Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07
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Title: Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 07
Editor: Charles Dudley Warner
Hamilton Wright Mabie
Lucia Gilbert Runkle
George H. Warner
Release date: May 4, 2009 [eBook #28684]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28684
Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Katherine Ward and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LIBRARY OF THE WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE, ANCIENT AND MODERN — VOLUME 07 ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Katherine Ward and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Transcriber's Note:
Minor spelling and typographical errors corrected without note.
Other archaic and variable spelling preserved as printed.
Editor's punctuation style preserved.
Table of Contents updated to match entries.
Passages in italics indicated by _underscores_.
Emphasized words within italics indicated by +pluses+.
Greek transliterations are surrounded by ~tildes~.]
LIBRARY OF THE
WORLD'S BEST LITERATURE
ANCIENT AND MODERN
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
EDITOR
HAMILTON WRIGHT MABIE
LUCIA GILBERT RUNKLE
GEORGE HENRY WARNER
ASSOCIATE EDITORS
Connoisseur Edition
Vol. VII.
NEW YORK
THE INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY
Connoisseur Edition
LIMITED TO FIVE HUNDRED COPIES IN HALF RUSSIA
_No._ 299
* * * * *
Copyright, 1896, by
R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill
_All rights reserved_
THE ADVISORY COUNCIL
CRAWFORD H. TOY, A.M., LL.D.,
Professor of Hebrew,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY, Cambridge, Mass.
THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY, LL.D., L.H.D.,
Professor of English in the Sheffield Scientific School of
YALE UNIVERSITY, New Haven, Conn.
WILLIAM M. SLOANE, Ph.D., L.H.D.,
Professor of History and Political Science,
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, Princeton, N.J.
BRANDER MATTHEWS, A.M., LL.B.,
Professor of Literature,
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York City.
JAMES B. ANGELL, LL.D.,
President of the
UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, Ann Arbor, Mich.
WILLARD FISKE, A.M., Ph.D.,
Late Professor of the Germanic and Scandinavian Languages and
Literatures,
CORNELL UNIVERSITY, Ithaca, N.Y.
EDWARD S. HOLDEN, A.M., LL.D.,
Director of the Lick Observatory, and Astronomer,
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, Berkeley, Cal.
ALCEE FORTIER, Lit.D.,
Professor of the Romance Languages,
TULANE UNIVERSITY, New Orleans, La.
WILLIAM P. TRENT, M.A.,
Dean of the Department of Arts and Sciences, and Professor of
English and History,
UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH, Sewanee, Tenn.
PAUL SHOREY, Ph.D.,
Professor of Greek and Latin Literature,
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, Chicago, Ill.
WILLIAM T. HARRIS, LL.D.,
United States Commissioner of Education,
BUREAU OF EDUCATION, Washington, D.C.
MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, A.M., LL.D.,
Professor of Literature in the
CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA, Washington, D.C.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOL. VII
LIVED PAGE
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER 1855-1896 2731
Triolet
The Love-Letters of Smith ('Short Sixes')
The Way to Arcady
Chant-Royal
Envoy
JOHN BUNYAN 1628-1688 2747
BY EDWIN P. PARKER
The Fight with Apollyon ('Pilgrim's Progress')
The Delectable Mountains (same)
Christiana and Her Companions Enter the Celestial City (same)
GOTTFRIED AUGUST BUeRGER 1747-1794 2767
William and Helen
The Wives of Weinsberg
EDMUND BURKE 1729-1797 2779
BY E. L. GODKIN
From Speech on 'Conciliation with America'
From Speech on 'The Nabob of Arcot's Debts'
From Speech on 'The French Revolution'
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT 1849- 2809
At the Pit ('That Lass o' Lowrie's')
FRANCES BURNEY (Madame D'Arblay) 1752-1840 2817
Evelina's Letter to the Rev. Mr. Villars ('Evelina')
A Man of the Ton ('Cecilia')
Miss Burney's Friends ('Letters')
ROBERT BURNS 1759-1796 2833
BY RICHARD HENRY STODDARD
The Cotter's Saturday Night
John Anderson, My Jo
Man Was Made to Mourn
Green Grow the Rashes
Is There for Honest Poverty
To a Mouse
To a Mountain Daisy
Tam o' Shanter
Bruce to His Men at Bannockburn
Highland Mary
My Heart's in the Highlands
The Banks o' Doon
JOHN BURROUGHS 1837- 2867
Sharp Eyes ('Locusts and Wild Honey')
Waiting
SIR RICHARD F. BURTON 1821-1890 2883
The Preternatural in Fiction ('The Book of a Thousand Nights
and a Night')
A Journey in Disguise ('The Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage
to El Medinah and Meccah')
En Route (same)
ROBERT BURTON 1577-1640 2904
Conclusions as to Melancholy ('The Anatomy of Melancholy')
HORACE BUSHNELL 1802-1876 2909
BY THEODORE T. MUNGER
Work and Play
From 'The Age of Homespun'
The Founders ('Work and Play')
Religious Music (same)
SAMUEL BUTLER 1612-1680 2927
Hudibras Described
LORD BYRON 1788-1824 2935
BY CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
Maid of Athens
Translation of a Romaic Song
Greece ('The Giaour')
The Hellespont and Troy ('The Bride of Abydos')
Greece and her Heroes ('The Siege of Corinth')
The Isles of Greece ('Don Juan')
Greece and the Greeks before the Revolution ('Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage')
To Rome (same)
The Coliseum (same)
Chorus of Spirits ('The Deformed Transformed')
Venice ('Childe Harold's Pilgrimage')
Ode to Venice
The East ('The Bride of Abydos')
Oriental Royalty ('Don Juan')
A Grecian Sunset ('The Curse of Minerva')
An Italian Sunset ('Childe Harold's Pilgrimage')
Twilight ('Don Juan')
An Alpine Storm ('Childe Harold's Pilgrimage')
The Ocean (same)
The Shipwreck ('Don Juan')
Love on the Island ('Don Juan')
The Two Butterflies ('The Giaour')
To His Sister ('Childe Harold's Pilgrimage')
Ode to Napoleon
The Battle of Waterloo ('Childe Harold's Pilgrimage')
Mazeppa's Ride ('Mazeppa')
The Irish Avatar
The Dream
She Walks in Beauty ('Hebrew Melodies')
Destruction of Sennacherib ('Hebrew Melodies')
From 'The Prisoner of Chillon'
Prometheus
A Summing-Up ('Childe Harold's Pilgrimage')
On This Day I Complete my Thirty-sixth Year
FERNAN CABALLERO (Cecilia Boehl de Faber) 1796-1877 3001
The Bull-Fight ('La Gaviota')
In the Home Circle (same)
GEORGE W. CABLE 1844- 3017
"Posson Jone'" ('Old Creole Days')
CAIUS JULIUS CAESAR 100-44 B.C. 3037
BY J. H. WESTCOTT
Defeat of Ariovistus and the Germans ('The Gallic Wars')
On the Manners and Customs of Ancient Gauls and Germans (same)
The Two Lieutenants (same)
Epigram on Terentius
THOMAS HENRY HALL CAINE 1853- 3067
Pete Quilliam's First-Born ('The Manxman')
PEDRO CALDERON 1600-1681 3071
BY MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN
The Lovers ('The Secret in Words')
Cyprian's Bargain ('The Wonderful Magician')
Dreams and Realities ('Such Stuff as Dreams are Made Of')
The Dream Called Life (same)
JOHN CALDWELL CALHOUN 1782-1850 3087
BY W. P. TRENT
Remarks on the Right of Petition (Speech in the Senate, 1840)
State Rights (Speech on the Admission of Michigan, 1837)
On the Government of Poland ('A Disquisition on Government')
Urging Repeal of the Missouri Compromise (Speech in the
Senate, 1850)
CALLIMACHUS Third Century B.C. 3101
Hymn to Jupiter
Epitaph
Epigram
Epitaph on Heracleitus
Epitaph
The Misanthrope
Epitaph upon Himself
Epitaph upon Cleombrotus
CHARLES STUART CALVERLEY 1831-1884 3107
From 'An Examination Paper,' 'The Posthumous Papers of the
Pickwick Club'
Ballad (Imitation of Jean Ingelow)
Lovers, and a Reflection (Imitation of Jean Ingelow)
Visions
Changed
Thoughts at a Railway Station
"Forever"
FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS
VOLUME VII
PAGE
Persian Manuscript (Colored Plate) Frontispiece
John Bunyan (Portrait) 2748
Edmund Burke (Portrait) 2780
Robert Burns (Portrait) 2834
Burns Manuscript (Facsimile) 2844
"Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon" (Etching) 2866
Lord Byron (Portrait) 2936
"Newstead Abbey" (Etching) 2942
"The Bull-Fight" (Photogravure) 3004
Julius Caesar (Portrait) 3038
Calderon (Portrait) 3072
John Caldwell Calhoun (Portrait) 3088
VIGNETTE PORTRAITS
Henry Cuyler Bunner
Gottfried August Buerger
Frances Burney
Sir Richard F. Burton
Robert Burton
John Burroughs
Horace Bushnell
Samuel Butler
George W. Cable
Thomas Henry Hall Caine
HENRY CUYLER BUNNER
(1855-1896)
The position which Henry Cuyler Bunner has come to occupy in the
literary annals of our time strengthens as the days pass. If the stream
of his genius flowed in gentle rivulets, it traveled as far and spread
its fruitful influence as wide as many a statelier river. He was above
all things a poet. In his prose as in his verse he has revealed the
essential qualities of a poet's nature: he dealt with the life which he
saw about him in a spirit of broad humanity and with genial sympathy.
When he fashioned the tender triolet on the pitcher of mignonette, or
sang of the little red box at Vesey Street, he wrote of what he knew;
and his stories, even when embroidered with quaint fancies, tread firmly
the American soil of the nineteenth century. But Bunner's realism never
concerned itself with the record of trivialities for their own sake.
When he portrayed the lower phases of city life, it was the humor of
that life he caught, and not its sordidness; its kindliness, and not its
brutality. His mind was healthy, and since it was a poet's mind, the
point upon which it was so nicely balanced was love: love of the trees
and flowers, love of his little brothers in wood and field, love of his
country home, love of the vast city in its innumerable aspects; above
all, love of his wife, his family, and his friends; and all these
outgoings of his heart have found touching expression in his verse.
Indeed, this attitude of affectionate kinship with the world has colored
all his work; it has made his satire sweet-tempered, given his tales
their winning grace, and lent to his poetry its abiding power.
[Illustration: HENRY C. BUNNER]
The work upon which Bunner's fame must rest was all produced within a
period of less than fifteen years. He was born in 1855 at Oswego, New
York. He came to the city of New York when very young, and received his
education there. A brief experience of business life sufficed to make
his true vocation clear, and at the age of eighteen he began his
literary apprenticeship on the Arcadian. When that periodical passed
away, Puck was just struggling into existence, and for the English
edition, which was started in 1877, Bunner's services were secured. Half
of his short life was spent in editorial connection with that paper. To
his wisdom and literary abilities is due in large measure the success
which has always attended the enterprise. Bunner had an intimate
knowledge of American character and understood the foibles of his
countrymen; but he was never cynical, and his satire was without
hostility. He despised opportune journalism. His editorials were clear
and vigorous; free not from partisanship, but from partisan rancor, and
they made for honesty and independence. His firm stand against political
corruption, socialistic vagaries, the misguided and often criminal
efforts of labor agitators, and all the visionary schemes of diseased
minds, has contributed to the stability of sound and self-respecting
American citizenship.
Bunner's first decided success in story-telling was 'The Midge,' which
appeared in 1886. It is a tale of New York life in the interesting old
French quarter of South Fifth Avenue. Again, in 'The Story of a New York
House,' he displayed the same quick feeling for the spirit of the place,
as it was and is. This tale first appeared in the newly founded
Scribner's Magazine, to which he has since been a constant contributor.
Here some of his best short stories have been published, including the
excellent 'Zadoc Pine,' with its healthy presentation of independent
manhood in contest with the oppressive exactions of labor organizations.
But Bunner was no believer in stories with a tendency; the conditions
which lie at the root of great sociological questions he used as
artistic material, never as texts. His stories are distinguished by
simplicity of motive; each is related with fine unobtrusive humor and
with an underlying pathos, never unduly emphasized. The most popular of
his collections of tales is that entitled 'Short Sixes,' which, having
first appeared in Puck, were published in book form in 1891. A second
volume came out three years later. When the shadow of death had already
fallen upon Bunner, a new collection of his sketches was in process of
publication: 'Jersey Street and Jersey Lane.' In these, as in the still
more recent 'Suburban Sage,' is revealed the same fineness of
sympathetic observation in town and country that we have come to
associate with Bunner's name. Among his prose writings there remains to
be mentioned the series from Puck entitled 'Made in France.' These are
an application of the methods of Maupassant to American subjects; they
display that wonderful facility in reproducing the flavor of another's
style which is exhibited in Bunner's verse in a still more eminent
degree. His prose style never attained the perfection of literary
finish, but it is easy and direct, free from sentimentality and
rhetoric; in the simplicity of his conceptions and the delicacy of his
treatment lies its chief charm.
Bunner's verse, on the other hand, shows a complete mastery of form. He
was a close student of Horace; he tried successfully the most exacting
of exotic verse-forms, and enjoyed the distinction of having written the
only English example of the difficult Chant-Royal. Graceful _vers de
societe_ and bits of witty epigram flowed from him without effort. But
it was not to this often dangerous facility that Bunner owed his poetic
fame. His tenderness, his quick sympathy with nature, his insight into
the human heart, above all, the love and longing that filled his soul,
have infused into his perfected rhythms the spirit of universal
brotherhood that underlies all genuine poetry. His 'Airs from Arcady'
(1884) achieved a success unusual for a volume of poems; and the love
lyrics and patriotic songs of his later volume, 'Rowen,' maintain the
high level of the earlier book. The great mass of his poems is still
buried in the back numbers of the magazines, from which the best are to
be rescued in a new volume. If his place is not among the greatest of
our time, he has produced a sufficient body of fine verse to rescue his
name from oblivion and render his memory dear to all who value the
legacy of a sincere and genuine poet. He died on May 11th, 1896, at the
age of forty-one.
TRIOLET
A pitcher of mignonette,
In a tenement's highest casement:
Queer sort of flower-pot--yet
That pitcher of mignonette
Is a garden in heaven set,
To the little sick child in the basement--
The pitcher of mignonette,
In the tenement's highest casement.
Copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons.
THE LOVE-LETTERS OF SMITH
From 'Short Sixes'
When the little seamstress had climbed to her room in the story over the
top story of the great brick tenement house in which she lived, she was
quite tired out. If you do not understand what a story over a top story
is, you must remember that there are no limits to human greed, and
hardly any to the height of tenement houses. When the man who owned that
seven-story tenement found that he could rent another floor, he found no
difficulty in persuading the guardians of our building laws to let him
clap another story on the roof, like a cabin on the deck of a ship; and
in the southeasterly of the four apartments on this floor the little
seamstress lived. You could just see the top of her window from the
street--the huge cornice that had capped the original front, and that
served as her window-sill now, quite hid all the lower part of the story
on top of the top story.
The little seamstress was scarcely thirty years old, but she was such an
old-fashioned little body in so many of her looks and ways that I had
almost spelled her "sempstress," after the fashion of our grandmothers.
She had been a comely body, too; and would have been still, if she had
not been thin and pale and anxious-eyed.
She was tired out to-night, because she had been working hard all day
for a lady who lived far up in the "New Wards" beyond Harlem River, and
after the long journey home she had to climb seven flights of
tenement-house stairs. She was too tired, both in body and in mind, to
cook the two little chops she had brought home. She would save them for
breakfast, she thought. So she made herself a cup of tea on the
miniature stove, and ate a slice of dry bread with it. It was too much
trouble to make toast.
But after dinner she watered her flowers. She was never too tired for
that, and the six pots of geraniums that caught the south sun on the top
of the cornice did their best to repay her. Then she sat down in her
rocking-chair by the window and looked out. Her eyry was high above all
the other buildings, and she could look across some low roofs opposite
and see the further end of Tompkins Square, with its sparse spring green
showing faintly through the dusk. The eternal roar of the city floated
up to her and vaguely troubled her. She was a country girl; and although
she had lived for ten years in New York, she had never grown used to
that ceaseless murmur. To-night she felt the languor of the new season,
as well as the heaviness of physical exhaustion. She was almost too
tired to go to bed.
She thought of the hard day done and the hard day to be begun after the
night spent on the hard little bed. She thought of the peaceful days in
the country, when she taught school in the Massachusetts village where
she was born. She thought of a hundred small slights that she had to
bear from people better fed than bred. She thought of the sweet green
fields that she rarely saw nowadays. She thought of the long journey
forth and back that must begin and end her morrow's work, and she
wondered if her employer would think to offer to pay her fare. Then she
pulled herself together. She must think of more agreeable things or she
could not sleep. And as the only agreeable things she had to think about
were her flowers, she looked at the garden on top of the cornice.
A peculiar gritting noise made her look down, and she saw a cylindrical
object that glittered in the twilight, advancing in an irregular and
uncertain manner toward her flower-pots. Looking closer, she saw that it
was a pewter beer-mug, which somebody in the next apartment was pushing
with a two-foot rule. On top of the beer-mug was a piece of paper, and
on this paper was written, in a sprawling, half-formed hand:--
_porter
pleas excuse the libberty And
drink it_
The seamstress started up in terror and shut the window. She remembered
that there was a man in the next apartment. She had seen him on the
stairs on Sundays. He seemed a grave, decent person; but--he must be
drunk. She sat down on her bed all a tremble. Then she reasoned with
herself. The man was drunk, that was all. He probably would not annoy
her further. And if he did, she had only to retreat to Mrs. Mulvaney's
apartment in the rear, and Mr. Mulvaney, who was a highly respectable
man and worked in a boiler-shop, would protect her. So, being a poor
woman who had already had occasion to excuse--and refuse--two or three
"libberties" of like sort, she made up her mind to go to bed like a
reasonable seamstress, and she did. She was rewarded, for when her light
was out, she could see in the moonlight that the two-foot rule appeared
again with one joint bent back, hitched itself into the mug-handle, and
withdrew the mug.
The next day was a hard one for the little seamstress, and she hardly
thought of the affair of the night before until the same hour had come
around again, and she sat once more by her window. Then she smiled at
the remembrance. "Poor fellow," she said in her charitable heart, "I've
no doubt he's _awfully_ ashamed of it now. Perhaps he was never tipsy
before. Perhaps he didn't know there was a lone woman in here to be
frightened."
Just then she heard a gritting sound. She looked down. The pewter pot
was in front of her, and the two-foot rule was slowly retiring. On the
pot was a piece of paper, and on the paper was--
_porter
good for the helth
it makes meet_
This time the little seamstress shut her window with a bang of
indignation. The color rose to her pale cheeks. She thought that she
would go down to see the janitor at once. Then she remembered the seven
flights of stairs; and she resolved to see the janitor in the morning.
Then she went to bed, and saw the mug drawn back just as it had been
drawn back the night before.
The morning came, but somehow the seamstress did not care to complain to
the janitor. She hated to make trouble--and the janitor might
think--and--and--well, if the wretch did it again she would speak to him
herself, and that would settle it. And so on the next night, which was a
Thursday, the little seamstress sat down by her window, resolved to
settle the matter. And she had not sat there long, rocking in the
creaking little rocking-chair which she had brought with her from her
old home, when the pewter pot hove in sight, with a piece of paper on
the top. This time the legend read:--
_Perhaps you are afrade i will
adress you
i am not that kind_
The seamstress did not quite know whether to laugh or to cry. But she
felt that the time had come for speech. She leaned out of her window and
addressed the twilight heaven.
"Mr.--Mr.--sir--I--will you _please_ put your head out of the window so
that I can speak to you?"
The silence of the other room was undisturbed. The seamstress drew back,
blushing. But before she could nerve herself for another attack, a piece
of paper appeared on the end of the two-foot rule.
_when i Say a thing i
mene it
i have Sed i would not
Adress you and i
Will not_
What was the little seamstress to do? She stood by the window and
thought hard about it. Should she complain to the janitor? But the
creature was perfectly respectful. No doubt he meant to be kind. He
certainly was kind, to waste these pots of porter on her. She remembered
the last time--and the first--that she had drunk porter. It was at home,
when she was a young girl, after she had the diphtheria. She remembered
how good it was, and how it had given her back her strength. And without
one thought of what she was doing, she lifted the pot of porter and took
one little reminiscent sip--two little reminiscent sips--and became
aware of her utter fall and defeat. She blushed now as she had never
blushed before, put the pot down, closed the window, and fled to her bed
like a deer to the woods.
And when the porter arrived the next night, bearing the simple appeal--
_Dont be afrade of it
drink it all_
the little seamstress arose and grasped the pot firmly by the handle,
and poured its contents over the earth around her largest geranium. She
poured the contents out to the last drop, and then she dropped the pot,
and ran back and sat on her bed and cried, with her face hid in her
hands.
"Now," she said to herself, "you've done it! And you're just as nasty
and hard-hearted and suspicious and mean as--as pusley!" And she wept to
think of her hardness of heart. "He will never give me a chance to say
'I am sorry,'" she thought. And really, she might have spoken kindly to
the poor man, and told him that she was much obliged to him, but that he
really must not ask her to drink porter with him.
"But it's all over and done now," she said to herself as she sat at her
window on Saturday night. And then she looked at the cornice, and saw
the faithful little pewter pot traveling slowly toward her.
She was conquered. This act of Christian forbearance was too much for
her kindly spirit. She read the inscription on the paper,
_porter is good for Flours
but better for Fokes_
and she lifted the pot to her lips, which were not half so red as her
cheeks, and took a good, hearty, grateful draught.
She sipped in thoughtful silence after this first plunge, and presently
she was surprised to find the bottom of the pot in full view. On the
table at her side a few pearl buttons were screwed up in a bit of white
paper. She untwisted the paper and smoothed it out, and wrote in a
tremulous hand--she _could_ write a very neat hand--
_Thanks._
This she laid on the top of the pot, and in a moment the bent two-foot
rule appeared and drew the mail-carriage home. Then she sat still,
enjoying the warm glow of the porter, which seemed to have permeated her
entire being with a heat that was not at all like the unpleasant and
oppressive heat of the atmosphere, an atmosphere heavy with the spring
damp. A gritting on the tin aroused her. A piece of paper lay under her
eyes.
_fine groing weather
Smith_
Now it is unlikely that in the whole round and range of conversational
commonplaces there was one other greeting that could have induced the
seamstress to continue the exchange of communications. But this simple
and homely phrase touched her country heart. What did "groing weather"
matter to the toilers in this waste of brick and mortar? This stranger
must be, like herself, a country-bred soul, longing for the new green
and the upturned brown mold of the country fields. She took up the
paper, and wrote under the first message:--
_Fine_
But that seemed curt: "for--" she added; "for" what? She did not know.
At last in desperation she put down "potatoes." The piece of paper was
withdrawn, and came back with an addition:--
_Too mist for potatos_
And when the little seamstress had read this, and grasped the fact that
"m-i-s-t" represented the writer's pronunciation of "moist," she laughed
softly to herself. A man whose mind at such a time was seriously bent
upon potatoes was not a man to be feared. She found a half-sheet of
note-paper, and wrote:--
_I lived in a small village before I came to New York, but I am
afraid I do not know much about farming. Are you a farmer?_
The answer came:--
_have ben most Every thing
farmed a Spel in Maine
Smith_
As she read this, the seamstress heard the church clock strike nine.
"Bless me, is it so late?" she cried, and she hurriedly penciled _Good
Night_, thrust the paper out, and closed the window. But a few minutes
later, passing by, she saw yet another bit of paper on the cornice,
fluttering in the evening breeze. It said only _good nite_, and after a
moment's hesitation, the little seamstress took it in and gave it
shelter.
* * * * *
After this they were the best of friends. Every evening the pot
appeared, and while the seamstress drank from it at her window, Mr.
Smith drank from its twin at his; and notes were exchanged as rapidly as
Mr. Smith's early education permitted. They told each other their
histories, and Mr. Smith's was one of travel and variety, which he
seemed to consider quite a matter of course. He had followed the sea, he
had farmed, he had been a logger and a hunter in the Maine woods. Now he
was foreman of an East River lumber-yard, and he was prospering. In a
year or two he would have enough laid by to go home to Bucksport and buy
a share in a ship-building business. All this dribbled out in the course
of a jerky but variegated correspondence, in which autobiographic
details were mixed with reflections moral and philosophical.
A few samples will give an idea of Mr. Smith's style:--
_i was one trip to van demens
land_
To which the seamstress replied:--
_It must have been very interesting._
But Mr. Smith disposed of this subject very briefly:--
_it wornt_
Further he vouchsafed:--
_i seen a Chinese cook in
hong kong could cook flapjacks
like your mother_
_a mishnery that sells Rum
is the menest of Gods crechers_
_a bulfite is not what it is
cract up to Be_
_the dagos are wussen the
brutes_
_i am 6 1-3/4
but my Father was 6 foot 4_
The seamstress had taught school one winter, and she could not refrain
from making an attempt to reform Mr. Smith's orthography. One evening,
in answer to this communication,--
_i killd a Bare in Maine 600
lbs waight_
she wrote:--
_Isn't it generally spelled Bear?_
but she gave up the attempt when he responded:--
_a bare is a mene animle any
way you spel him_
The spring wore on, and the summer came, and still the evening drink and
the evening correspondence brightened the close of each day for the
little seamstress. And the draught of porter put her to sleep each
night, giving her a calmer rest than she had ever known during her stay
in the noisy city; and it began, moreover, to make a little "meet" for
her. And then the thought that she was going to have an hour of pleasant
companionship somehow gave her courage to cook and eat her little
dinner, however tired she was. The seamstress's cheeks began to blossom
with the June roses.
And all this time Mr. Smith kept his vow of silence unbroken, though the
seamstress sometimes tempted him with little ejaculations and
exclamations to which he might have responded. He was silent and
invisible. Only the smoke of his pipe, and the clink of his mug as he
set it down on the cornice, told her that a living, material Smith was
her correspondent. They never met on the stairs, for their hours of
coming and going did not coincide. Once or twice they passed each other
in the street--but Mr. Smith looked straight ahead of him about a foot
over her head. The little seamstress thought he was a very fine-looking
man, with his six feet one and three-quarters and his thick brown beard.
Most people would have called him plain.
Once she spoke to him. She was coming home one summer evening, and a
gang of corner-loafers stopped her and demanded money to buy beer, as is
their custom. Before she had time to be frightened, Mr. Smith
appeared,--whence, she knew not,--scattered the gang like chaff, and
collaring two of the human hyenas, kicked them, with deliberate,
ponderous, alternate kicks, until they writhed in ineffable agony. When
he let them crawl away, she turned to him and thanked him warmly,
looking very pretty now, with the color in her cheeks. But Mr. Smith
answered no word. He stared over her head, grew red in the face,
fidgeted nervously, but held his peace until his eyes fell on a rotund
Teuton passing by.
"Say, Dutchy!" he roared. The German stood aghast. "I ain't got nothing
to write with!" thundered Mr. Smith, looking him in the eye. And then
the man of his word passed on his way.
And so the summer went on, and the two correspondents chatted silently
from window to window, hid from sight of all the world below by the
friendly cornice. And they looked out over the roof and saw the green of
Tompkins Square grow darker and dustier as the months went on.
Mr. Smith was given to Sunday trips into the suburbs, and he never came
back without a bunch of daisies or black-eyed Susans or, later, asters
or golden-rod for the little seamstress. Sometimes, with a sagacity rare
in his sex, he brought her a whole plant, with fresh loam for potting.
He gave her also a reel in a bottle, which, he wrote, he had "maid"
himself, and some coral, and a dried flying-fish that was something
fearful to look upon, with its sword-like fins and its hollow eyes. At
first she could not go to sleep with that flying-fish hanging on the
wall.
But he surprised the little seamstress very much one cool September
evening, when he shoved this letter along the cornice:--
[Illustration: Handwritten letter]
Respected and Honored Madam:
Having long and vainly sought an opportunity to convey to you
the expression of my sentiments, I now avail myself of the
privilege of epistolary communication to acquaint you with the
fact that the Emotions, which you have raised in my breast, are
those which should point to Connubial Love and Affection rather
than to simple Friendship. In short, Madam, I have the Honor to
approach you with a Proposal, the acceptance of which will fill
me with ecstatic Gratitude, and enable me to extend to you those
Protecting Cares, which the Matrimonial Bond makes at once the
Duty and the Privilege of him, who would, at no distant date,
lead to the Hymeneal Altar one whose charms and virtues should
suffice to kindle its Flames, without extraneous Aid
I remain, Dear Madam,
Your Humble Servant and
Ardent Adorer, J. Smith.
The little seamstress gazed at this letter a long time. Perhaps she was
wondering in what Ready Letter-Writer of the last century Mr. Smith had
found his form. Perhaps she was amused at the results of his first
attempt at punctuation. Perhaps she was thinking of something else, for
there were tears in her eyes and a smile on her small mouth.
But it must have been a long time, and Mr. Smith must have grown
nervous, for presently another communication came along the line where
the top of the cornice was worn smooth. It read:
_If not understood will you
mary me_
The little seamstress seized a piece of paper and wrote:--
_If I say Yes, will you speak to me?_
Then she rose and passed it out to him, leaning out of the window, and
their faces met.
Copyright of Keppler and Schwarzmann.
THE WAY TO ARCADY
Oh, what's the way to Arcady,
To Arcady, to Arcady;
Oh, what's the way to Arcady,
Where all the leaves are merry?
Oh, what's the way to Arcady?
The spring is rustling in the tree--
The tree the wind is blowing through--
It sets the blossoms flickering white.
I knew not skies could burn so blue
Nor any breezes blow so light.
They blow an old-time way for me,
Across the world to Arcady.
Oh, what's the way to Arcady?
Sir Poet, with the rusty coat,
Quit mocking of the song-bird's note.
How have you heart for any tune,
You with the wayworn russet shoon?
Your scrip, a-swinging by your side,
Gapes with a gaunt mouth hungry-wide.
I'll brim it well with pieces red,
If you will tell the way to tread.
Oh, I am bound for Arcady,
And if you but keep pace with me
You tread the way to Arcady.
And where away lies Arcady,
And how long yet may the journey be?
Ah, that (quoth he) I do not know:
Across the clover and the snow--
Across the forest, across the flowers--
Through summer seconds and winter hours.
I've trod the way my whole life long,
And know not now where it may be;
My guide is but the stir to song,
That tells me I cannot go wrong,
Or clear or dark the pathway be
Upon the road to Arcady.
But how shall I do who cannot sing?
I was wont to sing, once on a time--
There is never an echo now to ring
Remembrance back to the trick of rhyme.
'Tis strange you cannot sing (quoth he),
The folk all sing in Arcady.
But how may he find Arcady
Who hath nor youth nor melody?
What, know you not, old man (quoth he)--
Your hair is white, your face is wise--
That Love must kiss that Mortal's eyes
Who hopes to see fair Arcady?
No gold can buy you entrance, there,
But beggared Love may go all bare;
No wisdom won with weariness,
But Love goes in with Folly's dress;
No fame that wit could ever win,
But only Love, may lead Love in
To Arcady, to Arcady.
Ah, woe is me, through all my days
Wisdom and wealth I both have got,
And fame and name, and great men's praise;
But Love, ah Love! I have it not.
There was a time, when life was new--
But far away, and half forgot--
I only know her eyes were blue;
But Love--I fear I knew it not.
We did not wed, for lack of gold,
And she is dead, and I am old.
All things have come since then to me,
Save Love, ah Love! and Arcady.
Ah, then I fear we part (quoth he),
My way's for Love and Arcady.
But you, you fare alone like me;
The gray is likewise in your hair.
What love have you to lead you there.
To Arcady, to Arcady?
Ah, no, not lonely do I fare:
My true companion's Memory.
With Love he fills the Spring-time air;
With Love he clothes the Winter tree.
Oh, past this poor horizon's bound
My song goes straight to one who stands--
Her face all gladdening at the sound--
To lead me to the Spring-green lands,
To wander with enlacing hands.
The songs within my breast that stir
Are all of her, are all of her.
My maid is dead long years (quoth he),
She waits for me in Arcady.
Oh, yon's the way to Arcady,
To Arcady, to Arcady;
Oh, yon's the way to Arcady,
Where all the leaves are merry.
Copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons.
CHANT-ROYAL
I would that all men my hard case might know;
How grievously I suffer for no sin:
I, Adolphe Culpepper Ferguson, for lo!
I of my landlady am locked in,
For being short on this sad Saturday,
Nor having shekels of silver wherewith to pay:
She has turned and is departed with my key;
Wherefore, not even as other boarders free,
I sing (as prisoners to their dungeon stones
When for ten days they expiate a spree):
Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones!
One night and one day have I wept my woe;
Nor wot I, when the morrow doth begin,
If I shall have to write to Briggs & Co.,
To pray them to advance the requisite tin
For ransom of their salesman, that he may
Go forth as other boarders go alway--
As those I hear now flocking from their tea,
Led by the daughter of my landlady
Piano-ward. This day, for all my moans,
Dry bread and water have been served me.
Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones!
Miss Amabel Jones is musical, and so
The heart of the young he-boarder doth win,
Playing 'The Maiden's Prayer' _adagio_--
That fetcheth him, as fetcheth the banco skin
The innocent rustic. For my part, I pray
That Badarjewska maid may wait for aye
Ere sits she with a lover, as did we
Once sit together, Amabel! Can it be
That all that arduous wooing not atones
For Saturday shortness of trade dollars three?
_Behold_ the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones!
Yea! she forgets the arm was wont to go
Around her waist. She wears a buckle, whose pin
Galleth the crook of the young man's elbow.
_I_ forget not, for I that youth have been.
Smith was aforetime the Lothario gay.
Yet once, I mind me, Smith was forced to stay
Close in his room. Not calm, as I, was he;
But his noise brought no pleasaunce, verily.
Small ease he got of playing on the bones
Or hammering on his stove-pipe, that I see.
Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones!
Thou, for whose fear the figurative crow
I eat, accursed be thou and all thy kin!
Thee will I show up--yea, up will I show
Thy too thick buckwheats, and thy tea too thin.
Ay! here I dare thee, ready for the fray:
Thou dost _not_ "keep a first-class house," I say!
It does not with the advertisements agree.
Thou lodgest a Briton with a puggaree,
And thou hast harbored Jacobses and Cohns,
Also a Mulligan. Thus denounce I thee!
Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones!
ENVOY
Boarders! the worst I have not told to ye:
She hath stolen my trousers, that I may not flee
Privily by the window. Hence these groans.
There is no fleeing in a _robe de nuit_.
Behold the deeds that are done of Mrs. Jones!
Copyrighted by Charles Scribner's Sons.
JOHN BUNYAN
(1628-1688)
BY REV. EDWIN P. PARKER
John Bunyan, son of Thomas Bunnionn Junior and Margaret Bentley, was
born 1628, in the quaint old village of Elstow, one mile southwest of
Bedford, near the spot where, three hundred years before, his ancestor
William Boynon resided. His father was a poor tinker or "braseyer," and
his mother's lineage is unknown. He says,--"I never went to school to
Aristotle or Plato, but was brought up at my father's house in a very
mean condition, among a company of poor countrymen."
He learned to read and write "according to the rate of other poor men's
children"; but soon lost "almost utterly" the little he had learned.
Shortly after his mother's death, when he was about seventeen years of
age, he served as a soldier for several months, probably in the
Parliamentary army. Not long afterward he married a woman as poor as
himself, by whose gentle influence he was gradually led into the way of
those severe spiritual conflicts and "painful exercises of mind" from
which he finally came forth, at great cost, victorious. These religious
experiences, vividly described in his 'Grace Abounding,' traceable in
the course of his chief Pilgrim, and frequently referred to in his
discourses, have been too literally interpreted by some, and too much
explained away as unreal by others; but present no special difficulty to
those who will but consider Bunyan's own explanations.
From boyhood he had lived a roving and non-religious life, although
possessing no little tenderness of conscience. He was neither
intemperate nor dishonest; he was not a law-breaker; he explicitly and
indignantly declares:--"If all the fornicators and adulterers in England
were hanged by the neck till they be dead, John Bunyan would still be
alive and well!" The particular sins of which he was guilty, so far as
he specifies them, were profane swearing, from which he suddenly ceased
at a woman's reproof, and certain sports, innocent enough in themselves,
which the prevailing Puritan rigor severely condemned. What, then, of
that vague and exceeding sinfulness of which he so bitterly accuses and
repents himself? It was that vision of sin, however disproportionate,
which a deeply wounded and graciously healed spirit often has, in
looking back upon the past from that theological standpoint whence all
want of conformity to the perfect law of God seems heinous and
dreadful.
"A sinner may be comparatively a little sinner, and sensibly a
great one. There are two sorts of greatness in sin: greatness by
reason of number; greatness by reason of the horrible nature of
sin. In the last sense, he that has but one sin, if such an one
could be found, may in his own eyes find himself the biggest
sinner in the world."
"Visions of God break the heart, because, by the sight the soul
then has of His perfections, it sees its own infinite and
unspeakable disproportion."
"The best saints are most sensible of their sins, and most apt
to make mountains of their molehills."
Such sentences from Bunyan's own writings--and many like them might be
quoted--shed more light upon the much-debated question of his
"wickedness" than all that his biographers have written.
In John Gifford, pastor of a little Free Church in Bedford, Bunyan found
a wise friend, and in 1653 he joined that church. He soon discovered his
gifts among the brethren, and in due time was appointed to the office of
a gospel minister, in which he labored with indefatigable industry and
zeal, and with ever-increasing fame and success, until his death. His
hard personal fortunes between the Restoration of 1660 and the
Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, including his imprisonment for twelve
years in Bedford Gaol; his subsequent imprisonment in 1675-6, when the
first part of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' was probably written; and the
arduous engagements of his later and comparatively peaceful years,--must
be sought in biographies, the latest and perhaps the best of which is
that by Rev. John Brown, minister of the Bunyan Church at Bedford. The
statute under which Bunyan suffered is the 35th Eliz., Cap. 1,
re-enacted with rigor in the 16th Charles II., Cap. 4, 1662; and the
spirit of it appears in the indictment preferred against him:--"that he
hath devilishly and perniciously abstained from coming to Church to hear
Divine service, and is a common upholder of several unlawful meetings
and conventicles, to the great disturbance and distraction of the good
subjects of this Kingdom," etc., etc.
The story of Bunyan's life up to the time of his imprisonment, and
particularly that of his arrests and examinations before the justices,
and also the account of his experiences in prison, should be read in his
own most graphic narrative, in the 'Grace Abounding,' which is one of
the most precious portions of all autobiographic literature. Bunyan was
born and bred, he lived and labored, among the common people, with whom
his sympathies were strong and tender, and by whom he was regarded with
the utmost veneration and affection. He understood them, and they him.
For nearly a century they were almost the only readers of his published
writings. They came to call him Bishop Bunyan. His native genius, his
great human-heartedness and loving-kindness, his burning zeal and
indomitable courage, his racy humor and kindling imagination, all
vitalized by the spiritual force which came upon him through the
encompassing atmosphere of devout Puritanism, were consecrated to the
welfare of his fellow-men. His personal friend, Mr. Doe, describes him
as "tall in stature, strong-boned, of a ruddy face, with sparkling eyes,
nose well set, mouth moderately large, forehead something high, and his
habit always plain and modest." His portrait, painted in 1685, shows a
vigorous, kindly face, with mustachios and imperial, and abundance of
hair falling in long wavy masses about the neck and shoulders,--more
Cavalier-like than Roundhead.
[Illustration: JOHN BUNYAN.]
Bunyan was a voluminous writer, and his works, many of them posthumous,
are said to equal in number the sixty years of his life. But even the
devout and sympathetic critic is compelled to acknowledge the justice of
that verdict of time which has consigned most of them to a virtual
oblivion. The controversial tracts possess no elements of enduring
interest. The doctrinal and spiritual discourses are elaborations of a
system of religious thought which long ago "had its day and ceased to
be." Yet they contain pithy sentences, homely and pat illustrations, and
many a paragraph, rugged or tender, in which one recognizes the stamp of
his genius, and an intimation of his remarkable power as a preacher. The
best of these discourses, 'The Jerusalem Sinner Saved,' 'Come and
Welcome to Jesus Christ,' and 'Light for Them that Sit in Darkness,'
while they sparkle here and there with things unique and precious to the
Bunyan-curious student, would seem dull and tedious to the general
though devout reader. In many a passage we feel, to use his phrase, his
"heart-pulling power," no less than the force and felicity of his most
original images and analogies; but these passages are little oases in a
dry and thirsty land. The 'Life and Death of Mr. Badman' vividly
presents certain aspects of English provincial life in that day; but
they are repulsive, and the entire work is marred by flat moralizings
and coarse, often incredible stories.
The 'Holy War,' which Macaulay said would have been our greatest
religious allegory if the 'Pilgrim's Progress' had not been written, has
ceased to be much read. The conception of the conquest of the human soul
by the irresistible operation of divine force is so foreign to modern
thought and faith that Bunyan's similitude no longer seems a
verisimilitude. The pages abound with quaint, humorous, and lifelike
touches;--as where Diabolus stations at Ear-Gate a guard of deaf men
under old Mr. Prejudice, and Unbelief is described as "a nimble jack
whom they could never lay hold of";--but as compared with the 'Pilgrim's
Progress' the allegory is artificial, its elaboration of analogies is
ponderous and tedious, and its characters lack solidity and reality.
All these works, however, exhibit a remarkable command of the mother
tongue, a shrewd common-sense and mother wit, a fervid spiritual life,
and a wonderful knowledge of the English Bible. They may be likened to
more or less submerged wrecks kept from sinking into utter neglect by
the bond of authorship which connects them with the one incomparable
work which floats, unimpaired by time, on the sea of universal
appreciation and favor. Bunyan's unique and secure position in English
literature was gained by the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' the first part of
which was published in 1678, and the second in 1685.
The broader, freer conception of the pilgrimage--as old in literature as
the ninetieth Psalm, apt and fond, as innumerable books show, from De
Guileville's 'Le Pelerinage de l'Homme' in the fourteenth century to
Patrick's 'Parable' three hundred years later--took sudden possession of
Bunyan's imagination while he was in prison, and kindled all his finest
powers. Then he undertook, poet-wise, to work out this conception,
capable of such diversity of illustration, in a form of literature that
has ever been especially congenial to the human mind. Unguided save by
his own consecrated genius, unaided by other books than his English
Bible and Fox's 'Book of Martyrs,' he proceeded with a simplicity of
purpose and felicity of expression, and with a fidelity to nature and
life, which gave to his unconsciously artistic story the charm of
perfect artlessness as well as the semblance of reality. When Bunyan's
lack of learning and culture are considered, and also the comparative
dryness of his controversial and didactic writings, this efflorescence
of a vital spirit of beauty and of an essentially poetic genius in him
seems quite inexplicable. The author's rhymed 'Apology for His Book,'
which usually prefaces the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' contains many
significant hints as to the way in which he was led to
"Make truth spangle, and its rays to shine."
He had no thought of producing a work of literary excellence; but on the
other hand he had not, in writing this book, his customary purpose of
spiritual edification. Indeed, he put his multiplying thoughts and
fancies aside, lest they should interfere with a more _serious_ and
_important_ book which he had in hand!
"I only thought to make
I knew not what: nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbor; no, not I:
I did it mine own self to gratify.
. . . . . . .
Thus I set pen to paper with delight,
And quickly had my thoughts in black and white."
The words are exceedingly suggestive. In writing so aimlessly--"I knew
not what"--to gratify himself by permitting the allegory into which
he had suddenly fallen to take possession of him and carry him
whithersoever it would, while he wrote out with delight his teeming
fancies, was not Bunyan for the first time exercising his genius in a
freedom from all theological and other restraint, and so in a surpassing
range and power? The dreamer and poet supplanted the preacher and
teacher. He yielded to the simple impulse of his genius, gave his
imagination full sweep, and so, as never before or elsewhere, soared and
sang in what seemed to many of his Puritan friends a questionable
freedom and profane inspiration. And yet his song, or story, was not a
creation of mere fancy,--
"It came from my own heart, so to my head,
And thence into my fingers trickled;"--
and therefore, we add, it finds its way to the heart of mankind.
Hence the spontaneity of the allegory, its ease and freedom of movement,
its unlabored development, its natural and vital enfolding of that old
pilgrim idea of human life which had so often bloomed in the literature
of all climes and ages, but whose consummate flower appeared in the book
of this inspired Puritan tinker-preacher. Hence also the dramatic unity
and methodic perfectness of the story. Its byways all lead to its
highway; its episodes are as vitally related to the main theme as are
the ramifications of a tree to its central stem. The great diversities
of experience in the true pilgrims are dominated by one supreme motive.
As for the others, they appear incidentally to complete the scenes, and
make the world and its life manifold and real. The Pilgrim is a most
substantial person, and once well on the way, the characters he meets,
the difficulties he encounters, the succor he receives, the scenes in
which he mingles, are all, however surprising, most natural. The names,
and one might almost say the forms and faces, of Pliable, Obstinate,
Faithful, Hopeful, Talkative, Mercy, Great-heart, old Honest,
Valiant-for-truth, Feeble-mind, Ready-to-halt, Miss Much-afraid, and
many another, are familiar to us all. Indeed, the pilgrimage is our
own--in many of its phases at least,--and we have met the people whom
Bunyan saw in his dream, and are ourselves they whom he describes. When
Dean Stanley began his course of lectures on Ecclesiastical History at
Oxford, his opening words were those of the passage where the Pilgrim is
taken to the House Beautiful to see "the rarities and histories of that
place, both ancient and modern"; and at the end of the same course,
wishing to sketch the prospects of Christendom, he quoted the words in
which, on leaving the House Beautiful, Christian was shown the distant
view of the Delectable Mountains.
But for one glance at Pope and Pagan, there is almost nothing to
indicate the writer's ecclesiastical standing. But for here and there a
marking of time in prosaic passages which have nothing to do with the
story, there is nothing to mar the catholicity of its spirit. Romanists
and Protestants, Anglicans and Puritans, Calvinists and Arminians,--all
communions and sects have edited and circulated it. It is the completest
triumph of truth by fiction in all literature. More than any other human
book, it is "a religious bond to the whole of English Christendom." The
second part is perhaps inferior to the first, but is richer in incident,
and some of its characters--Mercy, old Honest, Valiant-for-truth, and
Great-heart, for instance--are exquisitely conceived and presented. Here
again the reader will do well to carefully peruse the author's rhymed
introduction:--
"What Christian left locked up, and went his way,
Sweet Christiana opens with her key."
"Go then, my little Book," he says, "and tell young damsels of Mercy,
and old men of plain-hearted old Honest. Tell people of Master Fearing,
who was a good man, though much down in spirit. Tell them of
Feeble-mind, and Ready-to-halt, and Master Despondency and his daughter,
who 'softly went but sure.'
"When thou hast told the world of all these things,
Then turn about, my Book, and touch these strings,
Which, if but touched, will such a music make,
They'll make a cripple dance, a giant quake."
This second part introduces some new scenes, as well as characters and
experiences, but with the same broad sympathy and humor; and there are
closing descriptions not excelled in power and pathos by anything in the
earlier pilgrimage.
In his 'Apology' Bunyan says:--
"This book is writ in such a dialect
As may the minds of listless men affect."
The idiom of the book is purely English, acquired by a diligent study of
the English Bible. It is the simplest, raciest, and most sinewy English
to be found in any writer of our language; and Bunyan's amazing use of
this Saxon idiom for all the purposes of his story, and the range and
freedom of his imaginative genius therein, like certain of Tennyson's
'Idylls,' show it to be an instrument of symphonic capacity and variety.
Bunyan's own maxim is a good one:--"Words easy to be understood do often
hit the mark, when high and learned ones do only pierce the air."
Of the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' in both its parts, we may say in the words
of Milton:--
"These are works that could not be composed by the invocation of
Dame Memory and her siren daughters, but by devout prayer to
that eternal Spirit who can enrich with all utterance and
knowledge, and send out his Seraphim, with the hallowed fire of
his altar, to touch and purify the lips of whom he pleases,
without reference to station, birth, or education."
Let Bunyan speak for his own book:--
"Wouldst thou be in a dream, and yet not sleep?
Or wouldst thou in a moment laugh and weep?
Wouldst thou lose thyself and catch no harm,
And find thyself again, without a charm?
Wouldst read thyself, and read, thou knowst not what,
And yet know whether thou art blest or not
By reading the same lines? O then come hither!
And lay my book, thy head, and heart together."
Bunyan died of fever, in the house of a friend, at London, August 12th,
1688, in the sixty-first year of his age. Three of his four children
survived him; the blind daughter, for whom he expressed such
affectionate solicitude during his imprisonment, died before him. His
second wife, Elisabeth, who pleaded for him with so much dignity and
feeling before Judge Hale and other justices, died in 1692. In 1661 a
recumbent statue was placed on his tomb in Bunhill Fields, and thirteen
years later a noble statue was erected in his honor at Bedford. The
church at Elstow is enriched with memorial windows presenting scenes
from the 'Holy War' and the 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and the Bunyan
Meeting-House in Bedford has bronze doors presenting similar scenes.
The great allegory has been translated into almost every language and
dialect under the sun. The successive editions of it are almost
innumerable; and no other book save the Bible has had an equally large
circulation. The verdict of approval stamped upon it at first by the
common people, has been fully recognized and accepted by the learned and
cultivated.
[Illustration: Signature: Edwin P. Parker]
THE FIGHT WITH APOLLYON
From the 'Pilgrim's Progress'
But now, in this Valley of Humiliation, poor Christian was hard put to
it; for he had gone but a little way before he espied a foul fiend
coming over the field to meet him; his name is Apollyon. Then did
Christian begin to be afraid, and to cast in his mind whether to go back
or to stand his ground: But he considered again that he had no armor for
his back, and therefore thought that to turn the back to him might give
him the greater advantage with ease to pierce him with his darts.
Therefore he resolved to venture and stand his ground; for, thought he,
had I no more in mine eye than the saving of my life, 'twould be the
best way to stand.
So he went on, and Apollyon met him. Now the monster was hideous to
behold: he was clothed with scales like a fish (and they are his pride);
he had wings like a dragon, feet like a bear, and out of his belly came
fire and smoke; and his mouth was as the mouth of a lion. When he was
come up to Christian, he beheld him with a disdainful countenance, and
thus began to question with him.
_Apollyon_--Whence come you? and whither are you bound?
_Christian_--I am come from the City of Destruction, which is the place
of all evil, and am going to the City of Zion.
_Apollyon_--By this I perceive thou art one of my subjects, for all that
country is mine, and I am the prince and god of it. How is it then that
thou hast run away from thy King? Were it not that I hope thou mayest do
me more service, I would strike thee now at one blow to the ground.
_Christian_--I was born indeed in your dominions, but your service was
hard, and your wages such as a man could not live on, "for the wages of
sin is death;" therefore when I was come to years, I did as other
considerate persons do--look out, if perhaps I might mend myself.
_Apollyon_--There is no prince that will thus lightly lose his subjects,
neither will I as yet lose thee; but since thou complainest of thy
service and wages, be content to go back; what our country will afford,
I do here promise to give thee.
_Christian_--But I have let myself to another, even to the King of
Princes, and how can I with fairness go back with thee?
_Apollyon_--Thou hast done in this according to the proverb, changed a
bad for a worse; but it is ordinary for those that have professed
themselves his servants, after a while to give him the slip and return
again to me: Do thou so too, and all shall be well.
_Christian_--I have given him my faith, and sworn my allegiance to him:
how then can I go back from this, and not be hanged as a traitor?
_Apollyon_--Thou didst the same to me, and yet I am willing to pass by
all, if now thou wilt yet turn again and go back.
_Christian_--What I promised thee was in my nonage; and besides, I count
that the Prince under whose banner now I stand is able to absolve me;
yea, and to pardon also what I did as to my compliance with thee: and
besides, O thou destroying Apollyon, to speak truth, I like his service,
his wages, his servants, his government, his company and country, better
than thine; and therefore leave off to persuade me further; I am his
servant, and I will follow him.
_Apollyon_--Consider again when thou art in cool blood, what thou art
like to meet with in the way that thou goest. Thou knowest that for
the most part his servants come to an ill end, because they are
transgressors against me and my ways: How many of them have been put to
shameful deaths; and besides, thou countest his service better than
mine, whereas he never came yet from the place where he is to deliver
any that served him out of our hands; but as for me, how many times, as
all the world very well knows, have I delivered, either by power or
fraud, those that have faithfully served me, from him and his, though
taken by them; and so I will deliver thee.
_Christian_--His forbearing at present to deliver them is on purpose to
try their love, whether they will cleave to him to the end: and as for
the ill end thou sayest they come to, that is most glorious in their
account; for, for present deliverance, they do not much expect it, for
they stay for their glory, and then they shall have it, when their
Prince comes in his, and the glory of the angels.
_Apollyon_--Thou hast already been unfaithful in thy service to him, and
how dost thou think to receive wages of him?
_Christian_--Wherein, O Apollyon, have I been unfaithful to him?
_Apollyon_--Thou didst faint at first setting out, when thou wast almost
choked in the Gulf of Despond; thou didst attempt wrong ways to be rid
of thy burden, whereas thou shouldst have stayed till thy Prince had
taken it off; thou didst sinfully sleep and lose thy choice thing; thou
wast also almost persuaded to go back at the sight of the lions; and
when thou talkest of thy journey, and of what thou hast heard and seen,
thou art inwardly desirous of vainglory in all that thou sayest or
doest.
_Christian_--All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out;
but the Prince whom I serve and honor is merciful, and ready to forgive;
but besides, these infirmities possessed me in thy country, for there I
sucked them in, and I have groaned under them, been sorry for them, and
have obtained pardon of my Prince.
_Apollyon_--Then Apollyon broke out into grievous rage, saying, I am an
enemy to this Prince; I hate his person, his laws and people: I am come
out on purpose to withstand thee.
_Christian_--Apollyon, beware what you do, for I am in the King's
highway, the way of holiness, therefore take heed to yourself.
_Apollyon_--Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the
way, and said, I am void of fear in this matter; prepare thyself to die;
for I swear by my infernal den, that thou shalt go no further; here will
I spill thy soul.
And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast, but Christian had a
shield in his hand, with which he caught it, and so prevented the danger
of that.
Then did Christian draw, for he saw 'twas time to bestir him: and
Apollyon as fast made at him, throwing darts as thick as hail; by the
which, notwithstanding all that Christian could do to avoid it, Apollyon
wounded him in his head, his hand, and foot. This made Christian give a
little back; Apollyon therefore followed his work amain, and Christian
again took courage, and resisted as manfully as he could. This sore
combat lasted for above half a day, even till Christian was almost quite
spent; for you must know that Christian, by reason of his wounds, must
needs grow weaker and weaker.
Then Apollyon, espying his opportunity, began to gather up close to
Christian, and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful fall; and with
that Christian's sword flew out of his hand. Then said Apollyon, I am
sure of thee now; and with that he had almost pressed him to death, so
that Christian began to despair of life: but as God would have it, while
Apollyon was fetching of his last blow, thereby to make a full end of
this good man, Christian nimbly stretched out his hand for his sword,
and caught it, saying, "Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy! when I
fall I shall arise;" and with that gave him a deadly thrust, which made
him give back, as one that had received his mortal wound; Christian,
perceiving that, made at him again, saying, "Nay, in all these things we
are more than conquerors through him that loved us." And with that
Apollyon spread forth his dragon's wings, and sped him away, that
Christian for a season saw him no more.
In this combat no man can imagine, unless he had seen and heard as I
did, what yelling and hideous roaring Apollyon made all the time of the
fight; he spake like a dragon; and on the other side, what sighs and
groans burst from Christian's heart. I never saw him all the while give
so much as one pleasant look, till he perceived he had wounded Apollyon
with his two-edged sword; then indeed he did smile, and look upward; but
'twas the dreadfulest sight that ever I saw.
So when the battle was over, Christian said, I will here give thanks to
him that hath delivered me out of the mouth of the lion, to him that did
help me against Apollyon. And so he did, saying:--
Great Beelzebub, the captain of this fiend,
Designed my ruin; therefore to this end
He sent him harnessed out: and he with rage
That hellish was, did fiercely me engage:
But blessed Michael helped me, and I
By dint of sword did quickly make him fly.
Therefore to him let me give lasting praise,
And thank and bless his holy name always.
Then there came to him a hand, with some of the leaves of the tree of
life, the which Christian took, and applied to the wounds that he had
received in the battle, and was healed immediately. He also sat down in
that place to eat bread, and to drink of the bottle that was given him a
little before; so being refreshed, he addressed himself to his journey,
with his sword drawn in his hand; for he said, I know not but some other
enemy may be at hand. But he met with no other affront from Apollyon
quite through this valley.
THE DELECTABLE MOUNTAINS
From the 'Pilgrim's Progress'
They went then till they came to the Delectable Mountains, which
mountains belong to the Lord of that Hill of which we have spoken
before; so they went up to the mountains, to behold the gardens and
orchards, the vineyards and fountains of water; where also they drank,
and washed themselves, and did freely eat of the vineyards. Now there
were on the tops of these mountains shepherds feeding their flocks, and
they stood by the highway side. The pilgrims therefore went to them, and
leaning upon their staves (as is common with weary pilgrims, when they
stand to talk with any by the way) they asked, Whose delectable
mountains are these? And whose be the sheep that feed upon them?
_Shepherds_--These mountains are "Immanuel's Land," and they are within
sight of his city; and the sheep also are his, and he laid down his life
for them.
_Christian_--Is this the way to the Celestial City?
_Shepherds_--You are just in your way.
_Christian_--How far is it thither?
_Shepherds_--Too far for any but those that shall get thither indeed.
_Christian_--Is the way safe or dangerous?
_Shepherds_--Safe for those for whom it is to be safe, "but
transgressors shall fall therein."
_Christian_--Is there in this place any relief for pilgrims that are
weary and faint in the way?
_Shepherds_--The lord of these mountains hath given us a charge "not to
be forgetful to entertain strangers"; therefore the good of the place is
before you.
I saw also in my dream, that when the shepherds perceived that they were
wayfaring men, they also put questions to them (to which they made
answer as in other places), as, Whence came you? and, How got you into
the way? and, By what means have you so persevered therein? For but few
of them that begin to come hither do show their face on these mountains.
But when the shepherds heard their answers, being pleased therewith,
they looked very lovingly upon them, and said, Welcome to the Delectable
Mountains.
The shepherds, I say, whose names were Knowledge, Experience, Watchful,
and Sincere, took them by the hand, and had them to their tents, and
made them partake of that which was ready at present. They said
moreover, We would that ye should stay here a while, to be acquainted
with us; and yet more to solace yourselves with the good of these
delectable mountains. They then told them that they were content to
stay; and so they went to their rest that night, because it was very
late.
Then I saw in my dream, that in the morning the shepherds called up
Christian and Hopeful to walk with them upon the mountains; so they went
forth with them, and walked a while, having a pleasant prospect on every
side. Then said the shepherds one to another, Shall we show these
pilgrims some wonders? So when they had concluded to do it, they had
them first to the top of a hill called Error, which was very steep on
the furthest side, and bid them look down to the bottom. So Christian
and Hopeful looked down, and saw at the bottom several men dashed all to
pieces by a fall that they had from the top. Then said Christian, What
meaneth this? The shepherds answered, Have you not heard of them that
were made to err, by hearkening to Hymeneus and Philetus, as concerning
the faith of the resurrection of the body? They answered, Yes. Then said
the shepherds, Those that you see lie dashed in pieces at the bottom of
this mountain are they; and they have continued to this day unburied (as
you see) for an example to others to take heed how they clamber too
high, or how they come too near the brink of this mountain.
Then I saw that they had them to the top of another mountain, and the
name of that is Caution, and bid them look afar off; which when they
did, they perceived, as they thought, several men walking up and down
among the tombs that were there; and they perceived that the men were
blind, because they stumbled sometimes upon the tombs, and because they
could not get out from among them. Then said Christian, What means this?
The shepherds then answered, Did you not see a little below these
mountains a stile, that led into a meadow, on the left hand of this way?
They answered, Yes. Then said the shepherds, From that stile there goes
a path that leads directly to Doubting Castle, which is kept by Giant
Despair; and these men (pointing to them among the tombs) came once on
pilgrimages as you do now, even till they came to that same stile; and
because the right way was rough in that place, and they chose to go out
of it into that meadow, and there were taken by Giant Despair and cast
into Doubting Castle; where, after they had been awhile kept in the
dungeon, he at last did put out their eyes, and led them among those
tombs, where he has left them to wander to this very day, that the
saying of the wise man might be fulfilled, "He that wandereth out of the
way of understanding shall remain in the congregation of the dead." Then
Christian and Hopeful looked upon one another, with tears gushing out,
but yet said nothing to the shepherds.
Then I saw in my dream that the shepherds had them to another place, in
a bottom, where was a door in the side of a hill, and they opened the
door, and bid them look in. They looked in therefore, and saw that
within it was very dark and smoky; they also thought that they heard
there a rumbling noise as of fire, and a cry as of some tormented, and
that they smelt the scent of brimstone. Then said Christian, What means
this?
The shepherds told them, This is a by-way to hell, a way that hypocrites
go in at; namely, such as sell their birthright, with Esau; such as sell
their Master, as Judas; such as blaspheme the Gospel, with Alexander;
and that lie and dissemble, with Ananias and Sapphira his wife. Then
said Hopeful to the shepherds, I perceive that these had on them, even
every one, a show of pilgrimage, as we have now: had they not?
_Shepherds_--Yes, and held it a long time too.
_Hopeful_--How far might they go on in pilgrimage in their day, since
they notwithstanding were thus miserably cast away?
_Shepherds_--Some further, and some not so far as these mountains.
Then said the pilgrims one to another, We had need to cry to the Strong
for strength.
_Shepherds_--Ay, and you will have need to use it when you have it too.
By this time the pilgrims had a desire to go forwards, and the shepherds
a desire they should; so they walked together towards the end of the
mountains. Then said the shepherds one to another, Let us here show to
the pilgrims the gates of the Celestial City, if they have skill to look
through our perspective-glass. The pilgrims then lovingly accepted the
motion; so they had them to the top of a high hill, called Clear, and
gave them their glass to look.
Then they essayed to look, but the remembrance of that last thing that
the shepherds had showed them made their hands shake, by means of which
impediment they could not look steadily through the glass; yet they
thought they saw something like the gate, and also some of the glory of
the place.
CHRISTIANA AND HER COMPANIONS ENTER THE CELESTIAL CITY
From the 'Pilgrim's Progress'
Now while they lay here and waited for the good hour, there was a noise
in the town that there was a post come from the Celestial City, with
matter of great importance to one Christiana, the wife of Christian the
pilgrim. So inquiry was made for her, and the house was found out where
she was. So the post presented her with a letter, the contents whereof
was, Hail, good woman, I bring thee tidings that the Master calleth for
thee, and expecteth that thou shouldest stand in his presence in clothes
of immortality, within this ten days.
When he had read this letter to her, he gave her therewith a sure token
that he was a true messenger, and was come to bid her make haste to be
gone. The token was an arrow with a point sharpened with love, let
easily into her heart, which by degrees wrought so effectually with her,
that at the time appointed she must be gone.
When Christiana saw that her time was come, and that she was the first
of this company that was to go over, she called for Mr. Great-heart her
guide, and told him how matters were. So he told her he was heartily
glad of the news, and could have been glad had the post come for him.
Then she bid that he should give advice how all things should be
prepared for her journey. So he told her, saying, Thus and thus it must
be, and we that survive will accompany you to the river-side.
Then she called for her children and gave them her blessing, and told
them that she yet read with comfort the mark that was set in their
foreheads, and was glad to see them with her there, and that they had
kept their garments so white. Lastly, she bequeathed to the poor that
little she had, and commanded her sons and daughters to be ready
against the messenger should come for them.
When she had spoken these words to her guide and to her children, she
called for Mr. Valiant-for-truth, and said unto him, Sir, you have in
all places showed yourself true-hearted; be faithful unto death, and my
King will give you a crown of life. I would also entreat you to have an
eye to my children, and if at any time you see them faint, speak
comfortably to them. For my daughters, my sons' wives, they have been
faithful, and a fulfilling of the promise upon them will be their end.
But she gave Mr. Stand-fast a ring.
Then she called for old Mr. Honest and said of him, Behold an Israelite
indeed, in whom is no guile. Then said he, I wish you a fair day when
you set out for Mount Sion, and shall be glad to see that you go over
the river dry-shod. But she answered, Come wet, come dry, I long to be
gone, for however the weather is in my journey, I shall have time enough
when I come there to sit down and rest me and dry me.
Then came in that good man Mr. Ready-to-halt, to see her. So she said to
him, Thy travel hither has been with difficulty, but that will make thy
rest the sweeter. But watch and be ready, for at an hour when you think
not, the messenger may come.
After him came in Mr. Despondency and his daughter Much-afraid, to whom
she said, You ought with thankfulness forever to remember your
deliverance from the hands of Giant Despair and out of Doubting Castle.
The effect of that mercy is, that you are brought with safety hither. Be
ye watchful and cast away fear, be sober and hope to the end.
Then she said to Mr. Feeble-mind, Thou wast delivered from the mouth of
Giant Slay-good, that thou mightest live in the light of the living for
ever, and see thy King with comfort. Only I advise thee to repent thee
of thine aptness to fear and doubt of his goodness before he sends for
thee, lest thou shouldest, when he comes, be forced to stand before him
for that fault with blushing.
Now the day drew on that Christiana must be gone. So the road was full
of people to see her take her journey. But behold, all the banks beyond
the river were full of horses and chariots, which were come down from
above to accompany her to the city gate. So she came forth and entered
the river with a beckon of farewell to those who followed her to the
river-side. The last words she was heard to say here was, I come, Lord,
to be with thee and bless thee.
So her children and friends returned to their place, for that those that
waited for Christiana had carried her out of their sight. So she went
and called and entered in at the gate with all the ceremonies of joy
that her husband Christian had done before her. At her departure her
children wept, but Mr. Great-heart and Mr. Valiant played upon the
well-tuned cymbal and harp for joy. So all departed to their respective
places.
In process of time there came a post to the town again, and his business
was with Mr. Ready-to-halt. So he inquired him out, and said to him, I
am come to thee in the name of Him whom thou hast loved and followed,
though upon crutches; and my message is to tell thee that he expects
thee at his table to sup with him in his kingdom the next day after
Easter, wherefore prepare thyself for this journey.
Then he also gave him a token that he was a true messenger, saying, "I
have broken thy golden bowl, and loosed thy silver cord."
After this Mr. Ready-to-halt called for his fellow pilgrims, and told
them saying, I am sent for, and God shall surely visit you also. So he
desired Mr. Valiant to make his will. And because he had nothing to
bequeath to them that should survive him but his crutches and his good
wishes, therefore thus he said, These crutches I bequeath to my son that
shall tread in my steps, with a hundred warm wishes that he may prove
better than I have done.
Then he thanked Mr. Great-heart for his conduct and kindness, and so
addressed himself to his journey. When he came at the brink of the river
he said, Now I shall have no more need of these crutches, since yonder
are chariots and horses for me to ride on. The last words he was heard
to say were, Welcome, life. So he went his way.
After this Mr. Feeble-mind had tidings brought him that the post sounded
his horn at his chamber door. Then he came in and told him, saying, I am
come to tell thee that thy Master has need of thee, and that in very
little time thou must behold his face in brightness. And take this as a
token of the truth of my message, "Those that look out at the windows
shall be darkened."
Then Mr. Feeble-mind called for his friends, and told them what errand
had been brought unto him, and what token he had received of the truth
of the message. Then he said, Since I have nothing to bequeath to any,
to what purpose should I make a will? As for my feeble mind, that I will
leave behind me, for that I have no need of that in the place whither I
go. Nor is it worth bestowing upon the poorest pilgrim; wherefore when I
am gone, I desire that you, Mr. Valiant, would bury it in a dung-hill.
This done, and the day being come in which he was to depart, he entered
the river as the rest. His last words were, Hold out faith and patience.
So he went over to the other side.
When days had many of them passed away, Mr. Despondency was sent for.
For a post was come, and brought this message to him, Trembling man,
these are to summon thee to be ready with thy King by the next Lord's
day, to shout for joy for thy deliverance from all thy doubtings.
And said the messenger, That my message is true, take this for a proof;
so he gave him "The grasshopper to be a burden unto him." Now Mr.
Despondency's daughter, whose name was Much-afraid, said when she heard
what was done, that she would go with her father. Then Mr. Despondency
said to his friends, Myself and my daughter, you know what we have been,
and how troublesomely we have behaved ourselves in every company. My
will and my daughter's is, that our desponds and slavish fears be by no
man ever received from the day of our departure for ever, for I know
that after my death they will offer themselves to others. For to be
plain with you, they are ghosts, the which we entertained when we first
began to be pilgrims, and could never shake them off after; and they
will walk about and seek entertainment of the pilgrims, but for our
sakes shut ye the doors upon them.
When the time was come for them to depart, they went to the brink of the
river. The last words of Mr. Despondency were, Farewell, night; welcome,
day. His daughter went through the river singing, but none could
understand what she said.
Then it came to pass a while after, that there was a post in the town
that inquired for Mr. Honest.... When the day that he was to be gone was
come, he addressed himself to go over the river. Now the river at that
time overflowed the banks in some places, but Mr. Honest in his lifetime
had spoken to one Good-conscience to meet him there, the which he also
did, and lent him his hand, and so helped him over. The last words of
Mr. Honest were, Grace reigns. So he left the world.
After this it was noised abroad that Mr. Valiant-for-truth was taken
with a summons by the same post as the other, and had this for a token
that the summons was true, "That his pitcher was broken at the
fountain." When he understood it, he called for his friends, and told
them of it. Then said he, I am going to my fathers, and though with
great difficulty I am got hither, yet now I do not repent me of all the
trouble I have been at to arrive where I am. My sword I give to him that
shall succeed me in my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that
can get it. My marks and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me
that I have fought his battles who now will be my rewarder. When the day
that he must go hence was come, many accompanied him to the river-side,
into which as he went he said, Death, where is thy sting? And as he went
down deeper he said, Grave, where is thy victory? So he passed over, and
all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.
Then there came forth a summons for Mr. Stand-fast (this Mr. Stand-fast
was he that the rest of the pilgrims found upon his knees in the
enchanted ground), for the post brought it him open in his hands. The
contents whereof were, that he must prepare for a change of life, for
his Master was not willing that he should be so far from him any longer.
At this Mr. Stand-fast was put into a muse. Nay, said the messenger, you
need not doubt of the truth of my message, for here is a token of the
truth thereof, "Thy wheel is broken at the cistern." Then he called to
him Mr. Great-heart, who was their guide, and said unto him, Sir,
although it was not my hap to be much in your good company in the days
of my pilgrimage, yet since the time I knew you, you have been
profitable to me. When I came from home, I left behind me a wife and
five small children: let me entreat you at your return (for I know that
you will go and return to your Master's house, in hopes that you may yet
be a conductor to more of the holy pilgrims) that you send to my family,
and let them be acquainted with all that hath and shall happen unto me.
Tell them moreover of my happy arrival to this place, and of the present
late blessed condition that I am in. Tell them also of Christian and
Christiana his wife, and how she and her children came after her
husband. Tell them also of what a happy end she made, and whither she is
gone. I have little or nothing to send to my family, except it be
prayers and tears for them; of which it will suffice if thou acquaint
them, if peradventure they may prevail.
When Mr. Stand-fast had thus set things in order, and the time being
come for him to haste him away, he also went down to the river. Now
there was a great calm at that time in the river; wherefore Mr.
Stand-fast, when he was about half-way in, he stood awhile, and talked
to his companions that had waited upon him thither. And he said:--
This river has been a terror to many; yea, the thoughts of it also have
often frighted me. But now methinks I stand easy; my foot is fixed upon
that upon which the feet of the priests that bare the ark of the
covenant stood, while Israel went over this Jordan. The waters indeed
are to the palate bitter and to the stomach cold, yet the thought of
what I am going to and of the conduct that waits for me on the other
side, doth lie as a glowing coal at my heart.
I see myself now at the end of my journey; my toilsome days are ended. I
am going now to see that Head that was crowned with thorns, and that
Face that was spit upon for me.
I have formerly lived by hearsay and faith, but now I go where I shall
live by sight, and shall be with him in whose company I delight myself.
I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of, and wherever I have seen the
print of his shoe in the earth, there I have coveted to set my foot too.
His name has been to me as a civet-box, yea, sweeter than all perfumes.
His voice to me has been most sweet, and his countenance I have more
desired than they that have most desired the light of the sun. His Word
I did use to gather for my food, and for antidotes against my faintings.
He has held me, and I have kept me from mine iniquities; yea, my steps
hath he strengthened in his way.
Now while he was thus in discourse, his countenance changed, his strong
man bowed under him, and after he had said, Take me, for I come unto
thee, he ceased to be seen of them.
But glorious it was to see how the open region was filled with horses
and chariots, with trumpeters and pipers, with singers and players on
stringed instruments, to welcome the pilgrims as they went up, and
followed one another in at the beautiful gate of the city.
GOTTFRIED AUGUST BUeRGER
(1747-1794)
The ballad of 'Lenore,' upon which Buerger's fame chiefly rests, was
published in 1773. It constituted one of the articles in that
declaration of independence which the young poets of the time were
formulating, and it was more than a mere coincidence that in the same
year Herder wrote his essay on 'Ossian' and the 'Songs of Ancient
Peoples,' and Goethe unfurled the banner of a new time in 'Goetz von
Berlichingen.' The artificial and sentimental trivialities of the
pigtail age were superseded almost at a stroke, and the petty formalism
under which the literature of Germany was languishing fell about the
powdered wigs of its professional representatives. The new impulse came
from England. As in France, Rousseau, preaching the gospel of a return
to nature, found his texts in English writers, so in Germany the poets
who inaugurated the classic age derived their chief inspiration from the
wholesome heart of England. It was Shakespeare that inspired Goethe's
'Goetz'; Ossian and the old English and Scotch folk-songs were Herder's
theme; and Percy's 'Reliques' stimulated and saved the genius of Buerger.
This was the movement which, for lack of a better term, has been called
the naturalistic. Literature once more took possession of the whole
range of human life and experience, descending from her artificial
throne to live with peasant and people. These ardent innovators spurned
all ancient rules and conventions, and in the first ecstasy of their
new-found freedom and unchastened strength it is no wonder that they
went too far. Goethe and Schiller learned betimes the salutary lesson of
artistic restraint. Buerger never learned it.
[Illustration: GOTTFRIED A. BUeRGER]
Buerger was wholly a child of his time. At the age of twenty-six he wrote
'Lenore,' and his genius never again attained that height. Much may be
accomplished in the first outburst of youthful energy; but without the
self-control which experience should teach, and without the moral
character which is the condition of great achievement, genius rots ere
it is ripe; and this was the case with Buerger. We are reminded of Burns.
Goethe in his seventy-eighth year said to Eckermann:--"What songs Buerger
and Voss have written! Who would say that they are less valuable or
less redolent of their native soil than the exquisite songs of Burns?"
Like Burns, Buerger was of humble origin; like Burns, he gave passion and
impulse the reins and drove to his own destruction; like Burns, he left
behind him a body of truly national and popular poetry which is still
alive in the mouths of the people.
Buerger was born in the last hour of the year 1747 at Molmerswende. His
father was a country clergyman, and he himself was sent to Halle at the
age of seventeen to study theology. His wild life there led to his
removal to Goettingen, where he took up the study of law. He became a
member and afterwards the leader of the famous "Goettinger Dichterbund,"
and was carried away and for a time rescued from his evil courses by his
enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Percy's 'Reliques.' He contributed to the
newly established Musenalmanach, and from 1779 until his death in 1794
he was its editor. In 1787 the university conferred an honorary degree
upon him, and he was soon afterward made a professor without salary,
lecturing on Kantian philosophy and aesthetics. Three times he was
married; his days were full of financial struggles and self-wrought
misery; there is little in his private life that is creditable to
record: a dissolute youth was followed by a misguided manhood, and he
died in his forty-seventh year.
It fell to the lot of the young Goethe, then an unknown reviewer, to
write for the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen in November, 1772, a notice
of some of Buerger's early poems. "The 'Minnelied' of Mr. Buerger," he
says, "is worthy of a better age; and if he has more such happy moments,
these efforts of his will be among the most potent influences to render
our sentimental poetasters, with their gold-paper Amors and Graces and
their elysium of benevolence and philanthropy, utterly forgotten." With
such clear vision could Goethe see at the age of twenty-three. But he
soon saw also the danger that lay in unbridled freedom. For the best
that was in Buerger Goethe retained his admiration to the last, but
before he was thirty he felt that their ways had parted. Among the
'Maxims and Reflections' we find this note:--"It is sad to see how an
extraordinary man may struggle with his time, with his circumstances,
often even with himself, and never prosper. Sad example, Buerger!"
Doubtless German literature owes less to Buerger than English owes to
Burns, but it owes much. Buerger revived the ballad form in which so much
of the finest German poetry has since been cast. With his lyric gifts
and his dramatic power, he infused a life into these splendid poems that
has made them a part of the folk-lore of his native land. 'Lenardo und
Blandine,' his own favorite, 'Des Pfarrers Tochter von Taubenhain' (The
Pastor's Daughter of Taubenhain), 'Das Lied vom braven Mann' (The Song
of the Brave Man), 'Die Weiber von Weinsberg' (The Women of Weinsberg),
'Der Kaiser und der Abt' (The Emperor and the Abbot), 'Der Wilde Jaeger'
(The Wild Huntsman), all belong, like 'Lenore,' to the literary
inheritance of the German people. Buerger attempted a translation of the
Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To
him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the
long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and
elicited warm praise from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller
had written a severe criticism of Buerger's poems, which had inflamed
party strife and embittered the last years of Buerger himself; but even
Schiller admits that Buerger is as much superior to all his rivals as he
is inferior to the ideal he should have striven to attain.
The debt which Buerger owed to English letters was amply repaid. In
'Lenore' he showed Percy's 'Reliques' the compliment of quoting from the
ballad of 'Sweet William,' which had supplied him with his theme, the
lines:--"Is there any room at your head, Willie, or any room at your
feet?" The first literary work of Walter Scott was the translation which
he made in 1775 of 'Lenore,' under the title of 'William and Helen';
this was quickly followed by a translation of 'The Wild Huntsman.'
Scott's romantic mind received in Buerger's ballads and in Goethe's
'Goetz,' which he translated four years later, just the nourishment it
craved. It is a curious coincidence that another great romantic writer,
Alexandre Dumas, should also have begun his literary career with a
translation of 'Lenore.' Buerger was not, however, a man of one poem. He
filled two goodly volumes, but the oft-quoted words of his friend
Schlegel contain the essential truth:--"'Lenore' will always be Buerger's
jewel, the precious ring with which, like the Doge of Venice espousing
the sea, he married himself to the folk-song forever."
WILLIAM AND HELEN
Walter Scott's Translation of 'Lenore'
From heavy dreams fair Helen rose,
And eyed the dawning red:--
"Alas, my love, thou tarriest long!
O art thou false or dead?"
With gallant Frederick's princely power
He sought the bold crusade;
But not a word from Judah's wars
Told Helen how he sped.
With Paynim and with Saracen
At length a truce was made,
And every knight returned to dry
The tears his love had shed.
Our gallant host was homeward bound
With many a song of joy;
Green waved the laurel in each plume,
The badge of victory.
And old and young, and sire and son,
To meet them crowd the way,
With shouts, and mirth, and melody,
The debt of love to pay.
Full many a maid her true-love met,
And sobbed in his embrace,
And fluttering joy in tears and smiles
Arrayed full many a face.
Nor joy nor smile for Helen sad;
She sought the host in vain;
For none could tell her William's fate,
If faithless or if slain.
The martial band is past and gone;
She rends her raven hair,
And in distraction's bitter mood
She weeps with wild despair.
"O rise, my child," her mother said,
"Nor sorrow thus in vain:
A perjured lover's fleeting heart
No tears recall again."
"O mother, what is gone, is gone,
What's lost forever lorn;
Death, death alone can comfort me;
O had I ne'er been born!
"O break, my heart, O break at once!
Drink my life-blood, Despair!
No joy remains on earth for me,
For me in heaven no share."
"O enter not in judgment, Lord!"
The pious mother prays;
Impute not guilt to thy frail child!
She knows not what she says.
"O say thy paternoster, child!
O turn to God and grace!
His will, that turned thy bliss to bale,
Can change thy bale to bliss."
"O mother, mother, what is bliss?
O mother, what is bale?
My William's love was heaven on earth;
Without it earth is hell.
"Why should I pray to ruthless Heaven,
Since my loved William's slain?
I only prayed for William's sake,
And all my prayers were vain."
"O take the sacrament, my child,
And check these tears that flow;
By resignation's humble prayer,
O hallowed be thy woe!"
"No sacrament can quench this fire,
Or slake this scorching pain;
No sacrament can bid the dead
Arise and live again.
"O break, my heart, O break at once!
Be thou my god, Despair!
Heaven's heaviest blow has fallen on me.
And vain each fruitless prayer."
"O enter not in judgment, Lord,
With thy frail child of clay!
She knows not what her tongue has spoke;
Impute it not, I pray!
"Forbear, my child, this desperate woe,
And turn to God and grace;
Well can devotion's heavenly glow
Convert thy bale to bliss."
"O mother, mother, what is bliss?
O mother, what is bale?
Without my William what were heaven,
Or with him what were hell?"
Wild she arraigns the eternal doom,
Upbraids each sacred Power,
Till, spent, she sought her silent room,
All in the lonely tower.
She beat her breast, she wrung her hands
Till sun and day were o'er,
And through the glimmering lattice shone
The twinkling of the star.
Then, crash! the heavy drawbridge fell
That o'er the moat was hung;
And, clatter, clatter, on its boards
The hoof of courser rung.
The clank of echoing steel was heard
As off the rider bounded;
And slowly on the winding stair
A heavy footstep sounded.
And hark! and hark! a knock--Tap! tap
A rustling stifled noise;
Door-latch and tinkling staples ring;
At length a whispering voice:
"Awake, awake, arise, my love!
How, Helen, dost thou fare?
Wak'st thou, or sleep'st? laugh'st thou, or weep'st?
Hast thought on me, my fair?"
"My love! my love! so late at night!
I waked, I wept for thee.
Much have I borne since dawn of morn;
Where, William, couldst thou be?"
"We saddle late--from Hungary
I rode since darkness fell;
And to its bourne we both return
Before the matin bell."
"O rest this night within my arms,
And warm thee in their fold!
Chill howls through hawthorn bush the wind;--
My love is deadly cold."
"Let the wind howl through hawthorn bush!
This night we must away;
The steed is wight, the spur is bright;
I cannot stay till day.
"Busk, busk, and boune! Thou mount'st behind
Upon my black barb steed:
O'er stock and stile, a hundred mile,
We haste to bridal bed."
"To-night--to-night a hundred miles!
O dearest William, stay!
The bell strikes twelve--dark, dismal hour!
O wait, my love, till day!"
"Look here, look here--the moon shines clear--
Full fast I ween we ride;
Mount and away! for ere the day
We reach our bridal bed.
"The black barb snorts, the bridle rings,
Haste, busk, and boune, and seat thee!
The feast is made, the chamber spread,
The bridal guests await thee."
Strong love prevailed: she busks, she bounes,
She mounts the barb behind,
And round her darling William's waist
Her lily arms she twined.
And, hurry! hurry! off they rode,
And fast as fast might be;
Spurned from the courser's thundering heels
The flashing pebbles flee.
And on the right, and on the left,
Ere they could snatch a view,
Fast, fast each mountain, mead, and plain,
And cot and castle flew.
"Sit fast--dost fear?--The moon shines clear!--
Fleet goes my barb--keep hold!
Fear'st thou?"--"O no!" she faintly said;
"But why so stern and cold?
"What yonder rings, what yonder sings?
Why shrieks the owlet gray?"--
"'Tis death-bells' clang, 'tis funeral song,
The body to the clay.
"With song and clang, at morrow's dawn,
Ye may inter the dead;
To-night I ride, with my young bride,
To deck our bridal bed.
"Come with thy choir, thou coffined guest,
To swell our nuptial song!
Come, priest, to bless our marriage feast!
Come all, come all along!"
Ceased clang and song; down sunk the bier;
The shrouded corpse arose:
And hurry! hurry! all the train
The thundering steed pursues.
And forward, forward, on they go;
High snorts the straining steed;
Thick pants the rider's laboring breath
As headlong on they speed.
"O William, why this savage haste?
And where thy bridal bed?"
"'Tis distant far,--low, damp, and chill,
And narrow,--trustless maid!"
"No room for me?"--"Enough for both;
Speed, speed, my barb, thy course!"
O'er thundering bridge, through boiling surge,
He drove the furious horse.
Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea;
The scourge is wight, the spur is bright,
The flashing pebbles flee.
Fled past on right and left how fast
Each forest, grove, and bower!
On right and left fled past how fast
Each city, town, and tower!
"Dost fear? dost fear? The moon shines clear,
Dost fear to ride with me?
Hurrah! hurrah! the dead can ride!"--
"O William, let them be!--
"See there, see there! What yonder swings
And creaks 'mid whistling rain?"
"Gibbet and steel, th' accursed wheel,
A murderer in his chain.
"Hollo! thou felon, follow here:
To bridal bed we ride;
And thou shalt prance a fetter dance
Before me and my bride."
And hurry! hurry! clash, clash, clash!
The wasted form descends;
And fleet as wind through hazel bush
The wild career attends.
Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea;
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee.
How fled what moonshine faintly showed!
How fled what darkness hid!
How fled the earth beneath their feet,
The heaven above their head!
"Dost fear? dost fear? the moon shines clear
And well the dead can ride;
Dost, faithful Helen, fear for them?"--
"O leave in peace the dead!"
"Barb! barb! methinks I hear the cock;
The sand will soon be run;
Barb! barb! I smell the morning air;
The race is well-nigh done."
Tramp! tramp! along the land they rode,
Splash! splash! along the sea;
The scourge is red, the spur drops blood,
The flashing pebbles flee.
"Hurrah! hurrah! well ride the dead;
The bride, the bride is come;
And soon we reach the bridal bed,
For, Helen, here's my home."
Reluctant on its rusty hinge
Revolved an iron door,
And by the pale moon's setting beam
Were seen a church and tower.
With many a shriek and cry whiz round
The birds of midnight, scared;
And rustling like autumnal leaves
Unhallowed ghosts were heard.
O'er many a tomb and tombstone pale
He spurred the fiery horse,
Till sudden at an open grave
He checked the wondrous course.
The falling gauntlet quits the rein,
Down drops the casque of steel,
The cuirass leaves his shrinking side,
The spur his gory heel.
The eyes desert the naked skull,
The mold'ring flesh the bone,
Till Helen's lily arms entwine
A ghastly skeleton.
The furious barb snorts fire and foam,
And with a fearful bound,
Dissolves at once in empty air,
And leaves her on the ground.
Half seen by fits, by fits half heard,
Pale spectres flit along,
Wheel round the maid in dismal dance,
And howl the funeral song:--
"E'en when the heart's with anguish cleft,
Revere the doom of heaven.
Her soul is from her body reft;
Her spirit be forgiven!"
THE WIVES OF WEINSBERG
Which way to Weinsberg? neighbor, say!
'Tis sure a famous city:
It must have cradled, in its day,
Full many a maid of noble clay.
And matrons wise and witty;
And if ever marriage should happen to me,
A Weinsberg dame my wife shall be.
King Conrad once, historians say,
Fell out with this good city;
So down he came, one luckless day,--
Horse, foot, dragoons,--in stern array,--
And cannon,--more's the pity!
Around the walls the artillery roared,
And bursting bombs their fury poured.
But naught the little town could scare;
Then, red with indignation,
He bade the herald straight repair
Up to the gates, and thunder there
The following proclamation:--
"Rascals! when I your town do take,
No living thing shall save its neck!"
Now, when the herald's trumpet sent
These tidings through the city,
To every house a death knell went;
Such murder-cries the hot air rent
Might move the stones to pity.
Then bread grew dear, but good advice
Could not be had for any price.
Then, "Woe is me!" "O misery!"
What shrieks of lamentation!
And "Kyrie Eleison!" cried
The pastors, and the flock replied,
"Lord! save us from starvation!"
"Oh, woe is me, poor Corydon--
My neck,--my neck! I'm gone,--I'm gone!"
Yet oft, when counsel, deed, and prayer
Had all proved unavailing,
When hope hung trembling on a hair,
How oft has woman's wit been there!--
A refuge never failing;
For woman's wit and Papal fraud,
Of olden time, were famed abroad.
A youthful dame, praised be her name!--
Last night had seen her plighted,--
Whether in waking hour or dream,
Conceived a rare and novel scheme,
Which all the town delighted;
Which you, if you think otherwise,
Have leave to laugh at and despise.
At midnight hour, when culverin
And gun and bomb were sleeping,
Before the camp with mournful mien,
The loveliest embassy were seen,
All kneeling low and weeping.
So sweetly, plaintively they prayed,
But no reply save this was made:--
"The women have free leave to go,
Each with her choicest treasure;
But let the knaves their husbands know
That unto them the King will show
The weight of his displeasure."
With these sad terms the lovely train
Stole weeping from the camp again.
But when the morning gilt the sky.
What happened? Give attention:--
The city gates wide open fly,
And all the wives come trudging by,
Each bearing--need I mention?--
Her own dear husband on her back,
All snugly seated in a sack!
Full many a sprig of court, the joke
Not relishing, protested,
And urged the King; but Conrad spoke:--
"A monarch's word must not be broke!"
And here the matter rested.
"Bravo!" he cried, "Ha, ha! Bravo!
Our lady guessed it would be so."
He pardoned all, and gave a ball
That night at royal quarters.
The fiddles squeaked, the trumpets blew,
And up and down the dancers flew,
Court sprigs with city daughters.
The mayor's wife--O rarest sight!--
Danced with the shoemaker that night!
Ah, where is Weinsberg, sir, I pray?
'Tis sure a famous city:
It must have cradled in its day
Full many a maid of noble clay,
And matrons wise and witty;
And if ever marriage should happen to me,
A Weinsberg dame my wife shall be.
Translated by C. T. Brooks: Reprinted from 'Representative German Poems'
by the courtesy of Mrs. Charles T. Brooks.
EDMUND BURKE
(1729-1797)
BY E. L. GODKIN
Edmund Burke, born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1729, was the son of a
successful attorney, who gave him as good an education as the times and
the country afforded. He went to school to an excellent Quaker, and
graduated at Trinity College in 1748. He appears to have then gone to
London in 1750 to "keep terms," as it was called, at the Middle Temple,
with the view of being admitted to the bar, in obedience to his father's
desire and ambition. But the desultory habit of mind, the preference for
literature and philosophical speculation to connected study, which had
marked his career in college, followed him and prevented any serious
application to the law. His father's patience was after a while
exhausted, and he withdrew Burke's allowance and left him to his own
resources.
This was in 1755, but in 1756 he married, and made his first appearance
in the literary world by the publication of a book. About these years
from 1750 to 1759 little is known. He published two works, one a
treatise on the 'Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful,' and
the other a 'Vindication of Natural Society,' a satire on Bolingbroke.
Stray allusions and anecdotes about other men in the diaries and
correspondence of the time show that he frequented the literary
coffee-houses, and was gradually making an impression on the authors and
wits whom he met there. Besides the two books we have mentioned, he
produced some smaller things, such as an 'Essay on the Drama,' and part
of an 'Abridgment of the History of England.' But although these helped
to secure him admission to the literary set, they did not raise him out
of the rank of obscure literary adventurers, who from the Revolution of
1688, and especially after the union with Scotland, began to swarm to
London from all parts of the three kingdoms. The first recognition of
him as a serious writer was his employment by Dodsley the bookseller, at
a salary of $100 a year, to edit the Annual Register, which Dodsley
founded in 1769. Considered as a biographical episode, this may fairly
be treated as a business man's certificate that Burke was industrious
and accurate. As his income from his father was withdrawn or reduced in
1755, there remain four years during which his way of supporting himself
is unknown. His published works were certainly not "pot-boilers." He
was probably to some extent dependent on his wife's father, Dr. Nugent,
an Irish physician who when Burke made his acquaintance lived in Bath,
but after his daughter's marriage settled in London, and seems to have
frequented and have been acceptable in the same coffee-houses as Burke,
and for the same reasons. But Burke was not a man to remain long
dependent on any one. These nine years were evidently not spent
fruitlessly. They had made him known and brought him to the threshold of
public life.
In 1759, political discussion as we understand it--that is, those
explorations of the foundations of political society and analyses of
social relations which now form our daily intellectual food--was hardly
known. The interest in religion as the chief human concern was rapidly
declining. The interest in human society as an organism to be studied,
and if need be, taken to pieces and put together again, was only just
beginning. Montesquieu's great work, 'The Spirit of the Laws,' which
demanded for expediency and convenience in legislation the place which
modern Europe had long assigned to authority, had only appeared in 1748.
Swift's satires had made serious breaches in the wall of convention by
which the State, in spite of the convulsions of the seventeenth century,
was still surrounded. But the writer whose speculations excited most
attention in England was Bolingbroke. The charm of his style and the
variety of his interests made him the chief intellectual topic of the
London world in Burke's early youth. To write like Bolingbroke was a
legitimate ambition for a young man. It is not surprising that Burke
felt it, and that his earliest political effort was a satire on
Bolingbroke. It attracted the attention of a politician, Gerard
Hamilton, and he quickly picked up Burke as his secretary, treated him
badly, and was abandoned by him in disgust at the end of six years.
The peculiar condition of the English governmental machine made possible
for men of Burke's kind at this period what would not be possible now.
The population had vanished from a good many old boroughs, although
their representation in Parliament remained, and the selection of the
members fell to the lords of the soil. About one hundred and fifty
members of the House of Commons were in this way chosen by great landed
proprietors, and it is to be said to their credit that they used their
power freely to introduce unknown young men of talent into public life.
Moreover in many cases, if not in most, small boroughs, however well
peopled, were expected to elect the proprietor's nominee. Burke after
leaving Hamilton's service was for a short time private secretary to
Lord Rockingham, when the latter succeeded Grenville in the Ministry in
1766; but when he went out, Burke obtained a seat in Parliament in 1765
in the manner we have described, for the borough of Wendover, from
Lord Verney, who owned it. He made his first successful speech the same
year, and was complimented by Pitt. He was already recognized as a man
of enormous information, as any one who edited the Annual Register had
to be.
[Illustration: EDMUND BURKE.]
A man of such powers and tastes in that day naturally became a
pamphleteer. Outside of Parliament there was no other mode of discussing
public affairs. The periodical press for purposes of discussion did not
exist. During and after the Great Rebellion, the pamphlet had made its
appearance as the chief instrument of controversy. Defoe used it freely
after the Restoration. Swift made a great hit with it, and probably
achieved the first sensational sale with his pamphlet on 'The Conduct of
the Allies.' Bolingbroke's 'Patriot King' was a work of the same class.
As a rule the pamphlet exposed or refuted somebody, even if it also
freely expounded. It was inevitable that Burke should early begin to
wield this most powerful of existing weapons. His antagonist was ready
for him in the person of George Grenville, the minister who had made way
for Burke's friend and patron Lord Rockingham. Grenville showed, as
easily as any party newspaper in our own day, that Rockingham and his
friends had ruined the country by mismanagement of the war and of the
finances. Burke refuted him with a mastery of facts and figures, and a
familiarity with the operations of trade and commerce, and a power of
exposition and illustration, and a comprehension of the fundamental
conditions of national economy, which at once made him famous and a
necessary man for the Whigs in the great struggle with the Crown on
which they were entering.
The nature of this struggle cannot be better described in brief space
than by saying that the King, from his accession to the throne down to
the close of the American War, was engaged in a persistent effort to
govern through ministers chosen and dismissed, as the German ministers
are now, by himself; while the subservience of Parliament was secured by
the profuse use of pensions and places. To this attempt, and all the
abuses which inevitably grew out of it, the Whigs with Burke as their
intellectual head offered a determined resistance, and the conflict was
one extraordinarily well calculated to bring his peculiar powers into
play.
The leading events in this long struggle were the attempt of the House
of Commons to disqualify Wilkes for a seat in the House, to punish
reporting their debates as a breach of privilege, and the prosecution of
the war against the American colonies. It may be said to have begun at
the accession of the King, and to have lasted until the resignation of
Lord North after the surrender of Cornwallis, or from 1770 to 1783.
Burke's contributions to it were his pamphlet, 'Thoughts on the Cause of
the Present Discontents,' and several speeches in Parliament: the first,
like the pamphlet, on the general situation, and others on minor
incidents in the struggle. This pamphlet has not only survived the
controversy, but has become one of the most famous papers in the
political literature of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is a century since
every conspicuous figure in the drama passed away; it is seventy years
since every trace of the controversy disappeared from English political
life; most if not all of the principles for which Burke contended have
become commonplaces of English constitutional practice; the discontents
of that day have vanished as completely as those of 1630: but Burke's
pamphlet still holds a high place in every course of English literature,
and is still read and pondered by every student of constitutional
history and by every speculator on government and political morals.
In 1774 Parliament was dissolved for the second time since Burke entered
it: and there a misfortune overtook him which illustrated in a striking
way the practical working of the British Constitution at that period.
Lord Verney, to whom he had owed his seat for the borough of Wendover at
two elections, had fallen into pecuniary embarrassment and could no
longer return him, because compelled to sell his four boroughs. This
left Burke high and dry, and he was beginning to tremble for his
political future, when he was returned for the great commercial city of
Bristol by a popular constituency. The six years during which he sat for
Bristol were the most splendid portion of his career. Other portions
perhaps contributed as much if not more to his literary or oratorical
reputation; but this brought out in very bold relief the great traits of
character which will always endear his memory to the lovers of national
liberty, and place him high among the framers of great political ideals.
In the first place, he propounded boldly to the Bristol electors the
theory that he was to be their representative but not their delegate;
that his parliamentary action must be governed by his own reason and not
by their wishes. In the next, he resolutely sacrificed his seat by
opposing his constituents in supporting the removal of the restrictions
on Irish trade, of which English merchants reaped the benefit. He would
not be a party to what he considered the oppression of his native
country, no matter what might be the effect on his political prospects;
and in 1780 he was not re-elected.
But the greatest achievement of this period of his history was his share
in the controversy over the American War, which was really not more a
conflict with the colonies over taxation, than a resolute and obstinate
carrying out of the King's principles of government. The colonies were,
for the time being, simply resisting pretensions to which the kingdom
at home submitted. Burke's speeches on 'American Taxation' (1774), on
'Conciliation with America' (1775), and his 'Letter to the Sheriffs of
Bristol' (1777) on the same subject, taken as a sequel to the 'Thoughts
on the Present Discontents,' form a body of literature which it is not
too much to pronounce not only a history of the dispute with the
colonies, but a veritable political manual. He does not confine himself
to a minute description of the arguments used in supporting the attempt
to coerce America; he furnishes as he goes along principles of
legislation applicable almost to any condition of society; illustrations
which light up as by a single flash problems of apparently inscrutable
darkness; explanations of great political failures; and receipts
innumerable for political happiness and success. A single sentence often
disposes of half a dozen fallacies firmly imbedded in governmental
tradition. His own description of the rhetorical art of Charles
Townshend was eminently applicable to himself:--"He knew, better by far
than any man I ever was acquainted with, how to bring together within a
short time all that was necessary to establish, to illustrate, and to
decorate that side of the question which he supported."
This observation suggests the great advantage he derives as a political
instructor from the facts that all his political speeches and writings
are polemical. The difficulty of keeping exposition from being dry is
familiar to everybody who has ever sought to communicate knowledge on
any subject. But Burke in every one of his political theses had an
antagonist, who was literally as he says himself, a helper: who did the
work of an opposing counsel at the bar, in bringing out into prominence
all the weak points of Burke's case and all the strong ones of his own;
who set in array all the fallacies to be exposed, all the idols to be
overthrown, all the doubts to be cleared up. Moreover he was not, like
the man who usually figures in controversial dialogues, a sham opponent,
but a creature of flesh and blood like Grenville, or the Sheriffs of
Bristol, or the King's friends, or the Irish Protestant party, who met
Burke with an ardor not inferior to his own. We consequently have, in
all his papers and speeches, the very best of which he was capable in
thought and expression, for he had not only to watch the city but to
meet the enemy in the gate.
After the close of the American War, the remainder of Burke's career was
filled with two great subjects, to which he devoted himself with an
ardor which occasionally degenerated into fanaticism. One was the
government of India by the East India Company, and the other was the
French Revolution. Although the East India Company had been long in
existence, and had towards the middle of the eighteenth century been
rapidly extending its power and influence, comparatively little had
been known by the English public of the nature of its operations.
Attention had been drawn away from it by the events in America and the
long contest with the King in England. By the close of the American War,
however, the "Nabobs," as they were called,--or returned English
adventurers,--began to make a deep impression on English society by the
apparent size of their fortunes and the lavishness of their expenditure.
Burke calculated that in his time they had brought home about
$200,000,000, with which they bought estates and seats in Parliament and
became a very conspicuous element in English public and private life. At
the same time, information as to the mode in which their money was made
and their government carried on was scanty and hard to acquire. The
press had no foreign correspondence; India was six months away, and all
the Europeans in it were either servants of the Company, or remained in
it on the Company's sufferance. The Whigs finally determined to attempt
a grand inquisition into its affairs, and a bill was brought in by Fox,
withdrawing the government of India from the Company and vesting it in a
commission named in the bill. This was preceded by eleven reports from a
Committee of Inquiry. But the bill failed utterly, and brought down the
Whig ministry, which did not get into office again in Burke's time. This
was followed in 1785, on Burke's instigation, by the impeachment of the
most conspicuous of the Company's officers, Warren Hastings. Burke was
appointed one of the managers on behalf of the Commons.
No episode in his career is so familiar to the public as his conduct of
this trial, owing to Warren Hastings having been the subject of one of
the most popular of Macaulay's Essays. None brought out more clearly
Burke's great dialectical powers, or so well displayed his mastery of
details and his power of orderly exposition. The trial lasted eight
years, and was adjourned over from one Parliamentary session to another.
These delays were fatal to its success. The public interest in it died
out long before the close, as usual in protracted legal prosecutions;
the feeling spread that the defendant could not be very guilty when it
took so long to prove his crime. Although Burke toiled over the case
with extraordinary industry and persistence, and an enthusiasm which
never flagged, Hastings was finally acquitted.
But the labors of the prosecution were not wholly vain. It awoke in
England an attention to the government of India which never died out,
and led to a considerable curtailing of the power of the East India
Company, and necessarily of its severity, in dealing with Indian States.
The impeachment was preceded by eleven reports on the affairs of India
by the Committee of the House of Commons, and the articles of
impeachment were nearly as voluminous. Probably no question which has
ever come before Parliament has received so thorough an examination.
Hardly less important was the report of the Committee of the Commons
(which consisted of the managers of the impeachment) on the Lords'
journals. This was an elaborate examination of the rules of evidence
which govern proceedings in the trial of impeachments, or of persons
guilty of malfeasance in office. This has long been a bone of contention
between lawyers and statesmen. The Peers in the course of the trial had
taken the opinion of the judges frequently, and had followed it in
deciding on the admissibility of evidence, a great deal of which was
important to the prosecution. The report maintained, and with apparently
unanswerable force, that when a legislature sits on offenses against the
State, it constitutes a grand inquest which makes its own rules of
evidence; and is not and ought not to be tied up by the rules
administered in the ordinary law courts, and formed for the most part
for the guidance of the unskilled and often uneducated men who compose
juries. As a manual for the instruction of legislative committees of
inquiry it is therefore still very valuable, if it be not a final
authority.
Burke, during and after the Warren Hastings trial, fell into
considerable neglect and unpopularity. His zeal in the prosecution had
grown as the public interest in it declined, until it approached the
point of fanaticism. He took office in the coalition which succeeded the
Fox Whigs, and when the French Revolution broke out it found him
somewhat broken in nerves, irritated by his failures, and in less
cordial relations with some of his old friends and colleagues. He at
once arrayed himself fiercely against the Revolution, and broke finally
with what might be called the Liberty of all parties and creeds, and
stood forth to the world as the foremost champion of authority,
prescription, and precedent. Probably none of his writings are so
familiar to the general public as those which this crisis produced, such
as the 'Thoughts on the French Revolution' and the 'Letters on a
Regicide Peace.' They are and will always remain, apart from the
splendor of the rhetoric, extremely interesting as the last words spoken
by a really great man on behalf of the old order. Old Europe made
through him the best possible defense of itself. He told, as no one else
could have told it, the story of what customs, precedent, prescription,
and established usage had done for its civilization; and he told it
nevertheless as one who was the friend of rational progress, and had
taken no small part in promoting it. Only one other writer who followed
him came near equaling him as a defender of the past, and that was
Joseph de Maistre; but he approached the subject mainly from the
religious side. To him the old regime was the order of Providence. To
Burke it was the best scheme of things that humanity could devise for
the advancement and preservation of civilization. In the papers we have
mentioned, which were the great literary sensations of Burke's day,
everything that could be said for the system of political ethics under
which Europe had lived for a thousand years was said with a vigor,
incisiveness, and wealth of illustration which must make them for all
time and in all countries the arsenal of those who love the ancient ways
and dread innovation.
The failure of the proceedings against Warren Hastings, and the
strong sympathy with the French Revolution--at least in its
beginning--displayed by the Whigs and by most of those with whom Burke
had acted in politics, had an unfortunate effect on his temper. He broke
off his friendship with Fox and others of his oldest associates and
greatest admirers. He became hopeless and out of conceit with the world
around him. One might have set down some of this at least to the effect
of advancing years and declining health, if such onslaughts on
revolutionary ideas as his 'Reflections on the French Revolution' and
his 'Letters on a Regicide Peace' did not reveal the continued
possession of all the literary qualities which had made the success of
his earlier works. Their faults are literally the faults of youth: the
brilliancy of the rhetoric, the heat of the invective, the violence of
the partisanship, the reluctance to admit the existence of any
grievances in France to justify the popular onslaught on the monarchy,
the noblesse, and the Church. His one explanation of the crisis and its
attendant horrors was the instigation of the spirit of evil. The effect
on contemporary opinion was very great, and did much to stimulate the
conservative reaction in England which carried on the Napoleonic wars
and lasted down to the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832.
There were, however, other causes for the cloud which came over Burke's
later years. In spite of his great services to his party and his
towering eminence as an orator and writer, he never obtained a seat in
the Cabinet. The Paymastership of the Forces, at a salary of $20,000 a
year, was the highest reward, either in honor or money, which his party
ever bestowed on him. It is true that in those days the Whigs were very
particular in reserving high places for men of rank and family. In fact,
their government was, from the Revolution of 1688 on, a thorough
oligarchy, divided among a few great houses. That they should not have
broken through this rule in Burke's case, and admitted to the Cabinet a
man to whom they owed so much as they did to him, excited wonder in his
own day, and has down to our own time been one of the historical
mysteries on which the students of that period love to expend their
ingenuity. It is difficult to reconcile this exclusion and neglect of
Burke with the unbounded admiration lavished on him by the aristocratic
leaders of the party. It is difficult too to account for Burke's quiet
acquiescence in what seems to be their ingratitude. There had before his
time been no similar instance of party indifference to such claims as he
could well make, on such honors and rewards as the party had to bestow.
The most probable explanation of the affair is the one offered by his
latest and ablest biographer, Mr. John Morley. Burke had entered public
life without property,--probably the most serious mistake, if in his
case it can be called a mistake, which an English politician can commit.
It is a wise and salutary rule of English public life that a man who
seeks a political career shall qualify for it by pecuniary independence.
It would be hardly fair in Burke's case to say that he had sought a
political career. The greatness of his talents literally forced it on
him. He became a statesman and great Parliamentary orator, so to speak,
in spite of himself. But he must have early discovered the great barrier
to complete success created by his poverty. He may be said to have
passed his life in pecuniary embarrassment. This alone might not have
shut him out from the Whig official Paradise, for the same thing might
have been said of Pitt and Fox: but they had connections; they belonged
by birth and association to the Whig class. Burke's relatives were no
help or credit to him. In fact, they excited distrust of him. They
offended the fastidious aristocrats with whom he associated, and
combined with his impecuniousness to make him seem unsuitable for a
great place. These aristocrats were very good to him. They lent him
money freely, and settled a pension on him, and covered him with social
adulation; but they were never willing to put him beside themselves in
the government. His latter years therefore had an air of tragedy. He was
unpopular with most of those who in his earlier years had adored him,
and was the hero of those whom in earlier years he had despised. His
only son, of whose capacity he had formed a strange misconception, died
young, and he passed his own closing hours, as far as we can judge, with
a sense of failure. But he left one of the great names in English
history. There is no trace of him in the statute book, but he has, it
is safe to say, exercised a profound influence in all succeeding
legislation, both in England and America. He has inspired or suggested
nearly all the juridical changes which distinguish the England of to-day
from the England of the last century, and is probably the only British
politician whose speeches and pamphlets, made for immediate results,
have given him immortality.
[Illustration: Signature: E. L. Godkin]
FROM THE SPEECH ON 'CONCILIATION WITH AMERICA'
Sir,--It is not a pleasant consideration; but nothing in the world can
read so awful and so instructive a lesson as the conduct of the Ministry
in this business, upon the mischief of not having large and liberal
ideas in the management of great affairs. Never have the servants of the
State looked at the whole of your complicated interests in one connected
view. They have taken things by bits and scraps, some at one time and
one pretense and some at another, just as they pressed, without any sort
of regard to their relations or dependencies. They never had any kind of
system, right or wrong; but only invented occasionally some miserable
tale for the day, in order meanly to sneak out of difficulties into
which they had proudly strutted. And they were put to all these shifts
and devices, full of meanness and full of mischief, in order to pilfer
piecemeal a repeal of an act which they had not the generous courage,
when they found and felt their error, honorably and fairly to disclaim.
By such management, by the irresistible operation of feeble counsels, so
paltry a sum as Threepence in the eyes of a financier, so insignificant
an article as Tea in the eyes of a philosopher, have shaken the pillars
of a commercial empire that circled the whole globe.
Do you forget that in the very last year you stood on the precipice of
general bankruptcy? Your danger was indeed great. You were distressed in
the affairs of the East India Company; and you well know what sort of
things are involved in the comprehensive energy of that significant
appellation. I am not called upon to enlarge to you on that danger;
which you thought proper yourselves to aggravate, and to display to
the world with all the parade of indiscreet declamation. The monopoly
of the most lucrative trades and the possession of imperial revenues
had brought you to the verge of beggary and ruin. Such was your
representation--such, in some measure, was your case. The vent of ten
millions of pounds of this commodity, now locked up by the operation of
an injudicious tax and rotting in the warehouses of the company, would
have prevented all this distress, and all that series of desperate
measures which you thought yourselves obliged to take in consequence of
it. America would have furnished that vent which no other part of the
world can furnish but America, where tea is next to a necessary of life
and where the demand grows upon the supply. I hope our dear-bought East
India Committees have done us at least so much good as to let us know
that without a more extensive sale of that article, our East India
revenues and acquisitions can have no certain connection with this
country. It is through the American trade of tea that your East India
conquests are to be prevented from crushing you with their burden. They
are ponderous indeed, and they must have that great country to lean
upon, or they tumble upon your head. It is the same folly that has lost
you at once the benefit of the West and of the East. This folly has
thrown open folding-doors to contraband, and will be the means of giving
the profits of the trade of your colonies to every nation but
yourselves. Never did a people suffer so much for the empty words of a
preamble. It must be given up. For on what principles does it stand?
This famous revenue stands, at this hour, on all the debate, as a
description of revenue not as yet known in all the comprehensive (but
too comprehensive!) vocabulary of finance--_a preambulary tax_. It is
indeed a tax of sophistry, a tax of pedantry, a tax of disputation, a
tax of war and rebellion, a tax for anything but benefit to the imposers
or satisfaction to the subject....
Could anything be a subject of more just alarm to America than to see
you go out of the plain high-road of finance, and give up your most
certain revenues and your clearest interests, merely for the sake of
insulting your colonies? No man ever doubted that the commodity of tea
could bear an imposition of threepence. But no commodity will bear
threepence, or will bear a penny, when the general feelings of men are
irritated; and two millions of people are resolved not to pay. The
feelings of the colonies were formerly the feelings of Great Britain.
Theirs were formerly the feelings of Mr. Hampden when called upon for
the payment of twenty shillings. Would twenty shillings have ruined Mr.
Hampden's fortune? No! but the payment of half twenty shillings, on the
principle it was demanded, would have made him a slave. It is the weight
of that preamble of which you are so fond, and not the weight of the
duty, that the Americans are unable and unwilling to bear.
It is then, sir, upon the _principle_ of this measure, and nothing else,
that we are at issue. It is a principle of political expediency. Your
Act of 1767 asserts that it is expedient to raise a revenue in America;
your Act of 1769, which takes away that revenue, contradicts the Act of
1767, and by something much stronger than words asserts that it is not
expedient. It is a reflection upon your wisdom to persist in a solemn
Parliamentary declaration of the expediency of any object for which at
the same time you make no sort of provision. And pray, sir, let not this
circumstance escape you,--it is very material: that the preamble of this
Act which we wish to repeal is not _declaratory of a right_, as some
gentlemen seem to argue it; it is only a recital of the _expediency_ of
a certain exercise of a right supposed already to have been asserted; an
exercise you are now contending for by ways and means which you confess,
though they were obeyed, to be utterly insufficient for their purpose.
You are therefore at this moment in the awkward situation of fighting
for a phantom, a quiddity, a thing that wants not only a substance, but
even a name; for a thing which is neither abstract right nor profitable
enjoyment.
They tell you, sir, that your dignity is tied to it. I know not how it
happens, but this dignity of yours is a terrible incumbrance to you; for
it has of late been ever at war with your interest, your equity, and
every idea of your policy. Show the thing you contend for to be reason;
show it to be common-sense; show it to be the means of attaining some
useful end: and then I am content to allow it what dignity you please.
But what dignity is derived from the perseverance in absurdity, is
more than ever I could discern. The honorable gentleman has said
well--indeed, in most of his _general_ observations I agree with him--he
says that this subject does not stand as it did formerly. Oh, certainly
not! Every hour you continue on this ill-chosen ground, your
difficulties thicken on you; and therefore my conclusion is, remove from
a bad position as quickly as you can. The disgrace and the necessity of
yielding, both of them, grow upon you every hour of your delay....
To restore order and repose to an empire so great and so distracted as
ours, is, merely in the attempt, an undertaking that would ennoble the
flights of the highest genius and obtain pardon for the efforts of the
meanest understanding. Struggling a good while with these thoughts, by
degrees I felt myself more firm. I derived at length some confidence
from what in other circumstances usually produces timidity. I grew less
anxious, even from the idea of my own insignificance. For, judging of
what you are by what you ought to be, I persuaded myself that you would
not reject a reasonable proposition because it had nothing but its
reason to recommend it. On the other hand, being totally destitute of
all shadow of influence, natural or adventitious, I was very sure that
if my proposition were futile or dangerous, if it were weakly conceived
or improperly timed, there was nothing exterior to it of power to awe,
dazzle, or delude you. You will see it just as it is; and you will treat
it just as it deserves.
The proposition is Peace. Not Peace through the medium of War; not
Peace to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless
negotiations; not Peace to arise out of universal discord, fomented from
principle in all parts of the empire; not Peace to depend on the
juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking
of the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple Peace,
sought in its natural course and in its ordinary haunts. It is Peace
sought in the spirit of Peace, and laid in principles purely pacific. I
propose by removing the ground of the difference, and by restoring the
_former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother country_,
to give permanent satisfaction to your people; and (far from a scheme of
ruling by discord) to reconcile them to each other in the same act and
by the bond of the very same interest which reconciles them to British
government.
My idea is nothing more. Refined policy ever has been the parent of
confusion, and ever will be so, as long as the world endures. Plain good
intention, which is as easily discovered at the first view as fraud is
surely detected at last, is, let me say, of no mean force in the
government of mankind. Genuine simplicity of heart is an healing and
cementing principle. My plan, therefore, being formed upon the most
simple grounds imaginable, may disappoint some people when they hear it.
It has nothing to recommend it to the pruriency of curious ears. There
is nothing at all new and captivating in it. It has nothing of the
splendor of the project which has been lately laid upon your table by
the noble lord in the blue ribbon. It does not propose to fill your
lobby with squabbling colony agents, who will require the interposition
of your mace at every instant to keep the peace amongst them. It does
not institute a magnificent auction of finance, where captivated
provinces come to general ransom by bidding against each other, until
you knock down the hammer, and determine a proportion of payments beyond
all the powers of algebra to equalize and settle.
The plan which I shall presume to suggest derives, however, one
great advantage from the proposition and registry of that noble
lord's project. The idea of conciliation is admissible. First, the
House, in accepting the resolution moved by the noble lord, has
admitted--notwithstanding the menacing front of our address,
notwithstanding our heavy bills of pains and penalties--that we do not
think ourselves precluded from all ideas of free grace and bounty.
The House has gone further: it has declared conciliation admissible,
_previous_ to any submission on the part of America. It has even shot a
good deal beyond that mark, and has admitted that the complaints of our
former mode of exerting the right of taxation were not wholly unfounded.
That right, thus exerted, is allowed to have something reprehensible in
it--something unwise, or something grievous: since in the midst of our
heat and resentment we of ourselves have proposed a capital alteration,
and in order to get rid of what seemed so very exceptionable have
instituted a mode that is altogether new; one that is indeed wholly
alien from all the ancient methods and forms of Parliament.
The _principle_ of this proceeding is large enough for my purpose. The
means proposed by the noble lord for carrying his ideas into execution,
I think indeed are very indifferently suited to the end; and this I
shall endeavor to show you before I sit down. But for the present I take
my ground on the admitted principle. I mean to give peace. Peace implies
reconciliation; and where there has been a material dispute,
reconciliation does in a manner always imply concession on the one part
or on the other. In this state of things I make no difficulty in
affirming that the proposal ought to originate from us. Great and
acknowledged force is not impaired, either in effect or in opinion, by
an unwillingness to exert itself. The superior power may offer peace
with honor and safety. Such an offer from such a power will be
attributed to magnanimity. But the concessions of the weak are the
concessions of fear. When such a one is disarmed, he is wholly at the
mercy of his superior, and he loses forever that time and those chances
which, as they happen to all men, are the strength and resources of all
inferior power.
The capital leading questions on which you must this day decide are
these two: First, whether you ought to concede; and secondly, what your
concession ought to be. On the first of these questions we have gained
(as I have just taken the liberty of observing to you) some ground. But
I am sensible that a good deal more is still to be done. Indeed, sir, to
enable us to determine both on the one and the other of these great
questions with a firm and precise judgment, I think it may be necessary
to consider distinctly the true nature and the peculiar circumstances of
the object which we have before us. Because after all our struggle,
whether we will or not, we must govern America according to that nature
and to those circumstances, and not according to our own imaginations
nor according to abstract ideas of right; by no means according to mere
general theories of government, the resort to which appears to me, in
our present situation, no better than arrant trifling. I shall therefore
endeavor, with your leave, to lay before you some of the most material
of these circumstances in as full and as clear a manner as I am able to
state them.
FROM THE SPEECH ON 'THE NABOB OF ARCOT'S DEBTS'
That you may judge what chance any honorable and useful end of
government has for a provision that comes in for the leavings of these
gluttonous demands, I must take it on myself to bring before you the
real condition of that abused, insulted, racked, and ruined country,
though in truth my mind revolts from it; though you will hear it with
horror: and I confess I tremble when I think on these awful and
confounding dispensations of Providence. I shall first trouble you with
a few words as to the cause.
The great fortunes made in India in the beginnings of conquest naturally
excited an emulation in all the parts, and through the whole succession,
of the company's service. But in the company it gave rise to other
sentiments. They did not find the new channels of acquisition flow with
equal riches to them. On the contrary, the high flood-tide of private
emolument was generally in the lowest ebb of their affairs. They began
also to fear that the fortune of war might take away what the fortune of
war had given. Wars were accordingly discouraged by repeated injunctions
and menaces; and that the servants might not be bribed into them by the
native princes, they were strictly forbidden to take any money
whatsoever from their hands. But vehement passion is ingenious in
resources. The company's servants were not only stimulated but better
instructed by the prohibition. They soon fell upon a contrivance which
answered their purposes far better than the methods which were
forbidden; though in this also they violated an ancient, but they
thought an abrogated, order. They reversed their proceedings. Instead of
receiving presents, they made loans. Instead of carrying on wars in
their own name, they contrived an authority, at once irresistible and
irresponsible, in whose name they might ravage at pleasure; and being
thus freed from all restraint, they indulged themselves in the most
extravagant speculations of plunder. The cabal of creditors who have
been the object of the late bountiful grant from His Majesty's
ministers, in order to possess themselves, under the name of creditors
and assignees, of every country in India as fast as it should be
conquered, inspired into the mind of the Nabob of Arcot (then a
dependent on the company of the humblest order) a scheme of the most
wild and desperate ambition that I believe ever was admitted into the
thoughts of a man so situated. First, they persuaded him to consider
himself as a principal member in the political system of Europe. In the
next place they held out to him, and he readily imbibed, the idea of the
general empire of Indostan. As a preliminary to this undertaking, they
prevailed on him to propose a tripartite division of that vast
country--one part to the company; another to the Mahrattas; and the
third to himself. To himself he reserved all the southern part of the
great peninsula, comprehended under the general name of the Deccan.
On this scheme of their servants, the company was to appear in the
Carnatic in no other light than as a contractor for the provision of
armies and hire of mercenaries, for his use and under his direction.
This disposition was to be secured by the Nabob's putting himself under
the guarantee of France, and by the means of that rival nation
preventing the English forever from assuming an equality, much less a
superiority, in the Carnatic. In pursuance of this treasonable project
(treasonable on the part of the English), they extinguished the company
as a sovereign power in that part of India; they withdrew the company's
garrisons out of all the forts and strongholds of the Carnatic; they
declined to receive the ambassadors from foreign courts, and remitted
them to the Nabob of Arcot; they fell upon, and totally destroyed, the
oldest ally of the company, the king of Tanjore, and plundered the
country to the amount of near five millions sterling; one after another,
in the Nabob's name but with English force, they brought into a
miserable servitude all the princes and great independent nobility of a
vast country. In proportion to these treasons and violences, which
ruined the people, the fund of the Nabob's debt grew and flourished.
Among the victims to this magnificent plan of universal plunder, worthy
of the heroic avarice of the projectors, you have all heard (and he has
made himself to be well remembered) of an Indian chief called Hyder Ali
Khan. This man possessed the western, as the company under the name of
the Nabob of Arcot does the eastern, division of the Carnatic. It was
among the leading measures in the design of this cabal (according to
their own emphatic language) to _extirpate_ this Hyder Ali. They
declared the Nabob of Arcot to be his sovereign, and himself to be a
rebel, and publicly invested their instrument with the sovereignty of
the kingdom of Mysore. But their victim was not of the passive kind.
They were soon obliged to conclude a treaty of peace and close alliance
with this rebel at the gates of Madras. Both before and since that
treaty, every principle of policy pointed out this power as a natural
alliance; and on his part it was courted by every sort of amicable
office. But the cabinet council of English creditors would not suffer
their Nabob of Arcot to sign the treaty, nor even to give to a prince at
least his equal the ordinary titles of respect and courtesy. From that
time forward, a continued plot was carried on within the divan, black
and white, of the Nabob of Arcot, for the destruction of Hyder Ali. As
to the outward members of the double, or rather treble, government of
Madras, which had signed the treaty, they were always prevented by some
over-ruling influence (which they do not describe but which cannot be
misunderstood) from performing what justice and interest combined so
evidently to enforce.
When at length Hyder Ali found that he had to do with men who either
would sign no convention, or whom no treaty and no signature could bind,
and who were the determined enemies of human intercourse itself, he
decreed to make the country possessed by these incorrigible and
predestinated criminals a memorable example to mankind. He resolved, in
the gloomy recesses of a mind capacious of such things, to leave the
whole Carnatic an everlasting monument of vengeance, and to put
perpetual desolation as a barrier between him and those against whom the
faith which holds the moral elements of the world together was no
protection. He became at length so confident of his force, so collected
in his might, that he made no secret whatsoever of his dreadful
resolution. Having terminated his disputes with every enemy and every
rival, who buried their mutual animosities in their common detestation
against the creditors of the Nabob of Arcot, he drew from every quarter
whatever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the arts of
destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and
desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities
of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and
stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their
horizon, it suddenly burst and poured down the whole of its contents
upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of
which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can
adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were
mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field,
consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants,
flying from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others,
without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of
function,--fathers torn from children, husbands from wives,--enveloped
in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers and
the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an
unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to evade this tempest fled
to the walled cities: but escaping from fire, sword, and exile, they
fell into the jaws of famine.
The alms of the settlement in this dreadful exigency were certainly
liberal, and all was done by charity that private charity could do:
but it was a people in beggary; it was a nation which stretched
out its hands for food. For months together these creatures of
sufferance,--whose very excess of luxury in their most plenteous days
had fallen short of the allowance of our austerest fasts,--silent,
patient, resigned, without sedition or disturbance, almost without
complaint, perished by an hundred a day in the streets of Madras; every
day seventy at least laid their bodies in the streets, or on the glacis
of Tanjore, and expired of famine in the granary of India. I was going
to awake your justice towards this unhappy part of our fellow-citizens
by bringing before you some of the circumstances of this plague of
hunger. Of all the calamities which beset and waylay the life of man,
this comes the nearest to our heart, and is that wherein the proudest of
us all feels himself to be nothing more than he is: but I find myself
unable to manage it with decorum; these details are of a species of
horror so nauseous and disgusting, they are so degrading to the
sufferers and to the hearers, they are so humiliating to human nature
itself, that on better thoughts I find it more advisable to throw a pall
over this hideous object, and to leave it to your general conceptions.
For eighteen months without intermission this destruction raged from the
gates of Madras to the gates of Tanjore; and so completely did these
masters in their art, Hyder Ali and his more ferocious son, absolve
themselves of their impious vow, that when the British armies traversed,
as they did, the Carnatic for hundreds of miles in all directions,
through the whole line of their march they did not see one man, not one
woman, not one child, not one four-footed beast of any description
whatever. One dead uniform silence reigned over the whole region. With
the inconsiderable exceptions of the narrow vicinage of some few forts,
I wish to be understood as speaking literally;--I mean to produce to you
more than three witnesses, above all exception, who will support this
assertion in its full extent. That hurricane of war passed through every
part of the central provinces of the Carnatic. Six or seven districts to
the north and to the south (and those not wholly untouched) escaped the
general ravage.
The Carnatic is a country not much inferior in extent to England. Figure
to yourself, Mr. Speaker, the land in whose representative chair you
sit; figure to yourself the form and fashion of your sweet and cheerful
country from Thames to Trent north and south, and from the Irish to the
German Sea east and west, emptied and emboweled (may God avert the omen
of our crimes!) by so accomplished a desolation. Extend your imagination
a little farther, and then suppose your ministers taking a survey of
this scene of waste and desolation; what would be your thoughts if you
should be informed that they were computing how much had been the amount
of the excises, how much the customs, how much the land and malt tax, in
order that they should charge (take it in the most favorable light) for
public service, upon the relics of the satiated vengeance of relentless
enemies, the whole of what England had yielded in the most exuberant
seasons of peace and abundance? What would you call it? To call it
tyranny sublimed into madness would be too faint an image; yet this very
madness is the principle upon which the ministers at your right hand
have proceeded in their estimate of the revenues of the Carnatic, when
they were providing, not supply for the establishments of its
protection, but rewards for the authors of its ruin.
Every day you are fatigued and disgusted with this cant:--"The Carnatic
is a country that will soon recover, and become instantly as prosperous
as ever." They think they are talking to innocents, who will believe
that by sowing of dragons' teeth, men may come up ready grown and ready
armed. They who will give themselves the trouble of considering (for it
requires no great reach of thought, no very profound knowledge) the
manner in which mankind are increased and countries cultivated, will
regard all this raving as it ought to be regarded. In order that the
people, after a long period of vexation and plunder, may be in a
condition to maintain government, government must begin by maintaining
them. Here the road to economy lies not through receipt, but through
expense; and in that country nature has given no short cut to your
object. Men must propagate, like other animals, by the mouth. Never
did oppression light the nuptial torch; never did extortion and usury
spread out the genial bed. Does any of you think that England, so
wasted, would, under such a nursing attendance, so rapidly and cheaply
recover? But he is meanly acquainted with either England or India, who
does not know that England would a thousand times sooner resume
population, fertility, and what ought to be the ultimate secretion from
both,--revenue,--than such a country as the Carnatic.
The Carnatic is not by the bounty of nature a fertile soil. The general
size of its cattle is proof enough that it is much otherwise. It is some
days since I moved that a curious and interesting map kept in the India
House should be laid before you. The India House is not yet in readiness
to send it; I have therefore brought down my own copy, and there it lies
for the use of any gentleman who may think such a matter worthy of his
attention. It is indeed a noble map, and of noble things; but it is
decisive against the golden dreams and sanguine speculations of avarice
run mad. In addition to what you know must be the case in every part of
the world (the necessity of a previous provision, seed, stock, capital)
that map will show you that the uses of the influences of heaven itself
are in that country a work of art. The Carnatic is refreshed by few or
no living brooks or running streams, and it has rain only at a season;
but its product of rice exacts the use of water subject to perpetual
command. This is the national bank of the Carnatic, on which it must
have a perpetual credit or it perishes irretrievably. For that reason,
in the happier times of India, a number, almost incredible, of
reservoirs have been made in chosen places throughout the whole country;
they are formed for the greater part of mounds of earth and stones, with
sluices of solid masonry; the whole constructed with admirable skill and
labor, and maintained at a mighty charge. In the territory contained in
that map alone, I have been at the trouble of reckoning the reservoirs,
and they amount to upwards of eleven hundred, from the extent of two or
three acres to five miles in circuit. From these reservoirs currents are
occasionally drawn over the fields, and these water-courses again call
for a considerable expense to keep them properly scoured and duly
leveled. Taking the district in that map as a measure, there cannot be
in the Carnatic and Tanjore fewer than ten thousand of these reservoirs
of the larger and middling dimensions, to say nothing of those for
domestic services and the uses of religious purification. These are not
the enterprises of your power, nor in a style of magnificence suited to
the taste of your minister. These are the monuments of real kings, who
were the fathers of their people; testators to a posterity which they
embrace as their own. These are the grand sepulchres built by ambition;
but the ambition of an insatiable benevolence, which, not contented with
reigning in the dispensation of happiness during the contracted term of
human life, had strained, with all the reachings and graspings of a
vivacious mind, to extend the dominion of their bounty beyond the limits
of nature, and to perpetuate themselves through generations of
generations, the guardians, the protectors, the nourishers of mankind.
Long before the late invasion, the persons who are objects of the grant
of public money now before you had so diverted the supply of the pious
funds of culture and population that everywhere the reservoirs were
fallen into a miserable decay. But after those domestic enemies had
provoked the entry of a cruel foreign foe into the country, he did not
leave it until his revenge had completed the destruction begun by their
avarice. Few, very few indeed, of these magazines of water that are not
either totally destroyed, or cut through with such gaps as to require a
serious attention and much cost to re-establish them, as the means of
present subsistence to the people and of future revenue to the State.
What, sir, would a virtuous and enlightened ministry do on the view of
the ruins of such works before them? on the view of such a chasm of
desolation as that which yawned in the midst of those countries to the
north and south, which still bore some vestiges of cultivation? They
would have reduced all their most necessary establishments; they would
have suspended the justest payments; they would have employed every
shilling derived from the producing, to re-animate the powers of the
unproductive, parts. While they were performing this fundamental duty,
whilst they were celebrating these mysteries of justice and humanity,
they would have told the corps of fictitious creditors whose crimes were
their claims, that they must keep an awful distance; that they must
silence their inauspicious tongues; that they must hold off their
profane, unhallowed paws from this holy work; they would have proclaimed
with a voice that should make itself heard, that on every country the
first creditor is the plow,--that this original, indefeasible claim
supersedes every other demand.
This is what a wise and virtuous ministry would have done and said.
This, therefore, is what our minister could never think of saying or
doing. A ministry of another kind would first have improved the country,
and have thus laid a solid foundation for future opulence and future
force. But on this grand point of the restoration of the country, there
is not one syllable to be found in the correspondence of our ministers,
from the first to the last; they felt nothing for a land desolated by
fire, sword, and famine; their sympathies took another direction: they
were touched with pity for bribery, so long tormented with a fruitless
itching of its palms; their bowels yearned for usury, that had long
missed the harvest of its returning months; they felt for peculation,
which had been for so many years raking in the dust of an empty
treasury; they were melted into compassion for rapine and oppression,
licking their dry, parched, unbloody jaws. These were the objects of
their solicitude. These were the necessities for which they were
studious to provide.
To state the country and its revenues in their real condition, and to
provide for those fictitious claims consistently with the support of an
army and a civil establishment, would have been impossible; therefore
the ministers are silent on that head, and rest themselves on the
authority of Lord Macartney, who in a letter to the court of directors
written in the year 1781, speculating on what might be the result of a
wise management of the countries assigned by the Nabob of Arcot, rates
the revenues, as in time of peace, at twelve hundred thousand pounds a
year, as he does those of the King of Tanjore (which had not been
assigned) at four hundred and fifty. On this Lord Macartney grounds his
calculations, and on this they choose to ground theirs. It was on this
calculation that the ministry, in direct opposition to the remonstrances
of the court of directors, have compelled that miserable enslaved body
to put their hands to an order for appropriating the enormous sum of
L480,000 annually, as a fund for paying to their rebellious servants a
debt contracted in defiance of their clearest and most positive
injunctions.
The authority and information of Lord Macartney is held high on this
occasion, though it is totally rejected in every other particular of
this business. I believe I have the honor of being almost as old an
acquaintance as any Lord Macartney has. A constant and unbroken
friendship has subsisted between us from a very early period; and I
trust he thinks that as I respect his character, and in general admire
his conduct, I am one of those who feel no common interest in his
reputation. Yet I do not hesitate wholly to disallow the calculation of
1781, without any apprehension that I shall appear to distrust his
veracity or his judgment. This peace estimate of revenue was not
grounded on the state of the Carnatic as it then, or as it had recently,
stood. It was a statement of former and better times. There is no doubt
that a period did exist when the large portion of the Carnatic held by
the Nabob of Arcot might be fairly reputed to produce a revenue to that,
or to a greater amount. But the whole had so melted away by the slow and
silent hostilities of oppression and mismanagement, that the revenues,
sinking with the prosperity of the country, had fallen to about L800,000
a year even before an enemy's horse had imprinted his hoof on the soil
of the Carnatic. From that view, and independently of the decisive
effects of the war which ensued, Sir Eyre Coote conceived that years
must pass before the country could be restored to its former prosperity
and production. It was that state of revenue (namely, the actual state
before the war) which the directors have opposed to Lord Macartney's
speculation. They refused to take the revenues for more than L800,000.
In this they are justified by Lord Macartney himself, who in a
subsequent letter informs the court that his sketch is a matter of
speculation; it supposes the country restored to its ancient prosperity,
and the revenue to be in a course of effective and honest collection. If
therefore the ministers have gone wrong, they were not deceived by Lord
Macartney: they were deceived by no man. The estimate of the directors
is nearly the very estimate furnished by the right honorable gentleman
himself, and published to the world in one of the printed reports of his
own committee; but as soon as he obtained his power, he chose to abandon
his account. No part of his official conduct can be defended on the
ground of his Parliamentary information.
FROM THE SPEECH ON 'THE FRENCH REVOLUTION'
When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot
possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us;
nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer. Europe, undoubtedly,
taken in a mass, was in a flourishing condition the day on which your
revolution was completed. How much of that prosperous state was owing to
the spirit of our old manners and opinions is not easy to say; but as
such causes cannot be indifferent in their operation, we must presume
that on the whole their operation was beneficial.
We are but too apt to consider things in the state in which we find
them, without sufficiently adverting to the causes by which they have
been produced and possibly may be upheld. Nothing is more certain than
that our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are
connected with manners and with civilization, have in this European
world of ours depended for ages upon two principles, and were indeed the
result of both combined: I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit
of religion. The nobility and the clergy, the one by profession, the
other by patronage, kept learning in existence even in the midst of arms
and confusions, and whilst governments were rather in their causes than
formed. Learning paid back what it received to nobility and to
priesthood; and paid it with usury, by enlarging their ideas and by
furnishing their minds. Happy if they had all continued to know their
indissoluble union and their proper place! Happy if learning, not
debauched by ambition, had been satisfied to continue the instructor,
and not aspired to be the master! Along with its natural protectors and
guardians, learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under
the hoofs of a swinish multitude.
If, as I suspect, modern letters owe more than they are always willing
to own to ancient manners, so do other interests which we value full as
much as they are worth. Even commerce and trade and manufacture, the
gods of our economical politicians, are themselves perhaps but
creatures; are themselves but effects, which as first causes we choose
to worship. They certainly grew under the same shade in which learning
flourished. They too may decay with their natural protecting principles.
With you, for the present at least, they threaten to disappear together.
Where trade and manufactures are wanting to a people, and the spirit of
nobility and religion remains, sentiment supplies, and not always
ill supplies, their place; but if commerce and the arts should be
lost in an experiment to try how well a State may stand without these
old fundamental principles, what sort of a thing must be a nation of
gross, stupid, ferocious, and at the same time poor and sordid
barbarians,--destitute of religion, honor, or manly pride, possessing
nothing at present and hoping for nothing hereafter?
I wish you may not be going fast, and by the shortest cut, to that
horrible and disgustful situation. Already there appears a poverty of
conception, a coarseness and vulgarity, in all the proceedings of the
Assembly and of all their instructors. Their liberty is not liberal.
Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and
brutal.
It is not clear whether in England we learned those grand and decorous
principles and manners, of which considerable traces yet remain, from
you, or whether you took them from us. But to you, I think, we trace
them best. You seem to me to be _gentis incunabula nostrae_. France has
always more or less influenced manners in England; and when your
fountain is choked up and polluted the stream will not run long, or not
run clear, with us or perhaps with any nation. This gives all Europe,
in my opinion, but too close and connected a concern in what is done in
France. Excuse me therefore if I have dwelt too long on the atrocious
spectacle of the 6th of October, 1789, or have given too much scope to
the reflections which have arisen in my mind on occasion of the most
important of all revolutions, which may be dated from that day,--I mean
a revolution in sentiments, manners, and moral opinions. As things now
stand, with everything respectable destroyed without us, and an attempt
to destroy within us every principle of respect, one is almost forced to
apologize for harboring the common feelings of men.
Why do I feel so differently from the Reverend Dr. Price and those of
his lay flock who will choose to adopt the sentiments of his discourse?
For this plain reason--because it is _natural_ I should; because we are
so made as to be affected at such spectacles with melancholy sentiments
upon the unstable condition of mortal prosperity, and the tremendous
uncertainty of human greatness; because in those natural feelings we
learn great lessons; because in events like these our passions instruct
our reason; because when kings are hurled from their thrones by the
Supreme Director of this great drama, and become the objects of insult
to the base and of pity to the good, we behold such disasters in the
moral as we should a miracle in the physical order of things. We are
alarmed into reflection; our minds (as it has long since been observed)
are purified by terror and pity; our weak, unthinking pride is humbled
under the dispensations of a mysterious wisdom. Some tears might be
drawn from me, if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage. I should
be truly ashamed of finding in myself that superficial, theatric sense
of painted distress, whilst I could exult over it in real life. With
such a perverted mind, I could never venture to show my face at a
tragedy. People would think the tears that Garrick formerly, or that
Siddons not long since, have extorted from me, were the tears of
hypocrisy; I should know them to be the tears of folly.
Indeed, the theatre is a better school of moral sentiments than churches
where the feelings of humanity are thus outraged. Poets, who have to
deal with an audience not yet graduated in the school of the rights of
men, and who must apply themselves to the moral constitution of the
heart, would not dare to produce such a triumph as a matter of
exultation. There, where men follow their natural impulses, they would
not bear the odious maxims of a Machiavellian policy, whether applied
to the attainment of monarchical or democratic tyranny. They would
reject them on the modern, as they once did on the ancient stage, where
they could not bear even the hypothetical proposition of such wickedness
in the mouth of a personated tyrant, though suitable to the character he
sustained. No theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne
in the midst of the real tragedy of this triumphal day: a principal
actor weighing, as it were in scales hung in a shop of horrors, so much
actual crime against so much contingent advantage, and after putting in
and out weights, declaring that the balance was on the side of the
advantages. They would not bear to see the crimes of new democracy
posted as in a ledger against the crimes of old despotism, and the
book-keepers of politics finding democracy still in debt, but by no
means unable or unwilling to pay the balance. In the theatre, the first
intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning, will show
that this method of political computation would justify every extent of
crime. They would see that on these principles, even where the very
worst acts were not perpetrated, it was owing rather to the fortune of
the conspirators than to their parsimony in the expenditure of treachery
and blood. They would soon see that criminal means, once tolerated, are
soon preferred. They present a shorter cut to the object than through
the highway of the moral virtues. Justifying perfidy and murder for
public benefit, public benefit would soon become the pretext, and
perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity, malice, revenge, and fear
more dreadful than revenge, could satiate their insatiable appetites.
Such must be the consequences of losing, in the splendor of these
triumphs of the rights of men, all natural sense of wrong and right.
But the reverend pastor exults in this "leading in triumph," because
truly Louis the Sixteenth was "an arbitrary monarch"; that is, in other
words, neither more nor less than because he was Louis the Sixteenth,
and because he had the misfortune to be born King of France, with the
prerogatives of which a long line of ancestors, and a long acquiescence
of the people, without any act of his, had put him in possession. A
misfortune it has indeed turned out to him, that he was born King of
France. But misfortune is not crime, nor is indiscretion always the
greatest guilt. I shall never think that a prince, the acts of whose
whole reign were a series of concessions to his subjects; who was
willing to relax his authority, to remit his prerogatives, to call his
people to a share of freedom not known, perhaps not desired, by their
ancestors: such a prince, though he should be subjected to the common
frailties attached to men and to princes, though he should have once
thought it necessary to provide force against the desperate designs
manifestly carrying on against his person and the remnants of his
authority,--though all this should be taken into consideration, I shall
be led with great difficulty to think he deserves the cruel and
insulting triumph of Paris and of Dr. Price. I tremble for the cause of
liberty, from such an example to kings. I tremble for the cause of
humanity, in the unpunished outrages of the most wicked of mankind. But
there are some people of that low and degenerate fashion of mind that
they look up with a sort of complacent awe and admiration to kings who
know how to keep firm in their seat, to hold a strict hand over their
subjects, to assert their prerogative, and by the awakened vigilance of
a severe despotism to guard against the very first approaches of
freedom. Against such as these they never elevate their voice. Deserters
from principle, listed with fortune, they never see any good in
suffering virtue, nor any crime in prosperous usurpation.
If it could have been made clear to me that the King and Queen of France
(those I mean who were such before the triumph) were inexorable and
cruel tyrants, that they had formed a deliberate scheme for massacring
the National Assembly (I think I have seen something like the latter
insinuated in certain publications), I should think their captivity
just. If this be true, much more ought to have been done; but done, in
my opinion, in another manner. The punishment of real tyrants is a noble
and awful act of justice; and it has with truth been said to be
consolatory to the human mind. But if I were to punish a wicked king, I
should regard the dignity in avenging the crime. Justice is grave and
decorous, and in its punishments rather seems to submit to a necessity
than to make a choice. Had Nero, or Agrippina, or Louis the Eleventh, or
Charles the Ninth, been the subject; if Charles the Twelfth of Sweden
after the murder of Patkul, or his predecessor Christina after the
murder of Monaldeschi, had fallen into your hands, sir, or into mine, I
am sure our conduct would have been different.
If the French King, or King of the French (or by whatever name he is
known in the new vocabulary of your constitution), has in his own
person and that of his Queen really deserved these unavowed but
unavenged murderous attempts, and those frequent indignities more cruel
than murder, such a person would ill deserve even that subordinate
executory trust which I understand is to be placed in him; nor is he fit
to be called chief in a nation which he has outraged and oppressed. A
worse choice for such an office in a new commonwealth than that of a
deposed tyrant could not possibly be made. But to degrade and insult a
man as the worst of criminals, and afterwards to trust him in your
highest concerns as a faithful, honest, and zealous servant, is not
consistent with reasoning, nor prudent in policy, nor safe in practice.
Those who could make such an appointment must be guilty of a more
flagrant breach of trust than any they have yet committed against the
people. As this is the only crime in which your leading politicians
could have acted inconsistently, I conclude that there is no sort of
ground for these horrid insinuations. I think no better of all the other
calumnies.
In England, we give no credit to them. We are generous enemies: we are
faithful allies. We spurn from us with disgust and indignation the
slanders of those who bring us their anecdotes with the attestation of
the flower-de-luce on their shoulder. We have Lord George Gordon fast in
Newgate; and neither his being a public proselyte to Judaism, nor his
having, in his zeal against Catholic priests and all sorts of
ecclesiastics, raised a mob (excuse the term, it is still in use here)
which pulled down all our prisons, have preserved to him a liberty of
which he did not render himself worthy by a virtuous use of it. We have
rebuilt Newgate, and tenanted the mansion. We have prisons almost as
strong as the Bastile for those who dare to libel the Queens of France.
In this spiritual retreat let the noble libeler remain. Let him there
meditate on his Talmud, until he learns a conduct more becoming his
birth and parts, and not so disgraceful to the ancient religion to which
he has become a proselyte; or until some persons from your side of the
water, to please your new Hebrew brethren, shall ransom him. He may then
be enabled to purchase, with the old hoards of the synagogue, and a very
small poundage on the long compound interest of the thirty pieces of
silver (Dr. Price has shown us what miracles compound interest will
perform in 1790 years), the lands which are lately discovered to have
been usurped by the Gallican Church. Send us your Popish Archbishop of
Paris, and we will send you our Protestant Rabbin. We shall treat the
person you send us in exchange like a gentleman and an honest man, as he
is; but pray let him bring with him the fund of his hospitality, bounty,
and charity; and depend upon it, we shall never confiscate a shilling of
that honorable and pious fund, nor think of enriching the treasury with
the spoils of the poor-box.
To tell you the truth, my dear sir, I think the honor of our nation to
be somewhat concerned in the disclaimer of the proceedings of this
society of the Old Jewry and the London Tavern. I have no man's proxy. I
speak only for myself when I disclaim, as I do with all possible
earnestness, all communion with the actors in that triumph, or with the
admirers of it. When I assert anything else, as concerning the people of
England, I speak from observation, not from authority; but I speak from
the experience I have had in a pretty extensive and mixed communication
with the inhabitants of this kingdom, of all descriptions and ranks, and
after a course of attentive observation begun early in life, and
continued for nearly forty years. I have often been astonished,
considering that we are divided from you but by a slender dike of about
twenty-four miles, and that the mutual intercourse between the two
countries has lately been very great, to find how little you seem to
know of us. I suspect that this is owing to your forming a judgment of
this nation from certain publications which do very erroneously, if they
do at all, represent the opinions and dispositions generally prevalent
in England. The vanity, restlessness, petulance, and spirit of intrigue
of several petty cabals, who attempt to hide their total want of
consequence in bustle, and noise, and puffing, and mutual quotation of
each other, makes you imagine that our contemptuous neglect of their
abilities is a mark of general acquiescence in their opinions. No such
thing, I assure you. Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make
the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great
cattle reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak chew the cud and
are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the
only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number;
or that after all they are other than the little, shriveled, meagre,
hopping, though loud and troublesome, insects of the hour.
FRANCES HODGSON BURNETT
(1849-)
Mrs. Burnett has told the story of her childhood and tried to interpret
her own personality in her autobiographical story, 'The One I Knew Best
of All.' She has pictured a little English girl in a comfortable
Manchester home, leading a humdrum, well-regulated existence, with
brothers and sisters, nurse and governess. But an alert imagination
added interest to the life of this "Small Person," and from her nursery
windows and from the quiet park where she played she watched eagerly for
anything of dramatic or picturesque interest. She seized upon the
Lancashire dialect often overheard, as upon a game, and practiced it
until she gained the facility of use shown in her mining and factory
stories. One day the strong and beautiful figure of a young woman,
followed by a coarse and abusive father, caught her attention, and years
afterward she developed Joan Lowrie from the incident.
When the Hodgson family suffered pecuniary loss, and hoping to better
its fortunes came to America, then best known to Frances from the pages
of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' she was fifteen. A year or two later she began
to send her stories to various magazines. In 1867 the first of these
appeared. She did not however attain her great popularity until the
appearance of 'That Lass o' Lowrie's' in 1877. The thoughtfully drawn
group of characters--Derrick the engineer, Grace the young minister,
Annie the rector's daughter, and Joan the pit girl,--are dramatic
figures, working out their life problems under the eyes and the comments
of half-cynical, half-brutalized miners. There is nothing in her history
to account for Joan, or for the fact that the strength of vice in her
father becomes an equal strength of virtue in her. Abused since her
babyhood, doing the work of a man among degrading companionships, she
yet remains capable of the noblest self-abnegation. Mrs. Burnett
delights in heroes and heroines who are thus loftily at variance with
their surroundings. Her stories are romantic in spirit, offering little
to the lover of psychologic analysis. Her character-drawing is the
product of quick observation and sympathetic intuition. She does not
write "tendency" novels, but appeals to simple emotions of love, hate,
revenge, or self-immolation, which sometimes, as in the case of her last
book, 'A Lady of Quality' (1895), verge on sensationalism. In 1873 Miss
Hodgson married Dr. Burnett of Washington. Her longest novel, 'Through
One Administration,' is a story of the political and social life of the
Capital. 'Little Lord Fauntleroy' (1886) is the best known of a series
of stories nominally written for children, but intended to be read by
their elders. 'Sara Crewe,' 'Giovanni and the Other,' 'Two Little
Pilgrims,' and 'Little Saint Elizabeth' are chronicles of superlunary
children. After those before mentioned, 'Esmeralda,' 'Louisiana,' 'A
Fair Barbarian,' and 'Haworth's' are her best known stories.
AT THE PIT
From 'That Lass o' Lowrie's'
The next morning Derrick went down to the mine as usual. There were
several things he wished to do in these last two days. He had heard that
the managers had entered into negotiations with a new engineer, and he
wished the man to find no half-done work. The day was bright and frosty,
and the sharp, bracing air seemed to clear his brain. He felt more
hopeful, and less inclined to view matters darkly.
He remembered afterward that as he stepped into the cage he turned to
look at the unpicturesque little town, brightened by the winter's sun;
and that as he went down he glanced up at the sky, and marked how
intense appeared the bit of blue which was framed in by the mouth of the
shaft.
Even in the few hours that had elapsed since the meeting, the rumor of
what he had said and done had been bruited about. Some collier had heard
it and had told it to his comrades, and so it had gone from one to the
other. It had been talked over at the evening and morning meal in divers
cottages, and many an anxious hand had warmed into praise of the man who
had "had a thowt for th' men."
In the first gallery he entered he found a deputation of men awaiting
him,--a group of burly miners with picks and shovels over their
shoulders,--and the head of this deputation, a spokesman burlier and
generally gruffer than the rest, stopped him.
"Mester," he said, "we chaps 'ud loike to ha' a word wi' yo'."
"All right," was Derrick's reply, "I am ready to listen."
The rest crowded nearer, as if anxious to participate as much as
possible, and give their spokesman the support of their presence.
"It is na mich as we ha' getten to say," said the man, "but we're fain
to say it. Are na we, mates?"
"Ay, we are, lad," in chorus.
"It's about summat as we'n heerd. Theer wur a chap as towd some on us
last neet as yo'd getten th' sack fro' th' managers--or leastways as
yo'd turned th' tables on 'em an' gi'en them th' sack yo'rsen. An' we'n
heerd as it begun wi' yo're standin' up fur us chaps--axin' fur things
as wur wanted i' th' pit to save us fro' runnin' more risk than we need.
An' we heerd as yo' spoke up bold, an' argied for us an' stood to what
yo' thowt war th' reet thing, an' we set our moinds on tellin' yo' as
we'd heerd it an' talked it over, an' we'd loike to say a word o' thanks
i' common fur th' pluck yo' showed. Is na that it, mates?"
"Ay, that it is, lad!" responded the chorus.
Suddenly one of the group stepped out and threw down his pick. "An' I'm
dom'd, mates," he said, "if here is na a chap as ud loike to shake hands
wi' him."
It was the signal for the rest to follow his example. They crowded about
their champion, thrusting grimy paws into his hand, grasping it almost
enthusiastically.
"Good luck to yo', lad!" said one. "We'n noan smooth soart o' chaps, but
we'n stand by what's fair an' plucky. We shall ha' a good word fur thee
when tha hast made thy flittin'."
"I'm glad of that, lads," responded Derrick heartily, by no means
unmoved by the rough-and-ready spirit of the scene. "I only wish I had
had better luck, that's all."
A few hours later the whole of the little town was shaken to its very
foundations by something like an earthquake, accompanied by an ominous,
booming sound which brought people flocking out of their houses with
white faces. Some of them had heard it before--all knew what it meant.
From the colliers' cottages poured forth women, shrieking and
wailing,--women who bore children in their arms and had older ones
dragging at their skirts, and who made their desperate way to the pit
with one accord. From houses and workshops there rushed men, who coming
out in twos and threes joined each other, and forming a breathless
crowd, ran through the streets scarcely daring to speak a word--and all
ran toward the pit.
There were scores at its mouth in five minutes; in ten minutes there
were hundreds, and above all the clamor rose the cry of women:--
"My mester's down!"
"An' mine!"
"An' mine!"
"Four lads o' mine is down!"
"Three o' mine!"
"My little un's theer--th' youngest--nobbut ten year owd--nobbut ten
year owd, poor little chap! an' ony been at work a week!"
"Ay, wenches, God ha' mercy on us aw'--God ha' mercy!" And then more
shrieks and wails, in which the terror-stricken children joined.
It was a fearful sight. How many lay dead and dying in the noisome
darkness below, God only knew! How many lay mangled and crushed, waiting
for their death, Heaven only could tell!
In five minutes after the explosion occurred, a slight figure in
clerical garb made its way through the crowd with an air of excited
determination.
"Th' parson's feart," was the general comment.
"My men," he said, raising his voice so that all could hear, "can any of
you tell me who last saw Fergus Derrick?"
There was a brief pause, and then came a reply from a collier who stood
near.
"I coom up out o' th' pit an hour ago," he said, "I wur th' last as coom
up, an' it wur on'y chance as browt me. Derrick wur wi' his men i' th'
new part o' th' mine. I seed him as I passed through."
Grace's face became a shade or so paler, but he made no more inquiries.
His friend either lay dead below, or was waiting for his doom at that
very moment. He stepped a little farther forward.
"Unfortunately for myself, at present," he said, "I have no practical
knowledge of the nature of these accidents. Will some of you tell me how
long it will be before we can make our first effort to rescue the men
who are below?"
Did he mean to volunteer--this young whipper-snapper of a parson? And if
he did, could he know what he was doing?
"I ask you," he said, "because I wish to offer myself as a volunteer at
once; I think I am stronger than you imagine, and at least my heart will
be in the work. I have a friend below--myself," his voice altering its
tone and losing its firmness,--"a friend who is worthy the sacrifice of
ten such lives as mine, if such a sacrifice could save him."
One or two of the older and more experienced spoke up. Under an hour it
would be impossible to make the attempt--it might even be a longer time,
but in an hour they might at least make their first effort.
If such was the case, the parson said, the intervening period must be
turned to the best account. In that time much could be thought of and
done which would assist themselves and benefit the sufferers. He called
upon the strongest and most experienced, and almost without their
recognizing the prominence of his position, led them on in the work. He
even rallied the weeping women and gave them something to do. One was
sent for this necessary article and another for that. A couple of boys
were dispatched to the next village for extra medical assistance, so
that there need be no lack of attention when it was required. He took
off his broadcloth and worked with the rest of them until all the
necessary preparations were made, and it was considered possible to
descend into the mine.
When all was ready, he went to the mouth of the shaft and took his place
quietly.
It was a hazardous task they had before them. Death would stare them in
the face all through its performance. There was choking after-damp
below,--noxious vapors, to breathe which was to die; there was the
chance of crushing masses falling from the shaken galleries--and yet
these men left their companions one by one, and ranged themselves
without saying a word at the curate's side.
"My friends," said Grace, baring his head and raising a feminine
hand,--"My friends, we will say a short prayer."
It was only a few words. Then the curate spoke again.
"Ready!" he said.
But just at that moment there stepped out from the anguished crowd a
girl, whose face was set and deathly, though there was no touch of fear
upon it.
"I ax yo'," she said, "to let me go wi' yo' and do what I con. Lasses,
some on yo' speak a word for Joan Lowrie!"
There was a breathless start. The women even stopped their outcry to
look at her as she stood apart from them,--a desperate appeal in the
very quiet of her gesture as she turned to look about her for some one
to speak.
"Lasses," she said again, "some on yo' speak a word for Joan Lowrie!"
There rose a murmur among them then, and the next instant this murmur
was a cry.
"Ay," they answered, "we con aw speak fur yo'. Let her go, lads! She's
worth two o' th' best on yo'. Nowt fears her. Ay, she mun go, if she
will, mun Joan Lowrie! Go, Joan lass, and we'n not forget thee!"
But the men demurred. The finer instinct of some of them shrank from
giving a woman a place in such a perilous undertaking--the coarser
element in others rebelled against it.
"We'n ha' no wenches," these said, surlily.
Grace stepped forward. He went to Joan Lowrie and touched her gently on
the shoulder.
"We cannot think of it," he said. "It is very brave and generous,
and--God bless you!--but it cannot be. I could not think of allowing it
myself, if the rest would."
"Parson," said Joan, coolly but not roughly, "tha'd ha' hard work to
help thysen, if so be as th' lads wur willin'!"
"But," he protested, "it may b
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