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Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3)

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Title: Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3)

Author: Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay Macaulay


        
Release date: February 10, 2009 [eBook #28046]

Language: English

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CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS

by

LORD MACAULAY

In Three Volumes

[Illustration: The Riverside Press logo.]

VOLUME III







Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge

Copyright, 1899, by Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
All Rights Reserved




TABLE OF CONTENTS

                                                 PAGE

  RANKE'S HISTORY OF THE POPES                      1

  LEIGH HUNT'S COMIC DRAMATISTS OF THE RESTORATION 47

  LORD HOLLAND                                    101

  WARREN HASTINGS                                 114

  FREDERIC THE GREAT                              243

  DIARY AND LETTERS OF MADAME D'ARBLAY            331

  THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ADDISON                396

  BARERE                                          487

  THE EARL OF CHATHAM                             591

  INDEX TO THE ESSAYS                             689




CRITICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS
III



RANKE'S HISTORY OF THE POPES[1]

_The Edinburgh Review_, October, 1840


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

          "bleibt stets von gleichem Schlag,
    Und ist so wunderlich als wie am ersten Tag."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    "Cumque superba foret Babylon spolianda tropaeis,
    Bella geri placuit nullos habitura triumphos."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome,
during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By Leopold Ranke,
Professor in the University of Berlin. Translated from the German by
Sarah Austin. 3 vols. 8vo. London: 1840.




LEIGH HUNT'S COMIC DRAMATISTS OF THE RESTORATION[2]

_The Edinburgh Review_, January, 1841


We have a kindness for Mr. Leigh Hunt. We form our judgment of him,
indeed, only from events of universal notoriety, from his own works, and
from the works of other writers, who have generally abused him in the
most rancorous manner. But unless we are greatly mistaken, he is a very
clever, a very honest, and a very good-natured man. We can clearly
discern, together with many merits, many faults both in his writings and
in his conduct. But we really think that there is hardly a man living
whose merits have been so grudgingly allowed, and whose faults have been
so cruelly expiated.

In some respects Mr. Leigh Hunt is excellently qualified for the task
which he has now undertaken. His style, in spite of its mannerism, nay,
partly by reason of its mannerism, is well suited for light, garrulous,
desultory _ana_, half critical, half biographical. We do not always
agree with his literary judgments; but we find in him what is very rare
in our time, the power of justly appreciating and heartily enjoying good
things of very different kinds. He can adore Shakespeare and Spenser
without denying poetical genius to the author of Alexander's Feast, or
fine observation, rich fancy, and exquisite humor to him who imagined
Will Honeycomb and Sir Roger de Coverley. He has paid particular
attention to the history of the English drama, from the age of
Elizabeth down to our own time, and has every right to be heard with
respect on that subject.

The plays to which he now acts as introducer are, with few exceptions,
such as, in the opinion of many very respectable people, ought not to be
reprinted. In this opinion we can by no means concur. We cannot wish
that any work or class of works which has exercised a great influence on
the human mind, and which illustrates the character of an important
epoch in letters, politics, and morals, should disappear from the world.
If we err in this matter, we err with the gravest men and bodies of men
in the empire, and especially with the Church of England, and with the
great schools of learning which are connected with her. The whole
liberal education of our countrymen is conducted on the principle that
no book which is valuable, either by reason of the excellence of its
style, or by reason of the light which it throws on the history, polity,
and manners of nations, should be withheld from the student on account
of its impurity. The Athenian Comedies, in which there are scarcely a
hundred lines together without some passage of which Rochester would
have been ashamed, have been reprinted at the Pitt Press and the
Clarendon Press, under the direction of syndics and delegates appointed
by the Universities, and have been illustrated with notes by reverend,
very reverend, and right reverend commentators. Every year the most
distinguished young men in the kingdom are examined by bishops and
professors of divinity in such works as the Lysistrata of Aristophanes
and the Sixth Satire of Juvenal. There is certainly something a little
ludicrous in the idea, of a conclave of venerable fathers of the church
praising and rewarding a lad on account of his intimate acquaintance
with writings compared with which the loosest tale in Prior is modest.
But, for our own part, we have no doubt that the great societies which
direct the education of the English gentry have herein judged wisely.
It is unquestionable that an extensive acquaintance with ancient
literature enlarges and enriches the mind. It is unquestionable that a
man whose mind has been thus enlarged and enriched is likely to be far
more useful to the state and to the church than one who is unskilled, or
little skilled, in classical learning. On the other hand, we find it
difficult to believe that, in a world so full of temptation as this, any
gentleman whose life would have been virtuous if he had not read
Aristophanes and Juvenal will be made vicious by reading them. A man
who, exposed to all the influences of such a state of society as that in
which we live, is yet afraid of exposing himself to the influences of a
few Greek or Latin verses, acts, we think, much like the felon who
begged the sheriffs to let him have an umbrella held over his head from
the door of Newgate to the gallows, because it was a drizzling morning,
and he was apt to take cold.

The virtue which the world wants is a healthful virtue, not a
valetudinarian virtue, a virtue which can expose itself to the risks
inseparable from all spirited exertion, not a virtue which keeps out of
the common air for fear of infection, and eschews the common food as too
stimulating. It would be indeed absurd to attempt to keep men from
acquiring those qualifications which fit them to play their part in life
with honor to themselves and advantage to their country, for the sake of
preserving a delicacy which cannot be preserved, a delicacy which a walk
from Westminster to the Temple is sufficient to destroy.

But we should be justly chargeable with gross inconsistency if, while we
defend the policy which invites the youth of our country to study such
writers as Theocritus and Catullus, we were to set up a cry against a
new edition of the Country Wife or the Way of the World. The immoral
English writers of the seventeenth century are indeed much less
excusable than those of Greece and Rome. But the worst English writings
of the seventeenth century are decent, compared with much that has been
bequeathed to us by Greece and Rome. Plato, we have little doubt, was a
much better man than Sir George Etherege. But Plato has written things
at which Sir George Etherege would have shuddered. Buckhurst and Sedley,
even in those wild orgies at the Cock in Bow Street for which they were
pelted by the rabble and fined by the Court of King's Bench, would never
have dared to hold such discourse as passed between Socrates and Phaedrus
on that fine summer day under the plane tree, while the fountain warbled
at their feet, and the cicadas chirped overhead. If it be, as we think
it is, desirable that an English gentleman should be well informed
touching the government and the manners of little commonwealths which
both in place and time are far removed from us, whose independence has
been more than two thousand years extinguished, whose language has not
been spoken for ages, and whose ancient magnificence is attested only by
a few broken columns and friezes, much more must it be desirable that he
should be intimately acquainted with the history of the public mind of
his own country, and with the causes, the nature, and the extent of
those revolutions of opinion and feeling which, during the last two
centuries, have alternately raised and depressed the standard of our
national morality. And knowledge of this sort is to be very sparingly
gleaned from parliamentary debates, from state papers, and from the
works of grave historians. It must either not be acquired at all, or it
must be acquired by the perusal of the light literature which has at
various periods been fashionable. We are therefore by no means disposed
to condemn this publication, though we certainly cannot recommend the
handsome volume before us as an appropriate Christmas present for young
ladies.

We have said that we think the present publication perfectly
justifiable. But we can by no means agree with Mr. Leigh Hunt, who
seems to hold that there is little or no ground for the charge of
immorality so often brought against the literature of the Restoration.
We do not blame him for not bringing to the judgment-seat the merciless
rigor of Lord Angelo; but we really think that such flagitious and
impudent offenders as those who are now at the bar deserved at least the
gentle rebuke of Escalus. Mr. Leigh Hunt treats the whole matter a
little too much in the easy style of Lucio; and perhaps his exceeding
lenity disposes us to be somewhat too severe.

And yet it is not easy to be too severe. For in truth this part of our
literature is a disgrace to our language and our national character. It
is clever, indeed, and very entertaining; but it is, in the most
emphatic sense of the words, "earthly, sensual, devilish." Its
indecency, though perpetually such as is condemned not less by the rules
of good taste than by those of morality, is not, in our opinion, so
disgraceful a fault as its singularly inhuman spirit. We have here
Belial, not as when he inspired Ovid and Ariosto, "graceful and humane,"
but with the iron eye and cruel sneer of Mephistopheles. We find
ourselves in a world, in which the ladies are like very profligate,
impudent, and unfeeling men, and in which the men are too bad for any
place but Pandaemonium or Norfolk Island. We are surrounded by foreheads
of bronze, hearts like the nether millstone, and tongues set on fire of
hell.

Dryden defended or excused his own offences and those of his
contemporaries by pleading the example of the earlier English
dramatists; and Mr. Leigh Hunt seems to think that there is force in the
plea. We altogether differ from this opinion. The crime charged is not
mere coarseness of expression. The terms which are delicate in one age
become gross in the next. The diction of the English version of the
Pentateuch is sometimes such as Addison would not have ventured to
imitate; and Addison, the standard of moral purity in his own age, used
many phrases which are now proscribed. Whether a thing shall be
designated by a plain noun substantive or by a circumlocution is mere
matter of fashion. Morality is not at all interested in the question.
But morality is deeply interested in this, that what is immoral shall
not be presented to the imagination of the young and susceptible in
constant connection with what is attractive. For every person who has
observed the operation of the law of association in his own mind and in
the minds of others knows that whatever is constantly presented to the
imagination in connection with what is attractive will itself become
attractive. There is undoubtedly a great deal of indelicate writing in
Fletcher and Massinger, and more than might be wished even in Ben Jonson
and Shakespeare, who are comparatively pure. But it is impossible to
trace in their plays any systematic attempt to associate vice with those
things which men value most and desire most, and virtue with everything
ridiculous and degrading. And such a systematic attempt we find in the
whole dramatic literature of the generation which followed the return of
Charles the Second. We will take as an instance of what we mean, a
single subject of the highest importance to the happiness of mankind,
conjugal fidelity. We can at present hardly call to mind a single
English play, written before the Civil War, in which the character of a
seducer of married women is represented in a favorable light. We
remember many plays in which such persons are baffled, exposed, covered
with derision, and insulted by triumphant husbands. Such is the fate of
Falstaff, with all his wit and knowledge of the world. Such is the fate
of Brisac in Fletcher's Elder Brother, and of Ricardo and Ubaldo in
Massinger's Picture. Sometimes, as in the Fatal Dowry and Love's
Cruelty, the outraged honor of families is repaired by a bloody revenge.
If now and then the lover is represented as an accomplished man, and
the husband as a person of weak or odious character, this only makes the
triumph of female virtue the more signal, as in Jonson's Celia and Mrs.
Fitzdottrel, and in Fletcher's Maria. In general we will venture to say
that the dramatists of the age of Elizabeth and James the First either
treat the breach of the marriage vow as a serious crime, or, if they
treat it as matter for laughter, turn the laugh against the gallant.

On the contrary, during the forty years which followed the Restoration,
the whole body of the dramatists invariably represent adultery, we do
not say as a peccadillo, we do not say as an error which the violence of
passion may excuse, but as the calling of a fine gentleman, as a grace
without which his character would be imperfect. It is as essential to
his breeding and to his place in society that he should make love to the
wives of his neighbors as that he should know French, or that he should
have a sword at his side. In all this there is no passion, and scarcely
anything that can be called preference. The hero intrigues just as he
wears a wig; because, if he did not, he would be a queer fellow, a city
prig, perhaps a Puritan. All the agreeable qualities are always given to
the gallant. All the contempt and aversion are the portion of the
unfortunate husband. Take Dryden for example; and compare Woodall with
Brainsick, or Lorenzo with Gomez. Take Wycherley; and compare Horner
with Pinchwife. Take Vanbrugh; and compare Constant with Sir John Brute.
Take Farquhar; and compare Archer with Squire Sullen. Take Congreve; and
compare Bellmour with Fondlewife, Careless with Sir Paul Plyant, or
Scandal with Foresight. In all these cases, and in many more which might
be named, the dramatist evidently does his best to make the person who
commits the injury graceful, sensible, and spirited, and the person who
suffers it a fool, or a tyrant, or both.

Mr. Charles Lamb, indeed, attempted to set up a defence for this way of
writing. The dramatists of the latter part of the seventeenth century
are not, according to him, to be tried by the standard of morality which
exists, and ought to exist, in real life. Their world is a conventional
world. Their heroes and heroines belong, not to England, not to
Christendom, but to an Utopia of gallantry, to a Fairyland, where the
Bible and Burn's Justice are unknown, where a prank which on this earth
would be rewarded with the pillory is merely matter for a peal of elvish
laughter. A real Horner, a real Careless, would, it is admitted, be
exceedingly bad men. But to predicate morality or immorality of the
Horner of Wycherley and the Careless of Congreve is as absurd as it
would be to arraign a sleeper for his dreams. "They belong to the
regions of pure comedy, where no cold moral reigns. When we are among
them we are among a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our
usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings, for
they have none among them. No peace of families is violated, for no
family ties exist among them. There is neither right nor wrong,
gratitude or its opposite, claim or duty, paternity or sonship."

This is, we believe, a fair summary of Mr. Lamb's doctrine. We are sure
that we do not wish to represent him unfairly. For we admire his genius;
we love the kind nature which appears in all his writings; and we
cherish his memory as much as if we had known him personally. But we
must plainly say that his argument, though ingenious, is altogether
sophistical.

Of course we perfectly understand that it is possible for a writer to
create a conventional world in which things forbidden by the Decalogue
and the Statute Book shall be lawful, and yet that the exhibition may be
harmless, or even edifying. For example, we suppose, that the most
austere critics would not accuse Fenelon of impiety and immorality on
account of his Telemachus and his Dialogues of the Dead. In Telemachus
and the Dialogues of the Dead we have a false religion, and
consequently a morality which is in some points incorrect. We have a
right and a wrong differing from the right and the wrong of real life.
It is represented as the first duty of men to pay honor to Jove and
Minerva. Philocles, who employs his leisure in making graven images of
these deities, is extolled for his piety in a way which contrasts
singularly with the expressions of Isaiah on the same subject. The dead
are judged by Minos, and rewarded with lasting happiness for actions
which Fenelon would have been the first to pronounce splendid sins. The
same may be said of Mr. Southey's Mahommedan and Hindoo heroes and
heroines. In Thalaba, to speak in derogation of the Arabian impostor is
blasphemy; to drink wine is a crime; to perform ablutions and to pay
honor to the holy cities are works of merit. In the Curse of Kehama,
Kailyal is commended for her devotion to the statue of Mariataly, the
goddess of the poor. But certainly no person will accuse Mr. Southey of
having promoted or intended to promote either Islamism or Brahminism.

It is easy to see why the conventional worlds of Fenelon and Mr. Southey
are unobjectionable. In the first place, they are utterly unlike the
real world in which we live. The state of society, the laws even of the
physical world, are so different from those with which we are familiar,
that we cannot be shocked at finding the morality also very different.
But in truth the morality of these conventional worlds differs from the
morality of the real world only in points where there is no danger that
the real world will ever go wrong. The generosity and docility of
Telemachus, the fortitude, the modesty, the filial tenderness of
Kailyal, are virtues of all ages and nations. And there was very little
danger that the Dauphin would worship Minerva, or that an English damsel
would dance, with a bucket on her head, before the statue of Mariataly.

The case is widely different with what Mr. Charles Lamb calls the
conventional world of Wycherley and Congreve. Here the garb, the
manners, the topics of conversation, are those of the real town and of
the passing day. The hero is in all superficial accomplishments exactly
the fine gentleman whom every youth in the pit would gladly resemble.
The heroine is the fine lady whom every youth in the pit would gladly
marry. The scene is laid in some place which is as well known to the
audience as their own houses, in St. James's Park, or Hyde Park, or
Westminster Hall. The lawyer bustles about with his bag, between the
Common Pleas and the Exchequer. The Peer calls for his carriage to go to
the House of Lords on a private bill. A hundred little touches are
employed to make the fictitious world appear like the actual world. And
the immorality is of a sort which never can be out of date, and which
all the force of religion, law, and public opinion united can but
imperfectly restrain.

In the name of art, as well as in the name of virtue, we protest against
the principle that the world of pure comedy is one into which no moral
enters. If comedy be an imitation, under whatever conventions, of real
life, how is it possible that it can have no reference to the great rule
which directs life, and to feelings which are called forth by every
incident of life? If what Mr. Charles Lamb says were correct, the
inference would be that these dramatists did not in the least understand
the very first principles of their craft. Pure landscape-painting into
which no light or shade enters, pure portrait-painting into which no
expression enters, are phrases less at variance with sound criticism
than pure comedy into which no moral enters.

But it is not the fact that the world of these dramatists is a world
into which no moral enters. Morality constantly enters into that world,
a sound morality and an unsound morality: the sound morality to be
insulted, derided, associated with everything mean and hateful; the
unsound morality to be set off to every advantage, and inculcated by all
methods, direct and indirect. It is not the fact that none of the
inhabitants of this conventional world feel reverence for sacred
institutions and family ties. Fondlewife, Pinchwife, every person in
short of narrow understanding and disgusting manners, expresses that
reverence strongly. The heroes and heroines, too, have a moral code of
their own, an exceedingly bad one, but not, as Mr. Charles Lamb seems to
think, a code existing only in the imagination of dramatists. It is, on
the contrary, a code actually received and obeyed by great numbers of
people. We need not go to Utopia or Fairyland to find them. They are
near at hand. Every night some of them cheat at the hells in the
Quadrant, and others pace the Piazza in Covent Garden. Without flying to
Nephelococcygia or to the Court of Queen Mab, we can meet with sharpers,
bullies, hardhearted impudent debauchees, and women worthy of such
paramours. The morality of the Country Wife and the Old Bachelor is the
morality, not, as Mr. Charles Lamb maintains, of an unreal world, but of
a world which is a great deal too real. It is the morality, not of a
chaotic people, but of low town-rakes, and of those ladies whom the
newspapers call "dashing Cyprians." And the question is simply this,
whether a man of genius who constantly and systematically endeavors to
make this sort of character attractive, by uniting it with beauty,
grace, dignity, spirit, a high social position, popularity, literature,
wit, taste, knowledge of the world, brilliant success in every
undertaking, does or does not make an ill use of his powers. We own that
we are unable to understand how this question can be answered in any way
but one.

It must, indeed, be acknowledged, in justice to the writers of whom we
have spoken thus severely, that they were, to a great extent, the
creatures of their age. And if it be asked why that age encouraged
immorality which no other age would have tolerated, we have no
hesitation in answering that this great depravation of the national
taste was the effect of the prevalence of Puritanism under the
Commonwealth.

To punish public outrages on morals and religion is unquestionably
within the competence of rulers. But when a government, not content with
requiring decency, requires sanctity, it oversteps the bounds which mark
its proper functions. And it may be laid down as a universal rule that a
government which attempts more than it ought will reform less. A
lawgiver who, in order to protect distressed borrowers, limits the rate
of interest, either makes it impossible for the objects of his care to
borrow at all, or places them at the mercy of the worst class of
usurers. A lawgiver who, from tenderness for laboring men, fixes the
hours of their work and the amount of their wages, is certain to make
them far more wretched than he found them. And so a government which,
not content with repressing scandalous excesses, demands from its
subjects fervent and austere piety, will soon discover that, while
attempting to render an impossible service to the cause of virtue, it
has in truth only promoted vice.

For what are the means by which a government can effect its ends? Two
only, reward and punishment; powerful means, indeed, for influencing the
exterior act, but altogether impotent for the purpose of touching the
heart. A public functionary who is told that he will be promoted if he
is a devout Catholic, and turned out of his place if he is not, will
probably go to mass every morning, exclude meat from his table on
Fridays, shrive himself regularly, and perhaps let his superiors know
that he wears a hair shirt next his skin. Under a Puritan government, a
person who is apprised that piety is essential to thriving in the world
will be strict in the observance of the Sunday, or, as he will call it,
Sabbath, and will avoid a theatre as if it were plague-stricken. Such a
show of religion as this the hope of gain and the fear of loss will
produce, at a week's notice, in any abundance which a government may
require. But under this show, sensuality, ambition, avarice, and hatred
retain unimpaired power, and the seeming convert has only added to the
vices of a man of the world all the still darker vices which are
engendered by the constant practice of dissimulation. The truth cannot
be long concealed. The public discovers that the grave persons who are
proposed to it as patterns are more utterly destitute of moral principle
and of moral sensibility than avowed libertines. It sees that these
Pharisees are farther removed from real goodness than publicans and
harlots. And, as usual, it rushes to the extreme opposite to that which
it quits. It considers a high religious profession as a sure mark of
meanness and depravity. On the very first day on which the restraint of
fear is taken away, and on which men can venture to say what they think,
a frightful peal of blasphemy and ribaldry proclaims that the
short-sighted policy which aimed at making a nation of saints has made a
nation of scoffers.

It was thus in France about the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Louis the Fourteenth in his old age became religious: he determined that
his subjects should be religious, too: he shrugged his shoulders and
knitted his brows if he observed at his levee or near his dinner-table
any gentleman who neglected the duties enjoined by the Church, and
rewarded piety with blue ribbons, invitations to Marli, governments,
pensions, and regiments. Forthwith Versailles became, in everything but
dress, a convent. The pulpits and confessionals were surrounded by
swords and embroidery. The Marshals of France were much in prayer; and
there was hardly one among the Dukes and Peers who did not carry good
little books in his pocket, fast during Lent, and communicate at Easter.
Madame de Maintenon, who had a great share in the blessed work, boasted
that devotion had become quite the fashion. A fashion indeed it was; and
like a fashion it passed away. No sooner had the old king been carried
to St. Denis than the whole court unmasked. Every man hastened to
indemnify himself, by the excess of licentiousness and impudence, for
years of mortification. The same persons who, a few months before, with
meek voices and demure looks, had consulted divines about the state of
their souls now surrounded the midnight table, where, amidst the
bounding of champagne corks, a drunken prince, enthroned between Dubois
and Madame de Parabere, hiccoughed out atheistical arguments and obscene
jests. The early part of the reign of Louis the Fourteenth had been a
time of license; but the most dissolute men of that generation would
have blushed at the orgies of the Regency.

It was the same with our fathers in the time of the Great Civil War. We
are by no means unmindful of the great debt which mankind owes to the
Puritans of that time, the deliverers of England, the founders of the
American commonwealths. But in the day of their power, those men
committed one great fault, which left deep and lasting traces in the
national character and manners. They mistook the end and overrated the
force of government. They determined, not merely to protect religion and
public morals from insult,--an object for which the civil sword, in
discreet hands, may be beneficially employed,--but to make the people
committed to their rule truly devout. Yet, if they had only reflected on
events which they had themselves witnessed and in which they had
themselves borne a great part, they would have seen what was likely to
be the result of their enterprise. They had lived under a government
which, during a long course of years, did all that could be done, by
lavish bounty and by rigorous punishment, to enforce conformity to the
doctrine and discipline of the Church of England. No person suspected of
hostility to that church had the smallest chance of obtaining favor at
the court of Charles. Avowed dissent was punished by imprisonment, by
ignominious exposure, by cruel mutilations, and by ruinous fines. And
the event had been that the Church had fallen, and had, in its fall,
dragged down with it a monarchy which had stood six hundred years. The
Puritan might have learned, if from nothing else, yet from his own
recent victory, that governments which attempt things beyond their reach
are likely not merely to fail, but to produce an effect directly the
opposite of that which they contemplate as desirable.

All this was overlooked. The saints were to inherit the earth. The
theatres were closed. The fine arts were placed under absurd restraints.
Vices which had never before been even misdemeanors were made capital
felonies. It was solemnly resolved by Parliament "that no person shall
be employed but such as the House shall be satisfied of his real
godliness." The pious assembly had a Bible lying on the table for
reference. If they had consulted it they might have learned that the
wheat and the tares grow together inseparably, and must either be spared
together or rooted up together. To know whether a man was really godly
was impossible. But it was easy to know whether he had a plain dress,
lank hair, no starch in his linen, no gay furniture in his house;
whether he talked through his nose, and showed the whites of his eyes;
whether he named his children Assurance, Tribulation, and
Maher-shalal-hash-baz; whether he avoided Spring Garden when in town,
and abstained from hunting and hawking when in the country; whether he
expounded hard scriptures to his troop of dragoons, and talked in a
committee of ways and means about seeking the Lord. These were tests
which could easily be applied. The misfortune was that they were tests
which proved nothing. Such as they were, they were employed by the
dominant party. And the consequence was that a crowd of impostors, in
every walk of life, began to mimic and to caricature what were then
regarded as the outward signs of sanctity. The nation was not duped.
The restraints of that gloomy time were such as would have been
impatiently borne, if imposed by men who were universally believed to be
saints. Those restraints became altogether insupportable when they were
known to be kept up for the profit of hypocrites. It is quite certain
that, even if the royal family had never returned, even if Richard
Cromwell or Henry Cromwell had been at the head of the administration,
there would have been a great relaxation of manners. Before the
Restoration many signs indicated that a period of license was at hand.
The Restoration crushed for a time the Puritan party, and placed supreme
power in the hands of a libertine. The political counter-revolution
assisted the moral counter-revolution, and was in turn assisted by it. A
period of wild and desperate dissoluteness followed. Even in remote
manor-houses and hamlets the change was in some degree felt; but in
London the outbreak of debauchery was appalling; and in London the
places most deeply infected were the Palace, the quarters inhabited by
the aristocracy, and the Inns of Court. It was on the support of these
parts of the town that the playhouses depended. The character of the
drama became conformed to the character of its patrons. The comic poet
was the mouthpiece of the most deeply corrupted part of a corrupted
society. And in the plays before us we find, distilled and condensed,
the essential spirit of the fashionable world during the anti-Puritan
reaction.

The Puritan had affected formality; the comic poet laughed at decorum.
The Puritan had frowned at innocent diversions; the comic poet took
under his patronage the most flagitious excesses. The Puritan had
canted; the comic poet blasphemed. The Puritan had made an affair of
gallantry felony without benefit of clergy; the comic poet represented
it as an honorable distinction. The Puritan spoke with disdain of the
low standard of popular morality; his life was regulated by a far more
rigid code; his virtue was sustained by motives unknown to men of the
world. Unhappily it had been amply proved in many cases, and might well
be suspected in many more, that these high pretensions were unfounded.
Accordingly, the fashionable circles, and the comic poets who were the
spokesmen of those circles, took up the notion that all professions of
piety and integrity were to be construed by the rule of contrary; that
it might well be doubted whether there was such a thing as virtue in the
world; but that, at all events, a person who affected to be better than
his neighbors was sure to be a knave.

In the old drama there had been much that was reprehensible. But whoever
compares even the least decorous plays of Fletcher with those contained
in the volume before us will see how much the profligacy which follows a
period of overstrained austerity goes beyond the profligacy which
precedes such a period. The nation resembled the demoniac in the New
Testament. The Puritans boasted that the unclean spirit was cast out.
The house was empty, swept, and garnished; and for a time the expelled
tenant wandered through dry places seeking rest and finding none. But
the force of the exorcism was spent. The fiend returned to his abode;
and returned not alone. He took to him seven other spirits more wicked
than himself. They entered in, and dwelt together: and the second
possession was worse than the first.

We will now, as far as our limits will permit, pass in review the
writers to whom Mr. Leigh Hunt has introduced us. Of the four, Wycherley
stands, we think, last in literary merit, but first in order of time,
and first, beyond all doubt, in immorality.

William Wycherley was born in 1640. He was the son of a Shropshire
gentleman of old family, and of what was then accounted a good estate.
The property was estimated at six hundred a year, a fortune which, among
the fortunes at that time, probably ranked as a fortune of two thousand
a year would rank in our days.

William was an infant when the Civil War broke out: and while he was
still in his rudiments, a Presbyterian hierarchy and a republican
government were established on the ruins of the ancient church and
throne. Old Mr. Wycherley was attached to the royal cause, and was not
disposed to entrust the education of his heir to the solemn Puritans who
now ruled the universities and public schools. Accordingly the young
gentleman was sent at fifteen to France. He resided some time in the
neighborhood of the Duke of Montausier, chief of one of the noblest
families of Touraine. The Duke's wife, a daughter of the house of
Rambouillet, was a finished specimen of those talents and
accomplishments for which her race was celebrated. The young foreigner
was introduced to the splendid circle which surrounded the duchess, and
there he appears to have learned some good and some evil. In a few years
he returned to his country a fine gentleman and a Papist. His
conversion, it may safely be affirmed, was the effect, not of any strong
impression on his understanding or feelings, but partly of intercourse
with an agreeable society in which the Church of Rome was the fashion,
and partly of that aversion to Calvinistic austerities which was then
almost universal among young Englishmen of parts and spirit, and which,
at one time, seemed likely to make one half of them Catholics and the
other half Atheists.

But the Restoration came. The universities were again in loyal hands;
and there was reason to hope that there would be again a national church
fit for a gentleman. Wycherley became a member of Queen's College,
Oxford, and abjured the errors of the Church of Rome. The somewhat
equivocal glory of turning, for a short time, a good-for-nothing Papist
into a good-for-nothing Protestant is ascribed to Bishop Barlow.

Wycherley left Oxford without taking a degree, and entered at the
Temple, where he lived gayly for some years, observing the humors of the
town, enjoying its pleasures, and picking up just as much law as was
necessary to make the character of a pettifogging attorney or of a
litigious client entertaining in a comedy.

From an early age he had been in the habit of amusing himself by
writing. Some wretched lines of his on the Restoration are still extant.
Had he devoted himself to the making of verses, he would have been
nearly as far below Tate and Blackmore as Tate and Blackmore are below
Dryden. His only chance for renown would have been that he might have
occupied a niche in a satire, between Flecknoe and Settle. There was,
however, another kind of composition in which his talents and
acquirements qualified him to succeed; and to that he judiciously betook
himself.

In his old age he used to say that he wrote Love in a Wood at nineteen,
the Gentleman Dancing-Master at twenty-one, the Plain Dealer at
twenty-five, and the Country Wife at one or two and thirty. We are
incredulous, we own, as to the truth of this story. Nothing that we know
of Wycherley leads us to think him incapable of sacrificing truth to
vanity. And his memory in the decline of his life played him such
strange tricks that we might question the correctness of his assertion
without throwing any imputation on his veracity. It is certain that none
of his plays was acted till 1672, when he gave Love in a Wood to the
public. It seems improbable that he should resolve on so important an
occasion as that of a first appearance before the world, to run his
chance with a feeble piece, written before his talents were ripe, before
his style was formed, before he had looked abroad into the world; and
this when he had actually in his desk two highly finished plays, the
fruit of his matured powers. When we look minutely at the pieces
themselves, we find in every part of them reason to suspect the accuracy
of Wycherley's statement. In the first scene of Love in a Wood, to go no
further, we find many passages which he could not have written when he
was nineteen. There is an allusion to gentlemen's periwigs, which first
came into fashion in 1663; an allusion to guineas, which were first
struck in 1663; an allusion to the vests which Charles ordered to be
worn at court in 1666; an allusion to the fire of 1666; and several
political allusions which must be assigned to times later than the year
of the Restoration, to times when the government and the city were
opposed to each other, and when the Presbyterian ministers had been
driven from the parish churches to the conventicles. But it is needless
to dwell on particular expressions. The whole air and spirit of the
piece belong to a period subsequent to that mentioned by Wycherley. As
to the Plain Dealer, which is said to have been written when he was
twenty-five, it contains one scene unquestionably written after 1675,
several which are later than 1668, and scarcely a line which can have
been composed before the end of 1666.

Whatever may have been the age at which Wycherley composed his plays, it
is certain that he did not bring them before the public till he was
upwards of thirty. In 1672 Love in a Wood was acted with more success
than it deserved, and this event produced a great change in the fortunes
of the author. The Duchess of Cleveland cast her eyes upon him, and was
pleased with his appearance. This abandoned woman, not content with her
complaisant husband and her royal keeper, lavished her fondness on a
crowd of paramours of all ranks, from dukes to rope-dancers. In the time
of the Commonwealth she commenced her career of gallantry, and
terminated it under Anne, by marrying, when a great-grandmother, that
worthless fop, Beau Fielding. It is not strange that she should have
regarded Wycherley with favor. His figure was commanding, his
countenance strikingly handsome, his look and deportment full of grace
and dignity. He had, as Pope said long after, "the true nobleman look,"
the look which seems to indicate superiority, and a not unbecoming
consciousness of superiority. His hair indeed, as he says in one of his
poems, was prematurely gray. But in that age of periwigs this misfortune
was of little importance. The Duchess admired him, and proceeded to make
love to him, after the fashion of the coarse-minded and shameless circle
to which she belonged. In the Ring, when the crowd of beauties and fine
gentlemen was thickest, she put her head out of her coach-window, and
bawled to him, "Sir, you are a rascal; you are a villain;" and, if she
is not belied, she added another phrase of abuse which we will not
quote, but of which we may say that it might most justly have been
applied to her own children. Wycherley called on her Grace the next day,
and with great humility begged to know in what way he had been so
unfortunate as to disoblige her. Thus began an intimacy from which the
poet probably expected wealth and honors. Nor were such expectations
unreasonable. A handsome young fellow about the court, known by the name
of Jack Churchill, was, about the same time, so lucky as to become the
object of a short-lived fancy of the Duchess. She had presented him with
five thousand pounds, the price, in all probability, of some title or
pardon. The prudent youth had lent the money on high interest and on
landed security; and this-judicious investment was the beginning of the
most splendid private fortune in Europe. Wycherley was not so lucky. The
partiality with which the great lady regarded him was indeed the talk of
the whole town; and sixty years later old men who remembered those days
told Voltaire that she often stole from the court to her lover's
chambers in the Temple, disguised like a country girl, with a straw hat
on her head, pattens on her feet, and a basket in her hand. The poet was
indeed too happy and proud to be discreet. He dedicated to the Duchess
the play which had led to their acquaintance, and in the dedication
expressed himself in terms which could not but confirm the reports which
had gone abroad. But at Whitehall such an affair was regarded in no
serious light. The lady was not afraid to bring Wycherley to court, and
to introduce him to a splendid society with which, as far as appears, he
had never before mixed. The easy king, who allowed to his mistresses the
same liberty which he claimed for himself, was pleased with the
conversation and manners of his new rival. So high did Wycherley stand
in the royal favor that once, when he was confined by a fever to his
lodgings in Bow Street, Charles, who, with all his faults, was certainly
a man of social and affable disposition, called on him, sat by his bed,
advised him to try change of air, and gave him a handsome sum of money
to defray the expense of a journey. Buckingham, then Master of the
Horse, and one of that infamous ministry known by the name of the Cabal,
had been one of the Duchess's innumerable paramours. He at first showed
some symptoms of jealousy; but he soon, after his fashion, veered round
from anger to fondness, and gave Wycherley a commission in his own
regiment and a place in the royal household.

It would be unjust to Wycherley's memory not to mention here the only
good action, as far as we know, of his whole life. He is said to have
made great exertions to obtain the patronage of Buckingham for the
illustrious author of Hudibras, who was now sinking into an obscure
grave, neglected by a nation proud of his genius, and by a court which
he had served too well. His Grace consented to see poor Butler; and an
appointment was made. But unhappily two pretty women passed by; the
volatile Duke ran after them; the opportunity was lost, and could never
be regained.

The second Dutch war, the most disgraceful war in the whole history of
England, was now raging. It was not in that age considered as by any
means necessary that a naval officer should receive a professional
education. Young men of rank, who were hardly able to keep their feet in
a breeze, served on board of the King's ships, sometimes with
commissions, and sometimes as volunteers. Mulgrave, Dorset, Rochester,
and many others, left the playhouses and the Mall for hammocks and salt
pork, and, ignorant as they were of the rudiments of naval service,
showed, at least, on the day of battle, the courage which is seldom
wanting in an English gentleman. All good judges of maritime affairs
complained that, under this system, the ships were grossly mismanaged,
and that the tarpaulins contracted the vices, without acquiring the
graces, of the court. But on this subject, as on every other where the
interests or whims of favorites were concerned, the government of
Charles was deaf to all remonstrances. Wycherley did not choose to be
out of the fashion. He embarked, was present at a battle, and celebrated
it, on his return, in a copy of verses too bad for the bellman.[3]

About the same time, he brought on the stage his second piece, the
Gentleman Dancing-Master. The biographers say nothing, as far as we
remember, about the fate of this play. There is, however, reason to
believe that, though certainly far superior to Love in a Wood, it was
not equally successful. It was first tried at the west end of the town,
and, as the poet confessed, "would scarce do there." It was then
performed in Salisbury Court, but, as it should seem, with no better
event. For, in the prologue to the Country Wife, Wycherley described
himself as "the late so baffled scribbler."

In 1675 the Country Wife was performed with brilliant success, which, in
a literary point of view, was not wholly unmerited. For, though one of
the most profligate and heartless of human compositions, it is the
elaborate production of a mind, not indeed rich, original, or
imaginative, but ingenious, observant, quick to seize hints, and patient
of the toil of polishing.

The Plain Dealer, equally immoral and equally well written, appeared in
1677. At first this piece pleased the people less than the critics; but
after a time its unquestionable merits and the zealous support of Lord
Dorset, whose influence in literary and fashionable society was
unbounded, established it in the public favor.

The fortune of Wycherley was now in the zenith, and began to decline. A
long life was still before him. But it was destined to be filled with
nothing but shame and wretchedness, domestic dissensions, literary
failures, and pecuniary embarrassments.

The King, who was looking about for an accomplished man to conduct the
education of his natural son, the young Duke of Richmond, at length
fixed on Wycherley. The poet, exulting in his good luck, went down to
amuse himself at Tunbridge Wells, looked into a bookseller's shop on the
Pantiles, and, to his great delight, heard a handsome woman ask for the
Plain Dealer, which had just been published. He made acquaintance with
the lady, who proved to be the Countess of Drogheda, a gay young widow,
with an ample jointure. She was charmed with his person and his wit,
and, after a short flirtation, agreed to become his wife. Wycherley
seems to have been apprehensive that this connection might not suit well
with the King's plans respecting the Duke of Richmond. He accordingly
prevailed on the lady to consent to a private marriage. All came out.
Charles thought the conduct of Wycherley both disrespectful and
disingenuous. Other causes probably assisted to alienate the sovereign
from the subject who had lately been so highly favored. Buckingham was
now in opposition, and had been committed to the Tower; not, as Mr.
Leigh Hunt supposes, on a charge of treason, but by an order of the
House of Lords for some expressions which he had used in debate.
Wycherley wrote some bad lines in praise of his imprisoned patron,
which, if they came to the knowledge of the King, would certainly have
made His Majesty very angry. The favor of the court was completely
withdrawn from the poet. An amiable woman with a large fortune might
indeed have been an ample compensation for the loss. But Lady Drogheda
was ill-tempered, imperious, and extravagantly jealous. She had herself
been a maid of honor at Whitehall. She well knew in what estimation
conjugal fidelity was held among the fine gentlemen there, and watched
her town husband as assiduously as Mr. Pinchwife watched his country
wife. The unfortunate wit was, indeed, allowed to meet his friends at a
tavern opposite to his own house. But on such occasions the windows were
always open, in order that her Ladyship, who was posted on the other
side of the street, might be satisfied that no woman was of the party.

The death of Lady Drogheda released the poet from this distress; but a
series of disasters, in rapid succession, broke down his health, his
spirits, and his fortune. His wife meant to leave him a good property,
and left him only a lawsuit. His father could not or would not assist
him. Wycherley was at length thrown into the Fleet, and languished there
during seven years, utterly forgotten, as it should seem, by the gay and
lively circle of which he had been a distinguished ornament. In the
extremity of his distress he implored the publisher who had been
enriched by the sale of his works to lend him twenty pounds, and was
refused. His comedies, however, still kept possession of the stage, and
drew great audiences which troubled themselves little about the
situation of the author. At length James the Second, who had now
succeeded to the throne, happened to go to the theatre on an evening
when the Plain Dealer was acted. He was pleased by the performance, and
touched by the fate of the writer, whom he probably remembered as one of
the gayest and handsomest of his brother's courtiers. The King
determined to pay Wycherley's debts, and to settle on the unfortunate
poet a pension of two hundred pounds a year. This munificence on the
part of a prince who was little in the habit of rewarding literary
merit, and whose whole soul was devoted to the interests of his church,
raises in us a surmise which Mr. Leigh Hunt will, we fear, pronounce
very uncharitable. We cannot help suspecting that it was at this time
that Wycherley returned to the communion of the Church of Rome. That he
did return to the communion of the Church of Rome is certain. The date
of his reconversion, as far as we know, has never been mentioned by any
biographer. We believe that, if we place it at this time, we do no
injustice to the character either of Wycherley or James.

Not long after, old Mr. Wycherley died; and his son, now past the middle
of life, came to the family estate. Still, however, he was not at his
ease. His embarrassments were great; his property was strictly tied up;
and he was on very bad terms with the heir-at-law. He appears to have
led, during a long course of years, that most wretched life, the life of
a vicious old boy about town. Expensive tastes with little money, and
licentious appetites with declining vigor, were the just penance for his
early irregularities. A severe illness had produced a singular effect on
his intellect. His memory played him pranks stranger than almost any
that are to be found in the history of that strange faculty. It seemed
to be at once preternaturally strong and preternaturally weak. If a
book was read to him before he went to bed, he would wake the next
morning with his mind full of the thoughts and expressions which he had
heard overnight; and he would write them down, without in the least
suspecting that they were not his own. In his verses the same ideas, and
even the same words, came over and over again several times in a short
composition. His fine person bore the marks of age, sickness, and
sorrow; and he mourned for his departed beauty with an effeminate
regret. He could not look without a sigh at the portrait which Lely had
painted of him when he was only twenty-eight, and often murmured,
_Quantum mutatus ab illo_. He was still nervously anxious about his
literary reputation, and not content with the fame which he still
possessed as a dramatist, was determined to be renowned as a satirist
and an amatory poet. In 1704, after twenty-seven years of silence, he
again appeared as an author. He put forth a large folio of miscellaneous
verses, which, we believe, has never been reprinted. Some of these
pieces had probably circulated through the town in manuscript. For,
before the volume appeared, the critics at the coffee-houses very
confidently predicted that it would be utterly worthless, and were in
consequence bitterly reviled by the poet in an ill-written, foolish, and
egotistical preface. The book amply vindicated the most unfavorable
prophecies that had been hazarded. The style and versification are
beneath criticism; the morals are those of Rochester. For Rochester,
indeed, there was some excuse. When his offences against decorum were
committed, he was a very young man, misled by a prevailing fashion.
Wycherley was sixty-four. He had long outlived the times when
libertinism was regarded as essential to the character of a wit and a
gentleman. Most of the rising poets, Addison, for example, John Philips,
and Rowe, were studious of decency. We can hardly conceive anything more
miserable than the figure which the ribald old man makes in the midst
of so many sober and well-conducted youths.

In the very year in which this bulky volume of obscene doggerel was
published, Wycherley formed an acquaintance of a very singular kind. A
little, pale, crooked, sickly, bright-eyed urchin, just turned of
sixteen, had written some copies of verses in which discerning judges
could detect the promise of future eminence. There was, indeed, as yet
nothing very striking or original in the conceptions of the young poet.
But he was already skilled in the art of metrical composition. His
diction and his music were not those of the great old masters; but that
which his ablest contemporaries were laboring to do he already did best.
His style was not richly poetical; but it was always neat, compact, and
pointed. His verse wanted variety of pause, of swell, and of cadence,
but never grated harshly on the ear, or disappointed it by a feeble
close. The youth was already free of the company of wits, and was
greatly elated at being introduced to the author of the Plain Dealer and
the Country Wife.

It is curious to trace the history of the intercourse which took place
between Wycherley and Pope, between the representative of the age that
was going out and the representative of the age that was coming in,
between the friend of Rochester and Buckingham and the friend of
Lyttelton and Mansfield. At first the boy was enchanted by the kindness
and condescension of so eminent a writer, haunted his door, and followed
him about like a spaniel from coffee-house to coffee-house. Letters full
of affection, humility, and fulsome flattery were interchanged between
the friends. But the first ardor of affection could not last. Pope,
though at no time scrupulously delicate in his writings or fastidious as
to the morals of his associates, was shocked by the indecency of a rake
who, at seventy, was still the representative of the monstrous
profligacy of the Restoration. As the youth grew older, as his mind
expanded and his fame rose, he appreciated both himself and Wycherley
more correctly. He felt a just contempt for the old gentleman's verses,
and was at no great pains to conceal his opinion. Wycherley, on the
other hand, though blinded by self-love to the imperfections of what he
called his poetry, could not but see that there was an immense
difference between his young companion's rhymes and his own. He was
divided between two feelings. He wished to have the assistance of so
skilful a hand to polish his lines; and yet he shrank from the
humiliation of being beholden for literary assistance to a lad who might
have been his grandson. Pope was willing to give assistance, but was by
no means disposed to give assistance and flattery too. He took the
trouble to retouch whole reams of feeble stumbling verses, and inserted
many vigorous lines which the least skilful reader will distinguish in
an instant. But he thought that by these services he acquired a right to
express himself in terms which would not, under ordinary circumstances,
become one who was addressing a man of four times his age. In one
letter, he tells Wycherley that "the worst pieces are such as, to render
them very good, would require almost the entire new writing of them." In
another, he gives the following account of his corrections: "Though the
whole be as short again as at first, there is not one thought omitted
but what is a repetition of something in your first volume, or in this
very paper; and the versification throughout is, I believe, such as
nobody can be shocked at. The repeated permission you give me of dealing
freely with you will, I hope, excuse what I have done; for, if I have
not spared you when I thought severity would do you a kindness, I have
not mangled you where I thought there was no absolute need of
amputation." Wycherley continued to return thanks for all this hacking
and hewing, which was, indeed, of inestimable service to his
compositions. But at last his thanks began to sound very like
reproaches. In private, he is said to have described Pope as a person
who could not cut out a suit, but who had some skill in turning old
coats. In his letters to Pope, while he acknowledged that the
versification of the poems had been greatly improved, he spoke of the
whole art of versification with scorn, and sneered at those who
preferred sound to sense. Pope revenged himself for this outbreak of
spleen by return of post. He had in his hands a volume of Wycherley's
rhymes, and he wrote to say that this volume was so full of faults that
he could not correct it without completely defacing the manuscript. "I
am," he said, "equally afraid of sparing you, and of offending you by
too impudent a correction." This was more than flesh and blood could
bear. Wycherley reclaimed his papers, in a letter in which resentment
shows itself plainly through the thin disguise of civility. Pope, glad
to be rid of a troublesome and inglorious task, sent back the deposit,
and, by way of a parting courtesy, advised the old man to turn his
poetry into prose, and assured him that the public would like his
thoughts much better without his versification. Thus ended this
memorable correspondence.

Wycherley lived some years after the termination of the strange
friendship which we have described. The last scene of his life was,
perhaps, the most scandalous. Ten days before his death, at
seventy-five, he married a young girl merely in order to injure his
nephew, an act which proves that neither years, nor adversity, nor what
he called his philosophy, nor either of the religions which he had at
different times professed, had taught him the rudiments of morality. He
died in December, 1715, and lies in the vault under the church of St.
Paul in Covent Garden.

His bride soon after married a Captain Shrimpton, who thus became
possessed of a large collection of manuscripts. These were sold to a
bookseller. They were so full of erasures and interlineations that no
printer could decipher them. It was necessary to call in the aid of a
professed critic; and Theobald, the editor of Shakespeare, and the hero
of the first Dunciad, was employed to ascertain the true reading. In
this way a volume of miscellanies in verse and prose was got up for the
market. The collection derives all its value from the traces of Pope's
hand, which are everywhere discernible.

Of the moral character of Wycherley it can hardly be necessary for us to
say more. His fame as a writer rests wholly on his comedies, and chiefly
on the last two. Even as a comic writer, he was neither of the best
school, nor highest in his school. He was in truth a worse Congreve. His
chief merit, like Congreve's, lies in the style of his dialogue. But the
wit which lights up the Plain Dealer and the Country Wife is pale and
flickering, when compared with the gorgeous blaze which dazzles us
almost to blindness in Love for Love and the Way of the World. Like
Congreve, and, indeed, even more than Congreve, Wycherley is ready to
sacrifice dramatic propriety to the liveliness of his dialogue. The poet
speaks out of the mouths of all his dunces and coxcombs, and makes them
describe themselves with a good sense and acuteness which puts them on a
level with the wits and heroes. We will give two instances, the first
which occur to us, from the Country Wife. There are in the world fools
who find the society of old friends insipid, and who are always running
after new companions. Such a character is a fair subject for comedy. But
nothing can be more absurd than to introduce a man of this sort saying
to his comrade, "I can deny you nothing: for though I have known thee a
great while, never go if I do not love thee as well as a new
acquaintance." That town wits, again, have always been rather a
heartless class, is true. But none of them, we will answer for it, ever
said to a young lady to whom he was making love, "We wits rail and make
love often, but to show our parts: as we have no affections, so we have
no malice."

Wycherley's plays are said to have been the produce of long and patient
labor. The epithet of "slow" was early given to him by Rochester, and
was frequently repeated. In truth his mind, unless we are greatly
mistaken, was naturally a very meagre soil, and was forced only by great
labor and outlay to bear fruit which, after all, was not of the highest
flavor. He has scarcely more claim to originality than Terence. It is
not too much to say that there is hardly anything of the least value in
his plays of which the hint is not to be found elsewhere. The best
scenes in the Gentleman Dancing-Master were suggested by Calderon's
Maestro de Danzar, not by any means one of the happiest comedies of the
great Castilian poet. The Country Wife is borrowed from the Ecole des
Maris and the Ecole des Femmes. The groundwork of the Plain Dealer is
taken from the Misanthrope of Moliere. One whole scene is almost
translated from the Critique de l'Ecole des Femmes. Fidelia is
Shakespeare's Viola stolen, and marred in the stealing; and the Widow
Blackacre, beyond comparison Wycherley's best comic character, is the
Countess in Racine's Plaideurs, talking the jargon of English instead of
that of French chicane.

The only thing original about Wycherley, the only thing which he could
furnish from his own mind in inexhaustible abundance, was profligacy. It
is curious to observe how everything that he touched, however pure and
noble, took in an instant the color of his own mind. Compare the Ecole
des Femmes with the Country Wife. Agnes is a simple and amiable girl,
whose heart is indeed full of love, but of love sanctioned by honor,
morality, and religion. Her natural talents are great. They have been
hidden, and, as it might appear, destroyed by an education elaborately
bad. But they are called forth into full energy by a virtuous passion.
Her lover, while he adores her beauty, is too honest a man to abuse the
confiding tenderness of a creature so charming and inexperienced.
Wycherley takes this plot into his hands; and forthwith this sweet and
graceful courtship becomes a licentious intrigue of the lowest and least
sentimental kind, between an impudent London rake and the idiot wife of
a country squire. We will not go into details. In truth, Wycherley's
indecency is protected against the critics as a skunk is protected
against the hunters. It is safe, because it is too filthy to handle, and
too noisome even to approach.

It is the same with the Plain Dealer. How careful has Shakespeare been
in Twelfth Night to preserve the dignity and delicacy of Viola under her
disguise! Even when wearing a page's doublet and hose, she is never
mixed up with any transaction which the most fastidious mind could
regard as leaving a stain on her. She is employed by the Duke on an
embassy of love to Olivia, but on an embassy of the most honorable kind.
Wycherley borrows Viola; and Viola forthwith becomes a pandar of the
basest sort. But the character of Manly is the best illustration of our
meaning. Moliere exhibited in his misanthrope a pure and noble mind,
which had been sorely vexed by the sight of perfidy and malevolence,
disguised under the forms of politeness. As every extreme naturally
generates its contrary, Alceste adopts a standard of good and evil
directly opposed to that of the society which surrounds him. Courtesy
seems to him a vice; and those stern virtues which are neglected by the
fops and coquettes of Paris become too exclusively the objects of his
veneration. He is often to blame; he is often ridiculous; but he is
always a good man; and the feeling which he inspires is regret that a
person so estimable should be so unamiable. Wycherley borrowed Alceste,
and turned him--we quote the words of so lenient a critic as Mr. Leigh
Hunt--into "a ferocious sensualist, who believed himself as great a
rascal as he thought everybody else." The surliness of Moliere's hero is
copied and caricatured. But the most nauseous libertinism and the most
dastardly fraud are substituted for the purity and integrity of the
original. And, to make the whole complete, Wycherley does not seem to
have been aware that he was not drawing the portrait of an eminently
honest man. So depraved was his moral taste that, while he firmly
believed that he was producing a picture of virtue too exalted for the
commerce of this world, he was really delineating the greatest rascal
that is to be found, even in his own writings.

We pass a very severe censure on Wycherley, when we say that it is a
relief to turn from him to Congreve. Congreve's writings, indeed, are by
no means pure; nor was he, as far as we are able to judge, a
warm-hearted or high-minded man. Yet, in coming to him, we feel that the
worst is over, that we are one remove further from the Restoration, that
we are past the Nadir of national taste and morality.

William Congreve was born in 1670, at Bardsey, in the neighborhood of
Leeds. His father, a younger son of a very ancient Staffordshire family,
had distinguished himself among the Cavaliers in the Civil War, was set
down after the Restoration for the Order of the Royal Oak, and
subsequently settled in Ireland, under the patronage of the Earl of
Burlington.

Congreve passed his childhood and youth in Ireland. He was sent to
school at Kilkenny, and thence went to the University of Dublin. His
learning does great honor to his instructors. From his writings it
appears, not only that he was well acquainted with Latin literature, but
that his knowledge of the Greek poets was such as was not, in his time,
common even in a college.

When he had completed his academical studies, he was sent to London to
study the law, and was entered of the Middle Temple. He troubled
himself, however, very little about pleading or conveyancing, and gave
himself up to literature and society. Two kinds of ambition early took
possession of his mind, and often pulled it in opposite directions. He
was conscious of great fertility of thought and power of ingenious
combination. His lively conversation, his polished manners, and his
highly respectable connections had obtained for him ready access to the
best company. He longed to be a great writer. He longed to be a man of
fashion. Either object was within his reach. But could he secure both?
Was there not something vulgar in letters, something inconsistent with
the easy apathetic graces of a man of the mode? Was it aristocratical to
be confounded with creatures who lived in the cocklofts of Grub Street,
to bargain with publishers, to hurry printers' devils and be hurried by
them, to squabble with managers, to be applauded or hissed by pit,
boxes, and galleries? Could he forego the renown of being the first wit
of his age? Could he attain that renown without sullying what he valued
quite as much, his character for gentility? The history of his life is
the history of a conflict between these two impulses. In his youth the
desire of literary fame had the mastery; but soon the meaner ambition
overpowered the higher, and obtained supreme dominion over his mind.

His first work, a novel of no great value, he published under the
assumed name of Cleophil. His second was the Old Bachelor, acted in
1693, a play inferior indeed to his other comedies, but, in its own
line, inferior to them alone. The plot is equally destitute of interest
and of probability. The characters are either not distinguishable, or
are distinguished only by peculiarities of the most glaring kind. But
the dialogue is resplendent with wit and eloquence, which indeed are so
abundant that the fool comes in for an ample share, and yet preserves a
certain colloquial air, a certain indescribable ease, of which Wycherley
had given no example, and which Sheridan in vain attempted to imitate.
The author, divided between pride and shame,--pride at having written a
good play, and shame at having done an ungentlemanlike thing,--pretended
that he had merely scribbled a few scenes for his own amusement, and
affected to yield unwillingly to the importunities of those who pressed
him to try his fortune on the stage. The Old Bachelor was seen in
manuscript by Dryden, one of whose best qualities was a hearty and
generous admiration for the talents of others. He declared that he had
never read such a first play, and lent his services to bring it into a
form fit for representation. Nothing was wanting to the success of the
piece. It was so cast as to bring into play all the comic talent, and to
exhibit on the boards in one view all the beauty, which Drury-Lane
Theatre, then the only theatre in London, could assemble. The result was
a complete triumph; and the author was gratified with rewards more
substantial than the applauses of the pit. Montagu, then a lord of the
treasury, immediately gave him a place, and, in a short time, added the
reversion of another place of much greater value, which, however, did
not become vacant till many years had elapsed.

In 1694 Congreve brought out the Double Dealer, a comedy in which all
the powers which had produced the Old Bachelor showed themselves,
matured by time and improved by exercise. But the audience was shocked
by the characters of Maskwell and Lady Touchwood. And, indeed, there is
something strangely revolting in the way in which a group that seems to
belong to the house of Laius or of Pelops is introduced into the midst
of the Brisks, Froths, Carelesses, and Plyants. The play was unfavorably
received. Yet, if the praise of distinguished men could compensate an
author for the disapprobation of the multitude, Congreve had no reason
to repine. Dryden, in one of the most ingenious, magnificent, and
pathetic pieces that he ever wrote, extolled the author of the Double
Dealer in terms which now appear extravagantly hyperbolical. Till
Congreve came forth,--so ran this exquisite flattery,--the superiority
of the poets who preceded the civil wars was acknowledged:--

    "Theirs was the giant race before the flood."

Since the return of the Royal house, much art and ability had been
exerted, but the old masters had been still unrivalled:--

    "Our builders were with want of genius curst.
    The second temple was not like the first."

At length a writer had arisen who, just emerging from boyhood, had
surpassed the authors of the Knight of the Burning Pestle and of the
Silent Woman, and who had only one rival left to contend with:--

    "Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,
    To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more."

Some lines near the end of the poem are singularly graceful and
touching, and sank deep into the heart of Congreve:--

    "Already am I worn with cares and age,
    And just abandoning the ungrateful stage;
    But you, whom every Muse and Grace adorn,
    Whom I foresee to better fortune horn,
    Be kind to my remains; and, oh, defend
    Against your judgment your departed friend.
    Let not the insulting foe my fame pursue,
    But guard those laurels which descend to you."

The crowd, as usual, gradually came over to the opinion of the men of
note; and the Double Dealer was before long quite as much admired,
though perhaps never so much liked, as the Old Bachelor.

In 1695 appeared Love for Love, superior both in wit and in scenic
effect to either of the preceding plays. It was performed at a new
theatre which Betterton and some other actors, disgusted by the
treatment which they had received in Drury-Lane, had just opened in a
tennis-court near Lincoln's Inn. Scarcely any comedy within the memory
of the oldest man had been equally successful. The actors were so elated
that they gave Congreve a share in their theatre; and he promised in
return to furnish them with a play every year, if his health would
permit. Two years passed, however, before he produced the Mourning
Bride, a play which, paltry as it is when compared, we do not say, with
Lear or Macbeth, but with the best dramas of Massinger and Ford, stands
very high among the tragedies of the age in which it was written. To
find anything so good we must go twelve years back to Venice Preserved,
or six years forward to the Fair Penitent. The noble passage which
Johnson, both in writing and in conversation, extolled above any other
in the English drama, had suffered greatly in the public estimation from
the extravagance of his praise. Had he contented himself with saying
that it was finer than anything in the tragedies of Dryden, Otway, Lee,
Rowe, Southern, Hughes, and Addison, than anything, in short, that had
been written for the stage since the days of Charles the First, he would
not have been in the wrong.

The success of the Mourning Bride was even greater than that of Love for
Love. Congreve was now allowed to be the first tragic as well as the
first comic dramatist of his time; and all this at twenty-seven. We
believe that no English writer except Lord Byron has, at so early an
age, stood so high in the estimation of his contemporaries.

At this time took place an event which deserves, in our opinion, a very
different sort of notice from that which has been bestowed on it by Mr.
Leigh Hunt. The nation had now nearly recovered from the demoralizing
effect of the Puritan austerity. The gloomy follies of the reign of the
saints were but faintly remembered. The evils produced by profaneness
and debauchery were recent and glaring. The Court, since the Revolution,
had ceased to patronize licentiousness. Mary was strictly pious; and the
vices of the cold, stern, and silent William were not obtruded on the
public eye. Discountenanced by the government, and falling in the favor
of the people, the profligacy of the Restoration still maintained its
ground in some parts of society. Its strongholds were the places where
men of wit and fashion congregated, and above all, the theatres. At
this conjuncture arose a great reformer whom, widely as we differ from
him in many important points, we can never mention without respect.

Jeremy Collier was a clergyman of the Church of England, bred at
Cambridge. His talents and attainments were such as might have been
expected to raise him to the highest honors of his profession. He had an
extensive knowledge of books; yet he had mingled much with polite
society, and is said not to have wanted either grace or vivacity in
conversation. There were few branches of literature to which he had not
paid some attention. But ecclesiastical antiquity was his favorite
study. In religious opinions he belonged to that section of the Church
of England which lies furthest from Geneva and nearest to home. His
notions touching Episcopal government, holy orders, the efficacy of the
sacraments, the authority of the Fathers, the guilt of schism, the
importance of vestments, ceremonies, and solemn days, differed little
from those which are now held by Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman. Towards the
close of his life, indeed, Collier took some steps which brought him
still nearer to Popery, mixed water with the wine in the Eucharist, made
the sign of the cross in confirmation, employed oil in the visitation of
the sick, and offered up prayers for the dead. His politics were of a
piece with his divinity. He was a Tory of the highest sort, such as in
the cant of his age was called a Tantivy. Not even the persecution of
the bishops and the spoliation of the universities could shake his
steady loyalty. While the Convention was sitting, he wrote with
vehemence in defence of the fugitive king, and was in consequence
arrested. But his dauntless spirit was not to be so tamed. He refused to
take the oaths, renounced all his preferments, and, in a succession of
pamphlets written with much violence and with some ability, attempted to
excite the nation against its new masters. In 1692 he was again arrested
on suspicion of having been concerned in a treasonable plot. So
unbending were his principles that his friends could hardly persuade him
to let them bail him; and he afterwards expressed his remorse for having
been induced thus to acknowledge, by implication, the authority of a
usurping government. He was soon in trouble again. Sir John Friend and
Sir William Parkins were tried and convicted of high treason for
planning the murder of King William. Collier administered spiritual
consolation to them, attended them to Tyburn, and, just before they were
turned off, laid his hands on their heads, and by the authority which he
derived from Christ solemnly absolved them. This scene gave
indescribable scandal. Tories joined with Whigs in blaming the conduct
of the daring priest. Some acts, it was said, which fall under the
definition of treason are such that a good man may, in troubled times,
be led into them even by his virtues. It may be necessary for the
protection of society to punish such a man. But even in punishing him we
consider him as legally rather than morally guilty, and hope that his
honest error, though it cannot be pardoned here, will not be counted to
him for sin hereafter. But such was not the case of Collier's penitents.
They were concerned in a plot for waylaying and butchering in an hour of
security, one who, whether he were or were not their king, was at all
events their fellow creature. Whether the Jacobite theory about the
rights of governments and the duties of subjects were or were not well
founded, assassination must always be considered as a great crime. It is
condemned even by the maxims of worldly honor and morality. Much more
must it be an object of abhorrence to the pure Spouse of Christ. The
Church cannot surely, without the saddest and most mournful forbodings,
see one of her children who has been guilty of this great wickedness
pass into eternity without any sign of repentance. That these traitors
had given any sign of repentance was not alleged. It might be that they
had privately declared their contrition; and, if so, the minister of
religion might be justified in privately assuring them of the Divine
forgiveness. But a public remission ought to have been preceded by a
public atonement. The regret of these men, if expressed at all, had been
expressed in secret. The hands of Collier had been laid on them in the
presence of thousands. The inference which his enemies drew from his
conduct was that he did not consider the conspiracy against the life of
William as sinful. But this inference he very vehemently, and, we doubt
not, very sincerely denied.

The storm raged. The bishops put forth a solemn censure of the
absolution. The Attorney-General brought the matter before the Court of
King's Bench. Collier had now made up his mind not to give bail for his
appearance before any court which derived its authority from the
usurper. He accordingly absconded and was outlawed. He survived these
events about thirty years. The prosecution was not pressed; and he was
soon suffered to resume his literary pursuits in quiet. At a later
period, many attempts were made to shake his perverse integrity by
offers of wealth and dignity, but in vain. When he died, towards the end
of the reign of George the First, he was still under the ban of the law.

We shall not be suspected of regarding either the politics or the
theology of Collier with partiality; but we believe him to have been as
honest and courageous a man as ever lived. We will go further, and say
that, though passionate and often wrongheaded, he was a singularly fair
controversialist, candid, generous, too high-spirited to take mean
advantages even in the most exciting disputes, and pure from all taint
of personal malevolence. It must also be admitted that his opinions on
ecclesiastical and political affairs, though in themselves absurd and
pernicious, eminently qualified him to be the reformer of our lighter
literature. The libertinism of the press and of the stage was, as we
have said, the effect of a reaction against the Puritan strictness.
Profligacy was, like the oak leaf on the twenty-ninth of May, the badge
of a cavalier and a high churchman. Decency was associated with
conventicles and calves' heads. Grave prelates were too much disposed to
wink at the excesses of a body of zealous and able allies who covered
Roundheads and Presbyterians with ridicule. If a Whig raised his voice
against the impiety and licentiousness of the fashionable writers, his
mouth was instantly stopped by the retort, You are one of those who
groan at a light quotation from Scripture, and raise estates out of the
plunder of the Church, who shudder at a _double entendre_, and chop off
the heads of kings. A Baxter, a Burnet, even a Tillotson, would have
done little to purify our literature. But when a man fanatical in the
cause of episcopacy, and actually under outlawry for his attachment to
hereditary right, came forward as the champion of decency, the battle
was already half won.

In 1698 Collier published his Short View of the Profaneness and
Immorality of the English Stage, a book which threw the whole literary
world into commotion, but which is now much less read than it deserves.
The faults of the work, indeed, are neither few nor small. The
dissertations on the Greek and Latin drama do not at all help the
argument, and, whatever may have been thought of them by the generation
which fancied that Christ Church had refuted Bentley, are such as, in
the present day, a scholar of very humble pretensions may venture to
pronounce boyish, or rather babyish. The censures are not sufficiently
discriminating. The authors whom Collier accused had been guilty of such
gross sins against decency that he was certain to weaken instead of
strengthening his case, by introducing into his charge against them any
matter about which there could be the smallest dispute. He was, however,
so injudicious as to place among the outrageous offences which he justly
arraigned some things which are really quite innocent, and some slight
instances of levity which, though not perhaps strictly correct, could
easily be paralleled from the works of writers who had rendered great
services to morality and religion. Thus he blames Congreve, the number
and gravity of whose real transgressions made it quite unnecessary to
tax him with any that were not real, for using the words "martyr" and
"inspiration" in a light sense; as if an archbishop might not say that a
speech was inspired by claret, or that an alderman was a martyr to the
gout. Sometimes, again, Collier does not sufficiently distinguish
between the dramatist and the persons of the drama. Thus he blames
Vanbrugh for putting into Lord Foppington's mouth some contemptuous
expressions respecting the church service; though it is obvious that
Vanbrugh could not better express reverence than by making Lord
Foppington express contempt. There is also throughout the Short View too
strong a display of professional feeling. Collier is not content with
claiming for his order an immunity from indiscriminate scurrility; he
will not allow that, in any case, any word or act of a divine can be a
proper subject for ridicule: Nor does he confine this benefit of clergy
to the ministers of the Established Church. He extends the privilege to
Catholic priests, and, what in him is more surprising, to Dissenting
preachers. This, however, is a mere trifle. Imaums, Brahmins, priests of
Jupiter, priests of Baal, are all to be held sacred. Dryden is blamed
for making the Mufti in Don Sebastian talk nonsense. Lee is called to a
severe account for his incivility to Tiresias. But the most curious
passage is that in which Collier resents some uncivil reflections thrown
by Cassandra, in Dryden's Cleomenes, on the calf Apis and his
hierophants. The words "grass-eating, foddered god," words which really
are much in the style of several passages in the Old Testament, give as
much offence to this Christian divine as they could have given to the
priests of Memphis.

But, when all deductions have been made, great merit must be allowed to
this work. There is hardly any book of that time from which it would be
possible to select specimens of writing so excellent and so various. To
compare Collier with Pascal would indeed be absurd. Yet we hardly know
where, except in the Provincial Letters, we can find mirth so
harmoniously and becomingly blended with solemnity as in the Short View.
In truth, all the modes of ridicule, from broad fun to polished and
antithetical sarcasm, were at Collier's command. On the other hand, he
was complete master of the rhetoric of honest indignation. We scarcely
know any volume which contains so many bursts of that peculiar eloquence
which comes from the heart and goes to the heart. Indeed the spirit of
the book is truly heroic. In order fairly to appreciate it, we must
remember the situation in which the writer stood. He was under the frown
of power. His name was already a mark for the invectives of one half of
the writers of the age, when, in the cause of good taste, good sense,
and good morals, he gave battle to the other half. Strong as his
political prejudices were, he seems on this occasion to have entirely
laid them aside. He has forgotten that he is a Jacobite, and remembers
only that he is a citizen and a Christian. Some of his sharpest censures
are directed against poetry which had been hailed with delight by the
Tory party, and had inflicted a deep wound on the Whigs. It is
inspiriting to see how gallantly the solitary outlaw advances to attack
enemies, formidable separately, and, it might have been thought,
irresistible when combined, distributes his swashing blows right and
left among Wycherley, Congreve, and Vanbrugh, treads the wretched
D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet, and strikes with all his
strength full at the towering crest of Dryden.

The effect produced by the Short View was immense. The nation was on the
side of Collier. But it could not be doubted that, in the great host
which he had defied, some champion would be found to lift the gauntlet.
The general belief was that Dryden would take the field; and all the
wits anticipated a sharp contest between two well-paired combatants. The
great poet had been singled out in the most marked manner. It was well
known that he was deeply hurt, that much smaller provocations had
formerly roused him to violent resentment, and that there was no
literary weapon, offensive or defensive, of which he was not master. But
his conscience smote him; he stood abashed, like the fallen archangel at
the rebuke of Zephon,--

    "And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
    Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw and pined
    His loss."

At a later period he mentioned the Short View in the preface to his
Fables. He complained, with some asperity, of the harshness with which
he had been treated, and urged some matters in mitigation. But, on the
whole, he frankly acknowledged that he had been justly reproved. "If,"
said he, "Mr. Collier be my enemy, let him triumph. If he be my friend,
as I have given him no personal occasion to be otherwise, he will be
glad of my repentance."

It would have been wise in Congreve to follow his master's example. He
was precisely in that situation in which it is madness to attempt a
vindication; for his guilt was so clear that no address or eloquence
could obtain an acquittal. On the other hand, there were in his case
many extenuating circumstances which, if he had acknowledged his error
and promised amendment, would have procured his pardon. The most rigid
censor could not but make great allowances for the faults into which so
young a man had been seduced by evil example, by the luxuriance of a
vigorous fancy, and by the inebriating effect of popular applause. The
esteem, as well as the admiration, of the public was still within his
reach. He might easily have effaced all memory of his transgressions,
and have shared with Addison the glory of showing that the most
brilliant wit may be the ally of virtue. But, in any case, prudence
should have restrained him from encountering Collier. The nonjuror was a
man thoroughly fitted by nature, education, and habit for polemical
dispute. Congreve's mind, though a mind of no common fertility and
vigor, was of a different class. No man understood so well the art of
polishing epigrams and repartees into the clearest effulgence, and
setting them neatly in easy and familiar dialogue. In this sort of
jewelry he attained to a mastery unprecedented and inimitable. But he
was altogether rude in the art of controversy; and he had a cause to
defend which scarcely any art could have rendered victorious.

The event was such as might have been foreseen. Congreve's answer was a
complete failure. He was angry, obscure, and dull. Even the green-room
and Will's Coffee-House were compelled to acknowledge that in wit, as
well as in argument, the parson had a decided advantage over the poet.
Not only was Congreve unable to make any show of a case where he was in
the wrong; but he succeeded in putting himself completely in the wrong
where he was in the right. Collier had taxed him with profaneness for
calling a clergyman Mr. Prig, and for introducing a coachman named Jehu,
in allusion to the King of Israel, who was known at a distance by his
furious driving. Had there been nothing worse in the Old Bachelor and
Double Dealer, Congreve might pass for as pure a writer as Cowper
himself, who, in poems revised by so austere a censor as John Newton,
calls a fox-hunting squire Nimrod, and gives to a chaplain the
disrespectful name of Smug. Congreve might with good effect have
appealed to the public whether it might not be fairly presumed that,
when such frivolous charges were made, there were no very serious
charges to make. Instead of doing this, he pretended that he meant no
allusion to the Bible by the name of Jehu, and no reflection by the name
of Prig. Strange, that a man of such parts should, in order to defend
himself against imputations which nobody could regard as important,
tell untruths which it was certain that nobody would believe!

One of the pleas which Congreve set up for himself and his brethren was
that, though they might be guilty of a little levity here and there,
they were careful to inculcate a moral, packed close into two or three
lines, at the end of every play. Had the fact been as he stated it, the
defence would be worth very little. For no man acquainted with human
nature could think that a sententious couplet would undo all the
mischief that five profligate acts had done. But it would have been wise
in Congreve to have looked again at his own comedies before he used this
argument. Collier did so, and found that the moral of the Old Bachelor,
the grave apophthegm which is to be a set-off against all the
libertinism of the piece, is contained in the following triplet:--

    "What rugged ways attend the noon of life!
    Our sun declines, and with what anxious strife,
    What pain, we tug that galling load--a wife."

"Love for Love," says Collier, "may have a somewhat better farewell, but
it would do a man little service should he remember it to his dying
day:"--

    "The miracle to-day is, that we find
    A lover true, not that a woman's kind."

Collier's reply was severe and triumphant. One of his repartees we will
quote, not as a favorable specimen of his manner, but because it was
called forth by Congreve's characteristic affectation. The poet spoke of
the Old Bachelor as a trifle to which he attached no value, and which
had become public by a sort of accident. "I wrote it," he said, "to
amuse myself in a slow recovery from a fit of sickness." "What his
disease was," replied Collier, "I am not to inquire: but it must be a
very ill one to be worse than the remedy."

All that Congreve gained by coming forward on this occasion was that he
completely deprived himself of the excuse which he might with justice
have pleaded for his early offences. "Why," asked Collier, "should the
man laugh at the mischief of the boy, and make the disorders of his
nonage his own, by an after approbation?"

Congreve was not Collier's only opponent. Vanbrugh, Dennis, and Settle
took the field. And, from a passage in a contemporary satire, we are
inclined to think that among the answers to the Short View was one
written, or supposed to be written, by Wycherley. The victory remained
with Collier. A great and rapid reform in almost all the departments of
our lighter literature was the effect of his labors. A new race of wits
and poets arose, who generally treated with reverence the great ties
which bind society together, and whose very indecencies were decent when
compared with those of the school which flourished during the last forty
years of the seventeenth century.

This controversy probably prevented Congreve from fulfilling the
engagements into which he had entered with the actors. It was not till
1700 that he produced the Way of the World, the most deeply meditated
and the most brilliantly written of all his works. It wants, perhaps,
the constant movement, the effervescence of animal spirits, which we
find in Love for Love. But the hysterical rants of Lady Wishfort, the
meeting of Witwould and his brother, the country knight's courtship and
his subsequent revel, and, above all, the chase and surrender of
Millamant, are superior to anything that is to be found in the whole
range of English comedy from the civil war downwards. It is quite
inexplicable to us that this play should have failed on the stage. Yet
so it was; and the author, already sore with the wounds which Collier
had inflicted, was galled past endurance by this new stroke. He resolved
never again to expose himself to the rudeness of a tasteless audience,
and took leave of the theatre forever.

He lived twenty-eight years longer, without adding to the high literary
reputation which he had attained. He read much while he retained his
eyesight, and now and then wrote a short essay, or put an idle tale into
verse; but he appears never to have planned any considerable work. The
miscellaneous pieces which he published in 1710 are of little value, and
have long been forgotten.

The stock of fame which he had acquired by his comedies was sufficient,
assisted by the graces of his manner and conversation, to secure for him
a high place in the estimation of the world. During the winter he lived
among the most distinguished and agreeable people in London. His summers
were passed at the splendid country-seats of ministers and peers.
Literary envy and political faction, which in that age respected nothing
else, respected his repose. He professed to be one of the party of which
his patron Montagu, now Lord Halifax, was the head. But he had civil
words and small good offices for men of every shade of opinion. And men
of every shade of opinion spoke well of him in return.

His means were for a long time scanty. The place which he had in
possession barely enabled him to live with comfort. And, when the Tories
came into power, some thought that he would lose even this moderate
provision. But Harley, who was by no means disposed to adopt the
exterminating policy of the October club, and who, with all his faults
of understanding and temper, had a sincere kindness for men of genius,
reassured the anxious poet by quoting very gracefully and happily the
lines of Virgil,--

    "Non obtusa adeo gestamus pectora Poeni,
    Nec tam aversus equos Tyria Sol jungit ab urbe."

The indulgence with which Congreve was treated by the Tories was not
purchased by any concession on his part which could justly offend the
Whigs. It was his rare good fortune to share the triumph of his friends
without having shared their proscription. When the House of Hanover came
to the throne, he partook largely of the prosperity of those with whom
he was connected. The reversion to which he had been nominated twenty
years before fell in. He was made secretary to the island of Jamaica;
and his whole income amounted to twelve hundred a year, a fortune which,
for a single man, was in that age not only easy, but splendid. He
continued, however, to practise the frugality which he had learned when
he could scarce spare, as Swift tells us, a shilling to pay the chairmen
who carried him to Lord Halifax's. Though he had nobody to save for, he
laid up at least as much as he spent.

The infirmities of age came early upon him. His habits had been
intemperate; he suffered much from gout; and, when confined to his
chamber, he had no longer the solace of literature. Blindness, the most
cruel misfortune that can befall the lonely student, made his books
useless to him. He was thrown on society for all his amusement; and in
society his good breeding and vivacity made him always welcome.

By the rising men of letters he was considered not as a rival, but as a
classic. He had left their arena; he never measured his strength with
them; and he was always loud in applause of their exertions. They could,
therefore, entertain no jealousy of him, and thought no more of
detracting from his fame than of carping at the great men who had been
lying a hundred years in Poets' Corner. Even the inmates of Grub Street,
even the heroes of the Dunciad, were for once just to living merit.
There can be no stronger illustration of the estimation in which
Congreve was held than the fact that the English Iliad, a work which
appeared with more splendid auspices than any other in our language, was
dedicated to him. There was not a duke in the kingdom who would not have
been proud of such a compliment. Dr. Johnson expresses great admiration
for the independence of spirit which Pope showed on this occasion. "He
passed over peers and statesmen to inscribe his Iliad to Congreve, with
a magnanimity of which the praise had been complete, had his friend's
virtue been equal to his wit. Why he was chosen for so great an honor,
it is not now possible to know." It is certainly impossible to know; yet
we think it is possible to guess. The translation of the Iliad had been
zealously befriended by men of all political opinions. The poet who, at
an early age, had been raised to affluence by the emulous liberality of
Whigs and Tories, could not with propriety inscribe to a chief of either
party a work which had been munificently patronized by both. It was
necessary to find some person who was at once eminent and neutral. It
was therefore necessary to pass over peers and statesmen. Congreve had a
high name in letters. He had a high name in aristocratic circles. He
lived on terms of civility with men of all parties. By a courtesy paid
to him, neither the ministers nor the leaders of the opposition could be
offended.

The singular affectation which had from the first been characteristic of
Congreve grew stronger and stronger as he advanced in life. At last it
became disagreeable to him to hear his own comedies praised. Voltaire,
whose soul was burned up by the raging desire for literary renown, was
half puzzled and half disgusted by what he saw, during his visit to
England, of this extraordinary whim. Congreve disclaimed the character
of a poet, declared that his plays were trifles produced in an idle
hour, and begged that Voltaire would consider him merely as a gentleman.
"If you had been merely a gentleman," said Voltaire, "I should not have
come to see you."

Congreve was not a man of warm affections. Domestic ties he had none;
and in the temporary connections which he formed with a succession of
beauties from the green-room his heart does not appear to have been
interested. Of all his attachments that to Mrs. Bracegirdle lasted the
longest and was the most celebrated. This charming actress, who was,
during many years, the idol of all London, whose face caused the fatal
broil in which Mountfort fell, and for which Lord Mohun was tried by the
peers, and to whom the Earl of Scarsdale was said to have made honorable
addresses, had conducted herself, in very trying circumstances, with
extraordinary discretion. Congreve at length became her confidential
friend. They constantly rode out together and dined together. Some
people said that she was his mistress, and others that she would soon be
his wife. He was at last drawn away from her by the influence of a
wealthier and haughtier beauty. Henrietta, daughter of the great
Marlborough, and Countess of Godolphin, had, on her father's death,
succeeded to his dukedom, and to the greater part of his immense
property. Her husband was an insignificant man, of whom Lord
Chesterfield said that he came to the House of Peers only to sleep, and
that he might as well sleep on the right as on the left of the woolsack.
Between the Duchess and Congreve sprang up a most eccentric friendship.
He had a seat every day at her table, and assisted in the direction of
her concerts. That malignant old beldame, the Dowager Duchess Sarah, who
had quarrelled with her daughter as she had quarrelled with everybody
else, affected to suspect that there was something wrong. But the world
in general appears to have thought that a great lady might, without any
imputation on her character, pay marked attention to a man of eminent
genius who was near sixty years old, who was still older in appearance
and in constitution, who was confined to his chair by gout, and who was
unable to read from blindness.

In the summer of 1728, Congreve was ordered to try the Bath waters.
During his excursion he was overturned in his chariot, and received some
severe internal injury from which he never recovered. He came back to
London in a dangerous state, complained constantly of a pain in his
side, and continued to sink, till in the following January he expired.

He left ten thousand pounds, saved out of the emoluments of his
lucrative places. Johnson says that this money ought to have gone to the
Congreve family, which was then in great distress. Dr. Young and Mr.
Leigh Hunt, two gentlemen who seldom agree with each other, but with
whom, on this occasion, we are happy to agree, think that it ought to
have gone to Mrs. Bracegirdle. Congreve bequeathed two hundred pounds to
Mrs. Bracegirdle, and an equal sum to a certain Mrs. Jellat; but the
bulk of his accumulations went to the Duchess of Marlborough, in whose
immense wealth such a legacy was as a drop in the bucket. It might have
raised the fallen fortunes of a Staffordshire squire; it might have
enabled a retired actress to enjoy every comfort, and, in her sense,
every luxury; but it was hardly sufficient to defray the Duchess's
establishment for three months.

The great lady buried her friend with a pomp seldom seen at the funerals
of poets. The corpse lay in state under the ancient roof of the
Jerusalem Chamber, and was interred in Westminster Abbey. The pall was
borne by the Duke of Bridgewater, Lord Cobham, the Earl of Wilmington,
who had been Speaker, and was afterwards First Lord of the Treasury, and
other men of high consideration. Her Grace laid out her friend's bequest
in a superb diamond necklace, which she wore in honor of him, and, if
report is to be believed, showed her regard in ways much more
extraordinary. It is said that a statue of him in ivory, which moved by
clockwork, was placed daily at her table, that she had a wax doll made
in imitation of him, and that the feet of the doll were regularly
blistered and anointed by the doctors, as poor Congreve's feet had been
when he suffered from the gout. A monument was erected to the poet in
Westminster Abbey, with an inscription written by the Duchess; and Lord
Cobham honored him with a cenotaph, which seems to us, though that is a
bold word, the ugliest and most absurd of the buildings at Stowe.

We have said that Wycherley was a worse Congreve. There was, indeed, a
remarkable analogy between the writings and lives of these two men. Both
were gentleman liberally educated. Both led town lives, and knew human
nature only as it appears between Hyde Park and the Tower. Both were men
of wit. Neither had much imagination. Both at an early age produced
lively and profligate comedies. Both retired from the field while still
in early manhood, and owed to their youthful achievements in literature
whatever consideration they enjoyed in later life. Both, after they had
ceased to write for the stage, published volumes of miscellanies which
did little credit either to their talents or to their morals. Both,
during their declining years, hung loose upon society; and both, in
their last moments, made eccentric and unjustifiable dispositions of
their estates.

But in every point Congreve maintained his superiority to Wycherley.
Wycherley had wit; but the wit of Congreve far outshines that of every
comic writer, except Sheridan, who has arisen within the last two
centuries. Congreve had not, in a large measure, the poetical faculty;
but compared with Wycherley he might be called a great poet. Wycherley
had some knowledge of books; but Congreve was a man of real learning.
Congreve's offences against decorum, though highly culpable, were not so
gross as those of Wycherley; nor did Congreve, like Wycherley, exhibit
to the world the deplorable spectacle of a licentious dotage. Congreve
died in the enjoyment of high consideration; Wycherley forgotten or
despised. Congreve's will was absurd and capricious; but Wycherley's
last actions appear to have been prompted by obdurate malignity.

Here, at least for the present, we must stop. Vanbrugh and Farquhar are
not men to be hastily dismissed, and we have not left ourselves space to
do them justice.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar,
with Biographical and Critical Notices. By Leigh Hunt. 8vo. London:
1840.

[3] Mr. Leigh Hunt supposes that the battle at which Wycherley was
present was that which the Duke of York gained over Opdam, in 1665. We
believe that it was one of the battles between Rupert and De Ruyter, in
1673.

The point is of no importance; and there cannot be said to be much
evidence either way. We offer, however, to Mr. Leigh Hunt's
consideration three arguments, of no great weight certainly, yet such as
ought, we think, to prevail in the absence of better. First, it is not
very likely that a young Templar, quite unknown in the world,--and
Wycherley was such in 1665,--should have quitted his chambers to go to
sea. On the other hand, it would be in the regular course of things,
that, when a courtier and an equerry, he should offer his services.
Secondly, his verses appear to have been written after a drawn battle,
like those of 1673, and not after a complete victory, like that of 1605.
Thirdly, in the epilogue to the Gentleman Dancing-Master, written in
1673, he says that "all gentlemen must pack to sea;" an expression which
makes it probable that he did not himself mean to stay behind.




LORD HOLLAND[4]

_The Edinburgh Review_, July, 1841


Many reasons make it impossible for us to lay before our readers, at the
present moment, a complete view of the character and public career of
the late Lord Holland. But we feel that we have already deferred too
long the duty of paying some tribute to his memory. We feel that it is
more becoming to bring without further delay an offering, though
intrinsically of little value, than to leave his tomb longer without
some token of our reverence and love.

We shall say very little of the book which lies on our table. And yet it
is a book which, even if it had been the work of a less distinguished
man, or had appeared under circumstances less interesting, would have
well repaid an attentive perusal. It is valuable, both as a record of
principles and as a model of composition. We find in it all the great
maxims which, during more than forty years, guided Lord Holland's public
conduct, and the chief reasons on which those maxims rest, condensed
into the smallest possible space, and set forth with admirable
perspicuity, dignity, and p

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