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Essays in Literature and History

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Title: Essays in Literature and History

Author: James Anthony Froude

Commentator: Hilaire Belloc


        
Release date: April 28, 2006 [eBook #18276]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/18276

Credits: Produced by Michael Madden


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ESSAYS IN LITERATURE AND HISTORY ***




Produced by Michael Madden





Essays on History and Literature

By James Anthony Froude

London: J. M. Dent & Co.,
1906
____

Contents

Arnold's Poems (Westminster Review, 1854)

Words about Oxford (Fraser's Magazine, 1850)

England's Forgotten Worthies (Westminster Review, 1852)

The Book of Job (Westminster Review, 1853)

The Lives of the Saints (Eclectic Review, 1852)

The Dissolution of the Monasteries (Fraser's Magazine, 1857)

The Philosophy of Christianity (The Leader, 1851)

A Plea for the Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties
(Fraser's Magazine, 1863)

Spinoza (Westminster Review, 1855)

Reynard the Fox (Fraser's Magazine, 1852)

The Commonplace Book of Richard Hilles (Fraser's Magazine, 1858)
____


INTRODUCTION

Froude had this merit--a merit he shared with Huxley alone of
His contemporaries--that he imposed his convictions. He fought
against resistance. He excited (and still excites) a violent
animosity. He exasperated the surface of his time and was yet
too strong for that surface to reject him. This combative and
aggressive quality in him, which was successful in that it was
permanent and never suffered a final defeat should arrest any
one who may make a general survey of the last generation in letters.

It was a period with a vice of its own which yet remains to be
detected and chastised. In one epoch lubricity, in another
fanaticism, in a third dulness and a dead-alive copying of the
past, are the faults which criticism finds to attack. None of
these affected the Victorian era. It was pure--though tainted
with a profound hypocrisy; it was singularly free from violence
in its judgments; it was certainly alive and new: but it had this
grievous defect (a defect under which we still labour heavily)
that thought was restrained upon every side. Never in the history
of European letters was it so difficult for a man to say
what he would and to be heard. A sort of cohesive public spirit
(which was but one aspect of the admirable homogeneity of the
nation) glued and immobilised all individual expression. One
could float imprisoned as in a stream of thick substance: one
could not swim against it.

It is to be carefully discerned how many apparent exceptions to
this truth are, if they be closely examined, no exceptions at
all. A whole series of national defects were exposed and
ridiculed in the literature as in the oratory of that day; but
they were defects which the mass of men secretly delighted to
hear denounced and of which each believed himself to be free.

They loved to be told that they were of a gross taste in art,
for they connected such a taste vaguely with high morals and
with successful commerce. There was no surer way to a large
sale than to start a revolution in appreciation every five years,
and from Ruskin to Oscar Wilde a whole series of Prophets
attained eminence and fortune by telling men how something new
and as yet unknown was Beauty and something just past was to be
rejected, and how they alone saw truth while the herd around them
were blind. But no one showed us how to model, nor did any one
remark that we alone of all Europe had preserved a school of
water-colour.

So in politics our blunders were a constant theme; but no one
marked with citation, document, and proof the glaring progress
of corruption, or that, for all our enthusiasm, we never once
in that generation defended the oppressed against the oppressor.
There was a vast if unrecognised conspiracy, by which whatever
might have prevented those extreme evils from which we now suffer
was destroyed as it appeared. Efforts at a thorough purge were
dull, were libellous, were not of the "form" which the Universities
and the public schools taught to be sacred. They were rejected as
unreadable, or if printed, were unread. The results are with us to-day.

In such a time Froude maintained an opposing force, which was
not reforming nor constructive in any way, but which will obtain
the attention of the future historian, simply because it was an
opposition.

It was an opposition of manner rather than of matter. The matter
of it was common enough even in Froude's chief decade of power.
The cause to which he gave allegiance was already winning when he
proceeded to champion it, and many a better man, one or two greater
men, were saying the same things as he; but they said such things
in a fashion that suggested no violent effort nor any demand for
resistance: it was the peculiar virtue of Froude that he touched
nothing without the virile note of a challenge sounding throughout
his prose. On this account, though he will convince our posterity
even less than he does ourselves, the words of persuasion, the
writings themselves will remain: for he chose the hardest wood in
which to chisel, knowing the strength of his hand.

What was it in him which gave him that strength, and
which permitted him, in an age that would tolerate no formative
grasp upon itself, to achieve a permanent fame? I will not
reply to this question by pointing to the popularity
of his History of England; the essays that follow will
afford sufficient material to answer it. He produced the
effect he did and remained in the eminence to which he
had climbed, first because his manner of thought was rigid
and of a hard edge; secondly, because he could use that
steel tool of a brain in a fashion that was general; he could
use it upon subjects and with a handling that was
comprehensible to great masses of his fellow-countrymen.

It is not certain that such a man with such interests would
have made his voice heard in any other society. It is
doubtful whether he will be translated with profit. His field
was very small, the points of his attack might all be found
contained in one suburban villa. But in our society his
grip and his intensity did fall, and fall of choice, upon such
matters as his contemporaries either debated or were ready
to debate. He therefore did the considerable thing we
know him to have done.

I say that his mind was rigid and of a close fibre: it was
a mind (to repeat the metaphor) out of which a strong
graying-tool could be forged. Its blade would not be
blunted: it could deal with its material. Of this character,
which I take to be the first essential in his achievement, the
few essays before us preserve an ample evidence.

Thus you will find throughout their pages the presence of
that dogmatic assertion which invariably proceeds from such
a mind, and coupled with such assertion is a continual
consciousness that his dogmas are dogmas: that he is asserting
unprovable things and laying down his axioms before he
begins his process of reasoning.

The contrary might be objected by some foreign observer,
or by some one who had a larger acquaintance with European
history than had he. I can imagine a French or an Irish
critic pointing to a mass of assertion with no corresponding
admission that it is assertion only: such a critic might quote
even from these few pages phrase after phrase in which
Froude poses as certain what are still largely matters of
debate. Thus upon page 144 he takes it for granted that
no miracles have been worked by contact with the bodies
of saints. He takes it for granted on page 161 that the
checking of monastic disorders, and the use of strong
language in connection with them, was peculiar to the
generation which saw at its close the dissolution of the
monasteries. He takes it for granted on page 125 that what
we call "manifestations" or what not,--spirit rappings,
table-turnings, and the rest--are deceptions of the senses to
which superstition alone would give credence.

He ridicules (upon p. 128) the tradition of St. Patrick which
all modern research has come to accept. He says downright
(upon pp. 186-187) that the Ancient world did not inquire
into the problem of evil. On p. 214 he will have it that the
ordinary man rejects, "without hesitation," the interference
of will with material causes. In other words, he asserts that
the ordinary man is a fatalist--for Froude knew very well
that between the fatalist and the believer in a possibility of
miracle there is no conceivable position. He will have it (on
p. 216) that a modern doctor always regards a "vision" as
an hallucination. On p. 217 he denies by implication the
stigmata of St. Francis--and so forth--one might multiply
the instances indefinitely. All Froude's works are full of
them, they are part and parcel of his method--but their
number is to no purport. One example may stand for all,
and their special value to our purpose is not that they are
mere assertions, but that they are assertions which Froude
must have known to be personal, disputable, and dogmatic.

He knew very well that the vast majority of mankind
accepted the virtue of relics, that intellects the equals of his
own rejected that determinism to which he was bound, and
that the Pagan world might be presented in a fashion very
different from his own. And in that perpetual--often gratuitous
--affirmation you have no sign of limitation in him but
rather of eagerness for battle.

It is an admirable fault or perhaps no fault at all, or if a
fault an appendage to the most considerable virtue a writer
of his day could have had: the virtue of courage.

See how he thrusts when he comes to lay down the law,
not upon what the narrow experience of readers understands
and agrees with him about, but upon some matter which he
knows them to have decided in a manner opposed to his own.
See how definite, how downright, and how clean are the
sentences in which he asserts that Christianity is Catholic
or nothing:--

". . . This was the body of death which philosophy detected
but could not explain, and from which Catholicism now
came forward with its magnificent promise of deliverance.

"The carnal doctrine of the sacraments, which they are
compelled to acknowledge to have been taught as fully in
the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics,
has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was
the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could
be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from
the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable,
without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But
the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless
organization could begin again from a new original, no pure
material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom
God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the
Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and
around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a
material body grew again of the substance of His mother,
pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when
it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things."

Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity,
where he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of
his readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of
Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and
Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is called
a thing "worn and old" even in Luther's time (upon page 194),
and he definitely prophesies a period when "our posterity"
shall learn "to despise the miserable fabric which Luther
stitched together out of its tatters."

His judgments are short, violent, compressed. They are
not the judgments of balance. They are final not as a goal
reached is final, but as a death-wound delivered. He throws
out sentences which all the world can see to be insufficient
and thin, but whose sharpness is the sharpness of conviction
and of a striving determination to achieve conviction in others
---or if he fails in that, at least to leave an enemy smarting.
Everywhere you have up and down his prose those short
parentheses, those side sentences, which are strokes of offence.
Thus on page 199, "We hear---or we used to hear when the
High Church party were more formidable than they are," &c.;
or again, on page 210, "The Bishop of Natal" (Colenso)
has done such and such things, "coupled with certain
arithmetical calculations far which he has a special aptitude."
There are dozens of these in every book he wrote. They
wounded, and were intended to wound.

His intellect may therefore be compared, as I have compared
it, to an instrument or a weapon of steel, to a chisel
or a sword. It was hard, polished, keen, stronger than what
it bit into, and of its nature enduring. This was the first of
the characters that gave him his secure place in English
letters.

The second is his universality--the word is not over-exact,
but I can find no other. I mean that Froude was the exact
opposite of the sciolist and was even other than the student.
He was kneaded right into his own time and his own people.
The arena in which he fought was small, the ideas he combated
were few. He was not universal as those are universal
who appeal to any man in any country. But he was eager
upon these problems which his contemporaries wrangled over.
He was in tune with, even when he directly opposed, the
class from which he sprang, the mass of well-to-do Protestant
Englishmen of Queen Victoria's reign. Their furniture had
nothing shocking for him nor their steel engravings. He
took for granted their probity, their common sense, and their
reading. He knew what they were thinking about and
therefore all he did to praise or blame their convictions,
to soothe or to exasperate them, told. He could see the
target.

Perpetually this looking at the world from the standpoint
of the men around him makes him say things that irritate
more particular and more acute minds than his own, but I
will maintain that in his case the fault was a necessary fault
and went with a power which permitted him to achieve the
sympathy which he did achieve. He talks of the "Celt"
and the "Saxon," and ascribes what he calls "our failures
in Ireland" to the "incongruity of character" between these
two imaginaries. He takes it for granted that "we are
something which divides us from mediaeval Christianity by
an impassable gulf." When he speaks of asceticism he must
quote "the hair shirt of Thomas a Becket." If he is speaking
of Oxford undergraduates one has "pleasant faces, cheerful
voices, and animal spirits," and at the end of the fine but
partial essay on Spinoza we have six lines which might come
bodily from a leader in the Daily Telegraph, or from any
copy of the Spectator picked up at random.

These are grave faults, but, I repeat, they are the faults of
those great qualities which gave him his position.

And side by side with such faults go an exceptional
lucidity, a good order within the paragraph and in the
succession of the paragraphs. A choice of subject suited to
his audience, an excision of that which would have bored or
bewildered it, a vividness of description wherewith to amuse
and a directness of conclusion wherewith to arrest his readers
--all these he had, beyond perhaps any of his contemporaries.

Occasionally that brotherhood in him leads him to faults
more serious. You get gross commonplace and utterly false
commonplace, of which when he came back to them (if
indeed he was a man who read his own works) he must
have been ashamed:--

"Persecutions come, and martyrdoms, and religious wars;
and, at last, the old faith, like the phoenix, expires upon its
altar, and the new rises out of the ashes.

"Such, in briefest outline, has been the history of religions,
natural and moral."

Or again, of poor old Oxford:--

"The increase of knowledge, and consequently of morality,
is the great aim of such a noble establishment as this; and
the rewards and honours dispensed there are bestowed in
proportion to the industry and good conduct of those who
receive them."

But the interesting point about these very lapses is that
they remain purely exceptional. They do not affect either
the tone of his writing or the value and intricacy of his
argument. They may be compared to those undignified
and valueless chips of conversational English that pop up
in the best rhetoric if it be the rhetoric of an enthusiastic
and wide man.

While, however, one is in the mood of criticism it is not
unjust to show what other lapses in him are connected
with this common sympathy of his and this very comprehension
of his class to which he owed his opportunity and
his effect.

Thus he is either so careless or so hurried as to use--
much too commonly--words which have lost all vitality,
and which are for the most part meaningless, but which go
the rounds still like shining flat sixpences worn smooth.
The word "practical" drops from his pen; he quotes "in a
glass darkly," and speaks of "a picture of human life"; the
walls of Oxford are "time-hallowed"; he enters a church
and finds in it "a dim religious light"; a man of Froude's
capacity has no right to find such a thing there. If he writes
the word "sin" the word "shame" comes tripping after.
It may be that he was a man readily caught by fatigue, or
it may bet it is more probable, that he thought it small
millinery to "travailler le verbe" At any rate the result
as a whole hangs to his identity of spirit with the thousands
for whom he wrote.

To this character of universality attach also faults not only
in his occasional choice of words but in his general style.

The word "style" has been so grossly abused during the
last thirty years that one mentions it with diffidence. Matthew
Arnold well said that when people came to him and asked
to be told how to write a good style he was unable to reply;
for indeed it is not a thing to be taught. It is a by-product,
though a necessary by-product, of good thinking. But when
Matthew Arnold went on to say that there was no such thing
as style except knowing clearly what you wanted to say, and
saying it as clearly as you could, he was talking nonsense.
There is such a thing as style. It is that combination of
rhythm, lucidity, and emphasis, which certainly must not
be consciously produced, but which if it arise naturally from
a man's pen and from his method of thought makes all the
difference between what is readable and what is not readable.
If any one doubt this let him compare the French Bible
with the English--both literal and lucid translations of the
same original; or again let him contrast the prose phrases of
Milton when he is dealing with the claims of the Church
in the Middle Ages with those of Mr. Bryce in the same
connection.

Now I say that just as the excellences of Froude's prose
proceeded from this universality of his so did the errors into
which that prose fell, and it is remarkable that these errors
are slips of detail. They proceed undoubtedly from rapid
writing and from coupling his scholarship with a very general
and ephemeral reading.

A few examples drawn from these essays will prove what
I mean. On the very first page, in the first line of the
second paragraph we have the word "often" coming after the
word "experience," instead of before it. He had written
"experience," he desired to qualify it, and he did not go back
to do what should always be done in plain English, and what
indeed distinguishes plain English from almost every other
language--to put the qualification before the thing qualified;
a peculiarly English mark in this, that it presupposes one's
having thought the whole thing out before writing it down.

On page 3 we have exactly the same thing; "A legend
not known unfortunately to general English readers." He
means of course, "unfortunately not known," but as the
sentence stands it reads as though he had meant to say,
somewhat clumsily, that the method in which English readers
knew the legend was not unfortunate.

He is again careless in the matter of repetitions, both of
the same word, and (what is a better test of ear) of rhymes
within the sentence: we have in one place "which seemed to
give a soul to those splendid donations to learning," and
further on in the same page "a priority in mortality."

On pages 34 and 35 you have "an intensely real conviction."
You are then told that "the most lawless men did
then really believe." Then that the American tribes were
in the eyes of the colonists "real worshippers" of the Devil,
and a few lines later we hear of "the real awfulness of the
world."

The position of the relative is often as slipshod as the
position of the qualicative; thus you will find upon page 37
that the pioneers "grayed out the channels, and at last paved
them with their bones, through which the commerce and
enterprise of England has flowed out of all the world." This
sentence is quite deplorable; it has a singular verb after two
nominatives, and is so framed that one might imagine the
commerce and enterprise of our beloved country to have flown
through those hollow interior channels, with which, I believe,
our larger bones are provided, and in which is to be discovered
that very excellent substance, marrow.

It is singular that, while these obvious errors have excited
so little comment, Froude should have been blamed so often
and by such different authorities for weaknesses of the pen
from which he did not suffer, or which, if he did suffer from
them, at least he had in common with every other writer
of our time and perhaps less than most.

Thus, as an historian he has been accused of two faults
which have been supposed by those who are ill acquainted
with the history of letters to be correlative: a straining
for effect and an inaccuracy of detail. There is not one of
his contemporaries who less forced himself in description
than Froude. Often in Green, very often in Freeman and
always in Carlyle you feel that your author is deliberately
exciting his mind and your own. Violent colours are chosen
and peculiar emphasis--from this Froude was free. He was
an historian.

To the end Froude remained an historian, and an historian
he was born. If we regret that his history was not general,
and that he turned his powers upon such a restricted set of
phenomena, still we must rejoice that there was once in
modern England a man who could sum up the nature of
a great movement. He lacked the power of integration.

He was not an artist. But he possessed to an extraordinary
degree the power of synthesis. He was a craftsman, as the
modern jargon goes. There is not in the whole range of
English literature as excellent a summary of the way in
which the Divinity of our Lord fought its way into the
leading brains of Europe, as appears upon page 192 of this
book. It is as good as Boissier; there runs all through it
knowledge, proportion, and something which, had he been
granted a little more light, or been nurtured in an intellectual
climate a little more sunny, would have been vision itself:--

"The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work
compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling
difficulty, what could He be but God? Who but God could
have wrested His prize from a power which half the thinking
world believed to be His coequal and co-eternal adversary?
He was God. He was man also, for He was the second
Adam--the second starting-point of human growth. He was
virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the
substance which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He
showed in the nature of His person after His resurrection,
what the material body would have been in all of us except
for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its
purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its
likeness."

There's a piece of historical prose which summarises,
teaches, and stamps itself finally upon the mind! Froude
saw that the Faith was the summit and the completion of
Rome. Had he written us a summary of the fourth and
fifth centuries--and had he written it just after reading some
dull fellow on the other side--what books we should have
had to show to the rival schools of the Continent!

Consider the sharp and almost unique judgment passed
upon Tacitus at the bottom of page 133 and the top of
page 134, or again, the excellent sub-ironic passages in which
he expresses the vast advantage of metaphysical debate:
which has all these qualities, that it is true, sober, exact,
and yet a piece of laughter and a contradiction of itself. It
is prose in three dimensions.

That pedantic charge of inaccuracy, with which I have
already dealt in another place, in connection with another
and perhaps a greater man, is not applicable to Froude. He
was hasty, and in his historical work the result certainly was
that he put down things upon insufficient evidence, or upon
evidence but half read; but even in his historical work (which
deals remember, with the most highly controversial part of
English history) he is as accurate as anybody else, except
perhaps Lingard. That the man was by nature accurate,
well read and of a good memory, appears continually throughout
this book, and the more widely one has read one's self,
the more one appreciates this truth.

For instance, there is often set down to Disraeli the remark
that his religion was "the religion of all sensible men." and
upon being asked what this religion might be, that Oriental
is said to have replied, "All sensible men keep that to
themselves." Now Disraeli could no more have made such a
witticism than he could have flown through the air; his
mind was far too extravagant for such pointed phrases.
Froude quotes the story (page 205 of this book) but rightly
ascribes it to Rogers, a very different man from Disraeli--
an Englishman with a mastery of the English language.

Look again at this remark upon page 20, "The happy allusion
of Quevedo to the Tiber was not out of place here:--the
fugitive is alone permanent.'" How many Englishmen know
that Du Bellay's immortal sonnet was but a translation of
Quevedo? You could drag all Oxford and Cambridge to-day
and not find a single man who knew it.

Note the care he has shown in quoting one of those hackneyed
phrases which almost all the world misquotes, "Que
mon nom soit fletri, pourvu que la France soit libre." Of a
hundred times that you may see those words of Danton's
written down, you will perhaps not see them once written
down exactly as they were said.

So it is throughout his work. Men still living in the
Universities accuse him vaguely of inexactitude as they will
accuse Jowett of ignorance, and these men, when one examines
them closely, are found to be ignorant of the French
language, to have read no philosophy between Aristotle and
Hobbes, and to issue above their signatures such errors of
plain dates and names as make one blush for English
scholarship and be glad that no foreigner takes our historical
school seriously.

There is always left to any man who deals with the writings
of Froude, a task impossible to complete but necessarily to be
attempted. He put himself forward, in a set attitude, to
combat and to destroy what he conceived to be--in the
moment of his attack--the creed of his countrymen. He was
so literary a man that he did this as much by accepting as by
denying, as much by dating from Elizabeth all we are as by
affirming unalterable material sequence and the falsity of
every transcendental acceptation. His time smelt him out
even when he flattered it most. Even when he wrote of the
Revenge the England of his day--luckily for him--thought
him an enemy.

Upon the main discussion of his life it is impossible to
pass a judgment, for the elements of that discussion are now
destroyed; the universities no longer pretend to believe.
And "free discussion" has become so free that the main
doctrines he assailed are no longer presented or read without
weariness in the class to which he appealed and from which
he sprang.

The sects, then, against which he set himself are dead:
but upon a much larger question which is permanent, and
which in a sort of groping way he sometimes handled,
something should be said here, which I think has never been
said before. He was perpetually upon the borderland of the
Catholic Church.

Between him and the Faith there stood no distance of space,
but rather a high thin wall; the high thin wall of his own
desperate conviction. If you will turn to page 209 of this
book you will see it said of the denial of the Sacrament
by the Reformers and of Ridley's dogma that it was bread
only "the commonsense of the country was of the same
opinion, and illusion was at an end." Froude knew that
the illusion was not at an end. He probably knew (for we
must continue to repeat that he was a most excellent historian)
that the "commonsense of the country" was, by the time
Ridley and the New English Church began denying the real
presence, and turning that denial into a dogma, profoundly
indifferent to all dogmas whatsoever. What "the common-sense
of the country" wanted was to keep out swarthy men,
chivalrous indeed but imperialists full of gold who owned
nearly all the earth, but who, they were determined, should
not own England.

Froude was fond of such assertions, his book is full of them,
and they are more than mere violence framed for combat;
they are in their curious way definite expressions of the man's
soul; for Froude was fond of that high thin wall, and liked
to build it higher. He was a dogmatic rationalist--one
hesitates to use a word which has been so portentously
misused. Renan before dying came out with one of his last
dogmas; it was to this effect, that there was not in the
Universe an intelligent power higher than the human mind.
Froude, had he lived in an atmosphere of perfectly free
discussion as Renan did, would have heartily subscribed to that
dogma.

Why then do I say that he was perpetually on the borderland
of the Catholic Church? Because when he leaves for a
moment the phraseology and the material of his youth and of
his neighbourhood, he is perpetually striking that note of
interest, of wonder, and of intellectual freedom which is the
note of Catholicism.

Let any man who knows what Catholicism may be read
carefully the Essay on the Dissolution of the Monasteries,
and the Essay on the Philosophy of Christianity which succeeds
it in this book, but which was written six years before.
Let him remember that nothing Froude ever wrote was
written without the desire to combat some enemy, and, having
made allowance for that desire, let him decide whether one
shock, one experience, one revelation would not have whirled
him into the Church. He was, I think, like a man who has
felt the hands of a woman and heard her voice, who knows
them so thoroughly well that he can love, criticise, or despise
according to his mood; but who has never seen her face.

And he was especially near to the Church in this: that
having discussed a truth he was compelled to fight for it and
to wound actively in fighting, He was an agent, He did,
He saw that the mass of stuff clinging round the mind
of wealthy England was decaying, He turned with regret
towards the healthy visions of Europe and called them
illusions because they were not provable, and because all
provable things showed a flee other than that of the creed
and were true in another manner. He despised the cowardice
--for it is cowardice--that pretends to intellectual conviction
and to temporal evidence of the things of the soul. He saw
and said, and he was right in saying, that the City of God is
built upon things incredible.

"Incredibilia nec crederim, nisi me compelleret ecclesiae auctoritas"

H. BELLOC.

____


The following is a list of the published works of J. A. Froude.
"Life of St. Neot" ("Lives of the English Saints," edited
by J. H. Newman), 1844. "Shadows of the Clouds" (Tales),
by Zeta (pseud.), 1847. "A Sermon (on 2 Cor. vii. 10) preached
at St. Mary's Church on the Death of the Rev. George May
Coleridge," 1847. Article on "Spinoza" (Oxford and Cambridge
Review), 1847. "The Nemesis of Faith" (Tale), 1849.
"England's Forgotten Worthies" (Westminster Review), 1852.
"Book of Job" (Westminster Review), 1853. "Poems of
Matthew Arnold" (Westminster Review), 1854. "Suggestions
on the Best Means of Teaching English History"
("Oxford Essays," &c.), 1855. "History of England," 12
vols., 1856-1870 "The Influence of the Reformation on the
Scottish Character," 1865. "Inaugural Address delivered to
the University of St. Andrews, March 19, 1869," 1869. "Short
Studies on Great Subjects," 1867, 2 vols., series 2-4, 1872-83
(articles from Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, &c.).
"The Cat's Pilgrimage," 1870 "Calvinism: Address at
St. Andrews," 1871. "The English in Ireland," 3 vols.,
1872-74. "Bunyan" ("English Men of Letters"), 1878. "Caesar:
a Sketch," 1879. "Two Lectures on South Africa," 1880.
"Thomas Carlyle" (a history of the first forty years of his
life, &c.), 2 vols., 1882. "Luther: a Short Biography," 1883.
"Thomas Carlyle" (a history of his life in London, 1834-80,
2 vols., 1884. "Oceana," 1886. "The English in the West
Indies," 1888. "Liberty and Property: an Address" [1888.]
"The Two Chiefs of Dunboy," 1889. "Lord Beaconsfield"
(a Biography), 1890. "The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon,"
1891. "The Spanish Story of the Armada," 1892. "Life
and Letters of Erasmus," 1894. "English Seamen in the
Sixteenth Century," 1895. "Lectures on the Council of Trent,"
1896. "My Relations with Carlyle," 1903.

Edited--"Carlyle's Reminiscences," 1882. "Mrs. Carlyle's
Letters," 1883.

____

ARNOLD'S POEMS

Five years ago there appeared a small volume entitled
"The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems, by A." (The Strayed
Reveller, and other Poems. By A. London: 1849) It
was received we believe with general indifference. The
public are seldom sanguine with new poets; the exceptions
to the rule having been for the most part signal
mistakes; while in the case of "A." the inequality of
merit in his poems was so striking that even persons
who were satisfied that qualities were displayed in them
of the very highest kind, were yet unable to feel confidence
in the future of an author so unusually incapable,
as it appeared, of knowing when he was doing well and
when he was failing.

Young men of talent experience often certain musical
sensations, which are related to poetry as the fancy of a
boy for a pretty face is related to love; and the counterfeit
while it lasts is so like the reality as to deceive not
only themselves but even experienced lookers-on who
are not on their guard against the phenomenon. Time
in either case is requisite to test the quality both of the
substance and of the feeling, and we desired some
further evidence of A.'s powers before we could grant
him his rank as a poet; or even feel assured that he
could ultimately obtain it. There was passion, as in a
little poem called "Stagyrus," deep and searching; there
was unaffected natural feeling, expressed sweetly and
musically; in "The Sick King of Bokhara," in several
of the Sonnets and other fragmentary pieces, there was
genuine insight into life and whatever is best and noblest
in it;--but along with this, there was often an elaborate
obscurity, one of the worst faults which poetry can have;
and indications that the intellectual struggles which,
like all young men in our times, he was passing through,
were likely to issue in an indifferentism neither pleasing
nor promising.

The inequality in substance was not more remarkable
than the inequality in the mechanical expression of it.
"The Forsaken Merman" is perhaps as beautifully
finished as anything of the kind in the English language.
The story is exquisitely told, and word and metre so
carefully chosen that the harmony of sound and meaning
is perfect. The legend itself we believe is Norwegan.
It is of a King of the Sea who had married an earthly
maiden; and was at last deserted by her from some
scruples of conscience. The original features of it are
strictly preserved, and it is told indirectly by the old
Sea King to his children in a wild, irregular melody, of
which the following extract will convey but an imperfect
idea. It is Easter time, and the mother has left her sea
palace for the church on the hill side, with a promise to
return--

"She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay.
'Children, dear, was it yesterday?
Children, dear, were we long alone?'
'The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.
Long prayers,' I said, 'in the world they say.
Come' I said, 'and we rose through the surf in the bay.
We went up the beach, by the sandy down,
Where the sea-stocks bloom to the white-walled town,
Through the narrow paved streets where all was still,
To the little gray church on the windy hill.
From the church came a murmur of folk at their prayers;
But we stood without in the cold blowing airs.

We climbed on the graves, on the stones worn with
rains,
And we gazed up the aisle, through the small leaded
panes.
She sate by the pillar, we saw her clear.
'Margaret! hist! come, quick, we are here!'
'Dear heart,' I said, 'we are long alone.'
'The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.'
'But, ah, she gave me never a look,
For her eyes were sealed to the holy book.
Loud prays the priest, shut stands the door.
Come away, children, call no more.
Come away, come down, call no more.'
Down, down, down,
Down to the depths of the sea.
She sits at her wheel in the humming town,
Singing most joyfully.
Hark what she sings: 'Oh, joy! oh, joy!
For the humming street, and the child with its toy;
For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well;
For the wheel where I spun,
And the blessed light of the sun.'
And so she sings her fill,
Singing most joyfully,
Till the shuttle falls from her hand,
And the whizzing wheel stands still.
She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,
And over the sand at the sea,
And her eyes are set in a stare,
And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-laden,
A long, long sigh,
For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden,
And the gleam of her golden hair."

Not less excellent, in a style wholly different, was A.'s
treatment (and there was this high element of promise
in A. that, with a given story to work upon, he was
always successful) of the AEgyptian legend of Mycerinus,
a legend not known unfortunately to general English
readers, who are therefore unable to appreciate the skill
displayed in dealing with it. We must make room for
one extract, however, in explanation of which it is only
necessary to say that Mycerinus, having learnt from the
oracle that being too just a king for the purposes of the
gods, who desired to afflict the AEgyptians, he was to
die after six more years, made the six years into twelve
by lighting his gardens all night with torches, and
revelled out what remained to him of life. We can give
no idea of the general conception of the poem, but as a
mere piece of description this is very beautiful.

"There by the river bank he wandered on,
From palm grove on to palm grove, happy trees,
Their smooth tops shining sunwards, and beneath
Burying their unsunned stems in grass and flowers;
Where in one dream the feverish time of youth
Might fade in slumber, and the feet of joy
Might wander all day long, and never tire:
Here came the king, holding high feast at morn,
Rose-crowned: and even when the sun went down,
A hundred lamps beamed in the tranquil gloom,
From tree to tree, all through the twinkling grove,
Revealing all the tumult of the feast,
Flushed guests, and golden goblets foamed with wine,
While the deep burnished foliage overhead
Splintered the silver arrows of the moon."

Containing as it did poems of merit so high as these,
it may seem strange that this volume should not have
received a more ready recognition; for there is no
excellence which the writer of the passages which we have
quoted could hereafter attain, the promise of which
would not be at once perceived in them. But the
public are apt to judge of books of poetry by the rule
of mechanism, and try them not by their strongest parts
but by their weakest; and in the present instance (to
mention nothing else) the stress of weight in the title
which was given to the collection was laid upon what
was by no means adequate to bearing it. Whatever be
the merits of the "Strayed Reveller" as poetry, it is
certainly not a poem in the sense which English people
generally attach to the word, looking as they do not
only for imaginative composition but for verse;--and
as certainly if the following passage had been printed
merely as prose, in a book which professed to be nothing
else, no one would have suspected that it was composed
of an agglutination of lines.

"The gods are happy; they turn on all sides their shining
eyes, and see below them earth and men. They see Tiresias
sitting staff in hand on the warm grassy Asopus bank, his
robe drawn over his old, sightless head, revolving inly the
doom of Thebes. They see the Centaurs in the upper glens
of Pelion, on the streams where the red-berried ashes fringe
the clear brown shallow pools; with streaming flanks and
heads reared proudly, snuffing the mountain wind. They
see the Scythian on the wide steppe, unharnessing his
wheeled house at noon; he tethers his beast down and
makes his meal, mare's milk and bread baked on the
embers; all around the boundless waving grass plains
stretch, thick starred with saffron and the yellow hollyhock
and flag-leaved isis flowers."

No one will deny that this is fine imaginative painting,
and as such poetical,--but it is the poetry of well
written, elegant prose. Instead of the recurring sounds,
whether of rhyme or similarly weighted syllables, which
constitute the outward form of what we call verse, we
have the careless grace of uneven, undulating sentences,
flowing on with a rhythmic cadence indeed, but free
from all constraint of metre or exactitude of form. It
may be difficult, perhaps it is impossible, to fix the
measure of license which a poet may allow himself
in such matters, but it is at least certain that the
greatest poets are those who have allowed themselves
the fewest of such liberties: in art as in morals,
and as in everything which man undertakes, true
greatness is the most ready to recognize and most
willing to obey those simple outward laws which have
been sanctioned by the experience of mankind, and
we suspect the originality which cannot move except
on novel paths.

This is but one of several reasons which explain the
apathy of the public on A.'s first appearance. There
was large promise, but the public require performance;
and in poetry a single failure overweighs a hundred
successes. It was possible that his mistakes were the
mistakes of a man whose face was in the right direction
--who was feeling his way, and who would ultimately
find it; but only time could decide if this were so; and
in the interval, the coldness of his reception would serve
to test the nature of his faculty.

So far we have spoken with reserve, for we have
simply stated the feelings with which we regarded this
little volume on first reading it; but the reserve is no
longer necessary, and the misgivings which we experienced
have not been justified. At the close of
last year another volume was published, again of
miscellaneous poems, which went beyond the most sanguine
hopes of A.'s warmest admirers. As before with "The
Strayed Revellers," so again with "Empedocles on
AEtna," (Empedocles on AEtna, and other Poems. By A. London:
1852) the piece de resistance was not the happiest selection.
But of the remaining pieces, and of all those
which he has more recently added, it is difficult to
speak in too warm praise. In the unknown A., we are
now to recognize a son of the late Master of Rugby, Dr.
Arnold. Like a good knight, we suppose he thought it
better to win his spurs before appearing in public with
so honoured a name; but the associations which belong
to it will suffer no alloy from him who now wears it.
Not only is the advance in art remarkable, in greater
clearness of effect, and in the mechanical handling of
words, but far more in simplicity and healthfulness
of moral feeling. There is no more obscurity, and no
mysticism; and we see everywhere the working of a
mind bent earnestly on cultivating whatever is highest
and worthiest in itself; of a person who is endeavouring,
without affectation, to follow the best things, to see
clearly what is good, and right, and true, and to fasten
his heart upon these. There is usually a period in the
growth of poets in which, like coarser people, they
mistake the voluptuous for the beautiful; but in Mr.
Arnold there is no trace of any such tendency; pure,
without effort, he feels no enjoyment and sees no beauty
in the atmosphere of the common passions; and in
nobleness of purpose, in a certain loftiness of mind
singularly tempered with modesty, he continually reminds
us of his father. There is an absence, perhaps,
of colour; it is natural that it should be so in the
earlier poems of a writer who proposes aims such as
these to himself; his poetry is addressed to the
intellectual, and not to the animal emotions; and to persons.
of animal taste, the flavour will no doubt be oversimple;
but it is true poetry--a true representation of
true human feeling. It may not be immediately popular,
but it will win its way in the long run, and has elements
of endurance in it which enable it to wait without
anxiety for recognition.

Among the best of the new poems is "Tristram and
Iseult." It is unlucky that so many of the subjects
should be so unfamiliar to English readers, but it is
their own fault if they do not know the "Mort d'Arthur."
We must not calculate, however, on too much knowledge
in such unpractical matters; and as the story is too
long to tell in this place, we take an extract which will
not require any. It is a picture of sleeping children as
beautiful as Sir Francis Chantrey's.

But they sleep in sheltered rest,
Like helpless birds in the warm nest
On the castle's southern side,
Where feebly comes the mournful roar
Of buffeting wind and surging tide,
Through many a room and corridor.
Full on the window the moon's ray
Makes their chamber as bright as day.
It shines upon the blank white walis,
And on the snowy pillow falls.
And on two angel heads doth play,
Turn'd to each other: the eyes closed,
The lashes on the cheek reposed.
Round each sweet brow the cap close set
Hardly lets peep the golden hair;
Through the soft opened lips the air
Scarcely moves the coverlet.
One little wandering arm is thrown
At random on the counterpane,
And often the fingers close in haste,
As if their baby owner chased
The butterflies again.
This stir they have and this alone,
But else they are so still--
Ah, you tired madcaps, you lie still;
But were you at the window now,
To look forth on the fairy sight
Of your illumined haunts by night,
To see the park glades where you play
Far lovelier than they are by day,
To see the sparkle on the eaves,
And upon every giant bough
Of those old oaks whose wan red leaves
Are jewelled with bright drops of rain--
How would your voices run again!
And far beyond the sparkling trees,
Of the castle park, one sees
The bare heath spreading clear as day,
Moor behind moor, far far away,
Into the heart of Brittany.
And here and there locked by the land
Long inlets of smooth glittering sea,
And many a stretch of watery sand,
All shining in the white moonbeams;
But you see fairer in your dreams."

This is very beautiful; a beautiful description of one
of the most beautiful objects in nature; but it is a
description which could never have been composed except by
a person whose mind was in tune with all innocent
loveliness, and who found in the contemplation of such
things not merely a passing emotion of pleasure but the
deepest and most exquisite enjoyment.

Besides "Tristram and Iseult," we select for especial
mention out of this second volume, "A Farewell,"
"Self-Dependence," "Morality "; two very highly-finished
pieces called "The Youth of Nature," and "The Youth
of Man," expressing two opposite states of feeling,
which we all of us recognize, and yet which, as far as
we know, have never before found their way into language;
and "A Summer Night," a small meditative
poem, containing one passage, which, although not
perfect--for, if the metre had been more exact, the
effect would, in our opinion, have been very much
enhanced--is, nevertheless, the finest that Mr. Arnold
has yet written.

And I. I know not if to pray
Still to be what I am, or yield and be
Like all the other men I see.
For most men in a brazen prison live,
Where in the sun's hot eye,
With heads bent o'er their toil, they languidly
Their minds to some unmeaning taskwork give,
Dreaming of nought beyond their prison wall;
And as, year after year,
Fresh products of their barren labour fall
From their tired hands, and rest
Never yet comes more near,
Gloom settles slowly down over their breast,
And while they try to stem
The waves of mournful thought by which they
are prest,
Death in their prison reaches them
Unfreed, having seen nothing still unblest.

And the rest, a few,
Escape their prison, and depart
On the wide ocean of life anew.
There the freed prisoner, where'er his heart
Listeth, will sail;
Nor does he know how there prevail,
Despotic on life's sea,
Trade winds that cross it from eternity.
Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred
By thwarting signs, and braves
The freshening wind and blackening waves.
And then the tempest strikes him, and between
The lightning bursts is seen
Only a driving wreck,
And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck
With anguished face and flying hair,
Grasping the rudder hard,
Still bent to make some port he knows not where,
Still standing for some false impossible shore.
And sterner comes the roar
Of sea and wind, and through the deepening gloom,
Fainter and fainter wreck and helmsman loom."

In these lines, in powerful and highly-sustained
metaphor, lies the full tragedy of modern life.

"Is there no life but these alone,
Madman or slave, must man be one?"

We disguise the alternative under more fairly-sounding
names, but we cannot escape the reality; and we know
not, after all, whether there is deeper sadness in a
broken Mirabeau or Byron, or in the contented prosperity
of a people who once knew something of noble
aspirations, but have submitted to learn from a practical
age that the business of life is to make money, and the
enjoyments of it what money can buy. A few are
ignobly successful; the many fail, and are miserable;
and the subtle anarchy of selfishness finds its issue in
madness and revolution. But we need not open this
painful subject. Mr. Arnold is concerned with the
effect of the system on individual persons; with the
appearance which it wears to young highly sensitive
men on their entry upon the world, with the choice of
a life before them; and it is happy for the world that
such men are comparatively rare, or the mad sort would
be more abundant than they are.

We cannot but think it unfortunate that this poem,
with several others of the highest merit, have been
omitted in the last edition, while others find a place
there, for which comparatively we care little. Uniformity
of excellence has been sacrificed to uniformity
of character, a subsidiary matter which in itself is of
slight importance, and which the public would never
quarrel for if they were treated with an ever pleasing
variety. As it is, we have still to search three volumes
for the best specimens of Mr. Arnold's powers, and
opportunities are still left for illmatured critics to make
extracts of an apparently inferior kind. There is a
remedy for this, however, in the future, and the necessary
sifting will no doubt get itself duly accomplished at
last. In the meantime, before noticing the late edition,
we have a few words to say about Empedocles, the
ground of objection to which we cannot think Mr. Arnold
adequately understands, although he has omitted it in
his present edition, and has given us his reasons for
doing so. Empedocles, as we all know, was a Sicilian
philosopher, who, out of discontent with life, or from
other cause, flung himself into the crater of Mount
AEtna. A discontent of this kind, Mr. Arnold tells
us, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance, is not
a fit subject for poetry. The object of poetry is to
please, and the spectacle of a man too weak to bear his
trials, and breaking under them, cannot be anything but
painful. The correctness of the portrait he defends;
and the fault, as he thinks, is not in the treatment, but
in the subject itself. Now it is true that as a rule poetry
is better employed in exhibiting the conquest over
temptations than the fall under them, and some escape
of this kind for the feelings must be provided in
tragedies, by the introduction of some powerful cause,
either of temptation acting on the will or of an external
force controlling the action, in order to explain and
reconcile us to the catastrophe. A mere picture of
imbecility is revolting simply; we cannot conceive ourselves
acting in the same way under the same circumstances,
and we can therefore feel neither sympathy with
the actor nor interest in his fate. But we must be
careful how we narrow our theories in such matters.
In Werther we have an instance of the same trial, with
the same issue as Mr. Arnold has described in Empedocles,
and to say that Werther was a mistake, is to
circumscribe the sphere of art by a definition which the
public taste will refuse to recognize. Nor is it true, in
spite of Schiller's authority, that "all art is dedicated to
enjoyment." Tragedy has other objects, the katharsis
or purifying of the emotions for instance, which, if we
are to continue to use words in their ordinary sense, is
something distinct from enjoyment, and not always reconcilable
with it. Whatever will excite interest in a
healthy, vigorous mind, that is a fair object of poetry,
and there is a painful as well as a pleasant interest; it
is an abuse of language to describe the sensations which
we experience on reading "Philoctetes" or "Hamlet" as
pleasant. They are not unmixedly painful, but surely
not pleasant.

It is not therefore the actual fate of Empedocles
which fails to interest us, but we are unable to feel that
Mr. Arnold's account of him is the true account. In
the absence of authentic material, the artist who hopes
to interest us in his fate must at least make the story
probable as he tells it; consistent in itself, with causes
clearly drawn out proportioned to the effects resulting
from them. And this it cannot be said that Mr. Arnold
has done. Powerful as is much of the language which
he places in the mouth of Empedocles, he has failed
to represent him as in a condition in which suicide
is the natural result. His trials, his disgusts, as far
as he exhibits them, are not more than man may
naturally be supposed able to bear, while of the impulses
of a more definite character there is no trace
at all. But a more grave deficiency still is, that among
all the motives introduced, there is not one to make the
climb of AEtna necessary or intelligible. Empedocles
on AEtna might have been Empedocles in his room
at Catana, and a dagger or a cup of hemlock would
have answered all purposes equally well with a plunge
in the burning crater. If the tradition of Empedocles
is a real story of a thing which really happened, we
may feel sure that some peculiar feeling connected
with the mountain itself, some mystical theory or local
tradition, led such a man as he was to such a means of
self-immolation.

We turn from Empedocles, which perhaps it is scarcely
fair to have criticised, to the first poem in the latest
edition, "Sohrab and Rustum," (Poems. By Matthew Arnold.
A New Edition, London: 1853.) a poem which alone would have
settled the position which Mr. Arnold has a right to claim
as a poet, and which is remarkable for
its success in every point in which Empedocles appears
deficient. The story comes down out of remote Persian
antiquity; it is as old, perhaps it is older, than the tale
of Troy; and, like all old stories which have survived
the changes of so long a time, is in itself of singular
interest. Rustum, the Hercules of the East, fell in
with and loved a beautiful Tartar woman. He left her,
and she saw him no more; but in time a child was
born, who grew up with the princes of his mother's
tribe, and became in early youth distinguished in all
manly graces and noblenesses. Learning that he was the
son of the great Rustum, his object is to find his father,
and induce him, by some gallant action, to acknowledge
and receive him. War breaks out between the Tartars
and the Persians. The two armies come down upon
the Oxus, and Sohrab having heard that Rustum had
remained behind in the mountains, and was not present,
challenges the Persian chief. Rustum, unknown to
Sohrab, had in the meantime joined the army, and
against a warrior of Sohrab's reputation, no one could
be trusted to maintain the Persian cause except the old
hero. So by a sad perversity of fate, and led to it by
their very greatness, the father and the son meet in
battle, and only recognize each other when Sohrab is
lying mortally wounded. It is one of those terrible
situations which only the very highest power of poetry
can dwell upon successfully. If the right chord be not
touched to the exactest nicety, if the shock of the
incident in itself be not melted into pathos, and the
nobleness of soul in the two sufferers be not made to
rise above the cruel accident which crushes them, we
cannot listen to the poet. The story overwhelms and
absorbs us; we desire to be left alone with it and with
our own feelings, and his words about it become officious
and intrusive. Homer has furnished Mr. Arnold with
his model, and has taught him the great lesson that the
language on such occasions cannot be too simple and the
style too little ornamented. Perhaps it may be thought
that he has followed Homer's manner even too closely.
No one who has read "Mycerinus" and the "Forsaken
Metman" can doubt that Mr. Arnold can write richly
if he pleases. It is a little startling, therefore, to find
the opening of this poem simpler than one would make
it, even if telling it in prose to a child. As in the
"Iliad," the same words are repeated over and over
again for the same idea, without variation or attempt
at it; and although it may easily be that our taste is
spoiled by the high seasoning of the modern style, the
result is that it strikes the attention to an extent which
would have been better avoided. A perfect style does
not strike at all, and it is a matter in which the reader
ought to be considered even more than the abstract
right. We have soon, however, ceased to think of that;
the peculiarity which we have mentioned is confined to
the beginning, and the success of the treatment is best
proved by our forgetfulness, as we read on, of art and
artist language and manner, in the overpowering interest
of the story as it is drawn out before us. Extracts will
convey a poor idea of a poem in which the parts are so
wholly subordinate to the effect of the whole, and yet,
in spite of this disadvantage, we can justify at least
partially to our readers the opinions which we have
generally expressed.

We will take the scene of the recognition, when
Sohrab, lying wounded, and as yet ignorant of the name
of his adversary, has declared himself Rustum's son.
The father, at first incredulous and scornful, is led step
by step, through the mention of old names and times,
towards the anaguorisis, and after the most delicately
traced alternations of feeling, all doubt is ended by the
mark of the seal on Sohrab's arm which Rustum had
given to his mother.

"How say'st thou? [Sohrab says.] Is that sign the proper
sign
Of Rustum's son, or of some other man's?
He spoke: but Rustum gazed, and gazed, and stood
Speechless; and then he uttered one sharp cry,
Oh, boy, thy father!"

This is the first hint to Sohrab who has been his foe.

"And his voice choked there,
And then a dark cloud pass'd before his eyes,
And his head swam, and he sank down to earth.
But Sohrab crawled to where he lay, and cast
His arms about his neck, and kiss'd his lips,
And with fond faltering fingers stroked his cheeks,
Trying to call him back to life: and life
Came back to Rustum; and he op'd his eyes;
And they stood wide with horrour: and he seized
In both his hands the dust which lay around,
And threw it on his face, and smirched his hair,
His hair, and face, and beard, and glittering arms:
And strong convulsive groanings shook his breast,
And his sobs choked him, and he clutched his sword
To draw it, and for ever let life out.
But Sohrab saw his thought, and held his hand,
And with a soothing voice he spoke, and said
'Father, forbear, for I but meet to-day
The doom that at my birth was written down
In Heaven, and thou art Heaven's unconscious hand.
Surely my heart cried out that it was thou,
When first I saw thee; and thy heart spoke too,
I know it; but Fate trod those promptings down
Under its iron heel; Fate, Fate engaged
The strife, and hurled me on my father's spear.
But let us speak no more of this: I find
My father: let me feel that I have found.
Come, sit beside me on this sand, and take
My head betwixt thy hands, and kiss my cheeks,
And wash them with thy tears, and say "My son!"
Quick: quick! for numbered are my sands of life,
And swift; for like the lightning to this field
I came, and like the wind I go away.
Sudden and swift, and like a passing wind:
But it was writ in Heaven that this should be.'
So said he: and his voice released the heart
Of Rustum; and his tears broke forth: he cast
His arms round his son's neck, and wept aloud,
And kiss'd him; and awe fell on both the hosts
When they saw Rustum's grief; and Ruksh, the
horse,
With his head bowing to the ground and mane
Sweeping the dust, came near, and in mute woe
First to the one, then to the other mov'd
His head, as if enquiring what their grief
Might mean; and from his dark compassionate
eyes
The big warm tears roll'd down and caked the
sand."

As a picture of human life in Homer's manner, we
cannot see why this passage, and indeed the whole poem,
should not be thought as good as any one of the
episodes in the "AEneid." We are not comparing Mr.
Arnold with Virgil: for it is one thing to have written
an epic and another to have written a small fragment;
but as a working up of a single incident it may rank
by the side of Nisus and Euryalus, and deeper chords
of feeling are touched in it than Virgil has ever
touched.

And this leads us to Mr Arnold's preface, and to the
account which he gives us of the object which he
proposes to himself in poetry: and our notice of this
must be brief, as our space is running to its conclusion.
He tells us, in a manner most feelingly instructive,
something of the difficulties which lie round a young
poet of the present day who desires to follow his art to
some genuine purpose; and what he says will remind
readers of Wordsworth of Professor Wilson's beautiful
letter to him on a very similar subject. Unhappily the
question is not one of poetry merely, but of far wider
significance. Not the poet only, but every one of us
who cannot be satisfied to tread with the crowd along
the broad road which leads--we used to know whither,
but desires "to cultivate," as Mr. Arnold says, "what is
best and noblest" in ourselves, are as sorely at a loss
as he is with his art. To find the best models,--that
indeed is the one thing for him and for us. But what
are they and where? and the answer to the aesthetic
difficulty lies as we believe in the solution of the moral
one. To say this, however, is of infinitely little service
for the practical direction of a living poet; and we are
here advised (and for present purposes no doubt wisely)
to fall back on the artists of classic antiquity. From
them better than from the best of the moderns, the
young poet will learn what art really is. He will learn
that before beginning to sing it is necessary to have
something to sing of, and that a poem is something else
than a collection of sweet musical sentences strung
together like beads or even jewels in a necklace. He
will learn that the subject is greater than the manner;
that the first is the one essential without a worthy
choice of which nothing can prosper. Above all, he
will learn that the restless craving after novelty, so
characteristic of all modern writing, the craving after
new plots, new stories, new ideas, is mere disease,
and that the true original genius displays itself not in
the fabrication of what has no existence, but in the
strength and power with which facts of history, or
stories existing so fixedly in the popular belief as to
have acquired so to say the character of facts, shall be
exhibited and delineated.

But while we allow with Mr. Arnold that the theory
will best be learnt from the ancients, we cannot allow,
as he seems to desire us to allow, that the practice of it
was confined to them, or recommend as he does the
disproportionate study, still less the disproportionate
imitation of them. All great artists at all times have followed
the same method, for greatness is impossible without it.
The Italian painters are never weary of the Holy
Family. The matter of Dante's poem lay before him
in the creed of the whole of Europe. Shakespeare has
not invented the substance of any one of his plays.
And the "weighty experience" and "composure of
judgment" with which the study of the ancients no
doubt does furnish "those who habitually practise it,"
may be obtained we believe by the study of the thoughts
of all great men of all ages; by the study of life in any
age, so that our scope be broad enough.

It is indeed idle nonsense to speak, as some critics
speak, of the "present" as alone having claims upon
the poet. Whatever is great, or good, or pathetic, or
terrible, in any age past or present, belongs to him, and
is within his proper province; but most especially, if he
is wise, he will select his subjects out of those which
time has sealed as permanently significant. It is not
easy in our own age to distinguish what has the
elements in it of enduring importance; and time is
wiser than we. But why dwell with such apparent
exclusiveness on classic antiquity, as if there was
no antiquity except the classic, and as if time were
divided into the eras of Greece and Rome and the
nineteenth century? The Hellenic poet sang of the
Hellenes, why should not the Teutonic poet sing of
the Teutons?

"Vixere fortes post Agamemnona."

And grand as are Achilles and Clytemnestra, they are
not grander than their parallels in the German epic
Criemhilda and Von Tronje Hagen. We do not
dream of prescribing to Mr. Arnold what subject he
should choose. Let him choose what interests himself
if he will interest his readers; and if he choose what is
really human, let it come from what age it will, human
hearts will answer to it. And yet it seems as if Teutonic
tradition, Teutonic feeling, and Teutonic thought had
the first claim on English and German poets. And
those among them will deserve best of the modern
world, and will receive the warmest welcome from it,
who will follow Shakespeare in modelling into forms of
beauty the inheritance which has come down to them
of the actions of their own race. So most faithfully,
if least directly, they will be treading in the steps
of those great poets of Greece whom they desire to
imitate. Homer and Sophocles did not look beyond
their own traditions and their own beliefs; they
found in these and these only their exclusive and
abundant material. Have the Gothic annals suddenly
become poor, and our own quarries become exhausted
and worthless?

____


WORDS ABOUT OXFORD

Many long years had passed since I visited Oxford,--
some twenty-eight or more. I had friends among the
resident members of that venerable domicile of learning.
Pleasant had been the time that I had spent there, of
which intervening years had not diminished the remembrance
--perhaps heightened the tone of its colouring.
On many accounts I regarded that beautiful city with
affectionate veneration. There were more than local
attractions to render it interesting. There were the
recollections of those who ceased in the interval to be
denizens of this world. These could not but breathe
sadness over the noble edifices that recalled men,
conversations, and convivialities which, however long
departed, shadowed upon the mind its own inevitable
destiny. Again were those venerable buildings before
me in their architectural richness. There were tower,
and roof, and gateway, in all their variety of outline,
defined with the sharp light and shade peculiar to
ecclesiastical architecture. There were tufted groves
overshadowing the haunts of learning; and there, too,
was old Magdalen, which used to greet our sight so
pleasantly upon our approach to the city. I began
to fancy I had leaped no gulf of time since, for the
Cherwell ran on as of old. I felt that the happy allusion
of Quevedo to the Tiber was not out of place here,
"The fugitive is alone permanent." The same river ran
on as it had run on before, but the cheerful faces that
had been once reflected in its stream had passed away.
I saw things once familiar as I saw them before; but
"the fathers, where were they ?" I was in this respect
like one awaked from the slumber of an age, who found
himself a stranger in his own land.

I walked through High Street. I entered All Souls'
and came out quickly, for the quadrangle, or rather one
glance round it, was sufficient to put "the past to pain."
I went over the different sites, and even paced Christ
Church meadows. But I could not deceive myself for
a moment. There was an indescribable vacuum somewhere
that indicated there was no mode of making the
past the present. What had become of the pleasant
faces, the cheerful voices, the animal spirits, which
seemed in my eyes to give a soul to those splendid
donations of our forefathers to learning in years gone
by? That instinct--soul, spirit, whatever it be--which
animates and vivifies everything, and without which the
palace is not comparable to the hovel possessing it,--
that instinct or spirit was absent for me, at least. At
length I adjourned to the Star, somewhat moody, more
than half wishing I had not entered the city. I ordered
my solitary meal, and began ruminating, as we all do,
over the thousandth-time told tale of human destiny by
generation after generation. I am not sure I did not
greet with sullen pleasure a heavy, dark, dense mass of
cloud that at that moment canopied the city. The
mind finds all kinds of congenialities grateful at such
moments. Some drops of rain fell; then a shower,
tolerably heavy. I could not go out again as I intended
doing. I sat and sipped my wine, thinking of the fate
of cities,--of Nineveh the renowned, of the marbles
lately recovered from thence with the mysterious arrowheaded
characters. I thought that some future Layard
might exhume the cornices of the Oxford temples. The
deaths of cities were as inevitable as those of men. I
felt that my missing friends had only a priority in
mortality, and that the law of the Supreme existed to
be obeyed without man's questionings.

But a sun-burst took place, the shower ceased, all
became fresh and clear. I saw several gownsmen pass
down the street, and I sallied forth again. Several who
were in front of me, so full was I of old imaginings,
I thought might be old friends whom I should recognize.
How idle! I strolled to the Isis. It was all glitter and
gaiety. The sun shone out warmly and covered the
surface of the river with gold. Numerous skiffs of the
university-men were alive on the water, realizing the
lines,--

"Some lightly o'er the current swim,
Some show their gaily gilded trim
Quick glancing to the sun."

Here was the repetition of an old performance, but
the actors were new. I too had once floated over that
glittering water, or lain up by the bank in conversation,
or reciting verses, or, perhaps, in that silent, dreamy
vacancy, in which the mind ruminates or rests folded
up within itself in the consciousness of its own immortality.

Here I must place a word or two in regard to the
censures cast upon this magnificent foundation of learning
relative to the extravagances of young collegians.
Let it be granted, as it is asserted by some, that there
is too much exclusiveness, and that there are improvements
to be recommended in some of the details of an
organization so ancient. It may be true to a certain
extent, for what under heaven is perfect? But a vast
mass of good is to be brought to bear on the other
hand. I cannot, therefore, agree in those censures
which journalism has cast upon the officers of the
university, as if they encouraged, or, at all events, did not
control, the vicious extravagance of young men. I am
expressing only an individual opinion, it is true; and
this may be a reason why it may be undervalued, when
the justice of a question is not the criterion by which
it is judged. All that such a foundation can be expected
to do is to render the advantages of learning
as accessible as possible, upon reasonable terms, that
genius, not wealth alone, may be able to avail itself of
its advantages. If the present sum be too high, let its
reduction be considered with a view to any practicable
change. The pecuniary resources of the collegian it
becomes no part of the duty of the university to control,
beyond the demands necessary for the main object
of instruction. As the circumstances of parents vary,
so will the pecuniary allowance made to their offspring.
It would be a task neither practicable nor justifiable
for the university to regulate the outlay of the collegian,
or, in fact, become the paymaster of his menus plaisirs.
Only let such a task be imagined in its enormity of
control, from the son of the nobleman with an allowance
of a thousand a year to one of a hundred and
fifty pounds. It is not in the college, but prior to the
arrival there of the youth, that he should be instructed
in the views his relations have in sending him, and be
taught that he must not ape the outlay and show of
those who have larger means. If a youth orders a
dozen coats within a time for which one only would
be found adequate, I do not see what his college has
to do with it. Youths entering the navy and army
are left in a much more extended field of temptation.
No time-hallowed walls shelter them. No salutary
college rules remind them of their moral duties, daily
and almost hourly. They go up and down the world
under their own guardianship, exposed to every sinister
influence, and with inclinations only restrained by their
own monitorship. The college discipline, even if it
extend not beyond college duties, is a perpetual
remembrancer of the high moral end for which the student is
placed within its precincts. His only allurement to
extravagance is the desire of vying with those who make
a greater display than himself, or else it arises from,
if possible, a less defensible motive, namely, that of
becoming himself an object of emulation to others. It
is not the duty of the college authorities to compensate
by their watchfulness the effects of a weak understanding,
or that lax principle, or the want of self-command,
of which the neglect of the parent or guardian has
been the cause. If the freshman is destitute of
self-dependence and self-restraint he must suffer from
the consequences. Not only in the navy and army is youth
exposed to temptations very far beyond the collegian,
but in the inns of court young men are left to take care
of themselves, in the midst of a great capital, without
any surveillance whatever. From these youths arise
excellent men of business. Most assuredly under the
surveillance of a college in smaller cities, and where
many heads of expense are from the nature of their
position wholly out of the question, it does seem singular
that such complaints should arise. It is true,
display is the vice of modern society among the old as
well as the young, and in both cases most dishonest
means are had recourse to sustain those appearances,
which are all the world looks to. It is possible, therefore,
that little efforts have been made to initiate youth,
prior to entering the universities, in that path of
self-denial and high-mindedness which are the safeguard
from vicious prodigality. They bring with them the
vices of their caste, whatever that caste may be. Youth
is imitative, and seldom a clumsy copyist, of the faults
of its elders, provided those faults are fashionable faults,
however unprincipled. However this may be, I must
protest against the universities being made answerable
for these doings. Attempts have been made, and failed,
in respect to manners and to credit; and have failed
clearly because they were impracticable, and, more than
that, better left alone. The university ought not to be
answerable in such cases, any more than the benchers
for the Temple students. It cannot be expected that
the noble quadrangles of our colleges are to become
something like poor-law prisons, and the regulations of
the night be extended over the day. The very existence
of the collegian, as such, implies something like
freedom, both mental and bodily. Learning that is
converted into a tyranny will never bring forth good
fruit. It is the duty of parents and schoolmasters to
impress upon the mind of youth that a seat of learning
is the home of an easy frugality rather than of prodigal
rivalry; that the university will only give degrees and
honours where there is industry and good moral conduct.
It is to be feared that youth, quitting the discipline
of the school, looks upon the university as the
place where he may indulge in his own wayward will,
and be as idle and indolent as he please. If this be
the case the university is not to blame for such lapses,
but a bad prior apprehension of duty, and a defective,
ill-directed education.

It is impossible to read the biographies of some of
our most celebrated men, and not to see that with
means scanty enough they were enabled to keep their
terms with honour, and in the end confer additional
celebrity upon the noble foundations where they had
studied. If such be the case, we have only the result
of personal good or ill conduct to explain the whole of
the affair. But enough on this subject.

But it is not the venerable appearance of University
College, hallowed by the associations of so many
centuries in age, nor Queen's opposite, nor All Souls',
nor any other of the colleges as mere buildings, that so
connect them with our feelings. We must turn the
mind from stone and wood to the humanity in connection
with them. It is that which casts over them
the "religious light," speaking so sadly and sweetly to
the heart. In University College we see the glorious
name of Alfred, and nearly a thousand years, with their
perished annals, point to it as the witness of their
departed successions. Who on seeing New College
does not recall William of Wykeham? and then, what
a roll of proud names own this renowned university
for their Alma Mater. The very stones "prate of the
whereabout" of things connected with the development
of great minds, and while we look without fatigue at
the gorgeous mass of buildings in this university, we
feel we are contemplating what carries an intimate
connexion, in object at least, with that all of man which
marches in the track of eternity. It is not mere antiquity,
therefore, on which our reverence for a great
seminary of learning is founded. Priority of existence
has no solid claims to our regard, except for that verde
antique which covers it, as it covers all things past.
good or indifferent; it is the connexion of the foundation
with the history of man--with the names that, like
the flowers called "immortals," bloom amid the wrecks
and desolateness with which the flood of ages strew the
rearway of humankind.

Of late there has been small response to feelings
such as these in the great world, for we have not been
looking much toward what is above us, nor discriminating
from meaner things those which approach to
heroic natures. We must abandon Mammon, politics,
and polemics, when we would approach the threshold
of elevated meditation--when we dwell on the illustrious
names of the past, and tread over the stones which they
trod. I never wandered along the banks of the sedgy
Cam, at that lone, twilight hour, when the dimness of
external objects tends most to concentrate the faculties
upon the immediate object of contemplation, but I
have fancied the shades of Bacon, Milton, or Locke,
to be near me, as the Indian fancies the shades of his
fathers haunt the old hunting-grounds of his race. I
know that these are heterodox feelings in the present
day. I know that he who speaks of Homer or Milton,
for example, is continually answered by the question,
"Who reads them now?" The truth being, perhaps,
that we are getting too far below them to relish their
superior standard in sterling merit. But there are still
in our universities, if not elsewhere, some who are
content to be the last of the Goths in the estimation
of the multitude, who cannot see the Isis, or Cherwell,
or the reedy Cam, without feelings of which the crowd
knows nothing; who can dream away an hour in the
avenue of Christ Church, and almost conjure spirits
from the depths of the grave to realize the pictures of
imagination, which are there always invested with purity
and holiness, so much do external things impress their
character on our imaginings. This is the true poetry
of life, neither found in the haunts of fashion, nor
among the denizens of Cornhill or St. Giles'. The good
and deep things of the mind, the search into the secrets
of nature, the sublimest truth, the purest philosophy of
which man has to boast, has proceeded from those who
were inhabitants of such seats of learning. It is
impossible to state the precise amount of assistance which
genius and learning may derive from the ease and peace
enjoyed in such a university. They are inestimable to
the student from association, tranquillity, and convenience.
The very "dim religious light" of college rooms
are solicitations to reflection. Then there are the
conveniences of first-rate professors, and access to the
writings of the learned in all ages. Thus some who
professed a distaste for a university life, have returned
to it again, and made it the arena where they have conquered
a lasting reputation--such, for example, was the
case with Gray the poet.

The increase of knowledge, and consequently of
morality, is the great aim of such a noble establishment
as this; and the rewards and honours dispensed there
are bestowed in proportion to the industry and good
conduct of those who receive them. If the offences of
freshmen outside the walls be unvisited by the university
from wariness in the offenders, or the impossibility of
controlling them, they are certain to meet with a just
estimation of their demerit here; and, as before noticed,
this is perhaps the best mode of repressing them. The
assistance derived by the industrious student from the
university itself is invaluable. The very locality is an
aid to progress. Where can there be places more
favourable for thought than those noble buildings,
ancient halls, and delightful walks? Everything invites
to contemplation. Magdalen always seemed to me as
if soliciting the student's presence in a peculiar manner.
A favourite resort of mine, at certain times, was the road
passing the Observatory, leading to Woodstock. But
of all the college walks, those of Magdalen were the
more impressive and attractive. It appeared to embody
the whole of the noble city in its own personification,
as a single word will sometimes express the pith of an
entire sentence. The "Mighty Tom" in the olden
time, even of Walter de Mapes, if its metal was then
out of the ore, never sounded (then perhaps not nine)
but the midnight hour, to that worthy archdeacon, with
more of the character of its locality, than the visual
aspect of Magdalen represents the beautiful city to one
in its entirety. It seems a sort of metonymy; Maudlin
put for Oxford. The walk is, after all, but a sober path,
worthy by association with one of the walks of Eden.
Yet it shows no gay foliage, nor "shade above shade
a woody theatre," such as is seen on a mountain
declivity. It is a simple shadowy walk--shadowy to
richness, cool, tranquil, redolent of freshness. There
the soul feels "private, inactive, calm, contemplative,"
linked to things that were and are not. The mellow
hue of time, not yet stricken by decay, clothes the
buildings of this college, which, compared with other
edifices more steeped in maturity of years, occupies,
as it were, a middle term in existence.

The variety of building in this city is amazing, and
would occupy a very considerable time to study even
imperfectly. At a little distance no place impresses the
mind more justly with its own lofty pretensions. The
towers, steeples, and domes, rising over the masses of
foliage beneath, which conceal the bodies of the edifices,
seen at the break of morning or at sunset, appear
in great beauty. Bathed in light, although not the
"alabaster tipped with golden spires" of the poet, for
even the climate of Oxford is no exception to the
defacement of nature's colouring, everywhere that coal
smoke ascends; but the tout ensemble is truly poetical
and magnificent.

Oriel still, they say, maintains its precedency of
teaching its students how to conduct themselves with a
view to university honours, and to the world's respect.
The preliminary examinations there have proved a
touchstone of merit, and elevated Oriel College into
something near the envy of every other in this country.
Worthy Oriel, the star of Oxford. "I don't know how
it is," said the Rev. C. C., walking down High Street one
day, "but Oriel College is all I envy Oxford. It is the
richest gem in the ephod of the high-priest (vice-chancellor)
of this university. I should like to steal
and transplant it to my Alma Mater among the fens."

There was formerly a Welsh harper in Oxford, whom
the collegians sometimes denominated King David.
He was the first of the Cymri brotherhood I ever heard
perform. Since that distant day I have often heard
those minstrels in their native land, particularly in
North Wales, at Bedd Gelert, Caernarvon, and other
places, but I confess I never was so much struck as by
this Oxford harper. He often played at the Angel,
where the university men used to group round him, for
he excited general admiration. His music was not of so
plaintive a character as that in his own land, or else the
scenery of the latter had some effect in saddening the
music there through association--perhaps this difference
was, after all, only in fancy.

Christchurch, the noblest of the churches! How
have I heard with delight its merry peal of bells, and the
deep resonance of the "Mighty Tom," that sounds with
no "friendly voice" the call home of the students still,
I presume, as it did so many years ago! There is a
long list of names, of no mean reputation, educated
here, since the rapacious Henry VIII. seized the
foundations, which had belonged to Cardinal Wolsey. The
gratitude of posterity, never very strong, has in the
present case preserved the remembrance of Wolsey,
if I recollect aright, by a statue of the proud man in
his cardinal's robes. The grove of trees belonging to
Christchurch, and the scenery accompanying the entire
buildings, are eminently impressive. Here, when divine
service is celebrating, there is a peculiar propriety, or
rather adaptation of the architecture to the feeling; the
trees, and every accompaniment, are suitable to the end.
There is religion or its sentiment addressing the mind
here through every sense. All that can raise devotion
in external appliances, combines in a wonderful manner;
and when the sound of the organ is reverberated deeply
along the vaulted roofs and walls, the effect was
indescribably fine. Christchurch walk or meadow is an
adjunct to this college, such as few places possess. I
have trod it with those who will never tread it again. I
have skimmed over its smooth shaven surface when life
seemed a vista of unmeasured years. Its very beauty
touches upon a melancholy chord, since it vibrates the
sound of time passed away with those who lie in dust in
distant climates, of whom memory alone is now the only
record that they were and are not.

I remember being told by an eminent, but aged
doctor in divinity, who had been the better part of his
life employed in the education of youth, that he had
kept an account of the history of all his pupils as far as
he could obtain it, and they were very numerous. From
his own tuition--and there were some celebrated names
amongst them--he traced them to the university, or to
professions of a more active nature than a sojourn
at the university would allow. To Oxford he had
sent the larger number of his pupils. "And afterwards,
doctor?" "Some came off nobly there: others
I heard of in distant parts of the globe in their country's
service: but it is the common tale with nearly all of
them--they are dead." What hosts, I often thought,
who had moved among, the deep shades of this university
until it became entwined with their earliest affections
--who had studied within those embattled walls until
the sight of them became almost a part of his existence
--what hosts of such have but served to swell the
waters of oblivion, and press the associations of a
common mortality upon the mind in the reflection on
this very truism! The late Sir Egerton Brydges--a
writer whose talents, though admitted, were never
received as they merited to have been by the world,
owing, perhaps, to an untoward disposition in other
respects--was of opinion that the calmness and
seclusion of a university were not best adapted for calling
forth the efforts of genius; but that adversity and some
struggling were necessary to bring out greatness of
character. He thought that praise enervated the mind,
and that to bear it required a much greater degree of
fortitude than to withstand censure. The consequence
of this would be, that the honours decreed in a
university must be pernicious to youth. This cannot be
conceded. Sir Egerton's notion may be just in relation to
himself, or to one or two temperaments irregularly constituted;
but a university exists not for the exceptions, but for the
many. How numerous is the list of those who, but for the
fostering care of Oxford or Cambridge, would have never been
known as the ornament and delight of their fellow-men!
How much more numerous is the list of those, whose abilities
not rising beyond the circle of social usefulness have lived
"obscure to fame," yet owe the pleasure they imparted
to their friends, and the beguilement of many troubles
inseparable from mortality, to the fruits of their university
studies, and to a partial unrolling before them of that
map of knowledge, which before those of loftier claims
and some hold upon fame had been more amply displayed!
In this view of the matter, the justness of
which cannot be contested, the utility of such foundations
is boundless. The effect upon the social body.--
I do not speak of polemics, but of the sound instruction
thus made available--cannot be estimated. In the midst
of fluctuating systems of instruction, it is something to
have a standard by which to test the measure of
knowledge imparted to youth. If accused of being
restricted in variety of knowledge, the perfection and
mastery in what is taught must be conceded to Oxford
and Cambridge. Perhaps there is too much reason to
fear, that without these foundations we should speedily
fall into a very superficial knowledge, indeed, of the
classical languages of antiquity. This would be to
exclude ourselves from an acquaintance with all past time,
except in monkish fiction and the feudal barbarism of
the Goths of the north.

There are, I verily believe, or I should rather say
there were, imbibed at the university so many attachments
at one time to words in place of things, that the
collegian in after life became liable to reproach upon
this head. Pedants are bred everywhere out of literature,
and the variety in verbiage once exhibited by some
university men has been justly condemned. But while
such word-worms were crawling here and there out of
the porches of our colleges, giants in acquirement were
striding over them in their petty convolutions. Their
intertwinings attracted the attention of the mere gazer,
who is always more stricken with any microcosmic
object that comes casually in the way and is embraced
at a glance, than with objects the magnitude of which
demand repeated examinations. But all this while the
great and glorious spring of knowledge was unpolluted.
The reign of mere verbiage passed away; the benefits
of the universities had never ceased to be imparted
the whole time. The key to the better stores of
knowledge was placed in the hands of every one who chose
to avail himself of its advantages. The minds of the
collegians were filled with an affection for the works of
the writers of antiquity, which have been the guide,
solace, and pleasure of the greatest and most accomplished
men since the Christian era commenced. Studies
will teach their own use in after life "by the wisdom
that is about them and above them, won by observation,"
as a great writer observes; but then there must be the
studies.

There seems of late years much less of that feeling
for poetry than once existed; the same may be observed
in respect to classical learning. Few now regard how
perished nations lived and passed away,--how men
thought, acted, and were moved, for example, in the
time of Pericles or the Roman Augustus. What are
they to us? What is blind Meonides to us, or that
Roman who wrote odes so beautifully--who understood
so well the philosophy of life and the poetry of life
at the spring of Bardusia? In the past generation, a
part of the adolescent being and of manhood extended
a kindly feeling towards them. We hear no admiration
of those immortal strains now. We must turn for
them to our universities. People are getting shy of them,
as rich men shirk poor friends. Are we in the declining
state, that of "mechanical arts and merchandize,"
to use Lord Bacon's phrase, and is our middle age of
learning past? Even then, thank Heaven, we have our
universities still, where we may, for a time at least,
enter and converse with the spirits of the good, that
"sit in the clouds and mock" the rest of the greedy
world. They will last our time--glorious mementos of
the anxiety of our forefathers for the preservation of
learning; hallowed by grateful recollections, by time,
renown, virtue, conquests over ignorance, imperishable
gratitude, a proud roll of mighty names in their sons,
and the prospect of continuing to be monuments of
glory to unborn generations. Long may Oxford and
Cambridge stand and brighten with years, though to
some they may not, as they do to me, exhibit a title to
the gratitude and admiration of Old England, to which
it would be difficult to point out worthy rivals.

____

ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES

The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent,
the Planetary system, and the Infinite deep of
the Heavens have now become common and familiar
facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of
our school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism
with our earliest breath of consciousness; it is all but
impossible to throw back our imagination into the time
when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred every mind
which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation
which God had sent down among mankind. Vast
spiritual and material continents lay for the first time
displayed, opening fields of thought and fields of
enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old
routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on
their own strength and their own power, unshackled
to accomplish whatever they might dare. And although
we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of
that enormous force of heart and intellect which
accompanied them (for they were as much the effect
as the cause, and one reacted on the other), yet at
any rate they afforded scope and room for the play
of powers which, without such scope, let them have
been as transcendent as they would, must have passed
away unproductive and blighted.

An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely
real conviction of the divine and devilish forces by
which the universe was guided and misguided, was
the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic
Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did
then really and truly believe in the actual personal
presence of God or the devil in every accident, or scene,
or action. They brought to the contemplation of the
new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated
with the spiritual convictions of the old era, which
were not lost, but only infinitely expanded. The
planets whose vastness they now learnt to recognize
were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for
good; the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon;
and the idolatrous American tribes were real worshippers
of the real devil, and were assisted with the
full power of his evil army.

It is a form of thought which, however in a vague
and general way we may continue to use its phraseology,
has become, in its detailed application to life, utterly
strange to us. We congratulate ourselves on the
enlargement of our understanding when we read the
decisions of grave law-courts in cases of supposed
witchcraft; we smile complacently over Raleigh's story
of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are
not such as he--entangled in the cobwebs of effete
and foolish superstition. The true conclusion is the
opposite of the conclusion which we draw. That
Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed,
and could be what they were notwithstanding, is to
us a proof that the injury which such mistakes can
inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as they
arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness
and mystery of the world, and of the life of human
souls upon it, they witness to the presence in such
minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most perfect
acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation
moves can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur,
the moral majesty, of some of Shakespeare's characters,
so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can
imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the
genius of the poet who has outstripped nature in his
creations; but we are misunderstanding the power
and the meaning of poetry in attributing creativeness
to it in any such sense; Shakespeare created, but only
as the spirit of nature created around him, working
in him as it worked abroad in those among whom he
lived. The men whom he draws were such men as he
saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he
heard in the ordinary conversations in which he joined.
At the Mermaid with Raleigh and with Sidney, and
at a thousand un-named English firesides, he found
the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos,
his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer
personal acquaintance which we can form with the
English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are
satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more
than the rhythmic echo of the life which it depicts.

It was, therefore, with no little interest that we
heard of the formation of a society which was to employ
itself, as we understood, in republishing in accessible
form some, if not all, of the invaluable records compiled
or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything
else, have their appointed death-day; the souls
of them, unless they be found worthy of a second birth
in a new body, perish with the paper in which they
lived, and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their
own want of merit, but from our neglect of them, were
expiring of old age. The five-volume quarto edition,
published in 1811, so little people then cared for the
exploits of their ancestors, was but of 270 copies;
it was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries,
or for the great libraries, where it could be
consulted as a book of reference; and among a people,
the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's
name, the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never
so much as occurred to them that general readers would
ever come to care to have it within their reach.

And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose
Epic of the modern English nation. They contain the
heroic tales of the exploits of the great men in whom
the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the
Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of
substantial facts, which rival them in interest and
grandeur. What the old epics were to the royally or
nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people.
We have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to
whom the heroism, like the dominion, of the world had
in time past been confined. But, as it was in the days
of the apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an
obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the divine
mission, the spiritual authority over mankind, so, in
the days of our own Elizabeth, the seamen from the
banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the
Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but
what was beating in their own royal hearts, went out
across the unknown seas fighting, discovering, colonizing,
and grayed out the channels, and at last paved them
with their bones, through which the commerce and
enterprise of England has flowed out over all the
world. We can conceive nothing, not the songs of
Homer himself, which would be read, among us at
least, with more enthusiastic interest than these plain
massive tales; and a people's edition of them in these
days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugene Sue
circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the
most blessed antidote which could be bestowed upon
us. The heroes themselves were the men of the people
--the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes;
and no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh,
lent its polish or its varnish to set them off. In most
cases the captain himself, or his clerk or servant, or
some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and
chronicled the voyage which he had shared, and thus
inorganically arose a collection of writings which, with
all their simplicity, are for nothing more striking than
for the high moral beauty, warmed with natural feeling,
which displays itself through all their pages. With us,
the sailor is scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck.
If he is distinguished in his profession, he is professional
merely; or if he is more than that, he owes it not to
his work as a sailor, but to independent domestic
culture. With them their profession was the school
of their nature, a high moral education which most
brought out what was most nobly human in them; and
the wonders of earth, and air, and sea, and sky, were a
real intelligible language in which they heard Almighty
God speaking to them.

That such hopes of what might be accomplished by
the Hakluyt Society should in some measure be disappointed,
is only what might naturally be anticipated
of all very sanguine expectation. Cheap editions are
expensive editions to the publisher, and historical
societies, from a necessity which appears to encumber
all corporate English action, rarely fail to do their work
expensively and infelicitously; yet, after all allowances
and deductions, we cannot reconcile ourselves to the
mortification of having found but one volume in the
series to be even tolerably edited, and that one to be
edited by a gentleman to whom England is but an
adopted country--Sir Robert Schomburgk. Raleigh's
"Conquest of Guiana," with Sir Robert's sketch of
Raleigh's history and character, form in everything but
its cost a very model of an excellent volume. For
every one of the rest we are obliged to say of them,
that they have left little undone to paralyze whatever
interest was reviving in Hakluyt, and to consign their
own volumes to the same obscurity to which time and
accident were consigning the earlier editions. Very
little which was really noteworthy escaped the industry
of Hakiuyt himself, and we looked to find reprints of
the most remarkable of the stories which were to be
found in his collection. They began unfortunately
with proposing to continue the work where he had
left it, and produce narratives hitherto unpublished
of other voyages of inferior interest, or not of English
origin. Better thoughts appear to have occurred
to them in the course of the work; but their evil
destiny overtook them before their thoughts could get
themselves executed. We opened one volume with
eagerness, bearing the title of "Voyages to the Northwest,"
in hope of finding our old friends Davis and
Frobisher, and we found a vast unnecessary Editor's
Preface; and instead of the voyages themselves, which
with their picturesqueness and moral beauty shine
among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of
Hakluyt, an analysis and digest of their results,
which Milton was called in to justify in an inappropriate
quotation. It is much as if they had undertaken to
edit "Bacon's Essays," and had retailed
what they conceived to be the substance of them in
their own language; strangely failing to see that the
real value of the actions or the thought of remarkable
men does not lie in the material result which can be
gathered from them, but in the heart and soul of those
who do or utter them. Consider what Homer's
"Odyssey" would be, reduced into an analysis.

The editor of the "Letters of Columbus" apologizes
for the rudeness of their phraseology. Columbus, he
tells us, was not so great a master of the pen as of the
art of navigation. We are to make excuses for him.
We are put on our guard, and warned not to be
offended, before we are introduced to the sublime record
of sufferings under which his great soul was staggering
towards the end of its earthly calamities, where the
inarticulate fragments in which his thought breaks out
from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of
which the highest literary pathos is poor and meaningless.

And even in the subjects which they select they are
pursued by the same curious fatality. Why is Drake
to be best known, or to be only known, in his last
voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to
immortalize the failure? When Drake climbed the tree
in Panama, and saw both oceans, and vowed that he
would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out
upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head
over the southernmost angle of the world; when he
scored a furrow round the globe with his keel, and
received the homage of the barbarians of the antipodes
in the name of the Virgin Queen; he was another man
from what he had become after twenty years of court
life and intrigue, and Spanish fighting, and gold-hunting.
There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we take it as
the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his death,
which we desire--not what he failed to do, but what
he did.

But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive
than all these is the editor of Hawkins's "Voyage to
the South Sea." The book is striking in itself; it is
not one of the best, but it is very good; and as it is
republished complete, if we read it through, carefully
shutting off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand,
we shall then find in it the same beauty which breathes
in the tone of all the writings of the period.

It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which
did no dishonour to him who sunk under it; and there
is a melancholy dignity in the style in which Hawkins
tells his story, which seems to say, that though he had
been defeated, and had never again an opportunity of
winning back his lost laurels, he respects himself still
for the heart with which he endured a shame which
would have broken a smaller man. It would have
required no large exertion of editorial self-denial to
have abstained from marring the pages with puns of
which Punch would be ashamed, and with the vulgar
affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of
the nineteenth century condescends to criticize and
approve of his half-barbarous precursor; but it must
have been a defect in his heart, rather than in his
understanding, which betrayed him into such an offence
as this which follows. The war of freedom of the
Araucan Indians is the most gallant episode in the
history of the New World. The Spaniards themselves
were not behindhand in acknowledging the chivalry before
which they quailed, and, after many years of ineffectual
attempts to crush them, they gave up a conflict which they
never afterwards resumed; leaving the Araucans alone,
of all the American races with which they came in
contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear from
them. It is a subject for an epic poem, and whatever
admiration is due to the heroism of a brave people
whom no inequality of strength could appal and no
defeats could crush, these poor Indians have a right to
demand of us. The story of the war was well known in
Europe: and Hawkins, in coasting the western shores of
South America, fell in with them, and the finest passage
in his book is the relation of one of the incidents of
the war.

"An Indian captain was taken prisoner by the Spaniards,
and for that he was of name, and known to have done
his devoir against them, they cut off his hands, thereby
intending to disenable him to fight any more against them.
But he, returning home, desirous to revenge this injury,
to maintain his liberty, with the reputation of his nation,
and to help to banish the Spaniard, with his tongue intreated
and incited them to persevere in their accustomed
valour and reputation, abasing the enemy and advancing
his nation; condemning their contraries of cowardliness.
and confirming it by the cruelty used with him and other
his companions in their mishaps; showing them his arms
without hands, and naming his brethren whose half feet
they had cut off, because they might be unable to sit on
horseback: with force arguing that if they feared them not.
they would not have used so great inhumanity--for fear
produceth cruelty, the companion of cowardice. Thus
encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs, and
liberty, choosing rather to die an honourable death fighting,
than to live in servitude as fruitless members of the
commonwealth. Thus using the office of a sergeant-major, and
having loaden his two stumps with bundles of arrows, he
succoured them who, in the succeeding battle, had their
store wasted; and changing himself from place to place,
animated and encouraged his countrymen with such comfortable
persuasions, as it is reported and credibly believed,
that he did more good with his words and presence,
without striking a stroke, than a great part of the army
did with fighting to the utmost."

It is an action which may take its place by the side
of the myth of Mucius Scaevola, or the real exploit of
that brother of the poet AEschylus, who, when the Persians
were flying from Marathon, clung to a ship till
both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it
with his teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in
the splendid calendar of Athenian heroes. Captain
Bethune, without call or need, making his notes merely,
as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as
he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom
of the page, that "it reminds him of the familiar
lines,--

"For Widdrington I needs must wail,
As one in doleful dumps;
For, when his legs were smitten off,
He fought upon his stumps."

It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the
ballad of Chevy Chase. It is the most deformed stanza *
of the modern deformed version which was composed
in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration of
the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for
serious poetry, they have ceased to sound in any ear as
other than a burlesque; the associations which they
arouse are only absurd, and they could only have
continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous
doggerel.
____
* Here is the old stanza. Let whoever is disposed to think us
too hard on Captain Bethune compare them.

"For Wetharrington my harte was wo,
That even he slayne sholde be;
For when both his leggis were hewen in to,
He knyied and fought on his knee."

Even Percy, who, on the whole, thinks well of the modern ballad,
gives up this stanza as hopeless.
____


When to these offences of the Society we add, that
in the long laboured appendices and introductions,
which fill up valuable space, which increase the
expense of the edition, and into reading which many
readers are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing
which assists the understanding of the stories which
they are supposed to illustrate, when we have found what
is most uncommon passed without notice, and what is
most trite and familiar encumbered with comment: we
have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these
volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave
of them and go on with our own more grateful subject.

Elizabeth, whose despotism was as peremptory as that
of the Plantagenets, and whose ideas of the English
constitution were limited in the highest degree, was,
notwithstanding, more beloved by her subjects than
any sovereign before or since. It was because,
substantially, she was the people's sovereign; because it
was given to her to conduct the outgrowth of the
national life through its crisis of change, and the weight
of her great mind and her great place were thrown on
the people's side. She was able to paralyze the dying
efforts with which, if a Stuart had been on the throne,
the representatives of an effete system might have made
the struggle a deadly one; and the history of England
is not the history of France, because the inflexible will
of one person held the Reformation firm till it had
rooted itself in the heart of the nation, and could not
be again overthrown. The Catholic faith was no longer
able to furnish standing ground on which the English
or any other nation could live a manly and a godly
life. Feudalism, as a social organization, was not any
more a system under which their energies could have
scope to move. Thenceforward not the Catholic Church,
but any man to whom God had given a heart to feel
and a voice to speak, was to be the teacher to whom
men were to listen; and great actions were not to
remain the privilege of the families of the Norman
nobles, but were to be laid within the reach of the
poorest plebeian who had the stuff in him to perform
them. Alone, of all the sovereigns in Europe, Elizabeth
saw the change which had passed over the world. She
saw it, and saw it in faith, and accepted it. The
England of the Catholic Hierarchy and the Norman Baron,
was to cast its shell and to become the England of free
thought and commerce and manufacture, which was to
plough the ocean with its navies, and sow its colonies
over the globe; and the first thunder birth of these
enormous forces and the flash of the earliest achievements of
the new era roll and glitter through the forty years of the
reign of Elizabeth with a grandeur which, when once its
history is written, will be seen to be among the most
sublime phenomena which the earth as yet has witnessed.
The work was not of her creation; the heart of the
whole English nation was stirred to its depths; and
Elizabeth's place was to recognize, to love, to foster,
and to guide. The government originated nothing;
at such a time it was neither necessary nor desirable
that it should do so; but wherever expensive enterprises
were on foot which promised ultimate good, but no
immediate profit, we never fail to find among the lists
of contributors the Queen's Majesty, Burleigh, Leicester,
Walsingham. Never chary of her presence, for Elizabeth
could afford to condescend, when ships were fitting for
distant voyages in the river, the Queen would go down
in her barge and inspect. Frobisher, who was but a
poor sailor adventurer, sees her wave her handkerchief
to him from the Greenwich Palace windows, and he
brings her home a narwhal's horn for a present. She
honoured her people, and her people loved her; and
the result was that, with no cost to the government,
she saw them scattering the fleets of the Spaniards,
planting America with colonies, and exploring the most
distant seas. Either for honour or for expectation of
profit, or from that unconscious necessity by which a
great people, like a great man, will do what is right, and
must do it at the right time, whoever had the means to
furnish a ship, and whoever had the talent to command
one, laid their abilities together and went out to pioneer,
and to conquer, and take possession, in the name of
the Queen of the Sea. There was no nation so remote
but what some one or other was found ready to undertake
an expedition there, in the hope of opening a trade;
and let them go where they would, they were sure of
Elizabeth's countenance. We find letters written by
her, for the benefit of nameless adventurers, to every
potentate of whom she had ever heard, to the Emperors
of China, Japan, and India, the Grand Duke of Russia,
the Grand Turk, the Persian Sofee, and other unheardof
Asiatic and African princes; whatever was to be
done in England, or by Englishmen, Elizabeth assisted
when she could, and admired when she could not. The
springs of great actions are always difficult to analyze--
impossible to analyze perfectly--possible to analyze
only very proximately, and the force by which a man
throws a good action out of himself is invisible and
mystical, like that which brings out the blossom and
the fruit upon the tree. The motives which we find
men urging for their enterprises seem often insufficient
to have prompted them to so large a daring. They did
what they did from the great unrest in them which
made them do it, and what it was may be best measured
by the results, by the present England and America.
Nevertheless, there was enough in the state of the
world, and in the position of England, to have furnished
abundance of conscious motive, and to have stirred the
drowsiest routinier statesman.

Among material occasions for exertion, the population
began to outgrow the employment, and there
was a necessity for plantations to serve as an outlet.
Men who, under happier circumstances, might have
led decent lives, and done good service, were now
driven by want to desperate courses--"witness," as
Richard Hakluyt says, "twenty tall fellows hanged last
Rochester assizes for small robberies;" and there is an
admirable paper addressed to the Privy Council by
Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law, pointing
out the possible openings to be made in or through.
such plantations for home produce and manufacture.

Far below all such prudential economics and mercantile
ambitions, however, lay a noble enthusiasm which
in these dull days we can hardly, without an effort,
realize. The life-and-death wrestle between the Reformation
and the old religion had settled in the last quarter
of the sixteenth century into a permanent struggle
between England and Spain. France was disabled.
All the help which Elizabeth could spare barely enabled
the Netherlands to defend themselves. Protestantism,
if it conquered, must conquer on another field; and by
the circumstances of the time the championship of the
Reformed faith fell to the English sailors. The sword
of Spain was forged in the gold-mines of Peru; the
legions of Alva were only to be disarmed by intercepting
the gold ships on their passage; and, inspired by an
enthusiasm like that which four centuries before had
precipitated the chivalry of Europe upon the East, the
same spirit which in its present degeneracy covers our
bays and rivers with pleasure yachts then fitted out
armed privateers, to sweep the Atlantic, and plunder
and destroy Spanish ships wherever they could meet
them.

Thus, from a combination of causes, the whole force
and energy of the age was directed towards the sea.
The wide excitement and the greatness of the interests
at stake, raised even common men above themselves;
and people who in ordinary times would have been no
more than mere seamen, or mere money-making merchants,
appear before us with a largeness and greatness
of heart and mind in which their duties to God and
their country are alike clearly and broadly seen and felt
to be paramount to every other.

Ordinary English traders we find fighting Spanish war
ships in behalf of the Protestant faith; the cruisers of
the Spanish main were full of generous eagerness for the
conversion of the savage nations to Christianity; and
what is even more surprising, sites for colonization were
examined and scrutinized by such men in a lofty statesmanlike
spirit, and a ready insight was displayed by
them into the indirect effects of a wisely-extended
commerce on every highest human interest.

Again, in the conflict with the Spaniards, there was a
further feeling, a feeling of genuine chivalry, which was
spurring on the English, and one which must be well
understood and well remembered, if men like Drake,
and Hawkins, and Raleigh, are to be tolerably understood.
One of the English Reviews, a short time ago,
was much amused with a story of Drake having excommunicated
a petty officer as a punishment for some
moral offence; the reviewer not being able to see in
Drake, as a man, anything more than; a highly brave
and successful buccaneer, whose pretences to religion
might rank with the devotion of an Italian bandit to the
Madonna. And so Hawkins, and even Raleigh, are
regarded by superficial persons, who see only such outward
circumstances of their history as correspond with
their own impressions. The high nature of these men,
and the high objects which they pursued, will only rise
out and become visible to us as we can throw ourselves
back into their times and teach our hearts to feel as
they felt. We do not find in the language of the
voyagers themselves, or of those who lent them their
help at home, any of that weak watery talk of "protection
of aborigines," which as soon as it is translated
into fact becomes the most active policy for their
destruction, soul and body. But the stories of the
dealings of the Spaniards with the conquered Indians,
which were widely known in England, seem to have
affected all classes of people, not with pious passive
horror, but with a genuine human indignation. A
thousand anecdotes in detail we find scattered up and
down the pages of Hakluyt, who, with a view to make
them known, translated Peter Martyr's letters; and
each commonest sailor-boy who had heard them from
his childhood among the tales of his father's fire-side,
had longed to be a man, that he might go out and
become the avenger of a gallant and suffering people.
A high mission, undertaken with a generous heart;
seldom fails to make those worthy of it to whom it is
given; and it was a point of honour, if of nothing more,
among the English sailors, to do no discredit by their
conduct to the greatness of their cause. The high
courtesy, the chivalry of the Spanish nobles, so
conspicuous in their dealings with their European rivals, either
failed to touch them in their dealings with uncultivated
idolaters, or the high temper of the aristocracy was
unable to restrain or to influence the masses of the
soldiers. It would be as ungenerous as it would be untrue,
to charge upon their religion the grievous actions
of men who called themselves the armed missionaries of
Catholicism, when the Catholic priests and bishops
were the loudest in the indignation with which they
denounced them. But we are obliged to charge upon
it that slow and subtle influence so inevitably exercised
by any religion which is divorced from life, and converted
into a thing of form, or creed, or ceremony, or system,
which could permit the same men to be extravagant in
a sincere devotion to the Queen of Heaven, whose
entire lower nature, unsubdued and unaffected, was
given up to thirst of gold, and plunder, and sensuality.
If religion does not make men more humane than they
would be without it, it makes them fatally less so; and
it is to be feared that the spirit of the pilgrim fathers,
which had oscillated to the other extreme, and had
again crystallized into a formal antinomian fanaticism,
reproduced the same fatal results as those in which the
Spaniards had set them their unworthy precedent. But
the Elizabethan navigators, full without exception of
large kindness, wisdom, gentleness, and beauty, bear
names untainted, as far as we know, with a single crime
against the savages; and the name of England was as
famous in the Indian seas as that of Spain was
infamous. On the banks of the Oronooko there was
remembered for a hundred years the noble captain who
had come there from the great Queen beyond the seas;
and Raleigh speaks the language of the heart of his
country, when he urges the English statesmen to colonize
Guiana, and exults in the glorious hope of driving
the white marauder into the Pacific, and restoring the
Incas to the throne of Peru.

"Who will not be persuaded," he says, "that now at length
the great Judge of the world hath heard the sighs, groans,
and lamentations, hath seen the tears and blood of so many
millions of innocent men, women, and children, afflicted,
robbed, reviled, branded with hot irons, roasted, dismembered,
mangled, stabbed, whipped, racked, scalded with hot
oil, put to the strapado, ripped alive, beheaded in sport,
drowned, dashed against the rocks, famished, devoured by
mastiffs, burned, and by infinite cruelties consumed, and
purposeth to scourge and plague that cursed nation, and to
take the yoke of servitude from that distressed people, as
free by nature as any Christian."

Poor Raleigh! if peace and comfort in this world
were of much importance to him, it was in an ill day
that he provoked the revenge of Spain. The strength
of England was needed at the moment at its own door;
the Armada came, and there was no means of executing
such an enterprise. And afterwards the throne of
Elizabeth was filled by a Stuart, and Guiana was to be
no scene of glory for Raleigh; but, as later historians
are pleased to think, it was the grave of his reputation.

But the hope burned clear in him through all the
weary years of unjust imprisonment; and when he was
a grey-headed old man, the base son of a bad mother
used it to betray him. The success of his last enterprise
was made the condition under which he was to be
pardoned for a crime which he had not committed; and
its success depended, as he knew, on its being kept
secret from the Spaniards. James required of him on
his allegiance a detail of what he proposed, giving him
at the same time his word as a king that the secret should
be safe with him, and the next day it was sweeping out
of the port of London in the swiftest of the Spanish
ships, with private orders to the Governor of St. Thomas
to provoke a collision when Raleigh should arrive there,
which should afterwards cost him his heart's blood.

We modern readers may run rapidly over the series of
epithets under which he has catalogued the Indian
sufferings, hoping that they are exaggerated, seeing that
they are horrible, and closing our eyes against them with
swiftest haste; but it was not so when every epithet
suggested a hundred familiar facts; and some of these (not
resting on English prejudice, but on sad Spanish evidence,
which is too full of shame and sorrow to be
suspected) shall be given in this place, however old a
story it may be thought; because, as we said above, it
is impossible to understand the actions of these men,
unless we are familiar with the feelings of which their
hearts were full.

The massacres under Cortez and Pizarro, terrible as
they were, were not the occasion which stirred the
deepest indignation. They had the excuse of what
might be called, for want of a better word, necessity,
and of the desperate position of small bands of men in
the midst of enemies who might be counted by millions.
And in De Soto, when he burnt his guides in Florida
(it was his practice when there was danger of treachery,
that those who were left alive might take warning); or
in Vasco Nunnez, praying to the Virgin on the mountains
of Darien, and going down from off them into the
valleys to hunt the Indian caciques, and fling them alive
to his bloodhounds; there was, at least, with all this
fierceness and cruelty, a desperate courage which we
cannot refuse to admire, and which mingles with and
corrects our horror. It is the refinement of the Spaniards'
cruelty in the settled and conquered provinces, excused
by no danger and provoked by no resistance, the details
of which witness to the infernal coolness with which it
was perpetrated; and the great bearing of the Indians
themselves under an oppression which they despaired of
resisting, which raises the whole history to the rank of a
world-wide tragedy, in which the nobler but weaker
nature was crushed under a malignant force which was
stronger and yet meaner than itself. Gold hunting
and lust were the two passions for which the Spaniards
cared; and the fate of the Indian women was only more
dreadful than that of the men, who were ganged and
chained to a labour in the mines which was only to cease
with their lives, in a land where but a little before they
had lived a free contented people, more innocent of
crime than perhaps any people upon earth. If we can
conceive what our own feelings would be, if, in the
"development of the mammalia" some baser but more
powerful race than man were to appear upon this planet,
and we and our wives and children at our own happy
firesides were degraded from our freedom, and became
to them what the lower animals are to us, we can
perhaps realize the feelings of the enslaved nations of
Hispaniola.

As a harsh justification of slavery, it is sometimes
urged, that men who do not deserve to be slaves will
prefer death to the endurance of it; and that if they
prize their liberty, it is always in their power to assert
it in the old Roman fashion. Tried even by so hard a
rule, the Indians vindicated their right, and before
the close of the sixteenth century, the entire group of
the Western Islands in the hands of the Spaniards,
containing, when Columbus discovered them, many
millions of inhabitants, were left literally desolate from
suicide. Of the anecdotes of this terrible self-immolation,
as they were then known in England, here are a
few out of many.

The first is simple, and a specimen of the ordinary
method. A Yucaian cacique, who was forced with his
old subjects to labour in the mines, at last "calling
those miners into an house, to the number of ninety-
five, he thus debateth with them:"--

"'My worthy companions and friends, why desire we to
live any longer under so cruel a servitude? Let us now go
unto the perpetual seat of our ancestors, for we shall there
have rest from these intolerable cares and grievances which
we endure under the subjection of the unthankful. Go ye
before, I will presently follow you.' Having so spoken, he
held out whole handfuls of those leaves which take away life,
prepared for the purpose, and giving every one part thereof,
being kindled to suck up the fume; who obeyed his command,
the king and his chief kinsmen reserving the last
place for themselves."

We speak of the crime of suicide, but few persons
will see a crime in this sad and stately leave-taking of
a life which it was no longer possible to bear with
unbroken hearts. We do not envy the Indian, who,
with Spaniards before him as an evidence of the fruits
which their creed brought forth, deliberately exchanged
for it the old religion of his country, which could sustain
him in an action of such melancholy grandeur. But
the Indians did not always reply to their oppressors
with escaping passively beyond their hands. Here is a
story with matter in it for as rich a tragedy as OEdipus
or Agamemnon; and in its stern and tremendous
features, more nearly resembling them than any which
were conceived even by Shakespeare.

An officer named Orlando had taken the daughter
of a Cuban cacique to be his mistress. She was with
child by him, but, suspecting her of being engaged in
some other intrigue, he had her fastened to two wooden
spits, not intending to kill her, but to terrify her; and
setting her before the fire, he ordered that she should
be turned by the servants of the kitchen.


"The maiden, stricken with fear through the cruelty
thereof, and strange kind of torment, presently gave up the
ghost. The cacique her father, understanding the matter,
took thirty of his men and went to the house of the captain,
who was then absent, and slew his wife, whom he had
married after that wicked act committed, and the women
who were companions of the wife, and her servants every
one. Then shutting the door of the house, and putting fire
under it, he burnt himself and all his companions that
assisted him, together with the captain's dead family and
goods."

This is no fiction or poet's romance. It is a tale
of wrath and revenge, which in sober dreadful truth
enacted itself upon this earth, and remains among the
eternal records of the doings of mankind upon it. As
some relief to its most terrible features, we follow it with
a story which has a touch in it of diabolical humour.

The slave-owners finding their slaves escaping thus
unprosperously out of their grasp, set themselves to
find a remedy for so desperate a disease, and were
swift to avail themselves of any weakness, mental or
bodily, through which to retain them in life. One of
these proprietors being informed that a number of his
people intended to kill themselves on a certain day,
at a particular spot, and knowing by experience that
they were too likely to do it, presented himself there
at the time which had been fixed upon, and telling
the Indians when they arrived, that he knew their
intention, and that it was vain for them to attempt to
keep anything a secret from him, he ended with saying,
that he had come there to kill himself with them; that
as he had used them ill in this world, he might use
them worse in the next; "with which he did dissuade
them presently from their purpose." With what efficacy
such believers in the immortality of the soul were likely
to recommend either their faith or their God; rather,
how terribly all the devotion and all the earnestness
with which the poor priests who followed in the wake
of the conquerors laboured to recommend it were
shamed and paralyzed, they themselves too bitterly
lament. It was idle to send out governor after governor
with orders to stay such practices. They had but to
arrive on the scenes to become infected with the same
fever, or if any remnant of Castilian honour, or any
faintest echoes of the faith which they professed, still
flickered in a few of the best and noblest, they could
but look on with folded hands in ineffectual mourning;
they could do nothing without soldiers, and the soldiers
were the worst offenders. Hispaniola became a mere
desert; the gold was in the mines, and there were no
poor slaves left remaining to extract it. One means
which the Spaniards dared to employ to supply the
vacancy, brought about an incident which in its piteous
pathos exceeds any story we have ever heard. Crimes
and criminals are swept away by time, nature finds an
antidote for their poison, and they and their ill
consequences alike are blotted out and perish. If we do
not forgive them, at least we cease to hate them, as it
grows more clear to us that they injured none so deeply
as themselves. But the Theriodes kakia, the enormous
wickedness by which humanity itself has been outraged
and disgraced, we cannot forgive, we cannot cease to
hate that; the years roll away, but the tints of it remain
on the pages of history, deep and horrible as the day
on which they were entered there.

"When the Spaniards understood the simple opinion
of the Yucaian islanders concerning the souls of their
departed, which, after their sins purged in the cold northern
mountains should pass into the south, to the intent that,
leaving their own country of their own accord, they might
suffer themselves to be brought to Hispaniola, they did
persuade those poor wretches, that they came from those
places where they should see their parents and children,
and all their kindred and friends that were dead, and
should enjoy all kinds of delights with the embracements
and fruition of all beloved beings. And they, being infected
and possessed with these crafty and subtle imaginations,
singing and rejoicing left their country, and followed vain
and idle hope. But when they saw that they were deceived,
and neither met their parents nor any that they desired,
but were compelled to undergo grievous sovereignty and
command, and to endure cruel and extreme labour, they
either slew themselves, or, choosing to famish, gave up
their fair spirits, being persuaded by no reason or violence
to take food. So these miserable Yucaians came to their
end."

It was once more as it was in the days of the
apostles. The New World was first offered to the
holders of the old traditions. They were the husbandmen
first chosen for the new vineyard, and blood and
desolation were the only fruits which they reared upon
it. In their hands it was becoming a kingdom not of
God, but of the devil, and a sentence of blight went
out against them and against their works. How fatally
it has worked, let modern Spain and Spanish America
bear witness. We need not follow further the history
of their dealings with the Indians. For their colonies,
a fatality appears to have followed all attempts at
Catholic colonization. Like shoots from an old decaying
tree which no skill and no care can rear, they were
planted, and for a while they might seem to grow; but
their life was never more than a lingering death, a
failure, which to a thinking person would outweigh in
the arguments against Catholicism whole libraries of
faultless calenas, and a consensus patrum unbroken
through fifteen centuries for the supremacy of St.
Peter.

There is no occasion to look for superstitious causes
to explain it. The Catholic faith had ceased to be the
faith of the large mass of earnest thinking capable
persons; and to those who can best do the work, all
work in this world sooner or later is committed.
America was the natural home for Protestants; persecuted
at home, they sought a place where they might
worship God in their own way, without danger of
stake or gibbet, and the French Huguenots, as
afterwards the English Puritans, early found their way
there. The fate of a party of Coligny's people, who
had gone out as settlers, shall be the last of these
stories, illustrating, as it does in the highest degree,
the wrath and fury with which the passions on both
sides were boiling. A certain John Ribauk, with about
400 companions, had emigrated to Florida. They were
quiet inoffensive people, and lived in peace there several
years, cultivating the soil, building villages, and on the
best possible terms with the natives. Spain was at
the time at peace with France; we are, therefore, to
suppose that it was in pursuance of the great crusade,
in which they might feel secure of the secret, if not
the confessed, sympathy of the Guises, that a powerful
Spanish fleet bore down upon this settlement. The
French made no resistance, and they were seized and
flayed alive, and their bodies hung out upon the trees,
with an inscription suspended over them, "Not as
Frenchmen, but as heretics." At Paris all was sweetness
and silence. The settlement was tranquilly
surrendered to the same men who had made it the
scene of their atrocity; and two years later, 500 of
the very Spaniards who had been most active in the
murder were living there in peaceable possession, in
two forts which their relation with the natives had
obliged them to build. It was well that there were
other Frenchmen living, of whose consciences the Court
had not the keeping, and who were able on emergencies
to do what was right without consulting it. A certain
privateer named Dominique de Gourges, secretly armed
and equipped a vessel at Rochelle, and, stealing across
the Atlantic and in two days collecting a strong party
of Indians, he came down suddenly upon the forts,
and, taking them by storm, slew or afterwards hanged
every man he found there, leaving their bodies on the
trees on which they had hanged the Huguenots, with
their own inscription reversed against them,--"Not as
Spaniards, but as murderers." For which exploit, well
deserving of all honest men's praise, Dominique de
Gourges had to fly his country for his life; and, coming
to England, was received with honourable welcome by
Elizabeth.

It was at such a time, and to take their part amidst
such scenes as these, that the English navigators
appeared along the shores of South America, as the armed
soldiers of the Reformation, and as the avengers of
humanity; as their enterprise was grand and lofty, so
was the manner in which they bore themselves in all
ways worthy of it. They were no nation of saints,
in the modern sentimental sense of that word; they
were prompt, stern men--more ready ever to strike
an enemy than to parley with him; and, private
adventurers as they all were, it was natural enough
that private foolishness and private badness should be
found among them as among other mortals. Every
Englishman who had the means was at liberty to fit
out a ship or ships, and if he could produce tolerable
vouchers for himself, received at once a commission
from the Court. The battles of England were fought
by her children, at their own risk and cost, and they
were at liberty to repay themselves the expense of their
expeditions by plundering at the cost of the national
enemy. Thus, of course, in a mixed world, there were
found mixed marauding crews of scoundrels, who played
the game which a century later was played with such
effect by the pirates of Tortuga. But we have to
remark, first, that such stories are singularly rare; and
then, that the victims are never the Indians, never any
but the Spaniards or the French, when the English were
at war with them; and, on the whole, the conduct and
character of the English sailors, considering what they
were and the work which they were sent to do, present
us all through that age with such a picture of gallantry,
disinterestedness, and high heroic energy, as has never
been overmatched; the more remarkable, as it was
the fruit of no drill or discipline, no tradition, no
system, no organized training, but was the free native
growth of a noble virgin soil.

Before starting on an expedition, it was usual for the
crew and the officers to meet and arrange among themselves
a series of articles of conduct, to which they
bound themselves by a formal agreement, the entire
body itself undertaking to see to their observance. It
is quite possible that strong religious profession, and
even sincere profession, might be accompanied, as it
was in the Spaniards, with everything most detestable.
It is not sufficient of itself to prove that their actions
would correspond with it, but it is one among a number
of evidences; and, coming, as they come before us,
with hands clear of any blood but of fair and open
enemies, their articles may pass at least as indications
of what they were.

Here we have a few instances:--

Hawkins's ship's company was, as he himself informs
us, an unusually loose one. Nevertheless, we find them
"gathered together every morning and evening to serve
God;" and a fire on board which only Hawkins's presence
of mind prevented from destroying ship and crew
together, was made use of by the men as an occasion to
banish swearing out of the ship.

"With a general consent of all our company, it was
ordained that there should be a palmer or ferula which should
be in the keeping of him who was taken with an oath; and
that he who had the palmer should give to every one that
he took swearing, a palmads with it and the femla; and
whosoever at the time of evening or morning prayer was
found to have the palmer, should have three blows given
him by the captain or the master; and that he should still
be bound to free himself by taking another, or else to run
in danger of continuing the penalty, which, being executed
a few days, reformed the vice, so that in three days together
was not one oath heard to be sworn."

The regulations for Luke Fox's voyage commenced
thus:--

"For as much as the good success and prosperity of every
action doth consist in the due service and glorifying of God,
knowing that not only our being and preservation, but the
prosperity of all our actions and enterprises do immediately
depend on His Almighty goodness and mercy; it is
provided-

"First, that all the company, as well officers as others,
shall duly repair every day twice at the call of the bell to
hear public prayers to be read, such as are authorized by the
church, and that in a godly and devout manner, as good
Christians ought.

"Secondly, that no man shall swear by the name of God,
or use any profane oath, or blaspheme His holy name."

To symptoms such as these, we cannot but attach a
very different value when they are the spontaneous growth
of common minds, unstimulated by sense of propriety
or rules of the service, or other official influence lay or
ecclesiastic, from what we attach to the somewhat similar
ceremonials in which, among persons whose position is
conspicuous, important enterprises are now and then
inaugurated.

We have said as much as we intend to say of the
treatment by the Spaniards of the Indian women. Sir
Walter Raleigh is commonly represented by historians
as rather defective, if he was remarkable at all, on the
moral side of his character. Yet Raleigh can declare
proudly, that all the time he was on the Oronooko,
"neither by force nor other means had any of his men
intercourse with any woman there;" and the narrator of
the incidents of Raleigh's last voyage acquaints his
correspondent "with some particulars touching the
government of the fleet, which, although other men in
their voyages doubtless in some measure observed, yet
in all the great volumes which have been written
touching voyages, there is no precedent of so godly
severe and martial government, which not only in itself
is laudable and worthy of imitation, but is also fit to be
written and engraven on every man's soul that coveteth
to do honour to his country."

Once more, the modern theory of Drake is, as we
said above, that he was a gentleman-like pirate on a
large scale, who is indebted for the place which he fills
in history to the indistinct ideas of right and wrong
prevailing in the unenlightened age in which he lived.
and who therefore demands all the toleration of our
own enlarged humanity to allow him to remain there.
Let us see how the following incident can be made to
coincide with this hypothesis:--

A few days after clearing the channel on his first great
voyage, he fell in with a small Spanish ship, which he
took for a prize. He committed the care of it to a
certain Mr. Doughtie, a person much trusted by, and
personally very dear to him, and this second vessel was
to follow him as a tender.

In dangerous expeditions into unknown seas, a second
smaller ship was often indispensable to success; but
many finely-intended enterprises were ruined by the
cowardice of the officers to whom such ships were
entrusted; who shrank as danger thickened, and again
and again took advantage of darkness or heavy weather
to make sail for England and forsake their commander.
Hawkins twice suffered in this way; so did Sir Humfrey
Gilbert; and, although Drake's own kind feeling for
his old friend has prevented him from leaving an exact
account of his offence, we gather from the scattered hints
which are let fall, that he, too, was meditating a similar
piece of treason. However, it may or may not have
been thus. But when at Port St Julien, "our General,"
says one of the crew,--

"Began to inquire diligently of the actions of Mr. Thomas
Doughtie, and found them not to be such as he looked for,
but tending rather to contention or mutiny, or some other
disorder, whereby, without redresse, the success of the
voyage might greatly have been hazarded. Whereupon the
company was called together and made acquainted with
the particulars of the cause, which were found, partly by Mr.
Doughtie's own confession, and partly by the evidence of
the fact, to be true, which, when our General saw, although
his private affection to Mr. Doughtie (as he then, in the
presence of us all, sacredly protested) was great, yet the
care which he had of the state of the voyage, of the
expectation of Her Majesty, and of the honour of his country,
did more touch him, as indeed it ought, than the private respect
of one man; so that the cause being thoroughly heard, and
all things done in good order as near as might be to the
course of our law in England, it was concluded that Mr.
Doughtie should receive punishment according to the
quality of the offence. And he, seeing no remedy but
patience for himself, desired before his death to receive the
communion, which he did at the hands of Mr. Fletcher, our
minister, and our General himself accompanied him in that
holy action, which, being done, and the place of execution
made ready, he, having embraced our General, and taken
leave of all the company, with prayers for the Queen's
Majesty and our realm, in quiet sort laid his head to the
block, where he ended his life. This being done, our
General made divers speeches to the whole company,
persuading us to unity, obedience, love, and regard of our
voyage, and for the better confirmation thereof, willed every
man the next Sunday following to prepare himself to receive
the communion, as Christian brethren and friends ought to
do, which was done in very reverent sort, and so with good
contentment every man went about his business."

The simple majesty of this anecdote can gain nothing
from any comment which we might offer upon it. The
crew of a common English ship organizing, of their own
free motion, on that wild shore, a judgment hall more
grand and awful than any most elaborate law court,
with its ermine and black cap, and robes of ceremony
for mind as well as body, is not to be reconciled with
the pirate theory, which we may as well henceforth put
away from us.

Of such stuff were the early English navigators; we
are reaping the magnificent harvest of their great
heroism; and we may see once more in their history
and in what has arisen out of it, that on these deep
moral foundations, and on none others, enduring
prosperities, of what kind so-ever, politic or religious,
material or spiritual, are alone in this divinely-governed
world permitted to base themselves and grow. Whereever
we find them they are still the same. In the courts
of Japan or of China, fighting Spaniards in the Pacific,
or prisoners among the Algerines, founding colonies
which by and by were to grow into enormous transatlantic
republics, or exploring in crazy pinnaces the
fierce latitudes of the Polar seas, they are the same
indomitable God-fearing men whose life was one great
liturgy. "The ice was strong, but God was stronger,"
says one of Frobisher's men, after grinding a night and
a day among the icebergs, not waiting for God to come
down and split them, but toiling through the long hours,
himself and the rest fending off the vessel with poles
and planks, with death glaring at them out of the ice
rocks, and so saving themselves and it. Icebergs were
strong, Spaniards were strong, and storms, and corsairs,
and rocks, and reefs, which no chart had then noted--
they were all strong, but God was stronger, and that was
all which they cared to know.

Out of the vast number it is difficult to make wise
selections, but the attention floats loosely over
generalities, and only individual men can seize it and hold
it fast. We shall attempt to bring our readers face to
face with some of these men; not, of course, to write
their biographies, but to sketch the details of a few
scenes, in the hope that they may tempt those under
whose eyes they may fall to look for themselves to
complete the perfect figure.

Some two miles above the port of Dartmouth, once
among the most important harbours in England, on a
projecting angle of land which runs out into the river
at the head of one of its most beautiful reaches, there
has stood for some centuries the Manor House of
Greenaway. The water runs deep all the way to it from
the sea, and the largest vessels may ride with safety
within a stone's throw of the windows. In the latter
half of the sixteenth century there must have met, in
the hall of this mansion, a party as remarkable as could
have been found anywhere in England. Humfrey and
Adrian Gilbert, with their half-brother, Walter Raleigh,
here, when little boys, played at sailors in the reaches of
Long Stream; in the summer evenings doubtless rowing
down with the tide to the port, and wondering at the
quaint figure-heads and carved prows of the ships which
thronged it; or climbing on board, and listening, with
hearts beating, to the mariners' tales of the new earth
beyond the sunset; and here in later life, matured men,
whose boyish dreams had become heroic action, they
used again to meet in the intervals of quiet, and the
rock is shown underneath the house where Raleigh
smoked the first tobacco. Another remarkable man, of
whom we shall presently speak more closely, could not
fail to have made a fourth at these meetings. A sailor
boy of Sandwich, the adjoining parish, John Davis,
showed early a genius which could not have escaped
the eye of such neighbours, and in the atmosphere of
Greenaway he learned to be as noble as the Gilberts,
and as tender and delicate as Raleigh. Of this party,
for the present we confine ourselves to the host and
owner, Humfrey Gilbert, knighted afterwards by Elizabeth.
Led by the scenes of his childhood to the sea
and to sea adventures, and afterwards, as his mind
unfolded, to study his profession scientifically, we find
him as soon as he was old enough to think for himself,
or make others listen to him, "amending the great
errors of naval sea cards, whose common fault is to
make the degree of longitude in every latitude of one
common bigness;" inventing instruments for taking
observations, studying the form of the earth, and
convincing himself that there was a north-west passage, and
studying the necessities of his country, and discovering
the remedies for them in colonization and extended
markets for home manufactures, and insisting with so
much loudness on these important matters that they
reached the all-attentive ears of Walsingham, and
through Walsingham were conveyed to the Queen.
Gilbert was examined before the Queen's Majesty and
the Privy Council, the record of which examination he
has himself left to us in a paper which he afterwards
drew up, and strange enough reading it is. The most
admirable conclusions stand side by side with the
wildest conjectures; and invaluable practical discoveries,
among imaginations at which all our love for him cannot
hinder us from smiling; the whole of it from first to last
saturated through and through with his inborn nobility
of nature.

Homer and Aristotle are pressed into service to prove
that the ocean runs round the three old continents, and
America therefore is necessarily an island. The gulf
stream which he had carefully observed, eked out
by a theory of the primum mobile, is made to demonstrate
a channel to the north, corresponding to Magellan's
Straits in the south, he believing, in common with
almost every one of his day, that these straits were
the only opening into the Pacific, the land to the
south being unbroken to the Pole. He prophecies a
market in the East for our manufactured linen and
calicoes:--

"The Easterns greatly prizing the same, as appeareth
in Hester where the pomp is expressed of the great
King of India, Ahasuerus, who matched the coloured
clothes wherewith his houses and tents were apparelled,
with gold and silver, as part of his greatest treasure."

These and other such arguments were the best
analysis which Sir Humfrey had to offer of the spirit
which he felt to be working in him. We may think
what we please of them. But we can have but one
thought of the great grand words with which the
memorial concludes, and they alone would explain the
love which Elizabeth bore him:--

"Never, therefore, mislike with me for taking in hand any
laudable and honest enterprise, for if through pleasure
or idleness we purchase shame, the pleasure vanisheth,
but the shame abideth for ever.

"Give me leave, therefore, without offence, always to
live and die in this mind: that he is not worthy to live
at all that, for fear or danger of death, shunneth his
country's service and his own honour, seeing that death
is inevitable and the fame of virtue immortal, wherefore
in this behalf routare vel lintere sperno."

Two voyages which he undertook at his own cost,
which shattered his fortune, and failed, as they naturally
might, since inefficient help or mutiny of subordinates,
or other disorders, are inevitable conditions under which
more or less great men must be content to see their great
thoughts mutilated by the feebleness of their instruments,
did not dishearten him, and in June, 1583, a last
fleet of five ships sailed from the port of Dartmouth,
with commission from the Queen to discover and take
possession from latitude 45^0 to 50^0 north--a voyage not
a little noteworthy, there being planted in the course of
it the first English colony west of the Atlantic. Elizabeth
had a foreboding that she would never see him again.
She sent him a jewel as a last token of her favour, and
she desired Raleigh to have his picture taken before he
went.

The history of the voyage was written by a Mr.
Edward Hayes, of Dartmouth, one of the principal
actors in it, and as a composition it is more remarkable
for fine writing than any very commendable thought in
the author. But Sir Humfrey's nature shines through the
infirmity of his chronicler; and in the end, indeed, Mr.
Hayes himself is subdued into a better mind. He had
lost money by the voyage, and we will hope his higher
nature was only under a temporary eclipse. The fleet
consisted (it is well to observe the ships and the size of
them) of the Delight, 120 tons; the barque Raleigh, 200
tons (this ship deserted off the Land's End); the Golden
Hinde and the Swallow, 40 tons each; and the Squirrel,
which was called the frigate, 10 tons. For the uninitiated
in such matters, we may add, that if in a vessel
the size of the last, a member of the Yacht Club would
consider that he had earned a dub-room immortality if
he had ventured a run in the depth of summer from
Cowes to the Channel Islands.

"We were in all," says Mr. Hayes, "260 men, among
whom we had of every faculty good choice. Besides,
for solace of our own people, and allurement of the savages,
we were provided of music in good variety, not omitting
the least toys, as morris dancers, hobby horses, and
May-like conceits to delight the savage people."

The expedition reached Newfoundland without accident.
St. John's was taken possession of, and a colony
left there, and Sir Humfrey then set out exploring along
the American coast to the south; he himself doing all
the work in his little 10-ton cutter, the service being too
dangerous for the larger vessels to venture on. One of
these had remained at St. John's. He was now accompanied
only by the Delight and the Golden Hinde, and
these two keeping as near the shore as they dared, he
spent what remained of the summer, examining every
creek and bay, marking the soundings, taking the bearings
of the possible harbours, and risking his life, as
every hour he was obliged to risk it in such a service, in
thus leading, as it were, the forlorn hope in the conquest
of the New World. How dangerous it was we shall
presently see. It was towards the end of August.

"The evening was fair and pleasant, yet not without
token of storm to ensue, and most part of this Wednesday
night, like the swan that singeth before her death, they in
the Delight continued in sounding of drums and trumpets
and fifes, also winding the cornets and haughtboys, and
in the end of their jollity left with the battell and ringing
of doleful knells."

Two days after came the storm; the Delight struck
upon a bank, and went down in sight of the other vessels,
which were unable to render her any help. Sir Humfrey's
papers, among other things, were all lost in her; at the
time considered by him an irreparable misfortune. But
it was little matter; he was never to need them. The
Golden Hinde and the Squirrel were now left alone of the
five ships. The provisions were running short, and the
summer season was closing. Both crews were on short
allowance; and with much difficulty Sir Humfrey was
prevailed upon to be satisfied for the present with what
he had done, and to lay off for England.

"So upon Saturday, in the afternoon, the 31st of
August, we changed our course, and returned back for
England, at which very instant, even in winding about,
there passed along between us and the land, which we
now forsook, a very lion, to our seeming, in shape, hair,
and colour; not swimming after the manner of a beast
by moving of his feet, but rather sliding upon the water
with his whole body, except his legs, in sight, neither yet
diving under and again rising as the manner is of whales,
porpoises, and other fish, but confidently showing himself
without hiding, notwithstanding that we presented
ourselves in open view and gesture to amaze him. Thus
he passed along, turning his head to and fro, yawning
and gaping wide, with ougly demonstration of long teeth
and glaring eyes; and to bidde us farewell, coming fight
against the Hinde, he sent forth a horrible voice, roaring
and bellowing as doth a lion, which spectacle we all beheld
so far as we were able to discern the same, as men prone
to wonder at every strange thing. What opinion others
had thereof, and chiefly the General himself, I forbear to
deliver. But he took it for Bonum Omen, rejoicing that he
was to war against such an enemy if it were the devil."

We have no doubt that he did think it was the devil;
men in those days believing really that evil was more
than a principle or a necessary accident, and that in all
their labour for God and for right, they must make their
account to have to fight with the devil in his proper person.
But if we are to call it superstition, and if this were
no devil in the form of a roaring lion, but a mere great
seal or sea-lion, it is a more innocent superstition to
impersonate so real a power, and it requires a bolder
heart to rise up against it and defy it in its living terror,
than to sublimate it away into a philosophical principle,
and to forget to battle with it in speculating on its origin
and nature. But to follow the brave Sir Humfrey,
whose work of fighting with the devil was now over, and
who was passing to his reward. The 2nd of September
the General came on board the Golden Hinde "to make
merry with us." He greatly deplored the loss of his
books and papers; and Mr. Hayes considered that the
loss of manuscripts could not be so very distressing,
and that there must have been something behind, certain
gold ore, for instance, which had perished also--
considerations not perhaps of particular value. He was
full of confidence from what he had seen, and talked
with all eagerness and warmth of the new expedition
for the following spring. Apocryphal gold-mines still
occupying the minds of Mr. Hayes and others, who were
persuaded that Sir Humfrey was keeping to himself some
such discovery which he had secretly made, and they
tried hard to extract it from him. They could make
nothing, however, of his odd ironical answers, and their
sorrow at the catastrophe which followed is sadly blended
with disappointment that such a secret should have
perished. Sir Humfrey doubtless saw America with
other eyes than theirs, and gold-mines richer than
California in its huge rivers and savannahs.

"Leaving the issue of this good hope (about the gold),"
continues Mr. Hayes, "to God, who only knoweth the truth
thereof, I will hasten to the end of this tragedy, which must
be knit up in the person of our General, and as it was God's
ordinance upon him, even so the vehement persuasion of
his friends could nothing avail to divert him from his wilful
resolution of going in his frigate; and when he was
entreated by the captain, master, and others, his well-wishers
in the Hinde, not to venture, this was his answer--'I will
not forsake my little company going homewards, with whom
I have passed so many storms and perils.'"

Albeit, thinks the writer, who is unable to comprehend
such high gallantry, there must have been something on
his mind of what the world would say of him, "and it
was rather rashness than advised resolution to prefer
the wind of a vain report to the weight of his own life,"
for the writing of which sentence we will trust the
author, either in this world or the other, has before this
done due penance and repented of it.

Two-thirds of the way home they met foul weather
and terrible seas, "breaking short and pyramid-wise."
Men who had all their lives "occupied the sea" had
never seen it more outrageous. "We had also upon
our mainyard an apparition of a little fire by night,
which seamen do call Castor and Pollux."

"Monday, the ninth of September, in the afternoon, the
frigate was near cast away oppressed by waves, but at that
time recovered, and giving forth signs of joy, the General,
sitting abaft with a book in his hand, cried unto us in the
Hinde so often as we did approach within hearing, 'We
are as near to heaven by sea as by land,' reiterating the
same speech, well beseeming a soldier resolute in Jesus
Christ, as I can testify that he was. The same Monday
night, about twelve of the clock, or not long after, the frigate
being a-head of us in the Golden Hinde, suddenly her lights
were out, whereof as it were in a moment we lost the sight;
and withal our watch cried, 'The General was cast away,'
which was too true."

So stirbt ein Held. It was a fine end for a mortal
man. We will not call it sad or tragic, but heroic and
sublime; and if our eyes water as we write it down,
it is not with sorrow, but with joy and pride.

"Thus faithfully," concludes Mr. Hayes (in some degree
rising above himself), "I have related this story, wherein
some spark of the knight's virtues, though he be
extinguished, may happily appear; he remaining resolute to a
purpose honest and godly as was this, to discover, possess,
and reduce unto the service of God and Christian piety,
those remote and heathen countries of America. Such is
the infinite bounty of God, who from every evil deriveth good,
that fruit may grow in time of our travelling in these
North-Western lands (as has it not grown?), and the crosses,
turmoils, and afflictions, both in the preparation and
execution of the voyage, did correct the intemperate humours
which before we noted to be in this gentleman, and made
unsavoury and less delightful his other manifold virtues.

"Thus as he was refined and made nearer unto the image
of God, so it pleased the Divine will to resume him unto
Himself, whither both his and every other high and noble
mind have always aspired."

Such was Sir Humfrey Gilbert; we know but little
more of him, and we can only conjecture that he
was still in the prime of his years when the Atlantic
swallowed him. Like the gleam of a landscape lit
suddenly for a moment by the lightning, these few
scenes flash down to us across the centuries; but what
a life must that have been of which this was the
conclusion! He was one of a race which have ceased to
be. We look round for them, and we can hardly
believe that the same blood is flowing in our veins.
Brave we may still be, and strong perhaps as they,
but the high moral grace which made bravery and
strength so beautiful is departed from us for ever.

Our space is sadly limited for historical portrait
painting; but we must find room for another of that
Greenaway party whose nature was as fine as that of
Gilbert, and who intellectually was more largely gifted.
The latter was drowned in 1583. In 1585 John Davis
left Dartmouth on his first voyage into the Polar seas;
and twice subsequently he went again, venturing in
small ill-equipped vessels of thirty or forty tons into the
most dangerous seas. These voyages were as remarkable
for their success as for the daring with which they
were accomplished, and Davis's epitaph is written on the
map of the world, where his name still remains to
commemorate his discoveries. Brave as he was, he is
distinguished by a peculiar and exquisite sweetness of
nature, which, from many little facts of his life, seems to
have affected every one with whom he came in contact
in a remarkable degree. We find men, for the love of
Master Davis, leaving their firesides to sail with him,
without other hope or motion; and silver bullets were
cast to shoot him in a mutiny; the hard rude natures of
the mutineers being awed by something in his carriage
which was not like that of a common man. He has
written the account of one of his northern voyages
himself; one of those, by the by, which the Hakluyt
Society have mutilated; and there is an imaginative
beauty in it, and a rich delicacy of expression, which is
a true natural poetry, called out in him by the first sight
of strange lands and things and people.

To show what he was, we should have preferred, if
possible, to have taken the story of his expedition into
the South Seas, in which, under circumstances of singular
difficulty, he was deserted by Candish, under whom
he had sailed; and after inconceivable trials, from famine,
mutiny, and storm, ultimately saved himself and his
ship, and such of the crew as had chosen to submit to
his orders. But it is a long history, and will not admit
of being mutilated. As an instance of the stuff of which
it was composed, he ran back in the black night in a
gale of wind through the Straits of Magellan, by a chart
which he had made with the eye in passing up. His
anchors were lost or broken; the cables were parted.
He could not bring up the ship; there was nothing for
it but to run, and he carried her safe through along
a channel often not three miles broad, sixty miles
from end, and twisting like the reaches of a river.
For the present, however, we are forced to content
ourselves with a few sketches out of the north-west
voyages. Here is one, for instance, which shows how
an Englishman could deal with the Indians. Davis had
landed at Gilbert's Sound, and gone up the country
exploring. On his return, he found his crew loud in
complaints of the thievish propensities of the natives,
and urgent to have an example made of some of them.
On the next occasion he fired a gun at them with blank
cartridge; but their nature was still too strong for them.

"Seeing iron," he says, "they could in no case forbear
stealing; which, when I perceived, it did but minister
to me occasion of laughter to see their simplicity, and I
willed that they should not be hardly used, but that our
company should be more diligent to keep their things,
supposing it to be very hard in so short a time to make
them know their evils."

In his own way, however, he took an opportunity of
administering a lesson to them of a more wholesome
kind than could be given with gunpowder and bullets
Like the rest of his countrymen, he believed the savage
Indians in their idolatries to be worshippers of the devil.
"They are witches," he says; "they have images in
great store, and use many kinds of enchantments."
And these enchantments they tried on one occasion to
put in force against himself and his crew.

"Being on shore on the 4th day of July, one of them
made a long oration, and then kindled a fire, into which
with many strange words and gestures he put divers things,
which we supposed to be a sacrifice. Myself and certain
of my company standing by, they desired us to go into
the smoke. I desired them to go into the smoke, which
they would by no means do. I then took one of them
and thrust him into the smoke, and willed one of my
company to tread out the fire, and spurn it into the sea,
which was done to show them that we did contemn their
sorceries."

It is a very English story--exactly what a modern
Englishman would do; only, perhaps, not believing that
there was any real devil in the case, which makes a
difference. However, real or not real, after seeing him
patiently put up with such an injury, we will hope the
poor Greenlander had less respect for the devil than
formerly.

Leaving Gilbert's Sound, Davis went on to the north-west,
and in lat. 63^0 fell in with a barrier of ice, which
he coasted for thirteen days without finding an opening.
The very sight of an iceberg was new to all his crew;
and the ropes and shrouds, though it was midsummer,
becoming compassed with ice,--

"The people began to fall sick and faint-hearted--
whereupon, very orderly, with good discretion, they
entreated me to regard the safety of mine own life, as well
as the preservation of theirs; and that I should not,
through overbouldness, leave their widows and fatherless
children to give me bitter curses.

"Whereupon, seeking counsel of God, it pleased His
Divine Majesty to move my heart to prosecute that which
I hope shall be to His glory, and to the contentation of
every Christian mind."

He had two vessels, one of some burthen, the other a
pinnace of thirty tons. The result of the counsel which
he had sought was, that he made over his own large
vessel to such as wished to return, and himself "thinking
it better to die with honour than to return with
infamy," went on, with such volunteers as would follow
him, in a poor leaky cutter, up the sea now called
Davis's Straits, in commemoration of that adventure,
4^0 north of the furthest known point, among storms and
icebergs, by which the long days and twilight nights
alone saved him from being destroyed, and, coasting
back along the American shore, discovered Hudson's
Straits, supposed then to be the long-desired entrance
into the Pacific. This exploit drew the attention of
Walsingham, and by him Davis was presented to
Burleigh, "who was also pleased to show him great
encouragement." If either these statesmen or Elizabeth
had been twenty years younger, his name would have
filled a larger space in history than a small corner of the
map of the world; but if he was employed at all in the
last years of the century, no vales sacer has been found
to celebrate his work, and no clue is left to guide us.
He disappears; a cloud falls over him. He is known
to have commanded trading vessels in the Eastern seas,
and to have returned five times from India. But the
details are all lost, and accident has only parted the
clouds for a moment to show us the mournful setting
with which he, too, went down upon the sea.

In taking out Sir Edward Michellthorne to India, in
1604, he fell in with a crew of Japanese, whose ship
had been burnt, drifting at sea, without provisions, in
a leaky junk. He supposed them to be pirates, but he
did not choose to leave them to so wretched a death,
and took them on board, and in a few hours, watching
their opportunity, they murdered him.

As the fool dieth, so dieth the wise, and there is no
difference; it was the chance of the sea, and the ill
reward of a humane action--a melancholy end for such
a man--like the end of a warrior, not dying Epaminondas-like
on the field of victory, but cut off in some poor
brawl or ambuscade. But so it was with all these men.
They were cut off in the flower of their days, and few
indeed of them laid their bones in the sepulchres of their
fathers. They knew the service which they had chosen,
and they did not ask the wages for which they had not
laboured. Life with them was no summer holyday, but
a holy sacrifice offered up to duty, and what their
Master sent was welcome. Beautiful is old age--beautiful
as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious
summer. In the old man, nature has fulfilled her work;
she loads him with her blessings; she fills him with
the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his
children and his children's children, she rocks him
softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with
blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful.
It is beautiful, but not the most beautiful. There is
another life, hard, rough, and thorny, trodden with
bleeding feet and aching brow; the life of which the
cross is the symbol; a battle which no peace follows,
this side the grave; which the grave gapes to finish,
before the victory is won; and--strange that it should
be so--this is the highest life of man. Look back
along the great names of history; there is none whose
life has been other than this. They to whom it has
been given to do the really highest work in this earth--
whoever they are, Jew or Gentile, Pagan or Christian,
warriors, legislators, philosophers, priests, poets, kings,
slaves--one and all, their fate has been the same--the
same bitter cup has been given to them to drink; and
so it was with the servants of England in the sixteenth
century. Their life was a long battle, either with the
elements or with men, and it was enough for them to
fulfil their work, and to pass away in the hour when
God had nothing more to bid them do. They did not
complain, and why should we complain for them?
Peaceful life was not what they desired, and an
honourable death had no terrors for them. Theirs was
the old Grecian spirit, and the great heart of the
Theban poet lived again in them:--

thanein d' oisin anagka
ti ke tis ananumon geras en skoto
kathemenos epsoi matan, apanton
kalon ammoros

"Seeing" in Gilbert's own brave words, "that death
is inevitable, and the fame of virtue is immortal;
wherefore in this behalf mutare vel timere sperno."

In the conclusion of these light sketches we pass
into an element different from that in which we have
been lately dwelling. The scenes in which Gilbert and
Davis played out their high natures were of the kind
which we call peaceful, and the enemies with which
they contended were principally the ice and the wind,
and the stormy seas and the dangers of unknown and
savage lands; we shall close amidst the roar of cannon,
and the wrath and rage of battle. Hume, who alludes
to the engagement which we are going to describe,
speaks of it in a tone which shows that he looked at it
as something portentous and prodigious; as a thing to
wonder at--but scarcely as deserving the admiration
which we pay to actions properly within the scope of
humanity--and as if the energy which was displayed in
it was like the unnatural strength of madness. He
does not say this, but he appears to feel it; and he
scarcely would have felt it, if he had cared more deeply
to saturate himself with the temper of the age of which
he was writing. At the time all England and all the
world rang with the story. It struck a deeper terror,
though it was but the action of a single ship, into the
hearts of the Spanish people--it dealt a more deadly
blow upon their fame and moral strength, than the
destruction of the Armada itself; and in the direct
results which arose from it, it was scarcely less
disastrous to them. Hardly, as it seems to us, if the most
glorious actions which are set like jewels in the history
of mankind are weighed one against the other in the
balance, hardly will those 300 Spartans who in the
summer morning sate "combing their long hair--for
death" in the passes of Thermopylae, have earned a
more lofty estimate for themselves than this one crew
of modern Englishmen.

In August, 1591, Lord Thomas Howard, with six
English line-of-battle ships, six victuallers, and two or
three pinnaces, were lying at anchor under the Island
of Florez. Light in ballast and short of water, with
half their men disabled by sickness, they were unable
to pursue the aggressive purpose on which they had been
sent out. Several of the ships' crews were on shore:
the ships themselves "all pestered and rommaging,"
with everything out of order. In this condition they
were surprised by a Spanish fleet consisting of 53
men-of-war. Eleven out of the twelve English ships obeyed
the signal of the Admiral, to cut or weigh their anchors
and escape as they might. The twelfth, the Revenge,
was unable for the moment to follow; of her crew of
190, 90 being sick on shore, and, from the position
of the ship, there was some delay and difficulty in
getting them on board. The Revenge was commanded
by Sir Richard Grenville, of Bideford, a man well
known in the Spanish seas, and the terror of the Spanish
sailors; so fierce he was said to be, that mythic
stories passed from lip to lip about him, and, like Earl
Talbot or Coeur de Lion, the nurses at the Azores
frightened children with the sound of his name. "He
was of great revenues," they said, "of his own inheritance,
but of unquiet mind, and greatly affected to
wars," and from his uncontrollable propensities for
blood-eating, he had volunteered his services to the
Queen; "of so hard a complexion was he, that I (John
Huighen von Linschoten, who is our authority here,
and who was with the Spanish fleet after the action)
have been told by divers credible persons who stood
and beheld him, that he would carouse three or four
glasses of wine, and take the glasses between his teeth
and crush them in pieces and swallow them down."
Such he was to the Spaniard. To the English he was a
goodly and gallant gentleman, who had never turned his
back upon an enemy, and was remarkable in that
remarkable time for his constancy and daring. In this
surprise at Florez he was in no haste to fly. He first
saw all his sick on board and stowed away on the
ballast, and then, with no more than 100 men left him
to fight and work the ship, he deliberately weighed,
uncertain, as it seemed at first, what he intended to do.
The Spanish fleet were by this time on his weather bow,
and he was persuaded (we here take his cousin Raleigh's
beautiful narrative and follow it in his words) "to cut
his mainsail and cast about, and trust to the sailing of
the ship."

"But Sir Richard utterly refused to turn from the enemy,
alledging that he would rather choose to die than to
dishonour himself, his country, and her Majesty's ship,
persuading his company that he would pass through their two
squadrons in spite of them, and enforce those of Seville to
give him way, which he performed upon diverse of the foremost,
who, as the mariners term it, sprang their luff, and fell
under the lee of the Revenge. But the other course had
been the better: and might right well have been answered in
so great an impossibility of prevailing: notwithstanding, out
of the greatness of his mind, he could not be persuaded."

The wind was light; the San Philip, "a huge highcarged
ship" of 1500 tons, came up to windward of
him, and, taking the wind out of his sails, ran aboard
him.

"After the Revenge was entangled with the San Philip,
four others boarded her, two on her larboard and two on
her starboard. The fight thus beginning at three o'clock in
the afternoon continued very terrible all that evening. But
the great San Philip, having received the lower tier of the
Revenge, shifted herself with all diligence from her sides,
utterly misliking her first entertainment. The Spanish ships
were filled with soldiers, in some 200, besides the mariners,
in some 500, in others 800. In ours there were none at all,
besides the mariners, but the servants of the commander
and some few voluntary gentlemen only. After many interchanged
vollies of great ordnance and small shot, the
Spaniards deliberated to enter the Revenge, and made
divers attempts, hoping to force her by the multitude of
their armed soldiers and musketeers; but were still repulsed
again and again, and at all times beaten back into their own
ship or into the sea. In the beginning of the fight the
George Noble, of London, having received some shot through
her by the Armadas, fell under the lee of the Revenge, and
asked Sir Richard what he would command him; but being
one of the victuallers, and of small force, Sir Richard bade
him save himself and leave him to his fortune."

A little touch of gallantry, which we should be
glad to remember with the honour due to the brave
English heart who commanded the George Noble; but
his name has passed away, and his action is an in
memoriam, on which time has effaced the writing.
All that August night the fight continued, the stars
rolling over in their sad majesty, but unseen through the
sulphur clouds which hung over the scene. Ship
after ship of the Spaniards came on upon the Revenge,
"so that never less than two mighty galleons were at
her side and aboard her," washing up like waves upon a
rock, and failing foiled and shattered back amidst the
roar of the artillery. Before morning fifteen several
armadas had assailed her, and all in vain; some had
been sunk at her side; and the rest, "so ill approving
of their entertainment, that at break of day they
were far more willing to hearken to a composition, than
hastily to make more assaults or entries." "But as the
day increased so our men decreased, and as the light
grew more and more, by so much the more grew our
discomfort, for none appeared in sight but enemies,
save one small ship called the Pilgrim, commanded
by Jacob Whiddon, who hovered all night to see the
success, but in the morning bearing with the Revenge
was hunted like a hare among many ravenous hounds--
but escaped."

All the powder in the Revenge was now spent, all
her pikes were broken, 40 out of her 100 men killed,
and a great number of the rest wounded. Sir Richard,
though badly hurt early in the battle, never forsook
the deck till an hour before midnight; and was then
shot through the body while his wounds were being
dressed, and again in the head; and his surgeon was
killed while attending on him. The masts were lying
over the side, the rigging cut or broken, the upper
works all shot in pieces, and the ship herself, unable to
move, was settling slowly in the sea; the vast fleet of
Spaniards lying round her in a ring like dogs round a
dying lion, and wary of approaching him in his last
agony. Sir Richard seeing that it was past hope,
having fought for fifteen hours, and "having by
estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery through
him," "commanded the master gunner, whom he knew
to be a most resolute man, to split and sink the ship,
that thereby nothing might remain of glory or victory
to the Spaniards; seeing in so many hours they were
not able to take her, having had above fifteen hours
time, above ten thousand men, and fifty-three men-of-war
to perform it withal; and persuaded the company,
or as many as he could induce, to yield themselves
unto God and to the mercy of none else; but as they
had, like valiant resolute men, repulsed so many
enemies, they should not now shorten the honour of
their nation by prolonging their own lives for a few
hours or a few days."

The gunner and a few others consented. But such
daimonie arete was more than could be expected of
ordinary seamen. They had dared do all which did
become men, and they were not more than men, at
least than men were then. Two Spanish ships had
gone down, above 1500 men were killed, and the
Spanish Admiral could not induce any one of the
rest of his fleet to board the Revenge again,
"doubting lest Sir Richard would have blown up himself
and them knowing his dangerous disposition." Sir Richard
lying disabled below, the captain finding the Spaniards
as ready to entertain a composition as they could be
to offer it, gained over the majority of the surviving
crew; and the remainder then drawing back from
the master gunner, they all, without further consulting
their dying commander, surrendered on honourable
terms. If unequal to the English in action, the
Spaniards were at least as courteous in victory. It is
due to them to say, that the conditions were faithfully
observed. And "the ship being marvellous unsavourie,"
Alonzo de Bacon, the Spanish Admiral, sent his boat
to bring Sir Richard on board his own vessel.

Sir Richard, whose life was fast ebbing away, replied,
that "he might do with his body what he list, for that
he esteemed it not; and as he was carried out of the
ship he swooned, and reviving again, desired the company
to pray for him."

The Admiral used him with all humanity, "commending
his valour and worthiness, being unto them a
rare spectacle and a resolution seldom approved." The
officers of the rest of the fleet, too, John Higgins tells
us, crowded round to look at him, and a new fight
had almost broken out between the Biscayans and the
"Portugals," each claiming the honour of having boarded
the Revenge.

"In a few hours Sir Richard, feeling his end approaching,
showed not any sign of faintness, but spake these words
in Spanish, and said, 'Here die I, Richard Grenville, with
a joyful and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life
as a true soldier ought to do that hath fought for his
country, queen, religion, and honour. Whereby my soul
most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always
leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true
soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.'
When he had finished these or other such like words,
he gave up the ghost with great and stout courage, and
no man could perceive any sign of heaviness in him."

Such was the fight at Florez, in that August of 1591,
without its equal in such of the annals of mankind as
the thing which we call history has preserved to us;
scarcely equalled by the most glorious fate which the
imagination of Barrere could invent for the Vengeur;
nor did it end without a sequel awful as itself.
Sea battles have been often followed by storms, and
without a miracle; but with a miracle, as the Spaniards
and the English alike believed, or without one, as we
moderns would prefer believing, "there ensued on this
action a tempest so terrible as was never seen or heard
the like before." A fleet of merchantmen joined the
armada immediately after the battle, forming in all 140
sail; and of these 140, only 32 ever saw Spanish harbour.
The rest all foundered, or were lost on the Azores.
The men-of-war had been so shattered by shot as to be
unable to carry sail, and the Revenge herself, disdaining
to survive her commander, or as if to complete his own
last baffled purpose, like Samson, buried herself and
her 200 prize crew under the rocks of St. Michael's.

"And it my well be thought and presumed," says John
Huyghen, "that it was no other than a just plague purposely
sent upon the Spaniards; and that it might be truly said,
the taking of the Revenge was justly revenged on them;
and not by the might of force of man, but by the power
of God. As some of them openly said in the Isle of
Terceira, that they believed verily God would consume
them, and that he took part with the Lutherans and heretics
... saying further, that so soon as they had thrown
the dead body of the Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Grenville
overboard, they verily thought that as he had a devilish
faith and religion, and therefore the devil loved him, so
he presently sunk into the bottom of the sea and down
into hell, where he raised up all the devils to the revenge
of his death, and that they brought so great a storm and
torments upon the Spaniards, because they only maintained
the Catholic and Romish religion. Such and the like
blasphemies against God they ceased not openly to utter."
____


THE BOOK OF JOB

The question will one day be asked, how it has been
that, in spite of the high pretensions of us English to a
superior reverence for the Bible, we have done so little
in comparison with our continental contemporaries
towards arriving at a proper understanding of it? The
books named below * form but a section of a long list
which has appeared in the last few years on the Book of
Job alone; and this book has not received any larger
share of attention than the others, either of the Old or
the New Testament. Whatever be the nature or the
origin of these books, (and on this point there is much
difference of opinion among the Germans as among
ourselves,) they are all agreed, orthodox and unorthodox,
that at least we should endeavour to understand them;
and that no efforts can be too great, either of research
or criticism, to discover their history, or elucidate their
meaning.
____
* I. Die poetischen Bucher des Alten Bundes. Erklart von
Heinrich Ewald. Gottingen: bei Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht.
1836.
2. Kurzgefasstes exegetisches Handbuck zum Alten Testament.
Zweite Lieferund. Hiob Von Ludwig Hirzel. Zweite Auflage,
durchgesehen von Dr. Justus Olshausen. Leipzig. 1852.
3. Quaestionum in Jobeidos locos vexatos Specimen. Von D.
Hermannus Hupfeld. Halis Saxonum. 1853.
____

We shall assent, doubtless, eagerly, perhaps noisily
and indignantly, to so obvious a truism; but our own
efforts in the same direction will not bear us out. The
able men in England employ themselves in matters of a
more practical character; and while we refuse to avail
ourselves of what has been done elsewhere, no book,
or books, which we produce on the interpretation of
Scripture acquire more than a partial or an ephemeral
reputation. The most important contribution to our
knowledge on this subject which has been made in
these recent years, is the translation of the "Library
of the Fathers," by which it is about as rational to
suppose that the analytical criticism of modern times
can be superseded, as that the place of Herman and
Dindoff could be supplied by an edition of the old
scholiasts.

It is, indeed, reasonable that, as long as we are
persuaded that our English theory of the Bible, as a whole,
is the right one, we should shrink from contact with
investigations, which, however ingenious in themselves,
are based on what we know to be a false foundation.
But there are some learned Germans whose orthodoxy
would pass examination at Exeter Hail; and there are
many subjects, such, for instance, as the present, on
which all their able men are agreed in conclusions that
cannot rationally give offence to any one. For the
Book of Job, analytical criticism has only served to clear
up the uncertainties which have hitherto always hung
about it. It is now considered to be, beyond all doubt,
a genuine Hebrew-original, completed by its writer
almost in the form in which it now remains to us. The
questions on the authenticity of the Prologue and
Epilogue, which once were thought important, have given
way before a more sound conception of the dramatic
unity of the entire poem; and the volumes before us
contain merely an inquiry into its meaning, bringing, at
the same time, all the resources of modern scholarship
and historical and mythological research to bear upon
the obscurity of separate passages. It is the most difficult
of all the Hebrew compositions--many words occurring
in it, and many thoughts, not to be found elsewhere in
the Bible. How difficult our translators found it may be
seen by the number of words which they were obliged
to insert in italics, and the doubtful renderings which
they have suggested in the margin. One instance of
this, in passing, we will notice in this place--it will be
familiar to everyone as the passage quoted at the opening
of the English burial service, and adduced as one of
the doctrinal proofs of the resurrection of the body: "I
know that my Redeemer liveth, and that He shall stand
at the latter day upon the earth; and though, after my
skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see
God." So this passage stands in the ordinary version.
But the words in italics have nothing answering to
them in the original--they were all added by the
translators to fill out their interpretation; and for in
my flesh, they tell us themselves in the margin that we
may read (and, in fact, we ought to read, and must read)
"out of," or "without" my flesh. It is but to write
out the verses omitting the conjectural additions, and
making that one small, but vital correction, to see how
frail a support is there for so large a conclusion; "I
know that my Redeemer liveth, and shall stand at the
latter... upon the earth; and after my skin...
destroy this...; yet without my flesh I shall see
God." If there is any doctrine of a resurrection here,
it is a resurrection precisely not of the body, but of the
spirit. And now let us only add that the word translated
Redeemer is the technical expression for the
"avenger of blood"; and that the second paragraph
ought to be rendered--"and one to come after me (my
next of kin, to whom the avenging my injuries belongs)
shall stand upon my dust," and we shall see how much
was to be done towards the mere exegesis of the text.
This is an extreme instance, and no one will question
the general beauty and majesty of our translation; but
there are many mythical and physical allusions scattered
over the poem, which, in the sixteenth century, there
were positively no means of understanding; and perhaps,
too, there were mental tendencies in the translators
themselves which prevented them from adequately
apprehending even the drift and spirit of it. The form
of the story was too stringent to allow such tendencies
any latitude; but they appear, from time to time,
sufficiently to produce serious confusion. With these
recent assistances, therefore, we propose to say something
of the nature of this extraordinary book--a
book of which it is to say little to call it unequalled
of its kind, and which will, one day, perhaps, when it
is allowed to stand on its own merits, be seen towering
up alone, far away above all the poetry of the
world. How it found its way into the Canon, smiting as
it does through and through the most deeply-seated
Jewish prejudices, is the chief difficulty about it now;
to be explained only by a traditional acceptance among
the sacred books, dating back from the old times of the
national greatness, when the minds of the people were
hewn in a larger type than was to be found among
the pharisees of the great synagogue. But its authorship,
its date, and its history, are alike a mystery to
us; it existed at the time when the Canon was composed;
and this is all that we know beyond what we
can gather out of the language and the contents of the
poem itself.

Before going further, however, we must make room
for a few remarks of a very general kind. Let it have
been written when it would, it marks a period in which
the religious convictions of thinking men were passing
through a vast crisis; and we shall not understand it
without having before us clearly something of the
conditions which periods of such a kind always and
necessarily exhibit.

The history of religious speculation appears in extreme
outline to have been of the following kind. We
may conceive mankind to have been originally launched
into the universe with no knowledge either of themselves
or of the scene in which they were placed; with
no actual k

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