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The World's Greatest Books — Volume 09 — Lives and Letters

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Title: The World's Greatest Books — Volume 09 — Lives and Letters

Editor: Arthur Mee
        J. A. Hammerton


        
Release date: April 1, 2004 [eBook #12059]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS — VOLUME 09 — LIVES AND LETTERS ***

THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS

JOINT EDITORS

ARTHUR MEE Editor and Founder of the Book of Knowledge

J.A. HAMMERTON Editor of Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia

VOL. IX LIVES AND LETTERS

MCMX

       *       *       *       *       *

Table of Contents

ABÉLARD AND HÉLOÏSE
  Love-Letters

AMIEL, H.F.
  Fragments of an Intimate Diary

AUGUSTINE, SAINT
  Confessions

BOSWELL, JAMES
  Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.

BREWSTER, SIR DAVID
  Life of Sir Isaac Newton

BUNYAN, JOHN
  Grace Abounding

CARLYLE, ALEXANDER
  Autobiography

CARLYLE, THOMAS
  Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell
  Life of Schiller

CELLINI, BENVENUTO
  Autobiography

CHATEAUBRIAND, FRANÇOIS RENÉ DE
  Memoirs from Beyond the Grave

CHESTERFIELD, EARL OF
  Letters to His Son

CICERO, MARCUS TULLIUS
  Letters

COLERIDGE, SAMUEL TAYLOR
  Biographia Literaria

COWPER, WILLIAM
  Letters

DE QUINCEY, THOMAS
  Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

DUMAS, ALEXANDRE
  Memoirs

EVELYN, JOHN
  Diary

FORSTER, JOHN
  Life of Goldsmith

FOX, GEORGE
  Journal

FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN
  Autobiography

GASKELL, MRS.
  The Life of Charlotte Brontë

GIBBON, EDWARD
  Memoirs

GOETHE, J.W. VON
  Letters to Zelter
  Poetry and Truth
  Conversations with Eckermann

GRAY, THOMAS
  Letters

HAMILTON, ANTONY
  Memoirs of the Count De Grammont

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL
  Our Old Home

A Complete Index of THE WORLD'S GREATEST BOOKS will be found at the end
of Volume XX.

       *       *       *       *       *




ABÉLARD AND HÉLOÏSE


Love-Letters


     In the Paris cemetery of Père-Lachaise, on summer Sundays,
     flowers and wreaths are still laid on the tomb of a woman who
     died nearly 750 years ago. It is the grave of Heloise and of
     her lover Abelard, the hero and heroine of one of the world's
     greatest love stories. Born in 1079, Abelard, after a
     scholastic activity of twenty-five years, reached the highest
     academic dignity in Christendom--the Chair of the Episcopal
     School in Paris. When he was 38 he first saw Heloise, then a
     beautiful girl of 17, living with her uncle, Canon Fulbert.
     Abelard became her tutor, and fell madly in love with her. The
     passion was as madly returned. The pair fled to Brittany,
     where a child was born. There was a secret marriage, but
     because she imagined it would hinder Abelard's advancement,
     Heloise denied the marriage. Fulbert was furious. With hired
     assistance, he invaded Abelard's rooms and brutally mutilated
     him. Abelard, distressed by this degradation, turned monk. But
     he must have Heloise turn nun; she agreed, and at 22 took the
     veil. Ten years later she learned that Abelard had not found
     content in his retirement, and wrote to him the first of the
     five famous letters. Abelard died in 1142, and his remains
     were given into the keeping of Heloise. Twenty years
     afterwards she died, and was buried beside him at Paraclete.
     In 1800 their remains were taken to Paris, and in 1817
     interred in Père-Lachaise Cemetery. The love-letters,
     originally written in Latin, about 1128, were first published
     in Paris in 1616.


_I.--Héloïse to Abélard_


Heloise has just seen a "consolatory" letter of Abelard's to a friend.
She had no right to open it, but in justification of the liberty she
took, she flatters herself that she may claim a privilege over
everything which comes from that hand.

"But how dear did my curiosity cost me! What disturbance did it
occasion, and how surprised I was to find the whole letter filled with a
particular and melancholy account of our misfortunes! Though length of
time ought to have closed up my wounds, yet the seeing them described by
you was sufficient to make them all open and bleed afresh. Surely all
the misfortunes of lovers are conveyed to them through the eyes. Upon
reading your letter I feel all mine renewed. Observe, I beseech you, to
what a wretched condition you have reduced me; sad, afflicted, without
any possible comfort unless it proceed from you. Be not then unkind, nor
deny me, I beg of you, that little relief which you only can give. Let
me have a faithful account of all that concerns you; I would know
everything, be it ever so unfortunate. Perhaps by mingling my sighs with
yours I may make your sufferings less, for it has been said that all
sorrows divided are made lighter.

"I shall always have this, if you please, and it will always be
agreeable to me that, when I receive a letter from you, I shall know you
still remember me. I have your picture in my room. I never pass it
without stopping to look at it. If a picture, which is but a mute
representation of an object, can give such pleasure, what cannot letters
inspire? We may write to each other; so innocent a pleasure is not
denied us. I shall read that you are my husband, and you shall see me
sign myself your wife. In spite of all our misfortunes, you may be what
you please in your letter. Having lost the substantial pleasures of
seeing and possessing you, I shall in some measure compensate this loss
by the satisfaction I shall find in your writing. There I shall read
your most sacred thoughts; I shall carry them always about with me; I
shall kiss them every moment. I cannot live if you will not tell me that
you still love me.

"When you write to me you will write to your wife; marriage has made
such a correspondence lawful and since you can without the least scandal
satisfy me why will you not? I am not only engaged by my vows, but I
have the fear of my uncle before me. There is nothing, then, that you
need dread. You have been the occasion of all my misfortunes, you
therefore must be the instrument of my comfort. You cannot but remember
(for lovers cannot forget) with what pleasure I have passed whole days
in hearing your discourse; how, when you were absent, I shut myself from
everyone to write to you; how uneasy I was till my letter had come to
your hands; what artful management it required to engage messengers.
This detail perhaps surprises you, and you are in pain for what may
follow. But I am no longer ashamed that my passion for you had no
bounds, for I have done more than all this.

"I have hated myself that I might love you; I came hither to ruin myself
in a perpetual imprisonment that I might make you live quietly and at
ease. Nothing but virtue, joined to a love perfectly disengaged from the
senses, could have produced such effects. Vice never inspires anything
like this; it is too much enslaved to the body. This was my cruel
uncle's notion; he measured my virtue by the frailty of my sex, and
thought it was the man and not the person I loved. But he has been
guilty to no purpose. I love you more than ever, and so revenge myself
on him. I will still love you with all the tenderness of my soul till
the last moment of my life."

Formerly, she tells him, the man was the least she valued in him. It was
his heart she desired to possess. "You cannot but be entirely persuaded
of this by the extreme unwillingness I showed to marry you, though I
knew that the name of wife was honourable in the world and holy in
religion; yet the name of your mistress had greater charms because it
was more free. The bonds of matrimony, however honourable, still bear
with them a necessary engagement, and I was very unwilling to be
necessitated to love always a man who would perhaps not always love me.
I despised the name of wife that I might live happy with that of
mistress."

And then, ecstatically recalling the old happy times, she deplores that
she has nothing left but the painful memory that they are past. Beyond
that, she has no regret except that against her will she must now be
innocent. "My misfortune was to have cruel relatives whose malice
destroyed the calm we enjoyed; had they been reasonable, I had now been
happy in the enjoyment of my dear husband. Oh, how cruel were they when
their blind fury urged a villain to surprise you in your sleep! Where
was I--where was your Heloise then? What joy should I have had in
defending my lover! I would have guarded you from violence at the
expense of my life. Oh, whither does this excess of passion hurry me?
Here love is shocked, and modesty deprives me of words."

She goes on to reproach him with his neglect and silence these ten
years. When she pronounced her "sad vow," he had protested that his
whole being was hers; that he would never live but to love Heloise. But
he has proved the "unfaithful one." Though she is immured in the
convent, it was only harsh relatives and "the unhappy consequences of
our love and your disgrace" that made her put on the habit of chastity.
She is not penitent for the past. At one moment she is swayed by the
sentiment of piety, and next moment she yields up her imagination to all
that is amorous and tender. "Among those who are wedded to God I am
wedded to a man; among the heroic supporters of the Cross I am the slave
of a human desire; at the head of a religious community I am devoted to
Abelard alone. Even here I love you as much as ever I did in the world.
If I had loved pleasures could I not have found means to gratify myself?
I was not more than twenty-two years old, and there were other men left
though I was deprived of Abelard. And yet I buried myself in a nunnery,
and triumphed over life at an age capable of enjoying it to its full
latitude. It is to you I sacrifice these remains of a transitory beauty,
these widowed nights and tedious days."

And then she closes passionately: "Oh, think of me--do not forget
me--remember my love, and fidelity, and constancy: love me as your
mistress, cherish me as your child, your sister, your wife! Remember I
still love you, and yet strive to avoid loving you. What a terrible
saying is this! I shake with horror, and my very heart revolts against
what I say. I shall blot all my paper with tears. I end my long letter
wishing you, if you desire it (would to Heaven I could!), for ever
adieu!"


_II. Abélard to Héloïse_


Abelard's answer to this letter is almost as passionate. He tells how he
has vainly sought in philosophy and religion a remedy for his disgrace;
how with equal futility he has tried to secure himself from love by the
rigours of the monastic life. He has gained nothing by it all. "If my
passion has been put under a restraint, my thoughts yet run free. I
promise myself that I will forget you, and yet cannot think of it
without loving you. After a multitude of useless endeavours I begin to
persuade myself that it is a superfluous trouble to strive to free
myself; and that it is sufficient wisdom to conceal from all but you how
confused and weak I am. I remove to a distance from your person with an
intention of avoiding you as an enemy; and yet I incessantly seek for
you in my mind; I recall your image in my memory, and in different
disquietudes I betray and contradict myself. I hate you! I love you! You
call me your master; it is true you were entrusted to my care. I saw
you, I was earnest to teach you; it cost you your innocence and me my
liberty. If now, having lost the power of satisfying my passion, I had
also lost that of loving you, I should have some consolation. But I find
myself much more guilty in my thoughts of you, even amidst my tears,
than in possessing you when I was in full liberty. I continually think
of you; I continually call to mind your tenderness."

He explains some of the means he has tried to make himself forget. He
has tried several fasts, and redoubled studies, and exhausted his
strength in constant exercises, but all to no purpose. "Oh, do not," he
exclaims, "add to my miseries by your constancy. Forget, if you can,
your favours and that right which they claim over me; allow me to be
indifferent. Why use your eloquence to reproach me for my flight and for
my silence? Spare the recital of our assignations and your constant
exactness to them; without calling up such disturbing thoughts I have
enough to suffer. What great advantages would philosophy give us over
other men if, by studying it, we could learn to govern our passions?
What a troublesome employment is love!"

Then he tries to excuse himself for his original betrayal. "Those
charms, that beauty, that air, which I yet behold at this instant,
occasioned my fall. Your looks were the beginning of my guilt; your
eyes, your discourse, pierced my heart; and, in spite of that ambition
and glory which tried to make a defence, love was soon the master." Even
now "my love burns fiercer amidst the happy indifference of those who
surround me. The Gospel is a language I do not understand when it
opposes my passion. Void of all relish for virtue, without concern for
my condition and without application to my studies, I am continually
present by my imagination where I ought not to be, and I find I have no
power to correct myself." He advises her to give up her mind to her holy
vocation as a means of forgetting him. "Make yourself amends by so
glorious a choice; make your virtue a spectacle worthy of men and
angels. Drink of the chalice of saints, even to the bottom, without
turning your eyes with uncertainty upon me. To forget Heloise, to see
her no more, is what Heaven demands of Abelard; and to expect nothing
from Abelard, to forget him even as an idea, is what Heaven enjoins on
Heloise."

He acknowledges that he made her take the veil for his own selfish
reasons, but is now bound to admit that "God rejected my offering and my
prayer, and continued my punishment by suffering me to continue my love.
Thus I bear alike the guilt of your vows and of the passion that
preceded them, and must be tormented all the days of my life." Once more
he adjures her to deliver herself from the "shameful remains" of a
passion which has taken too deep root. "To love Heloise truly," he
closes, "is to leave her to that quiet which retirement and virtue
afford. I have resolved it: this letter shall be my last fault. Adieu! I
hope you will be willing, when you have finished this mortal life, to be
buried near me. Your cold ashes need then fear nothing, and my tomb
shall be more rich and renowned."


_III.--Héloïse to Abélard_


The passion of Heloise is only inflamed by this letter from Abelard. She
has got him to write, and now she wants to see him and to hear more
about him. She cynically remarks that he has made greater advances in
the way of devotion than she could wish. There, alas! she is too weak to
follow him. But she must have his advice and spiritual comfort. "Can you
have the cruelty to abandon me? The fear of this stabs my heart." She
reproaches him for the "fearful presages" of death he had made in his
letter. And as regards his wish that she should take care of his
remains, she says: "Heaven, severe as it has been to me, is not so
insensible as to permit me to live one moment after you. Life without
Abelard were an insupportable punishment, and death a most exquisite
happiness if by that means I could be united to him. If Heaven but
hearken to my continual cry, your days will be prolonged and you will
bury me." It is his part, she says, to prepare _her_ for the great
crisis, to receive her last sighs. What could she hope for if _he_ were
taken away? "I have renounced without difficulty all the charms of life,
preserving only my love, and the secret pleasure of thinking incessantly
of you and hearing that you live. Dear Abelard, pity my despair! The
higher you raised me above other women, who envied me your love, the
more sensible am I now of the loss of your heart. I was exalted to the
top of happiness only that I might have the more terrible fall. Nothing
could be compared to my pleasures, and now nothing can equal my misery."

She blames herself entirely for Abelard's present position. "I, wretched
I, have ruined you, and have been the cause of all your misfortunes. How
dangerous it is for a great man to suffer himself to be moved by our
sex! He ought from his infancy to be inured to insensibility of heart
against all our charms. I have long examined things, and have found that
death is less dangerous than beauty. It is the shipwreck of liberty, a
fatal snare, from which it is impossible ever to get free."

She protests that she cannot forget. "Even into holy places before the
altar I carry the memory of our love; and, far from lamenting for having
been seduced by pleasures, I sigh for having lost them." She counts
herself more to be pitied than Abelard, because grace and misfortune
have helped him, whereas she has still her relentless passions to fight.
"Our sex is nothing but weakness, and I have the greater difficulty in
defending myself, because the enemy that attacks me pleases me. I doat
on the danger which threatens. How, then, can I avoid yielding? I seek
not to conquer for fear I should be overcome; happiness enough for me to
escape shipwreck and at last reach port. Heaven commands me to renounce
my fatal passion for you; but, oh! my heart will never be able to
consent to it. Adieu."


_IV.--Héloïse to Abelard_


Abelard has not replied to this letter, and Heloise begins by
sarcastically thanking him for his neglect. She pretends to have subdued
her passion, and, addressing him rather as priest than lover, demands
his spiritual counsel. Thus caustically does she proclaim her
inconstancy. "At last, Abelard, you have lost Heloise for ever.
Notwithstanding all the oaths I made to think of nothing but you, and to
be entertained by nothing but you, I have banished you from my thoughts;
I have forgot you. Thou charming idea of a lover I once adored, thou
wilt be no more my happiness! Dear image of Abelard! thou wilt no longer
follow me, no longer shall I remember thee. Oh, enchanting pleasures to
which Heloise resigned herself--you, you have been my tormentors! I
confess my inconstancy, Abelard, without a blush; let my infidelity
teach the world that there is no depending on the promises of women--we
are all subject to change. When I tell you what Rival hath ravished my
heart from you, you will praise my inconstancy, and pray this Rival to
fix it. By this you will know that 'tis God alone that takes Heloise
from you."

She explains how she arrived at this decision by being brought to the
gates of death by a dangerous illness. Her passion now seemed criminal.
She has therefore torn off the bandages which blinded her, and "you are
to me no longer the loving Abelard who constantly sought private
conversations with me by deceiving the vigilance of our observers." She
enlarges on her resolution. She will "no more endeavour, by the relation
of those pleasures our passion gave us, to awaken any guilty fondness
you may yet feel for me. I demand nothing of you but spiritual advice
and wholesome discipline. You cannot now be silent without a crime. When
I was possessed with so violent a love, and pressed you so earnestly to
write to me, how many letters did I send you before I could obtain one
from you?"

But, alas! her woman's weakness conquers again. For the moment she
forgets her resolution, and exclaims: "My dear husband (for the last
time I use that title!), shall I never see you again? Shall I never have
the pleasure of embracing you before death? What dost thou say, wretched
Heloise? Dost thou know what thou desirest? Couldst thou behold those
brilliant eyes without recalling the tender glances which have been so
fatal to thee? Couldst thou see that majestic air of Abelard without
being jealous of everyone who beholds so attractive a man? That mouth
cannot be looked upon without desire; in short, no woman can view the
person of Abelard without danger. Ask no more to see Abelard; if the
memory of him has caused thee so much trouble, Heloise, what would not
his presence do? What desires will it not excite in thy soul? How will
it be possible to keep thy reason at the sight of so lovable a man?"

She reverts to her delightful dreams about Abelard, when "you press me
to you and I yield to you, and our souls, animated with the same
passion, are sensible of the same pleasures." Then she recalls her
resolution, and closes with these words: "I begin to perceive that I
take too much pleasure in writing to you; I ought to burn this letter.
It shows that I still feel a deep passion for you, though at the
beginning I tried to persuade you to the contrary. I am sensible of
waves both of grace and passion, and by turns yield to each. Have pity,
Abelard, on the condition to which you have brought me, and make in some
measure my last days as peaceful as my first have been uneasy and
disturbed."


_V.--Abélard to Héloïse_


Abelard remains firm. "Write no more to me, Heloise, write no more to
me; 'tis time to end communications which make our penances of no
avail," he says. "Let us no more deceive ourselves with remembrance of
our past pleasures; we but make our lives troubled and spoil the sweets
of solitude. Let us make good use of our austerities, and no longer
preserve the memories of our crimes amongst the severities of penance.
Let a mortification of body and mind, a strict fasting, continual
solitude, profound and holy meditations, and a sincere love of God
succeed our former irregularities."

Both, he deplores, are still very far from this enviable state. "Your
heart still burns with that fatal fire you cannot extinguish, and mine
is full of trouble and unrest. Think not, Heloise, that I here enjoy a
perfect peace; I will for the last time open my heart to you; I am not
yet disengaged from you, and though I fight against my excessive
tenderness for you, in spite of all my endeavours I remain but too
sensible of your sorrows, and long to share in them. The world, which is
generally wrong in its notions, thinks I am at peace, and imagining that
I loved you only for the gratification of the senses, have now forgot
you. What a mistake is this!"

He exhorts her to strive, to be more firm in her resolutions, to "break
those shameful chains which bind you to the flesh." He pictures the
death of a saint and he works upon her fears by impressing upon her the
terrors of hell. His last recorded words to her are these:

"I question not, Heloise, but you will hereafter apply yourself in good
earnest to the business of your salvation; this ought to be your whole
concern. Banish me, therefore, for ever from your heart--it is the best
advice I can give you, for the remembrance of a person we have loved
guiltily cannot but be hurtful, whatever advances we may have made in
the way of virtue. When you have extirpated your unhappy inclination
towards me, the practice of every virtue will become easy; and when at
last your life is conformable to that of Christ, death will be desirable
to you. Your soul will joyfully leave this body, and direct its flight
to heaven. Then you will appear with confidence before your Saviour; you
will not read your reprobation in the Judgement Book, but you will hear
your Saviour say: 'Come, partake of My glory, and enjoy the eternal
reward I have appointed for those virtues you have practised.'

"Farewell, Heloise, this is the last advice of your dear Abelard; for
the last time let me persuade you to follow the rules of the Gospel.
Heaven grant that your heart, once so sensible of my love, may now yield
to be directed by my zeal. May the idea of your loving Abelard, always
present to your mind, be now changed into the image of Abelard truly and
sincerely penitent; and may you shed as many tears for your salvation as
you have done for our misfortunes."

Then the silence falls for ever.

       *       *       *       *       *




HENRI FRÉDÉRIC AMIEL


Fragments of an Intimate Diary


     Henri Frédéric Amiel, born at Geneva on September 21, 1821,
     was educated there, and later at the University of Berlin; and
     held a professorship at the University of Geneva from 1849
     until his death, on March 11, 1881. The "Journal Intime," of
     which we give a summary, was published in 1882-84, and an
     English translation by Mrs. Humphrey Ward appeared in 1885.
     The book has the profound interest which attaches to all
     genuine personal confessions of the interior life; but it has
     the further claim to notice that it is the signal expression
     of the spirit of its time, though we can no longer call it the
     modern spirit. The book perfectly renders the disillusion,
     languor and sentimentality which characterise a self-centred
     scepticism. It is the record, indeed, of a morbid mind, but of
     a mind gifted with extraordinary acuteness and with the utmost
     delicacy of perception. Amiel wrote also several essays and
     poems, but it is for the "Intimate Diary" alone that his name
     will be remembered.


_Thoughts on Life and Conduct_


Only one thing is needful--to possess God. The senses, the powers of the
soul, and all outward resources are so many vistas opening upon
Divinity, so many ways of tasting and adoring God. To be detached from
all that is fugitive, and to seize only on the eternal and the absolute,
using the rest as no more than a loan, a tenancy! To worship,
understand, receive, feel, give, act--this is your law, your duty, your
heaven!

After all, there is only one object which we can study, and that is the
modes and metamorphoses of the human spirit. All other studies lead us
back to this one.

I have never felt the inward assurance of genius, nor the foretaste of
celebrity, nor of happiness, nor even the prospect of being husband,
father, or respected citizen. This indifference to the future is itself
a sign; my dreams are vague, indefinite; I must not now live, because I
am now hardly capable of living. Let me control myself; let me leave
life to the living, and betake myself to my ideas; let me write the
testament of my thoughts and of my heart.


_Heroism and Duty_


Heroism is the splendid and wonderful triumph of the soul over the
flesh; that is to say, over fear--the fear of poverty, suffering,
calumny, disease, isolation and death. There is no true piety without
this dazzling concentration of courage.

Duty has this great value--it makes us feel reality of the positive
world, while yet it detaches us from it.

How vulnerable am I! If I were a father, what a host of sorrows a child
could bring on me! As a husband, I should suffer in a thousand ways,
because a thousand conditions are necessary to my happiness. My heart is
too sensitive, my imagination anxious, and despair is easy. The "might
be" spoils for me what is, the "should be" devours me with melancholy;
and this reality, present, irreparable, inevitable, disgusts or
frightens me. So it is that I put away the happy images of family life.
Every hope is an egg which may hatch a serpent instead of a dove; every
joy that fails is a knife-wound; every seed-time entrusted to destiny
has its harvest of pain.

What is duty? Is it to obey one's nature at its best and most spiritual;
or is it to vanquish one's nature? That is the deepest question. Is life
essentially the education of the spirit and of the intelligence, or is
it the education of the will? And does will lie in power or in
resignation?

Therefore are there two worlds--Christianity affords and teaches
salvation by the conversion of the will; but humanism brings salvation
by the emancipation of the spirit. The first seizes upon the heart, and
the other upon the brain. The first aims at illumining by healing, the
other at healing by illumining. Now, moral love, the first of these two
principles, places the centre of the individual in the centre of his
being. For to love is virtually to know; but to know is not virtually to
love. Redemption by knowledge or by intellectual love is inferior to
redemption by the will or by moral love. The former is critical and
negative; the latter is life-giving, fertilising, positive. Moral force
is the vital point.


_The Era of Mediocrity_


The era of mediocrity in all things is beginning, and mediocrity freezes
desire. Equality engenders uniformity; and evil is got rid of by
sacrificing all that is excellent, remarkable, extraordinary. Everything
becomes less coarse but more vulgar. The epoch of great men is passing
away; the epoch of the ant-hill is upon us. The age of individualism is
in danger of having no real individuals. Things are certainly
progressing, but souls decline.

The point of view of Schleiermacher's "Monologues," which is also that
of Emerson, is great indeed, but proud and egotistical, since the Self
is made the centre of the universe. It is man rejoicing in himself,
taking refuge in the inaccessible sanctuary of self-consciousness, and
becoming almost a god. It is a triumph which is not far removed from
impiety; it is a superhuman point of view which does away with humility;
it is precisely the temptation to which man first succumbed when he
desired to become his own master by becoming like the gods.

We are too much encumbered with affairs, too busy, too active; we even
read too much. We must throw overboard all our cargo of anxieties,
preoccupations and pedantry to recover youth, simplicity, childhood, and
the present moment with its happy mood of gratitude. By that leisure
which is far from idleness, by an attentive and recollected inaction,
the soul loses her creases, expands, unfolds, repairs her injuries like
a bruised leaf, and becomes once more new, spontaneous, true, original
Reverie, like showers at night, refreshes the thoughts which have become
worn and discoloured by the heat of day.

I have been walking in the garden in a fine autumnal rain. All the
innumerable, wonderful symbols which the forms and colours of Nature
afford charm me and catch at my heart. There is no country scene that is
not a state of the soul, and whoever will read the two together will be
astonished by their detailed similarity. Far truer is true poetry than
science; poetry seizes at first glance in her synthetic way that
essential thing which all the sciences put together can only hope to
reach at the very end.


_Lessons from the Greeks_


How much we have to learn from our immortal forefathers, the Greeks; and
how far better than we did they solve their problem! Their type was not
ours, but how much better did they revere, cultivate and ennoble the man
they knew! Beside them we are barbarians in a thousand ways, as in
education, eloquence, public life, poetry, and the like. If the number
of its accomplished men be the measure of a civilization, ours is far
below theirs. We have not slaves beneath us, but we have them among us.
Barbarism is not at our frontiers, but at our doors. We bear within us
greater things, but we ourselves are how much smaller! Strange paradox:
that their objective civilisation should have created great men as it
were by accident, while our subjective civilisation, contrary to its
express mission, turns out paltry halflings. Things are becoming
majestic, but man is diminishing.


_The Glory of Motherhood_


A mother should be to her child as the sun in the heavens, a changeless
and ever radiant star, whither the inconstant little creature, so ready
with its tears and its daughter, so light, so passionate, so stormy, may
come to calm and to fortify itself with heat and light. A mother
represents goodness, providence, law, nay, divinity itself, under the
only form in which childhood can meet with these high things. If,
therefore, she is passionate, she teaches that God is capricious or
despotic, or even that there are several gods in conflict. The child's
religion depends on the way in which its mother and its father have
lived, and not on the way in which they have spoken. The inmost tone of
their life is precisely what reaches their child, who finds no more than
comedy or empty thunder in their maxims, remonstrances and punishments.
Their actual and central worship--that is what his instinct infallibly
perceives. A child sees what we are, through all the fictions of what we
would be.

It is curious to see, in discussions on speculative matters, how
abstract minds, who move from ideas to facts, always do battle for
concrete reality; while concrete minds, on the other hand, who move from
facts to ideas, are usually the champions of abstract notions. The more
intellectual nature trusts to an ethical theory; the more moral nature
has an intellectualist morality.

The centre of life is neither in thought, nor in feeling, nor in will;
nor even in consciousness in so far as it thinks, feels, or wills; for a
moral truth may have been penetrated and possessed in all these ways,
and yet escape us still. Far below our consciousness is our being, our
substance, our nature. Those truths alone which have entered this
profound region, and have become ourselves, and are spontaneous,
involuntary, instinctive and unconscious--only these are really our life
and more than our external possessions. Now, it is certain that we can
find our peace only in life, and, indeed, only in eternal life; and
eternal life is God. Only when the creature is one, by a unity of love,
with his Creator--only then is he what he is meant to be.


_The Secret of Perpetual Youth_


There are two degrees of pride--one, wherein a man is self-complacent;
the other, wherein he is unable to accept himself. Of these two degrees,
the second is probably the more subtle.

The whole secret of remaining young in spite of years is to keep an
enthusiasm burning within, by means of poetry, contemplation and
charity, or, more briefly, by keeping a harmony in the soul. When
everything is rightly ordered within us, we may rest in equilibrium with
the work of God. A certain grave enthusiasm for the eternal beauty and
order; a glowing mind and cloudless goodwill: these are, perhaps, the
foundation of wisdom. How inexhaustible is the theme of wisdom! A
peaceful aureole surrounds this rich conception. Wisdom includes all
treasures of moral experience, and is the ripest fruit of a well-spent
life. She never ages, for she is the very expression of order, and order
is eternal. Only the wise man tastes all the savour of life and of every
age, because only he can recognise their beauty, dignity and worth. To
see all things in God, to make of one's own life a voyage to the ideal,
to live with gratitude, recollection, kindness and courage--this was the
admirable spirit of Marcus Aurelius. Add to these a kneeling humility
and a devoted charity, and you have the wisdom of God's children, the
undying joy of true Christians.


_The Fascination of Love_


Woman would be loved without reason, without analysis; not because she
is beautiful, or good, or cultivated, or gracious, or spiritual, but
because she exists. Every analysis seems to her an attenuation and a
subordination of her personality to something which dominates and
measures it. She rejects it therefore, and rightly rejects it. For as
soon as one can say "because," one is no longer under the spell; one
appreciates or weighs, and at least in principle one is free. If the
empire of woman is to continue, love must remain a fascination, an
enchantment; once her mystery is gone, her power is gone also. So love
must appear indivisible, irreducible, superior to all analysis, if it is
to retain those aspects of infinitude, of the supernatural and the
miraculous, which constitute its beauty. Most people hold cheaply
whatever they understand, and bow down only before the inexplicable.
Woman's triumph is to demonstrate the obscurity of that male
intelligence which thinks itself so enlightened; and when women inspire
love, they are not without the proud joy of this triumph. Their vanity
is not altogether baseless; but a profound love is a light and a calm, a
religion and a revelation, which in its turn despises these lesser
triumphs of vanity. Great souls wish nothing but the great, and all
artifices seem shamefully puerile to one immersed in the infinite.


_Man's Useless Yearning_


Eternal effort is the note of modern morality. This painful restless
"becoming" has taken the place of harmony, equilibrium, joy, that is to
say, of "being." We are all fauns and satyrs aspiring to become angels,
ugly creatures labouring at our embellishment, monstrous chrysalids
trying to become butterflies. Our ideal is no longer the tranquil beauty
of the soul, it is the anguish of Laocoon fighting with the hydra of
evil. No longer are there happy and accomplished men; we are candidates,
indeed, for heaven, but on earth galley-slaves, and we row away our life
in the expectation of harbour. It seems possible that this perfecting of
which we are so proud is nothing else but a pretentious imperfection.

The "becoming" seems rather negative than positive; it is the lessening
of evil, but is not itself the good; it is a noble discontent, but is by
no means felicity. This ceaseless pursuit of an endless end is a
generous madness, but is not reason; it is the yearning for what can
never be, a touching malady, but it is not wisdom. Yet there is none who
may not achieve harmony; and when he has it, he is within the eternal
order, and represents the divine thought at least as clearly as a flower
does, or a solar system. Harmony seeks nothing that is outside herself.
She is exactly that which she should be; she expresses goodness, order,
law, truth, honour; she transcends time and reveals the eternal.


_Memories of the Golden Age_


In the world of society one must seem to live on ambrosia and to know
none but noble thoughts. Anxiety, want, passion, simply do not exist.
All realism is suppressed as brutal. It is a world which amuses itself
with the flattering illusion that it lives above the clouds and breathes
mythological air. That is why all vehemence, the cry of Nature, all
suffering, thoughtless familiarity, and every frank sign of love shock
this delicate medium like a bombshell; they shatter this collective
fabric, this palace of clouds, this enchanted architecture, just as
shrill cockcrow scatters the fairies into hiding. These fine receptions
are unconsciously a work of art, a kind of poetry, by which cultivated
society reconstructs an idyll that is age-long dead. They are confused
memories of the golden age, or aspirations after a harmony which mundane
reality has not in it to give.


_Goethe Under the Lash_


I cannot like Goethe: he has little soul. His understanding of love,
religion, duty, patriotism, is paltry and even shocking. He lacks an
ardent generosity. A central dryness, an ill-cloaked egoism show through
his supple and rich talent. True, this selfishness of his at least
respects everyone's liberty and applauds all originality; but it helps
no one, troubles itself for no one, bears no one's burden; in a word, it
lacks charity, the great Christian virtue. To his mind perfection lies
in personal nobility, and not in love. His keynote is æsthetic and not
moral. He ignores sanctity, and has never so much as reflected on the
terrible problem of evil. He believes in the opportunity of the
individual, but neither in liberty nor in responsibility. He is a
stranger to the social and political aspirations of the multitude; he
has no more thought for the disinherited, the feeble, the oppressed,
than Nature has.

The profound disquiet of our era never touches Goethe; discords do not
affect the deaf. Whoso has never heard the voice of conscience, regret
and remorse, cannot even guess at the anxiety of those who have two
masters, two laws, and belong to two worlds, the world of Nature and the
world of Liberty. His choice is already made; his only world is Nature.
But it is far otherwise with humanity. For men hear indeed the prophets
of Nature, but they hear also the voice of Religion; the joy of life
attracts them, but devotion moves them also; they no longer know whether
they hate or adore the crucifix.


_Nothing New Under the Sun_


Jealousy is a terrible thing; it resembles love, but is in every way its
contrary; the jealous man desires, not the good of the loved one, but
her dependence on him and his triumph over her. Love is the
forgetfulness of Self; but jealousy is the most passionate form of
egoism, the exaltation of the despotic, vain and greedy Self, which
cannot forget and subordinate itself. The contrast is complete.

The man of fifty years, contemplating the world, finds in it certainly
some new things; but a thousand times more does he find old things
furbished up, and plagiarisms and modifications rather than
improvements. Almost everything in the world is a copy of a copy, a
reflection of a reflection; and any real success or progress is as rare
to-day as it has ever been. Let us not complain of it, for only so can
the world last. Humanity advances at a very slow pace; that is why
history continues. It may be that progress fans the torch to burn away;
perhaps progress accelerates death. A society which should change
rapidly would only arrive the sooner at its catastrophe. Yes, progress
must be the aroma of life, and not its very substance.

To renounce happiness and think only of duty; to enthrone conscience
where the heart has been: this willing immolation is a noble thing. Our
nature jibes at it, but the better self will submit to it. To hope for
justice is the proof of a sickly sensibility; we ought to be able to do
without justice. A virile character consists in just that independence.
Let the world think of us what it will; that is its affair, not ours.
Our business is to act as if our country were grateful, as if the world
judged in equity, as if public opinion could see the truth, as if life
were just, and as if men were good.


_The Only Art of Peace and Rest_


Few people know of our physical sufferings; our nearest and dearest have
no idea of our interviews with the king of terrors. There are thoughts
for which there is no confidant, sorrows which may not be shared.
Kindness itself leads us to hide them. One suffers alone; one dies
alone; alone one hides away in the little apartment of six boards. But
we are not forbidden to open this solitude to our God. Thus the
soliloquy of anguish becomes a dialogue of peace, reluctance becomes
docility, suffocation becomes liberty.

Willing what God wills is the only art of peace and rest. It is strange
to go to bed knowing that one may not see to-morrow. I knew it well last
night; yet here I am. When one counts the future by hours, and to-night
is already the unknown, one gives up everything and just talks with
oneself. I return to my mind and to my journal, as the hare returns to
its form to die. As long as I can hold pen and have a moment of solitude
I will recollect myself before this my echo, and converse with my God.
Not an examination of conscience, not an act of contrition, not a cry of
appeal. Only an Amen of submission ... "My child, give Me your heart."

       *       *       *       *       *




ST. AUGUSTINE


Confessions


     Aurelius Augustine was born at Tagaste, a city of Numidia, on
     November 13, 354. This greatest of the Latin Christian Fathers
     was the son of a magistrate named Patricius, who was a pagan
     till near the close of his life. Augustine was sent to school
     at Madaura, and next to study at Carthage. His mother, Monica,
     early became an ardent Christian, and her saintly influence
     guided the youth towards the light; but entanglement in
     philosophic doubts constrained him to associate with the
     Manichæans, and then with the Platonists. His mental struggles
     lasted eleven years. Going to Rome to teach rhetoric, he was
     invited to Milan to lecture, and there was attracted by the
     eloquent preaching of Bishop Ambrose. His whole current of
     thought was changed, and the two became ardent friends. In
     391, Augustine was ordained priest by Valerius, Bishop of
     Hippo, whose colleague he was appointed in 395. At the age of
     41, he was designated Bishop of Hippo, and filled the office
     for 35 years, passing away in his 76th year, on August 28,
     430, during the third year of the siege of Hippo by the
     Vandals under Genseric. His numerous and remarkable works
     stamp him as one of the world's transcendent intellects. His
     two monumental treatises are the "Confessions" and "The City
     of God."


_I.--Regrets of a Mis-spent Youth_


"Great art Thou, O Lord, and greatly to be praised." My faith, Lord,
should call on Thee, which Thou hast given me by the incarnation of Thy
Son, through the ministry of the preacher, Ambrose. How shall I call
upon my God? What room is there within me, wherein my God can come?
Narrow is the house of my soul; enlarge Thou it, that it may be able to
receive Thee. Thou madest us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless
until they rest in Thee.

I began, as yet a boy, to pray to Thee, that I might not be beaten at
school; but I sinned in disobeying the commands of parents and teachers
through love of play, delighting in the pride of victory in my contests.
I loved not study, and hated to be forced to it. Unless forced, I did
not learn at all. But no one does well against his will, even though
what he does is good. But what was well came to me from Thee, my God,
for Thou hast decreed that every inordinate affection should carry with
it its own punishment.

But why did I so much hate the Greek which I was taught as a boy? I do
not yet fully know. For the Latin I loved; not what my first masters,
but what the so-called grammarians taught me. For those first
lessons--reading, writing, and arithmetic--I thought as great a burden
and as vexatious as any Greek. But in the other lessons I learned the
wanderings of Æneas, forgetful of my own, and wept for the dead Dido
because she killed herself for love; while, with dry eyes, I endured my
miserable self-dying among these things, far from Thee, my God, my life.

Why, then, did I hate the Greek classics, full of like fictions to those
in Virgil? For Homer also curiously wove similar stories, and is most
pleasant, yet was disagreeable to my boyish taste. In truth, the
difficulty of a foreign tongue dashed as with gall all the sweetness of
the Greek fable. For not one word of it did I understand, and to make me
learn I was urged vehemently with cruel threats and stripes. Yet I
learned with delight the fictions in Latin concerning the wicked doings
of Jove and Juno, and for this I was pronounced a helpful boy, being
applauded above many of my own age and class.

I will now call to mind my past uncleanness and the carnal corruptions
of my soul; not because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God.
What was it that I delighted in, but to love and to be loved? But I kept
not the measure of love of soul to soul, friendship's bright boundary,
for I could not discern the brightness of love from the fog of lust.
Where was I, and how far was I exiled from the delights of Thy house, in
that sixteenth year of my age, when the madness of licence took the rule
over me? My friends, meanwhile, took no care by marriage to prevent my
fall; their only care was that I should learn to speak excellently, and
become a great orator. Now, for that year my studies were intermitted;
whilst, after my return from Madaura--a neighbouring city whither I had
journeyed to learn grammar and rhetoric--the expenses for a further
journey to Carthage were provided for me; and that rather by sacrifice
than by the ordinary means of my father, who was but a poor citizen of
Tagaste. But yet this same father had no concern how I grew towards
Thee; or how chaste I were; or, so that I were but eloquent, how barren
I were to Thy culture, O God.

But while in that my sixteenth year I lived with my parents, the briers
of unclean desires grew rank over my head, and there was no hand to root
them out. My father rejoiced to see me growing towards manhood, but in
my mother's breast Thou hadst already begun Thy temple, whereas my
father was as yet but a catechumen, and that but recently. I remember
how she, seized with a holy fear and trembling, in private warned me
with great anxiety against fornication. These seemed to me womanish
advices which I should blush to obey. But they were Thine, and I knew it
not. I ran headlong with such blindness that amongst my equals I was
ashamed of being less shameless than others when I heard them boast of
their wickedness. I would even say I had done what I had not done that I
might not seem contemptible exactly in proportion as I was innocent.


_II.--Monica's Prayers and Augustine's Paganism_


To Carthage I came, where there sang in my ears a cauldron of unholy
loves. I denied the spring of friendship with the filth of
concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lust.

Stage plays always carried me away, full of images of my miseries and of
fuel to my fire. In the theatres I rejoiced with lovers, when they
succeeded in their criminal intrigues, imaginary only in the play; and
when they lost one another I sorrowed with them. Those studies also
which were accounted commendable, led me away, having a view of
excelling in the courts of litigation, where I should be the more
praised the craftier I became. And now I was the head scholar in the
rhetoric school, whereat I swelled with conceit. I learned books of
eloquence, wherein I desired to be eminent. In the course of study I
fell upon a certain book of Cicero which contains an exhortation to
philosophy, and is called "Hortensius." This book changed my
disposition, and turned my prayers to Thyself, O Lord. I longed with an
incredible ardour for the immortality of wisdom, and began now to arise
a wish that I might return to Thee. I resolved then to turn my mind to
the Holy Scriptures, to see what they were; but when I turned to them my
pride shrank from their humility, disdaining to be one of the little
ones.

Therefore, I fell among men proudly doting, exceeding carnal, and great
talkers, who served up to me, when hungering after Thee, the Sun and
Moon, beautiful works of Thine, but not Thyself. Yet, taking these
glittering phantasies to be Thee, I fed thereon, but was not nourished
by them, but rather became more empty. I knew not God to be a Spirit.
Nor knew I that true inward righteousness, which judgeth not according
to custom, but out of the most righteous laws of Almighty God. Under the
influence of these Manichæans I scoffed at Thy holy servants and
prophets. And Thou "sentest Thine hand from above," and deliveredst my
soul from that profound darkness. My mother, Thy faithful one, wept to
Thee for me, for she discerned the death wherein I lay, and Thou
heardest her, O Lord. Thou gavest her answers first in visions. There
passed yet nine years in which I wallowed in the mire of that deep pit
and the darkness of error. Thou gavest her meantime another answer by a
priest of Thine, a certain bishop brought up in Thy Church, and well
studied in books, whom she entreated to converse with me and to refute
my errors. He answered that I was as yet unteachable, being puffed up
with the novelty of that heresy. "But let him alone awhile," saith he;
"only pray to God for him, he will of himself, by reading, find what
that error is, and how great its impiety." He told her how he himself,
when a little one, had by his mother been consigned over to the
Manichæans, but had found out how much that sect was to be abhorred, and
had, therefore, avoided it. But he assured her that the child of such
tears as hers could not perish. Which answer she took as an oracle from
heaven.

Thus, from my nineteenth year to my twenty-eighth we lived, hunting
after popular applause and poetic prizes, and secretly following a false
religion. In those years I taught rhetoric, and in those years I had
conversation with one--not in that which is called lawful marriage--yet
with but one, remaining faithful even unto her. Those impostors whom
they style astrologers I consulted without scruple. In those years, when
I first began to teach rhetoric in my native town, I had made one my
friend, only too dear to me from a community of studies and pursuits, of
my own age, and, as myself, in the first bloom of youth. I had perverted
him also to those superstitions and pernicious fables for which my
mother bewailed me. With me he now erred in mind, nor could my soul be
happy without him But behold Thou wert close on the steps of Thy
fugitives, at once "God of Vengeance" and Fountain of Mercies, turning
us to Thyself by wonderful means. Thou tookest that man out of this
life, when he had scarce filled up one whole year of my friendship,
sweet to me above all sweetness of that my life. For long, sore sick of
a fever, he lay senseless in a death-sweat; so that, his recovery being
despaired of, he was baptised in that condition. He was relieved and
restored, and I essayed to jest with him, expecting him to do the same,
at that baptism which he had received when in the swoon. But he shrank
from me as from an enemy, and forbade such language. A few days
afterwards he was happily taken from my folly, that with Thee he might
be preserved for my comfort. In my absence he was attacked again by the
fever, and so died. At this grief my heart was utterly darkened. My
native country was a torment, and my father's house a strange
unhappiness to me. At length I fled out of the country, for so my eyes
missed him less where they were wont to see him. And thus from Tagaste I
came to Carthage.


_III.--The Influence of St. Ambrose on Augustine's Life_


I would lay open before my God that nine and twentieth year of my age.
There had then come to Carthage a certain Bishop of the Manichæans,
Faustus by name, a great snare of the Devil, and many were entangled by
him through the smooth lure of his language. Because he had read some of
Cicero's orations and a few of Seneca's books, some of the poets, and
such volumes of his own sect as were written in good Latin, he acquired
a certain seductive eloquence. But it soon became clear that he was
ignorant in those arts in which I thought he excelled, and I began to
despair of his solving the difficulties which perplexed me. He was
sensible of his ignorance in these things, and confessed it, and thus my
zeal for the writings of the Manichæans was blunted. Thus Faustus, to so
many a snare of death, had now, neither willing nor witting it, begun to
loosen that wherein I was taken. Thou didst deal with me that I should
be persuaded to go to Rome and to teach there rather what I was teaching
at Carthage, my chief and only reason being that I heard that young men
studied there more peacefully, and were kept under a more regular
discipline. My mother remained behind weeping and praying. And, behold,
at Rome I was received by the scourge of bodily sickness, and I was
going down to hell, carrying all the sins that I had committed. Thou
healdest me of that sickness that I might live for Thee to bestow upon
me a better and more abiding health. I began then diligently to teach
rhetoric in Rome when, lo! I found other offences committed in that
city, to which I had not been exposed in Africa, for, on a sudden, a
number of youths plot together to avoid paying their master's salary,
and remove to another school. When, therefore, they of Milan had sent to
Rome to the prefect of the city, to furnish them with a rhetoric reader
for their city, I made application that Symmachus, then prefect of the
city, would try me by setting me some subject for oration, and so send
me. Thus to Milan I came, to Ambrose the bishop, best known to the whole
world as among the best of men, Thy servant. To him I was unknowingly
led by Thee, that by him I might knowingly be led to Thee. That man of
God received me as a father, and showed me an episcopal kindness at my
coming. Thenceforth I began to love him. I was delighted with his
eloquence as he preached to the people, though I took no pains to learn
what he taught, but only to hear how he spake.

My mother had now come to me. When I had discovered to her that I was
now no longer a Manichaean, though not yet a Catholic Christian, she was
not overjoyed as at something unexpected. But she redoubled her prayers
and tears for me now that what she had begged of Thee daily with tears
was in so great part realised; and she hurried the more eagerly to the
church, and hung on the lips of Ambrose, whom she loved as "an angel of
God," because she knew that by him I had been brought to that wavering I
was now in. I heard him every Lord's Day expound the word of truth, and
was sure that all the knots of the Manichæans could be unravelled. So I
was confounded and converted. Yet I panted after honours, gains,
marriage--and in these desires I underwent most bitter crosses.

One day, when I was preparing to recite a panegyric on the Emperor
[probably the Emperor Valentinian the Younger], wherein I was to utter
many a lie, and, lying, was to be applauded by those who knew I lied,
while passing through the streets of Milan, I observed a poor beggar
joking and joyous. I sighed, and spoke to the friends around me of the
many sorrows of the phantoms we pursued--for by all our effort and toil
we yet looked to arrive only at the very joyousness whither that beggar
had arrived before us. I was racked with cares, but he, by saying "God
bless you!" had got some good wine; I, by talking lies, was hunting
after empty praise. Chiefly did I speak of such things with Alypius and
Bebridius, of whom Alypius was born in the same town with me, and had
studied under me, and loved me. But the whirlpool of Carthaginian habits
had, when he lived there, drawn him into follies of the circus. One day
as I sat teaching my scholars, he entered and listened attentively,
while I by chance had in hand a passage which, while I was explaining,
suggested to me a simile from the circensian races, not without a jibe
at those who were enthralled by that folly. Alpius took it wholly to
himself, and he returned no more to the filths of the circensian
pastimes in Carthage. But he had gone before me to Rome, and there he
was carried away with an incredible eagerness after the shows of
gladiators. Him I found at Rome, and he clave to me and went with me to
Milan, that he might be with me, and also practise something of the law
that he had studied. Bebridius also left Carthage, that with me he might
continue the search after truth.

Meantime my sins were being multiplied. Continual effort was made to
have me married, chiefly through my mother's pains, that so once
married, the health-giving baptism might cleanse me. My concubine being
torn from my side as a hindrance to my marriage, my heart, which clave
unto her, was torn and wounded; and she returned to Africa, leaving with
me my son by her. But, unhappy, I procured another, though no wife.

To Thee be praise, Fountain of Mercies! I was becoming more miserable,
and Thou drewest nearer to me in my misery!


_IV.--The Birth of a New Life_


My evil and abominable youth was now dead. I was passing into early
manhood. Meeting with certain books of the Platonists, translated from
Greek into Latin, I therein read, not in the same words, but to the same
purpose, that "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God." But that "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among
us" I read not there. That Jesus humbled Himself to the death of the
Cross, and was raised from the dead and exalted unto glory, that at His
name every knee should bow, I read not there.

Then I sought a way of obtaining strength, and found it not until I
embraced "that Mediator between God and Man, the Man Christ Jesus."
Eagerly did I seize that venerable writing of Thy Spirit, and chiefly
the Apostle Paul. Whereupon those difficulties vanished wherein he
formerly seemed to me to contradict himself and the text of his
discourse not to agree with the testimonies of the Law and the Prophets.
But now they appeared to me to contain one pure and uniform doctrine;
and I learned to "rejoice with trembling."

I had now found the goodly pearl, which, selling all I had, I ought to
have bought, and I hesitated. To Simplicianus [sent from Rome to be an
instructor and director to Ambrose], then I went, the spiritual father
of Ambrose and now a bishop, to whom I related the mazes of my
wanderings. He testified his joy that I had read certain books of the
Platonists and had not fallen on the writings of other deceitful
philosophers. And he related to me the story of the conversion of
Victorianus, the translator of those Platonist books, who was not
ashamed to become the humble little child of Thy Christ, after he had
for years with thundering eloquence inspired the people with the love of
Anubis, the barking deity, and all the monster gods who fought against
Neptune, Venus and Minerva, so that Rome now adored the deities she had
formerly conquered. But this proud worshipper of daemons suddenly and
unexpectedly said to Simplicianus, "Get us to the Church; I wish to be
made a Christian." And he was baptised to the wonder of Rome and the joy
of the Church. I was fired by this story and longed now to devote myself
entirely to God, but still did my two wills, one new and the other old,
one carnal and the other spiritual, struggle within me; and by their
discord undid my soul.

And now Thou didst deliver me out of the bonds of desire, wherewith I
was bound most straitly to carnal concupiscence, I will now declare and
confess. Upon a day there came to see me and Alpius one Pontitianus, an
African fellow-countryman, in high office at the Emperor's court, who
was a Christian and baptised. He told us how one afternoon at Trier,
when the Emperor was taken up with the circensian games, he and three
companions went to walk in gardens near the city walls and lighten on a
certain cottage, inhabited by certain of Thy servants, and there they
found a little book containing the life of Antony. This some of them
began to read and admire; and he, as he read, began to meditate on
taking up such a life. By that book he was changed inwardly, as was one
of his companions also. Both had affianced brides, who, when they heard
of this change, also dedicated their virginity to God.


_V.--God's Command to Augustine and the Death of Monica_


After much soul-sickness and torment of spirit took place an incident by
which Thou didst wholly break my chains. I was bewailing and weeping in
my heart, when, lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice as of a
boy or girl, I know not what, chanting, and oft repeating "Tolle, lege;
tolle, lege" ["Take up and read; take up and read"]. Instantly I rose
up, interpreting it to be no other than the voice of God, to open the
Book and read the first chapter I should find. Eagerly I seized the
volume of the apostle and opened and read that section on which my eyes
fell first: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and
wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus
Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts
thereof." No further would I read, nor needed I, for a light as it were
of serenity diffused in my heart, and all the darkness of doubt vanished
away.

When shall I recall all that passed in those holy days? The
vintage-vacation I gave notice to the Milanese to provide their scholars
with another master to sell words to them; for I had made my choice to
serve Thee. It pleased Alypius also, when the time was come for my
baptism, to be born again with me in Thee. We joined with us the boy
Adeodatus, born of me, in my sin. Excellently hadst Thou made him. He
was not quite fifteen, and in wit surpassed many grave and learned men.
We were baptised, and anxiety for our past life vanished from us.

The time was now approaching when Thy handmaid, my mother Monica, was to
depart this life. She fell sick of a fever, and on the ninth day of that
sickness, and the fifty-sixth year of her age, and the three and
thirtieth of mine, was that religious and holy soul set free from the
body. Being thus forsaken of so great comfort in her, my soul was
wounded. Little by little the wound was healed as I recovered my former
thoughts of her holy conversation towards Thee and her holy tenderness
and observance towards us. May she rest in peace with her sometime
husband Patricius, whom she obeyed, "with patience bringing forth fruit"
unto Thee, that she might win him also unto Thee.

This is the object of my confessions now of what I am, not of what I
have been--to confess this not before Thee only, but in the ears also of
the believing sons of men. Too late I loved Thee! Thou wast with me, but
I was not with Thee. And now my whole hope is in nothing but Thy great
mercy. Since Thou gavest me continency I have observed it; but I retain
the memory of evil habits, and their images come up oft before me. And
Thou hast taught me concerning eating and drinking, that I should set
myself to take food as medicine. I strive daily against concupiscence in
eating and drinking. Thou hast disentangled me from the delights of the
ear and from the lusts of the eye. Into many snares of the senses my
mind wanders miserably, but Thou pluckest me out mercifully. By pride,
vainglory, and love of praise I am tempted, but I seek Thy mercy till
what is lacking in me by Thee be renewed and perfected. Thou knowest my
unskillfulness; teach me the wondrous things out of Thy law and heal me.

       *       *       *       *       *




JAMES BOSWELL


The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.


     James Boswell, born on October 18, 1740, was the son of
     Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, better known as Lord
     Auchinleck, one of the senators of the College of Justice, or
     Supreme Court, of Scotland. Boswell was educated at Edinburgh
     and Utrecht universities, and was called both to the Scots and
     the English Bar. He was early interested in letters, and while
     still a student, published some poems and magazine articles.
     Boswell was introduced to Dr. Johnson on May 16, 1763. The
     friendship rapidly ripened, and from 1772 to the death of the
     illustrious moralist, was unbroken. As an introduction to "The
     Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D."--perhaps the greatest of all
     biographies--we can hardly do better than use the words of the
     biographer himself. "To write the life of him who excelled all
     mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we
     consider his extraordinary endowments or his various works,
     has been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be
     reckoned in me a presumptuous, task. But as I had the honour
     and happiness of enjoying Dr. Johnson's friendship for upwards
     of twenty years; as I had the scheme of writing his life
     constantly in view; as he was well apprised of this
     circumstance, and from time to time obligingly satisfied my
     inquiries by communicating to me the incidents of his early
     years; and as I have spared no pains in obtaining materials
     concerning him, I flatter myself that few biographers have
     entered upon such a work as this with more advantages,
     independent of literary abilities, in which I am not vain
     enough to compare myself with some great names who have gone
     before me in this kind of writing." The "Life" was a signal
     success at the time of its publication, and even yet is
     unrivalled in the field of biography. Boswell latterly resided
     permanently in London, and was proprietor of, and principal
     contributor to, the "London Magazine". He died in his house in
     Great Portland Street on May 19, 1795.


_I.--Parentage and Education_


Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, in Staffordshire, on September
18,1709, and was baptised on the day of his birth. His father was
Michael Johnson, a native of Derbyshire, of obscure extraction, who
settled in Lichfield as a bookseller and stationer. His mother was Sarah
Ford, descended of an ancient race of substantial yeomanry in
Warwickshire. They were well advanced in years when they were married,
and never had more than two children, both sons--Samuel, their first
born, whose various excellences I am to endeavour to record, and
Nathaniel, who died in his twenty-fifth year.

Mr. Michael Johnson was a man of a large and robust body, and of a
strong and active mind; yet there was in him a mixture of that disease
the nature of which eludes the most minute inquiry, though the effects
are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those
things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general
sensation of gloomy wretchedness. From him, then, his son inherited,
with some other qualities, "a vile melancholy," which, in his too strong
expression of any disturbance of the mind, "made him mad all his
life--at least, not sober." Old Mr. Johnson was a pretty good Latin
scholar, and a citizen so creditable as to be made one of the
magistrates of Lichfield; and, being a man of good sense and skill in
his trade, he acquired a reasonable share of wealth, of which, however,
he afterwards lost the greatest part, by engaging unsuccessfully in a
manufacture of parchment.

Young Johnson had the misfortune to be much afflicted with the scrofula,
or king's evil, which disfigured a countenance naturally well formed,
and hurt his visual nerves so much that he did not see at all with one
of his eyes, though its appearance was little different from that of the
other. Yet, when he and I were travelling in the Highlands of Scotland,
and I pointed out to him a mountain, which, I observed, resembled a
cone, he corrected my inaccuracy by showing me that it was indeed
pointed at the top, but that one side of it was larger than the other.
And the ladies with whom he was acquainted agree that no man was more
nicely and minutely critical in the elegance of female dress.

He was first taught to read English by Dame Oliver, a widow, who kept a
school for young children in Lichfield. He began to learn Latin with Mr.
Hawkins, usher, or under-master, of Lichfield School. Then he rose to be
under the care of Mr. Hunter, the head-master, who, according to his
account "was very severe, and wrong-headedly severe. He used," said he,
"to beat us unmercifully, and he did not distinguish between ignorance
and negligence." Yet Johnson was very sensible how much he owed to Mr.
Hunter. Mr. Langton one day asked him how he had acquired so accurate a
knowledge of Latin, in which, I believe, he was exceeded by no man of
his time. He said, "My master whipped me very well. Without that, sir, I
should have done nothing." Indeed, upon all occasions, he expressed his
approbation of enforcing instruction by means of the rod. "The rod,"
said he, "produces an effect which terminates in itself. A child is
afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there's an end on't;
whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay
the foundation of lasting mischief."

From his earliest years Johnson's superiority was perceived and
acknowledged. He was from the beginning a king of men. His schoolfellow,
Mr. Hector, has assured me that he never knew him corrected at school
but for talking and diverting other boys from their business. He seemed
to learn by intuition; for though indolence and procrastination were
inherent in his constitution, whenever he made an exertion he did more
than anyone else. He was uncommonly inquisitive; and his memory was so
tenacious that he never forgot anything that he either heard or read.
Mr. Hector remembers having recited to him eighteen verses, which, after
a little pause, he repeated _verbatim_.

He never joined with the other boys in their ordinary diversions, for
his defective sight prevented him from enjoying them; and he once
pleasantly remarked to me "how wonderfully well he had contrived to be
idle without them." Of this inertness of disposition Johnson had all his
life too great a share.

After having resided for some time at the house of his uncle, Cornelius
Ford, Johnson was, at the age of fifteen, removed to the school of
Stourbridge, in Worcestershire, of which Mr. Wentworth was then master.
At this school he did not receive so much benefit as was expected, and
remaining there little more than a year, returned home, where he may be
said to have loitered for two years. He had no settled plan of life, and
though he read a great deal in a desultory manner, he read only as
chance and inclination directed him. "What I read," he told me, "were
not voyages and travels, but all literature, sir, all ancient writers,
all manly; though but little Greek, only some of Anacreon and Hesiod.
But in this irregular manner I had looked into many books which were not
known at the universities, where they seldom read any books but what are
put into their hands by their tutors; so that when I came to Oxford, Dr.
Adams, now Master of Pembroke College, told me I was the best qualified
for the university that he had ever known come there."


_II--Marriage and Settlement in London_


Compelled by his father's straitened circumstances, Johnson left
Pembroke College in the autumn of 1731, without taking a degree, having
been a member of it little more than three years. In December of this
year his father died.

In this forlorn state of his circumstances, he accepted an offer to be
employed as usher in the school of Market Bosworth, in Leicestershire.
But he was strongly averse to the painful drudgery of teaching, and,
having quarrelled with Sir Wolstan Dixie, the patron of the school, he
relinquished after a few months a situation which all his life
afterwards he recollected with the strongest aversion and even a degree
of horror. Among the acquaintances he made at this period was Mr.
Porter, a mercer at Birmingham, whose widow he afterwards married. In
what manner he employed his pen in 1733 I have not been able to
ascertain. He probably got a little money for occasional work, and it is
certain that he was occupied about this time in the translation of
Lobo's "Voyage to Abyssinia," which was published in 1735, and brought
him five guineas from this same bookseller. It is reasonable to suppose
that his rendering of Lobo's work was the remote occasion of his
writing, many years after, his admirable philosophical tale, "Rasselas,
Prince of Abyssinia."

Miss Porter told me that when Mr. Johnson was first introduced to her
mother his appearance was very forbidding; he was then lean and lank, so
that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye,
and the scars of the scrofula were deeply visible. He also wore his
hair, which was straight and stiff, and separated behind; and he often
had, seemingly, convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, which tended
to excite at once surprise and ridicule. Mrs. Porter was so much engaged
by his conversation that she overlooked all these external
disadvantages, and said to her daughter, "This is the most sensible man
that I ever saw in my life."

Though Mrs. Porter, now a widow, was double the age of Johnson, and her
person and manner, as described to me by the late Mr. Garrick, were by
no means pleasing to others, she must have had a superiority of
understanding and talents, as she certainly inspired him with a more
than ordinary passion. The marriage took place at Derby, on July 9,
1736.

He now set up a private academy, for which purpose he hired a large
house well situated near his native city. In the "Gentleman's Magazine"
for 1736 there is the following advertisement:

"At Edial, near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gentlemen are boarded
and taught the Latin and Greek languages, by SAMUEL JOHNSON."

But the only pupils that were put under his care were the celebrated
David Garrick and his brother George, and a Mr. Offely, a young
gentleman of fortune, who died early.

Johnson, indeed, was not more satisfied with his situation as the master
of an academy than with that of the usher of a school; we need not
wonder, therefore, that he did not keep his academy more than a year and
a half. From Mr. Garrick's account he did not appear to have been
profoundly reverenced by his pupils. His oddities of manner and uncouth
gesticulations could not but be the subject of merriment to them; and in
particular, the young rogues used to turn into ridicule his awkward
fondness for Mrs. Johnson, whom he used to name by the familiar
appellation of Tetty or Tetsey, which, like Betty or Betsey, is
provincially used as a contraction for Elizabeth, her Christian name,
but which to us seems ludicrous when applied to a woman of her age and
appearance. Mr. Garrick described her to me as very fat, with swelled
cheeks of a florid red produced by thick painting, and increased by the
liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and
affected both in her speech and her general behaviour.

While Johnson kept his academy, I have not discovered that he wrote
anything except a great portion of his tragedy of "Irene." When he had
finished some part of it, he read what he had done to his friend, Mr.
Gilbert Walmsley, Registrar of the Prerogative Court of Lichfield, who
was so well pleased with this proof of Johnson's abilities as a dramatic
writer that he advised him to finish the tragedy and produce it on the
stage. Accordingly, Johnson and his friend and pupil, David Garrick,
went to try their fortunes in London in 1737, the former with the hopes
of getting work as a translator and of turning out a fine
tragedy-writer, the latter with the intention of completing his
education, and of following the profession of the law. How, indeed,
Johnson employed himself upon his first coming to London is not
particularly known. His tragedy, of which he had entertained such hopes,
was submitted to Mr. Fleetwood, the patentee of Drury Lane Theatre, and
rejected.


_III.--Poverty Stricken in London_


Johnson's first performance in the "Gentleman's Magazine," which for
many years was his principal source of employment and support, was a
copy of Latin verses, in March, 1738, addressed to the editor. He was
now enlisted by Mr. Cave, as a regular coadjutor in his magazine, by
which he probably obtained a tolerable livelihood. What we certainly
know to have been done by him in this way were the debates in both
Houses of Parliament, under the name of "The Senate of Lilliput."

Thus was Johnson employed during some of the best years of his life,
solely to obtain an honest support. But what first displayed his
transcendent powers, and "gave the world assurance of the Man," was his
"London, a Poem in Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal," which came
out in May this year (1738), and burst forth with a splendour the rays
of which will forever encircle his name.

But though thus elevated into fame, Johnson could not expect to produce
many such works as his "London," and he felt the hardships of writing
for bread. He was therefore willing to resume the office of a
schoolmaster, and, an offer being made to him of the mastership of a
school, provided he could obtain the degree of Master of Arts, Dr. Adams
was applied to by a common friend to know whether that could be granted
to him as a favour from the university of Oxford. But it was then
thought too great a favour to be asked.

During the next five years, 1739-1743, Johnson wrote largely for the
"Gentleman's Magazine," and supplied the account of the Parliamentary
Debates from November 19, 1740, to February 23, 1743, inclusive. It does
not appear that he wrote anything of importance for the magazine in
1744. But he produced one work this year, fully sufficient to maintain
the high reputation which he had acquired. This was "The Life of Richard
Savage," a man of whom it is difficult to speak impartially without
wondering that he was for some time the intimate companion of Johnson;
for his character was marked by profligacy, insolence, and ingratitude;
yet, as he undoubtedly had a warm and vigorous, though unregulated mind,
had seen life in all its varieties, and been much in the company of the
statesmen and wits of his time, he could communicate to Johnson an
abundant supply of such materials as his philosophical curiosity most
eagerly desired; and so his visits to St. John's Gate--the office of the
"Gentleman's Magazine"--naturally brought Johnson and him together.


_IV.--Preparation of the "Dictionary"_


It is somewhat curious that Johnson's literary career appears to have
been almost totally suspended in 1745 and 1746. But the year 1747 is
distinguished as the epoch when Johnson's arduous and important work,
his "Dictionary of the English Language," was announced to the world, by
the publication of its "Plan or Prospectus."

The booksellers who contracted with Johnson, single and unaided, for the
execution of a work which in other countries has not been effected but
by the co-operating exertions of many, were Mr. Robert Dodsley, Mr.
Charles Hitch, Mr. Andrew Millar, the two Messieurs Longman, and the two
Messieurs Knapton. The price stipulated was fifteen hundred and
seventy-five pounds. The "Plan" was addressed to Philip Dormer, Earl of
Chesterfield, then one of his majesty's principal secretaries of state,
a nobleman who was very ambitious of literary distinction, and who, upon
being informed of the design, had expressed himself in terms very
favourable to its success. The plan had been put before him in
manuscript For the mechanical part of the work Johnson employed, as he
told me, six amanuenses.

In the "Gentleman's Magazine" for May, 1748, he-wrote a "Life of
Roscommon," with notes, which he afterwards much improved and inserted
amongst his "Lives of the English Poets." And this same year he formed a
club in Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row, with a view to enjoy literary
discussion.

In January, 1749, he published "Vanity of Human Wishes, being the Tenth
Satire of Juvenal Imitated"; and on February 6 Garrick brought out his
tragedy at Drury Lane. Dr. Adams was present at the first night of the
representation of "Irene," and gave me the following account. "Before
the curtain drew up, there were catcalls and whistling, which alarmed
Johnson's friends. The prologue, which was 'written by himself in a
manly strain, soothed the audience, and the play went off tolerably till
it came to the conclusion, when Mrs. Pritchard, the heroine of the
piece, was to be strangled on the stage, and was to speak two lines with
the bow-string around her neck. The audience cried out 'Murder! Murder!'
She several times attempted to speak, but in vain. At last she was
obliged to go off the stage alive." This passage was afterwards struck
out, and she was carried off to be put to death behind the scenes, as
the play now has it.

Notwithstanding all the support of such performers as Garrick, Barry,
Mrs. Pritchard, and every advantage of dress and decoration, the tragedy
of "Irene" did not please the public. Mr. Garrick's zeal carried it
through for nine nights, so that the author had his three nights'
profit; and from a receipt signed by him it appears that his friend Mr.
Robert Dodsley gave him one hundred pounds for the copy, with his usual
reservation of the right of one edition.

On occasion of his play being brought upon the stage, Johnson had a
fancy that as a dramatic author his dress should be more gay than he
ordinarily wore; he therefore appeared behind the scenes, and even in
one of the side boxes, in a scarlet waistcoat, with rich gold lace and a
gold laced hat. His necessary attendance while his play was in
rehearsal, and during its performance, brought him acquainted with many
of the performers of both sexes, which produced a more favourable
opinion of their profession than he had harshly expressed in his "Life
of Savage." With some of them he kept up an acquaintance as long as he
and they lived, and was ever ready to show them acts of kindness. He for
a considerable time used to visit the green room, and seemed to take
delight in dissipating his gloom by mixing in the sprightly chit-chat of
the motley circle then to be found there. But at last--as Mr. David Hume
related to me from Mr. Garrick--he denied himself this amusement from
considerations of rigid virtue.


_V.--"The Rambler" and New Acquaintance_


In 1750 Johnson came forth in the character for which he was eminently
qualified, a majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom. The vehicle
he chose was that of a periodical paper, which he knew had, upon former
occasions--those of the "Tattler," "Spectator," and "Guardian"--been
employed with great success.

The first paper of "The Rambler" was published on Tuesday, March 20,
1750, and its author was enabled to continue it without interruption,
every Tuesday and Friday, till Saturday, March 17, 1752, on which day it
closed. During all this time he received assistance on four occasions
only.

Posterity will be astonished when they are told, upon the authority of
Johnson himself, that many of these discourses, which we should suppose
had been laboured with all the slow attention of literary leisure, were
written in haste as the moments pressed, without even being read over by
him before they were printed. Such was his peculiar promptitude of mind.
He was wont to say, "A man may write at any time if he will set himself
doggedly to it."

Though Johnson's circumstances were at this time--1751--far from being
easy, his humane and charitable disposition was constantly exerting
itself. Mrs. Anna Williams, daughter of a very ingenious Welsh
physician, and a woman of more than ordinary talents in literature,
having come to London in hopes of being cured of a cataract in both her
eyes, which afterwards ended in total blindness, was kindly received as
a constant visitor at his house while Mrs. Johnson lived; and after her
death, having come under his roof in order to have an operation upon her
eyes performed with more comfort to her than in lodgings, she had an
apartment from him until the rest of her life at all times when he had a
house.

In 1752 he wrote the last papers of "The Rambler," but he was now mainly
occupied with his "Dictionary." This year, soon after closing his
periodical paper, he suffered a loss which affected him with the deepest
distress. For on March 17 his wife died. That his sufferings upon her
death were severe, beyond what are commonly endured, I have no doubt,
from the information of many who were then about him.

The circle of Johnson's friends, indeed, at this time was extensive and
various, far beyond what has been generally imagined. To trace his
acquaintance with each particular person were unprofitable. But
exceptions are to be made, one of which must be a friend so eminent as
Sir Joshua Reynolds, with whom he maintained an uninterrupted intimacy
to the last hour of his life.

When Johnson lived in Castle Street, Cavendish Square, he used
frequently to visit two ladies who lived opposite to him--Miss
Cotterells, daughters of Admiral Cotterell. Reynolds used also to visit
there, and thus they met. Mr. Reynolds had, from the first reading of
his "Life of Savage," conceived a very high admiration of Johnson's
powers of writing. His conversation no less delighted him, and he
cultivated his acquaintance with the laudable zeal of one who was
ambitious of general improvement.

His acquaintance with Bennet Langton, Esq., of Langton, in Lincolnshire,
another much valued friend, commenced soon after the conclusion of the
"Rambler," which that gentleman, then a youth, had read with so much
admiration that he came to London chiefly with the view of endeavouring
to be introduced to its author. By a fortunate chance he happened to
take lodgings in a house where Mr. Levett frequently visited, who
readily obtained Johnson's permission to bring Mr. Langton to him; as
indeed, Johnson, during the whole course of his life, had no shyness,
real or affected, but was easy of access to all who were properly
recommended, and even wished to see numbers at his _levée_, as his
morning circle of company might, with strict propriety, be called, for
he received his friends when he got up from bed, which rarely happened
before noon.


_VI.--Lord Chesterfield and the "Dictionary"_


In 1753 and 1754 Johnson relieved the drudgery of his "Dictionary" by
taking an active part in the composition of "The Adventurer," a new
periodical paper which his friends Dr. Hawkesworth and Dr. Bathurst had
commenced.

Towards the end of the latter year, when the "Dictionary" was on the eve
of publication, Lord Chesterfield, who, ever since the plan of this
great work had been addressed to him, had treated its author with cold
indifference, attempted to conciliate him by writing to papers in "The
World" in recommendation of the undertaking. This courtly device failed
of its effect, and Johnson, indignant that Lord Chesterfield should, for
a moment, imagine that he could be the dupe of such an artifice, wrote
him that famous letter, dated February 7, 1755, which I have already
given to the public. I will quote one paragraph.

"Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man
struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground,
encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take
of my labours, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed
till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and
cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it. I hope it is no
very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where no benefit has
been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as
owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for
myself."

Thinking it desirable that the two letters intimating possession of the
master's degree should, for the credit both of Oxford and of Johnson,
appear after his name on the title page of his "Dictionary," his friends
obtained for him from his university this mark of distinction by diploma
dated February 20, 1755; and the "Dictionary" was published on April 15
in two volumes folio.

It won him much honour at home and abroad; the Academy of Florence sent
him their "Vocabulario," and the French Academy their "Dictionnaire."
But it had not set him above the necessity of "making provision for the
day that was passing over him," for he had spent during the progress of
the work all the money which it had brought him.

He was compelled, therefore, to contribute to the monthly periodicals,
and during 1756 he wrote a few essays for "The Universal Visitor," and
superintended and contributed largely to another publication entitled
"The Literary Magazine, or Universal Review." Among the articles he
wrote for the magazine was a review of Mr. Jonas Hanway's "Essay on
Tea," to which the author made an angry answer. Johnson, after a full
and deliberate pause, made a reply to it, the only instance, I believe,
in the whole course of his life, when he condescended to oppose anything
that was written against him.

His defence of tea was indeed made _con amore_. I suppose no person ever
enjoyed with more relish the infusion of that fragrant leaf than
Johnson. The quantities which he drank of it at all hours were so great
that his nerves must have been uncommonly strong not to have been
extremely relaxed by such an intemperate use of it.

This year Johnson resumed the scheme, first proposed eleven years
previously, of giving an edition of Shakespeare with notes. He issued
proposals of considerable length, but his indolence prevented him from
pursuing the undertaking, and nine years more elapsed before it saw the
light.

On April 15, 1758, he began a new periodical paper entitled "The Idler,"
which came out every Saturday in a weekly newspaper called "The
Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette." These essays were continued
till April 5, 1760, and of the total of one hundred and three, twelve
were contributed by his friends, including Reynolds, Langton, and Thomas
Warton. "The Idler" has less body and more spirit than "The Rambler,"
and has more variety of real life, and greater facility of language. It
was often written as hastily as it predecessor.

In 1759, in the month of January, Johnson's mother died, at the great
age of ninety, an event which deeply affected him, for his reverential
affection for her was not abated by years. Soon after, he wrote his
"Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia," in order that with the profits he might
defray the expenses of her funeral, and pay some little debts which she
had left. He told Sir Joshua Reynolds that he composed it in the
evenings of one week, and sent it to the press in portions, as it was
written. Mr. Strahan, Mr. Johnston, and Mr. Dodsley purchased it for
£100, but afterwards paid him £25 more when it came to a second edition.
Though Johnson had written nothing else this admirable performance would
have rendered his name immortal in the world of literature. None of his
writings has been so extensively diffused over Europe; for it has been
translated into most, if not all, of the modern languages. Voltaire's
"Candide," written to refute the system of optimism, which it has
accomplished with brilliant success, is wonderfully similar in its plan
and conduct to Johnson's "Rasselas."

Early in 1762, having been represented to the king as a very learned and
good person, without any certain provision, his majesty was pleased to
grant him a pension of £300 a year. The prime movers in suggesting that
Johnson ought to have a pension were Mr. Thomas Sheridan and Mr. Murphy.
Having, in his "Dictionary," defined _pension_ as "generally understood
to mean pay given to a state hireling for treason to his country,"
Johnson at first doubted the propriety of his accepting this mark of the
royal favour. But Sir Joshua having given his opinion that there could
be no objection to his receiving from the king a reward for literary
merit, and Lord Bute having told him expressly, "It is not given you for
anything you are to do, but for what you have done," his scruples about
accepting it were soon removed.


_VII.--Boswell's First Meeting with Johnson_


Johnson, who thought slightingly of Sheridan's art, and perhaps resented
that a player should be rewarded in the same manner with him, upon
hearing that a pension of £200 a year had been given to Sheridan,
exclaimed, "What! Have they given _him_ a pension? Then it's time for me
to give up mine."

A man who disliked Johnson repeated his sarcasm to Mr. Sheridan, who
could never forgive this hasty, contemptuous expression, and ever after
positively declined Johnson's repeated offers of reconciliation.

It was Mr. Thomas Davies, the actor, turned bookseller, who introduced
me to Johnson. On Monday, May 16, 1763. I was sitting in Mr. Davies's
back parlour at 8 Russell Street, Covent Garden, after having drunk tea
with him and Mrs. Davies, when Johnson unexpectedly came into the shop.
Mr. Davies mentioned my name, and respectfully introduced me to him. I
was much agitated at my long-wished-for introduction to the sage, and
recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard
much, I said to Davies, "Don't tell where I come from----" "From
Scotland!" cried Davies roguishly. "Mr. Johnson," said I, "I do, indeed,
come from Scotland, but I cannot help it"--meaning this as light
pleasantry to reconciliate him. But with that quickness of wit for which
he was so remarkable he seized the expression "come from Scotland," and
as if I had said that I had come away from it, or left it, remarked,
"That, sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot
help." This stroke, and another check which I subsequently received,
stunned me a good deal; but eight days later I boldly repaired to his
chambers on the first floor of No. 1, Inner Temple Lane, and he received
me very courteously. His morning dress was sufficiently uncouth; his
brown suit of clothes looked very rusty. He had on a little, old,
shrivelled, unpowdered wig, which was too small for his head; his
shirt-neck and knees of his breeches were loose; his black worsted
stockings ill-drawn up; and he had a pair of unbuckled shoes by way of
slippers. But all these slovenly particularities were forgotten the
moment that he began to talk.

In February of the following year was founded that club which existed
long without a name, but at Mr. Garrick's funeral became distinguished
by the title of "The Literary Club." Sir Joshua Reynolds had the merit
of being the first proposer of it, to which Johnson acceded, and the
original members were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Johnson, Mr. Edmund
Burke, Dr. Nugent (Mr. Burke's father-in-law), Mr. Beauclerk, Mr.
Langton, Dr. Goldsmith, Mr. Chamier, and Sir John Hawkins. They met at
the Turk's Head in Gerard Street, Soho, one evening in every week at
seven, and generally continued their conversation till a very late hour.
After about ten years, instead of supping weekly, it was resolved to
dine together once a fortnight during the meeting of parliament, and,
their original tavern having been converted into a private house, they
moved first to Prince's in Sackville Street, then to Le Telier's in
Dover Street, and now meet at Parsloe's, St. James's Street. Between the
time of its formation and the time at which the second edition of this
work is passing through the press (June 1792), its numbers have been
raised to thirty-five, and the following persons have belonged to it:
Mr. Dunning (afterwards Lord Ashburton), Mr. Garrick, Dr. Shepley
(Bishop of St. Asaph), Mr. Thomas Warton, Mr. Joseph Warton, Dr. Adam
Smith, Lord Charlemont, Sir Robert Chambers, Dr. Percy (Bishop of
Dromore), Dr. Barnard (Bishop of Killaloe), Mr. Charles James Fox, Mr.
Gibbon, Mr. R.B. Sheridan, Mr. Colman, Mr. Windham, of Norfolk, Dr.
Burney, and the writer of this account.

This year Johnson was receiving his "Shakespeare," but he published a
review of Grainger's "Sugar Cane: A Poem" in the "London Chronicle," and
also wrote in "The Critical Review" an account of Goldsmith's excellent
poem, "The Traveller." In July 1765, Trinity College, Dublin, surprised
him with a spontaneous compliment of the highest academical honours, by
creating him Doctor of Laws, and in October he at length gave to the
world his edition of Shakespeare. This year was also distinguished by
his being introduced into the family of Mr. Thrale, an eminent brewer,
who was member for Southwark. The Thrales were so much pleased with him
that his invitations to their house were more and more frequent, till at
last he became one of the family, and an apartment was appropriated to
him, both in their house in Southwark and at Streatham.


_VIII.--Tours in the Hebrides and in Wales_


His friend, the Rev. Dr. Maxwell, speaks as follows on Johnson's general
mode of life: "About twelve o'clock I commonly visited him, and
frequently found him in bed, or declaiming over his tea, which he drank
very plentifully. He generally had a _levée_ of morning visitors,
chiefly men of letters--Hawkesworth, Goldsmith, Murphy, Langton,
Stevens, Beauclerk, etc., etc., and sometimes learned ladies,
particularly I remember a French lady of wit and fashion doing him the
honour of a visit. He seemed to me to be considered as a kind of public
oracle, whom everybody thought they had a right to visit and to consult;
and doubtless they were well rewarded. I never could discover how he
found time for his compositions. He declaimed all the morning, then went
to dinner at a tavern, where he commonly stayed late, and then drank his
tea at some friend's house, over which he loitered a great while, but
seldom took supper. I fancy he must have read and wrote chiefly in the
night, for I can scarcely recollect that he ever refused going with me
to a tavern, and he often went to Ranelagh, which he deemed a place of
innocent recreation."

In 1773 Johnson's only publication was an edition of his folio
"Dictionary," with additions and corrections, and the preface to his old
amanuensis, Machean's "Dictionary of Ancient Geography." His
"Shakespeare," indeed, was republished this year by George Stevens,
Esq., a gentleman of acute discernment and elegant taste.

On April 23, 1773, I was nominated by Johnson for membership of the
Literary Club, and a week later I was elected to the society. There I
saw for the first time Mr. Edmund Burke, whose splendid talents had made
me ardently wish for his acquaintance.

This same year Johnson made, in my company, his visit to Scotland, which
lasted from August 14, on which day he arrived, till November 22, when
he set out on his return to London; and I believe one hundred days were
never passed by any men in a more vigorous exertion. His various
adventures, and the force and vivacity of his mind, as exercised during
this peregrination, upon innumerable topics, have been faithfully, and
to the best of my ability, displayed in my "Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides."

On his return to London his humane, forgiving dispositions were put to a
pretty strong test by a liberty which Mr. Thomas Davies had taken, which
was to publish two volumes, entitled "Miscellaneous and Fugitive
Pieces," which he advertised in the newspapers, "By the Author of the
Rambler." In some of these Johnson had no concern whatever. He was at
first very angry, but, upon consideration of his poor friend's narrow
circumstances, and that he meant no harm, he soon relented.

Dr. Goldsmith died on April 4 of the following year, a year in which I
was unable to pay my usual spring visit to London, and in which Johnson
made a long autumn tour in Wales with Mr. and Mrs. Thrale. In response
to some inquiries of mine about poor Goldsmith, he wrote: "Of poor, dear
Goldsmith there is little to be told more than the papers have made
public. He died of a fever, made, I am afraid, more violent by
uneasiness of mind. His debts began to be heavy, and all his resources
were exhausted. Sir Joshua is of the opinion that he owed not less than
£2,000. Was ever poet so trusted before?"

This year, too, my great friend again came out as a politician, for
parliament having been dissolved in September, and Mr. Thrale, who was a
steady supporter of government, having again to encounter the storm of a
contested election in Southwark, Johnson published a short political
pamphlet, entitled "The Patriot," addressed to the electors of Great
Britain. It was written with energetic vivacity; and except those
passages in which it endeavours to vindicate the glaring outrage of the
House of Commons in the case of the Middlesex election and to justify
the attempt to reduce our fellow-subjects in America to unconditional
submission, it contained an admirable display of the properties of a
real patriot, in the original and genuine sense.


_IX.--Johnson's Physical Courage and Fear of Death_


The "Rambler's" own account of our tour in the Hebrides was published in
1775 under the title of "A journey to the Western Islands of Scotland,"
and soon involved its author, who had expressed his disbelief in the
authenticity of Ossian's poems, in a controversy with Mr. Macpherson.
Johnson called for the production of the old manuscripts from which Mr.
Macpherson said that he had copied the poems. He wrote to me: "I am
surprised that, knowing as you do the disposition of your countrymen to
tell lies in favour of each other, you can be at all affected by any
reports that circulate among them." And when Mr. Macpherson, exasperated
by this scepticism, replied in words that are generally said to have
been of a nature very different from the language of literary contest,
Johnson answered him in a letter that opened: "I received your foolish
and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my best to
repel, and what I cannot do for myself the law shall do for me. I hope I
shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat by the
menaces of a ruffian."

Mr. Macpherson knew little the character of Dr. Johnson if he supposed
that he could be easily intimidated, for no man was ever more remarkable
for personal courage. He had, indeed, an awful dread of death, or,
rather, "of something after death"; and he once said to me, "The fear of
death is so much natural to man that the whole of life is but keeping
away the thoughts of it," and confessed that "he had never had a moment
in which death was not terrible to him." But his fear was from
reflection, his courage natural. Many instances of his resolution may be
mentioned. One day, at Mr. Beauclerk's house in the country, when two
large dogs were fighting, he went up to them and beat them till they
separated.

At another time, when Foote threatened to _take him off_ on the stage,
he sent out for an extra large oak stick; and this mere threat, repeated
by Davies to Foote, effectually checked the wantonness of the mimic. On
yet another occasion, in the playhouse at Lichfield, as Mr. Garrick
informed me, Johnson having for a moment quitted a chair which was
placed for him between the side scenes, a gentleman took possession of
it, and when Johnson on his return civilly demanded his seat, rudely
refused to give it up; upon which Johnson laid hold of it, and tossed
him and the chair into the pit.

My revered friend had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments
of our fellow-subjects in America. As early as 1769 he had said to them:
"Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be grateful for anything
we allow them short of hanging." He had recently published, at the
desire of those in power, a pamphlet entitled "Taxation no Tyranny; an
Answer to the Resolutions and Address of the American Congress." Of this
performance I avoided to talk with him, having formed a clear and
settled opinion against the doctrine of its title.

In the autumn Dr. Johnson went to Ashbourne to France with Mr. and Mrs.
Thrale and Mr. Baretti, which lasted about two months. But he did not
get into any higher acquaintance; and Foote, who was at Paris at the
time with him, used to give a description of my friend while there and
of French astonishment at his figure, manner, and dress, which was
abundantly ludicrous. He was now a Doctor of Laws of Oxford, his
university having conferred that degree on him by diploma in the spring.


_X.--Johnson's "Seraglio"_


A circumstance which could not fail to be very pleasing to Johnson
occurred in 1777. The tragedy of "Sir Thomas Overbury," written by his
early companion in London, Richard Savage, was brought out, with
alterations, at Covent Garden Theatre, on February 1; and the prologue
to it, written by Mr. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, introduced an elegant
compliment to Johnson on his "Dictionary." Johnson was pleased with
young Mr. Sheridan's liberality of sentiment, and willing to show that
though estranged from the father he could acknowledge the brilliant
merit of the son, he proposed him, and secured his election, as a member
of the Literary Club, observing that "he who has written the two best
comedies of his age ["The Rivals" and "The Duenna"] is surely a
considerable man."

In the autumn Dr. Johnson went to Ashbourne to stop with his friend, the
Rev. Dr. Taylor, and I joined him there. I was somewhat disappointed in
finding that the edition of the "English Poets" for which he was to
write prefaces and lives was not an undertaking directed by him, but
that he was to furnish a preface and life to any poet the booksellers
pleased. I asked him if he would do this to any dunce's works if they
should ask him. Johnson: "Yes, sir, and _say_ he was a dunce." My friend
seemed now not much to relish talking of this edition; it had been
arranged by the forty chief booksellers of London, and Johnson had named
his own terms for the "Lives," namely, two hundred guineas.

During this visit he put into my hands the whole series of his writings
in behalf of the Rev. Dr. William Dodd, who, having been
chaplain-in-ordinary to his majesty, and celebrated as a very popular
preacher, was this year convicted and executed for forging a bond on his
former pupil, the young Earl of Chesterfield. Johnson certainly made
extraordinary exertions to save Dodd. He wrote several petitions and
letters on the subject, and composed for the unhappy man not only his
"Speech to the Recorder of London," at the Old Bailey, when sentence of
death was about to be pronounced upon him, and "The Convict's Address to
his Unhappy Brethren," a sermon delivered by Dr. Dodd in the chapel of
Newgate, but also "Dr. Dodd's Last Solemn Declaration," which he left
with the sheriff at the place of execution.

In 1778, I arrived in London on March 18, and next day met Dr. Johnson
at his old friend's, in Dean's Yard, for Dr. Taylor was a prebendary of
Westminster. On Friday, March 2d, I found him at his own house, sitting
with Mrs. Williams, and was informed that the room allotted to me three
years previously was now appropriated to a charitable purpose, Mrs.
Desmoulins, daughter of Johnson's godfather Dr. Swinfen, and, I think,
her daughter, and a Miss Carmichael, being all lodged in it. Such was
his humanity, and such his generosity, that Mrs. Desmoulins herself told
me he allowed her half-a-guinea a week.

Unfortunately his "Seraglio," as he sometimes suffered me to call his
group of females, were perpetually jarring with one another. He thus
mentions them, together with honest Levett, in one of his letters to
Mrs. Thrale: "Williams hates everybody; Levett hates Desmoulins, and
does not love Williams--Desmoulins hates them both; Poll (Miss
Carmichael) loves none of them."

On January 20, 1779, Johnson lost his old friend Garrick, and this same
year he gave the world a luminous proof that the vigour of his mind in
all its faculties, whether memory, judgement, and imagination, was not
in the least abated, by publishing the first four volumes of his
"Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Most Eminent of the English
Poets." The remaining volumes came out in 1781.

In 1780 the world was kept in impatience for the completion of his
"Lives of the Poets," upon which he was employed so far as his indolence
allowed him to labour.

This year--on March 11--Johnson lost another old friend in Mr. Topham
Beauclerk, of whom he said: "No man ever was so free when he was going
to say a good thing, from a _look_ that expressed that it was coming;
or, when he had said it, from a look that expressed that it had come."


_XI.--Johnson's Humanity to Children, Servants, and the Poor_


I was disappointed in my hopes of seeing Johnson in 1780, but I was able
to come to London in the spring of 1781, and on Tuesday, March 20, I met
him in Fleet Street, walking, or, rather, indeed, moving along--for his
peculiar march is thus correctly described in a short life of him
published very soon after his death: "When he walked the streets, what
with the constant roll of his head, and the concomitant motion of his
body, he appeared to make his way by that motion, independent of his
feet." That he was often much stared at while he advanced in this manner
may easily be believed, but it was not safe to make sport of one so
robust as he was.

I waited on him next evening, and he gave me a great portion of his
original manuscript of his "Lives of the Poets," which he had preserved
for me.

I found on visiting his friend, Mr. Thrale, that he was now very ill,
and had removed--I suppose by the solicitation of Mrs. Thrale--to a
house in Grosvenor Square. I was sorry to see him sadly changed in his
appearance. He died shortly after.

He told me I might now have the pleasure to see Dr. Johnson drink wine
again, for he had lately returned to it. When I mentioned this to
Johnson, he said: "I drink it now sometimes, but not socially." The
first evening that I was with him at Thrale's, I observed he poured a
large quantity of it into a glass, and swallowed it greedily. Everything
about his character and manners was forcible and violent; there never
was any moderation; many a day did he fast, many a year did he refrain
from wine; but when he did eat, it was voraciously; when he did drink
wine, it was copiously. He could practice abstinence, but not
temperance.

"I am not a severe man," Johnson once said; "as I know more of mankind I
expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man _a good man_ upon
easier terms than I was formerly."

This kind indulgence--extended towards myself when overcome by wine--had
once or twice a pretty difficult trial, but on my making an apology, I
always found Johnson behave to me with the most friendly gentleness. In
fact, Johnson was not severe, but he was pugnacious, and this pugnacity
and roughness he displayed most conspicuously in conversation. He could
not brook appearing to be worsted in argument, even when, to show the
force and dexterity of his talents, he had taken the wrong side. When,
therefore, he perceived that his opponent gained ground, he had recourse
to some sudden mode of robust sophistry. Once when I was pressing upon
him with visible advantage, he stopped me thus: "My dear Boswell, let's
have no more of this. You'll make nothing of it. I'd rather have you
whistle a Scotch tune."

Goldsmith used to say, in the witty words of one of Cibber's comedies,
"There is no arguing with Johnson, for when his pistol misses fire, he
knocks you down with the butt end of it."

In 1782 his complaints increased, and the history of his life this year
is little more than a mournful recital of the variations of his illness.
In one of his letters to Mr. Hector he says, indeed, "My health has
been, from my twentieth year, such as has seldom afforded me a single
day of ease." At a time, then, when he was less able than he had once
been to sustain a shock, he was suddenly deprived of Mr. Levett, who
died on January 17. But, although his health was tottering, the powers
of his mind were in no ways impaired, as his letters and conversation
showed. Moreover, during the last three or four years of his life he may
be said to have mellowed.

His love of little children, which he discovered upon all occasions,
calling them "pretty dears," and giving them sweetmeats, was an
undoubted proof of the real humanity and gentleness of his disposition.
His uncommon kindness to his servants, and serious concern, not only for
their comfort in this world, but their happiness in the next, was
another unquestionable evidence of what all who were intimately
acquainted with him knew to be true. Nor would it be just, under this
head, to omit the fondness that he showed for animals which he had taken
under his protection. I never shall forget the indulgence with which he
treated Hodge, his cat, for whom he himself used to go out and buy
oysters, lest the servants, having that trouble, should take a dislike
to the poor creature.


_XII.--The Last Year_


In April, 1783, Johnson had a paralytic stroke, which deprived him, for
a time, of the powers of speech. But he recovered so quickly that in
July he was able to make a visit to Mr. Langton, at Rochester, where he
passed about a fortnight, and made little excursions as easily as at any
time of his life. In August he went as far as the neighbourhood of
Salisbury, to Heale, the seat of William Bowles, Esq.; and it was while
he was here that he had a letter from his physician, Dr. Brocklesby,
acquainting him of the death of Mrs. Williams, which affected him a good
deal.

In the end of 1783, in addition to his gout and his catarrhous cough, he
was seized with a spasmodic asthma of such violence that he was confined
to the house in great pain, being sometimes obliged to sit all night in
his chair, a recumbent posture being so hurtful to his respiration that
he could not endure lying in bed; and there came upon him at the same
time that oppressive and fatal disease of dropsy. His cough he used to
cure by taking laudanum and syrup of poppies, and he was a great
believer in the advantages of being bled. But this year the very severe
winter aggravated his complaints, and the asthma confined him to the
house for more than three months; though he got almost complete relief
from the dropsy by natural evacuation in February.

On Wednesday, May 5, 1784--the last year of Dr. Johnson's life--I
arrived in London for my spring visit; and next morning I had the
pleasure to find him greatly recovered. But I was in his company
frequently and particularly remember the fine spirits he was in one
evening at our Essex Head Club. He praised Mr. Burke's constant stream
of conversation, saying, "Yes, sir; if a man were to go by chance at the
same time with Burke under a shed, to shun a shower, he would say, 'This
is an extraordinary man.'"

He had now a great desire to go to Oxford, as his first jaunt after his
illness; we talked of it for some days, and on June 3 the Oxford
post-coach took us up at Bolt Court, and we spent an agreeable fortnight
with Dr. Adams at Pembroke College.

The anxiety of his friends to preserve so estimable a life made them
plan for him a retreat from the severity of a British winter to the mild
climate of Italy; and, after consulting with Sir Joshua Reynolds, I
wrote to Lord Thurlow, the Lord Chancellor, for such an addition to
Johnson's income as would enable him to bear the expense.

Lord Thurlow, who highly valued Johnson, and whom Johnson highly valued,
at first made a very favourable reply, which being communicated to Dr.
Johnson, greatly affected him; but eventually he had to confess that his
application had been unsuccessful, and made a counter proposal, very
gratefully refused by Johnson, that he should draw upon him to the
amount of £500 or £600.

On Wednesday, June 30, I dined with him, for the last time, at Sir
Joshua Reynolds's, no other company being present; and on July 2 I left
London for Scotland.

Soon afterwards he had the mortification of being informed by Mrs.
Thrale that she was actually going to marry Signor Piozzi, a papist, and
her daughter's music-master. He endeavoured to prevent the marriage, but
in vain.

Eleven days after I myself had left town, Johnson set out on a jaunt to
Staffordshire and Derbyshire, flattering himself that he might be, in
some degree, relieved; but towards the end of October he had to confess
that his progress was slight. But there was in him an animated and lofty
spirit, and such was his love of London that he languished when absent
from it. To Dr. Brocklesby he wrote: "I am not afraid either of a
journey to London, or of a residence in it. The town is my element;
there are my friends, there are my books, to which I have not yet bid
farewell, and there are my amusements. Sir Joshua told me long ago that
my vocation was to public life, and I hope still to keep my station,
till God shall bid me 'Go in peace.'"

He arrived in London on November 16. Soon after his return both the
asthma and the dropsy became more violent and distressful, and though he
was attended by Dr. Heberden, Dr. Brocklesby, Dr. Warren, and Dr.
Butter, who all refused fees, and though he himself co-operated with
them, and made deep incisions in his body to draw off the water from it,
he gradually sank. On December 2, he sent directions for inscribing
epitaphs for his father, mother, and brother on a memorial slab in St.
Michael's Church, Lichfield. On December 8 and 9 he made his will; and
on Monday, December 13, he expired about seven o'clock in the evening,
with so little apparent pain that his attendants hardly perceived when
his dissolution took place. A week later he was buried in Westminster
Abbey, his old schoolfellow, Dr. Taylor, reading the service.

I trust I shall not be accused of affectation when I declare that I find
myself unable to express all that I felt upon the loss of such a "Guide,
Philosopher, and Friend." I shall, therefore, not say one word of my
own, but adopt those of an eminent friend, which he uttered with an
abrupt felicity: "He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill
up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. Johnson is dead. Let us
go to the next best: there is nobody; no man can be said to put you in
mind of Johnson."

       *       *       *       *       *




SIR DAVID BREWSTER


Life of Sir Isaac Newton


     Sir David Brewster, a distinguished physicist, was born at
     Jedburgh, on December 11, 1781. He was educated at Edinburgh
     University, and was licensed as a clergyman of the Church of
     Scotland by the Presbytery of Edinburgh. Nervousness in the
     pulpit compelled him to retire from clerical life and devote
     himself to scientific work, and in 1808 he became editor of
     the "Edinburgh Encyclopaedia." His chief scientific interest
     was optics, and he invented the kaleidoscope, and improved
     Wheatstone's stereoscope by introducing the divided lenses. In
     1815 he was elected a member of the Royal Society, and, later,
     was awarded the Rumford gold and silver medals for his
     discoveries in the polarisation of light. In 1831 he was
     knighted. From 1859 he held the office of Principal of
     Edinburgh University until his death on February 10, 1868. The
     "Life of Sir Isaac Newton" appeared in 1831, when it was first
     published in Murray's "Family Library." Although popularly
     written, not only does it embody the results of years of
     investigation, but it throws a unique light on the life of the
     celebrated scientist. Brewster supplemented it in 1855 with
     the much fuller "Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and
     Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton."


_I.--The Young Scientist_


Sir Isaac Newton was born at the hamlet of Woolsthorpe on December 25,
1642. His father, a yeoman farmer, died a few months after his marriage,
and never saw his son.

When Isaac was three years old his mother married again, and he was
given over to the charge of his maternal grandmother. While still a boy
at school, his mechanical genius began to show itself, and he
constructed various mechanisms, including a windmill, a water-clock, and
a carriage put in motion by the person who sat in it. He was also fond
of drawing, and wrote verses. Even at this age he began to take an
interest in astronomy. In the yard of the house where he lived he traced
the varying movements of the sun upon the walls of the buildings, and by
means of fixed pins he marked out the hourly and half-hourly
subdivisions.

At the age of fifteen his mother took him from school, and sent him to
manage the farm and country business at Woolsthorpe, but farming and
marketing did not interest him, and he showed such a passion for study
that eventually he was sent back to school to prepare for Cambridge.

In the year 1660 Newton was admitted into Trinity College, Cambridge.
His attention was first turned to the study of mathematics by a desire
to inquire into the truth of judicial astrology, and he is said to have
discovered the folly of that study by erecting a figure with the aid of
one or two of the problems in Euclid. The propositions contained in
Euclid he regarded as self-evident; and, without any preliminary study,
he made himself master of Descartes' "Geometry" by his genius and
patient application. Dr. Wallis's "Arithmetic of Infinites," Sanderson's
"Logic," and the "Optics" of Kepler, were among the books which he
studied with care; and he is reported to have found himself more deeply
versed in some branches of knowledge than the tutor who directed his
studies.

In 1665 Newton took his Bachelor of Arts degree, and in 1666, in
consequence of the breaking out of the plague, he retired to
Woolsthorpe. In 1668 he took his Master of Arts degree, and was
appointed to a senior fellowship. And in 1669 he was made Lucasian
professor of mathematics.

During the years 1666-69, Newton was engaged in optical researches which
culminated in his invention of the first reflecting telescope. On
January 11, 1761, it was announced to the Royal Society that his
reflecting telescope had been shown to the king, and had been examined
by the president, Sir Robert Murray, Sir Paul Neale, and Sit Christopher
Wren.

In the course of his optical researches, Newton discovered the different
refrangibility of different rays of light, and in his professorial
lectures during the years 1669, 1670, and 1671 he announced his
discoveries; but not till 1672 did he communicate them to the Royal
Society. No sooner were these discoveries given to the world than they
were opposed with a degree of virulence and ignorance which have seldom
been combined in scientific controversy. The most distinguished of his
opponents were Robert Hooke and Huyghens. Both attacked his theory from
the standpoint of the undulatory theory of light which they upheld.


_II.--The Colours of Natural Bodies_


In examining the nature and origin of colours as the component parts of
white light, the attention of Newton was directed to the explanation of
the colours of natural bodies. His earliest researches on this subject
were communicated, in his "Discourse on Light and Colours," to the Royal
Society in 1675.

Dr. Hooke had succeeded in splitting a mineral substance called mica
into films of such extreme thinness as to give brilliant colours. One
plate, for example, gave a yellow colour, another a blue colour, and the
two together a deep purple, but as plates which produced this colour
were always less than the twelve-thousandth part of an inch thick it was
quite impracticable, by any contrivance yet discovered, to measure their
thickness, and determine the law according to which the colours varied
with the thickness of the film. Newton surmounted this difficulty by
laying a double convex lens, the radius of the curvature of each side of
which was fifty feet, upon the flat surface of a plano-convex
object-glass, and in the way he obtained a plate of air, or of space,
varying from the thinnest possible edge at the centre of the
object-glass where it touched the plane surface to a considerable
thickness at the circumference of the lens. When the light was allowed
to fall upon the object-glass, every different thickness of the plate of
air between the object-glasses gave different colours, so that the point
where the two object-glasses touched one another was the centre of a
number of concentric coloured rings. Now, as the curvature of the
object-glass was known, it was easy to calculate the thickness of the
plate of air at which any particular colour appeared, and thus to
determine the law of the phenomena.

By accurate measurements Newton found that the thickness of air at which
the most luminous parts of the first rings were produced were, in parts
of an inch, as 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 to 178,000.

If the medium or the substance of the thin plate is water, as in the
case of the soap-bubble, which produces beautiful colours according to
its different degrees of thinness, the thicknesses at which the most
luminous parts of the ring appear are produced at 1/1.336 the thickness
at which they are produced in air, and, in the case of glass or mica, at
1/1.525 at thickness, the numbers 1.336, 1.525 expressing the ratio of
the sines of the angles of incidence and refraction which produce the
colours.

From the phenomena thus briefly described, Newton deduced that
ingenious, though hypothetical, property of light called its "fits of
easy reflection and transmission." This property consists in supposing
that every particle of light from its first discharge from a luminous
body possesses, at equally distant intervals, dispositions to be
reflected from, and transmitted through, the surfaces of the bodies upon
which it is incident. Hence, if a particle of light reaches a reflecting
surface of glass _when in its fit of easy reflection_, or in its
disposition to be reflected, it will yield more readily to the
reflecting force of the surface; and, on the contrary, if it reaches the
same surface _while in a fit of easy transmission_, or in a disposition
to be transmitted, it will yield with more difficulty to the reflecting
force.

The application of the theory of alternate fits of transmission and
reflection to explain the colours of thin plates is very simple.

Transparency, opacity and colour were explained by Newton on the
following principles.

Bodies that have the greatest refractive powers reflect the greatest
quantity of light from their surfaces, and at the confines of equally
refracting media there is no reflection.

The least parts of almost all natural bodies are in some measure
transparent.

Between the parts of opaque and coloured bodies are many spaces, or
pores, either empty or filled with media of other densities.

The parts of bodies and their interstices or pores must not be less than
of some definite bigness to render them coloured.

The transparent parts of bodies, according to their several sizes,
reflect rays of one colour, and transmit those of another on the same
ground that thin plates do reflect or transmit these rays.

The parts of bodies on which their colour depend are denser than the
medium which pervades their interstices.

The bigness of the component parts of natural bodies may be conjectured
by their colours.

_Transparency_ he considers as arising from the particles and their
intervals, or pores, being too small to cause reflection at their common
surfaces; so that all light which enters transparent bodies passes
through them without any portion of it being turned from its path by
reflexion.

_Opacity_, he thinks, arises from an opposite cause, _viz._, when the
parts of bodies are of such a size to be capable of reflecting the light
which falls upon them, in which case the light is "stopped or stifled"
by the multitude of reflections.

The _colours_ of natural bodies have, in the Newtonian hypothesis, the
same origin as the colours of thin plates, their transparent particles,
according to their several sizes, reflecting rays of one colour and
transmitting those of another.

Among the optical discoveries of Newton those which he made on the
inflection of light hold a high place. They were first published in his
"Treatise on Optics," in 1707.


_III--The Discovery of the Law of Gravitation_


From the optical labours of Newton we now proceed to the history of his
astronomical discoveries, those transcendent deductions of human reason
by which he has secured to himself an immortal name, and vindicated the
intellectual dignity of his species.

In the year 1666, Newton was sitting in his garden at Woolsthorpe,
reflecting on the nature of gravity, that remarkable power which causes
all bodies to descend towards the centre of the earth. As this power
does not sensibly diminish at the greatest height we can reach he
conceived it possible that it might reach to the moon and affect its
motion, and even hold it in its orbit. At such a distance, however, he
considered some diminution of the force probable, and in order to
estimate the diminution, he supposed that the primary planets were
carried round the sun by the same force. On this assumption, by
comparing the periods of the different planets with their distances from
the sun, he found that the force must decrease as the squares of the
distances from the sun. In drawing this conclusion he supposed the
planets to move in circular orbits round the sun.

Having thus obtained a law, he next tried to ascertain if it applied to
the moon and the earth, to determine if the force emanating from the
earth was sufficient, if diminished in the duplicate ratio of the moon's
distance, to retain the moon in its orbit. For this purpose it was
necessary to compare the space through which heavy bodies fall in a
second at the surface of the earth with the space through which the
moon, as it were, falls to the earth in a second of time, while
revolving in a circular orbit. Owing to an erroneous estimate of the
earth's diameter, he found the facts not quite in accordance with the
supposed law; he found that the force which on this assumption would act
upon the moon would be one-sixth more than required to retain it in its
orbit.

Because of this incongruity he let the matter drop for a time. But, in
1679, his mind again reverted to the subject; and in 1682, having
obtained a correct measurement of the diameter of the earth, he repeated
his calculations of 1666. In the progress of his calculations he saw
that the result which he had formerly expected was likely to be
produced, and he was thrown into such a state of nervous irritability
that he was unable to carry on the calculation. In this state of mind he
entrusted it to one of his friends, and he had the high satisfaction of
finding his former views amply realised. The force of gravity which
regulated the fall of bodies at the earth's surface, when diminished as
the square of the moon's distance from the earth, was found to be
exactly equal to the centrifugal force of the moon as deduced from her
observed distance and velocity.

The influence of such a result upon such a mind may be more easily
conceived than described. The whole material universe was opened out
before him; the sun with all his attending planets; the planets with all
their satellites; the comets wheeling in every direction in their
eccentric orbits; and the system of the fixed stars stretching to the
remotest limits of space. All the varied and complicated movements of
the heavens, in short, must have been at once presented to his mind as
the necessary result of that law which he had established in reference
to the earth and the moon.

After extending this law to the other bodies of the system, he composed
a series of propositions on the motion of the primary planets about the
sun, which was sent to London about the end of 1683, and was soon
afterwards communicated to the Royal Society.

Newton's discovery was claimed by Hooke, who certainly aided Newton to
reach the truth, and was certainly also on the track of the same law.

Between 1686 and 1687 appeared the three books of Newton's immortal
work, known as the "Principia." The first and second book are entitled
"On the Motion of Bodies," and the third "On the System of the World."

In this great work Newton propounds the principle that "every particle
of matter in the universe is attracted by, or gravitates to, every other
particle of matter with a force inversely proportional to the squares of
their distances." From the second law of Kepler, namely, the
proportionality of the areas to the times of their description, Newton
inferred that the force which keeps a planet in its orbit is always
directed to the sun. From the first law of Kepler, that every planet
moves in an ellipse with the sun in one of its foci, he drew the still
more general inference that the force by which the planet moves round
that focus varies inversely as the square of its distance from the
focus. From the third law of Kepler, which connects the distances and
periods of the planets by a general rule, Newton deduced the equality of
gravity in them all towards the sun, modified only by their different
distances from its centre; and in the case of terrestrial bodies, he
succeeded in verifying the equality of action by numerous and accurate
experiments.

By taking a more general view of the subject, Newton showed that a conic
section was the only curve in which a body could move when acted upon by
a force varying inversely as the square of the distance; and he
established the conditions depending on the velocity and the primitive
position of the body which were requisite to make it describe a
circular, an elliptical, a parabolic, or a hyperbolic orbit.

It still remained to show whether the force resided in the centre of
planets or in their individual particles; and Newton demonstrated that
if a spherical body acts upon a distant body with a force varying as the
distance of this body from the centre of the sphere, the same effect
will be produced as if each of its particles acted upon the distant body
according to the same law.

Hence it follows that the spheres, whether they are of uniform density,
or consist of concentric layers of varying densities, will act upon each
other in the same manner as if their force resided in their centres
alone. But as the bodies of the solar system are nearly spherical, they
will all act upon one another and upon bodies placed on their surface,
as if they were so many centres of attraction; and therefore we obtain
the law of gravity, that one sphere will act upon another sphere with a
force directly proportional to the quantity of matter, and inversely as
the square of the distance between the centres of the spheres. From the
equality of action and reaction, to which no exception can be found,
Newton concluded that the sun gravitates to the planets and the planets
to their satellites, and the earth itself to the stone which falls upon
its surface, and consequently that the two mutually gravitating bodies
approach one another with velocities inversely proportional to their
quantities of matter.

Having established this universal law, Newton was able not only to
determine the weight which the same body would have at the surface of
the sun and the planets, but even to calculate the quantity of matter in
the sun and in all the planets that had satellites, and also to
determine their density or specific gravity.

With wonderful sagacity Newton traced the consequences of the law of
gravitation. He showed that the earth must be an oblate spheroid, formed
by the revolution of an ellipse round its lesser axis. He showed how the
tides were caused by the moon, and how the effect of the moon's action
upon the earth is to draw its fluid parts into the form of an oblate
spheroid, the axis of which passes through the moon. He also applied the
law of gravitation to explain irregularities in the lunar motions, the
precession of the equinoctial points, and the orbits of comets.

In the "Principia" Newton published for the first time the fundamental
principle of the fluxionary calculus which he had discovered about
twenty years before; but not till 1693 was his whole work communicated
to the mathematical world. This delay in publication led to the
historical controversy between him and Leibnitz as to priority of
discovery.

In 1676 Newton had communicated to Leibnitz the fact that he had
discovered a general method of drawing tangents, concealing the method
in two sentences of transposed characters. In the following year
Leibnitz mentioned in a letter to Oldenburg (to be communicated to
Newton) that he had been for some time in possession of a method for
drawing tangents, and explains the method, which was no other than the
differential calculus. Before Newton had published a single word upon
fluxions the differential calculus had made rapid advances on the
Continent.

In 1704 a reviewer of Newton's "Optics" insinuated that Newton had
merely improved the method of Leibnitz, and had indeed stolen Leibnitz's
discovery; and this started a controversy which raged for years.
Finally, in 1713, a committee of the Royal Society investigated the
matter, and decided that Newton was the first inventor.


_IV.--Later Years of Newton's Life_


In 1692, when Newton was attending divine service, his dog Diamond upset
a lighted taper on his desk and destroyed some papers representing the
work of years. Newton is reported merely to have exclaimed: "O Diamond,
Diamond, little do you know the mischief you have done me!" But,
nevertheless, his excessive grief is said for a time to have affected
his mind.

In 1695 Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint, and his mathematical
and chemical knowledge were of eminent use in carrying on the recoinage
of the mint. Four years later he was made Master of the Mint, and held
this office during the remainder of his life. In 1701 he was elected one
of the members of parliament for Oxford University, and in 1705 he was
knighted.

Towards the end of his life Newton began to devote special attention to
the theological questions, and in 1733 he published a work entitled
"Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St.
John," which is characterised by great learning and marked with the
sagacity of its distinguished author. Besides this religious work, he
also published his "Historical Account of Two Notable Corruptions of
Scripture," and his "Lexicon Propheticum."

In addition to theology, Newton also studied chemistry; and in 1701 a
paper by him, entitled "Scala graduum caloris," was read at the Royal
Society; while the queries at the end of his "Optics" are largely
chemical, dealing with such subjects as fire, flame, vapour, heat, and
elective attractions.

He regards fire as a body heated so hot as to emit light copiously; and
flame as a vapour, fume, or exhalation, heated so hot as to shine.

In explaining the structure of solid bodies, he is of the opinion "that
the smallest particles of matter may cohere by the strongest
attractions, and compose bigger particles of weaker virtue; and many of
these may cohere and compose bigger particles whose virtue is still
weaker; and so on for diverse successions, until the progression end in
the biggest particles on which the operations in chemistry and the
colours of natural bodies depend, and which, by adhering, compose bodies
of a sensible magnitude. If the body is compact, and bends or yields
inward to pressure without any sliding of its parts, it is hard and
elastic, returning to its figure with a force arising from the mutual
attraction of its parts.

"If the parts slide upon one another the body is malleable and soft. If
they slip easily, and are of a fit size to be agitated by heat, and the
heat is big enough to keep them in agitation, the body is fluid; and if
it be apt to stick to things it is humid; and the drops of every fluid
affect a round figure by the mutual attraction of their parts, as the
globe of the earth and sea affects a round figure by the mutual
attraction of its parts by gravity."

In a letter to Mr. Boyle (1678-79) Newton explains his views respecting
the ether. He considers that the ether accounts for the refraction of
light, the cohesion of two polished pieces of metal in an exhausted
receiver, the adhesion of quick-silver to glass tubes, the cohesion of
the parts of all bodies, the phenomena of filtration and of capillary
attraction, the action of menstrua on bodies, the transmutation of gross
compact substances into aerial ones, and gravity. If a body is either
heated or loses its heat when placed in vacuo, he ascribes the
conveyance of the heat in both cases "to the vibration of a much subtler
medium than air"; and he considers this medium also the medium by which
light is refracted and reflected, and by whose vibrations light
communicates heat to bodies and is put into fits of easy reflection and
transmission. Light, Newton regards as a peculiar substance composed of
heterogeneous particles thrown off with great velocity in all directions
from luminous bodies, and he supposes that these particles while passing
through the ether excite in it vibrations, or pulses, which accelerate
or retard the particles of light, and thus throw them into alternate
"fits of easy reflection and transmission." He computes the elasticity
of the ether to be 490,000,000,000 times greater than air in proportion
to its density.

In 1722, in his eightieth year, Newton began to suffer from stone; but
by means of a strict regimen and other precautions he was enabled to
alleviate the complaint, and to procure long intervals of ease. But a
journey to London on February 28, 1727, to preside at a meeting of the
Royal Society greatly aggravated the complaint. On Wednesday, March 15,
he appeared to be somewhat better. On Saturday morning he carried on a
pretty long conversation with Dr. Mead; but at six o'clock the same
evening he became insensible, and continued in that state until Monday,
the 20th, when he expired, without pain, between one and two o'clock in
the morning, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.

       *       *       *       *       *




JOHN BUNYAN


Grace Abounding


     During his life of sixty years Bunyan wrote sixty books, and
     of all these undoubtedly the most popular are the "Pilgrim's
     Progress," "The Holy War," and "Grace Abounding." His "Grace
     Abounding to the Chief of Sinners," generally called simply
     "Grace Abounding," is a record of his own religious
     experiences. (Bunyan, biography: see FICTION.)


_I.--To the Chief of Sinners_


In this relation of the merciful working of God upon my soul I do in the
first place give you a hint of my pedigree and manner of bringing up. My
descent was, as is well-known to many, of a low and inconsiderable
generation, my father's house being of that rank that is meanest and
most despised of all the families in the land. Though my parents put me
to school, to my shame I confess I did soon lose that little I learnt.
As for my own natural life, for the time that I was without God in the
world, it was indeed according to the course of this world, and the
spirit that worketh in the children of disobedience, for from a child I
had but few equals for cursing, lying, and blaspheming. In these days
the thoughts of religion were very grievous to me. I could neither
endure it myself, nor that any other should. But God did not utterly
leave me, but followed me with judgements, yet such as were mixed with
mercy.

Once I fell into a creek of the sea and hardly escaped drowning; and
another time I fell out of a boat into Bedford river, but mercy yet
preserved me alive. When I was a soldier, I and others were drawn to
such a place to besiege it; but when I was ready to go, one of the
company desired to go in my place, to which I consented. Coming to the
siege, as he stood sentinel, he was shot in the head with a musket
bullet, and died. Here were judgement and mercy, but neither of them did
awaken my soul to righteousness.

Presently, after this I changed my condition into a married state, and
my mercy was to light upon a wife whose father was counted godly. Though
we came together so poor that we had not so much household stuff as a
dish or a spoon betwixt us both, yet she had two books which her father
left her when he died: "The Plain Man's Pathway to Heaven," and "The
Practice of Piety." In these I sometimes read with her, and in them
found some things that were pleasing to me, but met with no conviction.
Yet through these books I fell in very eagerly with the religion of the
times, to wit, to go to church twice a day, though yet retaining my
wicked life. But one day, as I was standing at a neighbour's
shop-window, cursing after my wonted manner, the woman of the house
protested that she was made to tremble to hear me, and told me I by thus
doing was able to spoil all the youth in the whole town.

At this reproof I was put to shame, and that, too, as I thought, before
the God of Heaven. Hanging down my head, I wished with all my heart that
I might be a little child again. How it came to pass I know not, but I
did from this time so leave off my swearing that it was a wonder to
myself to observe it. Soon afterwards I fell in company with one poor
man that made profession of religion. Falling into some liking to what
he said, I betook me to my Bible, especially to the historical part.
Wherefore I fell to some outward reformation, and did strive to keep the
commandments, and thus I continued about a year, all which time our
neighbours wondered at seeing such an alteration in my life. For though
I was as yet nothing but a poor painted hypocrite, I loved to be talked
of as one that was godly. Yet, as my conscience was beginning to be
tender, I after a time gave up bell-ringing and dancing, thinking I
could thus the better please God. But, poor wretch as I was, I was still
ignorant of Jesus Christ, and was going about to establish my own
righteousness.

But upon a day the good providence of God took me to Bedford, to work on
my calling, and in that town I came on three or four poor women sitting
at a door in the sun and talking about the things of God. I listened in
silence while they spoke of the new birth and the work of God on their
hearts. At this I felt my own heart began to shake, for their words
convinced me that I wanted the true tokens of a godly man. I now began
to look into my Bible with new eyes, and became conscious of my lack of
faith, and was often ready to sink with faintness in my mind, lest I
should prove not to be an elect vessel of the mercy of God. I was long
vexed with fear, until one day a sweet light broke in upon me as I came
on the words, "Yet there is room." Still I wavered many months between
hopes and fears, though as to act of sinning I never was more tender
than now. I was more loathsome in my own eyes than a toad, and I thought
I was so in God's eyes, too. I thought none but the devil could equalise
me for inward wickedness; and thus I continued a long while, even some
years together. But afterwards the Lord did more fully and graciously
discover Himself to me, and at length I was indeed put into my right
mind, even as other Christians are.

I remember that one day as I was travelling into the country, and musing
on the wickedness of my heart, that Scripture came to my mind. "He hath
made peace by the blood of His cross." I saw that the justice of God and
my sinful soul could embrace each other through this blood. This was a
good day to me. At this time I sat under the ministry of holy Mr.
Gifford, whose doctrine was, by God's grace, much for my stability. My
soul was now led from truth to truth, even from the birth and cradle of
the Son of God to His ascension and His second coming to judge the
world.

One day there fell into my hands a book of Martin Luther. It was his
"Commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians," and the volume was so old
that it was ready to fall to pieces. When I had but a little way perused
it, I found that my condition was in his experience so handled as if his
book had been written out of my heart. I do here wish to set forth that
I do prefer this book of Martin Luther upon the Galatians (excepting the
Holy Bible) before all the books I have ever seen, as most fit for a
wounded conscience. About this time I was beset with tormenting fears
that I had committed the unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost, and an
ancient Christian to whom I opened my mind told me he thought so, too,
which gave me cold comfort. Thus, by strange and unusual assaults of the
tempter was my soul, like a broken vessel, tossed and driven with winds.
There was now nothing that I longed for but to be put out of doubt as to
my full pardon. One morning when I was at prayer, and trembling under
fear that no word of God could help me, that piece of a sentence darted
in upon me: "My grace is sufficient." By these words I was sweetly
sustained for about eight weeks, though not without conflicts, until at
last these same words did break in with great power suddenly upon me:
"My grace is sufficient for thee," repeated three times, at which my
understanding was so enlightened that I was as though I had seen the
Lord Jesus look down from Heaven through the tiles upon me, and direct
these words to me.

One day, as I was passing in the field, with some dashes on my
conscience, fearing lest yet all was not right, suddenly this sentence
fell upon my soul: "Thy righteousness is in Heaven." I saw in a moment
that my righteousness was not my good frame of heart, but Jesus Christ
Himself, "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever." Now shall I go
forward to give you a relation of other of the Lord's dealings with me.
I shall begin with what I met when I first did join in fellowship with
the people of God in Bedford. Upon a time I was suddenly seized with
much sickness, and was inclining towards consumption. Now I began to
give myself up to fresh serious examination, and there came flocking
into my mind an innumerable company of my sins and transgressions, my
soul also being greatly tormented between these two considerations: Live
I must not, die I dare not. But as I was walking up and down in the
house, a man in a most woeful state, that word of God took hold of my
heart: "Ye are justified freely by His grace, through the redemption
that is in Jesus Christ." But oh, what a turn it made upon me! At this I
was greatly lightened in my mind, and made to understand that God could
justify a sinner at any time. And as I was thus in a muse, that
Scripture also came with great power upon my spirit: "Not by works of
righteousness that we have done, but according to His mercy He hath
saved us." Now was I got on high; I saw myself verily within the arms of
grace and mercy; and though I was before afraid to think of a dying
hour, yet now I cried with my whole heart: "Let me die."


_II.--Bunyan Becomes a Preacher_


And now I will thrust in a word or two concerning my preaching of the
Word. For, after I had been about five or six years awakened, some of
the ablest of the saints with us desired me, with much earnestness, to
take a hand sometimes in one of the meetings, and to speak a word of
exhortation unto them. I consented to their request, and did twice at
two several assemblies, though with much weakness, discover my gift to
them. At which they did solemnly protest that they were much affected
and comforted, and gave thanks to the Father of Mercies for the grace
bestowed on me. After this, when some of them did go to the country to
teach, they would also that I should go with them. To be brief, after
some solemn prayer to the Lord with fasting, I was more particularly
called forth and appointed to a more ordinary and public preaching of
the Word. Though of myself of all saints the most unworthy, yet I did
set upon the work, and did according to my gift preach the blessed
Gospel, which, when the country people understood, they came in to hear
the Word by hundreds. I had not preached long before some began to be
touched at the apprehension of their need of Jesus Christ, and to bless
God for me as God's instrument that showed the way of salvation.

In my preaching I took special notice of this one thing, that the Lord
did lead me to begin where His Word begins with sinners--that is, to
condemn all flesh, because of sin. Thus I went on for about two years,
crying out against men's sins, after which the Lord came in upon my soul
and gave me discoveries of His Blessed grace, wherefore I now altered in
my preaching, and did much labour to hold forth Christ in all His
relations, offices, and benefits unto the world. After this, God led me
into something of the mystery of union with Christ. Wherefore that I
discovered to them also. And when I had travelled through these three
chief points of the Word of God, about five years or more, I was cast
into prison, where I have lain above as long again, to confirm the truth
by way of suffering, as before in testifying of it by preaching
according to the Scriptures.

When I went first to preach the Word, the doctors and priests of the
country did open wide against me. But I was persuaded not to render
railing for railing, but to see how many of their carnal professors I
could convince of their miserable state by the law, and of the want and
worth of Christ. I never cared to meddle with things that were
controverted among the saints, especially things of the lowest nature. I
have observed that where I have had a work to do for God, I have had
first, as it were, the going of God upon my spirit to desire I might
preach there. My great desire in my fulfilling my ministry was to get
into the darkest places of the country, even amongst these people that
were furthest off of profession. But in this work, as in all other work,
I had my temptations attending me, and that of divers kinds. Sometimes
when I have been preaching I have been violently assailed with thoughts
of blasphemy, and strangely tempted to speak the words with my mouth
before the congregation. But, I thank the Lord, I have been kept from
consenting to these so horrid suggestions. I have also, while found in
this blessed work of Christ, been often tempted to pride and liftings up
of heart, and this has caused hanging down of the head under all my
gifts and attainments. I have felt this thorn in the flesh the very
mercy of God to me. But when Satan perceived that his thus tempting and
assaulting of me would not answer his design--to wit, to overthrow my
ministry--then he tried another way, which was to load me with slanders
and reproaches. It began, therefore, to be rumoured up and down the
country that I was a witch, a Jesuit, a highwayman, and the like. To all
which I shall only say, God knows that I am innocent. Now, as Satan
laboured to make me vile among my countrymen, that, if possible, my
preaching might be of none effect, so there was added thereto a tedious
imprisonment, of which I shall in my next give you a brief account.


_III.--In a Prison Cell_


Upon November 12, 1660, I was desired by some of the friends in the
country to come to teach at Samsell, by Harlington, in Bedfordshire, to
whom I made a promise to be with them. The justice, Mr. Francis Wingate,
hearing thereof, forthwith issued out his warrant to take me and bring
me before him. When the constable came in we were, with our Bibles in
our hands, just about to begin our exercise. So that I was taken and
forced to leave the room, but before I went away I spake some words of
counsel and encouragement to the people; for we might have been
apprehended as thieves or murderers. But, blessed be God, we suffer as
Christians for well-doing; and we had better be the persecuted than the
persecutors. But the constable and the justice's man would not be quiet
till they had me away. But because the justice was not at home on that
day, a friend of mine engaged to bring me to the constable next morning;
so on that day we went to him, and so to the justice. He asked the
constable what we did where we were met together, and what we had with
us? I know he meant whether we had armour or not; but when he heard that
there were only a few of us, met for preaching and hearing the Word, he
could not well tell what to say. Yet, because he had sent for me, he did
adventure to put a few proposals to me, to this effect: What did I
there? Why did I not content myself with following my calling? For it
was against the law that such as I should be admitted to do as I did. I
answered that my intent was to instruct the people to forsake their sins
and close in with Christ, lest they did perish miserably, and that I
could do both, follow my calling and also preach without confusion.

At which words he was in a chafe, for he said he would break the neck of
our meetings. I said it might be so. Then he wished me to get sureties
to be bound for me, or else he would send me to the gaol. My sureties
being ready, I called them in, and when the bond for my appearance was
made, he told them that they were bound to keep me from preaching; and
that if I did preach, their bonds would be forfeited. To which I
answered that I should break them, for I should not leave preaching the
Word of God. Whereat that my mittimus must be made, and I sent to the
gaol, there to lie till the quarter sessions.

After I had lain in the gaol for four or five days, the brethren sought
means again to get me out by bondsmen (for so runs my mittimus--that I
should lie there till I could find sureties). They went to a justice at
Elstow, one Mr. Crumpton, to desire him to take bond for my appearing at
quarter session. At first he told them he would; but afterwards he made
a demur at the business, and desired first to see my mittimus, which ran
to this purpose: That I went about to several conventicles in this
country, to the great disparagement of the government of the Church of
England, etc. When he had seen it, he said there might be something more
against me than was expressed in my mittimus; and that he was but a
young man, and, therefore, he durst not do it. This my gaoler told me;
whereat I was not at all daunted, but rather glad, and saw evidently
that the Lord had heard me; for before I went down to the justice, I
begged of God that if I might do more good by being at liberty than in
prison that then I might be set at liberty; but, if not, His will be
done. For I was not altogether without hopes that my imprisonment might
be an awakening to the saints in this country, therefore I could not
tell well which to choose; only I in that manner did commit the thing to
God. And verily, at my return, I did meet my God sweetly in the prison
again, comforting of me and satisfying of me that it was His will and
mind that I should be there.

When I came back to prison, when I was musing at the slender answer of
the justice, this word dropped in upon my heart with some life: "For He
knew that for envy they had delivered him."

Thus have I, in short, declared the manner and occasion of my being in
prison, where I lie waiting the good will of God, to do with me as he
pleaseth; knowing that not one hair of my head can fall to the ground
without the will of my Father.


_IV.--Bunyan's Story Supplemented_


The continuation by an intimate friend of Bunyan, written anonymously.

Reader--The painful and industrious author of this book has given you a
faithful and very moving relation of the beginning and middle of the
days of his pilgrimage on earth. As a true and intimate acquaintance of
Mr. Bunyan's, that his good end may be known, as well as his evil
beginning, I have taken upon me to piece this to the thread too soon
broke off.

After his being freed from his twelve years' imprisonment, wherein he
had time to furnish the world with sundry good books, etc., and by his
patience to move Dr. Barlow, the then Bishop of Lincoln, and other
churchmen, to pity his hard and unreasonable sufferings so far as to
procure his enlargement, or there perhaps he had died by the noisomeness
and ill-usage of the place. Being again at liberty, he went to visit
those who had been a comfort to him in his tribulation, giving
encouragement by his example, if they happened to fall into affliction
or trouble, then to suffer patiently for the sake of a good conscience,
so that the people found a wonderful consolation in his discourse and
admonition.

As often as opportunity would permit, he gathered them together in
convenient places, though the law was then in force against meetings,
and fed them with the sincere milk of the Word, that they might grow in
grace thereby. He sent relief to such as were anywhere taken and
imprisoned on these accounts. He took great care to visit the sick, nor
did he spare any pains or labour in travel though to the remote
counties, where any might stand in need of his assistance.

When in the late reign liberty of conscience was unexpectedly given, he
gathered his congregation at Bedford, where he mostly lived and had
spent most of his life. Here a new and larger meeting-house was built,
and when, for the first time, he appeared there to edify, the place was
so thronged that many were constrained to stay without, though the house
was very spacious.

Here he lived in much peace and quiet of mind, contenting himself with
that little God had bestowed on him, and sequestering himself from all
secular employments to follow that of his call to the ministry.

During these things there were regulators sent into all the cities and
towns corporate, to new model the government in the magistracy, etc., by
turning out some and putting in others. Against this Mr. Bunyan
expressed zeal with some weariness, and laboured with his congregation
to prevent their being imposed on in this kind. And when a great man in
those days, coming to Bedford upon such an errand, sent for him, as it
is supposed, to give him a place of public trust, he would by no means
come at him, but sent his excuse.

When he was at leisure from writing and teaching, he often came up to
London, and there went among the congregations of the Nonconformists,
and used his talent to the great good-liking of the hearers. Thus he
spent his latter years. But let me come a little nearer to particulars
of time. After he was sensibly convicted of the wicked state of his life
and converted, he was baptised into the congregation, and admitted a
member thereof in the year 1655, and became speedily a very zealous
professor. But upon the return of King Charles II. to the Crown in 1660,
he was on November 12 taken as he was edifying some good people, and
confined in Bedford Gaol for the space of six years; till the Act of
Indulgence to dissenters being allowed, he obtained his freedom by the
intercession of some in power that took pity on his sufferings; but was
again taken up, and was then confined for six years more. He was chosen
to the care of the congregation at Bedford on December 12, 1671. In this
charge he often had disputed with scholars that came to oppose him, as
thinking him an ignorant person; but he confuted, and put to silence,
one after another, all his method being to keep close to Scripture.

At length, worn out with sufferings, age, and often teaching, the day of
his dissolution drew near. Riding to Reading in order to plead with a
young man's father for reconciliation to him, he journeyed on his return
by way of London, where, through being overtaken by excessive rains and
coming to his lodgings extremely wet, he fell sick of a violent fever,
which he bore with much constancy and patience. Finding his vital
strength decay, he resigned his soul into the hands of his most merciful
Redeemer, following his Pilgrim from the City of Destruction to the New
Jerusalem. He died at the house of one Mr. Straddocks, a grocer, at the
Star on Snow Hill, in the Parish of St. Sepulchre, London, in the
sixtieth year of his age, after ten days' sickness; and was buried in
the new burying ground in Artillery Place.

       *       *       *       *       *




ALEXANDER CARLYLE


Autobiography


     Alexander Carlyle, minister of the Church of Scotland and
     author of the celebrated "Autobiography," was born at
     Cummmertrees Manse, Dumfriesshire, on January 26, 1722, and
     died at Inveresk on August 25, 1805. His commanding appearance
     won for him the sobriquet of "Jupiter Carlyle," and Sir Walter
     Scott spoke of him as "the grandest demi-god I ever saw." He
     was greatly respected in Scotland as a wise and tolerant man,
     where too many were narrow, bitter, and inquisitorial. With
     regard to freedom in religious thought he was in advance of
     his time, and brought the clerical profession into greater
     respect by showing himself a cultured man of the world as well
     as a leader of his Church. Carlyle, however, would hardly be
     remembered now but for the glimpses which his book gives of
     contemporary persons and manners. The work was first edited in
     1860 by John Hill Burton.


_I.--In the Days of Prince Charlie_


I have been too late in beginning this work, as I have entered on the
seventy-ninth year of my age, but I will endeavour, with God's blessing,
to serve posterity to the best of my ability with such a faithful
picture of times and characters as came within my view in the humble and
private sphere of life in which I have always acted.

My father, minister of Prestonpans, was of a warm and benevolent temper,
and an orthodox and eloquent orator. My mother was a person of an
elegant and reflecting mind, and was as much respected as my father was
beloved. Until 1732, when I was ten years of age, they were in very
narrow circumstances, but in that year the stipend was raised from £70
to £140 per annum. In 1735 I was sent to college.

Yielding to parental wishes, I consented, in 1738, to become a student
of divinity, and pursued my studies in Edinburgh and, from 1743, in
Glasgow, passing my trials in the presbytery of Haddington in the summer
of 1745. Early in September I was at Moffat, when I heard that the
Chevalier Prince Charles had landed in the north. I repaired to
Edinburgh, and joined a company of volunteers for the defence of the
city. Edinburgh was in great ferment, and of divided allegiance; there
was no news of the arrival of Sir John Cope with the government forces;
the Highlanders came on, no resistance was made, and the city
surrendered on the sixteenth. That night, my brother and I walked along
the sands to Prestonpans, and carried the news. Proceeding to Dunbar,
where Sir John Cope's army lay, I inquired for Colonel Gardiner, whom I
found very dejected.

"Sandie," said Colonel Gardiner, "I'll tell you in confidence that I
have not above ten men in my regiment whom I am certain will follow me.
But we must give them battle now, and God's will be done!"

Cope's small army was totally defeated at Prestonpans on the morning of
the twenty-first. I heard the first cannon that was fired, and started
to my clothes. My father had been up before daylight, and had resorted
to the steeple. I ran into the garden. Within ten minutes after firing
the first cannon the whole prospect was filled with runaways, and
Highlanders pursuing them. The next week I saw Prince Charles twice in
Edinburgh. He was a good-looking man; his hair was dark red and his eyes
black. His features were regular, his visage long, much sunburnt and
freckled, and his countenance thoughtful and melancholy.

In October of the same year I went to Leyden, to study at the university
there. Here there were twenty-two British students, among them the
Honourable Charles Townshend, afterwards a distinguished statesman, and
Mr. Doddeswell, afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer. We passed our
time very agreeably, and very profitably, too; for the conversations at
our evening meetings of young men of good knowledge could not fail to be
instructive, much more so than the lectures, which were very dull. On my
return from Holland, I was introduced by my cousin, Captain Lyon, to
some families of condition in London, and was carried to court of an
evening, for George II. at that time had evening drawing rooms, where
his majesty and Princess Amelia, who had been a lovely woman, played at
cards.

I had many agreeable parties with the officers of the Horse Guards, who
were all men of the world, and some of them of erudition and
understanding. I was introduced to Smollett at this time, and was in the
coffee-house with him when the news of the Battle of Culloden came, and
when London all over was in a perfect uproar of joy. The theatres were
not very attractive this season, as Garrick had gone over to Dublin; but
there remained Mrs. Pritchard, Mrs. Clive, and Macklin, who were all
excellent in their way. Of the literary people I met with I must not
forget Thomson, the poet, and Dr. Armstrong.

In June, 1746, I was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Haddington,
and was ordained minister of Inveresk on August 2, 1748. There were many
resident families of distinction, and my situation was envied as
superior to that of most clergymen for agreeable society. As one of the
"Moderate" party, I now became much implicated in ecclesiastical
politics. Dr. Robertson, John Home, and I had an active hand in the
restoration of the authority of the General Assembly over the
Presbyteries.


_II.--Literary Lions of Edinburgh_


It was in one of these years that Smollett visited Scotland, and came
out to Musselburgh. He was a man of very agreeable conversation and of
much genuine humour, and, though not a profound scholar, possessed a
philosophical mind, and was capable of making the soundest observations
on human life, and of discerning the excellence or seeing the ridicule
of every character he met with. Fielding only excelled him in giving a
dramatic story to his novels, but was inferior to him in the true comic
vein. At this time David Hume was living in Edinburgh, and composing his
"History of Great Britain." He was a man of great knowledge, and of a
social and benevolent temper, and truly the best-natured man in the
world.

I was one of those who never believed that David Hume's sceptical
principles had laid fast hold on his mind, but thought that his books
proceeded rather from affectation of superiority and pride of
understanding. When his circumstances were narrow, he accepted the
office of librarian to the Faculty of Advocates, worth £40 per annum,
and to my certain knowledge he gave every farthing of the salary to
families in distress. For innocent mirth and agreeable raillery I never
knew his match.

Adam Smith, though perhaps only second to David in learning and
ingenuity, was far inferior to him in conversational talents. He was the
most absent man in company that I ever saw, moving his lips, and talking
to himself, and smiling, in the midst of large companies. If you awaked
him from his reverie and made him attend to the subject of conversation,
he immediately began a harangue, and never stopped till he told you all
he knew about it, with the utmost philosophical ingenuity. Though Smith
had some little jealousy in his temper, he had the most unbounded
benevolence.

Dr. Adam Ferguson was a very different kind of man. He had been chaplain
to the 42nd, adding all the decorum belonging to the clerical character
to the manners of a gentleman, the effect of which was that he was
highly respected by all the officers, and adored by his countrymen and
the common soldiers. His office turned his mind to the study of war,
which appears in his "Roman History," where many of the battles are
better described than by any historian but Polybius, who was an
eyewitness to so many. He had a boundless vein of humour, which he
indulged when none but intimates were present; but he was apt to be
jealous of his rivals and indignant against assumed superiority.

They were all honourable men in the highest degree, and John Home and I
together kept them on very good terms. With respect to taste, we held
David Hume and Adam Smith inferior to the rest, for they were both
prejudiced in favour of the French tragedies, and did not sufficiently
appreciate Shakespeare and Milton; their taste was a rational act rather
than the instantaneous effect of fine feeling. In John Home's younger
days he had much sprightliness and vivacity, so that he infused joy
wherever he came. But all his opinions of men and things were
prejudices, which, however, did not disqualify him for writing admirable
poetry.

In 1754, the Select Society was established, which improved and gave a
name to the _literati_ of this country. Of the first members were Lord
Dalmeny, elder brother of the present Lord Rosebery; the Duke of
Hamilton of that period, a man of letters could he have kept himself
sober; and Mr. Robert Alexander, wine merchant, a very worthy man but a
bad speaker, who entertained us all with warm suppers and excellent
claret. In the month of February, 1755, John Home's tragedy of "Douglas"
was completely prepared for the stage, and he set out with it for
London, attended by six or seven of us. Were I to relate all the
circumstances of this journey, I am persuaded they would not be exceeded
by any novelist who has wrote since the days of "Don Quixote." Poor Home
had no success, for Garrick, after reading the play, returned it as
totally unfit for the stage. "Douglas," however, was acted in Edinburgh
in 1756, and had unbounded success for many nights; but the
"high-flying" set in the Church were unanimous against it, as they
thought it a sin for a clergyman to write any play, let it be ever so
moral. I was summoned before the Presbytery for my conduct in attending
the play, but was exonerated by the General Assembly.

About the end of February, 1758, I went to London with my sister
Margaret to get her married with Dr. Dickson. It is to be noted that we
could get no four-wheeled chaise till we came to Durham, those
conveyances being then only in their infancy, and turnpike roads being
only in their commencement in the North. Dr. Robertson having come to
London to offer his "History of Scotland" for sale, we went to see the
lions together. Home was now very friendly with Garrick, and I was often
in company with this celebrated actor.

Garrick gave a dinner to John Home and his friends at his house at
Hampton, and told us to bring golf clubs and balls that we might play on
Molesey Hurst. Garrick had built a handsome temple with a statue of
Shakespeare in it on the banks of the Thames. The poet and the actor
were well pleased with one another, and we passed a very agreeable
afternoon.

We yielded to a request of Sir David Kinloch to accompany him on a jaunt
to Portsmouth, and were much pleased with the diversified beauty of the
country. We viewed with much pleasure the solid foundation of the naval
glory of Great Britain, in the amazing extent and richness of the
dockyards and warehouses, and in the grandeur of her fleet in the
harbour and in the Downs. There was a fine fleet of ten ships of the
line in the Downs, with the Royal George at their head, all ready for
sea.


_III.--Scottish Social Life_


The clergy of Scotland, being under apprehensions that the window tax
would be extended to them, had given me in charge to state our case to
some of the Ministers, and try to make an impression in our favour. The
day came when we were presented to Lord Bute, but our reception was cold
and dry. We soon took our leave, and no sooner were we out of hearing
than Robert Adam, the architect, who was with us, fell a-cursing and
swearing--"What! had he been most graciously received by all the princes
in Italy and France, to come and be treated with such distance and pride
by the youngest earl but one in all Scotland?" They were better friends
afterwards, and Robert found him a kind patron when his professional
merit was made known to him. Lord Bute was a worthy and virtuous man,
but he was not versatile enough for a Prime Minister; and though
personally brave, was void of that political firmness which is necessary
to stand the storms of state. We returned to Scotland by Oxford,
Warwick, and Birmingham.

In August, 1758, I rode to Inverary, being invited by the Milton family,
who always were with the Duke of Argyll. We sat down every day fifteen
or sixteen to dinner, and the duke had the talent of conversing with his
guests so as to distinguish men of knowledge and ability without
neglecting those who valued themselves on their birth and their
rent-rolls. After the ladies were withdrawn and he had drunk his bottle
of claret, he retired to an easy-chair by the fireplace; drawing a black
silk nightcap over his eyes, he slept, or seemed to sleep, for an hour
and a half.

In the meantime, the toastmaster pushed about the bottle, and a more
noisy or regardless company could hardly be. Dinner was always served at
two o'clock, and about six o'clock the toastmaster and the gentlemen
drew off, when the ladies returned, and his grace awoke and called for
his tea. Tea being over, he played two rubbers at sixpenny whist. Supper
was served soon after nine, and he drank another bottle of claret, and
could not be got to go to bed till one in the morning. I stayed over
Sunday and preached to his grace. The ladies told me that I had pleased
him, which gratified me not a little, as without him no preferment could
be obtained in Scotland.

It was after this that I wrote what was called the "Militia Pamphlet,"
which had a great and unexpected success; it hit the tone of the
country, which was irritated at the refusal to allow the establishment
of a militia in Scotland.

The year 1760 was the most important of my life, for before the end of
it I was united with the most valuable friend and companion that any
mortal ever possessed. I owed my good fortune to the friendship of John
Home, who pointed out the young lady to me as a proper object of suit,
without which I should never have attempted it, for she was then just
past seventeen, when I was thirty-eight. With a superior understanding
and great discernment for her age, she had an ease and propriety of
manners which made her much distinguished in every company. She had not
one selfish corner in her whole soul, and was willing to sacrifice her
life for those she loved.

       *       *       *       *       *




THOMAS CARLYLE


Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell


     Thomas Carlyle, the celebrated literary moralist, was born at
     Ecclefechan, Scotland, Dec. 4, 1795. He was educated at the
     village school and at the Annan Grammar School, proceeding to
     Edinburgh University in 1809. The breakdown of his dogmatic
     beliefs made it impossible for him to enter the clerical
     profession, and neither school-teaching nor the study of law
     attracted him. Supporting himself by private teaching, Carlyle
     made the beginnings of a literary connection. He fought his
     way under great difficulties; he was hard to govern; he was a
     painfully slow writer; and ignorance and rusticity mar his
     work to the very end. Yet a fiery revolt against impostures,
     an ardent sympathy for humanity, a worship of the heroic, an
     immutable confidence in the eternal verities, and occasionally
     a wonderful perception of beauty, made Carlyle one of the most
     influential English writers of the nineteenth century. His
     marriage in 1826 with Jane Baillie Welsh was an unhappy one.
     Carlyle died on February 4, 1881, having survived his wife
     fifteen years. The three volumes of "Cromwell's Letters and
     Speeches," with elucidations by Carlyle, were published in
     1845; the first work, one might say, conveying a sympathetic
     appreciation of the great Protector, all histories of the man
     and his times having been hitherto written from the point of
     view either of the Royalists or of the revolutionary Whigs. To
     neither of these was an understanding of Puritanism at all
     possible. Moreover, to the Cavaliers, Cromwell was a regicide;
     to the Whigs he was a military usurper who dissolved
     parliaments. To both he was a Puritan who applied Biblical
     phraseology to practical affairs--therefore, a canting
     hypocrite, though undoubtedly a man of great capacity and
     rugged force.


_I.--Puritan Oliver_


One wishes there were a history of English Puritanism, the last of all
our heroisms. At bottom, perhaps, no nobler heroism ever transacted
itself upon this earth; and it lies as good as lost to us in the elysium
we English have provided for our heroes! The Rushworthian elysium.
Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Puritanism is not
of the nineteenth century, but of the seventeenth; it is grown
unintelligible, what we may call incredible. Heroes who knew in every
fibre, and with heroic daring laid to heart, that an Almighty justice
does verily rule this world; that it is good to fight on God's side, and
bad to fight on the devil's side. Well, it would seem the resuscitation
of a heroism from the past is no easy enterprise.

Of Biographies of Cromwell, there are none tolerable. Oliver's father
was a country gentleman of good estate, not a brewer; grandson of Sir
Richard Cromwell, or Williams, nephew of Thomas Cromwell "mauler of
monasteries"; his mother a Stuart (Steward), twelfth cousin or so of
King Charles. He was born in 1599, went to Cambridge in the month that
Shakespeare died. Next year his father died, and Oliver went no more to
Cambridge. He was the only son. In 1620 he married.

He sat in the Parliament of 1628-29; the Petition of Right Parliament; a
most brave and noble Parliament, ending with that scene when Holles held
the Speaker down in his chair. The last Parliament in England for above
eleven years. Notable years, what with soap-monopoly, ship-money, death
of the great Gustavus at Lûtzen, pillorying of William Prynne, Jenny
Geddes, and National Covenant, old Field-Marshal Lesley at Dunse Law and
pacification thereafter nowise lasting.

To chastise the Scots, money is not attainable save by a Parliament,
which at last the king summons. This "Short Parliament," wherein Oliver
sits for Cambridge, is dismissed, being not prompt with supplies, which
the king seeks by other methods. But the army so raised will not fight
the Scots, who march into Northumberland and Durham. Money not to be had
otherwise than by a Parliament, which is again summoned; the Long
Parliament, which did not finally vanish till 1660. In which is Oliver
again, "very much hearkened unto," despite "linen plain and not very
clean, and voice sharp and untuneable."

Protestations; execution of Strafford, "the one supremely able man the
king had"; a hope of compromise being for a time introduced by "royal
varnish." Then, in November, 1641, an Irish rebellion blazing into Irish
massacre; and in Parliament, the Grand Remonstrance carried by a small
majority. In January, the king rides over to St. Stephen's to arrest the
"five members." Then on one side Commissions of Array, on the other
Ordinance for the Militia. In July and August, Mr. Cromwell is active in
Cambridgeshire for the defence of that county, as others are elsewhere.
Then Captain Cromwell, with his troop of horse, is with Essex at
Edgehill, where he does his duty; and then back in Cambridgeshire,
organising the Eastern Association. So we are at 1643 with the war in
full swing.

Letters have been few enough so far; vestiges, traces of Cromwell's
doings in the eastern counties; a successful skirmish at Grantham, a
"notable victory" at Gainsborough. In August, Manchester takes command
of the Association, with Cromwell for one of his colonels; in September,
first battle of Newbury, and signing of the Solemn League and Covenant
at Westminster. Cromwell has written "I have a lovely company; you would
respect them did you know them"--his "Ironsides." In October, Colonel
Cromwell does stoutly at Winceby fight; has his horse shot under him.
Lincolnshire is nearly cleared.

On March 20, 1643, there is a characteristic letter to General Crawford,
concerning the dismissal of an officer, whom Cromwell would have
restored. "Ay, but the man is an Anabaptist. Are you sure of that? Admit
he be, shall that render him incapable to serve the public? Sir, the
state, in choosing men to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions.
Take heed of being too sharp against those to whom you can object little
but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of
religion."

In July was fought, in Yorkshire, the battle of Marston Moor, the
bloodiest of the whole war, which gave the whole north to the
Parliamentary party. Cromwell Writes to his brother-in-law, to tell him
of his son's death. Of the battle, he says, "It had all the evidences of
an absolute victory obtained by the Lord's blessing upon the godly
party. We never charged but we routed the enemy. God made them as
stubble to our swords." Soon after he is indignant with Manchester for
being "much slow in action," especially after the second battle of
Newbury. Hence comes the self-denying ordinance, in December, and
construction of New Model Army.

From which ordinance Cromwell is virtually dispensed, being appointed
for repeated periods of forty days, and doing good work in Oxfordshire
and elsewhere; clearly indispensable, till the Lord General Fairfax gets
him appointed Lieutenant-general; and on his joining Fairfax, and
commanding the cavalry, the king's army is shattered at Naseby. "We
killed and took about 5,000," writes Cromwell to Lenthall. "Sir, this is
none other but the hand of God."

Thenceforward, this war is only completing of the victory. After the
storming of Bristol, Cromwell writes, "Presbyterians, Independents, all
have here the same spirit of faith and prayer; they agree here, have no
names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere." No
canting here!

Cromwell captures Winchester, and Baring House, and sundry other
strongholds. Finally, this first civil war is ended with the king's
surrender of himself to the Scots.


_II.--Regicide_


Thereafter, infinite negotiations, public and private; the king hoping
"so to draw, either the Presbyterians or the Independents, to side with
me for extirpating one another that I shall be really king again."
Ending with the Scots marching home, and the king being secluded in
Holmby House. We note during this time a letter to Bridget Cromwell, now
the wife of General Ireton.

But now Parliament is busy carrying its Presbyterian uniformity
platform. London city and the Parliament are crying out to apply the
shears against sectaries and schismatics; the army is less drastic;
shows, indeed, an undue tolerance to Presbyterian alarm. With Cromwell's
approval the army is to be quartered not less than twenty-five miles
from London. This quarrel between army and Parliament waxes; the army
gains strength by securing the person of the king, finally marches onto
London, and gets its way. All is turmoil again, however, when Charles
escapes from Hampton Court, where they have lodged him, but is detained
at Carisbrooke. When 40,000 Scots are coming to liberate the king, the
army's patience breaks down. Hitherto, Cromwell has striven for an
honest settlement. Now we of the army conclude, with prayer and tears,
that these troubles are a penalty for our backslidings, conferences,
compromises, and the like; that "if the Lord bring us back in peace,"
Charles Stuart, the Man of Blood, must be called to account.

The eastern counties and Wales are up; the Scots are coming. Fairfax
goes to Colchester, Cromwell to Wales, where Pembroke keeps him a month;
thence, to cut up the Scots army in detail in the straggling battle
called Preston, of which he gives account, as also does "Dugald
Dalgetty" Turner. The clearance of the north detains him for some time,
during which he deals sternly with soldiers who plunder. In November he
is returning from Scotland, writing, too, a suitable letter to Colonel
Hammond, the king's custodian at Carisbrooke. Matters also are coming to
a head between army and the Parliament, which means to make
concessions--fatal in the judgement of the army--and to ignore the said
army; which, on the other hand, regards itself as an authority called
into being by God and having responsibilities, and purges the
Parliament, Cromwell arriving in town on the evening of the first day of
purging. Whereby the minority of the members is become majority. And
this chapter of history is grimly closed eight weeks later with a
certain death warrant.

The Rump Parliament becomes concerned with establishment of the
Commonwealth Council of State; appoints Mr. Milton Secretary for Foreign
Languages, and nominates Lieutenant-general Cromwell to quell rebellion
in Ireland. Oliver's extant letters are concerned with domestic
matters--marriage of Richard. While the army for Ireland is getting
prepared, there is trouble with the Levellers, sansculottism of a sort;
shooting of valiant but misguided mutineers having notions as to
Millennium.

On August 15, Cromwell is in Ireland. His later letters have been full
of gentle domesticities and pieties, strangely contrasted with the fiery
savagery and iron grimness of the next batch. Derry and Dublin are the
only two cities held for the Commonwealth. The Lord-lieutenant comes
offering submission with law and order, or death. The Irish have no
faith in promises; will not submit. Therefore, in the dispatches which
tell the story, we find a noteworthy phenomenon--an armed soldier,
solemnly conscious to himself that he is the soldier of God the Just,
terrible as death, relentless as doom, doing God's judgements on the
enemies of God.

Tredah, that is Drogheda, is his first objective, with its garrison of
3,000 soldiers. Drogheda is summoned to surrender on pain of storm;
refuses, is stormed, no quarter being given to the armed garrison,
mostly English. "I believe this bitterness will save much effusion of
blood through the goodness of God." The garrison of Dundalk, not liking
the precedent, evacuated it; that of Trim likewise. No resistance, in
fact, was offered till Cromwell came before Wexford. After suffering a
cannonade, the commandant proposed to evacuate Wexford on terms which
"manifested the impudency of the men." Oliver would only promise quarter
to rank and file. Before any answer came, the soldiery stormed the town,
which Cromwell had not intended; but he looked upon the outcome as "an
unexpected providence."

The rule of sending a summons to surrender before attacking was always
observed, and rarely disregarded. "I meddle not with any man's
conscience; but if liberty of conscience means liberty to exercise the
mass, that will not be allowed of." The Clonmacnoise Manifesto, inviting
the Irish "not to be deceived with any show of clemency exercised upon
them hitherto," hardly supports the diatribes against Cromwell's
"massacring" propensities. Also in Cromwell's counter-declaration is a
pregnant challenge. "Give us an instance of one man since my coming to
Ireland, not in arms, massacred, destroyed, or banished, concerning the
massacre or destruction of whom justice hath not been done or
endeavoured to be done."

That the business at Drogheda and Wexford did prevent much effusion of
blood is manifest from the surrenders which invariably followed almost
immediately upon summons. The last he reports is Kilkenny (March, 1650);
his actual last fight is the storm of Clonmel; for, at the request of
Parliament, he returns to England to attend to other matters of gravity,
Munster and Leinster being now practically under control.


_III.--Crowning Mercies_


Matters of gravity indeed; for Scotland, the prime mover in this
business of Puritanism, has for leaders Argyles, Loudons, and others of
the pedant species; no inspired Oliver. So these poor Scotch governors
have tried getting Charles II. to adopt the Covenant as best he
can--have "compelled him to sign it voluntarily." Scotland will either
invade us or be invaded by us--which we decide to be preferable.
Cromwell must go, since Fairfax will not resign his command in favour of
Cromwell; who does go, with the hundred-and-tenth psalm in the head and
heart of him.

So he marches by way of Berwick to Musselburgh, where he finds David
Lesley entrenched in impregnable lines between him and Edinburgh. He
writes to the General Assembly of the Kirk in protest against a
declaration of theirs. "Is it, therefore, infallibly agreeable to the
Word of God, all that you say? I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ,
think it possible that you may be mistaken." But shrewd Lesley lies
within his lines, will not be tempted out; provisions are failing, and
the weather breaking. We must fall back on Dunbar--where Lesley promptly
hems us in, occupying the high ground.

But presently Lesley, at whatsoever urging, moves to change ground,
which movement gives Oliver his chance. He attacks instead of awaiting
attack; the Scots army is scattered, 3,000 killed and 10,000 prisoners
taken. Such is Dunbar Battle, or Dunbar Drove. Edinburgh is ours, though
the Castle holds out; surrenders only on December 19, on most honourable
terms. But what to do with Scotland, with its covenanted king, a
solecism incarnate?

We have a most wifely letter to Cromwell from his wife, urging him to
write oftener to herself and to important persons: correspondence
concerning Dunbar medal, and Chancellorship of Oxford University; and
the lord general falls ill, with recoveries and relapses.

Active military movements, however, become imperative, so far as the
general's health permits. In spring and early summer is some successful
skirmishing; in July Cromwell's army has, for the most part, got into
Fife, thereby cutting off the supplies of the king's army at Stirling,
which suddenly marches straight for the heart of England, the way being
open. Cromwell, having just captured Perth, starts in pursuit, leaving
George Monk to look after Scotland.

The Scots march by the Lancashire route, keeping good discipline, but
failing to gather the Presbyterian allies or Royalist allies they had
looked for. On August 22, Charles erects his standard at
Worcester--ninth anniversary of the day Charles I. erected his at
Nottingham. On the anniversary of Dunbar fight his Scotch army is
crushed, battling desperately at Worcester; cut to pieces, with six or
seven thousand prisoners taken. Cromwell calls it "for aught I know, a
crowning mercy," and fears lest "the fullness of these continued mercies
may occasion pride and wantonness." Charles, however, escapes. The
general here sheaths his war-sword for good, and comes to town, to be
greeted with acclamations.

Of the next nineteen months the history becomes very dim. There are but
five letters, none notable. The Rump sits, conspicuous with red-tapery;
does not get itself dissolved nor anything else done of consequence;
leaves much that is of consequence not done. Before twelve months the
officers are petitioning the lord general that something be done for a
new Representative House; to be, let us say, a sort of Convention of
Notables. At any rate, in April, 1653, the Rump propose to solve the
problem by continuing themselves; till the lord general ejects them
summarily in a manner that need not here be retold. With this for
consequence, that Cromwell himself, "with the advice of my Council of
Officers," nominates divers persons to form the new Parliament, which
shall be hereafter known as "Bare-bones."

In this Parliament, which included not a few notable men, Cromwell made
the first speech extant, justifying his dismissal of the Rump, and the
summoning of this assembly, chosen as being godly men that have
principles. A speech intelligible to the intelligent. But this
Parliament failed of its business, which is no less than introducing the
Christian religion into real practice in the social affairs of this
nation; and dissolved itself after five months. Four days later the
Instrument of Government is issued, naming Oliver Protector of the
Commonwealth, Council of Fifteen, and other needful matters.


_IV.--Protector Oliver_


A new Reformed Parliament, elected, with Scotch and Irish
representatives, is to meet on September 3. Parliament meets. Oliver's
speech on September 3 is unreported, but we have that on September 4,
and another eight days later. "You are met for healing and settling. We
are troubled with those who would destroy liberty, and with those who
would overturn all control. This government which has called you, a Free
Parliament, together, has given you peace instead of the foreign wars
that were going on; there remains plenty for you to do." But the
Parliament, instead of doing it, sets to debating the "Form of
Government" and its sanctioning.

Hence our second speech. "I called not myself to this place. God be
judge between me and all men! I desired to be dismissed of my charge.
That was refused me. Being entreated, I did accept the place and title
of Protector. I do not bear witness to myself. My witnesses are the
officers, the soldiery, the City of London, the counties, the judges;
yea, you yourselves, who have come hither upon my writ. I was the
authority that called you, which you have recognised. 

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