addison, 340

Marlborough, Duchess of, her friendship with Congreve, 408 ; her inscription on his monument, 409

Marlborough, Duke of, 259 ; his conversion to Whiggism, 129 ; his acquaintance with the Duchess of Cleveland,-and commencement of his splendid fortune, 373 ; notice of Addison's poem in his honor, 358

Marlborough and Godolphin, their policy, 353

Maroons (the), of Surinam, 386 ; to: 388

Marsh, Bishop, his opposition to Calvinistic doctrine, 170

Martinique, capture of, 32

Martin's illustrations of the Pilgrim's Progress, and of Paradise Lost, 251

Marvel, Andrew, 333

Mary, Queen, 31

Masque, the Italian, 218

Massinger, allusion to his "Virgin Martyr," 220 ; his fondness for the Roman Catholic Church, 30 ; indelicate writing in his dramas, 356

Mathematical reasoning, 103 ; studies, their advantages and defects, 346

Mathematics, comparative estimate of, by Plato and by Bacon, 451

Maximilian of Bavaria, 328

Maxims, general, their uselessness, 310

Maynooth, Mr. Gladstone's objections to the vote of money for, 179

Mecca, 301

Medals, Addison's Treatise on, 329 351

Medici, Lorenzo de. See Lorenzo de Medici.

Medicine, comparative estimate of the science of, by Plato and by Bacon, 454 456

Meer Cossim, his talents, 260 ; his deposition and revenge, 266

Meer Jatlier, his conspiracy, 240 ; his conduct during the battle of Plassey, 243 240 ; his pecuniary transactions with Clive, 251 ; his proceedings on being threatened by the Great Mogul, 250 ; his fears of the English, and intrigues with the Dutch, 258 ; deposed and reseated by the English, 266 ; his death, 270 ; his large bequest to Lord Clive, 279

Melanethon, 7

Melville, Lord, his impeachment, 292

Meinmius, compared to Sir Wm. Temple, 112

Memoirs of Sir "William Temple, review of, 1 115 ; wanting in selection and compression, 2

Memoirs of the Life of Warren Hastings, review of, 1 148

Memoirs, writers of, neglected by historians, 423

Memory, comparative views of the importance of, by Plato and by Bacon, 454

Menander, the lost comedies of, 375

Mendaeium, different species of, 430

Mendoza, Hurtado de, 81

Mercenaries, employment of, in Italy, 283 ; its political consequences, 284 ; and moral effects, 285

Messiah, Pope's, translated into Latin verse by Johnson, 175

Metals, the precious, production of, 351

Metaphysical accuracy incompatible with successful poetry, 225

Metcalfe, Sir Charles, his ability and disinterestedness, 298

Methodists, their rise unnoticed by some writers of the history of England under George II., 426 ; their early object, 318

Mexico, exactions of the Spanish viceroys in, exceeded by the English agents in Bengal, 266

Miehell, Sir Francis, 401

Middle ages, inconsistency in the schoolmen of the, 415

Middlesex election, the constitutional question in relation to it, 101 104

Middleton, Dr., remarks on his Life of Cicero, 340 341 ; his controversies with Bentley, 112

Midias, Demosthenes' speech against, 102

"Midsummer Night's Dream," sense in which the word "translated" is therein used, 180

Milan, Addison's visit to, 345

Military science, studied by Machiavelli, 306

Military service, relative adaptation of different classes for, 280

Militia (the), control of, by Charles I. or by the Parliament, 488

Mill, James, his merits as a historian, 277 278 ; defects of his History of British India, 195 196 ; his unfairness towards Clive's character, 237 ; his Essay on Government reviewed, 5 51 ; his theory and method of reasoning, 6 8 10 12 18 20 46 48 ; his style. 8 ; his erroneous definition of the end of government, 11 ; his objections to a Democracy only practical ones, 12 ; attempts to demonstrate that a purely aristocratic form of government is necessarily bad, 12 13 ; so also an absolute monarchy, 13 14 ; refutation of these arguments, 15 16 18 ; his inconsistencies, 16 17 96 97 121; his narrow views, 19 20 ; his logical deficiencies, 95 ; his want of precision in the use of terms, 103 108 ; attempts to prove that no combination of the simple forms of government can exist, 21 22 ; refutation of this argument., 22 29 ; his ideas upon the representative system. 29 30 ; objections to them, 30-32; his views upon the qualifications of voters, 32 36 ; objections to them, 36 38 41 42 ; confounds the interests of the present generation with those of the human race, 38 39 ; attempts to prove that the people understand their own interest, 42 ; refutation of this argument, 43 ; general objections to his theory, 44 47 122 ; defended by the Westminster Review, 529 ; inconsistencies between him and the reviewer, 56 58 ; the reviewer mistakes the points at issue, 58 60 61 65 70 77 114 ; and misrepresents arguments, 62 73 74 ; refutation of his positions. 63 64 66 74 76 122 127 ; the reviewer shifts the issue, 68 127 128 ; fails to strengthen Mill's positions, 71 ; and manifests great disingenuousness, 115 118 129 130

Millar, Lady, her vase for verses, 271

Milton, review of his Treatise on Christian Doctrine, Mr. Lemon's discovery of the MS. of it, 202 ; his style, "202; his theological opinions, 204 ; his poetry his great passport to general remembrance, 205 211 ; power of his imagination, 211 ; the most striking characteristic of his poetry, 213 375 ; his Allegro and Penseroso, 215 ; his Cornus and Samson Agonistes, 215 ; his minor poems, 219 ; appreciated the literature of modern Italy, 219 ; his Paradise Regained, 219 ; parallel between him and Dante, 17 18 ; his Sonnets most exhibit his peculiar character, 232 ; his public conduct, 233 ; his defence of the execution of Charles L, 246 ; his refutation of Salmasius, 248 ; his conduct under the Protector, 249 ; peculiarities which distinguished him from his contemporaries, 253 ; noblest qualities of every party combined in him, 260 ; his defence of the freedom of the press, and the right of private judgment, 262 ; his boldness in the maintenance of his opinions, 263 ; recapitulation of his literary merits, 264 ; one of the most "correct" poets, 338 ; his egotism, 82 ; effect of his blindness upon his genius, 351 Dryden's admiration of, 369 370

Milton and Cowley, an imaginary conversation between, touching the great Civil War, 112 138

Milton and Shakspeare,character of, Johnson's observations on, 417

Minden, battle of, 247

Minds, great, the product of their times, 323 325

Mines, Spanish-American, 85 351

Ministers, veto by Parliament on their appointment, 487 ; their responsibility lessened by the Revolution, 531

Minorca, capture of, by the French, 232

Minority, period of, at Athens, 191 192

"Minute guns!" Diaries Townshend's exclamation on hearing Bute's maiden speech, 33

Mirabeau, Dumont's recollections of, 71 74 ; his habit of giving compound nicknames, 72 ; compared with Wilkes, 72 ; with Chatham, 72 73

Missionaries, Catholic, their zeal and spirit, 300

Mittford, Mr., his History of Greece reviewed, 172 201 ; its popularity greater than its merits, 172 ; his characteristics, 173 174 177 420-422; his scepticism and political prejudices, 178 188 ; his admiration of an oligarchy, and preference of Sparta to Athens, 181 183 ; his views in regard to Lyeurgus, 185 ; reprobates the liturgic system of Athens, 190 ; his unfairness, 191 422; his misrepresentation of Demosthenes, 191 193 195 197 ; his partiality for Æschines, 193 194 ; his admiration of monarchies, 195 ; his general preference of the Barbarians to the Greeks, 190 ; his deficiencies as an historian, 190 197; his indifference for literature and literary pursuits, 197 199

Modern history, the period of its commencement, 532

Mogul, the Great, 27 ; plundered by Hastings, 74

Mohammed Heza Khan, his character, 18 ; selected by Clive, 21 ; his capture, confinement at Calcutta and release, 25

Molière, 385

Molwitz, battle of, 171

Mompesson, Sir Giles, conduct of Bacon in regard to his patent, 401 402 ; abandoned to the vengeance of the Commons, 412

Monarch, absolute, establishment of, in continental states, 481 Mitford's admiration of, 195

Monarchy, the English, in the l6th century, 15 20

Monjuieh, capture of the fort of, by Peterborough, 115

Monmouth, Duke of, 300 ; his supplication for life, 99

Monopolies, English, during the latter end of Elizabeth's reign, multiplied under James, 304 401 ; connived at by Bacon, 402

Monson, Mr., one of the new councillors under the Regulating Act for India, his opposition to Hastings, 40 ; his death and its important consequences, 54

Montagu, Basil, review of his edition of Lord Bacon's works, 330 ; character of his work, 330 ; his explanation of Lord Burleigh's conduct towards Bacon, 350 ; his views and arguments in defence of Bacon's conduct towards Essex, 373 379 ; his excuses for Bacon's use of torture, and his tampering with the judges, 391 394 ; his reductions on Bacon's admonitions to Buckingham, 403 ; his complaints against James for not interposing to save Bacon, 415 ; and for advising him to plead guilty, 410 ; his defence of Bacon, 417 430

Montagu, Charles, notice of him, 338 ; obtains permission for Addison to retain his fellowship during his travels, 338 Addison's Epistle to him, 350 ; see also Halifax, Lord.

Montague, Lord, 399

Montague, Marv, her testimony to Addison's colloquial powers, 300

Montague, Mrs., 126

Mont Cenis, 349

Monttesquieu, his style, 314 304 365 Horace Walpole's opinion of him, 155 ; ought to have styled his work L'esprit sur les Lois, 142

Montesquieu and Machiavelli, comparison between, 314

Montgomery, Mr. Robert, his Omnipresence of the Deity reviewed, 199 ; character of his poetry, 200 212

Montreal, capture of, by the British, 170 245

Moody, Major Thomas, his reports on the captured negroes reviewed, 361 404 ; his character, 302 303 404 ; characteristics of his report, 304 402; its reception, 304 ; its literary style, 305 ; his principle of an instinctive antipathy between the White and the Black races, 365 ; its refutation, 306 367 ; his new philosophy of labor, 373 374 ; his charges against Mr. Dougal, 376 ; his inconsistencies, 377 ; and erroneous deductions, 379 380 391 ; his arrogance and bad grammar, 394 ; his disgraceful carelessness in quoting documents, 399

Moore, Mr., extract from his "Zelnco," 420

Moore's Life of Lord Byron, review of, 324 367 ; its style and matter, 324 ; similes in his "Lalla Rookh," 485

Moorshedabad, its situation and importance, 7

Moral feeling, state of, in Italy in the time of Machiavelli, 271

Morality of Plutarch, and the historians of his school, political, low standard of, after the Restoration, 398 515

More, Sir Thomas, 305 416

Moses, Bacon compared to, by Cowley, 493

"Mountain" (the), their principles, 454 455 ; their intentions towards the King, 450 457 ; its contests with the Girondists, 458 459 402 460 ; its triumph, 473

"Mountain of Light," 145

Mourad Bey, his astonishment at Buonaparte's diminutive figure, 357

"Mourning Bride," by Congreve, its high standing as a tragic drama, 391

Moylan, Mr., review of his Collection of the Opinions of Lord Holland as recorded in the Journals of the House of Lords, 412 420

Mucius, the famous Roman lawyer, 4 ; note.

Mutiny, Begum, 24 43

Munro, Sir Hector, 72

Munro, Sir Thomas, 298

Munster, Bishop of, 32

Murphy, Mr., his knowledge of stage effect, 273 ; his opinion of "The Witlings," 273

Mussulmans, their resistance to the practices of English law, 5

Mysore, 71 ; its fierce horsemen, 72

Mythology, Dante's use of, 75 76

---

N.

Nabobs, class of Englishmen to whom the name was applied, 280 283.

Names, in Milton, their significance, 214 ; proper, correct spelling of, 173

Naples, 347

Napoleon, his policy and actions as first Consul, 513 514 525 283 280 ; his treatment of Barer, 514 516 518 522 520 ; his literary style, 515 ; his opinion of Barère's abilities, 524 525 ; his military genius, 293 294 ; his early proof of talents for war, 297 ; his hold on the affections of his subjects, 14 ; devotion of his Old Guard surpassed by that of the garrison of Arcot to Clive, 210 Mr. Hallam's parallel between him and Cromwell, 504 ; compared with Philip II. of Spain, 78 ; protest of Lord Holland against his detention, 213 ; threatens to invade England, 287 ; anecdotes respecting, 236 237 357 495 408

Nares, Rev. Dr., review of his Burleigh and his Times, 1 30

National Assembly. See Assembly.

National Debt, Southey's notions of, 153 155 ; effect of its abrogation, 154 England's capabilities in respect to it, 180

National feeling, low state of, after the Restoration, 525

Natural history, a body of, commenced by Bacon, 433

Natural religion, 302 303

Nature, Dryden's violations of, 359 ; external, Dante's insensibility to, 72 74 ; feeling of the present age for, 73 ; not the source of the highest poetical inspiration, 73 74

Navy, its mismanagement in the reign of Charles II., 375

Negroes, their legal condition in the West Indies, 307 310 ; their religious condition, 311 313 ; their social and industrial capacities, 301 402 Major Moody s theory of an instinctive antipathy between them and the Whites, and its refutation, 305 307 ; prejudices against them in the United States, 368 361 ; amalgamation between them and the Whites, 370 373 ; their capacity and inclination for labor, 383 385 387 391 ; the Maroons of Surinam, 380 ; to: 388 ; inhabitants of Hayti, 390 ; to: 400 ; their probable fate, 404

Nelson, Southey's Life of, 136

"New Atalantis" of Bacon, remarkable passages in, 488

Newbery, Mr., allusion to his pasteboard pictures, 215

Newcastle, Duke of, his relation to Walpole, 178 191 ; his character, 191 ; his appointment as head of the administration, 226 ; his negotiations with Fox, 227 228 ; attacked in Parliament by Chatham, 229 ; his intrigues, 234 ; his resignation of office, 235 ; sent for by the king on Chatham's dismissal", leader of the Whig aristocracy, 239 ; motives for his coalition with Chatham, 240 ; his perfidy towards the king, 242 ; his jealousy of Fox, 242 ; his strong government with Chatham, 243 244 ; his character and borough influence, 472 ; his contests with Henry Fox, 472 ; his power and patronage, 7 8 ; his unpopularity after the resignation of Chatham, 34 35 ; he quits office, 35

Newdigate, Sir Roger, a great critic, 342

Newton, John, his connection with the slave-trade, 421 ; his attachment to the doctrines of predestination, 176

Newton, Sir Isaac, 207 ; his residence in Leicester Square, 252 Malbranche's admiration of him, 340 ; invented the method of fluxions simultaneously with Leibnitz, 324

"New Zealander" (the), 301 160 162 201 41 42

Niagara, conquest of, 244

Ninleguen, congress at, 59 ; hollow and unsatisfactory treaty of, 60

Nizam, originally a deputy of the Mogul sovereign, 59

Nizam al Mulk, Viceroy of the Deecan, his death, 211

Nonconformity. See Dissent in the Church of England.

Normandy, 77

Normans, their warfare against the Albigenses, 310

Norris, Henry, the nickname "Little Dickey" applied to him by Addison, 417

North, Lord, his change in the constitution of the Indian government, 35 ; his desire to obtain the removal of Hastings, 53 ; change in his designs, and its cause, 57 ; his sense, tact, and urbanity, 128 ; his weight in the ministry, 13 Chancellor of the Exchequer, 100 ; at the head of the ministry, 232 ; resigns, 235 ; forms a coalition with Fox, 239 ; the recognized heads of the Tory party, 243

Northern and Southern countries, difference of moral feeling in, 285 286

Novels, popular, character of those which preceded Miss Burney's Evelina, 319

November, fifth of, 247

Novum Organum, admiration excited by it before it was published, 388 ; and afterwards, 409 ; contrast between its doctrine and the ancient philosophy, 438 448 405 ; its first book the greatest performance of Bacon, 492

Nov, Attorney-General to Charles I, 456

Nugent, Lord, review of his Memorials of John Hampden and his Party, 427

Nugent. Robert Craggs, 13

Nuncomar, his part in the revolutions in Bengal, 19 20 ; his services dispensed with by Hastings, 24 ; his rancor against Mahommed Reza Khan, 25 ; his alliance with the majority of the new council, 42 43; his committal for felony, trial, and sentence, 45 40 ; his death, 48 49

---

O.

Oates, Titus, remarks on his plot, 295 300

Oc, language of Provence and neighboring countries, its beauty and richness, 308

Ochino Bernardo, 349 ; his sermons on fate and free-will translated by Lady Bacon, 349

Odd (the), the peculiar province of Horace Walpole, 161

"Old Bachelor," Congreve's, 389

Old Sarum, its cause pleaded by Junius, 38

Old Whig, Addison's, 417

Oleron, 509

Oligarchy, characteristics of, 181 183.

Olympic games, Herodotus' history read at, 331

Oniai. his appearance at Dr. Burney's concerts, 257 ; anecdote about, 59

Oinichund, his position in India, 238 ; his treachery towards Clive, 241 249

Omnipresence of the Deity, Robert Montgomery's reviewed, 199

Opinion, public, its power, 169

Opposition, parliamentary, when it began to take a regular form, 433

Orange, the Prince of, 46 ; the only hope of his country, 51 ; his success against the French. 52 ; his marriage with the Lady Mary, 60

Orators, Athenian, essay on, 139 157; in what spirit "their works should be read, 149 ; causes of their greatness found in their education, 149 ; modern orators address themselves less to the audience than to the reporters, 151

Oratory, how to be criticised, 149 ; to be estimated on principles different from those applied to other productions, 150 ; its object not truth but persuasion, 150 ; little of it left in modern days, 151 ; effect of the freedom of the press upon it, 151 ; practice and discipline give superiority in, as in the art of war, 155 ; effect of the division of labor upon, 154 ; those desirous of success in, should study Dante next to Demosthenes, 78 ; its necessity to an English statesman, 96 97 363 364 251 253

Orestes, the Athenian highwayman, 34 ; note.

Doloff, Count, his appearance at Dr. Burney's concert, 256

Orme, merits and defects of his work on India, 195

Ormond, Duke of, 108 109

Orsiui, the Princess, 105

Orthodoxy, at one time a synonyme for ignorance and stupidity, 343

Osborne, Sir Peter, incident of Temple with the son and daughter of, 16 23

Osborne, Thomas, the bookseller, 131

Ossian, 77 331

Ostracism, 181 182

Oswald, James, 13

Otway, 191

Overbury, Sir Thomas, 426 428

Ovid, Addison's Notes to the 2d and 3d hooks of his Metamorphoses, 328

Owen, Mr. Robert, 140

Oxford, 287

Oxford, Earl of. See Harley, Robert. Oxford, University of, its inferiority to Cambridge in intellectual activity, 343 344 ; its disaffection to the House of Hanover, 402 36 ; rose into favor with the government under Bute, 36

---

P.

Painting, correctness in, 343 ; causes of its decline in England after the civil wars, 157

Paley, Archdeacon, 261 Mr. Gladstone's opinion of his defence of the Church, 122 ; his reasoning the same as that by which Socrates confuted Aristodemus, 303 ; his views on "the origin of evil," 273 276

Pallas, the birthplace of Goldsmith, 151

Paoli, his admiration of Miss Burney, 271

Papacy, its influence, 314 ; effect of Luther's public renunciation of communion with it, 315

Paper currency, Southey's notions of, 151 152

Papists, line of demarcation between them and Protestants, 362 Papists and Puritans, persecution of, by Elizabeth, 439

Paradise, picture of, in old Bibles, 343 ; painting of, by a gifted master, 343

Paradise Regained, its excellence, 219

Paris, influence of its opinions among the educated classes in Italy, 144

Parker, Archbishop, 31 Parliaments of the 15th century, their condition, 479

Parliament, the, sketch of its proceedings, 470 540 Parliament of James I., 440 441 Charles I., his first, 443 444 ; his second, 444 445 ; its dissolution, 446 ; his fifth, 401

Parliament, effect of the publication of its proceedings, 180 Parliament, Long. See Long Parliament.

Parliamentary government, 251 253.

Parliamentary opposition, its origin, 433

Parliamentary reform, 131 21 22 233 237 239 241 410 425

Parr, Dr., 120

Milton, Parties, state of, in the time of Milton, 257 ; in England, 171 130 ; analogy in the state of, 1704 and 182 353 ; mixture of, at George II.'s first levee after Walpole's resignation, 5

Partridge, his wrangle with Swift, 374

Party, power of, during the Reformation and the French Revolution, 11 14 ; illustrations of the use and the abuse of it, 73

Pascal, Blaise, 105 300 ; was the product of his age, 323 Patronage of literary men, 190 ; less necessary than formerly, 191 352 ; its injurious effects upon style, 352 353

"Patriots" (the), in opposition to Sir R. Walpole, 170 179 ; their remedies for state evils, 181 183 Patriotism, genuine, 396

Paul IV., Pope, his zeal and devotion, 318 324

Paulet, Sir Amias, 354

Paulieian theology, its doctrines and prevalence among the Albigenses, 309 ; in Bohemia and the Lower Danube, 313

Pauson, the Greek painter, 30 ; note.

Peacham, Rev. Mr., his treatment by Bacon, 389 390

Peel, Sir Robert, 420 422

Peers, new creations of, 486 ; impolicy of limiting the number of, 415 410

Pelham, Henry, his character, 189 ; his death. 225

Pelhams (the), their ascendency, 188 ; their accession to power, 220 221 ; feebleness of the opposition to them, 222 ; see also Newcastle, Duke of.

Pembroke College, Oxford, Johnson entered at, 174 175

Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, Pitt entered at, 225

Péner, M.. translator of the works of Machiavelli, 207

Peninsular War, Southey's, 137

Penseroso and Allegro, Milton's, 215

Pentathlete (a), 154

People (the), comparison of their condition in the 10th and 19th centuries, 173 ; their welfare not considered in partition treaties, 91 92

Pepys, his praise of the Triple Alliance, 44 ; note.

Percival, Mr., 411 414 419

Pericles, his distribution of gratuities among the members of the Athenian tribunals, 420 ; the substance but not the manner of his speeches transmitted by Thucydides, 152

Persecution, religious, in the reign of Elizabeth, 439 440 ; its reactionary effect upon churches and thrones, 456 ; in England during the progress of the Reformation, 14

Personation, Johnson's want of talent for, 423

Personification, Robert Montgomery's penchant for, 207

Persuasion, not truth, the object of oratory, 150

Peshwa, authority and origin of, 59

Peterborough, Earl of, his expedition to Spain, 110 ; his character, 110 123 124 ; his successes on the northeast coast of Spain, 112 119 ; his retirement to Valencia thwarted, 123 ; returns to Valencia as a volunteer, 123 ; his recall to England, 123

Petiton, 452 469 475

Petition of Right, its enactment, 445 ; violation of it, 445

Petrarch, characteristics of his writings, 56 57 88 90-96, 211 ; his influence upon Italian literature to Altieri's time unfavorable, 59 ; criticism upon, 80-99; his wide celebrity. 80 ; besides Cervantes the only modern writer who has attained an European reputation, 80 ; the source of his popularity to be found in his egotism, 81 82 ; and the universal interest felt in his theme, 82 85 365 ; the first eminent poet wholly devoted to the celebration of love, 85 ; the Provençal poets his masters, 85 ; his fame increased by the inferiority of his imitators, 86 ; but injured by their repetitions of his topics, 94 ; lived the votary of literature, 86 ; and died its martyr, 87 ; his crowning on the Capitol, 86 87 ; his private history, 87 ; his inability to present sensible objects to the imagination, 89 ; his genius, and his perversion of it by his conceits, 90 ; paucity of his thoughts, 90 ; his energy of style when lie abandoned amatory composition, 91 ; the defect of his writings, their excessive brilliancy, and want of relief, 92 ; his sonnets, 93 95 ; their effect upon the reader's mind, 93 ; the fifth sonnet the perfection of bathos, 93 ; his Latin writings over-estimated by himself and his contemporaries, 95 96 413 ; his philosophical essays, 97 ; his epistles, 98 ; addressed to the dead and the unborn, 99 ; the first restorer of polite letters into Italy, 277

Petty, Henry, Lord, 296

Phalaris, Letters of, controversy upon their merits and genuineness, 108 112 114 119

Philarehus for Phylarehus, 381

Philip II. of Spain, extent and splendor of his empire, 77

Philip III. of Spain, his accession, 98 ; his character, 98 104 ; his choice of a wife, 105 ; is obliged to fly from Madrid, 118 ; surrender of his arsenal and ships at Carthagena, 119 ; defeated at Alinenara, and again driven from Madrid, 126 ; forms a close alliance with his late competitor, 138 ; quarrels with France, 138 ; value of his renunciation of the crown of France. 139

Philip le Bel, 312

Philip, Duke of Orleans, regent of France, 63 66 ; compared with Charles II. of England, 64 65

Philippeaux, Abbe, his account of Addison's mode of life at Blois, 339

Philips, John, author of the Splendid Shilling, 386 ; specimen of his poetry in honor of Marlborough, 386 ; the poet of the English vintage, 50

Philips, Sir Robert, 413

Phillipps, Ambrose, 369

Philological studies, tendency of, 143 ; unfavorable to elevated criticism, 143

Philosophy, ancient, its characteristics, 436 ; its stationary character, 441 459 ; its alliance with Christianity, 443 445 ; its fall, 445 446 ; its merits compared with the Baconian, 461 462 ; reason of its barrenness, 478 479

Philosophy, moral, its relation to the Baconian system, 467

Philosophy, natural, the light in which it was viewed by the ancients, 436 443 ; chief peculiarity of Bacon's, 435

Phrarnichus, 133

Pilgrim's Progress, review of Southey's edition of the, 250 ; see also Bunyan.

Pilpav, Fables of, 188

Pindar and the Greek drama, 216 Horace's comparison of his imitators, 362

Piozzi, 216 217

Pineus (the), 31 ; note.

Pisistratus, Bacon's comparison of Essex to him, 372

Pitt, William, (the first). (See Chatham, Earl of.)

Pitt, William, (the second.) his birth, 221 ; his precocity, 223 ; his feeble health, 224 ; his early training, 224 225 ; entered at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, 225 ; his life and studies there, 225 229 ; his oratorical exercises, 228 229 ; accompanies his father in his last attendance in the House of Peers, 223 230 ; called to the bar, 230 ; enters Parliament, 230 ; his first speech, 233 ; his forensic ability, 2 14 ; declines any post that did not entitle him to a seat in the Cabinet, * 235 ; courts the Ultra-Whigs, 236 ; made Chancellor of the Exchequer, 247 ; denounces the coalition between Fox and North, 240 ; resigns and declines a place at the Treasury Hoard, 241 ; makes a second motion in favor of Parliamentary Reform, 241 ; visits the Continent, 242 ; his great popularity, 244 244 ; made First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer, 240 ; his contest with the opposition, 247 ; his increasing popularity in the nation, 248 ; his pecuniary disinterestedness, 249 257 208 ; reelected to Parliament, 24 ; the greatest subject that England had seen for many generations, 250 ; his peculiar talents, 250-257; his oratory, 254 255 128 ; the correctness of his private life, 258 ; his failure to patronize men of letters and artists, 259 202 ; his administration can be divided into equal parts, 202 ; his lirst eight years, 202 271 ; his struggle upon the question of the Regency, 205 207 ; his popularity, 207 208 ; his feelings towards France, 270 272 ; his change of views in the latter part of his administration not unnatural, 272 274 45 ; failure of his administration of military affairs, vi.275, 277 ; his undiminished popularity, 277 278 ; his domestic policy, 27S, 274 ; his admirable policy respecting Ireland and the Catholic Question, 289 281 ; his resignation, 281 ; supports Addington's administration. 284 ; grows cold in his support, 285 ; his quarrel with Addington. 287 ; his great debate with Fox upon the war question, 288 ; his coalition with Fox, 236 ; to: 242 410 191 ; his second administration, 292 ; his failing health, 294 ; his ill-success in the coalition against Napoleon, 294 295 ; his illness increases, 295 250 ; his death, 297 ; his funeral, 298 ; his debts paid from the public treasury, 298 ; his neglect of his private finances, 298 249 ; his character, 299 300 410 411 ; his admiration for Hastings, 107 110 117 ; his asperity towards Francis, 104 ; his speech in support of Fox's motion against Hastings, 117 ; his motive, 119 ; his position upon the question of Parliamentary Reform, 410

Pius V., his bigotry, 185 ; his austerity and zeal, 424

Pius VI., his captivity and death, 440 ; his funeral rites long withheld, 440

Plagiarism, effect of, on the reader's mind, 94 ; instances of R. Montgomery's, 199 202

"Plain Dealer," Wycherley's, its appearance and merit, 370 384 ; its libertinism, 480

Plassey, battle of, 243 246 ; its effect in England, 254

Plato, comparison of his views with those of Racon, 448 404 ; excelled in the art of dialogue, 105

Plautus, his Casina, 248

Plays, English, of the age of Elizabeth, 448 ; rhyme introduced into, to please Charles II., 349 ; characteristics of Dryden's rhyming, 355 301

Plebeian, Steele's, 4

Plomer, Sir T., one of the counsel for Hastings on his trial, 127

Plutarch and the historians of his school, 395 402 ; their mental characteristics, 395 ; their ignorance of the nature of real liberty, 590 ; and of true patriotism, 397 ; their injurious influence, 348 ; their bad morality, 398 ; their effect upon Englishmen, 400 ; upon Europeans and especially the French, 400 402 70 71 ; contrasted with Tacitus, 409 ; his evidence of gifts being given to judges in Athens, 420 ; his anecdote of Lysias's speech before the Athenian tribunals, 117

Poem, imaginary epic, entitled "The Wellingtoniad," 158

Poetry, definition of, 210 ; incapable of analysis, 325 327 ; character of Southey's, 139 ; character of Robert Montgomery's, 199 213 ; wherein that of our tunes differs from that of the last century, 337 ; laws of, 340 ; to: 347 ; unities in, 338 ; its end, 338 ; alleged improvements in since the time of Dryden, 348 ; the interest excited by Byron's, 383 Dr. Johnson's standard of, 416 Addison's opinion of Tuscan, 361 ; what excellence in, depends upon, 384 335 ; when it begins to decline, 337 ; effects of the cultivation of language upon, 337 338 ; of criticism, 338 ; its St. Martin's Summer, 339 ; the imaginative fades into the critical, in all literatures, 330 37 2

Poets, effect of political transactions upon, 62 ; what is the best education of, 73 ; are bad critics, 76 327 328 ; must have faith in the creations of their imaginations, 328 ; their creative faculty, 354

Poland, contest between Protestantism and Catholicism in, 326 330

Pole, Cardinal, 8

Police, Athenian, 34 French, secret, 119 120

Politeness, definition of, 407

Politian, allusion to, i 279

Political convulsions, effect of, upon works of imagination, 62 ; questions, true method of reasoning upon, 47 50

Polybius, 395

Pondicherry, 212 ; its occupation by the English, 60

Poor (the), their condition in the 16th and 19th centuries, 173 ; in England and on the Continent, 179 182

Poor-rates (the), lower in manufacturing than in agricultural districts. 146

Pope, his independence of spirit, 191 ; his translation of Homer's description of a moonlight night, 338 ; relative "correctness" of his poetry, 338 Byron's admiration of him, 351 ; praise of him, by Cowper, 351 ; his character, habits, and condition, 404 ; his dislike of Bentley, 113 ; his acquaintance with Wycherley, 381 ; his appreciation of the literary merits of Congreve, 406 ; the originator of the heroic couplet, 333 ; his condensation in consequence of its use, 152 ; his testimony to Addison's conversational powers, 366 ; his Rape of the Lock his best poem, 394 ; his Essay on Criticism warmly praised in the Spectator, 394 ; his intercourse with Addison, 394 ; his hatred of Dennis, 394 ; his estrangement from Addison, 403 ; his suspicious nature, 403408; his satire of Addison, 409 411 ; his Messiah translated into Latin verse by Johnson, 175

Popes, review of Ranke's History of the, 299

Popham, Major, 84

Popish Plot, circumstances which assisted the belief in, 294 298

Popoli, Duchess of, saved by the Earl of Peterborough, 116

Porson, Richard, 259 260

Port Royal, its destruction a disgrace to the Jesuits and to the Romish Church, 333

Portico, the doctrines of the school so called, 441

Portland, Duke of, 241 278

Porto Carrero, Cardinal, 94 98 Lewis XIV.'s opinion of him, 104 ; his disgrace and reconciliation with the Queen Dowager, 121

Portrait-painting, 385 338

Portugal, its retrogression in prosperity compared with Denmark, 340

Posidonius, his eulogy of philosophy as ministering to human comfort, 436

Post Nati, the great case in the Exchequer Chamber, conducted by Bacon, 387 367 ; doubts upon the legality of the decision, 387

Power, political, religions belief ought not to exclude from, 303

Pratt, Charles, 13 Chief Justice, 86 ; created Lord Camden, and intrusted with the seals. 91

Predestination, doctrine of, 317

Prerogative royal, its advance, 485 ; in the 16th century, 172 ; its curtailment by the Revolution, 170 ; proposed by Bolingbroke to be strengthened, 171 ; see also Crown.

Press, Milton's defence of its freedom, 262 ; its emancipation after the Revolution, 530 ; remarks on its freedom, 169 270 ; censorship of, in the reign of Elizabeth, 15 ; its influence on the public mind after the Devolution, 330 ; upon modern oratory, 150

Pretsman, Mr., 225

Prince, The, of Machiavelli, general condemnation of it, 207 ; dedicated to the younger Lorenzo de Medici; compared with Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws, 013.

Printing, effect of its discovery upon writers of history, 411 ; its inventor and the date of its discovery unknown, 444

Prior, Matthew, his modesty compared with Aristophanes and Juvenal, 352

Prisoners of war, Barêre's proposition tor murdering, 490-495.

Private judgment, Milton's defence of the right of, 202 Mr. Gladstone's notions of the rights and abuses of, 102 103

Privileges of the House of Commons, change in public opinion in respect to them, 330 See also Parliament.

Privy Council, Temple's plan for its reconstitution, iv. 04; Mr. Courtenay's opinion of its absurdity contested, 5 77 Barillon's remarks upon it, 7

Prize compositions necessarily unsatisfactory, 24

Progress of mankind in the political and physical sciences, 271 277 ; in intellectual freedom, 302 ; the key of the Baconian doctrine, 430 ; how retarded by the unprofitableness of ancient philosophy, 430 405 ; during the last 250 ; years, 302

Prometheus, 38

Prosperity, national, 150

Protector (the), character of his administration, 248

Protestant nonconformists in the reign of Charles I., their intolerance, 473

Protestantism, its early history, 13 ; its doctrine touching the right of private judgment, 104 ; light which Ranke has thrown upon its movements, 300 301 ; its victory in the northern parts of Europe, 314 ; its failure in Italy, 315 ; effect of its outbreak in any one part of Christendom, 317 ; its contest with Catholicism in France, Poland, and Germany, 325 331 ; its stationary character, 348 349

Protestants and Catholics, their relative numbers in the 10th century, 25

Provence, its language, literature, and civilization in the 12th century, 308 309 ; its poets the teachers of Petrarch, 85

Prussia, king of, subsidized by the Pitt and Newcastle ministry, 245 ; influence of Protestantism upon her, 339 ; superiority of her commercial system, 48 49

Prynne, 452 459

Psalnianazur, George, 185

Ptolemaic system, 229

Public opinion, its power, 168

Public spirit, an antidote against bad government, 18 ; a safeguard against legal oppression, 18

Publicity (the), of parliamentary proceedings, influence of, 108 ; a remedy for corruption, 22

Pulci, allusion to, 279

Pulteney, William, his opposition to Walpole, 202 ; moved the address to the king on the marriage of the Prince of Wales, 210 ; his unpopularity, 218 ; accepts a peerage, 219 ; compared with Chatham, 93

Pundits of Bengal, their jealousy of foreigners, 98

Punishment, warning not the only end of, 404

Punishment and reward, the only means by which government can effect its ends, 303

Puritanism, effect of its prevalence upon tlie national taste, 302 347 ; the restraints it imposed, 300 ; reaction against it, 307

Puritans (the), character and estimate of them, 253 257 ; hatred of them by James I, 455 ; effect of their religious austerity, 109 Johnson's contempt for their religious scruples, 411 ; their persecution by Charles I., 451 ; settlement of, in America, 459 ; blamed for calling in the Scots, 405 ; defence of them against this accusation, 405 ; difficulty and peril of their leaders, 470 ; the austerity of their manners drove many to the royal standard, 481 ; their position at the close of tlie reign of Elizabeth, 302 303 ; their oppression by Whitgift, 330 ; their faults in the day of their power and their consequences, 307 368 ; their hostility to works of the imagination, 340 347

Puritans and Papists, persecution of, by Elizabeth, 430

Eym, John, his influence, 407 Lady Carlisle's warning to him, 478 ; his impeachment ordered by the king, 477

Pynsent, Sir William, his legacy to Chatham, 63

Pyramid, the Great, Arab fable concerning it, 347 ; how it looked to one of the French philosophers who accompanied Napoleon, 58

"Pyrenees (the), have ceased to exist," 99

---

Q.

Quebec, conquest of, by Wolfe, iii.

Quince, Peter, sense in which he uses the word "translated," 405 406

Quintilian, his character as a critic, 141 142 ; causes of his deficiencies in this respect, 141 ; admired Euripides, 141

---

R.

Rabbinical Learning, work on, by Rev. L. Addison, 325

Racine, his Greeks far less "correctly" drawn than those of Shakspeare, 338 ; his Iphigenie an anachronism, 338 ; passed the close of his life in writing sacred dramas, 300

Raleigh, Sir Walter, i 36 ; his varied acquirements, 96 ; his position at court at the close of the reign of Elizabeth, 364 ; his execution, 400

"Rambler" (the), 190

Itamsav, court painter to George III., 4L

Ramus, 447

Ranke, Leopold, review of his History of the Popes, 299 349 ; his

qualifications as an historian, 299 347

Rape of the Lock (the), Pope's best poem, 394 ; recast by its author, 403 404

Rasselas, Johnson's, 19G, 197

Reader, Steele's, 403

Reading in the present age necessarily desultory, 147 ; the least part of an Athenian education, 147 148.

Reasoning in verse, Drvden's, 300 308

Rebellion, the Great, and the Revolution, analogy between them, 237 247

Rebellion in Ireland in 1840, 473

Reform, the process of, often necessarily attended with many evils, 13 ; its supporters sometimes unworthy, 13

Reform Bill, 235 ; conduct of its opponents, 311

Reform in Parliament before the Revolution, 539 ; public desire for, 541 ; policy of it, 542 131 ; its results, 54 50

Reformation (the), Milton's Treatise of, 204 ; the history of the Reformation much misrepresented, 439 445 ; party divisions caused by it, 533 ; their consequences, 534 ; its immediate effect upon political liberty in England, 435 ; its social and political consequences, 10 ; analogy between it and the French Revolution, 10 11 ; its effect upon the Church of Rome, 87 ; vacillation which it produced in English legislation, 344 ; auspices under which it commenced, 313 ; its effect upon the Roman court, 323 ; its progress not effected by the event of battles or sieges, 327

Reformers, always unpopular in their own age, 273 274

Refugees, 300

Regicides of Charles L, disapproval of their conduct, 240 ; injustice of the imputations cast on them, 240 247

Regium Donum, 170

Regulating Act, its introduction by Lord North, and change which it made in the form of the Indian government, 35 52 03; power which it gave to the Chief Justice, 67

Reign of Terror, 475 500

Religion, national establishment of, 100 ; its connection with civil government, 101 ; sey.; its effects upon the policy of Charles I., and of the Puritans, 108 ; no disqualification for the safe exercise of political power, 300 ; the religion of the English in the 10th century, 27 31 ; what system of, should be taught by a government, 188 ; no progress made in the knowledge of natural religion, since the days of Thales, 302 ; revealed, not of the nature of a progressive science, 304 ; injurious influence of Louis XIV. upon, iii. 04; of slavery in the West Indies, 311 313

Remonstrant, allusion to Milton's Animadversions on the, 204

Rent, 400

Representative government, decline of, 485

Republic, french, Burke's character of, 402

Restoration (the), degenerated character of our statesmen and politicians in the times succeeding it, 512 513 ; low standard of political morality after it, 512 ; violence of party and low state of national feeling after it, 525 : that of Charles II. and of Lewis XVIII. contrasted. 283 284; its effects upon the morals and manners of the nation, 367 308

Retrospective law, is it ever justifiable? 403 404 400 ; warranted by a certain amount of public danger, 470

"Revels, Athenian," scenes from, 30

Review, New Antijacobin (the). See Antijacobin Review.

Revolution (the), its principles often grossly misrepresented, 235 ; analogy between it and the "Great Rebellion," 237 247 ; its effect on the character of public men, 520 ; freedom of the press after it, 530 ; its effects, 530 ; the fruit of a coalition, 410 ; ministerial responsibility since, 531 ; review of (Mackintosh's History of, 251 335

Revolution, the French, its history, 440-513; its character, 273 275 ; warnings which preceded it, 440 441 50 340 427 428 ; its social and political consequences, 10 11 205 200 532 534 430 ; its effects on the whole salutary, 40 41 67 ; the excesses of its development, 41 44 ; differences between the first and the second, 515 ; analogy between it and the Reformation, 10 11 Dumont's views upon it, 41 43 44 40; contrasted with the English, 40 50 08, 70

Revolutionary tribunal, (the). See Tribunal.

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 126

Rheinsberg, 150

Rhyme introduced into English plays to please Charles II., 349

Richardson, 298

Richelieu, Cardinal, 338

Richmond, Duke of, 107

Rigby, secretary for Ireland, 12

Rimini, story of, 74

Riots, public, during Grenville's administration, 70

Robertson, Dr., 472 215 Scotticisms in his works, 342

Robespierre, 340 ; analogy between his followers and those of Kniperdoling, 12 420 470 480 ; false accusations against, 431 ; his treatment of the Girondists, 473 474 ; one of the Committee of Safety, 475 ; his life attempted, 489 ; the division in the Committee, and the revolution of the ninth Thermidor, 497 499 ; his death, 500 ; his character, 501

Robinson, Sir Thomas, 228

Rochefort, threatening of, 244

Rochester, Earl of, 307 114 335

Rockingham, Marquess of, his characteristics, 73 ; parallel between his party and the Bedfords, 73 ; accepts the Treasury, 74 ; patronizes Burke, 75 ; proposals of his administration on the American Stamp Act, 78 ; his dismissal, 88 ; his services, 88 89 ; his moderation towards the new ministry, 93 ; his relation to Chatham, 102 ; advocated the independence of the United States, 100 ; at the head of the Whigs, 232 ; made First Minister, 235 ; his administration, 23(i, 237 ; his death, 237

Rockingham and Bedfords, parallel between them, 73

Sir Thomas, 273 Uohillas, description of them, 29 ; agreement between Hastings and Stirajah Dowlali for their subjugation, 30 31

Roland, Madame, 43 452 453 473

Homans (the), exclusiveness of, 413 410 ; under Diocletian, compared to the Chinese, 415 416

Romans and Greeks, difference between, 287 ; in their treatment of woman, 83 84

Roman Tale (a), fragments of, 119 ; game, called Duodeeim Scriptæ, 4 ; note,; name for the highest throw on the dice, 13 ; note.

Home, ancient, bribery at, 421 ; civil convulsions in, contra-ted with those in Greece, 189 190 ; literature of, 347 349

Rome, Church of, its encroaching disposition, 295 296 ; its policy, 308 ; its antiquity, 301 ; see also Church of Home.

Hooke, Sir George, his capture of Gibraltar, 110 ; his fight with a French squadron near Malaga, 110 ; his return to England, 110

Rosamond, Addison's opera of, 361

Roundheads (the), their literature, 234 ; their successors in the reign of George I. turned courtiers, 4

Rousseau, his sufferings, 365 Horace Walpole's opinion of him, 156

Rowe, his verses to the Chloe of Holland House, 412

Roval Society (the), of Literature, 20-29.

Royalists (the), of the time of Charles I., 257 ; many of them true friends to the Constitution, 483 ; some of the most eminent formerly in opposition to the Court, 471

Royalists, Constitutional, in the reign of Charles I., 471 481

Rumford, Count, 147

Rupert, Prince, 493 ; his encounter with Hampden at Chalgrove, 493

Russell, Lord, 526 ; his conduct in the new council, 96 ; his death, 99

Russia and Poland, diffusion of wealth in, as compared with England, 182

Rutland, Earl of, his character, 411 412

Ruyter, Admiral de, 51

Rymer, 417

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S.

Sacheverell. Dr., his impeachment and conviction, 130 362 121

Sackville, the Earl of, (16th century,) 36 261

Sackville, Lord George, 13

Sadler, Mr., his Law of Population reviewed, 214 249 ; his style, 214 215 270 305 306; specimen of his verse, 215 ; the spirit of his work, 216 217 220 270 305 ; his objections to the Doctrines of Malthus. 217 218 222 228 244 271 272 ; answer to them, 219 221 ; his law stated, 222 ; does not understand the meaning of the words in which it is stated, 224226, 278 279 ; his law proved to be not true, 226 227, 231 238 280295; his views injurious to the cause of religion, 228 230 ; attempts to prove that the increase of population in America is chiefly owing to immigration, 238 239 245 249 ; refutes himself, 239 240 ; his views upon the fecundity of the English peers, 240 241 298 304 ; refutation of these arguments, 241 243 ; his general characteristics, 249 ; his Refutation refuted, 268 306 ; misunderstands Paley's arguments, 273 274 ; the meaning of "the origin of evil," 274 278 ; and the principle which he has himself laid down, 295 298

St. Denis, 484

St. Dennis and St. George-in-the Water, parishes of, imaginary lawsuit between, 100

St. Ignatius. See Loyola.

St. John, Henry, his accession to power in 171 130 141 ; see also Bolingbroke, Lord.

St. John, Oliver, counsel against Charles I.'s writ for ship-money, 457 464 ; made Solicitor-General, 472

St. Just, 466 470 474,475,498, 500

St. Louis, his persecution of liberties, 421

St. Maloes, ships burnt in the harbor of, 244

St. Patrick, 214

St. Thomas, island of, 381 383

Saintes, 510

Sallust, characteristics of, as a historian, 404 400 ; his conspiracy of Catiline has rather the air of a clever party-pamphlet, than of a history, 404 ; grounds for questioning' the reality of the conspiracy, 403 ; his character and genius, 337

Salmasius, Milton's refutation of, 248

Salvator Rosa, 347

Samson, Agonistes, 215

San Marino, visited by Addison, 340

Sanscrit, 28 98

Satire, the only indigenous growth of Roman literature, 348

Savage, Richard, his character, 180 ; his life by Johnson, 187 214

Savile, Sir George, 73

Savonarola, 316

Saxony, its elector the natural head of the Protestant party in Germany, 328 ; its persecution of the Calvinists, 329 ; invasion by the Catholic party in Germamy 337

Schism, cause of, in England, 334

Schitab Roy, 23 24

Schwellenberg, Madame, her position and character, 283 284 297

Science, political, progress of, 271 279 334

Scholia, origin of the House of, 59

Scotland, cruelties of James II. in, 300 311 ; establishment of the Kirk in, 322 159 ; her progress in wealth and intelligence owing to Protestantism, 340 ; incapacity of its natives to hold land in England even after the Union 300

Scots (the), effects of their resistance to Charles I., 400 401 ; ill feeling excited against them by Bute's elevation to power, 39 40 ; their wretched condition in the Highland, and Fletcher of Saltoun's views upon it, 388 389

Scott, Major, his plea in defence of Hastings, 105 ; his influence, 100 ; his challenge to Burke, 114

Scott, Sir Walter, 435 ; relative "correctness" of his poetry, 338 ; his Duke of Rockingham (in "Peveril"), 358 Scotticisms in his works, 342 ; value of his writings, 428 ; pensioned by Earl Grey, 201

Seas, Liberty of the, Barêre's work upon, 512

Sedley, Sir Charles, 353

Self-denying ordinance (the), 490

Seneca, his work "On Anger," 437 ; his claims as a philosopher, 438 ; his work on natural philosophy, 412 ; the Baconian system in reference to, 478

Sevajee, founder of the Mahratta empire, 59

Seven Years' War, 217 245

Seward, Mr., 271

Sforza, Francis, 280

Shaltesbury, Lord, allusion to, 208 13 ; his character, 81 89 ; contrasted with Halifax, 90

Shakspeare, allusion to, 208 30 ; one of the most "correct" poets, 337 ; relative "correctness" of his Troilus and Cressida, 338 ; contrasted with Byron, 359 Johnson's edition of, 417 199 342 ; his superlative merits, 345 ; his bombast, 301 ; his fairies' songs, 304

Shaw, the Lifeguardsman, 357

Shebbeare, Bute's patronage of, 40

Shelburne, Lord, Secretary of State in Chatham's second administration, 91 ; his dismissal, 100 ; heads one section of the opposition to North, 233 ; made First Lord of the Treasury, 237 ; his quarrel with Fox, 239 ; his resignation, 241

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 257 350

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 389 ; his speech against Hastings, r. 121 ; his encouragement to Miss Burney to write for the stage, 273 ; his sarcasm against Pitt, 210

Sheridan and Congreve, effect of their works upon the Comedy of England, 295 ; contrasted with Shakspeare, 295

Ship-money, question of its legality, 157 ; seq.

Shrewsbury, Duke of, 397

Sienna, cathedral of, 319

Sigismund of Sweden, 329

Silius Italicus, 357

Simonides, his speculations on natural religion, 302

Sismondi, M., 131 ; his remark about Dante, 58

Sixtus V., 321

Skinner Cyriac, 202

Slave-trade, 259

Slavery in Athens, 189 ; in Sparta, 190 ; in the West Indies, 303 ; its origin there, 301 305 ; its legal rights there. 305 310 ; parallel between slavery there and in other countries, 311 ; its effects upon religion, 311 313 ; upon public opinion and morals, 311 320 ; who are the zealots for, 320 321 ; their foolish threats, 322 ; effect of, upon commerce, 323 325 ; impunity of its advocates, 325 32G; its danger, 328 ; and approaching downfall, 329 ; defended in Major Moody's report, 361 373 371 ; its approval by Fletcher of Saltoun, 388 389

Smalridge, George, 121 122

Smith, Adam, 286

Smollett, his judgment on Lord Carteret, 188 ; his satire on the Duke of Newcastle, 191

Social contract, 182

Society, Mr. Southey's Colloquies on, reviewed, 132

Society, Royal, (the), of literature, 20-29; its absurdity, 20 ; dangers to be apprehended from it, 20-23; cannot be impartial, 21 22 ; foolishness of its system of prizes, 23 21 Dartmoor the first subject proposed by it for a prize, 21 31 ; never published a prize composition, 25 ; apologue illustrating its consequences, 25 29

Socrates, the first martyr of intellectual liberty, 350 his views of the uses of astronomy, 152 ; his reasoning exactly the reasoning of Paley's Natural Theology, 511 303 ; his dialogues, 381

Soldier, citizen, (a), different from a mercenary, 61 187

Somers, Lord Chancellor, his encouragement of literature, 337 ; procures a pension for Addison, 338 ; made Lord President of the Council, 362

Somerset, the Protector, as a promoter of the English Reformation, 452 ; his fall, 396

Somerset, Duke of, 415

Sonnets, Milton's, 233 Petrarch's, 93 95

Sophocles and the Greek Drama, 217

Soul, 303

Soult, Marshal, reference to, 67

Southampton, Earl of, notice of, 384

Southcote, Joanna, 336

Southern and Northern countries, difference of moral feeling in, 285

Southey, Robert, review of his Colloquies on Society, 132 ; his characteristics, 132 134; his poetry preferable to his prose, 136 ; his lives of Nelson and John Wesley, 136 137 ; his Peninsular War, 137 ; his Book of the Church, 137 ; his political system, 140 ; plan of his present work, 141 ; his opinions regarding the manufacturing system, 146 ; his political economy, 151 ; seq.; the national debt, 153 156 ; his theory of the basis of government, 158 ; his remarks on public opinion, 159 160 ; his view of the Catholic claims, 170 ; his ideas on the prospects of society, 172 ; his prophecies respecting the Corporation and Test Acts, and the removal of the Catholic disabilities, 173 ; his observations on the condition of the people in the 16th and 19th centuries, 174 ; his arguments on national wealth, 178 180 ; review of his edition of Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, 250 ; see also Bunyon.

South Sea Bubble, 200

Spain, 488 ; review of Lord Mahon's War of the Succession in, 75 ; her state under Philip, 79 ; her literature during the 16th century, 80 ; her state a century later, 81 ; effect produced on her by bad government, 85 ; by the Reformation, 87 ; her disputed succession, 88 91 ; the Partition Treaty, 92 93 ; conduct of the French towards her, 93 ; how affected by the death of Charles, 98 ; seq.; designation of the War of the Spanish Succession, 338 ; no conversions to Protestantism in, 348

Spanish and Swiss soldiers in the time of Machiavelli, character of, 307

Sparre, the Dutch general, 107

Sparta, her power, causes of its decline, 155 ; note; defeated when she ceased to possess, alone of the Greeks, a permanent standing army, Mr. Milford's preference of over Athens, 181 ; her only really great men, 182 ; characteristics of her government, 183 184 ; her domestic institutions, 184 185; character of some of her leading men, 185 ; contrasted with Athens, 186 187 ; slavery in, 190

Spectator (the), notices of it, 385389, 397

Spelling of proper names, 173

Spencer, Lord, First Lord of the Admiralty, 277

Spenser, 251 252 ; his allegory, 75

Spirits, Milton's, materiality of them, 227

Spurton, Dr., 494

Spy, police, character of, 519 520

Stafford, Lord, incident at his execution, 300

Stamp Act, disaffection of the American colonists on account of it, 78 ; its repeal, 82 83

Stanhope, Earl of, 201

Stanhope, General, 115 ; commands in Spain (1707), 125 126

Star Chamber, 459 ; its abolition, 468

Staremberg, the imperial general in Spain (in 170 125 128

States, best government of, 154

Statesmanship, contrast of the Spanish and Dutch notions of, 35

Statesmen, the character of, greatly affected by that of the times, 531 ; character of the first generation of professed statesmen that England produced, 342 348

State Trials, 293 302 325 427

Steele, 366 ; his character, 369 Addison's treatment of him, 370 ; his origination of the Tatler, 374 ; his subsequent career, 384 355, 401

Stephens,.Tames, his Slavery in the British West Indies reviewed, 303 330 ; character of the work, 303 304 ; his parallel between their slave laws and those of other countries, 311 ; has disposed of the arguments in its favor, 313

Stoicism, comparison of that of the Bengalee with the European, 19 20

Strafford, Earl of, 457 ; his character as a statesman, 460 ; bill of attainder against him, 462 ; his character, 454 ; his impeachment attainder, and execution, 468 ; defence of the proceedings agains him, 470

Strawberry Hill, 146

Stuart, Dugald, 142

"Sublime" (the). Longinus on, 142 Burke and Dugald Stewart on, 142

Subsidies; foreign, in the time of Charles II., 523

Subsidizing foreign powers, Pitt's aversion to, 231

Succession in Spain, war of the, 75 ; see also Spain.

Sugar, its cultivation and profits, 395 390 403

Sujah Dowlah, Nabob Vizier of Oude, 28 ; his flight, 32 ; his death, 85

Sullivan, Mr., chairman of the East India Company, his character, 265 ; his relation to Clive, 270

Sunderland, Earl of, 201 Secretary of State, 302 ; appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 399 ; reconstructs the ministry in 171 413

Supernatural beings, how to be represented in literature, 69 70

Superstition, instance of, in the 19th century, 3Ü7.

Supreme Court of Calcutta, account of, 45

Surajah Dowlah, Viceroy of Bengal, his character, 231 ; the monster of the "Black Hole," 232 ; his flight and death, 246 251 ; investigation by the House of Commons into the circumstances of his deposition, 28

Surinam, the Maroons of, 386

Sweden, her part in the Triple Alliance, 41 ; her relations to Catholicism, 329

Swift, Jonathan, his position at Sir William Temple's, 101 ; instance of his imitation of Addison, 332 ; his relations with Addison, 399 ; joins the Tories, 400 ; his verses upon Boyle, 118 119

Swiss and Spanish soldiers in the time of Machiavelli, character of, 307

Sydney, Algernon, 525 ; his reproach on the scaffold to the sheriff's, 327

Sydney, Sir Philip, 36

Syllogistic process, analysis of, by Aristotle, 473

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T.

Tacitus, characteristics of, as a writer of history, 406 408 ; compared with Thucydides, 407 409 ; unrivalled in h is delineations of character, 407 ; as among ancient historians in his dramatic power, 408 ; contrasted, in this respect, with Herodotus, Xenophon, and Plutarch, 408 409

Tale, a Roman, Fragments of, 119

Talleyrand, 515 ; his fine perception of character, 12 ; picture of him at Holland House, 425

Tallien, 497 499

Tasso, 353 354 ; specimen from Hoole's translation, 334

Taste, Drvden's, 366 368

Tatler (the), its origination, 373 ; its popularity, 380 ; change in its character, 384 ; its discontinuance, 385

Taxation, principles of, 154 155

Teignmouth, Lord, his high character and regard for Hastings, 103

Telemachus, the nature of and standard of morality in, 359 ; iii. Off-62.

Telephus, the hero of one of Euripides' lost plays, 45 ; note.

Tempest, the great, of 170 359

Temple, Lord, First Lord of the Admiralty in the Duke of Devonshire's administration, 235 ; his parallel between Byng's behavior at Minorca and the king's behavior at Oudenarde, 238 ; his resignation of office, 30 ; supposed to have encouraged the assailants of Bute's administration, 42 ; dissuades Pitt from supplanting Grenville,69; prevents Pitt's acceptance of George III.'s offer of the administration, 72 ; his opposition to Rockingham's ministry on the question of the Stamp Act, 79 ; quarrel between him and Pitt, 89 90 ; prevents the passage of Fox's India Bill, 240 247

Temple, Sir William, review of Courtenay's Memoirs of, 1 115 ; his character as a statesman, 3 7 12 13 ; his family, 13 14; his early life, 15 ; his courtship of Dorothy Osborne, 16 17; historical interest of his love-letters, 18 19 22 23 ; his marriage, 24 ; his residence in Ireland, 25 ; his feelings towards Ireland, 27 28 ; attaches himself to Arlington, 29 30 ; his embassy to Munster, 33 ; appointed resident at the court of Brussels, 33 ; danger of his position, 35 ; his interview with DeWitt, 36 ; his negotiation of the Triple Alliance, 39 41 ; his fame at home and abroad, 45 ; his recall, and farewell of De Witt, 47 ; his cold reception and dismissal, 48 49; style and character of his compositions, 49 50 ; charged to conclude a separate peace with the Dutch, 56 ; offered the Secretaryship of State, 58 ; his audiences of the king, 59 60; his share in bringing about the marriage of the Prince of Orange with the Lady Mary, 60 ; required to sign the treaty of Nimeguen, 60 ; recalled to England, 61 ; his plan of a new privy council, 04, 76 79 ; his alienation from his colleagues, 95 90 ; his conduct on the Exile Question, 97 ; leaves publie life, and retires to the country, 98 ; his literary pursuits, 99 ; his amanuensis, Swift, 101 ; his Essay on Ancient and Modern Learning, 105 108 ; his praise of the Letters, 107 115 ; his death and character, 113 115

Terentianus, 142

Terror, reign of. See Deign of Terror.

Test Act (the), 270

Thackeray, Dev. Francis, review of his Life of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, etc., 194 250 ; his style and matter, 194 195 ; his omission to notice Chatham's conduct towards Walpole, 218

Thales, 302

Theatines, 318

Theology, characteristics of the science of, 302 300

Theramenes, his tine perception of character, 12

Thrale, Mrs., 389 ; her friendship with Johnson, 200 207 ; her marriage with Piozzi, 210 217 ; lier position and character, 270 ; her regard tor Miss Burney, 270

Thucydides, his history transcribed by Demosthenes six times, 147 ; character of the speeches introduced into his narrative, 152 388 389; the great difficulty of understanding them arises from their compression, 153 ; and is acknowledged by Cicero, 153 ; lies not in the language but in the reasoning, 153 ; their resemblance to each other, 153 ; their value, 153 ; his picturesque style compared to Vandyke's, 380 ; description of it, 388 ; has surpassed all rivals in the art of historical narration, 389 ; his deficiencies, 390 ; his mental characteristics, 391 393 ; compared with Herodotus, 385 ; with Tacitus, 407 409

Thurlow, Lord, sides against Clive, 292 ; favors Hastings, 107 117 121 130 ; his weight in the government, 107 235 ; becomes unpopular with his colleagues, 237 ; dismissed, 241 ; again made Chancellor, 247

Tiberius, 407 408

Ticked, Thomas, Addison's chief favorite, 371 ; his translation of the first hook of the Iliad. 405408; character of his intercourse with Addison, 407 ; appointed by Addison Undersecretary of State, 415 Addison intrusts his works to him, 418; his elegy on the death of Addison, 421 ; his beautiful lines upon Holland House, 423

Timlal, his character of the Karl of Chatham's maiden speech, 210

Tinville, Fouquier, 482 489 503

Toledo, admission of the Austrian troops into, 170 110

Toleration, religious, the safest policy for governments, 455 ; conduct of James IL as a professed supporter of it, 304 308

Tories, their popularity and ascendancy in 171 129 ; description of them during the sixty years following the Devolution, 141 ; of Walpole's time, 200 ; mistaken reliance by James II. upon them, 310 ; their principles and conduct after the Devolution, 332 ; contempt into which they had fallen (1754), 220 Clive unseated by their vote, 227 ; their joy on the accession of Anne, 352 ; analogy between their divisions in 1704 and in 1820, 353 ; their attempt to rally in 1707, 302 ; called to office by Queen Anne in 1710, 382 ; their conduct on occasion of the tirst representation of Addison's Cato, 391 392; their expulsion of Steele, from the House of Commons, 390 ; possessed none of the publie patronage in the reign of George L, 4 ; their hatred of the House of Hanover, 2 4 15 ; paucity of talent among them, 5 ; their joy on the accession of George III., 17 ; their political creed on the accession of George I., 20 21 ; in the ascendent for the tirst time since the accession of the House of Hanover, 313; see Whigs.

Tories and Whigs after the Devolution, 530

Tortola, island of, 362 ; its negro apprentices, 374 376 ; its legislature, 377 ; its system of labor, 379

Torture, the application of, by Bacon in Peacham's case, 383 394 ; its use forbidden by Elizabeth, 393

Mr. Jartline's work on the use of it, 394 ; note.

Tory, a modern, 132 ; his points of resemblance and of difference to a Whig of Queen Anne's time, 132 133

Toulouse, Count of, compelled by Peterborough to raise the siege of Barcelona, 117

Toussaint L'Ouverture, 366 390

Townshend, Lord, his quarrel with Walpole and retirement from public life, 203

Townshend, Charles, 13 ; his exclamation during the Earl of Bute's maiden speech, 33 ; his opinion of the Rockingham administration, 74 Chancellor of the Exchequer in Pitt's second administration, 91 Pitt's overbearing manners towards him, 95, 96; his insubordination, 97 ; his death, 100

Town Talk, Steele's, 402 Tragedy, how much it has lost from a notion of what is due to its dignity, 20

Tragedies, Dryden's, i. 360 361. Trainbands of the City (the), 479 480 ; their publie spirit, 18 Transubstantiation, a doctrine of faith, 305

Travel, its uses, 420 Johnson's contempt for it, 420 ; foreign, compared in its effects to the reading of history, 42G, 427

"Traveller" (the), Goldsmith's, 1

Treadmill, the study of ancient philosophy compared to labor in the, 441

Treason, high, did the articles against Strafford amount to? 462 ; law passed at the Revolution respecting trials for, 328 Trent, general reception of the decisions of the council of, 32 Trial of the legality of Charles I.'s writ for ship-money, 457 ; of Strafford, 468; of Warren Hastings, 126

Tribunals, the large jurisdiction exercised by those of Papal Rome, 314

Tribunal, Revolutionary, (the), 496 501

Triennial Bill, consultation of William III. with Sir William Temple upon it, 103

Triple Alliance, circumstances which led to it, 34 38 ; its speedy conclusion and importance, 41 45 Dr. Lingard's remarks on it, 42 43 ; its abandonment by the English government, 49 ; reverence for it in Parliament,

Truth the object of philosophy, history, fiction, and poetry, but not of oratory, 150

Tudors (tlie), their government popular though despotic, 16 ; dependent on the public favor, 20 21 ; parallel between the Tudors and the Caesars not applicable, 21 ; corruption not necessary to them, 168

Turgot, M. 67 ; veneration with which France cherishes his memory, 298 427

Turkey-carpet style of poetry, 199

Turner, Colonel, the Cavalier, anecdote of him, 501

Tuscan poetry, Addison's opinion of, 360

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U.

Union of England with Scotland, its happy results, 160 ; of England with Ireland, its unsatisfactory results, 160 ; illustration in the Persian fable of King Zohak, 161

United Provinces, Temple's account of, a masterpiece in its kind, 50

United States, happiness in, its causes, 39 40 ; growth of the population of, 238 239 245 249 ; their prejudices against negroes, 368 369

Unities (the), in poetry, 341

Unity, hopelessness of having, 161

University, the London, essay upon, 331 360 ; objections to. 331 ; their unreasonableness, 332 ; the necessity of the institution, 333 334 ; religious objections, 334 335 337 ; its great advantages, 335 ; its locality, 336 ; objections on that ground, 338 389 ; refutation of them, 339 ; its freedom from the radical defects of the old universities, 359 ; its future, 360

Universities, their principle of not withholding from the student works containing impurity, 351 352 ; change in tlie relations to government of Oxford and Cambridge in Bute's time, 37 ; their jealousy of the London University, 331 348 ; religious differences in, 338 ; their moral condition, 339 340 ; their glorious associations, 341 ; radical defects of their system, 342 ; their Wealth and Privileges, 343 344 ; character of their studies, 344 ; objected to by Bacon and others, 345 ; evils of their system of education, 354 ; their prizes and rewards, 355 ; idleness of their students, 355 35 ; character of their graduates, 357 ; their fitness for real life, 358 359

Usage, the law of orthography, 173

Uses, statute of, 37

Usurper (a), to obtain the affection of his subjects must deserve it, 14 15

Utilitarians, 5 8 50 52 55 07, 78 79 ; their theory of government criticised, 92 131 ; their mental characteristics, 92 ; the faults of their philosophy, 93 123130; its inutility, 79 87 90 ; their impracticability, 100 ; the inaccuracies of their reasoning, 119 120 ; their summum barium, 123 ; their disingenuousness, 130 131

Utility, the key of the Baconian doctrine, 430

Uti. edit, the treaty of exasperation of parties on account of it, 135 130 ; dangers that were to be apprehended from it, 137 ; state of Europe at the time, 130 ; defence of it, 139 141

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V.

Vandyke, his portrait of the Earl of Strafford, 454

Yausittart. Mr., Governor of Bengal, his position, 9 ; his fair intentions, feebleness, and inefficiency, 9

Varela's portrait of James II., 251

Vattel, 27

Vega, Garcilasso de la, a soldier as well as a poet, 81

Vendôme, Duke of, takes the command of the Bourbon forces in Spain (1710), iii 127

Venice, republic of, next in antiquity to tin- line of the Supreme Pontiff's, 300

Venus, the Roman term for the highest throw on the dice, 13 ; note.

Vergniaud, 452 457 473 474

Verona, protest of Lord Holland against the course pursued by England at the Congress of, 413

Verres, extensive bribery at the trial of, 421

Verse, occasional, 350 ; blank, 300 ; reasoning in, 300

Versification, modern, in a dead language, 212

Veto, by Parliament, on the appointment of ministers, 487 ; by the Crown on aets of Parliament, 488

"Violet Crown, city of," a favorite epithet of Athens, 30 ; note.

"Vicar of Wakefield" (the), 159 161

Vigo, capture of the Spanish galleons at. 170 108

"Village, Deserted" (the), Goldsmith's, 162 103

Villani, John, his account of the state of Florence in the 14th century, 276

Villn-Vieiosa, battle of, 171 128

Villiers, Sir Edward, 412

Virgil not so "correct" a poet as Homer, 337 ; skill with which Addison imitated him, 331 Dante's admiration of, 329

Vision of Judgment, Southev's, 145

Voltaire. the connecting link of the literary schools of Lewis XIV. and Lewis XVI., 355 Horace Walpole's opinion of him. 155 ; his partiality to England, 412 294 ; meditated a history of the conquest of Bengal, 214; his character, and that of his compeers, 294 ; his interview with Congreve, 407 ; his genius venerated by Frederic the Great, 100 ; his whimsical conferences with Frederic, 176 ; seq.; compared with Addison as a master of the art of ridicule, 370 377 ; his treatment by the French Academy, 23 ; failed to obtain the poetical prize,

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W.

Wages, effects of attempts by government to limit the amount of, 362 ; their relations to labor, 383 385 400

Waldegrave, Lord, made first Lord of the Treasury by George II., 242 ; his attempt to form an administration, 243

Wales, Frederic, Prince of, joined the opposition to Walpole, 208 ; his marriage, 209 ; makes Pitt his groom of the bedchamber, 216 ; his death, 222 223 ; headed the opposition, 7 ; his sneer at the Earl of Bute, 20

Wales, Princess Dowager of, mother of George 111 18 ; popular ribaldry against her, 42

Wales, the Prince of, generally in opposition to the minister, 208

Walker, Obadiah, 112 113

Wall, Mr., Governor of Goree, 318

Waller, Edmund, his conduct in the House of Commons, 303 ; similarity of his character to Lord Bacon's, 38 5 386

Walmesley, Gilbert, 177

Walpole, Lord. 400 404

Walpole, Sir Horace, review of Lord Dover's edition of his Letters to Sir Horace Mann, 143 ; eccentricity of his character, 144 145 ; his politics, 146 ; his affectation of philosophy, 149 ; his unwillingness to be considered a man of letters, 149 ; his love of the French language, 152 ; character of his works, 156 158 ; his sketch of Lord Carteret, 187

Walpole, Sir Robert, his retaliation on the Tories for their treatment of him, 136 ; the "glory of the Whigs," 165 ; his character, 166 ; seq.; the charges against him of corrupting the Parliament, 171 ; his dominant passion, 171 173; his conduct in regard to the Spanish war, 173 ; his last struggle, 178 ; outcry for his impeachment, 179 ; formidable character of the opposition to him, 175 206 ; his conduct in reference to the South Sea bubble, 200 ; his conduct towards his colleagues, 202 205 ; found it necessary to resign, 217 ; bill of indemnity for witnesses brought against him, 218 ; his maxim in election questions in the House of Commons, 473 ; his many titles to respect, 416 417

Walpolean battle, the great, 165 426

Walsingham, the Earl of (16th century), 36

Wanderer, Madame D'Arblay's, 311

War, the Art of, by Machiavelli, 306

War of the Succession in Spain, Lord Mahon's, review of, 75 112 ; see Spain.

War, in what spirit it should be waged, 187 188 ; languid, condemned, 495 Homer's description of, 356 357 ; descriptions of by Silius Italicus, 357 ; against Spain, counselled by Pitt and opposed by Bute, 29 ; found by Bute to be inevitable, 32 ; its conclusion, 37 ; debate on the treaty of peace, 49

War, civil. See Civil War.

Ward, John William, Lord Dudley, 288

Warburton, Bishop, his views on the ends of government, 122 ; his social contract a fiction, 182 ; his opinion as to the religion to be taught by government, 188

Warning, not the only end of punishment, 464

Warwick, Countess Dowager of, 411 412 ; her marriage with Addison, 412

Warwick, Earl of, makes mischief between Addison and Pope, 469 ; his dislike of the marriage between Addison and his mother, 411 ; his character, 412

Watson, Bishop, 425

Way of the World, by Congreve, its merits, 403

Wealth, tangible and intangible, 150 152 ; national and private, 153 180 ; its increase among all Masses in England, 180 187 ; its diffusion in Russia and Poland as compared with England, 182 ; its accumulation and diffusion in England and in Continental states, 182

Wodderburne, Alexander, his defence of Lord Clive, 292 ; his urgency with Clive to furnish Voltaire with the materials for his meditated history of the conquest of Bengal, 294

Weekly Intelligencer (the), extract from, on Hampden's death, 405

Weldon, Sir A., his Story of the meanness of Bacon, 407

Wellesley, Marquis, his eminence as a statesman, iv. 05; his opinion as to the expediency of reducing the numbers of the Privy Council, 05; l'itt's friendship for him, 205

Wellington, Duke of, 90 357 408 409 420 ; l'itt's estimate of him, 290 "Wellingtoniad" (the), an imaginary epic poem, 158 171

Wendover, its recovery of the elective franchise, 443

Wesley, John, Southey's life of, 137 ; his dislike to the doctrine of predestination, 170

West Indies (the), slavery in, 303 330 ; its origin and legal condition there, 303 310 ; state of religion in, 311 313 ; state of manners, 314 310 ; public opinion in, 315 317 318 319; despotic character of the inhabitants, 320-322; commerce of, 323 325 ; character of the proprietors, 320-329; slavery in, approaching its end, 328 329 ; their system of cultivation, 378 381 403

Westminster Hall, 42 ; the scene of the trial of Hastings, 124

Westphalia, the treaty of, 314 338

Wharton, Earl of, lord lieutenant of Ireland, 371 ; appoints Addison chief secretary, 371

Wheler, Mr., his appointment as Governor-General of India, 54 ; his conduct in the council, 57 02, 74

Whigs (the), their unpopularity and loss of power in 171 130 ; their position in Walpole's time, 20 207 ; their violence in 1679, 299 ; the king's revenge on them, 301 ; revival of their strength, 304 ; their conduct at the Devolution, 319 320 ; after that event, 330 ; doctrines and literature they patronized daring the seventy years they were in power, 332 Mr. Courtenay's remark on those of the 17th century, 272 ; attachment of literary men to them after the Devolution, 337 ; their fall on the accession of Anne, 351 301 ; in the ascendant in 170 Queen Anne's dislike of them, 381 ; their dismissal by her, 381 ; their success in the administration of the government, 381 ; dissensions and reconstruction of the Whig government in 1717, 430 ; enjoyed all the public patronage in the reign of George I., 4 5 ; acknowledged the Duke of Newcastle as their leader, 8 ; their power and intiuence at the close of the reign of George II., 10 ; their support of the Brunswick dynasty, 15 ; division of them into two classes, old and young, 72 ; superior character of the young Whig school, 73 ; see Tories.

Whig and Tory, inversion of the meaning of, 131

Whigs and Tories after the Devolution, 530 ; their relative condition in 171 130 ; their essential characteristics, 2 ; their transformation in the reign of George I., 3 ; analogy presented by France, 4 ; subsidence of party spirit between them, 5 ; revival under Bute's administration of the animosity between them, 38

Whitgift, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, his character, 353 ; his Calvinistic doctrines, 175177; his zeal and activity against the Puritans, 330

Wickliffe, John, juncture at which he rose, 312 ; his intiuence in England, Germany, and Bohemia, 313

Wieland, 341

Wilberforce, William, travels upon the Continent with Pitt, 242 ; opposes Fox's India bill, 245 240 ; reelected to Parliament, 249 ; his efforts to suppress the slave-trade, 209 ; his intimate friendship with Pitt, 287 297 ; his description of Pitt's speech against Hastings, 120

Wilkes, John, conduct of the government with respect to his election for Middlesex, 535 ; his comparison of the mother of George III. to the mother of Edward 111 , 42 ; his persecution by the Grenville administration, 56 ; description of him, 56 ; his North Briton, 56 ; his committal to the Tower, 56 ; his discharge, 57 ; his Essay on Woman laid before the House of Lords, 511; tights a duel with one of Lord Bute's dependents, 60 ; flies to France, 60 ; is works ordered to be burnt by the hangman, and himself expelled the House of Commons, and outlawed, 60 ; obtains damages in an action tor the seizure of his papers, 61 ; returns from exile and is elected for Middlesex, 100 ; compared to Mirabeau, 72

Wilkie, David, recollection of him at Holland House, 425 ; failed in portrait-painting, 319

William III., low state of national prosperity and national character in his reign, 529 ; his feeling in reference to the Spanish succession, 102 ; unpopularity of his person and measures, 101 ; suffered under a complication of diseases, 101 ; his death, 102 ; limitation of his prerogatives, 103 ; compact with the Convention, 320 ; his habit of consulting Temple, 103 ; coalition which he formed against Lewis XIV. secretly favored by Home, 339 ; his vices not obtruded on the public eye. 392 ; his assassination planned, 394 Addison's Lines to him, 333 ; reference to him, 67

Williams, Dean of Westminster, his services to Buckingham, and counsel to him and the king, 411 416

Williams, John, his character, 139 270 ; employed by Hastings to write in his defence, 139

Williams, Sir William, his character as a lawyer, 378 ; his view of the duty of counsel in conducting prosecutions, 378

Wimbledon Church, Lord Burleigh attended mass at, 6

Windham, Mr., his opinion of Sheridan's speech against Hastings, 122 ; his argument for retaining brands in the impeachment against Hastings, 123 ; his appearance at the trial, 12S; his adherence to Burke, 136

Wine, excess in, not a sign of ill-breeding in the reign of Queen Anne, 367

"Wisdom of our ancestors," proper value of the plea of, 272

Wit, Addison's compared with that of Cowley and Butler, 375

Witt, John de, power with which he governed Holland, 32 ; his interview with Temple, 36 ; his manners, 36 37 ; his confidence in Temple and deception by Charles' court, 47 ; his violent death, 51

Wolcot, 270 238

Wolfe, General, l'itt's panegyric upon, 213 ; his conquest of Quebec and death, 244 ; monument voted to him, 244

Woman, source of the charm of her beauty, 74 ; her different treatment among the Greeks and the Romans, 83 85 ; in the middle ages, 85 ; and among civilized nations generally, 33 35

Women, as agricultural laborers, 394 395

Women (the) of Dryden's comedies, 356 ; of his tragedies, 357 358

Woodfall, Mr., his dealings with Junius, 38

Wordsworth, relative "correctness" of his poetry, 338 Byron's distaste for, 352 ; characteristics of his poems, 356 362 ; his egotism, 82

Works, public, employment of the public wealth in, 155 ; publie and private, comparative value of, 155

Waiting, grand canon of, 76

Wycherley, William, his literary merits and faults, 368 ; his birth, family, and education, 369 370 ; age at which he wrote his plays, 370 371 ; his favor with the Duchess of Cleveland, 372 373 ; his marriage, 376 ; his embarrassments, 377 ; his acquaintance with Pope, 381 383 ; his character as a writer, 384 387; his severe handling by Collier, 599 ; analogy between him and Congreve, 410

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X.

Xenophon, his report of the reasoning of Socrates in confutation of Aristodeinus, his political economy, 149 ; his presentation of the Spartan character, 185 ; his style, 393 ; his mental characteristics, 393 394 ; contrasted with Herodotus, 394 ; with Tacitus, 403

Y.

York, Duke of, 62 ; anxiety excited by his sudden return from Holland, 94 ; detestation of him, 94 ; revival of the question of his exclusion, 96

York House, the London residence of Bacon and his father, 408 432

Yonge, Sir William, 205

Young, Dr., his testimony to Addison's colloquial powers, 366

Z.

Zohak, King, Persian fable of, 17 161