CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 LIBRARY 
 
 THIS BOOK IS ONE OF A 
 COLLECTION MADE BY 
 
 BENNO LOEWY 
 1854-1919 
 
 AND BEQUEATHED TO 
 CORNELL UNIVERSITY 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PN 751.W76E8 
 
 Ethica or. Characteristics of men mann 
 
 3 1924 027 144 967 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tiiis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924027144967 
 
ETHICA: 
 
 OK 
 
 GHARACTEEISTICS OP MEN, MANNERS, 
 AND BOOKS. 
 
E T H I C A: 
 
 OE, 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS Of MEN, MANNERS, 
 
 AND BOOKS. 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR LLOYD WINDSOR. 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 SMITH, ELDER AND CO., 65, CORNHILL. 
 
 M.DCCO.LS. 
 
lliie right of Translation is reserved.'^ 
 
P E E F A C E. 
 
 The literary life of the past two centuries, like the social, 
 has a large element of anecdote in it, by the contem- 
 plation of which alone it can be fuUy realized. Stray 
 waifs — straws in the intellectual atmosphere — ^not infre- 
 quently afford material for the most efficacious mental 
 characterization, where the formal facts of biography 
 proper, though at first sight more imposing, give 
 a less authentic portraiture. To arrest these motes of 
 intelligence, now fast eluding the ken of the present 
 generation, and to winnow them on the threshing-floor 
 of biological criticism, is my object. The title of the 
 Work sufficiently interprets its aim; but it is fair to add, 
 that the titles attached to the several chapters give a very 
 far from adequate idea of their actual contents. 
 
 It should be stated that Chapters I., IV., and VII., 
 are reprinted, with considerable additions, from the 
 " British Quarterly Review ; " to whose editor the author 
 desires to make his cordial acknowledgment. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 THE MENTAL HISTORY OP MONTAIGNE. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Literary Relation between France and England, and England 
 and Germany, investigated. — ^Lessing and Johnson. — The late Mr. 
 St. John's " Montaigne." — Mr. Crowe's " History of France." — 
 M. Thierry.— M. Guizot. — Independence of Literature on Politics. — 
 Montaigne's "Essays" an Autobiography. — Resemblance to Colley 
 Gibber's "Apology." — His Birth and Education.— Extraordinary 
 Prejudices of his Father. — His Son's remarkable Training. — His 
 curious Mental Deficiencies. — His absence of Memory compared to 
 Wycherley's.— His Literary Indolence.— Effects of the Political Crisis 
 on him. — Examination of the Character of Religious Wars in France. 
 — Reformers in France and England contrasted. — The English Puri- 
 tan a Syncretism of the Pastoreaux and Jacquerie Element. — ^Effects 
 of the prevailing anti-Erastianism on French Revolutions. — Mon- 
 taigne's Apathy towards both Political and Religious Movements. — 
 His Absolute Doctrines. — Hobbes and Filmer. — Partly the Result of 
 his Court Education. — ^Effects of the Literary Revolution in France 
 on him. — ^Ronsard. — Marot. — Malherbe. — His Marriage and Senti- 
 ments on Matrimony. — The Oxford Reviewer reiuted. — ^Discovery 
 of Montaigne's " Diary." — Overlooked by Biographers, but essential 
 to his Characterization. — Contrasted as a Classical Diarist with 
 Addison. — His curious Experiences at Rome. — Criticism of his 
 " Essays." — Their great Originality. — Their Language and Style. — 
 Montaigne's reputed Egotism inquired into. — Was Montaigne a 
 Christian ? — His Intellectual Liberality. — The Mental Characteristics 
 of his Age. — His remarkable Positivism. — Striking Anticipation of 
 Bacon. — His Miscellaneousness. — ^Ben Jonson. — His real Merit as a 
 Thinker, and his Philosophic Position. — An Educational Reformer. 
 — Cowper . I 
 
VIH CONTENTS, 
 
 CHAPTEK II. 
 
 MILTON:— HIS POLITICS, PROSE WRITINGS, AND 
 BIOGRAPHERS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Popular ignorance of Milton's early Idiosjmcracies. — The Literary 
 Tastes of his Youth. — ^A Positivist, and a Satirist. — His exoteric 
 Education. — The tendency of Politics, from the Reformation, to be 
 associated with Religious Considerations. — Origin of this Amalgama- 
 tion. — ^Its Effect in producing Traitors on both sides ; Campions and 
 'Parsonses ; Vanes and Hugh Peterses. — Its Influence on the Prero- 
 gative. — Striking Reactionary Spirit in the Present Centviry, illus- 
 trated by the Divorce between Legislation and Religion. — ^Attempt 
 at Protests. — Mr. Gladstone's "Church and State." — Mr. SeweU's 
 " Christian Politics." — This tendency to develop the Personality of 
 the Social Unit neutralized, however, by the Press, and other Lite- 
 rary Corporations. — Return to Milton. — His Political Connection 
 with Cromwell examined. — As a Politician contrasted with Southey. 
 — Cromwell's Puritanism investigated by the light of his Letters. — 
 Mr. Buckle's Assertion that the Great Rebellion was a War of 
 Classes, examined and reftited. — Origin of the Scriptural and Pagan 
 Complexions severally assumed by the English and French Revo- 
 lutions. — Milton's Revolutionary Speculations futile. — Natural Aver- 
 sion in the English Mind to Political Experiments. — Return of 
 Charles. — Singular Contrasts in his Character and Habits. — Position 
 of Milton. — His Prose Writings compared with Burke's. — Examina- 
 tion of his Biographies. — The Present Age the Age of Biography. — 
 Cause of this. — Growth of Milton's Political Reputation. — Warbur- 
 ton. — Warton. — Merits of Johnson as Critic and Biographer. — The 
 prevailing Views of History in his Day. — Present Taste for Hero- 
 izing. — Mr. Carlyle. — Damaging Influence on the Integrity of His- 
 tory.— Mr. Masson's " Life of Milton."— The Theory of the Associa- 
 tion of History with Biography : How far Practicable , . .51 
 
 CHAPTER IIL 
 DRYDEN, OR THE LITERARY MORALITY OF AN EPOCH. 
 
 Association of Intellectual and Material Elements in Civilization. 
 
 Social History and Intellectual History explain each other. Machia- 
 
 veUi, Erasmus, D'Alembert — Sforza, Henry VTTT,, Tom Paine. 
 
 English Society in the Seventeenth Century investigated. — ^Its Licen- 
 tiousness not produced by the Commonwealth. — The two Eras con- 
 trasted in their Literature. — Bunyan. — MUton. — The Drama. Its 
 
 Power testified by Chesterfield, and its Immorality exemplified by 
 
CONTENTS. IX 
 
 PAGE 
 
 the "Tatler" and the "Guardian." — Pope and Chesterfield influ- 
 enced by it. — Dryden's position in the Movement. — ^His provoking 
 Character,^-A Trimmer all his Life. — His Conversion to Romanism 
 examined, and Mr. Bell's Theory. — HaUam. — ^Progress of Scepticism. 
 — BoUngbroke and Shaftesbury. — Swift and Atterbury, Pope and 
 Garth. — Critique on "The Hind and Panther." — ^Its Allegory de- 
 fended.— Johnson. — ^Macaulay. — Dryden's striking Intellectuality. — - 
 His Conduct in the Literary Crisis, and Review of the Rise of 
 Euphuism. — Singular inequality of his Genius. — ^His " Absalom and 
 Achitophel." — His lenient View of Shaftesbury explained. — A Poli- 
 tical Writer. — His Dramas Political Pamphlets. — The old Dramatists 
 not Politicians. — Authorship of the " Essay on Satire." — Growth of 
 French Tastes. — Oldham. — ^Butler. — Addison. — The English Drama . 
 modelled on the French and Spanish. — ^Dryden's Theory of Tragedy 
 foimded on Ariosto. — Revolution in Taste in the next Generation 
 curiously exemplified. — ^Low State of Criticism. — Rymer as a Critic. 
 — ^Dryden's Prose Writings. — His Comedies. — His Controversy with 
 'CoUier investigated. — His "Virgil." — ^National Interest in it. — 
 Compared with Pope's " Homer " ,...,.. 112 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 DE FOE, AND THE RISE OP PAMPHLETEERING. 
 
 Political Discussion is, in its Infancy, Political Satire. — ^Progress of 
 PoUtical Satire. — ^First, Verse. — Then, Prose. — ^Barbour and Cowley 
 before Swift. — Reason of this. — Its Superior Form adapted to 
 a Superior State of Intelligence. — ^Dryden. — Oldham. — Wilkes. — 
 Jimius. — The Restoration. — Culminatiag Point of Political Satire. — 
 "Hind and Panther," &o. — Popular Reasons for the Change into 
 Sober Prose. — ^Increase of Party and Party Spirit. — The Revolution 
 the Era of Polemical Literature. — Somers. — Locke. — Sidney. — ^Wal- 
 pole. — On the Invasion of Wit by Politics. — History of Pamphleteer- 
 ing. — Ben Jonson. — ^Burton. — Sir Roger L'Estrange. — The Claims 
 of Pamphleteering to Notice, as an Element of Literary and Political 
 History. — ^Warbiirton. — Mrs. Macaulay. — The Fate of the Pamph- 
 leteer described by One of themselves. — Authors sometimes depend 
 on their Works for Notoriety. — Sometimes the contrary. — Hobbes. — 
 Warburton. — Bolingbroke. — De Lolme. — Shakspeare. — The Abbe 
 St. Pierre. — De Foe.— De Foe's Political Experience.— His Adoption 
 of Popular Views. — The Letter to a Dissenter. — The Proper Course 
 for the Dissenters to have adopted on James's Indulgence. — De 
 Foe's striking Personal Resemblance to William.— The Crisis of the 
 Succession Bill. — ^Republication of Republican Works. — Fletcher. — 
 Harrington. — Sidney. — The Truebom Englishman. — De Foe and 
 Anne.— True Character of Anne,— De Foe's Political Activity,— The 
 
: CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 question of Peace, and Curious Plight of Swift. — De Foe's strange 
 Political Martyrdom. — His Shortest Way with the Dissenters, a 
 Literary Curiosity. — His Suiferings contrasted with Swift's Course 
 of Triumph in Ireland. — His imaginative Works. — ^Monopoly of 
 Fame hy his " Crusoe."— Parallel instance. — De Foe and Bunyan, 
 representatives of a Sect, or Caste. — Bunyan's power of Allegorizing. 
 — Milton. — ^schylus. — ^De Foe. — Swift. — The " Crusoe " singularly 
 characteristic of the Keligious Nature of De Foe. — ^Plagiarism by a 
 French Author to propagate Eousseau's opinions. — Account of it. — 
 De Foe no Poet. — Coleridge. — "Tatlers" and "Spectators." — 
 Swift's writings, how far Philosophical. — ^De Foe as Anticipator of 
 Howard, Macadam, and the Free-trade Catechism. — His strong Eng- 
 lish Characteristics contra,sted with the tastes of his Literary Con- 
 temporaries 178 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 POPE AND SWIFT, BOLINGBKOKE AND HARLEY. 
 
 Literary Biography Prolix and Minute. — English and Continental 
 Men of Letters. — The Moral and Physical Welfare of Literary Men 
 before and after the Revolution. — The System of Dedication a Mark 
 of their Condition. — The Theory of External Rewards at the Revo- 
 lution examined. — ^Dissociation of Literature from Politics after 
 Anne, and consequent Dissociation of Literary Men from the Court. 
 — Pope. — Arbuthnot. — Gay. — Johnson. — Its results in creating a 
 Literature of the Beau Monde. — Relations between the two Litera- 
 tures. — Goldsmith. — Gibbon. — Mrs. Macaulay. — Johnson. — Lord 
 Lyttleton. — Walpole. — Chesterfield. — Mutual Intercourse of Lite- 
 rary Men. — The Quarrels of Authors. — Churchill. — Philips. — ^Moore. 
 — ^Byron. — Macaulay. — Pope. — His Early Position as a Man of 
 Letters. — His Splenetic Habits. — His Quarrel with Addison. — An 
 Unbiassed Estimate of Addison's Character. — Pope's Treatment of 
 his Friends. — The Affair of his Letters. — The Relation of Bookseller 
 and Bookmaker Examined and Exemplified. — Pope's Poetical Posi- 
 tion Defined. — Dryden. — Reaction in EngUsh Poetry. — Cowper's 
 Place in that Reaction. — Scott. — Byron. — Effect of Politics on Poetry. 
 — Classic Poetic Fervour. — Speculation on Pope's proposed Epic. — 
 His Satires and Epistle to Abelard Criticized. — Swift as a Satirist.^ — 
 D'Alembert on English Criticism. — Milton. — Bacon. — Addison. — 
 Swift's Poetry to be Examined by the Light of his Life. — Attempt 
 at Elucidating his Real Character. — Not Trusted by Queen Anne's 
 Ministry. — The Opposite Theory Refuted. — Harley's Character. — 
 
 Bolingbroke. — His Historical Position. — His Personal Demeanour. 
 
 Connection with Pope and Swift. — Particular Estimate of his Intel- 
 lectual Career. — His Superiority to Harley. — His Versatile, Imposing 
 Genius 215 
 
CONTENTS. XI 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 GOLDSMITH, AND THE HISTJ3RY OF PROSE FICTION 
 IN ENGLAND. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Rise of Fiction in England. — The Stage. — Priority in Development 
 of French Imaginative Literature. — The Voyages Imaginaires of 
 Swift and De Foe. — Richardson compared with Marivaux. — The 
 Preternatural School. — Reaction in favour of History, Scott. — And 
 of Domestic Portraiture, Miss Austen. — Peculiar Sectarian Character 
 of Modem Fiction. — Mr. Reade and Mr. Dickens equivalent to 
 Howard and Bentham. — ^Effect on the Personal Character of the 
 Author. — His Wide Sphere of Action. — Goldsmith. — ^Lord Macau- 
 lay. — The Popular Estimate of him rather Sensational than Intellec- 
 tual. — The Lives of the NoveUsts Influenced their "Works. — Con- 
 dition of Literary Men in Goldsmith's Day. — Goldsmith Compared 
 with Sterne. — His Colloquial Powers Contrasted with Johnson's. — 
 His Curious Psychological Development. — His Literary Talents. — 
 As an Imaginative Writer, as an Essayist, and as an Historian and 
 Poet. — His View of European Literature Criticized. — The Sweetness 
 of his Style. — ^Examination into the Style of the Commonwealth 
 Writers, and the New School of Anne. — Boileau. — Addison. — John- 
 son. — ^^sthetic Tastes of the latter. — Goldsmith, as a Dramatist, com- 
 pared with Farquhar. — A Final Estimate of his Character . . 285 
 
 CHAPTER VIL 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF ANCIENT AND MODERN 
 ORATORS. 
 
 Rise of Oratory. — Historical Oratory preceded by Historical Dialogue. 
 — Herodotus as a Dialogist. — Hume. — Shakspeare. — Herodotus's 
 Set Speeches. — His Character as a Historian. — ^Mr. Sewel, and the 
 Author of the " Theosophy of Enghsh History." — Xenophon. — The 
 " Anabasis " and the " Tales of the Crusaders."— The " Cyropaedia." 
 — Cyrus a Godfrey or Rinaldo. — Xenophon's Vanity. — His Oratory, 
 — Thucydides. — His UtUitarianism. — His Description of Demoraliza- 
 tion in Greece compared with Machiavelli's Account of Italy. — 
 Thucydides contrasted with Tacitus and Sharon Turner. — His Ora- 
 tory. — His Idea of History, and Fox's Objections anticipated. — His 
 Speeches as Debates, as Authentic, probably, as Johnson's. — The 
 Speeches of Latin Historians. — Tacitus. — Sallust. — Livy. — Caesar. — 
 The later Greek Historians. — Dionysius and Dion Cassius. — Modem 
 Historical Composition Examined. — Rise of Oratory Proper.— State 
 
XU CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 of Greece and of Kome in the most Flourishing Period of Oratory. 
 — Decline of Ancient Oratory. — Cicero. — Tacitus. — Augustus. — 
 Suetonius. — The Greek Rhetoricians. — QuintiUan. — The System of 
 National Education adapted to turn out an Orator. — Rise of Pro- 
 fessional or Forensic Orators. — Demosthenes and Cicero were the 
 Swift and Junius of their Generation. — The Artifices of Oratory. — 
 Bubb Dodington. — Grattan. — Cicero. — Quintilian. — The "Insti- 
 tutes" Examined. — The Artistic Devotion of Ancient Audiences. — 
 The Areopagus and the Forum contrasted with the Old Bailey and 
 Westminster Hall. — Cicero's Character Animadverted on. — Demo- 
 sthenes. — Hume's Criticism Examined. — Rise of Modem Oratory. 
 — It? Development in England at the Renaissance. — ^Bacon. — ^Ben 
 Jonson's Criticism. — Oratory of the Rebellion. — Of the Revolution. 
 — Bolingbroke's Oratory. — ^Reason of its Peculiar Vocal Character- 
 istics. — Chesterfield's Receipt. — Contrast of the Present Parliamentary 
 Oratory. — Oratory in Walpole's Time. — Growth of Artistic Oratory. 
 — Chatham. — Compared with Mirabeau. — Parliamentary Oratory 
 now Uninfluential. — ^Pitt. — Fox. — Fox and Demosthenes Compared. 
 — ^Lord Brougham. — Burke, a Psychological Study. — Criticism on 
 Oratory scant. — Aristotle. — Dionysius. — Longinus. — Quintilian. — 
 Cicero.— Merits of Modem Dialogists 322 
 
E T H I C A. 
 
 CHAPTEE I. 
 
 THE MENTAL HISTORY OF MONTAIGNE. 
 
 The Literaiy Kelation between- Prance and England, and England and 
 Germany, inTCstigated, — ^Leasing and Johnson. — The late Mr. St. John's 
 " Montaigne." — ^Mr. Crowe's " History of France." — ^M. Thierry. — 
 M. Gnizot. — Independence of Literature on Polities. — Montaigne's 
 " Essays" an Autobiography. — ^Res^nblance to CoUey Gibber's " Apo- 
 logy." — His Birth and Education. — ^Extraordinary Prejudices of his 
 Father. — EEs Son's remarkable Training. — His curious Mental Defi- 
 ciencies. — His absence of Memory compared to Wycherley's. — ^His 
 Literary Indolence. — ^Effects of the Political Crisis on him. — Exami- 
 nation of the Character of Religious Wars in France. — Reformers in 
 France and Engla,nd contrasted. — The English Puritan a Syncretism 
 of the Pastoreaux and Jacquerie Element. — ^Effects of the prevailing 
 anti-Erastianism on French Revolutions. — Montaigne's Apathy to- 
 wards both Political and Religious Movements. — His Absolute Doc- 
 trines. — Hobbes and Fiimer. — ^Partly the Result of his Court Edu- 
 cation. — ^Effects of the Literacy Revolution in France on him. — 
 Ronsard. — Marot. — Malherbe. — His Marriage and Sentiments on 
 Matrimony. — The Oxford Reviewer refuted. — Discovery of Mon- 
 taigne's " Diary." — Overlooked by Biographers, but essential to his 
 Characterization.^ Contrasted as a Classical Diarist with Addison. 
 — His curious Experiences at Rome. — Criticism of his " Essays." — 
 Their great Originality. — Their Language and Style. — Montaigne's 
 reputed Egotian inquired into. — Was Montai^e a Christian? — His 
 Intellectual Liberality. — ^The Mental Characteristics of his Age. — His 
 remarkable Positivism. — Striking Anticipation of Bacon. — His Miscel- 
 laneousness. — ^Ben Jonson. — His real Merit as a Thinker, and his 
 Philosophic Poation. — An Educational Reformer. — Cowper. 
 
 The literary relation between France and England has 
 undergone a complete change since the day that Mau- 
 pertuis pleaded the merits of Newton, or, stUl more 
 recently, since the day that Dumont expounded the 
 
 1 
 
ETHICA ; 
 
 oracles of Bentham. France holds no longer the 
 position of moonshee or interpreter to England. The 
 achievements of British genius are no longer conveyed 
 to Europe in the language of Gaul. The monopoly of 
 criticism, which rendered Paris the arbitress of European 
 taste, has long since passed away, and Enghsh authors 
 are far more disposed to look for a continental notoriety 
 to the tribunals of Hamburg and Vienna. At the same 
 time, a juster distribution of power has brought with it 
 a juster apphcation of it. Enghsh hterature has 
 gained in originaUty, as it has gained in independence; 
 whUe French hterature has received in compensation a 
 far more philosophic appreciation than could have been 
 bestowed on it by the fine gentlemen and fine ladies 
 who, more than a century ago, spent their time in imi- 
 tating the models of Voiture and Balzac, and in labour- 
 ing to prove BoUeau a greater critic than Horace. It 
 was not always so. Our relations with Germany are 
 comparatively modem. Lessing and Johnson were 
 contemporaries, yet, to all appearance, neither ever heard 
 of the other. Our hterary relations with France were 
 estabUshed earher. The mutual interchange of thought 
 at the revival of philosophy in the two countries won- 
 derfully and rapidly confirmed them. Thus it was 
 written from Paris, in the year 1780, that " the Eng- 
 lish language and hterature are so cultivated in France, 
 and so eagerly learned, that the best authors of Great 
 Britain are now reprinting in the metropohs. Shakes- 
 peare, Addison, Pope, Johnson, Hume, and Kobertson 
 are to be pubhshed here very soon."^ It was complained 
 that BaskerviUe's famous type, " bought for a trifle," w'as 
 used to propagate the Enghsh tongue. 
 
 At present it is difficult to take up the hst of pubKca- 
 tions for a single quarter without observing the striking 
 
 ' Nichol's "Anecdotes Lit." vol. iii. p. 460. 
 
OB CHAEACTEEISTICS. 6 
 
 intimacy into whiish mere intellectual, connection has 
 ripened. It must be owned, that on our side the law of 
 reciprocity has not been well maintained. A stray Life, 
 such as that of the late Mr. St. John's "Montaigne," or a 
 not very original History, such as that of Mr. Crowe's, 
 scarcely compensates for the generous labour which 
 M. Thierry has bestowed on one epoch of our country, 
 and M. Guizot on another. If we are the debtors, 
 however, we are not without gratitude. The great 
 principle of Hterary cosmopohtanism is recognized; 
 literature, in fact, has triumphed over the narrow com- 
 passes of the political geographer. It has surmounted 
 the artificial limits of mere fiscal horizons. And it is no 
 poor consolation that amid the animosities of race and 
 faction, a single bond of union yet remains among 
 nations, not to be measured by lines of latitude and 
 longitude. There is a certain class of authors, whose 
 works are so completely the refiex of their lives, that 
 tiiey can only be studied or apprehended through the 
 Hght cast upon them by their Lives. Of this species of 
 quasi- autobiography, an example, though a mean one, 
 wiU readily suggest itself in the title of CoUey Gibber's 
 ' ' Apology. ' ' Montaigne's ' ' Essays ' ' afford a more perfect, 
 because a more spiritual specimen. 
 
 Montaigne was bom in his father's Chateau of Mon- 
 taigne, in Perigord, in the summer of the year 1533 — a 
 date which his biographers do not forget to notice as 
 corresponding to sixty years after the discovery of 
 printing, forty after the discovery of America, and fifteen 
 after Luther began to preach his Reforms. Of his father 
 it is necessary to say a few words. 
 
 He seems to have been a man of more than ordinarily 
 eccentric proportions. Early in hfe he had taken part in 
 those fierce campaigns in which the hordes of the North, 
 headed by leaders more skilful and more unscrupulous 
 
 1—2 
 
4 ETHICA : 
 
 than Alboin or Attila, once more swept across the sunny 
 landscapes of the Alps to ravish the fair virginity of 
 ItaHan civilization. He seems to have been present at 
 that terrible siege, for which his son could find but a 
 single parallel in the gloomy annals of war, when the 
 citizens of Milan, driven to madness between the iasults 
 of Del Guasto and the perfidy of Bourbon, hurried from 
 the precarious shelter of their grass-grown palaces to 
 starve in weUs or underground cellars, or to hide their 
 outraged honour iu the waters of the Olona. 
 
 The guerdons of military renovra, distributed with 
 such lavish hands around him, do not appear, however, 
 to have aroused his chivalry. We soon after find him 
 marrying and settling down at his ancestral estate, 
 closing a career of continence so remarkable that his 
 philosophic son has not forgotten to pay special tribute 
 to it. But the old soldier had not yet relinquished his 
 old habits. In all the scattered records that his son has 
 left of his person and manners we readily trace the 
 discipline of the camp. His face, bronzed by the suns of 
 a southern sky, reflected in its gravity the modesty and 
 precision of his demeanour. His person, retaining the 
 scrupulousness and neatness of the parade-ground, was 
 strong, well-knit, and well-proportioned. A horror of 
 anything approaching to effeminacy was one of his 
 peculiar characteristics. To supply the deficiencies of 
 nature, whether of mind or body, by a course of artificial 
 training, was one of his pecuhar crotchets. There stiU 
 remained in the son's lifetime canes fuU of lead, with 
 which the sire was wont to exercise his arms for throwing 
 the bar or the stone, and shoes with leaden heels to make 
 him hghter for running or leaping. Miraculous stories 
 of his powers of vaulting were current among the 
 peasants of the Didoire, and, if we are to beheve our 
 only authority on the subject, many was the silken 
 
OE CHABACTERISTICS. 5 
 
 courtier from Paris or Navarre that might have seen the 
 old man, now past three-score, throwing himself at a 
 bound, in his farred gown, into the saddle, or making the 
 tour of the table on his thumbs, or springing up the 
 stairs three or four at a time, with an agihty unknown at 
 the Louvre. A special subject of his ridicule, in spite of 
 the stone, was physic, a contempt for which, inherited by 
 his usually good-natured representative, has supphed him 
 with an opportunity of bequeathing to posterity all the 
 collected raillery of antiquity, from Herodotus and Plato 
 to Dion and Stobaeus. The household of the Sieur 
 Montaigne did not, as a matter of course, escape the 
 influence of this philosophic devotion to rules and regu- 
 lations. The son, indeed, more than once pronounces 
 his distaste for all domestic avocation. SaUust had 
 declared it to be a servile employment. The younger 
 Phny had called it a base and abject care to be left to 
 servants. Accordingly, he made it a point not to know 
 how his steward disbursed his revenues, how much his 
 lacquey gave for his stuffs, how his gardener ordered 
 his vines, or his cook dressed his meats. Not so 
 the father. Not a disbursement was made, however 
 small, not an account rendered, that was not duly 
 registered in the day-book, and handed to the special 
 care of a bailiff. In addition to this, a journal was at 
 hand, under the supervision of a secretary, dedicated to 
 the reception of remarkable occurrences, the change of a 
 groom, the death of a child, the marriage of a tenant, 
 the visit of a critic from Holland, or a cavaUer from Pau. 
 This was not all, however. His travels from Italy 
 had brought b im into contact with the little Court at 
 Navarre, where the sister of Francis was wont to flee the 
 irksome magnificence of St. Germains to write novels in 
 imitation of Boccaccio, or sonnets in the spirit of the 
 ' ' Encomium Morse. ' ' The associations acquired at Nerac 
 
t> ETHICA : 
 
 were duly transplanted to the pumpkin-beds of Montaigne. 
 Francis the First, among his other pretensions to 
 grandeur, affected to rival the Cosmos in his patronage 
 of letters, reared palaces for Primaticio and II Eossi to 
 adorn and decorate, estabUshed factories to rival the 
 looms of Flanders, collected rare manuscripts, lavished 
 his Toumois Sols on Greek savants and Venetian carvers, 
 and spent the moments he could snatch from toying with 
 the Duchess D'Estampes, or arranging the next pageant, 
 in criticizing the designs of Finiguerra and Cellini, and 
 contemplating the golden-haired madonnas of Da Vinci. 
 Patronage had become accordingly a fashion, and the 
 fashion set by the monarch had bitten his Perigordian 
 subject. The house of the Bordeaux Prevot soon be- 
 came as notorious as Fontainebleau or Blois. Learned 
 strangers from across the frontier readily took their host's 
 queer theories and bad Spanish in return for a liberty 
 of discussion denied them by the Sorbonne. 
 
 The result of aU this was, a new idiosyncrasy developed 
 itself. The veteran became a scholar, and the combina- 
 tion of the two characters in one immediately displayed 
 itself m the traming of his third son. As might have 
 been expected, the exigencies of the boy's bodily develop- 
 ment first came under notice. That he might not acquire 
 the silken proportions of a Sir Paris was his chief object. 
 He was accordingly, as he afterwards tells us, provided 
 with god-parents of the meanest fortune, and taken from 
 the cradle to be nursed at the breast of a common 
 villager. Hardy as was his infantine training, it does 
 not, however, seem to have produced the usual fruit. 
 Years after, the essayist declared that he could not hear 
 the rattle of an arquebus without starting, or see a 
 chicken's neck pulled off without trouble, or endure the 
 cry of a hare in his dog's teeth. The next consideration 
 was the subject of education. It had formed one of the 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 7 
 
 principal topics of discussion at the chateau on more than 
 one occasion. The inconvenience of the ordinary method 
 was particularly insisted upon, and more than one com- 
 mentator on Seneca and Aristotle had pronounced that 
 the tedious course by which the languages were acquired 
 was the sole cause the modems could not arrive at the 
 perfection of Athenians and Romans. It is probable, 
 too, that he had read Rabelais, and been struck with the 
 manner in which he makes the youthfd Garagantua 
 discuss the gossip of Pliay and Athenseus over his inter- 
 vals of quince marmalade. 
 
 At any rate he hit upon a pleasant project for making 
 his son a good classic. He had him, " before he could 
 speak," deUvered into the hands of a German tutor, 
 imported expressly from his own country, at a very large 
 salary. Two assistants were associated with him, whose 
 conversations were only to be held in the dialect of Cicero 
 and Terence. The very household were converted into 
 scholars to forward the education of the youthful pedant. 
 Not a man-servant nor a maid-servant in the domaia 
 that had not a scrap of dog-Latin ready to respond to 
 the Usp of their young master. The whole village 
 threatened to lose its native tongue, and when the 
 essayist wrote, stable-boys and artisans stiU made use 
 of terms that had less of Gascon than Roman in them. 
 
 To the acquisition of Greek the road was not so level. 
 To puzzle the son's brains was not the father's design. 
 A superstition in the matter of children's weakness of 
 brain had already suggested to hhn the process of 
 awakening the boy to the sound of the flute or the 
 viohn. It was with a similar precaution that he now 
 devised the method of tossmg out parisyllabics and im- 
 parisyllabics on the table •' after the manner of those who 
 play at chess." The conception, however, worthy as it 
 was of the intuitive system of Pestalozzi himself, was an 
 
ETHICA : 
 
 acknowledged failure. " Of Greek," said Montaigne, in 
 one of those singular fits of candour which have thrown a 
 charm over his " Confessions " not surpassed by Eousseau's, 
 " I had never anything hut a smattering." Eventually 
 the good man's eccentricity fairly succumbed to the 
 force of common opinion, and at the age of six young 
 Montaigne was despatched to study the humanities at 
 the college of Guienne, at that time, according to the 
 testimony of contemporary historians, the best and most 
 flourishing in France. Here, however, his early training 
 stood him in good stead. He was at once, on his 
 entrance, preferred to the first form, and at thirteen 
 he had gone through the academical course. The study 
 of others was his amusement, and whUst other boys were 
 reading the adventures of Amadis he would slip away 
 from the tennis-court or the morris-dance to pore over 
 the Transformations of Ovid, and enjoy the jokes of 
 Plautus. His schoolfellows were amazed that a lad who 
 could not speak Perigordian or French should act the 
 Latin plays of the great Muretus with the spirit of a 
 young Roscius, and make scholars like Buchanan look to 
 their scholarship. 
 
 There was great danger of Montaigne's falling a 
 victim to this youthful precocity. He was in a fair 
 way of turning out a prodigy or a pedant. Happily for 
 posterity his natural disposition completely neutralized 
 the effect of his training. Had we not his own repeated 
 assurance, it would be difficult to beUeve that he was as 
 indolently inclined as he professed to be. He seems to 
 have possessed very httle of the materials for making a 
 student. His wit, he complains, was slothful, gomg no 
 faster than it was led ; his understanding slow, his inven- 
 tion languishing. The least cloud arrested his progress. 
 He never proposed to hunself a riddle, be it never so 
 easy, that he could find out. The smallest subtlety was 
 
OR CHABACTEEISTICS. 9 
 
 in danger of gravelling him. In games where quickness 
 and originality are required, nothing but the commonest 
 points could he venture to apprehend. Chess, he parti- 
 cularly tells us, he hated, as far too grave and serious 
 a diversion for him. His appHcation was singularly 
 lethargic. If he turned over a book, he did not study it, 
 and the books that he did turn over must be such as are 
 pleasant and easy, and tickle his fancy. If one book did 
 not please him, he took another, and even that he never 
 meddled with, but at such times as he was weary of doing 
 nothing. Anything that did not come to him as kiadly 
 as his "Decameron" or " Pantagruel," he fairly threw 
 aside. To bite his nails about difficulties was no part of 
 his philosophy. He never travelled, indeed, without 
 books, but days and sometimes months passed over 
 without his looking at them. His very Latin, which 
 was to him as his mother tongue, he soon lost the use 
 of speaking or writing, though so strong was the force 
 of habit, that on one occasion, after a lapse of forty 
 years, on seeing his father swoon, he involimtarily caught 
 himself usiag Latia interjections. One of the circum- 
 stances which must undoubtedly have contributed to 
 retard his reputation was his wonderful deficiency of 
 memory. His defect in that faculty is, according to his 
 own account, almost incredible. He would sometimes 
 take up a book for new, which but a year before he had 
 scribbled all over with notes and comments. His hbrary 
 was situated in a comer of his house. If he had any- 
 thing in his head, he could not go across the basscourt 
 that led to it without forgetting it. In speaking, the 
 sHghtest digression from the subject left him bewildered. 
 Verses that any of his playmates would have leamt 
 in twenty minutes, took him three hours to acquire by 
 heart. The very names of his servants were beyond his 
 powers of retention. He could tell that they had three 
 
10 ETHICA : 
 
 syllables, that they sounded harsh, that they began or 
 ended with such or such a letter, but that was aU. He 
 sometimes fancied that he should resemble that Messala 
 of whom PHny, in his " Natural History," has written, that 
 he forgot his own name. It more than once befel him 
 to forget the watchword he had a few hours previously 
 given or received, and iu spite of Cicero's experience, to 
 put his purse in a lock-up, that afterwards escaped his 
 recollection. Sometimes his memory played him tricks 
 similar to those that are recorded of Wycherley, and he 
 would either forget his own compositions and writings, 
 or appropriate those of a brother author's for his own. 
 
 There was nothing, indeed, in his lazy, sluggish con- 
 stitution, by which a careless observer could have inti- 
 mated that the name of Montaigne was destined to form 
 an epoch in the history of French literature and French 
 philosophy. Liberty and laziness were, he says, his 
 predominating qualities. Nothing was more distasteful 
 to him than a matter of dehberation. He would rather 
 have been cheated of four hundred crowns than be at the 
 trouble of overlooking his accounts. The idea of con- 
 sultation broke his rest. The very correction of his 
 writings was a task beyond him. He could not bring 
 himself even to revise his orthography or his punctuation. 
 He had been solicited to write the history of his own 
 times. Had he acceded to the request, it is probable 
 that De Thou would never be taken from the book-shelf. 
 But he refused. Not for the glory of Sallust would he 
 submit himself to a labour of so much assiduity and 
 perseverance. His bodily functions were apparently well 
 attuned to this heavy disposition. His person was small, 
 lower than the middle stature, though he does not forget 
 to add that Aristotle had said little men are pretty, and 
 that the Grand Duke Francis Maria de' Medici was his 
 height. But though strong and well knit, he never 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 11 
 
 possessed the agility of his father. The most awkward 
 page in his household <30uld beat him in dancing, tennis, 
 or wrestHng. Swimming or fencing he never could learn. 
 His hands were so clumsy that he could never so much 
 as write so as to read what he had written.^ He knew 
 about as much of making a pen, or folding a letter, as 
 a fishwife on the Petit Pont, and he could no more carve 
 a capon than he could saddle a horse or lure a hawk. 
 "Extremely idle, both by nature and art," are his own 
 words, "I would as wilhngly lend a man my blood as my 
 pains." His ignorance of common things was amazing. 
 He had had his estate in his own hands since his pre- 
 decessor had left him to succeed, yet he could not cast 
 up. the accounts of his rents, or reckon a counter, or 
 even teU the names of the current coin. He had been 
 bred up in the country amongst- husbandmen, yet he 
 did not know the difference between one grain and 
 another, could scarcely distinguish between a cabbage 
 and a lettuce, and had spent more than half his life in 
 ignorance of the use of leaven in making bread, or 
 fermentation in making wine. In compensation for all 
 these disadvantages, he possessed one valuable qualifi- 
 cation. Whatever he did put his mind to comprehend, 
 he comprehended with a thoroughness that quicker intel- 
 lects must have despaired of. It is possible, that had 
 he been of a less indolent or a more studious disposition, 
 his Uterary renown had never reached a wider sphere 
 than the ScaKgers or Buchanans, or he might have 
 reahzed the anticipation which Goldsmith, in one of his 
 letters to his kinsfolk, amusingly makes about himself, 
 and be still mentioned with profound respect in a German 
 comment or a Dutch dictionary. As it was, he protested 
 that he only nibbled on the outward crust of learning ; 
 
 ' La Bruyere (" Des Jugements," vol. ii. p. 84) relates a similar faiUng of 
 the simple-hearted Comeille. 
 
12 ETHICA : 
 
 that he only knew that there is a science of law, a 
 science of physics, and four parts -in mathematics ; that 
 he could never fathom the depths of Aristotle, and that 
 the only books of sohd learning he could ever seriously 
 devote himself to were Plutarch and Seneca ; and the 
 result is, he has bequeathed to the remotest posterity 
 a work far surpassing in interest the works of either 
 Plutarch or Seneca. 
 
 To return to his biography. Montaigne's hfe, before 
 the production of his " Essays," had nothing of the easy 
 chair of the philosopher about it. After quitting the 
 coUege of Guienne he commenced the study of law, 
 and at the age of twenty-one his biographers find him 
 arrayed in the red robe of a councillor in the Parhament 
 of Perigueux. The crisis in which he Hved was in truth 
 one of action, not contemplation. The career of France 
 for the last half-century, or more, had been one of foreign 
 aggression. Naples and the Milanese still remained to 
 tempt the ambition of kings, and the day-dream of con- 
 quest, which had roused the energies of Charles VII., 
 had come down to Francis, rendered more attractive by 
 the adventitious concurrence of a nature singularly im- 
 pulsive and ostentatiously sensitive to the pretensions 
 of chivalry. Independent of all personal considerations, 
 the governments of Europe had not yet ceased to vibrate 
 at the first shock of that strange pohtical maxim, un- 
 known to the statesmen of earher years, whose principle 
 was proclaimed as the equiUbrium of power. Nor was 
 this all. By the side of that physical activity that 
 attended the birth of the science of diplomacy into the 
 world, there was in operation a revolution fated to pro- 
 duce results stUl more startling than even the aUiance 
 of the Most Christian King with the heir of Mahommed. 
 
 It has always struck me as a subject of peculiar in- 
 terest, how it was that the religious reformation, which 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS, 13 
 
 has done so much for pohtical liberty in England, should, 
 in spite of the vigour of its efforts, have done so little 
 for constitutional progress in France. The inquiry is 
 hardly adapted for a parenthesis, but it would not be 
 difficult to offer a superficial explanation of the pheno- 
 menon. The wars of rehgion in France were, I think — 
 leaving a small margin for the necessary intermixture of 
 questions not purely moral — reUgious wars. Protes- 
 tantism, that produced at different times its Anabaptists 
 in Germany, and its Fifth-monarchy men in England, 
 was, particularly in its infancy in France, systematically 
 isolated from the consideration of pohtics. Nothing can 
 afford a clearer proof of this than the language held, not 
 in the ballads and pamphlets of the hour, but in the 
 authorized enactments and manifestos which were in- 
 tended as counter-statements to the edicts of Catherine 
 and the Lorraines. Free toleration of their rehgion, 
 and free exercise of their worship, were, with scarcely an 
 exception, the main articles of their treaties. " The 
 execrable day of St. Bartholomew," says Chateaubriand, 
 " made France hosts of martyrs." But confiscations, 
 delations, the Estrapade and the Chambre Ardente, were 
 not sufficient to make the martyrs democrats. When the 
 cruelty of the Guises created the conspiracy of Amboise, 
 the reformed refused to act with the malcontents tiU they 
 had consulted the divines of Germany and Switzerland, 
 and then only consented to co-operate when they found 
 it lawful, with a Prince of the blood at their head, to 
 oppose the Government of the Lorraines, and re-esta- 
 bhsh the Government of their King. Even after the 
 Parhament of Paris had decreed the death of traitors to 
 the heretics, the traitors themselves, in their proposal to 
 bring lansquenets from Germany, and to receive the 
 musqueteers of Elizabeth, declared that they had only 
 the honour of God before their eyes, the liberation of the 
 
14 ETHICA : 
 
 king and queen, and the maintenance of the edicts. The 
 chiefs who put their seals to the treaty of Milhau, never 
 hound up in their alliance any principle of political fra- 
 ternization, such as that which actuated, for example, 
 the Tennis-court oath. Neither Conde nor L'Hopital 
 contemplated lese-majeste in the association of the Con- 
 sistorians with the Gentils-hommes. The Huguenot pea- 
 sant, who rushed with his reaping-hook and pike against 
 the gay marauders of the Butcher of Vassey, still prayed 
 in the Sabhath assembly of his camp for the king, the 
 queen-mother, the princes of the blood-royal, and the 
 members of the King's Council. The sturdy veteran of 
 Dreux, who shouted his devotion to the popular refrain 
 of " Dieu garde de mal le petit homme," never had it in 
 his thoughts to anticipate the author of the " ga ira." 
 CoUgni would never have dreamed of being the proto- 
 type of Mirabeau, or Navarre of acting Philip EgaJite. 
 Even on the other side the spirit of fanaticism never 
 seriously propounded doctrines of pohtical reform. The 
 deed of Jacques Clement, it is true, was compared to the 
 achievements of Judith and Eleazer. Guise was David, 
 and Henri III. was GoHah. But the worthless abbes 
 and priests who daily thundered from their pulpits in 
 favour of the new Gideon, and filled their papiers rouges 
 with fresh victims for the Seine, would have recoiled ia. 
 their work of blood had they foreseen the conscription 
 lists of the Directorat or the Consulat. The wretches 
 who ground their children's bones to make them bread, 
 rather than admit the fat Beamise, were far from 
 acknowledging the same motives as the Sansculottes and 
 Poissardes of a later era. 
 
 In England the reHgious reformer and the politician 
 were as one. The war was at once a secular war and a 
 holy war. The fanatic who put to flight the proud 
 Apollyons of Lindsey and Rupert, fanned his fanaticism 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 15 
 
 ■with the motives of the Parliamentarian. The Kound- 
 head commemorated in his triumph at Naseby the 
 trimnph of those principles which he had inherited from 
 Wycliffe, and the trimnph of those principles which, 
 through 'many a reverse, he had inherited from the tes- 
 tators of Magna Charta. In his conduct he was a zealot 
 and a statesman, and in his principles he endorsed the 
 sentiments of the " PUgrim's Progress," and the sentiments 
 of " Eikonoclastes." The traditional poUcy of his party 
 comprehended the elements of that spiritual democracy 
 known iu Mediaeval history by the name of the Pasto- 
 reaux, with the elements of that social democracy known 
 by the name of the Jacquerie. Like the old military 
 orders of Christendom, they contrived a imion of two dis- 
 tinct interests. But unlike the Mediaeval organization, 
 rehgibn, yielding to the exigencies of municipal develop- 
 ment, divorced itself from the poetical alhance with 
 Chivalry, to become the coadjutor of a more practical 
 Sociology. A type for the English Kevolution might 
 easUy be found among the examples of Southern Europe, 
 — in the revolutions, for instance, of Florence. It would 
 have been an easy task to have lighted on a Savonarola 
 among the Pulpiters of Blackfriars, nor would it have 
 been difficult to have met with representatives of the 
 Piagnoni within the precincts of Westminster. 
 
 The difference of motive in the two revolutions — in 
 the revolution as it was developed in England and in 
 France — made itself visible in the different results. The 
 legislation that represents the process and the extent of 
 the reaction in England presents the anomalous appear- 
 ance of great ecclesiastical reforms intermingling and 
 co-operating with great civil reforms. Thus the legis- 
 lative assembly is found to combine the duties of a 
 convocation. The same enactment that preserves the 
 Uberty of the person maintains the Hberty of conscience. 
 
16 ETHICA : 
 
 The same document that contains a proposal for a new 
 liturgical directory, contains a proposal for a new limi- 
 tation of the royal prerogative of the sword. The same 
 legislation that destroys the Star Chamber destroys the 
 High Commission Court. The same advocate Who votes 
 for the abolition of the House of Peers, votes for the 
 imposition of the Covenant. And the same man that 
 demands triennial Parliaments, declares himself dissatis- 
 fied without Presbyterian synods. This Erastian feature, 
 so strongly developed in the reaction aUuded to, has 
 always, more or less, clung to aU our subsequent revo- 
 lutions. Thus our reUgious revolutions have never been 
 altogether divorced from the consideration of politics, 
 and our pohtical revolutions have never been independent 
 of the consideration of reUgion. The drama of our 
 enfranchisement has, in its various stages, always 
 reflected the operation of this principle. Such scenes 
 as the execution of Charles and Laud, the imprisonment 
 of the seven bishops, and the death of Monmouth, as 
 they are characteristic of our final revolutions, bo are 
 they congenial to aU their rehearsals. 
 
 In France it was far otherwise. The anti-Erastian 
 principle, which, by the nature of the dominant rehgion, 
 distinctly separated ecclesiastical supremacy from civil 
 supremacy, dissociated civil encroachment from ecclesias- 
 tical encroachment, and consequently resistance to the 
 ecclesiastical legislator from resistance to the civil legis- 
 ktor. Hence throughout the history of the popular 
 struggle the two principles of action are never con- 
 founded. The hberty of the sect is never identified with 
 the Uberty of the subject. In discussion the demarcation 
 is stiU more insisted on. The Institution Chretienne 
 claims no kindred purpose with Boetie's " Voluntary Ser- 
 vitude," orHoflEinan's " Franco Gallia." The exposition 
 of the Catholic faith, and the history of Protestant varia- 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 17 
 
 tions are far less political than the " Telemaeque." It was 
 not till nearly two centuries later that the identification, 
 as in England, between political and religious interests, 
 became stronger; and the result is manifested in the dismal 
 historical association, which couples in the same page the 
 story of the MitraUlades and the feasts of the Supreme 
 Being, the " Rights of Man " and the " Age of Reason," 
 the " Social Contract " and the "System of Nature." 
 
 If Huguenotism showed any particular attachment to 
 a political principle, it was rather to aristocracy than 
 democracy, as might indeed have been expected from its 
 alhance with a dynastic question ; nor would it require 
 much scrutiny to detect in the various conflicts to which 
 its amalgamation with the aristocratic element exposed 
 it, the germ of that factious confasion which resulted in 
 the Fronde. 
 
 In the great movements in which he hved Montaigne 
 played no very important part. His natural character 
 rather disposed him to an easy neutraUty. His morality, 
 ethical and pohtical, was of too phlegmatic a temper to 
 subject him to immoderate engagements. He had no 
 interests at stake, and his propensities to mischief were 
 not strong enough to warrant the disguise of zeal. To 
 swim iu troubled waters without fishing in them was the 
 motto that regulated his activity. To light up one candle 
 to St. Michael and another to his dragon — ^to foUow the 
 right cause even to the fire, but to do his utmost to 
 avoid the fire — ^was his philosophy of duty. In spite of 
 his ostentatious repudiation of prejudice, he had no sym- 
 pathy with the genius of Protestantism, and scarcely was 
 at the pains to conceal the fact that he regarded Pro- 
 testants as fanatical innovators, possessing no higher 
 views of innovation than to sing psalms in French 
 instead of Latin, and to call their children Methusalems, 
 Ezekiels, and Malachis, instead of Charleses, Louises, and 
 
 2 
 
18 ethica: 
 
 Francises. His ideas of toleration were hardly such as 
 became the friend of Boetie. He advocated, as indeed 
 he was compelled to do, a kind of universal indulgence 
 logically deduced from his own private principles of 
 universal doubt, but founded on no large maxims of 
 political science. 
 
 He hated umovation, civil and rehgious, with the 
 cold and apathetic hatred of a man who could not appre- 
 ciate its benefits. Change imphed heresy, heresy impUed 
 choice, and choice the infirmity of human judgment 
 renders sUppery and uncertain. " Ipsa consuetude assen- 
 tiendi periculosa esse videtur et lubrica," said the pagan 
 philosopher, and the Christian philosopher repeated it 
 after him. "In public affairs there is no government 
 so ill, provided it be ancient and has been constant, that 
 is not better than alteration. Our manners are infinitely 
 corrupted, and wonderfully inclined to grow worse. Of 
 our laws and customs there are many that are barbarous 
 and monstrous ; nevertheless, by reason of the difficulty 
 of reformation, and the danger of stirring things, if I 
 could put something under to stay the wheel, and to 
 keep it where it is, I would do it with aU my heart. 
 Happy people who do what they are commanded with 
 greater facility than they who command, without tor- 
 menting themselves with the causes ; who suffer them- 
 selves gently to roU on after the celestial revolution. 
 Obedience is never pure nor calm in him who argues or 
 disputes." Hobbes or FUmer might have written the 
 closing paragraph. Continued intercourse, as he sur- 
 mised, with the humours of the ancients, had, I suspect, 
 put him out of humour with his own times. No one 
 could otherwise beheve, save on some such principle of 
 morbid partiaHty, that he was serious ia applying to 
 Charondas and Lycurgus epithets that he denied to 
 L'Hopital, any more than it could be believed that he 
 
OE CHABACTEEISTICS. 19 
 
 really thought the javehns of antiquity superior to the 
 modern arquebus. It suggests curious reflections to hear 
 the old Gascon of the sixteenth century describing Eng- 
 lishmen in terms that an Englishman of the nineteenth 
 would be most entitled to retort, and expressing his 
 shame and confusion that a nation with whom he had so 
 great familiarity should despise the adAdce of Socrates, 
 and indulge in as many legal whimsies as Persians or 
 Indians. 
 
 No forecast of Rousseau or the Jacobins of Vende- 
 miaire and Prairial could have flitted across the manu- 
 script when he wrote that the best and most excellent 
 government for every nation is that under which it has 
 been maintained ; that debates about the best forms of 
 society and the most commodious rules to bind it are 
 debates only proper for the exercise of wits, of fools 
 aiming at the reputation of Pyrrha and Cadmus, and that 
 the quatrain of his friend M. de Piras was the soundest 
 wisdom : 
 
 Ayme I'estat, tel que tu le veois estre, 
 
 S'il est royal ayme la royaute ; 
 S'U est du pere, ou bien communaute, 
 
 Ayme I'aussi ; car Dieu t'y a fait naistre. 
 
 The only authenticated instances in which the 
 opinions of the essayist appear identified in the conduct 
 of the man are connected with his presence in one or two 
 of the various conflicts that were continually occurring in 
 his neighbourhood. Mr. St. John has traced him at the 
 age of twenty-five at the siege of Thionville by Guise 
 and Strozzi. It is possible that he was present with 
 Charles IX, at the taking of Eouen, and more than 
 probable, from an allusion in his " Essays," that he wit- 
 nessed the battle of Dreux. 
 
 Be this as it may, his intimacy at the Courts of Paris 
 under successive monarchs leaves no doubt as to his 
 sympathies or his loyalty. He was no enemy to Court 
 
 2—2 
 
20 ETHICA : 
 
 life, lie tells us ; and his natural prudence, not without 
 a show of simphcity and indiflference, kept him safe 
 under the treacherous patronage of Catharine. He loved 
 himself too well to be guilty of ambition, and the 
 timorous discretion with which he declared that he would 
 sooner be the third in Perigord than the first at the 
 Louvre, more than once recommended him to the Lor- 
 raines as a suitable agent in their negotiations with 
 Navarre. As a man of letters, too, his experience in the 
 capital of Henri H. could not have been without its 
 attractions. That experience coincided with an epoch in 
 the history of French literature. The appearance of the 
 " Pleiades " was creating in French poetry a revolution 
 not unlike, in its general characteristics, to that which 
 EngUsh critics hold responsible for the so-called meta- 
 physical era in English poetry. The erudite enthusiasm 
 of Eonsard had already disengaged his contemporaries 
 from their devotion to the elegant and arch simphcity of 
 Marot, and half induced them to take part in the re- 
 action with which his name is associated, and which was 
 soon destined to encounter in its turn another reaction 
 in the person of Malherbe. With such irritating topics 
 for discussion, it is not difficult to conjecture how the 
 essayist, who was already well known among the book- 
 sellers of the Quartier Latin, and had been admitted into 
 the assembhes of Antoine de Baif, passed the time not 
 occupied with attendance on Charles or Henri. 
 
 "From the slavery of Courts and pubhc enjoy- 
 ments," Montaigne, as an inscription still extant attests, 
 "took refuge in the bosom of the learned virgins;" in 
 other words, retired to his chateau, at the age of thirty- 
 eight ; and from the moment he retires his hfe becomes 
 uninteresting. He had married at thirty-three, an age, 
 which he does not omit to remark, was two years below 
 the standard of Aristotle, and three above that of Plato ; 
 
OB 0HARACTEEI8TI0S. 21 
 
 and his wife survived him, when he died of a quinsy in 
 1592. 
 
 As thus at the eleventh hour his wife has been intro- 
 duced, it is but fair to say that Montaigne was not the 
 misogynist he is sometimes represented to be. He has 
 now and then written things about women that would 
 have won him the friendship of Euripides, but there is 
 no cause for showing that his marriage life was other 
 than it should have been : 
 
 " United, though divided, twain in one." 
 
 I do not say that his appreciation of the sex was such as 
 would induce him to subscribe to the chivalrous doctrines 
 of the Catechisme de Philosophie Positive, but I cannot 
 help opposing to the charge of a recent Oxford Eeviewer, 
 "that he does not seem able even to conceive that there 
 can be anything so excellent and refined as friendship in 
 marriage," his own assertion, in his ovra words, that "a 
 good marriage refuses the company and condition of 
 love, and endeavours to represent those of friendship. 
 It is a gentle way of social hfe, full of constancy and 
 confidingness, with an infinite number of solid offices 
 and mutual obKgations. No woman who has once tasted 
 thereof would wish to stand in lieu of mistress to her 
 husband. If she is lodged in his affections as wife, she 
 is much more honourably and securely lodged." 
 
 One event in his life must not be passed over. 
 Montaigne had inherited from his father one of the most 
 painful diseases that the flesh of man is heir to. As he 
 had grown old, the malady had increased ; till at length, 
 philosopher as he was, his philosophy fairly gave way. 
 Not all the reasoning of the Porch could make an attack 
 of nephritic coKc a pleasure. For medicine and medical 
 men, it had been his habit to express the most profound 
 mistrust. Indeed, some of his most violent irony had 
 
22 ethica: 
 
 been spent on the profession of Celsus and Paracelsus. 
 Travelling, on the other hand, he had always appre- 
 ciated ; and as he looked upon it as a general panacea, 
 to travel he determined. The history of his travels long 
 lay entombed in the family chest at the old Chateau 
 Montaigne, and were only accidentally brought to hght 
 by the researches of a venturesome antiquarian. Per- 
 mission to collate the manuscript was soon demanded 
 and obtaiaed. The paper was found to belong to the 
 latter half of the sixteenth century. The villanous 
 handwriting, and the stiU more villanous spelling, left 
 no doubt as to the author. The style, too, frank and 
 cynical, naive and coarse, was still the style of the old 
 egotist of the "Essays." Every circumstance identified 
 it, and the prize, bearing on it the dust of two centuries, 
 was finally given to the world. 
 
 The first feeling on perusing it is certainly one of 
 disappointment. Montaigne set out in the spirit of a 
 valetudinarian, and before he had half completed his 
 journey the humours of the valetudinarian had fairly 
 engrossed his whole attention. The activity of the 
 waters at Baden, the superiority of the soups and salads 
 of Linde to those of Perigord, and of the wines of Augs- 
 burg to those of Florence, the richness of the sheets at 
 Inspruck, and of the curtains of Sterzinguen, the fineness 
 of the bread at Bostan, the poUteness of the German 
 landlords contrasted with the landlords of Italy, the 
 failure of crabs and feather-beds at Rovere, and of old 
 wine at Vincenza, the cheapness of board at Padua and 
 Bologna, the badness of the Roman mutton, scarcely 
 compensated for by the luxury of artichokes and green 
 peas in March, are items that very soon begin to form 
 the staple products of his daily register, and are clearly 
 considered of far more importance than the antiquity of a 
 bronze medal, the course of an aqueduct, or the girth of 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 23 
 
 a column. It is amusing to see how the egotism of the 
 invahd gradually overcomes the philosophy of the tra- 
 veller. He is not five minutes in a village before he 
 makes his secretary explore all the objects of comfort 
 that the customs of the villagers supply, till at length 
 the state of the dormitory and the kitchen becomes his 
 gauge of civilization. Whether it is in some part due to 
 the partiality of the secretary or not, it is certain that 
 quite as much prominence is assigned to the fact of a 
 people using pewter or earthenware, eating their eggs 
 boiled or poached, or their truffles with or without vinegar 
 and on, as to their being Lutherans or Catholics, sub' 
 jects of the Emperor or free mountaineers. 
 
 Those who look to find in the author the geniahty of 
 the classical tourist, such geniality as they meet with, 
 for example, in the pages of Addison, will scarcely have 
 their expectations realized. Addison, indeed, contem- 
 plated everything with the eye of an ancient Eoman. 
 The most trifling objects were associated in his mind 
 with the familiar studies of his school-days. The first 
 sight of the crafty porter bustling for his luggage on the 
 wharves of Genoa instantly supphes him with half-a-dozen 
 quotations from his "Virgil" and his " SUius ItaUcus." 
 The lazy independence of the NeapoHtan lazzaroni sug- 
 gests a contrast from his " Statius." A storm in the 
 Ligurian Gulf, recals to his mind the old character given it 
 seventeen hundred years ago by Horace. The rustling 
 of the ohve-groves around Lake Larius drives him to his 
 " Claudian ; " and the fenny reeds of the slow Mincius to 
 his " Georgics." The snow-white oxen that browsed by 
 his side along the banks of the Clitumnus are still to him 
 the sacred breed of Juvenal. In the marshes of Eavenna 
 he hears the frogs croak as they croak in Martial's 
 epigrams, and sees the stream of the Eubicon swollen 
 beneath the thaw of the mountain snow, just as Lucian 
 
24 ETHICA : 
 
 had seen it. Even the hquefaction of the blood of 
 St. Januarius he cannot contemplate without recollecting 
 a counterpart in the miracle which Horace pretends to 
 have witnessed with so much amusement at Gnatia : — 
 
 " Dehinc Gnatia lymphis 
 
 Iratis extructa dedit risusque jocosque, 
 Dmn flamm^ sine thura liquescere limine sacro 
 Persuadere cupit : credat Judseus Apella, 
 Nonego." Sat. 5, ]ib.\. 
 
 Not thus Montaigne. There is very little of the spirit of 
 the antiquarian in his movements. It cannot fail to 
 strike every reader of his travels that a man who had 
 written a book as full of Latin quotations as our own 
 Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," should pass through 
 the scenes of classical antiquity with hardly a single 
 reference to a Roman author. It is true that his secre- 
 tary is responsible for a portion of his diary; but what his 
 secretary wrote, he always dictated, and what he dictated, 
 he generally revised. At Padua, for instance, he gives us a 
 particular account of the economy of Uving, is diHgent ia 
 relating the chemical quaUties of the hot-springs hard by, 
 but forgets all about the knight-errantry of Antenor, and 
 the description which Virgil has given us of its origin. 
 All along the road from Eome'to Tivoli, he sees the 
 orchards as they struck the eye of Horace ; scents the 
 steam of the sulphureous Albula, rank as when Martial 
 gave it the epithet ; crosses the rich cascades of the 
 Teverone, the " prseceps Anio ;" but leaves them aU with- 
 out the passing tribute of a reminiscence to explain the 
 machinery of the Cardinal of Ferrara's water-works. At 
 Nami he asks for a particular soil, which he had read in 
 his Pliny is softened by heat and dried by rain, but 
 he never troubles himseK to identify in the roaring 
 abysses of the Velino and the Nar, the gulf through 
 which the poet's Alecto shoots herself into hell. At 
 Pavia he takes his readers with him across the Ticino, 
 
OR CHAEACTBEISTICS. 25 
 
 whose singular transparency, so unusual for the moun- 
 tain-fed streams of Italy, more than one poet has sung, 
 but it is only to tell them that the beds have no mat- 
 tresses, and that horses can be hired there for two julios 
 a post. 
 
 What he does describe, however, it is but fair to say 
 that the notes of Mr. Pepys himself are not made with 
 more curious fehcity. Rome was the principal object of 
 his attraction^; and accordingly, his diary at Rome is fall 
 of choice crumbs for those who will stoop to pick them up. 
 The various rehgious ceremonies, novelties to the trans- 
 Alpine stranger, next to the prescriptions of officious 
 physicians, and the effects of his warm baths and cassia 
 pills — ^for, in spite of his infideHty, Montaigne was con- 
 tinually sacrificing a cock to Esculapius — occupy him 
 most. He happened to be present in the Holy City on 
 Christmas-day, and curiosity and devotion led him to 
 St. Peter's. The Pope, Gregory XIH., at that time past 
 fourscore, but still prominent by his upright bearing, 
 majestic countenance, and long white beard, administered 
 mass in person. Around him were the Cardinals Medici, 
 Caraffa, and Famese, names fall of significance to the 
 student of ItaUan history. During the whole ceremony 
 all remained seated with their caps on, talking and 
 laughing. On another occasion, while the same Pope 
 stood on the steps of St. Peter's, arrayed in full ponti- 
 ficals, and excommunicated the Huguenots, and aU 
 princes who should detain any estates belonging to 
 Mother Church, the same cardinals stood by, and, at 
 the sound of the anathema, held their sides with fits of 
 laughter. What struck him most, however, was the 
 singular contrivance at the administration of the sacra- 
 ment, of using a particular instrument to imbibe the 
 wine from the chahce, in order to avoid poison. Two 
 -things, which do not always fall to the lot of every 
 
26 ethica: 
 
 traveller to the Eternal City to witness, he had the good 
 fortune to participate in — ^kissing the Pope's toe, and 
 seeing a miracle. The latter operation was soon over : 
 it consisted in the cure of a demoniac. The patient was 
 held on his knees before the altar, secured by a cloth 
 round the neck. The thaumaturgus, a priest, proceeded 
 to exorcise the evil spirit with aU the charms his breviary 
 would supply, and then feU to attacking the poor victim 
 with his fists as heartily as he could lay on. AU his 
 efforts, however, were unsuccessful till he had pro- 
 nounced a fierce anathema with pix and taper in hand. 
 The man was then released and sent home. The priest 
 assured Montaigne that it was a very obstinate devU, but 
 that he had the day before freed a woman of a very big 
 devil indeed, that had long molested her, and had, in 
 parting, spent his last venom on her by discharging 
 through her mouth a quantity of naUs and pins, and a 
 lock of his hair. The process of kissing the Pope's toe 
 was far more tedious, and Montaigne describes it in his 
 best manner, though it may be suspected the devotee, at 
 the bottom, regarded them both in much the same Ught 
 as the essayist. 
 
 What interested him as much as anything during his 
 stay at Kome was the treasures of the Vatican Kbrary. 
 Here he was permitted — a permission which, he remarks, 
 was denied to the French ambassador — ^to handle the 
 manuscripts of his darhng Seneca and Plutarch, and, 
 among others of less notoriety, to turn over the pages 
 of a Virgil — the rival claimant for antiquity to that 
 which, more than a century after, Addison scrutinized in 
 the library of St. Lawrence, at Florence. Both travellers 
 observed that the first four lines, usually printed at the 
 opening of the ' ' Mneidi, ' ' were wanting. Special courtesy 
 seems to have been generally paid the old Gascon. One 
 instance deserves to be noticed. He had brought with 
 
OB CHARA.CTERISTICS. 27 
 
 him into Rome the few books he was ta the habit of 
 makiag his travelling companions; among them was a 
 copy of his "Essays." All had been seized at his entrance ; 
 and certainly, if any one of them had less claim than 
 another to be marked with the expurgata, it was the 
 volume which contained the Apology for Sebond. It 
 turned out, however, that he had nothing to fear. The 
 system which had prosecuted Marot for eating bacon in 
 Lent, and thrown Rabelais into a dungeon for learning 
 Greek, was quite ready to overlook anything that, even 
 if it were rather philosophical, was not absolutely Pro- 
 testant. The volume was returned with the mark of 
 the Maestro del Sacro Palasso. It had been objected, 
 indeed, by the censor, that the word Tribune was used 
 in an equivocal sense, rather more congenial to the 
 atmosphere of old than new Rome ; that the Apology 
 for the Emperor JuUan was not altogether orthodox ; 
 and that certain opinions on the education of children, 
 and the punishment of criminals, were not becoming a 
 layman ; but the objections were overruled. Anything 
 not in good taste they left to the author to expunge. 
 Any censure that might have been accidentally passed 
 on it, they begged him to disregard. In the meantime, 
 they were bound to keep back a French translation of 
 the "History of the Swiss," the translator being a heretic. 
 To these mots de courtoisie, as he designates them, 
 we may be quite sure Montaigne was not altogether in- 
 sensible. Few men, indeed, whatever patriotic eulogists 
 may say to the contrary, ever possessed a larger share of 
 self-importance. No alderman, councillor, or parvenu, 
 was more quick to appreciate the sKghtest mark of 
 respect that might add to his dignity. One of the 
 earhest objects of his ambition had been the Order of 
 St. Michael. He desired it, he said, above all things. 
 Eventually his desire was gratified; but it was not till 
 
28 ETHICA : 
 
 the lavish distribution of it among knaves and panderers 
 had made the honour very like a badge of dishonour. 
 When he came to Eome, the idea of obtaining the title 
 of Eoman citizen took possession of his faculties. He 
 " set all his wits to work" for the purpose ; and after 
 some difficulty, and a good deal of manoBUvring, thanks 
 to the interference of the Pope's major domo, " who had 
 taken a great fancy to him," he received the official 
 document, couched, he takes care to add, " in the same 
 comphmentary terms that were addressed, on the like 
 occasion, to Signor Jacomo Buoncompagnone, Duke of 
 Sero, the ' Pope's own son.' " Indeed, it is in the diary 
 of his travels far more than in his " Essays," that the 
 latent vanity of his character is continually peeping out. 
 It is evident that he does not stir without being con- 
 scious that he is a Frenchman, a knight, and lord- 
 proprietor of the good patrimony of Montaigne. He 
 does not pass a night in a hostelry without taking care, 
 on quitting, to fix a copy of his arms over the door 
 of the room he had occupied ; and it is weU if he does 
 not tell us how many crowns he gave the painter, and 
 how many pence the man who made the frame. On 
 one occasion, he had his bearings emblazoned in fine 
 rich colours and gold, on canvas, and went so far as 
 to induce his host to give him his oath, that they should 
 never be removed. If the authorities of the town through 
 which he might chance to pass send him a stoup of 
 wine, or the lady of the manor a brace of partridges, 
 he is sure to detail the whole ceremony, the number of 
 the sergeants who bring it, the dress of their uniform, 
 and the rank of the officers. Any disguise to promote 
 his own rank was welcome. At Augsburg, the burgo- 
 master took him and his suite for a company of knights 
 and barons. The mistake was too. suggestive to be lost 
 on our traveller. He instantly gave orders to his people 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 29 
 
 to conceal their names, and by no means to mention 
 the rank of Messieurs. All that day he strutted up and 
 down the thoroughfares of Augsburg unattended, " con- 
 ceiving that this of itself served to make them be held 
 in more honour." A compliment or a rebuff makes aU 
 the difference in the world with him. The Archduke 
 Ferdinand of Austria refused him the privilege of kissing 
 hands, and it is pitiable to witness his chagrin. But 
 nothing can afford him greater satisfaction than the 
 opportunity of telling how the Duke of Ferrara sent a 
 gentleman of his court to receive them, how the Duke 
 raised his cap as they entered, and how he remained 
 uncovered all the while M. de Montaigne conversed with 
 him. Even the rank of the Maestro del Sacro Palasso 
 and his colleague, who overlooked his " Essays" — " both 
 persons high in authority, and both ehgible for Cardinals," 
 • — does not escape him. 
 
 To the consideration of his "Essays" it is now time 
 to devote ourselves, and that too, I trust, in a spirit very 
 different from that of his Eoman critics. Their composi- 
 tion, if we are to take the author's assertions literally, 
 was purely a work of amusement, a something -pour 
 passer le temps. Nothing can be more earnest than his 
 efforts to repudiate any serious constructions that sober 
 people might be disposed to put on his labours. His 
 only purpose, he avows, for committing such chimeras, 
 such fantastic monsters to writing, is to make them 
 ashamed of themselves, and of himself. They are mere 
 trifles, beneath the notion of criticism, only fit to hover 
 in a middle region, and to take with men of moderate 
 capacities. They are only the fruits of a fagoting-up of 
 stray pieces, collected to beguile the tedium of idleness, 
 and only patched together at snatches. He is, he assures 
 his Mend, Madame du Duras, less a writer of books than 
 anything else. Nothing could be more inimical to him 
 
30 ethica: 
 
 than the reputation of being a pretty fellow at writing, if 
 such a trade was his sole claim for reputation. As for 
 expecting to gain any reputation by these follies, he wiU 
 be content if he does not come off the loser. There is 
 nothing in aU this, however, of the vanity and affectation 
 of Horace Walpole, for instance. Montaigne, all the 
 time he was depreciating them, publish them in whatever 
 spirit he might, knew that his "Essays" must strike a 
 generation accustomed only to tread the narrow rounds of 
 scholastic philosophy. He knew that the furred doctors 
 of the schools, the lettre-ferits — to use a Perigordian 
 phrase — the letter marked, would be scandalized to see a 
 layman degrading Aristotle from a logician to a mere 
 man, and introducing Plato into an essay on coaches. 
 Accordingly, he assumed, and barely assumed, the thin 
 disguise of a mere trifler. It cost him nothing to depre- 
 ciate his labours, and depreciate them he did, and with 
 apparent good faith. But amid his half-lisped disparage- 
 ments we can stiU trace the twinkling eye, and the smile 
 that beUes every stroke of the pen. 
 
 He was, indeed, safe to win in the teeth of every 
 adversary. His ' ' Essays ' ' contained intrinsic captivations 
 of their own, which no disparagement on his part could 
 have weakened or impaired. That writer could never at 
 any time have been without more than ordinary attrac- 
 tions that can, after the lapse of nearly three centuries, 
 still excite a generous envy in the breasts of foreigners in 
 possession of the " Spectators " and " Kamblers." To the 
 palates of contemporaries satiated with the stately barren- 
 ness of academical learning his book offered the rich repast 
 of a hvely erudition garnished with an originahty that has 
 never been surpassed. It presented to them the enun- 
 ciation of a novel truth, that the proper study of mankind 
 is man, and that the study of man is not to be regulated 
 by the domineering logic of the cloister or the cell. In 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 31 
 
 the illustration of this, its favourite theory, it traversed 
 with them the records of ages long since considered as 
 palaeozoic, explored the secret recesses of history and of 
 Hterature, brought them into communion in a familiar 
 guise with the mysterious heroes of archaeology, substan- 
 tiated the phantoms of deeds that had been to the 
 uninitiated hitherto as only names, and quickened iuto 
 existence individuahties that had been to them but as 
 statues, disenchanted them of that fond idea implanted 
 by the earliest stroke of the ferule, that antiquity is but a 
 receptacle for demi-gods, and by way of degrading them 
 from the giddy pinnacle of selfish exclusiveness on which 
 the infatuation of habit and education had placed them, 
 proved to them that Socrates might as well have been 
 bom at Geneva, and that Cicero was modelled of the 
 same clay as a Perigordian ploughboy. 
 
 And all this it did in language natural and familiar, 
 in discourses where the gaiety of the accomplished man 
 of the world and the acuteness of the metaphysician meet 
 and unite. It is the peculiar characteristic of Mon- 
 taigne's fame, insisted on even by those who, to all 
 appearance, have never read his works through, that he 
 had the courage to rescue philosophy, as yet cribbed and 
 cabined within the narrow circuit of the Academy, and 
 to lead her with trippiug step enough into broad and 
 genial fields of speculation, not to be intruded into by the 
 syllogism of the scholar, or the dogma of the pedant. 
 There is sententiousness for the student, and the air du 
 monde, the "air cavalier," as Malebranche calls it, for the 
 courtier. The elegant trifler might with surprise have 
 found in the pages of the old Gascon squire matter as 
 irritating as anything he was accustomed to search for in his 
 "Decameron," while the more laborious investigator rose 
 from their perusal with the satisfaction of having learned 
 more in one hour of the philosophy of human existence 
 
32 ethica: 
 
 than Doctors Seraphic or Beatific coiild have taught him 
 in a hfetime. 
 
 To these attractions was added the attraction of a 
 style singularly in unison with the object of the author 
 and his works. It was precisely the informal, irregular 
 style, epigrammatic as Eochefoucault's, adapted to the 
 deUvery of episodes and miscellanies. To the taste of 
 most Enghshmen, even in the diluted form of a transla- 
 tion, it possesses too much mannerism to be tolerated 
 any length of time. Gifted with a large share of " dear 
 wit and gay rhetoric " of his own, he overlaid it too 
 thickly with artificial ornaments borrowed from the 
 ancients, and thus repels where he meant to captivate, 
 hke the iU-judged Beauty in the " RetaUation," 
 
 " Who beplasters with rouge her own natural red." 
 
 Anything pretending to the subtleties of rhetoric, 
 Montaigne himself expressly disclaims with his usual self- 
 denial : 
 
 " He was too warm, on pickmg work to dwell, 
 But faggoted his notions as they fell, 
 And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well." ' 
 
 He knows, he says, as little about ablative, conjunc- 
 tive, substantive, or grammar as his lacquey. To use 
 the expression of Malherbe, he was not preparing meat 
 for cooks. Ronsard had proclaimed it as his mission to 
 infuse richness and variety into the French of Marot, 
 and had used the dialects of France as promiscuously as 
 Homer used the dialects of Greece. Montaigne seems to 
 have adopted a similar hcence. The dialects of Nor- 
 mandy, of Poitiers, of Lyons, and of Mans were all the 
 same to him. "And let Gascon step in if French wiU 
 not suffice." On the whole, we may apply to bini what 
 Rochester wrote of a man, some of the comic features of 
 
 ' Dryden, " Absalom and Achitophel." 
 
OE CHARACTERISTICS. 33 
 
 whose character might easily be expanded into analogous 
 proportions with his own : — 
 
 " His works do yet impart 
 
 More proofs of nature tlian of art; 
 
 With just, bold strokes, he dashes here and there, 
 
 Showing great mastery with little care. 
 
 Scorning to varnish his good touches o'er. 
 
 To make the fools and women praise the more." 
 
 Unfortunately, the sentiments and language of the 
 " Essays" bear quite as much the stamp of freedom as the 
 style. Though some of them were addressed to women, 
 the deHcacy of even the hardiest reader is continually 
 being shocked by an unlooked-for encounter with expres- 
 sions and turns of thought that would not have been 
 used by that notorious Duke of Beaufort, whom the 
 contemporaries of Montaigne had christened the King of 
 the Markets, and the fame of whose grossness is stiU 
 preserved in the works of St. Evremond. On this matter 
 we would not abate one syllable of Pascal's strong and 
 indignant exclamation: " Les defauts de Montaigne 
 sont grands: U. est plein des mots sales et deshon- 
 netes." 
 
 A second charge, that of egotism, brought against 
 him from the same quarter, it is not so difficult to pal- 
 liate. That Montaigne is an egotist is certain ; that he 
 is not an egotist in the vulgar acceptation of the term is 
 equally certain. The definition of selfishness, self- 
 conceit, self-commendation, which we are accustomed to 
 associate with the word, entirely falls when apphed to 
 him. The truth is, the Port-Eoyalists half acquitted 
 him almost in the same breath that they accused him, 
 when they explained their accusation to be, "le sot 
 projet que Montaigne a de se peindre." Montaigne 
 himself confesses as much. There is no affected attempt 
 to conceal the matter. Neither is there any frowardness 
 to justify it. If he plays the fool, it is, as he says, at his 
 
 3 
 
34 ETHICA : 
 
 own expense, and nobody is concerned in it. What he 
 tells of himself, he tells openly, and without partiaUty. 
 His egotism commences, indeed, where another man's 
 ends. He is far more expUcit, far more communicative 
 about his deficiencies than his excellences, and makes 
 greater capital of his vices than his virtues. Custom, he 
 acknowledges, has made a man's speaking of himself 
 vicious, and positively forbids it in condemnation of the 
 vanity that seems inseparably attached to the testimony 
 men give of themselves. Just, as a general rule, this 
 condemnation is unwarranted in the case of a writer who, 
 to borrow his own estimate of PhiHp de Comines, is as 
 free from vanity when speaking of himself as from affec- 
 tation or envy when speaking of others. " Que diable a- 
 t'-on k faire de savoir ce qu'il aime ! " exclaimed the 
 ScaHgers and Dupuys ; but there is certainly as Httle con- 
 ceit ia the egotism that prompts a man to tell what wine 
 he likes best, or whether he hkes his venison high, or 
 prefers salt-fish to the rump of a beccafico, as there is 
 in that feehng of self-importance on the strength of which 
 autobiographers consider themselves entitled to relate the 
 extent of their patrimony or the colour of their hair. 
 
 The more than BosweUian candour with which -Mon- 
 taigne unfolds one by one the reduphcations of his 
 character, and exposes, to use his own forcible expression, 
 the very veins, muscles, and tendons of his moral and 
 physical anatomy, might strike a casual observer as 
 indicative of a morbid unconsciousness of the claims 
 of self-respect. Such, however, would be but a poor 
 estimate of the object of the philosopher, however it 
 might be true in part of the man. Montaigne makes 
 his confessions knowingly and with a perfect sensibihty 
 to the consequences. And, though he affects neither the 
 enthusiasm of Rousseau nor the impudence of Abelard 
 it is easy to see from the easy tone in which he scarcely 
 
OE CHARACTEBISTICS. 35 
 
 condescends to apologize for his hardihood, that he was 
 equally indifferent to those consequences. None but a 
 very bold man or a very vain one would have ventured 
 on the experiment. Montaigne was both. He was vain, 
 and vain enough to beheve that the ecccentricity of the 
 motive which suggested the publication of his " Essays," 
 would atone for his vanity in publishing them. He was 
 conscious that the world would be made familiar with 
 his faults, but the consciousness that it would overlook 
 them in the contemplation of the novelty the exposure 
 afforded added to his confidence. In spite, too, of his 
 chapter on Vanity, the rare execution of the artist must 
 not be forgotten as a plea. Montaigne was not blind 
 to his own powers of analysis. Hence an air of self- 
 complacency in his very self-humiliations. He portrays 
 his defects only that he might show how gracefiil he can 
 be in the portraiture, like, those unhappy creatures who^ 
 bom without hands or feet, forget their deformities in 
 the pride and dehght they take in exhibitiag the dehcacy 
 with which they can thread a needle or ply a brush. 
 
 And it is certain that he has succeeded in his object. 
 No book has been rendered more interesting to his 
 readers by the very exposure that renders it so painful 
 to the morahst. All the first impulses to disgust at the 
 grotesqueness of a dissection which every man of taste 
 must condemn, and which no man of any native dehcacy 
 would have submitted himself to, are sunk in the feehngs 
 of pleasure and curiosity with which we contemplate the 
 results of the operation. Eepulsive as is the audacity 
 with which he lifts up " the stupid rag that hides his 
 poor humanity," we forget it while we watch him catch- 
 ing the Ughts and shades of a character siagularly 
 chameleon-hke in its complexion, and preserving the 
 reflections of every hue as vividly as though he were 
 endowed with the fabulous mirror of Lao ; nor do we 
 
 3—2 
 
36 ETHICA : 
 
 find leisure to wonder at that strange inconsistency 
 between his mental and moral organization, to which 
 we are indebted for the most deUghtfal book in the 
 world, — that total absence of equihbrium between his 
 intellect and his moral sense, while we listen to him 
 relating with quaint and humorous minuteness all the 
 habits of his mind and body, his preferences and preju- 
 dices, his unconquerable love of ease, his weakness of 
 memory, his hatred of restraint, his contempt for cere- 
 mony, his . distaste for society, his love of doubt, his 
 sceptical incHnings ; intermingled with stiU more garru- 
 lous details of his person, — what size he was, so short 
 that it was with difficulty he could keep his legs amid 
 the crowded streets of Paris, and of so poor a presence 
 that strangers were continually transferring the obeisance 
 due to the master of the house to his barber, — what 
 kind of physiognomy he had, so jovial, but withal of 
 such tolerable interpretation that on more than one oc- 
 casion the arquebus of the freebooter had been arrested 
 by its courteous intelligence, — what kind of voice he 
 had, so loud and unmusical that he could not reduce 
 it to a whisper even in moments of confidence ; and 
 descending in the scale of his propensities, how he 
 liked his meats, roast better than boiled, and his bread 
 without salt in it ; how he could not dine without a 
 clean napkin after the German fashion, and never made 
 use of spoon or fork; how he could not endure long 
 meals, and imitated Augustus in coming to table last; 
 how, like Marius, he could not drink except out of a 
 certain form of glass, and then must drink neither pure 
 water nor pure wine; how, in spite of Plato's admonition, 
 he slept as heavily as the great Scipio, though in un- 
 warmed sheets ; how he stood the snows of a Perigordian 
 winter in only one pair of silk stockings, and wore a 
 vulture's skin under his quilted doublet ; how he hated 
 
OB CHAEACTERISTICS. 37 
 
 fogs, pedants, and stupid lacqueys, and loved scratching 
 his ear above all things in the world. Bacon, in his 
 essay on Discourse, tells us that he knew a man who 
 was wont to say of the egotist in scorn, " He must 
 needs be a wise man, he speaks so much of himself! " 
 Montaigne's wisdom, at this rate of judging, it must be 
 owned, must have surpassed that of Solomon. After 
 all, however, it is some consolation to reflect that a 
 httle more of reserve, a little less of egotism, aaad his 
 book would have degenerated into the sombre propor- 
 tions of a mere ethical treatise, as neglected as his own 
 " Seneca." If he has lost by his laborious candour, 
 that at least has gained, and the gain is not imparted 
 to another. It can only be acknowledged, in conclusion, 
 that his self-immolation on the shrine of his own glory, 
 the sacrifice of himself on the altar he had raised to 
 his own renown, would have been far more appreciated, 
 had it b.een accomplished without giving occasion to one 
 of those — 
 
 " Books, the scandal of the shelves, 
 
 In which lewd sensualists print out themselves." 
 
 It is .with considerable reluctance that I leave the 
 company of the gossip for that of the metaphysician. 
 While he lived Montaigne surrounded himself with 
 doubts, and it is, perhaps, but a fair retaliation on him 
 that his reputation should partake of the dubious cha- 
 racter it does. On the very threshold of an inquiry into 
 his tastes and prepossessions, the examiner meets with 
 nothing but hesitation and conjecture. Was Montaigne 
 a good Cathohc ? was he a Christian ? are questions 
 which everybody asks, and which no one can answer ; 
 and it is typical of the pyrrhonic condition in which he 
 discharged the- exigencies of his career that he has been 
 claimed at once at Kome and at Femey, that the founda- 
 tions of these respective claims were rested on the one 
 
38 ETHICA : 
 
 single production of his mind, and that as far as that 
 production is concerned, both claimants are amply justi- 
 fied in their pretensions. A discriminating taste might 
 readily find sentiments in his "Essays," worthy of an 
 honest CathoHc, and even of a member of the Saint 
 Union, whUe from the same source might be extracted 
 pages that would form a fit preface to a Breviary of the 
 Holy Philosophical Church of a later era. 
 
 One thing may be predicated of him without fear of 
 contradiction or partisanship. It is certain that with the 
 spiritual element of the great religious revolution that 
 was going on around him, he did not identify himself 
 either by word or deed. There is nothing in his book or 
 his actions to show that he had any sympathy with the 
 authors of the Confession of Augsburg, or that if he had 
 openly renounced his allegiance to Rome he would have 
 transferred it to Geneva. If he was disposed to show 
 any sympathy with the reaction at aU, it was not in its 
 character of a Protestant reaction, but in its character of 
 an intellectual one. His prepossessions were all on this 
 side. His large and Uberal mind could, in matters of 
 hterature, readily urge the plea for liberality. His pre- 
 judices in this respect had all been inherited from those 
 gallant Deipnosophs who quoted the "Morgante Maggiore" 
 at the table of Leo X., from those fine young libertines 
 who, under the name of Pantagruelists, joined with Car- 
 dinal Du BeUay in pronouncing " Garagantua " to be a 
 book Kar' i^o'^-nv. Had he Hved a hundred years earlier, he 
 would have been a welcome guest, along with Ficino, at 
 the viUa at Fiesole; or yet earlier stUl, he would have 
 been among the most eager of those five thousajid who 
 day after day received their intellectual food from the 
 lover of Heloise, 
 
 On the other hand, he never owned his associations 
 by his demeanour. From his writings, indeed, he had 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 39 
 
 nothing to apprehend. ProTided they contained nothing 
 that could be translated into heresy; they were safe from 
 the Index Purgatorius. He rather did his best to show 
 that he was as good a Catholic as Guise. He kissed the 
 Pope's toe, though he does not omit the opportunity for 
 ridiculing the habit. He hung up his ex-voto at the 
 shrine of Loretto, though he takes care to mention that 
 the Grand Turk had just before done the same. If out- 
 ward conformity be the test, then the decision must be 
 that Montaigne was both a Cathohc and a Christian. 
 But the value of that conformity must be estimated by 
 his own confessions, and his own confessions are, unfor- 
 tunately for those who would vindicate his orthodoxy, 
 radically at variance with the deductions to be drawn 
 from his conduct. The truth is, Uke the Common 
 Councilman in Goldsmith's Essays, he had his eyes wide 
 open, and contrived to make his contemporaries beUeve 
 that he was asleep. Every great moral revolution has 
 its Montaignes, time-servers, trimmers,— 
 
 " — creatures' of a double kind," — 
 
 men who can reconcile themselves to the adoration of 
 idols, while in secret they worship the True God — men 
 who 
 
 " Build God a church, and laugh his Word to scorn." 
 
 Why he should have been at the pains to blind the eyes 
 of his generation is not so clear. Perhaps he thought, 
 with Malherbe, that the best rehgion of a subject is that 
 of his prince. " Some," he writes, " impose upon the 
 world that they beUeve that which they do not. Others, 
 more in number, make themselves beheve that they 
 beheve, not being able to penetrate into what it is to 
 believe." It might be that he ranked himself in the 
 latter category. Perhaps he was content to regulate his 
 conduct on the model of that docile, easy mind he has 
 
40 ETHICA : 
 
 elsewhere depicted as " making nought of its own judg- 
 ment, neither disbeheving nor estabUshing any dogma 
 against common observances, humble, obedient, disci- 
 plinable, studious, a sworn enemy of heresy, and con- 
 sequently freeing itself from the vain and irrehgious 
 opinions of sectarianism." Or, once more, it may be 
 that he intended to solve the whole enigma when he 
 made the acknowledgment that " having incidentally 
 begotten in himseK a certain constancy of opinion, he 
 did not easily change for fear of losing by the bargain ; 
 that as he was not capable of choosing he took other 
 men's choice, and to keep himself from perpetually 
 roUing, kept himself where Providence had placed him." 
 At any rate it is not too much to say, and he himself 
 owns to the fact, that he was not one of those higher and 
 nobler souls he so finely alludes to, " more sohd and 
 clear-sighted than others, who by a long and religious 
 investigation have obtained a more clear and penetrating 
 insight into their creed, and have discovered the mys- 
 terious and divine secret of their ecclesiastical dispensa- 
 tion." 
 
 The general complexion of his character tends to con- 
 tradict the assumption that Montaigne was a man likely 
 to become a candidate for martyrdom. There was, indeed, 
 a large share of hyperbole about him, of gesticulation, 
 of frankness in the assertion of his views, and of emphasis 
 in their maintenance — qualities which, sometimes, under 
 easy circumstances, may compensate for a deficiency of 
 moral courage. But there is no enthusiasm about him. 
 Morally speaking, he does not betray a single well-defined 
 partiahty that could lay claim to the strength of a 
 prejudice, or an opinion marked enough to involve the 
 imputation of partisanship. So equivocal was his 
 moderation, that more than once he had an oppor- 
 tunity of congratulating himself that he is a Guelf to 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 41 
 
 the Ghibellines, and a GhibeUine to the Guelfs. As 
 for mere intellectual conviction, that alone never yet 
 made a martyr. If it could, GaUleo had not escaped 
 the rack and pulleys. And even intellectual convic- 
 tion he possessed as little on this as on any other 
 subject. 
 
 There is this excuse for him ; he lived at a crisis when 
 convictions of any kiud were weak and unsettled. The 
 " Que sgais-je ? " of his motto might well have been accepted 
 as the general device of the age. Events were occurring 
 around that might weU have shaken a soberer mind than 
 Montaigne's in its confidence ia human experience, in its 
 estimate of human penetration. He saw all the old truths 
 which had held the world in subjection for so many 
 centuries rudely denied. In the general convulsion he 
 recognized the veil which had concealed the mysteries of 
 spiritualism rudely rent in twain. All the old associations 
 had been torn up, and, as yet, nothing fixed, nothing 
 certain, had been substituted in their place. The truth 
 is, the sudden estabhshment of Protestantism must have 
 presented to the mind of the observer phenomena as 
 confounding as the estabhshment of Christianity itself. 
 The inteUigent Cathohc may have regarded the reaction 
 against Cathohcism with amazement similar to that mth. 
 which the penetrating minds of paganism, of such pagans 
 as Phny and Julian, regarded the great insurrection against 
 the rehgion of Socrates and Varro. 
 
 As it was, the idea of doubt and uncertainty penetrated 
 into the natural avenues of Montaigne's understanding, 
 and leavened the whole mass of his philosophy. His 
 mind was not a profound one, but it was a comprehensive 
 one, and its comprehensiveness was made to promote 
 the infatuation. Stimulated, in spite of his habitual 
 faineantise, by a large and almost universal inquisitiveness, 
 he set himself to scan the vast circle of human knowledge, 
 
42 ETHICA : 
 
 and then prepared to deduct from his inquiry the logical 
 establishment of human ignorance. The essence of his 
 philosophy, if philosophy it may be called, is embodied in 
 his Apology for the work of Eaymond De Sebond, and is 
 propounded under cover of defendiag the old position of 
 mysticism that faith is not founded on reason, by proviug 
 that reason has no foundation of its own. To this proof 
 aU the strength of his intellect, and the zeal and humour 
 of his character, are directed by turns. Setting out with 
 an investigation into the essential distinction between 
 animals and man, he arrives at a conclusion analogous to 
 that at which Helvetius arrived in his famous work on the 
 Mind, and the very opposite to that which Hume after- 
 wards maintains in one of his Essays (on the Instinct of 
 Beasts) , that there is less of difference between certain 
 men and certain beasts than there is between some men 
 and other men. The iuteUigence of the elephant, the 
 sagacity of the dog, the fideUty of the horse, the subtlety 
 of the fox, the prudence of the ant, and the dehberation- 
 of the spider and bee, are, to his mind, so many protests 
 against that arrogance and presumption that would raise 
 a middle waU of partition between the individual creature 
 and the general creation. Of course, such a decision 
 can only lead him to a general depreciation of human 
 knowledge ; and in the treatment of this his favourite 
 theme, he appears to use Burke's famous expression — a 
 very Vitruvius of ruiu. What is man ? Man is but a 
 thing of nought ! is the burden of his examination and 
 discovery. The vanity of human achievements, the vanity 
 of human wisdom, its fickleness, its frailty, its hesitation 
 and doubts, are the principal accompaniments. Few, 
 indeed, but must realize the utter weakness of unaided 
 nature, as he summons up before them the records of its 
 collected strength, contrasts its failures with its successes, 
 its decisions with its disputes, its moments of variation 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 43 
 
 with its moments of stability, and then bids philosophy 
 account for the picture. 
 
 The great blemish in Montaigne's reasoning is his 
 singular one-sidedness. He seems to have started on 
 his speculations unconsciously imbued with a principle of 
 optimism. His imagination first attributed to human 
 nature a standard of perfectibility to which it lays no 
 claim, and then his judgment quarrelled with the contrast 
 iu the conception and the reality. The mental and 
 physical constitution of man is limited by bounds, beyond 
 which it may not transgress ; and Montaigne overlooked 
 the consideration that the inanity of the speculations, 
 the idleness of the opinions in which man sometimes 
 indulged, is rather a testimony to the presumption than 
 the imbecUity of his na;ture. The failures of great 
 geniuses are marks by which the observer may measure 
 their strength rather than gauge their weakness. The 
 helplessness of human philosophy on certain subjects 
 but too plainly testifies to its fallibility, but does not 
 invalidate its claims to consent on all. The various 
 conflicting deductions of antiquity on matters of the 
 most vital importance with which he fills up half his 
 treatise — the ignorance which permitted Aristotle to assert 
 that God is the heat of heaven ; or Zeno, that he is an 
 animal; or Parmenides, a circle— the poverty of dis- 
 crimination which prompted Empedocles to teach that 
 the soul is a thing of blood ; or Hesiod that it is a 
 composition of clay and water; or Thales, a nature 
 without repose, and self-moving — ^the uncertainty that 
 drove Plato, Epicurus, and Pythagoras to invent their 
 ideas, atoms, and numbers, to explain the phenomenon 
 of the universe — prove not that human reason is utterly 
 incapable, but that those speculators whose examples he 
 adduced were exercising their reason on matters too 
 high for them, and for which it is not originally adapted. 
 
44 ETHICA : 
 
 Uncertainty in everything which does not come under 
 the cognizance of the senses, or which is not revealed 
 to us, is indeed the general condition of man's nature ; 
 but it is a poor and comfortless philosophy that would 
 plunge its disciple into the despair of scepticism, because 
 it cannot give him the title to assume the arrogance of 
 the dogmatist. 
 
 Even the senses, the beginning and the end of our 
 knowledge, according to his account, he does not acquit 
 of the inconsistencies of error. He had studied man as 
 a moral and intellectual phenomenon, and the result of 
 his study had been to find him wanting. But if moral 
 philosophy presented to him nothing but a mass of unin- 
 teUigible chimeras, ui physical science he could recognize, 
 to use his own contemptuous expression, only dreams 
 and fanatic foUies. The state of contemporary science 
 was not, indeed, very encouraging to a man whose mind 
 was imbued in epechism. Accordingly, he charges 
 science with being nothing more than sophisticated 
 poetry, and with imposing on mankind, "not that which 
 really is, or what she really beUeves, but what she has 
 contrived with the greatest and most plausible hkelihood 
 of truth." Every art has its presuppositions, on the 
 merit of which it negotiates for its general acceptance ; 
 and every presupposition is linked, as it were, in a league 
 of amity, to promote the general imposition. Thus the 
 logician refers the signification of words to the gramma- 
 rian ; the rhetorician borrows his state of argument from 
 the logician; the poet his measure from the musician; 
 the geometrician his proportions from the arithmetician ; 
 and the metaphysician takes physical conjecture for his 
 foundation. 
 
 Those who would have Montaigne to be something 
 more than the precursor of Charron, may, if they please 
 to pursue the hint, consider this declamation against the 
 
OR CHAKACTERISTICS. 45 
 
 deductive process as a latent anticipation in favour of 
 the philosophy of induction.' Indeed, it would not be 
 difficult to find scattered here and there the seeds of 
 other systems than Bacon's. His arraignment of our 
 sense-knowledge — ^his interrogation, "How do we know 
 that there are not sensitive faculties in nature fit to 
 judge of the occult properties of things, the want of which 
 keeps us ignorant of their essence?" — ^what does it 
 suggest but the mendacity of our subjective knowledge, 
 the position of Hume and Kant ! There is much more 
 of seminal science in Montaigne. Thus it is with the 
 growth of knowledge, as it is with the growth of the 
 globe. What appears to be new, the accurate explorer 
 traces back to a long antiquity. For a period old 
 systems he buried beneath new crusts. Fresh^ layers 
 are deposited. At length a disturbance takes place ; 
 curiosity is excited, and some venturesome archaeologist 
 disembogues the skeleton of a philosophy, or the sepul- 
 chred dust of what was once a vital theory. 
 
 The spirit which actuated Montaigne in these violent 
 fits of depreciation is anything but a philosophic one. 
 Ridiculiag the presumption of dogmatists, he had uncon- 
 sciously fallen into a dogmatism of a very unreasonable 
 cast. A Uttle more modesty might have taught him, in 
 the language of Bacon, that those who complain of the 
 
 ' My readers may not be unwilling to compare two extracts, one from 
 the " Apology for Sebond," the other from the "NoTom Organum : " — 
 
 " Every science has its principles, presupposed, by which judgment is 
 everywhere kept in check. Our masters possess and gain beforehand as 
 much room in our belief, as is necessary towards their conclusions; the 
 assent and approbation we allow them giving them wherewith to draw us 
 from the right and left, and to whirl us about at their pleasure. Let the 
 generals which tyrannize over us be weighed in the balance." — Moktaigne. 
 
 " As things are at present conducted, a sudden transition is made from 
 sensible objects and particidar facts to general propositions, which are 
 accounted principles, and round which, as around so many fixed poles, 
 disputation and argument continually revolve." — Bacon. 
 
46 ETHICA : 
 
 subtlety of nature, the entanglement of causes, and the 
 imperfection of the human understanding, do rather 
 choose to accuse the common state of men and things, 
 than make confession of themselves/ Doubting, as he 
 did, the eflBcacy of reason, he was compelled to rest him- 
 self contented with bare assertion, and with supporting 
 his assertions by the authority of men to whom he had 
 been aU along denying any authority. It is but a realiza- 
 tion of the blunderer in the " Progress of Error," who — 
 
 " With a clear and shining lamp supplied, 
 First puts it out, then takes it for a guide." 
 
 From this deficiency of argumentative proof, as weU as 
 from want of method and arrangement in his proof, 
 the admirers of Montaigne have never claimed for him a 
 higher position than that of a philosopher without a sect. 
 There is nothing in him to iatimate that he proposed to 
 himself the foundation of a school. He made use of his 
 reason to inquire and interrogate, but not to determine ; 
 and inquisitiveness without decision is too repugnant to 
 the idea of system ever to beget one. His pohcy is to 
 suggest the problem, but he does not venture to suggest 
 the solution. There is not sufficient unity of purpose in 
 his book, certainly not sufficientunity of plan, to form 
 the consistent basis on which to rear the structure of an 
 academy. Ben Jonson was right in bringing biTn for- 
 ward as the master of those loose spirits, who, he says, 
 turn over aU books, and are equally searching in all 
 papers — that wiU act out of what they presently find or 
 meet without choice. "By which means it happens that 
 what they have discredited or impugned in one week, 
 they have hereafter or before extolled in the same 
 manner."® The curious observer may possibly discover 
 through all his deviations that a smgle thread still gives 
 
 ' Pref. ad " Instaurat. Mag." 
 
 ' " Discoveries.'' Art., Ingeniorum Discrimina. 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 47 
 
 connection and sequence to all his movements. But the 
 miscellaneous manner in which he handled his theme 
 hardly presents that uniformity of design which is to be 
 found, for instance, in the characteristics of Shaftesbury. 
 He hurries from subject to subject, with as little regard 
 for classification as the author of the " Tales of the 
 Princess Schezerade." Hence, ia the course of his aber- 
 rations, he himself appears in a thousand different guises, 
 at one time a Stoic, then an Epicurean, then a Stoic 
 agaia. He had taken Plutarch and Seneca as his model, 
 and the tone and style of his thought had become so 
 completely identified with theirs that he could not sustain 
 himself long in any position, or promise himself constancy 
 ia any discussion requiriug even ordiaary appUcation and 
 perseverance. 
 
 This assimilation of himself with the authors of 
 antiquity is one of the most marked of Montaigne's 
 characteristics. It filled his pages with ostentatious 
 citations from the Ubraries of Greece and Borne, thereby 
 setting the fashion of that pedantic abuse of quotation 
 which long after Balzac attempted to ridicule in his 
 "Barbon," and which, in our own country, Ben Jonson 
 laughed at in his "Silent Woman," and Butler carica- 
 tured in his "Hudibras." But it affected him ia poiats 
 of far more serious importance than mere dialectical or 
 rhetorical propriety. It affected him very visibly, for 
 instance, in his sentiments on death and suicide. It 
 would be diflScult to name any author, not pretending to 
 inspiration, who has handled more grandly or more 
 solemnly that grandest and most solemn of all themes, 
 the MortaHty of Man. The necessity of the inevitable 
 hour, the advantages of contemplatiag its approach, the 
 philosophy of despising its arrival, are aU urged over and 
 over again with a pathos and an eloquence that might 
 have been envied in the Porch or the Academy. But of 
 
48 ETHICA : 
 
 those loftier motives which, for the Christian, disarms 
 the King of Terrors, robs the grave of its sting, and 
 makes death itself the portal to life, he makes as Uttle 
 account as though he knew no more about the secrets 
 of immortahty than Epictetus, or any of those poetic 
 heathens who filled their stanzas with stories about 
 Charon and the Capacious Urn. Early training, again, 
 may be permitted to explain the preference which he 
 gives to Epaminondas, Alexander, and Caesar, over the 
 generals of his own day ; or to account for the zeal he 
 displays about the factions of Consular Rome, contrasted 
 with his apathetic demeanour towards the civil broils 
 of his own country; but no partiaHty can excuse his 
 advocacy of voluntary death, the finest, as he calls it, of 
 all deaths. It is true that in the height of his career he 
 pretends to recollect the canon of the Creator against 
 self-murder ; but though he pauses between the fortitude 
 of Regulus and the weakness of Cato, it is clear that the 
 balance of his decision is in favour of the svXoyov l^ayw-yriv 
 of the Stoics. In his journey through Italy, he had 
 seen Tasso pining in the dungeons of Ferrara. Addison, 
 when he passed over the same ground, heard the 
 gondohers of Venice beguUing the toil of the oar with 
 stanzas from the ' ' Jerusalem Dehvered. ' ' Montaigne could 
 not mention the miserable phght of the poor poet without 
 the cruel declaration that he had less of compassion 
 than of anger for the man who could thus be content to 
 survive himseK and his works. 
 
 Such equivocal philosophy as this must, as a matter 
 of course, considerably narrow Montaigne's reputation in 
 the estimate of posterity. Whether his eccentricities, to 
 call them by the mildest term, were the fruit of design or 
 of accident, whether they formed part of his schemes, or 
 whether they were not rather owing to the absence of all 
 scheme, it is difficult to decide. The discursive, loose, 
 
OB CHARACTEBISTICS. 49 
 
 and unmethodical style in which he set down his thoughts 
 must be held responsible for some of the apparent con- 
 tradictions and mutations that chequered his judgment. 
 At any rate, though he affords ample grounds for the 
 charge of pyrrhonism, those who accuse him so positively 
 of absolute irreligion do so at the risk of their own 
 penetration. It wiU be more charitable to regard him 
 rather as one of those 
 
 " Spirits of a middle sort, 
 
 Too black for heaven, yet too white for hell, 
 Who just dropped halfway down, nor lower fell." 
 
 What Montaigne's real merit as a thinker is, I 
 conceive to be this. He was the first, who had the 
 boldness in an age of pedants to strip pedantry of much 
 of its domineering pretensions. In his position, as the 
 recognized antagonist of conventionalism, he stood face 
 to face with the accumulated dogmatism of centuries, 
 and this too when the faggots were yet drying that were 
 to bum Bruno. It is true that the extent of the 
 reaction, the force of the rebound operated injuriously 
 on his own character, that in the first enjoyment of 
 freedom he was in danger of faUing, and actually did fall 
 into Ucentiousness. But it is certain that his very 
 exaggerations were not without fruit. By pointing out 
 to men with a boldness and a distinctness that could not 
 but arrest attention the road to emancipation, he rendered 
 them less tolerant of tyranny. By illustrating to them, 
 with a positiveness of colouring almost revolting, the 
 utter fallibility of human reason, he assisted them in their 
 efforts to release themselves from the control of any 
 other reason but their own. By teaching them, in a 
 word, to doubt, he taught them, involuntarily indeed, 
 and, like Balaam, against his intention, to examine. In 
 this view, and in this view only, can Montaigne be 
 regarded as an ally of the Reformation. 
 
 4 
 
50 ETHICA : 
 
 In many other respects he was far in advance of his 
 generation. Indeed, whatever are his failings, however 
 httle Christianity owes to a sceptic who insimiated that 
 the creed of the Christian is sustained by the same 
 innate principle of credulity as that which actuates the 
 Mahommedan or the Bhuddist, however Protestants may 
 feel towards the bigot who thought Protestantism a mere 
 " moral frenzy," it cannot be denied that society is 
 indebted to the liberahty of the thinker who, in an age 
 when Baroco and Barahpton were supreme, published in 
 language as modem as anything to be found in the 
 Tirocinium of Cowper,* views of education enlightened 
 enough to win the fatare approbation of Locke ; who, 
 while De Thou was filling his book with the grossest 
 fictions of witchcraft, laughed to scorn the absurdities of 
 demonology; and who, though a contemporary of the 
 Estrapade, protested against the use of torture almost 
 half a century before the use of torture had been autho- 
 rized by the conduct of our own Bacon. 
 
 ' It is no accident or inadvertence that has thus associated the poet and 
 the philosopher. Those who will be at the pains to compare the " Review 
 of Schools " and Montaigne's twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth Essays, will 
 find ample compensation in tracing out not only an analogy of sentiment, 
 but even a verbal identity, in the pages of the two authors. 
 
OR CHARACTEBISTICS. 51 
 
 CHAPTEB II. 
 
 MILTON:— HIS POLITICS, PROSE WRITINGS, AND 
 BIOGRAPHERS. 
 
 Popular ignorance of Milton's early Idiosyncracies. — The Literary Tastea of 
 his Youth. — A Positivist, and a Satirist. — His exoteric Education. — 
 The tendency of Politics, from the Reformation, to he associated with 
 Religious Considerations. — Origin of this Amalgamation. — ^Ita Effect 
 in producing Traitors on both sides ; Campions and Parsonses ; Vanes 
 and Hugh Peterses. — Its Iniiuence on the Prerogative. — Striking 
 Reactionary Spirit in the Present Century, illustrated by the Divorce 
 between Legislation and Religion. — Attempt at Protests. — Mr. Glad- 
 stone's " Church and State."— Mr. Sewell's " Christian PoUtics." — This 
 tendency to develop the Personality of the Social Unit neutralized, 
 however, by the Press, and other Literary Corporations. — Return to 
 Milton. — His Political Connection with Cromwell examined. — As a 
 Politician contrasted with Southey. — Cromwell's Puritanism investi- 
 gated by the hght of his Letters. — Mr. Buckle's Assertion that the 
 Great Rebellion was a War of Classes, examined and refuted. — Origin 
 of the Scriptural and Pagan Complexions severally assumed by the 
 English and French Revolutions. — Milton's Revolutionary Speculations 
 futile. — Natural Aversion in the English Mind to Political Experi- 
 ments. — Return of Charles, — Singular Contrasts in his Character and 
 Habits. — Position of MUton. — His Prose Writings compared with 
 Burke's. — Examination of his Biographies. — The Present Age the Age 
 of Biography. — Cause of this. — Growth of Milton's Political Reputation. 
 — Warburton. — ^Warton. — Merits of Johnson as Critic and Biographer. 
 — The prevaUing Views of History in his Day. — Present Taste for 
 Heroizing. — Mr. Caxlyle. — Damaging Influence on the Integrity of 
 History. — Mr. Masson's " Life of Milton." — The Theory of the Associa- 
 tion of History with Biography : How fer Practicable. 
 
 Milton somewhere compares the career of a great and 
 a good man to a poem. Estimating a poem with 
 reference to its dramatic divisions of a beginning, a 
 middle, and an end, the comparison is singularly apph- 
 cable to Milton's own career. His life comprehending, as 
 it does, that great Epic in our history which relates the 
 
 4—2 
 
52 ethica: 
 
 portentous rape on English Liberty, exactly divides itself 
 into three epochs, of which the rebellion forms the central 
 and most conspicuous. Of the proem, or first part of his 
 career, it is no paradox to say that nine educated persons 
 out of ten have-no well-defined conception. That his 
 father was a Scrivener, that he hved in Bread Street at 
 the sign of the;.Sjpread Eagle, that young Milton was 
 generally considered by his neighbours a precocious child, 
 rather given to Psalmody and Hebrew, that he went to 
 St. Paul's School, that he left school for Christ's College, 
 Cambridge, where by report of maHce, he got whipped, 
 and left Christ's College for Italy, where he saw Galileo 
 fresh from prison, and finally that he returned from Italy 
 to England, an EvangeKcal Alfieri filled with sonnetteer- 
 ing and patriotism, are the familiar circumstantial outUnes 
 which it is thought something like guiltiness to be 
 ignorant of. But for the groundwork, the substance 
 of the portrait, imagination or prejudice is left to do 
 its best. The result is obvious. Imagination uncon- 
 trolled by facts takes refuge in its sole remaining guide, 
 the popular principle that the child is father of the 
 man ; the process of moral and physical identification 
 is pushed to the extreme, till by a species of anticipation 
 all fair proportions in the order of development are 
 rejected, and the dimensions of the man become the 
 measure of the child. Instead of the boyhood of a 
 great man being considered as the testator to his man- 
 hood, it is really made the legatee. The dawn is made 
 to glow with the deep colouring of the noon-day blaze. 
 His life is spelt backwards, and the fulfilments of 
 maturity are read as the promises of youth. Thus, the 
 infant Byron is the Giaour in petticoats, and thus, in the 
 child Milton is to be seen nothing but the bearded gloom 
 of the Regicide and the full-grown asceticism of the 
 Puritan. 
 
OB CHAEACTEBISTICS. 63 
 
 The truth is, it would have been difficult to find 
 among the three thousand students of Cambridge, one 
 to whom the rational enjoyments of Ufe were more 
 thoroughly acceptable, one more constitutionally suscep- 
 tible of physical and intellectual pleasure. He was not, 
 we may be assured, wild, did not make a Trinculo of 
 himself, and certainly did not join his feUow-classmen in 
 the noble game of duping prostitutes, and running off with 
 heiresses. But his tastes for chaste pursuits no more 
 constituted him an ascetic, than his love of fenciag made 
 him a debauche. Those who nicknamed him the Lady 
 were as far from intending to caricature his sensitiveness, 
 or to predicate of him that he took his precepts from the 
 Stoic's Tub, as he was from laying claim to the reputation 
 of gallantry when he owned to a modest famiharity with 
 playhouses. Intellectually, no undergraduate could be 
 less exclusive. In his coUege exercises may be traced 
 all that hberality for which the future author of the 
 Areopagitica contended. His college exercises, iudeed, 
 have been too long ignored in the consideration of his 
 life; and, in the estimation of his early character, I suspect 
 that out of his professed admirers, not niuety-nine out of 
 a hundred have ever read them. Yet I feel quite sure 
 not one out of the ninety-nine can have an adequate idea 
 of Milton without reading them. 
 
 It would not be easy, for example, from any other 
 source to discover that the author of the " Paradise 
 Lost," in whose teeth has been so often cast the im- 
 putation of being an Anti-Copemican, was a philo- 
 sopher in the very spirit of the Baconian philosophy, 
 that in the closing struggle between scholasticism and 
 positivism he arrayed himself on the side of Progress, 
 just as in the coming struggle between a less spiritual 
 prescription and a less spiritual reform, he was to array 
 himself on the side of Liberty. Still less likely would 
 
54 ETHICA : 
 
 it be suspected that the author of Comus could himself 
 BO far yield to routine as to plead the worship of the Son 
 of Circe, and to sacrifice to him in drolleries of Fescen- 
 nine indeKcacy, too nauseous even for that shaggy mon- 
 ster's rabble crew. The Instauratio Magna does not 
 contain a fairer tribute to the superior worth of experi- 
 mental science over Dialectic Sophistry, than is to be 
 found in one of his Academic Orations. On the other 
 hand, the Encomium Morce does not employ language 
 more equivocal than is to be encountered in another of 
 them. AU the humour of Horace is there, it is true, but it 
 is accompanied with more than the grossness of Juvenal. 
 It is not difficult to reconcile these apparent incon- 
 gruities. In the very midst of them may stiU be dis- 
 cerned the germs of those moral idiosyncracies, which 
 have stamped on the character of the man a superscrip- 
 tion of their own. Indeed, the very inconsistencies might 
 with little skiU be made to give a prominence to his 
 normal habitude. If he plays the fool, as he expresses 
 it with a vivacity not generally associated with the 
 name of Milton, he displays a contempt for his occupation 
 with a candid emphasis that can never be mistaken. In 
 the very wit and merriment, never very dehcate, with 
 which he tickles the sides of the men who expose bim for 
 their amusement, he lashes the abuses of the system 
 which authorizes the exposure with the fearlessness and 
 dexterity of the future Smectymnuuan. He joins in their 
 fooleries, contributes to their galas, but with an ill- 
 disguised irony he scorns his audience whilst he amuses 
 them, and while their mirth is making capital of his 
 wit, suffers his wit to make capital of their mirth. He 
 hisses while they laugh, sneers when they applaud, and 
 with the Hebrew Athlete in the hands of the Philistines, 
 chastises his captors at the very moment that he makes 
 sport for them. 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 55 
 
 If we quit his academical career, and look at what may 
 be called the exoteric education of MHtoii, it will not be 
 difficult to trace the influence of events on such a dis- 
 position, at once sanguine and impatient. 
 
 He was bom in 1608, that is to say, he was bom at 
 the very dawn of the great crisis in the history of his 
 country. Monarchy was on the very verge of its grand 
 cUmacteric. Liberty, but tardily released from its swad- 
 dhng clothes, had just begun to show the down upon the 
 chia. Symptoms of a precocious and a vigorous growth 
 had indeed been already revealed to a few observant 
 prognosticators. We had just passed the most seditious 
 age in EngUsh History. Europe was still ringing with 
 the arraigning accents of the Spaniard Charles V,, and 
 the Frenchman Montaigne, that of all people on the face 
 of the earth, the English is the most whimsical, and the 
 most restless. The memory of the Wyatts and Devereux 
 was stiU fresh in the minds of those who would have 
 repudiated the imputation. Not that the impeachment 
 deserved repudiation. They who have studied our con- 
 stitution nosologically, know that the moments of extra- 
 ordinary disturbance in its organism have eventually 
 proved to it prognostications of extraordinary vitahty. 
 The genius of hberty refuses to dispense its heahng 
 power through a stagnant medium. The vital fluid of 
 society must be stirred to the very depths ere the disease 
 can be reUeved. Like that Sacred Water, to be remedial 
 it must be periodically troubled. By the time that 
 Milton was ripe for college, the crisis had begun to 
 assume a distinct physiognomical character. The balance 
 of empire was trembhng in the scales. The sceptre had 
 long quitted the hands of the Barons. They had never 
 recovered the Statute of Population and the Statute of 
 Alienation. And while the influence of the aristocracy 
 had been waning, the power of the commonalty was daily 
 
56 ethica: 
 
 rising. The last serf had been emancipated. So far 
 back as Edward the Sixth's reign, that discriminating 
 monarch had borne reluctant testimony to its growth 
 when he complained that the grazier, the farmer, and the 
 merchant became landed men, and called themselves 
 gentlemen, "though they be but churls," and since 
 Edward's time the association of the churl with the 
 gentleman, had multiplied virtually as well as numerically, 
 quaUtatively as well as quantitatively. It is true that the 
 effects of this impulse on the undercurrent of society were 
 as yet not very visible, not visible enough to distract the 
 attention of the youthful student from his Euripides 
 and his Du Bartas. It is true, that the relative propor- 
 tions of power in the governor and the governed stiU 
 remained to all appearance unchanged, that the preroga- 
 tive indulged in all its old caprices, and exercised unre- 
 strained all its old privileges, fought the battle of 
 Calvinism in HoUand at one moment, and at the next 
 burned Calviuists in Smithfield, punished the sinner that 
 attended a bearbaiting on a Sabbath, and then punished 
 the saint that would not attend a Whitsunale or a 
 Morris-dance, promoted its Carrs and ViUierses as it 
 had promoted its Leicesters and Essexes, imprisoned its 
 Hampdens and Prynnes, as it had imprisoned its Went- 
 worths and Stricklands, republished its absolute theories 
 and its despotic doctrines, and found its Cowels and 
 Blackwoods, its Sibthorps and Manwayrings to recon- 
 secrate them, as it had found its Parkers and Whitgifts 
 to originate and embody them. 
 
 But to oppose these aggressions a reactionary spirit 
 was springing up, reflecting indeed the material growth 
 of society, but reflecting too another element, not so 
 material ia its recent development, a spirit differing from 
 that spirit of sectarian enthusiasm, which, in Ehzabeth's 
 time, had plotted against her as a bastard, and as a 
 
OR CHARACTEBI8TICS. 57 
 
 heretic compared her to Judith, and sighed for some 
 Holofemes to do the deed ; but, at the same time, so far 
 partaking of enthusiasm as to produce, if not Campions 
 and Parsonses, a race of men who, at least, saw inca- 
 pacity in religious intolerance, and whose conduct was to 
 be guided by that famous maxim, enunciated by the chief 
 among them, that they who preach the best and pray the 
 best, fight the best. What the historical origin of this 
 spirit is, how it came to be an active potentiality on the 
 side of pohtical freedom, an irresistible co-agent in the 
 scheme of society militant, wiU be best seen in tracing the 
 rise of its canonical representatives in history. 
 
 If we would find the origin of that strange syncretism 
 of poUtics and reHgion, theology and legislation, typified 
 in the word Puritan, we must refer back to that rehgious 
 Revolution, which posterity has consented to caU the 
 Reformation. There is, perhaps, no movement in history 
 which ojBfers so many anomalies to the penetration of the 
 student. Its very birth was, so to speak, irregular. It 
 did not spring hke political revolutions from a graduated 
 series of enactments, wrung from the gripe of tyranny. 
 No antecedent acts of successful reform familiarized, as 
 in a natural order of development, the final catastrophe. 
 No compromise on compromise introduced the closing 
 change. Up to the very date of Henry's secession, the 
 Statute Book still bristled with penalties and disabilities. 
 The old rehgion was stUl associated with power. It had 
 weight on its side, and if it had not logical right, it had 
 at least prescriptive right. Its dominancy, to aU outward 
 seeming, was more secure than that of its ally. Royalty, 
 however temporarily triumphant, could not overlook that 
 long hst of historical protests which is headed with 
 Magna Charta. For rehgion, its long career of ascen- 
 dancy has only been interrupted by assaults that served 
 but to confirm it. Its enemies had attacked it. They 
 
58 ETHICA : 
 
 had been discomfited, and their discomfiture had increased 
 its strength. On a sudden Henry deserted it, and the 
 balance of dominion was reversed. Without prehminary 
 negotiation, with scarce a prehminary warning, it fell. 
 Hence the abrupt outhnes with which the great catastrophe 
 stands out in the scroll of history. And hence too, the 
 long system of compromise and negotiation, which instead 
 of preceding, succeeded its fall. The suddenness of the 
 event left no time for conviction. Some men feigned it, 
 and accepted doctrines under one monarch to persecute 
 for them under the next. Such were the Gardiners and 
 Bonners. Others, of less hardihood, betrayed all the 
 ludicrous oscillations of consciences too weak not to yield 
 eventually, but too strong to be overcome at once. Such 
 were the Cranmers and Jewels. The spuit of vacillation 
 characterized the movement even to the very lengths of 
 contradiction. Protestants and Cathohcs were dragged 
 on the same hurdle to be burned at the same stake. 
 The legislation reflected the character of the doctrine that 
 originated it. The Bible was pubhcly exposed, but the 
 printing of scripture disallowed. It was lawful to pray to 
 Images, but it was not lawful to warrant their use from 
 Holy Writ. It was legal to pray to the Saints, but not 
 legal to expect favom-s from them. It was orthodox to 
 pray for the souls of the departed, but informal to support 
 the doctriue of the Mass. The Bible might be read in 
 EngUsh, but the fagot was ordained for him. who read 
 the New Testament. The old rites had, in fact, been 
 retained with new interpretations. The spirit was re- 
 served, the letter only modified. 
 
 In the midst of this, the Act of Supremacy doubled the 
 value of the royal power in England. No king in Europe 
 exercised such authority, for no king in Europe had 
 assumed the crozier with the sceptre. All that ecclesiasti- 
 cal jurisdiction which had so long been the ambition of 
 
OR CHABACTEEISTICS. 59 
 
 kings, for which they had cringed, intrigued, fought, was 
 concentrated in the person of Henry the Eighth. The 
 great problem of contemporary legislation, the reconcile- 
 ment of the political and spiritual supremacy, a problem 
 which the ingenuity of saints and the blood of Martyrs 
 had failed to solve, the strong will, and stronger passions, 
 of one man unravelled. 
 
 It is easy to see how one of the immediate effects of 
 this duplicate Supremacy was ■ to associate religion with 
 politics, and how, from this association, pohtical denomi- 
 nations came to be necessarily identified with religious 
 denominations. And as Koyalty was identified with 
 theology, so loyalty became as one with orthodoxy, and 
 disaffection with non-conformity. Prerogative and Church 
 went hand in hand. Hooker's fourth and fifth proposi- 
 tions, that the Church, like other societies, is invested with 
 power to make laws for its well being, and that when the 
 Scripture is sUent, human authority may interpose — 
 together with his two last propositions, that aU who are 
 bom -within the confines of an establishment, and are 
 baptized into it, are bound to submit to its ecclesiastical 
 laws under penalties, — were not so much an apology 
 for, as an authoritative justification of that policy which 
 dictated EHzabeth's message to the Parliament on the 
 third imprisonment of Wentworth, that the Commons 
 might redress such popular grievances, as were complained 
 of in the counties, but must leave aU matters of state to 
 herself, and the Council, and all matters of Church to 
 herself and the bishops. Under this policy treason and 
 heresy in the eyes of the law were as one. The High 
 Commission turned over its victims to the civil magistrate 
 as a heretic and schismatic ; the civil magistrate passed 
 him on to the hangman as a traitor and repubhcan. In 
 time, causes of conscience were considered as matters of 
 faction. The Spiritual courts played into the hands of 
 
60 ETHICA : 
 
 the Temporal, and instead of being brow-beaten by 
 Bishops and Proctors, the religious recusant was made 
 to hold up his hands at the assizes before justices and 
 juries as a felon. The Canon-law transferred him to the 
 Common Law, Convocation to Westminster Hall. 
 
 Thus the coalition of political and rehgious supremacy 
 at the hands of Henry the Eighth, was at first prejudi- 
 cial to liberty. It put on laws and multiphed restrictions, 
 which it cost a century of bloodshed to cancel and re- 
 move. Teleologically, however, it was favourable to hberty. 
 It aggravated, no doubt, the means of oppression ; but it 
 stimulated the motives of resistance. It created a new 
 principle of resistance, as it created a novel protest for 
 oppression. The evil and the panacea, the disease and 
 the remedy, the means of action and the means of 
 counteraction were begotten together. As theology en- 
 tered into the composition of the tyranny, so it entered, 
 too, into the composition of that reactionary power by 
 which the tyranny fell. The cry of "No king, no 
 bishop, no bishop, no king," while it well typified the 
 Erastian ceremony, by which the Church was wedded to 
 the State, suggested the means of defence, as well as the 
 elements of aggression. Hitherto the Church had stood 
 in somewhat antagonistic relation to the State. It 
 obeyed another supremacy; it looked for other patronage. 
 It had its own order impatient of the honours of secular 
 ordination ; and it had its own territorial patrimony, 
 jealously impervious to secular encroachment. It had 
 been, above all, its own legislator in matters of faith, and 
 whether its legislation was popular or unpopular, it alone 
 bore the consequences as it alone claimed the respon- 
 sibihty. This responsibility, with these consequences, the 
 Act of Supremacy transferred to the Crown. Thus the 
 monarch by doubling his power had doubled his liability. 
 He made the prerogrative weaker, when he was extending 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 61 
 
 the bounds of the prerogative, He decreased its strength, 
 as he increased its accountability. If the Star Chamber 
 had wounded the citizen through the side of the heretic, 
 the Popular Chambers of Rhetoric wounded the Sovereign 
 through the side of the Prelate. Persecution soon 
 changed the reUgious recusant into the pohtical recu- 
 sant. It made him a traitor while he kept him a 
 schismatic. Questions of discipUne grew iato questions 
 of poUtics. Controversies about plurahties and non- 
 residence, missals and antiphonals, square caps and 
 tippets, were naturally exchanged for controversies about 
 the right of magistrates to enforce et-csetera oaths, con- 
 fiscations and imprisonments. Eidicuhng Lambethisms, 
 as the nickname went, gave place to high and angry 
 speculations of an import that the authors of the Martinse 
 Thesianse scarcely dreamed of. 
 
 Henry ought to have gone farther, or ought not to 
 have gone so far. The new Establishment was an Insti- 
 tution founded on a compromise. He left it with many 
 of the abuses of the Old Institution adhering to it, and 
 what was not the case with the old institution, he left 
 the Sovereign power as its sole responsible representative. 
 The popular mind had far outstripped it, and the impulse 
 to the popular mind had in a large degree been given by 
 the very hand that now offered to restrain and curb it. 
 That ensued, which might have been expected to ensue. 
 The popular mind in its own defence refused to advance 
 backward. The first enchantment had been broken. It 
 refused to submit to the chains of a second, or listen to 
 
 " The backward mutters of dissevering power.'' 
 
 Those who are acquainted with the Parliamentary 
 History of Elizabeth's reign know how even thus early 
 this amalgamation of the ecclesiastical and secular supre- 
 ruacy, this confusion of civil and religious obedience. 
 
62 ETHICA : 
 
 operated in propagating and. encouraging the abstract 
 principle of resistance to the prerogative. It was in the 
 power of EKzabeth's successor to have taken advantage 
 of the opportunity for an eqnitable settlement that had 
 been lost at the Reformation. James had been a rigid 
 Calvinist. He had been a Protestant of the purest kirk 
 on earth. He had indeed been a Puritan in very thin 
 disguise. But he changed with the climate. He recog- 
 nized too vividly the value of supremacy to the crown to 
 give it up. The Hampton Court Conference accordingly 
 broke up, and all that the Solomon of his age did towards 
 an accommodation, was to say that a Puritan was a 
 Protestant frightened out of his wits, and that Puritan 
 ministers looked more like Turks than Christians. 
 
 There is one extenuating circumstance for James's 
 conduct. The rehgious crisis had produced strange 
 phenomena in the world of poUtical philosophy. Not the 
 least strange of these phenomena was the anomalous 
 position in which monarchy had been placed. The 
 Church of Rome had been absolute in her tendencies. 
 On principle she had, as a rule, identified her own cause 
 with the cause of kings. Now, however, kings refused to 
 accept of her alliance, and rejected her aid. In retaliation 
 she converted her blessings into curses, and turned her 
 support into resistance. Apostacy was not to be honoured 
 with logic, and by a singular admixture of the popular 
 dogma, that the Sovereignty of Kings is inferior to that 
 of the people, with the absolute dogma that sovereigns 
 have received of God the sword of punishment for heretics, 
 she drew the comfortable deduction that an heretical 
 sovereign is amenable to the tribunal of his people, and 
 might be deposed, stabbed, or poisoned. By a process 
 of counter-retaliation, the doctrine of one extreme sect 
 became the teaching of the other. At least, if the spirit 
 which actuated the reasoning of Bellarmine and Mariana, 
 
OB OHAKAOTERISTICS. 63 
 
 was not identical with that which inflamed Knox and 
 Goodman, the difference ia their ultimate conclusion was 
 very Uttle, not greater indeed than the difference between 
 the knife of Eavaillac and the axe of the Eump. Thus by 
 a strange coincidence, but an unavoidable one, the doctrine 
 of resistance to kings, became a general subject of contem- 
 plation to both parties that divided Europe. Both those 
 who were by force of prescriptive principle the alUes of 
 monarchy, and. those who were by the force of position 
 its enemies, seemed to have agreed in depre(3iating it. 
 
 In this dilemma, James proclaimed himself the Cham- 
 pion of Royalty. He entered the lists on his own behoof, 
 and not content with that he picked up the gage on 
 behalf of his neighbours. He became the representative 
 of the intellectual reaction. EUzabeth had fought with 
 arms against the physical aggression. James saw only 
 the spiritual aggression, and he defied Bellarmine with 
 his pen as Elizabeth had defied Parma with her chivalry. 
 It is characteristic both of the man and the Eeformed 
 sovereign that the weapons which he employed should 
 have been taken from the armoury of theology. Chan- 
 cellor Egerton said of him, he had never seen the king 
 and the priest more united in one person. If we add the 
 title of pedant, we have his whole character. In his fits 
 of ratiocination, he does not hesitate to bring the two 
 latter titles to the support of the first. He lays more 
 stress for example on a text from St. Paul than on his 
 descent from the loins of Henry the Seventh. He 
 evidently has more confidence in a reductio ad absurdwm, 
 or a couplet from Du Bartas, than in the statute of a 
 Plantagenet. He sets more store by the book of Cowel 
 disengaging kings from aU laws, and the doctrine of 
 Blackwood that the English were all slaves from the 
 Norman Conquest, than he did on the wiU of EUzabeth. 
 Either this was philosophy, or it was folly. Either 
 
64 ETHICA : 
 
 he was craftily opposing the "piggots," as he calls them, 
 with their own weapons, or else he was unwittingly 
 preparing weapons for their hands. When James be- 
 queathed to his son his digest of arbitrary theories, loaded 
 with dogmatic appeals to Solomon and David, Moses and 
 Jethro, and charged him to keep it as Alexander kept the 
 Iliads of Homer, the signs of the times might have 
 forewarned him that the same authority would supply his 
 son's enemies with pretexts for comparing him to Agag, 
 and cutting him off Uke Ahab. It would have been more 
 profitable for himself and his heir, had he confined him- 
 self to pedantic controversy only. To keep Voscius out 
 of his chair of Divinity, to convict Arminius of schism in 
 his grave, to reduce Cardinal Perron to a contradiction in 
 terms, or prove Buchanan to be an " Archi-bellows " of 
 rebellion, was trifling, it is true, but it was more harmless 
 than the task of proving kings to be "justly called Gods," 
 and subjects to be " mere pawns at chess." 
 
 Throughout the whole of James's reign, the alliance 
 between the prerogative and theology grew stronger and 
 stronger, tiU by the close of it, it was not difficult for a 
 careful observer to foretell that things were quite as ripe 
 for a rehgious revolution as for a political revolution, and 
 that if there should be a poHtical revolution, it would 
 partake strongly of a rehgious character. 
 
 Such was the state of things when Milton went to 
 coUege. Ere he had left it, Charles succeeded, and the 
 rehgious complexion developed itself more markedly than 
 ever. The press was restrained in favour of the sovereign 
 prelacy. The hcensers of the Press were compared by 
 Sir Edward Deering, to the managers of the Index Ex- 
 purgatorius. In spite of that grim wit which proposed to 
 discharge the canons, dismount and melt them down, the 
 convocational synod continued to pass canonical decrees, 
 settling the extent of the king's power, and the source of 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 65 
 
 his order, defining treason and inflicting civil penalties. 
 Churclimen were put into the commissions of Peace, and 
 the chief of his order could boast that for the first time 
 since Henry VIII., a bishop wielded the staff of a Lord 
 Treasurer. The spirit of the legislation that built up this 
 tyranny, naturally engendered the spirit of the legislation 
 that destroyed it. The House of Commons not unfrequently 
 engaged in the duties of a religious Council ; Committees 
 of religion were appointed, and the tenets of Armenius and 
 Gomar contested with the punctiliousness of schoolmen. 
 The synod at Dort was mentioned more often than the 
 gathering at Kunnymede. The names of Martin Bucer 
 and Peter Martyr were invoked more often than those of 
 the Montfords, and Marischals. Protests against images, 
 crucifixes, altars and candles were engrossed on the same 
 parchment with protests against salt, soap, and leather 
 monopoUes, and the oppressions of the Stannary Courts. 
 The impositions of the prerogative were rebutted by texts 
 from Ezekiel and Daniel, and its creatures condemned to 
 the block out of Eusebius and St. Chrysostom.* 
 
 Thus the temporal power taking advantage of its 
 original association with the ecclesiastical power advanced 
 its exorbitant claims under ecclesiastical pretexts. And 
 thus came to be fought simultaneously the great battle of 
 civil and reUgious freedom. The same result operating 
 from the same cause may be traced in our second great 
 revolution. The Patriots of 1688, who prayed for a 
 Protestant wind, did not forget that the pohtical doc- 
 trines of the Dispensing Power and of Passive Obedience 
 had been enuntiated in Acts of Religious Indulgence. 
 
 It is interesting in reference to the discussion of this 
 epoch to contemplate, by way of contrast, the striking 
 reactionary tendency which seems to domineer steadily 
 over the pohty of the present century. The tendency of 
 
 ' See " Parliamentary History," and the Trial of Laud. 
 
 5 
 
66 ETHICA : 
 
 the seventeenth century was ' undoubtedly to associate 
 theology and politics. There is' as little doubt that the 
 principle which overrules the nineteenth is based on a 
 practical divorce between reUgion and legislation. It 
 would be possible, were this the proper place, to trace the 
 operation, if not the rise, of the idea from the accidental 
 severance of the bishops from the Executive at the 
 Eevolution. At that crisis the church was found wanting 
 in its favourite doctrine of adhesion to the Crown. 
 Whether jurors or nonjurors are implied, there could 
 be no gainsaying the conclusion that the conduct of the 
 Church was suggestive of an initial dissociation from the 
 State. Since then, conservatism, it is true, has made its 
 stand in the persons of both priest and layman. But 
 the opponent of such doctrines as are enuntiated in 
 Mr. Gladstone's " Church and State," and more grossly 
 in Mr. Sewel's " Christian Politics," contents himself 
 with pointing to the tendency of domestic legislation. 
 Nor can it be denied that to the philosophic historian of 
 the present epoch, the Secularization of education, the 
 removal of rehgious disabilities to civil offices, the Aboli- 
 tion of Ecclesiastical jurisdiction in civil matters, the 
 facilitation of Divorce on the one hand, and of Marriage 
 on the other, wiU appear as so many stages in that 
 drama, the catastrophe of which he predicts to be the 
 ultimate reversal of old developments, and the dissolution 
 of old bonds. Abroad too, he wiU probably observe that, 
 though for a moment the legislative mind of Europe 
 seemed to recur to the pohcy of Charles V., or Phihp II., 
 yet the phenomenon of the Holy Alliance eventually 
 terminated m the invasion of the Vatican, and the pro- 
 pagation of such a breed as the Hermes, the Ronges, and 
 the Czerkys ; while the teaching of Madame Krudener, 
 and the Concordat, nourished, if it did not logically create, 
 the rude anti-Erastianism of About and La Gueronni^re. 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 67 
 
 The exciting causes, of rather the main supports, of 
 this divorce lie on the surface. The phenomenon itself 
 argues no invidious hostihty of the State directly to the 
 Church. The truth is, the development of the individua- 
 lity is the typical idea of the age. The tendency in all 
 legislation is to dissociate the man from the member of 
 the corporation. Though it is evident that this is the 
 case, and not to be denied even by those who refuse to 
 allow Mr. Mill's " Essay on Liberty" to be m any way a 
 representative book, the exponent of an existing class ia 
 society, there is this to compensate them. While Govern- 
 ment is relaxing its hold of the man, there is taking its 
 place a large and varied machinery of affiliation, if the 
 term may be used, which promises to be as active and as 
 powerful as any purely governmental consideration has 
 been, or could be. While the direct interference of the 
 poUtical legislature with the citizen is less, the citizen is 
 "becoming more and more political by indirect means. 
 This is not the place for following out an idea, which it 
 would be easy to expand into an essay. It is enough 
 here to point to the Press and to Periodical hterature, 
 more impressive, because less ductile than the Press, to 
 suggest at once the substitute which has offered itself in the 
 place of G-ovemment. Philosophically speaking, the Press 
 encourages combination. Each combination has its code 
 of corporate opinions, binding on its members collectively, 
 and exacting as well an individual allegiance. No mere 
 governmental bond could be closer. This hint must suffice 
 to explain accordingly, how, in the absence of a mere 
 governmental bond, society can secure and does secure to 
 itself its sectarianism and its doctrinaireism. On the 
 platform, in the rostrum of the lecture-room, the engine 
 is at work with an effectiveness and a facility that would 
 surprise those seedlings of the Press, the pamphleteers of 
 other days, the Swifts, Steeles, De Foes, could they glance 
 
 5—2 
 
68 ETHIOA : 
 
 for a moment on Printing House Square or Exeter Hall. 
 The principle of Corporation is paramount. The first 
 step is to form an opinion ; the next, to form an associa- 
 tion. Association is, in fact, one of the great dynamics 
 of modem society. It is moral force en masse. If we 
 look into the old civiKzations, the idea of physical force 
 at once appears to predominate. Men acted, not in a 
 body, but by virtue of individual prowess. If we compare 
 their philosophy of action with their present posterity's, 
 the philosophy of Muscle with the philosophy of Mind, 
 we might say that the former impUes the redisintegration, 
 the latter the unification of the many into the one. 
 
 It will probably excite more than ordinary curiosity 
 to know how Milton's latest and most elaborate biogra- 
 pher will treat the only event left in his hfe to excite 
 curiosity, his official connection with Cromwell. It ought 
 to be indeed no longer a matter of controversy whether 
 Milton was justified in retaining under the Protectorate 
 the office he had accepted under the EepubHc. In great 
 revolutions that stedfast uniformity cannot be looked for 
 that characterizes the man who lives in a period of rest. 
 Events come quick and diversified. Opinions, sometimes 
 the product of events, sometimes the cause of them, pass 
 through a rapid series of transformations. Founded on 
 circumstances, they change with the circumstances on 
 which they are founded. The dogmas of yesterday 
 become the paradoxes of to-day. The speculations of 
 to-day are the materials for the holocaust of the day 
 after. Venerable principles, princples that have almost 
 borne the unquestionable authority of intuitions, prin- 
 ciples that have grown with a man's growth, ingrained 
 themselves in his very being, become bone of his bone, 
 and flesh of his flesh, are hurried before the revolu- 
 tionary tribunal, tried, found wanting, and discarded for 
 ever. In this dilemma the poHcy of the wise man is 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 69 
 
 plain. He preserves his reputation for constancy by 
 being inconstant. He retains his relative by changing 
 his positive position. He shifts with the current. He 
 changes his means in order that he may preserve his 
 ends. 
 
 That this principle of pohtical adaptation was not 
 hostile to the generally uncompromising genius of 
 Milton, we have his own words for believing. In his 
 oration for Plancius, Cicero laid it down as a maxim, 
 that the same men are not always bound to obey the 
 same opinions, but such as the circumstances of the 
 country, the stream of popular opinion, and the preser- 
 vation of peace seem to render necessary. In his second 
 defence of the people of England, the Enghsh poet 
 repeats the dictum of the Roman orator, and empha- 
 tically endorses it. That the circumstances of the 
 country were such as justified not so much a change of 
 opiuion— for MUton's opinions were stiU unchangeably 
 opposed to anarchy, to the tyranny of many, as to the 
 tyranny of one — as a change of conduct, wiU scarcely be 
 disallowed. 
 
 The ParHament of 1650, the Parliament which 
 CroruweU put out of doors with less ceremony than 
 he would have dispersed a mob of lacqueys, was not 
 the ParHament of 1640, the ParHament which, amid the 
 blazing of tar-barrels and the shouts of a nation, had 
 abrogated one by one the accumulated usurpations of 
 centuries. Those who would recognize the difierence in 
 the two stages of its existence, and would know how 
 Milton appreciated that difference, may compare the 
 picture he gives of it in the " Apology for Smectym- 
 nuus," with his subsequent portrait in the " History of 
 England." Alas ! how had the fine gold become dim ! 
 The heroes whose exploits surpassed " the exploits of 
 highest fame in prose and panegyrics of old," were now 
 
70 ETHIOA : 
 
 " mere thieves in office." The men who had sate in the 
 commonwealth " as Gods," whose ordinary surname had 
 been the Fathers of their Country, were now mere 
 " hucksters," with no other knowledge of poUty than 
 could be collected from the shop and the warehouse. In 
 truth, no antithesis would be rhetorical enough for the 
 contrast. The ParUament had fallen indeed from its 
 high estate. From an assembly of persons of gravity 
 and wisdom, such as Clarendon speaks of, it had dege- 
 nerated into a mere consistory of committee-men and 
 sequestrators, too insignificant even, for the genius of 
 Butler to caricature. At one moment the tool of its 
 friends, at another the victim of its masters, it had 
 become a mere channel through which were conveyed 
 their wishes or their decrees. The most obsequious 
 of the Plantagenet or Tudor Parliaments scarcely dis- 
 played such meanness, coupled with intervals of such 
 tyranny. All the old machinery of arbitrary power was 
 restored ; all the old oppression reappeared, rendered ten 
 times more irritating by the trifling demeanour of the 
 oppressor. MiUtary tribunals dignified with the name of 
 High Courts of Justice, but in reaUty mere general Courts- 
 martial, dispensed laws in a style even more summary 
 than the Star Chamber. Tests more stringent than the 
 tests of the old regime were imposed by Ecclesiastical 
 Courts more intolerant than the Court of High Com- 
 mission, and the Council of the North. For one unclean 
 spirit cast out, seven more wicked than the first had been 
 introduced. The press was shackled by regulations as 
 irritating as any that ever issued from the manufactory 
 of Laud. Taxes and excises more galHng than ship- 
 money or compulsory knighthood were multipUed yearly, 
 monthly, weekly. The representation of the country was 
 in confusion. Bills for regulating the elections were put 
 off from Wednesday to Wednesday, and those who had 
 
OE CHARACTEBISTICS. 71 
 
 the spirit left to be facetious, remarked that the body 
 which had passed the self-denial ordinance, had not suffi- 
 cient self-denial among them to dissolve. The debates 
 were held with closed doors, and so indifferent were the 
 debaters to business, that the House rarely mustered fifty, 
 and never mustered more than one hundred and twenty.* 
 Peculation and bribery were so barefaced, that even 
 some of their own associates refused to partake of the 
 spoil, and so extortionate that the very leads and bells of 
 cathedrals were set up to auction to supply it. * In the 
 meantune, this remnant of a Parliament, npt content 
 with neglecting the serious business of the country, made 
 a serious business of trifles. Though it feigned such 
 activity as to usurp the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts 
 of justice, by trying and giving sentence as Whitelocke 
 words it, secundum arbitrium, its legislative aspirations 
 rarely rose above patches, and rouge powder, the voca- 
 bulary of the swearer, or the morals of the Bordello. 
 Its own jurisdiction had sunk so low, that scarce a 
 sheriff could be found to notice its votes, or execute its 
 orders. ^ At home the sense of the nation showed itself 
 strongly in petitions and protests. Women and boys 
 clamoured for its dissolution at its very gates; and, if 
 we are to beheve Walker and Dugdale, its own fears 
 accused the very public cooks of a conspiracy against it. 
 Abroad the prestige of the nation was fast declining, and 
 but for the soldiers, must have expired altogether: Its 
 ambassadors were cudgelled in the public streets, mur- 
 dered in their own houses, and insulted in the parks as 
 
 ' " Pari. Hist.," vols, xix., xx. 
 
 ' "Pari. Hist.," vol. xx. p. 91. CoUegiate churches were saved by the 
 poor majority of four. Ireton and Deverill Hollis were among the scrupu- 
 lous few. Ludlow's " Mem.," vol. i. p. 371 ; and Appendix to " Pari. 
 Hist, of England," vol. iii. p. 1602. 
 
 ' This appears from an act to enforce the sheriffs to their duty. " Pari. 
 Hist.," vol. xix. p. 312. 
 
72 ethica: 
 
 robbers and dogs.^ Such was tbe body whose privileges 
 Cromwell is accused of usurping, and whose standard 
 Milton is accused of deserting. 
 
 It is not easy to conceive how those, who couple the 
 two men in the same accusation, can avoid giving to 
 Milton the advantage of a joint acquittal. His career 
 finds its justification, in fact, in the career of his asso- 
 ciate. It would be entirely beside my purpose to enter 
 into the merits of Cromwell's conduct. Most thoughtful 
 persons have already made up their minds on the subject. 
 But if honour abroad, and comparative peace at home ; 
 if the reverence of friends and the fear of enemies ; if 
 legislation based on the philosophy of Government, 
 actuated by a spirit of justice, administered in a spirit of 
 equity ; if toleration, if hberty of person and hberty of 
 conscience ; if the achievement of all these things be an 
 excuse for a single act of usurpation, then must it also be 
 an excuse for a single act of tergiversation. It might be 
 left to the temper of the inquirer to decide whether 
 Milton's personal attachment to Cromwell had any in- 
 fluence on his acceptance of office under him. It is 
 certain that in the works of Milton vtlU be found the 
 noblest panegyric of CromweU in the language. But the 
 same work contains words of advice and of warning, almost 
 of remonstrance, couched in tones that suggest rather the 
 unimpassioned co-operation of a mere pohtical partizan, 
 than the warm and yielding partiahty of the personal 
 favourite. It is certain, too, that Milton was not the 
 man to sacrifice his convictions to his partiahty. His 
 was not the character to make favourites or to become a 
 favourite. As a general rule, his temper was one to 
 assert itself too strongly, even to the verge of defiance, to 
 
 ' See some curious instances collected out ofWhitelocke, the "Mercuiius 
 Politicus," Sir Edward Nicholas' Letters, and Carte, in "Pari. Hist.," 
 vol. xix. p. 473. 
 
OE CHARACTERISTICS. 73 
 
 be genial. It might gain compliance, or command 
 respect, but hardly win aflfection. Even in his famiUar 
 correspondence, the careful observer wiU trace a tone of 
 ceremoniousness, of superiority almost dictatorial, and 
 BUigularly repulsive to the easy, ductUe familiarity of com- 
 radeship. There was, to use a Baconian metaphor, very 
 httle of moisture in his disposition. Like the fleece of 
 Gideon, whUe aU remained damp he alone was dry. 
 This characteristic appears in exaggerated proportions in 
 his equivocal treatment of his wife. It manifests itself 
 stiU more strongly in the cold judicial manner iu which 
 he handles the subject of divorce. And more than all 
 it manifests itself ia the rigid impartiahty, the well-nigh 
 unfeeling formahty, with which in the Eikonoclastes he 
 deals out a scanty measure of apology, or of compassion, 
 for a fallen kiag. In phrenological phrase, his wonder 
 or admiration was smaU indeed. 
 
 It may be justly charged against our men of letters, 
 that consistency has not characterized them as a body. 
 The most eminent among them have certainly not been 
 notorious for either reHgious or pohtical constancy. If 
 we do not know enough of Dryden to decide without 
 hesitation on his honesty of purpose, we know enough at 
 least to justify hesitation. Swift, next to Dryden in 
 eminence, was equal to him in versatility. Pope, if he 
 had any principles at aU, possessed them in subordination. 
 PohticaUy a democrat, even to sociahsm, religiously a 
 papist, and philosophically or intellectually an Epechist 
 at best, it may be left to his future biographers to dis- 
 cover his real faith. If we descend in the scale, the 
 minor men of letters are scarcely more trustworthy, 
 examples than their superiors. Prior started in Mfe a 
 Whig and became a violent Tory. Kowe, once a Tory, 
 would scarcely condescend to hold converse with Whigs. * 
 
 ' Spence's " Anecdotes," by Singer, p. 2. 
 
74 ETHICA : 
 
 Perhaps a man of equal poetic taste, and in some sense 
 of equal business habitude with MUton, might be met 
 with in Southey. But it would be simple injustice to 
 compare the author of " Joan of Arc " with the author of 
 the " Hymn to the Vaudois." Southey, under charitable 
 construction, had two existences ; up to middle age he 
 was a boy possessed of the faculties of manhood ; at 
 two-and-thirty, when most men exhibit the fixity of age, 
 he was just throwing off the hearty enthusiasm of 
 Mrs. Cottle's back parlour. His training was, perhaps, 
 the most miscellaneous that ever turned out aji enthu- 
 siast. Neither the Church, Physic, nor the Law could 
 fix the quicksilver of his mind. He took up from West- 
 minster to Oxford a heart fiiU of feehng and poetry, and 
 a head fall of Eousseau and Werter. Gibbon gave the 
 tone to his theology ; Tom Payne and the Abbe Sieyes 
 to his politics. He had the same confidence that Southey, 
 Seward, Level, and Co. should found a State which 
 should be more enduring than Penn's, as he had in 
 his after days that his "History of the Brazils " should 
 be to the South Americans, what, to use his own ex- 
 pression, Herodotus is to Europe. No one need repeat 
 the slanders of the men who printed his " Wat Tyler," 
 and then cried for a new alphabet, that the old Hte- 
 rature might be useless. His enemies would do foul 
 wrong to his honest nature, in cataloguing even with 
 the dubious Dryden the name of the man who in 
 his youth had written panegyrics on Martin, and who 
 hved to celebrate Laud, and to be pensioned by a Tory 
 Ministry. But it must be owned that, though maturity 
 and travel put to flight the extravagant dreams of Panti- 
 socracy and Aspheteism, there is wanting throughout the 
 tenor of his Ufe the fixity of purpose, the robustness and 
 constitutional concentrativeness, that penetrate through 
 the life of Milton as through an Epic. Milton, in fact, 
 
OR CHARAOTERISTICS. 75 
 
 contriTed a complete divorce between his two characters 
 of poet and man of business. The secretary was never 
 the poet, except in the embroidered richness of his ofl&cial 
 diction. Southey, the Reviewer, the author of a social 
 Treatise, was Southey the author of " Madoc " and 
 "Thalaba" stiU. 
 
 If MUton was no worshipper of Cromwell, there were 
 stUl ties of association remaining, strong points of sym- 
 pathy, strong lines of assimilation, to create a wondrous 
 fellow-feeling between them. It is true that the Crom- 
 well of 1658, the Cromwell who had purged Parliament, 
 packed ParUament, created major-generals, created lords, 
 was, to all outward appearance, no longer the Cromwell 
 who, from among the fens of Huntingdon, cried out in 
 the agony of his soul, that he was as one who lived in 
 the blackness of Kedar, a hater of hght, a lover of dark- 
 ness, a chief, the chief of sinners,^ But if there was 
 not the old enthusiasm, there was still the old language. 
 What originated in enthusiasm continued, it may have 
 been, in policy. To the very last, the declarations, the 
 manifestoes, the speeches, were mingled with what 
 Clarendon would have called the spirit of cant, and 
 Hugh Peters, the spirit of edification. To the very 
 last there continued that tone of self-mortification, and 
 those accents of self-denial that remind us, whenever 
 they occur, of the chequered despair of the Grace 
 Abounding. In pubUc despatches, as in private letters, 
 he is still such an one as formerly, having a body of sin 
 and death, a poor looker-on, a weak instrument, that 
 can do nothing but through believing, not worthy the 
 name of a worm, a dry bone.** To pubhc correspondents, 
 as to private, to the Scotch Commissioners as to his 
 cousin Eobin, there are the same earnest appeals and 
 
 ' "Letters," ed. Carlyle, toI. i. p. 141. 
 
 = Id. vol. i. pp. 391, 397, 472. vol. ii. pp. 162, 114. 
 
76 ETHICA : 
 
 textual exhortations. It is not for every eye to penetrate 
 the secret emotions of the closet. Who could have 
 suspected the orthodoxy of the man who holds nego- 
 tiations with his enemies in the spirit of a divine, pUfers 
 his watchwords from the war-songs of David, halts in 
 the hottest pursuits to sing a Hymn, and dismisses his 
 Parhament in the language of a theological Exegesis. 
 It is not easy ait this distance of time, when the lapse 
 of two centuries has deteriorated to their origiaal value 
 the hyperboles of party and the gesticulations of par- 
 tisans ; when history, that searcher of hearts, has laid 
 bare every muscle and every nerve ; when we, who sit 
 as judges, far removed from the sphere of contagion, can 
 contemplate unimpassioned the factions of Lambeth and 
 the factions of Grocer's Hall; can Usten unmoved to 
 the plea of the orthodox Pulpit, and the plea of the 
 heterodox Tub ; it is not easy for us, thus unbiassed, to 
 penetrate the thick-woven veU of enthusiasm, and decide 
 where the hoUow mask ended, and the solid feature 
 commenced. 
 
 Almost as an invariable rule the detractors of Crem- 
 weU have mistaken the exact point in which all doubts 
 of his siQcerity should centre. The question at issue is 
 not. Were his words consistent with his deeds ? but. 
 Were his deeds consistent with the welfare of the State ? 
 It is not a question of means, it is a question of ends. 
 It is true that the globe and the sceptre did not har- 
 monize well with the self-repudiating tone, the unas- 
 suming garb, and the unworldly tastes. These were but 
 the instruments, the tools, which the ignorance or the 
 prejudice of the vulgar sometimes compels their bene- 
 factors to adopt. The hypocrisy of Cromwell must be 
 decided not by the character of the agents that he used 
 to effect his purpose, but by the nature of the purpose 
 itself. Was that purpose in harmony with his previous 
 
OR CHABACTEEISTICS. 77 
 
 conduct ? There is evidence to prove that Milton 
 thought so. And if it was, then is Cromwell's hypo- 
 crisy, if hypocrisy it was, justified. The end that 
 Cromwell proposed to himself, the settlement of the 
 national differences, could, he clearly saw, be attained 
 by no other means. If he must go on, it must be in the 
 same track. If he would retain his co-operators with 
 him in the good cause, it must be by gratifying their 
 whims, even at the- risk of his own reputation. The 
 only compensation left him was, that those who approved 
 the patriot vindicated the hypocrite. And with respect 
 to the charge of hypocrisy, his advocates are not without 
 a witness on his behalf. His letters would show that if 
 Cromwell was a spiritual hypocrite, then were all Puri- 
 tans, from Baxter to Bunyan, hypocrites as weU. No- 
 where else could be found a more perfect picture of 
 aesthetic Puritanism. He is, in fact, the very represen- 
 tative man of those gloomy devotional enthusiasts. As 
 he advances in Ufe, it is clear that his enthusiasm 
 waxes stronger rather than declines. Success seems to 
 strengthen conviction. Every fresh victory is a fresh 
 providence, " clear, unclouded, on behalf of the saints." 
 In every action he sees the interposition of a present 
 God. He would not argue with his cousin about abstract 
 principles of obedience, about the lawfulness of this 
 authority, and the unlawfulness of that. Such subtle- 
 ties were but fleshly, fit for men of carnal minds, who 
 live only upon their mumpsimus and sumpshnus. He 
 appealed to fact. Did not the triumph of the cause 
 prove the justice of the cause ! Was it not God's finger 
 that made the cavaliers of Eupert as stubble to their 
 swords ! Did Fairfax cut down those unrighteous Kent- 
 ishmen ? was it not rather God breaking the oppressor, 
 as in the days of Midian ? Ormond had been driven 
 from Dubhn, with the slaughter of four thousand 'men ; 
 
78 ETHICA : 
 
 was it not a sign that the Lord was very near ? Drogheda 
 had been stormed, and not thirty persons had been left 
 aUve in it ; it was to God that all honest hearts must 
 give the praise ! It was the Spirit of God which had set 
 it ia their hearts to knock aU the officers on the head, 
 kill every tenth man, and ship the rest to a hngering 
 death in the Barbadoes. It was God's revolution, not 
 his ; God who had revealed the necessity of his reigning, 
 not he.^ Surely a man who could use such language as 
 this might as easily have imposed on himself as have 
 imposed on others ; might as easily have mistaken the 
 exhausted acquiescence of the country for their appro- 
 bation, and, when he climbed, have fancied it was they 
 who pushed. 
 
 "While on the subject of misapprehensions connected 
 with the epoch, it might not be unprofitable to discuss 
 one of an important character, supported by a consi- 
 derable display of authority, and promising, on that 
 support, to win considerable acquiescence. " That the 
 Great KebeUion was a war of classes," says Mr. Buckle, 
 in his very unequal work on civiUzation in England, " is 
 one of those palpable facts which he on the surface of 
 history." It must be owned that, palpable as it is, it is 
 a fact not hkely to suggest itself seriously to an inquisi- 
 tive reader, least of aU to an inquisitive reader of another 
 portion of Mr. Buckle's own book. A war of classes, as 
 everybody knows, is emphatically a war of property. It 
 can take place only in a community where so strong a 
 line of distinction, moral and physical, is drawn between 
 the rich and the poor, that it shall be the privilege of the 
 rich to oppress the poor, and the interest of the poor to 
 retaliate on the rich. Now, that it was not in the power 
 of the privileged class in England at this particular 
 epoch to use such pressure on the class below them 
 
 ' "Letters," vol. i. pp. 233, 447, 468, 461. 
 
OE CHARACTEEISTICS. 79 
 
 as to provoke an insurrection, no one has shown more 
 clearly than Mr. Buckle himself in another part of his 
 researches. 
 
 For two centuries, that is to say, from the wars of 
 the Koses, the personal and the legislative influence 
 of the aristocracy had been slowly but surely decHning. 
 The time when their despotic arrogance could provoke 
 the socialistic choruses of the Balls and Straws was 
 gone by, never to return. The poHcy of the subtle 
 Henry VII., the magnificent pride of Henry VIII., 
 the overbearing temper of Elizabeth, had as effectually 
 weakened the prestige of nobility, as the decrees of the 
 Convention against liveries and coats of arms. It would 
 not be easy to find specimens of presumptuous juris'- 
 diction such as that which Mr. Buckle tells us in another 
 country, and at a later age, consigned Marmontel and 
 the Abbe MoreUet to the Bastile. In a social point 
 of view, the tendency of the upper classes and the lower 
 classes was towards amalgamation rather than divergence. 
 And, indeed, this spirit of affinity was almost necessitated 
 by the nature -of things. The social amalgamation was 
 more than encouraged by the legislative amalgamation. 
 Every one is familiar with that principle in our consti- 
 tution by the operation of which hereditary authority 
 is so intimately blended with democratic authority, the 
 influence of rank with the power of office, that there can 
 never be other than a combined interchange of sympathy 
 between the plebeian and the patrician portions of the 
 community. In the present crisis that sympathy showed 
 itself in a very marked degree. So far was the aristo- 
 cracy from provoking the jealousy of the' democracy, that 
 to a great extent they made the popular cause their own. 
 In the House of Lords the arbitrary measures of Charles 
 encountered opposition almost as obstinate as they had 
 met with from the House of Commons. All matters of 
 
80 ' ethica: 
 
 grievance, matters of ecclesiastical innovation, infringe- 
 ments of the propriety of goods, breaches of Parlia- 
 mentary privilege, were regularly discussed and decided 
 on with ahnost invariable unanimity by the two Houses. 
 When the citizens of London presented a petition to 
 the fugitive king for a parhament, the peers, whom he 
 had summoned to him at York, presented a petition to 
 the same effect. A peer, Manchester, was among one 
 of the six members whom Charles had impeached ; and 
 in the great struggle against ship-money, a member of 
 the peerage had stood side by side with the commoner 
 Hampden. 
 
 As far as I can judge, Mr. Buckle has mistaken 
 the material, so to speak, of the revolution for its 
 spirit. He has been misled, probably, by the sneer 
 of Hume, that the Kttle Parhament was composed 
 chiefly of low mechanics. Now, it is true that in the 
 great contest the nation was divided into two sections, 
 and that the nobles took the royal side, and the yeomanry 
 and tradesman embraced the popular faction ; though 
 even this cannot be allowed without considerable modi- 
 fication, since the popular armies were commanded by 
 scions of noble houses. But this distribution of parties 
 most surely does not prove that the contest was one of 
 classes. It simply proves, that in a great nation there 
 wiU always be found a considerable number in whom 
 hereditary attachment and personal partiaUty wiU over- 
 come the appreciation of justice and the sense of security. 
 It cannot be denied, and I readily grant it, that in 
 certain intervals in the struggle, the legislative power 
 found itseK lodged in the unclean hands of colonels 
 who had been draymen, and majors who had once been 
 tinkers and cobblers ; but these colonels and majors 
 were, after all, mere passive agents, involuntary instru- 
 ments, puppets placed in their high eminence by the 
 
OE CHAEACTEEISTICS. 81 
 
 army, %at is to say, by a class of men the majority 
 of whom never dreamed, even ia their wildest moments 
 of excess, of anticipating the Gueux and the Sans- 
 culottes of another generation. Mr. Buckle has laid 
 great stress on the abrogation of the House of Lords 
 as a symptom of the prevalence of a great sociaUstic 
 spirit. As he has been particularly minute in this item 
 of .proof, I will take the pains to foUow him in his 
 investigations. 
 
 The first practical protest agaiast the peerage was the 
 Self-denying Ordinance. Now it is clear as dayhght that 
 this measure was not a personal one ; that it did not 
 originate in any kindred spirit to that which at a future 
 day saw iacivism in the epaulette of a chevaUer or the 
 blue ribbon of a marquis ; that, in fact, it only extended 
 to the legislative capacity of the then existing remnant 
 of an Upper House. Nor can it be doubted that the 
 measure was one entirely justified by circumstances, 
 whether it be regarded as an act of self-defence or an 
 act of retaliation. For what had been the conduct of 
 the chief member of that noble Eump towards the 
 Commonwealth ? Mr. Buckle, who has been particu- 
 larly ingenious in misapplyiag a vast amount of industry 
 in this portion of his history, shall tell us. " Just 
 before the war began, the Earl of Essex was appointed 
 general of the Parhamentary forces, with the Earl of 
 Bedford as his heutenant. A commission to raise troops 
 was likewise given to the Earl of Manchester. Notwith- 
 standing these marks of confidence, the nobles in whom 
 Parhament was at first disposed to trust could not avoid 
 showing the old leaven of their order. The Earl of 
 Essex so conducted himself as to inspire the popular 
 party with the greatest apprehensions of his treachery. 
 The Earl of Bedford, though he had received a mihtary 
 command, did not hesitate to abandon those who con- 
 
 6 
 
82 ETHICA : 
 
 ferred it ; the apostate noble fled from Westminster to 
 Oxford, but finding the king did not receive him with 
 favour, he returned to London." And how were these 
 traitors to their high trust treated by the Common- 
 wealth they had betrayed? Were they strung up to 
 the nearest lantern ? Were their heads, dripping in 
 gore, kicked hke footballs among the pubKc gutters ? 
 or their hearts torn out and their blood drunk by .the 
 savage citizens to the sound of Liberty, Equality, and 
 Fraternity ? Mr. Buckle should have added that Essex 
 tucurred no other penalty than that of receiving a pension 
 of two thousand a-year, and Manchester no other degra- 
 dation than that of being raised to a responsible seat 
 in the committee of both kingdoms. As for the next 
 enactment, the abolition of the Lords' House fi'om the 
 legislature, it was but an extension of the first measure, 
 and the same arguments that justify the first measure 
 justify it. The Upper House had become a mere faction 
 of titled demagogues, a focus to which all the petty 
 intrigues of small adventurers converged. Extreme cases 
 demanded extreme measures. If Cromwell was to con- 
 tinue to fight the battle of liberty, such men as the 
 Denbighs and WiUoughbys must not continue to legislate 
 for it. And it is certain that it was only against their 
 legislative privileges that the measure was aimed. No 
 popular fanaticism proceeded to strip them of their digni- 
 ties. On the contrary, immediately on the abolition of 
 the Upper House three of the members were returned 
 to the Lower, and by way of special comphment' were 
 voted to retain their former seats in committees. More 
 than once it was agreed to preserve to them their rights 
 according to the fundamental laws of the kingdom and 
 the Covenant, and that, too, by the very council of war 
 which numbered among its members some of Mr. Buckle's 
 
 ' "Pari. Hist." vol. xix. p. 106. 
 
OR CHAEACTEBISTICS. 83 
 
 most conspicuous draymen, serving-men, and tapsters.' 
 As it was, too, so little was the measure approved % the 
 majority, that when offered for the approbation of the 
 executive council of state, consisting of forty-one, only 
 nineteen would testify to it, though fourteen out of the 
 forty-one were regicides. 
 
 And so far was it from reflecting a change in pubhc 
 opinion, that scarce a civil officer or a beneficed clergy- 
 man, even among the Presbyterians, subscribed then- 
 consent to it. Indeed, the respect with which the de- 
 prived member of the aristocracy was treated generally, 
 amounted to a rather ludicrous anomaly. To the very 
 last he retained his title and his precedence. If he went 
 to a pubhc diuner, the most ceremonious importunity 
 was observed m giving him the highest place and the 
 first accommodation.^ Special notice was taken of his 
 decease. Thus, when the Earl of Pembroke died, the 
 House adjourned, in order that the members might 
 attend his corpse out of town.^ The heirs of peers always 
 succeeded to their father's title, and sometimes succeeded 
 to their father's office.* In the enactments of the House 
 of Commons, the gradations of ranks were rigorously 
 and, indeed, invidiously observed ; and the marquis or 
 baronet who should take the august name of his Creator 
 in vain, was mulcted in a heavier fine than the squire, 
 the gentleman, and the artisan.* Even when the dregs 
 of the lower classes had been raised to power by Crom- 
 well, so httle was personal animosity felt for the class 
 
 ' Whitelocke, 288, quoted by Hallam. Mr. Buckle, who ia fond of 
 quoting Hallam, may perhaps make some future use of Hallam's opinion 
 that " wise men might easily perceive that the regal power was only sus- 
 pended through the force of circumstances, not abrogated by any real change 
 in public opinion." " Const. Hist.," chap. x. part ii. 
 
 ' See an amusing instance in the case of the Earl of Pembroke. " Pari. 
 Hist," Tol. xix. p. 128. 
 
 ' Ibid. vol. xix. p. 248. ■* Ibid. p. 252. « Ibid. p. 285. 
 
 6—2 
 
'84 ethica: 
 
 whose judicial rights they had absorbed, that in. the 
 midst of plunder and sequestration, a peer or peeress 
 might calculate on having a settlement allowed them out 
 of the forfeiture, to preserve their position and dignity.^ 
 There was, indeed, a trifling faction, a wretched band of 
 robbers scarce worthy the name of a faction, the strag- 
 glers of the cause, who hung in the rear of the great 
 movement, and indulged in the excesses of success, sec- 
 taries who bore the same position ia it as the Capuchia 
 Chabot, and the Abbe Sieyes, and who clamoured for King 
 Jesus at one moment, and at the next conspired against 
 all authority, human and divine. But these men, the 
 adherents of no party, were persecuted and renounced by 
 all. That the rational Levellers had no sympathy with 
 their views of equahty, we have their own disclaimer to 
 vindicate them. " The leveUing of aU estates and 
 qualities, these sober Levellers were never guilty of 
 desiring," writes one of their most amiable adherents, 
 Mr. Hutchinson.'' 
 
 I cannot conceive how, with such proofs as these, 
 any one could be disposed to speak of the English Revo- 
 lution in the same terms that he would speak of the 
 French Eevolution, or apply to the one event the charac- 
 teristics of the other. So far from its being a servile 
 war, or, to use a less offensive word, a social war, it 
 would seem more in accordance with historical deduction 
 to adopt the nomenclature of the Scotch Commissioners, 
 and to call it a bellum episcopale. It certainly is to be 
 wondered that so distinguished an advocate of M. Comte's 
 hierarchical distribution of history, as Mr. Buckle ap- 
 pears to be, should have missed the opportunity of de- 
 voting his energies towards discovering in the epoch a 
 facsimile of that philosopher's theological era. Such 
 
 ' See the case of the Earl of Derby. " Pari. Hist.," vol. xx p 292 
 = " Memoirs," p. 285. 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 86 
 
 characters as the Naylors and Foxes might easily have 
 been exaggerated into the requirements of fetichism, 
 while the saying of King Charles, in one of his negotia- 
 tions with the Parhament, that it was " an age in which 
 mankind are governed by the pulpit," might have been 
 no bad foundation for a series of constructive illustra- 
 tions. As it is, however he may attempt to confound 
 Puritanism with Fourierism, I suspect that the student 
 who realizes aright that solemn struggle for administra- 
 tive reform, wiU refuse to degrade it into a war of red 
 caps and wooden shoes. 
 
 It is not difficult to explain how it came to pass that 
 the movement should have assumed the theological 
 aspect that it did. I have already traced the growth 
 of the revolutionist. But coat, conduct, and ship money, 
 though they may have produced the repubhcan, did not 
 produce the precisianist. Constitutional tyranny may 
 have been responsible for the Regicide, but it was not 
 responsible for the Saint. Every great physical insurrec- 
 tion has its complexion given it by some spiritual or iu- 
 teUectual agent. The French Eevolution was nursed 
 and cradled in the bosom of a contemporary philosophical 
 movement ; and, accordingly, the French Revolution de- 
 veloped itself in a speculative, philosophical dress. What 
 the publication of the " Encyclopedie " was to the French 
 Eevolution, the publication of the Bible was to the 
 Enghsh. The instruments of their respective agents 
 are types of their respective civilization. The mind of 
 France was older by two hundred years than the mind of 
 England. The France of Voltaire with the France of 
 Caxton are no more to be compared than the grown 
 man with the child in the gocart. The intellectual 
 cultivation of France was in its prime. For years her 
 genius had been propounding great social problems, and 
 solving them. For years the great questions of the 
 
86 ethica: 
 
 rights of man, of political liberty, and social amelioration, 
 had been occupying the thoughts of statesmen to whom 
 More was as an infant. Hence the intellectual cast of 
 her revolution. Men flew for their lessons to their 
 Aristotles and Livys, to the schools of Greece and to the 
 models of Eome. In England, as in aU Europe, anti- 
 quity was stiU severed from the eyes of the vulgar by the 
 scarce receding night of medisevaUsm. The Bible was 
 the only book of popular circulation. In its simple nar- 
 rative was included all the philosophy, moral and poh- 
 tical, of the multitude. Very few had read the " Politics," 
 or had heard of the existence of such heroes as Brutus 
 and Harmodius. But every child knew how the priest 
 of God had hewn the oppressor before the altar of sacri- 
 fice. Every village blacksmith, to whom Scsevola was a 
 name unknown, had taken part, in his imagination, with 
 the left-handed young Benjamite, whose dagger had 
 found the heart of the Moabite prince ; while scarce a 
 village maiden who had not Hstened, with kindling eye, 
 on the Sabbath bench, to the story of the Hebrew 
 heroine, whose nail had smote the temple of the Canaan- 
 itish warrior till he died. Thus as both the French and 
 EngHsh Revolutions were distinguished by a pecuhar 
 moral caste, so they both in their distinctions obeyed the 
 impulse of a special spiritual agent. In both instances, 
 indeed, that impulse exercised an undue influence. In 
 both cases the alliance between the intellectual and 
 physical agent was pushed to an ahnost comic exaggera- 
 tion. The Jacobin put on the toga: the Puritan assumed 
 the ephod. The Jacobin had his Ides ; the Puritan his 
 Sabbaths. The Puritan christened his church a syna- 
 gogue; the Jacobin turned his into a pantheon. The 
 Puritan christened his chHd Jerubbabel or Joshua ; the 
 Jacobin prefixed to his name Anarchasis or Gracchus. 
 The Puritan appointed fasts regulated out of the ^ook of 
 
OB OHABACTEEISTICS. 87 
 
 Deuteronomy ; the Jacobin had his pubUc feasts of 
 Spartan broth from the receipt-book of Lycurgus. The 
 Puritan legislated against paint, dancing, and stage 
 plays ; the Jacobin copied the toilets of Herculaneum, 
 and, decked a la Cleopatra, a la Diane, and a la Psyche, 
 tripped half naked to the orgies of the Champ de 
 Mars. 
 
 I cannot think that Milton's plan of settlement, as 
 it is embodied in his appeal to Monk, and his deUneation 
 of a free Commonwealth, was founded on a fair and 
 rational view of circumstances. CromweU was dead. 
 There was no Joshua to take the place of that Moses. 
 The assembly of constitution-mongers, that styled itself 
 a ParKament, was, in truth, a likeness — and a very bad 
 likeness — of the Eump. There was not the material 
 for Monk to have formed even the nucleus of an 
 Administration. To have framed and empahneUed such a 
 Constitution as Milton proposed — a Constitution which, 
 as far as I can judge, would have spht up the country 
 into a number of separate interests, like the United 
 Provinces, but iU-cemented by the central agency of a 
 perpetual senate like that of Venice — would have re- 
 quired a slow and tedious process of elaboration, hardly 
 suited to an emergency. 
 
 In addition to this, the tide which — as I have at- 
 tempted to show — never ebbed very far, had turned in 
 favour of Royalty. The greater part of the nation— as 
 Milton indignantly acknowledges — was ready, and even 
 anxious, for the revival of the old forms. Constitution- 
 ally, the national mind is unfavourable to fundamental 
 revolutions. Its changes — always made with reluctance 
 — are always introduced by slow degrees. It is owing to 
 this steady aversion to rapid movements, that our legis- 
 lative prosperity has not kept pace with our social. Four 
 centuries had elapsed to our last great Revolution, since 
 
88 ETHICA : 
 
 the highway of liberty had been opened with so much 
 solemnity in the meadow of Knnnymede. All down 
 that lengthened avenue of time, the eye may trace — and 
 trace with pride — ^the busy footsteps of progress, ere the 
 serf at one end of the vista had appeared as the citizen 
 of the other. But no triumph can conceal the fact, that 
 the interval, which had raised the comforts of mind and 
 body ; exalted the standard of tastes ; made a gentleman 
 of the boor, and a philosopher of the gentleman, had 
 left them both but httle advanced towards the tardy goal 
 of pohtical enfranchisement. To drop metaphor, the 
 Bill of Eights was but a repubhcation of Magna Charta. 
 The claims it asserted were but the claims for an old 
 iuheritance. That it was nothing more emphatic than a 
 republication, that these claims were simply recapitu- 
 lative, marks the tribute which forbearance pays to 
 oppression, when oppression is accompanied with fraud, 
 and forbearance with credulity. 
 
 Nothing is more remarkable in our legislation than 
 this retrospective spirit. Our provisions for the future 
 are always founded on our experience of the past. Our 
 reforms follow the abuse, as the rebound follows the 
 blow. We act only because we are compelled to act. 
 We complain only because there is a grievance that 
 prompts the complaint. Our activity is only a counter- 
 activity; our resistance only a retahation. The spe- 
 culatively deontological, to speak in the Benthamese 
 tongue, does not enter into the considerations of our 
 chartism. This characteristic of it, making our legis- 
 lation more deductive than inductive, has at least this 
 advantage, that though we forfeit in some degree the 
 benefit of theory, we reap the benefit of experience ; and 
 though it discourages the discoveries of science, it holds 
 out no flattery to the empiricism of the sciolist. Hence 
 the neglect which constitutional models, framed on a 
 
OR characteristics; 89 
 
 priori principles, however attractive, have always expe- 
 rienced among us. And hence, at this particular crisis, 
 the futility of the stiUbom speculations of Milton and 
 the Eota Club. 
 
 There is another feature,too, in the national character, 
 which co-operated strongly in producing a reaction against 
 Cromwell's successor in favour of the dead King's heir. 
 The English people, of all people in the world, are least 
 impulsive in choosing their favourites, and least capricious 
 in discarding them. They are slow to love, and slow to 
 hate. In their revolutions — on those occasions when the 
 gravity of their calmer moments yields to the pressure of 
 an hysterical excitement — a certain sobriety of demeanour 
 has never forsaken them. Their enthusiasm has never 
 been divested of a natural phlegm* Impulse, however 
 irresistible its proposals, has, in action, been always 
 subdued, by the solemn observance of forms and cere- 
 monies, into a seeming dehberation. Passion, with 
 them, if it has not always been guided by the dictates 
 of reason, has always affected a logical apology. The 
 occasions where either impulse or passion has roused 
 them to vengeance or requital, are rare. But when 
 they have been moved to visit with their displeasure, or 
 to make an offer of their esteem, their emotions have in 
 neither case taken the form of paroxysms. Slow to 
 anger, they have been slow to avenge. Thus, in their 
 recent rising up to vengeance, they vented their indigna- 
 tion with the calmness of judges, rather than with the 
 fury of executioners. The object of their vengeance was 
 a monarch ; but, though as great a tyrant as ever issued 
 orders from Susa or Bagdad, there was nothing of the 
 bowstring in their proceedings. Judgment regularly pre- 
 ceded execution. The haU which witnessed his trial, 
 was the same haU which witnessed the iU-usage of his 
 own victims. The forms of procedure were regulated, 
 
90 ethica: 
 
 as nearly as possible, by the voice of precedent. As 
 little partiality was shown, as could be shown in a case 
 where the tyranny of the accused had left none but 
 his accusers to sit as his judges. Again, years after they 
 adopted another king, with the same punctihousness that 
 they rejected his predecessor. They gave their alle- 
 giance with the same decorum that they withdrew it. 
 And, as it was their interest to withdraw it, so it was not 
 without an eye to interest that they gave it. Thus, their 
 gifts have always had the mercenary air of bargains. As 
 they never hate without a cause, so they never love with- 
 out an equivalent. And thus, both their love and their 
 hate are never too deep to be interrupted. 
 
 It was in obedience to the dictates of this peculiar 
 organization, that they now acted as they did. They had 
 cut off Charles's head. They now suffered him to be ca- 
 nonized. They had helped Cromwell to the crown. They 
 now helped to string up his bones to Tyburn. Thirty 
 years had elapsed siuce the sins of tyranny had been 
 expiated in its blood. But nothing was thought of save 
 the memory of the expiation. Only two years had elapsed 
 since the DeHverer was laid in his tomb. But, in those 
 two years, an overwhelming sea of troubles had half 
 effaced the trophies of his life. The popularity of the 
 one, therefore, rose in the same proportion as his injuries 
 became more and more indistinct. The popularity of 
 the other sank as the benefits derived from his presence 
 became more and more neutralized. 
 
 To return to Milton. At no crisis in his career does 
 the great patriot excite a profounder interest than in his 
 position at the Restoration. There he stood, the last of 
 a race of heroes, his giant limbs fettered, his hopes 
 
 bhghted, his dreams not realized, his Uberty forfeited 
 
 that hberty to whose semce he had consecrated the 
 nerve of his youth, the sweat of his manhood, and the 
 
OR CHARAOTERIBTICS. 91 
 
 wisdom of his age, and at whose shrine he had sacrificed 
 the friendships of the learned, the blandishments of the 
 noble, the peace of his mind, the very light of his eyes [ 
 Weary had that pilgrimage been, that toU of forty years. 
 And what had it produced ? He had seen many signs 
 and wonders, he had seen a more obstinate Pharaoh 
 overwhelmed in a more terrible fate, he had traversed 
 that dreary wilderness, he had drunk of those bitter 
 waters, and what was his reward ! The dog had re- 
 turned to his vomit, and the sow to waUow in the mire ! 
 The Israel of his heart had gone back to the fleshpots, 
 the taskmasters, and the idols of Egypt ! Milton, indeed, 
 had probably foreboded it. In almost the last legacy 
 which he bequeathed to his countrymen, his prophetic 
 spirit had given them warning. 
 
 He probably divined the fruit from the nature of the 
 tree. The education of Charles had fitted him for the life 
 of an epicure rather than for that of a king. Few men, 
 heirs to such high expectations, had been compelled to 
 submit to such degradations. With a disposition singu- 
 larly voluptuous, not so much with passion, strong and 
 uncontrollable, as with a moral sense weak and iU- 
 defined, and an integrity of purpose lethargic and infirm, 
 the heir to three kingdoms had passed his life in the 
 midst of privations and misfortunes. It was httle to be 
 wondered that a Quixotic Prince, who had hved hitherto 
 a mere adventurer ia the world, who had been subjected 
 to indignities from hands that compensated for the be- 
 trayal of the father by insulting the son, whose privations 
 had become a proverb, who had been compelled to shun 
 the footsteps of his own subjects, and to hve a wanderer 
 in the woods of his own kingdom, who had been at one 
 time a cook, at another a butler, who had lodged in a 
 bam and dressed Uke a ploughman, who had been 
 pensioned by one foreign monarch and turned out of his 
 
92 ETHICA : 
 
 retreat by another, who had been so profligate as to be 
 suspected of robbing a church at Bruges, and so poor as 
 to have received the hospitaKty of a citizen at Brussels, 
 it is no marvel that a voluptuous prince should, when 
 opportunity offered, have turned out a voluptuous mon- 
 arch. To a temperament more accessible to impres- 
 sions than Charles's, misfortune may have imparted les- 
 sons of gravity and seriousness. But Charles knew no 
 restraints. Even the stately occupations of royalty he 
 could not endure. He was, or affected to be, a sort 
 of Eabelais among kings. He loved to enjoy the same 
 freedom at Whitehall that he had enjoyed at the 
 Hague. He brought to the throne the habits he had 
 contracted ia the dens of Paris and the cocklofts of 
 Brussels. In his official demeanour, so to speak, he 
 was a strange compound of the adventurer and the 
 monarch. To the sobrieties of business he could never 
 accustom himself. So long as he could feed his ducks in 
 St. James's Park, or fish ia the Thames at Datchet, or 
 play at tennis in the MaU, or experimentahze in his 
 laboratory, or crack jokes with KLUigrew, or hum a song 
 with D'Urfey, or have a passage of arms with the bear 
 Hobbes, as he called him, or Usten to the gossip of 
 Evelyn or Pepys, or get some one to listen to his own 
 Boscobel adventures, he was happy. This happiuess 
 nothing cduld disturb but the sight of Clarendon. 
 Etiquette changed him in an ipstant to a cynic. Eti- 
 quette, indeed, he would not always put up with. Some- 
 times he shocked the stately ceremoniousness of his 
 peers by sauntering into the council board with his dogs 
 at his heels, or standing with his back to the fire and his 
 hands behmd his back, when he should have been com- 
 posed on his throne in the presence of the assembled 
 House of Lords. "A sauntering way with the fair 
 sex," was the quality ascribed by one of our older histo- 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 93 
 
 rians to Edward IV. " Sauntering," said Mulgrave, " was 
 Charles's sultana queen." 
 
 And yet the natural character of Charles was not 
 fundamentally maUcious. Most of his vices arose in the 
 want of reflexion. It is well known that he was styled 
 by his contemporaries, by those who knew him best, the 
 Unthinking. It is only by the test of heedlessness that 
 his inconsistencies can be accounted for ; otherwise he is 
 simply a bundle of inexpUcable contradictions. He in- 
 sulted his wife, and loved his children. He made a bad 
 husband and a good father. He pretended to modesty 
 as a man, and made no pretence to patriotism as a king. 
 He was ashamed to ask his parliament for more money, 
 yet he was not ashamed to receive a pension from Louis. 
 He never paid his legal debts, and generally paid his 
 debts of honour. He would not pay Dryden, but he 
 could pay the PendereUs. He would not give a monu- 
 ment to his father, yet he squandered seventy thousand 
 on his mistresses. He set up for a patron, and forgot to 
 bestow his patronage. He admired poetry, and neglected 
 poets. He carried ' ' Hudibras " in his pocket, and permitted 
 Butler to starve. His very habits were inconsistent. 
 He never did a wise thing, and was always surrounded 
 by wits, by Clarendon and Eochester, by Dorset and 
 Buckingham, by Etheredge and Sedley. He bore the 
 reputation of a lazy debauche, yet he always rose at five 
 and walked at a pace that astounded his nephew and 
 irritated his court. Nor did his physiognomy correspond 
 to his manners. His complexion was dark and satur- 
 nine, his eye large and black, yet he was known aU over 
 Europe as the merriest monarch of his day, as the man 
 who came into his kingdom with a bon-mot, and died 
 with a joke upon his Hps. His features were naturally 
 inclined to fierceness and his voice to harshness, yet he 
 was resistless in gallantry, invincible in his amours, the 
 
94 ETHICA : 
 
 favourite of the voluptuous Castlemaine, the beautifal 
 Querouaille, and the charming Stewart. As vp^as the 
 king, so was the court. The Jacobitism of Johnson, 
 indeed, has induced him to depreciate its grossness as 
 compared with that of the Hanoverian succession, but 
 the reader of such books as Count Grammont's Memoirs 
 will probably find it a reUef to turn even to the sombre 
 history of that seragho, which witnessed the tragedy of 
 Kizzio repeated in the murder of Konigsmark, and the 
 conquests of Carwell revived with prosaic decency in the 
 German charms of Schulemburg and Kielmansegge. 
 
 Though the subject of Milton's poetry is an inex- 
 haustible one, and the field that has borne such fruitfal 
 crops is stiU not without a rich ear for the venturesome 
 reaper, yet it might be more profitable just now to thrust 
 the sickle of criticism iuto the scarcely less luxurious 
 pasture of the poet's prose writings. 
 
 In passing from the prose writings of Milton to those 
 of Burke, it has often occurred to me, how entirely the 
 apparent difference in the characteristics of authors 
 depends not in an essential difference in their iadividual 
 quahties, but in an accidental difference in their combina- 
 tion. Nothing at first sight can be more incongruous 
 than the style of Milton by the style of Burke. The 
 involved sentences, the tangled metaphors, the redupli- 
 cated imagery, the redundant verbiage have to the casual 
 reader's ear but httle of that harmonious ring which the 
 musical periods of Burke give out. Yet upon examination 
 it will be found that, though formally distinct, it is spiri- 
 tually identical, though strongly opposed by virtue of 
 construction, it is strongly and intimately assimilated by 
 virtue of essence. Such is their latent similarity that in 
 characterizing the two authors, the critic has occasion to 
 use but one and the same language. Both were masters 
 of their native tongue, though both sometimes deformed 
 
OB CHAEACTRRISTICS. 95 
 
 that tongue with harsh and crabbed innovations of a 
 foreign growth. Both were rich in the cumulative trea- 
 sures of an exhaustless imagination, sometimes lavished 
 by both with the imprudence of a too prodigal hand. 
 Both possessed in an almost magic degree, a wondrous 
 power of realization, and a copiousness of invention that 
 in both sometimes outran it. In both was developed the 
 faculty of magnifyiug the famihar, turning the dust of 
 common opportunity into gold, and in the hands of both 
 the uncouth vocabulary of science became malleable to 
 such a delicate consistency of sweetness with strength, as 
 to reahze the Saturnian prodigy of 
 
 "Honey sweating from the porea of oak.'" 
 
 In their vices, the parallel holds equally good. Their 
 vices were generally the vices of excess. Milton, like 
 Burke, offends from exuberance. Like Burke, from a 
 fatal facUity of diction, and an excess of ductile power, 
 he was too fond of distorting physical terms into a meta- 
 physical significance. By way of illustrations, I subjoin 
 specimens from both — specimens but little short of 
 absolute caricature. 
 
 Burke. — " The royal estabhshment has shrunk into 
 the pohshed httleness of modern elegance and personal 
 accommodation. It has evaporated from gross concrete 
 into an essence and rectified spirit of expense, when you 
 have tons of ancient pomp in a vial of modem luxury."'' 
 
 Milton. — " It is still episcopacy that before all our 
 eyes worsens and sliogs the most learned of our ministers, 
 who no sooner advanced to it but like a seething pot 
 set to cool, exhale, and reek out the greatest part of their 
 zeal, settling in a skinny congeahnent of ease and sloth 
 at the top ; their devotion most commonly coming to 
 
 ' Dryden's " Ovid," " Speech on Economical Reform. 
 
96 ethica: 
 
 that queazy temper of lukewarmness, that gives a vomit 
 to God himself." ' 
 
 Burke. — " The minister was rasping from the marrow- 
 less bones of skeleton establishments an empirical ali- 
 mentary powder, to diet into the simiUtude of health the 
 languishing chimseras of fraudulent reformations, desirous 
 to draw a resource out of the crumbs dropped from the 
 trenchers of penury." 
 
 Milton. — " If God intended no such thiug, we do 
 injuriously in thinking to taste better of pure evangeUc 
 manna, by seasoning our mouths with the tainted scraps 
 and fragments of an unknown table, and searching among 
 the verminous and polluted rags dropped, overworn from 
 the toUing shoulders of time, with these, deformedly to 
 guild, and interlace the entire, the spotless, the undecay- 
 ing robe of truth." * 
 
 Burhe. — *' Never can these stings be extracted by all 
 the surgery of murder ; never can the throbbings they 
 have created be assuaged by all the emollient cataplasms 
 of robbery and confiscation." ^ 
 
 Milton. — " EeaHty shall not turn to gold, but to the 
 drops of scum and slavery, breeding and settling both in 
 the bodies and souls of men such as do not in time with 
 the sovereign treacle of sound doctrine fortify their hearts 
 against her hierarchy." * 
 
 Milton, hke Burke, was deficient in humour, or rather, 
 he failed in the process of being humorous. Nothing can 
 be clumsier than some of Burke's attempts at drollery, 
 as they are recorded in his writings and parliamentary 
 experience, except some corresponding efforts of Milton, 
 especially in the Smectynmuan and Sahnasian con- 
 troversies. It is easy to appreciate their value, when 
 
 > "Of Reformation in England." = " Of Palatial Episcopacy." 
 
 ' "Letters on a Regicide Peace." 
 ■* " Reason of Church Government." 
 
OK CHARACTERISTICS. 97 
 
 the following is quoted as among the least contemp- 
 tible of them. " I have not been so light as the 
 pahn of a bishop, which is the lightest thing in the 
 world, when he brings out his. Book of Ordination for 
 them ; contrary to that which is wont in releasing out of 
 prison, any one that will pay his fees, is laid hands on ! " ^ 
 But if Milton and Burke failed in the smaller warfare of 
 caustic raUlery, they wielded the deadly weapons of high 
 invective with terrible effectiveness. Both their admirers 
 and detractors, wUl probably agree, that in this item their 
 passions, sometimes in the enuntiation of their principles, 
 overcame their sense of humanity and their sense of 
 decorum. Justice and decency, manners and morality, 
 would alike disclaim political animosity when it is accom- 
 panied with ribald vulgarity, and at once refuse to own 
 the authenticity of such coarse delineation as the portraits 
 of Benfield and Hastiags, Salmasius and More. 
 
 If, in a general summary of Milton's characteristics, 
 I should be asked to point out the predominating 
 feature in his organism, I should unhesitatingly direct 
 attention to his imagination. Perhaps the writer who 
 stands at the farthest antipodes to Milton in this respect, 
 is Johnson. I do not refer to his poetry, for that con- 
 tains as little of the faculty that combines and creates, 
 as it is possible for it to contain. But I speak of his 
 prose writings. In his "Kambler," with the exception 
 of a few stiff and formal allegories, I do not remember a 
 single figure beyond the reach of an attorney. There are, 
 indeed, a few incongruous images varnished, furbished 
 up, and inserted to impose on the unwary. But it is 
 easy to see that they never came from the workshop of 
 nature, that they are composed of a metal that never 
 came from the fiery crucible of the fancy. In his " Eas- 
 selas" there was greater room, as, indeed, there was 
 
 ' " Apology for Smectymnuus." 
 
98 ethica: 
 
 greater demand for the elements of imagery. But his 
 "Kasselas" is even less imaginative than his "Rambler." 
 Perhaps from it, more than from any other of his works, 
 may be extracted more notorious instances of his frigid in- 
 susceptibiHty, his unimpassioned propriety. For example, 
 he has to speak, or to make his Hermit speak, of the un- 
 manUness of cloistered virtue. " I am sometimes ashamed 
 to think that I could not secure myself from vice, but by 
 retiring from the exercise of virtue, and begin to suspect 
 that I was rather impelled by resentment than led by 
 devotion into solitude. My fancy riots in scenes of foUy, 
 and I lament that I have lost so much, and gained so 
 little. In solitude, if I escape the example of bad men, 
 I want likewise the counsel and conversation of the 
 good," &e. What a Contrast to the fused warmth 
 which Milton infuses into the same subject. "I cannot 
 praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised, and 
 unbreathed, that never salhes out and seeks her adversary, 
 but slinks out of the race when that immortal garland is 
 to be run for, not without dust and heat. That virtue, 
 which is but a youngling in a contemplation of earth, and 
 knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, 
 and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure ; her 
 whiteness is but an excremental whiteness," &c.^ 
 
 I have spoken of Milton's power of realization, that 
 wondrous power, which has made so many generations 
 more famihar with the topography of Eden, than they 
 are with the, physical geography of their own con- 
 tinent, painted on their dazzled eyes the fiendish 
 splendours of Pandemonium, high capital of Satan and 
 his peers, the brazen folds, and golden architrave, thfe 
 fretted roof, the frieze with bossy sculptures graven, and 
 many a row pendent by subtle magic, 
 
 " Of starry lamps and blazing cressets, fed 
 With naphtha and asphaltes." 
 
 ' Areopagitiea. 
 
OE CHAEACTEBISTICS. 99 
 
 It is equally astonishing this fecundity of the realizing 
 faculty in his prose writings. There are many episodes 
 in them which stand out in bold reUef, with the fresh- 
 ness and Yividness of paintings. I doubt whether Swift 
 or Defoe could have given the following idea more 
 vividly : — " With less fervency was studied what St. Paul 
 or St. John had written, than was Hstened to one that 
 would say, Here he taught, here he stood, this was his 
 stature, and thus he went habited ; and oh ! happy this 
 house which harboured him, and that cold stone whereon 
 he rested, this village wherein he wrought such a miracle, 
 and that pavement bedewed with the warm effusion of 
 his last blood, that spouted up into eternal roses to 
 crown his martyrdom.^" As in my own mind I have 
 often appKed to Burke, and to a greater, it may be, 
 than Burke, the test which Burke so happily applied 
 to Sir Joshua Reynolds, that " his portraits remind 
 the spectator of the invention of history and the 
 amenity of landscape," so now I would be understood 
 to apply it to Milton. It forms one more tie of kin- 
 dredship between the two writers. Perhaps it is this 
 power of verification, so pecuhar to both, that may 
 account for their common attachment to the figure 
 Prosopopoeia. No one who is at aU conversant with his 
 writings can have forgotten to what efifect Burke has 
 employed it in his terrible portraits of Sansculottism. 
 Those who can call to mind some of these portraits may 
 not be unwilling to confront them with a specimen or 
 two from Milton. The first is a personification of Ex- 
 communication, " She is instant ; she beseeches, by 
 the dear and sweet promises of salvation, she entices 
 and woos; by all the threatenings and thunders of the 
 Law and rejected Gospel, she charges and adjures. This 
 is all her armoury, her munition, her artUlery. Then 
 
 ' Of Prelatial Episcopacy. 
 
 7—2 
 
100 ETHICA : 
 
 she awaits with long sufferance and yet ardent zeal. As 
 for the fogging proctorage of money, with such an eye 
 as struck Gehazi with leprosy and Simon Magus with a 
 curse, so does she look, and so threaten her fiery whip 
 against that banking den of thieves who dare then 
 baffle, and buy and sell the awful and majestic wrinkles 
 of her brow.^" The second, the most exquisite m the 
 language, is a personification of Love. It wiU be found 
 in the sixth chapter of his tract on the " Doctrine and 
 Discipline of Divorce," where those who have the taste to 
 appreciate it, will have the enterprise to search it out. 
 
 Here I close my comparison, imperfect as it is, 
 between the writings of Milton and the writings of 
 Burke. Those who are intimately acquainted with the 
 actions of both, may perhaps extend it to an investiga- 
 tion of their characters. Nor indeed will they want 
 items of similarity to interest and amuse. In their 
 habits, their tastes, and their lives enough wiLL be found 
 to identify them. Both were singularly egotistic, yet 
 both were singularly unselfish. Both were voraciously 
 fond of learning, both injured their health in its acqui- 
 sition, and both displayed the versatility of their learning 
 on the same subjects. Both have left fragments of a 
 history of their country. Both had the same early 
 antipathy to mathematical science ; both had the same 
 preference for Euripides to Sophocles. The one wrote 
 on the sublime and beautiful; the other illustrated it. 
 There is not a dissimilarity in their respective destinies. 
 Milton, like Burke, lived in a great revolutionary epoch, 
 and, like Burke, took part in it with his pen; Uke 
 Burke, he advocated the claims of rational freedom 
 against tyranny and anarchy ; and, like Burke, he pro- 
 cured to himself the suspicion of political apostacy for 
 his pains. Like Burke he pushed his taste for reform 
 ' Of " Reformation in England." 
 
OE CHABACTBRISTICS. 101 
 
 almost to empiricism ; and, like Burke, it was his fate 
 to see most of his speculative reforms admired, applauded, 
 and neglected. Like Burke, he was not a successful 
 man. He wrote against prelacy, and he lived to see it 
 restored; he wrote against monarchy, and lived to feel 
 the heavy hand of monarchy triumphant. Both feU on 
 evil tongues and evU days. Country squires, fresh from 
 the dog-kennel and the cider-tap, learned to laugh with 
 impunity at the great statesman's speeches, and sting 
 him to madness with their insults. The poet whose 
 fame had made the tour of Europe, and extorted gifts 
 from kings, Uved to he the butt of every pot-house 
 satirist who had wit enough to be blasphemous, and the 
 aim of pulpit sarcasm to every Whitehall divine that had 
 blasphemy enough to be witty,^ 
 
 It is decidedly suggestive of the liberahty of the age, 
 that so many biographies of Milton have been hazarded. 
 For it is not mere caprice that overrules the fluctuations 
 of an old writer's popularity. In the revolutionary period 
 which preceded the accession of Wilham, the prose works 
 of Milton were reprinted. In that period of great social 
 stagnation, when Bute ruled George the Third, and 
 George the Third ruled England, Lord Monboddo was 
 compelled to search for a copy of his writings among the 
 presses of Amsterdam. Very suggestive indeed is the 
 repute in which MUton stood at that time. Warburton 
 was a bishop, and "Warburton speaks of him m a tone 
 which would have been severe had it been applied to the 
 most venal Grub-Street hack. In a letter to Hurd, he 
 confesses that though he disbeheves Lauder's forgeries, 
 they had done good — mortified Milton's silly adorers. 
 Warton confessed that his "Defence of the Enghsh 
 People," was remembered no more. It was complained 
 that though more than one pa mphlet had appeared in 
 
 ' » See South's" Sermons." 
 
102 ETHICA : 
 
 defence of Hammond and Gray, more tlian four years 
 had been allowed to elapse before a single word had been 
 said in defence of the author of the " Paradise Lost." 
 Perhaps, indeed, Johnson's Essay is best known as a 
 criterion of Milton's popularity. 
 
 The " Lives of the Poets " presents a remarkable 
 instance of what may be called the sustaining power of 
 style and reputation. Johnson's book wUI always be 
 read, and read with pleasure, but never with cordiality. 
 Indeed, that sort of pleasure which the perusal of it 
 provokes consists in the kind of vigilant dissonance 
 which the judgment of the reader unremittingly main- 
 tains with his mere taste. Its composition is singularly 
 attractive to him. The criticism which it embodies, 
 operates upon him in the meanwhile with something 
 of the gentle violence of an irritant. In perusing 
 the " Lives," the conviction at once intrudes itself 
 that the author displays, in remarkable co-existence, 
 very strong quahfications with very strong disqualifi- 
 cations for the task. It would not have been easy 
 for the booksellers who pitched upon Johnson, to have 
 picked out of the repubUc of letters, a man more 
 singularly adapted by his intellectual powers to have 
 made such a book readable, at the same time more com- 
 pletely disquahfied by his habits and tastes to have made 
 it congenial or acceptable. Johnson, in fact, had but 
 httle poetry in his nature, and but little of the faculty of 
 appreciating poetry. With the "Rambler," he was quite 
 at home. Insisting on the art of Hving well, on the 
 advantages of learned poverty, and the disadvantages of 
 idle opulence, was his legitimate province, and it is one 
 which he presides over with regal superiority. But in 
 the realms of imagination, he sways the sceptre Hke a 
 vulgar tyrant. It is not difficult to see from the "Lives" 
 themselves where his real strength lay. A poet, who 
 
OR CHABACTEEISTIOS. 103 
 
 should combine in his nature as little of real poetry, and 
 as much of picturesque metaphysics as possible, was the 
 character he was the least incapacitated to deal with. 
 Such a poet was Pope. Accordingly, his treatment of 
 Pope always . has been, and always will be, least repug- 
 nant to a reader of sensibiUty. 
 
 It would be amusing to collect a few of the adverse 
 criticisms which posterity has disallowed, and which 
 one of the first great critical works in our language 
 authorized. No writer, he asserts, since Pope's ap- 
 pearance wanted melody, though Gray, Collins, Savage, 
 and Shenstone, who did not write tiU Pope was rot- 
 tiQg in Twickenham Cemetery, are pronounced to be 
 " all harsh." Bowe, we are told, seldom moves either 
 pity or terror, though Eowe's " Lucan " is superior to 
 the " Paradise Lost." Swift " excites no admira- 
 tion ; " perhaps the only feeling which he does ex- 
 cite. Thomson he could not read through. Churchill, 
 the most muscular rhymester, to say the least, since 
 Dryden, is " a shallow fellow." It is curious to see how 
 at various stages of his life his judgment was warped by 
 his principles or his tastes. Sometimes his nationality 
 overcame him. Hume he speaks of as an echo of Vol- 
 taire; Voltaire as an empty Trinculo. Of Eobertson's 
 book he would not trust himself to speak. Akenside, 
 more a Scotchman than an Enghshman, though he 
 assigns him a place among the poets, he yet owns to 
 BosweU, he could never read through.^ Sometimes his 
 reverence for Christianity and the hierarchy interferes 
 with him. Thus he gives the praise to Watts which he, 
 denies to Collins, though Collins was decidedly the 
 Shelley of his century. His book, though professedly a 
 criticism of the works of the poets, seldom includes their 
 prose composition. Swift's prose works he does not even 
 
 ' Though he elsewhere puts him above Gray and Mason. 
 
104 ETHICA : 
 
 catalogue. Of Milton's he says as little as he can pos- 
 sibly help, and that Httle not much to the purpose. He 
 was not, in fact, calculated to form an estimate of such 
 writings as Milton's. And for this reason. They were 
 History; and of History Johnson had no appreciation. 
 He took little of that burning interest in the fate of great 
 men and great nations which the philosophic historian 
 feels. The past was with him literally the past. Talking 
 of an historian, he confesses him not half so interesting 
 an object as the moralist. There is but a shallow stream 
 of thought in history. All its colouring and philosophy 
 is mere conjecture. It is no better than an almanack. 
 Histories of the downfalls of kingdoms and the revolutions 
 of empires, he writes in one of his Ramblers (60) , are 
 read with great tranquillity. With the same tranqmlHty, 
 he owns, he contemplated the Highlands, unexcited by 
 that strange mixture of Eomance with History, which, to 
 this day, thickens the breathing of the least sensitive 
 traveller. Knox was to him a name as idle as Alaric. 
 His followers as uninteresting as Goths. For Algernon 
 Sidney and Lord WiUiam Russell, who loved pohtical 
 hberty weU, if not wisely, he has no other name than 
 " rascals." Of pohtical liberty, Johnson seems to have 
 had no very defined notion. He speaks of the question 
 of the duration of Parhaments, for example, as so im- 
 material, that he would not give half-a-crown to turn the 
 scale one way or the other. The legality of general 
 warrants is, in his idea, a matter of perfect indifference. 
 It is but fair to say, in his views of History, Johnson 
 only shared in the popular estimation. That estimation 
 was not a high one. Pope had spoken of it in a strain 
 equally trifling. Facts in ancient history, he says, are 
 not very instructive now. We need not study history 
 below the Pyrenean treaty, for since the Pyrenean treaty 
 a new set of motives and principles rule Europe, So he 
 
OB CHAEACTERISTICS. 105 
 
 said, and so he averred Lord Bolingbroke had told him. 
 -^sthetically Johnson had no sensibility, that quahty on 
 which, says Burke, depends judgment in the arts, and 
 which is to ordinary discrimination what tears are to 
 grief. He hated music. It was one of his curious 
 prejudices. A fine singer with him only shared in the 
 merit of a common canary-bird. He had such a con- 
 tempt for painting, that he avowed that he would have 
 sate in a room with the greatest masters with their backs 
 turned. He was almost as bhnd as he was deaf. A fine 
 prospect afforded him no pleasure. He travelled to Paris, 
 and refused to look out of a window at the scenery. A 
 blade of grass was a blade of grass, in France or in 
 England. 
 
 It is very far from my wish or my intention to join in 
 any vulgar depreciation of Johnson's character. This is 
 not the time of day to overlook those large, and robust 
 features, which knit like sinews the compact outlines of 
 his mental stature. His later piety, slightly tinctured 
 with superstition, it is true, his honesty sometimes 
 exaggerated into blunt rudeness, are fair game for the 
 captious, but ridicule cannot claim his unadulterated 
 charity, and personal, if not, intellectual benevolence. 
 At the same time, it is right to protest against the 
 appearance of a Johnsoniad. The truth is, heroizing is 
 the radical vice of the day. It is easy to see its origin. 
 It arises from a strong tendency to allow that which our 
 ancestors denied, its legitimate authority to the past. 
 History is Hterally become philosophy teaching by ex- 
 ample. We search out the examples, and we scrupulously 
 extract the philosophy. The age is a retrospective one. 
 We are, in fact, making capital of our ancestors. The 
 dry bones are resuscitated. Breath is once more breathed 
 into the nostrils. And in the pride of our vitalizing 
 power, motives, and all the phenomena of mental and 
 
106 ethica: 
 
 moral existence are authoritatively assigned. There is 
 this danger in our biological creation. The offspring 
 bears too strongly the stamp of the parent. We impart, 
 while we should receive. We invent, while we should 
 only reproduce. History becomes either caricature or 
 panegyric. The latter is now the order of the day. 
 Thus we have had panegyrics on Henry the Eighth, on 
 William, on Cromwell, and it is not unUkely that we are 
 to have a panegyric on Frederick the Great. Seriously, 
 such writers as Mr. Carlyle are doing incurable damage 
 to the integrity of History. Their style is at once a 
 suspicious agent in the cause of unadorned historical 
 truth. It is not writiag ; it is painting. The strongest 
 colours which the imagination can supply are pressed 
 into service. A man who adopts this style of composition 
 is clearly not his own master. He is the victim of his 
 emotions. JS[o ordinary demonstrations wiU suit him. 
 The outliues of a commonplace character — of those sort of 
 unostentatious characters of which history is composed — 
 would sit tamely on his canvas. He must either laugh 
 or weep, execrate or worship, sketch divinities or demons. 
 His subject must be as much above the proportions of 
 ordinary men, as Dryden's heroes, and if they are not, he 
 fabricates them. To employ the silent language of 
 capitals and italics, is a contraband interference with the 
 conviction of the reader. Such artists are not historians, 
 but lawyers ; advocates, forestalling the decision of their 
 audience by illicit agencies. 
 
 I do not say that Johnson wilfully or systematically 
 adopted this plan in the case of Milton. But it can- 
 not be denied that Johnson was not the man to write 
 an appreciative paper on Milton. He simply wanted 
 susceptibility, a power of discriminating, and realizing. 
 His deficiencies did not escape the eye of contempo- 
 raries. In time, the palpable injustice of his critique 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 107 
 
 on Milton especially provoked retaliation. It was 
 hinted that the man who wrote of the Paradise Lost, 
 that its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure, was 
 thinking of his pedagogue days at Market Bosworth 
 School. The malignant assertion that aU Milton's wives 
 were virgins, was playfully construed into a buU, unworthy 
 of the author of the Enghsh Dictionary. One trait in 
 Johnson's character the critic aptly enough seized upon. 
 His indifference to the beauties of the "AUegro" and 
 "Penseroso" was attributed to his general aversion to 
 nature. " Has he no taste for a landscape, a grove, or 
 a spring ?" asks the critic ; " one would think the smoke 
 of London as pleasant to him as a coalpit to a neighbour 
 of Newcastle." General counter-criticisms followed 
 rapidly. It was hinted that old age alone could have 
 made the author insensible to the prettinesses of Shen- 
 stone, or to the lyric genius of Collins and Gray. 
 " Magnus Aristoteles, sed major Veritas." Miss Seward 
 owned to Hayley that she dreaded to peruse his volumes. 
 Hayley in return compares the author to the Satan of 
 Milton, cursing the sun for shining in that sphere from 
 which he is for ever excluded. Johnson, indeed, rather 
 opposed his criticism on Milton's poetry to the soUd 
 testimony of its popularity, offered by its circulation. 
 Though Somers claims to have brought the poet into 
 notice, his poetry early exacted a wondering and solemn 
 admiration. While Swift was developing his genius, it 
 had gone through fourteen editions. And before the 
 poems of Blenheim and the Campaign had ceased to be 
 talked of, Jacob Tonson averred , that the poem he had 
 ever got most, by, had been the Paradise Lost. ^ 
 
 In noticing the current biographies of Milton, it 
 would be an omission to pass by Mr. David Masson's 
 recent work, more particularly as its enterprising asso- 
 
 ' Spence's " Anecdotes," by Singer, p. 261. 
 
108 ETHICA : 
 
 ciation of history proper with biography proper has 
 attracted special notice. To the critical reader, while 
 giving the author more than ordinary credit for a more 
 than ordinary industry, it wiU. seem to have failed pre- 
 cisely in those particulars where the effects of industry 
 would be least visible or least appreciated, in the par- 
 ticulars of execution, arrangement, and what I may call, 
 artistic association. The materials are there to super- 
 fluity ; but their unmethodised regularity rather suggests 
 the inharmonious uniformity of a lumber-room, than the 
 scientific dependence of a museum. 
 
 In one of its elementary stages history is indispu-, 
 tably biography. The historian, yet young in pohtical 
 knowledge, is naturally shy of pohtical speculation. His 
 stock of philosophy is limited, because his stock of his- 
 tory, which may be termed philosophy in the making, 
 is limited. He therefore leaves deduction for narration. 
 His object is to appeal rather to the imagination than 
 the reason ; rather to provoke his reader's attention, 
 than to excite his ratiocination. With this view he sets 
 about to arrange his materials in the most attractive 
 form he can devise, and he soon discovers that of all 
 attractive forms the biographical is the most seductive 
 and the most convenient. Within its accommodating 
 compass he can exercise at will the privileges of expan- 
 sion and compression. To select a hero, to group 
 around him details sufficiently complete to maintam a 
 unity of design, yet sufficiently curtailed to leave him 
 the centre of the group— such, originally, was the care 
 of the historiographer. Historiography was, in fact, 
 Biography. Now, Biography is History. The com- 
 pound feature is still there, but in the ingredients of the 
 compound the proportions are reversed. The individual 
 is lost m the events. The sphere of interest is enlarged 
 at the expense of the personahty. That of which Hume 
 
OR Cn^RACTBRISTICS. 109 
 
 justly complains in the dramas of Congreve, takes place. 
 The principle of dramatic association is stretched to its 
 utmost ; the sUghtest contiguity of time or place is con- 
 sidered a sufficient excuse for enlarging the plot. Events 
 abnormally independent of each other are forced into a 
 position of mutual dependence. The remotest incidents 
 are pressed withiu the circle of vision, till the focal figure 
 is ecHpsed by the interposing mass. The chain of con- 
 nexion is extended as far as ever it wiU go, and it is well 
 if each - Hnk iu the chain does not become the nucleus of 
 an independent narrative. 
 
 It is easy to see how this taste for amplification may 
 exceed the limits of dramatic propriety. In characteriza- 
 tion the biographer is under similar obHgations with the 
 painter. He cannot, indeed, be too minute in the 
 dehneation of his central figure. Verisimilitude is his 
 object ; and, accordingly, every muscle, every mole, is 
 a candidate for verification. CromweU, when he bade 
 Lely put in every blotch, while he administered a just 
 reproof to his violation of historic truth, administered at 
 the same time a just reproof to his violation of artistic 
 truth. He was, in fact, giving him a lesson in art, 
 while he gave him a lesson in honesty. At the same 
 time the truth, but nothing but the truth, is required. 
 Excess is as criminal as suppression. The artist who 
 should bury his subject amid an engrossing heap of 
 accessories, is as guilty as he who leaves his outlines 
 but half, filled up. The sympathy of the spectator is 
 continually being diverted by the diversities in the 
 tout ensemble. His concern suffers repeated interruption. 
 His curiosity sustains a breach, corresponding to each 
 breach in the unity of design. 
 
 There are, it is true, occasions when the strictness 
 of this canon may lawfully be relaxed — conditions under 
 which biography may lawfully glide into history. The 
 
110 ethica: 
 
 biography of statesmen is necessarily a mixed biography ; 
 the history of their Uves is the history of their times. 
 To understand the career of such men as Raleigh or 
 Walpole, it is necessary to have an intimate acquaint- 
 ance with the political events of half a century. Under 
 these circumstances, no one would grudge their reams 
 and their quartos to a Uvelier Nares or a more impartial 
 Coxe. In the case of men of letters, other considera- 
 tions present themselves. Pope and Johnson need no 
 interpreters out of the precincts of the closet. The man 
 who cannot distinguish between a Jacobite and a Whig, 
 may still boast of a tolerably famiUar idea of the author 
 of the "Dunciad;" while the most indiscriminating 
 critic that ever lived may form some conception of the 
 writer of "Rasselas," even though the one never heard 
 of the Excise Act, and though the other never read 
 •'Taxation no Tyranny." Literature may indeed be 
 so completely associated with poHtics, that the man of 
 letters may be almost identified with the poKtician. 
 Here, again, exceptional phenomena uiterfere; and to 
 appreciate the labours of a Dryden or a Swift, our 
 researches must extend from the fabrication of bed- 
 chamber intrigues, to the history of great dynastic revo- 
 lutions. If we would become acquainted with the 
 character of the poet who has bequeathed to us the 
 "Absalom and Achitophel," we must penetrate into 
 such vulgar mysteries as the fable of the " Black Box" 
 and the fable of the " Warming-Pan." If we would 
 study the lover of Stella, we must first study the peace 
 of Utrecht, 
 
 But even in mixed biography, where the scope of the 
 subject necessarily affects the scope of treatment, this 
 licence to latitude can never be used too sparingly. 
 The artistic inconveniences have been already alluded 
 to ; but there are reasons of equity, as well as reasons 
 
OE CHAEACTEEISTICS. Ill 
 
 of art, against the practice. By neglecting the division 
 of labour, by blending into one the two departments of 
 biography and history, mjustice is certain to be done to 
 one or other of them. A book professing, as Mr. Mas- 
 son's book emphatically professes, such a combination, 
 can hardly faU to contain matter totally irrelevant to 
 the main design of a biography, or utterly inadequate 
 to the co-ordinate design of a history. Eeaders of such 
 books generally rise from them with the impression, 
 either that the author has in reality undertaken the 
 history of the times, only so far as it may elucidate the 
 life, or else that he has engaged to write the Ufe, only 
 that he might write the history of the times. It might 
 not be without its use, to remind authors of this class 
 that by thus entering iato a twofold contract with their 
 readers they expose themselves to a double risk. They 
 become indictable, in fact, on two distinct counts ; 
 amenable before the bar of criticism, on two separate 
 liabUities. What their chances of justification are may 
 easily be conceived. It is rare that acquittal follows on 
 both charges ; rare that the spirit as well as the letter of 
 both engagements is carried out. It is rare, indeed, that 
 a hit is made exactly between wind and water ; that the 
 boundary hne which separates the historian from the 
 biographer is not transgressed by one or other; that 
 the history and the biography supply each their own 
 experiences, and nothing more or nothing less ; that the 
 aggregate of the work, in fact, attains to the state of dis- 
 junctive fusion proposed by the title-page, and realized in 
 the poet's pentameter — 
 
 " United, yet divided — ^twain iu one." 
 
112 ethica: 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 DRYDEN, OK THE LITERARY MORALITY OF AN EPOCH. 
 
 Association of Intellectual and Material Elements in Civilization. — Social 
 History and Intellectual History explain each other. — MachiaveUi, 
 Erasmus, D'Alembert. — Sforza, Henry VIII., Tom Paine. — ^English 
 Society in the Seventeenth Century investigated. — ^Its Licentiousness 
 not produced hy the Commonwealth. — The two Eras contrasted in their 
 Literature. — ^Bunyan. — Milton. — The Drama. — ^Its Power testified by 
 Chesterfield, and its Immorality exemplified hy the " Tatler " and the 
 " Guardian." — Pope and Chesterfield influenced by it. — Dryden's posi- 
 tion in the Movement. — His provoking Character. — ^A Trimmer all his 
 Life. — His Conversion to Romanism examined, and Mr. Bell's theory. — 
 Hallam. — Progress of Scepticism. — Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. — 
 Swift and Atterbury, Pope and Garth. — Critique on " The Hind and 
 Panther." — Its Allegory defended. — Johnson. — Macaulay. — Dryden's 
 striking Intellectuality. — His Conduct in the Literary Crisis, and Re- 
 view of the Rise of Euphuism. — Singular inequality of his Genius. — 
 His "Absalom and Achitophel." — His lenient View of Shaftesbury 
 explained. — A PoUtical Writer. — His Dramas Political Pamphlets — 
 The Old Dramatists not Politicians. — Authorship of the "Essay on 
 Satire." — Growth of French Tastes. — Oldham. — Butler. — Addison. — 
 The English Drama modelled on the French and Spanish. — ^Dryden's 
 Theory of Tragedy founded on Ariosto. — ^Revolution in Taste in the 
 next Generation curiously exemplified. — Low State of Criticism. — ■ 
 Rymer as a Critic. — Dryden's Prose "Writings. — His Comedies. — His 
 Controversy with Collier investigated. — His "Virgil." — ^National In- 
 terest in it. — Compared with Pope's " Homer." 
 
 The communion that exists between the elements of 
 civiKzation is perhaps more generally acknowledged than 
 investigated. Yet cbnl and intellectual society present a 
 remarkable analogy in their history. Sometimes the 
 analogy is not so plain. Sometimes the harmony of 
 their development is interrupted, and for a moment their 
 relation to each other seems rather reactionary than co- 
 operative. But concord is soon restored. The anta- 
 
OE CHAEACTERISTICS. 113 
 
 gonism is but temporary. The one element obeys the 
 impulse which the other gives. The revolution on this 
 side has ultimately procured a revolution on that. And 
 the equipoise, only chronologically disturbed, is once 
 more on the balance. 
 
 Nowhere is this law of association more potentially 
 visible than ia the phases of modem society ; and indeed 
 to study the composition of that society without a full 
 appreciation of it, is to do violence to the unity and 
 integrity of the philosophy of history. On this principle 
 of affinity, hterature is an index to civilization. An ode,' 
 a single baUad, the subtleties of a monastic doctor, the 
 song of a troubadour, or the tale of a trouvere, thus 
 acquire a gravity not comprehended by the ordinary 
 reader. On the other hand, to the intelligent student 
 a crusade and a miracle-play interpret each other. The 
 twofold influence of a rehgion peculiarly objective, and 
 a physical code peculiarly reUgious, is at once suggested 
 to him. In the process of his researches, this idea of 
 assimilation wiU be applied yet farther, to a greater 
 refinement of adaptation. From contemplating its in- 
 fluence on the development of an era, he will ascend to 
 trace its efiects on the individual. Nor wiU he be long 
 in identifying by way of specimen the intellectual causes 
 which have bequeathed to him the "Prince," the " En- 
 comium Morae," and the "Encyclopedic," with the moral 
 causes which at similar intervals produced their counter- 
 parts in Sforza, Henry VIII., and Tom Paine. Among 
 aU the examples of social and intellectual reciprocity, 
 however, he will find none more prominent than that 
 offered by the history of EngHsh society in the middle of 
 the seventeenth century. 
 
 It is a common remark, that the licentiousness of the 
 Eestoration was the effect of the restraint of the Com- 
 monwealth, The fanaticism of one epoch, it is said, 
 
 8 
 
114 ethica: 
 
 nurtured, if it did not create, the infidelity of the other. 
 The saints of to-day conceived the Atheists of to-morrow. 
 The age of Puritan piety had been as episodical in Eng- 
 land, as the age of academical Atheism afterwards was in 
 France. The very exaggeration of the Puritan aesthetics 
 had overthrown their system. The fervour of real senti- 
 ment had long since given place to the fancies of fashion. 
 The symbols of a religion were depreciated to the mere 
 external expressions of a mode. What had been begun in 
 zeal was continued in affectation. There had been zeal, 
 indeed, but it was emphatically a zeal not according to 
 knowledge. Had the revolutionists been content with 
 correcting the errors of a past generation, instead of pre- 
 scribing rules for preserving the virtues of the present, 
 had they cut off Charles's head, without cutting off their 
 own beards, had they limited effectually the king's pre- 
 rogative without corrupting the king's Enghsh, had they, 
 in a word, been reformers without being Puritans, we 
 should have had much less of vicious hypocrisy, and 
 much less of open profligacy; much less of psalm- 
 smging, but much less of sabbath-breaking ; fewer 
 rehgious meetings at Blackfriars, but fewer riotous 
 assembhes at Whitehall; fewer such fanatics as Vane 
 and Ireton, but fewer such debauches as Rochester and 
 Buckingham. 
 
 But though in effect it has thus been usual to charge 
 the Commonwealth with the folhes of the Restoration, the 
 change of manners was too emphatic to be accounted for 
 on the principle of a simple antithesis. It is not possible 
 that, except (to use a pathological term) there had been 
 a prior disposition, the body pohtic should have taken the 
 disease with so much readiness and in so virulent a type. 
 Those who are accustomed to study with attention the 
 history of their country, must have discovered that, as 
 far back as the beginning of the sixteenth century, 
 
OB CHABACTERISTICS. 115 
 
 symptoms of a social reaction had manifested themselves. 
 The nation, it was observed, divided in their theological 
 and pohtical opinions, had early assumed external cha- 
 racteristics by which those opinions might be known and 
 testified. All along the history of the reigns of EUza- 
 beth, James, and Charles, may be traced, with topo- 
 graphical accuracy, the movements of the two sections, 
 who developed themselves the more distinctly, the one 
 under the Commonwealth, the other at the Restoration. 
 The same gloomy affectations, the same spiritual eccen- 
 tricities that distinguished the Puritan when Puritanism 
 was triumphant at Whitehall, distinguished his ancestor 
 when Puritanism shrank from the eye of Parker and 
 Whitgift ; and was to be looked for, not in the lobbies of 
 the Royal Palace, but concealed in bams and under 
 hedgerows, or stowed away in the holds of vessels bound 
 for the distant settlements of the Mississippi and the 
 Connecticut. 
 
 The propensity to place an excessive emphasis on the 
 coarse joUity of the Restoration as the product of the 
 Commonwealth, has not been without prejudice to the 
 truth. It should rather seem that the social revolution 
 was the result of a prior constitutional taint — that the 
 sins of the children were begotten of the sins of the 
 father, — that to the Roaring-boys, Roysterers, and Bona- 
 venturas of the one period, we are indebted for the 
 Scourers, Bailers, and Mohawks of the other, and to the 
 rope-dancers, bear-baitings, ruffles and ringlets of the 
 First Charles, for the Clevelands, the Lucy Walters, and the 
 Nell Gwynns, of the Second. It cannot be denied, indeed, 
 after an impartial survey of the tendency of the manners 
 of the whole European aristocracy of the sixteenth 
 century, — after a review ever so rapid, of the morality 
 which presided at the courts of Francis, of Leo, of Mary, 
 in Scotland, and of Henry VIII. and EHzabeth in 
 
 8—2 
 
116 ethica: 
 
 England, that the rough and homely virtues of the old 
 territorial Feudalism had expired with it, and that the 
 society "which had witnessed the orgies of the Field of the 
 Cloth of Gold, — which had produced the just retribution 
 of Luther, and the unjust execution of More, the mys- 
 terious loves of Mary, and the mysterious amours of 
 Leicester, was guilty of no very extravagant contrast, 
 when it left the historian "to befoul his page with such 
 intrigues as the intrigues of the Cabal, and vyith such 
 fabrications as the fabrication of the Black Box. The 
 generation which had given cause for the disclosures 
 of the Enghsh ambassador, Throgmorton, at the Court 
 of Scotland, may well take the place of whipping-boy 
 to the generation that had Hstened to the disclosures ' 
 of the French ambassador, Barillon, at the Court of 
 England. 
 
 That such immorality was allowed to go unimpeached 
 must, in part, be ascribed to the absence of any legiti- 
 mate organ of restraint. Profligacy, when it found itself 
 irresponsible to pubhc opinion, soon grew insubordinate. 
 The moral balance, which the presence of a middle class 
 too rich to be made the victims of vice, and too poor to 
 indulge in its extravagances, maintains, was as yet 
 inefficient. With a prerogative comparatively free and 
 untrammelled, accidental quahfications in Charles co- 
 operated. His personal endowments, his misfortunes, 
 his good nature under them, acted strongly on the judg- 
 ment of a people always ready to overlook peccadilloes 
 that resulted in the head rather than in the heart. After 
 the Eevolution, and the recognition of a Third Estate, 
 when the moral boundary that separated Blackfriars from 
 Whitehall had disappeared ; after the publication of the 
 " Spectator," it is only in the episodical disorganization 
 attendant on a change of dynasty, that we find courtiers 
 such as those that figure in the pages of Burnett, or 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 117 
 
 courtezans such as those that live on the canvas of 
 Lely. 
 
 A safer estimate of the contrast between the two eras 
 could not be obtained, than is afforded by a comparative 
 view of their literature. The literature of the Common- 
 wealth was after its kiud scant, and too esoteric to live 
 in exposure. But we may take the "Pilgrim's Progress" 
 as one of the most genial specimens extant. No other 
 book in modern times, except, perhaps the "Philosophical 
 Dictionary," do we find so impregnated with the genius of 
 the age. No other book stereotypes with such fidelity 
 the very spirit of contemporary history. It is difficult to 
 peruse that wonderful satire — for satire it undoubtedly is 
 — without feeling that its author was inspired by the 
 events happening around him, and that had there been 
 no Cromwell, there would have been no Bunyan. In the 
 fervid confessions of the " Grace Abounding," may be 
 seen the embodiment of that enthusiasm which in- 
 spired the courage of Lilbume and Prynne< As far as 
 the " Pilgrim's Progress" is concerned, it would be no 
 novelty to adapt the abstract creations of the tinker's 
 brain to the concrete world in which he moved, to find 
 titles among the peers of Charles which should suit as 
 personifications of my Lord Carnal-Dehght, my Lord 
 Luxurious, my Lord Desire-of- Vain-Glory, my old Lord 
 Lechery, or likenesses among the perjured witnesses of 
 Scroggs, to represent to the hfe such vermin as Pick- 
 thank; Envy, and Superstition, The characters, indeed, 
 are far more easily adapted, because they are far more 
 natural than even those of Butler, whose " Hudibras " 
 it might not be unreasonable to regard as a counter- 
 satire. Descending in the scale, it would not be fanciful 
 to apply all the details of Bunyan's machinery, to trace 
 out in those antiquarian relics, preserved with so much 
 reverence in the Hall of the Palace by the Hill of Zion, 
 
118 ethica: 
 
 in Moses's rod, in the hammer and nails with which Jael 
 slew Sisera, in the pitchers, trumpets, and lamps, with 
 which Gideon put to flight the armies of Mideon, in the 
 string and stone with which David slew the Phihstine, 
 and in the sword with which the Lord shall slay the Man 
 of Sin in the day that he shall rise up to the prey, em- 
 blems of those very weapons with which the God-fearing 
 dragoons of Fleetwood and Fairfax had put to rout the 
 proud Apollyons of Rupert and Dighy, and types, but ill- 
 concealed, of that stem doctrine which, trampling under 
 foot the high-flown superstition of the divine right of 
 kings, left its embodiment in that gloomy parchment 
 that Horace Walpole has christened the Magna Charta 
 of England. Or take, for another example, the works of 
 Milton. That the " Paradise Lost " was intended to 
 have any allegorical signification cannot he predicated of 
 it ; but that the crisis in which the author wrote is re- 
 flected in the gloomy grandeur of his sentiments, is as 
 reasonable a conjecture, as that SackviUe should have 
 been under local influence when he commenced his 
 " Mirror of Magistrates." It would be a genial specu- 
 lation, and only a speculation, that the terrible contest 
 between good and evil, between the powers of light and 
 the powers of darkness, shadowed forth in a dim and 
 mysterious exaggeration, that fearful conflict between 
 liberty and despotism, moraUty and immorahty, the flesh 
 and the spirit. The obdurate and ill-judged encroachment 
 of Charles might not have been ill-represented, in the 
 poet's mind, by that personification of ambition that, 
 
 "Would sooner reign in hell, than serve in heaven.'' 
 
 Be that as it may, the purity and sublimity of the 
 "Paradise Lost " was as wholly uncongenial to the tastes of 
 the generation who crowded the pits of the King's or the 
 Duke's theatres, to listen to the blasphemy of Dorax and 
 
OE CHARACTERISTICS. 119 
 
 the ravings of Antonio, as Don Sebastian would have been 
 to the generation that preceded it. The subsequent 
 alliance between literature and immorality was in truth 
 complete. Talent has seldom been prostituted to such 
 filthy purposes as it was by those intellects that crowded 
 round the fireside of Wills*. There is, perhaps, but one 
 other era in the history of modern civilization, when the 
 ethics of a people have been systematically degraded to a 
 level with the code of a Chinese or a Mussulman, the era 
 directly preceding the French Kevolution. 
 
 What encyclopaediacal philosophy had been to the 
 moral revolution in France, the stage was to the moral 
 revolution in England. The drama on a smaller scale 
 took the place of a circulating library. The age of 
 vulgar reading had not come in. Popular readers were 
 few, and consequently popular authors were few. Between 
 the metropohtan pubhc and the author, there was no more 
 efficient medium of communication than the stage; Nor 
 was the influence of the stage in its capacity of mutual 
 interpreter narrow and confined, as it may at first appear. 
 On the contrary, the moral power of the English drama 
 was every whit as great as the moral power of the Grecian 
 drama, when Aristophanes laughed to scorn before an 
 Athenian audience the sublimest of Athenian philosophers. 
 A caricature by Shadwell was more effectual than a whole 
 London Charivari. A single puppet show hke Bartho- 
 lomew Fair did more than a dozen proclamations. 
 Chesterfield, years after, bears retrospective testimony in 
 one of the most polished of his speeches. "When we 
 were out of humour with Holland, Dryden the laureate 
 wrote his play on the cruelty of the Dutch at Amboyna. 
 When the affair of the Exclusion Bill was depending, he 
 wrote his 'Duke of Guise.' When the Court took 
 offence at the citizens, the stage was employed to expose 
 them, as a parcel of designing knaves, griping usurers. 
 
120 ethica: 
 
 and cuckolds into the bargain. The CavaKers were always 
 the fine gentlemen ; and the Dissenters who were to be 
 abused, were always hypocritical, dissembhng rogues, or 
 quaint mischievous fellows. league, a notorious rogue, 
 who lived by rapine and plunder, was always a fine 
 gentleman ; and he who could not follow league in his 
 politics, was a sad fellow and capable of no trust 
 whatever."* 
 
 Powerful as the Enghsh Stage was, it was proportion- 
 ally immoral. Its profanity is positively inconceivable to 
 those who have been accustomed to sit in almost domestic 
 privacy and listen enchanted by the eloquence of a Sid- 
 dons to sentiments that could not raise a blush on the 
 most virgin modesty, to what befel the chastened love of 
 Juliet, the deep filial affection of Cordelia, and the fatal 
 passion of .Opheha. Various as are the merits and the 
 styles of such writers as Congreve and Wycherley, Van- 
 brugh and Farquhar, they all agree in their licentiousness. 
 The Ehzabethan drama had not been without its blemishes, 
 but it was purity itself, compared with the drama that it 
 preceded. The interest of the dramatist was in truth to 
 be unclean. Loathsomeness was the guarantee of success. 
 A modest dramatist would have been synonymous with a 
 suicide, with a man residing in a garret at the Mint, 
 sharing his mouldy crust with mice, with a washerwoman 
 for a dun and a baihff for an attendant. "To have 
 drawn a man of probity," wrote Steele in his review of 
 Wycherley's "Country Wife," ^ "had been a monster, and 
 a poet had at that time discovered his want of knowledge 
 of the manners of the court he lived in, by a virtuous 
 character in his fine gentleman, as he would show his 
 ignorance by dramng a vicious one to please his present 
 audience." Moroseness was the general bugbear. In 
 
 ' " Chesterfield's Works," vol. 5, pp. 13, 14, 150. 
 ' " Tatler," No. 3. 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 121 
 
 his play of Cleomenes, Dryden for once yielding to the 
 nature of his subject, attributed continency to his principal 
 character. The fact did not pass unnoticed by the critics 
 of the pit. One of them in raillery told the poet, that if 
 he had been in sohtude with the lady, he would not have 
 passed his time so churhshly as the Spartan, '^ There 
 was too much geniality of taste and pursuit in the 
 imaginary characters, to shock either those who portrayed 
 them or those who criticized them. Plenty of the fine 
 gentlemen who frequented the Bowling Green or the 
 Cock Pit, and whose drolleries on Tower Hill or at the Cock 
 in Bow Street, would have astonished the more delicate 
 sensibilities of the Fribbles and Maccaronis that amused 
 the analytical skUl of Walpole, might have sate for 
 Sir Arthur Addle or Lord Foppington ; and even the 
 unique vileness of the Friths, the Mir3,bels, and Flippants 
 might have found its counterpart in the fine ladies who 
 shook off the last night's debauch in the bazaars of the 
 New Exchange, or in frolicking at the Eing, or the 
 Fairs, in the dress of country lasses, in red petticoats, 
 high-heel pattens and woollen waistcoats. 
 
 It was pretended that the Carohne drama presented 
 no improprieties more gross than those which defile the 
 pages of Johnson, of Beaumont, of Fletcher, and of 
 Shakspeare. The fine gentlemen of the two dramas 
 afford a fair test. Dryden maintained, that it was im- 
 possible for writers, who were not gentlemen themselves, 
 to clothe their characters in the garb of gentlemen. The 
 old poets, he objected, kept low company. It might be 
 questioned whether the frequenters of the Eoyal Oak, 
 the Mitre, or the Roebuck, in the days of the second 
 Charles, had any right to despise the good company 
 that night upon night filled up the benches of the 
 Mermaid, the Devil, or the Boar, in the days of Queen 
 
 ' " Guardian," No. 45. 
 
122 ethica: 
 
 Bess or of James ; whether the wit that tickled the fancy 
 and shook the sides of the authors of " Love in a Y/ood," 
 " The Old Bachelor," " The Confederacy," and " Lim- 
 berham," was more jovial and less profane than that wit 
 which circulated at the table at which Ben Jonson acted 
 host, and Shakspeare, Beaumont, and Fletcher were 
 among the guests. But the most hasty comparison would 
 decide. Take the men, and contrast the low vulgarity 
 of such sparks as the Wildbloods, the Harcourts, the 
 Homers, the Woodals, the Rhodophils, and Beaugards 
 of the Caroline, with the elegant vivacity -of the Mercu- 
 tios, the Benedics, the Valentines, the Lovelesses, the 
 Truewits and the Clermonts of the Ehzabethan dra- 
 matists. The same' vicious hum^our appears in the 
 feminine portraits. It is impossible not to appreciate 
 the wide difference of those tastes which imagined, on 
 the one hand, the Cordelias and Portias, the Aspatias, 
 Helenas, and Celanthas, and to which we are indebted 
 on the other for the Frails and Phants, the AngeHcas, 
 Berinthias, and Delindhas. It took nearly a century to 
 eradicate the influence of this cold and heartless hcen- 
 tiousness which displayed itself iu the treatment of the 
 sex. The kindlier appreciation of the womanly virtues 
 set on foot by the " Spectator," and which certainly 
 spoke better for the morality of Buttons' than of Wills', 
 did 'not prevent Pope from exhorting one of his female 
 acquaintance — 
 
 " Not to quit the free innocence of life 
 For the dull glory of a virtuous wife," 
 
 and from further asserting that women " had no 
 character at aU ; " a sophisticated dogma which Chester- 
 field endorsed, when he informed his son, in words 
 worthy the disciple of Kochefoucault, that " they are but 
 children of a larger growth, whom a man of sense only 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 123 
 
 humours and plays with, but could never dream of con- 
 sulting or trusting." ^ 
 
 ^ None but a cynic, or a critic like Rhymer, would quarrel 
 with the comic dramatists for making such unhmited 
 use of so legitimate an ingredient in the comic drama as 
 Love. The blame may be justly thrown upon them, not 
 for rendering all other topics subordinate to love, but for 
 rendering love subordinate to vice ; not for introducing 
 love on the stage, but for introducing it in so filthy an 
 attire. The love of the stage of the Restoration is no 
 more that ethereal thing we are accustomed to see em- 
 bodied in a Juhet or a Desdemona, than a draped figure 
 is like a naked satyr. The sentiments of the latter love 
 were the sentiments of the Coal Yard, and its language 
 the language of Lewknor Lane. Pictures too gross for 
 the "Decameron" were conveyed in expressions that 
 Rousseau would have erased from his "Heloise," and 
 Montaigne would not have admitted into his Essays. Nor 
 was the moral mechanism of the plot without substantial 
 auxiUaries. Among other novel artifices suggested' by the 
 ingenuity of the new taste was scenic representation ; an 
 artifice carried in a little time to such an excess, that it 
 was agreed by the critics of Addison's date, that the tailor 
 and painter often contributed more to the success of a 
 tragedy than the poet, and that a well-dressed play had 
 sometimes brought a fuller audience than a well-written 
 one.^ Thus, to the fascinations of genius succeeded the 
 fascinations of art. To the language of the lip, was added 
 the still more inflaming language of gesture. Every one 
 has experienced the power which living scenery has, of 
 impressing on the mind of the spectator the sentiments 
 of the play. When declamation has failed, the coldest 
 heart has wanned under its influence. Scenic decoration 
 is to the stage, what dress, complexion, and attitude are 
 
 ' Vol. ij p. 181. ' " Spectator," No. 24 
 
124 ethica: 
 
 to the wax model. It bestows on the most inanimate 
 trope something of the kindred animation of life. It is 
 under its vivifying influence that we crack our sides with 
 Falstaff, shudder with Macbeth, shiver with Lear, and give 
 our little tribute of a tear to the tomb of the Capulets. 
 Bottom, when he calculated that in the garb of despairing 
 Pyramus he could make his audience look to their eyes ; 
 Quince, when he guaranteed that Fluke, in a masque, 
 should by his roar be mistaken for Thisbe, or that Smug, 
 as Hon, should frighten duchess and ladies into fits — do 
 credit to their knowledge of human nature, if not to their 
 experience in theatrical machinery. A play, be it comedy 
 or tragedy, supported by the paraphernaha of the stage 
 or the wardrobe, is prepared for conquest and empire. 
 The action is assisted by the circumstances of locality. 
 The actors have nature and life on their side. Their 
 mien is aided by their attire, their gestures are realized 
 in their equipage. A piece thus armed and accoutred, is 
 far more powerful than the most elaborate epic. A dozen 
 perusals of such works as " Cain," or the " Morgante 
 Maggiore," would not have the effect of a single repre- 
 sentation of such a character as " Zaire" or " Dominick." 
 
 I have incidentally compared, as means to an end, 
 the French philosophy and the Enghsh drama ; I may 
 now add, that what Voltaire was to that philosophy, 
 Dryden was to the drama. 
 
 There is no character in English literature which can 
 be investigated with less of satisfaction than Dryden's. 
 The gloomy virulence of Swift may excite our pity or 
 our disgust. The malignity of Pope may shock our 
 benevolence; the unsubdued recklessness of Goldsmith 
 may provoke a gesture of indignation; but none of 
 them summon up those pecuhar feelings of irritation 
 with which we are accustomed to contemplate the cold 
 moral insusceptibiUty of the author of the " Kehgio 
 
OR CHABACTEEISTICS. 125 
 
 Laici." One of his satirists called him " forced Bayes." 
 The epithet exactly expresses a life spent in sinning and 
 repenting, in continually protesting against temptation 
 and continually submitting to it. 
 
 The career of Dryden commenced as a trimmer. 
 Just fresh from coUege, he occupied a corresponding 
 place in the household of his cousin, Sir Gilbert 
 Pickering, to that which Swift held in the estabhsh- 
 ment of Sir WiUiam Temple. When Cromwell died, 
 he paid homage to his memory in an ode which, had 
 he never written another line, would have left him a 
 reputation not above Spratt's or Walsh's ; and when 
 Cromwell's adumbration had disappeared before the rising 
 sun of Charles, he wrote the "Astraea Redux" to Charles's 
 welcome. There is some excuse for his versatility in this 
 instance at least. It may be doubted whether he was 
 ever other than a monarchist at heart ; whether, though 
 he may have submitted to dependence on repubhcan 
 relatives, he had ever been deeply imbued with republican 
 principles. It was more likely in his real sentiments 
 he was neutral; that he either did not trouble himself 
 about the matter at aU, or that if he did, he was con- 
 tent to maintain the same Laodicean lukewarmness that 
 Dorset maintained, when the House of Orange, expelled 
 the House of Stuart. It was not difficult either, for a 
 moderate monarchist, with some little concession, to 
 satisfy his prejudices with what vestiges of royalty 
 Cromwell had created around him. There was very 
 little of the Puritanism of other days left to shock the 
 most -delicate sensibility. The difference between living 
 under Cromwell and living under Charles during the 
 subsequent . years of Cromwell's reign, '^was very Httle 
 greater than the difference between wearing a rosette 
 under a Bourbon, and wearing the tricolour under a 
 Bonaparte. And the prejudices of a young man of five- 
 
126 ethica: 
 
 and-twenty, of such a temperament as Dryden's, would 
 hardly hays been regulated by the Herald's office. The 
 Protectorate was a useful measure in 1667. The Ee- 
 storation was an equally useful measure in 1660. Many 
 things had rendered it a necessary one. Ohver was 
 dead. His natural successor was incapable. Under 
 such circumstances, even the politician who had con- 
 sented to the death of the first Charles, if his system 
 of political ethics was a rational one, might have joined 
 his voice to the multitude's in proclaiming the second. 
 His pHancy, indeed, would be equivocal, but it certainly 
 would not be unjustifiable. On the other hand, it must 
 not be overlooked that pecuniary dependence has never 
 yet been considered as a stimulant to independence of 
 principle, and that Dryden's poverty throws a strong 
 suspicion on his tergiversation. 
 
 If any importance is to be attached to the satirical 
 hyperbole of ShadweU, that he took up with a lodging no 
 bigger than a pocket-glass, dined at a threepenny ordi- 
 nary enough to starve a vacation tailor, kept little com- 
 pany, went clad in homely drugget, drank wine as seldom 
 as a Kechabite, — it may be concluded that his privations 
 were not slight. There is another account, which asso- 
 ciates him with Herringman, a bookseller in the New 
 Exchange, as a preface writer and occasional drudge. On 
 this account his most recent commentator, Mr. Bell, seems 
 disposed to place but little dependence, to my mind with- 
 out sufficient reason. That Dryden's means were limited 
 may be seen by his subsequent efforts through life to 
 better them. And it appears to be just as reasonable 
 that he should be a hack to Herringman in his younger 
 days, when he was unknown to fame, as that he should 
 have been the Helot of Jacob Tonson when he could 
 afford to Hve in Gerard Street, and had a reputation 
 of thirty years' standing to faU back on. His circum- 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 127; 
 
 stances were not quite so destitute, perhaps^ as Prior's- 
 when Dorset lighted upon hini, Horace in hand, in the 
 corner of the Eummer Tavern ; but they were, I suspect, 
 very little better than Johnson's, when he took up his 
 abode in Woodstock Street ; or Eichardson's, when he 
 acted as assistant in Mr, John Wylde's shop at Stationers' 
 Hall. Whatever was his condition, a seat at the newly- 
 instituted Royal Society on the same bench with Chief 
 Justice Hale and Lord Keeper Guildford, obtaiaed through 
 the patronage of Sir Eobert Howard, and a marriage 
 into the family of the Earl of Berks, destined to turn 
 out as unhappy as Addison's union with the Countess 
 of Warwick, proved that the change of principle had 
 not been altogether without some advantages. 
 
 It is during this period of conjugal misery that his 
 biographer finds another instance of that strange admix- 
 ture of fickleness of judgment, of subservience of taste," 
 and insensibility of disposition almost amounting to indif- 
 ference to censure, that stamps with a spurious character 
 all the transactions of his hfe. 
 
 As if through a sort of reaction to the naked grandeur 
 of the "Paradise Lost," the old maxim that had been 
 current in Sir Philip Sidney's time, *' that the chief hfe 
 of modem versifying consisteth in the like sounding of 
 words," had been revived, and a consequent passion for 
 rhyme had invaded the realms of Parnassus on the 
 Restoration. Swift's receipt for making a good poem, 
 to try it as you would sound a pipkin, and if it rings well 
 on the knuckle to be sure there is no flaw in it, seems 
 to have been anticipated. Sidney mentions "rhyming 
 to death, as is said to be done in Ireland;" and it is 
 certain, had he hved a century and a half later, he might 
 have transferred the imputation to England. It had 
 become a fashionable vice, countenanced by such men 
 as Hall in his " Satires," and lasting, with considerable 
 
128 ethica: 
 
 strength, long enough to gain the consent of such men 
 as Goldsmith and Johnson. One of the few who made 
 a partial stand against the doctrine was Sir Eobert 
 Howard, Dryden's brother-in-law. Dryden himself pub- 
 lished an essay in direct opposition, wherein he main- 
 tained the superiority of rhyme over blank verse with the 
 common arguments in its favour of dignity, distinctness, 
 and emphasis. He did more. He wrote rhymmg trage- 
 dies, and plainly hmted at the defect of the "Hamlet" 
 and " Othello " in this respect. One step even yet 
 farther he took, unequalled iu audacity even by that 
 heau-esprit of the middle ages that Addison teUs us 
 turned the " MneiA" into rhyme for the sake of energy — • 
 he proclaimed his intention to Milton of tagging the 
 "Paradise Lost." This is evidently a mere matter of 
 hterary judgment, and the modification of it imphes no 
 moral inconsistency. Nevertheless, it is difl&cult to re- 
 frain from seeing a deficiency somewhere — a vitiation of 
 temperament, however shght, when we find Dryden, not 
 long after, ridicuhng the opinion he had maintained so 
 urgently, with a self-culpatory emphasis that a wretch 
 like Scarron would have been ashamed to use*, openly 
 renouncing his prejudice in a prologue to a play, and 
 with a most hardy forgetfuhaess of his own sacrilegious 
 attempt, publicly proclaiming that "barbarous nations 
 and more barbarous times debased the majesty of verse 
 to rhymes." 
 
 But these trifles are mere mint, annise, and cummin 
 compared to that weightier matter of his conversion to 
 the Romish persuasion, which has east a shadow across 
 his grave. 
 
 In the examination into the sincerity of that conver- 
 sion great stress has been laid by his enemies on the 
 " Eeligio Laici." To consider that document, however, 
 as the confession of a conscientious Protestant is absurd. 
 
OR CHAEAOTERISTICS. 129 
 
 Its sentiments, indeed, tell more against him than all 
 the events of his Hfe put together ; but their testimony is 
 generally extracted only on a different view. Its chief 
 characteristic is a wholesale denunciation of all sects and 
 of all religions whatever. It expresses the most total 
 adiaphorism. The whole drift of the piece reads as 
 nothing more than a satire, in very bare disguise, upon 
 every denomination of Christians. Heretics and infidels, 
 philosophical Deists, Protestant fathers, Hebrew rabbis, 
 Catholic patriarchs and Catholic councils, Socinians, 
 Presbyterians, Puritans, each and all are made to state 
 their arguments and creeds, and their arguments and 
 creeds are made to appear inconclusive and irrecon- 
 cilable. At length the climax is reached. The poet ends 
 by ironically admitting the convenience of that argu- 
 ment which had unsettled ChiUingworth, namely, that 
 it would be well if a church could be found whose 
 authority might be omnipotent and whose decisions might 
 be infallible : 
 
 " Such an omniscient church we wish indeed." 
 
 In the absence of this desideratum, the argument is 
 followed up by the only consistent conclusion it could 
 have led him to, " that," to use the words of Sir Walter 
 Scott, " the best way is to think as Httle as possible on 
 the subject" — a species of self-complacency not unlike 
 Ben Jonson's, when he excused his conversion to Popery 
 with the plea that " he took the priest's word." 
 
 " The unlettered Christian who believes in gross, 
 Plods on to heaven, and is never at a loss." 
 
 One would almost believe that such a doctrine had been 
 pilfered from the "Leviathan," and that its author had 
 imbibed of that fashionable Hobbism that sarcastically 
 said of the mysteries of rehgion, that " hke pills for the 
 Bick, swallowed whole, they have the virtue to cure ; but 
 
 9 
 
130 ethioa: 
 
 chewed, they are for the most part cast up without effect." 
 It was, in truth, a metrical ratification of the dogma of 
 St. Augustine : In duhiis lihertas. The apology for 
 turning Eomanist for the sake of those *' helps to 
 heaven," as Johnson calls them, and which indeed 
 would have made Johnson himself a Papist, according 
 to his own confession, had not *' an obstinate rationahty" 
 prevented him, is plainly forestalled by the contempt 
 Dryden expresses for "such brushwood aid" as Pope, 
 Councils, and Tradition. 
 
 This method of criticising the poem, and accounting 
 for the principles adapted to it, was no novelty, even at 
 the date of its pubhcation. His enemies need no other 
 words to condenm him than those Sir Walter Scott used 
 to justify him : " It is remarkable that his friends do 
 not seem to have considered the Beligio Laid as expres- 
 sive of his decided sentiments ; for Charles Blount, a 
 noted free-thinker, in consequence of this very work, wrote 
 a Deistical treatise in prose, bearing the same title, and 
 ascribed with great testimony of respect to his most 
 honoured friend, John Dryden, Esquire." It might have 
 been added that on this very worh the Earl of Eoscommon 
 founded a poem, which the reader is left to consider at 
 choice either an impious parody or parallel. "Dryden 
 did not, therefore," adds Sir Walter Scott, in another 
 place, " abandon the Church of England for that of Kome, 
 but was converted to the CathoUc Church from a state of 
 infidelity, or rather pyrrhonism." Accordingly, if so 
 lenient a critic as Sir Walter admits that he was an 
 infidel at one time, it is no very harsh judgment that 
 would keep him an infidel at another. If he was a 
 Protestant only for the sake of outward submission — " to 
 my own Church submitting still" — there can be no harm 
 in supposing him a Catholic for the sake of personal 
 convenience. A bad Protestant can suffer no injustice 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 131 
 
 when he is made a bad Catholic. That his external 
 conformity should plead his Protestantism is no more to 
 be inferred, than it is that Johnson was a CathoHc 
 because he prayed for the soul of his wife, and took no 
 sugar in his tea on Fridays. If Dryden confessed, as he 
 did confess in the Preface to this very piece, that he 
 was by nature iucUned to scepticism in moral philo- 
 sophy, it may be reasonably concluded that he would 
 not be naturally disinchned to scepticism in religious 
 philosophy. 
 
 Mr. Hallam was of opinion that a man who could 
 reason so well on one side in the Eeligio Laid might 
 have reasoned himself into the sentiments of the " Hind 
 and Panther." That the ratiocination of the former 
 poem expresses anything more than the timorous in- 
 decision of a disposition deeply enamoured of the " non 
 licuit," it is difficult to see. On the best construction 
 the excuse would only leave him a rationaUst, and it 
 must be confessed that it is far easier to believe in the 
 sincerity of a convert from one extreme to the other— of a 
 convert like Rochester or Count Struensee, than to attach 
 any reality to the conversion or rather the conformity of 
 such a character. 
 
 The imputation of scepticism, it will be remembered, 
 was not confined to Dryden. Of those Who on the 
 Restoration had trimmed between the excess of heat and 
 the excess of cold, between the torrid zone of Puritanism 
 and the frigid zone of Orthodoxy, numbers had fallen 
 into an atmosphere of philosophic serenity verging on the 
 temperature of "Deism." ' Such men of fashion as 
 Wilmot and ViUiers were after their kind mere idle 
 scoffers of all reHgion. But even grave statesmen hke 
 Mulgrave, Shaftesbury, Temple, and Halifax, were sus- 
 pected of regarding the mysteries of the faith with very 
 little more of reverence than the courtiers of JuUan 
 
 9—2 
 
132 . ETHICA : 
 
 regarded the machinery of the Paganism they were 
 engaged in reyiving. The men of letters indulged in the 
 same speculative tendencies. To mention only one, 
 Wycherley had been converted from Protestantism to 
 Eomanism, back again from Romanism to Protestantism, 
 and reconverted so as to die a Romanist. In the 
 next generation this infidelity spread, and produced at 
 various times such philosophers as Bohngbroke and 
 Shaftesbury, such priests as Atterhury and Swift, and 
 such poets as Garth and the author of the " Essay on 
 Man." 
 
 The charge of venal apostacy is not brought against 
 a man whose tenor of life would at once plead his 
 honesty. The opinions of his contemporaries were de- 
 cidedly against him. Prior, in his imitation of Juvenal's 
 seventh Satire, clearly considers him a renegade. So did 
 Gray. Stillingfleet talked of his changing his reUgion for 
 bread. The testimony of the town, such as it was represented 
 in Tom Brown or Ned Ward, is worth nothing. Nor 
 was it the only time in his existence that he had been 
 guilty of betraying a very suspicious lukewarmness on 
 subjects on which men are apt to think most, and to have 
 their convictions the strongest. He had been all his 
 hfe saying or doing something which the next moment 
 compelled him to retract or repent. The tact with 
 which, at the Restoration, he contrived to shp out of one 
 political creed into another, has been already noticed. 
 Every one knows the defects of his Comedies in common 
 with the pieces of the day. In the ode to Mrs. Anne 
 Kilhgrew, the noblest, says Dr. Johnson, in the language, 
 but which in truth is so full of conceits and extravagance, 
 that Crashaw would not have owned it, occur these lines, 
 the overflowing, apparently, of a conscience inflamed 
 against the sin they decry : — 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 133 
 
 " O gracious God ! how far have we 
 Profaned thy heavenly gift of poesie — 
 Made prostitute and profligate the Muse, 
 Debased to each obscene and impious use ! 
 O wretched we! why were we hurried down 
 
 This lubiique and adulterous age, 
 To increase the streaming ordures of the stage?" 
 
 This penitential apostrophe was written in 1685. Five 
 years after, " Don Sebastian " was brought out, with an 
 Epilogue too coarse to be hinted at. In the satire of 
 " Absalom and Achitophel " he constrained his feehngs 
 so as to exhibit a phlegmatic indifference ahke in punish- 
 ing his enemies and vindicating his friends. Once, 
 indeed, when Settle and Shadwell were so troublesome as 
 to give him absolute pain, he managed to sharpen his 
 bluntness into indignation, and under the names of 
 Doeg, Og and MacFlecknoe, to do for them, what 
 Boileau was doing for Cotin and Chapelain. Even when 
 his literary vanity was justly wounded, after he had been 
 maltreated by Rochester, after Eochester had out of mahce 
 set up Crowne at court, at the expense of his reputation 
 and in defiance of his office, the poet-laureate had the easy 
 good nature, or rather the want of spirit, to tender his ser- 
 vices to write an epilogue for the masque of his rival. Is 
 it likely that a man of such a temperament, almost em- 
 bodying Horace Walpole's definition of Lord Carteret — 
 a man of no sensations — who never exhibited any par- 
 ticular prejudices, or any particular preferences; who 
 was considered, by his companions, "the mildest crea- 
 ture known ; " who was too languid even to exact any 
 pay from the very tenants who occupied his house, and 
 who was so heedless of his fame as to tell the Enghsh 
 people, in his " Life of Francis Xavier," how the Apostle 
 of the Indies had raised the dead, how his crucifix had 
 sweated, how a crab had picked up out of the sea the 
 saint's cross, and a thousand other absurd fabrications. 
 
134 ETHIOA : 
 
 should have eared much about his theological reputation, 
 or his theological principles ? Was it probable that a 
 playwright, who had been bred in a profligate Court, who 
 had led a profligate life, who had employed his youth in 
 ridiculing the rehgion of his manhood, and who now at 
 the last employed his manhood in ridicuHng the rehgion 
 of his youth, should have been as invuhierable as Andrew 
 Marvel ? Is it unreasonable to suspect the courtier, who 
 had written a satire on Eomanism when Romanism was 
 in disgrace, and who had become a convert to Eomanism 
 when Romanism was on the throne, who composed the 
 " Spanish Friar " in the time of Charles, and the " Hind 
 and Panther " in the time of James ? If it is added 
 to this, that Dryden was miserably poor when Charles 
 died and James succeeded — so poor, that the penetrating 
 eye of Hume has detected the effects of hunger and haste 
 even in his "Fables" — that his poverty was increased 
 by his Protestantism, that he could gain nothing by 
 railing at James now ; that he might, and actually did, 
 gain a good deal by taking James's part ; it must be 
 owned that his detractors have presumptions strong 
 enough almost to produce conviction. Of anything 
 approaching to documentary evidence they have been 
 deprived by Mr. BeU's discovery of an exchequer war- 
 rant, bearing date the 6th of May, 1684, and authorizing, 
 together with the payment of four years' salary in arrear, 
 an additional payment of one hundred pounds a year. 
 This transaction must be at once acknowledged to over- 
 throw the common theory which made James the original 
 author of the "Bonus." "It is manifest," says Mr. 
 BeU, " that the extra annuity granted by James was not 
 a new grant, but the resumption of an annuity granted 
 by his predecessor." " The pension," adds that editor, 
 "was resumed on the 4th of March, 1685-6." For a whole 
 year, accordingly, Dryden remained on the original salary 
 
OR CHARAOTBRISTICS. 135 
 
 of the laureatesMp. " The anonymous defence of the 
 Duchess of York's paper, in which Dryden for the first 
 time espoused the doctrines of Eome, appeared late in 
 1686." 
 
 I am not disposed to have much sympathy with that 
 species of adjudication, which would pretend to hmit the 
 fluctuations and hesitations, which precede and accom- 
 pany the harrowing throes of a great mind, in its pro- 
 cesses of conversion, or change, to the exact chronological 
 epoch of a day or a month. No impartial ohserver of 
 Dryden's character would be likely to hazard his con- 
 victions either for or against him, in such a question, on 
 the conclusion drawn by Mr. Bell, even if that conclu- 
 sion were drawn from strictly accurate premises, which it 
 is not. The defence of the Duchess of York's paper 
 was not the first time that Dryden, by impUcation, con- 
 fessed his apostacy. According to Mr. Bell's own 
 account, a translation of " Varilla's Heresies," made by 
 the King's express desire, was entered, for Dryden, at 
 Stationers' Hall, in April, 1686. Whether the few weeks 
 that intervened between the date of entry and the date 
 of the resumption of the grant were employed in the 
 contemplation of the subject, there is nothing to show. 
 That Dryden must have been confirmed in his views ere 
 James demanded the translation, is hardly to be dis- 
 puted ; unless, indeed, we spht the distinction between 
 the man and the officer, and, as in the case of the Saxon 
 family, where a very good Roman Cathohc king may 
 make a very good Protestant Elector, admit that James 
 was content to beheve that a Protestant poet possessed 
 the materials for making a Cathohc historian. 
 
 Independently, however, of such evidence, other in- 
 ferences, founded on the sure basis of logic and history, 
 tend to suppress any inclination to place a charitable 
 construction on Dryden's motives. It is hardly credible 
 
136 ETHICA : 
 
 that James would have bestowed a gratuity where he did 
 not expect an equivalent. His meanness and parsimony- 
 had passed into a proverb. Already he had rephed to 
 Dryden's appeal for patronage and assistance, by cutting 
 him out of his annual butt of sack. That he should 
 suddenly bestow his bounty on the man whom he had 
 robbed of his right, without some sordid hope of requital, 
 is too ungenial to his character to be received. Dryden, 
 it is weU known, had given serious offence to James by 
 caricaturing his rehgion. What voluntary inducement 
 James had to purchase an enemy, to repay insult with a 
 pension, is not easy to conjecture. Why James should 
 have refused the grant at one time, and conceded it after 
 the expiration of a year, passes my comprehension. 
 The excuse that the hst of Charles's pensioners was too 
 formidable a document to be considered in less time, is 
 not worth a moment's consideration. If it did not take 
 a month to retract a perquisite, it surely need not have 
 taken twelve months to confer a favour. The truth 
 seems to be, Dryden found it hard to hve out of the 
 atmosphere of the Court. His needy pen needed pa- 
 tronage. His abUities were such that they could not 
 have escaped the eye of James, who was at that moment 
 in want of a champion to defend his faith against the 
 faith of Stillingfleet and Burnet. The result was, the 
 poet was compelled to submit to the same fate that many, 
 equally great, received at the hands of the same master. 
 Father Saunders had been sent to him, and had found 
 hhn less obdurate than Doctor Kadcliffe.* Or he had 
 been closeted with James, just as Lobb, Howe, Baxter, 
 
 ' Dr. Radcliffe thus ivrites in reply to one of the numerous missionaries 
 sent to corrupt him :— " You mistake in considering my opinions more 
 biassed than the generaHty of mankind. I had one of your new convert's 
 poems in my hands just now. You know them to be Mr. Dryden's, and 
 on what occasion they were written," &c. 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 137 
 
 and Kiffin were after him ; and he had fallen, just as 
 LoLb and others were doomed to fall. He consented 
 to write for the creed which he had abused, and 
 among the firstfruits of his consent had been " Varilla's 
 Heresies." 
 
 The steadfastness with which he adhered to his re- 
 ligion after the patronage of James was arrested by the 
 succession of WUliam, proves nothing. The most har- 
 dened villain has some compunction. No inan would 
 betray a first error by a second. Few men, even more 
 obtuse than Dryden, would-be renegades twice in their 
 lives. Added to this, it was not at all certain that 
 James's expulsion was a final one ; that William would 
 not occupy an episodical page in Enghsh history, as 
 Cromwell had done before him. There were plenty of 
 circumstances occurring around to justify such a con- 
 clusion. The pohtical horizon was dark with omens of 
 ill for the usurper. Loyal fingers still squeezed the 
 symbohc orange in the chocolate-houses of St. James's, 
 and loyal lips still toasted the King over the Water; 
 while hearts beat high with the hope that James would 
 return to cherish his own again. " If such an event 
 should occur, then," reasoned Dryden, "it must occur 
 soon for my benefit. If it is not to occur, then the 
 infirmities of age will soon put me beyond the necessity 
 of needing it." And the explanation is in some degree 
 countenanced by the poet's refusing to take the oaths. 
 He would not commit himself with the new king, that he 
 might not forfeit the favour of the old. By this course 
 he saved his reputation, and eventually might save his 
 salary. 
 
 It affords a certain rehef to turn from Dryden the 
 Laureate to Dryden the Poet. The " Hind and Panther," 
 critically speakmg, offers as good a sample of his poetical 
 attainments as could be found. Its pecuharities have 
 
138 ETHIOA : 
 
 made it familiar to most readers of poetry, where its 
 intrinsic merits would have faUed. It is a clear account 
 in verse of the differences which separate the Church of 
 England from the Church of Kome, and a charitable 
 attempt at reconcihng these differences. The Church of 
 Eome is represented under a simihtude borrowed, I con- 
 jecture, from the poem of Solomon, a mUk-white hind, 
 doomed or condenmed to death, yet fated not to die. 
 The Church of England is symbohzed by the panther, 
 the finest creature of the spotted kind, too good to be a 
 beast of prey. The destruction of the hind is the object 
 of the beasts of the field : the Atheistical ape, the Ana- 
 baptist boar, the Unitarian fox, the Presbyterian wolf, 
 the Independent bear ; — ^her only defence the kingly 
 guardianship of the British lion. The chief characteristic 
 of the piece is the united appeal it makes to the imagina- 
 tion and the reason, and the curiosity which the treat- 
 ment of an ecclesiastical disquisition, more adapted to 
 the province of a Bellarmin or a Chilhngworth, in a 
 poetic dress, naturally excites. Its chief praise is that it 
 possesses as little poetical extravagance as possible, and 
 as much poetical harmony as logic is capable of, that 
 the expressions of the poet are as musical as the thoughts 
 of the philosopher wUl allow. The chief defect, on the 
 other hand, is in the machinery. The media of commu- 
 nication are wholly disproportioned to the importance of 
 the subject. The conductors, so to speak, are too insig- 
 nificant to suit the importance of the sentiments they 
 are intended to convey. To borrow the sarcasm of 
 Goldsmith, " the little fishes are made to talk too much 
 like whales." "A fable," says Dr. Johnson, "which" 
 exhibits two beasts talking theology, appears at once 
 fuU of absurdity." " The absurdity of the plan," repeats 
 Lord Macaulay, " is obvious." The wits of the day were 
 so much amused at the idea, that they jeeringly assigned 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 139 
 
 the circulation of the poem among hand-hoxes, the 
 waste-paper baskets of coffee-houses, the factory depart- 
 ments of trunk-makers' shops, and the parcel-rooms of 
 Chancery Lane. Two of them. Prior and Montague, 
 whom Dryden in the day of his sovereignty had often 
 distinguished kindly among the novices who crowded 
 round his arm-chair in the balcony at Wills', put their 
 heads together, and produced a travestie entitled, " The 
 City Mouse and Country Mouse." The plot, it is true, 
 was sufficiently open to banter, but it may be doubted 
 whether such unmitiga,ted condemnation is perfectly 
 justifiable. The question would be, not whether Dry- 
 den's fable is unreasonable, but whether any zoological 
 fable is reasonable ? It is evident a hind cannot talk ; 
 but if the laws of fiction allow it to talk in one place, it 
 is no transgression of those laws for it to talk in 
 another. What the subject of its conversation may be, 
 as far as affecting the reahzation of the metaphor is 
 concerned, is very little to the purpose. It does not at 
 all influence the fictitiousness of the allegory that the 
 animal talks in syllables and dissyllables on one occa- 
 sion and uses trisyllables and polysyllables on another. 
 No sensible person's imagination is hkely to be beguiled, 
 more or less, because it employs the language of the 
 nursery in La Fontaine or Pilpay, and makes use of the 
 language of Eheims or Pouay in Dryden. A child would 
 hardly be seduced into the belief that a fox could talk, 
 because it discusses the inconvenience of tails, instead of 
 holding a dialogue on the subject of transubstantiation 
 and papal infallibility. It might not be possible to ex- 
 culpate Dryden from the charge of exaggeration, or the 
 injudicious extension of allegorical licence ; but it would 
 be easy to show that after all the charge is founded, not 
 on the general laws of criticism, such as those which 
 regulate the flights of the poet, but on the unsettled 
 
140 ETHICA : 
 
 principles of an irrational predilection. It should "seem 
 in reality, that the author of " The Hind and Panther " 
 was as authorized to dictate the quaUty of his animals' 
 colloquial powers, as the author of " Gulliver's Travels " 
 was to prescribe the dimensions of his men's statures, or 
 the length of their Uves. 
 
 After all, what critics have denominated the gro- 
 tesqueness of the fable, may have shown the art of the 
 fabuUst. Dryden was too keen an observer of the world 
 not to know that the wit of a dialogue has often fallen 
 martyr to the dulness of a plot. Instead, therefore, of 
 adopting a famihar method, he devised an expedient 
 entirely novel. Instead of a conversation between a 
 good-humoured priest and an inflammable parson, in 
 Chaucer's manner, we have a dialogue between a gentle 
 Hind and surly Panther. The policy of his choice in 
 adopting the hind for the type of "his Church must not 
 be overlooked. By this representation he exhibited her, 
 not in the glory of dominion, but with the humility of 
 subjection. By making her simple, weak, and persecuted, 
 he appealed to the sympathy of opponents chivalrously 
 quick to succour the helpless and avenge the oppressed. 
 In taking away from her strength, he diminished her 
 weakness; and when he made her harmless, he made 
 her seductive. 
 
 The learning infused into " The Hind and Panther," 
 bespeaks its author's principal poetical defect, the ex- 
 cess of the intellectual element, to the disparagement of 
 the fancy. Throughout his life the reasoning faculty 
 predominated to a prejudicial degree. This was, doubt- 
 less, owing a good deal to the education it had received, 
 and to the crisis m poetical hterature in which his lot 
 had been cast. 
 
 The extinction of chivalry, and the decay of the 
 Provencal, had bequeathed to Europe a corrupt and 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTIOS. 141 
 
 degenerate code of embellisliment, whose peculiarity, 
 nurtured in the parKaments of Love, consisted in ex- 
 pressing hyperbolical passions in hyperbohcal sentiments 
 and language. It is to this root that is to be traced 
 that vicious style, reproved by the muse of " Filicaja," 
 and designated by Boileau as "clinquant," which produced 
 the solemn triflings of the Seicentisti and Petrarchisti in 
 Italy, flourished under the name of Cultismo in Spain, 
 and under the protection of the Pleiades in France, 
 developed itself finally in that style -pi-ecieuse, which 
 has ennobled Mohere, and for ever degraded the fair 
 inmates of the Hotel de EambouiUet. For the morbid 
 appearance of these concetti in Enghsh hterature, Dr. 
 Johnson holds Marini responsible. But it is certain 
 that, long before the time of either Marini or AcheUini, 
 the taste for undue ornament may be traced by the 
 antiquarian in the pages of Surrey, Wyatt, and Chaucer, 
 and in the fugitive pieces prior to Chaucer. In Eliza- 
 beth's reign the plague became systematized, and the 
 beauty who had not been a scholar of Lily, or could 
 not parley Euphuism, could not hope for a smile or a tap 
 on the cheek from the Eoyal pupil of Ascham. Nor was 
 it otherwise than congenial at the Court of the monarch 
 whose fondness for a good quibble was far more notori- 
 ous than his fondness for a good sermon, and whose 
 goodwill was purchasable by any lawned priest or privy 
 councillor that had his quirk or conundrum in readiness 
 for the pulpit or the bench. The absurdity of this " new 
 Enghsh " can still raise a smile in the caricature Shak- 
 speare has left of it in his Don Adriano de Armado, and 
 Scott in his Sir Pierce Shafton. Its peculiar features 
 are to this day easily portrayed. Poetry, under its 
 influence, ceased to be alluring, and became laborious. 
 False sentiment was overloaded with false wit. Verse 
 became the vehicle not of affording pleasure, but of 
 
142 ETHIOA : 
 
 displaying learning. Alliterations, puns, forced con- 
 ceits, bombastic allusions, heterogeneous ideas violently 
 associated, abstruse illustrations, curious contrasts, hy- 
 perbolical comparisons, familiar conceptions clothed ia 
 monstrous ambiguities, natural phenomena spoiled by 
 unnatural combinations: all these features may be dis- 
 tinguished by any one who will be at the pains to 
 glance at the works of Cowley, Donne, and Crashaw, 
 or at Johnson's criticism on them.^ Under this incon- 
 gruous system the dignity of the grandest figure was 
 made ridiculous by the worthlessness of its ornaments. 
 Hence, the poets excited ridicule where they meant to 
 extract admiration. We feel disposed to regard them as 
 we would regard a Patagonian, whose splendid Kmbs are 
 decked out in glass beads and metal buttons, and we 
 forget the natural grandeur of his structure in wondering 
 at the grotesqueness of his costume. In perusing their 
 works, we are reminded, against our wiU, of the Doctor's 
 feast in SmoUett's " Peregrine Pickle." There are birds 
 no rarer than a goose or a barn-door fowl, but they are 
 so disguised in pepper, lovage, coriander, oU, mint, 
 rue, and assafoetida, that we lose at once aU taste for the 
 meat and all rehsh for the condiment. Nor is the super- 
 abundance of the article any apology for its rankness. 
 Their imagination keeps a perpetual feast, their wit holds 
 a continual carniyal. They missed the golden mean be- 
 tween gratifying the readers' taste and disgusting them 
 with repletion. Nausea, at length, supervenes. What 
 one's stomach cannot digest, one's appetite loathes. The 
 result is, we are compelled to treat their generosity as 
 
 • There is an ingenious criticism on the vices of Euphuism in the 62nd 
 Number of the " Spectator," — a paper -which one would have been disposed 
 to think Johnson had seen before -writing his review of Cowley's works, had 
 he not, in a letter published for the fli-st time in the " Gentleman's Magazine" 
 for 1784, erroneously declared that Cowley had never received any critical 
 examination. 
 
OR CHARAOTBEISTICS. 143 
 
 Johnson, by way of reproof to his extravagance, treated 
 poor Goldsmith's third course, refrain from tasting it. 
 
 It was this taint that Dryden inherited, and though 
 there is a vast difference between his earher pieces and 
 his later, between his "Astrsea Eedux" and his "Bri- 
 tannia Eediviva," yet the infection clung to him from 
 first to last. His definition of wit, as " a propriety of 
 words and thoughts adapted to the subject," and which, 
 as Addison observed, would have made Euclid the great- 
 est wit that ever put pen to paper, was likely to mislead 
 him. Accordingly, in aU his congratulatory poems, in 
 those pieces which appeal rather to the feelings than the 
 intellect, the effects of his erroneous theory appear con- 
 tinually in the form of a most offensive association of 
 congruities and resemblances. The feature wiU explain 
 itself best by exempUfication, and the best example is the 
 ode already cited, the "Britannia Eediviva." The sub- 
 ject of it is characteristic of the period, the birth of 
 the Pretender. The images employed in it are ecstatic 
 enough to have gratified the most' vitiated moments of 
 Martial or Ovid. There is scarcely an expression which 
 a reader of poetry would not wish to see expunged. 
 Sometimes the babe, the innocent object of the rhapsody, 
 is a pagan divinity ; sometimes he is a Christian divinity. 
 Sometimes he is compared to the infant Child of Beth- 
 lehem, sometimes to the God whom Crete refused to 
 hold. Sometimes he is a heathen hero, sometimes a 
 mediaeval prince; sometimes he is Henry, sometimes 
 Edward, sometimes Eichard. At one moment he is the 
 manna, the celestial bread, at another Moses himself. 
 Now he is drawn down by holy violence from heaven to 
 make us EngHshmen again, now he is deposited in a 
 sacred cradle and delivered over to the keeping of seraphs 
 with strict orders to take possession and secure the line, 
 and to beware of the .republican dragon in particular, 
 
144 ETHICA : 
 
 and republicans in general, who are sometimes snakes 
 with, forked tongues, and sometimes Jews. The only 
 sentiment in it which most people would be disposed to 
 endorse, is the confession of its author, 
 
 " That the furious transport of the news 
 Had to prophetic madness fired the muse — 
 Madness ungovernable, uninspired." 
 
 And yet it is to this muse we are indebted for the Fables, 
 the " Ode to St. CeciHa" and the "Alexander's Feast." 
 
 It is, however, this remarkable inequahty in the works 
 of Dryden, individually and collectively, which must 
 strike every one who passes from his panegyric on 
 Lord Hastings to his "Medal," and from his "Annus 
 MirabiUs" to his " Absalom and Achitophel." Some one 
 has said: "I have seen Tintoret now equal to Titian, 
 now less than Tintoret." In tracking Dryden from his 
 chrysahs state through aU his gradations to the fuU 
 expansion of the perfect man, the same reflection 
 suggests itself at every step. 
 
 In his versification the contempt of regularity amounts 
 to an absolute blemish. Lines half finished precede lines 
 with two or three syllables to spare. A rude sentiment 
 prolonged in a gigantic Alexandrine jostles the dehcate 
 sweetness of its neighbour, and a slovenly figure inserted 
 at hazard destroys the beauty of a trope that agrees as 
 ill with it as 
 
 " SappWs diamonds with her dirty smock." 
 
 His muse indeed was graphically said to put on soiled 
 linen with her diamonds. Dryden, in fact, wanted a 
 little of that quality of which Pope possessed too much. 
 He despised the labour of the file, and preferred robust 
 rudeness to poHshed grace. 
 
 Measuring his satires by the exaggerated fulsomeness 
 of his panegyrics, a casual observer, ignorant of his real 
 nature, would probably conjecture them to be the most 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 145 
 
 virulent in the language. But they afe, in fact, the 
 most temperate. His adulation is as flagrant as his 
 ahuse is gentle. His shafts are never winged with the 
 fire of implacable resentment. Like the fury of Armida 
 in the act of drawing her bow on Rinaldo, there is a 
 mingled expression of reluctance that would almost seem 
 to ask 
 
 " That all its vehemence be spent in air." 
 
 In his " Medal," there is none of that violent personality 
 which the author of the ' ' Dunciad ' ' inflicted on his victims. 
 In consequence of this moderation, his pohtical satires 
 read more Uke pamphlets, and pamphlets far more im- 
 partial than some of Dean Swift's. Owing to the different 
 feehngs with which he took up his pen to blame or to 
 praise, and the great contrast in the emphasis he bestowed 
 in his censure and his encomium, the historical impar- 
 tiahty of his portraits is confined but to one half of 
 them. Few for instance would be able to acknowledge 
 in the Godlike David, with his "native mercy," his 
 "clemency," his "tenderness of blood," and his " manly 
 temper," the effigy of that monarch who cheated his 
 tradesmen to enrich his concubines, sold his country for 
 gold, sht his subjects' noses, and cut off his councillors' 
 heads. On the other hand, in analyzing his characters, 
 it must be observed, Dryden differed from the old school 
 of Satirists as a skilful anatomist differs from a butcher. 
 In dissecting his subjects, he is careful that he does not 
 mawl'them. He kills his victims, so to speak, according 
 to rule. His deUneations accordingly are as much 
 superior to the grotesque combinations of Butler, as the 
 productions of a scientific caricaturist are to the slate 
 drawings of a child. All his men are human beings, not 
 Chinese figures. It would be easy to illustrate this 
 peculiar skill of his, in keeping rigidly on this side burles- 
 que, by a reference to the character of his Achitophel. 
 
 10 
 
146 ETHICA : 
 
 An unexperienced hand might have expected that the 
 poet would not have spared his calumniating powers in 
 describing Shaftesbury. But no such thing. There is 
 no exaggeration of malice* He is represented as iio 
 extraordinary monster. Cicero's |)6rtrait of Cataline is 
 hyperbole in comparison* So is Sallust's. Those who 
 rise from contemplating Butler's portrait of the same 
 individual will be amazed at the contrast. In Dryden's, 
 we look in vain for the wretch we are accustomed to see 
 in Butler's delineation. In Dryden's, we can find no " bell- 
 wether," no "old canting wizard/' no "subtle baffler of 
 the law," no "fatal firebrand," no "abomination." He 
 is neither " hell's journeyman," nor " rebel," nor the 
 " cacofage of the age," nor "the Sanford of the public 
 stage," nor "the quintessence of all that's naught," nor 
 " the broacher of schism." Nor do we recognize that 
 "the devil's in him," or that he is " the tap of deviHsm," 
 or that "treason, like dropsy humours, flows out of hJm," 
 or yet that " he's too cunning to be caught/' or that 
 " he loves the rump with aU his gizzard." 
 
 On the contrary, in '* Achitophel " we have no in- 
 carnation of iniquity, no creature altogether abominable, 
 to whom Cethagus or Clodius would have been as angels 
 of hght, but simply a man whose ambition had over- 
 topped his prudence; a "restless, bold, and turbulent 
 statesman ;" a statesman of the tribe of the Wolseys, 
 the Essexes, and Lauds, and by no means the worst of 
 his tribe. Added to this, in the opposite balance, we 
 have a judge unbribed, unsought, swift of despatch, and 
 easy of access. The whole portrait together makes up 
 nothing more terrible than a courtier as giddy as 
 Simderland, and a judge less venial than Bacon. Nor 
 is this impartiahty without its poHcy. In extenuating 
 nought and setting down nought in malice, in preserving 
 all -the hghts and shades of character common to human 
 
OB CHABACTBRISTICS. 147 
 
 nature, he has insured at once the attention and the 
 sympathy of the reader. It is by these alternate changes, 
 by this subtle mixture of good and evil, of candour and 
 deceit, of vice and virtue, of laudable traits and damnable 
 propensities, by the very inconsistency, in a word, that 
 he has silcceeded in Satirizing the original. Nothing is 
 more contemptible in the minor satirists than the habit of 
 creating an image, fembodying in it all the deadly sins, as 
 the Hindoos do their Ehlidderi, or the Persians their 
 Arimanes, and calUng it, Man.^ 
 
 It is, perhaps, one of the principal ingredients in 
 Milton's success, that in drawing his portraits he did not 
 make his imagiaation body forth the form of things 
 unknown. His moderation is a happy one. By not 
 personifying his characters with the minuteness of Dante, 
 he has avoided the ill effects of familiarity. By imparting 
 to them, nevertheless, a human signification, he took 
 the best means of ensuring human synapathy. By 
 enduing the abstract with the quahties of the concrete, 
 though with no definite forms; by giving to his spirits 
 "head, eye, ear, intellect, sense," and attributing to 
 them " colour, shape, and size," he reaches not only 
 the head but the heart of the spectator. The repre- 
 sentation becomes so vivid, that the- spectator not only 
 comprehends but feels. It is remarkable how MUton's 
 anxiety to avoid the common imputation of having 
 exaggerated the fiendish character of his fiends, shows 
 itself wherever it reasonably can-^to such an extent, 
 indeed, as to lead Arnold to reject his Satan for the 
 Mephistopheles. Thus, in spealdng of the loyalty of 
 Satan's subjects, he writes : — 
 
 " For neither do the spirits damned, 
 Lose all their virtue." 
 
 ' His connection with Lord Shaftesbury, I conjecture, accounts for his 
 favourable view of him. Shaftesbury had married one daughter of Lord 
 Spencer, and Drydeu's brothet-in-Iaw had married another. 
 
 10—2 
 
148 • ethica: 
 
 And again, when some of the Stygian seraphim sing, — ■ 
 
 " The harmony — 
 — ^W'hat could it less, when spirits immortal sing ? — 
 Suspended hell, and took with ravishment 
 The thronging audience." 
 
 In losing heaven, an ordinary poet would have made 
 such subjects lose all their heavenly attributes. 
 
 As Milton's name has been mentioned in connection 
 with Dryden's, it may be perhaps allowed to indulge in a 
 little critical conjecture which concerns both. 
 
 No one who has read the "Paradise Lost," and 
 the " Absalom and Achitophel," with attention or con- 
 secutively, can weU have helped observing the intense 
 likeness of language and of sentiment that pervades 
 certain portions of the two. It would not be a hard 
 matter to search out single features which Milton has 
 ascribed to one or other of the Stygian conclave, and 
 which, put together, should form the portrait of Dryden's 
 "Achitophel." Satan's half-penitent soliloquy, and the 
 latter part of Absalom's first reply to the tempter, have 
 much in common. But here is a coincidence that with 
 some critics would pass for a plagiarism. The first 
 extract is taken from Satan's awful apostrophe to the 
 deity, one of the most splendid pieces of that splendid 
 composition : — 
 
 " Oh ! had his powerful destiny ordained 
 Me some inferior angel, I had stood 
 Then happy : no unbounded hope had raised 
 Ambition — " 
 
 Dryden says of Absalom — 
 
 "Unblamed of life, ambition set aside. 
 Not stained with cruelty, not puff'd with pride. 
 How happy had he been, if destiny 
 Had higher placed his birth, or not so high." 
 
 The similarity is, to say the least, singular, and when 
 it is remembered that Dryden had always candidly re- 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 149 
 
 echoed Marvel's admiration of Milton, that he viewed his 
 poem with the eye of a critic, and that he formed one of 
 his own poems on the "Paradise Lost," the coincidence 
 may not be altogether unaccountable. 
 
 Dr. Johnson has taken upon himself to find fault with 
 the abrupt termination of the " Absalom and Achitophel." 
 " Who can forbear to think of an enchanted castle," he 
 writes " with a wide moat and lofty battlements, walls of 
 marble and gates of brass, which vanish at once into air 
 v/hen the destined knight blows his horn before it ? " It 
 is curious that a scheme so obvious should have required 
 comment. Some critics have laboriously endeavoured to 
 vindicate Dryden from Johnson's censure, on the ground 
 that the poem is not a romance, and that the author of 
 the poem was consequently not governed by the laws 
 that regulate romantic compositions. Others, more 
 reasonably, have maintained that the sudden conclusion 
 of his story was not purely gratuitous ; that the author, 
 writing on historical subjects, was compelled to bound his 
 imagination by the present, and, shunning conjecture, to 
 keep to fact. The truth is, however, Dryden himself 
 solved the problem when he wrote in his preface, "Who 
 knows but the reconcihation of Absalom and David may 
 yet come to pass? Things were not brought to an 
 extremity when I left the story. There seems room left 
 yet for composure. The devil himself may be saved. The 
 true end of satire, is the amendment of vice by correc- 
 tion." 
 
 " He durst not then too deeply probe the wound, 
 As hoping still the nobler parts were sound ; 
 But strove with anodynes to assuage the smart, 
 And mildly thus his medicines did impart." 
 
 By not painting Absalom as irrecoverably lost, he left 
 him grounds for penitence and for hope. By delicately 
 drawing the veil of concealment over the future, by leaving 
 his portrait half drawn, he stimulated his repentance by 
 
150 ethioa: 
 
 palliating his crimes. The effect of the rehgious nomen- 
 clature was curious. The names of Ahsalom and Achi- 
 tophel became the popular ahases for the court. The 
 wits and parsons especially, made capital of the title. 
 For some time broadsheets and sermons, full of pointed 
 adaptations from tie story of Samuel, issued from coffee- 
 house and pulpit. Answers and counter-satires came 
 from the Whig pamphleteers in abundance. For months 
 the town was deluged with reflections on the author of 
 " Absalom and Achitophel," with ironical panegyrics on 
 the author of " Absalom and Achitophel." One piece 
 entitled the "Whip and Key," and written by a Non- 
 conformist minister, exposed Dryden's "Allegory," by a 
 reference to the meaning of the Hebrew names. Absalom, 
 it was said, meant " brother of a fool." "In that case," 
 retorted Dryden, "I give up my claim. The author of the 
 ' Whip and Key ' must pass undisputed for the next of 
 kin." The sale of the piece was extensive. Johnson's 
 father, then a country bookseller, told his distinguished 
 son that he had not known it equalled by anythiag, except 
 Sacheverel's trial. 
 
 Apropos of the " Absalom and Achitophel," it is 
 interesting to notice the controversial, the pohtical, 
 what he himseff calls the legislative aspect of many of 
 Dryden's chief pieces. It will be demonstrated in the 
 succeeding chapter, how it was that poetry assumed the 
 guise of pamphleteering, and how it was that, in its 
 early stage, pamphleteering was initiated in the form of 
 poetry. At present, it is enough to say, that fuUy to 
 appreciate Dryden as an author, it is necessary to be 
 fuUy acquainted with the history of his times. It is not 
 one of the least characteristics of those times, that state- 
 craft absorbed every branch of polite literature, even the 
 drama, Some of Dryden's plays, for instance, are really 
 dramatic pamphlets, and would a few years later have 
 
OB CHAEACTEEISTICS. 151 
 
 astonished the pohticians that appropriated Addison's 
 " Cato," They abound in special pleading, in court 
 doctrines, and personified theories. Some of the allu- 
 sions inserted with tliis aim were destined to be inter- 
 preted in a very different sense. Some time after the 
 accession of William, for example, tlie king 'and queen 
 were present at the theatre ; the choice of the play was 
 the " Spanish Fryar.'- No choice could have been more 
 unlucky, as it happened, the " Spanish Fryar" abounding 
 in allusions which could not fail to be appHed. In one 
 place a spectator observes of the Queen of Arragon, 
 represented in the procession, " she usurps the throne, 
 keeps the old king in prison, and at the same time is 
 praying for a blessmg on her army," And elsewhere, 
 " Can I sooth tyranny, seem pjeased to see my royal 
 master murdered, his crown usurped, a distaff on the 
 throne? And what title has the queen, but lawless 
 force ? and force it is that must pull her down," The 
 poor queen was at her wits' end. Her conduct had 
 always been regarded with a scarce suppressed moral 
 mistrust even by her partizans. The whole audience now 
 witnessed her chagrin. In vain she put her fan to her 
 face, affected indifference, called for her palatiue and 
 hood that had never been mislaid. The pit turned 
 their heads over their shoulders, and it may easily be 
 imagined that more than one Tory saw in the discomfiture 
 of the queen, the punishment, if not the penitence, of the 
 daughter.^ 
 
 The contrast in the unpolitical character of the old 
 drama, is not a little remarkable ; Gifford has endeavoured 
 to prove that Massinger was a Roman Catholic, as CoUey 
 Cibber had endeavoured to prove of Shakspeare. But the' 
 truth is, the personality at stake is not sufficient to identify 
 either author. The neutrahty, in the writings of Shak- 
 
 ' "Dalrymple'sMem.,".vol. iii. p. 88; Letter of the Earl of Nottingham. 
 
152 ethica: 
 
 speare especially, is sufficiently shown by the variety of 
 judgments passed on him. Thus Warburton attempts to 
 demonstrate him to be a Whig ; while Hume, on the con- 
 trary, can see no love of hberty in him. Warburton's 
 ingenuity is marvellous in this respect. One of his letters . 
 to Birch fairly converts the " Midsummer Night's Dream " 
 into an elaborate poHtical allegory. The Dolphin is the 
 Dauphine, the Mermaid is Mary of Scotland. Her dulcet 
 breath refers to Mary's Latin Oration in the Louvre ; certain 
 stars, to the various matches proposed to her, more parti- 
 cularly the Duke of Norfolk. On some such principle, I 
 suppose, we find a mention in Stevens' " Percy Correspon- 
 dence," of a clergyman writing a pamphlet to prove that 
 the character of Hamlet was intended for James I., and the 
 Ghost for Lord Damley.^ The revival of Shakspeare at 
 the Hanoverian accession, seems to have roused the inge- 
 nuity of these quasi-political commentators. When 
 "Eichard H." was restored at Covent Garden, in 1738, 
 Haynes, the then printer of the " Craftsman," was prose- 
 cuted for writing a letter full of pohtical applications from 
 the play to Walpole. The play seems to have been a 
 favourite on this score. The dialogue of Northumberland 
 and his friends, is especially referred to by Davies,'' as 
 furnishing rare material for innuendo. The words, " The 
 King is not himself, but basely led by flatterers," were 
 always the signal for clapping of hands and clattering of 
 sticks, and when the actor said — 
 
 " The Earl of Wiltshire hath the State in farm," 
 
 the cries of Walpole, and the shouting and huzzaing, 
 reached their height. Wolsey again on the revival of 
 " Henry VIH." was invariably appUed to Walpole. 
 
 To return to Dryden. The "Essay on Satire" comes 
 
 ' " Nichol's Illustrations," vol. vii. p. 23. 
 ' "Dramatic Anecdotes," vol. i. p. 153, 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 153 
 
 nearest to our usual conception of satire, such as it 
 is generally associated with the "KolUad" and the 
 " Dunciad." It is chiefly read as one of the few poetical 
 assaults which have procured their authors the reward of a 
 personal chastisement, and as having up to this moment 
 identified the name of the capricious Earl of Rochester 
 with " Black Will and his Cudgel." There is a question 
 connected with its authorship which still keeps up an 
 interest in it, and which from time to time has created 
 as much controversy as the authorship of the " Epistles 
 of Phalaris." Malone considers that Mulgrave wrote 
 it and Dryden corrected it. Johnson, in his hfe of 
 Mulgrave, maintains a timid neutrality. In his life of 
 Dryden he unhesitatingly ascribes it to Mulgrave alone. 
 Dean Lockier, on his part, confidently gives it to Dryden. 
 Sir Walter Scott is very positive on the other side. 
 " The versification of the poem," he asserts, "is as 
 flat and inharmonious as the plan is careless and ill- 
 arranged." Nor does he think that any portion of the 
 Essay received revision from Dryden's pen. "Dryden's 
 verses would have shone among Mulgrave's as gold 
 among copper. The whole Essay is a stagnant level, 
 no one part of it rising above the rest as to speak 
 the work of a superior hand. The thoughts when con- 
 ceived with spirit are unhappily brought out." This 
 criticism seems hardly in unison with Sir Walter's usual 
 fairness. The " Essay on Satire " is not so brilliant 
 as the " Absalom and Achitophel," nor from its charac- 
 teristic simplicity of plot could it well have been. But 
 neither is it totally flat and devoid of music. The hues 
 on Algernon Sydney's brother, " The Little Lad," are 
 far too coarse and felicitous for the languid muse of 
 Mulgrave. The other objection urged by Sir Walter, 
 that Dryden's subsequent position with the king was 
 inconsistent with the harsh treatment that monarch 
 
3.54 , ethioa: 
 
 undergoes in the course of the piece, is plainly fore- 
 stalled by Rochester's voluntary confession that Charles 
 had perused the libel, and was in no way displeased 
 with his share. Added to this, Dryden might have 
 been anxious to confirm Mulgrave's regard by punish- 
 ing Mulgrave's enemies, and among those enemies, Sir 
 Walter himself tells us, Charles then was. 
 
 Those who know anything of the wretched morality 
 of literary men during that wretched period, will easily 
 call to mind the peculiar position which patrons held 
 towards their clients, and the reputation which Rochester 
 in particular held among patrons. He had set up for 
 the Richelieu of the age, or rather had arrogated to 
 himself among wits the same pre-eminence that Warwick 
 did among kings. Rochester had quarrelled v/ith Mul- 
 grave. The latter had posted him as a coward, and 
 seduced Dryden from his allegiance to him. Rochester 
 in revenge had procured a play of the notorious Elkanah 
 Settle the honour of a representation at Court. The 
 "Empress of Morocco" was acted at Wliitehall, and a 
 prologue, written for it by Rochester, was spoken for it 
 by Lady Howard. The printer, relying upon the popular 
 prejudice, had adorned it with cuts, and allotted its price 
 at two shUlings. Settle, astonished at his success, began 
 to grow insolent, and Dryden to grow envious. The 
 latter, in conjunction with Shadwell and Crowne, medi- 
 tated revenge, and was on the point of losing his power 
 by losing his self-composure, when Rochester interfered 
 by demohshing Settle's dignity. Another puppet was 
 set up. Crowne succeeded to Elkanah, and a Uttle time 
 after Otway took the place of Crowne. If the Essay 
 accordingly be considered as the work of Dryden, these 
 circumstances give some meaning to the following lines, 
 and invest them with a personal significance which, if 
 they were written by Mulgrave, they certainly cannot 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 155 
 
 have. They are, on this principle of explanation, a 
 jealous remonstrance against the fickleness of that royal 
 friendship, and the indiscrimination of that public taste, 
 which, by thus patronizing the plays of Settle and 
 Crowne, had permitted their authors to usurp Dryden's 
 rights. 
 
 " 'Tis being devout at play, wise at a ball, 
 Or bringing wit and friendship to Whitehall. 
 But with sharp eyes those nicer faults to find, 
 Which lie obscurely in the nicest mind — 
 That little spark which all the rest doth foil, 
 To wipe off that would be a noble toil. 
 Beyond the loose writ libels of this age, 
 Or the forced scenes of a declining stage ; 
 Above all censure, too, each little wit 
 Will he so glad to see the greater hit." 
 
 The same idea, which would seem to reflect on the 
 recent pubhcation of a libel by Rochester, occurs in the 
 preface to his " All for Love." " The case is hard with 
 writers. If they succeed not, they must starve. If they 
 do, some maHcious satire is prepared to level them, for 
 daring to please without the leave of the rich." 
 
 But the " Essay on Satire " affords other and inter- 
 nal evidence. Compare the sentiments contained in 
 the following lines with that conteniptuous good-nature 
 that dictated this sentence to Luke Milbourne : " Let 
 him be satisfied he shall not force himself upon me as an 
 adyersary. I contemn him too much to enter into com- 
 j)e|iition with him." 
 
 " In this alone methinks the antients erred 
 Against the grossest follies they declaim — 
 Hard they pursue, but hunt ignoble game. 
 Nothing is easier than such blots to hit. 
 And 'tis the talent of each vulgar wit ; 
 Besides, 'tis labour lost, for who would preach 
 Morals to Armstrong, or dull Aston teach? " 
 
 The comcidence of thought and expression in this and 
 other poems of Dryden are remarkable. Under the 
 character of Rophester we have hini called — 
 
156 ethica; 
 
 " A very Killigrew without good-nature, 
 For what a Bessus has he always lived." 
 
 A parallel use of the name, borrowed apparently from 
 Beaumont's and Fletcher's play of "A King, no King," 
 occurs in the address to Lee in his " Alexander: " — 
 
 " And as cheap penn'orths to ourselves afford 
 As Bessus and the Brother of the Sword." 
 
 Dryden's opinions on matrimony would have gratified 
 Euripides and are well known. Compare the two following 
 passages. The first forms the opening of the "Absalom 
 and Achitophel." The second is pointed at Dorset in the 
 Satire : — 
 
 " In pious times, ere priesthood did begin, 
 Before polygamy was made a sin, 
 When man on many multiplied his kind, 
 Ere one to one was cursedly confined.''^ 
 
 " Thus Dorset, married, lugged about the matrimonial load, 
 TiU Fortune, blindly kind as well as he, 
 Has ill restored him to his liberty" 
 
 Mulgrave is thus spoken of, or, if we are to consider him 
 capable of reahzing the absurdity of Brantom's hero, 
 who is made to laugh at himself and was in consequence 
 laughed at by Warton, thus speaks of himself : — 
 
 " After all his vulgar marriage mocks. 
 With beauty dazded. Mumps was in the stocJts." 
 
 The hkeness which the Shaftesbury of the Essay bears 
 to the Achitophel of the Satire is so obvious that any 
 reader of ordinary penetration could adduce half a dozen 
 passages. 
 
 Shaftesbury is — 
 
 "Our little Machiavel, 
 His limbs are crooked, and his body shakes. 
 Yet his hard mind, which all this trouble makes, 
 No pity of its poor companion takes." 
 
 Achitophel is — 
 
 " A fiery soul, which worketh out its way, 
 Fretteth the pigmy body to decay, 
 And o'er-informed the tenement of clay." 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 167 
 
 In the Essay, Shaftesbury is made to — 
 
 " Quit his dear ease, some deep design to lay." 
 
 Achitophel is — 
 
 " Bankrupt of life, yet prodigal of ease." 
 
 In the Essay, Shaftesbury will — 
 
 " laugh at his hest friends." 
 
 Achitophel is — 
 
 "In friendship false, implacable in hate." 
 
 Achitophel does — 
 
 "Refuse his age the needful hours of rest; 
 Punish a body which he could not please." 
 
 In Shaftesbury — 
 
 " 'Twere crime in any man but him alone, 
 To use a body so, though 'tis one's own." 
 
 One more parallel shall be adduced. Dryden, in speaking 
 of Shaftesbury's fickleness and impetuosity, makes use of 
 this domestic image : — 
 
 " So cat, transformed, sate gravely and demure, 
 TiU mouse appeared, and thought himself secure. 
 But soon the lady had him in her eye, 
 And on her friend did just as oddly fly.'' 
 
 Achitophel, in stimulating the flagging energies of Absa- 
 lom, thus paints the character of his rival : — 
 
 " He meditates revenge who least complains, 
 And like a lion slumbering in the way, 
 Or sleep dissembling, while he waits his prey. 
 His fearless foes within his distance draws. 
 Constrains his roaring and contracts his paws. 
 Till in the last, in time for fary found. 
 He shoots with sudden vengeance from the ground." 
 
 It only remains to be added that the general testimony 
 of his contemporaries assigns the authorship of this piece 
 to Dryden, that it is printed among the State Poems as 
 
158 ethica: 
 
 his, that an answer was made to it on the same con- 
 jecture, and that Narcissus Luttrell tells us that he was 
 beaten by three fellows by order of the Duchess of 
 Portsmouth, — such is his origin of the catastrophe, — for 
 the abuse she received in it.' 
 
 There is one element in his pergonal satires which 
 redound to his merit — their comparative decency. There 
 is nothing more illustrative of the current demorahzation 
 than the state of the satiric muse. Even the common 
 subjects of theological discussion were bereft of ordinary 
 reverence, and opponents ridiculed their neighbours in 
 language compared to which the " Smectyningeus " is 
 holyday speech, and in pamphlets whose very titles 
 steam with a vapour too nauseous even for the author of 
 " The Tale of a Tub." Some one, indeed, was wanting 
 to do for the satirists what ColKer had done for the 
 dramatists of the day. Witness, for instance, the 
 Fescennine indecency of such collections as the State 
 Poems. The usage of the King is perhaps one of the 
 most remarkable features to a generation only acquainted 
 with the milder freedom of a Lousiad, or to those 
 who recollect what guerdon a troubadour, who might 
 chance to take too much liberty with the dignity of a 
 Henry the First, received. Nor did his deficiency in this 
 respect impair the efficacy of Dryden's satires. They 
 can never be considered as racy, Ught, and epigram- 
 matic as Pope's. Such a style would not, indeed, have 
 been congenial to the gravity of all his subjects. His 
 manner, on the whole, may be described as striking the 
 balance between the cold animation of Pope, and the 
 severe sententiousness of Johnson. The distaste for 
 pohsh led him not unfrequently into rugged informalities 
 totally urtworthy of him. But he made up at the end in 
 the energy of the stroke for the bluntness of the metal. 
 
 ' Diary," yol. i. p. 30. 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 159 
 
 The satire of Pope — to follow up the metaphor — ^bore 
 the same proportion to the satire of Dryden, that the 
 sword of Solyman does to the sword of Cceur de Lion^ 
 As far as appearance goes, the odds are in favour of thd 
 glittering Damascus blade and the subtle dexterity of the 
 Mussulman. But, in the contest, it is found that the 
 more homely weapon of the Christian Knight compen- 
 sated for its rusticity by its temper, and the power of the 
 arm that wielded it. It could not split a hair, but it 
 could sever a bar of iron. 
 
 The irregular and vacillating outline which bounds 
 the character of Dryden, would rather suggest a sub- 
 ordination of taste to conventional standard, than any 
 want of originahty. The ostrich-flight of his career, 
 the convulsive anxiety to quit the low level to which 
 habit and associatioii confined him, indicates that if hd 
 was not allowed to mount the bold heights of a reformer, 
 it was not altogether from a deficiency of inclination. 
 On one occasion in particular, he did violence to his 
 bonds, and showed a liberahty worthy of aU mention. 
 
 Charles the Second, among other foreign innovations^ 
 had encouraged the importation of French models to an 
 excess that did not escape the satirists of the day. The 
 pulviUoSj essences, and Chadreux perruques, are still 
 remembered by the fierce denunciations of Oldham and 
 Butler. Even so late as the " Spectator," the efi'ects of 
 the peace with France in introducing such French 
 fopperies as valets de chambre and patches, and such 
 French terms as defiles, marauding, corps, and carte 
 blanche, were gravely debated by Addison in two of his 
 most pleasant lucubrations.^ 
 
 Among the Caroline innovations was one connected 
 with the stage, which has left its mark upon the whole 
 dramatic Uterature of the period, and threatened to 
 
 ' Nos. 165, 45. 
 
160 ethica: 
 
 cramp the English theatre by the load of unreasonable 
 rules, that had already reduced the simphcity of the 
 Parisian stage to absolute barrenness. At this junc- 
 ture it was, that Dryden came forward as the champion 
 of the modem against the classical school. And it 
 is wholly characteristic of the chequered and unequal 
 reputation of the author, that the compass of two short 
 essays should contain the denunciation of the unities 
 and an advocacy of rhyme ; that in a few pages 
 the writer should rise above Kacine, and sink below 
 Sir Eobert Howard. The controversy was carried on 
 in the form of a dialogue, not exactly in the style of 
 Swift on a parallel occasion, but with a sufficient degree 
 of piquancy and learning. It was agreed that the French 
 plots, by confining the Kmits of the drama, had confined 
 the invention of the dramatist ; that what was meant to 
 induce chasteness, had brought on poverty ; and that, 
 in the zeal against plethory, the spectator went away 
 with his appetite but half satisfied, and the playwright 
 with the knowledge that his imagination had been but 
 half developed. A contrast between the great EHza- 
 bethan poets and the French poets then ensues, which 
 involves the superiority of the copious and comprehensive 
 genius displayed by the former, with a protest, on the 
 part of Dryden, against Shakespeare's occasional flatness. 
 Happy for him had he been content with finding out 
 what he supposed to be Shakespeare's errors, without 
 taking the trouble to supply what he supposed to be 
 emendations to them. The reaction was too strong for 
 him. He testified its undue influence on him when he 
 pitted his " Aurungzebe" against the " Cid." In con- 
 demning, and with justice, the more than classic severity 
 of the French school, he involuntarily grafted the worst 
 features of that school, on the worst features of the 
 Spanish. The French stage wanted a little of what the 
 
OB CHARACTEBISTICS. 161 
 
 Spanish stage had too much — more action and less 
 declamation. It is not difficult to give the chief requisites 
 of this composite drama. To quote a line from Cowley's 
 Pindaric Odes, there was nothing but — 
 
 "Figures, conceits, raptures, and sentences." 
 
 The language was conceived in the pompous spirit of 
 Versailles. The actions and situations were conducted 
 in the exaggerated spirit of Castile, and to complete the 
 portrait, the dialogue was carried on in the argumentative 
 spirit of Seneca. The entire style comprehended, in 
 fact, all the defects of Kacine and ComeiUe, with aU the 
 defects of Lope de Vega and Calderon. There were 
 many reasons why this bombastic magnificence of 
 thought and expression, - which sate so well on the 
 Spanish stage, should have ill become either the stages 
 of France or England. The Spanish stage was all 
 action. The absurd hyperbole, which calmer criticism 
 might easily have detected in the gallantry and devotion 
 of the heroes and heroines of Lope and Cervantes, 
 escaped in the busthng confusion of incessant adventure. 
 The ardent flights of fancy which passed unmolested 
 amid the excitement of intrigue on intrigue, of ladders 
 and trapdoors, duels and rapes, upon the Spanish stage, 
 might have shocked even the comprehensive imaginations 
 of the courtly habitues who crowded the naked boards of 
 the Hotel de Bourgogne. Added to this, their idiosyn- 
 crasies might plead the excuse of national manners. No 
 laws drawn from the codes of antiquity were permitted, 
 as yet, to put a check on their chivalrous representations. 
 The humble audiences who had just ceased to pelt their 
 oranges and cucumbers at the Biscayans and clowns 
 whom the author of "Numantia" had but lately de- 
 posed, were but little hkely to brook the ligaments of 
 AristoteUan rules. Cervantes himself, indeed, in his 
 "Don Quixote," had blamed his countrymen for their 
 
 11 
 
162 ETHICA : 
 
 flagrant violation of dramatic propriety. But he had 
 been loath in practising what he preached. The grand- 
 sons of those who conquered at Granada, needed not to 
 go to Greeqe or Rome for heroes or heroines. Leaving 
 to others the stately coldness of heroic antiquity, then- 
 fervid patriotism found for them 'models in the simple 
 annals of ifivery native village. Romance was the atmo- 
 sphere which they breathed. War, and the adventures 
 of war, were familiar to them from their cradle. Even 
 hterature had taken up its residence, not in the breasts 
 of voluptuous abbes or precocious mechanics, but in the 
 hearts of warriors. Their greatest students had not un- 
 frequently displayed all the quaUfications of their greatest 
 heroes. Cervantes had lost an arm in the battle of 
 Lepanto, and had tasted captivity in the dungeons of 
 the corsairs of Barbary. Boscan, Garcilaso, Mendoza, 
 Montemayor, Castilejo, before him, had aU been dis- 
 tinguished soldiers. Camoens, a kindred in misfortune 
 if not m nationahty, had upheld the boast of Galician 
 valour in the piratic fastnesses of the Chinese Sea. To 
 such experience as this, may be attributed those san- 
 guinary decorations with which the susceptibihty of 
 Spanish honour adorned the drama — the sword and the 
 dagger. Such stirring activity could find no genial 
 response ia the lives of the wits who ate their supper and 
 feigned heroism in Boileau's parlour at Auteuil. The 
 shghtest symptoms of chivalrous vivacity were at once 
 chilled by the stately ceremoniousness of hon ton. The 
 mechanical steriHty of the French stage, however, was 
 amply compensated for by its rhetorical richness. The 
 reason of the spectator suffered for the compulsion of the 
 dramatist. 
 
 To make every tragic lover a Paladin, and every 
 tragic king an Alexander, was the first fondamental 
 maxim of the new doctrine, as it was enunciated in the 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 163 
 
 " Tyrannic Love " and tlie "Indian Emperor." Nor was 
 it considered, that to be true and to be brave, to indulge 
 his mistress in every caprice and to make for her every 
 sacrifice, was sufficient in the gallant. It was necessary 
 for the latter, not only to convince his Dulcinea of his 
 regard by his deeds, but to analyze that regard by his 
 arguments ; not only, in fact, to be a lover, but to be a 
 logician. The courage of an Amadis was blended with 
 the dialectic skill of an Aquinas. The hero is at once a 
 Falstaff and a Hudibras — a cross-birth from the camp 
 and the schools. " A mimical tone, a fantastic action, 
 a couchant sense, and a phrase rampant," to quote a 
 rather fantastic expression from a contemporary tract, 
 quarter the coat of arms of this preux chevalier. It 
 would, indeed, not be easy, without an extract, to reahze 
 this strange association of metaphysics with heroics. It 
 is almost beyond the reach of parody. Those who know 
 Butler's satire on the style, in his repartees between Cat 
 and Puss at a Caterwauling, know that what was intended 
 to be an exaggeration has, in reality, fallen considerably 
 short of the original. The result of this rash and bom- 
 biastic inversion of nature was the perpetration of incon- 
 sistencies that it is difficult to perceive a man of Dry- 
 den's penetration could have overlooked. Thus, in his 
 " Cleomenes," the Copernican hypothesis is familiarized 
 at the Court of Sparta ; Ovid's metamorphosis, and the 
 story of Gorgon and the Dragon's teeth, are bandied 
 about as pleasant recollections in the harem of the Em- 
 peror of Barbary; and venerable mufti, who never heard 
 of any kingdom beyond the rising and the setting sun, 
 " o'erleap their horizon," and treat Ximenes, and Wolsey, 
 with a famiharity that would have made the racks and 
 ■puUeys of the Holy Office to groan and creak again. 
 
 The vices and virtues of the characters partake of the 
 same uncongetiiality. There is no more comparison 
 
 11—2 
 
164 ethica: 
 
 between our smaller qualities and their gigantic emotions 
 than therie is between a Lilliputian aind a Brobdignag. 
 The heroes out-Orlahdo . Orlando. The heroines are 
 more than a match for Dorinda or Bradamante. But 
 this is not the worst. It is not enough that the hero 
 must talk in rhyme, in what Bottom calls " 'Ercles' 
 vein ;" that the verse must be heroic; that, in fact, accord- 
 ing to Dryden's own description, "the plot, the characters, 
 the wit, the passions, the deUneations, must be exalted 
 above the level of common converse, as high as the 
 imagination of the poet can carry them." Chesterfield's 
 receipt that "tragedy must be something bigger than 
 life," is anticipated, and the invisible world must be 
 ransacked to supply in commensurate style the wants of 
 the tremendous champion. The exaggerated magnificence 
 of language and sentiment must be supported by adequate 
 machinery. Ghosts, monsters, magicians, genii, aU the 
 spiritual paraphernaha of Arabian and Teutonic super- 
 stition must be introduced. To such an extent did the 
 supernatural predomiriate, especially in the tragedies of 
 Dryden, that he was ironically pointed out as " the man 
 whom nature seems to have chosen to enlarge the poet's 
 empire, and to complete the discoveries others had begun 
 to shadow." There was, indeed, an air of greatness in 
 some of his characters, but it was a bladdered greatness. 
 They rise and swell, but it is the flatulence of a dropsy. 
 
 It was evident that Tragedy had been reduced to 
 mere pantomimic extravagance, and, however gaUing the 
 punishment inflicted on Dryden by Buckingham and his 
 crew, the " Rehearsal " must, at least, be allowed to have 
 made an effort to do for the mock heroism of the EngHsh 
 stage, what the corrective caricatures of Cervantes and 
 Le Sage did for the fooleries of an exploded knight- 
 errantry, and the satire of Boileau for the four thousand 
 four hundred pages of D'Urfey's " Astrsea," the six 
 
OR CHARACTEBISTICS. 165 
 
 thousand pages of Gomberville's " Polexandre," and the 
 ten octavo volumes of Madame Scuderi's "Grand Cyrus." 
 Not that Dryden's muse always_ indulged in this subhmity 
 of flight. There were intervals of repose, pauses during 
 which the representations became more rational, the 
 language less frenzied. The scenes between Hector and 
 Troilus, between Sebastian and Dorax, have always been 
 celebrated, and present a strange contrast to the rhodo- 
 montades of Almanzor and Maximin. It was his theory, 
 not his execution, that must be impugned. The text 
 on which he founded that theory was the two first lines 
 of Ariosto : 
 
 " Le donne, i cavalier, I'arme, gli amori, 
 Le cortesie, I'audaci imprese, io canto." ' 
 
 Those, then, who would iustitute an invidious comparison 
 between himself and Shakspeare, are comparing what 
 was never meant tO be compared. They might with equal 
 reason compare " Kobinson Crusoe" with the "Arabian 
 Nights." Dryden's idea of the drama was neither of the 
 historical, nor of the legendary, but of the heroic cast, 
 and his conception of the heroic was such as inspired the 
 champions of Christendom or the fabulous knights of 
 King Arthur. " The laws of the heroic poem," he says, 
 " indulge the poet with the hberty of dreaming all things 
 as far beyond the ordinary proportions of the stage as 
 that is beyond the common words and actions of human 
 hfe." " A play dressed in famihar and easy shape, fitted 
 to the common actions and passions of human life," he 
 distinctly repeats, " is only a play m narration, not a 
 heroic poem." Dryden made this mistake. He con- 
 founded the province of the imagination and the reason, 
 and allotted to" them a partition in their operation which 
 they never yet acquired in the contemplation of either 
 prose or poetry, reality or fiction. Extravagance has its 
 
 ', See his "Essay on Heroic Plays." 
 
166 ethioa: 
 
 limits beyond whicli it provokes not wonder, but criti- 
 cism. Heroic poems may suit the silence of the study, 
 but they shrink from the clamour of a public representa- 
 tion. When Dryden praised the oracle of Appius, the 
 witchcraft of Erictho in Lucan, the ghost of Polydorus in 
 Virgil, the Enchanted Wood in Tasso, and the Bower of 
 Bhss in Spenser, he did not reflect that they were scenes, 
 not in heroic plays, but in heroic poems. This is his error. 
 Bring "Don Roderick" on the boards and it becomes a 
 mere pantomime. The "Ihad" dramatized would not 
 gain half the audience it does as an epic. AchUles may 
 rant it in the Homeric ballads with propriety, and so 
 may Rinaldo in the " Jerusalem Delivered." On the stage 
 Bilboa and Drawcansir would be considered tame in 
 comparison. It was but a practical exemplification of his 
 theory, and a practical illustration of its extravagance when 
 Dryden reduced the " Paradise Lost " into the dramatic 
 form of the " State of Innocence." If any one was more 
 entitled to have hoped for success in that theory, it was 
 he. His diction and powers of versification came nearer 
 to Milton's than any of his contemporaries. But as soon 
 could a corrupt tree have brought forth good fruit. They 
 served him as the knights of the middle ages were 
 sometimes served by the weight of that very chain armour 
 originally intended for their defence. Otway or Congreve 
 did not possess or acquire half his talent and facility for 
 rhyming, yet there are not ten persons found with morbid 
 taste enough to leave the "Venice Preserved" or the 
 "Mourning Bride," for the "Indian Emperor" or the 
 " Aurungzebe." 
 
 It would have been a grateful task to have discovered 
 any improvement beyond his age in his comedies. But 
 looking at them even in a literary point of view they 
 are almost below criticism. They are in truth wholly 
 unsuited for comparison. Their merits and defects are 
 
OE CHAEACTEEI8TIC9. 167 
 
 all their own. They were written for a class and they 
 accordingly form a class in themselves. They were, 
 literally speaking, idola theairi. The plays have as- 
 sumed the impress of that spirit of singularity that 
 called for them. All the characters are distinguished by 
 a disgusting uniformity of expression. They are un- 
 mistakable representations of a particular set of men and 
 women. They portray neither males nor females, but 
 gallants of the stamp of Grammont and ladies of the 
 same grade as Barbara Palmer. Half a century later, 
 such exhibitions would never have been composed, or if 
 they had they would undoubtedly have fallen victims, to 
 that ethical reaction which drew from Johnson his grave 
 rebuke of Hannah More for having read "Tom Jones" 
 and extorted the indignant exclamation of Dr. Watts to 
 Eichardson that no lady could read " Pamela " without 
 blushing. It is an anomaly that he should have scrupled 
 to versify Chaucer's "Wife of Bath," on account of its 
 indehcacy, and yet should have unhesitatingly introduced 
 characters and scenes unequalled for indehcacy even in 
 the seventeen plays of Mrs. Afra Behn, * who, as Pope 
 sang, fairly put hers to bed. 
 
 It is curious to witness the revolution that the next 
 generation effected in the morals of the drama. Garrick 
 attempted to revive one of Otway's least obscene plays, 
 " The Soldier's Fortune," and, says Davies, was severely 
 handled by the audience for his pams. It was an objec- 
 tion to the erection of Dr. Tennison to the See of Canter- 
 bury, that he had as, parish priest preached the funeral 
 sermon over that strange child of pleasure, NeU Gwynne, 
 A critic incurred the warm displeasure of the monthly 
 reviewers for re-editing the "Clouds," a worthless 
 comedy,^ that would have been hissed on the Enghsh 
 Theatre. Dennis, a name of more repute in his genera- 
 
 ' This catastrophe actually occurs in the "Volunteers" ofShadwell. 
 2 Nichols, vol. ii. p. 380. 
 
168 ethica: 
 
 tion than in ours, openly confessed that he preferred the 
 "OEdipus" of Sophocles to the "Julius Caesar" of 
 Shakspeare, ' ' because it is very rehgious. ' ' A " tragedy, ' ' 
 he writes, "ought to be a solemn lectui-e."* The same 
 critic heads a strong protest against the Italian Opera, 
 on the ground that music destroys pubHc spirit, that 
 operas have been the invariable attendant of slavery, and 
 that to their influence it is owing the modem ItaKan is 
 not the ancient Roman. To introduce the ItaHan Opera 
 into England, was for the yeoman of Kent or Sussex to 
 plant the olive of Lucca or the orange of Naples instead 
 of his pippins and wheat. 
 
 It might be urged as an apology for some of Dryden's 
 dramatic defects, that he was, in a sense stricter than is 
 generally conceived, the creature of his age. He had no 
 guide to chastise his faults, to suggest corrections, an 
 advantage which the merest scribbler of our days pos- 
 sesses in full enjoyment. Criticism was at its lowest 
 ebb. Among critics Eymer held a very prominent 
 position. Pope plainly asserts that he was a very great 
 critic indeed. Yet this is the way that Rymer spoke of 
 Shakspeare : " In tragedy he appears quite out of his 
 element. His brains are turned. He raves and rambles 
 without any coherence. His imagination was hankering 
 after his masters, the cobblers and parish clerks, and Old 
 Testament strollers. His Portias and Desdemonas are 
 Betty Mackerels. ' ' * His superciliousness had already been 
 spent on those "who are pleased to call the ' Paradise Lost' 
 a poem." In his depreciation of S.hakspeare he followed 
 rather than led the tastes of his generation. After the 
 Restoration, the old dramatists are scarcely noticed. 
 Miserable alterations, such as "Macbeth" by Davenant, 
 the "Tempest" by Shadwell, appropriated the success 
 
 ' " The Advancement and Keform of Modern Poetry :" a Critical Dis- 
 course, by Mr. Dennis. 1701. 
 
 ' " Short View of Tragedy." Eymer. 156 pp. 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 16.9 
 
 due to the originals. So little were the originals read at 
 the time, that Quia, who frequently repeated some of 
 "Macbeth" in company, always quoted Davenant's alte- 
 ration, and Mrs. Pritchard, celebrated in the same play, 
 owned that she had never read any but the part the 
 prompter ordered for her. "Kichard III.," so popular 
 in Shakspeare's own day, was not performed from the 
 Restoration till the end of the century. In 1704, the 
 Queen commanded the " Merry Wives of Windsor" to be 
 performed at St. James's ; but though the whole force 
 of Betterton's company was exerted, the piece had no 
 success. Hume exhibits no rehsh for Shakspeare, and 
 but httle sense of his merit. His criticism in his History 
 is singularly tasteless, and if we are to beheve Malone, 
 we are indebted to Lord Kaimes, that it is not harsher. 
 Pepys speaks of the "Midsummer Night's Dream" as a 
 stupid play, and Pepys, it may be supposed, was only 
 endorsing the opinion of the audience. Horace Walpole, 
 a man of real critical abihty, has scarcely a kindher term 
 for the same play.^ With these tests before us, we are 
 not surprised to find Dryden on the same dramatic level 
 with his critics, and hesitating, as he does in his " Essay 
 on Dramatic Poetry," to put Shakspeare in the same 
 rank with Fletcher. 
 
 The most valuable productions connected with his 
 comedies are the prefatory introductions, pieces of criti- 
 cism which still deserve to be read not only for the 
 intrinsic novelty of their style — a style which has been 
 
 ' Perhaps the prices paid hy London hooksellers to different editors may 
 Stand as a test of Shakspeare's rising popularity, as well as of the editors' 
 respective merits: — ^Paid to Kowe, S6l. lOs.; Hughes, 28/. 7.s.; Pope, 
 2171. I2s.; Fenton, 301. 14s.; Gay, S5l. 17s.; Whalley, 12;.; Theohald, 
 6521. 10s.; Warburton, 500^.; Capel, 300Z. ; Johnson, for the 1st edition, 
 S751. ; for the 2nd edition, lOOl. — " Gentleman's Magazine," vol. Ivii. p. 76. 
 
 A correspondent of Garrick expects from the promised edition of John- 
 son, that his emendations will be so useful, that this sixth edition will be the 
 last, not only for this, but for the ensuing century.— Nichols, vol. v. p. 597. 
 
170 ethica: 
 
 rather inadequately called the imitation of Burke — but 
 as the precursors of those miscellaneous reviews which 
 were destined to produce the " Tatler " and the " Spec- 
 tator." But even these are disfigured by a few of those 
 unaccountable irregularities, which appear to have been 
 almost constitutional in the genius of their author. 
 
 Indeed any one reading his prose works casually, 
 would be brought to a halt by the contradictions that 
 must inevitably attract his notice. Thus in one place 
 he will find him snarling loudly at Sandys, the translator 
 of Ovid ; in another he represents him as the best ver- 
 sifier of the former age, and his work " most ingenious 
 and learned." In the discourse on Epic Poetry, he 
 places it above Tragedy; in the discourse on Tragedy, 
 he in as many words gives Tragedy the preference. 
 What must strike the casual reader, however, even more 
 than his faults, is the marvellous power he displays over 
 the EngHsh tongue. Here his strength lay. He felt it, 
 and felt that it was a crisis Avith our language as well as 
 with our literature. He consented, therefore, to exercise 
 his skiU rather than his imagination. I have always 
 thought this the reason why, as a poet, he figm-es so 
 largely as a mere translator. Homer, Virgil, Ovid, and 
 Chaucer he put into EngHsh, and such English as only 
 he of aU his contemporaries could have employed. 
 Before Dryden revived Chaucer, to use the expression, 
 he was neglected as an obsolete writer. Cowley regarded 
 him as a dry old-fashioned wit, and most of those who 
 were not antiquarians partook in Cowley's decision. The 
 few "Vfho really penetrated below the grotesque costume 
 of his style, on the other hand, looked upon him as an 
 antiquarian might look on his bronzed shield covered 
 with iron-mould and rust, and plainly hinted that to 
 polish his time-honoured diction was downright profana- 
 tion. Such was the Earl of Leicester, one of Dryden's 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 171 
 
 patrons, to whose opinion Dryden so far bowed as not to 
 commence Ms version till after the Earl's death. 
 
 It would have been more satisfactory for Dryden's 
 fame had he given us the Prefaces without the Come- 
 dies. As a rule, our EngUsh dramatists combine the 
 office of comedy and tragedy writers in one and the 
 same person. Shakspeare has given us specimens in 
 both departments as near perfection as can be. The 
 ancient drama made a partition in the offices. Aristo- 
 phanes, Plautus, and Terence never put on the buskin, 
 ^schylus, Sophocles, and we may include Euripides, 
 are celebrated by no comical achievement. Dryden's 
 intellect was one of those by which the rule might have 
 been very beneficially observed. The style of his tragedies 
 represents a mind of large tragic elements, impassioned, 
 sensitive, not without a tiage of melancholy, and cer- 
 tainly not without a very tuspiring energy. Nothing about 
 him indicates Hvely humour, facetiousness, or sympathy 
 with the commonplaces of ordinary beings, such as fill 
 up the comic tableaux. It is therefore easy to be un- 
 derstood, that he forsook the guidance of his own genius, 
 when he engaged to produce so many comedies a year. 
 The scandal that he offered to his own better nature and 
 intelligence produced one of the most singular phe- 
 nomena in the annals of literature. 
 
 Every student of literature recollects the occasion 
 which called for Jeremy CoUier's chastisement of the dra- 
 matists of the Eestoration. Colher was by his Ufe and 
 principles adapted for the office of a censor. A Jacobite 
 of the strictest sect, he had at the Revolution espoused 
 the cause of the Stuarts, and had early excited the spleen 
 of the Grovemment by pamphlets written in opposition to 
 Burnet in defence of James. For these misdemeanors he 
 had, through a conscientious scruple of not giving bail, 
 been committed to Newgate. On the Assassination plot 
 
172 ethica: 
 
 being detected, he had, in company with Pratt and Cook, 
 attended Sir John Friend and Sir WiUiam Perkyns on 
 the scaffold, and had formally absolved the former, for 
 which he drew down on himself a strong declaration from 
 the Primate and ten of his suffragans, and was outlawed 
 by the civil authorities. During his outlawry he wrote 
 his Essays on such miscellaneous subjects as clothes, 
 dueUing, music, the entertainment of books, &c., which 
 have survived longer than such moral effusions usually 
 do, and which, anticipating, as they did, the objects of 
 the Kamblers, certainly entitle him to rank with Mon- 
 taigne and La Bruyere, Before he died, he achieved 
 the scheme of writing a History of the Church, from 
 the first entrance of Christianity into Britain to the close 
 of the reign of Henry VH., whose partiahties did not 
 escape the criticisms of Burnet and Keimet. The work, 
 however, most in point here, is his " Short View of the 
 ImmoraUty and Profaneness of the EngHsh Stage, to- 
 gether with the Sense of Antiquity on the Subject." The 
 wit displayed in the treatise has saved it from the fate 
 of Prynne's, and has entitled it, in the eyes of some 
 critics, to a share in the praise we usually bestow on the 
 charm that lingers round the pen of Pascal. But the 
 very title showed that he had overshot the mark. He 
 opened the indictment with the charge of profanity, as 
 exempHfied in the abuse of the clergy, evil speaking, &c. 
 In aU this he was correct enough. The " Amphitryon " 
 and the "Eelapse" were fair game for the moralist; 
 and it was not going too far in contrasting the stage of 
 the Restoration with that of Fletcher and Jonson. But 
 to produce the authorities of Fletcher and Jonson against 
 the modern stage was clearly a mistake of zeal; for 
 though the reputation of the Ehzabethan dramatists was 
 not so uniformly threadbare, yet there were still holes in 
 it. It was but reasonable, accordingly, that his oppo- 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 173 
 
 nents, in defence, questioned the justice of setting up 
 the author of "The Custom of the Country" against 
 the author of "The Mock Astrologer." Unhappily, 
 CoUier went still further, and besides producing the 
 testimonies of Aristotle and St. Chrysostom, he com^ 
 mitted the oversight of comparing the EngUsh stage, not 
 indeed with that of Mohere, but with the stage of Plautus 
 and Aristophanes. The error was plain. It matters 
 not in the least degree whether the Greek or Eoman 
 theatres are or are not less offensive than the English ; 
 whether the " Mencechmi " is less obscene than the 
 " Mock Astrologer," or the "Kelapse " than the " Heau- 
 tontimeroumenos," or the "Double-Dealer" or "Don 
 Sebastian" than the "Eumenides" or "Antigone." 
 Lapse of time, change of habits, diversity of tastes, 
 would be quite sufficient to overthrow the value of a 
 comparison as a test of morality. Manners vary, and 
 with them the standards of judgment. The piety of one 
 age is the irreUgion of another ; the models of one 
 nation the reprobation of another. The venerable 
 Fathers of Carthage, who interdicted the perusal of 
 Thucydides and Cicero, would never have put in a salvo 
 for the author of " Midsummer Night's Dream." The 
 people who thought Diogenes a philosopher would have 
 thought Pascal a fool. The people who worship an 
 onion or a crocodUe are laughed at by the people who 
 adore a wafer or a toenail ; and the Paphlagonian dupes 
 who patronized the impositions of an Alexander, are held 
 up to ridicule by the countrymen of an Abbe Paris. The 
 classic author of the " Amphitryon," when he portrayed 
 the lecheries of Jupiter, did homage to his divinity ; and 
 Hesiod and Homer, when they made their gods inces- 
 tuous, made them god-Hke. 
 
 CoUier's assault, however, disfigured as it was, had 
 a sensible effect on the wits. Perhaps no piece of 
 
174 ethica: 
 
 criticism in the English language ever achieved such 
 immediate sensation — ^not even that which provoked the 
 "EngHsh Bards and Scotch Beviewers." Vanbrugh 
 pubhshed a vindication of his condemned play, and 
 Congreve endeavoured in his reply to gloss over the 
 guilty passages, and by the pains he took to ridicule 
 his priestly opponent showed that he could aot afford 
 to despise him, Dryden, though he flinched from "the 
 horse-play of his raiUery," defended himself ia terms 
 half apologetic, half prevaricatory. He had the good 
 sense to plead guilty to all "expressions which could 
 be truly arraigned of obscenity or immorality." Some 
 of his excuses in defence of his conduct are singularly 
 unworthy, and would have been laughed at, even in the 
 days when Dr. Aikin and Letitia Barbauld were thought 
 oracles in the province of theatrical criticism. 
 
 In the " Essay on Dramatic Poetry," for instance, he 
 teUs us that a play ought to be a just image of human 
 nature ; that the plays of the Eestoration reflected the 
 manners of the Eestoration, and, consequently, that the 
 playwrights were guiltless. The original axiom may 
 stand, it is evident, without further ceremony; but it 
 does not foUow, that because a fabricator of plays is 
 licensed to make his selection from the wide world 
 around him, he is at liberty to make those selections 
 without discretion or judgment. His very choice imposes 
 on him some degree of responsibility. A physician is 
 licensed to make use of every drug of the Pharmacopoeia. 
 Because his diploma commissions him to practise, it does 
 not commission him to kill. A painter is at liberty to 
 decide upon objects for his own canvas. But no painter, 
 however skiKul, if he is desirous of a niche in the 
 National Gallery, would presume upon that Hberty and 
 daub his canvas with objects the most offensive that nature 
 could afford him. The same responsibility attaches itself 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 175 
 
 to the noYelist. The difference between a play by Con- 
 greve or Dryden and a play by Shakspeare, is precisely 
 the difference between a novel by Reynolds and a novel 
 by Scott. To extract diversion from licentiousness is in 
 the power of the merest caricaturist. To fetch mirth 
 from innocence belongs to a master hand only. 
 
 Here is another specimen of what Jeremy Collier 
 calls Dryden's comfortable casuistry* The chief end 
 of comedy, we are told, is to delight. Instruction, if 
 it has anything at all to do with comedy, is no more 
 than a secondary object ; for the business of the comic 
 poet is to make you laugh. Why the poet may not 
 instruct you at the same time that he makes you laugh, 
 why instruction and amusement may not travel together, 
 or what natural antithesis there is between a moral and 
 a joke, we are not told. Even if the postulate were 
 granted that the end of comedy is to delight, it does 
 not follow that that end is obtained only by making 
 comedy vicious — that to make a character facetious it 
 is necessary to make it profane. At any rate, Dryden's 
 receipt to purchase amusement at the expense of decency 
 is both bad logic and bad manners. His recipe of taking 
 a purge in order to be pensive, or letting blood in order 
 to be poetic, is not more constitutionally fatal. The 
 people of EHzabeth's reign seem to have been wiser in 
 their generation. *' To go to a theatre," says an author 
 whom CoHier quotes, " to drive away fancies, is as good 
 physic as for an ache in your head to knock out your 
 brains, or when you are stung with a wasp to rub the 
 sore with a nettle." Such an 'epigrammatic quotation 
 was far more to the purpose than the saying of Aristotle, 
 that a false appetite alone can stomach scandalous satis- 
 faction, and that a sick and distempered invaUd is no good 
 judge. As for the pretence that the dramatist only repre- 
 sented vice in such emphatic colours that he might promote 
 
176 ethica: 
 
 virtue, it is just as likely that the " Tyrannic Love " or 
 " Limberham " should have converted their audience from 
 blasphemy and adultery, as that any one of the Italian 
 tyrants of the middle ages should have given over assassi- 
 nating their enemies and plundering their allies through 
 a righteous appreciation of Machiavelli's " Prince." 
 
 For comedy Dryden was not, in fact, suited. As he 
 confessed, he wrote not for the gratification of his own 
 partiahty, but for the taste of the generation among 
 whom he Kved. 
 
 The influence of the age affected him, as the influence 
 of Solomon's seal affected the genii in the fisherman's 
 box. It is only when he does violence to his confinement, 
 that he rises to his proper height and expands to his proper 
 dimensions. One reflection alone, in consequence, can a 
 contemplation of his chequered career call up. It is a 
 pitiful truth, but when we see a Dryden descending to the 
 foibles of conventionaUsm, or a Verulam and a Raleigh 
 consenting to the dreams of witchcraft and the juggles 
 of astrology, it must be owned that the constitution of 
 genius permits it at once to soar and to creep. 
 
 To catalogue Dryden's miscellaneous productions is not 
 my purpose. His " Alexander's Feast," and his " Ode to 
 St. CeciUa," are known even to those who are ignorant of 
 his " Fables," and his translations. This is not the time 
 of day to form an estimate of his " Virgil." Every scholar 
 knows that his "Virgil " is no more Virgil than Pope's 
 " Homer " is the real Homer. The first thought on 
 reading the two is, not that the writers mistook their 
 vocation, but that they each mistook their choice of 
 authors. Pope's genius was much more adapted to deal 
 with the terser and more studious brevity of Virgil. 
 Dryden, as he afterwards owned, would have given us 
 more of Homer. As it is, his faults might be recognized 
 by any one who knows the faults of his genius. He has 
 
OS CHARACTEEISTICS. 177 
 
 not translated "Virgil," but paraphrased the " J^lneid." 
 All sorts of liberties are taken with the versification. 
 But far greater liberties are taken with the sense. The sins 
 of omission and commission strike the reader at every me- 
 taphor and figure. Dryden, in fact, owned that he was ex- 
 hausted before he was more than half through his labours. 
 Pope at first experienced similar exhaustion, but the task 
 grew easy to him as he went on. Dryden's choice was 
 probably influenced by the barrenness of the field; 
 Denham had tried his hand on a portion of the ^neid, 
 so had Waller ; Cowley had given a rifacimento of the 
 second " Georgic." An almost national interest was 
 taken, too, in Dryden's progress; Lauderdale, though 
 in France, sent him his translation of the "iEneid." 
 Congreve reviewed the work as it proceeded, and offered 
 his corrections freely. Addison furnished an essay and 
 the arguments. Translations were sent him from Italy, 
 and all the extant editions of " Virgil " or his Commen- 
 tators placed at his service. The slovenliness of Dryden 
 when the work appeared gave fuU occupation to his critics ; 
 his negligence was well known to them, and such vulgar- 
 isms as "buxom Juno," "jolly Autumn," " grandam 
 Cybele," were quickly fastened on. Spence observes that 
 the work has so much spirit as to have the air of an 
 original rather than of a translation. And this, I conceive, 
 is at once its praise and its blame. It certainly is not 
 Virgil, but it is Dryden — the strong, impetuous, full- 
 resounding muse of Dryden. The chief characteristic, 
 his usual characteristic, is that of great strength by the 
 side of great Hcence. Dryden, indeed, saw his own 
 deficiencies, and with that candid, good-humoured placa- 
 bility so pecuHar to him, and sometimes so winning in 
 him, even exaggerated them. " My copy," said the large- 
 hearted poet, " Uke Spenser's false Florimel, made of snow, 
 melts and vanishes when the true one comes in sight." 
 
 12 
 
178 ethica: 
 
 CHAPTEE IV. 
 
 DE FOE, AND THE RISE OF PAMPHLETEERING. 
 
 Political Discussion is, in its Infancy, Political Satire. — ^Progress of Political 
 Satire. — First, Verss. — Then, Prose. — Barbour before Cowley and Swift. 
 — Reason of this. — Its Superior Form adapted to a Superior State of 
 Intelligence. — Dryden. — Oldham. — Wilkes. — Junius. — The Restora- 
 tion. — Culminating Point of Political Satire. — " Hind and Panther," &c. 
 — Popular Reasons for the Change into Sober Prose. — Increase of Party 
 and Party Spirit. — The Revolution the Era of Polemical Literature. — 
 Somers. — Locke. — Sidney. — Walpole. — On the Invasion of Wit by 
 Politics. — History of Pamphleteering. — Ben Jonson. — ^Burton. — Sir 
 Roger L'Estrange. — The Claims of Pamphleteering to Notice, as an 
 Element of Literary and Political History. — Warburton. — ^Mrs. Ma- 
 caulay. — The Fate of the Pamphleteer described by One of themselves. 
 — Authors sometimes depend on their Works for Notoriety. — Some- 
 times the contrary. — Hobbes. — ^Warburton. — Bolingbroke. — De Lohne. 
 — Shakspeare. — The Abbe St. Pierre. — De Foe. — De Foe's Political 
 Experience. — His Adoption of Popular Views. — The Letter to a Dis- 
 senter. — The Proper Course for the Dissenters to have adopted on 
 James's Indulgence. — De Foe's striking Personal Resemblance to AVil- 
 liam. — The Crisis of the Succession Bill. — Republication of Republican 
 Works. — Fletcher. — Harrington. — Sidney. — The Trueborn English- 
 man. — De Foe and Anne.-^True Character of Anne. — De Foe's Political 
 Activity. — The question of Peace, and Curious Plight of Swift. — De 
 Foe's strange Political Martyrdom. — His Shortest Way with the Dis- 
 senters, a Literary Curiosity. — His Sufferings contrasted with Swift's 
 Course of Triumph in Ireland. — His imaginative Works. — Monopoly of 
 Fame by his " Crusoe." — Parallel instance. — De Foe and Bunyan, re- 
 presentatives of a Sect, or Caste.— Bunyan's power of Allegorizing. — 
 Milton.— .ffischylus.—De Foe.— Swift.— The "Crusoe" singularly 
 characteristic of the Religious Nature of De Foe. — Plagiarism by a 
 French Author to propagate Rousseau's opinions. — Account of it. — De 
 Foe no Poet. — Coleridge. — "Tattlers" and "Spectators."— Swift's 
 writings, how far Philosophical.— De Foe as Anticipator of Howard, 
 Macadam, and the Free-trade Catechism.— His strong English Charac- 
 teristics contrasted with the tastes of his Literary Contemporaries. 
 
 The contrast in the state of political satire, properly so 
 called, before the Restoration, and subsequently to it, 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 179 
 
 must have struck every attentive student of English 
 literature. The change from the sarcastic drolleries of 
 Martin Marprelate and his fraternity, to the severe and 
 mascuHne delineations of character that gave a tone to 
 the factious exhibitions of Charles's and James's reign, is 
 a feature not to be overlooked. The explanation of the 
 phenomenon is not difficult. It should seem that satire 
 follows in its development the course of poetry. The 
 appeal to the imagiuation comes first, the appeal to the 
 reason last. It took refuge in ballads before it appeared 
 in pamphlets. The rudeness of the Atellan farces pre- 
 ceded the pohsh of Juvenal. On the contemporaries of 
 BarboUr and Gower the euphuistic conceits of Cowley 
 would have been thrown away. On the clowns and 
 minstrels who chastised the vices of the great in clumsy 
 witticisms at the expense of the neighbouring prelate or 
 the reigning favourite, ratiocination would have been 
 utterly lost. An elaborate comparison, such as that 
 which Swift has drawn between Pericles and Halifax, 
 Sotners and Aristides, would not have had the effect of a 
 single rhyming couplet hiccoughed out in dog-Latin by a 
 drowsy clerk, A rude Sirvente against Henry dropped 
 on the skirts of the nearest greenwood, a vulgar joke on 
 the name of Edward, or a doggerel comparison between 
 De Montford and Mattathias, was far more influential, we 
 may be assured, than a broadsheet by Johnson would 
 have been. The most unlettered Gohard that ever 
 directed his wit against a Duke of Lancaster or an Alice 
 Ferrers, would have had far more power than a patriot 
 like Andrew Marvel. The " Tale of a Tub " would have 
 given far' less umbrage than a squib by Skelton. 
 
 Not that I am disposed to attach any excessive influence 
 to the pohtical songs of what may be termed the Satumian 
 era of English satire. I am quite willing to believe that 
 the political songs of a people may be an index to the 
 
 12—3 
 
180 ethica: 
 
 popular mind, but at the same time, I am very far from 
 believing that any one of the songs which the antiquarian 
 researches of Mr. Wright have given us, ever gave one- 
 tenth the impulse to popular feehng as that famous air 
 for instance, which we know by the name of " LUli- 
 bullero." The reason is plain. The elements of political 
 satire are liberty and intelligence. As a poKtical engine 
 it can flourish only in a community where it is not illegal 
 and where it is not unappreciated. In an age of 
 ignorance it is unfelt, In an age of despotism it is harm- 
 less. Place Dryden at the court of Henry YII. and the 
 genius of the author of "Absalom and Achitophel " 
 would never have done for Simnel and Warbeck what it 
 did for Monmouth. Place Oldham at the court of 
 Edward IV. and the pen that could write with so much 
 honest roughness against the lover of Lucy Walters, 
 would have been blunted by the despotic inviolability of 
 the lover of Elizabeth WoodviUe. Had Wilkes Uved 
 under the House of Lancaster his demagoguism would 
 never have raised him from obscurity. Had Junius hved 
 under the House of Tudor, his eloquence must have been 
 silent, or had he inveighed against the Essexes and 
 Leicesters, he might possibly have shared in the fate of 
 Tom Nash, or Udal. 
 
 There were many reasons why political satire should 
 have reached its culminating point after the Bestoration. 
 It was indebted undoubtedly for its sudden progress to 
 maturity to the extraordinary combination of the rhyming 
 and reasoning faculties in the person of Dryden. In his 
 hands it ventured even on the stage, and that too, with 
 an emphasis that would have startled the mystery- 
 mongers of a preceding generation. His genius may be 
 said, indeed, to have created a new department in satire 
 as distinct from that in which Mapes wrote his pas- 
 quinades as the " Hind and Panther " is distinct from 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 181 
 
 the " Lousiad." The hneal descendants of Mapes, we 
 take it, were not Dryden, but the authors of " Hudibras " 
 and the " State Poems." 
 
 But politically speaking, the change in the composi- 
 tion, style, and object of the now satirical hterature is to 
 be referred to a twofold origin, to the enlarged sphere of 
 faction, and the increased stimulus to party spirit. The 
 reforms of William and Mary had totally altered the 
 legislative dispensation of the English Government. The 
 monarch was no longer the seat of political power. 
 Business of state was no longer transacted in the closets 
 of the royal palace. The day when personal opposition 
 to a courtier, or pubhc resistance to a court measure, led 
 to a sudden death or mutilation, was fast declining. The 
 mob who tugged at the clasps of Sir Robert Walpole's 
 cloak in the lobby of the House of Commons, would 
 never have seriously dreamed of repeating the tragedy of 
 Overbury or ViUiers, Godfrey or Coventry. Intrigues 
 had assumed the air and importance of popular parties. 
 The dawn of a new epoch of liberty, unknown in Grub 
 Street, had just begun to dissipate the darkness of the 
 old regime. The axe had been laid to the very root of 
 that jealous system of exclusiveness which compelled 
 Cave to smuggle an eavesdropper into the gallery of the 
 House, and saw Johnson writing the debates in a garret 
 in Exeter Street. 
 
 Another element but recently ignored was struggHng 
 successfully for its representation in the body politic. 
 That process of action and reaction by which English 
 society is moulded, and of which the English Parliament 
 is but a concentrated type, began to display itself with a 
 significance far too strong, and in an arena far too exten- 
 sive to be nursed by the prohfic brains of hireling poets 
 and poetasters. The generation which had driven one 
 king to St. Germains and had dictated conditions to 
 
182 ethioa: 
 
 another, was not to be led by the rhymes and sarcasms 
 of a muse. As parties grew bolder and more defined, 
 partisans grev/ less and less scrupulous. The strange 
 and chaotic mixture of the claims of James and the 
 claims of William, of the claims of the Church of Rome, 
 the claims of the Church of England, and the claims of 
 Dissent, had confounded amidst their alternate rivalries 
 the two old constitutional principles of Conservatism and 
 Reform. Almost as many shades of opinion as there 
 were members disturbed the repose of Parliament, and 
 almost every shade had its expositor and interpreter in 
 or out of the House. There were Whigs Uke Nottingham 
 and Portland, attached to William's person and title ; 
 Whigs like Godolphin and Marlborough, in correspon- 
 dence with St. Germains ; old Whigs hke Harley, indif- 
 ferent ahke to the King in exile and the King in posses- 
 sion, and only jealous of the prerogative. There were 
 Tories who were Jacobites ; and Tories, who though they 
 v/ere not Jacobites, were certainly not WiUiamites. AU 
 these several parties, again, joined in their poUtical pre- 
 judices, were subdivided in their theological tenets. 
 There were Non-juring High Churchmen, Non-juring 
 Low Churchmen, High Church Jurors, Low Church 
 Jurors, Dissenters arrayed against the Church of Eng- 
 land, Dissenters arrayed agatast the Church of Rome. 
 The more varied the faction, the more various the litera- 
 ture. One uniform characteristic it possessed. It was 
 almost all pohtical and polerpical. The era was essen- 
 tially an era of pamphleteers. Such at least may seem 
 no unjust description of the times in which a statesman 
 like Somers condescended to pen his pohtical tracts, a 
 philosopher like Locke to write his " Essay on Tolera- 
 tion," and a patriot like Sidney to pubhsh his " Dis- 
 courses on Government." The monopoly of wit by 
 politics was complete, and in a few years no author 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 183 
 
 Gould write a play without affecting the patches on a 
 lady's cheek, or the smile on a courtier's mouth ; no 
 epigram without allusion to "ways and means," would 
 pass muster at St. James's, and no ode without the 
 rhymes of " nation " and " administration " be read at 
 White's or the Grecian.^ 
 
 Pamphlets, indeed, form a very large and a very pre- 
 tentious element in the intellectual and political history 
 of England. Numerically speaking, they are, at any 
 given period, an index to the quiescent or the disturbed 
 state of society. The swarm produced at the Civil Wars 
 is still the despair of every student, as the collection of 
 30,000 presented to the Museum by King George III. 
 bears witness. The growing taste for this species of 
 literature had been already testified to by Ben Jouson in 
 his " Staple of News," and by the complaint of Burton 
 in his " Anatomy of Melancholy," that if anybody reads 
 now-a-days, it is a playbook, or a pamphlet of news.^ 
 After the Restoration, there was an official reaction 
 against them. The reason given by the privileged 
 licenser, Sir Roger L'Estrange, for refusing his coun- 
 tenance to them, is highly characteristic ; "I think they 
 make the multitude too familiar with the actions and 
 counsels of their superiorSj too pragmatical and censo- 
 rious, and give them not only an itch, but a kind of 
 colourable right and licence to be meddling with the 
 Government." By the Revolution, the press was again 
 set to work. It had been complained, hitherto, that 
 political literature had taken refuge in imaginative litera- 
 ture, and that poets had become politicians, and their 
 plays business of State.^ Now, however, the increase of 
 
 ' See an amusing letter on this subject from Horace Walpole to Richard 
 West, May 4th, 1742. 
 
 ' Page 122. 
 
 ' " Reflection on the pretended parallel in Dryden's play of ' Duke of 
 Guise.' " Pamphlet. 
 
184 ' ethica: 
 
 political discussion in a more consistent shape, ere the 
 stamp duty had killed Grub Street, as Swift expresses it 
 to Stella, was such, that it was regarded as a fatal dis- 
 turber to the peace and welfare of famihes, "the meanest 
 of the shopkeepers and handicrafts spending whole days 
 in coffee-houses, to hear news and talk pohtics, whilst 
 their wives and children want bread at home, and they 
 themselves are thrust into gaols, or forced to take 
 sanctuary in the army." 
 
 This species of literature, indeed, is not without its 
 claims . It was preliminary and supplementary to the press . 
 It encouraged discussion, and it preserved it. It was at 
 once history, and its comment. The sphere of activity 
 of the press proper was very limited. Its duties were 
 of the very lowest description, those of a mere chronicle. 
 It portends better times, the opening of a more ambitious 
 era, when we find Warburton registering the boast of his 
 friend that his " Mercuries " were read and admired in 
 Ireland, Barbadoes, and Newfoundland.^ It was some- 
 thing, for a certain department of hterature to assume as 
 its peculiar province the propagation of contemporary 
 history, when the views of history were so low, and the 
 avenues to historical research so jealously guarded, that 
 no lady who entered the Museum for the purposes of 
 research could be sure of escaping without an insult.'^ 
 The treatment of the pamphleteer, indeed, was by no 
 means adequate to his labours. In one of the pamphlets 
 of the hour, an amusing picture is thus drawn of his 
 destiny : — " We gentlemen authors write for the gentle- 
 men printers, the gentlemen prmters print for the 
 gentlemen booksellers, the gentlemen booksellers sell to 
 
 ' "Nichol's Literary Illustrations," vol. ii. p. 15. 
 
 ° Mrs. Macaulay, the Radical Historian of the last century, was the 
 first lady who repaired to the then reading-rooms for study, and was insulted 
 too grossly for details to be given. — Pinkerton's Correspondence. Nichol's 
 Illustrations, vol. i. 137. 
 
OR CHARACTEBISTICS. 185 
 
 the gentlemen readers ; but at last comes the Christmas 
 pies, the tarts, the trunks, the bandboxes, the paper- 
 kites, and forthwith consume what the gentlemen readers 
 bought, the gentlemen booksellers sold, the gentlemen 
 printers printed, and the gentlemen authors wrote." 
 
 There are authors who live only in their names while 
 their works have expired. None but the student, per- 
 haps, has made himself acquainted with the subtle 
 ductihty of the " Leviathan ; " with the paradoxical 
 enigmas of the " Divine Legation ; " with the aristocratic 
 philosophy of the " Idea of a Patriot King ;" yet every 
 intelligent person knows something about the strange 
 vagaries of Hobbes, the testy temper and impetuous 
 erudition of Warburton, the political eccentricities of the 
 colleague of Harley, and the friend of Pope. Sometimes 
 again the individuaUty of an author is sunk in his works. 
 Who ever thinks of De Lohne's exile while conning his 
 speculations on the "Enghsh Constitution;" of Cer- 
 vantes' wound and poverty, while charging with the 
 doughty Knight of La Mancha ; of Shakspeare's childish 
 pranks on the banks of the Avon, or his more manly 
 frivohties at the Devil, while listening to the prayers of 
 httle Arthur, or the witticisms of Dogberry ; of the Abbe 
 St. Pierre rebuked into despair by the united wisdom of 
 Voltaire and M, De Stael, while wandering with Virginia 
 in those sweet orange-groves where the myrtle never dies, 
 and the turtle-dove always loves. Such has been the 
 fate of De Foe. His book is read throughout the civilized 
 world. The goat-skin dress of Crusoe, the gaunt cap 
 and umbrella, the cutlass and trusty musket, the man 
 Friday, the settlement, with aU its little colony of goats, 
 pigs, parrots, and monkeys, are as familiar pictures in 
 the tents of the wandering Arabs, as to the occupants of 
 every nursery from St. Petersburg to Calcutta and New 
 York. Yet not every hundredth passenger in Kegent 
 
18& , ethica: 
 
 ^treet knows anything of the strange and active life of 
 the man whose imagination has amused their ancestors 
 for more than a century and a half. 
 
 De Foe's existence reached over a long episode of 
 Enghsh history. He had written his first pamphlet, and 
 was' known at the coffee-houses before Charles had 
 received holy unction at the hands of Father Huddle- 
 stone, and he was still in the vigour of his reputation 
 when the death-bed of Anne was disturbed with the 
 disappointed ravings of Bohngbroke, with the white 
 staff under his feet, and the imprecations of Atterbury, 
 clamouring for the Pretender. The period has been 
 pronounced by a precipitate writer to have been, poh- 
 tically speaking, "and for the purpose of satire, a mean 
 one. De Foe's writings alone would be sufficient refuta- 
 tion of this indiscreet remark. Such an education as his 
 falls happily to the lot of few mortals. While he was yet 
 dangling in the arms of his nurse at St. Giles's, Monk 
 had earned for himself a ducal escutcheon ; the blood of 
 Scrope and Hugh Peters had atoned for the success of 
 Cromwell ; Milton was feigning himself dead, to escape 
 the peering eyes of the worthless Finch; the heir of 
 Charles the First was initiating his reign with maypoles 
 and orange -wenches, was forgetting the promises he made 
 in exile, and making new promises to forget, was renoun- 
 cing the covenant which he had made in Scotland, and 
 revoking the oath he had contracted at Breda, turning 
 out into the highways two thousand ministers in one day, 
 selhng hcences in St. Paul's Churchyard for his subjects 
 to eat flesh in Lent, attending secret mass himself, and 
 encouraging the malice of Clarendon, and the buffoonery 
 of Sheldon ; * and long ere he had left off his "Virgil " and 
 his " Euclid's Elements " at Mr. Norton's academy, at 
 Newington Green, the King of France had paid the King 
 
 ' " Pepys' Diary," ii. 342, 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 187 
 
 of England four hundred thousand pounds to surrender 
 Dunkirk, two millions of livres to subvert the Protes- 
 tant religion and declare himself a CathoHc, and three 
 millions to overthrow the hberties of Holland ; the Cabal 
 had been formed ; Bedloe had been presented with five 
 hundred pounds ; the reptile Oates had been pensioned ; 
 the strange tale of pilgrims, handcuffs, and knives, was 
 being bandied about in every tavern ; the city blunder- 
 busses had been burnished up; hats, feathers, and 
 shoulder-belts were brought into mode ; De Foe himself 
 was strutting about, flail in hand — as he called his oaken 
 cudgel — through crowds of 'prentices at Cripplegate, 
 discoursing under their voices about the wild Tory 
 murderers, whom the Papishes had smuggled over from 
 the bogs of Ireland. He had just entered the livery, 
 and put his name down as a hosier of Cornhill, in the 
 Chamberlain's books, when the reaction took place that 
 drove Shaftesbury to the Continent, and brought Sidney 
 and RusseU to the block ; and when the doctrines of 
 Filmer and Hobbes on divine right and passive obedience 
 were confirmed, on pain of iufamy here and damnation 
 hereafter, in fuU convocation, by the University of Oxford. 
 Acts like these might well have made the most sanguine 
 patriot tremble for his country. To an iutelhgent ob- 
 server, the rapid succession of such scenes of tyranny, 
 plot exploded by counter-plot, corporations disfranchised, 
 electors bribed, the elected pensioned, parhaments un- 
 constitutionally dissolved, jury-boxes unconstitutionally 
 packed, must have recalled painful recollections of the 
 past, and offered but poor prestige for the future. It was 
 little to be wondered at that the best-disposed should 
 have hesitated before he acted, and at last should have 
 acted without reluctance. 
 
 If anything could have confirmed the leanings of 
 De Foe, it would have been James's conduct on his 
 
188 ETHICA : 
 
 accession. A judicious correction of abuses might have 
 eonciUated many a mind in whom the offensive treatment 
 of his brother still rankled. Moderation in politics — 
 and especially moderation in those politics which had 
 religion for their object — might have won over many a 
 victim of intolerance, and subdued into inactivity many a 
 lukewarm disposition not yet fanned mto fanaticism ; 
 and, as far as human conjecture may be allowed, might, 
 by a seeming acquiescence, have paved the way for the 
 triumph of that Church which, above every other human 
 system, knows weU the value of insidious gentleness, 
 compared with open violence and sincere antagonism. 
 Those who condemn the stubborn and unyielding bigotry 
 of James on prudential grounds, should not forget that 
 on more than one occasion a blind and obstinate stupidity 
 had assisted the cause of liberty and government. As 
 it was, every one knows how James began his reign by 
 fair speeches to his parhament ; by appropriating the 
 customs without his parliament's consent ; by driving his 
 English subjects into the cocklofts of the Netherlands ; 
 by proselytizing his Scotch subjects with the dragoons of 
 Claverhouse; by filling up his regiments with Roman 
 Catholic majors and colonels : by throwing Baxter into 
 gaol, and expelling Locke from Christ Church. 
 
 It was not surprising that De Foe's choice should 
 have been readily made. When Monmouth was captured 
 by the bloodhounds of Portman, he took refuge from the 
 butcheries of Kirke and Jeffries on the Continent. When 
 he returned, he found the heart of James still as hard as 
 the nether millstone. He recognized Father Petre pre- 
 siding at the Privy Council Board. He heard the 
 dispensing power legalized in the courts of justice, and 
 read Catholic pastoral letters, printed by the King's own 
 printer, for pubhc propagation. The cowl and the rosary 
 of the Jesuit, and the mendicant garb of the Franciscan, 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 189 
 
 the Carmelite, and the Benedictine, he met in every 
 thoroughfare. He saw Farmer foisted on Magdalen 
 College, Massey collated to the Deanery of Christchurch ; 
 Lobb, a chief among the Independents, and Vincent 
 Alsop, the chief of the Presbyterians, acquiescing ia a 
 toleration which was but a thin disguise for absolutism. 
 
 It was this last act by which James, with a cunning 
 which Voltaire would have admired in his favourite Juhan, 
 aimed at despotism under the specious appearance of 
 clemency, that provoked De Foe's impatient opposition. 
 The "Letter to a Dissenter," which was as famous then 
 as Burnet's " Pastoral Letter " was a few years after- 
 wards, and which has sometimes been attributed to De 
 Foe, is now decided to have been the work of the 
 accomplished Halifax. But De Foe's own sentiments 
 on the occasion are known by his subsequent declaration. 
 These sentiments agreed in the main with Halifax's, 
 and were the sentiments of every intelligent .Dissenter 
 who, unlike Alsop and Lobb, dared to face unabashed 
 the frowns which could not subdue Baxter and Howe. 
 Some time before, when Western Europe proposed to 
 allow the Turks to take Vienna, because Austria was at 
 enmity with Western Europe, De Foe manfully exposed 
 tliis illogical malice. He now wrote, that as he had 
 formerly maintained that it was better for the Popish 
 House of Austria to ruin the Protestants in Hungary, 
 than for the Infidel House of Othman to ruin both 
 i^rotestant and Papist by overrunning G-ermany, so it was 
 more desirable that the Church of England should strip 
 the Dissenters of their very clothes, than that the Papists 
 should fall on both Churchmen and Dissenters and strip 
 them of their skins. Was there anything more absurd 
 than in King James giving the Dissenters liberty of con- 
 science at the expense of the constitution ? It is difficult 
 to refrain from observing that it would have been well for 
 
190 ETHICAr 
 
 the Dissenters had they been guided by De Foe's advice. 
 They evidently had the balance of power in their own 
 hands. But they were not politicians enough to take 
 advantage of the opportunity. They lost it, and it never 
 returned. When under the ascendancy of their High 
 Church opponents they were left not long after without 
 instruction for their children, without security for their 
 nainistry, they remembered with regret their shortsighted- 
 ness in not securing their liberty by a stipulated treaty. 
 
 De Foe's attachment to William has not passed 
 unnoticed by any of his biographers. It was something 
 like the devotion of Friday for Crusoe. On William's 
 previous visit to London, the keen penetration of the 
 former had involuntarily awakened in his mind a myste- 
 rious sympathy whieh was not to be bounded by the 
 grave. The constitution of their minds was not dissimilar. 
 The best friends and the worst enemies of either knew 
 well that the intimacy with which the condescension of 
 the Sovereign had hallowed the loyalty of the subject, 
 had its origin here. The same solid judgment, the same 
 phlegmatic independence, the same cautious temperament 
 — slow to decide but quick to execute, — often, when a 
 whole tribe of courtiers waited in the ante-room — found 
 for De Foe ready admittance into the more social privacy 
 of the closet. Even the countenances, so strikingly 
 indicative of the character in each, bore a perceptible 
 resemblance. What others taunted him with, it was his 
 pride to recollect, that strangers had been known t4 
 observe that the aquiline nose, the eagle eye, the heroic 
 mouth, and whole masculine physique of the monarch, 
 which the poorest engraver even now cannot wholly mar, 
 were common to both. To the end of his days he never 
 ceased to remember, with respectful gratitude, with what 
 gracious familiarity the Queen had been accustomed to 
 ask his co-operation in the attainment of some novel 
 
OR CHAEACTEBISTICS. 191 
 
 piece of china, or in the distribution of her favourite 
 evergreens at Kensington. While James, hesitating be- 
 tween his bodily fear and his faith in the pov^er of the 
 Host, was dallying with the artful Compton, and while 
 Oxford was pledging her plate for the invader, De Foe 
 had been one of those who joined the triumphal march of 
 WUliam. When WUHam entered London, the envious 
 eye of Oldmixon had recognized him in a richly laced 
 cravat and fine flowing cloak taking part in the cavalcade, 
 And at that critical moment, when the scrupulous politics 
 of the Tory Highflyers would yield only to the authority 
 of Somers' famous precedent from the " History of 
 Sweden," De Foe was on the benches of the Parliament 
 House, listening with unfeigned contempt to the irrational 
 delicacy of a party who afiected still to regard as their 
 lawful sovereign the man whom they had duped out of a 
 Idngdom, and still to regard as a stranger the man whom 
 they had pawned their hereditary tankards and principles 
 to introduce. 
 
 The measures of William's Government De Foe 
 defended with the energy of a partisan. When William's 
 opinion that with such an enemy as Louis for a neighbour, 
 a standing army was politic, and even necessary, was made 
 the text of a dozen pamphlets as an opinion more suited 
 for the atmosphere of Bagdad or Constantinople, De Foe 
 manfully maintained that prevention is better than cure, 
 and that the surest way to keep peace is to be prepared 
 for war. When the Partition treaty was made the ground 
 for criminating speeches in Parliament, a pamphlet, bear- 
 ing the title, " The Two Great Questions considered," 
 startled the town by the forcible reasoning in which the 
 writer enforced the wisdom of the contract. His enemies 
 did not forget that in his idolatry of WiUiam he did not 
 want an apology for the massacre of Glencoe. His 
 advocacy on the matter of the Succession Bill was certainly 
 
192 ethica: 
 
 more to his credit. It is difficult now to realize the 
 critical excitement that attended the progress of that 
 measure. It was evidently a crisis in which party spirit 
 had free limits for a wild and dangerous career. A slight 
 quivering of the balance, an unfair predominance of a 
 heterodox view, might have converted the most consti- 
 tutional monarchy in the world into a republic like 
 Holland, or a despotism like Spain. There is no doubt 
 that the nation, by the death of the Duke of Gloucester, 
 had arrived at a dilemma similar to that which had 
 occurred on the demise of BUzabeth, and that a mishap 
 might have renewed the old scenes of Mary or of Crom- 
 well. There were Tories deriding the Act of Settlement, 
 and calling on the Pretender, Whigs exclaiming against 
 the Prerogative and voting for limitation and the Elector, 
 and Democrats iatent upon the immediate exclusion of 
 the Princess Anne and the establishment of a common- 
 wealth. If we are to credit the writers of the day, 
 repubhcan principles were openly propagated. Language 
 that had not been heard since the days of WaUingford 
 House and the Kota Club circulated freely in the coffee- 
 houses. Pamphlets appeared in which the SaKc law 
 was significantly recommended for adoption in England. 
 Noblemen even gave themselves up to the work, and 
 were earnest in the study of Fletcher's " Kepublican 
 Politics" and such like pubKcations. New editions of 
 the works of Milton, Ludlow, and Sidney, were issued by 
 the press. The " Oceana " of Harrington was passed 
 through the town emblazoned with a dedication to Harley 
 and the Lord Mayor of London. And the imposing irony 
 of a tract entitled the "Free State of Noland," founded 
 on the " Oceana " and the " Discourse on Government," 
 was entirely lost in the terror which its artful gravity 
 created. A faction was not wanting seriously to discuss 
 the claims of the descendants of Monmouth himself, and 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 193 
 
 the pens of Drake and Davenant did not hesitate to 
 report that William was secretly plotting with Louis and 
 Monsieur Poussin. It seems amazing that in spite of 
 these morbid symptoms the Bill which contained measures 
 for the Protestant Succession, and the memory of which 
 was preserved on the canvas of Sir Godfrey Kneller, 
 should, on its first presentation, have met with no better 
 treatment than a consignment to the Devil. 
 
 De Foe's most successful effort in the cause of the 
 House of Orange was his famous " True-born Enghsh- 
 man." It is not necessary to repeat the old tale of in- 
 gratitude which reproached WilHam with being a 
 foreigner, and with rewarding in the hour of his success 
 those foreigners who had assisted him in the hour of 
 trial. The fame of Schomberg has survived the pam- 
 phlet of Tutchin. De Foe's pamphlet proved at once 
 the futility of the sneer. An Enghshman, he showed, was 
 the most mongrel-breed on the face of the earth. The 
 escutcheon of Enghsh nobihty, he reminded the sneerers, 
 was crossed by the bar sinister of a crowd of French 
 cooks, Scotch pedlars, ItaUan adventurers, and Flemish 
 bastards — the lasciAdous creation of Charles's lazy, long, 
 lascivious reign. The literary merits of the tract were 
 by no means commensurate with the subject. De Foe's 
 name has been associated as a poet with the names of 
 Motteux and Tate, and the best test of his Hues is the 
 standard of his companions. The " True-bom English- 
 man " was but a doggrel, perhaps an intentional one. 
 Had the piece been adorned with the pretensions of a 
 highly-finished epic, it might have won a place in some 
 popular selection from the English poets. But as a 
 familiar satire it was hawked from street to street and 
 shouted out at every market-place. The circulation in 
 this manner reached to no less than eighty thousand 
 copies. Hosts of unprincipled booksellers anticipated a 
 
 13 
 
194 ETHICA : 
 
 year's income by the surreptitious sale of pirated editions, 
 at the various prices of a penny, twopence, and sixpence. 
 Nine editions, on. good paper, fairly printed, and sold at 
 the advance price of a shUHng, were set down to the 
 account of the author. Even the sale of " The Conduct 
 of the AUies" fell far below it. The effect of the 
 sarcasm folly corresponded. Nearly twenty years after 
 it was confessed that the boast of being a true-bom Eng- 
 lishman was exploded. The word which had daily 
 graced the speeches of the factious, and was in the 
 mouth of every Jacobite, became as obsolete as wooden 
 shoes. WilHam, conscious of the service rendered his 
 cause, sent for De Foe to the palace. At his death, 
 "more mortally wounded by the pointed rage of divided 
 parties than by the fall from his horse," wfaUe others 
 were drinking to the health of Sorrel and the little 
 gentleman in black — such was the Egyptian idolatry of a 
 horse and a mole — De Foe gave vent to his feelings in 
 an elegy entitled " The Mock Mourners," iu verses sin- 
 gularly distinguished for a mixture of prosy common- 
 place and great irregular excellence. 
 
 The loss of William did not paralyze the energy of 
 De Foe. For Anne, indeed, he did not entertain so 
 strong a feehng of personal regard. Anne was, in fact, 
 one of those characters formed to co-operate involun- 
 tarily with a great revolution. It is worth a pause to 
 consider what would have been the effect on the popular 
 protest against arbitrary power, had such a Queen as 
 Elizabeth been opposed to it. More depends on the 
 personal bearing of Anne than mere casual readers of 
 history are v/ont to allow. Those who have penetrated 
 behind the scenes have reason to be convinced that a 
 little more strength of wiU, and a httle more fearlessness 
 of decision, would have given a very different complexion 
 to the crisis to what it at present bears. But the fact is 
 
OR CHABACTEBISTICS. 195 
 
 the formation of Anne's character had been fatally in- 
 fluenced by the circumstances of her life. Ever since she 
 had known herself she had never known what it was to 
 indulge without reserve in freedom of choice. Her posi- 
 tion had been one to demand a continual sacrifice of her 
 inclination to her interest and her duty. She had been 
 early forced to educate herself in dupUcity. Those whom 
 she was disposed to love she had been compelled to treat 
 with most hostility ; and those whom she detested in her 
 heart she had been forced to feign most cordiaUty 
 towards. She had all affection for her father, and she 
 had been forced to countenance a foreigner in usurping 
 her father's throne. Her sacrifices had never met with 
 adequate return. William wanted manners; Mary, to 
 use the Duchess of Marlborough's expression, wanted 
 bowels. Mary, therefore, forgot she was her sister, and 
 William that she would be his successor. In self-defence, 
 accordingly, she had been compelled to regulate her be- 
 haviour by such artful examples as she found in such 
 women as Lady Marlborough, and to mould her disposi- 
 tion by such sophistical precepts as she found in such 
 •writers as Montaigne.^ All the little arts which she had 
 acquired in the hour of her misfortune grew up with her 
 in the hour of her prosperity. She had been imposed 
 on all her life ; she became correspondingly slow, equi- 
 vocal, and cautious. The lessons of Harley had perhaps 
 strengthened her inclinations. Indeed, never had mistress 
 so congenial a minister, or minister so congenial a 
 mistress. In the disposal of vacancies a year often 
 passed before the Treasurer decided ; months more went 
 by before the Queen would ratify his decision. She 
 would consent to his recommendation ; but though he 
 
 ' " Conduct," p. 183. From whence it would appear that the old Gascon 
 sophist was one of the very few authors she allowed herself to take an 
 interest in. 
 
 13—3 
 
196 ethica: 
 
 held the warrant in his hands for her signature, she 
 never would sign it on the spot. ^ In the affair of the 
 Succession her vacillation was ludicrous. She was by 
 nature a woman of strong prejudices, but those prejudices 
 were happily counteracted a little by a weak wiU. She 
 acted, therefore, after her kind. She would, and she 
 would not. She wrote letters to her brother, assuring 
 him of the reversion of the crown. She told Buckingham 
 she would do her best for his interests. She then 
 pretended she had no disposition to favour her brother. 
 Bolingbroke had been seen under the same roof with him 
 in the Opera, at Paris. * She said at Court he ought to 
 have withdrawn at the other's appearance. At her 
 toilette not one of her ladies could mention the Chevaher 
 without drawing down an expression of impatience. * If 
 any Lord, as Argyle, for instance — told her some persons 
 were suspected about her, or some persons presumed to 
 suspect her, all the answer was a smile, in which the 
 sneer was as visible as the assent, or a " How can any 
 one entertain such thoughts ? " Though she would not 
 admit the claims of her brother, she betrayed no pre- 
 ference for the claims of her cousin. The Elector had 
 been induced to demand through his ambassador his 
 writ as Duke of Cambridge, prior to his proposed appear- 
 ance in the House of Lords. The Ministry were in 
 perplexities. The Chancellor referred the ambassador to 
 the Treasurer, the Treasurer to the Queen. But no clue 
 could be got to her inclinations. She expressed great 
 annoyance to Harley ; told Harley she would not suffer 
 any of the Electoral family here ; then, that she mtended 
 to invite over the Electoral Prince next summer; that 
 the ambassador's applying to the Chancellor was a mark 
 of contempt ; then that he ought to have apphed to the 
 
 Smft. = Swift and Stuart Papers. ' Swift's " Inquiry." 
 
OR CHARACTEBISTICS. 197 
 
 Secretary of State.' But still De Foe was not idle. 
 Any minister knew he could claim in the cause of honesty 
 the honest exertions of the Veteran patriot. Was he 
 wanted to assist the Union ? He had left his family at 
 Tooting, and within a week was on the other side of the 
 Tweed, encountering the jealous arguments of Presbyterian 
 pamphleteers and the more dangerous brickbats of Edin- 
 burgh mobs. Was he required on some secret service on 
 the Continent ? In less than two days he was on the road 
 to Paris or the Hague. To this spirit of industry was 
 added a spirit of independence proportionally strong. In 
 an age when to be a political writer was to be a venal 
 one, his honesty won him the pillory and a prison. In 
 an age which gave birth to FuUer and the Tumham- 
 green ambuscade ; in an age of Itahan assassinators like 
 Fenwick, Barclay, and Friend, and of Italian statesmen 
 hke Wharton and Sunderland, his political consistency 
 left him with a reputation superior to Swift's, Dryden's, 
 and Prior's. No ministerial gold could seduce the stub- 
 born old partisan to a level with the Leslies and Kid- 
 paths, A partisan we can hardly call him. The nominal 
 distinctions of party he did not appear to recognize, at 
 least as a standard of conduct. Though a strong friend 
 of Wmiam, whUe Prior was writing of James as the 
 lean, worn, and rivelled old bully of St. Cloud, De Foe 
 was openly deprecating the cruel treatment and insult 
 which James had received at the hands of those who were 
 nearest and dearest to him. Though a Whig, he stre- 
 nuously supported against the W^higs the pohcy of a 
 standing army. Though a Dissenter, when the question 
 of occasional conformity was raised, he took part with the 
 Church against Dissent. Though a PEotestant, when the 
 Bill for preventing the growth of Popery in Ireland had 
 been forced upon the Queen, he took part with the Eoman 
 
 ' Macpherson's " Papers," vol. ii. p. 592. 
 
198 ethica: 
 
 Catholjca against the bigotry of Protestantism. Though 
 a Mend of Godolphin, he was always regarded with 
 esteem by Harley. Though a friend to Harley, he re- 
 fused to support him on the subject of peace. 
 
 The mention of this latter measure reminds one of 
 another contemporary political satirist of De Foe — I 
 mean, of course, Swift. The question, as etery one 
 knows, had become a ministerial one. The prospect of 
 the Tories depended entirely on its success. As the day 
 approached, the greatest anxiety was felt at Court. The 
 Whigs were straining their utmost. A powerful oppo- 
 sition had been mustered. The majority of the House 
 of Lords was generally known to be favourable to them. 
 Lord Nottingham, a man noted in that by no means 
 barren period of eloquence for a tolerable speaker, had 
 deserted to their side. PubUc indignation was daily 
 fostered by the aid of tracts, in one of which Harley 
 himself was represented as the Enghsh Cataline. The 
 minister of the Elector of Hanover had given in a violent 
 memorial against the peace, and caused it to be printed. 
 Four editions of " The Conduct of the AUies," it is true, 
 had been called for in a single week ; but the Lord Chief 
 Justice Parker had already proceeded against the pub- 
 lisher, and the Dutch Envoy had lodged his protest. In 
 the very quarter, too, where they should have looked for 
 support, the Ministry found nothing but trifling, inde- 
 cision, and inaction. Symptoms of indiff"erence on 
 the part of the Queen had been observed even by 
 Mrs. Masham. On her way from the House she ^had 
 refused her hand to the Lord Chamberlain, the Duke 
 of Shrewsbury, and the Great Chamberlam, the Earl of 
 Lindsay, and given it to the Duke of Somerset. Added 
 to this, the Lord Treasurer himself had already sustained 
 a defeat in the House on a collateral question on the 
 peace introduced by Nottingham, and could only reply 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 199 
 
 to the anxieties of his friends, that he could not help it, 
 that people would forswear themselves, and that the 
 hearts of kings were unsearchable. The new Ministry, 
 it was currently rumoured, had been already named. 
 Somers was to have the White Staff, and Walpole to be 
 Chief Secretary. The Whigs had desired their friends 
 to take places to see the Lord Treasurer carried to the 
 Tower; whUe Wharton had been observed to clasp his 
 throat, to indicate the species of revenge they intended 
 to take. The plight of Swift himself aU this time was 
 too miserable to be ludicrous. As the crisis drew on he 
 determined on flying. He writes to SteUa like a man 
 bewildered. He entreated Secretary St. John to beg the 
 Lord Treasurer, as soon as ever he found the change 
 resolved on, to send him abroad somewhere or other as 
 Queen's Secretary, where he might remain till the next 
 Ministry recalled him, "when," he adds, " I shall he sick 
 for six months." 
 
 The effect of De Foe's high spirit was undoubtedly 
 prejudicial to himself. Owning no parties, professionally 
 attached to no faction, he was persecuted by all. His 
 persecutions and his endurance reminds us of one to 
 whom he was far superior, the independent Prynne. It 
 would fill pages to detail his sufferings. His own lan- 
 guage, in reviewing them, is painfully pathetic. His 
 letters were opened, his papers extracted from the coffee- 
 houses, his goods and merchandise mysteriously removed 
 from the vessel that imported them. He was continually 
 receiving missives, threatening to rabble his house, to 
 carry him off, to murder him. Sometunes he was dogged 
 into dark passages, sometimes his door was beset by 
 ruffians in the disguise of baihffs, sometimes sham writs 
 were forced into his hands to extort money. PubHcations 
 full of abuse were dropped into his window at Hackney. 
 The " Observators," the " Behearsals," and the " Med- 
 
200 ETHICA : 
 
 leys," calumniated him as a bankrupt and a cheat. One 
 opponent charged him with stealing a horse at Coventry. 
 Swift, who probably took his hint for his celebrated letter 
 to Lord Oxford, on an institution for the improvement of 
 the Enghsh language, from De Foe, called him in the 
 " Examiner" illiterate and an idiot. Gay denied him 
 the possession of anything but the superficial parts of 
 learning. The Swedish Ambassador brought a false 
 accusation against him. The Muscovite Ambassador 
 complained against him. Narcissus Luttrel teUs us, be- 
 cause he had written in his "Review," that "money 
 makes Christians to fight for the Turks, gives servants 
 to the Devil, nay, even to the very Czar of Muscovy." ^ 
 On one occasion he was put into the pillory. Twice he 
 was thrown into Newgate. 
 
 The origin of the first incarceration is one of the 
 most curious in the history of hterature. During the 
 whole of William's reign, in spite of the toleration, a 
 strong undercurrent had set in against dissent. On 
 Anne's accession, moderation or restraint was no longer 
 necessary. The feeling burst forth in precipitate violence. 
 The Queen's speech at the first Parliament was ominous 
 for the Nonconformists, The Church was alluded to in 
 tones of triumph. The Commons, in reply, talked about 
 its perfect restoration to its old privileges. "What those 
 privileges were was soon made manifest. The BiU for 
 the prevention of Occasional Conformity had passed the 
 Lower House. The Upper House rejected it. Theii" 
 rejection only inflamed the zeal outside. Sermons, 
 disclaiming toleration, were preached and published. 
 Crowds of women, drunk with bigotry, echoed such 
 doctruies. Swift, in his journal, bears humorous testi- 
 mony to the virulence of party spirit, when he wrote 
 that the very dogs in the street had become more 
 
 ' "N. L.'s Diary," vol. vi. 224. Oxford Press. 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 201 
 
 ixoublesome, and that Tory cats and Whig cats held 
 midnight debate on the roof of his house. The bloody 
 flag of Saccheverel had been unfolded. The joke about 
 two parallel straight liaes meeting in a centre, was in 
 every tavern. At length a pamphlet, entitled " The 
 Shortest Way with the Dissenters," really written by 
 De Foe, but apparently the work of some Ultra or High- 
 flyer, was announced. The persecuting sentiments of 
 the author were ironically exaggerated till they might 
 have been fathered by St. Dominick. But notwith- 
 standing the exterminating advice, the imposition was 
 completely successful. People were quite ready to do 
 for the Nonconformists what Louis XIV. had done for 
 the Huguenots, and Philip II. for the Moors. They 
 are to be rooted out of the nation — such was the 
 language — as serpents, toads, and vipers. The gaUows 
 and the galleys were publicly hinted at. A Cambridge 
 Fellow ranked the treatise next to the Holy Bible and 
 the sacred comments. Down with the Whigs, down 
 with the Conventicle, was echoed by press, pulpit, and 
 coffee-house. Forty-one was to be revenged, and the 
 process was — the shortest way. When the imposition 
 exploded, and the Tories found they had been applauding 
 a book written by a dissenting Pomponatius, the outcry 
 was as loud on the other side. The " London Gazette " 
 took up the official hue and cry. The tract, it was 
 written, was a scandalous and seditious one. Whoever 
 should discover the author, Daniel De Foe, should be 
 entitled to the Queen's reward of fifty pounds. The 
 Dissenters themselves stiU refused to be convinced of 
 the ruse. One honest Colonel undertook to be hangman, 
 rather than that the author should want a pass out of 
 the world. Another gentleman, the president of a club, 
 declared that he would deUver him up without the 
 government's remuneration. At last, the zeal of Not- 
 
202 bthica: 
 
 tingham and Leslie achieved their object. The publisher 
 was to be proceeded against in the author's room, and 
 this the author would not allow. De Foe surrendered 
 himself, was found guilty, and was sentenced by Sir 
 Simon Harcourt to pay a fine of two hundred marks, 
 to stand three times in the pillory, be imprisoned during 
 the Queen's pleasure, and to find sureties for good 
 behayiour for seven years. The severity of the sentence 
 was acknowledged by his enemies, and turned the tide 
 of popular favour. The pillory, in which the great wit 
 stood, was hung with garlands. During the exhibition 
 his health was drunk, and refreshments duly provided 
 for him. The simple man's honest triumph may be 
 contrasted with the gaudy ovation which the pubUcation 
 of the " Draper's Letters " procured Swift in the Emerald 
 Isle. That singular love of pre-eminence, compounded 
 with an inherent love of strife, and a morbid itch for 
 notoriety, had just drawn from him his famous agitation 
 against the halfpence of Wood. All his hopes of pro- 
 motion in England had been surrendered by him with 
 expressions of bitter disappointment. In his recent 
 visits to London he was never received, except with a 
 view to his corruption, with anything but cold and 
 studied pohteness. Once, and then only for 'a short 
 time, he was permitted an entrance into the brilliant 
 dissipations of Leicester House. Worn out with intrigue, 
 he had carried his malignant spirit to the other side of 
 the Channel, to meet with aU the compensation adulation 
 and pohtical demonstration could supply to him. Wherever 
 he went the ringing of bells, bonfires, and triumphal 
 arches preceded him, and cities waited for him with their 
 freedom enclosed in silver boxes. The Draper's Head 
 became a sign, Engra^ngs of his portrait, compli- 
 mentary medallions, and handkerchiefs adorned with the 
 patriot's likeness, were in every shop window, while the 
 
OR CHAKACTERISTICS. 203 
 
 exuberant enthusiasm of the worthy members of the 
 Draper's Club at Taplin's found vent for itself in songs 
 and midnight toasts, glowing with all the music and 
 zeal of Irish chivalry. Yet, notwithstanding these noisy 
 testimonies of popularity, those who are acquainted with 
 his confessions know the feelings with which the object 
 of them endured them. 
 
 I do not intend to enter into the details of De Foe's 
 political existence under George I. There was but little 
 prospect of literary leisure to gild the gloomy setting of 
 one of the longest, the most laborious, and the most 
 upright political lives that the Kevolution produced. His 
 last tract he wrote in 1715, and ere the sheets were in 
 the printer's hands apoplexy overtook him. Sixteen 
 years were yet to be spared him, and during those 
 six-teen years occurred one of the most singular pheno- 
 mena in the development of the human miad. The 
 lateness of the growth of Dryden's and of Burke's 
 imagination is familiar to all. But it would be difficult 
 through the whole range of .mental history to find a 
 parallel for that anomalous author who could at the 
 age of sixty, amid the hardening struggles of party 
 warfare, give to the world such an argosy of fiction as 
 that contained in the later volumes of De Foe. 
 
 The history of these volumes, indeed, one cannot 
 contemplate without accepting the lesson that the con- 
 trast between their past popularity and their present 
 neglect presents. While the adventures of "Robinson 
 Crusoe " are to be picked up at every bookstall from 
 London to Aleppo, there are about as many who turn 
 from it to the " Cavalier," the " History of the Plague," 
 or of "Captain Singleton," as there are who leave 
 " Macbeth" and "Hamlet" for the "Venus and Adonis," 
 " Paradise Lost " for "Paradise Regained," or the "Pil- 
 grim's Progress" for the "Holy War." In works of 
 
204 ethica; 
 
 fiction it is perhaps natural that taste should be capri- 
 cious, and the judgment of one generation reversed by 
 the succeeding one. Who, for instance, reads Cowley 
 as often as he reads Homer, yet MUton predicted that 
 the works of Cowley would be read when the Homeric 
 ballads were forgotten. Who reads Davenant ? yet 
 Hobbes claimed for Davenant an immortahty that is 
 due to Milton alone. Who gives Waller or PameU more 
 than a single perusal ? yet Dryden modestly exaggerated 
 the claims of Waller's muse at the expense of his own, 
 and Hume in his " Essays " tells us that where he read 
 Cowley once he could read Parnell fifty times. 
 
 In criticising De Foe's life and works, it is difficult 
 to refrain from associating both with the principle of 
 caste. There were, we take it, two men whom the 
 great Puritan reaction brought forth, illustrating seve- 
 rally its two great phases — religious and pohtical — ■ 
 Bunyan and De Foe. Bunyan's strong imagination, 
 reacted on by the events of the hour, made him an 
 earnest religionist. The associations of De Foe left 
 him a political zealot. Their works are but types of 
 their class. De Foe is Bunyan ia the garb of a layman. 
 Bunyan is De Foe in the pulpit. In the hands of a pro- 
 phetic tinker human nature is represented in the form 
 of a spiritual creation and in a spiritual capacity, full 
 of energy, indeed, and inventive aspirations, but with 
 aspirations set on things above, and with an energy 
 that obeys an intuition less gross than that of sinew and 
 nerve. With De Foe, as exemphfied in his " Crusoe," 
 the powers of man are bent on the attainment of earthly 
 objects — earthy. It is this practical spirit which distin- 
 guishes it from the more imaginative interest excited 
 by the " Prisons of Pellico " and the " Picciola " of 
 De Santaine. Not a little of its absorbing interest 
 we are inclined to beheve rests in reality on this unwit- 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 205 
 
 ting admiration with which we watch the progressive 
 triumph of man over matter, with which we see material 
 natm-e, animals and savages, gradually succumbing to the 
 coercive control of that peculiar contriving power, an 
 excess of which has at different times produced a FrankUn 
 and a Watt. The power of individuaUzing he shared in 
 common with the author of the "Pilgrim's Progress." 
 Thus Bunyan's personifications are the most real, 
 De Foe's characters the least fictitious. Bunyan was 
 the last of that allegorical school which the piety or 
 the superstition of the middle ages bequeathed to us. 
 In this view the "PUgrim's Progress" is not so much 
 a novelty as a renaissance, and as he was the last, so 
 he was the best. If we compare him to the author of 
 "Visions of Piers Plowman," "The Mirror for Magis- 
 trates," or the " Faerie Queen," we shall at once see 
 the superiority of his skill in his emblematical characters. 
 His allegorical personages, regarded as attributes, are as 
 far superior to those of his predecessors as the Michael 
 and Gabriel of Milton to the Bia and Kratos of JEschylus. 
 For De Foe, there is no writer in the English language 
 whose fictions wear the garb of fact so becomingly. The 
 anecdotes connected with them are ample testimonies to 
 his imposing powers of originahty ; for indeed no writer 
 without originahty could ever have beguiled the penetra- 
 tion of Chatham and Johnson. There is not a child 
 who does not beheve in the adventures of Crusoe as 
 strongly as he believes in the history of Joseph. 
 
 In powers of reahzation we would compare him with 
 Swift, not but that the Dean gains by the comparison. 
 There is more skiU, it is presumed, required to paint 
 natural objects naturally, than to paint monstrous objects 
 consistently. Swift undoubtedly has very vividly drawn 
 the adventures of Lilliput, but he had the hcence which 
 the unexplored province of the praetematural always give's. 
 
206 ethica: 
 
 De Foe painted the familiar, and the execution is 
 always withm reach of criticism. Swift can only extract 
 our wonder or excite our scepticism. De Foe has been 
 tried by our experience, and has almost cheated us of our 
 beUef. If Swift had been an artist, and preserved the 
 same characteristics, he would have illustrated the 
 infernal terrors of Milton's Pandemonium to perfection ; 
 but it would have been reserved for the cunning art of a 
 De Foe to engrave the natural dehghts of his Paradise. 
 
 As with all books that hold the popular affections, his 
 "Crusoe" is remarkable for its simplicity, and indeed, 
 one might justly include in this remark all De Foe's 
 works of fiction.* The language employed and the style 
 are Herodoteanly simple. It is to an eminent degree the 
 language of the common people. One of his satirists in 
 derision consigned the circulation of his pieces among aU 
 the old women in London from Tothill- street to Lime- 
 house Hole ; and when it is remembered that this has 
 been the fate of the " Pilgrun's Progress," it may be 
 questioned whether the sarcasm is not a comphment. 
 The " Crusoe " has been seriously attributed to the 
 prison-hours of Harley; but it bears too much the 
 impress of De Foe's character to admit of the least doubt 
 of the authorship. The hero is strictly the model of 
 an independent. On every occasion the idiosyncracies 
 of the Puritan peep out. The strictness with which in 
 the midst of his solitude he kept the Sabbath, and the 
 devotion with which he observed the anniversary of his 
 shipwreck, might have been considered a protest against 
 Laud's legislation for Sunday sports. The strong peni- 
 tential agonies in which he reviewed his past career, his 
 
 ' " The first part of ' Robinson Crusoe ' cleared the proprietors of it a 
 thousand pounds, and though the second sold off about two editions, yet the 
 booksellers would have given two hundred pounds that it had never been 
 printed, the fijst would have been so much more saleable without it," — 
 " Spencer's Anecdotes," 258, Singer's Edition. 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 207 
 
 self-condemnation when suddenly enligiiiened, the vision 
 of the avenger who descended from a great black cloud, 
 in a bright flame of fire, making the earth to tremble at 
 his step, and the air to flash lightning as he moved 
 forward with his uphfted spear to kill him, remind us of 
 the earnest confessions of the Grace Abounding. The 
 curious arguments and hesitations which induced him 
 several times to spare the wretches who only wanted to 
 find him out to eat him, the comparison between himself 
 and Saul in the midst of the Philistines, the thought that 
 flashed across him on seeing the footprint in the sand 
 that Satan had taken upon him human form in order to 
 frighten him, the superstitious curiosity with which he 
 observed that all the accidents of his hfe had been 
 providentially arranged for a corresponding day in the 
 year, clearly betray the pen of the author who sent such 
 moral effusions as the " Family Instructor," and the 
 " Behgious Courtship," into the closets of kings. The 
 conversation with Friday on the existence of evil in the 
 world might have been held by De Foe any Sabbath from 
 the pulpit in Surrey Chapel. 
 
 It would have surprised De Foe, could he have anti- 
 cipated that his work was to be pressed into the service 
 of a certain school of the French philosophy of the 
 eighteenth century. Such was the case. Soon after the 
 appearance of the "EmUius," Paris produced a work 
 entitled the " New Eobinson Crusoe," in which the 
 author definitively stated that the undertaking had been 
 suggested to him by that eminent production. Most 
 readers of French literature know the passage where 
 Eousseau apostrophizes the work of De Foe as far above 
 Aristotle, Pliny, and Buffon. It was complained, how- 
 ever, by the author of the " New Crusoe," that the old 
 did not really come up to Rousseau's mark, that he starts 
 on his solitary existence with European tools and 
 
208 ETHicA : 
 
 instruments, which Kousseau's natural man cannot have. 
 The author then proceeds to carry out Eousseau's idea. 
 The new Crusoe Uke the old one, is shipwrecked on a 
 desert island. He is hterally in a state of nature. 
 Nature, however, is cunningly made to supply the assist- 
 ance which civilization had offered to his prototype. A 
 natural cave is converted into his dwelhng-place, of which 
 a row of withies is the wall; a shell is his spade; a 
 stone of an opportune shape, with an opportune hole 
 in it, is his hatchet ; a cocoa-nut forms his cup ; the back 
 of a turtle his trough ; the bones of fishes supply the 
 place of needles and pins ; bark does the duties of pack- 
 thread ; palm-leaves act for gingham and sUk ; and the 
 skins of a lama for wearing apparel. A flash of Hghtning 
 compensates for the absence of a tinder-box. There is 
 some httle ingenuity displayed in the first portion of the 
 story, though the form of it, in dialogue, tells sadly 
 against its mterest. By far the greater portion of the 
 tale itself is an exact copy of De Foe, without De Foe's 
 marvellous circumstantiaUty. If the plagiarism was 
 unacknowledged, as to all appearance it was, it consti- 
 tutes one of the most hnpudent thefts that on£ foreigner 
 ever committed on the intellectual property of another. 
 All the graphic details, so famihar to readers of the 
 original tale, the start at the impression of the foot in the 
 sandy sohtude, the discovery of savages at then: loathsome 
 feast, the rescue of the Indian victim, his baptism after 
 the day, Friday, his education and wild habits, the means 
 of rescue, a storm at sea, and a deserted ship, which was 
 to supply the island with every Em-opean article of 
 defence and consumption, the ultimate rescue by Friday 
 of his own father from an Indian war-feast, the stockade, 
 assault, and repulse, every Uttle item, including the 
 celebrated scene of the dying goat in the cave, have been 
 given afresh with far less of vividness and ofreaUstic power, 
 
OR CIIAEACTEEISTICS. 209 
 
 and, under the most favourable circumstances, in the most 
 unwarrantable spirit of appropriation. It is only this 
 latter feature that can render the work itself at all an 
 object of literary curiosity. 
 
 It seems rather paradoxical that De Foe should be 
 accused of want of imagination. It is certain he was no 
 poet, though he himself was disposed to set a high 
 jfoetical value on his metrical treatise " De jure Divino." 
 Pope, in his " Treatise on Bathos," assigned him his 
 portion among the ostriches, which, though they could 
 not fly, were yet able to outrun the fleetest horse ; an 
 idea more than once appropriated by a writer who, to use 
 the words of Dryden, when he invades authors, invades 
 them like a monarch, and whose skill converts theft into 
 a victory. Most of his imaginative productions are the 
 result, not so much of a romantic fancy, as of a keen 
 .observation and a methodical reason. It will perhaps 
 help to diminish our wonder at the lateness of their 
 publication, if we can be convinced that his fictions draw 
 as little upon the ideal and as much upon experience as 
 fictions can possibly do. His education, ^doubtless, 
 assisted him. As a volunteer, in the service of con- 
 stitutional government, his avocations must have carried 
 bim through scenes of stirring adventure. The Highlands 
 were as famihar to him as his own Stoke Newington. 
 And in England there was scarcely a province that he had 
 not visited. From his trips across the Channel, and his 
 occasional intercourse with such characters as Dampier, 
 his genius might have derived the lawless encounters of 
 the piracies of " Captain Singleton." While his expe- 
 rience about the Court of Charles II., or as a pohtical 
 refugee in the haunts of the metropolis, or in Newgate, 
 must have brought before his observant eye many an 
 original for the fortunate Eoxana or the guilty Moll 
 Flanders. To the wretchlessness of human nature his 
 
 14 
 
210 ethica: 
 
 mind, like the mind of Crabbe and of Hogarth, must 
 have been peculiarly sensitive. For, like Johnson's, it 
 was a believing one. The Doctor, it is well known, 
 believed in second sight, and almost beUeved in the 
 Cock Lane Ghost. Nor is there want of evidence to 
 show that De Foe himself shared in a rather charac- 
 teristic conviction in the phenomena of dreams and in the 
 spectral paraphemaUa of the spiritual world. 
 
 It has been said that the discovery of the footprint on 
 the sand was a poetical touch on the part of the author 
 worthy of Shakspeare. But we may be quite sure that 
 the author no more dreamt of setting himself up as a 
 rival to him whose genius has given us the scene of Lady 
 Macbeth's guilty start at the blood-stained hand, than 
 the originator of the nursery rhymes on the Covetous 
 King thought of making, according to Lord Macaulay^ 
 the best hexameter in the English language, when he 
 wrote — 
 
 " The Queen was in her garden, making bread and honey.'' 
 
 Some have doubted whether from the presence of the 
 practical element so strongly developed in his constitution, 
 he even possessed those lighter qualities, belonging more 
 to the fancy than to the reason, which so admirably 
 adapted Steele and Addison to be the arbiters of taste. 
 Coleridge said, he could select papers from his "Review" 
 not inferior in wit and humour, and superior in style and 
 thought, to the " Tatlers " and " Spectators." But I 
 am more disposed to allow him the attributes of solidity 
 than of raciness. Under these heads he showed at once 
 his superiority and his inferiority to Swift. Rhetorically 
 speaking, the brilliant, easy, idiomatic style of the Dean 
 places him, as a pamphleteer, beyond reach. But here 
 his praise ends, and De Foe's begins. His writings are 
 not those of a philosopher, but those of a partisan. We 
 look in vain for evidence of a mind probing deep into the 
 
OE CHABAOTEEISTICS. 211 
 
 causes of things, uninfluenced by everything but an 
 anxiety after truth. The reader of his works rises from 
 their perUsal with a perfect knowledge of the particular 
 defects of particular men, but the motives of those men, 
 the moral origin of those defects, are never touched upon. 
 There is abundance of good satire, of hearty abuse^ but 
 no analysis of character, no appeal to the metaphysics of 
 nature i This is doubtless partly to be attributed to the 
 confined Bphei:e of his composition* He wrote not for 
 mankind, but for a class. His dealings were not with 
 universal truths, but with local facts. Propositions 
 were framed for him, and a distinct course of reasoning 
 laid down. Hence, in all his discussions, even in thos^ 
 which admit of more elaborate treatment, he clings to 
 circumstances, discarding the cause for the simple effect. 
 This is more evident in his larger treatises. In his 
 furious invectives against the Whigs, he abuses them, not 
 because their legislation was based on false political con- 
 clusions, but because Somers and Godolphin were not 
 Tories, and Lord Oxford and Dean Swift were. He 
 promoted agitation among the Irish, not to redress the 
 real grievances of Ireland, the animosities of -class, the 
 influences of a deteridrating religion, the absence of 
 educational legislation, but simply because Irish coffers 
 were being enriched by halfpence from a private mint. 
 The contrast in De Foe ^ould be best illustrated by a 
 recurrence to his " Essay on Projects." The author of 
 the " Directions to Servants " could never have elevated 
 his mind from the absorbing frivolities of poUtics to 
 conceive it. It is with this "Essay" that De Foe's 
 fame as a poHtical economist is associated. It would 
 not be fair to compare Kim to Bacon, or, what would be 
 a more genial comparison, to Adam Smith. Yet it is 
 certain that he comes nearer to the author of the 
 "Wealth of Nations/' than do the econoniists of his 
 
 14—2 
 
212 ETHICA : 
 
 own day, Child, Petty, or Daveriant. It would hardly be 
 believed that the man whose name has been overlooked 
 by SmoUett, and later historians, had anticipated Mac- 
 adam and Howard, had laid the foundation of Bethlehem 
 Asylum and Greenwich Academy, had pubhshed exposi- 
 tions of views on commerce not unworthy of the Free 
 Trade Catechism, had suggested the reform of the 
 national banking system, had proposed the establishment 
 of provincial banks — and this, too, when not twenty years 
 before the rise of shops in the country villages had been 
 seriously deplored as the ruin of the great towns ; and 
 had projected a scheme for a commission of bankruptcy, 
 for friendly societies, and for an institution for the 
 education of females. It is not one of the least anomahes 
 about his singular character and fate, that posterity 
 should forget the merits of a writer who had, in his time, 
 composed one of the most extraordinary books since the 
 " Century of Inventions " or the " Principia," and whose 
 moth-eaten pages should one day help to mould the mind 
 of such a philosopher as FranHin. 
 
 In closing a review of De Foe's career, one cannot 
 help acknowledging that there is no writer in EngUsh 
 literature whose characteristics bear more strongly the 
 stamp of nationality. Everything about him is identified 
 with that idiomatic creature we are accustomed to recog- 
 nize as the portrait of an Enghsh citizen. Goldsmith is 
 Irish all over. The artistic affabihty of Addison would 
 rather suggest an association with the fellow-countrymen 
 of La Bruyere. The artificiaUty of Johnson's exterior 
 compromises the earnestness of his spirit. The brusque 
 and indomitable emphasis which Swift sometimes infused 
 into his demeanour, comes nearest to him. But it is in 
 De Foe alone we meet with the plain, unembeUished 
 existence of the Anglo-Saxon element, exemplifying 
 itself in its vigorous common sense, its epigrammatic 
 
OR CHABACTEEISTICS. 213 
 
 expressiveness, its homely and prosaic reality. His 
 individuality realizes the philosophy of common life as 
 thoroughly as that of Addison illustrates its amenities. 
 His experience embodies, as it were, the chivalry of the 
 middle class, the heroism of the bourgeoisie. Every page 
 of his writings is impregnated with the spirit of rational 
 industry, which he opposed to the sensualism around him, 
 and of which he is the canonical exponent. Cobbett did 
 not yield less to sentiment. Critics have decided that 
 tliis unmusical deficiency in taste has ruined his reputa- 
 tion as a literary artist, that his versification' is harsh, his 
 characterization homely, his narration without variety. 
 The remark might, indeed, be justly extended to his 
 conduct in matters where other men, with more sensibility, 
 would have escaped the imputation. The reason is plain. 
 His speculations had not been elaborated in the studio. 
 His academy had been the world. He had not been 
 " swaddled, rocked, and dandled," into a theorist. 
 "Nitor in adversum," was his motto, as emphatically 
 as it was Burke's. His sphere of contemplation was not 
 in the realms of imagination, but of fact. His studies 
 were identified, not with the ideal, but with the real. 
 He had no sympathies with the prevaiUng tastes of the 
 age. His powers were enlisted in another quarter ; his 
 subjects were of sterner stuff. The dehcacies of criticism, 
 the elegancies of the " belles lettres " he resigned to the 
 wits, who decided over then* cups at Button's on the 
 merits of Pope's "Homer" and Tickell's; or to the 
 fine gentlemen of White's, who reUeved the tedium of 
 ombre with bets on the arrival of Sir Henry Newton's 
 despatches from the Court of Tuscany, with Fihcaja's last 
 Latin ode on Lord Somers. His standard was not 
 "mode," but utility. His character accordingly shone, 
 to use a Baconian expression, with a dry Hght. His 
 mental and moral structure partook of the angular 
 
214 ETHICA : 
 
 conformation peculiar to his sect. In his idiosyncracies 
 the mechanical predominated. His ethics were those of 
 a reformer, and were composed in the single word 
 Progress. A century later in England he would have 
 been called a Utihtarian, in Germany a Eudsemonist. 
 
OR CHARACTEBISTICS. 215 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 POPE AND SWIFT, BOLINGBEOKE AKD HARLEY. 
 
 Literary Biography Prolix and Minute. — English and Continental Men of 
 Letters. — The Moral and Physical Welfare of Literary Men before and 
 alter the Revolution. — The System of Dedication a Mark of their Con- 
 dition. — The Theory of External Rewards at the Revolution examined. 
 — Dissociation of Literature from Politics after Anne, and consequent 
 Dissociation of Literary Men from the Court. — ^Pope. — Arbuthnot. — 
 Gay. — -Johnson. — ^Its results in creating a Literature of the Beau Monde. 
 Relations between the two Literatures. — Goldsmith. — Gibbon. — Mrs. 
 Macaulay. — Johnson. — Lord Lyttleton. — Walpole. — Chestei-field. — 
 Mutual Intercourse of Literary Men. — The Quarrels of Authors. — 
 Churchill. — Philips. — ^Moore. — Byron. — Macaulay. — Pope. — His Early 
 Position as a Man of Letters. — His Splenetic Habits. — His Quarrel with 
 Addison. — An Unbiassed Estimate of Addison's Character. — Pope's 
 Treatment of his Friends. — The Affair of his Letters. — The Relation 
 of Bookseller and Bookmaker Examined and Exempliiied. — Pope's 
 Poetical Position Defined. — Dryden. — Reaction in English Poetry. — 
 Cowper's Place in that Reaction. — Scott. — ^Byron. — Effect of Politics 
 on Poetry. — Classic Poetic Fervour. — Speculation on Pope's proposed 
 Epic. — His Satires and Epistle to Abelard Criticized. — Swift as a Satirist. 
 — D'Alembert on English Criticism. — Milton. — ^Bacon. — Addison. — 
 Swift's Poetry to be Examined by the Light of his Life. — Attempt at 
 Elucidating his Real Character. — Not Trusted by Queen Anne's 
 Ministry. — The Opposite Theory Reftited. — Harley's Character. — 
 Bolingbroke. — His Historical Position. — His Personal Demeanour. — 
 Connection with Pope and Swift. — Particular Estimate of his Intellectual 
 Career. — His Superiority to Harley. — His Versatile, Imposing Genius. 
 
 The prolixity of the literary annals of the eighteenth 
 century is remarkable* The general intimacy 'Sfith 
 writers of every grade may be said to exceed the vulgar 
 intimacy with those other characters, whose position the 
 muse of history has marked by a more dignified and a 
 more emphatic prominence. Most persons who would 
 cheerfully own their ignorance as to whether Charles II. 
 -was a quick walker, or WiUiam of Orange a hard drinker, 
 
216 ethica: 
 
 would repel the insinuation on their reading, were they 
 suspected of not knowing that Dryden took snuff, and 
 Johnson was purblind and laughed like a rhinoceros. 
 Their failures and \drtues, the gestures and dress, the 
 habits and even the conversations of the men of letters, 
 have been reported to us with a fidehty that Plutarch 
 would have envied, and that almost mocks the obUvion of 
 the tomb. The grand outlines of Johnson's figm-e, with 
 all its irregularities, as they have been preserved to us by 
 the skiU of an artist as superior to Plutarch, as Plutarch 
 is to Diogenes Laertius, stand forth in rehef too bold to 
 escape the notice of even the most transient passenger. 
 But the man who required to be told that Lord Chester- 
 field was one of the best Viceroys Ireland ever had, that 
 Sir Eobert Walpole governed the kingdom in Latin, that 
 Pitt used a crutch, and Fox loved ombre and champagne, 
 would tell you in turn how Swift rose from planting 
 asparagus in Moor Park, to lord it over the October Club, 
 how Addison could not talk without a bottle, how Pope 
 had a hunch on his back, and died worth eight hundred 
 a year, how Steele entertained the beggars of Edinburgh 
 on wiae-whey, and whiskey-punch, with baihfifs for hvery- 
 servants, how Sterne joked in his sermons, and died in 
 the hands of menials, and how Goldsmith was an inspired 
 idiot, who wrote like an angel, loved sassafras, and was 
 buried two thousand pounds in debt. 
 
 And yet no period more deserves to have the veil of 
 secrecy drawn over it, calls up more chequered feehngs, 
 or presents more chequered scenes of high intellectual 
 culture, by the side of such httle heroism of character, as 
 that period which dates from the birth of Dryden to the 
 birth of Scott. It would have been a flattering feature 
 in our nationahty if the mental history of England had 
 offered any favourable contrast in its material condition 
 to that career of misfortune which has so uniformly 
 
OB CHARACTEEISTICS. 217 
 
 attended the footsteps of genius, and almost identified 
 the profession of authorship with the calamities of 
 authors. Unhappily the annals of our literature present 
 no exception. For all the bitter associations connected 
 with its pursuit abroad, we can oppose associations more 
 bitter still. Tasso, apostrophizing his cat for a single ray 
 of light from her eyes, Cervantes in prison, MoUere 
 starving for a bowl of broth, are episodes of misery and 
 woe to which a very ordinary familiarity with native 
 biography can find ready counterparts. There can be 
 but small room for congratulation in the contemplation 
 of the physical and moral life of the man of letters, that 
 toil, envy, want, the grossest poverty, accompanying the 
 grossest viciousness, should form the prominent items of 
 his existence, and that satire should be so often authorized 
 to point to a cellar in the Mint, or a cell in the Fleet, as 
 the final repose for the remnant of a body snatched from 
 long years of servitude to the patron or the bookseller. 
 
 It would be unjust to attribute this uniform picture of 
 demorahzation to individual conformation. Personal 
 characteristics, indeed, it is but too certain lent their 
 co-operation, but the force of circumstances, of those 
 circumstances in which literature was placed, must not 
 be overlooked in the calculation. 
 
 Much has been said of the condition of the man of 
 letters in Johnson's time. It has on one occasion and 
 another been stigmatized as the epoch when the degra- 
 dation of literature was complete, and when literary 
 morality was at its Nadir. The criticism that compre- 
 hended in this view the fate of the Churchyards, Stowes, 
 and Butlers, would probably lend but a reluctant assent 
 to this position. It would probably question, and question 
 with justice, whether the generation in which Bacon 
 expressed his fear that he who had lived to study should 
 have to study to live, was authorized to upbraid that 
 
218 ETHiCA : 
 
 generation which repeated at once the fears and the anti- 
 thesis of the philosopher, in the sententious expression 
 of Johnson, " that he who Uved to please must please 
 to live." Physically speakmg, with some little margin, the 
 imputation cast on the Johnsonian era may stand. 
 Morally, however, I would award the precedence in igno- 
 miny to the era immediately succeeding the Eestoration. 
 Externally, the condition of the man of letters at the 
 court of Charles, has much in it that is attractive. It is 
 evident that, at the first glance, there is much to be 
 envied in the existence of the wit who formed ties of 
 friendship, and even stronger ties of kindred, among the 
 haughtiest noblesse in the world, who treated his sovereign 
 with far less of ceremony than a grandee of France 
 treated Eichelieu, and who even, though he did soinetimes 
 meet with Black WiU and his cudgel, had that sovereign 
 to visit him on his sick-bed, and to send him a purse to 
 get him out of the Fleet ; but, in truth, this was but the 
 tinsel that made the chains of slavery more conspicuous. 
 There was patronage indeed, but there was no inde- 
 pendence. The ancient serf was not more subservient to 
 his liege lord than the literary bondsman was to his 
 patron. Fidelity obtained for him a little of the pa- 
 tronizing affection which a gentleman of the court of 
 James might have bestowed on his Alsatia squire. 
 Animosity forfeited his favour, and sometimes led to a 
 Rose Alley ambuscade. No famiharity could compensate 
 for the demoralizing effect of that system, which in the 
 indignant language of satire reduced the author's pro- 
 fession below that of jack-puddings, jugglers, and 
 mountebanks, and rated his subservience at less than a 
 coachman's pay.^ 
 
 Among the incidents attached to this moral servitude, 
 none perhaps is more expressive of the utter degradation 
 
 ' See Oldham's Works. 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 219 
 
 of the Kterary character than the fashion of dedication. 
 Johnson, on this ground, has not failed to taunt Dryden 
 with his serviKty. He probably had him in his 
 eye when he wrote in the "Kambler"' that to solicit 
 patronage was to put virtue to sale, that none can be 
 pleased without praise, and few can be praised without 
 falsehood. But the characteristic neither commenced 
 nor expired with Dryden. Adulation had become idioma- 
 tic even in Fuller's time. It was as much the mark of 
 the man of letters as an oak leaf was of a cavaher, or a 
 calf s head of a Puritan. For poets, indeed, it was as 
 much a religious necessity to flatter, as it was for an 
 Egyptian to propitiate Osiris by the offering of a spotted 
 bull, and it is accordingly with a full appreciation of the 
 duties of the laureateship, that I can find a more ready 
 apology for the author of the " Hind and Panther " com- 
 paring the new-born babe of James to the infant Child at 
 Bethlehem, than for Bishop South, for instance, calling 
 Milton, from his pulpit at Whitehall, "a blind old adder." 
 But even the most indulgent critic would be less ready to 
 excuse that helpless spirit of servitude which, with an 
 insensibility that has not escaped the irony of Shaftes- 
 bury,^ openly subordinated in the preface to the "'Don 
 Sebastian " the just canons of criticism to the ipse dixit 
 of an earl. It must be owned to have been symptomatic 
 of a reaction against this pHant moraUty, when Pope put 
 Middleton into the " Dunciad " for the dedication of his 
 " Cicero " to Lord Hervey, and when he dedicated his own 
 translation of the *' IHad " to Congreve. 
 
 It is not without its lesson to observe how this 
 deficiency in amour propre, in that spirit of self-respect 
 and independence which left Spinoza polishing glasses in 
 a garret in Leyden, and practising Epicureanism on two- 
 pence a day, rather than dedicate his works to Louis XIV., 
 
 ' No. civ. * " Characteristics," toI. iii. p. 277. 
 
220 ETHiCA : 
 
 has deformed the hterary character up to the moment 
 that Johnson dechned the patronage of Chesterfield. It 
 has, indeed, been the custom to regard with special 
 gratification the era of the Revolution as the saturnalia 
 of our hterature. The political EeTolution did for the 
 Literature of England T/hat the social Revolution did for 
 the Literature of France, when it carried its audience 
 from laughing at the triflings of the Jesuits and Jansenists, 
 Classics and Moderns, to contemplate the pubUcation of 
 the " Encyclopedie." Morally speakuig, its tone was im- 
 proved, and the promise of improvement was amply 
 ratified, when in the same cottage where the ghastly 
 viciousness of the Restoration had just expired in the 
 person of Sedley, the virtues of a new era were initiated 
 by the pen of Steele. In addition to this, it became 
 allied to the science of government, and by that alliance 
 acquired something of the dignity of a State machinery. 
 Statesmen became men of letters and men of letters 
 became statesmen. The first Lord of the Treasury issues 
 a " Treatise on Government," and the author of " The 
 Campaign" becomes Mr. Secretary Addison. BoUngbroke 
 indites his idea of a patriot king, and a pamphleteer 
 grows into Mr. Commissioner Steele. Pensions, deaneries, 
 secretaryships, were the common rewards of talent — a 
 splendid indemnification for that capricious support, 
 which had sent Otway from the champagne dinners of my 
 Lord Plymouth to starve for a week at a Tower hill ale- 
 house. A poet had a share in the administration of the 
 State, such as none had in the most intellectual days of 
 Athens or Rome, and such that would have made Plato 
 shudder. But literature was still distinctly a trade, a 
 matter of supply and demand, of labour and recompence. 
 The idea of service was still distinctly and professionally 
 associated with the literary vocation . Nothing was gained 
 without service. The minister that made Swift a Dean, 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 221 
 
 would never have made Macaulay a Baron. Indeed, 
 nothing better illustrates the footing on which hterature 
 stood, than the precariousness of the tie which bound it to 
 its patrons, and the unscrupulousness with which that tie . 
 was either contracted or broken. Thus, a few lucky Knes 
 got Addison on the road to emolument, and an unlucky 
 paper in his " Tatler " lost Steele his gazetteership. The 
 dedication of his Pastorals to Bolingbroke obtained for 
 Gay his appointment of Secretary to the Hanoverian 
 embassy, but when Bolingbroke fell, he fell with him. 
 Nor was venality and parasitism less its characteristic 
 than at the worst times of the Restoration. A seat at a 
 Minister's table may have supplied Young with invitations 
 for a week ; but he wrote the ' ' Epistle to Lord Lahsdowne ' ' 
 and the ' ' Instalment. ' ' A drive in a Minister's chariot may 
 have provided Prior with a citizen's coach ever afterwards, 
 but he was guilty of the " Carmen Sseculare." Tickell 
 obtained anUnder-Secretaryship, but he wrotethe "Royal 
 Progress." Rich as the profession was with such rewards, 
 it cannot be denied that the . system was not without its 
 prejudicial influences, and that it is a pleasure to turn 
 from such shackled prosperity to the more sombre scenes 
 of a more independent era — to quit the presence of Pamell 
 lingering at the door of my Lord Oxford's chamber, and 
 of Rowe learning Spanish to win his favour, to see 
 Johnson asserting his freedom to Bute, and Goldsmith 
 resisting the bribes of Walpole. 
 
 It was, I am inclined to think, owing in no small 
 degree to their entire dissociation from the Court, that 
 the contemporaries of the " Rambler" and " Guardian " 
 could afford to descant on the mischiefs of following 
 patrons, and the meanness of indiscriminate dedication. 
 Whether this dissociation was attributable at all to that 
 individual insensibility to the claims of literature that 
 Goldsmith imputed to Walpole, — or whether it was that 
 
222 ethica: 
 
 Walpole's exigencies were satisfied with the mediocre 
 abilities of the Guthries and Amalls, — or whether, again, 
 the separation was promoted by the interference of an 
 intellectual middle class, of that class which in the 
 persons of Mrs, Thrale and Mrs. Unwin afforded the 
 same protection to Johnson and Oowper, that in another 
 generation the Duchess of Marlborough had afforded to 
 Congreve, and the Duchess of Queensberry to Gay, it is 
 certain that the contrast in the social status of the man 
 of letters under Walpole's administration^ and under 
 Harley's, is at once as sudden as it is remarkable. 
 Hitherto the personal condescension of the great had 
 always compensated for the poverty of the learned. It 
 forms not the least agreeable items in their biographies, 
 that Chaucer could afford to ^peak of the time when he 
 had his losengeours at the courts of Edward andEichard; 
 and that Spenser, in the hour of his misfortune, could 
 stiU boast poetically of his Prince's grace ; and it is a 
 redeeming point ia his fame, that James, in spite of his 
 arrogant pedantry, could descend to pen a complimentary 
 autograph to the author of " Hamlet," and to treat 
 Buchanan with almost the same familiarity that he 
 allowed Steenie and Archie Armstrong to use towards 
 himself. The graceful features of the son's character 
 presented too great a contrast to his father's demeanour, 
 for him to have been less courteous to the Cowleys and 
 Seldens. Cromwell, indeed, did not regard the man of 
 letters as a connoisseur so much as a pohtician. His 
 Court was hardly a congenial atmosphere for the Muses. 
 Yet Milton was his secretary, and Waller resided there 
 as his cousin, and theatrical indulgence was granted to 
 Davenant. Nor must that liberality pass unmentioned 
 which pensioned Casaubon, though he would not write 
 an answer to the " Eikon Basilike," and welcomed Har- 
 rington to Whitehall, though he was president of the 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 223 
 
 Rota Club and author of the " Oceana." The good- 
 natured Charles's taste for the company of wits is as 
 weU known as his taste for women and spaniels. James's 
 parsimony was notorious ; but even the parsimony of 
 James did not prevent him from compensating the com- 
 pUments of Dryden with personal kindnesses, or paying 
 the debts of the author of the " Plain Dealer." William 
 treated poets as mere mechanics ; yet his cold reserve 
 was laid aside to welcome De Foe into his closet ; and 
 Narcissus Luttrel tells us he could so far appreciate the 
 poHtical value of poetry, as to order Congreve a hundred 
 guineas for his poem on the Queen, and Cibber two 
 hundred for a farce caricaturiug the Nonjurors, to 
 knight Blackmore for some secret service, and to put 
 Steele down, according to his own account, in the last 
 table-book he ever wrote, in return for his " Grief k la 
 Mode." 
 
 Under Anne, in spite of the association of literature 
 with poHtics, its treatment became more ceremonious; 
 and on the accession of the House of Brunswickj etiquette 
 so far widened the distance between it and the Court, 
 that the by-stander marks it as a special sign of urbanity, 
 when he hears Arbuthnot say that King George had read 
 the " Dunciad," and been pleased to observe that Pope 
 was a very honest man; or sees a pruacess invite Gay 
 to read his tragedy, and pick him up when awe at her 
 presence had precipitated him over the furniture ; or 
 watches his monarch holding a conversation with John- 
 son in the gallery of "Whitehall, or deigning to express 
 his opinion to Madame D'Arblay, on her last new 
 novel. 
 
 The result, or it may be the partial origin, of this 
 formal reflection on the profession of authorship, was 
 a partition in the distribution of literature, a revolution 
 in its composition and style. The beau inonde acquired 
 
224 ' ETHiCA : 
 
 a literature of its own, a literature of belles lettres, of 
 a luxurious kind, taking no cognizance of the things 
 of common life, and flourishing only in an exoteric 
 atmosphere pecuHar to itself. Its guiding principle was 
 an entire devotion to the To prepon. Its themes were of 
 a correspondmg character. It indulged only in subjects 
 of virtu. It was anecdotal, and it tells us how George I. 
 reverenced vampires, and the Duchess of Kendal ravens. 
 Or it was epistolary, and gave the gossip of the Grand 
 Turk's Harem. Or it aspired to criticism, and took 
 under its protection the crooked back of King Richard 
 and the theology of King James. Or stiU more ambitious, 
 it ventured on philosophy, and discussed the aesthetics of 
 the baU-room and the dinner-table. The representatives 
 of this fastidious Hterature modelled their demeanour to 
 their topics. The gulf that existed between themselves 
 and those who made no pretensions to rank with them, 
 was distinctly acknowledged when Chesterfield repelled 
 Johnson, and Walpole repudiated Chatterton. Their 
 appreciation of their neighbours, and of their neighbours' 
 productions, may be inferred from the lofty exclusiveness 
 of their judgments. According to this supercilious code, 
 the muse of Goldsmith smeUs too much of Southwark 
 Fair to be tolerated ; none but gentlemen like Etheridge 
 and Sedley could write genteel comedy, and the comedy 
 of " She Stoops to Conquer " is considerably below 
 General Burgoyne's farce. In the same estimation 
 Gibbon's ConstantinopoHtan History is a digusting sub- 
 ject, and Eobertson has great affectation of philosophy 
 without success. Mrs. Macaulay, indeed, is Dame 
 Thucydides, but then Mrs. Macaulay, we are told, kept 
 two servants in laced Uveries, assumed the air of a 
 princess, and out-CorneUzed the Comelesians. It was 
 a scandalum magnatum in the lower brood of authors to 
 take liberties with the works or the names of the upper. 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 225 
 
 Johnson, who in another generation would have occupied 
 a prominent chair among the aristocratic Deipnosophs of 
 the Scriblerus Club, in his life of Lyttleton used the 
 familiar term of "poor Lyttleton." Walpole tells us 
 the consequence. Mrs. Montague declared she would 
 never ask him to dinner again. It would be amusing 
 indeed, if it. were not provoking, to see how little of 
 that toleration which was awarded to Mason and Grray 
 was awarded to Johnson, and how little the ruder qualities 
 of his manly nature were comprehended by the fine 
 intellects whose knowledge of the world was almost 
 confined to the artistic reunions of Strawberry Hill, and 
 to Mrs. Montague's has hleu meetings. Walpole, who 
 is continually repudiating the character of an author to 
 Lady Ossory, who calls Goldsmith a fool, scorns the 
 idea of being elbowed by Scotch metaphysicians, or of 
 admiring Akenside or the Kowleian manuscripts, or 
 anything but Lord Hervey's verses, or Miss Knight's 
 " Marcus Flaminius," styles him a sycophantic old nurse, 
 and an unfortunate monster; sheds tears of laughter 
 over every page of his pubHshed prayers; compares 
 them to the diary of an old almswoman ; attributes to 
 him the bigotry of a monk, with his folly ; and professes 
 himself at a loss to understand, how such a man could 
 set himself the penance of reading two hundred verses 
 of the Bible per diem, or go through Vossius on Baptism 
 in his dotage, when he had never read the Apocrypha, 
 and only heard of the story of Bel and the Dragon in 
 his boyhood. Chesterfield, whose unfeeling picture of 
 poor Fielding every one knows, who had no kinder term 
 for the author of " Humphrey CUjaker" than a profligate 
 hirehng, had, if possible, still less sympathy for the poor 
 creature who wrote " Easselas " to bury his mother. In 
 his memoirs, in a single breath, he calls him odious, 
 mean, arrogant, self-sufficient, overbearing, and un- 
 
 15 
 
226 ethica: 
 
 grateful ; says that his manners were sordid and brutal, 
 his style vicious and ridiculously bombastic, and his 
 pedantry above a country schoolmaster's ; and elsewhere 
 he describes him as a respectable Hottentot ; details for 
 the amusement of his noble correspondent the mode in 
 which he mangles everything he means to carve, and 
 throws everything he means to drink everywhere but 
 down his throat ; and, in a paper in the "World" (100), 
 does not hesitate pointedly to recommend to his notice 
 the more poUshed and genteeler parts of our language, 
 in terms that meant that poUteness and gentihty were 
 not characteristic of the atmosphere in which Johnson 
 moved. 
 
 The spirit that dictated this discourtesy, though it 
 specially marked the schism in Hterature, the divorce 
 between literature and patronage, was not confined to 
 any 'particular era or any particular class. It does not 
 appear that patronage had much to do with regulating 
 the tone of social intercourse among authors. The 
 hostilities of such Crispinuses as the Settles and Cro-vvTies 
 may now and then have been promoted by a Eochester, 
 but as a general rule the Milboumes and Dennises re- 
 quired no adventitious encouragement. The quarrels of 
 authors constitute as prominent a page as their calamities. 
 The effusions of the satiric muse supply as many orna- 
 ments as the epic or lyric. The personahties of the 
 Hterary history of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
 centuries in particular have invested its literature with 
 something of that antiquarian interest, that attaches 
 itself to the feuds of a Norman baron or a Highland 
 thane, or to the hereditary ill-humour of the Capulets. 
 Its degradation to the prosaic associations of a mere 
 commerce, and its identification with those trade artifices 
 which from time to time produced the Landers, Mac- 
 phersons, and Irelands, render these animosities more 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTIOS. 227 
 
 provoking to the curiosity, Tonson bargaining with 
 Dryden for verses at sixpence a Une, Curl accusing Pope 
 of poisoning him, Pope walking the lanes of Eichmond 
 with loaded firearms in his pockets, Johnson knocking 
 down Osborne with one of his own folios,^ Churchill and 
 his oaken flail^ Philips and his birchen rod, are scenes 
 and episodes not readily realized by the student of a 
 later epoch, whose propriety has never been shocked by 
 any catastrophe more fatal than the report of "Little's 
 leadless pistol," who has never read anything more severe 
 than the "Pursuits of Literature" or "English Bards 
 and Scotch Reviewers," and who, on the other hand, 
 has seen the publication of a popular history arrest the 
 traffic of streets, and peacefully monopolize the attention 
 of a nation. 
 
 It was the misfortune of the subject of this Essay, 
 that he was born in such a state of things. They were 
 not calculated, it must be confessed, to have a beneficial 
 uifluence even on the most favourable disposition. They 
 were least calculated to chasten and correct the ungenial 
 disposition of such a man as Pope. And yet the boy- 
 hood of Pope gave no promise of such a bitter harvest. 
 Indeed, there are no more pleasant associations attached 
 to the early days of any literary man, not even to 
 Milton's, than there are to the years spent at Binfield. 
 No one who had watched that pale and languid form 
 lending his favourite cypresses, or gliding with his 
 mother among the stately beeches of Windsor, or sub- 
 mitting his paraphrases of Thomas a Kempis to the 
 criticism of his father, could have foreseen the author of 
 the severest satire in the language, or could have pre- 
 dicted that the destined owner of Twickenham should 
 
 ' The identical book which Johnson used on this occasion was still in 
 notoriouspreservationintheyear 1812, when Nichols saw it in the possession 
 of a bookseller at Cambridge. — Nichols, viii, p. 446. 
 
 15—2 
 
228 ethica; 
 
 have so little claim in honesty, candour, and all the 
 nobler parts, to be ranked with the Bard of Horton. The 
 contrast between Pope the boy and Pope the man is so 
 great, so sudden, that ordinary attempts at elucidation are 
 useless. The transformation which the spear of Ithuriel 
 eifected on the disguise of Satan was not more marvel- 
 lous or more complete. 
 
 Nor is there any accounting for the change in the 
 force of circumstances. Poverty, the general plea for 
 all the distempers of genius, could not be produced 
 in his case. With the prospect of a fair inheritance 
 on his father's demise, he was receiving billets doii.v 
 from duchesses, and exchanging visits with the Eoman 
 Catholic squires of Oxford and Sussex, while Budgell 
 was struggling with the rapids of London Bridge, and 
 Savage was preparing for Gloucester Gaol. In Lon- 
 don, young as he was, he had been introduced at the 
 clubs, had dined with Addison at Buttons', had been 
 kindly noticed in the " Spectator," publicly compli- 
 mented by Wycherley, and stood well as a promising 
 hand among the booksellers. The pubUcation of the 
 •' Eape of the Lock," had startled a generation still con- 
 vulsed by the "Dispensary" of Garth, and had already 
 brought him into favourable comparison with the author 
 of the "Lutrin" and the " Secchia Kapita." Walsh, 
 whom Dryden characterized as one of the best critics of 
 the age, but who was in reahty only a better sort of 
 Eymer, had spoken of him in the same breath with 
 Virgil. His prospects, as far as supremacy in his own 
 walk was concerned, were most reassuring. The course 
 was clear to him. There was not a single competitor 
 whom he could not have easily distanced. Johnson, 
 indeed, had lately taken up his abode in London, but his 
 name was hardly known beyond the precincts of his 
 bookseller's counting-house. He had not written his 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 229 
 
 " London " Before Pope had written his " Dunciad." 
 Addison, indeed, might have afforded him some appre- 
 hension. The simile of the "Angel " was in the mouth 
 of every honest Whig, and his pastoral translations from 
 the " Georgics " had aroused the despairing emulation 
 of Dryden. But Addison was nearly twenty years his 
 senior, and belonged to the generation that was going 
 out, rather than to the generation that was coming in. 
 Wycherley, whose handsome face had once recommended 
 him to the voluptuous Castlemaine, was compensating 
 for a youth of debauchery by an old age of dotage, and 
 Steele was far too irregular a genius seriously to be 
 dreaded as a rival. Swift was giving up to party what 
 was meant for mankind. Philips had published his 
 " Pastorals," but then Philips was only known by the 
 name of Namby Pamby, which those "Pastorals" ob- 
 tained for him. Young was busy in that career of pro- 
 stitution, which even the publication of the "Night 
 Thoughts," twenty years after, has hardly excused. 
 Churchill was still engaged in preaching and selling cider 
 to his Welsh parishioners. Akenside did not pubhsh his 
 great work on the "Pleasures of the Imagination" till 
 Pope had scarcely breath left to praise it. Pope was, in 
 fact, on Addison's demise, the heir presumptive to the 
 throne of literature. Nevertheless, we find him, almost at 
 the very threshold of his existence, earning for himself 
 a most unenviable notoriety ia the " History of the 
 Quarrels of Authors," and through all his hfe betraying 
 a most unseemly anxiety to maintain what nobody could 
 seriously have attempted to dieprive him of, pre-eminence 
 and fame. His life, indeed, was one long tissue of con- 
 spiracies, of gratuitous efforts to build up his own repu- 
 tation on the ruin of other people's. His literary religion 
 seems to have been borrowed from the Court of Valhalla. 
 He appeared to be always acting under the impression 
 
230 ETHicA : 
 
 that the attainment of renown could only Be acquired by 
 the destruction of his enemies, and that the road to 
 immortality could never be reached unless it were paved 
 with their brainless skulls. One of his earhest pieces, 
 his " Essay on Criticism," pubhshed at an age when few 
 have so far forgotten the gentle lessons of childhood to 
 learn the language of scorn with such cordiahty, was so 
 full of personalities, that Addison, though he paid ready 
 testimony to its promise of talent, could not forbear 
 from giving a gentle reproof to the animus displayed in 
 its composition. 
 
 To that animus, indeed, Addison himself was soon 
 to be sacrificed. The portrait of Atticus and its origin 
 are so famihar, and the conclusions it suggests have 
 been so uniformly disparaging to the temper of Pope, 
 that any inquiry into its details, undisturbed as they are 
 by any new evidence, would hardly repay the pains of 
 perusal. It is only sufficient to say that Addison had 
 more than once unwittingly offended Pope's pride ; that 
 he now added a new cause of anger by a reported 
 depreciation of Pope's translation of Homer, in favour 
 of a projected translation by Tickell; and that Pope 
 accused him of plottmg, in conjunction with Tickell, 
 against his fame, — to see at once the grounds of Addison's 
 offence and of Pope's accusation. Conjecture, indeed, 
 may possibly acquit Pope of a splenetic fabrication. 
 There is no doubt, without placing any emphatic re- 
 Hance on Spence's testimony, that Addison was jealous 
 of any literary rivalry. There is more than one authen- 
 ticated anecdote of his sensitiveness on this score. That 
 he wrote the translation of the "Iliad" in question is 
 undoubtedly false ; that he corrected it, largely and 
 laboriously, was the testimony of the manuscript. What 
 more reasonable than that he should have taken pains 
 in forwarding what he had so large a share in creating ; 
 
OE CHARACTERISTICS. 231 
 
 and that his efforts to forward it should have been re- 
 ported by some Mallet or other to Pope, in terms exag- 
 gerated enough to make it appear that those efforts were 
 in reaHty directed against Pope. That Addison should 
 have associated himself in a league of offence with such 
 things as the Gildons, is as unlikely as that Shakspeare 
 should have formed a combination against Decker with 
 the wretches whom Jonson places among the crowds in 
 St. Paul's aisle, and Hall makes to dine with Duke Hum- 
 phrey. On the other hand, that Tickell published his 
 translation of the "Iliad" only as a specunen of his 
 abihty for the " Odyssey," is, to use the remark of Jervas 
 and Fortescue, who may be considered as representing 
 one shade of pubhc opinion on the matter, " almost as 
 improbable as that Gay should have published the first 
 book of the ' Odyssey,' to bespeak the favour of the 
 town for a translation of Statins." 
 
 Not that I wish to join in the vulgar adulation of 
 Addison's character. After the most serious considera- 
 tion, it is my unbiassed opinion that, in the contemplation 
 of that character, certain veins of temperament which 
 traverse his composition obliquely, have been wilfully or 
 neghgently passed by. Addison all through life was 
 influenced visibly, I think, by his natural taste, hitherto 
 strangely overlooked, for the clerical profession. He had 
 designed to take orders, we are told, in his earlier days ; 
 and it is certain that if he had not been a Minister in 
 the State, he would have been a Minister ia the Church. 
 As Secretary he did the duties of a Bishop, defended his 
 religion against the Freethinkers, published "Evidences 
 of Christianity," and premeditated a translation of the 
 " Psalms." Nor could any one who ever compared the 
 "Examiner" with the "Spectator" deny that he was 
 a fitter aspirant for the lawn than Swift. Old Jacob 
 Tonson, who had no love for him, used to say, he ever 
 
232 ETHiCA : 
 
 thought him a priest at heart.^ His character, accord- 
 ingly, suggests rather piety than generosity. There 
 was nothing to indicate, either in his actions or in his 
 demeanour, a manly, confident, outspoken nature. He 
 was, on the contrary, shy and diffident, and he seems to 
 have contracted a hahit, common to the shy and diffi- 
 dent, of hesitation, circumlocution, and reserve, not really 
 inconsistent with good-nature, but very often in the mind 
 of the man of the world mistaken for malice. On 
 literary matters especially, his decision was given with a 
 hesitation that more than one of his audience have 
 attributed to jealousy. It is easy to see how a man hke 
 Pope would translate a stutter or a hsp. Faint praise 
 was as caustic as open enmity to one so sensitive to 
 either. In addition to the mere physical formalities of 
 demeanour, tradition quite as authentic as that by which 
 we are guided in our judgment of Johnson, or of Pope 
 himself, has come down to us of Addison, which irre- 
 sistibly conveys the impression of a mind anxiously tena- 
 cious of its own property. It is a common thing to see 
 a person, nervous about his own rights, claim them mth 
 a reduplicated earnestness, that a self-composed man 
 would consider superfluous. This species of analogous em- 
 phatic self-appropriation marked the conduct of Addison. 
 He had not, I believe, at the bottom any literary greed, 
 though his enemies describe him as over solicitous of 
 praise and fame. But, whatever he did, he seems to 
 have eventually claimed. His. deficiency was in his- 
 manner of claiming it. He whispered, where he should 
 have spoken out. He shuffled, when he should have 
 been erect. A bad interpretation was therefore put on 
 this awkwardness. His mode of praising was thought to 
 be only a cryptic mode of damning. He was not chai-y 
 of his literary assistance to others, but his mode of 
 
 ' Spence's "Lit. Anec." 151, and ibid 248. 261. 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 233 
 
 urging a debt involved so much clumsy finesse, that 
 every one who could not comprehend him, cried shame 
 on his underhandedness. One meets with people every 
 day, who do a kindness with the air of men incurring an 
 obligation, or who demand the return of a due with the 
 trepidation of robbers. Some such interpretation, I 
 believe, must be put on Addison's conduct to Steele, and, 
 with some modification, to Pope. 
 
 To prolong the discussion ; Addison was not a com- 
 panionable, social, or genial man. He possessed a sense 
 of rectitude, an uneasy sense of the claims of moral 
 propriety, which would allow of no cordiality v^rith his 
 associates. Intellectually, on the other hand, there was 
 sufficient affinity to closen the tie of brotherhood. His 
 natm'e, already timorous, was thus drawn both ways : 
 while one part of it felt the influence of attraction, 
 the other part, awkwardly enough, acknowledged the 
 influence of repulsion. If his mind made any advance 
 towards assimilation with others, his conscience inter- 
 fered to counteract the intimacy. He might be willing 
 to appear cordial. He could not help appearing re- 
 served. A timid man is always a suspicious man. He 
 sees daggers in the air. He invents hostilities. He 
 anticipates enemies, and by this means he very often 
 makes them. For, as a general rule, a suspicious man is 
 a suspected one. His behaviour rouses the attention of 
 the observer, and attention soon gives place to convic- 
 tion. He is first the object of scrutiny, and then the 
 object of mistrust. This is the process by which the 
 dubious man becomes doubted. And by some such pro- 
 cess as this his associates were regarded by Addison, and 
 Addison by his associates. It is easy to see why Steele 
 formed an exception, though even Steele's reverence and 
 attachment were not always proof against his friend's 
 mysterious behaviour. Steele's was a large-hearted. 
 
234 ETHiCA : 
 
 generous, impulsive nature. He had not a particle of 
 suspicion in him. He had, in fact, what never co- exists 
 in a suspicious nature, a keen sense of his own great 
 dehnquencies. He was eager, therefore, to acknowledge 
 superiority, and to profit by it. He saw the generally 
 equable, upright, stedfast tenure of Addison's conduct, 
 and he clung to him accordingly with something of the 
 tenacity with which a parasite clings to the unmoved 
 trunk. That Addison's conduct sometimes puzzled him 
 it is true, but he was not the man to scrutinize keenly 
 the motives of a friend, and not till that friend's conduct 
 became really or apparently inexpHcable, were his doubts 
 excited. But any discussion in Pope's favour, it must be 
 owned, is considerably impaired by the general tenor of 
 his conduct. There were very few of his friends whom 
 his ill-judged jealousy or his suspicious temper did not 
 convert into enemies before he died. Nay, he is among 
 the few rastances of those whose fate it has been to 
 exchange the friendship of a lifetime for posthumous 
 enmity. Among his earliest aristocratic acquaintance 
 was Lady Mary Wortley Montague, the wittiest woman 
 of her day, without pedantry, yet of parts sufficiently 
 superior to the ordinary herd of her contemporaries to 
 receive special homage among the poets and patriots of 
 the Kit Cat. To her intellectual and personal attrac- 
 tions Pope paid the most assiduous court. His letters 
 convey sentiments couched in language that in a period 
 of less high-flown gallantry, or from any other person, 
 might have met with a more ridiculous penalty than 
 laughter and neglect. And yet before he died he made 
 the object of this romantic passion the victim of lam- 
 poons so gross, that it does not exaggerate their character 
 to say he hved to be ashamed of repubhshing them. 
 Philips, one of his earhest associates, he caricatured under 
 the guise of a friendly criticism, and concluded by treat- 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 235 
 
 ing him with particular virulence to the end of his days. 
 He even suspected Swift, quarrelled with his humble 
 Allen, and went so far as to call Warburton, who had 
 defended his "Essay on Man" agamst Crousay, a 
 sneaking fellow. If he was indebted to any man, bound 
 to him by the ties of honour and gratitude, he was to 
 Bohngbroke. Spenser had not received such kindness 
 or such condescension from Surrey. Yet every one 
 knows how he treated Bohngbroke; and that all the 
 time Bohngbroke was supplying him with hints for his 
 poems and plans for his grottoes, he was privately 
 printing off a surreptitious edition of Bolingbroke's 
 works. 
 
 There was one aggravating feature attached to his 
 enmities. He never would confess them. Nothing 
 could induce him to take off the mask. Detection robbed 
 revenge of half its sweetness, and accordingly he 
 descended to every contrivance rather than be detected. 
 The distinction he recognized to Martha Blount, between 
 telling a he and '* equivocating genteeUy," provided him 
 with no difficult means of concealment. In an Horatian 
 dialogue, he repeated his slanders on Lady Montague in 
 an indecent couplet. The whole town recognized her as 
 Sappho. Through the intervention of Lord Peterborough 
 she solicited an explanation. An explanation in the way 
 of an acknowledgment, Pope might easily have afforded. 
 Though the days of personal retaliation had not yet quite 
 gone by, it was not probable that Lady Mary would have 
 employed any more formidable weapon than a counter- 
 lampoon. Yet he impudently denied any allusion to his 
 fair antagonist, protested that he had never apphed the 
 name in verse or prose, that some one had invented a 
 false story to support a false accusation, and that he only 
 spoke of such Sapphos as imitate more the lewdness 
 than the genius of the ancient one. The epistle on the 
 
236 ETHiCA : 
 
 " Use of Eiches " contained a pointed satire against the 
 Duke of Chandos. No one could have blamed him for 
 exemplifying the contrast between true grandeur and false 
 magnificence. His enemies asserted that he was under 
 an obligation to the Duke, and that such ingratitude was 
 a poor return for a gift of 5001. This, however, he 
 took care stoutly to deny, yet though he denied this, he 
 would not bring himself to confess that Timon's villa 
 meant canons. In his " Treatise on Bathos " he had put 
 Aaron Hill, one of the least influential, but not the least 
 serviceable and intelligent, of his friends among the 
 "Flying Fishes," and afterwards found him a place 
 in the "Dunciad." Now, the allusion to Hill in the 
 "Dunciad" was rather of a flattering character than 
 otherwise. Pope hunself owned as much. Yet, when 
 Hill taxed him with the personality, in both instances 
 under the disguise of initials, he would not own that the 
 initials were intended for Hill, assured him that the letters 
 iu the " Bathos " were set at random, that he was weary 
 of telling a great truth, that he was not the author of the 
 notes to the " Dunciad," and that he would use his 
 influence with the editor to get the ofl'ensive note 
 expunged. Dennis had written some harsh remarks on 
 Pope's "Essay on Criticism." Pope had satirized hun 
 under the name of Appius, and otherwise subjected him 
 to the grossest ridicule. Yet on a certain occasion he is 
 hypocrite enough to write to Hill, that he was never 
 angry with a criticism of Mr. Dennis on his poetry, and 
 that if he could do Mr. Dennis a service to-morrow, he 
 would. Theobald had attempted to palm off a play of 
 the " Fatal Falsehood," as Shakspeare's. Pope put him 
 into the " Treatise on Bathos." Theobald remonstrated 
 through the medium of Hill. Once more Pope writes to 
 Hill, that he never meant anything by it, that he did not 
 suppose the play to be Theobald's, but that he (Theobald) 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 237 
 
 gave it as Shakspeare's, and that he (Pope) took it of 
 that age, and that he did not write the " Treatise on 
 Bathos," or most of it, but Arbuthnot, In his famous 
 satire on Woman he had condensed all the failings of the 
 Duchess of Marlborough into his character of Atossa. It 
 was reported among those who had every authority for 
 the report, that he had received a thousand pounds to 
 suppress it, yet he asserted the original to be the Duchess 
 of Buckingham. He flattered PameU, and abused him 
 behind his back. He flattered Hughes, and owned to 
 Swift that he was but a poor mediocrist. 
 
 This peculiar temperament, acting on a body naturally 
 irritable, and having for an ally an intellect naturally keen 
 and penetrating, led him from time to time into a course 
 of duphcity so obscure, that the disentanglement of the 
 details of his biography from the folds in which he has 
 involved them, is stiU a puzzle to the most enterprising 
 biographer. It is perfectly bewildering to unravel the 
 web of stratagem which he has wove about him. Lady 
 BoHngbroke said, and said truly, that he would play 
 the politician about cabbages and turnips. One of the 
 strongest features in his character was his intellectual 
 ambition, a passion for literary success. Most of his 
 egotism concentred on this point. Once or twice, indeed, 
 in spite of his infirmities, there peeps out in his letters a 
 little personal vanity, as when he insinuates to Teresa 
 Blount that some women hke men of his make. But this 
 faiUng seldom went beyond a deprecatory allusion to him- 
 self, or an anxiety about his sword and knee-buckles, or a 
 pardonable desire to let his friends know how he walked 
 with Mrs. Lepel by moonlight in the gardens of Hampton 
 Court, or how Lady Cox mixed his electuary, Lady 
 Codrington pounded his sulphur, and Mrs. Bridget Bethel 
 brewed his broth; and was entirely absorbed in his 
 restless itch for notoriety. To obtain this, he involved 
 
238 ETHiCA : 
 
 himself in all kinds of perplexities. One of his capital 
 engines was the " Grab Street Journal," bj means of which, 
 by the aid of anonymous letters, advertisements, fictitious 
 compUments and fictitious threats, he contrived to keep 
 his name continually before the town. And one of his 
 capital artifices was to feign a piracy on his own works, 
 excite curiosity by a feigned prosecution, and then to 
 publish what he was pleased to term a true and genuine 
 edition in his own defence. This, there is now very httle 
 doubt, is the true explanation of that mysterious tale 
 connected with Curl's pubUcation of his letters. Pope 
 wished to publish his correspondence. But he wished, 
 too, to prepare the public for its reception by a little 
 preUminary agitation. Accordingly he got some of his 
 minions to take charge of the manuscript, drop down the 
 Thames to Southwark, and enter into negotiation with 
 Curl. Curl, a perfect Helluo after that kind of game, 
 after a time consented. The bait took. The bookseller 
 put out an advertisement for an edition of Pope's 
 correspondence with the Earls of Halifax, BurUngton, 
 and others, and was duly summoned before the Lords 
 for infringement of their privileges. Within two months 
 subscriptions for an authentic edition at a guinea a 
 volume were issued by the poet. 
 
 The evidence against Pope has, in process of time, so 
 accumulated under the diligent researches of biographer 
 after biographer, that it is necessary to compress the 
 materials for judgment into the smallest compass. The 
 outlines of the case so compressed run thus. In 1733, 
 Curl advertised a Life of Pope, and sohcited through 
 the same medium any genealogical information on the 
 subject of his advertisement. He soon receives a com- 
 munication signed P. T., containing among other things 
 a sketch of Pope's family,— the very counterpart in some 
 of its details to one which Pope himself had given in a 
 
OE CHAEACTERISTICS. 239 
 
 note to the Epistle to Arbutlinot, — and an offer of further 
 information relative to his life. To this offer, Curl 
 repUes, and a second letter from the anonymous P. T. 
 parenthetically suggests the publication of a certain 
 collection of the poet's letters, which had fallen into 
 his hand, in the form of a five-shiUing volume. For 
 more than two years Curl apparently hesitates to take 
 any notice of the suggestion, and at the expiration of 
 that period transmits the communication of P. T. to 
 Pope. Pope immediately disclaims all collusion or deal- 
 ings with Curl or his correspondent, doubts that the 
 latter has any collection he pretends to, expresses a 
 belief that the whole thing is a forgery, and — itself a very 
 suspicious indifference — asserts that he shall not trouble 
 himself about it. P. T., roused by Pope's disclaimer, 
 once more appears on the stage, accuses Curl of betraying 
 him, stoutly maintains the genuineness of his copies, offers 
 to meet Curl at the Eose Tavern, and lay before him the 
 printed sheets, and concludes by countermanding the 
 interview on the plea he might be assaulted by Pope's 
 Twitnam bravos. How Pope was to know of the meeting 
 in which he had no share, was, as Curl said, the cream of 
 the jest. In compensation, however, for the disappoint- 
 ment, an emissary of P. T., in the guise of a grotesque 
 compound of the barrister and priest, caUing himself 
 Smith, visits Curl at his own house late in the night, 
 shows him a copy of the book in sheets, with about a 
 dozen of the original letters, promises the whole at their 
 next meeting, and by dint of more promises induces Curl, 
 after another diplomatic communication from P. T., to 
 advertise the volume. The original manuscripts in the 
 meantime had not been delivered, and it was not till 
 some period had elapsed after the advertisement alluded 
 to had appeared in the " Post Boy," that Curl received 
 them out of the hands of two porters, — who, according to 
 
240 ETHicA : 
 
 Smith, had come by water, — and paid his money only to 
 find a large default in his bargain. The catastrophe has 
 been already hinted at. It happened that the Bookseller's 
 Bill, otherwise entitled an Act for the better Encourage- 
 ment of Leamuig, came on that very day in the House 
 of Lords. The strange nature of the advertisement had 
 not escaped the notice of some of its advocates, and a 
 clause to prevent such an enormous licence for the future 
 was suggested. As the advertisement pretended to 
 pubhsh the answers of Pope's noble correspondents, it 
 was considered a breach of the Standing Order of the 
 House, and Black Kod was put in motion. Curl was 
 arrested, ordered to attend before the Upper House, and 
 in his extremity cautioned by P. T. and Smith to divulge 
 nothing that had passed. On an examination of the 
 books before the Lords they were found to contain not a 
 single letter from a single peer. 
 
 Never was plot more clumsily contrived, or more 
 clumsily carried out. Pope, among his other faihngs, 
 possessed, as has been shown, no small share of literary 
 vanity. Though he was always repudiating, with an 
 effrontery that would have set ill on Walpole, the "noisy 
 praises" of fame, no Hterary epicure ever tricked out his 
 entertainments with a keener view to his reputation. 
 He was continually retouching and recasting. He recast 
 his " Eape of the Lock." He put his " Essay on Man " 
 through a course of sixteen months' elaboration, and 
 then by way of gauging the public favour published it as 
 another's, with an impudent preface alluding to himself 
 as the " noted author." The manuscripts of his 
 "Homer" prove that he bestowed as much pains on 
 it as Thomson ever did on his "Seasons." The 
 "Dunciad," as might have been expected, was con- 
 tinually undergoing some alteration or revision. What 
 he was displeased with he disowned, suppressed, and 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 241 
 
 sometimes fathered on Gay and Savage. To suit the 
 generation for whom they were written, his letters were 
 composed with a labour that Lyttelton would hardly have 
 , given to his " History." The good thing that was sent 
 to Lord BoHngbroke by tliis mail, was sent to Lady Mon- 
 tague by the next, and to Martha Blount by the follow- 
 mg. To suit the palates of posterity they were rewritten, 
 remodelled, expurgated, and condensed, till their original 
 significance was almost subhmated. Unhappily this 
 anxious management it is that has helped to criminate 
 hhn. Subsequent comparison has shown, that between 
 the surreptitious edition pubHshed by Curl and the 
 authentic edition pubhshed by himself, both ia point of 
 omissions and interpolations, the most complete identity 
 exists. It is hardly after this worth while adding, that 
 the very year Curl had the mysterious offer made him, 
 that very year Pope withdrew his deposit of letters from 
 the library of Lord Oxford. 
 
 It must be observed, what has been generally over- 
 looked, that the publication of Uterary correspondence 
 formed no unimportant item in the sum of an author's 
 achievements, and was not so triflingly estimated in 
 Pope's time as in our own. Association with the 
 countrymen of Balzac and Voltaire had considerably 
 raised the value of that species of composition in 
 pubKc estimation, even since Dryden's time. Most of 
 the dilettanti of the day wrote for a purpose, and even 
 Swift set so much by his letters as to keep copies of 
 them. Shenstone goes so far as to tell us that he valued 
 his more than aU his poetry. Accordingly, it may help 
 to account for Pope's anxiety, when it is remembered 
 that the name of Lady Mary Montague would hardly 
 have been known but for her putative epistolary achieve- 
 ments, and that Walpole, in spite of his pretended indif- 
 ference, would hardly have been otherwise preserved from 
 
 16 
 
242 ETHiCA : 
 
 oblivion, even by his " Castle of Otranto." But besides 
 all this, the cry of "Wolf ! " was no uncommon stratagem 
 of Pope. Once before, in his preface to the third 
 volume of his " Miscellanies," he accuses the booksellers 
 ^of ransacking the closets of the sick, and breaking open 
 the cabinets of the dead, to procure their private papers, 
 though ParneU, Kowe, Addison, and Garth, had died 
 without undergoing any such posthumous penalty. And 
 again, in the case of the " Dunciad," he talks with the 
 utmost seriousness of pirated editions, printed in Ireland, 
 which never existed anywhere but in his own inventive 
 imagination. The fact is, piracy was no uncommon 
 resource of his own. He was justly suspected of having a 
 hand in the surreptitious publication of Lady Montague's 
 "Eclogues," and more than suspected of printing a clan- 
 destine edition of Lord Bolingbroke's " Patriot King." 
 
 The intercourse of Curl with Pope is very suggestive 
 of the relation which the bookseller before the nineteenth 
 century bore to the book-maker. Every one has heard 
 of the contract for poetry which Tonson made with 
 Dryden at so much a line, and the story that Johnson 
 told Nichols, that Cave, who was considered a generous 
 paymaster, always bargained for lines by the hundred, 
 and generally expected the long hundred. Literatm-e, 
 in fact, was reduced to a mere commerce, and the making 
 of books to a trade on the same terms as the making of 
 houses. Authors and critics were as purchaseable com- 
 modities as carpenters and bricklayers. A swarm of 
 hacks arose at the bidding of the speculative bookseller, 
 translators who did not know Greek from Hebrew, and 
 critics whom a sHce of pudding in the back parlour 
 would propitiate for ever. It would be easy to foresee 
 the effects of such a state of things, if the remains of 
 what was the popular literature of the day did not 
 embody them. Dryden complained that the inferiority 
 
OR CHAEAOTERISTICS, 243 
 
 of the English to the French translations was owing to 
 the booksellers. They cared httle how the business was 
 done, provided it was done. They lived by selling titles, 
 not books.^ These titulary puflfs, reprobated by Swift, 
 and ridiculed by Arbuthnot, formed by no means the 
 only machinery of imposition. A spirit of interest, or 
 a dearth of original material, stimulated the booksellers 
 generally to recover old national authors. From the 
 laboratory of Curl alone some of our most valuable 
 antiquarian authorities, such as Aubrey and Ashmole, 
 had appeared. This scheme, a purely commercial one, 
 was conducted in a purely commercial spirit. To carry 
 it out, two evils were introduced, the one involving the 
 other, a system of subscription, and a 'system of adver- 
 tisement, of a character unknown to the bibliopoKcal 
 history of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the man- 
 oeuvring exercised would now disgrace a quack-medicine 
 vendor, and would scarcely be countenanced by the least 
 respectable journal. A book was advertised to catch the 
 eye of subscribers before it went to press. A flaring 
 prospectus was offered to the unwary reader of the 
 "Post-boy." The proposals were ludicrously minute. 
 The size of the work, the number of sheets, the quality 
 of paper, the price, were all as minutely detailed as 
 though the work were really in the hands of the printer, 
 or even conceived in the author's brain. No cireum- 
 stantiaUty was omitted. Sometimes the copies of pro- 
 posals alone would have made a volume. One author, 
 we find from Nichols, circulated no less than 8,650.^ 
 It not unfrequently happened that the book thus pro- 
 posed was never commenced, or, if commenced, never 
 completed. Johnson tells us of one Cooke, who trans- 
 lated Hesiod, and lived twenty years on a translation 
 of Plautus, for which he was always taking subscrip- 
 
 ' Dryden's " Life of Lucian." = " Literary Illustrations," vol. ii. p. 108. 
 
 16—2 
 
244 ETHicA : 
 
 tions. The subscribers, indeed, were generally the 
 sufferers. Sometimes, if the subscription was low, it 
 was not thought worth while returning it. Such sums 
 as five shUliags or seven shillings were not expected to 
 be appHed for.^ The tricks of the booksellers would 
 have disgraced a modem Art Union. In the case of 
 Du Halde's " China," reported by Nichols,* it was 
 gravely proposed that all the profits of the work should 
 be divided away among the subscribers, or that fifty 
 pounds should be dedicated as an art prize, or that all 
 the profits should be divided among the first thousand 
 subscribers by lot, or that all copies remaining unsold 
 at the conclusion of the work should be put up to 
 auction,''and the produce be awarded by the mathematical 
 engines to the fortunate ticket-holders. Sometimes the 
 bookseller, mistrustful of the real author's fame, pur- 
 chased a more notorious prefix for the occasion. One 
 hundred guineas was the price sometimes exacted by 
 the putative author. The " Lives of the Poets," which 
 pass for Gibber's, for example, was reaUy written by 
 an amanuensis of Johnson, named Eobert Shiels, and 
 Gibber, who was then in the ling's Bench, received ten 
 guineas. A double literary fraud in this instance was 
 intended. It was ambiguously printed "Mr. Gibber," 
 that the title might pass for GoUey Gibber, instead of 
 his son Theophilus. A translation of Lucian was com- 
 monly called Dryden's, from a sense of justice to some 
 bookseller who had paid a sum of money for the poet's 
 name. Pope was charged with lending the booksellers 
 his name for his " Shakspeare," to promote the credit of 
 an exorbitant subscription.^ As good an example of the 
 
 ' Nichols, vol. ii. p. 628. = Vol. v. p. 46. 
 
 ^ Nichols, ii. p. 761. It wUl save specific references to state at once that 
 nearly all the examples produced on this subject are given from Nichols, in 
 whose not very provoking mass of literary correspondence and iUustrations 
 they lie half buried. 
 
OR CHAEACTEBISTICS. 245 
 
 evils of the system may be found in the account of 
 Stackhouse's negotiations for printing the history of the 
 Bible. A curious stratagem founded on this practice 
 was resorted to by the eccentric Wortley Montague to 
 obtain a temporary supply. A work on the rise and 
 fall of the Koman empire, really written by his tutor, 
 was pubhshed with the name of Montague on the title- 
 page. Old Montague, seeing the advertisement, sent for 
 his son, and gave him a hundred-pound note, promising 
 him a similar present for each new edition.^ 
 
 Surreptitious publications of authors' property were 
 not uncommon. Johnson was treated as Pope is said to 
 have been treated by Curl. During his absence in Scot- 
 land, Tom Davies collected his Miscellaneous Pieces, and 
 published them in two volumes, by the author of the 
 "Eambler," without his knowledge. Burke commenced 
 a suit against Owen for even yet greater treachery and 
 impudence. Indeed this peculiar morality was not con- 
 fined to the trade in England. It was the boast of the 
 Irish booksellers that they could procure from any printing- 
 office in London sheets of any book printing in it before 
 publication. Eichardson's " Sir Charles Grandison " 
 was thus pirated, in spite of every precaution. The 
 treachery of the Dubhn booksellers in this instance ex- 
 tended to Scotland, and it was even proposed to send a 
 pirated copy to France, for translation. It was the 
 practice in Germany, France, Holland, and Switzerland 
 to publish a description of such sharks, to engrave their 
 features, and to distribute them among 'the printing- 
 houses. A sort of Coventry was inflicted on them by 
 the honest journeymen of the trade, and even burial was 
 denied to them. The custom of spurious impressions 
 began early. In a paper printed in 1663, an advertise- 
 
 ' A London publisher advertised a life of the King by Robert Southy, 
 •hoping to evade the law by the misspelt name. 
 
246 ETHrcA : 
 
 ment occurs warning the public against a false and im- 
 perfect copy of a poem called " Hudibras," as a cheat 
 designed to abuse both buyer and author. 
 
 It was not always thus nefarious in the trade. The 
 upper classes of booksellers were a superior set. Their 
 wit, their scholarship, their bookish knowledge, and their 
 knowledge of men, made their houses more frequented 
 than taverns or coffee-houses. In the middle of the 
 seventeenth century, Koger North teUs us, men went to 
 Little Britain as regularly as they went to market, and 
 the name of Bowyer would alone redeem the profession 
 in the eighteenth century. Indeed the success of some 
 printing estabHshments might well raise a feeling of 
 historical envy in the Row itself. It was an ordinary 
 affair for printers and pubUshers to become aldermen, 
 city councillors, and freemen of the city. One printer, 
 Strahan, rose to be a M.P., and had Charles James Fox 
 for his colleague ; one received the honour of knight- 
 hood, and one rolled in his gUt chariot as Lord Mayor. 
 One could afford to have his hunters, and to run down 
 a stag with Majesty. The account of Lord Mayor 
 Barber's reception at Versailles, on a hunting visit to 
 Prance, is stiH to be met with in the newspapers of the 
 time. In the eyes of such men the author was some- 
 thing more than the under-agent to the bookseller, as 
 Steevens happily terms it in the preface to his " Shaks- 
 peare," and, on the whole, experienced far other treat- 
 ment to that which Dryden, for instance, suffered from 
 Tonson, though Tonson died worth 100,000L, and could 
 afford to leave a will of twenty-seven pages. The spe- 
 culative and graspmg spirit of booksellers indeed not 
 uncommonly overreached itself, and it frequently hap- 
 pened that when subscribers came to be verified, nine 
 out of ten were, as the phrase went, " men of buckram." 
 Nor was the morality among the purchasing much better 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 247 
 
 than that of the manufacturing community. A book on 
 the pubKsher's counter does not always seem to have 
 been safe from mutilation at the hands of any physician 
 who wanted a recipe, or any scholar who wanted a 
 quotation. One of the most respectable booksellers in 
 Little Britain, Bateman by name, who had Swift for a 
 customer, would never suffer any one to look into a book 
 in his shop, and when asked, would say, " I suppose 
 you may be a doctor or an author ; and if you buy the 
 book, I wiU engage it to be perfect before you leave me, 
 but not after, as I have had leaves torn out and books 
 returned, to my great loss and prejudice." 
 
 It is an observation of Pope, recorded by Spence, that 
 poetry is capable of being divided into schools as well as 
 painting, and that we might discern schools of the poets 
 as distinctly as schools of the painters. Without assign- 
 ing the origin of the remark to Pope, the principle that 
 prompted it has long exercised a prejudicial influence on 
 poetical criticism, and still holds its ground among a cer- 
 tain class of minds. It has been the fashion to talk of 
 Chaucer and Spenser as belonging to the Italian school, 
 though it is evident that Chaucer and Spenser, save in 
 the choice of their materials, were no more of the ItaUan 
 than Virgil or Statins were of the Grrecian, or Byron 
 or Moore of the Oriental school. Pope himself, and 
 Dryden by the same test, have been catalogued among 
 the French school of poets, though Dryden declared to 
 Bolingbroke that he drew more of his criticism from. 
 Spain than from Prance, and though Pope was so noto- 
 riously improficient a student of French as hardly to be 
 able to speak it. The use of French words in the poems 
 of Dryden proves nothing to the supremacy of French 
 taste. They are rather the rehcs of that quaint habit 
 which besprinkled the works of Chaucer and Shakspeare 
 with G-allicisms, and of almost all the poets and dra- 
 
248 ETHiCA : 
 
 matists up to Cowley and Dryden.^ The " Rape of the 
 Lock" would have been pubHshed, had Boileau never dis- 
 cussed the laws of harmony or written the "Lutrin," and 
 "Cato" would still have observed the unities without 
 Eacine or Voltaire. The same spirit of generaUzation led 
 Madame de Stael to confine the epithets "classic" and 
 "romantic" to her divisions of modem poetry, though it 
 is evident the " Odyssey" for example had as much claim 
 to the one title or the other as the " Franciad." Hume, 
 I am iuchned to think, inadvertently gave a much more 
 philosophic explanation for the appearance of such a 
 phenomenon as Pope, when he wrote in his "Essays" 
 that an excess of refinement is an extreme which most 
 men are apt to fall into, after learning has made great 
 progress, and after eminent writers have appeared in 
 every species of composition. 
 
 The appearance of Pope was, in fact, the natural 
 result of the operation of the law, which attributes to the 
 imagination the priority of development over the reason. 
 It is on this principle no accidental relation or proportion 
 that the poetical interval between Chaucer and Pope 
 bears to the chronological. The history of EngUsh 
 poetry during that interval is as much the history of pro- 
 gressive refinement as the history of social manners, and 
 
 ' Though accused of introducing French terms, Dryden was keenly 
 alive to the inferiority of the French language for the purposes of the epic. 
 " Their language," he writes, in his " Discourse on Epic Poetry," " is not 
 strung with sinews like our English. It has the nimbleness of a greyhound, 
 but not the hulk or body of a mastiff. Our men and our verses overbear 
 them by their weight. Pondere non numero is the English motto.'' Though 
 Johnson, in his preface to the " Dictionary," apprehended that the licence of 
 translators would soon reduce us to babble a dialect of France, in his " Life 
 of Dryden " he acknowledged that few of the French words which the poet 
 allowed, had been incorporated or retained in our language. It should seem, 
 indeed, that Dryden himself rather obeyed than gave an impidse to the taste 
 of the age, in the fashionable GaUomania. In his preface to " All for Love," he 
 distinctly says, "I should not have troubled myself thus far with French poets 
 but that I find our Chedreux critics wholly form their judgment by them." 
 
OE CHAEACTERISTICS. 249 
 
 the "Essay on Criticism" and the "Essay on Man" 
 are as much the legitimate climacterics of the one as the 
 Habeas Corpus and the Bill of Rights are of the other. 
 Poetry, in truth, has its ancestors as well as Liberty, 
 and its genealogical epochs have each their several 
 characteristics and their several representatives. The 
 degeneracy &om epic simpUcity to philosophic embellish- 
 ment was consummated, not at a moment, but only by a 
 long series of graduation. Pope was only the poetical 
 successor of Dryden. Dryden, if he did not inherit the 
 disfigurements, inherited the aims of the metaphysical 
 poets, and the metaphysical poets were born when 
 Surrey, the GranviUe of a former age, as Pope called 
 him, anticipated the Granville of a later, by permitting 
 his muse to prolong the conceits of Vaucluse. The reign 
 of Dryden, moreover, was on the decline. If we are to 
 believe Spence, and the insinuation of Dennis, a clique 
 mustered round Addison and Steele to depreciate him.^ 
 Prior, while yet a Whig, had satirized the " guilty 
 Bayes " in his "Modem Translators." Eowe, in a poetical 
 epistle published a few years before his death, upbraided 
 the generation which had suffered him to write on, in 
 spite of sense. 
 
 On the other hand, the history of Enghsh poetry 
 after Pope, is the history of a great poetical reaction 
 against that demorahzation of which Pope is the ex- 
 ponent. The counter revolution was in its turn a 
 gradual one. Its approach was heralded by unmistake- 
 able signs. The pubhcation of "Chevy Chase" and 
 "John GUpin," was one archaeological protest in its 
 favour. The pubhcation of "Ossian's Poems" and the 
 "Eowleian Manuscripts" was another. When it did 
 come, its violence showed the precipitance with which 
 the public mind recurred to the models of antiquity. It 
 
 ' See Dennis's Letter to Tonson — " Maloniana." 
 
250 ETHicA : 
 
 may be easily imagined what favours a poet, whose muse 
 was dedicated to the rough exploits of Border Outlaws, 
 would have received from a generation that had rejected 
 the "Percy BeHques" and the Bunic Odes of Gray, 
 or how the courtly rhymesters of Buttons' would have 
 stared to hear a ploughman entrancing the town with 
 melodies of Dorian sweetness, such as the classic pipe of 
 Pan never uttered. 
 
 The name of Cowper has generally been prominently 
 associated with the revolution that followed the poetical 
 supremacy of Pope. Perhaps, no one of his contempora- 
 ries was better -adapted for the post. I do not speak of 
 Cowper's bodily and moral existence — :of that long and 
 dismal existence, worn out with the alternate horrors of 
 self-conviction and self-penitence, and finally expiring 
 between the harsh pietism of an eccentric minister, and 
 the Madame Guyonism of a stiU more eccentric woman. 
 I refer to his intellectual education. His mind had no 
 preconceived models to mar its origiuaUty. He had 
 always had a rather fastidious aversion to imitation. He 
 had not read a Une of English poetry since he was a boy. 
 He had not so much as heard of CoUins. He adored 
 Churchill, and Churchill hated Pope. If he had any 
 other early predilection, it was in favour of Prior, of the 
 "Hudibras" and the "Splendid Shilling." There was 
 in addition to this a singular perverseness in the pubHc 
 decision with regard to poetry, not at all unlikely to 
 provoke a protest from an origmal imagination. A most 
 adverse judgment had gone out generally against the 
 elder poets, or against those who were not copyists of 
 the younger generation in fashion. The monthly Be- 
 viewers had called for a translation of Spenser into 
 modern English. Mason had ranked, in one of his 
 puerile poems, Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton, below 
 Pope, though he lived to know better. Gray and Mason 
 
OE CHARACTEEISTICS. 251 
 
 had been laughed at, and Cowper himself had heen 
 among the laughers. Collins's odes encumbered his 
 bookseller's shelves. MaUet's recommendation could do 
 nothing for Thomson's " Winter." Indeed, a very open 
 war had been declared against descriptive poetry. The 
 monthly reviewers had written, that "with regard to the 
 moraUzing of rural paintings, it is almost always attended 
 with quaintness, and a forced manner. The descriptive 
 poet should leave the discovery of his moral to the 
 sagacity of his readers." Jeffrey could not have said 
 more to the Lake school. Such was the state of things 
 when the " Task " appeared. Like every poem of note 
 'since Pope's time, if we except Falconer's " Ship- 
 wreck," it was composed in blank verse. Blank verse, 
 indeed, at heart Cowper disUked. It is more difficult, 
 he wrote, and not so amusing. It was not without 
 some opposition that his claims as a poetical reformer 
 were recognized. Men who had just come fresh from 
 Glover's " Athenaid," or who, like Gibbon and Miss 
 Seward, thought the "Essay on Epic Poetry" and the 
 " Triumph of Temper " were the only things worth 
 having since Pope, could not accommodate their theory 
 of poetry to the devotional seriousness and the dry 
 humour of the "Task" or the "Retirement." The 
 "Critical Review" openly preferred his hghter pieces, 
 the "Rose" and the "Nightingale," to "such long moral 
 lectures," and owned that they were evidently best 
 adapted to the poet's genius. Cowper's own humour 
 preserved him from the influence of such blind guides. 
 Moral lecturing, as it was termed, he considered to be 
 his peculiar vocation. Indeed, his superstition on this 
 subject threatened some of his happiest efforts. He did 
 not think that he was called to handle Milton. He 
 trusted that Providence had designed him for something 
 better than a translator of "Homer." Though to " John 
 
252 ETHiCA : 
 
 Gilpin," even more than to the "Task," he owed his 
 popularity ; though the figure of the Cheapside horse- 
 man was to be seen in every print-shop; though such men 
 as Sheridan went to hear it read, and such women as 
 Mrs. Siddons clapped their hands in ecstasy at it, yet he 
 cursed himself for having written it. 
 
 If Cowper originated the reaction against Pope, or 
 was among the first, more correctly, to co-operate with it, 
 we must go forward to the poetical associations of Scott, 
 to witness it in its highest and most active develop- 
 ment. I know no one, indeed, who was more constitu- 
 tionally adapted to direct a phase in Uterature, none to 
 whose composition the phase of literature which he* 
 directed was more thoroughly congenial. From none of 
 his contemporaries could the notes of the ancient 
 minstrelsy have extracted a more cordial response, or 
 the pictures of legendary lore obtained a more cordial 
 assent. In his composition he possessed pre-eminently 
 some of the materials which go to make up the antiquarian 
 in common with the grandame, an indefatigable taste for 
 and a trysting faith in the superstitions of other days. 
 Horace Walpole affected to display a frivolous penchant 
 for relics. But the mania of the connoisseur of Straw- 
 berry Hill was the result of nothing but an idle whim. 
 He was quaint, in fact, and quaintness seemed a part of 
 his nature. He had a taste for architecture, but in this, 
 as, indeed, in aU his tastes, there was more curiosity than 
 science, more whim than genius, and more foppery than 
 anything.^ Scott's passion was more the passion of a 
 man. of science. There was in it a Quixotic sincerity, an 
 unworldly honesty, very much akin to that which drove his 
 own Monkbaims from his home at Fairport, to hunt for 
 Eoman remains among the neighbouring hills, and very 
 different from that trifling partiaUty which furnished 
 
 ' See Hardinge Letters, "Nichols' Lit. Anec," vol. viii. p. 527. 
 
OE CHABACTERISTICS. 253 
 
 the villa of the author of the " Castle of Otranto " with 
 the musty coUeetions of the auction mart, with pipes, 
 spurs, parchments, and spear-heads. In addition to these 
 personal predilections, there was much m his favour. From 
 the locality in which he was bred, and in which he sang, he 
 acquired all the advantages which are to be extracted from 
 the union of the romance of fiction and the romance of 
 history. The physical features of Scotland, its mountains 
 and lakes, its brownies and pixies, wraiths and cantrips, 
 the character of its people, half shepherds half moss- 
 troopers, the traditions of their homes, half fictitious 
 half historical, presented to his kindred taste features of 
 no ordinary interest. The predilections of Burns were 
 strong, but they were the result rather of association and 
 habit than of education, the predilections of the nursery 
 rather than the studio. Scott's fervent imagination early 
 imbibed of the atmosphere which he breathed. A critic 
 of the day, himself a Scotchman, objected strongly to the 
 redundant reappearance of such chivalrous creations as 
 Marmion, and such aerial creatures as the White Lady 
 of Avenal. It required, indeed, but httle effort to conjure 
 up old scenes of antique superstition and antique prowess. 
 The traditions of forest and lake, the bare-kneed Gael 
 that hunted the antlered monarch of the wood amid his 
 pine-clad crags one day, and opposed his Celtic claymore 
 to the steel of the Saxon invader the next, the gloomy 
 chieftain whose castled steep defied all but the spell of 
 the withered weird, the aged minstrel to whose hoary 
 locks the iron-studded gates unbarred, the holy palmer 
 from Salem first and last from Eome, the lordly abbot, 
 bloated with Ehenish and the pride of the keys, the black 
 cowled monk, the modesty of the veiled sisterhood, were 
 aU as familiar to him as the legends about Fingall's HaU 
 and Selma's Feast, or the more authentic tales of 
 Knox and the Bruce. What aU the associations which 
 
254 ETHiCA : 
 
 still cling to the Thessalian hills are to the fallen 
 descendants of Homer and Leonidas, what the lakes and 
 dales of the Swiss Rhine still whisper to the coimtrTinen 
 of TeU, such are the impressions which yet linger with 
 hereditary affection round the tangled brakes, the sedgy 
 fens, and heathery moors of the Highland home. 
 
 With the labours of Scott the genial mind of Byron 
 associated him, even in defiance of his eccentric love of 
 paradox. Like the Beau in the «' Tatler," who, hesitating 
 between the changes of fashion, wore a buckle in one 
 shoe and a string in the other, he aided and abetted the 
 romantic regeneration in his practice and opposed himself 
 to it in theory. Judguag him by his works, the school of 
 Pope was the very last school with which we should be 
 disposed to identify him. Yet it is certain his principles 
 were enHsted on its side. He took part with Scott, but 
 he openly rebukes himself for doing so, says he is ashamed 
 of it; and if he does not assert in as many words that 
 the author of the " Essay on Man " is as high a poet as 
 Shakspeare or MUton,^ he does not hesitate to insinuate 
 that all the paltry renown and trashy jingle of the up- 
 starts that pretend to rival him, all the Claudians of the 
 day, wiU wither before the fame of that illustrious and 
 unrivalled man. A depreciation of Pope was with him a 
 symptom of the dechne of Enghsh poetry, and the pubU- 
 cation of an edition of Pope's works, the redemption of 
 the pubUc taste from rapid degeneracy. Petrarch in hke 
 manner despised the poems of Knighthood, and sighed 
 for the heroic mythology of antiquity ; yet he has 
 embodied the very spirit of mediaeval heroism in sonnets 
 that still survive the forgotten beauties of his " Africa." 
 There are scarcely any of Byron's pieces, with the excep- 
 tion, perhaps, of his "Cain," which betray any of the con- 
 templative metaphysics of the school of Pope ; and even that 
 
 ' See Letters 324, 370, and Strictures on Bowles, passim. 
 
OR CHARAOTBEISTICS. 255 
 
 would, on second thoughts, hardly admit of a comparison. 
 His selection of subjects was evidently spontaneous and 
 original. He delighted to write about, as he deHghted 
 to live among, the warm and glowing landscapes of 
 southern skies. The idle strains of the gondoher, the 
 gay kiosk, the whiff of the amber-topped chibouque, the 
 shout of the Imaum from the gilded minaret, the sound of 
 the grave tambour, the whiz of the swift jereed, the 
 glance of the silver-sheathed ataghan, the tumultuous 
 revelries of the carnival, the solemn frivohties of the 
 Rhamazan, were to him stimulants as inspiring as the 
 tartan, the bonnet, and the wailing pibroch had been to 
 the colder fancy of the northern bard. Whatever were 
 his own prejudices, it will always be to his merit to have 
 been among the foremost who introduced the esoteric 
 imagination of the Saxon to the splendours of that 
 oriental imagery, destined to find a still more genial inter- 
 preter in the author of " LaUa Rookh." 
 
 If the genius of Byron proved itself a slave to the age, 
 I am not sure that Pope may not plead a corresponding 
 influence as an apology for some of his blemishes. 
 
 There is no period in English annals in which the 
 EngKsh character appears less idiomatic in the eye of 
 the student, than during that interval which elapses 
 between the death of Milton and the birth of Cowper. 
 All those famihar traits of high-spirited courtesy and 
 chivalrous independence, so replete with the most amia- 
 ble associations of patriotism, it had entirely divested 
 itself of. The native vein of romance, that moved 
 Surrey and Sidney to high deeds and higher aspirations 
 — that well-tempered love of speculation, which confined 
 within the limits of common sense the subtle intellects 
 of Bacon and Shakspeare — were laid aside for a morbid 
 compound of formahty that, to say the least of it, was 
 too pretentious to be really English, and a frivolity too 
 
256 ETHICA : 
 
 clumsy to be truly French. In literature, in manners, 
 and in dress, from the highest operations of philosophy 
 to the artifices of the toilette-table and the economy of 
 the kitchen-garden, there was no fashion but what was 
 rendered subservient to this -vicious combination. The 
 cordial precision of the Puritan was hardly less charac- 
 teristic than the new epidemic. 
 
 No department of letters felt the contagion more 
 severely than poetry. Poetry, indeed, became such as 
 it might have been expected to become, among a people 
 whose ideas of beauty were confined to the number of 
 their patches or the height of their caprioles, and their 
 ideas of nature to the shears of Bridgman and Kent; 
 who believed, with Johnson, that Fleet Street was the 
 finest prospect in the world ; deemed, with Chesterfield, 
 that etiquette is the essence of morahty ; and were con- 
 tent to accept the dictum of Bolingbroke, that hiemeance 
 is one of the first endowments of a king. Imagination 
 succumbed to the restraints of hon ton. Its flights became 
 subdued, its harmony unimpassioned, its raptures soft- 
 ened to a whisper. It acquired an air of sickly robust- 
 ness, of civic rusticity, of club-house sentimentality. 
 
 One particular circumstance which considerably aided 
 the malign iafluence of conventionalism, was the strong 
 association of poetry with poHtics, whether it developed 
 itself in satire or ia panegyric. The' Muse, it is evident, 
 had nothing to gain by haviag to sing of the discords 
 of James and Monmouth, and the quarrels of Whigs and 
 Tories. The ears of faction might have been tickled to 
 hear Shaftesbury compared to a Jew, or Marlborough 
 to an eagle or an angel, but on the imagination the 
 analogy could have had only a prosaic effect. Pegasus, 
 as Sheffield sang in his " Art of Poetry," bears but a 
 dead weight, when rid by your lumpish Minister of State. 
 For every ode to Pulteney or Walpole, for every com- 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 257 
 
 parison between Anna and a Phoenix, William and 
 Mount Etna, for every verse that built a temple to 
 Liberty or raised a monument to Milton, a muse was 
 sacrificed. The association, happy as it was for poets, 
 was most unfortunate for poetry. Men who were paid 
 well to convert the merits and demerits of every intrigue 
 into rhyme, had neither the inchnation nor the leisure 
 to turn their eye beyond the precincts of Westminster or 
 the Palace Yard. Accordingly, it would be difficult to 
 find an interval in the poetical Uterature of any other 
 country, when poetry so entirely forsook its natural 
 functions, and paid less obeisance to nature. It might, 
 with some labour, be possible to find a familiar figure 
 among the scenic sketches of the dramatists. But of 
 descriptive poetry, such as it appeared in the " Comus," 
 or in the "Dewdrop" of MarveU, and such as it was 
 afterwards to appear in Cowper and Thomson, there was 
 literally none. 
 
 Even such imagery as made pretensions to an 
 EngUsh dress was so disguised in the fopperies of 
 Greece and Kome, as scarcely to deserve the credit of 
 nationality. Indeed at no period had the authors of 
 antiquity exercised a greater influence on our national 
 letters. To say that they supplied all the material for 
 manufacturing our poetry, is to give but a small idea of 
 that influence. Every writer who felt his powers of 
 originating inferior to his powers of imitating, compen- 
 sated for the superiority of his ear over his imagination, 
 by translating the "Pastorals" of Theocritus, turning 
 the " iEneid," " Thebaid," or " Pharsalia " into Eng- 
 lish rhythm, and adapting the " Satires " of Horace and 
 Juvenal, or the "Elegies" of Ovid, to an English dress. 
 The inauguration of a king, the birth of a prince, or the 
 marriage of a princess, was sure to be celebrated in Latin 
 hexameters or sapphics, fiUed with appeals to Jove, the 
 
 17 
 
258 ETHiCA : 
 
 Parcse, or Matrona. Nor was the infatuation confined 
 to the mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease ; the most 
 popular judges shared in it. The " Leonidas " of Glover 
 was quoted with applause in the gay circle of Leicester 
 House, when that circle contained Mallet and the author 
 of the "Seasons." Lord Lyttleton pronounced the for- 
 tunate writer equal to Pope and Milton, and gravely 
 thanked the age for having given him Homer agaia. 
 Hume joined with the critical reviewers in their hyper- 
 boHcal praises of Wilkie's " Epigoniad." Spratt's adap- 
 tation of the " Plague at Athens," from Thucydides, was 
 far better received than the "Paradise Lost." Even 
 the drama did not escape ; and audiences in possession 
 of "Lear," "Macbeth," and "Hamlet," were found 
 ready to shower their plaudits on any trash that bore 
 the classic title of " Cato," "Phaedra and Hippolytus," 
 " Apollo and Daphne." The spirit of Paganism had 
 taken possession of our imagiuation as completely as it 
 had absorbed our taste in EHzabeth's time, when, accord- 
 ing to HaU and Hohngshed, every pageant was a pan- 
 theon, every pastrycook a mythologist, and every foot- 
 man a satyr, — when the metamorphosis was regularly 
 reacted in a sweetmeat, and the siege of Troy re-fought 
 in a plum-cake. In the ornamental jargon which it 
 introduced into our verse, the Stour was Stourus, a 
 Cheshire cheese was a Carnavian cheese ; the Po, Padua; 
 the Danube, Ister ; the Khone, Ehodanus : and no author 
 who did not wish to see his Epic consigned to the second- 
 hand book-staUs of Moorfields, would have alluded to 
 England but as Britannia, Flanders as Flandria, and 
 KamiUies as KamUUa. Ingenuity found a metaphor for 
 the most famihar objects. A wig is Alecto's snaky 
 tresses, a passenger traversing St. Giles is Theseus 
 traversing the labyrinth of Crete, and a magistrate sit- 
 ting in judgment is nothing less than Minos or Ehada- 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 259 
 
 manthus. According to the very letter of Boileau's 
 canon, framed under the pressure of a taste which he 
 was very far from originating, a poem contained all the 
 gods in Spence's *' Polymetis." 
 
 " Every virtue a divinity is seen ; 
 Prudence is Pallas, Beauty's Paphos' Queen. 
 'Tis not a cloud from which swift lightnings fly, 
 But Jupiter that thunders from the sky : 
 Echo's no more an airy empty sound, 
 But a fair nymph that weeps her lover drowned." 
 
 In the Pastorals, the shepherd's pipe is sure to be the 
 pipe of Pan, and the dewdrops the tears of Aurora. 
 Every lover must be a despairing Damon or a cruel 
 Phillis. The sun must be Phoebus and the moon Cynthia. 
 Every pot-house Anacreontic must echo with invocations 
 of Comus, Jove, and Bacchus. Our poetry, indeed, has 
 never been free from mannerism. In Cowley, it dis- 
 played conceits of thought ; in Wordsworth, if I may 
 use the expression, conceits of feeling ; in Pope, conceits 
 of style predominate. 
 
 Nothing better illustrates the general depravity than 
 the use of the sonnet and ode. In the hands of Milton it 
 had breathed lofty laments over the victims of Savoy, or 
 chanted its paeans of triumph with the Sabsean cowherds. 
 If we turn to his successors, to those who were considered 
 his rivals, the Hammonds, Landsdownes, Priors, and So- 
 mervilles, we find nothing but diluted comphments from 
 Ovid, devoted to the praise of some townish Chloe or Clselia, 
 as unlike the heroines of Ovid, as a naked prostitute is 
 unUke a naked Indian. Nor did this inverted taste end 
 here. It comprehended the whole circle of the poHte 
 artSj and according to the periodicals of the day shed its 
 influence on lawn, avenue, grassplot, and parterre. The 
 Christian theology, it was complained, had been expunged 
 to make room for the heathen mythology. If a pond was 
 
 17—2 
 
260 ETHiOA : 
 
 dug, Neptune emerged from the basin and presided in tlie 
 middle. If a vista was cut through a grove, it must be ter- 
 minated by a Dryad or an Apollo. Every walk had its 
 complement of Fauns, every library its Penates, and every 
 haU-door its presiding Lares. It was humorously hinted^ 
 that the very churches had been invaded, that one honest 
 Hampshire baronet had ordered two fine statues of Fame 
 and Fortune to take the place of St. Peter and St. Paul, 
 and that pur Lady had made room for Proserpine, and 
 the holy St. Christopher fallen a victhn to the Famesian 
 Hercules. 
 
 It was this wretched mannerism that Pope seemed 
 bom to extend to its utmost limits. In one respect the 
 association was of use to him. But the ornaments that 
 served him when he was writing of the loves of Paris 
 and Helen, the wrath of Achilles and the wanderings of 
 Ulysses, failed him entirely when he began to sing of 
 Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter. No City laureate 
 would now be guilty of transplanting the elaborate theo- 
 gony of Greece and Eome into the Druidical simpH- 
 city of Saxon scenery, a fashion which deserved a keener 
 chastisement than the affected ridicule of Gay's " Shep- 
 herds' Week." The idea of SiciUan muses and naiads 
 watching over the alders of Thames, or Flora or Pomona 
 protecting the orchards of Hampton, presents a hardly 
 less incongruous image to modern taste, than the Earl 
 of Peterborough with his star and garter on guarding a 
 basket of cabbages in the Bath market. Pope, indeed, 
 had no appreciation of true pastoral poetry. Descriptive 
 poetry was in his opinion as absurd as a feast made up 
 of sauces. Accordingly he treated it as a mere condiment, 
 a subordinate rehsh adapted to give a flavour to a passing 
 sentiment, but wholly unworthy of affording the main 
 
 ' In a paper in the " Connoisseur," 113. 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 261 
 
 entertainment. His ''Garden" after Cowley was written 
 solely on this principle. The laurel and narcissus are 
 introduced solely as auxiliaries to the story of Daphne and 
 the Ovidian boy. 
 
 It is not intended to deny the author of the " House 
 of Fame" a just appreciation of Nature; but his taste was 
 evidently set in a subjective mould. His very earliest 
 pieces, written at an age when the imagiaation might 
 naturally be considered the warmest, betray all the colder 
 faculties of the metaphysician and the critic. Warton 
 was in the wrong in saying that his epic would never 
 have been successful, since his constant reasoning had 
 crushed his imagination. His imagination, as he grew 
 older, grew warmer. Any one who wUl compare his 
 ''Essay on Criticism" with his "Essay on Man" will 
 see that in copiousness of illustration and in sweetness of 
 expression, the philosophic poem is the superior of the 
 two. Had he fulfilled his design of writing an epic 
 according to his programme, it would, I suspect, have con- 
 tained many judicious analogies, many highly enamelled 
 portraits, and many beautiful episodes in the picturesque. 
 But his associations would have disqualified him for 
 representing the simple habits of primitive heroism. 
 Brutus would have been too much like Earl Peter- 
 boirough, and the Egyptian sages would have discoursed 
 on civU regimen, modes of worship, and modes of 
 government, too much in the style of Lord Boliagbroke. ; 
 
 It would be foreign to my pm-pose to make any de- 
 tailed exammation of Pope's poetical claims. As a poet, 
 his fame has been subjected to the severest test of con- 
 troversy, before his position in poetry has been assigned 
 him. That position, ranking him just beneath Dryden 
 in some things, and just above him in others, is no longer 
 likely to be gainsaid by any but a disciple affected with 
 a Byronic enthusiasin. They who would take the highest 
 
262 ETHicA ; 
 
 estimate of his natural powers, must forget his "Homer," 
 and turn from those of his poems whose subjects require 
 the pencil of the painter, to those which pretend to take 
 cognizance of men, manners, and sentiments — ^from his 
 "Windsor Forest," for instance, to his "Moral Essays." 
 Great stress has been laid on his " Epistle of Heloise 
 to Abelard," as an exemplification of his command of 
 the tender passions. In realjty, I am disposed to think 
 that his disposition was far too warped, his temper too 
 much under constitutional influence, and his habits too 
 much associated with the morahty of the Eestoration, to 
 leave him anything but a very deficient reahzation of 
 feminine excellence. Nothing is more marked than his 
 systematic depreciation of the womanly virtues in his 
 writings. A "youth of passion and an age of spleen" 
 are aU the characteristics he allows them, and they are, 
 accordingly, the only characteristics with which he has 
 drawn them. His females are for the most part rakes or 
 beldams, flirts or prudes, Chloes or Atossas. It is cha- 
 racteristic of the " Epistle of Heloise " that its reputa- 
 tion decays with its age. There is scarcely a reader that 
 does not rise from its perusal with the conviction that, 
 moving as are the sentiments, deep as is the despair of 
 the heroine, the whole piece is, nevertheless, an esoteric, 
 written for an age, and only adapted for the age in which 
 it was written. The chord of human suffering is touched, 
 indeed, but it is not swept by that master-hand that gave 
 us the plaints of Ophelia. It is what it professes to be — 
 an Elegy, discoursing alternate notes of rapture and re- 
 morse, but the remorse is half stifled with the clouds of 
 fragrance that swim around it, and the rapture is too 
 plainly actuated by a spirit that might have warmed the 
 eloquence of any of those fashionable demireps, whose 
 names were daily invoked in pretty Ovidian couplets on 
 the toasting-glasses of every coffee-house. No beauty 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 263 
 
 that it contains could compensate for the allusion to the 
 effects of Abelard's mutilation, in that fatal Kne, — 
 
 " No pulse that riots, and no blood that glows." 
 
 Warton, when he praised the poet for the delicacy with 
 which the whole catastrophe was referred to, reaUy 
 acknowledged, what nobody will be disposed to deny, 
 that the reference had better been away. Even in a 
 ludicrous poem, such insinuations must always be offen- 
 sive. "When Hobbelia talks of putting golden flies into 
 the mug of Lubberkin, in Gay's " Pastorals," though 
 she had the plea of rusticity on her side, yet there is 
 hardly a reader of taste or discrimination who is not ot 
 opinion, that G-ay might with more propriety have left the 
 figure to its natural atmosphere, to the Hans Carvel or 
 the Paulo Purganti. 
 
 If the " Rape of the Lock " had not been exempted 
 by its title of mock heroic, a somewhat similar charge of 
 sophistication might be brought against it. Good as it is, 
 it would have been still more appreciated did it not un- 
 fortunately suggest a comparison. Those who have seer^ 
 Prospero ruling the tempest, or Puck girdUng the earth 
 in a moment, or Ariel shielding virtue from enchantment, 
 are not likely to look with favour on the author, who has 
 narrowed the domain of fairydom to the superficies of a 
 fine lady's boudoir. The transformation to Zephyretta 
 guiding the nice conduct of a fan, or BriUante superin- 
 tending the arrangement of an ear-pendant, or Crispissa 
 tendmg a hair-braid, or Ariel dispensing the comfort of a 
 lap-dog, suggests at the moment the idea that the poem 
 was intended to be a caricature, intended to perform the 
 duties of the "Eehearsal" or the "Splendid Shilling." 
 Addison, who knew the propensities of Pope, and loved 
 the classic creations of the "Midsummer Night's Dream " 
 and the " Masque of Comus " too much to see them 
 parodied, probably foresaw the result when he advised 
 
264 ETHiCA : 
 
 Pope to let the poem stand as it stood at first, without 
 the fairy machinery. That he gave him this advice, as 
 the cankered mind of Pope suggested, because he fore- 
 saw that he should not succeed, is as incredible as that 
 Dryden should have recommended Creech to translate 
 " Horace " because he foresaw that he should fail. 
 
 The basis on which Pope's fame chiefly rests, is un- 
 doubtedly his complete mastery over his native language. 
 No man, not even Thucydides or Tacitus, practised the 
 art of condensation and compression more successfully, 
 and no poet, certainly no EngUsh poet, ever imparted 
 such epigrammatic brevity, combiaed with such smooth- 
 ness of versification, a brevity — 
 
 " That turned the common dust 
 Of servile opportunity to gold," 
 
 and a smoothness that assisted the metre without im- 
 pairing its temper, — very different to the insipid har- 
 mony of those posthumous imitators who, season after 
 season, turned out by the thousand, as honest Ben Jon- 
 son sings, — 
 
 " Verses as smooth and soft as cream, 
 In which there is neither depth nor stream." 
 
 It is this consummate polish that has given to his satires 
 that air of excessive coldness which the critics object to 
 them. The slow artifices of elaboration but tamely express 
 the ever gleaming vehemence of moral indignation. If 
 it is true that out of the fulness of the heart the mouth 
 speaketh, fervour of feeling and spontaneity of diction 
 have too close a connection in rhetoric and nature to 
 suffer a divorce. In Pope we see too much of the poet 
 to beheve in the satirist, too much of the composer to 
 beheve that the notes are but the unwrought expressions 
 of involuntary emotions. We recognize, indeed, the curl 
 of the lip and the kindling of the eye, but it is all in the 
 triumph of self. It was his error in supposing that 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 265 
 
 fictitious zeal could be disguised by style ; that, as Bottom 
 considered that Fluke by his roar could frighten his 
 audience into the conviction that he was a Uon, he might 
 by the energy of his vituperation forge a claim to a 
 censorship. 
 
 In his personal satires, on the other hand, aU is cum 
 grano. No ingenious metaphor or laboured antithesis is 
 required to counteract the malice and the spite he does 
 not feel. There is no mumbling of the game he cares 
 not to bite. When he has to deal with the farcical 
 foibles of character, the polish that enfeebled the severity 
 of his moral muse only renders the arrows of his ridicule 
 more poignant. Like those satyrs of Ethiopia, that 
 Herodotus tells us of, his dexterity consists in devouring 
 ants and aU creeping things. The individual frailties of 
 the Theobalds and Dennises, Curls and Lintots, had far 
 more effort in inspiring his scorn and stirring his bile, 
 than the generic depravity of a society whose degrada- 
 tions he shared in, with much too philosophic an apathy 
 cordially to loathe. 
 
 There was but one man, a contemporary of Pope, to 
 whom nature had given an authentic title to act the part 
 of the " cynic." That man was Swift. In his constitu- 
 tion, the temper, the tongue, and the heart of the 
 misanthrope met in harmonious co-operation. Scorniug 
 his fellow-men with a hatred more withering than that of 
 Mephistopheles, treating the claims of social propriety with 
 a callousness more contemptuous than that of Timon, 
 he wanted neither the inclination to abuse, nor the 
 courage to express his abuse. Not ignorant of or insen- 
 sible to the claims of virtue, intimately familiar with the 
 phases of every vice, he only required the native force of 
 his caustic eloquence to have been turned from the 
 absorbing interests of poKtics to nobler aims, to have 
 earned for himself a reputation loftier than that of 
 
266 ETHioA ; 
 
 Juvenal. Even the maKce of Pope fades away before 
 the blazing rhetoric of his misanthropy. Pope's satires, 
 by the side of those of the author of the "Legion Club" 
 — to use the expression for which Jacob Hall was so 
 soundly rated by Milton, and which the old poet for 
 the first time in our language characterized as a BuU — 
 are comparatively toothless. The dexterity which Pope 
 expended in the accumulation of ingenious ornament, was 
 with him concentrated to render the blow more unavoid- 
 able. Homeliness and brevity were rare advantages to a 
 pen so enamoured of invective, and so habituated to the 
 expression of an almost heartless ferocity. 
 
 Foreign writers have accused us of sinking the per- 
 sonal in the literary character. "In England," wrote 
 D'Alembert, in his essay on " Men of Letters," " people 
 were content with Newton's being the greatest intellect 
 of the age. In France, one would have wished him to 
 be also amiable." 
 
 There is hardly a biography of any native celebrity, 
 whose pages would not supply a contradiction to this 
 illiberal slander. Nowhere is criticism more alert to 
 detect the vices of genius, or more disposed to distin- 
 guish between the man and his book. We admu-e, 
 for instance, the " Paradise Lost " in humble amaze- 
 ment, but we do not forget that its author was the 
 opponent of Salmasius and the husband of Mary Powel. 
 We watch with reverence that mighty genius which 
 bequeathed to us the " Instauratio Magna " tracing an 
 echo or stuffing a capon, but we are never for a moment 
 insensible to the dripping head of Essex and the cracking 
 sinews of Peacham.^ Sir Koger de Coverley is seldom 
 from our elbow, but even his hearty presence cannot 
 keep out of our sight the fatal wine-bottle and the 
 
 ' The cause for Bacon, however, is about to he reheard, and with every 
 probability of a modification of judgment 
 
OB CHAEACTEBISTICS. 267 
 
 suspicious Homer. The most hasty contemplation of 
 such a character as Swift's, would alone be sufficient to 
 quell any rising prejudice or impartiality. For Swift, 
 it must be observed, was not without his recommen- 
 dation. Every page of his writings, it is true, is lighted 
 up with a demoniacal glare. His pen is always steeped 
 in the gall of bitterness. His sentiments are always 
 pervaded as it were with a spirit of Phalarism, are 
 always expressive of enjoyment in the torments of his 
 victims. The corruption of his feUow-men is the meat 
 and drink of his appetite. He seems to feed on the 
 unsound parts — on the offal of their character — with the 
 same gusto that a ghoul is said to feed on the remains 
 of the charnel-house, that a gourmand feeds on the 
 disease that composes his pate de foi gras. Yet, in spite 
 of these repulsive features, though Southey had not a 
 greater aversion for a pork-butcher than I have for a 
 moral anthropophagus, there is a fascination connected 
 with his mental reputation that affects me, I confess, 
 in some such mysterious manner as the leprosy of 
 his mistress affected the poet's Glendoveer. Yet, in 
 spite of these fascinations, one does not forget in the 
 author of " Lilliput " the Dean of St. Patrick's, the 
 follower of Somers, and the lover of Stella. 
 
 To return. The poetry of Swift bears singularly the 
 stamp of his character. To form an even tolerably 
 correct notion of that character, it must be considered 
 in reference to his destiny. He had, in fact, joined 
 one of the unhappiest of fates to one of the unhappiest 
 of tempers. He had come into the world unpropitiously. 
 In after years the only commemoration he would give 
 his birthday, was the perusal of that fine outburst of 
 wretchedness, in which Job laments that a man child 
 was bom to his father. Between his birth and his 
 entrance into college, he underwent vagaries that would 
 
268 ETHiCA : 
 
 have tried the nerves of a gipsy.- After he had entered 
 college new troubles awaited him. His temper was 
 haughty; his . imagination active. He soon, therefore, 
 kicked against the restraints of a routine which pressed 
 hardest on both temper and imagination. Burgeldicius 
 and Keckermannus were soon given up for coffee-houses 
 and taverns. Instead of syllogisms and theses, he took 
 to writing squibs on his tutors. All that remained, 
 therefore, of his college life was a series of admonitions, 
 submissions, and suspensions. He quitted it accordingly 
 for his mother's residence in Leicestershire, only to find 
 it necessary to quit his mother's residence for the 
 patronage of Sir William Temple, His biography from 
 this date is nothing but a series of designs petulantly 
 formed, and disappointments angrily borne. At Moor- 
 park he had been noticed by William. But WiUiam 
 had died, and Swift, scarcely better than a dependant 
 of Temple, had gained nothing but the knowledge to 
 cut asparagus in the Dutch manner. He had been 
 ordained, but ordination had brought him no prize. He 
 had hastily thrown off the priest for the pamphleteer 
 with as httle success. Theologically a Tory, he had 
 fought in the ranks of the Whigs, but the Whigs had 
 looked coldly on him, and the Tories, with whom he 
 afterwards coalesced, had rewarded him with an eccle- 
 siastical banishment to a country, which was to treat 
 him with a hatred and an affection such as was new 
 towards a man of letters, and such as in the next 
 century Scotland exhibited towards Sir Walter Scott 
 only. The " Draper's Letters " made even a greater 
 impression than the letters of Malachi Malagrowther. 
 In domestic matters he had been equally unhappy. He 
 had not been married till his fame was well nigh con- 
 summated ; but both in his married and in his single 
 state, he had contrived to retain over women an influence 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 269 
 
 which beaux like Selwyn and wits like Chesterfield 
 never acquired, and which still remains an inexphcable 
 feature in that strange disposition. Even now, erudite 
 writers and ladies of a certain stamp rank the eccentric 
 loves of Cadenus and Vanessa with those of Petrarch and 
 Laura, Abelard and Heloise. 
 
 I have my own theory with regard to his ainours, 
 but in the present state of documentary evidence I do 
 not feel justified in urging it. One thing which, in the 
 interval, may help to a comparatively fair estimate of his 
 conduct, is a trait which entered largely into his pubhc 
 as well as private demeanour, his apparent love of incon- 
 sistency for inconsistency's sake. He called himself, for 
 example, a Tory in matters of Church, while he wrote 
 the "Tale of a Tub" as a caricature on the Church. 
 He then called himself a Tory in pohtics, and left a letter 
 full of the strongest denunciations on standing armies, 
 and other main tenets of Tory doctrine. He carried 
 himself proudly, and even superciliously, towards the 
 Ministry, though he wore out his nights and days in 
 working for them Hke a slave. He domineered over his 
 curates and domestics, yet no employer was really kinder. 
 He took high ground on subjects of doctrinal religion, 
 yet those who witnessed his singularities half accused 
 him of making religion a jest. His rudeness and even 
 harshness towards the sex was proverbial ; yet one of the 
 sex who knew him well, declared that she was better 
 content to be drawn a Daphne by him than a Saccharissa 
 by Waller. This discrepancy extended itself to his 
 works. In his poems the subjects are as nauseous as 
 could be found out of Rochester or Prior ; yet, nauseous 
 though they be, it is impossible to deny rare felicity to 
 the treatment. The contrast between Addison and Swift 
 is singularly brought out, I think, by the contrast of 
 their literary manners. Addison discouraged vice; but 
 
270 ETHicA : 
 
 he discouraged it not by exposing it in all its filthy attire, 
 but negatively, by insisting on the enjoyments and rarer 
 seductions of virtue. Swift took vice in its most legible 
 shape, and held it up to public disgust. Swift taught by 
 repulsion ; Addison by attraction. 
 
 A strange unhappy destiny seems to mark out Swift's 
 whole career, moral, hterary, and poUtical, for special 
 observation from even the most transient critic. He was 
 a priest and a dean in the eyes of his ovm generation ; 
 he is very Uttle better than a vicious Lothario in ours. 
 His poetry and his prose gave him an easy superiority 
 among the critics of his day. Even a foreigner, and that 
 foreigner a Schlosser, can now discover that beyond the 
 mere husk of style, they contain no principle of perma- 
 nence in them. PohticaUy, he caught the shadow, but 
 the substance was denied him. He was flattered and 
 unrewarded. I know that I am treading on dubious 
 ground. I know that it is still a question whether Swift 
 was imposed on by the flatteries, which Queen Anne's 
 Ministry dealt out to him in a thousand deHcate and 
 insidious ways. 
 
 It is indeed surprising how many sensible people still 
 beUeve, and will apparently beheve to the end of their 
 days, that Harley and St. John placed more confidence 
 in Swift than they did in each other. Not a word that 
 the sanguine egotism of the ambitious parson wrote to 
 a woman too weak or too fond to disbeheve him, that 
 these partisans do not cordially endorse. To them, as 
 to himself, he is the pillar of the State, the straw to 
 support a drowning Cabinet. The truth is, as Lord 
 Orrery asserted, the Cabinet employed him, but they did 
 not trust him. They cajoled him with the mockery of 
 trust, called him "Jonathan," complamed that they 
 could keep nothing from him, admitted him into their 
 bed-chambers while stars and garters waited at the 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 271 
 
 levee door, regulated their dinner hours to please him, 
 took him to Windsor in their coach, whispered signifi- 
 cantly into his ear to tease the Whigs, gave him their 
 pictures enamelled in zinc and a dozen other little me- 
 mentos, treated his Irish friends with reluctant civility, 
 laughed at his complaints, and, it may he, listened 
 gravely to his advice. But these, though they may be 
 the marks of friendship — friendship which the intellect of 
 Swift merited as weU as earned — are no indications of 
 pohtical confidence. Their intercourse was undoubtedly 
 famiHar enough. His relation to them, as the pam- 
 phleteer of their party, demanded it ; he must have 
 known their plans of opposition and their measures of 
 defence before he could write about them. Beyond this, 
 however, he did not know ; and this he knew in common 
 with his fellow-scribes. But that he was trusted as 
 Prior, for instance, was trusted, and as his friends would 
 -pretend he was trusted, we have, besides his own pubHc 
 confession, made ia sober earnest, that 
 
 " All that passes inter nos, 
 Might be proclaimed at Charing Cross," 
 
 the most convincing proofs. I will give a few of them, 
 and I hope there will be an end of extravagances in his 
 favour. Conjecture was rife as to the appointment of 
 the Privy Seal for the coming conference at Utrecht. 
 The matter was not a very important one, and Swift, if 
 anybody, might have been supposed to be in the secret. 
 But Swift writes, " My Lord Treasurer began a health to 
 my Lord Privy Seal. Prior punned, and said it was so 
 privy he knew not who it was. But I fancy they have 
 fixed it all, and we shall know to-morrow. When I went 
 out this morning, I was surprised with the news that the 
 Bishop of Bristol was Lord Privy Seal." ^ Again — the 
 reference is to Prior's clandestine visit to Versailles, to 
 
 ' Diary. 
 
272 ethica: 
 
 open negotiations for peace : " Prior has been absent out 
 of town these three months, nobody knows where, and is 
 lately returned. People confidently affirm that he has 
 been in France, and I half beheve it. The Secretary 
 pretends he knows nothing about it."^ At a later date : 
 " They say it is certain Prior has been in France. No- 
 body doubts it. I had not time to ash the Secretary, he 
 was in such haste." ^ " Here is the Duke of Marlborough 
 going out of England. Lord knows why ! which causes 
 many speculations."^ "Lord Bolingbroke told me I 
 must walk away when diuner was done, because Lord 
 Treasurer and he and another were to enter upon busi- 
 ness. I said it was fit that I should know their busi- 
 ness as anybody, for I was to justify," He stayed, indeed, 
 but we have his own words that " it was so important 
 that he was hke to sleep on it." Once more. The 
 proofs of the whole Tory Ministry, and the Queen at the 
 head of them, being engaged in intrigues with St. Ger-. 
 maias are so strong that no one now doubts them for an 
 instant; yet so completely was Swift in the dark, that 
 he asserts,* " The Queen, to my knowledge, hated and 
 despised the Pretender." And in another place,* " Mi- 
 nisters would never have held the mask on before me, 
 and if such affairs were in agitation, I must have had 
 very bad luck not to have discovered some grounds for 
 suspicion." That he was imposed on, or, what is the 
 more rational view of the matter, that he imposed on 
 himself and his friends, there cannot, after such testi- 
 mony, be a shadow of doubt. 
 
 In addition to this, there is the evidence suggested by 
 the characters of the individual Ministers with whom Swift 
 had to deal. Men with such Httle natural affinity for 
 
 • Diary. » Ibid. 3 i^^^ 
 
 * " Note to Burnet," vi. 68. 
 
 ' " Enquiry into the behaviour of the Queen's last Ministry." 
 
OR CHABACTEEISTICS. 273 
 
 each other would hardly have combined to trust Swift ; 
 for it must be remembered, so far from there being any 
 cordiaHty, the quarrels of the Cabinet had become the 
 talk of every coflfee-house. Common friends saw the 
 issue, shrugged their, shoulders, but refused to inter- 
 meddle. Swift, indeed, was an exception. His interest 
 depended on their reconciliation, and he was indefatigable 
 in his efforts to reconcile. He was continually manoeu- 
 vring to bring the Secretary and Treasurer together in 
 Mrs. Masham's drawing-room, but of no avail. Once he 
 contrived for them to travel five hours in the same coach 
 to Windsor ; but Harley only remained reserved, Boling- 
 broke suspicious. Several times he harangued them 
 seriously, told them their mischiefs might be ended in 
 two minutes, or would end the Ministry in two months, 
 and that he would retire. His success was never varied ; 
 the Secretary generally nodded, the Treasurer asked him 
 to dinner next day. 
 
 There never were colleagues less morally and intel- 
 lectually adapted to command the confidence of each 
 other, or to suggest a mutual deposit of confidence in 
 their friends. To the title of statesman, Harley had very 
 little claims, in the scientific sense of the word. His 
 ideas of statesmanship may be gathered from what he 
 used to tell Swift, that " wisdom in public affairs is not 
 what is commonly beUeved, the forming of schemes with 
 remote views, but the making use of such incidents as 
 happen."^ This is diplomacy; but it is not states- 
 manship. 
 
 But he did not even fulfil the ordinary duties of the 
 head of a Cabinet. The complaints against him on this 
 score were numerous on aU sides. He was tainted with; 
 that " evil affection inherent in power," stigmatized so 
 
 long ago by jEschyluS, the roig fiXovai fii\ imroiOevai. He 
 ' Swift, "Letter to Arch. King," July 12, 1711. 
 
 18 
 
274 ETHiCA : 
 
 affected to this end the most mysterious air of secrecy. 
 It pervaded all he did or said, every feature in his coun- 
 tenance, every muscle in his body. I have always thought 
 that the character of Dubius in Cowper's "Conversation" 
 is an admirable portrait of Harley : 
 
 " He woidd not with a peremptory tone 
 Assert the nose upon his fece his own ; 
 With hesitation admirably slow, 
 He hmnhly hopes, presumes it may he sO. 
 Through constant dread of giving truth oflfence, 
 He ties up all his hearers in suspense ; 
 Knows what he knows as if he knew it not. 
 What he remembers seems to have forgot. 
 His sole opinion, whatsoe'er befall, 
 Centring at last in having none at all. 
 His ambiguities his total sum. 
 He might as well be blind, and deaf and dumbs" 
 
 It was rarely an ambassador at a levee could get more 
 than a monosyllable from him, and that monosyllable 
 uttered above a whisper/ Harcourt declared that he 
 never knew any more of the measures of the Court than 
 his footman, and that Lord Oxford scarcely kneW him.^ 
 He screens so, writes another correspondent, that not 
 even any of the first nobihty can get an audience without 
 difl&culty.^ He seldom gave a direct answer ; and it was 
 the current report that he only gave a direct answer 
 when he did not mean to adhere to it. He rarely could 
 be induced to appoint the hour for an interview ; and if 
 he appointed an hour, he rarely kept it. Such talents, it 
 is plain, might have regulated an attorney's office, but 
 were ill adapted to carry on a government. Harley 
 refused to see that a Prime Minister must not always 
 wear the cloak of the conspirator, that it is sometimes 
 even his interest to be a httle more candid and a Httle 
 less circumlocutive than a pettifogger. He forgot that 
 punctuality and decision are as much the duty of a 
 
 ' Macph. "Papers," vol. ii. p. 518. = Ibid. vol. ii. p. 532. 
 
 ^ Ibid. vol. ii. p. 296. 
 
OK CHABAOTEEISTICS. 275 
 
 Btatesman as of a tradesman ; that the science of govern- 
 ment is a science reqtiiring as strict an observance of 
 time, place, and method, as the science of barter; 
 that it is sometimes a dangerous over-refinement to act 
 in common business out of the common road ; that a 
 contempt for forms and ceremonies, for Httle helps and 
 little hindrances, may do vel-y weU for a philosopher Uke 
 Hobbes to write about as the essence of magnanimity, 
 but that in the case of so compHcated a piece of ma- 
 chinery as a Cabinet it is apt to lead to chaos ; that, to 
 use Swift's expression, a small infusion of the alderman 
 is absolutely necessary to those engaged in the adminis- 
 tration of pubHc affairs. A great deal of this awkward 
 reserve in the distribution of power, this tricksy poly- 
 pragmacy, as the lampoons of the day called it, was 
 doubtless assumed, and assumed probably to hide a want 
 of power. It was one of his maxims that, for a minister 
 to preserve the reputation of power, he must preserve the 
 appearance of it. And this motive explains at once that 
 affected indifference to censure, and that tardiness of self- 
 viadication, which Swift put down to good-nature and 
 benevolence. His moderation was in fact cowardice ; his 
 philosophy covetousness. The Queen was a most difficult 
 person to move. Harley could not endure the suspicion 
 that he was not able to move her. He could endure any 
 amount of abuse from his colleagues for not doing what 
 they wished, rather than own that he had too iittle 
 influence with his mistress and theirs to do it. " It was 
 whipping day," he used to say, and they might rail as 
 they please. He always took the blatoe on himself, in 
 order to assume the power to himself. He rather affected 
 his fault to be real, than allow his power to be fictitious. 
 On BoHngbroke's individual character, I shall dwell 
 at some length. It is, indeed, one of those briUiant, 
 attractive characters that sometimes flash across the 
 
 18—2 
 
276 ethica: 
 
 student's path, and inAdte an almost rapt contemplation. 
 Irrespectively of his connection with Swift, I shall there- 
 fore make no apology for bringing to bear upon it labours 
 consummated elsewhere. 
 
 History, especially the history of our own country, 
 abounds in a certain class of characters whose names, 
 though still inserted in capitals on its pages, are scarcely 
 ever mentioned above a whisper ; whose titles to immor- 
 tahty are rather assumed than allowed ; and the state of 
 whose reputation, so far from enjoying a flourishing 
 vitality, resembles more the condition of Dante as he 
 describes himself in a single Une of the " Inferno " 
 before the awful presence of Dis : — 
 
 " I died not, yet no life was in me left." 
 
 Foremost among this class I would assign Bohngbroke a 
 place. Even while living he enjoyed, I beUeve, but a 
 very equivocal repute. To those who were capable of 
 judging he seems to have appeared — to borrow a very 
 significant expression from the "Merchant of Venice" 
 — every man in no man, a statesman without statesman- 
 ship, a philosopher vyithout philosophy, an enthusiast 
 vdthout enthusiasm. Now that he is dead, and his 
 speculations are buried with him, there is little reaUy 
 worth the tribute of a monument from posterity. It is 
 only on those enlarged priuciples of public justice that 
 led the ancients to pay funeral honours ahke to those 
 who failed and those who won in their battles, that pos- 
 terity can condescend to notice him. The preservation 
 of his memory, in fact, Hke the preservation of those 
 bodies which the skill of the embalmer and mason has 
 bequeathed to the latest ages, is due to the share of 
 neglect he has met with. Such neglect becomes an 
 absolute kindness, and 
 
 " Rudeness to him were fairest courtesy." 
 
 But, though looked upon with suspicion as something of 
 
OE CHAEACTERISTICS. 277 
 
 an empiricist among the more thoughtful of his genera- 
 tion, by those who came within the circle of his influence 
 there is no doubt he was hailed as the regenerator of the 
 age, deserving more success than it awarded him. The 
 secret of that influence is, I suspect, he possessed in a 
 rare degree the art of imposing on mankind. Nature 
 had given to his demeanour something of that easy 
 dignity of carriage which artifice had given to his pen ; 
 and a well-tempered arrogance stimulated him to use his 
 natural powers to fascinate his contemporaries, just as an 
 itch for notoriety prorhpted him to use his acquired 
 powers to win the ear of posterity. His life was one 
 continued study. In his youth, though really enamoured 
 of learning, he affected to copy the Bacchanals he read 
 of in the "New Atalantis " of Mrs. Manley. In his 
 manhood, though burning with the lust of political sway, 
 he affected the model of those philosophers who had won 
 the heart and the devotion of Plutarch. When he could 
 not succeed in the latter as well as he had done in the 
 former — when, on retiring into some philosophic her- 
 mitage, his friends, instead of sending him philosophic 
 stanzas for his Porch, sent him couplets full of dirt and 
 irony ^ — he changed his tone, yielded to their remon- 
 strances, and effected a compromise by assuming the part 
 of Alcibiades, or, what he loved best, according to Swift, 
 the character of Petronius. Such a disguise, it must be 
 owned, suited him best. His friends were amazed at the 
 versatiKty of the man who seemed — 
 
 " Now all for pleasure, now for Church and gtate." 
 
 Nor, if he was sometimes a rake among statesmen, could 
 any of his associates complain that he was the statesman 
 among rakes. In town he was always the man of ton, 
 the best-dressed saunterer in the Mall, the readiest hand 
 for a game at the club, or a bottle at the chop-house. 
 
 ' One of these will be found in Swift's " Journal to Stella." 
 
278 bthica: 
 
 No stranger could recognize the Secretary in the gay- 
 hearted Kbertine who quoted snatches from Tibullus over 
 pyramids of ortolans and brimmers of Tokay. In the 
 country he smoked tobacco with his neighbours, inquired 
 after the wheat in such a field, paid visits to the kennel, 
 and soon knew all the names of the hounds. The 
 general complaint was that he carried his contempt of 
 the farce of State too far, that he mixed the fine gentle- 
 man too much with the man of business, and was in the 
 habit of feigning that the load of affairs was too great 
 for him. His despatches certainly show that he never 
 overlooked the moment when he could forget the Minister 
 in the friend, and that he was quite as ready to discuss 
 the convoy of a batch of Dutch bay-trees, or a cask of 
 Barbadoes waters, as the brouillon of a treaty. 
 
 But, though the author of the " Patriot King " may 
 have been a fool among judges, he was undoubtedly a judge 
 among fools. That he succeeded in imposing on Swift and 
 Pope, is illustrated by their own extravagant testimony. 
 To have retained the mask under such penetrating eyes 
 assuredly betokened no common actor. On Pope's com- 
 plete victimization, perhaps, less stress is to be laid. No 
 man was more a dupe to the specious appearance of 
 virtue in others, as one of his earUest biographers 
 acknowledged. He knew, too, very httle of Bolingbroke's 
 real sentiments.^ The philosopher did not admit him 
 beyond the vestibule of his temple. His position with 
 regard to Bolingbroke was that of Eudsemon in the porch 
 of Hypatia's lecture-room. He knew the world only as 
 he saw it from his grotto at Twickenham. Added to 
 this, Pope was a poet, and poets are the last tests of a 
 skUfd imposture. Their imaginations, always ready to 
 be struck by the imposing, are always easiest to be im- 
 posed upon. Their eye rests upon nothing but pro- 
 
 ' See Bishop Warburton's Works, vol. vii. : 4to. 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 279 
 
 minences, and their passions, like the love and hate of 
 satirists, are roused only by the extravagantly good or 
 the extravagantly evil. They seldona look between the 
 two extremes, and they seldom, therefore, allow their 
 prejudices to be subdued by a compromise. The brilhant 
 features of BoHngbroke's character caught his fancy, and 
 he paid him the adoration of an immortal. The loath- 
 some features of Dennis passed before his pen, and he 
 depicted him as a demon. But with Swift the case was 
 otherwise. He moved in the world early, was familiar 
 with aU its jugglery, and could estimate its false glare 
 and ghtter as well as any man. Yet any one who knows 
 anything of his history, knows the superstitious admira- 
 tion with which he regarded Bohngbroke. A partial 
 explanation may be found in Swift's own vanity and 
 selfishness, two impulses which throughout all his life 
 ludicrously distorted his moral powers of vision. The 
 same feehng that led him to magnify his own credit with 
 the ministry, led him to magnify their individual import- 
 ance. As he believed that Bohngbroke could not retain 
 his place without his aid, he was naturally induced to 
 beUeve that Bohngbroke was " the greatest young man 
 he ever saw " — far too great, in fact, to be mentioned 
 in the same page with "the spluttering Sir William 
 Temple." 
 
 By position as well as by intellect, Bohngbroke, it 
 must be remembered, too, was by far the most prominent 
 man of his day. The force of his position reacted on the 
 influence of his intellect. No one of his contemporaries 
 moving in his sphere could come near him. Harley, 
 though he affected a great taste for literature, had really 
 very Uttle Hterature about him. It was " a hollow brain 
 behind a serious mask." Beyond a happy quotation or 
 two from his " Virgil," all his hterary activity was but an 
 ingenious idleness. He somethnes, when half fuddled 
 
280 ethica: 
 
 with Burgundy at the club, hiccuped out couplets made 
 in his more sober moments. Bad as they were, they are, 
 we are inchned to think, the best thing he did. The 
 specimen usually quoted, indeed, is not in his favour :— 
 
 " To serve with love, 
 And shed your blood, 
 Approved is above. 
 But bere below 
 The examples show 
 'Tis fatal to be good." 
 
 It is but fair to say, that this absurd imitation of 
 Dryden was scribbled at the end of a note to Swift, the 
 night before he was dismissed. If we are to beheve 
 Arbuthnot, he sometimes perpetrated a "reaUy most 
 excellent copy of verses." "I really believe when he 
 lays down he wiU prove a very good poet. I remember 
 the last part of his verses complaining of ill-usage ; at 
 the close he concludes :^ — 
 
 " ' He that cares not to rule, will be sure to obey. 
 When summoned by Arbuthnot, Pope, Pamell, and Gay.' " 
 
 Bolingbroke, indeed, was nothing of a poet, but even 
 as a poet he far surpassed Harley. The strongest praise 
 that can be given to his poetry will be, to most readers, 
 its strongest condemnation. Such as it is, it is quite 
 worthy of the age of Anne and the companion of Prior, 
 inferior to none in its supply of Dehan gods, chaste 
 Castahas, and laughing Cupids. But his poetry was his 
 last claim to the veneration of his admirers. No man in 
 his career had yet found time to criticize Aristotle and 
 refute Plato. No man in his rank could venture, from 
 personal acquaintance, to call Seneca a stoical fop, 
 Jerome a surly, foul-mouthed bully, and Austin an idiot. 
 If his body, too, was all vice, his mind seemed all virtue. 
 
 ' Arbuthnot to Swift, June 12, 1714. Arbuthnot's position was too 
 dependent on his criticism for his criticism to be independent on his position. 
 The reader of Macaulay, however, should not forget Arbuthnot's testimony. 
 
OR CHABACTERISTICS. 281 
 
 He had propounded a new code of moral philosophy ; he 
 had crayoned out a new model of government. 
 
 It is due to their reputation to say, that there were 
 Thomases among his disciples who doubted his specula- 
 tions on these latter subjects. Pope, though he antici- 
 pated the learned figure his patron would make on the 
 same shelf with Locke and Malebranche, yet was half 
 inspired to prophesy that "if Lord Bolingbroke ever 
 trifles, it will be when he writes on divinity." The truth 
 is, he sate down to his philosophy without any of the 
 feelings of a philosopher. He carried with him into his 
 study aU the resentments of the cabinet. AU his pieces 
 betray the spirit of the polemic. He abused the divines 
 just as he had abused the Whigs. He sees a conspiracy 
 between divines and atheists, just as he saw a conspiracy 
 between Whigs and Jacobites. His temper, too, was 
 none of the best. It had been rendered dogmatic by 
 power long uninterrupted, and then soured by iU success 
 long resented. He came, too, late to the study of his 
 subject, without any previous preparation, and as one of 
 his opponents reminded him in the language of Tully, 
 'O-tlnfiadtiQ homines scis quam insolentes sint. He called 
 Paul a leather-stocking pontiff, and Plato a delirious 
 knave, just as in the "Craftsman" he calls Walpole a 
 great macaw and a Norfolk gamester. 
 
 That the pecuhar department of philosophy, therefore, 
 which Bolingbroke chose, was the last department which, 
 by the natural formation of his character, he was autho- 
 rized to choose, no one will doubt. At the same time, 
 no one wiU say, as Warburton said, that there is nothing 
 to be met with in his works but the rankness of South 
 without his force, and the malignity of MarveU without 
 his wit. Warburton's own fate, unhappily, is that of his 
 opponent. Very few take to the "First Philosophy;" 
 but fewer still leave the "First Philosophy" for the 
 
282 ETHiCA : 
 
 " Divine Legation." There are, impartially speaking, not 
 many books in which there is such little relative propor- 
 tion between the thought and the diction — in which the 
 cost bestowed on the workmanship so enormously out- 
 values the intrinsic cost of the materials. If the philo- 
 sophy is worthless, we cannot fairly say the same of the 
 language in which it is embalmed. We approach his 
 ethical works, indeed, with the same feeling and with the 
 same curiosity that we approach the buried remains of 
 some Coptic mummy. With reverent fingers we unwreath 
 the precious folds that support the crumbhng mass within. 
 We cherish the smallest shred of the picture -written 
 texture, amazed at the elaborate value of the shrine ; 
 but for the carcass itself, we turn from it with loathing, 
 eager to denounce the extravagance that wasted on it the 
 costly spices which alone have kept it from dissolution. 
 
 Sterne or ChurchUl playing the preacher, is hardly 
 more incongruous than Bolingbroke seated 
 
 " Among the budge doctors of tlie Stoic fur ; " 
 
 and no biographer would leave their discourses for the 
 " Rosciad " or " Tristram Shandy " more readily than 
 one quits his philosophical speculations for his political 
 reflections. While he remains in the mephitic atmo- 
 sphere of metaphysics, he is a mere dilettante, just as 
 Horace Walpole was a dilettante in Hterature, and Ches- 
 terfield a dilettante in aesthetics. The moment he quits 
 theory for^^fact, and leaves deduction for narration, the 
 giddy fool, to use one of his own expressions, is converted 
 into the formal pedant. Nothing can betray less of the 
 author of the "Patriot King " — a work in which specu- 
 lation still predominates — than the author of the " State 
 of Parties." A casual reader, judging from the tenor of 
 the writer's life, might expect to find much ingenious 
 argument in behalf of Tories, and much ingenious abuse 
 of Whigs. One moment's consideration spent on his 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 283 
 
 character will at once dispel such a suspicion. And while 
 it affords enhghtenment, it will at the same time suggest 
 the explanation how it was that a man who lived hke an 
 epicurean, in the loosest acceptation of the term, yet 
 wrote like a Stoic, in the strictest sense of stoicism, 
 should have promoted civil and rehgious disabihties bills, 
 yet on subjects of civil and religious hberty should, in his 
 writings, have outstripped every Whig from Buchanan to 
 Dr. Price. 
 
 To follow Bolingbroke into exile, and through 
 all the deviations of his career, is not my intention, 
 though such an exposure would display yet more emphati- 
 cally the ignorance of those who persist in associating a 
 man hke Swift in his pohtical confidence. How he at 
 last entered into the service of the Prince for whom he 
 had so long plotted, and was made Secretary of State — ■ 
 how it fell to his lot to be suspected by his new friends, 
 as he had been suspected by his old ones — how he was 
 ignominiously rejected by them in spite of real services — 
 how that rejection led to a still more ignominious revenge, 
 — is told in every history, and in none more perspi^ 
 cuously, I wiU not say more ingenuously, than in the 
 history of his own confessions. 
 
 When he once more returned to England, he found 
 himself in another atmosphere than when he had left it. 
 The tumultuous waters of sedition had almost subsided to 
 their natural level in the constitution. Party feeling had 
 divested itself of a spirit of open rebelhon. There was 
 scarcely any demand for its display, and no apology for 
 its excesses either in Church or State. The portrait of 
 Sacheverel, which had once enhanced the popularity of 
 tobacco-pipes among the pinnacle-flyers of a few years 
 back, was now considered by Hogarth worthless enough 
 to share the company of Captain Macheath in the 
 " Harlot's Progress." The turbulent spirit of Atterbury, 
 
284 ETHiCA : 
 
 the last of a turbulent race, passed into exile as he 
 returned from it. The South Sea bubble, with aU its 
 kindred bubbles, had burst, and nothing more formidable 
 was left to rouse the rivalry of caricaturists or medaUists 
 than a Parliamentary duel or a Coventry riot. The best 
 thing, therefore, for a man who had so misspent the 
 opportunities of public hfe, was to retire from it. But 
 such was not the object of that restless spirit. He made 
 a feint, indeed, of retiring — bought a farm, built ricks, 
 painted the dwelUng-house with agricultural emblems in 
 chalk, set up over the doors agricultural mottoes in Latin, 
 and applied to himself moral reflections from Seneca.^ 
 But aU this parade was a mere counterfeit. There was 
 no sincerity in it, except, perhaps, the sincerity which 
 arises from a man's ignorance of his own inclinations. 
 
 The truth is, there are some few aspiring to the title 
 of moralists w^ho cut a most inconsistent figure between 
 their preaching and their practice ; and among these few 
 Bolingbroke holds a prominent position. The unsus- 
 pecting student who allows himself to ghde along the 
 smooth current of his biographical effusions, who yields 
 to the seductions of that noble style, breathing as it does 
 a dignified attachment to truth, and full of a dignified for- 
 bearance of error, wiU be loath to beheve, in his desire to 
 do credit, if not to the finest writing, at least to the finest 
 reading in the English language, that the author who 
 is thus eloquent in excuses for hating his enemies and 
 loving his friends, was notorious for the pUancy with 
 which he betrayed his friends to his enemies, and resold 
 his enemies to his friends ; and if unsurpassed in the art 
 of apologizing for treachery, unsurpassed in the art of 
 being treacherous with impunity. 
 
 Not to quit the mam topic of the chapter abruptly, it 
 may be objected with regard to Pope the man, that I 
 
 ' Bolingbroke's Works, vol. ii. p. 78. 
 
OR CHAEACTEBISTICS. 285 
 
 have taken a partial and a not very flattering view of his 
 character. It is true that I have extenuated naught, but 
 I have set down naught in malice. It would be easy, as 
 some have done, to paint an heroic hunchback, not 
 inferior to his age in general depravity, and superior to 
 it in mental abihty. But a mischievous rule to intro- 
 duce iato criticism is that which justifies a man by his 
 generation ; which would excuse his gluttony because 
 they were gluttonous ; his indecency, because they were 
 not prigs; his irreHgion, because they were sceptics. 
 Pope's character is not difficult of analysis ; and his 
 plain, dry, unadorned disposition is the last to caU for 
 notes of admiration and notes of enthusiasm. The good 
 in him must really be judged by, not contrasted with, the 
 evil. His virtues, in fact, were the residue of his vices. 
 He was comparatively sociable, but his sociabihty was the 
 result of a very irritable temper, that bore him reactively 
 into close relationship with a few, as it drove him farther 
 from his general friends. He affected reUgion; but if 
 we are to beUeve conversational records, and his own 
 writings, his sense of religion was the very dregs and 
 leavings of an active scepticism. He exhibited but little 
 viciousness in principle, but it was because conventional 
 morahty allowed him a very free iadulgence in practice. 
 
 Owiag to, or, at least, in conjunction with, the retro- 
 spective tendencies of the age, Paneulogism is become 
 one of the most prominent vices of criticism. 
 
286 ethioa: 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 GOLDSMITH, AND THE HISTOEY OF PROSE FICTION 
 IN ENGLAND. 
 
 Rise of Fiction in England.— The Stage. — Priority in Development ot 
 French Imaginative Literature. — The Voyages Imaginaires of Swift and 
 De Foe. — ^Richatdson compared with Marivanx. — The Preternatural 
 School. — Reaction in favour of History, Scott. — And of Domestic 
 Portraiture, Miss Austen. — Peculiar Sectarian Character of Modem 
 Fiction. — Mt. Reade and Mr. Dickens equivalent to Howard and 
 Bentham. — ^Effect on the Personal Character of the Author. — His 
 Wide Sphere of Action. — Goldsmith. — ^Lord Macaulay. — The Popular 
 Estimate of him rather Sensational than Intellectual. — The Lives of 
 the Novelists Influenced their Works. — Condition of Literary Men in 
 Goldsmith's Day. — Goldsmith Compared with Sterne. — His Colloquial 
 Powers Contrasted with Johnson's. — His Curious Psychological De- 
 velopment.— His Literary Talents. — As an Imaginative Writer, as an 
 Essayist, and as an Historian and Poet. — His View of European 
 Literature Criticized. — The Sweetness of his Style. — ^Examination into 
 the Style of the Commonwealth Writers, and the New School of Anne. 
 — Boileau. — Addison. — Johnson. — ^Esthetic Tastes of the latter.^- 
 Goldsmith, as a Dramatist, compared with Farquhar. — A Final 
 Estimate of his Character. 
 
 Those who would trace the true rise of moral and ra- 
 tional fiction in England must go to the " Canterbury- 
 Tales." But the most prominent history of primitive 
 EngHsh fiction is, in reality, the history of the stage. 
 It is interesting to observe the difference of development 
 in the imaginative literature of France and England. 
 While we were compelled to go to Jonson and Shaks- 
 peare, our neighbours were enjoying the inimitable irony 
 of Pantagruel and of Montaigne, who is to all intents 
 and purposes as genuine a romancer as Lawrence Sterne. 
 Our stage fiction anticipated theirs. Their [prose fiction 
 anticipated ours. Our Shakspeare preceded our Fielding. 
 
OE CHARACTERISTICS. 287 
 
 They had their Kabelais before they had their Mohere. 
 The great revolutionary episode that ushered in the 
 Stuart dynasty, while it effectually put a stop to the 
 growth of dramatic fiction, strange to say, rendered itself 
 remarkable by the production of two of the most marvel- 
 lous fictitious creations that ever graced the Uterature of 
 any country. While the French were poring over the 
 " Eomans de longue Haleine " of G-omberville, Oalpre- 
 nede, and Madame Scuderi, all unsophisticated England 
 was suspended on the adventures of the Pilgrim Chris- 
 tian. And while Milton was shadowing out the topo- 
 graphy of hell, the courtiers of the Louvre were duly 
 travelling the " Carte du pays de Tendre," sailing down 
 the river " d'Inclination," and the lake " Indifference," 
 to the villages of " Jolhsvers" and " Epitres Galantes/' 
 or the towns of "Petits Soins" and "Tendre sur Estime." 
 The Eestoration produced a new era, or rather it 
 reproduced, as far as fiction was concerned, the cha- 
 racteristics of the era preceding the rebellion. It still 
 lingered on the boards of the theatre, though the spirit 
 of theatrical hterature, sharing as it had done with poli- 
 tics, with morals, and even with language, in the great 
 reaction against governmental monasticism, had httle 
 in common with that which prompted "Lear" or the 
 " Alchemist." I have elsewhere illustrated the features 
 pecuUar to the drama of this epoch. Off the stage imagi- 
 nation produced little, and that little deeply impregnated 
 with the prevailing spirit. I am not going to criticize the 
 productions of Mrs. Manley or Mrs. Behn. They may do 
 so, who have the patience. The voyages imaginaires of 
 Swift and De Foe, on the other hand, must not be passed 
 over. They bear the same relation to real voyages and 
 travels as romances do to history and biography. Of De 
 Foe I have already spoken, and as this is rather a view of 
 the history of fictitious literature, than a criticism of par- 
 
288 ETHiCA : 
 
 ticTilar fictions, I shall not stop to speak of Swift. Most 
 persons have made up their minds about " GuUiver's 
 Travels." There is one feature in its composition^ per- 
 haps, which I may point out, the tact with which the 
 author has confined himself to the use of the ordinary 
 phenomena of nature. He has exaggerated, but nothing 
 more. We shall the more readily appreciate his skill, if 
 we compare his work with the "True History of Lucian " 
 for example, with its rivers of wines, its seas of milk, 
 and its islands of cheese. 
 
 If we except the pleasiag allegories and tales of the 
 " Spectator" and " Rambler," it may with safety be said 
 that the House of Hanover ushered in a new style of 
 fiction. The novels of Richardson and his compeers did 
 for England, what the novels of Madame La Fayette and of 
 Marivaux did for France ; and the same praise that Voltaire 
 applied to the French might be apphed to the English 
 artists : "Les premieres ou Von vit les mceurs." Fiction now, 
 for the first time, exhibited a varied vitality. Its object, I 
 am disposed to think, may be considered reactionary to the 
 CaroUne moraUty. Its subject-matter was domestic life. 
 It was stUl, however, strictly imaginative. The heroines 
 of Richardson are as much monsters in virtue, as Dryden's 
 were in heroism, or Wycherley's in vice. It cannot be 
 said to have succeeded in its aim, though that aim was a 
 good one. Nevertheless, its insipidities were far prefer- 
 able to the stimulating marvels of Walpole, Mrs. Rad- 
 clifi'e, and the supernatural school. 
 
 To this school a very happy reaction sprang up, and 
 fiction, from dealing in the extremes of imagination, went 
 round mto the sobrieties of history. The empire of fiction 
 was now divided. The taste for historical romance, as it 
 was inculcated by its great founder Scott, flourishes apace. 
 But fiction recurred in part to its original design, and the 
 portraiture of domestic life revived. Miss Austen is, in 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 289 
 
 this .light, the legitimate successor of Kichardson and 
 Goldsmith, as Sir Bulwer Lytton, Mr. James, and Mr. 
 Ainsworth are the nominal successors of Scott. These 
 two departments, history and domestic life, fiction seems 
 to have monopohzed. But a new and very striking 
 feature, pecuHar to the age, has been introduced into it. 
 
 I have said incidentally in my view of Milton, that 
 the State is fast loosenmg its hold upon the individual, 
 and I added that, by way of compensation, sectarianism 
 has seized upon the prey the State is surrendering. 
 Tie search would be in vain to find a period wherein 
 society is more absorbed, I wiU not say by politics, but 
 by party. There never was, in fact, an era in which 
 the effects of private liberty have developed themselves 
 in so many sections, each section marked out by distinct, 
 sharp, uncompromising outlines. This sectional spirit 
 of antagonism — social, theological, and political anta- 
 gonism — monopoHzes everything. It would astonish 
 some persons to reaUze how keenly and how practically 
 the idea of party leavens their daily intercourse, taints 
 even the conceptions of their domestic Hves ; and while 
 they congratulate themselves that they are less and less 
 liable to the interference of the State, is making them 
 each day more and more liable to the interference of a 
 Corporation. 
 
 It is literature, and more especially imaginative litera- 
 ture, that I would indicate as assuming this sectional 
 appearance. Historical Uterature, we know, has always 
 been party-spirited. It has always had more of the 
 pamphlet than of history in it, though even in purely 
 historical Hterature there is now interwoven an elaborated 
 philosophy, a partisanship, an interpenetrating speciality, 
 if I may use the term in the place of special pleading, 
 more earnest, more refined, more exquisitely laboured, 
 and more subtly intermingled, and such as the Oldmixons 
 
 19 
 
290 ethica: 
 
 and Macaulays of the last century never dreamed of. It 
 would be easy to exemplify the domineering manner in 
 which sectionaHsm intrudes into even the most trifling 
 diversions of the imagination. It seems, indeed, as 
 though the imagination had arrogated to itself the rights 
 of interpretership to the great social world about it, the 
 right of doing what pamphlets did a century ago. The 
 intellect thus appears to respond to the manias of society. 
 For example, is there a Roman mania ? forthwith a family 
 of novels appear, none without a sly Jesuit in it. Or a 
 socialistic mania ? a dozen incarnations of educated Wat 
 Tylers, in the shape of philosophic tailors, rise on the 
 arena. Is it a rehgious or philosophic mania in divinity 
 or metaphysics ? we are instantly transported to Alex- 
 andria to be lectured by a woman. Or an anti-slavery 
 mania ? all the eloquence of Wilberforce moves less 
 than the heroes who spring up in Virginia and Maryland. 
 A novel literally does the duty of a social reformer. 
 Everything is objective. We are becoming a dramatic 
 people. The dry form of the tract or speech is eschewed. 
 People must be stimulated through then- feelings. Their 
 sense of conviction must be got at through their sense 
 of the pathetic, or their sense of the ridiculous. A 
 prison reform, for example, is required ! Nothing less wiU 
 satisfy them than a scenic representation of the old 
 abuses, the hard-hearted gaoler, the culprit, and all the 
 instruments of torture. The delays of pohtical and civil 
 justice are complained of! The red tape office must be 
 satirized in detaU. Government must be depicted in 
 caricature. Somebody must do for official life what 
 Hogarth did for social, and Gilray for ministerial. All 
 its comedy must be acted over with the proper gesticu- 
 lation, dress, and wardrobe. A roar is raised, and the 
 remedy follows. Seriously, Mr. Charles Eeade and Mr. 
 Charles Dickens take the place of Howard and Bentham. 
 
OE CHAEACTERISTICS. 291 
 
 By thus becoming partisan, literature has undoubtedly 
 raised the tone of its profession, and the character of its 
 professors. It is not difficult for an author now-a-days 
 to acquire an importance scarcely inferior to that of the 
 founder of a new religion. He is a potentiality in the 
 State. He wields an influence which writers who merely 
 wrote to amuse and instruct never could have wielded. 
 Instruction and amusement simply, are no longer his 
 objects. The tendency now is to found schools of 
 opinion. He is accordingly the archpriest of some sect, 
 or school. He numbers his disciples by the thousand. 
 According to his power and opportunities, he is regarded 
 with a reverence and an attachment, none the less that 
 not one of those thousand disciples ever caught a 
 gHmpse of his features, save what the frontispiece to 
 their favourite volume afforded them. Nor is the 
 tyranny he exercises over their minds the weaker for 
 his bodily absence. With the sceptre of his pen, he 
 has their intellects and their hearts under magic con- 
 trol. All the organized machinery by which opinion 
 is propagated is at his command, and he has his own 
 public organs, as he has his own private coteries. In 
 return , for this devotion, he himself owes a kind of 
 allegiance, very irritating and very troublesome, but 
 indispensable, to his followers. He is under perpetual 
 surveillance, lives in a harassing state of publicity. 
 Notoriety follows him wherever he goes. The eye of 
 society is watching him with interest. The common 
 curiosity pries even into his domestic habits. If he 
 gives a lecture, it is known in a few hours from one end "of 
 Britain to the other, what he said, and whether in what 
 he said he was true to his writings, and to himself. If 
 he sets out on his travels, every merchant on 'Change 
 knows what capital is to be honoured with his presence, 
 — Paris, Berlin, or Rome, — before the packet which con- 
 
 19—2 
 
292 ethica: 
 
 veys him has crossed the channel. A notoriety is 
 attached to his coat, that was never attached to Gold- 
 smith's bloom-coloured suit. He vies with statesmen 
 and crowned heads in giving his name to articles of 
 apparel and articles of consumption. He is not indeed 
 without his reward in the interval. Ladies lionize him 
 at conversaziones by day, and soirees by night. He is 
 the toast at public dinners, and the president at pubhc 
 charities. The platform yearns after him. Political con- 
 stituencies offer him a seat in Parhament free of expense. 
 Universities give him their very professorships. And 
 cities present him with their freedom in gold boxes. 
 
 It may be doubted whether the very provoking 
 scrutiny maintained by society over authors is not car- 
 ried to the extreme. It is a wholesome rule that hterary 
 reputation should be affected by personal reputation, but 
 in identifying the two, gossip is ultimately made the 
 arbitress of intellectual renown. Sometimes, as in the 
 case of Byron, the author benefits, while the man suffers. 
 More commonly it is the reverse. But again it is not, in 
 moderation, without a very beneficial influence. Society, 
 by recognizing no divorce between the author and the 
 man, makes the former dependent on the latter. He 
 may not be a statesman, but he must be an experienced 
 man of the world. He may not be a priest, but he must 
 be a gentleman, both in habit and expression. He can- 
 not separate the preaching from the practice. He may 
 caricature the imbecilities of class and rank, but he must 
 be himself free from affectation. He may satuize the 
 vicious, but he must be himself free from vice. He does 
 not lose his personahty, as his predecessors did. He im- 
 parts, on the contrary, his own reputation to his work. 
 The reader not unfrequently respects the book, because 
 he respects the writer of it. Neither reader nor pub- 
 hsher would tolerate a caste of men, giving their spaxe 
 
OB CHAEACTERISTICS. 293 
 
 minutes to the desk, which they could win from the glass 
 and the dice-hox. 
 
 Macaulay has observed that Goldsmith has been 
 singularly fortunate in his biographers. I am of opinion 
 that he has been fortunate only in the same degree that 
 a man is fortunate, who has his deformities illustrated by 
 a skilful rather than a clumsy hand, as that renowned 
 nobleman of petulant memory, for instance, was fortu- 
 nate in having his blotches and pimples delineated with 
 such disgusting fidehty by the spiteful brush of Hogarth. 
 To have one's features drawn by a distinguished painter, 
 or one's life written by an industrious biographer, is cer- 
 tainly a distinguished honour, and so it is to be shot 
 with silver bullets or drowned in a butt of Malmsey. 
 Ignotwm pro magnifico, is a happy idea, and one to which 
 the imagination readily assents. Mystery is a rare 
 magnifier. Half the most glowing phenomena of history 
 blaze with a negative fire. Half its most brilliant cha- 
 racters, hke glowworms, are seen to best advantage in 
 the dark, or hke certain crystals, are transparent only 
 till they are held up to the sun. Obscurity is their 
 atmosphere. The more misty it is, the better it con- 
 ducts their scattered rays. A beam through a chink can 
 disperse them. A single page of O'Meara's "Diary" or 
 Sir Hudson Lowe's " Memoirs" can destroy the dazzling 
 effect of a whole library of imperial bulletins. Had as 
 little hght been shed on Bacon as on Shakspeare, the 
 gloom that overshadows the reputation of Bacon would 
 have become invisible, and left his character as clear in 
 the eyes of the world as Shakspeare's ! 
 
 Messrs. Prior and Foster have undoubtedly increased 
 the general acquaintance with Goldsmith, but it is not 
 certain that they have not in proportion diminished the 
 general respect for him. There are few men whose cha- 
 racters could stand observation better than Johnson's. 
 
294 ' ethica: 
 
 Yet it is a question whether even Johnson's character, 
 nicely balanced as it is between excellencies and defects, 
 has not been prejudiced by exposure. Groldsmith's is 
 precisely the character to make a man a very scorn and 
 derision to them that are round about him, a character 
 that a man would, if possible, hide from those of his own 
 household. Yet few characters have been more tho- 
 roughly, more intimately explored. He was vain, fickle, 
 frivolous, and dissipated, an inharmonious compound of 
 the simple virtues of the cradle, and the nubile vices of 
 the club-house. As long as we take a superficial view of 
 him, overlook the shadows cast by the angles of his 
 moral organism, we are as kindly disposed to him as we 
 can be towards so much intelligence paralyzed by so 
 much infirmity. When we read him through the spec- 
 tacle of his books, we feel admiration for him as a man 
 of letters. When we turn from his book to his bio- 
 graphy, our admiration on reflection becomes adulterated 
 with a feeling that scarcely stops at pity. 
 
 There is, I am aware, a good deal of irrational senti- 
 mentahty associated with the memory of Goldsmith. To 
 some minds there is a charm attaching itself to his very 
 failings, that defies the sober hand of the moralist. Even 
 those who look with suspicion on the roystering guards- 
 man Steele, and have not a good word for the artistic sensi- 
 bility of Sterne, compensate for their want of charity by 
 the unctuous sacrifices they pay to the good nature of the 
 author of the " Traveller." Unprincipled dissipation 
 in Sterne and Steele are softened down into improvi- 
 dence in him. Thus a recent lecturer and critic speaks 
 of his truthfulness with all the emphasis that notes of 
 admiration can supply. Yet he is continually writing 
 letters to his relatives full of boastful mendacity, at a 
 time when he might have sate for the original of 
 Hogarth's distrest poet. The fact requires no comment, 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 295 
 
 save tlae passing observation how the vices of a character 
 may be made to shrink and contract at the genial pre- 
 sence of a single chivalric virtue, such as generosity. 
 On some such one-sided principle knight-errantry still 
 holds undivided sway over the hearts of school-girls and 
 marching ensigns. That he was popular is evident from 
 the pains that such men as Johnson took to justify him, 
 and such men as BosweU to malign him. But his 
 popularity, I suspect, was owing to the very failings which 
 those who befriended him most, were most anxious in 
 deprecating. His intellectual reputation was generally 
 allowed to supply the place of his moral. He made a 
 good companion at the Turk's Head. And no one was 
 disposed to deny his hand to the man who was much too 
 good-natured to provoke envy, and much too wrong- 
 headed to excite respect. I am not conviaced that much 
 of his eccentricity was not affected at first, and that hke 
 Fielding's wag who counterfeited stuttering till he could 
 not open his lips without a stutter, his oddities produced 
 by affectation were finally confirmed by habit. He cer- 
 tainly gave way most systematically to his deficiencies 
 without the shghtest energetic attempt at correcting them. 
 That he was conscious of them is evident from the 
 manner in which he adapts them to his various 
 creations, whom he represents elsewhere as "rivalHng 
 angels and imitating brutes." The famous portrait of 
 the author, in his "View of Pohte Learning in Europe," 
 is nothing more or less than a very thinly disguised 
 duphcate of Goldsmith himself. *' He is a child of the 
 Repubhc, he writes, for while he is able to direct others, 
 how incapable is he found of guiding himself! His 
 simplicity exposes him to all the insidious approaches of 
 cunning ; his sensibility to the slightest invasion of con- 
 tempt." Nay, more, so strong was the mens conscia 
 culpce that he not only made use of his short-comings for 
 
296 ethica: 
 
 illustrations, but he did not hesitate openly to caricature 
 them in his fictitious characters ; in his Honeywood and 
 Lofty m the " Good-natured Man," in Higgms in the 
 "Haunch of Venison," and in the Black Man in the 
 " Citizen of the World." He did everything but correct 
 them. His friends are content that he had the candour 
 to acknowledge them, forgetting that confession is not 
 always repentance. 
 
 The events attending Groldsmith's entrance into the 
 world are too familiar to need depicting. Those who 
 inherit toothpicks or tobacco-holders cut from the haw- 
 thorn bush of Lissoy, or who beheve, with Sir Walter 
 Scott, that Lissoy was the type of the Deserted Village, 
 may associate the scenes of his youth with Auburn. 
 There is one argument that might assist their conviction, 
 namely, the copiousness with which Goldsmith has 
 usually drawn on his own history for the history of his 
 imaginative creations. He has been, in every respect 
 but that of writing his biography, his own biographer. 
 Nor, indeed, do I confine the remark to Goldsmith alone ; 
 the feature is characteristic of all the writers of fiction of 
 that day. If any inteUigent reader were to be asked 
 what constituted the most distinguished points of con- 
 trast between the writers of fiction of that period and the 
 present, he would undoubtedly, iii his reply, lay par- 
 ticular emphasis on the strong air of reality and fact in 
 the productions of the one period, compared with the 
 palpable fictitiousness of the other. Nowhere, indeed, 
 do we meet with such powers of reahzing, accompanied, 
 at the same time, with such powers of originating. And 
 those who are famihar with what process a writer of 
 kindred reputation among ourselves has attained a cor- 
 responding facility, will hit upon a proper explanation of 
 the phenomenon. The mission of the fictitious writers 
 of Goldsmith's time was a practical protest against that 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 297 
 
 fabling extravagance which Walpole caricatured in his 
 " Castle of Otranto," and that fantastic dramatic narra- 
 tive which for the flattery of an episodical taste had been 
 enunciated through the medium of the stage, and was 
 rapidly passing away with the generation that had 
 heard the wit of Congreve confounded by the moraUty of 
 CoUier. Such a mission, it was plain, required writers 
 not formed in the studio or the academy. Personal 
 experience and constant contact with their fellow-men 
 could alone educate them for the task. 
 
 And such an education they had. The works of Rich- 
 ardson, of Fielding, of Smollett, of Sterne, and of Gold- 
 smith were not the fruits of a fancy rich and at leisure. 
 Their authors had been no carpet-knights, but had hved 
 and acted the hves of their heroes ; they had been men of 
 , the world from their youth upwards. The familiarity which 
 Fielding had attained with human nature was acquired by 
 a process the very reverse of Richardson. He had passed 
 from a life of honourable independence to a, life of ruin 
 and debauchery. His extravagance at Stowe, his house 
 and equipage, his stud and kennel, the splendour of his 
 table, sufficiently speak to the imprudence of their 
 master. But had it not been for this imprudence, to 
 whom must the student of English Hterature have looked 
 for such dehneations of Enghsh character as Squire 
 Western and Black George. Lady Mary Wortley Mon- 
 tague sneers at his occupation of " Trading Justice of 
 the Peace for Westminster and Middlesex," the highest 
 end of his preferment being to rake in the lowest seats 
 of vice and misery. It is true that his office was not a 
 very respectable one ; that the functionaries who held it 
 wrung a precarious existence out of thieves and pick- 
 pockets ; and that " the dirtiest wages on earth," as poor 
 Fielding himself called it, reduced him to the necessity 
 of finding companionship in a poor bhnd brother and 
 
298 ETHiCA : 
 
 three wild Irishmen, and of being content with a dinner 
 off a leg of cold mutton, and a bone of ham, all in one dish, 
 and the dish on a dirty cloth ; yet notwithstanding these 
 plebeian disqualifications, it is very problematical whether 
 eyen Lady Mary Wortley Montague could have given us 
 " Tom Jones," " Jonathan Wild," or " Amelia." Who 
 but SmoUett, the ex-mate of a ship, and a vagabond on 
 the face of the earth, could have imagined Oakum and 
 Whiffe, Trunnion and Pipe, Hatchway, Bowler, and 
 Jack RatHn. We do not know much of Sterne's life, 
 but the knowledge we do possess is quite enough to 
 convince us that the experience of that life had no smaU 
 influence on the characters of his works ; that the in- 
 imitable adventures of Yorick, Uncle Toby, and Corporal 
 Trim were but a stereotype picture of Sterne's own ex- 
 istence in the barracks of Carrickfergus and the Isle of 
 Wight ; and that the tour through France, in company 
 with La Fleur, prompted the exquisite sketches, unsur- 
 passed by the master-hands of Cervantes and Le Sage, 
 of the Monk of Calais and the dead ass of Nampont. 
 His acquaintance with the garrets of Grub Street, the 
 dens of St. Martin, and the haunts about Lincoln Fields, 
 taught Johnson how to write his " London." 
 
 Nor was Goldsmith at all wanting in these pecuhar 
 quahfications. His life was sufficiently erratic. His youth 
 had been passed under the care of a village pedagogue, 
 whose boast it was to have served as a quarter-master in 
 the service of his sovereign Lady Queen Anne, and whose 
 chief pretension to teaching was a strong taste for en- 
 livening the tedium of Virgil by mstilluig anecdotes of 
 Penmsular prowess into ears already too familiar with 
 the stories of "Freney the Robber," and other spirited 
 biographies of Hibernian knight-errantry. From thence, 
 with no farther injury than a quickened imagmation, and 
 an initiation into that happy indifference of temperament 
 
OR CHAEACTBEISTICS. 299 
 
 which, in after years was to leave him dreaming of the 
 wealth of Peruvian mines, while the baker was hinting at 
 the Court of Bequests, and the milkwoman holding her 
 tally in vain, the boy was sent to a seminary at Edge- 
 worth's-town, where he picked up with some strolUng 
 players and minstrels, and from whence he entered as a 
 sizar at Dublin, where he puzzled over " Burgersdicius " 
 and " Singlesius," with a tutor who was notorious 
 through the town for his ferocity and strength, and whose 
 destiny it was to be murdered by the girl he had seduced. 
 Such an education was not likely to fit him for the 
 sobrieties of a profession. Accordingly, one is not sur- 
 prised to find him owning an escape from the restraint of 
 ordination, as some say, to the colour of his breeches, 
 and ridding himself of the patronage of an uncle who 
 wished to make a lawyer of him, by going to Edinburgh, 
 under pretence of walking the hospitals, and then wan- 
 dering up and down Italy and the Contiaent, like his 
 philosophic vagabond George Primrose, under the pre- 
 tence of studying medicine under the great Albinus at 
 Leyden. 
 
 Groldsmith's early lot in London was undoubtedly a 
 hard one. He made his appearance just at the close of 
 that barren transition period to the man of letters, which 
 we are accustomed to associate by way of contrast with 
 the time when Johnson, just fresh from coUege, was 
 rambling about the street by midnight with Savage, 
 wringiag off knockers, and knocking down watchmen, and 
 the time when in receipt of honours and a pension, he 
 had long ago set the mark of infamy upon the unwomanly 
 brow of Savage's mother. He came too late to enjoy 
 the fruits of aristocratic patronage, and a little too early 
 to reap the advantages of pubUc patronage. 
 
 All the amenities of hterature had passed. Private 
 patronage, that feudal patronage which had sheltered 
 
300 ETHICA : 
 
 Gower ancl Chaucer in the halls of princes, had already 
 dwindled down into the miserable pittance which Dryden 
 had received at the hands of Sir William Pickering, and 
 Swift, the last of the domestic pensioners, at the hands of 
 Sir WilUam Temple. That miserable system, so rife at 
 the Restoration, which had made the hireling author as 
 famihar at the Court of Charles, as the Whitefriars' bull- 
 dog had. been at the Court of James, which had produced 
 such toads as the Settles and Crownes, and such episodes 
 as the Eose AUey ambuscade, had happily expired, the 
 moment that Johnson quitted the chamber of Chesterfield 
 for the counting-house of Osborne. The benefits derived 
 to literary men by the Revolution, when with the rise of 
 popular factions and the development of Parliamentary 
 privileges, it had created a new kind of polemical "writer, 
 by creating a new kind of polemical hterature, as distinct 
 from the political literature of the Restoration as the 
 " Dissensions at Athens " and the " True-born English- 
 man " were distinct from the " Hind and Panther " and 
 the "Absalom and Achitophel," had been crushed by the 
 coarse and undiscerning policy of the tasteless Walpole. 
 The day when a dinner at my Lord Somers' could procure 
 a poor poet invitations for a week, or an airing in my 
 Lord Oxford's chariot, has supphed him with a citizen 
 coach for every occasion after ; the day when Svdft, to 
 use his own words, so often used before, saw Harley pass 
 through a swarm of titled cHents with his wand of office 
 in his hand, to greet Parnell ; the day when Swift himself 
 could overthrow the regularity of a Minister's household, 
 and dictate the guests of a Minister's table, had gone by. 
 There were, indeed, still a few of the understrappers of 
 literature, slaves of the backstairs, wretches who span 
 out a life of bondage to die a death of misery ; hirelings 
 prostituting their talents for gold, and left to perish 
 broken-hearted, of starvation, raving mad, in gaols, in 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 301 
 
 foreign lands, without a friendly hand to close their 
 eyes, without even the last repose of a decent grave. 
 But -with the Guthries, the Homes, the Oldmixons, the 
 Arnolds, the Amhersts, and the Drakes, Goldsmith would 
 make no alliance. If he must he a slave, the bookseller, 
 not the Minister, should be his patron. The bondage of 
 the Griffiths was better than the bondage of the Walpoles. 
 The change for the better had set in, however, long 
 before he died. That he might have been respectable, 
 and even rich, we have his own words for believing. His 
 confession was that he could have earned any time four 
 pounds a day. In one of his papers in the " Bee," on 
 the Augustan Age of England, we find him writing that 
 " a man who can be prudently content to catch the pubhc, 
 is certain of living without dependence. More, Savage 
 and Amherst felt all the miseries that usually attend the 
 ingenious and imprudent, that attend men of strong 
 passions, and no 'phlegmatic reserve." A man who had the 
 sense to make these remarks, and not be guided by them, 
 deserved to share their fate. He reminds us of the prisoner 
 of the Fleet, declaiming on the danger of the French inva- 
 sion to Enghsh hberty through the bars of his cell, to 
 the turnkey. "Young writers," he adds, "do generally 
 encounter every hardship attending aspiring indigence. 
 The old, and of estabUshed reputation, enjoy the more 
 vulgar and prudent satisfaction of putting riches in com- 
 petition with fame," It was Goldsmith's own fault, 
 accordingly, that he would never grow old. This expla- 
 nation accounts at once for the anomaly of his poverty 
 by the side of Johnson's independence. 
 
 Without pretending to Lord Clarendon's penetration, 
 who argued, that because Lord Falkland and Sidney 
 Godolphin were small men, diminutiveness was a sign of 
 genius in his day, it may be said that looseness was as 
 much the mark of a wit in the time of Goldsmith, as a 
 
302 ethica: 
 
 beard was of a philosopher in the time of Lucian. The 
 lives of such men as Savage and Boyce were the lives of 
 highwaymen, continually demanding the generosity of 
 society, and continually in want. The bookseller's hack 
 was pecuharly open to the charge of reckless extra- 
 vagance. To be able to accomplish his task in time for 
 the printer's devil, was all the jobber's concern. To men 
 who, like Goldsmith, possessed the happy knack of Bayle, 
 of "reading with his five fingers," a few days miserable 
 seclusion was all that was required. A strong paroxysm 
 of idleness and extravagance succeeded to the paroxysm 
 of study and appUcation. A night or two at the tavern 
 or at Eanelagh compensated for the mouldy crust, the 
 fireless grate of the garret. A short time, and the 
 wages of intellectual labour had gone to enrich the coffers 
 of the faro-table, or the pocket of the nearest sharper. 
 
 It was his peculiar conformation of character, how- 
 ever, that most conspicuously paralyzed Goldsmith's 
 progress in the world. It is well known that he laughed 
 at Sterne as a dull fellow, yet if I were disposed to 
 associate him with any of his contemporaries, it would be 
 with the author of " Yorick." In temperament a whole 
 Hst of phenomena might identify the two. The reckless 
 disregard of consequences, so characteristic of Sterne's 
 magnetic philosophy, the want of discretion which he 
 contemptuously described as the "understrapping virtue," 
 that genial joviality which made Warburton despair of his 
 reform, the inharmonious want of balance between the 
 man and the writer, that puzzled his Cambridge tutors, 
 the eccentric levity that made Gray tremble to hear him 
 preach, the tender susceptibihty to affection that has 
 linked his name so sweetly with his " Lydy," the rash 
 insensibihty to the experience of the hour, which com- 
 pelled him at last to hire a pane in a stationer's shop, to 
 advertise his pen for hire, and finally consigned him to 
 
OR CHABACTEEISTICS. 303 
 
 die in the strange hands of hirelings, each idiosyncracy 
 finds its counterpart in those incidents which make up 
 the sum of Goldsmith's moral and physical existence. 
 HaK his troubles through life took their rise in his 
 thoughtlessness, developing itself in various ways, in his 
 generosity, his extravagance and vanity. His very virtues 
 were out of tune. So httle heroism of purpose had he, 
 that those emotions which should have been the result of 
 dehberation and will, were in him simply the fruits of 
 animal excitement and sensation. Thus, he was 
 generous without method, extravagant without motive, 
 and vain without control. At Dubhn he was known to 
 have slept all night 'm the inside of a feather bed, which 
 he had ripped open as a substitute for the blankets he 
 had bestowed on a poor street singer and her naked 
 children, and ia London, in the midst of his difficulties, 
 he would unhesitatingly give his last penny to any 
 adventurer who was at the paias to stimulate his bounty 
 by the shallowest tale of distress. 
 
 Such inconsiderateness, it must be confessed, is 
 venial ; but the want of disciphne which made him yield 
 to the impulse of feeling, ceased to be pardonable, when 
 it betrayed itself in the gratification of personal caprice. 
 No one would overlook that unscrupulousness that made 
 him waste his earnings at the whist-table, at a time when 
 he had but a single chair in his room, when he had 
 determined on the necessity of giving up hot suppers, and 
 sugar in his tea, and when he actually contemplated an 
 expedition to the factories of the Coromandel coast. It 
 is difficult to realize a man so morbidly inadequate to self- 
 denial, that he should be compelled by want to stop up 
 his grate with brick-bats, to go without coal, and be in 
 debt to his milkman, and who, notwithstanding, should 
 be required to be warned by a schoolmistress, to whose 
 husband he had been 'prenticed, to " give some one his 
 
304 ethica: 
 
 wages to take care of, as the young gentlemen's were." 
 There were few of the enjoyments of the luxurious that he 
 did not haye a share in. He indulged in propensities above 
 his means and station, as unscrupulously as if he had been 
 ViUiers Duke of Buckingham himself. He gambled, and 
 staked his last penny with as much indifference as old 
 Manners. Some demon whispered, " Have a taste ! " as 
 into Sir Visto's ear, and forthwith, at his death, his tailor's 
 bill amounted to hundreds. It was not his extravagance 
 only. A feeUng of vanity, curiously irreconcileable with 
 his general organization, led him into some strange 
 inconsistencies. Sometimes he would consent without the 
 slightest sensibihty to that feeling which ChurchiU said 
 was as when a man cut away a piece from his own flesh, 
 to blot out half a play to please a bad critic, or to beheve 
 that Alexander was contemporary with Montezuma, to 
 please a quizzing friend; at other times he would 
 choke with grief, stamp, and swear eternal silence, 
 because a second-rate performance had not brought 
 him a fortune. Sometimes his vanity would take a 
 personal form, and he would keep company with none 
 but Beauclerc, Burke, and such like, though twenty- 
 four hours had not elapsed since he had been roys- 
 tering it at the Globe Tavern or the Wednesday 
 Club, where a pig-butcher might call him " Noll ! old 
 boy! " and pat him on the back. His appearance, in- 
 deed, in such fits of fastidiousness, is hardly less ridi- 
 culous than that of a man afflicted with elephantiasis who 
 should be curious in the cut of his boots. It was a spas- 
 modic pride that seized him suddenly, and left him 
 suddenly. Under its influence he would make any sacri- 
 fice rather than consent to the superiority of a rival 
 
 jump into a pool at Versailles at the risk of his gentility, 
 or into a ditch at Lord Harrington's, at the risk of a 
 bran new silk coat, and an unpaid-for pair of mao'ni- 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 305 
 
 ficent ruffles. Sometimes, Ms spirit of emulation took 
 the appearance of literary envy. Boswell, who like 
 most idolaters would have every one bow down and 
 worship the idol he had set up, has recorded, with the 
 jealousy of a devotee, any ineffectual hostility to the 
 shrine of Johnson. The domineering demeanour of 
 Johnson was proverbial wherever the morahst circulated. 
 The irritability of his temper, the indulgence of a feeling 
 of personal superiority, or, it may be, the exhibition of a 
 brusque independence, flattered by the common consent 
 of society, was felt and resented repeatedly. To the 
 sensitive mind of Goldsmith, who was rising, as Johnson 
 had risen, to an emiuence that did not belong to him 
 originally, and of which he might be naturally jealous, 
 the airs of rivalry were particularly galhng. The author 
 of the "Rambler," it is true, was at least twenty years 
 the senior of the author of the " Vicar of Wakefield." 
 But the latter forced at times from one extreme to the 
 other, from the helplessness of an infant to the arrogance 
 of a full-fledged wit, now and then failed to make allow- 
 ance for the consequence which age will always be en- 
 titled to assume. Every one recollects the occasion, so 
 graphically but so spitefully commemorated by Boswell, 
 when, at a dinner at Dilly's, the bookseller, he failed to 
 distract the attention of the company from the stertorous 
 voice of Johnson, and *' like a baffled gamester," taking 
 up his hat to rush from the room, yet lingered " to vent 
 his spleen under pretext of supporting Toplady," he was 
 rewarded for the interruption by Johnson saying (sternly) , 
 * Sir, I am not interrupting the gentleman ! I was only 
 giving him a sequel of my attention. Sir ! you are im- 
 pertinent ! ' Silence was sometimes his safest course. 
 The scene at Sir Joshua Eeynolds's, connected with the 
 joke about sending discoloured peas to Hammersmith, as 
 the way to Turn 'en Green, can still extract a laugh from 
 
 20 
 
306 ETHiCA : 
 
 any one who is malicious enough to take pleasure in the 
 misfortunes of blundering genius. 
 
 It is not much to be wondered at that he failed in con- 
 tact with Johnson. Johnson combined in his manner not 
 a httle of the dogmatism of Warburton and the petulance 
 of Dennis. He did not converse. He dictated. Circum- 
 stances, and his own fearless spirit, had placed him on the 
 pinnacle of the literary world. Accordingly, he acted as 
 though he wished to make the republic of letters a mo- 
 narchy, and himself the monarch. What Collier said of 
 Henry VIH. in his controversy with Luther, may be ap- 
 plied to him. He leans too much upon his character, 
 argues in his garter-robes, and writes, as it were, with 
 his sceptre. Disraeli has suggested that Goldsmith may, 
 without any perversion of intellect, have sometimes insti- 
 tuted a favourable contrast between himself and Johnson. 
 This, however, can hardly be predicated of him. He was 
 the last man in the world to be guUty of any serious 
 jealousy in that direction. However momentary pique 
 may sometimes have aroused his emulation, in reahty he 
 cared Uttle apparently for his Uterary reputation. He 
 was what Congreve and Gray, with fantastic foppery, pre- 
 tended to be — totally indifferent to the title of a man of 
 letters. He wrote in order that he might live, and at 
 last he regarded Hterature too much as a trade to be 
 vain of it. With regard to his conversation, it must be 
 acknowledged that the standard of his colloquial excel- 
 lence was generally considered to be below par, the de- 
 ficiency not being so much in quantity as in quality. 
 The idea, from Garrick's famous sarcasm that he talked 
 Uke poor Poll, is that he prattled too much. His de- 
 meanour was the very reverse of Dryden's, who described 
 himseK as slow and dull in talk, reserved and saturniue 
 in humour. His garruhty, to judge from the ordinary 
 accounts, was anything but confined. Pope's character 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 307 
 
 of Gay seems rather to fit Mm. " He was a natural 
 man, without design, who spake what he thought and 
 just as he thought it." Neither the excellences nor the 
 deficiencies of conversational attainments indeed will ever 
 be the criterion, by which a discrimiaating judge would be 
 disposed to decide on the hterary merits of the highest 
 or the humblest in the walks of literature. He would 
 not deny the claims of Addison because he could not 
 open his hps in company, or exaggerate the claims of 
 Johnson because he talked to his monarch in the gallery 
 of Whitehall, just as he talked in the drawing-room of 
 Streatham Park, or the back parlour of Meet Street. 
 The accompUshments of the drawing-room are the 
 accomplishments of any man who has the nerve to 
 converse with briskness and to listen with complacency. 
 They are the accomplishments of manner, not of in- 
 tellect, the superfluous ornaments, not the mainstay of 
 the structure. We are fascinated with the address of a 
 Chesterfield, but we do not blame a writer, because to 
 the reputation of a great essayist he does not add the 
 reputation of a great beau, any more than we combine 
 in a necessary union the statesman with the historian. 
 No one would maintain, for instance, that Walpole ought 
 not to be classed in the ranks of British statesmen 
 because he did not know who Empson and Dudley were, 
 or Pitt in the rank of British orators, because he was 
 ignorant, or heedless, of the rules which preserve the 
 etiquette of the British House of Commons. 
 
 I have lingered thus on the exculpation of Gold- 
 smith's fame, by way of correcting a very growing dis- 
 position to estimate his abiUties by the ridiculous pro- 
 portions to which they are reduced by the maUce of 
 Boswell, who was continually maUgning him behind his 
 back, who, had it not been for his connection with 
 Johnson, would probably have taken no notice of him, 
 
 20—2 
 
308 ethica: 
 
 and wlio was not -worthy, with all his faults, to unloose 
 the latchet of his shoes. In spite of the offensive con- 
 trast, which the hand of the artist has so skilfully elabo- 
 rated, nowhere do the amiabihties of Johnson appear so 
 captivating as in his intercourse with Goldsmith. The 
 interest which he takes in his welfare reminds one of 
 that of a father towards his son. He uses every artifice 
 that affection could suggest to cure him of his eccen- 
 tricities. He rebukes his extravagance by refusing to 
 taste his dinner, and he comphments the poverty of his 
 room and his attire by some such graceful remark as 
 " Nil te qucesiveris extra." He keeps his failings and mis- 
 haps a profound secret, and grieves when he sees them 
 voluntarily exposed. He revises his poems for him, sells 
 his manuscript for ready money, sits in the front box to 
 laugh — as only he could laugh— his comedy into success, 
 and when his purse is empty, and Goldsmith could bear 
 any disease better than the maladc de poche, replenishes 
 it from his own. It was this good heart under a rough 
 manner that the latter testified his appreciation for, when 
 he characterized his friend as having " nothing of the 
 bear about him but his skin." 
 
 To return to Goldsmith's character. Few men have 
 exhibited so strongly the extremes of great speculative 
 wisdom and great practical imprudence. In point of in- 
 tellectual qualifications he was not much below a genius. 
 In point of moral or psychological development he was 
 very little above Casper Hauser. His intelhgence predo- 
 minated over his judgment, as tyrannically as his aensi- 
 Inlity over his will. The schism between genius and 
 character was complete. Every noodle of a waiter that 
 handed him his sassafras at the club, thought himself 
 entitled to laugh at his stupid good nature, yet this over- 
 grown baby, as he has been called, could set his mark on 
 such men as Johnson and Burke, and write a poem 
 
OB CHAEACTBBISTICS, 309 
 
 .nearly as venomous as the " Dunciad." Any child could 
 shake his faith in his knowledge of history, yet he has 
 thrown over history the tender graces of a style that 
 might have awaked the envy of Lyttleton and Black- 
 stone. There was no one who had a more slovenly 
 appreciation of the exactitudes of science, yet he wrote 
 a book on a subject demanding the closest scientific 
 acumen, which is still read by a generation in possession 
 of " Buffon " and the "Bridgewater Treatises." Nor is 
 the anomaly confined to his intellectual structure. 
 Morally speaking, he was as singular a bundle of incon- 
 sistencies as ever puzzled phrenology. His childish fits 
 of temper, his childish fits of mirth, his quickness to 
 take offence, his quickness to forgive it, his vanity in the 
 wrong place, his want of spirit in the right place, his 
 exaggerated pride, his exaggerated humility, his extra- 
 vagant spleen, his extravagant benevolence, together 
 make up a creature not to be reconciled or explained in 
 notes of admiration, or eleemosynary epithets. Nor does 
 it at aU clear up the phenomena that sensible men to 
 this day are still found, who cannot approach his 
 memory without falling into ecstacies that would mis- 
 become a dancing dervish. His fate at his death was 
 perhaps equally strange. His face during life had been 
 so ugly that children turned from it with affright, 
 yet women crowded round his coffin to get a lock of his 
 hair. He could not rest on his death-bed for the 
 thoughts of the baiUff and creditor that every artifice of 
 extravagance had- brought on him, yet Johnson, who 
 w^ould not sit at table with Fielding, pronounced him a 
 very great man and wrote his epitaph. Walpole called 
 him an idiot, yet the tidings of his decease could draw 
 the tear of regret from the eye of Burke, and arrest the 
 pencil of Eeynolds. His reckless good nature, perhaps, 
 his in artificiality of manner, was at the bottom of it all. 
 
310 ethica: 
 
 It destroyed his character, but won him a reputation. It 
 was at once the bane and the antidote. Like the weapon 
 that pierced Telephus, it gave the wound and supplied 
 the cure for it. If we were allowed to judge him, as the 
 schoolmen judged their saints and doctors, and as he 
 himself fancifully judged his Chinese philosopher, we 
 should not be far off the mark if we said he had genius 
 at the maximum degree, common sense as one. 
 
 No man's Uterary talents come more within the scope 
 of the critic than his. His writings partook strongly of 
 his character. Candid simplicity, unaffected plainness, 
 are symptomatic of both. His sentiments are as free 
 from elaborations as his demeanour. He aimed at no 
 fictitious attractiveness, and the attractions which draw us 
 to him as by a natural impulse we recognize to be with- 
 out guile and without design. His artlessness is well 
 displayed in the undisturbed naivete with which he repu- 
 diates a charge of taculcating absolute doctrines in his 
 History of England. " Grod knows I have no thought 
 for or against liberty in my head ; my whole aim being 
 t(t make a book of a decent size, and which, as Kichard 
 says, would do no harm to nobody," This is Goldsmith 
 all over. Warburton editing " Shakspeare," Bentley 
 editing " Milton," is hardly a more incongruous picture 
 than the author of the " Vicar of Wakefield " battling 
 with the Whigs about standing armies and the divine 
 right of kings. PoUtical biases he had none, or if he had, 
 they were easily dispelled, or else idly assumed. We 
 may well beheve that a man with so httle tone in his 
 private opinions would not be very dogmatic in his ex- 
 pression of them, or at the most only formally so. 
 
 His fame as a writer of imagination rests prmcipally 
 on his "Vicar of Wakefield." Like the "Crusoe" of 
 De Foe, it has survived all those other works of the 
 reason, which he might have been disposed to value 
 
OR CHARAOTERISTICS. 311 
 
 most. It is by this that he is most vulgarly known 
 amongst us. In spite of the absurdities of plot, and it 
 may be through that very deficiency which Cumberland 
 cast in its teeth, namely, want of grandeur of design, it 
 still has a charm for youth and age. The characters, as 
 may be expected, are strongly in keeping with the asso- 
 ciations of their author. Dr. Primrose, with his wise 
 saws and foohsh deeds, is Goldsmith, without Gold- 
 smith's townish vices. The blunder about the green 
 spectacles is only the story of the white mice in another 
 form, and the tale of Mr. Jenkinson and the check is 
 only the counterpart of the Frenchman and the fabulous 
 History of England. Mrs. Primrose, it is suggested, is 
 from the model of his mother, and the rest of the family, 
 with their unsophisticated habits and ways, he might 
 easily have found types for, by casting back his thoughts 
 to the time when he too thought cross purposes the 
 highest stretch of human wit, and an evening spent in a 
 game of questions and command, enlivened by "Johnny 
 Armstrong's last Good-night," the highest pitch of 
 human happiness. His "Vicar" indeed ranks among 
 those productions which owe their existence to the deve- 
 lopment of certain strong idiosyncracies in the composition 
 of their compositor's temperaments. It would be men- 
 tioned with those creations which bear not only the 
 impress of locality, as the "Koran" and the "Divine 
 Comedy," but the impress of individuality, as the "Pil- 
 grim's Progress," or the " Grace Aboundtag" of Bunyan, 
 the "Biography" of BosweU, the " Tristram Shandy" of 
 Sterne, and the " Cain" of Byron. 
 
 His "Essays" are not so much read as they deserve. 
 The "Adventures of a StroUing Player," and the papers 
 on "Ennui," on the "Cultivation of a Taste for the 
 Belles Lettres and a Taste for Poetry," may stand for 
 wit and humour with the best of the "Tatlers" and 
 
312 bthica: 
 
 "Spectators." The allegory of " Assem," the man- 
 hater, is inferior to the visions of Mirza only in the 
 character of its subject. His "Chinese Letters," more 
 generally known as the " Citizen of the World," is more 
 happy in its idea than its execution. Though it has 
 been objected to as a portrait of the middle rather than 
 of the upper ranks of society, it was nevertheless one of 
 the best caricatures of natural manners and failings since 
 the sarcasms of Captain Lemuel GuUiver. 
 
 In poetry, the author of "The Deserted Village" 
 ranks not among the highest of the descriptive poets. 
 There is a sweetness in the tone of his muse that recom- 
 mends it to the memory, more than the verse of Thomson 
 or any other of his druidical contemporaries. His praise 
 is rather a negative one, that he was free from those 
 classic allusions, that mythological idolatry, which has 
 made the poetry of the eighteenth century as distin- 
 guished as the poetry of the seventeenth, and Pope, in 
 spite of his protest in a letter to a Person of quality, as 
 distinguished as Cowley, and to which Addison opposed 
 the "Pastorals" of Ambrose Philips as an antidote. 
 The viciousness of Goldsmith's most formal efforts never 
 includes the Damons and Corydons, Phillises and 
 Chloes, with which, as Dorset rather inelegantly sang, 
 
 " The poor town had tumbled so long." 
 
 It must be allowed to redound to his honour, that 
 with his musical facility of versification he resisted the 
 enticements of an age whose pastorals and eclogues were 
 but faint echoes of Virgil and Theocritus, whose sylvan 
 dramas were laid in Arcadia, and peopled with Fauns and 
 Satyrs, where the sheep that browsed the grass of 
 Windsor Forest were presided over by Pan, the crab- 
 apples by Pomona, the tulips and buttercups by Flora, 
 and where no guardian less ignoble than Cloacina dis- 
 pe^sed the destinies of Fleet Ditch. It is in confirmation 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS, 313 
 
 of his antagonism to this meretricious taste thai we find 
 him elsewhere objecting to the reAdval of pastoral poetry 
 in the hands of Guarini in Italy; though, indeed, the 
 associations of. locality sometimes apologize for eccen- 
 tricities as much as the actual associations of the age, 
 and we should be as httle disposed to find fault with 
 Guarini for transforming his abbes and nuns into shep- 
 herds and shepherdesses, as we are to blame Dante for 
 mixing up Virgil and St. Peter, Purgatory and the Kiver 
 Styx. 
 
 There are some scenes in the " Deserted Village " of 
 domesticated humility, which would almost anticipate the 
 "Borough." Not that Goldsmith is to be associated 
 with Crabbe for a moment. There was as much difference 
 between Goldsmith and Crabbe as between Pope and 
 Churchill. The rudeness of Crabbe presented the same 
 contrast to the grace of Goldsmith, that the slovenly 
 verse of ChurchiU did to the pohshed verse of Pope. 
 The subjects, of both Crabbe and Goldsmith were homely 
 to a degree. Here the comparison ended. In manner 
 they had nothing in common. In the delineation of 
 their theme they differed utterly. There is more of fact, 
 less of ideahty, in Crabbe's poetry than in the poetry of 
 any Enghsh writer, not excepting Chaucer. Goldsmith 
 is undoubtedly to some extent historical; but his "Auburn" 
 was seen with the eye of the imagination, not with the 
 eye of the flesh. The material muse of Crabbe painted 
 not the embellished life of the poet, but real Hfe, such 
 Ufe as he met with in his parish at Aldborough. The 
 ordinary colours of poetry, the vulgar materials of poets 
 — sentimental, swains and milkmaids, hawthorn groves, 
 daisied meadows, and purling streams — ^he deserted for 
 the haunts and the victims of human guilt and human 
 misery ; for the dens of crowded cities, the gin-shop, 
 the prison, and the lazar-house. The Danaes and Tity- 
 
314 ETHICA : 
 
 ruses of fiction were converted into such deKneations 
 as Keene and Blaney, Clelia and Ellen Orford. He 
 was essentially the poet of low life.' His poetry, stands in 
 the same relation to common poetry, that.the " Beggars' 
 Opera " does to the ordinary representations of the 
 drama. Were we to search for his representative among 
 prose writers, we should point to De Foe ; among painters, 
 to the author of " Grin Lane " and the " Eake's Pro- 
 gress." 
 
 We come now to what may be considered one of 
 Goldsmith's most ambitious attempts, his " View of the 
 State of Polite Learning in Europe." As far as personal 
 experience goes, he was as much authorized to write 
 it as iEneas was to tell the tale of Troy. The best 
 part, indeed, is the part which he ought to have written 
 best, the part that relates to the inferior grade of the 
 men of letters in England. His familiarity with the 
 haunts and habits of all that beggarly crew, in lace or 
 rags, from Kent Street to the MaU, from the Strand 
 to St. Giles's, admirably quahfied him to expatiate on 
 what he calls the victims of the booksellers, the Ned 
 Purdons, the Sales, and Mores. His familiarity has 
 in one particular entirely warped his judgment. He 
 takes decidedly too low a view of the character of the 
 author. His own associations became so habitually 
 demoralized, his tastes so vitiated, that, like the -effect of 
 brandy on the dram-drmker, his conscience had become 
 callous to distinction. He describes the destmy of an 
 author in terms that might have been consistent with 
 the days of Butler and Otway, and, wittingly or imwit- 
 tingly, concludes by giving to him qualifications that 
 would have been repudiated with indignation by the 
 poorest hack that ever snuffed his candle between finger 
 and thumb. According to him, he is in the eyes of 
 society a creature only adapted to make a pliant bow, 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 315 
 
 to have an immoderate friendship for a good table, and 
 to be laughed at by an alderman. And this iU-deserved 
 stigma is thrown on the discrimination of that society 
 that knew how. to reward soberness and temperance in 
 Johnson. In his "Citizen of the World," ^ it is true, he 
 adopts a diflferent tone, says a writer of real merit might 
 easily be rich, and, consequently, though the ridicule 
 of living in a garret might have been wit in the last 
 age, continues so no longer, because no longer true. 
 
 It would be useless to take a view of his essay in all 
 its details. There is one error pervading his argument 
 relative -to the decline of polite Uterature, as he despond- 
 ingly regards it, which is rather amusing to the contem- 
 poraries of the Quarterhes of the nineteenth century. 
 On the principle of maximce leges, cornipta civitas, he 
 proclaims the increase of criticism to be a fatal portent 
 of decay, and exclaims on the existence of two Reviews 
 in London. The fact being, he mistook the symptoms 
 of the disease for the disease ; his assertion that there 
 was scarcely an error which criticism did not excuse or 
 promote, only proving that the decay existed not so 
 much in the general taste as in criticism itself, and 
 that it was not so much a cause as an effect. Not 
 long after, as an involuntary illustration of this decay, 
 we find him returning to the old theory which Dryden 
 had given up, after attempting to tag Milton's verse with 
 rhyme, that " blank verse is one of the disagreeable 
 instances of the prevailing pedantry." A poor process 
 to adopt, it must be owned, of reforming criticism by 
 such an abortion of it, and rather suggestive of the 
 conduct of the Russian who courts his mistress by falling 
 asleep in her lap. 
 
 His " Review of the State of Literature on the 
 Continent" is by far the most unsatisfactory portion of 
 
 ~ ' Letter 84. 
 
316 ethica: 
 
 his performance. For Italy he mentions Metastasio 
 and Maffei, and writes a good deal at the expense of 
 the virtuosi and Jilosophi. In Germany, he passes over 
 the author of the " Christiad," and can hear little 
 more than the nego, -proho, distinguo, of the Cartesians 
 and Aristotehans. In Spain, he praises Marquis D'En- 
 senada for suppressing seminaries of monastic ignorance, 
 and tells us that Padre Feypoo wi'ote a book of vulgar 
 errors for their exposure. Count Tessin's " Letters 
 to a Young Prince " he considers to be no bad beginning 
 for Sweden ; and for Denmark, we are informed in a 
 sentence that the history of polite literature rose and 
 fell there with the famous Baron Holberg, who, probably, 
 would never have been mentioned had not his vagaries 
 through Europe made him as notorious as Goldsmith 
 himself. It is only at the close, by way of parenthesis, 
 after deciding on the "low state of current hterature in 
 these countries," that he remarks, that Zeno, Algarotti, 
 Goldoni, Muratori, and Stay, in Italy, HaUer, Klopstock, 
 and Rabner, in Germany, Muschenbrook and Gaubius in 
 Holland, "deserve the highest applause." He does not 
 even mention Beccaria or Tiraboschi, Buffon, Le Sage 
 or Marmontel, Gessner or Kant, Boerhaave or Linnaeus. 
 It would be just as if a Frenchman of his day. La Harpe, 
 for instance, in taking a view of polite learning in Europe, 
 should descant on the degradation English Hterature had 
 encountered in the hands of Rochester, Crowne, Tate, 
 and ShadweU, without making any reference to the 
 writers of Queen Anne's reign. A good deal of this 
 superficiahty is to be attributed to the haste with which 
 he was compelled to strike off his compositions for the 
 press, and to those miserable exigencies of the hack's 
 existence which made him perform the feat of writing 
 a " History of Greece " in five weeks, and Smollett the 
 still more incredible achievement of throwing off the 
 
OR CHAEACTEBISTICS. 817 
 
 voluminous history of twelve centuries in almost as many 
 months. To the same cause may be attributed another 
 characteristic of Goldsmith, the variety of topics which 
 he handled. He is to be seen treating every subject, 
 visiting every clime, famihar with every tongue, appearing 
 as conversant with the advantages or disadvantages of the 
 Seven Years' War, the Golden Treaty, and the question of 
 trade to Spanish America, as with the rise of the Dutch 
 republic, and the decline of the French parliaments ; at 
 one time criticizing Voltaire's controversy on tragedy 
 with La Motte, the laws of Beau Nash, and the insti- 
 tutes of Francis Xavier ; at another, discussing the 
 physiological phenomena of sleep, and the medical pro- 
 perties of sleep's most fatal enemy— tea. 
 
 As far as the style of his composition is concerned, 
 the most censorious critic would be bound to confirm the 
 approbation awarded to it by the general judgment of his 
 cotemporaries. There is a compactness and a succinct- 
 ness about it very ungenial to the habits of the author, 
 and hardly to be expected from a writer of his loose and 
 dissipated disposition. " Style," said Buffon, " is the 
 man." Dr. Arnold, following up the idea, has drawn 
 up a plan for discovering the tastes of an historian by 
 his works. I was always sceptically disposed towards 
 such general aphorisms, and the example of Goldsmith 
 does not dispel my mistrust. The man who should judge 
 of his demeanour by his style, would, I am inclined to 
 think, be as far wrong as that lady who concluded from 
 Thomson's works that the poet was a good swimmer and 
 an abstemious man. Johnson said that he could make 
 his "Natural History" read hke a Persian tale. This 
 is his praise, and no trifling praise. There is a curiosa 
 felicitas, a scrupulous dehcacy, a something , equally 
 removed from dogmatism and a lisp, combining the 
 charming deference of insinuation with the masculine 
 
318 ethica: 
 
 accentuation of philosophic judgment, which must have 
 been pecuharly grateful to the generation which had not 
 yet ceased to pine at the loss of the " Spectator." He 
 belonged, indeed, in this respect rather to the age that 
 was going out than to the age that was coming in. With 
 the revolution that, headed by Johnson and Burke, was 
 carrying back the style of Enghsh composition to the 
 nervous phraseology of Hobbes, Dryden, Clarendon, and 
 the writers of the Commonwealth, he would not connect 
 himself. For the Gothic informahty, the Teutonic im- 
 pressiveness, of their Ehzabethan ancestors, the writers 
 of Queen Anne had no sympathy. Indeed, after the 
 Revolution aU incitement to independence at the expense 
 of perspicuity, had become obsolete and unfashionable. 
 The spread of knowledge had entailed on those whose 
 business it was to communicate it, distinctness and ease ; 
 the result was, a reactionary spirit set in. The pon- 
 derous folios of antiquity, pregnant with the large and 
 elaborate argumentations of laborious study, addressed, 
 as they had been, to minds not loath to see a favourite 
 theory exhausted or a learned controversy illuminated by 
 proHx proofs or accumulated dogmas, they treated as the 
 button-maker of Goldsmith treated the rude luxury of 
 the poet's garden. He conceived that as beauty in a 
 button ought to be of regular pattern, so the same regu- 
 larity ought to be maintained in a landscape ; accord- 
 ingly, he clipped up the hedges and cut down the gloomy 
 walks, made vistas upon the stables, and proclaimed 
 himself a man of taste. To decorate the massive struc- 
 tures which others had built was their second-rate labour. 
 At the art of adorning they were consummate workmen. 
 The roughest granite lost its homehness and its sub- 
 Hmity under their chaste and delicate chisel. But it 
 would be a libel on originaHty to assign it as the cha- 
 racteristic of an era, a master critic of which, Addison, 
 
OR CHAEACTBEISTICS. 319 
 
 complained that "we have little else left us but to 
 represent the common sense of mankind in more strong, 
 more beautiful, and more uncommon lights." With 
 despair in their hearts and the saying of Boileau on 
 their Hps, "that wit and fine writing does not consist so 
 much in advancing things that are new, as in giving 
 to things that are old an agreeable turn," it was natural 
 that they should have acquiesced tamely in the awkward- 
 ness of their situation. They had come at the eleventh 
 hour. They found every province occupied. The sickles 
 of others had already reaped the fuU crop of wisdom. 
 Such was their argument. Even Goldsmith was affected 
 at first by the same despondency, — though he afterwards 
 took courage and corrected himself, — when he wrote, " It 
 is a misfortune for fine writers to be born in a period so 
 enlightened as ours. The harvest of wit is gathered in, 
 and Uttle left to glean."* 
 
 It is certainly to his credit that he did not imitate 
 Johnson. There are scattered remarks about his 
 Essays which look very like formal rebukes to John- 
 son's mannerisms ; as, for instance, at the close of 
 his " View of Learning," he speaks of the inflated 
 style that was looked upon as fine writing, the loaded 
 epithet, and trifles dressed with dignity. It is only 
 the original of what he translated in another form, when 
 he said that Johnson " made his little fishes talk 
 like whales;" or — an expression not quite so familiar, 
 but equally feKcitous — characterized him as a man for 
 ever hunting after lofty words to dehver mean ideas, 
 " for ever gaping, when he only means to dehver a 
 whisper." Had Johnson had the "Natural History" to 
 write, there is no doubt he would have made it a work of 
 philosophy. Even Buflfon could not refrain from making 
 
 ■ This remark occurs in the first edition of the "View of Learning," and 
 only in the first. 
 
320 ETHicA : 
 
 the Dove an opportunity of inserting his theory of love, 
 and the article Hare an opportunity for a dissertation 
 on the dispersion of nations. Johnson vfas, in fact, an 
 admirable aesthetic critic, a genuine moralist. He viewed 
 everything through an ethical lens. His turn of mind 
 eminently adapted him for an essayist. Here he was 
 in his element. When he leaves it for the realms of 
 imagination, he is in an atmosphere that does not belong 
 to him ; he flounders about in gigantic imbecihty. His 
 "Irene" is a good specimen of his awkwardness; his 
 " Rasselas," perhaps, is even a better. Of plot there is 
 none. But the deficiency in dramatic contrivance is the 
 least evil. Reason usurps the place of sentiment, and 
 sentiment of . sensibility. There is logic where there 
 should have been rhetoric, and rhetoric where there 
 should have been feeling. The incongruity of the vehicle 
 might not have been unintentional, but it could easily 
 have been avoided. And if Dryden deserved ridicule for 
 making his " Hind and Panther " talk like parsons, that 
 caprice was scarcely less excusable which made a young 
 Eastern novice talk like a philosopher. It was the old 
 Aristophanean proverb over again of the ass carrying the 
 mysteries. 
 
 I have left but little room to speak of Goldsmith's 
 merits as a comedian. As a comedian, indeed, he may 
 soon be dismissed. He has nothing in common Avith the 
 dramatists of the Restoration, neither the wit nor the 
 obscenity of Wycherley or Congreve. If he resembles 
 either, it is Farquhar, or more closely Vanbrugh, and that 
 only in the delineation of such characters as depend for 
 their development on an excess of animal spirits, his 
 Tony Lumpkin for example. His cotemporaries decided 
 on his merits when they hesitated between himself and 
 Kelly. 
 
 I must now bring the review of Goldsmith's character 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 321 
 
 and writings to a close. I should be sorry in my dis- 
 section of him to have offended any old prejudices in his 
 favour, to be regarded as depreciating him myself, or 
 stimulating others to think worse of him than they did. 
 I am as much disposed as any one to turn the wrong end 
 of the telescope on his faihngs. But to be identifying 
 the name of Goldsmith with the cause of virtue and 
 philanthropy, is rather too unreasonable to be counte- 
 nanced. It is to associate "Hudibras" with the "Paradise 
 Lost." I would think of him as an infirm man of genius, 
 beset by the vices of a precarious profession, neither so 
 childish as to be devoid of moral responsibility, as some 
 would have him, nor so callous as to be insensible to his 
 moral deliaquehcies ; as he, in fact, would have thought 
 of himself when, reposing in the parlour of the Boar's 
 Head Tavern, half drowsy with punch, he lay dreaming 
 of Shakspeare, Falstaff, and the merry crew of East- 
 cheap, or when, half distracted with headache and remorse, 
 he rushed from the room in the Temple, so emblematic 
 in its confusion, strewed with papers, half-torn books, 
 violins, loose pieces of money, half-worn finery, and half- 
 emptied bottles, to welcome the panting form of the 
 indignant Johnson. 
 
 21 
 
322 ETHioA ; 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF ANCIENT AND MODERN ORATORS. 
 
 Rise of Oratory. — ^Historical Oratory preceded by Historical Dialogue. — 
 Herodotus as a Dialogist. — Hume. — Shakspeare. — Herodotus's Set 
 Speeches. — His Character as a Historian. — Mr. Sewel, and the Author 
 of the " Theosophy of English History." — Xenophon. — The "Anabasis " 
 and the "Tales of the Crusaders." — The " Cyropaedia." — Cyrus a 
 Godfrey or Rinaldo. — Xenophon's Vanity. — His Oratory. — Thucydides. 
 — His Utihtarianism. — His Description of Demoralization in Greece 
 compared with Machiavelli's Account of Italy. — Thucydides con- 
 trasted with Tacitus and Sharon Turner. — ^His Oratory. — His Idea 
 of History, and Fox's Objections anticipated. — Hjs Speeches as De- 
 bates, as Authentic, probably, as Johnson's. — The Speeches of Latin 
 Historians. — Tacitus. — SaUust. — Livy. — Caesar. — The later Greek His- 
 torians. — Dionysius and Dion Cassius. — Modem Historical Composition 
 Examined. — ^Rise of Oratory Proper. — State of Greece and of Rome 
 in the most Flourishing Period of Oratory. — Decline of Ancient 
 Oratory. — Cicero. — Tacitus. — Augustus. — Suetonius. — The Greek 
 Rhetoricians. — QuintiUan. — The System of National Education adapted 
 to turn out an Orator. — Rise of Professional or Forensic Orators. — 
 Demosthenes and Cicero were the Swift and Junius of their Generation. 
 — The Artifices of Oratory. — Bubb Dodington.— Grattan. — Cicero. — 
 QuintiUan. — The "Institutes" Examined. — The Artistic Devotion of 
 Ancient Audiences. — The Areopagus and the Forum contrasted with 
 the Old BaUey and Westminster Hall. — Cicero's Character Animad- 
 verted on. — Demosthenes. — Hiune's Criticism Examined. — Rise of 
 Modem Oratory. — ^Its Development in England at the Renaissance. — 
 Bacon. — Ben Jonson's Criticism. — Oratory of the Rebellion. — Of the 
 Revolution. — Bolingbroke's Oratory. — Reason of its Peculiar Vocal Cha- 
 racteristics. — Chesterfield's Receipt— Contrast of the Present Parliamen- 
 tary Oratory.— Oratory in Walpole's Time.— Growth of Artistic Oratory. 
 — Chatham. — Compared with Mirabeau. — Parhamentary Oratory now 
 Uninfluential.— Pitt.— Fox.- Fox and Demosthenes Compared.— Lord 
 Brougham.— Burke, a Psychological Study.— Criticism on Oratory 
 scant.— Aristotle.— Dionysius. — Longinus. — Qumtilian. —Cicero.— 
 Merits of Modern Dialogists. 
 
 The eloquence of nature precedes the eloquence of art, 
 as language precedes grammar. But the distinction in 
 time and the distinction in essence are by no means pro- 
 portional. Art converts into rules the accidents of nature. 
 
OR CHARACTBEISTICS. 323 
 
 The untaught speaker seems therefore to anticipate the 
 teachings of art. Without artifice he unwittingly employs 
 all the machinery that art alone is supposed to supply. 
 He speaks in tropes. Every period contains a figure. 
 Every sentence is a metaphor. His language is eminently 
 ornamental. Nor is it for mere ornament's sake. His 
 ornaments are in fact his arguments. The bow of Hero- 
 dotus's Ethiopian and the fagot of Mr. Erskine's Indian 
 expressed at once rare imagery and sound logic. They 
 were at once highly figurative and highly diplomatic. 
 Thus it is with the early history of nations as it is with 
 their early poetry. It is richly symboHstic. It substitutes 
 imagination for reason, or rather, it contrives a complete 
 fusion of imagination with reason. Physical objects 
 are made to express metaphysical ideas. The diction 
 becomes poetic. All the beauties and all the defects of 
 civihzed oratory are anticipated. The conception some- 
 times suffers for the language. The language sometimes 
 exalts the conception. There is no well-regulated con- 
 sistency. The mean jostles the magnificent. The 
 famiUar elbows the sublime. And in the same breath 
 is produced the splendid imagery of Burke, and the 
 vulgarity of Mr. Spurgeon. Such appear to be the 
 characteristics of uneducated oratory. 
 
 As oratory proper does not form a branch of literature 
 tiU after the development of history, it is clear that, next 
 to the poets, specimens of oratory must be looked for in 
 the historians. At first sight it should seem that these 
 specimens are hkely to be too scanty for a test. The 
 requirements necessary for the preservation of oratory 
 are not few. Truthfulness in the narrative capacity, or 
 skill in the imitative faculty, are among the most pro- 
 minent. To give the real sentiments of the speaker with 
 fidelity, or to make the fictitious as much hke the sup- 
 posed model of the real as possible, is what the historian 
 
 21—2 
 
324 ETHicA : 
 
 is called upon to do. Unfortunately, to fulfil the first 
 exigency, is almost always, in an infantine society, out of 
 his power. If he had the inchnation to be accurate, in 
 all but contemporary history, the materials are wanting 
 to him on which his accuracy might occupy itself. All 
 that he can do, therefore, is to invent and originate. 
 And to exercise his oratorical invention, numberless cir- 
 cumstances tempt him. His very failure in material 
 contributes to his success. His imagmation is under no 
 dread of documentary restraint." Historical records are 
 scant. Historical composition is stiU more limited. 
 Technical rules are few. Caprice has not yet been con- 
 verted into a science. History, not yet developed into 
 an art, is still a taste. His only examples are the poets, 
 and the poets are all in his favour. There is no inves- 
 tigation of cause and effect, because there has been no 
 previous registration, by which to guide investigation. 
 The historian is but the reporter of facts. He rehearses ; 
 he tells therefore what he heard, and as he heard it. He 
 has gathered his materials by his own personal obser- 
 vation. He has collected them oraUy. He has in addi- 
 tion to this to deliver them orally. He has therefore 
 to amuse as weU as to instruct. Possessed of keen sen- 
 sibihty himself, he has to address an audience as sensitive 
 as children. To enforce realization, there is. but oneway. 
 He becomes dramatic. He speaks for his characters. 
 He makes his characters speak for themselves. In the 
 heat of, personation he has recourse to the simplest form 
 of oratory, dialogue ; and in an instant he is Croesus 
 discussing the philosophy of happiness with Solon, or 
 Cambyses mocking the priests of the Egyptian Apis. The 
 Greek historians, says Quintilian, assume a licence almost 
 equal to that of poets. The reason is plain. Early 
 history had at least assumed a poetic form. The privilege 
 of mixing the ideal with the real, originally accorded to 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 325 
 
 the poet, was continued to the primitive historian. 
 Herodotus's work is thus a transition from the epic to 
 history. The " Odyssey " and the " CKo " contain very 
 much of the marvellous in common. 
 
 Herodotus, as he is the first of historians, so he is, in 
 point of excellence as in point of time, the first of his- 
 torical dialogists. Colloquy was not suited to the style of 
 Thucydides, and he has therefore avoided it. Xenophon 
 was every whit as fond of gossip as Herodotus. Nor 
 indeed does the gossip of Xenophon strike our ear with 
 such inconsistency as that of Herodotus. Xenophon's 
 work is a personal memoir, not a history. Dialogue in 
 such a work can hardly be open to the same objections 
 as dialogue in a history. We enjoy in Walpole what we 
 should turn from with disgust in Smollett. The author 
 is part of his narrative. His own eyes have witnessed 
 the adventures he relates. His own ears have listened 
 to the conversation he details. The credibility and the 
 interest of these details are increased in proportion to the 
 probability of their genuineness. We at once conclude 
 that it is more likely that Xenophon should have known 
 what Cyrus said to Clearchus, or what passed between 
 Clearchus and Ariseus, than that Herodotus should have 
 overheard the intercourse of Harpagus with the herdsman 
 Mithridates. - In manner, Xenophon does not yield to 
 Herodotus as a scientific dialogist. But in some in- 
 stances, especially in his fictitious dialogue, he is not so 
 happy in the subject-matter. The dialogue between the 
 child Cyrus and his grandfather Astyages, in the first 
 book of the " Cyropsedia," is to my mind singularly mis- 
 placed. The style is simple enough, and, with a trifling 
 exception, is exactly the style which a child would use, if 
 a chUd could talk with such precocity. But the truth is, 
 he is no longer a child. He is a monstrous phenomenon, 
 a lisping philosopher in petticoats. The same objection 
 
326 ETSiCA : 
 
 will apply to another, and the most pretentious dialogue 
 in the " Cyropsedia," that between Cyrus and Tigranes 
 in the third book. The absurdity of making a half-tamed 
 Armenian prince discuss the nature of fear and discretion 
 in the Socratic manner with his father's conqueror, and 
 at the moment of his father's arrest, is at once evident. 
 But the whole dialogue might have been heard by Xeno- 
 phon any time at the Agora, or among the gymnasia. It 
 is easy to trace the origin of that skill with which the 
 Persian prince leads his victim to convict himself step 
 by step, and finally to pronounce his ovra doom. Put 
 Socrates for Cyrus, Hippias or Aristippus for Tigranes, 
 and the whole piece might read as an extract from the 
 " MemorabiHa." 
 
 In Herodotus the coUoquy is generally singularly 
 characteristic, and to the purpose. No part of the dia- 
 logue is foreign to the text. It is never out of place, 
 and, instead of fitting clumsily into the narrative, it 
 really forms an integral portion of it. No one can 
 become thoroughly famihar with its simpUcity of style 
 without being forcibly reminded of the colloquial manner 
 of the Old Testament. 
 
 It is evident that little reUance has been placed upon 
 the creation of effect. There is no attempt at attitudi- 
 nizing, or at that worst and most popular trick of modern 
 dialogists, expression-painting. We know that Croesus 
 is in an agony of grief, but nothing is said of the sobs 
 and the tears. We are told that Cambyses rages like a 
 madman, but we never see him knitting the brow or 
 gnashing the teeth. The chief defect is, perhaps, a 
 tendency in the characters to be sententious, to utter 
 short oracular yvwfiai, in the style of Sir Piercie Shafton. 
 It is of course natural that such unfortunates as Croesus 
 and Demaratus should take every opportunity for apho- 
 rizing on the instabihty of human greatness. But it is 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 327 
 
 not only the priTilege of the wretched. The king on his 
 throne morahzes. The ambassadors at the Council 
 Board morahze. Generals moralize on the battle-field ; 
 and even the Amazon Artemisia cannot direct her 
 triremes "without a quirk that would have better suited an 
 Aspasia. The fondness of Herodotus for dialogue has, 
 among modem critics especially, affected his reputation 
 as a historian. As far as its manner may distinguish it, 
 his history may be allowed to bear the same relation to 
 that of Thucydides, for example, as the history of Walpole 
 bears to that of Hume. In Walpole's work the self- 
 delineation of character is made to predominate. We 
 are introduced behind the scenes. We are led into the 
 company of the personages. The king and his ministers 
 are as famihar to us as those of our own household. 
 Every whisper reaches us. We witness every emotion in 
 the closet, and every gesture at the council board. In 
 Herodotus the development of the individuality is carried 
 out on the same principle. We are at once transported 
 into the courts of Susa and Ecbatana. There is none of 
 the stately ceremoniousness of history to interfere with 
 our curiosity. We hear every man address us in his 
 own tongue. His own lips tell us the misfortunes of 
 Crcesus. His own lips betray to us the secret motives of 
 Cyrus or Darius. Xerxes as he is drawn by Herodotus, 
 and as he is drawn by Diodorus Siculus, exactly describes 
 the difference between the Henry TV. of Shakspeare, and 
 the Henry TV. of Hume. In the latter case we have a 
 dry catalogue of actions and quahties; in the former 
 thei;e is nothing less than a dramatic representation. 
 
 As history progresses, and the materials of history 
 accumulate, the style of historical composition assumes a 
 severer cast. ColloquiaUsms are avoided. Private con- 
 versation is suppressed, or assumes an obHque form, 
 scarcely distinguishable from the narrative. But, while 
 
828 ETHicA : 
 
 the imitation of private conversation is no longer an item 
 in the art, the imitation of public speaking becomes 
 proportionally prominent. Thus history, ceasing to be 
 dramatic, becomes oratorical. As the object of history is 
 truth, and all mere imitation is fiction, the benefit derived 
 from this change can only indeed be comparative. The 
 skill of the artist may assist the imposition, but it is still 
 an imposition. The speech of Eichard III. in Shak- 
 speare, on accepting the crown, resembles the speech of 
 CromweU under similar circumstances, in a very marked 
 degree, and is perhaps the most characteristic speech 
 that fiction ever put into the mouth of a character. But 
 the one is authentic. The other is not. In spite of its 
 verisimilitude, therefore, we take the one and leave the 
 other. On the other hand, verisimihtude is the test by 
 which such imitations must finally be tried. If the 
 subject-matter of the oratory be fictitious, the style of 
 the oratory should at least be consistent. The historian 
 who should choose to avail himself of a rhetorical exposi- 
 tion of his views, incurs a responsibility while he reaps 
 an advantage. He adds the duties of the artist to those 
 of the narrator. And while he is falfiUing the purposes 
 of the historian, he has to pay obeisance to the exigencies 
 of the dramatist. The difficulties of the task are 
 increased twofold. It [ is no wonder, therefore, upon 
 examination, almost every historian who has braved 
 them, has finally succumbed to them. 
 
 Set speeches in Herodotus are, considering the extent 
 of his work and his opportunities for introducing them, 
 comparatively rare. It is evident that his familiar pen 
 has no sympathy with the formalities of oratory. One of 
 the very few attempts he has made at deliberative oratory 
 is not in his favour, the harangue in the third book, 
 where the several Persians discuss the merits of forms of 
 government, of which then- own experience could have 
 
OR CHARACTERISTIC S. 329 
 
 afforded them no criterion. The inconsistency did not 
 escape the critics of his own day. And, indeed, it seems 
 to me clear that Herodotus was fully conscious of the 
 apparent anomaly by his retrospective attempt in the 
 sixth book ^ to justify it. In some of the other speeches, 
 while the style is rhetorically excellent, the matter at 
 once betrays their origin. The episode in the speech of 
 Mardonius before Xerxes, reflecting on the mutual diAd- 
 sions of the Grecian States, is evidently the sentiment of 
 the Grecian author who had seen and suffered by those 
 divisions.* The pohtical principles of the writer appear 
 again in the frequent national enunciation of repubhcan 
 ideas. If it was an anomaly that a few Persian princes 
 should hold a philosophical disquisition on the compa- 
 rative merits of a monarchy, a democracy, and an oli- 
 garchy, it was certainly a still greater anomaly that a 
 Samian tyrant should denounce the claims of tyranny, 
 and proclaim the advantages of universal equahty.' The 
 most characteristic harangues — ^for they can scarcely be 
 called speeches — are those put into the Hps of Xerxes. 
 Every expression is that of a man whose word is law. 
 The authoritative demeanour with which he expresses his 
 resolutions, whUe he affects to ask advice, is precisely the 
 manner of the Persian despot, who levels mountains, 
 chastises the ocean, and falls into a passion with the gods. 
 On the whole, the great charm by which the history of 
 Herodotus has endeared itself to the hearts of a thousand 
 generations is the impress that it bears of the personal 
 character of its author. Of that character fairer oppor- 
 tunities of test and judgment have produced fairer con- 
 ceptions. Instead of the simple credulous traveller, 
 whose art has been mistaken for artlessness — who, in 
 spite of his own repudiation, has been made to beheve in 
 marvels which he diplomatically detailed for the gratifi- 
 
 » Ch. 43. ' Bk. vii. c. 9. " Bk. iii. 142. 
 
330 bthioa: 
 
 cation of an audience to whom the marvellous was always 
 grateful — instead of the adventurer who wanted to pass 
 off for facts of natural history tales ahout bald men, and 
 goat-footed men, men without eyes, and men without 
 names, — we have the scientific naturalist and carefal 
 explorer. In truth, few inquirers have undergone such 
 difficulties or taken such pains to verify their inquiries. 
 The portrait of Oldbuck of Monkbams is no exaggerated 
 representation of the spirit of antiquarianism that burned 
 in him. The laborious diUgence with which he followed 
 up the slightest clue to the solution of a problem, is still 
 a pattern for archaeologists. Could the registrar at Sais 
 give him no information about -the sources of the Nile, in 
 a few days he was making his way to Elephantine, and 
 carrying on his explorations in defiance of crocodiles and 
 Ethiopian nomades. Was he at fault in the identification 
 of the Grecian and Egyptian Herculese, he is soon heard 
 of at the Phoenician Tyre, pursuing the clue to Pharos, 
 conversing with the priests of the temple, and noting 
 down the offerings between the pillars of gold and 
 emerald.^ It is interesting to watch how the spirit of 
 religion co-operated with the spirit of the antiquarian. 
 But while it stimulated his researches, there is no doubt 
 it interfered with their results. While the same curiosity 
 is expressed towards sacred and secular objects, the 
 difference in his treatment of them is marked. Thus he 
 can afford to laugh at the accounts of ants larger and 
 swifter than camels, of asses that never drink, and sheep 
 with tails a foot and a half broad. But the moment the 
 sacred birds, the phoenix, the serpent with wings, the 
 coal-black ibis, come before his notice, his whole de- 
 meanour changes. He hastens through the deserts of 
 Arabia to verify their bones, but no irreverent incredulity 
 escapes him in the description of them. It is evident 
 
 ' Bk. ii. c. 44. 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 331 
 
 that he reports on them with the same scrupulous restraint 
 that he reports on the authenticity or veracity of oracles. 
 If he disbeheves, he dares not deny. If he has any 
 doubts, he dares not express them.^ That Herodotus 
 was a rehgious man is certain : the very opposite to his 
 cotemporary Thucydides. Wonder, and veneration the 
 more emphatic expression of wonder, which was wanting 
 in the latter, was signally developed in him. His vene- 
 ration was, in truth, almost cosmopoHtan. Each fresh 
 mystery, each new rite, each novel god, exacted his 
 homage, the African Ammon and the Babylonian Belus, 
 the bull Apis, and the dwarf Phthah. The stress which 
 he lays on the doctrine of special Providence, illustrated 
 by the numberless examples of divine interposition which 
 he details, is a kindred feature, and traceable to the same 
 cause. Every action has its accompanying dream, every 
 event is made dependent on some previous prognostica- 
 tion, whose operation is equally sure, whether it be the 
 voice of an oracle or the dropping of a phthisical tyrant's 
 tooth. This taste for supernatural explanation is doubt- 
 less singular in a man who possessed scientific sagacity, 
 and who might have conversed with Pericles, and hstened 
 to the raiUery of the author of the " Clouds." But it is 
 no uncommon thing to find a man living in a highly- 
 developed state of society recur for some of his opinions to 
 its infancy. In our own day we have seen a Cambridge 
 divine writing a book which nobody has read but to laugh 
 at, called the " Theosophy of EngUsh History," as full of 
 mystical interpretations as an Alexandrian rhapsodist 
 could have made it, and an Oxford divine propounding a 
 system of " Christian PoHtics " that would have been 
 thought preposterous by an apostle. 
 
 Not a little of my criticism on Herodotus might be 
 transferred to Xenophon. In character, the two authors 
 
 "^ • Bk. yiii. c. 77. " 
 
332 ETHiCA : 
 
 present striking features of resemblance. Both were reli- 
 gious animals. Both were fond of adventure and travel- 
 ling. Both were gifted with a singular facihty of com- 
 municating their travels, though in investigation and in 
 detail Xenophon is far more superficial than Herodotus. 
 Judging the two authors by the only test left to judge 
 them by, their works, Xenophon is undoubtedly the least 
 attractive' character of the two. The "Anabasis" is an 
 egotistic romance. It is aU Xenophon. It bears about 
 the same relation to history that Scott's " Tales of the 
 Crusaders " do to the Chronicles. There are features in 
 both, indeed, not wanting in analogy. Xenophon is 
 Cceur de Lion. The Greeks are to the Persians what 
 the Christians are to the Saracens. A handful of Greeks 
 assault myriads of Persians. The Greeks are always 
 successful. The Persians are always the victims. The 
 Persians are always perfidious. The Greeks are patterns 
 of honourable warfare. Xenophon is the mainstay of 
 the expedition. He is invincible in stratagem and tactics. 
 In the camp he associates with the warriors, shares their 
 danger, and soothes their apprehensions by all the arts 
 of precept and example. At the council board his 
 eloquence carries the day. When differences of opinion 
 arise, he is always at hand to temper the debate, and 
 give advice, and his advice is always successful. And to 
 complete the parallel, he is always the victim of calunmy 
 and misrepresentation at the hands of the very men 
 whom his advice has preserved. Xenophon himself, 
 too, had all the rehgious superstition of a Crusader. 
 Theologically speaking, he is the perfect type of the un- 
 educated Greek. He never moves without sacrificmg. 
 The augurs are his ministers. He permits the army to 
 starve rather than proceed against the victims. The 
 soothsayer Silanus makes as great a figure in his camp 
 as the hermit of Engaddi does in the camp of the Chris- 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 333 
 
 tians. A sneeze, or- the flight of an eagle, was to him 
 what a dream or a meteorological phantasm was to them. 
 In reading the " Cyropsedia " it is difficult to divest 
 oneself of the impression that it is a parabolic represen- 
 tation of the author of the "Anabasis." independently 
 of certain analogous circumstances in the plots of each, 
 Xenophon undoubtedly holds the position in the one 
 which Cyrus holds in the other. Cyrus is one of those 
 insufferable heroes, courageous, handsome, gallant, and 
 wise, in a word, possessed of that superhuman combi- 
 nation of virtues which mediaeval romancers sometimes 
 embodied in their Godfreys and Rinaldos, and which 
 modern novelists at present embody in their curates. He 
 is pious, of course, or Xenophon would have had none of 
 him. Indeed, the assiduity with which he offers up 
 Hbations at all kinds of inconvenient moments, sings 
 hymns and poems before going to battle, and chooses a 
 sacred watchword, reminds me very strongly of those 
 warhke saiats of another era, who went to meet the foe 
 with the praises of God in their mouths, and a two-edged 
 sword in their hands, the heroes of Marston and Edge- 
 hUl. He is generous beyond conception, wins battles 
 only to gratify the man who envied him, takes thousands 
 of prisoners only to release them, and mountains of 
 plunder only to refund his share of it. In the field he 
 is sure to be victorious. In debate, it is with hun as it 
 was with Shaftesbury, as though one inquired of an 
 oracle. The combination of prowess and sagacity is so 
 marvellous that, literally speaking, neither history nor 
 fiction supply his parallel, unless it may be some of those 
 wonderful compounds of wit and muscle that Dryden in 
 his most extravagant moments created for his heroic 
 tragedies. Prosperity does not elate him. Adversity 
 does not oppress him. His ingenuity conducts to the 
 one, and triumphs over the other. Every one adores 
 
334 ETHicA ; 
 
 him. His enemies feel it a privilege to become his 
 friends. His friends closen the tie by claiming relation- 
 ship to him. Something after the pattern of this, his 
 perfect model, does Xenophon strive to paint himself in 
 the "Anabasis." There is, in addition, a disagreeable 
 tone of assumption in his autobiography, which he has 
 happily denied to his counterpart. Thus, not content 
 with praising himself, he makes others praise him ; nay, 
 he makes others, in the midst of abusing him, praise 
 him. This is the case with Seuthes, and if some read- 
 ings of the passage be correct, it is the case with 
 Philanus. He takes evident satisfaction in dwelling on 
 the difficulties that arise, and still more in showing that 
 the Athenian called Xenophon was the very man to sug- 
 gest the remedy. His fellow officers and colleagues in 
 command are scarcely heard of, and his commanding 
 officer, Cheirisopus, who is clearly a more distinguished 
 man than he is painted, is never mentioned except in an 
 unfavourable contrast. 
 
 This vanity or egotism would be less disgusting or 
 irritating in a reaUy strong and masculine mind, if such 
 a mind could indulge in it. But no such mind had 
 Xenophon. Most vain of mortals, he was the least 
 opiniative. His opinions were tastes, his principles 
 fancies. In politics he was the sane latitudinarian that 
 Herodotus was in religion. He trimmed his sails to 
 every wind. He shifted with every tide. He changed 
 his mind with every chmate. On the Tigris he was a 
 despot. At Sparta an aristocrat. At Athens a repub- 
 lican. Thrasybulus, Agesilaus, Cyrus, tyrannized over 
 him one by one. Custom or the tone of pohtical 
 morality may excuse this cosmopolitanism, but nothing 
 can excuse the unjust taunts with which he takes every 
 opportunity of -vilifying his maternal country Attica, and 
 his unfair glorification of his adopted country Lace- 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 335 
 
 daemon. In his expedition he is continually reminding 
 his soldiers of the superiority of the Spartan over the 
 Athenian, and wherever he can, he betrays a partiahty 
 so hot and unseemly for them, that a bystander can 
 scarcely refrain from attributing it to a poHtic dread of 
 them. With regard to Xenophon's hterary merits, it can 
 scarcely be said that he ever rose above the mere dilettante. 
 The ' ' Cyropaedia " is a pleasingly told tale . Its chief value 
 is the iadication it affords of the hero-worshipping mind 
 of the author. The Cyrus of the tale is no more like 
 the real Cyrus than Fenelon's " Telemachus " is like the 
 Dauphin, or Bohngbroke's patriot prince like the heir 
 of George II. He probably was neither so bad, nor 
 so pretentious. The minor works, the treatises on 
 Huntiag and Horsemanship, the " Life of AgesUaus," 
 and the " Memorabilia," are good illustrations of the 
 desultory and the obsequious habits of the writer ; habits 
 which, it must always be remembered with gratitude, 
 prompted him to do for one of the subHmest minds of 
 antiquity that service which Arrian paid to Epictetus, 
 and which in modem times a still more obsequious 
 devotee paid to Johnson. 
 
 On the contents of the "Anabasis" I have already 
 expressed my opinion. In point of execution it probably 
 holds the same place in Grecian literature that the work 
 of Caesar occupies in the historical Hterature of Rome, 
 although in saying thus much no critic would for a moment 
 think of predicating equal abUity of the two productions. 
 In lucidness and simpKcity of style, the one has no advan- 
 tage over the other, save to the modem reader the advan- 
 tage of facility of interpretation which the Latin language 
 affords. But for keenness of observation, and philo- 
 sophical delineation of national character and customs, 
 the Grecian wUl bear no comparison with the Roman. 
 It is probably this uniform simphcity of manner and 
 
336 ETHiCA : 
 
 diction that has led QuintiKan to give Xenophon more 
 credit than he deserves for the oratorical portions of his 
 work. In the rhetorical execution of them there is httle 
 or no inconsistency, except the inconsistency unavoidable, 
 and it should seem unreasonably censured, of making 
 Persians utter their sentiments in terms of G-reek rhetoric. 
 As far as the matter of them is concerned, later criticism 
 has exposed them to a more fundamental change. Free 
 from the casuistry and misplaced subtlety of Thucydides, 
 in the mechanical arrangements of his speeches he com- 
 mits blunders that Thucydides would never have been 
 guilty of. Thus he affects to relate speeches of his 
 own hearing which, by his own showing, he could never 
 have heard. Nay, he pretends to relate to an audience 
 as novelties events which, by his own showing, that 
 audience had taken a chief part in. In other respects 
 there are some few inconsistencies which a more careful 
 artist than Xenophon would not have overlooked. In 
 the first book of the " Anabasis," for iustance, Cyrus, in 
 the act of grasping the despotic crown of Persia, is 
 represented as depreciating his own future subjects as 
 cowardly barbarians, and haranguing the Greeks for 
 Greece and Uberty. In the sixth book of the " Hel- 
 lenics," again, he teUs us that Autocles was a skilful 
 orator. He then puts into his mouth scarce a dozen 
 sentences, and those sentences but little to the purpose ; 
 while CalHas, the torch-bearer, speaks more, and far 
 more rhetorically. The celebrated dying oration of 
 Cyrus to his son, considered as a rhetorical display, is 
 undoubtedly one of the finest things of the kind in 
 antiquity. Like the dialogue aheady alluded to, it would 
 not have misbecome the lips of Socrates. But for this 
 very reason it is smgularly out of place in the lips of the 
 aged Persian despot. 
 
 Coming between Herodotus and Xenophon in point 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 337 
 
 of time, but iii every other respect far in advance of both, 
 is Thucydides. No ancient mind displayed, to use a 
 Baconian expression, less moisture in its composition. 
 His character shines in a dry light. Rehgiously speak- 
 mg, there is a tone of half-concealed scepticism running 
 through his work which reminds us of Voltaire in his 
 soberest moments, or more vividly of Montaigne. From 
 the simple credulity of his predecessor Herodotus, he is 
 as entirely free as from the senile theophilanthropy of 
 his successor Xenophon. He was, in the strictest sense 
 of the term, a utilitarian. The immediate value of a 
 human action was his standard of right. Its physical 
 and moral significance he treated at par. Its practical 
 consequences, not its ethical elements, are what he most 
 dwells upon. Man in his pohtical, not in his moral 
 nature, is clearly the main object of his study. Abstract 
 virtue and disiaterestedness he leaves for philosophers to 
 dream about. His own test is the vulgar disposition of 
 his feUow-men such as he found them, not ia the Utopia 
 of the Lyceum or Stoa, but on the battle-field and iu the 
 senate-house. It is not easy to divest oneself of the idea 
 that the tenor of the expressions which he put into the 
 mouth of the Athenian ambassadors in the first book is 
 intended to represent his own philosophy of human 
 nature, and human motives, when he makes them vindi- 
 cate their character ia triumph, on the strength of their 
 having done nothing contradictory to the ordinary dispo- 
 sition of man, under the ordinary incitements of 
 "honour, fear, and profit." However this may be, it 
 may justly be imputed to him that an unamiable, so- 
 phisticated estimate interpenetrates aU his composition, 
 narrative as well as rhetorical. The speeches of his 
 suppliants are the least supphcatory in style and manner 
 to be met with in any author. There is no appeal to 
 the feeUngs, or the sympathies, none of the eloquent 
 
 22 
 
338 ETHiCA : 
 
 rhetoric of suffering and despair applying to the memory 
 of past associations for aid. On the contrary, the style 
 is hard and dry as a problem of EucHd, Its argumenta- 
 tive craftiness testifies that it is not friendship but logic 
 that it rehes on, that the suppliant depends on demon- 
 strating not the justice of his own claims to be succoured, 
 but the interest of the supplicated to succour him. 
 Anything Hke the influence of compassion is silently and 
 mutually eschewed. The speech of Cleon, again, against 
 clemency may have laid the foundation of MacchiaveUi's 
 chapter on the comparative advantages of cruelty and 
 mercy. In his judgment of character this cold, anaes- 
 thetic temperament displays itself perhaps more pro- 
 minently still. Success is apparently his test of ability. 
 Not the object, but the attainment of the object, is what 
 he looks to. He clearly despises Pausanias, for example, 
 for his want of self-control to conceal his purpose, 
 though that purpose involved the ruin of his country. 
 Themistocles, on the other hand, whose treachery was 
 more successful, he is in raptures with, calls him a great 
 natural genius, worthy of admiration from aU men, of 
 the greatest foresight, the best judge of the present, the 
 best conjecturer of the future. Alcibiades, whose double 
 villany he deliberately relates, he as dehberately passes 
 over without a word of moral comment. Nicias, on the 
 other hand, whose scrupulous piety lost him the finest 
 fleet that ever left the Piraeus, he treats with a contempt 
 more bitter than the raillery of Aristophanes. 
 
 This deficiency in ethical discrimination naturally de- 
 preciates the historian's character in the estimation of a 
 modem reader. But it may be suggested that Thucydides 
 simply shared in the defects of his age. The characteris- 
 tics of that age he himself paints, as only he could paint, 
 in a chapter which, though often overlooked by philo- 
 logical critics, contains the finest specimens of analytical 
 
OB CHAEACTEEISTICS. 339 
 
 characterization in the writings of antiquity, not even, 
 excepting Tacitus.* I have mentioned the name of Mac- 
 chiavelli. I can only say that a similar fundamental 
 controversion in ethics seems, to have taken place in 
 Greece to that which took place in Italy in MacchiaveUi's 
 time. All the ties of honour and moraUty — all those ties, 
 in fact, which are the uncostly pledges between citizen 
 and citizen, the cheap sureties of mutual security — ^were 
 utterly disregarded. Mutual distrust begetting mutual 
 treachery, and in turn begotten by it ; ambition daring 
 by every secret means to get the superiority ; animosity 
 that betrayed itself only at the moment that it was 
 satiated — such, says the historian, was the prevaihng 
 disposition. There was no lack of intellectual refine- 
 ment, but it was exhibited only in the eminent cunniag 
 of its devices and the monstrous cruelty of its vengeance. 
 The successful plotter was thought clever, the successful 
 counter-plotter still cleverer. Oaths were but the masks 
 for treachery, and he that contrived to put his enemy off 
 his guard wreaked his vengeance on him aU the more 
 sweetly for his confidence, taking into account the safety 
 of the plan and the prize he aimed at for cleverness. 
 The portraiture suggested by the next paragraph, if pos- 
 sible, still more vividly recalls the era of the " Prince." 
 The majority, when honest, more easily acquired the 
 name of talented, than, when simple, that of good. 
 Piety, indeed, was in fashion with none ; but those who 
 had the luck to carry out their viUany under fair pre- 
 tences were the most highly spoken of. Simplicity, 
 which is so large an ingredient in a noble nature, was 
 laughed out of being. 
 
 Such a state of political and social demoraHzation 
 had Thucydides witnessed. He had witnessed, too, all 
 the practical effects produced by it. Those who pass 
 
 — — — ' Bk. iii. 82. 
 
 22—2 
 
340 ethica: 
 
 their lives amid the hardeniag scenes of a moral revolu- 
 tion, rarely escape the infection. Their moral nature, at 
 first shocked, afterwards acquiesces in circumstances over 
 which they have no control. Famiharity with vice in its 
 most horrible forms blunts their enthusiasm for the deli- 
 cate phases of virtue. They have so long smelt the 
 smell of blood, that they forget to sicken at it. They 
 have so long seen the enormities of faction go unchas- 
 tised, that they forget to chastise them. Hence the 
 indifference with which Thucydides speaks of assassina- 
 tions and massacres, more horrible than any assassina- 
 tions ; the total absence of virtuous horror, of the sceva 
 indignatio of the morahst or the satirist, as he details the 
 alternate fates of Corcyreans, Helots, and Scionians. In 
 one respect this indifference to moralizing has not been 
 without its service to him. The narrative flows on with 
 uninterrupted simphcity, and the reader is spared those 
 tedious episodes which disfigure the pages of a certain 
 class of historians, easier specified than described, of 
 whom Polybius in ancient history, and Sharon Turner in 
 modem, may be considered the representatives. For it 
 is a general rule that writers who combine the offices of 
 morahst and historian succeed well iu neither, and 
 acquire an air of insipidity in both ; just as a soil which 
 will produce grapes as well as corn will probably produce 
 neither in perfection. We object to the fierce moral 
 denunciation peculiar to this class of writers, for the 
 same reason that a Chinaman objects to the shading of a 
 European pamting; there are too many black spots in it. 
 It is probably this impassiveness which explains what 
 critics are so fond of complaining of, the want of ethic 
 portraiture. In this respect Thucydides presents a signal 
 contrast to Tacitus. The Koman historian is as minute 
 as a Dutch painter in his moral delineation. He ana- 
 lyzes his characters with laborious punctiliousness, and 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 341 
 
 dwells on each particular feature with the painstaking 
 curiosity of an anatomist. Such is his method of treat- 
 ing Augustus, Tiberius, Germanicus, and all his chief 
 personages. The Grecian writer is eUiptical in this as in 
 everything else. He patats, as it were, by inference. 
 He represents actions, and he leaves his reader to infer 
 quaUties. He gives outKnes, and he expects the spec- 
 tator to supply the filhng up. Axid this he does with 
 such consummate skill and consistency, that a single 
 stroke of his pencil conveys aU the impressions of the 
 most elaborate brush. That Alcibiades loved dogs and 
 horses, and was held in high repute by the citizens, is 
 all the positive colouring bestowed on his character. 
 Yet no one can doubt, on arising from the narrative that 
 includes his hfe, that he has as good a conception of 
 him as he has of the Earl of Essex or the Earl of 
 Shaftesbury. All we are told of the General Nicias is 
 that he was rather given to the observance of rites and 
 oracles. Yet the whole disposition of Nicias becomes in 
 the end as familiar to us as that of Prince Eugene. 
 Like that ancient painter in Pliny, who, unable to trust 
 the eloquence of his art, drew a veil over the face which 
 he dared not depict, Thucydides gives us posture, cir- 
 cumstance, locahty, everything but expression. In this 
 he is the most impartial of historians. A fair allot- 
 ment of prominence is assigned to each character. No 
 one is left in the background by neglect. This is more 
 striking when we turn from him to those modem histo- 
 rians, of the last century especially, who in the distribu.- 
 tion of their attention seem to have copied those pre- 
 KaphaeUte painters of martyrdoms, who only introduced 
 the assistants to fill up the space iu the canvas, left 
 empty by the saint and his executioner. 
 
 There is no doubt that the frequent introduction of 
 speeches contributes very materially to the development of 
 
342 ethioa: 
 
 character, and in some degree may be allowed to compen- 
 sate for the absence of special characterization. And this, 
 indeed, in skilful hands, is one of the usages of rhetorical 
 execution. The character is allowed to portray itself. 
 We catch the manners of the man living as they arise 
 from his own lips. Each new sentiment is a key. 
 Every word is an index. And, however artificial in point 
 of style, the speeches of Thucydides are admirably 
 characteristic in point of matter. Cleon is always 
 insolently sanguine. Brasidas is always generously con- 
 fident. Nicias is always conscientious and prudent. Alci- 
 biades is always precipitate and specious. Alcibiades' 
 address to the Spartans, indeed, in the sixth book, is so 
 admirable an exposure of his own character, that I can 
 never beheve that he made it. Thucydides, on the other 
 hand, undoubtedly indulges his neglect of ethical por- 
 traiture to a culpable extent. The curt and abrupt 
 manner in which he has dismissed Pericles from the 
 scene has always been registered agaiust him. And the 
 omission is recorded with greater emphasis, that with 
 the name and title of Pericles to fame was associated the 
 foundation of aU that mental and artistic supremacy 
 which, through good repute and through ill repute, has 
 clung for more than twenty generations to the name of 
 Athens. From aU that Thucydides has said of the 
 matter, no one could infer that he lived and wrote in a 
 city renowned as the nurse of every art and every science, 
 at a time when he might have witnessed a tragical 
 contest between JEschylus and Sophocles, or have left 
 Socrates lecturing against the Sophists in the markets 
 place, to linger with Phidias among the friezes and 
 statues of the Parthenon. This suppression, while it 
 illustrates the dry idiosyncrasies of the historian, illus- 
 trates at the same time the condition of history. And 
 while we wonder at him, it would be unjust to forget 
 
OR CHARACTEBISTICS. 343 
 
 that, even within our own memory, laws of historical 
 composition have heen laid down quite as exclusive and 
 quite as confined. It is not at all impossible that Thucy- 
 dides might have been influenced in his creation of an 
 historical model by considerations similar to those which 
 guided the estimate of Fox, and that he too might have 
 thought a critical digression in favour of literature and art 
 an unseemly interruption to the office of history, " which 
 ceases to be history when it ceases to be narrative." 
 
 I speak advisedly when I say that my judgment of 
 Thucydides' character will not find favour among a cer- 
 tain class of readers. When Warburton undertook to 
 edit " Shakspeare," Quin, the player, sent him a message 
 that he had better stick to his own Bible, and let theirs 
 alone. To a not very limited set of minds Thucydides 
 stands in much the same light as Shakspeare did to 
 Quin. They regard him psychologically as they regard 
 him etymologically ; their fondness for him is propor- 
 tioned to his profundity. With him, too, are associated 
 the early triumphs of the school days, and the manlier 
 triumphs of a more laborious scholarship. There is an 
 odium scholasticum as well as an odium theologicum. 
 With this atrabilious advocacy of their favourite author, 
 a not very definite notion of classic history co-operates. 
 In spite of Mr. Grote, they stiU continue to speak of 
 Grecian men and Grecian institutions as they would 
 speak of men and institutions that had no share in their 
 common humanity — as they speak of the Strulbugs and 
 the academies of Laputa. They have no idea of a 
 civilization distinct from their own, with its appropriate 
 complex political and moral machinery. They look upon 
 the characters who figure in it as demons or demigods, 
 personified vices or personified virtues. Thucydides was 
 evidently a man of superior sagacity, of a long reach of 
 political vision, of a cool judicial penetration. But 
 
344 ETHicA : 
 
 Thucydides was a Greek, nevertheless; a fellow-coun- 
 tryman of the men who identified national honour with 
 national interest, whose custom it was to murder the 
 generals they captured, to prevent their doing further 
 mischief. There can be no injustice in attributing to 
 such a G-reek motives that can be justly attributed to 
 Dr. Paley. But these persons know Thucydides chiefly 
 for his concise, condensed, and nervous Attic ; and they 
 think it a pity that a man who wrote so purely and so 
 well, should be allowed a standard of morahty not supe- 
 rior to an EngHsh archdeacon's. They are shocked that 
 so much unimpassioned logic should conceal an Eudae- 
 monism as gross as Jeremy Bentham's. They cannot 
 endure that we should suspect an historian who is so 
 little of the satirist and so Kttle of the panegyrist. 
 
 The fact is, Thucydides is an author to be studied, 
 not read. You may read his work, as most people do, 
 for his Greek, but you must dissect it for his character. 
 His is just the style, an impartial, dehberative, what 
 Dryden, speaking of his own didactic poem, called, " a 
 legislative style," to impose upon the casual reader. He 
 paints so eUipticaUy, he allows so httle of his personaUty 
 to appear, he keeps himself so habitually in the back- 
 ground, he hints so much more than he speaks out, that 
 the spectator yields almost without resistance to such 
 oracular attraction. It is necessary to rid yourself of first 
 impressions before you can hope to be disenchanted. It 
 is only then that you discover in the author a man sin- 
 gularly jealous of the interference of mere habit and pre- 
 judice, almost cynically distrustful of the influence of the 
 feeHngs over the rational faculty, ironically tolerant of 
 moral violations, and almost sarcastically justificatory of 
 the claims of self-interest. I am not judging Thucydides 
 j&'om the speeches of the historian. Dramatic con- 
 sistency required him to condemn his villains out of 
 
OR CHARACTEBISTICS. 345 
 
 their own mouth. It would be just as unfair to conclude 
 that he was a Mend to treachery, because Alcibiades 
 justifies his iQci-yism, or to murder, because Cleon advo- 
 cates the slaughter of the Mityleneans, as to agree with 
 those wise commentators who maintaiued that Shaks- 
 peare was a Koman Cathohc, because the Ghost in 
 " Hamlet " describes the Eoman CathoUc state of pur- 
 gatory. Nor am I depreciating Thucydides below the 
 common standard of his age. What I urge is, that that 
 standard was a low one, and that Thucydides fully came 
 up to it. 
 
 With regard to the speeches of Thucydides, they are 
 stiU more palpably counterfeit than those of Herodotus 
 or Xenophon. It did not need his acknowledgment 
 to discover their fictitiousness. However varied in gene- 
 ral matters, they all reflect that common mannerism 
 which is an infaUible sign of a common origia. As 
 debates, they are much less authentic than Johnson's 
 parUamentary reports, and are quite as idiomatic. The 
 dense, close-knit, epigrammatic texture of Thucydides' 
 style is, of all styles, least fitted for oratory. It is 
 especially unfitted for attributed oratory. The want of 
 characteristic discrinunation is at once more forcibly 
 realized, and as we Usten to the infant hsping in the 
 same unwearied enthymem as the wise and high-minded 
 statesman, the incongruity strikes us as it struck the 
 ingenious Queen of Brobdignag, while enraptured by the 
 eloquence of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, and we cannot 
 help sharing her surprise that so much wit should exist 
 in so diminutive a form. The Boeotian uses all the 
 casuistry of the Sicilian. The laconic Spartan indulges 
 in the volubility of the Corinthian, while Boeotian, 
 Spartan, and Coriuthian speakers employ the Atticisms 
 of the Athenian writer. Certain portions of some of the 
 speeches are evidently mere rhetorical expositions of the 
 
346 bthica: 
 
 views of the author. The speech of Athenagoras con- 
 taining a comparative estimate of oKgarchy and demo- 
 cracy, and the speech of the Corinthian ambassador 
 containing a comparative estimate of Athenians and 
 Lacedaemonians, seem to me to betray the terse analy- 
 tical skill of Thucydides, when Thucydides chose to be 
 analytical. The mixtm-e of invention and truth in the 
 speeches has an unpleasant effect. We cannot believe 
 that the spirit is there, and the letter only different. 
 The judgment can make no compromise. It involun- 
 tarily refases its assent to a composition which, by its 
 own claims, is not fiction ; yet which by its own acknow- 
 ledgment is not history. Our interest is divided. We 
 vacillate in alternate uncertainty between what is au- 
 thentic and what is ideal. Finally, we end by regarding 
 them with some such analogous feeling as we look upon 
 some of De Foe's historical novels, for instance, " The 
 Cavaher," or " Captain Carleton." We are sure that 
 the mere external expression is false, we are not sure 
 that the substance is true. 
 
 When we come to the speeches of Latin historians, 
 other considerations present themselves. We lose the 
 test of dialect. Except in eases of very marked style, 
 we lose in some degree the test of style. Both Sallust 
 and Tacitus possess this style. We are therefore ena- 
 bled to convict them out of their own mouth. Sallust, 
 jfrom his propinquity to the times of which he vn-ote, 
 may lay a more emphatic claim to genuineness in the 
 matter of his speeches. But the composition there is 
 no mistaking. The speech attributed to Csesar on the 
 punishment of the conspirators, doubtless contains the 
 very arguments of Csesar as he used them before the 
 senate. But a schoolboy can discern the contrast in the 
 fictitious and the acknowledged style of Csesar. He does 
 not indeed assimilate himself in any way to the character 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 347 
 
 of the speaker whom he personates. Marius, whom he 
 describes as unlearned, and a despiser of the Greek arts, 
 uses all the terse and epigrammatic rhetoric of Memmius, 
 whom he represents to be a great and powerful orator. 
 SaUust was an imitator of Thucydides. Tacitus was a 
 more devoted imitator of SaUust. He is even yet more 
 elliptical and disjointed in his style than either. His 
 style indeed is to that of Thucydides what shorthand is 
 to ordiuary writing. Thucydides is obscure by construc- 
 tion. Tacitus is obscure by positive suppression. It is 
 not to be wondered, therefore, that, in rhetorical apti- 
 tude, the same deficiencies are observable in the several 
 writers. Like SaUust, he fails in characteristic assimi- 
 lation. He condemns Claudius, for example, as a man 
 of feeble understanding, yet he makes Claudius indulge 
 in the brief, compact, and nervous phraseology of 
 Augustus. In the same pointed, vigorous, and idiomatic 
 phraseology women supplicate, emperors storm, generals 
 address their soldiers, the Pannonian legions address 
 their generals. Livy's style is rather less idiomatic. 
 Consequently, his rhetorical discrepancies are to the 
 casual reader less striking. Hence, though the speeches 
 which Livy has given to Scipio and Hannibal are quite 
 as fictitious as any which Shakspeare has given to 
 Henry the Fifth or Charles the Sixth, and though it is 
 far more Ukely that Csesar should have used the senti- 
 ments of SaUust, than Scipio or Hannibal have used 
 those of Livy, it is almost as likely that Scipio should 
 have spoken in the manner of Livy, as that CsDsar 
 should have spoken in the manner of SaUust. 
 
 The Greek historians of Latin subjects are stiU 
 further beyond the reach of criticism. The better their 
 composition, the more skilful their rhetoric, the less 
 impalpable becomes the imposition. Dionysius, for 
 example, was a master of rhetoric, and some of his 
 
348 ETHiCA : 
 
 speeches are framed with laborious skill, after the 
 manner of Demosthenes. The result is, the conviction 
 that they were spoken by those by whom the author 
 would represent them as being spoken, does not for one 
 moment linger on the mind of the least sagacious reader. 
 A deficiency of skiU, on the other hand, is equally fatal. 
 Thus, if we had not Caesar's own curt and mihtary 
 address, before the fight with ArioTistus, we should never 
 be imposed on by the eight pages, folio, of oratory which 
 Dion Cassius puts into his mouth. 
 
 The historical composition of modem times, when 
 contrasted with that of antiquity, presents a singular 
 exemption from the Hcences of fiction. In this depart- 
 ment of Hterature, at least, we yield to no age. Indeed, 
 the superiority of the modems over the ancients, in this 
 item, is as signal as the superiority of the ancients ia 
 matters of taste. History is more exact, and it is more 
 exact not only in the letter but in the spirit. "When 
 Dionysius said that history is philosophy, he was far 
 from reaUzing what is meant by the philosophy of 
 history. The material for supplying it did not yet exist 
 to any extent. Fiction was introduced to conceal the 
 want of fact, and, owing to the condition of traditional 
 evidence, fiction was sometimes accepted as fact. The 
 knowledge of one generation depended on the memory of 
 the preceding. It was easy, therefore, to impose where 
 it was so difficult to discriminate. In modern times the 
 great characteristic of history is its truthfulness and 
 authenticity. The possession of genuine documents at 
 once precludes the presence of the supposititious element. 
 As these documents accumulated, that element became 
 more and more ignored, and a writer who should now 
 return to the model of Guicciardini or Buchanan would 
 pass for a romancer. Thucydides complains with some 
 bitterness of the incorrect notions the men of his time 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 349 
 
 had even of such contiguously antecedent events as the 
 murder of Hipparchus. He blames them, with great 
 justice, for trusting without examination to traditional 
 report. Such a complaint would now be uncalled for, 
 because such a state of things would now be impossible. 
 The Record Office is a surety against it. Individual 
 curiosity is a surety against it too. Great indeed would 
 be the astonishment of an ancient historian at that 
 inquisitive faculty of our own day, against which nothing 
 seems proof, which penetrates into the charnel-houses 
 of the past, reanimates the dry bones of history, and 
 from the accumulated dusts of ages recovers and recon- 
 stitutes the broken fragments of evidence almost despaired 
 of, deciphers the musty diplomacy of courts, interprets 
 the whispers of the closet, republishes the noisy dehbe- 
 rations of the senate-house, and exposes, in aU their 
 natural preservation, the mysterious intrigues of the 
 innermost bedchamber. With such sources at his com- 
 mand the historian has no need of fictitious embellish- 
 ment to excite interest. His acquaintance with the 
 defanct dynasties of his country, though less dramatically 
 paraded, is far more intimate and special than that which 
 Herodotus has feigned with Croesus and Cambyses. He 
 can reahze the motives, habits, and very lineaments of 
 the great departed patriots and benefactors of his race as 
 vividly as Thucydides did those of Pericles. And he is 
 more familiar with its traitors and its scourges than 
 Sallust was with CataHne. No dialogue in Xenophon 
 has ever commanded such credit as those few sentences 
 which passed between the victim and his executioner on 
 the scaffold of More. No integral speech in Tacitus or 
 Livy presents half such trustworthy claims as the 
 shortest summary in Macaulay or Hume. At the same 
 time it must be owned that, if we have preserved the 
 matter, we have not preserved the manner. The sum- 
 
350 ethica: 
 
 maries of Macaulay and Hume are every whit as charac- 
 teristic of their authors as anything to be found in 
 Tacitus or Livy. 
 
 Oratory, like satire, is nourished by the disasters of 
 society. The stagnation of prosperous repose, the nurse 
 of every other art, is fatal to it. Like the genius in 
 Shakspeare, it thrives best in a tempest. Its element is 
 an atmosphere of ferment, and the greater the fermen- 
 tation, the more spiritual and refined its flavour. Thus 
 the period when eloquence at Athens was at its height, 
 was precisely the period when Athenian demorahzation 
 was most complete. While Athens was still the eye of 
 Greece, whUe her supremacy in arts and war and social 
 development was still unquestioned, the fame of her 
 eloquence was nowhere. At last the crisis came. CoaH- 
 tions were formed against her. Disunion prevailed 
 among her patriots. Distrust predominated among her 
 allies. Her tributaries insulted her. Her provinces 
 revolted from her. Her territories were ravaged. All 
 the vials of wrath seemed to be poured out upon her. 
 Her fleets, proud with the ancient fame of Salamis and 
 Mycale, fled before navies which, compared with her 
 own, were but as of yesterday. Her armies, once the 
 terror of the barbarians, languished in the quarries of 
 its Syracusan captors. Her free citizens were converted 
 into slaves, and the arms of the insolent conqueror were 
 hung up in the halls of the Imperial repubUc. Then it 
 was, in the gloomy setting of her material dominion, that 
 the sun of her eloquence dawned upon the ruins of her 
 falhng empire. And ere that dawn had burst forth into 
 the dazzling splendour of its noonday blaze, the cup of 
 suffering had been drunk to the very dregs. The sceptre 
 had passed away for ever. A despot fiercer than he of 
 Babylon had put his hand on the fair virginity of Grecian 
 civilization. The viceroy of a despot domineered over 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 351 
 
 the countrymen of Epaminondas and Pericles. Mace- 
 donian cohorts had claimed to be the legislators of the 
 Peloponnesus, and the sons of Peloponnesian sages and 
 heroes swelled the barbarous triumph of a Macedonian 
 king. It was then, in the midst of every calamity and 
 every degradation, in the expiring agony of her closing 
 gasp, that the accents of Demosthenes lent their awful 
 thunder to the scene. 
 
 The same phenomenon, produced by similar causes, 
 occurred Ukewise at Eome. The great repubUc of the 
 Scipios and the Gracchi had turned its hberty into 
 licence. Domestic and civil discord reigned in every 
 comer. Faction was pitted agaiast faction ; and family 
 against family. New phases of sedition were daily 
 calUng forth new laws. Demagogues and incendiaries 
 held the comitia and tribunals. The magistrates, brow- 
 beaten, despaired of the pubUc safety. There was no 
 justice in the forum ; no security in the senate. Such 
 were the worthless times that produced that noble race 
 of orators, of whose memory the world is still proud. 
 In such times each busy hour is a subject of declama- 
 tion for the orator. He takes stock of every opportunity. 
 A poUtical assault, a, riot, a libel, the smallest act of in- 
 civism, all are so much capital to him. It certainly is to 
 be regretted that the material necessary for the develop- 
 ment of oratory is to be found only in such times. But 
 that this is the natural law of oratory, its progress 
 throughout the world demonstrates. Demosthenes would 
 not have been known but for Philip. The oration for 
 Quinctius and Archias would never have made the repu- 
 tation of Cicero. It was not in the learned silence of an 
 academical nursery that Burke and Mirabeauwere rocked 
 and dandled into orators. It was no foriuitous associa- 
 tion that Unked the fame of Fox with the fortunes of 
 Washington. 
 
352 ethica: 
 
 The subsequent history of eloquence in Eome leads 
 more strongly to the same conclusion. The republic was 
 sacrificed. To the reign of turbulence had succeeded 
 that settled calm which generally follows the involuntary 
 suppression of the conflicting elements of popular mis- 
 government. The genius of liberty had, in fact, fled, 
 and with Kberty had gone, too, the genius of eloquence. 
 Any one who is . at the pains to compare the later 
 speeches of Cicero with his speeches during and before 
 his consulship, his speech for MarceUus, for instance, 
 with his speech against Cataline, or that for Ligarius 
 with that against Marc Antony, may discern without 
 difficulty the contrast in the tone of the two manners, 
 as representing the contrast in the temper of the two 
 periods. StiU later, that contrast became more and 
 more marked and insisted on by writers. Tacitus, if Taci- 
 tus be the author of the " Tract on Eloquence " usually 
 ascribed to him, laments with some degree of passion 
 the change ; and not without a ludicrous pathos deplores 
 the new narrow robe, the httle room, and the circum- 
 scribing hour-glass as indicative of the revolution which 
 had overtaken oratory. To govern a people unused to 
 tyranny in safety, it is necessary to govern them in 
 ignorance. The pubUc taste was therefore corrupted, in 
 order to ensure pubHc subordination. Invention was 
 turned iato less dangerous channels. Instead of high 
 questions of pohtics or ethics, questions which would 
 have been despised by the ingenious triflers of scholasti- 
 cism, about cases of magic, oracular responses, and step- 
 dames more unnatural than poets could make them, were 
 regularly discussed by becurled young declaimers who 
 would not for their reputations have called a pickled 
 herring or a buhush by their names. For the impas- 
 sioned themes with which Cicero shook the senate, were 
 substituted subjects which even the genius of Juvenal 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 353 
 
 has not caricatured. Indeed a general crusade set in 
 against Cicero, as against the orator of hberty. Every 
 young anti- Ciceronian who could stumble through a 
 book or two of Thucydides, called himself an Attic, and 
 sneered at the memory of the great orator as an Asiatic. 
 A sort of euphuism became the fashion at the court of 
 Augustus, analogous to that which reigned at the court 
 of our first James. Suetonius tells us that Augustus, 
 who affected to be a writer, was a professed enemy to 
 the ornamental diction of the preceding age. He tells 
 us that he introduced several improprieties into the Latin 
 tongue, and he gives us some whimsical particulars. 
 Maecenas, his minister, so far outdid his master, that the 
 latter laughed at him. All the mob of courtiers took 
 up the cry. The Greek rhetoricians, who swarmed at 
 Rome, readily took the side of the Attics. It has been 
 noticed that Horace does not once mention Cicero, and 
 Virgil without reserve gave up the palm of eloquence to 
 the Greeks. Quintilian tells us that the two Asinii 
 Polhones, father and son, attacked him with great acri- 
 mony, and that the younger PoUio wrote a book to prove 
 his father the better orator of the two. Such were the 
 twin fates of Oratory and of Rome. 
 
 If the revolutionary atmosphere of ancient States 
 gave ample opportunity for the development of eloquence, 
 it must be acbiowledged that no device was neglected to 
 make eloquence what it was, unsurpassed. The whole 
 system of national education, if it had any definite 
 object, seemed to propose to itself the creation of a breed 
 of national orators. There was no divorce between the 
 student and the man of eloquence. The Athenian boy 
 buried his silent head in no well-thumbed books. The 
 Athenian man spent no midnight oil in the solitary' 
 speculations of science or art. All his knowledge had 
 been gained orally. What he knew of history he had 
 
 23 
 
354 ethica: 
 
 learnt from the lips of men who had composed and acted 
 it. What he knew of philosophy he had acquired from 
 the living comments of sages who had propounded it. 
 In the course of his intellectual existence he had perhaps 
 heard with his own ears, and in the pubHd gathering of 
 his nation, the great traveller recount his wondrous tales 
 of Egyptian, and Babylonian story. Later in life he had 
 sat beneath the pahn-trees of the Academia, and listened 
 while the old man eloquent discussed, in the langTiage of 
 a god, on more than mortal truths. As time advanced 
 and the individual became absorbed into the citizen, the 
 taste which early culture had originated, the claims of 
 duty and self-defence confirmed. The capricious tyranny 
 of revolution might at any moment place him in the 
 dock before the Prytanes. To the motive of apprehen- 
 sion was superadded that of ambition. Every fear and 
 every hope, the enmity of the great, the malignity of the 
 poor, the flatteries of foreign potentates, the courtship of 
 domestic magistracies, the admiration of a crowd of 
 chents, the curule chair of the consul, these were the 
 stimulants to oratorical distinction. Nor was there any 
 difficulty of preferment. The saying of Hobbes, that a 
 democracy is an aristocracy of orators, subject to the 
 monarchy of a single orator, contains some truth, though 
 it is the truth decked in an invidious guise. The reason 
 is plain. Everything is done by dehberation, and every 
 one has an equal right of deliberation. The division of 
 labour is not marked as m a close government. The 
 general is a statesman, and both are necessarily orators. 
 In this state of things any one may hope to be a The- 
 mistocles or a Caesar, 
 
 As the demand for eloquence increased, the supplies 
 became greater. At length a division took place. 
 Oratory became a separate profession. Nor can it be 
 denied by this division oratory was improved. It was 
 
OB CHARACTERISTICS. 855 
 
 mucli more reasonable that a rhetor who should give llis 
 whole time to the practice of the trade, should turn out 
 a better commodity than a soldier Hke Themistocles. 
 But what oratory gained in quality it lost in morality. 
 The pursuit of eloquence became a pursuit of gain, and 
 the moment it becatne an affair of gain, it ceased to be 
 an affair of principle. The rhetoricians accordingly 
 betrayed aU the tactics of mercenary soldiers. Attached 
 to no individual convictions, without patty, without 
 patriotism, warm in language, cold in heart, like the 
 Free Lances of the Middle Ages, or like the professional 
 advocates of the French senate, they hired out theif 
 services from one faction to another, and even from one 
 eountty to another. Democrats to-day, aristocrats to- 
 morrow, pocketing the pay now of the demagogue of 
 Athens, now of the oligarch of Sparta, now of the 
 tyrant of Macedon, such were the Lysiases and Isocrates, 
 the Demadeses and ^schineses of the Athenian bema. 
 
 It is probably owing to the operation of a system like 
 this, combined with certain diverse features in criminal 
 legislation, that classical eloquence presents to the 
 modem student anomalies so offensive, and apparently 
 go irreconcileable. The laws were few, the judges werd' 
 many. Hence, instead of being the mere interpreters of 
 the law, they were invested with the office of legislators. 
 The business of the pleader was therefore manifest. The 
 study of eloquence was more necessary to him than the 
 study of jurisprudence. He felt no responsibility to 
 codes, and he dreaded no restraint from the wholesome 
 gUidalice of precedent. To prove the accused guilty, or 
 rathet to extract a verdict of guilty from the judges who 
 also sat as jurors, and to exaggerate his punishment, by 
 exaggerating his guilt, this was his object. To do this, 
 the most bitter invective, the semblance of personal 
 hatred, the subterfuge of political expediency, all those 
 
 23—2 
 
356 ETHiCA : 
 
 weapons, in a word, which the more impartial justice of 
 modern times denounces v/ith a vengeance, were the 
 common expedients. The only parallel, indeed, which 
 could be suggested in modem judicial investigation would 
 be found in some of the state trials of the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries. Some of the diatribes of 
 Lysias and Demosthenes wiU be found to be admirable 
 archetypes of that sort of judicial rhetoric, which passed 
 current before a Scroggs and a Jeffries. 
 
 Even the dehberative eloquence partook largely of 
 this vituperative character. The speeches of Demo- 
 sthenes and Cicero contain matter that would have made 
 even such furious adepts as Swift and Junius stare and 
 gasp. The fact may be accounted for and in part pal- 
 liated by the consideration that Cicero and Demosthenes 
 held the same position and fulfilled the same functions 
 in their society, that Swift and Junius did in the genera- 
 tion that belonged to them. There was no press. All 
 the medium of communication was oral discussion. 
 Discussion therefore discharged the offices of dissertation. 
 Political satire spoke in the objective guise of scenic 
 representation. Political speculation intruded itself at 
 every unseemly opportunity on the bema and the ros- 
 trum. The drama of Aristophanes did for the Sophists 
 what the more formal circulation of Butler's poems did 
 for the Puritans. Demosthenes— I refer to his forensic 
 efforts — sometimes pleaded in the style of a debate. 
 Lysias wrote lampoons. Isocrates composed pamphlets.* 
 
 The effects of the latitude allowed by the simplicity 
 of the laws were not dimmished by the multipUcity of 
 the judges; imagination, unconfined by the limits of 
 statutes and the letter of legal decisions, found full 
 scope for a free exercise. All the artifices of seduction 
 
 • It is but fair to say, that this happy characterization of the oratorical 
 productions of Isocrates, is due to Lord Monboddo. 
 
OB CHAEACTEEI8TICS. 357 
 
 were put in force. The Eoman, like the Grecian, was 
 a slave to his age. Effect to him was eyerything. The 
 objective features of oratory, the statuary, and the milli- 
 nery, were accordingly a potentiality in themselves. They 
 were half of conviction. The arrangement of posture 
 and dress assumed an importance which to us seems 
 frivolous. Cicero, on one occasion, reproaches Quintius, 
 as for a criminal act, for the folds of his robes floating 
 about his heels. With an audience but half reconciled 
 to the embroidered rhetoric of a brocaded beau, like 
 Bubb Dodington, the change of a familiar periwig might 
 interrupt the fascination of the studied phrase and the 
 courtier-Uke period.^ But none of his most violent 
 rivals ever thought of taunting Fox with the slovenly 
 carriage of his sword, or the dirtiness of his linen, or 
 impeacliing Grattan for the colour of his yellow gloves. 
 Quintilian has been inculpated for his laborious attention 
 to the study of attitudes in his " Institutes," Quintilian 
 was a generous man and a tolerably just critic. Though 
 a Eoman and at war with the Grecian rhetoricians, he 
 has a good word for all the classic authors of Greece, 
 compares Homer to Jupiter, apologizes for Demosthenes, 
 and speaks more highly than they deserved of Lysias 
 and Isocrates. He has been accused of flattery to 
 Domitian. But the truth is, he does not employ towards 
 Domitian one-half the fulsomeness of expression that an 
 Anglican divine did towards Charles II., and a French 
 divine towards Louis XIV. Those who blame him should 
 blame the system under which he wrote, and which he 
 denounces while he attempts to improve. When he teUs 
 his pupils how to direct the eyes and to hold the head, 
 what is the right management Of the eyehd and the 
 eyebrow, and what of the muscle of the cheek, how to 
 command the nose and lip, and when to show the teeth, 
 
 ' Cumberland's " Memoirs." 
 
358 bthica: 
 
 he is but paying obeisance to the temper of the times. 
 A course of oratorical tuition was no trifling matter to 
 a Roman youth. To learn how to sway his sides, to 
 slap his thigh, and stamp his foot, was as important as 
 that he should be nice in the choice of his words, 
 syllables, and even letters. It was not enough that 
 he should be able to define the difference between an 
 enthymema and an epichirema, a thesis and an hypo- 
 thesis, a trope and a figure; that he should be fully 
 acquamted with the five divisions of rhetoric, the three 
 kinds of causes, and the three kinds of states, it was 
 necessary .that he should be conversant with all the 
 technicalities of gesture, that he should be able to in- 
 terpret the language of the hand, that he should know 
 what position of the forefinger and thumb meant demon- 
 stration, what affirmation, and what argumentation ; that 
 he should be advised how to wear the bandage round 
 his legs, how to arrange the purple border of his angus- 
 ticlave, how to compose his hair, and to wipe the sweat 
 from his face. 
 
 In proportion to their artistic devotion, the judicial 
 audiences of antiquity were equally sensitive. A trial, 
 therefore, not unfrequently presented all the pathetic 
 contrivances of a drama. Waxen models, images, 
 pictures, and a hundred other childish devices that would 
 not now be tolerated in a theatre, formed the ordinary 
 decorations of a court. The objective genius of anti- 
 quity indeed is nowhere better illustrated than in their 
 legal proceedings. The contrast between the formahties 
 of the Old Bailey, or Westminster Hall, and those of 
 the Areopagus or the Forum, could, if mutually witnessed, 
 have produced in their respective audiences nothing but 
 mutual repulsion. An Enghshman can have but httle 
 sympathy with that sentimental justice that yields to 
 the exposure of a beautiful bosom, and melts into tears 
 
OE CHAEACTEBISTICS. 359 
 
 at the sight of a bloody cloak ov a gaping wound. A 
 Roman or a Grecian, on the other hand, would have 
 regarded with supreme disgust the impartial majesty of 
 that stem judicature which saw unpitied the weeping 
 children of Strafford, looked unmoved at the bleeding 
 loins of Lilburne, and laughed aloud at the impassioned 
 dagger of Burke. 
 
 Though oratory at Eome was naturally more proKfic 
 and its chances of survival greater, it has been the good 
 fortune of Grecian oratory, as far at least as quantity 
 goes, to justify its claims to a superior immortality. 
 The single name of Cicero comprehends almost the sole 
 pretensions of Italian eloquence to preservation, and 
 certainly constitutes its claims for excellence. If we 
 set Cicero against Demosthenes, we have no extant 
 names to oppose to ^schines, to Lysias, or Isocrates. 
 Had it been otherwise, had any of the great speakers 
 upon whose merits and defects Cicero has bequeathed 
 to us one of the most delightful pieces of antique 
 criticism that exists, been represented at the tribunal 
 of posterity, it is not unhkely that their reputation 
 would have been as completely absorbed in that of the 
 orator who has preserved their fame, as the reputation 
 of ^schines and his compeers has been in that of 
 Demosthenes. 
 
 With no author in antiquity have we a more famihar 
 acquaintance than we have with Cicero. And unhappily, 
 it may be added, no author has ever suffered more by 
 our famiharity. Of Demosthenes we know with certainty 
 little, and that httle is aU in his favour. The collection 
 of Cicero's letters which time has left us, forms a stereo- 
 scopic view of the writer's habits and disposition for the 
 purposes of characterization, unequalled in literature. 
 Perhaps the work that comes nearest to them in modern 
 times is the " Epistolary Essays " of Montaigne. As 
 
360 ETHiCA : 
 
 might be inferred, I have no affection for the character 
 of Cicero. He certainly is not a man after my heart. 
 Pkitarch, according to his fashion, has drawn an inge- 
 nious parallel in his destiny and that of Demosthenes. 
 He has confined it to their pohtical careers. There the 
 parallel begins, and there it most assuredly ends. Every- 
 thing else about them must be illustrated by contrast. 
 In their moral, as in their Hterary idiosyncrasies, they 
 are wide as the poles asunder. There was something 
 of the modern Greek in Cicero, tricky, time-serving, 
 and specious. There was something of the old Eoman 
 about Demosthenes, firm, patriotic, undaunted against 
 odds. The emphasis on the t6 Trpinov, which runs 
 through his works, seasoning and flavouring them with 
 an honest piquancy, is remarkable. His simpHcity, 
 indeed, belonged to the heroic ages. His generation 
 could not understand a man whose whole intelhgence 
 was exhausted in identifying the moral and the virtuous 
 with the political, or rather in substituting the one 
 motive for the other. It speaks well for his noble 
 rehance on, his hearty belief and confidence in the 
 better part of his nation. But, had it not been their 
 interest to appear disinterested, it is to be feared his 
 system would have damned him as a politician. That 
 the Thebans should forget their enmities and the Athe- 
 nians their defeat on moral grounds, was an idea that 
 could only have imposed on the sensitive soul of an 
 orator flattered by his own warmth into the conviction. 
 The arms of Philip had more to do with it than the 
 ethics of Demosthenes. With Cicero, on the other 
 hand, expediency, as a principle of action, was all in 
 all. A man so egotistic could have had no sublimer 
 rule of conduct. His egotism was, in truth, disgusting. 
 It certainly is better founded than that of Falstaflf; but 
 it is quite as intrusive. It insinuates itself at every 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 361 
 
 odd moment. When' it is not arrogant, it is affected. 
 When it does not strut, it creeps. The reader cannot 
 enjoy the familiar gossip of the letter-writer without 
 being interrupted by the purple of the Consul. We 
 never lose sight of the man who put Catahne to flight, 
 and saved the eapitol. The boast is doubtless justifiable, 
 and in a modest man would not have been without a 
 well-earned gracefulness. But Cicero had not a grain 
 of modesty in his whole composition. He was habitu- 
 ally vain, and everything that he said or did was adul- 
 terated by his vanity. His love of his country was of 
 a pecuhar kind. He certainly possessed it, but it was 
 not disinterested. He loved the welfare of his country 
 because it involved his own welfare. Its triumphs had 
 been his triumphs. All his personal glory had been 
 associated with the defeat of its enemies and the success 
 of its friends. Hence a less vain man than Cicero might 
 have imposed on himself, might have mistaken the real 
 motives of his patriotism. This self-delusion was all 
 that distmguished him for the better from the men who 
 would sooner have seen their country sink, provided 
 their mullet-ponds were safe. His selfishness leaks out 
 from a hundred little imprudent apertures in his corre- 
 spondence. It was by serving his country that he had 
 gained his authority in the senate-house, and his figure 
 at the bar. It was by continuing to serve his country 
 that he could avoid the mortification he so much dreaded, 
 that six hundred years hence Pompey should be better 
 known than himself. This dread of extinction displays 
 itself to a painful degree in his absence in Syria. Though 
 that government justly authorized his self-congratulation, 
 and the congratulation of his friends, he was miserable. 
 And why was he miserable ? Not because Pacorus had 
 crossed the Euphrates with an army of Parthians, but 
 because Cicero is determining causes at Laodicea while 
 
362 ethica: 
 
 Plotius is pleading in the Forum; not because Cicero 
 is at the head of two legions, but because Pompey is at 
 the head of an army. 
 
 His vanity made him the victim of every one who 
 took the pains to impose upon him. The solemn 
 trifler, Pompey, the astute Caesar, courted and won 
 him by turns. On the other hand, his busy diplomacy 
 gave him the semblance of imposing on others. He 
 flattered his flatterers. He fawned upon Cgesar. He 
 then fawned upon Caesar's murderer, Brutus, and next 
 he fawned upon Caesar's heir, Octavius. He flattered 
 Antony, yet he acknowledged it as a great omission 
 that Antony did not suffer on the Ides of March. . He 
 flattered Dolabella, though he could not refrain fi-om 
 owning that he hated him. A good deal of this incon- 
 sistency, I believe, must be put down to any other 
 feeling than that of deliberate villany. It was probably 
 a compound of that morbid sensibility that would have 
 urged Quinctius to falsify history, and that morbid fear 
 that attempted to urge Atticus to repudiate- one of his 
 early orations for him. He was always vaciUating between 
 a consideration for the safety of his life and a considera- 
 tion for the safety of his reputation. He fled as soon 
 as he thought it dangerous to remain. He returned as 
 soon as his friends ridiculed him for flying.^ His whole 
 conduct presents a strange divorce between the philo- 
 sopher and the statesman, between the man of letters 
 and the man of action. He wrote against glory, and 
 was the slave of it. He wrote about the philosophy 
 of consolation, and he was inconsolable. His affectation 
 of content indeed was marvellously strong, but it only 
 helped to render his discontent more palpable. Instead 
 of the consul who braved the daggers of Clodius, we 
 have nothing but a dejected old driveller, half stifled 
 
 ' Lib. 16, iii. Ep. ~~ ' 
 
OE CHABACTEEISTICS. 363 
 
 with rheum and tears,- and half choked with cursing 
 the day of his own birth. He would not be comforted. 
 Never was a man oppressed with such a weight of cala- 
 mity. Never had a man more reason to wish for death- 
 He would not see his brother, because he would not have 
 his brother see his inexpressible misery. Yet in the 
 midst of aU-this the assumption of the man is mai/el- 
 lous. The expressions remind me of Bolingbroke, as 
 indeed they must remind anybody who ever compared 
 the letters to Atticus with the letter to Pope. He had 
 given up the world. He intended to study, to bequeath 
 himself to pliilosophy, to the nine Muses.* Indifference 
 was a greater comforter than hope, He had no curiosity 
 left. Though each remove from Eome extracted a more 
 pitiable protest, and the courier who did not bring a 
 letter fall of gossip from his friend, was sure to take 
 back one full of complaint and remonstrance. The 
 least change in fortune rouses him. The repeal of his 
 banishment puts him into the other extreme. In an 
 instant all his resolutions are gone. The tears are 
 dried up. Sunshine peeps out on the face that had 
 relinquished hope, And in a little while no one can 
 trace the philosopher or the exile in the correspondent 
 who fiUs his letters with dehrious accounts how all 
 Brundusium rang with acclamations at his approach; 
 how aU Eome, whose greeting was worth having, turned 
 out to greet him ; how the gates of the city aud the 
 stairs of the public temples, up to the very capitol, 
 thronged with shouting masses, eager to welcome the 
 " Father of his country." 
 
 Demosthenes is egotistic. But his. is an egotism of 
 another kind from Cicero's. It was singularly unobtru- 
 sive and timid. He says himself that the mere thought 
 of talking of oneself made him shrink as from a vulgar 
 
 ' Ep. V. 
 
364 ethica: 
 
 and offensive artifice/ Only once does he recapitulate 
 his past services to his country, and that was for the 
 purpose of authorizing and justifymg a renewed offer of 
 service. What he had said on former occasions would 
 make them appreciate better what he had to say now. 
 And if there is any vanity in the instances he proceeds to 
 enumerate, his conclusion would more than apologize for 
 it. It at once expresses the modesty and the high sense 
 of morahty of Demosthenes. If he had shown greater 
 foresight in these instances of his, he meant not to boast. 
 He ascribed it to no superior sagacity of his own. There 
 were but two sources by which he pretended to anticipate 
 the future — fortune, that beats the" ingenuity of man, and 
 contradicts his expectations, and an honest and just esti- 
 mate of things, which kept the obscuring filth of lucre 
 from his political discernment. 
 
 In the literary merits of the two great actors there 
 is a still greater contrast. Quintilian's criticism, that 
 nothing can be added to Cicero, nothing can be taken 
 from Demosthenes, is one of those vague, unmeaning 
 antitheses that sometimes disfigure criticism. It has 
 been a great favourite ; and if I recollect rightly, it has 
 been pilfered by a great critic of the last century to 
 distinguish the characteristics of Dryden and Pope. To 
 extract any positive idea of their oratorical excellence 
 from it, to arrive even at any comparative dimensions of 
 their intellectual stature, would be impossible. It would 
 be just as possible to ascertain the physical proportions 
 of two men, one of whom should be depicted as taller 
 than Tom Thumb, and the other not so tall as the 
 Norfolk Giant. Though QuintiHan's criticism is thus 
 defective, it would be scarcely worth while at this late 
 hour to supply its deficiencies. The style of the two 
 authors varies with their characters. Cicero the pleader 
 
 ' Or. to Peace. 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 365 
 
 is Cicero the consul still — ^the man who loves to hear his 
 name echoed in the market-place, the official enamom-ed 
 of the gewgaws of office, the flatteries of obsequious 
 clients, the plaudits of a wondering senate. Every 
 startUng turn, every happy repartee, is evidently intended 
 as a personal demonstration, an affidavit of ability on the 
 part of the speaker. Like the language of Bayes, his 
 language aims at elevating and surprising. The atten- 
 tion of the hearer is at once attracted from the matter to 
 the man. His complaint that Demosthenes did not fiU 
 his ears suggests at once his own tastes and Demo- 
 sthenes' manner. In the dazzHng fence of rhetoric he 
 was far more scientific than the Grecian. He uses every 
 fence that art supplies with dihgent dexterity. Indeed, 
 he may be said not so much to have fulfilled the rules of 
 art as to have multipHed or created them. If critics 
 have drawn their scientific terms and definitions from 
 Aristotle, it is from the magazine of Cicero's works they 
 have taken their exempUfications. Demosthenes could 
 never have supplied Quintilian with the illustrative mate- 
 rial of his richly-illustrated treatise. To Demosthenes, 
 indeed, the command of the witty and pathetic, and 
 consequently the command of aU those postures and 
 turns which the witty and pathetic supply, and which 
 make the deepest impression on the modern reader, was 
 denied by the laws or the prejudices of his country. 
 
 But, had it been otherwise, I doubt if they were 
 genial to his peculiar mental constitution. There is but 
 one instance of anything approaching to facetiousness 
 that I recoUect in all his works, and that is too bad 
 to excite the mirth of even the best-humoured Tory. It 
 occurs in the " Embassy." -^schines, who had been 
 accused of corruption, rebuked the violent attitude of 
 one of his accusers by a reference to the statue of Solon, 
 who was represented as speaking with his hand deco- 
 
866 • ethica: 
 
 rously folded under his mantle. The raillery lies in 
 Demosthenes' retort, "Not to speak with the hand 
 folded, but to execute your embassage with the hands 
 folded, that is your duty." Demosthenes' style was, in 
 fact, a business one. Various and diversified, free from 
 aU mannerism, it would be almost impossible to parody 
 it. In the texture of its members it is a model of sim- 
 phcity and chastity. It is not impossible to find whole 
 orations where there is not a single prominent epithet. 
 This barrenness of diction is compensated for by the 
 marvellous arrangement of the words. Move them, and 
 you break the charm. The rhythm is the sense. You 
 destroy not only the ring of the sentence, but its signifi- 
 cance. You not only diminish the verbal force of the 
 expression, you enervate the tatensity of the meaning. 
 Of no modern orations can this be said, unless it be of 
 some of the orations in Milton. The similarity of struc- 
 ture, indeed, in the compre'hensive, long, and paren- 
 thetical sentences, may be something more than fanciful, 
 when it is remembered to what expedients the Grecian 
 resorted to lengthen his wind, and that Garrick confessed 
 himself unable to pronounce the periods of the English 
 poet. 
 
 It is very far from true, however, that Demosthenes 
 is destitute of aU the ornaments of oratory. His 
 speeches abound in the happiest figures. The " Olyn- 
 thiacs" especially are fertile in metaphors, analogies, 
 and similes. The famous comparison of the Cloud, on 
 which his admirers love to dwell, has only been sur- 
 passed, I think, by the Great Black Cloud of Burke.^ 
 Nothing is to be found in Cicero so imposing as the 
 sublime invocation of the heroic spirits of Marathon." 
 For modem oratory, no room is left for such invocations. 
 They died out with the kindly superstition of the pagan 
 ' Speech on Nabob of Arcot's Debts. 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 367 
 
 theogony. If they linger anywhere in any effectiveness, 
 it is in the eloquence of Roman CathoHc senates. With 
 Protestantism they lose half their force, by having lost 
 all their credit. Talon, invoking on his knees the spirit 
 of St. Louis to look down with compassion on his divided 
 parliaments, and Pitt invoking the genius of the British 
 Constitution, are as different in nature as the concrete 
 and the abstract. In minute painting, in historical 
 characterization, Demosthenes is undoubtedly deficient. 
 What he has left us in that manner, however, speaks 
 rather against his inclination than his ability. The 
 scene in the city, on the seizure of Elatea by Philip, and 
 the banquet scene in the house of Xenophon, are given 
 with all the vivid colouring and the realizing skiU of Hero- 
 dotus. The comparison of ^schines to a fracture or 
 sprain, most prominent where the body is most diseased, 
 is at once a happy sarcasm and a nice analogy. 
 
 Hume, in contrasting the austere, rational manner of 
 Demosthenes with the rhetorical and richly-decorated 
 style of Cicero, has hesitated at the apparent incoti- 
 sistency involved by the distinctive character of the 
 separate audiences. He is puzzled that the rhymes, the 
 pUns, the jingleS, and a^^. the artifices of wit and pathos 
 should have been bestowed on the refined assemblies of 
 Rome; and the vehement reasoning, the chastened 
 harmony, be reserved for the lowest vulgar of Athens. 
 The fact is, it is precisely because the Roman assembhes 
 were more refined than the Grecian, that the oratory of 
 the Roman speaker was more effective. Ratiocination is, 
 generally speaking, thrown away on a cultivated audience, 
 where the common sense of the common people demands 
 and yields to it. Its own reasons are generally founded 
 on acute discrimination, and are therefore less likely to 
 be moved by the reason of another. Its principles are. 
 prejudices, and its prejudices are seldom amenable to the 
 
368 ETHicA : 
 
 mere external influence of argument. It is not so with 
 its passions and its sensibilities. Cultivated as it is, it 
 has by its very culture become the victim of its tastes. 
 Conviction, therefore, is to be come at through its feel- 
 ings. "Where it would despise an enthymeme, it sur- 
 renders to a trope. Caesar would never have absolved 
 Deiotanes against his fixed resolution, had the Oration 
 , for Deiotanes contained simply all the subtlety of Lysias. 
 The effect of Burke's appeal to the imagination of his 
 hearers, as he detailed to them, scene after scene, the 
 desolating tyranny of Warren Hastings — ^the murders, 
 the desecrations, the confiscations — is well known. It is 
 equally well known what was the effect on the same class 
 of hearers of his argumentative efforts, the elaborate 
 reasonings, the profound philosophy, and the laborious 
 historical illustrations. 
 
 To return to Demosthenes. In comparing his juri- 
 dical with liis deliberative pieces, we are at once struck 
 with his superior self-adaptability over his Eoman rival. 
 Cicero's style is always uniform. Whatever be the natm'e 
 of his subject, he is always on stilts. In the private 
 orations of Demosthenes we come at once on a new 
 manner. In that against Androtion, and in that against 
 Leptines, for example, we look in vain for the author of 
 the "Embassy" and the "Crown." The copiousness, 
 the force, and the grandeur are exchanged for a simple, 
 temperate, and rational conciseness. In point of legal 
 assimilation, the orations of the Greek master come 
 nearer to modern models than those of Cicero. The 
 causes why legal arguments, and the observance of legal 
 forms, especially at Rome, were so lax, have been already 
 hinted at ; and though Cicero himself complains of the 
 ridiculous arrogance of the illiterate swaggerers that loiter 
 about the courts of justice and the tribunals of the proc- 
 tors, ready to undertake any suit, however intricate, of 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 369 
 
 guardianship, agnation, circumluvions, wills, or property, 
 his own pleadings predicate no necessary acquaintance 
 with prescriptive laws. This renders the likeness be- 
 tween his forensic and his political efforts more con- 
 spicuous. In Demosthenes it is otherwise, though even 
 in Demosthenes there are anomalies, sometimes ludicrous 
 and sometimes criminal, which stand out from the other- 
 wise equable canvas, and mar the general resemblance. 
 The speech against Midias, for example, whether de- 
 livered or not, is read with tolerable complaisance, till a 
 sudden regret on the part of the speaker, that he had no 
 children to produce before the jury, shocks our pro- 
 priety, and the production of a categorical table of the 
 defendant's misdeeds since his childhood confirms the 
 revulsion. 
 
 No sketch of ancient oratory, I am well aware, could 
 have any pretensions to completeness without a more 
 than casual reference to one department almost confined 
 to ancient oratory, that of epideictic eloquence. It is, 
 however, for this very reason, that a casual reference is 
 inadequate to its treatment, that I must leave it un- 
 touched. 
 
 In passing on to a survey of modern oratory, it is 
 found that the law which regulated the development of 
 ancient eloquence, and which gave to Longinus his proud 
 contrast between the elocutional fame of despotic Persia 
 and free Hellas, has never ceased to operate. Freedom 
 still assists her foster-chUd ; and if we would watch its 
 growth to matured vitaUty, if we would sit by its cradle 
 and admire its manhood, it is to the land of freedom that 
 we must recur, the land of Magna Charta and the Bill of 
 Rights. 
 
 In tracing the harmonious development of our liberty 
 and our eloquence, it must be acknowledged that our 
 liberty once lisped. The intentions of its early cham- 
 
 24 
 
370 BTHicA : 
 
 pions were superior to their utterance. They were men 
 of deeds, not words, as men who could not decipher their 
 Psalter were likely to be^ The language was such as 
 became them, curt, matter-of-facSt, and to the purpose, 
 more like the language of lawyers than legislators. A 
 rough remonstrance against some fresh usurpation of the 
 prerogatiye, or a categorical schedule of grievances drawn 
 up in the unembossed diction of a notary or a clerk, was 
 the extent of Parliamentary rhetoric* At length, the 
 sudden spread of classical learning consequent on the 
 Renaissance, and the spread of bibUcal literature con- 
 sequent on the Reformation, displayed a twofold influence, 
 at once classical and rehgious, on its character. It passed 
 at once from one extreme to the other, from excess of 
 simplicity to excess of pedantry. Hitherto the pedantry 
 had been left to some sage bishop or chancellor, big with 
 the grandeur of the Painted Chamber and the learned 
 import of his Latin thesis. Now every honest burgess 
 tried to exhibit his little stock of letters, and brought 
 his Aristotle or his Plato to bear against a ques- 
 tion of usury as readily as the theologian brought his 
 St. Augustine or St. Ambrose in support of church 
 attendance.^ Henry VIH. is Hannibal and the Good 
 Shepherd, a Solomon for justice, a Samson for strength, 
 and an Absalom for beauty.^ Sometimes the speaker 
 indulges in as many conceits as an ode of Cowley. 
 " The great world," we are told, " contains three several 
 divisions— the divine world, thd celestial world, and the 
 terrestrial world ; man, a microcosm, a little world, has 
 also three parts — a head, a heart, and inferior members. 
 After the likeness of these is the EngKsh Constitution 
 framed. The King is the head. The Peers the body. 
 The Commons the rest of the machine." The Marian 
 orators are at their wit's end for te rms to designate the 
 
 ' 755, " Pari. Hist." ^"527^ 
 
OE CHABACTEEISTIQS. 371 
 
 enactments of their predecessors. They are Draco's 
 laws ; they are the laws of a more cruel Dionysius. 
 Under Elizabeth the records of Parliamentary oratory 
 increase in dignity. One great name among her coun- 
 cillors begins to fecite a more than ordinary curiosity. 
 Bacon spoke as he wrote. In his speeches, indeed, such 
 as we have them, he does not altogether appear the 
 searching philosopher and the ingenious inquirer that he 
 does in his writings. But the manner in both is the 
 same, cogent yet fluent, and with a certain sententious 
 amplitude of diction that betokens a mind easily stimu- 
 lated and easily controlled. There is far more imagiua- 
 tiveness in his earlier speeches than there is in his earlier 
 writings. His speech on the Bill for Suppressing Abuses 
 in Weights and Measures is singularly playful, lively, 
 and animated. It perhaps can hardly be expected that 
 in a court Hke that of James I.j whei'e a quibble was a 
 test of loyalty, and pedantry a test of good breeding, that 
 he should have escaped the infection. His later speeches 
 and addresses are accordingly disfigured with aU the 
 fashionable vice. One expression is so comic^ in that 
 saddest of biographical documents j the " Submission to 
 the Lords," that even the seriousness of the occasion can- 
 not restrain a smile. " I hopej" he says, " I may justify 
 myself with Job, that I have not concealed my sin, as did 
 Adam, nor hid my faults in my bosom. It rests, there- 
 fore, that without Jig -leaves, I make confession and 
 acknowledgmetit."^ Ben Jonson's description of Lord 
 Bacon as an orator must be accepted with qualifications, 
 Such a speaker must always have possessed an undue 
 influence on such a listener: " His languages where he 
 could spare, or pass by a jest^ was nobly censorious. No 
 man ever spake more neatly^ more pressly, more weightily^ 
 or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. 
 
 ■~ ' > 1238. 
 
 24—2 
 
372 ETHicA : 
 
 No member of his speech, but consisted of his oym graces. 
 His hearers could not cough or look aside from him with- 
 out loss. He commanded when he spoke, and had his 
 judges angry and pleased at his devotion. The fear of every 
 man that heard him was, lest he should make an end."^ 
 
 The settlement of the new religious regulation 
 opened up the sluices of history, and afforded unusual 
 opportunity for the fluency of debate. The doctrmal 
 questions that continually arose gave, in particular, novel 
 stimulants to theological oratory. Perhaps at no other 
 time has the Episcopal Bench displayed greater rhetorical 
 pretensions. The speech of the Bishop of Chester, and 
 that of the Archbishop of York, on the Act of Supre- 
 macy, are elaborate and erudite attempts. To understand 
 their claims, they must be ranked in the same class with 
 those profound and original historical treatises which have 
 sometimes marked the political discussion of great consti- 
 tutional questions, with the speech of Whitelocke, for 
 instance, on changing the old law style from French 
 into English, and the speech of Somers on the Abdica- 
 tion question. 
 
 The Rebelhon came, and with it set in a strong con- 
 trast. High and fundamental questions, affecting the 
 basis of society, left no room for ceremonious trifling. 
 The peculiar characteristics of the movement imparted 
 a strong impress to the oratory. It was unquestionably 
 the oratory of the undisciplined, but of the impassioned, 
 of men more earnest in the expression of their feehngs 
 than choice in the selection of their language. They 
 spoke as the spirit within gave them utterance. The 
 mouth spake out of the fulness of the heart. Their 
 speech was fervent and excited. It retained, therefore, 
 the features of fervour and great agitation, an ungraceful, 
 entangled, disorderly dialect ; a strange gibberish of 
 ' Discourses : " De Claris Oratoribus." 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 373 
 
 political philosophy and religion, fooUshness to the Jews, 
 and to the Greeks a stumhling-block, but full of signi- 
 ficance to the inspired lips that uttered it, needing no 
 interpreter to the enraptured ears that listened to it. 
 
 The period dating from the Kestoration to the Revolu- 
 tion is for the purposes of oratorical illustration compara- 
 tively barren. The political reputation of such names as 
 Clarendon, Shaftesbury, Somers, and Halifax have well 
 nigh absorbed their oratorical fame. The period was, 
 however, the birth-time of debate — of that bastard com- 
 position, a httle less than oratorical, and a little more 
 than colloquial, which requires an ' attentive ear rather 
 than a laborious memory, and a ready tongue rather 
 than an eloquent one. But though the science of debate 
 was developed by artists whose skill has never been 
 excelled, there are no really distinguished orators, with 
 the exception, perhaps, of Halifax, till the appearance of 
 the briUiant and versatile Bolingbroke. What Boling- 
 broke's oratory was, we have nothing whereby to form a 
 decision. Pitt thought the discovery of one of his speeches 
 a greater boon than the discovery of any extinct piece of 
 antiquity. I thiak, however, it may be said generally 
 what it was not. It was not very argumentative; nor 
 apt to descend into particulars, or to take refuge in 
 statistics ; neither abusively personal, nor bombastically 
 egotistic. This I judge, partly from the style of his 
 works, partly from the temperament of the speaker, and 
 partly from the characteristics of the age in which the 
 speaker lived. Those who are familar with the debates 
 of the period will readily recognize what those charac- 
 teristics were. There was, in fact, and properly speaking, 
 no debating. There was much fine declamation, abun- 
 dant indulgence in tropes and repartees, an infinite deal 
 of nothing in a word, but no logical exposition of views. 
 The truth is, the logical part was done out of doors. If 
 
374 ETHiCA : 
 
 a minister wanted to convince his party, forthwith some 
 pamphlet, bearing the title of the "Crisis," or the "Con- 
 duct of the Allies," took the understanding of the town 
 by storm. By this arrangement sufficient room was left 
 for a course of study in the graces of oratory within 
 doors. The requirements of this education are best told 
 in the language of one of its most accomphshed disciples. 
 Here is Chesterfield's receipt for making a speaker : 
 " Take of common sense quantum suffidt, and a little 
 appHcation to the rules and orders of the House." 
 Throw obvious thoughts in a new Ught, and make up the 
 whole with a large quantity of purity and elegance of 
 style. Graceful utterance pleases their "eyes and ears, 
 but strong reason is thrown away upon them."* This 
 was no fanciful article merely inserted to gratify a fanci- 
 ful system of sesthetics. It was advice earned from 
 experience. He had himself, he tells us, when he first 
 entered the House, felt a certain awe upon him. But 
 that feeling soon vanished when a better acquaintance 
 discovered to him that out of aU the five hundred and 
 sixty who heard him, not above thirty could understand 
 reason, all the rest having ears to hear, but no sense to 
 judge. He had seen some of the shallowest wits of his 
 day triumph over sohd genius, and he had seen genius 
 descend, perforce, to the artifices of mediocrity. Lord 
 Chancellor Cowper was a man well worthy to be ranked 
 in the latter category ; but if we are to credit Chester- 
 field's testimony. Lord Cowper's strength as an orator 
 lay in the weakness of his reasons, and the charms of his 
 elocution.^ The Duke of Argyle was notorious for the 
 flimsy poverty of his arguments ; but he was notorious, 
 too, for being the most pleasing speaker of his day. "He 
 charmed, he warmed, he ravished his audience." Lord 
 Townshend, on the contrary, never spoke but he spoke to 
 
 ' " Chesterfield's Works," vol. ii. p. 356. » Ibid. vol. ii: p. 368. 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 375 
 
 the point, "materially, with argument and knowledge;" 
 and, as a consequence. Lord Townshend "never pleased." 
 Eloquence then, and for half a century after, compre- 
 hended literally the art of elocution, and comprehended 
 nothing more. " When you enter the House," writes 
 that accomplished master of ceremony we have just been 
 quoting, " you will be ranked only according to your 
 eloquence, and by no means according to your matter. 
 Your sole business will be to shine, not to weigh. 
 Manner is all in all." ^ A man who should have had the 
 courage to despise that fashionable ghbness of tongue,. 
 
 " The flowers of Bubo, and the flow of Yonge," 
 
 must have endured the mortification of addressing empty 
 benches. Burke "thought of convincing," and the effect 
 on his hearers is the theme of verse and prose. 
 
 The contrast in the latter style of oratory does not 
 need exemphfication. The cause of the change is easily 
 explained. The analytic mind of Cicero explained it two 
 thousand years ago, when he wrote, " Mirahile cum pltt- 
 rimum infaciendo intersit inter doctum et rudem, qimm non 
 multum differat in judicando." ^ No man hopes now to 
 carry a favourite measure by personal philippics, or 
 general appeals to first principles. He has to deal with 
 a class of men who care nothing for execution, or for the 
 artifices of style with which an argument may be stated, 
 but who have a wonderful faculty in judging and ap- 
 preciatjing the conclusion. He reasons, therefore, and 
 reasons his best, because he knows that ere twelve hours 
 are past his reasons will be weighed and commented on 
 with logical acumen by a hundred thousand eyes. The 
 corollary from this state of things is plain. Oratory must 
 more and more lose that smell of the lamp which Pytheas 
 cast in the teeth of Demosthenes. The interval that at 
 present separates the ornate declamation of antiquity, more 
 
 ' " Chesterfield's Works," toI. ii. p. 116. ' "De Oratore," iii. 51. 
 
376 ethica: 
 
 especially of Eoman antiquity, from the modem debate 
 must become wider and wider. The style of dehberative 
 oratory must degenerate more and more into the sim- 
 plicity and barrenness of practical colloquy. The statuary 
 of oratory may still be cultivated, but the poetry and the 
 music must decline. Quintilian would be as useless 
 among us as Dr. Blair. A debater has but little chance 
 of retouching his efforts like Cicero, and but Httle need 
 for a portfolio of proems such as those that the great 
 Grecian kept by him. It is only in times of pohshed 
 idleness, or of passionate fermentation, when the demands 
 of practical business can yield to the seductions of great 
 abstract questions — only in a country where the harmonics 
 of political economy are more studied than its arithmetic, 
 or only among a people ready to take rhetoric in the 
 room of argument, more willing, ia fine, to be persuaded 
 than convinced— that a public character need fly for aid 
 to pebbles and pitch-pipes.^ 
 
 ' I giye two specimens of the deliberative oratory of the period over 
 which my remarks are supposed to extend. The first specimen shall be 
 taken from one extremity of the epoch, the second from the other extremity. 
 Both are taken from reputed masters in the art. This is the style, and these 
 are the arguments, with which AVhigs like Burnet (vol. vi. 156) would have 
 dissuaded Tories like Harley from concluding a peace at Utrecht in defiance 
 of the Allies : " Man was made after the image of God, the God of all 
 truth, as we know who is the father of lies. Fidelity to engagements is 
 therefore based on the ground that God hates the deceitfiil man in whose 
 mouth there is no faithfulness ; that in the less perfect religion of the Jews, 
 when the Gibeonites had, by a fraudulent proceeding, drawn Joshua and the 
 Israelites into a league with them, it was sacredly observed, and the viola- 
 tion of it severely punished ; that when the last of the kings of Judah 
 shook off the fidelity to which he had bound himself to the king of Babylon, 
 the prophet thereupon said with indignation, ' Shall we break the oath of 
 God and prosper ? ' " and then he runs off into the double-dealings of popes, 
 and the moral maxims of Grotius and Pufi'endorf. I turn from the political 
 homilist to the metaphysical politician. Here is a casual extract from that 
 fine, that incomparable speech of Burke, on the conciliation of America :— 
 " In every arduous enterprise we consider what we are to lose as well as 
 what we are to gain ; and the more and better stake of liberty every people 
 possess, the less they will hazard in a vain attempt to make it more. These 
 are the cords of man. Man acts from adequate motives relative to his 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 377 
 
 With Bolingbroke's parliamentary decease there was a 
 sudden lull in oratory, prolonged far into the reign of the 
 second Hanoverian king. Not that this lengthened period 
 was without its good speakers. The names of Wyndham, 
 of Carteret, of Pulteney, and of Walpole might well re- 
 deem the reputation of any period. It is only in juxtaposi- 
 tion with the more brilliant constellations of the brilliant 
 epoch that immediately succeeded, that such lights be- 
 come obscure. The characteristics of the oratory were 
 pedantry and invective. It would be difficult to find in 
 the oratorical annals of any age or country a spirit so pug- 
 nacious, enunciated by a tongue so licentious. To arrive 
 at anything approaching the criminative fury with which 
 Pulteney attacked Walpole, or Walpole attacked Pulteney, 
 we must pass on to the times of G-rattan and Flood. The 
 eloquence of the Rotunda was at that date a strange com- 
 pound of ferocity and intelligence. With something of the 
 patriotic wisdom of an antique senate, it combined the 
 manners of a bear-garden. In truth, the practical wisdom 
 of the Legislature was strangely interpenetrated by the 
 moral code of highwaymen. It certainly would take less 
 time to enumerate the names of the members of that illus- 
 trious body who had not left the lobby with a challenge in 
 their pockets, or been bound over to keep the peace on the 
 very benches where they broke it, than it would to men- 
 tion those who had. The long supremacy of Walpole, and 
 the daring originality of some of his measures, irritated an 
 opposition singularly strong in rhetorical apphances. The 
 style of the " Craftsman " and the " Occasional Writer " 
 was imported into Parliament. Similes, quotations, and 
 
 interest, and not on metaphysical speculations. Aristotle, the great master 
 of reasoning, cautions us, and with great propriety, against this species of 
 delusive geometrical accuracy in moral arguments, as the most fallacious of all 
 sophistry," &c. &c. It would be difficult to decide which reference in the 
 two extracts is more out of place, the appeal to the llehrew or the Greek 
 ethicist. 
 
378 ETHicA : 
 
 parallels from old story, as trite as those which amuse 
 an American Congress, where a speech on the Oregon 
 question has been supplied from the " Odyssey," ^ crowded 
 every attack against ministers. Sir Robert himself was 
 sometimes Dudley or Empson, sometimes a more wicked 
 and blasphemous Leo X.,* sometimes Sir Epicure Mam- 
 mon,^ sometimes a wretched empiric dosing the British 
 Constitution into the grave. The taste for metaphor was 
 siugularly strong, and has been noticed casually by the ge- 
 nerally keen-sighted Horace Walpole. The eighth volume 
 of the "Parliamentary History" affords some curious illus- 
 trations of this habit. In the debate in the Commons on 
 the Address to the King, on the opening of the fifth 
 session of the seventh ParUament, no less than four con- 
 secutive speakers of eminence close their speeches with 
 similes so ingeniously far-fetched, and so laboriously 
 applied, that they would not have misbecome the court of 
 James I. One example is given, and, as it is by no 
 means the worst of the series, a fair judgment may be 
 formed of the oratory which tolerated it. " Our late 
 affairs resemble a set of quiet, honest country-folk got 
 into a country dance, who get through their dance with a 
 great deal of ease and alacrity, until a turbulent, noisy 
 fellow intrudes among them, who immediately forced 
 himself into the dance, and made such a noise, that such 
 a one was out, and such a one not right, such a step out 
 of tune, and such a turn not according to rule, that they 
 could not go on with the dance ; but then at last they 
 resolved to turn this troublesome fellow out, and they all 
 went on quietly and easy as they had done before."* On 
 the whole, the speeches of Walpole's time are chequered 
 compositions. Their beauties are generally fragmentary. 
 
 ' The perpetrator was Mr. Benton. The representatives for Boston, the 
 American Athens, are, I believe, much given to this affectation. 
 = 1190. ' 1300. 1 880. 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 879 
 
 They recall those poetical pieces current in France in 
 Malherhe's time, where a few pretty lines, called by the 
 critics " passage-verses," stand out from a very dead 
 level of mediocrity. 
 
 Such, on a hasty view, had been the process by which 
 English oratory attained its Attic climax. Eloquence 
 had, doubtless, never been without its representatives, 
 its long hne of ancestors, its gallery of heroic portraits. 
 Single and individual speeches still survive in the musty 
 records of the Parliamentary debates that might fairly 
 challenge the masterpieces of Chatham. But at no 
 period before Chatham's time had there been so universal 
 an incorporation of the man of business with the man of 
 wit. Chesterfield, as we have seen, was so struck with 
 the preponderance of the latter feature, that he saw in it 
 the extinction of the former. It is all manner, he wrote, 
 and no substance. Purity of diction, harmony of periods, 
 and elegance of style were the instructions he gave to his 
 son. He himself was without doubt a proficient. There 
 is in his speeches a Pharisaical purity, a ceremonial neat- 
 ness peculiar to the best-bred man and the most fastidious 
 taste of his age. They were light, agreeable, ingenious 
 essays, such as he might have written for the "World" 
 or for "Fog's Journal;" and, if they were Kstened to 
 with the same satisfaction with which they are read, must 
 have been eminently successful. It is almost needless to 
 add, that they bear without disguise the stamp of the 
 most elaborate preparation. It must be owned that 
 there was much in the objective features of the prevailing 
 oratory to lead Chesterfield to his depreciatory decision. 
 He needed not to have told us that one young member 
 was caught through the keyhole of his door practising 
 rhetoric by the glass, to convince us that very unusual 
 emphasis was placed on both the statuary and the 
 music of oratory. AU that we know of the greatest 
 
380 ETHiCA : 
 
 orator of the day, tends to convince us that he was also 
 the greatest actor of his day. 
 
 Neither Demosthenes who embodied the idea, nor 
 Cicero who strove to carry it out, nor any EngKsh orator, 
 ever realized so completely the philosophy of action as 
 Chatham. What distinguished him above his fellows 
 was this, his purely physical influence over the audience. 
 Nature had moulded him an orator. His voice was both 
 clear and rotund. The shghtest whisper could be heard 
 above the hum of chatterers ; and when he raised his 
 tone to an elevated pitch, it startled the distant loungers 
 of the lobbies. The cornet of cavalry had not been 
 without its use to the statesman. His figure, erect by 
 nature, and rendered more commanding by discipline, 
 maintained an air of grandeur and inflexibihty that rarely 
 or never was relaxed. In moments of passion, there was 
 something of the Sibyl on her tripod about him. The 
 oldest member or the hardiest wit quailed before "the 
 terrors of his beak and the lightning of his eye." Every- 
 thing about him, his language, his manners, his virtues, 
 and even his vices, were on a scale of sublimity, some- 
 times bordering on the confines of the ridiculous. The 
 slightest indiscretion might imperil the efiect, and this 
 indiscretion Chatham was now and then guilty of. On 
 such occasions, even his friends could not repudiate the 
 niclmame of Comedian for him. A certain facility of 
 feigning intense feeling facihtated this theatrical display. 
 Was he summoned to deliver up the seals, he burst into 
 tears at the feet of the king. Did he attend a state 
 drawing-room, he bowed so low that the courtiers 
 laughed at the hooked nose that peered through his legs. 
 Even his infirmities were turned to account, and more 
 than once a touch of pathos or a feUcitous stroke of 
 irony has been due to the crutch and the flannel bandage. 
 Pitt's patriotism was large indeed, but it cannot be 
 
OR CHAEACTERISTICS. 381 
 
 denied that it was sometimes paraded very rashly, and 
 very theatrically. In the sometimes presumptuous glori- 
 fication of his country, he reminds one of those gallant 
 princes of the middle ages, who endangered themselves 
 wilfully, by charging barred gates, or hurrying their 
 pennons single-handed against the foe, merely for the 
 honour of the ladies. 
 
 After his exaltation to the House of Lords, his 
 speaking became lecturing. No man ever ventured so 
 to trifle with the dignity of that most dignified body. 
 His manner became more and more dictatorial. Con- 
 scious of power, like a coquette, he too often con- 
 descended to display his power merely for the sake 
 of the display. Sure of the submissiveness of his col- 
 leagues, he taxed their spirit of obedience that he might 
 expose their state of dependence. His own spirit re- 
 mained firm and undaunted. He frequently infringed on 
 the rules of debate, and indeed he seemed to treat the 
 rules of debate with iU-concealed defiance. Some of his 
 most remarkable and most palpable successes originated 
 at moments of an overbearing impatience of very well- 
 merited interruptions on that score. In the House of 
 Lords he was undoubtedly out of place. He was far 
 more adapted for a revolutionary speaker. In a tumul- 
 tuous audience like the National Assembly of France, he 
 would have been a second Mirabeau. In some points he 
 bears a very considerable resemblance to Mirabeau. In 
 deportment and gesture, in the exterior qualities of the 
 orator, there was much in common. Men who remem- 
 bered the great French tribune have left distinct and 
 careful portraits of his physique, the masculine port, the 
 broad and bony frontal, the eagle eye that, though dis- 
 torted, dismayed his audience with a look, the voice of 
 thunder, the defiant accents that dared a reply, the hair 
 that waved like the mane of a lion. Unlike Chatham, 
 
382 ETHicA : 
 
 Mirabeau did not improvieatize. All, or most, of his 
 celebrated hits were the result of careful premeditation : 
 his Comparison of the Gracchi, his allusion to the Tar- 
 peian rock, his apostrophe to Sieyes- In the delivery of 
 his unpremeditated effusions the similitude with some 
 modification recurs again. His frame dilated. His face 
 convulsed. His eye shot forth flamesi He roared. 
 He stamped. His hair whitened with foam. Has whole 
 system was seized with an electrid irritability, and 
 writhed as under an almost preternatural agitation. In 
 retort, in that kind of abrupt, indignantj disdainful 
 repartee which crushes its victim as by a blow, he was, 
 like Chatham^ unsurpassed by any of his cotemporaries, 
 and J like Chatham, he was singularly dexterous in con- 
 verting a taunt into a victorious reprimand. Of irony, 
 stingiug, insolent ironyj both the great champions were 
 perfect masters. It would not be difficult to extend the 
 parallel to their mental temperaments. Both men were 
 devoured with pride, a passionate, overbearing, fierce, 
 absorbing pride. Both were chivakously attached to a 
 cause, and both displayed a certain sensibility to "defeat, 
 nearly akin to vanity. In the manner of both the dictator 
 prevailed, sustained in both by a majestic self-rehance, 
 and enunciated in a language almost monarchical. 
 
 The contrast ia the argumentative value and the 
 effective success in Chatham's speeches, is explained by 
 his vehemence of manner. Argument, as Burke con- 
 feB^ed, and as his attempted reply to Lord Mansfield on 
 the Wilkes case clearly demonstrates, was not his forte. 
 There is no consecutive reasoning in his orations, no 
 cool, judicial arrangement, no well-organized concatena- 
 tion of ideas. He spoke rather a series of fine senti- 
 ments, each commensurate with the sentence that con- 
 tained it, beginning with it and ending with it. Hence 
 the number of his palpable hits. Effective as they were, 
 
OR CHAEAOTERISTICS. 383 
 
 they were ieertainly not marks of a skilful debater. But 
 they were to a pre-eminent degree marks of a skilful 
 dramatist. And to enunciate them successfully required 
 the parts of a skilful actor. This actor, Chatham, We 
 know, was. In place of argument, he had unflinching 
 assumptioiii The ipse dixi^ the "I affirm," and the "I 
 am ready to maintain," and " I pledge myself to prove " 
 constituted aU his logic. The reason why his orations 
 were so devoid of elaborate ratiocination is the reason^ 
 perhaps, why they were otherwise so effective. They 
 were entirely unpremeditated. He possessed great 
 facility of invention, with the greatest oratorical energy, 
 and his energy and invention deemed to be proportioned 
 to each other^ and to be mutually dependent on each 
 other. He could not speak set speeches. His harangue 
 On Wolfe was elaborately prepared, and all that it is 
 notorious for is its complete failure^ Though no man 
 knew so well how to say what he pleased, we may easily 
 beUeve, with Walpole, that no man ever knew so little 
 what he was going to say; Fulfilling the law of compen- 
 sation^ he was in every other respect a most prodigal 
 speaker. He certainly spoke too often and too longj and 
 it was not without reason that the king returned him one 
 of his speeches to be shortened; His manner was singu- 
 larly wordy. He reiterated, aggravated^ and repeated. 
 Indeed, half of his strength hes in his happy trick of 
 verbal reduplication * Such sentences aSj "I was credu- 
 lous j I was duped, I was deceived," " It was unjust, 
 groundless, illiberal, unmanly," it is evident, owe their 
 emphasis to their structure and their pleonasm. Not 
 that Chatham was a mere sophistical rhetor. His rheto- 
 rical expressions were strong, because his convictions 
 were strong* His vehemence was fed by his sincerity, 
 and in turn stimulated it. His mind magnified every- 
 thing. Every little abnormal phenomenon in the Con- 
 
384 ETHiCA : 
 
 stitution was a source of aggravated apprehension, and it 
 may be of an exaggerated expression of his apprehension. 
 An impolitic peace was an omen of despair to him. 
 " The country was sold at the late peace ; it was sold by 
 the Court of Turin to the Court of France." The ex- 
 pulsion of Wilkes was the ruin of the Constitution. " A 
 breach is made ia the Constitution — the battlements are 
 dismantled, the citadel is open to the first invader, the 
 waUs totter, the place is no longer tenable ; what then 
 remains for us but to stand foremost in the breach, to 
 repair it, or to perish in it ? " 
 
 Hume asserted that, if the manner of Demosthenes 
 could be copied, it would have an infalhble success over 
 a modern assembly. Burke thought otherwise. It is 
 certain that the style of Demosthenes is far more genial 
 to a parliamentary audience of our day than that of 
 Chatham. There can be no doubt that, estimated by the 
 influence of individual speeches, the influence of oratory 
 has gradually been on the decHne. It would be easy to 
 show that this decline has not been owing to any failure 
 in the character of the audience. It was once, and 
 among a certain class of idolators it still is, the fashion, 
 to dwell on the superior refinement of the audiences of 
 antiquity. This, however, is a ridiculous partiahty, 
 founded on a misapprehension. The British House of 
 Commons is the most perfect arena for the display of 
 oratory that the most sanguine rhetorician could have 
 imagined for himself. The most experienced statesmen 
 that the world ever saw are among its speakers. The 
 most refined critics are among its judges. Historians sit 
 in it. Philosophers, profound as any Athens ever reared, 
 and poets as sensitive as any Athenian, respond to every 
 echo within its walls. Intellect and taste, every art and 
 every science, has its representative there. A quick 
 sense of propriety, the fruit of high talent and high 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 385 
 
 birth, a cultivated fastidiousness, a mental and a moral 
 activity rarely at rest, a keen philanthropic susceptibility, 
 all the material for the production of the most exquisite 
 oratory, and all the material for the most exquisite 
 appreciation of it, coUect, re-act, and centre there. The 
 truth is, it is to the political not to the ethical inflexi- 
 biUty of the audience that their apparent inertia and 
 indifference are to be traced. Party has its ties which no 
 sentimental homUies, no power of ratiocination, can 
 break. All the pathos of Pitt could not weaken the 
 coalition of Fox and North. Political convictions are 
 not always arrived at by the path of reason. Those that 
 hear are not always unprejudiced. Hence, as a con- 
 ciliatory engine and for the purpose of persuasion, oratory 
 is robbed of half its power. The Opposition laughs, 
 weeps, applauds, but does not change its benches. The 
 same influence, producing a similar effect, extends itself 
 beyond the circle of the audience. It is said that a 
 modem orator speaks to those who read rather than to 
 those who hear him. This indeed is but the natural re- 
 sult of the operation of that constitutional progress which 
 has lessened the independence of the representative on 
 the elector. In the days of Old Sarum no representative 
 thought of consulting the interests or dreading the aliena- 
 tion of his constituents. In the days when as yet reporters 
 were not, no body of constituents could ensure the exposi- 
 tion of their interests by their representative. Soon after 
 Johnson ceased to write the debates in a garret of Exeter 
 Street, a change set in, which has not yet ceased to 
 develop its effects, and the influence of which is' gradually 
 assimilating the style . of debate in the British House of 
 Commons to that which prevails in the American Con- 
 gress. The language of the American statesman is that 
 of an agent, or, more emphatically, of an advocate. He 
 is not at rest till he has despatched at least one speech a 
 
 25 
 
386 ETHiCA : 
 
 session full of flattering attention to his clients. The 
 tone of the English orator is that of a trustee. He 
 speaks under evident restraint. He is continually looking 
 backward and forward ; backward to the pledges of the 
 last hustmgs, forward to the prospects of the next. He 
 talks as it were before judges to whom he is finally 
 accountable. If he is bold enough to renounce the 
 promises of his functional baptism, to despise the cate- 
 chism to come, there is a despair in his boldness which 
 testifies to his sense of responsibility even in the act of 
 repudiating it. But on the reader, equally as on the 
 hearer, the effect of a parliamentary oration is generally 
 inadequate. The ties of the reader, though removed 
 from the immediate sphere of contact, are equally strong. 
 His pohtical principles have probably been inherited with 
 his reKgious principles. His attachment to the tenets of 
 Jacobitism is probably as strong as his attachment to the 
 articles of the Nicene Creed. Or his horror of protection 
 is as keen as his horror of episcopacy. From his child- 
 hood he has been nourished with the milk of Toryism or 
 the strong meat of Whiggism. The speeches that he 
 reads, therefore, are generally uttered by the oracles of 
 his own party ; or, if he does lend an ear to his oppo- 
 nents, it is not for conviction sake, when conviction would 
 involve the shame of heresy, and the surrender of here- 
 ditary associations, as dear in his sight as the quarterings 
 of his family escutcheon. 
 
 But though the influence of rhetoric in the House 
 of Commons is clearly not such as was enunciated by 
 the great orators of antiquity, teleologically speaking, 
 the modern orator is not without his influence. The 
 difference is, his influence is exemphfied slowly and by 
 degrees. He wins in the long run. A single success, 
 an isolated triumph of eloquence, may give him a 
 momentary reputation. Every one who has ever heard 
 
OB CHABACTERISTICS. 387 
 
 of Single-speech .Hamilton knows that it does not give 
 him power. It is in the aggregate, by reiteration, by 
 accumulation, that he prevails. Under such terms, 
 though his language may be unstudied, though he may 
 never have looked into the Parhamentary Logic, the 
 faculty of speech is power. In the English Constitution it 
 is pohtical power ; it is statesmanship. No recommen- 
 dation can supply the absence of its prestige. Splendid 
 abihties, the utmost literary renown, are without it insuf- 
 ficient testimonies. Dissociated from it, the historian of 
 the Roman Empire Hngers below the gangway. Assisted 
 by it, a comet of horse becomes the arbiter of Europe. 
 
 The elder Pitt was an orator by nature. He was not 
 taught and schooled into declamatory perfection. His 
 knowledge was very confined. His knowledge of the. 
 English language, indeed, was derived from a fountain 
 pure and undefiled — the poems of Spenser and the 
 sermons of Barrow. The younger Pitt, on the other 
 hand, was an orator by discipline and by inheritance. 
 He was early a thorough master of the G-reek and Latin 
 tongues. He was therefore a thorough master of all 
 those great oratorical achievements whose fame shall 
 survive when the Gteek and Latin tongues shall be unde- 
 cipherable. They formed, we are told, his favourite study. 
 He translated them, retranslated them, analysed and got 
 them by heart. Early associations tended to strengthen 
 and confirm the effects of physical heritage and educa- 
 tional training. It could not have well been otherwise 
 with Chatham's son. The fame of that great man had 
 penetrated into the nursery of Hayes. Of the eldest 
 son's appreciation we know nothing. The eldest son 
 was no genius. But biography still loves to linger on 
 the strangely precocious interest which the second son 
 took in his father's renown. Before other boys left 
 school, he was holding mock debates at a London tavern, 
 
 25—2 
 
388 ETHiCA : 
 
 and astonishing men who lived to hear his great parha- 
 mentary triumphs, and to repeat that his great parlia- 
 mentary triumphs did not surpass the tentative effusions 
 of the amateur. Long before he scandahzed the Doctors 
 of Golgotha by presuming to set up for Cambridge, his 
 form was famihar to the starers of the House of Com- 
 mons. Day by day the young athlete was to be seen in 
 the gallery, exercising his memory, and practising his 
 discrimination by hearing and answering in his own 
 mind the great geniuses of debate. It was no wonder, 
 when he entered the arena in earnest, the general cry 
 was that a champion had taken the field. His first 
 triumph came with his first speech. A hundred eyes 
 strove to trace in the features and the manner of the 
 young orator the old famihar hneaments of the sire who 
 slept in Westminster. A hundred memories recalled the 
 tones which had more than once roused the chivalry of 
 England to action. "It is not a chip of the old block," 
 said Burke, enthusiastically, "it is the old block himself." 
 Pitt soon displayed qualities the very opposite to 
 those of his rival. Fox. He was shy and formal. His 
 manners were stiff and reserved. A great deal was due 
 to the circumstances under which he entered Hfe. He 
 had passed from college to the cabinet, and he brought 
 to the cabinet something of that self-complacency and 
 formahty which, somehow or other, is always contracted 
 by certain natures ta the precincts of the college. Even 
 in his most relaxed moments his most indulgent com- 
 panions were nettled to find in the friend, as in the 
 minister, that academical starchness and that academical 
 affectation which dons and tutors love to see in their 
 undergraduates. Among his enemies, or, properly 
 speaking, among his opponents, it operated to his dis- 
 advantage. Men who were accustomed to the genial 
 familiarity and hearty good-fellowship of Fox, mistook his 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 389 
 
 shyness for cunning, and denounced his formahty as 
 hauteur. He was, they said, the man of ancient Car- 
 thage. He was the man of modern Italy. He was any- 
 thing but an Englishman.* Both the eloquence and the 
 lives of the two statesmen present a very marked con- 
 trast. Pitt was cold and artificial. In his oratory, as in 
 his demeanour, everythiug bespoke a temperament well 
 under command. There are no sallies of passion, no 
 vehement apostrophes. When he attempted to be" 
 earnest, he generally ended in being dignified. When 
 he attempted to be warm, his warmth never exceeded 
 the bounds of the most careful good breeding. His 
 simplicity was studied. His energy was an educated 
 one. Hamilton said that his eloquence appeared to him 
 " languid elegance ;" Fox's, " spirited vulgarity." Flood 
 thought that neither merited the title of eloquent 
 speakers. Pitt's he calls " didactic declamation; " Fox's, 
 "argumentative conversation." Acute observers thought 
 Pitt many leagues behind Fox, though it was acknow- 
 ledged that Pitt had, v/hat Fox had not, dignity of 
 manner which is the form, and dignity of character which 
 is the art, of oratory. '^ 
 
 His style, like the style of Fox, verbose, but 
 verbose rather by redundancy than by repetition, without 
 pomp, with few flowers of rhetoric and few images, was 
 exactly the style to suit the nature of the man, well 
 regulated, firm, and reasonable. It was by the aid of 
 this style, I suspect, that he was enabled to excel in 
 two very distinct and even opposite qualifications, in 
 the art of ampHfication and the art of suppression. 
 When he would be expHcit, he unfolded his state- 
 ments with perfect lucidness and distinctness. When 
 
 ' Godwin. 
 
 » Nichol's "Illustrations." Letters of Hardinge to Horace Walpole, 
 
 vol. iii. p. 212. 
 
390 ETHicA : 
 
 he wished to be reserved, he did not suppress his lan- 
 guage, indeed, but he concealed his meaning under the 
 semblance of candour, and gratified the curiosity of his 
 hearers under the semblance of satisfying it. He certainly 
 had not the commanding brilliancy of his father, but his 
 language was more correct, and his reasoning more 
 methodical. It is denied that he is argumentative. 
 There is no doubt Fox, in the gross, is superior to him 
 in the art of reply. But in Pitt it was not so much 
 inabihty as disinclination. His measured style was not 
 accommodated to the coUoquial manner of Fox. But 
 that he could be argumentative, could take his oppo- 
 nent's objections, arrange them in formal order, and 
 reply to them one by one with masterly succinctness, is 
 manifest to any one who will take the pains to read his 
 speech on the discussion of PreUminary Articles of Peace 
 with France, Spain, and Austria, February 21, 1783 ; 
 his speech on the abolition of slavery, April 2, 1792 ; 
 and his speech on Fox's resolution about the pacification 
 with France, May 30, 1794. He indulged in none of 
 the fanciful imagery of Burke, and evidently thought it 
 unsuited to the business of debate. One of his bitterest 
 and happiest castigations was extorted by the imaginative 
 exuberance of Burke's speech on the King's address, 
 December 6, 1782, and may be found in his own speech 
 in reply. Sheridan's gay and lively manner was pecu- 
 Uarly distasteful to him. He had chastised Burke. He 
 took occasion to ofi'er a dignified rebuke to Sheridan. 
 The theatre, he told him, was the fit place for the gay 
 effusions of his fancy, his turns, and his epigrammatic 
 points. Let him reserve them for the stage, and on the 
 stage they would doubtless have the good fortune sui 
 flaiisus gaudere theatri. The reproof was a happy one, 
 but it is remembered, unfortunately, by the far happier 
 counter-retort which it called up. "Flattered and 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 391 
 
 encouraged by the Eight Honourable gentleman's enco- 
 miums on my talents," said the wit, " if ever* I again 
 engage them in the composition he alludes to, I may be 
 led by an act of presumption to attempt an improvement 
 upon one of Ben Jonson's best characters, the character 
 of the Angry Boy in the ' Alchemist.' " 
 
 Sheridan himself was far superior to Pitt in what 
 may be called the Comedy of Debate. Indeed, if the 
 perfection of his oratory is to be estimated by the 
 number of its several accompKshments, he might be 
 pronounced superior to Pitt in the gross. No single 
 rhetorical beauty is in one place or another absent from 
 it. The ridiculous, the pathetic, and the subhme, 
 each reached a climax in him. Yet Sheridan's repu- 
 tation never was and never can be placed on a level 
 with Pitt's. The truth is, he resembled an ancient 
 Pentathlete. Skilled in all the five exercises, he was 
 superior in all to mere amateurs, but inferior in each 
 to professionals. His information was hmited. His 
 classical learning was below his general information. The 
 powers of his mind were extensive, but they exceeded its 
 acquisitions. He was accused of displaying too much 
 wit. Yet those who knew him have since declared that 
 no one came at their wit more laboriously. Whole 
 mornings were secretly dedicated to it, apparently sur- 
 rendered to the lazy sleep of fashion; and the happy 
 epigram or lively repartee of to-day was probably manu- 
 factured a week, or even a month, before its delivery. 
 Some one has mentioned him in the same breath with 
 the Grecian Hyperides. And perhaps it would be difficult 
 to ^ve his characteristics in fitter words than those 
 applied to Hyperides by Longinus: "There is an ex- 
 haustless fund of wit about him, a vein of piquant satire, 
 a natural grace, a ekUfahiess of irony, jests not clumsy 
 or loose, after the manner of the old Attic writers, but 
 
392 ETHiCA : 
 
 natural and easy ; a ready talent for ridicule, a deal of 
 comic point, conveyed in a style of well-managed plea- 
 santry, and in all things a winning gracefulness that is 
 almost inimitable. It is plain, too, that he has composed 
 some of his discourses in a style more like poetry than 
 prose." " Sheridan's," said Burke, as if in imitation of 
 Longinus, " is a middle style between prose and poetry." 
 In every way dissimilar to Pitt was his great anta- 
 gonist. Fox. Pitt was studious and abstemious. Fox 
 loved dissipation, and hated appHcation. Pitt was 
 ambitious, and was industrious to reaUze his ambition. 
 Fox was ambitious, but it was the passion he took 
 least pains in gratifying. He loved popularity, yet 
 he did httle to win it, and was perpetually doing 
 much to risk it. He disguised no vice, though a little 
 disguise might have saved him much obloquy. Void 
 of design, and impatient of culture, his parts were 
 natural, and his success due only to his parts. As a 
 statesman, in private virtues he was of the race of the 
 Whartons and Rochesters, and the last of his race. 
 Since his time no minister has left behind him such 
 details of extravagance and dissoluteness. That he was 
 the best-natured man aUve must be placed, however, as 
 a balance in his favour. Men who hated him as a 
 politician could not deny their heart to the man. As 
 a politician, too, it was difficult to hate him. All that 
 generosity and good-humour which fascinated in his 
 private life and among his private associates, clung to 
 him in politics. He had no spleen. He bore no iU- 
 will; none that an evening with "Don Quixote" and 
 Mrs. Armistead could not remove. It was emphatically 
 true of him that the sun did not go down on his wrath. 
 In the hearty enthusiasm of a moment of admiration he 
 would more than once have carried off Pitt to Brookes'. 
 When the philosophic labours of a lifetime had jangled 
 
OR CHAEACTEEISTICS. 393 
 
 the fine-strung sensibilities of Burke, the statesman 
 wept, while the philosopher pouted. Outside the House 
 his popularity, though sometimes endangered, was scarcely 
 less. His vices, I suspect, operated upon his character 
 among his cotemporaries as did those of his ancestor 
 Charles II. They were vices of the heart rather than 
 of the head, originating in indolence rather than in 
 mahgnancy. Hence his friends pardoned the man they 
 had not the courage to condemn. They overlooked the 
 rake in the statesman ; and while he disgraced the 
 metropolis with scenes as vicious as any that were ever 
 enacted on Tower HiU or at Bartholomew Fair, they still 
 clung to the champion, in whom they reaUzed the cause 
 that had bled with Hampden on the field, and with 
 Sidney on the scafibld. They never found him wanting. 
 His exertions were quite commensurate with his idleness. 
 His activity equalled his sloth. If he gave his nights 
 to champagne and ombre, he gave his days to the serfs 
 of Africa and the Helots of America. He was not a 
 successful man. His fondness for play was scarcely 
 surpassed by his fondness for politics. Yet in play he 
 ended as a beggar, and for his success in pohtics, it 
 is enough to say that, with the exception of eleven 
 months, he was never out of opposition. His passion 
 for women equalled his passion for play. Yet those 
 who enjoyed his confidence, and lived to review in 
 charity the wild acts of a not very maHgnant nature, 
 declared that he never formed a connection with a woman 
 that was not unlucky to him. 
 
 If the exhibition of emotion be the test of sincerity, 
 and the exhibition of sincerity the test of a great orator. 
 Fox was one of the greatest orators that ever lived. 
 The hurried sentence, the involuntary exclamation, the 
 vehement gesture, the start, the agitation, everything 
 was indicative of that kind of eloquence that comes 
 
394 ethica: 
 
 from the heart, and goes to the heart. His tongue 
 faltered, his voice grew stifled, and his face bathed 
 with tears. Pitt lost by the contrast in his demeanour. 
 Those who watched the motions of his great rival saw 
 in the stiff, unbending figure the monotonous inflection, 
 and the solemn posture, the formal grace of a passionless 
 automaton. They matched the earnestness, the anima- 
 tion, the enthusiasm of the one, against the gravity, the 
 smoothness, and the plausibility of the other, and they 
 denied that there could be warmth where there was so 
 little fire. 
 
 In taking into consideration, however, the supe- 
 riority of Fox in this respect, it must be remembered 
 that his oratory was cradled and nursed in opposi- 
 tion. The effect of such a position on parHamentary 
 oratory is by no means slight. His independence of 
 situation imparts to the speaker an independence of 
 tone. No official reserve is there to chUl his animation 
 or to curb his tongue. Horace Walpole has remarked, 
 in one of his Memoirs, that Marchmont in opposition 
 and Marchmont in place were two very different speakers. 
 The warmth and fire of his elocution when out of office 
 disappeared, and left him without a single redeeming 
 grace in office. Something of the same test must be 
 applied in a comparison of Fox with Pitt. In logic, 
 in all the formalities of eloquence, in all those points, 
 in fact, where his nature and habits would suggest an 
 inferiority, he was inferior to Pitt. In the latter there 
 is a faultless regularity of thought, accompanied by a 
 technical arrangement of diction, that is never violated. 
 Fox, though choice in expression, is loose in arrange- 
 ment. His declamation flowed from him in a torrent. 
 But though his words escaped from him, rather than 
 were uttered, they were the vehicle of close, and some- 
 times of subtle argument. There has been some reaction 
 
OR CHARACTEEISTICS. 395 
 
 against Sir James Mackintosh's verdict, that he was the 
 most Demosthenian speaker since Demosthenes.^ The 
 truth is, easy as it seems, nothing is more really difficult 
 than to discriminate between speakers, except it be to 
 find words which shall give the results of discrimination 
 an exact equational expression. Any one who will read 
 
 ' I should have dwelt with greater emphasis on this reaction, had I dis- 
 covered that any other than Lord Brougham was the chief promoter of it. 
 Lord Brougham is a man who has other claims than those of an intellectual 
 old age, to veneration. His has been one of the hardest working minds of . 
 his generation. . His position is not without interest. He lives in the 
 present, but his great triumphs are situated in the past. He has acted 
 history, and he has survived to hear the comments of history on the part he 
 has acted. But though thus connecting two generations, as it were, in his 
 own person, 'it cannot be said of Lord Brougham that he was ever the leader 
 of either of them. He is rather a remarkable instance of the great success 
 which a supple mind sometimes achieves by labouring like a slave for the age 
 — by pursuing, rather than foreseeing its wants ; and by diligently co-operating 
 with its efforts, rather than by dexterously anticipating them. He has not 
 been, at any time of his life, ahead of his generation. But though he has 
 not been a pioneer, he has always been among the foremost in the van. He 
 has exhibited in this, great ductUity, rather than great originality. He has 
 been led, but he has followed at an almost imperceptible interval. Those 
 who have read his letter to Lord Lansdowne on the French Revolution of 
 1848, will readily appreciate my meaning. Such, I believe, will be the 
 praise awarded by posterity to Lord Brougham. Criticism is approaching a 
 sentimental stage with regard to him. Grey hairs are seductive at all times. 
 When set off by undiminished activity of intellect, the unusual combination 
 of bodily weakness and mental vigour invites the perilous interference of an 
 unusual sympathy. The audience and the'actor'are connected, also, by too 
 many ties. The tones of his voice are still ringing in their ears. Their 
 plaudits have not ceased to welcome the ardour of his gesticulation. They 
 aTe judging Roscius before he has quitted the boards. 
 
 His literary productions impartial criticism wiU, I think, approach 
 with a different feeling. They have not the elements of immortality in 
 them. They partake of the character of his general existence. A busy, 
 hurried, clever tone pervades them, interrupted by periods of brilliancy, 
 but exhibiting more effect than either profUndity or originality. The work 
 in which he impugns Sir James Mackintosh's judgment — the "Essays on 
 Statesmen" — ^is, considering the popularity it has enjoyed, one of the most 
 superficial works ever written on such a topic. Its sketchy, linear treatment 
 is miserably out of all proportion to the subject. Its inconsistencies, con- 
 tradictions, vague declamatoriness, are not .the least among its deficiencies. 
 If we except the showy diction, and the fastidiously elaborated eloquence, 
 it is only justice to say that so grand a topic has rarely met with a treatment 
 so inadequately commonplace. 
 
396 ethica: 
 
 Hume's eloquent delineation of Demosthenes will see at 
 a glance that it can properly be applied to no other 
 EngUsh orator than Fox. The chief point in which 
 Fox differs from Demosthenes is the inartificial arrange- 
 ment of his language. But the difference hes in the 
 amount of application, not in the effect produced. For 
 the purposes of oratory, the language of both is as 
 successfully disposed as it could be. There are most 
 certainly some very singular parallels of excellences hi 
 their speeches. I have noted down many, but one 
 example in particular of Fox is so Demosthenian, that 
 I cannot refrain from giving it. It occurs in the speech 
 on American affairs, on the opening of the session for 
 November, 1781. And it is curious that, in this speech, 
 the orator quotes and applies to the situation of this 
 country a famous address of Demosthenes to his country- 
 men: — " There was one circumstance in the conduct and 
 the language of Ministers he could not help taking notice 
 of. It Avas that, amidst all their sorrow for the loss of 
 Earl Cornwallis and his brave army, there seemed one 
 thing which gave them great consolation, and for which 
 they were grateful. It was, that our fleet had not 
 ventured to fight the enemy. Hear it," exclaimed the 
 orator; "hear it, Mr. Speaker; it is a source of joy 
 new in the history of Great Britain, that we rejoice 
 on the occasion of one of our fleets not venturing to 
 engage and fight the enemy. To even this are we 
 reduced." I almost fear to venture on my own trans- 
 lation of the famous rebuke in the first Phihppic, which 
 every scholar has doubtless anticipated in his own mind 
 before I quote it : — " Do ye prefer walking about and 
 askmg one another, Is there any news ? What ! tell 
 me, can there be greater news than that a man of 
 Macedonia is subduing Athenians, and administering 
 Greece ? " The whole of Fox's speech is most Demo- 
 
OR CHAEACTBRISTICS. 397 
 
 sthenian. The imaginary dialogue between the King of 
 France and his subjects, the indignant outburst that 
 followed on the sneer of Dundas, are rather copies than 
 parallels. 
 
 Superior to Fox, superior to Pitt, was Burke. Any 
 disadvantages, on the part of Fox, in natural abiUties, 
 were increased by the character of his personal pursuits. 
 Burke maintained through hfe that habit of study that 
 Pitt had in his youth, and he added to his powers of 
 accumulation what Pitt had not, a large and philoso- 
 phical scrutiny. While Fox was making up his losses at 
 Newmarket, or drinking out the night at Hockrel, the 
 author of the "Treatise on the Sublime" was pushing 
 into the recondite realms of every science a rare and 
 unwearied spirit of investigation. He boasted, and 
 boasted truly, that he had none of that master-vice, 
 sloth, in his composition. Man of genius though he 
 was, he possessed in a remarkable degree the industry of 
 a vulgar plodder. Nor was his industry a fastidious one. 
 Nothing was too high or too low for it. It compre- 
 hended everything, from the most elaborate act of im- 
 perial legislation to the discussion of a Dutch or Itahan 
 master with Reynolds or Barry, or parsnips and Indian 
 com with Arthur Young. In spite of these quaUfica- 
 tions, however, Burke has always struck me as a memo- 
 rable instance of more than adequate means of command- 
 ing success, resulting in a very inadequate share of it. 
 He was the greatest political philosopher of his day, yet 
 he commanded no adherents. He was the greatest 
 orator, yet he commanded no converts, and could scarce 
 command an audience. He was the best-informed man 
 in Parliament. He certainly was most exact and most 
 ready in his information. His mind was well stocked 
 with every sort of intellectual merchandize. Every 
 article was in its place, prepared at a moment's notice 
 
398 ethica: 
 
 for exhibition to the casual customer. Added to this, he 
 had the means of pleasing as weU as convincing. His 
 language was choice and classical, and copiously yarious. 
 Imagery the most bountiful and the most beautiful set 
 off his homeliest wares. They were packed in a style of 
 sentence which, if it had any fault, had the fault of an 
 excess of harmony. He was, too, one of the wittiest 
 men even in that regal period of wit. Yet he was tire- 
 some, his name passed into a parhamentary proverb, and 
 the signal for his rising to speak was the signal for his 
 audience to quit their benches. 
 
 The cause of Burke's inadequate moral supremacy 
 lies, I think, in the composition of his character. He 
 was a man of no compromise. " I have ever Kked," 
 he writes to the Marquis of Eockingham, "I have 
 ever liked a decided situation of friendship or amity." 
 His attachments were strong, and his antipathies were 
 strong, whUe to both his impetuous temper imparted 
 an air of earnestness almost approaching to passion. 
 Calculating politicians could not understand it. They 
 could not understand that a man should give him- 
 self and his friends so much vexation for nothing; 
 and they put down his eagerness to interest, and his 
 anxiety to ambition. He was naturally sensitive, and 
 strangely enough, as he grew older, he seemed to 
 grow more warm, more sensitive, and more passion- 
 ate. The chills of age did not damp his ardour. H!is 
 intellect suppHed fuel to his sensations; his sensations 
 inflamed his intellect. The tender enthusiasm of his old 
 age was probably intensified by the events of his previous 
 life. He had lived in a strange and a wild time. He 
 mistook the renovation of society for its dissolution. 
 The agonies attending the birth of Liberty sounded in 
 his ears as the agonies of its death. Ere his pubhc life 
 had begun, symptoms of the great insurrection of the 
 
OR CHARACTERISTICS. 399 
 
 human mind had set in. Ere he had been laid in his 
 grave at Beaconsfield, the great drama had been played 
 out. On the heights of Boston, on the banks of the 
 Hudson, on the banks of the Seine, he had watched it 
 scene by scene, act after act, to the final consummation 
 of the great closing catastrophe. Nor had he been an 
 unconcerned spectator. Nay, each successive change, 
 each new phase, struck a corresponding chord in his 
 bosom. The great drama had opened in the guise of 
 rational freedom, and he gave it his confidence. It 
 promised to end in the triumph of anarchy, and he 
 sacrificed to it his_ despair. It began in order, and he 
 applauded. It ended 'm confusion, and he denounced. 
 
 Burke had in reality all that nervous anxiety and that 
 exaggerated apprehensiveness, which Chatham assumed. 
 Chatham was always thundering at the destroyers of 
 his country, and predicting its present destruction. In 
 Burke's irritable soul, this was a real, not a fictitious 
 fear. His letters and speeches are full of the notes of 
 earnest despair. Never indeed has despair chanted 
 dirges so sweet and so solemn. In Lord George Gor- 
 don's riots, as in the American Eevolution, it was 
 "Fuimus," "Fuimus." "We were undone." "We 
 were a doomed nation." "We were no longer a 
 nation." On the French Eevolution the cry became 
 more earnest as the evil appeared more extensive. He 
 had foreseen the destruction of freedom in England. 
 His prophetic vision, guided by the terrors of an over- 
 Wrought imagination, now recognized the decay of free- 
 dom in Europe. Such a disposition could never have 
 been sustained without a warm and philanthropic heart. 
 His philanthropy accordingly was universal. He had an 
 instinctive horror, pohtical and moral, of all oppression, 
 national and individual. His large sympathies were 
 extended to every chmate and every grade, from the 
 
400 ETHICA : 
 
 Catholic who groaned beneath penal disabilities amid the 
 bogs of Tipperary, to the African who rotted in the slave 
 factories of Guinea ; from the king who was martyred in 
 the gaze of his European capital, to the princes whom 
 European rapacity -plundered in the city of the Jumna. 
 When he died, it is said that his heart was found en- 
 larged to an unusual size. It would be a pleasing fiction 
 to believe, with the Arabian physiologist, that the 
 physical organism is in death not unfrequently commen- 
 surate with the moral capacities of life. 
 
 As was the success of the poHtician, so was the suc- 
 cess of the orator. In both positions excess rather than 
 deficiency was the cause of his failure. As a politician 
 he had too much mind and too much sensibility. As an 
 orator he combined too much reason with too much 
 imagination. As an orator he was too much of the poet 
 and too much of the philosopher. As a poHtician he 
 was too much of the student with too much of the par- 
 tisan. He abhorred the appHcation of abstract terms to 
 pontics, yet no man clothed pohtics in a more abstract 
 metaphysical dress. His first speech, said a critic of the 
 day, struck the House as a new kind of political philo- 
 sophy. It was soon found that, new or old, the House 
 was not the place for its successful exposition. AU is 
 not parHamentary that is philosophical. His eloquence 
 was not calculated for that meridian. It would have 
 shone eminently in a discussion society, or in an essay, 
 and indeed his speeches read more hke essays than 
 orations. He spoke from the study, and it certainly 
 needed the retirement of the study to appreciate what 
 he spoke. In an assembly where immediate apprehen- 
 sion is necessary, there is no time for the slow process 
 of contemplation. Hence the effect became totally 
 inadequate to the cause. It was all appeal to the intel- 
 lect, and no appeal to the passions. His subtlety for- 
 
OB CHABACTEEISTICS. 40l 
 
 lified his observations, but it weakened the impressions 
 on the audience. What they could not comprehend, 
 they called futile. Burke wanted in this what he wanted 
 m his political conduct generally, address, insinuation, 
 management, self-control. His imagination ran away 
 with him just as his temper ran away with him. It was 
 not his fault that he did hot try to evade the sub- 
 stantial merits of a question by treating it iu some 
 merely temporal or local consideration. But he dealt 
 too abundantly, too generously in estabHshing general 
 positions. Some of his speeches resemble tracts on 
 purely speculative doctrines. Yet, after all, his argu- 
 ments were not as shrewd as Fox's. The predominance 
 of his imagination may be traced in his early pursuits 
 and tastes. At one time it seemed to threaten his career. 
 There was danger, in the opinion of some of his friends, 
 that he was lapsing into the idleness of a poet, at the 
 expense of severer studies. "Poetry," he writes to his 
 friend Shackleton, "nothing but poetry could go down 
 with me. I am entirely absorbed in the furor poedcus." 
 This accounts for the profusion of metaphor broadcast 
 over his writings, especially over his later writings. The 
 redundancy of images is far more prodigal in his " Letters 
 on a Begicide Peace," for example, composed when he 
 was considerably over sixty, than in his "Essay on the 
 SubUme," the work of his comparative youth. 
 
 It is singular, and at the same time it is suggestive of 
 his natural gifts, that his premeditated speeches should 
 be far more chaste and sobered than his unpremeditated, 
 While other men require leisure to stimulate and excite 
 their imagination, he required leisure to tame and curtail 
 his, His famous speech on the proposed repeal of the tea 
 duty, though extemporized, and delivered on the spur of 
 the moment, was always considered by the best judges 
 among its audience, as containmg wonderful power of 
 
 26 
 
402 ethica: 
 
 ratiocination indeed, but an almost criminal excess of 
 luxuriant imagery. It needed the art of touchiag the 
 passions. Its hearers, neither persuaded nor deprecated, 
 simply wondered and smiled. It was not the moment, 
 it was said, for Cicero to be as playful and fanciftd as 
 Ovid. It is recorded among the miracles of Mahomet 
 that the Prophet enabled his followers for days, not only 
 to subsist, but to grow fat on the sticks and stones of 
 the desert. Burke's imagination was gifted with similar 
 faculties of assimilation. His mental powers of attrition' 
 extracted the most sustaining nutriment from the driest 
 rhetorical materials. His imagination, in fact, Hke his 
 reason, was not an aristocratic one. It adapted itself 
 easily to all subjects. It did not despise the day of small 
 things. It took under its protection the grandest and 
 the meanest topics, the fate of an hemisphere, or the 
 state of the king's kitchen; and whatever it illustrated, 
 it illustrated successfully. It occupied itseK with the 
 dungeon of a captive queen, and it threw around the 
 horrid tragedy a tenderness and a grace that robbed it of 
 half its repulsiveness. It entered the royal buttery, and 
 in an instant the dry details of purveyorships, cooks, and 
 turnspits are worked up into a scene that might have 
 drawn tears of theatrical envy from Sheridan. The 
 Welsh revenue adventures of Baron North and his 
 knight Probert, in the same speech, the speech for 
 economical reform, interests for all the world like a 
 mediaeval tale of chivalry. Even at this distance of time, 
 and upon a hundredth perusal, it must be owned that 
 there never was a more playful or amusing way of 
 getting rid of such dry and repulsive details. The power 
 of combining grave and gay, wit and pathos, was in 
 truth one of that remarkable man's most remarkable 
 faculties. In a speech he deUvered the early part of the 
 year 1778, the first part made Lord North convulsed 
 
OB CHAEACTEEISTICS. 403 
 
 with laughter. The latter portion, it was noticed, drew 
 iron tears down the cheek of the yeteran Barre. 
 
 Such was Burke ; or, rather, such is a very faint outUne 
 of what Burke was, philosopher, morahst, metaphysician. 
 There is a tendency just now to regard his virtues with 
 suspicion, and his failings with harshness. His frame 
 and his intellect so reacted upon one another, that a close 
 and earnest psychological study alone can adequately 
 hope to decide upon his merits. The great crisis in 
 which he hved had a curious effect on more than one 
 contemporary mind. It has given an air of inconsis- 
 tency, even of obhquity, to more than one otherwise 
 straightforward career. Statesmen and philosophers, the 
 great shock has thrown severa,l from the perpendicular, 
 and reversed the motion of their pubhc walk. Beginning 
 with progress, with their faces set in the right direction, 
 they remain, Uke Lot's wife, eloquent monuments of 
 the danger of looking back. 
 
 Into the career of these historical monitors, or, what 
 is more germane to the subject, into the merits of their 
 oratory, it is not my intention at present to enter. The 
 history of oratory is indeed not a topic to be exhausted 
 in the limits of an ephemeral essay. My own skeleton 
 outhne of it has been offered rather by way of suggestion 
 than as example. Criticism is partial. It has iavaded 
 every department of literature but this ; though it is 
 quite certain that no other department of literature is 
 more attractive, or is likely to be more remunerative of 
 toil. The best treatment which ancient oratory has 
 encountered is undoubtedly to be met with in the treatise 
 of Cicero on " Illustrious Orators." Aristotle is too much 
 of the philosopher. Dionysius is too much of the gram- 
 marian and logophiHst. Quiatilian is too much of the 
 professional rhetor. Longinus has hardly any preten- 
 sion. His book on the Subhme is certainly not a book 
 
404 ethica: ob characteeistics. 
 
 of philosophic criticism. Instead of being called a 
 " Treatise on the Sublime," it should have been called a 
 " Treatise on the Sublimities of certain Authors." It 
 is rather a collection of examples, than an analysis of 
 principles. He is rather the historian of the subhme 
 than its critic. Cicero, and Cicero only, can be held 
 up as a model, both in doctrine and in practice, to 
 modem industry. The critic and the historian are well 
 balanced in him. His book is written, too, in excellent 
 taste and in an excellent spirit, rather unusual for him, 
 of considerable impartiality and great modesty. The 
 only questionable part about it is the form. Dialogue is 
 a precarious plan, and enjoys but a fickle popularity. It 
 was far more suited to ancient than it is to modem 
 feelings. The imaginary dialogues of modem times 
 are not always dialogues of the imagination. They are, 
 generally speaking, void of all character and personahty; 
 and the language, instead of being diversified, is more 
 tediously monotonous than unpretending narrative. It 
 may be as well for the enterprising spirit that would 
 indulge in this particular form to pause and remember 
 that. Lord Lyttleton's " Dialogues of the Dead," once so 
 celebrated, are now only known to the facetious memory 
 of the antiquarian critic as Dead Dialogues. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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