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The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2

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Title: The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 2

Author: Thomas De Quincey

Editor: Alexander H. Japp


        
Release date: June 30, 2008 [eBook #25940]
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Language: English

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Produced by Robert Connal, Josephine Paolucci and the
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(This file was produced from images generously made
available by the Bibliothèque nationale de France
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THE POSTHUMOUS WORKS

OF

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

_EDITED FROM THE AUTHOR'S MSS., WITH INTRODUCTIONS AND NOTES_

BY

ALEXANDER H. JAPP LL.D., F.R.S.E.

_VOLUME II._

LONDON WILLIAM HEINEMANN 1893

[_All rights reserved_]




CONVERSATION AND COLERIDGE

With Other Essays

_CRITICAL, HISTORICAL, BIOGRAPHICAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, IMAGINATIVE AND
HUMOROUS_

BY

THOMAS DE QUINCEY

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1893




PREFACE.


All that is needful for me to say by way of Preface is that, as in the
case of the first volume, I have received much aid from Mrs. Baird Smith
and Miss De Quincey, and that Mr. J. R. McIlraith has repeated his
friendly service of reading the proofs.

ALEXANDER H. JAPP.

LONDON,
_March 1st, 1893._




CONTENTS.


CHAPTER                                                               PAGE

INTRODUCTION                                                             1

I. CONVERSATION AND S. T. COLERIDGE                                      7

II. MR. FINLAY'S HISTORY OF GREECE                                      60

III. THE ASSASSINATION OF CÆSAR                                         91

IV. CICERO (SUPPLEMENTARY TO PUBLISHED ESSAY)                           95

V. MEMORIAL CHRONOLOGY                                                 107

VI. CHRYSOMANIA; OR, THE GOLD-FRENZY IN ITS PRESENT STAGE              157

VII. DEFENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEERAGE                                    169

VIII. THE ANTI-PAPAL MOVEMENT                                          174

IX. THEORY AND PRACTICE                                                182

X. POPE AND DIDACTIC POETRY                                            189

XI. SHAKSPEARE AND WORDSWORTH                                          197

XII. CRITICISM ON SOME OF COLERIDGE'S CRITICISMS OF WORDSWORTH         201

XIII. WORDSWORTH AND SOUTHEY: AFFINITIES AND DIFFERENCES               208

XIV. PRONUNCIATION                                                     213

XV. THE JEWISH SCRIPTURES COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN IN NO MODERN ERA     221

XVI. DISPERSION OF THE JEWS, AND JOSEPHUS'S ENMITY TO CHRISTIANITY     225

XVII. CHRISTIANITY AS THE RESULT OF PRE-ESTABLISHED HARMONY            228

XVIII. THE MESSIANIC IDEA ROMANIZED                                    238

XIX. CONTRAST OF GREEK AND PERSIAN FEELING IN CERTAIN ASPECTS          241

XX. OMITTED PASSAGES AND VARIED READINGS                               244
  1. Dinner                                                            244
  2. Omitted Passages from the Review of Bennett's Ceylon              246
  3. Gillman's Coleridge                                               255
  4. Why Scripture does not Deal with Science ('Pagan Oracles')        257
  5. Variation on a Famous Passage in 'The Daughter of Lebanon'        260




DE QUINCEY'S POSTHUMOUS WORKS.




_INTRODUCTION._


All that needs to be said in the way of introduction to this volume will
best take the form of notes on the articles which it contains.

I. '_Conversation and S. T. Coleridge._' This article, which was found
in a tolerably complete condition, may be regarded as an attempt to deal
with the subject in a more critical and searching, and at the same time
more sympathetic and inclusive spirit, than is apparent in any former
essay. It keeps clear entirely of the field of personal reminiscence;
and if it glances at matters on which dissent must be entered to the
views of Coleridge, it is still unvaryingly friendly and reverent
towards the subject. It is evidently of a later date than either the
'Reminiscences of Coleridge' in the 'Recollections of the Lakes' series,
or the article on 'Coleridge and Opium-Eating,' and may be accepted as
De Quincey's supplementary and final deliverance on Coleridge. The
beautiful apostrophe to the name of Coleridge, which we have given as a
kind of motto to the essay, was found attached to one of the sheets;
and, in spite of much mutilation and mixing of the pages with those of
other articles, as we originally found them, it was for the most part so
clearly written and carefully punctuated, that there can be no doubt,
when put together, we had it before us very much as De Quincey meant to
publish it had he found a fitting chance to do so. For such an article
as this neither _Tait_ nor _Hogg's Instructor_ afforded exactly the
proper medium, but rather some quarterly review, or magazine such as
_Blackwood_. We have given, in an appended note to this essay, some
corroboration from the poems of Coleridge of the truth of De Quincey's
words about the fatal effect on a nature like that of Coleridge of the
early and very sudden death of his father, his separation from his
mother, and his transference to Christ's Hospital, London.

II. _Mr. Finlay's_ '_History of Greece_.' This essay is totally
different, alike in the advances De Quincey makes to the subject, the
points taken up, and the general method of treatment, from the essay on
Mr. Finlay's volumes which appears in the Collected Works. It would seem
as though De Quincey, in such a topic as this, found it utterly
impossible to exhaust the points that had suggested themselves to him on
a careful reading of such a work, in the limits of one article; and
that, in this case, as in some others, he elaborated a second article,
probably with a view to finding a place for it in a different magazine
or review. In this, however, he either did not succeed, or, on his own
principle of the opium-eater never really finishing anything, retreated
from the practical work of pushing his wares with editors even after he
had finished them. At all events, we can find no trace of this article,
or any part of it, having ever been published. The Eastern Roman Empire
was a subject on which he might have written, not merely a couple of
review articles, but a volume, as we are sure anyone competent to judge
will, on carefully reading these articles, at once admit. This essay,
too, was found in a very complete condition, when the various pages had
been brought together and arranged. This is true of all save the last
few pages, which existed more in the form of notes, yet are perfectly
clear and intelligible; the leading thoughts being distinctly put,
though not followed out in any detail, or with the illustration which he
could so easily have given them.

III. '_The Assassination of Cæsar_.' This was clearly meant to be
inserted at the close of the first section of 'The Cæsars,' but was at
the last moment overlooked, though without it the text there, as it
stands in the Collected Works, is, for De Quincey, perhaps too hurried
and business-like.

IV. The little article on '_Cicero_' is evidently meant as a
supplementary note to the article on that eminent man, as it appears in
the Collected Works. Why De Quincey, when preparing these volumes for
the press, did not work it into his text is puzzling, as it develops
happily some points which he has there dwelt on, and presents in a very
effective and compact style the mingled feelings with which the great
Proconsul quitted his office in Cilicia, and his feelings on arriving at
Rome.

V. _Memorial Chronology._--This is a continuation of that already
published under the same title in the Collected Works. In a note from
the publishers, preceding the portion already given in the sixteenth
volume of the original edition, and the fourteenth of Professor Masson's
edition, it is said: 'This article was written about twenty years ago
[1850], and is printed here for the first time from the author's _MS_.
It was his intention to have continued the subject, but this was never
done.' From the essay we now present it will be seen that this last
statement is only in a modified sense true--the more that the portion
published in the Messrs. Black's editions is, on the whole, merely
introductory, and De Quincey's peculiar _technica memoria_ is not there
even indicated, which it is, with some degree of clearness, in the
following pages, and these may be regarded as presenting at least the
leading outlines of what the whole series would have been.

De Quincey's method, after having fixed a definite accepted point of
departure, was to link the memory of events to a period made signal by
identity of figures. Thus, he finds the fall of Assyria, the first of
the Olympiads, and the building of Rome to date from about the year 777
B.C. That is his starting-point in definite chronology. Then he takes up
the period from 777 to 555; from 555 to 333, and so on.

De Quincey was writing professedly for ladies only, and not for
scholars; and that his acknowledged leading obstacle was the
semi-mythical wilderness of all early oriental history is insisted on
with emphasis. The way in which he triumphs over this obstacle is
certainly characteristic and ingenious. Though the latter part is
fragmentary, it is suggestive; and from the whole a fair conception may
be formed of what the finished work would have been had De Quincey been
able to complete it, and of the eloquence with which he would have
relieved the mere succession of dates and figures.

It is clear that in the original form, though the papers were written
for ladies, the phantasy of a definite 'Charlotte' as fair
correspondent had not suggested itself to him; and that he had recourse
to this only in the final rewriting, and would have applied it to the
whole had he been spared to pursue his plan of recast and revision for
the Collected Works, as it was his intention to have done. Mrs. Baird
Smith remembers very clearly her father's many conversations on this
subject and his leading ideas--it was, in fact, a pet scheme of his; and
it is therefore the more to be regretted that his final revision only
embraced a small portion of the matter which he had already written.

It only needs to be added that, at the time De Quincey wrote,
exploration in Assyria and Egypt, not to speak of discovery in Akkad,
had made but little way compared with what has now been accomplished,
else certain passages in this essay would no doubt have been somewhat
modified.

VI. The article entitled '_Chrysomania; or the Gold Frenzy at its
Present Stage_', was evidently written after the two articles which
appeared in _Hogg's Instructor_. Not improbably it was felt that the
readers of _Hogg's Instructor_ had already had enough on the Gold Craze,
and this it was deemed better not to publish; but it has an interest as
supplementing much that De Quincey had said in these papers, and is a
happy illustration of his style in dealing with such subjects. Evidently
the editor of _Hogg's Instructor_ was hardly so attracted by these
papers as by others of De Quincey's; for we find that he had excised
some of the notes.

VII. '_The Defence of the English Peerage_' is printed because, although
it does not pretend to much detail or research, it shows anew De
Quincey's keen interest in the events of English history, and his vivid
appreciation of the peerage as a means of quickening and reviving in
the minds of the people the memorable events with which the earlier
bearers of these ancient titles had been connected.

VIII. The '_Anti-Papal Movement_' may be taken to attest once more De
Quincey's keen interest in all the topics of the day, political, social,
and ecclesiastical.

IX. The section on literature more properly will be interesting to many
as exhibiting some new points of contact with Wordsworth and Southey.

X. The articles on the '_Dispersion of the Jews_,' and on '_Christianity
as the result of a Pre-established Harmony_,' will, we think, be found
interesting by theologians as well as by readers generally, as attesting
not only the keen interest of De Quincey in these and allied subjects,
but also his penetration and keen grasp, and his faculty of felicitous
illustration, by which ever and anon he lights up the driest subjects.




_I. CONVERSATION AND S. T. COLERIDGE._

     Oh name of Coleridge, that hast mixed so much with the
     trepidations of our own agitated life, mixed with the
     beatings of our love, our gratitude, our trembling hope;
     name destined to move so much of reverential sympathy and so
     much of ennobling strife in the generations yet to come, of
     our England at home, of our other Englands on the St.
     Lawrence, on the Mississippi, on the Indus and Ganges, and
     on the pastoral solitudes of Austral climes!


What are the great leading vices of conversation as generally
managed?--vices that are banished from the best society by the
legislation of manners, not by any intellectual legislation, but in
other forms of society, and exactly as it approaches to the character of
vulgarism, disturbing all approaches to elegance in conversation, and
disorganizing it as a thing capable of unity or of progress? These vices
are, first, disputation; secondly, garrulity; thirdly, the spirit of
interruption.

I. I lay it down as a rule, but still reserving their peculiar rights
and exceptions to young Scotchmen for whom daily disputing is a sort of
daily bread, that the man who disputes is a monster, and that he ought
to be expelled from civilized society. Or could not a compromise be
effected for disputatious people, by allowing a private disputing room
in all hotels, as they have private rooms for smoking? I have heard of
two Englishmen, gentlemanly persons, but having a constitutional _furor_
for boxing, who quieted their fighting instincts in this way. It was
not glory which they desired, but mutual punishment, given and taken
with a hearty goodwill. Yet, as their feelings of refinement revolted
from making themselves into a spectacle of partisanship for the public
to bet on, they retired into a ball-room, and locked the doors, so that
nothing could transpire of the campaigns within except from the
desperate rallies and floorings which were heard, or from the bloody
faces which were seen on their issuing. A limited admission, it was
fancied, might have been allowed to select friends; but the courteous
refusal of both parties was always 'No; the pounding was strictly
confidential.' Now, pray, gentlemen disputers, could you not make your
pounding 'strictly confidential'? My chief reasons for doing so I will
mention:

1. That disputing is in bad tone; it is vulgar, and essentially the
resource of uncultured people.

2. It argues want of intellectual power, or, in any case, want of
intellectual development. It is because men find it easier to talk by
disputing than by _not_ disputing that so many people resort to this
coarse expedient for calling the wind into the sails of conversation. To
move along in the key of contradiction is the cheapest of all devices
for purchasing a power that is not your own. You are then carried along
by a towing-line attached to another vessel. There is no free power.
Always your antagonist predetermines the course of your own movement;
and you his. What _he_ says, you unsay. He affirms, you deny. He knits,
you unknit. Always you are servile to _him_; and he to _you_. Yet even
that system of motion in reverse of another motion, of mere antistrophe
or dancing backward what the strophe had danced forward, is better after
all, you say, than standing stock still. For instance, it might have
been tedious enough to hear Mr. Cruger disputing every proposition that
Burke advanced on the Bristol hustings; yet even _that_ some people
would prefer to Cruger's single observation, viz., 'I say _ditto_ to Mr.
Burke.' Every man to his taste: I, for one, should have preferred Mr.
Cruger's _ditto_.[1] But why need we have a _ditto_, a simple _affirmo_,
because we have _not_ an eternal _nego_? The proper spirit of
conversation moves in the general key of assent, but still not therefore
of mere iteration, but still each bar of the music is different. Nature
surely does not repeat herself, yet neither does she maintain the
eternal variety of her laughing beauty by constantly contradicting
herself, and quite as little by monotonously repeating herself. Her
samenesses are differences.

II. Of the evils of garrulity, which, like the ceaseless droppings
of water, will eat into the toughest rock of patience and
self-satisfaction, I have spoken at considerable length elsewhere. Its
evils are so evident that they hardly call for further illustration. The
garrulous man, paradoxical as it may seem to say it, is a kind of
pickpocket without intending to steal anything--nay, rather he is fain
to please you by placing something in your pocket--though too often it
is like the egg of the cuckoo in the nest of another bird.

III. Now, as to _Interruption_, what's to be done? It is a question that
I have often considered. For the evil is great, and the remedy occult. I
look upon a man that interrupts another in conversation as a monster
far less excusable than a cannibal; yet cannibals (though,
comparatively with _interrupters_, valuable members of society) are
rare, and, even where they are _not_ rare, they don't practise as
cannibals every day: it is but on sentimental occasions that the
exhibition of cannibalism becomes general. But the monsters who
interrupt men in the middle of a sentence are to be found everywhere;
and they are always practising. Red-letter days or black-letter days,
festival or fast, makes no difference to _them_. This enormous nuisance
I feel the more, because it is one which I never retaliate. Interrupted
in every sentence, I still practise the American Indian's politeness of
never interrupting. What, absolutely _never_? Is there _no_ case in
which I should? If a man's nose, or ear, as sometimes happens in high
latitudes, were suddenly and visibly frost-bitten, so as instantly to
require being rubbed with snow, I conceive it lawful to interrupt that
man in the most pathetic sentence, or even to ruin a whole paragraph of
his prose. You can never indeed give him back the rhetoric which you
have undermined; _that_ is true; but neither could he, in the
alternative case, have given back to himself the nose which you have
saved.

I contend also, against a great casuist in this matter, that had you
been a friend of Æschylus, and distinctly observed that absurd old
purblind eagle that mistook (or pretended to mistake) the great poet's
bald head--that head which created the Prometheus and the Agamemnon--for
a white tablet of rock, and had you interrupted the poet in his talk at
the very moment when the bird was dropping a lobster on the sacred
cranium, with the view of unshelling the lobster, but unaware that at
the same time he was unshelling a great poet's brain, you would have
been fully justified. An impertinence it would certainly have been to
interrupt a sentence as undeniable in its Greek as any which that
gentleman can be supposed to have turned out, but still the eagle's
impertinence was greater.[2] That would have been your excuse. Æschylus,
or my friend the casuist, is not to be listened to in his very learned
arguments _contra_.

Short of these cases, nothing can justify an interruption; and such
cases surely cannot be common, since how often can we suppose it to
happen that an eagle has a lobster to break just at the moment when a
tragic poet is walking abroad without his hat? What the reader's
experience may have been, of course, is unknown to me; but, for my own
part, I hardly meet with such a case twice in ten years, though I know
an extensive circle of tragic poets, and a reasonable number of bald
heads; eagles certainly not so many--they are but few on my visiting
list; and indeed, if that's their way of going on--cracking literary
skulls without leave asked or warning given--the fewer one knows the
better. If, then, a long life hardly breeds a case in which it is
strictly lawful to interrupt a co-dialogist, what are we to think of
those who move in conversation by the very principle of interruption?
And a variety of the nuisance there is, which I consider equally bad.
Men, that do not absolutely interrupt you, are yet continually _on the
fret_ to do so, and undisguisedly on the fret all the time you are
speaking. To invent a Latin word which ought to have been invented
before my time, 'non interrumpunt at _interrupturiunt_.' You can't talk
in peace for such people; and as to prosing, which I suppose you've a
right to do by _Magna Charta_, it is quite out of the question when a
man is looking in your face all the time with a cruel expression in his
eye amounting to 'Surely, that's enough!' or a pathetic expression which
says, '_Have_ you done?' throwing a dreadful reproach into the _Have_.
In Cumberland, at a farmhouse where I once had lodgings for a week or
two, a huge dog as high as the dining-table used to plant himself in a
position to watch all my motions at dinner. Being alone, and either
reading or thinking, at first I did not observe him; but as soon as I
did, and noticed that he pursued each rising and descent of my fork as
the poet 'with wistful eyes pursues the setting sun,' that unconsciously
he mimicked and rehearsed all the notes and _appoggiaturas_ that make up
the successive bars in the music of eating one's dinner, I was compelled
to rise, and say, 'My good fellow, I can't stand this; will you do me
the favour to accept anything on my plate at this moment? And to-morrow
I'll endeavour to arrange for your being otherwise employed at this hour
than in watching _me_.' It seems a weakness, but I really cannot eat
anything under the oppression of an envious _surveillance_ like that
dog's. A man said to me, 'Oh, what need you care about _him_? He has had
_his_ dinner long ago.' True, at twelve or one o'clock; but at six he
might want another; but, if he thinks so himself, the result is the
same. And that result is what the whole South of Frankistan[3] calls the
_evil eye_. Wanting dinner, when he sees another person in the very act
of dining, the dog (though otherwise an excellent creature) must be
filled with envy; and envy is so contagiously allied to malice, that in
elder English one word expresses both those dark modifications of
hatred. The dog's eye therefore, without any consciousness on his own
part, becomes in such a case _an evil eye_: upon me, at least, it fell
with as painful an effect as any established eye of that class could do
upon the most superstitious Portuguese.

Now, such exactly is the eye of any man that, without actually
interrupting one, threatens by his impatient manner as often as one
begins to speak. It has a blighting effect upon one's spirits. And the
only resource is to say frankly (as I said to the dog), 'Would you
oblige me, sir, by taking the whole of the talk into your own hands? Do
not for ever threaten to do so, but at once boldly lay an interdict upon
any other person's speaking.'

To those who suffer from nervous irritability, the man that suspends
over our heads his _threat_ of interruption by constant impatience, is
even a more awful person to face than the actual interrupter. Either of
them is insufferable; and in cases where the tone of prevailing manners
is not vigorous enough to put such people down, or where the individual
monster, being not _couchant_ or _passant_, but (heraldically speaking)
_rampant_, utterly disregards all restraints that are not enforced by a
constable, the question comes back with greater force than ever, which I
stated at the beginning of this article, 'What's to be done?'

I really cannot imagine. Despair seizes me 'with her icy fangs,' unless
the reader can suggest something; or unless he can improve on a plan of
my own sketching.

As a talker for effect, as a _bravura_ artist in conversation, no one
has surpassed Coleridge. There is a Spanish proverb, that he who has not
seen Seville, has seen nothing. And I grieve to inform the present
unfortunate generation, born under an evil star, coming, in fact, into
the world a day after the fair, that, not having heard Coleridge, they
have _heard_--pretty much what the strangers to Seville have _seen_,
which (you hear from the Spaniards) amounts to nothing. _Nothing_ is
hardly a thing to be proud of, and yet it has its humble advantages. To
have heard Coleridge was a thing to remember with pride as a trophy, but
with pain as a trophy won by some personal sacrifice. To have heard
Coleridge has now indeed become so great a distinction, that if it were
transferable, and a man could sell it by auction, the biddings for it
would run up as fast as for a genuine autograph of Shakespeare. The
story is current under a thousand forms of the man who piqued himself on
an interview which he had once enjoyed with royalty; and, being asked
what he could repeat to the company of his gracious Majesty's remarks,
being an honest fellow he confessed candidly that the King, happening to
be pressed for time, had confined himself to saying, 'Dog, stand out of
my horse's way'; and many persons that might appear as claimants to the
honour of having conversed with Coleridge could perhaps report little
more of personal communication than a courteous request from the great
man not to interrupt him. Inevitably, however, from this character of
the Coleridgean conversation arose certain consequences, which are too
much overlooked by those who bring it forward as a model or as a
splendid variety in the proper art of conversation. And speaking myself
as personally a witness to the unfavourable impression left by these
consequences, I shall not scruple in this place to report them with
frankness.

At the same time, having been heretofore publicly misrepresented and
possibly because misunderstood as to the temper in which I spoke of
Coleridge, and as though I had violated some duty of friendship in
uttering a truth not flattering after his death, I wish so far to
explain the terms on which we stood as to prevent any similar
misconstruction. It would be impossible in any case for me to attempt a
Plinian panegyric, or a French _éloge_. Not that I think such forms of
composition false, any more than an advocate's speech, or a political
partisan's: it is understood from the beginning that they are one-sided;
but still true according to the possibilities of truth when caught from
an angular and not a central station. There is even a pleasure as from a
gorgeous display, and a use as from a fulness of unity, in reading a
grand or even pompous laudatory oration upon a man like Leibnitz, or
Newton, which neglects all his errors or blemishes. This abstracting
view I could myself adopt as to a man whom I had learned to know from
books, but not as to one whom I knew also from personal intercourse. His
faults and his greatness are then too much intertwisted. There is still
something unreal in the knowledge of men through books; with which is
compatible a greater flexibility of estimate. But the absolute realities
of life acting upon any mind of deep sincerity do not leave the same
liberty of suppression or concealment. In that case, the reader may
perhaps say, and wherever the relations of the writer to a deceased man
prescribe many restraints of tenderness or delicacy, would it not be
better to forbear speaking at all? Certainly; and I go on therefore to
say that my own relations to Coleridge were not of that nature. I had
the greatest admiration for his intellectual powers, which in one
direction I thought and think absolutely unrivalled on earth; I had also
that sort of love for him which arises naturally as a rebound from
intense admiration, even where there is little of social congeniality.
But, in any stricter sense of the word, _friends_ we were not. For years
we met at intervals in society; never once estranged by any the
slightest shadow of a quarrel or a coolness. But there were reasons,
arising out of original differences in our dispositions and habits,
which would probably have forever prevented us, certainly _did_ prevent
us, from being confidential friends. Yet, if we had been such, even the
more for that reason the sincerity of my nature would oblige me to speak
freely if I spoke at all of anything which I might regard as amongst his
errors. For the perfection of genial homage, one may say, in the
expression of Petronius Arbiter, _Præcipitandus est liber spiritus_, the
freedom of the human spirit must be thrown headlong through the whole
realities of the subject, without picking or choosing, without garbling
or disguising. It yet remains as a work of the highest interest, to
estimate (but for that to display) Coleridge in his character of great
philosophic thinker, in which character he united perfections that never
_were_ united but in three persons on this earth, in himself, in Plato
(as many suppose), and in Schelling, viz., the utmost expansion and in
some paths the utmost depths of the searching intellect with the utmost
sensibility to the powers and purposes of Art: whilst, as a creator in
Art, he had pretensions which neither Plato nor Schelling could make.
His powers as a Psychologist (not as a Metaphysician) seem to me
absolutely unrivalled on earth. And had his health been better, so as
to have sustained the natural cheerfulness towards which his nature
tended, had his pecuniary embarrassments been even moderately lightened
in their pressure, and had his studies been more systematically directed
to one end--my conviction is that he would have left a greater
philosophic monument of his magnificent mind than Aristotle, or Lord
Bacon, or Leibnitz.

With these feelings as to the pretensions of Coleridge, I am not likely
to underrate anything which he did. But a thing may be very difficult to
do, very splendid when done, and yet false in its principles, useless in
its results, memorable perhaps by its impression at the time, and yet
painful on the whole to a thoughtful retrospect. In dancing it is but
too common that an intricate _pas seul_, in funambulism that a dangerous
feat of equilibration, in the Grecian art of _desultory_ equitation
(where a single rider governs a plurality of horses by passing from one
to another) that the flying contest with difficulty and peril, may
challenge an anxiety of interest, may bid defiance to the possibility of
inattention, and yet, after all, leave the jaded spectator under a sense
of distressing tension given to his faculties. The sympathy is with the
difficulties attached to the effort and the display, rather than with
any intellectual sense of power and skill genially unfolded under
natural excitements. It would be idle to cite Madame de Staël's remark
on one of these meteoric exhibitions, viz., that Mr. Coleridge possessed
the art of monologue in perfection, but not that of the dialogue; yet it
comes near to hitting the truth from her point of view. The habit of
monologue which Coleridge favoured lies open to three fatal objections:
1. It is antisocial in a case expressly meant by its final cause for the
triumph of sociality; 2. It refuses all homage to women on an arena
expressly dedicated to their predominance; 3. It is essentially fertile
in _des longueurs_. Could there be imagined a trinity of treasons
against the true tone of social intercourse more appalling to a Parisian
taste?

In a case such as this, where Coleridge was the performer, I myself
enter less profoundly into the brilliant woman's horror, for the reason
that, having originally a necessity almost morbid for the intellectual
pleasures that depend on solitude, I am constitutionally more careless
about the luxuries of conversation. I see them; like them in the rare
cases where they flourish, but do not require them. Not sympathizing,
therefore, with the lady's horror in its intensity, I yet find my
judgment in harmony with hers. The evils of Coleridgean talk, even
managed by a Coleridge, were there, and they fixed themselves
continually on my observation:

I. It defeats the very end of social meetings. Without the excitement
from a reasonable number of auditors, and some novelty in the
composition of his audience, Coleridge was hardly able to talk his best.
Now, at the end of some hours, it struck secretly on the good sense of
the company. Was it reasonable to have assembled six, ten, or a dozen
persons for the purpose of hearing a prelection? Would not the time have
been turned to more account, even as regarded the object which they had
substituted for _social_ pleasure, in studying one of Coleridge's
printed works?--since there his words were stationary and not flying, so
that notes might be taken down, and questions proposed by way of letter,
on any impenetrable difficulties; whereas in a stream of oral teaching,
which ran like the stream of destiny, impassive to all attempts at
interruption, difficulties for ever arose to irritate your nervous
system at the moment, and to vex you permanently by the recollection
that they had prompted a dozen questions, every one of which you had
forgotten through the necessity of continuing to run alongside with the
speaker, and through the impossibility of saying, 'Halt, Mr. Coleridge!
Pull up, I beseech you, if it were but for two minutes, that I may try
to fathom that last sentence.' This in all conversation is one great
evil, viz., the substitution of an alien purpose for the natural and
appropriate purpose. Not to be intellectual in a direct shape, but to be
intellectual through sociality, is the legitimate object of a social
meeting. It may be right, medically speaking, that a man should be
shampooed; but it cannot be right that, having asked him to dine, you
should decline dinner and substitute a shampooing. This a man would be
apt to call by the shorter name of a _sham_.

II. It diminishes the power of the talking performer himself. Seeming to
have more, the man has less. For a man is never thrown upon his mettle,
nor are his true resources made known even to himself, until to some
extent he finds himself resisted (or at least modified) by the reaction
of those around him. That day, says Homer, robs a man of half his value
which sees him made a slave. But to be an autocrat is as perilous as to
be a slave. And supposing Homer to have been introduced to Coleridge
(a supposition which a learned man at my elbow pronounces
intolerable--'It's an anachronism, sir, a base anachronism!' Well, but
one may _suppose_ anything, however base), Homer would have observed to
me, as we came away from the _soirée_, 'In my opinion, our splendid
friend S. T. C. would have been the better for a few kicks on the
shins. That day takes away half of a man's talking value which raises
him into an irresponsible dictator to his company.'

III. It diminishes a man's power in another way less obvious, but not
less certain. I had often occasion to remark how injurious it was to the
impression of Coleridge's finest displays where the minds of the hearers
had been long detained in a state of passiveness. To understand fully,
to sympathise deeply, it was essential that they should react. Absolute
inertia produced inevitable torpor. I am not supposing any indocility,
or unwillingness to listen. Generally it might be said that merely to
find themselves in that presence argued sufficiently in the hearers a
cheerful dedication of themselves to a dutiful patience.

The mistake, in short, is to suppose that the particular power of talk
Coleridge had was a _nuance_ or modification of what is meant by
conversational power; whereas it was the direct antithesis: it differed
diametrically. So much as he had of his own peculiar power, so much more
alien and remote was he from colloquial power. This remark should be
introduced by observing that Madame de Staël's obvious criticism passes
too little unvalued or unsearched either by herself or others. She
fancied it an accidental inclination or a caprice, or a sort of
self-will or discourtesy or inattention. No; it was a faculty in polar
opposition to the true faculty of conversation.

Coleridge was copious, and not without great right, upon the subject of
Art. It is a subject upon which we personally are very impatient, and
(as Mrs. Quickly expresses it) peevish, as peevish as Rugby in his
prayers.[4] Is this because we know too much about Art? Oh, Lord bless
you, no! We know too little about it by far, and our wish is--to know
more. But _that_ is difficult; so many are the teachers, who by accident
had never any time to learn; so general is the dogmatism; and, worse
than all, so inveterate is the hypocrisy, wherever the graces of liberal
habits and association are supposed to be dependent upon a particular
mode of knowledge. To know nothing of theology or medicine has a sort of
credit about it; so far at least it is clear that you are not
professional, and to that extent the chances are narrowed that you get
your bread out of the public pocket. To be sure, it is still possible
that you may be a stay-maker, or a rat-catcher. But these are
out-of-the-way vocations, and nobody adverts to such narrow
possibilities. Now, on the other hand, to be a connoisseur in painting
or in sculpture, supposing always that you are no practising artist, in
other words, supposing that you know nothing about the subject, implies
that you must live amongst _comme-il-faut_ people who possess pictures
and casts to look at; else how the deuce could you have got your
knowledge--or, by the way, your ignorance, which answers just as well
amongst those who are not peevish. We, however, _are_ so, as we have
said already. And what made us peevish, in spite of strong original
_stamina_ for illimitable indulgence to all predestined bores and
nuisances in the way of conversation, was--not the ignorance, not the
nonsense, not the contradictoriness of opinion--no! but the false,
hypocritical enthusiasm about objects for which in reality they cared
not the fraction of a straw. To hear these bores talk of educating the
people to an acquaintance with what they call 'high art'! Ah, heavens,
mercifully grant that the earth may gape for us before _our_ name is
placed on any such committee! 'High art,' indeed! First of all, most
excellent bores, would you please to educate the people into the high
and mysterious art of boiling potatoes. We, though really owning no
particular duty or moral obligation of boiling potatoes, really _can_
boil them very decently in any case arising of public necessity for our
services; and if the art should perish amongst men, which seems likely
enough, so long as _we_ live, the public may rely upon it being
restored. But as to women, as to the wives of poor hard-working men, not
one in fifty can boil a potato into a condition that is not ruinous to
the digestion. And we have reason to know that the Chartists, on their
great meditated outbreak, having hired a six-pounder from a pawnbroker,
meant to give the signal for insurrection at dinner-time, because (as
they truly observed) cannon-balls, hard and hot, would then be plentiful
on every table. God sends potatoes, we all know; but _who_ it is that
sends the boilers of potatoes, out of civility to the female sex, we
decline to say.

Well, but this (you say) is a digression. Why, true; and a digression is
often the cream of an article. However, as you dislike it, let us
_re_gress as fast as possible, and scuttle back from the occult art of
boiling potatoes to the much more familiar one of painting in oil. Did
Coleridge really understand this art? Was he a sciolist, was he a
pretender, or did he really judge of it from a station of
heaven-inspired knowledge? A hypocrite Coleridge never was upon any
subject; he never affected to know when secretly he felt himself
ignorant. And yet, of the topics on which he was wont eloquently to hold
forth, there was none on which he was less satisfactory--none on which
he was more acute, yet none on which he was more prone to excite
contradiction and irritation, if that had been allowed.

Here, for example, is a passage from one of his lectures on art:

'It is sufficient that philosophically we understand that in all
imitations two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be
perceived as existing. Those two constituent elements are likeness and
unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all genuine creations of
art there must be a union of these disparates. The artist may take this
point of view where he pleases, provided that the desired effect be
perceptibly produced, that there be likeness in the difference,
difference in the likeness, and a reconcilement of both in one. If there
be likeness to nature without any check of difference, the result is
disgusting, and the more complete the delusion the more loathsome the
effect. Why are such simulations of nature as wax-work figures of men
and women so disagreeable? Because, not finding the motion and the life
all we expected, we are shocked as by a falsehood, every circumstance of
detail, which before induced you to be interested, making the distance
from truth more palpable. You set out with a supposed reality, and are
disappointed and disgusted with the deception; whilst in respect to a
work of genuine imitation you begin with an acknowledged total
difference, and then every touch of nature gives you the pleasure of an
approximation to truth.'

In this exposition there must be some oversight on the part of
Coleridge. He tells us in the beginning that, if there be 'likeness to
nature without any check of difference, the result is disgusting.' But
the case of the wax-work, which is meant to illustrate this proposition,
does not at all conform to the conditions; the result is disgusting
certainly, but not from any want of difference to control the sameness,
for, on the contrary, the difference is confessedly too revolting; and
apparently the distinction between the two cases described is simply
this--that in the illegitimate case of the wax-work the likeness comes
first and the unlikeness last, whereas in the other case this order is
reversed. But that distinction will neither account _in fact_ for the
difference of effect; nor, if it _did_, would it account upon any reason
or ground suggested by Coleridge for such a difference. Let us consider
this case of wax-work a little more vigilantly, and then perhaps we may
find out both why it is that some men unaffectedly _are_ disgusted by
wax-work; and secondly, why it is that, if trained on just principles of
reflective taste, all men _would_ be so affected.

As a matter not altogether without importance, we may note that even the
frailty of the material operates to some extent in disgusting us with
wax-work. A higher temperature of the atmosphere, it strikes us too
forcibly, would dispose the waxen figures to melt; and in colder seasons
the horny fist of a jolly boatswain would 'pun[5] them into shivers'
like so many ship-biscuits. The grandeur of permanence and durability
transfers itself or its expression from the material to the impression
of the artifice which moulds it, and crystallizes itself in the effect.
We see continually very ingenious imitations of objects cut out in paper
filigree; there have been people who showed as much of an artist's eye
in this sort of work, and of an artist's hand, as Miss Linwood of the
last generation in her exquisite needlework; in both cases a trick, a
_tour-de-main_, was raised into the dignity of a fine art; and yet,
because the slightness of the material too emphatically proclaims the
essential perishableness of the result, nobody views such modes of art
with more even of a momentary interest than the morning wreaths of smoke
ascending so beautifully from a cottage chimney, or cares much to
preserve them. The traceries of hoar frost upon the windows of inhabited
rooms are not only beautiful in the highest degree, but have been shown
in several French memoirs to obey laws of transcendental geometry, and
also to obey physical laws of startling intricacy. These lovely forms of
almighty nature wear the grandeur of mystery, of floral beauty, and of
science (immanent science) not always fathomable.[6] They are anything
but capricious. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like _them_;
and yet, simply because the sad hand of mortality is upon them, because
they are dedicated to death, because on genial days they will have
passed into the oblivion of graves before the morning sun has mounted to
his meridian, we do not so much as honour them with a transient stare
from the breakfast-table. Ah, wretches that we are, the horrid
carnalities of tea and toast, or else the horrid bestialities in morning
journals of Chartists and Cobdenites at home, of Red Ruffians abroad,
draw off our attention from the chonchoids and the cycloids pencilled by
the Eternal Geometrician! and these celestial traceries of the dawn,
which neither Da Vinci nor Raphaello was able to have followed as a
mimic, far less as a rival, we regard as a nuisance claiming the
attentions of the window-cleaner; even as the spider's web, that might
absorb an angel into reverie, is honoured amongst the things banned by
the housemaid. But _the_ reason why the wax-work disgusts is that it
seeks to reproduce in literal detail the traits that should be softened
under a general diffusive impression; the likeness to nature is
presented in what is essentially fleeting and subsidiary, and the 'check
of difference' is found also in this very literality, and not in any
effort of the etherealizing imagination, as it is in all true works of
art; so that the case really stands the exact opposite of that which
Coleridge had given in his definition.[7]

To pass from art to style. How loose and arbitrary Coleridge not
infrequently was in face of the laws on that subject which he had
himself repeatedly laid down! Could it be believed of a man so quick to
feel, so rapid to arrest all phenomena, that in a matter so important as
that of style, he should have nothing loftier to record of his own
merits, services, reformations, or cautions, than that he has always
conscientiously forborne to use the personal genitive _whose_ in
speaking of inanimate things? For example, that he did not say, and
could not have been tempted or tortured into saying, 'The bridge _whose_
piers could not much longer resist the flood.' Well, as they say in
Scotland, some people are thankful for small mercies. We--that is, you,
the reader, and ourselves--are _persons_; the bridge, you see, is but a
_thing_. We pity it, poor thing, and, as far as it is possible to
entertain such a sentiment for a bridge, we feel respect for it. Few
bridges are thoroughly contemptible; and we make a point, in obedience
to an old-world proverb, always to speak well of the bridge that has
carried us over in safety, which the worst of bridges never yet has
refused to do. But still there _are_ such things as social distinctions;
and we conceive that a man and a 'contributor' (an _ancient_ contributor
to _Blackwood_), must in the herald's college be allowed a permanent
precedency before all bridges whatsoever, without regard to number of
arches, width of span, or any other frivolous pretences. We acknowledge
therefore with gratitude Coleridge's loyalty to his own species in not
listening to any compromise with mere things, that never were nor will
be raised to the peerage of personality, and sternly refusing them the
verbal honours which are sacred to us humans. But what is the principle
of taste upon which Coleridge justifies this rigorous practice? It
is--and we think it a very just principle--that this mechanic mode of
giving life to things inanimate ranks 'amongst those worst mimicries of
poetic diction by which imbecile writers fancy they elevate their
prose.' True; but the same spurious artifices for giving a fantastic
elevation to prose reappear in a thousand other forms, from some of
which neither Coleridge nor his accomplished daughter is absolutely
free. For instance, one of the commonest abuses of pure English amongst
our Scottish brethren, unless where they have been educated out of
Scotland, is to use _aught_ for _anything_, _ere_ for _before_,
_well-nigh_ for _almost_, and scores besides. No home-bred, _i.e._
Cockney Scotchman, is aware that these are poetic forms, and are as
ludicrously stilted in any ear trained by the daily habits of good
society to the appreciation of pure English--as if, in Spenserian
phrase, he should say, '_What time_ I came home to breakfast,' instead
of '_When_ I came home.' The _'tis_ and _'twas_, which have been
superannuated for a century in England, except in poetic forms, still
linger in Scotland and in Ireland, and these forms also at intervals
look out from Coleridge's prose. Coleridge is also guilty at odd times
(as is Wordsworth) of that most horrible affectation, the _hath_ and
_doth_ for _has_ and _does_. This is really criminal. But amongst all
barbarisms known to man, the very worst--and this also, we are sorry to
say, flourishes as rankly as weeds in Scotch prose, and is to be found
in Coleridge's writings--is the use of the _thereof_, _therein_,
_thereby_, _thereunto_. This monstrous expression of imperfect
civilization, which for one hundred and fifty years has been cashiered
by cultivated Englishmen as _attorneys' English_, and is absolutely
frightful unless in a lease or conveyance, ought (we do not scruple to
say) to be made indictable at common law, not perhaps as a felony, but
certainly as a misdemeanour, punishable by fine and imprisonment.

In nothing is the characteristic mode of Coleridge's mind to be seen
more strikingly than in his treatment of some branches of dramatic
literature, though to that subject he had devoted the closest study. He
was almost as distinguished, indeed, for the points he missed as for
those he saw. Look at his position as regards some questions concerning
the French drama and its critics, more particularly the views of
Voltaire, though some explanation may be found in the fact, which I have
noticed elsewhere, that Coleridge's acquaintance with the French
language was not such as to enable him to read it with the easy
familiarity which ensures complete pleasure. But something may also be
due to his deep and absorbed religious feeling, which seemed to
incapacitate him from perceiving the points where Voltaire, despite his
scepticism, had planted his feet on firm ground. Coleridge was aware
that Voltaire, in common with every Frenchman until the present
generation, held it as a point of faith that the French drama was
inapproachable in excellence. From Lessing, and chiefly, from his
_Dramaturgie_, Coleridge was also aware, on the other hand, upon what
erroneous grounds that imaginary pre-eminence was built. He knew that it
was a total misconception of the Greek unities (excepting only as
regards the unity of fable, or, as Coleridge otherwise calls it, the
_unity of interest_) which had misled the French. It was a huge blunder.
The case was this: Peculiar embarrassments had arisen to the Athenian
dramatists as to time and place, from the chorus--out of which chorus
had grown the whole drama. The chorus, composed generally of men or
women, could not be moved from Susa to Memphis or from one year to
another, as might the spectator. This was a fetter, but, with the
address of great artists, they had turned their fetters into occasions
of ornament. But, in this act of beautifying their narrow field, they
had done nothing to enlarge it. They had submitted gracefully to what,
for _them_, was a religious necessity. But it was ridiculous that modern
dramatists, under no such necessity (because clogged with no inheritance
of a personal chorus), should voluntarily assume fetters which, having
no ceremonial and hallowed call for a chorus, could have no meaning. So
far Coleridge was kept right by his own sagacity and by his German
guides; but a very trifle of further communication with Voltaire, and
with the writers of whom Voltaire was speaking, would have introduced
him to two facts calculated a little to raise Voltaire in his esteem,
and very much to lower the only French writer (viz., Racine) whom he
ever thought fit to praise. With regard to Voltaire himself he would
have found that, so far from exalting the French poetic literature
_generally_ in proportion to that monstrous pre-eminence which he had
claimed for the French drama, on the contrary, from this very drama,
from the very pre-eminence, he drew an argument for the general
inferiority of the French poetry. The French drama, he argued, was
confessedly exalted amongst the French themselves beyond any other
section of their literature. But why? Why was this? If the drama had
prospered disproportionately under public favour, what caused that
favour? It was, said Voltaire, the social nature of the French, with
their consequent interest in whatever assumed the attire of conversation
or dialogue; and, secondly, it was the peculiar strength of their
language in that one function, which had been nursed and ripened by
this preponderance of social habits. Hence it happened that the drama
obtained at one and the same time a greater _interest_ for the French,
and also (by means of this culture given to conversational forms) most
unhappily for his lordship's critical discernment of flavours, as well
as his Greek literature, happens to be a respectable Joe Miller from the
era of Hierocles, and through _him_ probably it came down from
Pythagoras. Yet still Voltaire was very far indeed from being a
'scribbler.' He had the graceful levity and the graceful gaiety of his
nation in an exalted degree. He had a vast compass of miscellaneous
knowledge; pity that it was so disjointed, _arena sine calce_; pity that
you could never rely on its accuracy; and, as respected his epic poetry,
'tis true 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true, that you are rather
disposed to laugh than to cry when Voltaire solemnly proposes to be
sublime. His _Henriade_ originally appeared in London about 1726, when
the poet was visiting this country as a fugitive before the wrath of
Louis the Well-beloved; and naturally in the opening passage he
determined to astonish the weak minds of us islanders by a flourish on
the tight-rope of sublimity. But to his vexation a native Greek (viz., a
Smyrniot), then by accident in London, called upon him immediately after
the publication, and, laying his finger on a line in the exordium (as it
then stood), said, 'Sare, I am one countryman of Homer's. He write de
Iliad; you write de Henriade; but Homer vos never able in all de total
whole of de Iliad to write de verse like dis.' Upon which the Greek
showed him a certain line.

Voltaire admired the line itself, but in deference to this Greek irony,
supported by the steady advice of his English friends, he finally
altered it. It is possible to fail, however, as an epic poet, and very
excusable for a Frenchman to fail, and yet to succeed in many other
walks of literature. But to Coleridge's piety, to Coleridge's earnest
seeking for light, and to Coleridge's profound sense of the necessity
which connects from below all ultimate philosophy with religion, the
scoffing scepticism of Voltaire would form even a stronger repulsion
than his puerile hostility to Shakespeare. Even here, however, there is
something to be pleaded for Voltaire. Much of his irreligion doubtless
arose from a defective and unimpassioned nature, but part of it was
noble, and rested upon his intolerance of cruelty, of bigotry, and of
priestcraft--but still more of these qualities not germinating
spontaneously, but assumed fraudulently as masques. But very little
Coleridge had troubled himself to investigate Voltaire's views, even
where he was supposing himself to be ranged in opposition to them.

A word or two about those accusations of plagiarism of which far too
much has been made by more than one critic; we ourselves having,
perhaps, been guilty of too wantonly stirring these waters at one time
of our lives; and in the attempt to make matters more clear, only, it
may be, succeeded in muddying them. Stolberg, Matthison, Schiller,
Frederika Brun, Schelling, and others, whom he has been supposed to have
robbed of trifles, he could not expect to lurk[8] in darkness, and
particularly as he was actively contributing to disperse the darkness
that yet hung over their names in England. But really for such
bagatelles as were concerned in this poetic part of the allegation--even
Bow Street, with the bloodiest Draco of a critical reviewer sitting on
the bench, would not have entertained the charge. Most of us, we
suppose, would be ready enough to run off with a Titian or a Correggio,
provided the coast were clear, and no policemen heaving in sight; but to
be suspected of pocketing a silver spoon, which, after all, would
probably turn out to be made of German silver--faugh!--we not only defy
the fiend and his temptations generally, but we spit in his face for
such an insinuation. With respect to the pretty toy model of Hexameter
and Pentameter from Schiller, we believe the case to have arisen thus:
in talking of metre, and illustrating it (as Coleridge often did at
tea-tables) from Homer, and then from the innumerable wooden and
cast-iron imitations of it among the Germans--he would be very likely to
cite this little ivory bijou from Schiller; upon which the young ladies
would say: 'But, Mr. Coleridge, we do not understand German. Could you
not give us an idea of it in some English version?' Then would he, with
his usual obligingness, write down his mimic English echo of Schiller's
German echo. And of course the young ladies, too happy to possess an
autograph from the 'Ancient Mariner,' and an autograph besides having a
separate interest of its own, would endorse it with the immortal
initials 'S. T. C.,' after which an injunction issuing from the Court of
Chancery would be quite unavailing to arrest its flight through the
journals of the land as the avowed composition of Coleridge. They know
little of Coleridge's habits who suppose that his attention was
disposable for cases of this kind. Alike, whether he were unconsciously
made by the error of a reporter to rob others, or others to rob him, he
would be little likely to hear of the mistake--or, hearing of it by some
rare accident, to take any pains for its correction. It is probable that
such mistakes sometimes arose with others, but sometimes also with
himself from imperfect recollection; and _that_, owing chiefly to his
carelessness about the property at issue, so that it seemed not worth
the requisite effort to vindicate the claim if it happened to be _his_,
or formally to renounce it if it were not. But, however this might be,
his daughter's remark remains true, and is tolerably significant, that
the people whom (through anybody's mistake) he seems to have robbed were
all pretty much in the sunshine of the world's regard; there was no
attempt to benefit by darkness or twilight, and an intentional robber
must have known that the detection was inevitable.

A second thing to be said in palliation of such plagiarisms, real or
fancied, intentional or not intentional, is this--that at least
Coleridge never insulted or derided those upon whose rights he is
supposed to have meditated an aggression.

Coleridge has now been dead for more than fifteen years,[9] and he lived
through a painful life of sixty-three years; seventy-eight years it is
since he first drew that troubled air of earth, from which with such
bitter loathing he rose as a phoenix might be supposed to rise, that,
in retribution of some treason to his immortal race, had been compelled
for a secular period to banquet on carrion with ghouls, or on the spoils
of _vivisection_ with vampires. Not with less horror of retrospect than
such a phoenix did Coleridge, when ready to wing his flight from
earth, survey the chambers of suffering through which he had trod his
way from childhood to gray hairs. Perhaps amongst all the populous
nations of the grave not one was ever laid there, through whose bones so
mighty a thrill of shuddering anguish would creep, if by an audible
whisper the sound of earth and the memories of earth could reach his
coffin. Yet why? Was he not himself a child of earth? Yes, and by too
strong a link: _that_ it was which shattered him. For also he was a
child of Paradise, and in the struggle between two natures he could not
support himself erect. That dreadful conflict it was which supplanted
his footing. Had he been gross, fleshly, sensual, being so framed for
voluptuous enjoyment, he would have sunk away silently (as millions
sink) through carnal wrecks into carnal ruin. He would have been
mentioned oftentimes with a sigh of regret as that youthful author who
had enriched the literature of his country with two exquisite poems,
'Love' and the 'Ancient Mariner,' but who for some unknown reason had
not fulfilled his apparent mission on earth. As it was, being most
genial and by his physical impulses most luxurious; yet, on the other
hand, by fiery aspirations of intellect and of spiritual heart being
coerced as if through torments of magical spells into rising heavenwards
for ever, into eternal commerce with the grander regions of his own
nature, he found this strife too much for his daily peace, too imperfect
was the ally which he found in his will; treachery there was in his own
nature, and almost by a necessity he yielded to the dark temptations of
opium. That 'graspless hand,' from which, as already in one of his early
poems (November, 1794) he had complained--

    'Drop friendship's priceless pearls as hour-glass sands,'

was made much _more_ graspless, and in this way the very graces of his
moral nature ministered eventually the heaviest of his curses. Most
unworldly he was, most unmercenary, and (as somebody has remarked) even
to a disease, and, in such a degree as if an organ had been forgotten by
Nature in his composition, disregardful of self. But even in these
qualities lay the baits for his worldly ruin, which subsequently caused
or allowed so much of his misery. Partly from the introversion of his
mind, and its habitual sleep of reverie in relation to all external
interests, partly from his defect in all habits of prudential
forecasting, resting his head always on the pillow of the _present_--he
had been carried rapidly past all openings that offered towards the
creation of a fortune before he even heard of them, and he first awoke
to the knowledge that such openings had ever existed when he looked back
upon them from a distance, and found them already irrecoverable for
ever.

Such a case as this, as soon as it became known that the case stood
connected with so much power of intellect and so much of various
erudition, was the very ideal case that challenges aid from the public
purse. Mrs. Coleridge has feelingly noticed the philosophic fact. It was
the case of a man lame in the faculties which apply to the architecture
of a fortune, but lame through the very excess in some other faculties
that qualified him for a public teacher, or (which is even more
requisite) for a public stimulator of powers else dormant.

A perfect romance it is that settles upon three generations of these
Coleridges; a romance of beauty, of intellectual power, of misfortune
suddenly illuminated from heaven, of prosperity suddenly overcast by the
waywardness of the individual. The grandfather of the present
generation, who for us stands forward as the founder of the family,
viz., the Rev. John Coleridge; even _his_ career wins a secret homage of
tears and smiles in right of its marvellous transitions from gloom to
sudden light, in right of its entire simplicity, and of its eccentric
consistency. Already in early youth, swimming against a heady current of
hindrances almost overwhelming, he had by solitary efforts qualified
himself for any higher situation that might offer. But, just as this
training was finished, the chances that it might ever turn to account
suddenly fell down to zero; for precisely then did domestic misfortunes
oblige his father to dismiss him from his house with one solitary
half-crown and his paternal benediction. What became of the half-crown
is not recorded, but the benediction speedily blossomed into fruit. The
youth had sat down by the roadside under the mere oppression of grief
for his blighted prospects. But gradually and by steps the most
unexpected and providential, he was led to pedagogy and through this to
his true destination--that of a clergyman of the English church--a
position which from his learning, his devotion, and even from his very
failings--failings in businesslike foresight and calculation--his
absence of mind, his charitable feelings, and his true docility of
nature, he was fitted to adorn; and, indeed, but for his eccentricities
and his complete freedom from worldly self-seeking, and indifference to
such considerations as are apt to weigh all too little with his fellows
of the cloth, he might have moved as an equal among the most eminent
scholars and thinkers. Beautiful are the alternate phases of a good
parish priest--now sitting at the bedside of a dying neighbour, and
ministering with guidance and consolation to the labouring spirit--now
sitting at midnight under the lamp of his own study, and searching the
holy oracles of inspiration for light inexhaustible. These pictures were
realized in J. Coleridge's life.

Mr. Wordsworth has done much to place on an elevated pedestal a very
different type of parish priest--Walker of Seathwaite. The contrast
between him and John Coleridge is striking; and not only striking but
apt, from some points of view, to move something of laughter as well as
tears. The strangest thing is that, if some demon of mischief tempts us,
a hurly-burly begins again of laughter and mockery among that ancient
brotherhood of hills, like Handel's chorus in 'l'Allegro' of 'laughter
holding both his sides.'

                    'Old Skiddaw blows
    His speaking-trumpet; back out of the clouds
    On Glaramara, "_I say, Walker_" rings;
    And Kirkstone "goes it" from his misty head.'

The Rev. Walker, of Seathwaite, it is recorded, spent most of his time
in the parish church; but doing what? Why, spinning; _always_ spinning
wool on the steps of the altar, and only _sometimes_ lecturing his
younger parishioners in the spelling-book. So passed his life. And, if
you feel disposed to say, '_An innocent life_!' you must immediately add
from Mr. Wordsworth's 'Ruth,' '_An innocent life, but far astray_!' What
time had he for writing sermons? The Rev. John Coleridge wrote an
exegetical work on the Book of Judges; we doubt whether Walker could
have spelt _exegetical_. And supposing the Bishop of Chester, in whose
diocese his parish lay, had suddenly said, 'Walker, _unde derivatur_
"_exegesis_"?' Walker must have been walked off into the corner, as a
punishment for answering absurdly. But luckily the Bishop's palace
stood ninety and odd miles south of Walker's two spinning-wheels. For,
observe, he had _two_ spinning-wheels, but he hadn't a single Iliad. Mr.
Wordsworth will say that Walker did something besides spinning and
spelling. What was it? Why, he read a little. A _very_ little, I can
assure you. For _when_ did he read? Never but on a Saturday afternoon.
And _what_ did Walker read? Doubtless now it was Hooker, or was it
Jeremy Taylor, or Barrow? No; it was none of these that Walker honoured
by his Saturday studies, but a magazine. Now, we all know what awful
rubbish the magazines of those days carted upon men's premises. It would
have been indictable as a nuisance if a publisher had laid it down
_gratis_ at your door. Had Walker lived in _our_ days, the case would
have been very different. A course of _Blackwood_ would have braced his
constitution; his spinning-wheel would have stopped; his spelling would
have improved into moral philosophy and the best of politics. This very
month, as the public is by this time aware, Walker would have read
something about himself that _must_ have done him good. We might very
truly have put an advertisement into the _Times_ all last month, saying,
'Let Walker look into the next _Blackwood_, and he will hear of
something greatly to his advantage.' But alas! Walker descended to
Hades, and most ingloriously as _we_ contend, before _Blackwood_ had
dawned upon a benighted earth. We differ therefore by an inexpressible
difference from Wordsworth's estimate of this old fellow. And we close
our account of him by citing two little sallies from his only known
literary productions, viz., two letters, one to a friend, and the other
to the Archbishop of York. In the first of these he introduces a child
of his own under the following flourish of rhetoric, viz., as 'a pledge
of conjugal endearment.' We doubt if his correspondent ever read such a
bit of sentiment before. In the other letter, addressed to the
Metropolitan of the province, Walker has the assurance to say that he
trusts the young man, his son (_not_ the aforesaid cub, the pledge of
conjugal endearment) will never disgrace the _paternal_ example, _i.e._,
Walker's example. Pretty strong _that_! And, if exegetically handled, it
must mean that Walker, junr., is to continue spinning and spelling, as
also once a week reading the _Town and Country Magazine_, all the days
of his life. Oh, Walker, you're a very sad fellow! And the only excuse
for you is, that, like most of your brethren in that mountainous nook of
England, so beautiful but so poor, you never saw the academic bowers of
either Oxford or Cambridge.

Both in prose and verse, much prose and a short allowance of verse, has
Wordsworth celebrated this man, and he has held him aloft like the
saintly Herbert[10] as a shining model of a rural priest. We are glad,
therefore, for Wordsworth's sake, that no judge from the Consistorial
Court ever happened to meet with Walker when trudging over the Furness
Fells to Ulverston with a _long_ cwt. (120 lb. avoirdupois) of wool on
his back, a thing which he did in all weathers. The wool would have been
condemned as a good prize, and we much fear that Walker's gown would
have been stripped over his head; which is a sad catastrophe for a
pattern priest. Mr. John Coleridge came much nearer to Chaucer's model
of a _Parish_ Priest, whilst at the same time he did honour to the
Academic standard of such a priest. He loved his poor parishioners as
children confided to his pastoral care, but he also loved his library.
But, on the other hand, as to Walker, if ever _he_ were seen burning the
midnight oil, it was not in a gentleman's study--it was in a horrid
garret or cock-loft at the top of his house, disturbing the 'conjugal
endearments' of roosting fowl, and on a business the least spiritual
that can be imagined. By ancient usage throughout this sequestered
region, which is the Savoy of England (viz., Cumberland, Westmoreland,
and Furness) all accounts are settled annually at Candlemas, which means
the middle of February. From Christmas, therefore, to this period the
reverend pastor was employed in making out bills, receipts, leases and
releases, charges and discharges, wills and codicils to wills for most
of the hardworking householders amongst his flock. This work paid better
than spinning. By this night work, by the summer work of cutting peats
and mowing grass, by the autumnal work of reaping barley and oats, and
the early winter work of taking up potatoes, the reverend gentleman
could average seven shillings a day besides beer. But meantime our
spiritual friend was poaching on the manors of the following people--of
the chamber counsel, of the attorney, of the professional accountant, of
the printer and compositor, of the notary public, of the scrivener, and
sometimes, we fear, of the sheriff's officer in arranging for special
bail. These very uncanonical services one might have fancied sufficient,
with spinning and spelling, for filling up the temporal cares of any one
man's time. But this restless Proteus masqueraded through a score of
other characters--as seedsman, harvester, hedger and ditcher, etc. We
have no doubt that he would have taken a job of paving; he would have
contracted for darning old Christopher's silk stockings, or for a mile
of sewerage; or he would have contracted to dispose by night of the
sewage (which the careful reader must not confound with the sewerage,
that being the ship and the sewage the freight). But all this coarse
labour makes a man's hands horny, and, what is worse, the starvation,
or, at least, impoverishment, of his intellect makes his mind horny;
and, what is worst of all in a clergyman, who is stationed as a watchman
on a church-steeple expressly to warn all others against the
all-besetting danger of worldliness, such an incessant preoccupation of
the heart by coarse and petty cares makes the spiritual apprehensiveness
and every organ of spiritual sensibility more horny than the hoofs of a
rhinoceros.

Kindliness of heart, no doubt, remained to the last with Mr. Walker,
_that_ being secured by the universal spirit of brotherly and social
feeling amongst the dalesmen of the lake district. He was even liberal
and generous, if we may rely upon the few instances reported by W. W.
His life of heroic money-getting had not, it seems, made his heart
narrow in that particular direction, though it must not be forgotten
that the calls upon him were rare and trivial. But however _that_ may
have been, the heart of stone had usurped upon the heart of flesh in all
that regarded the spiritualities of his office. He was conscientious, we
dare say, in what related to the _sacramentum militaire_ (as construed
by himself) of his pastoral soldiership. He would, perhaps, have died
for the doctrines of his church, and we do not like him the worse for
having been something of a bigot, being ourselves the most malignant of
Tories (thank Heaven for all its mercies!). But what tenderness or
pathetic breathings of spirituality _could_ that man have, who had no
time beyond a few stray quarters of an hour for thinking of his own
supreme relations to heaven, or to his flock on behalf of heaven? How
could that man cherish or deepen the motions of religious truth within
himself, whose thoughts were habitually turned to the wool market?
Ninety and odd years he lived on earth labouring like a bargeman or a
miner. Assuredly he was not one of the _fainéans_. And within a narrow
pastoral circle he left behind him a fragrant memory that will, perhaps,
wear as long as most reputations in literature. Nay, he even acquired by
acclamation a sort of title, viz., the posthumous surname of the
_wonderful_; pointing, however, we fear, much less to anything in
himself than to the unaccountable amount of money which he left behind
him--unaccountable by comparison with any modes of industry which he
practised, all of which were indomitably persevering, but all humble in
their results. Finally, he has had the honour (which, much we fear, men
far more interesting in the same situation, but in a less homely way,
never _would_ have had) of a record from the pen of Wordsworth. We and
others have always remarked it as one of the austere Roman features in
the mind of Wordsworth, that of all poets he has the least sympathy,
effeminate or not effeminate, with romantic disinterestedness. He cannot
bear to hear of a man working by choice for nothing, which certainly
_is_ an infirmity, where at all it arises from want of energy or of just
self-appreciation, but still an amiable one, and in certain directions a
sublime one. Walker had no such infirmity. He laboured in those fields
which ensure instant payment. Verily he _had_ his reward: ten per cent.,
at least, beyond all other men, without needing to think of reversions,
either above or below. The unearthly was suffocated in _him_ by the
earthly. Let us leave him, and return to a better man, viz., to the Rev.
John Coleridge, author of the _Quale-quare-quidditive_ case--a man equal
in simplicity o£ habits and in humility, but better in the sight of God,
because he laboured in the culture of his higher and not his lower
faculties.

Mr. John Coleridge married a second time; and we are perplexed to say
_when_. The difficulty is this: he had by his second wife ten children.
Now, as _the_ Coleridge, the youngest of the flock, was born in 1772,
the space between that year and 1760 seems barely adequate to such a
succession of births. Yet, on the other hand, _before_ 1760 he could not
probably have seen his second wife, unless, indeed, on some casual trip
to Devonshire. Her name was Anne Bowden; and she was of a respectable
family, that had been long stationary in Devonshire, but of a yeomanly
rank; and people of that rank a century back did not often make visits
as far as Southampton. The question is not certainly of any great
importance; and we notice it only to make a parade of our chronologic
acumen. Devilish sly is Josy Bagstock! It is sufficient that her last
child was her illustrious child; and, if S. T. C.'s theory has any
foundation, we must suppose him illustrious _because_ he was the last.
For he imagines that in any long series of children the last will,
according to all experience, have the leonine share of intellect. But
this contradicts our own personal observation; and, besides, it seems to
be unsound upon an _à priori_ ground, viz., that to be the first child
carries a meaning with it: _that_ place in the series has a real
physiologic value; and we have known families in which, from generation
to generation, the first-born child had physical advantages denied to
all that followed. But to be the last child must very often be the
result of accident, and has in reality no meaning in any sense known to
nature. The sixth child, let us suppose, is a blockhead. And soon after
the birth of this sixth child, his father, being drunk, breaks his neck.
That accident cannot react upon this child to invest him with the
privileges of absolute juniority. Being a blockhead, he will remain a
blockhead. Yet he is the youngest; but, then, nature is no party to his
being such, and probably she is no party (by means of any physical
change in the parents) once in a thousand births to a case of absolute
and predeterminate juniority.

Whether with or without the intention of nature, S. T. C. was fated to
be the last of his family. He was the tenth child of the second flock,
and possibly there might have been an eleventh or even a twentieth, but
for the following termination of his father's career, which we give in
the words of his son. 'Towards the latter end of September, 1781, my
father went to Plymouth with my brother Francis, who was to go out as'
(a) 'midshipman under Admiral Graves--a friend of my father's. He
settled Frank as he wished, and returned on the 4th of October, 1781. He
arrived at Exeter about six o'clock, and was pressed to take a bed there
by the friendly family of the Harts; but he refused, and, to avoid their
entreaties, he told them that he had never been superstitious, but that
the night before he had had a dream, which had made a deep impression on
him. He dreamed that Death had appeared to him, as he is commonly
painted, and had touched him with his dart. Well, he returned home; and
all his family, _I_ excepted, were up. He told my mother his dream; but
he was in good health and high spirits; and there was a bowl of punch
made, and my father gave a long and particular account of his travels,
and that he had placed Frank under a religious captain, and so forth. At
length he went to bed, very well and in high spirits. A short time after
he had lain down, he complained of a pain to which he was subject. My
mother got him some peppermint water, which he took; and after a pause
he said, "I am much better now, my dear!" and lay down again. In a
minute my mother heard a noise in his throat, and spoke to him; but he
did not answer, and she spoke repeatedly in vain. Her shriek awaked me,
and I said, "Papa is dead!" I did not know of my father's return, but I
knew that he was expected. How I came to think of his death, I cannot
tell; but so it was. Dead he was. Some said it was gout in the heart;
probably it was a fit of apoplexy. He was an Israelite without guile,
simple, generous; and, taking some Scripture texts in their literal
sense, he was conscientiously indifferent to the good and evil of this
world.'

This was the account of his father's sudden death in 1781, written by S.
T. Coleridge in 1797. 'Thirty years afterwards' (but after 1781 or after
1797?), says Mr. H. N. Coleridge, 'S. T. C. breathed a wish for such a
death, "if," he added, "like him I were an Israelite without guile!" and
then added, "The image of my father, my revered, kind, learned,
simple-hearted father, is a religion to me."'

In his ninth year, therefore, thus early and thus suddenly, Coleridge
lost his father; and in the result, though his mother lived for many a
year after, he became essentially an orphan, being thrown upon the
struggles of this world, and for ever torn from his family, except as a
visitor when equally he and they had changed. Yet such is the world, and
so inevitably does it grow thorns amongst its earliest roses, that even
that dawn of life when he had basked in the smiles of two living
parents, was troubled for _him_ by a dark shadow that followed his steps
or ran before him, obscuring his light upon every path. This was Francis
Coleridge, one year older, that same boy whom his father had in his last
journey upon earth accompanied to Plymouth.

We shall misconceive the character of Francis if we suppose him to have
been a boy of bad nature. He turned out a gallant young man, and
perished at twenty-one from over exertion in Mysore, during the first
war with Tippoo Sahib. How he came to be transferred from the naval to
the land service, is a romantic story, for which, as it has no relation
to _the_ Coleridge, we cannot find room.

In that particular relation, viz., to _the_ Coleridge, Francis may seem
at first to have been unamiable, and especially since the little Samuel
was so entirely at the mercy of his superior hardiness and strength;
but, in fact, his violence arose chiefly from the contempt natural to a
bold adventurous nature for a nursery pet, and a contempt irritated by a
counter admiration which he could not always refuse. 'Frank,' says S. T.
C., looking back to these childish days, 'had a violent love of beating
me; but, whenever _that_ was superseded by any humour or circumstances,
he was always very fond of me, and used to regard me with a strange
mixture of admiration and contempt. Strange it was not; for he hated
books, and loved climbing, fighting, playing, robbing orchards, to
distraction.'

In the latter part of 1778, when S. T. C. was six years old, and
recently admitted to King's School at Ottery, he and his brother George
(that brother to whom his early poems were afterwards dedicated) caught
a putrid fever at the same time. But on this occasion Frank displayed
his courageous kindness; for, in contempt of orders to the contrary, and
in contempt of the danger, he stole up to the bedside of little Samuel
and read Pope's 'Homer' to him. This made it evident that Frank's
partiality for thumping S. T. C. did really arise very much out of a
lurking love for him; since George, though a most amiable boy, and ill
of the same fever in another room, was left to get well in the usual
way, by medicine and slops, without any thumping certainly, but also
without any extra consolations from either Iliad or Odyssey. But what
ministered perpetual fuel to the thumping-mania of Francis Coleridge was
a furor of jealousy--strangely enough not felt by him, but felt _for_
him by his old privileged nurse. She could not inspire her own passions
into Francis, but she could point his scorn to the infirmities of his
rival. Francis had once reigned paramount in the vicarage as universal
pet. But he had been dethroned by Samuel, who now reigned in his stead.
Samuel felt no triumph at that revolution; Francis no anger. But the
nurse suffered the pangs of a baffled stepmother, and looked with
novercal eyes of hatred and disgust upon little Sam that had stolen away
the hearts of men and women from one that in _her_ eyes was a thousand
times his superior. In that last point nurse was not so entirely wrong,
but that nine-tenths of the world (and therefore, we fear, of our
dearly-beloved readers) would have gone along with her, on which account
it is that we have forborne to call her 'wicked old nurse.' Francis
Coleridge, her own peculiar darling, was memorable for his beauty. All
the brothers were handsome--'remarkably handsome,' says S. T. C., 'but
_they_,' he adds, 'were as inferior to Francis as _I_ am to _them_.'[11]

Reading this and other descriptions of Frank Coleridge's beauty (in our
Indian army he was known as the _handsome Coleridge_), we are disposed
to cry out with Juliet,

    'Beautiful tyrant! fiend angelical!
    Dove-feathered raven!'

when we find how very nearly his thoughtless violence had hurried poor
S. T. C. into an early death. The story is told circumstantially by
Coleridge himself in one of the letters to Mr. Poole; nor is there any
scene more picturesque than this hasty sketch in Brookes's 'Fool of
Quality.' We must premise that S. T. C. had asked his mother for a
particular indulgence requiring some dexterity to accomplish. The
difficulty, however, through _her_ cautious manipulations, had just been
surmounted, when Samuel left the room for a single instant, and found
upon his return that the beautiful Francis had confounded all Mama's
labours, and had defeated his own enjoyment. What followed is thus told
by Samuel nearly twenty years after: 'I returned, saw the exploit, and
flew at Frank. He pretended to have been seriously hurt by my blow,
flung himself upon the ground, and there lay with outstretched limbs.'
This is good comedy: the pugnacious Frank affecting to be an Abel,
killed by a blow from Cain such as doubtless would not have 'made a dint
in a pound of butter.' But wait a little. Samuel was a true penitent as
ever was turned off for fratricide at Newgate. 'I,' says the unhappy
murderer, 'hung over him mourning and in great fright;' but the murdered
Frank by accident came to life again. 'He leaped up, and with a hoarse
laugh gave me a severe blow in the face.' This was too much. To have
your grief flapped back in your face like a wet sheet is bad, but also
and at the same time to have your claret uncorked is unendurable. The
'Ancient Mariner,' then about seven years old, could not stand this.
'With _his_ cross-bow'--no, stop! what are we saying? Nothing better
than a kitchen knife was at hand--and 'this,' says Samuel, 'I seized,
and was running at him, when my mother came in and took me by the arm. I
expected a whipping, and, struggling from her, I ran away to a little
hill or slope, at the bottom of which the Otter flows, about a mile from
Ottery. There I stayed, my rage died away; but my obstinacy vanquished
my fears, and taking out a shilling book, which had at the end morning
and evening prayers, I very devoutly repeated them, thinking at the same
time with a gloomy inward satisfaction how miserable my mother must be.
I distinctly remember my feelings when I saw a Mr. Vaughan pass over the
bridge at about a furlong's distance, and how I watched the calves in
the fields beyond the river. It grew dark, and I fell asleep. It was
towards the end of October, and it proved a stormy night. I felt the
cold in my sleep, and dreamed that I was pulling the blanket over me,
and actually pulled over me a dry thorn-bush which lay on the ground
near me. In my sleep I had rolled from the top of the hill till within
three yards of the river, which flowed by the unfenced edge of the
bottom. I awoke several times, and, finding myself wet and cold and
stiff, closed my eyes again that I might forget it.

'In the meantime my mother waited about half an hour, expecting my
return when the _sulks_ had evaporated. I not returning, she sent into
the churchyard and round the town. Not found! Several men and all the
boys were sent out to ramble about and seek me. In vain. My mother was
almost distracted, and at ten o'clock at night I was cried by the crier
in Ottery and in two villages near it, with a reward offered for me. No
one went to bed; indeed, I believe half the town were up all the night.
To return to myself. About five in the morning, or a little after, I was
broad awake, and attempted to get up and walk, but I could not move. I
saw the shepherds and workmen at a distance and cried, but so faintly
that it was impossible to hear me thirty yards off. And there I might
have lain and died, for I was now almost given over, the ponds, and even
the river (near which I was lying), having been dragged. But
providentially Sir Stafford Northcote, who had been out all night,
resolved to make one other trial, and came so near that he heard me
crying. He carried me in his arms for nearly a quarter of a mile, when
we met my father and Sir Stafford's servants. I remember, and never
shall forget, my father's face as he looked upon me while I lay in the
servant's arms--so calm, and the tears stealing down his face, for I was
the child of his old age. My mother, as you may suppose, was outrageous
with joy. Meantime in rushed a young lady, crying out, "_I hope you'll
whip him, Mrs. Coleridge_." This woman still lives at Ottery, and
neither philosophy nor religion has been able to conquer the antipathy
which I feel towards her whenever I see her.' So says Samuel. We
ourselves have not yet seen this young lady, and now in 1849,
considering that it is about eighty years from the date of her
wickedness, it seems unlikely that we shall. But _our_ antipathy we
declare to be also, alas! quite unconquerable by the latest supplements
to the Transcendental philosophy that we have yet received from
Deutschland. Whip the Ancient Mariner, indeed! A likely thing _that_:
and at the very moment when he was coming off such a hard night's duty,
and supporting a character which a classical Roman has pronounced to be
a spectacle for Olympus--viz., that of '_Puer bonus cum malâ-fortunâ
compositus_' (a virtuous boy matched in duel with adversity)! The sequel
of the adventure is thus reported: 'I was put to bed, and recovered in a
day or so. But I was certainly injured; for I was weakly and subject to
ague for many years after.' Yes; and to a worse thing than ague, as not
so certainly to be cured, viz., rheumatism. More than twenty years after
this cold night's rest, _à la belle étoile_, we can vouch that Coleridge
found himself obliged to return suddenly from a tour amongst the
Scottish Highlands solely in consequence of that painful rheumatic
affection, which was perhaps traceable to this childish misadventure.
Alas! Francis the beautiful scamp, that caused the misadventure, and
probably the bad young lady that prescribed whipping as the orthodox
medicine for curing it, and the poor Ancient Mariner himself--that had
to fight his way through such enemies at the price of ague, rheumatism,
and tears uncounted--are all asleep at present, but in graves how widely
divided! One near London; one near Seringapatam; and the young lady, we
suppose, in Ottery churchyard, but her offence, though beyond the power
of Philosophy to pardon, is not remembered, we trust, in her epitaph!

We are sorry that S. T. C. having been so much of a darling with his
father, and considering that he looked back to the brief connection
between them as solemnized by its pathetic termination, had not reported
some parts of their graver intercourse. One such fragment he does
report; it is an elementary lesson upon astronomy, which his father gave
him in the course of a walk upon a starry night. This is in keeping with
the grandeur and responsibility of the paternal relation. But really, in
the only other example (which immediately occurs) of Papa's attempt to
bias the filial intellect, we recognise nothing but what is mystical;
and involuntarily we think of him in the modern slang character of
'governor,' rather than as a 'guide, philosopher, and friend.' It seems
that one Saturday, about the time when the Rev. Walker in Furness must
have been sitting down to his _exegesis_ of hard sayings in the _Town
and Country Magazine_, the Rev. Coleridge thought fit to reward S. T. C.
for the most singular act of virtue that we have ever heard imputed to
man or boy--to 'saint, to savage, or to sage'--viz., the act of eating
beans and bacon to a large amount. The stress must be laid on the word
_large_; because simply to masticate beans and bacon, we do not
recollect to have been regarded with special esteem by the learned
vicar; it was the liberal consumption of them that entitled Samuel to
reward. That reward was one penny, so that in degree of merit, after
all, the service may not have ranked high. But what perplexes us is the
_kind_ of merit. Did it bear some mystical or symbolic sense? Was it
held to argue a spirit of general rebellion against Philosophy, that S.
T. C. should so early in life, by one and the same act, proclaim
mutinous disposition towards two of the most memorable amongst earth's
philosophers--Moses and Pythagoras; of whom the latter had set his face
against beans, laying it down for his opinion that to eat beans and to
cut one's father's throat were acts of about equal atrocity; whilst the
other, who tolerated the beans, had expressly forbidden the bacon? We
are really embarrassed; finding the mere fact recorded with no further
declaration of the rev. governor's reasons, than that such an
'attachment' (an _attachment_ to beans and bacon!) 'ought to be
encouraged'; but upon what principle we no more understand than we do
the principle of the _Quale-quare-quidditive_ case.

The letters in which these early memorabilia of Coleridge's life are
reported did not proceed beyond the fifth. We regret this greatly, for
they would have become instructively interesting as they came more and
more upon the higher ground of his London experience in a mighty world
of seven hundred boys--insulated in a sort of monastic but troubled
seclusion amongst the billowy world of London; a seclusion that in
itself was a wilderness to a home-sick child, but yet looking verdant as
an oasis amongst that other wilderness of the illimitable metropolis.

It is good to be mamma's darling; but not, reader, if you are to leave
mamma's arms for a vast public school in childhood. It is good to be the
darling of a kind, pious, and learned father--but not if that father is
to be torn away from you for ever by a death without a moment's warning,
whilst as yet you yourself are but nine years old, and he has not
bestowed a thought on your future establishment in life. Upon poor S. T.
C. the Benjamin of his family, descended first a golden dawn within the
Paradise of his father's and his mother's smiles--descended secondly and
suddenly an overcasting hurricane of separation from both father and
mother for ever. How dreadful, if audibly declared, this sentence to a
poor nerve-shattered child: Behold! thou art commanded, before thy first
decennium is completed, to see father and mother no more, and to throw
thyself into the wilderness of London. Yet _that_ was the destiny of
Coleridge. At nine years old he was precipitated into the stormy arena
of Christ's Hospital. Amongst seven hundred boys he was to fight his way
to distinction; and with no other advantages of favour or tenderness
than would have belonged to the son of a footman. Sublime are these
democratic institutions rising upon the bosom of aristocratic England.
Great is the people amongst whom the foundations of kings _can_ assume
this popular character. But yet amidst the grandeur of a national
triumph is heard, at intervals, the moaning of individuals; and from
many a grave in London rises from time to time, in arches of sorrow
audible to God, the lamentation of many a child seeking to throw itself
round for comfort into some distant grave of the provinces, where rest
the ear and the heart of its mother.

Concerning this chapter of Coleridge's childhood, we have therefore at
present no vestige of any record beyond the exquisite sketches of his
schoolfellow, Charles Lamb. The five letters, however, though going over
so narrow a space, go far enough to throw a pathetic light upon
Coleridge's frailties of temperament. They indicate the sort of nervous
agitation arising from contradictory impulses, from love too tender, and
scorn too fretful, by which already in childish days the inner peace had
been broken up, and the nervous system shattered. This revelation,
though so unpretending and simple in manner, of the drama substantially
so fearful, that was constantly proceeding in a quiet and religious
parsonage--the bare possibility that sufferings so durable in their
effects should be sweeping with their eternal storms a heart so
capacious and so passively unresisting--are calculated to startle and to
oppress us with the sense of a fate long prepared, vested in the very
seeds of constitution and character; temperament and the effects of
early experience combining to thwart all the morning promise of
greatness and splendour; the flower unfolding its silken leaves only to
suffer canker and blight; and to hang withering on the stalk, with only
enough of grace and colour left to tell pathetically to all that looked
upon it what it might have been.


EDITOR'S NOTE TO THIS ESSAY.

Certainly this idea of De Quincey about the misfortune to Coleridge of
the early loss of his father, separation from his mother, and removal
from Devon to London, is fully borne out by the more personal utterances
to be found in Coleridge's poems. Looking through them with this idea in
view, we are surprised at the deposit left in them by this conscious
experience on Coleridge's part. Not to dwell at all on what might be
very legitimately regarded as _indirect_ expressions of the sentiment,
we shall present here, in order to add emphasis to De Quincey's
position, some of the extracts which have most impressed us. From the
poem in the Early Poems 'To an Infant,' are these lines:

    'Man's breathing miniature! thou mak'st me sigh--
    A babe art thou--and such a thing am I,
    To anger rapid and as soon appeased,
    For trifles mourning and by trifles pleased,
    Break friendship's mirror with a tetchy blow,
    Yet snatch what coals of fire on pleasure's altar glow.'

Still more emphatic is this passage from the poem, 'Frost at Midnight':

    'My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
    With tender gladness thus to look at thee,
    And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
    And in far other scenes! For I was reared
    In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
    And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
    But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
    By lakes and sandy shores beneath the crags
    Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
    Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
    And mountain crags; so shalt thou see and hear
    The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
    Of that eternal language, which thy God
    Utters, who from eternity doth teach
    Himself in all and all things in Himself.
    Great Universal Teacher! he shall mould
    Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.'

In another place, when speaking of the love of mother for child and that
of child for mother, awakened into life by the very impress of that love
in voice and touch, he concludes with the line:

    'Why was I made for Love and Love denied to me?'

And, most significant of all, is that Dedication in 1803 of his Early
Poems to his brother, the Rev. George Coleridge of Ottery St. Mary, when
he writes, after having dwelt on the bliss this brother had enjoyed in
never having been really removed from the place of his early nurture:

    'To me the Eternal Wisdom hath dispensed
    A different fortune, and more different mind--
    Me, from the spot where first I sprang to light
    Too soon transplanted, ere my soul had fixed
    Its first domestic loves; and hence, through life
    Chasing chance-started friendships. A brief while
    Some have preserved me from life's pelting ills,
    But like a tree with leaves of feeble stem,
    If the clouds lasted, and a sudden breeze
    Ruffled the boughs, they on my head at once
    Dropped the collected shower: and some most false,
    False and fair-foliaged as the manchineel,
    Have tempted me to slumber in their shade
    E'en 'mid the storm; then breathing subtlest damps
    Mixed their own venom with the rain from Heaven,
    That I woke poisoned! But (all praise to Him
    Who gives us all things) more have yielded me
    Permanent shelter: and beside one friend,
    Beneath the impervious covert of one oak
    I've raised a lowly shed and know the name
    Of husband and of father; not unhearing
    Of that divine and nightly-whispering voice,
    Which from my childhood to maturer years
    Spake to me of predestinated wreaths,
    Bright with no fading colours!
                      Yet, at times,
    My soul is sad, that I have roamed through life
    Still most a stranger, most with naked heart,
    At mine own home and birthplace: chiefly then
    When I remember thee, my earliest friend!
    Thee, who didst watch my boyhood and my youth;
    Did'st trace my wanderings with a father's eye;
    And, boding evil yet still hoping good,
    Rebuked each fault and over all my woes
    Sorrowed in silence!'

And certainly all this only gains emphasis from the entry we have in the
'Table Talk' under date August 16, 1832, and under the heading,
'Christ's Hospital, Bowyer':

'The discipline of Christ's Hospital in my time was ultra-Spartan; all
domestic ties were to be put aside. "Boy!" I remember Bowyer saying to
me once when I was crying the first day of my return after the holidays.
"Boy! the school is your father! Boy! the school is your mother! Boy!
the school is your brother! the school is your sister! the school is
your first cousin, and all the rest of your relations! Let's have no
more crying!"'

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Really now I can't say that. No; I couldn't have stood Cruger's
arguments. 'Ditto to Mr. Burke' is certainly not a very brilliant
observation, but still it's supportable, whereas I must have found the
pains of contradiction insupportable.

[2] This sublimest of all Greek poets did really die, as some
biographers allege, by so extraordinary and, as one may say, so
insulting a mistake on the part of an eagle.

[3] _Frankistan._--There is no word, but perhaps Frankistan might come
nearest to such a word, for expressing the territory of Christendom
taken jointly with that of those Mahometan nations which have for a long
period been connected with Christians in their hostilities, whether of
arms or of policy. The Arabs and the Moors belong to these nations, for
the circle of their political system has always been made up in part by
a segment from Christendom, their relations of war being still more
involved with such a segment.

[4] 'Merry Wives of Windsor,' Act I., Sc. 4. Mrs. Quickly: '... An
honest, willing, kind fellow, as ever servant shall come in house
withal; and I warrant you no tell-tale, nor no breed-hate; his worst
fault is, that he is given to prayer; he is something peevish that way;
but nobody but has his fault--but let that pass.'--ED.

[5] '_Pun them into shivers_': Troilus and Cressida, Act II., Sc. 1. We
refer specially to the jolly boatswain, having already noticed the fact,
that sailors as a class, from retaining more of the simplicity and quick
susceptibility belonging to childhood, are unusually fond of waxen
exhibitions. Too much worldly experience indisposes men to the
playfulness and to the _toyfulness_ (if we may invent that word) of
childhood, not less through the ungenial churlishness which it gradually
deposits, than through the expansion of understanding which it promotes.

[6] '_Science not always fathomable._' Several distinguished Frenchmen
have pursued a course of investigations into these fenestral phenomena,
which one might call the _Fata Morgana of Frost_; and, amongst these
investigators, some--not content with watching, observing,
recording--have experimented on these floral prolusions of nature by
arranging beforehand the circumstances and conditions into which and
under which the Frost Fairy should be allowed to play. But what was the
result? Did they catch the Fairy? Did they chase her into her secret
cells and workshops? Did they throw over the freedom of her motions a
harness of net-work of coercion as the Pagans over their pitiful
Proteus? So far from it, that the more they studied the less they
understood; and all the traps which they laid for the Fairy, did but
multiply her evasions.

[7] The passage occurs at p. 354, vol. ii. of the _Lectures_; and we now
find, on looking to the place, that the illustration is drawn from 'a
dell of lazy Sicily.' The same remark has virtually been anticipated at
p. 181 of the same volume in the rule about 'converting mere
abstractions into persons.'

[8] It is true that Mr. De Quincey _did_ make the mistake of supposing
Coleridge to have 'calculated on' a remark which Mrs. Coleridge justly
characterises as a blind one. It _was_ blind as compared with the fact
resulting from grounds not then known; else it was _not_ blind as a
reasonable inference under the same circumstances.

[9] If for the words 'more than fifteen years' we say sixteen or
seventeen, as Coleridge died in 1834, this article would be written in
1850 or 1851.--ED.

[10] 'The Saintly Herbert,' the brother, oddly enough, of the brilliant
but infidel Lord Herbert of Cherbury; which lord was a versatile man of
talent, but not a man of genius like the humble rustic--his unpretending
brother.

[11] In saying this, Coleridge unduly disparaged his own personal
advantages. In youth, and before sorrow and the labour of thought had
changed him, he must have been of very engaging appearance. The _godlike
forehead_, which afterwards was ascribed to him, could not have been
wanting at any age. That exquisite passage in Wordsworth's description
of him,

    'And a pale face, that seem'd undoubtedly
    As if a blooming face it ought to be,'

had its justification in those early days. If to be blooming was the
natural tendency and right of his face, blooming it then was, as we have
been assured by different women of education and taste, who saw him at
twenty-four in Bristol and Clifton. Two of these were friends of Hannah
More, and had seen all the world. They could judge: that is, they could
judge in conformity to the highest standards of taste; and both said,
with some enthusiasm, that he was a most attractive young man; one
adding, with a smile at the old pastoral name, 'Oh, yes, he was a
perfect Strephon.' Light he was in those days and agile as a feathered
Mercury; whereas he afterwards grew heavy and at times bloated; and at
that gay period of life his animal spirits ran up _naturally_ to the
highest point on the scale; whereas in later life, when most
tempestuous, they seemed most artificial. That this, which was the
ardent testimony of females, was also the true one, might have been
gathered from the appearance of his children. Berkeley died an infant,
and him only we never saw. The sole daughter of Coleridge, as she
inherited so much of her father's intellectual power, inherited also the
diviner part of his features. The upper part of her face, at seventeen,
when last we saw her, seemed to us angelic, and pathetically angelic;
for the whole countenance was suffused by a pensive nun-like beauty too
charming and too affecting ever to be forgotten. Derwent, the youngest
son, we have not seen since boyhood, but at that period he had a
handsome cast of features, and (from all we can gather) the
representative cast of the Coleridge family. But Hartley, the eldest
son, how shall we describe _him_? He was most intellectual and he was
most eccentric, and his features expressed all that in perfection.
Southey, in his domestic playfulness, used to call him the _Knave of
Spades_; and he certainly _had_ a resemblance to that well-known young
gentleman. But really we do not know that it would have been at all
better to resemble the knave of hearts. And it must be remembered that
the knave of spades may have a brother very like himself, and yet a
hundred times handsomer. There _are_ such things as handsome likenesses
of very plain people. Some folks pronounced Hartley Coleridge too
Jewish. But to be a Jew is to be an Arab. And our own feeling was, when
we met Hartley at times in solitary or desolate places of Westmoreland
and Cumberland, that here was a son of Ishmael walking in the wilderness
of Edom. The coruscating _nimbus_ of his curling and profuse black hair,
black as erebus, strengthened the Saracen impression of his features and
complexion. He wanted only a turban on his head, and a spear in his
right hand, to be perfect as a Bedouin. But it affected us as all things
are affecting which record great changes, to hear that for a long time
before his death this black hair had become white as the hair of
infancy. Much sorrow and much thought had been the worms that gnawed the
roots of that raven hair; that, in Wordsworth's fine way of expressing
the very same fact as to Mary Queen of Scots:

    'Kill'd the bloom before its time,
    And blanch'd, without the owner's crime,
      The most resplendent hair.'

Ah, wrecks of once blooming nurseries, that from generation to
generation, from John Coleridge the apostolic to S. T. C. the sunbright,
and from S. T. C. the sunbright to Hartley the starry, lie scattered
upon every shore!




_II. MR. FINLAY'S HISTORY OF GREECE._


In attempting to appraise Mr. Finlay's work comprehensively, there is
this difficulty. It comes before us in two characters; first, as a
philosophic speculation upon history, to be valued against others
speculating on other histories; secondly, as a guide, practical
altogether and not speculative, to students who are navigating that
great trackless ocean the _Eastern_ Roman history. Now under either
shape, this work traverses so much ground, that by mere multiplicity of
details it denies to us the opportunity of reporting on its merits with
that simplicity of judgment which would have been available in a case of
severer unity. So many separate situations of history, so many critical
continuations of political circumstances, sweep across the field of Mr.
Finlay's telescope whilst sweeping the heavens of four centuries, that
it is naturally impossible to effect any comprehensive abstractions, as
to principles, from cases individual by their nature and separated by
their period not less than by their relations in respect to things and
persons. The mere necessity of the plan in such a work ensures a certain
amount of dissent on the part of every reader; he that most frequently
goes along with the author in his commentary, will repeatedly find
himself diverging from it in one point or demurring to its inferences in
another. Such, in fact, is the eternal disadvantage for an author upon
a subject which recalls the remark of Juvenal:

    'Vester porro labor fecundior, historiarum
    Scriptores: petit hic plus temporis, atque olei plus:
    Sic _ingens rerum numerus_ jubet, atque operum lex.'

It is this _ingens rerum numerus_ that constitutes at once the
attraction of these volumes, and the difficulty of dealing with them in
any adequate or satisfactory manner.

Indeed, the vistas opened up by Mr. Finlay are infinite; in _that_ sense
it is that he ascribes inexhaustibility to the trackless savannahs of
history. These vast hunting-grounds for the imaginative understanding
are in fact but charts and surveyors' outlines meagre and arid for the
timid or uninspired student. To a grander intellect these historical
delineations are not maps but pictures: they compose a forest
wilderness, veined and threaded by sylvan lawns, 'dark with horrid
shades,' like Milton's haunted desert in the 'Paradise Regained,' at
many a point looking back to the towers of vanishing Jerusalem, and like
Milton's desert, crossed dimly at uncertain intervals by forms doubtful
and (considering the character of such awful deserts) suspicious.

Perhaps the reader, being rather 'dense,' does not understand, but we
understand ourselves, which is the root of the matter. Let us try again:
these historical delineations are not lifeless facts, bearing no sense
or moral value, but living realities organized into the unity of some
great constructive idea.

Perhaps we are obscure; and possibly (though it is treason in a writer
to hint such a thing, as tending to produce hatred or disaffection
towards his liege lord who is and must be his reader), yet, perhaps,
even the reader--that great character--may be 'dense.' 'Dense' is the
word used by young ladies to indicate a slight shade--a _soupçon_--of
stupidity; and by the way it stands in close relationship of sound to
_Duns_, the schoolman, who (it is well known) shared with King Solomon
the glory of furnishing a designation for men weak in the upper
quarters. But, reader, whether the fault be in you or in ourselves,
certain it is that the truth which we wish to communicate is not
trivial; it is the noblest and most creative of truths, if only we are
not a Duns Scholasticus for explanation, nor you (most excellent
reader!) altogether a Solomon for apprehension. Therefore, again lend us
your ears.

It is not, it has not been, perhaps it never will be, understood--how
vast a thing is combination. We remember that Euler, and some other
profound Prussians, such as Lambert, etc., tax this word _combination_
with a fault: for, say they, it indicates that composition of things
which proceeds two by two (viz., com-_bina_); whereas three by three,
ten by ten, fifty by fifty, is combination. It is so. But, once for all,
language is so difficult a structure, being like a mail-coach and four
horses required to turn round Lackington's counter[12]--required in one
syllable to do what oftentimes would require a sentence--that it must
use the artifices of a short-hand. The word _bini-æ-a_ is here but an
exponential or representative word: it stands for any number, for
_number_ in short generally as opposed to unity. And the secret truth
which some years ago we suggested, but which doubtless perished as
pearls to swine, is, that com_bina_tion, or com_terna_tion, or
com_quaterna_tion, or com_dena_tion, possesses a mysterious virtue quite
unobserved by men. All knowledge is probably within its keeping. What we
mean is, that where A is not capable simply of revealing a truth
(_i.e._, by way of direct inference), very possible it is that A viewed
by the light of B (_i.e._, in some mode of combination with B) shall be
capable; but again, if A + B cannot unlock the case, these in
combination with C shall do so. And if not A + B + C, then, perhaps,
shall A + B + C combined with D; and so on _ad infinitum_; or in other
words that pairs, or binaries, ternaries, quaternaries, and in that mode
of progression will furnish keys intricate enough to meet and to
decipher the wards of any lock in nature.

Now, in studying history, the difficulty is about the delicacy of the
lock, and the mode of applying the key. We doubt not that many readers
will view all this as false refinement. But hardly, if they had much
considered the real experimental cases in history. For instance, suppose
the condition of a people known as respects (1) civilization, as
respects (2) relation to the sovereign, (3) the prevailing mode of its
industry, (4) its special circumstances as to taxation, (5) its physical
conformation and temperament, (6) its local circumstances as to
neighbours warlike or not warlike, (7) the quality and depth of its
religion, (8) the framework of its jurisprudence, (9) the machinery by
which these laws are made to act, (10) the proportion of its towns to
its rural labour, and the particular action of its police; these and
many other items, elements, or secondary features of a people being
known, it yet remains unknown which of these leads, which is inert, and
of those which are not inert in what order they arrange their action.
The _principium movendi_, the central force which organizes and assigns
its place in the system to all the other forces, these are quite
undetermined by any mere arithmetical recitation of the agencies
concerned. Often these primary principles can be deduced only
tentatively, or by a regress to the steps, historically speaking,
through which they have arisen. Sometimes, for instance, the population,
as to its principle of expansion, and as to its rate, together with the
particular influence socially of the female sex, exercises the most
prodigious influence on the fortunes of a nation, and its movement
backwards or forwards. Sometimes again as in Greece (from the oriental
seclusion of women) these causes limit their own action, until they
become little more than names.

In such a case it is essential that the leading outlines at least should
be definite; that the coast line and the capes and bays should be
well-marked and clear, whatever may become of the inland waters, and the
separate heights in a continuous chain of mountains.

But we are not always sure that we understand Mr. Finlay, even in the
particular use which he makes of the words 'Greece' and 'Grecian.'
Sometimes he means beyond a doubt the people of Hellas and the Ægean
islands, as _opposed_ to the mixed population of Constantinople.
Sometimes he means the Grecian element as opposed to the Roman element
_in_ the composition of this mixed Byzantine population. In this case
the Greek does not mean (as in the former case) the non-Byzantine, but
the Byzantine. Sometimes he means by preference that vast and most
diffusive race which throughout Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, the Euxine and
the Euphrates, represented the Græco-Macedonian blood from the time of
Alexander downwards. But why should we limit the case to an origin from
this great Alexandrian æra? Then doubtless (330 B.C.) it received a
prodigious expansion. But already, in the time of Herodotus (450 B.C.),
this Grecian race had begun to sow itself broadcast over Asia and
Africa. The region called _Cyrenaica_ (viz., the first region which you
would traverse in passing from the banks of the Nile and the Pyramids to
Carthage and to Mount Atlas, _i.e._, Tunis, Algiers, Fez and Morocco, or
what we now call the Barbary States) had been occupied by Grecians
nearly seven hundred years before Christ. In the time of Croesus (say
560 B.C.) it is clear that Grecians were swarming over Lydia and the
whole accessible part of Asia Minor. In the time of Cyrus the younger
(say 404 B.C.) his Grecian allies found their fiercest opponents in
Grecian soldiers of Artaxerxes. In the time of Alexander, just a
septuagint of years from the epoch of this unfortunate Cyrus, the most
considerable troops of Darius were Greeks. The truth is, that, though
Greece was at no time very populous, the prosperity of so many little
republics led to as ample a redundancy of Grecian population as was
compatible with Grecian habits of life; for, deceive not yourself, the
_harem_, what we are accustomed to think of as a Mahometan institution,
existed more or less perfectly in Greece by seventeen centuries at least
antecedently to Mahometanism. Already before Homer, before Troy, before
the Argonauts, woman was an abject, dependent chattel in Greece, and
living in nun-like seclusion. There is so much of _intellectual_
resemblance between Greece and Rome, shown in the two literatures, the
two religions, and the structure of the two languages, that we are apt
to overlook radical repulsion between their _moral_ systems. But such a
repulsion did exist, and the results of its existence are 'writ large'
in the records, if they are studied with philosophic closeness and
insight, and could be illustrated in many ways had we only time and
space for such an exercise. But we must hurry on to remark that Mr.
Finlay's indefiniteness in the use of the terms 'Greece' and 'Grecian'
is almost equalled by his looseness in dealing with institutions and the
principles which determined their character. He dwells meditatively upon
that tenacity of life which he finds to characterize them--a tenacity
very much dependent upon physical[13] circumstances, and in that respect
so memorably inferior to the social economy of Jewish existence, that
we have been led to dwell with some interest upon the following
distinctions as applicable to the political existence of all nations who
are in any degree civilized. It seems to us that three forces, amongst
those which influence the movement of nations, are practically
paramount; viz., first, the _legislation_ of a people; secondly, the
_government_ of a people; thirdly, the _administration_ of a people. By
the quality of its legislation a people is moulded to this or that
character; by the quality of its government a people is applied to this
or that great purpose; by the quality of its administration a people is
made disposable readily and instantly and completely for every purpose
lying within the field of public objects. _Legislation_ it is which
shapes or qualifies a people, endowing them with such qualities as are
more or less fitted for the ends likely to be pursued by a national
policy, and for the ends suggested by local relations when combined with
the new aspects of the times. _Government_ it is which turns these
qualifications to account, guiding them upon the new line of tendencies
opening spontaneously ahead, or (as sometimes we see) upon new
tendencies created deliberately and by forethought. But _administration_
it is which organizes between the capacities of the people on the one
hand, and the enlightened wishes of the government on the other--that
intermediate _nexus_ of social machinery without which both the amplest
powers in a nation and the noblest policy in a government must equally
and continually fall to the ground. A general system of instruments, or
if we may use the word, system of instrumentation and concerted
arrangements--behold the one sole _conditio sine qua non_ for giving a
voice to the national interests, for giving a ratification to the
national will, for giving mobility to the national resources. Amongst
these three categories which we have here assigned as summing up the
relations of the public will in great nations to the total system of
national results, this last category of _administration_ is that which
(beyond the rest) postulates and presupposes vast developments of
civilization. Instincts of nature, under favourable circumstances, as
where the national mind is bold, the temper noble, veracity adorning the
speech, and simplicity the manners, may create and _have_ created good
elementary laws; whilst it is certain that, where any popular freedom
exists, the government must resemble and reflect the people. Hence it
cannot be denied that, even in semi-barbarous times, good legislation
and good government may arise. But good administration is not
conceivable without the aids of high civilization. How often have piracy
by sea, systematic robbery by land, tainted as with a curse the
blessings of life and property in great nations! Witness the state of
the Mediterranean under the Cilicians during the very sunset of Marius;
or, again, of the Caribbean seas, in spite of a vast Spanish empire, of
Buccaneers and Filibusters. Witness Bagandæ in Roman Spain, or the cloud
of robbers gathering in France through twelve centuries after _every_
period of war; witness the scourges of public peace in Italy, were it in
papal Rome or amongst the Fra Diavolos of Naples.

We believe that, so far from possessing any stronger principle of
vitality than the Roman institutions, those of Greece Proper (meaning
those originally and authentically Greek) had any separate advantage
only when applied locally. They were essentially _enchorial_
institutions, and even _physically_ local (_i.e._, requiring the same
place as well as the same people); just as the ordinances of Mahomet
betray his unconscious frailty and ignorance by presuming and
postulating a Southern climate as well as an Oriental temperament. The
Greek usages and traditionary monuments of civilization had adapted
themselves from the first to the singular physical conformation of
Hellas--as a 'nook-shotten'[14] land, nautically accessible and laid
down in seas that were studded with islands systematically adjusted to
the continental circumstances, whilst internally her mountainous
structure had split up almost the whole of her territory into separate
chambers or wards, predetermining from the first that galaxy of little
republics into which her splintered community threw itself by means of
the strong mutual repulsion derived originally from battlements of
hills, and, secondarily, from the existing state of the military art.
Having these advantages to begin with, reposing upon these foundations,
the Greek civil organization sustained itself undoubtedly through an
astonishing tract of time; before the ship _Argo_ it had commenced;
under the Ottoman Turks it still survived: for even in the Trojan æra,
and in the pre-Trojan or Argonautic æra, already (and perhaps for many
centuries before) the nominal kingdoms were virtually republics, the
princes being evidently limited in their authority by the 'sensus
communis' of the body politic almost as much as the Kings of Sparta were
from the time of Lycurgus to the extinction of the Peloponnesian
independence.

Accidents, therefore, although accidents of a permanent order (being
founded in external nature), gave to Greece a very peculiar advantage.
On her own dunghill her own usages had a tenacity of life such as is
seen in certain weeds (couch-grass, for instance). This natural
advantage, by means of intense local adaptation, did certainly prove
available for Greece, under the circumstances of a hostile invasion.
Even had the Persian invasion succeeded, it is possible that Grecian
civilization would still have survived the conquest, and would have
predominated, as actually it did in Ionia, etc.

So far our views seem to flow in the channel of Mr. Finlay's. But these
three considerations occur:

1st. That oftentimes Greece escaped the ravages of barbarians, not so
much by any quality of her civil institutions, whether better or worse,
as by her geographical position. It is 'a far cry to Loch Awe'; and had
Timon of Athens together with Apemantus clubbed their misanthropies,
joint and several, there would hardly have arisen an impetus strong
enough to carry an enemy all the way from the Danube to the Ilyssus; yet
so far, at least, every European enemy of Thebes and Athens had to
march. Nay, unless Monsieur le Sauvage happened to possess the mouths of
the Danube, so as to float down 'by the turn of tide' through the
Euxine, Bosphorus, Propontis, Hellespont, etc., he would think twice
before he would set off a-gallivanting to the regions of the South,
where certainly much sunshine was to be had of undeniable quality, but
not much of anything else. The Greeks were never absolute paupers,
because, however slender their means, their social usages never led to
any Irish expansion of population; but under no circumstances of
government were they or could they have been rich. Plunder therefore,
that could be worth packing and cording, there was little or none in
Greece. People do not march seven hundred miles to steal old curious
bedsteads, swarming, besides, with fleas. Sculptured plate was the
thing. And, from the times of Sylla, _that_ had a strange gravitation
towards Rome. It is, besides, worth noticing--as a general rule in the
science of robbery--that it makes all the difference in the world which
end of a cone is presented to the robber. Beginning at the apex of a
sugar-loaf, and required to move rapidly onwards to the broad basis
where first he is to halt and seek his booty, the robber locust advances
with hope and cheerfulness. Invert this order, and from the vast base of
the Danube send him on to the promontory of Sunium--a tract perpetually
dwindling in its breadth through 500 miles--and his reversion of booty
grows less valuable at every step. Yet even this feature was not the
most comfortless in the case. That the zone of pillage should narrow
with every step taken towards its proper ground, this surely was a bad
look-out. But it was a worse, that even this poor vintage lay hid and
sheltered under the Ægis of the empire. The whole breadth of the empire
on that side of the Mediterranean was to be traversed before one cluster
of grapes could be plucked from Greece; whereas, upon all the horns of
the Western Empire, plunder commenced from the moment of crossing the
frontier. Here, therefore, lies one objection to the supposed excellence
of Grecian institutions: they are valued, upon Mr. Finlay's scale, by
their quality of elastic rebound from violence and wrong; but, in order
that this quality might be truly tested, they ought to have been equally
and fairly tried: now, by comparison with the Western provinces, that
was a condition not capable of being realized for Greece, having the
position which she had.

2ndly. The reader will remark that the argument just used is but
negative: it does not positively combat the superiority claimed for the
Greek organization; that superiority may be all that it is described to
be; but it is submitted that perhaps the manifestation of this advantage
was not made on a sufficient breadth of experiment.

Now let us consider this. Upon the analogy of any possible precedent,
under which Rome could be said to have taken seven centuries in
unfolding her power, our Britain has taken almost fourteen. So long is
the space between the first germination of Anglo-Saxon institutions and
the present expansion of British power over the vast regions of
Hindostan. Most true it is that a very small section of this time and a
very small section of British energies has been applied separately to
the Indian Empire. But precisely the same distinction holds good in the
Roman case. The total expansion of Rome travelled, perhaps, through
eight centuries; but five of these spent themselves upon the mere
_domestic_ growth of Rome; during five she did not so much as attempt
any foreign appropriation. And in the latter three, during which she
did, we must figure to ourselves the separate ramifications of her
influence as each involving a very short cycle indeed of effort or
attention, though collectively involving a long space, separately as
involving a very brief one. If the eye is applied to each conquest
itself, nothing can exhibit less of a slow or gradual expansion than the
Roman system of conquest. It was a shadow which moved so rapidly on the
dial as to be visible and alarming. Had newspapers existed in those
days, or had such a sympathy bound nations together[15] as could have
supported newspapers, a vast league would have been roused by the
advance of Rome. Such a league _was_ formed where something of this
sympathy existed. The kingdoms formed out of the inheritance of
Alexander being in a sense Grecian kingdoms--Grecian in their language,
Grecian by their princes, Grecian by their armies (in their privileged
sections)--_did_ become alarming to the Greeks. And what followed? The
Achæan league, which, in fact, produced the last heroes of
Greece--Aratus, Philopoemen, Cleomenes. But as to Rome, she was too
obscure, too little advertised as a danger, to be separately observed.
But, partly, this arose from her rapidity. Macedonia was taken
separately from Greece. Sicily, which was the advanced port of Greece to
the West, had early fallen as a sort of appanage to the Punic struggle.
And all the rest followed by insensible degrees. In Syria, and again in
Pontus, and in Macedonia, three great kingdoms which to Greece seemed
related rather as enemies than as friends, and which therefore roused no
spirit of resistance in Greece, through Rome had already withdrawn all
the contingent proper from Greece. Had these powers concerted with Egypt
and with Greece a powerful league, Rome would have been thrown back
upon her Western chambers.

The reason why the Piratic power arose, we suppose to have been this,
and also the reason why such a power was not viewed as extra-national.
The nautical profession as such flowed in a channel altogether distinct
from the martial profession. It was altogether and exclusively
commercial in its general process. Only, upon peculiar occasions arose a
necessity for a nautical power as amongst the resources of empire.
Carthage reared upon the basis of her navy, as had done Athens, Rhodes,
Tyre, some part of her power: and Rome put forth so much of this power
as sufficed to meet Carthage. But that done, we find no separate
ambition growing up in Rome and directing itself to naval war.
Accidentally, when the war arose between Cæsar and Pompey, it became
evident that for rapidly transferring armies and for feeding these
armies, a navy would be necessary. And Cicero, but for _this crisis_,
and not as a _general_ remark, said--that 'necesse est qui mare tenuit
rerum potiri.'

Hence it happened--that as no permanent establishment could arise where
no permanent antagonist could be supposed to exist--oftentimes, and
indeed always, unless when some new crisis arose, the Roman navy went
down. In one of these intervals arose the Cilician piracy. Mr. Finlay
suggests that in part it arose out of the fragments from Alexander's
kingdoms, recombining: partly out of the Isaurian land pirates already
established, and furnished with such astonishing natural fortresses as
existed nowhere else if we except those aërial caves--a sort of mountain
nests on the side of declivities, which Josephus describes as harbouring
Idumean enemies of Herod the Great, against whom he was obliged to
fight by taking down warriors in complete panoply ensconced in baskets
suspended by chains; and partly arising on the temptation of rich
booties in the commerce of the Levant, or of rich temples on shore
amidst unwarlike populations. These elements of a warlike form were
required as the means of piracy, these fortresses and Isaurian caves as
the resources of piracy, these notorious cargoes or temples stored with
wealth as temptations to piracy, before a public nuisance could arise
demanding a public chastisement. And yet, because this piracy had a
local settlement and nursery, it seemed hardly consonant to the spirit
of public (or international) law, that all civil rights should be denied
them.

Not without reason, not without a profound purpose, did Providence
ordain that our two great precedents upon earth should be Greece and
Rome. In all planets, if you could look into them, doubt not (oh, reader
of ours!) that something exists answering to Greece and Rome. Odd it
would be--_curioes_! as the Germans say--if in Jupiter--or Venus--those
precedents should exist under the same _names_ of Greece and Rome. Yet,
why not? Jovial--and Venereal--people may be better in some things than
our people (which, however, we doubt), but certainly a better language
than the Greek man cannot have invented in either planet. Falling back
from cases so low and so lofty (Venus an inferior, Jupiter a far
superior planet) to our own case, the case of poor mediocre Tellurians,
perhaps the reader thinks that other nations might have served the
purpose of Providentia. Other nations might have furnished those
Providential models which the great drama of earth required. No.
Haughtily and despotically we say it--No. Take France. _There_ is a
noble nation. We honour it exceedingly for that heroic courage which on
a morning of battle does not measure the strength of the opposition;
which, when an enemy issues from the darkness of a wood, does not stop
to count noses, but like that noblest of animals, the British bull-dog,
flies at his throat, careless whether a leopard, a buffalo, or a tiger
of Bengal. This we vehemently admire. This we feel to be an echo, an
iteration, of our own leonine courage, concerning which--take you note
of this, oh, chicken-hearted man! (if any such is amongst _our_
readers)--that God sees it with pleasure, blesses it, and calls it 'very
good!' Next, when we come to think at odd times of that other courage,
the courage of fidelity, which stands for hours under the storm of a
cannonade--British courage, Russian courage--in mere sincerity we cannot
ascribe this to the Gaul. All this is true: we feel that the French is
an imperfect nation. But suppose it _not_ imperfect, would the French
therefore have fulfilled for us the mission of the Greek and the Roman?
Undoubtedly they would not. Far enough are we from admiring either Greek
or Roman in that degree to which the ignorance, but oftener the
hypocrisy, of man has ascended.

We, reader, are misanthropical--intensely so. No luxury known amongst
men--neither the paws of bears nor the tails of sheep--to us is so sweet
and dear as that of hating (yet much oftener of despising) our excellent
fellow-creatures. Oftentimes we exclaim in our dreams, where excuse us
for expressing our multitude by unity, 'Homo sum; humani nihil mihi
tolerandum puto.' We kick backwards at the human race, we spit upon
them; we void our rheum upon their ugly gaberdines. Consequently we do
not love either Greek or Roman; we regard them in some measure as
humbugs. But although it is no cue of ours to admire them (viz., in any
English sense of that word known to Entick's Dictionary), yet in a
Grecian or Roman sense we may say that [Greek: thaumazomen],
_admiramur_, both of these nations: we marvel, we wonder at them
exceedingly. Greece we shall omit, because to talk of the arts, and
Phidias, and Pericles, and '_all that_,' is the surest way yet
discovered by man for tempting a vindictive succession of kicks. Exposed
to the world, no author of such twaddle could long evade assassination.
But Rome is entitled to some separate notice, even after all that has
been written about her. And the more so in this case, because Mr. Finlay
has scarcely done her justice. He says: 'The Romans were a tribe of
warriors. All their institutions, even those relating to property, were
formed with reference to war.' And he then goes on to this invidious
theory of their history--that, as warriors, they overthrew the local
institutions of all Western nations, these nations being found by the
Romans in a state of civilization much inferior to their own. But
eastwards, when conquering Greece, her institutions they did _not_
overthrow. And what follows from that memorable difference? Why, that in
after days, when hives of barbarians issued from central Europe, all the
Western provinces (as not cemented by any native and home-bred
institutions, but fighting under the harness of an exotic organization)
sank before them; whereas Greece, falling back on the natural resources
of a system self-evolved and _local_, or epichorial in its origin, not
only defied these German barbarians for the moment, but actually after
having her throat cut in a manner rose up magnificently (as did the
Lancashire woman after being murdered by the M'Keans of Dumfries)[16],
staggered along for a considerable distance, and then (as the
Lancashire woman did not) mounted upon skates, and skated away into an
azure infinite of distance (quite forgetting her throat), so as to--do
what? It is really frightful to mention: so as to come safe and sound
into the nineteenth century, leaping into the centre of us all like the
ghost of a patriarch, setting her arms a-kimbo, and crying out: 'Here I
come from a thousand years before Homer.' All this is really true and
undeniable. It is past contradiction, what Mr. Finlay says, that Greece,
having weathered the following peoples, to wit, the Romans; secondly,
the vagabonds who persecuted the Romans for five centuries; thirdly, the
Saracens; fourthly and fifthly, the Ottoman Turks and Venetians;
sixthly, the Latin princes of Constantinople--not to speak seventhly and
eighthly of Albanian or Egyptian Ali Pashas, or ninthly, of Joseph Humes
and Greek loans, is now, viz., in March, 1844, alive and kicking. Think
of a man, reader, at a _soirée_ in the heavenly spring of '44 (for
heavenly it _will_ be), wearing white kid gloves, and descended from
Deucalion or Ogyges!

Amongst the great changes wrought in every direction by Constantine, it
is not to be supposed that Mr. Finlay could overlook those which applied
a new organization to the army. Rome would not be Rome; even a product
of Rome would not be legitimate; even an offshoot from Rome would be of
suspicious derivation, which _could_ find that great master-wheel of the
state machinery a secondary force in its system. It is wonderful to mark
the martial destiny of all which inherited, or upon any line descended
from Rome in every age of that mighty evolution. War not barbaric, war
exquisitely systematic, war according to the vigour of all science as
yet published to man, was the talisman by which Rome and the children
of Rome prospered: the S.P.Q.R. on the legionary banners was the sign
set in the rubric of the heavens by which the almighty nation, looking
upwards, read her commission from above: and if ever that sign shall
grow pale, then look for the coming of the end, whispered the prophetic
heart of Rome to herself even from the beginning. But are not all great
kingdoms dependent on their armies? No. Some have always been protected
by their remoteness, many by their adjacencies. Germany, in the first
century from Augustus, retreated into her mighty forests when closely
pressed, and in military phrase 'refused herself' to the pursuer. Persia
sheltered herself under the same tactics for ages;[17] scarcely needed
to fight, unless she pleased, and, when she did so, fought in alliance
with famine--with thirst--and with the confusion of pathless deserts.
Other empires, again, are protected by their infinity; America was found
to have no local existence by ourselves: she was nowhere because she was
everywhere. Russia had the same illimitable ubiquity for Napoleon. And
Spain again is so singularly placed with regard to France, a chamber
within a chamber, that she cannot be approached by any power not
maritime except on French permission. Manifold are the defensive
resources of nations beyond those of military systems. But for the Roman
empire, a ring fence around the Mediterranean lake, and hemmed in upon
every quarter of that vast circuit by an _indago_ of martial hunters,
nature and providence had made it the one sole available policy to stand
for ever under arms, eternally 'in procinctu,' and watching from the
specular altitude of her centre upon which radius she should slip her
wolves to the endless circumference.

Mr. Finlay, in our judgment, not only allows a most disproportionate
weight to vicious taxation, which is but one wheel amongst a vast system
of wheels in the machinery of administration, and which, like many
similar agencies, tends oftentimes to react by many corrections upon its
own derangements; but subsequently he views as through a magnifying
glass even these original exaggerations when measured upon the scale of
moral obligations. Not only does false taxation ruin nations and defeat
the possibility of self-defence--which is much--but it cancels the
duties of allegiance. He tells us (p. 408) that 'amidst the ravages of
the Goths, Huns, and Avars, the imperial tax-gatherers had never failed
to enforce payment of the tribute as long as anything remained
undestroyed; though according to the rules of justice, the Roman
government had really forfeited its right to levy the taxes, as soon as
it failed to perform its duty in defending the population.' We do not
believe that the government succeeded in levying tribute vigorously
under the circumstances supposed; the science and machinery of
administration were far from having realized that degree of exquisite
skill. But, if the government _had_ succeeded, we cannot admit that this
relation of the parties dissolved their connection. To have failed at
any time in defending a province or an outwork against an overwhelming
enemy, _that_ for a prince or for a minister is a great misfortune.
Shocking indeed it were if this misfortune could be lawfully
interpreted as his crime, and made the parent of a second misfortune,
ratifying the first by authorizing revolt of the people; and the more
so, as that first calamity would encourage traitors everywhere to
prepare the way for the second as a means of impunity for their own
treason. In the prospect of escaping at once from the burdens of war,
and from the penalties of broken vows to their sovereign, multitudes
would from the first enter into compromise and collusion with an
invader; and in this way they would create the calamity which they
charged upon their rulers as a desertion; they would create the
embarrassments for their government by which they hoped to profit, and
they would do this with an eye to the reversionary benefit anticipated
under the maxim here set up. True, they would often find their heavy
disappointment in the more grievous yoke of that invader whom they had
aided. But the temptation of a momentary gain would always exist for the
improvident many, if such a maxim were received into the law of nations;
and, if it would not always triumph, we should owe it in that case to
the blessing that God has made nations proud. Even in the case where men
had received a license from public law for deserting their sovereign,
thanks be to the celestial pride which is in man, few and anomalous
would be the instances in which they really _would_ do so. In reality it
must be evident that, under such a rule of Publicists, subjects must
stand in perpetual doubt whether the case had emerged or not which law
contemplated as the dissolution of their fealty. No man would say that a
province was licensed to desert, because the central government had lost
a battle. But a whole campaign, or ten campaigns, would stand in the
same predicament as a solitary battle, so long as the struggle was not
formally renounced by the sovereign. How many years of absolute
abandonment might justify a provincial people in considering themselves
surrendered to their own discretion, is a question standing on the
separate circumstances of each separate case. But generally it may be
said, that a ruler will be presumed justly _not_ to have renounced the
cause of resistance so long as he makes no treaty or compromise with the
enemy, and so long as he desists from open resistance only through
momentary exhaustion, or with a view to more elaborate preparation.
Would ten battles, would a campaign, would ten campaigns lost, furnish
the justifying motive? Certainly it would be a false casuistry that
would say so.

Why did the Romans conquer the Greeks? By _why_ we mean, Upon what
principle did the children of Romulus overthrow the children of Ion,
Dorus, Æolus? Why did not these overthrow those? We, speak _Latino
more_--Vellem ostenderes quare _hi_ non profligaverint _illos_? The
answer is brief: the Romans were _one_, the Greeks were _many_. Whilst
no weighty pressure from without had assaulted Greece, it was of
particular service to that little rascally system that they were split
into sections more than ever we _have_ counted or mean to count. They
throve by mutual repulsion, according to the ballad:

    When Captain X. kick'd Miss Roe, Miss Roe kick'd Captain X. again.'

Internally, for pleasant little domestic quarrels, the principle of
division was excellent; because, as often as the balance tended to
degravitation (a word we learned, as Juliet tells her nurse, 'from one
we danc'd withal'), _instanter_ it was redressed and trimmed by some
renegade going over to the suffering side. People talk of Athens being
beaten by the Spartans in the person of Lysander; and the vulgar notion
is, that the Peloponnesian war closed by an eclipse total and central
for our poor friend Athens. Nonsense! she had life left in her to kick
twenty such donkeys to death; and, if you look a very little ahead,
gazettes tell you, that before the peace of Antalcidas, those villains,
the Spartans (whom may heaven confound!) had been licked almost too
cruelly by the Athenians. And there it is that we insist upon closing
that one great intestine[18] war of the Greeks. So of other cases:
absolute defeat, final overthrow, we hold to be impossible for a Grecian
state, as against a Grecian state, under the conditions which existed
from the year 500 B.C. But when a foreign enemy came on, the
possibilities might alter. The foreigner, being one, and for the moment
at least united, would surely have a great advantage over the crowd of
little pestilent villains--right and left--that would be disputing the
policy of the case. There lay the original advantage of the Romans;
_one_ they were, and _one_ they were to the end of Roman time. Did you
ever hear of a Roman, unless it were Sertorius, that fought against
Romans? Whereas, scoundrel Greeks were always fighting against their
countrymen. Xenophon, in Persia, Alexander, seventy years later, met
with their chief enemies in Greeks. We may therefore pronounce with
firmness, that unity was one cause of the Roman superiority. What was
the other? Better military institutions. These, if we should go upon the
plan of rehearsing them, are infinite. But let us confine our view to
the separate mode in each people of combining their troops. In Greece,
the _phalanx_ was the ideal tactical arrangement; for Rome, the
_legion_. Everybody knows that Polybius, a Greek, who fled from the
Peloponnesus to Rome a little before the great Carthaginian war,
terminated by Scipio Africanus, has left a most interesting comparison
between the two forms of tactical arrangement: and, waiving the details,
the upshot is this--that the phalanx was a holiday arrangement, a
tournament arrangement, with respect to which you must suppose an excess
of luck if it could be made available, unless by mutual consent, under a
known possibility of transferring the field of battle to some smooth
bowling-green in the neighbourhood. But, on the other hand, the legion
was available everywhere. The _phalanx_ was like the organ, an
instrument almighty indeed where it can be carried; but it cost eight
hundred years to transfer it from Asia Minor to the court of Charlemagne
(_i.e._, Western Europe), so that it travelled at the rate of two miles
_per annum_; but the _legion_ was like the violin, less terrifically
tumultuous, but more infinite than the organ, whilst it is in a perfect
sense portable. Pitch your camp in darkness, on the next morning
everywhere you will find ground for the _legion_, but for the fastidious
_phalanx_ you need as much choice of ground as for the arena of an opera
stage.

And the same influence that had tended to keep the Greeks in division,
without a proper unity, operated also to infect the national character
at last with some lack of what may be called self-sufficiency. They were
in their later phases subtle, but compliant, more ready to adapt
themselves to changes than to assert a position and risk all in the
effort to hold it. Hence it came that even the most honourable and
upright amongst a nation far nobler in a moral sense (nobler, for
instance, on the scale of capacity for doing and suffering) never rose
to a sentiment of respect for the ordinary Grecian. The Romans viewed
him as essentially framed for ministerial offices. Am I sick? Come,
Greek, and cure me. Am I weary? Amuse me. Am I diffident of power to
succeed? Cheer me with flattery. Am I issuing from a bath? Shampoo me.

The point of view under which we contemplate the Romans is one which
cannot be dispensed with in that higher or transcendental study of
history now prompted by the vast ferment of the meditative mind. Oh,
feeble appreciators of the public mind, who can imagine even in dreams
that this generation--self-questioned, agitated, haunted beyond any
other by the elementary problems of our human condition, by the awful
_whence_ and the more awful _whither_, by what the Germans call the
'riddle of the universe,' and oppressed into a rebellious impatience by

        'The burthen of the mystery
    Of all this unintelligible world,'

--that this, above all generations, is shallow, superficial, unfruitful?
That was a crotchet of the late S. T. Coleridge's; that was a crotchet
of the present W. Wordsworth's, but which we will venture to guess that
he has now somewhat modified since this generation has become just to
himself. No; as to the multitude, in no age can it be other than
superficial. But we do contend, with intolerance and scorn of such
opposition as usually we meet, that the tendencies of this generation
are to the profound; that by all its natural leanings, and even by its
infirmities, it travels upwards on the line of aspiration and downwards
in the direction of the unfathomable. These tendencies had been
awakened and quickened by the vast convulsions that marked the close of
the last century. But war is a condition too restless for sustained
meditation. Even the years _after_ war, if that war had gathered too
abundantly the vintages of tears and tragedy and change, still rock and
undulate with the unsubsiding sympathies which wars such as we have
known cannot but have evoked. Besides that war is by too many issues
connected with the practical; the service of war, by the arts which it
requires, and the burthen of war, by the discussions which it prompts,
almost equally tend to alienate the public mind from the speculation
which looks beyond the interests of social life. But when a new
generation has grown up, when the forest trees of the elder generation
amongst us begin to thicken with the intergrowth of a younger shrubbery
that had been mere ground-plants in the æra of war, _then_ it is, viz.,
under the heavenly lull and the silence of a long peace, which in its
very uniformity and the solemnity of its silence has something analogous
to the sublime tranquillity of a Zaarrah, that minds formed for the
great inquests of meditation--feeling dimly the great strife which they
did not witness, and feeling it the more deeply because for _them_ an
idealized retrospect, and a retrospect besides being potently contrasted
so deeply with the existing atmosphere, peaceful as if it had never
known a storm--are stimulated preternaturally to those obstinate
questionings which belong of necessity to a complex state of society,
turning up vast phases of human suffering under all varieties, phases
which, having issued from a chaos of agitation, carry with them too
certain a promise of sooner or later revolving into a chaos of equal
sadness, universal strife. It is the relation of the immediate isthmus
on which we stand ourselves to a past and (prophetically speaking) to a
coming world of calamity, the relation of the smiling and halcyon calm
which we have inherited to that darkness and anarchy out of which it
arose, and towards which too gloomily we augur its return--this relation
it is which enforces the other impulses, whether many or few, connecting
our own transitional stage of society with objects always of the same
interest for man, but not felt to be of the same interest. The sun, the
moon, and still more the starry heavens alien to our own peculiar
system--what a different importance in different ages have they had for
man! To man armed with science and glasses, labyrinths of anxiety and
study; to man ignorant or barbarous less interesting than glittering
points of dew. At present those 'other impulses,' which the permanent
condition of modern society, so multitudinous and feverish, adds to the
meditative impulses of our particular and casual condition as respects a
terrific revolutionary war, are _not_ few, but many, and are all in one
direction, all favouring, none thwarting, the solemn fascinations by
which with spells and witchcraft the shadowy nature of man binds him
down to look for ever into this dim abyss. The earth, whom with
sublimity so awful the poet apostrophized after Waterloo, as 'perturbed'
and restless exceedingly, whom with a harp so melodious and beseeching
he adjured to rest--and again to rest from instincts of war so deep,
haunting the very rivers with blood, and slumbering not through
three-and-twenty years of woe--is again unsealed from slumber by the
mere reaction of the mighty past working together with the too probable
future and with the co-agencies from the unintelligible present. The
fervour and the strife of human thought is but the more subtle for
being less derived from immediate action, and more so from hieroglyphic
mysteries or doubts concealed in the very shows of life. The centres of
civilization seethe, as it were, and are ebullient with the agitation of
the self-questioning heart.

The fervour is universal; the tumult of intellectual man, self-tormented
with unfathomable questions, is contagious everywhere. And both from
what we know, it might be perceived _à priori_, and from what we see, it
may be known experimentally, that never was the mind of man roused into
activity so intense and almost morbid as in this particular stage of our
progress. And it has added enormously to this result--that it is
redoubled by our own consciousness of our own state so powerfully
enforced by modern inventions, whilst the consciousness again is
reverberated from a secondary mode of consciousness. All studies
prosper; all, with rare exceptions, are advancing only too impetuously.
Talent of every order is almost become a weed amongst us.

But this would be a most unreasonable ground for charging it upon our
time and country that they are unprogressive and commonplace. Nay,
rather, it is a ground for regarding the soil as more prepared for the
seed that is sown broadcast. And before our England lies an ample
possibility--to outstrip even Rome itself in the extent and the grandeur
of an empire, based on principles of progress and cohesion such as Rome
never knew.


FURTHER NOTES FOR ARTICLE ON MR. FINLAY'S HISTORY.

_Civilization._--Now about prisoners, strange as this may seem, it
really is not settled whether and how far it is the duty in point of
honour and reasonable forbearance to make prisoners. At Quatre Bras very
few were made by the French, and the bitterness, the frenzy of hatred
which this marked, led of necessity to a reaction.

But the strangest thing of all is this, that in a matter of such a
nature it should be open to doubt and mystery whether it is or is not
contradictory, absurd, and cancellatory or obligatory to make prisoners.
Look here, the Tartars in the Christian war, not from cruelty--at least,
no such thing is proved--but from mere coercion of what they regarded as
good sense the Tartars thought it all a blank contradiction to take and
not kill enemies. It seemed equal to taking a tiger laboriously and at
much risk in a net, then next day letting him go. Strange it is to say,
but it really requires an express experience to show the true practical
working of the case, and this demonstrates (inconceivable as that would
have been to the Tartars) that the capture is quite equal (quoad damage
to the enemy) to the killing.

(1.) As to durability, was it so? The Arabs were not strong except
against those who were peculiarly weak; and even in Turkey the Christian
Rajah predominates.

(2.) As to bigotry and principles of toleration Mr. Finlay says--and we
do not deny that he is right in saying--they arose in the latter stages.
This, however, was only from policy, because it was not safe to be so;
and repressed only from caution.

(3) About the impetuosity of the Arab assaults. Not what people think.

(4.) About the permanence or continuance of this Mahometan system--we
confound the religious system with the political. The religious movement
engrafted itself on other nations, translated and inoculated itself upon
other political systems, and thus, viz., as a principle travelling
through or along new machineries, propagated itself. But here is a deep
delusion. What should we Europeans think of an Oriental historian who
should talk of the Christians amongst the Germans, English, French,
Spaniards, as a separate and independent nation? My friend, we should
say, you mistake that matter. The Christians are not a local tribe
having an insulated local situation amongst Germans, French, etc. The
Christians _are_ the English, Germans, etc., or the English, Germans,
French, _are_ the Christians. So do many readers confer upon the Moslems
or Mahometans of history a separate and independent unity.

(_a_) Greek administration had a vicarious support.

(_b_) Incapacity of Eastern nations to establish primogeniture.

(_c_) Incapacity of Eastern nations to be progressive.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] '_Lackington's counter_': Lackington, an extensive seller of old
books and a Methodist (see his _Confessions_) in London, viz., at the
corner of Finsbury Square, about the time of the French Revolution,
feeling painfully that this event drew more attention than himself,
resolved to turn the scale in his own favour by a _ruse_ somewhat
unfair. The French Revolution had no counter; he _had_, it was circular,
and corresponded to a lighted dome above. Round the counter on a summer
evening, like Phæton round the world, the Edinburgh, the Glasgow, the
Holyhead, the Bristol, the Exeter, and the Salisbury Royal Mails, all
their passengers on board, and canvas spread, swept in, swept round, and
swept out at full gallop; the proximate object being to publish the
grandeur of his premises, the ultimate object to publish himself.

[13] 'Dependent upon _physical_ circumstances,' and, amongst those
physical circumstances, intensely upon climate. The Jewish ordinances,
multiplied and burthensome as they must have been found under any
mitigations, have proved the awfulness (if we may so phrase it) of the
original projectile force which launched them by continuing to revolve,
and to propagate their controlling functions through forty centuries
under all latitudes to which any mode of civilization has reached. But
the _Greek_ machineries of social life were absolutely and essentially
limited by nature to a Grecian latitude. Already from the earliest
stages of their infancy the Greek cities or rural settlements in the
Tauric Chersonese, and along the shores (Northern and Eastern) of the
Black Sea, had been obliged to unrobe themselves of their native Grecian
costumes in a degree which materially disturbed the power of the Grecian
literature as an influence for the popular mind. This effect of a new
climate to modify the influence of a religion or the character of a
literature is noticed by Mr. Finlay. Temples open to the heavens,
theatres for noonday light and large enough for receiving 30,000
citizens--these could no longer be transplanted from sunny regions of
Hymettus to the churlish atmospheres which overcast with gloom so
perpetual poor Ovid's sketches of his exile. Cherson, it is true, in the
Tauric Chersonese, survived down to the middle of the tenth century; so
much is certain from the evidence of a Byzantine emperor; and Mr. Finlay
is disposed to think that this famous little colonial state retained her
Greek 'municipal organization.' If this could be proved, it would be a
very interesting fact; it is, at any rate, interesting to see this saucy
little outpost of Greek civilization mounting guard, as it were, at so
great a distance from the bulwark of Christianity (the city of
Constantine), under whose mighty shadow she had so long been sheltered,
and maintaining _by whatever means_ her own independence. But, if her
municipal institutions were truly and permanently Greek, then it would
be a fair inference that to a Grecian mechanism of society she had been
indebted for her Grecian tenacity of life. And this is Mr. Finlay's
inference. Otherwise, and for our own parts, we should be inclined to
charge her long tenure of independence upon her strong situation,
rendered for _her_ a thousand times stronger by the two facts of her
commerce in the first place, and secondly, of her commerce being
maritime. Shipping and trade seem to us the two anchors by which she
rode.

[14] 'Nook-shotten,' an epithet applied by Shakspeare to England.

[15] Christianity is a force of unity. But was Paganism such? No. To be
idolatrous is no bond of union.

[16] See Murder as one of the Fine Arts. (Postscript in 1854.)

[17] '_Under the same tactics_'--the tactics of 'refusing' her columns
to the enemy. On this subject we want an elaborate memoir
historico-geographical revising every stage of the Roman warfare in
Pers-Armenia, from Crassus and Ventidius down to Heraclius--a range of
six and a half centuries; and specifically explaining why it was that
almost always the Romans found it mere destruction to attempt a passage
much beyond the Tigris or into central Persia, whilst so soon after
Heraclius the immediate successors of Mahomet overflowed Persia like a
deluge.

[18] 'Intestine war.' Many writers call the Peloponnesian war (by the
way, a very false designation) the great _civil_ war of Greece.
'Civil'!--it might have been such, had the Grecian states had a central
organ which claimed a common obedience.




_III. THE ASSASSINATION OF CÆSAR._


The assassination of Cæsar, we find characterized in one of his latter
works (_Farbenlehre_, Theil 2, p. 126) by Goethe, as '_die
abgeschmackteste That die jemals begangen worden_'--_the most
outrageously absurd act that ever was committed_. Goethe is right, and
more than right. For not only was it an atrocity so absolutely without a
purpose as never to have been examined by one single conspirator with a
view to its probable tendencies--in that sense therefore it was absurd
as pointing to no result--but also in its immediate arrangements and
precautions it had been framed so negligently, with a carelessness so
total as to the natural rebounds and reflex effects of such a tragic
act, that the conspirators had neither organized any resources for
improving their act, nor for securing their own persons from the first
blind motions of panic, nor even for establishing a common rendezvous.
When they had executed their valiant exploit, the very possibility of
which from the first step to the last they owed to the sublime
magnanimity of their victim--well knowing his own continual danger, but
refusing to evade it by any arts of tyranny or distrust--when they had
gone through their little scenic mummery of swaggering with their
daggers--cutting '5,' '6' and 'St. George,' and 'giving point'--they had
come to the end of the play. _Exeunt omnes: vos plaudite_. Not a step
further had they projected. And, staring wildly upon each other, they
began to mutter, 'Well, what are you up to next?' We believe that no act
so thoroughly womanish, that is, moving under a blind impulse without a
thought of consequences, without a concerted succession of steps, and no
_arrière pensée_ as to its final improvement, ever yet had a place or
rating in the books of Conspiracy, far less was attended (as by accident
this was) with an equipage of earth-shattering changes. Even the poor
deluded followers of the Old Mountain Assassin, though drugged with
bewildering potions, such men as Sir Walter Scott describes in the
person of that little wily fanatic gambolling before the tent of Richard
_Coeur-de-lion_, had always settled which way they would run when the
work was finished. And how peculiarly this reach of foresight was
required for these anti-Julian conspirators--will appear from one fact.
Is the reader aware, were these boyish men aware, that--besides, what we
all know from Shakespeare, a mob won to Cæsar's side by his very last
codicils of his will; besides a crowd of public magistrates and
dependents charged upon the provinces, etc., for two years deep by
Cæsar's act, though in requital of no services or attachment to himself;
besides a distinct Cæsarian party; finally, besides Antony, the express
representative and assignee of Cæsar, armed at this moment with the
powers of Consul--there was over and above a great military officer of
Cæsar's (Lentulus), then by accident in Rome, holding a most potent
government through the mere favour of Cæsar, and pledged therefore by an
instant interest of self-promotion, backed by a large number of Julian
troops at that instant billeted on a suburb of Rome--veterans, and
fierce fellows that would have cut their own fathers' throats 'as soon
as say dumpling' (see Lucan's account of them in Cæsar's harangue before
Pharsalia)? Every man of sense would have predicted ruin to the
conspirators. '_You'll tickle it for your concupy_' (Thersites in 'Troil
and Cress.') would have been the word of every rational creature to
these wretches when trembling from their tremulous act, and reeking from
their bloody ingratitude. For most remarkable it is that not one
conspirator but was personally indebted to Cæsar for eminent favours;
and many among them had even received that life from their victim which
they employed in filching away _his_. Yet after that feature of the
case, so notorious as it soon became, historians and biographers are all
ready to notice of the centurion who amputated Cicero's head that, he
had once been defended by Cicero. What if he had, which is more than we
know--must _that_ operate as a perpetual retaining fee on Cicero's
behalf? Put the case that we found ourselves armed with a commission (no
matter whence emanating) for abscinding the head of Mr. Adolphus who now
pleads with so much lustre at the general jail delivery of London and
Middlesex, or the head of Mr. Serjeant Wild, must it bar our claim that
once Mr. Adolphus had defended us on a charge of sheep-stealing, or that
the Serjeant had gone down 'special' in our cause to York? Very well,
but doubtless they had their fees. 'Oh, but Cicero could not receive
fees by law.' Certainly not by law; but by custom many _did_ receive
them at dusk through some postern gate in the shape of a huge cheese, or
a guinea-pig. And, if the 'special retainer' from Popilius Lænas is
somewhat of the doubtfullest, so is the 'pleading' on the part of
Cicero.

However, it is not impossible but some will see in this desperate game
of hazard a sort of courage on the part of the conspirators which may
redeem their knavery. But the courage of desperation is seldom genuine,
and least of all where the desperation itself was uncalled for. Yet even
this sort of merit the conspirators wanted. The most urgent part of the
danger was that which in all probability they had not heard of, viz.,
the casual presence at Rome of Julian soldiers. Pursuing no inquiries at
all, they would hear not; practising no caution, they would keep no
secret. The plot had often been betrayed, we will swear: but Cæsar and
Cæsar's friends would look upon all such stories as the mere expressions
of a permanent case, so much inevitable exposure on _their_ part--so
much possibility of advantage redounding to the other side. And out of
these naked possibilities, as some temptation would continually arise to
use them profitably, much more would arise to use them as delightful
offsets to the sense of security and power.

     [Mommsen is more at one with De Quincey here than Merivale,
     who, at p. 478, vol. ii., writes: 'We learn with pleasure
     that the conspirators did not venture even to sound Cicero';
     but at vol. iii., p. 9, he has these significant words:
     'Cicero, himself, we must believe, was not ashamed to lament
     the scruples which had denied him initiation into the plot.'
     Forsyth writes of Cicero's views: 'He was more than ever
     convinced of the want of foresight shown by the
     conspirators. Their deed, he said, was the deed of men,
     their counsels were the counsels of children,' 'Life of
     Cicero,' 3rd edition, pp. 435-6.--ED.]




_IV. CICERO (SUPPLEMENTARY TO PUBLISHED ESSAY)._


Some little official secrets we learn from the correspondence of Cicero
as Proconsul of Cilicia.[19] And it surprises us greatly to find a man,
so eminently wise in his own case, suddenly turning romantic on behalf
of a friend. How came it--that he or any man of the world should fancy
any substance or reality in the public enthusiasm for one whose
character belonged to a past generation? Nine out of ten amongst the
Campanians must have been children when Pompey's name was identified
with national trophies. For many years Pompey had done nothing to
sustain or to revive his obsolete reputation. Capua or other great towns
knew him only as a great proprietor. And let us ask this one searching
question--Was the poor spirit-broken insolvent, a character now so
extensively prevailing in Italian society, likely to sympathize more
heartily with the lordly oligarch fighting only for the exclusive
privileges of his own narrow order, or with the great reformer who
amongst a thousand plans for reinfusing vitality into Roman polity was
well understood to be digesting a large measure of relief to the
hopeless debtor? What lunacy to believe that the ordinary citizen,
crouching under the insupportable load of his usurious obligations,
could be at leisure to support a few scores of lordly senators
panic-stricken for the interests of their own camarilla, when he
beheld--taking the field on the opposite quarter--one, the greatest of
men, who spoke authentically to all classes alike, authorizing all to
hope and to draw their breath in freedom under that general recast of
Roman society which had now become inevitable! As between such
competitors, which way would the popularity be likely to flow? Naturally
the mere merits of the competition were decisive of the public opinion,
although the petty aristocracy of the provincial boroughs availed
locally to stifle those tumultuous acclamations which would else have
gathered about the name of Cæsar. But enough transpired to show which
way the current was setting. Cicero does not dissemble that. He
acknowledges that all men's hopes turned towards Cæsar. And Pompey, who
was much more forced into towns and public scenes, had even less
opportunity for deceiving himself. He, who had fancied all Campania
streaming with incense to heaven on his own personal account, now made
the misanthropical discovery--not only that all was hollow, and that his
own name was held in no esteem--but absolutely that the barrier to any
hope of popularity for himself was that very man whom, on other and
previous grounds, he had for some time viewed as his own capital
antagonist.

Here then, in this schism of the public affections, and in the
mortifying discovery so abruptly made by Pompey, lay the bitter affront
which he could not digest--the injury which he purposed to avenge. What
barbed this injury to his feelings, what prepared him for exhausting
its bitterness, was the profound delusion in which he had been
previously laid asleep by flattering friends--the perfect faith in his
own uniform popularity. And now, in the very teeth of all current
representations, we advance this proposition: That the quality of his
meditated revenge and its horrid extent were what originally unveiled to
Cicero's eyes the true character of Pompey and his partisans.

       *       *       *       *       *

The last letter of the sixth book is written from Athens, which city,
after a voyage of about a fortnight, Cicero reached precisely in the
middle of October, having sailed out of Ephesus on the 1st. He there
found a letter from Atticus, dated from Rome on the 18th of September;
and his answer, which was 'by return of post,' closes with these words:
'Mind that you keep your promise of writing to me fully about my darling
Tullia,' which means of course about her new husband Dolabella; next
about the Commonwealth, which by this time I calculate must be entering
upon its agony; and then about the Censors, etc. Hearken: 'This letter
is dated on the 16th of October; that day on which, by your account,
Cæsar is to reach Placentia with four legions. What, I ask myself for
ever, is to become of us? My own situation at this moment, which is in
the Acropolis of Athens, best meets my idea of what is prudent under the
circumstances.'

Well it would have been for Cicero's peace of mind if he could seriously
have reconciled himself to abide by that specular station. Had he
pleaded ill-health, he might have done so with decorum. As it was,
thinking his dignity concerned in not absenting himself from the public
councils at a season so critical, after a few weeks' repose he sailed
forward to Italy, which he reached on the 23rd of November. And with
what result? Simply to leave it again with difficulty and by stratagem,
after a winter passed in one continued contest with the follies of his
friends, nothing done to meet his own sense of the energy required,
every advantage forfeited as it arose, ruined in the feeble execution,
individual activity squandered for want of plan, and (as Cicero
discovered in the end) a principle of despair, and _the secret reserve
of a flight operating_ upon the leaders _from the very beginning_. The
key to all this is obvious for those who read with their eyes awake.
Pompey and the other consular leaders were ruined for action by age and
by the derangement of their digestive organs. Eating too much and too
luxuriously is far more destructive to the energies of action than
intemperance as to drink. Women everywhere alike are temperate as to
eating; and the only females memorable for ill-health from luxurious
eating have been Frenchwomen or Belgians--witness the Duchess of
Portsmouth, and many others of the two last centuries whom we could
name. But men everywhere commit excesses in this respect, if they have
it in their power. With the Roman nobles it was almost a necessity to do
so. Could any popular man evade the necessity of keeping a splendid
dinner-table? And is there one man in a thousand who can sit at a festal
board laden with all the delicacies of remotest climates, and continue
to practise an abstinence for which he is not sure of any reward? All
his abstinence may be defeated by a premature fate, and in the meantime
he is told, with some show of reason, that a life defrauded of its
genial enjoyments is _not_ life, is at all events a present loss, whilst
the remuneration is doubtful, except where there happen to be powerful
intellectual activities to reap an _instant_ benefit from such
sacrifices. Certainly it is the last extremity of impertinence to attack
men's habits in this respect. No man, we may be assured, has ever yet
practised any true self-denial in such a case, or ever will. Either he
has been trained under a wholesome poverty to those habits which
intercept the very development of a taste for luxuries, which evade the
very possibility therefore of any; or if this taste has once formed
itself, he would find it as impossible in this as in any other case to
maintain a fight with a temptation recurring _daily_. Pompey certainly
could not. He was of a slow, torpid nature through life; required a
continual supply of animal stimulation, and, if he had _not_ required
it, was assuredly little framed by nature for standing out against an
_artificial_ battery of temptation. There is proof extant that his
system was giving way under the action of daily dinners. Cicero mentions
the fact of his suffering from an annual illness; what may be called the
_etesian_ counter-current from his intemperance. Probably the liver was
enlarged, and the pylorus was certainly not healthy. Cicero himself was
not free from dyspeptic symptoms. If he had survived the Triumvirate, he
would have died within seven years from some disease of the intestinal
canal. Atticus, we suspect, was troubled with worms. Locke, indeed, than
whom no man ever less was acquainted with Greek or Roman life, pretends
that the ancients seldom used a pocket-handkerchief; knew little of
catarrhs, and even less of what the French consider indigenous to this
rainy island--_le catch-cold_. Nothing can be more unfounded. Locke was
bred a physician, but his practice had been none; himself and the cat
were his chief patients. Else we, who are no physicians, would wish to
ask him--what meant those continual _febriculæ_ to which all Romans of
rank were subject? What meant that _fluenter lippire_, a symptom so
troublesome to Cicero's eyes, and always arguing a functional, if not
even an organic, derangement of the stomach? Take this rule from us,
that wherever the pure white of the eye is clouded, or is veined with
red streaks, or wherever a continual weeping moistens the eyelashes,
there the digestive organs are touched with some morbid affection,
probably in it's early stages; as also that the inferior viscera, _not_
the stomach, must be slightly disordered before toothache _can_ be an
obstinate affection. And as to _le catch-cold_, the-most dangerous shape
in which it has ever been known, resembling the English _cholera
morbus_, belongs to the modern city of Rome from situation; and probably
therefore to the ancient city from the same cause. Pompey, beyond all
doubt, was a wreck when he commenced the struggle.

Struggle, conflict, for a man who needed to be in his bed! And struggle
with whom? With that man whom his very enemies viewed as a monster
([Greek: teras] is Cicero's own word), as preternaturally endowed, in
this quality of working power. But how then is it consistent with our
view of Roman dinners, that Cæsar should have escaped the universal
scourge? We reply, that one man is often stronger than another; every
man is stronger in some one organ; and secondly, Cæsar had lived away
from Rome through the major part of the last ten years; and thirdly, the
fact that Cæsar _had_ escaped the contagion of dinner luxury, however it
may be accounted for, is attested in the way of an exception to the
general order of experience, and with such a degree of astonishment, as
at once to prove the general maxim we have asserted, and the special
exemption in favour of Cæsar. He _only_, said Cato, he, as a
contradiction to all precedents--to the Gracchi, to Marius, to Cinna, to
Sylla, to Catiline--had come in a state of temperance (_sobrius_) to the
destruction of the state; not meaning to indicate mere superiority to
wine, but to _all_ modes of voluptuous enjoyment. Cæsar practised, it is
true, a refined epicureanism under the guidance of Greek physicians, as
in the case of his emetics; but this was by way of evading any gross
effects from a day of inevitable indulgence, not by way of aiding them.
Besides, Pompey and Cicero were about seven years older than Cæsar. They
stood upon the threshold of their sixtieth year at the _opening_ of the
struggle; Cæsar was a hale young man of fifty-two. And we all know that
Napoleon at forty-two was incapacitated for Borodino by incipient
disease of the stomach; so that from that day he, though junior by
seventeen years to Pompey, yet from Pompey's self-indulgence (not
certainly in splendid sensuality, but in the gross modes belonging to
his obscure youth) was pronounced by all the judicious, superannuated as
regarded the indispensable activity of martial habits. If he cannot face
the toils of military command, said his officers, why does he not
retire? Why does he not make room for others? Neither was the campaign
of 1813 or 1814 any refutation of this. Infinite are the cases in which
the interests of nations or of armies have suffered through the dyspepsy
of those who administered them. And above all nations the Romans laid
themselves open to this order of injuries from a dangerous oversight in
their constitutional arrangements, which placed legal bars on the
youthful side of all public offices, but none on the aged side. Of all
nations the Romans had been most indebted to men emphatically young; of
all nations they, by theory, most exclusively sanctioned the pretensions
of old ones. Not before forty-three could a man stand for the
consulship; and we have just noticed a case where a man of pestilent
activity in our own times had already become dyspeptically incapable of
command at forty-two. Besides, after laying down his civil office
(which, by itself, was often in the van of martial perils), the consul
had to pass into some province as military leader, with the prospect by
possibility of many years' campaigning. It is true that some men far
anticipated the legal age in assuming offices, honours, privileges. But
this, being always by infraction of fundamental laws, was no subject of
rejoicing to a patriotic Roman. And the Roman folly at this very crisis,
in trusting one side of the quarrel to an elderly, lethargic invalid,
subject to an annual struggle for his life, was appropriately punished
by that catastrophe which six years after threw them into the hands of a
schoolboy.

Yet on the other hand it may be asked, by those who carry the proper
spirit of jealousy into their historical reading, was Cicero always
right in these angry comments upon Pompey's strategies? Might it not be,
that where Cicero saw nothing but groundless procrastination, in reality
the obstacle lay in some overwhelming advantage of Cæsar's? That, where
his reports to Atticus read the signs of the time into the mere panic of
a Pompey, some more impartial report would see nothing to wonder at but
the overcharged expectations of a Cicero? Sometimes undoubtedly this is
the plain truth. Pompey's disadvantages were considerable; he had no
troops upon which he could rely; that part which had seen service
happened to be a detachment from Cæsar's army, sent home as a pledge for
his civic intentions at an earlier period, and their affection was still
lively to their original leader. The rest were raw levies. And it is a
remarkable fact, that the insufficiency of such troops was only now
becoming matter of notoriety. In foreign service, where the Roman
recruits were incorporated with veterans, as the natives in our Eastern
army, with a small proportion of British to steady them, they often
behaved well, and especially because they seldom acted against an enemy
that was not as raw as themselves. But now, in civil service against
their own legions, it was found that the mere novice was worth nothing
at all; a fact which had not been fully brought out in the strife of
Marius and Sylla, where Pompey had himself played a conspicuous and
cruel part, from the tumultuary nature of the contest; besides which the
old legions were then by accident as much concentrated on Italian ground
as now they were dispersed in transmarine provinces. Of the present
Roman army, ten legions at least were scattered over Macedonia, Achaia,
Cilicia, and Syria; five were in Spain; and six were with Cæsar, or
coming up from the rear. To say nothing of the forces locked up in
Sicily, Africa, Numidia, etc. It was held quite unadvisable by Pompey's
party to strip the distant provinces of their troops, or the great
provincial cities of their garrisons. All these were accounted as so
many reversionary chances against Cæsar. But certainly a bolder game was
likely to have prospered better; had large drafts from all these distant
armies been ordered home, even Cæsar's talents might have been
perplexed, and his immediate policy must have been so far baffled as to
force him back upon Transalpine Gaul. Yet if such a plan were eligible,
it does not appear that Cicero had ever thought of it; and certainly it
was not Pompey, amongst so many senatorial heads, who could be blamed
for neglecting it. Neglect he did; but Pompey had the powers of a
commander-in-chief for the immediate arrangements; but in the general
scheme of the war he, whose game was to call himself the servant of the
Senate, counted but for one amongst many concurrent authorities.
Combining therefore his limited authority with his defective materials,
we cannot go along with Cicero in the whole bitterness of his censure.
The fact is, no cautious scheme whatever, no practicable scheme could
have kept pace with Cicero's burning hatred to Cæsar. 'Forward, forward!
crush the monster; stone him, stab him, hurl him into the sea!' This was
the war-song of Cicero for ever; and men like Domitius, who shared in
his hatreds, as well as in his unseasonable temerity, by precipitating
upon Cæsar troops that were unqualified for the contest, lost the very
_élite_ of the Italian army at Corfinium; and such men were soon found
to have been embarked upon the ludicrous enterprise of 'catching a
Tartar;' following and seeking those

                        'Quos opimus
    Fallere et effugere est triumphus.'


ADDITIONAL NOTES FOR CICERO.


I.

Bribery was it? which had been so organized as the sole means of
succeeding at elections, and which, once rendered necessary as the organ
of assertion for each man's birthright, became legitimate; in which
Cicero himself declared privately that there was '[Greek: exochê] in
nullo,' no sort of pre-eminence, one as bad as another, _pecunia
exaequet omnium dignitatem_. Money was the universal leveller. Was it
gladiators bought for fighting with? These were bought by his friend
Milo as well as his enemy Clodius, by Sextus Pompey on one side as much
as by Cæsar on the other. Was it neglect of _obnunciatio_? And so far as
regards treating, Cicero himself publicly justified it against the
miserable theatrical Cato. How ridiculous to urge that against a popular
man as a crime, when it was sometimes enjoined by the Senate with
menaces as a duty! Was it the attacking all obnoxious citizens' houses?
That was done by one side quite as much as by the other, and signifies
little, for the attack always fell on some leading man in wealth; and
such a man's house was a fortress. Was it accepting provinces from the
people? Cicero would persuade us that this was an unheard of crime in
Clodius. But how came it that so many others did the same thing? Nay,
that the Senate abetted them in doing it; saying to such a person, 'Oh,
X., we perceive that you have extorted from the people.'


II.

Then his being recalled; what if a man should say that his nephew was
for it, and all his little nieces, not to mention his creditors? The
Senate were for it. But why not? Had the Senate exiled him? And,
besides, he was their agent.


III.

It was 'an impious bargain' are the words of Middleton, and Deiotarus
who broke it was a prince of noble character. What was he noble for? We
never heard of anything very noble that he did; and we doubt whether Dr.
Conyers knew more about him than we. But we happen to know why he calls
him noble. Cicero, who long afterwards came to know this king personally
and gave him a good dinner, says now upon hearsay (for he had then never
been near him, and could have no accounts of him but from the wretched
Quintus) that _in eo multa regia fuerunt_. Why yes, amputating heads was
in those parts a very regal act. But what he chiefly had in his eye,
comes out immediately after. Speaking to Clodius, he says that the visit
of this king was so bright, _maxime quod tibi nullum nummum dedit_.


IV.

Wicked Middleton says that Cicero followed his conscience in following
Pompey and the cause approved by what in the odious slang of his own
days he calls 'the honest men.' But be it known unto him that he tells a
foul falsehood. He followed his personal gratitude. This he is careful
to say over and over again. Some months before he had followed what he
deemed the cause of the Commonwealth and of the _boni_. The _boni_ were
vanished, he sought them and found only a heap of selfish nobles, half
crazy with fear and half crazy with pride. These were gone, but Pompey
the man remained that he clung to. And in his heart of hearts was
another feeling--hatred to Cæsar.


V.

403. 'Cicero had only stept aside' was the technical phrase for lurking
from creditors. So Bishop Burnet of Sir Edmondbury Godfrey, it was
thought he might have stept aside for debt.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Cicero entered on the office of Proconsul of Cilicia on the last
day of July, 703 A.U.C.; he resigned it on the last day but one of July,
704.--ED.




_V. MEMORIAL CHRONOLOGY._


I. _The Main Subject Opened._ What is Chronology, and how am I to teach
it? The _what_ is poorly appreciated, and chiefly through the defects of
the _how_. Because it is so ill-taught, therefore in part it is that
Chronology is so unattractive and degraded. Chronology is represented to
be the handmaid of history. But unless the machinery for exhibiting this
is judicious, the functions, by being obscured, absolutely lose all
their value, flexibility, and attraction. Chronology is not meant only
to enable us to refer each event to its own particular era--that may be
but trivial knowledge, of little value and of slight significance in its
application; but chronology has higher functions. It teaches not only
when A happened, but also with what other events, B, C, or D, it was
associated. It may be little to know that B happened 500 years before
Christ, but it may be a most important fact that A and B happened
concurrently with D, that both B and D were prepared by X, and that
through their concurrent operation arose the ultimate possibility of Z.
The mere coincidences or consecutions, mere accidents of simultaneity or
succession, of precession or succession, maybe less than nothing. But
the co-operation towards a common result, or the relation backwards to a
common cause, may be so important as to make the entire difference
between a story book, on the one hand, and a philosophic history, on the
other, of man as a creature.

History is not an anarchy; man is not an accident. The very motions of
the heavenly bodies for many a century were thought blind and without
law. Now we have advanced so far into the light as to perceive the
elaborate principles of their order, the original reason of their
appearing, the stupendous equipoise of their attraction and repulsion,
the divine artifice of their compensations, the original ground of their
apparent disorder, the enormous system of their reactions, the almost
infinite intricacy of their movements. In these very anomalies lies the
principle of their order. A curve is long in showing its elements of
fluxion; we must watch long in order to compute them; we must wait in
order to know the law of their relations and the music of the deep
mathematical principles which they obey. A piece of music, again, from
the great hand of Mozart or Beethoven, which seems a mere anarchy to the
dull, material mind, to the ear which is instructed by a deep
sensibility reveals a law of controlling power, determining its
movements, its actions and reactions, such as cannot be altogether
hidden, even when as yet it is but dimly perceived.

So it is in history, though the area of its interest is yet wider, and
the depths to which it reaches more profound; all its contradictory
phenomena move under one embracing law, and all its contraries shall
finally be solved in the clear perception of this law.

       *       *       *       *       *

Reading and study ill-conducted run to waste, and all reading and study
are ill-conducted which do not plant the result as well as the fact or
date in the memory. With no form of knowledge is this more frequently
the case than with history. Such is the ill-arranged way of telling all
stories, and so perfectly without organization is the record of history,
that of what is of little significance there is much, and of what is of
deep and permanent signification there is little or nothing.

The first step in breaking ground upon this almost impracticable
subject, is--to show the student a true map of the field in which his
labours are to lie. Most people have a vague preconception, peopling the
fancy with innumerable shadows, of some vast wilderness or Bilidulgerid
of trackless time, over which are strewed the wrecks of events without
order, and persons without limit. _Omne ignotum_, says Tacitus, _pro
magnifico_; that is, everything which lies amongst the shades and
darkness of the indefinite, and everything which is in the last degree
confused, seems infinite. But the gloom of uncertainty seems far greater
than it really is.

One short distribution and circumscription of historical ages will soon
place matters in a more hopeful aspect. Fabulous history ceases, and
authentic history commences, just three-quarters of a millennium before
Jesus Christ; that is, just 750 years. Let us call this space of time,
viz., the whole interval from the year 750 B.C. up to the Incarnation of
Christ, the first chamber of history. I do not mean that precisely 750
years before our Saviour's birth, fabulous and mythological history
started like some guilty thing at the sound of a cock-crowing, and
vanished as with the sound of harpies' wings. It vanished as the natural
darkness of night vanishes. A stealthy twilight first began to divide
and give shape to the formless shadows: what previously had been one
blank mass of darkness began to break into separate forms: outlines
became perceptible, groups of figures started forward into relief; chaos
began to shape and organize its gloomy masses. Next, and by degrees,
came on the earliest dawn. This ripened imperceptibly into a rosy aurora
that gave notice of some mightier power approaching. And at length, but
not until the age of Cyrus, five centuries and a half before Christ,
precisely one century later, the golden daylight of authentic history
sprang above the horizon and was finally established. Since that time,
whatever want of light we may have to lament is due to the _loss_ of
records, not to their original _absence_; due to the victorious
destructions of time, not[20] to the error of the human mind confounding
the provinces of Fable and of History.

Let the first chamber of history therefore be that which stretches from
the year 750 B.C. to the era of His Incarnation. I say 750 for the
present, because it would be quite idle, in dealing with intervals of
time so vast, to take notice of any little excess or defect by which the
actual period differed from the ideal; strictly speaking, the period of
authentic history commences sixteen or seventeen years earlier. But for
the present let us say in round numbers that this period commenced 750
years B.C. And let the first chamber of history be of that duration.

B. Next let us take an equal space _after_ Christ. This will be the
second chamber of history. Starting from the birth of our Savio

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