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Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2

by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay · English · Gutenberg #2168 · 846,474 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2

Author: Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay


        
Release date: June 26, 2008 [eBook #2168]
                Most recently updated: July 14, 2008

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2168

Credits: Produced by Mike Alder, Sue Asscher and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES — VOLUME 2 ***




Produced by Mike Alder and Sue Asscher





THE MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS AND SPEECHES OF LORD MACAULAY.

Contributions To The Edinburgh Review

By Thomas Babington Macaulay


VOLUME II.



CONTENTS.


CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.

John Dryden. (January 1828.)

History. (May 1828.)

Mill on Government. (March 1829.)

Westminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill. (June 1829.)

Utilitarian Theory of Government. (October 1829.)

Sadler's Law of Population. (July 1830.)

Sadler's Refutation Refuted. (January 1831.)

Mirabeau. (July 1832.)

Barere. (April 1844.)




MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS OF LORD MACAULAY.




CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.




JOHN DRYDEN. (January 1828.)


     "The Poetical Works of John Dryden".  In 2 volumes.
     University Edition.  London, 1826.


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

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

The same remark will apply equally to the fine arts. The laws on which
depend the progress and decline of poetry, painting, and sculpture,
operate with little less certainty than those which regulate the
periodical returns of heat and cold, of fertility and barrenness. Those
who seem to lead the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning
it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing. Without a just
apprehension of the laws to which we have alluded the merits and defects
of Dryden can be but imperfectly understood. We will, therefore, state
what we conceive them to be.

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

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

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

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

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

We do not mean to say that the contemporaries of Dante read with less
emotion than their descendants of Ugolino groping among the wasted
corpses of his children, or of Francesca starting at the tremulous kiss
and dropping the fatal volume. Far from it. We believe that they admired
these things less than ourselves, but that they felt them more. We
should perhaps say that they felt them too much to admire them. The
progress of a nation from barbarism to civilisation produces a change
similar to that which takes place during the progress of an individual
from infancy to mature age. What man does not remember with regret the
first time that he read Robinson Crusoe? Then, indeed, he was unable
to appreciate the powers of the writer; or, rather, he neither knew nor
cared whether the book had a writer at all. He probably thought it not
half so fine as some rant of Macpherson about dark-browed Foldath,
and white-bosomed Strinadona. He now values Fingal and Temora only as
showing with how little evidence a story may be believed, and with
how little merit a book may be popular. Of the romance of Defoe he
entertains the highest opinion. He perceives the hand of a master in ten
thousand touches which formerly he passed by without notice. But, though
he understands the merits of the narrative better than formerly, he is
far less interested by it. Xury, and Friday, and pretty Poll, the boat
with the shoulder-of-mutton sail, and the canoe which could not be
brought down to the water edge, the tent with its hedge and ladders, the
preserve of kids, and the den where the old goat died, can never again
be to him the realities which they were. The days when his favourite
volume set him upon making wheel-barrows and chairs, upon digging caves
and fencing huts in the garden, can never return. Such is the law of our
nature. Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once
enjoy the flowers of the spring of life and the fruits of its autumn,
the pleasures of close investigation and those of agreeable error. We
cannot sit at once in the front of the stage and behind the scenes. We
cannot be under the illusion of the spectacle, while we are watching the
movements of the ropes and pulleys which dispose it.

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

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

"Little more worth remembering occurred during the play, at the end of
which Jones asked him which of the players he liked best? To this he
answered, with some appearance of indignation at the question, 'The
King, without doubt.'--'Indeed, Mr Partridge,' says Mrs Miller, 'you
are not of the same opinion with the town; for they are all agreed that
Hamlet is acted by the best player who was ever on the stage.'--'He the
best player!' cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer; 'why I could
act as well as he myself. I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have
looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then to be
sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where
you told me he acted so fine, why any man, that is, any good man, that
had such a mother, would have done exactly the same. I know you are
only joking with me; but indeed, madam, though I never was at a play in
London, yet I have seen acting before in the country, and the King for
my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, and half as loud again as
the other. Anybody may see he is an actor.'"

In this excellent passage Partridge is represented as a very bad
theatrical critic. But none of those who laugh at him possess the tithe
of his sensibility to theatrical excellence. He admires in the wrong
place; but he trembles in the right place. It is indeed because he is
so much excited by the acting of Garrick, that he ranks him below the
strutting, mouthing performer, who personates the King. So, we have
heard it said that, in some parts of Spain and Portugal, an actor who
should represent a depraved character finely, instead of calling down
the applauses of the audience, is hissed and pelted without mercy.
It would be the same in England, if we, for one moment, thought that
Shylock or Iago was standing before us. While the dramatic art was in
its infancy at Athens, it produced similar effects on the ardent and
imaginative spectators. It is said that they blamed Aeschylus for
frightening them into fits with his Furies. Herodotus tells us that,
when Phyrnichus produced his tragedy on the fall of Miletus, they fined
him in a penalty of a thousand drachmas for torturing their feelings by
so pathetic an exhibition. They did not regard him as a great artist,
but merely as a man who had given them pain. When they woke from the
distressing illusion, they treated the author of it as they would have
treated a messenger who should have brought them fatal and alarming
tidings which turned out to be false. In the same manner, a child
screams with terror at the sight of a person in an ugly mask. He has
perhaps seen the mask put on. But his imagination is too strong for his
reason; and he entreats that it may be taken off.

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

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

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

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

Yet the effect of these early performances, imperfect as they must
necessarily be, is immense. All deficiencies are supplied by the
susceptibility of those to whom they are addressed. We all know what
pleasure a wooden doll, which may be bought for sixpence, will afford
to a little girl. She will require no other company. She will nurse it,
dress it, and talk to it all day. No grown-up man takes half so much
delight in one of the incomparable babies of Chantrey. In the same
manner, savages are more affected by the rude compositions of their
bards than nations more advanced in civilisation by the greatest
master-pieces of poetry.

In process of time, the instruments by which the imagination works are
brought to perfection. Men have not more imagination than their rude
ancestors. We strongly suspect that they have much less. But they
produce better works of imagination. Thus, up to a certain period, the
diminution of the poetical powers is far more than compensated by the
improvement of all the appliances and means of which those powers
stand in need. Then comes the short period of splendid and consummate
excellence. And then, from causes against which it is vain to struggle,
poetry begins to decline. The progress of language, which was at first
favourable, becomes fatal to it, and, instead of compensating for the
decay of the imagination, accelerates that decay, and renders it more
obvious. When the adventurer in the Arabian tale anointed one of his
eyes with the contents of the magical box, all the riches of the earth,
however widely dispersed, however sacredly concealed, became visible to
him. But, when he tried the experiment on both eyes, he was struck
with blindness. What the enchanted elixir was to the sight of the body,
language is to the sight of the imagination. At first it calls up
a world of glorious allusions; but, when it becomes too copious, it
altogether destroys the visual power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have attempted to show that, as knowledge is extended and as the
reason develops itself, the imitative arts decay. We should, therefore,
expect that the corruption of poetry would commence in the educated
classes of society. And this, in fact, is almost constantly the case.
The few great works of imagination which appear in a critical age are,
almost without exception, the works of uneducated men. Thus, at a
time when persons of quality translated French romances, and when the
universities celebrated royal deaths in verses about tritons and fauns,
a preaching tinker produced the Pilgrim's Progress. And thus a ploughman
startled a generation which had thought Hayley and Beattie great poets,
with the adventures of Tam O'Shanter. Even in the latter part of the
reign of Elizabeth the fashionable poetry had degenerated. It retained
few vestiges of the imagination of earlier times. It had not yet been
subjected to the rules of good taste. Affectation had completely tainted
madrigals and sonnets. The grotesque conceits and the tuneless numbers
of Donne were, in the time of James, the favourite models of composition
at Whitehall and at the Temple. But, though the literature of the Court
was in its decay, the literature of the people was in its perfection.
The Muses had taken sanctuary in the theatres, the haunts of a class
whose taste was not better than that of the Right Honourables and
singular good Lords who admired metaphysical love-verses, but whose
imagination retained all its freshness and vigour; whose censure and
approbation might be erroneously bestowed, but whose tears and laughter
was never in the wrong. The infection which had tainted lyric and
didactic poetry had but slightly and partially touched the drama. While
the noble and the learned were comparing eyes to burning-glasses, and
tears to terrestrial globes, coyness to an enthymeme, absence to a pair
of compasses, and an unrequited passion to the fortieth remainder-man in
an entail, Juliet leaning from the balcony, and Miranda smiling over the
chess-board, sent home many spectators, as kind and simple-hearted
as the master and mistress of Fletcher's Ralpho, to cry themselves to
sleep.

No species of fiction is so delightful to us as the old English drama.
Even its inferior productions possess a charm not to be found in any
other kind of poetry. It is the most lucid mirror that ever was held up
to nature. The creations of the great dramatists of Athens produce the
effect of magnificent sculptures, conceived by a mighty imagination,
polished with the utmost delicacy, embodying ideas of ineffable majesty
and beauty, but cold, pale, and rigid, with no bloom on the cheek, and
no speculation in the eye. In all the draperies, the figures, and the
faces, in the lovers and the tyrants, the Bacchanals and the Furies,
there is the same marble chillness and deadness. Most of the characters
of the French stage resemble the waxen gentlemen and ladies in the
window of a perfumer, rouged, curled, and bedizened, but fixed in
such stiff attitudes, and staring with eyes expressive of such utter
unmeaningness, that they cannot produce an illusion for a single moment.
In the English plays alone is to be found the warmth, the mellowness,
and the reality of painting. We know the minds of men and women, as we
know the faces of the men and women of Vandyke.

The excellence of these works is in a great measure the result of
two peculiarities, which the critics of the French school consider as
defects,--from the mixture of tragedy and comedy, and from the length
and extent of the action. The former is necessary to render the drama
a just representation of a world in which the laughers and weepers are
perpetually jostling each other,--in which every event has its
serious and ludicrous side. The latter enables us to form an intimate
acquaintance with characters with which we could not possibly become
familiar during the few hours to which the unities restrict the poet.
In this respect, the works of Shakspeare, in particular, are miracles
of art. In a piece, which may be read aloud in three hours, we see a
character gradually unfold all its recesses to us. We see it change with
the change of circumstances. The petulant youth rises into the politic
and warlike sovereign. The profuse and courteous philanthropist sours
into a hater and scorner of his kind. The tyrant is altered, by the
chastening of affliction, into a pensive moralist. The veteran general,
distinguished by coolness, sagacity, and self-command, sinks under a
conflict between love strong as death, and jealousy cruel as the grave.
The brave and loyal subject passes, step by step, to the extremities
of human depravity. We trace his progress, from the first dawnings of
unlawful ambition to the cynical melancholy of his impenitent remorse.
Yet, in these pieces, there are no unnatural transitions. Nothing is
omitted: nothing is crowded. Great as are the changes, narrow as is the
compass within which they are exhibited, they shock us as little as the
gradual alterations of those familiar faces which we see every evening
and every morning. The magical skill of the poet resembles that of the
Dervise in the Spectator, who condensed all the events of seven years
into the single moment during which the king held his head under the
water.

It is deserving of remark, that, at the time of which we speak, the
plays even of men not eminently distinguished by genius,--such, for
example, as Jonson,--were far superior to the best works of imagination
in other departments. Therefore, though we conceive that, from causes
which we have already investigated, our poetry must necessarily have
declined, we think that, unless its fate had been accelerated by
external attacks, it might have enjoyed an euthanasia, that genius might
have been kept alive by the drama till its place could, in some degree,
be supplied by taste,--that there would have been scarcely any interval
between the age of sublime invention and that of agreeable imitation.
The works of Shakspeare, which were not appreciated with any degree of
justice before the middle of the eighteenth century, might then have
been the recognised standards of excellence during the latter part of
the seventeenth; and he and the great Elizabethan writers might have
been almost immediately succeeded by a generation of poets similar to
those who adorn our own times.

But the Puritans drove imagination from its last asylum. They prohibited
theatrical representations, and stigmatised the whole race of dramatists
as enemies of morality and religion. Much that is objectionable may be
found in the writers whom they reprobated; but whether they took the
best measures for stopping the evil appears to us very doubtful, and
must, we think, have appeared doubtful to themselves, when, after the
lapse of a few years, they saw the unclean spirit whom they had cast out
return to his old haunts, with seven others fouler than himself.

By the extinction of the drama, the fashionable school of poetry,--a
school without truth of sentiment or harmony of versification,--without
the powers of an earlier, or the correctness of a later age,--was left
to enjoy undisputed ascendency. A vicious ingenuity, a morbid quickness
to perceive resemblances and analogies between things apparently
heterogeneous, constituted almost its only claim to admiration. Suckling
was dead. Milton was absorbed in political and theological controversy.
If Waller differed from the Cowleian sect of writers, he differed for
the worse. He had as little poetry as they, and much less wit; nor is
the languor of his verses less offensive than the ruggedness of theirs.
In Denham alone the faint dawn of a better manner was discernible.

But, low as was the state of our poetry during the civil war and the
Protectorate, a still deeper fall was at hand. Hitherto our literature
had been idiomatic. In mind as in situation we had been islanders. The
revolutions in our taste, like the revolutions in our government, had
been settled without the interference of strangers. Had this state of
things continued, the same just principles of reasoning which, about
this time, were applied with unprecedented success to every part of
philosophy would soon have conducted our ancestors to a sounder code of
criticism. There were already strong signs of improvement. Our prose
had at length worked itself clear from those quaint conceits which still
deformed almost every metrical composition. The parliamentary debates,
and the diplomatic correspondence of that eventful period, had
contributed much to this reform. In such bustling times, it was
absolutely necessary to speak and write to the purpose. The absurdities
of Puritanism had, perhaps, done more. At the time when that odious
style, which deforms the writings of Hall and of Lord Bacon, was almost
universal, had appeared that stupendous work, the English Bible,--a book
which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone
suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power. The respect
which the translators felt for the original prevented them from adding
any of the hideous decorations then in fashion. The groundwork of the
version, indeed, was of an earlier age. The familiarity with which the
Puritans, on almost every occasion, used the Scriptural phrases was no
doubt very ridiculous; but it produced good effects. It was a cant; but
it drove out a cant far more offensive.

The highest kind of poetry is, in a great measure, independent of those
circumstances which regulate the style of composition in prose. But with
that inferior species of poetry which succeeds to it the case is widely
different. In a few years, the good sense and good taste which had
weeded out affectation from moral and political treatises would, in the
natural course of things, have effected a similar reform in the sonnet
and the ode. The rigour of the victorious sectaries had relaxed.
A dominant religion is never ascetic. The Government connived at
theatrical representations. The influence of Shakspeare was once more
felt. But darker days were approaching. A foreign yoke was to be imposed
on our literature. Charles, surrounded by the companions of his long
exile, returned to govern a nation which ought never to have cast him
out or never to have received him back. Every year which he had passed
among strangers had rendered him more unfit to rule his countrymen.
In France he had seen the refractory magistracy humbled, and royal
prerogative, though exercised by a foreign priest in the name of
a child, victorious over all opposition. This spectacle naturally
gratified a prince to whose family the opposition of Parliaments had
been so fatal. Politeness was his solitary good quality. The insults
which he had suffered in Scotland had taught him to prize it. The
effeminacy and apathy of his disposition fitted him to excel in it. The
elegance and vivacity of the French manners fascinated him. With the
political maxims and the social habits of his favourite people, he
adopted their taste in composition, and, when seated on the throne, soon
rendered it fashionable, partly by direct patronage, but still more by
that contemptible policy, which, for a time, made England the last of
the nations, and raised Louis the Fourteenth to a height of power and
fame, such as no French sovereign had ever before attained.

It was to please Charles that rhyme was first introduced into our plays.
Thus, a rising blow, which would at any time have been mortal, was
dealt to the English Drama, then just recovering from its languishing
condition. Two detestable manners, the indigenous and the imported, were
now in a state of alternate conflict and amalgamation. The bombastic
meanness of the new style was blended with the ingenious absurdity of
the old; and the mixture produced something which the world had never
before seen, and which, we hope, it will never see again,--something,
by the side of which the worst nonsense of all other ages appears to
advantage--something, which those who have attempted to caricature it
have, against their will, been forced to flatter--of which the tragedy
of Bayes is a very favourable specimen. What Lord Dorset observed
to Edward Howard might have been addressed to almost all his
contemporaries--

     "As skilful divers to the bottom fall
     Swifter than those who cannot swim at all;
     So, in this way of writing without thinking,
     Thou hast a strange alacrity in sinking."

From this reproach some clever men of the world must be excepted, and
among them Dorset himself. Though by no means great poets, or even good
versifiers, they always wrote with meaning, and sometimes with wit.
Nothing indeed more strongly shows to what a miserable state literature
had fallen, than the immense superiority which the occasional rhymes,
carelessly thrown on paper by men of this class, possess over the
elaborate productions of almost all the professed authors. The reigning
taste was so bad, that the success of a writer was in inverse proportion
to his labour, and to his desire of excellence. An exception must be
made for Butler, who had as much wit and learning as Cowley, and who
knew, what Cowley never knew, how to use them. A great command of good
homely English distinguishes him still more from the other writers of
the time. As for Gondibert, those may criticise it who can read it.
Imagination was extinct. Taste was depraved. Poetry, driven from
palaces, colleges, and theatres, had found an asylum in the obscure
dwelling where a Great Man, born out of due season, in disgrace, penury,
pain and blindness, still kept uncontaminated a character and a genius
worthy of a better age.

Everything about Milton is wonderful; but nothing is so wonderful as
that, in an age so unfavourable to poetry, he should have produced the
greatest of modern epic poems. We are not sure that this is not in
some degree to be attributed to his want of sight. The imagination is
notoriously most active when the external world is shut out. In sleep
its illusions are perfect. They produce all the effect of realities. In
darkness its visions are always more distinct than in the light. Every
person who amuses himself with what is called building castles in the
air must have experienced this. We know artists who, before they attempt
to draw a face from memory, close their eyes, that they may recall a
more perfect image of the features and the expression. We are therefore
inclined to believe that the genius of Milton may have been preserved
from the influence of times so unfavourable to it by his infirmity.
Be this as it may, his works at first enjoyed a very small share of
popularity. To be neglected by his contemporaries was the penalty which
he paid for surpassing them. His great poem was not generally studied or
admired till writers far inferior to him had, by obsequiously cringing
to the public taste, acquired sufficient favour to reform it.

Of these, Dryden was the most eminent. Amidst the crowd of authors who,
during the earlier years of Charles the Second, courted notoriety
by every species of absurdity and affectation, he speedily became
conspicuous. No man exercised so much influence on the age. The reason
is obvious. On no man did the age exercise so much influence. He was
perhaps the greatest of those whom we have designated as the critical
poets; and his literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the
whole history of the school to which he belonged,--the rudeness and
extravagance of its infancy,--the propriety, the grace, the dignified
good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination
was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint
parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the
satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet.
The revolution through which English literature has been passing, from
the time of Cowley to that of Scott, may be seen in miniature within the
compass of his volumes.

His life divides itself into two parts. There is some debatable ground
on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with tolerable
accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be inclined to fix
as the date of a great change in his manner. During the preceding period
appeared some of his courtly panegyrics--his Annus Mirabilis, and most
of his plays; indeed, all his rhyming tragedies. To the subsequent
period belong his best dramas,--All for Love, the Spanish Friar, and
Sebastian,--his satires, his translations, his didactic poems, his
fables, and his odes.

Of the small pieces which were presented to chancellors and princes it
would scarcely be fair to speak. The greatest advantage which the Fine
Arts derive from the extension of knowledge is, that the patronage of
individuals becomes unnecessary. Some writers still affect to regret the
age of patronage. None but bad writers have reason to regret it. It is
always an age of general ignorance. Where ten thousand readers are eager
for the appearance of a book, a small contribution from each makes up
a splendid remuneration for the author. Where literature is a luxury,
confined to few, each of them must pay high. If the Empress Catherine,
for example, wanted an epic poem, she must have wholly supported
the poet;--just as, in a remote country village, a man who wants a
muttonchop is sometimes forced to take the whole sheep;--a thing which
never happens where the demand is large. But men who pay largely for the
gratification of their taste, will expect to have it united with some
gratification to their vanity. Flattery is carried to a shameless
extent; and the habit of flattery almost inevitably introduces a
false taste into composition. Its language is made up of hyperbolical
commonplaces,--offensive from their triteness,--still more offensive
from their extravagance. In no school is the trick of overstepping the
modesty of nature so speedily acquired. The writer, accustomed to find
exaggeration acceptable and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. It
is not strange, therefore, that the early panegyrical verses of Dryden
should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound with the conceits
which his immediate predecessors had brought into fashion. But his
language and his versification were already far superior to theirs.

The Annus Mirabilis shows great command of expression, and a fine ear
for heroic rhyme. Here its merits end. Not only has it no claim to be
called poetry, but it seems to be the work of a man who could never, by
any possibility, write poetry. Its affected similes are the best part
of it. Gaudy weeds present a more encouraging spectacle than utter
barrenness. There is scarcely a single stanza in this long work to which
the imagination seems to have contributed anything. It is produced, not
by creation, but by construction. It is made up, not of pictures, but of
inferences. We will give a single instance, and certainly a favourable
instance,--a quatrain which Johnson has praised. Dryden is describing
the sea-fight with the Dutch--

     "Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball;
     And now their odours armed against them fly.
     Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall,
     And some by aromatic splinters die."

The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the
situation of the sufferers or the spectators. His narration ought to
produce feelings similar to those which would be excited by the event
itself. Is this the case here? Who, in a sea-fight, ever thought of the
price of the china which beats out the brains of a sailor; or of the
odour of the splinter which shatters his leg? It is not by an act of the
imagination, at once calling up the scene before the interior eye, but
by painful meditation,--by turning the subject round and round,--by
tracing out facts into remote consequences,--that these incongruous
topics are introduced into the description. Homer, it is true,
perpetually uses epithets which are not peculiarly appropriate.
Achilles is the swift-footed, when he is sitting still. Ulysses is the
much-enduring, when he has nothing to endure. Every spear casts a long
shadow, every ox has crooked horns, and every woman a high bosom, though
these particulars may be quite beside the purpose. In our old ballads a
similar practice prevails. The gold is always red, and the ladies always
gay, though nothing whatever may depend on the hue of the gold, or the
temper of the ladies. But these adjectives are mere customary additions.
They merge in the substantives to which they are attached. If they at
all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so slight as in no respect
to alter the general effect. In the passage which we have quoted from
Dryden the case is very different. "Preciously" and "aromatic" divert
our whole attention to themselves, and dissolve the image of the battle
in a moment. The whole poem reminds us of Lucan, and of the worst parts
of Lucan,--the sea-fight in the Bay of Marseilles, for example. The
description of the two fleets during the night is perhaps the only
passage which ought to be exempted from this censure. If it was from
the Annus Mirabilis that Milton formed his opinion, when he pronounced
Dryden a good rhymer but no poet, he certainly judged correctly. But
Dryden was, as we have said, one of those writers in whom the period of
imagination does not precede, but follow, the period of observation and
reflection.

His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, are admirable subjects for
those who wish to study the morbid anatomy of the drama. He was utterly
destitute of the power of exhibiting real human beings. Even in the far
inferior talent of composing characters out of those elements into
which the imperfect process of our reason can resolve them, he was very
deficient. His men are not even good personifications; they are not
well-assorted assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes
a very coarse and marked distinction, and gives us, not a likeness, but
a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded, and
everything else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an inn-door,
whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only
in his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill. For most of
his pictures seem, like Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed
not to resemble anything in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or
in the waters under the earth.

The latter manner he practises most frequently in his tragedies, the
former in his comedies. The comic characters are, without mixture,
loathsome and despicable. The men of Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad
enough. Those of Smollett are perhaps worse. But they do not approach
to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of
Dryden. The vices of these last are set off by a certain fierce hard
impudence, to which we know nothing comparable. Their love is the
appetite of beasts; their friendship the confederacy of knaves. The
ladies seem to have been expressly created to form helps meet for such
gentlemen. In deceiving and insulting their old fathers they do not
perhaps exceed the license which, by immemorial prescription, has been
allowed to heroines. But they also cheat at cards, rob strong boxes, put
up their favours to auction, betray their friends, abuse their rivals
in the style of Billingsgate, and invite their lovers in the language
of the Piazza. These, it must be remembered, are not the valets and
waiting-women, the Mascarilles and Nerines, but the recognised heroes
and heroines who appear as the representatives of good society, and who,
at the end of the fifth act, marry and live very happily ever after. The
sensuality, baseness, and malice of their natures is unredeemed by any
quality of a different description,--by any touch of kindness,--or even
by any honest burst of hearty hatred and revenge. We are in a world
where there is no humanity, no veracity, no sense of shame,--a world for
which any good-natured man would gladly take in exchange the society of
Milton's devils. But as soon as we enter the regions of Tragedy, we find
a great change. There is no lack of fine sentiment there. Metastasio
is surpassed in his own department. Scuderi is out-scuderied. We are
introduced to people whose proceedings we can trace to no motive,--of
whose feelings we can form no more idea than of a sixth sense. We have
left a race of creatures, whose love is as delicate and affectionate
as the passion which an alderman feels for a turtle. We find ourselves
among beings, whose love is a purely disinterested emotion,--a loyalty
extending to passive obedience,--a religion, like that of the Quietists,
unsupported by any sanction of hope or fear. We see nothing but
despotism without power, and sacrifices without compensation.

We will give a few instances. In Aurengzebe, Arimant, governor of Agra,
falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects his suit with
scorn; but assures him that she shall make great use of her power over
him. He threatens to be angry. She answers, very coolly:

     "Do not:  your anger, like your love, is vain:
     Whene'er I please, you must be pleased again.
     Knowing what power I have your will to bend,
     I'll use it; for I need just such a friend."

This is no idle menace. She soon brings a letter addressed to
his rival,--orders him to read it,--asks him whether he thinks it
sufficiently tender,--and finally commands him to carry it himself. Such
tyranny as this, it may be thought, would justify resistance. Arimant
does indeed venture to remonstrate:--

     "This fatal paper rather let me tear,
     Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear."

The answer of the lady is incomparable:--

     "You may; but 'twill not be your best advice;
     'Twill only give me pains of writing twice.
     You know you must obey me, soon or late.
     Why should you vainly struggle with your fate?"

Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something about
fate and free-will, and walks off with the billet-doux.

In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Almeria with a garland as a
token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies:--

     "I take this garland, not as given by you;
     But as my merit's and my beauty's due;
     As for the crown which you, my slave, possess,
     To share it with you would but make me less."

In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents
to murder his two sons and a benefactor to whom he feels the warmest
gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty
tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that she smiles upon his rival.

     "Lynd.  And when did I my power so far resign,
             That you should regulate each look of mine?

     Abdel.  Then, when you gave your love, you gave that power.

     Lynd.  'Twas during pleasure--'tis revoked this hour.

     Abdel.  I'll hate you, and this visit is my last.

     Lynd.  Do, if you can:  you know I hold you fast."

That these passages violate all historical propriety, that sentiments to
which nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of
Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra, is a light accusation. We
have no objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian puritan, or a
Bohemian seaport. While the faces are good, we care little about the
back-ground. Sir Joshua Reynolds says that the curtains and hangings
in an historical painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely
drapery. The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The
truth of character is the first object; the truth of place and time is
to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself could tell the
actor to turn out his toes, and remind him that Keeper Hatton was
a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time, a writer of a very
different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in
the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery.

We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not Moors or
Americans, but because they are not men and women;--not because love,
such as he represents it, could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, but
because it could not exist anywhere. As is the love of his heroes, such
are all their other emotions. All their qualities, their courage, their
generosity, their pride, are on the same colossal scale. Justice and
prudence are virtues which can exist only in a moderate degree, and
which change their nature and their name if pushed to excess. Of justice
and prudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favourites destitute. He
did not care to give them what he could not give without measure. The
tyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes altered by a few touches,
similar to those which transformed the honest face of Sir Roger de
Coverley into the Saracen's head. Through the grin and frown the
original features are still perceptible.

It is in the tragi-comedies that these absurdities strike us most.
The two races of men, or rather the angels and the baboons, are there
presented to us together. We meet in one scene with nothing but
gross, selfish, unblushing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as
a punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, are condemned to talk
nothing but prose. But, as soon as we meet with people who speak in
verse, we know that we are in society which would have enraptured the
Cathos and Madelon of Moliere, in society for which Oroondates would
have too little of the lover, and Clelia too much of the coquette.

As Dryden was unable to render his plays interesting by means of that
which is the peculiar and appropriate excellence of the drama, it was
necessary that he should find some substitute for it. In his comedies he
supplied its place, sometimes by wit, but more frequently by intrigue,
by disguises, mistakes of persons, dialogues at cross purposes,
hair-breadth escapes, perplexing concealments, and surprising
disclosures. He thus succeeded at least in making these pieces very
amusing.

In his tragedies he trusted, and not altogether without reason, to
his diction and his versification. It was on this account, in all
probability, that he so eagerly adopted, and so reluctantly abandoned,
the practice of rhyming in his plays. What is unnatural appears less
unnatural in that species of verse than in lines which approach more
nearly to common conversation; and in the management of the heroic
couplet Dryden has never been equalled. It is unnecessary to urge any
arguments against a fashion now universally condemned. But it is worthy
of observation, that, though Dryden was deficient in that talent which
blank verse exhibits to the greatest advantage, and was certainly the
best writer of heroic rhyme in our language, yet the plays which have,
from the time of their first appearance, been considered as his best,
are in blank verse. No experiment can be more decisive.

It must be allowed that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies contains
good description and magnificent rhetoric. But, even when we forget that
they are plays, and, passing by their dramatic improprieties, consider
them with reference to the language, we are perpetually disgusted by
passages which it is difficult to conceive how any author could have
written, or any audience have tolerated, rants in which the raving
violence of the manner forms a strange contrast with the abject tameness
of the thought. The author laid the whole fault on the audience, and
declared that, when he wrote them, he considered them bad enough to
please. This defence is unworthy of a man of genius, and after all, is
no defence. Otway pleased without rant; and so might Dryden have done,
if he had possessed the powers of Otway. The fact is, that he had a
tendency to bombast, which, though subsequently corrected by time
and thought, was never wholly removed, and which showed itself in
performances not designed to please the rude mob of the theatre.

Some indulgent critics have represented this failing as an indication
of genius, as the profusion of unlimited wealth, the wantonness of
exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear a nearer affinity to the
tawdriness of poverty, or the spasms and convulsions of weakness. Dryden
surely had not more imagination than Homer, Dante, or Milton, who
never fall into this vice. The swelling diction of Aeschylus and Isaiah
resembles that of Almanzor and Maximin no more than the tumidity of a
muscle resembles the tumidity of a boil. The former is symptomatic
of health and strength, the latter of debility and disease. If ever
Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along,
but when he is hurrying his imagination along,--when his mind is for a
moment jaded,--when, as was said of Euripides, he resembles a lion, who
excites his own fury by lashing himself with his tail. What happened
to Shakspeare from the occasional suspension of his powers happened
to Dryden from constant impotence. He, like his confederate Lee, had
judgment enough to appreciate the great poets of the preceding age, but
not judgment enough to shun competition with them. He felt and admired
their wild and daring sublimity. That it belonged to another age than
that in which he lived and required other talents than those which
he possessed, that, in aspiring to emulate it, he was wasting, in
a hopeless attempt, powers which might render him pre-eminent in a
different career, was a lesson which he did not learn till late. As
those knavish enthusiasts, the French prophets, courted inspiration by
mimicking the writhings, swoonings, and gaspings which they considered
as its symptoms, he attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury,
to bring on a real paroxysm; and, like them, he got nothing but his
distortions for his pains.

Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated Pindar
to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen wings, and who
experienced so fatal and ignominious a fall. His own admirable good
sense preserved him from this error, and taught him to cultivate a
style in which excellence was within his reach. Dryden had not the same
self-knowledge. He saw that the greatest poets were never so successful
as when they rushed beyond the ordinary bounds, and that some
inexplicable good fortune preserved them from tripping even when they
staggered on the brink of nonsense. He did not perceive that they were
guided and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from
the dictation of the imagination; and they found a response in the
imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work himself,
by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness, a rational
frenzy.

In looking over the admirable designs which accompany the Faust, we
have always been much struck by one which represents the wizard and the
tempter riding at full speed. The demon sits on his furious horse as
heedlessly as if he were reposing on a chair. That he should keep his
saddle in such a posture, would seem impossible to any who did not
know that he was secure in the privileges of a superhuman nature. The
attitude of Faust, on the contrary, is the perfection of horsemanship.
Poets of the first order might safely write as desperately as
Mephistopheles rode. But Dryden, though admitted to communion with
higher spirits, though armed with a portion of their power, and
intrusted with some of their secrets, was of another race. What they
might securely venture to do, it was madness in him to attempt. It
was necessary that taste and critical science should supply his
deficiencies.

We will give a few examples. Nothing can be finer than the description
of Hector at the Grecian wall:--

     o d ar esthore phaidimos Ektor,
     Nukti thoe atalantos upopia lampe de chalko
     Smerdaleo, ton eesto peri chroi doia de chersi
     Dour echen ouk an tis min erukakoi antibolesas,
     Nosphi theun, ot esalto pulas puri d osse dedeei.
     --Autika d oi men teichos uperbasan, oi de kat autas
     Poietas esechunto pulas Danaioi d ephobethen
     Neas ana glaphuras omados d aliastos etuchthe.

What daring expressions! Yet how significant! How picturesque! Hector
seems to rise up in his strength and fury. The gloom of night in his
frown,--the fire burning in his eyes,--the javelins and the
blazing armour,--the mighty rush through the gates and down
the battlements,--the trampling and the infinite roar of the
multitude,--everything is with us; everything is real.

Dryden has described a very similar event in Maximin, and has done his
best to be sublime, as follows:--

     "There with a forest of their darts he strove,
     And stood like Capaneus defying Jove;
     With his broad sword the boldest beating down,
     Till Fate grew pale, lest he should win the town,
     And turn'd the iron leaves of its dark book
     To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook."

How exquisite is the imagery of the fairy-songs in the Tempest and the
Midsummer Night's Dream; Ariel riding through the twilight on the
bat, or sucking in the bells of flowers with the bee; or the little
bower-women of Titania, driving the spiders from the couch of the Queen!
Dryden truly said, that

     "Shakspeare's magic could not copied be;
     Within that circle none durst walk but he."

It would have been well if he had not himself dared to step within
the enchanted line, and drawn on himself a fate similar to that
which, according to the old superstition, punished such presumptuous
interference. The following lines are parts of the song of his
fairies:--

     "Merry, merry, merry, we sail from the East,
     Half-tippled at a rainbow feast.
     In the bright moonshine, while winds whistle loud,
     Tivy, tivy, tivy, we mount and we fly,
     All racking along in a downy white cloud;
     And lest our leap from the sky prove too far,
     We slide on the back of a new falling star,
     And drop from above
     In a jelly of love."

These are very favourable instances. Those who wish for a bad one may
read the dying speeches of Maximin, and may compare them with the last
scenes of Othello and Lear.

If Dryden had died before the expiration of the first of the periods
into which we have divided his literary life, he would have left a
reputation, at best, little higher than that of Lee or Davenant. He
would have been known only to men of letters; and by them he would have
been mentioned as a writer who threw away, on subjects which he was
incompetent to treat, powers which, judiciously employed, might have
raised him to eminence; whose diction and whose numbers had sometimes
very high merit, but all whose works were blemished by a false taste,
and by errors of gross negligence. A few of his prologues and epilogues
might perhaps still have been remembered and quoted. In these little
pieces he early showed all the powers which afterwards rendered him the
greatest of modern satirists. But, during the latter part of his
life, he gradually abandoned the drama. His plays appeared at longer
intervals. He renounced rhyme in tragedy. His language became less
turgid--his characters less exaggerated. He did not indeed produce
correct representations of human nature; but he ceased to daub such
monstrous chimeras as those which abound in his earlier pieces. Here and
there passages occur worthy of the best ages of the British stage. The
style which the drama requires changes with every change of character
and situation. He who can vary his manner to suit the variation is the
great dramatist; but he who excels in one manner only will, when that
manner happens to be appropriate, appear to be a great dramatist; as the
hands of a watch which does not go point right once in the twelve hours.
Sometimes there is a scene of solemn debate. This a mere rhetorician may
write as well as the greatest tragedian that ever lived. We confess
that to us the speech of Sempronius in Cato seems very nearly as good
as Shakspeare could have made it. But when the senate breaks up, and we
find that the lovers and their mistresses, the hero, the villain, and
the deputy-villain, all continue to harangue in the same style, we
perceive the difference between a man who can write a play and a man who
can write a speech. In the same manner, wit, a talent for description,
or a talent for narration, may, for a time, pass for dramatic genius.
Dryden was an incomparable reasoner in verse. He was conscious of his
power; he was proud of it; and the authors of the Rehearsal justly
charged him with abusing it. His warriors and princesses are fond of
discussing points of amorous casuistry, such as would have delighted a
Parliament of Love. They frequently go still deeper, and speculate on
philosophical necessity and the origin of evil.

There were, however, some occasions which absolutely required this
peculiar talent. Then Dryden was indeed at home. All his best scenes are
of this description. They are all between men; for the heroes of Dryden,
like many other gentlemen, can never talk sense when ladies are in
company. They are all intended to exhibit the empire of reason
over violent passion. We have two interlocutors, the one eager and
impassioned, the other high, cool, and judicious. The composed and
rational character gradually acquires the ascendency. His fierce
companion is first inflamed to rage by his reproaches, then overawed
by his equanimity, convinced by his arguments, and soothed by his
persuasions. This is the case in the scene between Hector and Troilus,
in that between Antony and Ventidius, and in that between Sebastian and
Dorax. Nothing of the same kind in Shakspeare is equal to them, except
the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which is worth them all three.

Some years before his death, Dryden altogether ceased to write for the
stage. He had turned his powers in a new direction, with success
the most splendid and decisive. His taste had gradually awakened his
creative faculties. The first rank in poetry was beyond his reach; but
he challenged and secured the most honourable place in the second. His
imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich; it enabled him to run,
though not to soar. When he attempted the highest flights, he became
ridiculous; but, while he remained in a lower region, he out-stripped
all competitors.

All his natural and all his acquired powers fitted him to found a good
critical school of poetry. Indeed he carried his reforms too far for
his age. After his death our literature retrograded; and a century was
necessary to bring it back to the point at which he left it. The general
soundness and healthfulness of his mental constitution, his information,
of vast superficies, though of small volume, his wit scarcely inferior
to that of the most distinguished followers of Donne, his eloquence,
grave, deliberate, and commanding, could not save him from disgraceful
failure as a rival of Shakspeare, but raised him far above the level of
Boileau. His command of language was immense. With him died the secret
of the old poetical diction of England,--the art of producing rich
effects by familiar words. In the following century it was as completely
lost as the Gothic method of painting glass, and was but poorly supplied
by the laborious and tesselated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the
other hand, he was the first writer under whose skilful management the
scientific vocabulary fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this
department, he succeeded as completely as his contemporary Gibbons
succeeded in the similar enterprise of carving the most delicate flowers
from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became
ductile at his touch. His versification, in the same manner, while it
gave the first model of that neatness and precision which the following
generation esteemed so highly, exhibited at the same time, the last
examples of nobleness, freedom, variety of pause, and cadence. His
tragedies in rhyme, however worthless in themselves, had at least served
the purpose of nonsense-verses; they had taught him all the arts of
melody which the heroic couplet admits. For bombast, his prevailing
vice, his new subjects gave little opportunity; his better taste
gradually discarded it.

He possessed, as we have said, in a pre-eminent degree the power of
reasoning in verse; and this power was now peculiarly useful to him. His
logic is by no means uniformly sound. On points of criticism, he always
reasons ingeniously; and when he is disposed to be honest, correctly.
But the theological and political questions which he undertook to treat
in verse were precisely those which he understood least. His arguments,
therefore, are often worthless. But the manner in which they are stated
is beyond all praise. The style is transparent. The topics follow each
other in the happiest order. The objections are drawn up in such a
manner that the whole fire of the reply may be brought to bear on them.
The circumlocutions which are substituted for technical phrases are
clear, neat, and exact. The illustrations at once adorn and elucidate
the reasoning. The sparkling epigrams of Cowley, and the simple
garrulity of the burlesque poets of Italy, are alternately employed, in
the happiest manner, to give effect to what is obvious or clearness to
what is obscure.

His literary creed was catholic, even to latitudinarianism; not from any
want of acuteness, but from a disposition to be easily satisfied. He was
quick to discern the smallest glimpse of merit; he was indulgent even to
gross improprieties, when accompanied by any redeeming talent. When he
said a severe thing, it was to serve a temporary purpose,--to support an
argument, or to tease a rival. Never was so able a critic so free
from fastidiousness. He loved the old poets, especially Shakspeare. He
admired the ingenuity which Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He
did justice, amidst the general silence, to the memory of Milton. He
praised to the skies the school-boy lines of Addison. Always looking on
the fair side of every object, he admired extravagance on account of the
invention which he supposed it to indicate; he excused affectation
in favour of wit; he tolerated even tameness for the sake of the
correctness which was its concomitant.

It was probably to this turn of mind, rather than to the more
disgraceful causes which Johnson has assigned, that we are to attribute
the exaggeration which disfigures the panegyrics of Dryden. No writer,
it must be owned, has carried the flattery of dedication to a greater
length. But this was not, we suspect, merely interested servility: it
was the overflowing of a mind singularly disposed to admiration,--of a
mind which diminished vices, and magnified virtues and obligations. The
most adulatory of his addresses is that in which he dedicates the State
of Innocence to Mary of Modena. Johnson thinks it strange that any
man should use such language without self-detestation. But he has not
remarked that to the very same work is prefixed an eulogium on Milton,
which certainly could not have been acceptable at the Court of Charles
the Second. Many years later, when Whig principles were in a great
measure triumphant, Sprat refused to admit a monument of John Phillips
into Westminster Abbey--because, in the epitaph, the name of Milton
incidentally occurred. The walls of his church, he declared, should not
be polluted by the name of a republican! Dryden was attached, both
by principle and interest, to the Court. But nothing could deaden his
sensibility to excellence. We are unwilling to accuse him severely,
because the same disposition, which prompted him to pay so generous a
tribute to the memory of a poet whom his patrons detested, hurried him
into extravagance when he described a princess distinguished by the
splendour of her beauty and the graciousness of her manners.

This is an amiable temper; but it is not the temper of great men. Where
there is elevation of character, there will be fastidiousness. It
is only in novels and on tombstones that we meet with people who are
indulgent to the faults of others, and unmerciful to their own; and
Dryden, at all events, was not one of these paragons. His charity was
extended most liberally to others; but it certainly began at home. In
taste he was by no means deficient. His critical works are, beyond all
comparison, superior to any which had, till then, appeared in England.
They were generally intended as apologies for his own poems, rather than
as expositions of general principles; he, therefore, often attempts
to deceive the reader by sophistry which could scarcely have
deceived himself. His dicta are the dicta, not of a judge, but of an
advocate:--often of an advocate in an unsound cause. Yet, in the very
act of misrepresenting the laws of composition, he shows how well he
understands them. But he was perpetually acting against his better
knowledge. His sins were sins against light. He trusted that what was
bad would be pardoned for the sake of what was good. What was good, he
took no pains to make better. He was not, like most persons who rise to
eminence, dissatisfied even with his best productions. He had set up no
unattainable standard of perfection, the contemplation of which might
at once improve and mortify him. His path was not attended by an
unapproachable mirage of excellence, for ever receding, and for ever
pursued. He was not disgusted by the negligence of others; and he
extended the same toleration to himself. His mind was of a slovenly
character,--fond of splendour, but indifferent to neatness. Hence most
of his writings exhibit the sluttish magnificence of a Russian noble,
all vermin and diamonds, dirty linen and inestimable sables. Those
faults which spring from affectation, time and thought in a great
measure removed from his poems. But his carelessness he retained to the
last. If towards the close of his life he less frequently went wrong
from negligence, it was only because long habits of composition
rendered it more easy to go right. In his best pieces we find false
rhymes,--triplets, in which the third line appears to be a mere
intruder, and, while it breaks the music, adds nothing to the
meaning,--gigantic Alexandrines of fourteen and sixteen syllables,
and truncated verses for which he never troubled himself to find a
termination or a partner.

Such are the beauties and the faults which may be found in profusion
throughout the later works of Dryden. A more just and complete estimate
of his natural and acquired powers,--of the merits of his style and of
its blemishes,--may be formed from the Hind and Panther, than from any
of his other writings. As a didactic poem, it is far superior to the
Religio Laici. The satirical parts, particularly the character of
Burnet, are scarcely inferior to the best passages in Absalom and
Achitophel. There are, moreover, occasional touches of a tenderness
which affects us more, because it is decent, rational, and manly, and
reminds us of the best scenes in his tragedies. His versification sinks
and swells in happy unison with the subject; and his wealth of
language seems to be unlimited. Yet, the carelessness with which he has
constructed his plot, and the innumerable inconsistencies into which
he is every moment falling, detract much from the pleasure which such
various excellence affords.

In Absalom and Achitophel he hit upon a new and rich vein, which he
worked with signal success. They ancient satirists were the subjects
of a despotic government. They were compelled to abstain from political
topics, and to confine their attention to the frailties of private life.
They might, indeed, sometimes venture to take liberties with public men,

     "Quorum Flaminia tegitur cinis atque Latina."

Thus Juvenal immortalised the obsequious senators who met to decide the
fate of the memorable turbot. His fourth satire frequently reminds us of
the great political poem of Dryden; but it was not written till Domitian
had fallen: and it wants something of the peculiar flavour which belongs
to contemporary invective alone. His anger has stood so long that,
though the body is not impaired, the effervescence, the first cream,
is gone. Boileau lay under similar restraints; and, if he had been free
from all restraints, would have been no match for our countryman.

The advantages which Dryden derived from the nature of his subject he
improved to the very utmost. His manner is almost perfect. The style
of Horace and Boileau is fit only for light subjects. The Frenchman
did indeed attempt to turn the theological reasonings of the Provincial
Letters into verse, but with very indifferent success. The glitter of
Pope is gold. The ardour of Persius is without brilliancy. Magnificent
versification and ingenious combinations rarely harmonise with the
expression of deep feeling. In Juvenal and Dryden alone we have the
sparkle and the heat together. Those great satirists succeeded in
communicating the fervour of their feelings to materials the most
incombustible, and kindled the whole mass into a blaze, at once dazzling
and destructive. We cannot, indeed, think, without regret, of the part
which so eminent a writer as Dryden took in the disputes of that period.
There was, no doubt, madness and wickedness on both sides. But there was
liberty on the one, and despotism on the other. On this point, however,
we will not dwell. At Talavera the English and French troops for a
moment suspended their conflict, to drink of a stream which flowed
between them. The shells were passed across from enemy to enemy without
apprehension or molestation. We, in the same manner, would rather
assist our political adversaries to drink with us of that fountain of
intellectual pleasure, which should be the common refreshment of both
parties, than disturb and pollute it with the havoc of unseasonable
hostilities.

Macflecnoe is inferior to Absalom and Achitophel only in the subject. In
the execution it is even superior. But the greatest work of Dryden was
the last, the Ode on Saint Cecilia's Day. It is the masterpiece of the
second class of poetry, and ranks but just below the great models of the
first. It reminds us of the Pedasus of Achilles--

     os, kai thnetos eon, epeth ippois athanatoisi.

By comparing it with the impotent ravings of the heroic tragedies we may
measure the progress which the mind of Dryden had made. He had learned
to avoid a too audacious competition with higher natures, to keep at
a distance from the verge of bombast or nonsense, to venture on no
expression which did not convey a distinct idea to his own mind. There
is none of that "darkness visible" of style which he had formerly
affected, and in which the greatest poets only can succeed. Everything
is definite, significant, and picturesque. His early writings resembled
the gigantic works of those Chinese gardeners who attempt to rival
nature herself, to form cataracts of terrific height and sound, to
raise precipitous ridges of mountains, and to imitate in artificial
plantations the vastness and the gloom of some primeval forest. This
manner he abandoned; nor did he ever adopt the Dutch taste which Pope
affected, the trim parterres, and the rectangular walks. He rather
resembled our Kents and Browns, who imitating the great features of
landscape without emulating them, consulting the genius of the place,
assisting nature and carefully disguising their art, produced, not a
Chamouni or a Niagara, but a Stowe or a Hagley.

We are, on the whole, inclined to regret that Dryden did not accomplish
his purpose of writing an epic poem. It certainly would not have been
a work of the highest rank. It would not have rivalled the Iliad, the
Odyssey, or the Paradise Lost; but it would have been superior to the
productions of Apollonius, Lucan, or Statius, and not inferior to the
Jerusalem Delivered. It would probably have been a vigorous narrative,
animated with something of the spirit of the old romances, enriched with
much splendid description, and interspersed with fine declamations and
disquisitions. The danger of Dryden would have been from aiming too
high; from dwelling too much, for example, on his angels of kingdoms,
and attempting a competition with that great writer who in his own
time had so incomparably succeeded in representing to us the sights and
sounds of another world. To Milton, and to Milton alone, belonged the
secrets of the great deep, the beach of sulphur, the ocean of fire, the
palaces of the fallen dominations, glimmering through the everlasting
shade, the silent wilderness of verdure and fragrance where armed angels
kept watch over the sleep of the first lovers, the portico of diamond,
the sea of jasper, the sapphire pavement empurpled with celestial roses,
and the infinite ranks of the Cherubim, blazing with adamant and gold.
The council, the tournament, the procession, the crowded cathedral, the
camp, the guard-room, the chase, were the proper scenes for Dryden.

But we have not space to pass in review all the works which Dryden
wrote. We, therefore, will not speculate longer on those which he might
possibly have written. He may, on the whole, be pronounced to have been
a man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a
sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who
succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who, in that
department, succeeded pre-eminently; and who with a more independent
spirit, a more anxious desire of excellence, and more respect for
himself, would, in his own walk, have attained to absolute perfection.




HISTORY. (May 1828.)

     "The Romance of History.  England."  By Henry Neele.
     London, 1828.

To write history respectably--that is, to abbreviate despatches, and
make extracts from speeches, to intersperse in due proportion epithets
of praise and abhorrence, to draw up antithetical characters of great
men, setting forth how many contradictory virtues and vices they united,
and abounding in "withs" and "withouts"--all this is very easy. But
to be a really great historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual
distinctions. Many scientific works are, in their kind, absolutely
perfect. There are poems which we should be inclined to designate as
faultless, or as disfigured only by blemishes which pass unnoticed in
the general blaze of excellence. There are speeches, some speeches of
Demosthenes particularly, in which it would be impossible to alter a
word without altering it for the worse. But we are acquainted with
no history which approaches to our notion of what a history ought to
be--with no history which does not widely depart, either on the right
hand or on the left, from the exact line.

The cause may easily be assigned. This province of literature is a
debatable land. It lies on the confines of two distinct territories.
It is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and, like other
districts similarly situated, it is ill defined, ill cultivated, and ill
regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the
Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and
absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction. It is sometimes
theory.

History, it has been said, is philosophy teaching by examples.
Unhappily, what the philosophy gains in soundness and depth the examples
generally lose in vividness. A perfect historian must possess an
imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and
picturesque. Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself
with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying
deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and
ingenious reasoner. Yet he must possess sufficient self-command to
abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis. Those who
can justly estimate these almost insuperable difficulties will not think
it strange that every writer should have failed, either in the narrative
or in the speculative department of history.

It may be laid down as a general rule, though subject to considerable
qualifications and exceptions, that history begins in novel and ends
in essay. Of the romantic historians Herodotus is the earliest and the
best. His animation, his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful talent
for description and dialogue, and the pure sweet flow of his language,
place him at the head of narrators. He reminds us of a delightful child.
There is a grace beyond the reach of affectation in his awkwardness, a
malice in his innocence, an intelligence in his nonsense, an insinuating
eloquence in his lisp. We know of no writer who makes such interest
for himself and his book in the heart of the reader. At the distance
of three-and-twenty centuries, we feel for him the same sort of pitying
fondness which Fontaine and Gay are said to have inspired in society.
He has written an incomparable book. He has written something better
perhaps than the best history; but he has not written a good history;
he is, from the first to the last chapter, an inventor. We do not here
refer merely to those gross fictions with which he has been reproached
by the critics of later times. We speak of that colouring which is
equally diffused over his whole narrative, and which perpetually leaves
the most sagacious reader in doubt what to reject and what to receive.
The most authentic parts of his work bear the same relation to his
wildest legends which Henry the Fifth bears to the Tempest. There was
an expedition undertaken by Xerxes against Greece; and there was an
invasion of France. There was a battle at Plataea; and there was
a battle at Agincourt. Cambridge and Exeter, the Constable and the
Dauphin, were persons as real as Demaratus and Pausanias. The harangue
of the Archbishop on the Salic Law and the Book of Numbers differs much
less from the orations which have in all ages proceeded from the right
reverend bench than the speeches of Mardonius and Artabanus from those
which were delivered at the council-board of Susa. Shakspeare gives us
enumerations of armies, and returns of killed and wounded, which are
not, we suspect, much less accurate than those of Herodotus. There are
passages in Herodotus nearly as long as acts of Shakspeare, in which
everything is told dramatically, and in which the narrative serves only
the purpose of stage-directions. It is possible, no doubt, that the
substance of some real conversations may have been reported to the
historian. But events which, if they ever happened, happened in ages and
nations so remote that the particulars could never have been known to
him, are related with the greatest minuteness of detail. We have all
that Candaules said to Gyges, and all that passed between Astyages and
Harpagus. We are, therefore, unable to judge whether, in the account
which he gives of transactions respecting which he might possibly have
been well informed, we can trust to anything beyond the naked outline;
whether, for example, the answer of Gelon to the ambassadors of the
Grecian confederacy, or the expressions which passed between Aristides
and Themistocles at their famous interview, have been correctly
transmitted to us. The great events are, no doubt, faithfully related.
So, probably, are many of the slighter circumstances; but which of them
it is impossible to ascertain. The fictions are so much like the facts,
and the facts so much like the fictions, that, with respect to many most
interesting particulars, our belief is neither given nor withheld, but
remains in an uneasy and interminable state of abeyance. We know that
there is truth; but we cannot exactly decide where it lies.

The faults of Herodotus are the faults of a simple and imaginative
mind. Children and servants are remarkably Herodotean in their style of
narration. They tell everything dramatically. Their "says hes" and "says
shes" are proverbial. Every person who has had to settle their disputes
knows that, even when they have no intention to deceive, their reports
of conversation always require to be carefully sifted. If an educated
man were giving an account of the late change of administration, he
would say--"Lord Goderich resigned; and the King, in consequence, sent
for the Duke of Wellington." A porter tells the story as if he had been
hid behind the curtains of the royal bed at Windsor: "So Lord Goderich
says, 'I cannot manage this business; I must go out.' So the
King says,--says he, 'Well, then, I must send for the Duke of
Wellington--that's all.'" This is in the very manner of the father of
history.

Herodotus wrote as it was natural that he should write. He wrote for a
nation susceptible, curious, lively, insatiably desirous of novelty
and excitement; for a nation in which the fine arts had attained their
highest excellence, but in which philosophy was still in its infancy.
His countrymen had but recently begun to cultivate prose composition.
Public transactions had generally been recorded in verse. The first
historians might, therefore, indulge without fear of censure in the
license allowed to their predecessors the bards. Books were few. The
events of former times were learned from tradition and from popular
ballads; the manners of foreign countries from the reports of
travellers. It is well known that the mystery which overhangs what is
distant, either in space or time, frequently prevents us from censuring
as unnatural what we perceive to be impossible. We stare at a dragoon
who has killed three French cuirassiers, as a prodigy; yet we read,
without the least disgust, how Godfrey slew his thousands, and Rinaldo
his ten thousands. Within the last hundred years, stories about China
and Bantam, which ought not to have imposed on an old nurse, were
gravely laid down as foundations of political theories by eminent
philosophers. What the time of the Crusades is to us, the generation of
Croesus and Solon was to the Greeks of the time of Herodotus. Babylon
was to them what Pekin was to the French academicians of the last
century.

For such a people was the book of Herodotus composed; and, if we may
trust to a report, not sanctioned indeed by writers of high authority,
but in itself not improbable, it was composed, not to be read, but to
be heard. It was not to the slow circulation of a few copies, which the
rich only could possess, that the aspiring author looked for his reward.
The great Olympian festival,--the solemnity which collected multitudes,
proud of the Grecian name, from the wildest mountains of Doris, and the
remotest colonies of Italy and Libya,--was to witness his triumph. The
interest of the narrative, and the beauty of the style, were aided
by the imposing effect of recitation,--by the splendour of the
spectacle,--by the powerful influence of sympathy. A critic who could
have asked for authorities in the midst of such a scene must have been
of a cold and sceptical nature; and few such critics were there. As was
the historian, such were the auditors,--inquisitive, credulous, easily
moved by religious awe or patriotic enthusiasm. They were the very
men to hear with delight of strange beasts, and birds, and trees,--of
dwarfs, and giants, and cannibals--of gods, whose very names it was
impiety to utter,--of ancient dynasties, which had left behind them
monuments surpassing all the works of later times,--of towns like
provinces,--of rivers like seas,--of stupendous walls, and temples, and
pyramids,--of the rites which the Magi performed at daybreak on the tops
of the mountains,--of the secrets inscribed on the eternal obelisks of
Memphis. With equal delight they would have listened to the
graceful romances of their own country. They now heard of the exact
accomplishment of obscure predictions, of the punishment of crimes over
which the justice of heaven had seemed to slumber,--of dreams, omens,
warnings from the dead,--of princesses, for whom noble suitors contended
in every generous exercise of strength and skill,--of infants, strangely
preserved from the dagger of the assassin, to fulfil high destinies.

As the narrative approached their own times, the interest became still
more absorbing. The chronicler had now to tell the story of that
great conflict from which Europe dates its intellectual and political
supremacy,--a story which, even at this distance of time, is the most
marvellous and the most touching in the annals of the human race,--a
story abounding with all that is wild and wonderful, with all that is
pathetic and animating; with the gigantic caprices of infinite wealth
and despotic power--with the mightier miracles of wisdom, of virtue,
and of courage. He told them of rivers dried up in a day,--of
provinces famished for a meal,--of a passage for ships hewn through the
mountains,--of a road for armies spread upon the waves,--of monarchies
and commonwealths swept away,--of anxiety, of terror, of confusion, of
despair!--and then of proud and stubborn hearts tried in that extremity
of evil, and not found wanting,--of resistance long maintained against
desperate odds,--of lives dearly sold, when resistance could be
maintained no more,--of signal deliverance, and of unsparing revenge.
Whatever gave a stronger air of reality to a narrative so well
calculated to inflame the passions, and to flatter national pride, was
certain to be favourably received.

Between the time at which Herodotus is said to have composed his
history, and the close of the Peloponnesian war, about forty years
elapsed,--forty years, crowded with great military and political events.
The circumstances of that period produced a great effect on the
Grecian character; and nowhere was this effect so remarkable as in the
illustrious democracy of Athens. An Athenian, indeed, even in the
time of Herodotus, would scarcely have written a book so romantic and
garrulous as that of Herodotus. As civilisation advanced, the citizens
of that famous republic became still less visionary, and still less
simple-hearted. They aspired to know where their ancestors had been
content to doubt; they began to doubt where their ancestors had thought
it their duty to believe. Aristophanes is fond of alluding to this
change in the temper of his countrymen. The father and son, in the
Clouds, are evidently representatives of the generations to which they
respectively belonged. Nothing more clearly illustrates the nature of
this moral revolution than the change which passed upon tragedy. The
wild sublimity of Aeschylus became the scoff of every young Phidippides.
Lectures on abstruse points of philosophy, the fine distinctions of
casuistry, and the dazzling fence of rhetoric, were substituted for
poetry. The language lost something of that infantine sweetness which
had characterised it. It became less like the ancient Tuscan, and more
like the modern French.

The fashionable logic of the Greeks was, indeed, far from strict. Logic
never can be strict where books are scarce, and where information is
conveyed orally. We are all aware how frequently fallacies, which, when
set down on paper, are at once detected, pass for unanswerable arguments
when dexterously and volubly urged in Parliament, at the bar, or in
private conversation. The reason is evident. We cannot inspect them
closely enough to perceive their inaccuracy. We cannot readily compare
them with each other. We lose sight of one part of the subject before
another, which ought to be received in connection with it, comes before
us; and as there is no immutable record of what has been admitted and
of what has been denied, direct contradictions pass muster with little
difficulty. Almost all the education of a Greek consisted in talking and
listening. His opinions on government were picked up in the debates of
the assembly. If he wished to study metaphysics, instead of shutting
himself up with a book, he walked down to the market-place to look for
a sophist. So completely were men formed to these habits, that even
writing acquired a conversational air. The philosophers adopted the form
of dialogue, as the most natural mode of communicating knowledge. Their
reasonings have the merits and the defects which belong to that species
of composition, and are characterised rather by quickness and subtilty
than by depth and precision. Truth is exhibited in parts, and by
glimpses. Innumerable clever hints are given; but no sound and durable
system is erected. The argumentum ad hominem, a kind of argument most
efficacious in debate, but utterly useless for the investigation of
general principles, is among their favourite resources. Hence, though
nothing can be more admirable than the skill which Socrates displays in
the conversations which Plato has reported or invented, his victories,
for the most part, seem to us unprofitable. A trophy is set up; but no
new province is added to the dominions of the human mind.

Still, where thousands of keen and ready intellects were constantly
employed in speculating on the qualiies of actions and on the principles
of government, it was impossible that history should retain its whole
character. It became less gossiping and less picturesque; but much more
accurate, and somewhat more scientific.

The history of Thucydides differs from that of Herodotus as a portrait
differs from the representation of an imaginary scene; as the Burke or
Fox of Reynolds differs from his Ugolino or his Beaufort. In the former
case, the archetype is given: in the latter it is created. The faculties
which are required for the latter purpose are of a higher and rarer
order than those which suffice for the former, and indeed necessarily
comprise them. He who is able to paint what he sees with the eye of the
mind will surely be able to paint what he sees with the eye of the body.
He who can invent a story, and tell it well, will also be able to tell,
in an interesting manner, a story which he has not invented. If, in
practice, some of the best writers of fiction have been among the worst
writers of history, it has been because one of their talents had merged
in another so completely that it could not be severed; because, having
long been habituated to invent and narrate at the same time, they found
it impossible to narrate without inventing.

Some capricious and discontented artists have affected to consider
portrait-painting as unworthy of a man of genius. Some critics have
spoken in the same contemptuous manner of history. Johnson puts the case
thus: The historian tells either what is false or what is true: in the
former case he is no historian: in the latter he has no opportunity for
displaying his abilities: for truth is one: and all who tell the truth
must tell it alike.

It is not difficult to elude both the horns of this dilemma. We will
recur to the analogous art of portrait-painting. Any man with eyes and
hands may be taught to take a likeness. The process, up to a certain
point, is merely mechanical. If this were all, a man of talents might
justly despise the occupation. But we could mention portraits which are
resemblances,--but not mere resemblances; faithful,--but much more than
faithful; portraits which condense into one point of time, and exhibit,
at a single glance, the whole history of turbid and eventful lives--in
which the eye seems to scrutinise us, and the mouth to command us--in
which the brow menaces, and the lip almost quivers with scorn--in which
every wrinkle is a comment on some important transaction. The account
which Thucydides has given of the retreat from Syracuse is, among
narratives, what Vandyke's Lord Strafford is among paintings.

Diversity, it is said, implies error: truth is one, and admits of no
degrees. We answer, that this principle holds good only in abstract
reasonings. When we talk of the truth of imitation in the fine arts, we
mean an imperfect and a graduated truth. No picture is exactly like
the original; nor is a picture good in proportion as it is like the
original. When Sir Thomas Lawrence paints a handsome peeress, he does
not contemplate her through a powerful microscope, and transfer to the
canvas the pores of the skin, the blood-vessels of the eye, and all the
other beauties which Gulliver discovered in the Brobdingnagian maids
of honour. If he were to do this, the effect would not merely be
unpleasant, but, unless the scale of the picture were proportionably
enlarged, would be absolutely FALSE. And, after all, a microscope of
greater power than that which he had employed would convict him of
innumerable omissions. The same may be said of history. Perfectly and
absolutely true it cannot be: for, to be perfectly and absolutely
true, it ought to record ALL the slightest particulars of the slightest
transactions--all the things done and all the words uttered during
the time of which it treats. The omission of any circumstance, however
insignificant, would be a defect. If history were written thus, the
Bodleian Library would not contain the occurrences of a week. What is
told in the fullest and most accurate annals bears an infinitely small
proportion to what is suppressed. The difference between the copious
work of Clarendon and the account of the civil wars in the abridgment
of Goldsmith vanishes when compared with the immense mass of facts
respecting which both are equally silent.

No picture, then, and no history, can present us with the whole truth:
but those are the best pictures and the best histories which exhibit
such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole.
He who is deficient in the art of selection may, by showing nothing
but the truth, produce all the effect of the grossest falsehood. It
perpetually happens that one writer tells less truth than another,
merely because he tells more truths. In the imitative arts we constantly
see this. There are lines in the human face, and objects in landscape,
which stand in such relations to each other, that they ought either to
be all introduced into a painting together or all omitted together. A
sketch into which none of them enters may be excellent; but, if some
are given and others left out, though there are more points of likeness,
there is less likeness. An outline scrawled with a pen, which seizes the
marked features of a countenance, will give a much stronger idea of it
than a bad painting in oils. Yet the worst painting in oils that ever
hung at Somerset House resembles the original in many more particulars.
A bust of white marble may give an excellent idea of a blooming face.
Colour the lips and cheeks of the bust, leaving the hair and eyes
unaltered, and the similarity, instead of being more striking, will be
less so.

History has its foreground and its background: and it is principally in
the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another.
Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the
great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon; and a general
idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight touches.

In this respect no writer has ever equalled Thucydides. He was a perfect
master of the art of gradual diminution. His history is sometimes as
concise as a chronological chart; yet it is always perspicuous. It
is sometimes as minute as one of Lovelace's letters; yet it is never
prolix. He never fails to contract and to expand it in the right place.

Thucydides borrowed from Herodotus the practice of putting speeches of
his own into the mouths of his characters. In Herodotus this usage is
scarcely censurable. It is of a piece with his whole manner. But it is
altogether incongruous in the work of his successor, and violates, not
only the accuracy of history, but the decencies of fiction. When once
we enter into the spirit of Herodotus, we find no inconsistency. The
conventional probability of his drama is preserved from the beginning
to the end. The deliberate orations, and the familiar dialogues, are
in strict keeping with each other. But the speeches of Thucydides are
neither preceded nor followed by anything with which they harmonise.
They give to the whole book something of the grotesque character of
those Chinese pleasure-grounds in which perpendicular rocks of granite
start up in the midst of a soft green plain. Invention is shocking where
truth is in such close juxtaposition with it.

Thucydides honestly tells us that some of these discourses are purely
fictitious. He may have reported the substance of others correctly, but
it is clear from the internal evidence that he has preserved no more
than the substance. His own peculiar habits of thought and expression
are everywhere discernible. Individual and national peculiarities are
seldom to be traced in the sentiments, and never in the diction. The
oratory of the Corinthians and Thebans is not less Attic, either in
matter or in manner, than that of the Athenians. The style of Cleon is
as pure, as austere, as terse, and as significant, as that of Pericles.

In spite of this great fault, it must be allowed that Thucydides has
surpassed all his rivals in the art of historical narration, in the
art of producing an effect on the imagination, by skilful selection
and disposition, without indulging in the license of invention. But
narration, though an important part of the business of a historian, is
not the whole. To append a moral to a work of fiction is either useless
or superfluous. A fiction may give a more impressive effect to what
is already known; but it can teach nothing new. If it presents to us
characters and trains of events to which our experience furnishes
us with nothing similar, instead of deriving instruction from it, we
pronounce it unnatural. We do not form our opinions from it; but we
try it by our preconceived opinions. Fiction, therefore, is essentially
imitative. Its merit consists in its resemblance to a model with which
we are already familiar, or to which at least we can instantly refer.
Hence it is that the anecdotes which interest us most strongly in
authentic narrative are offensive when introduced into novels; that what
is called the romantic part of history is in fact the least romantic. It
is delightful as history, because it contradicts our previous notions
of human nature, and of the connection of causes and effects. It is, on
that very account, shocking and incongruous in fiction. In fiction,
the principles are given, to find the facts: in history, the facts are
given, to find the principles; and the writer who does not explain the
phenomena as well as state them, performs only one half of his office.
Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which
interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them like gold in the ore,
that the mass derives its whole value: and the precious particles are
generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation
is a task of the utmost difficulty.

Here Thucydides is deficient: the deficiency, indeed, is not
discreditable to him. It was the inevitable effect of circumstances. It
was in the nature of things necessary that, in some part of its progress
through political science, the human mind should reach that point which
it attained in his time. Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
The axioms of an English debating club would have been startling and
mysterious paradoxes to the most enlightened statesmen of Athens. But
it would be as absurd to speak contemptuously of the Athenian on this
account as to ridicule Strabo for not having given us an account of
Chili, or to talk of Ptolemy as we talk of Sir Richard Phillips. Still,
when we wish for solid geographical information, we must prefer the
solemn coxcombry of Pinkerton to the noble work of Strabo. If we wanted
instruction respecting the solar system, we should consult the silliest
girl from a boarding-school, rather than Ptolemy.

Thucydides was undoubtedly a sagacious and reflecting man. This clearly
appears from the ability with which he discusses practical questions.
But the talent of deciding on the circumstances of a particular case is
often possessed in the highest perfection by persons destitute of
the power of generalisation. Men skilled in the military tactics
of civilised nations have been amazed at the far-sightedness and
penetration which a Mohawk displays in concerting his stratagems, or in
discerning those of his enemies. In England, no class possesses so much
of that peculiar ability which is required for constructing ingenious
schemes, and for obviating remote difficulties, as the thieves and the
thief-takers. Women have more of this dexterity than men. Lawyers have
more of it than statesmen: statesmen have more of it than philosophers.
Monk had more of it than Harrington and all his club. Walpole had more
of it than Adam Smith or Beccaria. Indeed, the species of discipline
by which this dexterity is acquired tends to contract the mind, and to
render it incapable of abstract reasoning.

The Grecian statesmen of the age of Thucydides were distinguished by
their practical sagacity, their insight into motives, their skill in
devising means for the attainment of their ends. A state of society in
which the rich were constantly planning the oppression of the poor,
and the poor the spoliation of the rich, in which the ties of party
had superseded those of country, in which revolutions and
counter-revolutions were events of daily occurrence, was naturally
prolific in desperate and crafty political adventurers. This was the
very school in which men were likely to acquire the dissimulation of
Mazarin, the judicious temerity of Richelieu, the penetration, the
exquisite tact, the almost instinctive presentiment of approaching
events which gave so much authority to the counsel of Shaftesbury, that
"it was as if a man had inquired of the oracle of God." In this school
Thucydides studied; and his wisdom is that which such a school would
naturally afford. He judges better of circumstances than of principles.
The more a question is narrowed, the better he reasons upon it. His
work suggests many most important considerations respecting the first
principles of government and morals, the growth of factions, the
organisation of armies, and the mutual relations of communities. Yet
all his general observations on these subjects are very superficial. His
most judicious remarks differ from the remarks of a really philosophical
historian, as a sum correctly cast up by a bookkeeper from a general
expression discovered by an algebraist. The former is useful only in a
single transaction; the latter may be applied to an infinite number of
cases.

This opinion will, we fear, be considered as heterodox. For, not to
speak of the illusion which the sight of a Greek type, or the sound of
a Greek diphthong, often produces, there are some peculiarities in the
manner of Thucydides which in no small degree have tended to secure to
him the reputation of profundity. His book is evidently the book of a
man and a statesman; and in this respect presents a remarkable contrast
to the delightful childishness of Herodotus. Throughout it there is
an air of matured power, of grave and melancholy reflection, of
impartiality and habitual self-command. His feelings are rarely
indulged, and speedily repressed. Vulgar prejudices of every kind,
and particularly vulgar superstitions, he treats with a cold and
sober disdain peculiar to himself. His style is weighty, condensed,
antithetical, and not unfrequently obscure. But, when we look at his
political philosophy, without regard to these circumstances, we find
him to have been, what indeed it would have been a miracle if he had not
been, simply an Athenian of the fifth century before Christ.

Xenophon is commonly placed, but we think without much reason, in the
same rank with Herodotus and Thucydides. He resembles them, indeed,
in the purity and sweetness of his style; but in spirit, he rather
resembles that later school of historians whose works seem to be fables
composed for a moral, and who, in their eagerness to give us warnings
and examples, forget to give us men and women. The Life of Cyrus,
whether we look upon it as a history or as a romance, seems to us a
very wretched performance. The Expedition of the Ten Thousand, and the
History of Grecian Affairs, are certainly pleasant reading; but they
indicate no great power of mind. In truth, Xenophon, though his taste
was elegant, his disposition amiable, and his intercourse with the world
extensive, had, we suspect, rather a weak head. Such was evidently the
opinion of that extraordinary man to whom he early attached himself,
and for whose memory he entertained an idolatrous veneration. He came in
only for the milk with which Socrates nourished his babes in philosophy.
A few saws of morality, and a few of the simplest doctrines of natural
religion, were enough for the good young man. The strong meat, the bold
speculations on physical and metaphysical science, were reserved for
auditors of a different description. Even the lawless habits of a
captain of mercenary troops could not change the tendency which the
character of Xenophon early acquired. To the last, he seems to have
retained a sort of heathen Puritanism. The sentiments of piety and
virtue which abound in his works are those of a well-meaning man,
somewhat timid and narrow-minded, devout from constitution rather than
from rational conviction. He was as superstitious as Herodotus, but in
a way far more offensive. The very peculiarities which charm us in
an infant, the toothless mumbling, the stammering, the tottering, the
helplessness, the causeless tears and laughter, are disgusting in
old age. In the same manner, the absurdity which precedes a period
of general intelligence is often pleasing; that which follows it is
contemptible. The nonsense of Herodotus is that of a baby. The nonsense
of Xenophon is that of a dotard. His stories about dreams, omens, and
prophecies, present a strange contrast to the passages in which the
shrewd and incredulous Thucydides mentions the popular superstitions.
It is not quite clear that Xenophon was honest in his credulity; his
fanaticism was in some degree politic. He would have made an excellent
member of the Apostolic Camarilla. An alarmist by nature, an aristocrat
by party, he carried to an unreasonable excess his horror of popular
turbulence. The quiet atrocity of Sparta did not shock him in the same
manner; for he hated tumult more than crimes. He was desirous to find
restraints which might curb the passions of the multitude; and he
absurdly fancied that he had found them in a religion without
evidences or sanction, precepts or example, in a frigid system of
Theophilanthropy, supported by nursery tales.

Polybius and Arrian have given us authentic accounts of facts; and here
their merit ends. They were not men of comprehensive minds; they had
not the art of telling a story in an interesting manner. They have
in consequence been thrown into the shade by writers who, though less
studious of truth than themselves, understood far better the art of
producing effect,--by Livy and Quintus Curtius.

Yet Polybius and Arrian deserve high praise when compared with the
writers of that school of which Plutarch may be considered as the head.
For the historians of this class we must confess that we entertain a
peculiar aversion. They seem to have been pedants, who, though destitute
of those valuable qualities which are frequently found in conjunction
with pedantry, thought themselves great philosophers and great
politicians. They not only mislead their readers in every page, as to
particular facts, but they appear to have altogether misconceived the
whole character of the times of which they write. They were inhabitants
of an empire bounded by the Atlantic Ocean and the Euphrates, by the
ice of Scythia and the sands of Mauritania; composed of nations whose
manners, whose languages, whose religion, whose countenances and
complexions, were widely different; governed by one mighty despotism,
which had risen on the ruins of a thousand commonwealths and kingdoms.
Of liberty, such as it is in small democracies, of patriotism, such as
it is in small independent communities of any kind, they had, and they
could have, no experimental knowledge. But they had read of men who
exerted themselves in the cause of their country with an energy unknown
in later times, who had violated the dearest of domestic charities, or
voluntarily devoted themselves to death for the public good; and they
wondered at the degeneracy of their contemporaries. It never occurred to
them that the feelings which they so greatly admired sprung from local
and occasional causes; that they will always grow up spontaneously in
small societies; and that, in large empires, though they may be forced
into existence for a short time by peculiar circumstances, they cannot
be general or permanent. It is impossible that any man should feel for
a fortress on a remote frontier as he feels for his own house; that he
should grieve for a defeat in which ten thousand people whom he never
saw have fallen as he grieves for a defeat which has half unpeopled the
street in which he lives; that he should leave his home for a military
expedition in order to preserve the balance of power, as cheerfully as
he would leave it to repel invaders who had begun to burn all the corn
fields in his neighbourhood.

The writers of whom we speak should have considered this. They should
have considered that in patriotism, such as it existed amongst the
Greeks, there was nothing essentially and eternally good; that an
exclusive attachment to a particular society, though a natural,
and, under certain restrictions, a most useful sentiment, implies
no extraordinary attainments in wisdom or virtue; that, where it has
existed in an intense degree, it has turned states into gangs of robbers
whom their mutual fidelity has rendered more dangerous, has given a
character of peculiar atrocity to war, and has generated that worst of
all political evils, the tyranny of nations over nations.

Enthusiastically attached to the name of liberty, these historians
troubled themselves little about its definition. The Spartans, tormented
by ten thousand absurd restraints, unable to please themselves in the
choice of their wives, their suppers, or their company, compelled to
assume a peculiar manner, and to talk in a peculiar style, gloried in
their liberty. The aristocracy of Rome repeatedly made liberty a plea
for cutting off the favourites of the people. In almost all the little
commonwealths of antiquity, liberty was used as a pretext for measures
directed against everything which makes liberty valuable, for measures
which stifled discussion, corrupted the administration of justice, and
discouraged the accumulation of property. The writers, whose works we
are considering, confounded the sound with the substance, and the
means with the end. Their imaginations were inflamed by mystery. They
conceived of liberty as monks conceive of love, as cockneys conceive of
the happiness and innocence of rural life, as novel-reading sempstresses
conceive of Almack's and Grosvenor Square, accomplished Marquesses and
handsome Colonels of the Guards. In the relation of events, and the
delineation of characters, they have paid little attention to facts,
to the costume of the times of which they pretend to treat, or to the
general principles of human nature. They have been faithful only to
their own puerile and extravagant doctrines. Generals and statesmen are
metamorphosed into magnanimous coxcombs, from whose fulsome virtues we
turn away with disgust. The fine sayings and exploits of their heroes
remind us of the insufferable perfections of Sir Charles Grandison, and
affect us with a nausea similar to that which we feel when an actor,
in one of Morton's or Kotzebue's plays, lays his hand on his heart,
advances to the ground-lights, and mouths a moral sentence for the
edification of the gods.

These writers, men who knew not what it was to have a country, men who
had never enjoyed political rights, brought into fashion an offensive
cant about patriotism and zeal for freedom. What the English Puritans
did for the language of Christianity, what Scuderi did for the language
of love, they did for the language of public spirit. By habitual
exaggeration they made it mean. By monotonous emphasis they made it
feeble. They abused it till it became scarcely possible to use it with
effect.

Their ordinary rules of morality are deduced from extreme cases. The
common regimen which they prescribe for society is made up of those
desperate remedies which only its most desperate distempers require.
They look with peculiar complacency on actions which even those
who approve them consider as exceptions to laws of almost universal
application--which bear so close an affinity to the most atrocious
crimes that, even where it may be unjust to censure them, it is unsafe
to praise them. It is not strange, therefore, that some flagitious
instances of perfidy and cruelty should have been passed unchallenged in
such company, that grave moralists, with no personal interest at stake,
should have extolled, in the highest terms, deeds of which the
atrocity appalled even the infuriated factions in whose cause they were
perpetrated. The part which Timoleon took in the assassination of his
brother shocked many of his own partisans. The recollection of it preyed
long on his own mind. But it was reserved for historians who lived some
centuries later to discover that his conduct was a glorious display of
virtue, and to lament that, from the frailty of human nature, a man who
could perform so great an exploit could repent of it.

The writings of these men, and of their modern imitators, have produced
effects which deserve some notice. The English have been so long
accustomed to political speculation, and have enjoyed so large a measure
of practical liberty, that such works have produced little effect on
their minds. We have classical associations and great names of our own
which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times.
Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We
respect to the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol
and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and
Westminster Abbey, the place where the great men of twenty generations
have contended, the place where they sleep together! The list of
warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or
preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison
with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sidney is as noble as
the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think
with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell
saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death
was past. Even those parts of our history over which, on some accounts,
we would gladly throw a veil may be proudly opposed to those on which
the moralists of antiquity loved most to dwell. The enemy of English
liberty was not murdered by men whom he had pardoned and loaded with
benefits. He was not stabbed in the back by those who smiled and cringed
before his face. He was vanquished on fields of stricken battle; he was
arraigned, sentenced, and executed in the face of heaven and earth. Our
liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has
a character of its own,--a character which has taken a tinge from
the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the
peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a
language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of
meaning to ourselves, scarcely intelligible to strangers.

Here, therefore, the effect of books such as those which we have been
considering has been harmless. They have, indeed, given currency to
many very erroneous opinions with respect to ancient history. They
have heated the imaginations of boys. They have misled the judgment and
corrupted the taste of some men of letters, such as Akenside and Sir
William Jones. But on persons engaged in public affairs they have had
very little influence. The foundations of our constitution were laid
by men who knew nothing of the Greeks but that they denied the orthodox
procession and cheated the Crusaders; and nothing of Rome, but that
the Pope lived there. Those who followed, contented themselves with
improving on the original plan. They found models at home and therefore
they did not look for them abroad. But, when enlightened men on the
Continent began to think about political reformation, having no patterns
before their eyes in their domestic history, they naturally had
recourse to those remains of antiquity, the study of which is considered
throughout Europe as an important part of education. The historians of
whom we have been speaking had been members of large communities, and
subjects of absolute sovereigns. Hence it is, as we have already said,
that they commit such gross errors in speaking of the little republics
of antiquity. Their works were now read in the spirit in which they
had been written. They were read by men placed in circumstances closely
resembling their own, unacquainted with the real nature of liberty, but
inclined to believe everything good which could be told respecting it.
How powerfully these books impressed these speculative reformers, is
well known to all who have paid any attention to the French literature
of the last century. But, perhaps, the writer on whom they produced the
greatest effect was Vittorio Alfieri. In some of his plays, particularly
in Virginia, Timoleon, and Brutus the Younger, he has even caricatured
the extravagance of his masters.

It was not strange that the blind, thus led by the blind, should
stumble. The transactions of the French Revolution, in some measure,
took their character from these works. Without the assistance of these
works, indeed, a revolution would have taken place,--a revolution
productive of much good and much evil, tremendous but shortlived, evil
dearly purchased, but durable good. But it would not have been exactly
such a revolution. The style, the accessories, would have been in many
respects different. There would have been less of bombast in language,
less of affectation in manner, less of solemn trifling and ostentatious
simplicity. The acts of legislative assemblies, and the correspondence
of diplomatists, would not have been disgraced by rants worthy only of a
college declamation. The government of a great and polished nation would
not have rendered itself ridiculous by attempting to revive the usages
of a world which had long passed away, or rather of a world which
had never existed except in the description of a fantastic school of
writers. These second-hand imitations resembled the originals about as
much as the classical feast with which the Doctor in Peregrine Pickle
turned the stomachs of all his guests resembled one of the suppers of
Lucullus in the Hall of Apollo.

These were mere follies. But the spirit excited by these writers
produced more serious effects. The greater part of the crimes which
disgraced the revolution sprung indeed from the relaxation of law, from
popular ignorance, from the remembrance of past oppression, from
the fear of foreign conquest, from rapacity, from ambition, from
party-spirit. But many atrocious proceedings must, doubtless, be
ascribed to heated imagination, to perverted principle, to a distaste
for what was vulgar in morals, and a passion for what was startling and
dubious. Mr Burke has touched on this subject with great felicity of
expression: "The gradation of their republic," says he, "is laid in
moral paradoxes. All those instances to be found in history, whether
real or fabulous, of a doubtful public spirit, at which morality
is perplexed, reason is staggered, and from which affrighted nature
recoils, are their chosen and almost sole examples for the instruction
of their youth." This evil, we believe, is to be directly ascribed to
the influence of the historians whom we have mentioned, and their modern
imitators.

Livy had some faults in common with these writers. But on the whole he
must be considered as forming a class by himself: no historian with whom
we are acquainted has shown so complete an indifference to truth. He
seems to have cared only about the picturesque effect of his book, and
the honour of his country. On the other hand, we do not know, in the
whole range of literature, an instance of a bad thing so well done. The
painting of the narrative is beyond description vivid and graceful. The
abundance of interesting sentiments and splendid imagery in the speeches
is almost miraculous. His mind is a soil which is never over-teemed, a
fountain which never seems to trickle. It pours forth profusely; yet
it gives no sign of exhaustion. It was probably to this exuberance of
thought and language, always fresh, always sweet, always pure, no sooner
yielded than repaired, that the critics applied that expression which
has been so much discussed lactea ubertas.

All the merits and all the defects of Livy take a colouring from the
character of his nation. He was a writer peculiarly Roman; the proud
citizen of a commonwealth which had indeed lost the reality of liberty,
but which still sacredly preserved its forms--in fact, the subject of
an arbitrary prince, but in his own estimation one of the masters of the
world, with a hundred kings below him, and only the gods above him. He,
therefore, looked back on former times with feelings far different from
those which were naturally entertained by his Greek contemporaries, and
which at a later period became general among men of letters throughout
the Roman Empire. He contemplated the past with interest and delight,
not because it furnished a contrast to the present, but because it
had led to the present. He recurred to it, not to lose in proud
recollections the sense of national degradation, but to trace the
progress of national glory. It is true that his veneration for antiquity
produced on him some of the effects which it produced on those who
arrived at it by a very different road. He has something of their
exaggeration, something of their cant, something of their fondness for
anomalies and lusus naturae in morality. Yet even here we perceive
a difference. They talk rapturously of patriotism and liberty in the
abstract. He does not seem to think any country but Rome deserving of
love; nor is it for liberty as liberty, but for liberty as a part of the
Roman institutions, that he is zealous.

Of the concise and elegant accounts of the campaigns of Caesar little
can be said. They are incomparable models for military despatches. But
histories they are not, and do not pretend to be.

The ancient critics placed Sallust in the same rank with Livy; and
unquestionably the small portion of his works which has come down to us
is calculated to give a high opinion of his talents. But his style
is not very pleasant: and his most powerful work, the account of the
Conspiracy of Catiline, has rather the air of a clever party pamphlet
than that of a history. It abounds with strange inconsistencies, which,
unexplained as they are, necessarily excite doubts as to the fairness
of the narrative. It is true, that many circumstances now forgotten may
have been familiar to his contemporaries, and may have rendered passages
clear to them which to us appear dubious and perplexing. But a great
historian should remember that he writes for distant generations, for
men who will perceive the apparent contradictions, and will possess no
means of reconciling them. We can only vindicate the fidelity of Sallust
at the expense of his skill. But in fact all the information which we
have from contemporaries respecting this famous plot is liable to the
same objection, and is read by discerning men with the same incredulity.
It is all on one side. No answer has reached our times. Yet on the
showing of the accusers the accused seem entitled to acquittal.
Catiline, we are told, intrigued with a Vestal virgin, and murdered his
own son. His house was a den of gamblers and debauchees. No young man
could cross his threshold without danger to his fortune and reputation.
Yet this is the man with whom Cicero was willing to coalesce in a
contest for the first magistracy of the republic; and whom he described,
long after the fatal termination of the conspiracy, as an accomplished
hypocrite, by whom he had himself been deceived, and who had acted with
consummate skill the character of a good citizen and a good friend. We
are told that the plot was the most wicked and desperate ever known,
and, almost in the same breath, that the great body of the people, and
many of the nobles, favoured it; that the richest citizens of Rome were
eager for the spoliation of all property, and its highest functionaries
for the destruction of all order; that Crassus, Caesar, the Praetor
Lentulus, one of the consuls of the year, one of the consuls elect,
were proved or suspected to be engaged in a scheme for subverting
institutions to which they owed the highest honours, and introducing
universal anarchy. We are told that a government, which knew all this,
suffered the conspirator, whose rank, talents, and courage rendered
him most dangerous, to quit Rome without molestation. We are told that
bondmen and gladiators were to be armed against the citizens. Yet we
find that Catiline rejected the slaves who crowded to enlist in his
army, lest, as Sallust himself expresses it, "he should seem to identify
their cause with that of the citizens." Finally, we are told that the
magistrate, who was universally allowed to have saved all classes of
his countrymen from conflagration and massacre, rendered himself so
unpopular by his conduct that a marked insult was offered to him at
the expiration of his office, and a severe punishment inflicted on him
shortly after.

Sallust tells us, what, indeed, the letters and speeches of Cicero
sufficiently prove, that some persons consider the shocking, and
atrocious parts of the plot as mere inventions of the government,
designed to excuse its unconstitutional measures. We must confess
ourselves to be of that opinion. There was, undoubtedly, a strong party
desirous to change the administration. While Pompey held the command of
an army, they could not effect their purpose without preparing means for
repelling force, if necessary, by force. In all this there is nothing
different from the ordinary practice of Roman factions. The other
charges brought against the conspirators are so inconsistent and
improbable, that we give no credit whatever to them. If our readers
think this scepticism unreasonable, let them turn to the contemporary
accounts of the Popish plot. Let them look over the votes of Parliament,
and the speeches of the king; the charges of Scroggs, and the harangues
of the managers employed against Strafford. A person who should form his
judgment from these pieces alone would believe that London was set on
fire by the Papists, and that Sir Edmondbury Godfrey was murdered for
his religion. Yet these stories are now altogether exploded. They have
been abandoned by statesmen to aldermen, by aldermen to clergymen, by
clergymen to old women, and by old women to Sir Harcourt Lees.

Of the Latin historians, Tacitus was certainly the greatest. His
style, indeed, is not only faulty in itself, but is, in some respects,
peculiarly unfit for historical composition. He carries his love of
effect far beyond the limits of moderation. He tells a fine story
finely, but he cannot tell a plain story plainly. He stimulates till
stimulants lose their power. Thucydides, as we have already observed,
relates ordinary transactions with the unpretending clearness and
succinctness of a gazette. His great powers of painting he reserves for
events of which the slightest details are interesting. The simplicity
of the setting gives additional lustre to the brilliants. There are
passages in the narrative of Tacitus superior to the best which can be
quoted from Thucydides. But they are not enchased and relieved with the
same skill. They are far more striking when extracted from the body of
the work to which they belong than when they occur in their place, and
are read in connection with what precedes and follows.

In the delineation of character, Tacitus is unrivalled among historians,
and has very few superiors among dramatists and novelists. By the
delineation of character, we do not mean the practice of drawing up
epigrammatic catalogues of good and bad qualities, and appending them
to the names of eminent men. No writer, indeed, has done this more
skilfully than Tacitus; but this is not his peculiar glory. All the
persons who occupy a large space in his works have an individuality of
character which seems to pervade all their words and actions. We know
them as if we had lived with them. Claudius, Nero, Otho, both the
Agrippinas, are masterpieces. But Tiberius is a still higher miracle of
art. The historian undertook to make us intimately acquainted with a man
singularly dark and inscrutable,--with a man whose real disposition long
remained swathed up in intricate folds of factitious virtues, and over
whose actions the hypocrisy of his youth, and the seclusion of his old
age, threw a singular mystery. He was to exhibit the specious qualities
of the tyrant in a light which might render them transparent, and enable
us at once to perceive the covering and the vices which it concealed. He
was to trace the gradations by which the first magistrate of a republic,
a senator mingling freely in debate, a noble associating with his
brother nobles, was transformed into an Asiatic sultan; he was to
exhibit a character, distinguished by courage, self-command, and
profound policy, yet defiled by all

     "th' extravagancy
     And crazy ribaldry of fancy."

He was to mark the gradual effect of advancing age and approaching death
on this strange compound of strength and weakness; to exhibit the old
sovereign of the world sinking into a dotage which, though it rendered
his appetites eccentric, and his temper savage, never impaired the
powers of his stern and penetrating mind--conscious of failing strength,
raging with capricious sensuality, yet to the last the keenest of
observers, the most artful of dissemblers, and the most terrible of
masters. The task was one of extreme difficulty. The execution is almost
perfect.

The talent which is required to write history thus bears a considerable
affinity to the talent of a great dramatist. There is one obvious
distinction. The dramatist creates; the historian only disposes.
The difference is not in the mode of execution, but in the mode
of conception. Shakspeare is guided by a model which exists in his
imagination; Tacitus, by a model furnished from without. Hamlet is to
Tiberius what the Laocoon is to the Newton of Roubilliac.

In this part of his art Tacitus certainly had neither equal nor second
among the ancient historians. Herodotus, though he wrote in a dramatic
form, had little of dramatic genius. The frequent dialogues which he
introduces give vivacity and movement to the narrative, but are not
strikingly characteristic. Xenophon is fond of telling his readers, at
considerable length, what he thought of the persons whose adventures he
relates. But he does not show them the men, and enable them to judge for
themselves. The heroes of Livy are the most insipid of all beings, real
or imaginary, the heroes of Plutarch always excepted. Indeed, the
manner of Plutarch in this respect reminds us of the cookery of those
continental inns, the horror of English travellers, in which a certain
nondescript broth is kept constantly boiling, and copiously poured,
without distinction, over every dish as it comes up to table.
Thucydides, though at a wide interval, comes next to Tacitus.
His Pericles, his Nicias, his Cleon, his Brasidas, are happily
discriminated. The lines are few, the colouring faint: but the general
air and expression is caught.

We begin, like the priest in Don Quixote's library, to be tired with
taking down books one after another for separate judgment, and feel
inclined to pass sentence on them in masses. We shall therefore,
instead of pointing out the defects and merits of the different modern
historians, state generally in what particulars they have surpassed
their predecessors, and in what we conceive them to have failed.

They have certainly been, in one sense, far more strict in their
adherence to truth than most of the Greek and Roman writers. They do
not think themselves entitled to render their narrative interesting by
introducing descriptions, conversations, and harangues which have no
existence but in their own imagination. This improvement was gradually
introduced. History commenced among the modern nations of Europe, as it
had commenced among the Greeks, in romance. Froissart was our Herodotus.
Italy was to Europe what Athens was to Greece. In Italy, therefore,
a more accurate and manly mode of narration was early introduced.
Machiavelli and Guicciardini, in imitation of Livy and Thucydides,
composed speeches for their historical personages. But, as the classical
enthusiasm which distinguished the age of Lorenzo and Leo gradually
subsided, this absurd practice was abandoned. In France, we fear, it
still, in some degree, keeps its ground. In our own country, a writer
who should venture on it would be laughed to scorn. Whether the
historians of the last two centuries tell more truth than those of
antiquity, may perhaps be doubted. But it is quite certain that they
tell fewer falsehoods.

In the philosophy of history, the moderns have very far surpassed the
ancients. It is not, indeed, strange that the Greeks and Romans should
not have carried the science of government, or any other experimental
science, so far as it has been carried in our time; for the experimental
sciences are generally in a state of progression. They were better
understood in the seventeenth century than in the sixteenth, and in
the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth. But this constant
improvement, this natural growth of knowledge, will not altogether
account for the immense superiority of the modern writers. The
difference is a difference not in degree, but of kind. It is not merely
that new principles have been discovered, but that new faculties seem to
be exerted. It is not that at one time the human intellect should have
made but small progress, and at another time have advanced far: but
that at one time it should have been stationary, and at another time
constantly proceeding. In taste and imagination, in the graces of style,
in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the
ancients were at least our equals. They reasoned as justly as ourselves
on subjects which required pure demonstration. But in the moral sciences
they made scarcely any advance. During the long period which elapsed
between the fifth century before the Christian era and the fifth century
after it little perceptible progress was made. All the metaphysical
discoveries of all the philosophers, from the time of Socrates to the
northern invasion, are not to be compared in importance with those which
have been made in England every fifty years since the time of Elizabeth.
There is not the least reason to believe that the principles of
government, legislation, and political economy, were better understood
in the time of Augustus Caesar than in the time of Pericles. In our
own country, the sound doctrines of trade and jurisprudence have
been, within the lifetime of a single generation, dimly hinted, boldly
propounded, defended, systematised, adopted by all reflecting men of all
parties, quoted in legislative assemblies, incorporated into laws and
treaties.

To what is this change to be attributed? Partly, no doubt, to the
discovery of printing, a discovery which has not only diffused knowledge
widely, but, as we have already observed, has also introduced into
reasoning a precision unknown in those ancient communities, in which
information, was, for the most part, conveyed orally. There was, we
suspect, another cause, less obvious, but still more powerful.

The spirit of the two most famous nations of antiquity was remarkably
exclusive. In the time of Homer the Greeks had not begun to consider
themselves as a distinct race. They still looked with something of
childish wonder and awe on the riches and wisdom of Sidon and Egypt.
From what causes, and by what gradations, their feelings underwent a
change, it is not easy to determine. Their history, from the Trojan to
the Persian war, is covered with an obscurity broken only by dim and
scattered gleams of truth. But it is certain that a great alteration
took place. They regarded themselves as a separate people. They had
common religious rites, and common principles of public law, in which
foreigners had no part. In all their political systems, monarchical,
aristocratical, and democratical, there was a strong family likeness.
After the retreat of Xerxes and the fall of Mardonius, national pride
rendered the separation between the Greeks and the barbarians complete.
The conquerors considered themselves men of a superior breed, men who,
in their intercourse with neighbouring nations, were to teach, and
not to learn. They looked for nothing out of themselves. They borrowed
nothing. They translated nothing. We cannot call to mind a single
expression of any Greek writer earlier than the age of Augustus,
indicating an opinion that anything worth reading could be written in
any language except his own. The feelings which sprung from national
glory were not altogether extinguished by national degradation. They
were fondly cherished through ages of slavery and shame. The literature
of Rome herself was regarded with contempt by those who had fled before
her arms, and who bowed beneath her fasces. Voltaire says, in one of his
six thousand pamphlets, that he was the first person who told the French
that England had produced eminent men besides the Duke of Marlborough.
Down to a very late period, the Greeks seem to have stood in need of
similar information with respect to their masters. With Paulus Aemilius,
Sylla, and Caesar, they were well acquainted. But the notions which
they entertained respecting Cicero and Virgil were, probably, not unlike
those which Boileau may have formed about Shakspeare. Dionysius lived
in the most splendid age of Latin poetry and eloquence. He was a
critic, and, after the manner of his age, an able critic. He studied
the language of Rome, associated with its learned men, and compiled its
history. Yet he seems to have thought its literature valuable only for
the purpose of illustrating its antiquities. His reading appears to have
been confined to its public records, and to a few old annalists. Once,
and but once, if we remember rightly, he quotes Ennius, to solve a
question of etymology. He has written much on the art of oratory: yet he
has not mentioned the name of Cicero.

The Romans submitted to the pretensions of a race which they despised.
Their epic poet, while he claimed for them pre-eminence in the arts of
government and war, acknowledged their inferiority in taste, eloquence,
and science. Men of letters affected to understand the Greek language
better than their own. Pomponius preferred the honour of becoming an
Athenian, by intellectual naturalisation, to all the distinctions which
were to be acquired in the political contests of Rome. His great
friend composed Greek poems and memoirs. It is well-known that Petrarch
considered that beautiful language in which his sonnets are written,
as a barbarous jargon, and intrusted his fame to those wretched Latin
hexameters which, during the last four centuries, have scarcely found
four readers. Many eminent Romans appear to have felt the same contempt
for their native tongue as compared with the Greek. The prejudice
continued to a very late period. Julian was as partial to the Greek
language as Frederic the Great to the French: and it seems that he could
not express himself with elegance in the dialect of the state which he
ruled.

Even those Latin writers who did not carry this affectation so far
looked on Greece as the only fount of knowledge. From Greece they
derived the measures of their poetry, and, indeed, all of poetry that
can be imported. From Greece they borrowed the principles and the
vocabulary of their philosophy. To the literature of other nations they
do not seem to have paid the slightest attention. The sacred books
of the Hebrews, for example, books which, considered merely as human
compositions, are invaluable to the critic, the antiquarian, and
the philosopher, seem to have been utterly unnoticed by them. The
peculiarities of Judaism, and the rapid growth of Christianity,
attracted their notice. They made war against the Jews. They made
laws against the Christians. But they never opened the books of Moses.
Juvenal quotes the Pentateuch with censure. The author of the treatise
on "the Sublime" quotes it with praise: but both of them quote it
erroneously. When we consider what sublime poetry, what curious history,
what striking and peculiar views of the Divine nature and of the
social duties of men, are to be found in the Jewish scriptures, when
we consider that two sects on which the attention of the government was
constantly fixed appealed to those scriptures as the rule of their faith
and practice, this indifference is astonishing. The fact seems to be,
that the Greeks admired only themselves, and that the Romans admired
only themselves and the Greeks. Literary men turned away with disgust
from modes of thought and expression so widely different from all
that they had been accustomed to admire. The effect was narrowness and
sameness of thought. Their minds, if we may so express ourselves, bred
in and in, and were accordingly cursed with barrenness and degeneracy.
No extraneous beauty or vigour was engrafted on the decaying stock. By
an exclusive attention to one class of phenomena, by an exclusive
taste for one species of excellence, the human intellect was stunted.
Occasional coincidences were turned into general rules. Prejudices were
confounded with instincts. On man, as he was found in a particular state
of society--on government, as it had existed in a particular corner
of the world, many just observations were made; but of man as man,
or government as government, little was known. Philosophy remained
stationary. Slight changes, sometimes for the worse and sometimes for
the better, were made in the superstructure. But nobody thought of
examining the foundations.

The vast despotism of the Caesars, gradually effacing all national
peculiarities, and assimilating the remotest provinces of the empire to
each other, augmented the evil. At the close of the third century after
Christ, the prospects of mankind were fearfully dreary. A system of
etiquette, as pompously frivolous as that of the Escurial, had been
established. A sovereign almost invisible; a crowd of dignitaries
minutely distinguished by badges and titles; rhetoricians who said
nothing but what had been said ten thousand times; schools in which
nothing was taught but what had been known for ages: such was the
machinery provided for the government and instruction of the most
enlightened part of the human race. That great community was then in
danger of experiencing a calamity far more terrible than any of
the quick, inflammatory, destroying maladies, to which nations are
liable,--a tottering, drivelling, paralytic longevity, the immortality
of the Struldbrugs, a Chinese civilisation. It would be easy to indicate
many points of resemblance between the subjects of Diocletian and the
people of that Celestial Empire, where, during many centuries, nothing
has been learned or unlearned; where government, where education, where
the whole system of life, is a ceremony; where knowledge forgets to
increase and multiply, and, like the talent buried in the earth, or
the pound wrapped up in the napkin, experiences neither waste no
augmentation.

The torpor was broken by two great revolutions, the one moral, the other
political, the one from within, the other from without. The victory of
Christianity over Paganism, considered with relation to this subject
only, was of great importance. It overthrew the old system of morals;
and with it much of the old system of metaphysics. It furnished the
orator with new topics of declamation, and the logician with new points
of controversy. Above all, it introduced a new principle, of which the
operation was constantly felt in every part of society. It stirred the
stagnant mass from the inmost depths. It excited all the passions of a
stormy democracy in the quiet and listless population of an overgrown
empire. The fear of heresy did what the sense of oppression could not
do; it changed men, accustomed to be turned over like sheep from tyrant
to tyrant, into devoted partisans and obstinate rebels. The tones of an
eloquence which had been silent for ages resounded from the pulpit of
Gregory. A spirit which had been extinguished on the plains of Philippi
revived in Athanasius and Ambrose.

Yet even this remedy was not sufficiently violent for the disease. It
did not prevent the empire of Constantinople from relapsing, after a
short paroxysm of excitement, into a state of stupefaction, to which
history furnishes scarcely any parallel. We there find that a polished
society, a society in which a most intricate and elaborate system of
jurisprudence was established, in which the arts of luxury were well
understood, in which the works of the great ancient writers were
preserved and studied, existed for nearly a thousand years without
making one great discovery in science, or producing one book which
is read by any but curious inquirers. There were tumults, too, and
controversies, and wars in abundance: and these things, bad as they are
in themselves, have generally been favourable to the progress of the
intellect. But here they tormented without stimulating. The waters were
troubled; but no healing influence descended. The agitations resembled
the grinnings and writhings of a galvanised corpse, not the struggles of
an athletic man.

From this miserable state the Western Empire was saved by the fiercest
and most destroying visitation with which God has ever chastened
his creatures--the invasion of the Northern nations. Such a cure was
required for such a distemper. The fire of London, it has been observed
was a blessing. It burned down the city; but it burned out the plague.
The same may be said of the tremendous devastation of the Roman
dominions. It annihilated the noisome recesses in which lurked the seeds
of great moral maladies; it cleared an atmosphere fatal to the health
and vigour of the human mind. It cost Europe a thousand years of
barbarism to escape the fate of China.

At length the terrible purification was accomplished; and the second
civilisation of mankind commenced, under circumstances which afforded a
strong security that it would never retrograde and never pause. Europe
was now a great federal community. Her numerous states were united
by the easy ties of international law and a common religion. Their
institutions, their languages, their manners, their tastes in
literature, their modes of education, were widely different. Their
connection was close enough to allow of mutual observation and
improvement, yet not so close as to destroy the idioms of national
opinion and feeling.

The balance of moral and intellectual influence thus established
between the nations of Europe is far more important than the balance
of political power. Indeed, we are inclined to think that the latter
is valuable principally because it tends to maintain the former. The
civilised world has thus been preserved from a uniformity of character
fatal to all improvement. Every part of it has been illuminated with
light reflected from every other. Competition has produced activity
where monopoly would have produced sluggishness. The number of
experiments in moral science which the speculator has an opportunity of
witnessing has been increased beyond all calculation. Society and human
nature, instead of being seen in a single point of view, are presented
to him under ten thousand different aspects. By observing the manners of
surrounding nations, by studying their literature, by comparing it with
that of his own country and of the ancient republics, he is enabled to
correct those errors into which the most acute men must fall when they
reason from a single species to a genus. He learns to distinguish
what is local from what is universal: what is transitory from what is
eternal; to discriminate between exceptions and rules; to trace the
operation of disturbing causes; to separate those general principles
which are always true and everywhere applicable from the accidental
circumstances with which, in every community, they are blended, and
with which, in an isolated community, they are confounded by the most
philosophical mind.

Hence it is that, in generalisation, the writers of modern times have
far surpassed those of antiquity. The historians of our own country are
unequalled in depth and precision of reason; and, even in the works of
our mere compilers, we often meet with speculations beyond the reach of
Thucydides or Tacitus.

But it must, at the same time, be admitted that they have characteristic
faults, so closely connected with their characteristic merits, and of
such magnitude, that it may well be doubted whether, on the whole,
this department of literature has gained or lost during the last
two-and-twenty centuries.

The best historians of later times have been seduced from truth, not
by their imagination, but by their reason. They far excel their
predecessors in the art of deducing general principles from facts. But
unhappily they have fallen into the error of distorting facts to suit
general principles. They arrive at a theory from looking at some of the
phenomena; and the remaining phenomena they strain or curtail to suit
the theory. For this purpose it is not necessary that they should assert
what is absolutely false; for all questions in morals and politics
are questions of comparison and degree. Any proposition which does not
involve a contradiction in terms may by possibility be true; and, if all
the circumstances which raise a probability in its favour, be stated and
enforced, and those which lead to an opposite conclusion be omitted or
lightly passed over, it may appear to be demonstrated. In every human
character and transaction there is a mixture of good and evil: a little
exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a
watchful and searching scepticism with respect to the evidence on one
side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition
on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the
Fourth.

This species of misrepresentation abounds in the most valuable works of
modern historians. Herodotus tells his story like a slovenly witness,
who, heated by partialities and prejudices, unacquainted with the
established rules of evidence, and uninstructed as to the obligations
of his oath, confounds what he imagines with what he has seen and heard,
and brings out facts, reports, conjectures, and fancies, in one mass.
Hume is an accomplished advocate. Without positively asserting much more
than he can prove, he gives prominence to all the circumstances which
support his case; he glides lightly over those which are unfavourable to
it; his own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which
seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions
into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract
of their evidence is given. Everything that is offered on the other side
is scrutinised with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance
is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is
extenuated, or passed by without notice; concessions even are sometimes
made: but this insidious candour only increases the effect of the vast
mass of sophistry.

We have mentioned Hume as the ablest and most popular writer of his
class; but the charge which we have brought against him is one to which
all our most distinguished historians are in some degree obnoxious.
Gibbon, in particular, deserves very severe censure. Of all the numerous
culprits, however, none is more deeply guilty than Mr Mitford. We
willingly acknowledge the obligations which are due to his talents
and industry. The modern historians of Greece had been in the habit of
writing as if the world had learned nothing new during the last sixteen
hundred years. Instead of illustrating the events which they narrated
by the philosophy of a more enlightened age, they judged of antiquity by
itself alone. They seemed to think that notions, long driven from every
other corner of literature, had a prescriptive right to occupy this
last fastness. They considered all the ancient historians as equally
authentic. They scarcely made any distinction between him who related
events at which he had himself been present and him who five hundred
years after composed a philosophic romance for a society which had in
the interval undergone a complete change. It was all Greek, and all
true! The centuries which separated Plutarch from Thucydides seemed
as nothing to men who lived in an age so remote. The distance of
time produced an error similar to that which is sometimes produced by
distance of place. There are many good ladies who think that all the
people in India live together, and who charge a friend setting out for
Calcutta with kind messages to Bombay. To Rollin and Barthelemi, in the
same manner, all the classics were contemporaries.

Mr Mitford certainly introduced great improvements; he showed us that
men who wrote in Greek and Latin sometimes told lies; he showed us that
ancient history might be related in such a manner as to furnish not only
allusions to schoolboys, but important lessons to statesmen. From that
love of theatrical effect and high-flown sentiment which had poisoned
almost every other work on the same subject his book is perfectly free.
But his passion for a theory as false, and far more ungenerous, led him
substantially to violate truth in every page. Statements unfavourable
to democracy are made with unhesitating confidence, and with the utmost
bitterness of language. Every charge brought against a monarch or an
aristocracy is sifted with the utmost care. If it cannot be denied, some
palliating supposition is suggested; or we are at least reminded that
some circumstances now unknown MAY have justified what at present
appears unjustifiable. Two events are reported by the same author in
the same sentence; their truth rests on the same testimony; but the one
supports the darling hypothesis, and the other seems inconsistent with
it. The one is taken and the other is left.

The practice of distorting narrative into a conformity with theory is
a vice not so unfavourable as at first sight it may appear to the
interests of political science. We have compared the writers who indulge
in it to advocates; and we may add, that their conflicting fallacies,
like those of advocates, correct each other. It has always been held,
in the most enlightened nations, that a tribunal will decide a judicial
question most fairly when it has heard two able men argue, as unfairly
as possible, on the two opposite sides of it; and we are inclined
to think that this opinion is just. Sometimes, it is true, superior
eloquence and dexterity will make the worse appear the better reason;
but it is at least certain that the judge will be compelled to
contemplate the case under two different aspects. It is certain that no
important consideration will altogether escape notice.

This is at present the state of history. The poet laureate appears for
the Church of England, Lingard for the Church of Rome. Brodie has moved
to set aside the verdicts obtained by Hume; and the cause in which
Mitford succeeded is, we understand, about to be reheard. In the midst
of these disputes, however, history proper, if we may use the term, is
disappearing. The high, grave, impartial summing up of Thucydides is
nowhere to be found.

While our historians are practising all the arts of controversy, they
miserably neglect the art of narration, the art of interesting the
affections and presenting pictures to the imagination. That a writer may
produce these effects without violating truth is sufficiently proved
by many excellent biographical works. The immense popularity which
well-written books of this kind have acquired deserves the serious
consideration of historians. Voltaire's Charles the Twelfth, Marmontel's
Memoirs, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Southey's account of Nelson, are
perused with delight by the most frivolous and indolent. Whenever
any tolerable book of the same description makes its appearance, the
circulating libraries are mobbed; the book societies are in commotion;
the new novel lies uncut; the magazines and newspapers fill their
columns with extracts. In the meantime histories of great empires,
written by men of eminent ability, lie unread on the shelves of
ostentatious libraries.

The writers of history seem to entertain an aristocratical contempt for
the writers of memoirs. They think it beneath the dignity of men who
describe the revolutions of nations to dwell on the details which
constitute the charm of biography. They have imposed on themselves a
code of conventional decencies as absurd as that which has been the
bane of the French drama. The most characteristic and interesting
circumstances are omitted or softened down, because, as we are told,
they are too trivial for the majesty of history. The majesty of history
seems to resemble the majesty of the poor King of Spain, who died a
martyr to ceremony because the proper dignitaries were not at hand to
render him assistance.

That history would be more amusing if this etiquette were relaxed will,
we suppose, be acknowledged. But would it be less dignified or less
useful? What do we mean when we say that one past event is important and
another insignificant? No past event has any intrinsic importance.
The knowledge of it is valuable only as it leads us to form just
calculations with respect to the future. A history which does not
serve this purpose, though it may be filled with battles, treaties, and
commotions, is as useless as the series of turnpike tickets collected by
Sir Matthew Mite.

Let us suppose that Lord Clarendon, instead of filling hundreds of folio
pages with copies of state papers, in which the same assertions
and contradictions are repeated till the reader is overpowered with
weariness, had condescended to be the Boswell of the Long Parliament.
Let us suppose that he had exhibited to us the wise and lofty
self-government of Hampden, leading while he seemed to follow, and
propounding unanswerable arguments in the strongest forms with the
modest air of an inquirer anxious for information; the delusions which
misled the noble spirit of Vane; the coarse fanaticism which concealed
the yet loftier genius of Cromwell, destined to control a motionless
army and a factious people, to abase the flag of Holland, to arrest
the victorious arms of Sweden, and to hold the balance firm between the
rival monarchies of France and Spain. Let us suppose that he had made
his Cavaliers and Roundheads talk in their own style; that he had
reported some of the ribaldry of Rupert's pages, and some of the cant of
Harrison and Fleetwood. Would not his work in that case have been more
interesting? Would it not have been more accurate?

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the
whole be false. The circumstances which have most influence on the
happiness of mankind, the changes of manners and morals, the transition
of communities from poverty to wealth, from knowledge to ignorance,
from ferocity to humanity--these are, for the most part, noiseless
revolutions. Their progress is rarely indicated by what historians are
pleased to call important events. They are not achieved by armies, or
enacted by senates. They are sanctioned by no treaties, and recorded
in no archives. They are carried on in every school, in every church,
behind ten thousand counters, at ten thousand firesides. The upper
current of society presents no certain criterion by which we can judge
of the direction in which the under current flows. We read of defeats
and victories. But we know that nations may be miserable amidst
victories and prosperous amidst defeats. We read of the fall of wise
ministers and of the rise of profligate favourites. But we must remember
how small a proportion the good or evil effected by a single statesman
can bear to the good or evil of a great social system.

Bishop Watson compares a geologist to a gnat mounted on an elephant,
and laying down theories as to the whole internal structure of the vast
animal, from the phenomena of the hide. The comparison is unjust to the
geologists; but is very applicable to those historians who write as
if the body politic were homogeneous, who look only on the surface of
affairs, and never think of the mighty and various organisation which
lies deep below.

In the works of such writers as these, England, at the close of the
Seven Years' War, is in the highest state of prosperity: at the close of
the American war she is in a miserable and degraded condition; as if
the people were not on the whole as rich, as well governed, and as
well educated at the latter period as at the former. We have read books
called Histories of England, under the reign of George the Second, in
which the rise of Methodism is not even mentioned. A hundred years hence
this breed of authors will, we hope, be extinct. If it should still
exist, the late ministerial interregnum will be described in terms which
will seem to imply that all government was at an end; that the social
contract was annulled; and that the hand of every man was against his
neighbour, until the wisdom and virtue of the new cabinet educed order
out of the chaos of anarchy. We are quite certain that misconceptions
as gross prevail at this moment respecting many important parts of our
annals.

The effect of historical reading is analogous, in many respects, to
that produced by foreign travel. The student, like the tourist, is
transported into a new state of society. He sees new fashions. He hears
new modes of expression. His mind is enlarged by contemplating the wide
diversities of laws, of morals, and of manners. But men may travel far,
and return with minds as contracted as if they had never stirred from
their own market-town. In the same manner, men may know the dates of
many battles and the genealogies of many royal houses, and yet be
no wiser. Most people look at past times as princes look at foreign
countries. More than one illustrious stranger has landed on our island
amidst the shouts of a mob, has dined with the king, has hunted with the
master of the stag-hounds, has seen the guards reviewed, and a knight
of the garter installed, has cantered along Regent Street, has visited
Saint Paul's, and noted down its dimensions; and has then departed,
thinking that he has seen England. He has, in fact, seen a few public
buildings, public men, and public ceremonies. But of the vast and
complex system of society, of the fine shades of national character, of
the practical operation of government and laws, he knows nothing. He who
would understand these things rightly must not confine his observations
to palaces and solemn days. He must see ordinary men as they appear in
their ordinary business and in their ordinary pleasures. He must mingle
in the crowds of the exchange and the coffee-house. He must obtain
admittance to the convivial table and the domestic hearth. He must bear
with vulgar expressions. He must not shrink from exploring even the
retreats of misery. He who wishes to understand the condition of mankind
in former ages must proceed on the same principle. If he attends only to
public transactions, to wars, congresses, and debates, his studies will
be as unprofitable as the travels of those imperial, royal, and serene
sovereigns who form their judgment of our island from having gone in
state to a few fine sights, and from having held formal conferences with
a few great officers.

The perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of
an age is exhibited in miniature. He relates no fact, he attributes no
expression to his characters, which is not authenticated by sufficient
testimony. But, by judicious selection, rejection, and arrangement, he
gives to truth those attractions which have been usurped by fiction.
In his narrative a due subordination is observed: some transactions are
prominent; others retire. But the scale on which he represents them is
increased or diminished, not according to the dignity of the persons
concerned in them, but according to the degree in which they elucidate
the condition of society and the nature of man. He shows us the court,
the camp, and the senate. But he shows us also the nation. He considers
no anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no familiar saying, as too
insignificant for his notice which is not too insignificant to
illustrate the operation of laws, of religion, and of education, and to
mark the progress of the human mind. Men will not merely be described,
but will be made intimately known to us. The changes of manners will be
indicated, not merely by a few general phrases or a few extracts from
statistical documents, but by appropriate images presented in every
line.

If a man, such as we are supposing, should write the history of England,
he would assuredly not omit the battles, the sieges, the negotiations,
the seditions, the ministerial changes. But with these he would
intersperse the details which are the charm of historical romances. At
Lincoln Cathedral there is a beautiful painted window, which was made by
an apprentice out of the pieces of glass which had been rejected by
his master. It is so far superior to every other in the church, that,
according to the tradition, the vanquished artist killed himself from
mortification. Sir Walter Scott, in the same manner, has used those
fragments of truth which historians have scornfully thrown behind them
in a manner which may well excite their envy. He has constructed out of
their gleanings works which, even considered as histories, are scarcely
less valuable than theirs. But a truly great historian would reclaim
those materials which the novelist has appropriated. The history of the
government, and the history of the people, would be exhibited in
that mode in which alone they can be exhibited justly, in inseparable
conjunction and intermixture. We should not then have to look for the
wars and votes of the Puritans in Clarendon, and for their phraseology
in Old Mortality; for one half of King James in Hume, and for the other
half in the Fortunes of Nigel.

The early part of our imaginary history would be rich with colouring
from romance, ballad, and chronicle. We should find ourselves in the
company of knights such as those of Froissart, and of pilgrims such as
those who rode with Chaucer from the Tabard. Society would be shown from
the highest to the lowest,--from the royal cloth of state to the den of
the outlaw; from the throne of the legate to the chimney-corner where
the begging friar regaled himself. Palmers, minstrels, crusaders,--the
stately monastery, with the good cheer in its refectory and the
high-mass in its chapel,--the manor-house, with its hunting and
hawking,--the tournament, with the heralds and ladies, the trumpets and
the cloth of gold,--would give truth and life to the representation.
We should perceive, in a thousand slight touches, the importance of
the privileged burgher, and the fierce and haughty spirit which swelled
under the collar of the degraded villain. The revival of letters would
not merely be described in a few magnificent periods. We should discern,
in innumerable particulars, the fermentation of mind, the eager appetite
for knowledge, which distinguished the sixteenth from the fifteenth
century. In the Reformation we should see, not merely a schism which
changed the ecclesiastical constitution of England and the mutual
relations of the European powers, but a moral war which raged in every
family, which set the father against the son, and the son against the
father, the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the
mother. Henry would be painted with the skill of Tacitus. We should have
the change of his character from his profuse and joyous youth to his
savage and imperious old age. We should perceive the gradual progress
of selfish and tyrannical passions in a mind not naturally insensible or
ungenerous; and to the last we should detect some remains of that open
and noble temper which endeared him to a people whom he oppressed,
struggling with the hardness of despotism and the irritability of
disease. We should see Elizabeth in all her weakness and in all her
strength, surrounded by the handsome favourites whom she never trusted,
and the wise old statesmen whom she never dismissed, uniting in herself
the most contradictory qualities of both her parents,--the coquetry, the
caprice, the petty malice of Anne,--the haughty and resolute spirit of
Henry. We have no hesitation in saying that a great artist might produce
a portrait of this remarkable woman at least as striking as that in the
novel of Kenilworth, without employing a single trait not authenticated
by ample testimony. In the meantime, we should see arts cultivated,
wealth accumulated, the conveniences of life improved. We should see the
keeps, where nobles, insecure themselves, spread insecurity around them,
gradually giving place to the halls of peaceful opulence, to the oriels
of Longleat, and the stately pinnacles of Burleigh. We should see towns
extended, deserts cultivated, the hamlets of fishermen turned into
wealthy havens, the meal of the peasant improved, and his hut more
commodiously furnished. We should see those opinions and feelings which
produced the great struggle against the House of Stuart slowly growing
up in the bosom of private families, before they manifested themselves
in parliamentary debates. Then would come the civil war. Those
skirmishes on which Clarendon dwells so minutely would be told, as
Thucydides would have told them, with perspicuous conciseness. They are
merely connecting links. But the great characteristics of the age, the
loyal enthusiasm of the brave English gentry, the fierce licentiousness
of the swearing, dicing, drunken reprobates, whose excesses disgraced
the royal cause,--the austerity of the Presbyterian Sabbaths in the
city, the extravagance of the independent preachers in the camp, the
precise garb, the severe countenance, the petty scruples, the affected
accent, the absurd names and phrases which marked the Puritans,--the
valour, the policy, the public spirit, which lurked beneath these
ungraceful disguises,--the dreams of the raving Fifth-monarchy-man, the
dreams, scarcely less wild, of the philosophic republican, all these
would enter into the representation, and render it at once more exact
and more striking.

The instruction derived from history thus written would be of a vivid
and practical character. It would be received by the imagination as well
as by the reason. It would be not merely traced on the mind, but branded
into it. Many truths, too, would be learned, which can be learned in
no other manner. As the history of states is generally written, the
greatest and most momentous revolutions seem to come upon them like
supernatural inflictions, without warning or cause. But the fact is,
that such revolutions are almost always the consequences of moral
changes, which have gradually passed on the mass of the community, and
which originally proceed far before their progress is indicated by any
public measure. An intimate knowledge of the domestic history of nations
is therefore absolutely necessary to the prognosis of political events.
A narrative, defective in this respect, is as useless as a medical
treatise which should pass by all the symptoms attendant on the early
stage of a disease and mention only what occurs when the patient is
beyond the reach of remedies.

A historian, such as we have been attempting to describe, would indeed
be an intellectual prodigy. In his mind, powers scarcely compatible with
each other must be tempered into an exquisite harmony. We shall sooner
see another Shakspeare or another Homer. The highest excellence to which
any single faculty can be brought would be less surprising than such a
happy and delicate combination of qualities. Yet the contemplation of
imaginary models is not an unpleasant or useless employment of the mind.
It cannot indeed produce perfection; but it produces improvement
and nourishes that generous and liberal fastidiousness which is not
inconsistent with the strongest sensibility to merit, and which, while
it exalts our conceptions of the art, does not render us unjust to the
artist.

*****




MILL ON GOVERNMENT. (March 1829.)

     "Essays on Government, Jurisprudence, the Liberty of the
     Press, Prisons, and Prison Discipline, Colonies, the Law of
     Nations, and Education."  By James Mill, Esq., author of the
     History of British India.  Reprinted by permission from the
     Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  (Not for sale.)
     London, 1828.

Of those philosophers who call themselves Utilitarians, and whom others
generally call Benthamites, Mr Mill is, with the exception of the
illustrious founder of the sect, by far the most distinguished. The
little work now before us contains a summary of the opinions held by
this gentleman and his brethren on several subjects most important to
society. All the seven essays of which it consists abound in curious
matter. But at present we intend to confine our remarks to the Treatise
on Government, which stands first in the volume. On some future
occasion, we may perhaps attempt to do justice to the rest.

It must be owned that to do justice to any composition of Mr Mill is
not, in the opinion of his admirers, a very easy task. They do not,
indeed, place him in the same rank with Mr Bentham; but the terms in
which they extol the disciple, though feeble when compared with the
hyperboles of adoration employed by them in speaking of the master, are
as strong as any sober man would allow himself to use concerning Locke
or Bacon. The essay before us is perhaps the most remarkable of the
works to which Mr Mill owes his fame. By the members of his sect, it is
considered as perfect and unanswerable. Every part of it is an article
of their faith; and the damnatory clauses, in which their creed abounds
far beyond any theological symbol with which we are acquainted, are
strong and full against a

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