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 ESSAYS AND TALES, 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN STERLING, 
 
 COLLECTED AND EDITED, 
 
 WITH A MEMOIE OF HIS LIFE, 
 
 JULIUS CHARLES HARE, M.A., 
 
 RECTOR OF HERSTMONCEUX. 
 
 IN TWO VOLUMES. 
 VOL. I. 
 
 LONDON 
 JOHN W. PARKER, WEST STRAND. 
 
 M.DCCC.XLVIII.
 
 LONDON: 
 HARRISON AND CO., PRINTKRS, 
 
 ST. martin's lane.
 
 
 ^•1 
 
 CO.NTENTS OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Sketch of the Author's Life i 
 
 Shades of the Dead 1 
 
 Alexander the Great 3 
 
 Joan of Arc 20 
 
 WyclifFe 30 
 
 Columbus 4(1 
 
 Gustavus Adolphus 60 
 
 ^..Milton 73 
 
 I' 
 /Bui'ns 87 
 
 CRmcAL Essays 99 
 
 On Coleridge's Christabel 101 
 
 On the Broad Stone of Honour Ill 
 
 On Napier's War in the Peninsula 120 
 
 """^On Montaigne 129 
 
 On Simonides 188 
 
 On Carlyle 252 
 
 Characteristics of German Genius 382 
 
 ^^On Tennyson's Poems 422 
 
 Lecture, On the Worth of Knowledge 4G3
 
 SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR'S LIFE. 
 
 TTE, of whose mind and character a faint and 
 very imperfect portrait is presented in these 
 volumes, was the son of Edward and Hester 
 Sterling, born at Kames Castle in the Isle of 
 Bute on the 20th of July 1806, where his 
 father, who was of Irish extraction, happened to 
 be residing. In 1810 his parents removed to 
 Llanblithian in Glamorganshire : here they re- 
 mained till 1814. Thus John Sterling's child- 
 hood was nurtured amid forms of wild and 
 romantic beauty; and his early boyhood was 
 spent in a rich and finely wooded country. 
 
 The impressions made on him by the latter 
 were deep and lasting. In a letter written 
 nearly thirty years after, he says of one of his 
 friends, that he had "lighted by accident on the 
 quiet nook, — quiet as something patriarchal or 
 starry, — where I passed my childhood, and 
 which, I suppose, more than any other outward 
 locality, belongs to my very nature, and will 
 be found within me like Calais in the heart of 
 Queen Mary. There are places that I love more 
 
 VOL. I. a
 
 U LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 for the persons I have known in them; but 
 still they are places, externals, accidents. Put 
 the same people elsewhere; and of the places 
 I should think but little. That green silent 
 valley with its baby brooklet is very differently 
 infused and incorporated in me; its grass to me 
 the symbol and archetype of all verdure and 
 tranquillity, a spiritual, not material thing; its 
 clouds the only authentic ones of cloud-collecting 
 Jove. For it was from those objects that I 
 learnt to read and love the essential forms of 
 nature and life. Strange it often is, in travelling 
 through hundreds and thousands of miles, to 
 think that every patch and hamlet which we pass 
 Avith so much indifference, has the same meta- 
 physical, religious value to those who were born 
 and nurtured there. — The three or four years 
 which I passed at Llanblithian have to me that 
 indescribable charm and sacredness, which those 
 years must possess for every one in whom the 
 powers of imagination and reflection liave been at 
 all happily cultivated. The spot of earth which 
 supplied the first pictures of nature and of human 
 life that I can in the least recall, and where 
 dawned my consciousness of the feelings and 
 aspirations, the frailties and inward trials which 
 must now for ever characterize me, — tliis place
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. ill 
 
 has an importance for me beyond that of London, 
 where I have gained most of my knowledge, and 
 of Rome, which has best fulfilled the visions of 
 my fancy." 
 
 While he was here, he used to say, he dis- 
 tinctly remembered having speculated on points 
 of philosophy, and especially on the idea of 
 Duty, which presented itself to him in this 
 way. If I could save my papa and mama from 
 being killed, I know I should at once do it. Now 
 why? To he killed would be very painful; and yet 
 I should give my own consent to being hilled. The 
 solution presented itself as a dim awe-stricken 
 feeling of unknown obligation. It is remarkable 
 that he did not connect this perplexity with any- 
 thing he had been told of right and wrong, or of 
 God, heaven, or hell, or at all imagine that in 
 this could lie the key to the mystery. Here he 
 had several companions whose strong influence on 
 his mind and heart he thought he could clearly 
 trace in after years; and with characteristic 
 ardour he acknowledged the benefit. 
 
 In the autumn of 1814, when peace was 
 restored, the family went over to France. 
 They resided at Passy for seven months, where 
 the entire change in their life surprised and 
 excited him. He felt the power of that busier 
 
 a 2
 
 IV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 life, with which he was now brought in con- 
 tact. The new, he said, was poured on his 
 senses and understanding, not in a stream, but a 
 Niagara cataract; and he was at a time of life 
 to receive its animating, expanding influences, 
 though he could comprehend but a small part of 
 Avhat every day presented. They were living 
 here very quietly and happily without any re- 
 markable incidents, when news arrived one after- 
 noon that Napoleon had landed in France. They 
 were at once involved in the hurry and alarm 
 of the other English; and after some terrible 
 suspense they started for the coast in a large 
 carriage with a single pair of horses for the 
 journey. It seemed perilous; but they reached 
 Dieppe in safety, where his father joined them, 
 after seeing Bonaparte's entrance into Paris, and 
 observing the depressed looks of the people, and 
 the frantic exaltation of the troops. In the 
 autumn of 1815 they settled in London. 
 
 From his birth he was a very delicate child, 
 reared with much difficulty by his mother's de- 
 voted care. The pulmonary disease, which at last 
 terminated his life, was always hovering near him ; 
 and he passed few years without some threaten- 
 ing indications. Hence he was imable to go 
 through the ordinary hard discipline of a public
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. V 
 
 school, but was sent, as more favorable intervals 
 of health allowed, to several schools, among others 
 to Dr. Burney's at Greenwich. He afterwards 
 spent some time under the tuition of Dr. Waite 
 at Blackheath, and of Dr. Trollope, the master 
 of Christ^s Hospital. 
 
 Among the anecdotes which I have heard of 
 his boyhood, the following seem characteristic 
 enough to be worth recording. He used to relate 
 that, when he was about nine years old, he 
 was much struck by his master's telling him 
 that the word sincere was derived from the 
 practice of filling up flaws in furniture with 
 wax, whence sine cera came to mean pure, not 
 vampt up. This explanation, he said, gave him 
 great pleasure, and abode in his memory, as 
 having first shown him that there is a reason 
 in words as well as in other things : nor was 
 it the worse for this purpose from having been 
 drawn from the practice of Monmouth Street, 
 rather than of the primeval upholsterers of 
 ancient Italy. About the same time, having 
 been desired to write a description of a storm 
 in Latin hexameters, he tried to conceive what 
 would be the real appearance and effects of a 
 great tempest in a landscape, and, among other 
 things, dwelt on the terror of all kinds of
 
 VI LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 animals, especially of the Hon, so frightened by 
 the thunder as to let the deer fly past him 
 without attempting to seize them. His father, 
 to whom he shewed the verses, said this was a 
 good thought ; and these words of praise recurred 
 to his mind as an encouragement, when he was 
 disheartened by the fear that he should never be 
 able to do anything. He also remembered that, 
 when about ten years old, at school, he was first 
 imprest by the merit of a complicated and sono- 
 rous sentence. He was standing near the head 
 boy, when a new usher asked some question 
 about a small closed bookcase. The boy an- 
 swered that it contained a collection for the use 
 of the school, which for some reason had been 
 locked up and disused. "Formerly," he said, 
 " it Avas managed by a committee of the boys, 
 and, though on a small scale, was conducted, I 
 assure you, sir, with all the regularity that would 
 be found in the largest institutions." The ele- 
 gance with which these clauses were put together 
 and varied, and the spirit of the personal address 
 in the middle, struck him as admirable, and, 
 though it exprest no thought or image, lingered 
 in his mind after much that was more memorable 
 had passed away. Long afterwards, indeed 
 through life, he was haunted by a love of grandi-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Vll 
 
 loquence, and was fond of giving his style a 
 rhetorical elevation by a less natural arrange- 
 ment of the words, so that to write simply always 
 cost him peculiar watchfulness and effort. 
 
 It was while he was at this school, in his 
 eleventh year, that he made his first attempt in 
 literature. He had a brother about three years 
 younger, Edward, of whom he was very fond, 
 and who was taken away from school in conse- 
 quence of a cold caught after the measles. The 
 two elder brothers went home from time to time. 
 On one of these occasions John had been ponder- 
 ing what he could do to give any pleasure to his 
 darling brother, when he bethought himself that 
 Edward was fond of stories, and that he might 
 write out one which he had read, and thus make 
 a little book for him. So he made a book by 
 folding up a sheet of paper to the size of half 
 a card ; and on these tiny pages he began to 
 write out the story of Valentine and Orson after 
 a version of his own : to render it still more 
 like a book, he wrote it in Eoman letters. He 
 had not finished it, but brought home what he 
 had done, in the hope of pleasing Edward. The 
 little boy however was sinking fast, and was 
 unable to take any notice of his brother's book. 
 An infant sister was also fading from the world.
 
 VUl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 They both died in the same week. The loss of 
 Edward was an agonizing and lasting grief to 
 John. For years Edward's image haunted him. 
 He used to say to himself, Edward is near me 
 now. Edioard is loatcMng me. He knows what 
 I am doing and thinking^ — is sad for my faults. 
 I must, I will strive to do what he would approve 
 of. These feelings, he thought in after life, had 
 taught him better than anything else, how deeply 
 rooted in human nature is the tendency to the 
 worship of saints, to the beatification and deifica- 
 tion of those whom death has hidden from our 
 outward eyes. A reminiscence of these feelings 
 must have been floating before liis mind, when 
 he wrote the story of the Lycian Painter. 
 
 His father was the author of some letters 
 which appeared in the Times under the signature 
 of Vetus in the year 1812, and which excited a 
 good deal of curiosity about their origin; and 
 from that time forward he was much engaged 
 as a political writer. Thus John Sterling was 
 early led to take a lively interest in political 
 affairs, an interest which afterwards mounted 
 from the temporary questions of party politics, 
 to those which concern the moral well-being of a 
 people. In later years, speaking of the crude 
 opinions on morals and politics and taste, which
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. IX 
 
 he held when he first went to College, he told 
 me that, while a boy, he read through the 
 whole Edinburgh Eeview from its beginning; 
 a diet than which hardly any could yield less 
 wholesome food for a young mind, and which 
 could scarcely fail to puff it up with the wind of 
 self-conceit. 
 
 In the autumn of 1824 he went to Trinity 
 College, Cambridge, where he became one of the 
 pupils at my classical lectures. Here I was soon 
 attracted by the marks of his genial intellect and 
 spirit. A good scholar indeed, in the common 
 sense of that phrase, he never was: few Eng- 
 lishmen become so, without going through a 
 regular course of scholastic instruction. But he 
 was something better, inasmuch as he soon 
 shewed that he could relish and delight in the 
 beauty of Greek poetry, and the practical and 
 speculative wisdom of Greek history and phi- 
 losophy. Thus began an acquaintance, which 
 subsequently ripened into one of the most pre- 
 cious friendships vouchsafed to me during my 
 life. 
 
 Here let me mention an instance of the self- 
 forgetting energy and impetuosity which dis- 
 tinguished him even from his childhood. One 
 day, while we were at lecture, we were alarmed 
 
 a 3
 
 X LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 by a cry that the King's Court, the building of 
 which was not quite completed, was on fire. Of 
 course all the members of the College rushed to 
 the spot, to render such help as they could. 
 The undergraduates formed in lines from the 
 gateway to the river, passing buckets to and 
 from the fire-engine, and behaved with admi- 
 rable alacrity and order. Having to go down 
 the line for the purpose of giving some direc- 
 tions, I saw that the last person in It was 
 Sterling, standing up to his waist in the river. 
 I reproved him for thus endangering a life, which 
 seemed to hang by so slight a thread, and for 
 occupying the most laborious, and to him very 
 hurtful post, when his weakness required that 
 he should have taken one of the easier. But 
 he only said laughing. Somebody must stand in 
 the rive?-; therefore ichy not I? To be foremost 
 in the hour of risk, to shrink from no difficulty, 
 from no labour, up to his utmost strength, and 
 even beyond it, by which a friend could be 
 served, or good done, was ever his principle and 
 his practice. 
 
 In the regular course of the studies at the 
 University, Sterling did not take much part. Of 
 the genial young men who go to Cambridge, 
 many do not. This is greatly to be regretted.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XI 
 
 For even where the alternative is not blank idle- 
 ness, or intellectual self-indulgence and dissipa- 
 tion, it is a misfortune for a young man to lose 
 the disciplinary influence of a prescribed system, 
 and the direction and encouragement of intelligent 
 guides. It is perilous to set sail on such a sea as 
 that of Knowledge, with so many sirens to lure us 
 astray, and so many whirlpools to swallow us up ; 
 and yet to have no compass or pilot. The blame 
 however in such cases does not rest wholly 
 with the pupils. One of the mischievous con- 
 sequences from the prevalence of that hollow 
 fallacy, that emulation is the chief spring and 
 spur of intellectual activity, has been to narrow 
 the range of studies to such as afford the 
 greatest facilities for instituting a comparison 
 among the numerous competitors, that is, to 
 such as present definite, tangible results, mea- 
 surable grain by grain. Where a positive scale 
 is adopted, this is not requisite : but where each 
 candidate is to have his relative place assigned 
 to him, the subject matter of the competition 
 must be determinate, and of such a kind that 
 the proficiency of each in it may be ascertainable 
 with exactitude. It is true, this is quite im- 
 possible: lesser merits will often be estimated 
 above higher ones; and much will ever depend
 
 XU LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 upon chance: but hence it has come to pass that 
 almost the only study especially fostered by the 
 University, and rewarded by its honours, except 
 the various branches of mathematical science, is 
 classical philology, of a somewhat meagre kind, 
 hardly rising beyond grammatical criticism, and 
 the minute details of archeology. But if a certain 
 class of studies is specially encouraged, those 
 which are left without this encouragement are 
 in a manner discouraged. The contrast of the 
 sunshine deepens the shade. When a race is 
 going on, they who do not join in it are mostly 
 mere bystanders with no higher object than 
 amusement. At all events they cannot partake 
 in the benefit of being swayed and borne along 
 by a common impulse: they lose the stimulus, 
 so powerful with the young, of sympathy in a 
 common pursuit : and if they follow any peculiar 
 studies by themselves, they are thereby set in 
 a kind of opposition to authority and established 
 institutions, are led to look upon them with 
 dislike, if not with disdain, and to feel an 
 overweening confidence in their own wisdom. 
 It is often made a matter of complaint, that 
 men of the world, men who act a prominent 
 part in public life, feel little aflfection for their 
 University. For this there are various grounds;
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XIU 
 
 some of them connected with the ordinary temper 
 of the years spent there, which is seldom reve- 
 rential: but one cause assuredly is, that the 
 University in many cases has done next to 
 nothing for them. Under a conviction of this 
 sort, Sterling, when he left Cambridge, wrote 
 of it in the AtheruBum as miserably failing in 
 fulfilling its office, and took a warm interest 
 in the new London University, in which he 
 hoped that what seemed to him the capital de- 
 fects of our older Universities might be remedied. 
 This may be censured by some as presumptuous; 
 but it arose from the feeling that the University 
 had not supplied him with the discipline and 
 teaching which he needed. 
 
 The greatest benefit, and the most lasting 
 derived from the years spent at College, often 
 lies in the friendships formed there. This was 
 eminently the case with Sterling. Of those 
 with whom he lived familiarly, several continued 
 his intimate friends through life, especially 
 Richard Trench and Frederic Maurice, both of 
 whom he loved and revered with an affection 
 such as can only spring from a strong and deep 
 heart. He often declared that to the latter, 
 with whom he was afterwards connected by 
 their marrying two sisters, he owed more than
 
 XIV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 to any other man except Coleridge. Writing 
 to me in 1829, while they were working together 
 for the AthencBum, he said : " Of what good you 
 have found in the AthencBum, by far the larger 
 part is attributable to him. When I have done 
 any good, I have seldom been more than a patch 
 of sand to receive and retain the impression of 
 his footstep." And again, speaking of the Essays 
 which open these volumes: "The Shades of the 
 Dead are mine ; but all that is in them was 
 learnt from Coleridge or Maurice.*" With the 
 help of the latter, he gradually emancipated him- 
 self from that crampt and cramping system of 
 opinions in philosophy and taste, which he had 
 brought with him to College; but against which, 
 incompatible as they were with depth or largeness 
 of thought, even if left to himself, his spirit must 
 sooner or later have revolted. Sooner or later 
 he could not fail to cry to their advocates. Let 
 the dead hury their dead. 
 
 At that time it was beginning to be acknow- 
 ledged by more than a few that Coleridge is the 
 true sovereign of modern English thought. The 
 Aids to Rejlection had recently been published, 
 and were doing the work for which they are so 
 admirably fitted; that book, to which many, as 
 has been said by one of Sterling's chief friends.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XV 
 
 "owe even their own selves." Few felt this obli- 
 gation more deeply than Sterling. " To Coleridge 
 (he wrote to me in 1836) I owe education. 
 He taught me to believe that an empirical phi- 
 losophy is none, that Faith is the highest Reason, 
 that all criticism, whether of literature, laws, or 
 manners, is blind, without the power of discern- 
 ing the organic unity of the object." He became 
 an enthusiastic admirer and reverer of his great 
 master; the riches of whose wisdom he, in his 
 earlier writings, was continually asserting and 
 proclaiming, as is apparent even in the portion 
 of them incorporated in this collection. When 
 an opportunity occurred, he sought out the old 
 man in his oracular shrine at Highgate, and 
 often saw him in the last years of his life; and 
 he was one of the two disciples who attended his 
 funeral, my own duties rendering it impossible 
 for me to make a third. It is to be regretted 
 that he did not preserve an account of Coleridge's 
 conversations with him; for he was capable of 
 representing their depth, their ever varying hues, 
 their sparkling lights, their oceanic ebb and flow ; 
 of which his published Table-talk hardly gives 
 the slightest conception. Unfortunately Sterling 
 merely took notes of his first interview with Cole- 
 ridge; but these are the only record I have seen.
 
 XVI LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 which enables one at all to apprehend how 
 his wonderful combination of philosophical and 
 poetical powers manifested themselves in his dis- 
 course. Hence I doubt not that many readers 
 will be gratified if I insert them here. 
 
 *' IVIr. Coleridge happened to lay his hand upon 
 a little old eno-ravino; of Luther with four German 
 verses above it. He said, ' How much better this 
 is than many of the butcher-like portraits of 
 Luther, which we commonly see! He is of all 
 men the one whom I especially love and admire.' 
 Pointing to the first words of the German verses, 
 he explained them, Luther, the dear hero. ' It is 
 singular, (he said,) how all men have agreed in 
 assigning to Luther the heroic character; and 
 indeed it is certainly most just. Luther, how- 
 ever wrong in some of his opinions, was always 
 right in design and spirit. In translating his 
 ideas into conceptions, he always understood 
 something higher and more universal than he 
 had the means of expressing. He did not be- 
 stow too much attention on one part of man's 
 nature to the exclusion of the others; but gave its 
 due place to each, — the intellectual, the practical, 
 and so forth. He is great, even where he is 
 wrong, — even in the sacramental controversy.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XVll 
 
 the most unhappy in which he engaged; for his 
 idea of Christ's body becoming infinite by its 
 union with the godhead is entirely wrong.' Some 
 one mentioned Calvin. He said * Calvin was 
 undoubtedly a man of talent; I have a great 
 respect for him; he had a very logical intellect; 
 but he wanted Luther's powers.' 
 
 " He then began to speak of landscape-garden- 
 ing, in consequence of some remark about the 
 beautiful view behind the house in which he 
 resides. 'We have gone too far in destroying 
 the old style of gardens and parks. There was 
 a great deal of comfort in the thick hedges, 
 which always gave you a sheltered walk dm'ing 
 winter. There is certainly a propriety in the 
 gradual passing away of the works of man in the 
 neighbourhood of a home. The great thing is to 
 discover whether the scenery is such that the 
 country seems to belong to man, or man to the 
 country. Now among the lakes of Westmoreland 
 man evidently belongs to the country: the very 
 cottages seem merely to rise out of, and to be 
 growths of, the rock. But the case is different 
 in a country where everything speaks of man, 
 houses, corn-fields, cattle. There your improve- 
 ments ought to be in conformity with the cha- 
 racter of the place. Man is so in love with
 
 XVlil LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 intelligence, that where he is not intelligent 
 enough to discover it, he will impress it. Some 
 of the finest views about here (Highgate) are 
 only to be seen from among the most wretched 
 habitations. Luther said truly: How different is 
 a rich country from a happy country! A rich 
 country is always an unhappy, miserable, de- 
 graded country.' 
 
 " He then went into a long exposition of the 
 evils of commerce and manufactures ; the argu- 
 ment of which, I think, is to be found in one of 
 the Lay Sermons. In the course of it he took 
 occasion to say that the Legislature is defective. 
 * I don't mean anything about the nonsense of 
 universal suffrage; but the land-proprietors have 
 too great a proportion of power. Land is some- 
 thing fixed and tangible: if one man have more 
 of it, another must have less. But this other 
 kind of wealth, which is founded in the National 
 Debt and so forth, — one man's having a million of 
 it does not prevent another man's getting two 
 millions of it; nay, it rather makes it more pro- 
 bable that he will do so. Thirty or forty years 
 ago, it would have been a disgrace to a merchant 
 to be seen on the Stock Exchange. Now it is 
 thought nothing of. There are only two remedies 
 for the evil of our excessive increasing popula-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XlX 
 
 tion. We have not virtue enough for the one, 
 which is a plan of general and continued emi- 
 grations, in which the people would be perpe- 
 tually going forth, headed by the priest and the 
 noble. In every parish a certain portion of every 
 family ought to live under the knowledge that 
 at a certain age they were to emigrate. The 
 other remedy is a perfectly free trade in corn; 
 but this would only do for a time. More rich 
 men are springing up in the country than the 
 country can support: the Regent's Park is 
 covered as it were with an enchanted city. 
 
 " ' The division of labour has proceeded so far 
 even in literature, that people do not think for 
 themselves; their review thinks for them.' He 
 said to a person in the company: 'Your friend 
 
 Mr. , was here some time ago. He is evidently 
 
 a man of great talent. We had a long dispute toge- 
 ther about laughter. Mr. was maintaining that 
 
 notion of Hobbes's, that laughter arises from 
 contempt. My theory was, that it always springs 
 from the sudden experience of a pleasure, for 
 which the nerves are not sufficiently prepared, 
 and that laughter is the little convulsion by 
 which nature gets rid of the struggle.' 
 
 "The population of Highgate, and the number 
 of churches and chapels in it happened to be
 
 XX LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 mentioned, when Coleridge said : ' There never 
 was such a mistake as the Government has com- 
 mitted in letting the population outstrip the 
 churches to such an extent. They forgot that 
 religion, even in its exterior forms, is the centre 
 of gravity. Christendom is so obviously superior 
 to all the rest of the world in everything, — science, 
 civilization, power, — that it is impossible to doubt 
 of the mere external advantages of religion.' But, 
 it was said, how much of Christianity is there in 
 France ! ' Why,' replied Coleridge, ' there are a 
 great many queer Christians even here; but still 
 religion exists as a power in the country. London 
 has a great weight after all among mankind. 
 People perhaps are not themselves religious; but 
 they give their half guineas, and they are civil. 
 Christianity brings immense advantages to a 
 savage. It is an evident preferment for him. 
 The missionaries have done a great deal for us 
 in clearing up our notions about savage nations. 
 What an immense deal of harm Captain Cook's 
 Voyages did in that way ! Sailors, after being a 
 long time at sea, found a fertile island, and a 
 people of lax morals, which were just the things 
 they wanted ; and of course there never were 
 such dear, good, kind, amiable people. We know 
 now that they were more detestably licentious
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. xxi 
 
 than we could have imagmed. And then the 
 romance of the Pelew Islanders! There scarcely 
 ever existed such a set of blood-thirsty barba- 
 rians. Savages have a notion of higher powers 
 than their own all around them ; but that is a 
 part of superstition, not religion. The person- 
 ality of the Deity is the great thing. The 
 ancients were Spinozists : they could not help 
 seeing an energy in Nature. This was the anima 
 mundi sine centro of the philosophers. The people 
 of course changed it into all the forms that their 
 imagination could supply. The religion of the 
 philosophers was Pantheism, and that of the 
 people Polytheism. They knew nothing of a 
 creative power: at first there was Chaos and 
 Night; and Avhat produced the universe they 
 could not tell. The gods were merely the first 
 birth of Chaos. This is very evident also in 
 that notion of the Stoics, that after ten thousand 
 years the gods required to be formed again. 
 Even Plato, who alone of them all had any idea 
 of God, says that it is very hard to discover, 
 and impossible to communicate it. And I have no 
 doubt that the first great apostasy, the building 
 of the Tower of Babel, consisted in erecting a 
 temple to the heavens, to the universe. The 
 first sovereigns of all countries were priests.
 
 XXU LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 and after them warriors. This is clear from 
 the Northern traditions of Odin, the Sagas, and 
 so forth. When the families of the priests in- 
 termarried with the children of the more igno- 
 rant people, theu" offspring applied their superior 
 intelligence and knowledge to the purposes of 
 conquest: hence the great conquests recorded 
 of old. We never hear of such conquests by- 
 savage nations, when they are not directed by 
 the wisdom of a priesthood. 
 
 " 'I lately heard Dr. Chalmers preach an excel- 
 lent sermon. Thinking so differently from him 
 upon religion as I do, I was nevertheless much 
 pleased. He enforced and illustrated very strongly 
 that provision of the Deity, which makes punish- 
 ment inseparable from sin. The great difficulty 
 is to reconcile the efficacy of our good works and 
 the necessity of Christ's atonement.' 
 
 ** He then gave a long and very interesting ac- 
 count of Irving's notions about the second coming 
 of our Lord, and of the book on the subject which 
 he has lately translated from the Spanish of a 
 Chilian Jesuit. 'He learned Spanish for the 
 purpose of reading it. His introduction is one 
 of the purest and most beautiful pieces of Eng- 
 lish I have read for many years. It was quite 
 restoring to me. It is wonderful how, in the
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XXUl 
 
 course of three or four years since the publi- 
 cation of his Orations, he has completely changed 
 his style. They were full, as I told him, of Scot- 
 icisms. Gallicisms, and all isms but Anglicisms. 
 In the Introduction to this book I only detected 
 two errors ; one of them the phrase open up a 
 subject, which, I suppose, is an innovation of the 
 sectarian pulpits. It is quite in the full flowing 
 manner of our old writers, yet without imitation. 
 His style is quite his own. I care not for his 
 opinions : as to them I differ from him entirely : 
 but I shall always say, Mr. Irving is a noble 
 creature. It is unfortunate that he thinks these 
 views of his about the second coming of Christ 
 of such importance as to induce him to discuss 
 them in the pulpit, while so many of his congre- 
 gation must be hungering for the mere common 
 bread of life. Yet the book he has translated is 
 a most powerful piece of reasoning, except where 
 they rely upon a part of Daniel and the Reve- 
 lation. It is there Mr. Irving fails. It is clear, 
 from certain passages in the Gospels and in St. 
 Paul, that the Apostles interpreted the ancient 
 prophecies as foreshowing a second advent of 
 Christ in the body upon earth. It is for Mr. 
 Irving's opponents to show reason for dissenting 
 from the Apostles on this point.'
 
 XXIV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 " Mr. Coleridge is not tall, and rather stout : 
 his features, though not regular, are by no 
 means disagreeable; the hair quite grey; the 
 eye and forehead very fine. His appearance 
 is rather old-fashioned; and he looks as if he 
 belonged not so much to this, or to any age, as 
 to history. His manner and address struck me 
 as being rather formally courteous. He always 
 speaks in the tone and in the gesture of 
 common conversation, and laughs a good deal, 
 but gently. His emphasis, though not declama- 
 tory, is placed with remarkable propriety. He 
 speaks perhaps rather slowly, but never stops, 
 and seldom even hesitates. There is the strongest 
 appearance of conviction, without any violence in 
 his manner. His language is sometimes harsh, 
 sometimes careless, often quaint, almost always, I 
 think, drawn from the fresh delicious fountains of 
 our elder eloquence. I have no doubt that the 
 diction of much that I have reported is dif- 
 ferent from Coleridge's, and always of course 
 vastly inferior. I have treasured up as many of 
 his phrases as I could; they will easily be re- 
 cognised. On one occasion he quoted a line of 
 his own poetry, saying, ' If I may quote a verse 
 of mine written when I was a very young man.' 
 It was something to this effect : ' They kill too
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XXV 
 
 slow for men to call it murder.' He happened 
 to mention several books in the course of his 
 remarks; and he always seemed inclined to men- 
 tion them goodnaturedly. 
 
 "I was in his company about three hours; 
 and of that time he spoke during two and 
 three quarters. It Avould have been delightful 
 to listen as attentively, and certainly easy for 
 him to speak just as well for the next forty-eight 
 hours. On the whole his conversation, or rather 
 monologue, is by far the most interesting I ever 
 heard or heard of. Dr. Johnson's talk, with 
 which it is obvious to compare it, seems to me 
 immeasurably inferior. It is better balanced and 
 scrubbed, and more ponderous with epithets; but 
 the spirit and flavour and fragrance, the know- 
 ledge and the genius are all Avanting. The one 
 is a house of brick, the other a quarry of jasper. 
 It is painful to observe in Coleridge, that, Avith 
 all the kindness and glorious far-seeing intelli- 
 gence of his eye, there is a glare in it, a light 
 half unearthly, half moi'bid. It is the glittering 
 eye of the Ancient Mariner. His cheek too shows 
 a flush of over-excitement, the red of a storm- 
 cloud at sunset. When he dies, another, and one 
 of the greatest of their race, will rejoin the few 
 
 VOL. I. b
 
 XXVI LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Immortals, the ill understood and ill requited, 
 who have walked this earth." 
 
 Powerful too was the impression produced on 
 Sterling by the great poet, whose name is always 
 associated with that of Coleridge, and whose wri- 
 tings have exercised so salutary an influence on 
 the most genial minds of the present generation. 
 Ample evidence of this, both direct and indirect, 
 is to be found in Sterling's writings, especially 
 in the Sexton^s Daughter, in which the inspira- 
 tion derived from Wordsworth may be discerned 
 throughout; and when he first saw Wordsworth, 
 in 1828, he wrote thus to a friend: "More than 
 all the Excursion and the Platonic Ode is de- 
 veloped in his domelike forehead. And his 
 manner and conversation are full of the pleasant 
 playful sincerity and kindness, which are so 
 observable in his Avorks. The utter absence of 
 pretension in all he says and looks is very stri- 
 king. He does not say many things to be 
 remembered; and most of his observations are 
 chiefly noticeable for their delicate taste, strong 
 good sense, and stout healthy diction, rather than 
 for imagery or condensed principles of philo- 
 sophy. You see in him the repose or the sport.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XXVll 
 
 but neither the harlequinade, nor the conflict of 
 genius. I believe he has long turned the corner 
 of life; and yet there is not about him the 
 slightest tendency to be wearied or disgusted 
 with human nature, or to be indifferent towards 
 the common little objects, occurrences, and people 
 round him. All his daily fireside companionable 
 sympathies are as sensitive and good-humoured 
 as ever. Is not this fine? and what one would 
 hope to see in great men; if one had not so 
 much reason to fear being generally disappointed? 
 His talk is as different from Coleridge's as can be, 
 and, if considered separately from what we know 
 of the man, is certainly far less interesting. 
 Coleridge's monologue is perhaps better even than 
 his writing: for it is as profound, as nobly and 
 precisely expressed ; while it exhibits more of the 
 union of poetry and philosophy than any of his 
 books either in verse or prose, and is perhaps 
 more fresh and flowing, and a little more adapted 
 to ordinary comprehension than the Friend or 
 the Biographia; not because it deals with less 
 important subjects, or treats them less thoroughly, 
 but because it abounds rather more in illustra- 
 tion, displays more variety of style, and is helped 
 by the most expressive voice in the world, by 
 the most speaking face, and an eye the very 
 
 02
 
 XXvm LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 oreran of benevolent wisdom. Colerido;e is the 
 philosopher in conversation by being all philo- 
 sopher, and Wordsworth by not affecting to be it 
 at all. The conversation of the latter springs from 
 and is coloured by the immediate circumstances, 
 is full of observation and kindliness, and refers 
 directly to the people he is among. Coleridge, 
 without much attention to time or place, pours 
 out his mind in reflection; and it is only marked 
 by particular circumstances or facts, inasmuch as 
 it seems to have habitually absorbed the outward 
 world into its own substance." 
 
 At College moreover it was that Sterling's 
 eyes opened to discern the beauty of Greek poetry 
 and art. "What a lively feeling he had for these, 
 appears from the tales on Greek subjects, written 
 shortly after, which are printed in the second of 
 these volumes. Nor was it merely by Greek 
 poetry that he was fascinated. As the tenden- 
 cies of his mind were rather reflective and specu- 
 lative, than intuitive and productive, he was 
 delighted with the Greek historians and philo- 
 sophers, as far as he knew them : and though, 
 as I have already said, he was not eminent as a 
 scholar, few Englishmen have been more power- 
 fully imprest and acted upon by Niebuhr's 
 Roman Illstonj. AYriting to me in 1829, he
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XXIX 
 
 said : " It was the first help I had in getting out 
 of the slough of Benthamism; and I never tliink 
 of the book without the kind of feeling which 
 one enjoys in recollecting some exquisite face or 
 landscape seen years ago in a mood of tranquil 
 sympathy. Till I met with Niebuhr, I always 
 hated the Romans, and everytliing connected 
 with them ; and I owe to him alone that I can 
 now take pleasure in thinking of the nation which 
 fills the largest space on the canvas of the world's 
 history." Niebuhr's devout love of Truth, wliich 
 shrank from no toil, no exertion, to gain a satis- 
 factory conviction, even on a petty question of 
 grammar or archeology, and which was still more 
 clearly manifested by his imrivaUed judicial can- 
 dour in making use of his materials, so as never 
 to strain any tittle of evidence beyond what it 
 could legitimately bear, was exactly after Ster- 
 ling's own heart. Not indeed that he ever sought 
 out Truth by similar laborious processes : this was 
 ^ot the bent of his mind ; nor would his weak 
 and irritable constitution have allowed of it. But 
 by sacrifices of other kinds he did seek Truth, 
 with a stern self-oblivion, and rejoiced in offer- 
 ing them up to her. In a letter in 1843, speak- 
 ing of Arnold, one of the Englishmen of our 
 days whom he most admired, he says : " There is
 
 XXX LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 a singleness of eye in his writings, wliich is as 
 like what one conceives of the Deity as a star to 
 the sun. I know not Avhat higher praise could 
 be given to any mortal ; and it is due to Niebuhr, 
 whom he so much admired, as surely as to him- 
 self." Soon after, in a time of affliction, he 
 wrote : " I have found Niebuhr's letters more 
 congenial and attractive than any other book. 
 Such a monument of diligent self-formation as 
 his life presents I do not know elsewhere. His 
 feeling for the Noble and the True is certainly 
 altogether heroic." So again, in the last June 
 of his life, having just read the biography of 
 Arnold, he writes : " I like, respect, and love the 
 man, much more than the book, which strikes me 
 as too bulky for the matter. Or is it that, know- 
 ing the main points, I could not fairly look for 
 the pleasure of novelty? I certainly was dis- 
 appointed at the narrowness of his range of 
 thought, his entire want of imagination, of hu- 
 mour, of philosophy, and even of philosophical 
 criticism. And yet how noble a man he was 
 practically ! and how clear his view of the moral 
 evils of England ! But it is men like Niebuhr 
 and Schlciermacher who have my whole heart. I 
 never ran through a book with more delight than 
 the two volumes of Niebuhr's Lectures on Roman
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XXXI 
 
 History.'''' What especially charmed hun was the 
 manner in which Niebuhr had revived the Roman 
 nation, with all its conflicting interests, the strug- 
 gles of its parties, and its heroic characters, in- 
 vesting those who had long been little else than 
 themes of declamation, or heroes of rhetorical 
 dramas, with living flesh and blood. On this 
 point he speaks in his Essay on the Characteristics 
 of German Genius, p. 419; and these volumes 
 contain ample evidence how well he apprehended 
 and appreciated what has been effected by Ger- 
 man philology for the resurrection of the spirit of 
 antiquity. 
 
 In the debating society at Cambridge, Sterling 
 was one of the most prominent members. I have 
 been told by several of the most intelligent among 
 his contemjDoraries, that, of all the speakers they 
 ever heard, he had the greatest gift of natural 
 eloquence. On this I never had adequate means 
 for forming a judgement ; but his conversational 
 powers were certainly among the most brilliant I 
 have witnessed. In carrying on an argument I 
 have known no one comparable to him. In addi- 
 tion to the secondary merits of a rich command 
 of language and illustration, he used to show a 
 mastery of the subject matter, proceeding from 
 the singular clearness of his understandino- and
 
 XXXll LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 readiness of his knowledge, which, even when his 
 adversaries had chosen ground where they fancied 
 themselves at home, took them by surprise, and 
 confounded them. lie seemed like a skilful 
 chess-player, who knew by anticipation how his 
 opponent was going to move, nay, foresaw a long 
 series of moves, and, like Socrates, would push 
 him on, move after move, till he suddenly found 
 himself checkmated. At times too he would 
 maintain a contest of this sort against half a 
 dozen antagonists at once, holding the reins of 
 four or six in hand without letting them get 
 entangled, answering all in turn, and having a 
 sufficient answer for each. 
 
 After residing somewhat more than a year at 
 Trinity College, Sterling followed the example 
 of his friend IMaurice in migrating to Trinity 
 Hall, with the intention of graduating in Law: 
 but he left Cambridge in 1827, without taking 
 a degree; for which purpose he returned in 
 the autumn of 1833, when he was about to 
 enter into orders. During the first four years 
 of the intervening period, he resided chiefly in 
 London, employing himself actively in literature. 
 In those years, one of his dearest friends, Richard 
 Trench, writes to me, " I saw him often ; and to 
 him, and my intercourse with hhn in that crisis of
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XXXIU 
 
 life, I feel that I owe more than to any other 
 living man. It was impossible to come in con- 
 tact with his noble nature, without feeling oneself 
 in some measure ennobled, and lifted up, as I 
 ever felt when I left him, into a higher region 
 of objects and aims than that in which one is 
 tempted habitually to dwell." Like testimony to 
 the benefits derived from intercourse with him 
 could be borne by numbers. There are persons 
 who, by a certain felicity of nature, throvigh a 
 peculiar combination of magnanimity and gene- 
 rosity with gentleness and open-hearted frank- 
 ness, loving to give the very best of what they 
 have, are gifted with a sort of divining rod for 
 drawing out what is hidden in the hearts of their 
 brethren ; and of such persons I have known no 
 finer example than Sterling. For in him, as in 
 such persons it must ever be, the nobleness of his 
 outward look and gesture and manner betokened 
 that of his spirit, and showed that the whole 
 man, heart and soul and mind, was uttering 
 himself in his eloquent speech. Hence many 
 witnesses might be collected out of all classes of 
 society, who would rejoice to declare, that to him 
 they owed the first awakening of a higher being, 
 that from him they learnt what they were, and 
 what they ought to be. 
 
 ^-3
 
 XXXIV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 In 1828 he wrote a good deal in the Athenaum, 
 which in the latter half of that year, and through- 
 out the next, was conducted by his friend Mau- 
 rice, with his assistance. It assumed a tone 
 tar above that of any similar paper: indeed I 
 hardly know any English journal, which has 
 borne such consistent witness to high philoso- 
 j)hical and moral principles, as this did under 
 their management. From Sterling's contributions 
 I have selected several for insertion in these 
 volumes, the Shades of the Dead, the Travels of 
 Theodore Elbert, and half a dozen tales. About 
 the authorship of one or two of the latter I may 
 possibly have been mistaken; as in their case I 
 have been guided solely by internal evidence : this 
 however seemed to me decisive. These writings 
 show powers of imagination and reflection very 
 remarkable in a young man of two and twenty. 
 Perhaps the most striking and precious quality in 
 them is the deep sympathy with the errors and 
 faults, and even with the sins of mankind, a 
 sympathy which, in different modes, characterizes 
 the works of his two great friends, Mr. Maurice 
 and INIr. Carlyle, more than almost any writers 
 I know of; and which was a main cause of his 
 warm admiration for the latter. This sympathy 
 was awakened by very different contemplations.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XXXV 
 
 and proceeded from very different grounds, from 
 those which lead our great poet to lament 
 "What man has made of man;" but it concurred 
 with him in that lamentation. It arose from 
 the deep consciousness of partaking in the same 
 sinful nature: but, while it acknowledged the 
 power of circumstances in making men what 
 they are, it did not therefore exonerate the will 
 from its moral responsibility; nor would it have 
 left men to continue what they are. It yearned 
 with passionate intensity, not merely to improve 
 their circumstances, but also to speak to and 
 emancipate their will, by calling out the con- 
 science from its state of stagnation, or of maimed, 
 crushed inertness. Had Sterling's health allowed 
 him to lead an active life, to this work he would 
 have devoted it. This was what he always set 
 before him, when he was most himself. When 
 he was fain to content himself with lower aims, 
 it arose in a great measure from the debility and 
 comparative languor occasioned by the encroach- 
 ments of disease. 
 
 AU the while however he was well aware how 
 hurtful the practice of writing in journals is, 
 especially for young, half-formed minds. "The 
 desultory, fragmentary kind of thinking, (he said 
 in a letter to me,) to Avhich I am too prone, is
 
 XXXVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 encouraged by the habit of composition for a 
 weekly journal ; and I feel so strongly the 
 necessity of educating myself, that I should 
 be glad if it were possible not to let a line 
 of mine be printed for some years to come. 
 But I fear this cannot be. I must go on sa- 
 crificing the future to the present, grinding my 
 seed-corn, and cutting down my saplings. The 
 time is not yet come in my case for acting 
 directly upon others." Then, after mentioning 
 a projected tour in Germany, he adds: *' To 
 spend some time at Berlin or Gottingen would 
 undoubtedly be of great advantage to me, inas- 
 much as at all events it would take me away 
 from the busy idleness of London, and the 
 wretched technicalities of trade literature. I 
 am not so sure that I should gain more by going 
 abroad, than by withdrawing myself, if possible, 
 from anything like my present occupations, and 
 calmly studying for inward, instead of outward 
 ends." 
 
 In the autumn of 1828 Sterling spent some 
 weeks in Paris. The impressions produced on 
 him by what he saw of the French character, are 
 thus described in a letter: — " I have very imper- 
 fect means of forming any judgement as to what a 
 man is in France. I am inclined to believe that
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XXXVU 
 
 such a thing exists there, and will hereafter be- 
 come more common. But what Coleridge calls 
 ' the manly character' is certainly very rare, and 
 in the best specimens very imperfect. This you 
 will readily believe, when I tell you that, among 
 the men a little older than ourselves, but not yet 
 admissible to the Chamber, who, of course, are 
 the strength of the country, the prevailing tone 
 is that of ridicule and incredulity; not I mean 
 merely as regards religion, but as to ideas in gene- 
 ral. No people are abler in applying means to 
 ends; but religion, the arts, and philosophy are 
 in a miserable condition, not because they are in 
 embryo, but because they have arrived at a 
 stunted maturity. By the statement both of 
 Roman Catholics and Protestants, the men who 
 care for adhering to any acceptation of Christi- 
 anity, are not a tenth of the whole nation. But 
 it is much more striking to hear the way in which 
 religion is commonly talked about; and the most 
 melancholy circumstance of all is, that the best 
 school of French teachers, those who conduct the 
 Globe, are not at aU inclined to do more than treat 
 Christianity as a highly respectable form of ' the 
 religious idea,' without having, in general, a notion 
 that it should be made a matter of personal con- 
 cern to every man. The continental philosophy
 
 XXXVlll LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 of the eighteenth century undervalued Christia- 
 nity, because it looked upon all religions with 
 equal contempt. The continental philosophy of 
 the nineteenth undervalues it, because it looks at 
 all with equal respect, and is as far in the one 
 case as in the other, from comprehending rightly 
 the wants of the individual mind. Cousin makes 
 it the peculiar glory of our epoch, that it endea- 
 vours to comprehend the mind of all other ages. 
 But I fear it must be the tendency of his philo- 
 sophy, while it examines what all other philoso- 
 phies were, to prevent us from being anything 
 ourselves. We must do more than clearly under- 
 stand in what way the various religions have 
 resolved such great problems, as those of freewill 
 and necessity (for instance); we must also do it for 
 ourselves. We must live, not only for the past, 
 but also for the present. Herein is the great 
 merit of Coleridge: and I confess for myself, I 
 would rather be a believing Jew or Pagan, than 
 a man who sees through all religions, but looks 
 not with the eyes of any." 
 
 About this time Sterling took an enthusiastic 
 interest in behalf of the Spanish refugees, who 
 had left their native country after the destruction 
 of the Constitution in 1823. Their cause was 
 pleaded with great earnestness and eloquence in
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XXXlX 
 
 the AthencBum, and also, as I am told, in a very 
 spirited pamphlet, which however I have not 
 seen. Among the Spaniards he became ac- 
 quainted with, was General Torrijos, whom he 
 always regarded as a man of heroic nobleness 
 and statesmanly wisdom. He used to speak of 
 that General as a man altogether different from 
 every other Southern European whom he had 
 known ; and as one who desired, in any future 
 edifice of freedom, to build on the ancient insti- 
 tutions of Spain, and not to begin on a new 
 ground-plan. For these reasons he longed, when 
 the insurrection in 1830 broke out, that Torrijos 
 should take the lead in it; and he crossed the 
 Channel with him to St. Valery in a fishing 
 boat. He would gladly have gone further, and 
 have accompanied his friend in the ill-fated expe- 
 dition which finally terminated in his execution at 
 Malaga. But Sterling's health unfitted him for 
 such a work ; his presence in England was needed 
 for the managing of the correspondence, and the 
 collection of the funds for the expedition, so that 
 Torrijos insisted on his returning, as a condition 
 indispensable to the success of the enterprise. 
 The calamitous issue of this undertaking, the 
 death of Torrijos and of an English friend who 
 accompanied him, weighed so heavily on Ster-
 
 xl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 ling's mind, mixed up with a feeling of most 
 unmerited self-reproach, as though he himself 
 ought to have shared theu' dangers and their 
 fate, that to the end of his life he could hardly 
 bear to hear the subject spoken of. 
 
 Late in the autumn of 1830 he married Susannah, 
 the eldest daughter of Lieutenant-General Barton, 
 who at the time of her marriage had too much 
 reason to fear that she might before long be left a 
 Avidow ; but whom, through the mysterious dis- 
 pensations of life and death, he survived for more 
 than a year, 
 
 A few months after his marriage, in conse- 
 quence of threatening pulmonary symptoms, it 
 was thought advisable that he should go to the 
 West Indies, where his family had some pro- 
 perty in the island of St. Vincent. Here he 
 was residing at the tune of the terrible hurri- 
 cane Avhich desolated that island in 1831. His 
 house was blown down over his head ; and 
 he took refuge with his wife, whose confine- 
 ment was approaching, in a cellar, Avhere they 
 had to remain some days, until the violence 
 of the hurricane was spent. Almost everything 
 he had in the house was destroyed by it; and 
 he was scarcely able to preserve more than half a 
 dozen rumpled books. In a letter from hence he
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. xli 
 
 wrote: "The landscapes around me here are noble 
 and lovely as any that can be conceived on earth. 
 How indeed could it be otherwise in a small 
 island of volcanic mountains, far within the 
 tropics, and perpetually covered with the richest 
 vegetation ? The moral aspect of things is bad 
 enough, but, if we had time, would be far from 
 irremediable. On the whole the Anti- Slavery 
 Society are much nearer the truth than their 
 opponents. The negroes are by no means so 
 poetical a race as you seem to suppose. The 
 African traditions that you speak of, were pro- 
 bably collected several years ago. But, even if 
 the slave-trade were still carried on, it would be 
 difficult to collect here any traits of negro cha- 
 racter and belief so wild and curious as those 
 which have been communicated by our travellers 
 in Africa. So far as I see, the slaves here are 
 good-humoured, cunning, deceitful, and idle, with- 
 out any great aptitude for ferocious crimes, and 
 very little scruple at committing others. But I 
 have seen them much only in very favorable cir- 
 cumstances. They are, as a body, decidedly unfit 
 for freedom, and if left, as at present, completely 
 in the hands of their masters, never will become 
 so, unless through the agency of the Methodists." 
 His own exertions for the instruction and im-
 
 xlii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 provement of the negroes under liis charge were 
 such as threatened to counteract the purpose for 
 which he had gone to the West Indies; and his 
 wife became seriously alarmed for his life. She 
 was very thankful therefore when they returned 
 to Europe in August 1832. One of his chief 
 motives for returning was that he mio-ht find out 
 a good schoolmaster for the negroes, and send 
 him over to St. Vincent's. 
 
 In 1833 he published the novel of Arthur 
 Conhigsby, the main part of which had been 
 written some years before. He could not well 
 write anything which did not bear marks of a 
 vigorous mind; but in this work the elements, 
 except in an episode here and there, are too 
 manifestly in a state of fermentation. There 
 is a strong sense of the evils of society ; but the 
 evils are not subdued, or brought under any sort 
 of harmony: they predominate and gain the 
 victory. 
 
 During his stay in the "West Indies, he began 
 to form the resolution of devoting himself to the 
 ministry of the Church. His speculations on 
 questions connected with religion, which had pre- 
 viously been rather of a philosophical cast, became 
 more directly theological; and his own personal 
 convictions OTew livelier and more definite. In
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. xllii 
 
 February 1832, he wrote to a friend: " So far as 
 it is possible for two men to compare notes, which 
 however is so difficult, as to render the ordinary 
 religious confidences little more than parrotry or 
 gibberish, I should say that I agree with you in 
 all essentials. I feel with you, that the great 
 difficulty, and the one the solution of which 
 would end all others, lies in the Will; and there 
 is no resource but obedience, patience, and prayer. 
 As to your view of om' nearness to the end of this 
 dispensation, I have often been inclined to enter- 
 tain it; but I know that this belief is a ready 
 means of self-delusion, and leads to drawing 
 innumerable worldly passions into the service of 
 religion, where of course they are but disguised 
 enemies. Every man's life is to him the latter 
 times; and every man's death- hour, to him the 
 dawning of the Day of Judgement. Moreover I 
 cannot see my way to any such certainty as Irving 
 derives from the Prophecies; and I have scarcely 
 the trace of doubt that the unknown tongues 
 are the familiar and easily intelligible language 
 of mere human vanity and superstition. Of the 
 changes in the relations of society, I tliink nearly 
 with you. They may all be traced to the in- 
 creased facility of communication and combina- 
 tion, without a corresponding increase of know-
 
 xliv LIFE OF THE AUTIIOK. 
 
 ledge and morality. But I do not see that the 
 line is yet outwardly so plain and broad between 
 the white and the impure, the faithful and the 
 rebel spirits, as to warrant us in looking for any 
 speedy and final manifestation of the Person of 
 Christ. With St. Simonism and some of its 
 disciples I am tolerably familiar. They tried to 
 convert me at Paris a few years ago. I was taken 
 suddenly to one of their meetings, where I was- 
 the only Gentile; and the first thing I heard 
 was, that religion is one of the fine arts. In 
 discussing the doctrines of the sect with some of 
 its leaders, I rested my argument entirely on the 
 truth of Christianity. There is one obstacle to 
 their success, which will meet them throughout 
 Europe, and more especially in England, viz., 
 that potent spirit of individuality, which may be 
 regarded as the shadow of the Gospel, extending 
 to vast regions and millions of minds altogether 
 ignorant of the substance. Ages ago the Chinese 
 were St. Simonists in theory; and that is as 
 much as any man or people ever can be. Of the 
 details of English politics happily I do not hear 
 much. On the whole I think the chief European 
 Governments rather less wicked and foolish than 
 usual. Colonization and education might, I sus- 
 pect, even now save England from revolution.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR, xlv 
 
 But it will soon be too late; and I fear the 
 Church is already doomed. You do not tell me 
 whether you still incline to take orders. I often 
 think of doing so; and if nothing unforeseen 
 should happen to change my views, and I can 
 leave this in two or three years, I may still be 
 ordained before I am thirty." 
 
 Again, during his voyage homeward in August 
 of the same year, he wrote thus to a friend, who, 
 he had heard, was on the point of marriage : 
 ** The prospects for your future life, wliich this 
 event presents to me, are a great and substantial 
 consolation. I have a somewhat longer expe- 
 rience than you of the benefits of marriage to a 
 man whose heart and principles are scarcely, or 
 very recently, fixed in the line of practical Chris- 
 tianity. I Avrite on this matter with more con- 
 fidence and gratitude than I could have expressed 
 a very few months ago. For I seem to myself 
 of late to have entered decidedly, and for the 
 first time, into possession of those blessings Avhich 
 are offered to all in Christ's Redemption; and 
 among the many means which under God's good 
 providence have helped me so far forward, I re- 
 gard my marriage and the birth of my child as 
 nearly, if not quite, the chiefest. I also feel that 
 I owe the deepest gratitude to Coleridge, and.
 
 xlvi LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 though not quite to the same extent, to Edward 
 Irving. I have read the Aids to Reflection again 
 and again, and with ever new advantage; and in 
 the Sermons, Lectures, and Discourses of Irving, 
 although his unceasing vehemence makes me 
 dizzy, his polemical violence repels me, and I see 
 much rashness and presumption, and, as I think, 
 some positive error, I yet feel throughout the love, 
 faith, and hope, the life, though not always the 
 light, of a richly gifted and regenerate man. 
 Aided by these, disciplined by many grave 
 events, and not, I trust, unguided by the Holy 
 Spirit, I have begun of late to read the Bible 
 with diligence and unfailing interest, and have in 
 some degree learnt by experience the power and 
 advantage of prayer, and enjoy, what I never 
 knew before, and what even now is checkered 
 with many fears, a lively and increasing hope 
 that I may be able to overcome the world. You 
 must, I think, know the hesitation and reluctance 
 with which one writes in this way, even to one's 
 nearest and dearest friends. But it is the subject 
 that now perpetually fills my mind; and I think 
 you will not wish that I should have gone out 
 of the way to seek for other more amusing and 
 unpersonal topics." 
 
 Some months after his return to Europe, he
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. xlvii 
 
 went to Germany, purposing to spend some time 
 there in acquiring its language and studying its 
 literature. Here I met him at Bonn in June, 1833, 
 when I was returning from Italy to commence 
 my residence at Herstmonceux. In the com-se 
 of conversation, I was delighted to find that the 
 advice which I had given him some years be- 
 fore, to enter into the Christian ministry, had 
 taken root in his mind, and was beginning to 
 assume a definite form. He talked of spending a 
 year or two abroad, with the view of gaining 
 some insight into German philosophy and theo- 
 logy, and said he then hoj)ed to take orders, if he 
 could find any one to give him a title. I strongly 
 urged him to execute this latter resolution, add- 
 ing that, if, when he did so, my own curacy were 
 vacant, I should deem it a blessed privilege to 
 enlist such a man in the service of the Church. 
 A few months afterwards he wrote to me that 
 my visit had led him to alter his plans, and that, 
 if my curacy was not filled up, and I still retained 
 the intention of oflPering it to him, he would seek 
 ordination immediately. Accordingly he was or- 
 dained Deacon at Chichester on Trinity Sunday, 
 1834. To Priest's orders he was never admitted, 
 as the state of his health, ere many months were 
 gone by, put a compulsory close to his ministerial 
 life.
 
 xlvlii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 During the few months that he was allowed to 
 fulfill the duties of the ministry, he shewed the 
 same energy and zeal which he carried into every- 
 thing he undertook. He was continually devising 
 some fresh scheme for improving the condition of 
 the Parish. His aim was to awaken the minds 
 of the people, to arouse their conscience, to call 
 forth their sense of moral responsibility, to make 
 them feel their own sinfulness, their need of re- 
 demption, and then to lead them to a recognition 
 of the Divine Love by which that redemption is 
 ofiered to us. In visiting them he was diligent 
 in all weathers to the risk of his own health, 
 which was greatly impaired thereby ; and his 
 gentleness and considerate care for the comforts 
 of the sick won their affection, so that, though 
 his stay was very short, his name is still, after a 
 dozen years, cherished by many. Here too his 
 peculiar faculty of discerning and drawing forth 
 latent powers was evinced in several instances, 
 among others in that of a poor cobbler, witli 
 whom, in one of his pastoral visits, he was much 
 struck, so as to invite him to become a teacher 
 in our Sunday School, and who has since mounted 
 by degrees to be the clerk of a parochial union, 
 and superintendent registrar of the district, thank- 
 fully acknowledging that his whole rise is owing
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. xllx 
 
 to Sterling's kind exhortation and encouragement. 
 But the best record of his views with regard to his 
 ministerial duties is the following paper, written 
 while he was engaged in them, at a time when we 
 were thinking about building an additional school, 
 which was erected some time after, for the boys 
 of the Parish. He was in the daily habit of 
 noting down his thoughts and feelings on matters 
 which interested him. Large piles of these papers 
 he ordered to be burnt during liis last illness ; 
 and perhaps this is the only one which, through 
 a happy accident, has been preserved. 
 
 " The only way for a clergyman, the best way 
 for all, to regard the parish they live in, is as a 
 Church, in the primitive Christian sense of the 
 word; that is, a community of people called 
 by God's grace from the world, that is, from 
 following their own desires, their own theories, 
 their own interests, to the acknowledgement of 
 the true spiritual end of man's existence, made 
 known to us and attainable by us through Jesus 
 Christ, — this end being a moral union with God. 
 This view ought to determine all our outward 
 duties; and if it were allowed to do so, which 
 could only be by our having inwardly the mind 
 of Christ, it would perpetually serve in return 
 
 VOL. I. c
 
 1 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 to awaken us to more lively personal communion 
 with Him, and imitation of Him. The only 
 adequate examples I know of how the Spirit of 
 God, if not resisted and grieved by us, would 
 lead us to regard our relations towards our fellow 
 members in our particular Church, are those of 
 the great apostles, Paul, Peter, and John. I 
 consider it no small calamity, that men are 
 commonly so persuaded of the total difference in 
 kind between the work of God's Spirit in the 
 hearts of these men, and in those of all other 
 Christians, that laymen have altogether, and 
 clergymen almost, ceased to regard them as 
 models for us, except in their abstinence from 
 acts of sin. A little knowledge and reflection 
 will prove the erroneousness of this view; and 
 every mind which feels any earnest sympathy 
 with them, has a witness in itself that it is called 
 to a like kind, however inferior an extent of 
 action. Now let us bear this in mind, and con- 
 sider how one of them, say St. Paul, would be 
 likely to act, if placed in another age than his 
 own, and confined to one small division of coun- 
 try, in short, if he were in the situation of a 
 modern parish priest. Is it not plain that he 
 would substitute, for his former wide excursions.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. ll 
 
 the greatest possible intensity of influence in 
 detail? It would be no longer from Jerusalem 
 to Damascus, to Arabia, to Derbe, Lystra, 
 Ephesus, Philippi, Athens, Corinth, Rome, that 
 he would travel: but each house would be to 
 him what each of these great cities was,— a place 
 where he would bend his whole being, and spend 
 his heart, for the conversion, purification, eleva- 
 tion of those under his influence. The whole 
 man would be for ever at work for this purpose, 
 — head, heart, knowledge, time, body, posses- 
 sions, — all would be directed to this end; and, 
 except so far as other duties, viz., those to a 
 family interfered, to this end alone. And if 
 Paul would have done this, — each of us ought 
 to try to do so. Of course none of us is a Paul; 
 but we may be perfectly like him in will, how- 
 ever meaner and weaker in faculties. The iris 
 in the dewdrop is just as true and perfect an 
 iris, as the bow that measures the heavens, and 
 betokens the safety of a world from deluge. I 
 conceive that a Paul would have been for ever 
 moving from house to house to do his Master's 
 work; but there are doubtless two particular 
 departments, which peculiarly require an apos- 
 tolic faithfulness, — I mean worship, and educa- 
 
 c 2
 
 Hi LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 tion, in each of which there ought to be much 
 of the other. But with the adults in the weekly 
 service devotion should be the chief, and teaching 
 the inferior element; while with the young in 
 schools the opposite proportion must be estab- 
 lished. In each case the two should be insepa- 
 rable; and the Church and the School itself 
 should be considered to be so intimately related, 
 that each implies the design of establishing the 
 other; a design so gravely and deeply held, that 
 its execution should be retarded by nothing, but 
 the absolute and hard necessities of outward 
 life. Too long in England (and here alone, I 
 believe, of Protestant countries) the Church 
 dragged on its maimed and sickly existence 
 without the School; and we are now suffering 
 for the sinful omission, in the attempt to set up 
 the School as a substitute for and rival of the 
 Church. What then would Paul have said, had 
 he been placed in a parish where the school was 
 wanting? "Would he have talked about it, dined, 
 slept, talked about it again, — or about something 
 else, — and done nothing? and that too while 
 the Church was there, as a memorial of the 
 ' completing counterpart' so deeply needed ? while 
 he had the pulpit of the Church as a fulcrum
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Hii 
 
 for his lever, with which to move, if it could 
 not be done otherwise, the very tombstones of 
 his hearers' fathers, as materials for that no less 
 necessary, or less holy temple, — the temple of the 
 young ? Nor do I suppose the case would have 
 seemed to him much better, if half or a third of 
 the children, the lambs of his flock, were receiving 
 a nominal education. But the matter will not 
 bear talking of: it is too plain. AYould he have 
 had silver in his house, or luxury of any kind, 
 the worth of which might enable him to supply 
 the want? These things so used, or locked up 
 from use, seem rather the 'hay, straw, stubble,' 
 than the gold and precious stones that he talks 
 of, as materials of the spiritual structure. What 
 then should we do? I cannot doubt; and yet 
 I dare not answer. For while I Avrite, and try 
 to convince myself, I feel and know how many 
 more opposing weaknesses and self-delusions I 
 have within, than my words would seem to ac- 
 knowledge, or the notion of my sincerity would 
 admit. I often think myself ready for any sa- 
 crifice, yet give way the next minute to some 
 paltry temptation of temper, or indolence, or 
 pleasure, or vainglory. And even in medita- 
 ting on the mind of the Apostles, I dare not
 
 liv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 calculate how much of my own wish for theii* 
 zeal, and for doing their works, is a mere selfish 
 lust of activity, or a desire for the praise of men. 
 So that this, like so many other speculations and 
 projects, must end, I fear, only in a prayer to God, 
 to pardon the sins I have committed, while the 
 thoughts have been passing through my mind, — 
 and to give me the honest heart and single eye, 
 without which all attempts to serve him are 
 miserable hypocrisy." 
 
 Of that which it was to me personally to have 
 such a fellow-labourer, to live constantly in the 
 freest communion with such a friend, I cannot 
 speak. He came to me at a time of heavy afflic- 
 tion, just after I had heard that the brother, who 
 had been the sharer of all my thoughts and feel- 
 ings from my childhood, had bid farewell to his 
 earthly life at Rome ; and thus he seemed given 
 to me to make up in some sort for him whom 
 I had lost. Almost daily did I look out at 
 his usual hour for coming to me, and watch 
 his tall slender form walking rapidly across the 
 hill in front of my window, with the assurance 
 that he was coming to cheer and brighten, to 
 rouse and stir me, to call me up to some height 
 of feeling, or down into some depth of thought.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Iv 
 
 His lively spirit responding instantaneously to 
 every impulse of Nature or of Art, his generous 
 ardour in behalf of whatever is noble and true, 
 his scorn of all meanness, of all false pretences 
 and conventional beliefs, softened as it was by 
 compassion for the victims of those besetting sins 
 of a cultivated age, his never flagging impetuo- 
 sity in pushing onward to some unattained point 
 of duty or of knowledge, along with his gentle, 
 almost reverential, affectionateness towards his 
 former tutor, rendered my intercourse with him 
 an unspeakable blessing ; and time after time has 
 it seemed to me that his visit had been like a 
 shower of rain, bringing down freshness and 
 brightness on a dusty roadside hedge. By him 
 too the recollection of these our daily meetings 
 was cherished till the last. In a letter to his 
 eldest boy, who was at school, and to whom he 
 used to write daily, about two months before his 
 death, after speaking of various flowers in his 
 garden, especially of some gumcistuses, he says : 
 " I think I like them chiefly because I remember 
 a large bush of the kind, close to the greenhouse 
 through which one passed into Mr. Hare's library. 
 The ground used to be all white with the fallen 
 flowers. I have so often stood near it, talking to 
 him, and looking away over the Pevensey Level
 
 Ivi LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 to the huge old Roman Castle, and the sea, and 
 Beachy Head beyond. The thought of the happy 
 hours I have so spent in talking with him is and 
 always will be very pleasant. It is long since I 
 saw him. I have been too ill, and have too much 
 besides upon me, to keep up latterly almost any 
 correspondence. But I know that if we met 
 to-morrow, or to-morrow come a hundred years, 
 it would be as of old, like brothers. Happy, is 
 it not, my boy, that there are in human life 
 such ties of affection and mutual faith, as no 
 lapse of time can weaken !" 
 
 To himself too the brief period of his minis- 
 terial life was fraught with blessing, as it ever 
 must be to one who endeavours to fulfil its duties 
 in such a spirit. It gave him a definite purpose 
 and aim, — the highest of all purposes and aims, — 
 a definite field of action, which to a man of his 
 energy was almost a necessity, and without which 
 the habits of bold, searching speculation are en- 
 compassed with numerous dangers. It supplied 
 him with a centre for his life, and gathered all 
 his faculties around it, which were heightened 
 even severally by their mutual action upon each 
 other, and by the grandeur and inspiring cha- 
 racter of their object. To the last, though much 
 changed in many of his interests and of his views.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ivii 
 
 he looked back with thankfulness to his work at 
 Herstmonceux. Thus in 1841, writing about his 
 past life, he said that his " inmost nature, sup- 
 pressed and perverted for years by ignorance, by 
 serious errors, and heavy sorrows, was set right 
 at last and made healthy by the moral effort and 
 self-sacrifice of taking orders." 
 
 Unhappily for the parish, and for me, and for 
 himself also, the state of his health did not allow 
 him to carry on his pastoral labours for more 
 than six months. Having entered upon them in 
 June, 1834, he wrote to me in the following 
 September: " The perpetual return of slight 
 obscure uneasiness in the chest, which I feel to 
 be connected with my former serious illnesses, 
 and a liability, which I have suffered from all my 
 life, to severe derangements of the digestion, with 
 all their train of pains, languors, and depressions, 
 do not, I trust, make it improbable that I may 
 go on with my present very inadequate scale of 
 labour for some months, or impossible that I may 
 regain perfect health; but I think the chances 
 are against me. I have not the slightest inten- 
 tion, and certainly no wish, to abandon my post, 
 and only mention my belief, that you may be 
 able to turn in your mind the question as to 
 what course you ought to pursue for the good of 
 
 c 3
 
 Iviii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 the parish, in case of my being disabled. The 
 interests of our flock must of course be the great 
 consideration with you, — and with me too, as long 
 as I hold my present situation. I believe I need 
 hardly say that I have no plans or expectations, 
 no feelings, which could make me desirous of 
 being separated from you. Little as I have been 
 able to do in my vocation, compared with my 
 ideal of a parish priest, or even with the achieve- 
 ments of very many other men, it is more than 
 I expected, and much more than I have ever 
 earned a right to hope for. If you should be 
 content to go on as at present, I shall be rejoiced 
 to do my best as long as I am able to do any- 
 thing." This he continued to do with unabated 
 zeal till the following February, when he was 
 forced to go to London for advice. Thence he 
 wrote : " The blow has come at last, for which 
 I have been trying to prepare both you and 
 myself. I have been for near an hour to-day with 
 Dr. Nicholl, who gave as much attention and 
 anxiety to my case as if I had been heir to the 
 Crown ; and the conclusion is, that, though not 
 now, he thinks, seriously ill, perfect quiet is 
 necessary to prevent dangerous pulmonary illness 
 creeping on till it may become irremediable. I 
 ought not, in his opinion, to attempt tlic per-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. lix 
 
 formance of any public duty for some time to 
 come. You will know with what pain I write 
 this, and how much the sorrow I feel at the 
 prospect before me must be aggravated by the 
 necessity for snapping so suddenly the cords by 
 which I have been endeavouring to help you in 
 working our machinery. Deep as is my own 
 regret for myself, I hardly think of it so much 
 as of the situation in which you will now for a 
 time at least be placed. I can only trust that 
 the Providence, which so greatly for my good 
 first placed me in your Parish, will now enable 
 you to find some one equal to be your assistant in 
 those happy, and, I trust, useful labours from 
 which I am withdrawn. I hope to see you on 
 Monday, and make what arrangements we can 
 for the good of the people. It is some consolation 
 to fancy myself still entitled to take part with 
 you in planning for their benefit. However my 
 present state of health may end, living or dying, 
 I shall always look to the months of my ministry 
 at Herstmonceux, and of my closer connection 
 with you, as a most bright and healthy contrast 
 to my previous life. When I think of leaving 
 you, I feel as if the one sabbath of my life were 
 at an end. I may fix in London or elsewhere, 
 and may spend more or fewer hours and words in
 
 Ix LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 the service of the Church ; but I shall be in the 
 midst of excitements and contentions of which I 
 have long since swallowed many a drenching dose, 
 and which I look forward to for the future with 
 horror." 
 
 Still, though forced to give up all active duty, 
 he continued to reside at Herstmonceux till the 
 autumn of 1835, and then went to London and 
 took a house at Bayswater. During the whole of 
 this year his mind was in the fullest vigour ; and 
 he was busy in studying philosophy and theology, 
 especially the best German writers, and in plan- 
 ning works of his own on cognate subjects, some 
 of which Avere executed to a considerable extent. 
 The chief forms Avhich his plans assumed were a 
 series of Discourses on Kevelation, and a Treatise 
 on Ethics. In March 1836 he wrote to me: 
 " The Discourses that I have taken so much pains 
 with, begin to look more shapely. I hope before 
 long to send you the contents of a volume to look 
 at. I premise, before any Biblical enquiry, three 
 Essays on God, on Revelation, and on Sin. I 
 then give a rapid survey of the Scriptures, 
 follow this by dissertations on Inspiration, Mira- 
 cles, and Prophecy, and then add six or seven 
 consecutive discourses on the main topics of the 
 Old Testament, in chronological order, beginning
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixi 
 
 with the Fall, Of this more than half is actually 
 written out, and a still larger proportion of the 
 second half on the New Testament. — I have just 
 finished an Essay or Discourse on the Narrative 
 of the Fall, which pretty well satisfies my own 
 mind as to the main outlines; but I do not 
 yet see my way as to the history of Cain and 
 Abel. The narrative is evidently meant to be 
 significant, and not a mere legend (see, for in- 
 stance, the names) ; and yet significant of what ? 
 What is the meaning of Cain's punishment 
 and the mark set upon him ? — I will own to you 
 that, the more I go into the Old Testament, the 
 more ground I find for hesitating about the great 
 physical miracles, from the apparent mixture of 
 alloy in the narratives, their slight outward 
 authority, and the difficulties of any scheme that 
 would furnish a previous ground for the facts, 
 and yet account for the imperfection of our re- 
 cord of them. But I am far from giving the 
 thing up; for it is impossible to overlook the 
 continuity of the faith in a revealed Monotheism 
 among the Jews from Abraham to Christ, or to 
 doubt that scientific enquiry and inward expe- 
 rience bring out more and more the reality and 
 exclusiveness of His claims as the Son of God, 
 and the Redeemer of mankind. I would give
 
 Ixil LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 much for a commentary by Tholuck or Olsliausen 
 on the Old Testament, similar to that of the 
 latter on the New. I have just read Schiller's 
 Lecture on the Sending of Moses, which, if there 
 were nothing else against it, would, I think, be 
 sufficiently overthrown by the patriarchal history, 
 in which the evidence for reality, and resting on 
 contemporary documents, or wonderfully accurate 
 tradition, seems, from the progressive continuity 
 in the most minute points, to be perfectly irre- 
 sistible. — I must have much misrepresented my- 
 self, if I said anything at all resembling the 
 notion that the Jewish colouring of the Gospel 
 arises only from the accidental circumstance of 
 our Lord's birth in Judea. My difficulty is to 
 imagine how any one can think so, considering 
 that, in any other part of the world. He must 
 have begun like Paul at Athens, by preaching an 
 ' unknown God,' and that probably the only and 
 indispensable point of transition for the early 
 Churches beyond Judea from Paganism to Chris- 
 tianity was the faith of the Proselytes of the 
 Gate, and the yearnings of those, with whom, 
 though unconverted, the Jews had intercouse, 
 for further knowledge of the One and Pighteous 
 God of Israel. But for the spiritual faith and 
 ethics of the Jews, it seems to me that there
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixiii 
 
 would have been nothing in the Old World with 
 which the New could connect itself; and the 
 Gospel would have dropt from the clouds like 
 a meteoric stone, instead of rising into view as 
 the purest portion of a vein co-eval with the 
 creation, and of which everything else is but, as 
 it were, the ore or the dross. But the obscurity 
 to my mind lies in this, that, in the very propor- 
 tion in which the Hebrew records afford clear 
 and lively evidence of this evangelic element in 
 the old world, in the same degree they are free 
 from the mixture of the prodigiously miraculous ; 
 and therefore one cannot but ask whether the 
 physically marvellous be not a separable alloy. 
 I am far from denying the possibility, that in the 
 earliest times, and especially at the great epoch 
 of the constitution of a Monotheistic nation, all 
 things may have been in a more outward state, 
 and connected themselves necessarily with more 
 visible manifestations of the spiritual system 
 around us and within us ; and that the evolution 
 of the Inward through the Visible into amazing 
 phenomena may have been the necessary charac- 
 teristic of such a period, and the only mode of 
 bringing home to men's apprehensions the idea 
 and reality of a Will and Reason ruling our 
 nature, and the kindred archetype of the pecu-
 
 Ixiv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 liarly human in man. — You have now, very 
 roughly and slenderly stated, what is my diffi- 
 culty in the matter ; and any hint you can givQ 
 me towards the solution will be more acceptable 
 than rubies. But I must add, that any painful- 
 ness of interest in the question arises entirely 
 from the state of opinion on the matter in this 
 country ; as no possible view of it would to my 
 mind one whit weaken the security of the Gospel, 
 any more than the overthrow of the old notion of 
 the uncompounded and elemental nature of atmo- 
 spheric air could tend to impede the breathing of 
 the undeceived philosopher." A like train of 
 thought is carried on somewhat fancifully in the 
 following remarks : " I have just read Schleier- 
 macher's beautiful and affecting discourse at his 
 son's grave. I know nothing more perfect or 
 precious. In a minor way it is striking to see 
 how so unfanciful (I do not say, unimaginative) 
 a man is hurried into imagery by feeling. It is 
 in a great degree the want of faith, hope, and 
 love, that makes people write on religion in 
 a style suitable for bills of lading and kings* 
 speeches ; and it was partly the fulness of these 
 in the Prophets that gave them their visionary 
 and symbolic style. You see, Schleiermacher 
 opens with images ; and the style then runs
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. IxV 
 
 smoother and more equably ; and such, I think, 
 is the natural course of passion. I cannot but 
 connect this with the bursts of fact-imagery and 
 phenomenal wonders at the first crash of each of 
 the great epochs of Revelation. If this makes 
 you laugh, I do not know that it will have done 
 any harm." 
 
 Of the ethical work which was occupying 
 his thoughts at the same time, he speaks in 
 several letters. In one, he says : " I have read 
 through "NYhewell's edition of Mackintosh's Dis- 
 sertation on Ethics. I like it much better than I 
 expected ; and it has cleared up some of my own 
 views in a way that has led me to write a good 
 many pages, with more hope of success in making 
 an intelligible and innoxious book. I think I see 
 my way clearly as to the fundamental principle, 
 which I place in a peculiar feeling, connected 
 with and guiding volition ; though I am far from 
 holding a moral instinct, prescribing to what voli- 
 tions this feeling shall attach itself. The rule of 
 this I find in the nature of man as a whole, to the 
 preservation and development of which, it seems 
 plain enough, our poAver of voluntary action must 
 be directed ; and hence the laws of its operation. 
 My difficulty, in which however I see some light, 
 is as to a point mentioned in Schleiermacher's
 
 Ixvi LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Introduction to his Kritik der Sittenlehre, at the 
 end of the second section, the Eintheilung des 
 menschlichen Geistes in teas immer filr einzelne 
 einander hei oder untergeordnete Krdfte und 
 Vermogen. For of course a Power directed to 
 the preservation and unfolding of our being must 
 take into account the relation and subordination 
 of its parts. I hope to escape all the abysmal 
 questions as to the genesis and constitution of 
 the Will, and as to Freedom or Necessity ; taking 
 as facts that we are conscious of volition, and of a 
 moral feeling or conscience." In the next letter 
 he replies to some remarks I made on the fore- 
 going statement : " A year ago, or nearly so, 
 when I first took up the question of Morals, I saw 
 clearly enough what you state as to the certainty 
 that they must depend on something deep, per- 
 manent, and universal, and not merely on our 
 feelings of pleasure and pain, or on any blind in- 
 stinct, which is properly the name for whatever 
 is lowest, not for what is highest in man. But I 
 could make little progress, and felt that there was 
 something beyond my grasp. I now feel con- 
 vinced that I have caught the clue. There is no 
 doubt that the law of the Will must be found in 
 the Reason, that is, in our power of immediate 
 intuition as to the ends of our being and the
 
 LIFE OP THE AUTHOR. Ixvli 
 
 foundations of our constitution. But there Is 
 another element In the question, over which it 
 seems to me that the Scotch and the Benthamites 
 have alike broken their shins. For, if we admit 
 what I have just stated, there is no answer to the 
 enquiry, why we regard guilt in ourselves with a 
 different feeling from that with which we behold 
 all other confusion and ruin ; the feeling which, 
 I affirm. Is not a feeling deciding what Is right 
 and wrong, but one which, the fact of the right 
 and wrong being given, attaches to these a sense 
 or emotion of approval and blame. I propose to 
 insist on and explain this in the first place, till I 
 have made it perfectly clear that I am not speak- 
 ing of the Moral Law, but of the Moral Sanction. 
 This point having been settled, there arises the 
 much more difficult one, the answer to which I 
 have by no means exhausted in its details, but as 
 to which I see enough to be tolerably sure that 
 the thing may be done. My view amounts nearly 
 to the old Stoical one of perfection. It seems 
 involved in the very notion of the Will, as the 
 guiding power of a being, that its operations 
 should be directed to the preservation and good 
 of the being. If it be said that what this is 
 depends on the fancy or taste of every one in 
 particular, and that we are without a law, I
 
 Ixviii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 propose to show that this is not true; that the 
 more man is man, the more his Avhole nature 
 is unfolded in all its parts, the more clear it 
 becomes that there is a system and meaning, 
 a balance and proportion of his powers, which 
 cannot be violated without disturbance and a 
 sense of guilt; but, analysed to its last elements, 
 I think it may be shewn that our nature is a 
 complex of two powers, or a double operation 
 of one; and that these poles of humanity are 
 FeeKng and Knowledge. To develope each of 
 these to its utmost limits, till at last it shall 
 fill the whole sphere of existence, and to keep 
 the equipoise of the two, seems to me to be the 
 proper function of the Will ; and that it may be 
 proved that our instincts, affections, and cir- 
 cumstances work toward this purpose, till they 
 issue in a self-consciousness which is its own 
 evidence of the truth, I say that the object of 
 feeling and of intelligence is simply existence: 
 but observe, that existence is interesting to us 
 in proportion as it rises from nothingness to the 
 full capacity of feeling and of intelligence, with 
 the Will as their arbiter. Hence man is more 
 important to us than an animal, an animal than 
 a stone, and God than all. This is my hierarchy 
 of being, according to the scale of which. Con-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixix 
 
 science decides that our affections and under- 
 standing must act. The second active principle 
 is, that existence is important to us in propor- 
 tion as it is brought within our reach. A flower 
 in my garden is therefore perhaps of more value 
 to me than a sage in India, or an angel in the 
 sun. Thirdly I would affirm that we are bound 
 to value the objects of our feelings and intelligence 
 in proportion to their accordance with their proper 
 aims and with ours. Hence an lago or a devil 
 may be the object of moral abhorrence. Besides 
 these views, Avhich seem to me nearly sufficient 
 for determining the moral law as to ourselves, 
 and as to our intercourse with other moral 
 beings, there is a train of consequences arising 
 from the fact that we and they are not mere 
 points in space, but have bodies connecting us 
 with a whole system of outward things. The 
 needs of these bodies, their capacities of suffering 
 and enjoyment, and the powers they exercise 
 around us, establish claims for them which it is 
 a point of duty to take into account; the con- 
 nection with our other faculties being such, that 
 these last are crippled or unnerved by the result 
 of either ascetic denial or epicurean indulgence. 
 Lastly, on these principles it may, I think, be 
 shewn that the most perfect moral state is that
 
 Ixx LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 in which our feelino;s and intelli2:ence are most 
 directed to the only perfect moral Being, and 
 habitually regard all things with reference to 
 Him. Very possibly I may not have made my- 
 self intelligible ; but I feel persuaded I have got 
 my foot on firm ground; and, with leisure and 
 health, I hope to complete a tenable system. 
 I have been reading some of Schleiermacher, and 
 hope with time and labour to master his scheme ; 
 but it involves much work on the authors he 
 talks of." 
 
 The great Christian idea, by which at that 
 time he was chiefly impressed, was that of Sin, 
 and the consequent necessity of Redemption. 
 To this in his letters at that period he is conti- 
 nually recurring; for instance, after saying that he 
 had been reading the Life of St. Theresa: "There 
 is the deepest piety, the most watchful self-dis- 
 trust, and the most ardent zeal for Christian 
 perfection, with many beautiful thoughts, and 
 some A'ery curious anecdotes. But the notion 
 of our good works meriting certain returns from 
 God runs through the whole that I have read. 
 Everything that I read about the Romanists 
 disinclines me more and more to any scheme of 
 reunion with them, which should not require an 
 explicit renunciation, by a General Council sane-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixxi 
 
 tioned by the Pope, of penance, indulgences, and 
 auricular confession. I am persuaded, these never 
 can be practically in operation, without over- 
 throwing the foundations of the Clu-istian system, 
 by introducing that wicked fiction of our having 
 claims against God." In another letter he writes : 
 " I have been looking into the Koran with re- 
 ference to my Discom'ses. I find more good, and 
 less ill, than I anticipated, in Mahomet, and 
 am far from clear that it is right to call him 
 an impostor. The two great blots of his system 
 seem to be, first, the want of a history: it is 
 all words, and no facts. Secondly there is an 
 entire absence of the idea of sacrifice, and of the 
 whole circle of truths that revolve about it, and 
 are the deepest and most essential in the Gospel. 
 He was a warlike and Ai'abian Socrates, and 
 probably really believed himself commissioned 
 from heaven." Again, speaking of Milman's 
 History of the Jews, he writes: " There is cer- 
 tainly in some parts a leaning to regard the 
 Mosaic system, and generally the providential 
 government of the Jews, as directed more to 
 merely secular and economical objects than I 
 can think ; and he perhaps tends to represent 
 Kevelation as little more than the manifestation 
 and divine sanction of a rational and benign
 
 Ixxii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 scheme of morality; hence seeming in a manner 
 to overlook the deeper and more peculiar ele- 
 ments of sin, and a sense of guilt in the nature 
 of man, with all the Pauline consequences, and 
 the necessity and reality of a communication of 
 spiritual life, which are so chief a part of the 
 teaching of John. This of course darkens his 
 view of much of the earlier dispensation; and on 
 sacrifices, for instance, he seems to have nothing 
 of the least interest to oiFer; though I think he 
 does keep clear of the narrow and ghastly 
 speculations of Magee, and of most of our 
 modern orthodox Brahmins." A similar con- 
 viction manifests itself in the following remarks, 
 though founded on an erroneous representa- 
 tion of Kant's Ethics. " E. seems to me not 
 to have yet gone beyond a notional life. It is 
 manifest that he has no knowledge of the ne- 
 cessity of a progress from Wissen to Wesen; and 
 one therefore is not much surprised that he 
 should think Kant a sufficient hierarch. I know 
 very little of Kant's doctrine; but I made out 
 from E. what seems to me a fundamental un- 
 soundness in his moral scheme, viz., the asser- 
 tion of the certainty of a heavenly futurity for 
 man, because the idea of duty involves that of 
 merit, and hence of reward. Now duty seems
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. IxxHl 
 
 in reality rather to exclude merit; and at all 
 events the notion of external reward is a mere 
 empirical appendage, and has none but an ar- 
 bitrary connexion with ethics. I regard it as 
 a very happy thing for E. that he has come to 
 England. In Italy he probably would never have 
 gained any intuition into the reality of Being, 
 as different from a mere power of speculating 
 and perceiving; and of course without this he 
 can never reach to more than the merest Gnosis, 
 which, taken alone, is a poor inheritance, a box 
 full of title-deeds to an estate, which is covered 
 with lava, or sunk under the sea." From finding 
 this deep conviction of sin, which he missed in 
 so many other books, he was so much delighted 
 with Tholuck's True Initiation of the Doubter, 
 that he translated it, as he said, "without the 
 smallest thought of publishing my version, which 
 has been written partly to secure my own know- 
 ledge of the book, but chiefly for the use of 
 some half dozen friends, — Mr. D. for instance, 
 the defect of whose theology, compounded as it 
 is of the doctrine of the Greek Fathers, of the 
 Mystics, and of ethical philosophers, consists, 
 if I may hint a fault in one whose holiness, 
 meekness, and fervour would have made him the 
 beloved disciple of him whom Jesus loved, in 
 VOL. I. d
 
 IxxiV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 an insufficient apprehension of the reality arid 
 depth of sin." Indeed this one thought was at 
 this time the key-note of all his speculations. Thus 
 he wrote: "I find in all my conversations with 
 B. that his fundamental position is, the good of 
 evil: he is for ever quoting Goethe's epigram 
 about the idleness of wishing to jump off one's 
 shade. This is of course very closely connected 
 Avith Pantheism, and also with the dusky glare of 
 discontent, which pervades B.'s whole mind; for, 
 by a fine necessity of our being, the evil that we 
 deny, thereby becomes only the more present 
 to us; and its final extinction becomes impos- 
 sible, till it has revealed itself in all its depth 
 and reality." Again: "I have been looking 
 into Jonathan Edwards. It is curious that, 
 when I wrote to you about my ethical views, I 
 did not to the best of my recollection know of 
 Edwards's. I certainly did not when I struck 
 first into my present path. There is some con- 
 fusion and much imperfection in his speculations 
 on the subject; but he seems to me to have 
 been near the truth, when he asserted the law 
 of Duty to be the love of Being. He seems 
 best described as a Protestant Schoolman, a 
 man exercising wondrous analytical powers on 
 arbitrary and sometimes fallacious premises. I
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixxv 
 
 have not yet found my way as to the theoiy of 
 the Will, but have little doubt that the truth 
 lies below Edwards's digging. I find myself 
 more and more attracted toAvards the divines 
 who occupy themselves much in setting forth 
 the depth and extent of sin, as a fact of human 
 nature; though, as you may suppose, far from 
 satisfied with the Calvinistic theories as to the 
 divine purposes and the process of Redemption. 
 I do not find Tholuck as full or satisfactory as 
 I could wish on this last matter; the doctrine 
 of substitution appearing in him with too much 
 nakedness. But I am in hopes it may be shcAvn 
 that this, when connected with the cycle of 
 ideas relating to Christ's Headship, and to the 
 unity of our nature as common to Him and us, 
 issues in the one radical and comprehensive truth, 
 which man requires, and which Revelation on so 
 many sides sets forth; and so to justify and in- 
 terpret the stupendous emotions, the prodigious 
 revolutions of character, the altered aspect of 
 the world, and all the oracular breathings of the 
 Spirit, which are found in connection with the 
 doctrines of Guilt and Atonement.'^ 
 
 During the same period he also indulged now 
 and then, as at intervals he was ever fond of 
 doing, in poetical composition. But his poems 
 
 d 2
 
 Ixxvl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Avere mostly rather the imaginative expression 
 of predetermined moral and philosophical truths, 
 than the spontaneous utterance of a poetical mind, 
 in whose creations the concrete, living, personal 
 interest precedes and predominates over that of 
 any abstract, reflective propositions. Thus, hav- 
 ing been kept at home by a cold, he says, in 
 November, 1835: "Between last night and Friday 
 last I wrote a poem of six hundred lines, something 
 similar in character to the Statues (a portion of 
 which had been printed in the Athenaum for June, 
 1829), and which I think of as the first book of 
 a longish work, in which the Statues would form 
 the third. The second would be a tale of guilty 
 love; and the fourth would include the greater 
 part of a poem on the Bible, which you would 
 find in my manuscripts. I have got now into the 
 way of writing with so much facility, that I may 
 j)erhaps reckon on accomplishing this design be- 
 fore very long. The first book, which is complete 
 by itself, represents a youth, the pupil of a poetic 
 magician, who, when the boy is about to go into 
 the world, calls up, by his enchanted harpings, a 
 series of beautiful phantom women, and tells him 
 that shapes of kindred splendour will encounter 
 him in all nature and life, but that, to give beauty 
 of any kind an abiding reality, it must be sought
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixxvii 
 
 and appropriated only under the consciousness and 
 controll of duty and exclusive love. In the second 
 book, if I ever write it, I shall endeavour to ex- 
 emplify this by the misery and degradation arising 
 from the hero's fall into this evil state ; and there 
 would thus be room for more of common human 
 interest than in the first. The third opens with a 
 reference to the speaker's distress ; and this would 
 appear as the result of the previous circumstances, 
 while I should so alter it as to make the Archi- 
 mage the same as the minstrel of the first book. 
 The fourth would pass on from the summit of 
 human existence, as reflective and creative, which 
 is exhibited at the close of the Statues, to the 
 Christian idea of man, as eminently and pecu- 
 liarly receptive and submissive; and it is here 
 that I should introduce the poem on the Bible. 
 In the most general sense it would in some de- 
 gree be my object to exhibit the gorgeousness 
 and vividness of Shelley's imagery, with the me- 
 ditative beauty and wide speculation of Words- 
 worth, but both on the high and enduring ground 
 of the Gospel. I assure you I do not think I am 
 so wedded to this project, that I should be pained 
 by my friends' disapproval of it. I shall be grate- 
 ful to you if you will tell me exactly wliat you 
 think."
 
 Ixxviii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 His confidence in his poetical powers was ever 
 easily shaken; and though his plans might be 
 formed with eager enthusiasm, and might seem 
 to hold out splendid visions, he was not withheld 
 either by vanity or by obstinacy from abandon- 
 ing them, on the expression of objections from a 
 friend whose judgement he respected. Thus, a 
 couple of months after the letter last quoted, he 
 wrote: " For several weeks I have left my metri- 
 cal labours, but after nearly completing the poem 
 of which I described the plan to you. Your sug- 
 gestion as to the necessity for a strong and real 
 human interest was perfectly sound ; but I thought 
 that the character of the work in that respect was 
 determined by what was already written ; and the 
 consequence is, that the poem is, I think, deficient 
 in interest, and too abstract in its ground and 
 colouring for general readers. I abandoned the 
 idea of a Christian conclusion, from the appre- 
 hension that our sense of personal concern in this 
 would be too strong for the mere phantasmagoria 
 of the rest, and would produce an unpleasant jar. 
 The composition therefore is useless, except in 
 fragments ; some of which, especially some lyrical 
 portions, may perhaps give pleasure to my friends." 
 
 A spirit of his order could not but be continu- 
 ally busying itself in meditating and speculating
 
 LIFE or THE AUTHOR. kxlx 
 
 on the prospects of the world and of Christianity. 
 In February, 1836, he wrote to me; "My mind has 
 been a good deal turned to the probable fortunes 
 of the world and the Church ; and I incline rather 
 more to the hope of a great speedy revival and 
 re-organization, founded on the obvious multipli- 
 cation and streno;theninoj of all the elements of 
 human life and activity, which seem seething in 
 unexampled disturbance, and breaking forth on 
 all hands; and which can, I suppose, only be 
 harmonized by being connected with some root 
 of permanence and some centre of peace. If any 
 existing society or Church is to be the nucleus of 
 a new system, it can only be by the slougliing off 
 of much that is old. But I hope this will be done 
 rather by the impulse of new life from within, 
 than by any wrench from without. The quantity 
 of inwardness, faith, and power, which has come 
 before me in my own generation, cannot, I think, 
 pass away into the Invisible without helping to- 
 wards some great outward revolution. But O ! 
 how perilous will be the position of any man who 
 may stand forth as the leader and standard-bearer 
 in such a movement ! For how small and weakly 
 charged were the ' lofts of storied thunder,' even 
 in Luther's time, which the Prince of this world 
 could set loose against him, compared with those
 
 Ixxx LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 of modern Civilization and Philosophy, wliich 
 would be just as fierce in their way, and as guile- 
 ful, as were of old the Papacy and the Empire." 
 In May of the same year he wrote thus: "I 
 suppose you will have heard of the Bishop of 
 London's appeal to the public, to subscribe for 
 the building and endowing of fifty new Churches 
 in the Capital. I hope there is more chance of 
 success than if he had spoken of five. I am out 
 of the way of hearing what more is doing about 
 it ; but I wish men could be persuaded to take it 
 up in the spirit of the Crusaders, one man give 
 his plate, another his horses, a third his super- 
 fluous books, and so forth; and that every man 
 who cares for Christianity, or even for the diflii- 
 sion of the faith that men are not beasts, would 
 remember how little any outward sacrifice is, 
 compared with the object of raising mankind, and 
 one's self with them, out of the whirl of dreams 
 and sensations into the region of the Universal 
 and Personal. Of course no heaps of bricks, with 
 incomes attached to them by way of souls, can do 
 this without a deepening and refining of life and 
 affection in those who are to minister at the new 
 altars. But I am sure that this latter and higher 
 hope will be helped to fulfilment, instead of being 
 retarded, by the outward means. Some of the
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixxxi 
 
 so-called Evangelicals have established a society, 
 in which I take much interest, called the Church 
 Pastoral Aid Society, for the purpose of sup- 
 plying lay assistants, Deacons in the old sense, 
 to those Parochial Clergymen who may wish for 
 and want them. These are to visit the poor and 
 sick, read to them, converse with them, exhort 
 them to attend the Church-services, and, as I 
 hope, lay the foundations of additional congrega- 
 tions where such are wanting. The improvement 
 of the Clergy can come, I suppose, only from the 
 Universities, where we can only pray that some 
 one may arise to widen and strengthen the gene- 
 ral and the theological education." His earnest 
 feelings on the last-mentioned point he was con- 
 tinually expressing, as for instance, in another 
 letter: "My two great practical objects, had I 
 any power, would be to mend the education of 
 the Clergy at the Universities, and to bring a 
 very much larger body of teachers to bear on our 
 population, especially in towns. I am half out 
 of patience with societies for converting Jews, 
 Turks, and New Zealanders, while half the people 
 in our great cities have never heard of a God, 
 except to blaspheme by. It is possible how- 
 ever that the expansive and contractile powers 
 of the Church may strengthen each other ; and if 
 
 d 3
 
 Ixxxii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 SO, there is no more to be said, but to get imme- 
 tl lately a new Society, with the Bishops at its 
 head, and 100,000?. a year, to evangelize our 
 town masses." Again: " The Bishop of London's 
 exertions for church-building, &c., are admirable: 
 and once let a plan be broached at either Univer- 
 sity for a better education of the clergy, and it 
 must needs go on. As enquiry proceeds, doubts 
 Avill deepen and multiply; and the necessity will 
 become more and more apparent for a stronger 
 and more spiritual faith to build on, whether 
 the superstructure is meant to be a Polity or a 
 Science." 
 
 I have dwelt thus long on this period of my 
 friend's life, not only because it was the time 
 when our correspondence was the most frequent 
 and copious, and when the subjects of it were the 
 most interesting, but also because it was the pe- 
 riod of his greatest moral and intellectual energy, 
 Avhen all his faculties were working together for 
 the accomplishment of a grand purpose, and when 
 he seemed about to fulfil the end for wliich he was 
 so richly endowed. But, alas ! this period was 
 soon cut short; the works he was engaged in 
 were interrupted; and thougli he lived several 
 years after, lie was never able to resume them, or 
 to apply continuously to anything that called for
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixxxili 
 
 laborious thought or study. About the middle of 
 March, 1836, the pulmonary symptoms became 
 alarming. On the 24th he wrote to me : " The 
 decision of the medical men is, that I have no 
 actual pulmonary disease, but that there is de- 
 cided danger of it. My own impression, from 
 the most careful observation, is, that there pro- 
 bably is a beginning of consumption, and that it 
 is only a question as to a few months sooner or 
 later. I have to be thankful for a perfect freedom 
 from grief or anxiety, except some uneasiness as 
 to the secular interests of my poor children ; but 
 this too I hope to be enabled to regard as, no less 
 than everything else, a subject for faith in a 
 higher order of things than that visible to the 
 outward or newspaper eyes of men." Then, after 
 speaking of several books that he had lately been 
 reading, he adds : " You will perhaps think it 
 strange that a man who sees a sea of shadows so 
 close before him, with only a vague, though glow- 
 ing light-streak beyond, should be thinking at all 
 of theological literature and speculation. But so 
 it is. I feel no violent emotion, that either blows 
 me up into rapture, or puffs me down into appre- 
 hension; and I cannot live quietly and contentedly 
 without distinct intellectual objects, as well as 
 mere impulses of feeling ; and I do not see how
 
 Ixxxlv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 I should benefit either myself or others by endea- 
 vouring to force a spurious enthusiasm. At the 
 same time I have never, I think, for the same 
 nvmiber of days, felt less of doubt or difficulty as 
 to the certainty of our hope through the Saviour, 
 than during: the last fortnight. That which I 
 should be most tempted to wish otherwise, is the 
 necessity for abstaining from the society of my 
 friends, which would be a great pleasure; and 
 perhaps there are some of them to whom the calm 
 assurance of the reality and sufficiency of the 
 Gospel, as a message of peace, might be of some 
 comfort. But doubtless it is, even to our eyes, 
 wisely ordained ; and I may gain more by my 
 solitude than I could by having even IMaurice 
 with me." 
 
 It was ordered that he should spend the follow- 
 ing Avinter in a warmer climate ; and even then 
 he caught at the hope of being able to engage in 
 some useful employment. " On the whole it is 
 my impression that I shall decide on going to the 
 West Indies. I have some reason to believe that 
 Government would willingly commission me to 
 report on the schools, and other spiritual ma- 
 chinery of all kinds, their state, efficacy, and 
 imperfections. I am well aware how far from 
 competent I am to do this as might be wished,
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixxxv 
 
 and how extremely difficult it would be to write 
 of Dissenters and Churclimen honestly, and yet 
 without giving needless offence to either party. 
 But one may always hope to do some good ; and 
 it is not clear that the Colonial Office would hit 
 on any one who would take more pains about the 
 matter. I sometimes think that it is possible a 
 report written with clearness, moderation, and 
 earnestness, graces not beyond the reach of any 
 conscientious labourer, might do some good by 
 its indirect bearing on education in this country. 
 Tell me what you think; and do not be afraid 
 to say that the project is too arduous, or that a 
 castle in the air, in the shape of a pedagogic in- 
 stitute, (see the big one in the Wanderjaltre,^ is 
 still but an air castle. I have been ordered not 
 to work since the beginning of my illness, and 
 have obeyed diligently by lying on a sofa and 
 reading all manner of idlenesses. Among other 
 things I have gone through Gary's Pindar, look- 
 ing here and there at the Greek, and with pro- 
 found veneration for the old Thcban. He seems 
 to me one of the most nobly religious minds I 
 know of, in spite of his Paganism. I can hardly 
 doubt that, if he had been born a Jew, he would 
 have been a grand prophet. I have also amused 
 myself with Herodotus and Thucydides, and, of
 
 Ixxxvi LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 later days, Pliilip de Comines, all with keen re- 
 lish. I owu that I cannot conceive any grounds 
 for comparing Herodotus, as a deep and compre- 
 hensive intellect, with Thucydides. But the 
 Ionian, by his childlike receptivity, catches many 
 traits of human nature, which Thucydides would 
 overlook. By the way, look at the story of 
 Rhampsinitus in the second Book, and see if it is 
 not precisely in the manner of the Ai-ahian Nights. 
 No doubt, as told to Herodotus, it had the dramatic 
 filling up, which is all it wants. I wish I could 
 see a comparison drawn by Thirlwall, or some 
 such man, between Thucydides, Tacitus, and Ma- 
 chiavelli. I do not knoAV that there were ever 
 three men of first-rate genius more akin, and yet 
 with how great differences ! I have just read two 
 Beilagen by Tholuck to his Commentary on the 
 Hebrews, which are of first-rate excellence. Sa- 
 crifice is better treated than I have ever seen ; 
 and the pages 101-8 contain the clearest, fullest, 
 and most satisfactory statement I know of the 
 central mystery of the Gospel." 
 
 Among the plans suggested, one was that he 
 should spend the next winter at Rome. " On 
 the whole (he wrote), you may suppose I look 
 forward with some pleasure to the prospect of 
 knowing Rome. I have always had a sort of
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixxxvll 
 
 superstition about some mysterious fate leading 
 me thither, and a sense of fragmentariness from 
 not having been there, easily explicable from 
 natural grounds, and kept down by a more 
 rational faith. But besides this, there are ob- 
 vious and great advantages in seeing such a 
 spectacle. Yet I do assure you that on the 
 whole the predominant feeling in my mind is 
 one of dejection at the interruption of my serious 
 pursuits, and the disappointment of the hopes of 
 being of some use, which during the last few 
 years I have begun to indulge. If I do not 
 bake myself in a mud crust, like a hippopo- 
 tamus, in summer, I must begin anew a kind 
 of esthetic and poetic life, which I thought I 
 had done with, and which, though under happier 
 auspices, and, I believe, a holier guidance than 
 of old, still fills me with an uneasiness that I 
 think you can imagine. Doubtless all, if one 
 will let it be so, is for the best; and whether in 
 Rome or at Herstmonceux, among cottages or 
 imperial ruins, "the blue sky bends over all," and 
 is everywhere the finite image of an Infinite and 
 All-sufficient Presence. To this we must all learn 
 more and more to trust; and I know not why 
 the Saviour, whom Paul preached at Rome in 
 prison, should be imagined to abandon the
 
 Ixxxvili LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 meanest of His followers in the more perilous 
 freedom of natural life and genial cultivation." 
 
 As tlie time of his dej)arture approached, he 
 wrote : " If I recover, we shall all be happy in 
 England next summer; and if not, though I 
 sometimes shrink at the thought of the long, 
 long, lonely winter, with declining health. In a 
 foreign country, and my Avife and children on 
 the other side of the sea, the end is so sure 
 and overwhelming as to reduce these things to 
 a very mean insignificance. I do not however 
 mean to call up the vulgar phantom of lackadai- 
 sical Optimism, or pretend to believe that, in a 
 System of things full of corruption and curses, all 
 is for the best. That It is for the best that evil 
 should be possible, is as certain, as that it is good 
 there should be reasonable beings. But that it 
 is for the best that these beings should in any 
 case choose, or have chosen evil, is an assertion 
 which seems to me to involve the denial of the 
 reality of evil at all; and the man who does not 
 find this in his own breast, must either be misled 
 by speculation to question the facts which he 
 ought to speculate on, or must be besotted with 
 strono; drink, or the drowsier and more sensual 
 narcotic of good-natvu'cd indifference. The common 
 cant, — for it is really nothing else, — betrays the
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Ixxxix 
 
 weakness and vagueness of the common appre- 
 hensions as to the intensity of human wickedness, 
 and the amount and acuteness of misery neces- 
 sarily generated in a state of things in which sin 
 is mingled as in ours. Paley's saying, It is a 
 happy world after all, which some might attribute 
 to the goodness of his heart, seems to me one of 
 the most cruelly heartless of all human utterances. 
 It is appalling even to a man of Christian faith, to 
 reflect that full ninety-nine hundredths of man- 
 kind, since the beginning of history, have been little 
 better than blindfolded victims of superstitions, 
 or slaves of their bodily necessities, — casting out 
 their children to hogs, as in China, — leaving their 
 kindred to die of hunger, as in India, and among 
 all savages, — nursed in worse than bestial confu- 
 sions, as in Otaheite, and even Greece and Rome, 
 — massacred by thousands on the tombs of their 
 chiefs, as in Ashantee, — or similarly assassinated 
 by the government, as in Sparta, — mowed down 
 in millions by war, pestilence, and famine, 
 throughout the East, the most ancient and po- 
 pulous countries; and these devastations laying 
 waste the feelings and faith of men, as surely as 
 they destroy their bodies; and all this through 
 more than a hundred generations; while of the 
 few who have risen into distinct self-conscious-
 
 XC LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 ness, a large, perhaps the larger proportion have 
 made shipwreck of all practical principle, and have 
 dreamt themselves away again into mere word- 
 gamblers and shadow-fighters. The wonder, and 
 the cause for thankfulness is, that, with all this, 
 there is a vein of genial life in nature, and a 
 vivacious strength in human hopes and traditions, 
 and a line of light in Christianity, that make it 
 possible for any, however few, to believe and 
 teach that all these are the corruptions, not the 
 constitutions of humanity. But that here and 
 now all is for the best, is either a fiction as gross 
 as transubstantiation, or involves a miserable 
 denial, not only of any best, but of any real 
 good for man. For it is curious, but I think, on 
 reflection certain, that Optimism and Pessimism 
 are at bottom identical. It is one of the hardest 
 of all mysteries to imagine how it can be possible 
 for us to remain undisturbed, even in our highest 
 attainable elevation of being, if we should then 
 be conscious of the reality of such horrors as are 
 displayed in the tragedy of Cenci, as abound in 
 the records of hospitals and prisons, such as 
 the robbery and beating of the poor Beguine, 
 mentioned by Vidocq, who came to visit the 
 galley-slaves only to relieve their wants, and was 
 by these very men thus outraged; or such as
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. xci 
 
 Hogarth paints in his Idle Apprentice, on his way 
 to transportation, jeering and defying his mother's 
 tears. Among these inexplicable and insupport- 
 able mysteries of evil, I am of course far from 
 reckoning the natural sorrows and sufferings, 
 such as poor G. has had in so large a measure, 
 and which may be, and, I believe, mostly are the 
 best of all disciplines for the spirit." 
 
 The Roman plan was however abandoned, or, 
 as it proved, postponed to a future year; and 
 Sterling spent the autumn and winter of 1836, 
 and the first half of 1837, at the house of a rela- 
 tion near Bordeaux. Here, being precluded by 
 the state of his health from engaging in any 
 work that would have required severe thought 
 and labour, he wrote a variety of lighter things, 
 in prose and verse, many of which were printed 
 in Blackwood's Magazine. "I have made time 
 (he says) to write a good many verses, especially 
 most of a poem, which, I suppose, will run to 
 more than 1500 lines, and which I call the Sexton's 
 Daughtir. It is an English village tale, and 
 pleases me more than most of my attempts, be- 
 cause it is a step away from visions and allego- 
 ries, such as I am naturally most inclined to. If 
 I can finish it, I shall probably publish it. In 
 the mean time Blackwood is going to publish some
 
 XCn LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 short sets of verses, which I call Lyric Leaves. I 
 have written a number of such poems since we 
 parted. I find it an employment that I can carry 
 on in the midst of interruptions from health much 
 better than I can continuous study, especially 
 of a speculative kind, where a dropt stitch takes 
 one back to the beginning. I did not like to 
 throw away good money on so bad a speculation 
 as that of publishing poems on my own account, 
 of the merit of which I felt extremely doubtful ; 
 and I therefore thought it a good plan to have 
 them printed in a Magazine, and so to collect the 
 opinions of those in whose judgements I should 
 put more confidence than in my own." Again, 
 after speaking of a report that a friend, whom he 
 highly valued, was a candidate for a Professorship 
 of Political Economy, he adds : " My view of the 
 state and needs of the Church and of Theology in 
 England is such, that I grudge the application of 
 zeal and talent by any Clergyman to matters not 
 directly those of his calling; though I am far 
 from denying myself occasional excursions into 
 the fields, or rather the haunted misty woods and 
 broken glades of imaginative literature. In this 
 way I write verses in summer, when only I can 
 write them, and prose fragments in winter, and 
 read what falls in my reach at all times. But
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XClll 
 
 I make my unsettled life, and more unsettled 
 health, and the want of a library, my excuse for 
 this desultory campaigning." Again: "Blackwood 
 is going to publish verses of mine, under the title 
 of Lyric Leaves^ in his Magazine. If he will let 
 me, I shall probably go on writing for him, at all 
 events in verse, as it will always be an induce- 
 ment to correct and finish the little things that 
 I have constantly bouncing up in my brains, and 
 which I commonly scribble in a book, completed 
 as to substance and outline, but not smoothed off. 
 He wants me to send him prose ; and I have dis- 
 patched a bag of scraps, under the unhappy rubric 
 of Crystals from a Cavern; but I could not think 
 of another, unless I called them a Saturday Pie, 
 from the custom I have heard mentioned of cook- 
 ing the broken meat in this way at the end of the 
 week. But alas ! I had no sustaining dish or am- 
 bient crust to offer. I may send him some short 
 tales. If you see the book, you will find me out 
 by the signatures of S. S. S. or J. J. J., unless 
 Blackwood snips off the tail of my articles, as 
 they do by puppies. I sign the verses S. S. S. 
 chiefly for the sake of the pleasant self-gratula- 
 tion so many people will have in turning the first 
 S into an A." It was from Bordeaux that he 
 made the excursion to visit Montaio-ne's Cha-
 
 XClV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 teau, the account of which closes the Essay upon 
 him. 
 
 Still he did not altogether abandon severer 
 studies ; and at times he formed projects of more 
 important works ; but the line of his studies Avas 
 such as to estrange him more and more from 
 the theological and ecclesiastical opinions of our 
 Church. " I constantly meditate (he wrote in 
 November, 1836) larger and more connected 
 performances, and of late have been speculating 
 chiefly on the possibility and propriety of at last 
 breaking the charmed sleep of English Theology 
 by a book on the authority of the Scriptures. I 
 sent to England for a volume on Inspiration, 
 lately published by a learned Dissenter, a Dr. 
 Henderson. He means well enough, but merely 
 takes the old ground, and makes no attempt to 
 meet the obvious objections as to discrepancies, 
 &c. ; and he is evidently much more afraid of 
 offending his brethren by his denial of literal dic- 
 tation, than of disappointing intelligent enquirers 
 by leaving all their doubts unanswered. His ar- 
 gument, e.g. for the inspiration of Mark's Gospel, 
 amounts nearly to this, that Mark was probably 
 infallible, because he was an acquaintance of Peter, 
 and because Dr. H. would be abused by other Dis- 
 sentino; Ministers if he allowed that he was not.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XCV 
 
 But make It ever so plain that, In upsetting this 
 dead idol, one was striving for Christianity, and 
 not for critical and historical science merely, yet I 
 am persuaded that any clergyman caught in the fact 
 must abandon all notion of acting for the future 
 in any ecclesiastical function. It has struck me 
 that, if my life should be prolonged, as I must 
 probably at all events relinquish all public mi- 
 nistration, I might perhaps be peculiarly well 
 situated for trying to do some good of this kind 
 to theology. The materials are all prepared and 
 abundant in the books of the Germans. I find 
 that I could not conscientiously publish the things 
 I wrote some time ago about the Old Testament. 
 The earlier portions of it seem to me too uncer- 
 tain to justify me in professing that thorough and 
 religious faith In them which I do not entertain. 
 Christianity however has lost none of its value in 
 my eyes; and I read Schlelermacher with increased 
 satisfaction. I have been looking into Bayle: 
 he is a strange fish, with no more heart or ima- 
 gination than a slug, and yet honest and good- 
 natured." About a month after, recurring to the 
 same topics, he says : " Of the speculative and 
 arduous books at my command here, my favorite 
 at present is Schlelermacher's Sermons, which I 
 have begun to read consecutively, and find in
 
 XCVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 them infinite food for reflection, and strong and 
 constant impulses to good. I had never read 
 them at all till about a month ago, and I was 
 quite unprepared for the compass and value 
 which they seem to me to possess. I am far 
 from wishing to set him up in opposition to 
 minds like Tholuck's; but what they have in 
 common, is found in him with such fulness, 
 clearness, and comprehensiveness, and supported 
 by, or rather supporting such an extent of know- 
 ledge, such a conscientious sobriety of judgement, 
 and a moral structure so thoroughly earnest, 
 disciplined, and all alive, as I have never seen 
 rivalled in any other. He is more like Augus- 
 tin than Luther, Paul than John, Baxter than 
 Leighton. Inferior doubtless to them all, unless 
 perhaps Baxter, in some respects, the age and 
 country he lived in, have yet given him a peculiar 
 value for us, as dealing with the circumstances 
 and the knowledge which are a part of our actual 
 world, and which are so full for us all, of per- 
 plexity as well as of help. — Much more diffused 
 as Christian life probably is in England than in 
 any other country, we are perhaps rather hasty 
 in jumping to the conclusion that what there is, 
 is more advanced than on the Continent. Of 
 course I am not speaking of the mass in either
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XCVU 
 
 case, but only of those whose minds are habi- 
 tually governed by a love for the will of God, 
 as revealed to us in Christ. It is very difficult 
 to form any comparison from personal experience; 
 and I suppose, as to numbers, if there is one such 
 person in Britain out of fifty, there may be one 
 in five hundred on the Continent. But if I were 
 to judge from the religious books in England and 
 Germany, which are far more attainable and cer- 
 tain grounds, I should say that the Christianity of 
 the one country more resembled that of the Apo- 
 stles before Pentecost, and that of the other the 
 matured mind of Paul and John. However this 
 may be, I will own to you, — for I do not know 
 why I should not deal with you in all sincerity, 
 — that I find myself more and more removed 
 from all the views in which the Church of Eno-- 
 land divines diifer from the foreign Protestant 
 Churches. I cannot trace this tendency to any 
 corrupt self-indulgence of my own, but find that, 
 the more I endeavour to draw near in heart, 
 mind, and life to the Saviour, and the more 
 earnestly I strive to know and do the will of 
 God, the less I seem disposed to admit anytliing 
 like the claims of a hierarchy, venerable though 
 it may be as a monument, and useful as an in- 
 strument, or to believe in any normal outward 
 VOL. I. e
 
 XCVlll LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 institution, by Christ or the apostles, of rulers 
 and teachers in the Church. The divine autho- 
 rity of such seems to me merely identical with 
 their evangelic value. I write these things, be- 
 cause I know you would rather have the conclu- 
 sions of a sincere mind, than the compliances of a 
 hypocritical one. I feel no pleasure, but great 
 pain, in differing from so many of the wisest and 
 holiest of my countrymen; but I dare not lie for 
 God." 
 
 In the folloAving April, he again spoke of 
 Schleiermacher's Sermons: " They kept possession 
 of me for a long time, till I was knocked into 
 chaos by heavy illness, from which I have now 
 been relieved for about two months ; and, though 
 somehow I have not got back to Schleiermacher, 
 I still think of him as, on the whole, the greatest 
 spiritual teacher I have ever fallen in with. I 
 cannot make up my mind as to the essential dif- 
 ference between him and Coleridge, which, I 
 presume, is what Steffens alludes to in his little 
 mortuary tract. In order to do so, I must study 
 Sclileiermacher and the others long and conti- 
 nuously. I suppose they would deny his right 
 to establish an exclusive scheme of self-conscious- 
 ness, and would rather start from the Truths 
 which self-consciousness presupposes. But I
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. XCIX 
 
 have been too much driven about by Illness and 
 distraction to fix my mind on speculations of this 
 compass. — I still feel that, if I had health and 
 books, one of the best services I could render to 
 England would be a full exposition of the relation 
 in which the Bible stands to Christianity. I do 
 not think any preliminary volume of sermons 
 would supply the place of that evident and deep 
 conviction of the Gospel, which must be seen and 
 felt to underlie and support the whole enquiry. 
 This would satisfy the few who are at once in- 
 telligent and conscientious; and the rest nothing 
 will satisfy but servile acquiescence." 
 
 The political state of England at this time dis- 
 turbed him a good deal. "I read the English 
 papers regularly, and not always with pleasure. 
 But on the whole I am growing less and less 
 hopeful of any good from Toryism, and more 
 inclined to try to make the best of an in- 
 evitable democracy. I urged S. R. to pay the 
 Church-rates out of the taxes, and to do as much 
 for the Dissenting chapels ; but he said it could 
 not be carried. Something of the kind will ulti- 
 mately be our only escape from the voluntary 
 system ; and I should be glad to make the com- 
 promise at once. — I have never for many years 
 doubted that the Government ought to be in the 
 
 e2
 
 G LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 hands of the apiaroL, and not of the hrjixos. But 
 I have certainly grown more and more discon- 
 tented at the want of faith in their own principles, 
 or in any principles, among the Conservatives, — 
 more and more satisfied that those who look 
 hisrher and see further than the hour and the 
 cart-rut among them, have really not the guid- 
 ance of the party, and that its management is 
 in the hands of purblind, peddling selfishness. 
 With the Radicals, I mean the higher order 
 among them, such as write the London Review, 
 I am as little pleased as you can be, regarding 
 them as men ; for on the highest matters their 
 minds are in a purely negative state. But they 
 have a political faith, and far from an ungenerous 
 one, on behalf of their countrymen ; and for it 
 they are w^illing to make sacrifices, and act with 
 a zeal, perfectly heroic, compared with the mere 
 tradesman-like dabbling and shuffling of the Carl- 
 ton Club. Moreover, when I compare the West- 
 minster Review, in its origin, with the London 
 Review now, I shall find it hard to point out a 
 body of men in Europe, mixing with politics, 
 who have improved so much as these writers. If 
 I could give to conscientious and intelligent aris- 
 tocrats their power over the people, I would do it 
 to-morrow; but I see no such men in any osten-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. ci 
 
 sible position, and with any chance in their favour 
 in England." 
 
 The appearance of the cholera in Italy and the 
 south of France in the summer of 1837 compelled 
 Sterling to abandon his intention of spending the 
 ensuing winter at Nice or at Pisa; and he brought 
 his family back to England, still cherishing a hope 
 that he might be allowed to turn his banishment 
 to some use by exerting himself for the better 
 education of the negroes in the West Indies. 
 This however was absolutely forbidden by his 
 physicians ; and that he might not be exposed to 
 the temptations, so difficult for him to resist, of a 
 hurtful activity, he was sent to Madeira. " Of 
 course (he wrote) the removal from my family is 
 bitter enough ; but it has the great and indispen- 
 sable alleviation, that I am sure it is the right 
 step to take. If I can continue for the next 
 eight months in my present health, I trust I may 
 then fix myself in England, which would be an 
 inestimable blessing. You can perhaps conceive 
 what a weariness of the spirit it is, that I can 
 undertake nothing of any compass Avithout dis- 
 tractions and interruptions every three or four 
 months, either from illness or removal. Life 
 ceases to be a chain, and falls into a heap of 
 broken links. — I have been so knocked about for
 
 CU LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 the last four months, that I have hardly had a 
 quiet thought on any subject ; and I am looking 
 forward with delight to being still, even at the 
 distance I shall be at from all I love. But for me 
 there is no quiet possible without much activity 
 of mind ; so that I may perhaps be able to show 
 you on my return some fruits, however unripe, of 
 my solitude." 
 
 Some of these fruits were sent before lono; 
 to Blackwood' s Magazine. A fortnight after his 
 arrival in Madeira, he wrote: "I have not yet 
 got much work in hand ; for I have been putting 
 together a third series of Crystals, which, I fear, 
 are rather poor, and a fourth tale of Legendary 
 Lore, called the Armour and the Skeleton; but it 
 has been knocked off at a heat, and, I fancy, will 
 turn out to be a mere grotesque, and, as it aims 
 liigher, will be a failure. — But I hope to proceed 
 on something like a plan for the remainder of 
 the winter, if I remain so long in this Island of 
 Madeira, and this larger island of a larger ocean, 
 which we call the World. I have not yet my 
 task very clearly defined before me ; but I wish 
 to try if I can make anything out of some theo- 
 logical notions that are floating about me, like the 
 fair white vapours round the crags of these moun- 
 tains. I have brought with me some of the best
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CUl 
 
 of the German theologians ; but my apparatus of 
 books is still very scanty for any purpose but my 
 own instruction ; and when it is a question of 
 teaching others, completeness becomes an object 
 not to be overlooked. However the great thing 
 is, not to let any powers within one rust, but to 
 exercise them earnestly and hopefully, in the faith 
 that sooner or later one will thus be able to help 
 others. It was very remarkable to observe on 
 board the vessel the number of persons of strong 
 faith and very pleasing character ; and I believe 
 there are many more here than I know of. There 
 is also an English Church, which has sprung up 
 within a few years, and is now rather flourishing, 
 under the care of a very good man, a Mr. Lowe, 
 of Christ's, Cambridge." 
 
 Two months after he wrote : " I was occupied 
 busily for about a month in writing a story which 
 interested me much, not by its plan, but by the 
 sides of life and thought which it led me to deve- 
 lope. My tale, which I call the Onyx Ring, is 
 now nearly finished and copied out ; but I see so 
 much questionable in its structure, that I think I 
 shall ask you to read it in manuscript, and use 
 your judgement about sending it to Blackwood. 
 It is a great satisfaction to me to find that my
 
 CIV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 own opinions about my things in Blackwood 
 exactly agree with yours. I prefer the poems you 
 mention, and find the faults that you complain of, 
 which I shall try to avoid in future compositions. 
 The Lady of the Castle never satisfied me. I sent 
 it, I fancy, only for the foolish reason that I had 
 written it ; and I am sure, or think, I should not 
 have done so, if I had known of La Motte Fou- 
 que's poem on the same subject. I have a ballad 
 on a subject handled by Uhland ; and, on seeing 
 his, I suppressed mine. In fact, my life has been 
 so broken, busy, and sometimes so agitated, that 
 I have never, till within the last two years, made 
 any progress towards technical skill ; and I feel 
 my own weakness in every sentence I write, of 
 prose or verse. The Editor's comments are, as 
 you observe, stuflT; only I persuade myself I shine 
 through them, like a paper lantern on a stall 
 through a London fog. — I have read a good deal 
 of Thirl wall's History over again, and have found 
 even more in it than I had supposed. I can name 
 no history In English at all comparable to it for 
 depth and compass, unless, — prepare to laugh, — 
 Carlyle's. But the one lights up the darkness of 
 the past with lamps, which seem reflexions of the 
 immortal stars above them ; the other with a wide
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CV 
 
 and red volcanic glare, in which the world appears 
 half dying into spectral vapour, half flaming into 
 intenser life." 
 
 This admiration for the History of Greece, and 
 for its author's other writings, was often expressed. 
 "His Essay On the Irony of Sophocles,''' he says in 
 one letter, " seems to me the most exquisite criti- 
 cism I ever read." Again in another: "I have 
 read Thirlwall's second volume, which has filled 
 me with admiration. It is droll to see the dull 
 puffs printed by the publishers, in which a writer 
 as great as Thucydides and Tacitus, and with far 
 more knowledge than they, is lumped with Moore 
 and Mackintosh and Sir Walter Scott. Even for 
 my peculiar objects, there is more valuable mate- 
 rial and fructifying principle in the book, than in 
 almost any I know; and besides the overflowing 
 knowledge, there is throughout a glow of austere 
 enthusiasm, characteristic of the very highest 
 minds." 
 
 All the while he continued to indulge in his 
 favorite speculations. " I have not written a 
 word, or read many pages, as to theology, but 
 have thought a good deal, and with much satis- 
 faction. On many points I am not less sceptical, 
 perhaps more than ever ; but I have, on the 
 whole, a lively and progressive confidence in 
 
 e3
 
 CVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Christian truth, and enjoy so much peace, clear- 
 ness, and activity, that all clouds appear to me 
 not portions of the sky, but obscurations of it, 
 and therefore sure in time to vanish. I seem to 
 see distinctly that the hour must come for the 
 disclosure to England of a scientific theory of the 
 Bible ; which hov^ever will not, in my view, di- 
 rectly affect the faith of the multitude, but will 
 certainly modify all our theology and theological 
 no-education. I hold it nearly immaterial for the 
 ultimate result, whether this revolution shall be 
 brought about by the writings of an infidel, or of 
 a scientific believer ; but of course most important 
 for the believer's own being, if he should do the 
 work, not to feel or write, even momentarily, as 
 an infidel. I can, I trust, sincerely affirm, that I 
 am in heart as ready to receive the whole narra- 
 tive of the Pentateuch, as that of Paul's preaching 
 at Ephesus and Athens, if the grounds of belief 
 were equal ; but where there is a clear conviction 
 of the reason, I feel less and less inclined to ajjprove 
 of an entire and contented suppression of one's 
 opinion on such subjects. I find the Evangelicals 
 I have fallen in with here more tolerant than I 
 expected, when once they are satisfied that a man 
 is sincere in heart, and not a concealed scoffer. — I 
 have just been looking again over Pusey's Answer
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Cvii 
 
 to Eose, and find it very interesting. I think it 
 more nearly than any other English book I know 
 expresses my theological opinions ; and the image 
 it raises of the man is truly delightful." 
 
 Among the friends whom he made here, was 
 one who continued in the inner circle of them dur- 
 ing the remainder of his life. " I have drawn a 
 good deal tighter my bonds with one of my friends, 
 Dr. Calvert, a physician, nephew of Wordsworth's 
 Raisley Calvert. He is full of strong sense, con- 
 science, and kindness, and has seen a great deal of 
 the fine world, of which I know nothing, so that 
 his anecdotes always interest me. He has taken 
 to reading diligently my books of German theo- 
 logy, Olshausen, Schleiermacher, Twesten, &c. ; and 
 we have infinite gossip about these topics, strength- 
 ening each other mutually in the faith that Reve- 
 lation is not a sandhill of texts. He is an Oriel 
 man, a contemporary and friend of Froude'g, 
 but quite opposed to Puseyism." — " But what 
 I chiefly mourn for is, that I hear of no ade- 
 qviate development of faith and intelligence in 
 opposition to this perverse and fantastic school. — 
 John Mill has now obtained the uncontrolled 
 management of the London Beview; and he is 
 very anxious to make it a larger and freer kind 
 of organ. He has written to persuade me to con-
 
 cvm LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 tribute; but I have answered him that for several 
 reasons I cannot do so at present. In factj I 
 much doubt whether I could write anything for 
 him worth printing. At all events it is plea- 
 sant to know that he unquestionably aims at 
 widening and humanizing the radical world. As 
 to politics, I of course hear little; but I am still 
 persuaded the Radicals will before many years 
 be in power, from the inadequacy of our upper 
 classes to the awful functions they are invested 
 with. The education of the people is my great 
 question; and I should augur nothing but good 
 and blessings, if I could only see the clergy, as a 
 body, sensible of the immensity of their duties 
 in that respect. As it is, I expect democracy, 
 and democratic education, and the ultunate down- 
 fall of the Church." 
 
 From the winter in Madeira Sterling derived 
 much benefit; and he spent the summer of 1838 
 in England, in a greatly improved state of health. 
 At this time he wrote the essays on Montaigne 
 and Simonides for tlte London Review. In the 
 former there were several things, both in the 
 matter and style, that displeased me; and I wrote 
 to express my objections with a good deal of 
 severity; which I mention for the sake of insert- 
 ins; the following letter. It exhibits a beau-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CIX 
 
 tlful feature in Sterling's character, the readiness 
 and thankfulness with which he listened to cen- 
 sures upon his writings, a feature always charac- 
 teristic of him, though very rarely found in the 
 irritable race of authors. "Your letter, which 
 I received this afternoon too late for the post, has 
 affected me so much, thati cannot do any work till 
 I have acknowledged it. I need not tell you 
 that I am grateful for your kindness in writing 
 as you do about my article on Montaigne; but 
 how deeply and sincerely I thank you, that I 
 cannot tell you. From everybody, with one 
 other exception, I have heard only flattery about 
 it, which to a considerable extent my own know- 
 ledge contradicted. I knew that the earlier half 
 of the essay is dim and struggling, struggling 
 partly to escape from obscurity, and showing the 
 struggle, but not achieving clearness. I also felt, 
 in reading it over connectedly in print, that there 
 are jerks and wilful oddities of expression, which I 
 should be very anxious to efface, if that were now 
 possible. And seeing so much wrong, I am sure 
 there must be much more, which others, if they 
 were equally earnest, and only equally competent 
 with myself, would see more distinctly than I can. 
 In the main purpose and design of the article, I 
 did not perceive that I had gone wrong; but even
 
 ex LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 as to this I may well be in error. I wrote it in 
 scraps, and with confused hurry, which annoyed 
 me so much that I certainly should have stopped, 
 had I not promised M. to try to help hun." 
 
 Still, notwithstanding the improvement in his 
 health, it was deemed advisable that Sterling 
 should pass the next winter also abroad; and this 
 year he was allowed to accomplish the wish he had 
 long cherished of going to Rome. He travelled 
 with his friend. Dr. Calvert, through Belgium, 
 up the Rhine, across Switzerland, and came down 
 upon Milan. His absence from home this time 
 proved rich in enjoyment, chiefly from the op- 
 portunities it afforded him of studying many of 
 the best remains of ancient and of Clu-istian art. 
 For, though he never handled a pencil himself, 
 he had always a fine eye for works of art, and a 
 special delight in contemplating beauty under 
 artistical forms, as is apparent in several of his 
 earliest compositions. Thus from Lausanne he 
 wrote: "On the whole the objects that have most 
 struck me since I left England are the pictures 
 I saw in Belgium; all those which I care much 
 about, except one Perugino and one Fra Barto- 
 lomeo, being of the old Transalpine School, with 
 which I was before entirely unacquainted. Van 
 Eyck, rather the two Van Eycks, Memmling, and
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXI 
 
 Matsys, are great men of the past, with whom 
 I seem to have become familiar, and who have 
 helped to strengthen the sense of the seriousness 
 and depth of human life, and of the immediate rela- 
 tion it stands in to a good above it. Their faults 
 and defects seem, like those of their period in 
 history, to be instructive, as showing how much 
 of limitedness, and even of utter weakness, is 
 compatible with earnest and devout power; and 
 the history of painting since their day, as well as 
 all other history, appears to show that mankind 
 will always be working against this narrowness, 
 and try to gain strength in the direction where it 
 feels itself weak, carrying on this process also in 
 an exclusive and exaggerated spirit, and not, till 
 after long and many trials, able to combine its 
 earlier and later gains and faculties into a pro- 
 portioned and balanced unity. This again dis- 
 solves and loses itself in frivolity and extravagance, 
 out of which the world rises, after painful expe- 
 riences, and recurs to the old types and methods, 
 using them with the addition of wider knowledge 
 and more perfect means, till the new period in 
 turn beats against its bounds, partly breaks over 
 them, and partly breaks them down, and, in pur- 
 suing a fresh aim, seems for a time to sacrifice 
 much which it had before acquired. But no doubt.
 
 CXn LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 through all these changes, the ideal universe is 
 unfolding itself into fact; and it is a high pri- 
 vilege to be able consciously to help the work, in 
 however small a department. Well, if we could 
 also remember and feel, that, to do this truly, we 
 must start from a personal life, rooted in and 
 harmonizing with the centre of all. The want of 
 this personal first principle seems the fatal curse 
 of all dilettantism and cultivated coxcombry, ar- 
 tistic and religious, and specially ruins all those 
 persons whom I have seen professing the ele- 
 gances and refinements of the Neo-catholic doc- 
 trine. But you see I have been running ofi" into 
 speculations, which in the eternal fitness of things 
 have no business at the post-ofiice." 
 
 At Florence he of course recurred with in- 
 creased interest to the same subject. "I spent 
 some days at Bologna, where it seemed to me that 
 the Caraccis' pictures, and those of their followers, 
 were like things produced by most ingenious 
 machines of pictorial Perkinses and Babbages. I 
 rejoiced in Francia and Perugino, and thought 
 the St. Cecilia a dazzling piece of incongruity, 
 the form of the painting being that of the simple 
 visionary style of earlier times, and the sen- 
 timent and execution that of beautiful but not 
 devout nature. I had before seen Parma, as well
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXUl 
 
 as Milan, and grown to love Luini, Corregglo, 
 and the Sposalizio. Here I breathe, if not the 
 most ennobling, certainly the most delightful air 
 of my life. The two Galleries, and the aspect of 
 the town, keep me in a state of harmless intoxica- 
 tion, more coherent than dream, more exciting 
 than rational insight, half poetry, half religion, or 
 rather the pure enthusiasm which is common to 
 both, clad in the fairest visible forms of nature 
 and imagination. I fancy I write nonsense; but 
 it is because I can find no sense to express the 
 kind of childish, yet intellectual, joy which Flo- 
 rence perpetually feeds in me. The Venus shakes 
 my allegiance to her of Melo, without having 
 overthrown it. It seems the perfection of inno- 
 cent beauty, neither melted into passion, nor 
 raised to piety. The contrast, on the one and 
 baser hand, is Titian's, and, on the other and 
 nobler, the Madonna del Cardellino; but the 
 statue is perhaps the least like anything I was 
 familiar with before. Diana's virgins might learn 
 modesty from it; and I think it must produce 
 something of a similar influence on every one who 
 looks at it. I do not think Raphael's pictures 
 have raised my previous estimate of him, though 
 they have rendered it much more lively. The 
 Madonna del Gran Duca, and the Cardellino
 
 CXIV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 give me as high and pure pleasure as any. The 
 Seggiola is an age forward in experience of life 
 and human feeling, as well as talent; but it has 
 none of the Perugian piety. It does not how- 
 ever seem to me at all mistaken or spurious, 
 except perhaps in the praying St. John, who 
 seems to have no business there ; for the picture 
 has nothing to do with Christianity. — My chief 
 regret arises from the obscure feeling that I am 
 capable of doing some good to others, and that I 
 am not attempting it. But the cultivation of 
 one's own sense for whatever is loveliest and 
 highest in the world is not a mere idle amuse- 
 ment, and may some day or other issue in fruits, 
 valuable much more than in proportion to the 
 time apparently lost in producing them. The 
 work which would most interest me would be a 
 prose fiction of some kind; but I cannot bring 
 myself to believe that I ought, for the purpose of 
 embodying in this way my views of life, to give 
 up my first, and probably last opportunity of 
 studying the masterpieces of all the creative arts, 
 except the verbal and musical." 
 
 The winter of 1838-9 he spent at Eorae, with 
 Dr. Calvert, who was long confined to his room 
 by what almost seemed to be the last stage of 
 consumption, and whom Sterling nursed "equally
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXV 
 
 ready (as Dr. Calvert said) to read the Bible, go 
 into the deepest Christian philosophy, or to toast 
 his bread for him ;" — and his letters from thence 
 are full of the delight which he derived from his 
 abode there. " During the last three months I 
 have seen, felt, breathed little but Rome. My 
 residence here has not only been as favorable 
 to my health as could possibly have been antici- 
 pated, but has given me more of deep and constant 
 pleasure than I could well have imagined, or at 
 all hoped. I have not attempted to gain origi- 
 nality by differing from all mankind, but have 
 been content to see and reverence the greatness of 
 Raphael and Michael Angelo. Both of them 
 exceed my fancy of their excellence, but, I think, 
 Michael most. For I had not been prepared for 
 him by any works comparable to the Cartoons for 
 extent and variety; and the Frescoes of the 
 Sistine seem to me to rise far beyond even the 
 sculptures of the Medicean Chapel at Florence. 
 He has interested me so deeply, that I hope, on 
 my return to England, to write some sort of 
 notice of him, especially as I think he is not at all 
 appreciated by most English people. Taking 
 character and genius both into account, he seems 
 to me the greatest Italian since Dante. Of 
 Raphael I think like all the world, except that
 
 CXVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 he does not give me the mipression of a very high 
 or pure religious spirit. I find the works pre- 
 vious to 1500 of inexhaustible interest. My want 
 is that of more complete knowledge of the sculp- 
 tures in the Vatican : but I am afraid of the cold ; 
 and I fear I shall quit Rome still very ignorant 
 of them. The statue of a sleeping female, which 
 used to be called Cleopatra, and now Ariadne, 
 gives me, I think, as much pleasure as any other. 
 I conceive it to be the nymph of a fountain. 
 But I think all the gratification which any works 
 of art here give me, is little, in comparison with 
 that derived from the general look of Rome and 
 the country round it. The views which combine 
 the city with the Campagna and the mountains, 
 strike me as the grandest in style and the most 
 thoroughly poetic I have ever seen. It would 
 require not only exquisite poetry, but this united 
 with a divine music, to render the sort of impres- 
 sion made by these prospects. That, for instance, 
 from the front of St. John Lateran, from the 
 Pincian, from San Pietro in Montorio, and es- 
 pecially from Sant Onofrio, the Convent of 
 Tasso, the lonely tranquillity of the Aventine, 
 and all that opens round it, — indeed any spot in 
 Rome which gives a glim23se of the mountains, 
 raises and harmonizes the mind, not only as the
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXvii 
 
 nobler aspects of the world always do, but with 
 unrivalled fulness of imagery, and with a thought- 
 ful sense of personal reconciliation to the lot of 
 humanity. A great moral, which words cannot 
 compass, lives about one in the silent, lasting 
 poetry of all one sees. In such feelings one 
 loses no doubt for a time any tendency to action, 
 and one is willing to let one's own life slip away 
 into the wondrous stream of existence which 
 reflects forms so large and bright. For a while 
 the sibyls seem no better than sirens. But one 
 returns swiftly to the world of action and will, 
 with better strength and more serious faith; and 
 the very visions one has been lost in, force on 
 one's mind the truth, or rather truism, that Rome 
 was not built by thinking a building, but by 
 building a thought. — Far as Rome is from Eng- 
 land, it has probably kept you more frequently 
 before me than any other place even in England 
 would have done. Much of my time here has 
 past away in mere reverie about former parts of 
 my life, and the persons I have best known. For, 
 spending many hours in wandering about the 
 outskirts of the city, and looking at the outsides 
 of things, the images of those most familiar to 
 me naturally rise to people the scene, and add 
 their figures to the motley variety who still
 
 CXVIU LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 live in the flesh, and the bewildering train whose 
 spirits haunt the City of Ruins. — How the aspect of 
 modern Rome, the churches, the ceremonies, and the 
 Papal court, should produce any of the Romanizing 
 appetite, is to me a puzzle. I have seen the Pope 
 in all his pomp at St. Peter's; and he looked to 
 me a mere lie in livery. The Romish controversy 
 is doubtless a much more difficult one than the 
 managers of the Religious Tract Society fancy, 
 because it is a theoretical dispute ; and, in dealing 
 with notions and authorities, I can quite under- 
 stand how a mere student in a library, with no 
 eye for facts, should take either one side or the 
 other. But how any man, with clear head and 
 honest heart, and capable of seeing realities, and 
 distinguishing them from scenic falsehoods, should, 
 after living in a Romanist country, and especially 
 at Rome, be inclined to side with Leo against 
 Luther, I cannot understand. — I have never found 
 my interest in the objects around me flag since 
 the day I left England; and the months that 
 have since passed seem in the retrospect like part 
 of an eternal existence, in which one should take 
 in all the different aspects of existence at a glance, 
 and without the succession, and therefore mutual 
 expulsions, to which our impressions are subjected 
 in time."
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXIX 
 
 Still, in the midst of this life of esthetical and 
 poetical enjoyment. Sterling retained his lively 
 interest in the state of our Church. "Your ac- 
 count of religious doings in England (he wrote) 
 is extremely satisfactory; and, however men may 
 differ as to the amount of change desirable, it is 
 clear that there is some progress in a right direc- 
 tion. There are of course two great lines in 
 which improvement may take place, — the one 
 that of outward, the other that of inward life in 
 the Church, which are often inseparable, some- 
 times not easily distinguishable. I sujipose most, 
 though not all, of what is doing amongst us, is 
 the adjustment and extension of our actual scheme, 
 the building of churches, establishment of schools, 
 enforcing residence of clergymen, and so forth, 
 which is all of high, and, above all with us, 
 most urgent importance. That which connects 
 itself most closely with one's personal feelings 
 and pursuits, would be change of another kind, 
 namely, a renewal of the spirit of theology in the 
 Church, bringing with it, as it necessarily would, 
 a progress beyond the existing state of knowledge 
 usual among our divines, which recognises nothing 
 but the old creeds and forms of the Fathers, — that 
 portion of scholastic doctrine which in Protestant 
 countries survived the Reformation, — the pecu-
 
 CXX LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 liaritles of the Reformation itself, — the results of 
 the long struggle between Puritanism and Armi- 
 nianism, — and, lastly, the negative moderation of 
 the last century. Sometliing of all this is more 
 or less consciously admitted into the views of 
 every cultivated religious teacher in England, 
 who is not originally precluded by his character 
 from the possibility of cultivation, as clay from 
 being polished into rubies. But it is evident 
 that this compilation omits any living sense of the 
 sj)irit and tendencies of the Fathers, looks only at 
 some fragmentary results of the Scholastic Theo- 
 logy, altogether disowns, or rather ignores, the 
 great mystical teachers who hold so fast an idea 
 that Scepticism cannot meddle with, and, the most 
 noticeable point of all, will not hear of the appli- 
 cation to Cliristian history of the conjoint prin- 
 ciples of criticism and construction, which, it daily 
 becomes plainer, will even in England have their 
 course with regard to all so-called profane tradi- 
 tion, which in truth is only profane so far as it is 
 false, and, thus transmuted and resurgent, becomes 
 divine. These are thoughts, which, you must 
 know, have long been striking deeper and deeper 
 root in me. But I trust they do not make me 
 unjust to the wonderful amount of devotion, zeal, 
 humanity, practical energy, and real Christian life.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXXl 
 
 among the upper classes in England, which, in the 
 midst of all manner of sectarian follies and fantas- 
 tic conceits, render the Church among us in some 
 respects a witness and example to all other Chris- 
 tian communities." Again : " The theological and 
 moral questions of the day seem constantly gaiii- 
 ing in compass and general interest ; and I hear 
 of little done in what seems to me a right direc- 
 tion. And seeing, as I think, the aieed, and also 
 the craving, for higher and larger truth than is 
 commonly diffused, and the want of persons to 
 supply what the occasion demands, I think very 
 often of the possibility of doing something, how- 
 ever little, to brighten my own hour of history, if 
 not any future ones. I have written some short 
 moral and theological essays, which I can easily 
 add to, and which, with others I have at home, 
 would make a book, not formally systematic, but, 
 I trust, earnest and coherent." 
 
 He had left his wife in England, expecting the 
 birth of her fifth child, "an event which," he said, 
 " seems more than usually anxious from my ab- 
 sence at such a distance. But both the truths 
 which inspire true philosophy, and the experience 
 of life, abundantly teach one that time and space, 
 which are so definitely measurable by machinery, 
 are yet for human beings almost as variable, and 
 VOL. L /
 
 CXXll LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 as completely under the sway of the will and the 
 higher affections, as thoughts and actions them- 
 selves ; and shrink and fade, or spread to infini- 
 tude, in accordance with the folding or expansion 
 of the soul's cherubic wings. How often one 
 finds in life, that an idea, which one may have 
 met in youth made visible in words, but also 
 veiled in them, and which in this shape has 
 haunted one with a vague sense of something 
 divine, but dim and inscrutable, becomes, at the 
 call of conscience, or when real events and beings 
 give it its fit body, the open aspect of a messenger 
 from Heaven, and the familiarfriend of all one's 
 after days ! Many things, as well as the point 
 which now suggests it, have often, and s})ecially 
 of late, led me to this reflection. And there is 
 something like, in an inferior degree, to the same 
 experience in the distinctness of the forms which 
 travelling and the sight of Switzerland and Italy 
 have given in my mind to images, which before, 
 at best, were featureless as clouds, and often, by 
 a process which you will understand, though not 
 easy to explain, seemed to spread their shapeless 
 dusk over all the rest of one's conceptions, and to 
 change from clouds in a clear sky to mists darken- 
 insr the whole earth. I did not sit down with 
 malice prepense to mystify either you or myself
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXXIU 
 
 with dissertations; but the top of a pen is a 
 favourite haunt for imps of all kinds, from which 
 they guide the motions of the nib, often with 
 more violence than discretion." On hearing that 
 the expected child died a few weeks after its 
 birth, he immediately returned to England, with 
 a good deal of risk to his health, but with no 
 serious injury. Here, after much deliberation, it 
 was determined that Clifton would be the best 
 place for him to fix his family in, whence he 
 might move in the winter to the coast of Devon- 
 shire or Cornwall, or, in case of need, to a more 
 southern latitude. 
 
 Sterling had a foreboding, as has been seen, 
 that his journey to Rome was to exercise a mo- 
 mentous influence upon him ; and so in a certain 
 sense it did. As the years Avhich Goethe spent 
 in Italy formed the turning point in his life, when 
 the fervid German poet ripened, not without 
 some impairing of his previous powers, into the 
 exquisite cosmopolite artist, in like manner a 
 change not wholly dissimilar took place at this 
 epoch in the character and bent of Sterling's 
 mind and pursuits. In lieu of the dread with 
 which he had looked forward to the necessity of 
 employing himself again in poetry and fine lite- 
 rature, he seemed henceforward rather to regard 
 
 /2
 
 CXXiv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 this as his chief vocation, and as one of the 
 highest, if not the very highest, of all voca- 
 tions. This arose from his being compelled to 
 abandon all projects of works requiring conti- 
 nuous thought and study: for it is a sort of law 
 of our nature to attach a paramount significance 
 to the particular work, whatever it may be, that 
 we are engaged in, — a law in many respects very 
 salutary in its operation, as else we should seldom 
 devote ourselves to our work heartily, — a law too 
 by which energetic characters, like Sterling's, are 
 the most swayed. Indeed the whole course of 
 this narrative has shown with wliat intensity he 
 gave himself up to the immediate object of his 
 aim ; and often he could not well do this, without 
 casting some disparagement upon other objects, 
 even, it might be, upon those about which he had 
 been no less zealous a little before. Besides, the 
 sights with which his travels so richly supplied 
 him, were the fulfilment and satisfying of early 
 longings and visions about art, which gave them 
 a greater power over him. An indication of this 
 change of view, which became a co-operating 
 cause in increasing it, was his growing admiration 
 of Goethe ; of whom, in one of his earlier letters, 
 he had said : " I am more and more convinced that 
 Goethe rescues the individual from contending
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXXV 
 
 passions, not to animate it with new life, but to 
 bury it amid the pomps and beneath the mauso- 
 leum of Art," — of whom too, even in the Onyx 
 Ring, he has given such a cold, repulsive, al- 
 most hateful representation in the character of 
 Walsingham; whereas in his latter years he re- 
 garded Goethe as one of the greatest, not merely 
 among poets, but also among moral teachers. 
 Moreover, in consequence of Sterling's complete 
 withdrawal from the practical ministerial life, the 
 negative tendencies of his theological speculations 
 were continually gaining strength. Such a nega- 
 tive element exists in all minds ; and only by its 
 proper subjugation can the intellect and will of 
 the individual be brought into harmony with the 
 universal. As I have said in another place, 
 Man's first word is Yes ; his second. No ; his third 
 and last. Yes: and while the bulk of men stop 
 short at the first, very few attain to the third. 
 For it is not to be attained once for all, nor ever 
 completely. The negative spirit will abide with 
 us, so long as there is evil in ourselves ; and it 
 ought to abide in us so long as there is evil in 
 the world. For this is its office, to deny that evil, 
 to strive against, and to annul it. Hence it is es- 
 pecially strong in those who are framed for ener- 
 getic action, — in those who, beholding the enoj'-
 
 CXXVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 mous evils in the existing state of things, are seized 
 with a burning desire to deliver the Avorld from 
 them. When this spirit is rightly regulated, — 
 when the JVo is taken up into a higher Yes, as the 
 negative commandments of the Law pass into the 
 positive commandments of the Gospel, — when a 
 man has come to the conviction that the only be- 
 neficent way of denying a prevalent falsehood is 
 by asserting the opposite higher truth, and that in 
 like manner, to overthrow evil, he must strive 
 earnestly and perse veringly to establish good, — - 
 he who acts according to this conviction will, in 
 one mode of action, become a patriotic hero, — in 
 another, a philosophic sage, — in another, through 
 that atonement, which, having sought, he will find, 
 a saint. But in order that this negative tendency 
 may be restrained from mischievous exaggeration, 
 it requires almost indispensably to be counter- 
 balanced and kept in check by the sobering in- 
 fluences of practical activity, Avhich is under the 
 necessity of taking the actual as the ground of its 
 operations, and, unless in an age of chaotic revo- 
 lution, ever uses what exists as the material for its 
 new structures. On the other hand, when the way- 
 wardness and frowardness of the intellect are with- 
 out that wholesome check, which arises from the 
 need of shaping our speculations in conformity to
 
 LIFE or THE AUTHOR. Cxxvil 
 
 the objects we have to deal with, a person is apt 
 to run riot in mere negations, and may almost get 
 at length to hear nothing but the echoes of his 
 own No through all the recesses of his mind. 
 Bitter too is the privation, when we feel that we 
 have a work to do, that it is a work which ought 
 to be done, and see no one else likely to do it, yet 
 find it perpetually snatched away by a Tantalic 
 fate from our grasp; whereas all, especially genial 
 spirits, derive a solace and joy from their appro- 
 priate work, even as Nature rejoices in her vernal 
 and autumnal parturition. In truth, to the gene- 
 rality of minds, perhaj^s to all, but pre-eminently 
 to those who are framed for vigorous action, action 
 is a necessity, without the help of which specula- 
 tion will work itself up into a feverish disease; 
 as has been manifested over and over again in 
 history, not merely by individuals, but by whole 
 classes ; for instance, by the Greek Sophists, by 
 the Schoolmen in the middle ages, and by many 
 deplorable phenomena in the recent Philosophy 
 and Theology of Germany. Even in physical 
 science, where the Will is much less intrusive to 
 mislead the Understanding, the ages anterior to 
 Bacon furnish an endless series of illustrations 
 how prone Speculation is to wander, whenever it 
 slips away even for a moment from the leading-
 
 CXXvm LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 strings of Experience. For while Truth is ever 
 circular, and bends its couree round its invisible 
 centre, S}>eculation flies off at every point in a tan- 
 gent, and, if left to follow its own impulses, loses 
 itself in a notional vacuity. Thus in manifold 
 ways are we taught that our Lord's saying is the 
 declaration of a universal law : to know truth, of 
 whatsoever kind, we must do it. 
 
 These remarks are called from me here, where I 
 am about to speak of the latter years of my dear 
 friend's life, and of the changes which took place 
 in his opinions on subjects of the highest moment. 
 We have seen how he attached himself to critical 
 theology, and with what continually increasing 
 interest he studied that of Germany. The ten- 
 dency of his early education had been negative, 
 after that mode of negativeness which we may 
 remember as characteristic of such as drew their 
 opinions from the oracles of the Ediyibiirgh 
 Review thirty years ago. A variety of influ- 
 ences, among others the fascination of Cole- 
 ridge's genius, drew him away from this negative 
 state, and wrought a temporary reconciliation 
 with that which is best and soundest in the faith 
 and institutions of his countrymen. Under 
 these and other calming and sobering influ- 
 ences, he took orders. How he did so, how he
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR- CXXix 
 
 devoted himself to the duties thus incurred, with 
 his whole heart and soul, we have seen. Still 
 there was always a broad divergence in his 
 opinions from those which are held by the great 
 body of the Church, the very same divergence 
 of which Coleridge speaks in his Confessions of 
 an Enquiring Spirit. Those Confessions, though 
 they were not printed till after Coleridge's death, 
 had been Avritten many years before: he kept 
 them back with the purpose, which, like so many 
 of his purposes, came to nought, of adding the 
 half which is still wanting to complete the argu- 
 ment. Sterling however had read them in ma- 
 nuscript with delight and sympathy, had been 
 permitted to transcribe them, and had adopted 
 the views concerning Inspiration expressed in 
 them, deeming these views, as Coleridge did, to 
 be thoroughly compatible with a deep and lively 
 Christian faith, and with a full reception of all 
 that is essential in the doctrines of our Church. 
 Had Sterling been allowed to continue in the 
 practical labours of the ministry, we may feel a 
 trustful assurance that he would have gone on 
 from strength to strength, and that the Truth, 
 which he served so devotedly, would have mani- 
 fested itself more and more clearly to his under- 
 standing. But when he was arrested in his 
 
 /3
 
 CXXX LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 course of practical activity, and bad only to 
 employ himself in speculation, his negative con- 
 victions became stronger and stronger. The ex- 
 tracts from his letters show this. They show too 
 what weight he attached to bis views on the 
 inspiration of the Scriptures. Herein he was 
 confinned by the exaggerated importance ascribed 
 in our popular theology to certain ignorant, un- 
 critical, baseless assumptions concerning literal 
 inspiration. But an error, especially when it is 
 dominant, -will drive its opponents into the very 
 opposite error; and one exaggeration provokes 
 another. They who discern what is false in it, 
 see that falsehood tlu'ough a magnifying glass, 
 and, fixing their gaze solely thereon, lose sight of 
 the truth which it enfolds and distorts. We have 
 seen how Sterling grew to regard an intelligent 
 theory of inspiration, and of the relation between 
 the Bible and the faith which it conveys, as the 
 most pressing want of our Church. That it is a 
 most pressing one is indeed certain; and such it 
 has long been acknowledged to be by those who 
 meditate on theology. But in this, as in all 
 other, nay, more almost than in any other matters, 
 little good and far more harm will be done 
 by the removal of the error, if in removing it 
 we cut down the tree round which the parasite
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. cxxxi 
 
 has clung. For a state of blank negation is also 
 an error, and a more ghastly one. If Sterling's 
 health had allowed him to execute his first pro- 
 jects, his aim would have been rather to set free 
 and establish the truth, than to destroy the error. 
 But after every fresh interruption of his work, 
 finding himself more and more precluded from all 
 prospect of treating the question in its full com- 
 pass and its widest bearings, he grew to concen- 
 trate his mind more and more on this one negative 
 point. At the same time he became withdrawn 
 more and more from other theological specula- 
 tions, by finding his chief occupation in literature ; 
 and he felt more and more estranged from our 
 Church, and even from some of the friends whom 
 he had previously loved and revered the most, 
 but who, he thought, could hardly look with much 
 indulgence on a person separated from them by so 
 broad a difference. Besides, there is a certain 
 high-minded loyalty, which incites the generous 
 to devote themselves to the service of a truth, 
 when they conceive it to be unduly neglected and 
 condemned; and this itself acts as a motive on 
 them to exaggerate its claims to homage. There 
 are those too, — and Sterling was one, — on whom 
 the power of such loyalty is only the stronger, 
 when it requires great and arduous sacrifices.
 
 cxxxu LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 such as he believed himself to be making in a 
 large forfeiture of esteem and affection. 
 
 This he expected to incur by the first thing that 
 he wrote after his return to England, his Essay 
 on Carlyle. This essay was meant to be a just 
 tribute to a friend, whom for some years he had 
 honoured and loved with an ever increasing affec- 
 tion and admiration. He had purposed to write 
 it before he went to Italy: "When I have done 
 with Simonides (he said), I intend to try if I 
 can write an essay on Carlyle. I shall not do it 
 at all completely; but I do not know any one 
 else who would be likely to do it, and would do it 
 better. An essay on him by Maurice would be 
 of very great value, far beyond anything I can 
 hope to do; but I may perhaps bring out some 
 points that he would not touch upon." This 
 plan was postponed however in consequence of his 
 journey, and not resumed till he went to Clifton. 
 Thence he wrote : " My work has been writing a 
 review of Carlyle's Miscellaneous Works. I sup- 
 pose it must be fifty pages; and I have left out a 
 great deal that I had written. It has cost me 
 trouble, and given me knowledge, but will, I fear, 
 satisfy few or none, and disturb many. Those 
 who do not understand it will of course dislike it; 
 and perhaps those who do may still more bitterly
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXXXIU 
 
 disapprove it. But, tliough I expect to lose 
 friends and gain enemies, I am glad of having 
 spoken out what seems to me true. It was 
 written because I thought myself bound to stand 
 up, when no one else would, on behalf of views 
 which I believe, and think important. But it 
 was also written in the midst of distractions of all 
 kinds, and under frequent pains and languors, 
 which necessitated strong explosions of will to 
 control them, such as can hardly have failed to 
 give an over violent, broken, harsh, and altogether 
 excessive character both to the style and opinions." 
 About the same time he read Strauss's Life of 
 Jesus, a book which a person can hardly read 
 without being more or less hurt by it. If we 
 walk through mire, some of it will stick to us, 
 even when we have no other aim than to make 
 our way through it, much more when we dabble 
 about in it and sift it. Such too must be the 
 case with those who pass through any sort of 
 moral mire. The only security for such persons is, 
 when their purpose is, with God's help, to purify 
 the mire. Then we may converse with publi- 
 cans and sinners, as Howard, as Elizabeth Fry, 
 as Sarah Martin did, as so many others have done, 
 following the example of their heavenly Master, 
 whose garments were only whitened by what to
 
 CXXXlV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 others would liave been pollution. Such a pur- 
 pose is a charm, which will enable one to pass 
 through the fire unharmed, and to touch the 
 plague-stricken without being infected. But 
 mere curiosity will not do this; nor will the 
 mere desire of knowledge. So too is it with the 
 books, of whatsoever kind, written to overthrow 
 or undermine any of those truths, which are set 
 before us as the lodestars of our moral nature. 
 He who reads such books out of curiosity, will 
 find more or less of the mire cleaving to him. So 
 will he who has no higher principle than the mere 
 love of knowledge. If we take up a red-hot coal, 
 we shall not quench its fire, albeit we do so to 
 ascertain whether it will really burn us; and to 
 take up a red-hot coal would be safer than to 
 read Helvetius and the Systeme de la Nature. 
 When we see every story which we have held 
 sacred from our childhood, twisted and torn and 
 mangled in all manner of ways, — when the utmost 
 ingenuity of a dexterous advocate, scraping to- 
 gether the results of all that previous advocates 
 have effected, is employed in picking holes in 
 the New Testament, in fabricating absurdities, in 
 detecting or devising inconsistencies and contra- 
 dictions, — how can one allow one's mind to dwell 
 among such contemplations, without having one's
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXXXV 
 
 reverence impaired by them? If we have the 
 shield of faith, we can indeed repel these, as well 
 as all other fiery darts, but not otherwise; and he 
 who has that shield, will be too deeply conscious 
 of his own weakness in holding it, to expose him- 
 self without some strong need amongst them. 
 Such maxims, it may be objected, would pre- 
 clude all serious, earnest, candid enquiry, if a man 
 is never to read a book, until his mind is made 
 up to reject whatever in it militates against his 
 preconceived notions; and thus the only happy 
 lot of humanity would be one of perpetual stag- 
 nation. But this is far beyond my mark. I 
 merely meant to point out that great dangers 
 compass those who venture into regions where 
 they are taught to regard all their previous con- 
 victions as futile and groundless. As the poet 
 has so grandly expressed it, 
 
 " The intellectual power through words and things 
 Goes sounding on, a dim and perilous way." 
 
 Thus it has done: and thus it will do. We cannot 
 arrest it: but the way is " dim and perilous;" and 
 many are continually making shipwreck during 
 the progress of discovery. Moreover, in Sterling's 
 peculiar case, that which to the bulk of Eng- 
 lish readers would have been very repulsive in 
 Strauss, his Hegelian philosophy, was on the con-
 
 CXXXVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 trary an attraction. Not that he had ever had leisure 
 to study and become familiar with Hegel, and the 
 other masters of German philosophy. But, through 
 his early intercourse with Coleridge and others, he 
 had been prepared to welcome them, and to sym- 
 pathize with them; and being thus prepared, their 
 logic, their great powers of analysis and construc- 
 tion, the comprehensiveness of their views of nature 
 and of man, their conscientiousness in examining all 
 details, and their determination to dig down to the 
 principles of all things, delighted and almost dazzled 
 him. Thus he was unable altogether to resist the 
 fascination of those pantheistic tendencies, which 
 Philosophy, in her wiser moments, has ever been 
 trying to escape from, but which, when she fancies 
 herself safe on the one side, she immediately finds 
 besetting her on the other side. 
 
 Of Sterling's opinions during the latter part of 
 his life, I cannot give so full an account as during 
 the period of our greater intimacy and sympathy. 
 For after some painful controversial letters on the 
 subject of Strauss, in which it did not appear that 
 any good was likely to accrue from our prolong- 
 ing the controversy, our correspondence became 
 much less frequent; and though his love of truth 
 and his frankness would not allow him to suppress 
 or disguise his convictions, he did not dwell on
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXXXVll 
 
 what he knew would so deeply distress me. 
 Among the motives which rendered him more 
 indulgent to Strauss, was one which is always 
 powerful with generous minds, the discovery that 
 he had previously been led to wrong him, in con- 
 sequence of the vague and vindent abuse he had 
 heard from others. " Strauss maintains zealously 
 that the Old Testament idea of God was present 
 to the mind of Jesus Christ in a fulness and 
 clearness which it had not in the noblest of the 
 prophets, — that this animated his whole life and 
 character, — and that the peculiarity of thought 
 which distinguished him from all other Jewish 
 teachers, was that of the purely Ideal and Uni- 
 versal in the mind and will of God, rendering 
 Him the God of mankind, and of all pure and 
 righteous hearts, and not merely of one race 
 living under a peculiar set of positive institutions. 
 As soon as I found that Strauss did really hold 
 this belief, and exhibit Jesus as a Jewish Socrates, 
 it appeared to me that I had always been doing 
 him great injustice, in supposing him to represent 
 the holiest of men as a vulgar Kabbi or dema- 
 gogue, or as a mere unknown figure, to whom a 
 series of fjintastic and tragic events had acciden- 
 tally been attributed." Of course I cannot exa- 
 mine here how far this representation is correct;
 
 CXXXVUl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 but it shows one of the inducements whicli acted 
 on Sterling's mind, and how injustice of every 
 kind is sure to defeat itself. " In the midst of all 
 perplexities and anxieties, (he adds,) I have an 
 inward peace to be thankful for, which contro- 
 versies do not destroy, and derived from a region 
 wdiich my speculative doubts do not approach. 
 I can wish my friends no higher blessing, than 
 that they may share in abundance, that of which 
 a small measure consoles me under all troubles." 
 Again : " I think that you attribute to Strauss a 
 moral and religious deadness, which I do not 
 perceive, though he is evidently not capable, by 
 his constitution, of devotional warmth. One of 
 the points that most surprised me in him, after 
 the accounts that I had heard, w^as his assertion of 
 the ethical greatness and divine wisdom of Jesus; 
 and I should be very sorry if men of distinct 
 historical faith were ever uncandid enough to 
 confound him wath the materialist, empirical in- 
 fidels, to whom all claim of anything more than 
 brutal for man appears as a fraud or a dream. 
 — What the ultimate results of such enquiries will 
 be, I dare not predict to others, or to myself: but 
 I rest my soul on the unwavering conviction that 
 God is at once Love and Wisdom, and wills no 
 one to continue in intentional error; that through
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. cxxxix 
 
 Christ lie has freed me, and many generations of 
 millions of his children, from the dominion of 
 selfishness in all its forms, worldly or supersti- 
 tious; and that He will complete His work, not 
 by darkening the light He gives us, but by 
 clearing it more and more into the knowledge of 
 all truth. According to my conviction, this 
 searching and comprehensive criticism leaves the 
 ideas of the Trinity, the Incarnation^ the Atone- 
 ment, and the offices of the Spirit, precisely where 
 they were. If indeed it be maintained that there 
 is no power, however darkened and corrupted, 
 inherent in man's reasonable constitution, of dis- 
 covering divine verities, and that they must 
 therefore be added by mere verbal accretion from 
 without, it is plain enough that the doubt thrown 
 on the historical authority of the New Testament 
 would remove all certain ground for religious 
 doctrine. But as long as this carnal extrava- 
 gance, — which indeed in another way is itself 
 fatal to religion, — is not taught, I cannot see how 
 the questioning the greater number, or at least' 
 the more amazing, of the miracles of the Saviour 
 at all involves the necessity for denying him to 
 have been spiritually the Son of God, and histo- 
 rically the Jewish Messiah; and it obviously no 
 way interferes with the doctrine that the Divine
 
 Cxl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Being is essentially Triune, or with the amplest 
 assertion of the honours and prerogatives of the 
 Holy Spirit. All these are matters which, as it 
 appears to me, remain for separate examination ; 
 in which process any one at all agreeing with the 
 recent historical criticism would refuse an uncon- 
 ditional, but might well yield a very large and 
 presumptive assent to the declarations of the 
 apostles, and of the doctors and synods of the 
 Church in all ages." I cite this passage as show- 
 ino- the lig-ht in which Sterlins; reGrarded Strauss; 
 but, though in ordinary cases I deem it inconsistent 
 with my office to point out what appears to me 
 erroneous in his opinions, and thus to carry on a 
 running controversy with him, it seems right to 
 state here, that, even if the total incompatibility 
 of Strauss's critical views with the reception of 
 the great doctrines just spoken of were not mani- 
 fest, as I think it plainly is, on the face of his Life 
 of Jesus, the publication of his Christliche Glau- 
 benslehre has since shown that the same criticism, 
 which eats away all the facts of Christianity, must, 
 by an inevitable consequence, undermine, and in 
 course of time swallow up all its essential doctrines, 
 which are inextricably interwoven with its facts, 
 and of which we cannot recognise the reality and 
 necessity except in connexion therewith.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. cxli 
 
 To some readers it may be surprising to read 
 the following extract from a letter written at the 
 same time with those from which I have taken 
 the foregoing passages. "I read last night a 
 small volume by W. Huntington, S.S., called 
 Heaven taken by Prayer. Seldom have I been 
 more astonished, all my impressions of him 
 having been derived from a dimly remembered, 
 and most scurrilous and coxcombical article (unless 
 I do it great injustice) of Southey's in the Quar- 
 terly Review, and from an anecdote quoted out of 
 Matthews the comedian's life, which on such au- 
 thority I do not credit. This little book shows 
 him as the worthy compeer of Bunyan ; and there is 
 hardly any one in history, whose sincerity I could 
 less easily doubt. His narrative is one of the 
 most deeply affecting and heart-seizing I ever 
 saw ; and he seems to me to have been a Cobbett 
 with a conscience. In that additional idea by the 
 way what a world of difference lies! The book 
 would have charmed Coleridge, the fourth volume 
 of whose Literary Remains I have just looked 
 through. Fervour and truthfulness of heart are 
 deeply marked in them, as well as insight and 
 speculative genius. But it is plain enough that he 
 knew there were not a hundred people in Eng- 
 land who would give a rush for the orthodoxy.
 
 cxlli LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 however self-assured, which rejected as much of 
 the Scriptures and the Apostles' Creed as did not 
 square with the conclusions of the sanctified 
 Reason. And yet he had not courage to incur 
 the consequences of claiming, with one stride, the 
 right to stand upon his own faith, and not upon 
 other men's traditions." 
 
 On the state of the Church he wrote: "The 
 Church of England seems now far more likely 
 than ever before, to get a working parochial 
 organization for Church and school. In the 
 meantime the gulf between the knowledge of 
 the clergy and the best lights of the age seems 
 wider than ever, and cannot, I fear, be closed. 
 The moment reflection begins at the Universities, 
 and tends to become systematic, extensive hetero- 
 doxy will, I think, be inevitable, and will not be 
 able to reconcile itself, either with the stiiF par- 
 liamentary formulas, or with that popular evan- 
 gelical dogmatism, which is almost the only living 
 form of religion among the mass of the nation. 
 The Bible, so far as it is generally believed, is the 
 Koran of England; and the first result of awakened 
 religious reflection is to prove that this is precisely 
 what the Bible neither is, nor pretends to be, nor 
 can, without ghastly superstition, be taken for. 
 How these contradictions will end I cannot tell;
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. cxliii 
 
 but that they have begun, and cannot readily be 
 stopped, is evident to any quiet bystander." 
 
 During the summer of 1839 at Clifton, Ster- 
 ling became acquainted with Mr. Francis New- 
 man, the present Professor of Latin at the 
 London University College, who soon became one 
 of his most highly valued friends, and his esteem 
 for whom he proved by leaving his eldest son 
 under his guardianship. 
 
 At Clifton he began to project his tragedy on 
 Strafford. In October 1839 he wrote: "I have 
 read most of Strafford's letters for the sake of a 
 task I have in my head; and they have greatly 
 raised my opinion of his abilities and character. 
 He seems to me to have been among the greatest 
 of administrators, and one of the most energetic, 
 complete, and truly impressive characters in our 
 history. I have been scribbling some ethical 
 fragments, more to clear my own thoughts, than 
 for any other purpose. I have also been making 
 a collection of philosophical hymns, which I 
 am calling Hymns of a Hermit, and sending to 
 Blackwood. I am not concerning myself at this 
 moment in theological matters, except quite phi- 
 losophically, with regard to the idea of God and 
 of the Will. I rest by no means in contented 
 certainty, but in the persuasion that much, on
 
 cxliv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Avhicli I was once positive, is, and must remain 
 doubtful, and that nevertheless there is enough of 
 distinct and ascertained truth, to form the sub- 
 stance of energetic lives and systematic thoughts. 
 The regularity of my pursuits, and the full em- 
 ployment of my time keep me cheerful and con- 
 tented; and I know that the kind of work I do is 
 that for which I am most fit, while it holds out 
 the hope that I may be of some use to others." 
 
 The impi'ovement in his health, which he 
 seemed to have derived from his winter in Italy, 
 was however very transient. Even in Septem- 
 ber he wrote : " I have been constantly unwell, 
 though not very ill, and have no doubt that I 
 shall suffer always from ulcerated lungs, and pro- 
 bably be freed by this malady both from itself 
 and all other earthly evils. How soon, is another 
 question, on which I knoAv nothing. As the only 
 service that I can, by anticipation, render to my 
 children, I have begun to write an account of my 
 life, in which I hope, by a clear display of the 
 faults I have committed, and the better influences 
 to which I have been subjected, to help them, 
 when they arc of years for reflection, in the task 
 of relying on something aljove themselves, and in 
 following this, not only zealously, but Avithout the 
 spurious humility of contented ignorance and pre-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Cxlv 
 
 judlce. It also lies very near my heart that they 
 should one day know how favoured I have been in 
 my friends, and to set before them, as far as words 
 can do it, examples which they may very possibly 
 not find around them in actual life. But I have 
 much to speak of which will require great nicety 
 in the handling ; and though on my own account 
 I could even dare to tell whatever is worst of my- 
 self, it would not be the way to benefit those for 
 whom I wish to write." These memoirs he after- 
 wards destroyed, along with his other papers ; and 
 hardly anything remains of them, except the few 
 anecdotes of his childhood related above. 
 
 About this time he began to print a collection 
 of his poems, which, in token of our long friend- 
 ship, he dedicated to me. While so engaged, 
 in the latter part of November, 1839, he burst 
 a blood-vessel ; and his life seemed for a time to 
 hang by a thread. However he regained some 
 degree of strength, and went in the following 
 January to Falmouth, with the purpose of sailing 
 by the next ship to Madeira. Thence he wrote : 
 *'I am truly glad and thankful that you are 
 pleased with my offering, which is more than I 
 dared hope. It was printed in the midst of my 
 illness; and correcting the press was a weary 
 labour to me ; nor did I know what to do about 
 
 VOL. I. g
 
 Cxlvi LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 the little appendages, Preface, Dedication, &c. ; 
 and they ran in my head, till, in despair, I wrote 
 down what seemed to burn my fingers while I 
 traced the letters. I have tried to mend a mul- 
 titude of lines and expressions, but still see much 
 to be done that I hope to do hereafter, and much 
 more that I despair of being able to correct. Of 
 all my own contemporary friends, I am not aware 
 that there is one who thinks me entitled to write 
 verses, except Trench; and I know there is a 
 great presumption in favour of their judgement. 
 But I turn so spontaneously and joyously to this 
 mode of expression, that I am loth to relinquish 
 it. Carlyle writes to me that he likes the Hymns, 
 which is a great deal for him to say of any verses 
 of mine. His Cha?'tis7n, full as it is of incon- 
 sistencies and fallacies, has yet, besides his usual 
 merits, one to me very striking peculiarity. All 
 the phrases about the ultimate coincidence of 
 Right and Might, and everything touching on the 
 ground of Ethics, is here, for the first time in his 
 works, so guarded and explained, as to present 
 not the slightest apparent sanction of immorality. 
 This change has given me more pleasure than 
 anything I remember to have noticed in a book 
 for this long time past. I had the other day a 
 very beautiful and most cordially affectionate 
 letter from him."
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Cxlvii 
 
 The packet which was to convey Sterling to 
 Madeu'a, brought Dr. Calvert to Falmouth; and 
 after considerable deliberation it was resolved that 
 the two friends should stay where they were. 
 At Falmouth he became acquainted with the 
 family of the Foxes, with whom he lived on the 
 most intimate terms during the rest of his life. 
 For some time he had also the pleasure of seeing 
 Mr. John Mill there, one of the friends whom for 
 many years he had most loved and esteemed and 
 admired. In the month of March he wrote : " I 
 have to spend my days in walking about, maun- 
 dering after some geological trivialities, and have 
 three or four hours only in the twenty-four for 
 reading, writing, and correspondence. — I have 
 been reading a volume of poems by Hartley Cole- 
 ridge, which seem to me beautiful. The sonnets 
 seem to stand in the same relation to Shakspere's, 
 that the best of Wordsworth's do to Milton's. — In 
 the half-hours I can give to any work but caring 
 for my health, I have written a good many verses 
 on small matters, and a series of short Essays, each 
 perhaps twice the average length of Bacon's, on 
 important matters, — marriage, education, duty, 
 books, religion, &c., which, I hope, when cor- 
 rected and rewritten, may be of some use in 
 helping people to think more connectedly and 
 
 ^2
 
 cxlviii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 trustfully than they now do, on points on which 
 we famous and sensible English are rather accus- 
 tomed to take for granted, what the devil indeed 
 would be ready enough to grant, but Nature and 
 Reason, and therefore God, sturdily deny. My 
 present position, and the kind of life I am driven 
 to, prevent any progress of the larger under- 
 takings, which I think of Avith many vain regrets. 
 But it is a blessing to be even as well as I am, 
 and able to do anything. — As far as I know, my 
 volume of Poems has excited no interest what- 
 ever; and I must think of begging your pardon 
 for having put your name into a bottle, and 
 thrown it into Lethe, after the fashion of too 
 sanguine voyagers. Of course three months are 
 a very short trial; but I have myself such real 
 distrust of any merit in the book, justifying its 
 publication, that I am ready enough to imitate 
 poor Charles Lamb's hiss at his own farce. I 
 have been lookino; over the two volumes of his 
 Letters ; and I am disposed to consider them the 
 pleasantest in the language, not excepting the 
 best of Cowper's, nor, of course, Horace Wal- 
 pole's. He was a man of true genius, though on 
 a small scale, as a spangle may be gold as pure as 
 a doubloon. I cannot describe the feeling of the 
 ludicrous which came over me just now, on find-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. Cxlix 
 
 ing a passage where he talks of Adam grudging a 
 penny for nonpareils at a stall in Mesopotamia, 
 when remembering the unpurchased plenty of his 
 former orchard. — I have sometimes thought it 
 would be a good thing, if a College, like that at 
 Durham, could be established at Exeter, to diffuse 
 a little knowledge and activity in the West. I 
 suppose the Bishop could get it done by a word 
 addressed to the Clergy and Tory gentry. There 
 is a very general interest here in the natural 
 sciences among the upper and middle classes ; and 
 the lower, I fancy, are much better behaved and 
 taught than the average of those in England. Tliis 
 town and immediate neighbourhood, which are all 
 I know of Cornwall, present a curious contrast in 
 the look of the people to the central parts of the 
 kingdom. They are much more like the French, 
 with small heads, and compact features, and dark 
 eyes. I hear that they spend much more of their 
 money on clothes, and less on food, than is usual in 
 England, which, I have been told, is also the case 
 in Scotland. The high wages of mining, and the 
 abundance of cheap fish, tend much to better their 
 condition." 
 
 In the beginning of April, 1840, Sterling re- 
 turned to Clifton, where he had been forced to 
 leave his family. Here he wrote : " The delight
 
 cl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 of finding my cliiklren well, improved, merry, and 
 affectionate, is one that you can understand ; and 
 on the whole I have much reason to be thankful 
 for the state of my peculiar world, though with 
 some reasons for anxiety, and especially with 
 abundant threatenings of uncertainty in my own 
 life, which I am now as much disposed to over- 
 value, as I was for many years inclined to under- 
 rate it and be careless of it. I am still in great 
 confusion here, my books and pa^iers being as tan- 
 gled a wreck as the speculative doctrines of my 
 clear country in our age. With me indeed the 
 disorder is settling into some shape, though the 
 Avaste of my day in walking about leaves me little 
 time for any kind of work, and less of that hope 
 which alone makes work delightful. I trust 
 however, I may by and by begin again to write 
 some Essays, of which I did a dozen or more at 
 Falmouth. I do not know that I am fit for any- 
 thing better; but I am certain of doing some 
 good by shewing the absence of all coherence and 
 life in the prevalent English notions, and my own 
 faith in the possibility of deep and systematic 
 knowledge on the laws and first jirinciples of our 
 existence. I am very glad you can find any satis- 
 faction in the Poems. To me they have never 
 been very joyous, and arc now almost entirely
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. cli 
 
 distasteful. When I think of Christahel and Her- 
 mann and Dorothea, I feel a strong persuasion 
 that I deserve the pillory for ever w^riting verses 
 at all. The writings of Schelling, Fichte, and 
 some others, give me the same uneasy belief as to 
 prose ; and I only work myself up to do anything, 
 from the faith that after all I must have been 
 meant for some use, and that, if I cannot write 
 well, I am at all events unable to do anything else 
 better. You will not think this affectation, but 
 may perhaps consider it morbid egotism ; so I will 
 talk of pleasanter things. I received yesterday 
 from Cambridge a sumptuously printed poem, 
 the Song of the Sirens. There is decided meaning, 
 and much rhythmic eloquence in the thing ; but it 
 does not satisfy me. My taste for controversial 
 poetry is, I fear, extremely latent, if not feeble ; 
 nor could I heartily sympathize with a writer of 
 prose, who saw and exposed the inadequacy of 
 Carlyle's views, without seeing, or at least with- 
 out owning, the two propositions, or either of 
 them, which in my mind are the clearest and most 
 comprehensive on the spiritual state of England 
 in our day; first, that our appointed guides have, 
 as a class, and historically speaking, done their 
 work intolerably ill, and much worse than those 
 of any other Protestant country; and secondly.
 
 clii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 that the time Is past, when the realization of our 
 old Church institutions and Reformation theology 
 would have satisfied the best minds, a recon- 
 structive revolution in thought being inevitable, 
 which will destroy much still held sacred among 
 us, and will readjust all to the one great modem 
 principle of the self-conscious and Christianly 
 sanctified Reason. I wish good speed to every 
 attempt at fulfilling any long neglected ideal of 
 goodness; but I am satisfied of nothing more 
 entirely, than of the necessity for a great crisis 
 in the belief of England, which will indeed de- 
 stroy Socialism and Sectarianism, but will just 
 as certainly shake off the Thirty-nine Articles. I 
 write plainly to you ; but pray believe that I am 
 far from thinking it right to blaze up suddenly 
 in the face of a nation's creed and customs. No- 
 thins: but reverence for Truth should exceed our 
 reverence for all objects of men's living faith ; 
 and I am most anxious to be preserved from a 
 spirit of intemperate blame, or of mocking levity. 
 If I saw any hope that Maurice and Samuel Wil- 
 berforoe and their fellows could reorganize and 
 reanimate the Church and nation, or that their 
 own minds could continue progressive without 
 becoming revolutionary, I think I could willingly 
 wrap my head in my cloak, or lay it in the
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clui 
 
 grave, without a word of protest against aught 
 that is. But I am well assured that this cannot 
 be ; and I must do what work Is given me to do, 
 under heavier penalties for omission than I dare 
 encounter. — Ullmann's answer to Strauss I have 
 not seen, but have no doubt It Is very good ; 
 though one of the deepest, bitterest, and most 
 lasting disappointments of my life was, what I 
 think, his failure In the Essay ilber die Utisiind- 
 lichheit Jesu. I shall never forget, but, I hope, 
 never again experience the dismay with which 1 
 reviewed his enquiry, and was compelled to say 
 he had not made good his point. I have now 
 healed this large and woful wound In quite 
 another way than Ullmann's ; and I cannot regret 
 my experience, though I would not willingly 
 endure the like again." 
 
 In the following June he wrote: "My life is 
 stagnant and altogether unproductive; but my 
 health gains by Idleness; and I must be content 
 to dream of the future, instead of living now, and 
 reap visionary harvests, for which I am neither 
 ploughing nor sowing, and which must therefore 
 probably end In vision. My inward story, so far 
 as there Is one, has been verging more and more 
 to the exercise of Imagination in the free, sympa- 
 thetic, and earnest study of human life; and I 
 
 i?3
 
 cliv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 vaguely deliberate on plans of works of fiction 
 more than on any other sort of literary enterprise. 
 German philosophy stands afar in the background, 
 a cloudy, but also starry temple, hallowed to the 
 same God worshipped by mankind in so many 
 tents, dens, barns, and minsters. The idleness 
 which is necessary for health, prevents my study- 
 ing the books I should most like to read; and I 
 take up only those which can be mastered with- 
 out much continuous reflection. Of these flying 
 leaves, few have lately pleased me better than 
 a pamphlet of Arnold's on Prophecy, worth, I 
 suspect, all else on the subject in the English 
 language, pointing out a principle, and leading on 
 to more truth than it declares. — I find everywhere 
 ears and hearts open to any thoughtful and sin- 
 cere word, only how few to speak such langiiage! 
 I would give much to have any of my older and 
 deeper friends near me, were that possible. 
 Meanwhile there is much kindness, practical 
 honesty and good sense, in many round me ; 
 though reflection and faith in a spirit beyond the 
 letter are looked on with more suspicion than a 
 cage of serpents, or a bale of cotton fresh from a 
 city of the plague. — I have had a most cordial 
 letter from Emerson, thanking me for my Poems. 
 They must improve much in a voyage over the
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clv 
 
 Atlantic; for he writes of them in a way quite 
 unlike any other eulogies that have reached me. 
 Carlyle I have not heard from lately, but see 
 many proofs that he is gradually doing his work, 
 and convincing men's hearts that no belief can be 
 adopted as useful, unless embraced as true, with- 
 out being far Avorse than useless; a brief pro- 
 position of most revolutionary import in a day 
 like ours. — I will copy here some of the last 
 words of James Naylor the quaker, which express 
 what I at present regard as the eternal truth 
 embodied in Christianity. ' There is a spirit which 
 I feel, that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge 
 any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in 
 hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is 
 to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary 
 out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a 
 nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of 
 all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so 
 it conceives none in thoughts to any other. If it 
 be betrayed, it bears it; for its ground and spring 
 is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown 
 is meekness; its life is everlasting love unfeigned, 
 and takes its kingdom with entreaty, and not with 
 contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. 
 In God alone it can rejoice, though none else 
 regard it, or can own its life. It is conceived in
 
 ch'I LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it ; 
 nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It 
 never rejoiceth but through sufferings; for with 
 the world's joy it is murdered. I found it alone, 
 being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with 
 them who lived in dens and desolate places in the 
 earth, who through death obtained this resurrec- 
 tion and eternal holy life.' " 
 
 In September he gave the following account of 
 his occupations. "I continue to feel more interest 
 in poetical composition than in any other pursuit, 
 and have been reading chiefly Goethe and Schiller, 
 with an increasing conviction that, however far 
 from them, it is in their course I must travel. 
 Yet how strange it seems that, except Words- 
 worth, now at the limit of human life, there is not 
 one man in England who has strenuously devoted 
 himself to imaginative literature, as a serious 
 and noble art, requiring as much labour and se- 
 verity as theology or politics! Carlyle is the 
 only man I know of (unless M.) under sixty, who 
 has shown himself the possessor of transcendent 
 genius; and in him it all serves the purpose of 
 moral and political exhortation, like that of the 
 old Hebrew prophets. The barrenness and dark- 
 ness of our actual English world, so far as ideals 
 are concerned, strikes me, I think, more and
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clvii 
 
 more; and I escape with inexpressible delight 
 into the fruitful and sunny region of poetry, and 
 especially into Goethe's realm of art. In reading 
 his letters what most delisrhts me is the overflow- 
 ing fulness of affection. No one who has read 
 them can suspect hira of selfish coldness; and yet 
 I see from Strauss's admirable Streitschriften, that 
 the blustering booby Menzel does so. I used to 
 think it probably true, but had then never read 
 the letters. — I have read Heine's poems, and with 
 very great enjoyment. Poor fellow ! I hear he 
 has so wearied out his better genius, that for years 
 he has been unable to write a verse. Have you 
 seen the two volumes of Shelley's prose? a sad 
 specimen of book-making and reader- swindling, 
 but still containing beautiful things. He seems 
 half mad about Cliristianity. Conceive his think- 
 ing it a mere and very calamitous accident in the 
 history of the world, and lamenting that the 
 progress of Greek culture was stopped first by 
 the Roman conquests and then by this Jewish 
 superstition. I suppose, no educated German 
 would have been capable of such absurdity. It is 
 pleasant however to find that he had come quite 
 to see through the French sensationist infidels; 
 and there are innumerable traits of kindness and 
 truthfulness in the letters. With all my admira-
 
 clviii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 tion of his genius, the want of real human nature 
 in his poetry makes it very unsatisfying; and it is 
 remarkable that he never seems to have suspected 
 anything wrong in his own choice of so monstrous 
 a theme as that of the Cenci. With all his faults, 
 he was a generous, heroic being; and his riper 
 mind would have furnished such light as English 
 poetry has not now, whatever it may once have had. 
 I have been able just to glance through Sewell's 
 Article on Carlyle. All his dissertations that I 
 have seen, and eminently this, are like handsome 
 buildings with floors of glass, through which one 
 looks and sees that there is no foundation to the 
 walls. He is made of words, and nothing more. 
 Imagine a man pretending to survey the world, 
 and all its wisest men, and to reconstruct his age, 
 and writing down, as he does in his Ethics, that 
 external historical testimony of God's revealed 
 will is the only true basis of moral science. As if 
 all science is not within, and all morality! and as 
 if anything external could be the basis of anything 
 within! — One can hardly conceive how so quick 
 and sharp an advocate fails to perceive that his 
 doctrine of unlimited obedience and docility serves 
 just as well for a Calvinist, or Unitarian, nay, for 
 a Brahmin or a Bonze, as for an Oxford High 
 Churchman, and therefore can be of no use to any
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clix 
 
 of them. Take this assumption away; and what 
 has the Truth, according to Sewell, to rest upon ? 
 At his weapons the Romanist is sure to reap 
 the final fruits of all these Anglican victories. 
 Francis Newman, who alone of my friends here 
 has spent his life in reflection and study. Is just 
 gone ; and It will be long before I find his match. — 
 Tieck, I hear, says that he likes Carlyle's writings, 
 but complains that they are so ganz Englisch; 
 while all England protests against them as ganz 
 Deutsch: the gold and silver shield once more." 
 
 About the same time he wrote to another 
 friend. "I have done little lately but read 
 Goethe, in whom there is endless pleasure and 
 profit: and the beauty of whose character, his 
 steadfast sense of duty, and warm and noble affec- 
 tions, have never seemed to me half so plain, as 
 now that I have read more than a thousand of his 
 letters, as well as many of his works that I did 
 not know before. The task he and others, but he 
 chiefly, performed so thorouglily for Germany, 
 still remains to be seriously begun for England." 
 
 The early part of the ensuing winter he spent 
 at Torquay, the latter part at Penzance. Writ- 
 ing from the former place, he gave the following 
 account of his convictions: "the universal and 
 eternal truth of the Gospel Is that view of the
 
 clx LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 relations of men to God, and to each other, 
 which presents itself as true to the heart, con- 
 science, and reason, when purified by Christian 
 influences; wliich influences are obtained by the 
 meditation on, and sympathy with, the life and 
 mind of Christ recorded in Scripture, and by the 
 teaching and example of other believers in Him. 
 On this view. Christian truth is that, and only that, 
 doctrine which commends itself to the minds of all 
 who share in the spirit of Christ; which spirit 
 may be briefly described as a prevailing temper of 
 reverential and aflfectionate self-denial. Taking 
 all ages and countries through, this essential doc- 
 trine will be found to resolve itself into the ac- 
 knowledgement of Christ as the Ideal Man, and 
 therefore the representative of the Divine Mind 
 towards us." 
 
 Speaking at the same time about our Church, 
 he said : " One remark has grown into my mind 
 with deeper and deeper conviction for many 
 years, viz., that all the other means of animating 
 the lower, including the middle classes, with in- 
 terest in the Church, are almost trivial, until you 
 begin by organizing congregations, that is, bodies 
 of communicants, feeling themselves linked toge- 
 ther by common duties and rights, and exercising 
 their congregational privileges as inseparable from
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxi 
 
 their Christian character, and of course excluding 
 those who manifestly violate the Christian cove- 
 nant in essentials. Nothing, I am sure, that can 
 be done among the Clergy, or to then- flocks, — 
 much as is needed in both respects, — has near 
 the importance of this great change ; the want of 
 which makes the Church more fatally helpless 
 than, I imagine, any other Protestant body in 
 the world. — I have read a great deal of Trench's 
 book on the Parables, and like it. His main 
 rule of interpretation however, I am persuaded, is 
 wrong, viz., to make every part of the imagery 
 of the Parables spiritually significant, that can by 
 any means be so treated. My belief is, that the 
 main point in each is the only one perfectly ex- 
 pressed, and that all the rest is merely subordi- 
 nate and external." 
 
 His chief occupation this winter was his tra- 
 gedy of Strafford. In January, 1841, he said: "I 
 am writing a tragedy, which interests and occu- 
 pies me, I think, more than anything I ever at- 
 tempted." Again, four days after : " I have just 
 written the three first acts of a tragedy, and hope 
 soon to do the rest ; but it will all have to be re- 
 written much more slowly. I never was in water 
 where I swam so lightly ; and I shall be very 
 curious for the censures of my friends, when the
 
 clxli LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 time comes." In the following August lie wrote: 
 " My health has been but feeble ; and till a 
 month ago I did not even attempt any regular 
 mental employment. Since then I have been 
 busy with my tragedy on Strafford, which I wrote 
 the first draft of in the winter, and which, when 
 written over a third time, will perhaps interest 
 the few readers of poetry we still have left among 
 us. It has cost me far more trouble than anything 
 else I ever attempted, and is laid by for the pre- 
 sent, that it may be looked at with fresh eyes. — 
 Of other people's writings I have seen very lately 
 nothing that has much interested me, but Emer- 
 son's Essays. They are sometimes self-contra- 
 dictory, and often push detached truths into 
 paradox ; but they have much of depth, of com- 
 prehensiveness, and of beauty, and express what 
 at this time many minds among us require, 
 and yet will hardly find in English." In Oc- 
 tober he Avrote : " During the last few days I 
 have read through Willtelm Meister, which I 
 never before read in German, and never at all 
 since I was in the West Indies. Up to that time 
 it had been one of the three or four books that 
 had most influenced me. I have gone through it 
 now with indescribable pleasure, and see clearly 
 how much there is to be set against even those
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxiii 
 
 parts which formerly most offended me. The 
 indecorums unfit it for young women ; but its 
 moral tendency I cannot but revere ; while the 
 clear and full beauty must be felt and loved, not 
 talked about. On the whole, as I have been 
 saying, the book is, more than any other, the 
 gospel of Experience, certainly not completely, 
 transparently poetic, and even in its didactic 
 purpose, sometimes trivial and perverse, but with 
 more knowledge of human life, wants, and neces- 
 sities, than can anywhere else he found. Goethe's 
 works are, on the Avhole, the only world except 
 the real one, in which it is possible for a man of 
 our age truly to live. One may exist in others; 
 and so does a mummy in its case. — I have also 
 just been reading the portion as yet published of 
 K. O. Mliller's admirable history of Greek lite- 
 rature, and have been specially pleased by his 
 account of Thucydides, and of the distinction 
 between him and Herodotus. Miiller is to me 
 the most delightful writer on classical subjects I 
 have ever looked into. All his archeology is alive 
 and human. — I have just put together a lot of 
 miscellaneous poems, near twenty, not so good on 
 the whole as those in my volume, — the corrected 
 Hymns of a Hermit, and all the Thoughts in 
 Rhyme, — in three divisions, meditative, satirical.
 
 clxiv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 and lyrical. The whole would be a volume about 
 the size of the last ; but I cannot afford to print 
 them myself, and may probably send them to 
 America, where Emerson would arrange the pub- 
 lication. I send you the manuscript of my Straf- 
 ford. I hardly dare hope you will like it ; but no 
 adverse judgement can mislead me as to the 
 amount of reflection I have put in it, and the 
 knowledge it has procured me." 
 
 To the observations which I sent him on his 
 tragedy, he replied : " It would take a great deal 
 of public applause at all to match the pleasure 
 which your letter has given me. I never had 
 ventured to hope that you could feel so much 
 approbation of my work. It had interested me 
 deeply, and cost me much trouble ; and there is 
 a class of readers, and especially of critics, of 
 the Charles Lamb school, who, it seemed likely, 
 would be gratified by it. But there appeared 
 very much in it that might grievously offend both 
 the deeply religious and the classically cultivated. 
 Seldom has life afforded me a livelier surprise or 
 a more cordial pleasure than that of opening your 
 letter. On the two largest questions, perhaps we 
 may come to agree more than we seem to do now. 
 You can hardly dislike more than I, any mere ac- 
 cident in a tragic catastrophe ; but my conception
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxv 
 
 of the thing was this: that Strafford attempted to 
 construct and manage a grand, magnanimous des- 
 potism in a country affording no materials for any 
 manly, noble system, but that of Parliamentary 
 Government. He had everything honest and 
 energetic in the nation against him ; and, till 
 after his death, it stood as one man against the 
 Court. Hence his only allies were the utterly 
 worthless, persons who were sure to fail and be- 
 tray him in the hour of need. This was no acci- 
 dent, but the very essence of the matter at issue. 
 The tragic interest consists in the fact, that never- 
 theless he was a truly great man, or might be so 
 represented, and, when his cause was irretrievably 
 gone, as it deserved, stood out all the more strik- 
 ing and coherent figure from the ruin around him. 
 The other great point is that of his character. 
 Why was he so odious to the nation ? You com- 
 pare Coriolanus : but observe the difference. It 
 was chiefly the Roman's personal arrogance, that 
 made him intolerable. Strafford too was over- 
 haughty; but his crime was in his cause, in the 
 despotism which he supported, and which I have 
 made him confess was his great object. The 
 whole play bubbles, I hope, and flames with the 
 universal zeal of England for a Parliamentary 
 Government, which had in fact not one plausible
 
 clxvi LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 and strong opponent, except "VVentwortb. As to 
 his complaint of Charles' ingratitude, we have no 
 record of it, because we have hardly any notices 
 of him from his intimate friends. In intercourse 
 with them, entire silence on the subject w^ould, I 
 think, have been affectation. The rest are minor 
 points ; and on several of them I have followed 
 your hints. I still cannot see that I have done 
 Laud any injustice, and do not understand how 
 the man who cut off Prynne's ears, and forced a 
 Buriolice on Scotland at the point of the sword, 
 can fairly be called a sincere lover of peace. I 
 did the best for him I could, in making him ex- 
 press vigorously the principle which lay at the 
 root of all his ecclesiastical doings, which I do 
 not think, nor have represented as a mere absur- 
 dity. Hampden and Pym, no doubt, Avould not 
 themselves have dealt with the mob as I repre- 
 sent: but that they would and must have em- 
 ployed others to do so, the history of all popular 
 revolutions seems to me to prove. It served my 
 purpose better to make them work directly." 
 
 lieturning to the same subject in a subsequent 
 letter, he added : " ]\Iy estimate of Strafford's real 
 character was formed from a careful study of the 
 two folios of his letters. He was, in fact, a far 
 less generous man than I have represented him;
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxvii 
 
 and I find much difficulty in believing that he 
 meant to be taken at his word in writing his 
 well-known letter to the King. But, however 
 this may be, he was essentially a man of the 
 Alva, Wallenstein and Napoleon, the Marius and 
 Ca3sar stamp. Restless energy, clear sagacity, 
 obstinate volition, and boundless love of power, 
 are the obvious traits of the Avhole class. In 
 such men it appears to me that Christianity, or, 
 in other words, self-annihilating piety, can have 
 no large and consistent place ; and it is clear from 
 his correspondence that, though no doubt in some 
 sense a believer, religious feeling had no hold 
 on him at all. No doubt, as you say, there is a 
 great difficulty in presenting it at all in a drama ; 
 but, besides this, to have brought it forward 
 vividly in any of the other characters would have 
 spoilt my poem, by introducing a second and in- 
 congruous interest. My object was to exhibit a 
 man preserving his personal strength and com- 
 pleteness in the most disastrous circumstances, 
 and against the most fearful odds; and I found 
 such a character in the last very eminent English 
 public man who met a truly tragic end. For the 
 sake of this, to my feelings, grand and elevating 
 picture, I put up with the objection that I all 
 along felt to the absence of personal counterforces
 
 clxviii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 and visible facts, in the merely general political 
 nature of the causes that produced Strafford's 
 overthrow. It could have been evaded only by 
 introducing and giving prominence to one or 
 more merely personal enemies of Strafford, as 
 some one Avhose wife or sister he had seduced, 
 or some Irishman whom he had stript of his 
 estates; but for more than one reason I found 
 this inexpedient. — The monotony of the versifi- 
 cation is, I fear, in this work irremediable. It is 
 more after the pattern of Schiller and Goethe, 
 than of Shakspere. But I was obliged to write 
 as well as I could from my own ear and feeling; 
 and the result for good and evil was hardly calcu- 
 lated beforehand. — Lately I have been reading 
 again some of Alfred Tennyson's second volume, 
 and with profound admiration of his truly lyric 
 and idyllic genius. There seems to me to have 
 been more epic power in Keats, that fiery beau- 
 tiful meteor; but they are two most true and 
 great poets. When one thinks of the amount of 
 recognition they have received, one may well 
 bless God that poetry is in itself strength and 
 joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind, or 
 left alone in its own magic hermitage. It is true, 
 no doubt, that what new poetry we have is little 
 cared for ; but also true that there is wonderfully
 
 LIFE OP THE AUTHOR. clxix 
 
 little deserving any honour. Compare onr pre- 
 sent state with twenty years ago, when Words- 
 worth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, and Scott, the 
 novelist, were all vigorously productive. Carlyle 
 is the one great star that has arisen since ; and he 
 is far more prophet than singer." 
 
 Finding himself perpetually driven to the 
 southern coast. Sterling removed with his family 
 in the summer of 1841 from Clifton to Falmouth 
 His health was manifestly declining; sharp at- 
 tacks of illness became more frequent, and left 
 their traces behind in continually increasing weak- 
 ness. Yet still the vigour of his mind held out, 
 and enabled him to do much, notwithstand- 
 ing the feebleness of his body; and he joyfully 
 embraced every opportunity of benefiting those 
 among whom he dwelt. Of liis life at Falmouth 
 I have received the following account from one 
 who knew him there intimately. "He used 
 to rise as early as five o'clock, to read and 
 write in his little study, overlooking the sea, 
 spent much of the mornings in long rides and 
 walks, in the keenest enjoyment of the life and 
 beauty around him, and returned to an early 
 dinner with his children, entering into all their 
 amusements, as if he were one of them. Christ- 
 mas eve was always a gala day, when the task of 
 
 VOL. I. h
 
 clxx LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 ornamenting and illuminating the Christmas tree 
 devolved principally on him. His sympathies 
 were ever ready for small as well as great things; 
 and the feelings of a child he always treated with 
 respect. In the evenings he would often invite 
 a few friends to join their happy little family 
 party. We looked over his portfolios of German 
 and Italian engravings, listening to his reminis- 
 cences of Italy, or to his sparkling thoughts on 
 the great men whose portraits lay before us, or to 
 his criticisms on the works and minds of the 
 great artists. Sometimes these evenings were 
 devoted to the reading of manuscript poetry, — 
 sometimes to Wordsworth, his comments on 
 whom were invaluable, full of light and love, — 
 sometimes to an essay on Dante; but always to 
 something that might help the young forward, 
 whom he wished to regard him as an elder 
 brother, ever ready to assist them in their diffi- 
 culties, to give them faithful advice, and to exer- 
 cise his many gifts as talents entrusted to him 
 for their benefit." 
 
 I have already spoken of his peculiar faculty of 
 eliciting dormant powers in those with whom he 
 was brought into contact, and have said that 
 many owe the awakening of their moral being 
 to him. As an instance of his painstaking kind-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxxi 
 
 ness to the young, and of the wisdom with which 
 he endeavoured to direct their studies toward the 
 noblest aims, I will here insert a series of extracts 
 from some letters to a friend, in whose educa- 
 tion he took a warm interest, and who says of 
 them that " they did him more good than he can 
 well express." The first was written to him 
 when a pupil at King's College, London. "I 
 am very glad to hear your account of what 
 you are doing, which seems all very well, except 
 the mathematics. I fear you run some chance of 
 losing your time by attempting what is beyond 
 your strength, if you meddle as yet with the 
 differential calculus. Unless you perfectly un- 
 derstand and feel quite familiar with all the pre- 
 vious steps, the study of such a subject is a mere 
 waste of labour. — I have myself wasted years of 
 my life, by hurrying to things which were beyond 
 my capacity, and would gladly save you from the 
 same misfortune. I am now laboriously endea- 
 vouring, with my mere odds and ends of leisure, 
 to learn things in mathematics, which I ought to 
 have known twelve years ago. But then I have 
 the satisfaction of feeling that every half hour I 
 so employ, now gives me some real knowledge. 
 As to your classical studies, I suppose you could 
 not do better than you are now doing. On the 
 
 A 2
 
 clxxii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 whole my chief fear as to the system in general 
 is, that it may perhaps distract your mind with 
 too great a variety of studies. The subjects es- 
 pecially on which the Principal lectures, are likely 
 to be beyond the powers of a great many of his 
 pupils; and on the Evidences of Christianity, as 
 on all other enquiries, superficial knowledge rather 
 injures than improves the mind. The best course 
 I think that you can follow, is to employ all your 
 strength in thoroughly mastering the elementary 
 parts of your studies, and for this purpose to sa- 
 crifice, if it be necessary, the chance of prizes and 
 present applause. If you so fix your attention as 
 to seize strong hold of the first principles of mathe- 
 matics, and of Greek grammar, you will facilitate 
 all your after studies, and be gaining mental 
 power, though you may be losing prizes. You 
 say nothing of composition in Greek and Latin, 
 which is, I believe, the greatest help to accurate 
 knowledge, and is considered at the Universities 
 as the surest test of it. As you arc reading 
 Herodotus, I may mention that Talboys of Ox- 
 ford published some years ago a translation of a 
 little essay of Niebuhr's on his Geography, 
 which you would do well to read. Always re- 
 member, in reading Herodotus, that, though he 
 wished to tell the truth, the stories which he
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxxili 
 
 heard from others, for instance from the Egyp- 
 tian priests, are often mere lies. I believe, 
 the guidino; idea of his book is the difference in 
 the mind of a Greek between Greece and all 
 barbarous countries, that is, all others than 
 Greece. You hardly find the germs of this in 
 Homer: it is strongly presented in Herodotus; 
 much more so, I fancy, in -ZEschylus; and this 
 principle was finally realized and proved to be 
 no dream of national vanity in the wars of the 
 younger Cyrus and of Alexander the Great. As 
 you are reading Greek plays, you should try to 
 borrow the translation of Schlegel on Dramatic 
 Literature, and read what he says of the ancient 
 drama. He is perhaps rather unfair to Euripides." 
 The next extracts are from letters written to 
 Oxford. " As to the spirit in which your read- 
 ing is to be carried on, you will have the best 
 advice from your present Lecturer. I can only 
 repeat, what I am sure you wiU have gathered 
 from him, in earnestly urging you not to propose 
 to yourself any outward or tempoi'ary object, as 
 your highest end, but to regard every subordinate 
 purpose as serious and worthy only in so far as 
 you may render it conducive to the cultivation of 
 the Intelligence, Conscience, and pure Affections, 
 which are the spiritual and permanent portions of
 
 clxxiv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 our Being. Knowledge itself and mental power, 
 dignified and of good report as these are, when 
 compared with passive indolence, or with the 
 activity of the passions and sensations, yet, if 
 separated from the perpetual companionship of 
 the reasonable affections and the moral will, and 
 from the idea of that highest Keason and Love, 
 to whom we owe ourselves not in part, but 
 wholly, may be but the instruments of a less 
 curable, and more painful, and infinitely more 
 mischievous corruption. Study therefore with a 
 constant reference to the reasonable and noble 
 uses of study, remembering that the enjoyments 
 of the intellect, much less its Avorldly dignities and 
 profits, are not the reasons of our having it; and 
 therefore study deliberately, steadily, severely, 
 conscientiously. But you must not suppose that 
 I think a student of your years can possibly be 
 the fittest judge of the direction and extent of his 
 labom's. You are in the hands of a system, and 
 of teachers, who are indeed imperfect, but are 
 nevertheless far more likely to be right than you 
 can be imagined to be; and even if you were 
 tempted to strike out a path for yourself, and by 
 some sport of accident hit upon a better than 
 that in which you are directed, the moral loss 
 would probably be far greater than the intellec-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxxv 
 
 tual gain, — the loss of humility, of quiet, of self- 
 distrust, of teachableness, no less the peculiar 
 Graces, or Charities of the student, than zeal 
 for knowledge, sympathy with the wise, the aus- 
 tere devotion to truth and right, are the Muses 
 appointed to inspire him. Beware also of desul- 
 tory reading, and especially of modern works of 
 entertainment. Periodicals and novels are to all 
 in this generation, but more especially to those 
 whose minds are still unformed, and in the pro- 
 cess of formation, a new and more effectual sub- 
 stitute for the plagues of Egypt, vermin that 
 corrupt the wholesome waters, and infest our 
 chambers. That they do not excite invincible 
 disgust, but are rather armed with potent attrac- 
 tion, is but an aggravation of the evil. An 
 older work, even of mere fancy, always must 
 address itself in us to something better than 
 the vulgar, drowsy sense of custom, and blind, un- 
 conscious habit. Its differences from our own 
 thoughts and age will necessarily excite to re- 
 flection. But moreover of older books one natu- 
 rally takes up the best; and even for relaxation, 
 if I may judge for myself, you will find a canto of 
 Spenser, or a book of Milton, at least as lively a 
 cordial as a volume of Bulwer, or an article in 
 the Quarterly Review. And what a difference in
 
 cLsxvi LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 the after flavour! I will add my opinion that, if 
 admission to a debating society came in your way, 
 I should rather prefer to hear of your declining it. 
 I should even have some doubt as to the smaller 
 circles in which essays are read, and literary ques- 
 tions debated. But on this latter point you must 
 of course decide, chiefly with reference to your 
 own amount of leisure, and to the kind of compa- 
 nions you would be associated with. Above all 
 and in all things, however, even the smallest, en- 
 deavour to act on reflection, and with an eye to a 
 principle. Avoid carefully flippancy, gossip, loss 
 Df time in talk. Cultivate at the bottom of your 
 heart a spirit of piety, benevolence, and purity: 
 and do not keep these for the great occasions, and 
 what are called the serious afiairs of life; but let 
 the sunny presence of reason and religion in you 
 be like that of the sun itself, which, while it hghts 
 up the great regions of nature, sends the same 
 radiance even through chinks and keyholes." 
 
 The next letter was written to the same friend, 
 after he had been unsuccessful in an examination. 
 " I was by no means so unhappy as you seem to 
 wish me to be, at your failure to obtain the scho- 
 larship. Indeed that seemed to me a less im- 
 portant matter than your anxiety on the subject, 
 Avhich will probably be a far greater advantage to
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxxvi 
 
 you from the exertions it will induce you to make, 
 than any preferment could be. I confess I should 
 even wish you to moderate your earnestness, not 
 of study, but of zeal for the rewards of study; 
 as these, though very good, and even necessary in 
 their way, are much less interesting and valuable 
 than the knowledge you will get by the way ; and 
 it is a pity your ambition, which seems to run in 
 so full a stream, should confine itself to the small 
 object, and think comparatively nothing of the 
 great one. I have no doubt that in time you will 
 get your share of the honours and emoluments of 
 the University; but I venture to add my anxious 
 wish that you may always remember such things, 
 could they be piled up like Pelion on Ossa, will 
 still at most be means, not ends. You wrote to 
 me about reading logic; and I was glad to learn 
 that you liked it. There is, I believe, no good 
 book on the subject read at Oxford, except the 
 earliest of all. It would be worth your while to 
 examine an article on the subject, I think a 
 review of Whately, which appeared in the Edin- 
 burgh Review some five years ago. It is, I be- 
 lieve, by Sir W. Hamilton of Edinburgh, who 
 knows more of the matter than any one that ever 
 wrote on it in our language. If you cared to go 
 further, the best book is a small volume in 
 
 hZ
 
 cLxxviii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 German by Twesten. In reading logic, which is 
 of course a very elementary part of metaphysics, 
 you have at least this advantage, that the science 
 in its main outlines is indisputably established, 
 and indeed has been so ever since Aristotle. For 
 the sceptical attacks on him as to this study are 
 mere blunders about his object, supposing this to 
 be the proposal of some new instrument of dis- 
 covery, and not the mere analysis of a simple act 
 of reasoning. Synthetics are a far more difficult 
 and extensive enquiry than analytics, but not, I 
 suppose, so much attended to in your schools. I 
 should like to hear more than you told me of your 
 studies in general, what books you had been read- 
 ing, and what you thought of them. But you 
 must not let your first thoughts about books stifle 
 the subsequent ones. It sometimes happens that 
 one takes up a notion about the main purpose or 
 general character of an author, and then bends 
 and cuts up everything one meets with in him to 
 suit this preHminary view. But in guarding 
 against this error, and keeping the mind open to 
 new impressions, it is nevertheless better to start 
 with some conception, of course a very malleable 
 and ductile one, of what we are to meet, as we 
 have thus an interest in going on warily and 
 vigorously, so as to find grounds for and against
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxxix 
 
 our anticipation. The worst way of all is the 
 utterly lifeless, stupid, and acquiescing one, such 
 as that of the somnambulists, who walk about 
 with their eyes open, read and talk, and then of a 
 sudden wake, and know not a jot of what they 
 have been doing. But many are somnambulists 
 all their lives, and in fact only cheat their neigh- 
 bours by affecting to be better than mummies, or 
 than suits of clothes hung upon electric wires. 
 Therefore toil, feel, think, hope. A man is sure 
 to dream enough before he dies, without making 
 arrangements for the purpose." 
 
 The next letter contains some sound advice 
 with regard to abstinence from the theological 
 controversies then raging at Oxford. " Your 
 account of your studies is very satisfactory. I 
 suppose there is no doubt of the corruptness of 
 the Poetics; and there is certainly none as to the 
 elevation and depth of Sophocles, whom I am 
 very happy to find that you appreciate. A true 
 and pure feeling for poetry is not, I think, nearly 
 so common as ordinary conversation might lead 
 us to suppose; and it is closely connected with 
 moral and intellectual qualities of the highest 
 value, with a sense for, and preference of, the true 
 in all things, and with a perception of the simply 
 and severely Beautiful, which is the proper garb.
 
 clxxx LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 or rather body of the True, the form in and by 
 which it becomes outwardly apparent and intelli- 
 gible. People perpetually fancy that they love 
 poetry, when that which they really like is 
 rhythmical rhetoric, presenting, not ideal, essen- 
 tial, quiet truth in its appropriate medium, but 
 only the common, the empty, and the spuriotis, 
 in a vague, tawdry, noisy element of vulgarity. 
 As to your question about the views of Pusey and 
 Newman, I have now neither leisure nor space to 
 give you a suitable answer. In general however, 
 I do not believe that there is a patent given by 
 God to any body of men, whether an episcopally 
 ordained clergy or not, to be always right on the 
 essentials of religion: and until this point is 
 proved, the whole fabric is but a building hanging 
 in the air. If it were proved, then I say we are 
 schismatics for leaving Rome. As to this ques- 
 tion, and all those most closely connected with it, 
 I should advise you, if you really wish to examine 
 the matter for yourself, to read the first volume 
 of Neander, translated by the younger Rose. In 
 the main I agree with the German. I do not, 
 however, at all see the necessity for your saying 
 that you agree with Xcwman, until you really 
 have sifted the arguments on both sides. In your 
 position and at your age, it will always be suffi-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clsxxl 
 
 dent for you to say that you have not yet had 
 leisure and opportunity for studying the questions 
 at issue. They have puzzled far older and more 
 highly informed men; and there is surely no 
 reason why you should dub yourself a partisan 
 in this or any other cause, before your time. It 
 is my firm belief, that, in spite of great talents 
 and acquirements in the supporters of these 
 opinions, prodigious zeal and conviction, and 
 much moral and religious excellence, the whole 
 thing is unsound, fantastic, arbitrary, and cannot 
 ultimately stand. 
 
 " I do not know that I have been reading any- 
 thing which I need write about to you, except 
 Hallam's three concluding volumes of the Intro- 
 duction to Modern Literature. It is one of the 
 few classical books which have appeared in Eng- 
 lish in our day. Sense, acuteness, thoughtfulness, 
 care, elegance, information, mark it throughout. 
 There is more of cold candour, than of enthu- 
 siastic warmth, with a decided tendency to 
 moderation and caution, verging sometimes to- 
 wards indifference. The criticism on works of 
 imagination is always excellent, though one may 
 sometimes see ground to differ from him. The 
 comments on the physical sciences are more a 
 compilation, but, I suppose, very well done. It 
 
 ,/
 
 cbcxxii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Is on philosophy and tlie higher theology that 
 there is most room to dissent ; though even here 
 there are a multitude of good remarks, and some 
 extremely neat and concise accounts of the 
 systems of great men. I cannot feel that he is 
 at home in this highest region of thought, or is 
 always just to those who are. But, though some- 
 what narrow and not deep, he is not so fixed in 
 one definite, small scheme, as to preclude the pro- 
 gress of those who regard him as their teacher, 
 and will rather on the whole favour the advance 
 of a philosophic spirit, by the many diversities of 
 view which he describes, by his hostility to vulgar 
 ignorance, and by the general tolerance and ear- 
 nestness which mark his character. It is incom- 
 parably his best book, and one of the very best 
 in recent English literature. But you must not 
 meddle with it till you have taken your degree." 
 
 The next letter relates to a theme which had 
 been appointed for a prize poem. "It is im- 
 possible, with any time I can now give to the 
 matter, to suggest anything of the least value on 
 the subject of the Judgement of Brutus. I might 
 perhaps, were I writing about it, attempt to vary 
 the monotonous rhetorical heaviness of such com- 
 positions, by supposing a Roman peasant to turn 
 up with his spade, while digging in his vineyard,
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxxxiii 
 
 a broken bas-relief, on which he should see the 
 
 judgement scene set forth, and the main point 
 
 made obvious by the likeness of the youths to the 
 
 Consul, and by the Lictors standing near them 
 
 in attitude of menace. I am not sure whether 
 
 something; mio-ht not be made of the contrast be- 
 es o 
 
 tween the Roman Consul and the Jewish King, 
 who would have saved his rebellious son, and 
 who wept over the corpse of Absalom. I ,am 
 sure it would be desirable to say nothing about 
 Liberty, but to set forth Law as the constrain- 
 ing, justifying power, and a legal polity, w^hence 
 civilization, order, and the purity and safety of 
 that domestic life, which Brutus seemingly vio- 
 lated, as the great aim of all Roman patriots. 
 Perhaps it may be said that the Roman, nay, the 
 Greek valued his home for the sake of his country, 
 the household for the State; while the reverse is 
 true of modern Europe. Another curious con- 
 trast to Brutus is presented in Pericles, and his 
 overthrow of the laws in order to legitimize his 
 bastard son. I think they say he never wept, 
 except at the funeral of his last child, — he whose 
 boast it was that he had made no Athenian weep. 
 If you want some modern contrast for Brutus, and 
 that in a Roman, take some one of the Popes, and 
 his efforts to aggrandize his bastards at the ex-
 
 clxxxlv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 pense, not only of Rome as a civil state, but of the 
 ecclesiastical polity which had Rome for its centre. 
 Paul III., or Alexander VI., might serve your pur- 
 pose, and, would furnish room for some brilliant 
 painting on the difference between the Pagan and 
 the Papal city. Would it be appropriate, speak- 
 ing of the Judgement itself, to describe the silent 
 horror, broken only by a wide groan of the people 
 of Rome, and then rise to tell how the invisible 
 powers above, Avho must be described with vague 
 Miltonic grandeur, looked calmly pleased in their 
 serene halls, prescient of the greatness which 
 should swallow all other empires, and lead a hun- 
 dred triumphs past the tomb of Brutus? This is 
 all random talk; so take it only at what it is 
 worth. It might be worth suggesting the dis- 
 tinction between such cases as that of Brutus and 
 Manlius, and the family massacres of barbarian 
 kings, for mere personal purposes. Rome was 
 twice saved by parental authority, once in the case 
 of Brutus, and again in that of Coriolnus, accord- 
 ing to the legend, which is all you want. Other 
 mothers must have suffered the wrongs of Lu- 
 cretia, if Brutus had not shown the virtue of a 
 Roman father, &c. &c. &c. &c. The predominant 
 moral feeling of Rome is shown in the guilt of the 
 sons of Brutus, while the daugliter of Agamem-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxxxv 
 
 non was perfectly innocent ; but the perfect Ro- 
 man parallel of the Greek story is that of Vir- 
 ginius." 
 
 After his friend had passed his examination for 
 his degree, Sterlinor wrote thus : — " Of course it 
 would have been better had you been in the 
 first class ; but it is creditable to be even in the 
 second; and you have no doubt some powers and 
 attainments which an examination could not test, 
 and which are more valuable than those your 
 judges did take measure of. The important point 
 however is, the future, not the past. I have very 
 little advice to give, chiefly this : do not be in a 
 hurry to involve yourself for life in any special 
 employment. If you can obtain pupils, yovi will 
 be able to cultivate your own mind, while you are 
 helping them, and by-and-by will be at least as fit 
 as now to come to a final decision. — As to reckon- 
 ing on literature as a means of subsistence, it is a 
 melancholy kind of speculation, and in ninety- 
 nine cases out of a hundred, produces bitter dis- 
 appointment. Nothing at all events could justify 
 the scheme, except success already obtained. 
 If you can write what shall be worth money, and 
 have the sovereigns in your pocket, you may 
 fairly hope to do the same thing again. But at 
 the best, the temptation to write for the market.
 
 clxxxvi LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 and so degrade one's own feelings and character, 
 is, when one depends on the public for bread, a 
 temptation so strong, that only the firmest and 
 noblest minds can long resist it. I shall be very- 
 glad to hear what you may think of writing, and, 
 if you go on with it, to look at it before you send 
 it forth on any venture." 
 
 A few months after. Sterling sent his friend 
 further advice, on the cultivation of his moral 
 being. "I was glad to have your account of 
 yourself, and especially to find that you are neither 
 idling nor growing narrow. Indolence is the 
 failing of the weak ; but in this country the 
 strong, in the immense majority of cases, stunt 
 themselves into men of mere practice, or of some 
 pinching and mechanical kind of dogma, which 
 they call Truth, and think it comes down ready 
 made for them from heaven, like a hailstone. 
 Keep your vigour and your freedom of mind both 
 together, and at all costs. Be a cobbler all your 
 days, rather than surrender them ; nay, remember 
 always that the only work you have to do, is to 
 cultivate and realize these more and more, and that 
 you are to cat and drink, and wear a shirt, only in 
 order to this end. Our age in this country, with 
 all its loud delusions and profound barbarisms of 
 soul, calls groaningly for help from the few to
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxxxvii 
 
 whom any better spark is given. But even were 
 it otherwise, or were it hopeless that you should 
 help others, the clearness, coherence, and life of 
 your own existence can only be secured by un- 
 ceasing efforts to do whatever is the best work 
 that seems to lie, however distant, before you. 
 It is hard, no doubt, to keep these things in mind, 
 and act upon them, whilst so much distraction 
 goes on around you, and perpetually shrieks. Only 
 look how jjeaceful and lioio icise I am ! But still it 
 is possible. — The right of the State to superintend 
 and modify all bequests for public purposes arises 
 from this, that the possibility of such bequests is 
 a creation of the State. Wherever men exist, 
 they will wish to bequeathe the fruits of their 
 labours to their children ; and the universality of 
 the wish will secure the right in each individual 
 case. But then the property is as freely enjoyed 
 by the heir as by his predecessor ; and the privilege 
 of restraining this right, of establishing trusts for 
 public purposes, is the work of law, and may by 
 law be shaped and altered at the will of the legis- 
 lators. The propriety of exercising this sove- 
 reignty from time to time arises from the chang- 
 ing circumstances and wants of successive gene- 
 rations." 
 
 On his friend's becoming a tutor in a family,
 
 clxxxvlii LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Sterling wrote to him: — " As to advice, which you 
 ask for, — positively, be useful ; negatively, don't 
 be obtrusive; and you will be sure to succeed. If 
 you are zealous in your own peculiar duties, and 
 careful not to step beyond them without adequate 
 cause, any but very singular people wUl be sure to 
 value you; and you will prosper accordingly. As 
 objects more personal to yourself, you must consider 
 the acquisition of any knowledge in your power 
 as to the country you will be living in (Sweden), 
 which very few persons in England know any- 
 thing about. The real condition of the people 
 will be hard to discover; but, if you remain there 
 a year or two, you ought to bring aAvay some 
 accurate conception of the state of politics, of 
 religion, of education, of literature, and even of 
 the morals and manners of the higher classes. 
 As to these matters, I have only two hints to 
 offer, both obvious enough. Learn the language: 
 read the Bible in it, and a daily newspaper, if 
 there is such a thing: and secondly, as soon as 
 you can, talk it to everybody you come across. 
 You will find, I imagine, the use, or even neces- 
 sity, of a more careful and formal politeness than 
 we have time for in England. If circumstances 
 permit, you will learn a good deal by going to 
 the theatre. Buy books of the plays and foUow
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. clxxxix 
 
 the actors. The second personal object is one 
 not dependent on your position at Stockholm, 
 namely, the improvement of your own mind in 
 the higher departments. I highly approve of 
 your design to study German philosophy, but 
 shall not be shocked to hear you abandon it, after 
 trial. It will however by no means be necessary, 
 if you should thus retreat, to fall back upon any 
 position so untenable as that of Pusey. The 
 unlimited authority of the clergy was in the 
 Middle Ages, as the unlimited authority of the 
 Scriptures is generally among us now, the sub- 
 stitute for that reasonable and practical religion, 
 which is both reconcilable with the best know- 
 ledge, and sufficient for the higher wants of life 
 and action: and this may be understood and 
 realized by myriads, to whom Schelling and Hegel 
 are thick darkness. — Consider what seem to be 
 the habits of the family you will be living in, as 
 soon as you can after joining them; and leave 
 them alone at whatever part of the day, probably 
 after dinner, they will most like to be left to 
 themselves. Try to gain the boys' affections by 
 deserving it. — Do not forget to keep a journal of 
 all the information you collect about the country 
 you are living in. But omit gossiping stories 
 about individuals, unless very well attested, of
 
 CXC LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 very expressive; and even then try to leave out 
 names, when possible. Be serious in your pur- 
 poses without affectation; and join cheerfulness 
 with earnestness; and all will go well: how, no 
 one can say, any more than, when a ship is 
 lanched, one can be sure what voyages she will 
 have to make. But for an ill-built vessel no sea 
 is smooth, and no wind fair." 
 
 To return to Sterling's life at Falmouth: broken 
 as his health was and unfit for continuous exer- 
 tion, he still did far more for others than most 
 persons in the fullest health think of attempt- 
 ing. Earnestly desirous of promoting the intel- 
 lectual and moral culture of the inhabitants, he 
 induced some of his friends to join with him in 
 establishing a course of lectures at the Poly- 
 technic Institution, and himself gave the opening 
 one, which is printed at the end of this volume, 
 and another on Greek sculpture, though he had 
 for seven 3'ears been unable to speak in public 
 without yearly increasing danger. He took an 
 active part, as he had done years before when he 
 was curate in my parish, in setting up a book- 
 club for the poor. Those who were in sorrow he 
 comforted and strengthened, by teaching them the 
 wisdom of trying to help others. He felt a special 
 interest in cncom*aging and advising the Cornish
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXCl 
 
 artists, the style of whose paintings is said to 
 have been visibly improved since they listened to 
 his criticisms; for he never shrank from the duty, 
 so irksome to most men, of pointing out their 
 faults and failures. Whatever could be done for 
 the education of the poor, he still as ever hailed 
 with fervent pleasure; and in the autumn of 1840 
 he declared that the Church had taken the 
 greatest step in national education since the days 
 of Lvither. 
 
 The revision of his early Avritings in Blackwood 
 occupied him in the autumn of 1841. Two years 
 later he said that his opinions had changed on 
 many points, so that some of these things had 
 become almost as strange to him as if written by 
 some one else ; but, he added, " Writing them 
 did me great good; and they gave a high pleasure 
 to her whose sympathy Avas then my all in all. 
 Whether they have any lasting worth for others, 
 time alone can show. One must think often of 
 what Cornelius, the painter, said : / starved for 
 twenty years; and then the world came round to me. 
 Providence has freed me from the risk of starv- 
 ing ; and I can trust myself for bearing cheerfully 
 any amount of neglect from the public, which in 
 truth is an affliction that does not cost me a 
 thought a month."
 
 CXCn LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 In the beginning of 1842 he was deprived of 
 one of his most intimate friends. " Since I wrote 
 last I have lost Calvert, the man with whom, of 
 all others, I have been during late years the most 
 intimate. Simplicity, benevolence, practical sense, 
 and moral earnestness were his great, unfailing 
 characteristics ; and no man, I believe, ever 
 possessed them more entirely. His illness had 
 latterly so prostrated him both in mind and body, 
 that those who most loved him were most anxious 
 for his departure. My own health is such as 
 to make my thoughts very conversant with the 
 grave, with futurity, and with whatever lasts in 
 the midst of our fluctuations. The daily loss of 
 all we most value seems to me almost the only 
 natural course of things: and the idea of what 
 supplies and compensations remain, or are added, 
 gains additional force from every blow that prunes 
 us. What most lastingly pains me is the reflec- 
 tion on the discords needlessly admitted into my 
 life, and the pain unreasonably given to others." 
 
 Sterling's feelings, on the death of his friend, 
 were thus expressed in the Epitaph which was 
 srraven on his tombstone : — 
 
 Pure soul ! strong, kind, and peaceful, 'mid the pain 
 That racked and solemnized thy torch of love, 
 
 Here in our world below we mourn in vain, 
 But would not call thee from thy world above.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXClll 
 
 Of varied wisdom, and of heart sincere, 
 
 Through gloomy ways thy feet unfaltering trod ; 
 
 Reason thy lamp, and Faith thy star while here, 
 Now both one brightness in the light of God. 
 
 Some time before, his affection for this friend 
 
 had dictated the following lines : — 
 
 'Tis true, dear friend, there was a time 
 When life could ring a memer chime 
 
 Than aught the present hears : 
 But, while our hearts those days recall. 
 There is a bliss exceeding all 
 
 We felt in other years. 
 
 For still the thought of things gone by 
 Relieves of pain the lingering sigh 
 
 We give to former woe. 
 And fills with finer joy the sense 
 Of happiness that, once intense. 
 
 Has now a starry glow. 
 
 To float on Memory's twilight seas, 
 We spread a quiet sail at ease, 
 
 Beneath a crescent moon : 
 The dead around, the young, the fair, 
 Seem whispering through the silent air 
 
 That we shall meet them soon. 
 
 And thou and I, dear friend, whose life 
 Has been so full of toil and strife, 
 
 By sorrow led to Truth, 
 May learn, in mutual peace and love. 
 That man is made for hopes above 
 
 The pleasures dear to youth. 
 
 About this time one of his friends who best 
 knew him, Mr. Mill, wrote thus ; " I fear not 
 VOL. I. i
 
 CXCIV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 SO much for his bodily state, as for his spirits. It 
 is so hard for an active mind like his to reconcile 
 itself to comparative idleness, and to what he 
 considers as iiselessness, only however from his 
 inability to persuade himself of the good which 
 his society, his correspondence, and the very 
 existence of such a man diffuses through the 
 world. If he did but know the moral, and even 
 intellectual influence which he exercises, without 
 writing or publishing anything, he would think it 
 quite worth living for, even if he were never to 
 be capable of writing again." 
 
 In consequence of a continual slight hemor- 
 rhage, he was advised, early in the spring of 
 1842, to take a voyage for a couple of months 
 about the Mediterranean. But this did not avail 
 to restore his health, as his former journeys had 
 done. Soon after his return he wrote thus : 
 " The only really satisfactory part of my tour 
 was the three weeks at Naples and in its neigh- 
 boiu:hood, which have left matter for three cen- 
 turies of profitable remembrance. The works of 
 art in that gallery are hardly less valuable than 
 at Rome; and Pompeii and Paestum are unsur- 
 passed in interest even by the Vatican. These 
 things teach what human nature, especially in 
 youth, is slow and sad to learn, that the world
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXCV 
 
 has lost as well as gained much in two thousand 
 years, — lost perhaps as irreparably as it has gained 
 securely. Faintly and from a distance as we 
 must now converse with the art of Greece, we 
 must yet learn more and more to doubt if there 
 is any living voice of equal power. It is not so 
 certain that 'the oracles are dumb,' but plain 
 enough that the ears are deaf. At Rome, after 
 a week, I began to grow ill, and set out suddenly. 
 But that week has left some clear images, mixed 
 with much personal, private sadness. St. Peter's, 
 with its altar lighted and its windows darkened, 
 is a new and potent image. Pisa and Genoa I 
 saw, each of them for a few hours, and both with 
 much pleasure. A week in France did little for 
 me, especially as I staid too short a time in Paris 
 to see the Louvre. But France is alive and 
 active compared with Italy; and one felt oneself 
 again in the modern actual world. A young- 
 naval officer, a Vicomte and man of science, who 
 has been round and in the world, and is entrusted 
 with the French Government experiments on the 
 Archimedes screw, gave me much agreeable talk, 
 and is the neatest example I have seen of -tire 
 positive side of our civilization." 
 
 Writing to another friend of this journey, he 
 said : " My run of two months gave me three 
 
 i 2
 
 CXCVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 delightful weeks at and near Naples, quite new- 
 ground, and meriting all its old and late renown. 
 The landscapes are perfect, which can be said of 
 few others known to me. Pompeii, and the trea- 
 sures drawn from it, especially the ancient fresco 
 paintings, have an interest beyond any visible 
 remains of classic life I know; and the great 
 temple at Paestum is the most beautiful of all 
 buildings, at least for a man who has not visited 
 Sicily or Greece. — In thinking of these objects, 
 they come before the eye with a vivid beauty, 
 such as to uncultivated men must carry with it a 
 sense of outwardness and revelation. The only 
 drawback from Naples was the want of any friend 
 of like mind ; yet few portions of life have been 
 equally pleasant and fruitful. At Rome, — to 
 which I travelled by laud, through Capua and 
 Anxur, (a beautiful journey as far as this last 
 place, now Terracina,) — I spent but nine days, 
 two or three of them lost from illness. There 
 all was both new and old: such another week 
 earth could not furnish me." 
 
 Soon after his return from Italy, Sterling began 
 a poem on Coeur de Lion. He intended this to 
 be the work of his life, to go on and grow with 
 him, and stand all the tests he could give it in 
 after years. Several books were written some-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXCVll 
 
 what in the manner of Ariosto. It was designed 
 to exhibit a kind of typical view of the education 
 of a man, taking Richard through various adven- 
 tures and experiences, until his rough and rugged 
 nature was subdued and mellowed into harmony. 
 " Of how far grander growth (he said) were 
 the men of old times than of ours. The earth 
 may be everywhere more green and luxuriant; 
 but there are none of those giant oaks and ferns 
 which it bore in former ages. Some say that 
 there is compensation in the more general cul- 
 tivation: but it is a poor compensation not to 
 live in an age of great men. We have so much 
 fewer examples now of moral and intellectual 
 greatness combined than formerly." Yet at the 
 same time he complained of Carlyle's utterly con- 
 demning; our age as void of faith and heroism. 
 " There is more of the heroism of domestic life 
 now (he said) than in any age of the world." He 
 longed much to write on Shakspeare as the son of 
 his time, but did not feel strength for such a 
 work. He sometimes expressed wonder whether 
 the many things of which his mind was full would 
 go on and be brought to perfection in another 
 world. 
 
 In the following September, 1842, he wrote to 
 me. "You may perhaps have heard that this
 
 CXCYlll LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 summer lias been a bad one with me. Dlness has 
 unfitted me during the hist two months for any- 
 kind of work, and ahiiost for writing even a note. — 
 The loss of Arnold, whom I never saw, has grieved 
 me as if he had been a friend. — When in Italy, 
 in spring, Adii Corinthum, I saw Piestum, and 
 thought of your delight in a vision, which to me 
 also was one of the strangest and most delightful 
 on earth. What I was least prepared for was the 
 beauty of the antique frescoes at Naples ; but all 
 was beautiful. Latterly even Italy has faded 
 from me ; and, being sick and weak, the sense of 
 spiritual incoherence and debility in the whole 
 land, and in almost all its utterances, has lain on 
 me more heavily than I can tell you. — Much, on 
 your account, do I rejoice to hear that Bunsen is 
 to be at Herstmonceux. Dear Herstmonceux ! 
 that I can cease to think of only when I think no 
 longer. 
 
 *' The at least seemingly successful attack made 
 by Strauss on much of the scriptural narrative 
 makes it a desperate engine among uncultivated 
 minds for overthrowing the whole of Christianity. 
 They are now translating it for the poor; and in 
 their dreadfully untaught state the ruin of his- 
 torical religion will appear to involve the fate of 
 all moral oblig-ation. The accounts I hear from
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CXCIX 
 
 very competent persons, of the utter absence of 
 any religious feeling and any kind of thought 
 among huge masses of the manufacturing poor, 
 daily amaze me ; and my own knowledge of the 
 state of some of the peasantry, combined with 
 this kind of information, goes far to satisfy me 
 that all our institutions have been almost entirely \ 
 worthless for humanizing the poor as a class. — We ' 
 never have had any form of religion since the 
 Reformation efficient among the poor; and it 
 seems probable that any fit for the purpose must 
 assume a very different shape from that which the 
 Clergy generally are as yet prepared to acknow- 
 ledge. It is said that Wesleyanism is now not at 
 all progressive ; and, so far as I can learn, no 
 kind of fanaticism, providing any serious check on 
 brutality, makes way in the large towns of the 
 North. What will come of it all, who dares pro- 
 phecy, or almost guess ? Arnold I believe to have 
 been one of the very few, perhaps the only man y 
 in England, seeing the whole evil, and prepared 
 to make such changes in the Church-system as 
 might possibly have rendered it effectual for its 
 nominal purpose among those who most need a 
 moral reform. Here the real Church is Wesleyan ; 
 but over three- fourths of England there is, I fear, 
 none."
 
 CC LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Soon afterwards he was greatly delighted by 
 Tieck's Vittoria Accoi-omhona. "I am not sure 
 that it is not the most remarkable novel I know. 
 In intensity and range it is far superior to Don 
 Quixote, in depth and truth to all English and 
 all French fictions. In Wilhelm Meister there 
 is no strictly moral aim ; but there is an analogous 
 ideal one, and a standard of cultivation, though 
 not of duty, towards which the personages tend. 
 But in Vittoria Tieck seems inspired by the 
 feeling that there is no rule of life whatever, con- 
 formity to which is not too dearly bought by the 
 abatement of our energies. The most fearful 
 crimes, and the utter disorganization of society, 
 are shown as tolerable, and even attractive, when 
 accompanied by the richness and freedom of in- 
 dividual existence and enormous human energy. 
 If a German be excusable for feeling this, in a 
 country where art and science and religion are all 
 impelled and united by so strong a living creative 
 spirit, no wonder that we, in the stench of our 
 material wealth, and the deadness of all noble 
 thought, should often be overwhelmed by the 
 same faith or fancy. — I have also read with much 
 pleasure Liicke's notice of K. O. Muller. I sup- 
 pose Miillei''s preference of the Dorians must 
 be explained by the fact that his studies had
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCl 
 
 chiefly lain towards the earlier period of Greek 
 history." 
 
 About the same time he wrote to a friend who 
 had been translating the Edda. " Your transla- 
 tion is often very happy, full of those short, sharp- 
 cut words, that carry home the meaning at a 
 stroke. As to the book itself, there is less of the 
 tone of ancient simple-hearted truth than I had 
 hoped, though no doubt many of the materials 
 may have arisen in that way. I have made no 
 enquiries into the matter, nor even considered it 
 very deeply; but it seems to me at first sight that 
 the old legends had become, before they were 
 fixed in this form, mere popular tales, like those 
 in Grimms Mdhrchen. Thor's journey is cer- 
 tainly very grim-wise, and with a light touch of 
 humour: curious to compare it with the adven- 
 tures of Hercules. But on the whole how poor is 
 everything, matched against the mythology of the 
 Greeks! They must remain till the end of time 
 the mythologists of mankind. There have been 
 Christian poets as great as any; but, for a com- 
 plete, infinite, poetic world, we must still go back 
 to Olympus and Arcadia, and all that belongs to 
 them. The day, one hopes, may come, Avhen, 
 pedants having ceased to seek either true history 
 or false religion in that beautiful creation, it will 
 
 £3
 
 ecu LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 become known to all the earth, even the now 
 gross, suffering multitude, as an inexhaustible 
 treasure-house of noble joys. — Thorwaldsen's 
 statues I have seen in plaster, and can conceive 
 how far more striking they must be in the 
 Church for which they were intended. He is how- 
 ever not at all preeminently a Christian sculptor, 
 though much the greatest since Michael Angelo. 
 It was very curious to observe in his studio at 
 Rome, that his design for the hearers of Homer 
 rhapsodizing is substantially the same as that for 
 the company gathered about the Baptist, which 
 fills a pediment of the Copenhagen Church. It 
 is too much, no doubt, to say, as some have said, 
 that there can be no Christian sculpture; but cer- 
 tainly the spirit of the Gospel has never been as 
 perfectly exhibited in this form of art, or art of 
 form, as in the Cartoons and some of the Ma- 
 donnas of Raphael, and even in the works of some 
 earlier painters. The grave equipoise of soul, 
 expressed in symmetric images, is evidently Thor- 
 waldsen's predominant characteristic: and this is 
 appropriate to moral and philosophical, not to 
 devotional elevation. Did you ever hear the story 
 of his being at a party at Bunsen's, whose house 
 was on the Capitoline Hill, on the site of the 
 Temple of 01ym})ian Jove, and where the conver-
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCUl 
 
 sation, as often under Bunsen's guidance, took a 
 very Christian turn, till Thorwaldsen remarked 
 through the window, commanding a noble pros- 
 pect of Rome, the modern city, the planet Jupiter 
 in great glory, and filling his glass exclaimed: Well! 
 Here's in honour of the ancient Gods. — As to literary 
 matters I have not been in the way of hearing 
 much. I saw in some periodical a review of poems 
 by an Oxford man, a Mr. Faber, which seemed to 
 me to show a really poetic feeling, in the dreamy 
 flow of the verse, and soft involution of the images. 
 But, on the whole, poetry is well-nigh dead among 
 us: it counts for nothing among the great work- 
 ing forces of the age, except so far as Words- 
 worth's idyllic and didactic songs in some slight 
 
 degree counteract the coarse materialism of se- 
 es 
 
 ciety, and the superstitious literalism of the 
 Church. Carlyle is the great antagonist of these 
 evils; and his new volume on Heroes will perhaps 
 be more widely felt than anything he has done; 
 and, in spite of some considerable exaggerations, 
 is on the whole more free from delusive paradox, 
 than his other works, and quite equal to the best 
 of them in glow, force, and prophetic insight. 
 There is nothing to me stranger, than that a man 
 of our time, with wide literary culture, should 
 have so fully the prophetic immediateness and
 
 CCIV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 intensity; of which there is, I believe, no other 
 example in recent ages, except among the unin- 
 structed. England goes on with its old, blind, 
 unerring force, in its railroad fashion, and com- 
 mands the wonder and even respect of men, while 
 it does little towards enlightening them. We are 
 strange, neat-handed Titans, and, if wanting fire 
 from Heaven, make at least the cheapest and most 
 polished of patent lamps for receiving it when it 
 shall come." 
 
 For many years Sterling had been tried by 
 various forms and degrees of sickness ; but he had 
 also to drink deeply of the other cup of human 
 suffering, before his earthly course was closed. 
 At the beo-inninj? of 1843 he broke a blood-vessel 
 by over-exerting himself in helping a maid-servant 
 to carry a weight which he thought too heavy 
 for her. This was followed by two months of 
 anxious nursing, during which, as ever, his con- 
 stant care was lest his attendants should wear 
 themselves out by waiting upon him; and he 
 would often send away his wife to rest, saying, "It 
 would be so sad for the children to lose us 
 both." In the month of March he had gained 
 strength enough to go to London for a few 
 days, to see his mother, whose health was rapidly 
 declining. On this occasion I had the happiness
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCV 
 
 of spending a couple of hours with him; for a 
 great happiness it was, notwithstanding the pain- 
 ful shock of seeing the change which years of 
 sickness had wrought in his form and features, 
 and though other changes, still sadder to me, had 
 interrupted that close union of thought and feeling 
 which at one time subsisted between us. We had 
 not met for several years; and we both perhaps 
 were half afraid that this twofold separation might 
 have produced some sort of estrangement. But 
 this fear instantly vanished; and we felt that our 
 affection was undiminished. On his return to Fal- 
 mouth he wrote to me: "My journey to London, 
 and the cold it gave me, would have been worth 
 while, had it only been for the sake of seeing you. 
 In much that I had reckoned on, I was disap- 
 pointed, by being confined to the house; but this 
 more than made up for all: only I have been 
 thinking ever since of the many things I ought to 
 have asked about. Heaven grant the summer do 
 not pass without our meeting again ! " 
 
 Alas ! this wish was unfulfilled. Anxiety 
 about his wife's approaching confinement had 
 made him hasten home sooner than he otherwise 
 would have done. On Good Friday, 1843, he 
 wrote to me: " This Friday is doubly good. ]My 
 wife has just been brought to bed of a stout
 
 CCVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 little girl; and they are both doing as well as 
 possible.'^ On the following Monday however 
 a great change took place in her, though not 
 enough to alarm the physicians. He watched 
 over her through the night, during which she 
 rapidly became worse ; and early on the Tuesday 
 morning he sent for the physicians. Wlien the 
 post came in, he left the room to see what account 
 it brought of his mother. She had died on Easter 
 Sunday. He returned to his wife, who asked what 
 tidings he had received. He told her. She mur- 
 mured, "Poor old man!" meaning his widowed 
 father, and never spoke again. Ere long she had 
 ceased to breathe; and witliin two hours he found 
 himself deprived both of his mother and of his wife. 
 He had always loved his mother with the ten- 
 derest aifection. In a note written a few days 
 before her death, he said : " All is confusion and 
 dismay; but I still try to read and work. When 
 I think of my childhood, I feel that I can only 
 cry. Gray might well say, / noiv feel that a 
 man can have but one mother; and mine did a 
 thousand times more for me, than most women 
 have head or heart to do for their sons. But for 
 her, I might have been a fool or a money-maker; 
 and she is perhaps at this moment expiring." His 
 wife was a woman of a noble character, of gi'eat
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCVll 
 
 energy and self-controul, with high intellectual 
 endowments, for which he had such respect, that 
 whatever he wrote was submitted to her judge- 
 ment ; and he often spoke of the help he derived, 
 especially from her musical ear. Sometimes he 
 would write his poems in a diiferent metre, if she 
 did not think them harmonious. Her duties as a 
 wife and mother were fulfilled with the devotion 
 of all her faculties to them: her love for him was 
 boundless as his for her. It might have been 
 thought that this twofold blow, falling so suddenly 
 and at once on one who was so much enfeebled, 
 must have crushed him. But with Sterling the 
 feeling of duty overcame every hindrance. He 
 could not give himself up even to such sorrow, 
 when his duty to his children commanded him to 
 repress it. He called them round him, told them 
 of their loss, and wrote down these words, " The 
 Lord gave; and the Lord hath taken away: 
 blessed be the name of the Lord I" and " Blessed 
 are they that mourn; for they shall be comforted;" 
 which he desired them to copy out, and learn. 
 He told them that he must now try to be a 
 Mother as well as a Father to them. On the 
 evening after the funeral, feeling quite worn out, 
 he said to them, as he bade them good night: 
 " If I am taken from you, God will take care 
 of you."
 
 CCvni LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 A fortnight after, he wrote: "I have felt the 
 kindness of your letter far more deeply than I can 
 now attempt to express. It has been one of many 
 consolations granted to me during the last weeks, 
 which I have found of far more efficacy, than I 
 could have before imagined. The thought of her, 
 and of her excellence, and the confident hope 
 that we are not divided for ever, have been my 
 great blessings. But my children,' my friends 
 have also been invaluable ministers of good to 
 me." 
 
 In the month of June he removed from Fal- 
 mouth to Ventnor, partly for the sake of being 
 nearer to his relations and to most of his friends, 
 and partly because every object at Falmouth re- 
 minded him too painfully of his loss. "It ap- 
 peared (he wrote) to be decidedly the opinion of 
 the medical men that the climate of Ventnor is 
 the best attainable in England; access to one's 
 friends is far easier than from Torquay ; and there 
 are much better educational advantages than at 
 other places recommended for their winter mild- 
 ness. The country is very pretty, the people 
 civil, and not beggarly. Prices are high; but 
 the only serious disadvantage is the distance from 
 Herstmonceux, and all places where I can see the 
 face of a friend. In this res}>ect, as well as some
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCIX 
 
 others, raj departure from Falmouth was very 
 grievous. But one's work in life, or half of it, is 
 to bear pain patiently ; and it all can be borne if 
 one chooses." At times during that summer he 
 talked of paying me a visit. "I have been in 
 thought visiting Herstmonceux numberless times, 
 and now and then have fancied I could do so with- 
 out too much pain. The other day I was on the 
 point of going to Brighton; and it would have 
 been easy to go on. My journey was stopped by 
 a cold. But before that, I liad nearly made up 
 my mind, that no pleasure my visit could bring to 
 others would counterbalance the misery I must 
 myself endure in again visiting that place. Such 
 feelings cannot be brought under rule, and no 
 doubt are also very wayward. To-morrow I may 
 think differently; but for a few days I shall not 
 be able to leave London; and even then I doubt 
 whether I shall be in a state to approach you. 
 There are some spots, where it seems to me that 
 I could have no business unless to die." 
 
 Intellectual employment was always indispen- 
 sable to Sterling. During the summer of 1843 
 he revised and printed his tragedy of Strafford. 
 " That I should do so (he wrote) was the strong 
 wish of one whose wishes are now all-powerful 
 with me, as well they may be. Laud, I fear,
 
 CCX LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 remains with all the blots that offended you. 
 Whatever may be the historical fact, the empty 
 violence of the man, as I have drawn him, is re- 
 quisite for contrast, and to round the circle of 
 characters presented. — I have been reading some 
 German books. Tieck's Novellen have been in- 
 teresting me much, though time has failed for 
 more than four or five of the little volumes. 
 Some of the shorter and simpler tales, as the 
 Gelehrte and the Weihnachfsabend, are delightful. 
 In the longer and more ambitious he is often 
 either prolix or exaggerated ; and the essential 
 formative idea is sometimes a very obvious one, 
 though richly disguised. In these respects how 
 inferior to Goethe, and yet how superior in all to 
 any part of modern English literature ! — A friend 
 brought me some weeks ago from Germany one 
 of the latest and most important of the Hegelian 
 attacks on Schelllng, a volume of Lectures by 
 Michelet. I have only dipped into it; but it 
 rather pleases me. It is the most lucid German 
 composition on philosophy that I remember, ex- 
 cept Fichte's writings. One cannot, I think, help 
 rather doubting whether Schelling really has any 
 great idea in reserve, other than those of his early 
 works. If so, it will be hard to extinguish the 
 Hegelian system, which seems to have grown so
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXl 
 
 naturally and necessarily out of the previous stage 
 of thought. Living as we do in England, to read 
 a German book on these matters is like knocking 
 one's head through the blue sky, and getting a 
 view at the other side of the stars, not, I think, 
 the wrong side. The state of thought and of life 
 among us is indeed wretched enough compared 
 with what one would wish; but compared with 
 twenty years ago tliere does seem a considerable 
 improvement, a better tone among young men, 
 a more open mind in literature, less of that mon- 
 strous national self-satisfaction, and more humanity 
 and sense in politics. This good however, such 
 as it is, seems very weak, vague, and shapeless, 
 and, above all, has no sufficient chiefs and repre- 
 sentatives. The real strength of the nation still 
 seems to be almost all of that brute mechanic 
 kind. Think if we had a dozen men to stand up 
 for ideas, as Cobden and his friends do for machi- 
 nery. — Has all our hope of a better day dis- 
 appeared with Arnold? Lately I saw here a 
 pupil of his, who spoke of him with that enthu- 
 siasm which is so beautiful in all his better 
 scholars. From him I heard of A.'s panic vene- 
 ration for the talents, at least, of Newman, — 
 a feeling to me incomprehensible. That New- 
 man has much shrewdness and some elea'ancc
 
 CCXU LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 of mind, is clear enough ; but how any one ac- 
 customed to read Plato and Aristotle, Schleier- 
 macher, or even Neander, can do more than 
 smile at his helpless dullness on the ground of 
 principles, of ideas, this is to me very odd." 
 Among the signs of the improvement in the state 
 of thought and feeling, which Sterling here hails, 
 was the Charge delivered that year by Archdeacon 
 Manning, which he read with the greatest interest 
 and delight. 
 
 The winter of 1843 was passed without any 
 alarming attack, though with gradually increasing 
 weakness. But on the 4th of April, 1844, a 
 slight exertion caused the breaking of a blood- 
 vessel, and a hemorrhage so violent, that the 
 persons around him thought it must be fatal. 
 Still, through the care and skill of his friend and 
 physician. Dr. Martin, and the singular elasticity of 
 his constitution, he rallied again ; although he had 
 a strong presentiment that the Easter Tuesday, 
 which was the anniversary of his loss, would be 
 the day of his own death. Soon however it be- 
 came too plain that the improvement must needs 
 be brief, and that the progress of the disease, at 
 the utmost, could only be retarded for a few 
 months. Even for this he had to submit to the 
 privation of not seeing his children for more than
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXIU 
 
 a few minutes a day. He was forbidden to see 
 any of his friends, except his brothers and his 
 wife's sister, whom he had long loved and revered 
 as a pattern of all that is most excellent in woman- 
 hood, and who had nursed him with the tenderest 
 care during his extreme danger in April. In this 
 state of what he deemed utter uselessness, he 
 wrote : " Is it wrong to pray that this cup may 
 pass away? but I hope I may be enabled to sub- 
 mit and endure. By far my greatest privation, 
 independent of the unspeakable one that ended 
 my Falmouth life, is the want of all society Avith 
 my friends. Hare and F. Newman, as well as 
 others, would have come to see me; but I was 
 obliged to decline. This is my first experience 
 of passing months without any intellectual inter- 
 course except on paper. My days pass fast; but 
 a great charm is wanting." 
 
 About the same time he wrote to me : " I also 
 had been thinking a thousand times of writing to 
 you, especially as there neither was nor is any 
 chance of my being Avell enough to see you. 
 Much however of the last three months has been 
 spent in recollection of my friends, and with more 
 unmixed thankfulness than for any blessing of my 
 life, except my marriage. The faces of the poor 
 people at Herstmonceux have also recurred to me
 
 CCxiv LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 very often, especially of some whom I saw dying 
 there. Though with so much less of outward 
 comfort, their patience exceeded mine ; yet on 
 any ground I have little to complain of. This 
 world lies even now clear and bright before me, 
 and, being good in itself, is the prelusive image of 
 a still better one. It will be a most blessed re- 
 lease Avhen I am called away ; for I cannot hope 
 ever again to be of the smallest use in this world. 
 Farewell! You can never know the fondness 
 with which I recall the minutest portion of our 
 intercourse. We shall meet again, be well assured. 
 Christianity is a great comfort and blessing to 
 me, although I am quite unable to believe all its 
 original docvTments. I am thankful for all things, 
 and hope much." 
 
 Still, even at this time, he read much, and with 
 a lively interest. Happening one day to open a 
 volume of William Law's works, he met with his 
 answer to Mandeville's Fable of the Bees, which 
 struck him as so satisfactory a refutation of the 
 immoral systems of that age, that he could not 
 rest till he had written to his brother-in-law, Mr. 
 Maurice, and sought for his assistance in reprint- 
 ing it; which plan was executed soon after. The 
 thought of being still able to help others gave 
 him such a spring for the moment, that those who
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXV 
 
 were about him half fancied he was growing 
 stronger. 
 
 One of his cliief employments during these 
 months of extreme debility was writing daily 
 letters to his eldest son, whom he had just sent to 
 King's College School. He had little strength 
 for other correspondence; but he wished that his 
 son should have this lasting memorial of a father's 
 love; and while he tried to adapt his letters to 
 the capacity of a boy, he desired to furnish him 
 with some of the results of his own experience in 
 life, with short sketches of his chief friends, and 
 Avith exhortations to cultivate manly energy and 
 truth. 
 
 Another daily employment was to read over 
 his own papers, letters, journals, and unfinished 
 compositions; large piles of which were com- 
 mitted to the flames. At the same time he found 
 an amusement and interest in correcting some of y 
 his previous poems, and making additions to them. 
 On the 1st of September he wrote: — "During 
 the last week I have had much of enjoyment, 
 mainly Avliile composing; though I must warn 
 you that what I Avrite now may turn out very 
 feeble and wandering, Avhen submitted to other 
 eyes. There is however, unless I am greatly 
 deceived, a character of calmness, and hope, and
 
 CCXVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 mellow evening peace diffused through these little 
 
 things, that will at least interest my friends. 
 
 Their affection has also been a real comfort. 
 
 There was a note from Carlyle not long since, I 
 
 think the noblest and tenderest thing that ever 
 
 came from human pen. Mill's letters have been 
 
 almost equally remarkable, and, considering the 
 
 man, are perhaps much more so. Newman has 
 
 been all in word and deed that man could be. 
 
 A letter of Emerson had more heart than one 
 
 would suppose could be found in all America. 
 
 Trench, in spite of much inward and outward 
 
 separation, has shewn himself what he always 
 
 was, one whose feelings are pure as crystal, and 
 
 warm as the sun. Of the Maurices and my 
 
 brother, I need not write. But the knowledge of 
 
 how they all felt has been a real and constant 
 
 comfort at the times when I most wanted it." 
 
 The practice of writing verses continued with 
 
 him even till the very last. In a note dated on 
 
 the 17th of September, he said, with reference to 
 
 a poem entitled the Litany of Great Men, which 
 
 had appeared in Blackwood in the preceding 
 
 March : " The last of the heroes in my bead-roll 
 
 is, you may remember, Shelley; then comes 
 
 " Regent of poetic mountains, 
 Drawing from their deepest fountains
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXVll 
 
 Freshness, pure and everlasting, 
 
 Wordsworth, de&v and honoured name, 
 
 O'er thee pause the stars, forecasting 
 Tlay imperishable fame." 
 
 He added that he had been reading a good deal 
 
 of Wordsworth, and was more than ever struck 
 
 by his strong sense of righteousness, comparing it 
 
 very favorably with the passionate, but confused, 
 
 utterances of some other writers, and declaring 
 
 his conviction that Wordsworth was incomparably 
 
 the greatest writer of his time. " Coleridge might 
 
 have been so ; only he would not take the 
 
 trouble." 
 
 In one of his notes at this time he said that he 
 had gained but little good from what he had heard 
 or read of Theology; but "what gives me the 
 greatest comfort are those words in the Lord's 
 Prayer, TIit/ will be done.^^ 
 
 On the 16tli of September there was a great 
 and sudden increase of weakness, which convinced 
 him and those around him that the end was at 
 hand. In this conviction he said : " I thank the 
 All-wise One." His sister remarked the next 
 day that he was unusually cheerful. He lay on 
 the sofa quietly, telling her of little things that he 
 wished her to do for him, and choosing out books 
 to be sent to his friends. On the 18th he was 
 again comforted by letters from ]\Ir. Trench and 
 
 VOL. I. k
 
 CCXVm LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Mr. Mill, to whom he took pleasure in scribbling 
 some little verses of thanks. Then, writing a few 
 lines in pencil, he gave them to his sister, saying, 
 " This is for you ; you will care more for this I" 
 The lines were — 
 
 Could we but hear all Nature's voice, 
 
 From Glowworm up to Sun, 
 'Twould speak with one concordant sound, 
 
 « Thy wUl, God, be done!" 
 
 But hark, a sadder, mightier prayer 
 
 From all men's hearts that live, 
 " Thy will be done in earth and heaven, 
 
 And Thou my sins forgive!" 
 
 These were the last words he wrote. He 
 murmured over the last two lines to himself. He 
 had been very quiet all that day, little inclined to 
 read or speak, until the evening, when he talked 
 a little to his sister. As it grew dusk, he ap- 
 peared to be seeking for something, and, on her 
 asking what he wanted, said, " Only the old 
 Bible, which I used so often at Herstmonceux 
 in the cottages;" and wliich generally lay near 
 him. A little later his brother arrived from 
 London, Avith whom he conversed cheerfully 
 for a few minutes. He was then left to settle 
 for the night. But soon he grew worse; and 
 the servant summoned the family to his room. 
 He was no longer able to recoornise them. The
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOPw CCXIX 
 
 last struggle was short; and before eleven o'clock 
 his sph'it had departed. 
 
 He was buried in the beautiful little churchyard 
 of Bonchurch. 
 
 In drawing up this memorial of my dear Friend, 
 my chief materials have been a long course of 
 letters which I received from him during the last 
 sixteen years of his life, and another rich series 
 of letters to Mr. Trench. To these have been 
 added a few very interesting letters to another 
 friend, and some recollections supplied by persons 
 who were intimate with him in his latter years. 
 Doubtless many more of his letters must be ex- 
 tant; and though few of them can have exprest 
 his inmost thoughts and feelings so fully as those 
 I have had to make use of, all must be instinct 
 with that genial life which characterized every 
 movement of his spirit. If any of his friends, 
 who may have preserved such letters, will entrust 
 me with them, I will gladly insert such portions 
 as may seem to throw fresh light on his character 
 and opinions, should I live to see these volumes 
 reach a second edition. 
 
 I have felt it a solemn duty to speak of my 
 Friend's errors as well as of that in liim which 
 was noblest and wisest, and which I could most 
 
 k 2
 
 CCXX LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 heartily sympathize with and admire. Had I 
 omitted the former, the representation would have 
 been false, — a procedure unjustifiable in all cases, 
 above all, in the portraiture of one who hated 
 every kind of falsehood with an intense hatred, 
 and whose spirit burnt with a consuming love of 
 truth; not indeed like the fiery bush, which is 
 tlie type of the very highest minds, such as St. 
 Paul's and Luther's, Avhen the Spirit of God takes 
 possession of them; but with a flame approaching 
 more nearly thereto than is often found in this 
 world of phantoms and interests. I do not mean 
 that every foolish, intemperate word a wise man 
 may utter, and every wrong act a good man may 
 perform, is to be scrupulously noted down in any 
 earthly Book of Judgement. That which in its 
 nature is transient and perishable, should be 
 allowed to pass away: the decayed leaves should 
 be left in the mould with which they have mingled. 
 But it is not so Avith errors which have gained 
 a permanent influence, which have shaped the 
 growth of the tree. A bent tree is not to be 
 drawn as a straight one; or the truth of history 
 vanishes, and its use as a discipline of knowledge 
 and of wisdom. Hence the representation of my 
 friend's life is unsatisfactory. By the omission of 
 certain portions, it might easily have been made
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXXl 
 
 to appear more satisfactory: but then it would 
 have been a lie: and every lie, — O that people 
 would believe it! — is at best but a whited sepul- 
 chre. The representation of his life is unsatis- 
 factory, because the problem of his life was 
 incomplete. That problem, as has been truly 
 observed to me by one of his chief friends, was 
 the same as the great problem of our age. In 
 fact, it was the same with the great problem of 
 all ages, to reconcile faith with knowledge, philo- 
 sophy with religion, the subjective world of 
 human speculation with the objective world in 
 which God has manifested Himself by a twofold 
 Revelation, outwardly to our senses, and spiritually 
 to our spirits. Nay, this is only the intellectual 
 side of the problem, though not merely intellectual, 
 inasmuch as in the higher regions of thought the 
 wings of the intellect flag and droop, unless a 
 moral power nerve and sustain them. For what 
 is the great moral problem of mankind, — though 
 in this, since the will is the main seat of our weak- 
 ness, we have wandered still more widely from 
 its true solution, — but to strive after a like atone- 
 ment? From the first dawn of speculation, man 
 has ever been endeavouring to solve this great 
 problem under one form or other; and it has ever 
 been receiving fresh, though only partial solutions.
 
 CCXXU LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Even since it was solved once for all, for every 
 practical purpose of life, by the Incarnation of 
 the Word, new forms of the speculative problem 
 have been continually presenting themselves: 
 every new solution has disclosed a deeper mystery 
 still unsolved: nor has any form of it been more 
 perplexing than that in which it presents itself 
 to the meditative minds of our own times. If 
 we look through the recent history of thought, 
 especially in Germany, where thought upon such 
 subjects has been far more active and vigorous 
 than elsewhere, we may see what powers have 
 been engaged in it, and what powers have been 
 baffled, at least so far as only to attain to a very 
 partial and inconclusive solution. One wizard 
 after another has bid the waves be still, and then, 
 deluded by a momentary lull, has fancied that he 
 had found out the spell to bind them: but anon 
 they have swollen, and tost, and roared; and he 
 too has been swept along by them. It is true, very 
 many, nay, the great bulk of mankind may find 
 peace in some partial solution of the problem, and 
 may walk on quietly and straightforward along 
 the path of life, without troubling themselves 
 about the doubts and questionings which are 
 incessantly lifting up their heads on each side of 
 it, to scare and mock all such as stop to look at
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXXni 
 
 them. But there are minds, whose lot It is to 
 grapple with the hardest problems of their age, 
 and who cannot rest until they have solved them, 
 — men who seem to regard it as their appointed 
 task to descend to the gates of Hades, and bring 
 back Cerberus in chains; and of these men Sterling 
 was one. Nor are such men to be dismist with a 
 cold taunt, or a severe reproof, as wasting them- 
 selves unprofitably in grubbing about the roots, 
 instead of feeding on the fruit. For the roots 
 too may often need to have the soil about them 
 loosened, and uncongenial substances removed: 
 nor is it well to blame those who devote them- 
 selves to this more arduous labour, in order that 
 others may have more abundant and better fruit 
 to feed on. If the great problems of speculation, 
 which are continually rising up as our horizon 
 widens, are left unexplored, — if those who arc set 
 to be the guiding spirits of their age, pass them 
 by, and are content provided they can evade and 
 escape from them, or if they try to impose upon 
 their followers by denying their existence or their 
 magnitude and danger, the vessel after a while 
 will assuredly strike against the rock, and founder. 
 In such a state of things, falsehood is sure to 
 creep in, and to spread from mind to mind, from 
 heart to heart, with hollowness, hypocrisy, and a
 
 CCXXIV LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 whole le2;ion of fiends in its train. We must do 
 the work that is set us to do, the intellectual 
 work, as well as the moral: we must not shirk it, 
 or slur it over: and this is a part of it. 
 
 Moreover, in every age, beside the speculative 
 difficulties which present themselves to the intel- 
 lect, there are vast practical difficulties, arising 
 from the corruption of the will, evils pervading 
 the whole frame of society, evils against which 
 man is appointed to combat, but which the slaves 
 of Custom allow to subsist as inevitable: and 
 never were these difficulties, these evils, greater 
 or more appalling than in our age; never perhaps 
 Avas there a huger mass of misery and corruption 
 lying around the foundations of the splendid fabric 
 of society. Here is another great problem, 
 which the earnest lover of truth and good must 
 set himself : and when he sees how shamefully it 
 has been neglected by those who ought, at the 
 cost of their heart's best blood, to have sought its 
 solution, he may easily grow to look with indig- 
 nant scorn on them; even as he may be apt to 
 feel scorn for those who altogether neglect the 
 speculative problem. This scorn too may easily 
 extend itself to the untempered mortar, whereby 
 the difficulties arc plastered over, and hid from the 
 eyes of the multitude.
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXXV 
 
 Now Sterling, throughout his life, had a very- 
 lively and painful feeling of the difficulty and 
 momentousness of both these problems, as may- 
 be seen even in his earliest writings in the 
 AthencBum ; though of course one of them would 
 come forward more distinctly and forcibly at one 
 time, at another time the other : and, by the law 
 of his nature. Thought and Feeling were imme- 
 diately to issue in Action. His energy compelled 
 him to strive with all his might for the removal 
 of the evils which he saw and felt. When he 
 was allowed to devote himself to this work, the 
 discords within him, which are ever the harsher 
 in the natural man in proportion to his strength, 
 seemed to be softening into concord. But, as I 
 have observed before, when the vent of practical 
 activity was closed against him, his intellectual 
 impulses gradually became too restless to be kept 
 in co-ordination with the established order of the 
 world. His feelings of the evils in the intel- 
 lectual and moral state of society preyed upon 
 his heart. He began to deem himself the oppo- 
 nent, the antagonist of everything that is. Hence, 
 by an almost inevitable transfer, he regarded 
 himself as separated and alienated from those 
 Avhose work it is to carry out the present insti- 
 tutions of society; and, what was one of the
 
 CCXXVl LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 bitterest of all draughts to a person of his strong 
 affections, he fancied himself cut off and estranged 
 from many whom he had regarded with the 
 highest admiration and love. For by his circum- 
 stances he was unhappily deprived of those 
 reconciling influences, which we derive in prac- 
 tical life from perceiving how many, even of those 
 who seem at variance with us, are in fact labour- 
 ing in their several stations for the same great 
 end, though it may be with a very narrow and 
 imperfect discernment of it. Owing to these 
 causes. Sterling, in his latter years, as we have 
 seen, felt almost driven to take refuge in the 
 serener regions of poetry and art. To this the 
 state of his health also greatly contributed. As 
 he says of himself so pathetically in one of his 
 letters (page ci.), his "life had ceased to be a 
 chain, and fell into a heap of broken links." 
 This of itself was incompatible with continuous 
 exertion in any severer study; whence it was 
 more difficult for him to wade through the dreary 
 morass of negatives to the firm land beyond. 
 Thus, through the chasm thrown across his life 
 by the interruption of his practical exertions, it 
 became wholly incomplete. Indeed we may look 
 upon it as having been broken off, so to say, at 
 the end of the fourth act. The primary, partial
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXXVU 
 
 solution at the end of the third act had been suc- 
 ceeded by a fresh, wider, deeper gulf of entangle- 
 ments and perplexities; and he did not live 
 to attain to the higher solution of the fifth 
 act. Few men do; in our age only here and 
 there one. Still the germs of that higher and 
 deeper reconciliation may be discerned in some of 
 his last words, and in those last precious lines 
 which he wrote, and which prove how entirely he 
 had been delivered, during the solitude and silence 
 of his sick room, from all forms of pantheistic 
 delusion, — if indeed he was ever bewildered 
 thereby, — and how the consciousness of sin, and 
 of the need of forgiveness, was still predominant 
 in his soul. 
 
 It may be thought that the story of Sterling's 
 life is a warning to refrain from all speculation. 
 But this would be to misread and pervert it. 
 When we listen to those most beautiful and 
 gracious words, in which our Lord gives thanks 
 to the Father, that He has hid the mysteries of 
 heaven from the wise and prudent, and has 
 revealed them to babes, are we to conclude 
 from them, that God has set a ban against wisdom 
 and prudence, and has excluded the wise and the 
 prudent from the kingdom of Heaven? Surely 
 this cannot be. Even the deplorable shipwreck of
 
 CCXXVlll LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Solomon is not to teach us this lesson. For what 
 does the whole history of the Church declare? 
 "Was Moses, who was skilled in all the learning of 
 the Egyptians, debarred thereby from receiving 
 the revelation of the eternal I am? "Was St. 
 Paul shut out from the kingdom of Heaven ? or 
 Athanasius, or Augustin, or Bernard, or Hooker? 
 Our Lord's words are indeed a warning, and so 
 is the whole volume of the Scriptures, from the 
 story of the Fall downward, against man's natural 
 proneness to overrate worldly wisdom and know- 
 ledge, and to believe that of himself he can 
 penetrate into the mysteries of God. But on the 
 other hand it ought only to render us the more 
 indulgent toward those who have these heavy 
 incumbrances to struggle with. We ought to 
 judge them the more leniently for this very rea- 
 son. If there is any man, who, having exerted 
 himself laboriously and perseveringly to pry into 
 the hidden recesses of our nature, to pierce 
 through the unfathomable abyss of evil, and to 
 catch a glimpse of the light and glory beyond 
 and behind, can say he has never been shaken or 
 troubled in the calm composure of his faith, let 
 him cast a stone at Sterling: I cannot. Nor 
 should they, who, never having engaged in such 
 enquiries, can form no estimate of the difficulties
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXXlX 
 
 besetting them. The reader of Cowper's Letters 
 may remember how, in speaking of Johnson's 
 Lives of the Poets, he says to Newton, that he 
 had " observed but one man in the whole number, 
 whose mind seemed to have the slightest tincture 
 of religion." In this there was a <2:ood deal of 
 morbid exaggeration, arising from the narrowness 
 of Cowper's own religious views at the time; for 
 Milton was one of the poets thus condemned in a 
 mass, as not having the slightest tincture of religion. 
 Something too is attributable to the Biographer's 
 incapacity for representing man's inner life. Still, 
 with all these deductions, the fact noticed may 
 serve as an instance of the separation, almost the 
 divorce, which took place between man's intel- 
 lectual and spiritual faculties a century and a half 
 ago. If we look tln-ough a list of the historians 
 during the same period, or of the metaphysicians, 
 or of the men of science, the same fact forces itself 
 upon us. There are divers exceptions indeed; but 
 the majority bear witness that the intellect of 
 man had thrown off its allegiance to Christian 
 truth. In many cases no doubt this sprang from 
 some moral perversity wresting the judgement 
 awry. But it must also be conceded that the 
 advocates of Christian truth did not set it forth 
 in that simple, convincing majesty, which would
 
 CCXXX LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 have constrained the intellect to bow before it. 
 Nor can any one be well acquainted with the 
 state of the intellectual world in our days, with- 
 out knowing that the same phenomenon is still 
 lamentably frequent, not merely in France and 
 Germany, but also in England. Among men of in- 
 tellectual vigour, I will not say the majority, but 
 undoubtedly a very large portion, are only with- 
 held from open infidelity by giving up their 
 thoughts entirely to the business of this world, 
 and turning away with a compromising indiffer- 
 ence from serious enquiries about religion. In 
 such a state of things it becomes the imperative 
 duty of all who love the truth in Christ, to purge 
 it, so far as they can, from the alloy which it may 
 have contracted in the course of ages through the 
 admixture of human conceits, and which renders 
 it irreconcilable with the postulates of the intel- 
 lect. This is indeed a very delicate work, and 
 accompanied with many risks; and many will go 
 astray in attempting to accomplish it. But still 
 it must be done. The men of our days will not 
 believe, unless you prove to them that what they 
 are called upon to believe, docs not contradict 
 the laws of their minds, and that it rests upon a 
 solid, unshakable foundation. We cannot arrest 
 the winds or the waves; nor can we arrest the
 
 LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. CCXXXi 
 
 blasts and tides of thought. These too blow and 
 roll where they list. We may indeed employ 
 them both; but, to turn them to account, we 
 must svifFer ourselves to be impelled and borne 
 along by them, without fainting at the thought 
 of the perils we may have to encounter, and in 
 the hope that, with the help of our heavenly 
 compass, we may render those tumultuous 
 elements subservient to the good of mankind. 
 Fresh obstacles are ever rising across our 
 path; and we must assail them. If we do 
 so, though some lives may be lost in the 
 attack, one obstruction after another will gra- 
 dually be removed. Now Sterling was one of 
 the menj whose nature commanded him to stand 
 in the van of human progress. He belonged to 
 the body-guard of him who might be called by 
 the name of the heroic Prussian, Marshal For- 
 wards. If there was a post of danger, he would 
 rush to it; if a forlorn hope was sent out, he 
 would be among the first to join it. Such men 
 we honour, although they fall; nay, we honour 
 them the more, because they fall. Of the mystery 
 of their fiill we cannot judge; but we may trust 
 that he, who, so far as we can discern, has ear- 
 nestly loved Truth, and sincerely desired to serve
 
 CCXXXn LIFE OF THE AUTHOR. 
 
 the God of Truth, will be judged by the God of 
 INIercy: and we may feel sure that the prayer for 
 fojjgiveness, when it rises from the depths of a 
 departing spirit, cannot be uttered in vain. 
 
 J. C. H. 
 
 Herstmonceux, 
 
 Ncio Yem-'s Eve, 1847.
 
 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 REPRINTED FROM THE ATHENJEUM FOR 1829. 
 
 VOL. I. B
 
 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 I. 
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 
 
 n^HERE is a kind of philosophy adapted to 
 drawing-rooms, by which the character of 
 all conquerors would be at once given over to 
 unmingled and indiscriminate abhorrence. The 
 shedding of human blood is thereby described 
 as something so detestable that only the last 
 necessity can justify it. We are told that men 
 should visit with curses the memories of those 
 who have given rise to contention and slaughter, 
 and that^the meanest peasant is more deserving 
 of respect than victorious kings or triumphant 
 generals. The heroic ideal is brought into con- 
 tempt by the most ignorant ; and the weak and 
 the narrow-minded exult in their philanthropic 
 wisdom, while they expose the real evils of what 
 are called the military virtues. 
 
 Nor will any one question that it is a bold and 
 weighty matter to be the immediate cause of pain 
 and death to thousands. For though it mischt be 
 hard to prove that the sufferings of the soldier 
 are greater than those of other men, or that 
 they are not overbalanced by the enjoyments of 
 
 B 2
 
 4 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 activity and hope, yet he who begins a war does 
 doubtless become the direct originator of many 
 miseries. But what great good was ever achieved 
 for mankind without accompanying sorrow? The 
 greatest benefactor of the world, the teacher of 
 truth, can hardly accomplish his task without 
 uprooting some old sympathies, and disturbing the 
 minds which he enlightens. In the education of 
 an individual, his Avill can be strengthened only 
 by subjecting him to rude and severe trials ; nor 
 can any great national revolution be brought 
 about, which shall not give pain to many. We 
 must judge the leader of every important change, 
 with reference to the thought which guided him : 
 we must see whether the shock, the excitement, 
 the exaltation of his name, the pride of transitory 
 victory, were the objects for which he was willing 
 to subdue the immediate impulses of charity ; or 
 whether he regarded the innovations and contests 
 and bloody triumphs, as evils necessarily atten- 
 dant on a higher and more lasting end ; mis- 
 fortunes as much as possible to be diminished by 
 a wise man, but for the avoiding of which no effe- 
 minate timidity should induce him to sacrifice a 
 great object. 
 
 This will not justify such a conqueror as Na- 
 poleon, who had no other than a personal })urpose, 
 and who was willing for the attainment of it to 
 crush whatever was most valuable in Europe. 
 But it will serve as a defence for the general
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 5 
 
 Spirit of Roman enterprise, for the conduct of the 
 Spaniards in America, and of the English in Ilin- 
 dostan. And in truth, if we are to lop away from 
 the existing culture in Europe whatever has been 
 gained by the results of conquest, we should leave 
 but a meagre and decaying stem. For how large 
 a portion of the character of Christendom may be 
 traced to the Roman and the Teutonic domina- 
 tion ! And scarcely has there been a polity able 
 to save any nation from sinking into a horde of 
 savages, that has not been founded on a conquest. 
 Conquest has been the great instrument of almost 
 every revolution that has improved the world ; 
 and we in England have especially little pretence 
 for denying its beneficial results. The Celtic 
 barbarism was unable to advance human nature 
 beyond the point at which Cajsar found it in 
 Britain ; and the Romans brought to the country 
 laws, arts, and Christianity. The institutions 
 had decayed ; the national character was weak ; 
 and we were strengthened by Saxon blood and 
 youth. But the nation remained apart, and 
 hardly at all connected with the other portions of 
 the Christian commonwealth ; and the Normans, 
 while they introduced their superior refinement 
 and their riper chivalry, became a bond between 
 England and the rest of Eiu'ope. All these co- 
 operated to one end ; and that was our actual 
 England. 
 
 The oriental war waged bv Alexander the
 
 6 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 Great would have come close in the eyes of 
 every Greek, had it stood on no other gi'ound, 
 to one of direct self-defence. It was the pro- 
 longation of a contest which had endured for 
 many generations, and in the course of which 
 Greece itself had been twice ravaged by hordes 
 of Asiatics, and its fairest city made a spoil. The 
 Grecian patriot, nourished from his boyhood on 
 the Homeric songs, and accustomed to hear the 
 names of INIiltiades and Themistocles as the 
 greatest glories of his country, and of the oppres- 
 sion of the Ionian cities as the chiefest wrong 
 done to a free people by barbarians, could scarcely 
 conceive any relation between Greece and Persia 
 but that of deadly hostility. A peace was then 
 no more than a truce, a temporary interruption of 
 that warfare which was the natural condition of 
 all countries not bound together by a common 
 language and worship. 
 
 The wealth indeed of the Asiatic satrapies, and 
 the factious divisions of every city, which made 
 the losing party seek for assistance even from the 
 enemies of his race, brought about some change 
 in this state of things. The neighbouring peril 
 of Macedonian predominance led the greatest of 
 unsuccessful statesmen to receive from the minis- 
 ters of Darius the money which might enable him 
 to resist Philip. But the laws of political society, 
 and the circumstances of the world, were stronger 
 even than the will and intellect of Demosthenes,
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 7 
 
 who opposed himself and the fame of Athens 
 against a power, to Avhich Phocion, taking calmei- 
 counsel, resolutely submitted. A man of genius. 
 King of Macedon, was necessarily leader of 
 Greece; but let it not be forgotten that, by the 
 same necessity, Greece, having a leader, was con- 
 queror of Asia. 
 
 The knowledge, cultivation, and energy accu- 
 mulated by free institutions, by traditionary reli- 
 gion, by philosophy and the arts, within the 
 circling seas and mountains of the Hellenic land, 
 must have overflowed on the surrounding countries. 
 "Without the aid of Philip or Alexander, bands 
 of mercenary soldiers, intriguing politicians, and 
 ambitious chieftains, would have torn the empire of 
 Darius, and made the language and the thoughts 
 of Southern Europe familiar in the palaces of the 
 Eastern satraps. The methodized and accom- 
 plished mind would have found its way to the 
 barbarian thrones, with a current as sure and per- 
 petual as that which pours the waters of the 
 Danube into the sea. But the supremacy of a 
 monarchy was necessary to give singleness and con- 
 centration to the efforts of the many jealous cities. 
 Greece needed to be split into numerous repub- 
 lics, that it might put forth the first bright fruits 
 of human cultivation ; but the hand of a kingly 
 leader was required to gather and to spread the 
 seeds on the banks of the Orontes and the Nile. 
 This was the office of the Kins: of Macedon.
 
 8 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 Demosthenes failed in his opposition to it and 
 him ; for the time had come when mankind could 
 gain no more by the continued independence of 
 Thebes or Athens. Democracy had done its 
 utmost for Grecian culture, and thereafter could 
 only be mischievous in popularizing and enfeebling 
 the civilization which it had in many respects 
 advanced. The internal ministry of Greek ac- 
 tivity was nearly at an end; and to make it 
 available for the world, a leader was required 
 with a more stable and unquestioned title than 
 the vote of a populace, or the influence of one 
 among many co-ordinate commonwealths, could 
 possibly furnish. He was to be of Grecian race 
 and language ; for he was to guide men of that 
 race, and to spread abroad the rich nourish- 
 ment of that language. It behoved him to be 
 captain of all Greece ; for he was to go forth 
 as its representative ; and he needed at the same 
 time a support other than the Peloponnese or 
 Attica could supply; for amid envies, factions, 
 and revolutions, that would have been physically 
 inadequate. Above all, it was necessary that in 
 soul and talents he should display whatever either 
 of thoughtful or heroic power the philosophy of 
 the wisest schools could call forth and cherish in 
 human nature; for to mankind and to posterity 
 he was to present himself as the impersonation 
 and champion of the highest culture of that 
 country, which nothing but its moral superiority
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 9 
 
 could entitle to civil predominance. All this was 
 necessary; and it all existed in Alexander. 
 
 Supposing Greece to have been freed from 
 those inward distractions which nothing but 
 Macedonian guidance could have allayed, it would 
 have been able, by a succession of various im- 
 pulses, to rend, to seize, or to mould large portions 
 of the Persian empire. Alexander had l^een 
 educated between Philip and Aristotle, and 
 looked to do more than this. A hundred teachers, 
 innumerable statesmen and warriors, a noble tra- 
 ditional religion, the most wonderful artists that 
 ever existed, many pregnant varieties of polity, 
 had made the country of his fixthers what it was, 
 and therein had given him the means he was to 
 employ. The broad and barbarous East was 
 spread before him, full of tyrannies old and new, 
 decayed institutions, oppressed races, undeveloped 
 powers, and in these, and in the hopes of the 
 vulgarest Greek, a common man might have found 
 a mighty object, without bestowing on them any 
 deep reflection. But beyond fame and domina- 
 tion, the ends which the very circumstances 
 almost pointed out, and which were at all events 
 proclaimed by the hopes of the populace, and by 
 the names of Pausanias and Xenophon, — beyond 
 these, Alexander found in himself an end higher 
 and more permanent; for he was born with un- 
 equalled capacity ; and his mind Avas the complete 
 outward result of that method in thought, whidi 
 
 B 3
 
 10 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 has given their godlike stations to Socrates, 
 Plato, and Aristotle. 
 
 He was the man of Greece, and was to impress 
 on the continent of Asia not only the skill and 
 valour of his coimtry in the field, but also its 
 reverence for religion, and its creative power 
 in the arts, and in moral and political wisdom. 
 He knew that his mission was nobler than, as 
 a chief of free companions, to plunder and lay 
 waste, or, like an oriental conqueror, to trample 
 on all previous rights, institutions, and convic- 
 tions, and substitute for them the grim and 
 solitary idol of his own supremacy. He went 
 forth to conquer indeed; for by the sword alone 
 could the despotism of the sword be broken: but 
 he went also to raise up, to guard, to renew, to 
 cultivate; and, first clearing away with his iron 
 engines the hard successive strata of former tyran- 
 nies, to lay bare to the sky, to water, and fertilize 
 the soil beneath, to permit the secret seed to 
 grow, and to mingle with it many new and some 
 exotic germs. That this is neither dream nor 
 fable, that Alexander was neither a madman nor 
 a ruffian, nor an adventuring knight, would have 
 seemed obvious from all his history. But unhap- 
 pily he left no commentaries behind him; he had 
 no Thucydides or Livy to chronicle his great- 
 ness ; and his memory has remained only to excite 
 the wonder of the crowd, the detestation of 
 pseudo - philosophers, and the admiration and 
 reverence of a few retired students.
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 11 
 
 The first year of Alexander's reign was no 
 more than a loud and complex overture to his 
 after life. His only object seems to have been to 
 subdue and awe the invaders of his kingdom, and 
 the rebels against his federal authority, so that he 
 might begin his great eternal enterprise with the 
 utmost possible rapidity and effectiveness. He 
 performed a series of exploits, which, if truly 
 narrated to us, were sufficient to have placed a 
 Roman consul on a level with Camillus and 
 Scipio; but they were merely the transitory and 
 stormy dawn of that day, wdiich brought the great 
 luminary of Greece from its rising on the Ther- 
 maic Gulf till it set on that of Persia. 
 
 The first recorded deed of the Grecian enter- 
 prise is singularly consistent with the purpose of 
 the whole expedition, and with the education and 
 character of Alexander. He visited and honoured 
 the spot with which tradition had associated the 
 names of Homer's heroes, and his local descrip- 
 tions. He had been taught tlu'ough all his boy- 
 hood to delight in lays, which, besides their poetic 
 value, and their relation to the tendency of his 
 mind as a king and captain, had the merit of 
 recording a portion of the great struggle between 
 Europe and Asia, and of displaying in the 
 brightest light his noble ancestor, the swift-footed 
 and god-descended Achilles. All history an- 
 nounced that these poems were the lovely flowers 
 of that Asiatic Greece, which now lay helpless
 
 12 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 and enslaved under the sceptre of the great king, 
 and which Alexander was about to liberate ; and 
 they were thus in every way the work naturally 
 pointed out to be the manuals of his education. 
 The strength of their influence over him was 
 shown by his first proceeding on the soil of the 
 Eastern continent. By performing religious rites 
 on the plain of the Troad, he publicly put away 
 from Macedonia the character, which it bore in 
 the Homeric times, of a barbarous country, apart 
 from Greece, and sending forth its chieftains to 
 combat in alliance with the Asiatics. He who 
 sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles, and made the 
 Homeric works his daily study, constituted him- 
 self the representative of the Hellenic mind, and 
 the champion of its cause ; and ^vhen we know 
 that he went to battle with a shield preserved 
 from the days of Agamemnon borne before him, 
 it is not easy to avoid the fancy that those ancient 
 kings and warriors, whose memories he had cele- 
 brated, and who live for ever so brightly in the 
 songs of the heroic age, moved round him and 
 before him from the plain, the mounds, the rivers, 
 and the sea of Troy, to the hills of Bactria and 
 the banks of the Indus. 
 
 But in how different a spirit from that of the 
 traditionary ages did he make war against his 
 enemies ! It was his aim to found a larger polity, 
 embracing an immeasurably greater variety of 
 circumstances and habits, and acting by a more
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 13 
 
 complicated mechanism, than Grecian statesmen 
 had before conceived. And how uniformly 
 therefore and earnestly did he, conqueror and 
 innovator as he was, and creator of a fresh epoch 
 in the history of the world, how constantly did 
 he seek to find old foundations for his new estab- 
 lishments! how abhorrent was all his system, a 
 far more benevolent and enlightened one than 
 any before imagined, from the attempt to root 
 out and desolate the old convictions of mankind 
 He sought to strengthen men's belief and hope in 
 their social condition, to put life into the heart of 
 the world, and to substantiate in a political body 
 the subtle and potent spirit of the highest philo- 
 sophic culture. He did not enslave, massacre, 
 or plunder: but, wherever he subdued men, he 
 was ready to respect their human nature. 
 Wherever he found any vestiges of ancient law 
 and order, he zealously restored them; wherever 
 any religious faith, he also did worship to the 
 gods revered by liis subjects ; wherever skill, 
 valour, industry, he encouraged and rewarded 
 them ; wherever open enmity, he met it, overcame 
 it, and then forgot it. To pursue the footsteps 
 of this wise and accomplished genius, would 
 require a comment on every action of the busiest 
 of lives, for ten pregnant and unexampled years. 
 But there is a unity of purpose in a great man's 
 conduct, which we may comprehend and ad- 
 mire, without illustrating it by all that his life
 
 14 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 would furnish for its display. And in the history 
 of Alexander^ above all, it is evident, that lie 
 had made for himself a generous and permanent 
 scheme of policy, scarcely, as it seems, to have 
 been learned from Aristotle, and certainly opposed 
 to the views of the democratic writers of Greece. 
 
 He acted differently from almost all the con- 
 querors of whom he could have read, and diffe- 
 rently from those former heroes of legendary song, 
 who probably were the ideal of his personal feel- 
 ings. For in him was blooming the latest ripeness 
 of Grecian thought ; and he who sacrificed to 
 Hercules, Achilles, and Bacchus, and exceeded in 
 war their traditionary exploits, was also to show 
 forth the practical results of whatever laborious 
 knowledge and profound meditation of human 
 affairs his country could glory in. Therefore, 
 instead of finding in him a wild and reckless ad- 
 venturer, caring only to outstrip the hurricane, 
 and, like it, to lay waste his path, we see in Alex- 
 ander the severe judge, the benignant fosterer, the 
 man who delighted to pause in his career of hum- 
 bling subjugation, and recreate the world with 
 more than kingly generosities, with the rites of a 
 beautiful worsliip, and the shows and splendours 
 of poetry, — the creator of cities in the solitude, 
 and of commerce in the barren haunts of robbers. 
 
 There are other conquerors, to whom genius 
 equal with his has been popularly attributed, but 
 between whom and him an essential difterence is
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 15 
 
 observable. The talents which have been shown 
 by some vulgar modern captains', are all displayed 
 in the means and mechanism they have employed : 
 their object was utterly poor, low, narrow, and 
 personal, that of the meanest and weakest-minded 
 of men. The ingenuity and boldness of Alex- 
 ander in pursuing his end were not inferior to 
 those of any recent idol ; but his vast, his un- 
 approachable superiority was in the greatness of 
 that end itself. Others, with vigorous faculties 
 and large means at their disposal, have endea- 
 voured to lessen and compress whatever they 
 came in contact with, that it might be more 
 suitable to the intrinsic pettiness of their purpose. 
 They have sought, for instance, to cut off from 
 society the action of many of its chief springs, 
 such as religion, or historic remembrances, or the 
 possibility of personal independence, to enfeeble 
 and beat down the world till it should lie like a 
 crushed and blotted mantle beneath the feet of 
 him who has slain its wearer. Alexander habitu- 
 ally cherished and invigorated whatever feelings 
 and thoughts he discovered in any nation; his 
 mind even went beyond what moral energy the 
 world contained; and he aimed at increasing it 
 on all sides by the wise arts of the statesman, and 
 of founding on it the power that should govern 
 an immeasurable empire. 
 
 But it may be replied, in all tliis Alexander 
 failed. And indeed the reality was far below
 
 16 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 the tliouglit; for, if the world would conform 
 Itself to a great idea, we should see the mound of 
 primeval Eden opening out until it became the 
 only limit of the globe. But, in the measure 
 and fashion in which earthly affairs will yield and 
 assimilate themselves to the conceptions of genius, 
 the design of the JVIacedonian conqueror was 
 realized. Shall we say that nothing was done in 
 the stir and loosening of all the roots of thouffht 
 designedly produced by these wars and this 
 policy? Did not civilization gain anything, when 
 the world for the first time saw a general improv- 
 ing all that he subdued, rather than enriching 
 himself by his appropriations? Can that lan- 
 guage, of which the very vocabulary has more of 
 wisdom and poetry than the literature of other 
 tongues, have been communicated to vast regions, 
 and have taught them nothing? Or what shall 
 we say of the many cities, the fair posterity of 
 Alexander, surviving when the blood of his off- 
 spring had passed away, and preserving so many 
 centres and radiating points of knowledge ; of the 
 soul of Greece inhabiting and informing a new 
 frame on the borders of the Nile, when it had 
 ceased to find a resting-place on the banks of the 
 Ilissus? Or can the result have been contempt- 
 il)le of that mixture and inter-connnunion of the 
 old polytheisms, which, by taking somewhat of its 
 peculiar character from each, and weakening the 
 exclusiveness of the hold of all over the minds of
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 17 
 
 nations, was probably a great and necessary pre- 
 parative for the reception of Christianity? 
 
 We know not how far the story of the Mace- 
 donian meeting with the high-priest of the Jews 
 may have been altered by the vanity of the 
 people through whom it was transmitted, or 
 adorned and rendered wonderful by the talents of 
 Josephus. There is something so impressive in 
 the image of the young conqueror, covered with 
 the dust from the shattered walls of Tyre, bending 
 to the name of God, and proclaiming that his 
 minister had appeared to him in a vision, that 
 every one, but for our modern dread of the 
 marvellous, would incline to believe in it. There 
 appears no reason for denying that a spirit 
 like Alexander's, intent, far-seeing, and imbued 
 with the highest revelations of a religious philo- 
 sophy, may so have brooded among his native 
 hills over the fields that lay open to his enterprise, 
 and the truths which he had learned to revere, as 
 to perceive that, much as he might do for the 
 world, the circle of its moral capacities would yet 
 remain unfilled, — that the unity of God could 
 hardly be made by him to supplant the anthropo- 
 morphic polytheisms of the nations; and a shaping 
 imagination would then have naturally imperso- 
 nated, in the form of a celestial instructor, the 
 truth which no one, but by the fore-knowledge of 
 faith, could then expect to become popular. This 
 may have taken place in the mind of a pujnl of
 
 18 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 Aristotle; and the supposition will explain the 
 reverence and awe of the young commander for a 
 priest presenting himself as the teacher of that 
 great principle, Avhicli was unknown beyond Judea 
 to any but the wisest masters of science, and 
 their most favoured pupils. 
 
 The legend, even if legend it be, is at all events 
 remarkable, as bringing together the representa- 
 tives of the two greatest moral forces then existing 
 in the world, of Grecian thought and Jewish 
 religion. The two afterwards allied themselves 
 in the Egyptian city of Alexander, and conjointly 
 gave a powerful impulse to the mind. Their 
 perfect conciliation and union remained to be 
 effected by Clu*istianity. 
 
 Whether this last great consummation was in 
 any way promoted by the influence exercised 
 by the Grecian conquests on the Heathen modes 
 of belief, is a difficult and perilous question. Most 
 persons will probably think that there is much of 
 mischief in all similar speculations, and will, it is 
 to be hoped, at the same time maintain that 
 Alexander is not to be judged by what we can 
 discover of the distant consequences flowing from 
 his deeds. 
 
 It would be melancholy indeed if any theory 
 as to the evil results of a great man's actions, 
 when those themselves were evidently generous, 
 arduous, and the fruit of noble conceptions, 
 should be allowed to rob Fame of lier children,
 
 ALEXANDER THE GREAT. 19 
 
 and human nature of its loftiest examples. Shall 
 the praise of courage, gentleness, endurance, mag- 
 nanimity, and zeal in high purposes, perish, be- 
 cause a man who died before he had reached the 
 middle term of life, could not complete the largest 
 design that ever animated a statesman or general ? 
 Or shall we consider but as a mad adventurer tlio 
 soldier whom Aristotle advised to treat the con- 
 quered as slaves, and who preferred the far more 
 difficult and less glittering attempt to make them 
 subjects of a temperate rule and citizens of a legal 
 polity? the young and chivalrous leader, who, 
 when the wisest minds of Greece could perceive 
 no radical distinction between nations, but the 
 broad difference of Greek and barbarian, studied, 
 comprehended, and turned to the advantage of all, 
 whatever was valuable and characteristic in each 
 of twenty races. We may measure the importance 
 of his life by the permanence of Grecian influence 
 in Asia till all was swallowed up by Rome ; and 
 the loss sustained in his death, by the confusion 
 and agonies of empires which succeeded his domi- 
 nation. He perished, having lived scarce more 
 than thirty years, still meditating on his death- 
 bed mighty designs for the future, and leaving 
 behind him as his trophy the noblest empire that 
 ever existed. The funeral games that celebrated 
 his decease, were contests for kingdoms ; and the 
 mantle of the Macedonian soldier was divided into 
 the imperial robes of many monarchs.
 
 n. 
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 
 
 170 UK hundred years ago the English had very 
 nearly done to France and to England the im- 
 measurable injury of conquering that nearest and 
 most powerful of continental nations. The nobles 
 of the two countries had displayed alike the most 
 brilliant courage and the warmest patriotism. 
 The energy of the Commons of our country had 
 inclined the scale to the side of the islanders; 
 and neither the chivahy of France, nor its middle 
 classes, nor its Church, had any help for the afflic- 
 tion of the land. That which princes, knights, 
 burghers, and prelates could not do, was done by 
 a peasant girl, who knew not her letters, and had 
 gained her bread by the labour of her hands. 
 
 On the borders of Champagne and Lorraine 
 was the hamlet of Domremy, attached to the 
 village of Greux. The country around was rich 
 in forests, meadows, and rivers ; and the peasantry 
 who inhabited it w^ere frequently disturbed by 
 the neighbourhood of war, and from the vicinity 
 of the Burgundian power were violently split 
 into favourers of the contending potentates. In 
 Domremy, which was attached to Charles and 
 France, was a cottage, occupied by the family of 
 a poor farmer, whose name was Jacques D'Arc, 
 and that of his Avife Isabel. They liad tlu'ee sons 
 and two daughters, of whom one was Joan.
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 21 
 
 The child was early noted for a tranquil, medi- 
 tative, and charitable disposition. She learned 
 from her mother the three great elements of 
 popular Christianity, the Lord's Prayer, the 
 Creed, and the Ave Maria. By her too she 
 was instructed in all she knew of religion. Public 
 prayer and private confession were the only parts 
 of it in which she was aided by the priest. 
 
 She became skilful in the womanly works of 
 sewing and spinning, and, when a child, accom- 
 panied her father and brothers in the rural labours 
 of weeding and tending sheep; and, while still 
 very young, was employed in guiding cattle to 
 pasture, where they might be safe from the search 
 of the wandering soldier. She was noted for a 
 bashful quiet which restrained her from frequent- 
 ing; the street of the hamlet. She sometimes 
 played in the fields with other children, and some- 
 times sang at the village merry-making, but 
 scarcely ever danced. From these occasions of 
 pleasure she loved to retire to the church, and 
 was often found there alone with her palms joined, 
 and her eyes fixed on an image of the Saviour or 
 his Virgin Mother. She gave all she had in cha- 
 rity, and tended the sick of the hamlet, and woidd 
 relinquish her bed to any belated traveller, and lie 
 herself on the hearth. In her habits she was tem- 
 perate and active ; and she was beloved by all her 
 neighbours, though she frequently withdrew from 
 amonjT them to the church. She deli^chted to
 
 22 SHADES OF THE DEAD, 
 
 converse of God and the Virgin, and was con- 
 stantly heard repeating to herself the snatches of 
 her childish prayers. While in the fields, if she 
 could not leave her flock at the sound of the 
 church-bell, she knelt on the grass and prayed 
 amid her sheep beneath the open sky ; and when 
 she found that the beadle sometimes neglected to 
 ring the bell for complines, she promised him a 
 little present for the better performance of his 
 duty. Near Domremy was a chapel consecrated 
 to the Virgin, and called the Hermitage of St. 
 Mary. Thither she weekly repaired, and lighted 
 a candle to our Lady ; and she often left at irre- 
 gular intervals her labours in the country, and 
 went to this favourite place of devotion. 
 
 Half a league from her native village, and 
 within sight of her cottage, was an ancient wood 
 of oaks ; and beneath it stood a beech, the most 
 graceful and feminine of trees. This green and 
 livino' memorial was invested with a traditional 
 importance, and was called the Beauty of May, 
 the tree of the ladies, and the fairy tree ; beside 
 it rose a spring salutary to the sick. It was 
 the tradition, that fairies had of old haunted the 
 tree with songs and dances ; and under the 
 boughs a knight had been seen to hold converse 
 with one of these fantastic beings, who had all dis- 
 api)eared in consequence of the sins of their human 
 neighbours. The priests were then accustomed to 
 stand at Whitsuntide in the shadow of the beech,
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 23 
 
 to chant some prayers and read a portion of the 
 gospel of St. John, the beautiful narrative and 
 spiritual wisdom of the best beloved disciple. 
 The gentry of the country sometimes feasted 
 under the foliage, and encouraged the sports of 
 the village children; so little of dislike or fear 
 mingled itself with that ancient and religious 
 belief: and yearly, in May, the youths of Dom- 
 remy sang and danced at the fairy tree, around a 
 rude and fragile figure made of leaves and grass, 
 ate the cakes of their housewife mothers, and 
 hung on the branches gay crowns and garlands of 
 spring flowers, which they removed at night to 
 their cottages, and regarded as in some degree 
 sanctified by the poetry and devotion of those 
 8imj)le rites. In those rites Joan, when a child, 
 partook, joined in the songs, platted her wreaths 
 of blossoms, to suspend them on the boughs, or 
 offer them at the image of the Virgin; but while 
 the belief of the peasants, moulded by their 
 desires, held that under the leafy shadow a root 
 lurked in the ground, Avliich, if dug for and ob- 
 tained, would give wealth to its possessor, the 
 simple piety of the child rejected the faith in any 
 supernatural influence exerted for sordid ends. 
 
 So passed the maiden's earliest years. The 
 wars of the Bui-gundians and the Armagnacs 
 shook all the land ; and the civil contention and 
 lawless violence which possessed it, tended to 
 innovate and pervert all ancient customs and
 
 24 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 traditions, to destroy or corrupt whatever had of 
 old been honoured. But the influences to which 
 those of the time were so hostile, fostered in the 
 midst of thes etumults the pure and energ eticsoul, 
 which was to subdue the evil, and restore to 
 France an undisturbed and national existence. 
 The chapel-bell resounded over the meadows 
 where the cattle fed, and through the wood of 
 oaks, even when those fields were trodden by 
 bands of soldiers. Under the loud voices of war 
 still breathed the gentle whisper of lovely and 
 pious tradition. The sun still shed its ripening 
 light over the breasts of men; and patriotism and 
 devotion grcAv in the human heart, against the nip- 
 ping or uprooting influences of rapine, cruelty, am- 
 bition, and terror. Joan early learnt to long for 
 the liberation of her country, and the re-establish- 
 ment of ancient rights, and to hope for these only 
 through the will of God. There was but one 
 inhabitant of her village who favoured the enemy ; 
 and she wished that he, if God should so please, 
 might die; yet, many years after her death, he 
 spoke of her with esteem and regret. 
 
 That a virgin from Lorraine should deliver 
 France, was an ancient prophecy, such as live 
 throughout the world on the tongues of the multi- 
 tude, and Avalt till some predominant spirit shall 
 find in them the merit of its glorious achieve- 
 ments. This popular prediction foretold tliat the 
 deliverer would appear from the wood in sight of
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 25 
 
 the cottage of Jacques D'Arc; and it Avas now to 
 be fulfilled by his daughter, the poor herdsmaiden. 
 When she was about thirteen, she seemed to her- 
 self to hear at noon, in her father's garden, a 
 voice of God, ' to assist me,'' as she afterwards said 
 amid her dying peril, ' to govern myself.'' She at 
 first was greatly frightened; but she often after- 
 wards heard the voice, which commanded her to 
 live religiously, and to go into the part of the 
 kingdom more peculiarly called France. The 
 sound was generally accompanied by a great bril- 
 liancy in the direction from which it was heard. 
 On beins; examined as to the visible form of the 
 supernatural appearance, she said that she had 
 been visited by St. Michael and the angels, and 
 by St. Catherine and St. Margaret, whose diadems 
 were precious and resplendent. She also spoke 
 of having heard her dead brothers address her out 
 of heaven. When the first of her visions left her, 
 she wept because she had not been allowed to 
 depart from earth along with it. The shapes that 
 visited her were crowned and shining faces; but 
 she saw neither limbs nor garments. They spoke 
 in sweet and gentle tones. She knew not at first 
 whether the beings that came to her were from 
 heaven; but the wisdom and holiness of their 
 counsel after a time convinced her. 
 
 When her conviction of supernatural inter- 
 course had continued for four or five years, she 
 stated to others that she was appointed by God to 
 
 VOL. I. C
 
 26 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 raise the siege of Orleans, which was at that time 
 besieged by the English, and on which depended 
 the fate of the kingdom. After a year's complaint 
 and solicitation, she succeeded in obtaining the 
 escort of one of her brothers, of two gentlemen, 
 and some attendants, who brought her in neat 
 attire to the residence of Charles the Seventh at 
 Chinon. She was at this time about eighteen, 
 of a middle size, remarkable for that personal 
 strength which was needful to her mission, but 
 well-proportioned, with dark locks falling on her 
 shoulders, a i)leasing countenance, and gentle 
 voice. Her rural habits and early sports had 
 familiarized her with the practice of riding on 
 horseback, and with the management of a lance. 
 
 It is memorable and beautiful, that, amid the 
 rude comrades by whom on this long journey she 
 was surrounded, the awe of her sanctity and en- 
 thusiasm was such, that, by the testimony of the 
 very gentlemen and squires, she subdued and 
 purified even their imaginations to reverence her 
 virffin holiness. 
 
 Her history from this time forward may be 
 told in a few words. She announced that it was 
 her vocation to relieve Orleans, and convey the 
 king in safety to be crowned at Rheims. She 
 accomplished her task with a rapidity and energy 
 which astonished Europe. From the day on 
 which these great objects were attained, her soul 
 appears to have been more and more disturbed;
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 27 
 
 and her successes, though still brilliant and won- 
 derful, became more uncertain and partial. Be- 
 fore her nineteenth year she was made captive 
 and thrown into prison. Her feet were bound by 
 a weighty chain, which was joined to her bed and 
 to a beam five feet long. Another chain was 
 fastened round her slender waist. She was in- 
 closed, from the day of her arrival at Rouen until 
 her trial, in a cage of iron, in which she was 
 fettered by the neck, the feet, and the hands. 
 Three Englishmen slept in her chamber. 
 
 In the course of her long and harassing trial, 
 she never varied from her assertion of the divinity 
 of her mission, and the justice of her object. She 
 clung to the use of male attire, as if feeling that 
 she was bound to proclaim in her appearance the 
 peculiarity of her vocation and character. And 
 she only consented to abjure the crimes imputed 
 to her, and to dress as a woman, on being com- 
 manded so to do by the clergy, in whom she 
 trusted as the directors of her conscience, and the 
 delegates of Heaven. "When it was announced 
 to her that she was to be burnt, she wept with 
 piteous agony. When at the scaffold a bitter and 
 calumnious accusation was read to her, she an- 
 swered nothing, but asked for a crucifix. The 
 last word she uttered was the name of the 
 Saviour. She was not twenty when she died; 
 and the last year of her life had been spent in 
 prison. 
 
 C2
 
 28 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 So died a maiden, perhaps the most wonderful, 
 exquisite, and complete personage in all the his- 
 tory of the world. To maintain this, it need not 
 be denied that her persuasion of the outward 
 appearance of divine agency was caused by a 
 diseased excitability of the fancy. That such a 
 disease exists, though not frequently, is most 
 certain. But this very malady, which besieged 
 the bodily eye with visions of the soul, was in her 
 but the extension and exaggeration of what seems 
 a necessary characteristic in every woman's faith: 
 for it is probably a law of female nature, that it 
 can liaA'e no belief but in that which stands to it 
 in an outward relation. The condition of the 
 human mind in that age, the thoughts with wliich 
 alone a peasant girl could be familiar, and the 
 tendencies of her own mind, all co-operated to 
 prevent the pious and meditative child from 
 questioning the reality of the beautiful shapes, 
 whose whole true being may have been in fact 
 projected into the external world from her own 
 earnest soul. 
 
 There are among us persons, not a few, with 
 some such fantastic and shaping powers. But 
 they almost always become diseased and senti- 
 mental dreamers, or insane and unprincipled fana- 
 tics; both of them using that power of vivid 
 picturing, which delights the passive mind, in 
 order to escape from thought and self-conscious- 
 ness, and from the steady realities of duty and
 
 JOAN OF ARC. 29 
 
 religion. The Virgin of Arc felt that the voice 
 of God, which spoke within her, and which 
 brought to her ears an outward articulation, came 
 not to relieve her from the exertion of the w^ill, 
 not to supply an intoxicating excitement, not to 
 cry down the conscience, but ^ to assist her to 
 govern herself.^ The calmest and humblest mind 
 that guides itself by a principle, though but a law 
 of prudence, and which therefore is compelled to 
 self-sacrifice, though the ultimate object may be 
 the lowest conceivable, is far more nearly akin to 
 the spirit of the Maid of Orleans, than the rest- 
 less tempers which pamper their feverish sensi- 
 bilities with glittering cloud pictures and romantic 
 stimulants, which are devoid of moral purpose, 
 and live under no religious sanction. 
 
 The best account of Joan of Arc is in Mr. Sharon Turner's 
 History of England during tlie Middle Ages. In the above 
 paper his materials have been freely used, and sometimes per- 
 haps his language.
 
 III. 
 
 WYCLIFFE. 
 
 Happy moment was it for England when her Chaucer, who 
 has rightly been called the morning star of her literature, 
 appeared above the horizon, — when her Wycliffe, hke the sun, 
 " shot orient beams" through the night of Romish supersti- 
 tion. — Wordsworth, Friend, vol. iii. p. 28. 
 
 T^HE fourteenth century after Christ is one of 
 the greatest ages in the history of the world. 
 It is the beginning of the wonderful period which 
 brought to mankind the revival of ancient learn- 
 ing, the invention of printing, the discovery of 
 America, and the Reformation. That century 
 however may well stand alone, and advance an 
 independent claim to honour, as a time in which 
 the human mind was most active and eminent; 
 and in which Petrarca, Boccaccio, and Rienzi, the 
 Black Prince, and Du Guesclin, Chaucer, Occam, 
 William of Wykeham, Froissart, and Wycliffe, 
 however variously distinguished, were so far alike, 
 that they displayed accomplishments and virtues 
 sufficient to ennoble the rudest and most melan- 
 choly page of history. 
 
 Chaucer, Boccaccio, Petrarca, and Occam were 
 the representatives of that learning and thoughtful 
 genius, wliich had recently burst out in such 
 brightness over the world, and of which Dante 
 and Aquinas had been, in the previous age, the 
 most resplendent stars. Of these the two Italian
 
 WYCLIFFE. 31 
 
 poets, and the author of the Canterbury Tales, 
 filled a station which the world is even now suffi- 
 ciently disposed to value, and exhibited the power 
 of the imagination as gloriously as any who pre- 
 ceded or have followed them, joined with a degree 
 of philosophic cultivation still rarer in the present 
 time than their creative faculties. Occam is pro- 
 bably as good an example as could be found of 
 the scope of that speculation which prevailed in 
 the purely papal ages. In him, as in many others, 
 it fostered very high endowments, and minis- 
 tered in their service: he taught himself, in the 
 studies of scholastic metaphysics and logic, to 
 examine with jealousy the politico-ecclesiastical 
 authority Avhich the talents of Hildebrand had 
 sustained and exalted; and he sharpened in the 
 schools the weapons which wounded the papacy, 
 and defended the imperial throne. Rienzi per- 
 sonated at Rome that democratic spirit, which 
 broke out in other parts of Europe in tumults 
 less memorable than his; and along with it he 
 exhibited a fantastic and irregular historical mad- 
 ness, excited by the vague recollections of Roman 
 splendour, and connecting him and the popular 
 revolts with the intellectual energy and fine intox- 
 ication of learning, Avhicli may be discerned in 
 many minds of the period. In William of Wyke- 
 ham we discover one of the best specimens of the 
 Roman hierarchy, with its mixture of worldly 
 ambition and ecclesiastical magnificence: we see
 
 32 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 liim a statesman and founder of colleges, govern- 
 ing and giving permanence to what already ex- 
 isted, but as far as possible from adding anything 
 to the standard of freedom and culture then exist- 
 ing in tlie world. Froissart, though a priest, was 
 altogether animated by the courtly and warlike 
 spirit of chivalry, and may be ranked with the 
 hero of Cressy and Poictiers, and with the Con- 
 stable Du Guesclin, as one of the worthies of that 
 remarkable system. At the same time Flanders 
 smd Italy were busy and proud Avith their com- 
 mercial greatness. And thus through several 
 spreading branches, all connected at the root, the 
 warm quick sap of intelligence and activity was 
 circulating in European society. 
 
 Chivalry and commerce are both of them 
 compatible with extreme deficiency of thought. 
 Poetry is a mighty liberator; but it may live and 
 rule amid entire practical acquiescence; it does 
 not necessarily involve the boldness of the will. 
 The scholastic philosophy, which has been so often 
 ]ironounced worthless by those who have not 
 studied it, and by those who have both studied it 
 and stolen from it, was almost exclusively in the 
 liands of churchmen, whom interest and subordi- 
 nation alike forbad to give it free w^ay in religion 
 or politics: and the popular rebellions were a 
 mere blind resistance to immediate evils, uncon- 
 nected with any principle of politics, morals, or 
 religion, and only dashed, in the case of Rienzi's
 
 WYCLIPFE. 33 
 
 revolution, with some sounding names, vague 
 remembrances, and frantic expectations. 
 
 In the ecclesiastical establishments ought pro- 
 perly to have been found the defenders of the 
 rights and laws of conscience, and of the untrans- 
 ferable power and duty to make the cultivation of 
 our moral nature the business of existence : but 
 it was more gainful and more flattering to ambi- 
 tion to persuade men that they were dependent 
 for happiness, not on God, or on their own power 
 of self-determination, but on the purchasable 
 favours of the priesthood. Whence then was the 
 voice to be heard, which should require the world 
 to seek for the purification and strengthening of 
 their minds by faith in God, and in that image of 
 Him which belongs to us all; not by penances 
 avenging on the flesh the sins of the soul, or by 
 indulgences bought for a price ? 
 
 It is to these things, and such as these, that 
 men have always had recourse, in order to escape 
 from the bitter necessity of self-examination and 
 self-reliance. In Egypt and India, as well as 
 Papal Europe, men find it easier to deal with 
 their confessors than with their consciences ; they 
 substitute penance for penitence ; and instead of 
 raising their minds to the spiritual conception of 
 God, which demands inward exertion, they fix 
 their eyes on a wooden image, in the contempla- 
 tion of which the higher powers of the soul may 
 
 C3
 
 34 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 be completely passive*. So it was in the four- 
 teenth century through almost the whole of 
 Europe ; and with all the pursuits before enume- 
 rated to distract mankind, and the portentous 
 obstacle of the Roman Catholic Church to im- 
 pede them, it would have been hard to guess 
 from what quarter a reform was to be looked for. 
 Erigena had questioned transubstantiation, the 
 master sorcery which makes so many others prac- 
 ticable ; and probably with no mean ability. But 
 he seems to have written chiefly for the learned ; 
 and his labours and opinions had sunk from the 
 recollection of Europe. Berengarius had much 
 more recently opposed the same monstrous doc- 
 trine ; but his memory does not appear to have 
 lived among the succeeding generations ; and his 
 repeated retractions would at all events have 
 tlu'own a dark cloud over his name. Besides 
 these learned and speculative men, various little 
 
 " There is some immortal wisdom on this subject in the 
 Friend, the longest published work of our Christian Plato, Mr. 
 Coleridge. We do not now remember the page at which the 
 passage we would particularly refer to will be found [voL i., 
 pp. 66 — 60 ;] but no one can go wrong in reading the whole 
 book. It only requires to be more generally studied, to do more 
 towards elevating and enlightening the national mind, than any 
 work published among us for the last century and a half. We 
 may add, that to read it with any profit requires considerably 
 more attention and thought than is commonly given to novels 
 and newspapers. These however do not belong to that small 
 class of writings, of which it may be said, as of the Friend, that 
 they are more to us than food or raiment.
 
 WYCLIFFE. 35 
 
 congregations of the indigent and obscure were 
 scattered over the dominions of the Komish hier- 
 archy, and guarded in secret a holy flame, of 
 which one spark was enough to call down on 
 them the vengeance of the powerful. These, 
 from the simple study of the Bible, unaided by 
 general knowledge, and without the guidance of 
 sufficient interpreters, encouraged themselves to 
 cast away the belief of all that Luther afterwards 
 rejected, and are said not even to have held the 
 strange error of consubstantiation. Occam also, 
 and several others, opposed themselves to the 
 corruptions and usurpations in ecclesiastical dis- 
 cipline, without denying the dogmas of popery. 
 
 It may be remarked of these reformers, that 
 either, like those last mentioned, they only re- 
 sisted abuses obvious to the meanest and dullest, 
 such as the luxury and profligacy of the priest- 
 hood, and their temporal tyrannies and avarice, 
 evils which, though they had been remedied, 
 would have left the principal mischiefs of the 
 system, as regarded the minds of the laity, in all 
 their original force ; or that they only objected to 
 some one corruption, such as transubstantiation, 
 and that among the learned and with little 
 courage; or that, like the Waldcnses, inheriting 
 Christianity in a sound and pure tradition, they 
 clung to the faith of their predecessors, but with- 
 out supporting the avowal of their faith on those 
 grounds of clerkly knowledge, and with that force
 
 36 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 of religious philosophy, which so fortify, when 
 they do not attemjjt to supersede, the conscien- 
 tious persuasion of the wayfaring Christian. 
 
 Of John Wycliffe, the father of the Pro- 
 testants, none of this can be said. He addressed 
 himself with equal boldness and equal skill to the 
 instructed and the simple. He attacked both 
 the worldly abuses of Romanism, and the less 
 apparent, but far more deadly evils of the papal 
 doctrine. He appealed alike to the conscience of 
 the peasant, the practised intellect of the meta- 
 physician, and the book-learning of the divine. 
 And for these characteristics of his story, were it 
 for nothing else, he would deserve to be placed 
 high in the roll of English greatness, and to be 
 studied with honesty and earnestness like his own. 
 
 There are two kinds of reformers, in both of 
 which particular defect and error may be noted ; 
 those who address themselves to a class unfit to 
 judge of the matters in question; and those who, 
 from indolence, cowardice, or contempt, seek to 
 retain among a few, in sealed reservoirs, truths of 
 importance to mankind. Among the former are 
 ahnost all who have sought to popularize science, 
 and more especially philosophy, by bringing them 
 down to the level of the vulgar, instead of at- 
 tempting the slow and laborious, but worthy task 
 of raising the vulgar to the heights of genuine 
 and grounded knowledge. Among the latter 
 have been many retu-ed students, whose failing, it
 
 WYCLIFFE. 37 
 
 may be remarked, is of much less ill effect than 
 that of the others. 
 
 There have also been some, the real and lasting 
 benefactors of the world, avIio have spoken directly 
 to that which exists in all men, conscience and 
 moral convictions, have sought to call these 
 powers into activity, and to make them, as they 
 ought to be and may be, the arbiters of the 
 individual well-being of every one; men, who in 
 doing this have yet laid aside none of the high 
 and scientific titles of knowledge, and who, in 
 making the vulgar wise, have sedulously abstained 
 from vulgarizing wisdom itself into mere popular 
 cleverness and empirical handicraft. Of these 
 were Moses and the Prophets, and St. Paul ; 
 and of these, among the foremost of the unin- 
 spired, were Erasmus, Luther, and, in an earlier 
 and darker age, our own Wycliffe. 
 
 The world has been often told, that deeply- 
 founded and far-sighted wisdom is useless, that 
 common sense and social experience are our qnly 
 safe conductors, and that any loftier and larger 
 knowledge than they can give, if indeed it exist 
 at all, will unfit men for teaching the crowd, 
 and prevent them from reforming actual abuses. 
 Yet no error can be of general and permanent 
 injury, without cloaking itself in the disguises of 
 philosophy and abstract truth : and how shall these 
 false shews, mimicries, and pretences of reason 
 be laid open and dispelled, save by the jiowcr of
 
 38 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 that genuine wisdom which they dare to ape? 
 The man of mere common sense knows not the 
 base on which stands the error that he would 
 oppose; and, himself a thing of shadow, he fights 
 with the shadow which, by Intercepting the 
 light of heaven, it casts along the soil; he would 
 chase it away Avith the glimmer of his lantern, and 
 does not perceive that, only by uprooting and 
 overthrowing the tower, can he destroy the dim 
 and fantastic image. Moses, who confounded the 
 magicians of Pharaoh, was wise In all the learning 
 of the Egyptians ; and the pupil of Gamaliel be- 
 came the great Apostle of Christianity. In the 
 same way WyclifFe, the arch and accursed heretic 
 of the Romanists, was, by the confession of his 
 most malignant enemies, skilful above all men 
 in the very arts which they esteemed the most, 
 and in which they found their armoury for onset 
 and defence. The canon law, the creation of 
 papal Rome, — the law of the ancient empire, which, 
 from being the mother, had become the handmaid 
 of the canon law, and which in so many respects 
 was a code of despotism, — the established meta- 
 physics and logic of the times, which had been 
 framed for the greater part by servants of the 
 papacy, and which were apparently the most 
 remote af all studies from the sympathy with 
 the Ignorant, and the practical and simple ear- 
 nestness, so conspicuous In the life of WycliiFe, — 
 the fathers, on whom the church establishment
 
 WYCLIFFE. 39 
 
 had been most accustomed to rely, — all these 
 were habitually studied by the patriarch of the 
 Reformation, and mastered with an obscure and 
 self-denying diligence, very different from the 
 ostentatious ignorance of our modern brawling 
 innovators. And how did he turn this know- 
 ledge to the profit of his great enter[)rise ? 
 Was it by clamouring against ancient autho- 
 rity, and against the scientific foundations of 
 philosophy, because they were wrenched to the 
 support of existing falsehood? Did he reject, 
 for instance, that scholastic learning, by which 
 transubstantiation, the great root of error, was 
 commonly defended? No: he did not speak in 
 the abodes of philosoj^hic theology a language to 
 which those meditative cells were unaccustomed: 
 he did not address the practised dialectician, the 
 metaphysical thinker, in the tongue of the market: 
 but knowing that from clear and well-established 
 premises no false conclusion could ever be deduced, 
 he boldly applied to the healing of the wound the 
 weapons that had inflicted it; and, by the use of 
 the very terminology and method of the schools, 
 he exposed how absurd it was asserere quod sit 
 accidens sine siihjecto in hostia veritatis. 
 
 He was indeed a man of massy, voluminous, 
 and subtle knowledge ; one who, with the intel- 
 lectual sinews and skill to win the unbloody 
 crown of the athlete, chose rather the sweat and 
 toil and peril of the militant soldier. He had
 
 40 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 all the learning and agility of mind required for 
 the calm contentions of libraries and colleges, so 
 fruitful at that period in power and worldly 
 honour. But did he, like so many among his 
 contemporaries, thus employ his talents ? Where 
 shall we find, in any age or country, amongst the 
 lowest ranks of vulgar fanaticism, a man more 
 zealous to encourage and animate the consciences 
 of the poor and ignorant ? Is it not admirable to 
 see that he, the doctor and philosopher of the old 
 schools, introduced into the church the jjractice of 
 that diligent and, as it were, rustic preaching, so 
 especially designed and fitted to enlighten the 
 lowly mass of the people ? Nor was this adapta- 
 tion of his own great mind to the needs of the 
 weakest a small sacrifice in WycliiFe. For it is 
 clear from his writings that, if ever there was 
 any one who delighted in long and difficult trains 
 of reasoning for their own sake, as giving plea- 
 surable exercise to his faculties, — who loved to 
 busy himself in the building up and compacting 
 of scientific knowledge, — he was the man. Yet 
 through these fine and immense webs of reasoning, 
 how lion-like does he constantly break forth with 
 some bold, direct appeal to that moral sense, 
 which is the great practical standard of truth ! 
 When we hear of the gay heroisms of chivalry, 
 with all its showy enterprise and delight, it would 
 be well to rcincmbcr hoAv far more of resolution 
 and dariuo- and humble self-sacrifice was hid
 
 WYCLIFFE. 41 
 
 beneath a scholar's cloak, than ever beat within 
 a blazoned surcoat. 
 
 It is not enough to love truth; we must also 
 love the communication of it : and herein it is 
 that WyclifFe differed from the sequestered 
 thinkers, and those who dedicated themselves to 
 a contemplative life. His mind rejoiced, if ever 
 did a lover while he was winning his way to his 
 mistress, in pressing on through a thousand laby- 
 rinths of laborious thought ; his spirit exulted, if 
 ever did any, in soaring to the high and etherial 
 empire of divine conceptions ; but he was too 
 deeply filled with fervent charity to devote him- 
 self to meditation. And his was a charity very 
 different from that Avhich seeks to relieve itself as 
 hastily as possible of the burthen of sympathy 
 with others, which escapes as rapidly as it can 
 from the painful aspect of suffering, by an alms 
 that will feed the body, but leave the soul in its 
 starvation. His cliarity " began at the love of 
 man's spirit ;" and the communication of religious 
 knowledge was, in his conviction, "the best service 
 that man may do for his brother." 
 
 His charity towards the poor was so incessant 
 and powerful, that it furnished the readiest pre- 
 text for his calumniators, who accused him of 
 enmity to lawful authority, and of favouring 
 anarchy. How stood the case? The Church of 
 Rome had elevated its own pretensions above the 
 dominion of the state and the national law. It
 
 42 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 maintained that church-property rested not on the 
 same high ground, that ground consecrated by 
 expediency, on which other property is based. It 
 proclaimed that from it, and its necessary and 
 universal supremacy, all authorities whatsoever 
 were derived. It thus confovmded the limits of 
 law and of religion, and took the latter from 
 under the jurisdiction to which alone it is right- 
 fully subordinate, that of the conscience and the 
 divine reason ; while it brought the former into 
 a region where it is an alien and interloper. 
 WyclifFe, to oppose this tremendous evil, and 
 acting like the true subject of a lawful state, 
 showing himself, as he ever Avas, firstly a Chris- 
 tian, secondly an Englishman, announced that the 
 power and property of the clergy Avas built on 
 the same ground of law as all else relating to 
 man's social condition; and in language bold in- 
 deed, and, if uttered in our day and altered cir- 
 cumstances, perilously daring, proclaimed that the 
 law of God and tlie law of England were alone 
 binding on the people, and that the lands of the 
 clergy were given, not for their benefit, but for 
 that of the laity. 
 
 It has been said that his language on this sub- 
 ject would now be dangerous; and for this reason. 
 No one among us now pretends, or at least is for 
 a moment listened to while pretending, that the 
 property of the Church of England is held by a 
 title different from that which guards all other
 
 WYCLIFFE. 43 
 
 property. He therefore, who should now at 
 length and vehemently urge that these possessions 
 are bestowed for the general advantage, as if this 
 were not the case with all possessions, would by 
 implication be maintaining that they ought to be 
 employed for the general advantage in some other 
 mode than at present. And tliis, into whatever 
 excess Wycliffe may have been driven by the 
 fearful magnitude of the evil which then existed, 
 he was far too wise a man to desu-e in circum- 
 stances such as ours. 
 
 It was his doctrine, that the Church, as a poli- 
 tical and endowed establishment, is a part of the 
 State, and not a paramount authority rising above 
 it, and controlling it. So also was it held in the 
 ancient commonwealths. But did Wycliffe be- 
 lieve, as was ordained among them, and as, before 
 the personality of God was revealed, and when 
 nothing but pantheism or polytheism was possible, 
 had perhaps been rightfully ordained, that it was 
 treason in any individual to dissent from the creed 
 of the state? It may safely be answered, that he 
 of all men was the great champion for the legal 
 independence of every man's conscience, except 
 on that universal reason, into the place of which 
 no human institution may honestly dare to intrude. 
 
 At the same time it must be remembered that 
 his whole life bears witness, how strenuous were 
 his exertions to aid the efforts of all men towards 
 the attainment of inward tranquillity and light.
 
 44 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 To this yearning and activity his innumerable 
 sermons and treatises bear witness, and above all 
 the translation of the Scriptures into English, the 
 great witness and imperishable instrument of that 
 Reformation, to which he devoted his whole mind. 
 Of the lesser peculiarities of WyclifFe's cha- 
 racter and habits, we scarcely know anything. 
 But it is evident from his writings and history, 
 that he was habitually under the influence of an 
 austere and lofty enthusiasm, more steady and 
 less passionate than that of Luther, though not 
 with less of courage, faith, or wisdom. He seems 
 to have been naturally of a grave and severe 
 temper; nor was it likely to have been enlivened 
 by the circumstances of the time in which he 
 lived. His youth was passed in hard and rigid 
 study: his early manhood was contemporary with 
 a plague, one of the widest and most fearful deso- 
 lations that tradition has told of: his later years 
 were passed in perpetual and harassing conflict, 
 in grief at the corruption that surrounded him, in 
 peril of his life, in restless labour, in prayer and 
 lamentation for the Church of God. Nor can we 
 wonder that he presents himself to after times 
 with little bloom upon his cheek, and no crown of 
 flowers girding that thoughtful forehead, and 
 shading those intent eyes. He seems to us one 
 in whom all tliat allies the aspects of other men 
 to the business and rejoicings and fattened indo- 
 lence of the world, had shrunk away, and left
 
 WYCLIFFE. 45 
 
 only the untrembllng brow and look, the toiling 
 brain, and lip kindled for prophecy, which became 
 the minister of holy wrath, the champion of dan- 
 gerous and providential enterprise. 
 
 Yet the name of this recluse controversialist 
 and apostle of the poor, this threadbare priest and 
 gospel logician, is for ever connected with much 
 of what is most splendid and imposing in the 
 memorable age to which he belongs. There was 
 a greatness in his mission, and an equal greatness 
 in liis mind, which cast into shadow the petty 
 distinctions of rank, and seem, as we read, to 
 make the worldly glories, with which he some- 
 times came in contact, wither from before his 
 face. It was much for a poor pi'eacher and 
 professor in that age, that, side by side and unre- 
 proved, he should stand with Percy the Earl 
 Marshal, and John of Gaunt, with dukes of Anjou 
 and Burgundy, with primates and legates. To 
 him, and with the purpose that filled his soul, 
 these names and genealogies were of little moment 
 for good or evil: but strange as it may then 
 have been that he, a mean man and despised, 
 should be thus surrounded, it is far more strange 
 to the thoughtful reader of history, it will be 
 infinitely stranger still at the day of judgement, 
 that the names of those prelates and princes and 
 that of WyclifFe should ever have been written 
 together.
 
 46 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 By far the best existing authority for the character of Wycliffe 
 is his Life published in two volumes by Mr. Vaughan in 1828. 
 It is executed with sense, diligence, and talent, and conveys a 
 great mass of information in a most agreeable and manly style. 
 If Dr. Lingard be capable of blushing, his forehead must have 
 been dyed with crimson while he read this work, and remem- 
 bered the disgraceful, if not rather pitiable, account he has given 
 of one of the greatest of Englishmen. We are sincerely anxious 
 for the general and permanent reputation of Mr. Vaughan's 
 book ; and we would therefore suggest to him that in any 
 future edition, (and many such we trust will be required,) lie 
 would do wisely in omitting almost the whole of his very long 
 introduction, which, though learnedly and ably executed, as- 
 sumes a ground already and adequately occupied. It is an 
 excellent abstract, and might perhaps with advantage be pub- 
 lished separately; but, filling more than half of his first volume, 
 it tends to hide the characteristic purpose of his book ; and no 
 reader, with diligence to study it, will find any difficulty in 
 obtaining abundant information on the subject of which it treats. 
 In place of it we much wish that he had printed, in an appendix, 
 the precise words, in all respects but the orthography, used by 
 Wycliffe in the many curious and admirable passages which he 
 quotes from the writings of the reformer. Modernized as they 
 now appear, the reader is constantly fretted by the desire to 
 know how much of the language is Wyclift'e's, and how much 
 Mr. Vaughan's. With some abbreviations in the body of the 
 work, the whole might easily be comprised in one volume. The 
 printing of the book, as it now stands, is unhappily very careless. 
 On the whole however we regard it as a precious addition to 
 English Literature, as a work written in an excellent spirit, and 
 one which required and manifests a degree and kind of learned 
 labour very uncommon among the boasters of the nineteenth 
 century.
 
 IV. 
 
 COLUMBUS. 
 
 T^HE result of the prolonged existence of the 
 earth has been to extend the field of man's free 
 and unfearing agency. This is the natural effect 
 of accumulating experience. 
 
 The ancient world, so far as any single nation 
 knew it, was a narrow island of solid soil, rooted 
 to the centre, and overarched by its own definite 
 firmament, while all beyond was vision, mystery, 
 and the substance of a dream. Men looked from 
 their fields and watch-towers into distant lands, 
 as we gaze from some hill-side upon the vague 
 brightness and mingling colours of the evening 
 clouds and the calm ocean. The earth, of which 
 they had knowledge, was encompassed by imagi- 
 nation and tradition with a thousand mythological 
 kingdoms, with the cities of Meru, the golden 
 bowers of Olympus, the gardens of the Hespe- 
 rides glimmering through the desert, the icy 
 habitations of Caucasus, and the banquet halls of 
 Ethiopia. The Greek, who saw the stars arising 
 out of the sea, might fancy that they had won 
 their brightness from the glorious islands of 
 Antilla or Atlantis, in which they reposed by 
 day, and which were hidden in the distance from 
 the eyes of men. Along the doubtful margin of 
 the actual world, gigantic monsters and lovely
 
 48 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 shadows walked half visible. INIlghty lands, in 
 the conception of the Christian, around the more 
 certain sphere in which he dwelled, were peopled 
 with the holy descendants of Seth, with the 
 progeny of demons, with angels themselves, with 
 loathsome fiends, and innumerable wondrous mini- 
 sters of human temptations, or servants of saintly 
 triumph. A broad belt filled with beings as 
 strange as the shapes of the Zodiac encircled in 
 the mind of every one the little region to wliich 
 he was himself accustomed, commanded his awe, 
 and repelled his inquiry. 
 
 Of the men who have dissipated these fancies, 
 have fixed the clouds into solidity, and chased the 
 shadows from the ends of the earth, the chief is 
 Columbus. He accomplished more than any one 
 else towards making us masters of the world on 
 which Ave tread, and giving us, instead of yawn- 
 ing abysses and realms of vapour, wide waters 
 for our ships, and lands for the city and the 
 plough. He has rendered to the Avorld an im- 
 perishable service. He stands in history as the 
 completer of the globe, the conqueror who has 
 added to the commonwealth of mankind imheard- 
 of provinces and barbarous tribes. The barrier 
 within which we moved with reluctant terror, 
 like a lion in a circle of protruded spears, impetu- 
 ous but fearful, was broken down by the Genoese 
 sailor, and all around us Avas laid open to our 
 onset. The mound on which so many phantoms
 
 COLUMBUS. 49 
 
 poised themselves, and displayed their wings, was 
 by him uprooted from its foundation, and made 
 to mingle with the sky. Thenceforward there 
 was no limit to the action of any thought: no 
 walls confined the arena of human enterprise, but 
 those which the nature of things has appointed. 
 
 The kind of good resulting from the success 
 of Columbus is peculiarly adapted to win the 
 admiration of the present age. He enlarged 
 and strengthened the mechanism by which we 
 work, the material on which we employ ourselves. 
 Could all knowledge of the man be destroyed, 
 the great action of his life would be commonly 
 held up as the most beneficial that any one could 
 perform; for it dispelled innumerable visions, 
 valuable only to men's fancies and affections, and 
 incapable of being employed in the sphere of 
 reality. It brought under our certain knowledge, 
 and subjected to our activity, regions and faculties 
 of nature, from which we have drawn unmeasured 
 physical advantages. Nor was there anything 
 even apparently accidental in this acquisition: 
 Columbus always pointed it out as the certain 
 consequence of his design. The bringing together 
 of distant countries, the increase of wealth, the 
 excitement of commerce, were inherent in that 
 thought which occupied half his life. Was he 
 then nothing else than such a man as may invent 
 a spinning-machine or a steam-boat, as may 
 originate great changes in the material possessions 
 VOL. I. D
 
 50 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 of society, as may show himself earnest in oppo- 
 sing, and incapable of comprehending the seers of 
 visions and the dreamers of phantoms ? Did he 
 resemble the idols of the nineteenth century ? 
 Or was he fit to be a great man of that age which 
 produced the Reformation ? 
 
 The greatness of that period did not consist, 
 more than that of any other, in the neglect of 
 mechanical and material objects, nor naturally 
 involved it; but it implied the estimation of 
 mechanical things as instrumental, and not as 
 ends; and never but in this way has aught seminal 
 been done, even in mechanical discovery. So 
 was it with Columbus, who more than almost any 
 man augmented the means of mankind. Look 
 at his Avholc life, and all we know of his mind, 
 and see what it is that distinguishes him. Not 
 that he discovered America; for a fisherman 
 driven to sea by a storm might have done this ; 
 but he is marked out from other men by the spirit 
 in which he conceived his enterprise, and the 
 objects which he proposed to himself. His inten- 
 tion was to clear up delusion, to solve difficulties, 
 to disperse a thousand misty errors, to gain for 
 European action a new and immense field; but 
 his motive, and it is from this that we must judge 
 the character of the man, was chiefly religious. 
 
 In his own letters, addresses, and narratives, 
 that which strikes us as different from the writ- 
 ings of any other bold and instructed seaman, is
 
 COLUMBUS. 51 
 
 the constant appeal to religious authority. He 
 looks forward with joy and confidence to the 
 reception of the true faith by great countries, 
 and to the acquisition for himself of wealth, which 
 shall enable him to make another crusade, and 
 recover the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the 
 unbelievers. He asserts again and again, as the 
 foundation of his enterprise, the trust and cer- 
 tainty that God had given him, in the hope of 
 leading the way for Christianity to vast and un- 
 known kingdoms, then pagan and blind; and, in 
 addition to those sound and scientific reasons for 
 the existence of a Western land, Avhich no man 
 in his own day could refute, and the accuracy of 
 which was proved by his success, he supports liis 
 plan by a strange variety of arguments taken 
 from religion and prophecy. He was a diligent 
 student of the Bible; and from it he draws a 
 hundred misapplied predictions. In his convic- 
 tion the attempt to which he devoted himself was 
 designed from of old by Providence; and he, as 
 its selected minister, was watched over by saints 
 and angels; and the mother of the Lord pointed 
 his path along the waters. The cross was the 
 ensign of his triumph; and his task was almost 
 accomplished, w^hen he had first displayed the em- 
 blem of his faith on the shores of the new world. 
 Year after year, through all the changes from 
 success and honour and delegated sovereignty to 
 sorrow and shame, amid the vicissitudes of poverty 
 
 D 2
 
 52 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 and disease, until his melancholy death, he was 
 constantly occupied by thoughts of the vows 
 -which he had made in the freshness of his hopes, 
 and which he had not been able to fulfil; his 
 dreams assumed the shapes of heavenly messen- 
 gers, and uttered to him discourses of providential 
 warning or holy comfort; and when courtiers and 
 adventurers were alike intent on the one object 
 of enriching themselves in the colonies he had 
 discovered, and then commanded, — when the 
 priests who had been sent to aid him were busy 
 in plotting against his power, — he meditated on 
 the prospect of rescuing Jerusalem from the 
 Mussulmans. 
 
 Columbus, the great overthrower of the fantastic 
 and mysterious idolatries which were founded on 
 the ignorance of mankind, the man who more 
 than all others rooted the vague phantoms, that 
 to the mind of every one filled the unknoANTi 
 earth, did not therefore want a childlike simpli- 
 city of faith in the truths of religion. He sepa- 
 rated for ever the two worlds of the infinite and 
 the finite, and cleared our knowledge of each by 
 drawing a broad line between them. His genius 
 enlarged and completed the domain of man's phy- 
 sical exertion; but his mind was still as true as 
 ever to the existence of a higher region, neediiag 
 not the patronage of courts for its discovery, and 
 revealed to us by a mightier being than he. He 
 explored and opened to the light of day the pro-
 
 COLUMBUS. 53 
 
 vlnces of fancy and mythology; but woe be to 
 the dishonesty of those who overlook that he left 
 to the spu-it its own serene kingdom, and bowed 
 before its heavenly tabernacle! What he added 
 to our material world, he did not take away from 
 the immaterial; but while he excluded for ever 
 from a part the shadows and superstitions of igno- 
 rance, he would have subordinated the whole to 
 religion. 
 
 It is true indeed, that the religion of Columbus 
 was not the purest Christianity, though exalted 
 in his mind to a nobler faith than that common in 
 his age. He sustained himself through a thousand 
 conjunctures of uncertainty and danger by a trust 
 in Providence, which was the most remarkable 
 quality in his character. In him the latest bright- 
 ness of Roman Catholicism displayed itself; and 
 when in that form Christianity had reached, if 
 not subdued, every portion of the world, nothing 
 remained but the task of internal reformation. 
 
 But though the mind of Columbus was in 
 many respects dark and weak, in this it was 
 strong; in a religious hope and reliance, which 
 taught him to refer immediately to God whatever 
 of clear knowledge and new illumination he pos- 
 sessed. He felt himself marked out and appointed, 
 with the other especial servants of Heaven, to per- 
 form a liigh spiritual work. The vividness of 
 his intuition, the strength of his hope, he did not 
 seek to account for from the accidents of his cha-
 
 54 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 racter, or the scattered learning of his life. He 
 thought that all was given to liim for a predicted 
 purpose, and that he was ranged among the patri- 
 archs and prophets chosen from of old to do the 
 work of Providence. The wise men of our day 
 will mock at him for his childish creduhty; but 
 let no one despise this holy enthusiasm, unless he 
 too has felt as strong a faith as belonged to 
 Columbus in the distant and hidden, and as ready 
 an energy in attempting to substantiate for all 
 men that which before existed but in the thought 
 of one ; and, having felt these, can assert the pos- 
 sibility of their action without any mixture of 
 humble piety. He was indeed in all things child- 
 like; cliildlike in his humility, childlike in his 
 confidence, childhke in the keenness and freshness 
 of all his sensations; yet was it he who disco- 
 vered, and by this very unfearing simplicity of 
 heart, that new world which has changed the 
 whole condition and subsequent history of the old. 
 The name of the discoverer of America would 
 give us, if we wanted accurate knowledge, the 
 conception of a vast and iron mind, trampling 
 over obstacles, compelling kings and seas to yield 
 to him, and realizing the cloudlike dreams of anti- 
 quity by an act of will as imperative and irre- 
 sistible as that by which the ocean-god framed 
 and lifted over the water the island of Apollo. 
 He connects himself with the stern benefactors, 
 the heroic shadows of antiquity, Jason, and the
 
 COLUMBUS, 55 
 
 warlike Bacchus, and the wandering Hercules. 
 The fancy natm-ally conceives of him as a mighty 
 spectral shape, leaning, like some old sea-phan- 
 tom, on a gigantic rudder, and fixed for ever in 
 dim and unmoving sublimity on some icy crag of 
 Darien, with two worlds of water spread below 
 him. A form remote, immense, and unapproach- 
 able, alone seems suitable to his fame. We can- 
 not imagine him as a man beat back by daily 
 opposition, impeded by the follies of the vulgar, 
 checked and stung by the reptiles of society ; and 
 the act which revealed a second world likens itself 
 in our thought to the simplicity and singleness of 
 a creation. 
 
 But this bold, imposing, and right onward 
 course, this unity and distinctness of action, can 
 scarcely exist among men, unless in some false and 
 melo-dramatic appearance. To struggle and ago- 
 nize, to win a little way by much exertion, to be 
 attended in our completest triumphs by the shame 
 of some particular failure, or to be cut off in the 
 midst of hopes brighter than any we have realized, 
 is the fate of humanity. In Columbus we do not 
 discover one great inspiration displaying itself in 
 action as soon as attained, and leaving to him 
 whom it favoured nothing for the future but to 
 die in his renown. He does not delineate himself 
 in history with a few vague shadowy lines, in 
 which none of the half tints and finer lineaments 
 of man can be discerned. But we see him
 
 56 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 throughout made up of much greatness and some 
 weakness, encompassed with obstructions so petty 
 that one would wish him to blow them away like 
 cobwebs, yet so strong that, giant as he was, he 
 frequently could not escape from them; often 
 baffled, and sometimes irritated by the despicable; 
 and such, that his effigy ought to be moulded by 
 the historian in gold, not virgin, but tormented 
 into purity by the furnace. 
 
 We trace him with more than the interest 
 which follows a hero of romance, through the 
 doubtful and adventurous years of his earlier life* 
 There is a meditative cm'iosity, which yearns to 
 discover in what obscure and silent conjuncture of 
 his vigorous manhood the idea of the world's com- 
 pletion by his means first dawned over his imagi- 
 nation : we can only know that his mind was 
 built up into its strength amid the incessant affairs 
 of Mediterranean commerce and war, by expe- 
 rience gathered for a vile price, and at the risk of 
 life, by knowledge slowly and dispersedly col- 
 lected, and above all by faith, the master principle, 
 not to be learned from without, but drawing the 
 life and strength and loveliness of all things to 
 its own high inward service. With how many 
 strange doubts and misgivings, and momentary 
 temptations of a magical fancy, and recurring ter- 
 rors at the very rashness of his own conception, 
 must this great man have contended, whether in 
 his narrow chamber, or on the unsteady deck of
 
 COLUMBUS. 57 
 
 some paltry bark, guided between Spain and Italy, 
 with a crew of a half-score men, by him who was 
 first to break the gates of the Atlantic! Image 
 him in his little cabin studying by the flickering 
 light of a solitary lamp, and to the sound of the 
 winds and waters, the marvellous descriptions of 
 Marco Polo, or the more pregnant pages of 
 Scripture, in wliich with tremulous, yet confident 
 expectation, he taught himself to read the me- 
 morable prophecies of his own enterprises, and 
 evidences of his special selection. Image the 
 poor adventurer, the son of the Genoese wool- 
 comber, and a sailor since his early boyhood, 
 wrestling for the sense of some dark saying, which 
 he wanted learning to interpret, and finding its 
 significance come gradually glimmering out of the 
 page at the call of his earnest reliance: conceive 
 him weighing, hesitating, trembling, turning to 
 the stars an eye of hope, repeating a hasty sup- 
 plication to the saints, reviewing in his thoughts 
 the large and mixed array of testimonies on which 
 he had employed years in building up his trust, 
 resting at last with secure triumph in the cer- 
 tainty which God had given him, till again he 
 turned away with terror to consider the inade- 
 quacy of his means for the fulfilment of his 
 mission. Thus, by the effort of an honest unagi- 
 nation, let us paint Columbus; and we shall help 
 ourselves to think what and how great he was. 
 The wondrous magic-lantern of history shows 
 
 D 3
 
 58 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 him to us a poor wayfarer, accompanied by his 
 son, and appearing on foot at the gate of a monas- 
 tery to implore bread for liis boy. The tall and 
 majestic pauper, with his ruddy cheek tinged by 
 years and hardship, and bright hair so early 
 turned to snow, must have presented a singular 
 portrait of freshness and courage, battered, but 
 not overthrown by misfortune. There was a 
 spirit in his clear grey eye, which, while he dis- 
 coursed to the Prior of Santa Maria de Rabida 
 on his designs and convictions, would indicate 
 that he had in himself that union of the heroic 
 and saintly character required for so perilous an 
 enteqjrise. And probably he who heard Colum- 
 bus speak with the honest and earnest simplicity 
 through all his life so peculiarly belonging to 
 him, must have perceived a power in his words 
 that softened the contrast, so strange to us, be- 
 tween the condition of the solitaiy beggar and 
 the vastness of the thought wliich he announced. 
 
 O immeasurable scope of himian genius ! O 
 mighty strength of tnist in God ! O miserable 
 inequality of earthly fortimes ! O mysterious 
 complication of mortal power and weakness I how 
 wonderfully are they all displayed in the story of 
 Columbus ! And liow much of faith in the sincere 
 and humble workings of the mind may we cer- 
 tainly derive from the contemplation of this 
 minister of Providence a mendicant at Palos,— 
 in his frail skiff the discoverer of the largest of
 
 COLUMBUS. 59 
 
 the world's continents, — at Barcelona received by 
 kings with more than the honours of a triumphant 
 consul, — then brought in chains from his own 
 new world, — and at last, on a neglected bed of 
 pain and death, carrying with him, amid his 
 heavenly hopes, the consciousness of how noble a 
 deed his life had accomplished, and leaving to 
 mankind the inheritance of America, and the 
 memory of another pure and creative mind.
 
 GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS. 
 
 TN this incomplete condition of mankind, while 
 the germs of glory are as yet distempered with 
 so many green and unconcocted humours, so that 
 often the decay of an excessive age would seem 
 to be mingled with the rawness of our immaturity, 
 and the worm of death to be already feeding on 
 the crude infancy of human existence, now des- 
 perate, as it were, of revival, it would be incon- 
 siderate or fanatical to hope that the world can 
 move by a serene and purely intellectual progi*es- 
 sion. It is with inward struggles that an indi- 
 vidual obtains any great thought ; it is with 
 harder struggles that he becomes entirely and 
 calmly master of it ; and likewise it is only amid 
 social contests that the world, regarded as one 
 organized body, seizes a like thought, and with 
 more severe and perilous contests that such a 
 thought is made a consistent portion of the gene- 
 ral mind. These contests, what are they but the 
 wars and persecutions and violences which fill all 
 history with the clashing of arms and the steam 
 of slaughter? Hence it is that men have ques- 
 tioned whether the laurel be more proper to the 
 conqueror or the sage, and that the palm has 
 adorned alike the spiritual and the military 
 triumph. The selected messengers of God ap-
 
 GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS. 61 
 
 pear not among us but in disguise ; and we know 
 not whether to hope for them beneath the glitter- 
 ing panoply, or the scholar's gown, or the raiment 
 of camel's hair. 
 
 Thoughts are as mighty men, that in their 
 infancy lie still in the cradle, (if not rather 
 warring even then against serpents,) and in their 
 old age become tranquil hermits, or lawful and 
 established monarchs ; but their middle years are 
 fuU of strife and bloodshed. Such is the condi- 
 tion of human affairs, that an idea which has not 
 yet given rise to social contention, is scarcely 
 more than in embryo, and has not been born into 
 the world. If a truth that concerns the body of 
 mankind be weighed in the balance of even jus- 
 tice, the turbulent and tyrannous will assuredly 
 seek to weigh down by his sword the scale that 
 contains the gold; and by the sword alone can the 
 wrong be remedied. So it was in the early ages 
 with the religion of the pagan priesthoods; so 
 with the philosophic cidture of Greece, which 
 broke forth, armed like its own Pallas, and over- 
 ran the East ; so with the empire of law, the 
 inheritance of the Romans, and cause to which 
 they ministered ; so with Christianity and Maho- 
 metanism, opposed on this side and on that to 
 idolatry ; so, lastly, was it with Protestantism. 
 
 This doctrine needed from the beginning the 
 defence of arms ; for by arms it was to be tried. 
 It was successfully supported in the field, and its
 
 62 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 existence seeured by solemn treaties ; but in the 
 Thirty years' War the vigour of its youth seemed 
 for a time to have passed away. The contest was 
 obviously unequal; and England, which alone 
 appeared to have the power of authoritative inter- 
 ference, was now, as regarded the Continent, 
 either indolent or impotent. The revolted posses- 
 sions of Spain in the north of Europe were feeble 
 and tottering; Henry IV. was dead; and the 
 glory which his victories had conferred on the 
 Huguenots, had been in some degree withdrawn 
 from them by his subsequent apostasy. In Ger- 
 many Protestantism was divided against itself, 
 and without a sufficient leader; nor was it easy 
 for men to guess from what quarter a champion 
 could be looked for. The modern existence of 
 Sweden was little remembered, until the appear- 
 ance of Gustavus Adolphus. 
 
 Scandinavia was the seat of an ancient mytho- 
 logy, one of the wildest and most shadowy that 
 has ever been conceived. The remoteness of the 
 country, and the dreariness of the clunate, seemed 
 in the apprehensions of the rest of Europe to 
 render possible the marvels of that tradition ; and 
 a race of fierce and gigantic warriors, blood- 
 thirsty, reckless, and idolatrous, might be thought 
 the appropriate inhabitants of an ill-known and 
 snowy waste. It was easy and natural to dream 
 of the dim phantoms of that superstition as still 
 lingering in those bleak and obscure regions ; but
 
 GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS. 63 
 
 it was difficult to conceive its people refined to 
 the utmost degree then known in Europe, and 
 mingling with skill and decision in the wars and 
 negociations of southern kingdoms; nor would 
 what was beyond all prudent supposition have 
 been realized, but for the genius of one man. 
 
 Gustavus Adolphus, a king from his eighteenth 
 year, lived till liis thirty-sixth a life worthy of a 
 great soldier and ruler, but insufficient to have 
 placed his name among the foremost in history. 
 These years of internal labour, and of war with 
 Sweden and Poland, are chiefly remarkable as 
 helping to the formation of that mind which 
 speedily astonished Europe, as giving to Gustavus 
 his knowledge of war and of human nature, and as 
 enabling him to put together and perfect that 
 mechanism of glory and power, in which he com- 
 bined the wisdom of so many counsellors, the 
 valour and conduct of so many leaders, and the 
 discipline and stubborn courage of an um-ivalled 
 army. Yet during this period of preparation the 
 rare greatness of the man so showed itself, that a 
 sage observer would have announced, not virtue 
 or capacity, but opportunity alone, to be wanting. 
 A master genius was required to discover and call 
 out the admirable talents with which Gustavus 
 siu-roimded himself, and, above all, to produce 
 and cultivate in his soldiers a temperance, a hu- 
 manity, a religious morality, which appear a 
 living and self-subsisting excellence more than
 
 64 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 a passive subordination. Throughout these diffi- 
 culties and perils he is rather equal to his after 
 renown than to his actual circumstances ; and we 
 watch him with an interest proportioned to the 
 importance of the hero, not to that of the drama 
 or the theatre, whether he be discoursing to his 
 senate of peace and war, and the columns of 
 national greatness ; or labouring at Riga, with 
 a pick-axe in his hand, among his Dalecarlian 
 miners; or contending in agility and ingenuity 
 as the leader of an army against bands of Poles 
 and Cossacks; or returning thanks in churches 
 for victories, forerunners of Leipsic and the Lech ; 
 or displaying, as at Elbingen, the native simplicity 
 and confidence of his character, when, having left 
 his general and the burgomaster to sign the capi- 
 tulation in his tent, he walked into the town as a 
 visitor, apologized to the wondering crowd for the 
 disorder of his dress, and stepping aside from their 
 admiration into a bookseller's shop, asked the 
 tradesman for a copy of Buchanan's poems. 
 
 In the year 1630 the King of Sweden began 
 his German warfare; and assuredly no one ever 
 more decidedly brought with him the character- 
 istics of an agent of Providence, whether in the 
 unexpectedness of the interposition, the seeming 
 smallness of his worldly resources, the elevated 
 objects at which he aimed, or the splendour of 
 triumph that accompanied his first efforts. In a 
 region dedicated of old to the iron attributes
 
 GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS. 65 
 
 and stormy renown of gigantic heroes and stern 
 demigods, he was raised up, as if by the word 
 of an angel, from the tomb of Vasa, a brighter 
 spirit more gloriously embodied. Crowned as 
 it were with the meteors of the North, he broke 
 violently through the armed and seagirt boundary 
 of that arena in which Protestantism was strug- 
 gling for its existence, and rushed between his 
 over-mastered religion and the enemies that were 
 destroying it, setting at nought the superiority of 
 numbers and riches, and the fame of unconquered 
 generals old in arms, the manifold greatness of 
 Spain, and the traditional awe of the Austrian 
 Cjesar and of the Roman Pontiff. In two years 
 he had marched from North to South of Germany, 
 had penetrated from the Baltic well nigh to the 
 Lake of Constance, had passed the Rhine, had 
 entered in triumph Munich, the high seat of his 
 chiefest enemy, and prayed in Augsburg, a centiu*y 
 before the cradle of Protestantism, and still con- 
 secrated by the name of Luther. In fine, within 
 that little space he had wrested victory from the 
 greatest captain of the age, seized three hundred 
 forts and cities, and shaken in Vienna the heart- 
 strings of the empire; above all, had so confirmed 
 and exalted the hopes of the Protestants, that the 
 despised and oppressed religion no longer dreaded 
 the frown of Pharaoh, or submitted to Egyptian 
 taskmasters. 
 
 The great conquerors of the world have always
 
 66 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 run their career either with extraordinary means 
 at their disposal, or encountering feeble though 
 boastful and wealthy enemies. Bonaparte had 
 at his command the most compact of European 
 kingdoms, with the greatest and most ingenious 
 people, abeady used to bear their banners to 
 victory, and absolutely subjugated to his will. 
 Alexander and Cassar (men comparable for mili- 
 tary skill and personal accomplishment, though 
 of widely different moral estimation,) brought 
 discipline to war against rudeness, and civilization 
 against barbarism; and Scipio and Hannibal 
 wielded the powers of the two weightiest com- 
 munities on earth. The warriors who have 
 rapidly overrun large territories, if unsupported 
 by these advantages, have seldom been opposed 
 to countries rough and massive with fortresses, 
 and loaded like the fist of an ancient boxer 
 with threatening and ponderous destruction. In 
 all these circumstances Gustavus Adolphus was 
 distinguished from those of smiilar glory who 
 went before or have followed him. The region 
 from which he went forth to war was Sweden, a 
 small, a weak, and frozen patrimony. The king- 
 doms to which he bade defiance were no other 
 than the German Empu'e and Spain, Italy and 
 the Indies. 
 
 If moreover the aspect of the time be considered, 
 it will be found especially abundant in warlike 
 excellence. Gustavus was not like Frederick of
 
 GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS. 67 
 
 Prussia, a vigorous and creative mind, standing 
 alone with indisputable superiority in a compa- 
 ratively barren age. The period of Gustavus was 
 fertile, almost beyond precedent or later example, 
 in men whose heroic characters and profound 
 intelligence gave dignity to whatever cause they 
 supported. Three, above all, were impressively 
 eminent, and seemed to be governed by a destiny 
 necessarily connected with that of their great 
 antagonist. Tilly, Pappenheim, and Wallenstein 
 were generals whose names stand out in liistory 
 with a picturesque and definite brilliance, and a 
 natural individuality, the most attractive and 
 imposing. Pappenheim, though as young as Gus- 
 tavus, was seamed with nearly a hundred scars, 
 like a many-dinted sword of the most precious 
 temper and admirable poise. The restless and 
 burning Achilles of the Empire and Popery, his 
 courage glowed like a furnace, and his impetuosity 
 likened him to the wind. Of a wild and excessive 
 spirit, he never could be cautious for himself; but 
 aware of the importance of his cause, and deeply 
 attached to it, he was as far from being over-rash 
 for liis soldiers; and heading them, Tilly was 
 scarcely more careful, or Wallenstein subtler than 
 he. He fell on the same field as Gustavus, and 
 rejoiced in dying, that the enemy of his faith had 
 also perished. The declining age of Tilly was 
 united in the same cause with his early manhood. 
 Bold and determined, he looked at all occurrences
 
 68 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 and persons with an eye of clear, sullen, and un- 
 pitying intelligence. His religion was bigoted, 
 and his morality austere; he had none of the 
 dreaming fancies, the mystical affections, and 
 wayward kindliness of the Germans; and reck- 
 lessness and intolerance were in him resolve, and 
 not as in the Spaniards passion. He too in his 
 hoary hairs, and after a life of victory, was 
 deprived of his long glories, and then slain by the 
 arras of the Swede. The last antagonist of Gus- 
 tavus, and the most remarkable, was the Duke of 
 Friedland. He too was possessed of a potent and 
 brooding mind, in the depths and gloom of which 
 he found at last the doom of his own destruction. 
 By temper he was more imperious and magnificent 
 than almost ever was a king. He possessed 
 immense estates, and a reputation in itself vast, 
 and the more conspicuous, inasmuch as it seemed 
 to contain the seeds of an illimitable superiority. 
 He was confessedly unrivalled in the art of 
 collecting and rapidly organizing an army; he had 
 never been defeated by any opponent in the con- 
 duct of one. The unbounded profusion of his 
 largesses appeared to have in them more of a 
 careless condescension than of any warmer im- 
 pulse. Above all, the strength of his mind is 
 rendered impressive by its conjunction with the 
 weakness of astrological credulity; and the deeply 
 founded despotism and infinite ambition of his 
 character shrunk and bowed before the predictions
 
 GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS. 69 
 
 of an Italian star-gazer. At last his fame and 
 that of Gustavus, were brought to the arbitrement 
 on the plain of Lutzen; and the Bohemian lost 
 the victory, and the Swede his life. From the 
 time of the death of Gustavus, an occurrence 
 readily supposed to be glorious to the Imperialists, 
 because it was more advantageous than would 
 have been many victories, the fiercest longings of 
 Wallenstein took apparently more consistence and 
 a loftier flight. If we may believe the rumours 
 and hints that have reached us, he marched reso- 
 lutely forward towards the delusion of royalty, 
 nor perceived that the shining vapour floated 
 above his grave. 
 
 Around these principal figures, many others 
 grouped themselves, worthy in less stirring times, 
 and among less powerful spirits, to have held the 
 foremost place. Nor did Gustavus attempt to 
 oppose these formidable minds with a mechanism 
 moved only by his own conceptions. His genius 
 resembled that precious gem of Eastern fable, 
 which uncovered to the eyes of its owner all the 
 inferior jewels in the mines of earth. Feeling no 
 jealousy of neigbouring reputations, he sought for, 
 and drew around him a band of men fit followers 
 of such a commander, Horn, Bannier, Torstenson, 
 Duke Bernard, and, above all, the one whose name 
 might well be the polar star to ministers of state, 
 the wise Chancellor Oxenstiern. 
 
 The inferior means employed by the king of
 
 70 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 Sweden are even more memorable than the nobler 
 instruments; for they were more distinguished 
 from their class, and more wonderfully improved 
 beyond their first elements. His native dominions 
 could permanently furnish but a small portion of 
 the army required for garrisons and campaigns in 
 Germany. And though Europe was then filled 
 with hordes of mercenary soldiers, they were 
 addicted to unmeasured turbulence and licence; 
 and the pay required for the services of a 
 small body would speedily have exhausted the 
 resources of Sweden. In the formation, from 
 these materials, of an army such as that wliich 
 defeated Tilly and Wallenstein, the greatness of 
 the king was the most eminently displayed. 
 Rich governments supplied the wants of his oppo- 
 nents; and the devastation of provinces marked 
 their course. It Avas only by the utmost law- 
 lessness and cruelty of rapine, that the Duke of 
 Friedland created and held together legions, as if 
 by a spell. Gustavus was engaged in a religious 
 enterprise; and the principles of his warfare were 
 based not only on the nature of his design, but on 
 that high and far-sighted prudence which can 
 scarcely divide itself from conscientious wisdom. 
 The discipline which he enforced was strict as that 
 of Spartans, and moral as that of hermits; and as 
 the camp of the Romans was a temple, so that 
 of the Swedes was no less] admiral )le for order, 
 virtue, and devotion, than if it had been a place
 
 GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS. 71 
 
 holy to God. The contributions which were the 
 fruits of his victories^ relieved the subjugated 
 regions from half the inconveniences, and all the 
 horrors, of unsuccessful resistance. And thousands 
 of rude and licentious soldiers accustomed to 
 change their banners in every campaign, and to 
 make each secession a pretext for plundering 
 the country round their quarters, now, though 
 commanded for the most part by officers whom no 
 tie but interest bound to their general, were yet 
 united in faithful and iiTesistible phalanxes by 
 the stronger than astral influence of one man's 
 predominant wisdom and heroism. 
 
 Such were the wonders accomplished by Gus- 
 ta\Tis in making and compacting the engines 
 of his power. They never could have been done 
 by any one whose ends were lower than sublime; 
 for the design which occupies by a necessary 
 retroaction modifies the means whereby we seek 
 to attain it. But the aim of the Swede, even if 
 it be regarded separately, evidently appears both 
 lofty and permanent. He purposed to secure for 
 Protestantism so firm an establishment in the 
 Empire, that neither force, such as Spain has 
 always been ready to employ, nor tyranny, such 
 as that of the Imperial Edict of Restitution, nor 
 atrocity, such as the Massacre of St. Bartholo- 
 mew, nor faithlessness, like the subsequent Revo- 
 cation of the Edict of Nantz, nor all the wiles of the 
 Papacy or violence of Roman Catholic potentates,
 
 72 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 should avail to shake its firm foundation. With- 
 out this fearless and princely interposition, those 
 sparks of fire from Heaven which had been scat- 
 tered abroad by the censers of Wycliffe and Huss 
 and Luther, would have been trampled and extin- 
 guished beneath the armed heels of royal perse- 
 cutors and prelatical tyrants. It was the purpose 
 of Gustavus to elevate the flame on an altar of 
 rock, and collect its seeds in imperishable lamps. 
 Nor is it a mean evidence of his splendid faculties 
 and heavenly mission, that, when the hand which 
 had tended the sacred light, and guarded it from 
 the lovers of darkness, was disarmed and crushed 
 by death, new champions sprung from his blood, 
 and inherited his heroism; the impulse of his 
 glory still moved his followers; and his spirit was 
 with them from camp to camp, and battle to 
 battle, till the liberties of Germany, the security of 
 the possessions and rights of the Protestants, were 
 established for ever by the peace of Westphalia. 
 
 The spirit in which the supporters of his cause 
 fought and took counsel, was the better spirit of 
 his nobler and more characteristic thoughts. The 
 genius that guided him was something in his later 
 years checked or degraded by aims of a personal, 
 though large ambition. And this great soul de- 
 parted from earth at a time when nothing remained 
 for it, perhaps, but hopes less pure than those 
 that had before inspired it, and the triumphs of 
 selfish exertion.
 
 VI. 
 
 MILTON. 
 
 PiNE of the most remarkable changes in the his- 
 tory of the world is that which has substituted 
 the action of circumstances for the influence of 
 individual character. To questions whether this 
 revolution be useful or mischievous, only the one 
 answer can be returned, — that it is necessary. 
 But omitting all discvission as to the political 
 results of this alteration, we may yet observe that 
 nothing can be more pernicious than to let it 
 extend to the moulding of our own minds. For 
 whether any man's well-being can be destroyed 
 by adverse fortune (which almost all Pagan wis- 
 dom and example, no less than Christianity, nega- 
 tive), it is clear that the most favourable accidents 
 can never secure it. Yet our education generally 
 tends to turn attention, not on the virtues and 
 accomplishments of illustrious men, but on the 
 precepts left to us by them, or to be drawn from 
 their lives, for advancing ourselves in society, and 
 prudently governing our conduct. 
 
 It would therefore in our age be especially 
 useful to set up before the eyes of men the por- 
 traits of the great minds which now exist for us 
 only in their thoughts or actions, and to display 
 them for the reverential love of later times in 
 their living personalities, surrounded, as golden 
 
 VOL. I. E
 
 74 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 statues In a temple, by unstained and sacred air. 
 Such tasks are not dear to those whom profit or 
 vanity has made skilful in bookcraft; and the 
 attempt is tlius remitted to workmen who want 
 perhaps almost every quality required for success, 
 but the earnestness with which they Avould wil- 
 lingly devote themselves to its achievement. 
 
 Milton stands apart from nearly all the men 
 who hold a permanent place in the estimation of 
 the world. With scarcely an exception, their 
 memories are still, as it were, naturally joined to 
 the affairs of society. Shakspeare is read perhaps 
 less for his poetry, than for the number ' of prac- 
 tical maxims and sayings and descriptions of gene- 
 ral application, which crowd his pages. Newton 
 retains his place in fame by the physical direction 
 of his pursuits. Bacon is crowned with both 
 these diadems. But the fourth great name of 
 England dwells aloft, and eqiially remote from the 
 business of the day, and the studies of natural 
 pliilosophy. The merchant cannot learn from him 
 to grow rich. He has left no proofs to the mathe- 
 matician. The man of the world can find in his 
 writings no directions for his carriage in courts 
 and assemblies. In the eyes of the present gene- 
 ration his political opinions are an obsolete fancy, 
 his system of church-government a baseless dream, 
 and his plan of education a grotesque rarity for 
 literary museums. He is even hateful to many 
 for his defence of regicide; he is distasteful to
 
 MILTON. 75 
 
 more for his heretical doctrine ; the works which 
 employed the larger portion of his life are diffi- 
 cult and gloomy, and now half hidden by the rust 
 and cobwebs of the two centuries which have in- 
 troduced to popularity such different theories from 
 his; his poetry, to persons who read for amuse- 
 ment, is far too massive and learned, and fur- 
 nishes food little grateful to the majority of those 
 in whose views his religion is not contemptible. 
 
 Whence then comes it that he is still spoken of 
 as a bright and almost an awful spirit? It assur- 
 edly does not arise from the accidental conform- 
 ity of a few of his opinions with those of some 
 modern politicians. They employ his eternal 
 name for their own low momentary purposes. 
 They use a forensic lens to kindle from that sun 
 their heaps of weeds, and so breed a stench in the 
 nostrils of their enemies. But he sjjoke so little 
 to the crowd, he lived so long ago, his faith was 
 so sincere, and his morality so exalted, that he 
 will never receive from them that cordial idolatry, 
 which rewards their recent champions. He has 
 lately been panegyrized by them in this country, as 
 the Bible, when it Avas taken to Rome after the sack 
 of Jerusalem, might have been applauded by some 
 Greek adventuring rhetorician, who had looked 
 for an hour into the volume. Nor can the reve- 
 rence felt for him be explained by the religious 
 frame of his longest poem. For some of our 
 most admired religious authorities have declared 
 
 E 2
 
 76 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 that the Rev. Mr. PoUok's Course of Time Is 
 superior to Paradise Lost. Pure poetry will not 
 maintain an author in the thoughts of English- 
 men; or Spenser would not be almost forgotten. 
 There must be some cause different from all these 
 for our national admiration of Milton; and it can 
 be found in nothing but the dignity of his cha- 
 racter. That, careless as the learned and the 
 popular are becoming of such titles to renown, is 
 still a claim on the sympathy of mankind; and so 
 it ever must be, unless we shall sink into a horde, 
 externally civilized, but morally uncultivated. 
 
 Milton was abundantly skilled in the dialectic 
 art; he had a divine intuition into the logic of 
 poetry; but he was not particularly remarkable, 
 among men of genius, for penetrating and com- 
 prehensive intellect. This is very clear from his 
 political and theological writings. His scheme of 
 Government is that of a piu'cly ideal common- 
 wealth, and has the fault common to the greater 
 number of such conceptions, that it never could 
 be practised, except among beings for whom no 
 government at all would be necessary. His 
 opinions as to a Church Establishment are of an 
 exactly similar description; and no imagination 
 less powerful than his could have realized such 
 ^nsions to any mind. Nor could these phantom 
 plans have obtained, in the thoughts of a nation, 
 the living force necessary to their action, unless 
 every man had been able to breathe into them
 
 MILTON. 77 
 
 from himself a breath of existence as powerful 
 as that with wliich they were imbued by their 
 creator. But this could not be. The roots by 
 which institutions hold to the minds of most men, 
 and draw nourishment from them, are custom and 
 antiquity, far more than the feeling of security, 
 the love of order, and the reliance on acknoAv- 
 ledged right, which influence the few thoughtful 
 heads. Milton cut off these roots in himself, and 
 nourished his theory by stronger and deeper ones, 
 penetrating below the surface, into the reason and 
 freedom of his nature. His plans are glorious 
 manifestations of his character. But in politics 
 no more than in poetry could he lay aside the 
 austere and magnificent individuality of his mind, 
 and think for others from a knowledge of what 
 they are, instead of considering them as repeti- 
 tions of his nobler self He knew little of the 
 tangled complication of modern society, of the 
 reciprocal action of various classes, which have 
 grown up and been sanctioned by centuries, of all 
 the differences made by the increasing importance 
 of property between the commonwealth of Eng- 
 land and that of Rome. He saw, in his idea of 
 rulers, the combined elements of a moral and a 
 civil guardianship, resembling, but for their elec- 
 tive title, an old priestly aristocracy. The people 
 were in his eyes a body whose freedom would 
 best be secured by obedience to these governors : 
 and he took but slight account of that great middle
 
 78 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 mass of unripe active intelligence, which did not 
 exist in the ancient world, but the power of which 
 over civil affau-s and literature is the most remark- 
 able characteristic of modern times. 
 
 His political opinions with regard to circum- 
 stances are of little value as rules for practice. 
 He did not belong to the age in which he wrote, 
 nor peculiarly to any age. He saw no more of 
 the subtle springs and interwoven tendencies of 
 his own day than of any other. He would have 
 walked as much alone in the time of Elizabeth, 
 as in that of Charles. And though living in any 
 period of public movement, he Avould have flung 
 his gigantic shadow over the field of battle con- 
 tested by dwai-fish combatants ; his motives would 
 have been entirely different from theirs ; and he 
 would have stridden among them without belong- 
 ing to either faction, thoiigh turning perhaps the 
 victory at his will. His political treatises can 
 teach the active statesman very little ; but they 
 are splendid and living evidences, for him who 
 reads aright, of the freedom and earnestness, 
 which were as necessary to the mind of Milton, 
 as the air of heaven to the world of animal exist- 
 ence. They are more than this ; they are memo- 
 rable assertions of that possible freedom of human 
 nature, which, though incapable of being made 
 the broad ostensible basis of a government, must 
 be more or less implied in every polity designed 
 to hold together beings at all superior to the
 
 MILTON. 79 
 
 brutes. In them he calls God and man to wit- 
 ness, that liberty is our natural inheritance ; and, 
 though not knowing or heeding that where it 
 does not exist in the minds of men, institutions 
 pretending to embody it must be hollow and dead, 
 he is yet an inspired moral teacher, proclaiming 
 that it is every man's first vocation to labour for 
 freedom in himself, and his second to struggle for 
 its recognition in the laws of his country. And 
 thus it is that, where it was possible for Milton 
 to succeed, there he was successful. He taught 
 to all Europe that the death of Charles was not a 
 mere violence of an aimless and criminal faction, 
 but a deed which alone could make evident the 
 birth and rigour of a new power, a hitherto un- 
 heard-of self-reliance among the citizens of a 
 modern state. The execution of that sovereign, 
 than whom a falser and more treacherous never 
 existed, is now maintained by almost all men to 
 have been both foolish and wicked. But in how 
 different a spirit was it defended by Milton, from 
 that in which it was treated of by the Royalists, 
 who condemned it, not as a separate offence, but 
 as part of a rebellion more just and necessary 
 than any foreign war that England ever waged. 
 And mistaken though he probably was in his 
 defence of the English people, let us not forget 
 how nearly the language and doctrines of that 
 mighty pleading are akin to those of the Areo- 
 pagitica, the first great proclamation of a prin-
 
 80 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 ciple, which has now become the most familiar 
 and most valuable inheritance of every one 
 amongst us. 
 
 His views of church- government are indeed 
 far more opposed to anything that could safely 
 be practised, than his political theories. But we 
 may draw from them at least the moral of the 
 utter worthlessness of hierarchies and ceremonies, 
 without our own co-operation. To Milton such 
 aids were unnecessary. The ladder is needless 
 for him who has an angel's wings. But he has 
 taught us more eloquently than almost any man, 
 that the very ladder of God will not enable the 
 cripple or the sluggard to mount to heaven. In 
 this, in all, he contends for the activity and free- 
 dom of the individual mind. It was the treasure 
 which he imceasingly guarded ; it was the citadel 
 which he spent his life in defending ; it was the 
 faith of wliich he was the great apostle. And what 
 thouo-h he overlooked the humble needs of the 
 wayfaring Christian, who fears to stand alone lest 
 he should fall ; the time shall come when the 
 meanest and the weakest will be lifted side by 
 side with Milton, and feel that they are upheld 
 by that inward and self-subsisting force, on which 
 they dare not now rely. 
 
 Nor are his poems less remarkable than his 
 prose writings, for the evidence they afford of the 
 personal loftiness and concentration of his cha- 
 racter. It was the glory of Shakspeare to make
 
 MILTON. 8 1 
 
 himself master of the universe as it is ; and on 
 that account there is no conjuncture of affairs, no 
 subtle variety of character, to which some passage 
 of his dramas is not applicable. It was the glory 
 of Milton to create for himself a universe of his 
 own ; and every line of his works shows us an 
 instance of the employment of ordinary materials 
 in relation to a high, internal, moral end. Shak- 
 speare modelled out of his own pure metal a 
 bright image of everything around him, and a 
 thousand noble human sculptures. The great 
 blind poet collected all that the world could 
 supply of valuable, and, melting it into one rich 
 Corinthian substance, cast with it a statue of 
 himself, exhibiting man in his most divine form, 
 and to be recognised by men as long as they shall 
 retain their likeness to God. 
 
 Milton's independence of his age, and of all 
 but the laws of his own excellence, is no less 
 remarkable in these poems, than in his other writ- 
 ings and in his life. He was in faith a Hebrew 
 prophet, and in knowledge and culture a Greek 
 philosopher. Paradise Lost is the noblest mytho- 
 logical creation that ever existed. It does not 
 connect itself indeed with the popular belief of 
 any time or country; for Milton, of all men, was 
 least able to throw himself into another set of 
 thoughts than his own; and those that demand 
 that he should have done so, and lament that his 
 angels are not the angels of our childhood, nor his 
 
 E 3
 
 82 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 fiends the devils of a puppet-show, forget that the 
 living principle of Milton's being, his sublime and 
 statue-like aloofness, must have been destroyed 
 before he could have thus written. Conscience 
 was the moving power, imagination the great 
 instrument of his mind. For the sport of fancy, 
 the agility of busy intelligencer, he had little 
 propensity. 
 
 It is cm'Ious to observe how the general opinion 
 has decided with regard to the relative merit of 
 his poems. Paradise Lost is, by the consent of 
 almost all, the greatest poem of England ; while 
 Paradise Regained is scarcely more familiar to the 
 majority of educated persons than Gondihert or 
 the Purple Island. The one which images the 
 struggle and agony of the universe in the task of 
 self-determination, which contains the gigantic 
 impersonations of evil, and the disastrous rout of 
 human hope, finds an apt correspondence in the 
 breast of every one. But the lovely child of the 
 old age of Milton, the serene proclamation of the 
 power to conquer, the even and majestic triumph 
 of tempted humanity, has perished from the 
 memory of the nation, as completely as if it had 
 been laid in the sepulchre of its author. 
 
 Until there is a stronger inclination to raise out 
 of that oblivious dust what remains to us of his 
 productions, there is but little chance that we 
 shall think of erecting and vivifying the image of 
 himself; yet around what retired student does so
 
 MILTON. 83 
 
 calm a glory rest, as that Avhich encircles Milton ? 
 From his age, so fertile in the greatest men, we 
 look in vain for his compeer, and shrink from 
 setting in comparison with him the pertm'bed 
 spirit of Vane, the virtue of Falkland, slender 
 and feeble, though pure as diamond, or the less 
 austere morality of the pregnant and fervent 
 Taylor. We see Milton surrounded by a conflict, 
 for humble honesty the most fearful that can 
 exist; but we see liim passing tlu'ough it trium- 
 phant. Unlike Hobbes, the cowardly sophist, 
 who fled from England at her utmost need, he 
 left the land which his education and tastes 
 made dear to him above all others, and which he 
 could scarcely hope again to visit ; he broke away 
 from a train of afiectionate admirers, and the 
 ennobling sphere of the old Roman greatness, and 
 came to submit himself to the Avhirlwind by which 
 his country was shaken. The days of a life which 
 more lately bore the fruit of the Paradise Lost and 
 Regained he employed in the toil of teaching, that 
 he might devote his nights to the composition of 
 treatises splendid enough to have dazzled a world, 
 but that they were too lofty to engage the vulgar 
 eye. In an age rioting with drunken opinions, he 
 too was sometimes misled by a finer and more 
 spiritual intoxication. But the man is untouched 
 by the condemnation which lights on the intel- 
 lectual error; his heroic, if not rather angelic, 
 excellence remains undimmed, unapproached by
 
 84 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 censure; suspicion dares not look his memory in 
 the face; his name stands amongst us as a monu- 
 mental pillar, elevated enough to be a standard for 
 human nature, and of which stain or decay can- 
 not reach the lowest stone in the pedestal. 
 
 He may have erred as to divorce; but it was 
 not from the strength of sensual passion, or the 
 weakness of conscience. He overlooked a thou- 
 sand prudential considerations as to government; 
 but from no want of reverence for the principle 
 of law, or love for all that can maintain, purify, 
 or exalt society. And if, in moulding liis idea of 
 a Church, he forgot that the limit which restrains 
 may also secure and support, how glorious was 
 the error, if the wretchedness of any error can 
 ever by relation be glorified, compared to that 
 of men who would compress and enslave the 
 freest and the most self-sustained spirit on earth, 
 even such a one as that of jNIilton himself! 
 
 Xor is he this severe and complete model, awful 
 and holy, but, as he is sometimes described, 
 scarcely at all engaging. The altar-flame, wliich 
 burns on the sacred mountain, lighted also with a 
 genial and kindly ray the low domestic hearth. 
 He loved the country, and society, and cheerful 
 books; and delighted in all the cordial elegances 
 and delicate graces of life, as keenly as those, 
 who far from being able to write the Defensio Se- 
 cunda, have never even read it. There is all the 
 simplicity and all the liveliness that good Isaac
 
 MILTON. 85 
 
 Walton would have desired, in the glimpses that 
 remain to us of his private life. We read of him 
 inviting Mr. Lawrence or Cyriac Skinner to con- 
 verse with him over wine, and thus to enjoy a 
 pleasure, of which 
 
 Who can judge and spare 
 To interpose it oft is not unwise. 
 
 We hear of him composing an unrivalled poem in 
 honour of a young lady, at the request of his 
 friend, Mr. Henry Lawes. And she, the heroine 
 of Comus, by a singular felicity, after the glory 
 of being celebrated by Milton, achieved the greater 
 glory of protecting Jeremy Taylor. How fami- 
 liarly does he seem to have conversed with Elwood 
 and his other friends, about that which men are 
 often jealous of seeing handled, the progress of his 
 writings! How profoundly did he love the wife 
 to whom he addressed that saintly sonnet! And 
 how beautiful, calm, and clear are the liints that 
 remain to us of his latter days, when, wrapped 
 with a coarse grey coat, he sat in summer 
 evenings among the flowers at his door, and 
 rejoiced in the fresh air of heaven; or when, more 
 solemnly suited with black, he was placed in a 
 room hung round with faded green, and bent his 
 pale sightless countenance over the organ on 
 which he delighted to play ! And amid the smoke 
 and fury of the fiercest political battle waged in 
 England since the Reformation, with what ex- 
 quisite sweetness and modest sublimity does he
 
 86 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 recur to the romances, in which, as a boy, he 
 had looked for amusement, and from which, by 
 the necessity of his nature, he had drawn instruc- 
 tion and moral noiurishment. 
 
 He had scorn indeed, and vehemence for all the 
 baseness that met his eye. But let us not forget 
 that the meekest man who ever lived, drove the 
 money-changers from the temple with a scourge, 
 and threatened to purge the garner with a ter- 
 rible and destroying fan.
 
 VII. 
 BURNS. 
 
 n^HERE are two frequent lamentations which 
 might well teach us to doubt the wisdom of 
 popular opinions: men bewail in themselves the 
 miseries of old age, and in others the misfortune 
 of an early death. They do not reflect that life 
 is made up of emotions and thoughts, some cares 
 and doubts and hopes and scattered handfuls of 
 sorrow and pleasure, elements incapable of being 
 measured by rule, or dated by an almanack. It is 
 not from the calendar or the parish-register that we 
 can justly learn for what to grieve, and wherefore 
 to rejoice; and it is rather an affected refinement 
 than a sage instinct, to pour out tears in propor- 
 tion as our wasting days, or those of our friends, 
 are marked by the clepsydra. And even as old 
 age, if it be the iruit of natural and regular exis- 
 tence, is full, not of aches and melancholy, but of 
 lightness and joy ; so there are men who perform 
 their course in a small circle of years, whose 
 maturity is to be reckoned, not by the number of 
 their springs and summers, but of their inward 
 seasons of greenness and glory, and who by a 
 native kindliness have enjoyed, during a brief and 
 northern period, more sunshine of the soul than ever 
 came to the clouded breast of a basking Ethiop. 
 Yet the many men of exalted genius who have
 
 88 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 died in early life, have all been lamented, as if 
 they had perished by some strange and unnatural 
 chance, and as if He, without whose will -no 
 sparrow falls to the ground, only suspended his 
 Providence with regard to the eaole ministers of 
 Truth and Beauty. Happ}" indeed, thrice happy, 
 are such beings as Sophocles and Titian, in whom 
 the golden chain runs out to the last link, and 
 whose hearts are fed by a bright calm current, 
 until they fall asleep in a fresh and blooming 
 antiquity. But happy also were Kaphael, Sidney, 
 and Schiller, who accomplished, in the half of 
 man's permitted term, the fulfilment of theu- aim, 
 and gained sight of the rising stars, when others 
 were still labouring in the heats of noon. Happy 
 we may even call the more distm-bed and incom- 
 plete career of Byron and Shelley and Burns, 
 who were so much clogged by earthly impedi- 
 ments, and vexed with mental disease, nourished 
 by the disease of the material frame, that death 
 would rather seem, if we may humbly speak what 
 perhaps we but ignorantly and wildly fancy, a 
 setting free to further improvement, than a final 
 cutting off in the midst of imperfection. 
 
 Burns died at the middle age of life; but had 
 he attained a century, his fame could not have 
 been more sure and permanent, and scarcely more 
 extensive than it is. And even as regards hia 
 own mind, it is hard to discover what added years 
 w^ere likely to have given him. The men to whom
 
 BURNS. 89 
 
 length of days is important, are those the sphere 
 of whose action is yet incomplete, or those whose 
 faculties are not yet wrought into maturity. We 
 see around us some whose powers are still inade- 
 quately developed, and therefore incongruous and 
 unbalanced, whose minds are evidently raw and 
 turbid, but full of promise. These, if any are 
 to be justly pitied for what befalls them on earth, 
 deserve commiseration when they perish by an 
 early fate. And again there are others whose 
 perfected powers seem not to have found their 
 worthy object, but to be grasping at emptiness; 
 and for them there is a noble future, which it is 
 hard that the tyranny of the grave should turn to 
 lamentation. But Burns was in neither of these 
 classes, neither among the luminaries that have not 
 filled their orb, nor among those that have not 
 moved along the whole of their appointed cycle. 
 
 The defect of Burns's mind was that of will, 
 one which has existed in many great poets, and in 
 some great philosophers, but which has been 
 visited in them with no such severe condemnation 
 as that which has befallen him. As to all his 
 impulses and all his faculties, they appear to have 
 been the most healthy and vigorous. His keen 
 sense of social enjoyment, his generosity, his 
 integrity, his vast comprehension of men and 
 nature, his profuse and powerful imagination, and 
 admirable understanding, were the elements that 
 went to the production of the most wonderful
 
 90 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 being who ever walked the earth; and all these 
 are seen in him not casually, nor apart, but 
 living and moving together, as united portions 
 of one organized whole. His poetry is not the 
 result of a knack, or of a sibylline frenzy, but is 
 the genuine and natural fruitage of the whole 
 mind, and that one of more varied and splendid 
 endowments than any between itself and the 
 unapproached poets of a distant age. He did 
 not, like some preceding and some following 
 authors, divest himself of any of his human facul- 
 ties or feelings, that a lawless and artificial fancy 
 might occupy itself undisturbed in heaping toge- 
 ther a fictitious and incoherent world. His know- 
 ledge and sense are everywhere the companions 
 and supporters of his genius; nor is it true that 
 he shakes off conscience and religion, to revel 
 the more freely in sensual enjoyment. He was 
 indeed weak and wandering ; for his will was not 
 adequate to his convictions; but his imaginative 
 power and kindly affections made his evil doings 
 less injurious to him, than they are to the more 
 animal natures, and also render the celebration of 
 wrong in his poetry infinitely less contagious to 
 others, than in the writings of meaner and more 
 sordid men. For such were the tendencies and 
 qualities of his mind, that, in following him even 
 to haunts of debauchery, we are not compelled to 
 stoop to sympathy with the worthlessness of the 
 gratifications in which he too often indulged, but
 
 BURNS. 91 
 
 rather taught to feel and know how godlike 
 is the privilege of transmuting the foul or the 
 wretched into the nourishment of thought and 
 the means of a high and intellectual gladness. 
 There is no poetry in the enjoyment of which we 
 keep a more innocent or poetic state of feeling 
 than in reading the lyrics of Burns, which exalt 
 even licence and riot, and purify evil by the might 
 of his creative gifts. How different in this from 
 the works of Rousseau, or even the earlier writ- 
 ings of Byron, in which the reality of evil is ever 
 strong and substantial at the centre, surrounded 
 by a thin gloss and affected verbiage! while in 
 Burns the life and the potency are always to be 
 found in the poetry with which he encircles the 
 hint or incident that serves him as a pretext. If 
 we attempt to render his compositions literal or 
 historical, we reduce them to a jest, a name, a 
 nothing; or, if there be a kernel of wrong, it is 
 so poor, trivial, cold, and unattractive, as to be 
 utterly inadequate for the explanation of the poet's 
 rapture or our own. Put the corpus delicti in 
 Tam O'Shanter or the Jolly Beggars into the 
 hands of a police-reporter; and he will tell you 
 that he can make nothing of it, that it is some- 
 thing so slight and shadowy, as to furnish no 
 excitement whatever to the craving passions of 
 the mob. The art and mastery of the poet are 
 shown in getting away from the rudeness and / 
 
 raeagreness of his nominal subject into regions of
 
 92 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 intellect and imagination; while in some other 
 writers the occurrence of which they treat, is 
 barely alluded to at first, and all their intellect 
 and imagination are employed to bring it closer 
 and closer before our eyes, till it appears at last 
 as the main object and purpose of their writing 
 in all its naked and glowing pruriency. No; the 
 faculties, the sympathies of this man could have 
 gained nothing by longer life; for nothing was 
 wanting in them which the noblest of our kind 
 should have. 
 
 Nor did Burns fail to replenish with light the 
 circle assigned to him. He had an understanding 
 such as, with a different culture, might have made 
 him the most keen and masterly of the busy. He 
 had eloquence to be the lord of conversation, and 
 a simple and constant love of nature, such as ani- 
 mated Isaac Walton or Gilbert White. But he 
 was peculiarly called to be a great national poet; 
 he was called to tliis by the state of his coiuitry, 
 and by the character of his own genius. Before 
 his day there was scarcely any subject of common 
 interest for the different classes of Scotchmen. 
 The national government was gone; the national 
 religion acted with far greater force on the lower 
 than on the higher orders; for many of the aris- 
 tocracy were indifterent to it, and many of them 
 dissenters from it: while literature, which ought 
 to have been above all imbued with an eager 
 patriotism, and to have held up a Scotch standard.
 
 BURNS. 93 
 
 and given a Scotch cultivation to every Scotch- 
 man, was employed in raising the large and showy 
 but diseased and unfavourable fruits of a school 
 half French, half English, but not at all charac- 
 teristic or native. The higher and lower ranges 
 of society were therefore bound together by 
 scarcely any mutual sympathies, or care for the 
 same objects. Wallace was still the hero, and 
 Knox the prophet of the people ; while the gentry 
 were reading the Spectator, and the philosophers 
 and historians were imitating Montesquieu and 
 Rousseau. A peasant stepped from behind his 
 plough, and, striding into the ring of professors 
 and men of the Avorld, spoke to them and to all 
 Scotland in a language which no Scotchman could 
 refuse to obey, and which none before him had 
 ever attempted to utter. 
 
 That peasant was Burns ; and he unquestionably 
 bore on his forehead the seal of his destination, 
 and took upon himself a ministry for which 
 powers were requisite such as had belonged to no 
 man in these nations since the age of Charles I. 
 His wit, his pathos, his manly sense, and trium- 
 phant lyric enthusiasm, were not only superior in 
 their combinations to anything that had existed 
 among us for more than a century ; but separately 
 would have equalled him to those who possessed 
 in the highest degree the similar faculties. In 
 him nothing was liollow, nothing artificial; his 
 words are all expressive, and his thoughts all 
 
 /
 
 94 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 true; and if the human nature which he presents 
 to us be sometimes coarse iu mannei', and some- 
 times lax in morality, though never to the same 
 extent as among the fashionable writers of the 
 reign of Anne and the first two Georges, be it 
 remembered that it is always a living and genuine 
 human nature; that by him no scarecrows or 
 phantoms or abstractions are sought to be passed 
 off on us as men; that he exhibits to us no emo- 
 tion, which he has not thoroughly conceived, nor 
 describes any appearance, which his mind's eye 
 has not clearly seen. 
 
 Nor was the wonder the less in his day, nor 
 among some persons in ours, when the mode of 
 his education Avas considered. How could he, a 
 man without information, be a great author, un- 
 less he was in some way inspu'ed? He was 
 indeed inspired with that living power, which the 
 information given by the Scotch academic scheme 
 would almost certainly have repressed. He was 
 filled with that breath of genius, which has some- 
 times almost kindled into a flame the dead ashes 
 of abstract terms and generalities, the chief ele- 
 ments of the scholastic system of Scotland, but 
 which in him was happily turned aside to no use 
 so unworthy and so unprofitable. He had not 
 been nourished on the dry dust of terminologies 
 and technical artifices, but had drawn liis know- 
 ledge from the real and vital stores of the world ; 
 and it was all therefore of that kind which readily
 
 BURNS. 95 
 
 turns into poAver. The professors at Edinburgh, 
 even those whom a dead metaphysical system 
 had made indifferent to practical truth, might 
 well stare and be confounded at seeing that all 
 their years of lecturing and abstracting, and 
 their crowded benches of admiring pupils had 
 never furnished one instance of success in the 
 great object of intellectual education, the gene- 
 ration of power, wliich a peasant or a child 
 who had heard Tarn O'Shanter or the War- / 
 
 song of Bruce, would not have laughed to see 
 compared with the mighty, the generous, the 
 thoughtful mind of the Ayrshire ploughman. 
 Nor would it have served them to say that 
 genius cannot be produced by education ; for, 
 though education cannot produce it, education 
 can stifle it, and doubtless has in numberless 
 instances stifled or perverted the genius, which 
 has come youthful and hopeful into the hands of 
 Scotch professors. Why are there no great poets 
 among the negro slaves or the American savages? / 
 but becavise their education, the influence, that is, 
 on their minds, of the circumstances in Avhich 
 they are placed, can never permit the develop- 
 ment of mental power. It cannot be said that 
 Burns was an example of natural capacity, and 
 that the men among whom he found himself at 
 Edinburgh were merely examples of good educa- 
 tion ; for there is no instance of natural cajmcity, 
 in an entirely unfavourable situation, having forced
 
 96 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 its way to sui^remacy in thought. Burns was just 
 as much educated as the pupils of Dr. Blair or of 
 Dr. Keid ; but he was educated by realities, they 
 by abstractions ; he by substances, they by sha- 
 dows ; and so admirable was the instruction given 
 him by his father, and so well had he learned to 
 attach importance to things, instead of words, 
 that his boyhood seems scarcely to have suffered 
 even from reading Locke's Essay on the Human 
 Understanding. That book indeed left but few 
 traces in his mind ; while the realities of geometry, 
 which he fortunately studied for a short time in 
 his early manhood, evidently did much towards 
 aiding his growth, and so strongly possessed him, 
 that they have sometimes even forced themselves 
 into his poetry. Thus it was that the national 
 poet of Scotland, the first modern author who so 
 wrote as to teach the hearts of his compatriots to 
 leap within them at the name of their country, — 
 thus it was that he who bound Scotchman to 
 Scotchman by a stronger bond of sym[)athy than 
 any before existing, — that the man who has done 
 immortal honour to the reign and the land in 
 which he lived, and to the noble tongue he spoke, 
 came forth from among its peasants, not its men 
 of learning, and formed the thoughts that now 
 pervade England, India, and America, — not while 
 listening to lectures on the association of ideas, 
 but while jesting and praying, ploughing and 
 sowing, reading Shakspearc and talking politics,
 
 BURNS. 97 
 
 in the wretched huts or sterile fields of obscure 
 labour. 
 
 "Why wonder that so little was done to aid him / 
 
 at Edinburgh? He gained the condescending- 
 praise of polite academicians for his rude and 
 curious efforts. Among them he was superior to 
 them, and different from them, but in no way- 
 belonged to them. He had knowledge, compared 
 to which their acquirements were but dreams of 
 the night. He wrought with powers, and they 
 with rules ; they juggled, and he performed mira- 
 cles. He spoke of human nature, and was a man ; 
 they talked of the faculty of abstraction, and were 
 professors. He had probably hoped much from 
 the literary men of his country; and the dis- 
 appointment of these hopes, when, being himself 
 godlike, instead of walking with the gods, he was 
 surrounded by an interminable conflict of Avord- 
 champions and shadow-fighters, may perhaps have, 
 in some degree, perplexed and saddened him ; but 
 he did not lose faith in himself or in nature, when 
 he had learned to believe no longer in the patrons 
 and practitioners of letters. He had still some- 
 thing to put his trust in ; for the tones of God's 
 great melody, which circles through all worlds, / 
 
 were still vibrating in his heart. He judged 
 wisely and resolutely in betaking himself to farm, 
 ay, and even to guage, rather than attempt to be 
 one of the machine-horses of literature. For the 
 narrowest and most sordid sphere of practical life 
 
 VOL. I. F
 
 / 
 
 98 SHADES OF THE DEAD. 
 
 was better for him, than the di'awing-rooms of 
 mechanical teachers of composition, and empirical 
 lectures on philosophy, — better for him, even 
 though he was thus exposed to vulgar tempta- 
 tions, which, alas ! he had not always the strength 
 to resist. And why lament over his early fate ? 
 He did not die until he had done his task ; and 
 knowing as he did the weakness of his will, it was 
 far better for him thus to perish, than to lead any 
 longer a life, which, adding nothing to his intellect 
 or imagination, might have served only to deaden 
 liis conscience. The precious vessel shivered itself 
 into fragments, rather than continue any longer 
 to hold poison. But those bright streams in 
 which the wine of the angels so long flowed from 
 it, will delight and in-sagorate the world for ever.
 
 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 F 2
 
 ON COLERIDGE'S CHRISTABEL : 
 
 An Appeal Apologetic, from Philip deunk 
 TO Philip sober. 
 
 From the Athenceum for 1828. 
 
 TT is common to hear everything which Mr. 
 Coleridge has written condemned with bitter- 
 ness and boldness. His poems are called extra- 
 vagant ; and his prose works, poems too, and of 
 the noblest breed, are pronounced to be mystical, 
 obscure, metaphysical, theoretical, unintelligible, 
 and so forth; just as the same phrases have 
 over and over been applied, with as much saga- 
 city, to Plato, St. Paul, Cudworth, and Kant. 
 But Christabel is the only one of his writings 
 which is ever treated with unmingled contempt ; 
 and I wish to examine with what justice this 
 feeling has been excited. In the first place it 
 should be remembered, that, at the time when 
 it was written, the end of the last century, no 
 attempt had been made in England by a man of 
 genius for a hundred and fifty years to embody 
 in poetry those resources which feudal manners 
 and popular superstitions supply to the imagina- 
 tion. To those who care not for the mythology 
 of demoniac terrors and wizard enchantment, Mr. 
 Coleridge did not write. He did not write for 
 Bayles and Holbachs ; nor did he write for Glan-
 
 102 CKITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 vils or Jameses : but for those who, not believiog 
 the creed of the people, not holding that which 
 was in a great degree the substantial religion 
 of Europe for a thousand years, yet see in these 
 superstitions the forms under which devotion 
 presented itself to the minds of our forefathers, 
 the grotesque mask assumed for a period, like 
 the veil on the face of Moses, as a covering for 
 the glory of God. Persons who think this obse- 
 lete faith to be merely ridiculous, will of course 
 think so of Christabel. He who perceives in 
 them a beauty of their own, and discovers all 
 the good to which in those ages they were 
 necessary accompaniments, will not object to 
 have them represented, together with all the 
 attributes and associations which rightly belong 
 to them, and in which genius, while it raises- 
 them from their dim cemetery, delights again to 
 array them. 
 
 That much of the machinery of the poem is, 
 in the eyes of a natural philosopher or a woman 
 of fashion, trivial or laughable, bears not upon 
 the question. The fidlest persuasion of the im- 
 possibility of every occurrence in the tale is not 
 in the least incompatible with that kind of faith 
 which is amply sufficient for the demands of the 
 poet. It admits of much question, whether the 
 mind be in the more healthy and natural state, 
 when it is disposed to treat with scorn and ridi- 
 cule whatever lies beyond the limit of its own
 
 COLERIDGE'S CHRISTABEL. 103 
 
 convictions, or when it studies with affection and 
 interest every shape and mode of human belief, 
 and attempts to trace out and sympathize with 
 that germ of good and truth, which lies some- 
 where amid the roots of every article of popular 
 credence. But the latter is at all events the 
 only condition of feeling on which poetry pre- 
 tends to act ; and he who brings a mind bristling 
 with demonstration or experiment to receive the 
 imf)act of a creative imagination, acts as iniqui- 
 tously as Laertes fighting with a sword against 
 the foil of Hamlet. 
 
 The very first lines of Christahel are frequently 
 selected as objects of ridicule. Be it remembered 
 that they are the opening of a tale of witchery, 
 and that, unless they are read in that good faith 
 and singleness of heart, with which a child would 
 listen to such a story, they are not heard Avith 
 the predisposition to which alone the author ad- 
 dressed himself. 
 
 'Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, 
 
 And the owls have awakened the crowing cock ; 
 
 Tu-whit ! Tu-who ! 
 
 And hark again ! the crowing cock, 
 
 How drowsily it crew ! 
 
 Sir Leoline, the baron rich, 
 
 Hath a toothless mastiff l^itch ; 
 
 From her kennel, beneath the rock, 
 
 She maketh answer to the clock, 
 
 Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour, 
 
 Ever and &ye, by shine and shower, 
 
 Sixteen short howls, not over-loud ; 
 
 Some say, she sees my lady's shroud.
 
 104 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Now, I confess, I do not see what there is more 
 absurd in this than in the croaking raven of Vir- 
 gil; or, though it be talked of as the drivelling 
 folly of Bottom, why it is a whit less dignified 
 than the song of Puck. 
 
 Whilst the scritch-owl, scritching loud. 
 Puts the wretch that lies in woe. 
 In remembrance of a shroud ; 
 
 or again, than the lay of Winter: 
 
 When nightly sings the staring owl, 
 
 Tu whu! 
 
 Tu whit! Tu-whu! 
 
 I avow that these verses seem to me admirably 
 calculated for bringing before the reader the 
 ' witching hour of night,' with all that thrilling 
 and ghost-ridden feeling which is the proper re- 
 cipient of the mysterious story. As to the 
 boarding-school-miss delicacy about the gender 
 of the mastiff, we hear no objection to Cowper's 
 lines, 
 
 Kilwick's echoing wood, 
 Where oft the bitch-fox hides her hapless brood. 
 
 And judging from the analogy of human beings, 
 and from long and general tradition, an ancient 
 female of the dog species is as likely to be distin- 
 guished above the male by supernatural endow- 
 ments, and intimacy with the foul fiend, as is 
 confessedly the case among human beings. In 
 the succeeding lines there is nothing to observe 
 upon, except their exquisite and pictorial beauty.
 
 COLERIDGE'S CHRISTABEL. 105 
 
 unless, with a certain notorious critic, I were to 
 remark the phrase in the third of these lines: 
 
 She had dreams all yesternight 
 Of her own betrothed knight ; 
 Dreams that made her moan and leap, 
 As on her bed she lay in sleep. 
 
 The critic who has objected to the employment 
 of the word leap, as an expression for the rest- 
 lessness occasioned by a painful dream, might 
 perhaps be puzzled to reply if he were asked why 
 it is inappropriate. The next lines to these are 
 beautiful specimens of a kind of excellence, which 
 runs through the whole poem, the presentation 
 of the clearest and brightest pictures by the 
 smallest number of words. 
 
 She stole along, she nothing spoke ; 
 The breezes they were still also ; 
 And nought was green upon the oak, 
 But moss and rarest misletoe. 
 She kneels l^eneath the huge oak tree. 
 And in silence prayeth she. 
 
 A hundred stanzas of details would not make 
 plainer the terror and devotion of the lovely lady, 
 and the silent dimness of the ancient oak. All 
 that follows for two pages is in a style of the 
 most concise and brilliant perfection; and no poet 
 whatsoever of our day has given us, in four times 
 the space, the same quantity and variety of living 
 imagery as is treasured in these thirty or forty 
 lines. The description of the fiendish damsel, 
 
 F 3
 
 106 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 if such she were, is given in three words, with 
 a grace and distinctness which no one but Spenser 
 could have equalled, and which would have cost 
 him many more words to convey. Her narrative 
 is a masterly counterfeiting of the eiFect which 
 terror produces, in leading the sufferer to dwell 
 on unimportant, as much as on important par- 
 ticulars, and also exliibits the attempt which she 
 makes, after the manner of all skilful liars, to add 
 evidence to her story by minute details, together 
 with the superfluity of epithet and adjuration, 
 and shows her consciousness of falsehood by the 
 over-anxiety to secure credence. I am perfectly 
 convinced that no play of our day by any other 
 writer, — nor is this saying much, — contains a 
 passage so dramatic as the tale told by Geraldine. 
 The circumstances which follow are all of them 
 imagined with the highest beauty and fitness. 
 Christabel had a terrible dream about evils be- 
 falling her lover. She went out into the forest 
 to pray beneath an ancient oak, and found there 
 a lady in distress, who told her a story of unpro- 
 voked outrage and suffering. Then mark how 
 the narrative, throughout the variety of its pic- 
 tures, so full of minute and elegant tracery, is 
 filled with indications of something unearthly 
 and dangerous in the character of the stranger. 
 In the first place, by the belief of our ancestors, 
 the evil powers could harm no one who had not 
 consented in some way to their design, and sub-
 
 COLERIDGE'S CHRISTABEL. 107 
 
 mitted to their influence. Therefore, after the 
 
 tale of Geraldine, come these lines: — 
 
 Stretch forth thy hand (thus ended she,) 
 And help a wretched maid to flee. 
 Then Christabel stretched forth her hand, 
 And comforted fau' Geraldine. 
 
 Then again, in entering the castle thi'ough the 
 
 wicket in the gate. 
 
 The gate that was ironed within and without, 
 
 Where an army in battle array had marched out, 
 
 The lady sank, belike through pain; 
 
 And Christabel, with might and main, 
 
 Lifted her up, a weary weight, 
 
 Over the threshold of the gate. 
 
 Then the lady rose again. 
 
 And moved as she were not in pain. 
 
 Then, as they cross the court. 
 
 Outside her kennel the mastiff old 
 Lay fast asleep in moonshine cold. 
 The mastiff old did not awake, 
 Yet she an angry moan did make. 
 
 Every line in this portion of the poem is filled 
 with some strong under-import ; and how com- 
 pletely do we perceive, in the next paragraph, the 
 tokens we should expect of a supernatural and 
 evil presence ! 
 
 They passed the hall, that echoes still, 
 
 Pass as lightly as you will. 
 
 The brands were flat, the brands were dying, 
 
 Amid their own white ashes lying; 
 
 But, when the lady passed, there came 
 
 A tongue of light, a fit of flame ; 
 
 And Christabel saw the lady's eye, 
 
 And nothing else saw she thereby.
 
 108 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tail, 
 Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. 
 
 The element of fire seems to recognise the pre- 
 sence of the fiend; and the domestic hearth cries 
 aloud, as it were, to the innocent maiden, and 
 lights up the gleaming eye of her destroyer. The 
 following paragraphs are remarkable for their 
 clearness and brightness of description, without 
 any of that detailed and wordy minuteness which 
 injures the corresponding passages of Scott. The 
 ladies converse about ChristabePs deceased mo- 
 ther; and the daughter utters a pious ejaculation 
 of longing for her presence: 
 
 mother dear! that thou wert here! 
 
 1 would, said Geraldine, she were. 
 
 This last line has been quoted, as if it were 
 mere flatness and drivelling. But mark the re- 
 sult. Geraldine, by way of ingratiating herself 
 with her victim, pretends to sympathize with her 
 filial affection, and therein expresses her assent to 
 a wish for the presence of the dead mother. The 
 spirit comes, comes to protect her child, and, if 
 possible, rescue her from the demon. After the 
 last couplet. 
 
 But soon with altered voice, said she — 
 
 Off, wandering mother! peak and pine! 
 
 I have power to bid thee flee ! 
 
 Alas! what ails poor Geraldine? 
 
 Why stares she with unsettled eye? 
 
 Can she the bodyless dead espy? 
 
 And why with hollow voice cries she? 
 
 Off, woman off! this hour is mine :
 
 Coleridge's christabel. 109 
 
 Though thou her guardian spirit be, 
 
 Off, woman, off ! 'tis given to me. 
 * * » * * 
 
 The lady wiped her moist cold brow, 
 And faintly said, 'Tis over now! 
 
 Again the wild-flower wine she drank : 
 Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright, 
 And from the floor whereon she sank, 
 The lofty lady stood upright : 
 She was most beautiful to see. 
 Like a lady of a far countree. 
 
 No one, it would seem, could be insensible to 
 the perfect fitness of every word in these latter 
 rhimes, or could fail to perceive with how few 
 touches the beautiful witch or demon is placed 
 before us. We have room for no more long quo- 
 tations from the first part of the poem, except 
 those exquisite final lines of the conclusion: 
 
 And see ! the lady Christabel 
 Gathers herself from out her trance ; 
 Her limbs relax ; her countenance 
 Grows sad and soft ; the smooth thin lids 
 Close o'er her eyes ; and tears she sheds, 
 Large tears that leave the lashes bright : 
 And oft the while she seems to smile, 
 As infants at a sudden light : 
 Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep. 
 Like a youthful hermitess, 
 Beauteous in a wilderness, 
 Who, praying always, prays in sleep. 
 And if she move unquietly, 
 Perchance, 'tis but the blood so free 
 Comes back and tingles in her feet. 
 No doubt she hath a vision sweet. 
 What if her guardian spirit 'twere !
 
 no CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 What if she knew her mother near ! 
 But this she knows, in joys and woes, 
 That saints will aid, if men will call ; 
 For the blue sky bends over all ! 
 
 Throughout the poem there runs and lives one 
 especial excellence, the beauty of single lines and 
 expressions, perfect flowers in themselves, yet in- 
 terfering as little with the breadth and unity of 
 the general effect, as the primroses and hawthorns 
 of the valley with its sweeping perspective of 
 light and shadow. No one, I imagine, can fail to 
 recognise in it the original germ of the Lay of the 
 Last Minstrel; but bow superior is it to that 
 spirited and brilliant tale, in the utter absence 
 both of defect and superfluity in the diction, — in 
 the thrilling interest and beauty of every, the 
 slightest circumstance, — in the relation of each 
 atom to the whole, — and in the deep reflection, 
 which is the very atmosphere and vital air of the 
 whole composition !
 
 The Broad Stone of Honour: or, The True Sense 
 
 AND Practice of Chivalry. — By Kenelm 
 
 Henry Digby, Esq. 
 
 (From the Athenceiim for 1829.^ 
 
 A LL history is filled with gorgeous systems, 
 which have existed either in books or practice, 
 founded on some partial and ill-comprehended im- 
 pulses, and iiol on the deeper and more regular 
 principles of the mind. They have seldom flou- 
 rished, except in connection with something wiser 
 and more permanent, and, though not the sacred 
 text, may be considered as brilliant marginal illu- 
 minations, which sometimes illustrate, often cari- 
 cature, its meaning, and never express it in all its 
 purity and power. Such was Chivalry, a splendid 
 and fantastic dream, at one moment sinking into 
 the merest folly and inanity of the slumbering 
 mind, and rising at another to the borders of 
 sacred and prophetic vision. 
 
 We confess that its origin does not appear to 
 us that unaccountable mystery, which it has some- 
 times been regarded. Wherever two heteroge- 
 neous principles are forced into coalition, the result 
 will at first be something false and bright, par- 
 taking in part of the attributes of both, but 
 animated by the essence of neither, though melt- 
 ing away insensibly on both sides into one or the
 
 112 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 other. Such we believe to have been the origin 
 of the latest Alexandrian Platonism, when Pagan 
 philosophy, disguised or not, as it happened, in 
 Pagan polytheism, encountered revealed religion, 
 and as yet was struggling against it. The same 
 theory might be exemplified by the history of 
 European, and, we believe, of Arabian philosophy ; 
 nor will it want confirmation from the revolutions 
 of the arts. Chivalry appears to be the natural 
 transitory product from the junction of Chris- 
 tianity with the spirit of the Teutonic tribes; the 
 sparkling sunbow in the foam which rose from the 
 confluence of these opposing forces. 
 
 The Germany of Tacitus was undoubtedly not 
 intended by him as a literal portrait of the 
 country which he professes to describe. He 
 dwells on those features in which his country- 
 men were at that time most deficient, as if to 
 reproach them for their inferiority; though any 
 improvement to be produced in this way could 
 scarcely be of a different kind from that of the 
 Roman ladies, who, in admiration of the northern 
 yellow hair, covered their own sable ringlets with 
 wiffs of the envied colour. Enouf^h however re- 
 mains of certain, in the immortal Essay of Tacitus, 
 and in the writings of Cresar and others, to prove 
 that there existed in the minds of the Germans a 
 genuine heroic ideal, to which, however irregu- 
 larly and inconsistently, they sought to conform 
 their actions. Frank, ostentatious, and headlong
 
 THE BROAD STONE OF HONOUR. 113 
 
 courage, — enterprise for the mere sake of activity 
 and excitement, often mingled with and yielding 
 to the love of plunder, — respect for women, and 
 laws, fanciful or not, restraining with regard to 
 them the animal impulses, — all these are manifest 
 among the tribes of ancient Germany. 
 
 When they became the temporal masters of the 
 Christian laity, they became also the spiritual 
 slaves of the Christian priesthood. What could 
 have been expected to arise from these circum- 
 stances? A powerful and rich nobility would 
 naturally delight in splendour; a race of warriors, 
 placed among all the elements of contention, would 
 not be likely to relinquish war; barbarians, with 
 nothing but a formless and unlettered supersti- 
 tion, could not fail to be subdued by the imposing 
 array of Christianity as it was then practised, 
 and by the talents, imperfect as they were, of 
 the clergy; and men Avho had been accustomed 
 to regard females with deference, becoming more 
 luxurious and more polished, would probably 
 establish between the sexes whatever elaborate 
 courtesy and fanciful refinement they were ca- 
 pable of conceiving. Thus we arrive at the 
 rudiments of the chivalrous character. We find 
 among them no tendency to intellectual activity, 
 except so far as would suffice to ornament the 
 intercourse in haU or bower with rude verse and 
 ruder music, — no disposition to look any further 
 in religion than a priest might point out, or to
 
 114 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 seek in it anything but a patron saint, who was 
 to be served by the sword, and a mechanism of 
 salvation, of which the lance should be the mov- 
 ing force. 
 
 In the course of time the point of honour be- 
 came more refined, the respect for women more 
 ostentatious and outwardly delicate ; more and 
 more of the humanizing influences of religion, 
 imperfectly as it was then known, were mingled 
 with the system. But the ground-plan remained 
 the same, though additional stages increased the 
 loftiness of the tower, though the shields sus- 
 pended in the hall were enriched with more 
 honourable blazonry, the windows glowed with 
 more splendid emblems of love, valour, and super- 
 stition, gayer pennons waved from the battle- 
 ments, and more courteous defiances were spoken 
 in the tilt-yard, echoed by minstrels, and ap- 
 plauded from the cushioned galleries. 
 
 The learned and delightful author, whose work 
 we have named at the head of this paper, is the 
 sturdiest and most enthusiastic champion of Chi- 
 valry, whom we happen to have met with. He 
 defends it with far other zeal, knowledge, and 
 talents, from those which have been displayed 
 in its support by several modern sentimental 
 writers, avIio appear to connect with it no notions 
 but those of crimson scarfs and gilded shields, 
 love, horsemanshij), and bloody battles. He evi- 
 dently writes with deep conviction; and his views
 
 THE BROAD STONE OF HONOUR. 115 
 
 appear to us the fairest possible exhibition of the 
 system. 
 
 Mr. Digby expatiates at great length on all 
 the knightly virtues, of which he can find any 
 instance, in history or poetry, from the time of 
 Abraham to about a hundred years ago. All 
 these examples of human excellence he binds 
 together by the spell of an admirable English 
 style, and heightens by the riches of his un- 
 bounded learning, and so calls the whole glitter- 
 ing and magnificent heap the trophy of Chivalry. 
 If the work were something less long and less 
 learned, we do not know any which would be 
 more likely to win a courteous and flowery belief 
 in its doctrine from the tastes and impulses of all. 
 But there is in it one error, or that which so 
 seems to us, the great error of the book, the great 
 error of Mr. Digby, the great error of Chivalry, 
 which would lead us sincerely to regret if the 
 Broad Stone of Honour were to become popular. 
 
 The writer defends Chivalry, not merely for 
 the valour and courtesy which it required and 
 fostered, but as founded on the Roman Catholic 
 creed, or on what he considers to be so. We 
 beheve that he is right ; we believe that Chivalry 
 was necessarily connected with the doctrines of 
 the Papal Church; Ave believe that there is an 
 essential difierence between the idea of a che- 
 valier and that of a gentleman, between the cha- 
 racter of Bayard and that of Su' Philip Sidney.
 
 116 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 It is on this account we say that Chivahy was 
 not made to last, that its heroes are now the 
 shadows of a painted dream, and that the writer 
 of this beautiful and earnest volume walks alone 
 in an age, which, if not equal to some gone by, at 
 least supplies a few bright spirits in whose con- 
 victions it would do him no dishonour to partake. 
 The perfect gentleman is distinguished from 
 the perfect man by something of aristocratic pride 
 and worldly magnificence. The knight, as dis- 
 played by Mr. Digby, — and he could have no 
 more powerful or favourable delineator, — was 
 distinguished from him by something more, — by 
 an utter toq)or of the reason, which led him to 
 substitute, for the living and enlightened faith of 
 the conscience, a belief made up of fanciful im- 
 pulse and of passive assent to dogmas, for which 
 it was neither desired to find evidence nor mean- 
 ing. The latter is the religion stated by Mr. 
 Digby as the main principle of Chivalry, and 
 obviously announced as his own. Do we believe 
 that this is the religion which really animates 
 him ? No ; for we discern in his writings all 
 the traces of a happy, an active, a benevolent, a 
 pious, and therefore in many respects a healthy 
 mind. But we believe that want of habit, or 
 perhaps of inclination, to turn his eyes within, 
 and reflect on what he is conscious of, prevents 
 him from understanding the real grounds of his 
 own belief; and in this way also we account for
 
 THE BROAD STONE OF HONOUR. 117 
 
 whatever good actually existed in the spirit of 
 Chivalry. But we shall pursue this topic no 
 further: for it is most painful to express vehe- 
 ment dissent from such a writer, and, we will 
 say, though we have no personal knowledge of 
 Mr. Digby, such a man as the author of the 
 Broad Stone of Honour. 
 
 We have never read a volume more full than 
 this of a loving gentleness, and an earnest admi- 
 ration for all things beautiful and excellent. Its 
 pages seem to breathe out the freshness of the 
 fields, and the venerable air of antiquity. The 
 beings with whom the author surrounds us, are 
 lovely, and sparkling, and bold, yet filled with 
 the purest and truest life-blood of humanity; 
 and, contemplating them as they glide in long 
 procession from the book into the heart, we turn 
 from the meagreness and deformity of the greater 
 portion of our present literature, with the feeling 
 which rose on the lips of Miranda, when, accus- 
 tomed to the sight of Caliban and Sycorax, she 
 first beheld the troop of brave creatures brought 
 by strange witchery to her island. If every leaf 
 were a plate of silver or ivory graven by Cellini, 
 it could not be more rich in beautified shapes, and 
 pregnant symbols, and aU the embodied poetry 
 of a shaping imagination. It even seems, — so 
 powerful are the thoughts of the writer, — as if 
 the immeasurable world of allusion and quotation, 
 the bloom, as it were, collected from all existing
 
 118 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 literature, were by him appropriated and trans- 
 fused into his own conceptions. The unnum- 
 bered fragments and graces of all books which he 
 has gathered together, do not seem laid in a con- 
 fused heap for barbaric ostentation ; but his own 
 fancies and conclusions are assimilated to them; 
 and they all appear together like jewels disposed 
 in some fair, significant, and complicated figure, 
 on the golden tissue of his general design. We 
 raise our eyes from them to look at some ancient 
 picture or green landscape, and do not feel that 
 we have made any sudden and startling transi- 
 tion ; but the whole woven and flowing web, 
 with all its emblems of honour and religious 
 heraldry, seems of a piece with whatever we can 
 see without, or remember or create witliin us, of 
 delicate and true, precious and sacred. 
 
 We do not say, nor assuredly mean, that any 
 one would do wisely in adopting Mr. Digby's 
 opinions. These, if not capricious, are too often 
 infected by the great false principle, which seems 
 in liun, — how diflerently from that in other men! 
 — to occupy a chamber in his brain, and never to 
 approach his heart. But we think that, in defend- 
 ing Chivalry on the grounds whicli he has adopted, 
 he has, unconsciously perhaps, done good of ano- 
 ther, and, in our opinion, more valuable kind than 
 that which he intended. We are sure that his 
 sympathies, cxcei)t some accidental, if we may so 
 express ourselves, and external ones, are all
 
 THE BROAD STONE OF HONOUR. 119 
 
 healthy as well as lively; and in an age like 
 ours, when men too often err by false and weak 
 and artificial impulses, as well as systems, we are 
 inclined to think that we could find no better 
 awakening and preparation for that still higher 
 state of mind, which Mr. Digby only partially 
 exemplifies, and altogether condemns, than the 
 keen and genial sensibility and wholesome affec- 
 tions so plainly manifested in every line of thia 
 volume. We must be children, before we can 
 be men. We must be sure that we have emotions 
 and feelings, before we can hopefully attempt to 
 subordinate them to the reason. We are con- 
 vinced that Mr. Digby would be an invaluable 
 friend, though we cannot agree with him, that 
 it would be advantageous to have the Abbe de la 
 Mennais for a father confessor.
 
 / History of the War in the Peninsula and in the 
 South of France, from the year 1807 to the year 
 1814. By W. F. p. Napier, C.B., Lt.-Colonel H.-P. 
 Forty-Third Regiment. 
 
 (From the Athenceum for 1829.^ 
 
 n^HIS is the most celebrated, and probably the 
 ablest military history in our language. The 
 story which Colonel Napier professes to tell, is 
 that of the only wars since those of Marlborough, 
 waged by England in Europe, to which we now 
 attach any considerable interest. That interest 
 arises in a great degree from the extent and 
 variety of occurrences in which our countrymen 
 took the foremost part, from the success which 
 waited on their exertions, from the remarkable 
 talents and character of their commander, and 
 from the fact that the struggle in the Peninsula 
 is the last in which England has been engaged. 
 Were there nothing else observable in the Spa- 
 nish war, these peculiarities would be sufficient 
 to maintain a general curiosity and sympathy 
 with regard to it, and to furnish ample ground 
 for the labours of an eloquent, learned, and po- 
 pular historian. Such undoubtedly is Colonel 
 Napier. His general knowledge and acuteness 
 are conspicuous in every page of his writings. 
 We arc often surprised and pleased by some 
 unexpected allusion to good literature or famous
 
 NAPIER'S WAR IN THE PENINSULA. 121 
 
 story; the descriptions of the Vcarious places of 
 combat are admirably clear and comprehensive; 
 and the reasons of the warlike manoeuvres are 
 made plain, even to quiet civilians, by the skill 
 and talent of the writer. There is no lack of 
 reflections, and these, though we frequently dis- 
 sent from them, neither common-place nor absurd. 
 The book is full of an eager soldierly ardour ; and 
 with regard to individuals we perceive no undue 
 bias, except a slight tendency to favour Soult, 
 scarcely blamable under the circumstances, and a 
 prejudice against IMr. Canning, not wonderful in a 
 man who naturally inclines to look at persons and 
 reputations tlu'ough a merely military telescope. 
 
 The style, above all, of the history is really ex- 
 cellent ; we might almost say, perfect. There is 
 certainly no great quality in which it is deficient: 
 it has ease, animation, brevity, correctness, and 
 vigour, and these, taken together, in a greater 
 degree than any other historical writer of English, 
 except Raleigh and Hallam. For Clarendon is 
 prolix, and often vague, — Hume weak, negligent, 
 and unidiomatic, — Robertson monotonous and 
 heavy, — Gibbon ostentatious, — Scott careless, — 
 Lingard made to sell, — Sharon Turner for style 
 contemptible, — Mill formal and petty, — and 
 Southey, who approaches nearest to the true 
 mark, too often misses it by feebleness and af- 
 fectation. These latter remarks, be it remem- 
 bered, concern merely the structure and beauty 
 
 VOL. I. G
 
 122 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 of periods and paragraphs. Of general merit 
 there is little wanting in Colonel Napier's work, 
 but (which indeed is the rarest of qualities, and 
 in modern English liistorians absolutely un- 
 known,) the weight and depth of observation 
 conspicuous in Tacitus and Machiavelli, and 
 sometimes in Niebuhr; sometimes also, we may 
 add, as we are speaking of a military writer, in 
 Polybius. 
 
 Attributing, as we do, these brilliant and va- 
 rious accomplishments to the author whose work 
 now lies before us, we may perhaps be asked 
 what other fault we find with him, besides 
 the want of that profound aphoristic wisdom 
 already adverted to. Our answer is ready. 
 Colonel Napier in our opinion has written the 
 history of a war, of Avhich lie has not caught 
 the true spirit and meaning. It is easy to say 
 that the man whom we criticize is probably a 
 much better judge of this than we are; but in 
 the first place, we claim to be credited only so far 
 as we support our opinion by sound argument; 
 and secondly, we do not mean to enter the lists 
 with a learned tactician and practised soldier, as 
 to the propriety or impropriety of any particular 
 manoeuvres. 
 
 Colonel Napier we will allow to be unrivalled 
 authority in the theory of scientific war. But 
 it seems to us that, in narrating and examining 
 the Spanish contest, he has mistaken the nature
 
 Napier's war in the peninsula. 123 
 
 of much of the mechanism on which he sits in 
 judgement. This matter is one in which the most 
 skilful and instructed soldier, if he be a mere 
 soldier, must be declared incompetent. And if 
 the endowments and graces which accompany his 
 military knowledge, do not include considerable 
 reach of thought, and power of moving beyond 
 his purely professional sphere, industry and elo- 
 quence, and the utmost advantage of position, 
 will undoubtedly be ineffectual for the perform- 
 ance of a lasting and complete work. This is the 
 case with the historian of the Peninsular War. 
 
 The resistance of the Spaniards to Bonaparte 
 we consider as one of the noblest efforts of 
 national enthusiasm; and the character of that 
 people seems to us, in many respects, deserving of 
 the highest admiration. The country had been 
 ruled for more than two centuries by one of the 
 most degrading despotisms that ever existed. 
 The lower classes were eminently ignorant, and 
 consequently prejudiced and passionate. The 
 upper ranks were very deficient in sympathy with 
 them, and had been enfeebled by their govern- 
 ment more probably than any aristocracy in 
 Europe. The Church had studiously excluded 
 knowledge; and naturally none but the worst 
 kind had gained a furtive admittance. Except 
 this Church, every institution of the country had 
 fallen into decay. Foreigners scarcely ever ap- 
 peared in Spain; and the few who passed the 
 
 G 2
 
 124 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 dreary boundary of the dying land, found there 
 but smoulderhig relics of the fire which once 
 blazed with so much splendour over all the earth. 
 
 Such was the state of a kingdom, against which 
 the most cunning and strongest military tyranny 
 that ever existed suddenly i)ut forth all its re- 
 sources. The chief fortresses were won by frauds 
 more vile than those Avhich consign felons to New- 
 gate. The former government was destroyed; and 
 its immediate re-establishment rendered impossible 
 by the captivity of the sovereign. Many of the 
 ablest and best instructed of the Spaniards, of 
 those who would naturally have been guides to 
 the people, were willing to truck the indepen- 
 dence of theu' country for the political benefits 
 promised by the invaders. In these circumstances 
 what could be expected from Spain? The nation 
 was a crowd of individuals almost entirely di- 
 A'ested of that organization which had previously 
 united them ; and powerful and disciplined armies, 
 commanded by some of the most skilful generals 
 in the world, held the cities and fortresses, and 
 occupied the highways of the kingdom. Never 
 were a people in a worse situation for maintaining 
 their independence: yet, if they did not rise and 
 struggle, they would necessarily become a pro- 
 vince of France; and the race which had beaten 
 back the invasion of Africa, which had conquered 
 America, and once given law to Europe, would 
 become slaves to the slave of a French usurper.
 
 Napier's war l\ the peninsula. 125 
 
 There have been nations, which, in such a state 
 of things, would have given evidence of courage 
 and patriotism only by sullen mm-murs and re- 
 luctant servility, and would have been applauded 
 in history even for these manifestations of public 
 virtue. Spain did more. The habits of action 
 and self-guidance, the mechanism of resistance 
 were utterly wanting; but the war of the Pe- 
 ninsula proved that there is in the Spaniard a 
 force of individual character akin to the spirit of 
 Padilla and of Cortes, and equal, even in the 
 nineteenth century, to high occasions. There was 
 nothing else on which the hopes of independence 
 could rely; but this was much. It gathered the 
 nation under a standard, which once overshadowed 
 half the world, and bore against the French with 
 the rude unsystematized energies of the whole 
 people. The explosion of indignant and often arro- 
 gant courage drove the invaders beyond the Ebro, 
 but only to return after a time with tenfold 
 numbers and resolution. Hordes of peasants, half 
 armed and scarcely at all disciplined, were gene- 
 rally dispersed with ease when brought to battle ; 
 and the French again obtained possession of al- 
 most the whole Peninsula. 
 
 Now it really seems a little unreasonable that 
 men of skill and authority, overflowing with 
 Jomini and science and literature, with Hannibal 
 and Frederick and so forth at their fingers' ends, 
 should very violently condemn the unfortunate
 
 126 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Spaniards, because they had not knowledge and 
 discipline by instinct. Deprive England of her 
 middle classes, degrade her gentry, subject her 
 for centuries to the Inquisition and the Index 
 Expurgatorius, annihilate her army, and bring a 
 foreign force of three hundred thousand men into 
 the country, support them by strong fortresses, 
 give them possession of London, Manchester, and 
 Bristol, and set half the educated men amongst us 
 on the side of the invaders, and consider what kind 
 of resistance we should be likely to make. A gallant 
 one undoubtedly, one full of obstinacy and courage 
 and enterprise, and finally successful. But should 
 we have no instances of fifty thousand half-disci- 
 plined peasants beaten by twenty thousand vete- 
 rans? Would there be among us no apathy, no 
 ignorance, no arrogance or frenzy, no examples of 
 fierce revenge for unexampled wrongs? none of 
 those innumerable follies and crimes attributed, 
 and often jiistly, to the Spaniards? They pro- 
 mised, says Colonel Napier, infinitely more than 
 they performed. Is this wonderful ? Do all the 
 boastings and failures, of which he speaks, prove 
 anything but that self-confidence, which belongs 
 to the Spanish character, and without which the 
 nation never would have attempted, much less 
 succeeded in the many glorious enterprises that 
 ennoble its history ? They would not submit to 
 be ruled by English counsel, though their own 
 leaders and governors were often Aveak and pas-
 
 NAPIER'S WAR IN THE PENINSULA. 127 
 
 sionate and incapable. And we should like to 
 know if any nation, with strong national feeling, 
 much more if the Spaniards distinguished for the 
 strongest, would ever submit, ought ever to submit, 
 to the rule even of the wisest and most benevolent 
 auxiliaries. If the spirit of independence had not 
 been so mighty as to spurn the notion of obeying 
 foreigners, would not the country have gained 
 much more by yielding its free-will to Bonaparte 
 than to Mr. Frere ? The only possibility or purpose 
 of resistance depended on the vehemence of the re- 
 solution to stand self-supported, or not at all. And 
 again, when the historian narrates, with the horror 
 of a chivalrous soldier, the cruelties committed by 
 the Spaniards on the French, why does he repre- 
 sent the cruelties of the French as mere pardon- 
 able retaliations for these ? Why does he almost 
 uniformly lay out of sight the unrivalled and 
 detestable criminality of tlie first aggression of 
 Bonaparte on Spain ? Why uniformly forget the 
 infamous horrors practised by the French soldiers 
 on the people, — practised indeed by almost all 
 French armies, in almost every country in Avhich 
 they have fought, — the first and real causes of the 
 murders which the Spanish husbands and fathers 
 and brothers frequently and madly perpetrated ? 
 
 We do not mean to say that Colonel Napier 
 has overlooked all this : but we do think that he 
 has generally wished to throw the remembrance 
 of it aside, and to look at the Spanish war as an
 
 128 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 ordinary contest between disciplined armies, to 
 judge it by the rules of these more common and 
 systematic struggles, and to praise or blame an 
 outraged, brave, tumultuous people, without suf- 
 ficient institutions or rulers, — and whom their 
 previous government had done all in its power 
 to semibarbarize, — according to principles framed 
 from the practice of well-drilled and regularly 
 commanded armies, fighting, not for their coun- 
 try's life, honour, vengeance, but to gain in quiet 
 times a fortress or a canton for some sleepy, 
 card-playing sovereign.
 
 I. Observations on an Autograph of Shakspere, and 
 THE Orthography of his Name. Communicated 
 to the Society of Antiquaries by Sir Frederick Mad- 
 den. London, 1838, Bvo. 
 
 II. De la Servitude Volontaire, ou le Contr'un, par 
 
 ESTIENNE DE LA BoETIE (1548), AVEC LES NoTES DE 
 M. COSTE, ET UNE PREFACE DE F. DE LA MeNNAIS. 
 
 Paris, 1835. 8vo. 
 III. Essais de Michel de Montaigne, avec des Notes 
 
 DE TOUS LES CoMMENTATEURS. Paris, 1834. 1 Vol. 
 
 laro-e 8vo. 
 
 (From the London and Westminster Renew for 1837.^) 
 
 'T^HE first of these works is a kind of modern 
 sucker from the ancient root of Florio's 
 translation of Montaigne's Essays, printed in the 
 year 1603. Sir Frederick Madden in his pam- 
 phlet brings forward evidence, which appears 
 sufficient, that the particular copy under his con- 
 sideration was the property of Shakspere ; for so, 
 it appears, we are to write the name. And the 
 title-page of this little Essay bears a fac-simile 
 of the poet's signature. It is to be lamented 
 that tliis cannot be copied here. But our readers 
 must take it on our testimony, that the name is 
 in characters as crabbed, as if Shakspere, like 
 Hamlet, had held it, " as our statists do, a base- 
 ness to write fair." There is a passage in the 
 Tempest well known to contain several expres- 
 sions identical with those of Florio in his trans- 
 
 G 3
 
 130 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 lation of a part of one of the Essays. And it 
 would at all events have been highly improbable 
 that Shakspere should not have read them. On 
 the whole the celebrated soliloquy in Hamlet 
 presents a more characteristic and expressive 
 resemblance to much of Montaigne's writings, 
 than any other portion of the plays of the great 
 dramatist w^hicli we at present remember; though 
 it would doubtless be easy to trace many apparent 
 transfers from the Frenchman into the English- 
 man's works, as both were keen and many-sided 
 observers of mankind in the same age and neigh- 
 bouring countries. But Hamlet was in those days 
 no popular type of character; nor were Mon- 
 taigne's views and tone familiar to men till he 
 had himself made them so. Now the Prince of 
 Denmark is very nearly a Montaigne, lifted to a 
 higher eminence, and agitated by more striking 
 circumstances and a severer destiny, and alto- 
 gether a somewhat more passionate stioicture of 
 man. It is not however veiy wonderful that 
 Hamlet, who was but a part of Shakspere, should 
 exhibit to us more than the whole of Montaigne ; 
 and the external facts appear to contradict any 
 notion of a French ancestry for the Dane, as the 
 play is said to have been produced in 1600, and the 
 translation of the Essays not for three years later. 
 However this may be, it is interesting to find 
 any points of analogy between a poetical creation, 
 probably the most subtle and profound of Shak-
 
 MONTAIGNE. 131 
 
 spere, and a living man actually co-existent with 
 the poet, and who must doubtless often have seen 
 in Paris men whom Shakspere conversed Avitli 
 but a few days afterwards in London. They 
 had the same busy and fervid world around them, 
 listened to the same tales of Eastern travel and 
 American adventure; and all the great public 
 events and personages in the foreground of the 
 picture seen by one were conspicuous in the back- 
 ground gazed at by the other. Very ordinary 
 men, nay, inanimate things derive an interest 
 from our certainty that they were contemporary 
 with those whom the world cannot forget. The 
 celebrated and productive minds, whose lives 
 flowed on through the same days of storm and 
 sunshine, seem each to reflect a light upon the 
 other ; and the group starts forward into distinct- 
 ness and vividness, while the single figure might 
 have seemed dim, cold, and stiff", as the recumbent 
 efiigy in a twilight chapel. 
 
 Montaigne on all accounts deserves at least as 
 much notice as the world has ever given to him : 
 and readers, who willingly spend much time in 
 attempting to estimate the comparative worth of 
 books, many of which will probably be outlived 
 by their authors, may not perhaps grudge an 
 hour to some remarks on the merits and pecu- 
 liarities of a writer, who was read by Shaks])ere, 
 and whose fame has survived the mutations of 
 more than two centuries.
 
 132 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 It is probably the great canon of all biographies, 
 and of all writings the interest of which is mainly- 
 biographical, that those are best, which present the 
 most complete picture of the lives they relate to. 
 To some this will seem a truism, to others a para- 
 dox. But most persons appear to judge of the 
 value of the picture of a human life, with refer- 
 ence to the importance of the man in the history 
 of the world, rather than to the fulness and accu- 
 racy of the delineation. Yet it may be well 
 maintained that the stioicture and growth of a 
 man, of any man, are in themselves so grave and 
 fruitful a reality, that, independently of extra- 
 ordinary endowments or exploits, a true and per- 
 fect image of his inward being would be a richer 
 and higher creation, than any portrait at all less 
 accurate of a much more remarkable mind. The 
 ol)ject is itself so deep and immense, that, in con- 
 templating any single example of it, all differences 
 of degree are lost sight of. The mind is so filled 
 by the aspect of Mont Blanc, that it refuses to 
 admit the mere arithmetical fact of the doubly or 
 trebly superior altitude of Chimborazo and the 
 Himalayah. The scientific measurement may be 
 accurate; but a mass of earth ten times the height 
 would not more completely possess the eye and 
 heart with a sense of how sublime and lasting a 
 thing, of how overpowering vastness a mountain 
 is. Now, whatever the foot-rule and barometer 
 may say, a man is larger and more than a moun-
 
 MONTAIGNE. 133 
 
 tain. In the only instance on record in which 
 the two characters were combined, that of Quin- 
 bus Flestrin at Lilliput, those ingenious people, 
 no doubt, regarded it as more wonderful to see a 
 mountain endowed with human qualities, than 
 they would have done to see a man merely 
 enlarged to the size of a mountain. A man 
 swelled and petrified into a hill would in effect 
 have sunk and dwindled. But the hill, could it 
 be imbued with life and reason, would undergo a 
 change no less ennobling than the clay figure of 
 Prometheus, or the statue of Pygmalion, when 
 kindling with the fiery spirit of will and con- 
 sciousness. Still more therefore is it true of 
 men, than of the grandest physical appearance, 
 that in contemplating any one of them the mere 
 comparative diversities vanish from the eye. Any 
 one is not so much greater or less, as infinite; and 
 his compass spreads beyond the utmost limit of our 
 vision, and absorbs all attempt at a precise estimate. 
 Of all men whose memories at all sm-vive, the 
 least fruitful for us are the mere vague historic 
 shadows, around which there is a din and whirl of 
 social tumult, but of whose inward lives we know 
 so little, that they remain as scarcely more than 
 names on tombs or hollow trophies. Next to them 
 in insignificance for us, although not quite so low, 
 however really inferior in vigour and truth of 
 nature, are the declaimers and dealers in rhe- 
 torical falsehood, — a Seneca, a Rousseau, a Haz-
 
 134 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 litt. For by turning their language inside out, 
 by pulling to pieces the fictitious structure, and 
 as It were anatomizing the wax-work, we may, 
 through a laborious process of reflection and re- 
 construction, arrive at some knowledge of what 
 they were, from the study of Avhat they desired 
 to appear. But the truly precious and instruc- 
 tive specimens of human nature which the past 
 leaves us, are the men in whom we du'ectly, and 
 from themselves, know both what they were, and 
 why and how they were so. And it is very re- 
 markable that we have not this knowledge of any 
 w^orthless and despicable soul. Those who have 
 painted themselves truly, however unconsciously, 
 are the true and ample minds. The weak and 
 base, who have designed to do it at all, have always 
 betaken themselves to distortion and falsehood, as 
 persons of misshapen forms often throw themselves 
 into unnatural and painful attitudes, to hide, as 
 they imagine, the blemishes of their figures. On 
 the other hand, we are minutely and abundantly 
 informed of the mind and character of Augustin 
 and Luther, of Dante, of Cicero, of the holy and 
 stainless Socrates. We know Milton, as he was, 
 and with open eyes behold him luminous In his 
 blindness. We stand beside young Goethe, while 
 we listen to his Poetry and Truth, and seem with 
 his universal sensibility to receive the just and 
 sharp impression from all things and men, and with 
 his unwearied and felicitous intelligence to shape
 
 MONTAIGNE. 135 
 
 all into new and complete pictures. And far 
 meaner and narrower as was the man, it is in this 
 way that we grow acquainted with Montaigne, 
 when we read his Essays, and find that there are 
 few of our kinsmen or friends whom we can see 
 into so thorouglily, or with whom, though dwelling 
 for years under one roof, we seem to live in such 
 intimate communion. 
 
 This is a great thing. The parings of nails, 
 the clippings of hair, the worn-out slipper of a 
 conqueror's foot, which has kicked thousands or 
 millions of men before it, the glove from a hand 
 that many lips delighted to salute, though lips 
 and fingers have long since been food for worms, 
 — these matters have for some their value. We 
 doubt not that the peruke of Louis XIV., or 
 the cocked hat of Marlborough, would fetch, in 
 any London auction-room, a price beyond Vol- 
 taire's History of the one, or Archdeacon Coxe's 
 Life of the other. Yet these memorials can sug- 
 gest, even to the creative soul of a collector of 
 curiosities, only a faint and imperfect conception 
 of their former owners; while, in the writings 
 of any one who, like Montaigne, has chronicled 
 himself, we have the very man, a living human 
 being brought before us. We are not compelled 
 to infer the kernel from the husk, the Hercules 
 from — not the foot — but the sandal, to fill up 
 for ourselves with substantial form the empty 
 vestments which adumbrate their wearer. Here
 
 136 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the inward is tliat which is clearest, the flame 
 within the coloured lamp, throwing its light upon 
 and through those outward and surrounding cir- 
 cumstances, which alone biography and history 
 for the most part present to us. Hard indeed 
 is the work of a biographer, who seldom gives 
 any distinct and tenable knowledge of the hero 
 he describes. But he always, more or less well, 
 and more or less unconsciously, does something 
 towards painting himself. His mistakes and 
 dreams as to another are the facts of his own 
 mind. We see him living and moving at his 
 easel, where he may be daubing only the cloudiest 
 caricature of some one else. That which he 
 ostensibly writes of is as worthless as the later 
 text inscribed above the faded characters of a 
 genuine classic. While he blabs mendacious 
 gossip about the victim of his rhetoric, he be- 
 trays the whole secret, the imperishable rcaHty, 
 of his own character, aims, and insight. But 
 when he writes, as iSlontaigne did, of himself, 
 the dream, the delirium, the inane folly, is hardly 
 less valuable than the earnest confession, the sim- 
 ple-hearted narrative of events. He may not 
 always write truth and wisdom about his own 
 temper, principles, and story; but the weaknesses 
 and delusions are also liis, his own, and alike 
 contribute to embody before our eyes the one 
 living human being. 
 
 On this topic, what a man is, more books have
 
 MONTAIGNE. 137 
 
 been written than on all other matters, probably 
 because, so far as we know, books are written by 
 men. It lies at the root of all history, all poetry, 
 and all that, in the highest sense of the word, is 
 philosophy. But indeed, more properly speaking, 
 it is of this matter, and this alone, that all books 
 more or less directly treat, and about this that all 
 thoughts are occupied. For speculations, the 
 least apparently human, are in reality based on 
 some portion or other of man, and on this alone; 
 those as to reptiles, which may well concern 
 man, himself a worm : those as to the earth we 
 tread on, we being ourselves but dust and clay; 
 those as to the air and stars, for what else are 
 we but a breath, and our lives but sparks of fire 
 in a vault of darkness? Nor can it be said that 
 this is a fantastic abuse of metaphor. On this 
 subject nothing properly is metaphor; for all 
 analogies, even the wildest combinations twisted 
 together by the fancy, have their one root in the 
 unity of our consciousness. And in all we seek 
 to know, our aim is only to discover what there 
 is in the thing, corresponding to somewhat in 
 ourselves. Thus we discern it; thus we master 
 it, make it our own, truly know it. That in an 
 object which answers to, or dovetails with our- 
 selves, is what we really mean by the object. 
 And manifestly so ; for if there be aught in it 
 which meets and assimilates with nothing in us, 
 of that something, that algebraic x never to be
 
 138 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 discovered, we cannot speak, or think, or dream. 
 Not only do we not know it, but we never can 
 know it. In this largest, but also most true 
 sense then, it is certain that all books relate to 
 man, and only to man; yet some to that which 
 is more essential and characteristic in us, some 
 to that which is less. Of some the ground and 
 element lies nearer to our affections and will and 
 intelHgence, to that which is least changeable in 
 us, and is the framework and support of all the 
 rest; others to that which we cannot but regard 
 as more outward and superficial. Some treat of 
 man in his inmost life, beliefs, feelings, purposes, 
 and successes; others more of the material world, 
 which is also, but more remotely, his, — his co- 
 lossal hut, and inexhaustible nnne, and insatiable 
 catacomb. In one way or otlier the strongest 
 and most cutting thoughts of man, since the 
 beginning of his current almanac and present 
 calendar some five thousand years ago, have 
 been exercised and expended in shaping out a 
 clearer and clearer image of himself, both as he 
 finds himself immediately within, and as he re- 
 cognizes liis own obscure likeness in the canvass 
 of Nature, bordered with its frame of Time and 
 Space, the carvings of Avhich are also one endless 
 intertexture of human resemblances. Much of 
 the work of becoming what we may be, consists 
 in knowing what we are; and we should go mad 
 and rot in preternatural idleness, if Ave had not
 
 MONTAIGNE. 139 
 
 the task of gradually finding ourselves expressed 
 in the universe, and the universe impressed upon 
 ourselves, and of more and more realizing this 
 correspondence outwardly by action, whence arts, 
 and trades, and journeys, and ships, and harvests, — 
 and inwardly by thought and love, from which 
 arise religions, poetry, sciences, all heroism and 
 goodness. 
 
 Of the books that show us what we are, there 
 have been in many ages better than the Essays 
 of Montaigne; but it may be affirmed without 
 meaning to offend any one, that even in our age 
 there are several worse. His book is not the 
 widest, nor the deepest; but it is a perfectly 
 genuine record of a far livelier and richer and 
 more honest mind than common. There are 
 oracles of loftier and more fiery spirits, belong- 
 ing less than this to our time and tendencies, 
 and, though immortal as Death itself, which will 
 outlive all but Life, yet not more deserving of 
 immortality, than these doubts, fancies, endless 
 egotisms, of a dead old Gascon gentleman. 
 
 Such he was. He acquaints us with man, 
 chiefly by exhibiting to us a man, the offspring 
 of one age, and the native of a single spot ; and 
 we must consider what these circumstances made 
 him, that we may the better understand what 
 in himself he was. He belonged, in a word, to 
 the most active portion of the human race, in 
 the most eager and productive period that it
 
 140 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 has known, at least since it first contrived to 
 shape itself into social existence. Printing, like 
 the former and latter rain, was diffusing the 
 knowledge long; collected in the vaijue and dim 
 clouds of the past. Columbus had burst the 
 gates of the Atlantic, and shown to men a new 
 heaven and a new earth, and other forms of 
 human nature than those of our elder regions. 
 And wliile the new was pouring in, the old was 
 rapidly crumbling down and passing away. More 
 connexion and interdependence was growing up 
 in all the concerns of life. Individual strength 
 and wild energy were settling down. The solid 
 vault of dogma under which men hved was thin- 
 ning off, and widening, and w^avering; and while 
 a new and bright vegetation of literature opened 
 over the earth, the ancient snows and ice-rocks 
 of tradition melted and burst along in foaming 
 torrents. Together with these changes, a looser 
 width of luxury and excitement was unfolded; 
 and the sweeter wines of the new age were min- 
 gled with deadlier poisons. In Germany misery 
 and fanaticism and heroic faith, — in Italy un- 
 bounded falsehood and creative genius, — in Eng- 
 land lawless brutality and popular zeal, — in 
 France all these elements, were mixed together. 
 During the first half of the sixteenth century 
 the Reformation began and was secured, — More 
 and Cranmer were executed, — Luther lived aud 
 died, — Rabelais stood forth as a fervid genius in
 
 MONTAIGNE. 141 
 
 the mask of a buiFoon, — Raffaelle, Durer, and 
 Michael Angelo painted themselves for ever on 
 the most massive tablets of the mind of man, — 
 Ariosto embalmed chivalry in a gorgeous tomb, 
 — Fiesco conspired, — Machiavelli theorized, — 
 Melanchthon and Scaliger taught, — Cortez and 
 Pizarro passed, like its own earthquakes, through 
 America, — the feudal greatness of French no- 
 bility blazed almost its last, — France, Germany, 
 and Italy wore each other out in idle wars. In 
 the midst of these confusions, Calvin was con- 
 demned by Rome as a heretic, for establishing 
 the power wliich enabled him to burn Servetus. 
 Rome was sacked by an army of adventurers, and 
 Trent filled with a council of Romish prelates. 
 Faith, energizing in Luther, threw off its cowl; 
 and his Emperor, unable to compel him to wear 
 it, placed it on his own head, and sank into a 
 convent. The world was learning that Homer, 
 Socrates, and Plutarch were more than names, 
 and growing to feel Avhat they really meant. 
 And while Montaigne was drinking deepest of 
 their spirit, the Protestants of Meriudol and 
 Cabrieres were massacred; and in Guyenne, at 
 his own threshold, the peasantry were maddened 
 into revolt by the Gabelle (1548), and were 
 crushed again under heavier sorrows. 
 
 In fine, the state of society in Western Europe 
 resembled a party of mariners saving themselves 
 on a raft constructed out of the wreck of their
 
 142 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 former stately but worn-out vessel. With woes, 
 and panic-cries, and bleeding hands, and fierce 
 contentions, and the deaths of many, they con- 
 struct a frail support amid the stormy waves; 
 but the ruin of the ship has laid open to them 
 precious treasures and priceless instruments, long 
 sealed up and forgotten, within the hold; new 
 necessities develop more complete inventions; 
 the strong call of the hour awakens fresh life in 
 many a heart, before weak and torpid; and on 
 tlieir creaking and wave-washed deck they sail 
 before the wind in greater terrors, but with hap- 
 pier auspices than before. 
 
 In the midst of this revolution, Montaigne, 
 born in 1533, rose to consciousness. In the 
 course of his life he saw the world around him 
 convulsed with the fiercest religious wars, the 
 massacre of St. Bartholomew perpetrated, the 
 Dutch republic created. He was contemporary 
 with Cervantes and with Shakspere. Seldom has 
 there been on earth a broader scene of apparent 
 confusion; but in the midst of the storm far 
 nobler and more various powers were at work, 
 than in the downfall of the Roman Empire, or 
 the conflicts of the middle ages. Much of house- 
 hold simplicity was perishing; popular fancy and 
 feelino; were losing; much of their unconscious 
 beauty; the rude and slow machinery of political 
 society was breaking and crushing down; above 
 all, the old unquestioned beliefs of men were
 
 MONTAIGNE. 143 
 
 Inwardly decaying, and were shaken and tottering 
 under outward attacks. The fierce horrors, base 
 frauds, and lascivious indulgences of public life, 
 were rather multiplied and darkened than at all 
 suppressed: yet thought and humanity were liv- 
 ing more strongly, and generating life; and, in 
 the confused and ferocious tumult, there were 
 some who taught, and many who received the 
 teaching, that faith in higher than visible things 
 had a foundation of its own in the heart of man 
 to rest on, and need not lean for ever on the hol- 
 low and spurious support of a despotic priesthood. 
 But this last and greatest truth was preached in 
 the midst of passions and delusions which were 
 closely mingled with it, as the stream turned into 
 a stagnant pool is itself stained by that which it 
 purifies. Thus it might perhaps have been anti- 
 cipated that, in the awakening knowledge of a 
 beautiful and inexhaustible Pagan literature, self- 
 satisfying speculation and easy sympathy would 
 find abundant pretext and encouragement to 
 shrink from the gigantic battle of austere belief 
 and distinct principles into a world of intelligent 
 delight. The survey of mankind, as a mere 
 object of curious observation, both invited and 
 bewildered the reason; and the richest and most 
 many-coloured spectacle of human existence which 
 the world had ever exhibited, was heightened and 
 contrasted by a better knowledge of a remote and 
 wonderful past.
 
 144 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Montaigne was the son of a Gascon country 
 gentleman and soldier, rather a humourist, of 
 whom he gives the following account (11. 2)*: 
 " My house has been a long time open to men of 
 learning, and is very well known by them; for 
 my father, who was the master of it fifty years 
 and more, l)eing warmed with that zeal with 
 Avliich King Francis I. liad newly embraced lite- 
 rature, and brought it into esteem, spared no 
 pains nor expense to get an acquaintance with 
 men of learning, treating them, at his house, as 
 persons sacred, who had divine wisdom by some 
 special inspiration, collecting their sentences and 
 sayings as so many oracles, and with the more 
 veneration and religion, as he was the less quali- 
 fied to judge of them; for he had no knowledge 
 of letters any more than his predecessors had." 
 
 The mode of education pursued by this some- 
 what singular person with regard to his second 
 son is described by the subject of the experiment 
 in the following passages (III. 13): " If I had 
 any sons I should wish them my fortune. The 
 good father that God gave me, who has nothing 
 of me but the acknowledgment of his bounty 
 (though truly 'tis a very hearty one), sent me 
 from my cradle to be brought up in a poor village 
 of his, and there continued me all the while I was 
 
 * The passages from Montaigne ::rc given from the corrected 
 edition of Cotton's translation, published in London in \Ti')9.
 
 MONTAIGNE. 145 
 
 at nurse, and longer, bringing me up to the 
 meanest and most common way of living : Magna 
 pars libertatis est bene moratus venter [Seneca 
 Epist. 123] i. e. A well-governed belly is a great 
 part of liberty. Never take upon yourselves, 
 much less give up to your wives, the care of their 
 nurture. Leave the forming them to fortune, 
 under popular and natural laws; leave it to cus- 
 tom to train them up to frugality and hardships, 
 that they may rather descend from them than 
 ascend to them. This humour of my father's yet 
 aimed at another end, that is, to make me familiar 
 with those people and with that rank of men who 
 most need our assistance; believing that I should 
 be more obliged rather to regard them who ex- 
 tended their arms to me, than those who turned 
 their backs upon me; and for this reason also it 
 was that he provided me sureties at the font, of 
 the meanest fortune, to oblige and bind me to 
 them." And in I. 25: "My deceased father, 
 having made all the inquiry that a man could 
 possibly do among men of learning and under- 
 standing of an exact method of education, was by 
 them apprized of the inconvenience which at- 
 tended the practice at that time; and he was told 
 that the tedious time we spent in learning the 
 languages, which cost them but very little, if any, 
 was the only reason we could not attain to the 
 magnanimity of the ancient Greeks and Romans, 
 nor to their knowledge. I do not however be- 
 
 VOL. I. H
 
 146 CKITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 lieve that to be the only cause; but the expedient 
 my father found out for this was, that, while I was 
 at nurse, and before I began to speak, he com- 
 mitted me to the care of a German, who since 
 died a famous physician in France, totally igno- 
 rant of our language indeed, but very well versed 
 in the Latin." 
 
 He proceeds to describe his learning Latin col- 
 loquially, and to a pitch of great fluency, even 
 in childhood. We have afterwards several odd 
 anecdotes and remarks about his own early life, 
 the substance of which is that he was of very 
 irretentive memory and indolent character, and 
 that the desultory and amusing mode of instruc- 
 tion pursued with him even at college was, in 
 Montaigne's opinion, requisite, in order to prevent 
 so dull a mind from abhorring all serious mental 
 labour. 
 
 The frame of the child thus trained and in- 
 structed was, as we find from frequent notices in 
 his writings, robust and capable of much fatigue, 
 although towards middle life afflicted with pain- 
 ful disease, the chronicle of which forms the bulk 
 of his book of travels *. He was of short stature, 
 but well set, and with a full, strong, and open 
 face. 
 
 Montaigne thus grew towards maturity, with 
 
 " ' Journal du Voyage de M, de Montaigne en Italic,' &c. par 
 M. de Querlon. Paris, 1774. 4 to.
 
 MONTAIGNE. 147 
 
 an education more like that of our day than of 
 his. In the management of those first years of 
 life, it is impossible not to see the source of mucli 
 that afterwards marked him out from others. 
 The main principle, of teaching him everything 
 without requiring any conscious effort, or pro- 
 ducing any sense of struggle on his part, doubt- 
 less disinclined him, as such a system always 
 must, to encounter hardships or engage in con- 
 flict: whence, partly, the indolence, though a 
 busy indolence, of his life: hence too, in a great 
 degree, his reluctance to admit any views of man 
 and duty, which required him to regard life as a 
 long battle against ignorance and weakness, in a 
 word, against evil, and which estimate the highest 
 and best of our thoughts and feelings as only 
 then pure and active, when consciously toiling 
 against the stream of self-indulgence. But as his 
 education gave him, not only ease, but also know- 
 ledge, and opened to him an inexhaustible source 
 of mental pleasure, no wonder that he became a 
 literary epicure, and made the gratification of 
 every whim in speculation, and to a great degree 
 in practice, the only aim, if so it can be called, of 
 his existence. Thanks however to the sound 
 structure of mind and body, to the sturdy manly 
 nature, which he partly inherited from his father, 
 partly owed to his care, — to the strong and honest 
 minds and the admirable books with which he was 
 early familiarized, — there is under and around all 
 
 H2
 
 148 CRITIC AI. ESSAYS. 
 
 this capricious idleness a predominant, clear, 
 homely sense and apprehensiveness for truth, 
 accompanied by sincerity and kindliness of Avill, 
 the natural yokefellows of such endowments, 
 which give both the most sterling value and the 
 most exquisite charm to his w'orks. 
 
 At thirteen years of age his taste for study, 
 and perhaps his dislike to military discipline and 
 vexation, were so decided, that, although the son 
 of a wealthy gentleman and soldier in the six- 
 teenth century, he preferred the business of a 
 law-court to that of a camp. After the requisite 
 preparations he became, in the year 1554, a coun- 
 sellor at Bordeaux, and he signs himself as such 
 in writing to his father in 1563. He abandoned 
 this profession on the death of his elder brother, 
 which opened the way for his own succession. 
 As, in so long and egotistical a work as the Es- 
 says, he never mentions the fact that he had been 
 a lawyer, it seems probable that he felt somewhat 
 ashamed of this portion of his life. Indeed he 
 evidently valued himself a good deal on his im- 
 portance as Seigneur of Montaigne, perhaps esti- 
 mating more highly this external and unques- 
 tionable advantage, from his scepticism as to the 
 certainty of any less palpable distinctions. What- 
 ever his feelings may have been with regard to 
 his own professional career, it is certain that he 
 gained and kept a bitter and scornful disgust at 
 the mass of arbitrary pedantries and cruel wrongs
 
 MONTAIGNE. 149 
 
 involved in the system which then regulated the 
 social interests of his countrymen. 
 
 During his life as counsellor he travelled fre- 
 quently to Paris and to the Court. He became 
 acquainted with Henry II., and was appointed 
 a Gentleman of the Chamber. In general his 
 remarks on politics exhibit much familiarity with 
 the affairs and persons of his own time. He was 
 intimate with L'Hospital and with De Thou, 
 minds as impartial and honest probably as his 
 own, but devoid of his speculative tendencies and 
 powers, which were united with their practical 
 talents and civil wisdom only in our Lord Bacon. 
 Clear, kindly, festive was he as the Christmas 
 fireside, and formed for sympathy and friendship. 
 Of his life at Bordeaux, before his succession to 
 his father's estate, the most important fact was 
 his friendship with his fellow-counsellor La 
 Boetie, an affection which makes a streak of light 
 in modern biography, almost as beautiful as that 
 left us by Lord Brook and Sir Philip Sidney. 
 Montaigne's letter to his father, giving an ac- 
 count of his friend's calm and considerate death- 
 bed, is full of grief and love, as are all the pas- 
 sages in his Essays relating to the same person, 
 who was of his own years, and whom he lost in 
 the year 1563, when they were both about the 
 age of thirty. La Boetie also says, in his Traite 
 de la Servitude Volontaire* (p. 142), "Friendship 
 
 * La Mennais' edition, mentioned at the head of this article.
 
 150 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 is a sacred name; it is a holy thing; it never 
 arises but between good men, exists only by 
 mutual esteem, supports itself not so much by 
 services on either part, as by goodness of life. 
 That which makes a friend certain of another, is 
 the knowledge which he has of his integrity. The 
 sureties which he has for him are his good dispo- 
 sition, fidelity, and stedfastness. There cannot 
 be friendship where there is cruelty, where there 
 is disloyalty, where there is injustice." 
 
 This little book, De la Servitude Voloiitaire) 
 seems to have been written when the author Avas 
 only sixteen. It is a declamation against the 
 lawless government of many by one, with much 
 that recals Tacitus, and something that resembles 
 the political writings of our Milton, but having a 
 pervading tone of idle imitative rhetoric, such as 
 is all but inevitable in the work of one so young. 
 Though doubtless in some degree prompted by 
 the miseries of France in that day, it is chiefly 
 a reproduction of the sonorous and statuesque 
 republicanism of the classical writers, an eloquent, 
 headlong, youthful utterance of a sharp, clear 
 brain and glowing heart, to whom the world was 
 yet but a stage for declamation, while almost all 
 the outward facts of life lay concealed from him 
 behind the scenic curtain. Warmth and reason- 
 ableness are finely blended in the book, though 
 weakened by a kind of abstract vagueness, a 
 dateless no-wherc-ncss of the facts and topics.
 
 MONTAIGNE. 151 
 
 There is no trace of the wayward, fantastic self- 
 questioning, which gives charm and peculiarity to 
 Montaigne. But probably at La Boetie's age 
 his friend's writings would have shown much less 
 of this than now appears in them. For pas- 
 sionate life and keenness of style, the Treatise is 
 more remarkable even than the Essays. 
 
 Montaigne married at thirty-three, not from 
 any strong affection, but for reasons of propriety 
 and convenience. After his father's death he 
 lived chiefly at Montaigne St. Michel, his well- 
 known chateau. He made frequent journeys in 
 France, travelled in Italy, and was twice elected 
 Mayor of Bordeaux, evidently much to his satis- 
 faction. Though in troublesome times, his go- 
 vernment of the city was, conformably to his 
 character, quiet and moderate. He was also con- 
 temporary with the massacre of St. Bartholomew ; 
 and he was with De Thou at Blois in 1588, when 
 the Due de Guise was slain. The result for us of 
 all these facts is, that Montaigne knew mankind 
 on many sides, and in the most different classes. 
 He was in a station to associate easily with the 
 highest ranks, even with kings, and of habits and 
 a temper that smoothed his intercourse even with 
 the lowest. He had learning to make him an apt 
 companion for scholars; practical shrewdness and 
 knowledge to procure him respect from the world, 
 and the secure and easy circumstances which gave 
 him perfect leisure to indulge his tastes and fan-
 
 152 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 cies, and to speculate upon those of others. And 
 in fine, he was a man whose thoughts neither 
 turned strongly to action nor to ideal truth, but 
 delighted to converse with all kinds of distinct 
 human realities. 
 
 In his writings the central scene of his outward 
 life always appears to be his chateau, which he 
 delights to paint as built mostly by his father, 
 with notliing added to it by him, — as the only 
 sentleman's house in France unfortified against 
 either party in the civil war, — and as strong and 
 hospitable enough to shelter his poorer neighbours 
 ajiainst the mere marauders of the time. In a 
 tower of this building was the study and library 
 of Montaigne; and here he describes himself as 
 composing the book in which the description 
 occurs, and which is almost as certain to last 
 as the nature of man, which it so amply and 
 minutely presents to us. 
 
 Strange that by means of a little chemical mix- 
 ture, lamp-black and so forth, on a tissue of old 
 rags, the thoughts of a man should thus be pre- 
 served for all men. For what can seem a less 
 suitable vehicle for a thought, — consider it, — a 
 thouoht ! than smoke-dirt and worn filaments of 
 flax. These then perhaps are not that which 
 makes the thought last, but that which lets us 
 see that it does last, as the wire on which the 
 insect's diamond wing is held under the glass of a 
 microscope. Montaigne is gone, to where he will
 
 MONTAIGNE. 153 
 
 have found some at least of his doubts cleared up, 
 But for us he has left a mantle behind him, not 
 only inscribed, as are the magic garments of 
 romance, with many strange characters, but 
 showing the familiar folds and twists of the 
 short and stout-bodied old Gascon. In that 
 mantle we need not wrap ourselves; but we 
 may try to peruse and measure it. Thus it 
 remains to us as a fact, that Montaigne did, 
 what no man had done before, nor has any man 
 so well done since, — in sharp light, and with 
 endlessly daring strokes, painted himself, as the 
 one great certainty in a world of doubt, — him- 
 self, a living being, a person, a man, bright 
 shining, like an enchanted head, — a human image 
 of brassy flame in Rembrandt's wizard cave of 
 blackness. 
 
 Many have shown us man in general, and have 
 done this better or worse, according to their 
 several shares of manhood. But the mischief of 
 such delineations is, that man in general is after 
 all a fiction; for man exists only in particular. 
 The essential forms and germs of our whole 
 nature are stored indeed in every individual ; and 
 as the reason gradually awakens to the music of 
 experience, a corresponding image becomes pre- 
 sent to it of man as a single ideal being. But 
 this image is always to some extent imperfect, 
 and yet has a tendency to allure and even im- 
 prison our attention within itself, and to shut out 
 
 H3
 
 154 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 any entrances, or, if we may use the word, in- 
 growths, of further knowledge. And he before 
 whom the image floats cloudy and pendulous, 
 while, still indefinite and unsteady, it draws up, 
 like a water-spout column, new substance of 
 reality into its own bulk, often does better ser- 
 vice to himself and others, than he who does 
 homage to and worships a fixed idea, however 
 noble and capacious, admitting of no growth or 
 maturation. By the encyclopedic and intermi- 
 nable, as opposed to the defining, shaping process, 
 we may well indeed become boundless, aimless, 
 . and incoherent. And so to a certain extent was 
 Montaigne, but also rich, various, of inexhaus- 
 tible yearnings after new mental treasures of 
 comparisons and contrasts, and ever sending out 
 his wealth possessed on new ventures of wealth 
 to be acquired. He sits a golden gnome in his 
 sparry cells and galleries piled with jewels; and 
 he is their true discoverer and guardian, and, 
 though not the creative spirit, with the one eflSca- 
 cious image of the Aladdin's Palace into which 
 the jewels shall be built, is yet akin to him, and 
 at heart owns him as a brother. 
 
 Great again is the power of a Dante, of a 
 Shakspere, even of a Machiavelli, a De Thou, 
 in showing us some shadows and surfaces of many 
 men, some leaves of the great ti'ce of man's life. 
 But after all they can give us only lines and 
 gleams, lines as of a withered leaf wasted to a
 
 MONTAIGNE. 155 
 
 skeleton lace-leaf, gleams vague as those of forests 
 seen through mist. To know what really is or 
 has been, there is required an insight into the 
 thing, such as these writers possessed, but cannot 
 give. For it cannot be given, any more than a 
 living eye of retina and nerve can be given to a 
 head in the first construction of which it has been 
 omitted. The insight must be found or won 
 within : beaming, seeing from the heart, into the 
 heart it looks. Now this in Montaigne we find ; 
 and the reality and meaning of this he has exem- 
 plified better than almost any one. His book, he 
 tells us, is one about himself, and only about hini- 
 self. All else, anecdote, speculation, narrative, is 
 there only for this purpose. We have him before 
 us in all his relations to others, in all his occupa- 
 tions, all his moods, and all his outward actions. 
 What can be quoted of him gives as weak and 
 dwarfed a notion of him, as a handful of dried 
 leaves from an Indian forest can give of that 
 gorgeous and exuberant world of foliage. But 
 what else can we do? Thus we know (I. 1) that 
 he was compassionate, but (I. 2) not subject to 
 violent impulses of grief; that (I. 3), though of 
 licentious speech, he was in some respects of sen- 
 sitive modesty; and (I. 4) ready to trust, but too 
 proud to do it when it could be attributed to 
 despair and weakness, rather than to confidence 
 and faith in another. He tells us (I. 8), " AVlien 
 I lately retired to my own house, witli a resolu-
 
 156 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 tion to avoid all manner of concern in affairs as 
 much as possible, and to spend the small re- 
 mainder of my life in privacy and peace, I fancied 
 I could not give my mind more enjoyment than 
 to leave it at full liberty to entertain, rest, and 
 compose itself; which I also hoped that it might 
 do the more easily henceforvvards, as being by 
 time become more settled and improved. But 
 I find, Variam semper dant otia mentem: [Lucan, 
 iv. 704.] 
 
 Even in the most retired states 
 
 A thousand thoughts an idle life creates : 
 
 that, on the contrary, like a horse broke loose, 
 which runs away with greater speed than the 
 rider would put him to, it gives birth to so many 
 chimeras and fantastic monsters, one upon the 
 neck of another, without order and design, that, 
 for the sake of surveying the folly and absurdity 
 of them Avhen I list, I have begun to draw a 
 catalogue of them, hoping in time to make my 
 mind ashamed of itself." 
 
 He paints minutely (I. 9) his want of memory 
 and his perfect veracity, and (I. 10) the absence 
 of his mind, and its liability to quick movements 
 and spurts of thoughts, — (I. 12) his dislike to 
 ceremonies and love of politeness, — (I. 1 1 and I. 
 17) his disbelief in omens, presentiments, and 
 ghosts. Elsewhere (as I. 18, &c.) he is full of a 
 profound sense of the instability of all things 
 human, — and (I. 19) shows himself to us as not
 
 MONTAIGNE. 157 
 
 melancholy, yet ever thoughtful, and often medi- 
 tating on death. In another place he thinks it 
 worth mentioning (I. 35) that, although his coun- 
 trymen generally wore coloured clothes, he seldom 
 put on other than white or black, in imitation 
 of his father. He tells us (I. 55) that he used 
 perfumed gloves and handkerchiefs, — in another 
 place that his doublet too was perfumed, — and he 
 records (I. 56) that he constantly made the sign 
 of the cross even when he yawned. The few 
 following words have often been alluded to (II. 
 12): "When I play with my cat, who knows 
 whether puss is not more diverted with me, than 
 I am with puss? We divert each other recip- 
 rocally with monkey tricks." 
 
 We learn that he wore for his device a balance, 
 with the characteristic motto. Que sqay je. He 
 was vain of the order of St. Michael, which had 
 been bestowed on him, and even, as appears 
 from his travels, of his coat of arms, which he 
 left showily emblazoned at different places on his 
 road. He tells us (II. 25) that he always carried 
 a stick in walking. Elsewhere he says (II. 17) 
 that he was of low stature: "I am, as to the 
 rest, strong and well-knit : my face is not puffed, 
 but full; my complexion betwixt jovial and me- 
 lancholic, moderately sanguine and hot, Uiide rigent 
 setis mihi crura, et pectora villis : my health vigo- 
 rous and sprightly, even to a well-advanced age, 
 and rarely troubled with sickness. Such I was, I
 
 158 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 say; for I do not make any reckoning of myself, 
 now that I am engaged in the advances of old age, 
 being already past forty." 
 
 The man who writes so simply about such 
 matters, rises in other places to a height of feeling 
 almost lyrical, and to the noblest truth of thought, 
 as when he says (I. 36): "Our judgements are 
 sick, and conformable to the corruption of our 
 manners. I observe, most of the wits of these 
 times pretend to shine by obscuring the glory of 
 the brave and generous actions of former ages, 
 putting some vile construction upon them, and 
 foro-ino; vain causes and motives of them. A 
 mighty subtilty indeed I Show me the greatest 
 and most unblemished action in life; and I will 
 invent fifty bad ends to obscure it. God knows, 
 whose intentions will extend them out to the full, 
 what diversity of images our internal wills are 
 liable to: they do not so maliciously jjlay the 
 censurers, as they do it ignorantly and rudely 
 with their detraction. The same pains and li- 
 cense that others take to detract from these illus- 
 trious names, I would willingly take to lend them 
 a lift to raise them higher. As for these rare 
 figures that are culled out by the consent of the 
 wisest men for an example to the world, I should 
 not stick to honour them more, as far as my in- 
 vention would permit, by the circumstances of 
 favourable construction. And we are to believe 
 that the force of our invention is infinitely short
 
 MONTAIGNE. 159 
 
 of their merit. It is the duty of good men to 
 paint virtue as beautiful as possible; and there 
 would be no indecency in the case, should our 
 passions a little transport us in favour of such 
 sacred forms. What these people do to the con- 
 trary, they either do 'out of malice, or by the vice 
 of confining their belief to their own capacity as 
 aforesaid, or, which I am more inclined to think, 
 for not having their sight strong, clear and ele- 
 vated enough, to conceive the splendour of virtue 
 in her native purity." 
 
 He shows his insight into style in speaking 
 of a celebrated passage of Lucretius, (III. 5): 
 " Those good poets stood in need of no smart 
 subtle turn of phrase. Their language is copious, 
 and full of a natural and constant spirit. ' Tis 
 altogether epigrammatical; with a sting not only 
 in the tail, but in the head, stomach, and feet. 
 There is nothing forced in it, nothing drawling; 
 and it ever keeps the same pace without variation. 
 Contextus totus virilis est; non sunt circa Jlosculos 
 occupati. [Seneca. Epist. 33.] /. e. The whole 
 texture of it is manly, without the ornament of 
 flowers. 'Tis not an eloquence that is delicate 
 and inoffensive only: 'tis nervous and solid; and 
 does not please only, but actually engrosses and 
 captivates; and the finest understandings are the 
 most charmed with it. When I see those sublime 
 forms of expression so lively, so profound, I do 
 not say 'tis well uttered, but well conceived. 'Tis
 
 160 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the sprightliness of the iniagination that gives 
 pomp and sublimity to the language. Pectus est 
 quod dlsertinn facit. [Quint. 1. x.] i. e. Elo- 
 quence is owing to the frame of the mind. Our 
 people call language judgement, and fine words 
 full conceptions. This painting is not so much 
 owing to the dexterity of hand, as to the lively 
 
 impression of the object on the mind The 
 
 sense illuminates and produces the words, which 
 are no longer words of air, but of flesh and bone. 
 They signify more than they express. . . . The 
 wits set off a language by their way of handling 
 and managing it, not so much innovating it, as 
 by putting it to more vigorous and various ser- 
 vices, and straining and bending it to them. 
 They do not introduce new terms into it; but 
 they enrich those they have already, give them 
 more w^eight, spirit, and energy; and add new 
 turns, which are however authorized by the wise 
 and ingenious application which they are not at a 
 loss to make of them. This is the end which all 
 should have in view, who are ambitious of the 
 honour of writing well; and as for those who have 
 not genius to attain to it, they ought to think of 
 
 something else We do not easily discern 
 
 the energy of some of those words which I have 
 selected, because he common use of them has, in 
 some measure, impaired their beauty, and rendered 
 it vulgar; as is the case in our common talk, where- 
 in there are excellent phrases and metaphors, the
 
 MONTAIGNE. 161 
 
 beauty of which is faded by their being anti- 
 quated, and their lustre sullied by too common 
 handling. But this abates nothing of the relish 
 to men of understanding; neither does it derogate 
 from the glory of those ancient authors, who, 'tis 
 likely, first brought those words into that lustre." 
 There are perhaps few better specimens at once 
 of his manner and his sagacity than the following 
 passage (III. 11): "I have seen the birth of 
 many miracles of my time, which, although they 
 were still-born, yet have we not failed to fore- 
 see what they would have come to had they lived. 
 It is but finding the end of the clue, and a man 
 may wind off as much as he will; and there is a 
 greater distance betwixt nothing and the minutest 
 thing in the world, than there is betwixt that 
 and the greatest. Now the first that are tinc- 
 tured with this beginning of novelty, when they 
 set out their history, find, by the opposition they 
 meet with, where the difficulty of persuasion lies, 
 and caulk that place with some false piece. Be- 
 sides that Insita hominibus libidine alendi de in- 
 dustria rumores, men having a natural lust to 
 propagate reports, we naturally make a conscience 
 of restoring what has been lent us, without some 
 usury and addition of our own invention. Private 
 error first creates public error; and afterwards in 
 turn public error causes a particular one: thus 
 all this fabric rises by patch-work from hand to 
 hand, so that the remotest witness knows more
 
 162 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 than those that are nearest; and the last informed 
 is more certain than the first. 'Tis a natural 
 progress: for whoever believes anything thinks 
 it a work of charity to persuade another into the 
 same opinion. Which the better to do, he will 
 make no difficulty of adding as much of his own 
 invention as he conceives necessary to obviate 
 the resistance or want of conception he supposes 
 in others. I myself, who make a particular con- 
 science of lying, and am not very solicitous of 
 gaining credit and authority to Avhat I say, do 
 yet find, that in the arguments I have in hand, 
 being warmed with the opposition of another, or 
 by the proper heat of my own narration, I swell 
 and puiF up my subject by voice, motion, vigour, 
 and force of words, and moreover by extension 
 and amplification, not without prejudice to the 
 naked truth: but I do it on condition neverthe- 
 less, that to the first who brings me to recollec- 
 tion, and who asks me the plain and real truth, 
 I presently surrender, and deliver it to him with- 
 out exaggeration, without emphasis or interlarding 
 of my own. A quick and earnest way of speaking 
 as mine is, is apt to run into hyperbole. There 
 is nothing to which men commonly are more 
 inclined, than to give way to their own opinions. 
 Where the ordinary means fail us, we add com- 
 mand and force, fire and sword. 'Tis a mis- 
 fortune to be at that pass, that the best touch- 
 stone of the truth nmst be the multitude of
 
 MONTAIGNE. 1 G3 
 
 believers. In a crowd where the number of fouls 
 so much exceeds the wise. Quasi vero quidquam 
 sit tarn valde, quam nihil sapere, vidgare. Sanitatis 
 patrocinium est insanientium turha. [Cicero de 
 Div. lib. ii., c. 39. Item Aug. de Civit. Dei. 1. 
 vi., c. 10.] L e. As if anything were so common 
 as ignorance. The mob of fools is a protection 
 to the wise. 'Tis hard for a man to form liis 
 judgement against the common opinions. The 
 first persuasion taken of the very subject itself 
 possesses the simple; and from that it spreads to 
 the wise, by the authority of the number and tlie 
 antiquity of the witnesses. For my part, what 
 I should not believe from one, I should not 
 believe from a hundred; and I do not judge of 
 
 opinions by the years To this very hour 
 
 all these miracles and strange events have con- 
 cealed themselves from me ; T have never seen 
 a more evident monster or miracle in the world 
 than myself: a man grows familiar with all 
 strange things by time and custom; but the 
 more I visit, and the better I know myself, the 
 more does my own deformity astonish me, and the 
 less I understand of myself." And afterwards 
 (III. 13) much to the same eiFect: " In my opi- 
 nion, of the most ordinary, common, and known 
 tilings, could we but penetrate them, the greatest 
 miracles of nature might be formed, and the most 
 wonderful examples, especially upon the subject 
 of human actions."
 
 164 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 There are few thoughts in systematic thinkers, 
 that go deeper than the following remark of 
 Montaigne, which is the more striking as found 
 in one so immethodical, and so averse from com- 
 plete schemes of theory (III. 1): "Our structure 
 both external and internal, is full of imperfection: 
 yet there is nothing in nature but what is of use, 
 not even inutility itself. There is nothing in this 
 universe, which has not some proper place in it. 
 Our being is cemented with certain scurvy qua- 
 lities: ambition, jealousy, envy, revenge, super- 
 stition, despair, have so natural a lodgement in us, 
 that the image of them is discerned in the brute 
 beasts: nay cruelty itself, a vice so much out of 
 nature; for even in the midst of compassion we 
 feel within us an luiaccountable bitter-sweet titil- 
 lation of ill-natured pleasure in seeing another 
 suflfer; and even children are sensible of it. 
 'Suave mari magno tiirbantibus cequora vetitis, 
 E terra magnum alterius spectare laborem.^ 
 * 'Tis sweet from land to see a storm at sea, 
 And others sinking whilst ourselves are free.' 
 Whoever should divest man of the seeds of such 
 qualities would destroy the fundamental conditions 
 of human life." 
 
 These extracts may be fitly concluded with the 
 following true as well as characteristic aphorism, 
 (III. 2): "'Tis all one; all moral philosophy is 
 as applicable to a vulgar and private life as to the 
 most splendid. Every man carries the entire 
 form of the human condition."
 
 MONTAIGNE. 165 
 
 Such, in some faint traits and fragments, taken 
 directly from himself, is a rude shadow of Mon- 
 taigne. He was unquestionably a large-minded, 
 clear, and healthy man. For almost every kind 
 of human existence he had sympathy and love, 
 and understood much of its scheme and tendencies, 
 keeping himself unshaken and distinct in the midst 
 of it. That was a rare intelligence and kindliness 
 of heart, which in his age could make a man an- 
 ticipate so much of the practical wisdom of later 
 times, — reprobating torture, and all cruel modes 
 of capital punishment, — lamenting loudly the 
 treatment of savage nations by Europeans, — 
 seeing through all the pretexts for courtly pro- 
 fusion, and condemning it, although himself a 
 courtier and holding a place, as mere reckless 
 cruelty to the people. He also utterly disbelieved 
 the whole train of magical wonders, ghosts, ma- 
 terial visions, witchcraft, and such other blun- 
 dering modes of representing the supernatural 
 by distorting and interrupting nature. This view 
 of him, on the unquestionable evidence of his 
 own writings, which on these points are most 
 uniformly consistent, seems to fall in with all the 
 other evidence which his whole works and life, 
 and his own open-hearted statements, furnish of 
 his remarkable and unvarying honesty. For he 
 who admits falsehood into the inner chambers 
 of the heart, and among his household gods, 
 can seldom fail to have some lurking fancy
 
 166 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 of a fundamental ground of disorder and con- 
 fusion as the basis of the universe, and hence 
 almost inevitably believes in the fashionable delu- 
 sions of his day, whatever they may be. Vain 
 dream of quacks and of their dupes, that a man, 
 by being a quack, loses all belief in quackery! 
 Knowing that his own pretences are false, he has 
 the more credulity to spare for those of others. 
 He who passes false coin is the more, not the 
 less likely to be taken in by sham jewels offered 
 cheap, or by any other temptation suitable to his 
 greediness and his self-complacent cunning. All 
 swindlers are in truth, by the nature of the case, 
 members of a joint-stock company for mutual 
 deception. Moreover this thorough honesty of 
 Montaigne is hardly separable from clear sagacity, 
 combined with genuine sympathy such as his. 
 The mirror of the true mind faithfully represented 
 the true realities presented to it; for it was nei- 
 ther muffled up by a veil of selfishness, nor 
 cracked by passion, nor painted over with a 
 tawdiy coat of ostentatious conceits and follies. 
 Wherever no one of these things happens, and 
 the mind is vividly awake and active, there will 
 be accurate and stcdfast knowledge of all that 
 lies nearest to the man, and most concerns his 
 work on earth. And this attainment we find 
 characteristically marked and certain in INIon- 
 taigne, whose judgements on public affairs, on 
 education, on diversities of character, and on
 
 MONTAIGNE. 1G7 
 
 literature, are always instructive or suggestive, 
 however imperfect. 
 
 Doubtless no allegations of wisdom on some 
 points can meet the charges against Montaigne 
 of frequent inconsistencies and of fundamental 
 scepticism. The occasional self-contradiction, in 
 a man who writes so much from the fancy of 
 the moment, is not wonderful. But even of this 
 there is less than might be supposed. Indeed, 
 if the man or his book were a mere bundle of 
 unconnected livelinesses and sparkles of thought, 
 either would be nearly as worthless as the dullest 
 heap of trivialities. A man without character, 
 and a type of thought of his own, may appear to 
 be many things, but in reality is little more than 
 nothing. Bnt a oneness with many sides to it, 
 and capable of quick revolution and transforma- 
 tion, is a more vital and productive thing, than 
 the stagnant and staring singleness of aims and 
 habits, which the meanest minds can understand 
 and measure. 
 
 Of his scepticism something more must be said. 
 That Montaigne was a sceptic, in the sense of 
 finding all the theories he knew of, which profess 
 to systematize the whole of human life, scanty and 
 frail, there can be no doubt. That he was wrong 
 in this decision, no man of strong and cultivated 
 speculative powers will now maintain. But his 
 error seems to be, that he had no faith in the 
 reasonableness of the attempt. The philosophy
 
 168 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 known in his time was ill calculated to convert 
 him. That of antiquity was very imperfectly 
 understood, and had been produced under obsolete 
 circumstances and conditions, and could no longer 
 answer the demands of later experience. It 
 must also be said that he had never passed 
 through any really methodical course of philo- 
 sophical inquiry, nor undergone any accurate 
 scientific discipline. The current religious opi- 
 nions, which he by no means opposed, might 
 have seemed likely to bring him in contact with 
 a large scheme of speculative theology, con- 
 structed chiefly by the schoolmen. But this 
 system of doctrine, wdiether Romanist or Pro- 
 testant, was little fitted to meet the wishes of a 
 mind like his; for, under the name and sacred 
 attributes of Revelation, it admitted a cumbrous 
 element of what was purely arbitrary and capri- 
 cious. And attempting to combine this with the 
 facts of life, and the principles of mere intel- 
 ligence, it produced a discordant compound, ob- 
 viously unstable and inadequate. The truth is, 
 that any philosophical scheme of the w^orld known 
 to him, perhaps any conceivable one, must neces- 
 sarily have seemed as idle and vain, as would the 
 tissue of cobwebs on the vaults and pillars of some 
 noble building, if oflfered as a sufficient diagram 
 and explanation of the principles of its construc- 
 tion. 
 
 The chief document on the subject of his philo-
 
 MONTAIGNE. 169 
 
 sophical opinions, or rather of his opinions about 
 philosophy, is the celebrated Aj)olo(jy for Raymond 
 de Sebonde (Essays II. 12). This writer had 
 taken the sum of the current opinions of the day, 
 and had attempted to justify them by arguments 
 of mere speculation from the premises of human 
 experience. A perilous and fantastic attempt, in 
 which it would have been well had he considered 
 that nothing can be understood and maintained, 
 except in reference to the causes and conditions 
 by which it has arisen ; that therefore, as the 
 religious creed of his day had been partly the 
 product of a tradition grounded in foreign and 
 ancient modes of thought and feeling, partly of 
 the metaphysical science of intermediate times, 
 partly of accident and caprice, it would have 
 been a miracle far greater than any of those 
 which he vindicated, had it been found, as he 
 asserted, in strict correspondence with the prin- 
 ciples of universal reason, and the demands of 
 human nature through the whole series of ages. 
 It would have been well had he known that the 
 existence of an absolute and eternal element in 
 the vague and shifting mass of the common be- 
 liefs, — which is all that religion requires, all that 
 philosophy can grant, — is only to be defended by 
 the admission, or rather the declaration, that 
 there is also in it a vesture liable to decay, and 
 a body doomed to death. It is also unfortunate 
 for Raymond not to have so clearly read himself, 
 VOL. I. I
 
 170 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 as to see that the task he had undertaken was 
 one giving room and occasion beyond all others 
 for the exercise of lawless ingenuity, and the 
 mad attempt to harness and guide assumptions 
 and sophisms in the path of Truth, which admits 
 of no such service. The work of any man in 
 any age, who attempts such an enterprise, must 
 needs resemble a mirage landscape of Egypt, in- 
 terspersed among, and partly reflecting, partly 
 obscuring, granite temples and marble gods, but 
 itself an airy, fleeting vision. Eeason may well, 
 as in mathematical science^ give, after the lapse 
 of centuries, a final decision in favour of its own 
 slow results, — or attain at last an insight into the 
 laws and being of great facts, such as the system 
 of the stars, or the moral and physical structure 
 of man : but that it should conclusively and for 
 ever be able to ratify a huge medley of feelings, 
 speculations, and legends, such as was called in 
 the middle ages the orthodox faith, and render 
 these imperative through eternity, — tliis can be 
 credited only by a mind weakened and heated 
 by the lust for wonder, or lost for the time in 
 the labyrinth of its own subtilty, or, in distrust 
 of reason, leaning terror-stricken on any most 
 hopeless substitute for it. 
 
 The argument of Montaigne however is for 
 the most part independent of the peculiar line 
 of reasoning adopted by De Sebonde. For the 
 main purport of his Essay is not so much to
 
 MONTAIGNE. l7l 
 
 justify the topics of his author, as to maintain 
 that, however unsatisfactory these may be, human 
 thought, without admitting the idea of a positive 
 and outward revelation, can form no more en- 
 during scheme. The whole matter Indeed Is 
 probably handled only for the purpose of accu- 
 mulating objections to the theories of all the 
 philosophical schools which Montaigne knew of. 
 In this, though always lively and striking, he 
 is comparatively unsuccessful, partly from igno- 
 rance of the doctrines he refers to, which he has 
 caught at chiefly in fragments, and by way of 
 anecdote, but still more from the want of genuine 
 philosophical capacity. This may perhaps be 
 generalized under the larger term of Reason in 
 its highest being, — of the power which beholds 
 and converses with supersensual and universal 
 realities. These, apprehended by the intellect, 
 are philosophic truths, or first principles, — em- 
 braced, reverenced, and obeyed by the will, are 
 laws of duty, — relied on and worshipped by the 
 heart, are objects of religion, — and embodied in 
 beautiful symbols, are the deified forms of the 
 imagination, and haunt and spiritualize the liigh- 
 est poetry. Now this manifold but one power, 
 which is nothing less or other than the spirit or 
 life of man in its loftiest energy, Montaigne did 
 not in any ample degree possess. Had it existed 
 more fully in him, though he might have rejected 
 as insufficient all actual philosophies, yet, sup- 
 
 I 2
 
 172 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 posing him to have remained the same in type 
 of character, and to have made reflection, — as he 
 did make it, — his chief business, he would inevit- 
 ably have believed in and prophesied a future 
 and more perfect philosophy, even if he had not 
 been able to create it. 
 
 The proof that he was not remai'kably under 
 the guidance of this Daimon or Genius may per- 
 haps be strengthened, for those who need such 
 evidences, by the fact that, in the midst of much 
 light and jjlayful writing, of many comic stories 
 and abundant wit, he displays no trace of humour, 
 such as glorifies the much dulness and almost trans- 
 mutes the filth of Rabelais. It is the characteristic 
 office of humour to exhibit earnest feelino;s and 
 deep thoughts in grotesque, often in extravagant 
 and monstrous forms, such as outwardly con- 
 trast the most with that of which they are the 
 vehicle, and by the sense of this o})position 
 heighten and sharpen the effect of that which 
 moves and lives within. It is not in any emi- 
 nent degree a French faculty; and the greatest 
 comic writers of France since Rabelais, to wit, 
 Moliere and Voltaire, both of whom in their 
 shrewd and cunning sarcasm Montaigne some- 
 what resembles, hardly exhibit a trace of it. 
 
 But with this deficiency in Montaigne, and 
 with the fact that in him, as in all, the negative 
 side of the mind is the weak and ungenial one, 
 it is unfair to say that there was either an entire
 
 MONTAIGNE. 173 
 
 denial of the possibility of speculative truth for 
 man, or indiiference to those who sought it. Of 
 all authors his favourite is Plutarch, the zealous 
 guardian of the trophies of the men of old, and 
 burner of incense at the tombs of heroes and of 
 sages, in whom the conviction of the triumphant 
 efficacy of thought had the warmth of a passion 
 as well as the clearness of an idea. Of all men 
 the one whom he seems most thoroughly to have 
 revered and loved is the saint, prophet, and mar- 
 tyr of Pagan wisdom, Socrates. It may indeed 
 be doubted how much he steadily understood of 
 the greatness of the best Athenian. But it is 
 very remarkable that with such entire sincerity 
 and fervour he selected him for his full admira- 
 tion and love. For Montaigne lived in an age 
 when pompous dogmas and empty speculations 
 were mingled Avitli a strong and fiery, but indis- 
 tinct element of pure religious faith; when morals 
 were to a great extent sunk in gross indulgence, 
 corrected by harsh and glaring dashes of monkish 
 severity; and when many men were practically 
 and most memorably great, with little or no com- 
 prehension of the real value and tendency of their 
 own lives. In this glittering and smoky tumult, 
 the Gascon did not pretend to offer any remedy 
 for the evils of the time, or to be able to harmo- 
 nize the piercing tones and thunders of its dis- 
 cords. He lived an off-hand life, and painted it 
 with sudden and shiftino; colours. Yet that a
 
 174 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 deeper sense was hidden in him of a truth and 
 adamantine system, at the base of the world's 
 confusions, and of his own levities, seems proved, 
 not only by the impression of his works as a 
 whole, but by his reverential admiration for the 
 great master of Grecian thought. Socrates too 
 lived in a time when many minds were sick, 
 struggling, and half delirious, when the simple 
 dignity of earlier days was no longer possible, 
 when men had begun to think of themselves and 
 their own nature, and sophists were teaching 
 the comfortable lesson that all things are mere 
 concrete falsehood, and that to live by lies, and 
 think for gain and glory, was the noblest work 
 of man. In an earlier time Socrates would pro- 
 bably have been contented to be the Solon or 
 the Aristides of his country, — a character in 
 which some of his noblest endowments could not 
 have been developed, and his intuition into the 
 deepest heart of things would have slumbered ; a 
 character also of homely, unspeculative superi- 
 ority, which could not have made him what he 
 was, the greatest fact in an age of refinements 
 and dialectics. But the diseases of thought could 
 only be cured by purer and mightier thought: 
 and it was the task of Socrates to do this, not 
 merely for his own, but for all time. Moreover, 
 in setting forth by word and deed the reality 
 of truth and heroic goodness, against the mere 
 gi'eedy appetite for pleasure, to which the
 
 MONTAIGNE. 175 
 
 sophists made their cleverness subservient, he 
 exhibited the freshest, liveliest, least affected 
 image of a reasonable, generous man that ever 
 brightened the Pagan world. Stedfast and com- 
 plete was he as this round earth, abundant and 
 living as the summer. The perennial glow and 
 upward strivings of innumerable hearts down to 
 this hour, — the faith in the certainty of reason, — 
 the knowledge that we do not live in a heap of 
 disorders, but in a world of intelligence and good, 
 — these we owe in a higher degree to him, than 
 to any native of this western continent. It would 
 be hard to estimate how much of the best wisdom 
 and the warmest hopes that inspire the souls of 
 all men, are owing to the poor murdered Athe- 
 nian, whose life was a long assertion of conscience 
 against quackery, and his death its triumph over 
 the folly of the men whom he so faithfully served 
 and loved. The silent tear in the secret chamber, 
 — the calm resolution of meditative sympathy to 
 go and do likewise, — the purpose in other hearts to 
 live like him for duty, and not for profit or praise, 
 — these are his right and imperishable honours. 
 But honour be also in his smaller measure to 
 the sUght capricious Frenchman, who, among 
 fierce sects and the breaking forth of the great 
 deeps of opinion and of denial, — in the midst of 
 his own follies and inconsistencies, and with no 
 distinct or firm view of that scheme of the super- 
 sensual in the centre of which he fretted and
 
 176 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 indulged himself, — yet had honesty and warmth 
 of soul to see in Socrates a victorious witness 
 for the grandeur and lastingness of truth*. 
 
 Socrates was put to death on a charge of irre- 
 ligion ; and many words have been expended, 
 perhaps a few wasted, on the question, whether 
 his French eulogist is or is not liable to the same 
 accusation. Did Montaigne believe Christianity ? 
 A compendious question, which would be clear 
 enough to admit of an answer, if we only knew 
 what is meant by belief, and what by Chris- 
 tianity. Sad is the condition of a talker in 
 drawing-rooms, very sad that of a writer of dis- 
 sertations, who attempts to answer a question 
 before he knows the meaning of it. Man in 
 such a case, though the highest of earthly beings, 
 is a sight painful to mortal eyes, and Avhich might 
 almost draw the softest tears from behind the 
 hardest of spectacles. In the answers that have 
 been given to the categorical demand touching 
 the faith of Montaigne, something of this dark- 
 ness is perhaps discernible. But it may safely 
 be affirmed, that, if by unbelief be meant the 
 opinion that Christianity is, like the Art of Cag- 
 liostro or the Narrative of Psalmanazar, a jmre 
 fiction, a conscious work of some one's fancy, and 
 that it no more concerns us than judicial astro- 
 logy or the oracles of Augurs, which seems to 
 
 See the Essays passim, but esiiccially III. 12.
 
 MONTAIGNE. 177 
 
 have been the pithy doctrine of Hume and Vol- 
 taire, then doubtless in this Avay, and to this; 
 extent, Montaigne was not an unbeliever. If on 
 the other hand belief is the acknowledgement that 
 a certain set of propositions have been committed 
 by irresistible power to the keeping of a certain 
 caste of men, on the acquiescence in which state- 
 ments, and the submission to which men, our 
 eternal weal or woe is made dependent, — with 
 the proviso that the doctrines themselves and the 
 commission of the teachers are not to be scruti- 
 nized at all, or to be in any way connected with 
 the results of our experience or the principles of 
 our reason, — then, in this sense, Montaigne be- 
 lieved. Nay, in the bewilderment of his mis- 
 understanding at the immensity and seeming 
 contradictions of the universe, perhaps he even 
 hoped that one day or other the puzzle of exist- 
 ence would find its solution in the accompanying 
 puzzle of Revelation. But if Christianity be 
 regarded, not as an arbitrary puzzle, but as a 
 necessary mystery, that is, a truth dark to the 
 careless and unprepared eye, but luminous and 
 the light of all things to the spirit purified by 
 love of God, and by entire self-sacrifice, — as a 
 truth founded in the nature of man, claimed by 
 his noblest wants, manifested by the full harmony 
 of all his powers, and by their triumph over in- 
 ward and outward disturbances and desolations, 
 completely realized in the Saviour, and attainable 
 
 I 3
 
 178 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 for all by the heartfelt recognition of it in him, — 
 this is a Christianity of which Montaigne had not 
 only no belief, but no conception. Again, if 
 faith be not a blind and desperate clutching to 
 an unknown somewhat, like the drowning man's 
 grasp at any object near liim, though it be the 
 shark's jaw, or the dagger of the sword-fish, — if 
 it be anything more and better than a voluntary 
 relinquishing of all voluntary action under the 
 name of obedience, — if it be the affectionate and 
 loyal adherence of the heart to the truths of 
 reason, which the passions and selfishness tempt 
 us to deny, — then it is a power of which Mon- 
 taigne had experienced but little, and whicli he 
 did not at all understand. All that we find in 
 him of Christianity would be suitable to apes 
 and dogs, rather than to rational and moral 
 beings. 
 
 It is however to be desired that he should be 
 treated with justice, if not for his sake, yet for 
 ours. He was not, in any high, pure sense, a 
 religious man; but he was honest, clear-sighted, 
 and affectionate. Nothing human was for him 
 without a meaning and a value ; and he cherished, 
 in the midst of his vanities and inconsistencies, 
 a cheerful conviction that goodness and wisdom 
 do some how or other preside over this black and 
 cloudy web of things. He walked indeed in a 
 circle of darkness, within which his little world 
 of life and light burnt like a lantern: but, as he
 
 MONTAIGNE. 179 
 
 moved along, the darkness kindled round him, 
 and showed itself to be but a dormant light. For 
 human existence was to liim itself a lucid thing, 
 often broken indeed, and wavering, but still 
 bright and radiant. To him it Avas joy and hope 
 to live our common life; and the healthy fresh- 
 ness and vigour of all his emotions and percep- 
 tions required no aid of creative imagination or 
 brooding reflection to give them worth and 
 beauty. For him the earth, which had swal- 
 lowed so many generations, and suffered so many 
 wounds, was green and prosperous. The sky, 
 battered and pierced by so many mad wishes, 
 fruitless prayers, and airy pinnacles of visions 
 which had passed away, bent smoothly and 
 securely over him, and smiled with crystalline 
 azure. To be alive, and man, — to see, to feel, 
 to walk, to think, to read Plutarch, or hunt 
 over the plains of Perigord, filled him with the 
 buoyancy of childhood. The human faces of 
 ruined or plague-struck peasants, of the citizens 
 of Bordeaux, of the people of Paris, of the nobles 
 and dames of France, stamped as all were with 
 stories of folly and suffering, yet had also a 
 precious import as the countenances of men, and 
 won from him an eager sympathy. From this 
 fellow-feeling of brotherhood, the grey old earth, 
 with the infinity of space above, and the immea- 
 surable grave below, had for him beauty and 
 sweetness and elastic gladness. And liis brain,
 
 180 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 wondering and growing weary at the spectacle 
 of history, to him a long riddle, poised itself and 
 rested softly in the book-tower of his chateau, 
 with the memory of La Boetie, the presence of 
 the wise men of old, and the anticipated kindness 
 of his own and of all future times. Sceptic as 
 he was, the dark and ulcered scepticism of a later 
 age was unknown to him. The towered landscape 
 of Greece and Rome had been disclosed anew 
 before him and his generation. The expanse of 
 the future was bursting open with the clash and 
 storm-music of battles; and he knew not how 
 much or how little to expect from the change, 
 but felt that there was dew and bloom for him 
 upon the near and friendly soil on which he set 
 his foot. 
 
 Weak, no doubt, and dim and hazy must the 
 best image appear to us, that we can now recover 
 of a man who lived three hundred years ago. 
 The past exists indeed, imperishable, unchange- 
 able; but it seems to flit away from us into a gulf 
 of shadows: and we can hardly satisfy ourselves 
 that it ever has been the throbbing, bright-eyed 
 thing, that we call Now. But that Now, even 
 while we write it, stiffens to a mummy in the 
 memory, melts in the fancy to a spectre, and is 
 nowhere to be seen as Avhat it was. Thus, not 
 only the sunny statuary of Grecian life, the 
 clanging stride of Rome, the high-hearted fer- 
 ment of pride and gracefulness and faith in the
 
 MONTAIGNE. 181 
 
 middle ages, are worn away to ghostly emptiness; 
 but we too, and our full uneasy existence, are 
 slipping away from ourselves into the same vague 
 twilight. It is not only Montaigne, who pines 
 and decays into a name and an effigy; but those 
 who read of him, and he who writes. Obscure 
 as he hovers before us, shall we appear at a 
 coming age; and palpable and bold as we now 
 are, so once was he, and that departed world of 
 thought and feeling, in which he moved and en- 
 joyed, and at last vanished into dust and di'eams. 
 
 The fact of the outward material existence of 
 any one long gone by, — of his having been like 
 us a creature of flesh and blood, of heart and 
 brain, of days and moments, of birth and death, 
 and sorrow and endless hopes, — is sometimes more 
 distinctly brought home to us by the sight, or 
 even the report, of any definite fact or object 
 connected with him and still remaining. So is it 
 with the autograph of Shakspere in Florio's old 
 translation of Montaigne ; and so, still more stri- 
 kingly, with the house in which Montaigne dwelt, 
 and which he has described, and which still stands 
 as in his days, in an unfrequented nook in the 
 country of Perigord. It happens that there is an 
 unpublished narrative of a visit to the spot, by a 
 young man who was at one time supposed capable 
 of a future improvement in practical sense and 
 worldly respectability, such as he is far from 
 having realized. He has however, or at least
 
 182 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 had, a rude and awkward propensity for opening 
 his eyes and describing what he saw, the fruits 
 of which, on this particular Occasion, may here 
 be presented. The narrative will form a slovenly 
 kind of appendage to this ragged scarecrow image 
 of a notable man. 
 
 "Sept. 21, 18 — .— I left Bordeaux yesterday, with my 
 chivalrous and melancholy companion, for Libourne on the 
 Dordogne, and drove the whole way through a flat and 
 richly cultivated country with a good many trees. It was 
 dark when we reached the banks of the river, at seven in 
 the evening ; and we saw the water gleaming under us as 
 we drove over the bridge with the lights of the town in 
 front. We soon reached our hotel, called Des Princes, 
 where we slept. This morning we rose in good time, 
 breakfasted, and started at a few minutes after eight, in a 
 light caleche, for Castillon, which lies up the river, on the 
 same side as Libourne. The road is flat, and the river not 
 insight; but the country looks extremely rich and pros- 
 perous, with a profusion of scattered trees, and with some 
 pleasant rising grounds on the opposite side of the road to 
 that on which the Dordogne lies. The sun was shining 
 brightly, though with a good many clouds about the sky ; 
 and the air was peculiarly clear, so that every tree and 
 plant, and even the single vine-leaves, were beautifully 
 distinct and vivid. It was a pleasure to see the solid- 
 looking, white houses, with the sharp scalloped shadows 
 of the eaves. Every labourer's face under his broad straw 
 hat had a strong shadow thrown as far as the upper-lip. 
 Sometimes a withered bright red leaf on the summit of 
 a vine-spray, with the light glowing through it, looked 
 as brilliant as the rul)y glass of an old cathedral win- 
 dow. The vines themselves were of more picturesque 
 growth than about Bordeaux, rising to a much greater 
 height round pointed poles, and pushing out their young 
 boughs of pale green in bacchanal liberty. The black
 
 MONTAIGNE. 183 
 
 bunches were the largest and most massive I ever saw, 
 and seemed to promise the strength which is said to cha- 
 racterize the wines of tliis district, called from the little 
 town of St. Emilion, on the ridge to the north of the river. 
 There was generally a sparkling crispness about the views, 
 a softness in the air, and over the country an appearance 
 of ease and substantial wealth, which were very animating. 
 Castillon, four or five leagues from Libourne, is a much 
 smaller town, with some remains of antiquity in its ap- 
 pearance. Close to it was fought the battle which deprived 
 the English of Guyenne, and in which the two Talbots 
 fell. Here we exchanged our caleche for a small charabanc 
 with one horse, which took us to Montaigne St. Michel, 
 along a detestable road, mostly somewhat ascending. We 
 found the higher ground to be a wide, broken plain, out of 
 sight of the Dordogne, and studded with small stone wind- 
 mills, each carrying a conical roof. 
 
 " The first memorial of the days of Montaigne which we 
 discovered, was the parish church, a very old building. 
 There is a massive square tower covered by a slightly 
 pointed roof, and having two large openings near its sum- 
 mit in each side, which look like windows, but are with- 
 out shafts, and seem to distinguish a good deal of the 
 church architecture of the neighbourhood. There is a 
 round apsis beyond the tower at the east end, with only 
 two small loophole windows ; and at the west end is raised 
 a small curiously complicated wooden superstructure, de- 
 signed to contain the bell of a large clock, to which access 
 is obtained by a rude external wooden gallery, painted red, 
 and stretching all the length of the body of the church, 
 close under the eaves. From this building runs a straight 
 road, perhaps a quarter of a mile long, to the chateau. 
 
 *' The part of Montaigne's house which we first reached 
 was the tower described by him in his Essay On the Three 
 Commerces (III, 3.), as containing his library and study. 
 It is a plain, round structure, at the south-eastern comer 
 of the chateau ; a dead wall runs from it on each side, at 
 right angles, and rises to about half its height. This is 
 in reality the exterior of ranges of outbuildings, which form
 
 184 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 two sides of the court-yard. In this wall, close to the 
 tower, and facing us as we approached, was a small gate, 
 through which we found entrance. The chateau itself 
 was now on our left, running along the western side of the 
 quadrangle. It is a high huilding of grey stone, evidently 
 very ancient, and probahly untouched, except for repairs, 
 since the days of Montaigne's father. There are a consi- 
 derable number of windows scattered very irregularly over 
 the front. Near the middle at each side of the small un- 
 ornaniented entrance are two large and high towers of 
 unlike architecture; the one with deep machicolations, the 
 other without them, and both with conical roofs. If 
 erected, as I presume, by Montaigne's father, the building 
 must be about three hundred years old: the whole place 
 has now an air of sluttish neglect, though not at all of 
 decay. It is now inhabited by an old gentleman, formerly 
 a military man, whose civility we should ill repay by re- 
 cording any idle accounts of his simple establishment and 
 very agreeable conversation. The house is only one room 
 deep ; and behind it nins along and broad terrace, covered 
 v,'ith grass, and with some trees growing upon it, among 
 others a large horse-chesuut. It is bordered by a stone 
 balustrade, which rises on the edge of a steep, wooded 
 bank, and has beyond it a very extensive prospect over a 
 flat country, with slight eminences on the horizon, marked 
 towards the north by the village and chateau of Mont 
 Pe3'roux, which in IMontaigne's day was a sort of depen- 
 dence on his seigneurie, and belonged to his .younger 
 brother. Near it, and still higher against the sky, are 
 the ruins of the chateau of Gurson, destroyed in the Re- 
 volution, and which seems to have been a castle in our 
 English sense of the word, that is, a feudal abode con- 
 structed for defence. It was probably the residence of 
 the lady to whom Montaigne addresses his Essay on 
 Education (I. 25). The whole prospect is woody and 
 cultivated, but without water, or any very remarkable 
 outlines, open, airy, quiet, and sufficiently prosperous. 
 The old gentleman told us that he was possessed of eleven 
 metairies or farms with the chateau, but that Montaigne
 
 MONTAIGNE. 185 
 
 had held eighteen. The property had come by marriage 
 to the Segur family, who liad taken the name of Segur de 
 Montaigne. They sold the estate to the present owner, 
 who in turn was ready to dispose of it, if he could find a 
 purchaser. 
 
 "After taking leave of our host we returned to the 
 corner tower, which we examined throughout, and were 
 much interested by tlie minute agreement of its present 
 state with everything recorded in Montaigne's description. 
 This too was evidently not a modern and factitious cor- 
 respondence, but secured by the abstinence of the successive 
 owners from any changes, liowever slight. The ground 
 floor retains the appearance of having once been a small 
 chapel, though now dark and dilapidated. The first floor, 
 which was the sleeping-apartment of the Gascon philo- 
 sophei-, does not look as if it had been applied since his 
 day to any other purpose. The third and last story is that 
 so particularly described by its occupant, as having con- 
 tained his library and study. These are his words (III. 8) : 
 ' When I am at home I the oftener visit my library, 
 from which I at once survey all the operations of my 
 family. 'Tis over the entrance into my house, from whence 
 I have a view under me of my court-yards and garden, 
 and of most of the offices of my house. There I turn over 
 one book, then another, on various subjects, witliout order, 
 and without design. One while I i-uminate ; another while 
 1 copy and dictate, as I walk to and fro, such whimsies 
 as these in my Essays. 'Tis in the tliird story of a 
 tower, of which the first is my chapel, the second a 
 chamber and its closets, where I often lie to be retired ; 
 above it is a great wardrobe. This was formerly the most 
 useless part of my house. I there pass away the most of tlae 
 days of my life, and most of the hours in the day, but am 
 never there at night. At the end of it there is a very neat 
 closet, with pleasant window-liglits, and a fire-place. And 
 was I not more afraid of the troul)le than of the expense, 
 — the trouble which drives me from all application to 
 business,— I could easily join to it on each side, and on 
 the same floor, a gallery of 100 paces in length, and 12 in
 
 186 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 breadth ; there being walls already raised, though for 
 another design, to the height that is requisite. Every 
 retired place should have a walk in it ; for if I sit still, 
 my thoughts sleep; my fancy does not operate so well, as 
 when 'tis put in motion by that of my legs. They who study 
 without a book are all in the same condition. The form 
 of my study is round, and has no more straight than what 
 is taken up by my table and chair, so that the curve presents 
 me with a view of all my books, in five rows of shelves, 
 quite round me. It has three noble and free prospects, and 
 is 16 paces in the diameter. I am not so continually there 
 in the winter ; for my house is perched upon an eminence, 
 as its name imports; and this part of it is most exposed to 
 the wind, which pleases me the better, for not being so 
 easy of access, and a little remote, as well for the benefit of 
 exercise as for being more retired. 'Tis there that I am in 
 my kingdom, as we say ; and there I endeavour to render 
 myself sole monarch, and to sequester this corner from all 
 society, — conjugal, filial, and civil.' 
 
 " This passage would answer in most respects as a de- 
 scription of the spot at this hour, though he who wrote it 
 has been dead two hundred and fifty years. The room 
 still overlooks the entrance of the chateau, and, from three 
 windows in different sides of the circuit, commands the 
 garden, the court, the house, and the outhouses. The 
 books indeed are gone ; but the many small rafters of the 
 roof are inscribed on their lower faces with mottoes and 
 pithy sentences, which recall, as by a living voice, the 
 favourite studies and thoughts of Montaigne. Such are 
 these few hastily transcribed in a note-book. ' 1 . Solum 
 certum nihil esse certi; et homine nihil miserius aut superbius. 
 2. AWoictiv SXKov 6eu)V re Kavdpcondiv /leXet. 3. Tapacrcrei 
 Toiis dvdpanrovs ov ra ypdfLfj.aTa, dWd ra nepl ratv ypapniarav 
 doyfiara. 4. Quid superbis, terra et cinis! Eccl. x. 6. 
 Vae qui sapientes estis in oculis vestris. Eccl. v. 6. Favere 
 jucunde praesentibus. Caetera extra te. 7. HavTi Xoya Xoyos 
 tcTos uvrUeiTai. 8. Nostra vagatur in tenebris, nee caeca 
 potest mens cernere verum. 9. Fecit Deus hominem similem 
 umbrae post soils occasum. Eccl. vii.'
 
 MONTAIGNE. 187 
 
 "The chapel still shows the recess, where stood the 
 altar ; and there are the remains of colours and gilding 
 on the defaced coats of arms around the walls. The bed- 
 room floor presents nothing remarkable ; but that above, 
 in which are the inscriptions on its rafters, preserves the 
 exact form described by its ancient occupant. The paces 
 of Montaigne must have been of about a foot and a half ; 
 for the diameter of the tower inside is about twenty-four 
 feet. The circle is at one part cut by two straight walls, 
 joining in an angle, being the portion wliich he spealis of 
 as adapted for his seat and table. The three windows, 
 affording a rich and free prospect, are still unchanged. 
 There is a sort of closet opening off the room, with the 
 traces of painted ornaments on tlie wall, a fire-place, as he 
 mentions, at one end, and a window, which entitles it to 
 be spoken of as tres plaisamment pcrce, - having a pleasant 
 window-light,— and which, though directly overlooking 
 the court-yard, furnishes a view, above the northern line 
 of offices, towards Mont Peyroux and Gurson. 
 
 " The whole appearance and position of tliis apartment 
 seem especially characteristic of Montaigne. The cheerful- 
 ness, the airiness, the quiet, the constant though somewhat 
 remote view of natural objects, and of the far-spread and 
 busy occupations of men, — all are suitable to him. The 
 ornamenting the joists of his chamber-roof with several 
 scores of moral sentences was the work of a speculative 
 idler ; and their purport is always, so far as I saw, suitable 
 to his sceptical but humane and indulgent temper. The 
 neglect of all elegance and modern convenience in the 
 house, together with its perfect preservation from decay, 
 add to the interest, and seem to prove that it is maintained 
 in its old completeness and bareness, not from any notion 
 of use, but out of respect for the memory of its celebrated 
 owner."
 
 SiMONiDis Cei Carminlm Reliquiae. Ediuit 
 
 Dr. F. G. SCHXEIDEWIN. 
 
 (From the London and Westminster Review /o?' 1888. J 
 
 'T'HIS is a very careful and intelligent edition of 
 the remains of one of the greatest Grecian 
 poets, of whom however unhappily little more 
 than couplets, quatrains, and fragments are now 
 extant. He composed long lyric poems ; but no 
 one of these now exists entire ; nor have we more 
 than twenty-five continuous lines of his composi- 
 tion, and only in two instances nearly so many. 
 Of distichs however, and short inscriptions, a 
 considerable number are preserved. The fate of 
 his works thus is much as if a sculptor had 
 wrought both statues and gems, and many of the 
 more minute performances remained uninjured, 
 while of the larger none were found vmmutilated, 
 and of most only the names survived. The relies 
 might still be of high value, and, when compared 
 with the notices and criticisms of ancient writers, 
 might suffice as materials for a full and distinct 
 conception of the artist's peculiar genius, ten- 
 dencies, and achievements. And so it is with the 
 poet ; of whom we may obtain from the existing 
 memorials a sharper and livelier image, than we 
 have of many men whose reputations have been 
 blown abroad by louder trumpets. The portrait 
 thus obtained exhibits a combination of delicacy
 
 SIMONIDES. 189 
 
 and earnestness, together Avith a marked expressive 
 individuality, which, if it could be adequately con- 
 veyed, must needs interest reflective readers, and 
 has at all events much to stir and win the fancy. 
 To convey a knowledge of the man, so far as we 
 can now know him, to those Avho either want the 
 requisite preparatory information, or have not 
 been led to employ it on the Cean poet, is the task 
 now before us. Almost all the materials have 
 been provided by Dr. Schneidewin, whose text we 
 must be understood to adopt, and to make use of 
 the authorities whom he has employed. There 
 can be no question of the obligation owed to him 
 by every lover of the best literature, for the good 
 sense, learning, and zeal, with which he has de- 
 voted himself to his work. Simonides, could he 
 revive, would doubtless repay in his fashion, by 
 an honorary inscription to Dr. Schneidewin, the 
 monument thus raised to his own memory. 
 
 The editor of this old poet, obscure and worth- 
 less as his labours may seem to the crowd of 
 readers, has, in our conviction, conferred a real 
 benefit upon the world. For he has facilitated 
 our knowledge of the most perfect of human lite- 
 ratures. It has been the destiny of the Greeks, 
 that the more livingly mankind have at any time 
 been impelled to the tasks of systematic reflection 
 and imaginative creation, the more powerfully 
 have they been drawn to the works of that people, 
 to seek the guidance and inspiration of their
 
 190 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 labours. For largeness and beauty of design, 
 and accuracy of execution, their compositions re- 
 main unsurpassed, and almost unrivalled. It is 
 true, the most advanced portion of our race have 
 derived from the East, and not from Greece, their 
 clearest and deepest knowledge of our relation to 
 that Infinite, out of which we are born, and to 
 which we ever tend. Above the enchanted island 
 of Greek thought, the canopy of varied and glit- 
 tering clouds has opened, and displayed the Cross 
 hung high amid the stars ; while Olympus and its 
 gods are but an earthly eminence of the green and 
 bloomino; land below. Still the race of Hellas 
 has given us unsurpassed models of the fairest 
 works which we can accomplish on earth, has best 
 taught us how we may come to understand the 
 faculties we are to work with, and the rules to 
 which their operation ought to be subjected. This 
 assertion is only limited, and not overthrown, by 
 the consideration that, when, after many centuries 
 of dark struggle, faith had at last grown into 
 harmony with life, — or, in other words, when, by 
 a process long and painful in proportion to the 
 value of the result. Christian self-denial and Pagan 
 self-assertion had attained an equipoise, strength- 
 ening and elevating each other, — then was real- 
 ized, in being and action, in men and their works, 
 in RafFaelle and Shaksi)ere, in Do Sales and 
 Melanchthon, a still higher and sublimer ideal 
 than liad been divined by Phidias, Sophocles, and 
 Plato.
 
 SIMONIDES. 191 
 
 It is happily become a common-place to say 
 that among the noblest works to be accomplished 
 by men are those to which the imagination gives 
 its name. They are the creations in which signi- 
 ficant realities are harmonized into a beautiful 
 unity. Whatever we can do that is eminent in its 
 kind comes more or less under this description; 
 but it peculiarly and fully applies only to the pro- 
 ductions of the fine arts. Thus in statuary the 
 repose of perfect life is to be presented in round 
 and fixed forms, with a simplicity corresponding 
 to the definiteness and solidity of the material. 
 Thus painting displays the moment when different 
 energies are most clearly and strongly combined 
 towards one centre, and produce one complex but 
 satisfying impression of the alliance of colour and 
 form with character and action. In architecture, 
 where human life does not translate itself into 
 tints or masses, it shapes, out of a set of contri- 
 vances for practical ends, a symmetrical whole, 
 stamped with a single and permanent aspect of 
 human feeling. So again music attunes the vague 
 flow of passion and emotion, balancing their rest- 
 less fluctuations into delightful order. But in all 
 these arts the means are those which exist in 
 nature, stone and metal, lines, hues, notes and 
 tones ; and the power these possess of suggesting 
 anything of which the eye or ear does not directly 
 take cognisance, is very limited and imperfect: 
 while there is a whole reffion of thouerht and
 
 192 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 feeling, the inward and invisible land of the 
 human spirit, which they can only hint and 
 dumbly point at. There is but one outward phe- 
 nomenal object which surveys and indicates all 
 that man is conscious of, namely, articulate speech 
 or language. It has indeed certain weaknesses 
 and incapacities ; but it is co-extensive with the 
 whole of our being, though not going so deep as 
 our nature goes, — standing in the subordinate 
 relation of the symbol to the reality. Still it is 
 symbolic of the whole ; while the arts which work 
 with natural materials deal with only a part, and 
 that a surface of this whole. The art analogous 
 to these, but using words instead of other instru- 
 ments and materials, is poetry, the only form of 
 composition which has for its main purpose the 
 presentation of the beautiful by means of lan- 
 guage. Other arts which employ words, as 
 rhetoric, logic, historical narrative, have not the 
 beautiful for their aim ; and the arts which have 
 this aim, and do not employ language, are in com- 
 parison feeble and partial. Poetry takes in a 
 wider range of existence, builds on a deeper foun- 
 dation, works with a more eifectual instrument, 
 and addresses itself more directly to the hearts of 
 all men. Science only analyses that, of which 
 poetry presents the vital image, and of which it 
 gives, by its predominant sentiment and adequate 
 catastro})he, the highest, that is, a practical solu- 
 tion. Khetoric aims at influencin"- the conduct or
 
 SIMONIDES. 193 
 
 the opinions of men by other means than a simple 
 exposition of truth, or a presentation of image.s 
 which embody it, and is limited by the peculia- 
 rities of the moment, and of the men whom it 
 addresses ; while History is bound by the hard 
 and literal facts which it relates, from which if it 
 departs to aim at the ideal, it mistakes its own 
 work, and is poetry, — probably maimed and de- 
 faced, — under the name of history. Thus Poetry 
 is the highest and most harmonious utterance of 
 man's heart ; and verse, its characteristic form, 
 indicates that it aims at being so even in the 
 modvilation of its sounds. 
 
 In this greatest art the Greeks have been, on 
 the whole, the foremost masters of the world. Of 
 the earliest period in their liistory the only full 
 and connected records are two poems. These, the 
 Iliad and Odyssey, are the first monuments upon 
 the banks of the stream of European existence ; 
 and they have given rise to all the others which 
 we meet with in tracing downwards that main 
 flood. They awakened and harmonized the minds 
 of all Greece, and inspired those who have in- 
 spired mankind. They also exhibit the ages 
 during which they were composed, which are 
 shown under the name and honours of a still 
 eai'lier and legendary time, amplified and more 
 brightly tinted, but still manifestly to be recog- 
 nised. The tribes and cities were under the rule 
 of hereditary kings, the chiefs of warlike bands 
 VOL. I. K
 
 194 CKITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 of nobles, while the crowd of the people were 
 comparatively poor, unarmed, and helpless. In 
 the halls of these leaders, which were stored with 
 wine and food, with embroidered garments, orna- 
 ments, furniture of metals, and finely-wrought 
 arms, and which resounded with the feasts of their 
 lords, the divine minstrel chanted to his harp the 
 ballad which recorded the deeds of those who 
 heard him, and of their glorious ancestors. The 
 old tale of war, with all its circvimstances of local 
 and family names, was rounded and brightened 
 into graceful and distinct completeness. A world 
 of wonder lay on every side about the near fore- 
 ground, and filled the past with its miracles ; and 
 over all spread the region of the gods, who in 
 festivity, in wrath, or love, had often mingled 
 with mortals. But an inscrutable death-land 
 stretched below, the scene of unknown sadness 
 and pain, where life faded into a pale and languid 
 dream; and an impenetrable law of destiny, 
 brightened now and then with an evident gleam 
 of retribution, encircled the dominions both of 
 men and gods. Of these songs the special and 
 broad aspect was that of an unbroken painting of 
 the outward ; the clearness and beauty of which 
 animated the singer into creative joy, without 
 awakening the rcfiective self-consciousness which 
 would have marred the simplicity and directness 
 of his uninterrupted talc. He regarded the spec- 
 tacle of life, as tradition presented it to him.
 
 SIMONIDES. 195 
 
 clothed, as by tradition it must be, in the colours 
 of the present, with eager, wondering interest, 
 which he imparted to his hearers : but he did not 
 say to them, — what he had never said to himself, 
 — We too are men like those of ichom ice sing ; and 
 it is ourselves that we see lifted and lighted up in 
 them ; and therefore it is that our hearts beat in so 
 lively accord with theirs. Thus their poetry had a 
 charm of childish delight and admiration, not 
 indeed of all the most valuable, but by far the 
 hardest to reproduce in after-ages of criticism and 
 science, — ages when even generosity and self- 
 denial can scarcely outlive the impulse of the 
 moment, without beginning to consider how gene- 
 rous and self-denying they are. It would be idle 
 to regret that those old days of genial and shrewd 
 instinct could not last ; but it is well in our 
 changed, sharpened, and more speculative times, 
 to look upon the rude and onward strength which 
 once existed, and which softened itself to melody 
 in the songs of Homer. 
 
 We could not see those days and poems with our 
 present sense of a keen and strange awakening 
 into a far distant mode of being, had it not so long 
 and so completely passed aAvay. The busy life of 
 Greece, around and below the hereditary heroic 
 monarchies, was constantly rising and gaining 
 strength ; and when accident or revolution left a 
 void, or disclosed a weakness in the royalty of anv 
 state, the new and ready forces working all about 
 
 K2
 
 VJG CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 it thrust themselves into the gap, excluded the 
 old names, and made the dominion their own. 
 Before the period of any much later literature 
 now extant, the royalties had almost all vanished 
 even in name ; and increasing wealth, numbers, 
 and energy had won political authority for some 
 smaller or larger portion of the citizens of each 
 state, for an aristocracy, or for what the Greeks 
 called a democracy, or for a ruler, the Tyrannus 
 of antiquity, whom circumstances and character, 
 not birthright, invested with power. This period 
 may be called that of the tyrannies, as the Homeric 
 ages were those of legitimate monarchy. But 
 these later intrusive governors naturally arose 
 from the wants and energies of their time, when 
 the traditions and feelings of the old heroic sove- 
 reignties were still fresh. The idea of law for 
 itself, and not impersonated in a man, had not yet 
 reached its mature and independent strength ; and 
 the boldest, the ablest, he, in short, who was 
 deemed, if he was not, the worthiest, easily and 
 often quietly created an authority which the people 
 felt to be needful. Such a ruler more closely 
 resembled Cosmo de' Medici, than the vulgar 
 ruffians from whom we have derived our concep- 
 tion of a tyrant. His power was no doubt partly 
 maintained by fear, but was generally to a great 
 degree founded on affection, gratitude, and admi- 
 ration ; and was for the most part closely con- 
 nected with that free movement and active life of
 
 SIMONIDES. 197 
 
 the city, that festal splendour and social ease, in 
 the midst of which it sprang up, and from which 
 it derived much of its vigour as well as graceful- 
 ness. Advancing arts, deepening reflection, grow- 
 ing population, increasing wealth and expense, 
 and more numerous and closer relations of traffic 
 and pleasure between multitudes of men, all 
 marked the period of the tyrannies, which imme- 
 diately preceded the liveliest and most creative 
 age of art and philosophy that the world has ever 
 known. Science began in Ionia and Italy, while 
 the contests of the games were objects of yearly 
 growing interest, and were sung by the sweetest 
 and gravest poets of the Hellenic race. 
 
 We thus find the rise of deliberate, self-con- 
 scious reflection, and a more matured and variously 
 cultivated sense of symmetry, in close union. 
 Men were not only pushing out and tempering 
 new powers, but felt and told themselves that they 
 were doing so, and thought and spake of what and 
 why these efforts were, and of themselves as the 
 authors of them. In the more open and popular 
 life now enjoyed, each exulted in his more distinct 
 personality. In the public assembly, at the reli- 
 gious pomp, or the spectacle of the heroic games, 
 every one both read the sympathy of those around 
 him in their eyes, and felt and exclaimed inwardly 
 that he too rejoiced with them, and was, like each 
 of them, a man, a Greek, a citizen of some god- 
 protected state. Behind all this lay the bright
 
 198 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 back-ground of religious and epic tradition, with 
 its gods, its kings, its tales of war and love and 
 woe, animating every rock and vale and stream 
 and mural city witli its own memorable legend. 
 Hence, with such a language, such a people, as 
 the Greek, there could not but be poetry ; and of 
 this the peculiar characteristic, distinguishing it 
 from the old spontaneous gush and unbroken flow 
 of narrative song, was the reflection and self-con- 
 sciousness of the individual poet, finding and 
 strengthening a kindred power in all around him. 
 This is lyrical poetry : it has its own measures, 
 its own music, laws, and a purpose of its own. 
 But the indispensable and universal quality, rather 
 the inmost spirit of its life, is the impulse to pre- 
 sent the poet as appropriating and living in the 
 images he shapes, and to lead his hearers to the 
 same state ; instead of directly presenting those 
 images as nature, giving them unmodified by the 
 personality of the poet, and fitted to his hearers 
 only by a roundness, entireness, and fluency, 
 which no separate part of the great web of reality, 
 when cut off" from the whole, can in itself possess. 
 A picture of the world painted in words, with 
 men as the clearest and foremost portion of it, 
 but as to whom the artist has never asked himself 
 what he thinks and feels, or stirred his hearers 
 to ask themselves, all being contented to enjoy a 
 sympathy in which they forget their own exist- 
 ence ; this is essentially epic i)oetry. A vocal
 
 SIMONIDES. 199 
 
 picture, in which everything has for its deepest 
 basis its relation to the man conceiving it, and to 
 the men whom he calls around ; this is lyric 
 poetry. But one other great form of poetry is 
 possible, that which combines much of the charm 
 and force of both the others, in which self-con- 
 sciousness projects itself into external figm'es, and 
 appears as unself-consciousness, presenting them at 
 the same time more directly even than epic song. 
 This is the drama. 
 
 Of the lyric poetry of Greece little is left to 
 us; and the only considerable body of poems of 
 this kind by one writer, the Odes of Pindar, 
 belong to that period when poetry had already 
 ripened into the drama; for Pindar was younger 
 than ^schylus. But somewhat earlier than these 
 gigantic minstrels, fit singers of destiny and the 
 gods, and of the ancient half-divine heroes, was 
 a man of whom sufficient relics still exist to 
 supply a clear knowledge of his style, and of 
 whose life we know enough to form a distinct 
 image both of his outward circumstances and his 
 inward frame and culture. This man is Simo- 
 nides, whose fame filled antiquity as rich wine a 
 golden urn; and who for this alone would be ever 
 noticeable, that he is the earliest human beino- of 
 European race, not politically eminent, of whose 
 character in its finer traits and subleties we can 
 obtain a well-grounded and many-sided resem- 
 blance.
 
 200 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 The Island Ceos* is the nearest of the Cyclades 
 to Attica, and lies over-against Cape Sunium, 
 from which its lofty mountain summit is distinctly 
 visiblef. The island is broken in surface, but 
 extremely productive of good wine, various fruits, 
 and excellent honey. It also abounds in pure 
 water; and it has an admirable harbour. It 
 seems to have been early occupied by a Dorian 
 race, who were subsequently overpowered, but 
 not expelled, by Ionian colonists. The popula- 
 tion thus included the two main types of Greek 
 character, blended into one peculiarly its own. 
 Aristseus, the mild and prosperous god, the in- 
 ventor of agriculture and of the treatment of 
 bees, the companion of Bacchus, the son of 
 Apollo, and at Ceos in some measure identified 
 with his father, was the more especial deity of 
 the island. Artemis was also worshipped as inse- 
 parable from her brother. In the city loulis, the 
 birth-place of Simonides, there was a temple to 
 Aphrodite-Ctesylle, connected with the mournful 
 legend of Ctesylle and her lover Hermochares, 
 which the poet must have been accustomed to 
 hear from his earliest infancy. The tale went, 
 that the Athenian Hermochares had seen the 
 maiden dancing in a festival at the altar of Apollo 
 
 " See the first part of Brbndsted's very valuable Reisen und 
 UntersucJningen in Griechenland. Paris, 182C. 
 
 f Mount Elias, the loftiest in the island, rises 570 French 
 metres (near 2000 English feet) above the sea.
 
 SIMONIDES. 201 
 
 In Carthjea, the other principal town of the it^land, 
 and had informed her of his love by writing on 
 an apple, which he cast towards her in the temple 
 of Artemis, The father of the maiden swore 
 by the laurel of Apollo to give him his daughter, 
 but afterwards broke his oath, and bestowed her 
 on another. She eloped by night with Hermo- 
 chares, sailed to Athens, and was wedded. But 
 the god decreed to punish her father for his per- 
 jury; and she died in giving birth to her child. 
 A dove was seen to rise from her funeral pile, 
 Avhlle the body had disappeared; and the god 
 commanded Hermochares to build a temple at 
 loulis to Aphrodite-Ctesylle. There is a point 
 in the interior of the island, from which the pros- 
 pect takes in the sea, the neighbouring islands, 
 the coast of Attica, as far as Cape Sunium, and 
 in the foreground the site of loulis, where now 
 stands the town of Zea. A little below this 
 point has recently been discovered a colossal lion*, 
 hewn in the live rock, and doubtless connected 
 with an ancient legendf, which records that the 
 nymphs at first inhabited the watered island, tilh 
 being scared by a lion, they fled to Carystus in 
 Euboea. And hence, (says the old author), is a 
 cape at Ceos called the Lion. It is also to Ceos, 
 that tradition referred the story of the beautiful 
 
 • Brondsted, p. 30, 31, 32. 
 
 •|- Preserved by Heraclides Ponticus, and cited by Brondsted. 
 
 K3
 
 202 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 youth, Cyparissus*, whose clearest playfellow and 
 friend was a noble stag, sacred to the nymphs 
 and dear to all the islanders. The boy by chance 
 wounded him mortally with an arrow, and in his 
 overpowering grief prayed the gods that he might 
 be for ever a mourner. This prayer was heard ; 
 and he was changed into a cypress. This tree, 
 with its unchanging and melancholy foliage, was 
 doubtless frequent and striking in the busy land- 
 scape and under the bright sky of Ceos. 
 
 The people, among whom religion and imagi- 
 nation had so nmch jjower, were generally of 
 grave and severe habits. The youths and maidens 
 drank only water until after marriage. Li- 
 centiousness of pleasure was strictly forbidden. 
 The men put on no marks of mourning for their 
 children. But the most remarkable of their cus- 
 toms, at least in later times than those of Simo- 
 nides, and very possibly in his also, was, that 
 the old of both sexes, when sensible of decaying 
 strength, would meet, as at a feast, and pledge 
 each other in cups of poison. Yet these islanders 
 were engaged in busy commerce, and partook 
 abundantly of cultivated enjoyment. And their 
 land was independent, and probably in its highest 
 prosperity, during the first half of the life of Si- 
 monides, before the insular dominion of Athens. 
 
 Simonides was born in the middle of the sixth 
 
 * Ovid, Metam. x. 106.
 
 SIMONIDES. 203 
 
 century before our era (b.C. 556) and lived till 
 near the middle of the following one (b.C. 467 ) 
 He was later than the great lyrical poets Ibycus, 
 Alcaeus, Stesichorus, and Sappho. But his fame, 
 if not more lasting or more widely spread among 
 his countrymen, yet rose higher, and included 
 the praise of more various talents. In his long 
 life he was contemporary with several of the chief 
 names and most memorable events of human 
 history. Xenophanes, the chief of the Eleatic 
 school of speculation, — the deeply religious and 
 reflective Heraclitus, the greatest of the Ionic 
 philosophers, — and Pythagoras, the systematic 
 moralist and politician, all lived during his ac- 
 tive and brilliant years. Pisistratus, whose name 
 is no less inseparable from the history of the 
 Homeric poems than from that of Athens, ruled 
 there during his youth; where Thepsis began 
 to exhibit his lyrical impersonations, when the 
 singer of the neighbouring island had barely 
 reached man's estate, and was probably casting 
 his eyes with longing admiration on the shores 
 of the wider world around him. The ships which 
 frequented the harbour of his native island, and 
 the strangers whom he met on his travels, must 
 have told him of the capture of Babylon by 
 Cyrus, and some years afterwards of the con- 
 quest of Egypt by Cambyses, and the extinction 
 of that peculiar nationality, in which Herodotus, 
 who beheld only its wreck, found so much to
 
 204 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 puzzle him by its strangeness, and to delight him 
 by its mysterious analogies and contrasts to Greek 
 beliefs and customs. Later in his life he beheld 
 the conflict between his countrymen and the 
 empire of Cyrus, and recorded in verse the glo- 
 ries of Marathon, Thermopyla3, and Platasa. He 
 saw the greatness and heard the melodious sound 
 of ^schylus and Pindar. And the first rumour 
 of the character and genius of Pericles may have 
 reached his dying ears. These names, which 
 even as such are to us stirring and delightful, 
 lived as men, with living deeds and voices, around 
 the living Simonides; and we cannot doubt that 
 in serene joy he felt himself one of them. 
 
 The earliest vestige which remains of the life 
 of the poet, consists in a citation by Athenfeus 
 of four obscure lines attributed to liim, which 
 may be thus translated: 
 
 1. — ccxxx*. 
 The wild kid's father, and the dreadful fish. 
 
 Their heads together drooping, let descend 
 Upon their eyes the son of night, nor wish 
 
 Great Bacchus' slaughtering minister to tend. 
 
 Of these verses three explanations are suggested 
 in Athenseus. The one which appears most 
 probable, is that at the feast of Bacchus in lou- 
 lis, the native place of Simonides, an ox was to 
 
 • The Roman numerals refer throughout this paper to the 
 edition by Schneidewin, the Arabic to our own series of trans- 
 lations.
 
 SIMONIDES, 205 
 
 be sacrificed. The axe used for the purpose had 
 been sent to a smith, who had not returned it in 
 time, and Simonides, then a lad, was despatched for 
 it. But he found that the smith had neglected 
 his task, and was asleep in the midst of his idle 
 implements. On his return he intimated the 
 state of the case in these riddling lines. The 
 wild kid's father seems to indicate something 
 made of goat-skin, perhaps the smith's leather 
 apron, but more probably the bellows. The 
 dreadful fish means a crah, which was a name 
 among the Greeks for a pair of tongs. The son 
 of night is sleejo. The quietly comic turn of 
 mind which the poet displayed in after-life, and 
 which lay deep in his character, comes out even 
 in this early slight anecdote. 
 
 It is unknown to what time of his life Ave 
 should refer a somewhat similar trait, resting on 
 the same authority; but as it is the only other 
 mention of him in connexion with his native 
 island, and is suitable to his early manhood as 
 well as to any after-time, it may be noticed here. 
 It is said that Simonides was employed in in- 
 structing a choir, or a band of singers, in honour 
 of Apollo, at the Temple of the God in Carthasa. 
 The remains of this building still exist*, and have 
 been explored recently. It stood upon a height ; 
 and water was daily brought by an ass to the poet 
 
 * See Brondsted.
 
 206 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 and his scholars from a fountain below. The 
 verses are, in English, 
 
 2. — ccxxxi. 
 
 Who will not gain the sweet Cicada's meed, 
 Epeius, son of Panopeus, must feed. 
 
 The interpretation is this. The poet meant to 
 decree that whoever of the singers should not be 
 present at the appointed hour, should be fined in 
 a measure of barley for the ass. The song of 
 the Cicada being typical of poetry, its meed was 
 the lyric prize; and Epeius, being, according to 
 the tradition, one of the Grecian heroes at Troy, 
 was employed to carry water for the others: hence 
 his name was jestingly used to designate the 
 unheroic quadruped, which probably sounded 
 a little less far-fetched to a Greek, from the 
 well-known Homeric comparison of Ajax to the 
 same animal. The little tale, trifling as it is, 
 brings before us a graceful miniature picture of 
 the poet, surrounded by liis troop, devoted to 
 the worship of the god of song, the patron of the 
 prosperity of their country, and, while honouring 
 him by noble and eai'nest hymns, indulging at 
 intervals in light social merriment. 
 
 Some verses of Phredrus (iv. 21) relate a 
 story of Simonides, which seems to belong to the 
 first years of his absence from Ceos, rather than 
 to any later period. For his poverty is spoken 
 of as the cause of his journeys in Asia Minor,
 
 SIMONIDES. 207 
 
 where he is said to have written panegyrical poems 
 for money, as Pindar did afterwards ; and there 
 is no reason to imagine that he was ever in want 
 after his visit to Athens, under the patronage of 
 the sons of Pisistratus. Phtedrus is not a very 
 sufficient authority ; but the story is improbable 
 only in the eyes of those who attach a graver 
 importance than we do to the charge of avarice, 
 often advanced against Simonides, with which the 
 anecdote appears inconsistent. If the report of 
 his love of Avealth is partly founded on mistake 
 and exaggeration (which, as a general rule, is true 
 of the alleged faults of all eminent men), and if, 
 though a real tendency of his mind, it was 
 always under the control of his clear sense, the 
 tale has nothing unlikely in it. It is said that on 
 his return from Asia towards Ceos the vessel made 
 shipwreck ; and while the other passengers were 
 engaged in securing their valuables, Simonides 
 took no thought about the property he had ac- 
 quired on his travels, and answered some one, who 
 asked him the reason of this, / carry all my jtos- 
 sessions tcith me. And so it proved; for those 
 who escaped were plundered of all they had, 
 while the fame of Simonides, and his poetic 
 talents, exerted very likely, as we know they 
 sometimes were, in extempore verse, secured him 
 a friendly and even splendid reception at the 
 neighbouring town of Clazomena?, where rich pre- 
 sents were bestowed on him.
 
 208 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 The direct authority of Hipparchus, the son cff 
 Pisistratus, at Athens, began in the year B.C. 528, 
 and lasted till 514. During some portion of 
 these years we know that Simonides, now in the 
 prime and fulness of his life, was favoured and 
 enriched by him and lived at Athens in his inti- 
 mate society. It was at this period that a jealousy 
 arose between the Cean master, and Lasos of 
 Hermione, the Dithyrambic poet, who was also at 
 Athens, honoured and celebrated. Anacreon also 
 lived under the same protection ; and an inscrip- 
 tion for the tomb of the amatory songster, or 
 rather a little poem in that form, is extant 
 (CLXXi.), by no means wanting in beauty of ex- 
 pression. The youthful flood of passionate intox- 
 ication, which poured through the poems* and 
 filled the heart of the Teian, can have met with 
 little sympathy from Simonides, who has not left 
 a single line inspired by love, and whose impulses 
 were probably too quiet, and his intellect too pre- 
 dominant, to let him either create or prize the 
 poetic expression of sensual longings and raptures. 
 It is not known whether he remained at Athens 
 after the death of Hipparchus in 514. The wife 
 of Hippoclus, the tyrant of Lampsacus, was 
 buried in a tomb which had this inscription, the 
 work of Simonides : 
 
 • The larger part of those commonly attributed to Anacreon, 
 and translated as his, are probably of a much later time.
 
 SIMONIDES. 209 
 
 3,— CLXX. 
 
 Of Greeks was Hippias first, while shone his day ; 
 
 Below Archedice his daughter lies. 
 Sire, husband, bretliren, sons had kingly sway ; 
 
 But ne'er did pride within her bosom rise. 
 
 It has been said that he showed his ingratitude 
 for the favours he had received from the family of 
 Pisistratus, by composing a laudatory inscription, 
 probably designed for the brazen statues of Har- 
 modius and Aristogeiton, the work of the sculptor 
 Antenor, which were publicly set up at Athens, 
 and were carried away by Xerxes. The awkward 
 cleft in one of the names could not have been 
 avoided in Greek lines of the metre usual for 
 inscriptions, but renders it uncertain whether 
 Simonides wrote the distich; for there is nothing 
 at all like this ugly fracture in his other writings, 
 and but a single instance that we know of besides 
 in Greek literature. Our English version, on 
 the Chinese plan of copying, reproduces the 
 anomaly. 
 
 4. CLXXXVII. 
 
 Day dawned on Athens, when Aristogeit — 
 — on and Harmodius dared Hipparchus smite. 
 
 This accusation against the poet, like so many 
 others arising from the application of coarse 
 popular maxims which save the trouble of re- 
 flection, has little reason in it, even if the lines 
 were his. It was not as a member of a political 
 party, but as a foreign poet, that he had bright-
 
 210 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 ened the society of Hipparchiis with pleasantry 
 and wisdom, and had accepted liis bounty. Pro- 
 bably, when the question arose between the 
 popular government and that of one man at 
 Athens, he may have sincerely approved of the 
 revolution, wliich introduced the Y\u(\.oi autonomy 
 prevailing in his own island. It was certainly 
 more consistent with his own tastes as well as 
 fortunes to live under the patronage of a refined 
 and humane ruler, than in the tumidt of a demo- 
 cracy. But there is no ground to suppose that 
 he did not believe it a form of political society 
 the best adapted to some parts of Greece. 
 
 After the death of Hipparchus, and before the 
 Persian war, the poet is found in Thessaly, where 
 he enjoyed the protection and favour of the great 
 families, the Aleuada? and Scopadje. His poetry 
 however was probably not so well appreciated by 
 most of those around him as in Southern Greece: 
 for it is said that he was asked, why he could not 
 enchant the Thessalians as well as other men ? 
 and that he answered. Because the Thessalians are 
 too uncultivated for me to enchant them. There are 
 several snatches and fragments of song relating to 
 his residence in this country. It is said that he 
 was drinking at table with others, and that the 
 attendants who handed round snow to be mixed 
 in the cups, overlooked him ; whereupon he pro- 
 duced at the moment these verses :
 
 SIMONIDES. 211 
 
 5. — ccxxvii. 
 This snow around the Olympian steep was cast 
 By Boreas blowing keen his Thracian blast, 
 And chilled the cloakless breast ; but soon, yet frore. 
 Beneath Pieria's soil was covered o'er. 
 Of it give me my share ; for none methinks 
 At a friend's banquet a warm goblet drinks. 
 
 It was probably during the beat of summer that 
 these lines were imagined and spoken, when the 
 picture must have been in pretty and poignant 
 contrast with the feelings and the season. The 
 following inscription for a hound dates evidently 
 from his residence in the same country: 
 
 6.— CLXXXV. 
 
 Hound Lycas, even now thy white bones cold 
 Within this tomb must needs the stags arouse: 
 
 Thy worth great Pelion knew, and Ossa's wold. 
 And all Cithaeron's solitary brows. 
 
 The next lines are part of an ode in honour of 
 Scopas, the son of Creon : 
 
 7.— XII. 
 
 A man can hardly good in truth become, 
 
 With hands, feet, mind, all square, without a flaw. 
 * * * « 
 
 Nor suits my thought the word of Pittacus, 
 
 Though he was sage, that to be virtuous 
 
 Is hard. This fits a god alone. 
 
 A man must needs to evil fall. 
 
 When by hopeless chance o'erthrown. 
 
 Whoso does well, him good we call. 
 
 And bad if bad his lot be known ; 
 
 Those by the gods beloved are best of all.
 
 212 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Enough for me in sooth 
 
 Is one not wholly wrong, 
 Nor all perverse, but skilled in useful truth, 
 
 A healthy soul and strong. 
 He has no blame from me. 
 
 Who love not blame ; 
 For countless those who foolish be. 
 
 And fair are all things free from shame. 
 That therefore which can ne'er be found, 
 
 I seek not, nor desire with empty thought, 
 A man all blameless, on this wide-spread ground, 
 
 'Mid all who cull its fruitage vainly sought. 
 If found, ye too this prize of mine 
 
 Shall know ; meanwhile all those I love 
 And praise, who do no wrong by will malign ; 
 For to necessity must yield the Gods above. 
 
 We have also the fragment of a lament for the 
 destruction of the family of the Scopad® : 
 
 8. — XLVI. 
 
 Thou ne'er forsee'st, O man, the coming day, 
 Nor know'st how long the rich his wealth shall own. 
 
 For not so swiftly skims the fly away, 
 As all our bliss is flown. 
 
 The poet is said to have been closely interested in 
 the catastrophe to which this poem refers. The 
 story is spoken of by Callimachus and Ovid, and 
 is recounted by Phajdrus, and after him by La- 
 fontaine and Fenelon. It is also found in several 
 ancient prose-writers. Simonides, it relates, was 
 feasted by Scopas at Cranon in Thessaly, with a 
 crowd of kinsmen and guests, before whom he 
 recited the ode he had composed in honour of his 
 host's victory in the chariot-race. He liad inter-
 
 SIMONIDES. 213 
 
 woven with the praises of the victor those of 
 Castor and Pollux, the patrons of horsemanship. 
 Scopas was dissatisfied at this, and said that he 
 should only give the poet half the present 
 intended for him, leaving him to look for the 
 remainder to the gods, to whom so large a por- 
 tion of the song had been devoted. Simonides 
 doubtless maintained his usual composure, pro- 
 bably not without a smile ; but in a few moments 
 he was informed that two young men on horse- 
 back were asking for him at the door. He obeyed 
 the call, but on reaching the open air looked in 
 vain for his visitors. In the mean time he was 
 startled by a crash behind him ; the building had 
 fallen in, and overwhelmed the whole company. 
 Simonides alone escaped alive. The tradition 
 further reported, that, after the destruction of his 
 companions, Simonides identified the mangled and 
 disfigured bodies, from recollecting the place at 
 the tables occupied by each guest. In this fact 
 some of the ancients saw the evidence of an art 
 of technical memory said to have been invented 
 by the poet. It is more natural and satisfactory 
 to refer it to his habitual accuracy of observation, 
 and spontaneous power of remembrance, of which 
 he himself speaks in the following couplet : 
 
 9. — cciv. 
 Simonides, son of Leoprepes, 
 No peer in memory at eighty sees. 
 
 It is interesting to connect with this sharpness of
 
 214 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the mental eye that lively verbal presentation 
 of objects, which Longinus insisted on as remark- 
 ably distingnisliing him. It might be deemed 
 that the sordid folly here attributed to Scopas is 
 disproved by the poet's having lamented his fate 
 in song. This however is not so unlikely as it has 
 been thouglit, if Ave consider that he was pre-emi- 
 nently qualified and inclined to make allowances 
 for others, and to escape the errors of those who 
 judge mankind by too high or too peculiar a 
 standard. 
 
 Before the first Persian invasion, we find 
 Simonides again in connexion with Athens ; for 
 we have an inscription from his hand, probably 
 in honour of those Athenians who fell in battle 
 against the Chalcidians of Euboea, when these 
 joined the Boeotians in support of the invasion of 
 Attica by the Spartans under Cleomenes. The 
 lines are these : 
 
 10.— CXLVIII. 
 
 At Dirphys' foot we fell ; and o'er us here 
 Beside Euripus' shore this mound was piled ; 
 Not undeserved ; for youth to us was dear ; 
 And that we lost in hattle's tempest wild. 
 
 The Athenian army had earlier in the same day 
 gained a victory over the Boeotians. The pri- 
 soners taken from both parties of the enemy were 
 kept in chains until redeemed by a heavy ransom. 
 Of this money a portion was em[)loyed on a four- 
 liorse chariot, doubtless of metal, dedicated to
 
 SIMONIDES. 215 
 
 Minerva. This occasioned the following inscrip- 
 tion: 
 
 11.— CLXXXVIII, 
 
 The sons of Athens, who in warlike toil 
 Boeotia's host and Chalcis' overthrew, 
 And chained the captives, here the tenth of spoil 
 Set up as horses unto Pallas due. 
 
 After the defeat of the first Persian Invasion 
 (490 B.C.) he produced these lines in record of the 
 Athenian victory : 
 
 12. — CXLIX. 
 
 At Marathon for Greece the Athenians fought; 
 And low the gilded Medians' power they brought. 
 
 Another couplet expresses its own purport : 
 
 13. — CLXXXIX. 
 
 Me, goat-foot Pan, the Arcadian, foe to Medes, 
 To Athens friend, Miltiades set up. 
 
 In the year after the battle he is said to have 
 gained the prize from ^schylus in a public con- 
 test, by an elegy on those who fell at Marathon. 
 Much might be said on the probable distinction 
 between the compositions of the two great poets. 
 The exquisite pathos, the clear and quiet depth of 
 Simonides, must have presented a beautiful con- 
 trast to the no less admirable vehemence and 
 impassioned force of the dramatic giant. Such is 
 the difference which all the fine arts exemplify, at 
 many periods of their history, between the 
 strength which serenely rests and delightedly
 
 216 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 balances itself within the bounds of harmony, and 
 that which, without in truth exceeding them, 
 seems ever on the point of springing and breaking- 
 over. 
 
 After this time we lose sight of the poet for 
 near ten years, until the invasion of Greece under 
 Xerxes again brings him before us. When vic- 
 tories by land and sea, and the genius of Themis- 
 tocles had ended for ages the attempts of Asia 
 upon Europe, we find the Cean celebrating the 
 chief events and men of the war in a series of 
 poems. The following lines are the fragment 
 of an encomium on those who fell at Thei'mopylae : 
 
 14.— IX. 
 
 Of those who at Thermopylae were slain, 
 
 Glorious the doom, and beautiful the lot : 
 
 Their tomb an altar ; men from tears refrain 
 
 To honour them, and praise, but mourn them not. 
 
 Such sepulchre nor drear decay, 
 
 Nor all-destroying time shall waste ; this right have they. 
 
 Within their grave the homebred glory 
 
 Of Greece was laid ; this witness gives 
 
 Leonidas the Spartan, in whose story 
 
 A wreath of famous virtue ever lives. 
 
 15 CL. 
 
 On those who fell at ThermopylcB. 
 Against three hundred myriads gathered here, 
 P'rom Pelops' land four thousand felt no fear. 
 
 16.— CLI. 
 
 On tJie Lacedcemonians who fell with Leonidas. 
 To those of Lacedsemon, stranger, tell. 
 That as their laws commanded here we fell.
 
 SIMONIDES. 217 
 
 17.— CLII. 
 Of famed Megistias here behold the tomb. 
 Him on this side Spercheus slew the Medes; 
 A seer who well foresaw his coming doom, 
 But would not lose his share in Sparta's deeds. 
 
 18. CLIII. 
 
 On those who fell loith Leonidas, 
 If well to die be valour's noblest part, 
 In this with us no mortal men may vie : 
 Freedom for Greece we sought with fearless heart, 
 And here in undecaying fame we lie. 
 
 19.— CLIV. 
 
 On the same. 
 These won for Sparta fame through endless days, 
 Wlien death's dark cloud upon themselves they drew. 
 But dying died not ; for their valour's praise 
 From Hades' dwelling leads them up anew. 
 
 20.— CLV. 
 On the same. 
 This, Leonidas ! the glorious grave 
 Of those who fell with thee, wide Sparta's king. 
 'Gainst countless shafts and rushing horses brave 
 Of Media's host they stood unwavering. 
 
 21.— CLVI.* 
 
 Perhaps a Fragment of a Poem on the same. 
 Time every action will most truly scan, 
 And show the mind that is within the man. 
 
 22.— CL\T[. 
 
 These, fain for Greece against the Medes to die, 
 In Opoeis, chief of Locrian cities, lie. 
 
 * It has been doubted whether this and the three preceding 
 are really by Simonides. 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 218 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 23.— CLVir. 
 For the Corinthians fallen at Salamis, and buried there. 
 Stranger, in Corinth we were known of yore ; 
 Here in tlie isle of Ajax now are we : 
 With ease Phoenicia's prows we overbore. 
 And Mede and Persian, setting Hellas free. 
 
 24.— CLViii. 
 For the Monument in honour of the same erected at the 
 
 Isthmus. 
 
 When Hellas trembled all on danger's brink. 
 To give our lives for her we did not shrink. 
 
 25 . — CLix. 
 On the Athenians fallen at Salamis. 
 The sons of Athens here laid Persia low, 
 And saved their native land from slavery's woe. 
 
 26.— CLX. 
 On Adimantus, taho commanded at Salamis. 
 Here Adimantus lies, by whom led on 
 To fight, all Hellas freedom's garland won. 
 
 27-— cixi. 
 
 Fragment of an Inscription for those who fell near 
 
 Bysantium. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 And all who near Byzantium's fishy sea 
 
 Undaunted fell to set their country free. 
 
 28. — CLX\ai. 
 
 Inscription for the Men of Megara, who fell at Platasa. 
 
 That Greece and Megara might still be free 
 Our death we welcomed ; some beside the sea 
 Beneath Euboea, where is known the shrine 
 Of pure, bow-bearing Artemis divine ; 
 Some at Mount Mycale ; and some whose blows 
 Destroyed at Salamis Phoenicia's prows ;
 
 SIMONIDES. 219 
 
 And some who dared on that Boeotian plain 
 Attack the horseman-myriads not in vain. 
 And in the city's crowded central place 
 Thus our Nisseans chose our deeds to grace. 
 
 29. — CLXix. 
 
 Inscription for a Lion on the Grave of Leonidas. 
 
 Of beasts the bravest I, of mortals he, 
 
 Upon this mound of stone now watched by me. 
 
 30.— cxc. 
 
 On Consecrated Arms. 
 
 The conquering crew of Diodorus gave 
 These arms to Leto, spoils of Medians brave. 
 
 31. — cxci. 
 
 On a Trophy at Delphi. 
 
 In sign and witness of victorious deeds 
 The Delphians raised me, honouring highest Jove, 
 When they with Phoebus' aid tlie assaulting Medes 
 Had chased, and saved the brass-crowned fane and grove. 
 
 32. — cxcii. 
 
 On a Trophy in honour of Artemis. 
 
 The sons of Athens here at sea subdued 
 
 In fight all Asia's many- voiced brood ; 
 
 And when the Medes had fallen, they built up this 
 
 Their trophy due to maiden Artemis. 
 
 33. — cxciii. 
 On Democritus. 
 
 Dertiocritus was third of all, when met 
 The Greek and Mede at Salamis in fray : 
 Five ships he took, and free one Doi-ian set. 
 Which first barbarian hands had made their prey. 
 
 L2
 
 220 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 34.— cxciv. 
 On a Consecrated Picture of Corinthian Women. 
 For Greece, and most to aid their townsmen bold, 
 These women much the Cyprian power besought : 
 Great Aphrodite loved this noblest hold 
 Of Greece ; for it against the Medians fought. 
 
 35. — cxcv. 
 
 On a Golden Tripod at Delphi. 
 
 This gift for wide-spread Greece was made by those 
 Who rescued all its towns from slavery's woes. 
 
 36.— cxcviii. 
 
 On a Tripod at Delphi. 
 
 Pausanias, chief of Greece, who slew the Medes, 
 To Phoebus gave this fruit of warlike deeds. 
 
 37.— CXCVIII. 
 
 On a Bronze Vase. 
 
 This sign of valour Euxine's shore to gi'ace 
 Pausanias gave to him who rules the seas, 
 The chief o'er Greece of Lacedaemon's race, 
 Sprung tlu'ough Cleombrotus from Hercules. 
 
 38.— cxcix. 
 On an Altar to Jupiter. 
 
 The Greeks, in pride of their victorious ai'ms. 
 Which conquered following on where valour drove. 
 For Greece delivered all from Persia's swarms. 
 This altar built to thank delivermg Jove. 
 
 39.— cc. 
 
 On Arms in the Temple of Athene. 
 
 These bows and arrows now from strife at rest 
 Are hung on high within Athene's fane; 
 Which oft in fight by gore from many a breast 
 Of horsemen Medes were washed with crimson stain.
 
 SIMONIDES. 221 
 
 40.— Lix. 
 
 On the Battle of Platcea. A Fragment. 
 
 The midmost those of watered Ephyre, 
 
 Well skilled in all the discipline of war; 
 
 And Glaucus' sons from Corinth on the sea 
 
 Made witness to their toils the golden star 
 
 That lights the noontide air: and thus shall he 
 
 Their and their father's glory spread afar ; 
 
 For he sees all things best, the noontide's golden star. 
 
 Here are brought together all the memorial 
 verses extant on the conflict between Greece and 
 Asia, which are either known to have been com- 
 posed by Simonides, or can probably be attri- 
 buted to him. The English reader will be struck 
 by boldnesses and harshnesses of expression, for 
 which the original poet is not responsible, and 
 which will appear excusable only to those who 
 know by trial the difficulty of rendering in Eng- 
 lish verse compositions of so limited a form and 
 so compact a structure, and containing many 
 Greek names, having no natural affinity to our 
 rhymes, and admitting of no equivalents. The 
 character which distinguishes these inscriptions, 
 is a perfect appropriateness, at once weighty and 
 elegant, to their well-known subjects and to their 
 monumental purpose; a merit for which an in- 
 ferior poet might have been led to substitute 
 either the pictorial narrative of epic song, or the 
 excited feeling of lyric. This sense of the fitting 
 and adequate, when embracing a large domain of 
 thought, combined with creative genius, is the
 
 222 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 sufficient and only source of the highest works 
 of art. Theraistocles seems no less apt for the 
 Opportunity he was placed in, than Simonides 
 for the task of commemorating his achievements. 
 
 With this Athenian he stood in close personal 
 relation. We have indeed only a single couplet 
 directly devoted to him, in which the poet says : 
 
 41.— cxcvit. 
 
 A Thracian woman named Abrotonon 
 Bestowed on Greece Themistocles her son. 
 
 But there are anecdotes showing that they were 
 in habits of social intercourse. It is even said 
 that Simonides on some occasion asked too great 
 a favour of him, while he was commandei', and 
 that he replied, his friend would be a bad poet 
 in singing against tune, and he a bad ruler in 
 acting against law. The tale sounds very like 
 the sonorous phrase of some later writer ; for it 
 was not respect for the laws, or for the idea of 
 duty in any form, that distinguished Themisto- 
 cles. It may however have been an excuse to 
 avoid doing something inconvenient, but perhaps 
 in itself innocent, to which there happened to be 
 a plausible technical objection. Themistocles is 
 also reported to have indulged in some pleasantry 
 on occasion of the poet's consent to have his por- 
 trait taken, his features not being favourable for 
 that purpose. The Athenian may the more have 
 been tempted to this from the consciousness of
 
 SIMONIDES. 223 
 
 that noble aspect which many centuries afterwards 
 was observed in the statue he had erected of him- 
 self. The great statesman was not very likely 
 to have reflected that there is no man, however 
 obscure, much less such a poet as Simonides, 
 of whose countenance an accurate picture, ac- 
 companied with other adequate records of his 
 character and story, would not be a precious 
 
 ■ document. The most remarkable trait of their 
 conversation is the answer of Themistocles to 
 the Cean's offer of teaching him how to cultivate 
 the art of remembering : / should ^jre/J?/* that of 
 
 forgetting. This is probably the only memorial 
 which for a moment shows us the deep self- 
 consciousness of a man so famous by his worldly 
 faculties and deeds. 
 
 The poet is also recorded to have lived in 
 familiarity with the other Greek whose name 
 is most connected with the history of the Per- 
 sian overthrow, the Spartan Pausanias. In the 
 height and giddiness of his fame and power, 
 Pausanias at a banquet asked his guest for some 
 lively saying to give zest to the conviviality, 
 when the poet replied. Remember that thou art 
 a man. Afterwards, when in utter ruin, and 
 dying of famine, Pausanias exclaimed, O! Cean 
 
 friend, great teas thy word to me ; and I in my 
 
 folly held it for nought. 
 
 The fate of these two men, the most eminent 
 in their day, of Athens and of Sparta, both fallen
 
 224 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 before their deaths into calamity, and leaguing 
 themselves with the Persians, whom they had 
 gained immoii:al renown by defeating, — the one 
 dying in exile, and the other as an infamous cri- 
 minal, — has left no trace in the existing writings 
 of Simonides, who had known them both. Their 
 stories however were well fitted to strengthen 
 that vein of mom'nful reflection on the weakness 
 and instability of man, which is apparent in some 
 fragments of his poems, and was evidently essen- 
 tial to his character. Nor can it be doubted that 
 he must often have heaved a thoughtful sigh over 
 the confused mischances of will and circumstance, 
 which had overthrown the two chief conqueroi^s 
 at Platasa and Salamis, and had brought on them, 
 not only miseiy, but that saddest Mud of defeat, 
 stigmatized by the conscience of mankind with 
 the name of guilt. 
 
 Simonides was now nearly eighty years old, 
 and must have looked forward to that close which 
 alike ends the tale of the most quietly successful 
 and the most fatally disturbed life, and transfers 
 to other worlds of action both the poet and the 
 hero. But it did not consist with his clear and 
 shaping spirit to waste himself in lamenting either 
 for the unalterable past which had devoured others, 
 or for his own inevitable future. Accortlingly 
 we find him engaged at Athens in recording the 
 choral successes of his friends as well as his own. 
 The following lines appear designed to comme-
 
 SIMONIDES. 225 
 
 morate the victory of a tribe which had often 
 
 before failed ; 
 
 42.— ccv. 
 On a Votive Tripod, 
 Oft swelled with vivid shout the Bacchanal Hours, 
 While strove the Acamantian tribe in song ; 
 Oft crowned with sacred caps and votive flowers 
 The anointed heads of that melodious throng. 
 This Tripod, sign of their victorious day, 
 They won, instructed by Antigenes, 
 Argive Ariston guiding well the lay, 
 With Dorian pipings sweet the soul to please. 
 But Hipponicus, Struthon's son, defrayed 
 The cost, and in the Graces' car was set : 
 They 'mid mankind his name illustrious made, 
 Dear to each Muse that wears the violet. 
 
 43.— ecu. 
 On a Votive Tablet. 
 That bulls and tripods fifty -six were gained, 
 Simonides, by thee, this tablet shows. 
 Thy voice has oft sweet choirs of singers trained; 
 So now in Victory's car thou may'st repose. 
 
 44. — cciii. 
 On a Choral Victory. 
 
 In Athens Adimantus ruled, when won 
 The tribe Antiochis their tripod fair ; 
 And Aristides, of Xenophilus son, 
 Set forth a choir of fifty voices rare ; 
 Whom taught at eighty years Simonides, 
 The famous offspring of Leoprepes. 
 
 It must have been after Simonides was eighty 
 (B.C. 476), that he left Athens to visit Hiero of 
 Syracuse. There is a faint probability that an 
 
 L 3
 
 226 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 anecdote often recorded of him ought to be re- 
 ferred to this voyage. Having landed with his 
 shipmates near Tarentum, he found the corpse 
 of a murdered man, and buried it on the shore. 
 The following night an apparition of the man 
 stood before him, and warned him not to sail the 
 next day. His companions disregarded the coun- 
 sel ; and a storm sank them in the waters. There 
 is an inscription, wliich probably was designed for 
 the spectral prophet : 
 
 45. — CLxxxiii. 
 
 The man who saved, though dead, by faithful aid 
 Simonides of Ceos, here is laid. 
 
 We have also another couplet which may have 
 been designed for the tomb, or may be part of 
 an elegy: 
 
 46. — cLxxiv. 
 
 Do thou, protecting Jove ! my murderers slay. 
 And those who dug my grave with life repay. 
 
 This wish of the murdered man has been re- 
 presented as likely to proceed from Simonides, 
 inasmuch as Plato introduces him in the Re- 
 public, maintaining the doctrine, which indeed 
 was that usual among the ancients, that it is 
 just to benefit our friends and injure our enemies. 
 The more interesting point however is the friendly 
 vision, in which it is easy for us now to read the 
 evidence of a nature more finely sensitive than 
 common to all human impressions, and to the phy- 
 sical tendencies of things, and thus beholding with
 
 SIMONIDES. 227 
 
 the clearness and immediateness of Intuition, much 
 
 which is concealed from ordinary eyes, and which 
 
 theory could never attain to. 
 
 It is well known that the great victory gained 
 
 at Himera by the Sicilians under Gelo against 
 
 the Carthaginians was said to have been won 
 
 on the same day on which the Ijattle of Salamis 
 
 was fought (B.C. 480). On this occasion Gelo 
 
 and his brothers dedicated a tripod at Delphi, on 
 
 which the inscription was composed by Simonides, 
 
 and is as follows : 
 
 47.— cxcvi. 
 
 Dinomenes' four sons this tripod gave, 
 Gelo and Hiero, Polyzelus third. 
 Last Tlirasybulus, having helped to save 
 Greece, and subdued the great barbarian herd. 
 
 About three years after the battle, Hiero suc- 
 ceeded his brother as ruler of Syracuse, and 
 of a large portion of Sicily. The power of tliis 
 family may be unagined from the fact, that, 
 before it had been strengthened by the victory 
 at Himera, Gelo offered on certain conditions to 
 aid the Greeks against Xerxes with thirty ships 
 of Avar and an army of thirty thousand men, and 
 to supply provisions during the war for the whole 
 army of the Greeks. Hiero Avas probably the 
 richest and most powerful man of the Hellenic 
 race before Philip of Macedon. But still more 
 was he distinguished by his love for the most 
 beautiful kinds of cultivation, and by the favour
 
 228 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 he showed to the most illustrious men of his age. 
 He drew to his court at the same time Simonides, 
 ^•Eschylus, and Pindar. With these were asso- 
 ciated Bacchjlides the Cean, a lyric poet younger 
 than Simonides, and related to him, and Epi- 
 charmus, the writer of comedies, whose thoughtful 
 knowledge of human nature is celebrated in an- 
 tiquity. These names are sufficient vouchers for 
 the tastes of Hiero, and for the kind of conver- 
 sation he delighted in. The world has assuredly 
 never seen, unless at AVeimar, so remarkable a 
 union of men of the highest genius at the court 
 of a prince. iEschylus we know to have been 
 memorable for his power of rounding into a 
 whole, producing a deep sense of beauty, the 
 highest images of strength and pain then con- 
 ceivable by man; and to have been himself a 
 hero worthy to paint the heroism of an earlier 
 and huger lineage. In Pindar the only element 
 is beauty, the whole life harmony, and the 
 composition is a whole of which every part is a 
 distinct type, so that, more than almost any other 
 poet of equal greatness, he can be adequately 
 presented in fragments. All his own existence 
 was probably devoted to the cultivation and en- 
 joyment of the fair melodious world which his 
 odes display to us. Bacchylides was probably 
 but a weaker Simonides; and Epicharmus must 
 have been akin to the elder Cean, rather by his 
 shrewd and various knowledge of human nature
 
 STMONIDES. 229 
 
 and life, than by anything resembling the de- 
 lightful and masterly compass of song Avhich 
 distinguished the lyric poet. In Simonides we 
 have not only this power of harmonious en- 
 chantment, but also a clear and deep reflective in- 
 sight into the seriousness of our destiny on earth, 
 and the rules of sympathy, tolerance, and earnest 
 labour, by which it may best be wrought to 
 good. These qualities, matured and strengthened 
 by his long and manifold experience, rendered 
 him both a valuable counsellor and a delightful 
 companion to Hiero, while the renowned ruler 
 lived in his Syracuse, in sight of the great moun- 
 tains and the wide sea, surrounded with the 
 wealth of fruitful Sicily, and honoured by the 
 noblest masters of song and wisdom then existing 
 in the world. We find traces of this cordial 
 intercourse between the poet and the sovereign 
 in more than one anecdote. Immediately after 
 his ai'rival Simonides succeeded in reconciling 
 Theron of Agrigentum to Hiero; and the al- 
 liance was secured by the marriage of the Sy- 
 racusan prince to Theron's sister. Hiero, on the 
 other hand, sent the poet such a superabundant 
 quantity of provisions, that he was in the habit 
 of selling a portion of them; which indeed was 
 probably the wish of his patron. Being asked 
 by some foolish acquaintance why he did this? 
 he answered quietly. To exhibit Hiero's magni- 
 Jicence and my moderation. He probably addressed
 
 230 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 poems to Hiero, as Pindar did; and it has been 
 suggested that we have a fragment of one of these 
 in the lines, 
 
 48. — cxvii. 
 
 Without delight, 
 
 What mortal life, what sovereign rule were dear ? 
 
 If wanting this the gods' estate were drear. 
 
 He was also on terms, at least of acquaintance, 
 with the wife of Hiero, in the arrangement for 
 whose marriage he had taken a decisive part. It 
 is said that she once asked him whether it was 
 best to be rich or wise ? and that he answered. 
 Rich ; for I see icise men waiting at the doors of the 
 wealthy : a piece of courteous irony in which the 
 lady probably saw less than all its meaning. In a 
 similar strain of pleasantry it is related that at an 
 entertainment a very large hare was set on the 
 table, but not near the poet, who however had a 
 portion of it sent to him by the prince himself, 
 and immediately parodied a line of Homer (xiv. 
 33) in the verse 
 
 49. — ccxxviii. 
 Though large it did not reach as far as me. 
 
 But of these traits of the man during the Sici- 
 lian years which closed his long life, the most 
 celebrated, and the most remarkable, is his answer 
 to Hiero's question. What is God ? / 7nust ask, 
 he replied, a day to consider. On the morrow his 
 answer to the same inquiry was, that he must have
 
 SIMONIDES. 231 
 
 two days. And at each following demand he 
 doubled the time which would be needful for him 
 to solve the difficulty. At last, when Hiero was 
 wearied out, and begged to know the reason of 
 this proceeding. It is, he said, because the more I 
 rejiect upon the matter, the darker I find it. 
 
 Tertullian, it is well known, tells a similar story 
 of Thales and Croesus, and says, that the simplest 
 Christian could have answered a question, which 
 baffled so wise a Pagan. Bayle, on the other 
 hand, has employed one of the most ingenious and 
 striking essays in his Dictionary to show that 
 there are, even in modern times, and for a man 
 possessing Christian faith, difficulties in the inquiry 
 which it is impossible to get over. Nor is it hard 
 to show that Tertullian at least had no answer 
 ready, the incompleteness of which Simonides 
 could not easily have manifested. The point at 
 issue between Tertullian and Bayle, the Montanist 
 and the Sceptic, might have been rendered a good 
 deal clearer by a consideration of the difference 
 between the knowledge which conscience and 
 religion requu'e, — which is all that Christianity 
 offers, and is indeed far the most important, for it 
 concerns all men, — and the knowledge necessary 
 to supply a basis and centre for a complete deve- 
 lopment of all we know in lucid and unbroken 
 unity; which is evidently the kind of know- 
 ledge of God found so difficult by Simonides. It 
 is plain that religion exhibits the highest and
 
 232 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 universal Being in a form to be apprehended by 
 the affections, which is the greatest good that can 
 be accomplished for man. But this form may be 
 much more vaffue and more limited than the scien- 
 tific intelligence can rest content with, when it 
 seeks one primary idea, to which all phenomena 
 may, in due degrees, and in their several direc- 
 tions, be subordinated. The religious truth most 
 concerns all men ; for all men have affections that 
 tend more or less to the unseen and eternal ; and 
 faith is inseparable from the moral law, wliich the 
 conscience of all men requires. But the multi- 
 tude have been always, and still are, able to carry 
 on the work of life, — nay, to carry it on, if they 
 so please, honestly and successfully, — with a very 
 shadowy and partial insight into more than the 
 practical uses of a few of the commonest and most 
 necessary objects around them. They are quite 
 incapable of imagining an inquiry which should 
 aim to find a single fundamental source of exist- 
 ence, and to assign the relations to this of all that 
 we know, and of our conscious powder of knowing. 
 The religious demand was very inadequately 
 answered by Paganism ; and the scientific one 
 was only beginning to be apprehended and feebly 
 responded to when Simonides confessed his igno- 
 rance. Nor was it till about the time of his 
 death* that the man was born, who laid the im- 
 
 * Simonides died 407 : Socrates was born 470 B.C.
 
 SIMONIDES. 233 
 
 movable foundations of philosophy by the prin- 
 ciple of the essential unity of all knowledge, and 
 by the development of the idea that in man, and 
 not in the physical universe, we must look for the 
 clearest and highest type of the Archetypal Being. 
 It is impossible however not to feel a strong and 
 pensive interest in bringing together the early 
 childhood and the extreme old age of this great 
 poet, in seeing him join as a boy in the sacrifices 
 of his native town, and after more than threescore 
 years and ten wearying his subtle intellect, his 
 inexhaustible memory, and creative imagination, 
 to discover some distinct position for the reason, 
 by which it might explain and enlarge the object 
 of his own and of his country's religion into a 
 universal ground of being. That which lay be- 
 tween his boyish faith and his hoary inquny, was 
 a whole human life. The powers within him, 
 which had been thus unfolded and trained, were 
 those which essentially belong to every one. The 
 question was one which lies in the onward road of 
 all human thought ; and there are none in whom 
 self-consciousness has ever been awakened, who 
 must not feel as if a dim lantern were moving 
 through the dusky passages of their own existence, 
 when they meditate on the millions of reflections 
 and of images which must have flitted past him, or 
 been successively grouped into different principles, 
 each in turn tried and abandoned, while the old 
 man mused in solitude on the problem of the
 
 234 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 source of that being which he shared with the 
 universe, and of which he had experienced so 
 much, yet felt that he understood so little. These 
 reflections give an additional pathos to his answer, 
 when, being asked how long a time he had lived, 
 he replied: A short time, hit mcmy years ; for even 
 the thousand years which the gods grant to the 
 Hyperboreans, are only a moment, nay, less than a 
 moment. 
 
 This life, which had been so long graced by 
 genius and fame, ended at ninety (b.c. 467), 
 possessed to the last of the full vigour and har- 
 mony of its faculties. Dying at Syracuse, he 
 was buried outside its gates ; and his tomb bore 
 this inscription : 
 
 Six times and fifty thou the tripod prize, 
 Simonides, didst gain ; and dying here 
 In Sicily, thy soul so sweet and wise 
 To Ceos and to Greece is ever dear. 
 
 This tomb was afterwards destroyed by the Agri- 
 gentine commander Phoenix in a war with Syra- 
 cuse, in order to build a tower against the city, 
 which proved the means of its capture. 
 
 To the little that is known of the poet's history, 
 which has all been preserved from the significance 
 of the several anecdotes, it may be well to add 
 such sayings of liis as are recorded, and the most 
 characteristic remaining specimens of his poetry, 
 before we oflfer a few words on his writings and 
 character. When some one asked him to write a
 
 SIMONIDES. 235 
 
 panegyrical poem, assuring him that he should 
 always feel grateful for it, Simonides produced 
 two caskets, and said that the one, into which he 
 put the thanks he received, was always empty in 
 time of need ; the other, into which he put his 
 money, always full. Being asked who were the 
 best-born men, he answered. Those descended from 
 a line of ivealthy ancestors ; referring doubtless to 
 the want of liberal cultivation in those who had 
 been compelled to earn their own subsistence : for 
 it is evident from his own story that there was in 
 that age felt to be some incongruity between the 
 possession of high and various talents, and the 
 acceptance of a direct price for the exercise of 
 them. He was an admirer of silence, like all 
 men of very eminent thoughtfulness, and pro- 
 bably, like many of them, must often have smiled 
 at his own volubility in praise of it. He said that 
 he had often repented of speaking, but never of 
 holdino; his tong-ue. Yet he saw the other side of 
 the truth : for he once addressed a silent guest at 
 an enter taiutment with the pithy words. Friend, 
 if you are a fool, you have been doing taisely; but if 
 wise, foolishly. Some one told him that he had 
 heard several persons speaking ill of him ; and the 
 poet answered. Then why did not you leave off 
 slandering me with your ears? in which three 
 simple remarks on the subject of speaking and 
 hearing is perhaps couched all the truth of the 
 matter. When he was asked, why even in old
 
 236 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 age he kept on accumulating money. Because, he 
 replied, / tcould rather at my death leave something 
 to my enemies, than during my life loant anything of 
 my friends. And on a similar occasion he said, 
 that old age had deprived him of most other plea- 
 sures, and that he must make the best of his power 
 of enriching himself, which almost alone remained. 
 He called painting silent poetry, and poetry vocal 
 painting : and the ancients found in his composi- 
 tions a vividness of presentation corresponding to 
 his theory. Lastly it may be mentioned that, 
 when a person who had gained a victory in a 
 chariot-race at Olympia with mules, offered him a 
 trifling sum of money for the usual ode, Simonides 
 said that mules were too undignified a topic for 
 poetry ; but, on receiving a larger reward, he 
 wrote an ode beginning. 
 
 Ye daughters sprung from wind-swift horses, hail ! 
 
 In which tale, as in several of the others, a reader 
 more sagacious than the mules will rather see the 
 proofs of his dexterous pleasantry, than of the 
 moral meanness very needlessly imputed to him. 
 It is scarcely worth while to ask a question so 
 little likely to be answered as. Who among the 
 patrons or employers of Simonides better deserved 
 or had more hardly earned their wealth ? 
 
 Among his poems and fragments now extant are 
 several unconnected with any remarkable events in 
 his life, wliicli therefore have not appeared in our
 
 SIMONIDES. 237 
 
 narrative, but which are either beautiful or other- 
 wise characteristic. 
 
 The following epigram is a mock inscription for 
 Timocreon, a Rhodian athlete and poet, who had 
 joined the Persians against Greece at the time of 
 the invasion, and was not permitted by Themis- 
 tocles, after Xerxes had been routed, to return to 
 his own country. The Rhodian had therefore 
 attacked in his writings not only Themistocles, but 
 Simonides, as his friend, and as the great poet of 
 the successful war against the barbarians. The 
 retort of the latter was said to be perfectly justi- 
 fied by the habits of his adversary : 
 
 60. CLXXXVI. 
 
 Timocreon of Rhodes, who much devoured, 
 
 Much drank, much slandered, lies by death o'erpowered. 
 
 The following stanza is a little scolion, or song, 
 for the table ; and has in the original a delightful 
 elegance and simplicity : 
 
 51. XLII. 
 
 Good health for moi-tal man is best, 
 
 And next to this a beauteous form, ^ 
 
 Then riches not by guile possessed, 
 
 And lastly youth with friendships warm. 
 
 These fragments of dancing-songs (hyporchemata) 
 have something of the same character : 
 
 52. — xLiii. 
 Like a reinless courser's bound, 
 Or an Amyclean hound, 
 Chase thou with wheeling footstep the song's 
 meandering sound.
 
 238 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 53.— xLiv. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 As o'er the flowery Dotian ground, 
 Chasing the horned stag, flies the hound, 
 And seizes the prey with a deadly bound. 
 While it tui'ns its neck to gaze around. 
 
 The fitness of these passages to be illustrated by 
 the pantomime of the dancers is plain even to us ; 
 and this is the point for which they are cited by 
 Plutarch, who describes the poet as excelling in 
 this kind of composition. 
 
 The following are specimens of a cast of reflec- 
 tion which seems to have been habitual with liim. 
 
 54.— Lii. 
 To one dread gulf all things in common tend : 
 There loftiest virtues, amplest riches end. 
 
 65. — Liii. 
 
 Long are we dying ; reckoned up from birth, 
 Few years, and evil those, are ours on earth. 
 
 66.— Liv. 
 Of men the strength is small, the hopes are vain. 
 And pain in life's brief space is heaped on pain ; 
 And death inevitable hangs in air. 
 Of which alike the good and evil share. 
 
 57. — LX. 
 'Mid mortal beings nought for ever stays ; 
 And thus with beauteous love the Chian says, 
 The race of man departs like forest leaves; 
 Though seldom he who hears the truth receives : 
 For Hope, not far from each, in every heart, 
 Of men full-grown, or those unripe will start ; 
 And still, while blooms the lovely flower of youth, 
 The empty mind delights to dream untruth,
 
 SIMONroES. 239 
 
 Expects nor age nor death, and bold and strong 
 Thinks not that sickness e'er can work it wrong. 
 
 Ah fools ! deluded thus, untaught to scan, 
 How swiftly pass the youth and life of man. 
 This knowing, thou, while still thou hast the power, 
 Indulge thy soul, and taste the blissful hour. 
 
 He has no less forcibly expressed another, but not 
 inconsistent truth, in this fragment : 
 
 58. — XXXII. 
 
 And 'tis said 
 
 That Virtue, dwelling high on pathless rocks, 
 A holy goddess, loves the holy place. 
 And never there is seen by eyes of those 
 Whom painful labour has not tried within, 
 And borne them up to manhood's citadel. 
 
 The poet Cleobulus had composed an epitaph on 
 a certain Midas, of which the following lines are a 
 version. The brazen maid means doubtless a 
 bronze pillar erected on the stone sepulclu-e, and 
 inscribed with the verses : 
 
 A brazen maid am I on Midas' tomb. 
 While water flows, and trees grow tall and bloom. 
 While gleams the moon, and rays of sunrise flash, 
 While rivers run, and ocean billows dash. 
 Above this mournful grave I still shall rise, 
 And tell the passer-by here Midas lies. 
 
 To these lines Simonides refers as follows : 
 
 69.— X. 
 
 The Lindian Cleobulus who can praise. 
 When beyond the river flowing, 
 And beyond the springtime's growing, 
 The golden moon and fair sun-rays.
 
 240 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 He prolongs a pillar's hour? 
 
 For the gods are over all supreme : 
 
 But o'er the stone men's hands have power. 
 
 So foolish he from whom the theme. 
 
 The following inscription is a contrast to that of 
 Cleobulus, as well as to most of those by Simonides 
 himself; 
 
 60. — CLXXVIII. 
 
 I, Theodorus, dying pleased my foe, 
 
 Whose death will please a third : thus all must go. 
 
 This fragment, probably of a lament, breathes 
 the poet's most usual feeling: 
 
 61.— LI. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Not even those in former time, 
 Godlike sons of gods sublime, 
 Could a painless life prolong. 
 Pure from sickness, free fi-om wrong, 
 Nor so to calm old age could climb. 
 
 The last citation with which we will illustrate 
 the talents and sentiment of the poet, is one of 
 the most celebrated and most exquisitely beautiful 
 remains of ancient literature. In reading it In 
 the original the same sense of tender and de- 
 lightful harmony is experienced as in looking 
 at one of the most finished and admirable reliefs 
 of Grecian sculpture, with all the superiority 
 possessed by Avords over every other organ of art. 
 
 Danae, according to the legend, was cast into 
 the sea with her child shut up in a chest, and
 
 SIMONIDES. 241 
 
 having, as it seems from an expression in the 
 poem, a lamp beside her. The concluding lines 
 refer to Jupiter as the father of her child. 
 
 62.— L. 
 
 And when upon the graven coffer fell 
 
 The wind, and dashed the watery swell, 
 
 With wetted cheeks she sank in mickle fear, 
 
 And her hand on Perseus pressed, 
 
 And said. My child, what grief is here ! 
 
 But thou upon my milky breast. 
 
 In this mournful brass-bound ark, 
 
 Takest thus thy quiet rest, 
 
 'Mid the lamp-illumined dark. 
 
 Nor the waves that ripple past, 
 
 O'er thy long unmoistened hair 
 
 Heedest thou, nor voiceful blast. 
 
 In thy purple garment laid, thou a face so fair. 
 
 But if this pain to thee were pain, 
 Thine ear had heard my voice complain. 
 Rest thou, my child, in sleep. 
 And still may rest the deep. 
 And rest my boundless woe. 
 And soon, father Jove ! from thee 
 May help be sent to us below ; 
 And if my words too boldly flow. 
 For this my baby's sake forgive thou me. 
 
 These translations may afford the kind of help 
 for forming a judgement of Simonides, which rude 
 engravings supply to a person who has not seen 
 the pictures. It will be apparent even in the 
 versions that the poet's characteristics are tem- 
 perate and simple vigour, and thoughtful pathetic 
 elegance. In him pregnant justness of reflection, 
 and lively distinctness in presenting images, wore 
 
 VOL. I. M
 
 242 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 surrounded, as with an atmosphere, or ambient 
 evening sea, by a deep and tender hmiianity, 
 which is the basis of his poetic feeling. An 
 earnest sense of the greatness of valour and ge- 
 nerosity was in liim closely connected, — as it 
 often is not, — with a clear insight into the diffi- 
 culty of eminent virtue for man, and a corres- 
 ponding sagacity and meditative kindliness in 
 allowing for failures and vices, which it is so 
 easy to denounce, and so hard to avoid. In his 
 conversation it seems that there was often a large 
 mixture of u'ony, in which, while saying what 
 the occasion appeared to require, and what 
 his companions could understand, he inwardly 
 pleased himself with the consideration of the 
 larger and deeper and vei*y different kind of 
 truth which it would have been unsuitable to 
 express: a mode of conversation, the indispen- 
 sable resource of any one who, seeing farther 
 than those about him, either is not impelled by 
 his temperament to urge and enforce his own 
 convictions upon all, however incapable of re- 
 ceiving them rightly, or who deliberately disap- 
 proves of the attempt to do so. The quickness, the 
 precision, and the calmness of his understanding 
 peculiarly fitted him to excel in this mode of 
 expression; and his tact and delicate sympathy 
 enabled him to exercise his skiU without offending 
 others. The practice of ironical speaking no 
 doubt indicates a vcrv distinct consciousness of
 
 SIMONIDES. 243 
 
 superiority as to the immediate topic over most 
 of those around. But this is no less manifest 
 in the zealous endeavour to convert them all to 
 our peculiar mode of thinking: and the inevitable 
 ill success is apt to betray itself in fierce denun- 
 ciations and revilings, which are full as far from 
 charity as is quiet aloofness and the courteous 
 disguise of equivocal expression. It often hap- 
 pens that the only other possible method of social 
 intercourse, for a man serious in his purposes 
 and character, is to withdraw into stern silence, 
 and present himself as an unconquerable dumb 
 protester against every one else, except when an 
 opportunity offers of oracularly disclosing his own 
 opinion, rather seeming to legislate for the inferior 
 beings about him, than to interchange feeling, 
 fancy, and reflection, with congenial neighbours. 
 This sullen moral dignity was not the method of 
 the Cean poet; nor is it that which any poet, 
 any man with a glowing heart and gift of utter- 
 ance, could bring himself to adopt. Of his 
 imputed avarice little need be said. The trans- 
 parent brightness and steadiness of his appre- 
 hension, which showed itself in his accurate use 
 of words, and in his fresh and bold painting of 
 images, was evidently the ground of that ap- 
 preciation of objects, which gave them so much 
 value in his eyes, and rendered wealth, the ma- 
 terial symbol of all other possessions, even unduly 
 dear to him. At the same time it must be said, 
 
 M2
 
 244 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 that probably the largest portion of what the 
 ancients wrote on the matter proceeded from 
 folly, malignity, envy, disappointed sycophancy? 
 and from the deep-seated infirmity of man, which 
 tries to supply its own sense of weakness by 
 giving an exaggerated and diseased strength to 
 its fancies, metaphors, hopes, professions, and 
 assertions of all kinds. Simonides played, as 
 was his custom, with those who either unwor- 
 thily attempted to cozen him into enriching them, 
 or who talked inflated gossip on the subject of 
 his alleged covetousness ; and thus he amused 
 himself by strengthening the charge. And 
 though parsimony be, for obvious reasons, an un- 
 popular feeling, it is certainly the least noxious 
 of all others, and not incompatible with noble 
 heights of uprightness and earnestness. The 
 accusation against Simonides, the only one of 
 the least moment, had probably some ground of 
 fact. It points to a structure of character, which 
 is chiefly substantiated by the strong negative 
 evidence that there is nothing known to the 
 contrary in his life or writings, — namely, to a 
 coldness of personal affection. We hear nothing 
 of his family ties, except that he did leave a 
 daughter; nor have we the record of any heart- 
 felt friendships. He stands before us alone, 
 though in the centre of a splendid prospect, and 
 in the vicinity of transcendent characters. Ge- 
 nius is his, and exquisite cultivation and com-
 
 SIMONIDES. 245 
 
 pleteness, a soft, polished amenity, and much of 
 meditative benevolence. But of moral enthu- 
 siasm, or of absorbing affection, he was probably- 
 less capable than many of his inferiors in intellect 
 and in the sense of ideal harmony. It may how- 
 ever be questioned whether, in trying him by 
 this standard, we do not show a narrow injustice, 
 which he would not have practised towards 
 persons the most unlike himself. The vulgar 
 measure for men is often a mere fictitious com- 
 bination of inconsistent qualities, such as we find 
 united only in the heroes of dull romances and 
 dramas. The more distance of time or place, 
 or strangeness of story, or height of fame removes 
 any one from the trivial and prosaic circle of 
 daily life, the more unscrupulously is he required 
 to display a monstrous medley of internecine 
 excellencies. It is better for us to take great 
 men as we can get them, not as we fancy we 
 could improve and beautify them. And it is 
 satisfactory to turn from the talk of rhetori- 
 cians and scholiasts about Simonides, and enjoy 
 a poem like his Danae, where we find what 
 we may be quite certain lay deep in the heart 
 of the man. In this we may see, besides the 
 thorough masterliness of the style, and the per- 
 fect roundness and loveliness of the picture, a free- 
 dom from exaggeration and a truth of feeling to 
 which little in poetry is equal. The sea is not in 
 any extraordinary commotion; nor is Danae in
 
 246 CRITICAL ESSAYS, 
 
 convulsions: and with how far more impressive 
 a gleam does her little lamp burn in the darkness, 
 than all the lightnings of the sky, and all the 
 torches of the Furies! The loss of his many- 
 works has added to the value of the grains and 
 sparks remaining to us. All these relics, which 
 have not already appeared in this essay, we now 
 subjoin, except a few fragments, consisting of 
 one or two lines, and a very few rather longer 
 portions, which it has been found inexpedient or 
 impossible to render into English verse. 
 
 63.— xnii. 
 From an Ode to an unhiown Conqueror in the Gaines. 
 
 And over his head* 
 Birds without number ai-e flying, and fishes are leaping 
 
 around, 
 Out of the deep blue waters won by the tuneful sound. 
 For no whisper was heard in the air 
 Of the wind which shakes the leafy glen, 
 To prevent the song that warbled there, 
 Gliding within the ears of men. 
 In the winter thus does Jove's high reason 
 For a fortnight lull the sea to rest ; 
 And mortals call it the peaceful season 
 Of the gorgeous halcyon's sacred nest. 
 
 64.— Lxi. 
 On Timarchus. 
 Ah ! sore disease, to men why enviest thou 
 Their prime of years before they join the dead? 
 His life from fair Timarchus snatching now, 
 Before the youth his maiden bride could wed. 
 
 This fragment comes from a passage about Orpheus.
 
 , SIMOMIDES. 247 
 
 65. — Lxii. 
 
 On Timarchus. 
 
 Timarchus, circled in his sire's embrace, 
 Exclaimed, while breathing out his latest breath, 
 Timenor's son, henceforth in thought retrace , 
 The strength and calm of soul I keep in death. 
 
 66. — ccvi. 
 
 On an Olt/mpic Wrestler. 
 
 Know, Theognetus won the Olympic wreatli 
 
 For hands well reined and ruled, the wrestler's crown. 
 
 Most fair in form, nor aught in skill beneath 
 
 His beauty, honouring thus his noble town. 
 
 67. — ccvii. 
 On a Figure of Hermes. 
 
 Leocrates, of Stroebus son, thy love 
 This bust to Hermes gave, each fair-haired Grace 
 So honouring : where ? in Academia's grove. 
 The deed I tell to all who tread the place. 
 
 68.— ccix. 
 
 On a Statue of Dandes. 
 
 The Argive runner Dandes here behold. 
 
 Whose victories graced that land of many steeds ; 
 
 Twice at Olympia won, at Pytho thrice, 
 
 At Isthmus twice, at Nemea thrice five times, 
 
 Elsewhere more often than can here be said. 
 
 ■ 69.— Lxiii. 
 On Gorgo. 
 Young Gorgo dying to her mother said. 
 While clinging on her bosom wept the maid, 
 Beside my father stay thou here, and bear 
 A happier daughter for thine age to care.
 
 248 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 70.— Lxiv. 
 
 On a Person drowned at Sea. 
 
 Dark Geranea ! would thy woful steep 
 
 Saw Danube's flood or Tanais wind below. 
 
 And ne'er had heard the loud Scyronian deep 
 
 Around snow-clad Moluria's valleys flow. 
 
 But now ice-cold the corpse, and void the tomb, 
 
 Thus mourning here the shipwrecked voyager's doom. 
 
 Tl.^LXV. 
 
 Inscription for those who saved Tegea. 
 
 Through these men's valour into stainless air 
 The smoke of Tegea's ruin did not burst : 
 They chose their sons should dwell in freedom there, 
 And they themselves should fall amid the first. 
 
 72. — cLxvi. 
 
 Inscription for the Athenians who wisuecessfully defended 
 Tegea. 
 
 The men of fearless heart, whose tomb is here, 
 Who died to rescue Tegea's pastoral town. 
 Remember we, that Hellas' voice may ne'er 
 Deny their vanquished heads fair Freedom's crown. 
 
 73. — CLxviii. 
 
 Inscription for Shipwrecked Mariners. 
 
 Tyrrhenian spoil to Phoebus' fane they led : 
 
 One sea, one ship, one tomb now holds them dead. 
 
 74. — CLxxii. 
 
 Inscrijttion. 
 I will record, — for 'twere no seemly doom 
 Had Archenautes' wife a nameless tomb, — 
 Xanthippe, sprung from Periander's race. 
 Who held 'mid Corinth's towera the ruler's place.
 
 SIMONIDES. 249 
 
 75.— CLxxiii. 
 
 Inscription, or Fragment of an Elegy. 
 
 The tomb of Megacles whene'er I see. 
 Unhappy Callias ! then I pity thee. 
 
 76. — CLxxiv. 
 
 Inscription. 
 
 Theognis of Sinope's tomb am I, 
 By Grlaucus reared for ancient amity. 
 
 77. CLXXV. 
 
 Thou liest, Clisthenes, in foreign earth. 
 Whom wandering o'er the Euxine destiny found : 
 Thou could'st not reach thy happy place of birth, 
 Nor seest the waves that gird tliy Chios round. 
 
 78.— CLXXVI. 
 
 Inscription for Cleodemns, who was slain rather than flj/ 
 before the Thracians. 
 
 By shame of flight was Cleodemus led 
 At deep Theaerus' mouth to mournful doom, 
 Surprised by ambushed Thracians ; so he spread 
 His fame to Diphilus, his father's, tomb. 
 
 79. — CLXXVII. 
 
 Inscription. 
 
 We each lament the loved ones nearest us ; 
 But friends and city mourn Nicodicus. 
 
 80.— CLXXIX. 
 
 Below Pythonax and his brother lie. 
 Before they saw their blooming youth pass by. 
 Their father, Megaristus, raised the tomb 
 That here for ever shall record their doom. 
 
 M3
 
 250 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 81. — CLXXX. 
 
 Inscription. 
 
 A poor man, not a Croesus, here lies dead, 
 And small the sepulclii'e befitting me : 
 Gorgippus I, who knew no marriage-bed, 
 Before I wedded pale Persephone. 
 
 82. — CLxxxi. 
 
 Tnscri2)tion, 
 This tomb to Spinther dead his father piled. 
 
 83. — CLxxxii. 
 
 Inscription for Brotachus the Cretan. 
 
 Here T, Gortynian Brotachus, am laid 
 
 In death, for which I came not, but for trade. 
 
 84.— cci. 
 
 On a Soldier's Spear dedicated to Jove. 
 
 Against this pillar tall thou taper spear 
 Repose, to Jove oracular offered here : 
 For now thy brass is old, and, worn at length 
 By warlike uses, thou hast lost thy strength. 
 
 85. — ccxiv. 
 
 On a Statue of Mile. 
 
 Fair statue this of Milo fair, who won 
 
 Seven times the Pisan prize, and quailed to none. 
 
 86.— ccxv. 
 
 On a Statue of Artemis. 
 
 This Artemis two hundred drachmas cost 
 Of Paros, those that bear the goat embossed. 
 Arcesilas, Aristodicus' son, 
 Wrought it, as fair as by Athene done.
 
 SIMONIDES. . 251 
 
 87.- ccxvi. 
 On a Crown, 
 Alcon of Crete to Leto's twin-born son 
 Devotes the Isthmian crown his boxing won. 
 
 88. — ccxvii. 
 On the Boxer PMlon. 
 
 Philon am I, Corcyrian Glaucus' son, 
 
 Who twice the Olympian prize of boxing won. 
 
 89. — ccxviii. 
 
 Here Polygnotus, son of Aglaophon, 
 The Thracian, painted burning llion. 
 
 99.— ccxx. 
 On certain Picttires which had been unjustly criticized. 
 Not skill-less Cimon painted thee ; but thus 
 Blame finds all works, e'en those of Dtedalus. 
 
 100. — ccxxi. 
 
 On a Picture. 
 
 Iphion, he of Corinth, painted this. 
 
 With hands, though faultless, doomed their fame to miss. 
 
 101. — CCXXI. 
 
 On a Painting. 
 Iphion's hand this painting wrought, whom fed 
 The water from Pirene's fountain-head. 
 
 102. — ccxxiii. 
 
 A Fraginent. 
 * * * * 
 
 With staves upon their shoulders those before 
 To Tegea loads of fish from Argos bore.
 
 ON THE WRITINGS OF THOMAS CARLYLE. 
 
 (From the London and Westininster Review for 1839.^ 
 
 A LL countries at all times require, and Eng- 
 land perhaps at present not less than others, 
 men having a faith at once distinct and large, 
 the expression of what is best in their time, and 
 having also the courage to proclaim it, and take 
 their stand upon it. Many a one there is among 
 us, prompted by the blind fire of feeling and the 
 blast of conscience, who adopts fervently, even 
 fiercely, some mode or fragment of an old creed, 
 pushes it to all extremes, presses it on all hearers, 
 and exliibits all the self-reliance and vehemence 
 of a prophet, but one to whom clear vision is 
 wanting. For where the general insight and 
 elevation necessary in our day for an adequate 
 view of man exist, there must the difficulties be 
 most keenly felt, which lie in the way of any 
 recognised tradition, or render it at least insuf- 
 ficient. Knowledge without belief, and belief 
 Avithout knowledge, divide in the main the Eng- 
 lish world between them. The apparent excep- 
 tions are generally cases of compromise, when 
 men are content to half-believe one thing, and 
 half-say another; for a whole belief would de- 
 mand its own complete expression. And in the 
 repeating by rote, for the sake of quiet, of
 
 CARLYLE. 253 
 
 popular creeds and formulas, the sense of dis- 
 content and doubt, which lurks in the heart, 
 asserts itself by stammering and reluctant sighs 
 or sneers. Semi-sincere persuasions, semi-candid 
 declarations, make up our limbo of public opinion. 
 There is often, perhaps most often, heart in the 
 words ; but often too, — how often who dare ask ? 
 within the heart a lie. 
 
 It is not to be denied that we have also in 
 literature and society many a man who proposes 
 his scheme of human life and of the universe. 
 But they almost all labour under the evil that 
 these schemes are fatally partial or superficial. 
 Some one breaks off a corner of our nature, — calls 
 it suggestion, or association, or self-interest, or 
 sympathy, or pleasure and pain, or profit and 
 loss, or the nervous system; and, lifting up the 
 fragment, says. Behold! this is the essence of man. 
 He builds a hut with a few stones of Thebes or 
 Babylon in the corner of some inmieasurable ruin, 
 and exclaims, Lo I the hundred-gated town restored! 
 See here rebuilt the city of the great king ! 
 
 As these theories, which all have their plau- 
 sibility, their use, and their vestige of truth in 
 them, take in but some small grains, but some 
 faint shadows of what man is ; therefore the livincr 
 soul of man, with its longings and capacities of 
 faith, refuses to acknowledge them. They sprung 
 from no unfathomable depth of craving for reality, 
 glow with no full stream of life ; and accordingly
 
 254 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 they have no hold on any but the cold and re- 
 cluse spinner of mferences, or the empty self- 
 seeker of this world, who considers knowledge 
 as ornamental, and looks at himself in the mu'ror, 
 whether of glass or of human eyes, with more 
 complacency when he can say, / too am a phi- 
 losopher. 
 
 Of all such pale and shrivelled theories it is 
 the common characteristic, that they belong to 
 minds skilled more or less in dialectics and the 
 management of terms, but poorly furnished with 
 the large and solid stuff of human nature, wliich 
 should furnish the premises of their schemes. 
 The senses indeed may be acute, and the appe- 
 tites voracious, as well as the understanding 
 quick and patient ; but the breast is compara- 
 tively empty of love, of hope, of awe ; the will 
 disdains to bow under aught higher than itself; 
 and the dead artificial parasol of self-conceit, 
 which can be raised or lowered, opened or folded, 
 painted and tricked out at pleasure, is substi- 
 tuted for the infinite concave of Heaven, be- 
 neath whose vault man walks at once humbled 
 and inspired. 
 
 Of such speculators it is the inevitable and 
 deadly lot, that the overpowering consciousness 
 of what is lowest and most chaotic in us, rather 
 than of the higher and brighter, — the spirit-man, 
 — supplies the materials which the intellect works 
 on, from which it draws its thin unbroken clue
 
 CARLYLE. 255 
 
 of speculation: and having only this to start 
 from and to shape with, the finer and truer the 
 power of syllogizing, the more coherently worth- 
 less is the whole result. Of far nobler and more 
 fruitful promise than such a man, is the poor be- 
 wildered visionaiy, perhaps fanatic, who feels a 
 sursce of dim forces in his soul, which he cannot 
 explain, or can only explain into something as 
 unsubstantial as a dream. On his great world 
 of life, now confused and dark, peace will assur- 
 edly one day descend, and morning open. He 
 will find that Paradise was preparing for liim, 
 while it seemed to him that all was hell. But 
 in our day such visionaries are less and less pos- 
 sible. The spread of shallow but clear know- 
 ledge, like the cold snow-water issuing from the 
 glaciers, daily chills and disenchants the hearts 
 of millions once credulous. Daily therefore does 
 it become more probable that millions will follow 
 in the track of those who are called their betters. 
 Thus will they find in the world nothing but an 
 epicurean stye, to be managed, with less dirt and 
 better food, by patent steam-machinery, but still 
 a place for swine, though now the swine may be 
 washed, and their victuals more equally divided. 
 
 Is it not strange then that in such a world, 
 in such a country, and among those light-hearted 
 Edinburgh Reviewers, a man should rise and 
 proclaim a creed ; not a new and more ingenious 
 form of words, but a truth to be embraced with
 
 256 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the whole heart, and in which the heart shall 
 find, as his has found, strength for all combats, 
 and consolation, though stern not festal, under 
 all sorrows ? Amid the masses of English print- 
 ing sent forth every day, part designed for the 
 mest trivial entertainment, part black with the 
 narrowest and most lifeless sectarian dogmatism, 
 part, and perhaps the best, exhibiting only facts 
 and theories in physical science, and part filled 
 with the vulgarest economical projects and de- 
 tails, which would turn all life into a process of 
 cookery, culinary, political, or sentimental, — how 
 few writings are there that contain, like these, 
 a distinct doctrine as to the position and calling 
 of man, capable of affording nourishment to the 
 heart, and support to the will, and in harmony 
 at the same time with the social state of the 
 world, and with the most enlarged and bright- 
 ened insight which human wisdom has yet at- 
 tained to ! 
 
 We have been so little prepared to look for 
 such an appearance, that it is difficult for us to 
 realize the conception of a genuine coherent view 
 of life thus presented to us in a book of our day, 
 which shall be neither a slight compendium of 
 a few moral truisms, flavoured with a few im- 
 moral refinements and paradoxes, such as con- 
 stitute tlie floating ethics and religion of the 
 time ; nor a fierce and gloomy distortion of some 
 eternal idea, torn from its pure sphere of celes-
 
 CARLYLE. 257 
 
 tial light, to be raved about l)y the ignorant, 
 whom it has half enlightened, and half made 
 frantic. But here, in our judgement, — that is, 
 in the judgement of one man, who speaks con- 
 siderately what he fixedly believes, — we have the 
 thought of a wide, and, above all, of a deep soul, 
 which has expressed, in fitting words, the fruits 
 of patient reflection, of piercing observation, of 
 knowledge many-sided and conscientious, of de- 
 voutest awe, and faithfuUest love. To expound 
 his faith in our language will seem not unpre- 
 sumptuous, while his own is at hand, and may be 
 read by all. But, as a hint and foretaste of what 
 is written in his works, it may be said that Mr. 
 Carlyle thus teaches : 
 
 1. The Universe, including Man as its Chief 
 Object, is all a region of Wonder and mysterious 
 Truth, demanding, before all other feelings, Re- 
 verence, as the Condition of Insight. 
 
 2. For he who rejects from his Thoughts all 
 that he cannot perfectly analyse and comprehend, 
 all that claims veneration, never will meditate on 
 the primary fact of Existence. Yet what is so 
 necessary to the Being of a Thing, so certainly 
 the deepest secret in it, as Being itself? All 
 else in an object, — all qualities and properties 
 viewed without reference to this, which is their 
 root and life, — cannot, rightly speaking, be under- 
 stood, though they may be counted, measured, 
 and handled.
 
 258 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 3. Religion therefore is the highest bond be- 
 tween Man and the Universe. The world rises 
 out of unknown sacred depths before the soul, 
 which it ever draws into contemplation of it. It 
 repels the man into entire ignorance, only when 
 he fails to acknowledge the unfathomable Depth 
 which he and it belong to. 
 
 4. But at best we are immensely ignorant. 
 Around us is a fulness of life, now vocal in a 
 tone, now visible in a gleam, but of which we 
 never can measure the whole compass, or number 
 and explore the endless forces. 
 
 5. Yet, to him who looks aright, the Divine 
 Substance of all is to be seen kindling at moments 
 in the smallest, no less than in the grandest thing 
 that is : for Existence is itself divine, and awakens 
 in him who contemplates, a sense of divinity, such 
 as men of old were fain to call prophetic. 
 
 6. This sense of the Divine, penetrating and 
 brightening a man's whole nature, attuning his 
 utterance, and unfolding into images that blaze 
 out of the darkness of custom and practice, and 
 shape themselves into a completeness of their 
 own, — this is Poetry, — the highest Form of the 
 God-like in Man's being, the freest recognition 
 of the God-like in All. 
 
 7. As there is a poetic Light dormant in all 
 Things, to which the Music of our Feelings gives 
 the signal of awakening, — so especially is this 
 true of man, in whom dwells the Knowledge of 
 Existence, as well as the Fact.
 
 CARLYLE. 259 
 
 8. *Thus the seer finds in his brethren, of every 
 age and land, the most perplexing, startling, woe- 
 ful, but also the highest, fairest, amplest, all-sug- 
 gestive figures of his life-long vision. 
 
 9. But to know and understand even Man is 
 not for man the foremost task. We are made, by 
 the craft of Nature, — of Him whom Nature 
 clothes, veils, and manifests, — chiefly to be our- 
 selves Makers. To work, to do, is our calling, — 
 that for which we were called forth to be. 
 
 10. Knowledge and Strength, In their highest 
 and most harmonious energy, are the reward only 
 of the noblest effort. But all who toil in any 
 work, when the work is not a mere winnowing of 
 chaff, are doing humanly, worthily. 
 
 11. Therefore to trace men and their ways 
 through the dusky mazes of the Past, and among 
 all the confusions of our own time, — to see what 
 they are doing, and how, and why, — Is itself a 
 work fit for a thoughtful and affectionate mind, 
 and will not be without fruit either for them or 
 him. 
 
 12. But in this survey of all things round us, 
 and in the experience of ourselves, which we shall 
 certainly gain if we attempt such devout and 
 sympathetic observation. Evil, Grief, Horror, 
 Shame, Follies, Errors, Frailties of all kinds, will 
 needs press upon the eye and heart. And thus 
 the habitual temper of the best will rather be 
 strenuous and severe than light and joyous.
 
 260 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 13. A cutting sorrow, a weary indignation will 
 not be far from him who duly weighs the world. 
 But in unswerving labour for high ends, in valour 
 and simplicity, in truth with himself and with all 
 men, there shall still be a sustaining power. So 
 shall he have faith in a good ever present, but 
 bleeding and in mourners' garments, among the 
 sons of men. And by perseverance to the end 
 life may be completed bravely and worthily, 
 though with no bacchanalian triumph. 
 
 We are far from wishing any one to pin his 
 faith on these propositions, either as absolutely, 
 still less as completely true, or as adequate state- 
 ments of Mr. Carlyle's views. They have in- 
 deed been deduced, not without care, from his 
 writings ; and those who read them with reflec- 
 tion and a tentative sympathy will hardly fail to 
 see in them the representation of a pure and lofty 
 mind, and one original, if only in this, that his 
 doctrine is but the dogmatic form of his whole 
 feelings and character, and not a web of abstract 
 speculation. 
 
 If in these views were not included a full re- 
 cognition of the worth of Christianity, there 
 would be much reason to accuse them of fatal 
 error. But such a man as we have spoken of, 
 with such convictions, is not likely to be guilty of 
 callous sneers against any devout faith in things 
 beyond the region of the senses: least of all.
 
 CARLYLE. 261 
 
 against that religion which has strengthened and 
 glorified the lives of a greater number of the 
 truest heroes and martyrs, than all other worships, 
 and all philosophies together. The gospel, the 
 good tidings of Jesus of Nazareth, not merely 
 have now come to be taken for granted by the 
 many, but are recognised by whosoever is of 
 purest purpose and most comprehensive thought 
 among civilized men, as, on grounds of intelligible 
 reason, of experienced accordance with our deepest 
 cravings, and of unquestionable results in history 
 and in the hearts of men, the most effective word 
 of truth ever communicated to this earth. The 
 countless dreams which have been spun around it, 
 the frauds practised in its name, the carnal bat- 
 tles waged for its spiritual watchwords, the be- 
 wildering varieties of schemes, sects, heresies, 
 speculations, laws, rites, customs, crimes, and 
 miseries, which have been joined to it, and have 
 seemed to spring from it, are all but so many proofs 
 of the far-spreading roots which it has struck into 
 the world, and which have twisted themselves 
 among all the fibres that fill the whole soil of 
 human life, and have modified the growth of all 
 its products. The plough, the hammer, and the 
 loom, the Roman laws, the arts of Greece, in- 
 cluding among them the alphabet which Greece 
 imported, are not more inextricably bound up 
 with all civilized existence, than the influences, 
 avowed or disguised, of the message published by
 
 262 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the Hebrew fishermen. The full and clear power 
 of Christianity rises indeed so far above the heads 
 of any but the fewest, that to most it seems 
 cloudlike amid the clouds. But it works unseen 
 and under many names ; and it has victories pre- 
 pared for it beyond the splendour of its prophetic 
 symbols, tinged as these are with the colours of 
 one period and country ; while its sjilrit will 
 inevitably spread to all, and diffuse itself through 
 every instant of future time. 
 
 Of the main view as to the world, which we 
 have attributed to Mr. Carlyle, it is evident that 
 the great fountain is the literature of Germany 
 during the last sixty years. This is not merely 
 apparent from tlie citations which he makes, the 
 men he delights in, and the key-words and pecu- 
 liar turns of expression which he employs; but 
 the proof of It lies In the thought itself. All the 
 higher minds of Germany, beginning at least with 
 Lessing, have seen and tauglit, not that there is a 
 scheme of divine truth, called Clmstianity, on one 
 side, and on the other a heap of vulgar expe- 
 riences and notions, called the World, the two 
 connected by a rope, longer or shorter, weaker or 
 tougher, called Evidences of Keliglon ; but that 
 human existence, and the universe which it 
 belongs to, are alike manifestations of a higher 
 Idea, Avhicli breaks out In all true knowledge, 
 and above all, but not exclusively, in what is 
 called, and is. Revelation. To exhibit more and
 
 CARLYLE. 263 
 
 more of this truth in adequate images, and with 
 fitting melody, has been the aim of all the nobler 
 and more genuine artists, and especially the poets 
 of Germany. To establish it by historical en- 
 quiry, to show a high reason pervading the low 
 confusions of all ages, has been the inspiring 
 purpose of her historians, animating them to a 
 generous laboriousness too little practised in such 
 works among us. To determine with speculative 
 precision the limits and being of this Idea, or 
 productive truth, not itself to be seen save by the 
 clear vision of the purest inward eye, to free it 
 from arbitrary commixtures, and display it as a 
 sufficient fontal source of all we know and all we 
 are, has been the great problem of those won- 
 drous philosophers from Kant to Hegel, the most 
 peculiar and surprising children of the latest age 
 of human history. Of all these classes of men, 
 united in the pursuit of a common object, by 
 means however various, it has been the felt, still 
 more than the asserted principle, that the truth 
 they sought can only be attained by reverent and 
 conscientious toil. Faith in that Hiirher than 
 actual Things, of which these are the reflec- 
 tion, prepares men for beholding it, and lends an 
 interest to the facts which otherwise they never 
 could possess. Even in its imperfect, partial dis- 
 plays, this higher unseen Subsistence has supplied 
 the energy and light of all religions upon earth. 
 In Its chief historical radiation it has been, rather
 
 264 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 than been mingled with, Christianity : and in its 
 fulness and purity consists the Christian religion 
 of the wisest and most faithful spirits. But 
 this supersensual, infinite Reality, of which all 
 phenomena are bvit gleams and echoes, has spoken 
 in all times more or less forcibly home to the 
 hearts of all men who have ever rejoiced with 
 trembling at the name of God. 
 
 In this general point of view, and the bent of 
 soul which it implies, Mr. Carlyle is entirely at 
 one with the Germans ; whose tendencies are 
 daily mingling more and more with the whole 
 thought of the best minds in Europe. These 
 views indeed have been often very indirectly con- 
 veyed to those who now partake of them, and who 
 are sometimes furiously ungrateful for a benefit, 
 of which one wishes therefore to believe them 
 unconscious. The speculations of Coleridge, 
 which are daily working wider and wider changes 
 among us, were altogether cast, and in his case 
 avowedly, in a German mould. But in no one 
 known in English letters has the influence of that 
 old fatherland of England been so apparent and 
 bold as in Mr. Carlyle. Yet there is not any 
 among those Teutonic seers, sages, and singers, 
 to whom he can be very closely likened. 
 
 For professed philosophers, knowledge is the 
 end of existence. They live in order to think. 
 The universe presents itself to them as a conflux 
 of forces, subter-human, human, and superhuman.
 
 CARLYLE. 265 
 
 working to the perpetual production and suste- 
 nance of a boundless living whole, which it is their 
 special vocation to apprehend and contemplate, and 
 so to rise to the view of the primordial truth, 
 which originates and lights up all. Now with Mr. 
 Carlyle this is not the case. He casts aside all 
 slighter and more partial theories than those 
 matured by these great thinkers, as insufficient 
 for the spirit of a wise man in our day. But by 
 him the best wisdom is valued as a means of the 
 best work. To know is not his end, but to be. 
 He seeks to be wise, in order to be worthy ; and 
 by the same measure strives to judge whatever 
 representation or fact of human life is brought 
 before him. To struggle manfully in doing the 
 highest work within our power, at all costs of 
 outward contradiction, — to be consistent and 
 complete in a true purpose, down to the most 
 trifling detail of every day, word, and thought, — 
 and to live thus, not by calculation, with pedantic 
 self-conscious accuracy, but by dint of an impidse 
 of heroism and conviction energizing in the whole 
 character, and moulding it altogether, — this is the 
 task which in his view is given to man. 
 
 Therefore to the noblest of mere philosophers 
 he stands related somewhat in this way. The 
 speculative seer, if of a high and genuine order, 
 must needs by spiritual instinct regard the uni- 
 verse as a divine vision, and the reason as an 
 inspired organ for beholding this ; which is equally 
 
 VOL. I. N
 
 266 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the implicit faith of philosopher, poet, and hero. 
 But the sage is by nature and purpose also a 
 dialectician, and labours to define the primal 
 truth he sees, to pursue it into all its ramifica- 
 tions, and to show that these afford, or indeed are, 
 the true solution of all the facts and classes of 
 facts, which direct observation discloses to all 
 men, but which it cannot interpret. Now the 
 systematic process of ratiocination is one from 
 which Mr. Carlyle turns with comparative indiffe- 
 rence. He values the master truth of the philo- 
 sopher, not as an idea to be worked upon, and 
 minutely evolved by the understanding, but to be 
 taken into the character and affections, to rule the 
 will, and to shape and glorify the whole structure 
 of the man and of his life. 
 
 Neither does he exactly resemble the poets, in 
 whom he so much delights, and whose worth he 
 has so keenly insisted on. These men, especially 
 Goethe, Schiller, and Jean Paul, but also all 
 great creative singers, having a true insight into 
 the wondrousness and depth of things, and the 
 harmony in which they grow together in the 
 midst of conflicts and jarrings, which are them- 
 selves essential to this harmony, do not make it 
 their business to unfold the idea of it as an object 
 of speculation. Nor do they dii'cctly labour to 
 realize it more evidently in practice and fact. 
 But stirred and enlightened by it, and filled from 
 it with a breath of its melodious joy, they shape
 
 CARLYLE. 267 
 
 its images as given them from without, and new- 
 born within their souls, into fresh and fair sem- 
 blances, that reproduce, in partial shows of the 
 whole, a more vocal and facile display of its true 
 being. Their own delight in the beauty and 
 worth of real existence pours itself into their re- 
 production of it. Aiming neither at teaching 
 men as the philosopher, nor at exciting and organ- 
 izing them anew on a nobler model, as the prac- 
 tical hero, they indirectly impart their own living 
 consciousness of truth, and draw men, without 
 exhorting them, towards the higher regions where 
 the poet dwells rejoicing. 
 
 Such is not the case with Mr. Carlyle : he does 
 not rest at ease in the contemplation of fair pic- 
 tures of life, leaving them to find their own 
 reception, and work silently their own vague 
 effect upon mankind. The practical problem and 
 struggle of Man entirely possesses him. With 
 its force he speaks; towards its aim he works. 
 He seldom relaxes to enjoy the aspect of images, 
 however beautiful, however familiar to his heart, 
 unless they have a du'ect significance and effi- 
 ciency for this end. And finding no sufficient 
 peace in the music of sweet song, he loves the 
 resounding lyre Avhich builds up the walls of cities, 
 or the blast of the trumpet which throws them 
 down. 
 
 Not that he wants poetry, any more than phi- 
 losophy. But they are his wings, and not his 
 
 N 2
 
 268 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 heaven. His heart and mouth are full of them ; 
 but they are not the springs of his existence. 
 The man among the Germans, whose works at 
 first sight his undoubtedly the most resemble, is 
 that strange, huge mass of lambent, innocuous 
 fire, full of gas-jets and grotesque tongues, and 
 salamanders and flaming eyes, — Jean Paul Rich- 
 ter. They are like, in the apparent rudeness, 
 harshness, lawless capriciousness of style, full of 
 meanings and images, but these looking incohe- 
 rent, or at least as yet unreconciled. Both con- 
 stantly use words sanctioned by no custom or 
 even precedent, and of course, though often ex- 
 pressive, sometimes not compensating for their 
 oddness by any special felicity. In both it looks 
 as if there Avere strong, nay overpowering, self- 
 wiU and self-consciousness, The thought, as well 
 as speech, often finds its sufficient explanation in 
 the peculiarities of individual character, rather 
 than in the demands and laws of the matter 
 handled. In neither is there much exercise of 
 skill in logical abstractions and their discipline, or 
 much clear delineation of objects, uncoloured by 
 the particular and casual feelings of the artist. 
 As to their views of liuman life, they have also 
 much in common. The ground in both appears 
 to be furnished by a deep and fervid sense of 
 whatever is noblest and fairest in man's active 
 powers, — and this realized not only in the imagi- 
 native consciousness, but in the personal character
 
 CARLYLE. 269 
 
 of each. Alike they slu-lnk with fastidious and 
 self-complacent vivacity from all the forms, bla- 
 zonries, and authorities of social existence, Avhen 
 these happen to be Insufficiently supported by the 
 worth of the men, whom Nature's habitual Irony 
 has thus dignified. A fine and genuine, nay 
 stern and sublime enthusiasm, a puritanic Quix- 
 otism, for the lovely, the true, the right, the ever- 
 lasting, — is heightened and softened in both by 
 the perpetual presence of a graver than Cervan- 
 tean humour, which blends with and repeats the 
 lofty feeling in a mode of kindred contrast. Both 
 the German and the Englishman use whatever 
 portions and aspects of the phenomenal world 
 they advert to, neither for their simple and direct 
 beauty, nor as facts having their meaning and 
 purport in themselves, but as hints and whispers 
 of a higher and unseen world, the proper abode of 
 man. In each there is a fulness and warmth of 
 nature, which would suffice to place them among 
 the sacred band, the Immortals of history. And 
 in each also there is something unfashioned, exces- 
 sive, tumultuous, far indeed from the vulgar 
 chaotic fury and darkness of passions and preju- 
 dices, but still at war with the brightness and 
 heavenly peace, which are rather suggested and 
 promised to the heart, than made apparent to the 
 eye. 
 
 With these obvious points of resemblance, there 
 are also very considerable discrepancies, partly
 
 270 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 doubtless to be explained by the difference of time, 
 still more by that of country, and most of all by 
 that original variety of structure, which shows 
 Itself between every pair of ploughmen, nay of 
 plough-horses, and more and more clearly comes 
 out as the effect of a universal law, the higher we 
 rise in the class of beings we contemplate. The 
 two men, of whom we speak, are of the highest 
 that the earth produces, the genial teachers of 
 truth, and inspired painters of symbols for the 
 fundamental realities of our existence. The dis- 
 tinctions between the two are accordingly deep 
 and extensive. In Jean Paul, much as there is of 
 struggle, and, in details, of imappeased contradic- 
 tion and jarring unevenness, the prevalent spirit 
 is that of earnest, eager, childlike sympathy. This 
 fills him most often with joy, always with satis- 
 faction. The healthfid, cordial abundance of his 
 emotions and fancies is all he needs. Thus re- 
 plete and bright with the best gifts of life, after 
 a youth of bitter pangs and conflicts, his heart 
 seems to repose in Its own ceaseless activity, and 
 unweariedly creates new images of men's unaf- 
 fected joys and ennobling sori'ows, and unlimited 
 powers of love and hope. But (in this a true 
 poet) all life is for him only a storehouse of 
 expressive, shining, stai'tling, or burlesque unages. 
 With Mr. Carlyle the case is far otherwise : he 
 lives to fight, breathes war-flames of disdain and 
 zeal, and moves only to wrestle and trample 
 forward.
 
 CARLYLE. 271 
 
 The clearness of the eye to see whatever is per- 
 manent and substantial, and the fervour and 
 strength of heart to love it as the sole good of life, 
 are thus in our view Mr. Carlyle's pre-eminent 
 characteristics, as those of every man entitled to 
 the fame of the most generous order of greatness. 
 Not to paint the good which he sees and loves, or 
 see it painted, and enjoy the sight, — not to under- 
 stand it, and exult in the knowledge of it, — but 
 to take his position upon it, and for it alone to 
 breathe, to move, to fight, to mourn, and die, — 
 this is the destination which he has chosen for 
 himself. His avowal of it, and exhortation to do 
 the like, is the object of all liis writings. And, 
 reasonably considered, it is no mean service to 
 which he is thus bound. For the real, the ger- 
 minal truth of nature is not a dead series of phy- 
 sical phenomena, into the like of which all pheno- 
 mena are cunningly to be explained away. This 
 pulseless, rigid iron frame-work, on which the 
 soft soil of human life is placed, and above which 
 its aerial flowers and foliage rise, does not pass 
 with him for the essential and innermost principle 
 of all. It is rather that which, being itself poorest, 
 the poorest of faculties can apprehend. As phy- 
 sical mechanism, it is that which is most palpable 
 and undeniable by any; because it is that which 
 lies nearest the nothingness, whence it has been 
 hardly rescued, and is therefore most akin to 
 minds in whose meanness of structure or culture
 
 272 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 even human existence might seem scarce better 
 than nothingness. He knows, few in our nation 
 so Avell, that, of a world of mere machinery, the 
 highest king and priest would be the neatest clock- 
 Avork figure. And in such a world a being feel- 
 ing ever towards a somewhat beyond what he can 
 weigh and measure, and looking up to find above 
 himself that which is too high for him to under- 
 stand, would be an anomaly as lawless and incre- 
 dible as the wildest fabled monster, the Minotaur, 
 the Chimera, the Titan, — the Sphynx itself, — nay 
 a more delirious riddle than any that in dreams it 
 proposes to us. 
 
 On the other hand, neither is that for him 
 the solid, abiding, inexhaustible, which is re- 
 ceived as such by popular acquiescence. It must 
 needs be a truth which the spirit, cleared and 
 strengthened by manifold knowledge and expe- 
 rience, and above all by strong and stedfast 
 endeavour, can rest in, and say: This I mean, not 
 because it is told me, were my informants all the 
 schools of Rabbins, or a hierarchy of angels ; but 
 because I have looked into it, tried it, found it health- 
 ful and sufficient, and thus know that it will sta7id 
 the stress of life. We may be right or wrong in 
 our estimate of Mr. Carlyle ; but we cannot be 
 mistaken in supposing that on this kind of anvil 
 have all truly great men been fashioned, and of 
 metal thus honest and enduring. 
 
 Further, it must be said that, true as is his
 
 CARLYLE. 273 
 
 devotion to the truth, so flaming and cordial is his 
 hatred of the false, in whatever shapes and names 
 delusions may show themselves. Affectations, 
 quackeries, tricks, frauds, swindlings, commercial 
 or literary, baseless speculations, loud ear-catching 
 rhetoric, melodramatic sentiment, moral drawl- 
 ings and hyperboles, religious cant, clever political 
 shifts, and conscious or half-conscious fallacies, all 
 in his view, come under the same hangman's 
 rubric, — proceed from the same offal heart. How- 
 ever plausible, popular, and successful, however 
 dignified by golden and purple names, they are lies 
 against ourselves, — against whatever in us is not 
 altogether reprobate and infernal. His great argu- 
 ment, the theme of his song, the spirit of his lan- 
 guage, lies in this, that there is a work for man 
 worth doing, which is to be done with^he whole 
 of his heart, not the half or any other fraction. 
 Therefore, if any reserve be made, any corner 
 kept for something unconnected with this true 
 work and sincere purpose, the whole is thereby 
 vitiated and accurst. So far as his arm reaches 
 he is undoing whatever in nature is holy, ruining 
 whatever is the real creation of the great Worker 
 of All. This truth of purpose is to the soul, what 
 life is to the body of man ; — that which unites 
 and organizes the mass, keeping all the parts in 
 due proportion and concord, and restraining them 
 from sudden corruption into worthless dust. 
 
 From this turn of mind and ground-plan of 
 
 -N3
 
 274 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 conviction it follows that to Mr. Carlyle the 
 objects of chief interest are memorable persons, — 
 men who have fought strongly the good fight. 
 And more especially, though not exclusively, does 
 he revere and study those living nearest to our 
 own time and cu'cumstances, in whom we may 
 find monumental examples of the mode in which 
 our difficulties are to be conquered. These men 
 he rejoices and eminently succeeds in delineating, 
 in enabling us to see what is essential and phy- 
 siognomical in each, and how the facts of nature 
 and society favoured and opposed the formation of 
 his life into a large completeness. The hin- 
 drances such a man had to overcome, the ener- 
 gies by which he vanquished them, and the work, 
 whatever it may have been, which he thus accom- 
 plished for mankind, appear in these pictures with 
 lucid clearness, marked with a force and decision 
 of hand and style worthy of the greatest masters. 
 Thus having taken anxious measure of the per- 
 plexities and dangers of human life in its higher 
 progresses, he has learnt also to pity, with a 
 mother's tenderness, the failings and confusions 
 of those against whom these hostile forces have 
 prevailed. His proudest and most heroic odes in 
 honour of the conquerors are mingled with or 
 followed by some strain of pity for those who have 
 fallen and been swallowed up in the conflict. The 
 dusky millions of human shapes that flit around 
 us, and in history stream away, fill him with an
 
 CARLYLE. 275 
 
 almost passionate sorrow. Their hunger and 
 nakedness, their mistakes, terrors, pangs, and 
 ignorances, press upon his soul like personal cala- 
 mities. Of him, more than of all other English 
 writers, perhaps writers of any country, it is true, 
 that not in words and fits of rhetorical sentiment, 
 but in the foundation of his being, man, however 
 distant and rude a shadow, is to him affecting, 
 venerable, full of a divine strength, which, for the 
 most part, is rather cramped and tortured than 
 ripened to freedom in this fleshly life and world. 
 This kind of feeling must be felt as truly distin- 
 guishing him by all who read his works. For 
 though similar expressions to some of his have 
 been used by many, from no one, at least in our 
 language, have they proceeded with so resolute 
 and grand a force of radiant clearness and adaman- 
 tine conviction. 
 
 Only when the sufferers are in the foreground 
 and his main objects, does he seem to forget that 
 their oppressors or despisers, the tyrannous, luxu- 
 rious, frivolous, empty-hearted, are also themselves 
 victims, playing the part of destroyers ; that cir- 
 cumstances had done wrong to them, no less than 
 to those whom they harass and degrade ; and that 
 to be slowly poisoned with sweet baits in the flush 
 and abundance of life, and so to sink away in 
 sottish dreams, is not at all less horrible, than to 
 be gradually starved and worn to death, while 
 courage, or at least dumb endurance, confronts
 
 276 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the inevitable blow, and hope whispers In the 
 sharpened ear, that a better destiny lies beyond. 
 But wdien these base and selfish souls of lower 
 earth, — the men of pleasure, who to all beneath 
 them are men of pain, — come themselves before 
 him, he well comprehends what they perhaps could 
 least understand, that they too are to be pitied as 
 well as blamed; although the tragedy of their 
 lives is not that to which it is most important to 
 call a world of spectators. 
 
 Thus loving the ideal realized in things and 
 persons, not expounded in systematic thought, — 
 zealous as a missionary for the concrete, and 
 towards the abstract severe as an inquisitor, — 
 this writer very naturally holds in detestation all 
 attempts to give dialectics any important place in 
 human life. He admits indeed that reflection 
 inevitably produces thoughts, which find no suffi- 
 cient symbols in any single objects, but are the 
 ideal roots of whole classes of existence, and 
 finally pass into one great principle of life, origi- 
 nating and organizing all that is. But the attempt 
 to define this in any precise form of words, though 
 it has been the aim, as he admits, of many of the 
 greatest among men, meets with small sympathy 
 from him. Above all does he scorn, rend, explode, 
 and excommunicate, while he despises, the endea- 
 vour to trace out the various lines and steps by 
 which this first principle is logically arrived 
 at, and then again from it are deduced the con-
 
 CARLYLE. 277 
 
 ceptlons corresponding to the facts of the uni- 
 verse. 
 
 Now although in Mr. Carlyle's view of this 
 matter there be, as we believe, some, perhaps 
 much prejudice, his judgement is mainly deter- 
 mined by an indubitable truth, which he sees with 
 clearest eyes, and only, as we think, regards it too 
 exclusively. It is certain that men with whom 
 this enterprise of logical construction and deduc- 
 tion has been the great task of life, have seldom 
 been open to a sufficient course of outward and 
 inward experience, not to undervalue all but the 
 scanty set of facts on which they base their 
 scheme. Nay more, inasmuch as these facts have 
 not been looked at by the light of analogies from 
 many others, there are sides even of them which 
 the theory takes no account of. Thus it never 
 can exhaust, that is, adequately interpret, even 
 the things which it counts worthy of notice. The 
 man, fancying his brain the sunny mirror of the 
 universe, lives in fact in a small sham world, 
 where there is at best a spark of light amid thick 
 shadows that wear hardly a semblance of realities. 
 
 Further still, as he who has devoted himself 
 exclusively or chiefly to the formation and arrange- 
 ment of definitions, is likely to have been led 
 thereto by a preponderance of the merely ratio- 
 cinative faculty, and a deficiency of the nobler 
 and more substantial powers, these, and their 
 correlatives in objects, are not what he is apt to
 
 278 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 seek for or to acknowledge anywhere. His theory 
 is likely to leave out whatever is deepest and most 
 essential in the universe. Now all things Ijeing 
 linked together and interfused, in the lowest 
 things there must be some power or capacity cor- 
 responding to something above it, and by which 
 it is ultimately related to the highest of all. But 
 this is precisely what the too narrow and mecha- 
 nical inquirer cannot comprehend. Therefore 
 even the lowest and most lifeless forms of things, 
 which correspond best to his own stiff and angular 
 faculty of reasoning, are, as to their true meaning 
 and most important relations, altogether beyond 
 his ken. 
 
 As the merely logical thinker is apt to be thus 
 defective in his views, so also in his practice is he 
 sure to be detected as artificial and abortive. By 
 a judicious use of the phraseology of the day, and 
 the exercise of conjuring ingenuity in rather a 
 higher than the manual mode, he may easily pass, 
 while he deals only with words, for a wise, almost 
 an all-wise. Doctor. But when he comes to deal 
 with things as a practical worker, his ignorance of 
 that which is essential in them necessarily baffles 
 him, as often as he quits the vulgar empirical rules 
 which rest merely on unsystematic experience- 
 Success in his own department of definition and 
 refutation, and blindness to all beyond it, fill him 
 with hopeless conceit and self-assurance; and 
 failing in all that he attempts practically, he will
 
 CARLYLE. 279 
 
 most often be led to throw the blame upon the 
 poor unconscious World, which, having its own 
 affairs to attend to, obstinately and spitefully 
 will not be, what he has so demonstratively proved 
 it is. 
 
 As Mr. Carlyle now plaintively, now indig- 
 nantly teaches, no less does such a man fail when 
 he undertakes to delineate objects as an artist, 
 than when he handles them as a practician. For 
 this too it is necessary that he should in the first 
 place know what is truly vital in each thing, or at 
 all events in that central one to which in his new 
 creation the others are to be related, that so he 
 may light this with a blaze of imagination, and 
 leave out of view only the accidental, partial, and 
 insignificant. 
 
 There is then a true and most pregnant, nay a 
 humane meaning in the constant flayings and 
 extirpations to which the merely logical man is 
 subjected by Mr. Carlyle. But his treatment is 
 so hard, that any bowels of compassion, not unna- 
 turally and dangerously indurated, must yearn 
 towards the sufferer, thus dissected alive, while 
 the operator moreover grins during the process 
 with a disdainful glee, harder to be borne than 
 much anatomy. Even with this alarming example 
 before us, we may venture to suggest that all 
 human beings must be more or less abstract 
 thinkers; and that, though logical thinking is 
 much and fatally overrated, when it withdraws
 
 280 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 men's attention from the premises to the mode of 
 arguing from them, yet it is of indispensable use 
 in giving clearness and compactness to our know- 
 ledge, and enabling us, with light mastery, to 
 impart it to others. It is also certain that of some 
 of the wisest of mankind, it has been the special 
 vocation to be dialecticians. Of the schoolmen, 
 for instance, whom Mr. Carlyle speaks of, as if 
 they had been employed literally, not figuratively, 
 in splitting hairs, there can be no serious doubt 
 that the divine promptings of their age, and of 
 their own souls, impelled them to the worthiest 
 study of the most arduous problems of man's 
 existence. They laboured for the highest end 
 then known among mankind, with a zeal and 
 insight, according to the measure of what was 
 then possible, which has seldom been equalled in 
 later times. In the fourteenth century Luther 
 would have been, as Wickliffe Avas, a pre-eminent 
 schoolman. And Mr. Carlyle, could he have been 
 then born, would, like Dante, have been imbued 
 with the Aristotelian method, and have been ready 
 to encounter all opponents in arguments founded 
 on Peter Lombard, and marshalled in all the forms 
 of syllogistic mood and figure. 
 
 We have said that this writer's great power is in 
 historic delineation of men and events, to which 
 he gives extraordinary vividness and boldness ; 
 and this, not by knack or system, or a draughts- 
 man's eye for the outwardly picturesque, but by
 
 CARLYLE. 281 
 
 intense feeling of the effectual and expressive 
 everywhere, and of the relation in which all 
 objects stand to the natural hearts of men. But 
 there is another series of facts, for which his mind 
 is far less generously open, than for the characters 
 and deeds of persons. These are the beliefs, which 
 each age and individual has framed for himself or 
 accepted. To these he does not give much heed ; 
 of course not denying, or mistaking, the certainty 
 that all beliefs have followed each other in the 
 history of the world according to a fixed law, and 
 are connected by the same with all the circum- 
 stances of each generation, and that, in obedience 
 to this law, they emerge, unfold themselves, pass 
 away, or are transmuted into other modes of faith. 
 But he dwells on little else than the importance of 
 the spirit with which the creed is held, the degree 
 of seriousness and devotion in the believer's mind, 
 — rather than the quality and amount of truth 
 which his belief embodies. 
 
 Now it is no unfruitful and minute, but a spa- 
 cious and teeming field of thought, which spreads 
 before us when we begin to inquire, not so much 
 what manner of man was Heraclitus, or Plato, 
 Athanasius, or Luther, or Leibnitz, — as what was 
 the doctrine that each of them taught ; what view 
 did it unfold of Nature, Man, and God ; how was 
 it linked with what had gone before, and what 
 followed it ; and how did the truth of the one 
 mind become moulded by the thoughts of genera-
 
 282 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 tions, before it passed into the reason of the fol- 
 lowing sage; and how changed by him did it 
 asain go forth to create and burn within the 
 bosoms of its next inheritors ? 
 
 Assuredly Mr. Carlyle would not deny this to 
 be worth considering. But it is not a study wuth 
 which, so far as we can see, he concerns himself 
 peculiarly. And in consequence of this indif- 
 ference of his, one is sometimes tempted in reading 
 him to fancy that in his view it is only a delusion, 
 however unavoidable, by which importance is 
 attached to the beliefs and denials of mankind ; 
 the honesty and zeal with which we believe being 
 very slightly dependent on the object of our faith. 
 No doubt the stupid arrogance of multitudes does 
 lean with ridiculous weight on many theories or 
 phrases, which for them in their state of feeling 
 might really be shuffled and interchanged, and 
 redisti'ibuted among the contending parties by 
 mere chance, without any but the slightest effect 
 upon their state of soul. And remarkable it 
 sometimes is, when an ordinary mortal, who 
 unwillingly pays his yearly taxes, and willingly 
 reads his daily newspaper, professes, with full 
 belief that he believes, some scheme of faith such 
 as might suit a disguised archangel, such as ought 
 to encircle the adoring head with a halo of mytho- 
 logical glories, and raise the feet in sovereign 
 loftiness above the cares and perturbations of 
 mortality, wdiile the man shall all the while be
 
 CARLYLE. 283 
 
 crawling In the mire, and thinking only of his 
 prospective mess of pottage. Yet there is some 
 relation, most definite and certain, however indi- 
 rect, between his creed and him. The fetish 
 religion of Africa as clearly bears the marks of 
 negro barbarism, as the Epicurism of Lucretius 
 and the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius express the 
 refinement of Rome. The philosophy of Aristotle 
 is not accidentally, but by the necessity of the 
 man's constitution and circumstances, distinct from 
 that of Plato, the theology of Augustine from 
 that of Fenelon, and again the speculations of 
 the Brahmins from those of the Rabbins. It must 
 be worth while to understand what these distinc- 
 tions are, whence they arise, and to what they 
 tend ; for the expressed belief is a standard, 
 though not an infallible one, whereby to ascertain 
 that real belief, which is as genuine a fact of man's 
 life as any other. No belief is ever professed by 
 any one, which has not been at some tune the real 
 conviction of somebody. And the thoughts that 
 a man thinks are, when we can really ascertain 
 them, as significant of what he is as any action of 
 his life. 
 
 Having thus spoken of what seem to us some 
 of Mr. Carlyle's most important peculiarities, 
 positive and negative, we have still to notice one 
 as striking as any, and perhaps as deeply essential 
 to the man, — we mean his humour ; which is most 
 nervous and original in quality, and in his whole
 
 284 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 mode of thought is pervading and constitutive. 
 Yet he is not a humourist; for, as Coleridge* 
 has set forth, and as common opinion hokls, it 
 seems necessary to this type of man, that the 
 whim, the oddity, should not merely tinge the 
 feelings, but determine the bent of the character. 
 Now whatever there is of fantastic and grotesque 
 in the mind, assuredly in this case has no such 
 preponderating force : yet it perpetually ap- 
 pears in the mode of viewing objects and express- 
 ing thoughts, notching the composition with 
 qtieerest zigzags and intricate turns of foliage, 
 and carving the massive and deeply-shaded sur- 
 faces with many a mocking preter-human visage. 
 
 Let us then, in the first place, try to understand 
 what humour is. It implies and is grounded in a 
 peculiar view of human life, which view, when it 
 rules the man's convictions and conduct, makes 
 him a humourist : when it affects only a part of 
 his discourse, and what is lighter and more super- 
 ficial in his actions and demeanour, the humour 
 may be perfectly true and vigorous, but the man is 
 something more than a humourist, which ceases to 
 be his proper designation. 
 
 • Literary Remains, vol. i. p. 135. There is here a very 
 interesting account of the different kinds of the ludicrous. But 
 it seems difficult to understand the distinction between wit of 
 thoughts, which Coleridge assigns specially to the Italians, and 
 wit of words, wliich he attributes to the French. Wit of words 
 cannot mean an odd clatter of sounds ; and what is a word but a 
 sound expressing a thought ?
 
 CARLYLE. 285 
 
 The view of life which may properly be called 
 humorous, seems to arise from the tendency to 
 connect the mean and monstrous with what in 
 itself is serious and majestic. The insane and 
 utterly abortive, the squalid rags and ejected off- 
 scourings of existence, have in themselves nothing 
 to move laughter or give pleasure. Yet this, or 
 something approaching to this, some mode of 
 imbecility, something vile and rotten, is found as 
 a portion of all representations which are valued 
 as humorous ; not indeed in all comic delineations ; 
 for in these the mere inconsistency in some of the 
 externals of life is often all, and enough. The 
 sharpest, loudest contrasts and discords between 
 things which none of them strongly interest us, in 
 which our more serious feelings are no way in- 
 volved, — this is the pure element of the comic. 
 Wit again is the same contrast exhibited in abstract 
 unfigured words, and not in those which sugo-est 
 images of the senses. Drollery is mere incon- 
 gruous combination, without any true antithesis 
 between the thoughts. But the humorous admits 
 of harsher shadows and more stately forms than 
 any of these. And why is this ? What is their 
 use? Evidently that the grand and base may 
 thus mutually relieve and heighten each other. 
 And the stronger the opposition, the more effec- 
 tual the humour : but this within the limit that, 
 when the serious and noble is so excellent as to 
 fill the whole heart with pity or with awe, we
 
 286 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 loathe any inconsistent accompaniment ; which 
 only the most daring masters, at the peril of their 
 heads, can then successfully introduce. 
 
 Now, from this it would follow that, in order 
 to really humorous writing, a man must have a 
 true and intuitive perception of the simply and 
 eternally good and great in all the modes of 
 human life. The eye for this will also be 
 probably the quickest and surest in discerning 
 what most contrasts with it, — the trivial and 
 bombastic, the drivelling, squinting, sprawling 
 clowneries of Nature, with all her worn out 
 stage-properties and rag-fair emblazonments. 
 
 In Aristophanes such a power of insight served 
 the purposes of the gayest, most graceful, and 
 symmetrical fancy. With less abundance in the 
 flood of imagery, and something finer and more 
 celestial in the heart, it constituted the genius of 
 Cervantes. Depress his habitual tone of joyous- 
 ness, narrow and harden the man ; and you produce 
 Swift. Weaken again his will, and strengthen 
 his animal impulses; and the result is Eabelais. 
 Lighten the whole of much of its force, and leave 
 the waters shallower by half, but make them also 
 brighter and more delicate; and we figure to 
 ourselves a Sterne. In the same way enrich the 
 understanding, warm and ex})and the bosom, and 
 add a tenfold force of nature ; and you will laugh, 
 and weep, and be lifted up in the presence of 
 Jean Paul.
 
 CARLYLE. 287 
 
 This view of humour makes it evident that 
 the quality can belong only to those, in whom 
 there is a strong and keen consciousness of what- 
 ever has genuine worth. It will be obvious then 
 to ask, why all men of large and elevated souls 
 are not remarkable for humour? And we mig-ht 
 answer, that there is more or less of it in 
 all such men. But in fact those whose powers 
 are devoted to practical work, as generals or 
 statesmen, and those whom Nature specially fits 
 for such careers, look at things with reference 
 only to the question, — What is to be done with 
 them? How must they be handled? And it 
 may be said that it is the aim of their lives to 
 be practical humourists, by exhibiting the golden 
 and triumphant side of life in their own persons 
 and fortunes, and the failing and absurd one in 
 those of their opponents. Thus the humour 
 lies not in their words, but their history, — in 
 which oftentimes destiny out-humours them, and 
 with a puff of wind shifts and reverses the whole 
 project of their existence; whereby, in proportion 
 as they are lowered and reduced to nothing, the 
 humour of the tale for a philosophic observer 
 is heightened and becomes transcendent. 
 
 Philosophers again, and all scientific thinkers, 
 are little likely to display much humour in their 
 speech or actions: for they have not in general 
 the perception of reality in the concrete, suffi- 
 ciently vivid and eager to enable them to feel
 
 288 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the force of contrast between the highest ob- 
 jects and the lowest. Their work lies among 
 thoughts, not things, or their images; and what 
 would be humour in a poet appears in them as 
 some hard and thin reductio ad ahsurdum; the 
 absurd being, not the Olympian foolery of a 
 Quixote or a FalstaiF, but merely the logically 
 inconsistent. 
 
 This account of humour being admitted, it 
 becomes evident why the humorous lies so near, 
 as often has been remarked, to the pathetic and 
 sublime; how they pass into each other by per- 
 petual undulations and successions, with a play 
 and interfusion of vital energy from one to the 
 other: so that the homely farce of a Hembrandt 
 and a Bunyan, of a Hogarth and a Fielding, lies 
 under and supports conceptions, of which the 
 tenderness and lofty passion will never fade from 
 human hearts. 
 
 It may be added, as a curious psychological 
 fact, that we happen to have known a person, 
 on whose veracity we could rely, and who stated 
 that he had more than once, in the midst of 
 scenes of general gaiety, been compelled to retire 
 vmder the irresistible inclination to burst into tears. 
 The same person had sometimes, on hearing 
 of the severe affliction of others, a painful dif- 
 ficulty in refraining from laughter. This pecu- 
 liarity he himself explained by a tendency, which 
 was deeply grounded in his character, to feel
 
 CARLYLE. 289 
 
 acutely the incongruities of the world, and to 
 contemplate all things as the idle straws and 
 bubbles in the eddies of that dark, swift stream. 
 
 However this may be, it is to be noted that 
 a predominance of humour is hardly compatible 
 with perfect harmony and proportion between 
 the different powers in man. The thorough 
 symmetry of soul, which seeks and creates the 
 symmetrical everywhere, recoils from those sud- 
 den encounters of high and low. Comedy, which 
 moves in a uniform element of the light and 
 ludicrous, is appropriate even to the purest and 
 most perfect imagination, as we find in Cervantes 
 and Shakspere. But humour, which passes with no 
 gradation from heart-wrung tears, from lordliest 
 dignity, to the paltry and the futile, — this shocks, 
 this embitters the high poet's serene complete- 
 ness. Accordingly we find that, in all the men 
 most peculiarly distinguished for humour, there 
 is a strain in life, as well as thought, of the irre- 
 gular and cyclopic; the farce of the imagination 
 alternating with the vehemence of the heart. 
 Nor can we deny that there is in Mr. Carlyle, 
 as in Jean Paul, and more perhaps than in him, 
 a share of tumultuous abruptness, and of gloomy 
 spectral fervour, which increases the significancy 
 of his works, while it removes them from the 
 ideal of poetic roundness and delicacy. 
 
 We have now said much, too much for our 
 readers, too little for the subject, on what seem 
 VOL. I. O
 
 290 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 to US the chief peculiarities of a most memorable 
 man. But any one who should take up the 
 writings themselves Avith no other preconception 
 than that which we have attempted to give him, 
 would doubtless be startled at the strangeness of 
 the style which prevails more or less tliroughout 
 them. They are not careless, headlong, pas- 
 sionate, confused; but they bear a constant look 
 of oddity, which seems at first mere wilful wan- 
 tonness, and which we only afterwards find to 
 be the discriminating stamp of original and strong 
 feeling. This, — this feeling, rooted in profound 
 susceptibility, and matured into a central vivi- 
 fying power, — is, we should say, the author's 
 most extraordinary distinction. For it is not 
 the ostentatious, impetuous sentiment, which 
 calls, a sufficient audience being by, on heaven 
 and earth for sympathy, and would wish for 
 that of Tartarus too, as an additional acknoAV- 
 ledgement of its sublime sincerity. Here, on 
 the contrary, the feeling is not what the man is 
 proud of, and would fain exhibit. He shrinks 
 from the profession, nay, from the sense of it; 
 even painfully labours to trifle and be at ease, 
 that he may hide from others, and may for him- 
 self forget, the thorny fiigot-load of his own 
 emotions. Yet make them known he must; for 
 they are not those of some private personal grief 
 or passion, from which he may escape into lite- 
 rature or science, and leave his pains and longings
 
 CARLYLE. 291 
 
 beliind him; but his sensibilities are burning with 
 a slow immense fire, kindled by the very theme 
 on which he writes, and compelling him to write. 
 The greatness and weakness, the infinite hopes 
 and unquenchable reality of human life, — the 
 aching pressure of the body and its wants on 
 the myriads of millions in whom celestial force 
 sleeps and di'eams of hell, — the sight of follies* 
 frauds, cruelties, and lascivious luxury, in the 
 midst of a race thus endowed and thus sufifering, 
 — and the unconquerable will and thought with 
 which the few work out the highest callino- of 
 all men, — these it is, and not self-indulging 
 distresses and theatrical aspirations of his own, 
 which boil and storm within. Therefore does he 
 speak with the solid strength and energy, which 
 gives so serious and rugged an aspect to his 
 sentences; while, perpetually checking himself, 
 from a wise man's shame at excessive emotion, 
 and from the knoAvledge that others will but half 
 sympathize with him, he adds to his most weighty 
 utterances a turn of irony, Avhich relieves the 
 excessive strain. 
 
 It must also be considered that, having looked 
 piercingly and bravely into the doings of the 
 world, and found much thereof false, and much 
 more only half true, he is constantly led to speak 
 of things either held in esteem or blandly tole- 
 rated, and to convey his knowledge of their 
 worthlessness, in a tone of quiet, deliberate scorn, 
 
 O 2
 
 292 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 whicli couples itself in friendly dissonance with 
 his fervid worship of many a ragged, outcast 
 heroism; as the answer of an Arab Sheik to 
 the messenger of a Pasha requiring the free son 
 of the desert to pay tribute, compared with his 
 welcome to his tents of the naked, wandering 
 stranger. 
 
 Add to this, that Mr. Carlyle's resolution to 
 convey his meaning at all hazards makes him 
 seize the most effectual and sudden words, in 
 spite of usage and fashionable taste ; and that 
 therefore, when he can get a brighter tint, a 
 more expressive form, by means of some strange, 
 — we must call it, — Carlylism, English, Scotch, 
 German, Greek, Latin, French, Technical, Slang, 
 American, or Lunar, or altogether Superlunar, 
 transcendental, and drawn from the eternal No- 
 where, — he uses it with a courage which might 
 blast an academy of lexicographers into a Hades 
 void even of vocables. 
 
 We should infer from Mr. Carlyle's style that 
 he is not naturally fluent, or at least had not 
 been led in very early life, when alone perhaps 
 it can be done, to use with smooth dexterity a 
 conventional mechanism of discourse on all the 
 topics known in civilized life. ^^Tiere this, which 
 may be called the rain-spout or parish-pump 
 faculty, has been mvich developed, it is very 
 difficult, if not impossible, to gain that short, 
 sliarp, instantaneous mode of expression, which
 
 CARLYLE. 2&3 
 
 says what the speaker feels to be the right thing, 
 and no more, and so leaves it. But if, fi'om 
 circumstances of any kind, whether of personal 
 seclusion, or of silent and severe habits in those 
 about us in childhood, this knack or gift has not 
 been carried to any very awful perfection, such 
 as one finds in barristers, preachers, literary jour- 
 neymen, leaders of the House of Commons, auc- 
 tioneers, and the like, — and if, nevertheless, there 
 is real matter crowding and glowing for utterance, 
 a man's speech is likely to have a pith and direct- 
 ness otherwise extremely hard of attainment, and 
 which recals the reason given by old Gaunt in 
 Richard II,, for the hope that his own dying 
 counsels may influence the young king : 
 
 Where words are scarce, they are seldom spent in vain : 
 For they breathe truth, that breathe their words in pain. 
 
 Furthermore it may be observed, on the choice 
 of words shown in this author's writings, that his 
 clear and irresistible eye for the substantial and 
 significant in all objects, and his carelessness of 
 the merely abstract, display themselves in an im- 
 mediateness and prominence of expression, to 
 which we see nothing in its kind equal in modern 
 English books. His style is not so much a figured, 
 as an embossed one. The shapes which it exhibits 
 have not only neatness and strength, which those 
 of a clever rhetorician often have, but a truth 
 and life, which show them to be prompted by the
 
 294 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 writer's feeling and experience of things, and not 
 arranged from a calculation of what will be the 
 effect on others. 
 
 Ilavino; said so much of what strikes us as most 
 remarkable in Mr. Carlyle, it is time for us, — 
 more than time, — to speak particularly of the con- 
 tents of the books now before us. The bulkier 
 of these is a collection of Essays, which have 
 appeared in different English periodical works 
 during the last ten or twelve years. We regard 
 them as the most important series of papers that 
 any one man has contributed to the present race 
 of Heviews and Magazines, — nay, as incomparably 
 the most so. About two-thirds of the whole re- 
 late to German literature, and of these the greater 
 number to authors who, though all now departed, 
 have been living in our own day. 
 
 Of these portraits none is so remarkable for its 
 subject as that of Goethe, communicated in two 
 articles, which contain various translated s[)eci- 
 mcns from his works, but chiefly consist of de- 
 scriptions of his character and life. It is not too 
 much to say, that to these and other labours of 
 the same hand is due almost all the just appre- 
 ciation of Goethe now existing in England. A 
 few, twenty years ago a very few, there doubtless 
 were in this country, who understood that he 
 was on the whole the most remarkable person of 
 modern times. But for the widened and • fast 
 widening knowledge of this truth amonii; all who
 
 CARLYLE. 295 
 
 occupy themselves with literature, so that it is 
 no longer a mere secret doctrine, but courts the 
 sunshine and challenges opponents, the chief im- 
 mediate cause must be found in the zeal with 
 which it has been made known by INIr. Carlyle. 
 
 Surely the sight thus presented to us is a suf- 
 ficiently surprising one. Imagine a man of the 
 mould and aspect of Luther standing forth to 
 proclaim the greatness and immortal beauty of 
 a poet such as Shakspere. So dramatic, so sym- 
 bolic is the contrast between the eulogized and 
 the eulogist. They resemble each other indeed, 
 as two truly great men, of self-coherent thoughts 
 and lives, must needs be like : and both of them 
 rise far above the common stature of man. The 
 one how large of bone, how sturdy, and with a 
 look of combat, and of high crusader enthusiasm! 
 Yet this he readily exchanges for a broad, dis- 
 dainful scorn of vermin that come nigh him, 
 whom he treads down and brushes into inane 
 abysses with a tyrannous gust of ridicule. This 
 again in turn passes swiftly into bitter natural 
 tears for the misery of those on whose behalf 
 he has armed himself to battle. A man of thews 
 and courage, such as seldom have been clothed 
 in knightly mail, resembling perhaps a great 
 Christianized giant of romance, a legendary 
 Christopher, — so solid does he stand, so simple, 
 blunt, and inartificial in his stride and bearing. 
 One who in generous courtesy and trustful kind-
 
 296 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 liness is of no less large a frame than in mere 
 strength and exuberance of life. Then look at 
 the man on whom he bends such reverential 
 eyes; tall indeed, and full, and fixed, and so 
 catching the eye, but far more detaining it by 
 a refined dignity, and the perfect look of sculp- 
 tured gracefulness, and yielding softer and higher 
 music than ever was shed from the image of the 
 divine Memnon over the Egyptian desert. In a 
 word, with much in common, the distinguishing 
 characteristic of the one is indomitable strength, 
 that of the other unblemished symmetry. 
 
 The points in Goethe on which Mr. Carlyle 
 emphatically dwells, are his conscientious labo- 
 riousness, his unbounded tolerance, arising from 
 his vmiversal comprehensiveness, and, lastly, his 
 reverence, not formal but vital, for the truth and 
 love on which the universe is based, and which 
 are the highest manifestations of the life that 
 pervades it. 
 
 The first of these qualities, his manifold and 
 ceaseless industry, used and perfected to the end, 
 through a life of more than eighty years, is doubt- 
 less an example to be held in remembrance, — a 
 historic thing. There has been however many a 
 mere man of learning who has probably worked 
 as incessantly. It is Goethe's distinction in this 
 respect, that, with a soul open to tlx; varied 
 joys of life, and allured by flattering circum- 
 stances, he yet toiled on systematically for the
 
 CARLYLE. 297 
 
 highest ends, in the pursuit of which a man must 
 proceed, if at all, with the purest freedom, as if 
 he had been plodding in the meanest routine 
 which permits and almost requires the mecha- 
 nization of the mind. The friendly tolerance, 
 springing from cheerful sympathies and the clear- 
 est, least prejudiced of understandings, is a merit 
 of a far more uncommon kind ; for seldom has 
 there been a man capable of apprehending truth, 
 and of engaging in the higher tasks of thought, 
 to whom it has been given to recognise all modes 
 and tints of worth in all human beings, however 
 inconsistent with the speculative system which 
 the mere intellect had adopted. But that this 
 was a special and most highly cultivated endoAv- 
 ment of Goethe's, is plain to any one who reads 
 his works ; yet under this limitation, that, as 
 his own philosophic preconceptions never ob- 
 scured his sense of excellence, or even of much 
 more vulgar merit, when he found it realized 
 in life, those in whom such dogmatic positive- 
 ness is predominant, and suppresses, or tends to 
 suppress, the candid openness to human facts, 
 were those to whom he least spontaneously did 
 justice. When this devotion to an abstract ideal 
 was stirred and inflamed into zealous action, as 
 in great religious reformers, then least of all did 
 Goethe expand his heart to admit the claims of 
 the ethical hero, though his understanding was 
 always far too clear-siglited not to acknowledge 
 
 O 3
 
 298 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the importance of such men in the history of the 
 world. Lastly, in Goethe's veneration for a 
 Highest above him, Mr. Carlyle has found a 
 religious music, the fit accompaniment of his own 
 noblest hopes and convictions. In Goethe this 
 consciousness of an Infinite Perfection, which 
 man's best faculties can but faintly discern, and 
 his fairest creations but narrowly figure, seems to 
 us to have been ever present and awake. Its 
 pulsations may, we think, be felt, its animating 
 and purifying breath Inhaled through all his 
 works, though often so inseparably combined 
 with the whole structure that one cannot ex- 
 tract It from this page or that, and say, — Lo ! 
 here, or Lo ! there. But if thus living through- 
 out his writings, as the spring-time moves in 
 every air and leaf of the green landscape, this 
 l)Iety of Imagination cannot have been wanting 
 to his character and life. Yet it must be added, 
 that there Is but a small portion of the poet's 
 works in which this feeling Is manifested in the 
 form of distinct opinion. And, though he was 
 always probably quite capable of appreciating 
 its value In others. It was by no means one of 
 the excellences In man, which he In general 
 held requisite in order to obtain his respect and 
 sympathy. 
 
 AVlio can doubt that Goethe would at any time 
 have preferred the society of a flippant, smooth, 
 dilettante Horace Walpole, to that of a stern, pro-
 
 CARLYLE. 299 
 
 phetic, ignorant Whitfield? Who does not see 
 tliat Mr. Carlyle Avould have fixed his eye upon 
 the letter-wi'iting virtuoso with hardly more of 
 interest than on a fashionable vender of antique 
 curiosities? and would have owned the man of 
 gloom and glare, the songless rhapsodist, as a 
 true brother, not a man of quality, but a 
 man? 
 
 Groethe, in his notes to Benvenuto Cellini, has 
 spoken with high eulogy of Lorenzo de' Medici, 
 and with contemptuous dislike of Savonarola. 
 This man, as those know who have carefully 
 read the documents on his character, was a most 
 sincere and fervid Koman Catholic Puritan, and 
 was held in veneration during his life, and long 
 after his death, by at least half the most eminent 
 and best of his Florentine contemporaries, and 
 by innumerable others. Of liis chief admirers 
 may be named Philip de Comines and Michael 
 Angelo. Now there is little boldness in conjec- 
 turing that Mr. Carlyle would consider Lorenzo 
 worthless or worse, and would feel for the 
 reforming monk an admiration akin to that 
 with which he regards John Knox and Martin 
 Luther. 
 
 The glory however remains, and must always 
 remain, for Mr. Carlyle, of having been the first 
 to inform that half of the civilized world whose 
 speech is English, that Goethe is the man to 
 whom, for fullness joined to fineness of nature,
 
 300 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 at once for capacity and accomplishment, no 
 other of our age can be compared. Nay, the 
 best among them, whom the others must ulti- 
 mately, however unwillingly, obey, have through 
 him been so informed of, or rather by, this truth, 
 that it rests for them in the main on its just 
 and unalterable grounds. All the knowledge of 
 Goethe wliich may be added, must cohere with 
 that which he has given, and depend upon it, 
 like the bartizans, bridges, court-yards, turrets, 
 and encircling walls, with the immovable gothic 
 keep, which is the ancestral stronghold of the 
 great castle. Others in England before him un- 
 doubtedly knew the truth on this subject, and 
 some had published it : but no one in such a way 
 as to force it on the attention of all who read 
 miscellaneous literature, and to induce multi- 
 tudes, especially of younger men, to acquaint 
 themselves with the writings of the greatest man 
 of our time. 
 
 When it is said that Goethe was this, how 
 much is in the words implied ! No less than 
 that it is he who has seen widest and deepest 
 into the wants and powers of his age, and has 
 best shown wliat may be done in it, by those 
 who must in the end be the teachers of the 
 others. That he was a much greater man than 
 had been in Europe for several generations, may 
 or may not arise simply from the fact, that the 
 age itself was generally a far more comi)lex and
 
 CARLYLE. 301 
 
 more energetic one than those which had imme- 
 diately preceded. Of his place in it there is 
 likely to be less and less of doubt. Whatever 
 else may be written about him in English, which 
 will hardly surpass in interest what we have be- 
 fore us, these are at least the first at all ample 
 notices, which, when Goethe had been for about 
 half a century established by his works as the first 
 mind in Europe, made Englishmen aware of the 
 fact. Grasshoppers had before chirped for and 
 against the rumoured foreign singer ; and these 
 are often pleasant verdant animals. But now it 
 was no grasshopper ; the creature is of a different 
 race. Bos locuhis est. It was the roaring of a 
 bull*, which the mountains needs must hear and 
 reply to. The Divine Monster, renewing the 
 Europan tale, carried on his back, as he rode 
 the waters, the unreluctant Muse of Gennany. 
 
 It need hardly be said, that, neither on the sub- 
 ject of Goethe, nor on almost any other, do we 
 profess, or inwardly yield, unconditional assent to 
 Mr. Carlyle. In many things he seems to us 
 hyperbolical and inordinate ; in many negligent 
 of counter-considerations. Seeing clearly Avhich 
 scale descends, so zealous is he to recognise the 
 fact for himself, and enforce it on others, that he 
 overlooks the existence of any weight at all, — and 
 often there is a heavy one, — on the other side of 
 
 Roaring bulls he would him make to tame. — Spenser.
 
 302 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the balance. With reference to Goethe, there is 
 a droll example of what we may venture to call 
 partisanship, which is amusingly unlike the 
 writer's general and most religious accuracy of 
 statement. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle's Essays contain one on Count 
 Cagliostro, in which, through a surface of much 
 emblematic and arabesque design, the whole 
 reality of the magician, and of his place in the 
 universe, — a region ultimately, however slowly, 
 fatal to quacks, — may plainly be discovered. In 
 this biography Herr von Goethe is presented to 
 us as a traveller at Palermo, the city which 
 Count Cagliostro honoured by being born there. 
 Goethe, visiting it in the course of his Italian 
 journey, in April, 1787, desired, as he informs us, 
 to see the nearest relatives of so illustrious a 
 thaumaturgist. Mr. Carlyle proceeds to trans- 
 late several pages in which the Poet relates the 
 particulars of his visit, and the imaginative asser- 
 tions (ready as those of that other famous voyager 
 to Sicily, Ulysses) by virtue (?) of which he in- 
 troduced himself, and accounted for his appear- 
 ance there, such as his acquaintance with 
 Cagliostro, and the like. In the course of con- 
 versation it appears, that Cagliostro had left at 
 Palermo, not only an unsavory renown, but a 
 debt of fourteen gold ounces, — we presume doub- 
 loons, — due to a poor widowed sister, who tells 
 Goethe the fact. ISIr. Carlyle ends his account
 
 CARLYLE. 303 
 
 of the matter with this sentence: "As for the 
 Signora Capitnmmino, with her three fatherless 
 children, we can believe, at least, that the four- 
 teen gold ounces were paid by a sure hand, and 
 so her heavy burden for some space lightened a 
 little." 
 
 Fourteen doubloons amount, as we reckon, to 
 about 501. And the English author seems to say, 
 that Goethe paid this money in Cagliostro's name. 
 Now in the last edition of Goethe's works we 
 find, at vol. 28, p. 146, these two paragraphs im- 
 mediately following the last words translated by 
 the biographer of Cagliostro : 
 
 I need not say that the interest which I took in this 
 family excited in me a lively wish to be of use to them, and 
 to assist them in their necessity. Through my means they 
 were now again deceived; and their hopes of an unexpected 
 help were, by the curiosity of northern Europe, in the way 
 to be a second time disappointed. 
 
 My first design was to present to them, before my depar- 
 ture, those fourteen ounces which the runaway had remained 
 indebted to them, and to conceal my gift under the pretext 
 that I hoped to obtain tlie sum again from him. But when 
 I made my calculation at liome, and took account of ray 
 cash and paper, I saw clearly that, in a country where from 
 want of communication distances grow to be almost infinite, 
 I should i)lace myself in difficulty, if I took upon me to 
 remedy, by a piece of cordial good-nature, the dishonesty 
 of a scoundrel. 
 
 This comparison of the impression in Mr. 
 Carlyle's mind with that on bookseller Cotta's 
 paper, from which the former professes to have
 
 304 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 been derived, suggests to us, with new satisfac- 
 tion, a passage of the same author, which his 
 great English interpreter has also somewhere 
 quoted. {Tag und Jahres Hefte, Werke, xxxii., 
 p. 63.) Goethe here speaks of himself as " in- 
 mostly convinced that man in the present, and 
 still more in his recollection, shapes and models 
 the outward world according to his own peculi- 
 arities." 
 
 The other dissertations on German literature 
 are all of high value, and show an amount of care 
 and sincerity, which may be regarded as quite 
 exemplary for such papers. Those on Schiller, 
 Jean Paul, and Novalis, are portraits at full 
 length, and living as if done by Rubens. But of 
 these productions we cannot now speak in detail. 
 There are two essays on Frenchmen of the 18th 
 century, — Voltaire and Diderot, — which are also 
 masterpieces of free, strong, and just delinea- 
 tion. 
 
 The account of Voltaire especially may, both 
 for the importance of the hero (of the narrative), 
 and for the vigour and solidity of the composi- 
 tion, be considered as a work in this kind which 
 will outlast the Plymouth breakwater and the 
 New Houses of Parliament. It is a sinjjular 
 illustration of the writer's character. We have in 
 Voltaire a combination of all the qualities in 
 almost the highest degree, which his critic most 
 unconditionally defies and spits at, — levity, logic,
 
 CARLYLE. 305 
 
 conventional culture, and decorousness, pecuniary 
 prosperity, sneering indifference. Hardly could 
 any one imagine anything, except the hard, inso- 
 lent brutality of a powerful fool, or the sleek and 
 lying gravity of a worldly priest, which would 
 more jar on Mr. Carlyle's feelings and faith, than 
 the fortunes, combined with the propensities, of 
 Voltaire. He had all that there is in Goethe, 
 which contrasts so curiously with the character of 
 Goethe's chief English admirer. And he wanted 
 that most pure and bright imagination, which 
 made Goethe so felicitous an interpreter of all the 
 symbols that embody truth, and which is his 
 chief intellectual claim to admiration and love. 
 Yet so searching and expansive is the English- 
 man's understanding of all genuine talents and 
 endeavours, such his sense of justice, and his 
 power of doing justice, that he sets before us an 
 image of the French wit, fully as remarkable for 
 the candid kindliness of the artist, as for the emi- 
 nence of his subject. 
 
 Odd concurrence, and perhaps peculiar to our 
 time ; when the grave, religious anchorite issues 
 from the primeval ruins and palm-groves where 
 he has made his hermitage, and, visiting the court 
 of a Sultan, looks at and quietly appreciates the 
 dancing, juggling jester and imjrrovisatore, whom 
 the crowd applaud, and neither condemns their 
 levity, nor suggests the propriety of impaling 
 him. New spectacle in our moral annals, when
 
 306 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 an Augustine, — fiery and innneasurable as that 
 Hannibal who sprang from the same soil, and in a 
 world wider and higher than Hannibal's as Heaven 
 than Earth, — contemplates a ribald tearless Lu- 
 cian, not as a fiendish reptile to be crushed, but 
 as an erring man who worked with such means 
 as he had in such dreary work as lay before him, 
 and is to be understood, pitied, pardoned, not 
 plunged into an inextinguishable flame-bath of 
 abhorrence. 
 
 In this essay on Voltaire, as we have referred 
 to it at all, it may be worth while to notice that 
 we find a favourite doctrine of Mr. Carlyle's put 
 forward in these words ; " The thinking and the 
 moral nature, distinguished by the necessities of 
 speech, have no such distinction in themselves, 
 but, rightly examined, exhibit in every case the 
 strictest sympathy and correspondence, are indeed 
 but different phases of the same indissoluble unity, 
 — a living mind." 
 
 Now in this and all similar statements of the 
 author, it has always seemed to us that he neither 
 does justice to himself nor to his readers. He is 
 haunted apparently by some ghost of a theory, 
 wliich fills him with just antipathy, — that the 
 faculties of a man arc lifeless, sepai'able things, 
 put together like differently coloured bits of wood 
 in a joiner's inlaid work, so that the chess-player 
 is constructed by a higher effort of the same kind 
 of skiU employed in constructing his chess-table:
 
 CARLYLE. 307 
 
 which, could man do nothing better than play 
 chess, might have a show of some meaning. But 
 to love and make love while playing chess, like 
 Ferdinand and Miranda, or to philosophize over 
 his game, like Nathan the Wise, — this passes the 
 craft of any timber-and-toy-work ever imagined 
 before or since the days of Hiram of Tyre. This 
 notion, that juxtaposition of dead parts, not con- 
 spiration of living powers, is the secret of our 
 being, which is taught by several thinkers, or, 
 omitting the aspirate, tinkers, in psychology, Mr. 
 Carlyle opposes, often with victorious derision 
 and divine feeling, but often also, as it seems, by 
 all manner of random and amorphous assertions, 
 which, like bursting cannon and reverting Con- 
 greve-rockets, injure his own cause at least as 
 much as that which he combats. As if a wise 
 man could find no other way of putting aside a 
 fool's wooden buckler, but by running full tilt 
 against it with his own head, in which concussion 
 the philosophic skull is not the implement that of 
 the two will be the least damaged. 
 
 In this passage, let us ask, what is the value of 
 the assertion that there is no distinction in themselves 
 between the thinking and the moral nature? Mr. 
 Carlyle has shown abundantly well that Voltaire 
 was not the greatest of men as a practical, that is, 
 a moral being. Therefore, he says, neither can he 
 have been the greatest of thinkers. The reasoning 
 is perfectly just, because, as no one doubts, the same
 
 308 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 thinking faculty will think better when combined 
 with a good moral nature than with a bad one. 
 Therefore any man who has been as acute and 
 intellectually susceptible as Voltaire, and has also 
 had a stronger and more religious conscience, 
 must have been a. wiser and farther-seeing man. 
 And as there is no ground, even independently of 
 experience, for doubting the possibihty of this 
 better example of manhood, it is of course likely 
 that Voltaire was not the best of thinkers. It is 
 matter of fact that tliere have been both better 
 intellects and nobler hearts than his, sometimes 
 separate, and sometimes united, forming in the 
 last case the highest class of human beings we 
 know, — Socrates, for instance, and Shakspere. 
 
 But after the statement that, because Voltaii'e 
 was not the best, therefore he was not the wisest 
 of men, — a sacred truth, — what is the reason 
 given for it ? Because the thinking and the moral 
 nature are but different phases of the same ijidis- 
 soluhle unity, — a living mind. But we suppose it 
 must equally be allowed that memory and fancy 
 are also but different phases, &c. Therefore all the 
 persons of well-nigh miraculous memory, who 
 could repeat the Bible by rote and so forth, have 
 been also the most brilliant speakers and writers. 
 So sympathetic sensibility and the talent for 
 number and geometry are but different phases of 
 the same indissoluble unitg. Therefore Howard 
 and Wilbcrforce were mathematicians equal to
 
 CAELYLE. 309 
 
 Lagrange and Laplace ; and Newton was demon- 
 strably a man of the warmest and liveliest affec- 
 tions. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle's mode of stating his opinion must 
 therefore, as it seems, be abandoned. But to 
 refute him is far less important than to understand 
 him, — to know what his essential meaning is, and 
 Avhat is its value. 
 
 According to the popular opinion, he is evidently 
 altogether wrong: for it is vulgarly held that 
 there is no connection wdiatever between the 
 amount and liveliness of the intellect, and the 
 worth of the heart and conscience. The highest 
 power of insight and creation are perpetually 
 attributed in common talk to persons, of whom it 
 is supposed that they are entirely destitute of all 
 sense of duty. This notion Mr. Carlyle sees to 
 be a gross blunder, and one the correction of 
 which is important, not only that we may better 
 estimate the persons in whom there is alleged to 
 be this mixture of light and darkness, but that we 
 may apprehend more clearly the whole relation of 
 goodness to greatness in those in whom they are 
 admitted to have been combined, and may rectify 
 all our habitual conceptions of the groundwork of 
 human life. 
 
 The truth may perhaps be this. No man can 
 be a great poet or philosopher, Avithout having in 
 his own mind a large share of what is best in man. 
 If it does not exist in his life, it cannot become
 
 310 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 known to his intelligence. If not known it can- 
 not be represented in his image of the world, 
 which will consequently be a mean and scanty 
 one. So far the old maxim holds: quantum sumus 
 scimus. The greatest of mankind are those in 
 whom there is the combination of what is morally 
 best, of love and will, with luminous intelligence. 
 But these may be mixed in endless varieties of 
 proportion among the whole mass of men below 
 the highest. Nay, if one reads a few columns of 
 police reports and trials, one is tempted to fancy 
 that the majority of mankind may be divided into 
 the two classes of clever scoundrels, and the well- 
 intentioned simpletons whom they dupe. Mr. 
 Carlyle w^ould hardly deny that there is many a 
 peasant, such say as the fathers of Burns and of 
 Luther, in whom dwells a far higher and more 
 sacred sense of obligation and of reverence than 
 in Yoltau'e, yet for whom it would be ridiculous 
 to claim such talents as he possessed. In se- 
 verity and persistency of conscientiousness, how 
 far does a dogged Mr. Xewton of Olney, a 
 dull Mr. Scott of Aston- Sanford, stand above a 
 Gibbon and a Hume ! In knowledge, clearness, 
 though tfulness, how much ftirther below them ! 
 Or compare a Colonel Gardiner, a Colonel Hut- 
 chinson, with a Frederick II., with a Duke of 
 Guise, — a Man of Ross with a Lord Bolingbrokc, 
 — a missionary Swartz with an un-missionary 
 Lord Clive or Hyder AH, — a Mr. Calamy with
 
 CARLYLE. 311 
 
 a Dr. South, — a Savonarola with an Erasmus, — a 
 Jeanie Deans with a Madame de Sevigne, — and 
 then admire the attempt to identify conscience 
 and understanding, head and heart ! 
 
 In fact, so far as common observation reaches, 
 in physical science, in practical business, in elo- 
 quence, conversational, forensic, or senatorial, 
 there may be almost any force of understanding 
 and volition, without faith, aifectionateness, 
 duteousness, truth. Witness so many a coarse 
 and brutal mathematician and naturalist, — so 
 many an utterly profane and reprobate statesman, 
 — witness a Wolsey, an Ezzelino, a Tiberius, a 
 Richelieu. Nay, it may be said, that no mean 
 reach of anthropological theory, of insight into 
 man, so far as he is a selfish and instinctive, not a 
 generous and rational being, may be found in 
 persons themselves of the poorest, shallowest cha- 
 racter; as in how many a tricky Jesuit, how 
 many a French philosopher of the 18th century ; 
 as in a Lucian, a Lord Chesterfield, a Pere 
 Joseph, a Talleyrand, and alas ! a Machiavclli and 
 a Bacon. 
 
 It is easy for any one who has studied Mr. 
 Carlyle's writings, to imagine with what huge 
 disdain and aloofness he would listen to trivialities 
 of this kind, and make it apparent with a kind of 
 articulate rhinoceros grunt, that he had taken 
 such cases into his account, and weighed them 
 better than his critic. So be it. We at least
 
 312 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 have no doubt that he has seen more clearly than 
 most, perhaps than all other, living men, the im- 
 possibility of apprehending the highest principles 
 of things, without having in our own breasts a 
 noble model and ideal of man, — that is to say, 
 without having before our eyes the highest form 
 of tlie highest being we know. But his zeal in 
 setting forth this great truth seems perpetually to 
 carry him headlong, before he has cleared his way, 
 into a jungle of expressions where his own pro- 
 gress is impeded, and his weaker followers at- 
 tempting to track him may very possibly be alto- 
 gether bewildered. 
 
 The most usual expedient for making out his 
 case is to say merely that all intelligence, except 
 that w^hich requires goodness, — intelligence not 
 lighted by and looking to what is most divine in 
 man, — is not intelligence at all. Consequently 
 he adopts a vocabulary of his own, for what most 
 men would call understanding of some kind, — such 
 as adroitness, logic, and so forth. For some re- 
 source must be found to avoid calling by the 
 name of intellect a mental faculty, which has 
 often nevertheless made the possessor the king of 
 millions of minds. Yet there is no obvious ab- 
 surdity in suggesting that it is this same hard 
 mechanical understanding, which, when combined 
 with a free, large, resolute, and glowing heart, 
 makes the man of men, the king, not of one, but 
 of all ages. On the other hand, who has not
 
 CARLYLE. 313 
 
 known some poor dark dreamer, full of celestial 
 faith and courage and humble beneficence, to 
 whom if you could but give the talent of a 
 Rochester, you would have a Fenelon, — the wdt 
 of a Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and you 
 would produce a Madame Roland ? 
 
 Mr. Carlyle, in order to make some of his 
 favourite personages square with his theory, seems 
 to us to do more than use words in new senses. 
 Thus he rates Dr. Johnson's abilities far higher 
 than any one else would, who holds the same 
 extensive and energetic views as to literature and 
 science. And this because Johnson, though as 
 far as a prodigiously clever man well can be from 
 either poetry or philosophy, was an indubitably 
 noble champion of integrity and manhood. And 
 so of Mirabeau on the other hand, whose talents 
 it would be ludicrous to deny, his great pane- 
 gyrist maintains a moral theory, in which pro_ 
 bably not one earnest and reverential mind in 
 Europe would agree. For • the problem of this 
 much debated lamentable man does in truth seem 
 of no difficult solution. He stands before us on 
 the whole free from inward or outward disguises, 
 — a mass of flagrant energies, in brain, limbs, and 
 appetite, without law or wisdom of any kind, — 
 but driven through the indulgence of all maddest 
 impulses into the worst of meanness and filth; a 
 man, in a word, with a Self more requiring to 
 be commanded than that of any one else in his 
 
 VOL. I. P
 
 314 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 day, and yet than whom not one was less capable 
 of Self-command. Often did he stirringly un- 
 common deeds, sometimes perhaps a splendidly 
 impetuous and effective one, most frequently mere 
 clever tricks for self-advancement, not seldom acts 
 of intemperance, which the thinnest film of self- 
 respect would have rendered impossible on any 
 temptation. But for the Revolution, he would 
 probably, and not unrighteously, have ended his 
 career in the galleys, to which he was rapidly 
 hastening. The sound of this great commotion 
 he heard with the same joy as a pirate in chains 
 in the hold of a vessel, when he catches the bel- 
 lowing of the storm, and hears the timbers creak, 
 and the spars falling; for now there is a chance 
 that he may be let loose, and even called on 
 to aid in saving all the rest; otherwise he has 
 nothing to hope but the gallows. In the wreck 
 of that doomed and worthless French government, 
 he showed himself, with a self-conscious daring, 
 cool swiftness, and tremendous volubility, which 
 made him for a time the grandest lord of misrule 
 that modern Europe ever saw. But in spite of 
 the opinion of Mr. Carlyle, which was also, we 
 believe, that of Niebuhr, it seems inconceivable 
 that he, or even a man with all his gifts and 
 none of his shame, — even a Hercules without the 
 poisoned shirt, — could have solved such a problem 
 as that of saying when the Revolution was to stop. 
 For stop it could not at any point short of the
 
 CARLYLE. 315 
 
 utter disgust and weariness of the people at a 
 blood-stained, fiend-possessed anarchy, which, in 
 order to abhor, they must first have experienced. 
 Finally therefore Mirabeau stands in history with 
 a head of diamond, nerves of iron, and a mouth 
 of gold, and one whose furnace of a soul con- 
 tained far more of clay and dross and fetid rot- 
 tenness than of any purer, manlier material. 
 
 This view of the distinction between head and 
 heart, wit and will, no doubt is common-place and 
 hackneyed; but so are Euclid and the Almanac. 
 
 There is but one other of these biographical 
 representations which we propose to speak of. 
 It is that of Samuel Johnson. Of few men 
 named in English literature has more been said 
 and written. His works are known more or less 
 to all Englishmen who read; and there is a still 
 more substantial record of him in Boswell's Life 
 than in his own writings. On these materials 
 innumerable artisans have been at work. For 
 fifty years he has been a perpetual theme of 
 journalists. He is still a sort of venerable name, 
 as of something bigger and more sonorous than 
 other authors of the eighteenth century, not 
 without a shadow of romance, — a something: 
 between the Parish Schoolmaster and the Great 
 Mogul. For a considerable time after his death 
 he passed, even among cultivated men, for a pro- 
 found thinker, a teacher of the principles of 
 human life, and the best of authorities in literary 
 
 P2
 
 316 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 criticism; while, as to his rhetorical ability, the 
 only question seemed to be whether he was great, 
 — almost incomparably great, — by dint of, or in 
 spite of, his style. Of late years the tide has 
 tui'ned. The habit has grown up of looking 
 wider and deeper in literatm-e, than was usual 
 in his day. Men require freedom, energy, pic- 
 turesqueness, subtlety, even at the cost of a 
 certain neatness and full-dress modishness, then 
 thought indispensable. We have come nearer 
 to reality in all ways, and find therefore that we 
 must widen our circle of mental activity, as the 
 horizon of nature spreads endlessly around us. 
 Thus the common estimate of Johnson has 
 changed; and younger, fresher gods have drawn 
 off men's attention from the Jove, whose shake 
 of his un-ambrosial wig once ruled the world. 
 A prejudiced, emphatic pedant, — is probably the 
 sort of description which would most nearly hit 
 the prevalent opinion about him during the last 
 twenty years. Nor has the teaching of men of 
 high talent been wanting recently to enforce 
 this view of his pretensions. But listen to Mr. 
 Carlyle's voice. The scene changes with a flash; 
 and Johnson stands before us, revealed in gigantic 
 size, an object for all ages of reverential love. 
 
 By what magic is this done? Nay, it is not 
 by magic, but by that art, of which magic, were 
 there such a secret in existence, would be a 
 subordinate handicraft department. With an
 
 CARLYLE. 317 
 
 eye, one of the rarest ever given to man, and 
 sharpened by stedfast use, he sees the essential, 
 the intrinsic in other men, and, while he sees it^ 
 reads it aloud in a tone which all must hear. 
 
 What he tells us of in Johnson is not the 
 theories, the prejudices, the style of the man. 
 It is the man himself; what he had the capacity 
 to be; above all, what he Avilled to be, and how 
 resolutely. Thus we see the rough, sorrowful, 
 over-violent, voracious, unrefined man start out 
 as a hero, a worn, unwearied wrestler for con- 
 science-sake, whose life was the grand work, to 
 which all his written works are but an appendix 
 and pieces justificadves. It is not that he says 
 this, as it is here said, or as any one might say 
 it, in abstract terms, which convey the meaning 
 only as a black profile represents the face, — hardly 
 so well: for in this the outline is the fac- simile of 
 a part of the original ; but abstract terms express 
 only a general notion, Avhich belongs equally to 
 ten thousand originals, and can therefore accu- 
 rately image no one of them specially. But Mr. 
 Carlyle so says the thing, as to startle the eye 
 with it and stamp it on the heart. For him who 
 has read his account of Johnson, the old grey 
 scarred, passionate, but purely good man is for 
 ever a living being, one whom we have heard 
 with profit, gazed at with veneration, nay, whom 
 we have known as those did not know him, at 
 whose tables he sat, and to whose questions he
 
 318 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 replied. We know him both by faith and insight, 
 inwardly and in his structure, and as a toiling 
 mortal man in this painful land of the Immortal. 
 
 Thus in that flat and meagre English eigh- 
 teenth century, which produced the houses, the 
 furniture, the thoughts, the people, that we are 
 most accustomed to consider decayed and out of 
 date, human life comes before us in one great, awk- 
 ward image, still a sacred beaming reality. There 
 is no well-known biography of any man written by 
 one who knew him intimately, which sets him so 
 livingly before us in all his breadth and strength, 
 in what was peculiar to him, and not his acci- 
 dental fringes and appendages, and with all that 
 was truly shaping and influencing in his age and 
 circumstances, as this delineation of Johnson by 
 a man who never saw him in the body, — knew 
 him not till he had been removed from the stage 
 and stage-lamps of the present, to live before the 
 spiritual eye among the starry depths of heaven. 
 
 In this singular essay it may be remarked, and 
 well deserves to be thought of, that Mr. Carlyle 
 never appears to have been forcibly struck by the 
 sad unrest, the entu'C absence of peace in John- 
 son's whole life. As fixed by his moral strength 
 as the hardest material framework of the earth, 
 and freely standing fast against all temptation, 
 supported also by an unwavering belief in a 
 Divine Friend of man ruling the universe, yet 
 was he always anxious and spectre-haunted.
 
 CARLYLE. 319 
 
 Though too stout of heart for legions of fiends 
 to drag him into their pit of darkness, yet he 
 always fancied that He, against whom all fiends 
 are in revolt, would thrust him from his presence 
 over the brink of destruction. 
 
 Nor did this arise directly from a thoroughly 
 diseased physical frame infecting a healthy 
 mind; which would perhaps be the commonest 
 solution. For Johnson's view of all beyond the 
 mechanical and palpable had in itself the seeds 
 of all the moral misery which he suffered. The 
 mere moral element, the conscience, was in him 
 nobly, but also fearfully predominant. By earnest 
 longing to fulfil the moral law did no man, from 
 Adam to the Baptist, from Paul to Luther, ever 
 yet find peace on earth. Those incapable of self- 
 devouring emotion and brooding melancholy may 
 easily find in rules of duty a safeguard against any 
 such wrong-doing, as would produce consequences 
 very painful to them; but a fervid and meditative 
 spirit carries conscience with it as a divine curse, 
 if this be not transfigured and glorified into the 
 revelation of a good higher than all laws of duty. 
 
 The philosopher has his insight into an ideal 
 self-subsistent first principle, the source and end 
 of all things. The regenerate religious believer 
 enjoys communion with an unseen, ever-present 
 Deity. The poet and poetic artist cultivates his 
 general consciousness of an eternal harmony and 
 beauty pervading all objects, and lending them
 
 320 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 whatever they enjoy of worth. These are rea- 
 lities of life, in subordination to which the 
 agonizing conscience is reconciled with the 
 universe, and so lights up the soul, without 
 consuming it to the ashes of sorrow. 
 
 Now in Johnson this higher consciousness 
 never took complete eifect. It worked indeed 
 negatively and destructively towards the over- 
 throw of all joy, rather than genially towards the 
 realization of a sacred and mysterious peace. Not 
 refreshings were his, but witherings from the 
 face of God. For him the grave was an ultimate 
 den of horrors, not a crypt through which we 
 rise into the bright, eternal temple. In all 
 beyond the material and prudential, his theoretic 
 insight was most dim and weak, — a purblind 
 dream of insight. And thus he endeavoured to 
 find a home for his reason in that region of the 
 traditional and authoritative, which is even at 
 best a road to travel on, a mine to work in, — 
 but can for no mortal be a place of final rest. 
 
 That Mr. Carlyle does not notice in Johnson 
 this absence of serene joy, — how different from 
 the vain self-satisfaction of the world I — is an 
 evidence of his characteristic tendency to sympa- 
 tliize with every struggle, and turn away from the 
 fruits of every victory. His applause is never 
 for him that putteth off his armour, but always 
 for him that putteth it on. And the most reso- 
 lute and mighty preacher in our day, of a Truth
 
 CARLYLE. 321 
 
 to be believed and enjoyed by all, is he who seems 
 least capable of valuing the repose of spirit, the 
 quieting of inward tumults and terrors, which the 
 courage to fight as he fights has earned for so 
 many weaker men. 
 
 The want of capacity for the higher kinds of 
 thought gives, as has been often felt, a peculiar 
 hardness, deadness, and inane pomp to Johnson's 
 writings. And his panegyrist's disposition to look 
 chiefly at the practical vigour of a man's life, 
 rather than at the quality of his intellect, is well 
 illustrated by the fact, that he almost brings him- 
 self to attribute a positive and lasting value to 
 these loud and swollen productions. Nay, in one 
 of these essays, though not in that on Johnson, he 
 has distinctly praised the preface to Shakspere, of 
 which it might seem in our day hard to imagine 
 how, being written by a sane and grammatical 
 man, it could well be worse than it is. May Ave 
 not, for instance, ruminate with a kind of languid, 
 despairing amazement on the opinion that Shak- 
 spere is blamable for writing without any moral 
 purpose, and "is not always careful to show in 
 the virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked,^' — 
 and so forth, through a series of ponderous futili- 
 ties, which remind one of notliing more profitable 
 than a mesh of cobwebs stiffened and vamped 
 into buckram. With his gross and heavy logical 
 faculty, and nothing more, with at least an utter 
 want of transparent depth of imagination, what 
 
 P 3
 
 322 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 could Johnson say of poetry, that should be worth 
 listening; to? Or how can we marvel that he 
 flounders among words and crotchets as in a slough, 
 when plunging with tusked muzzle and pachyder- 
 matous bulk, into a region where only enchanted 
 arms, the shield of diamond and the sword of sun- 
 beams, can avail the destined knight ? As some 
 great earth-monster, Johnson tunnels under 
 ground, and heaves out rocks and tons of soil 
 before him. But to move in air, and beyond the 
 stars, a man must fly, not mine ; and only by 
 such digging faculty did Samuel ever show any 
 intellectual prowess. Coleridge has somewhere 
 spoken of him as the overrated man of his age, 
 feeling, as might be expected, the hacking coarse- 
 ness of that material understanding when applied 
 to spiritual objects. Carlyle has shown clearly 
 enough that the man was not overrated, but on 
 the whole prodigiously undervalued. Though 
 able to discern, had he so chosen, much of that 
 defectiveness and rudeness of brain which repelled 
 Coleridge, he deals tenderly with the most con- 
 founding pieces of (un-) philosophic botching, 
 and flaring, noisy, sham solutions, in honour of the 
 integrity and sturdiness of the clumsy Centaur's 
 life and effort. 
 
 Thus much be said of the accounts of eminent 
 men, which form so large a portion of these 
 volumes. Of general dissertations not professedly 
 biographical, there are only two considerable
 
 CARLYLE. 323 
 
 essays. One of these, on the Signs of the Times, 
 is a proclamation, in Mr. Carlyle's most express 
 manner, of the mechanical tendencies and enthral- 
 ment of our age. He sees freedom of heart, 
 pure enthusiasm, self- forgetting personal noble- 
 ness of all kinds, fled, as it seems to him, from the 
 world. Therefore he stands a mourning, too pain- 
 fully living man amid a people of corpses, and 
 artificial composite imitations of the old heroic 
 race, — an inspired one, wailing to the winds of 
 heaven, and the all-entombing mountains, because 
 no human ear is open to him. But clear, swift, 
 far-sounding as a torrent, his words spread forth, 
 and will stream into many hearts. The heavy 
 lamentation will come as a voice of hope to those 
 who feel it the worst of evils that there is no one 
 to lament with them ; and in earnest sorrow they 
 will find a stir to action, and a dawning breath of 
 joy. Amid the clamorous snarl and gossip of 
 literature, and the dead formulas of superficial 
 science, here sounds a true prophetic voice, which 
 the best of the dead might throb to hear. Nor 
 will it be without fit audience among us, avIio, for 
 want of living prophets to slay, have only tried to 
 abolish the memory of the old ones, save as pageant 
 figures for adorning shrines which they would have 
 called down lightning to devour. 
 
 The second paper of which we spoke is entitled 
 Characteristics. Of this it is far more difficult to 
 say any reasonable word. In the details and
 
 324 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 colouring it is full of Mr. Carlyle's spirit. But 
 as a whole, and in its purport, it seems to us (that 
 is, to one living man) obscure, self-contradictory, 
 strained, like the long far-glimmering dream of 
 some wise vision, that has been in other ages, or 
 shall in new ages be. This is not said dogmati- 
 cally, but with full consciousness that the fault 
 may be in the reader, not the writer. For to no 
 reflecting man can it be unknown, that the not- 
 understood will often, most often, present itself as 
 the unintelligible, by no defect of light in the 
 object, but by defect of eye in the beholder. It 
 is a droll, yet a compassionable fancy of many, 
 that what is called ordinary education, that is to 
 say, a small smattering of Latin, and a large 
 smattering of English vocables, enables every 
 one, or all but every one, to know at a glance 
 what significance and worth there is in all the 
 uttered speculations of the wisest heads. It is 
 therefore indubitable that Mr. Carlyle may have 
 an idea, which, if it could be imparted to the per- 
 plexed mind, would enable it to see in this disser- 
 tation a complete and consistent view of the high 
 matters there dealt with. As the case now stands, 
 it appeal's confused, and dark, not with excess of 
 light. Yet the obscure looks nowise inscrutable, 
 but having its explanation in some fallacies most 
 natural and seductive to a man like him with 
 whose works we arc now occupied. Would you 
 have a pine-forest teeming and arcadian as an
 
 CARLYLE. 325 
 
 orchard ? An idle question ! Or the inside of a 
 pyramid light and sunny as a greenhouse ? How 
 vain an expectation ! Leave we such fancies ; and 
 make the best of what we have. 
 
 The main argument of the whole exposition is 
 the evil of consciousness; which indeed is with 
 Mr. Carlyle the root of all evil. It is not that in 
 his view, as in that of all wise men, consciousness 
 is liable to its excesses and derangements, but that 
 the fact is itself a mischief and misery to man, 
 and our only wholesome state that in which we 
 work instinctively and spontaneously, not volun- 
 tarily and reflectively. 
 
 In this docti'ine all the confusion seems expli- 
 cable on the supposition that consciousness is used 
 in a vague, unsteady sense, for the thing itself, 
 and for all the maladies to which it is liable, and 
 the sorrows and absurdities which these produce ; 
 as if a man should call digestion the great stand- 
 ing grievance of the human body, meaning thereby 
 indigestion. Mr. Carlyle seems to conceive a 
 mature man, with cultivated powers of thought, 
 and reasonable, free activity, in whom conscious- 
 ness has never been developed, — a sort of monster 
 that earth never knew, and which will probably 
 not exist in Heaven. 
 
 There is of course a truth in this theory ; or it 
 could not be a theory, but words without meaning. 
 There is an important truth ; or it would hardly 
 be the opinion of him who professes it. But the
 
 326 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 truth is in this essay connected with what seems as 
 large a mass of error as can easily be met with in 
 a great and generous thinker: and it is lost in 
 such a bundle of exaggerations and paralogisms, 
 that he may count himself happy, who by long 
 metallurgic toil can make any gain of it at all. 
 
 The truth involved in the doctrine appears to 
 be, that the mind which is perpetually looking at 
 and listening to its OAvn individuality, its private 
 and particular associations, tastes, talents, and his- 
 tory, is wasting and corrupting its cajiacities, reduc- 
 ing itself to worthlessness, perpetually rehearsing 
 the same paltry drama before the same beggarly 
 audience. Let so much be granted, nay, zealously 
 maintained. 
 
 But Mr. Carlyle lumps under the same condem- 
 nation all introspection of a man's being, not only 
 in its individuality, as the being of Thomas Car- 
 lyle, or Bubb Doddington, or Honore Gabriel 
 Eiquetti Mirabeau, or William Wilberforce, — but 
 so far as it is the exemplar, and the only one that 
 he can primarily study, of the being of all other 
 men. My consciousness is the window, the only 
 possible one, through which I look at the universe. 
 My individuality is the looking-glass, — always a 
 small, often a cracked and dim one, that hangs on 
 the inner wall of the same chamber. I may 
 hardly open my eyes at all, which is the case with 
 the greater number of mankind. Or I may look 
 thi'ough the window, — which brightens and en-
 
 CARLYLE. 327 
 
 larges itself during the process^ — and so see what- 
 ever it has been appointed for me to look at, as 
 the greatest and best of men have always done. 
 Or I may turn my back on the window, and gaze 
 only at as much of the prospect as is reflected in 
 the mirror, which is the proceeding of coxcombs 
 and quacks. In the confounding of these last two 
 very different mental acts, lies, as we conceive, 
 the main error of the essay. 
 
 The habit of contemplating the particular 
 monad, self, for its own sake, is a mere self-seek- 
 ing, which divides us from other beings. Self- 
 intuition and self-interpretation, when the self is 
 regarded as a product of higher forces, similar to 
 the other, and especially to the human, products 
 of the same, is indispensable to all true knowledge 
 of man and men, and even of all other things, in 
 that chief sense in which their essence is a reality 
 analogous to us. The exploring of myself in 
 this higher view is not a nourishing, but a cor- 
 recting, of vanity. Self is thus resolved into a 
 result, an exponent, of laws, which it depends on, 
 not commands, — is valued for the sake of that 
 which is above it, — is dis-individualized, uniso- 
 lated, rather universalized and idealized. To 
 deal with these two opposite, and in truth irre- 
 concilable processes of the soul, as if they Avere 
 one, or at least inseparable, is no trifling departure 
 from wisdom. 
 
 But there also seems to be a subordinate
 
 328 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 mistake, a cub-chimera accompanying the dam 
 thereof, — namely, the supposition that the most 
 thoughtful and creative of men have not a con- 
 sciovisness of their own particular characters and 
 powers. That act by which they are and have 
 become great, — the clear discernment of the 
 microcosmical self, and the esteem for it only as 
 the type of all, — excludes, during its continuance, 
 the thought of the atomic self in its private and 
 accidental features and drapery. But the light 
 which has been thus gained and sj)read over the 
 universe, illuminates also the twig and cobweb 
 nearest us. The sunrise which enables me to see 
 the wide landscape through the window, no less 
 permits me, Avhen I am weary of meditative 
 enthusiasm, to see my own visage in the mirror, 
 and smile at the wrinkles and the paleness witli 
 which I have confronted so fresh and o^lowing; a 
 natm'al vision. 
 
 Accordingly the fact appears to be, that, — 
 except in rude primitive ages, when greatness 
 could only be spontaneous, not voluntary, instinc- 
 tive, not reflective — every great man knows what 
 he is, — knows it so well and habitually that he 
 never needs to spend his time in affected senti- 
 mental speculations on himself. A few flashing 
 looks into his own story, and the meditated ex- 
 perience of life, give such a man a consciousness 
 which he cannot lose if he would, and would not 
 if he could, of all that he is as an individual time-
 
 CARLYLE. 329 
 
 bubble. But far differently is this knowledge 
 won and employed from the ignorant self-admi- 
 ration of the fop, wasting his life in the worship 
 of an idol, which, like an altar-piece ruined by 
 the smoke of the tapers, becomes the more worth- 
 less the longer and more fervently it is honoured. 
 
 The reasons by which Mr. Carlyle maintains 
 his views are chiefly these : 
 
 1. In health we are insensible of our bodily 
 functions; -and the fact of our having a body at 
 all is recalled to us only by pain, which is the 
 result of disturbance or sickness : therefore, judg- 
 ing by analogy, the same is true of the mind. 
 
 But the fact asserted is only partly real. We 
 are conscious of our bodies by means of their 
 pleasures, as well as of their pains. Moreover the 
 statement is nothing to the purpose. The bodily 
 sensations are totally unlike in kind to the re- 
 flective self-consciousness. The true analogy to 
 this, drawn from the body, is the knowledge of 
 his organs and functions, which a physiologist 
 acquires by self-observation, and which, so far as 
 it is possible, is by no means incompatible wath 
 health. Doubtless, when the body becomes as it 
 were the centre of the man's consciousness, when 
 pain compels the energies of the soul to spend 
 themselves on the sense of misery in the phy- 
 sical frame, this is a consequence of disease, and 
 that in a violent degree. But the evil here is, 
 that the supremacy of the mind is thus suspended
 
 330 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 by the intrusion of sensations, which, in the sane 
 and normal state of man, are the servants, not 
 the masters, of his reasonable will. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle's doctrine is clenched by the asser- 
 tion that, Had Adam remained in Paradise there 
 had heen no anatomy, and no metaphysics. Now 
 certainly it has not been one of the results of. 
 eating the fruit of knowledge, to teach us what 
 would, or what could uot have been our state, if 
 we had not tasted of it. Doubtless, as Bonaparte 
 used to say, when he was met by a foul wind, or 
 an unexpected frost, — But for this the destinies of 
 the world would have been different ! — a proposi- 
 tion not likely to be contested against the master 
 of so many legions, but which we may now ven- 
 ture to smile at. If we can at all conceive a 
 paradisiacal state for so anti-paradisiacal a being 
 as man, it would be one enriched with all our 
 blessings, and liable to none of our calamities. 
 But as we conceive the knowledge of anatomy 
 and of metaphysics to be among our most un- 
 questionable, if not our most unmixed, advan- 
 tages, we, for our part, should consider Paradise 
 as decidedly improved by the admission of these, 
 and indeed of all kinds of science as well as of 
 art. Had Adam remained in a state of childish 
 weakness as well as simplicity, which seems 
 sliadowed out in the brief Biblical narrative, he 
 would probably have remained ignorant of many 
 things which even Mr. Carlyle thinks worth
 
 CARLYLE. 331 
 
 knowing. But had he begun to reflect, his 
 thoughts, for aught that we can guess, must 
 have followed the same laws, and been directed 
 to the same objects, as those of his descendants. 
 
 2. Life, we are told, exists for purposes external 
 to itself: therefore to turn away our thoughts 
 from these to the processes of life is a practical 
 error. 
 
 But surely no. If by these external purposes 
 be meant the handling of material things, life 
 has far wider, higher aims. We may learn and 
 teach truth for the holiness of truth, and not that 
 by her means we may eat, drink, and be clothed. 
 Man, it is admitted, can attain to a knowledge, 
 to some genuine vision or imagination of sacred 
 laws to which he is subjected, and of a wondrous, 
 boundless system which he belongs to. Is it 
 ideally possible, or is it consistent with fact, that 
 he can do this, and yet not, by an inevitable and 
 no less rightful step onward, begin to sunder 
 what is eternal and divine in those laws from 
 what is spurious and accidental, — to widen by 
 experience and reflection the first small arbitrary 
 limits of that system, — to consider how, by what 
 bonds of affection and necessity, he is connected 
 with the All around him, — and to examine where 
 and when he may and must, in order to free and 
 healthful action, cut the temporary ties of custom 
 and opinion, by which his range has been confined 
 and his limbs fettered ? If he does this, how can
 
 332 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the process be distinguished from that of philo- 
 sophic reflection, — inspired intuition going before, 
 but ever followed by, and alternating with, distinct 
 self-consciousness ? For of this self-consciousness 
 the rise and final maturity are prophetically implied 
 in the mere fact that man can reflect, and cannot 
 live within the circle of his instincts. 
 
 3. Much grows in us, and much is given to us, 
 of which we cannot discern the source, or trace 
 the law. It is an intuition, an inspiration. — Yea 
 verily. But so far is denied by no one, with 
 whom there need here be argument. And fur- 
 ther it is manifest that he who would close his 
 mind against all suggestions of the true and beau- 
 tiful, which he cannot pre-define and lay down in 
 program, makes the speculative machinery, which 
 ought to be but a tool In his hands, a torturing 
 framework to confine them. Therefore, says Mr. 
 Carlyle, to seek to know what can be known 
 without exclusion or self-limitation, is but a 
 diseased craving. Therefore Is it a licentious 
 daring and slow self-destruction to reflect at all 
 on ourselves in relation to the Universe and to 
 Its Author. And therefore not only must all 
 higher and ideal truths be taken for granted 
 where they cannot be seen; but, even where they 
 can, Avc must close our eyes, and feel for them 
 groping. Depart then, ye profane! who fancy 
 that life and light are not only organized and 
 methodized in our structure according to a plnn
 
 CARLYLE. 333 
 
 which we may partly decipher, but that they 
 enable us to apprehend and meditate on the limits 
 which divide this conscious being of ours from 
 the ocean of divine existence surrounding and 
 sustaining it. Yet is it not rather certain that, 
 only by such meditation, and the actions which 
 it both prompts and purifies, can our humanity 
 be preserved at once integral and progressive, 
 neither closing itself against the radiance of the 
 objective universe, nor letting itself lazily dissolve 
 and be lost in those currents, from which, not by 
 chance nor vainly, was it distinguished and im- 
 personated into a man ? 
 
 4. Genius is ever a secret to itself. — In the sense 
 of inability to trace the channels and influxes by 
 which what is best comes to it, this has indubi- 
 tably its share of truth. How far it is true even 
 in this sense may afterwards be considered. But 
 let it first be noticed, that the consciousness which 
 has been hitherto spoken of and justified, is the 
 inward contemplation, not of what is peculiar in 
 the individual, but of what is universal in the 
 race, — of what characterizes, not a man, but 
 Man. That the man of genius does not know 
 himself to be a man of genius, might be alto- 
 gether true ; and yet this very man might study 
 with unwearied scrutiny the workings of his own 
 soul, not as his, but as God's ; and as his nearest, 
 and brightest, and by far his faithfullest, and his 
 only perfectly open, summary of God's whole 
 creation.
 
 334 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 But even in the other sense, namely, that a 
 man of genius does not know himself to be such, 
 the assertion is to be admired for a certain felicity 
 of courage, rather than for any ascertainable pre- 
 cision. There would be far more of truth in the 
 opinion, that there never yet was a man of genius 
 who did not know his own powers. But this it 
 is not necessary to affirm. It is sufficient to 
 maintain that there is no man memorable in 
 literature for the highest talents, who cannot be 
 shown to have well known that he possessed 
 them. 
 
 In fact, there is only one person, whom Mr. 
 Carlyle ever alleges, — and he is a stock example, 
 — in proof of his doctrine : this one of course is 
 Shakspere. As here, for instance, he says, " The 
 Shaksperc takes no airs for writing Hamlet and 
 the Tempest, understands not that it is anything 
 surprising.^'' Probably indeed he took no airs, 
 though even this we do not know. He had 
 better work to do than taking airs for Hamlet, 
 namely, taking pains for Othello. And he was 
 doubtless too thoroughly aware of his own great- 
 ness, to be vain of it. In his plays he says 
 nothing on himself, and his own character and 
 history, Avhich can now be recognized to have 
 that meaning. But in dramatic writing how 
 could he speak of himself by name or obvious 
 allusion ? And finer and indirect references to 
 his individual feelings and circumstances may, for
 
 CARLYLE. 335 
 
 aught we know, be found in every page ; but 
 that our ignorance of the minuter facts of his 
 life entirely conceals them from us. However 
 this may be, we have the evidence of his sonnets 
 to prove that, Avhere occasion oiFered, he had no 
 hesitation in speaking of his own genius, as of a 
 matter which he was perfectly acquainted with. 
 The 1 8th, for instance, concludes thus : 
 
 But thy eternal summer shall not fade. 
 Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest ; 
 
 Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, 
 When in eternal lines to time thou growest : 
 
 So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see. 
 
 So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 
 
 The two last lines of the 1 9th are : 
 
 Yet do thy worst, Old Time : despite thy wrong, 
 My love shall in my verse ever live young. 
 
 And the two first of the 55th ; 
 
 Not marble, nor the gilded monuments 
 
 Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhime. 
 
 Or look at the end of the 81st : 
 
 Your monument shall be my gentle verse, 
 Whicli eyes not yet created shall o'er-read ; 
 
 And tongues to be your being shall rehearse, 
 When all the breathers of this world are dead : 
 
 You still shall live (such virtue hath my pen) 
 
 Where breath most breathes, — even in the mouths 
 of men. 
 
 And in the 107th it is thus written : 
 
 And thou in this shalt find thy monument, 
 When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
 
 336 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 The whole basis of the notion, Avhich these pas- 
 sages superabundantly refute, lies in the apparent 
 indifference Avith which he treated his plays in not 
 publishing a complete edition of them. But for 
 this there may very possibly have been external 
 reasons which we are not aware of. He did 
 print the larger number of his works ; which is 
 sufficient to prove that he aimed at something 
 more than theatrical success. The language of 
 his first editors sounds as if he had intended to 
 publish the whole collection himself, but was pre- 
 vented by death. 
 
 It is also well worth considering, that, however 
 high Shakspere's estimate of his own powers might 
 have been, he had no facts before him from which 
 it was possible to imagine the importance that 
 English books were to obtain in the annals of 
 mankind. The only books then thought of with 
 veneration were in Greek, Latin, or Italian. That 
 an author writing English could thereby become 
 one of the capital figures in human history, was 
 concealed, possibly by nature's kindness, certainly 
 by inevitable circumstances, from him who was 
 best to realize the truth. Spenser indeed knew 
 otRerwise ; but Spenser read Italian, and was a 
 professed imitator of Italian poets, who had done 
 in their language what he wished to do in his. 
 But literature, except as learning, and that chiefly 
 theological, was held in small esteem, and gave no 
 social importance. It is evident that Shakspere's
 
 CARLYLE. 337 
 
 plays ranked high in general repute among the 
 dramatic productions of his day. As much is 
 plainly stated, as well as elsewhere, also in the 
 preface of his first editors, Heminge and Condell, 
 " to the great variety of readers.'''' Now these same 
 editors prefixed to the volume a dedication as well 
 as a preface. This is addressed to the two 
 brothers, the Earls of Pembroke and of Mont- 
 gomery. And hear how these friends and com- 
 rades of Shakspere write of his works, even after 
 his death, which might have been expected to 
 raise prodigiously their tone in speaking of him. 
 " Right Honourable, Whilst we studie to be 
 thankful in our particular for the many favors we 
 have received from your L. L., we are falne upon 
 the ill fortune to mingle two the most diverse 
 things that can be, feare and rashness ; rashness 
 in the enterprize and feare of the successe. For, 
 when we value the places your H. H. sustaine, 
 wee cannot but know the dignity greater than to 
 descend to the reading of these trifles; and while 
 we name them trifles, we have deprived ourselves 
 of the defence of our dedication, . . . We can- 
 not goe beyond our owne powers. Country hands 
 reache forth milke, creame, fruits, or what they 
 have; and many nations (we have heard) that had 
 not gummes and incense, obtained their requests 
 with a leavened cake. It was no fault to ap- 
 proach their gods by what means they could; 
 and the most, though meanest, of things arc 
 VOL. I. Q
 
 338 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 made more precious when they are dedicated to 
 temples." 
 
 This was the language of the chosen friends 
 whom Shakspere had commemorated in his Avill : 
 and among the many proofs of the low estimation 
 in those days of all literature, which did not come 
 under the head of learning, it Avould be hard to 
 discover any to us more striking. An Earl of 
 Pembroke was of too great dignity to descend to 
 the reading of poems, which we now know will be 
 read and treasured by milhons when the House of 
 Peers itself shall have sunk into the grave where 
 lie those wondrous Earls; nay, will be the wonder 
 and delight perhaps of new continents sprung 
 from the deep, when England, with her chalky 
 cliffs, shall have melted again into her limitary 
 seas. We know that, if in the wreck of Britain, 
 and all she has produced, one creation of her spirit 
 could be saved by an interposing genius to be the 
 endowment of a new world, it would probably be 
 the volume which the author's fi-iends, after his 
 death, thought too insignificant to be read by two 
 courtiers of King James I. And because we 
 know this, we fancy it wonderful that they and 
 Shakspere did not know it, as if the sudden vogue 
 of pamphlets and ballads for a few previous years 
 could have suggested to them any such result. 
 As well might one imagine that Shaksjjcre ought 
 to have anticipated the discoveries of Newton and 
 the inventions of "Watt.
 
 CARLYLE. 339 
 
 But from this ignorance of his as to the future 
 historical importance of his works, how strange 
 does it seem to infer that he had not discovered 
 his own creative and intellectual superiority to all 
 about him : though of course he had better things 
 to do than habitually to repeat to himself, How 
 much sweeter and nobler a singer am I than my 
 elder, Marlowe! Hoxo much freer, and fresher, and 
 more bland a spirit than my younger, Jonson ! 
 How much more thoughtful, fiery, deep, and sub- 
 stantial than the moonlight soul of Spenser ! Yet 
 that he did not know himself to be all this, we can 
 find neither proof nor probability. 
 
 And how far more astonishing is it to suj)pose, 
 that, because he did not foresee the destiny of his 
 works to be the best inheritance of his country- 
 men through all time, therefore he had not looked 
 into his own mind, and found there, — there, where 
 alone it could be found, — the interpretation of the 
 dream of human life which floated round him, — 
 that he had not discerned, in the feelings and 
 thoughts which he was conscious of, the hint and 
 explanation of those which he moulds now into 
 an Imogen, now an Othello, now a Hotspur, now 
 a FalstaiF. This must be proved by stronger evi- 
 dence than even an assertion of Mr. Carlyle's. 
 Nay, properly, no evidence could prove it ; for 
 the thing must be seen as true and eternal in 
 itself, or is incapable of being known at all. 
 
 As to all the other men most memorable in 
 
 Q 2
 
 340 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Clu-istian literature, the case is clear. No one can 
 overlook the proud, even fierce, self-consciousness 
 of Dante, the distinct praises which he fearlessly 
 bestows on his own labours, the inward, melan- 
 choly scrutiny, which is the theme of the Vita 
 Nuova and the Convito, and the w' hole plan and tone 
 of the great poem, which may not inaptly be de- 
 scribed as a journey through the kingdoms of self- 
 consciousness, exhibited in images of the outer 
 world, such as the eyes and as the fancy see it. 
 
 No less plain is the self-gratulation of Cer- 
 vantes, and his avowed preference of his own 
 writings to those of his contemporaries; and all 
 who value Don Quixote as anything better than 
 a farce, have ever seen that the poet drew the 
 substance of his work, though perhaps undesign- 
 edly, from the depths of his own character, its 
 visionary aspirations towards impossible good, and 
 the incongruous failures to which time and cir- 
 cumstance exposed his longings. 
 
 That Milton's grandest, as well as his most tri- 
 vial writings are undisguised fragments and 
 glimpses of Milton's individual self, all will admit, 
 and no one more readily than JVIr. Carlyle. His 
 moral reason, exalted into the region of pure 
 intelligence, and invested with crystalline glory, 
 constitutes, not suggests, the highest beings of his 
 Heaven. His austere, concentrated, often baffled 
 human affections are the originals of his earthly 
 personages. And his passionate and gloomy self-
 
 CARLYLE. 341 
 
 will, like his shadow thrown by a flash of light- 
 ning upon the snow-wall of an Alpine ridge, sup- 
 plies the shapes and the demoniac stature of his 
 nether spirits. 
 
 Of Goethe it need here only be said, that a 
 graceful and easy, but most assured sense of his 
 own worth, circulates through every fibre of his 
 creations, and is uttered loudly enough on suitable 
 occasions. No writer ever existed, in whom one 
 finds more of direct self-observation. Much even 
 in his works, which is not in the form of psycho- 
 logical remarks, yet in substance is nothing else, 
 though endued with the most beautiful and cun- 
 ningest of mythical and fabulous imagery. If 
 Mr. Carlyle persuades himself that Goethe's ex- 
 ample lends any support to his theory, the pensive 
 reader cannot fail to be reminded of certain 
 zealous divines, who discover the most peculiar 
 of the Christian mysteries in the legends of Pagan 
 poets, and in rites on which the Christian Church 
 made implacable war. 
 
 5. We have next an attack on Logic. Here 
 Mr. Carlyle is of the opinion of so many meta- 
 physicians, that a knowledge of the process of 
 drawing inferences from principles is not an im- 
 portant help towards drawing them correctly. 
 Very possibly this is true. This process however, 
 though the study of it may not be of much im- 
 portance in the practical art of thinking, is yet 
 one portion of the truth of our nature, which does
 
 342 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 lie completely within our ken, and which it can 
 injure no one to understand. The syllogistic 
 scheme, though as certain as the Rule of Three, is 
 no more than this any substitute for the higher 
 logic by Avhich we decide on the premisses we are 
 to reason from. This great and primal science is, 
 precisely on account of its depth and compass, far 
 more difficult to bring within any systematic 
 limits. The knowledge of it is the aim of the 
 highest speculation. The noblest moral effort 
 strives to realize it in the being, and not merely 
 to embrace it in the intelligence. Its realities are 
 the vital germs within all true poetic unages. 
 And these primitive verities are as much more 
 wonderfid and beautiful than the logical forms by 
 which we connect them with our experience, as the 
 starry Heavens are sublime in comparison Avith 
 the brazen tubes and o'lass lenses of the astro- 
 nomer. 
 
 But this view of the dignity and sanctity of 
 those seminal principles of things and of know- 
 ledge, which the technical, drudging logician is apt 
 to overlook, seems no way inconsistent with a 
 l)elief in the use of logic, as a clear exposition of 
 the rules by which mankind instinctively and uni- 
 versally reason from their experience, whatever 
 that experience may be. The inadequacy of such 
 subordinate and instrumental logic to make a man 
 wise cannot be too clearly seen : but hardly less 
 important is it to understand that it has no such
 
 CARLYLE. 343 
 
 evil consequences as Mr. Carlyle attributes to it. 
 It is well worth considering, for instance, that the 
 Schoolmen, instead of being, as he seems to ima- 
 gine, the least wise, were the most wise of all 
 men living in then' times, doing, many of them, 
 the best practical work, and often Avith hearts 
 awake to aU excellence and beauty which the 
 world had then disclosed before the eyes of Euro- 
 pean men. 
 
 When we find a Luther, a Napoleon, a Goethe, 
 cited as intuitive in contrast to dialectic men, is it 
 not plain that they had simply a larger amount of 
 inward and outward facts, and a clearer insight 
 into the master idea of the business in hand than 
 others? and that from these primordial truths they 
 reasoned, not with less, but with more logical 
 swiftness and force than others, and the two Ger- 
 mans with a full and sharp consciousness of the 
 process and method of their thoughts? 
 
 6. Virtue is next subjected to the same iron 
 yoke and Caudine infamy as logic. And here, 
 above all, do we seem to find the inanity, or at 
 least extreme imperfection, of the view propounded 
 to us. Be it admitted, — be it enforced by word, 
 deed, and life, that man, to be worthy, must live 
 in a sphere of pure voluntary impulses to good, 
 the flow of which has become habitual, and is the 
 result of many moral victories. But when men 
 have learnt to reflect on all other things, hoAV is it 
 possible that this alone should not be to them a
 
 344 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 problem for reflection ? Where the will in all its 
 aims is generous and grand, and therefore neces- 
 sarily, in smaller and more conventional phrase, 
 right, is it not certain that the insight gained by 
 such reflection will in turn corroborate and renew, 
 not debase and infect, the strength of the better 
 promptings? How weak, unstable, vacillating 
 from right to wrong, from truth to falsehood, and 
 certain to be driven from precipitate appetite into 
 dreariest doubt of all things, — how dreamy and 
 half-sincere is that virtue sure to be, which, un- 
 reasoned of, misunderstood, taking itself for 
 granted, dwells in a mind awakened to the medi- 
 tative knowledge of other principles, but only not 
 of moral ones ! 
 
 How sad an image of the chaos and ruin of our 
 age is shown us to mourn over, when a wise and 
 brave man, if such there be on earth, is driven, in 
 the recoil from empirical corruption and mechanic 
 theories of the essentially hyper-mechanical, into 
 hymning the praises of blind ignorance, and well 
 nigh envying the condition of Homer's warriors, 
 or of the peasants who in England, in the nine- 
 teenth century after Christ, are left almost as 
 dark as they ! 
 
 Oh no ! True it cannot be, that to the ■popular 
 judgement, he who talks much about virtue in the 
 abstract begins to be suspicious .... that ages of 
 heroism are not ages of moral philosophy ; that 
 virtue^ when it can be philosophized of, has become
 
 CARLYLE. 345 
 
 aware of itself, is sickly and beginning to decline. 
 The great Athenian teacher of virtue was not 
 less, but far more vu'tuous than any of those who 
 scoffed at him, — far more heroic as a citizen, as a 
 soldier, as a man, than those who would have 
 returned to the old unthinking days of merely 
 manual heroism. Cicero was hardly a worse man 
 than Clodius or Catiline, who wrote no books De 
 Officiis. Seneca was not the most earnest of 
 seekers after truth ; but it would have been well 
 for Rome and for the world, had he, not Nero, 
 ruled the empire. It was Marcus Aurelius, and 
 not Commodus, who wrote the Meditations which 
 have supplied the motto to the History of the 
 French Revolution. In the midst of that dark 
 Syrian corruption, he, who realized in his life a 
 higher good than Plato or Antoninus taught in 
 writing, was also the great preacher and doctor of 
 the truth which he practically revealed ; and his 
 words are known as widely as his name ; and by 
 himself was it declared that they too are spirit and 
 are life. Or will it be said that Paul was no 
 ethical expositor, and that Luther never un- 
 folded in many a volume the reason of the law, 
 which he obeyed while he lived in freedom above 
 it? 
 
 7. Of Mr. Carlyle's anathema on sentimental 
 morality, little need be said. It is most true, and 
 in our age most necessary to be spoken; but it 
 makes nothing for his purpose. Not by silence, 
 
 Q3
 
 346 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 not by unconsciousness, but by high, earnest 
 teaching, like his own, of what man's true great- 
 ness is, may the foul and nauseous imitations, the 
 corpses painted beyond the tint of life, and fester- 
 ing and rotting within, be shown for the dead and 
 shameful things they are. 
 
 8. The subsequent passages on the evils of a 
 self-conscious state of society arc in some respects 
 most brilliant, and even suggestive of truth. Yet 
 there can be few readers who will not feel that the 
 author wants the full and clear command of the 
 idea, which, not being manifest to him, confuses 
 liim with hints of its presence, such as only serve 
 to make dai'kness visible. It is impossible to con- 
 trovert the proposition, that some one period in 
 history is unhealthy as compared with another: 
 for what measure have we of the moral unhealthi- 
 ness of a period ? To some it might seem that 
 the tenth century, when there was hardly any but 
 theological reflection, and no diffused and public 
 thought at all, was a less healthy age of England 
 than the sixteentli, when there Avas so much, or 
 than the seventeenth, when there was more of 
 manly majestic character than in any other time 
 of our annals, and when also there was endless 
 speculation on all the great questions that have 
 ever excited the human mind. 
 
 Let us here episodically note, that, in the essay 
 on the Signs of the Times, it is somewhat marvel- 
 lously said of the English nation in Elizabeth's
 
 CAPvLYLE. 347 
 
 day, " They had their Shakspere and Pliilip 
 Sidney, where we have our Sheridan Knowles 
 and Beau Brummel." In the strength and rich- 
 ness of human nature, abundant, stately, saturated 
 with life, like tropical vegetation, the days of 
 Elizabeth had at least an apparent superiority to 
 ours. But the point would perhaps have been 
 less grotesquely maintained by a reference to 
 Walter Scott and Wellington, rather than to 
 Knowles and Brummel : for in those times also 
 there were to be found in London poets of less 
 than the highest genius, and fops to quite the 
 highest absurdity. But, as of Sidney, it is better 
 worth remarking, that he, like all gentlemen of 
 his age, — Mr. Carlyle's peculiarly favoured period, 
 — was trained in the scholastic logic, — that his 
 own writings are full of ethical dissertations and 
 high-flown speculative rhapsodies on moral excel- 
 lence, — that he patronized not only Spenser but 
 Giordano Bruno, — the most abstract intellect 
 among all the metaphysicians of that age, — and 
 that his chosen friend was the Lord Brooke, 
 whose writings are still in our hands, and furnish 
 one of the most remarkable memorials of a sleep- 
 less, brooding self-consciousness to be found in 
 all English literature. 
 
 This in passing. The question of the good and 
 evil arising from, or implied in, the awakened 
 consciousness of a nation, might lead us much 
 farther than we can now travel. It can here be
 
 348 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 only suggested, that the greatest period, — incom- 
 parably, — in the history of the world, in this 
 respect, was that of the Reformation. Then the 
 stone effigies and armour, the velvet suits and 
 mantles, of the baronage of all northern Europe, 
 — then the gaberdines, and cloaks, and formal 
 decorums of the guilds and arts, — then the dust, 
 and bones, and rags, and hunger, and servile 
 rudeness of the labourer, — all started and crashed 
 up in new portentous life, with thought working 
 in every head, faith mounting from all hearts 
 through all far-glancing eyes, and the eloquence 
 of true inspiration pouring from millions of long- 
 frozen tongues. When was there ever national 
 self-consciousness, if not now? And who will 
 say that this was not the most accepted of all 
 times, — the most brightly illumined page in all 
 the stained and^ worn, but still legible chi'onicles 
 of human history? 
 
 It may be added, that the noblest day of 
 Germany for greatness of character and public 
 spii'it, since that of the Reformation, was during 
 the resistance to Napoleon, which followed, and 
 manifestly in a great degree arose from, the 
 manlier culture furnished by the high philosophy 
 and philosophic poetry of the preceding fifty 
 years. 
 
 What is more peculiarly and emphatically 
 called a self-conscious state of society, appears 
 to mean only that state in which so much know-
 
 CARLYLE. 349 
 
 ledge is spread abroad among the people, that 
 topics necessarily interesting to human beings, 
 but which have hitherto been the property of 
 retired students, or small classes, and distinct 
 professions of men, are now generally discussed, 
 thereby of necessity exciting the stronger feelings 
 natural to larger masses of people, and stirring 
 up men whose incomplete culture makes them 
 more liable than the learned to headlong impulses, 
 and beliefs at once passionate and visionary. But 
 in these facts what wise man can see a predomi- 
 nance of evil ? Where the new conflux of igno- 
 rance and knowledge produces, instead of the old 
 torpor, active and hot delusion, there is but the 
 one remedy of giving more knowledge, and so 
 expelling the ignorance which is the poison- 
 element in the fermentation; and when the up- 
 roar of the popular mind directs itself against 
 institutions, knowledge will teach them, — for, 
 blind experience having failed, only true know- 
 ledge can do it, — Avhat is really good in these. 
 Woe to those who attempt the maintenance of 
 what is bad! 
 
 Leaving all further notice of the arguments 
 and illustrations in the essay, it may be observed, 
 that, of the men who have arisen to public view 
 as thinkers in England during the last twenty 
 years, the one of the most fervid, sincere, far- 
 reaching genius, is also the one of the keenest and 
 deepest self-consciousness. We will not do him
 
 350 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 the injustice of pointing him out to Mr. Carlyle's 
 abhorrence. 
 
 Finally, if we are not to return to some jejune 
 fiction of a state of nature, — that is, to barbarous, 
 to savage, and ultimately to brutal existence, — 
 the consciousness of mankind must be more and 
 more widely awakened, and their minds be thus 
 redeemed from gross animal torpor, and from 
 the hardly less melancholy state of merely me- 
 chanical speculation. In the finer and loftier 
 spirits this consciousness, organized and fixed in 
 systematic thought, in images of reality, and in 
 free, self-commanding life and action, must form 
 the substance of all philosophy, all poetry, and 
 all heroism. Its corruption into idle vanity and 
 diseased sentiment is doubtless also inevitable. 
 But what good thing is there, what best thing, 
 what love to man, what faith in God, which human 
 frailty does not thus twist and crush into evil? 
 If we are to wait for a good which cannot be 
 abused, will Mr. Carlyle tell us how such is pos- 
 sible for a finite being, capable of infinite ad- 
 vancement, and therefore dissatisfied with what 
 he already possesses, and uncertain of what lies 
 before him? For what is our present life, but 
 the dusk and wavering image of the Future and 
 Final, seen amidst the smoke of tlie Past, which 
 slowly and for ever burns around us ? 
 
 This long examination of a single essay of our 
 author is an evidence of respect for him, which
 
 CARLYLE. 351 
 
 he at least will understand as it is meant. It is 
 natural and unavoidable to speak more concisely 
 when there is only applause to utter. May our 
 readers feel that the admiration we express is 
 no less sincere than the dissent. 
 
 Among the works of Mr. Carlyle, there is one 
 fiction, — Sartor Resartus, — Tlie Life and Opinions 
 of Herr Teufelsdrbckh. This consists of two 
 intertwisted threads, though both spun off the 
 same distaff, and of the same crimson wool. 
 There is a fragmentary, though, when closely 
 examined, a complete biography of a supposed 
 German professor, and, along with it, portions 
 of a supposed treatise of his on the philosophy 
 of clothes. Of the three books, the first is pre- 
 paratory, and gives a portrait of the hero and 
 his circumstances. The second is the biographical 
 account of him. The third, under the rubric of 
 extracts from his work, presents us with his 
 picture of human life in the nineteenth century. 
 
 How so unexampled a topic as the philosophy 
 of clothes can be made the vehicle for a philo- 
 sophy of man, those will see who read the book. 
 But they must read it with the faith that, in 
 spite of all appearances to the contrary, it is the 
 jest which is a pretence, and that the real purport 
 of the whole is serious, yea, serious as any re- 
 ligion that ever was preached, far more serious 
 than most battles that have ever been fought 
 since Agamemnon declared war ao-ainst Priam.
 
 352 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 One general consideration may enable the 
 more speculative to understand how things can 
 be united so remote and discrepant as are the 
 visible clothes of men, and the invisible causes 
 of All. Our doings all bear the stamp of some 
 portion of our being. Now every portion of our 
 being is inseparably linked with all the rest; and 
 therefore each primary art, and every hereditary 
 contrivance of human life, may be used as an 
 emblem leading up to the conception of our whole 
 constitution, and all its relations. Clothes then 
 are of this universal indispensable nature, and so 
 have a groimd of perennial reality. Further 
 they, like every thing that all men use, are 
 made more or less symbolical, bear the image 
 of time, country, character, and station, and so 
 are true necessary hieroglyphics, in which all the 
 history of mankind is to be found, expressed or 
 understood. 
 
 In this book that strange style appears again 
 before us in its highest oddity. Thunder-peals, 
 flute-music, the laugh of Pan and the nymphs, 
 the cleai' disdainful whisper of cold Stoicism, and 
 the hurly-burly of a country fair, succeed and 
 melt into each other. Again the clamour sinks 
 into quiet; and we hear at last the grave, mild 
 liymn of devotion sounding from a far sanctuary, 
 though only in faint and dying vibrations. So 
 from high to low, from the sublime to the most 
 merely trivial, fluctuates the feeling of the poet.
 
 CARLYLE. 353 
 
 NoAV In a Vulcan's cave of rock, with its smoke 
 and iron tools, and gold and rubies, — now in 
 dismal mines and dens, and now in fairy bowers, 
 shifting to the vulgarest alleys of stifling cities, — 
 yet do we always feel that there is a mystic in- 
 fluence around us, bringing out into sharp homely 
 clearness what is noblest in the remote and in- 
 finite, exalting into wonder what is commonest 
 in the dust and toil of every day. In this en- 
 chanted island. Prosper©, the man of serene art, 
 rules indeed supreme, and has his bidding lightly 
 done, but oftener by a band of shaggy Calibans, 
 than by a choir of melodious Ariels. And 
 it is most bewildering of all, — for is not the 
 common that which, by disclosing its strangeness, 
 has ever the greatest power to amaze us? — that 
 the Prospero is a man of our age, in our familiar 
 garb, with no magic instruments but the words 
 we all use. Even the Calibans and Ariels of 
 the vision are the dull, customary tribe, — peasant, 
 artisan, gentleman and lady, whom we know by 
 rote as the obvious alphabet of our lives. 
 
 'Tis weird work all. If Jean Paul presents 
 to us milk and wine, here, instead of wine, is 
 alcohol and something more, and the milk what 
 one might fancy not of a cow, but a she-mam- 
 moth. 
 
 Hopeless is the contrast, the contradiction, 
 which the book at first presents, to all our 
 common world, its laws, and usages, and familiar
 
 354 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 insignificance. Nothing beautiful is liere, nothing 
 cahnly, manifestly wise. We look at it not for 
 its worth, but its oddity. Gradually the eye 
 learns to find some dawning coherence and sta- 
 bility, as if it were not merely mist. Then one 
 entanglement untwists itself after another: joint 
 and lineament, plan and structure appear, intricate 
 indeed, but palpable. At last we cross ourselves, 
 and know not whether to laugh or weep, when 
 we find that we were puzzled, not by the want of 
 aught real and substantial in the object, but by 
 the presence of so many more forms of truth and 
 nature than we commonly discern in life, and 
 which yet, although we knew them not, were 
 ever there. These shadows too, now no longer 
 illusive, are all compacted by their own vital 
 unity, which excludes the unmeaning and alien, 
 and brings the expressive and lasting elements of 
 our time and being, however seemingly discor- 
 dant, into smooth, indissoluble conjunction. In 
 what seemed a fair-booth, half smoke, half can- 
 . vass, full of puppets, toys, dolls, refuse trinkets, 
 peering vaguely through thick confusion, there 
 is discovered to be implied nothing less than a 
 model, and that a living one, of the world itself; 
 such as God in his eternity, and man in his six 
 thousand years, have made it. The image is not 
 indeed complete, but broad, full, bright, and 
 most genuine, created and imparted by an earnest 
 soul, to which nothing tliat lives and grows, and
 
 CARLYLE. 355 
 
 is not a mere idle falsehood, comes as worthless. 
 It is, in fine, a system of highest philosophy in 
 figures of liveliest truth, and wanting only, — 
 though this is not a small want, — the soft musical 
 roundness and honeyed flow of song, to be a poem 
 such as these latter days of English speech have 
 not produced. 
 
 Much there is that at the tenth, no less than at 
 the first perusal, must seem aiFected, arbitrary, and 
 little more than mere burlesque. But the law 
 which unites the capacity for all that is highest 
 and most beautiful, with the tendency to see 
 meaning in the commonest, even sordid things, 
 — and the experience of all strongest hearts, that 
 they must often needs escape, if they would not 
 break upon the spot, from the fierce immensity 
 of feeling into the homely fire-side circle of the 
 ludicrously vulgar, — these (Avhicli to no one 
 knowing what is in man, and not merely what 
 comes out of him, can be unknown truths) ex- 
 plain so many seeming anomalies and discords, 
 that all the rest may well be believed equally 
 fitting, or, if not, but pardonably wrong. 
 
 There are indeed persons of high faculties and 
 excellent cultivation, to whom a limited, conven- 
 tional, rather than convictional, standard will 
 make the whole distasteful. But, — blessed be 
 that endless dawning, which for ever discloses 
 more and more of the eternal within the narrow 
 bounds of time ! — this temper is ceasing to be that
 
 356 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 of our age. Those who read the book for the 
 worth that is in it, will assuredly not miss their 
 reward. 
 
 Yet read without bitter pain it cannot be. The 
 heaps of misery which lie about us intermingled 
 with joys and hopes, are here sundered and looked 
 at by themselves. The root of sorrow and evil is 
 laid bare, and frightens the sunshine with its 
 blackness. Nay, so intently and right onward 
 does the author pursue his task of denudation, 
 that it seems at last as if something physically 
 dreadful were a-doing, and something half-demo- 
 niac were at work ; the secret of which impression 
 seems to be, that in this book the mind is not 
 brought into agreement with that great move- 
 ment of nature, of which our universe and life 
 are but the momentary result and manifestation. 
 Science in one way, in another purely imaginative 
 poetry, creating what is quite distinct from the 
 poet's individuality, and in a third mode the calm 
 completeness of active morality, — these diiferently, 
 but all truly, reproduce in a human form the mild, 
 profound unity of the whole system of being. 
 In each of these aspects of things we see how fire 
 and storm, strife and death, pain and evil, are but 
 superficial disturbances of the great concord, 
 which, could Ave so stand apart from them as to 
 unriddle their meaning, would always be beheld 
 but as necessary to the existence which they seem- 
 ingly threaten, and elements of that music with
 
 CARLYLE, 357 
 
 which we fancy them, and as practical beings must 
 assume them, to jar. But here, in this volume, 
 the orgasm of shaping thought and desolating 
 emotion bursts with ruin through the stedfast 
 bounds of science, of art, and of conscientious 
 activity. The author brings together creation 
 and destruction, to work precipitately and face to 
 face in open conflict, not with their true and ever- 
 lasting, though unacknowledged alliance. His 
 own heart reads the purport of their operation, and 
 eagerly feels the greatness of their tasks, but shares 
 none of that sublime tranquillity in which the 
 twain repose, nm'sed at each breast of their mighty 
 mother. 
 
 That in these world-encircling speculations and 
 symbolic designs, which alternate from the small 
 sharpness of Hogarth to the measurelessness of 
 Michael Angelo, there is much omitted, much 
 distorted and overdrawn, cannot be surprising. 
 He who the most sincerely believes in and admires 
 the excellence of the man and his works, will be 
 able to see no little that he must think altogether 
 mistaken. But be it ever remembered, that there 
 is more of profitable truth in the eiTors of the 
 wise, than in the just conclusions of thoughtless 
 men : and even where there does not appear to be 
 any high principle, — perverted into an equally 
 grave delusion, but still there, and to be recog- 
 nised, though disguised and contorted, — yet there 
 is always some great and pure feeling, working.
 
 358 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 however questionably, and forcing us to reflect 
 on the depth of its source and the grandeur of its 
 objects. 
 
 Teufelsdrockh represents it as a mere delirium, 
 that the village of Dumdrudge, having no private 
 Dumdrudgian quarrel Avith any French village 
 whatever, should send out thirty of her working 
 sons to kill and be killed by thirty French wearers 
 of sabots, in some corner of the south of Spain, 
 merely because the rulers of the two countries 
 have fallen out. Yet it needs not a philosopher 
 or poet to see that the village of Dumdrudge had 
 far better do this, than wait to have pillage and 
 massacre and worse brought to the parish green and 
 into every cottage, by the injured innocents who 
 ravaged Spain rather than England, only because 
 England would not let them visit her first. 
 
 Independently of this particular instance, there 
 is a vapid, common-place view of the whole matter, 
 such as Teufelsdrockh would probably think one 
 had better die than hint at, much less utter, but 
 which is not the less true. For Dumdrudge 
 gains considerably by belonging to a country 
 having a government of some kind. A govern- 
 ment must have power to decide on many things, 
 and among these on war and peace, for all its 
 subjects, Dumdrudge included. Being fallible, it 
 may A'cry possibly decide wrong, and nevertheless 
 be better than no government at all. Moreover, 
 Avith or Avithout rulers, men, being pugnacious.
 
 CARLYLE. 359 
 
 will fight and kill each other ; any one man Avho 
 chooses to go to Avar for a wife, or a wigwam, or a 
 copy of Sartor Resartus, having, in a state of 
 nature, — that is, a savage state, — the power to 
 compel any other man to do battle to the death for 
 these possessions. For constables are decidedly a 
 product of government, and not, like their staves, 
 of vegetation. Finally, few things can be more 
 certain than that fighting is reduced by political 
 society, from every man's most necessary occupa- 
 tion, to be the trade of a comparatively few, even 
 if every Dumdrudge sends her thirty every year 
 to be drilled and shot at. 
 
 This vicAv is not fitted, like Teufelsdrockli's, to 
 amuse and elevate the universe; but that Avith 
 our limited faculties it should appear to us truer 
 than his, is, Ave must admit, our misfortune rather 
 than our fault. Nor indeed, when Herr Teufels- 
 drockh condescends to disguise himself, and to 
 discourse on governments and society like any 
 mouthing quack philanthropist and friend of 
 humanity, is the simple-minded reader to be solely 
 blamed, if for a moment he fancies that the pro- 
 fessor is no other than AA^hat he pretends to be. 
 When the philosopher seems to consider Botany 
 Bay as the true Atlantis, Utopia, and Isle of 
 Heroes, — the convict-hulk as the ark in Avliich the 
 faithful few are divinely set apart, — and all gaols 
 and treadmills as the sacred retreats and mystic 
 grottoes of the only modern saints and sages, —
 
 360 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 whether even a Teufelsdrockh can pass without 
 suspicion, while teaching a doctrine so subversive 
 of the Old Bailey and the New Police, let remote 
 posterity decide. 
 
 This statement is in fact only a very temperate 
 caricature of opinions which frequently appear in 
 these works. It may be hoped that there are few 
 readers who Avill not see them to be errors gene- 
 rated by the corruption of serious truths. They 
 suggest a point of view so neglected and so 
 unpopular, and at the same time so important, as 
 a corrective of the opposite and reigning onesided- 
 ness, that they will probably be of far more use 
 to mankind, than the reiteration of the axiomatic 
 principles, which we have repeated and taken 
 for granted, till we have nearly ceased to under- 
 stand them. 
 
 The book is the most extraordinary mixture we 
 know of the purest and rarest truth with much 
 truth in itself of equal depth, but here exagge- 
 rated into not merely hyperbolical phrases, — of 
 which indeed there is little if anything, — but 
 hyperbolical opinions; opinions, that is, which 
 have fallen over the battlements they were placed 
 to defend, and been dashed into separate pieces or 
 confused lumps. Any man who, although thus 
 erring, at the same time utters much and original 
 wisdom and poetry, is of course a person of strong 
 abilities, and, if all is done with unaffected earnest- 
 ness, must be of strong character also. Here
 
 CARLYLE, 361 
 
 purpose and faculty, will and talents, are combined 
 and exist in friendly union, and all in the highest 
 vigour ; and it is not the least charm of the book, 
 that it supplies some seminal hints on the mode in 
 which a mind so marked and so capacious has been 
 formed and ripened. Nay, a zealous student 
 will often be inclined to suspect that, in Teufels- 
 drockh, a British biography looks through the 
 widely different and much exaggerated mask of 
 a German one. It is impossible not to connect 
 the characteristics which run through all these 
 volumes with such passages as the following : "To 
 look through the show of things into things them- 
 selves, he is led and compelled. The 'passivity' 
 given him by birth is fostered by all turns of his 
 fortune. Everywhere cast out, like oil out of 
 water, from mingling in any employment, in any 
 public communion, he has no j)ortion but solitude 
 and a life of meditation. The whole energy of 
 his existence is directed, through long years, on 
 one task ; that of enduring pain, if he cannot cure 
 it. Thus everywhere do the shows of things 
 oppress him, withstand him, threaten him with 
 fearfullest destruction : only by victoriously pene- 
 trating into things themselves can he find peace 
 and a stronghold," Sartor, p. 211. 
 
 In the doctrine of Teufelsdrockh also, as in 
 that of Mr. Carlyle, belief in Goethe holds a 
 chief place. \_Sartor, p. 262.] Yet here too it 
 must be said as before, that those who look 
 
 VOL. I. li
 
 362 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 in the Professor for any great conformity of 
 opinion or cliaracter with the poet, will be much 
 disappointed. Among innumerable other differ- 
 ences, there is this most marked, that the sym- 
 pathies of the Privy Councillor are chiefly with 
 the wealthy and cultivated classes, those of the 
 writer on clothes rather with the poor, the vulgar, 
 — in a Avord, the cultivating. Goethe respects 
 all established things merely as such, and troubles 
 himself but little to enquire how this or that has 
 grown into authority. Teufelsdi'ockh's instinct 
 is to embitter himself against all that is, so far as 
 it is the work of man. The reason of the differ- 
 ence perhaps is partly this, that Goethe could do 
 all he cared to do, namely, be a poet and thinker 
 of the highest order, in the midst of his actual 
 circumstances ; and therefore any disturbance of 
 these was a mere hindrance to him, forcing him 
 to adjust himself to a new state of things. Teu- 
 fclsdrockh, on the other hand, though perhaps he 
 knows it not, is pre-eminently a moral and poli- 
 tical man, in soul, if not in act, a reformer, and 
 one of Titanic bulk and force. Finding in the 
 present no field and facts adequate to his long- 
 ings, and unable to rest, like Goethe, in mere ima- 
 ginations, he feels himself crippled and wounded 
 at every step, and thinks it is his time which Is 
 out of joint. Not that, judged even by his total 
 standard, the present age is at all inferior to any 
 past one, but that it is liis, and therefore partly
 
 CARLYLE. 363 
 
 responsible for his dissatisfaction. For among 
 the many and precious truths which the Professor 
 not only talks of, but knows at heart, this is not 
 one, — that he who has not peace within himself 
 to-day, would not have it, whatever he may 
 fancy, were to-day changed into a yesterday or 
 a to-morrow ever so distant, and in its remoteness 
 ever so alluring. Teufelsdrockh discerns, and can 
 point out, a path traversing the far past and the 
 far future ; but, — as is so often known of a faint 
 track upon a moor, — around him, where he is 
 actually walking, he can hardly discover a ves- 
 tige of it. There all seems confusion; and 
 although he walks forward, as a wise man will, 
 towards the line of path before him, using what 
 marks there are to guide him, yet he journeys 
 in tribulation and horror, inwardly cursing the 
 day that he was born, while he recounts aloud 
 the grounds which he unquestionably has of con- 
 tentment, — nay, of rejoicing. Goethe concerned 
 himself little about the past, except for the use 
 he could make of it, and not at all about the 
 future, because from it he could derive no profit. 
 But he stept cheei'fully and bravely on in the 
 midst of the present, where he felt that his work 
 lay, and did his work with joy. With joy Teu- 
 felsdrockh works not, but with all the stronger 
 courage: for he toils on, wanting all the poet's 
 cordial impulses of happiness. He finds wisdom 
 and implements, and a niggard but sufficient sup- 
 
 K2
 
 364 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 port, everywhere around him ; here a Mentor, 
 there a ship, — always bread and water, — and, 
 when needful, an entrance to the prophetic land 
 of spirits ; only nowhere a mild and musical tran- 
 quillity of heart, which for many a meaner mortal 
 has stood, as well it might, in lieu of all outward 
 help. 
 
 There may perhaps be found some rude analogy 
 between the men, him of Weimar and him of 
 Weissnichtwo, both of the Universe, — and the 
 hot spring of Iceland, boiling among snows and 
 blasted rocks, comj^ared with a sunny river flow- 
 ing from its distant hills by groves and meadows, 
 and beautiful hamlets and king's porticoes. But 
 the image is far from doing justice to the harsher 
 and less halcyon soul. 
 
 In closing what It has occurred to us to say of 
 Mr. Carlyle's writings, it would be wrong to omit 
 all mention of the History of the French Revolu- 
 tion, although but a passing and most insufficient 
 notice can here be given to It. Of all books in 
 the English language which the present age has 
 given birth to. It is that which, most surprising 
 and disheartening men at first sight, seems after- 
 wards, so far as can be judged from the very 
 many known experiments, the most forcibly to 
 attract and detain them. The general result 
 appears to be an eager, wide ebullience of the 
 soul, issuing in manifold meditations, and in an 
 altered and deepened feeling of all human life.
 
 CARLYLE. 365 
 
 The book has made no outward noise, but havS 
 echoed on and on within the hearts of men. 
 Instances might be cited, without probably one 
 exception, of persons of the most oddly diverse 
 characters, and of kinds and degrees of cultivation 
 no less unlike, from, as it were, the grass beneath 
 our feet and the hidden flowers in cold green 
 nooks, to the pine and oak of amplest growth 
 above our heads, — all equally, though most dif- 
 ferently, aifected by that electric blaze. 
 
 How can this be explained ? By popular de- 
 lusion, — say perhaps those who hold themselves 
 undeludable ; as indeed they are ; for darkness 
 cannot be darkened. But this book is not, hardly 
 can be, popular. The crowd have no part or lot 
 in the matter; deeply as the influence of the 
 work may act, which all wise books do, more or 
 less, on the condition of them and their descen- 
 dants. Nor can that well be a delusion, which 
 gives men new and more varied thoughts, lively, 
 far-piercing emotions, and which instils divine 
 energy, the wine of truth spiced with the balm 
 of pity, into souls before dormant, and walking 
 the woi'ld as dreamers in a land of dreams. But 
 it is an old and faithful saying, that, where there 
 is no eye to see reality, there is ever an eyebrow 
 waiting to rise in scornful wonder at the name of 
 it. Where the substantial hand to grasp things 
 worthy is wanting, there is always some thin 
 shadow-hand to wave them off with mocking
 
 366 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 gestures. But the living truth, thus slighted, 
 will assuredly outlast the dead contempt, which 
 carries its own death-poison in its essence. 
 
 This history is in fact a genuine breathing 
 epic. Complete and fixed in its design, it thrills 
 with life-blood through and through. It shows 
 how the most golden fancy, and the most vivify- 
 ing imagination may be exercised in all their 
 glory and fullest flood, within the bounds of the 
 literally true, of that which was transacted in 
 the lives of our fathers, and which filled with its 
 jar and smoke, and diiu'nal apparitions, the pages 
 of hundreds of newspapers. 
 
 Yet does it contain many sayings, which a 
 friend of Mr. Carlyle's might be pardoned if he 
 wished to blot out with tears. These are pain- 
 ful in different ways, and would be hard to class 
 under one head. But their most general character 
 is that of a hatred for things as they are, showing 
 itself in cool mockery at their destruction, and in 
 joy at manifestations, however monstrous, of the 
 will to destroy them ; a temper which, discovered 
 in a man so superior to the average even of think- 
 ing men, gives much to ponder on, and at least 
 something heartily to lament. Among passages 
 of this cast, we remember none so obviously and 
 so afflictingly perverse and noxious, as the con- 
 clusion of his account of the September massacres. 
 
 It is hardly necessary to say, tliat we have no 
 liking for the slimy mud-sea of corruption into
 
 CARLYLE. 367 
 
 which the French government, and higher classes, 
 had sunk themselves during the last century. If 
 any consideration could increase the disgust which 
 the spectacle raises, it would be that they brought 
 the people to a state, or left them in one, which 
 made the villanies of the Revolution possible, 
 while rendering the Revolution itself a most 
 necessary and wholesome purification. But these 
 views have nothing in them to diminish the horror, 
 which all but madmen, or sane men in moments 
 of madness, feel at such proceedings as those of 
 September; for in these there was the foulest, 
 most astounding proof of the extent and force of 
 wickedness, rankling under the smooth surface of 
 European life. 
 
 The deliberate slaughter in broad day, — nay, 
 day after day, in the chief and most polished city 
 of the continent, — of many many hundreds of 
 perfectly helpless men and women, trembling 
 prisoners locked up in gaols, with no offence pre- 
 tended against them, but that they wished to 
 preserve the social advantages which they had 
 inherited from long generations of their ancestors, 
 — this was an act of desperate and cowardly bru- 
 tality, which may well, even now, make any 
 human being shudder at the amount of moral 
 jX)ison hidden, — perhaps still working, — in the 
 veins of modern society. No one but a block- 
 head, and that one speaking with extempore 
 inspiration, rather than with a moment's fore-
 
 368 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 thought, would allege the number of lives de- 
 stroyed, for any other purpose than to prove that 
 the thing was not done heedlessly as insignificant. 
 And if pestilence, or the shipwreck of a fleet, had 
 devoured ten times as many, who would now be 
 at the pains to speak of the matter ? The curse 
 of the thing is in the black, malignant passions 
 wliich urged on the work. It may no doubt be 
 alleged that the crime was one not of passion but 
 policy, and done to frighten the Royalists into 
 quiet during the struggle against the Prussian 
 army. But even supposing that there was any 
 danger at all of an aristocratic insurrection, which 
 the historian does not attempt to establish, it is 
 plain that so enormous a precaution never could 
 have been resolved on, but by men either utterly 
 vitiated in their whole souls, or at the moment 
 under the influence of the most atrocious feelings. 
 Probably the authors of the massacre arc guilty 
 in both respects. Thus it was that they broke 
 through all the restraints of moral custom, which 
 he who defies, except in order to promote some 
 still higher than customary truth, is in the most 
 justly hateful class of human beings, and not 
 the less hateful, the more we hold him also deplo- 
 rable. 
 
 It is on this very ground that is placed a half- 
 explicit, faltering defence, — not the less grievous 
 because spoken with some reserve. The conclu- 
 ding words of the narrative arc these : (vol. iii..
 
 CARLYLE. 369 
 
 p. 65.) " Instead of shrieking more, It were per- 
 haps edifying " — alas, no ! — " to remark, on the 
 other side, what a singular thing Customs (in 
 Latin, Mores) are ; and how fitly the Virtue, 
 Virtus, Manhood or Worth, that Is In a man, 
 is called his Morality or Customariness. Fell 
 Slaughter, one [of] the most authentic products 
 of the Pit you would say, once give it Customs, 
 becomes War, with Laws of War, and Is Custo- 
 mary and Moral enough; and red individuals 
 carry the tools of it girt round their haunches, not 
 without an air of pride, — which do thou nowise 
 blame. While see ! so long as it Is but dressed in 
 hodden or russet, and Revolution, less frequent 
 than War, has not yet got its Laws of Revolution, 
 but the hodden or russet Individuals are Uncusto- 
 mary, — O shrieking beloved brother blockheads of 
 Mankind, let us close those wide mouths of ours ; 
 let us cease shrieking, and begin considering ! " 
 
 From this it is hard to Imagine otherwise, than 
 that the writer conceives the dliference to our 
 feelings of the death of a thousand persons in 
 battle, and the same number by massacre, arises 
 from the commonness of the one and the rarity of 
 the other fact ; as a death by fever attracts less 
 notice than a death by drowning. But O ! shame, 
 shame to use the wonderful power of words for 
 thus darkening men's plainest and holiest know- 
 ledge ! The difference is not In many or fcAv, cus- 
 tom or no custom, hodden or scarlet, but in the 
 
 R 3
 
 370 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 souls, the purposes, the feelings of the men who 
 do the deed. Let a hundred thousand people, 
 once in ten centuries, perish by earthquake ; and 
 yet a single midnight murder wrought by revenge 
 or avarice, such as every day's newspaper records, 
 is to the eye of reason a more fearful, awful oc- 
 cuiTence than the wide destruction of a city. 
 Nature's immediate extinction of myriads of her 
 children is but doing all at once what she does 
 hourly throughout the world ; now indeed in a 
 way more impressive to the imagination, yet with 
 no peculiar moral import. But the existence in 
 one man of the spirit of Cain, of cunning, ruth- 
 less malignity, which casts aside not only all hu- 
 man compassion, but the divine reverence for the 
 life of man as a thing consecrate and inviolable, — 
 and this at no bidding of sudden passion, and in 
 no hot thirst of conflict, much less at the clear 
 command of reason, which authorizes the judge 
 to condemn the desperately guilty, the soldier to 
 fight for his own country against a foreign one, — 
 this is a new and peculiar fact, sufficient to appal 
 every man not too near the brutes for even the 
 dimmest meditation. In a battle how different is 
 the case, where the man who takes life, no les3 
 exposes his own ; where the sense of right is so 
 strong that npt only the base and ferocious, but 
 the gentlest and most thoughtful, feel themselves 
 engaging in no vile, unhallowed work, but are 
 purified and nerved by sympathies, beliefs, and
 
 CARLYLE. 371 
 
 that religious help of custom, — by patriotism, 
 loyalty, discipline, pride of profession, fellow- 
 feeling with thousands equally perilled, and the 
 ennobling sense of danger encountered for the 
 sake of an idea, — which all so light up with 
 their blaze the whole of life, that the shades of 
 death are lost and melt away in the splendour. 
 But in the cold, tame, dangerless assassination of 
 a herd of miserable prisoners from mere hatred of 
 their class and names, or even, if you will, from 
 the wish to intimidate others, — and in its incon- 
 sistency with all the practices of modern life, 
 which had no palliation of habit to disguise the 
 hideousness of the act, — who does not see a reve- 
 lation of evil sufficient to dishearten and sorely 
 wound the highest faith in all possibilities of 
 good? 
 
 Thoughts so plain and sad as these INIr. Carlyle 
 will call inarticulate shrieking, and will speak of 
 the wide mouths of blockheads. We should be 
 sorry to exchange the sorrow for his ill-timed 
 and poorly imagined sophistry and scorn, painful 
 as such regret is, against the sardonic comfort 
 with wliich he will no doubt regard all similar 
 comments. 
 
 It must however be said, that there are few, if 
 any, other passages so wretchedly perverse as 
 this ; and much of the book, probably by far the 
 greatest part of it, is as pure and grand in feeling, 
 as it is distinct and glowin"; in the imao-es which
 
 372 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 it presents. It is however throughout a book 
 that makes the heart ache more than Tacitus, 
 though somewhat in the same way. It has no- 
 thing to cheer, nothing to tranquillize. But that 
 which most agitates, and like sorcery possesses the 
 reader, is not the tale of idle folly drivelling on 
 till it ends in the worse earnest of madness, and 
 horror thickening the pure sunshine with the reek 
 of death; — not the overthrow into infernal ruin 
 of the oldest and most habitual state of things, 
 with all its honours, brought before the mind's 
 eye as distinctly as if present to that of the body, 
 and teaching the least considerate how insecure 
 for all men are the softest and most valued cir- 
 cumstances, and that he only who can always be 
 faithful to himself, has aught lasting to rely on. 
 That which darkens and scares us more than all 
 this, is the perpetual sense of the writer's wasting 
 toil of heart, of the immeasurable weight of pain 
 and grief which he has not ceased to bear, — the 
 stern resolve, compressing the mad furies of the 
 soul, but unal)le to cast them out. What a spec- 
 tacle is it to see such a man as this, so rich in 
 endowment, so decisive and victorious in perform- 
 ance, who yet finds the world, and the world's 
 law, and the law of his own nature, so ill a friend 
 to him, tliat he more sympathizes with almost the 
 worst rebellion against all law, than with almost 
 the best submission to it; that he thinks a 
 Boland, a Vcrgniaud, only ridiculous ; a Turgot
 
 CARLYLE. 373 
 
 coldly respectable; while a greedy ruffian Danton, 
 a mass of brutal self-will and reinless appetite, 
 kindles his admiration, and almost his love I Dull 
 must the breast be, which shall not deeply receive, 
 and retain for ever, the great image of a man 
 on whom has been laid the doom to feel more 
 acutely, to love more absorbingly, hope more 
 grandly, will more bravely, than all around him, 
 and yet has reaped from these capacities, — not 
 joy, not peace, — but a more biting sorrow, and a 
 hea,vier gloom, than afflicts his weaker comrades. 
 A fact to be long noted, — an abyss to be sted- 
 fastly, mournfully, not irreverently gazed into : 
 for this is no showy, self-indulgent discontent ; 
 rather is it one of which he who sufters, himself 
 says nothing, would willingly cease to tliink, and 
 betrays it only, but most clearly, by his view, — 
 so heroic, so Avide, and yet so sad, — of all his 
 world and aims. Were it a theatric affectation 
 put on to be stared at, the trick has been made 
 the most of by others, and worn to rags so sordid 
 that none could now well mistake them for a 
 king's mourning garments. But here all men feel 
 that, though the opinions may be wrong, the style 
 extravagant, and what amount of error you please 
 to assign in the whole scheme of the man and his 
 writings, yet the foundation and buttresses of the 
 evident genius are self-forgetting earnestness and 
 manly simplicity. These are not lies, not matter
 
 374 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 of shifting costume, but truth tried seven times in 
 sevenfold fire. 
 
 It has more than once happened, in the course 
 of this essay, that the name of Luther has come 
 in contact with that of Mr. Carlyle ; and on the 
 whole, startling as the assertion must at first sight 
 seem, and extreme as the outward differences un- 
 doubtedly are, there is no one known in literary 
 history, whom the British writer so nearly resem- 
 bles in the essentials of his character. None but 
 the least reflecting can need to be reminded, that 
 their discordance of opinion and total dissimilitude 
 of conduct, instead of being objections to the 
 truth of this resemblance, are the necessary con- 
 ditions of its existence : for, could the same mass 
 and kind of energies and capacities, which consti- 
 tuted the man of the sixteenth century, be 
 reproduced in the nineteenth, they would of 
 course no less deeply and lastingly receive the 
 altered influence of a time so different. It would 
 be a poor jest to pretend that any one claims for 
 the later thinker the importance in the world 
 which three centuries have proved to be the right 
 of the Saxon Reformer; but no fear of being 
 misunderstood and ridiculed need suppress the 
 statement, that in the type and scale of their ten- 
 dencies and faculties there is a genuine likeness. 
 We find in both the same sincerity, largeness, and 
 fervour, similar sudden and robust eloquence, and
 
 CARLYLE. 375 
 
 broad and unshackled views of all things, — a 
 flowing cordiality based on a deep and severe, 
 often almost dismal and sepulchral conscientious- 
 ness, — an equal liability to fierce and scornful 
 prejudice, and indulgence of the ultimate possi- 
 bilities, almost impossibilities, of exaggeration, 
 yet with an entire superiority to merely frivolous 
 and ingenious paradox. In each, one sees in 
 everything the man says, and not merely in the 
 great and premeditated proclamations, the same 
 individual physiognomic stamp, — the royal broad 
 arrow, not only on the anchor and the cannon, but 
 on the gimlet and the tenpenny nail. Their fun- 
 damental unity of conception lives in a religious 
 awe of the Divine, as revealed in the universe, 
 and in the inspired hearts and heart-kindled acts 
 and utterance of men. The true knowledge of 
 this, pouring itself out at great epochs in poetic 
 deeds and words, has always been subsequently 
 analysed into dogma, and stifled and petrified in 
 authoritative, not intuitive symbols. Now of both 
 these men it is the great labour to restore the old 
 free animation of this truth, and to lead men to 
 find in the enjoyment of it the only, but all-suffi- 
 cient, liberation from selfishness and death. 
 
 In this enterprise, far unlike indeed is the lan- 
 guage and demeanour of the German schoolman, 
 married monk, and tamer of popes and devils, 
 from that of the English writer in our day. But 
 our day is a time of steam-engines and news-
 
 376 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 papers, of natural philosophy and representative 
 constitutions. Scientific scepticism has pulverized 
 the histories once most surely believed, which 
 reappear only in the forms of avowed historical 
 romances. But of all these prodigious innova- 
 tions, which have stripped the father of lies of so 
 much traditional costume, and at the same time 
 have taught us to detect the presence of his 
 numerous family in so many things that our an- 
 cestors believed as certain truth, — for thinkers of 
 ]VIr. Carlyle's order (by which he is likely to stand 
 as firmly as any earl on record) there is none so 
 Important as the place which speculation, and 
 especially that of the Germans, the children of 
 Luther, has claimed and secured for itself. It is 
 an all but Immeasurable change, that science has 
 now and for ever seized the right of deciding on the 
 premisses which she shall admit, — is not merely 
 bound to the duty of accepting those supplied to 
 her, whether by the decrees of church-councils 
 and theologians, or by the creeds and canons of 
 the bodily senses. Leaving to religion its own 
 practical rights, which arc everlasting, and which 
 no other power can arrogate, science now postu- 
 lates only what is essential to the scientific con- 
 struction of knowledge. She leaves the feelings 
 of reverence and duty to glorify, as conscience and 
 faith require, the principle which she herself 
 acknowledges as the liighcst affirmation of the 
 intelligence and the essence of all being ; but she
 
 CARLYLE. 377 
 
 refuses to accept their representation of her 
 primal truth, as that which is valid for her. This 
 crisis, which has expelled from the sanctuary of 
 pure intuition everything but that ideal which 
 is necessary as a centre for consistent thought, 
 and has left external tradition and assertion, how- 
 ever authorized, to fill only their appropriate place 
 in the affections and practical life, has made philo- 
 sophy a new and independent world, surrounding 
 with its diaphanous circle the spheres of all other 
 knowledge and belief. Insight thus purified and 
 realized has, in om* view of the matter, taken for 
 Mr. Carlyle the place of the warring and incon- 
 gruous schemes which battled in Luther's brain 
 and life; for the Reformer's philosophy halted 
 between reason and authority, — the blind power 
 attempting to thrust itself into the seat of the 
 luminous one, and to make its own laws impe- 
 rative over a rival, which, though outwardly 
 subdued, still inwardly rebelled against the usur- 
 pation. This modern revolution of thought has 
 thus given to the man of our day, and of Luther's 
 mould, a clear and coherent image of existence, 
 unattainable by the highest intelligence three 
 hundred years ago. And this appears diffused 
 throughout all Mr. Carlyle's writings, though 
 often in grotesque forms, and with a vindictive 
 ill-will to speculation, not because it is so remote 
 from, but because it is so near to his heart. For 
 his controversy against philosophy is a mere do-
 
 378 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 mestic quarrel, between parties who dispute with 
 the less restraint, because knowing that they 
 never can be separated. 
 
 But though a person of strong heart and wide 
 vision has thus in our time advantages on the 
 theoretic side unknown some generations back, 
 the practical side of the account is far less ob- 
 viously in his favour. Then, the very tyranny of 
 the moral and religious scheme, which made itself 
 the arbiter of speculative truth, as well as of its 
 own axioms and rules, rendered life narrower and 
 more false, but also more compact and unques- 
 tionable and easily to be managed. Men, by dint 
 of faith, were at ease and satisfied in the midst of 
 dark intellectual confusion. Christianity set the 
 bounds and measured out the foundation of science 
 as well as of duty, — claimed to be, and for devout 
 men was, mistress of all thoughts, as well as all 
 moral actions, was the lyric sibyl, the wise en- 
 chantress, as well as the holy dedicated vestal. 
 Now doubt has come in; denial has established its 
 irresistible claims over much that was once held 
 sacred; and it is a hard task for the wisest to 
 determine where that which has unquestioned 
 right to go so far, shall find its just limitation 
 and be bid stop for ever. Then, the principles 
 which men disobeyed in practice, they unani- 
 mously held to be true, in a sense in which no 
 wise man noAV maintains them ; for instance, in 
 their arbitrary application to physical facts, as
 
 CARLYLE. 379 
 
 well as to tlie elements and pathways of all specu- 
 lation. So that, however sure the victory may 
 be, there is a battle to be fought, often a life-long 
 one, by the best of minds, which men of this 
 stamp were not, or not much, exposed to in the 
 age of the Reformation. Then moreover, reli- 
 gion established a partial indeed, and capricious, 
 and partly erroneous, ground for all scientific 
 thought, but still a high and solemn one; — far 
 transcending, not men's moral wants, but the 
 pretensions of their gross appetites and carnal 
 experience. Now, the world not only professes 
 religion, and practically disregards it, but talks of 
 truth, and means thereby the mere arrangements 
 of outward life, in opposition to all genuine 
 philosophy asserting any high and independent 
 ground: for it is the decree of the sovereign 
 populace among us, that philosophy is merely 
 experience generalized, and not the correcting and 
 balancing antithesis of experience, which alone 
 makes its facts intelligible to the seeking and 
 wayworn reason. Men assuredly did not do 
 what Luther and Savonarola taught, — but ad- 
 mitted that they taught rightly. Men now as 
 little do what the wise man counsels ; but more- 
 over they deny what he believes, yea knows. 
 
 Distracted enough therefore, and perilous is 
 the condition of him who refuses to walk by the 
 lantern, — dark, not because closed, but because 
 there is no candle in it, — which custom points to
 
 380 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 as a source of light, and being herself blind knows 
 not its worthlessness. When men have begun to 
 tliink a little, and have not yet learned to think 
 rightly, their belief in their own infallible omni- 
 science is apt to be proportionate to their igno- 
 rance; and accordingly they hate him who knows 
 the truth, which they only dream of: and his 
 refusal to dream contentedly with them passes 
 for an insane rebellion. Add to these outward 
 ills the hindrance which he must strive against 
 within, the spectres and shadows of the valley of 
 death which he must confront and overcome, if 
 he would not be to himself a ghastlier apjiarition 
 than they; and we may somewhat guess how 
 hard, and of how more than pagan heroism, told 
 of historic champion, or fabled of demigod, his 
 task must be, who would now walk in this world 
 stedfastly and with clear light, and breathing 
 the air of wisdom's astral climate, while his feet 
 are amid the mire and pitfalls, the tainted se- 
 pulchres of the dead, and unclean beasts that 
 frequent them. 
 
 In this state of things, and not solely in origi- 
 nal dissonance of character, we may perhaps find 
 the explanation of one marked difference between 
 the man of the sixteenth century and the similar 
 man of the nineteenth. The former could speak 
 out heartily and devoutly in the full confidence 
 of faithful, humble reception from his hearers; 
 but in our days we find the no less fervid utte-
 
 CARLYLE. 381 
 
 ranee of an equally practical and positive spirit 
 turning back in irony upon himself, and by his 
 tone of caustic, rather than poignant self-mockery 
 giving the most peculiar and emphatic expression 
 to all his teaching. Luther's irony, when he 
 does resort to it, is all polemical, — a sword to 
 attack. The Englishman's is generally self-re- 
 pressive, — even more than self-defensive, — as a 
 mantle in which he would wrap his head, and 
 shut out the images of his own zeal and indig- 
 nation. 
 
 Here must end our remarks on the admirable 
 writings of a great man. Could it be hoped that, 
 by what has been said, any readers, and especially 
 any thinkers, will be led to give them the atten- 
 tion they require, but also deserve, in this there 
 would be ample repayment, even were there not 
 at all events a higher reward, for the labour, 
 which is not a slight one, of forming and asserting 
 distinct opinions on a matter so singular and so 
 complex. For few bonds that unite human beings 
 are purer or happier, than a common understand- 
 ing and reverence of what is truly wise and 
 beautiful. This also is religion. Standing at 
 the threshold of these works, we may imitate 
 the saying of the old philosopher to the friends 
 who visited him on their return from the temples, 
 Let us enter; for here too are gods.
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 
 
 Fragments from German Prose-Writers. Translated 
 BY Sarah Austin. 
 
 (From the Foreign Quarterly Review for 1842.^ 
 
 COME have experienced, and all can imagine, 
 the pleasure of waking in a new long-desired 
 country, with vague wonder and uncertainty how 
 that foreign life would present itself, and then 
 receiving its first greetings from a fair smiling 
 figure, who presents us with a nosegay of un- 
 known flowers, and looks our welcome to the 
 fields they grew in. Such must be to many 
 English readers the interest and joy imparted by 
 this rich and graceful, as well as truly friendly 
 offering; which is at once a garland of fresh 
 flowers, and a string of lasting pearls. Perhaps 
 no other prose literature but that of Greece could 
 have furnished the materials of a volume at once 
 so wise, so bright, and so varied; and those 
 Hellenic books, nearer than any modern can be to 
 the age of primeval awe, and combining, as no 
 other, childish liveliness with mature thought, 
 yet want some of the nobler, the very no- 
 blest elements of our Christian world, and the 
 clear complete knowledge of nature and history, 
 which in our time we require, and which the 
 Germans, beyond all other })eople, have realized. 
 In truth, resembling the Greeks far more than
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 383 
 
 do the writers of any other nation as to elevation 
 and fulness, they have for us the incomparable 
 merit that they are the children and teachers of 
 our own time. At all events, whatever may or 
 may not be the value of German literature, it 
 is plain that Mrs. Austin is, of all English per- 
 sons, the one who has best succeeded in making 
 its worth clear and pleasant to merely English 
 readers. Mr. Carlyle, with his deep spirit and 
 prophetic originality, has been, and will remain 
 we suppose for ever, the great hierophant, dis- 
 closing to prepared minds the truly divine wisdom 
 of that modern Holy Land. But it requires to 
 have something of a " foregone conclusion" of 
 Germanism within us, and much of the temper 
 of a devout neophyte, to receive the infinite be- 
 nefit of his teaching. Mrs. Austin, with the 
 unpretending ease and felicity of her soft, open, 
 womanly nature, interprets to all like one of 
 themselves, in familiar though choice language, 
 whatever can be so commimicated, of the Beliefs, 
 Images, and Feelings, that the highest hearts and 
 most creative geniuses and most sagacious inqui- 
 rers of modern times have bestowed upon the 
 world. Let us acknowledge our obligation by 
 sitting beside her, — it is no painful position, — 
 in the same great school. 
 
 Her book is one that hardly perhaps permits, 
 and certainly does not require, any comment. 
 Nor do we propose attempting one. But Mrs.
 
 384 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Austin, and her and our readers, will pardon 
 us if we make it an excuse for offering some 
 remarks on the history of modern literature, 
 and on the place which that of Germany holds 
 among the higher products of Christian Europe. 
 That in the last twenty -five years it has gained 
 a universal importance, is plain matter of fact. 
 The writings of Chateaubriand, of Byron, of 
 Manzoni, have excited a wide and eager feel- 
 ing; but none of these men, nor any of their 
 countrymen, have produced a work, the object 
 of repeated translations and commentaries, like 
 the Faust of Goethe. And it is well known 
 that this poem does not stand out from the 
 other literature of its country, as something 
 different in spirit, but only as of greater depth 
 and more perfect execution than most other 
 German books, many of which, besides those of 
 its author, are analogous to it in purpose and 
 tendency. 
 
 A little wider survey teaches us that, as a 
 matter of European interest, the theories and 
 images of the Germans succeeded immediately 
 to that place Avhich had been occupied just before 
 by the great writers of France; by Voltaire, and 
 especially by Rousseau. It is not only that every 
 cultivated person is expected to know something 
 aJxmt these Teutonic singers and sages; but their 
 feelings and opinions reappear in the works of 
 their most celebrated contemporaries in all other
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 385 
 
 countries. For instance, among us, Scott and 
 Byron had both of them been anticipated in what 
 is most essential to them by German authors; 
 though no doubt the Feudalism of the one, and 
 the Suicidism of the other, are more fully de- 
 veloped in them than in any foreigners by whom 
 they may have been influenced. Still more re- 
 markably than in poetry, the philosophical spe- 
 culations of all Europe are daily learning 
 obedience to the example of Germany. M. 
 Guizot is a pupil of those deep and zealous 
 schools. Cuvier was himself by birth and edu- 
 cation a German. Coleridge is the genial in- 
 terpreter of the lore, now of Kant, and now of 
 Schelling. Mr. Wordsworth, who under the 
 guise of a poet is pre-eminently a high hortatory 
 moralist, teaches only doctrines (except when 
 eulogizing Archbishop Laud, &c.,) which might 
 be found long before his works appeared, even 
 more fully and vividly declared, in all the most 
 illustrious masters of our ancestral Teutonic 
 speech. 
 
 Some parts of this statement must pass for 
 the moment without evidence, as we cannot now 
 wait to support it in detail. Indeed it will be 
 denied, we believe, by few jiersons having a wide 
 prospect over the Avorld, that this German lite- 
 rature, or the state of mind which it expresses, 
 has, both in extent and seriousness of influence, 
 a remarkable meaning. This, Madame de Stael 
 
 VOL. I. S
 
 386 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 perhaps rather wished than quite attained to 
 recognise and explain. But, mistaken as are 
 many of her notions on the subject, and (we 
 suppose) all her translations from German books, 
 it is evident that she had really felt something 
 great in the minds of that country, something 
 that far exceeded her previous Parisian standard, 
 and was not even included in the large and ra- 
 diant, though spotted orb of Rousseau's genius. 
 Substantially her belief has become that of the 
 intelligent world; and the fear perhaps now is, 
 not so much that German literatiu'e may be in- 
 sufficiently valued, as that it may be prized on 
 wrong grounds, and used to mistaken purposes. 
 
 We will try to indicate some of the steps by 
 wliich mankind moved on to the production of 
 that German literatm'e, the worth of Avhicli we 
 hold indubitable by any one who, after due pre- 
 paration, has really searched into the matter. 
 
 The combination of urbane and courtly elegance 
 with ecclesiastical power, wealth, and wisdom, 
 produced in Italy the earliest modern literature 
 that can still be called much more than an object 
 of antiquarian study. This glory, failing with 
 the wholesome earnestness of the Church, whose 
 decay produced beyond the Alps the Protestant 
 Reformation, did not outlive that great change 
 by much more than the life of one generation. 
 Tasso died before the close of the sixteenth 
 century. The beauteous strength of the Ca-
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 387 
 
 tholic times lingered longer in Spain, where it 
 had been slower in unfolding itself, and had been 
 invigorated and hardened by its long conflict 
 against the Koran. Calderon, whose life filled 
 more than the first three-quarters of the seven- 
 teenth century, was the last great Catholic poet; 
 and we may safely affirm that the world will 
 never see anothei\ Not of course that there 
 may not be great poets born Catholics, and no- 
 minally, or even in a certain sense sincerely, such 
 throughout their lives ; but that the days are 
 long past when the form of feeling characteristic 
 of the middle ages, and filling them with mystic 
 many-coloured glories, can be the atmosphere and 
 lifeblood of a great man. 
 
 Long before the death of Calderon, nay before 
 his birth, the bloom and richness of Europe had 
 shown itself in the remote north under a very 
 different shape from those dear to him. His 
 predecessor Lope, the contemporary and moi'e 
 prosperous rival of Cervantes, was a soldier on 
 board the Armada, which would have invaded 
 England. But no doubt he little knew that, in 
 the cold and cloudy land of heretics, there was 
 then a burst of thought and imagination, the fame 
 of which in aftertimes would far exceed his own. 
 
 We had at that time among us a combination 
 such as existed nowhere else, of the mental 
 freedom and social vigour of the Reformation, 
 with the stateliness and strength of feudalism. 
 
 S2
 
 388 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 The result was the age of Elizabeth and Charles, 
 — Shakspere and Cromwell. It is now clear 
 enough to all Europe, that the England of 
 Shakspere was one of the chief scenes in the 
 long drama of the human intellect. It succeeded 
 to the splendour of Italian genius; for at this 
 time German thought was merely theological; 
 and France followed mainly in the same track. 
 Then broke out our civil war: and literature 
 thenceforth became among us a matter either 
 of pedantic research, or frivolous lightness, or 
 practical utility; not a free and beautiful out- 
 pouring of the heart. The material interests 
 of our commercial and parliamentary life occu- 
 pied the strongest minds so completely, that our 
 lighter works were the productions only of 
 second-rate men, and are, in the history of the 
 world, entitled but to small notice. In truth 
 there could not be any minds of a very high 
 order, when every thing was bartered away that 
 makes men great, — enthusiasm, romance, poetry, 
 the ideal in all departments but the useful and 
 luxurious arts. 
 
 Now came the turn of France, the age of Louis 
 XIV. Corneille, Racine, IMoliere, Bossuet, 
 Pascal, and Fenelon, and at last Voltaire, were 
 the representatives of a period in the history of 
 their nation, analogous, though not similar, to 
 that of Shakspere, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Raleigh, 
 and Bacon, among us. They gave to modern
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 389 
 
 literature a clearness, precision, and obvious 
 symmetry, which it had never possessed before; 
 and then they died: though Voltaire, with his 
 eighty years, lived over into a totally new epoch. 
 This later day may be called that of the French 
 revolution in facts, that of the German revolu- 
 tion in ideas; two great changes closely but not 
 very definably connected, in their causes, as well 
 as in their dates. By the German period of 
 ideas, we mean one in which the imagination 
 had far wider and deeper aims, and speculative 
 inquiry a much more serious and more compre- 
 hensive character, than in the preceding French 
 epoch; which however had also bequeathed to 
 its successor more of knowledge, elegance, sys- 
 tem, and conscious clearness, than had been at- 
 tained by England in her greatest age. 
 
 It may be remarked that, as Tasso lived after 
 the Reformation (died 1595), and was contem- 
 porary with Shakspere and Spenser, so Milton 
 (died 1674) might have seen every one of those 
 great writers of the age of Louis XIV., except 
 by much the latest as well as longest-lived, Vol- 
 taire: and similarly Rousseau (died 1778), on 
 the whole certainly the deepest and grandest of 
 the French men of genius, saw, though he knew 
 nothing of, the great outburst in Germany, when 
 Winkelmann, Lessing, and Klopstock, led the 
 way for Herder, Goethe, Kant, and Schiller. 
 In each case there was one memorable chrono-
 
 390 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 logical link between the departing and the coming 
 period of human strength. 
 
 Having thus cast a hasty glance at the mere 
 succession, in order of time, of these great move- 
 ments, it may be worth considering what were 
 the predominant ch'cumstances affecting the in- 
 tellectual character of each country, as shown in 
 its literature. 
 
 England, in the hundred years that followed 
 the accession of Elizabeth, was more alive with 
 various hopeful energy than it has ever been 
 since. In physical prosperity, enterprise of all 
 kinds, in stirring thought, poetic freedom and 
 greatness, and moral fervour and heroic conscien- 
 tiousness, all combined, no similar period in the 
 history of any nation has ever excelled this. Per- 
 haps there have never been two generations in any 
 country comparable to these. In pouit of mere 
 date, Spenser, Bacon, Sidney, Shakspere, and 
 Raleigh, might have been brothers ; and Hobbes, 
 Milton, Jeremy Taylor, Stratford, Hampden, and 
 Cromwell, were the contemporaries of their sons. 
 Down to the restoration of Charles II., — the 
 end of this extraordinary age, — feudal splendour, 
 commercial activity, rural freedom, catholic au- 
 thority, and biblical zeal, seemed all blended and 
 balanced ; the rich and golden hfc of the earlier 
 half of the century gradually yieldmg to the 
 sterner subsequent forces ; till at last, when all 
 else had passed away, the religious poetry of
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 391 
 
 Milton rose as the peal of a single organ over the 
 tomb of Cromwell, amid the lutes and drinking- 
 songs and oaths of Charles the Second's court. 
 
 In fact, in the Stuart portion of this hundred 
 years, though much of learned culture, poetic 
 impulse, and high-born dignity still remained, 
 the materializing commercial tendencies were gra- 
 dually gaining the dominion, which they have 
 now so long boasted; and were then far more 
 strikingly accompanied than in later times, by 
 that somewhat hard and narrow, but still noble 
 theological dogmatism, which is the only higher 
 kind of power that in recent times seems ever 
 to have allied itself with the activity of Anglo- 
 Saxon trade. Those puritan wars were only the 
 fierce transition to the orderly, stiff) prosaic, al- 
 dermanic form of national life, which has pre- 
 vailed in this country ever since. 
 
 Of this state of existence the explanation seems 
 to be, that trade, diffusing wealth and a certain, 
 strictly limited, intelligence, secures what is 
 sometimes called freedom; that is, representa- 
 tive government ; and gives the character of 
 more or less shrewd and solid, but very unheroic 
 men of business to the mass of the community. 
 On the other hand, all serious human action 
 develops the need of a moral law by which it 
 may be governed. But mere practical life only 
 seeks to have this law made as definite as pos- 
 sible, and enforced by the extremest sanction ;
 
 392 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 and hence rejects as dangerous all scientific in- 
 quiry into human duties and destinies, and shuns 
 all question of the coherence and completeness 
 of its creed, provided only that it be applicable 
 and positive. We must take into account also 
 the political weight of what is once established ; 
 and hence the repugnance on the part of con- 
 stituted authorities to intellectual movement, ex- 
 cept within a very definite sphere. The road is 
 made, the toll-gates settled, money paid at them 
 with grumbling, but without resistance : what 
 wonder that all concerned, from trustees down 
 to stone-breakers, feel a sincere public-spirited 
 suspicion of plans for new visionary railroads ? 
 And tliese latter, once established, as naturally 
 join the remains of the old tiu'npike interest, to 
 vilify the chimera of superseding all roads what- 
 ever by the use of wings, seven-league boots, or 
 any other transcendental furniture. On the other 
 side, in behalf of men's nobler tendencies, little is 
 to be said in this case ; but that knowledge even 
 in the weary, greedy multitude has a certain 
 weak expansiveness ; and the wealth which brings 
 leisure and luxury to the few, will also ask for 
 intellectual amusement, and will generally let 
 some of the gilding of sofas and chiffoniers over- 
 flow on the frames of pictures and the covers of 
 books. Which helps to man's higher culture we 
 are far from denying, though it may be doubted 
 whether they are quite all-suflicient.
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 393 
 
 In this state of things then, we are sure to 
 find, 1. An endless repetition of moral and re- 
 ligious commonplaces for practical use ; 2. An 
 infinite bustle of political discussion adapted to 
 the comprehension of all, and therefore to that 
 of the least comprehensive ; 3. Scientific inqui- 
 ries into " matter and motion," such as can be at 
 all connected with money-making; 4. Frivolous 
 literature in a perpetual succession of novelties, 
 made for to-day, and gloriously independent of 
 to-morrow. But under none of these heads could 
 we expect to find any thing deeper in meaning 
 or wider in survey, than an enlightened public 
 can relish. Little could be hoped of true and 
 energetic originality. And genius itself, which 
 comes from Heaven, and cannot be prevented by 
 the happiest mechanization of man, would hai'dly 
 break out except either in some loose and loud 
 subserviency to the multitude, or with faint- 
 hearted dishonest adherence to the letter of what 
 is orthodox, or by mad revolt, as in melodious 
 Shelley, against nature and necessity, no less tlian 
 laws and men. 
 
 In France, after the long confusion of civil 
 wars reaching down far later into their history 
 than those of our middle ages, we find social life, 
 and literature which embellished it, assuming 
 under Louis XIV. an elegance, finish, and festal 
 splendour, previously unknown in Europe. Every 
 thing became neat, and much magnificent ; but 
 
 S 3
 
 394 CKITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 ijtill, after the manner of courts, all in clear pre- 
 appointed forms, with reason itself appearing only 
 in the shape of etiquette. Yet the robust free life 
 of feudalism more or less siu'vived, and showed 
 itself in the characters of many of the marshals 
 and nobles, — how plainly, for instance, in the 
 Due de St. Simon ! — and even in the writings 
 of the great authors, though under somewhat 
 rigid control, and with a rather obsequious de- 
 corum. Literature had its pedantic unproductive 
 side in colleges and monasteries, but, as a public 
 fashionable matter, was fitted to the luxurious 
 tastes of a court and nobility. The middle classes, 
 long before so powerful in England, had not yet 
 in France risen into importance. Hence the pre- 
 vailing books had neither the plain serviceable 
 utility of our common moral disquisitions, nor 
 their careless manner, any more than the brave 
 liberality and largeness of our Elizabethan age. 
 It was evidently proper that pains should be 
 bestowed on what was meant to amuse and in- 
 struct a great king and his highborn nobles. 
 Then too, and long after, very little was to be 
 gained by copyright from the public ; so that a 
 terse and concise style, in harmony with the 
 mental clearness and compactness of the race, 
 very naturally came to characterize the produc- 
 tions of Racine and Bossuet. The colleo;es and 
 ecclesiastical authorities, with their popish tra- 
 ditions and rich endowments, helped to secure
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 395 
 
 elegant culture and finish. But their influence, 
 and the tastes of a court, were alike opposed to 
 any meddling with first princij^les ; and the main 
 elements of all high knowledge were required 
 to be merely taken for granted. These writers 
 show, perhaps better than any others in the 
 history of the world, how far it is possible to 
 go, in the absence of very varied natural life, and 
 of deep and free philosophy. The genius of 
 Moliere rose above the pitch of his contempo- 
 raries, and in spite of seeming destiny, made him 
 a great original painter of life, and a worthy 
 companion of Montaigne and Rabelais, who had 
 preluded, somewhat as Chaucer among us, to the 
 glories of a later age. His Misanthrope is more 
 truly Shaksperian, more simply, deeply drawn 
 from the realities of the human soul, than any 
 thing we have seen of the professedly Shak- 
 sperian school now shedding blood by pailfuk 
 on the Parisian stage. This play in fact antici- 
 pates Rousseau, and stands in a very singular 
 relation between Hamlet and Faust; and in like 
 manner Tartuffe strikes the key-note of much 
 that most distinguishes Voltaire. 
 
 This author of Zaire and Zadig, with all his 
 bold scepticism, seems only a vigorous and pro- 
 gressive survivor of the age of Louis XIV. He 
 himself hints, not obscurely, his claim to be the 
 Euripides in a triad, of which Corneille and 
 Racine formed the earlier pair. Sentimental
 
 396 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 emotion and all the refinements of a pleasant 
 life had been the main objects of the authors 
 whose Parnassus was Versailles. Even the state 
 preachers spoke of death and judgement with 
 ceremonious grace, as if to make the Christian 
 pulpit contribute its share to the pohshed enter- 
 tainments of the court. And they, and all their 
 lettered compeers, seemed to give up a tithe of 
 their worldly amusements in obedience to the 
 Church, by way of securing a continuance of 
 the remainder in a future life. Voltaire had 
 spirit and shrewdness to contest the claims of 
 the bishops, for the fragment which alone they 
 asked. By fifty years of multiform resistance, 
 he made his protest good, and at last had all 
 France with him. 
 
 But, in the main, while disputing the com- 
 mands of the hierarchy, he obeyed without an 
 audible murmur two other recognised powers ; 
 the laws of the state, and the rules of social cus- 
 tom. Rousseau arose, and rebelled also against 
 these. Voltaire had mostly aimed only at re- 
 lieving the world from a priesthood and a faith, 
 letting it last in other respects as it was. Kous- 
 seau insisted that men must have a belief, though 
 a reformed one, and that this reform ought to ex- 
 tend to their political constitutions, — nay, to all 
 their habits, tastes, and 2)ractical convictions. If, 
 as we ought, we leave out of view whole masses 
 of inane egotism and dialectical paradox, we must
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 397 
 
 own that he combined in his wonderful genius the 
 most impassioned affection and the most earnest 
 reason ; and, with all his faults, was more than 
 any man the precursor and representative of the 
 great intellectual revolution, which had begun in 
 Germany before his death, and has extended 
 more or less to all Europe. 
 
 To Germany, our final object, we now come. 
 It is certainly at first sight a very singular fact, 
 that its literature, from the Reformation for more 
 than two centuries onwards, was almost wholly 
 either of a scholastic or a commonplace character. 
 Theological, antiquarian, nay, speculative books, 
 there were in abundance; and the great, truly 
 encyclopedic name of Leibnitz has hardly a superior 
 among modern scientific thinkers. There were 
 also many works of a j^ractical kind for the people. 
 But of men of lasting eminence, writing classical 
 books in German on matters of general, not purely 
 academic, interest, there was not one till less than 
 a hundred years ago. The want of high and uni- 
 versal worth in German literature must have been 
 decided enough, and known to be so, when Ro- 
 bertson dared confess, with no particular appear- 
 ance of shame, that he had written the history of 
 Charles V. without being able to read the lan- 
 guage of that country which Charles ruled as 
 emperor, — the language, by his use of which 
 Luther in Charles's reign revolutionized Evu'ope. 
 
 The slow maturity of German thought is on
 
 398 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 consideration intelligjible enou^rli. In the first 
 place, all the other highly civilized parts of Eu- 
 rope were at one time ruled by Rome, and retained 
 always some strong traces of classical cultm'e. In 
 England indeed all Roman refinement seems to 
 have been swept away by the northern invaders; 
 and it is the only part of Europe, once Latin, 
 where this can be said to have been the case. But 
 our Norman conquerors, succeeding to the Saxons 
 and Danes, came to us from France, where they 
 had learnt a language of itself half Latin, and 
 many arts and tastes derived from the same noble 
 source. The subsequent long and close connexion 
 of our sovereigns, nobility, and clergy, with the 
 more enlightened country they sprang from, had 
 an evident and great effect upon Britain. Here 
 then was one means of knowledge and humanity 
 almost entirely wanting to the Germans. Hence 
 perhaps mainly it is that in modern times tlie 
 German courts displayed but little sensibility 
 for intellectual pleasures, till influenced in the 
 eighteenth century by the example of France. 
 
 Secondly, of the great European countries, 
 Germany is by far the most inland. Spain and 
 Italy are almost insular ; we are entirely so ; even 
 France has a land frontier on but one and a half 
 of its four sides ; while Germany is open to the 
 sea on but a portion of its northern boundary ; and 
 the greater part of that sea-coast looks to the land- 
 locked and remote Baltic. Hence there were not
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 399 
 
 the natural causes prevailing over all the West of 
 Europe for the growth of a wealthy and quick- 
 witted commercial class. And thus neither com'tly 
 nor mercantile refinement arose as early as in 
 Latinized and maritime countries. Rude nobles 
 and poor serfs composed the people of Germany, 
 long after polished aristocracies and rich intelli- 
 gent burghers had filled other lands with graceful 
 arts, and brought forth the various national litera- 
 tures of the modern world. 
 
 Thirdly, the religious wars caused in Germany 
 by the Reformation filled the whole following 
 century, and did not end till the middle of the 
 seventeenth. In France, where civilization was 
 already far more advanced, they occupied but a 
 few years ; and in England nothing of the kind 
 occurred till after our greatest intellectual age, 
 and then only disturbed six or seven years, and 
 hardly interfered at all Avith the progress of the 
 country in the arts of peace. 
 
 These considerations may help to explain the 
 fact, that Germany, after occupying almost the 
 whole of Roman Europe, and placing her sons on 
 all its chief thrones, and then inventing the print- 
 ing-press, and bringing forth Luther, was yet left 
 far behind by England, France, Italy, and Spain, 
 in the elaboration of that free, varied, and beauti- 
 ful modern culture, which in recent times it has 
 more completely appropriated and perfected than 
 any of its rivals.
 
 400 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 But perhaps the very causes which retarded the 
 efflorescence of Germany, also secured that the 
 flowers, when at last disclosed, should be more 
 abundant and richer. For what was it but the 
 strength, depth, uncommercial quiet and solidity 
 of the nation, that brought out the Reformation 
 among them? And were not these the virtues 
 which, two centuries after, fashioned themselves 
 into the Lessings, Goethes, and Kants? What 
 but the absence of political centralization, the di- 
 vision of Germany into many states, so long gave 
 up the country to wars for religion, which must 
 have ended far sooner, had the land, like France 
 and England, been under one government ? And 
 this very plurality of states and capitals, with 
 their courts and universities, has been among the 
 most obvious and certain causes of that wide- 
 spread, varied, unshackled intelligence, which the 
 torpid priestly colleges of England, and the single 
 tyrannical metropolis of France, have alike, though 
 in such different ways, prevented in their respec- 
 tive countries. 
 
 This slight, though, we believe, accurate sketch 
 of a gi^eat subject, may possibly seem imperfect; 
 for want of any statement why Spain and Italy 
 have done nothing in modern times at all compa- 
 rable to the intellectual achievements of the three 
 principal northern countries. To this difficulty 
 also something like a plausible answer can be fur- 
 nished. It is not because they have had no Pro-
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 401 
 
 testant Reformation, or, as in France, a Revolution 
 of equivalent energy. For we must still discover 
 why this has not taken place. The explanation 
 appears to be as to Spain, that the long struggle 
 against the Moors made hatred of heresy the one 
 serious passion of the people, and thus gave them 
 up more entirely than any other Europeans into the 
 hands of their clergy. Then the possession of 
 America rendered the sovereign independent of 
 the nation. And thus king and priest, the natu- 
 ral and reasonable representatives of the highest 
 forms of social life, obtained and used their power 
 to extinguish all national force and health in slow, 
 shameful decay. Fire indeed remained under the 
 ashes, and at last has burst out ; nor, we trust, 
 will the blaze be quenched again. 
 
 In Italy the mischief sprang from other causes. 
 The consolidation of the great monarchies of 
 France, Austria, and Spain, surrounded that 
 country with neighbours too strong for her di- 
 vided force to encounter. Her physical structure 
 made it easy to attack her in detail, and hard for 
 her to rally round any centre. The power of the 
 Bishop of Rome, inherited from the old civil pre- 
 eminence of that city, set apart one portion of the 
 peninsula under a consecrated rule, with w^hich it 
 was impossible for the other states to coalesce. 
 Thus inwardly distracted, nay cloven, and alter- 
 nately overpowered and parcelled into small des- 
 potisms by one or other of her neighbom's, Italy
 
 402 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 too sank into a languid imbecility, which only now 
 and then utters some detached phrase, recalling 
 her former and still latent strength. Had Rome 
 been governed by any sort of temporal ruler, he 
 would gradually, no doubt, have united all the 
 other Italian states ; and then, in confidence of 
 national dignity, every individual citizen would 
 have risen into higher life. But the anomaly of 
 a superannuated old clergyman governing, in the 
 name of God and of the Fisherman, the former 
 capital of the civilized world, was itself enough to 
 make it impossible that in modern times he should 
 extend a dominion, the foundation of which was 
 thus equivocal. 
 
 Taking up our former inquiry into the history 
 of the German mind, — what seems most peculiar 
 to that nation, among all those of Europe, is the 
 number and strength of the universities, and at 
 the same time their freedom from ecclesiastical 
 trammels. The nature of the land itself with 
 reference to commerce and other particulars, 
 the kinds of government, and the political divi- 
 sions, the diversities of religion established in the 
 several sections, the national character with its 
 deep and steady fire, and the tranquillity and se- 
 riousness of its social habits, all these arc im- 
 portant points. But, as discriminating Germany 
 from the other great European countries, there 
 is, we tliink, no fact nearly so significant and 
 productive, as the existence of a great number of
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 403 
 
 bodies of men selected for their eminence as 
 thinkers, and set apart to think, and permitted 
 to declare their thoughts with perfect, or nearly 
 perfect, freedom. 
 
 We see at tliis instant an Oxford professor of 
 unquestioned piety nearly worried to death for 
 controverting or supporting (we forget wliich) St. 
 Thomas Aquinas. A German may proclaim his 
 agreement with Plato, Spinoza, or Shaftsbury, 
 and his disregard of all the Fathers and all the 
 Reformers; and in all probability, if he shows 
 sincerity and genius in doing so, he will gain an 
 increased salary, the cross of an order, and a larger 
 body of pupils. It is not very difficult to per- 
 ceive which plan is the more likely to make 
 profound philosophical inquirers. 
 
 In England and Italy, even in France down 
 to the Revolution, there was neither any such 
 abundance of institutions for the highest know- 
 ledge, nor any such liberty in those existing. 
 Accordingly in these three countries it has been 
 almost exclusively in physical science, in matters 
 only remotely connected with theological dogma, 
 and therefore exempt from its control, that there 
 has been any steady conjoint progress, any re- 
 cognised independence of inquiry, and a deference 
 in the government for the opinion of the most 
 competent. In Germany alone has the case 
 been memorably otherwise. We find there an 
 oro-anization of men's hio;hest interests and ten-
 
 404 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 dencies, neither crushed by the jealousy of civil 
 rulers, nor perverted by ecclesiastics to serve the 
 purposes, — most important no doubt, but not 
 alone important, — of their profession. Perhaps 
 it would not be too much to say, that, as the 
 representative institutions of England and Ame- 
 rica are gradually being adopted by all the 
 civilized world as the best instruments for ar- 
 ranging men's outward and material concerns, 
 so the day must come when the intellectual 
 progress of mankind will stop, or something like 
 the German universities be everywhere esta- 
 blished, and endowed Avith at least as healthy 
 and noble a freedom as has been allowed in those 
 bodies. In that country, — poor as Germany is 
 compared w^ith England and France, — there may 
 now probably be found the greater jmrt of the 
 generous knowledge and earnest meditation ex- 
 tant on earth. But Oxford and Cambridge, 
 with perhaps more wealth than all the German 
 professors together, certainly do not contain six 
 men who have added a jot to human knowledge, 
 except in the physical sciences, and not more 
 than two or three, if so many, whose names 
 Europe has ever heard of in any department. 
 The monastic spirit of these establishments can- 
 not be expected to produce better fruits; and 
 we must rather pity than blame the individual 
 men, the victims of a system that they fancy 
 themselves bound to defend.
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 405 
 
 As the total result of these causes and revo- 
 lutions on the banks of the Rhine and Elbe, 
 what do we find? A modern German literature 
 no doubt, which lies before us and around us, 
 and is studied as the modern French and modern 
 Italian by those who have a taste for polite ac- 
 complishments. Something more however there 
 is than this. These German books are not merely 
 in a language of their own, but have a whole 
 physiognoiuy and character, distinct, original, 
 not only very unlike either our own or any 
 other writings, but also perhaps of a deeper, 
 wider kind. 
 
 What then, we would ask, is the word, — for 
 there must be one, — which more nearly than all 
 others expresses the specific character of the more 
 celebrated German writers during the last half 
 or three-quarters of a century? Let us try 
 some of the more popular solutions. 
 
 Is it homeliness ? 
 
 No, they are not more homely than Goldsmith, 
 or Crabbe, or Walter Scott; not more than even 
 Theocritus or Homer. But they combine home- 
 liness Avith a higher somewhat, which we hardly 
 find elsewhere in this connexion. 
 
 Is it ajfectlonateness'^ 
 
 Scarcely this either; though it is true that 
 their philosophers recognise, and their poets de- 
 lineate, a warmth and fulness of the feelings, and 
 not merely of the passions, such as other modern
 
 406 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 writers do not attempt except in spasms of sen- 
 timental exaggeration. But this is not universal 
 in these foreign works, and is not peculiar to 
 them. Shakspere and Cervantes, Dante, Boc- 
 caccio, and Montaigne, abound in the same tone, 
 which is also the familiar music of much of the 
 ancient classical literature. 
 
 Is it then mi/siticism? 
 
 Surely in no sense of the word can this be 
 found in the greater part of the poems of Goethe 
 and Schiller. Popularly speaking, the word 
 means nothing but obscurity; which, except so 
 far as every thing worth understanding requires 
 pains to understand it, is as little a fault of the 
 German writers, excluding Novalis, as of any in 
 all literature. A mystic is properly a man who 
 does not seek to bring his own higher feelings 
 and convictions into as much intellectual clearness 
 as they are capable of, but loves the solemn gloom 
 of indistinct emotion too well to approach it with 
 conscious reflection. In this sense there are per- 
 haps no men, having a deep faith of heart, so 
 little chargeable with mysticism, as the more emi- 
 nent of the German philosophers and even poets. 
 
 Is it then perhaps the opposite of mysticism, 
 reflection, which distinguislies these men from the 
 guides of other nations? 
 
 This, more nearly than any of the other charac- 
 teristics we have tried, might seem to fulfil the 
 purpose. jNI. Guizot has somewhere stated it as
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 407 
 
 the blame of German literature, that reflection is 
 too prominent and general in its productions ; that 
 there is not a sufficiently clear, direct representa- 
 tion of the outward realities of life. But though 
 there is more of large and accurate meditation in 
 these works than in any other contemporary mas- 
 terpieces, neither can this be styled their main 
 distinction. We find it indeed as a most import- 
 ant element in their poetic works. But it cannot 
 at all events characterize their philosophy ; for 
 that must always be entirely and purely reflective; 
 and to say that one philosophy is more so than 
 others, is merely to pronounce it the best. But 
 neither is it, though conceivably of course it might 
 be, the chief singularity of other than their philo- 
 sopliical treatises. There is in the mere descrip- 
 tive department, in verbal landscape-painting, and 
 the like, a clearness, completeness, and conciseness 
 in much of the writing of these men, — as Goethe 
 and Tieck, for instance, — to which we can find no 
 parallel elsewhere ; and in these two, and Schiller 
 and Jean Paul, a true, free exhibition of varieties 
 and greatnesses of human character, of shades and 
 depths of emotion, Avhich reflective thought could 
 never have revealed to any man, who had not 
 either felt them in his heart before his head took 
 notice of them, or found them in human life before 
 he generalized them into a theory. 
 
 Shall we then enlarge our phrase, and say that 
 it is knoicledge in general in whicli they excel?
 
 408 CRITICAL ESSAYS. . 
 
 In this also there is much plausibility. If we 
 look at their speculative writers, there is an extent 
 of survey, a mastery over the theories that all ages 
 and countries have produced, and the facts that 
 these theories were designed to explain, such as 
 no school among any other people has had the 
 least pretension to. Indeed, directly to translate, 
 or indirectly to borrow from these men, is suffi- 
 cient to obtain in other parts of Europe, and emi- 
 nently among us, the somewhat dangerous repute 
 of engaging deeply in the strangest of forbidden 
 pm'suits, — the black art of thinking. It is also an 
 unquestionable fact, that their poets have had an 
 acquaintance with philosophic speculation, with 
 the theory of criticism, with the history of the 
 fine arts, and with various languages and litera- 
 tures, such as could hardly be found among those 
 of most other countries. But neither can this be 
 what constitutes the clearly felt difference between 
 this and rival literatures. The difference is one 
 too deep and fundamental for mere book-know- 
 ledge, however large and various, to explain. The 
 whole view of life, and all the little unconscious 
 turns of feeling that meet us in every page of 
 their imaginative writings, spring from a far other 
 root than that of either our popular bravm'a writ- 
 ing, or of encyclopedic learning. 
 
 Do we come any nearer our object in trying if 
 culture will satisfy the spliinx ? 
 
 So it may seem ; for culture includes many of
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 409 
 
 the elements that we have already found in the 
 great fact before us. Yet neither will this quite 
 succeed. For culture will do every thing for 
 man, but give him the original capacity on which 
 it most successfully- works. If culture were all, 
 how far had a Voltaire been above a Shakspere, 
 a Gray before a Burns, a Mengs beyond a Cor- 
 reggio, a Dugald Stewart ahead of a Spinoza! 
 All which is much the reverse of true. 
 
 We requu'e something from which, — granting 
 the due circumstances, — culture, knowledge, and 
 reflection, clearness and liveliness of painting, the 
 seriousness that will to careless eyes appear mysti- 
 cism, the afiectionateness that fills a life and book 
 with warmth, and the homeliness which is the 
 proof of real interest in all the forms and condi- 
 tions of human nature, must, as water from its 
 fountain, rise and be manifest. And there is one 
 power in man, which, with proper qualities of 
 other kinds, and under favouring influences, will 
 produce all that and every other good thing. 
 There is but one. It is Earnestness of heart. 
 This we do conceive to be the grand fontal cha- 
 racteristic of the better German writings, as com- 
 pared with those that other nations have brought 
 forth during these last three-score years and ten. 
 
 Here perhaps we might fitly stop. For where 
 men have equal natural gifts, and equal circum- 
 stances. Earnestness is all tliat makes the differ- 
 ence. As to gifts, the Teutonic race are, in force, 
 
 VOL. I. T
 
 410 CRITICAL FSSAYS. 
 
 fire, and clearness, the masters of the modern 
 world ; being indeed the conquerors of it all, and 
 founders of its medieval Christian life. Their cir- 
 cumstances, as already we have partly seen, are 
 not in later times less favourable, but rather more 
 so than those of other countries : for they are in 
 good measure exempt from all-confusing commer- 
 cial bustle ; and do not slu-ink under the tyranny 
 of one huge feverish drunken metropolis ; and are 
 amply provided with seats of free thought, — at 
 once cause, result, proof, and furtherance of this 
 faithful national earnestness. Other things being 
 equal, or even not grossly unequal, the most 
 earnest people will be the wisest, most melodious, 
 most creative ; and this is what we esteem the 
 Germans to be, as shown in their modern books. 
 
 In France all or most that is loudly written, 
 and similarly spoken, seems designed for instant 
 effect on a vehement gregarious race. Nearer 
 ourselves we see much of a literature more for 
 household use, and regarded mainly as a conve- 
 nience for the domestic soid. Each country also 
 shares in the blessings characteristic of the other ; 
 and Germany in turn has enough of the same 
 froth and dregs as its neighbours. But it has 
 begotten all the greatest masters of thought pro- 
 duced in Europe since the time of Rousseau ; and 
 Tieck and Schelling are still alive to represent in 
 the flesh a literature, which for compass, loftiness, 
 and enduring beauty, for all that Earnestness
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 411 
 
 must in our modern world attempt and realize, is 
 quite unlike almost any thing that either we or 
 our nearest neighbours can boast of. 
 
 Happily for us no great European nation has so 
 close a relation as ourselves to these sons of the 
 weird northern Muses. We may largely gain by 
 using those rights of kindred, which they have 
 been always proud to insist on. For in varied 
 tones and utterances, — of calm reflection, of dra- 
 matic personation, oi' lyric enthusiasm, of epic and 
 idyllic narrative, — they teach us that our human 
 life is not only, as it must always be, a course of 
 hard toil, and a mixture of broken joys and sharp 
 sorrows, but full of a divine meaning, and capable 
 of immortal good. With deep meditative Avisdom, 
 and in forms of many-coloured beauty, they set 
 before us a lesson, which England much needs, 
 but is also most worthy to learn. Our coarse 
 mechanical strength is mingled with a rich and 
 strong element of conscience, humanity, and un- 
 wearied hope, but all tortured into maimed shapes, 
 and wrapped in thick gloom. We may gain help 
 towards the recovery both of light and beauty 
 among the men who still gloriously consecrate the 
 soil we first sprang from. There are many of us 
 who delight in the manifold glowing world of 
 Shakspere; others who have felt the tones of 
 eternal truth in the slow chant of Wordsworth, in 
 some piercing lyric phrase of Coleridge, and in the 
 sweet bewildered wail of Shelley. Many again 
 
 T2
 
 412 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 have stepped more lightly over our toilsome earth 
 in the presence of the bold shadows evoked from 
 the past by Scott. All these living hearts, varied 
 as are their habits and outward interests, will find 
 leaders of their pilgrimage, such as all the earth 
 beside does not afibrd, in the great men of modern 
 Germany. 
 
 There is one quality of those modern German 
 writers, which, it may be as well to warn unpre- 
 pared readers, will strike them with wonder, and 
 perhaps with fear. This is nothing but that free- 
 dom, to which we have before adverted. The 
 greater of those men have used their fine and 
 robust faculties in looking at life and nature for 
 themselves ; not in order to escape from duty, but 
 to fulfil it more abundantly, and on a larger scale 
 than custom would prescribe. There is nothing 
 more common than the sight of persons, the despair 
 of moralists in all ages, the fools named in Scrip- 
 ture, who throw off a burden which they are too 
 weak to bear bravely, and disown whatever is 
 high and pure within them, that they may sink into 
 inert, mean fiilseness and brutishncss. But there 
 is another revolt against popular rules and laws 
 of opinion, having a very different aim from this. 
 The weak man, to get rid of his load, will cut off 
 the arras to which it is tied, and maim his powers 
 to escape his obligations; but the strong man, 
 who refuses to " carry coals " at the bidding of 
 others, claims only to choose his own load, and
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 413 
 
 will bear willingly and with painful fidelity a far 
 heavier one, than the public opinion which he 
 disobeys would have dared to lay on him. Xo 
 taskmaster would have made those women, who 
 carried forth their husbands as their most precious 
 commodities, submit to a burden half so weighty. 
 And thus it is with all who engage seriously in 
 the task of life. Freely they choose, and freely 
 perform, a work beyond the compass of all legal 
 injunctions. For freedom is found at last to be 
 nothing else but the willing choice of those condi- 
 tions, which enable our best, most laborious powers, 
 to exert themselves for the fittest ends. And this 
 is the freedom towards which every noble soul 
 feels, toils, and bleeds, as towards its native and 
 only vital element, as the plant to light and air, 
 the fish out of the net into the fresh unbounded 
 water. This victorious effort it is, which glorifies 
 more or less every truly great man ; and above all 
 in modern times, those of Germany ; whose names 
 we constantly hear connected with the charge of 
 irreligion, licentiousness, and whatever of horrible 
 that stupid tongues can devise to ring in stupid 
 ears. As if profane irreverence, and mad self- 
 willed resistance to reason, could ever be the cha- 
 racteristic tendency of thoughtful, humane, and 
 imaginative minds. There is a freedom far unlike 
 that of the escaped convict, and consisting not in 
 doltish disobedience, but in the sacred and serene 
 obedience of love to the highest rule of duty we
 
 414 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 can find within us. Xot such is the freedom 
 secured by Magna Chartas, and Acts of Settle- 
 ment, that guard us from the tyranny of kings, 
 but leave us under the yoke of our next-door 
 neighbour's eyes, and our newswriter's pen. Nor 
 is any such liberty to be obtained by the most 
 diligent compliance with all the precepts of ethics 
 and theology, in which the heart and strength of 
 a man may be as much confined, as his body if it 
 were chained in a locked church. Divine com- 
 mandments ai*e but the commandments of divines, 
 for him who does not feel that in compliance with 
 them is the only liberation of liis soul from death. 
 A man who does not feel this may be gravely 
 wrong, but will not get himself right by tying 
 himself to the letter, in w^hich he finds no spirit. 
 The freedom of an earnest mind brings with it 
 laws as strict and holy as any in the Pentateuch 
 or the Canons, but also has tenfold strength for 
 the performance of the only work on earth really 
 worthy of a man. All the rest is the routine of a 
 scourged and hoodwinked heart. Political free- 
 dom is a 2:reat blessing ; but there is a still better 
 kind known only to the good and wise, and of 
 which Schiller and Fichte and their compeers are 
 teachers and examples, such as Europe for near 
 two centuries had hardly seen. 
 
 Connected, not very remotely, with this matter 
 of spiritual freedom, is the remarkable fact, that, 
 while, of the population of Germany, considerably
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 415 
 
 more than half are Catholics, every man who has 
 gained an immortal fame in that country as a 
 thinker, was born and bred a Protestant. As to 
 the right of the greater number of the following 
 names to appear in the list, there can be but one 
 opinion. 
 
 Leibnitz 
 
 Hegel 
 
 Frederick II. 
 
 Schleiermacher 
 
 Lessing 
 
 Eichhorn 
 
 Winkelmann 
 
 Johannes Miiller 
 
 Klopfstock 
 
 Jean Paul Richter 
 
 Herder 
 
 2 Stolbergs 
 
 Hamann 
 
 2 Schlegels 
 
 Wieland 
 
 2 Humboldts 
 
 F. H. Jacob! 
 
 Novalis 
 
 Goethe 
 
 Tieck 
 
 Schiller 
 
 F. A. Wolf 
 
 Kant 
 
 Voss 
 
 Fichte 
 
 Niebuhr 
 
 Schelling 
 
 Savigny. 
 
 Tlu*ee of these illustrious men, — one Stolberg, 
 one Schlegel, and Winkelmann, — became Catho- 
 lics ; the last, it is said, from mere convenience ; the 
 former two, no doubt, with entire sincerity. We 
 might perhaps have added Werner, the dramatic 
 poet, as to the purity of whose motives in the 
 same change there seems to be no cause for doubt. 
 But even these converts, all, except Winkelmann, 
 but second-rate among the great, were formed in 
 the comparative freedom of Protestant doctrine. 
 Of the others, many, perhaps nearly all, were 
 very far from what we commonly call orthodoxy, 
 — that is, from believing that the Creeds of the
 
 416 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Reformers three hundred years ago, or any one 
 such document, contain the whole and nothing 
 but the truth as to man's spiritual constitution 
 and destiny. But, though mostly heretics in the 
 eyes of synods and consistories, and of our bench 
 of bishops, they were generally far more com- 
 pletely removed from any allegiance to the doc- 
 trine of the Schoolmen, or to that of the Fathers ; 
 and the mere ai'tistic and romantic admiration felt 
 by some of them for the times of legend and 
 miracle was only similar in kind to that which 
 they cherished for the mythological beauty of 
 early Greece, and even of ancient India. Except 
 the two or three persons just mentioned, whose 
 history is not very hard of explanation, there was 
 not one of these men who would not rather have 
 saciificed his life, than the liberty of believing 
 and feeling for Imnself in conformity with the 
 promptings of his own soul, and with the spirit 
 of the times he belonged to. If we remember 
 that more than eighteen millions of the Germans 
 are Catholics, this Protestant consent of all their 
 strongest, deepest, and most genial minds, is per- 
 haps as significant a fact as any that history 
 presents. Not that it portends any triumph of 
 Exeter Hall over the Vatican, and the Prayer- 
 Book over the Missal, but that it exhibits the 
 emancipation of all truly great minds from the 
 bondage of all dead traditions, by whatever name 
 they may be trumpeted.
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 417 
 
 Strange moreover as it may seem, with all 
 their heterodoxy, there are not above five or six 
 in our whole list whose writings do not indicate 
 a far nobler, purer feeling of religion and of duty, 
 than can be found in our Paleys and Watsons, 
 and scores of well-reputed correct British theo- 
 logians. 
 
 We have already stated, that in our view their 
 most remarkable quality, and indeed the root of 
 all their merit, is moral earnestness. It has also 
 been pointed out that this Earnestness is com- 
 bined with, or seen to issue in, a Freedom, of 
 which the serious minds among us have in general 
 but little conception. If now we further attempt 
 to mark by one expression the idea which per- 
 vades this literature, and the consciousness of 
 which all sympathizing readers must more or 
 less obscurely derive from it, this may be called 
 
 the WORTH OF MAN. 
 
 This Worth we find exhibited in each of the 
 three great forms assumed by the genius of the 
 Germans, — in History, Philosophy, and Poetry. 
 History displays the facts of human nature ; phi- 
 losophy, the principles that the facts rise from 
 and express ; poetry, the symbols in which the 
 principles are Illustrated, and the facts more com- 
 pendiously and vividly reproduced. In all these 
 departments alike, the Worth of Man, the fellow- 
 feeling that we owe, and the labour that the 
 construction of our life requires and deserves, 
 
 T 3
 
 418 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 are shown with a settled strength and complete 
 beauty, far beyond the pitch of any other writings 
 we know, but those of the Greeks, and superior 
 even to them in depth and compass. We do not 
 forget Dante and Ariosto, Cervantes and Calde- 
 ron, Shakspere and ISIilton : but among the 
 Germans we have a whole literature, and not 
 merely one or two great minds; we have vast 
 regions of philosophy and history almost un- 
 known, and altogether unsurveyed, by any other 
 nation. And even their poets, being much the 
 latest that the world has produced with any 
 thing like equal powers, have, though certainly 
 not an absolute superiority to all their predeces- 
 sors, yet an extent of knowledge, and, above all, 
 a suitableness for us in this age, which earlier 
 ones could not possibly be endowed with. 
 
 But in history and philosophy (i. e. what is 
 commonly called metaphysics) the higher dignity 
 with which man appears, than that which our 
 popular authors allow him, is far more strikingly 
 manifest. The ancient Avorld especially has been 
 as good as reconquered for us from waste dark- 
 ness by the race of scholars, with Wolf, the 
 critic of Homer, at their head, whose works are 
 beginning, either by vague rumour or small sam- 
 ples, to make their way into England. Xiebuhr, 
 we all know, has reconstructed for us that old, 
 stem, half-Etruscan Rome, which had lain so 
 Ions buried under the ruins of her own later
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 419 
 
 empire, and chronicled only in supernatural, that 
 is, unnatural, legends. To him Man, as he trod 
 five-and-twenty centuries ago the banks of the 
 obscure and marshy Tiber, was still so yenerable 
 and dear an image, that a whole laborious life 
 might be well spent in tracing out his faintest 
 footsteps, and deepening the slightest outlines of 
 his story, till ages that seemed as completely lost 
 as if they had belonged to some anterior planet, 
 and whose place had for two thousand years been 
 supplied by fantastic fables, stood again before us 
 with the breath of life, and there, instead of a 
 shapeless cloud, was Rome resurgent " in all her 
 panoply." But it is less this result, with which 
 we are now concerned, than the spirit of sincere 
 faith, the feeling of the Worth of Man in his 
 historical no less than his present existence, which 
 makes Niebuhr so remarkable to us, and which 
 has made his fellow historians and philologers a 
 race so different from the earlier verbal pedants 
 and all-believing devourcrs of old books. If the 
 mythology and history, the thoughts and beliefs 
 of the classical world, and especially of ancient 
 Greece, have a living interest and coherent intel- 
 ligible subsistence for us, we owe it to such men 
 as Niebuhr, Wolf, Voss, K. O. Miiller, who have 
 penetrated Avith their sharp eyes and glowing 
 enthusiasm into the tangled thorny fruitless wil- 
 derness, the sacred haunt of ghosts and school- 
 masters.
 
 420 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Thus also is it with philosophy, which in Eng- 
 land and France had long attempted little more 
 than to explain away whatever is awful and divine 
 in man, into something, if not mean and bad, yet 
 small and frivolous. Our writers on such sub- 
 jects, often with the best purpose, but ill-placed 
 and stunted by the tendencies of the world they 
 lived in, like their French contemporaries, only 
 sought for the most part to analyse some separate 
 faculty or thing that they found in man. The 
 Germans took another road, made philosophy 
 properly constructive, and sought to ascertain and 
 consecrate laws around and above us, from which 
 we and all things spring and become intelligible ; 
 and not merely to use the tools of the workshop 
 within us in taking those tools to pieces. The 
 aim of the Germans is at least the nobler one, 
 and elevates, not dwarfs, the soul of him who 
 makes them his masters. There is a godlike 
 within us, that feels itself akin to the gods ; and 
 if we are told that both the godlike and the gods 
 are dreams, we can but answer that so to dream 
 is better than to wake and find ourselves nothiujj. 
 
 There is one remark, which reflections of tliis 
 kind are almost certain to call forth in a large 
 and respectable class of persons among us, viz., 
 that to assert the Wortli of Man is an arrogant 
 delusion, and one that puffs up men with vanity. 
 But this objection implies the absurd mistake of 
 supposing that, the loftier the standard by which
 
 CHARACTERISTICS OF GERMAN GENIUS. 421 
 
 we judge ourselves, the more and not the less 
 nearly shall we seem to reach its full height. 
 What is all that is held most holy, — what all 
 the godlike men whom religious tradition canon- 
 izes and glorifies, — but forms of a divine idea, ever 
 to be kept before us and approached, though in 
 each individual most imperfectly realized ? And 
 when in other words we speak of the Worth of 
 Man, which philosophy explains, history displays 
 in action, and poetry sings of and makes visible 
 to the soul, we but declare that there is a great- 
 ness of human nature, which rebukes the little- 
 ness of each, and yet is the common blessing and 
 support of us all. It is not those that think 
 most lowly of themselves, who will protest loud- 
 est against the asserters of the experienced and 
 still possible Worth of Man. We have already 
 sufficiently declared that we hold the great Ger- 
 man writers to be the chief teachers of this lesson 
 in the present age : and we wish nothing better 
 than that our readers may not take our word for 
 the fact, but examine it seriously for themselves. 
 We believe no one ever thoughtfully studied these 
 masters of modern thought, without finding in 
 them more and more of what is best for all men.
 
 POEMS BY ALFRED TENNYSON. 
 
 (From the Quarterly Review for 1842,^ 
 
 TT7HAT poetry might be in our time and land, 
 if a man of the highest powers and most 
 complete cultivation exercised the art among us, 
 will be hard to say, until after the fact of such 
 a man's existence. Waiting for this desirable 
 event, we may at least see that poetry, to be 
 for us what it has sometimes been among man- 
 kind, must wear a new form, and probably com- 
 prise elements hardly found in our recent writings, 
 and impossible in former ones. 
 
 Of verses indeed, of every sort but the excel- 
 lent, there is no want ; almost all however so 
 helpless in skill, so faint in meaning, that one 
 might almost fancy the authors wrote metre from 
 mere incapacity of expressing themselves in prose, 
 — as boys at school make nonsense-verses, before 
 they can construct a rational sentence. Yet it 
 is plain that even our magazine stanzas, album 
 sonnets, and rhymes in corners of newspapers, 
 aim at the forms of emotion, and use some of 
 the words in which men of genius have symbo- 
 lized profound thoughts. Tlic whole indeed is 
 o-enerally a lump of blunder and imbecility ; but 
 in the midst there is often some turn of cadence, 
 some attempt at an epithet of more significance
 
 TENNYSON. 423 
 
 and beauty, than perhaps a much finer uihid would 
 have hit on a hundred years ago. The crowds 
 of stammering children are the offspring of an 
 age that would fain teach them, — if it knew how, 
 — a richer, clearer language than they can learn 
 to speak. 
 
 It is hard in this state of things not to conceive 
 that the time, among us at least, is an essentially 
 unpoetic one, — one which, whatever may be the 
 worth of its feelings, finds no utterance for them 
 in melodious words. 
 
 Yet our age is not asleep. Great movements, 
 various activities, are heard and seen on all sides. 
 In the lowest department, that of mere mechanics, 
 consider what fifteen years have done. It was 
 only in the autumn of 1830, following close on 
 the French three memorable days of July, that 
 the Duke of Wellington opened the Manchester 
 and Liverpool Railroad. The population of the 
 busiest region on this earth were assembled round 
 him, whom all acknowledged as the greatest man 
 in England, at the inauguration of a new physical 
 power, then felt to double the strength and swift- 
 ness of human beings. While, among myriads of 
 gravely joyous faces, the new machines travelled 
 at a speed matcliing that of eagles, the life of a 
 great statesman shot off on a darker and more 
 distant journey ; and the thrill of fear and pain 
 at his destruction gave the last human tragic 
 touch to an event which would at any rate have
 
 424 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 retained for ever an historic importance. The 
 death of Mr. Huskisson startled the fixed bosom 
 of the veteran soldier ; and those who were near 
 perceived a quiver of the lip, a movement of the 
 eye, such as had hardly been caused by the most 
 unlooked-for and dreadful chances of his mighty 
 wars. To a calm observer the emotion of the 
 whole multitude, great and small, might strangely 
 have recalled far distant ages, and the feelings 
 with which ancient peoples held every great event 
 as incomplete, wanting the blood of a victim, — 
 too often human, — solemnly shed. In the most 
 prosperous and peaceful of national triumphs the 
 dark powers again claimed a share, and would not 
 be forgotten. 
 
 Since then about twelve years have passed ; 
 and behold what they have brought forth. Some 
 seventy millions of money have been expended, — 
 more, at the lowest estimate, than four times as 
 much as tlie Papacy was able to raise in a century 
 and a half for the construction of its greatest 
 monument, the costliest the world has ever seen. 
 These seventy millions of pounds have been sub- 
 scribed by private persons at their own choice 
 in one small countiy, and have created nearly 
 fifteen hundred miles of railroads, — structures 
 that surpass all pyranuds and Cyclopean walls, 
 and machines that would puzzle Archimedes, by 
 which myriads of men are perpetually travelling 
 like the heroes of fairy tales. It is probable
 
 TENNYSON. 425 
 
 tliat the roads of the Roman empire, the work 
 of many centuries, did not cost so much of human 
 labour, — and they certainly did not exhibit so 
 much greatness of thought, — as those that we 
 have built in less than twenty years. In the 
 state of society that has produced such results 
 there may be, we know there is, enough torpor, 
 even rottenness. But it cannot be on the whole 
 an insignificant stage of human existence, one 
 barren for imaginative eyes. 
 
 Or look at one of our general elections. The 
 absurdities are plain, no doubt : has not the ocean 
 froth and bubbles? But take the thing alto- 
 gether, and observe the mixture and spread of 
 interests and faculties brought into action, — 
 above all, the open boldness with which a nation 
 throws itself into the streets and markets, castmg 
 off, in the faith that it can reproduce, its company 
 of rulers, and letting the fools clamour, the poor 
 groan, the rich humble themselves, and all men 
 bring all to judgement, without a moment's fear 
 but that quiet will spring out of the tumult, and 
 a o'overnment be born from a mob. From the 
 castle of the highest peer to the clay-stained tip- 
 plers in the alehouse, from the bench of bishops 
 to the ranters in the moor-side smithy, all are 
 stirred and fluttered, feverish with the same anx- 
 ieties, debating in their different dialects the same 
 questions, and all alike dependent on the omnipo- 
 tence of an event which no man can absolutely
 
 426 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 control. Most of what they say is folly ; most 
 of then' objects of hope and fear chimeras : but 
 how full of throbbing business is the whole land ! 
 how braced are all the wishes and devices of all ! 
 Among so much of make-believe and sound, it is 
 a great thing that the whole country must at 
 least be willingly deceived, if it is to be gained 
 over, — must seem to itself rationally persuaded; 
 and that the most futile pretender can only cheat 
 by aj^ing, and so strengthening in others, the 
 qualities in which he is most deficient. At the 
 blast of the newsmen's tin trumpets all shadows 
 must walk out of their darkness into sunshine, 
 and there be tried ; when, if many of the um- 
 bratile fraudulently pass muster, there is at least 
 a public recognition of tlie laws of light. 
 
 Not merely is there a debate and seeming ad- 
 judication in every country-town on all matters 
 over the whole globe, which any tailor or brazier 
 may choose to argue ; but at last the tailor's and 
 the brazier's voice does really influence the course 
 of human afEiirs. The vote of tlie cobbler in an 
 alley turns the poll for a candidate ; the vote of 
 the member gains the triumph of his party ; and 
 the success of his party decides on every question 
 of peace or war over the globe, makes commercial 
 treaties with Abyssinia, creates a white common- 
 wealth among the savages of tlie Pacific Ocean, 
 sends armaments to Pekin, and raises or lowers 
 tlie price of silk grown among tlie Druses of
 
 TENNYSON. 427 
 
 Lebanon, and of opium sold on the frontiers of 
 Tartaiy. Within a year after the election In an 
 English village, its result is felt in the more or 
 less cost of food and clothes in Kaffer huts, and 
 in the value of the copper saucepan trafficked at 
 Timbuctoo for palm-oil and black babies. This 
 is not a vapid, insubstantial political existence for 
 the mass of men, not one devoid of topics and 
 emotions, however little they may hitherto have 
 been used In any books but those of statistics and 
 trade. 
 
 Or glance at the matter in another of its phases. 
 In the midmost rush of London business, and all 
 the clatter of its vehicles, turn aside through an 
 open door, and what do we see? A large and 
 lofty room, every yard of its floor and galleries 
 crammed with human, chiefly female life, — a pro- 
 digious sea of bonnets, and under each of these a 
 separate sentient sea of notions, and feelings, and 
 passions, all in some measure stirred by the same 
 tides and gales, — every one of them, however 
 narrow at the surface, in depth unfathomaljle. 
 
 Altogether irrespectively of our present pur- 
 pose, and on the most general grounds, it may be 
 safely said that in one of these great Exeter Hall 
 meetings there is more to strike us than almost 
 anywhere else we knoAV. The room is said to 
 hold four thousand persons; and from its form 
 they are all clearly visible at once, — all of the 
 middle or upper classes, well dressed, though often
 
 428 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 many of them iu Quaker uniform, and at these 
 times probably three-fourths of them women. 
 Such assemWages are in truth, for a large part of 
 the members, by far the most exciting outward 
 events of life. The faces themselves are alone 
 quite enough to prove no small share of moral 
 culture in the mass. The delicately ciu'ved 
 mouths and nostrils, the open yet quiet and 
 observant eyes, and a look of serious yet plea- 
 surable elevation, mark very clearly a chosen 
 class of our country. The men are of course less 
 pure and single in their stamp of feeling : busi- 
 ness has marked on them its contractedness, with 
 its strength. Yet these also have an appearance 
 of thougjht, althouijh Avith some coxcombical im- 
 portance and complacent theological primness. 
 Take however the Avhole assemblage, all it is 
 and all it represents; we know not where any- 
 thing like it could be discovered. No Roman 
 Catholic, no despotic, no poor, no barbarous, no 
 thorougldy demoralized, we fear we must add, no 
 very instructed and avcU organized community 
 could ever exhibit such a gathering, — voluntary 
 be it remembered, chiefly female, all with money 
 to spare, united for such remote and often fan- 
 tastic objects ; above all, under such leaders. For 
 in the kind of persons guiding these bodies, and 
 in their discourse, consists more than half the 
 wonder. In the House of Commons, in the 
 Courts of Law, avc mav hear nonsense enough.
 
 TENNYSON. 429 
 
 But in these places it is not the most vehement, 
 the most chimerical, — in other words, the most 
 outrageous and silly, who bear the chiefest sway, 
 but much the contrary. Now in such Strand- 
 Meetings, for the purest and noblest purposes, 
 it is plain enough that a loud tongue, combined 
 Avith a certain unctuous silkiness of profession, 
 and the most dismal obscuration of brain, may 
 venture with success upon the maddest assertions, 
 the most desperate appeals, and will draw sighs 
 and even tears of sympathy, by the coarsest 
 nonsense, from hundreds of amiable and thought- 
 ful persons dieted at home on Cowper, Fenelon, 
 Wordsworth, and tuned to Nature's softest melo- 
 dies. The carrier's horse (or was it ass?) that 
 could draw inferences, is but a brute symbol of 
 the spoken stuff that at religious meetings can 
 draw admiration from the finest female bosoms. 
 Such is the charm of twilio;ht meanings and mon- 
 strous images, used in behalf of some remote and 
 generous object, and strengthened by the oneness 
 of feelino: in a multitude of accordant hearts. 
 Very strange it is to witness the single thrill 
 of some two thousand bonnets, to hear the deep 
 long sigh from as many warm and gentle breasts, 
 all inspired by the raving folly of some declaimer, 
 or by the gravely numerical statements of moral 
 facts as to distant countries, proceeding from ill- 
 informed and well-paid agents, and which those 
 who know their falsity are sure enough not to
 
 430 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 seek the odium of refuting. The sure tact of 
 goodness leads the greater part of the hearers 
 right in home concerns, but has no measure of 
 probability for new experiments in remote lands. 
 The faith which lives in the Infinite and Eternal, 
 and is perpetually baffled in its search among pre- 
 sent things, adds joyfully its charms, the trans- 
 cendent element of all romance, to the faintest 
 glimpse between distant clouds, and feels it a duty 
 and delioht to believe in the realized visions of 
 credulous fancy. 
 
 Yet Avho can think without a certain approval 
 of the immense annual revenue, larger than that 
 of some continental kingdoms, raised by these 
 marvellous addresses to our best feelings ? Who 
 can compare, Avithout some admu-ation mixed in 
 his contempt, the coarse and brainless weakness 
 of the talk on these occasions, with the honest 
 virtue, the moral elegance of heart, in those 
 whom it influences ? Or who that lives in Eng- 
 land can be unaware that very many among the 
 auditors of these brazen mouth-pieces show, in 
 the whole course of their private lives, and in 
 hard stern trials of all kinds, a simple self-for- 
 getting nobleness and truth, beautifully contrasted 
 with the ostentatious emptiness of the charitable 
 melodrame ? 
 
 On the whole, the country in which these 
 varieties of good and evil are found mixed on such 
 a scale, can hardly be considered in a state of life-
 
 TENNYSON. 431 
 
 less inertness. Its want cannot be of themes and 
 interest, but rather of those able to seize what lies 
 before them, and turn it to right imaginative use. 
 For every one indeed knows that all our activities, 
 mechanical, political, missionary, celestial, or dia- 
 boUcal, are the immediate outgrowths of the 
 human beings engaged in such matters, and might 
 be found with much more inside and beneath 
 them in the hearts and lives of the individuals. 
 This is all the poet requires : a busy, vigorous, 
 various existence is the matter sine qud non of his 
 work. All else comes from witliin, and from him- 
 self alone. Now, strangely as our time is racked 
 and torn, haunted by ghosts, and errant in search 
 of lost realities, poor in genuine culture, incoherent 
 among its own chief elements, untrained to social 
 facility and epicurean quiet, yet unable to unite 
 its means in pursuit of any lofty blessing, half- 
 sick, half- dreaming, and whole-confused, — he 
 would be, not only misanthopic, but ignorant, 
 who should maintain it to be a poor, dull, and 
 altogether helpless age, and not rather one full of 
 great through conflicting energies, seething with 
 high feelings, and struggling towards the light 
 with piercing though still hooded eyes. The 
 fierce, too often mad force, that wears itself away 
 among the labouring poor, the manifold skill and 
 talent and unwearied patience of the middle 
 classes, and the still unshaken solidity of domestic 
 life among them, — these are facts open to all,
 
 432 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 though by none perhaps sufficiently estimated. 
 And over and among all society the wealth of our 
 richer peoi:)le is gathered and diffused, as it has 
 never been before anywhere else, shaping itself 
 into a thousand arts of luxury, a million modes of 
 social pleasure, which the moralist may have much 
 to object against, but which the poet, had we a 
 truly great one now rising among us, Avould well 
 know how to employ for his own purposes. 
 
 Then too, if we reflect that the empire and 
 nation seated here, as in its centre, and at home 
 so moving and multifarious, spreads its dominions 
 all round the globe, daily sending forth its chil- 
 dren to mix in the life of every race of man, seek 
 adventures in every climate, and fit themselves to 
 every form of polity, or it to them, — whereafter 
 they return in body, or at least reflect their men- 
 tal influences among us, — it cannot be in point of 
 diversity and meaning that Britain disappoints 
 any one capable of handling what it supplies. 
 
 See how Chaucer exhibits to us all that lay 
 around him, the roughness and ignorance, the 
 honour, faith, fancy, joyousness of a strong mind 
 and a strong age, both tranquil within bounds, 
 which, as large enough for their uses, neither had 
 tried to pass. How strikingly for us arc those 
 grating contrasts of social condition harmonized 
 by the home-))red feeling, that men, as they then 
 were, had tlic liberty and space they then needed; 
 the king and priest the all-suflicient guides of
 
 TENNYSON. 433 
 
 men's higher life, and all powers and even wishes 
 finding ample room, each within the range marked 
 out by custom ! Every figure is struck off by as 
 clear and cutting a stroke as that of a practised 
 mower with his scythe : — and of all these pecu- 
 liarities of character, — so blended in that world 
 are strength and unconsciousness, — not one ever 
 rises into individuality of principle. In clearness, 
 freedom, fulness, what delineation of our actual 
 life can be at all compared with this ? Of this 
 poet how truly may it be said. 
 
 O'er Chaucer's blithe old world, for ever new, 
 In noon's broad sunbeam shines the morning dew ; 
 And while tired ages float in shade away. 
 Unwearied glows with joy that clear to-day. 
 
 In Shakspere again, who never meant anything 
 of the kind, that period, with its far deeper wants 
 and more abundant forces, all lies softly, firmly 
 drawn by every random jotting of his pen. For 
 that, with all his unmatched reflectiveness, much 
 was thus lightly done, seems no less certain at the 
 hundredth perusal, than obvious at the first. The 
 stately courtesies and consecrated forms of the 
 past, all still untroubled, — but a new spirit rising 
 within those antique walls, and as yet professing 
 peaceful reverence, though it must one day shake 
 them down; the heaven-storming imagination still 
 toiling and sporting on the ground; the aimless 
 bravery of knighthood still wearing its blazon of 
 the starry cross, but going forth on real adventures 
 
 VOL. I. U
 
 434 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 for the conquest of our actual earth in East and 
 West ; thought blending, though almost unmarked, 
 with all the romance of passion ; and fancy, no 
 longer gathering flowers and strewing them in 
 childish sport, but weaving them into garlands for 
 victorious conscience, and using them for the cha- 
 ractery of knowledge : all this is undeniably there» 
 though unintended, and only because the great 
 mind of that and all time necessarily comprised 
 and reproduced whatever was essential in his age. 
 Ranks were still apart, customs unquestioned, 
 forms holy, and natural truth and wisdom only 
 the uncanonical, but inevitable comment, by which 
 men undesignedly interpreted the page of pre- 
 scription. And he who has best shown us all this, 
 as it truly was, yet sent forth at every breath a 
 fiery element, of which he was himself scarce con- 
 cious, that should some day kindle and burn nuich 
 still dear and venerable to him. 
 
 A gulf of generations lies between us and him ; 
 and the world is all changed around his tomb. 
 But whom have we had to feel and express, like 
 this man, the secret of our modern England, and 
 to roll al out before him the immense reality of 
 things, as his own small embroidered carpet, on 
 which he merely cared to sit down at his ease and 
 smoke his pipe ? 
 
 There have been but two writers among us, 
 whom every Englishman with a tincture of letters 
 has read or heard of, aiming to shape poetically an
 
 TENNYSON. 435 
 
 image of human life. These are of course Sir 
 Walter Scott and Lord Byron. But see how dif- 
 ferent their aim has been from such a one as we 
 hint at. The elder poet, with his wholesome sense 
 and clear felicity, has indeed given us much of 
 human fact, and this, as it could not be otherwise, 
 in the colours of tlie time he himself belonged to. 
 But he has swayed the sympathies of the world in 
 a great measure through their curiosity after the 
 past, which he, more than all men in the annals of 
 mankind, has taught us all to regard as alive and 
 still throbbing in spirit, though its bones be turned 
 to dust. 
 
 Byron has sought, through distance of place 
 and foreign costume, the interest which Scott ob- 
 tained from the strangeness of past ages ; and it 
 is but a small, though a profound and irrepressible 
 part of our far-spread modern mind, that he has 
 so well embodied in his scornful Harolds and 
 despairing Giaoui's. 
 
 We have indeed one of his works, only one, 
 which is a splendid attempt at a creative survey of 
 modern life, and contains all the essential elements 
 of such performance. And in spite of the puerile 
 egotisms and dawdling prate into which the poem 
 80 often wanders, the first five cantoes of Don Juan, 
 forming in point of bulk about a half, have more 
 of fiery beauty and native sweetness in them, than 
 anything we know of in our modern literature. 
 There is also a wide range and keenness of obser- 
 
 U 2
 
 436 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 vation ; and were some trivialities struck out, as 
 they so easily might be, no capital defect would 
 remain, but the weakness of speculative culture 
 visible in all Lord Byron's philosophical excursions. 
 In the latter half of the poem, and unhappily 
 when he is on English ground, the lax shapeless- 
 ness of structure, the endless slipshod, yawny 
 loungings, and vapid carelessness of execution, 
 become very disagreeable, in spite of passages rich 
 with imperishable beauty, wit, and vigour, such as 
 no other modern Englishman or man could have 
 approached. On the whole, with all its faults, 
 moral and poetic, the earlier portion of this sin- 
 gular book will probably remain, like the first half 
 of Faust, the most genuine and striking monument 
 of a whole recent national literature. But the 
 weakness as to all deeper thought, and the incom- 
 plete groundplan, place it somewhat lower than 
 could be wished. And at best it is but one book, 
 in an age that produces annual thousands. 
 
 Little therefore as is all that has been done 
 towards the poetic representation of our time, — 
 even in the looser and readier form of prose 
 romance, — it is hard to suppose that it is incapable 
 of such treatment. The still unadulterated purity 
 of home among large circles of the nation presents 
 an endless abundance of the feelings and charac- 
 ters, the want of which nothing else in existence 
 can supply even to a poet. And these soft and 
 steady lights strike an observer all the more, from
 
 TENNYSON. 437 
 
 the restless activity and freedom of social ambition, 
 the shifting changes of station, and the wealth 
 gathered on one hand and spent on the other with 
 an intenseness and amplitude of will, to which 
 there is at least nothing now comparable among 
 mankind. The power of self-subjection combined 
 with almost boundless liberty, indeed necessitated 
 by it, and the habit of self-denial with wealth 
 beyond all calculation, — these are indubitable facts 
 in modern England. But while recognised as 
 facts, how far do they still remain from that de- 
 velopment as thoughts, which philosophy desires, 
 or that vividness as images, which is the aim of 
 poetry ! It is easy to say that the severity of con- 
 science in the best minds checks all play of fancy, 
 and the fierceness of the outward strug-o-le for 
 power and riches absorbs the energies that would 
 otherwise exert themselves in shapeful melody. 
 But had we minds full of the idea and the strength 
 requisite for such work, they would find in this 
 huge, harassed, and luxurious national existence 
 the nourishment, not the poison, of creative art. 
 The death-struggle of commercial and political 
 rivalry, the brooding doubt and remorse, the gas- 
 jet flame of faith irradiating its own coal-mine 
 darkness, — in a word, our overwrought materialism 
 fevered by its own excess into spiritual dreams, — 
 all this might serve the purposes of a bold imagi- 
 nation, no less than the creed of the antipoetic 
 Puritans became poetry in the mind of Milton ;
 
 438 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 and all bigotries, superstitions, and gore-dyed 
 horrors were flames that kindled steady light in 
 Shakspere's humane and meditative song. 
 
 Of all our recent writers, the one who might 
 seem at first sight to have most nearly succeeded 
 in this quest after the poetic Sangreal is Crabbe. 
 No one has ranged so widely through all classes, 
 employed so many diverse elements of circum- 
 stance and chai'acter. But nowhere, or very, very 
 rarely, do we find in him that eager sweetness, a 
 fiery spu'ituous essence, yet bland as honey, want- 
 ing which all poetry is but an attempt more or 
 less laudable, and, after all, a failure. Shooting 
 arrows at the moon, one man's bow shoots higher 
 than another's ; but the shafts of all alike fall back 
 to earth, and bring us no light upon their points. 
 It needs a strange supernatural power to achieve 
 the impossible, and fix the silver shaft within the 
 orb, that shoots in turn its rays of silver back into 
 our human bosoms. 
 
 Crabbe is always an instructive and forceful, 
 almost always even an interesting writer. His 
 works have an imperishable value as records of his 
 time ; and it may even be said that few parts of 
 them but would have found an appropriate place 
 in some of the reports of our various commissions 
 for inquiring into the state of the country. Ob- 
 servation, prudence, acuteness, uprightness, self- 
 balancing vigour of mind arc evciywhcre seen, 
 and are exerted on the whole wide field of com-
 
 TENNYSON. 439 
 
 mon life. All that is wanting is the enthusiastic 
 sympathy, the jubilant love, whose utterance is 
 melody, and without which all art is little better 
 than a laborious ploughing of the sand, and then 
 sowing the sand itself for seed along the fruitless 
 furrow. 
 
 In poetry we seek, and find, a refuge from the 
 hardness and narrowness of the actual world. But 
 using the very substance of this Actual for poetry, 
 its positiveness, shrewdness, detailedness, incon- 
 gruity, and adding no new peculiar power from 
 within, we do no otherwise than if we should take 
 shelter from rain under the end of a roof-spout. 
 
 To Mr. Wordsworth of coiu'se these remarks 
 on Crabbe would be by no means applicable. 
 Yet even he has exhibited only one limited, how- 
 ever lofty region of life, and has made it far less 
 his aim to represent what lies around him by 
 means of self-transference into all its feelings, 
 than to choose therefrom what suits his sjjirit of 
 ethical meditation, and so compel mankind, out 
 alike of their toilsome daily paths and j^leasant 
 nightly dreams, into his own severe and stately 
 school of thought. The present movements of 
 human life, nay its varied and spontaneous joys, 
 to him are little, save so far as they afford a text 
 for a mind, in which fixed will, and stern specula- 
 tion, and a heart austere and measured even in its 
 pity, are far more obvious powers than fancy, 
 emotion, or keen and versatile sympathy. He
 
 440- CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 discourses indeed with divine wisdom of life and 
 nature, and all their sweet and various impulses ; 
 but the impression of his own great calm judicial 
 soul is always far too mighty for any all-powerful 
 feeling of the objects he presents to us. In his 
 latest volume there is a poem with the date of 1803, 
 At the Grave of Burns, full of reflective tender- 
 ness. But it is noticeable that even here Burns is 
 interesting, not for his own sake, and in his own 
 splendid personality, but with reference to Mr. 
 AVordsworth's mind, and the effect of the peasant's 
 poetry on him. We are glad indeed to have any 
 pretext for citing this beautiful stanza (p. 53) : 
 
 Well might I moum that he was gone, 
 Whose light I hailed when first it shone. 
 When, breaking forth as Nature's own. 
 
 It show'd my youth, 
 How verse may build a princely throne 
 
 On humble truth. 
 
 In thus pointing to the problem which poetry 
 now holds out, and maintaining that it has been 
 but partially solved by our most illustrious wri- 
 ters, there is no design of setting up an unat- 
 tainable standard, and then blaming any one in 
 particular for inevitably falling short of it. Out 
 of an age so diversified, and as yet so unshapely, 
 he who draws forth any graceful and expressive 
 forms is well entitled to high praise. Turning 
 into fixed beauty any part of tlie shifting and 
 mingled matter of our time, he docs what in it- 
 self is very diflicult, and affords very valuable
 
 TEiNNYSON. 441 
 
 help to all his future fellow-labourers. If he has 
 not given us back our age as a whole transmuted 
 into crystalline clearness and lustre, a work ac- 
 complished only by a few of the greatest minds 
 under the happiest circumstances for their art, 
 yet we scarce know to whom we should be 
 equally grateful as to him who has enriched us 
 with any shapes of lasting loveliness, ' won from 
 the vague and formless infinite.' 
 
 Mr. Tennyson has done more of this kind than 
 almost any one that has appeared among us 
 during the last twenty years. And in such a 
 task of alchemy a really successful experiment, 
 even on a small scale, is of great worth, compared 
 with the thousands of fruitless efforts or pretences 
 on the largest plan, which are daily clamouring 
 for all men's admiration of their nothingness. 
 
 The first of these two volumes consists of 
 republished poems, and may be regarded, we 
 presume, as all that Mr. Tennyson wishes to 
 preserve of his former editions. He has sifted 
 in most cases his earlier harvests, and kept the 
 better grain. There are some additions of verses 
 and stanzas here and there, many minute changes, 
 and also beneficial shortenings and condensations. 
 The second volume however is on the whole far 
 advanced in merit beyond the first. There is 
 more clearness, solidity, and certainty of mind 
 visible in it throughout: especially some of the 
 blank-verse poems, — a style almost unattempted 
 
 U3
 
 442 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 in the earlier series, — have a quiet completeness 
 and depth, a sweetness arising from the happy 
 balance of thought, feeling, and expression, that 
 / ranks them among the riches of our recent lite- 
 
 rature. 
 
 The collection includes poems of four mar- 
 kedly different kinds : 1. The Idyllic, in wliich 
 there is sometimes an epic calmness in repre- 
 senting some event or situation of private life, 
 sometimes a flow of lyrical feeling, but still ex- 
 panding itself in a narrative or description of the 
 persons, events, and objects that fill the poet's 
 imagination. 2. The purely Lyrical, — odes, 
 songs, and the more rapid ballads, where the 
 emotion is not only uppermost, but all in all, 
 and the occasions and interests involved appear 
 but casually and in hints. 3. Fancy pieces; 
 those namely of which the theme is borrowed or 
 imitated from conceptions of past ages now be- 
 come extremely strange or quite incredible for 
 us. In these the principal charm of the work 
 can spring only from the vividness and grace of 
 the imagery, the main idea making no direct 
 impression on our feelings. 4. There is a class 
 of Allegories, Moralities, didactic poems. We 
 might add another, of Facetire; but in these the 
 writer, though not unmeaning or without talent, 
 seems far inferior to himself; and they happily 
 fill but a small part of his pages. 
 
 The first and third of these classes, — the Idyls
 
 TENNYSON. 443 
 
 and Fancies, — are, in our view, of the greatest 
 merit, and differ in little but the stranger and 
 more legendary themes of the latter series, while 
 they resemble each other in a somewhat spacious 
 and detailed style of desci'iption, with however 
 an evident general predominance of personal 
 feeling, sometimes masked by the substitution of 
 an imaginary narrator for the real poet. 
 
 "We shall speak first of the second class, which 
 we have called Odes. Claribel, Lilian, Isabel, 
 Madeline, Adeline, Eleanor e, and Margaret, — all 
 are raptures in honour of ladies. Isabel is similar 
 in style and plan to the rest, but differs by being 
 addressed to a matron, not a maiden; and though, 
 like the others, euphuistic enough, and coldly 
 ingenious, is pleasant as a relief from the unreal- 
 ities of rhetorical sentiment. There is a beautiful 
 idea in it, — with much verbal melody and many 
 dainty phrases, far beyond the reach of any but 
 a man of genius, however inaptly genius may be 
 spent in dressing make-believe emotion swith far- 
 fetched rhythmic ornament. Claribel is a sort 
 of lament over a dead woman. The other young 
 ladies seem to have the advantage of being still 
 alive, but their poetic environment is not for 
 that the less ghostly and preternatm-al. In all 
 these pieces the will to write poetry seems to us 
 to have supplied (insufficiently) the place of poetic 
 feeling; though one sees that only a poet could 
 have written them. The heroines are moonshine
 
 444 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 maidens, in the number of whom Mr. Tennyson 
 is really as unconscionable as Solomon or Maho- 
 met. It may be suspected that neither the Arab 
 prophet nor Jewish king would much have ap- 
 proved such questionable charms as hlack-beaded 
 eyes and crimson-threaded lips. We of a more 
 metaphysical generation grow heartily weary of 
 the delicacies, and subtleties, and super-fineries 
 of so many mysterious passions, and phantom 
 objects, as carefully discriminated as varieties 
 of insects by Ehrenberg, or fossils by Owen. 
 The whole style smells of musk, and is not with- 
 out glimpses of rouge and pearl-powder. We 
 have found nothing here at once more distinct 
 and graceful than the following lines; and these 
 are marred by the two final epithets: 
 
 His bowstring slackehed, languid Love, 
 Leaning his cheek upon his hand. 
 Droops both his wings, regarding thee ; 
 And so would languish evermore, 
 Serene, impei'ial Eleanore. 
 
 Of the poem ' To ,' niucli need not be 
 
 said. '^ Clear-headed friend'' is the most ludicrously 
 flat beginning of a serious poem that we have 
 ever seen proceed from a real poet; and the con- 
 struction of the final strophe is so obscure, that 
 we have in vain attempted to disentangle it into 
 any meaning. Yet few readers can be required 
 to spend as much time on such a matter, as we 
 are botli bound and glad so to employ. In the
 
 TENNYSON. 445 
 
 same verses ' kingly intellecf is at least in that 
 connection a phrase of vague rhetoric. The two 
 little poems to the ' Owl' are at best ingenious 
 imitations of the manner of some of Shakspere's 
 and his contemporaries' songs; Avell done enough, 
 but not worth doing. / 
 
 The Recollectiojis of the Arabian Nights is of ^ 
 a better kind. The writer does not in this seem 
 painfully striving after topics, images, variations, 
 and originalities, but writing from lively con- 
 ception of a theme, which offered in abundance 
 the material suited to his fancy and ear. The 
 poem is at once brilliant and pleasing: but we 
 may remark that its merit is of a kind which 
 presents itself somewhat too easily to a reader 
 of the tales it recalls; that there is little progress 
 in imagery, and none in thought, beyond the 
 first stanza, in all the following thirteen ; and 
 that some meaning adapted to our modern Eu- 
 ropean brains might perhaps have been insinuated 
 under those gorgeous eastern emblems without 
 injury to their genuine Asiatic import. The 
 gold and red arabesque repeats itself, square af- 
 ter square of the pattern, with undeniable splen- 
 dour, but somewhat weai'ying monotony. y 
 
 The Ode to Memory aims at a far higher sort / 
 of excellence. Had it preceded, instead of fol- 
 lowing Mr. Wordsworth's ' Platonic Ode,' it 
 would have been a memorable poem. The elder 
 poet's solemn rapture on the ' Recollections of
 
 446 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Childhood' is comparable in its way, to the 
 Portland funeral vase, were that lighted, as it 
 ought to be, from within ; on a purple ground, dark 
 as midnight, still and graceful snow-white figures, 
 admitting of endless interpretations, aU more or 
 less fitting, but none perhaps conclusive. Mr. 
 Tennyson has caught some of the same feeling, 
 and much of the rhythm, but has not even earned 
 what was still within his power, the praise of a 
 greater variety and richness of painting, nor has 
 precipitated with Shelleyan passion the stream 
 that slept so calmly in Mr. Wordsworth's moun- 
 tain-lake. 
 
 There could hardly be a more decisive proof 
 of Mr. Tennyson's inaptitude for Orphic song 
 than the last six lines of this poem. 
 
 My friend, with thee to live alone, 
 Methinks, were better than to own 
 A crown, a sceptre, and a throne. 
 
 strengthen me, enlighten me! 
 
 1 faint in this obscurity, 
 Tliou dewy dawn of memory. 
 
 To tell Memory, the mystic jirophetess, to 
 whom in these transcendent initiations we owe all 
 notices connecting our small inchviduality with 
 the Infinite Eternal, that converse with her were 
 better than crowns and sceptres! Memory might 
 perhaps reply, ' ISIy friend, if you have not, after 
 encircling the universe, traversing the abyss of 
 ages, and uttering more than a hundi'ed lines,
 
 TENNYSON. 447 
 
 forgotten that there are such toys on that poor 
 earth as crowns and sceptres, it were better for 
 you to be alone, not with, but without me.' 
 Think how sublime a doctrine, that to have the 
 beatific vision is really better than the power and 
 pomp of the world. Philosophy, that sounds all 
 depths, has seldom approached a deeper bathos. 
 
 Of the little poem called Circumstance, we shall 
 quote the whole, pleased to find something that 
 we can produce in support of our admiration for 
 a large class of Mr. Tennyson's poems, on which 
 we have not yet touched. 
 
 Two children in two neighbour villages 
 Playing mad pranks along the heathy leas ; 
 Two strangers meeting at a festival; 
 Two lovers whispering by an orcliard-wall ; 
 Two lives bound fast in one with golden ease ; 
 Two graves grass-green beside a gray church-tower, 
 Wash'd with still rains, and daisy-blossomed ; 
 Two children in one hamlet born and bred : — 
 So runs the round of life from hour to hour. 
 
 Much is not attempted here, but the more 
 performed. How simple is the language! how 
 quietly flowing the rhythm! how clear the 
 images! and with what pleasant enigmatic open- 
 ness do the few lines set before us all the little 
 tale of the two villagers, playing, parted, meeting, 
 loving, wedding, dying, and leaving behind them 
 two orphan children ! It is a small tone of na- 
 tural feeling, caught and preserved with genuine 
 art, and coming home to every bosom that sweet 
 words can penetrate at all.
 
 448 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 Fatima is of a far higher pitch, but seems oddly 
 misnamed. It is full of true and vehement, yet 
 musical passion; and it suggests the strong flow 
 of Lesbian poetry, and particularly the well- 
 known fragment of Sappho addressed to a woman. 
 Whence then the name ? Lesbos has hardly 
 gained by becoming a part of Turkey, or Sap- 
 pho by turning into Fatima. But the poem is 
 beautiful: we scarcely know where in English 
 we could find anything so excellent, as expressing 
 the deep-hearted fulness of a woman's conscious 
 love. Many will read it, as if it belonged only 
 to some Fatima or Sappho to feel with this en- 
 tireness of abandonment. But there are hun- 
 dreds of women in the West end of London, — 
 and in the East end too, — who would find it only 
 a strain that nature had already taught them. 
 
 Lady Clara Vere de Vere aims at less, and 
 though of no very rare cast, is successful in all 
 that it attempts. Mr. Tennyson seems to have 
 intended to be very severe in this remonstrance 
 to a flirt. But the damsel who deserved it would 
 certainly have been rather flattered than provoked 
 by such a tribute to her powers. 
 
 The Blackbird, The Death of the Old Year, 
 and Edioard Gray, are all sufliciently good for 
 publication, but not for detailed criticism. Sir 
 Launcclot and Queen Guinevere is of similar tone, 
 but not cxtraordinai'y merit. The last but one 
 appears to be the best stanza.
 
 TENNYSON. 449 
 
 Now on some twisted ivy-net, 
 
 Now by some tinkling rivulet, 
 
 On mosses thick with violet, 
 
 Her cream-white mule his pastern set ; 
 
 And now more fleet she skimmed the plains, 
 Than she wliose elfin prancer springs 
 By night to eery warblings, 
 When all the glimmering moorland rings 
 
 With jingling bridle-reins. 
 
 In one less careful of his melody, — and we have 
 few very recent writers so successfully careful of 
 it, — we should hardly make any remark on the 
 harsh r^s in these latter lines, so unsuitable to the 
 vague and gliding fluency of the image. 
 
 Under the head of Fancies we class all those 
 poems relating to distant and marvellous circum- 
 stances and persons, such as we can only conceive, 
 and that very imperfectly, by a conscious removal 
 of our thoughts into regions of which we have 
 no experience, and which seem to us half impos- 
 sible. In some instances the poet only attempts 
 to reproduce outward relations of society, and a 
 kind of feeling, which have departed from our 
 common life, — as in The Sisters, The Beggar 
 Maid, St. Simeon, and St. Agnes. In others, 
 and the greater number of these pieces, he 
 rushes away with us into the ruins and sepul- 
 chres of old supernatural beliefs, — dear to him 
 however, not as still partly credible, or as having 
 ever been sacred and awful to mankind, but for 
 the graceful strangeness of the figures that tliey
 
 450 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 suggest and are linked with. This mythological 
 poetry is not of equal interest and difficulty with 
 that which j^roduces as brilliant and deep effects 
 from the ordinary realities of our own lives. But 
 it is far from worthless. Some German ballads 
 of this kind by Goethe and Schiller, — nay, by 
 Burger and by Heine, — have great poAver over 
 every one, from the art with which the imagi- 
 nation is won to accept as true what we still feel 
 to be so strange. This is done mainly by a 
 potent use of the mysterious relation between 
 man and nature, and between all men towards 
 each other, which always must show itself on 
 fitting occasions as the visionary, the ominous, 
 the spectral, the ' eery ' and awful consciousness 
 of a supernatural somewhat within our own 
 homely flesh. It appears to us that IVIr. Ten- 
 nyson has neither felt so deeply as some other 
 poets, — Coleridge, for instance, in Christabel, — 
 the moral ground on which this oracular intro- 
 sentient part of man is firmly built, nor has 
 employed its phantasmagoric power with such 
 startling witchery. But there is almost always 
 a vivid elegance and inward sweetness in his 
 elfin song, whether Gothic or Grecian; and he 
 sometimes even uses the legends of Pagan anti- 
 quity with a high perfection of dreamy music. 
 
 The Dying Swan, The Mej-man, and The 
 Mermaid, are figments which he has not con- 
 nected with any feeling that could render us
 
 TENNYSON. 45 1 
 
 willing to believe, nor with any meaning that 
 would give, them value as symhols. There is a 
 kind of unhappy materialism in some of these 
 attempts at spiritualizing nature; and in the 
 midst of some beautiful images we are stopped 
 short by fancies eqvially farsought and unplea- 
 sant; see for instance, vol. i p. 73. 
 
 There are however hardly any of these legen- 
 dary poems, that might not well be cited as exam- 
 ples of solid and luminous painting. We must 
 admit that Mr. Tennyson has scarcely succeeded, 
 perhaps has not tried, to unite any powerful im- 
 pression on the feelings with his coloured blaze. 
 It is painted, — though well-painted, — fire. But 
 in animated pomp of imagery, all in movement, 
 like a work of Paolo Veronese, few thing that we 
 know could rival these compositions. His figures 
 are distinct as those of brazen statuary on tombs, 
 brilliant as stained glass, musical as the organ- 
 tones of chapels. And as some of these romantic 
 songs remind us of Paul Cagliari, others, — those 
 especially that have been dreamt upon the lap of 
 the Greek Muse, — are akin to the creations of a 
 still greater painter than the Veronese, Correggio. 
 So mild and mournful in interest are these, so 
 perfect in harmony of images and rhythm, we 
 almost grieve at last to wake from our trance, and 
 find we have been deluded by a Pagan vision, and 
 by the echoes of oracles now dumb. Scarcely 
 fabled magic could be more successful. The effect
 
 452 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 is the result evidently of great labour, but also of 
 admirable art. As minstrel conjurations, perhaps 
 in English Kuhla Khan alone exceeds them. The 
 verse is full of liquid intoxication, and the lan- 
 guage of golden oneness. While we read, we too 
 are wandering, led by nymphs, among the thousand 
 isles of old mythology ; and the present fades away 
 from us into a pale vapour. To bewitch us with 
 our own daily realities, and not with their unreal 
 opposites, is a still higher task ; but it could not 
 be more thoroughly performed. 
 
 The Morte dt Arthur, the first poem in the second 
 volume, seems to us less costly jewel-work, with 
 fewer of the broad flashes of passionate imagery, 
 than some others, and not compensating for this 
 inferiority by any stronger human interest. The 
 miraculous legend of Excalibur does not come very 
 near to us, and, as reproduced by any modern 
 writer, must be a mere ingenious exercise of fancy. 
 The poem however is full of distinct and striking 
 description perfectly expressed ; and a tone of 
 mild, dignified sweetness attracts, though it hardly 
 avails to enchant us. The poet might perhajw 
 have made the loss of the magic sword, the death 
 of Arthur, and dissolution of the Round Table, a 
 symbol for the departure from earth of the whole 
 old Gothic world, with its half-pagan, all-poetic 
 faith, and rude yet mystic blazonries. But it 
 would be tyrannical exaction to require more 
 philosophy, in union with so fiery and productive
 
 TENNYSON. 453 
 
 a fancy. No one but Coleridge among us has 
 ever combined a thoroughly speculative intellect 
 with so restless an abundance of beautiful imagery 
 as we find in Mr. Tennyson ; and the younger 
 minstrel has as much of the reflection proper to an 
 age like ours, as any living poet except Mr. 
 Wordsworth, and as any but a very few deceased 
 ones. 
 
 The gift of comprehensive thoughtfulness does 
 not however show itself to advantage in St. Simeon 
 Stylites, a kind of monological personation of a 
 filthy and mad ascetic. We find exhibited, with / 
 the seriousness of bitter poetic irony, his loathsome, 
 yet ridiculous attempts at saintship, all founded on 
 an idea of the Divinity, fit only for an African 
 worshiping a scarecrow fetish, made of dog's bones, 
 goose-feathers, and dunghill-rags. This is no topic 
 for Poetry : she has better tasks than to wrap her 
 mantle round a sordid, greedy lunatic. 
 
 How different, how superior is Ulysses! There 
 is in this work a delightful epic tone, and a clear 
 unimpassioned wisdom, quietly carving its sage 
 words and graceful figures on pale but lasting 
 marble. Yet we know not why, except from 
 schoolboy recollections, a modern English poet 
 should write of Ulysses, rather than of the great 
 voyagers of the modern world, Columbus, Gama, 
 or even Drake. Their feelings and aims lie far 
 nearer to our comprehension, — reach us by a far 
 shorter line. Even of Godiva, different as is the
 
 454 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 theme, a similar observation holds. It also is 
 admirably well done ; but the singularity and 
 barbarousness of the fact spur, no doubt, the 
 fancy, even told in plain prose, yet are far from 
 rendering the topic favourable for poetry. The 
 Day-Dream, the old and pretty tale of the Sleeping 
 Beauty, is open to no such objection. Here the 
 poetry was made to the writer's hand; and one 
 cannot but wish that his grace, liveliness, and 
 splendour had been employed on a matter of his 
 own invention*; or, if borrowed, of some more 
 earnest meaning. Yet, as graceful and lively de- 
 scription, as truth playing behind the mask of 
 fairy-tale, the whole poem is most agreeable. 
 
 The poems which we would class under the 
 head Moralities, in which Reflection lifts the 
 rod to silence Feeling, are scattered up and down 
 the volumes under various titles. They almost 
 all appear to us decided and remarkable failures, 
 and only one or two of the shorter and slighter at 
 all worthy of Mr. Tennyson. 
 
 The Palace of Art indeed has the tints and force 
 of poetry, and shows the author's characteristic 
 power of distinct and deeply-dyed painting. But 
 
 " It is difficult to suppose that the poem was written before 
 the exhibition of Mr. Maclise's picture of The Sleeping Beauty 
 (1841),— a work displaying, like most of that rising artist's, great 
 wealth and boldness of fancy and execution, but, like too many 
 both of the paintings and the poems of our day, too ambitiously 
 crowded, and forced and glaring in its n i^n^yia.
 
 TENNYSON. 455 
 
 there is considerable affectation in some of the 
 groupings both of words and things ; and what is 
 worse, the meaning, the morality, is trivial, and 
 even mistaken. The writer's doctrine seems to be, 
 that the soul, while by its own energy surrounding 
 itself with all the most beautiful and expressive 
 images that the history of mankind has produced, 
 and sympathizing wholly with the world's best 
 thoughts, is perpetrating some prodigious moral 
 offence, for Avhich it is bound to repent in sack- 
 cloth and ashes. A more rational, and not less 
 religious view would seem to be, that we should 
 repent of the errors we commit from the /^activity 
 of our higher powers and feelings. AVe hardly 
 know a notion worthier of Simeon [Stylites], or 
 of some crack-brained sot repenting in the stocks, 
 than this doctrine that the use of our noblest 
 faculties on their right objects is an outrage against 
 our best duties. Happily Mr. Tennyson's practice 
 is wiser than the theory propounded in this piece ; 
 and his theory itself, if we may judge from the 
 doctrinal parts of his second and more mature 
 volume, is also much impi-oved. The long and 
 dull production called the Two Voices, a dispute 
 on immortality, adding nothing to our previous 
 knowledge, and of which the substance might have 
 been better given in three pages (or one) tlian 
 thirty, has yet no such folly in it as the many- 
 coloured mistake of the Palace of Art. 
 
 In all Mr. Tennyson's didactic writing one sees
 
 456 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 too clearly that, unless when the Image enchains 
 his heart, the Thought has far too little hold upon 
 him to produce any lively movement of soul. His 
 speculations have the commonplaceness, vague- 
 ness, and emptiness of dreams, though the dreams 
 of genius ; and hopefully do we trust that the 
 poet will not again throw off his magic mantle 
 either for the monkish gown or the stoic robe. 
 
 We have now reached that class of poems which 
 stand first in our list, and which we have entitled 
 Idyls. We have reserved till now all special 
 mention of them, as holding them the most valu- 
 able part of J\lr. Tennyson's writings, a real addi- 
 tion to our literatui'e. They have all more or less 
 of the properly Idyllic charactei*, though in three 
 or four of them marked with the rapid and sug- 
 gestive style of the ballad. In all we find some 
 warm feeling, most often love, a clear and faithful 
 eye for visible nature, skilful art and completeness 
 of construction, and a moidd of verse which for 
 smoothness and play of melody has seldom been 
 equalled in the language. The heartfelt tender- 
 ness, the glow, the gracefulness, the strong sense, 
 the lively painting, in many of these compositions, 
 drawn from the heart of our actual English life, 
 set them far above the glittering marvels and 
 musical phantasms of INIr. Tennyson's mythological 
 romances, at first sight the most striking portion 
 of his works. 
 
 Among the happier specimens of this class two
 
 TENNYSON. 457 
 
 are pre-eminent, the Gardenei-'s Daughter, and 
 Dora. These are both of them Idyls in the 
 strictest sense of the term, and might rank with 
 the eclogues of Theocritus and Virgil, and with 
 some poems of Goethe, — as anecdotes drawn from 
 rustic life and rounded into song. As compared 
 with the antique models, we see in them all the 
 gain that Christianity and civilization have brought 
 to the relation of the sexes, and to the characters 
 of women. 
 
 The Gardener's Daughter is a husband's recol- 
 lection of his successfid love, the object of which 
 has been withdrawn from him by death. The 
 unrhymed verse has a quiet fidness of sound, and 
 all the delineation a clear yet rich completeness of 
 truth, that render the little work, though far from 
 the loftiest, yet one of the most delightful we 
 know. 
 
 Dora, though not so luxuriously beautiful, has 
 less, indeed nothing, that could be spared without 
 serious loss. 
 
 Audley Court, and Walking to the Mail, are in a 
 lighter style, and with less of interest. The 
 Talking Oak is more important, but does not 
 satisfy us so well. This also, like most of Mr. 
 Tennyson's better poems, is love-inspired and 
 love-breathing. But an ancient oak, that is won 
 by a poet to utter Dodonaean oracles, would hardly 
 be so prolix and minute in its responses. In 
 Locksley Hall the fancy is again at home. It is 
 
 VOL. I. X
 
 / 
 
 458 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 perhaps on the whole the one of all these poems, 
 in which far-extended thought is best involved in 
 genuine and ardent imagination. A quick and 
 generous heart pours out through the lips of a 
 young man, who has been deceived by the woman 
 he loved, and who, inflamed with disappointment, 
 reviews at passionate speed, — far unlike the prosaic 
 slowness of professional reviewers, — the images 
 that the darkened world now presents to him, and 
 the diverse paths of action that he is tempted to 
 try. We know not what the author means by 
 his hero's talk of comrades and bugle-horns ; for 
 all the rest is the direct outbirth and reflection of 
 our own age. 
 
 Lady Clare is not memorable. The Lord of 
 Burleigh is an example of the skill with which 
 a poet can find a true and complete imaginative 
 interest in an anecdote of our actual refined 
 life. 
 
 Every thoughtful reader of the poems which 
 we have thus glanced through, will be led to 
 compare them with those on similar themes, of 
 present human existence in the country, by the 
 most profoundly reflective of our living poets, 
 Mr. Wordsworth. Michael, the Brothers, the story 
 of Margaret in the beginning of the Excursion, 
 Ruth, — these also are English Idyls, drawn from 
 the well-springs of Nature, and finished with the 
 painful care of a great artist. How naked and 
 bare they all arc in their solemn stillness ! Nor
 
 TENNYSON. 459 
 
 is it only in these poems, but even in works of 
 lighter and gladder movement, that we are com- 
 pelled to listen to the bard as to a grave teacher 
 of moral truth, whom the spirit of spontaneous 
 enjoyment, and even the sympathy with what- 
 ever is pathetic or grand in man, cannot hurry 
 beyond the school of his compassionate but austere 
 stoicism. Ignorance only, or lunacy, could deny 
 him a deep internal power of true poetry. But 
 even this, and not merely the manly passions and 
 the soft affections, even the shaping and inspired 
 imagination itself, is always subject to the con- 
 siderate dominion of the moral idea. Emotion, 
 the most general and obvious, the necessary im 
 pulse of all poetry in every age, is restrained in 
 all his writings by the awful presence of self- 
 centred will. The feelings are described, rather 
 than shared; the tragic passions summoned up, 
 only to be rebuked by a more solemn conjuration 
 than their own ; the free enjoyment of life and 
 nature approved only within the bounds of unre- 
 laxing caution ; and love, — the name bubbled by 
 every wave of Hippocrene, and thundered in all 
 the floods and storms of the main ocean of our 
 being, — is here a grave ritual sound, spoken over 
 the still waters drawn from the well of Truth for 
 a penitential baptism. 
 
 Of course it would be far from our desio-u to 
 charge this great writer with want of feeling. A 
 poet without feeling ! Fire without warmth ! and 
 
 X 2
 
 460 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 a heart without pulsation ! But it is clear that 
 his feelings are always strictly watched by his 
 meditative conscience, too strictly, not for wis- 
 dom, but for rapture. Not a prophet in the 
 wilderness lifting up his testmiony against an 
 evil generation, — for the heart of the seer must 
 be red and fierce as molten iron, — not a hermit 
 in his cave retired from human joys, — for the 
 anchorite floats above his rocky floor, forgetful 
 of laws and retributions, in an ecstasy of self- 
 denying love, that supplies the place of decalogue 
 and duties, — but, like the prophet and the monk, 
 this poet turns aside from the busy ways of life to 
 speculate, in sage and sometimes awful rhetoric, 
 on the wondrousness of existence, and the care 
 with which we must tend the purity of its foun- 
 tain in the heart. There Is no face so lovely, no 
 act so gusliing over with keen life, that can kindle 
 at once the minstrel into song, hurrying him be- 
 yond all thought of wrong and right, and having 
 warrant enough In the zealous heat which it In- 
 spires. Only in communion with the stars, the 
 mountains, and the sea, the flowers of spring, and 
 autumn leaves, and all the simple mysteries of 
 natural things, does his heart pour without pause 
 a stream of melodious gladness, and fear no danger 
 In Its own happy ecstasies. Even in these solemn 
 elevations of soul, he does not forget to Impose a 
 scheme of toils on human life. Among streams and 
 rocks he beo-Ins with discourse of virtue ; and when
 
 TENNYSON. 461 
 
 he has risen on the ladder of liis vision to the stars, 
 we still hear him singing from the solar way, that 
 it is by temperance, soberness, and chastity of 
 soul he has so climbed, and that the praise of this 
 heroic discipline is his last message to mankind. 
 A noble temper of heart ! A truly great man ! 
 He has strangely wedded his philosophic lore to 
 the sweetness of poetry. But the poetry would 
 have streamed out in a freer gush, and flushed the 
 heart with ampler joy, had the moral been less 
 obtruded as its constant aim. 
 
 In the younger of these two idyUic writers, on 
 the whole the most genial poet of English rural 
 life that we know, — for Burns was of another 
 language and country, no less than school, — there 
 is a very different stamp of soul. In his works 
 there has been art enough- required and used 
 to give clear and graceful roundness ; but all 
 skill of labour, all intellectual purpose, kept be- 
 hind the sweet and fervid impulse of the heart. 
 Thus all that we call affection, imagination, in- 
 tellect, melts out as one long happy sigh into 
 union with the visibly beautiful, and with every 
 glowing breath of human life. In all his better 
 poems there is this same character, — this fusion of 
 his own fresh feeling with the delightful affec- 
 tions, baffled or blessed, of others, — and with the 
 fairest images of the real world, as it lies before 
 us all to-day. To this same tendency all legend 
 and mystery are subordinate : to this the under-
 
 462 CRITICAL ESSAYS. 
 
 standing, theorizing and dogmatizing, ever minis- 
 ters, a loyal giant to a fairy mistress. In his better 
 and later works the fantastic and ingenious brain, 
 abounding in gold-dust and diamond-powder, and 
 the playmate of sphinxes and hieroglyphic beasts, 
 pours out its wealth, and yokes its monsters, only 
 for the service of that homely northern nature, 
 without whose smile all wealth is for us but 
 dead stones, and all mysteries but weaiy tasklike 
 puzzles.
 
 THE WOKTH OF KNOWLEDGE 
 
 AN INTRODUCTORY LECTURE, 
 
 DELIVERED AT THE FALMOUTH POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTION, 
 
 I 
 IN THE AUTUMN OF 1842. f
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 TN coming before you, my friends, this evening, 
 let me remind you that I am but one of 
 several persons among your neighbours, who, 
 acting certainly with no view to any object but 
 your advantage, hope they may be able to diffuse 
 some interesting knowledge among this com- 
 munity. In ajjpearing as the first of those en- 
 gaged in this enterprise, I am fulfilling the wish 
 of others, not my own, and therefore trust that I 
 shall not be considered as alone responsible for 
 great and inevitable imperfections in a task that I 
 never should have chosen. But I must not add 
 to my other offences that of wearying you with 
 any further apology. 
 
 In beginning these Lectures it seemed import- 
 ant to bring before you such considerations as 
 might awaken some thoughtful interest in our 
 purpose, and might give you some clear and, if 
 possible, some comprehensive notion of the busi- 
 ness that we have in hand- 
 But it did not appear advisable to renew in 
 your ears the incessant doctrine of our day, true 
 as no doubt it is, that knowledge is highly con- 
 
 X3
 
 466 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 venient for the practical purposes of life, and 
 enables us to work tin-mines with more profit, 
 and tan slioe-leather with more success, than 
 could be expected from unlettered barbarians. 
 The fact is undeniable. But it is also evident; 
 and those who do not learn it from hourly ex- 
 perience and observation, could hardly be con- 
 vinced by any verbal exposition, even could such 
 be given from this place as delightfully as in 
 the elegant and instructive volume of Sir John 
 Herschel on Natural Philosophy. 
 
 But the cultivated man is distinguished from 
 the boor or savage quite as much by his habitual 
 systematic love of Knowledge as by the share of 
 it that he possesses. He feels that the use of 
 Knowledge to spice our broth and line our coats 
 is but a small part of the claim that it maintains 
 on the settled enthusiasm of his soul. 
 
 To make men at once more earnest and more 
 tolerant, to give them light in the recesses of 
 their own bosoms, and to unfold before them 
 the picture of Being which God's sunrise daily 
 paints on the Canvas of Infinity, as all made 
 up of bright immortal truth, to show that Know- 
 ledge is no light, frail, pleasant diversion, but the 
 one needful food, the Heaven-commanded bread 
 and wine of every human spirit, — this is the main 
 purpose that we ought to have in view. The 
 great question is, how may this best be accom- 
 plished?
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 467 
 
 For our object this evening it might seem de- 
 sirable to lay before you some rapid survey of 
 human knowledge as a whole, of the various 
 departments into which it may most fitly be 
 divided, of the progress hitherto made in each 
 of these, of the connection of each with the others 
 and the whole, and of the comparative claims 
 they severally make on the attention of a rea- 
 sonable mind. This would have been perhaps 
 useful and striking, even very imperfectly per- 
 formed. We might have shown how there is one 
 great series of truths, beginning in the physical 
 world, and ending in the highest animal organiza- 
 tions and their minute and dull intelligence ; 
 another and more deeply attractive series in the 
 knowledge of Man, of his bodily structiu'e, and 
 his relations to physical nature, and thence on- 
 ward his higher powers and history; and a third 
 region of thought, the most comprehensive of all, 
 in which the Intellect whereby we know is no 
 longer the means only, but itself also the object of 
 our inquiries, and we consider knowledge and all 
 its powers and empire as a connected whole, — 
 Science in its purity, or Philosophy most pro- 
 perly so called. 
 
 To the first of these studies belongs Physical 
 Science generally, and all its applications in the 
 useful arts. Herein we deal with Light, Heat, 
 Electricity, Magnetism — all the insensitive, in- 
 variable forces which combine to build and per-
 
 468 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 petuate this outward universe. Tliey seem, under 
 the pressure of modern inquiry, gradually resolv- 
 ing themselves into fewer and larger forms of 
 existence, and showing how the increasing num- 
 ber of phenomena we know are accounted for 
 by simpler, more comprehensive laws, than we 
 were before acquainted with. To this range of 
 study belong also Chymistry, Mineralogy, Geo- 
 logy, and Astronomy, sciences which treat of 
 the material aggregates around us so far as these 
 are not organized. Lastly, we must place here 
 the knowledge of Plants and Animals, in both 
 of which classes a Life akin to our own more 
 or less feebly shows itself, rising from the almost 
 invisible moss, the slight embroidery on this im- 
 measurable bulk of things, to the fulness of brute 
 mind in the dog, the ape, and the elephant. 
 
 In the circle of human facts we should have to 
 include those which form the basis, firstly of 
 Physiology, dealing with our bodily life and 
 structure, and secondly of Psychology, or the 
 powers and laws of the human mind. Then, 
 and connected with these, Politics, Morals, and 
 Religion, the Beautiful Arts, and Arithmetic, 
 Geometry, and Logic; all, in fine, that goes to 
 make up man, independent of a distinct and com- 
 prehensive Philosophy. 
 
 The third, and by far the most arduous and 
 noblest of all kinds of Science, is that which 
 regards human nature not as affording but as
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 469 
 
 possessing knowledge, as a Being empowered to 
 know. This study of knowledge as a whole, of 
 what certainty it supplies and how, of the methods 
 to be pursued in searching for it, of the connection 
 of all its results, and the places they occupy with 
 regard to each other, is Philosophy j)roper. It 
 is Universal and Fundamental Science. "We owe 
 the very idea of it to the Greeks, who therein 
 built the eternal Lighthouse of Thought, leaving 
 to us as an endless duty to improve and feed the 
 lamps, and to strengthen and enlarge the out- 
 works and foundations of the pile. 
 
 The rules of practical life supply to most 
 persons an outward guidance; and the imagi- 
 nation, feelings, and conscience an inward faith. 
 But if we are to propose to ourselves as a distinct 
 problem for the Keason, to settle Avhat we can 
 and what we do know, and how we know any- 
 thing certainly, and what insight this knowledge 
 affords into our nature and destiny, — it is Philo- 
 sophy, the golden tablet inscribed with imperish- 
 able hieroglyphics, Philosophy, the Sibylline 
 Queen of our existence, from which we must 
 learn to solve these aching doubts, and soar into 
 this cloudless truth. 
 
 To sketch an outline of all our knowledge, such 
 as has been now suggested, would, in tlie abstract, 
 seem the fittest mode of opening a series of 
 inquiries into the various matters which several 
 teachers propose to bring before you. But on
 
 470 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 a large part of this field of Thought, more than 
 half at the very least, I have no attainments that 
 would enable me to say anything at all satisfac- 
 tory. Moreover such a dissertation would have 
 been unintelligible to the greater part of my 
 hearers. The young, the busy, the timidly 
 seeking rather than boldly thorough-going, and 
 all who have not received an education at once 
 large and finished, would perhaps be rather be- 
 wildered than helped by speculations of the 
 compass and difficulty now pointed out. 
 
 But there is another argument, and a stronger 
 one if possible than these, against any such at- 
 tempt. It is this, that for all but a few persons 
 in this country the general point of view in which 
 all knowledge ought to be regarded, is no less 
 obscure than the distinctions and relations 
 between the several regions of our intelligence, 
 and than the grounds, limits, and prerogatives 
 of the Intellect. It is therefore my wish to 
 impress upon you these two truths: first, that 
 Knowledge is an inseparable ideal AVliole in itself 
 most worthy of human interest: secondly, that 
 our age is one when all civilized men ought to 
 be made aware of this principle, and will find 
 in it the most unfailing, though not the liveliest 
 and loudest help amid the distractions and mis- 
 chiefs of the world. It is not too bold to say 
 that the hour of your attention and the many 
 hours of my labour will all have been worthily
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 4?! 
 
 employed, if the meaning of this doctrine can be 
 brought home to the apprehension even of one 
 or two not before impressed with it. 
 
 We say that Knowledge has an ideal complete- 
 ness. But what does ideal mean? It is a word 
 much used in recent literature, and likely to 
 become still more current, unless its place is 
 supplied by one more expressive. An Ideal 
 means something better than the Actual, but 
 yet inseparable from it; as the magnificent 
 interior of a palace, having the outside also 
 stately and suitable, but still chiefly interesting 
 as suggesting to us that which lies beyond. 
 
 The Universe itself looked at with reflection 
 is no doubt ideal enough. It is in one sense too 
 ideal, too remote and abstract to content even 
 the thoughtful student, and for most persons is 
 hardly conceivable at all. Man feels that he too 
 has rights and a place and task in the world, that 
 by its vastness seems to overwhelm us. He 
 endeavours to appropriate to himself, to make 
 his own, whatever suits him in nature, or lies 
 before him as possible and attractive in his own 
 existence. He tries to stamp his own impression 
 on what is nearest to him, and most engages him, 
 to make the Reality a representation of his own 
 Idea, that is, to make it intelligibly, familiarly 
 Ideal. For endless as the opposition is between 
 the Ideal and the Practical, this arises only from 
 the fact that they are altogether inseparable,
 
 472 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 that an Ideal result is the aim of every Practical 
 effort. We feel, we all feel, the difficulty of 
 succeeding in this; and the contrast of the wish 
 and the performance shows itself often as a hope- 
 less, always as a toilsome, strife between them. 
 It is a strife that never can come to a conclusion; 
 for when the object of yesterday is gained, when 
 the transient Ideal is realized to-day, the restless 
 hopefulness of the soul will always propose to 
 itself a new and higher one for to-morrow. To 
 idealize in some way our existence, with a greater 
 fulness of outward or of inward good, or into 
 more entire clearness and harmony, is the pur- 
 pose of all labour, of every law for repressing 
 crime, of every precept for correcting folly, of 
 all beautiful art, nay, of all religions on the earth, 
 which each presents to man, in the mode that 
 suits the age and country, an Eternal Ideal, now 
 of loftier than actual energies, now of pure and 
 divine peace. 
 
 To sum the whole in a few words: the aim 
 of the Ideal is Perfection. Then is not Nature 
 perfect? is not tliis great system of the Divine 
 Wisdom all that it ought to be? Yes, no doubt. 
 But every part and object in Nature is perfect 
 only with reference to the whole. It is our 
 human necessity and privilege to seek in it a 
 perfection relative to ourselves which it can only 
 derive from our shaping Thought. Feeling the 
 Actual insufficient for us, we mould it anew by
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 4^3 
 
 an Ideal pattern. Feeling tlie Ideal an absolute 
 Law above, a ceaseless fiery spirit within us, we 
 attempt to secure it as our own by embodying 
 it in actual reality. 
 
 If I have at all succeeded in explaining my 
 meaning, you wiU see that the Ideal is something 
 very distinct from the Imaginary. The same 
 power, the Imagination, no doubt works in both, 
 and brings before us that which is not present, 
 or even does not exist, as if we beheld it and 
 were masters of it. But the Imaginary may 
 also be the Impossible, and what we know at 
 the moment is so. For a drooping withered Tree 
 freshness and fulness of vegetation are a genuine 
 Ideal existence. Emerald leaves and fruits of 
 ruby are a mere fantastic sport of Imagination. 
 For the weary suffering sons of men boundless 
 wealth and miraculous wings are incoherent 
 extravagances. But eartlily subsistence, and 
 wisdom, and goodness, are for all human beings 
 the true Ideal of their lives. 
 
 Now, in this sense, I say that Knowledge, or 
 more expressively Truth, — for Knowledge is Truth 
 received into our Intelligence, — Truth is an Ideal 
 Whole. 
 
 It is Ideal inasmuch as it nowhere exists real- 
 ized. No man that ever lived knew one-hun- 
 dredth part of the words employed by our own 
 race in their various languages. Not only does 
 the history of the Past come before us only in
 
 474 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 some few faint lines and scanty fragments, so 
 that there must have been many great nations 
 on the earth, of whom no man now living has 
 ever heard the name, or can guess the story and 
 character ; if we look from nations to individuals, 
 we may remember that, besides the eight hundred 
 millions now upon the globe, there have been all 
 the ancestors of all these, every one of whom 
 has had a life that might have been written, a 
 language, a family, a character, a home, while 
 we possess no records except of a few thousands 
 of persons, and of them know only the merest 
 hints, and often fictitious rumours. But why go 
 to the ends of Space or Time? There is not a 
 friend we have whose whole existence is not to the 
 wisest of us a mass of mystery, streaked here and 
 there with a few dots of light. No one has read 
 a ten-thousandth part of all the books we have. 
 But had I read them all, there are physical laws 
 in the frame, and metaphysical thoughts in the 
 brain, of every peasant and child, which no book 
 has ever taken note of, and on which Philosophy 
 can furnish no theory. Nay, even of human 
 beings we need not speak. There is not a worm 
 upon the ground, not an insect in the air, the 
 compass and depth of whose life does not exceed 
 the measure of the largest mind, and involve 
 conditions that a thousand years of scarcli would 
 not reduce into perfect system. Truth is the 
 explanation of existence, of whatever really is.
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 475 
 
 and in an unbounded universe needs must be 
 itself an infinite thing. Therefore it is that, turn 
 where we will, and make what advance we can in 
 knowledge, the horizon ever flits and spreads 
 before us, and the most heroic of invaders has 
 still new and newer worlds to conquer. 
 
 But, having that characteristic of the Ideal, that 
 it is beyond the Actual, Knowledge has also the 
 other and no less essential, that it is in its own 
 nature, and in part, though not completely, ca- 
 pable of being realized. All is not dream and 
 doubt and ignorance; but there is much that we 
 do positively know. 
 
 Volumes, almost libraries, have been written 
 on the endless and chaotic diversities of human 
 opinion. It is a topic which will always afford 
 materials for new volumes and libraries. But 
 these can be of serious value only when it is 
 also confessed and explained that our errors and 
 inconsistencies have a limit to their excess, and 
 a principle of knowledge and certainty running 
 through them. The great visible objects round 
 us, sky, earth, and ocean, plants and animals, 
 evidently make on us the same immediate im- 
 pression as on our earliest fathers. The changes 
 of day and night, summer and winter, follow 
 their first law. The experience of heat and cold, 
 of the boiling and the freezing of Avater, the 
 pleasure of all sweet and all beautiful things, 
 and the dread of the hideous and frightful, all
 
 476 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 this remains as in the time of the Patriarchs, 
 and builds up a body of common knowledge. 
 Even where variety and inconsistency are most 
 alleged, in the ways and feelings and convictions 
 of mankind, how far more is there of agreement 
 and sympathy! Courage, justice, and compassion 
 continue, in spite of millions of seeming excep- 
 tions, to be in esteem from pole to pole, as they 
 have been since the dawn of human existence. 
 Read the oldest records of our race, and you will 
 find the writers holding up to admiration, or 
 relating with heart-felt emotion, the facts that 
 we ourselves the most delight in. The fidelity 
 of Joseph to his master, the love of Hector for 
 his wife and child, come home to our hearts as 
 suddenly as to those of the ancient Hebrew 
 among the Syrian mountains, or the Pagan Greek 
 in the islands of the -.3Egean sea. In the Indian 
 Code of Menu*, said to be at least three thou- 
 sand years old, as old as Homer, we find that 
 the husband and all the male relations are strictly 
 enjoined to honour the women : " where women 
 are dishonoured all religious acts become fruit- 
 less. Where a husband is contented with liis 
 wife and she with her husband, in that house 
 will fortune asssuredly be permanent." A hun- 
 dred generations of mankind have not changed 
 this. The first Chaldean who observed that the 
 
 * Elphinstone, I., 88.
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 477 
 
 planets seem to journey among the other stars, 
 and not merely to rise and set with them, that 
 Jupiter and Sirius follow different laws, knew a 
 Truth which is now the foundation of Astronomy 
 in London and Paris no less than of old in 
 Babylon. The first Egyptian who, meditating 
 on curved figures, discerned that there is one in 
 which all the lines from one point to the circum- 
 ference are equal, gained the Idea of a circle, such 
 as it has presented itself to every later mind of 
 man from Thales and Euclid down to Laplace 
 and Herschel. Nay, in truth, those who most 
 exalt the acquirements of our age compared with 
 the Past, — and they can hardly be too much ex- 
 alted, — must admit that all progress implies Con- 
 tinuity, — that we can take a step forward only by 
 having firm footing for the step behind it. 
 
 And as our errors are thus limited historically 
 by a track of knowledge running from age to age, 
 so also our knowledge itself is not a matter of 
 degree, something more or less remote from igno- 
 rance, with no distinct line dividing them. There 
 is no doubt an infinite extent of mere blank, where 
 even conjecture fails us; as, for instance, what 
 kinds of animals inhabit the stars. There is ano- 
 ther space of doubt and guess, which is a mere 
 question of more or less probability, as the in- 
 quiry whether the Druids came into England 
 with its first occupants, and brought their religion 
 with them, or whether it arose within this island
 
 478 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 by the gradual increase of reflection among men 
 who at first were brutal savages ? Or again, the 
 question whether the art of writing was known 
 among the Greeks in the time of Homer? But 
 even in this region of the uncertain there is 
 nothing which we may not possibly and very 
 conceivably come to know. Lastly, within these 
 two great zones, — first, that which we cannot, 
 secondly, that which we do not know, — there is 
 a tliird domain of light, that which we actually 
 and certainly do know, and which for us can 
 never possibly cease to be true. 
 
 According to a well-known story, some Sido- 
 nian mariners, probably at least a thousand years 
 before our era, were carrying a cargo of natron, 
 or native carbonate of soda, extensively used for 
 its cleansing properties, as wood-ashes are now. 
 They were sailing along the coast of Syria, and 
 landed to cook their food at the mouth of a 
 stream flowing down from the Mount Carmel 
 of Scripture. They took some lumps of the 
 natron from their boat, and used them as stones 
 to set theu' cauldron on. The fire which they 
 kindled beneath melted the soda and the flint- 
 sand of the shore, and, to the astonishment of 
 these Sidonians, formed a shining liquid, which 
 cooled and hardened, and was found to be trans- 
 parent. This was the first invention of glass. It 
 was soon manufactured by the Egyptians, and is 
 found abundantly in their tombs. But the pro-
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 479 
 
 cess has been so improved, and the wealth of 
 mankind so much increased, that every English 
 cottage is now better supplied than were the 
 palaces of the East or of Rome. Still however it 
 is as true as it was three thousand years ago, that 
 alkali and silex fused together will form a hard 
 transparent substance like the crystals of nature. 
 
 Nor is this kind of fact discredited by the 
 changes of fashion and of art. The same com- 
 mercial race had of old the skill to stain cloth 
 red by the liquor obtained from a shell-fish; and 
 hence the celebrated Tyrian dye, the most splen- 
 did ornament of queens, and used even for the dra- 
 peries of the Gods. We produce a similar colour 
 more easily, cheaply, and perfectly, by the cochi- 
 neal insect which we import from Mexico. But 
 the bright-red colour is still pleasant to the eye, 
 and might still be obtained from the same animal 
 which of old yielded it. Our knowledge has 
 indeed grown wonderfully; but the oldest fact is 
 fact to-day and for ever. 
 
 Nor would the moral history of Man, could we 
 here enter on it, afford any sufficient arguments 
 against the unchangeableness of the Laws which 
 govern our existence and the world around us. 
 In Knowledge of our own nature, and of our 
 relations to the highest Truths, there have been 
 many great revolutions as well as innumerable 
 unmarked fluctuations, and on the whole, no 
 doubt, immense progress. But still the funda-
 
 480 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 mental tendencies of the soul to faith, reverence, 
 sympathy, to the symbolic expression, and the 
 philosophical comprehension of all higher Ideas, 
 have shown themselves under all these modifica- 
 tions, — taking history as a whole, — and have 
 worked ceaselessly forward to fuller and purer 
 develoj)ment. After the lapse of thirty centu- 
 ries, and the enormous changes in belief and in- 
 sight that these have brought, the feeling that 
 prompted, the thought that shaped the language 
 of the Indian Vedas, the rites of Egyptian tem- 
 ples, and the prayer of the Homeric Agamemnon, 
 remain for us a serious and ennobling portion of 
 our own inmost hearts. 
 
 The conclusion we must come to, how im- 
 perfectly soever it has been now maintained, is 
 that, in the midst of the unknown waste around 
 us, we have a distinct field of Knowledge, and 
 that, although this be girt in by a belt of the un- 
 certain and merely probable, its centre is filled 
 with undoubted positive light, the native and 
 familiar home of human Keason. 
 
 "\Ve may thus see that Truth is an Ideal, — 
 something in its nature capable of being realized, 
 mastered, and enjoyed as our own, and yet also 
 leaving always something, nay much beyond and 
 above us, which allures us on to further etForts. 
 
 It was called an Ideal AVliole, — not a heap of 
 unconnected parts and fragments, but that which 
 has a oneness, and is essentially inseparable.
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 481 
 
 Nobody who reflects on Truth at all, can doubt 
 this; but it is desirable to bring it before our 
 minds as a distinct Idea. 
 
 Let any one look into himself, and he will find 
 all that he knows lying before his understanding, 
 and capable of being reviewed in succession, so 
 that there is no thought Avithin us from which we 
 may not pass to any other thought. No concep- 
 tions are so incongruous, that we cannot link them 
 together and bring them at once before us. From 
 the knowledge of the first rules of arithmetic we 
 may leap at pleasure, — nay, unless you stop your 
 ears you must leap at my pleasure, — from the 
 thought of the multiplication table to that of 
 Satan's address to the Sun in Milton, and thence 
 to the conquest of England by the Normans, and 
 thence to the cabbages in a garden, and thence to 
 the steam-vessels in America, — and so on without 
 limit. And I have chosen these images at 
 random to show that there are none too uncon- 
 nected for the oneness of the mind to combine 
 them into one, when it has the smallest call to do 
 so. For there is a oneness in our consciousness 
 and in all the objects with which it deals. 
 
 But this, it may be said, is nothing more than 
 an accidental outward oneness impressed upon the 
 objects of our thoughts by our act in thinking of 
 them. It might be shown that this is impossible, 
 that they could not be reviewed by us as one, unless 
 there were a previous oneness in the things them- 
 
 VOL. I. Y
 
 482 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 selves, a oneness in the conditions and principles 
 of their existence. But, as this consideration may 
 be too abstruse for many, it seems better to point 
 out how every department of om* knowledge loses 
 itself at its boundaries in some neighbouring por- 
 tion of Truth, and to show how impossible it is 
 to divide Knowledge into separate unconnected 
 scraps. 
 
 I have a field with three straight sides, and 
 only three, of which I desire to draw an exact 
 plan. Measuring the length of each of the three 
 sides, I at once draw a map of the whole field on 
 paper, without copying the shapes of the angles 
 where the sides join each other. How can I do 
 this? I do it because I know from the study of 
 geometry that the length of the three sides of a 
 triangle fixes the shapes that the corners must 
 have. I run over in my mind the definitions of a 
 straight line, an angle, and a triangle, and then 
 the steps of the proof by which mathematicians 
 make out this truth. From hence I might go on 
 to survey the whole of geometry, which is ob- 
 viously but an extension of the same kind of 
 inquiry. But instead of this, as I want to be 
 certain of the accuracy of the plan of my field, I 
 begin to consider how it is that I know the 
 arguments of the mathematicians to be true? 
 how it comes that there is any connection be- 
 tween the thoughts of the old Egyptian and Greek 
 geometers and my field here in Cornwall ? This
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 483 
 
 leads to the examination of my understanding 
 itself; and I reflect on the powers of our minds, 
 and the relation of our thoughts to the world 
 around us, and on the kind of belief which we have 
 and ought to have in our own reason. But this is 
 nothing else than what is commonly called Meta- 
 physics, but more properly Philosophy. Hence 
 I meditate on the history of such speculations, — 
 on the comparative merits of different teachers of 
 these truths, — on the schools of modern Germany, 
 thence on those of England and France in the 
 seventeenth century, — thence on the Schoolmen be- 
 fore the Reformation, — and so back to the Philoso- 
 phers of Greece, who followed Socrates, till I have 
 before me an outline of the inquiries of the human 
 race into the reality and possible compass of our 
 Knowledge. But does Thought stop here, and 
 find an ultimate wall at the tombs of Pythagoras 
 and Heraclitus ? No, we are here after so long a 
 journey apparently at the beginning of one great 
 period as well as at the end of another. For 
 from the history of Greek inquiry, tlie hierarchy 
 proposed by Pythagoras, and the deeply religious 
 character of the Asiatic Heraclitus, I am led 
 inevitably to the priestly doctrines and the old 
 oracular speculations of the East, Avhich propose 
 to give us intellectual certainty in the form of reli- 
 gious inspiration. And when we are now engaged 
 in the study of primeval religions, does this again 
 close the course of Thought, and leave me to rest 
 
 Y 2
 
 484 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 on the impassable threshold of a supernatural 
 temple ? Ah ! no : for I must ask, are the doc- 
 trines of Egypt, Chaldea, and India, are the an- 
 cient rivers of belief that have flowed and will 
 flow farther than Nile, Euphrates, and Ganges, 
 are they in turn but waters left by some still 
 earlier retiring flood of purer truth, or do they 
 spring from their several sufficient fountains, and 
 feed with increasing streams the rivulets of all 
 the younger earth? These questions must be 
 asked; for on the solution of them depends in turn 
 the importance we shall assign to the doctrines of 
 the East. And how must this be settled? We 
 plunge into the wilderness of early legend and 
 tradition, and, finding no contentment here, are 
 driven to examine the probabilities of the case, 
 and find that the history of mankind renders 
 probable the diflTusion of the race from an Asiatic 
 centre. Probable, not certain: and to help our 
 belief we inquire into the physical structure of 
 those regions, and from their geography are driven 
 to examine their geological formation, on which 
 indeed all geography rests, and which alone can 
 tell us whether four thousand years ago the banks 
 of the Euphi'ates were a rich and open region 
 friendly to man, and capable of supplying his 
 wants even in the infancy of his powers. But 
 how can we stop at the geology of Asia? The 
 plants, the animals, the climate, from which the 
 study of the astronomy is inseparable, all these
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 485 
 
 lead us into their several diverging tracks. Again, 
 the history of the primitive races of man opens 
 the whole region of Thought where we investigate 
 the structure and functions of the Mind. And 
 from any of these branches of inquiry we may 
 make a short cut bacli to Cornwall, and ask, to 
 which of the earliest divisions of mankind the 
 people of this island probably belonged? Or 
 from the geology we may return to the field we 
 started from, and compare our strata with those of 
 the countries round the Persian Gulf. While to 
 perform a more complete analysis of our rocks 
 and earths, we have all modern chymistry at hand, 
 and must pass from the field into the laboratory, 
 and rest from our journey round the globe in the 
 study of yet another science in the hall of the 
 Polytechnic Society. 
 
 It would be easy to occupy many hours with 
 similar demonstrations, that every science Ave 
 know, or know of, connects itself with every 
 other, and with that great whole of Knowledge 
 which has before been described to you as an 
 Ideal for ever tending to shape itself into clear 
 and complete certainty. But it will be more to- 
 our purpose to say something of the estimation 
 that Knowledge deserves from us, the second great 
 topic of which I proposed to treat. 
 
 Truth is not made for man, but man for Truth, 
 — a saying which it were well if we could write 
 in letters of fire on every human soul. Truth is
 
 486 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 not made for man, but man for Truth. This 
 universe, with its millions of orbs, does not exist 
 merely that we may crawl and talk on the sur- 
 face of the planet Earth. Nor are all the laws 
 of Nature perpetually working their embroidered 
 webs only to amuse our eyes and clothe our naked- 
 ness ; but we are here to use, so far as we can for 
 our own benefit, that which exists independently 
 of us, and to understand the order and feel the 
 greatness of the scheme of being in which our 
 place is fixed. 
 
 To do this, to know the meaning and connec- 
 tion of the realities around us and of our own 
 nature, has ever been an ennobling delight for 
 men. There never has been an age, never except 
 among bestial savages, a tribe entirely ignorant 
 that Knowledge is a blessing to the soul, and not 
 merely a toy for amusement, or a tool for gain. 
 It furnishes indeed abundant pleasure as a mere 
 jT-ratification, and, as all the usefid arts and manu- 
 factures, of which this country is a storehouse, 
 sufficiently prove, is the most effectual of all helps 
 to the acquisition of riches ; but human nature 
 asks for something more than either pleasure or 
 profit; and Truth is ever at hand, a veiled indeed, 
 and reserved, but inseparable attendant, to furnish 
 us witli all the higher food we need. 
 
 Read the account of the wonder and ecstacy 
 of the savage when a missionary wrote his name 
 at his dictation, and the dusky chieftain took the
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 487 
 
 paper to another European, and was amazed at 
 hearing read the very word he had desu"ed. His 
 astonishment and rapture of joy proceeded not at 
 all from any reflections on the value of writing as 
 a useful art, the most useful of all except language, 
 or from any vision of a library, a newspaper, and 
 a post-office ; but the new and great idea of this 
 unknown power in man burst upon him like the 
 dawn of day, and flashed upon his obscure thought 
 the conception of a luminous law. 
 
 There is a story in the history of England, told, 
 I think, originally by Bede, so justly called the 
 Venerable, which is as striking and affecting in 
 its way as any of those deeds of heroic patriotism 
 that enrich the annals of Greece and Rome. 
 
 More than twelve hundred years ago, when the 
 north-eastern part of England was occupied by the 
 Pagan Angles, or people of Jutland and Holstein, 
 who had conquered it from the old Celtic population, 
 a Christian missionary from Rome endeavoured to 
 introduce his better faith among these rude and 
 bloody men. The council of the chiefs was assem- 
 bled round their king. Paulinus spoke ; and at 
 last one of the warriors said : " The soul of man is 
 like a sparrow, which in a winter night, when the 
 king with his men is sitting by the warm fire, 
 enters for a moment from the storm and darkness, 
 flits through the lighted hall, and then passes 
 again into the black night. Thus," he said, " our 
 life shoots across the world ; but whence it comes
 
 488 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 and whither it goes we cannot teU. If then the 
 new doctrine can give us any certainty, O king, 
 let us receive it with joy." In this simple and 
 earnest fashion does the unappeasable longing of 
 man for knowledge speak itself out of the dim 
 barbarian soul. 
 
 Thus it is that in all periods of history men 
 supposed pre-eminently wise have been held in 
 esteem, nay in awe, by those around them. To 
 exhibit this fact in all its phases and developments 
 would be to write the best part of the history of the 
 world. Much of what is most interesting and im- 
 portant In the subject may be found stated with 
 admirable fervour and depth of spirit in a recent 
 volume of Mr. Carlyle's on Heroes and Hero- 
 Worship. It will be sufficient here to call your 
 attention to a single period of the past, about six 
 hundred years before Christ, when Zoroaster, 
 Confucius, and Gautama or Sakya-jNIuni, com- 
 monly called Buddha, when Pythagoras and Solon, 
 were all nearly contemporaries. 
 
 I have chosen this period chiefly because it is 
 the very earliest in history Avhich jiresents to us 
 distinct individual characters of men intellectually 
 great. Others, their compeers, must have pre- 
 ceded them at least in Egypt and in India ; as is 
 proved by the great political and religious insti- 
 tutions, the magnificent symbolic arts, and the 
 advanced state of society that existed long before 
 the age that I refer to. But of these earlier sages
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 489 
 
 and masters of the soul of man we have no certain 
 knowledge, except in the prodigious results of their 
 mental energy. 
 
 Of the men I have named the earliest was pro- 
 bably Zoroaster the Mede, whose life filled, I 
 believe, the latter half of the seventh century 
 before our era, from six liundred and fifty to six 
 hundred years before Christ. He was one of the 
 greatest of those teachers of the East, who gained 
 their power, not, as too many foolishly fancy, by 
 fraud, or in the main by violence, but by impart- 
 ino^ to those around them better knowledoi:e on the 
 highest objects than had before prevailed. It 
 seems likely that we possess a portion of the 
 writino;s of this thouo;htful man, which have been 
 translated into French and German. His system 
 was secured and consecrated in the only way then 
 possible, by the establishment or perpetuation of 
 a priesthood, with very cumbrous rites. But 
 essentially it contained an idea capable of surviv- 
 ing all external institutions, and which actually at 
 this hour subsists. The old religion of the tribe 
 Zoroaster belonged to seems to have consisted 
 chiefly in the adoration of fire, as the symbol of 
 what is divine in Nature, flame being to all man- 
 kind the most beavitifully attractive and myste- 
 rious of all natural objects not alive. But out of 
 this faith the meditation of Zoroaster seems to 
 have evolved the profound thought of a double 
 principle and a conflict of two hostile powers, as 
 
 Y 3
 
 490 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 manifested in all existence. Observing and feel- 
 ing this fact more deeply than all around him, he 
 generalized and heiglitened it into the doctrine 
 of two Powers or Beings, the good Ormuzd and 
 the evil Ahriman. But he did not leave it to 
 man which of these we should follow, but taught 
 that it is the whole and only task of our life to 
 make the good victorious over the evil, and that 
 a time shall come when, th.e victory being finally 
 achieved, the universe shall rise from its long and 
 painful purification into perfect stainless light. 
 The sins of the Avicked shall have been blotted 
 out by tremendous punishment; and they shall 
 themselves be re-united to the good in an eternity 
 of bliss. 
 
 Keep clearly before you that I am not com- 
 paring these doctrines with our better knowledge; 
 l)ut conceive them proclaimed as truth to the 
 rude, wild, and ignorant men, in the simplicity of 
 the early world ; and we see that it is no sottish 
 dream of mere savages, no frantic superstition of 
 bloody barbarians, but may well secure to Zoro- 
 aster the place that liis name holds among the 
 primeval sages of mankind. 
 
 The fate of his doctrine, — of the knowledge 
 that he poured over tlie blank ignorance of his 
 country, has been no less remarkable than the 
 man. It continued to be in the main the religion 
 of Media and Persia for about thirteen centuries, 
 \uitil almost extirpated l)y the jNIahometau con-
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 491 
 
 querors, the professors of a creed purer no doubt 
 and loftier than his. At this day it is held as 
 their fundamental faith by the Parsees of Bom- 
 bay, perhaps the most upright and intelligent of 
 all the natives of our Indian empire. One of 
 these persons was lately, probably is now, in Eng- 
 land, attended at the Plymouth meeting of the 
 British Association, and made a speech in Eng- 
 lish. Others of the same race and tenets have 
 travelled in this country, and published a very 
 striking book, containing their observations. They 
 seem to have been particularly impressed by the 
 extent to which the fire, that Zoroaster wor- 
 shipped on the Median hills, is used among us for 
 the purposes of the arts, and especially in impel- 
 ling steam-machinery. The great English mer- 
 cantile houses at Bombay have generally at least 
 one Parsee partner professing this old creed, and 
 whose belief in Ormuzd is sufficient to keep alive 
 in his whole conduct both a high degree of bene- 
 volence and the most conscientious integrity. 
 
 The person of whom I must next speak is 
 Sakya-Muni,. the founder of the Buddhist reli- 
 gion, which now prevails more extensively than 
 any other in the world, spreading over all the 
 nations between India and China, and to the 
 north of both these countries and in China itself, 
 and numbering at least three hundred millions of 
 followers. He was a native of India, wlio, in that 
 land of castes and idols, taught a less mythological.
 
 492 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 less symbolical, less priestly sclieme than Brah- 
 minism. He made a long step forward in the 
 history of human intelligence in the East, teaching 
 not perhaps a purer idea of the Deity than might 
 be found in the Brahmin books, but throwing open 
 to all his followers that enlightenment, which the 
 Brahmins only conveyed obscurely through means 
 of images and sculptured temples, and expressive 
 rites and ceremonies. In spite of the mass of folly 
 and some fraud that has been connected with the 
 Buddhist system, it is impossible to read the phi- 
 losophical speculations, the grand ideal view of 
 existence, and the practical precepts of truth, 
 purity, and mercy, contained in the scriptures of 
 the sect, and, comparing them with the notions 
 and superstitions of barbarous tribes and of the 
 savages whom our missionaries describe, not to 
 feel veneration for the old teacher whose name is 
 now held in honour by a third part of the human 
 race. His knowledge was small indeed conti'asted 
 with ours, but wonderfully greater than that of 
 the races whom he instructed, and of millions of 
 human beings at this hour. 
 
 According to the date of Gautama which I 
 believe in, — for there are very various traditions 
 and computations, — he was contemporary with 
 Confucius, the great master of Chinese wisdom, 
 a man whose own writings, said to be indubitable, 
 we still possess. His idea of man, and of our 
 duties and destiny, though far less abstract and
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 493 
 
 awful than that revealed to the Hebrews, is 
 neither a mean nor a dark one ; for he divides 
 the whole of existence into a Heaven above us, 
 an Earth below, and a Divine Keason in the 
 midst, impersonated as man. But in his tone and 
 turn of mind and practical tendencies Confucius 
 very closely resembles the American Franklin, 
 though Avith more of reverence and of family 
 affection than the modern seems to have been 
 inspired with. A spirit of good sense, benevo- 
 lence, and uprightness runs through his system, 
 and almost an indifference to those deeper and 
 more sublime considerations, which form the sub- 
 stance of all the old Eastern religions, except 
 among this Mongol race, and with which ours 
 has hai^pily made us familiar. But what should 
 especially be noticed is this, that we have here a 
 man who, without any warlike violence, and with- 
 out any marvellous imposture, by the mere force 
 of his honest intelligence of human nature, and its 
 needs and powers, by teaching and writing some 
 books, has made himself the light and law of the 
 whole Chinese people for a period of more than 
 tw^o thousand years. Attila and Genghis are 
 gone. Even Napoleon has become in one quarter 
 of a century little more than a stupendous monu- 
 ment of the past ; but the works of Confucius are 
 the household companions of all the learned in a 
 country where learning is held in more general 
 honour and is more widely spread than it has ever
 
 494 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 been anywhere else on earth. His precepts are 
 the real daily guides of human life for that enor- 
 mous population, and are at least professed as 
 thcu' own invariable system by the Tartars, who 
 have conquered and now rule the land. It is 
 curious to add that the descendants of Confucius 
 are undoubtedly the oldest traceable family on 
 the earth, and are now held in high honour in 
 the very province and in the city that he himself 
 inhabited. 
 
 About the same time as Gautama and Confu- 
 cius, lived in the distant West, in Greece, and 
 among the Greeks of southern Italy, the Samian 
 Pythagoras, an immortal name, were it only that 
 he, first of men, called himself a philosoplier, a 
 lover of wisdom. His genius and attainments 
 are more strikingly shown in the influence that 
 he personally exercised, and in the wondrous tales 
 of which, in after belief, he Avas the hero, than in 
 almost anything that can now be proved with 
 regard to his doctrines. Nor can we here attempt 
 any account of his life, his tenets, or his practical 
 aims, beyond the remark that he seems to have 
 been the first and most signal of all the eminent 
 persons, who, after the disappearance from their 
 country of the primitive priestly systems, have 
 attempted to form new and somewhat similar 
 comnumlties of their own, and to put the manage- 
 ment of human affairs entirely into the hands of a 
 college of wise men : but then they were of course
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 495 
 
 to be wise men of his own peculiar type, in ad- 
 vance no doubt, in many respects, of their age, 
 but whose power, if perpetuated, would inevitably 
 make them, or their descendants, the tyrants of 
 that intelligence which they propose to exercise 
 and enlighten. It was well for the Greeks, and 
 it is well for us, that no project has ever been 
 completely or long successful for forcing men to 
 think always according to an unchangeable pat- 
 tern, and submit themselves for ever to any cor- 
 porate class of teachers. 
 
 In the same age lived a man whose name is 
 commonly held less memorable than that of Pytha- 
 goras in the history of thought, but whose political 
 efforts were moi'c successful. His character also 
 is extremely winning by its mild firmness and 
 graceful good sense, not unlike, though far supe- 
 rior to our English Sir Thomas More. I mean 
 the Athenian Solon. More, — on the whole the 
 most illustrious victim ever put to death in Eng- 
 land on account or on the pretext of religion, — 
 could only imagine an ideal commonwealth, and 
 explain, not embody, his fair visions of human wis- 
 dom and happiness in that Utopia, which, like the 
 Quixote of the Spaniard, has furnished an adjective 
 of reproach against the benefactors of mankind, 
 that is a noble praise of him who conceived its 
 original. Solon also in his old age, as JMore in 
 his youth, described an imaginary blissful polity. 
 But the Greek had beforehand enacted, not merely
 
 496 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 fancied, not the best, but tlie best practicable laws, 
 and bequeathed them with his pure and lofty fame 
 to Athens. To them and^ him much doubtless, 
 we know not how much, is owing of that political 
 vigour and intellectual beauty, which in their com- 
 bination have made Attica, though a country 
 much smaller than Cornwall, be of all spots on 
 earth, except Palestine, incomparably the most 
 fertile of lasting and priceless benefits to man. 
 
 But, though a few instances out of many which 
 offer themselves, have thus illustrated the import- 
 ance of Knowledge, or of systematic reflection, 
 which is Knowledge, in the history of mankind, 
 it may still be said that these and the like are all 
 instances of men of transcendant genius. This no 
 doubt is true. It also seems that in the East 
 generally, and to a great extent in the old clas- 
 sical world, the "possibility of obtaining any but 
 practical knowledge has been limited, not only by 
 the natural incapacity of many minds and by hin- 
 dering circumstances, but also by positive laws 
 and customs, forbidding all beyond some select 
 class to employ themselves in the pursuit of 
 wisdom. In India to this day learning and spe- 
 culation are the privilege of the Brahmins, among 
 whom also Thought itself is rather a dead ornament 
 than a living force. In Greece and Rome a mul- 
 titude of the people were slaves, and of course 
 had as little of mental as of bodily freedom; and 
 from the scarcity of books when printing was
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 497 
 
 unknown, no one could learn much beyond the 
 popular religious traditions and the routine of his 
 own trade, unless possessed of rare advantages, and 
 able to devote himself almost entirely to study. 
 China indeed has had the art of printing much 
 longer than Europe; and there Knowledge is in 
 the hands of no priestly caste, but is itself on the 
 other hand very limited in extent. For of all the 
 sciences conversant with the structure of the 
 world, and with organic nature, and with the con- 
 stitution of the human mind, they know actually 
 nothing, and nothing of all history except that of 
 their own empire. Now the peculiar character of 
 Europe in our age seems to be twofold, — first, 
 that Knowledge exists among us with a hundred 
 times the fulness and accuracy it has ever gained 
 elsewhere: and secondly, that this unexampled 
 range of thought lies before every human being, 
 far indeed from perfectly open, but still so that 
 no very energetic mind need fail to take full 
 advantage of it, and that every one shares more 
 or less in its benefits. Gross, unreflecting, and 
 semi-barbarous as crowds among us are, Europe 
 has never known a time when nearly the same 
 proportion of its people have had access to nearly 
 so wide an expanse of Knowledge. 
 
 But the very wideness of the range will to 
 many seem a reason against all attempt at ex- 
 ploring it. Not only ideally, and looking at 
 Knowledge as a possibility, but as a practical fact.
 
 498 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 with regard to so much truth as man has brought 
 into clear intellectual light, and as is well 
 worth our study, it is undeniable that this under- 
 taking is far beyond the strength of any man. 
 Of course for any but a few, and those recluse 
 students, the possibilities of Knowledge lie within 
 very narrow limits. The mass of mankind have 
 neither the extent of mind even to imagine 
 Science as a Whole, nor the outward opportunities 
 of leisure, books, and the like, for learning more 
 than a very little of what others have ascertained. 
 
 Is it then an idle attempt to lay before you 
 even a rude sketch of human Thought, when the 
 greater number can hope to share so lightly in its 
 full enjoyment? I think not. It seems the 
 great object to show that there is such a better 
 land as that of Truth, lying more or less within 
 reach of all, and where all may gain a secure 
 footing, though few may visit even those parts 
 that others have traversed, and none can ever 
 examine the whole. 
 
 With Avhat curious and fascinated eyes must 
 the emigrant about to sail for America ponder 
 often over the map of that great continent, tra- 
 cing here the course of the Mississippi and Orel- 
 lana, there feeling as if he lost his breath at the 
 sififht of the immeasurable Cordilleras of the 
 Andes, and sweeping on the wings of sudden 
 thought from the flowery forests of Brazil and 
 Chili to the dreadful seas of either pole. Yet in
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 499 
 
 this empire of Columbus and Cortez, of Penn 
 and Washington, the emigrant all the while well 
 knows that he himself shall drive the plough and 
 lay his bones in some quiet valley of Canada or 
 Ohio, and no more rival the wanderings of a 
 Humboldt, than you who dwell in Europe are 
 likely to search with your own eyes every stream 
 and village of our continent between the Bospho- 
 rus and the Baltic Sea. 
 
 As the map of America before the intending 
 emigrant, so may you keep before you some faint 
 and general conception of that great Intellectual 
 Whole, of which some little dell or corner is all 
 that you can each of you make your home. 
 
 The greatness of the object, its variousness and 
 height and wondrous reality, should be to all a 
 ground of hopeful earnest interest, not of despair- 
 ing amazement, if you will only guide yourselves 
 by this clear idea, that for every human soul Know- 
 ledge has some side on which it is open and de- 
 lightful of approach, though requiring always 
 patient and laborious thought. There is no prac- 
 tical art, which is not rooted in a science, and may 
 not connect itself with a deep and complex theory. 
 Mathematics and Mechanics are the sciences of 
 carpentry and building. The theory of colour 
 and of the beautiful ou";ht to eno-ao-e the tailor 
 and the house-painter. When education is some- 
 what more advanced, the truth of this doctrine 
 will be understood by all. But, independently of
 
 500 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 tliis outward use, there is in every one an inward 
 capacity for and tendency to some kind of intel- 
 lectual pursuit, chosen beforehand by Providence 
 and Nature as an ideal vocation for each of us. 
 The physical sciences, and the whole sj)here of 
 natural history, and the yet more varied and im- 
 pressive history of man, and all the finer arts and 
 nobler relations of human beings to each other 
 and all above them, — all these supply not one or 
 ten, but hundreds of reasonable and beautiful and 
 sublime inquiries, by one or other of which, if not 
 by several, before many generations are past, every 
 one in civilized countries will be enlightened, at 
 least as certainly as they are now supplied with 
 food or clad with garments. 
 
 Finally, the impression that I most would wish 
 to leave upon your minds is this, that every one 
 who tries to connect his daily task, however mean, 
 with the highest thoughts he can apprehend, there- 
 by secures the rightfulness of his work, and is 
 raising his own existence to its utmost ])erfection. 
 Such I wish to be the last words I utter here ; 
 and they might fitly be the last that I should 
 speak on earth ; for, understood and laid to heart, 
 they include the whole true law of human life. 
 Let me repeat them again : He who tries to con- 
 nect his daily task, however mean, with the highest 
 thoughts he can apprehend, tlicrcby secures the 
 rightfulness of his work, and is raisinfj; his exist- 
 ence to its utmost srood.
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 501 
 
 These words sound no doubt vague and dark 
 to many, and to some perhaps seem trivial and 
 common-place. Vague and dark they must re- 
 main for all who do not endeavour to realize them 
 in practice in the whole of life. Common-place, 
 that is, at once obvious and shallow, they never 
 can be to any, unless they are entirely miscon- 
 ceived. Truly labour to connect your work, 
 however lowly, with the highest thoughts that 
 you are aware of, and towards which your heart 
 obscurely feels ; and you yourself are a far nobler 
 being than he whose place and business among 
 mankind are the grandest, but who lives with 
 thoughts and in a spirit below his outward lot. 
 Or, to say the same thing in other words, — for it 
 were well to impress upon the hearts of all what 
 concerns the cobbler and the sailor no less than 
 the prelate or statesman : — 
 
 With tasks, however mean, connect a thought 
 Beyond the thing, and they shall well be wrought ; 
 And for yourself mean toil contains all good, 
 If truth not mean therein is understood : 
 For 'tis the purpose of the mind alone, 
 That gilds a three-legged stool, or dims a throne. 
 If yonder skies witli grovelling soul we spell, 
 Our own conceit is all the tale they tell ; 
 But mark on dust tlu'ee scratches with a rod, 
 And Wisdom's hand has traced the name of God. 
 To lowly toil bring meditative power. 
 And find the Infinite in each small hour.
 
 502 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 To raise and to enlarge tlie mind by knowledge 
 is the special purpose of these Lectures : to raise 
 it above the sordiduess of mere money-making, of 
 sensual enjoyment, and of lazy frivolity: to en- 
 large it beyond the narrow bounds in which the 
 practical routine of labour and business would 
 otherwise shut it up. That this good should be 
 in some degree accomplished for all our hearers 
 by the instruction that will here be given, there 
 is but one condition that I know of necessary, 
 which is, that you should love Knowledge for its 
 own sake, and not merely for the vanity of know- 
 ing more than others, or for the outward benefits 
 to be gained from it in the affairs of life. Love 
 Knowledge as in itself a good, as that which 
 our minds are constituted to receive and enjoy, 
 and in possessing and extending which they feel 
 at home tranquil and energetic. For Knowledge 
 and outward activity are, as well as reverential 
 feeling, means by which we bring ourselves into 
 contact with the widening circles of that whole 
 frame of existence which we belong to. For 
 most of us practical effort of some kind is ren- 
 dered necessary by the circumstances in which we 
 are placed; and some sort of higher instinct 
 teaches us to adore; but beyond what little 
 knowledge our work implies, and the forms and 
 phrases of a higher wisdom, now to many a mere 
 dead tradition, the universe and the being of man
 
 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 503 
 
 remain to some men a colourless blank, and a 
 mute void, or at best a vague and shifting cloud 
 that changes its aspect at the will of all our pas- 
 sions and fancies. I feel that the Avish I am 
 about to utter is far too rash and aspiring; for, if 
 realized, it would make this assemblage the centre 
 of light for all the world. Yet I must say : 
 Would that all might try with earnest freedom 
 to use their best powers for the best objects, — not 
 those which are prescribed as best by this or that 
 system, or by one or other dogmatic teacher, but 
 for those ends which we truly, silently feel do 
 fully and with no equivocal joy engage and ex- 
 pand the reasonable soul within us. Let us 
 learn in such measure as our faculties and oppor- 
 tunities permit, that Nature and INIankind are a 
 great Whole, of which the individual is but a 
 small atomic part, and which only when conceived 
 if not thoroughly understood as a Whole, exalts 
 and warms us out of the petty selfishness that un- 
 fits us for our noblest duties, and dwarfs us to the 
 stature of our consciousness. Connect, I say again, 
 your daily tasks with the greatest thoughts you 
 know of, and thereby secure the rightfulness of 
 your work, and raise yourselves to the highest pitch 
 of vigour and of truth. 
 
 Take this, my friends, as the last expression of 
 a sincere good-will: 
 
 The World of God above us and below 
 Is here for Man to work in and to know.
 
 504 THE WORTH OF KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 But, like a ghost on Time's funereal In-ink, 
 
 Flits the pale Reason uninspired to think. 
 
 Spread free your wings and soar to Truth's great star ; 
 
 Nor be yoiu- Thoughts less than your birthrights are. 
 
 END OF VOL. I. 
 
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