THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF Kate Gordon Moore BIOGRAPHICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS. THOMAS DE QUINCEY. BOSTON AND NEW YORK : HOUGHTON. MTFFLTX AND COMPANY, tfrces, no doubt profoundly unlearned in Shakspeare's lan- guage, and thoroughly unable to do him justice, (and this we might well assume, since his great rival, Pope, irho had expressly studied Shakspeare, was, after all, K> memorably deficient in the appropriate knowledge,' yet, that of course he had a vaa-ue popular know]- 6HAKSPEA.RE. 17 edge of the mighty poet's cardinal dramas. Accident only led us into a discovery of our mistake. Twice or thrice we had observed, that if Shakspeare were quoted, that paper turned out not to be Addison's ; and at length, by express examination, we ascertained the curious fact, that Addison has never in one instance quoted or made any reference to Shakspeare. But was this, as Steevens most disingenuously pretends, to be taken as an exponent of the public feeling towards Shakspeare ? Was Addison's neglect representative of a general neglect ? If so, whence came Howe's edi- tion, Pope's, Theobald's, Sir Thomas Hanmer's, Bishop Warburton's, all upon the heels of one another ? With such facts staring him in the face, how shameless must be that critic who could, in support of such a thesis, refer to ' the author of the Taller, 1 contemporary with all these editors. The truth is, Addison was well aware of Shakspeare's hold on the popular mind ; too well aware of it. The feeble constitution of the poetic faculty, as existing in himself, forbade his sympathizing with Shakspeare ; the proportions were too colossal for his delicate vision ; and yet, as one who sought popu- larity himself, he durst not shock what perhaps he viewed as a national prejudice. Those who have hap- pened, like ourselves, to see the effect of passionate music and ' deep-inwoven harmonics ' upon the feeling of an idiot, 3 may conceive what we mean. Such music does not utterly revolt the idiot ; on the contrary, it las a strange but a horrid fascination for him ; it tlarms, irritates, disturbs, makes him profoundly un- '_appy ; and chiefly by unlocking imperfect glimpses of thoughts and slumbering instincts, which it is for his peace to have entirely obscured, because for him 2 16 SHAKSPEARE. they can be revealed only partially, and with the saa effect of throwing a baleful gleam upon his blighted condition. Do we mean, then, to compare Addison with an idiot ? Not generally, by any means. No- body can more sincerely admire him where he was a man of real genius, viz., in his delineations of character and manners, or in the exquisite delicacies of his bu mor. But assuredly Addison, as a poet, was amongst the sons of the feeble ; and between the authors of Cato and of King Lear there was a gulf never to be bridged over. 4 But Dryden, we are told, pronounced Shakspeare already in his day ' a little obsolete.' Here now we have wilful, deliberate falsehood. Obsolete, in Dry- den's meaning, does not imply that he was so with regard to his popularity, (the question then at issue,) but with regard to his diction and choice of words. To cite Dryden as a witness for any purpose against Shakspeare, Dryden, who of all men had the most ransacked wit and exhausted language in celebrating the supremacy of Shakspeare's genius, does indeed re- quire as much shamelessness in feeling as mendacity in principle. But then Lord Shaftesbury, who may be taken as half way between Dryden and Pope, (Dryden died in 1700, Pope was then twelve years old, and Lord S. wrote chiefly, we believe, between 1700 and 1710,) ' complains,' it seems, ' of his rude unpolished style, and his antiquated phrase and wit.' What if he does ? Let the whole truth be told, and then we shall see how much stress is to be laid upon such a judgment. The lecond Lord Shaftesbury, the author of the Character- sties, was the grandson of that famous political agitator SHAKSPEARE. 19 the Chancellor Shaftesbury, who passed his whole lif in storms of his own creation. The second Lord Shaftesbury was a man of crazy constitution, queruloLj from ill health, and had received an eccentric educa- tion from his eccentric grandfather. He was practised daily in talking Latin, to which afterwards he added a competent study of the Greek ; and finally he became unusually learned for his rank, but the most absolute and undistinguished pedant that perhaps literature has to show. He sneers continually at the regular built academic pedant ; but he himself, though no academic, was essentially the very impersonation of pedantry. No thought however beautiful, no image however mag- nificent, could conciliate his praise as long as it was clothed *in English; but present him with the most trivial commonplaces in Greek, and he unaffectedly fancied them divine ; mistaking the pleasurable sense of his own power in a difficult and rare accomplish- ment for some peculiar force or beauty in the passage. Such was the outline of his literary taste. And was it upon Shakspeare only, or upon him chiefly, that he lavished his pedantry ? Far from it. He attacked Milton with no less fervor ; he attacked Dryden with a thousand times more. Jeremy Taylor he quoted only to ridicule ; and even Locke, the confidential friend of his grandfather, he never alludes to without a sneer. As to Shakspeare, so far from Lord Shaftesbury'g censures arguing his deficient reputation, the very fact of his noticing him at all proves his enormous popu- larity ; for upon system he noticed those only who mled the public taste. The insipidity of his objections *o Shakspeare may be judged from this, that he com- ments in a spirit of absolute puerility upon the Dame 20 SHAKSPEARE. Desdemona, as though intentionally formed from the 3reek word for superstition. In fact, he had evidently read little beyond the list of names in Shakspeare ; yet there is proof enough that the irresistible beauty of what little he had read was too much for all his pedan- try, and startled him exceedingly ; for ever afterwards he speaks of Shakspeare as one who, with a little aid from Grecian sources, really had something great and promising about him. As to modern authors, neither this Lord Shaftesbury nor Addis on read any thing for the latter years of their lives but Bayle's Dictionary. And most of the little scintillations of erudition, which may be found in the notes to the Characteristics, and in the Essays of Addison, are derived, almost without exception, and uniformly without acknowledgment, from Bayle. 5 Finally, with regard to the sweeping assertion, that ' for nearly a hundred years after his death Shakspeare was almost entirely neglected,' we shall meet this scan- dalous falsehood, by a rapid view of his fortunes during the century in question. The tradition has always been, that Shakspeare was honored by the especial notice of Queen Elizabeth, as well as by that of James I. At one time we were disposed to question the truth of this tradition ; but that was for want of having read attentively the lines of Ben Jonson to the memory of Shakspeare, those generous lines which have so ab- surdly been taxed with faint praise. Jonson couid make no mistake on this point ; he, as one of Shak- speare's familiar companions, must have witnessed at the very time, and accompanied with friendly sym pathy, every motion of royal favor towards Shakspeare Vow he, in wcrds which leave no loom for doubt, xclaims. 8HAKSPEARE. 21 Sweet swan of Avon, what a sight it were To see thee in our waters yet appear; And make those nights upon the banks of Thames, That to did take Eliza and our Jamet.' These princes, then, were taken, were fascinated, with some of Shakspeare's dramas. In Elizabeth the approbation would probably be sincere. In James we can readily suppose it to have been assumed ; for he was a pedant in a different sense from Lord Shaftes- bury ; not from undervaluing modern poetry, but from caring little or nothing for any poetry, although he wrote about its mechanic rules. Still the royal impri- matur would be influential and serviceable no less when offered hypocritically than in full sincerity. Next let us consider at the very moment of Shakspeare's death, who were the leaders of the British youth, the principes juventutis, in the two fields, equally impor- tant to a great poet's fame, of rank and of genius. The Prince of Wales and John Milton ; the first being then about sixteen years old, the other about eight. Now these two great powers, as we may call them, these presiding stars over all that was English in thought and action, were both impassioned admirers of Shakspeare. Each of them counts for many" thou- sands. The Prince of Wales 6 had learned to appre- ciate Shakspeare, not originally from reading him, but from witnessing the court representations of his plays at Whitehall. Afterwards we know that he made Shakspeare his closet companion, for he was re- proached with doing so by Milton. And we know also, from the just criticism pronounced upon the char- acter a*d diction of Caliban by one of Charles's con- identiai counsellors, Lord Falkland, that the king't 22 SHAKSPEA.KE. admiration of Shakspeare had impressed a determina- tion upon the court reading. As to Milton, by double prejudices, puritanical and classical, his mind had been preoccupied against the full impressions of Shakspeare. Aud we know that there is such a thing as keeping the sympathies of love and admiration in a dormant state, or state of abeyance ; an effort of self-conquest realized in more cases than one by the ancient fathers, botk Greek and Latin, with regard to the profane classics. Intellectually they admired, and would not belie their admiration ; but they did not give their hearts cor dially, they did not abandon themselves to their natural impulses. They averted their eyes and weaned their attention from the dazzling object. Such, probably, was Milton's state of feeling towards Shakspeare after 1642, when the theatres were suppressed, and the fanatical fervor in its noontide heat. Yet even then he did not belie his reverence intellectually for Shak- speare : and in his younger days we know that he had spoken more enthusiastically of Shakspeare, than he ever did again of any uninspired author. Not only did he address a sonnet to his memory, in which he declares that kings would wish to die, if by dying they could obtain such a monument in the hearts of men ; but he also speaks of him in his 11 Penseroso, as the tutelary genius of the English stage. In this trans- mission of the torch (iafinado^oQia) Dryden succeeds to Milton ; he was born nearly thirty years later ; about thirty years they were contemporaries ; and by thirty years, or nearly, Dryden survived his great leader. Dryden, in fact, lived out the seventeenth century. AJid we have now arrived within nine years of the era, when the critical editions started in hot succession U SHAKSPAKE. 23 one another. The names we have mentioned were the great influential names of the century. But of inferior homage there was no end. How came Betterton the actor, how came Davenant, how came Rowe, or Pope, by their intense (if not always sound) admiration for Shakspeare, unless they had found it fuming upwards like incense to the pagan deities in ancient times, from altars erected at every turning upon all the paths of men? But it is objected that inferior dramatists were some- times preferred to Shakspeare ; and again that vile travesties of Shakspeare were preferred to the authen- tic dramas. As to the first argument, let it be remem- bered, that if the saints in the chapel are always in the same honor, because there men are simply discharging a duty, which once due will be due forever ; the saints of the theatre, on the other hand, must bend to the local genius, and to the very reasons for having a theatre at all. Men go thither for amusement. This is the paramount purpose, and even acknowledged merit or absolute superiority must give way to it. Does a man at Paris expect to see Moliere reproduced in pro- portion to his admitted precedency in the French drama ? On the contrary, that very precedency argues such a familiarization with his works, that those who are in quest of relation will reasonably prefer any recent drama to that which, having lost all its novelty, has lost much of its excitement. "We speak of ordi- nary minds ; but in cases of public entertainments, deriving part of their powsr from scenery and stage pomp, novelty is for all minds an essential condition of attraction. Moreover, in some departments of the comic, Beaumont and Fletcher, when writing in com- 24 SHAKSPEARE. bination, really had a freedom and breadth of manner which excels the comedy of Shakspeare. As to the altered Shakspeare as taking precedency of the genu- ine Shakspeare, no argument can be so frivolous. The public were never allowed a choice ; the great majority of an audience even now cannot be expected to carry the real Shakspeare in their mind, so as to pursue a comparison between that and the alteration. Their comparisons must be exclusively amongst what they have opportunities of seeing; that is, between the various pieces presented to them by the managers of theatres. Further than this, it is impossible for them to extend their office of judging and collating ; and the degenerate taste which substituted the caprices of Davenant, the rants of Dryden, or the filth of Tate, for the jewelry of Shakspeare, cannot with any justice be charged upon the public, not one in a thousand of whom was furnished with any means of comparing, but exclusively upon those (viz., theatrical managers,) who had the very amplest. Yet even in excuse for them much may be said. The very length of some plays compelled them to make alterations. The best of Shakspeare's dramas, King Lear, is the least fitted for representation; and even for the vilest alteration, it ought in candor to be considered that possession is nine points of the law. He who would not have intro- duced, was often obliged to retain. Finally, it is urged that the small number of editions through which Shakspeare passed in the seventeenth century, furnishes a separate argument, and a conclu- sive one against his popularity. We answer, that, considering the bulk of his plays collectively, the editions were not few. Compared with any knowi 8HAKSPEAKE. 2ft case, the copies sold of Shakspeare were quite as many s could be expected under the circumstances. Ten or fifteen times as much consideration went to the purchase of one great folio like Shakspeare, as would attend the purchase of a little volume like Waller or Donne. Without reviews, or newspapers, or adver- tisements, to diffuse the knowledge of books, the progress of literature was necessarily slow, and its ex- pansion narrow. But this is a topic which has already been treated unfairly, not with regard to Shakspeare only, but to Milton, as well as many others. The truth is, we have not facts enough to guide us ; for the number of editions often tells nothing accurately as to the number of copies. With respect to Shakspeare it is certain, that, had his masterpieces been gathered into small volumes, Shakspeare would have had a most extensive sale. As it was, there can be no doubt, that from his own generation, throughout the seventeenth century, and until the eighteenth began to accommo- date, not any greater popularity in him, but a greater taste for reading in the public, his fame never ceased to be viewed as a national trophy of honor ; and the most illustrious men of the seventeenth century were no whit less fervent in their admiration than those of the eighteenth and the nineteenth, either as respected its strength and sincerity, or as respected its open pro- jession, 7 It is therefore a false notion, that the general sym- athy with the merits of Shakspeare ever beat with a 'anguid or intermitting pulse. Undoubtedly, in times when the functions of critical journals and of news- papers were not at hand to diffuse or to strengthen the .mpressions which emanated from the capital, all opin- 20 SHAKSPEA&K. ions mast have travelled slowly nto the prjvinces. But even then, whilst the perfect organs of communi- cation were wanting, indirect substitutes were supplied by the necessities of the times, or by the instincts of political zeal. Two channels especially lay open be- tween the great central organ of the national mind, and the remotest provinces. Parliaments were occa- sionally summoned, (for the judges' circuits were too brief to produce much effect,) and during their longest suspensions, the nobility, with large retinues, continu- ally resorted to the court. But an intercourse more constant and more comprehensive was maintained through the agency of the two universities. Already, in the time of James I., the growing importance of the gentry, and the consequent birth of a new interest in political questions, had begun to express itself at Oxford, and still more so at Cambridge. Academic persons stationed themselves as sentinels at London, for the purpose of watching the court and the course of public affairs. These persons wrote letters, like those of the celebrated Joseph Mede, which we find in Ellis's Historical Collections, reporting to their fellow- collegians all the novelties of public life as they arose, or personally carried down such reports, and thua conducted the general feelings at the centre into lesser centres, from which again they were diffused into the ten thousand parishes of England ; for, (witn a very few exceptions in favor of poor benefices, Welsh or Cumbrian,) every parish priest must unavoidably have pent his three years at one or other of the English universities. And by this mode of diffusion it is, thai *re can explain the strength with which Shakspeare' Noughts and diction impressed themselves from a very SHAKSPEARE. 27 arly period upon the national literatuiv and even more generally upon the national thinking and conver- sation. 8 The question, therefore, revolves upon us in three- fold difficulty How, having stepped thus prema- turely into this inheritance of fame, leaping, as it were, thus abruptly into the favor alike of princes and the enemies of princes, had it become possible that in his native place, (honored still more in the final testimonies of his preference when founding a family mansion,) such a man's history, and the personal recollections which cling so aifectionately to the great intellectual potentates who have recommended them- selves by gracious manners, could so soon and so utterly have been obliterated ? Malone, with childish irreflection, ascribes the loss of such memorials to the want of enthusiasm in his admirers. Local researches into private history had not then commenced. Such a taste, often petty enough in its management, was the growth of after ges. Else how came Spenser's life and fortunes to be so utterly overwhelmed in oblivion ? No poet of a high order could be more popular. The answer we believe to be this : Twenty-six years after Shakspeare's death commenced the great parlia- mentary war. This it was, and the local feuds arising to divide family from family, brother from brother, upon which we must charge the extinction of traditions and memorials, doubtless abundant up to that era. The parliamentary contest it will be said, did not last above three years ; the king's standard having been first raised at Nottingham in August, 1642, and the Battle of Naseby (which ternuaateu 1he open warfare) 28 SHAKSPEARE. having been fought in June, 1645. Or even if we extend its duration to the surrender of the last garri- son, that war terminated in the spring of 1646. And the brief explosions of insurrection or of Scottish in- vasion, which occurred on subsequent occasions, were *11 locally confined, and none came near to Warwick- shire, except the battle of Worcester, more than five years after. This is true; but a short war will do much to efface recent and merely personal memorials. And the following circumstances of the war were even more important than the general fact. First of all, the very mansion founded by Shak- speare became the military head-quarters for the queen, in 1644, when marching from the eastern coast of England to join the king in Oxford; and one such special visitation would be likely to do more serious mischief in the way of extinction, than many years of general warfare. Secondly, as a fact, perhaps, equally important, Birmingham, the chief town of Warwick- shire, and the adjacent district, the seat of our hard- ware manufactures, was the very focus of disaffection towards the royal cause. Not only, therefore, would this whole region suffer more from internal and spon- taneous agitation, but it would be the more frequently traversed vindictively from without, and harassed by flying parties from Oxford, or others of the king'g garrisons. Thirdly, even apart from the political aspects of Warwickshire, this county happens to be the central one of England, as regards the roads be- tween the north and south ; and Birmingham has lung been the great central axis, 9 in which all the radii from ihe four angles of England proper meet and intersect Mere accident, therefore, of local position, much mor 8HAKSPEARE. 29 rhen united with that avowed inveteracy of malignant !eeling, which was bitter enough to rouse a re-action of bitterness in the raind of Lord Clarendon, would go far to account for -;he wreck of many memorials rela- ting to Shakspeare, as well as for the subversion of that quiet and security for humble life, in whbh the traditional memory finds its best nidus. Thus we ob- tain one solution, and perhaps the main one, of the otherwise mysterious oblivion which had swept away all traces of the mighty poet, by the time when those quiet days revolved upon England, in which again the solitary agent of learned research might roam in security from house to house, gleaning those personal remembrances which, even in the fury of civil strife, might long have lingered by the chimney corner. But the fierce furnace of war had probably, by its local ravages, scorched this field of natural tradition, and thinned the gleaner's inheritance by three parts out of four. This, we repeat, may be one part of the solution to this difficult problem. And if another is still demanded, possibly it may be found in the fact, hostile to the perfect consecration of Shakspeare's memory, that, after all, he was a player. Many a coarse-minded country gentleman, or village pastor, who would have held his town glorified by the distinction of having sent forth a great judge or an eminent bishop, might disdain to cherish the personal recollections which surrounded one whom custom regarded as little above a mountebank, and the illiberal .aw as a vagabond. The same degrading appreciation ittached both to the actor in plays and to their author. The contemptuous appellation of ' play-book,' served at randily to degrade the nighty volume which con- 30 SHAKSPEARB. tained Lear and Hamlet, as that of ' play-actor,' 01 ' player- man,' has always served with the illiberal OT the fanatical to dishonor the persons of Roscius or of Garrick, of Talma or of Siddons. Nobody, indeed, was better aware of this than the noble-minded Shak- speare ; and feelingly he has breathed forth in his sonnets this conscious oppression under which he lay of public opinion, unfavorable by a double title to his own pretensions ; for, being both dramatic author and dramatic performer, he found himself heir to a two- fold opprobrium, and at an era of English society when the weight of that opprobrium was heaviest. In reality, there was at this period a collision of forces acting in opposite directions upon the estimation of the stage and scenical art, and therefore of all the ministers in its equipage. Puritanism frowned upon these pur- suits, as ruinous to public morals ; on the other hand, loyalty could not but tolerate what was patronized by the sovereign ; and it happened that Elizabeth, James, and Charles I., were all alike lovers and promoters of theatrical amusements, which were indeed more indis- pensable to the relief of court ceremony, and the monotony of aulic pomp, than in any other region of life. This royal support, and the consciousness that any brilliant success in these arts implied an unusual share of natural endowments, did something in mitiga- tion of a scorn which must else have been intolerable to all generous natures. But whatever prejudice might thus operate against l,ie perfect sanctity of Shakspeare's posthumous repu- tation, it is certain that the splendor of his worldly lucccss must have done much to obliterate that effect ; iis admirable colloquial talents a good deal, and hii SHAKSPEARE. 31 gracious affability still more. The wonder, therefore, will still remain, that Better ton, in less than a century from his death, should have been able to glean so little. And for the solution of this wonder, we must throw ourselves chiefly upon the explanations we have made as to the parliamentary war, and the local ravages of its progress in the very district, of the very town, and the very house. If further arguments are still wanted to explain this mysterious abolition, we may refer the reader to the following succession of disastrous events, by which it should seem that a perfect malice of misfortune pur- sued the vestiges of the mighty poet's steps. In 1613, the Globe theatre, with which he had been so long connected, was burned to the ground. Soon after- wards a great fire occurred in Stratford ; and next, (without counting upon the fire of London ; just fifty years after his death, which, howeVer, would consume many an important record from periods far more re- mote,) the house of Ben Jonson, in which probably, as Mr. Campbell suggests, might be parts of his corres- pondence, was also burned. Finally, there was an old tradition that Lady Barnard, the sole grand-daughter of Shakspeare, had carried off many of his papers fro*! Stratford, and these papers have never since been traced. In many of the elder lives it has been asserted, tha* John Shakspeare, the father of the poet, was a butcher and in others that he was a woolstapler It is now settled beyond dispute that he was a glover. This waa his professed occupation in Stratford, though it is cer- tain that, with this leading trade, from which he took tig denomination, he combined some collateral pur- 32 SHAKSPEARE. suits ; and it is possible enough that, as openings offered, he may have meddled with many. In that age, in a provincial town, nothing like the exquisite subdivision of labor was attempted which we now see realized in the great cities of Christendom. And one trade is often found to play into another with so much reciprocal advantage, that even in our own days we do not much wonder at an enterprising man, in coun- try places, who combines several in his own person. Accordingly, John Shakspeare is known to have united with his town calling the rural and miscellaneous oc- cupations of a farmer. Meantime his avowed business stood upon a very different footing from the same trade as it is exercised in modern times. Gloves were in that age an article of dress more costly by mucn, and more elaborately decorated, than in our own. They were a customary present from some cities to the judges of assize, and to other official persons ; a custom of ancient standing, and in some places, we believe, still subsisting ; and in such cases it is reasonable to suppose that the glovet must originally have been more valuable than the trivial modern article of the same name. So also, perhaps, in their origin, of the gloves given at funerals. In reality, whenever the simplicity of an age makes it difficult to renew the parts of a wardrobe, except in capital towns of difficult access, prudence suggests that such wares should be manufactured of more durable materials ; and ; being so, they become obviously sus- ceptible of more lavish ornament. But it will not follow, from this essential difference in the gloves of Shakspeare's age, that the glover's occupation wai more lucrative. Doubtless he sold more costly glovea SHAKSPEARE 33 ind upon each pair had a larger profit, but for that rery reason he sold fewer. Two or three gentlemen 1 of worship ' in the neighborhood might occasionally require a pair of gloves, but it is very doubtful whether any inhabitant of Stratford would ever call for so mere a luxury. The practical result, at all events, of John Shak speare's various pursuits, does not appear permanentl) to have met the demands of his establishment, and in his maturer years there are indications still surviv- ing that he was under a cloud of embarrassment. He certainly lost at one time his social position in the town of Stratford ; but there is a strong presumption, in ow construction of the case, that he finally retrieved it ; and for this retrieval of a station, which he had forfeited by personal misfortunes or neglect, he was altogether indebted to the filial piety of his immortal son. Meantime the earlier years of the elder Shakspeare wore the aspect of rising prosperity, however unsound might be the basis on which it rested. There can be little doubt that "William Shakspeare, from his birth up to his tenth or perhaps his eleventh year, lived in care- icss plenty, and saw nothing in his father's house but that style of liberal housekeeping, which has ever dis- tinguished the upper yeomanry and the rural gentry jf England. Probable enough it is, that the resources for meeting this liberality were not strictly commen- surate with the family income, but were sometimes Allowed to entrench, by means of loans or mortgages, upon capital funds. The stress upon the family finaa- "ss was perhaps al times severe; tnd that it was borne *t all, must be Imputed to the large and even splendid 3 14 SHAKSPEAIE portion which John Shakspeare received with hia wife. This lady, for such she really was in an eminent sense, hy birth as well as by connections, bore the beautiful name of Mary Arden, a name derived from the ancient forest district 10 of the country ; and doubt- less she merits a more elaborate notice than our slender materials will furnish. To have been the mother of Shakspeare, how august a title to the reverence of infinite generations and of centuries beyond the vision of prophecy. A plausible hypothesis has been started in modern times, that the facial structure, and that the intellectual conformation, may be deduced more fre- quently from the corresponding characteristics in the mother than in the father. It is certain that no very great man has ever existed, but that his greatness has been rehearsed and predicted in one or other of his parents. And it cannot be denied that in the most eminent men, where we have had the means of pursu- ing the investigation, the mother has more frequently been repeated and reproduced than the father. We nave known cases where the mother has furnished all he intellect, and the father all the moral sensibility, upon which assumption, the wonder ceases that Cicero, Lord Chesterfield, and other brilliant men, who took the utmost pains with their sons, should have failed so conspicuously ; for possibly the mothers had been women of excessive and even exemplary stupidity. In the cise of Shakspeare, each parent, if we had any means of recovering their characteristics, could not fail to fvrnish a etudy of the most profound interest ; and wdtn regard to his mother in particular, if the moderr typo thesis be true, and if we are indeed to deduct SHAKSFEABE. 35 from her the stupendous intellect of her son, in that case she must have been a benefactress to her hu- band's family, beyond the promises of fairy land or the dreams of romance ; for it is certain that to her chiefly this family was also indebted for their worldly comfort. Mary Arden was the youngest daughter and the heiress of Robert Arden, of Wilmecote, Esq., in the county of Warwick. The family of Arden was even then of great antiquity. About one century and a quarter before the birth of William Shakspeare, a person bearing the same name as his maternal grand- father had been returned by the commissioners in their list of the Warwickshire gentry ; he was there styled Robert Arden, Esq., of Bromich. This was in 1433, or the 12th year of Henry VI. In Henry VII. 's reign, the Arden's received a grant of lands from the crown ; and in 1568, four years after the birth of William Shakspeare, Edward Arden, of the same family, was sheriff of the county. Mary Arden was, therefore, a young lady of excellent descent and connections, and an heiress of considerable wealth. She brought to her husband, as her marriage portion, the landed estate of Asbies, which, upon any just valuation, must be con- sidered as a handsome dowry for a woman of her station. As this point has been contested, and as it goes a great way towards determining the exact social pot LtioR of the poet's parents, let us be excused foi ftifl ng it a little more narrowly than might else seem *rai ranted by the proportions of our present life. Every question which it can be reasonable to raise at ill, it must be reasonable to treat with at least so much of minute research, as may justify the conclusion! which it is made to support. 36 SHAKSPEARE. The estate of Asbies contained fifty acres of arable land, six of meadow, and a right of commonage. What may we assume to have been the value of ita fee-simple ? Malone, who allows the total fortune of Mary Arden to have been 110 13s. 4d., is sure that the value of Asbies could not have been more than one hundred pounds. But why ? Because, says he, the ' average ' rent of land at that time was no more than three shillings per acre. This we deny ; but upon that assumption, the total yearly rent of fifty-six acres would be exactly eight guineas. 11 And therefore, in assigning the value of Asbies at one hundred pounds, it appears that Malone must have estimated the land at no more than twelve years' purchase, which would carry the value to 100 16s. ' Even at this estimate,' as the latest annotator 12 on this subject justly ob- serves, * Mary Arden's portion was a larger one than was usually given to a landed gentleman's daughter.' But this writer objects to Malone' s principle of valua- tion. ' We find,' says he, ' that John Shakspeare also farmed the meadow of Tugton, containing sixteen acres, at the Tate of eleven shillings per acre. Now what proof has Mr. Malone adduced, that the acres of Asbies were not as valuable as those of Tugton ? And if they were so, the former estate must have been worth between three and four hundred pounds.' In the main drift of his objections we concur with Mr. Campbell. But as they are liable to some criticism, let us clear the ground of all plausible cavils, and then ee what will be the result. Malone, had he been tlive, would probably have answered that Tugton WEJ t farm especially privileged by nature ; and that L iny man contended for so unusual a rent as elevet 8HAKSPEARE. 37 shillings an acre for land not known to him, the onut probandi would lie upon him. Be it so ; eleven shil- lings is certainly above the ordinary level of rent, but three shillings is below it. Wo contend, that foi tolerably good land, situated advantageously, that is, with a ready access to good markets and good fairs, such as those of Coventry, Birmingham, Gloucester, Worcester, Shrewsbury, &c., one noble might be assumed as the annual rent ; and that in such situa- tions twenty years' purchase was not a valuation, even in Elizabeth's reign, very unusual. Let us, however, assume the rent at only five shillings, and land at sixteen years' purchase. Upon this basis, the tent would be 14, and the value of the fee-simple 224. Now, if it were required to equate that sum with its present value, a very operose 13 calculation might be requisite. But contenting ourselves with the gross method of making such equations between 1560 and the current century, that is, multiplying by five, we shall find the capital value of the estate to be eleven hundred and twenty pounds, whilst the annual rent would be exactly seventy. But if the estate had been sold, and the purchase-money lent upon mortgage, (the only safe mode of investing money at that time,) the annual interest would have reached 28, equal to 140 of modern money; for mortgages in Elizabeth's uge readily produced ten per cent. A woman who should bring at this day an annual income of 140 to a provincial tradesman, living in a ort of rus in urbe, according to the simple fashions of rustic life, would assuredly be considered as an excel- ent match. And there can be little doubt that Mary Arden's dowry it was which, for some ten or a dozen S8 SHAKSPEARE. years succeeding to his marriage, raised her husband to so much social consideration in Stratford. In 1550 John Shakspeare is supposed to have first settled in Stratford, having migrated from some other part of Warwickshire. In 1557 he married Mary Arden; in 1565, the year subsequent to the birth of his son William, his third child, he was elected coe of the aldermen; and in the year 1568 he became first mag- istrate of the town, by the title of high bailiff". This year we may assume to have been that in which the prosperity of this family reached its zenith ; for in this year it was, over and above the presumptions furnished by his civic honors, that he obtained a grant of arms from Clarencieux of the Heralds' College. On this occasion he declared himself worth five hundred pounds derived from his ancestors. And we really cannot understand the right hy which critics, living nearly three centuries from his time, undertake to know his affairs better than himself, and to tax him with either inaccuracy or falsehood. No man would be at leisure to court heraldic honors, when he kne\v himself to be embarrassed, or apprehended that he soon might be so. A man whose anxieties had been fixed at all upon his daily livelihood would, by this chase after the aerial honors of heraldry, have made himself a butt for ridicule, such as no fortitude could enable him to sustain. In 1568, therefore, when his son William would be moving through his fifth year, John Shakspeare, (now honored by the designation of Master,) would be found *t times in the society of the neighboring gentry. Ten years in advance of this period he was already in lifuculties. But there is no proof that these difficultie SHAKSPEARE. 39 nad then reached a point of degradation, or of memo- rable distress. The sole positive indications of hit decaying condition are, that in 1578 he received an exemption from the small weekly assessment levied upon the aldermen of Stratford for the relief of the poor ; and that in the following year, 1579, he is found enrolled amongst the defaulters in the payment of taxes. The latter fact undoubtedly goes to prove that, like every man who is falling back in the world, he was occasionally in arrears. Paying taxes is not like the honors awarded or the possessions regulated by the Clarencieux ; no man is ambitious of precedency there ; and if a laggard pace in that duty is to be received as evidence of pauperism, nine tenths of the English people might occasionally be classed as pau- pers. With respect to his liberation from the weekly assessment, that may bear a construction different from the one which it has received. This payment, which could never have been regarded as a burden, not amounting to five pounds annually of our present money, may have been held up as an exponent of wealth and consideration ; and John Shakspeare may have been required to resign it as an honorable distinc- tion, not suitable to the circumstances of an embar- rassed man. Finally, the fact of his being indebted to Robert Sadler, a baker, in the sum of five pounds, and his being under the necessity of bringing a friend as security for the payment, proves nothing at all. There is not a town in Europe, in which opulent men cannot be found that are backward in the payment of their debts. And the probability is, that Master Sadler acted like most people who, when they sup a man tc be going down in the world, feel their AO SHAKSPKARE. respect for him sensibly decaying, and think it wise to trample him under foot, provided only in that act of trampling they can squeeze out of him their own indi- vidual debt. Like that terrific chorus in Spohr's oratorio of St. Paul, ' Stone him to death' is the cry of the selfish and the illiberal amongst creditors, alike towards the just and the unjust amongst debtors. It was the wise and beautiful prayer of Agar, ' Give me neither poverty nor riches;' and, doubtless, for quiet, for peace, and the latentis semita vitce, that is the happiest dispensation. But, perhaps, with a view to a school of discipline and of moral fortitude, it might be a more salutary prayer, ' Give me riches and pov- erty, and afterwards neither.' For the transitorial state between riches and poverty will teach a lesson both as to the baseness and the goodness of human nature, and will impress that lesson with a searching force, such as no borrowed experience ever can ap- proach. Most probable it is that Shakspeare drew some of his powerful scenes in the Timon of Athens, those which exhibit the vileness of ingratitude and the impassioned frenzy of misanthropy, from his personal recollections connected with the case of his own father. Possibly, though a cloud of two hundred and seventy years now veils it, this very Master Sadler, who was BO urgent for his five pounds, and who so little appre- hended that he should be called over the coals for it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, may have sate for the portrait of that Lucullus who says of Timon : ' Alas, good lord ! a noble gentleman tis, if he would not keep so good a house. Many a time anio,) must in every age ir&n perennial streams of intellectual life, we feel that the little accidents of birth and social conditio 44 SHAKSFEAHE. are so unspeakably below the grandeur of the theme are so irrelevant and disproportioned to the real interest at issue, so incommensurable with any of its relations, that a biographer of Shakspeare at once denounces himself as below his subject, if he can entertain such 8 question as seriously affecting the glory of the poet In some legends of saints, we find that they were born with a lambent circle or golden aureola about their Heads. This angelic coronet shed light alike upon the chambers of a cottage or a palace, upon the gloomy limits of a dungeon, or the vast expansion of a cathedral ; but the cottage, the palace, the dungeon, the cathedral, were all equally incapable of adding one ray of color or one pencil of light to the supernatural halo. Having, therefore, thus pointedly guarded ourselves from misconstruction, and consenting to entertain the question as one in which we, the worshippers of Shakspeare, have an interest of curiosity, but in which he, the object of our worship, has no interest of glory, we proceed to state what appears to us the re- sult of the scanty facts surviving when collated witl each other. By his mother's side, Shakspeare was an authentic gentleman. By his father's he would have stood in t more dubious position : but the effect of municipal honors to raise and illustrate an equivocal rank, has always been acknowledged under the popular tenden- cies cf our English political system. From the sort ol lead, therefore, which John Shakspeare took at one time amongst his fellow-townsmen, and fiom his rank of first magistrate, we may presume that, about the rear 1568, he had placed himself at the head of the SHAKSPEARE. 45 Stratford community. Afterwards he continued for lome years to descend from this altitude ; and the question is, at what point this gradual degradation may oe supposed to have settled. Now we shall avow it OH our opinion, that the composition of society in Stratford was such that, even had the Shakspeare family main- tained their superiority, the main body of their daily associates must still have been found amongst persons below the rank of gentry. The poet must inevitably have mixed chiefly with mechanics and humble trades- men, for such people composed perhaps the total community. But had there even been a gentry in Stratford, since they would have marked the distinc- tions of their rank chiefly by greater reserve of man- ners, it is probable that, after all, Shakspeare, with his enormity of delight in exhibitions of human nature, would have mostly cultivated that class of society in which the feelings are more elementary and simple, in which the thoughts speak a plainer language, and in which the restraints of factitious or conventional de- corum are exchanged for the restraints of mere sexual decency. It is a noticeable fact to all who have looked upon human life with an eye of strict attention, that the abstract image of womanhood, in its loveliness, its delicacy, and its modesty, nowhere makes itself more impressive or more advantageously felt than in the humblest cottages, because it is there brought into im- mediate juxtaposition with the grossness of manners, and the careless license of language incident to the fathers and brothers of the house. And this is more especially true in a nation of unaffected sexual gal- ,antry, 14 such as the English and the Gothic races in general ; since, under the immunity which their women 16 SHAK.SPEAKK. enjoy from all servile labors of a coarse or out-of-doors order, by as much, lower as they descend in the scale of rank, by so much more df* they benefit under the force of contrast with the men of their own level. A young man of that class, however noble in appearance, is somewhat degraded in the eyes of women, by the necessity which his indigence imposes of working under a master ; but a beautiful young woman, in the very poorest family, unless she enters upon a life of domestic servitude, (in which case her labors are light, suited to her sex, and withdrawn from the publi ? eye,) so long in fact as she stays under her father's roof, is as per- fectly her own mistress and sui juris as the daughter of an earl. This personal dignity, brought into stronger relief by the mercenary employments of her male con- nections, and the feminine gentleness of her voice and manners, exhibited under the same advantages of con- trast, oftentimes combine to make a young cottage beauty as fascinating an object as any woman of any station. Hence we may in part account for the great event of Shakspeare's early manhood, his premature marriage. It has always been known, or at least traditionally received for a fact, that Shakspeare had married whilst yet a boy, and that his wife was unaccountably older than himself. In the very earliest biographical sketch of the poet, compiled by Howe, from materials col- lected by Betterton, the actor, it was stated, (and tha* statement is now ascertained to have been correct,) tht he had married Anne Hathaway, ' the daughter of substantial yeoman.' Further than this nothing was known. But in September, 1836, was published a ?ery remarkable document, which gives the assurance f law to the time and fact of this event, yet stik SHAKSPEARE. 47 inless collated with another record, does nothing to essen the mystery which had previously surrounded its circumstances. This document consists of two parts ; the first, and principal, according to the logic of the case, though second according to the arrangement, being a license for the marriage of William Shakspeare with Anne Hathaway, under the condition ' of once asking of the bannes of matrimony,' that is, in effect, dispensing with two out of the three customary ask- ings ; the second or subordinate part of the document being a bond entered into by two sureties, viz. : Fulke Sandells and John Rychardson, both described an agricolcB or yeomen, and both marksmen, (that is, incapable of writing, and ' therefore subscribing by means of marks,') for the payment of forty pounds sterling, in the event of Shakspeare, yet a minor, and incapable of binding himself, failing to fulfil the con- ditions of the license. In the bond, drawn up in Latin, there is no mention of Shakspeare's name ; but in the license, which is altogether English, his name, of course, stands foremost ; and, as it may gratify the reader to see the very words and orthography of the original, we here extract the operative part of this document, prefacing only that the license is attached by way of explanation to the bond. ' The condition wf this obligation is suche, that if hereafter there shall not appere any lawfull lett or impediment, by reason of any precontract, &c., but that Willm. Shagspere, one thone ptie,' [on the one party,] ' and Anne Hathwey of Stratford, in the diocess of Worcester, maiden, may lawfully solemnize matrimony together ; and in the tame afterwards remaine and continew like man and vifFe. And, moreover, if the said Willm. Shagspere 18 SHA.KSPEARE. do not proceed to solemnization of mariadg with tb| said Anne Hathwey, without the consent of hir frinds then the said obligation ' [viz., to pay forty pounds' to be voyd and of none effect, or els to stand & abids in full force and vertue.' What are we to think of this document ? Trepida- tion and anxiety are written upon its face. The parties are not to be married by a special license ; not even by an ordinary license ; in that case no proclama- tion of banns, no public asking at all, would have been requisite. Economical scruples are consulted ; and yet the regular movement of the marriage ' through the bell-ropes ' 15 is disturbed. Economy, which re- tards the marriage, is here evidently in collision with some opposite principle which precipitates it. How is all this to be explained ? Much light is afforded by the date when illustrated by another document. The bond Dears date on the 28th day of November, in the 25th year of our lady the queen, that is, in 1582. Now the baptism of Shakspeare's eldest child, Susanna, is registered on the 26th of May in the year following. Suppose, therefore, that his marriage was solemnized on the 1st day of December; it was barely possible that it could be earlier, considering that the sureties, drinking, perhaps, at Worcester throughout the 28th of November, would require the 29th, in so dreary a season, for their return to Stratford ; after which some ^reparation might be requisite to the bride, since the marriage was not celebrated at Stratford. Next sup. pose the birth of Miss Susanna to have occurred, like her father's, two days before her baptism, viz., on the 24th of May. From December the 1st to May the 24th, both days inclusively , are one hundred ana SHAKSPEAEE. 49 seventy-five days ; which, divided by seven, give* precisely twenty-five weeks, that is to say, six months short by one week. Oh, fie, Miss Susanna, you came rather before you were wanted. Mr. Campbell's ccmment upon the affair is, that ' if this was the case,' viz., if the baptism were really solemnized on the 26th of May, ' the poet's first child would appear to have been born only six months and eleven days after the bond was entered into.' And he then concludes that, on this assumption, ' Miss Susanna Shakspeare came into the world a little pre- maturely.' But this is to doubt where there never was any ground for doubting ; the baptism was certainly on the 26th of May ; and, in the next place, the calcula- tion of six months and eleven days is sustained by substituting lunar months for calendar, and then only by supposing the marriage to have been celebrated on the very day of subscribing the bond in Worcester, and the baptism to have been coincident with the birth ; of which suppositions the latter is improbable, and the former, considering the situation of Worcester, impossible. Strange it is, that, whilst all biographers have worked with so much zeal upon the most barren dates or most baseless traditions in the great poet's life, realizing in a manner the chimeras of Laputa, and endeavoring ' to extract sunbeams from cucumbers,' Mich a story with regard to such an event, no fiction of village scandal, but involved in legal documents, a gtory so significant and so eloquent to the intelligent, should formerly have been dismissed without notice of any kind, and even now, after the discovery of 1836, with nothing beyoni a slight conjee 4 ural insinuation. 4 50 8H.AKSFEAKE. For our parts, we should have been the last amongst the biographers to unearth any forgotten scandal, or, after so vast a lapse of time, and when the grave had shut out all but charitable thoughts, to point any moral censures at a simple case of natural frality, youthful precipitancy of passion, of all trespasses the most venial, where the final intentions are honorable. But in this case there seems to have been something mere in motion than passion or the ardor of youth. I like not,' says Parson Evans, (alluding to Falstaff in mas- querade,) ' I like not when a woman has a. great peard ; I spy a great peard under her muffler.' Neither do we like the spectacle of a mature young woman, five years past her majority, wearing the semblance of having been led astray by a boy who had still two years and a half to run of his minority. Shakspeare him- self, looking back on this part of his ycathful history from his maturest years, breathes forth pathetic coun- sels against the errors into which his own inexperience had been insnared. The disparity of years between himself and his wife he notices in a beautiful scene of the Twelfth Night. The Duke, Orsino, observing the sensibility which the pretended Cesario had betrayed on hearing some touching old snatches of a love strain, swears that his beardless page must have felt the pas- lion of love, which the other admits. Upon this the dialogue proceeds thus : Duke. What kind of woman is't ? Viola, Of your complexion. Duke. She is not worth thee then. What years ? Viila, I'fiutk. About your years, my lord. Duke. Too old, by heaven. Let still the woman takt S elder than herself: to wean the to Am, 8HAKSPEABE. 51 So tways she level in her husband 1 * heart. For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and urifirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and won, Than women's are. Viola I think it well, my lord. Duke. Then let thy love be younger than thyself.. Or thy affection cannot hold the bent ; For women are as roses, whose fair flower, Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour.' These counsels were uttered nearly twenty years after the event in his own life, to which they probably look back ; for this play is supposed to have been written in Shakspeare's thirty-eighth year. And we may read an earnestness in pressing the point as to the inverted disparity of years, which indicates pretty clearly an appeal to the lessons of his personal experi- ence. But his other indiscretion, in having yielded so far to passion and opportunity as to crop by preliba- tion, and before they were hallowed, those flowers of paradise which belonged to his marriage day ; this he adverts to with even more solemnity of sorrow, and with more pointed energy of moral reproof, in the very last drama which is supposed to have proceeded from his pen, and therefore with the force and sanctity of testamentary counsel. The Tempest is all but ascertained to have been composed in 1611, that is, about five years before the poet's death ; and indeed could not have been composed much earlier ; for the very incident which suggested the basis of the plot, end of the local scene, viz., the shipwreck of Sir George Somers on the Bernradas, (which \* ^re in con- equeiice denominated tb^ Comers' Islands,) did not WJCUT until the year 1609. In tne opening of the 52 SHAKSPEAKE. fourth act, Prospero formally betroths his daughter to Ferdinand ; and in doing so he pays the prince a well- merited compliment of having 'worthily purchas'd this rich jewel, by the patience with which, for her Bake, he had supported harsh usage, and other painfu circumstances of his trial. But, he adds solemnly, If thou dost break her virgin knot before All sanctimonious ceremonies may With full and holy rite be ministered ; in that case what would follow ? ' No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fell, To make this contract grow; but barren hate, Sour-ey'd disdain and discord, shall bestrew The union of your bed with weeds so loathly That you shall hate it both. Therefore take heed, As Hymen's lamps shall light you.' The young prince assures him in reply, that no strength of opportunity, concurring with the uttermost temptation, not ' the murkiest den, The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion Our worser genius can ,' should ever prevail to lay asleep his jealousy of self- control, so as to take any advantage of Miranda's innocence. And he adds an argument for this absti- nence, by way of reminding Prospero, that not honor only, but even prudential care of his own happiness, ia interested in the observance of his promise. Any unhallowed anticipation would, as he insinuates, ' take away The edge of that day's celebration, When I shall think, or Phoebus' steeds are founder'd, Or night kept chain 'd below; ' that is, when even the winged hours would seem U SHAKSPEA.RE. Ft '3 move too slowly. Even thus Prospero is not quite latisfied. During his subsequent dialogue with Ariel, we are to suppose that Ferdinand, in conversing apart with Miranda, betrays more impassioned ardor than the wise magician altogether approves. The prince's caresses have not been unobserved ; and thus Prospero renews his warning : ' Look thou be true : do not give dalliance Too much the rein : the strongest oaths are straw To the fire i' the blood : be more abstemious, Or else good night your vow.' The royal lover reassures him of his loyalty to his engagements ; and again the wise father, so honorably jealous for his daughter, professes himself satisfied with the prince's pledges. Now in all these emphatic warnings, uttering the language ' of that sad wisdom folly leaves behind,' who can avoid reading, as in subtle hieroglyphics, the secret record of Shakspeare's own nuptial disappoint- ments ? We, indeed, that is, universal posterity through every age, have reason to rejoice in these dis- appointments ; for, to them, past all doubt, we are indebted for Shakspeare's subsequent migration to London, and his public occupation, which, giving him a deep pecuniary interest in the productions of his pen, guch as no other literary application of his powers 'ould have approached in that day, were eventually the raeanjf of drawing forth those divine works which have lurvived their author for our everlasting benefit. Our own reading and deciphering of the whole case U as follows. The Shakspeares were a handsome p mily, both father and sons. This we assume upon vhe following grounds: First, oj the presumption 54 SHA.KSPEARE. rising out of John Shakspeare's having won the favoi of a young heiress in higher rank than himself; secondly, on the presumption involved in the fact of three amongst his four sons, having gone upon tha stage, to which the most obvious (and perhaps in those days a sine qua non) recommendation would be a good person and a pleasing countenance ; thirdly, on the direct evidence of Aubrey, who assures us that Wil- liam Shakspeare was a handsome and a well-shaped man ; fourthly, on the implicit evidence of the Strat- ford monument, which exhibits a man of good figure and noble countenance ; fifthly, on the confirmation of this evidence by the Chandos portrait, which exhibits noble features, illustrated by the utmost sweetness of expression ; sixthly, on the selection of theatrical parts, which it is known that Shakspeare personated, most of them being such as required some dignity of form, viz., kings, the athletic (though aged) follower of an ath- letic young man, and supernatural beings. On these grounds, direct or circumstantial, we believe ourselves warranted in assuming that William Shakspeare was a handsome and even noble looking boy. Miss Anne Hathaway had herself probably some personal attrac- tions ; and, if an indigent girl, who looked for no pecuniary advantages, would probably have been early sought in marriage. But as the daughter of ' a sub- stantial yeoman,' who would expect some fortune in ais daughter's suitors, she had. to speak coarsely, a 'ittle outlived her market. Time she had none to lose. v illiam Shakspeare pleased her eye ; and the gentle- txess of his nature made him an apt subject for female blandishments, possiVy for female arts. Withou* mputing, however, to this Anne Hathaway any thin} SII A KSVKAKE. 55 so hateful as a settled plot for insnaring him, it WM easy enough for a mature woman, armed with such inevitable advantages of experience and of self-posses- ion, to draw onward a blushing novice ; and, without directly creating opportunities, to place nim in the way of turning to account such as naturally offered. Young boys are generally flattered by the condescending notice of grown-up women ; and perhaps Shakspeare's own lines upon a similar situation, to a young boy adorned with the same natural gifts as himself, may give us the key to the result : ' Gentle thou art, and therefore to be won ; Beauteous thou art, therefore to be assail'd ; And, when a woman woes, what woman's son Will sourly leave her till he have prevail'd ? ' Once, indeed, entangled in such a pursuit, any person of manly feeling would be sensible that he had no retreat ; that would be to insult a woman, grievously to wound her sexual pr;'de, and to insure her lasting scorn and hatred. These were consequences which the gentle-minded Shakspeare could not face. He pursued his good fortunes, half perhaps in heedless- ness, half in desperation, until he was roused by the -.lamorous displeasure of her family upon first discov- ering the situation of their kinswoman. For such a situation there could be but one atonement, and that was hurried forward by both parties : whilst, out of delicacy towards the bride the wedding was not cele- jraled in Stratford, (where the register contains no notice of such an event); nor, as Malone imagined, in Weston-upon-Avon, that being in the diocese of Glou* tester ; but in some parish, as yet undiscovered, in the iiocese of Worcester 56 SHAKSPEARE. But now arose a serious question as to the future maintenance of the young people. John Shakspeare was depressed in his circumstances, and he had other children besides William, viz., three sons and a daugh- ter. The elder lives have represented him as burdened f epigrams, chose to connect the cases by attributing in identity to the two John Combe's, though at wai with chronology. Finali), there is another specimen of doggerel at- tributed to Shakspeare, which is not equally unworthy of him, because not equally malignant, but otherwise tqnally below his intellect, no less than his scholar. hip ; we mean the inscription on his gravestone This, as a sort of siste viator appeal to future sexton* SHAKSPEAHE. 65 18 worthy of the grave-digger or the parish-clerk, who was probably its author. Or it may have been an antique formula, like the vulgar record of ownership in books : Anthony Timothy Dolthead's book, God give him grace therein to look.' Thus far the matter is of little importance ; and it might have been supposed that malignity itself could hardly have imputed such trash to Shakspeare. But when we find, even in this short compass, scarcely wider than the posy of a ring, room found for traducing the poet's memory, it becomes important to say, that the leading sentiment, the honxr expressed at any dis- turbance offered to his bones, is not one to whicn Shakspeare could have attached the slightest weight ; far less could have outraged the sanctities of place and subject, by affixing to any sentiment whatever (and, according to the fiction of the case, his farewell sentiment) the sanction of a curse. Filial veneration and piety towards the memory of this great man, have led us into a digression that might have been unseasonable in any cause less weighty than one, having for its object to deliver his honored name from a load of the most brutal malignity. Never more, we hope and venture to believe, will any thoughtless biographer impute to Shakspeare the asi- nine doggerel Avith which the uncritical blundering of his earliest biographer has caused his name to be dis- honored. We now resume the thread of our biog- raphy. The stream of history is centuries in working tself clear of any calumny with winch it has ono seen polluted. 5 86 8HAKSPEARE. Most readers will be aware of an old story, accord- ing to which Shakspeare gained his livelihood for some time after coming to London by holding the horses o r those who rode to the play. This legend is as idle aa any one of those which we have just exposed. No custom ever existed of riding on horseback to the play. Gentlemen, who rode valuable horses, would assuredly not expose them systematically to the injury of stand- ing exposed to cold for two or even four hours ; and persons of inferior rank would not ride on horseback in the town. Besides, had such a custom ever existed, stables (or sheds at least) would soon have arisen to meet the public wants ; and in some of the dramatic sketches of the day, which noticed every fashion as it arose, this would not have been overlooked. The r,tory is traced originally to Sir William Davenant. Betterton the actor, who professed to have received it from him, passed it onwards to Rowe, he to Pope, Pope to Bishop Newton, the editor of Milton, and Newton to Dr. Johnson. This pedigree of the fable, however, adds nothing to its credit, and multiplies tiie chances of some mistake. Another fable, not much less absurd, represents Shakspeare as having from the very first been borne upon the establishment of the theatre, and so far contradicts the other fable, but originally in the very humble character of call-boy or deputy prompter, whose business it was to summon each performer according to his order of coming upon the stage. This story, however, quite as much as the other, is irreconcilable with the discovery recently made by Mr. Collier, that in 1589 Shakspeare was a ^areholder in the important property of a principal London theatre. It seems destined tnat all the un- SHAKSFKARE. 67 ioubted facts of Shakspeare's life should come to us through the channel of legal documents, which are better evidence even than imperial medals ; whilst, on the other hand, all the fabulous anecdotes not having an attorney's seal to them, seem to have been the fictions of the wonder maker. The plain presumption from the record of Shakspeare's situation in 1589, coupled with the fact that his first arrival in London was possibly not until 1587, but according to the earliest account not before 1586, a space of time which leaves but little room for any remarkable changes of situation, seems to be, that, either in requital of ser- vices done to the players by the poet's family, or in consideration of money advanced by his father-in-law, or on account of Shakspeare's personal accomplish- ments as an actor, and as an adapter of dramatic works to the stage ; for one of these reasons, or for all of them united, William Shakspeare, about the 23d year of his age, was adopted into the partnership of a respectable histrionic company, possessing a first-rate theatre in the metropolis. If 1586 were the year in which he came up to London, it seems probable enough that his immediate motive to that step was the increasing distress of his father ; for in that year John Shakspeare resigned the office of alderman. There is, however, a bare possibility that Shakspeare might have gone to London about the time when he completed his twenty-first year, that is, in the spring of 1585, but not earlier. Nearly two years after the birth of his eldest daughter Susanna, his wife lay in for a second and a last time ; but she then brought her husband twins, a son and a daughter. These children wore baptized In February of the year 1585 , so that Shakspeare's 68 SHAKSPEARE. whole family of three children were born and baptized two months before he completed his majority. The twins were baptized by the names of Hamnet and Judith, those being the names of two amongst theii sponsors, viz., Mr. Sadler and his wife. Hamnet, which is a remarkable name in itself, becomes still more so from its resemblance to the immortal name of Hamlet 17 the Dane ; it was. however, the real baptis- mal name of Mr. Sadler, a friend of Shakspeare'a, about fourteen years older than himself. Shakspeare'a son must then have been most interesting to his heart, both as a twin child and as his only boy. He died in 1596, when he was about eleven years old. Both daughters survived their father ; both married ; both left issue, and thus gave a chance for continuing the succession from the great poet. But all the four grandchildren died without offspring. Of Shakspeare personally, at least of Shakspeare the man, as distinguished from the author, there remains little more to record. Already in 1592, Greene, in his posthumous Groat's-worth of Wit, had expressed the earliest vocation of Shakspeare in the following sentence : ' There is an upstart crow, beau- tified with our feathers ; in his own conceit the only Shakscene in a country ! ' This alludes to Shakspeare's office of recasting, and even recomposing, dramatic works, so as to fit them for representation ; and Master Greene, it is probable, had suffered in his self-estima- tion, or in his purse, by the alterations in some piece of his own, which the duty of Shakspeare to the gen eral interest of the theatre had obliged him to make. In 1 691 it has been supposed that Shakspeare wrote hi first drama, the Two 3entlemen of Verona ; the SHAKSPEARE. 69 east characteristically marked of all his plays, and, with the exception of Love's Labor's Lost, the least Interesting. From this year, 1591, to that of 1611, are jurt twenty years, within which space lie the whole dra- matic creations of Shakspeare, averaging nearly one for every six months. In 1611 was written the Tempest, which is supposed to have been the last of all Shak- speare's works. Even on that account, as Mr. Camp- bell feelingly observes, it has ' a sort of sacredness ; ' and it is a most remarkable fact, and one calculated to make a man superstitious, that in this play the great enchanter Prospero, in whom, ' as if conscious, 1 says Mr. Campbell, ' that this would be his last work, the poet has been inspired to typify himself as a wise, potent, and benevolent magician,' of whom, indeed, as of Shakspeare himself, it may be said, that ' within that circle ' (the circle of his own art) ' none durst tread but he,' solemnly and forever renounces his mys- terious functions, symbolically breaks his enchanter's wand, and declares that he will bury his books, his science, and his secrets. ' Deeper than did ever plummet sound.' Nay, it is even ominous, that in this play, and from the voice of Prospero, issues that magnificent prophecy of the total destruction, which should one day wallow up The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea all which it inherit.' /Lnd this prophecy ; s foUowed immediately by a most profound ejaculation, gathering into one pathetic ab the total philosophy of life : 70 8HAKSPEAKE. We are such stuff As dreams are made of; and our little life la rounded by a sleep ; ' that is, in effect, our life is a little tract of feverish vigLs, surrounded and islanded by a shoreless ocean of sleep sleep before birth, sleep after death. These remarkable passages were probably not unde- signed ; but if we suppose them to have been thrown off without conscious notice of their tendencies, then, according to the superstition of the ancient Grecians, they would have been regarded as prefiguring words, prompted by the secret genius that accompanies every man, such as insure along with them their own accom- plishment. With or without intention, however, it is believed that Shakspeare wrote nothing more after this exquisite romantic drama. With respect to the re- mainder of his personal history, Dr. Drake and others have supposed, that during the twenty years from 1591 to 1611, he visited Stratford often, and latterly once a year. In 1589 he had possessed some share in a theatre; in 1596 he had a considerable share. Through Lord Southampton, as a surviving friend of Lord Essex, who was viewed as the martyr to his Scottish politics, there can be no doubt that Shakspeare had acquired the favor of James I. ; and accordingly, on the 29th of May, 1603, about two months after the king's acces- sion to the throne of England, a patent was granted o the company of players who possessed the Globe theatre; in which patent Shakspeare's name stands second. This patent raised the company to the rank of his majesty's servants, whereas previously they are wipposed to have been simpiy the servants of the Lor* SHAKSi'EAKK. 71 Chamberlain. Perhaps it was in grateful acknowledg- ment of this royal favor that Shakspeare afterwards, in 1606, paid that sublime compliment to the house of Stuart, which is involved in the vision shown to Mac- beth. This vision is managed with exquisite skill. It was impossible to display the whole series of princes from Macbeth to James I. ; but he beholds the poster- ity of Banquo, one ' gold-bound brow ' succeeding to another, until he comes to an eighth apparition of a Scottish king, ' Who bears a glass Which shows him many more ; and some he sees Who twofold balls and treble sceptres carry ; ' thus bringing down without tedium the long succession to the very person of James I., by the symbolic image of the two crowns united on one head. About the beginning of the century Shakspeare had become rich enough to purchase the best house in Stratford, called The Great House, which name he altered to New Place ; and in 1602 he bought one hundred and seven acres adjacent to this house for a sum (320) corresponding to about 1500 guineas of modern money. Malone thinks that he purchased the house as early as 1597 ; and it is certain that about that time he was able to assist his father in obtaining t renewed grant of arms from the Herald's College, and therefore, of course, to re-establish his father's for- tunes. Ten years of a well-directed industry, viz., from 1591 to 1601, and the prosperity of the theatre in which he was a proprietor, had raised him to afflu- ence ; and after another ten years, int proved with the lame success, he was able to retire with an income of 300, or (according to the customary computations') in 72 SHAKSPEAKK. modem money of 1500, per annum. Shakspeare was in fact the first man of letters, Pope the second, and Sir Walter Scott the third, who, in Great Britain, Has ever realized a large fortune by literature ; or in Christendom, if we except Voltaire, and two dubious cases in Italy. The four or five latter years of his life Shakspeare passed in dignified ease, in profound medi- tation, we may be sure, and in universal respect, at his native town of Stratford; and there he died, on the 23d of April, 1616. 18 His daughter Susanna had been married on the 5th of June of the year 1607, to Dr. John Hall, 19 a phy- sician in Stratford. The doctor died in November, 1635, aged sixty; his wife, at the age of sixty-six, on July 11, 1640. They had one child, a daughter, named Elizabeth, born in 1608, married April 22, 1626, to Thomas Nash, Esq., left a widow in 1647, and subsequently remarried to Sir John Barnard ; but this Lady Barnard, the sole grand-daughter of the poet, had no children by either marriage. The other daughter, Judith, on February 10, 1616, (about ten weeks before her father's death,) married Mr. Thomas Quiney of Stratford, by whom she had three sons, Shakspeare, Richard, and Thomas. Judith was about thirty-one years old at the time of her marriage ; and living just forty-six years afterwards, she died in February, 1662, at the age of seventy-seven. Her three sons died without issue ; and thus, in the direct lineal descent, it is certain that no representative has survived of this transcendent; poet, the most august %mongst created intellects. After this review of Shakspeare's life, it become* ur duty to take a summary survey of his works, o SHAKSPEARE. 79 his intellect ual powers, and of his station in literature, a station which is now irrevocably settled, not so much (which happens in other cases) by a vast overbalance of favorable suffrages as by acclamation ; not so much by the voices of those who admire him up to the verge of idolatry, as by the acts of those who everywhere seek for his works among the primal necessities of life, demand them, and crave them as they do their daily bread ; not so much by eulogy openly proclaim- ing itself, as by the silent homage recorded in the endless multiplication of what he has bequeathed us ; not so much by his own compatriots, who, with regard to almost every other author, 20 compose the total amount of his effective audience, as by the unanimous 4 all hail ! ' of intellectual Christendom ; finally, not by the hasty partisanship of his own generation, nor by the biassed judgment of an age trained in the same modes of feeling and of thinking with himself, but by the solemn award of generation succeeding to genera- tion, of one age correcting the obliquities or peculiari- ties of another ; by the verdict of two hundred and thirty years, which have now elapsed since the very latest of his creations, or of two hundred and forty- i.jven years if we date from the earliest ; a verdict which has been continually revived and re-opened, probed, searched, vexed by criticism in every spirit, from the most genial and intelligent, down to the most malignant and scurrilously hostile which feeble heads Mid great ignorance could suggest when cooperating v-th impure hearts and narrow sensibilities ; a verdict, in short, sustained and countersigned by a longer series of writers, many of them pminent fcr wit or learning, than were ever before congregated upon any inquest 14 SHAKSPEARE. relating to any author, be he who he might, ancient w or modern, Pagan or Christian. It was a most witty laying with respect to a piratical and knavish publisher who made a trade of insulting the memories of de- ceased authors by forged writings, that he was ' among the new terrors of death.' But in the gravest sense it may be affirmed of Shakspeare, that he is among the modern luxuries of life ; that life, in fact, is a new thing, and one more to be coveted, since Shakspeare has extended the domains of human consciousness, and pushed its dark frontiers into regions not so much as dimly descried or even suspected before his time, far less illuminated (as now they are) by beauty and tropical luxuriance of life. For instance, a single instance, indeed one which in itself is a world of new revelation, the possible beauty of the female char- acter had not been seen as in a dream before Shak- speare called into perfect life the radiant shapes of Desdemona, of Imogene, of Hermione, of Perdita, of Ophelia, of Miranda, and many others. The Una of Spenser, earlier by ten or fifteen years than most of these, was an idealized portrait of female innocence and virgin purity, but too shadowy and unreal for a dramatic reality. And as to the Grecian classics, let not the reader imagine for an instant that any pro tot} po in this field of Shakspearian power can be looked for there. The Antigone and the Electro of the tragic poets are the two leading female characters that classi- cal antiquity offers to our respect, but assuredly not to our impassioned love, as disciplined and exalted in the school of Shakspeare. They challenge our admiration, evere, and even stern, as impersonations of filial duty cleaving to the steps of a desolate and afflicted old SHAKSPEARE. 75 man ; or of sisterly affection, maintaining the rights of i brother under circumstances of peril, of desertion, nd consequently of perfect self-reliance. Iphigenii, again, though not dramatically coming before us hi her own person, but according to the beautiful report of a spectator, presents us with a fine statuesque model of heroic fortitude, and of one whose young heart, even in the very agonies of her cruel immolation, refused to forget, by a single indecorous gesture, or so much as a moment's neglect of her own princely descent, and that she herself was ' a lady in the land.' These are fine marble groups, but they are not the warm breath- ing realities of Shakspeare ; there is ' no speculation ' in their cold marble eyes ; the breath of life is not in their nostrils ; the fine pulses of womanly sensibilities are not throbbing in their bosoms. And besides this immeasurable difference between the cold moony re- flexes of life, as exhibited by the power of Grecian art, and the true sunny life of Shakspeare, it must be observed that the Antigones, &c. of the antique put forward but one single trait of character, like the aloo with its single blossom. This solitary feature is pre- sented to us as an abstraction, and as an insulated quality ; whereas in Shakspeare all is presented in the concrete; that is to say, not brought forward in relief, as by some effort of an anatomical artist ; but em- bodied and imbedded, so to speak, as by the force of a creative nature, in the complex system of a human Sfe a life in which all tne elements move and play imultaneously, and with something more than mere imultaneity or co-existence, acting and re-acting each upon the other, nay, even acting by each other and iirough each other. In Shakspeare's characters is felt 76 SHAKSPEARE. for ever a real organic life, where each is for the whole and in the whole, and where the whole 'IB foi each and in each. They only are real incarnations. The Greek poets could not exhibit any approxima- tions to female character, without violating the truth of Grecian life, and shocking the feelings of the audience. The drama with the Greeks, as with us, though much less than with us, was a picture of human life ; and that which could not occur in life could not wisely be exhibited on the stage. Now, in ancient Greece, women were secluded from the society of men. The conventual sequestration of the yvvaixtoriris, or female apartment 22 of the house, and the Mahommedau con- secration of its threshold against the ingress of males, had been transplanted from Asia into Greece thousands of years perhaps before either convents or Mahommed existed. Thus barred from all open social intercourse, women could not develope or express any character by word or action. Even to have a character, violated, to a Grecian mind, the ideal portrait of feminine excel- lence; whence, perhaps, partly the too generic, too ittle individualized, style of Grecian beauty. But prominently to express a character was impossible under the common tenor of Grecian life, unless when tigh tragical catastrophes transcended the decorums of lhat tenor, or for a brief interval raised the curtain which veiled it. Hence the subordinate part which women play upon the Greek stage in all but some hall iozen cases, In the paramount tragedy on that stage, 'he model tragedy, the (Edipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, the'-e is virtually no woman at all ; for Jocasta is a party )e the story merely as the dead Laius or the self- murdered Sphinx was a party, viz., by her contribu 8HAKSPEARE. 1 ;ions to the fatalities of the event, not by anything she iocs or says spontaneously. In fact, the Greek poet, if a wise poet, could not address himself genially to a task in which he must begin by shocking the sensibili- ties of his countrymen. And hence followed, not only the dearth of female characters in the Grecian drama, but also a second result still more favorable to the ser.- of a new power evolved by Shakspeare. Wheneve' the common law of Grecian life did give way, it was, as we have observed, to the suspending force of some great convulsion or tragical catastrophe. This for a moment (like an earthquake in a nunnery) would set at liberty even the timid, fluttering Grecian women, those doves of the dove-cot, and would call some of them into action. But which ? Precisely those of energetic and masculine minds ; the timid and femi- nine would but shrink the more from public gaze and from tumult. Thus it happened, that such female characters as were exhibited in Greece, could not but be the harsh and the severe. If a gentle Ismene appeared for a moment in contest with some energetic *ister Antigone, (and, chiefly, perhaps, by way of draw- .ng out the fiercer character of that sister,) she was soon dismissed as unfit for scenical effect. So that not only were female characters few, but, moreover, of hese few the majority were but repetitions of mascu- Ine qualities in female persons. Female agency being icldom summoned on the stage, except when it had -eceived a sort of special dispensation from its sexual Character, by some terrific convulsions of the house r the city, naturally it assumed the style of action suited to these circumstances. And hence it arose, that not woman as she differed from man, but woman *8 SHA.KSFEAKK. as she resembled man woman, in short, seen under circumstances so dreadful as to abolish the effect of Bexual distinction, was the woman of the Greek tra- gedy. 23 And hence generally arose for Shakspeare the wider field, and the more astonishing by its perfect novelty, when he first introduced female characters, not as mere varieties or echoes of masculine charac- ters, a Medea or Clytemnestra, or a vindictive Hecuba, the mere tigress of the tragic tiger, but female charac- ters that had the appropriate beauty of female nature ; woman no longer grand, terrific, and repulsive, but woman ' after her kind ' the other hemisphere of the dramatic world ; woman, running through the vast gamut of womanly loveliness ; woman, as emancipated, exalted, ennobled, under a new law of Christian mo- rality ; woman, the sister and coequal of man, no longer his slave, his prisoner, and sometimes his rebel. 'It is a far cry to Loch Awe; ' and from the Athe- nian stage to the stage of Shakspeare, it may be said, is a prodigious interval. True; but prodigious as it is, there is really nothing between them. The Roman stage, at least the tragic stage, as is well known, was put out, as by an extinguisher, by the cruel amphithe- atre, just as a candle is made pale and ridiculous by iaylight. Those who were fresh from the real mur- uers of the bloody amphitheatre regarded with con- tempt the mimic murders of the stage. Stimulation too eoarse and too intense had its usual effect in making he sensibilities callous. Christian emperors arose ftt length, who abolished the amphitheatre in its bloodier features. But by that time the genius of the tragic muse had long slept the sleep of death. And hat muse had nc resurrection until the age of Shak SilnKSl'KAKK. 79 ipeare. So that, notwithstanding a gulf of nineteen centuries and upwards separates Shakspeare from Euri- pides, the last of the surviving Greek tragedians, the one is still the nearest successor of the other, just as Connaught and the islands in Clew Bay are next neighbors to America, although three thousand watery columns, each of a cubic mile in dimensions, divide them from each other. A second reason, which lends an emphasis of novelty and effective power to Shakspeare's female world, is a peculiar fact of contrast which exists between that and his corresponding world of men. Let us explain. The purpose and the intention of the Grecian stage was not primarily to develope human character, whether in men or in women : human fates were its object ; great tragic situations under the mighty control of a vast cloudy destiny, dimly descried at intervals, and brood- ing over human life by mysterious agencies, and for mysterious ends. Man, no longer the representative of an august will, man, the passion-puppet of fate, could not with any effect display what we call a character, which is a distinction between man and man, ema- nating originally from the will, and expressing its determinations, moving under the large variety of human impulses. The will is the central pivot of character ; and this was obliterated, thwarted, can- celled by the dark fatalism which brooded over the Grecian stage. That explanation will sufficiently clear np the reason why marked or complex variety of char- acter was slighted by the great principles of the Greek tragedy. And every scholar who has studied that grand drama of Greece with feeling, that drama, X) magnificent, so regal, so stately, and who ha* 80 SHAKSPEARE. thoughtfully investigated its principles, and its differ- ence from the English drama, will acknowledge tha* powerful and elaborate character, character, for in- stance, that could employ the fiftieth part of that pro- found analysis which has been applied to Hamlet to Falstaff, to Lear, to Othello, and applied by Mrs. Jamieson so admirably to the full development of the Shakspearian heroines, would have been as much wasted, nay, would have been defeated, and interrupted the blind agencies of fate, just in the same way as i* would injure the shadowy grandeur of a ghost to indi- vidualize it too much. Milton's angels are slightly touched, superficially touched, with differences of character ; but they are such differences, so simple and general, as are just sufficient to rescue them from the reproach applied to Virgil's 'fortemque Gya.n, for- temque Cloanthem ; ' just sufficient to make them know- able apart. Pliny speaks of painters who painted in one or two colors ; and, as respects the angelic characters, Milton does so ; he is monochromatic. So, and for reasons resting upon the same ultimate philoso- ohy, were the mighty architects of the Greek tragedy. They also were monochromatic ; they also, as to the characters of their persons, painted in one color. And so far there might have been the same novelty in Shak- peare's men as in his women. There might have been , but the reason why there is not must be sought in the fact, that History, the muse of History, had there even been no such muse as Melpomene, would have forced us into an acquaintance with human charac- ter. History, as the representative of actual life, of real man, gives us powerful delineations of charactei B its chief agents, that is, in men ; and therefore i* SHAKSPEARE. 81 s that Shakspeare, the absolute creatoi of female character, was but the mightiest of all painte-s with regard to male character. Take a single instance. The Antony of Shakspeare, immortal for its execution, is found, after all, as regards the primary conception, in history. Shakspeare's delineation is but the expan- sion of the germ already preexisting, by way of scattered fragments, in Cicero's Philippics, in Cicero's Letters, in Appian, &c. But Cleopatra, equally fine, is a pure creation of art. The situation and the scenic circumstances belong to history, but the character be- longs to Shakspeare. In the great world, therefore, of woman, as the interpreter of the shifting phases and the lunar varie- ties of that mighty changeable planet, that lovely satellite of man, Shakspeare stands not the first only, not the original only, but is yet the sole authentic oracle of truth. Woman, therefore, the beauty of the female mind, this is one great field of his power. The supernatural world, the world of apparitions, that is another. For reasons which it would be easy to give, reasons emanating from the gross mythology of the ancients, no Grecian, 24 no Roman, could have con- ceived a ghost. That shadowy conception, the pro- testing apparition, the awful projection of the human conscience, belongs to the Christian mind. And in all Christendom, who, let us ask, who, who but Shakspeare has found the power for effectually working this mys- terious mode of being ? In summoning back to earth ' the majesty of bur'ed Denmark,' hew like an awful tecromancer does Shakspeare appear I All the pomps nd grandeurs which relig-'on, which the grave, which the popular superstition had gathered about the subject 82 SHAKSPEARE. of apparitions, are here converted to his purpose, and bend to one awful effect. The wormy grave brought into antagonism with the scenting of the early dawn ; the trumpet of resurrection suggested, and again as an antagonist idea to the crowing of the cock, (a bird ennobled in the Christian mythus by the part he is made to play at the Crucifixion ;) its starting ' as a guilty thing ' placed in opposition to its maj estic ex- pression of offended dignity when struck at by the partisans of the sentinels ; its awful allusions to the secrets of its prison-house ; its ubiquity, contrasted with its local presence ; its aerial substance, yet clothed in palpable armor ; the heart-shaking solemnity of its language, and the appropriate scenery of its haunt, viz., the ramparts of a capital fortress, with no witnesses but a few gentlemen mounting guard a*, the dead of night, what a mist, what a mirage of vapor, is here accumulated, through which the dreadful being in the centre looms upon us in far larger proportions, than could have happened had it been insulated and left naked of this circumstantial pomp ! In the Tern- pest, again, what new modes of life, preternatural, yet 'ar as the poles from the spiritualities of religion ! Ariel in antithesis to Caliban ! What is most ethereal to what is most animal'! A phantom of air, an abstraction of the dawn and of vesper sun-lights, a bodiless sylph on the one hand ; on the other a gross carnal monster, like the Miltonic Asmodai, ' the flesh- liest incubus ' among the fiends, and yet so far enno- bled into interest by his intellectual power, and by the grandeur of misanthropy ! 25 In the Midsummer- Night's Dream, again, we have the old traditiona* "airy lovely mode of preternatural life, remodifiel SHAKSPEABE. 83 try Shakspcare's eternal talisman. Oberon and Titania remind us at first glance of Ariel. They approach, but how far they recede. They are like ' like, but, jh, how different ! ' And in no other exhibition of this dreamy population of the moonlight forests and forest-lawns, are the circumstantial proprieties of fairy life so exquisitely imagined, sustained, or expressed. The dialogue between Oberon and Titania is, of itself and taken separately from its connection, one of the most delightful poetic scenes that literature affords. The witches in Macbeth are another variety of super- natural life, in which Shakspeare's power to enchant and to disenchant are alike portentous. The circum- stances of the blasted heath, the army at a distance, the withered attire of the mysterious hags, and the choral litanies of their fiendish Sabbath, are as finely imagined in their kind as those which herald and which surround the ghost in Hamlet. There we see the positive of Shakspeare's superior power. But now turn and look to the negative. At a time when the trials of witches, the royal book on demonology, End popular superstition (all so far useful, as they pre- pared a basis of undoubting faith for the poet's serious use of such agencies) had degraded and polluted the ideas of these mysterious beings by many mean asso- ciations, Shakspeare does not fear to employ them in high tragedy, (a tragedy moreover which, though not the very greatest of his efforts as an intellectual whole, not as a struggle of passion, is among the greatest in iiny view, and positively t*ie greatest for scenical gran- deur, and in that respect makes the nearest approach f all English tragedies to the Grecian model ;) he does not fear to introduce, for the same appalling effect 84 SHAKSPEABE. as tha t for which JEschylus introduced the Eumenideg, i triad of old women, concerning whom an English wit has remarked this grotesque peculiarity in the popular creed of that day, that although potent ovei winds and storms, in league with powers of darkness, they yet stood in awe of the constable, yet relying on his own supreme power to disenchant as well as to enchant, to create and to uncreate, he mixes these women and their dark machineries with the power of armies, with the agencies of kings, and the fortunes of martial kingdoms. Such was the sovereignty of this poet, so mighty its compass ! A third fund of Shakspeare's peculiar power lies in his teeming fertility of fine thoughts and sentiments. From his works alone might be gathered a golden bead-roll of thoughts the deepest, subtilest, most pathetic, and yet most catholic and universally intelli- gible ; the most characteristic, also, and appropriate to the particular person, the situation, and the case, yet, at the same time, applicable to the circumstances of every human being, under all the accidents of life, and all vicissitudes of fortune. But this subject offers so vast a field of observation, it being so eminently the prerogative of Shakspeare to have thought more finely and more extensively than all other poets combined, that we cannot wrong the dignity of such a theme by doing more, in our narrow limits, than simply no- ticing it as one of the emblazonries upon Shakspeare's ihield. Fourthly, we shall indicate (and, as in the last case, Barely indicate, without attempting in so vast a field tc offer any inadequate illustrations) one mode of Shak- ipeare's dramatic excellence, which hitherto lias no 1 SHAKSPEA.UE. 85 attracted any special or separate notice. We allude to Ihe forms of life, and natural human passion, as appar- ent in the structure of his dialogue. Among the many defects and infirmities of the French and of the Italian drama, indeed, we may say of the Greek, the dialogue proceeds always by independent speeches, replying indeed to each other, hut never modified in its several openings hy the momentary effect of its several termi- nal forms immediately preceding. Now, in Shak- speare, who first set an example of that most important innovation, in all his impassioned dialogues, each reply or rejoinder seems the mere rebound of the previous speech. Every form of natural interruption, breaking through the restraints of ceremony under the impulses of tempestuous passion ; every form of hasty interro- gative, ardent reiteration when a question has been evaded ; every form of scornful repetition of the hos- tile words ; every impatient continuation of the hostile statement ; in short, all modes and formulae by which anger, hurry, fretfulness, scorn, impatience, or excite- ment under any movement whatever, can disturb 01 modify or dislocate the formal bookish style of com- mencement, these are as rife in Shakspeare's dia- logue as in life itself; and how much vivacity, how Drofound a verisimilitude, they add to the scenic effect s an imitation of human passion and real life, we need not say. A volume might be written, illustrating the vast varieties of Shakspeare's art and power in this one field of improvement ; another volume might be dedi- cated to the exposure of the lifeless and unnatural eftult from the opposite practice in the foreign stages of France and Italy. And we may truly say, that rere Shakspeare distinguished from them by Ini* BG SHAKSPEARb. lingle feature of nature and propriety, he would on that account alone have merited a great immor- tality. The dramatic works of Shakspeare generally ac- knowledged to be genuine consist of thirty-five pieces. The following is the chronological order in which thej are supposed to have been written, according to Mr. Malone, as given in his second edition of Shak- speare, and by Mr. George Chalmers in his Supple- mental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare Papers : Chalmers. Malone. 1. The Comedy of Errore, 1591 1592 2. Love's Labor's Lost, 1592 1594 3. Romeo and Juliet, 1592 1596 4. Henry VI., the First Part, 1593 1589 5. Henry VI., the Second Part, 1595 1591 6. Henry VI., the Third Part, 1595 1591 7. The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 1595 1591 8. Richard in., 1596 1593 9. Richard II., 1596 1593 10 The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1596 1601 11. Henry IV., the First Part, 1597 1597 12. Henry IV., the Second Part, 1597 1599 13. Henry V., 1597 1599 14. Merchant of Venice, 1597 1594 15. Hamlet, 1598 1600 16. King John, 1598 159^ 17. A Midsummer-Night's Dream, 1598 1594 18. The Taming of the Shrew, 1599 1596 19. All's Well that Ends Well, 1599 1606 20. Much Ado about Nothing, 1599 1600 21. AJ You Like It, 1602 1599 SHAKSPEARE. 87 Chalmers. Malone. 22. TroiluH and Cressida, 1610 1S02 23. Timon of Athens, 1611 1610 24. The Winter's Tale, 1601 1611 25. Measure for Measure, 1604 1603 26. King Lear, 1605 1605 27. Cymbeline, 1606 1609 28. Macbeth, 1606 1606 29. Julius Caesar, 1607 1607 30. Antony and Cleopatra, 1608 1608 31. Coriolanus, 1609 1610 32. The Tempest, 1613 1611 33. The Twelfth Night, 1613 1607 34. Henry VIII., 1613 1603 35. Othello, 1614 1604 Pericles and Titus Andronicus, although inserted in all the late editions of Shakspeare's Plays, are omitted in the above list, both by Malone and Chalmers, as not being Shakspeare's. The first edition of the Works was published in 1623, in a folio volume entitled Mr. William Shak- speare's Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. The second edition was published in 1632, the third in 1664, and the fourth in 1685, all in folio; but the edition of 1623 is considered the most authentic. Rowe published an edition in seven vols. 8vo, in 1709. Editions were published by Pope, in six vols. 4to, in 1725 ; by Warburton, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1747; by Dr. Johnson, in eight vols. 8vo, in 1765 ; by Stevens, 31 four vols. 8vo, in 1766 ; by Malone, in ten vols. 8vo, 'la. 1789; by Alexander Chalmers, in nine vols. 8vo, in 1811 ; by Johnson and Steevens, revised by Isaac Eeed, in twenty-one vols. 8vo, in 1813; and the Plays 88 SHA.KSPEARE. and Poems, with notes by Malone, were edited bj James Boswell, and published in twenty-one vols. 8vo, in 1821. Besides these, numerous editions have been published from time to time. LIFE OF MILTON. PREFATORY MEMORANDA. 1. THIS sketch of Milton's life was written 88 to meet the hasty demand of a powerful association (then in full activity) for organizing a systematic movement towards the improvement of popular reading. The limitations, as regarded space, which this association found itself obliged to impose, put an end to all hopes that any opening could be found in this case for an im- proved life as regarded research into the facts, and the true interpretation of facts. These, though often scandalously false, scandalously misconstructed even where true in the letter of the narrative, and read by generations of biographers in an odious spirit of malignity to Milton, it was nevertheless a mere necessity, silently and acquiescingly, to adopt in a case where any noticeable change would call for a justification, and any adequate justification would call for much ampler space. Under these circumstances, finding myself cut off from one mode of ser- vice 27 to the suffering reputation of this greatest among men, it occurred, naturally, that I might imperfectly compensate that defect by service of the same character applied in a different direction. Facts, falsely stated or maliciously colored, require, too frequently, elaborate details for their exposure : but tran- sient opinions, or solemn judgments, or insinuations dexterously applied to openings made by vagueness of statement or laxity of language, it is possible oftentimes to face and dissipate instan- 90 LIFE OF MILTON. taneously by a single word of seasonable distinction, or by a simple rectification of the logic. Sometimes a solitary whisper, suggesting a fact that had been overlooked, or a logical relation that had been wilfully darkened, is found sufficient for the tri- umphant overthrow of a scoff that has corroded Milton's memory for three 28 generations. Accident prevented me from doing much even in this line for the exposure of Milton's injuries: hereafter I hope to do more ; but in the mean time I call the reader's attention to one such rectification applied by myself to the effectual prostration of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the worst enemy that Milton and his great cause have ever been called on to confront ; the worst as regards undying malice, in which qualification for mischief Dr. Johnson was not at all behind the diabolical Lauder or the maniacal Curran ; and the foremost by many degrees in talents and opportunities for giving effect to his malice. I will here expand the several steps in the process of the case, so that the least attentive of readers, or least logical, may understand in what mode and in what degree Dr. Johnson, hunting for a triumph, allowed himself to trespass across the frontiers of calumny and falsehood, and at the same time may understand how far my own exposure smashes the Doctor's attempt in the shell. Dr. Johnson is pursuing the narrative of Milton's travels in Italy ; and he has arrived at that point where Milton, then in the south of that peninsula, and designing to go forward into Greece, Egypt, and Syria, is suddenly arrested by great tidings froin England : so great, indeed, that in Milton's ear, who well knew to what issue the public disputes were tending, these ti- dings must have sounded revolutionary. The king was prepar- ing a second military expedition against Scotland; that is against Scotland as the bulwark of an odious anti-episcopal church. It was notorious that the English aristocracy by a very large section, and much of the English nation upon motives variously combined, some on religious grounds, some on political, could not be relied on for any effectual support in a war having such objects, and opening so many occasions for diverting the national arms to popular purposes. It was pretty well known also, that dreadful pecuniary embarrassments woulO LIFE OF MILTON. 91 at last compel the king to summon, in right earnest, such a Par- liament as would no longer be manageable, but would in the very first week of its meeting find a security against a sudden dissolution. Using its present advantages prudently, any Par- liament would now bring the king virtually upon his knees: and the issue must be ample concession on the king's part to claimants now become national, or else Revolution and Civil War. At such a time, and with such prospects, what honest patriot could have endured to absent himself, and under no more substantial excuse than a transient gratification to his classical and archaeological tastes ? tastes liberal and honor- able beyond a doubt, but not of a rank to interfere with more solemn duties. This change in his prospects, and consequently in his duties, was painful enough, we may be sure, to Milton : but with his principles, and his deep self-denying sense of duty, there seems no room for question or hesitation : and already at this point, before they go a step further, all readers capable of measuring the disappointment, or of appreciating the temper in which such a self-conquest must have been achieved, will sym- pathize heroically with Milton's victorious resistance to a tempta- tion so specially framed as a snare for Aim, and at the same time will sympathize fraternally with Milton's bitter suifering of self- sacrifice as to all that formed the sting of that temptation. Such is the spirit in which many a noble heart, that may be far from approving Milton's politics, will read this secret Miltonic struggle more than two hundred years after all is over. Such is not the spirit (as we shall now see) in which it has been read by falsehood and malice. 2. But before coming to that, there is a sort of parenthesis of introduction. Dr. Johnson summons us all not to suffer any veneration for Milton to intercept our merriment at what, according to his version of the story, Milton is now doing. I therefore, on my part, call on the reader to observe, that in Dr. Johnson's opinion, if a great man, the glory of his race, should happen through human frailty to suffer a momentary eclipse of his grandeur, the proper and becoming utterance of our impres- sions as to such a collapse would not be by silence and sadness, but by vulgar yells of merriment. The Doctor is anxious that 92 LIFE OF MILTON. we should not in any case moderate our laughter under any re- membrance of who it is that we are laughing at. 3. Well, having stated this little item in the Johnson creed, I am not meditating any waste of time in discussing it, especially because the case which the Doctor's maxim contemplates is altogether imaginary. The case in which he recommended unrestrained laughter, was a case of " great promises and small performances." Where then does Dr. Sam show us such a case ? Is it in any part or section of Milton's Italian experi- ence ? Logically it ought to be so ; because else what relation can it bear to any subject which the Doctor has brought before us ? But in anything that Milton on this occasion, or on any occasion whatever connected with the sacrifice of his Greek, Egyptian, or Syrian projects, either said or did, there is no promise at all, small or great And as to any relation between the supposed promise and the subsequent performance, as though the one were incommensurable to the other, doubtless many are the incommensurable quantities known to mathema- ticians ; but 1 conceive that the geometry which measures their relations, where the promise was never made and the perform- ance never contemplated, must be lost and hid away in secret chambers of moonshine beyond the " recuperative " powers (Johnsonically speaking) of Apollonius himself. Milton made no promises at all, consequently could not break any. And to represent him, for a purpose of blame and ridicule, as doing either tiiis or that, is malice at any rate ; too much, I fear, is wilful, conscious, deliberate falsehood. 4. What was it then which Milton did in Italy, as to which I never heard of his glorying, though most fervently he was entitled to glory ? Knowing that in a land which is passing through stages of political renovation, of searching purification, and of all which we now understand by the term revolution, golden occasions offer themselves unexpectedly for suggesting golden enlargements or revisions of abuses else overlooked, but that, when the wax has hardened, the opening is lost, so that great interests may depend upon the actual presence of some individual reformer, and that his absence may operate injuri- ously through long generations, he wisely resolved (though say* LIFE OF MILTON. 93 ing little about the enormous sacrifice which this entailed) to be present as soon as the great crucible was likely to be in active operation. And the sacrifice which he made, for this great series of watching opportunities which so memorably he after- wards improved, was, that he renounced the heavenly specta- cle of the JEgean Sea and its sunny groups of islands, renounced the sight of Attica, of the Theban districts, of the Morea; next, of that ancient river Nile, the river of Pharaoh and Moses, of the Pyramids, and the hundred-gated Thebes ; finally, he re- nounced the land of Syria, much of which was then doubtless unsafe for a Frank of any religion, and for a Christian of any nation. But he might have travelled in one district of Syria, viz. Palestine, which for him had paramount attractions. All these objects of commanding interest to any profound scholar, Greece, the Grecian Isles, Egypt, and Palestine, he surrendered to his sense of duty ; not by any promise or engagement, but by the act then and there of turning his face homewards ; well aware at the time that his chance was small indeed, under his peculiar prospects, of ever recovering his lost chance. He did not promise any sacrifice. Who was then in Italy to whom he could rationally have confided such an engagement ? He made the sacrifice without a word of promise. So much for Dr. Johnson's " small performance." 5. But supposing that there had been any words uttered by Milton, authorizing great expectations of what he would do in the way of patriotic service, where is the proof that the very largest promises conceivable, interpreted (as they ought to have been) by the known circumstances of Milton's social position, were not realized in vast over-measure ? I contend that even the various polemic 29 works, which Milton published through the next twenty years ; for instance, his new views on Education, on Freedom of the Press, to some extent, also, his Apology for Tyrannicide, but above all his Defensio pro Populo Anylicano, against the most insolent, and in this particular case, the most iynorant champion that literary Christendom could have se- lected, that immortal Apology for England, " Whereof all Europe rang from side to side." 94 LIFE OF MILTON. Had this been all, he would have redeemed in the noblest man- ner any promises that he could have made, not to repeat that he made none. But there is a deeper knavery in Dr. Johnson than simply what shows itself thus far. One word remains to be said on another aspect of the case. 6. Thus far we see the Doctor fastening upon Milton a forged engagement, for the one sole purpose of showing that the responsibility thus contracted was ludicrously betrayed. Now let us understand how. Supposing Milton to have done what the Doctor vaguely asserts, i. e. to have promised that, during the coming revolutionary struggle in his country, he would him- self do something to make this struggle grand or serviceable, how was it, where was it, when was it, that he brought his vow to an inglorious solution, to the Horatian solution of Parturiunt monies, &c. ? Dr. Johnson would apparently have thought it a most appropriate and heroic solution, if Milton had made him- self a major in the Lobsters 80 of Sir Arthur Hazelrigg, or among the Ironsides of Cromwell. But, on the contrary, he made him- self (mum teneatis ?) a schoolmaster. Dr. Johnson (himself a schoolmaster at one time), if he had possessed any sense of true dignity, would have recollected and said secretly to himself, de tefabula narratur, and would have abhorred to throw out lures to a mocking audience, when he himself lurked under the mask offered to public banter. On this, however, I do not pause ; neither do I pause upon a question so entirely childish, as whether Milton ever was, in any legal sense, clothed with the character of schoolmaster ? I refuse even, out of reverential sympathy with that majestic mind that would have made Milton refuse, to insist upon the fact that, even under this most puerile assault upon his social rank, Milton did really (by making him- self secretary to Cromwell) rise into something very like the official station of Foreign Secretary. All this I blow away to the four winds. I am now investigating the sincerity and hon- esty of Dr. Johnson under a trying temptation from malice that cannot be expressed nor measured. He had bound himself to bring out Samson blind and amongst enemies to make sport for the Philistines at Gaza. And the sport was to lie in the col- lision between a mighty promise and a miserable performance LIFE OF MILTON. 95 What the Doctor tells us, therefore, in support of this allega- tion, is, that somewhere or other Milton announced a magnifi- cent display of patriotism at some time and in some place, but that when he reached London all this pomp of preparation evanesced in his opening a private boarding-school. Upon this I have one question to propound ; and I will mak( it more impressive, and perhaps intelligible, by going back into history, and searching about for a great man, as to whom the same question may be put with more effect. Most of us think that Hannibal was a great man ; and amongst distinguished people of letters, my own contemporaries, when any accident has suggested a comparison amongst the intellectual leaders of antiquity, I have noted that a very large majority (two thirds I should say against one) gave a most cordial vote for the suprem- acy of this one-eyed Carthaginian. Well, this man was once a boy ; and, when not more than nine years old, he was solemnly led by his father to the blazing altar of some fierce avenging deity (Moloch perhaps) such as his compatriots worshipped, and by all the sanctities that ever he had heard of, the boy was pledged and sacramentally bound to an undying hatred and persecution of the Romans. And most people are of opinion that he, the man who fought with no backer but a travelling 81 earthquake at Lake Thrasymene, and subsequently at Cannae left 50,000 Romans on the ground, and for seventeen years took his pleasure in Italy, pretty well redeemed his vow. Now let us suppose (and it is no extravagant supposition even for those days) that some secretary, a slave in the house of Amil- car, had kept a Boswellian record of Hannibal's words and acts from childhood upwards. Naturally there would have been a fine illustration (such as the age allowed) of the great vow at the altar. All readers in after times, arrested and impressed by the scene, would inquire for its sequel : did that correspond ? If amongst these readers there were a Samuel Johnson, he would turn over a page or two, so as to advance by a few months, and there he might possibly find a commemoration of some festival or carousing party, in which the too faithful and literal secretary had recorded that the young malek Hannibal had insisted angrily on having at dinner beefsteaks and oyster-sauce, a 96 LIFE OF MILTON. dish naturally imported by the Phoenician sailors from the Cas- siterides of Cornwall. Then would rise Sam in his glory, and, turning back to the vow, would insist that this was its fulfilment. Others would seek it on Mount St. Bernard, on the line of the Apennines, on the deadly field of Cannae ; but Sam would read thus : Suffer not your veneration to intercept your just and reasonable mocker}". Our great prince vows eternal hatred to the enemies of his country, and he redeems his vow by eat- ing a beefsteak with a British accompaniment of oyster-sauce. The same question arises severally in the Milton and the Hannibal case, What relation, unless for the false fleeting eye of malice, has the act or the occasion indicated to the sup- posed solemnity of the vow alleged ? Show us the logic which approximates the passages in either life. I fear that at this point any plain man of simple integrity will feel himself disconcerted as in some mystification purposely framed to perplex him. "Let me understand," he will say, " if a man draws a bill payable in twenty years after date, how is he liable to be called upon for payment at a term far within its legal curriculum ? " Precisely so : the very excess of the knavery avails to conceal it. Hannibal confessedly had pledged himself to a certain result, whereas Milton had not ; and to that extent Hannibal's case was the weaker. But assume for the moment that both stand on the same footing. Each is supposed to have guaranteed some great event upon the confidence which he has in his own great powers. But, of course, he under- stands that, until the full development of those powers on which exclusively he relies, he does not come within the peril of his own obligation. And this being a postulate of mere natural justice, I contend that there was no more relation, such as could have duped Dr. Johnson for a moment, between any suppos- able promise of Milton's in Italy and that particular week in which he undertook the training of his youthful nephews (or, if it soothes the rancor of Dr. Johnson to say so, in which he opened a boarding-school), than between Hannibal at the altar and the same Hannibal dining on a beefsteak. From all the days of Milton's life, carefully to pick out that one on which only Milton did what Sam implicitly thinks a mean, " low-lived ~ LIFE OF MILTON. 97 action, is a knavery that could not have gone undetected had the case been argued at bar by counsel. It was base, it must have been base, to enter on the trade of schoolmaster ; for, as Ancient Pistol, that great moralist, teaches us, " base is the man that pays " ; and Milton probably had no other durable resource for paying. But still, however vile in Milton, this does not at all mend the logic of the Doctor in singling out that day or week from the thousands through which Milton lived. Dr. Johnson wished to go further ; but he was pulled up by an ugly remembrance. In earlier years the desperation of malice had led him into a perilous participation in Lauder's atrocities ; by haste and by leaps as desperate as the offence, on that occasion he escaped ; but hardly : and I believe, much as the oblivions of time aid such escapes by obliterating the traces or the meanings of action, and the coherences of oral evidence, that even yet, by following the guidance of Dr. Douglas (the un- masker of the leading criminal), some discoveries might be made as to Johnson's co-operation. But in writing The Lives of the Poets, one of the Doctor's latest works, he had learned caution. Malice, he found, was not always safe ; and it might sometimes be costly. Still there was plenty of game to be had without too much risk. And the Doctor, prompted by the fiend, resolved to " take a shy," before parting, at the most consecrated of Milton's creations. It really vexes me to notice this second case at all in a situation where I have left myself so little room for unmasking its hollowness. But a whisper is enough if it reaches a watchful ear. What, then, is the supreme jewel which Milton has bequeathed to us ? Nobody can doubt that it is Paradise Lost? Into this great clief-d 'ceuvre of Milton, it was no doubt John- son's secret determination to send a telling shot at parting. He would lodge a little gage d'amitie, a farewell pledge of hatred, a trifling token (trifling, but such things are not estimated in money) of his eternal malice. Milton's admirers might divide it among themselves; and, if it should happen to fester and rankle in their hearts, so much the better ; they were heartily welcome to the poison : not a jot would he deduct for himself if thousand times greater. O Sam ! kill us not with munifi- 7 98 LIFE OF MILTON. cence. But now, as I must close within a minute or so, what in that pretty souvenir of gracious detestation with which our friend took his leave ? The Paradise Lost, said he, in effect, is a wonderful work; wonderful; grand beyond all estimate; sublime to a fault. But well, go on ; we are all listening. But I grieve to say it, wearisome. Jt creates a world of admiration (one world, take notice) ; but O that I, senior offshoot from the house of Malagrowthers, should live to say it ! ten worlds of ennui : one world of astonishment ; ten worlds of tcedium vita;. Half and half might be tolerated, it is often tolerated by the bibulous and others; but one against ten ? Xo, no ! This, then, was the farewell blessing which Dr. Johnson be- stowed upon the Paradise Lost : what is my reply ? The poem, it seems, is wearisome ; Edmund Waller called it dull. A man, it is alleged by Dr. Johnson, opens the volume ; reads a page or two with feelings allied to awe : next he finds himself rather jaded ; then sleepy : naturally shuts up the book ; and forgets ever to take it down again. Now, when any work of human art is impeached as wearisome, the first reply is wearisome to whom f For it so happens that nothing exists, absolutely noth- ing, which is not at some time, and to some person, wearisome, or even potentially disgusting. There is no exception for the works of God. " Man delights not me, nor woman either," is the sigh which breathes from the morbid misanthropy of the gloomy but philosophic Hamlet. Weariness, moreover, and even sleepiness, is the natural reaction of awe or of feelings too highly strung ; and this reaction in some degree proves the sin- cerity of the previous awe. In cases of that class, where the impressions of sympathetic veneration have been really unaf- fected, but carried too far, the mistake is to have read too much at a time. But these are exceptional cases : to the great majority of readers the poem is wearisome through mere vulgar- ity and helpless imbecility of mind ; not from overstrained ex- citement, but from pure defect in the capacity for excitement. And a moment's reflection at this point lays bare to us the malignity of Dr. Johnson. The logic of that malignity is simply this : that he applies to Milton, as if separately and specially LIFE OF MILTON. 99 true of Jiim, a rule abstracted from human experience spread over the total field of civilization. All nations are here on a level. Not a hundredth part of their populations is capable of any unaffected sympathy with what is truly great in sculpture, in painting, in music, and by a transcendent necessity in the supreme of Fine Arts, Poetry. To be popular in any but a meagre comparative sense as an artist of whatsoever class, is to be confessedly a condescender to human infirmities. And as to the test which Dr. Johnson, by implication, proposes as trying the merits of Milton in his greatest work, viz. the degree in which it was read, the Doctor knew pretty well, and when by accident he did not, was inexcusable for neglecting to inquire, that by the same test all the great classical works of past ages, Pagan or Christian, might be branded with the mark of suspi- cion as works that had failed of their paramount purpose, viz. a deep control over the modes of thinking and feeling in each suc- cessive generation. Were it not for the continued succession of academic students having a contingent mercenary interest in many of the great authors surviving from the wrecks of time, scarcely one edition of fresh copies would be called for in each period of fifty years. And as to the arts of sculpture and paint- ing, were the great monuments in the former art those, I mean, inherited from Greece, such as the groups, &c., scattered through Italian mansions, the Venus, the Apollo, the Hercules, the Faun, the Gladiator, and the marbles in the British Museum, purchased by the government from the late Lord Elgin stripped of their metropolitan advantages, and left to their own unaided attraction in some provincial town, they would not avail to keep the requisite officers of any establishment for housing them in salt and tobacco. We may judge of this by the records left behind by Benjamin Haydon, of the difficulty which he found in simply upholding their value as wrecks of the Phidian era. The same law asserts itself everywhere. What is ideally grand lies beyond the region of ordinary 33 human sym- pathies, which must, by a mere instinct of good sense, seek out objects more congenial and upon their own level. One answer to Johnson's killing shot, as he kindly meant it, is, that our brother is not dead but sleeping. Regularly as the cominf what may be called poetic science. We will lay open the true purpose of Milton by a single illustra- tion. In describing impressive scenery, as occurring MILTON. 129 in a hilly or a woody country, everybody must have noticed the habit which young ladies have of using the word amphitheatre : " amphitheatre of woods " " am- phitheatre of hills," these are their constant expres- sions. Why : Is it because the word amphitheatre is a Grecian word ? We question if one young lady in twenty knows that it is ; and very certain we are that no word would recommend itself to her use by that origin, if she happened to be aware of it. The reason lurks here : In the word theatre is contained an evanescent image of a great audience of a populous multitude. Now, this image half-withdrawn, half- flashed upon the eye and combined with the word hills or forests, is thrown into powerful collision with the silence of hills with the solitude of forests ; each image, from reciprocal contradiction, brightens and vivifies the other. The two images act, and react, by strcng repulsion and antagonism. This principle I might exemplify, and explain at great length ; but I impose a law of severe brevity upon myself. And I have said enough. Out of this one principle of subtle and lurking antagonism, may be explained everything which has been denounced inder the idea of pedantry in Milton. It is the key to all that lavish pomp of art and knowledge which is sometimes put forward by Milton in situations of in- tense solitude, and in the bosom of primitive nature as, for example, in the Eden of his great poem, and in the Wilderness of his " Paradise Regained." The shadowy exhibition of a regal banquet in the desert, draws out and stimulates the sense of its utter solitude uid remotion from men or cities. The images of 9 ISO MII/TOX. architectural splendor, suddenly raised in tne very centre of Paradise, as vanishing shows by the wand of A magician, bring into powerful relief the depth of silence, and the unpopulous solitude which possess this sanc- tuary of man whilst yet happy and innocent. Para- dise could not, in any other way, or by any artifice less profound, have been made to give up its essential and differential characteristics in a form palpable to the imagination. As a place of rest, it was necessary that it should be placed in close collision with the unresting strife of cities ; as a place of solitude, with the image of tumultuous crowds ; as the centre of mere natural beauty in its gorgeous prime, with the images of elab- orate architecture and of human workmanship ; as a place of perfect innocence in seclusion, that it should be exhibited as the antagonist pole to the sin and misery of social man. Such is the covert philosophy which governs Milton's practice, and which might be illustrated by many scores of passages from both the " Paradise Lost " and the " Paradise Regained." * In fact, a volume might be composed on this one chapter. And yet, from the * For instance, this is the key to that image in the " Paradise Regained," where Satan, on first emerging into sight, is com- pared to an old man gathering sticks " to warm him on a win- ter's day." This image, at first sight, seems little in harmony with the wild and awful character of the supreme fiend. No; it is not in harmony; nor is it meant to be in harmony. On the contrary, it is meant to be in antagonism and intense repulsion. The household image of old age, of human infirmity, and of do- mestic hearths, are all meant as a machinery for provoking and eliciting the fearful idea to which they are placed in collision knd as eo many repelling poles. MILTCN. 131 blindness or inconsiderate examination of his critics, this latent wisdom this cryptical science of poetic effects in the mighty poet has been misinterpreted, and set down to the effect of defective skill, or even of puerile ostentation. 2. The second great charge against Milton is, primd facie, even more difficult to meet. It is the charge of having blended the Pagan and Christian forms. The great realities of angels and archangels are continually combined into the same groups with the fabulous im- personations of the Greek mythology. Eve is inter- linked in comparisons with Pandora, with Aurora, with Proserpine. Those impersonations, however, may be thought to have something of allegoric meaning in their conceptions, which in a measure corrects this Paganism of the idea. But Eve is also compared with Ceres, with Hebe, and other fixed forms of Pagan superstition. Other allusions to the Greek mythologic forms, or direct combination of them with the real existences of the Christian heavens, might be produced by scores, were it not that we decline to swell our paper beyond the necessity of the case. Now, surely this at least is an error. Can there be any answer to this? At one time we were ourselves inclined to fear that Milton had been here caught tripping. In this in- stance, at least, he seems to be in error. But there is no trusting to appearances. In meditating upon the question, we happened to remsmber that the most solossal and Miltonic of painters had fallen into the very same fault, if fault it were. In his " Last Judg- ment," Michael Angelo has introduced the Pagan deities 132 MILTON. in connection with the hierarchy of the Christian heav- ens. Now, it is very true that one great man cannot palliate the error of another great man, by repeating the same error himself. But, though it cannot avail as an excuse, such a conformity of ideas serves as a summons to a much more vigilant examination of the case than might else be instituted. One man might err from inadvertency ; but that two, and both men trained to habits of constant meditation, should fall into the same error makes the marvel tenfold greater. Now we confess that, as to Michael Angelo, we do not pretend to assign the precise key to the practice which he adopted. And to our feelings, after all that might be said in apology, there still remains an im- pression of incongruity in the visual exhibition and direct juxtaposition of the two orders of supernatural existence so potently repelling each other. But, as regards Milton, the justification is complete ; it rests upon the following principle : In all other parts of Christianity, the two orders of superior beings, the Christian Heaven and tt e Pagan Pantheon, are felt to be incongruous not as the pure opposed to the impure (for, if that were the reason, then the Christian fiends should be incongruous with the angels, which they are not), but as the unreal opposed to the real. In all the hands of other poets, we feel that Jupiter, Mercury, Apollo, Diana, are not merely impure conceptions, but that they are baseless conceptions, phantoms of air, nonentities ; and there is much the same object-' on, in point of just taste, to the combination of such fabulous beings in the same groups with glorified saints and angels, as there is U MILTON. 133 the combination, by a painter or a sculptor, of real flesh-and-blood creatures, with allegoric abstractions. This is the objection to such combination in all other poets. But this objection does not apply to Milton : it glances past him ; and for the following reason Milton has himself laid an early foundation for his introduction of the Pagan Pantheon into Christian groups : the false gods of the heathen world were, ac- cording to Milton, the fallen angels. See his inimitable account of the fallen angels who and what they sub- sequently became. In itself, and even if detached from the rest of the " Paradise Lost," this catalogue is an u^ra-magnificent poem. They are not false, therefore, in the sense of being unreal, baseless, and having a merely fantastical existence like our European Fairies, but as having drawn aside mankind from a pure wor- ship. As ruined angels under other names, they are no less real than the faithful and loyal angels of the Christian heavens. And in that one difference of the Miltonic creed, which the poet has brought pointedly and elaborately under his reader's notice by his match- less roll-call of the rebellious angels, and of their Pagan transformations, in the very first book of the " Paradise Lost," is laid beforehand * the amplest foun- * Other celebrated poets have laid no such preparatory foun- dations for their intermixture of heathen gods with the heavenly host of the Christian revelation; for example, amongst thou- sands of others, Tasso, and still more flagrantly, Camoens, who rs not content with allusions or references that suppose the Pagan Mythology still substantially existing, but absolutely introduces them as potent agencies amongst superstitious and bigoted wor- ihippers of papal saints. Consequently, they, beyond all apology, we open to the censure which for Milton is subtly evaded. 134 MILTON. dation for his subsequent practice ; and at the same time, therefore, the amplest answer to the charge pre- ferred against him by Dr. Johnson, and by so many other critics, who had not sufficiently penetrated the Latent theory on which he acted. CHARLEMAGNE.* HISTORY is sometimes treated under the splendid conception of " philosophy teaching by example," and ome times as an " old almanac ; " and, agreeably to this latter estimate, we ourselves once heard a celebrated living professor f of surgery, who has been since dis- tinguished by royal favor, and honored with a title, making it his boast that he had never charged his memory with one single historical fact; that on the contrary he had, out of profound contempt for a sort of knowledge so utterly without value in his eyes, anx- iously sought to extirpate from his remembrance, or, if that were impossible, to perplex and confound, any relics of historical records which might happen to sur- vive from his youthful studies. " And I am happy to say," added he, " and it is consoling to have it in my power conscientiously to declare, that, although I have not been able to dismiss entirely from my mind some ridiculous fact about a succession of four great monar- chies, since human infirmity still clings to our best efforts, and will for ever prevent our attaining perfec- tion, still I have happily succeeded in so far confounding * A paper which arose on the suggestion of the History of Charlemagne, by G. P. B, James, Esq. London: Longman de Co., 1832. t " A celebrated living professor : " Living when this WM Written. 136 CHA.RLEMAGXK. nil distinctions of things and persons, of time and of places, that I could not assign the era of any one transaction, as I humbly trust, within a thousand years. The whole vast series of history is become a wilderness -o me ; and my mind, as to all such absurd knowledge, under the blessing of Heaven, is pretty nearly a tabula rasa." I was present at this etalage of ignorance, a perhaps I may already have informed the reader. And the case reminded me of one popularly ascribed to Orator Henley, who, in disputing with some careless fellow in a coffee-house, suddenly arrested his noisy antagonist by telling him that in one short sentence he had perpetrated two enormous mythologic blunders, having interchangeably confounded Plutus, the blind god of wealth, with Pluto, the gloomy tyrant of the infernal realms. " Confound them, have I ? " said the mythologic criminal. " Well, so much the better ; confound them both for two old rogues." " But," said Henley, " you have done them both unspeakable wrong." " With all my heart," rejoined the other, " they are heartily welcome to everything unspeakable below the moon : thank God, I know very little of such ruffians." " But how ? " said Henley ; " do I understand you to mean that you thank God for your ignorance ? " " Well, suppose I rfo," said the re- spondent, " what have you to do with that ? " " Oh, nothing," cried Henley ; " only I should say that in that case, you had a great deal to be thankful for." I was young at that time, little more than a boy, and thirstily I sighed to repeat this little story as applicable to the present case. In fact it was too applicable ; ana n case Sir Anthony should be of the same opinion, J CHAHLEMA.ONJE. 137 remembered seasonably that the finished and accom- plished surgeon carries a pocket case of surgical imple- ments ; lancets, for instance, that are loaded with viriu in every stage of contagion. Might he not inoculate me with rabies, with hydrophobia, with the plague oJ Cairo ? On the whole, it seemed better to make play against Sir Anthony with a sudden coruscation ol forked logic ; which accordingly I did, insisting upon it that as the true point of ambition was now changed for the philosophic student [the maximum of ignorance being the goal aimed at, and no longer the maximum of light], it had become outrageously vain-glorious in Sir Anthony to rehearse the steps of his own darkness ; that we, the chance-people in Mrs. Montague's draw- ing-room, were young beginners, novices that had no advantages to give us a chance in such a contest with central darkness in the persons of veteran masters. Mrs. Montague took my side, and said that I, for in- stance, myself did very well, considering how short had been my career as regarded practice, but it was really unfair to look for perfection in a mere beginner. In this Gothic expression of self-congratulation upor the extent of Lis own ignorance, though doubtless founded upon what the Germans call an einseitig * or one-sided estimate, there was, however, that sort of truth which is apprehended only by strong minds, such minds as \aturally adhere to extreme courses. Certainly the blank knowledge of facts, which is all that most readers gather from their historical studies, is a mere despotism Mark, reader, the progress of language, and consequently f novel ideas. This was written nearly thirty years ago, and It that time the term needed an apologetic formula. 138 CHARLEMAGNE. of rubbish without cohesion, and resting upon no basil of theory (that is, of general comprehensive survey) applied to the political development of nations, and accounting for the great stages of their internal move- ments. Rightly and profitably to understand history, it ought to be studied in as many ways as it may be written. History, as a composition, falls into three separate arrangements, obeying three distinct laws, and addressing itself to three distinct objects. Its first and humblest office is to deliver a naked, unadorned exposition of public events and their circumstances. This form of history may be styled the purely Narra- tive ; the second form is that which may be styled the Scenical ; and the third the Philosophic. What is meant by Philosophic History is well understood in our present advanced state of society ; and few histo- ries are written except in the simplest condition of human culture, which do not in part assume its func- tions, or which are content to lest their entire attraction upon the abstract interest of facts. The privileges of this form have, however, been greatly abused ; and the truth of facts has been so much forced to bend be- fore preconceived theories, whereas every valid theory ought to be abstracted from the facts, that Mr. Southey and others in this day have set themselves to decry the whole genus and class, as essentially at war with the very primary purposes of the art. But, under what- ever name, it is evident that philosophy, or an investi- gation of the true moving forces in every great train *nd sequence of national events, and an exhibition o the motives and the moral consequences in their larges. extent which have concurred with these events, cannof CHARLEMAGXE. 139 oe omitted in any history above the level of a childish understanding. Mr. Southey himself will be found to illustrate this necessity by his practice, whilst assailing it in principle. As to the other mode of history, his- tory treated scenically, it is upon the whole the most delightful to the reader, and the most susceptible of art and ornament in the hands of a skilful composer. The most celebrated specimen in the vulgar opinion is the Decline and Fall of Gibbon. And to this class may in part* be referred the Historical Sketches of Voltaire. Histories of this class proceed upon princi- ples of selection, presupposing in the reader a general knowledge of the great cardinal incidents, and bringing forward into especial notice those only which are sus- ceptible of being treated with distinguished effect. These are the three separate modes of treating his- tory ; each has its distinct purposes ; and all must * In part we say, because in part also the characteristic dif- ferences of these works depend upon the particular mode of the narrative. For narration itself, as applied to history, admits of a triple arrangement, dogmatic, sceptical, and critical; dog- matic, which adopts the current records without examination; sceptical, as Horace Walpole's Richard III., Malcolm Laing's Dissertation on Perkin Warbeck, or on the Gowrie Con- spiracy, which expressly undertakes to probe and try the unsound parts of the story; and critical, which, after an examination ol this nature, selects from the whole body of materials such as are roherent. There is besides another ground of difference in the quality of historical narratives viz., between those which move by means of great public events, and those which (like the C&- lars of Suetonius and the French Memoirs), postulating all such eapital events as are necessarily already known, and keeping them in the background, crowd their foreground with those per- tonal and domestic notices which we call anecdotes. 140 CHARLEMAGNE. contribute to make up a comprehensive total of his- torical knowledge. The first furnishes the facts ; the second opens a thousand opportunities for 'pictures oi manners and national temper in every stage of their growth ; whilst the third abstracts the political or the ethical moral, and unfolds the philosophy -which knitfl the history of one nation to that of others, and exhibits j the whole under their internal connection, as parts of one great process, carrying on the great economy of human improvement by many stages in many regions at one and the same time. Pursued upon this comprehensive scale, the study of history is the study of human nature. But some have continued to reject it, not upon any objection to the quality of the knowledge gained, but simply on the ground of its limited extent ; contending that in public and political transactions, such as compose the matter of history, human nature exhibits itself upon too nar- row a scale and under too monotonous an aspect ; that under different names, and in connection with different dates and regions, events virtually the same are con- tinually revolving ; that whatever novelty may strike the ear, in passages of history taken from periods widely remote, affects the names only, and circum- stances that are extra-essential ; that the passions meantime, the motives, and (allowing for difference oi manners) the means even, are subject to no variety ; that in ancient or in modern history there is no real accession made to our knowledge of human nature but that all proceeds by cycles of endless repetition and in fact that, according to the old complaint, " there is nothing new under the sun." CHARLEMAGNE. 141 It is not true that " there is nothing new under the lun." This is the complaint, as all men know, of a iaded voluptuary, seeking for a new pleasure and find- ing none, for reasons which lay in his own vitiated nature. Why did he seek for novelty ? Because old pleasures had ceased to stimulate his exhausted organs ; and that was reason enough why no new pleasure, had any been found, would operate as such for him. The weariness of spirit and the poverty of pleasure, which he bemoaned as belonging to our human condition, were not in reality objective (as a German philosopher would express himself), or laid in the nature of things, and thus pressing upon all alike, but subjective, that is to say, derived from the peculiar state and affections of his own organs for apprehending pleasure. Not the TO apprehensibile, but the TO apprehendens, was in fault ; not the pleasures, or the dewy freshness of pleasures had decayed, but the sensibilities of him who thus undertook to appraise them were biases and ex- hausted. More truly and more philosophically, it may be said that there is nothing old under the sun, no absolute repetition. It is the well known doctrine of Leibnitz,* * Leibnitz (who was twice in England), when walking in Kensington Gardens with the Princess of Wales, whose admira- tion oscillated between this great countryman of her own and Bir Isaac Newton, the corresponding idol of her adopted country, took occasion, from the beautiful scene about them, to explain in a lively way, and at the same time to illustrate and verify this favorite thesis . Turning to a gentleman in attendance upon fter Royal Highness, he challenged him to produce two leaves from any tree or shrub, which should be exact duplicates or fc- timiles of each other in those lines which variegate the surface (42 CHARLEMAGNK. that amongst the familiar objects of our daily experi- ence, there is no perfect identity. All in external na- ture proceeds by endless variety. Infinite change, illimitable novelty, inexhaustible difference, these are the foundations upon which nature builds and ratines her purpose of individuality ; so indispensable, amongst a thousand other great uses, to the very elements of social distinctions and social rights. But for the end- less circumstances of difference which characterize external objects, the rights of property, for instance, would have stood upon no certain basis, nor admitted of any general or comprehensive guarantee. As with external objects, so with human actions : amidst their infinite approximations and affinities, they are separated by circumstances of never-ending diver- sity. History may furnish her striking correspondences, biography her splendid parallels ; Rome may in certain cases appear but the mirror of Athens, England of Rome ; and yet, after all, no character can be cited, no great transaction, no revolution of "high- viced cities," no catastrophe of nations, which, in the midst of its resemblances to distant correspondences in other The challenge was accepted; but the result justified Leibnitz. It is in fact upon this infinite variety in the superficial lines of the human palm, that palmistry is grounded (or the science of divi- nation by the hieroglyphics written on each man's hand), and has its prima facie justification. Were it otherwise, this mode f divination would not have even a plausible sanction ; for, with- out the inexhaustible varieties which are actually found in th combination of these lines, and which give to each separate indi vidual his own separate type, the same identical fortunes niusl be often repeated; and there would be no foundation for assign mg to each his peculiar and characteristic destiny. CHA.BLEMAGNB. 143 , does not include features of abundant distinction and individualizing characteristics, so many and so im- portant, as to yield its own peculiar matter for philo- sophical meditation and its own separate moral. Hare is the case in history, or (to speak with suitable bold- ness) there is none, which does not involve circum- stances capable to a learned eye, without any external aid from chronology, of referring it to its own age. The doctrine of Leibnitz, on the grounds of individu- ality in the objects of sense, may, in fact, be profitably extended to all the great political actions of mankind. Many pass, in a popular sense, for pure transcripts or duplicates of similar cases in past times; but, accu- rately speaking, none are such truly and substantially. Neither are the differences by which they are severally marked and featured interesting only to the curiosity or to the spirit of minute research. All public acts, in the degree in which they are great and comprehensive, are steeped in living feelings and saturated with *s\*(* spirit of their own age ; and the features of their individuality, that is, the circumstances which chiefly distinguish them from their nearest parallels in other times, and chiefly prevent them from lapsing into blank repetitions of the same identical case, are generally the very cardinal points, the organs, and the depositories which lodge whatever best expresses the temper and tendencies of the age to which tney belong. So far are these special points of distinction from being slight or trivial, that in them par excellence is gathered and concentrated whatever a political philosopher would be best pleased to insulate and to converge within hig field of view. Ml CHAB.LEMAQNE. This, indeed is evident upon consideration ; and is in some sense Implied in the very verbal enunciation of the proposition : vi termini, it should strike every man who reflects, that in great national transactions of dif- ferent ages, so far resembling each other as to merit the description of parallels, all the circumstances of agree- ment, all those which compose the resemblance, for the ery reason that they are common to both periods of time, specially and characteristically belong to neither. It is the differential, and not the common, the points of special dissimilitude, not those of general similitude, which manifestly must be looked to for the philosophic valuation of the times or the people, for the adjudication of their peculiar claims in a comparison with other times and other people, and for the appraisement of the progress made, whether positively for its total amount, or relatively to itself, for its rate of advance at each separate stage. It is in this way of critical examination, that com- parison and the collation of apparent parallels, from being a pure amusement of ingenuity, rises to a philo- uophic labor, and that the study of history becomes at once dignified, and in a most practical sense profitable. It is the opinion of the subtlest and the most combining (if not the most useful) philosopher whom England has produced, that a true knowledge of history confers the gift of prophecy ; or that intelligently and saga- ciously to have looked backwards, is potentially to have looked forwards. For example, he is of opinion that any student of the great English civil war in the reign of Charles I., who should duly have noted th8 ligns precurrent and concurrent of those days, ana CHARLEMAGNE. 145 Bhould also have read the contemporary political pam- phlets, coming thus prepared, could not have failed, after a corresponding study of the French literature from 1750 to 1788, and, in particular, after collecting the general sense and temper of the French people from the Cuhiers (or codes of instruction transmitted by the electoral bodies to the members of the first National Assembly), to foresee in clear succession the long career of revolutionary frenzy, which soon after- wards deluged Europe with tears and blood. This may perhaps be conceded, and without prejudice to the doctrine just now delivered, of endless diversity in political events. For it is certain that the political movements of nations obey everlasting laws, and travel through the stages of known cycles, which thus in- sure enough of resemblance to guarantee the general outline of a sagacious prophecy ; whilst, on the other hand, the times, the people, and the extraordinary minds which, in such critical eras, soon reveal them- selves at the head of affairs, never fail of producing their appropriate and characteristic results of diffei- ence. Sameness enough there will always be to en- courage the true political seer, with difference enough to confer upon each revolution its own separate char- acter and its peculiar interest. All this is strikingly illustrated in the history of those great revolutionary events which belong to the life and times of thr Emperor Charlemagne. If any one period in history might be supposed to offer a barren and unprofitable picture of var, rapine and bloodshed, unfeatured by characteristic differences, and unimproved ,iy any peculiar moral, it is this section of the Euro- 10 146 CHARLEMAGNE. pean annals. Removed from our present times by a tho asand years, divided from us by the profound guli of what we usually denominate the dark ages ; placed, in fact, entirely upon the farther * side of that great barrier, this period of history can hardly be expected to receive much light from contemporary documents in an age so generally illiterate. Not from national archives, or state papers, when diplomacy was so rare, when so large a proportion of its simple transactions was conducted by personal intercourse, and after the destruction wrought amongst its slender chancery of written memorials by the revolution of one entire mil- lennium. Still less could we have reason to hope for much light from private memoirs at a period when the means of writing were as slenderly diffused as the motives ; when the rare endowments, natural and ac- quired, for composing history could so seldom happen to coincide with the opportunities for obtaining accurate information ; when the writers were so few, and the audience so limited, to which any writers soever could then profitably address themselves. With or without illustration, however, the age itself and its rapid suc- cession of wars between barbarous and semi-barbarous tribes, might, if any one chapter in history, be pro* burned barren of either interest or instruction, weari- somely monotonous ; and, by comparison with any parallel section from the records of other nations in the earliest stages of dawning civilization, offering no * According to the general estimate of philosophical history the tenth century (or perhaps the tenth and the eleventh oo jointly) must be regarded as the true meridian, or the perfect midnight, of the dark ages. CHARLEMAGNE. 147 rie feature of novelty beyond the names of the com- batants, their local and chronological relations, ana the peculiar accidents and unimportant circumstances of variety in the conduct or issue of the several battles which they fought. Yet, in contradiction to all these very plausible pre- sumptions, even this remote period teems with its own peculiar and separate instruction. It is the first great station, so to speak, which we reach after entering the portals of modern * history. It presents us with the evolution and propagation of Christianity in its present central abodes ; with the great march of civili- zation, and the gathering within the pale of that mighty agency for elevating human nature, and be- aeath the gentle yoke of the only true and beneficent religion, of the last rebellious recusants among the European family of nations. We meet, also, in con- junction with the other steps of the vast humanizing process then going on, the earliest efforts at legislation, * It has repeatedly been made a question, at what era we ought U date the transition from ancient to modern history. This question merits a separate dissertation. Meantime it is sufficient *> say in this place, that Justinian in the sixth century will unanimously be referred to the ancient division, Charlemagne in the eighth to the modern. These, then, are two limits fixed in each direction; and somewhere between them must lie the frontier line. Now the era of Mahomet in the seventh century is evidently the exact and perfect line of demarcation ; not only as pretty nearly bisecting the debatable ground, but also because the rise >f the Mohammedan power, as operating so powerfully upon (he Christian kingdoms of the south, and through them upon the whole of Christendom, at that time beginning to mould themselves and to knit, marks in the ivogt eminent sense the birth of a new era. 148 CHA.KLEMAGNK. recording, at the same time, the barbarous condition of those for whom they were designed, and the anti- barbarous views, alien or exotic, of the legislator, in the midst of his condescensions to the infirmities oi his subjects. Here also we meet with the elementary state, growing and as yet imperfectly rooted, of feudal- ism. Here, too, we behold in their incunabula, form- ing and arranging themselves under the pressure of circumstances, the existing kingdoms of Christendom. So far then from being a mere echo, or repetition, of analogous passages in history, the period of Charle- magne is novel to the extent of ambitious originality in its instruction, and almost unique in the quality of that instruction. For here only perhaps we see the social system forming itself in the mine, and the very process, as it were, of crystallization going on beneath our eyes. Mr. James, therefore, may be regarded as not less fortunate in the choice of his subject, than meritorious in its treatment ; indeed, his work is not so much the best, as the only history of Charlemagne which will hereafter be cited. For it reposes upon a far greater body of research and collation, than has hitherto been applied* even in France, to this inter- esting theme ; and in effect it is the first account of the t reat emperor and his times which can, with a due raluation of the term, be complimented with the title uf a critical memoir. Charlemagne, " the greatest man of the middle Or, in feet, than is likely to manifest itself to an unlearned reader of Mr. James's own book; for he has omitted to load his margin with references to authorities in many scores of instance! where he might, and perhaps where he ought, to have accredited to narrative by those indications of research. CHARLEMAGNE. 14S ages," in the judgment of his present biographer, was born A. D. 742, seven years before his father assumed the name of king. This date has been disputed ; but, on the whole, we may take it as settled, upon various collateral computations, that the year now assigned is the true one. The place is less certain ; but we do not think Mr. James warranted in saying that it is " unknown," if everything is to be pronounced " un- known," for which there is no absolute proof of a kind to satisfy forensic rules of evidence, or which has ever been made a question for debate, in that case we may apply a sponge to the greater part of history before the era of printing. Aix-la-Chapelle, Mr. James goes on to tell us, is implied as the birthplace in one of the chief authorities. But our own impres- sion is, that according to the general belief of succeed- ing ages, it was not Aix-la-Chapelle, but Ingelheim, a village near Mentz, to which that honor belonged. Some have supposed that Carlsburg, in Bavaria, was the true place of his birth ; and, indeed, that it drew its name from that distinguished event. Frantzius, in particular, says, that in his day the castle of that place was still shown to travellers with the reverential interest attached to such a pretension. But, after all, he gives his own vote for Ingelheim ; and it is singular that he does not so much as mention Aix-la-Chapelle. Of his education and his early years, Mr. James is of opinion that we know as little as of his birthplace. Certainly our information upon these particulars ia neither full nor circumstantial ; yet we know as much, perhaps, in these respects, of Charlemagne as of Na- poleon Bonaparte. And remarkable enough it is, that 150 CHARLEMAGNK. not relatively (or making allowances for the age), but absolutely, Charlemagne was much more accomplished than Napoleon in the ordinary business of a modem education ; Charlemagne, in the middle of the eighth century, than Napoleon in the latter end of the eigh- teenth. Charlemagne was, in fact, the most accom- plished man of his age ; Napoleon a sciolist for any age. The tutor of Charlemagne was Peter of Pisa, man eminent at that time for his attainments in liter- ature (in re grammatica) . From him it was that Char- lemagne learned Latin and Greek ; Greek in such a degree " ut sufficienter intelligeret," and Latin to the extent of using it familiarly and fluently in conversa- tion. Now, as to the man of the eighteenth century, Gieek was to him as much a sealed language as Chinese ; and, even with regard to Latin, his own secretary doubts upon one occasion, whether he wero sufficiently master of it to translate Juvenal's expres- sive words of Panem et Cir censes. Yet he had enjoyed the benefits of an education in a royal college, in a country which regards itself self-complacently as at the head of civilization. Again, there is a pretty strong tradition (which could hardly arise but upon some foundation), that Charlemagne had cultivated the Arabic so far as to talk it,* having no motive to that attainment more urgent than that politcal considera- " Arabice loquutum esse Aigolando Saracenorum regult, fur pin us (the famous Archbishop) auctor eat; nee id fide indig- Dum. Dam enira in expeditione Hispanica praecipuam belli inolem in ilium vertit, facile temporia tractu notitiam lingua ioi comparare potuit" FRANTZ. Hist. Car. Mag. That is uhad time sufficient for this acquisition, and a motive sufficient CHARLEMAGNE. 151 tions made it eligible for him to undertake an expedi- tion against those who could negotiate in no other language. Now, let it be considered how very much more powerful arguments there were in Napoleon's position for mastering the German and the English. His continental policy moved entirely upon the pivot of central Europe, that is, the German system of na- tions, the great federation of powers upon the Rhine and the Danube. And, as to England, his policy and his passions alike pointed in that direction as uniformly and as inevitably as the needle to the pole : every morning, we are told, tossing aside the Paris journals as so many babbling echoes of his own public illusions, expressing rather what was desired, than what was probable, he required of his secretary that he should read off into French the leading newspapers of Eng- land. And many were the times when he started up in fury, and passionately taxed his interpreter with mistranslation ; sometimes as softening the expressions, sometimes as over-coloring their violence. Evidently he lay at the mercy of one whom he knew to be want- ing in honor, and who had it in his power, either by way of abetting any sinister views of his own, or in collusion with others, to suppress, to add, to garble, and in every possible way to color and distort what he was interpreting. Yet neither could this humiliating ense of dependency on the one hand, nor the instant pressure of political interest on the other, ever urge Napoleon to the effort of learning English in the first sase, German or Spanish in the second. Charlemagne kgain cultivated most strenously and successfully, as to accomplishment peculiarly belonging tj the func- I."''-' CHARLEMAGNE. tions of his high station, the art and practice of elo- quence ; and he had this reward of his exertions that he was accounted the most eloquent man of his age : " totis viribus ad orationem exercendam conver- sus naturalem facundiam ita roboravit studio, ut prse- ter [I. propter^ promptum ac profluens sermonis genus facile cevi sui eloguentissimus crederetur." Turn to, Bonaparte. It was a saying of his sycophants, that ho sometimes spoke like a god, and sometimes worse than the feeblest of mortals. But, says one who knew him well, the mortal I have often heard, unfortunately never yet the god. He, who sent down this sneer to posterity, was at Napoleon's right hand on the most memorable occasion of his whole career that cardi- nal occasion, as we may aptly term it (for upon that his whole fortunes hinged), when he intruded violently upon the Legislative Body, dissolved the Directory, and effected the revolution of the eighteenth Brumaire. That revolution it was which raised him to the Consu- lar power ; and by that revolution, considered in its manner and style, we may judge of Napoleon in sev- eral of his chief pretensions courage, presence of mind, dignity, and eloquence ; for then, if ever, these qualities were all in instant requisition ; one word iffectually urged by the antagonist parties, a breath, a gesture, a nod, suitably followed up, would have made the total difference between ruler of France and a traitor hurried away a la lanterne. It is true, that the misera- ble imbecility of all who should have led the hostiel parties, the irresolution and the quiet-loving temper of Moreau, the base timidity of Bernadotto, in fact, the total defect of heroic minds amongst the French o CHARLEMAGNE. 153 ,hat day, neutralized the defects and more than com- pensated the blunders of Napoleon. But these were advantages that could not be depended on : a glass of brandy extraordinary might have emboldened the greatest poltroon to do that which, by once rousing a movement of popular enthusiasm, once making a be- ginning in that direction, would have precipitated the whole affair into hands which must have carried it far beyond the power of any party to control. Never, according to all human calculation, were eloquence and presence of mind so requisite ; never was either so deplorably wanting. A passionate exposition of the national degradations inflicted by the imbecility of the directors, an appeal to the assembly as Frenchmen, contrasting the glories of 1796 with the Italian disas- ters that had followed, might, by connecting the new candidate for power with the public glory, and the existing rulers with all the dishonors which had settled on the French banners, have given an electric shock to the patriotism of the audience, such as would have been capable for the moment of absorbing their feel- ings as partisans. In a French assembly, movements if that nature, under a momentary impulse, are far from being uncommon. Here then, if never before, here, if never again, the grandeur of the occasion demanded almost, we might say, implored, and clamorously invoked, the effectual powers of eloquence \nd perfect self-possession. How was the occasion met ? Let us turn to the actual scene, as painted in lively colors by a friend and an eye-witness : * " The * Not having the French original of Bourrienne's work, we we compelled to quote from the current translation, which, how- 154 CHARLEMAGNE. Accounts brought every instant to General Bonaparte determined him to enter the hall [of the Ancients] am take part in the debate. His entrance was hasty, and in anger ; no favorable prognostics of what he would say. The passage by which we entered led directly forward into the middle of the house ; our backs were towards the door ; Bonaparte had the President on his right ; he could not see him quite in front. I found myself on the General's right ; our clothes touched : Berthier was on his left. All the harangues composed for Bonaparte after the event differ from each other : no miracle that. There was, in fact, none pronounced to the ancients ; unless a broken conversation with the President, carried on without nobleness, propriety, or ever, is everywhere incorrect, and in a degree absolutely aston- ishing, and, where not incorrect, offensive from vulgarisms or ludicrous expressions. Thus, it translates un drole, a droll fellow, wide as the poles from the true meaning ; ce drole-la means that scoundrel. Again, the verb devoir, in all tenses (that eternal Btumbling-block to bad French scholars) , is uniformly mistrans- lated. As an instance of ignoble language, at p. 294, vol. i., he Bays, "Josephine was delighted with the disposition of her good- nd that of preconcerted perplexity, not the vaguenesi f incoherence and a rhapsody of utter contradiction * Some people may fancy that this scene of that day's dram* Iras got up merely to save appearances by a semblance of dig lOMaion, and that in effect it mattered not how the performanot CHARLEMAGNK. 157 What a contrast all this to the indefeasible majesty f Charlemagne ; to his courage and presence of mind, which always rose with the occasion ; and above all, to his promptitude of winning eloquence, that promp- tum ac profluens genus sermonis, which caused him to be accounted cevi sui eloquentissimus ! Passing for a moment to minor accomplishments, we find that Charlemagne excelled in athletic and gymnas- tic exercises ; he was a pancratiast. Bonaparte wanted those even which were essential to his own daily secu- rity. Charlemagne swam well ; Bonaparte not at all. Charlemagne was a first-rate horseman even amongst the Franks ; Napoleon rode ill originally, and no practice availed to give him a firm seat, a graceful equestrian deportment, or a skilful bridle hand. In a barbarous age the one possessed all the elegancies and ornamental accomplishments of a gentleman : the other, in a most polished age, and in a nation of even false refinement, was the sole barbarian of nis time ; presenting in his deficiencies the picture of a low mechanic, and in his positive qualities the violence and brutality of a savage.* Hence, by the was conducted where all was scenical, and the ultimate reliance, after all, on the bayonet. But it is certain that this view is erroneous, and that the final decision of the soldiery, even up to the very moment of the crisis, was still doubtful. Some time af ter this exhibition, " the hesitation reigning among the troops,'* says Bourrienne, " still continued." And in reality it was a mere accident of pantomime, and a clap-trap of sentiment, which finally gave a sudden turn in Napoleon's favor to their wavering resolutions. * We have occasionally such expressions as Dryden's -. "WLen Ud ID woods tht noble sa cage ran." These descriptions rest 158 CHARLEMAGNE. tvay, the extreme folly of those who have attempted to trace a parallel between Napoleon and the first Caesar. The hpaven-born Julius, as beyond all .lispute the greatest man of ancient history in moral grandeur, and therefore raised unspeakably above comparison with one who was eminent, even amongst ordinary men, for the pettiness of his passions, so also, upon an intellectual trial, will be found to challenge pretty nearly an equal precedency. Meantime, allowing for the inequality of their advantages, even Caesar would not have disdained a comparison with Charlemagne. All the knowledge current in Rome, Athens, or Rhodes, at the period of Caesar's youth, the entire cycle of a nobleman's education in a republic where all noblemen were from their birth dedicated to public services, this together with much and various knowl- edge peculiar to himself and his own separate objects had Caesar mastered ; whilst in an age of science, and in a country where the fundamental science of mathematics was generally diffused in unrivalled per- fection, it is well ascertained that Bonaparte's knowl- edge did not go beyond an elementary acquaintance with the first six books of Euclid ; but, on the other upon false conceptions; in fact no such combination anywhere exists as a man having the training of a savage, or occupying the exposed and naked situation of a savage, who is at the same time in any moral sense at liberty to be noble-minded. Men are moulded by the circumstances in which they stand habitually nd the insecurity of savage life, by makiug it impossible to fcrego any sort of advantages, obliterates the very idea of honor. Hence, with all savages alike, the point of honor lies ID treachery, in stratagem, and the utmost excess of what is di konorable, according to the estimate of cultivated man. CHARLEMAGNE. 159 hand, Charlemagne, even in that early age, was famil- iar with the intricate mathematics and the elaborate compulus of Practical Astronomy. But these collations, it will be said, are upon ques- tions not primarily affecting their peculiar functions. They are questions more or less extrajudicial. The true point of comparison is upon the talents of policy in the first place, and strategies in the second. A trial between two celebrated performers in these depart- ments, is at any rate difficult; and much more so when they are separated by vast intervals of time. Al- lowances must be made, so many and so various ; com- pensations or balances struck upon so many diversities of situation ; there is so much difference in the modes of warfare offensive and defensive ; the financial means, the available alliances, and other resources, are with so much difficulty appraised in order to raise ourselves to that station from which the whole ques- tion can be overlooked, that nothing short of a general acquaintance with the history, statistics, and diplomacy of the two periods, can lay a ground for the solid ad- judication of so large a comparison. Meantime, in the absence of such an investigation, pursued upon a scale of suitable proportions, what if we should sketch a rapid outline (cag iv rvny Ttegdafieiv) of its elements (to speak by a metaphor borrowed from practical as- tronomy) *. e., of the principal and most conspicuous points which its path would traverse ? How much Jhese two men, each central to a mighty system in his twn days, how largely and essentially they differed, whether in kind or in degree of merit, will appear in the course even of the hastiest sketch. The circum* 160 CHARLEMAGNE. glances in which they agreed, and that these uere suf. ficient to challenge an inquiry into their characteristic differences, and to support the interest of such an in- quiry, will probably be familiar to most readers, as among the commonplaces of general history which survive even in the daily records of conversation. Few people. can fail to know that each of these memorable men stood at the head of a new era in Eu- ropean history, and of a great movement in the social development of nations ; that each laid the founda- tions for a new dynasty in his own family, the one by building forwards upon a basis already formed by his two immediate progenitors, the other by dexterously applying to a great political crisis his own military preponderance ; and, finally, that each forfeited within a very brief period the one in his own person, the other in the persons of his immediate descendants the giddy ascent which he had mastered, and all the distinctions which it conferred ; in short, that " Time, which gave, did his own gifts confound ; " * but with this mighty difference that Time co-operated in the one case with extravagant folly in the individual, and in the other with the irresistible decrees of Provi- dence. Jfapoleon Bonaparte and Charlemagne were both, in a memorable degree, the favorites of fortune. It is true, that the latter found himself by inheritance in possession of a throne, which the other ascended by he fortunate use of his own military advantages. But ine throne of Charlemagne had been recently won bj aifl family, and in a way so nearly corresponding U * Shakspeare's Sonnets. CHARLEMAGNE. 16] that which was afterwards pursued by Napoleon, that in effect, considering how little this usurpation had been hallowed by time, the throne might, in each case, if not won precisely on the same terms, be considered to be held by the same tenure. Charlemagne, not less than Napoleon, was the privileged child of revolution ; he was required by the times, and indispensable to the crisis which had arisen for the Franks ; and he waa himself protected by the necessities to which he minis- tered. Clouds had risen, or were rising, at that era, on every quarter of France ; from every side she was menaced by hostile demonstrations ; and without the counsels of a Charlemagne, and with an energy of ac- tion inferior to his, it is probable that she would have experienced misfortunes which, whilst they depressed herself, could not but have altered the destinies oi Christendom for many ages to come. The resources of France, it is true, were immense ; and, as regarded the positions of her enemies, they were admirably con- centrated. But to be made available in the whole ex- tent which the times demanded, it was essential that hey should be wielded by a first-rate statesman, sup- ,orted by a first-rate soldier. The statesman and the soldier were fortunately found united in the person of ne man ; and that man, by the rarest of combinations, the same who was clothed with the supreme power of the state. Less power, or power less harmonious, or power the most consummate administered with less ab- solute skill, would doubtless have been found incom- petent to struggle with the tempestuous assaults which ;hen lowered over the entire frontier of France. It ras natural, and, uoon the known constitution of 11 162 CHARLEMAGNE. human nature, pretty nearly inevitable, that, in the course of the very extended warfare which followed, love for that glorious trade so irritating and so con- tagious should be largely developed in a mind an aspiring as Charlemagne's, and stirred by such gener- ous sensibilities. Yet is it in no one instance recorded, that these sympathies with the pomp and circumstance of war, moved him to undertake so much as a single campaign, or an expedition which was not otherwise demanded by his judgment, or that they interfered even to bias or give an impulse to his judgment, where it had previously wavered. In every case he tried the force of negotiation before he appealed to arms ; nay, sometimes he condescended so far in his love of peace, as to attempt purchasing with gold, rights or conces- sions of expediency, which he knew himself in a situ- ation amply to extort by arms. Nor, where these courses were unavailing, and where peace was no longer to be maintained by any sacrifices, is it ever found that Charlemagne, in adopting the course of war, Buffered himself to pursue it as an end valuable in and for itself. And yet that is a result not uncom- mon ; for a long and conscientious resistance to a measure originally tempting to the feelings, once being renounced as utterly unavailing, not seldom issues in a headlong surrender of the heart to purposes so vio- lently thwarted for a time. And even as a means, war (v&s such in the eyes of Charlemagne to something beyond the customary ends of victory and domestic ocurity. Of all conquerors, whose history is known tafficiently to throw light upon their motives, Charlo- jiagne is the only one who looked forward to th CHARLEMAGNE. 163 benefit of those he conquered, as a principal element amougst the fruits of conquest. " Doubtless," says his present biographer, " to defend his own infringed territory, and to punish the aggressors, formed a part of his design ; but, beyond that, he aimed at civilizing a people whose barbarism had been for centuries the curse of the neighboring countries, and at the same time conmunicating to the cruel savages, who shed the blood of their enemies less in the battle than in the sacrifice, the bland and mitigating spirit of the Chris- tian religion." This applies more particularly and circumstantially to his Saxon campaigns ; but the spirit of the remark is of general application. At that time a weak light of literature was beginning to diffuse improvement in Italy, in France, and in England. France, by situa- tion geographically, and politically by the prodigious advantage (which she exclusively enjoyed) of an un- divided government, with the benefit consequently of an entire unity in her counsels, was peculiarly fitted for communicating the blessings of intellectual cuhurp to the rest of the European continent, and for sustain- ing the great mission of civilizing conquest. Above all, as the great central depository of Christian knowl- edge, she seemed specially stationed by Providence as a martial apostle for carrying by the sword that mighty blessing, which, even in an earthly sense, Charlemagne could not but value as the best engine of civilization, to the potent infidel nations on her southern and east- ern frontier. A vast -evolution was at hand for Europe ; ill her tribes were destined to be fused in a new cru- mble, to be recast in happier moulds, and to form 164 CHA.RI.EMAfi.NT. one family of enlightened nations, to compose one great collective brotherhood, united by the tie of a common faith and a common hope, and hereafter to be known to the rest of the world, and to proclaim tlus unity, under the comprehensive name of Christendom. Baptism, therefore, was the indispensable condition tnd forerunner of civilization ; and from the peculiar ferocity and the sanguinary superstitions which dis- figured the Pagan nations in Central Europe, of which the leaders and the nearest to France were the Saxons, and from the bigotry and arrogant intolerance of the Mohammedan nations who menaced her Spanish fron- tier, it was evident that by the sword only it was pos- sible that baptism should be effectually propagated. War, therefore, for the highest purposes of peace, became the present and instant policy of France ; bloodshed for the sake of a religion the most benign ; and desolation with a view to permanent security. The Frankish emperor was thus invited to indulge in this most captivating of luxuries the royal tiger-hunt of war ; as being also at this time, and for a special purpose, the sternest of duties. He had a special dis- pensation for wielding at times a barbarian and exter- minating sword, but for the extermination of barbarism ; and he was privileged to be in a single instance an Attila, in order that Attilas might no more arise. Simply as the enemies, bitter and perfidious of France, the Saxons were a legitimate object of war ; as thfi standing enemies of civilization, who would neither receive it for themselves, nor tolerate its peaceable enjoyment in others, they and Charlemagne stood op. posed to each other as it were by hostile instincts. An., CHARLEMAGNE. 165 ibis most merciful of conquerors was fully justified in departing for once, and in such a quarrel, from hia general rule of conduct ; and for a paramount purpose of comprehensive service to all mankind, we entirely agree with Mr. James, that Charlemagne had a suffi- cient plea, and that he has been censured only hy ca- lumnious libellers, or by the feeble-minded, for applying a Roman severity of punishment to treachery continu- ally repeated. The question is one purely of policy ; and it may be, as Mr. James is disposed to think, that in point of judgment the emperor erred ; but certainly the case was one of great difficulty ; for the very in- firmity even of maternal indulgence, if obstinately and continually abused, must find its ultimate limit ; and we have no right to suppose that Charlemagne made his election for the harsher course without a violent self-conflict. His former conduct towards those very people, his infinite forbearance, his long-suffering, his monitory threats, all make it a duty to presume that he suffered the acutest pangs in deciding upon a vin- dictive punishment ; that he adopted this course aa being virtually by its consequences the least sanguinary ; and, finally, that if he erred, it was not through hi heart, but by resisting its very strongest impulses. It is remarkable that both Charlemagne and Bona- parte succeeded as by inheritance to one great element of their enormous power ; each found, ready to his hands, that vast development of martial enthusiasm, apon which, as its first condition, their victorious careei reposed. Each also found the great armory of ^sources opened, which g-ich a spirit, diffused over so ast a territory, must in any age insure. Of Charle- 166 CHARLEMAGNE. magne, in an age when as yet the use of infantry WM but imperfectly known, it may be said symbolically, that he found the universal people, patrician and ple- beian, chieftain and vassal, with the left foot * in the stirrup ; of Napoleon, in an age when the use of artil- lery was first understood, that he found every man standing to his gun. Both in short found war in procinctu ; both found the people whom they governed, willing to support the privations and sacrifices which war imposes ; hungering and thirsting for its glories, its pomps and triumphs; entering even with lively sympathy of pleasure into its hardships and its trials ; and thus, from within and from without, prepared for military purposes. So far both had the same good fortune ; f neither had much merit. The enthusiasm * Or perhaps the right, for the Prussian cavalry (who drew their custom from some regiments in the service of Qustavua Adolphus, and they again traditionally from others) are always trained to mount in this way. t It is painful to any man of honorable feeling that, whilst a great rival nation is pursuing the ennobling profession of arms, his own should be reproached contemptuously with a sordid dedication to commerce. However, on the one hand, things are not always as they seem; commerce has its ennobling effects, direct or indirect, war its barbarizing degradations. And, on the other hand, the facts even are not exactly as prima facie they were supposed; for the truth is, that, in proportion to its total population, England had more men in arms during the .ast war than France. But, generally speaking, the c.ose may be stated thus : the British nation is, by original constitution of mind, and by long enjoyment of liberty, a far nobler people than the French. And hence we see the reason and the necessity that he French should, with a view to something like a final balance to the effect, be trained to a nobler profession. Compensation! CHARLEMAGNE. 167 f Napoleon's days was the birth of republican sen- timents, and built on a reaction of civic and patriotic ardor. In the very plenitude of their rage against kings, the French Republic were threatened with at- tack, and with the desolation of their capital by a banded crusade of kings ; and they rose in frenzy to jneet the aggressors. The Allied Powers had them- selves kindled the popular excitement which provoked this vast development of martial power amongst the French, and first brought their own warlike strength within their own knowledge. In the days of Charle- magne the same martial character was the result of ancient habits and training, encouraged and effectually organized by the energy of the aspiring mayors of the palace, or great lieutenants of the Merovingian kings. But agreeing in this, that they were indebted to others for the martial spirit which they found, and that both turned to their account a power not created by them- selves ; Charlemagne and Napoleon differed, howevtr in the utmost possible extent as to the final application of their borrowed advantages. Napoleon applied them to purposes the very opposite of those which had originally given them birth. Nothing less than patri- otic ardor in defence of what had at one time appeared to be the cause of civil liberty, could have availed to evoke those mighty hosts which gathered in the early years of the Revolution on the German and Italian frontiers of France. Yet were these hosts applied, under the perfect despotism of Napoleon, to the final wre everywhere produced or encouraged by nature and by Provi- dence, and a nobler discipline in the one nation ia doubtlew lome equilibrium to a nobler nature in tb>5 other 168 CHA.BLEMAGNK. ?xtinction of liberty; and the armies of Jacobiziism, vho had gone forth on a mission of liberation for Europe, were at last employed in riveting the chains of their compatriots, and forging others for the greater ,M>rt of Christendom. Far otherwise was the conduct )f Charlemagne. The Prankish government, though ffe are not circumstantially acquainted with its forma, is known to have been tempered by a large infusion of popular influence. This is proved, as Mr. James observes, by the deposition cf Chilperic ; by the grand national assemblies of the Champ de Mars ; and by other great historical facts. Now, the situation of Charlemagne, successor to a throne already firmly es- tablished, and in his own person a mighty amplifier of its glories, and a leader in whom the Franks had un- limited confidence, threw into his hands an unexam- pled power of modifying the popular restraints upon himself in any degree he might desire. " Nunquam libertaa gratior exit, Quam sub rege pio " is the general doctrine. But as to the Franks in par- ticular, if they resembled their modern representatives