The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II
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Title: The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II
Editor: Henry Cabot Lodge
Francis W. Halsey
Release date: June 8, 2007 [eBook #21775]
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THE BEST
_of the_
WORLD'S CLASSICS
RESTRICTED TO PROSE
HENRY CABOT LODGE
Editor-in-Chief
FRANCIS W. HALSEY
Associate Editor
With an Introduction, Biographical and Explanatory Notes, etc.
In Ten Volumes
Vol. IV
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--II
[Illustration: DR. JOHNSON, GOLDSMITH, POPE, and GIBBON]
Funk & Wagnalls Company
New York and London
Copyright, 1909, by
Funk & Wagnalls Company
The Best of the World's Classics
VOL. IV
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--II
1672-1800
CONTENTS
VOL. IV--GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--II
SIR RICHARD STEELE--(Born in 1672, died in 1729.)
I Of Companions and Flatterers
II The Story-Teller and His Art.
(From _The Guardian_)
III Sir Roger and the Widow.
(From _The Spectator_)
IV The Coverley Family Portraits.
(From _The Spectator_)
V On Certain Symptoms of Greatness.
(From _The Tatler_)
VI How to Be Happy tho Married.
(From _The Tatler_)
LORD BOLINGBROKE--(Born in 1678, died in 1751.)
I Of the Shortness of Human Life
II Rules for the Study of History.
(One of the "Letters on the Study of History")
ALEXANDER POPE--(Born in 1688, died in 1744.)
I An Ancient English Country Seat.
(A Letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)
II His Compliments to Lady Mary.
(A Letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu)
III How to Make an Epic Poem.
(From _The Guardian_)
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU--(Born in 1689, died in 1762.)
I On Happiness in the Matrimonial State.
(A Letter to Edward Wortley Montagu before she married him)
II Inoculation for the Smallpox.
(A Letter to Sarah Criswell, written from Adrianople, Turkey)
LORD CHESTERFIELD--(Born in 1694, died in 1773.)
I Of Good Manners, Dress and the World.
(From the "Letters to His Son")
II Of Attentions to Ladies.
(From the "Letters to His Son")
HENRY FIELDING--(Born in 1707, died in 1754.)
I Tom the Hero Enters the Stage.
(From "Tom Jones")
II Partridge Sees Garrick at the Play.
(From "Tom Jones")
III Mr. Adams in a Political Light.
(From "Joseph Andrews")
SAMUEL JOHNSON--(Born in 1709, died in 1784.)
I On Publishing His "Dictionary."
(From the Preface to the "Dictionary")
II Pope and Dryden Compared.
(From the "Lives of the Poets")
III Letter to Chesterfield on the Completion of the "Dictionary."
(From Boswell's "Life")
IV On the Advantages of Living in a Garret.
(From _The Rambler_)
DAVID HUME--(Born in 1711, died in 1776.)
I The Character of Queen Elizabeth.
(From the "History of England")
II The Defeat of the Armada.
(From the "History of England")
III The First Principles of Government
LAURENCE STERNE--(Born in 1713, died in 1768.)
I The Starling in Captivity.
(From "The Sentimental Journey")
II To Moulines with Maria.
(From "The Sentimental Journey")
III The Death of LeFevre.
(From "Tristram Shandy")
IV Passages from the Romance of My Uncle Toby and the Widow.
(From "Tristram Shandy")
THOMAS GRAY--(Born in 1716, died in 1771.)
I Warwick Castle.
(A Letter to Thomas Wharton)
II To His Friend Mason on the Death of Mason's Mother
III On His Own Writings.
(A Letter to Horace Walpole)
IV His Friendship for Bonstetten.
(From a Letter to Bonstetten)
HORACE WALPOLE--(Born in 1717, died in 1797.)
I Hogarth.
(From the "Anecdotes of Painting in England")
II The War in America.
(From a Letter written at Strawberry Hill)
III The Death of George II.
(A Letter to Sir Horace Mann)
GILBERT WHITE--(Born in 1720, died in 1793.)
The Chimney Swallow.
(From "The Natural History of Selborne")
ADAM SMITH--(Born in 1723, died in 1790.)
I Of Ambition Misdirected.
(From the "Theory of Moral Sentiments")
II The Advantages of a Division of Labor.
(From "The Wealth of Nations")
SIR WILLIAM BLACKSTONE--(Born in 1723, died in 1780.)
Professional Soldiers in Free Countries.
(From the "Commentaries")
OLIVER GOLDSMITH--(Born in 1728, died in 1774.)
I The Ambitions of the Vicar's Family.
(From "The Vicar of Wakefield")
II Sagacity in Insects.
(From "The Bee")
III A Chinaman's View of London.
(From the "Citizen of the World")
EDMUND BURKE--(Born in 1729, died in 1797.)
I The Principles of Good Taste.
(From "The Sublime and Beautiful")
II A Letter to a Noble Lord
III On the Death of His Son
IV Marie Antoinette.
(From the "Reflections on the Revolution in France")
WILLIAM COWPER--(Born in 1731, died in 1800.)
I Of Keeping One's Self Employed.
(A Letter to John Newton)
II Of Johnson's Treatment of Milton.
(Letter to the Rev. William Unwin)
III On the Publication of His Books.
(Letter to the Rev. William Unwin)
EDWARD GIBBON--(Born in 1737, died in 1794.)
I The Romance of His Youth.
(From the "Memoirs")
II The Inception and Completion of the "Decline and Fall."
(From the "Memoirs")
III The Fall of Zenobia.
(From "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire")
IV Alaric's Entry into Rome.
(From "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire")
V The Death of Hosein.
(From "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire")
VI The Causes of the Destruction of the City of Rome.
(From "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire")
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND--II
1672-1800
SIR RICHARD STEELE
Born in Ireland in 1672; died in Wales in 1729; companion of
Addison at Oxford; served in the army in 1694, becoming a
captain; elected to Parliament, but expelled for using
seditious language; knighted under George I; quarreled with
Addison in 1719; founded the Tatler, and next to Addison,
was the chief writer for the Spectator.
I
OF COMPANIONS AND FLATTERERS
An old acquaintance who met me this morning seemed overjoyed to see
me, and told me I looked as well as he had known me do these forty
years; but, continued he, not quite the man you were when we visited
together at Lady Brightly's. Oh! Isaac, those days are over. Do you
think there are any such fine creatures now living as we then
conversed with? He went on with a thousand incoherent circumstances,
which, in his imagination, must needs please me; but they had the
quite contrary effect. The flattery with which he began, in telling me
how well I wore, was not disagreeable; but his indiscreet mention of a
set of acquaintance we had outlived, recalled ten thousand things to
my memory, which made me reflect upon my present condition with
regret. Had he indeed been so kind as, after a long absence, to
felicitate me upon an indolent and easy old age, and mentioned how
much he and I had to thank for, who at our time of day could walk
firmly, eat heartily and converse cheerfully, he had kept up my
pleasure in myself. But of all mankind, there are none so shocking as
these injudicious civil people. They ordinarily begin upon something
that they know must be a satisfaction; but then, for fear of the
imputation of flattery, they follow it with the last thing in the
world of which you would be reminded. It is this that perplexes civil
persons. The reason that there is such a general outcry among us
against flatterers is that there are so very few good ones. It is the
nicest art in this life, and is a part of eloquence which does not
want the preparation that is necessary to all other parts of it, that
your audience should be your well-wishers; for praise from an enemy is
the most pleasing of all commendations.
It is generally to be observed, that the person most agreeable to a
man for a constancy, is he that has no shining qualities, but is a
certain degree above great imperfections, whom he can live with as his
inferior, and who will either overlook or not observe his little
defects. Such an easy companion as this, either now and then throws
out a little flattery, or lets a man silently flatter himself in his
superiority to him. If you take notice, there is hardly a rich man in
the world who has not such a led friend of small consideration, who is
a darling for his insignificancy. It is a great ease to have one in
our own shape a species below us, and who, without being listed in our
service, is by nature of our retinue. These dependents are of
excellent use on a rainy day, or when a man has not a mind to dress;
or to exclude solitude, when one has neither a mind to that nor to
company. There are of this good-natured order who are so kind to
divide themselves, and do these good offices to many. Five or six of
them visit a whole quarter of the town, and exclude the spleen,
without fees, from the families they frequent. If they do not
prescribe physic, they can be company when you take it.
Very great benefactors to the rich, or those whom they call people at
their ease, are your persons of no consequence. I have known some of
them, by the help of a little cunning, make delicious flatterers. They
know the course of the town, and the general characters of persons; by
this means they will sometimes tell the most agreeable falsehoods
imaginable. They will acquaint you that such one of a quite contrary
party said, that tho you were engaged in different interests, yet he
had the greatest respect for your good sense and address. When one of
these has a little cunning, he passes his time in the utmost
satisfaction to himself and his friends; for his position is never to
report or speak a displeasing thing to his friend. As for letting him
go on in an error, he knows advice against them is the office of
persons of greater talents and less discretion.
The Latin word for a flatterer (_assentator_) implies no more than a
person that barely consents; and indeed such a one, if a man were able
to purchase or maintain him, can not be bought too dear. Such a one
never contradicts you, but gains upon you, not by a fulsome way of
commending you in broad terms, but liking whatever you propose or
utter; at the same time is ready to beg your pardon, and gainsay you
if you chance to speak ill of yourself. An old lady is very seldom
without such a companion as this, who can recite the names of all her
lovers, and the matches refused by her in the days when she minded
such vanities--as she is pleased to call them, tho she so much
approves the mention of them. It is to be noted, that a woman's
flatterer is generally elder than herself, her years serving to
recommend her patroness's age, and to add weight to her complaisance
in all other particulars.
We gentlemen of small fortunes are extremely necessitous in this
particular. I have indeed one who smokes with me often; but his parts
are so low, that all the incense he does me is to fill his pipe with
me, and to be out at just as many whiffs as I take. This is all the
praise or assent that he is capable of, yet there are more hours when
I would rather be in his company than that of the brightest man I
know. It would be a hard matter to give an account of this inclination
to be flattered; but if we go to the bottom of it, we shall find that
the pleasure in it is something like that of receiving money which lay
out. Every man thinks he has an estate of reputation, and is glad to
see one that will bring any of it home to him; it is no matter how
dirty a bag it is conveyed to him in, or by how clownish a messenger,
so the money is good. All that we want to be pleased with flattery, is
to believe that the man is sincere who gives it us. It is by this one
accident that absurd creatures often outrun the most skilful in this
art. Their want of ability is here an advantage, and their bluntness,
as it is the seeming effect of sincerity, is the best cover to
artifice.
It is indeed, the greatest of injuries to flatter any but the unhappy,
or such as are displeased with themselves for some infirmity. In this
latter case we have a member of our club, that, when Sir Jeffrey falls
asleep, wakens him with snoring. This makes Sir Jeffrey hold up for
some moments the longer, to see there are men younger than himself
among us, who are more lethargic than he is.
II
THE STORY-TELLER AND HIS ART[1]
I have often thought that a story-teller is born, as well as a poet.
It is, I think, certain, that some men have such a peculiar cast of
mind, that they see things in another light than men of grave
dispositions. Men of a lively imagination and a mirthful temper will
represent things to their hearers in the same manner as they
themselves were affected with them; and whereas serious spirits might
perhaps have been disgusted at the sight of some odd occurences in
life, yet the very same occurrences shall please them in a well-told
story, where the disagreeable parts of the images are concealed, and
those only which are pleasing exhibited to the fancy. Story-telling is
therefore not an art, but what we call a "knack"; it doth not so much
subsist upon wit as upon humor; and I will add, that it is not perfect
without proper gesticulations of the body, which naturally attend
such merry emotions of the mind. I know very well that a certain
gravity of countenance sets some stories off to advantage, where the
hearer is to be surprized in the end. But this is by no means a
general rule; for it is frequently convenient to aid and assist by
cheerful looks and whimsical agitations.
I will go yet further, and affirm that the success of a story very
often depends upon the make of the body, and the formation of the
features, of him who relates it. I have been of this opinion ever
since I criticized upon the chin of Dick Dewlap. I very often had the
weakness to repine at the prosperity of his conceits, which made him
pass for a wit with the widow at the coffee-house and the ordinary
mechanics that frequent it; nor could I myself forbear laughing at
them most heartily, tho upon examination I thought most of them very
flat and insipid. I found, after some time, that the merit of his wit
was founded upon the shaking of a fat paunch, and the tossing up of a
pair of rosy jowls. Poor Dick had a fit of sickness, which robbed him
of his fat and his fame at once; and it was full three months before
he regained his reputation, which rose in proportion to his floridity.
He is now very jolly and ingenious, and hath a good constitution for
wit.
Those who are thus adorned with the gifts of nature, are apt to show
their parts with too much ostentation. I would therefore advise all
the professors of this art never to tell stories but as they seem to
grow out of the subject-matter of the conversation, or as they serve
to illustrate or enliven it. Stories that are very common are
generally irksome; but may be aptly introduced, provided they be only
hinted at, and mentioned by way of allusion. Those that are altogether
new, should never be ushered in without a short and pertinent
character of the chief persons concerned, because, by that means, you
may make the company acquainted with them; and it is a certain rule,
that slight and trivial accounts of those who are familiar to us,
administer more mirth than the brightest points of wit in unknown
characters.
A little circumstance in the complexion of dress of the man you are
talking of, sets his image before the hearer, if it be chosen aptly
for the story. Thus, I remember Tom Lizard, after having made his
sisters merry with an account of a formal old man's way of
complimenting, owned very frankly that his story would not have been
worth one farthing, if he had made the hat of him whom he represented
one inch narrower. Besides the marking distinct characters, and
selecting pertinent circumstances, it is likewise necessary to leave
off in time, and end smartly; so that there is a kind of drama in the
forming of a story; and the manner of conducting and pointing it is
the same as in an epigram. It is a miserable thing, after one hath
raised the expectation of the company by humorous characters and a
pretty conceit, to pursue the matter too far. There is no retreating;
and how poor is it for a story-teller to end his relation by saying,
"that's all!"
III
SIR ROGER AND THE WIDOW[2]
In my first description of the company in which I pass most of my
time, it may be remembered that I mentioned a great affliction which
my friend Sir Roger had met with in his youth; which was no less than
a disappointment in love. It happened this evening that we fell into a
very pleasing walk at a distance from his house. As soon as we came
into it. "It is," quoth the good old man, looking round him with a
smile, "very hard that any part of my land should be settled upon one
who has used me so ill as the perverse widow did; and yet I am sure I
could not see a sprig of any bough of this whole walk of trees, but I
should reflect upon her and her severity. She has certainly the finest
hand of any woman in the world. You are to know, this was the place
wherein I used to muse upon her; and by that custom I can never come
into it, but the same tender sentiments revive in my mind, as if I had
actually walked with that beautiful creature under these shades. I
have been fool enough to carve her name on the bark of several of
these trees; so unhappy is the condition of men in love, to attempt
the removing of their passion by the methods which serve only to
imprint it deeper. She has certainly the finest hand of any woman in
the world."
Here followed a profound silence; and I was not displeased to observe
my friend falling so naturally into a discourse, which I had ever
before taken notice he industriously avoided. After a very long pause,
he entered upon an account of this great circumstance in his life,
with an air which I thought raised my idea of him above what I had
ever had before; and gave me the picture of that cheerful mind of his
before it received that stroke which has ever since affected his words
and actions. But he went on as follows:
"I came to my estate in my twenty-second year, and resolved to follow
the steps of the most worthy of my ancestors who have inhabited this
spot of earth before me, in all the methods of hospitality and good
neighborhood, for the sake of my fame; and in country sports and
recreations, for the sake of my health. In my twenty-third year I was
obliged to serve as sheriff of the county; and in my servants,
officers, and whole equipage, indulged the pleasure of a young man
(who did not think ill of his own person) in taking that public
occasion of showing my figure and behavior to advantage. You may
easily imagine to yourself what appearance I made, who am pretty tall,
rode well, and was very well drest, at the head of a whole county,
with music before me, a feather in my hat, and my horse well bitted. I
can assure you, I was not a little pleased with the kind looks and
glances I had from all the balconies and windows as I rode to the hall
where the assizes were held.
"But when I came there, a beautiful creature, in a widow's habit, sat
in court to hear the event of a cause concerning her dower. This
commanding creature (who was born for the destruction of all who
behold her) put on such a resignation in her countenance, and bore the
whispers of all around the court with such a pretty uneasiness, I
warrant you, and then recovered herself from one eye to another, until
she was perfectly confused by meeting something so wistful in all she
encountered, that at last, with a murrain to her, she cast her
bewitching eye upon me. I no sooner met it but I bowed like a great
surprized booby; and knowing her cause was to be the first which came
on, I cried, like a great captivated calf as I was, 'Make way for the
defendant's witnesses.' This sudden partiality made all the county
immediately see the sheriff also was become a slave to the fine widow.
During the time her cause was upon trial, she behaved herself, I
warrant you, with such a deep attention to her business, took
opportunities to have little billets handed to her counsel, then would
be in such a pretty confusion, occasioned, you must know, by acting
before so much company, that not only I, but the whole court, was
prejudiced in her favor; and all that the next heir to her husband had
to urge was thought so groundless and frivolous, that when it came to
her counsel to reply, there was not half so much said as every one
besides in the court thought he could have urged to her advantage.
"You must understand, sir, this perverse woman is one of those
unaccountable creatures that secretly rejoice in the admiration of
men, but indulge themselves in no further consequences. Hence it is
that she has ever had a train of admirers, and she removes from her
slaves in town to those in the country, according to the seasons of
the year. She is a reading lady, and far gone in the pleasures of
friendship. She is always accompanied by a confidant, who is witness
to her daily protestations against our sex, and consequently a bar to
her first steps toward love upon the strength of her own maxims and
declarations.
"However, I must needs say this accomplished mistress of mine has
distinguished me above the rest, and has been known to declare Sir
Roger de Coverley was the tamest and most humane of all the brutes in
the country. I was told she said so by one who thought he rallied me;
but upon the strength of this slender encouragement of being thought
least detestable, I made new liveries, new paired my coach horses,
sent them all to town to be bitted, and taught to throw their legs
well, and move all together before I pretended to cross the country,
and wait upon her. As soon as I thought my retinue suitable to the
character of my fortune and youth, I set out from hence to make my
addresses. The particular skill of this lady has ever been to inflame
your wishes, and yet command respect. To make her mistress of this
art, she has a greater share of knowledge, wit, and good sense, than
is usual even among men of merit. Then she is beautiful beyond the
race of women. If you will not let her go on with a certain artifice
with her eyes, and the skill of beauty, she will arm herself with her
real charms, and strike you with admiration instead of desire. It is
certain that if you were to behold the whole woman, there is that
dignity in her aspect, that composure in her motion, that complacency
in her manner, that if her form makes you hope, her merit makes you
fear. But then again, she is such a desperate scholar, that no country
gentleman can approach her without being a jest.
"As I was going to tell you, when I came to her house, I was admitted
to her presence with great civility; at the same time she placed
herself to be first seen by me in such an attitude as I think you call
the posture of a picture, that she discovered new charms, and I at
last came toward her with such an awe as made me speechless. This she
no sooner observed but she made her advantage of it, and began a
discourse to me concerning love and honor, as they both are followed
by pretenders, and the real votaries to them. When she discust these
points in a discourse, which I verily believe was as learned as the
best philosopher in Europe could possibly make, she asked me whether
she was so happy as to fall in with my sentiments on these important
particulars. Her confidant sat by her, and upon my being in the last
confusion and silence, this malicious aid of hers, turning to her,
says, 'I am very glad to observe Sir Roger pauses upon this subject,
and seems resolved to deliver all his sentiments upon the matter when
he pleases to speak.'
"They both kept their countenances, and after I had sat half an hour
meditating how to behave before such profound casuists, I rose up and
took my leave. Chance has since that time thrown me very often in her
way, and she as often directed a discourse to me which I do not
understand.
"This barbarity has kept me ever at a distance from the most
beautiful object my eyes ever beheld. It is thus also she deals with
all mankind, and you must make love to her, as you would conquer the
sphinx, by posing her. But were she like other women, and that there
were any talking to her, how constant must the pleasure of that man
be, who could converse with a creature--but, after all, you may be
sure her heart is fixt on some one or other; and yet I have been
credibly informed; but who can believe half that is said! After she
had done speaking to me, she put her hand to her bosom, and adjusted
her tucker. Then she cast her eyes a little down, upon my beholding
her too earnestly. They say she sings excellently; her voice in her
ordinary speech has something in it inexpressibly sweet. You must know
I dined with her at a public table the day after I first saw her, and
she helped me to some tansy in the eye of all the gentlemen in the
country. She has certainly the finest hand of any woman in the world.
I can assure you, sir, were you to behold her, you would be in the
same condition; for as her speech is music, her form is angelic. But I
find I grow irregular while I am talking of her; but, indeed, it would
be stupidity to be unconcerned at such perfection. Oh, the excellent
creature! she is as inimitable to all women as she is inaccessible to
all men."
I found my friend begin to rave, and insensibly led him toward the
house, that we might be joined by some other company; and am convinced
that the widow is the secret cause of all that inconsistency which
appears in some parts of my friend's discourse; tho he has so much
command of himself as not directly to mention her.
IV
THE COVERLEY FAMILY PORTRAITS[3]
I was this morning walking in the gallery, when Sir Roger entered at
the end opposite to me, and, advancing toward me, said he was glad to
meet me among his relations the de Coverleys, and hoped I liked the
conversation of so much good company who were as silent as myself. I
knew he alluded to the pictures, and as he is a gentleman who does not
a little value himself upon his ancient descent, I expected he would
give me some account of them. We were now arrived at the upper end of
the gallery, when the knight faced toward one of the pictures, and as
we stood before it, he entered into the matter, after his blunt way of
saying things, as they occur to his imagination, without regular
introduction, or care to preserve the appearance of chain of thought.
"It is," said he, "worth while to consider the force of dress; and how
the persons of one age differ from those of another, merely by that
only. One may observe also, that the general fashion of one age has
been followed by one particular set of people in another, and by them
preserved from one generation to another. Thus the vast jutting coat
and small bonnet, which was the habit in Henry the Seventh's time, is
kept on in the yeomen of the guard; not without a good and politic
view, because they look a foot taller, and a foot and a half broader;
besides, that the cap leaves the face expanded, and consequently more
terrible, and fitter to stand at the entrance of palaces.
"This predecessor of ours, you see, is drest after this manner, and
his cheeks would be no larger than mine, were he in a hat as I am. He
was the last man that won a prize in the Tilt-yard (which is now a
common street before Whitehall). You see the broken lance that lies
there by his right foot. He shivered that lance of his adversary all
to pieces; and bearing himself, look you, sir, in this manner, at the
same time he came within the target of the gentleman who rode against
him, and taking him with incredible force before him on the pommel of
his saddle, he in that manner rode the tournament over, with an air
that showed he did it rather to perform the rule of the lists than
expose his enemy; however, it appeared he knew how to make use of a
victory, and with a gentle trot he marched up to a gallery, where
their mistress sat (for they were rivals), and let him down with
laudable courtesy and pardonable insolence. I do not know but it might
be exactly where the coffee-house is now.
"You are to know this my ancestor was not only a military genius, but
fit also for the arts of peace, for he played on the bass viol as well
as any gentleman at court; you see where his viol hangs by his
basket-hilt sword. The action at the Tilt-yard you may be sure won the
fair lady, who was a maid of honor, and the greatest beauty of her
time; here she stands the next picture. You see, sir, my
great-great-great-grandmother has on the new-fashioned petticoat,
except that the modern is gathered at the waist. My grandmother
appears as if she stood in a large drum, whereas, the ladies now walk
as if they were in a go-cart. For all this lady was bred at court, she
became an excellent country wife, she brought ten children, and when I
show you the library, you shall see in her own hand (allowing for the
difference of the language) the best receipt now in English both for a
hasty pudding and a white-pot.
"If you please to fall back a little, because it is necessary to look
at the three next pictures at one view; these are three sisters. She
on the right hand, who is so very beautiful, died a maid; the next to
her, still handsomer, had the same fate, against her will; this homely
thing in the middle had both their portions added to her own, and was
stolen by a neighboring gentleman, a man of stratagem and resolution,
for he poisoned three mastiffs to come at her, and knocked down two
deer-stealers in carrying her off. Misfortunes happen in all families.
The theft of this romp, and so much money, was no great matter to our
estate. But the next heir that possess it was this soft gentleman whom
you see there. Observe the small buttons, the little boots, the laces,
the slashes about his clothes, and, above all, the posture he is drawn
in (which, to be sure, was his own choosing), you see he sits with one
hand on a desk writing and looking, as it were, another way, like an
easy writer, or a sonneteer. He was one of those that had too much wit
to know how to live in the world; he was a man of no justice, but
great good manners; he ruined everybody that had anything to do with
him, but never said a rude thing in his life; the most indolent person
in the world; he would sign a deed that passed away half his estate
with his gloves on, but would not put on his hat before a lady if it
were to save his country. He is said to be the first that made love by
squeezing the hand. He left the estate with ten thousand pounds debt
upon it; but, however, by all hands I have been informed that he was
every way the finest gentleman in the world. That debt lay heavy on
our house for one generation, but it was retrieved by a gift from that
honest man you see there, a citizen of our name, but nothing at all
akin to us. I know Sir Andrew Freeport has said behind my back that
this man was descended from one of the ten children of the maid of
honor I showed you above; but it was never made out. We winked at the
thing, indeed, because money was wanting at that time."
Here I saw my friend a little embarrassed, and turned my face to the
next portraiture. Sir Roger went on with his account of the gallery in
the following manner:
"This man [pointing to him I looked at] I take to be the honor of our
house. Sir Humphrey de Coverley; he was in his dealings as punctual as
a tradesman, and as generous as a gentleman. He would have thought
himself as much undone by breaking his word, as if it were to be
followed by bankruptcy. He served his country as a knight of the shire
to his dying day. He found it no easy matter to maintain an integrity
in his words and actions, even in things that regarded the offices
which were incumbent upon him, in the care of his own affairs and
relations of life, and therefore dreaded (tho he had great talents) to
go into employments of state, where he must be exposed to the snares
of ambition. Innocence of life and great ability were the
distinguishing parts of his character; the latter, he had often
observed, had led to the destruction of the former, and he used
frequently to lament that great and good had not the same
signification. He was an excellent husbandman, but had resolved not to
exceed such a degree of wealth; all above it he bestowed in secret
bounties many years after the sum he aimed at for his own use was
attained. Yet he did not slacken his industry, but to a decent old age
spent the life and fortune which was superfluous to himself, in the
service of his friends and neighbors."
Here we were called to dinner, and Sir Roger ended the discourse of
this gentleman, by telling me, as we followed the servant, that this
his ancestor was a brave man, and narrowly escaped being killed in the
civil wars. "For," said he, "he was sent out of the field upon a
private message the day before the battle of Worcester." The whim of
narrowly escaping by having been within a day of danger, with other
matters above mentioned, mixed with good sense, left me at a loss
whether I was more delighted with my friend's wisdom or simplicity.
V
ON CERTAIN SYMPTOMS OF GREATNESS[4]
There is no affection of the mind so much blended in human nature, and
wrought into our very constitution, as pride. It appears under a
multitude of disguises, and breaks out in ten thousand different
symptoms. Every one feels it in himself, and yet wonders to see it in
his neighbor. I must confess, I met with an instance of it the other
day where I should very little have expected it. Who would believe the
proud person I am going to speak of is a cobbler upon Ludgate hill?
This artist being naturally a lover of respect, and considering that
his circumstances are such that no man living will give it him, has
contrived the figure of a beau, in wood; who stands before him in a
bending posture, with his hat under his left arm, and his right hand
extended in such a manner as to hold a thread, a piece of wax, or an
awl, according to the particular service in which his master thinks
fit to employ him. When I saw him, he held a candle in this obsequious
posture. I was very well pleased with the cobbler's invention, that
had so ingeniously contrived an inferior, and stood a little while
contemplating this inverted idolatry, wherein the image did homage to
the man. When we meet with such a fantastic vanity in one of this
order, it is no wonder if we may trace it through all degrees above
it, and particularly through all the steps of greatness.
We easily see the absurdity of pride when it enters into the heart of
a cobbler; tho in reality it is altogether as ridiculous and
unreasonable, wherever it takes possession of a human creature. There
is no temptation to it from the reflection upon our being in general,
or upon any comparative perfection, whereby one man may excel another.
The greater a man's knowledge is, the greater motive he may seem to
have for pride; but in the same proportion as the one rises the other
sinks, it being the chief office of wisdom to discover to us our
weaknesses and imperfections.
As folly is the foundation of pride, the natural superstructure of it
is madness. If there was an occasion for the experiment, I would not
question to make a proud man a lunatic in three weeks' time, provided
I had it in my power to ripen his frenzy with proper applications. It
is an admirable reflection in Terence, where it is said of a parasite,
"_Hic homines ex stultis facit insanos._" "This fellow," says he, "has
an art of converting fools into madmen." When I was in France, the
region of complaisance and vanity, I have often observed that a great
man who has entered a levee of flatterers humble and temperate has
grown so insensibly heated by the court which was paid him on all
sides, that he has been quite distracted before he could get into his
coach.
If we consult the collegiates of Moorfields, we shall find most of
them are beholden to their pride for their introduction into that
magnificent palace. I had, some years ago, the curiosity to inquire
into the particular circumstances of these whimsical freeholders; and
learned from their own mouths the condition and character of each of
them. Indeed, I found that all I spoke to were persons of quality.
There were at that time five duchesses, three earls, two heathen gods,
an emperor, and a prophet. There were also a great number of such as
were locked up from their estates, and others who concealed their
titles. A leather-seller of Taunton whispered me in the ear that he
was the "Duke of Monmouth," but begged me not to betray him. At a
little distance from him sat a tailor's wife, who asked me, as I went,
if I had seen the sword-bearer, upon which I presumed to ask her who
she was, and was answered, "My lady mayoress."
I was very sensibly touched with compassion toward these miserable
people; and, indeed, extremely mortified to see human nature capable
of being thus disfigured. However, I reaped this benefit from it, that
I was resolved to guard myself against a passion which makes such
havoc in the brain, and produces so much disorder in the imagination.
For this reason I have endeavored to keep down the secret swellings of
resentment, and stifle the very first suggestions of self-esteem; to
establish my mind in tranquillity, and over-value nothing in my own or
in another's possession.
For the benefit of such whose heads are a little turned, tho not to so
great a degree as to qualify them for the place of which I have been
now speaking, I shall assign one of the sides of the college which I
am erecting, for the cure of this dangerous distemper.
The most remarkable of the persons, whose disturbance arises from
pride, and whom I shall use all possible diligence to cure, are such
as are hidden in the appearance of quite contrary habits and
dispositions. Among such, I shall, in the first place, take care of
one who is under the most subtle species of pride that I have observed
in my whole experience.
The patient is a person for whom I have a great respect, as being an
old courtier, and a friend of mine in my youth. The man has but a bare
subsistence, just enough to pay his reckoning with us at the Trumpet;
but, by having spent the beginning of his life is the hearing of great
men and persons of power, he is always promising to do good offices to
introduce every man he converses with into the world; will desire one
of ten times his substance to let him see him sometimes, and hints to
him that he does not forget him. He answers to matters of no
consequence with great circumspection; but, however, maintains a
general civility in his words and actions, and an insolent benevolence
to all whom he has to do with. This he practises with a grave tone and
air; and tho I am his senior by twelve years, and richer by forty
pounds per annum, he had yesterday the impudence to commend me to my
face, and tell me, "he should be always ready to encourage me." In a
word, he is a very insignificant fellow, but exceeding gracious. The
best return I can make him for his favors is to carry him myself to
Bedlam and see him well taken care of.
The next person I shall provide for is of a quite contrary character,
that has in him all the stiffness and insolence of quality, without a
grain of sense or good-nature, to make it either respected or
beloved. His pride has infected every muscle of his face; and yet,
after all his endeavors to show mankind that he contemns them, he is
only neglected by all that see him, as not of consequence enough to be
hated.
For the cure of this particular sort of madness, it will be necessary
to break through all forms with him, and familiarize his carriage by
the use of a good cudgel. It may likewise be of great benefit to make
him jump over a stick half a dozen times every morning.
A third, whom I have in my eye, is a young fellow, whose lunacy is
such that he boasts of nothing but what he ought to be ashamed of. He
is vain of being rotten, and talks publicly of having committed crimes
which he ought to be hanged for by the laws of his country.
There are several others whose brains are hurt with pride, and whom I
may hereafter attempt to recover; but shall conclude my present list
with an old woman, who is just dropping into her grave, that talks of
nothing but her birth. Tho she has not a tooth in her head, she
expects to be valued for the blood in her veins, which she fancies is
much better than that which glows in the cheeks of Belinda, and sets
half the town on fire.
VI
HOW TO BE HAPPY THO MARRIED[5]
My brother Tranquillus being gone out of town for some days, my sister
Jenny sent me word she would come and dine with me, and therefore
desired me to have no other company, I took care accordingly, and was
not a little pleased to see her enter the room with a decent and
matron-like behavior, which I thought very much became her. I saw she
had a great deal to say to me, and easily discovered in her eyes, and
the air of her countenance, that she had abundance of satisfaction in
her heart, which she longed to communicate. However, I was resolved to
let her break into her discourse her own way, and reduced her to a
thousand little devices and intimations to bring me to the mention of
her husband. But finding I was resolved not to name him, she began of
her own accord. "My husband," said she, "gives his humble service to
you," to which I only answered, "I hope he is well"; and, without
waiting for a reply, fell into other subjects.
She at last was out of all patience, and said, with a smile and manner
that I thought had more beauty and spirit than I had ever observed
before in her, "I did not think, brother, you had been so ill-natured.
You have seen, ever since I came in, that I had a mind to talk of my
husband, and you will not be so kind as to give me an occasion."
"I did not know," said I, "but it might be a disagreeable subject to
you. You do not take me for so old-fashioned a fellow as to think of
entertaining a young lady with the discourse of her husband. I know
nothing is more acceptable than to speak of one who is to be so, but
to speak of one who is so! indeed, Jenny, I am a better-bred man than
you think me."
She showed a little dislike at my raillery; and, by her bridling up, I
perceived she expected to be treated hereafter not as Jenny Distaff,
but Mrs. Tranquillus. I was very well pleased with this change in her
humor; and, upon talking with her on several subjects, I could not but
fancy I saw a great deal of her husband's way and manner in her
remarks, her phrases, the tone of her voice, and the very air of her
countenance. This gave me an unspeakable satisfaction, not only
because I had found her a husband, from whom she could learn many
things that were laudable, but also because I looked upon her
imitation of him as an infallible sign that she entirely loved him.
This is an observation that I never knew fail, tho I do not remember
that any other has made it. The natural shyness of her sex hindered
her from telling me the greatness of her own passion; but I easily
collected it from the representation she gave me of his.
"I have everything," says she, "in Tranquillus, that I can wish for;
and enjoy in him, what, indeed, you have told me were to be met with
in a good husband, the fondness of a lover, the tenderness of a
parent, and the intimacy of a friend."
It transported me to see her eyes swimming in tears of affection when
she spoke. "And is there not, dear sister," said I, "more pleasure in
the possession of such a man than in all the little impertinencies of
balls, assemblies, and equipage, which it cost me so much pains to
make you contemn?"
She answered, smiling, "Tranquillus has made me a sincere convert in a
few weeks, tho I am afraid you could not have done it in your whole
life. To tell you truly, I have only one fear hanging upon me, which
is apt to give me trouble in the midst of all my satisfactions: I am
afraid, you must know, that I shall not always make the same amiable
appearance in his eye that I do at present. You know, brother
Bickerstaff, that you have the reputation of a conjurer; and, if you
have any one secret in your art to make your sister always beautiful,
I should be happier than if I were mistress of all the worlds you have
shown me in a starry night."
"Jenny," said I, "without having recourse to magic, I shall give you
one plain rule that will not fail of making you always amiable to a
man who has so great a passion for you, and is of so equal and
reasonable a temper as Tranquillus. Endeavor to please, and you must
please; be always in the same disposition, as you are when you ask for
this secret, and you may take my word, you will never want it. An
inviolable fidelity, good humor, and complacency of temper outlive all
the charms of a fine face, and make the decays of it invisible."
We discoursed very long upon this head, which was equally agreeable to
us both; for, I must confess, as I tenderly love her, I take as much
pleasure in giving her instructions for her welfare, as she herself
does in receiving them. I proceeded, therefore, to inculcate these
sentiments by relating a very particular passage that happened within
my own knowledge.
There were several of us making merry at a friend's house in a country
village, when the sexton of the parish church entered the room in a
sort of surprize, and told us, "that as he was digging a grave in the
chancel, a little blow of his pickax opened a decayed coffin, in which
there were several written papers." Our curiosity was immediately
raised, so that we went to the place where the sexton had been at
work, and found a great concourse of people about the grave. Among the
rest there was an old woman, who told us the person buried there was a
lady whose name I do not think fit to mention, tho there is nothing in
the story but what tends very much to her honor. This lady lived
several years an exemplary pattern of conjugal love, and, dying soon
after her husband, who every way answered her character in virtue and
affection, made it her death-bed request, "that all the letters which
she had received from him, both before and after her marriage, should
be buried in the coffin with her." These, I found upon examination,
were the papers before us. Several of them had suffered so much by
time that I could only pick out a few words; as my soul! lilies!
roses! dearest angel! and the like. One of them, which was legible
throughout, ran thus:
_Madam_:--
If you would know the greatness of my love, consider that of your own
beauty. That blooming countenance, that snowy bosom, that graceful
person, return every moment to my imagination; the brightness of your
eyes hath hindered me from closing mine since I last saw you. You may
still add to your beauties by a smile. A frown will make me the most
wretched of men, as I am the most passionate of lovers.
It filled the whole company with a deep melancholy, to compare the
description of the letter with the person that occasioned it, who was
now reduced to a few crumbling bones, and a little moldering heap of
earth. With much ado I deciphered another letter which began with, "My
dear, dear wife." This gave me a curiosity to see how the style of one
written in marriage differed from one written in courtship. To my
surprize, I found the fondness rather augmented than lessened, tho the
panegyric turned upon a different accomplishment. The words were as
follows:
Before this short absence from you, I did not know that I loved you so
much as I really do; tho, at the same time, I thought I loved you as
much as possible. I am under great apprehension lest you should have
any uneasiness whilst I am defrauded of my share in it, and can not
think of tasting any pleasures that you do not partake with me. Pray,
my dear, be careful of your health, if for no other reason but because
you know I could not outlive you. It is natural in absence to make
professions of an inviolable constancy; but toward so much merit it
is scarce a virtue, especially when it is but a bare return to that of
which you have given me such continued proofs ever since our first
acquaintance. I am, etc.
It happened that the daughter of these two excellent persons was by
when I was reading this letter. At the sight of the coffin, in which
was the body of her mother, near that of her father, she melted into a
flood of tears. As I had heard a great character of her virtue, and
observed in her this instance of filial piety, I could not resist my
natural inclination, of giving advice to young people, and therefore
addrest myself to her. "Young lady," said I, "you see how short is the
possession of that beauty, in which nature has been so liberal to you.
You find the melancholy sight before you is a contradiction to the
first letter that you heard on that subject; whereas, you may observe
the second letter, which celebrates your mother's constancy, is
itself, being found in this place, an argument of it. But, madam, I
ought to caution you not to think the bodies that lie before you your
father and your mother. Know their constancy is rewarded by a nobler
union than by this mingling of their ashes, in a state where there is
no danger or possibility of a second separation."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: From the Guardian.]
[Footnote 2: From the Spectator.]
[Footnote 3: From the Spectator.]
[Footnote 4: From the Tatler.]
[Footnote 5: From the Tatler.]
LORD BOLINGBROKE
Born in 1678, died in 1751; his name, before he was a peer,
Henry St. John; entered Parliament in 1701, acting with the
Tories; Secretary of War in 1704-08; Secretary of State in
1710-14; created Viscount Bolingbroke in 1714; opposed the
accession of the House of Hanover, and on the death of Queen
Anne in 1714, fled to France, entering the service of the
Pretender, by whom he was soon dismissed and then returned
to England; a friend of Pope and Swift, Pope's "Essay on
Man" being addrest to him.
I
OF THE SHORTNESS OF HUMAN LIFE
I think very differently from most men of the time we have to pass,
and the business we have to do, in this world. I think we have more of
one, and less of the other, than is commonly supposed. Our want of
time, and the shortness of human life, are some of the principal
commonplace complaints which we prefer against the established order
of things; they are the grumblings of the vulgar, and the pathetic
lamentations of the philosopher; but they are impertinent and impious
in both. The man of business despises the man of pleasure for
squandering his time away; the man of pleasure pities or laughs at the
man of business for the same thing; and yet both concur superciliously
and absurdly to find fault with the Supreme Being for having given
them so little time. The philosopher, who misspends it very often as
much as the others, joins in the same cry, and authorizes this
impiety. Theophrastus thought it extremely hard to die at ninety, and
to go out of the world when he had just learned how to live in it. His
master Aristotle found fault with nature for treating man in this
respect worse than several other animals; both very unphilosophically!
and I love Seneca the better for his quarrel with the Stagirite[6] on
this head.
We see, in so many instances, a just proportion of things, according
to their several relations to one another, that philosophy should lead
as to conclude this proportion preserved, even where we can not
discern it; instead of leading us to conclude that it is not preserved
where we do not discern it, or where we think that we see the
contrary. To conclude otherwise is shocking presumption. It is to
presume that the system of the universe would have been more wisely
contrived, if creatures of our low rank among intellectual natures had
been called to the councils of the Most High; or that the Creator
ought to mend His work by the advice of the creature. That life which
seems to our self-love so short, when we compare it with the ideas we
frame of eternity, or even with the duration of some other beings,
will appear sufficient, upon a less partial view, to all the ends of
the creation, and of a just proportion in the successive course of
generations. The term itself is long; we render it short; and the want
we complain of flows from our profusion, not from our poverty.
Let us leave the men of pleasure and of business, who are often
candid enough to own that they throw away their time, and thereby to
confess that they complain of the Supreme Being for no other reason
than this, that He has not proportioned His bounty to their
extravagance. Let us consider the scholar and philosopher, who, far
from owning that he throws any time away, reproves others for doing
it; that solemn mortal who abstains from the pleasures, and declines
the business of the world, that he may dedicate his whole time to the
search of truth and the improvement of knowledge. When such a one
complains of the shortness of human life in general, or of his
remaining share in particular, might not a man more reasonable, tho
less solemn, expostulate thus with him: "Your complaint is indeed
consistent with your practise; but you would not possibly renew your
complaint if you reviewed your practise. Tho reading makes a scholar,
yet every scholar is not a philosopher, nor every philosopher a wise
man. It cost you twenty years to devour all the volumes on one side of
your library; you came out a great critic in Latin and Greek, in the
Oriental tongues, in history and chronology; but you were not
satisfied. You confest that these were the _literæ nihil sanantes_,
and you wanted more time to acquire other knowledge. You have had this
time; you have passed twenty years more on the other side of your
library, among philosophers, rabbis, commentators, school-men, and
whole legions of modern doctors. You are extremely well versed in all
that has been written concerning the nature of God, and of the soul of
man, about matter and form, body and spirit, and space and eternal
essences, and incorporeal substances, and the rest of those profound
speculations. You are a master of the controversies that have arisen
about nature and grace, about predestination and freewill, and all the
other abstruse questions that have made so much noise in the schools,
and done so much hurt in the world. You are going on, as fast as the
infirmities you have contracted will permit, in the same course of
study; but you begin to foresee that you shall want time, and you make
grievous complaints of the shortness of human life. Give me leave now
to ask you how many thousand years God must prolong your life in order
to reconcile you to His wisdom and goodness?
"It is plain, at least highly probable, that a life as long as that of
the most aged of the patriarchs would be too short to answer your
purposes; since the researches and disputes in which you are engaged
have been already for a much longer time the objects of learned
inquiries, and remain still as imperfect and undetermined as they were
at first. But let me ask you again, and deceive neither yourself nor
me, have you, in the course of these forty years, once examined the
first principles and the fundamental facts on which all those
questions depend, with an absolute indifference of judgment, and with
a scrupulous exactness? with the same care that you have employed in
examining the various consequences drawn from them, and the heterodox
opinions about them? Have you not taken them for granted in the whole
course of your studies? Or, if you have looked now and then on the
state of the proofs brought to maintain them, have you not done it as
a mathematician looks over a demonstration formerly made--to refresh
his memory, not to satisfy any doubt? If you have thus examined, it
may appear marvelous to some that you have spent so much time in many
parts of those studies which have reduced you to this hectic condition
of so much heat and weakness. But if you have not thus examined, it
must be evident to all, nay, to yourself on the least cool reflection,
that you are still, notwithstanding all your learning, in a state of
ignorance. For knowledge can alone produce knowledge; and without such
an examination of axioms and facts, you can have none about
inferences."
In this manner one might expostulate very reasonably with many a great
scholar, many a profound philosopher, many a dogmatical casuist. And
it serves to set the complaints about want of time, and the shortness
of human life, in a very ridiculous but a true light.
II
RULES FOR THE STUDY OF HISTORY[7]
I have considered formerly, with a good deal of attention, the subject
on which you command me to communicate my thoughts to you; and I
practised in those days, as much as business and pleasure allowed me
time to do, the rules that seemed to me necessary to be observed in
the study of history. They were very different from those which
writers on the same subject have recommended, and which are commonly
practised. But I confess to your lordship that this neither gave me
then, nor has given me since, any distrust of them. I do not affect
singularity. On the contrary, I think that a due deference is to be
paid to received opinions, and that a due compliance with received
customs is to be held; tho both the one and the other should be, what
they often are, absurd or ridiculous. But this servitude is outward
only, and abridges in no sort the liberty of private judgment. The
obligations of submitting to it likewise, even outwardly, extend no
further than to those opinions and customs which can not be opposed;
or from which we can not deviate without doing hurt, or giving
offense, to society. In all these cases, our speculations ought to be
free; in all other cases, our practise may be so. Without any regard,
therefore, to the opinion and practise even of the learned world, I am
very willing to tell you mine. But as it is hard to recover a thread
of thought long ago laid aside, and impossible to prove some things
and explain others, without the assistance of many books which I have
not here, your lordship must be content with such an imperfect sketch
as I am able to send you in this letter.
The motives that carry men to the study of history are different. Some
intend, if such as they may be said to study, nothing more than
amusement, and read the life of Aristides or Phocion, of Epaminondas
or Scipio, Alexander or Cæsar, just as they play a game at cards, or
as they would read the story of the seven champions.
Others there are whose motive to this study is nothing better, and who
have the further disadvantage of becoming a nuisance very often to
society, in proportion to the progress they make. The former do not
improve their reading to any good purpose; the latter pervert it to a
very bad one, and grow in impertinence as they increase in learning. I
think I have known most of the first kind in England, and most of the
last in France. The persons I mean are those who read to talk, to
shine in conversation, and to impose in company; who, having few ideas
to vend of their own growth, store their minds with crude unruminated
facts and sentences, and hope to supply by bare memory the want of
imagination and judgment.
But these are in the two lowest forms. The next I shall mention are in
one a little higher; in the form of those who grow neither wiser nor
better by study themselves, but who enable others to study with
greater ease, and to purposes more useful; who make fair copies of
foul manuscripts, give the signification of hard words, and take a
great deal of other grammatical pains. The obligation to these men
would be great indeed, if they were in general able to do anything
better, and submitted to this drudgery for the sake of the public; as
some of them, it must be owned with gratitude, have done, but not
later, I think, than about the time of the resurrection of letters.
When works of importance are pressing, generals themselves may take
up the pickax and the spade; but in the ordinary course of things,
when that pressing necessity is over, such tools are left in the hands
destined to use them, the hands of common soldiers and peasants. I
approve, therefore, very much the devotion of a studious man at Christ
Church, who was overheard in his oratory entering into a detail with
God, acknowledging the divine goodness in furnishing the world with
makers of dictionaries! These men court fame, as well as their
letters, by such means as God has given them to acquire it; and
Littleton exerted all the genius he had when he made a dictionary, tho
Stephens did not. They deserve encouragement, however, while they
continue to compile, and neither affect wit, nor presume to reason.
There is a fourth class, of much less use than these, but of much
greater name. Men of the first rank in learning, and to whom the whole
tribe of scholars bow with reverence. A man must be as indifferent as
I am to common censure or approbation, to avow a thorough contempt for
the whole business of these learned lives; for all the researches into
antiquity, for all the systems of chronology and history, that we owe
to the immense labors of a Scaliger, a Bochart, a Petavius, an Usher,
and even a Marsham. The same materials are common to them all; but
these materials are few, and there is a moral impossibility that they
should ever have more. They have combined these into every form that
can be given to them; they have supposed, they have guessed, they have
joined disjointed passages of different authors, and broken traditions
of uncertain originals, of various people, and of centuries remote
from one another as well as from ours. In short, that they might leave
no liberty untaken, even a wild fantastical similitude of sounds has
served to prop up a system. As the materials they have are few, so are
the very best and such as pass for authentic extremely precarious, as
learned persons themselves confess.
Julius Africanus, Eusebius, and George the Monk opened the principal
sources of all this science; but they corrupted the waters. Their
point of view was to make profane history and chronology agree with
sacred. For this purpose, the ancient monuments that these writers
conveyed to posterity were digested by them according to the system
they were to maintain; and none of these monuments were delivered down
in their original form and genuine purity. The dynasties of Manetho,
for instance, are broken to pieces by Eusebius, and such fragments of
them as suited his design are stuck into his work. We have, we know,
no more of them. The "Codex Alexandrinus" we owe to George the Monk.
We have no other authority for it; and one can not see without
amazement such a man as Sir John Marsham undervaluing this authority
in one page, and building his system upon it in the next. He seems
even by the lightness of his expressions, if I remember well, for it
is long since I looked into his canon, not to be much concerned what
foundation his system had, so he showed his skill in forming one, and
in reducing the immense antiquity of the Egyptians within the limits
of the Hebraic calculation.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: A name under which Aristotle was sometimes known, from
his birthplace Stag.]
[Footnote 7: One of the "Letters on the Study of History."]
ALEXANDER POPE
Born to London in 1688, died in 1744; his father a linen
draper, converted to the Catholic faith; not regularly
educated, owing to his frail and sickly body; began to write
in boyhood, and before he was seventeen had met the leading
literary men of London; his "Essay on Criticism," published
in 1711, translation of Homer in 1720 and 1725, "Essay on
Man," in 1732-34.
I
AN ANCIENT ENGLISH COUNTRY SEAT[8]
'Tis not possible to express the least part of the joy your return
gives me; time only and experience will convince you how very sincere
it is. I excessively long to meet you, to say so much, so very much to
you, that I believe I shall say nothing. I have given orders to be
sent for the first minute of your arrival--which I beg you will let
them know at Mr. Jervas's. I am four-score miles from London, a short
journey compared to that I so often thought at least of undertaking,
rather than die without seeing you again. Tho the place I am in is
such as I would not quit for the town, if I did not value you more
than any, nay everybody else there; and you will be convinced how
little the town has engaged my affections in your absence from it,
when you know what a place this is which I prefer to it; I shall
therefore describe it to you at large, as the true picture of a
genuine ancient country-seat.
You must expect nothing regular in my description of a house that
seems to be built before rules were in fashion: the whole is so
disjointed, and the parts so detached from each other, and yet so
joining again, one can not tell how, that--in a poetical fit--you
would imagine it had been a village in Amphion's time, where twenty
cottages had taken a dance together, were all out, and stood still in
amazement ever since. A stranger would be grievously disappointed who
should ever think to get into this house the right way. One would
expect, after entering through the porch, to be let into the hall;
alas! nothing less, you find yourself in a brew-house. From the
parlor you think to step into the drawing-room; but, upon opening the
iron-nailed door, you are convinced, by a flight of birds about your
ears, and a cloud of dust in your eyes, that it is the pigeon-house.
On each side our porch are two chimneys, that wear their greens on the
outside, which would do as well within, for whenever we make a fire,
we let the smoke out of the windows. Over the parlor window hangs a
sloping balcony, which, time has turned to a very convenient
penthouse. The top is crowned with a very venerable tower, so like
that of the church just by, that the jackdaws build in it as if it
were the true steeple.
The great hall is high and spacious, flanked with long tables, images
of ancient hospitality; ornamented with monstrous horns, about twenty
broken pikes, and a matchlock musket or two, which they say were used
in the civil wars. Here is one vast arched window, beautifully
darkened with divers scutcheons of painted glass. There seems to be
great propriety in this old manner of blazoning upon glass, ancient
families being like ancient windows, in the course of generations
seldom free from cracks. One shining pane bears date 1286. The
youthful face of Dame Elinor owes more to this single piece than to
all the glasses she ever consulted in her life. Who can say after this
that glass is frail, when it is not half so perishable as human beauty
or glory? For in another pane you see the memory of a knight
preserved, whose marble nose is moldered from his monument in the
church adjoining. And yet, must not one sigh to reflect, that the
most authentic record of so ancient a family should lie at the mercy
of every boy that throws a stone? In this hall, in former days, have
dined gartered knights and courtly dames, with ushers, sewers, and
seneschals; and yet it was but the other night that an owl flew in
hither, and mistook it for a barn.
This hall lets you up (and down) over a very high threshold, into the
parlor. It is furnished with historical tapestry, whose marginal
fringes do confess the moisture of the air. The other contents of this
room are a broken-bellied virginal, a couple of crippled velvet
chairs, with two or three mildewed pictures of moldy ancestors, who
look as dismally as if they came fresh from hell with all their
brimstone about 'em. These are carefully set at the further corner:
for the windows being everywhere broken, make it so convenient a place
to dry poppies and mustard-seed in, that the room is appropriated to
that use.
Next this parlor lies, as I said before, the pigeon-house, by the side
of which runs an entry that leads, on one hand and t'other, into a
bed-chamber, a buttery, and a small hole called the chaplain's study.
Then follow a brew-house, a little green and gilt parlor, and the
great stairs, under which is the dairy. A little further on the right,
the servants' hall; and by the side of it, up six steps, the old
lady's closet, which has a lattice into the said hall, that, while she
said her prayers, she might cast an eye on the men and maids. There
are upon this ground floor in all twenty-four apartments, hard to be
distinguished by particular names; among which I must not forget a
chamber that has in it a large antiquity of timber, which seems to
have been either a bedstead or a cider-press.
Our best room above is very long and low, of the exact proportion of a
bandbox; it has hangings of the finest work in the world; those, I
mean, which Arachne spins out of her own bowels: indeed, the roof is
so decayed, that after a favorable shower of rain, we may, with God's
blessing, expect a crop of mushrooms between the chinks of the floors.
All this upper story has for many years had no other inhabitants than
certain rats, whose very age renders them worthy of this venerable
mansion, for the very rats of this ancient seat are gray. Since these
have not quitted it, we hope at least this house may stand during the
small remainder of days these poor animals have to live, who are now
too infirm to remove to another: they have still a small subsistence
left them in the few remaining books of the library.
I had never seen half what I have described, but for an old starched
gray-headed steward, who is as much an antiquity as any in the place,
and looks like an old family picture walked out of its frame. He
failed not, as we passed from room to room, to relate several memoirs
of the family; but his observations were particularly curious in the
cellar: he shewed where stood the triple rows of butts of sack, and
where were ranged the bottles of tent for toasts in the morning; he
pointed to the stands that supported the iron-hooped hogsheads of
strong beer; then stepping to a corner, he lugged out the tattered
fragment of an unframed picture: "This," says he, with tears in his
eyes, "was poor Sir Thomas, once master of all the drink I told you
of: he had two sons (poor young masters!) that never arrived to the
age of his beer; they both fell ill in this very cellar, and never
went out upon their own legs." He could not pass by a broken bottle
without taking it up to show us the arms of the family on it. He then
led me up the tower, by dark winding stone steps, which landed us into
several little rooms, one above the other; one of these was nailed up,
and my guide whispered to me the occasion of it. It seems the course
of this noble blood was a little interrupted about two centuries ago
by a freak of the Lady Frances, who was here taken with a neighboring
prior; ever since which the room has been nailed up, and branded with
the name of the adultery-chamber. The ghost of Lady Frances is
supposed to walk here: some prying maids of the family formerly
reported that they saw a lady in a farthingale through the keyhole;
but this matter was hushed up, and the servants forbid to talk of it.
I must needs have tired you with this long letter; but what engaged me
in the description was a generous principle to preserve the memory of
a thing that must itself soon fall to ruin; nay, perhaps, some part of
it before this reaches your hands: indeed, I owe this old house the
same sort of gratitude that we do to an old friend that harbors us in
his declining condition, nay, even in his last extremities. I have
found this an excellent place for retirement and study, where no one
who passes by can dream there is an inhabitant, and even anybody that
would visit me dares not venture under my roof. You will not wonder I
have translated a great deal of Homer in this retreat; any one that
sees it will own I could not have chosen a fitter or more likely place
to converse with the dead. As soon as I return to the living, it shall
be to converse with the best of them. I hope, therefore, very speedily
to tell you in person how sincerely and unalterably I am, madam, your
most faithful, obliged, and obedient servant.
I beg Mr. Wortley to believe me his most humble servant.
II
HIS COMPLIMENTS TO LADY MARY[9]
I have been (what I never was till now) in debt to you for a letter
some weeks. I was informed you were at sea, and that 'twas to no
purpose to write till some news had been heard of you somewhere or
other. Besides, I have had a second dangerous illness, from which I
was more diligent to be recovered than from the first, having now some
hopes of seeing you again. If you make any tour in Italy, I shall not
easily forgive you for not acquainting me soon enough to have met you
there. I am very certain I shall never be polite unless I travel with
you, and it is never to be repaired, the loss that Homer has sustained
for want of my translating him in Asia.
You will come here full of criticisms against a man who wanted nothing
to be in the right, but to have kept you company; you have no way of
making me amends but by continuing an Asiatic when you return to me,
whatever English airs you may put on to other people. I prodigiously
long for your sounds, your remarks, your Oriental learning; but I long
for nothing so much as your Oriental self. You must of necessity be
advanced so far back in true nature and simplicity of manners, by
these three years' residence in the East, that I shall look upon you
as so many years younger than you was, so much nearer innocence (that
is truth) and infancy (that is openness). I expect to see your soul as
much thinner drest than your body, and that you have left off as weary
and cumbersome a great many damned European habits. Without offense to
your modesty be it spoken, I have a burning desire to see your soul
stark naked, for I am confident it is the prettiest kind of white soul
in the universe. But I forget whom I am talking to; you may possibly
by this time believe according to the Prophet, that you have none; if
so, show me that which comes next to a soul, you may easily put it
upon a poor ignorant Christian for a soul and please him as well with
it--I mean your heart--Mohammed I think allows you hearts; which
(together with fine eyes and other agreeable equivalents) are with all
the souls on the other side of the world.
But if I must be content with seeing your body only, God send it come
quickly. I honor it more than the diamond casket that held Homer's
Iliads; for in the very twinkle of one eye of it there is more wit,
and in the very dimple of one cheek of it there is more meaning, than
all the souls that were carefully put into woman since God had the
making of them.
I have a mind to fill the rest of this paper with an accident that has
happened just under my eyes, and has made a great impression on me. I
have just passed part of the summer at an old romantic seat of my Lord
Harcourt's which he lent me. It overlooks a commonfield, where, under
the shade of the haycock, sat two lovers as constant as ever were
found in romance, beneath a spreading beech. The name of the one (let
it sound as it will) was John Hewet; of the other, Sarah Drew. John
was a well-set man of about five and twenty, Sarah a brown woman of
eighteen. John had for several months borne the labor of the day in
the same field with Sarah; when she milked it was his morning and
evening charge to bring the cows to her pail.
Their love was the talk, but not the scandal, of the whole
neighborhood; for all they aimed at was the blameless possession of
each other in marriage. It was but this very morning that he had
obtained her parent's consent, and it was but till the next week that
they were to wait to be happy. Perhaps this very day, in the interval
of their work, they were talking about their wedding clothes, and
John was now matching several kinds of poppies and field flowers to
her complexion to make her a present of knots for the day.
While they are thus employed (it was in the last of July) a terrible
storm of thunder and lightning arose, that drove the laborers to what
shelter the trees or hedge afforded. Sarah, frightened and out of
breath, sunk on a haycock, and John (who was never separated from her)
sate by her side, having raked two or three heaps together to secure
her. Immediately there was heard so loud a crash as if heaven were
burst asunder. The laborers, all solicitous for each other's safety,
called to one another. Those that were nearest our lovers, hearing no
answer, stept to the place where they lay; they first saw a little
smoke and after this the faithful pair--John with one arm about his
Sarah's neck, and the other held over her face as if to screen her
from the lightning. They were struck dead and already grown stiff and
cold in this tender posture. There was no mark or discoloring on their
bodies, only that Sarah's eyebrow was a little singed and a small spot
between her breasts. They were buried the next day in one grave, in
the parish of Stanton Harcourt, in Oxfordshire; where my lord
Harcourt, at my request, has erected a monument over them....
Upon the whole, I can't think these people unhappy. The greatest
happiness, next to living as they would have done, was to die as they
did. The greatest honor people of their low degree could have was to
be remembered on a little monument; unless you will give them
another--that of being honored with a tear from the finest eyes in
the world. I know you have tenderness; you must have it; it is the
very emanation of good sense and virtue; the finest minds like the
finest metals dissolve the easiest.
But when you are reflecting upon objects of pity, pray do not forget
one, who had no sooner found out an object of the highest esteem than
he was separated from it; and who is so very unhappy as not to be
susceptible of consolation from others, by being so miserable in the
right as to think other women what they really are. Such a one can't
but be desperately fond of any creature that is quite different from
these. If the Circassian be utterly void of such honor as these have,
and such virtue as these boast of, I am content. I have detested the
sound of honest woman, and loving spouse, ever since I heard the
pretty name of Odaliche.
Dear Madam, I am forever yours,
My most humble services to Mr. Wortley.[10] Pray let me hear from you
soon, tho I shall very soon write again. I am confident half our
letters are lost.
III
HOW TO MAKE AN EPIC POEM[11]
It is no small pleasure to me, who am zealous in the interests of
learning, to think I may have the honor of leading the town into a
very new and uncommon road of criticism. As that kind of literature is
at present carried on, it consists only in a knowledge of mechanic
rules which contribute to the structure of different sorts of poetry,
as the receipts of good housewives do to the making puddings of flour,
oranges, plums, or any other ingredients. It would, methinks, make
these my instructions more easily intelligible to ordinary readers, if
I discoursed of these matters in the style in which ladies learned in
economics dictate to their pupils for the improvement of the kitchen
and larder.
I shall begin with epic poetry, because the critics agree it is the
greatest work human nature is capable of. I know the French have
already laid down many mechanical rules for compositions of this sort,
but at the same time they cut off almost all undertakers from the
possibility of ever performing them; for the first qualification they
unanimously require in a poet is a genius. I shall here endeavor (for
the benefit of my countrymen) to make it manifest that epic poems may
be made "without a genius," nay, without learning, or much reading.
This must necessarily be of great use to all those poets who confess
they never read, and of whom the world is convinced they never learn.
What Molière observes of making a dinner, that any man can do it with
money, and if a profest cook can not without, he has his art for
nothing, the same may be said of making a poem--it is easily brought
about by him that has a genius, but the skill lies in doing it without
one. In pursuance of this end, I shall present the reader with a plain
and certain receipt, by which even sonneteers and ladies may be
qualified for this grand performance.
I know it will be objected that one of the chief qualifications of an
epic poet is to be knowing in all arts and sciences. But this ought
not to discourage those that have no learning, as long as indexes and
dictionaries may be had, which are the compendium of all knowledge.
Besides, since it is an established rule that none of the terms of
those arts and sciences are to be made use of, one may venture to
affirm our poet can not impertinently offend in this point. The
learning which will be more particularly necessary to him is the
ancient geography of towns, mountains, and rivers; for this let him
take Culverius, value fourpence.
Another quality required is a complete skill in languages. To this I
answer that it is notorious persons of no genius have been oftentimes
great linguists. To instance in the Greek, of which there are two
sorts; the original Greek, and that from which our modern authors
translate. I should be unwilling to promise impossibilities; but
modestly speaking, this may be learned in about an hour's time with
ease. I have known one who became a sudden professor of Greek
immediately upon application of the left-hand page of the Cambridge
Homer to his eye. It is in these days with authors as with other men,
the well bred are familiarly acquainted with, them at first sight; and
as it is sufficient for a good general to have surveyed the ground he
is to conquer, so it is enough for a good poet to have seen the author
he is to be master of. But to proceed to the purpose of this paper.
For the Fable.--Take out of any old poem, history book, romance or
legend (for instance, Geoffrey of Monmouth, or Don Belianis of
Greece[12]), those parts of story which afford most scope for long
descriptions. Put these pieces together, and throw all the adventures
you fancy into one tale. Then take a hero you may choose for the sound
of his name, and put him into the midst of these adventures. There let
him work for twelve books; at the end of which you may take him out
ready prepared to conquer, or to marry; it being necessary that the
conclusion of an epic poem be fortunate.
To Make an Episode.--Take any remaining adventure of your former
collection, in which you could no way involve your hero; or any
unfortunate accident that was too good to be thrown away; and it will
be of use applied to any other person, who may be lost and evaporate
in the course of the work, without the least damage to the
composition.
For the Moral and Allegory.--These you may extract out of the fable
afterward, at your leisure. Be sure you strain them sufficiently.
For the Manners.--For those of the hero, take all the best qualities
you can find in all the celebrated heroes of antiquity; if they will
not be reduced to a consistency, lay them all in a heap upon him. But
be sure they are qualities which your patron would be thought to have;
and, to prevent any mistake which the world may be subject to, select
from the alphabet those capital letters that compose his name, and set
them at the head of a dedication before your poem. However, do not
absolutely observe the exact quantity of these virtues, it not being
determined whether or no it be necessary for the hero of a poem to be
an honest man. For the under characters, gather them from Homer and
Virgil, and change the names as occasion serves.
For the Machines.--Take of deities, male and female, as many as you
can use. Separate them into two equal parts, and keep Jupiter in the
middle. Let Juno put him in a ferment, and Venus mollify him. Remember
on all occasions to make use of volatile Mercury. If you have need of
devils, draw them out of Milton's Paradise, and extract your spirits
from Tasso. The use of these machines is evident; for since no epic
poem can possibly subsist without them, the wisest way is to reserve
them for your greatest necessities. When you can not extricate your
hero by any human means, or yourself by your own wits, seek relief
from heaven, and the gods will do your business very readily. This is
according to the direct prescription of Horace in his "Art of
Poetry," verse 191:
Never presume to make a god appear,
But for a business worthy of a god.[13]
That is to say, a poet should never call upon the gods for their
assistance but when he is in great perplexity.
For a Tempest.--Take Eurus, Zephyr, Auster, and Boreas, and cast them
together in one verse. Add to these of rain, lightning, and of thunder
(the loudest you can) _quantum sufficit_. Mix your clouds and billows
well together until they foam, and thicken your description here and
there with a quicksand. Brew your tempest well in your head, before
you set it a-blowing.
For a Battle.--Pick a large quantity of images and descriptions from
Homer's "Iliad," with a spice or two of Virgil, and if there remain
any overplus you may lay them by for a skirmish. Season it well with
similes, and it will make an excellent battle.
For Burning a Town.--If such a description be necessary, because it is
certain there is one in Virgil, Old Troy is ready burned to your
hands. But if you fear that would be thought borrowed, a chapter or
two of the Theory of the Conflagration, well circumstanced, and done
into verse, will be a good succedaneum.
As for Similes and Metaphors, they may be found all over the creation;
the most ignorant may gather them, but the danger is in applying them.
For this advise with your bookseller.
For the Language (I mean the diction).--Here it will do well to be an
imitator of Milton, for you will find it easier to imitate him in this
than anything else. Hebraisms and Grecisms are to be found in him,
without the trouble of learning the languages. I knew a painter, who
(like our poet) had no genius, make his daubings to be thought
originals by setting them in the smoke. You may in the same manner
give the venerable air of antiquity to your piece by darkening it up
and down with old English. With this you may be easily furnished upon
any occasion by the dictionary commonly printed at the end of Chaucer.
I must not conclude without cautioning all writers without genius in
one material point, which is, never to be afraid of having too much
fire in their works. I should advise rather to take their warmest
thoughts, and spread them abroad upon paper; for they are observed to
cool before they are read.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 8: A letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. The mansion here
described is Stanton Harcourt, near the hamlet of Cokethorpe in
Oxfordshire. Here the Harcourts had lived since the twelfth century.
At the date of Pope's letter, it was the seat of Simon Harcourt, first
viscount, but Simon's father, Sir Philip Harcourt, for many years was
the last of the family actually to live there, his widow afterward
permitting the buildings to fall into the state of decay which Pope
describes. In the tower is an upper chamber over the chapel which
still bears the name of "Pope's Study." It was there, in 1718, that
Pope finished the fifth volume of his translation of Homer. Simon, the
first viscount, had taken up his residence at Stanton Harcourt a short
time before the date of Pope's letter--that is, about 1715. He
frequently had as guests Pope, Swift, Gay and Prior, being himself
fond of literary pursuits. Twelve letters written to him by Pope have
been preserved among the family papers. Pope, in his letter to Lady
Mary, of September 1, 1718, which here follows the one beginning on
the previous page, in referring to the mansion uses the words, "which
he lent me," indicating that Pope was occupying the mansion at the
invitation of Lord Harcourt. Swift and Harcourt sometimes quarreled
over political matters, in which Harcourt was prominent. On one
occasion Swift called him "Trimming Harcourt."]
[Footnote 9: A letter dated September 1, 1718, and addrest to Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu, who was then living in Turkey. Pope and she
afterward (about 1722) quarreled bitterly. Leslie Stephen, discussing
the matter, says "the extreme bitterness with which Pope ever
afterward assailed her can be explained most plausibly, and least to
his discredit, upon the assumption that his extravagant expressions of
gallantry covered some real passion." If this be a true inference, his
passion "was probably converted into antipathy by the contempt with
which she received his declaration."]
[Footnote 10: Her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu, the name Montagu
having been added for reasons connected with a family estate.]
[Footnote 11: From the Guardian.]
[Footnote 12: "Belianis of Greece" was a continuation of the romance
"Amadis of Gaul," which was published in Spanish in 1547, and
translated into English in 1598. The author was Jeronimo Fernandez.]
[Footnote 13: The translation is by Roscommon.]
LADY MARY WORTLEY MONTAGU
Baptized in 1689, died in 1762; eldest daughter of the Duke
of Kingston; married Edward Wortley Montagu, grandson of the
Earl of Sandwich, in 1712; her husband sent to Turkey as
ambassador in 1716; she was a close friend of Pope, but
afterward quarreled with him; in 1739 left England, settling
in Venice, where she remained until 1762; her "Letters"
published in 1763, with further instalments in 1767 and
later years.
I
ON HAPPINESS IN THE MATRIMONIAL STATE[14]
I received both your Monday letters before I wrote the inclosed,
which, however, I send you. The kind letter was written and sent
Friday morning, and I did not receive yours till Saturday noon. To
speak truth, you would never have had it else; there were so many
things in yours to put me out of humor. Thus, you see, it was on no
design to repair anything that offended you. You only show me how
industrious you are to find faults in me: why will you not suffer me
to be pleased with you?
I would see you if I could (tho perhaps it may be wrong); but in the
way that I am here, 'tis impossible. I can't come to town but in
company with my sister-in-law: I can carry her nowhere but where she
pleases; or if I could, I would trust her with nothing. I could not
walk out alone without giving suspicion to the whole family; should I
be watched, and seen to meet a man--judge of the consequences!
You speak of treating with my father, as if you believed he would come
to terms afterward. I will not suffer you to remain in the thought,
however advantageous it might be to me; I will deceive you in nothing.
I am fully persuaded he will never hear of terms afterward. You may
say, 'tis talking oddly of him. I can't answer to that; but 'tis my
real opinion, and I think I know him. You talk to me of estates, as if
I was the most interested woman in the world. Whatever faults I may
have shown in my life, I know not one action in it that ever proved me
mercenary. I think there can not be a greater proof to the contrary
than my treating with you, where I am to depend entirely upon your
generosity, at the same time that I may have settled on me £500 per
annum pin-money, and a considerable jointure, in another place; not to
reckon that I may have by his temper what command of his estate I
please: and with you I have nothing to pretend to. I do not, however,
make a merit to you: money is very little to me, because all beyond
necessaries I do not value that is to be purchased by it. If the man
proposed to me had £10,000 per annum, and I was sure to dispose of it
all, I should act just as I do. I have in my life known a good deal of
show, and never found myself the happier for it.
In proposing to you to follow the scheme proposed by that friend, I
think 'tis absolutely necessary for both our sakes. I would have you
want no pleasure which a single life would afford you. You own you
think nothing so agreeable. A woman that adds nothing to a man's
fortune ought not to take from his happiness. If possible, I would add
to it; but I will not take from you any satisfaction you could enjoy
without me. On my own side, I endeavor to form as right a judgment of
the temper of human nature, and of my own in particular, as I am
capable of. I would throw off all partiality and passion, and be calm
in my opinion. Almost all people are apt to run into a mistake, that
when they once feel or give a passion, there needs nothing to
entertain it. This mistake makes, in the number of women that inspire
even violent passions, hardly one preserve one after possession. If we
marry, our happiness must consist in loving one another; 'tis
principally my concern to think of the most probable method of making
that love eternal. You object against living in London: I am not fond
of it myself, and readily give it up to you; tho I am assured there
needs more art to keep a fondness alive in solitude, where it
generally preys upon itself.
There is one article absolutely necessary: to be ever beloved, one
must ever be agreeable. There is no such thing as being agreeable
without a thorough good-humor, a natural sweetness of temper,
enlivened by cheerfulness. Whatever natural funds of gaiety one is
born with, 'tis necessary to be entertained with agreeable objects.
Anybody capable of tasting pleasure when they confine themselves to
one place, should take care 'tis the place in the world the most
agreeable. Whatever you may now think (now, perhaps, you have some
fondness for me), tho your love should continue in its full force
there are hours when the most beloved mistress would be troublesome.
People are not forever (nor is it in human nature that they should be)
disposed to be fond; you would be glad to find in me the friend and
the companion. To be agreeably the last, it is necessary to be gay and
entertaining. A perpetual solitude, in a place where you see nothing
to raise your spirits, at length wears them out, and conversation
insensibly becomes dull and insipid. When I have no more to say to
you, you will like me no longer.
How dreadful is that view! You will reflect for my sake you have
abandoned the conversation of a friend that you liked, and your
situation in a country where all things would have contributed to make
your life pass in (the true _volupté_) a smooth tranquillity. I shall
lose the vivacity which should entertain you, and you will have
nothing to recompense you for what you have lost. Very few people that
have settled entirely in the country, but have grown at length weary
of one another. The lady's conversation generally falls into a
thousand impertinent effects of idleness; and the gentleman falls in
love with his dogs and his horses, and out of love with everything
else. I am not now arguing in favor of the town: you have answered me
as to that point.
In respect of your health, 'tis the first thing to be considered, and
I shall never ask you to do anything injurious to that. But 'tis my
opinion, 'tis necessary, to be happy, that we neither of us think any
place more agreeable than that where we are. I have nothing to do in
London; and 'tis indifferent to me if I never see it more. I know not
how to answer your mentioning gallantry, nor in what sense to
understand you: whomever I marry, when I am married I renounce all
things of the kind. I am willing to abandon all conversation but
yours; I will part with anything for you, but you. I will not have you
a month, to lose you for the rest of my life. If you can pursue the
plan of happiness begun with your friend, and take me for that friend,
I am ever yours. I have examined my own heart whether I can leave
everything for you; I think I can: if I change my mind, you shall know
before Sunday; after that I will not change my mind.
If 'tis necessary for your affairs to stay in England, to assist your
father in his business, as I suppose the time will be short, I would
be as little injurious to your fortune as I can, and I will do it. But
I am still of opinion nothing is so likely to make us both happy as
what I propose. I foresee I may break with you on this point, and I
shall certainly be displeased with myself for it, and wish a thousand
times that I had done whatever you pleased; but, however, I hope I
shall always remember how much more miserable than anything else
would make me, should I be to live with you and to please you no
longer. You can be pleased with nothing when you are not pleased with
your wife. One of the "Spectators" is very just that says, "A man
ought always to be upon his guard against spleen and a too severe
philosophy; a woman, against levity and coquetry." If we go to Naples,
I will make no acquaintance there of any kind, and you will be in a
place where a variety of agreeable objects will dispose you to be ever
pleased. If such a thing is possible, this will secure our everlasting
happiness; and I am ready to wait on you without leaving a thought
behind me.
II
INOCULATION FOR THE SMALLPOX[15]
Apropos of distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that will make
you wish yourself here. The smallpox, so fatal and so general amongst
us, is here entirely harmless, by the invention of ingrafting, which
is the term they give it. There is a set of old women who make it
their business to perform the operation every autumn, in the month of
September, when the great heat is abated. People send to one another
to know if any of their family has a mind to have the smallpox; they
make parties for this purpose, and when they are met (commonly fifteen
or sixteen together), the old woman comes with a nutshell full of the
matter of the best sort of smallpox, and asks what vein you please to
have opened. She immediately rips open that you offer with a large
needle (which gives you no more pain than a common scratch), and puts
into the vein as much matter as can lie upon the head of her needle,
and after that binds up the little wound with a hollow bit of shell;
and in this manner opens four or five veins.
The Grecians have commonly the superstition of opening one in the
middle of the forehead, one in each arm, and one in the breast, to
mark the sign of the cross; but this has a very ill effect, all these
wounds leaving little scars, and is not done by those that are not
superstitious, who choose to have them in the legs, or that part of
the arm that is concealed. The children or young patients play
together all the rest of the day, and are in perfect health to the
eighth. Then the fever begins to seize them, and they keep their beds
two days, very seldom three. They have very rarely above twenty or
thirty [spots] in their faces, which never mark; and in eight days'
time they are as well as before their illness. Where they are wounded,
there remain running sores during the distemper, which I don't doubt
is a great relief to it. Every year thousands undergo this operation;
and the French ambassador says, pleasantly, that they take the
smallpox here by way of diversion, as they take the waters in other
countries. There is no example of any one that has died in it; and
you may believe that I am well satisfied of the safety of this
experiment, since I intend to try it on my dear little son.
I am patriot enough to take pains to bring this useful invention into
fashion in England; and I should not fail to write to some of our
doctors very particularly about it, if I knew any one of them that I
thought had virtue enough to destroy such a considerable branch of
their revenue for the good of mankind. But that distemper is too
beneficial to them, not to expose to all their resentment the hardy
wight that should undertake to put an end to it. Perhaps if I live to
return, I may, however, have courage to war with them. Upon this
occasion, admire the heroism in the heart of your friend, etc., etc.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 14: Letter to Edward Wortley Montagu, written before she
married him. Lady Mary was married to Montagu on August 12, 1712. At
his first proposal to her, he had been rejected. Lady Mary's father
insisted that she should marry another man; the settlements for this
marriage had been drawn and the wedding day fixt, when Lady Mary left
her father's house and married Montagu privately. Montagu was a man of
some eminence in public life, but noted for miserly habits. He
accumulated one of the largest private estates of his time.]
[Footnote 15: Letter to Sarah Criswell, dated Adrianople, Turkey,
April 1, O. S., 1717. To Lady Mary is usually accorded chief credit
for the introduction of inoculation into western Europe.]
LORD CHESTERFIELD
Born in 1694, died in 1773; educated at Cambridge; became a
member of Parliament; filled several places in the
diplomatic service; became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in
1734; his "Letters to His Son," published in 1774 after his
death.
I
OF GOOD MANNERS, DRESS AND THE WORLD[16]
There is a _bienséance_ with regard to people of the lowest degree; a
gentleman observes it with his footman, even with the beggar in the
street. He considers them as objects of compassion, not of insult; he
speaks to neither _d'un ton brusque_, but corrects the one coolly, and
refuses the other with humanity. There is no one occasion in the
world, in which _le ton brusque_ is becoming a gentleman. In short,
_les bienséances_ are another word for manners, and extend to every
part of life. They are propriety; the Graces should attend in order to
complete them: the Graces enable us to do genteelly and pleasingly
what _les bienséances_ require to be done at all. The latter are an
obligation upon every man; the former are an infinite advantage and
ornament to any man.
People unused to the world have babbling countenances, and are
unskilful enough to show what they have sense enough not to tell. In
the course of the world, a man must very often put on an easy, frank
countenance, upon very disagreeable occasions; he must seem pleased,
when he is very much otherwise; he must be able to accost and receive
with smiles those whom he would much rather meet with swords. In
courts he must not turn himself inside out. All this may, nay, must be
done, without falsehood and treachery: for it must go no further than
politeness and manners, and must stop short of assurances and
professions of simulated friendship. Good manners to those one does
not love are no more a breach of truth than "your humble servant," at
the bottom of a challenge, is; they are universally agreed upon and
understood to be things of course. They are necessary guards of the
decency and peace of society: they must only act defensively; and then
not with arms poisoned with perfidy. Truth, but not the whole truth,
must be the invariable principle of every man who hath either
religion, honor, or prudence.
I can not help forming some opinion of a man's sense and character
from his dress; and I believe most people do as well as myself. Any
affectation whatsoever in dress implies in my mind a flaw in the
understanding.... A man of sense carefully avoids any particular
character in his dress; he is accurately clean for his own sake; but
all the rest is for other people's. He dresses as well, and in the
same manner, as the people of sense and fashion of the place where he
is. If he dresses better, as he thinks--that is, more than they--he is
a fop; if he dresses worse, he is unpardonably negligent: but of the
two, I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little
drest, the excess on that side will wear off with a little age and
reflection; but if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at
forty and stink at fifty years old. Dress yourself fine where others
are fine, and plain where others are plain; but take care always that
your clothes are well made and fit you, for otherwise they will give
you a very awkward air. When you are once well drest for the day,
think no more of it afterward; and without any stiffness or fear of
discomposing that dress, let all your motions be as easy and natural
as if you had no clothes on at all.
A friend of yours and mine has justly defined good breeding to be "the
result of much good sense, some good nature, and a little self-denial
for the sake of others, and with a view to obtain the same indulgence
from them." Taking this for granted (as I think it can not be
disputed), it is astonishing to me that anybody who has good sense and
good nature (and I believe you have both) can essentially fail in good
breeding. As to the modes of it, indeed, they vary according to
persons, places, and circumstances, and are only to be acquired by
observation and experience; but the substance of it is everywhere and
eternally the same. Good manners are to particular societies what good
morals are to society in general--their cement and their security.
And as laws are enacted to enforce good morals, or at least to prevent
the ill effects of bad ones, so there are certain rules of civility,
universally implied and received, to enforce good manners and punish
bad ones. And indeed there seems to me to be less difference, both
between the crimes and punishments, than at first one would
imagine.... Mutual complaisances, attentions, and sacrifices of little
conveniences are as natural an implied compact between civilized
people as protection and obedience are between kings and subjects:
whoever in either case violates that compact, justly forfeits all
advantages arising from it. For my own part, I really think that next
to the consciousness of doing a good action, that of doing a civil one
is the most pleasing: and the epithet which I should covet the most,
next to that of Aristides, would be that of "well-bred."
Men who converse only with women are frivolous, effeminate puppies,
and those who never converse with them are bears.
The desire of being pleased is universal. The desire of pleasing
should be so too. Misers are not so much blamed for being misers as
envied for being rich.
Dissimulation, to a certain degree, is as necessary in business as
clothes are in the common intercourse of life; and a man would be as
imprudent who should exhibit his inside naked, as he would be indecent
if he produced his outside so.
A woman will be implicitly governed by the man whom she is in love
with, but will not be directed by the man whom she esteems the most.
The former is the result of passion, which is her character; the
latter must be the effect of reasoning, which is by no means of the
feminine gender.
The best moral virtues are those of which the vulgar are, perhaps, the
best judges.
Let us, then, not only scatter benefits, but even strew flowers, for
our fellow travelers in the rugged ways of this wretched world.
Your duty to man is very short and clear; it is only to do to him
whatever you would be willing that he should do to you. And remember
in all the business of your life to ask your conscience this question,
Should I be willing that this should be done to me? If your
conscience, which will always tell you truth, answers no, do not do
that thing. Observe these rules, and you will be happy in this world
and still happier in the next.
Carefully avoid all affectation either of mind or body. It is a very
true and a very trite observation that no man is ridiculous for being
what he really is, but for affecting to be what he is not. No man is
awkward by nature, but by affecting to be genteel, and I have known
many a man of common sense pass generally for a fool because he
affected a degree of wit that God had denied him. A plowman is by no
means awkward in the exercise of his trade, but would be exceedingly
ridiculous if he attempted the airs and grace of a man of fashion.
What is commonly called in the world a man or a woman of spirit are
the two most detestable and most dangerous animals that inhabit it.
They are strong-headed, captious, jealous, offended without reason,
and offending with as little. The man of spirit has immediate
recourse to his sword, and the woman of spirit to her tongue, and it
is hard to say which of the two is the most mischievous weapon.
Speak to the King with full as little concern (tho with more respect)
as you would to your equals. This is the distinguishing characteristic
of a gentleman and a man of the world.
That silly article of dress is no trifle. Never be the first nor the
last in the fashion. Wear as fine clothes as those of your rank
commonly do, and rather better than worse, and when you are well drest
once a day do not seem to know that you have any clothes on at all,
but let your carriage and motion be as easy as they would be in your
nightgowns.
Let your address when you first come into any company be modest, but
without the least bashfulness or sheepishness, steady without
impudence, and as unembarrassed as if you were in your own room. This
is a difficult point to hit, and therefore deserves great attention;
nothing but a long usage of the world and in the best company can
possibly give it.
II
OF ATTENTIONS TO LADIES[17]
Women, in a great degree, establish or destroy every man's reputation
of good breeding; you must, therefore, in a manner, overwhelm them
with the attentions of which I have spoken; they are used to them,
they expect them; and, to do them justice, they commonly requite
them. You must be sedulous, and rather over officious than under, in
procuring them their coaches, their chairs, their conveniences in
public places; not see what you should not see; and rather assist,
where you can not help seeing. Opportunities of showing these
attentions present themselves perpetually; but if they do not, make
them. As Ovid advises his lover, when he sits in the circus near his
mistress, to wipe the dust off her neck, even if there be none. _Si
nullus tamen excute nullum._ Your conversation with women should
always be respectful; but at the same time, _enjoué_, and always
addrest to their vanity. Everything you say or do should convince them
of the regard you have (whether you have it or not) for their beauty,
their wit, or their merit. Men have possibly as much vanity as women,
tho of another kind; and both art and good breeding require that,
instead of mortifying, you should please and flatter it, by words and
looks of approbation.
Suppose (which is by no means improbable) that at your return to
England, I should place you near the person of some one of the royal
family; in that situation good breeding, engaging address, adorned
with all the graces that dwell at courts, would very probably make you
a favorite, and, from a favorite, a minister; but all the knowledge
and learning in the world, without them, never would. The penetration
of princes seldom goes deeper than the surface. It is the exterior
that always engages their hearts; and I would never advise you to give
yourself much trouble about their understandings. Princes in general
(I mean those Porphyrogenets who are born and bred in purple) are
about the pitch of women; bred up like them, and are to be addrest and
gained in the same manner. They always see, they seldom weigh. Your
luster, not your solidity, must take them; your inside will afterward
support and secure what your outside has acquired.
With weak people (and they undoubtedly are three parts in four of
mankind) good breeding, address, and manners are everything; they can
go no deeper: but let me assure you, that they are a great deal, even
with people of the best understandings. Where the eyes are not
pleased, and the heart is not flattered, the mind will be apt to stand
out. Be this right or wrong, I confess, I am so made myself.
Awkwardness and ill breeding shock me, to that degree, that where I
meet with them, I can not find in my heart to inquire into the
intrinsic merit of that person; I hastily decide in myself, that he
can have none; and am not sure, I should not even be sorry to know
that he had any. I often paint you in my imagination, in your present
_lontananza_; and, while I view you in the light of ancient and modern
learning, useful and ornamental knowledge, I am charmed with the
prospect; but when I view you in another light, and represent you
awkward, ungraceful, ill bred, with vulgar air and manners, shambling
toward me with inattention and distractions, I shall not pretend to
describe to you what I feel, but will do as a skilful painter did
formerly, draw a veil before the countenance of the father.
I dare say you know already enough of architecture to know that the
Tuscan is the strongest and most solid of all the orders; but, at the
same time, it is the coarsest and clumsiest of them. Its solidity does
extremely well for the foundation and base floor of a great edifice;
but, if the whole building be Tuscan, it will attract no eyes, it will
stop no passengers, it will invite no interior examination; people
will take it for granted that the finishing and furnishing can not be
worth seeing, where the front is so unadorned and clumsy. But, if upon
the solid Tuscan foundation, the Doric, the Ionic, and the Corinthian
orders rise gradually with all their beauty, proportions, and
ornaments, the fabric seizes the most incurious eye, and stops the
most careless passenger, who solicits admission as a favor, nay, often
purchases it. Just so will it fare with your little fabric, which at
present I fear has more of the Tuscan than of the Corinthian order.
You must absolutely change the whole front or nobody will knock at the
door. The several parts which must compose this new front are elegant,
easy, natural, superior good breeding; and an engaging address;
genteel motions; an insinuating softness in your looks, words, and
actions; a spruce, lively air, and fashionable dress; and all the
glitter that a young fellow should have.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 16: From the "Letters to His Son," _passim_. Chesterfield,
the man of affairs--and he had real distinction in the public life of
his time--is quite forgotten, but his letters, which he wrote for
private purposes and never dreamed would be published, have made him
one of the English literary immortals.]
[Footnote 17: From the "Letters to His Son."]
HENRY FIELDING
Born in 1707, died in 1754; son of Gen. Edmund Fielding;
admitted to the bar in 1740; made a justice of the peace in
1748; chairman of Quarter Sessions in 1749; published
"Joseph Andrews" in 1742, "Tom Jones" in 1749, and "Amelia"
in 1751; among other works wrote many plays and "A Journal
of a Voyage to Lisbon," which was published in 1755, after
his death which occurred in Lisbon.
I
TOM THE HERO ENTERS THE STAGE[18]
As we determined when we first sat down to write this history to
flatter no man, but to guide our pen throughout by the directions of
truth, we are obliged to bring our hero on the stage in a much more
disadvantageous manner than we could wish; and to declare honestly,
even at his first appearance, that it was the universal opinion of all
Mr. Allworthy's family that he was certainly born to be hanged.
Indeed, I am sorry to say there was too much reason for this
conjecture, the lad having from his earliest years discovered a
propensity to many vices, and especially to one, which hath as a
direct tendency as any other to that fate which we have just now
observed to have been prophetically denounced against him. He had been
already convicted of three robberies; viz., of robbing an orchard, of
stealing a duck out of a farmer's yard, and of picking Master
Blifil's pocket of a ball.
The vices of this young man were, moreover, heightened by the
disadvantageous light in which they appeared, when opposed to the
virtues of Master Blifil, his companion--a youth of so different a
caste from little Jones, that not only the family but all the
neighborhood resounded his praises. He was indeed a lad of a
remarkable disposition; sober, discreet, and pious beyond his
age,--qualities which gained him the love of every one who knew him;
whilst Tom Jones was universally disliked, and many exprest their
wonder that Mr. Allworthy would suffer such a lad to be educated with
his nephew, lest the morals of the latter should be corrupted by his
example.
An incident which happened about this time will set the character of
these two lads more fairly before the discerning reader than is in the
power of the longest dissertation.
Tom Jones, who bad as he is must serve for the hero of this history,
had only one friend among all the servants of the family; for as to
Mrs. Wilkins, she had long since given him up, and was perfectly
reconciled to her mistress. This friend was the gamekeeper, a fellow
of a loose kind of disposition, and who was thought not to entertain
much stricter notions concerning the difference of _meum_ and _tuum_
than the young gentleman himself. And hence this friendship gave
occasion to many sarcastical remarks among the domestics, most of
which were either proverbs before, or at least are become so now; and
indeed, the wit of them all may be comprised in that short Latin
proverb, "_Noscitur a socio_," which I think is thus exprest in
English: "You may know him by the company he keeps."
To say the truth, some of that atrocious wickedness in Jones, of which
we have just mentioned three examples, might perhaps be derived from
the encouragement he had received from this fellow, who in two or
three instances had been what the law calls an accessory after the
fact. For the whole duck and a great part of the apples were converted
to the use of the gamekeeper and his family. Tho as Jones alone was
discovered, the poor lad bore not only the whole smart but the whole
blame; both which fell again to his lot on the following occasion.
Contiguous to Mr. Allworthy's estate was the manor of one of those
gentlemen who are called preservers of the game. This species of men,
from the great severity with which they revenge the death of a hare or
a partridge, might be thought to cultivate the same superstition with
the Bannians in India, many of whom, we are told, dedicate their whole
lives to the preservation and protection of certain animals; was it
not that our English Bannians, while they preserve them from other
enemies, will most unmercifully slaughter whole horse-loads
themselves, so that they stand clearly acquitted of any such
heathenish superstition.
I have indeed a much better opinion of this kind of men than is
entertained by some, as I take them to answer the order of nature, and
the good purposes for which they were ordained, in a more ample manner
than many others. Now, as Horace tells us, that there are a set of
human beings, _fruges consumere nati_, "born to consume the fruits of
the earth," so I make no manner of doubt but that there are others,
_feras consumere nati_, "born to consume the beasts of the field," or
as it is commonly called, the game; and none, I believe, will deny but
that those squires fulfil this end of their creation.
Little Jones went one day a-shooting with the gamekeeper; when
happening to spring a covey of partridges, near the border of that
manor over which fortune, to fulfil the wise purposes of nature, had
planted one of the game-consumers, the birds flew into it and were
marked (as it is called) by the two sportsmen in some furze bushes,
about two or three hundred paces beyond Mr. Allworthy's dominions.
Mr. Allworthy had given the fellow strict orders, on pain of
forfeiting his place, never to trespass on any of his neighbors; no
more on those who were less rigid in this matter than on the lord of
the manor. With regard to others, indeed, these orders had not been
always very scrupulously kept; but as the disposition of the gentleman
with whom the partridges had taken sanctuary was well known, the
gamekeeper had never yet attempted to invade his territories. Nor had
he done it now, had not the younger sportsman, who was excessively
eager to pursue the flying game, over-persuaded him; but Jones being
very importunate, the other, who was himself keen enough after the
sport, yielded to his persuasions, entered the manor, and shot one of
the partridges.
The gentleman himself was at that time on horseback, at a little
distance from them; and hearing the gun go off, he immediately made
toward the place, and discovered poor Tom; for the gamekeeper had
leapt into the thickest part of the furze-brake, where he had happily
concealed himself.
The gentleman having searched the lad and found the partridge upon
him, denounced great vengeance, swearing he would acquaint Mr.
Allworthy. He was as good as his word, for he rode immediately to his
house and complained of the trespass on his manor, in as high terms
and as bitter language as if his house had been broken open and the
most valuable furniture stolen out of it. He added that some other
person was in his company, tho he could not discover him; for that two
guns had been discharged, almost in the same instant. And, says he,
"We have found only this partridge, but the Lord knows what mischief
they have done."
At his return home, Tom was presently convened before Mr. Allworthy.
He owned the fact, and alleged no other excuse but what was really
true; viz., that the covey was originally sprung in Mr. Allworthy's
own manor.
Tom was then interrogated who was with him, which Mr. Allworthy
declared he was resolved to know, acquainting the culprit with the
circumstance of the two guns, which had been deposed by the squire and
both his servants; but Tom stoutly persisted in asserting that he was
alone; yet, to say the truth, he hesitated a little at first, which
would have confirmed Mr. Allworthy's belief, had what the squire and
his servants said wanted any further confirmation.
The gamekeeper, being a suspected person, was now sent for and the
question put to him; but he, relying on the promise which Tom had made
him to take all upon himself, very resolutely denied being in company
with the young gentleman, or indeed having seen him the whole
afternoon.
Mr. Allworthy then turned toward Tom with more than usual anger in his
countenance, and advised him to confess who was with him; repeating
that he was resolved to know. The lad, however, still maintained his
resolution, and was dismissed with much wrath by Mr. Allworthy, who
told him he should have the next morning to consider of it, when he
should be questioned by another person and in another manner.
Poor Jones spent a very melancholy night, and the more so as he was
without his usual companion, for Master Blifil was gone abroad on a
visit with his mother. Fear of the punishment he was to suffer was on
this occasion his least evil; his chief anxiety being lest his
constancy should fail him and he should be brought to betray the
gamekeeper, whose ruin he knew must now be the consequence.
Nor did the gamekeeper pass his time much better. He had the same
apprehensions with the youth; for whose honor he had likewise a much
tenderer regard than for his skin.
In the morning, when Tom attended the Reverend Mr. Thwackum, the
person to whom Mr. Allworthy had committed the instruction of the two
boys, he had the same questions put to him by that gentleman which he
had been asked the evening before, to which he returned the same
answers. The consequence of this was so severe a whipping, that it
possibly fell little short of the torture with which confessions are
in some countries extorted from criminals.
Tom bore his punishment with great resolution; and tho his master
asked him between every stroke whether he would not confess, he was
contented to be flayed rather than betray his friend, or break the
promise he had made.
The gamekeeper was now relieved from his anxiety, and Mr. Allworthy
himself began to be concerned at Tom's sufferings: for besides that
Mr. Thwackum, being highly enraged that he was not able to make the
boy say what he himself pleased, had carried his severity much beyond
the good man's intention, this latter began now to suspect that the
squire had been mistaken, which his extreme eagerness and anger seemed
to make probable; and as for what the servants had said in
confirmation of their master's account, he laid no great stress upon
that. Now, as cruelty and injustice were two ideas of which Mr.
Allworthy could by no means support the consciousness a single moment,
he sent for Tom, and after many kind and friendly exhortations, said,
"I am convinced, my dear child, that my suspicions have wronged you; I
am sorry that you have been so severely punished on this account"; and
at last gave him a little horse to make him amends, again repeating
his sorrow for what had passed.
Tom's guilt now flew in his face more than any severity could make it.
He could more easily bear the lashes of Thwackum than the generosity
of Allworthy. The tears burst from his eyes, and he fell upon his
knees, crying, "Oh, sir, you are too good to me. Indeed you are.
Indeed I don't deserve it." And at that very instant, from the fulness
of his heart, had almost betrayed the secret; but the good genius of
the gamekeeper suggested to him what might be the consequence to the
poor fellow, and this consideration sealed his lips.
Thwackum did all he could to dissuade Allworthy from showing any
compassion or kindness to the boy, saying "he had persisted in
untruth"; and gave some hints that a second whipping might probably
bring the matter to light.
But Mr. Allworthy absolutely refused to consent to the experiment. He
said the boy had suffered enough already for concealing the truth,
even if he was guilty, seeing that he could have no motive but a
mistaken point of honor for so doing.
"Honor!" cried Thwackum with some warmth: "mere stubbornness and
obstinacy! Can honor teach any one to tell a lie, or can any honor
exist independent of religion?"
This discourse happened at table when dinner was just ended; and there
were present Mr. Allworthy, Mr. Thwackum, and a third gentleman.
II
PARTRIDGE SEES GARRICK AT THE PLAY[19]
Mr. Jones having spent three hours in reading and kissing the
aforesaid letter,[20] and being, at last, in a state of good spirits,
from the last-mentioned considerations, he agreed to carry an
appointment, which he had before made, into execution. This was, to
attend Mrs. Miller, and her younger daughter, into the gallery at the
playhouse, and to admit Mr. Partridge as one of the company. For as
Jones had really that taste for humor which many affect, he expected
to enjoy much entertainment in the criticisms of Partridge, from whom
he expected the simple dictates of nature, unimproved, indeed, but
likewise unadulterated by art.
In the first row then of the first gallery did Mr. Jones, Mrs. Miller,
her youngest daughter, and Partridge take their places. Partridge
immediately declared it was the finest place he had ever been in. When
the first music was played, he said, "it was a wonder how so many
fiddlers could play at one time, without putting one another out."
While the fellow was lighting the upper candles, he cried out to Mrs.
Miller, "Look, look, madam, the very picture of the man in the end of
the common prayer book before the gunpowder-treason service." Nor
could he help observing with a sigh, when all the candles were
lighted, "That here were candles enough burned in one night to keep an
honest poor family for a whole twelvemonth."
As soon as the play, which was "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark," began,
Partridge was all attention, nor did he break silence till the
entrance of the ghost; upon which he asked Jones, "What man that was
in the strange dress; something," said he, "like what I have seen in
the picture. Sure it is not armor, is it?" Jones answered, "That is
the ghost." To which Partridge replied with a smile, "Persuade me to
that, sir, if you can. Tho I can't say I ever actually saw a ghost in
my life, yet I am certain I should know one, if I saw him, better than
that comes to. No, no, sir; ghosts don't appear in such dresses as
that, neither." In this mistake, which caused much laughter in the
neighborhood of Partridge, he was suffered to continue, till the scene
between the ghost and Hamlet, when 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. Ay, ay: go along with you! Ay, to be
sure! Who's fool then? Will you? lud have mercy upon such
foolhardiness? Whatever happens, it is good enough for you. Follow
you? I'd follow the devil as soon. Nay, perhaps it is the devil--for
they say he can put on what likeness he pleases. Oh! here he is again.
No farther! No, you have gone far enough already; farther than I'd
have gone for all the king's dominions." Jones offered to speak, but
Partridge cried, "Hush! hush! dear sir, don't you hear him?" And
during the whole speech of the ghost, he sat with his eyes fixt 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.
When the scene was over Jones said, "Why, Mr. Partridge, you exceed my
expectations. You enjoy the play more than I conceived possible."
"Nay, sir," answered Partridge, "if you are not afraid of the devil, I
can't help it; but to be sure, it is natural to be surprized at such
things, tho I know there is nothing in them: not that it was the ghost
that surprized me, neither; for I should have known that to have been
only a man in a strange dress; but when I saw the little man so
frightened himself, it was that which took hold of me." "And dost thou
imagine, then, Partridge," cries Jones, "that he was really
frightened?" "Nay, sir," said Partridge, "did not you yourself
observe afterward, when he found it was his own father's spirit and
how he was murdered in the garden, how his fear forsook him by
degrees, and he was struck dumb with sorrow, as it were, just as I
should have been, had it been my own case? But hush! O la! what noise
is that! There he is again. Well, to be certain, tho I know there is
nothing at all in it, I am glad I am not down yonder, where those men
are." Then turning his eyes again upon Hamlet, "Ay, you may draw your
sword; what signifies a sword against the power of the devil?"
During the second act Partridge made very few remarks. He greatly
admired the fineness of the dresses; nor could he help observing upon
the king's countenance. "Well," said he, "how people may be deceived
by faces? _Nulla fides fronti_ is, I find, a true saying. Who would
think, by looking in the king's face, that he had ever committed a
murder?" He then inquired after the ghost; but Jones, who intended he
should be surprized, gave him no other satisfaction than, "that he
might possibly see him again soon, and in a flash of fire."
Partridge sat in fearful expectation of this; and now, when the ghost
made his next appearance, Partridge cried out, "There sir, now; what
say you now? is he frightened now or no? As much frightened as you
think me, and, to be sure, nobody can help some fears. I would not be
in so bad a condition as what's his name, Squire Hamlet, is there, for
all the world. Bless me! what's become of the spirit? As I am a living
soul, I thought I saw him sink into the earth." "Indeed, you saw
right," answered Jones. "Well, well," cries Partridge, "I know it is
only a play; and besides, if there was anything in all this, Madam
Miller would not laugh so; for as to you, sir, you would not be
afraid, I believe, if the devil was here in person. There, there--ay,
no wonder you are in such a passion; shake the vile wicked wretch to
pieces. If she was my own mother, I would serve her so. To be sure all
duty to a mother is forfeited by such wicked doings.--Ay, go about
your business; I hate the sight of you."
Our critic was now pretty silent till the play which Hamlet introduces
before the king. This he did not at first understand, till Jones
explained it to him; but he no sooner entered into the spirit of it,
than he began to bless himself that he had never committed murder.
Then turning to Mrs. Miller, he asked her, "If she did not imagine the
king looked as if he was touched; tho he is," said he, "a good actor,
and doth all he can to hide it. Well, I would not have so much to
answer for, as that wicked man there hath, to sit upon a much higher
chair than he sits upon. No wonder he run away; for your sake I'll
never trust an innocent face again."
The grave-digging scene next engaged the attention of Partridge, who
exprest much surprize at the number of skulls thrown upon the stage.
To which Jones answered, "That it was one of the most famous
burial-places about town." "No wonder then," cries Partridge, "that
the place is haunted. But I never saw in my life a worse grave-digger.
I had a sexton, when I was clerk, that should have dug three graves
while he is digging one. The fellow handles a spade as if it was the
first time he had ever had one in his hand. Ay, ay, you may sing. You
had rather sing than work, I believe." Upon Hamlet's taking up the
skull, he cried out, "Well! it is strange to see how fearless some men
are: I never could bring myself to touch anything belonging to a dead
man, on any account. He seemed frightened enough too at the ghost, I
thought. _Nemo omnibus horis sapit._"
Little more worth remembering occurred during the play, at the end of
which Jones asked him, "Which of the players he had 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 ever was on the
stage." "He the best player!" cries Partridge, with a contemptuous
sneer, "why, I could act as well as he himself. 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,
Lord help me, 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, tho I was never to 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, half as loud again as the other.
Anybody may see he is an actor."
III
MR. ADAMS IN A POLITICAL LIGHT[21]
"I do assure you, sir," says he, taking the gentleman by the hand, "I
am heartily glad to meet with a man of your kidney; for, tho I am a
poor parson, I will be bold to say I am an honest man, and would not
do an ill thing to be made a bishop; nay, tho it hath not fallen in my
way to offer so noble a sacrifice, I have not been without
opportunities of suffering for the sake of my conscience, I thank
heaven for them; for I have had relations, tho I say it, who made some
figure in the world, particularly a nephew, who was a shopkeeper and
an alderman of a corporation. He was a good lad, and was under my care
when a boy, and I believe would do what I bade him to his dying day.
"Indeed, it looks like extreme vanity in me to affect being a man of
such consequence as to have so great an interest in an alderman; but
others have thought so too, as manifestly appeared by the rector whose
curate I formerly was sending for me on the approach of an election,
and telling me if I expected to continue in his cure that I must bring
my nephew to vote for one Colonel Courtly, a gentleman whom I had
never heard tidings of till that instant. I told the rector I had no
power over my nephew's vote (God forgive me for such prevarication!);
that I supposed he would give it according to his conscience; that I
would by no means endeavor to influence him to give it otherwise. He
told me it was in vain to equivocate; that he knew I had already spoke
to him in favor of Squire Fickle, my neighbor; and indeed it was true
I had; for it was at a season when the church was in danger, and when
all good men expected they knew not what would happen to us all. I
then answered boldly, if he thought I had given my promise he
affronted me in proposing any breach of it.
"Not to be too prolix, I persevered, and so did my nephew, in the
esquire's interest, who was chose chiefly through his means; and so I
lost my curacy. Well, sir, but do you think the esquire ever mentioned
a word of the church? _ne verbum quidem, ut ita dicam_; within two
years he got a place, and hath ever since lived in London, where I
have been informed (but God forbid I should believe that) that he
never so much as goeth to church. I remained, sir, a considerable time
without any cure, and lived a full month on one funeral sermon, which
I preached on the indisposition of a clergyman; but this by the bye.
"At last, when Mr. Fickle got his place, Colonel Courtly stood again;
and who should make interest for him but Mr. Fickle himself! that very
identical Mr. Fickle, who had formerly told me the colonel was an
enemy to both the church and state, had the confidence to solicit my
nephew for him; and the colonel himself offered me to make me chaplain
to his regiment, which I refused in favor of Sir Oliver Hearty, who
told us he would sacrifice everything to his country; and I believe
he would, except his hunting, which he stuck so close to that in five
years together he went but twice up to Parliament; and one of those
times, I have been told, never was within sight of the House. However,
he was a worthy man, and the best friend I ever had; for, by his
interest with a bishop, he got me replaced into my curacy, and gave me
eight pounds out of his own pocket to buy me a gown and cassock and
furnish my house. He had our interest while he lived, which was not
many years.
"On his death I had fresh applications made to me; for all the world
knew the interest I had in my good nephew, who now was a leading man
in the corporation; and Sir Thomas Booby, buying the estate which had
been Sir Oliver's, proposed himself a candidate. He was then a young
gentleman just come from his travels; and it did me good to hear him
discourse on affairs, which, for my part, I knew nothing of. If I had
been master of a thousand votes he should have had them all.
"I engaged my nephew in his interest, and he was elected; and a very
fine Parliament-man he was. They tell me he made speeches of an hour
long, and, I have been told, very fine ones; but he could never
persuade the Parliament to be of his opinion. _Non omnia possumus
omnes._ He promised me a living, poor man! and I believe I should have
had it, but an accident happened, which was that my lady had promised
it before, unknown to him. This indeed I never heard till afterward;
for my nephew, who died about a month before the incumbent, always
told me I might be assured of it.
"Since that time, Sir Thomas, poor man! had always so much business
that he never could find leisure to see me. I believe it was partly my
lady's fault, too, who did not think my dress good enough for the
gentry at her table. However, I must do him the justice to say he
never was ungrateful; and I have always found his kitchen, and his
cellar too, open to me: many a time, after service on a Sunday--for I
preached at four churches--have I recruited my spirits with a glass of
his ale. Since my nephew's death, the corporation is in other hands;
and I am not a man of that consequence I was formerly. I have now no
longer any talents to lay out in service of my country; and to whom
nothing is given, of him can nothing be required.
"However, on all proper seasons, such as the approach of an election,
I throw a suitable dash or two into my sermons, which I have the
pleasure to hear is not disagreeable to Sir Thomas and the other
honest gentlemen my neighbors, who have all promised me these five
years to procure an ordination for a son of mine, who is now near
thirty, hath an infinite stock of learning, and is, I thank Heaven, of
an unexceptionable life; tho, as he was never at a university, the
bishop refuses to ordain him. Too much care can not indeed be taken in
admitting any to the sacred office; tho I hope he will never act so as
to be a disgrace to any order, but will serve his God and his country
to the utmost of his power, as I have endeavored to do before him;
nay, and will lay down his life whenever called to that purpose. I am
sure I have educated him in those principles; so that I have acquitted
my duty, and shall have nothing to answer for on that account. But I
do not distrust him, for he is a good boy; and if Providence should
throw it in his way to be of as much consequence in a public light as
his father once was, I can answer for him he will use his talents as
honestly as I have done."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 18: From "Tom Jones, a Foundling," Book 3, Chapter 2.]
[Footnote 19: From Book 16, Chapter 5, of "The History of Tom Jones, a
Foundling."]
[Footnote 20: This was a letter from Sophia Weston, hoping "that
Fortune may be sometime kinder to us than at present."]
[Footnote 21: From Book 2, Chapter 8, of "The Adventures of Joseph
Andrews."]
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Born in 1709, died in 1784; son of a bookseller; educated at
Oxford, where he made a translation into Latin of Pope's
"Messiah"; established a school near Lichfield in 1736,
which soon failed; among its pupils David Garrick, with whom
he went to London in 1737; issued the plan of his
"Dictionary" in 1747, and published it in two volumes in
1755; published "The Vanity of Human Wishes" in 1749;
started _The Rambler_, a periodical, in 1750; writing nearly
the whole of it; wrote "Rasselas" in 1759; went to Scotland
with Boswell in 1773; published an edition of Shakespeare in
1765.
I
ON PUBLISHING HIS "DICTIONARY"[22]
It is the fate of those who toil at the lower employments of life to
be rather driven by the fear of evil than attracted by the prospect of
good; to be exposed to censure without hope of praise; to be disgraced
by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been
without applause, and diligence without reward.
Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries; whom
mankind have considered, not as the pupil, but the slave of science,
the pioneer of literature, doomed only to remove rubbish and clear
obstructions from the paths through which learning and genius press
forward to conquest and glory, without bestowing a smile on the humble
drudge that facilitates their progress. Every other author may aspire
to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach, and
even this negative recompense has been yet granted to very few....
In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be
immortal, I have devoted this book, the labor of years, to the honor
of my country, that we may no longer yield the palm of philology
without a contest to the nations of the continent. The chief glory of
every people arises from its authors: whether I shall add anything by
my own writings to the reputation of English literature, must be left
to time; much of my life has been lost under the pressures of disease;
much has been trifled away; and much has always been spent in
provision for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think
my employment useless or ignoble if, by my assistance, foreign nations
and distant ages gain access to the propagators of knowledge, and
understand the teachers of truth; if my labors afford light to the
repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon, to Hooker, to
Milton, and to Boyle.
When I am animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my book,
however defective, and deliver it to the world with the spirit of a
man that has endeavored well. That it will immediately become popular,
I have not promised to myself; a few wild blunders and risible
absurdities, from which no work of such multiplicity was ever free,
may for a time furnish folly with laughter, and harden ignorance into
contempt; but useful diligence will at last prevail, and there never
can be wanting some who distinguish desert, who will consider that no
dictionary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is
hastening to publication, some words are budding and some falling
away; that a whole life can not be spent upon syntax and etymology,
and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he whose
design includes whatever language can express, must often speak of
what he does not understand; that a writer will sometimes be hurried
by eagerness to the end, and sometimes faint with weariness under a
task which Scaliger compares to the labors of the anvil and the mine;
that what is obvious is not always known, and what is known is not
always present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprize
vigilance, slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual
eclipses of the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall
often in vain trace his memory at the moment of need for that which
yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come
uncalled into his thoughts tomorrow.
In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let it not
be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and tho no book was ever
spared out of tenderness to the author, and the world is little
solicitous to know whence proceeded the faults of that which it
condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to inform it, that the English
Dictionary was written with little assistance of the learned, and
without any patronage of the great; not in the soft obscurities of
retirement, or under the shelter of academic bowers, but amid
inconvenience and distraction, in sickness and in sorrow. It may
repress the triumph of malignant criticism to observe, that if our
language is not here fully displayed, I have only failed in an attempt
which no human powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons of
ancient tongues, now immutably fixt, and comprized in a few volumes,
be yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive; if
the aggregated knowledge and cooperating diligence of the Italian
academicians did not secure them from the censure of Beni;[23] if the
embodied critics of France, when fifty years had been spent upon their
work, were obliged to change its economy, and give their second
edition another form, I may surely be contented without the praise of
perfection, which if I could obtain in this gloom of solitude, what
would it avail me? I have protracted my work till most of those whom I
wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage
are empty sounds. I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity,
having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.
II
POPE AND DRYDEN COMPARED[24]
Pope profest to have learned his poetry from Dryden, whom, whenever an
opportunity was presented, he praised through his whole life with
unvaried liberality; and perhaps his character may receive some
illustration, if he be compared with his master.
Integrity of understanding and nicety of discernment were not allotted
in a less proportion to Dryden than to Pope. The rectitude of Dryden's
mind was sufficiently shown by the dismission of his poetical
prejudices, and the rejection of unnatural thoughts and rugged
numbers. But Dryden never desired to apply all the judgment that he
had. He wrote, and profest to write, merely for the people; and when
he pleased others he contented himself. He spent no time in struggles
to rouse latent powers; he never attempted to make that better which
was already good, not often to mend what he must have known to be
faulty. He wrote, as he tells us, with very little consideration; when
occasion or necessity called upon him, he poured out what the present
moment happened to supply, and, when once it had passed the press,
ejected it from his mind; for when he had no pecuniary interest, he
had no further solicitude.
Pope was not content to satisfy: he desired to excel, and therefore
always endeavored to do his best: he did not court the candor, but
dared the judgment of his reader, and expecting no indulgence from
others, he showed none to himself. He examined lines and words with
minute and punctilious observation, and retouched every part with
indefatigable diligence, till he had left nothing to be forgiven.
For this reason he kept his pieces very long in his hands, while he
considered and reconsidered them. The only poems which can be
supposed to have been written with such regard to the times as might
hasten their publication, were the two satires of "Thirty-eight," of
which Dodsley[25] told me that they were brought to him by the author
that they might be fairly copied. "Almost every line," he said, "was
then written twice over. I gave him a clean transcript, which he sent
some time afterward to me for the press with almost every line written
twice over a second time."
His declaration, that his care for his works ceased at their
publication, was not strictly true. His parental attention never
abandoned them; what he found amiss in the first edition, he silently
corrected in those that followed. He appears to have revised the
"Iliad," and freed it from some of its imperfections; and the "Essay
on Criticism" received many improvements after its first appearance.
It will seldom be found that he altered without adding clearness,
elegance, or vigor.
Pope had perhaps the judgment of Dryden, but Dryden certainly wanted
the diligence of Pope.
In acquired knowledge the superiority must be allowed to Dryden, whose
education was more scholastic, and who, before he became an author,
had been allowed more time for study, with better means of
information. His mind has a larger range, and he collects his images
and illustrations from a more extensive circumference of science.
Dryden knew more of man in his general nature, and Pope in his local
manners. The notions of Dryden were formed by comprehensive
speculation, and those of Pope by minute attention. There is more
dignity in the knowledge of Dryden, and more certainty in that of
Pope.
Poetry was not the sole praise of either; for both excelled likewise
in prose; but Pope did not borrow his prose from his predecessor. The
style of Dryden is capricious and varied, that of Pope is cautious and
uniform. Dryden obeys the motions of his own mind, Pope constrains his
mind to his own rules of composition. Dryden is sometimes vehement and
rapid, Pope is always smooth, uniform, and gentle. Dryden's page is a
natural field, rising into inequalities, and diversified by the varied
exuberance of abundant vegetation; Pope's is a velvet lawn, shaven by
the scythe, and leveled by the roller.
Of genius, that power which constitutes a poet, that quality without
which judgment is cold and knowledge is inert, that energy which
collects, combines, amplifies, and animates, the superiority must,
with some hesitation, be allowed to Dryden. It is not to be inferred,
that of this poetical vigor Pope had only a little because Dryden had
more; for every other writer since Milton must give place to Pope; and
even of Dryden it must be said, that if he has brighter paragraphs, he
has not better poems. Dryden's performances were always hasty, either
excited by some external occasion, or extorted by domestic necessity;
he composed without consideration, and published without correction.
What his mind could supply at call, or gather in one excursion, was
all that he sought, and all that he gave. The dilatory caution of Pope
enabled him to condense his sentiments, to multiply his images, and
to accumulate all that study might produce or chance might supply. If
the flights of Dryden, therefore, are higher, Pope continues longer on
the wing. If of Dryden's fire the blaze is brighter, of Pope's the
heat is more regular and constant. Dryden often surpasses expectation,
and Pope never falls below it. Dryden is read with frequent
astonishment, and Pope with perpetual delight.
III
LETTER TO CHESTERFIELD ON THE COMPLETION OF THE "DICTIONARY"[26]
My Lord: I have been lately informed by the proprietor of the _World_
that two papers, in which my Dictionary is recommended to the public,
were written by your Lordship. To be so distinguished is an honor,
which, being very little accustomed to favors from the great, I know
not well how to receive, or in what terms to acknowledge.
When, upon some slight encouragement, I first visited your Lordship, I
was overpowered, like the rest of mankind, by the enchantment of your
address, and could not forbear to wish that I might boast myself _le
vainqueur du vainqueur de la terre_--that I might obtain that regard
for which I saw the world contending; but I found my attendance so
little encouraged, that neither pride nor modesty would suffer me to
continue it. When I had once addrest your Lordship in public, I had
exhausted all the art of pleasing which a retired and uncourtly
scholar can possess. I had done all that I could; and no man is well
pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little.
Seven years, my lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward
rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been
pushing on my work through difficulties of which it is useless to
complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication,
without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile
of favor. Such treatment I did not expect, for I never had a patron
before.
The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found
him a native of the rocks.
Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man
struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground,
encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to
take of my labors, had it been early had been kind: but it has been
delayed till I am indifferent, and can not enjoy it; till I am
solitary, and can not impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.
I hope it is no very cynical asperity not to confess obligations where
no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public
should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has
enabled me to do for myself.
Having carried on my work thus far with so little obligation to any
favorer of learning, I shall not be disappointed tho I should conclude
it, if less be possible, with less; for I have been long wakened from
that dream of hope in which I once boasted myself with so much
exultation, my lord,
Your Lordship's most humble, most obedient servant,
SAM. JOHNSON.
IV
ON THE ADVANTAGES OF LIVING IN A GARRET[27]
Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the
disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they can not
comprehend. All industry must be excited by hope; and as the student
often proposes no other reward to himself than praise, he is easily
discouraged by contempt and insult. He who brings with him into a
clamorous multitude the timidity of recluse speculation, and has never
hardened his front in public life, or accustomed his passions to the
vicissitudes and accidents, the triumphs and defeats of mixt
conversation, will blush at the stare of petulant incredulity, and
suffer himself to be driven, by a burst of laughter, from the
fortresses of demonstration. The mechanist will be afraid to assert
before hardy contradictions the possibility of tearing down bulwarks
with a silkworm's thread; and the astronomer of relating the rapidity
of light, the distance of the fixt stars, and the height of the lunar
mountains.
If I could by any efforts have shaken off this cowardice, I had not
sheltered myself under a borrowed name, nor applied to you for the
means of communicating to the public the theory of a garret; a subject
which, except some slight and transient strictures, has been hitherto
neglected by those who were best qualified to adorn it, either for
want of leisure to prosecute the various researches in which a nice
discussion must engage them, or because it requires such diversity of
knowledge, and such extent of curiosity, as is scarcely to be found in
any single intellect; or perhaps others foresaw the tumults which
would be raised against them, and confined their knowledge to their
own breasts, and abandoned prejudice and folly to the direction of
chance.
That the professors of literature generally reside in the highest
stories has been immemorially observed. The wisdom of the ancients was
well acquainted with the intellectual advantages of an elevated
situation; why else were the Muses stationed on Olympus, or Parnassus,
by those who could with equal right have raised them bowers in the
vale of Tempe, or erected their altars among the flexures of Meander?
Why was Jove himself nursed upon a mountain? or why did the goddesses,
when the prize of beauty was contested, try the cause upon the top of
Ida? Such were the fictions by which the great masters of the earlier
ages endeavored to inculcate to posterity the importance of a garret,
which, tho they had been long obscured by the negligence and ignorance
of succeeding times, were well enforced by the celebrated symbol of
Pythagoras, "when the wind blows, worship its echo." This could not
but be understood by his disciples as an inviolable injunction to live
in a garret, which I have found frequently visited by the echo and the
wind. Nor was the tradition wholly obliterated in the age of Augustus,
for Tibullus evidently congratulates himself upon his garret, not
without some allusion to the Pythagorean precept:
How sweet in sleep to pass the careless hours,
Lull'd by the beating winds and dashing showers!
And it is impossible not to discover the fondness of Lucretius, an
early writer, for a garret, in his description of the lofty towers of
serene learning, and of the pleasure with which a wise man looks down
upon the confused and erratic state of the world moving below him:
... 'Tis sweet thy laboring steps to guide
To virtue's heights, with wisdom well supplied,
And all the magazines of learning fortified:
From thence to look below on human kind,
Bewilder'd in the maze of life, and blind.[28]
The institution has, indeed, continued to our own time; the garret is
still the usual receptacle of the philosopher and poet; but this, like
many ancient customs, is perpetuated only by an accidental imitation,
without knowledge of the original reason for which it was established:
The cause is secret, but th' effect is known.
Conjectures have, indeed, been advanced concerning these habitations
of literature, but without much satisfaction to the judicious
inquirer. Some have imagined that the garret is generally chosen by
the wits as most easily rented; and concluded that no man rejoices in
his aerial abode, but on the days of payment. Others suspect that a
garret is chiefly convenient, as it is remoter than any other part of
the house from the outer door, which is often observed to be infested
by visitants, who talk incessantly of beer, or linen, or a coat, and
repeat the same sounds every morning, and sometimes again in the
afternoon, without any variation, except that they grow daily more
importunate and clamorous, and raise their voices in time from
mournful murmurs to raging vociferations. This eternal monotony is
always detestable to a man whose chief pleasure is to enlarge his
knowledge, and vary his ideas. Others talk of freedom from noise, and
abstraction from common business or amusements; and some, yet more
visionary, tell us that the faculties are enlarged by open prospects,
and that the fancy is more at liberty when the eye ranges without
confinement.
These conveniences may perhaps all be found in a well-chosen garret;
but surely they can not be supposed sufficiently important to have
operated invariably upon different climates, distant ages, and
separate nations. Of a universal practise, there must still be
presumed a universal cause, which, however recondite and abstruse, may
be perhaps reserved to make me illustrious by its discovery, and you
by its promulgation.
It is universally known that the faculties of the mind are invigorated
or weakened by the state of the body, and that the body is in a great
measure regulated by the various compressions of the ambient element.
The effects of the air in the production or cure of corporeal
maladies have been acknowledged from the time of Hippocrates; but no
man has yet sufficiently considered how far it may influence the
operations of the genius, tho every day affords instances of local
understanding, of wits and reasoners, whose faculties are adapted to
some single spot, and who, when they are removed to any other place,
sink at once into silence and stupidity. I have discovered by a long
series of observations that invention and elocution suffer great
impediments from dense and impure vapors, and that the tenuity of a
defecated air at a proper distance from the surface of the earth
accelerates the fancy and sets at liberty those intellectual powers
which were before shackled by too strong attraction, and unable to
expand themselves under the pressure of a gross atmosphere. I have
found dulness to quicken into sentiment in a thin ether, as water, tho
not very hot, boils in a receiver partly exhausted; and heads, in
appearance empty, have teemed with notions upon rising ground, as the
flaccid sides of a football would have swelled out into stiffness and
extension.
For this reason I never think myself qualified to judge decisively of
any man's faculties, whom I have only known in one degree of
elevation; but take some opportunity of attending him from the cellar
to the garret, and try upon him all the various degrees of rarefaction
and condensation, tension and laxity. If he is neither vivacious
aloft, nor serious below, I then consider him as hopeless; but as it
seldom happens that I do not find the temper to which the texture of
his brain is fitted, I accommodate him in time with a tube of mercury,
first marking the point most favorable to his intellects, according
to rules which I have long studied, and which I may perhaps reveal to
mankind in a complete treatise of barometrical pneumatology.
Another cause of the gaiety and sprightliness of the dwellers in
garrets is probably the increase of that vertiginous motion, with
which we are carried round by the diurnal revolution of the earth. The
power of agitation upon the spirits is well known; every man has felt
his heart lightened in a rapid vehicle, or on a galloping horse; and
nothing is plainer than that he who towers to the fifth story is
whirled through more space by every circumrotation, than another that
grovels upon the ground floor. The nations between the tropics are
known to be fiery, inconstant, inventive, and fanciful, because,
living at the utmost length of the earth's diameter, they are carried
about with more swiftness than those whom nature has placed nearer to
the poles; and, therefore, as it becomes a wise man to struggle with
the inconveniences of his country, whenever celerity and acuteness are
requisite, we must actuate our languor by taking a few turns round the
center in a garret.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 22: From the Preface to the "Dictionary."]
[Footnote 23: Paul Beni was an Italian literary critic, who was born
in 1552, and died in 1625. He was a professor of theology, philosophy
and belles-lettres. The severity of his criticisms created many
enemies. He supported Tasso as against the Della Cruscans.]
[Footnote 24: From the "Lives of the Poets."]
[Footnote 25: Robert Dodsley, publisher, bookseller and author, was
born about 1703 and died in 1764.]
[Footnote 26: The date of this famous letter--perhaps now the most
famous of all Johnson's writings--is February 7, 1755. Leslie Stephen
has probably said the most definite word as to the circumstances in
which it was written, and in its justification. Johnson and
Chesterfield at one time were friendly. The first offense on
Chesterfield's part is said to have been caused by a reception
accorded to Colley Cibber, while Johnson was kept waiting in an
anteroom: this, however, has been denied by Boswell on the authority
of Johnson himself. There seems to be no doubt that Chesterfield
neglected Johnson while he was struggling with the "Dictionary." The
articles which he wrote for the _World_, to which the first sentence
in the letter refers, are believed to have been written with a view to
securing from Johnson a dedication of the "Dictionary" to himself. Mr.
Stephen remarks on the "singular dignity and energy" of Johnson's
letter. Johnson did not make it public in his own lifetime, but
ultimately gave copies of it to two of his friends, one of whom was
Boswell. Boswell published it in his "Life of Johnson," and deposited
the original in the British Museum. Chesterfield made no reply to the
letter, but, in conversation with Dodsley, the bookseller, a friend of
both men, said he had always been ready to receive Johnson, and blamed
Johnson's pride and shyness for the outcome of the acquaintance.
Chesterfield was long thought to have referred to Johnson as a
"respectable Hottentot," this being on the authority of Boswell, but
Dr. Birkbeck Hill has shown that this was not true. Mr. Stephen
declares that Johnson's letter "justifies itself," and that no author
can fail to sympathize with his declaration of literary
independence.]
[Footnote 27: From No. 117 of _The Rambler._]
[Footnote 28: This translation of the passage from Lucretius is
Dryden's.]
DAVID HUME
Born in 1711, died in 1776; educated at Edinburgh; lived in
France from 1734 to 1737; accompanied Gen. St. Clair on an
embassy to Vienna and Turin as judge-advocate; appointed
keeper of the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh in 1752;
visited France again in 1763; Under-secretary of State in
1767; published his treatise on "Human Nature" in 1739; his
"Essays" in 1741; his "Human Understanding" in 1748; his
"History of England" in 1754-61.
I
THE CHARACTER OF QUEEN ELIZABETH[29]
So dark a cloud overcast the evening of that day, which had shone out
with a mighty luster in the eyes of all Europe! There are few great
personages in history who have been more exposed to the calumny of
enemies and the adulation of friends than Queen Elizabeth; and yet
there is scarcely any whose reputation has been more certainly
determined by the unanimous consent of posterity. The unusual length
of her administration, and the strong features of her character, were
able to overcome all prejudices; and obliging her detractors to abate
much of their invectives, and her admirers somewhat of their
panegyrics, have at last, in spite of political factions, and what is
more, of religious animosities, produced a uniform judgment with
regard to her conduct. Her vigor, her constancy, her magnanimity, her
penetration, vigilance, and address are allowed to merit the highest
praises, and appear not to have been surpassed by any person that ever
filled a throne: a conduct less rigorous, less imperious, more
sincere, more indulgent to her people, would have been requisite to
form a perfect character. By the force of her mind she controlled all
her more active and stronger qualities, and prevented them from
running into excess: her heroism was exempt from temerity, her
frugality from avarice, her friendship from partiality, her active
temper from turbulency and a vain ambition: she guarded not herself
with equal care or equal success from lesser infirmities--the
rivalship of beauty, the desire of admiration, the jealousy of love,
and the sallies of anger.
Her singular talents for government were founded equally on her temper
and on her capacity. Endowed with a great command over herself, she
soon obtained an uncontrolled ascendent over her people; and while she
merited all their esteem by her real virtues, she also engaged their
affections by her pretended ones. Few sovereigns of England succeeded
to the throne in more difficult circumstances; and none ever conducted
the government with such uniform success and felicity. Tho
unacquainted with the practise of toleration--the true secret for
managing religious factions--she preserved her people, by her superior
prudence, from those confusions in which theological controversy had
involved all the neighboring nations: and tho her enemies were the
most powerful princes of Europe, the most active, the most
enterprising, the least scrupulous, she was able by her vigor to make
deep impressions on their states; her own greatness meanwhile remained
untouched and unimpaired.
The wise ministers and brave warriors who flourished under her reign,
share the praise of her success; but instead of lessening the applause
due to her, they make great addition to it. They owed, all of them,
their advancement to her choice; they were supported by her constancy,
and with all their abilities they were never able to acquire any undue
ascendant over her. In her family, in her court, in her kingdom, she
remained equally mistress: the force of the tender passions was great
over her, but the force of her mind was still superior; and the combat
which her victory visibly cost her, serves only to display the
firmness of her resolution, and the loftiness of her ambitious
sentiments.
The fame of this princess, tho it has surmounted the prejudices both
of faction and bigotry, yet lies still exposed to another prejudice,
which is more durable because more natural, and which, according to
the different views in which we survey her, is capable either of
exalting beyond measure or diminishing the luster of her character.
This prejudice is founded on the consideration of her sex. When we
contemplate her as a woman, we are apt to be struck with the highest
admiration of her great qualities and extensive capacity; but we are
also apt to require some more softness of disposition, some greater
lenity of temper, some of those amiable weaknesses by which her sex is
distinguished. But the true method of estimating her merit is to lay
aside all these considerations, and consider her merely as a rational
being placed in authority, and intrusted with the government of
mankind. We may find it difficult to reconcile our fancy to her as a
wife or a mistress; but her qualities as a sovereign, tho with some
considerable exceptions, are the object of undisputed applause and
approbation.
II
THE DEFEAT OF THE ARMADA[30]
The Lizard was the first land made by the Armada, about sunset; and as
the Spaniards took it for the Ramhead near Plymouth, they bore out to
sea with an intention of returning next day, and attacking the English
navy. They were descried by Fleming, a Scottish pirate, who was roving
in those seas, and who immediately set sail to inform the English
admiral of their approach, another fortunate event which contributed
extremely to the safety of the fleet. Effingham[31] had just time to
get out of port, when he saw the Spanish Armada coming full sail
toward him, disposed in the form of a crescent, and stretching the
distance of seven miles from the extremity of one division to that of
the other.
The writers of that age raise their style by a pompous description of
this spectacle; the most magnificent that had ever appeared upon the
ocean, infusing equal terror and admiration into the minds of all
beholders. The lofty masts, the swelling sails, and the towering prows
of the Spanish galleons seem impossible to be justly painted, but by
assuming the colors of poetry; and an eloquent historian of Italy, in
imitation of Camden, has asserted that the Armada, tho the ships bore
every sail, yet advanced with a slow motion; as if the ocean groaned
with supporting, and the winds were tired with impelling, so enormous
a weight. The truth, however, is, that the largest of the Spanish
vessels would scarcely pass for third rates in the present navy of
England; yet were they so ill framed or so ill governed, that they
were quite unwieldy, and could not sail upon a wind, nor tack on
occasion, nor be managed in stormy weather, by the seamen. Neither the
mechanics of shipbuilding, nor the experience of mariners, had
attained so great perfection as could serve for the security and
government of such bulky vessels; and the English, who had already had
experience how unserviceable they commonly were, beheld without dismay
their tremendous appearance.
Effingham gave orders not to come to close fight with the Spaniards;
where the size of the ships, he inspected, and the numbers of the
soldiers, would be a disadvantage to the English; but to cannonade
them at a distance, and to wait the opportunity which winds, currents,
or various accidents, must afford him, of intercepting some scattered
vessels of the enemy. Nor was it long before the event answered
expectation. A great ship of Biscay, on board of which was a
considerable part of the Spanish money, took fire by accident; and
while all hands were employed in extinguishing the flames, she fell
behind the rest of the Armada. The great galleon of Andalusia was
detained by the springing of her mast, and both these vessels were
taken, after some resistance, by Sir Francis Drake. As the Armada
advanced up the channel, the English hung upon its rear, and still
infested it with skirmishes. Each trial abated the confidence of the
Spaniards, and added courage to the English; and the latter soon
found, that even in close fight the size of the Spanish ships was no
advantage to them. Their bulk exposed them the more to the fire of the
enemy; while their cannon, placed too high, shot over the heads of the
English. The alarm having now reached the coast of England, the
nobility and gentry hastened out with their vessels from every harbor,
and reenforced the admiral. The Earls of Oxford, Northumberland, and
Cumberland, Sir Thomas Cecil, Sir Robert Cecil, Sir Walter Raleigh,
Sir Thomas Vavasor, Sir Thomas Gerrard, Sir Charles Blount, with many
others, distinguished themselves by this generous and disinterested
service of their country. The English fleet, after the conjunction of
those ships, amounted to a hundred and forty sail.
The Armada had now reached Calais, and cast anchor before that place
in expectation that the Duke of Parma, who had gotten intelligence of
their approach, would put to sea and join his forces to them. The
English admiral practised here a successful stratagem upon the
Spaniards. He took eight of his smaller ships, and filling them with
all combustible materials, sent them one after another into the midst
of the enemy. The Spaniards fancied that they were fireships of the
same contrivance with a famous vessel which had lately done so much
execution in the Schelde near Antwerp; and they immediately cut their
cables, and took to flight with the greatest disorder and
precipitation. The English fell upon them next morning while in
confusion; and besides doing great damage to other ships, they took or
destroyed about twelve of the enemy.
By this time it was become apparent, that the intention for which
these preparations were made by the Spaniards was entirely frustrated.
The vessels provided by the Duke of Parma were made for transporting
soldiers, not for fighting; and that general, when urged to leave the
harbor, positively refused to expose his flourishing army to such
apparent hazard; while the English not only were able to keep the sea,
but seemed even to triumph over their enemy. The Spanish admiral
found, in many recounters, that while he lost so considerable a part
of his own navy, he had destroyed only one small vessel of the
English; and he foresaw that by continuing so unequal a combat, he
must draw inevitable destruction on all the remainder. He prepared
therefore to return homeward; but as the wind was contrary to his
passage through the channel, he resolved to sail northward, and making
the tour of the island, reach the Spanish harbors by the ocean. The
English fleet followed him during some time; and had not their
ammunition fallen short, by the negligence of the officers in
supplying them, they had obliged the whole Armada to surrender at
discretion. The Duke of Medina[32] had once taken that resolution; but
was diverted from it by the advice of his confessor. This conclusion
of the enterprise would have been more glorious to the English; but
the event proved almost equally fatal to the Spaniards. A violent
tempest overtook the Armada after it passed the Orkneys. The ships had
already lost their anchors, and were obliged to keep to sea. The
mariners, unaccustomed to such hardships, and not able to govern such
unwieldy vessels, yielded to the fury of the storm, and allowed their
ships to drive either on the western isles of Scotland, or on the
coast of Ireland, where they were miserably wrecked. Not a half of the
navy returned to Spain; and the seamen as well as soldiers who
remained were so overcome with hardships and fatigue, and so
dispirited by their discomfiture, that they filled all Spain with
accounts of the desperate valor of the English, and of the tempestuous
violence of that ocean which surrounds them.
III
THE FIRST PRINCIPLES OF GOVERNMENT
Nothing appears more surprizing to those who consider human affairs
with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are
governed by the few; and the implicit submission with which men resign
their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we
inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that as
Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have
nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only
that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most
despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free
and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might
drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their
sentiments and inclination; but he must, at least, have led his
mamelukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinions.
Opinion is of two kinds, to wit, opinion of interest, and opinion of
right. By opinion of interest, I chiefly understand the sense of the
general advantage which is reaped from government, together with the
persuasion that the particular government, which is established, is
equally advantageous with any other that could easily be settled. When
this opinion prevails among the generality of a state, or among those
who have the force in their hands, it will give great security to any
government.
Right is of two kinds, right to Power and right to Property. What
prevalence opinion of the first kind has over mankind may easily be
understood by observing the attachment which all nations have to their
ancient government, and even to those names which have had the
sanction of antiquity. Antiquity always begets the opinion of right;
and whatever disadvantageous sentiments we may entertain of mankind,
they are always found to be prodigal both of blood and treasure in the
maintenance of public justice. There is, indeed, no particular in
which, at first sight, there may appear a greater contradiction in the
frame of the human mind than the present. When men act in a faction,
they are apt, without shame or remorse, to neglect all the ties of
honor and morality, in order to serve their party; and yet when a
faction is formed upon a point of right or principle, there is no
occasion where men discover a greater obstinacy, and a more determined
sense of justice and equity. The same social disposition of mankind is
the cause of these contradictory appearances.
It is sufficiently understood that the opinion of right to property is
of moment in all matters of government. A noted author has made
property the foundation of all government; and most of our political
writers seem inclined to follow him in that particular. This is
carrying the matter too far; but still it must be owned that the
opinion of right to property has a great influence in this subject.
Upon these three opinions, therefore, of public interest, of right to
power, and of right to property, are all governments founded, and all
authority of the few over the many. There are, indeed, other
principles, which add force to these, and determine, limit, or alter
their operation--such as self-interest, fear, and affection; but still
we may assert that these other principles can have no influence alone,
but suppose the antecedent influence of those opinions above
mentioned. They are, therefore, to be esteemed the secondary, not the
original principles of government.
For, first, as to self-interest, by which I mean the expectation of
particular rewards, distinct from the general protection which we
receive from government, it is evident that the magistrate's authority
must be antecedently established, at least be hoped for, in order to
produce this expectation. The prospect of reward may augment his
authority with regard to some particular persons; but can never give
birth to it, with regard to the public. Men naturally look for the
greatest favors from their friends and acquaintance; and, therefore,
the hopes of any considerable number of the state would never center
in any particular set of men, if these men had no other title to
magistracy, and had no separate influence over the opinions of
mankind. The same observation may be extended to the other two
principles of fear and affection. No man would have any reason to fear
the fury of a tyrant, if he had no authority over any but from fear;
since, as a single man, his bodily force can reach but a small way,
and all the further power he possesses must be founded either on our
own opinion, or on the presumed opinion of others. And tho affection
to wisdom and virtue in a sovereign extends very far, and has great
influence, yet he must antecedently be supposed invested with a public
character, otherwise the public esteem will serve him in no stead, nor
will his virtue have any influence beyond a narrow sphere.
A government may endure for several ages, tho the balance of power and
the balance of property do not coincide. This chiefly happens where
any rank or order of the state has acquired a large share in the
property; but, from the original constitution of the government, has
no share in the power. Under what pretense would any individual of
that order assume authority in public affairs? As men are commonly
much attached to their ancient government, it is not to be expected
that the public would ever favor such usurpations. But where the
original constitution allows any share of power, tho small, to an
order of men, who possess a large share of the property, it is easy
for them gradually to stretch their authority, and bring the balance
of power to coincide with that of property. This has been the case
with the House of Commons in England.
Most writers that have treated of the British Government have supposed
that, as the Lower House represents all the commons of Great Britain,
its weight in the scale is proportioned to the property and power of
all whom it represents. But this principle must not be received as
absolutely true. For tho the people are apt to attach themselves more
to the House of Commons than to any other member of the constitution,
the House being chosen by them as their representatives, and as the
public guardians of their liberty, yet are there instances where the
House, even when in opposition to the crown, has not been followed by
the people; as we may particularly observe of the Tory House of
Commons in the reign of King William. Were the members obliged to
receive instructions from their constituents, like the Dutch deputies,
this would entirely alter the case; and if such immense power and
riches, as those of all the commons of Great Britain, were brought
into the scale, it is not easy to conceive that the crown could either
influence that multitude of people, or withstand that balance of
property. It is true the crown has great influence over the collective
body in the elections of members; but were this influence, which at
present is only exerted once in seven years, to be employed in
bringing over the people to every vote, it would soon be wasted, and
no skill, popularity, or revenue could support it. I must, therefore,
be of opinion that an alteration in this particular would introduce a
total alteration in our government, and would soon reduce it to a pure
republic--and, perhaps, to a republic of no inconvenient form. For tho
the people, collected in a body like the Roman tribes, be quite unfit
for government, yet, when dispersed in small bodies, they are more
susceptible both of reason and order; the force of popular currents
and tides is, in a great measure, broken; and the public interest may
be pursued with some method and constancy. But it is needless to
reason any further concerning a form of government which is never
likely to have place.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 29: From Chapter 44 of the "History of England."]
[Footnote 30: From Chapter 42 of the "History of England."]
[Footnote 31: Lord Howard, of Effingham, admiral of the English
fleet.]
[Footnote 32: The Duke of Medina-Sidonia commanded the Armada, as
successor to Santa Cruz, "the ablest seaman of Spain," who had died
just as the ships were ready to sail. Medina-Sidonia is understood to
have taken the command reluctantly, as if aware of his unfitness for
so great a task, as indeed was proved by the event.]
LAURENCE STERNE
Born in 1713, died in 1768; his father an officer in one of
Marlborough's regiments; educated at Cambridge, admitted to
holy orders in 1738; became Prebendary of York, published
"Tristram Shandy" in 1760; visited France in 1762 and Italy
in 1765; published "The Sentimental Journey" in 1768, and
died the same year.
I
THE STARLING IN CAPTIVITY[33]
And as for the Bastile, the terror is in the word. Make the most of it
you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another word for a
tower, and a tower is but another word for a house you can't get out
of. Mercy on the gouty! for they are in it twice a year; but with nine
livres a day, and pen, and ink, and paper, and patience, albeit a man
can't get out, he may do very well within, at least for a month or six
weeks; at the end of which, if he is a harmless fellow, his innocence
appears, and he comes out a better and wiser man than he went in.
I had some occasion--I forget what--to step into the courtyard as I
settled this account; and remember I walked down-stairs in no small
triumph with the conceit of my reasoning. Beshrew the somber pencil,
said I vauntingly, for I envy not its powers, which paints the evils
of life with so hard and deadly a coloring. The mind sits terrified
at the objects she has magnified herself and blackened: reduce them to
their proper size and hue, she overlooks them. "'Tis true," said I,
correcting the proposition, "the Bastile is not an evil to be
despised; but strip it of its towers, fill up the fosse, unbarricade
the doors, call it simply a confinement, and suppose 'tis some tyrant
of a distemper and not of a man which holds you in it, the evil
vanishes, and you bear the other half without complaint." I was
interrupted in the heyday of this soliloquy with a voice which I took
to be of a child, which complained "it could not get out." I looked up
and down the passage, and seeing neither man, woman nor child, I went
out without further attention.
In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated
twice over; and looking up I saw it was a starling hung in a little
cage; "I can't get out, I can't get out," said the starling. I stood
looking at the bird; and to every person who came through the passage,
it ran fluttering to the side toward which they approached it, with
the same lamentation of its captivity: "I can't get out," said the
starling. "God help thee!" said I, "but I'll let thee out, cost what
it will"; so I turned about the cage to get the door. It was twisted
and double-twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it open
without pulling the cage to pieces. I took both hands to it. The bird
flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and
thrusting his head through the trellis, prest his breast against it as
if impatient. "I fear, poor creature," said I, "I can not set thee at
liberty." "No," said the starling, "I can't get out; I can't get
out," said the starling. I vow I never had my affections more
tenderly awakened; or do I remember an incident in my life where the
dissipated spirits, to which my reason had been a bubble, were so
suddenly called home. Mechanical as the notes were, yet so true in
tune to nature were they chanted, that in one moment they overthrew
all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile; and I heavily walked
up-stairs, unsaying every word I had said in going down them.
"Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery," said I, "still thou
art a bitter draft; and tho thousands in all ages have been made to
drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account. 'Tis thou,
thrice sweet and gracious goddess," addressing myself to liberty,
"whom all in public or in private worship, whose taste is grateful,
and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall change; no tint of
words can spot thy snowy mantle, or chemic power turn thy scepter into
iron; with thee to smile upon him as he eats his crust, the swain is
happier than his monarch, from whose court thou art exiled. Gracious
Heaven!" cried I, kneeling down upon the last step but one in my
ascent, "grant me but health, thou great bestower of it, and give me
but this fair goddess as my companion, and shower down thy miters, if
it seem good unto thy divine providence, upon those heads which are
aching for them."
The bird in his cage pursued me into my room. I sat down close to my
table, and leaning my head upon my hand, I began to figure to myself
the miseries of confinement. I was in a right frame for it, and so I
gave full scope to my imagination. I was going to begin with the
millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery;
but finding, however affecting the picture was, that I could not bring
it near me, and that the multitude of sad groups in it did but
distract me, I took a single captive, and having first shut him up in
his dungeon, I then looked through the twilight of his grated door to
take his picture. I beheld his body half-wasted away with long
expectation and confinement, and felt what kind of sickness of the
heart it was which arises from hope deferred. Upon looking nearer I
saw him pale and feverish; in thirty years the western breeze had not
once fanned his blood; he had seen no sun, no moon, in all that time,
nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his lattice;
his children--but here my heart began to bleed, and I was forced to go
on with another part of the portrait. He was sitting upon the ground
upon a little straw, in the furthest corner of his dungeon, which was
alternately his chair and bed; a little calendar of small sticks lay
at the head, notched all over with the dismal days and nights he had
passed there; he had one of these little sticks in his hand, and with
a rusty nail he was etching another day of misery to add to the heap.
As I darkened the little light he had, he lifted up a hopeless eye
toward the door, then cast it down, shook his head, and went on with
his work of affliction. I heard his chains upon his legs, as he turned
his body to lay his little stick upon the bundle. He gave a deep sigh:
I saw the iron enter into his soul. I burst into tears: I could not
sustain the picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn.
II
TO MOULINES WITH MARIA[34]
When Maria had come a little to herself, I asked her if she remembered
a pale thin person of a man who had sat down betwixt her and her goat
about two years before? She said she was unsettled much at that time,
but remembered it upon two accounts; that, ill as she was, she saw the
person pitied her: and next, that her goat had stolen his
handkerchief, and that she had beat him for the theft. "She had washed
it," she said, "in the brook, and kept it ever since in her pocket to
restore it to him in case she should ever see him again, which," she
added, "he had half promised her."
As she told me this, she took the handkerchief out of her pocket to
let me see it: she had folded it up neatly in a couple of vine-leaves,
tied around with a tendril: on opening it, I saw an S. marked in one
of the corners.
She had since that, she told me, strayed as far as Rome, and walked
around St. Peter's once, and returned back: that she found her way
alone across the Apennines, had traveled over all Lombardy without
money, and through the flinty roads of Savoy without shoes: how she
had borne it, and how she had got supported she could not tell: "But,
'God tempers the wind,'" said Maria, "'to the shorn lamb.'"
"Shorn, indeed, and to the quick," said I: "and wast thou in my own
land, where I have a cottage, I would take thee to it, and shelter
thee; thou shouldst eat of my own bread, and drink of my own cup: I
would be kind to thy Sylvio; in all thy weaknesses and wanderings I
would seek after thee, and bring thee back; when the sun went down, I
would say my prayers; and when I had done, thou shouldst play thy
evening song upon thy pipe, nor would the incense of my sacrifice be
worse accepted for entering heaven along with that of a broken heart!"
Nature melted within me as I uttered this: and Maria observing, as I
took out my handkerchief, that it was steeped too much already to be
of use, would needs go wash it in the stream. "And where will you dry
it, Maria?" said I.
"I'll dry it in my bosom," said she: "'twill do me good."
"And is your heart still so warm, Maria?" said I.
I touched upon a string on which hung all her sorrows: she looked with
wistful disorder for some time in my face; and then, without saying
anything, took her pipe, and played her service to the Virgin. The
string I had touched ceased to vibrate; in a moment or two, Maria
returned to herself, let her pipe fall, and rose up.
"And where are you going, Maria?" said I.
She said, "To Moulines."
"Let us go," said I, "together."
Maria put her arm within mine, and lengthening the string to let the
dog follow, in that order we entered Moulines.
III
THE DEATH OF LE FEVRE[35]
"In a fortnight or three weeks," added my uncle Toby, smiling, "he
might march."
"He will never march, an' please your Honor, in this world," said the
Corporal.
"He will march," said my uncle Toby, rising up from the side of the
bed with one shoe off.
"An' please your Honor," said the Corporal, "he will never march but
to his grave."
"He shall march," cried my uncle Toby, marching the foot which had a
shoe on, tho without advancing an inch--"he shall march to his
regiment."
"He can not stand it," said the Corporal.
"He shall be supported," said my uncle Toby.
"He'll drop at last," said the Corporal, "and what will become of his
body?"
"He shall not drop," said my uncle Toby firmly.
"Ah, well--a--day!--do what we can for him," said Trim, maintaining
his point, "the poor soul will die."
"He shall not die, by G--," cried my uncle Toby.
The accusing spirit, which flew up to heaven's chancery with the oath,
blushed as he gave it in; and the recording angel, as he wrote it
down, dropt a tear upon the word, and blotted it out forever.
My uncle Toby went to his bureau, put his purse into his
breeches-pocket, and, having ordered the Corporal to go early in the
morning for a physician, he went to bed and fell asleep. The sun
looked bright the morning after to every eye in the village but to Le
Fevre's and his afflicted son's; the hand of death prest heavy upon
his eyelids; and hardly could the wheel at the cistern turn round its
circle, when my uncle Toby, who had rose up an hour before his wonted
time, entered the Lieutenant's room, and without preface or apology,
sat himself down upon the chair by the bedside, and independently of
all modes and customs, opened the curtain in the manner an old friend
and brother-officer would have done it, and asked him how he did, how
he had rested in the night, what was his complaint, where was his
pain, and what he could do to help him; and without giving him time to
answer any one of these inquiries, went on, and told him of the little
plan which he had been concerting with Corporal the night before for
him.
"You shall go home directly, Le Fevre," said my uncle Toby, "to my
house, and we'll send for a doctor to see what's the matter: and we'll
have an apothecary; and the Corporal shall be your nurse; and I'll be
your servant, Le Fevre."
There was a frankness in my uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity,
but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul, and showed
you the go
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