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Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 2

by Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay · English · Gutenberg #2333 · 1,743,087 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Critical and Historical Essays — Volume 2

Author: Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay


        
Release date: September 1, 2000 [eBook #2333]
                Most recently updated: August 16, 2016

Language: English

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CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS, VOLUME II

By Thomas Babington Macaulay



FOREIGN HISTORY

MACHIAVELLI

RANKE’S HISTORY OF THE POPES

WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION

FREDERIC THE GREAT

POLITICAL CONTROVERSY

SOUTHEY’S COLLOQUIES

CIVIL DISABILITIES OF THE JEWS

GLADSTONE ON CHURCH AND STATE

LITERARY CRITICISMS

BACON

JOHN BUNYAN

DRAMATISTS OF THE RESTORATION

ADDISON

SAMUEL JOHNSON

MADAME D’ARBLAY

BYRON

MONTGOMERY

INDEX





MACHIAVELLI


(March 1827) _Oeuvres completes de MACHIAVEL, traduites par J. V. PERIER
Paris: 1825._


|THOSE who have attended to the practice of our literary tribunal are
well aware that, by means of certain legal fictions similar to those of
Westminster Hall, we are frequently enabled to take cognisance of cases
lying beyond the sphere of our original jurisdiction. We need hardly
say, therefore, that in the present instance M. Perier is merely a
Richard Roe, who will not be mentioned in any subsequent stage of the
proceedings, and whose name is used for the sole purpose of bringing
Machiavelli into court.

We doubt whether any name in literary history be so generally odious as
that of the man whose character and writings we now propose to consider.
The terms in which he is commonly described would seem to import that
he was the Tempter, the Evil Principle, the discoverer of ambition
and revenge, the original inventor of perjury, and that, before the
publication of his fatal Prince, there had never been a hypocrite, a
tyrant, or a traitor, a simulated virtue, or a convenient crime.
One writer gravely assures us that Maurice of Saxony learned all his
fraudulent policy from that execrable volume. Another remarks that since
it was translated into Turkish, the Sultans have been more addicted
than formerly to the custom of strangling their brothers. Lord Lyttelton
charges the poor Florentine with the manifold treasons of the house of
Guise, and with the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Several authors have
hinted that the Gunpowder Plot is to be primarily attributed to his
doctrines, and seem to think that his effigy ought to be substituted for
that of Guy Faux, in those processions by which the ingenious youth of
England annually commemorate the preservation of the Three Estates. The
Church of Rome has pronounced his works accursed things. Nor have our
own countrymen been backward in testifying their opinion of his merits.
Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of
his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.=

````Nick Machiavel had ne’er a trick,

````Tho’ he gave his name to our old Nick.

`````Hudibras, Part iii. Canto i.=

[But, we believe, there is a schism on this subject among the
antiquarians.]

It is indeed scarcely possible for any person, not well acquainted
with the history and literature of Italy, to read without horror and
amazement the celebrated treatise which has brought so much obloquy on
the name of Machiavelli. Such a display of wickedness, naked yet not
ashamed, such cool, judicious, scientific atrocity, seemed rather to
belong to a fiend than to the most depraved of men. Principles which
the most hardened ruffian would scarcely hint to his most trusted
accomplice, or avow, without the disguise of some palliating
sophism, even to his own mind, are professed without the slightest
circumlocution, and assumed as the fundamental axioms of all political
science.

It is not strange that ordinary readers should regard the author of such
a book as the most depraved and shameless of human beings. Wise men,
however, have always been inclined to look with great suspicion on
the angels and daemons of the multitude: and in the present instance,
several circumstances have led even superficial observers to question
the justice of the vulgar decision. It is notorious that Machiavelli
was, through life, a zealous republican. In the same year in which he
composed his manual of King-craft, he suffered imprisonment and torture
in the cause of public liberty. It seems inconceivable that the martyr
of freedom should have designedly acted as the apostle of tyranny.
Several eminent writers have, therefore, endeavoured to detect in this
unfortunate performance some concealed meaning, more consistent with the
character and conduct of the author than that which appears at the first
glance.

One hypothesis is that Machiavelli intended to practise on the young
Lorenzo de Medici a fraud similar to that which Sunderland is said to
have employed against our James the Second, and that he urged his pupil
to violent and perfidious measures, as the surest means of accelerating
the moment of deliverance and revenge. Another supposition which Lord
Bacon seems to countenance, is that the treatise was merely a piece of
grave irony, intended to warn nations against the arts of ambitious men.
It would be easy to show that neither of these solutions is consistent
with many passages in The Prince itself. But the most decisive
refutation is that which is furnished by the other works of Machiavelli.
In all the writings which he gave to the public, and in all those
which the research of editors has, in the course of three centuries,
discovered, in his Comedies, designed for the entertainment of the
multitude, in his Comments on Livy, intended for the perusal of the most
enthusiastic patriots of Florence, in his History, inscribed to one of
the most amiable and estimable of the Popes, in his public despatches,
in his private memoranda, the same obliquity of moral principle for
which The Prince is so severely censured is more or less discernible. We
doubt whether it would be possible to find, in all the many volumes of
his compositions, a single expression indicating that dissimulation and
treachery had ever struck him as discreditable.

After this, it may seem ridiculous to say that we are acquainted with
few writings which exhibit so much elevation of sentiment, so pure and
warm a zeal for the public good, or so just a view of the duties and
rights of citizens, as those of Machiavelli. Yet so it is. And even
from The Prince itself we could select many passages in support of this
remark. To a reader of our age and country this inconsistency is, at
first, perfectly bewildering. The whole man seems to be an enigma,
a grotesque assemblage of incongruous qualities, selfishness and
generosity, cruelty and benevolence, craft and simplicity, abject
villainy and romantic heroism. One sentence is such as a veteran
diplomatist would scarcely write in cipher for the direction of his most
confidential spy; the next seems to be extracted from a theme composed
by an ardent schoolboy on the death of Leonidas. An act of dexterous
perfidy, and an act of patriotic self-devotion, call forth the same kind
and the same degree of respectful admiration. The moral sensibility of
the writer seems at once to be morbidly obtuse and morbidly acute. Two
characters altogether dissimilar are united in him. They are not merely
joined, but interwoven. They are the warp and the woof of his mind; and
their combination, like that of the variegated threads in shot silk,
gives to the whole texture a glancing and ever-changing appearance. The
explanation might have been easy, if he had been a very weak or a very
affected man. But he was evidently neither the one nor the other.
His works prove, beyond all contradiction, that his understanding was
strong, his taste pure, and his sense of the ridiculous exquisitely
keen.

This is strange: and yet the strangest is behind. There is no reason
whatever to think, that those amongst whom he lived saw anything
shocking or incongruous in his writings. Abundant proofs remain of the
high estimation in which both his works and his person were held by
the most respectable among his contemporaries. Clement the Seventh
patronised the publication of those very books which the Council of
Trent, in the following generation, pronounced unfit for the perusal
of Christians. Some members of the democratical party censured the
Secretary for dedicating The Prince to a patron who bore the unpopular
name of Medici. But to those immoral doctrines which have since called
forth such severe reprehensions no exception appears to have been taken.
The cry against them was first raised beyond the Alps, and seems to have
been heard with amazement in Italy. The earliest assailant, as far as we
are aware, was a countryman of our own, Cardinal Pole. The author of the
Anti-Machiavelli was a French Protestant.

It is, therefore, in the state of moral feeling among the Italians of
those times that we must seek for the real explanation of what seems
most mysterious in the life and writings of this remarkable man. As
this is a subject which suggests many interesting considerations, both
political and metaphysical, we shall make no apology for discussing it
at some length.

During the gloomy and disastrous centuries which followed the downfall
of the Roman Empire, Italy had preserved, in a far greater degree than
any other part of Western Europe, the traces of ancient civilisation.
The night which descended upon her was the night of an Arctic summer.
The dawn began to reappear before the last reflection of the preceding
sunset had faded from the horizon. It was in the time of the French
Merovingians and of the Saxon Heptarchy that ignorance and ferocity
seemed to have done their worst. Yet even then the Neapolitan provinces,
recognising the authority of the Eastern Empire, preserved something
of Eastern knowledge and refinement. Rome, protected by the sacred
character of her Pontiffs, enjoyed at least comparative security and
repose, Even in those regions where the sanguinary Lombards had fixed
their monarchy, there was incomparably more of wealth, of information,
of physical comfort, and of social order, than could be found in Gaul,
Britain, or Germany.

That which most distinguished Italy from the neighbouring countries
was the importance which the population of the towns, at a very early
period, began to acquire. Some cities had been founded in wild and
remote situations, by fugitives who had escaped from the rage of the
barbarians. Such were Venice and Genoa, which preserved their freedom
by their obscurity, till they became able to preserve it by their power.
Other cities seem to have retained, under all the changing dynasties of
invaders, under Odoacer and Theodoric, Narses and Alboin, the municipal
institutions which had been conferred on them by the liberal policy of
the Great Republic. In provinces which the central government was too
feeble either to protect or to oppress, these institutions gradually
acquired stability and vigour. The citizens, defended by their walls,
and governed by their own magistrates and their own by-laws, enjoyed a
considerable share of republican independence. Thus a strong democratic
spirit was called into action. The Carlovingian sovereigns were too
imbecile to subdue it. The generous policy of Otho encouraged it. It
might perhaps have been suppressed by a close coalition between
the Church and the Empire. It was fostered and invigorated by their
disputes. In the twelfth century it attained its full vigour, and, after
a long and doubtful conflict, triumphed over the abilities and courage
of the Swabian princes.

The assistance of the Ecclesiastical power had greatly contributed to
the success of the Guelfs. That success would, however, have been a
doubtful good, if its only effect had been to substitute a moral for
a political servitude, and to exalt the Popes at the expense of the
Caesars. Happily the public mind of Italy had long contained the
seeds of free opinions, which were now rapidly developed by the genial
influence of free institutions. The people of that country had observed
the whole machinery of the Church, its saints and its miracles, its
lofty pretensions and its splendid ceremonial, its worthless blessings
and its harmless curses, too long and too closely to be duped. They
stood behind the scenes on which others were gazing with childish awe
and interest. They witnessed the arrangement of the pulleys, and the
manufacture of the thunders. They saw the natural faces and heard the
natural voices of the actors. Distant nations looked on the Pope as the
Vicegerent of the Almighty, the oracle of the All-wise, the umpire from
whose decisions, in the disputes either of theologians or of kings, no
Christian ought to appeal. The Italians were acquainted with all the
follies of his youth, and with all the dishonest arts by which he had
attained power. They knew how often he had employed the keys of the
Church to release himself from the most sacred engagements, and its
wealth to pamper his mistresses and nephews. The doctrines and rites of
the established religion they treated with decent reverence. But though
they still called themselves Catholics, they had ceased to be Papists.
Those spiritual arms which carried terror into the palaces and camps
of the proudest sovereigns excited only contempt in the immediate
neighbourhood of the Vatican. Alexander, when he commanded our Henry the
Second to submit to the lash before the tomb of a rebellious subject,
was himself an exile. The Romans apprehending that he entertained
designs against their liberties, had driven him from their city; and
though he solemnly promised to confine himself for the future to his
spiritual functions, they still refused to readmit him.

In every other part of Europe, a large and powerful privileged class
trampled on the people and defied the Government. But in the most
flourishing parts of Italy, the feudal nobles were reduced to
comparative insignificance. In some districts they took shelter under
the protection of the powerful commonwealths which they were unable to
oppose, and gradually sank into the mass of burghers. In other places
they possessed great influence; but it was an influence widely different
from that which was exercised by the aristocracy of any Transalpine
kingdom. They were not petty princes, but eminent citizens. Instead of
strengthening their fastnesses among the mountains, they embellished
their palaces in the market-place. The state of society in the
Neapolitan dominions, and in some parts of the Ecclesiastical State,
more nearly resembled that which existed in the great monarchies of
Europe. But the Governments of Lombardy and Tuscany, through all their
revolutions, preserved a different character. A people, when assembled
in a town, is far more formidable to its rulers than when dispersed over
a wide extent of country. The most arbitrary of the Caesars found it
necessary to feed and divert the inhabitants of their unwieldy capital
at the expense of the provinces. The citizens of Madrid have more than
once besieged their sovereign in his own palace, and extorted from him
the most humiliating concessions. The Sultans have often been compelled
to propitiate the furious rabble of Constantinople with the head of
an unpopular Vizier. From the same cause there was a certain tinge of
democracy in the monarchies and aristocracies of Northern Italy.

Thus liberty, partially indeed and transiently, revisited Italy; and
with liberty came commerce and empire, science and taste, all the
comforts and all the ornaments of life. The Crusades, from which the
inhabitants of other countries gained nothing but relics and wounds,
brought to the rising commonwealths of the Adriatic and Tyrrhene seas
a large increase of wealth, dominion, and knowledge. The moral and
geographical position of those commonwealths enabled them to profit
alike by the barbarism of the West and by the civilisation of the East.
Italian ships covered every sea. Italian factories rose on every shore.
The tables of Italian moneychangers were set in every city. Manufactures
flourished. Banks were established. The operations of the commercial
machine were facilitated by many useful and beautiful inventions. We
doubt whether any country of Europe, our own excepted, have at the
present time reached so high a point of wealth and civilisation as some
parts of Italy had attained four hundred years ago. Historians rarely
descend to those details from which alone the real state of a community
can be collected. Hence posterity is too often deceived by the vague
hyperboles of poets and rhetoricians, who mistake the splendour of a
court for the happiness of a people. Fortunately, John Villani has given
us an ample and precise account of the state of Florence in the early
part of the fourteenth century. The revenue of the Republic amounted
to three hundred thousand florins; a sum which, allowing for the
depreciation of the precious metals, was at least equivalent to six
hundred thousand pounds sterling; a larger sum than England and Ireland,
two centuries ago, yielded annually to Elizabeth. The manufacture of
wool alone employed two hundred factories and thirty thousand workmen.
The cloth annually produced sold, at an average, for twelve hundred
thousand florins; a sum fully equal in exchangeable value to two
millions and a half of our money. Four hundred thousand florins were
annually coined. Eighty banks conducted the commercial operations,
not of Florence only but of all Europe. The transactions of these
establishments were sometimes of a magnitude which may surprise even the
contemporaries of the Barings and the Rothschilds. Two houses advanced
to Edward the Third of England upwards of three hundred thousand marks,
at a time when the mark contained more silver than fifty shillings of
the present day, and when the value of silver was more than quadruple
of what it now is. The city and its environs contained a hundred and
seventy thousand inhabitants. In the various schools about ten thousand
children were taught to read; twelve hundred studied arithmetic; six
hundred received a learned education.

The progress of elegant literature and of the fine arts was proportioned
to that of the public prosperity. Under the despotic successors of
Augustus, all the fields of intellect had been turned into arid wastes,
still marked out by formal boundaries, still retaining the traces of
old cultivation, but yielding neither flowers nor fruit. The deluge of
barbarism came. It swept away all the landmarks. It obliterated all the
signs of former tillage. But it fertilised while it devastated. When
it receded, the wilderness was as the garden of God, rejoicing on
every side, laughing, clapping its hands, pouring forth, in spontaneous
abundance, everything brilliant, or fragrant, or nourishing. A new
language, characterised by simple sweetness and simple energy, had
attained perfection. No tongue ever furnished more gorgeous and vivid
tints to poetry; nor was it long before a poet appeared who knew how
to employ them. Early in the fourteenth century came forth the Divine
Comedy, beyond comparison the greatest work of imagination which had
appeared since the poems of Homer. The following generation produced
indeed no second Dante: but it was eminently distinguished by general
intellectual activity. The study of the Latin writers had never been
wholly neglected in Italy. But Petrarch introduced a more profound,
liberal, and elegant scholarship, and communicated to his countrymen
that enthusiasm for the literature, the history, and the antiquities
of Rome, which divided his own heart with a frigid mistress and a more
frigid Muse. Boccaccio turned their attention to the more sublime and
graceful models of Greece.

From this time, the admiration of learning and genius became almost an
idolatry among the people of Italy. Kings and republics, cardinals
and doges, vied with each other in honouring and flattering Petrarch.
Embassies from rival States solicited the honour of his instructions.
His coronation agitated the Court of Naples and the people of Rome as
much as the most important political transaction could have done. To
collect books and antiques, to found professorships, to patronise men of
learning, became almost universal fashions among the great. The spirit
of literary research allied itself to that of commercial enterprise.
Every place to which the merchant princes of Florence extended their
gigantic traffic, from the bazars of the Tigris to the monasteries
of the Clyde, was ransacked for medals and manuscripts. Architecture,
painting, and sculpture, were munificently encouraged. Indeed it would
be difficult to name an Italian of eminence, during the period of which
we speak, who, whatever may have been his general character, did not at
least affect a love of letters and of the arts.

Knowledge and public prosperity continued to advance together. Both
attained their meridian in the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent. We
cannot refrain from quoting the splendid passage, in which the Tuscan
Thucydides describes the state of Italy at that period. “Ridotta tutta
in somma pace e tranquillita, coltivata non meno ne’ luoghi piu montuosi
e piu sterili che nelle pianure e regioni piu fertili, ne sottoposta
ad altro imperio che de’ suoi medesimi, non solo era abbondantissima d’
abitatori e di ricchezze; ma illustrata sommamente dalla magnificenza di
molti principi, dallo splendore di molte nobilissime e bellissime citta,
dalla sedia e maesta della religione, fioriva d’ uomini prestantissimi
nell’ amministrazione delle cose pubbliche, e d’ingegni molto nobili in
tutte le scienze, ed in qualunque arte preclara ed industriosa.” When
we peruse this just and splendid description, we can scarcely persuade
ourselves that we are reading of times in which the annals of England
and France present us only with a frightful spectacle of poverty,
barbarity, and ignorance. From the oppressions of illiterate masters,
and the sufferings of a degraded peasantry, it is delightful to turn to
the opulent and enlightened States of Italy, to the vast and magnificent
cities, the ports, the arsenals, the villas, the museums, the libraries,
the marts filled with every article of comfort or luxury, the factories
swarming with artisans, the Apennines covered with rich cultivation up
to their very summits, the Po wafting the harvests of Lombardy to the
granaries of Venice, and carrying back the silks of Bengal and the
furs of Siberia to the palaces of Milan. With peculiar pleasure,
every cultivated mind must repose on the fair, the happy, the glorious
Florence, the halls which rang with the mirth of Pulci, the cell where
twinkled the midnight lamp of Politian, the statues on which the young
eye of Michael Angelo glared with the frenzy of a kindred inspiration,
the gardens in which Lorenzo meditated some sparkling song for the
May-day dance of the Etrurian virgins. Alas for the beautiful city! Alas
for the wit and the learning, the genius and the love!=

```“Le donne, e i cavalier, gli affanni, e gli agi,

```Che ne ‘nvogliava amore e cortesia

```La dove i cuor son fatti si malvagi.”=

A time was at hand, when all the seven vials of the Apocalypse were to
be poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant countries, a time of
slaughter, famine, beggary, infamy, slavery, despair.

In the Italian States, as in many natural bodies, untimely decrepitude
was the penalty of precocious maturity. Their early greatness, and their
early decline, are principally to be attributed to the same cause, the
preponderance which the towns acquired in the political system.

In a community of hunters or of shepherds, every man easily and
necessarily becomes a soldier. His ordinary avocations are perfectly
compatible with all the duties of military service. However remote may
be the expedition on which he is bound, he finds it easy to transport
with him the stock from which he derives his subsistence. The whole
people is an army; the whole year a march. Such was the state of society
which facilitated the gigantic conquests of Attila and Tamerlane.

But a people which subsists by the cultivation of the earth is in a very
different situation. The husbandman is bound to the soil on which he
labours. A long campaign would be ruinous to him. Still his pursuits
are such as give to his frame both the active and the passive strength
necessary to a soldier. Nor do they, at least in the infancy of
agricultural science, demand his uninterrupted attention. At particular
times of the year he is almost wholly unemployed, and can, without
injury to himself, afford the time necessary for a short expedition.
Thus the legions of Rome were supplied during its earlier wars. The
season during which the fields did not require the presence of the
cultivators sufficed for a short inroad and a battle. These operations,
too frequently interrupted to produce decisive results, yet served
to keep up among the people a degree of discipline and courage which
rendered them, not only secure, but formidable. The archers and billmen
of the middle ages, who, with provisions for forty days at their backs,
left the fields for the camp, were troops of the same description.

But when commerce and manufactures begin to flourish a great change
takes place. The sedentary habits of the desk and the loom render the
exertions and hardships of war insupportable. The business of traders
and artisans requires their constant presence and attention. In such a
community there is little superfluous time; but there is generally much
superfluous money. Some members of the society are, therefore, hired
to relieve the rest from a task inconsistent with their habits and
engagements.

The history of Greece is, in this, as in many other respects, the
best commentary on the history of Italy. Five hundred years before the
Christian era, the citizens of the republics round the Aegean Sea formed
perhaps the finest militia that ever existed. As wealth and refinement
advanced, the system underwent a gradual alteration. The Ionian States
were the first in which commerce and the arts were cultivated, and the
first in which the ancient discipline decayed. Within eighty years
after the battle of Plataea, mercenary troops were everywhere plying for
battles and sieges. In the time of Demosthenes, it was scarcely possible
to persuade or compel the Athenians to enlist for foreign service.
The laws of Lycurgus prohibited trade and manufactures. The Spartans,
therefore, continued to form a national force long after their
neighbours had begun to hire soldiers. But their military spirit
declined with their singular institutions. In the second century
before Christ, Greece contained only one nation of warriors, the
savage highlanders of Aetolia, who were some generations behind their
countrymen in civilisation and intelligence.

All the causes which produced these effects among the Greeks acted still
more strongly on the modern Italians. Instead of a power like Sparta,
in its nature warlike, they had amongst them an ecclesiastical state,
in its nature pacific. Where there are numerous slaves, every freeman is
induced by the strongest motives to familiarise himself with the use of
arms. The commonwealths of Italy did not, like those of Greece, swarm
with thousands of these household enemies. Lastly, the mode in which
military operations were conducted during the prosperous times of Italy
was peculiarly unfavourable to the formation of an efficient militia.
Men covered with iron from head to foot, armed with ponderous lances,
and mounted on horses of the largest breed, were considered as composing
the strength of an army. The infantry was regarded as comparatively
worthless, and was neglected till it became really so. These tactics
maintained their ground for centuries in most parts of Europe. That
foot-soldiers could withstand the charge of heavy cavalry was thought
utterly impossible, till, towards the close of the fifteenth century,
the rude mountaineers of Switzerland dissolved the spell, and astounded
the most experienced generals by receiving the dreaded shock on an
impenetrable forest of pikes.

The use of the Grecian spear, the Roman sword, or the modern bayonet,
might be acquired with comparative ease. But nothing short of the daily
exercise of years could train the man-at-arms to support his ponderous
panoply, and manage his unwieldy weapon. Throughout Europe this most
important branch of war became a separate profession. Beyond the Alps,
indeed, though a profession, it was not generally a trade. It was the
duty and the amusement of a large class of country gentlemen. It was the
service by which they held their lands, and the diversion by which, in
the absence of mental resources, they beguiled their leisure. But in the
Northern States of Italy, as we have already remarked, the growing power
of the cities, where it had not exterminated this order of men, had
completely changed their habits. Here, therefore, the practice of
employing mercenaries became universal, at a time when it was almost
unknown in other countries.

When war becomes the trade of a separate class, the least dangerous
course left to a government is to force that class into a standing army.
It is scarcely possible, that men can pass their lives in the service of
one State, without feeling some interest in its greatness. Its victories
are their victories. Its defeats are their defeats. The contract loses
something of its mercantile character. The services of the soldier are
considered as the effects of patriotic zeal, his pay as the tribute of
national gratitude. To betray the power which employs him, to be even
remiss in its service, are in his eyes the most atrocious and degrading
of crimes.

When the princes and commonwealths of Italy began to use hired
troops, their wisest course would have been to form separate military
establishments. Unhappily this was not done. The mercenary warriors of
the Peninsula, instead of being attached to the service of different
powers, were regarded as the common property of all. The connection
between the State and its defenders was reduced to the most simple
and naked traffic. The adventurer brought his horse, his weapons, his
strength, and his experience, into the market. Whether the King of
Naples or the Duke of Milan, the Pope or the Signory of Florence, struck
the bargain, was to him a matter of perfect indifference. He was for the
highest wages and the longest term. When the campaign for which he had
contracted was finished, there was neither law nor punctilio to prevent
him from instantly turning his arms against his late masters. The
soldier was altogether disjoined from the citizen and from the subject.

The natural consequences followed. Left to the conduct of men who
neither loved those whom they defended, nor hated those whom they
opposed, who were often bound by stronger ties to the army against
which they fought than to the State which they served, who lost by
the termination of the conflict, and gained by its prolongation, war
completely changed its character. Every man came into the field of
battle impressed with the knowledge that, in a few days, he might be
taking the pay of the power against which he was then employed,
and, fighting by the side of his enemies against his associates. The
strongest interests and the strongest feelings concurred to mitigate the
hostility of those who had lately been brethren in arms, and who might
soon be brethren in arms once more. Their common profession was a bond
of union not to be forgotten even when they were engaged in the service
of contending parties. Hence it was that operations, languid and
indecisive beyond any recorded in history, marches and counter-marches,
pillaging expeditions and blockades, bloodless capitulations and equally
bloodless combats, make up the military history of Italy during the
course of nearly two centuries. Mighty armies fight from sunrise to
sunset. A great victory is won. Thousands of prisoners are taken; and
hardly a life is lost. A pitched battle seems to have been really less
dangerous than an ordinary civil tumult.

Courage was now no longer necessary even to the military character.
Men grew old in camps, and acquired the highest renown by their warlike
achievements, without being once required to face serious danger.
The political consequences are too well known. The richest and most
enlightened part of the world was left undefended to the assaults of
every barbarous invader, to the brutality of Switzerland, the insolence
of France, and the fierce rapacity of Arragon. The moral effects which
followed from this state of things were still more remarkable.

Among the rude nations which lay beyond the Alps, valour was absolutely
indispensable. Without it none could be eminent; few could be secure.
Cowardice was, therefore, naturally considered as the foulest reproach.
Among the polished Italians, enriched by commerce, governed by law, and
passionately attached to literature, everything was done by superiority
and intelligence. Their very wars, more pacific than the peace of their
neighbours, required rather civil than military qualifications. Hence,
while courage was the point of honour in other countries, ingenuity
became the point of honour in Italy.

From these principles were deduced, by processes strictly analogous, two
opposite systems of fashionable morality. Through the greater part of
Europe, the vices which peculiarly belong to timid dispositions, and
which are the natural defence Of weakness, fraud, and hypocrisy, have
always been most disreputable. On the other hand, the excesses of
haughty and daring spirits have been treated with indulgence, and even
with respect. The Italians regarded with corresponding lenity those
crimes which require self-command, address, quick observation, fertile
invention, and profound knowledge of human nature.

Such a prince as our Henry the Fifth would have been the idol of the
North. The follies of his youth, the selfish ambition of his manhood,
the Lollards roasted at slow fires the prisoners massacred on the
field of battle, the expiring lease of priestcraft renewed for another
century, the dreadful legacy of a causeless and hopeless war bequeathed
to a people who had no interest in its event, everything is forgotten
but the victory of Agincourt. Francis Sforza, on the other hand, was the
model of Italian heroes. He made his employers and his rivals alike his
tools. He first overpowered his open enemies by the help of faithless
allies; he then armed himself against his allies with the spoils taken
from his enemies. By his incomparable dexterity, he raised himself from
the precarious and dependent situation of a military adventurer to
the first throne of Italy. To such a man much was forgiven, hollow
friendship, ungenerous enmity, violated faith. Such are the opposite
errors which men commit, when their morality is not a science but a
taste, when they abandon eternal principles for accidental associations.

We have illustrated our meaning by an instance taken from history. We
will select another from fiction. Othello murders his wife; he gives
orders for the murder of his lieutenant; he ends by murdering himself.
Yet he never loses the esteem and affection of Northern readers.
His intrepid and ardent spirit redeems everything. The unsuspecting
confidence with which he listens to his adviser, the agony with which he
shrinks from the thought of shame, the tempest of passion with which
he commits his crimes, and the haughty fearlessness with which he avows
them, give an extraordinary interest to his character. Iago, on the
contrary, is the object of universal loathing. Many are inclined to
suspect that Shakspeare has been seduced into an exaggeration unusual
with him, and has drawn a monster who has no archetype in human nature.
Now we suspect that an Italian audience in the fifteenth century would
have felt very differently. Othello would have inspired nothing but
detestation and contempt. The folly with which he trusts the friendly
professions of a man whose promotion he had obstructed, the credulity
with which he takes unsupported assertions, and trivial circumstances,
for unanswerable proofs, the violence with which he silences the
exculpation till the exculpation can only aggravate his misery, would
have excited the abhorrence and disgust of the spectators. The conduct
of Iago they would assuredly have condemned; but they would have
condemned it as we condemn that of his victim. Something of interest and
respect would have mingled with their disapprobation. The readiness of
the traitor’s wit, the clearness of his judgment, the skill with which
he penetrates the dispositions of others and conceals his own, would
have ensured to him a certain portion of their esteem.

So wide was the difference between the Italians and their neighbours.
A similar difference existed between the Greeks of the second century
before Christ, and their masters the Romans. The conquerors, brave and
resolute, faithful to their engagements, and strongly influenced by
religious feelings, were, at the same time, ignorant, arbitrary, and
cruel. With the vanquished people were deposited all the art, the
science, and the literature of the Western world. In poetry, in
philosophy, in painting, in architecture, in sculpture, they had no
rivals. Their manners were polished, their perceptions acute, their
invention ready; they were tolerant, affable, humane; but of courage
and sincerity they were almost utterly destitute. Every rude centurion
consoled himself for his intellectual inferiority, by remarking that
knowledge and taste seemed only to make men atheists, cowards, and
slaves. The distinction long continued to be strongly marked, and
furnished an admirable subject for the fierce sarcasms of Juvenal.

The citizen of an Italian commonwealth was the Greek of the time of
Juvenal and the Greek of the time of Pericles, joined in one. Like the
former, he was timid and pliable, artful and mean. But, like the latter,
he had a country. Its independence and prosperity were dear to him. If
his character were degraded by some base crimes, it was, on the other
hand, ennobled by public spirit and by an honourable ambition.

A vice sanctioned by the general opinion is merely a vice. The evil
terminates in itself. A vice condemned by the general opinion produces a
pernicious effect on the whole character. The former is a local malady,
the latter a constitutional taint. When the reputation of the offender
is lost, he too often flings the remains of his virtue after it in
despair. The Highland gentleman who, a century ago, lived by taking
blackmail from his neighbours, committed the same crime for which Wild
was accompanied to Tyburn by the huzzas of two hundred thousand people.
But there can be no doubt that he was a much less depraved man than
Wild. The deed for which Mrs. Brownrigg was hanged sinks into nothing,
when compared with the conduct of the Roman who treated the public to a
hundred pair of gladiators. Yet we should greatly wrong such a Roman if
we supposed that his disposition was as cruel as that of Mrs. Brownrigg.
In our own country, a woman forfeits her place in society by what, in
a man, is too commonly considered as an honourable distinction, and,
at worst, as a venial error. The consequence is notorious. The moral
principle of a woman is frequently more impaired by a single lapse
from virtue than that of a man by twenty years of intrigues. Classical
antiquity would furnish us with instances stronger, if possible, than
those to which we have referred.

We must apply this principle to the case before us. Habits of
dissimulation and falsehood, no doubt, mark a man of our age and country
as utterly worthless and abandoned. But it by no means follows that a
similar judgment would be just in the case of an Italian of the middle
ages. On the contrary, we frequently find those faults which we are
accustomed to consider as certain indications of a mind altogether
depraved, in company with great and good qualities, with generosity,
with benevolence, with disinterestedness. From such a state of
society, Palamedes, in the admirable dialogue of Hume, might have drawn
illustrations of his theory as striking as any of those with which
Fourli furnished him. These are not, we well know, the lessons which
historians are generally most careful to teach, or readers most willing
to learn. But they are not therefore useless. How Philip disposed his
troops at Chaeronea, where Hannibal crossed the Alps, whether Mary blew
up Darnley, or Siquier shot Charles the Twelfth, and ten thousand other
questions of the same description, are in themselves unimportant. The
inquiry may amuse us, but the decision leaves us no wiser. He alone
reads history aright who, observing how powerfully circumstances
influence the feelings and opinions of men, how often vices pass
into virtues and paradoxes into axioms, learns to distinguish what is
accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and
immutable.

In this respect no history suggests more important reflections than that
of the Tuscan and Lombard commonwealths. The character of the Italian
statesman seems, at first sight, a collection of contradictions, a
phantom as monstrous as the portress of hell in Milton, half divinity,
half snake, majestic and beautiful above, grovelling and poisonous
below, We see a man whose thoughts and words have no connection with
each other, who never hesitates at an oath when he wishes to seduce,
who never wants a pretext when he is inclined to betray. His cruelties
spring, not from the heat of blood, or the insanity of uncontrolled
power, but from deep and cool meditation. His passions, like
well-trained troops, are impetuous by rule, and in their most headstrong
fury never forget the discipline to which they have been accustomed. His
whole soul is occupied with vast and complicated schemes of ambition:
yet his aspect and language exhibit nothing but philosophical
moderation. Hatred and revenge eat into his heart: yet every look is
a cordial smile, every gesture a familiar caress. He never excites
the suspicion of his adversaries by petty provocations. His purpose
is disclosed only when it is accomplished. His face is unruffled, his
speech is courteous, till vigilance is laid asleep, till a vital point
is exposed, till a sure aim is taken; and then he strikes for the first
and last time. Military courage, the boast of the sottish German, of the
frivolous and prating Frenchman, of the romantic and arrogant Spaniard,
he neither possesses nor values. He shuns danger, not because he is
insensible to shame, but because, in the society in which he lives,
timidity has ceased to be shameful. To do an injury openly is, in his
estimation, as wicked as to do it secretly, and far less profitable.
With him the most honourable means are those which are the surest,
the speediest, and the darkest. He cannot comprehend how a man should
scruple to deceive those whom he does not scruple to destroy. He would
think it madness to declare open hostilities against rivals whom he
might stab in a friendly embrace, or poison in a consecrated wafer.

Yet this man, black with the vices which we consider as most loathsome,
traitor, hypocrite, coward, assassin, was by no means destitute even
of those virtues which we generally consider as indicating superior
elevation of character. In civil courage, in perseverance, in presence
of mind, those barbarous warriors, who were foremost in the battle or
the breach, were far his inferiors. Even the dangers which he avoided
with a caution almost pusillanimous never confused his perceptions,
never paralysed his inventive faculties, never wrung out one secret from
his smooth tongue, and his inscrutable brow. Though a dangerous enemy,
and a still more dangerous accomplice, he could be a just and beneficent
ruler. With so much unfairness in his policy, there was an extraordinary
degree of fairness in his intellect. Indifferent to truth in the
transactions of life, he was honestly devoted to truth in the researches
of speculation. Wanton cruelty was not in his nature. On the contrary,
where no political object was at stake, his disposition was soft
and humane. The susceptibility of his nerves and the activity of his
imagination inclined him, to sympathise with the feelings of others, and
to delight in the charities and courtesies of social life. Perpetually
descending to actions which might seem to mark a mind diseased through
all its faculties, he had nevertheless an exquisite sensibility, both
for the natural and the moral sublime, for every graceful and every
lofty conception. Habits of petty intrigue and dissimulation might have
rendered him incapable of great general views, but that the expanding
effect of his philosophical studies counteracted the narrowing tendency.
He had the keenest enjoyment of wit, eloquence, and poetry. The
fine arts profited alike by the severity of his judgment, and by the
liberality of his patronage. The portraits of some of the remarkable
Italians of those times are perfectly in harmony with this description.
Ample and majestic foreheads, brows strong and dark, but not frowning,
eyes of which the calm full gaze, while it expresses nothing, seems to
discern everything, cheeks pale with thought and sedentary habits, lips
formed with feminine delicacy, but compressed with more than masculine
decision, mark out men at once enterprising and timid, men equally
skilled in detecting the purposes of others, and in concealing their
own, men who must have been formidable enemies and unsafe allies, but
men, at the same time, whose tempers were mild and equable, and who
possessed an amplitude and subtlety of intellect which would have
rendered them eminent either in active or in contemplative life, and
fitted them either to govern or to instruct mankind.

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which
prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to
avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding
generations change the fashion of their morals, with the fashion of
their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under
their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors. Nor is
this all. Posterity, that high court of appeal which is never tired of
eulogising its own justice and discernment, acts on such occasions like
a Roman dictator after a general mutiny. Finding the delinquents too
numerous to be all punished, it selects some of them at hazard, to
bear the whole penalty of an offence in which they are not more deeply
implicated than those who escape, Whether decimation be a convenient
mode of military execution, we know not; but we solemnly protest against
the introduction of such a principle into the philosophy of history.

In the present instance, the lot has fallen on Machiavelli, a man whose
public conduct was upright and honourable, whose views of morality,
where they differed from those of the persons around him, seemed to have
differed for the better, and whose only fault was, that, having adopted
some of the maxims then generally received, he arranged them more
luminously, and expressed them more forcibly, than any other writer.

Having now, we hope, in some degree cleared the personal character of
Machiavelli, we come to the consideration of his works. As a poet he is
not entitled to a high place; but his comedies deserve attention.

The Mandragola, in particular, is superior to the best of Goldoni, and
inferior only to the best of Moliere. It is the work of a man who, if
he had devoted himself to the drama, would probably have attained the
highest eminence, and produced a permanent and salutary effect on the
national taste. This we infer, not so much from the degree, as from
the kind of its excellence. There are compositions which indicate still
greater talent, and which are perused with still greater delight, from
which we should have drawn very different conclusions. Books quite
worthless are quite harmless. The sure sign of the general decline of
an art is the frequent occurrence, not of deformity, but of misplaced
beauty. In general, Tragedy is corrupted by eloquence, and Comedy by
wit.

The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character. This,
we conceive, is no arbitrary canon, originating in local and temporary
associations, like those canons which regulate the number of acts in
a play, or of syllables in a line. To this fundamental law every other
regulation is subordinate. The situations which most signally develop
character form the best plot. The mother tongue of the passions is the
best style.

This principle rightly understood, does not debar the poet from any
grace of composition. There is no style in which some man may not under
some circumstances express himself. There is therefore no style which
the drama rejects, none which it does not occasionally require. It is
in the discernment of place, of time, and of person, that the inferior
artists fail. The fantastic rhapsody of Mercutio, the elaborate
declamation of Antony, are, where Shakspeare has placed them, natural
and pleasing. But Dryden would have made Mercutio challenge Tybalt in
hyperboles as fanciful as those in which he describes the chariot of
Mab. Corneille would have represented Antony as scolding and coaxing
Cleopatra with all the measured rhetoric of a funeral oration.

No writers have injured the Comedy of England so deeply as Congreve and
Sheridan. Both were men of splendid wit and polished taste. Unhappily,
they made all their characters in their own likeness. Their works bear
the same relation to the legitimate drama which a transparency bears to
a painting. There are no delicate touches, no hues imperceptibly fading
into each other: the whole is lighted up with an universal glare.
Outlines and tints are forgotten in the common blaze which illuminates
all. The flowers and fruits of the intellect abound; but it is the
abundance of a jungle, not of a garden, unwholesome, bewildering,
unprofitable from its very plenty rank from its very fragrance. Every
fop, every boor, every valet, is a man of wit. The very butts and dupes,
Tattle, Witwould, Puff, Acres, outshine the whole Hotel of Rambouillet.
To prove the whole system of this school erroneous, it is only necessary
to apply the test which dissolved the enchanted Florimel, to place the
true by the false Thalia, to contrast the most celebrated characters
which have been drawn by the writers of whom we speak with the Bastard
in King John or the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. It was not surely from
want of wit that Shakspeare adopted so different a manner. Benedick
and Beatrice throw Mirabel and Millamant into the shade. All the good
sayings of the facetious houses of Absolute and Surface might have been
clipped from the single character of Falstaff, without being missed. It
would have been easy for that fertile mind to have given Bardolph and
Shallow as much wit as Prince Hal, and to have made Dogberry and Verges
retort on each other in sparkling epigrams. But he knew that such
indiscriminate prodigality was, to use his own admirable language, “from
the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and
is, to hold, as it were, the mirror up to Nature.”

This digression will enable our readers to understand what we mean when
we say that in the Mandragola, Machiavelli has proved that he completely
understood the nature of the dramatic art, and possessed talents which
would have enabled him to excel in it. By the correct and vigorous
delineation of human nature, it produces interest without a pleasing or
skilful plot, and laughter without the least ambition of wit. The lover,
not a very delicate or generous lover, and his adviser the parasite, are
drawn with spirit. The hypocritical confessor is an admirable portrait.
He is, if we mistake not, the original of Father Dominic, the best comic
character of Dryden. But old Nicias is the glory of the piece. We cannot
call to mind anything that resembles him. The follies which Moliere
ridicules are those of affection, not those of fatuity. Coxcombs and
pedants, not absolute simpletons, are his game. Shakspeare has indeed a
vast assortment of fools; but the precise species of which we speak is
not, if we remember right, to be found there. Shallow is a fool. But his
animal spirits supply, to a certain degree, the place of cleverness. His
talk is to that of Sir John what soda water is to champagne. It has the
effervescence though not the body or the flavour. Slender and Sir Andrew
Aguecheek are fools, troubled with an uneasy consciousness of their
folly, which in the latter produces meekness and docility, and in the
former, awkwardness, obstinacy, and confusion. Cloten is an arrogant
fool, Osric a foppish fool, Ajax a savage fool; but Nicias is, as
Thersites says of Patroclus, a fool positive. His mind is occupied by no
strong feeling; it takes every character, and retains none; its aspect
is diversified, not by passions, but by faint and transitory semblances
of passion, a mock joy, a mock fear, a mock love, a mock pride, which
chase each other like shadows over its surface, and vanish as soon as
they appear. He is just idiot enough to be an object, not of pity or
horror, but of ridicule. He bears some resemblance to poor Calandrino,
whose mishaps, as recounted by Boccaccio, have made all Europe merry for
more than four centuries. He perhaps resembles still more closely
Simon da Villa, to whom Bruno and Buffalmacco promised the love of the
Countess Civillari. Nicias is, like Simon, of a learned profession;
and the dignity with which he wears the doctoral fur, renders his
absurdities infinitely more grotesque. The old Tuscan is the very
language for such a being. Its peculiar simplicity gives even to the
most forcible reasoning and the most brilliant wit an infantine air,
generally delightful, but to a foreign reader sometimes a little
ludicrous. Heroes and statesmen seem to lisp when they use it. It
becomes Nicias incomparably, and renders all his silliness infinitely
more silly. We may add, that the verses with which the Mandragola is
interspersed, appear to us to be the most spirited and correct of all
that Machiavelli has written in metre. He seems to have entertained the
same opinion; for he has introduced some of them in other places.
The contemporaries of the author were not blind to the merits of this
striking piece. It was acted at Florence with the greatest success. Leo
the Tenth was among its admirers, and by his order it was represented at
Rome.

[Nothing can be more evident than that Paulus Jovius designates the
Mandragola under the name of the Nicias. We should not have noticed
what is so perfectly obvious, were it not that this natural and palpable
misnomer has led the sagacious and industrious Bayle into a gross
error.]

The Clizia is an imitation of the Casina of Plautus, which is itself
an imitation of the lost kleroumenoi of Diphilus. Plautus was,
unquestionably, one of the best Latin writers; but the Casina is by no
means one of his best plays; nor is it one which offers great facilities
to an imitator. The story is as alien from modern habits of life, as the
manner in which it is developed from the modern fashion of composition.
The lover remains in the country and the heroine in her chamber during
the whole action, leaving their fate to be decided by a foolish father,
a cunning mother, and two knavish servants. Machiavelli has executed
his task with judgment and taste. He has accommodated the plot to a
different state of society, and has very dexterously connected it with
the history of his own times. The relation of the trick put on the
doting old lover is exquisitely humorous. It is far superior to the
corresponding passage in the Latin comedy, and scarcely yields to the
account which Falstaff gives of his ducking.

Two other comedies without titles, the one in prose, the other in verse,
appear among the works of Machiavelli. The former is very short, lively
enough, but of no great value. The latter we can scarcely believe to
be genuine. Neither its merits nor its defects remind us of the reputed
author. It was first printed in 1796, from a manuscript discovered in
the celebrated library of the Strozzi. Its genuineness, if we have been
rightly informed, is established solely by the comparison of hands.
Our suspicions are strengthened by the circumstance, that the same
manuscript contained a description of the plague of 1527, which has
also, in consequence, been added to the works of Machiavelli. Of this
last composition the strongest external evidence would scarcely induce
us to believe him guilty. Nothing was ever written more detestable
in matter and manner. The narrations, the reflections, the jokes, the
lamentations, are all the very worst of their respective kinds, at once
trite and affected, threadbare tinsel from the Rag Fairs and Monmouth
Streets of literature. A foolish schoolboy might write such a piece,
and, after he had written it, think it much finer than the incomparable
introduction of the Decameron. But that a shrewd statesman, whose
earliest works are characterised by manliness of thought and language,
should, at near sixty years of age, descend to such puerility, is
utterly inconceivable.

The little novel of Belphegor is pleasantly conceived and pleasantly
told. But the extravagance of the satire in some measure injures its
effect. Machiavelli was unhappily married; and his wish to avenge his
own cause and that of his brethren in misfortune, carried him beyond
even the licence of fiction. Jonson seems to have combined some hints
taken from this tale, with others from Boccaccio, in the plot of The
Devil is an Ass, a play which, though not the most highly finished of
his compositions, is perhaps that which exhibits the strongest proofs of
genius.

The Political Correspondence of Machiavelli, first published in 1767, is
unquestionably genuine, and highly valuable. The unhappy circumstances
in which his country was placed during the greater part of his public
life gave extraordinary encouragement to diplomatic talents. From
the moment that Charles the Eighth descended from the Alps, the whole
character of Italian politics was changed. The governments of the
Peninsula ceased to form an independent system. Drawn from their old
orbit by the attraction of the larger bodies which now approached them,
they became mere satellites of France and Spain. All their disputes,
internal and external, were decided by foreign influence. The
contests of opposite factions were carried on, not as formerly in the
senate-house or in the marketplace, but in the antechambers of Louis
and Ferdinand. Under these circumstances, the prosperity of the Italian
States depended far more on the ability of their foreign agents, than
on the conduct of those who were intrusted with the domestic
administration. The ambassador had to discharge functions far more
delicate than transmitting orders of knighthood, introducing tourists,
or presenting his brethren with the homage of his high consideration. He
was an advocate to whose management the dearest interests of his clients
were intrusted, a spy clothed with an inviolable character. Instead of
consulting, by a reserved manner and ambiguous style, the dignity of
those whom he represented, he was to plunge into all the intrigues of
the Court at which he resided, to discover and flatter every weakness
of the prince, and of the favourite who governed the prince, and of the
lacquey who governed the favourite. He was to compliment the mistress
and bribe the confessor, to panegyrise or supplicate, to laugh or weep,
to accommodate himself to every caprice, to lull every suspicion, to
treasure every hint, to be everything, to observe everything, to endure
everything. High as the art of political intrigue had been carried in
Italy, these were times which required it all.

On these arduous errands Machiavelli was frequently employed. He
was sent to treat with the King of the Romans and with the Duke of
Valentinois. He was twice ambassador of the Court of Rome, and thrice
at that of France. In these missions, and in several others of inferior
importance, he acquitted himself with great dexterity. His despatches
form one of the most amusing and instructive collections extant. The
narratives are clear and agreeably written; the remarks on men and
things clever and judicious. The conversations are reported in a
spirited and characteristic manner. We find ourselves introduced into
the presence of the men who, during twenty eventful years, swayed the
destinies of Europe. Their wit and their folly, their fretfulness and
their merriment, are exposed to us. We are admitted to overhear their
chat, and to watch their familiar gestures. It is interesting and
curious to recognise, in circumstances which elude the notice of
historians, the feeble violence and shallow cunning of Louis the
Twelfth; the bustling insignificance of Maximilian, cursed with an
impotent pruriency for renown, rash yet timid, obstinate yet fickle,
always in a hurry, yet always too late; the fierce and haughty energy
which gave dignity to the eccentricities of Julius; the soft and
graceful manners which masked the insatiable ambition and the implacable
hatred of Caesar Borgia.

We have mentioned Caesar Borgia. It is impossible not to pause for a
moment on the name of a man in whom the political morality of Italy was
so strongly personified, partially blended with the sterner lineaments
of the Spanish character. On two important occasions Machiavelli was
admitted to his society; once, at the moment when Caesar’s splendid
villainy achieved its most signal triumph, when he caught in one snare
and crushed at one blow all his most formidable rivals; and again when,
exhausted by disease and overwhelmed by misfortunes, which no human
prudence could have averted, he was the prisoner of the deadliest enemy
of his house. These interviews between the greatest speculative and
the greatest practical statesman of the age are fully described in the
Correspondence, and form perhaps the most interesting part of it.

From some passages in The Prince, and perhaps also from some indistinct
traditions, several writers have supposed a connection between those
remarkable men much closer than ever existed. The Envoy has even been
accused of prompting the crimes of the artful and merciless tyrant. But
from the official documents it is clear that their intercourse, though
ostensibly amicable, was in reality hostile. It cannot be doubted,
however, that the imagination of Machiavelli was strongly impressed, and
his speculations on government coloured, by the observations which he
made on the singular character and equally singular fortunes of a man
who under such disadvantages had achieved such exploits; who, when
sensuality, varied through innumerable forms, could no longer stimulate
his sated mind, found a more powerful and durable excitement in the
intense thirst of empire and revenge; who emerged from the sloth and
luxury of the Roman purple the first prince and general of the age; who,
trained in an unwarlike profession, formed a gallant army out of the
dregs of an unwarlike people; who, after acquiring sovereignty by
destroying his enemies, acquired popularity by destroying his tools; who
had begun to employ for the most salutary ends the power which he had
attained by the most atrocious means; who tolerated within the sphere of
his iron despotism no plunderer or oppressor but himself; and who fell
at last amidst the mingled curses and regrets of a people of whom his
genius had been the wonder, and might have been the salvation. Some of
those crimes of Borgia which to us appear the most odious would not,
from causes which we have already considered, have struck an Italian of
the fifteenth century with equal horror. Patriotic feeling also might
induce Machiavelli to look with some indulgence and regret on the memory
of the only leader who could have defended the independence of Italy
against the confederate spoilers of Cambray.

On this subject Machiavelli felt most strongly. Indeed the expulsion of
the foreign tyrants, and the restoration of that golden age which had
preceded the irruption of Charles the Eighth, were projects which, at
that time, fascinated all the master-spirits of Italy. The magnificent
vision delighted the great but ill-regulated mind of Julius. It divided
with manuscripts and sauces, painters, and falcons, the attention of the
frivolous Leo. It prompted the generous treason of Morone. It imparted
a transient energy to the feeble mind and body of the last Sforza. It
excited for one moment an honest ambition in the false heart of
Pescara. Ferocity and insolence were not among the vices of the national
character. To the discriminating cruelties of politicians, committed
for great ends on select victims, the moral code of the Italians was
too indulgent. But though they might have recourse to barbarity as an
expedient, they did not require it as a stimulant. They turned with
loathing from the atrocity of the strangers who seemed to love blood
for its own sake, who, not content with subjugating, were impatient to
destroy, who found a fiendish pleasure in razing magnificent cities,
cutting the throats of enemies who cried for quarter, or suffocating an
unarmed population by thousands in the caverns to which it had fled
for safety. Such were the cruelties which daily excited the terror and
disgust of a people among whom, till lately, the worst that a soldier
had to fear in a pitched battle was the loss of his horse and the
expense of his ransom. The swinish intemperance of Switzerland, the
wolfish avarice of Spain, the gross licentiousness of the French,
indulged in violation of hospitality, of decency, of love itself, the
wanton inhumanity which was common to all the invaders, had made them
objects of deadly hatred to the inhabitants of the Peninsula. The wealth
which had been accumulated during centuries of prosperity and repose
was rapidly melting away. The intellectual superiority of the oppressed
people only rendered them more keenly sensible of their political
degradation. Literature and taste, indeed, still disguised with a flush
of hectic loveliness and brilliancy the ravages of an incurable decay.
The iron had not yet entered into the soul. The time was not yet come
when eloquence was to be gagged, and reason to be hoodwinked, when the
harp of the poet was to be hung on the willows of Arno, and the right
hand of the painter to forget its cunning. Yet a discerning eye might
even then have seen that genius and learning would not long survive the
state of things from which they had sprung, and that the great men whose
talents gave lustre to that melancholy period had been formed under the
influence of happier days, and would leave no successors behind them.
The times which shine with the greatest splendour in literary history
are not always those to which the human mind is most indebted. Of this
we may be convinced, by comparing the generation which follows them with
that which had preceded them. The first fruits which are reaped under a
bad system often spring from seed sown under a good one. Thus it was, in
some measure, with the Augustan age. Thus it was with the age of Raphael
and Ariosto, of Aldus and Vida.

Machiavelli deeply regretted the misfortunes of his country, and clearly
discerned the cause and the remedy. It was the military system of the
Italian people which had extinguished their value and discipline, and
left their wealth an easy prey to every foreign plunderer. The Secretary
projected a scheme alike honourable to his heart and to his intellect,
for abolishing the use of mercenary troops, and for organising a
national militia.

The exertions which he made to effect this great object ought alone to
rescue his name from obloquy. Though his situation and his habits were
pacific, he studied with intense assiduity the theory of war. He made
himself master of all its details. The Florentine Government entered
into his views. A council of war was appointed. Levies were decreed. The
indefatigable minister flew from place to place in order to superintend
the execution of his design. The times were, in some respects,
favourable to the experiment. The system of military tactics had
undergone a great revolution. The cavalry was no longer considered as
forming the strength of an army. The hours which a citizen could
spare from his ordinary employments, though by no means sufficient to
familiarise him with the exercise of a man-at-arms, might render him an
useful foot-soldier. The dread of a foreign yoke, of plunder, massacre,
and conflagration, might have conquered that repugnance to military
pursuits which both the industry and the idleness of great towns
commonly generate. For a time the scheme promised well. The new troops
acquitted themselves respectably in the field. Machiavelli looked with
parental rapture on the success of his plan, and began to hope that the
arms of Italy might once more be formidable to the barbarians of the
Tagus and the Rhine. But the tide of misfortune came on before the
barriers which should have withstood it were prepared. For a time,
indeed, Florence might be considered as peculiarly fortunate. Famine
and sword and pestilence had devastated the fertile plains and stately
cities of the Po. All the curses denounced of old against Tyre seemed to
have fallen on Venice. Her merchants already stood afar off, lamenting
for their great city. The time seemed near when the sea-weed should
overgrow her silent Rialto, and the fisherman wash his nets in her
deserted arsenal. Naples had been four times conquered and reconquered
by tyrants equally indifferent to its welfare and equally greedy for its
spoils. Florence, as yet, had only to endure degradation and extortion,
to submit to the mandates of foreign powers, to buy over and over again,
at an enormous price, what was already justly her own, to return thanks
for being wronged, and to ask pardon for being in the right. She was
at length deprived of the blessings even of this infamous and servile
repose. Her military and political institutions were swept away
together. The Medici returned, in the train of foreign invaders, from
their long exile. The policy of Machiavelli was abandoned; and his
public services were requited with poverty, imprisonment, and torture.

The fallen statesman still clung to his project with unabated ardour.
With the view of vindicating it from some popular objections and of
refuting some prevailing errors on the subject of military science, he
wrote his seven books on The Art of War. This excellent work is in the
form of a dialogue. The opinions of the writer are put into the mouth of
Fabrizio Colonna, a powerful nobleman of the Ecclesiastical State, and
an officer of distinguished merit in the service of the King of Spain.
Colonna visits Florence on his way from Lombardy to his own domains.
He is invited to meet some friends at the house of Cosimo Rucellai,
an amiable and accomplished young man, whose early death Machiavelli
feelingly deplores. After partaking of an elegant entertainment,
they retire from the heat into the most shady recesses of the garden.
Fabrizio is struck by the sight of some uncommon plants. Cosimo says
that, though rare, in modern days, they are frequently mentioned by the
classical authors, and that his grandfather, like many other Italians,
amused himself with practising the ancient methods of gardening.
Fabrizio expresses his regret that those who, in later times, affected
the manners of the old Romans should select for imitation the most
trifling pursuits. This leads to a conversation on the decline
of military discipline and on the best means of restoring it. The
institution of the Florentine militia is ably defended; and several
improvements are suggested in the details.

The Swiss and the Spaniards were, at that time, regarded as the best
soldiers in Europe. The Swiss battalion consisted of pikemen, and bore a
close resemblance to the Greek phalanx. The Spaniards, like the soldiers
of Rome, were armed with the sword and the shield. The victories of
Flamininus and Aemilius over the Macedonian kings seem to prove the
superiority of the weapons used by the legions. The same experiment had
been recently tried with the same result at the battle of Ravenna, one
of those tremendous days into which human folly and wickedness compress
the whole devastation of a famine or a plague. In that memorable
conflict, the infantry of Arragon, the old companions of Gonsalvo,
deserted by all their allies, hewed a passage through the thickest of
the imperial pikes, and effected an unbroken retreat, in the face of the
gendarmerie of De Foix, and the renowned artillery of Este. Fabrizio,
or rather Machiavelli, proposes to combine the two systems, to arm the
foremost lines with the pike for the purpose of repulsing cavalry, and
those in the rear with the sword, as being a weapon better adapted
for every other purpose. Throughout the work, the author expresses the
highest admiration of the military science of the ancient Romans, and
the greatest contempt for the maxims which had been in vogue amongst the
Italian commanders of the preceding generation. He prefers infantry
to cavalry, and fortified camps to fortified towns. He is inclined to
substitute rapid movements and decisive engagements for the languid
and dilatory operations of his countrymen. He attaches very little
importance to the invention of gunpowder. Indeed he seems to think that
it ought scarcely to produce any change in the mode of arming or of
disposing troops. The general testimony of historians, it must be
allowed, seems to prove that the ill-constructed and ill-served
artillery of those times, though useful in a siege, was of little value
on the field of battle.

Of the tactics of Machiavelli we will not venture to give an opinion:
but we are certain that his book is most able and interesting. As a
commentary on the history of his times, it is invaluable. The ingenuity,
the grace, and the perspicuity of the style, and the eloquence and
animation of particular passages, must give pleasure even to readers who
take no interest in the subject.

The Prince and the Discourses on Livy were written after the fall of the
Republican Government. The former was dedicated to the young Lorenzo di
Medici. This circumstance seems to have disgusted the contemporaries of
the writer far more than the doctrines which have rendered the name of
the work odious in later times. It was considered as an indication
of political apostasy. The fact however seems to have been that
Machiavelli, despairing of the liberty of Florence, was inclined to
support any government which might preserve her independence. The
interval which separated a democracy and a despotism, Soderini and
Lorenzo, seemed to vanish when compared with the difference between
the former and the present state of Italy, between the security, the
opulence, and the repose which she had enjoyed under her native rulers,
and the misery in which she had been plunged since the fatal year in
which the first foreign tyrant had descended from the Alps. The noble
and pathetic exhortation with which The Prince concludes shows how
strongly the writer felt upon this subject.

The Prince traces the progress of an ambitious man, the Discourses the
progress of an ambitious people. The same principles on which, in the
former work, the elevation of an individual is explained, are applied
in the latter, to the longer duration and more complex interest of a
society. To a modern statesman the form of the Discourses may appear to
be puerile. In truth Livy is not an historian on whom implicit reliance
can be placed, even in cases where he must have possessed considerable
means of information. And the first Decade, to which Machiavelli has
confined himself, is scarcely entitled to more credit than our Chronicle
of British Kings who reigned before the Roman invasion. But the
commentator is indebted to Livy for little more than a few texts which
he might as easily have extracted from the Vulgate or the Decameron. The
whole train of thought is original.

On the peculiar immorality which has rendered The Prince unpopular, and
which is almost equally discernible in the Discourses, we have already
given our opinion at length. We have attempted to show that it belonged
rather to the age than to the man, that it was a partial taint, and by
no means implied general depravity. We cannot, however, deny that it is
a great blemish, and that it considerably diminishes the pleasure which,
in other respects, those works must afford to every intelligent mind.

It is, indeed, impossible to conceive a more healthful and vigorous
constitution of the understanding than that which these works indicate.
The qualities of the active and the contemplative statesman appear to
have been blended in the mind of the writer into a rare and exquisite
harmony. His skill in the details of business had not been acquired at
the expense of his general powers. It had not rendered his mind less
comprehensive; but it had served to correct his speculations and to
impart to them that vivid and practical character which so widely
distinguishes them from the vague theories of most political
philosophers.

Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so useless as
a general maxim. If it be very moral and very true, it may serve for a
copy to a charity-boy. If, like those of Rochefoucault, it be sparkling
and whimsical, it may make an excellent motto for an essay. But few
indeed of the many wise apophthegms which have been uttered, from
the time of the Seven Sages of Greece to that of Poor Richard, have
prevented a single foolish action. We give the highest and the most
peculiar praise to the precepts of Machiavelli when we say that they
may frequently be of real use in regulating conduct, not so much because
they are more just or more profound than those which might be culled
from other authors, as because they can be more readily applied to the
problems of real life.

There are errors in these works. But they are errors which a writer,
situated like Machiavelli, could scarcely avoid. They arise, for the
most part, from a single defect which appears to us to pervade his
whole system. In his political scheme, the means had been more deeply
considered than the ends. The great principle, that societies and laws
exist only for the purpose of increasing the sum of private happiness,
is not recognised with sufficient clearness. The good of the body,
distinct from the good of the members, and sometimes hardly compatible
with the good of the members, seems to be the object which he proposes
to himself. Of all political fallacies, this has perhaps had the widest
and the most mischievous operation. The state of society in the little
commonwealths of Greece, the close connection and mutual dependence of
the citizens, and the severity of the laws of war, tended to encourage
an opinion which, under such circumstances, could hardly be called
erroneous. The interests of every individual were inseparably bound
up with those of the State. An invasion destroyed his corn-fields and
vineyards, drove him from his home, and compelled him to encounter all
the hardships of a military life. A treaty of peace restored him to
security and comfort. A victory doubled the number of his slaves.
A defeat perhaps made him a slave himself. When Pericles, in the
Peloponnesian war, told the Athenians, that, if their country triumphed,
their private losses would speedily be repaired, but, that, if their
arms failed of success, every individual amongst them would probably
be ruined, he spoke no more than the truth, He spoke to men whom the
tribute of vanquished cities supplied with food and clothing, with
the luxury of the bath and the amusements of the theatre, on whom the
greatness of their Country conferred rank, and before whom the members
of less prosperous communities trembled; to men who, in case of a change
in the public fortunes, would, at least, be deprived of every comfort
and every distinction which they enjoyed. To be butchered on the smoking
ruins of their city, to be dragged in chains to a slave-market. To see
one child torn from them to dig in the quarries of Sicily, and another
to guard the harams of Persepolis, these were the frequent and probable
consequences of national calamities. Hence, among the Greeks, patriotism
became a governing principle, or rather an ungovernable passion.
Their legislators and their philosophers took it for granted that, in
providing for the strength and greatness of the state, they sufficiently
provided for the happiness of the people. The writers of the Roman
empire lived under despots, into whose dominion a hundred nations
were melted down, and whose gardens would have covered the little
commonwealths of Phlius and Plataea. Yet they continued to employ the
same language, and to cant about the duty of sacrificing everything to a
country to which they owed nothing.

Causes similar to those which had influenced the disposition of the
Greeks operated powerfully on the less vigorous and daring character
of the Italians. The Italians, like the Greeks, were members of small
communities. Every man was deeply interested in the welfare of the
society to which he belonged, a partaker in its wealth and its
poverty, in its glory and its shame. In the age of Machiavelli this was
peculiarly the case. Public events had produced an immense sum of misery
to private citizens. The Northern invaders had brought want to their
boards, infamy to their beds, fire to their roofs, and the knife to
their throats. It was natural that a man who lived in times like these
should overrate the importance of those measures by which a nation is
rendered formidable to its neighbours, and undervalue those which make
it prosperous within itself.

Nothing is more remarkable in the political treatises of Machiavelli
than the fairness of mind which they indicate. It appears where the
author is in the wrong, almost as strongly as where he is in the right.
He never advances a false opinion because it is new or splendid,
because he can clothe it in a happy phrase, or defend it by an ingenious
sophism. His errors are at once explained by a reference to the
circumstances in which he was placed. They evidently were not sought
out; they lay in his way, and could scarcely be avoided. Such mistakes
must necessarily be committed by early speculators in every science.

In this respect it is amusing to compare The Prince and the Discourses
with the Spirit of Laws. Montesquieu enjoys, perhaps, a wider celebrity
than any political writer of modern Europe. Something he doubtless owes
to his merit, but much more to his fortune. He had the good luck of a
Valentine.

He caught the eye of the French nation, at the moment when it was
waking from the long sleep of political and religious bigotry; and,
in consequence, he became a favourite. The English, at that time,
considered a Frenchman who talked about constitutional checks and
fundamental laws as a prodigy not less astonishing than the learned
pig or the musical infant. Specious but shallow, studious of effect,
indifferent to truth, eager to build a system, but careless of
collecting those materials out of which alone a sound and durable system
can be built, the lively President constructed theories as rapidly
and as slightly as card-houses, no sooner projected than completed, no
sooner completed than blown away, no sooner blown away than forgotten.
Machiavelli errs only because his experience, acquired in a very
peculiar state of society, could not always enable him to calculate the
effect of institutions differing from those of which he had observed the
operation. Montesquieu errs, because he has a fine thing to say, and is
resolved to say it. If the phaenomena which lie before him will not suit
his purpose, all history must be ransacked. If nothing established by
authentic testimony can be racked or chipped to suit his Procrustean
hypothesis, he puts up with some monstrous fable about Siam, or Bantam,
or Japan, told by writers compared with whom Lucian and Gulliver were
veracious, liars by a double right, as travellers and as Jesuits.

Propriety of thought, and propriety of diction, are commonly found
together. Obscurity and affectation are the two greatest faults of
style. Obscurity of expression generally springs from confusion
of ideas; and the same wish to dazzle at any cost which produces
affectation in the manner of a writer, is likely to produce sophistry
in his reasonings. The judicious and candid mind of Machiavelli shows
itself in his luminous, manly, and polished language. The style of
Montesquieu, on the other hand, indicates in every page a lively and
ingenious, but an unsound mind. Every trick of expression, from the
mysterious conciseness of an oracle to the flippancy of a Parisian
coxcomb, is employed to disguise the fallacy of some positions, and the
triteness of others. Absurdities are brightened into epigrams; truisms
are darkened into enigmas. It is with difficulty that the strongest
eye can sustain the glare with which some parts are illuminated, or
penetrate the shade in which others are concealed.

The political works of Machiavelli derive a peculiar interest from the
mournful earnestness which he manifests whenever he touches on topics
connected with the calamities of his native land. It is difficult to
conceive any situation more painful than that of a great man, condemned
to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it
during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its
dissolution, and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one,
till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption. To this
joyless and thankless duty was Machiavelli called. In the energetic
language of the prophet, he was “mad for the sight of his eye which
he saw,” disunion in the council, effeminacy in the camp, liberty
extinguished, commerce decaying, national honour sullied, an enlightened
and flourishing people given over to the ferocity of ignorant savages.
Though his opinions had no escaped the contagion of that political
immorality which was common among his countrymen, his natural
disposition seem to have been rather stern and impetuous than pliant and
artful When the misery and degradation of Florence and the foul outrage
which he had himself sustained recur to his mind, the smooth craft of
his profession and his nation is exchanged for the honest bitterness
of scorn and anger. He speaks like one sick of the calamitous times and
abject people among whom his lot is cast. He pines for the strength
and glory of ancient Rome, for the fasces of Brutus, and the sword of
Scipio, the gravity of the curule chair, and the bloody pomp of the
triumphal sacrifice. He seems to be transported back to the days when
eight hundred thousand Italian warriors sprung to arms at the rumour
of a Gallic invasion. He breathes all the spirit of those intrepid and
haughty senators who forgot the dearest ties of nature in the claims of
public duty, who looked with disdain on the elephants and on the gold of
Pyrrhus, and listened with unaltered composure to the tremendous tidings
of Cannae. Like an ancient temple deformed by the barbarous architecture
of a later age, his character acquires an interest from the very
circumstances which debase it. The original proportions are rendered
more striking by the contrast which they present to the mean and
incongruous additions.

The influence of the sentiments which we have described was not apparent
in his writings alone. His enthusiasm, barred from the career which it
would have selected for itself, seems to have found a vent in desperate
levity. He enjoyed a vindictive pleasure in outraging the opinions of
a society which he despised. He became careless of the decencies which
were expected from a man so highly distinguished in the literary and
political world. The sarcastic bitterness of his conversation disgusted
those who were more inclined to accuse his licentiousness than their
own degeneracy, and who were unable to conceive the strength of those
emotions which are concealed by the jests of the wretched, and by the
follies of the wise.

The historical works of Machiavelli still remain to be considered. The
Life of Castruccio Castracani will occupy us for a very short time, and
would scarcely have demanded our notice, had it not attracted a much
greater share of public attention than it deserves. Few books, indeed,
could be more interesting than a careful and judicious account, from
such a pen, of the illustrious Prince of Lucca, the most eminent of
those Italian chiefs who, like Pisistratus and Gelon, acquired a power
felt rather than seen, and resting, not on law or on prescription, but
on the public favour and on their great personal qualities. Such a work
would exhibit to us the real nature of that species of sovereignty,
so singular and so often misunderstood, which the Greeks denominated
tyranny, and which, modified in some degree by the feudal system,
reappeared in the commonwealths of Lombardy and Tuscany. But this
little composition of Machiavelli is in no sense a history. It has
no pretensions to fidelity. It is a trifle, and not a very successful
trifle. It is scarcely more authentic than the novel of Belphegor, and
is very much duller.

The last great work of this illustrious man was the history of his
native city. It was written by command of the Pope, who, as chief of the
house of Medici, was at that time sovereign of Florence. The characters
of Cosmo, of Piero, and of Lorenzo, are, however, treated with a freedom
and impartiality equally honourable to the writer and to the patron. The
miseries and humiliations of dependence, the bread which is more bitter
than every other food, the stairs which are more painful than every
other ascent, had not broken the spirit of Machiavelli. The most
corrupting post in a corrupting profession had not depraved the generous
heart of Clement.

The History does not appear to be the fruit of much industry or
research. It is unquestionably inaccurate. But it is elegant, lively,
and picturesque, beyond any other in the Italian language. The reader,
we believe, carries away from it a more vivid and a more faithful
impression of the national character and manners than from more correct
accounts. The truth is, that the book belongs rather to ancient than to
modern literature. It is in the style, not of Davila and Clarendon, but
of Herodotus and Tacitus. The classical histories may almost be
called romances founded in fact. The relation is, no doubt, in all its
principal points, strictly true. But the numerous little incidents which
heighten the interest, the words, the gestures, the looks, are evidently
furnished by the imagination of the author. The fashion of later times
is different. A more exact narrative is given by the writer. It may be
doubted whether more exact notions are conveyed to the reader. The
best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of
caricature, and we are not certain that the best histories are not
those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is
judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained
in effect. The fainter lines are neglected but the great characteristic
features are imprinted on the mind for ever.

The History terminates with the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Machiavelli
had, it seems, intended to continue his narrative to a later period. But
his death prevented the execution of his design; and the melancholy task
of recording the desolation and shame of Italy devolved on Guicciardini.

Machiavelli lived long enough to see the commencement of the last
struggle for Florentine liberty. Soon after his death monarchy was
finally established, not such a monarchy as that of which Cosmo had laid
the foundations deep in the institution and feelings of his countryman,
and which Lorenzo had embellished with the trophies of every science and
every art; but a loathsome tyranny, proud and mean, cruel and feeble,
bigoted and lascivious. The character of Machiavelli was hateful to the
new masters of Italy; and those parts of his theory which were in
strict accordance with their own daily practice afforded a pretext for
blackening his memory. His works were misrepresented by the learned,
misconstrued by the ignorant, censured by the Church, abused with all
the rancour of simulated virtue by the tools of a base government, and
the priests of a baser superstition. The name of the man whose genius
had illuminated all the dark places of policy, and to whose patriotic
wisdom an oppressed people had owed their last chance of emancipation
and revenge, passed into a proverb of infamy. For more than two hundred
years his bones lay undistinguished. At length, an English nobleman paid
the as honours to the greatest statesman of Florence. In the church of
Santa Croce a monument was erected to his memory, which is contemplated
with reverence by all who can distinguish the virtues of a great
mind through the corruptions of a degenerate age, and which will be
approached with still deeper homage when the object to which his public
life was devoted shall be attained, when the foreign yoke shall be
broken, when a second Procida shall avenge the wrongs of Naples, when a
happier Rienzi shall restore the good estate of Rome, when the streets
of Florence and Bologna shall again resound with their ancient war-cry,
Popolo; popolo; muoiano i tiranni!




VON RANKE


(October 1840) _The Ecclesiastical and political History of the Popes of
Rome, during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By LEOPOLD RANKE,
Professor in the University of Berlin: Translated from the German, by
SARAH AUSTIN. 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1840._


|IT IS hardly necessary for us to say that this is an excellent book
excellently translated. The original work of Professor Ranke is known
and esteemed wherever German literature is studied, and has been found
interesting even in a most inaccurate and dishonest French version. It
is, indeed, the work of a mind fitted both for minute researches and for
large speculations. It is written also in an admirable spirit, equally
remote from levity and bigotry, serious and earnest, yet tolerant and
impartial. It is, therefore, with the greatest pleasure that we now see
this book take its place among the English classics. Of the translation
we need only say that it is such as might be expected from the skill,
the taste, and the scrupulous integrity of the accomplished lady who, as
an interpreter between the mind of Germany and the mind of Britain, has
already deserved so well of both countries.

The subject of this book has always appeared to us singularly
interesting. How it was that Protestantism did so much, yet did no more,
how it was that the Church of Rome, having lost a large part of Europe,
not only ceased to lose, but actually regained nearly half of what she
had lost, is certainly a most curious and important question; and on
this question Professor Ranke has thrown far more light than any other
person who has written on it.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy
so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The
history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human
civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries
the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from
the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian
amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when
compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace
back in an unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the
nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far
beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in
the twilight of fable. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity.
But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy;
and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy
remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful
vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends
of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with
Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with
which she confronted Attila. The number of her children is greater than
in any former age. Her acquisitions in the New World have more than
compensated for what she has lost in the Old. Her spiritual ascendency
extends over the vast countries which lie between the plains of the
Missouri and Cape Horn, countries which a century hence, may not
improbably contain a population as large as that which now inhabits
Europe. The members of her communion are certainly not fewer than a
hundred and fifty millions; and it will be difficult to show that all
other Christian sects united amount to a hundred and twenty millions.
Nor do we see any sign which indicates that the term of her long
dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the governments
and of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the
world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end
of them all. She was great and respected before the Saxon had set
foot on Britain, before the Frank had passed the Rhine, when Grecian
eloquence still flourished at Antioch, when idols were still worshipped
in the temple of Mecca. And she may still exist in undiminished vigour
when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast
solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the
ruins of St. Paul’s.

We often hear it said that the world is constantly becoming more and
more enlightened, and that this enlightening must be favourable to
Protestantism, and unfavourable to Catholicism. We wish that we
could think so. But we see great reason to doubt whether this be a
well-founded expectation. We see that during the last two hundred and
fifty years the human mind has been in the highest degree active, that
it has made great advances in every branch of natural philosophy,
that it has produced innumerable inventions tending to promote the
convenience of life, that medicine, surgery, chemistry, engineering,
have been very greatly improved, that government, police, and law
have been improved, though not to so great an extent as the physical
sciences. Yet we see that, during these two hundred and fifty years,
Protestantism has made no conquests worth speaking of. Nay, we believe
that, as far as there has been a change, that change has, on the
whole, been in favour of the Church of Rome. We cannot, therefore, feel
confident that the progress of knowledge will necessarily be fatal to
a system which has, to say the least, stood its ground in spite of the
immense progress made by the human race in knowledge since the days of
Queen Elizabeth.

Indeed the argument which we are considering, seems to us to be founded
on an entire mistake. There are branches of knowledge with respect to
which the law of the human mind is progress. In mathematics, when once
a proposition has been demonstrated, it is never afterwards contested.
Every fresh story is as solid a basis for a new superstructure as the
original foundation was. Here, therefore, there is a constant addition
to the stock of truth. In the inductive sciences again, the law is
progress. Every day furnishes new facts, and thus brings theory nearer
and nearer to perfection. There is no chance that, either in the purely
demonstrative, or in the purely experimental sciences, the world will
ever go back or even remain stationary. Nobody ever heard of a reaction
against Taylor’s theorem, or of a reaction against Harvey’s doctrine of
the circulation of the blood.

But with theology the case is very different. As respects natural
religion,--revelation being for the present altogether left out of the
question,--it is not easy to see that a philosopher of the present day
is more favourably situated than Thales or Simonides. He has before him
just the same evidences of design in the structure of the universe
which the early Greeks had. We say just the same; for the discoveries of
modern astronomers and anatomists have really added nothing to the force
of that argument which a reflecting mind finds in every beast, bird,
insect, fish, leaf, flower and shell. The reasoning by which Socrates,
in Xenophon’s hearing, confuted the little atheist Aristodemus, is
exactly the reasoning of Paley’s Natural Theology. Socrates makes
precisely the same use of the statues of Polycletus and the pictures of
Zeuxis which Paley makes of the watch. As to the other great question,
the question, what becomes of man after death, we do not see that a
highly educated European, left to his unassisted reason, is more likely
to be in the right than a Blackfoot Indian. Not a single one of the many
sciences in which we surpass the Blackfoot Indians throws the smallest
light on the state of the soul after the animal life is extinct. In
truth all the philosophers, ancient and modern, who have attempted,
without the help of revelation to prove the immortality of man, from
Plato down to Franklin, appear to us to have failed deplorably.

Then, again, all the great enigmas which perplex the natural theologian
are the same in all ages. The ingenuity of a people just emerging from
barbarism is quite sufficient to propound those enigmas. The genius
of Locke or Clarke is quite unable to solve them. It is a mistake to
imagine that subtle speculations touching the Divine attributes, the
origin of evil, the necessity of human actions, the foundation of
moral obligation, imply any high degree of intellectual culture. Such
speculations, on the contrary, are in a peculiar manner the delight of
intelligent children and of half civilised men. The number of boys is
not small who, at fourteen, have thought enough on these questions to
be fully entitled to the praise which Voltaire gives to Zadig. “Il en
savait ce qu’on en a su dans tous les ages; c’est-a-dire, fort peu de
chose.” The book of Job shows that, long before letters and arts were
known to Ionia, these vexing questions were debated with no common
skill and eloquence, under the tents of the Idumean Emirs; nor has
human reason, in the course of three thousand years, discovered any
satisfactory solution of the riddles which perplexed Eliphaz and Zophar.

Natural theology, then, is not a progressive science. That knowledge of
our origin and of our destiny which we derive from revelation is indeed
of very different clearness, and of very different importance. But
neither is revealed religion of the nature of a progressive science. All
Divine truth is, according to the doctrine of the Protestant Churches,
recorded in certain books. It is equally open to all who, in any
age, can read those books; nor can all the discoveries of all the
philosophers in the world add a single verse to any of those books.
It is plain, therefore, that in divinity there cannot be a progress
analogous to that which is constantly taking place in pharmacy, geology,
and navigation. A Christian of the fifth Century with a Bible is neither
better nor worse situated than a Christian of the nineteenth century
with a Bible, candour and natural acuteness being, of course, supposed
equal. It matters not at all that the compass, printing, gunpowder,
steam, gas, vaccination, and a thousand other discoveries and
inventions, which were unknown in the fifth century, are familiar to the
nineteenth. None of these discoveries and inventions has the smallest
bearing on the question whether man is justified by faith alone, or
whether the invocation of saints is an orthodox practice. It seems
to us, therefore, that we have no security for the future against the
prevalence of any theological error that ever has prevailed in time past
among Christian men. We are confident that the world will never go
back to the solar system of Ptolemy; nor is our confidence in the least
shaken by the circumstance, that even so great a man as Bacon rejected
the theory of Galileo with scorn; for Bacon had not all the means of
arriving at a sound conclusion which are within our reach, and which
secure people who would not have been worthy to mend his pens from
falling into his mistakes. But when we reflect that Sir Thomas More was
ready to die for the doctrine of transubstantiation, we cannot but feel
some doubt whether the doctrine of transubstantiation may not triumph
over all opposition. More was a man of eminent talents. He had all the
information on the subject that we have, or that, while the world lasts,
any human being will have. The text, “This is my body,” was in his New
Testament as it is in ours. The absurdity of the literal interpretation
was as great and as obvious in the sixteenth century as it is now. No
progress that science has made, or will make, can add to what seems to
us the overwhelming force of the argument against the real presence. We
are, therefore, unable to understand why what Sir Thomas More believed
respecting transubstantiation may not be believed to the end of time by
men equal in abilities and honesty to Sir Thomas More. But Sir Thomas
More is one of the choice specimens of human wisdom and virtue; and the
doctrine of transubstantiation is a kind of proof charge. A faith which
stands that test will stand any test. The prophecies of Brothers and the
miracles of Prince Hohenlohe sink to trifles in the comparison.

One reservation, indeed, must be made. The books and traditions of a
sect may contain, mingled with propositions strictly theological, other
propositions, purporting to rest on the same authority, which relate
to physics. If new discoveries should throw discredit on the physical
propositions, the theological propositions, unless they can be separated
from the physical propositions, will share in that discredit. In this
way, undoubtedly, the progress of science may indirectly serve the cause
of religious truth. The Hindoo mythology, for example, is bound up with
a most absurd geography. Every young Brahmin, therefore, who learns
geography in our colleges learns to smile at the Hindoo mythology. If
Catholicism has not suffered to an equal degree from the Papal decision
that the sun goes round the earth, this is because all intelligent
Catholics now hold, with Pascal, that, in deciding the point at all, the
Church exceeded her powers, and was, therefore, justly left destitute
of that supernatural assistance which, in the exercise of her legitimate
functions, the promise of her Founder authorised her to expect.

This reservation affects not at all the truth of our proposition, that
divinity, properly so called, is not a progressive science. A very
common knowledge of history, a very little observation of life, will
suffice to prove that no learning, no sagacity, affords a security
against the greatest errors on subjects relating to the invisible world.
Bayle and Chillingworth, two of the most sceptical of mankind, turned
Catholics from sincere conviction. Johnson, incredulous on all other
points, was a ready believer in miracles and apparitions. He would not
believe in Ossian; but he was willing to believe in the second sight.
He would not believe in the earthquake of Lisbon; but he was willing to
believe in the Cock Lane ghost.

For these reasons we have ceased to wonder at any vagaries of
superstition. We have seen men, not of mean intellect or neglected
education, but qualified by their talents and acquirements to attain
eminence either in active or speculative pursuits, well-read scholars,
expert logicians, keen observers of life and manners, prophesying,
interpreting, talking unknown tongues, working miraculous cures, coming
down with messages from God to the House of Commons. We have seen an old
woman, with no talents beyond the cunning of a fortune-teller, and with
the education of a scullion, exalted into a prophetess, and surrounded
by tens of thousands of devoted followers, many of whom were, in
station and knowledge, immeasurably her superiors; and all this in the
nineteenth century; and all this in London. Yet why not? For of the
dealings of God with man no more has been revealed to the nineteenth
century than to the first, or to London than to the wildest parish in
the Hebrides. It is true that, in those things which concern this life
and this world, man constantly becomes wiser and wiser. But it is no
less true that, as respects a higher power and a future state, man, in
the language of Goethe’s scoffing friend,=

`````“bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag,

```Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag.”=

The history of Catholicism strikingly illustrates these observations.
During the last seven centuries the public mind of Europe has made
constant progress in every department of secular knowledge. But in
religion we can trace no constant progress. The ecclesiastical history
of that long period is a history of movement to and fro. Four times,
since the authority of the Church of Rome was established in Western
Christendom, has the human intellect risen up against her yoke. Twice
that Church remained completely victorious. Twice she came forth from
the conflict bearing the marks of cruel wounds, but with the principle
of life still strong within her. When we reflect on the tremendous
assaults which she has survived, we find it difficult to conceive in
what way she is to perish.

The first of these insurrections broke out in the region where the
beautiful language of Oc was spoken. That country, singularly favoured
by nature, was, in the twelfth century, the most flourishing and
civilised portion of Western Europe. It was in no wise a part of France.
It had a distinct political existence, a distinct national character,
distinct usages, and a distinct speech. The soil was fruitful and well
cultivated; and amidst the cornfields and vineyards arose many rich
cities each of which was a little republic, and many stately castles:
each of which contained a miniature of an imperial court. It was there
that the spirit of chivalry first laid aside its terrors, first took a
humane and graceful form, first appeared as the inseparable associate of
art and literature, of courtesy and love. The other vernacular dialects
which, since the fifth century, had sprung up in the ancient provinces
of the Roman empire, were still rude and imperfect. The sweet Tuscan,
the rich and energetic English, were abandoned to artisans and
shepherds. No clerk had ever condescended to use such barbarous jargon
for the teaching of science, for the recording of great events, or
for the painting of life and manners. But the language of Provence was
already the language of the learned and polite, and was employed
by numerous writers, studious of all the arts of composition and
versification. A literature rich in ballads, in war-songs, in satire,
and, above all, in amatory poetry amused the leisure of the knights
and ladies whose fortified mansions adorned the banks of the Rhone and
Garonne. With civilisation had come freedom of thought. Use had taken
away the horror with which misbelievers were elsewhere regarded. No
Norman or Breton ever saw a Mussulman, except to give and receive blows
on some Syrian field of battle. But the people of the rich countries
which lay under the Pyrenees lived in habits of courteous and profitable
intercourse with the Moorish kingdoms of Spain, and gave a hospitable
welcome to skilful leeches and mathematicians who, in the schools
of Cordova and Granada, had become versed in all the learning of
the Arabians. The Greek, still preserving, in the midst of political
degradation, the ready wit and the inquiring spirit of his fathers,
still able to read the most perfect of human compositions, still
speaking the most powerful and flexible of human languages, brought to
the marts of Narbonne and Toulouse, together with the drugs and silks of
remote climates, bold and subtle theories long unknown to the ignorant
and credulous West. The Paulician theology, a theology in which, as it
should seem, many of the doctrines of the modern Calvinists were mingled
with some doctrines derived from the ancient Manichees, spread rapidly
through Provence and Languedoc. The clergy of the Catholic Church were
regarded with loathing and contempt. “Viler than a priest,” “I would as
soon be a priest,” became proverbial expressions. The Papacy had lost
all authority with all classes, from the great feudal princes down to
the cultivators of the soil.

The danger to the hierarchy was indeed formidable. Only one transalpine
nation had emerged from barbarism; and that nation had thrown off all
respect for Rome. Only one of the vernacular languages of Europe had yet
been extensively employed for literary purposes; and that language was
a machine in the hands of heretics. The geographical position of the
sectaries made the danger peculiarly formidable. They occupied a central
region communicating directly with France, with Italy, and with Spain.
The provinces which were still untainted were separated from each other
by this infected district. Under these circumstances, it seemed probable
that a single generation would suffice to spread the reformed doctrine
to Lisbon, to London, and to Naples. But this was not to be. Rome cried
for help to the warriors of northern France. She appealed at once to
their superstition and to their cupidity. To the devout believer she
promised pardons as ample as those with which she had rewarded the
deliverers of the Holy Sepulchre. To the rapacious and profligate she
offered the plunder of fertile plains and wealthy cities. Unhappily, the
ingenious and polished inhabitants of the Languedocian provinces were
far better qualified to enrich and embellish their country than
to defend it. Eminent in the arts of peace, unrivalled in the “gay
science,” elevated above many vulgar superstitions, they wanted that
iron courage, and that skill in martial exercises, which distinguished
the chivalry of the region beyond the Loire, and were ill fitted to
face enemies who, in every country from Ireland to Palestine, had been
victorious against tenfold odds. A war, distinguished even among wars
of religion by merciless atrocity, destroyed the Albigensian heresy, and
with that heresy the prosperity the civilisation, the literature, the
national existence, of what was once the most opulent and enlightened
part of the great European family. Rome, in the meantime, warned by that
fearful danger from which the exterminating swords of her crusaders
had narrowly saved her, proceeded to revise and to strengthen her whole
system of polity. At this period were instituted the Order of Francis,
the Order of Dominic, the Tribunal of the Inquisition. The new spiritual
police was everywhere. No alley in a great city, no hamlet on a remote
mountain, was unvisited by the begging friar. The simple Catholic, who
was content to be no wiser than his fathers, found, wherever he turned,
a friendly voice to encourage him. The path of the heretic was beset by
innumerable spies; and the Church, lately in danger of utter subversion,
now appeared to be impregnably fortified by the love, the reverence, and
the terror of mankind.

A century and a half passed away; and then came the second great rising
up of the human intellect against the spiritual domination of Rome.
During the two generations which followed the Albigensian crusade, the
power of the Papacy had been at the height. Frederic the Second, the
ablest and most accomplished of the long line of German Caesars, had in
vain exhausted all the resources of military and political skill in
the attempt to defend the rights of the civil power against the
encroachments of the Church. The vengeance of the priesthood had pursued
his house to the third generation. Manfred had perished on the field of
battle, Conradin on the scaffold. Then a turn took place. The secular
authority, long unduly depressed, regained the ascendant with startling
rapidity. The change is doubtless to be ascribed chiefly to the general
disgust excited by the way in which the Church had abused its power
and its success. But something must be attributed to the character and
situation of individuals. The man who bore the chief part in effecting
this revolution was Philip the Fourth of France, surnamed the Beautiful,
a despot by position, a despot by temperament, stern, implacable, and
unscrupulous, equally prepared for violence and for chicanery, and
surrounded by a devoted band of men of the sword and of men of law. The
fiercest and most high minded of the Roman Pontiffs, while bestowing
kingdoms and citing great princes to his judgment-seat, was seized in
his palace by armed men, and so foully outraged that he died mad with
rage and terror. “Thus,” sang the great Florentine poet, “was Christ, in
the person of his vicar, a second time seized by ruffians, a second time
mocked, a second time drenched with the vinegar and the gall.” The seat
of the Papal court was carried beyond the Alps, and the Bishops of Rome
became dependants of France. Then came the great schism of the West.
Two Popes, each with a doubtful title, made all Europe ring with their
mutual invectives and anathemas. Rome cried out against the corruptions
of Avignon; and Avignon, with equal justice, recriminated on Rome. The
plain Christian people, brought up in the belief that it was a sacred
duty to be in communion with the head of the Church, were unable to
discover, amidst conflicting testimonies and conflicting arguments, to
which of the two worthless priests who were cursing and reviling each
other, the headship of the Church rightfully belonged. It was nearly
at this juncture that the voice of John Wickliffe began to make itself
heard. The public mind of England was soon stirred to its inmost depths:
and the influence of the new doctrines was soon felt, even in the
distant kingdom of Bohemia. In Bohemia, indeed, there had long been a
predisposition to heresy. Merchants from the Lower Danube were often
seen in the fairs of Prague; and the Lower Danube was peculiarly the
seat of the Paulician theology. The Church, torn by schism, and fiercely
assailed at once in England and in the German Empire, was in a situation
scarcely less perilous than at the crisis which preceded the Albigensian
crusade.

But this danger also passed by. The civil power gave its strenuous
support to the Church; and the Church made some show of reforming
itself. The Council of Constance put an end to the schism. The whole
Catholic world was again united under a single chief; and rules were
laid down which seemed to make it improbable that the power of that
chief would be grossly abused. The most distinguished teachers of the
new doctrine were slaughtered. The English Government put down the
Lollards with merciless rigour; and in the next generation, scarcely
one trace of the second great revolt against the Papacy could be found,
except among the rude population of the mountains of Bohemia.

Another century went by; and then began the third and the most memorable
struggle for spiritual freedom. The times were changed. The great
remains of Athenian and Roman genius were studied by thousands. The
Church had no longer a monopoly of learning. The powers of the modern
languages had at length been developed. The invention of printing had
given new facilities to the intercourse of mind with mind. With such
auspices commenced the great Reformation.

We will attempt to lay before our readers, in a short compass, what
appears to us to be the real history of the contest which began with
the preaching of Luther against the Indulgences, and which may, in one
sense, be said, to have been terminated, a hundred and thirty years
later, by the treaty of Westphalia.

In the northern parts of Europe the victory of Protestantism was rapid
and decisive. The dominion of the Papacy was felt by the nations of
Teutonic blood as the dominion of Italians, of foreigners, of men who
were aliens in language, manners, and intellectual constitution. The
large jurisdiction exercised by the spiritual tribunals of Rome seemed
to be a degrading badge of servitude. The sums which, under a thousand
pretexts, were exacted by a distant court, were regarded both as a
humiliating and as a ruinous tribute. The character of that court
excited the scorn and disgust of a grave, earnest, sincere, and devout
people. The new theology spread with a rapidity never known before. All
ranks, all varieties of character, joined the ranks of the innovators.
Sovereigns impatient to appropriate to themselves the prerogatives
of the Pope, nobles desirous to share the plunder of abbeys, suitors
exasperated by the extortions of the Roman Camera, patriots impatient of
a foreign rule, good men scandalised by the corruptions of the
Church, bad men desirous of the licence inseparable from great moral
revolutions, wise men eager in the pursuit of truth, weak men allured
by the glitter of novelty, all were found on one side. Alone among the
northern nations the Irish adhered to the ancient faith: and the cause
of this seems to have been that the national feeling which, in happier
countries, was directed against Rome, was in Ireland directed against
England. Within fifty years from the day on which Luther publicly
renounced communion with the Papacy, and burned the bull of Leo before
the gates of Wittenberg, Protestantism attained its highest ascendency,
an ascendency which it soon lost, and which it has never regained.
Hundreds, who could well remember Brother Martin a devout Catholic,
lived to see the revolution of which he was the chief author, victorious
in half the states of Europe. In England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden,
Livonia, Prussia, Saxony, Hesse, Wurtemburg, the Palatinate, in several
cantons of Switzerland, in the Northern Netherlands, the Reformation had
completely triumphed; and in all the other countries on this side of the
Alps and the Pyrenees, it seemed on the point of triumphing.

But while this mighty work was proceeding in the north of Europe, a
revolution of a very different kind had taken place in the south. The
temper of Italy and Spain was widely different from that of Germany and
England. As the national feeling of the Teutonic nations impelled them
to throw off the Italian supremacy, so the national feeling of the
Italians impelled them to resist any change which might deprive their
country of the honours and advantages which she enjoyed as the seat
of the government of the Universal Church. It was in Italy that the
tributes were spent of which foreign nations so bitterly complained. It
was to adorn Italy that the traffic in Indulgences had been carried to
that scandalous excess which had roused the indignation of Luther. There
was among the Italians both much piety and much impiety; but, with
very few exceptions, neither the piety nor the impiety took the turn
of Protestantism. The religious Italians desired a reform of morals and
discipline, but not a reform of doctrine, and least of all a schism. The
irreligious Italians simply disbelieved Christianity, without hating
it. They looked at it as artists or as statesmen; and, so looking at it,
they liked it better in the established form than in any other. It was
to them what the old Pagan worship was to Trajan and Pliny. Neither
the spirit of Savonarola nor the spirit of Machiavelli had anything in
common with the spirit of the religious or political Protestants of the
North.

Spain again was, with respect to the Catholic Church, in a situation
very different from that of the Teutonic nations. Italy was, in truth,
a part of the empire of Charles the Fifth; and the Court of Rome was,
on many important occasions, his tool. He had not, therefore, like the
distant princes of the North, a strong selfish motive for attacking
the Papacy. In fact, the very measures which provoked the Sovereign
of England to renounce all connection with Rome were dictated by the
Sovereign of Spain. The feeling of the Spanish people concurred with the
interest of the Spanish Government. The attachment of the Castilian to
the faith of his ancestors was peculiarly strong and ardent. With that
faith were inseparably bound up the institutions, the independence, and
the glory of his country. Between the day when the last Gothic king was
vanquished on the banks of the Xeres, and the day when Ferdinand and
Isabella entered Granada in triumph, near eight hundred years had
elapsed; and during those years the Spanish nation had been engaged in a
desperate struggle against misbelievers. The Crusades had been merely an
episode in the history of other nations. The existence of Spain had been
one long Crusade. After fighting Mussulmans in the Old World, she began
to fight heathens in the New. It was under the authority of a Papal bull
that her children steered into unknown seas. It was under the standard
of the cross that they marched fearlessly into the heart of great
kingdoms. It was with the cry of “St. James for Spain,” that they
charged armies which outnumbered them a hundredfold. And men said
that the Saint had heard the call, and had himself, in arms, on a grey
war-horse, led the onset before which the worshippers of false gods had
given way. After the battle, every excess of rapacity or cruelty was
sufficiently vindicated by the plea that the sufferers were unbaptized.
Avarice stimulated zeal. Zeal consecrated avarice. Proselytes and gold
mines were sought with equal ardour. In the very year in which the
Saxons, maddened by the exactions of Rome, broke loose from her yoke,
the Spaniards, under the authority of Rome, made themselves masters of
the empire and of the treasures of Montezuma. Thus Catholicism which, in
the public mind of Northern Europe, was associated with spoliation and
oppression, was in the public mind of Spain associated with liberty,
victory, dominion, wealth, and glory.

It is not, therefore, strange that the effect of the great outbreak of
Protestantism in one part of Christendom should have been to produce an
equally violent outbreak of Catholic zeal in another. Two reformations
were pushed on at once with equal energy and effect, a reformation of
doctrine in the North, a reformation of manners and discipline in the
South. In the course of a single generation, the whole spirit of the
Church of Rome underwent a change. From the halls of the Vatican to
the most secluded hermitage of the Apennines, the great revival was
everywhere felt and seen. All the institutions anciently devised for
the propagation and defence of the faith were furbished up and
made efficient. Fresh engines of still more formidable power were
constructed. Everywhere old religious communities were remodelled and
new religious communities called into existence. Within a year after
the death of Leo, the order of Camaldoli was purified. The Capuchins
restored the old Franciscan discipline, the midnight prayer and the life
of silence. The Barnabites and the society of Somasca devoted themselves
to the relief and education of the poor. To the Theatine order a still
higher interest belongs. Its great object was the same with that of our
early Methodists, namely to supply the deficiencies of the parochial
clergy. The Church of Rome, wiser than the Church of England, gave
every countenance to the good work. The members of the new brotherhood
preached to great multitudes in the streets and in the fields, prayed by
the beds of the sick, and administered the last sacraments to the
dying. Foremost among them in zeal and devotion was Gian Pietro Caraffa,
afterwards Pope Paul the Fourth. In the convent of the Theatines at
Venice, under the eye of Caraffa, a Spanish gentleman took up his abode,
tended the poor in the hospitals, went about in rags, starved himself
almost to death, and often sallied into the streets, mounted on stones,
and, waving his hat to invite the passers-by, began to preach in a
strange jargon of mingled Castilian and Tuscan. The Theatines were among
the most zealous and rigid of men; but to this enthusiastic neophyte
their discipline seemed lax, and their movements sluggish; for his
own mind, naturally passionate and imaginative, had passed through a
training which had given to all its peculiarities a morbid intensity and
energy. In his early life he had been the very prototype of the hero
of Cervantes. The single study of the young Hidalgo had been chivalrous
romance; and his existence had been one gorgeous day-dream of princesses
rescued and infidels subdued. He had chosen a Dulcinea, “no countess,
no duchess,”--these are his own words,--“but one of far higher station”;
and he flattered himself with the hope of laying at her feet the keys of
Moorish castles and the jewelled turbans of Asiatic kings. In the midst
of these visions of martial glory and prosperous love, a severe wound
stretched him on a bed of sickness. His constitution was shattered and
he was doomed to be a cripple for life. The palm of strength, grace, and
skill in knightly exercises, was no longer for him. He could no longer
hope to strike down gigantic soldans, or to find favour in the sight of
beautiful women. A new vision then arose in his mind, and mingled itself
with his old delusions in a manner which to most Englishmen must seem
singular, but which those who know how close was the union between
religion and chivalry in Spain will be at no loss to understand. He
would still be a soldier; he would still be a knight errant; but the
soldier and knight errant of the spouse of Christ. He would smite the
Great Red Dragon. He would be the champion of the Woman clothed with the
Sun. He would break the charm under which false prophets held the souls
of men in bondage. His restless spirit led him to the Syrian deserts,
and to the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. Thence he wandered back to the
farthest West, and astonished the convents of Spain and the schools of
France by his penances and vigils. The same lively imagination which had
been employed in picturing the tumult of unreal battles, and the charms
of unreal queens, now peopled his solitude with saints and angels. The
Holy Virgin descended to commune with him. He saw the Saviour face to
face with the eye of flesh. Even those mysteries of religion which are
the hardest trial of faith were in his case palpable to sight. It is
difficult to relate without a pitying smile that, in the sacrifice of
the mass, he saw transubstantiation take place, and that, as he stood
praying on the steps of the Church of St. Dominic, he saw the Trinity
in Unity, and wept aloud with joy and wonder. Such was the celebrated
Ignatius Loyola, who, in the great Catholic reaction, bore the same part
which Luther bore in the great Protestant movement.

Dissatisfied with the system of the Theatines, the enthusiastic Spaniard
turned his face towards Rome. Poor, obscure, without a patron, without
recommendations, he entered the city where now two princely temples,
rich with painting and many-coloured marble, commemorate his great
services to the Church; where his form stands sculptured in massive
silver; where his bones, enshrined amidst jewels, are placed beneath the
altar of God. His activity and zeal bore down all opposition; and under
his rule the order of Jesuits began to exist, and grew rapidly to the
full measure of his gigantic powers. With what vehemence, with what
policy, with what exact discipline, with what dauntless courage, with
what self-denial, with what forgetfulness of the dearest private ties,
with what intense and stubborn devotion to a single end, with what
unscrupulous laxity and versatility in the choice of means, the Jesuits
fought the battle of their Church, is written in every page of the
annals of Europe during several generations. In the order of Jesus was
concentrated the quintessence of the Catholic spirit; and the history of
the order of Jesus is the history of the great Catholic reaction. That
order possessed itself at once of all the strongholds which command the
public mind, of the pulpit, of the press, of the confessional, of the
academies. Wherever the Jesuit preached, the church was too small for
the audience. The name of Jesuit on a title-page secured the circulation
of a book. It was in the ears of the Jesuit that the powerful, the
noble, and the beautiful, breathed the secret history of their lives.
It was at the feet of the Jesuit that the youth of the higher and
middle classes were brought up from childhood to manhood, from the first
rudiments to the courses of rhetoric and philosophy. Literature and
science, lately associated with infidelity or with heresy, now became
the allies of orthodoxy. Dominant in the South of Europe, the great
order soon went forth conquering and to conquer. In spite of oceans and
deserts, of hunger and pestilence, of spies and penal laws, of dungeons
and racks, of gibbets and quartering-blocks, Jesuits were to be found
under every disguise, and in every country; scholars, physicians,
merchants, serving-men; in the hostile Court of Sweden, in the old
manor-houses of Cheshire, among the hovels of Connaught; arguing,
instructing, consoling, stealing away the hearts of the young, animating
the courage of the timid, holding up the crucifix before the eyes of
the dying. Nor was it less their office to plot against the thrones and
lives of apostate kings, to spread evil rumours, to raise tumults,
to inflame civil wars, to arm the hand of the assassin. Inflexible in
nothing but in their fidelity to the Church, they were equally ready
to appeal in her cause to the spirit of loyalty and to the spirit
of freedom. Extreme doctrines of obedience and extreme doctrines of
liberty, the right of rulers to misgovern the people, the right of every
one of the people to plunge his knife in the heart of a bad ruler, were
inculcated by the same man, according as he addressed himself to the
subject of Philip or to the subject of Elizabeth. Some described these
divines as the most rigid, others as the most indulgent of spiritual
directors; and both descriptions were correct. The truly devout listened
with awe to the high and saintly morality of the Jesuit. The gay
cavalier who had run his rival through the body, the frail beauty who
had forgotten her marriage-vow, found in the Jesuit an easy well-bred
man of the world, who knew how to make allowance for the little
irregularities of people of fashion. The confessor was strict or lax,
according to the temper of the penitent. The first object was to drive
no person out of the pale of the Church. Since there were bad people, it
was better that they should be bad Catholics than bad Protestants. If a
person was so unfortunate as to be a bravo, a libertine, or a gambler,
that was no reason for making him a heretic too.

The Old World was not wide enough for this strange activity. The Jesuits
invaded all the countries which the great maritime discoveries of the
preceding age had laid open to European enterprise. They were to be
found in the depths of the Peruvian mines, at the marts of the African
slave-caravans, on the shores of the Spice Islands, in the observatories
of China. They made converts in regions which neither avarice nor
curiosity had tempted any of their countrymen to enter; and preached and
disputed in tongues of which no other native of the West understood a
word.

The spirit which appeared so eminently in this order animated the
whole Catholic world. The Court of Rome itself was purified. During the
generation which preceded the Reformation, that Court had been a scandal
to the Christian name. Its annals are black with treason, murder, and
incest. Even its more respectable members were utterly unfit to be
ministers of religion. They were men like Leo the Tenth; men who, with
the Latinity of the Augustan age, had acquired its atheistical and
scoffing spirit. They regarded those Christian mysteries, of which they
were stewards, just as the Augur Cicero and the high Pontiff Caesar
regarded the Sibylline books and the pecking of the sacred chickens.
Among themselves, they spoke of the Incarnation, the Eucharist, and
the Trinity, in the same tone in which Cotta and Velleius talked of the
oracle of Delphi or the voice of Faunus in the mountains. Their years
glided by in a soft dream of sensual and intellectual voluptuousness.
Choice cookery, delicious wines, lovely women, hounds, falcons, horses,
newly-discovered manuscripts of the classics, sonnets, and burlesque
romances in the sweetest Tuscan, just as licentious as a fine sense of
the graceful would permit, plate from the hand of Benvenuto, designs for
palaces by Michael Angelo, frescoes by Raphael, busts, mosaics, and gems
just dug up from among the ruins of ancient temples and villas, these
things were the delight and even the serious business of their lives.
Letters and the fine arts undoubtedly owe much to this not inelegant
sloth. But when the great stirring of the mind of Europe began, when
doctrine after doctrine was assailed, when nation after nation withdrew
from communion with the successor of St. Peter, it was felt that the
Church could not be safely confided to chiefs whose highest praise was
that they were good judges of Latin compositions, of paintings, and
of statues, whose severest studies had a pagan character, and who
were suspected of laughing in secret at the sacraments which they
administered, and of believing no more of the Gospel than of the
Morgante Maggiore. Men of a very different class now rose to the
direction of ecclesiastical affairs, men whose spirit resembled that of
Dunstan and of Becket. The Roman Pontiffs exhibited in their own persons
all the austerity of the early anchorites of Syria. Paul the Fourth
brought to the Papal throne the same fervent zeal which had carried him
into the Theatine convent. Pius the Fifth, under his gorgeous vestments,
wore day and night the hair shirt of a simple friar, walked barefoot in
the streets at the head of processions, found, even in the midst of his
most pressing avocations, time for private prayer, often regretted
that the public duties of his station were unfavourable to growth in
holiness, and edified his flock by innumerable instances of humility,
charity, and forgiveness of personal injuries, while at the same time he
upheld the authority of his see, and the unadulterated doctrines of his
Church, with all the stubbornness and vehemence of Hildebrand. Gregory
the Thirteenth exerted himself not only to imitate but to surpass Pius
in the severe virtues of his sacred profession. As was the head, such
were the members. The change in the spirit of the Catholic world may
be traced in every walk of literature and of art. It will be at once
perceived by every person who compares the poem of Tasso with that of
Ariosto, or the monuments Of Sixtus the Fifth with those of Leo the
Tenth.

But it was not on moral influence alone that the Catholic Church relied.
The civil sword in Spain and Italy was unsparingly employed in her
support. The Inquisition was armed with new powers and inspired with a
new energy. If Protestantism, or the semblance of Protestantism, showed
itself in any quarter, it was instantly met, not by petty, teasing
persecution, but by persecution of that sort which bows down and crushes
all but a very few select spirits. Whoever was suspected of heresy,
whatever his rank, his learning, or his reputation, knew that he must
purge himself to the satisfaction of a severe and vigilant tribunal, or
die by fire. Heretical books were sought out and destroyed with similar
rigour. Works which were once in every house were so effectually
suppressed that no copy of them is now to be found in the most extensive
libraries. One book in particular, entitled Of the Benefits of the
Death of Christ, had this fate. It was written in Tuscan, was many
times reprinted, and was eagerly read in every part of Italy. But the
inquisitors detected in it the Lutheran doctrine of justification by
faith alone. They proscribed it; and it is now as hopelessly lost as the
second decade of Livy.

Thus, while the Protestant reformation proceeded rapidly at one
extremity of Europe, the Catholic revival went on as rapidly at the
other. About half a century after the great separation, there were,
throughout the North, Protestant governments and Protestant nations. In
the South were governments and nations actuated by the most intense zeal
for the ancient Church. Between these two hostile regions lay, morally
as well as geographically, a great debatable land. In France, Belgium,
Southern Germany, Hungary, and Poland, the contest was still undecided.
The governments of those countries had not renounced their connection
with Rome; but the Protestants were numerous, powerful, bold, and
active. In France, they formed a commonwealth within the realm, held
fortresses, were able to bring great armies into the field, and had
treated with their sovereign on terms of equality. In Poland, the King
was still a Catholic; but the Protestants had the upper hand in the
Diet, filled the chief offices in the administration, and, in the large
towns, took possession of the parish churches. “It appeared,” says the
Papal nuncio, “that in Poland, Protestantism would completely supersede
Catholicism.” In Bavaria, the state of things was nearly the same. The
Protestants had a majority in the Assembly of the States, and demanded
from the duke concessions in favour of their religion, as the price of
their subsidies. In Transylvania, the House of Austria was unable to
prevent the Diet from confiscating, by one sweeping decree, the estates
of the Church. In Austria Proper it was generally said that only
one-thirtieth part of the population could be counted on as good
Catholics. In Belgium the adherents of the new opinions were reckoned by
hundreds of thousands.

The history of the two succeeding generations is the history of the
struggle between Protestantism possessed of the North of Europe, and
Catholicism possessed of the South, for the doubtful territory which
lay between. All the weapons of carnal and of spiritual warfare were
employed. Both sides may boast of great talents and of great virtues.
Both have to blush for many follies and crimes. At first, the chances
seemed to be decidedly in favour of Protestantism; but the victory
remained with the Church of Rome. On every point she was successful. If
we overleap, another half century, we find her victorious and dominant
in France, Belgium, Bavaria, Bohemia, Austria, Poland, and Hungary.
Nor has Protestantism, in the course of two hundred years, been able to
reconquer any portion of what was then lost.

It is, moreover, not to be dissembled that this triumph of the Papacy
is to be chiefly attributed, not to the force of arms, but to a great
reflux in public opinion. During the first half century after the
commencement of the Reformation, the current of feeling, in the
countries on this side of the Alps and of the Pyrenees, ran impetuously
towards the new doctrines. Then the tide turned, and rushed as fiercely
in the opposite direction. Neither during the one period, nor during
the other, did much depend upon the event of battles or sieges. The
Protestant movement was hardly checked for an instant by the defeat at
Muhlberg. The Catholic reaction went on at full speed in spite of the
destruction of the Armada. It is difficult to say whether the violence
of the first blow or of the recoil was the greater. Fifty years after
the Lutheran separation, Catholicism could scarcely maintain itself on
the shores of the Mediterranean. A hundred years after the separation,
Protestantism could scarcely maintain itself on the shores of the
Baltic. The causes of this memorable turn in human affairs well deserve
to be investigated.

The contest between the two parties bore some resemblance to the
fencing-match in Shakspeare; “Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling,
they change rapiers, and Hamlet wounds Laertes.” The war between Luther
and Leo was a war between firm faith and unbelief, between zeal and
apathy, between energy and indolence, between seriousness and frivolity,
between a pure morality and vice. Very different was the war which
degenerate Protestantism had to wage against regenerate Catholicism.
To the debauchees, the poisoners, the atheists, who had worn the tiara
during the generation which preceded the Reformation, had succeeded
Popes who, in religious fervour and severe sanctity of manners, might
bear a comparison with Cyprian or Ambrose. The order of Jesuits alone
could show many men not inferior in sincerity, constancy, courage, and
austerity of life, to the apostles of the Reformation. But while danger
had thus called forth in the bosom of the Church of Rome many of the
highest qualities of the Reformers, the Reformers had contracted some
of the corruptions which had been justly censured in the Church of Rome.
They had become lukewarm and worldly. Their great old leaders had been
borne to the grave, and had left no successors. Among the Protestant
princes there was little or no hearty Protestant feeling. Elizabeth
herself was a Protestant rather from policy than from firm conviction.
James the First, in order to effect his favourite object of marrying his
son into one of the great continental houses, was ready to make immense
concessions to Rome, and even to admit a modified primacy in the Pope.
Henry the Fourth twice abjured the reformed doctrines from interested
motives. The Elector of Saxony, the natural head Of the Protestant party
in Germany, submitted to become, at the most important crisis of
the struggle, a tool in the hands of the Papists. Among the Catholic
sovereigns, on the other hand, we find a religious zeal often amounting
to fanaticism. Philip the Second was a Papist in a very different sense
from that in which Elizabeth was a Protestant. Maximilian of Bavaria,
brought up under the teaching of the Jesuits, was a fervent missionary
wielding the powers of a prince. The Emperor Ferdinand the Second
deliberately put his throne to hazard over and over again, rather than
make the smallest concession to the spirit of religious innovation.
Sigismund of Sweden lost a crown which he might have preserved if he
would have renounced the Catholic faith. In short, everywhere on the
Protestant side we see languor; everywhere on the Catholic side we see
ardour and devotion.

Not only was there, at this time, a much more intense zeal among
the Catholics than among the Protestants; but the whole zeal of the
Catholics was directed against the Protestants, while almost the whole
zeal of the Protestants was directed against each other. Within the
Catholic Church there were no serious disputes on points of doctrine.
The decisions of the Council of Trent were received; and the Jansenian
controversy had not yet arisen. The whole force of Rome was,
therefore, effective for the purpose of carrying on the war against the
Reformation. On the other hand, the force which ought to have fought the
battle of the Reformation was exhausted in civil conflict. While Jesuit
preachers, Jesuit confessors, Jesuit teachers of youth, overspread
Europe, eager to expend every faculty of their minds and every drop
of their blood in the cause of their Church, Protestant doctors were
confuting, and Protestant rulers were punishing, sectaries who were just
as good Protestants as themselves.=

```“Cumque superba foret BABYLON spolianda tropaeis,

```Bella geri placuit nullos habitura triumphos.”=

In the Palatinate, a Calvinistic prince persecuted the Lutherans. In
Saxony, a Lutheran prince persecuted the Calvinists. Everybody who
objected to any of the articles of the Confession of Augsburg was
banished from Sweden. In Scotland, Melville was disputing with other
Protestants on questions of ecclesiastical government. In England the
gaols were filled with men, who, though zealous for the Reformation,
did not exactly agree with the Court on all points of discipline and
doctrine. Some were persecuted for denying the tenet of reprobation;
some for not wearing surplices. The Irish people might at that time have
been, in all probability, reclaimed from Popery, at the expense of half
the zeal and activity which Whitgift employed in oppressing Puritans,
and Martin Marprelate in reviling bishops.

As the Catholics in zeal and in union had a great advantage over the
Protestants, so had they also an infinitely superior organisation. In
truth, Protestantism, for aggressive purposes, had no organisation at
all. The Reformed Churches were mere national Churches. The Church of
England existed for England alone. It was an institution as purely local
as the Court of Common Pleas, and was utterly without any machinery for
foreign operations. The Church of Scotland, in the same manner, existed
for Scotland alone. The operations of the Catholic Church, on the
other hand, took in the whole world. Nobody at Lambeth or at Edinburgh
troubled himself about what was doing in Poland or Bavaria. But Cracow
and Munich were at Rome objects of as much interest as the purlieus of
St. John Lateran. Our island, the head of the Protestant interest, did
not send out a single missionary or a single instructor of youth to the
scene of the great spiritual war. Not a single seminary was established
here for the purpose of furnishing a supply of such persons to foreign
countries. On the other hand, Germany, Hungary, and Poland were filled
with able and active Catholic emissaries of Spanish or Italian birth;
and colleges for the instruction of the northern youth were founded at
Rome. The spiritual force of Protestantism was a mere local militia,
which might be useful in case of an invasion, but could not be sent
abroad, and could therefore make no conquests. Rome had such a local
militia; but she had also a force disposable at a moment’s notice for
foreign service, however dangerous or disagreeable. If it was thought at
head-quarters that a Jesuit at Palermo was qualified by his talents
and character to withstand the Reformers in Lithuania, the order was
instantly given and instantly obeyed. In a month, the faithful servant
of the Church was preaching, catechising, confessing, beyond the Niemen.

It is impossible to deny that the polity of the Church of Rome is the
very master-piece of human wisdom. In truth, nothing but such a
polity could, against such assaults, have borne up such doctrines. The
experience of twelve hundred eventful years, the ingenuity and patient
care of forty generations of statesmen, have improved that polity to
such perfection that, among the contrivances which have been devised
for deceiving and oppressing mankind, it occupies the highest place. The
stronger our conviction that reason and scripture were decidedly on
the side of Protestantism, the greater is the reluctant admiration
with which we regard that system of tactics against which reason and
scripture were employed in vain.

If we went at large into this most interesting subject we should fill
volumes. We will, therefore, at present, advert to only one important
part of the policy of the Church of Rome. She thoroughly understands,
what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
In some sects, particularly in infant sects, enthusiasm is suffered to
be rampant. In other sects, particularly in sects long established
and richly endowed, it is regarded with aversion. The Catholic Church
neither submits to enthusiasm nor proscribes it, but uses it. She
considers it as a great moving force which in itself, like the muscular
power of a fine horse, is neither good nor evil, but which may be so
directed as to produce great good or great evil; and she assumes the
direction to herself. It would be absurd to run down a horse like
a wolf. It would be still more absurd to let him run wild, breaking
fences, and trampling down passengers. The rational course is to
subjugate his will without impairing his vigour, to teach him to obey
the rein, and then to urge him to full speed. When once he knows his
master, he is valuable in proportion to his strength and spirit.
Just such has been the system of the Church of Rome with regard to
enthusiasts. She knows that, when religious feelings have obtained the
complete empire of the mind, they impart a strange energy, that they
raise men above the dominion of pain and pleasure, that obloquy becomes
glory, that death itself is contemplated only as the beginning of a
higher and happier life. She knows that a person in this state is no
object of contempt. He may be vulgar, ignorant, visionary, extravagant;
but he will do and suffer things which it is for her interest that
somebody should do and suffer, yet from which calm and sober-minded men
would shrink. She accordingly enlists him in her service, assigns to him
some forlorn hope, in which intrepidity and impetuosity are more
wanted than judgment and self-command, and sends him forth with her
benedictions and her applause.

In England it not unfrequently happens that a tinker or coal-heaver
hears a sermon or falls in with a tract which alarms him about the state
of his soul. If he be a man of excitable nerves and strong imagination,
he thinks himself given over to the Evil Power. He doubts whether he
has not committed the unpardonable sin. He imputes every wild fancy that
springs up in his mind to the whisper of a fiend. His sleep is broken by
dreams of the great judgment-seat, the open books, and the unquenchable
fire. If, in order to escape from these vexing thoughts, he flies to
amusement or to licentious indulgence, the delusive relief only makes
his misery darker and more hopeless. At length a turn takes place. He is
reconciled to his offended Maker. To borrow the fine imagery of one who
had himself been thus tried, he emerges from the Valley of the Shadow
of Death, from the dark land of gins and snares, of quagmires and
precipices, of evil spirits and ravenous beasts. The sunshine is on his
path. He ascends the Delectable Mountains, and catches from their summit
a distant view of the shining city which is the end of his pilgrimage.
Then arises in his mind a natural and surely not a censurable desire,
to impart to others the thoughts of which his own heart is full, to warn
the careless, to comfort those who are troubled in spirit. The impulse
which urges him to devote his whole life to the teaching of religion is
a strong passion in the guise of a duty. He exhorts his neighbours; and,
if he be a man of strong parts, he often does so with great effect. He
pleads as if he were pleading for his life, with tears, and pathetic
gestures, and burning words; and he soon finds with delight, not
perhaps wholly unmixed with the alloy of human infirmity, that his rude
eloquence rouses and melts hearers who sleep very composedly while the
rector preaches on the apostolical succession. Zeal for God, love for
his fellow-creatures, pleasure in the exercise of his newly discovered
powers, impel him to become a preacher. He has no quarrel with the
establishment, no objection to its formularies, its government, or its
vestments. He would gladly be admitted among its humblest ministers,
but, admitted or rejected, he feels that his vocation is determined. His
orders have come down to him, not through a long and doubtful series of
Arian and Popish bishops, but direct from on high. His commission is the
same that on the Mountain of Ascension was given to the Eleven. Nor will
he, for lack of human credentials, spare to deliver the glorious message
with which he is charged by the true Head of the Church. For a man thus
minded, there is within the pale of the establishment no place. He has
been at no college; he cannot construe a Greek author or write a Latin
theme; and he is told that, if he remains in the communion of the
Church, he must do so as a hearer, and that, if he is resolved to be a
teacher, he must begin by being a schismatic. His choice is soon made.
He harangues on Tower Hill or in Smithfield. A congregation is formed. A
licence is obtained. A plain brick building, with a desk and benches, is
run up, and named Ebenezer or Bethel. In a few weeks the Church has
lost for ever a hundred families, not one of which entertained the
least scruple about her articles, her liturgy, her government, or her
ceremonies.

Far different is the policy of Rome. The ignorant enthusiast whom the
Anglican Church makes an enemy, and whatever the polite and learned may
think, a most dangerous enemy, the Catholic Church makes a champion. She
bids him nurse his beard, covers him with a gown and hood of coarse dark
stuff, ties a rope round his waist, and sends him forth to teach in her
name. He costs her nothing. He takes not a ducat away from the revenues
of her beneficed clergy. He lives by the alms of those who respect his
spiritual character, and are grateful for his instructions. He preaches,
not exactly in the style of Massillon, but in a way which moves the
passions of uneducated hearers; and all his influence is employed to
strengthen the Church of which he is a minister. To that Church he
becomes as strongly attached as any of the cardinals whose scarlet
carriages and liveries crowd the entrance of the palace on the Quirinal.
In this way the Church of Rome unites in herself all the strength of
establishment, and all the strength of dissent. With the utmost pomp
of a dominant hierarchy above, she has all the energy of the voluntary
system below. It would be easy to mention very recent instances in
which the hearts of hundreds of thousands, estranged from her by the
selfishness, sloth, and cowardice of the beneficed clergy, have been
brought back by the zeal of the begging friars.

Even for female agency there is a place in her system. To devout women
she assigns spiritual functions, dignities, and magistracies. In our
country, if a noble lady is moved by more than ordinary zeal for the
propagation of religion, the chance is that, though she may disapprove
of no doctrine or ceremony of the Established Church, she will end by
giving her name to a new schism. If a pious and benevolent woman enters
the cells of a prison to pray with the most unhappy and degraded of her
own sex, she does so without any authority from the Church. No line of
action is traced out for her; and it is well if the Ordinary does not
complain of her intrusion, and if the Bishop does not shake his head at
such irregular benevolence. At Rome, the Countess of Huntingdon would
have a place in the calendar as St. Selina, and Mrs. Fry would be
foundress and first Superior of the Blessed Order of Sisters of the
Gaols.

Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a
formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the
first General of a new society devoted to the interests and honour
of the Church. Place St. Theresa in London. Her restless enthusiasm
ferments into madness, not untinctured with craft. She becomes the
prophetess, the mother of the faithful, holds disputations with the
devil, issues sealed pardons to her adorers, and lies in of the Shiloh.
Place Joanna Southcote at Rome. She founds an order of barefooted
Carmelites, every one of whom is ready to suffer martyrdom for the
Church; a solemn service is consecrated to her memory; and her statue,
placed over the holy water, strikes the eye of every stranger who enters
St. Peter’s.

We have dwelt long on this subject, because we believe that of the many
causes to which the Church of Rome owed her safety and her triumph at
the close of the sixteenth century, the chief was the profound policy
with which she used the fanaticism of such persons as St. Ignatius and
St. Theresa.

The Protestant party was now indeed vanquished and humbled. In France,
so strong had been the Catholic reaction that Henry the Fourth found it
necessary to choose between his religion and his crown. In spite of his
clear hereditary right, in spite of his eminent personal qualities, he
saw that, unless he reconciled himself to the Church of Rome, he
could not count on the fidelity even of those gallant gentlemen whose
impetuous valour had turned the tide of battle at Ivry. In Belgium,
Poland, and Southern Germany, Catholicism had obtained complete
ascendency. The resistance of Bohemia was put down. The Palatinate was
conquered. Upper and Lower Saxony were overflowed by Catholic invaders.
The King of Denmark stood forth as the Protector of the Reformed
Churches: he was defeated, driven out of the empire, and attacked in
his own possessions. The armies of the House of Austria pressed on,
subjugated Pomerania, and were stopped in their progress only by the
ramparts of Stralsund.

And now again the tide turned. Two violent outbreaks of religious
feeling in opposite directions had given a character to the whole
history of a whole century. Protestantism had at first driven back
Catholicism to the Alps and the Pyrenees. Catholicism had rallied, and
had driven back Protestantism even to the German Ocean. Then the great
southern reaction began to slacken, as the great northern movement had
slackened before. The zeal of the Catholics waxed cool. Their union was
dissolved. The paroxysm of religious excitement was over on both sides.
One party had degenerated as far from the spirit of Loyola as the other
from the spirit of Luther. During three generations religion had been
the mainspring of politics. The revolutions and civil wars of France,
Scotland, Holland, Sweden, the long struggle between Philip and
Elizabeth, the bloody competition for the Bohemian crown, had all
originated in theological disputes. But a great change now took place.
The contest which was raging in Germany lost its religious character. It
was now, on one side, less a contest for the spiritual ascendency of the
Church of Rome than for the temporal ascendency of the House of Austria.
On the other side, it was less a contest for the reformed doctrines than
for national independence. Governments began to form themselves into
new combinations, in which community of political interest was far more
regarded than community of religious belief. Even at Rome the progress
of the Catholic arms was observed with mixed feelings. The Supreme
Pontiff was a sovereign prince of the second rank, and was anxious about
the balance of power as well as about the propagation of truth. It was
known that he dreaded the rise of an universal monarchy even more than
he desired the prosperity of the Universal Church. At length a great
event announced to the world that the war of sects had ceased, and that
the war of states had succeeded. A coalition, including Calvinists,
Lutherans, and Catholics, was formed against the House of Austria.
At the head of that coalition were the first statesman and the first
warrior of the age; the former a prince of the Catholic Church,
distinguished by the vigour and success with which he had put down
the Huguenots; the latter a Protestant king who owed his throne to a
revolution caused by hatred of Popery. The alliance of Richelieu
and Gustavus marks the time at which the great religious struggle
terminated. The war which followed was a war for the equilibrium of
Europe. When, at length, the peace of Westphalia was concluded, it
appeared that the Church of Rome remained in full possession of a vast
dominion which in the middle of the preceding century she seemed to be
on the point of losing. No part of Europe remained Protestant, except
that part which had become thoroughly Protestant before the generation
which heard Luther preach had passed away.

Since that time there has been no religious war between Catholics and
Protestants as such. In the time of Cromwell, Protestant England was
united with Catholic France, then governed by a priest, against Catholic
Spain. William the Third, the eminently Protestant hero, was at the
head of a coalition which included many Catholic powers, and which was
secretly favoured even by Rome, against the Catholic Lewis. In the time
of Anne, Protestant England and Protestant Holland joined with Catholic
Savoy and Catholic Portugal, for the purpose of transferring the crown
of Spain from one bigoted Catholic to another.

The geographical frontier between the two religions has continued to run
almost precisely where it ran at the close of the Thirty Years’ War; nor
has Protestantism given any proofs of that “expansive power” which has
been ascribed to it. But the Protestant boasts, and boasts most justly,
that wealth, civilisation, and intelligence, have increased far more
on the northern than on the southern side of the boundary, and that
countries so little favoured by nature as Scotland and Prussia are now
among the most flourishing and best governed portions of the world,
while the marble palaces of Genoa are deserted, while banditti infest
the beautiful shores of Campania, while the fertile sea-coast of the
Pontifical State is abandoned to buffaloes and wild boars. It cannot be
doubted that, since the sixteenth century, the Protestant nations have
made decidedly greater progress than their neighbours. The progress made
by those nations in which Protestantism, though not finally successful,
yet maintained a long struggle, and left permanent traces, has generally
been considerable. But when we come to the Catholic Land, to the part of
Europe in which the first spark of reformation was trodden out as
soon as it appeared, and from which proceeded the impulse which drove
Protestantism back, we find, at best, a very slow progress, and on the
whole a retrogression. Compare Denmark and Portugal. When Luther began
to preach, the superiority of the Portuguese was unquestionable. At
present, the superiority of the Danes is no less so. Compare Edinburgh
and Florence. Edinburgh has owed less to climate, to soil, and to the
fostering care of rulers than any capital, Protestant or Catholic. In
all these respects, Florence has been singularly happy. Yet whoever
knows what Florence and Edinburgh were in the generation preceding the
Reformation, and what they are now, will acknowledge that some great
cause has, during the last three Centuries, operated to raise one part
of the European family, and to depress the other. Compare the history
of England and that of Spain during the last century. In arms, arts,
sciences, letters, commerce, agriculture, the contrast is most striking.
The distinction is not confined to this side of the Atlantic. The
colonies planted by England in America have immeasurably outgrown in
power those planted by Spain. Yet we have no reason to believe that, at
the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Castilian was in any respect
inferior to the Englishman. Our firm belief is, that the North owes its
great civilisation and prosperity chiefly to the moral effect of the
Protestant Reformation, and that the decay of the southern countries of
Europe is to be mainly ascribed to the great Catholic revival.

About a hundred years after the final settlement of the boundary line
between Protestantism and Catholicism, began to appear the signs of the
fourth great peril of the Church of Rome. The storm which was now rising
against her was of a very different kind from those which had preceded
it. Those who had formerly attacked her had questioned only a part of
her doctrines. A school was now growing up which rejected the whole. The
Albigenses, the Lollards, the Lutherans, the Calvinists, had a positive
religious system, and were strongly attached to it. The creed of the new
sectaries was altogether negative. They took one of their premises
from the Protestants, and one from the Catholics. From the latter they
borrowed the principle, that Catholicism was the only pure and genuine
Christianity. With the former, they held that some parts of the
Catholic system were contrary to reason. The conclusion was obvious.
Two propositions, each of which separately is compatible with the most
exalted piety, formed, when held in conjunction, the ground-work of a
system of irreligion. The doctrine of Bossuet, that transubstantiation
is affirmed in the Gospel, and the doctrine of Tillotson, that
transubstantiation is an absurdity, when put together, produced by
logical necessity, the inferences of Voltaire.

Had the sect which was rising at Paris been a sect of mere scoffers, it
is very improbable that it would have left deep traces of its existence
in the institutions and manners of Europe. Mere negation, mere Epicurean
infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the
peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action. It inspires no
enthusiasm. It has no missionaries, no crusaders, no martyrs. If the
Patriarch of the Holy Philosophical Church had contented himself with
making jokes about Saul’s asses and David’s wives, and with criticising
the poetry of Ezekiel in the same narrow spirit in which he criticised
that of Shakspeare, Rome would have had little to fear. But it is due
to him and to his compeers to say that the real secret of their strength
lay in the truth which was mingled with their errors, and in the
generous enthusiasm which was hidden under their flippancy. They were
men who, with all their faults, moral and intellectual, sincerely and
earnestly desired the improvement of the condition of the human race,
whose blood boiled at the sight of cruelty and injustice, who made
manful war, with every faculty which they possessed, on what they
considered as abuses, and who on many signal occasions placed themselves
gallantly between the powerful and the oppressed. While they assailed
Christianity with a rancour and an unfairness disgraceful to men who
called themselves philosophers, they yet had, in far greater measure
than their opponents, that charity towards men of all classes and races
which Christianity enjoins. Religious persecution, judicial torture,
arbitrary imprisonment, the unnecessary multiplication of capital
punishments, the delay and chicanery of tribunals, the exactions of
farmers of the revenue, slavery, the slave trade, were the constant
subjects of their lively satire and eloquent disquisitions. When an
innocent man was broken on the wheel at Toulouse, when a youth, guilty
only of an indiscretion, was beheaded at Abbeville, when a brave
officer, borne down by public injustice, was dragged, with a gag in his
mouth, to die on the Place de Greve, a voice instantly went forth from
the banks of Lake Leman, which made itself heard from Moscow to Cadiz,
and which sentenced the unjust judges to the contempt and detestation
of all Europe. The really efficient weapons with which the philosophers
assailed the evangelical faith were borrowed from the evangelical
morality. The ethical and dogmatical parts of the Gospel were unhappily
turned against each other. On one side was a Church boasting of the
purity of a doctrine derived from the Apostles, but disgraced by the
massacre of St. Bartholomew, by the murder of the best of kings, by the
war of Cevennes, by the destruction of Port-Royal. On the other side
was a sect laughing at the Scriptures, shooting out the tongue at the
sacraments, but ready to encounter principalities and powers in the
cause of justice, mercy and toleration.

Irreligion, accidentally associated with philanthropy, triumphed for
a time over religion accidentally associated with political and
social abuses. Everything gave way to the zeal and activity of the new
reformers. In France, every man distinguished in letters was found in
their ranks. Every year gave birth to works in which the fundamental
principles of the Church were attacked with argument, invective, and
ridicule. The Church made no defence, except by acts of power. Censures
were pronounced: books were seized: insults were offered to the remains
of infidel writers; but no Bossuet, no Pascal, came forth to encounter
Voltaire. There appeared not a single defence of the Catholic doctrine
which produced any considerable effect, or which is now even remembered.
A bloody and unsparing persecution, like that which put down the
Albigenses, might have put down the philosophers. But the time for De
Montforts and Dominics had gone by. The punishments which the priests
were still able to inflict were sufficient to irritate, but not
sufficient to destroy. The war was between power on one side, and wit
on the other; and the power was under far more restraint than the wit.
Orthodoxy soon became a synonyme for ignorance and stupidity. It was as
necessary to the character of an accomplished man that he should despise
the religion of his country, as that he should know his letters. The new
doctrines spread rapidly through Christendom. Paris was the capital
of the whole Continent. French was everywhere the language of polite
circles. The literary glory of Italy and Spain had departed. That of
Germany had not dawned. That of England shone, as yet, for the English
alone. The teachers of France were the teachers of Europe. The Parisian
opinions spread fast among the educated classes beyond the Alps:
nor could the vigilance of the Inquisition prevent the contraband
importation of the new heresy into Castile and Portugal. Governments,
even arbitrary governments, saw with pleasure the progress of this
philosophy. Numerous reforms, generally laudable, sometimes hurried
on without sufficient regard to time, to place, and to public feeling,
showed the extent of its influence. The rulers of Prussia, of Russia,
of Austria, and of many smaller states, were supposed to be among the
initiated.

The Church of Rome was still, in outward show, as stately and splendid
as ever; but her foundation was undermined. No state had quitted her
communion or confiscated her revenues; but the reverence of the people
was everywhere departing from her.

The first great warning-stroke was the fall of that society which, in
the conflict with Protestantism, had saved the Catholic Church from
destruction. The Order of Jesus had never recovered from the injury
received in the struggle with Port-Royal. It was now still more rudely
assailed by the philosophers. Its spirit was broken; its reputation was
tainted. Insulted by all the men of genius in Europe, condemned by the
civil magistrate, feebly defended by the chiefs of the hierarchy, it
fell: and great was the fall of it.

The movement went on with increasing speed. The first generation of
the new sect passed away. The doctrines of Voltaire were inherited and
exaggerated by successors, who bore to him the same relation which the
Anabaptists bore to Luther, or the Fifth-Monarchy men to Pym. At length
the Revolution came. Down went the old Church of France, with all
its pomp and wealth. Some of its priests purchased a maintenance by
separating themselves from Rome, and by becoming the authors of a fresh
schism. Some, rejoicing in the new licence, flung away their sacred
vestments, proclaimed that their whole life had been an imposture,
insulted and persecuted the religion of which they had been ministers,
and distinguished themselves, even in the Jacobin Club and the Commune
of Paris, by the excess of their impudence and ferocity. Others, more
faithful to their principles, were butchered by scores without a trial,
drowned, shot, hung on lamp-posts. Thousands fled from their country
to take sanctuary under the shade of hostile altars. The churches were
closed; the bells were silent; the shrines were plundered; the silver
crucifixes were melted down. Buffoons, dressed in copes and surplices,
came dancing the carmagnole even to the bar of the Convention. The bust
of Marat was substituted for the statues of the martyrs of Christianity.
A prostitute, seated on a chair of state in the chancel of Notre Dame,
received the adoration of thousands, who exclaimed that at length,
for the first time, those ancient Gothic arches had resounded with
the accents of truth. The new unbelief was as intolerant as the old
superstition. To show reverence for religion was to incur the suspicion
of disaffection. It was not without imminent danger that the priest
baptized the infant, joined the hands of lovers, or listened to the
confession of the dying. The absurd worship of the Goddess of Reason
was, indeed, of short duration; but the deism of Robespierre and Lepaux
was not less hostile to the Catholic faith than the atheism of Clootz
and Chaumette.

Nor were the calamities of the Church confined to France. The
revolutionary spirit, attacked by all Europe, beat all Europe back,
became conqueror in its turn, and, not satisfied with the Belgian cities
and the rich domains of the spiritual electors, went raging over the
Rhine and through the passes of the Alps. Throughout the whole of the
great war against Protestantism, Italy and Spain had been the base of
the Catholic operations. Spain was now the obsequious vassal of the
infidels. Italy was subjugated by them. To her ancient principalities
succeeded the Cisalpine republic, and the Ligurian republic, and
the Parthenopean republic. The shrine of Loretto was stripped of the
treasures piled up by the devotion of six hundred years. The convents
of Rome were pillaged. The tricoloured flag floated on the top of
the Castle of St. Angelo. The successor of St. Peter was carried away
captive by the unbelievers. He died a prisoner in their hands; and even
the honours of sepulture were long withheld from his remains.

It is not strange that in the year 1799, even sagacious observers should
have thought that, at length, the hour of the Church of Rome was come.
An infidel power ascendant, the Pope dying in captivity, the most
illustrious prelates of France living in a foreign country on Protestant
alms, the noblest edifices which the munificence of former ages had
consecrated to the worship of God turned into temples of Victory,
or into banqueting-houses for political societies, or into
Theophilanthropic chapels, such signs might well be supposed to indicate
the approaching end of that long domination.

But the end was not yet. Again doomed to death, the milk-white hind was
still fated not to die. Even before the funeral rites had been performed
over the ashes of Pius the Sixth, a great reaction had commenced,
which, after the lapse of more than forty years, appears to be still in
progress. Anarchy had had its day. A new order of things rose out of the
confusion, new dynasties, new laws, new titles; and amidst them emerged
the ancient religion. The Arabs have a fable that the Great Pyramid was
built by antediluvian kings, and alone, of all the works of men, bore
the weight of the flood. Such as this was the fate of the Papacy. It
had been buried under the great inundation; but its deep foundations had
remained unshaken; and when the waters abated, it appeared alone amidst
the ruins of a world which had passed away. The republic of Holland was
gone, and the empire of Germany, and the great Council of Venice, and
the old Helvetian League, and the House of Bourbon, and the parliaments
and aristocracy of France. Europe was full of young creations, a French
empire, a kingdom of Italy, a Confederation of the Rhine. Nor had the
late events affected only territorial limits and political institutions.
The distribution of property, the composition and spirit of society,
had, through great part of Catholic Europe, undergone a complete change.
But the unchangeable Church was still there.

Some future historian, as able and temperate as Professor Ranke, will,
we hope, trace the progress of the Catholic revival of the nineteenth
century. We feel that we are drawing too near our own time, and that, if
we go on, we shall be in danger of saying much which may be supposed
to indicate, and which will certainly excite, angry feelings. We will,
therefore, make only one more observation, which, in our opinion, is
deserving of serious attention.

During the eighteenth century, the influence of the Church of Rome was
constantly on the decline. Unbelief made extensive conquests in all the
Catholic countries of Europe, and in some countries obtained a complete
ascendency. The Papacy was at length brought so low as to be an
object of derision to infidels, and of pity rather than of hatred to
Protestants. During the nineteenth century, this fallen Church has
been gradually rising from her depressed state and reconquering her old
dominion. No person who calmly reflects on what, within the last few
years, has passed in Spain, in Italy, in South America, in Ireland, in
the Netherlands, in Prussia, even in France, can doubt that the power of
this Church over the hearts and minds of men, is now greater far than it
was when the Encyclopaedia and the Philosophical Dictionary appeared.
It is surely remarkable, that neither the moral revolution of the
eighteenth century, nor the moral counter-revolution of the nineteenth,
should, in any perceptible degree, have added to the domain of
Protestantism. During the former period, whatever was lost to
Catholicism was lost also to Christianity; during the latter, whatever
was regained by Christianity in Catholic countries was regained also by
Catholicism. We should naturally have expected that many minds, on the
way from superstition to infidelity, or on the way back from infidelity
to superstition, would have stopped at an intermediate point. Between
the doctrines taught in the schools of the Jesuits, and those which were
maintained at the little supper parties of the Baron Holbach, there is
a vast interval, in which the human mind, it should seem, might find
for itself some resting-place more satisfactory than either of the two
extremes. And at the time of the Reformation, millions found such a
resting-place. Whole nations then renounced Popery without ceasing to
believe in a first cause, in a future life, or in the Divine mission of
Jesus. In the last century, on the other hand, when a Catholic renounced
his belief in the real Presence, it was a thousand to one that he
renounced his belief in the Gospel too; and, when the reaction took
place, with belief in the Gospel came back belief in the real presence.

We by no means venture to deduce from these phenomena any general law;
but we think it a most remarkable fact, that no Christian nation, which
did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the
sixteenth century, should ever have adopted them. Catholic communities
have, since that time, become infidel and become Catholic again; but
none has become Protestant.

Here we close this hasty sketch of one of the most important portions
of the history of mankind. Our readers will have great reason to feel
obliged to us if we have interested them sufficiently to induce them
to peruse Professor Ranke’s book. We will only caution them against
the French translation, a performance which, in our opinion, is just as
discreditable to the moral character of the person from whom it proceeds
as a false affidavit or a forged bill of exchange would have been, and
advise them to study either the original, or the English version, in
which the sense and spirit of the original are admirably preserved.




WAR OF THE SUCCESSION IN SPAIN


(January 1833) _History of the War of the Succession in Spain. By LORD
MAHON. 8vo. London: 1832._


|THE days when Miscellanies in Prose and Verse by a Person of Honour,
and Romances of M. Scuderi, done into English by a Person of Quality,
were attractive to readers and profitable to booksellers, have long gone
by. The literary privileges once enjoyed by lords are as obsolete as
their right to kill the king’s deer on their way to Parliament, or as
their old remedy of scandalum magnatum. Yet we must acknowledge that,
though our political opinions are by no means aristocratical, we always
feel kindly disposed towards noble authors. Industry, and a taste for
intellectual pleasures, are peculiarly respectable in those who can
afford to be idle and who have every temptation to be dissipated. It
is impossible not to wish success to a man who, finding himself placed,
without any exertion or any merit on his part, above the mass
of society, voluntarily descends from his eminence in search of
distinctions which he may justly call his own.

This is, we think, the second appearance of Lord Mahon in the character
of an author. His first book was creditable to him, but was in
every respect inferior to the work which now lies before us. He has
undoubtedly some of the most valuable qualities of a historian,
great diligence in examining authorities, great judgment in weighing
testimony, and great impartiality in estimating characters. We are not
aware that he has in any instance forgotten the duties belonging to his
literary functions in the feelings of a kinsman. He does no more than
justice to his ancestor Stanhope; he does full justice to Stanhope’s
enemies and rivals. His narrative is very perspicuous, and is also
entitled to the praise, seldom, we grieve to say, deserved by modern
writers, of being very concise. It must be admitted, however, that, with
many of the best qualities of a literary veteran, he has some of the
faults of a literary novice. He has not yet acquired a great command of
words. His style is seldom easy, and is now and then unpleasantly stiff.
He is so bigoted a purist that he transforms the Abbe d’Estrees into
an Abbot. We do not like to see French words introduced into English
composition; but, after all, the first law of writing, that law to which
all other laws are subordinate, is this, that the words employed shall
be such as convey to the reader the meaning of the writer. Now an Abbot
is the head of a religious house; an Abbe is quite a different sort of
person. It is better undoubtedly to use an English word than a French
word; but it is better to use a French word than to misuse an English
word.

Lord Mahon is also a little too fond of uttering moral reflections in a
style too sententious and oracular. We shall give one instance: “Strange
as it seems, experience shows that we usually feel far more animosity
against those whom we have injured than against those who injure us: and
this remark holds good with every degree of intellect, with every class
of fortune, with a prince or a peasant, a stripling or an elder, a hero
or a prince.” This remark might have seemed strange at the Court
of Nimrod or Chedorlaomer; but it has now been for many generations
considered as a truism rather than a paradox. Every boy has written on
the thesis “Odisse quem loeseris.” Scarcely any lines in English poetry
are better known than that vigorous couplet,=

```“Forgiveness to the injured does belong;

```But they ne’er pardon who have done the wrong.”=

The historians and philosophers have quite done with this maxim, and
have abandoned it, like other maxims which have lost their gloss, to bad
novelists, by whom it will very soon be worn to rags.

It is no more than justice to say that the faults of Lord Mahon’s book
are precisely the faults which time seldom fails to cure, and that the
book, in spite of those faults, is a valuable addition to our historical
literature.

Whoever wishes to be well acquainted with the morbid anatomy of
governments, whoever wishes to know how great states may be made feeble
and wretched, should study the history of Spain. The empire of Philip
the Second was undoubtedly one of the most powerful and splendid that
ever existed in the world. In Europe, he ruled Spain, Portugal, the
Netherlands on both sides of the Rhine, Franche Comte, Roussillon, the
Milanese, and the Two Sicilies. Tuscany, Parma, and the other small
states of Italy, were as completely dependent on him as the Nizam and
the Rajah of Berar now are on the East India Company. In Asia, the King
of Spain was master of the Philippines and of all those rich settlements
which the Portuguese had made on the coast of Malabar and Coromandel,
in the Peninsula of Malacca, and in the Spice-islands of the Eastern
Archipelago. In America his dominions extended on each side of the
equator into the temperate zone. There is reason to believe that his
annual revenue amounted, in the season of his greatest power, to a sum
near ten times as large as that which England yielded to Elizabeth. He
had a standing army of fifty thousand excellent troops, at a time when
England had not a single battalion in constant pay. His ordinary naval
force consisted of a hundred and forty galleys. He held, what no other
prince in modern times has held, the dominion both of the land and of
the sea. During the greater part of his reign, he was supreme on both
elements. His soldiers marched up to the capital of France; his ships
menaced the shores of England.

It is no exaggeration to say that, during several years, his power over
Europe was greater than even that of Napoleon. The influence of the
French conqueror never extended beyond low-water mark. The narrowest
strait was to his power what it was of old believed that a running
stream was to the sorceries of a witch. While his army entered every
metropolis from Moscow to Lisbon, the English fleets blockaded every
port from Dantzic to Trieste. Sicily, Sardinia, Majorca, Guernsey,
enjoyed security through the whole course of a war which endangered
every throne on the Continent. The victorious and imperial nation which
had filled its museums with the spoils of Antwerp, of Florence, and of
Rome, was suffering painfully from the want of luxuries which use had
made necessaries. While pillars and arches were rising to commemorate
the French conquests, the conquerors were trying to manufacture coffee
out of succory and sugar out of beet-root. The influence of Philip on
the Continent was as great as that of Napoleon. The Emperor of Germany
was his kinsman. France, torn by religious dissensions, was never a
formidable opponent, and was sometimes a dependent ally. At the same
time, Spain had what Napoleon desired in vain, ships, colonies, and
commerce. She long monopolised the trade of America and of the Indian
Ocean. All the gold of the West, and all the spices of the East, were
received and distributed by her. During many years of war, her commerce
was interrupted only by the predatory enterprises of a few roving
privateers. Even after the defeat of the Armada, English statesmen
continued to look with great dread on the maritime power of Philip. “The
King of Spain,” said the Lord Keeper to the two Houses in 1593, “since
he hath usurped upon the Kingdom of Portugal, hath thereby grown mighty,
by gaining the East Indies: so as, how great soever he was before, he
is now thereby manifestly more great: . . . He keepeth a navy armed to
impeach all trade of merchandise from England to Gascoigne and Guienne
which he attempted to do this last vintage; so as he is now become as
a frontier enemy to all the west of England, as well as all the south
parts, as Sussex, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. Yea, by means of
his interest in St. Maloes, a port full of shipping for the war, he is a
dangerous neighbour to the Queen’s isles of Jersey and Guernsey, ancient
possessions of this Crown, and never conquered in the greatest wars with
France.”

The ascendency which Spain then had in Europe was, in one sense, well
deserved. It was an ascendency which had been gained by unquestioned
superiority in all the arts of policy and of war. In the sixteenth
century, Italy was not more decidedly the land of the fine arts, Germany
was not more decidedly the land of bold theological speculation, than
Spain was the land of statesmen and of soldiers. The character which
Virgil has ascribed to his countrymen might have been claimed by the
grave and haughty chiefs, who surrounded the throne of Ferdinand the
Catholic, and of his immediate successors. That majestic art, “regere
imperio populos,” was not better understood by the Romans in the
proudest days of their republic, than by Gonsalvo and Ximenes, Cortes
and Alva. The skill of the Spanish diplomatists was renowned throughout
Europe. In England the name of Gondomar is still remembered. The
sovereign nation was unrivalled both in regular and irregular warfare.
The impetuous chivalry of France, the serried phalanx of Switzerland,
were alike found wanting when brought face to face with the Spanish
infantry. In the wars of the New World, where something different from
ordinary strategy was required in the general and something different
from ordinary discipline in the soldier, where it was every day
necessary to meet by some new expedient the varying tactics of a
barbarous enemy, the Spanish adventurers, sprung from the common people,
displayed a fertility of resource, and a talent for negotiation and
command, to which history scarcely affords a parallel.

The Castilian of those times was to the Italian what the Roman, in the
days of the greatness of Rome, was to the Greek. The conqueror had less
ingenuity, less taste, less delicacy of perception than the conquered;
but far more pride, firmness, and courage, a more solemn demeanour, a
stronger sense of honour. The subject had more subtlety in speculation,
the ruler more energy in action. The vices of the former were those of a
coward; the vices of the latter were those of a tyrant. It may be added,
that the Spaniard, like the Roman, did not disdain to study the arts and
the language of those whom he oppressed. A revolution took place in the
literature of Spain, not unlike that revolution which, as Horace tells
us, took place in the poetry of Latium: “Capta ferum victorem cepit.”
The slave took prisoner the enslaver. The old Castilian ballads gave
place to sonnets in the style of Petrarch, and to heroic poems in the
stanza of Ariosto, as the national songs of Rome were driven out by
imitations of Theocritus, and translations from Menander.

In no modern society, not even in England during the reign of Elizabeth,
has there been so great a number of men eminent at once in literature
and in the pursuits of active life, as Spain produced during the
sixteenth century. Almost every distinguished writer was also
distinguished as a soldier or a politician. Boscan bore arms with high
reputation. Garcilaso de Vega, the author of the sweetest and most
graceful pastoral poem of modern times, after a short but splendid
military career, fell sword in hand at the head of a storming party.
Alonzo de Ercilla bore a conspicuous part in that war of Arauco, which
he afterwards celebrated in one of the best heroic poems that Spain has
produced. Hurtado de Mendoza, whose poems have been compared to those
of Horace, and whose charming little novel is evidently the model of
Gil-Blas, has been handed down to us by history as one of the sternest
of those iron proconsuls who were employed by the House of Austria to
crush the lingering public spirit of Italy. Lope sailed in the Armada;
Cervantes was wounded at Lepanto.

It is curious to consider with how much awe our ancestors in those times
regarded a Spaniard. He was, in their apprehension, a kind of daemon,
horribly malevolent, but withal most sagacious and powerful. “They be
verye wyse and politicke,” says an honest Englishman, in a memorial
addressed to Mary, “and can, thorowe ther wysdome, reform and brydell
theyr owne natures for a tyme, and applye their conditions to the maners
of those men with whom they meddell gladlye by friendshippe; whose
mischievous maners a man shall never knowe untyll he come under ther
subjection: but then shall he parfectlye parceyve and fele them: which
thynge I praye God England never do: for in dissimulations untyll they
have ther purposes, and afterwards in oppression and tyrarnnye, when
they can obtayne them, they do exceed all other nations upon the
earthe.” This is just such language as Arminius would have used about
the Romans, or as an Indian statesman of our times might use about the
English. It is the language of a man burning with hatred, but cowed by
those whom he hates; and painfully sensible of their superiority, not
only in power, but in intelligence.

But how art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer son of the morning! How
art thou cut down to the ground, that didst weaken the nations! If we
overleap a hundred years, and look at Spain towards the close of the
seventeenth century, what a change do we find! The contrast is as great
as that which the Rome of Gallienus and Honorius presents to the Rome of
Marius and Caesar. Foreign conquest had begun to eat into every part of
that gigantic monarchy on which the sun never set. Holland was gone, and
Portugal, and Artois, and Roussillon, and Franche Comte. In the East,
the empire founded by the Dutch far surpassed in wealth and splendour
that which their old tyrants still retained. In the West, England had
seized, and still held, settlements in the midst of the Mexican sea.

The mere loss of territory was, however, of little moment. The reluctant
obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it is worth.
Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little
timely pruning. Adrian acted judiciously when he abandoned the conquests
of Trajan; and England was never so rich, so great, so formidable to
foreign princes, so absolutely mistress of the sea, as since the loss
of her American colonies. The Spanish Empire was still, in outward
appearance, great and magnificent. The European dominions subject to the
last feeble Prince of the House of Austria were far more extensive
than those of Lewis the Fourteenth. The American dependencies of the
Castilian Crown still extended far to the North of Cancer and far to the
South of Capricorn. But within this immense body there was an incurable
decay, an utter want of tone, an utter prostration of strength. An
ingenious and diligent population, eminently skilled in arts and
manufactures, had been driven into exile by stupid and remorseless
bigots. The glory of the Spanish pencil had departed with Velasquez and
Murillo. The splendid age of Spanish literature had closed with Solis
and Calderon. During the seventeenth century many states had formed
great military establishments. But the Spanish army, so formidable under
the command of Alva and Farnese, had dwindled away to a few thousand
men, ill paid and ill disciplined. England, Holland, and France had
great navies. But the Spanish navy was scarcely equal to the tenth part
of that mighty force which, in the time of Philip the Second, had been
the terror of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. The arsenals were
deserted. The magazines were unprovided. The frontier fortresses were
ungarrisoned. The police was utterly inefficient for the protection
of the people. Murders were committed in the face of day with perfect
impunity. Bravoes and discarded serving-men, with swords at their sides,
swaggered every day through the most public streets and s

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