UbRARt
 
 THE 
 
 F H I E N »: 
 
 A SERIES OF ESSAYS, 
 
 TO AID IN THE FORMATION OF FIXED PRINCIPLES 
 
 IN POLITICS, MORALS, AND RELIGION, 
 
 WITH 
 
 LITERARY AMUSEMENTS INTERSPERvS ED. 
 
 BY S. T. COLERIDGE, ESQ. 
 
 Accipe principium rursus, formamque coactam 
 Desere : mutata melior procede figura. claudian. 
 
 FIRST AMERICAN, FROM THE SECOND LONDON EDITION, 
 COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME. 
 
 4fifi77 
 
 BURLINGTON : 
 
 C H A U N C E Y GOODRICH. 
 1831. 
 
 i
 
 Av^ic: dvagr;(j'si.c, Ispoj AOFfi Ipyov bvu(fag. 
 
 ZQPOA'HTPOT Aoyla. 

 
 -« I • 
 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO THE AMERICAN EDITIOiV. 
 
 The general character and purpose of the work here offered 
 to the American public are to some extent already known 
 among us. Many, to whom it has itself been inaccessible, 
 have learned enough of it to form a high estimate of its value, 
 and the demand for it of late is such as to show that their num- 
 ber is increasing. This state of things renders a republication 
 of the work obviously desirable, and must be gratifying to those 
 who are concerned for the advancement of truth, and who be- 
 lieve this work to contain a valuable exhibition of some of its 
 great and vital principles. When nearly two years ago the 
 " Aids to Reflection," another work of the same author, came 
 before the public, there were many occasions of doubt with re- 
 gard to its probable reception. Those doubts are now remo- 
 ved. The result has justified the most flattering anticipations, 
 and furnishes abundant proof, that the " fit audience" to be 
 found among us for works of this kind is not so small as had 
 been apprehended. Indeed the manner in which that work 
 has been received, the sentiments which it has awakened, and 
 the class of persons whose attention has been specially direct- 
 ed to it, are such as furnish the best security tor the success of 
 similar works in future. The work now republished, though 
 not fitted in some respects to excite so deep an interest, will be 
 found, like that, concerned with the dcvelopemcnt of funda-
 
 . ' -J 
 vi 
 
 mental principles, and essentially connected with the same 
 views of trutli. It was designed obviously for more general 
 circulation, and great pains were taken by the author, both to 
 render his views intelligible, and to gain the attention of all> 
 who were capable of understanding them. To those who have 
 become acquainted with the " Aids to Reflection," it will be 
 acceptable both for its own sake and as a help in the study of 
 that work. To every scholar, and indeed to every man, who 
 would rightly apprehend the general principles and grounds of 
 obligation in politics, morals, and religion, it will be found a 
 safe and invaluable guide. 
 
 The edition now offered is simply a reprint of the English. 
 It was indeed intended to prefix an Essay of a general charac- 
 ter on the philosophical system of the author ; but the design 
 was abandoned, from a conviction that notbing worthy of the 
 subject could be given in the limits contemplated, or without 
 more time and labour than could now be devoted to its prepa- 
 ration. I shall therefore merely take the occasion to remark, 
 that his system is by no means, as some have alleged, essen- 
 tially the same with that of Kant. Although he acknowledges 
 his obligations to the writings of that philosopher, he is himself 
 sufficiently careful to inform us, that in regard to points of the 
 highest importance he follows a very diff"erent teacher. He dif- 
 ers from him, as Cudworth and More and the Platonizing divines 
 of the same age generally would have dilTered, and as some of 
 the most eminent German philosophers, as well as Tholuck 
 and other evangelical divines, of the present day, diifer from 
 him in their philosophical and theological views. Between the 
 views of Prof. Tholuck and those of Coleridge, indeed, there is 
 a very striking coincidence, as must have been obvious to all, 
 who are acquainted with the writings of both. This fact, con- 
 sidering the high reputation which Prof. Tholuck has in this 
 country, as an evangelical and zealous divine, I trust may serve 
 in some degree to diminish the fears, which good men still in- 
 dulge respecting the tendency of such speculations. The pre-
 
 Vll 
 
 sent volume however contains little to excite the fears of any 
 with regard to the doctrines of religion. But in its bearing 
 upon the general principles of philosophy received among us, it 
 will be found of the same character with all the works of its 
 author, and I trust may be instrumental in hastening the change, 
 which is already taking place, in our views of logic and meta- 
 physics. The Essays in which he vindicates the philosophy of 
 Lord Bacon from the prevailing misapprehensions of its charac- 
 ter, by showing its coincidence with that of Plato, are especially 
 valuable in this point of view ; and I could only wish, that those 
 who read them would examine for themselves and without pre- 
 judice the language of Lord Bacon in regard to the great princi- 
 ples of philosophy. It is now no longer hazardous to one's 
 reputation to call in question the authority of those philoso- 
 phers who have been most popular among us; and the article 
 on Brown's theory of perception in a late number of the Edin- 
 burgh Review shows, that language and thoughts derived from 
 German metaphysics may now be used to a much greater ex- 
 tent, than they have been done by Coleridge — in a work, where 
 formerly they would have been rejected with contumely. It 
 shows, too — what is more important — the ignorance and incon- 
 sistency betrayed in a system, that is still received in some of 
 our schools, but which it is to be hoped will give place to works 
 less exposed to critical reproach. A perusal of that article, and 
 a little reflection upon this and other things of a like kind, as 
 indicating the tendency of present inquiries in Great Britian 
 and this country, may convince us, that one who would be 
 thought not ignorant of philosophy hereafter, must acquaint 
 himself with something beyond the empiricism, which has so 
 long assumed its name among us. It need not now be inqui- 
 red, whether the Friend and other works of Coleridge are fit- 
 ted in the best possible manner to supply our deficiencies and 
 guide us to a better knowledge. They are believed b}^ niany, 
 - who are well qualified to judge, to be the best we have, and 
 calculated at least to cherish an ingenuous and earnest love
 
 via 
 
 ol the truth lor the truth's sake. As such, the present volume 
 commends itself to all who will attentively peruse it, but es- 
 pecially to the young men of our Colleges and higher schools. 
 At that period, when — more than at any other — they are forming 
 principles both of thought and action, and establishing — if they 
 ever do so — a character of their own, they will find it a wise 
 monitor and a faithful " Fhiend." 
 
 J. Marsh. 
 
 University of Vermont, 
 November, 1831.
 
 EPISTLE DEDICATORY. 
 
 Friend ! were an Author privileged to name his own judge — 
 in addition to moral and intellectual competence, I should look 
 round for some man, whose knowledge and opinions had for 
 the greater part been acquired experimentally : and the practi- 
 cal habits of whose life had put him on his guard with respect 
 to all speculative reasoning, without rendering him insensible 
 to the desirableness of principles more secure than the shifting 
 rules and theories generalized from observations merely empi- 
 rical, or unconscious in how many departments of knowledge, 
 and with how large a portion even of professional men, such 
 principles are still a desideratum. I would select too one who 
 felt kindly, nay, even partially, toward me ; but one whose par- 
 tiality had its strongest foundations in hope, and more prospec- 
 tive than retrospective would make him quick-sighted in the 
 detection, and unreserved in the exposure of the deficiencies 
 and defects of each present work, in the anticipation of a more 
 developed future. In you, honored Friend ! I have found all 
 these requisites combined and realized : and the improvement, 
 which these Essays have derived from your judgment and ju- 
 dicious suggestions, would, of itself, have justified me in ac- 
 companying them with a public acknowledgment of the same. 
 
 1
 
 2 
 
 But knowing, as you cannot but know, that I owe in great 
 measure the power of having written at all to your medical 
 skill, and to the characteristic good sense which directed its 
 exertion in my behalf; and whatever I may have written in 
 happier vein, to the influence of your society and to the daily 
 proofs of your disinterested attachment — knowing too, in how 
 entire a sympathy with your feelings in this respect the partner 
 of your name has blended the affectionate regards of a sister or 
 daughter with almost a mother's watchful and unwearied soli- 
 citude alike for my health, interest, and tranquillity ; — ^you will 
 not, I trust, be pained, you ought not, I am sure, to be surpris- 
 ed that
 
 TO 
 
 MR. AND MKS. GI}Li.MAN, 
 
 OF HIGHGATE, 
 THESE VOLUMES ARE DEDICATED, 
 
 IN TESTIMONY OF HIGH 
 
 RESPECT 
 AND GRATEFUL. AFFECTION, BY THEIR 
 
 FRIEND, 
 
 S. T. COLERIDGE. 
 
 October 7, 1818. 
 Highgate.
 
 THE FRIEND. 
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 Orede mihi, non est parvceJiducuB, polliceri opem decertantibus, consilium dubiis^ 
 lumen cwcis, spem dejectis, refrigerium fessis. Magna quidem hac sunt sijiant; 
 parva, si promittanlur. Verum ego non tarn aliis legem ponam, quam legem 
 vobis mece propria mentis exponam : quam qui probaverit, teneat ; cut non pla- 
 cu£7nt, abjiciat. Optarem, fateor^ talis esse, qui prodesse possem quam pluiimis. 
 
 Petrarch: "Do Vita Solitarin." 
 
 Antecedent to all History, and long glimmering through it 
 as a holy Tradition, there presents itself to our imagination an 
 indefinite period, dateless as Eternity, a State rather than a 
 Time. For even the sense of succession is lost in the unifor- 
 mity of the stream. 
 
 It was toward the close of this golden age (the memory of 
 which the self-dissatisfied Race of Men have everywhere pre- 
 served and cherished) when Conscience acted in Man with 
 the ease and uniformity of Instinct ; when Labor was a sweet 
 name for the activity of sane Minds in healthful Bodies, and 
 all enjoyed in common the bounteous harvest produced, and 
 gathered in, by common effort ; when there existed in the 
 Sexes, and in the Individuals of each Sex, just variety enough 
 to permit and call forth the gentle restlessness and final union 
 of chaste love and individual attachment, each seeking and 
 finding the beloved one by the natural afiinity of their Beings ; 
 when the dread Sovereign of the Universe was known only as 
 the universal Parent, no Altar but the pure Heart, and Thanks- 
 giving and grateful Love the sole Sacrifice 
 
 In this blest age of dignified Innocence one of their honored
 
 Elders, whose absence they were beginning to notice, entered 
 with hurrying steps the place of their common assemblage at 
 noon, and instantly attracted the general attention and wonder 
 by the perturbation of his gestures, and by a strange trouble 
 both in his eyes and over his whole countenance. After a short 
 but deep silence, when the first buzz of varied inquiry was be- 
 coming audible, the old man moved toward a small eminence, 
 and having ascended it, he thus addressed the hushed and lis- 
 tening company. 
 
 " In the warmth of the approaching mid-day, as I was repo- 
 sing in the vast cavern, out of which, from its northern portal, 
 issues the river that winds through our vale, a voice powerful, 
 yet not from its loudness, suddenly hailed me. Guided by my 
 ear I looked toward the supposed place of the sound for some 
 Form, from which it had proceeded. I beheld nothing but the 
 glimmering walls of the cavern. Again, as I was turning round, 
 the same voice hailed me : and whithersoever I turned my face, 
 thence did the voice seem to proceed. I stood still therefore, 
 and in reverence awaited its continuation. ' Sojourner of Earth! 
 (these were its words) hasten to the meeting of thy Brethren, 
 and the words which thou now hearest, the same do thou re- 
 peat unto them. On the thirtieth morn from the morrow's sun- 
 rising, and during the space of thrice three days and thrice three 
 nights, a thick cloud will cover the sky, and a heavy rain fall 
 on the earth. Go ye therefore, ere the thirtieth sun ariseth, 
 retreat to the cavern of the river and there abide, till the clouds 
 have passed away and the rain be over and gone. For know 
 ye of a certainty that whomever that rain wetteth, on him, yea, 
 on him and on his children's children will fall — the spirit of 
 Madness.' Yes ! Madness was the word of the voice : what 
 this be, I know not ! But at the sound of the word trembling 
 came upon me, and a feeling which I would not have had ; and 
 I remained even as ye beheld and now behold me." 
 
 The old man ended, and retired. Confused murmurs suc- 
 ceeded, and wonder, and doubt. Day followed day, and every 
 day brought with it a diminution of the awe impressed. They 
 could attach no image, no remembered sensations to the threat. 
 The ominous morn arrived, the Prophet had retired to the ap- 
 pointed cavern, and there remained alone during the appointed 
 time. On the tenth morning, he emerged from his place of 
 shelter, and sought his friends and brethren. But alas ! how
 
 affrightful the change ! Instead of the common children of one 
 great family, working towards the same aim by reason, even as 
 the bees in their hives by instinct, he looked and beheld, here 
 a miserable wretch watching over a heap of hard and unnutri- 
 tious substances, which he had dug out of the earth, at the cost 
 of mangled limbs and exhausted faculties. This he appeared 
 to worship, at this he gazed, even as the youths of the vale had 
 been accustomed to gaze at their chosen virgins in the first 
 season of their choice. There he saw a former companion 
 speeding on and panting after a butterfly, or a withered leaf 
 whirling onward in the breeze ; and another with pale and dis- 
 torted countenance following close behind, and still stretching 
 forth a dagger to stab his precursor in the back. In another 
 place he observed a whole troop of his fellow-men famishing 
 and in fetters, yet led by one of their brethren who had ensla- 
 ved them, and pressing furiously onwards in the hope of fam- 
 ishing and enslaving another troop moving in an opposite direc- 
 tion. For the first time, the Prophet missed his accustomed 
 power of distinguishing between his dreams and his waking 
 perceptions. He stood gazing and motionless, when several 
 of the race gathered around him, and enquired of each other, 
 who is this man ? how strangely he looks ! how wild ! — a worth- 
 less idler ! exclaims one : assuredly, a very dangerous madman! 
 cries a second. In short, from words they proceeded to vio- 
 lence ^^1 harassed, endangered, solitary in a world of forms 
 like his own, without sympathy, without object of love, he at 
 length espied in some foss or furrow a quantity of the madden- 
 ing water still unevaporated, and uttering the last words of 
 reason. It is in vain to be sane in a world of madmen, 
 plunged and rolled himself in the liquid poison, and came out 
 as mad and not more wretched than his neighbors and acquaint- 
 ance. 
 
 The plan of The friend is comprized in the motto to this 
 Essay.* This tale or allegory seems to me to contain the ob- 
 
 * {Translation.) — Believe mc, it requires no little confidence, to promise 
 Help to the Struggling, Coiuisel to tlie Doubtful, Light to the Blind, Hope to 
 the Despondent, Refieshment to the Weary. These are indeed great things, 
 if they be accomplished ; trifles if they exist but in a promise. I however 
 Eiim not so much to jirescribe a Law for others, as to set forth the Law of 
 my own Mind ; which let the man, who shall have approved of it, abide by ;
 
 8 
 
 jections to its practicability in all their strength. Either, says 
 the Sceptic, you are the Blind offering to lead the Blind, or 
 you are talking the language of Sight to those who do not pos- 
 sess the sense of seeing. If you mean to be read, try to en- 
 tertain and do not pretend to instruct. To such objections it 
 would be amply sufficient, on my system of faith, to answer, 
 that we are not all blind, but all subject to distempers of " the 
 mental sight," differing in kind and in degree ; that though all 
 men are in error, they are not all in the same error, nor at the 
 , same time ; and that each therefore may possibly heal the other, 
 even as two or more physicians, all diseased in their general 
 health yet under the immediate action of the disease on dif- 
 ferent days, may remove or alleviate the complaints of each 
 other. But in respect to the entertainingness of moral writings, 
 if in entertainment be included whatever delights the imagi- 
 nation or affects the generous passions, so far from rejecting 
 such a mean of persuading the human soul, my very system 
 compels me to defend not only the propriety but the absolute 
 necessity of adopting it, if we really intend to render our fel- 
 low-creatures better or wiser. 
 
 But it is with dullness as with obscurity. It may be posi- 
 tive, and the author's fault ; but it may likewise be relative, and 
 if the author has presented his bill of fare at the portal, the 
 reader has himself only to blame. The main question then is, 
 of what class are the persons to be entertained ? — " One of the 
 later schools of the Grecians (says Lord Bacon) is at a stand to 
 think what should be in it that men should love lies, where 
 neither they make for pleasure, as with poets ; nor for advan- 
 tage, as with the merchant; but for the lie's sake. I cannot tell 
 why, this same truth is a naked and open day-light, that doth 
 not shew the masques and mummeries and triumphs of the 
 present world half so stately and daintily, as candle-lights. 
 Truth may perhaps come to the price of a pearl, that sheweth 
 best by day ; but it will not rise to the price of a diamond or 
 carbuncle, which sheweth best in varied lights. A mixture of 
 lies doth ever add pleasure. Doth any man doubt, that if there 
 
 and let him, to whom it shall appear not reasonable, reject it. It is my earn- 
 est wish, I confess, to emjjloy my understanding and acquirements in that 
 mode and direction, in which T may be enabled to benefit the largest number 
 possiblp of my ftllow-creaturrs.
 
 9 
 
 were taken from men's minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, 
 false valuations, imaginations as one ivould^ and the like vinum 
 Daemonum (as a Father calleth poetry) but it would leave the 
 minds of a number of men poor shrunken things, full of me- 
 lancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?" 
 
 A melancholy, a too general, but not, 1 trust, a universal 
 truth ! — and even where it does apply, yet in many instances 
 not irremediable. Such at least must have been my persuasion : 
 or the present volumes must have been wittingly written to no 
 purpose. If I belived our nature fettered to all this wretched- 
 ness of head and heart by an absolute and innate necessity, at 
 least by a necessity which no human power, no efforts of rea- 
 son or eloquence could remove or lessen ; I should deem it 
 even presumptuous to aim at other or higher object than that of 
 amusing a small portion of the reading public. 
 
 And why not? whispers wordly prudence- To amuse 
 though only to amuse our visitors is wisdom as well as good- 
 nature, where it is presumption to attempt their amendment. 
 And truly it would be most convenient to me in respects of no 
 trifling importance, if I could persuade myself to take the ad- 
 vice. Relaxed by these principles from all moral obligation, 
 and ambitious of procuring pastime and self-oblivion for a race, 
 which could have nothing noble to remember, nothing desirable 
 to anticipate, I might aspire even to the praise of the critics 
 and dilettante of the higher circles of society ; of some trusty 
 guide of blind fashion ; some pleasant Analyst of Taste, as it 
 exists both in the palate and the soul ; some living guage and 
 mete-wand of past and present genius. But alas ! my former 
 studies would still have left a wrong bias ! If instead of per- 
 plexing my common sense with the flights of Plato, and of stiffen- 
 ing over the meditations of the imperial Stoic, I had been labor- 
 ing to imbibe the gay spirit of a Casti, or had employed my 
 erudition, for the benefit of the favored few, in elucidating the 
 interesting deformities of ancient Greece and India, what might 
 I not have hoped from the suff"rage of those, who turn in weari- 
 ness from the Paradise Lost, — because compared with the pru- 
 rient heroes and grotesque monsters of Italian Romance, or even 
 with the narrative dialogues of the melodious Metastasio, — that 
 — "Adventurous Song, 
 
 " Which justifies the ways of God to Man" 
 2
 
 10 
 
 has been found a poor substitute for Grimaldi, a most inapt 
 medicine for an occasional propensity to yawn ? For, as hath 
 been decided, to fill up pleasantly the brief intervals of fash- 
 ionable pleasures, and above all to charm away the dusky 
 Gnome of Ennui, is the chief and appropriate business of the 
 Poet and — the Novelist ! This duty unfulfilled, Appollo will 
 have lavished his best gifts in vain ; and Urania henceforth 
 must be content to inspire Astronomers alone, and leave the 
 Sons of Verse to more amusive Patronesses. And yet — and 
 yet — but it will be time to be serious, when my visitors have 
 sat down. 

 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 Sic oportct ad libnim, presertim miscellanei generis^ legendum accedere ledorem, ut 
 solet ad convivium conviva civilis. Convivaior annititur omnibus satisfacere : 
 et tamen si quid apponitur, quod hujus aid illius palato non respondeat, et hie 
 et ille urbane dissimidant, et alia fercida probant, ne quid contristent convivato- 
 rem. Quis enim eum convivam ferat, qui tantum hoc animo veniat ad mensam, 
 id carpens quce apponuntur nee vescatur ipse, nee alios vesci sinat ? et tamen his 
 quoque reperias inciviliores, qui palam, qui sine fine damnent ac lacercnt opus, 
 quod nunquam legerint. Jlst hoc plusquam sycoplianticuin est damnare quod 
 nescias. Erasmus. 
 
 The musician may tune his instrument in private, ere his 
 audience have yet assembled ; the architect conceals the foun- 
 dation of his building beneath the superstructure. But an au- 
 thor's harp must be tuned in the hearing of those, who are 
 to understand its after harmonies ; the foundation stones of his 
 edifice must lie open to common view, or his friends will hesi- 
 tate to trust themselves beneath the roof. 
 
 From periodical Literature the general Reader deems him- 
 self entitled to expect amusement, and some degree of infor- 
 mation ; and if the Writer can convey any instruction at the 
 same time and without demanding any additional thought (as 
 the Irishmen, in the hackneyed jest, is said to have passed oiF 
 a light guinea between two halfpence) this supererogatory 
 merit will not perhaps be taken amiss. Now amusement in 
 and for itself may be afforded by the gratification either of the 
 curiosity or of the passions. I use the former word as distin- 
 guished from the love of knowledge, and the latter in distinc- 
 tion from those emotions which arise in well-ordered minds, 
 from the perception of truth or falsehood, virtue or vice : — 
 emotions, which are always preceded by thought, and linked 
 with improvement. Again, all information pursued without 
 any wish of becoming wiser or better thereby, I class among 
 the gratifications of mere curiosity, whether it be sought for
 
 12 
 
 in a light Novel or a grave History. We may therefore omit 
 the word Information, as included either in Amusement or In- 
 struction. 
 
 The present Work is an experiment; not whether a writer 
 
 may honestly overlook the one, or successfully omit the other, 
 of the two elements themselves, wliich serious Readers at 
 least persuade themselves, they pursue ; but whether a change 
 might not be hazarded of the usual order, in which periodical 
 writers have in general attempted to convey them. Having 
 myself experienced that no delight either in kind or degree, 
 was equal to that which accompanies the distinct perception of 
 a fundamental truth, relative to our moral being ; having, long 
 after the completion of what is ordinarily called a learned edu- 
 cation, discovered a new world of intellectual profit opening on 
 me — not from any new opinions, but lying, as it were, at the 
 roots of those which I had been taught in childhood in my Cate- 
 chism and Spelling-book ; there arose a soothing hope in my 
 mind that a lesser Public might be found, composed of persons 
 susceptible of the same delight, and desirous of attaining it by 
 the same process. I heard a whisper too from within, (I trust 
 that it proceeded from Conscience not Vanity) that a duty was 
 performed in the endeavor to render it as much easier to them, 
 than it had been to me, as could be effected by the united ef- 
 forts of my understanding and imagination.* 
 
 * In conformity with this anxious wish I shall make no apology for sub- 
 joining a Translation of my Motto to this Essay. 
 
 (Traiislatxon.) A reader should sit down to a book, especially of the mis- 
 cellaneous kind as a well-behaved visitor does to a banquet. The master of 
 the feasts exerts himself to satisfy all his guests; but if after all his care and 
 pauis there should still be something or other put on the table that does !iot 
 suit this or that person's taste, they j)o]itcly pass it over without noticing the 
 circtunstance, and commend other dishes, that they may not distress their 
 kind host, or throw any damp on his spiiits. For who could tolerate a guest 
 tliat accepted an invitation to your table with no other purpose but that of 
 finding faidt with eveiy thing put before him, neither eating himself; orsufTer- 
 hig others to cat in comfort. And yet you may fall in with a still worse set 
 than even these, — with churls that in all coni])anies and without stop or stay 
 will condenm and ]Mdl to pieces a work which they had never read. But 
 this sinks below the baseness of an /j!/br?«fr, yea, tiiough he were a false wit- 
 ness to boot ! The man, who abuses a thing of which he is utterly ignorant, 
 unites the infamy of both— and in addition to this, makes himself the i)ander 
 and sycophant of his own and other men's envy and malignity.
 
 13 
 
 Actuated by this impulse, the Writer wishes, in the follow- 
 ing Essays, to convey not instruction merely, but fundamental 
 instruction ; not so much to shew my Reader this or that fact, 
 as to kindle his own torch for him, and leave it to himself to 
 choose the particular objects, which he might wish to examine 
 by its light. The Friexnd does not indeed exclude from his plan 
 occasional interludes ; and vacations of innocent entertain- 
 ment and promiscuous information, but still in the main he pro- 
 poses to himself the communication of such delight as rewards 
 the march of Truth, rather than to collect the flowers which di- 
 versify its track, in order to present them apart from the home- 
 ly yet foodful or medicinable herbs, among which they had 
 grown. To refer men's opinions to their absolute principles, 
 and thence their feelings to the appropriate objects, and in their 
 due degrees ; and finally, to apply the principles thus ascertain- 
 ed, to the formation of steadfast convictions concerning the most 
 important questions of Politics, Morality, and Religion — these 
 are to be the objects and the contents of this work. 
 
 Themes like these not even the genius of a Plato or a Ba- 
 con could render intelligible, without demanding from the 
 reader thought sometimes, and attention generally. By 
 THOUGHT I here mean the voluntary production in our ov/n 
 minds of those states of consciousness, to which, as to his fun- 
 damental facts, the Writer has referred us ; while attention 
 has for its object the order and connection of Thoughts and 
 Images, each of which is in itself already and familiarly known. 
 Thus the elements of Geometry require attention only ; but 
 the analysis of our primary faculties, and the investigation of 
 all the absolute grounds of Religion and Morals, are impossible 
 without energies of thought in addition to the effort of Atten- 
 tion. The Friend will not attempt to disguise from his Readers 
 that both Attention and Thought are Efforts, and the latter a 
 most difficult and laborious Effort ; nor from himself, that to 
 require it often or for any continuance of time is incompatible 
 with the nature of the present Publication, even were it less 
 incongruous than it unfortunately is with the present habits and 
 pursuits of Englishmen. Accordingly I shall be on my guard 
 to make the Numbers as few as possible, which would require 
 from a well educated Reader any energy of thought and volun- 
 tary abstraction. 
 
 But Attention, I confess, will be requisite throughout, except
 
 14 
 
 in the excursive and miscellaneous Essays that will be found 
 interposed between each of the three main divisions of the 
 Work. On whatever subject the mind feels a lively interest, 
 attention though always an effort, becomes a delightful effort. 
 I should be quite at ease, could I secure for the whole Work as 
 much of it, as a card party of earnest whist-players., often ex- 
 pend in a single evening, or a lady in the making-up of a fash- 
 ionable dress. But where no interest previously exists, atten- 
 tion (as every schoolmaster knows) can be procured only by 
 terror : which is the true reason why the majority of mankind 
 learn nothing systematically, except as school-boys or apprenti- 
 ces. 
 
 Happy shall I be, from other motives besides those of self- 
 interest, if no fault or deficiency on my part shall prevent the 
 Work from furnishing a presumptive proof, that there are still 
 to be found among us a respectable number of Readers who 
 are desirous to derive pleasure from the consciousness of be- 
 ing instructed or ameliorated , and who feel a sufficient in/eres^ 
 as to the foundations of their own opinions in Literature, Poli- 
 tics, Morals, and Religion, to afford that degree of attention, 
 without which, however men may deceive themselves, no ac- 
 tual progress ever was or ever can be made in that knowledge, 
 which supplies at once both strength and nourishment.
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 '--/Ar 'o)C TzaQsla^op rrfv tsxvtjv ttuqu aov" xonqofrov fiBV sv'-d'v^g 
 Oidov'oav'vno" xofinacjfia'toiv, xai 'grj/ua'tcov, inax^w'v, 
 "la/vavu /.lE^v -nqot'iiaTOV u'vjifv, xal to' ^ugog^acpeii^ov, 
 'EnvXXioic y.al nsgiTtu'TOig xui TevrXioiai fitxQoig 
 XvXoi'v StSov'g aiianvl^uTbiV, 'ano" ^i^lioji', ^anrjd'of'v. 
 
 Aristoph. Ran^. 
 
 Imitation.* 
 
 When I received the Muse from you, I found her puffed and pampered, 
 With pompous sentences and terms, a cumb'rous huge virago. 
 My first attention was applied to make her look genteelly, 
 And bring her to a moderate bulk by dint of lighter diet. 
 I fed her with plain household phrase, and cool familiar sallad, 
 With water-gruel episode, with sentimental jelly, 
 With moral mince-meat: till at length I brought her within compass. 
 
 Frere. 
 
 In the preceding Number I named the present undertaking 
 an Experiment. The explanation will be found in the follow- 
 ing Letter, written to a Correspondent during the first attempt, 
 and before the plan was discontinued from an original error 
 in the mode of circulation, as noticed in the Preface. 
 
 To R. L. 
 
 Deah Sir, 
 
 When I first undertook the present Publication for the sake 
 
 *This Imitation is printed here by permission of the Author, from a Series 
 of free Translations of selected Scenes from Arisiophanes : a work, of which 
 Ishould the Author be persuaded to make it public) it is my most dehberate 
 judgment, and inmost conviction, that it will form an important epoch in En- 
 glish Literature, and open out sources of metrical and rhythmical wealth in 
 the very heart of our language, of which few, if any, among us are aware. 
 
 s. T. a
 
 16 
 
 and with the avowed object of referring men in all things to 
 Principles or fundamental truths, I was well aware of the ob- 
 stacles which the plan itself Avould oppose to my success. 
 For in order to the regular attainment of this object, all the 
 driest and least attractive Essays must appear in the first fif- 
 teen or twenty Numbers, and thus subject me to the neces- 
 sity of demanding effort or solicting patience in that part of 
 the Work, where it was most my interest to secure the confi- 
 dence of my readers by winning their favor. Though I dared 
 warrant for the pleasantness of the journey on the whole ; 
 though I might promise that the road would, for the far greater 
 part of it, be found plain and easy, that it would pass through 
 countries of various prospect, and that at every stage there 
 would be a change of company ; ii still remained a heavy 
 disadvantage, that I had to start at the foot of a high and 
 steep hill : and I foresaw, not without occasional feelings of 
 despondency, that during the slow and laborious ascent it would 
 require no common management to keep my passengers in good 
 humor with the vehicle and its driver. As far as this incon- 
 venience could be palliated by sincerity and previous confes- 
 sions, I have no reason to accuse myself of neglect. In the 
 prospectus of The Friend, which for this cause I re-printed 
 and annexed to the first Number, I felt it my duty to inform 
 such as might be inclined to patronize the publication, that I 
 must submit to be esteemed dull by those who sought chiefly 
 for amusement: and this I hazarded as a ^eneraZ confession, 
 though in my own mind I felt a cheerful confidence that it 
 would apply almost exclusively to the earlier Numbers. I 
 could not therefore be surprised, however much I may have 
 been depressed, by the frequency with which you hear The 
 Friend complained of for its abstruseness and obscurity ; nor 
 did the highly flattering expressions, with which you accompa- 
 nied your communication, prevent me from feeling its truth to 
 the whole extent. 
 
 An author's pen, like children's legs, improves by exercise. 
 That part of the blame which rests on myself, I am exerting 
 my best faculties to remove. A man long accustomed to silent 
 and solitary meditation, in proportion as he increases the pow- 
 er of thinking in long and connected trains, is apt to lose or 
 lessen the talent of communicating liio thoughts with grace 
 and perspicuity. Doubtless too, I have in some measure in-
 
 17 
 
 jured my style, in respect to its facility and popularity, from 
 having almost confined my reading, of late years, to the works 
 of the Ancients and those of the elder Writers in the modern 
 languages. We insensibly imitate what we habitually admire ; 
 and an aversion to the epigrammatic, unconnected periods of 
 the fashionable Anglogallican taste has too often made me wil- 
 ling to forget, that the stately march and difficult evolutions, 
 which characterize the eloquence of Hooker, Bacon, Milton, 
 and Jeremy Taylor, are notwithstanding their intrinsic excel- 
 lence, still less suited to a periodical Essay. This fault I am 
 now endeavoring to correct ; though I can never so far sacrifice 
 my judgment to the desire of being immediately popular, as to 
 cast my sentences in the French moulds, or affect a style which 
 an ancient critic would have deemed purposely invented for 
 persons troubled with the asthma to read, and for those to 
 comprehend who labor under the more pitiable asthma of a 
 short-witted intellect. It cannot but be injurious to the hu- 
 man mind never to be called into effort ; the habit of receiving: 
 pleasure without any exertion of thought, by the mere excite- 
 ment of curiosity and sensibility, may be justly ranked among 
 the worst eff'ects of habitual novel reading. It is true that these 
 short and unconnected sentences are easily and iustanly under- 
 stood : but it is equally true, that wanting all the cement of 
 thoughts as well as of style, all the connections, and (if you. 
 will forgive too trivial a metaphor) all the hooks-and-eyes of the- 
 memory, they are as easily forgotten : or rather, it is scarcely 
 possible that they should be remembered. — Nor is it less true, 
 that those who confine their reading to such books dwarf their 
 own faculties, and finally reduce their understandings to a de- 
 plorable imbecility : the fact you mention, and which I shall 
 hereafter make use of, is a fair instance and a striking illustra- 
 tion. Like idle morning visitors, the brisk and breathless pe- 
 riods hurry in and hurry off" in quick and profitless succession ; 
 each indeed for the moments of its stay prevents the pain of 
 vacancy, while it indulges the love of sloth ; but all together 
 they leave the mistress of the house (the soul I mean) flat and 
 exhausted, incapable of attending to her own concerns, and un- 
 fitted for the conversation of more rational guests. 
 
 I know you will not suspect me of fostering so idle a hope, as 
 that of obtaining acquittal by recrimination ; or think that I am 
 attacking one fault, in order that its opposite may escape notice 
 
 o
 
 18 
 
 in the noise and smoke of the battery. On the contrary, I 
 shall do my best, and even make all allowable sacrifices, to ren- 
 der my manner more attractive and my matter more generally 
 interesting. In the establishment of principles and fundamen- 
 tal doctrines, I must of necessity require the attention of my 
 reader to become my fellow-laborer. The primary facts essen- 
 tial to the intelligibility of my principles I can prove to others 
 only as far as I can prevail on them to retire into themselves 
 and make their own minds the objects of their steadfast attention. 
 But, on the other hand, I feel too deeply the importance of the 
 convictions, which first impelled me to the present undertaking, 
 to leave unattempted any honorable means of recommending 
 them to as wide a circle as possible. 
 
 Hitherto, my dear Sir, I have been employed in laying the 
 foundation of my work. But the proper merit of a foundation 
 is its massiveness and solidity. The conveniences and orna- 
 ments, the gilding and stucco work, the sunshine and sunny 
 prospects, will come with the superstructure. Yet I dare not 
 flatter myself, that any endeavors of mine, compatible with 
 the duty I owe to truth and the hope of permanent utility, will 
 render The Friend agreeable to the majority of what is call- 
 ed the reading public. I never expected it. How indeed could 
 I, when I was to borrow so little from the influence of passing 
 events, and when I had absolutely excluded from my plan all 
 appeals to personal curiosity and personal interests ? Yet even 
 this is not my greatest impediment. No real information can 
 be conveyed, no important errors rectified, no widely injurious 
 prejudices rooted up, without requiring some eflbrt or thought 
 on the part of the reader. But the obstinate (and toward a 
 contemporary Writer, the contem])tuous) aversion to all intel- 
 lectual eflbrt is the mother evil of all which I had proposed to 
 war against, the Queen Bee in the hive of our errors and mis- 
 fortunes, both private and national. To solicit the attention of 
 those, on whom these debilitating causes have acted to their 
 full extent, would be no less absurd than to recommend exer- 
 cise with the dumb bells, as the only mode of cure, to a patient 
 paralytic in both arms. You, my dear Sir, well know, that 
 my expectations were more modest as well as more rational. 
 I hoped, that my readers in general would be aware of the im- 
 practicability of suiting every ICssay to every taste in any pe- 
 riod of the work ; and that they would not attritbute wholly to
 
 19 " "' 
 
 the author, but in part to the necessity of his plan, the austeri- 
 ty and absence of the lighter graces in the first fifteen or twenty 
 numbers. In my cheerful moods I sometimes flattered myself, 
 that a few even among those, who foresaw that my lucubrations 
 would at all times require more attention than from the nature 
 of their own employments they could afford them, might yet 
 find a pleasure in supporting the Friend during its infancy, so 
 as to give it a chance of attracting the notice of others, to 
 whom its style and subjects might be better adapted. But my 
 main anchor was the Hope, that when circumstances gradually 
 enabled me to adopt the ordinary means of making the publica- 
 tion generally known, there might be found throughout the 
 Kingdom a sufficient number of meditative minds, who, enter- 
 taining similar convictions with myself, and gratified by the 
 prospect of seeing them reduced to form and system, would 
 take a warm interest in the work from the very circumstance 
 that it wanted those allurements of transitory interests, which 
 render particular patronage superfluous, and for the brief season 
 of their blow and fragrance attract the eye of thousands, who 
 would pass unregarded 
 
 Flowers 
 
 Of sober tint, and Herbs of medicinal powers. 
 
 S. T. C. 
 
 In these three introductory Numbers, The Friend has en- 
 deavored to realize his promise of giving an honest bill of fare, 
 both as to the objects and the style of the Work. With refer- 
 ence to both I conclude with a prophecy of Simon Grynasus, 
 from his premonition to the candid Reader, prefixed to Fi- 
 cinus's translation of Plato, published at Leyden, 1557. How 
 far it has been gradually fulfilled in this country since the revo- 
 lution in 1688, I leave to my candid and intelligent Readers to 
 determine. 
 
 ' Ac dolet mihi quidem deliciis literarum inescatos subito jam 
 homines adeoj esse, praesertim qui Christianos esse profitentur, 
 ut legere nisi quod ad presentem gustum facit, sustineant nihil : 
 unde et disciplina et philosophia ipsa jam fere prorsus etiam a 
 doctis negliguntur. Quod quidem propositum studiorum nisi 
 mature corrigetur, tam magnum rebus incommodum dabit, quam 
 dedit barbaries olim. Pertinax res barbaries est fateor ; sed 
 minus potest tamen, quam ilia persuasa literarum, prudentior si
 
 20 
 
 RATioNE caret, sapientiae virtutisque specie misere lectores cir- 
 cumducens. 
 
 Succedet igitur, ut aihitror, baud ita multo post, pro rus- 
 ticana sseeuli nostri ruditate captatrix ilia blandi-loquentia, ro- 
 bur animi virilis onine, omnem virtutein masculum profligatura, 
 nisi cavetur.' 
 
 (Translation.) — In very trutb, it grieveth me that men, 
 those especially who profess themselves to be Christians, 
 should be so taken with the sweet Baits of Literature that 
 tbey can endure to read nothing but v/hat gives them imme- 
 diate gratification, no matter how low or sensual it may be. 
 Consequently, the more austere and disciplinary branches of 
 philosophy itself, are almost wholly neglected, even by the 
 learned. — A course of study (if such reading, with such a pur- 
 pose in view, could deserve that name) which, if not correct- 
 ed in time, will occasion worse consequences than even bar- 
 barism did in the times of our forefathers. Barbarism is, I 
 own, a wilful headstrong thing ; but with all its blind obstina- 
 cy it has less power of doing harm than this self-sufficient, 
 self-satisfied plain good common-sense sort of writing, this pru- 
 dent saleable popular style of composition, if it be deserted 
 by Reason and scientific Insight ; pitiably decoying the minds 
 of men by an imposing shew of aimableness, and practical 
 Wisdom, so that the delighted Reader knowing nothing knows 
 all about almost every thing. There will succeed therefore 
 in my opinion, and that too within no long time, to the rude- 
 ness and rusticity of our age, that ensnaring meretricious pojm- 
 larness in Literature, with all the tricksy humilities of the am- 
 bitious candidates for the favorable suffrages of the judicious 
 Public, which i( we do not take good care will break up and 
 scatter before it all robustness and manly vigor of intellect, all 
 masculine fortitude of virtue.
 
 ESi^AY IV. 
 
 Si modo qiUB jYaturd et Ratione concessa sint, assumpserimus, PrjESumtionis sus- 
 picio a )iobis quam longissime abesse debet Multa Antiquitati, nohismet ni- 
 hil, nrrogamus. JViMlne vos ? JVihil mehercule, nisi quod omnia omni aniino 
 Veritati arrogamiis et Sanctirnonice. 
 
 Ulr, Rinov. De Controversiis. 
 
 (Translation.) — If we assume only what Nature and Reason have granted, 
 with no shadow of right can we be suspected of Presumption. To Antiquity 
 we arrogate many things, to ourselves nothing. Nothing? Aye nothing: 
 unless indeed it be, that with all our strength we arrogate all things to Truth 
 and Moral Purity. 
 
 It has been remarked by the celebrated Haller, that we 
 are deaf while we are yawning. The same act of drowsiness 
 that stretches open our mouths closes our ears. It is much the 
 same in acts of the understanding. A lazy half-attention 
 amounts to a mental yawn. Where then a subject, that de- 
 mands thought, has been thoughtfully treated, and with an ex- 
 act and patient derivation from its principles, we must be wil- 
 ling to exert a portion of the same effort, and to think with 
 the author, or the author will have thought in vain for us. 
 It makes little difference for the time being, whether there be 
 an hiatus oscitans in the reader's attention, or an hiatus lacry- 
 mabilis in the author's manuscript. When this occurs during 
 the persual of a work of known authority and established fame, 
 we honestly lay the fault on our own deficiency, or on the un- 
 fitness of our present mood ; but when it is a contemporary 
 production, over which we have been nodding, it is far more 
 pleasant to pronounce it insufferably dull and obscure. Indeed, 
 as charity begins at home, it would be unreasonable to expect
 
 23 
 
 that a reader should charge himself with lack of intellect, 
 when the effect may be equally well accounted for by declar- 
 ing the author unintelligible ; or that he should accuse his own 
 inattention, Avhen by half a dozen phrases of abuse, as " hea- 
 vy stuffs metaphorical jargon^ &c., he can at once excuse his 
 laziness, and gratify his pride, scorn, and envy. To similar 
 impulses we must attribute the praises of a true modern rea- 
 der, when he meets with a work in the true modern taste : 
 videlicet, either in skipping, unconnected, short-winded asth- 
 matic sentences, as easy to be understood as impossible to be 
 remembered, in which the merest common-place acquires a 
 momentary poignancy, a petty titillating sting, from affected 
 point and wilful antithesis ; or else in strutting and rounded 
 periods, in which the emptiest truisms are blown up into illus- 
 trious bubbles by help of film and inflation. "Aye!" (quoth 
 the delighted reader) " this is sense, this is genius ! this I un- 
 derstand and admire ! I have thought the very same a hundred 
 times myself !'''' In other words, this man has reminded me of 
 my own cleverness, and therefore I admire him. ! for one 
 piece of egotism that presents itself under its own honest bare 
 face of " I myself I," there are fifty that steal out in the mask 
 of tuisms and ille-isms. 
 
 It has ever been my opinion, that an excessive solicitude 
 to avoid the use of our first personal pronoun more often has 
 its source in conscious selfishness than in true self-oblivion. 
 A quiet observer of human follies may often amuse or sadden 
 his thoughts by detecting a perpetual feeling of purest egotism 
 through a long masquerade of Disguises, the half of which, had 
 old Proteus been master of as many, would have wearied out 
 the patience of Menelaus. I say, \\\e patience only: for it would 
 ask more than the simplicity of Polypheme, with his one eye 
 extinguished to be deceived by so poor a repetition of Nobody. 
 Yet I can with strictest truth assure my Readers that with a 
 pleasure combined with a sense of weariness I see the nigh 
 approach of that point of my labors, in which I can convey my 
 opinions and the workings of my heart without reminding the 
 Reader obtrusively of myself. But the frequency, with which 
 I have spoken in my own person, recalls my apprehensions to 
 the second danger, which it was my hope to guard against ; 
 the probable charge of Arrogance, or presumption, both for 
 daring to dissent from the opinions of great authorities, and, in 

 
 23 
 
 my folIoAving numbers perhaps, from the general opinion con- 
 cerning the true value of certain authorities deemed great. 
 The word, Presumption, I appropriate to the internal feeling, 
 and Arrogance to the way and manner of outwardly expressing 
 ourselves. 
 
 As no man can rightfully be condemned without reference 
 to some definite law, by the knowledge of which he might 
 have avoided the given fault, it is necessary so to define the 
 constituent qualities and conditions of arrogance, that a reason 
 may be assignable why we pronounce one man guilty and ac- 
 quit another. For merely to call a person arrogant or most arro- 
 gant can convict no one of the vice except perhaps the ac- 
 cuser. I was once present, when a young man who had left 
 his books and a glass of water to join a convivial party, each 
 of whom had nearly finished his second bottle, was pronounced 
 very drunk by the whole party — "he looked so strange and 
 pale !" Many a man, who has contrived to hide his ruling pas- 
 sion or predominant defect from himself, will betray the same 
 to dispassionate observers, by his proneness on all occasions to 
 suspect or accuse others of it. Now arrogance and Presump- 
 tion, like all other moral qualities, must be shewn by some act 
 or conduct : and this too must be an act that implies, if not an 
 immediate concurrence of the Will, yet some faulty constitution 
 of the Moral Habits. For all criminality supposes its essentials 
 to have been within the power of the Agent. Either therefore 
 the facts adduced do of themselves convey the whole proof of 
 the charge, and the question rests on the truth or accuracy 
 with which they have been stated ; or they acquire their char- 
 acter from the circumstances. I have looked into a ponderous 
 Review of the Corpuscular Philosophy by a Sicilian Jesuit, in 
 which the acrimonious Father frequently expresses his doubt 
 whether he should pronounce Boyle or Newton more impious 
 than presumptuous^ or more presumptuous than impious. They 
 had both attacked the reigning opinions on most important sub- 
 jects, opinions sanctioned by the greatest names of antiquity, 
 and by the general suflrage of their learned Contemporaries or 
 immediate Predecessors. Locke was assailed with a full cry 
 for his presumption in having deserted the philosophical system 
 at that time generally received by the Universities of Europe ; 
 and of late years Dr. Priestly bestowed the epithets of arrogant 
 and insolent on Reid, Beattie, &c., for presuming to arraign
 
 24 
 
 certain opinions of Mr. Locke, himself repaid in kind by many 
 of his own countrymen for his theological novelties. It will 
 scarcely be affirmed, that these accusations were all of them 
 just, or that any of them were fit or courteous. Must we there- 
 fore say, that in order to avow doubt or disbelief of a popular 
 persuasion without arrogance, it is required that the dissentient 
 should know himself to possess the genius, and foreknow that 
 he should acquire the reputation, of Locke, Newton, Boyle, or 
 even of a Reid or Beattie ? But as this knowledge and pre- 
 science are impossible in the strict sense of the words, and 
 could mean no more than a strong inw-ard conviction, it is 
 manifest that such a rule, if it were universally established, 
 would encourage the presumptuous, and condemn modest and 
 humble minds alone to silence. And as this silence could not 
 acquit the individual's own mind of presumption, unless it 
 were accompanied by conscious acquiescence ; Modesty itself 
 must become an inert quality, which even in private society 
 never displays its charms more unequivocally than in its mode 
 of reconciling moral deference with intellectual courage, and 
 general diffidence with sincerity in the avowal of the particular 
 conviction. 
 
 We must seek then elsewhere for the true marks, by which 
 Presumption or Arrogance may be detected, and on which the 
 charge may be grounded with little hazard of mistake or in- 
 justice. And as I confine my present observations to litera- 
 ture, I deem such criteria neither difficult to determine or to 
 apply. The first mark, as it appears to me, is a frequent bare 
 assertion of opinions not generally received, without condescen- 
 ding to prefix or annex the facts and reasons on which such 
 opinions were formed ; especially if this absence of logical cour- 
 tesy is supplied by contemptuous or abusive treatment of such 
 as happen to doubt of, or oppose, the decisive ipse dixi. But 
 to assert, however nakedly, that a passage in a lewd novel, in 
 which the Sacred Writings are denounced as more likely to 
 pollute the young and innocent mind than a romance notorious 
 for its indecency — to assert, I say, that such a passage argues 
 equal impudence and ignorance in its author, at the time of wri- 
 ting and publisiiing it — this is not arrogance ; although to a vast 
 majority of the decent part of our countrymen it would be su- 
 perfluous as a truism, if it were exclusively an author's business 
 to convey or revive knowledge, and not sometimes his duty to
 
 25 
 
 awaken the indignation of his Reader by the expression of his 
 own. 
 
 A second species of this unamiable quality, which has been 
 often distinguished by the name of Warburtonian arrogance, 
 betrays itself, not as in the former, by proud or petulant omis- 
 sion of proof or argument, but by the habit of ascribing weakness 
 of intellect, or want of taste and sensibility, or hardness of heart, 
 or corruption of moral principle, to all who deny the truth of 
 the doctrine, or the sufficiency of evidence, or the fairness of 
 the reasoning adduced in its support. This is indeed not es- 
 sentially different from the first, but assumes a separate charac- 
 ter from its accompaniments : for though both the doctrine and 
 its proofs may have been legitimately supplied by the under- 
 standing, yet the bitterness of personal crimination will resolve 
 itself into naked assertion. We are, therefore, authorized by 
 experience, and justified on the principle of self-defence and 
 by the law of fair retaliation, in attributing it to a vicious tem- 
 per, arrogant from irritability, or irrita,ble from arrogance. This 
 learned arrogance admits of many gradations, and is palliated or 
 aggravated, accordingly, as the point in dispute has been more or 
 less controverted, as the reasoning bears a greater or smaller 
 proportion to the virulence of the personal detraction, and as the 
 persons or parties, who are the objects of it, are more or less 
 respected, more or less worthy of respect.* 
 
 *Ha(l the autlior of the Divine Legation of Moses more sliilfully appro- 
 priated his coarse eloquence of abuse, his customary assurance of the idiotcy, 
 both in head and heart, of all his opponents; if he had employed those vigor- 
 ous arguments of his own vehement humor in the defence of Truths ac- 
 knowledged and reverenced by learned men in general ; or if he had confi- 
 ned them to the names of Chubb, Woolston, and other precursors of Mr. Thom- 
 as Payne ; we should perhaps still characterize his mode of controversy by 
 its rude violence, but not so often have heard his name used, even by those 
 who have never read his writings, as a j)roverbial expression of learned Arro- 
 gance. But when a novel and doubtful hy})othesis of his own formation was 
 the citadel to be defended, and his mephitic hand-granados were thrown 
 with the fury of lawless despotism at the fair reputation of a Sykes and a 
 Lardner, we not only confirm the verdict of his inde]jendeiit contemporaries, 
 but cease to wonder, that arrogance should rendei- Jiian an object of contempt 
 in many, and of aversion in all instances, when it was capable of hurrying a 
 Christian teacher of equal talents and learning into a slanderous vulgarity, 
 which escapes our disgust only when we see the writer's own reputation the 
 sole victim. But throughout his great work, and the pamphlets in which he 
 
 4
 
 26 
 
 Lasth', it must be admitted as a just imputation of presump- 
 tion when an individual obtrudes on the public eye, with all 
 the high pretensions of originality, opinions and observations, 
 in regard to which he must plead wilful ignorance in order to 
 be acquitted of dishonest plagiarism. On the same seat must 
 the writer be placed, who in a disquisition on any important 
 subject proves, by falsehoods either of omission or of positive 
 error, that he has neglected to possess himself, not only of the 
 information requisite for this particular subject, but even of those 
 ac(juirements, and that general knowledge, which could alone 
 authorize him to commence a public instructor : this is an office 
 which cannot be procured gratis. The industry, necessary for 
 the due exercise of its functions, is its purchase-money ; and 
 the absence or insufficiency of the same is so far a species of 
 dishonesty, and implies a pi'esumption in the literal as well as 
 the ordinary sense of the word. He has taken a thing before 
 he had acquired any right or title thereto. 
 
 If in addition to this unfitness which every man possesses 
 the means of ascertaining, his aim should be to unsettle a gen- 
 eral belief closely connected with public and private quiet ; 
 and if his language and manner be avowedly calculated for the 
 illiterate (and perhaps licentious) part of his contrymen ; dis- 
 gusting as his presumption must appear, it is yet lost or evan- 
 escent in the close neighbourhood of his guilt. That Hobbes 
 translated Homer in English verse and published his translation, 
 furnishes no positive evidence of his self-conceit, though it 
 implies a great lack of self-knowldege and of acquaintance with 
 the nature of poetry. A strong wish often imposes itself on 
 the mind for an actual power; the mistake is favored by tlie 
 innocent pleasure derived from the exercise of versification, 
 perhaps by the approbation of intimates ; and the canditate asks 
 from more impartial readers that sentence, which Nature has 
 not enabled him to anticipate. But when the philosopher of 
 Malmsbury waged war with Wallis and the fundamental truths 
 of pure geometry, every instance of his gross ignorance and 
 
 siipportpd it, ho always seems to write as if he had deemed it aduty of deco- 
 iian to jiuhhsh hisfaneies on the Mosaic Law, as the Law itself was dehvered, 
 that is, "in thunders and lightnings;" or as if he had applied to his own book 
 intsead of the sac-red mount, the nietiaee — Thtrt shall not a hand touch it but 
 he shall surely be stoned or shot through.
 
 27 
 
 utter misconception of the very elements of the science he pro- 
 posed to confute, furnished an unanswerable fact in proof of his 
 high presumption ; and the confident and insulting language of 
 the attack leaves the judicious reader in as little doubt of his 
 gross arrogance. An illiterate mechanic, when mistaking some 
 disturbance of his nerves for a miraculous call proceeds alone 
 to convert a tribe of savages, whose language he can have no 
 natural means of acquiring, may have been misled by impulses 
 very different from those of high self-opinion ; but the illite- 
 rate perpetrator of " the Age of Reason," must have had his 
 very conscience stupified by the habitual intoxication of pre- 
 sumptuous arrogance, and his common-sense over-clouded by 
 the vapors from his heart. 
 
 As long therefore as I obtrude no unsupported assertions on 
 my Readers ; and as long as I state my opinions and the evidence 
 which induced or compelled me to adopt them, with calmness 
 and that diffidence in myself, w^hich is by no means incompatible 
 with a firm belief in the justness of the opinions themselves; 
 while I attack no man's private life from any cause, and detract 
 from no man's honors in his public character, from the truth of 
 his doctrines, or the merits of his compositions, without detail- 
 ing all my reasons and resting the result solely on the argu- 
 ments adduced ; while I moreover' explain fully the motives of 
 duty, which influenced me in resolving to institute such inves- 
 tigation ; while I confine all asperity of censure, and all expres- 
 sions of contempt, to gross violations of truth, honor, and de- 
 cency, to the base corrupter and the detected slanderer; while 
 I write on no subject, which I have not studied with my best at- 
 tention, on no subject which my education and acquirments 
 have incapacitated me from properly understanding ; and above 
 all while 1 approve myself, alike in praise and in blame, in close 
 reasoning and in impassioned declamation, a steady rRii:>;D to 
 the two best and surest friends of all men, Truth and Hoatestt ; 
 I will not fear an accusation of either Presumption or Arrogance 
 from the good and the wise : I shall pity it from the weak, and 
 despise it from the wicked.
 
 ESSAY V. 
 
 In eodem pedore nullum est hoiiestorum turphimque consortium : et cogitare optima 
 simvl el deterrima non magis est wiius animce quam ejusdem hominis honum 
 esse ac malum. Quintilian. 
 
 There is no fellowship of honor and baseness in the same breast; and to com- 
 bine the best and the worst designs is no more possible in one mind, than 
 it is for the same man to be at the same instant virtuous and vicious. 
 
 Cognitio veritatis omnia falsa, si mode pro/erantur, eiiam quce pi'ius inaudita eranf, 
 et dijudicare et subvertere idonea est. Augustintjs. 
 
 A knowledge of the truth is equal to the task both of discerning and of con- 
 futing all false assertions and erroneous arguments, though never before 
 met with, if only they may freely be brought forward. 
 
 I have said, that my very system compels me to make every 
 fair appeal to the feelings, the imagination and even the fancy. 
 If these are to be withheld from the service of truth, virtue, and 
 happiness, to what purpose were they given ? in whose service 
 are they retained ? I have indeed considered the disproportion 
 of human passions to their ordinary objects among the strongest 
 internal evidences of our future destination, and the attempt to 
 restore them to their rightful claimants, the most imperious duty 
 and the noblest task of genius. The verbal enunciation of this 
 master-truth could scarcely be new to me at any period of my 
 life since earliest youth ; but I well remember the particular 
 time, when the words first became more than words to me, 
 when they incorporated with a living conviction, and took their 
 place among the realties of my being. On some wide com- 
 mon or open heath, peopled with Ant-hills, during some one 
 of the grey cloudy days of the late Autumn, many of my Rea- 
 ders may have noticed the effect of a sudden and momentary 
 flash of sunshine on all the countless little animals within his 
 view, aware too that the self-same influence was darted co-in-
 
 39 
 
 stantaneously over all their swarming cities as far as his eye 
 could reach ; may have observed, with what a kindly force the 
 gleam stirs and quickens them all ! and will have experienced 
 no unpleasureable shock of feeling in seeing myriads of myriads 
 of living and sentient beings united at the same moment in one 
 gay sensation, one joyous activity ! But awful indeed is the 
 same appearance in a multitude of rational beings, our fellow- 
 men, in whom too the effect is produced not so much by the ex- 
 ternal occasion as from the active quality of their own thoughts. 
 I had walked from Gottingen in the year 1799, to witness the 
 arrival of the Queen of Prussia, on her visit to the Baron Von 
 Hartzberg's seat, five miles from the University. The spa- 
 cious outer court of the palace was crowded with men and 
 women, a sea of heads, with a number of children rising out of 
 it from their father's shoulders. After a buzz of two hours ex- 
 pectation, the avant-courier rode at full speed into the Court. 
 At the loud cracks of his long whip and the trampling of his 
 horse's hoofs, the universal shock and thrill of emotion — I have 
 not language to convey it — expressed as it was in such manifold 
 looks, gestures, and attitudes, yet with one and the same feeling 
 in the eyes of all ! Recovering from the first inevitable conta- 
 gion of sympath}^, I involuntarily exclaimed, though in a language 
 to myself alone intelligible, " man ! ever nobler than thy 
 circumstances ! Spread but the mist of obscure feeling over 
 any form, and even a woman incapable of blessing or of injury 
 to thee shall be welcomed with an intensity of emotion ade- 
 quate to the reception of the Redeemer of the world !" 
 
 To a creature so highly, so fearfully gifted, who, alienated as 
 he is by a sorcery scarcely less mysterious than the nature on 
 which it is exercised, yet like the fabled son of Jove in the 
 evil day of his sensual bewitchment, lifts the spindles and dis- 
 taffs of Omphale with the arm of a giant. Truth is self-restora- 
 tion : for that which is the correlative of Truth, the existence 
 of absolute Life, is the only object which can attract towards it 
 the whole depth and mass of his fluctuating Being, and alone 
 therefore can unite Calmness with Elevation. But it must be 
 Truth without alloy and unsophisticated. It is by the agency 
 of indistinct conceptions, as the counterfeits of the Ideal and 
 Transcendent, that evil and vanity exercise their tyranny on 
 the feelings of man. The Powers of Darkness are politic if 
 not wise ; but surely nothing can be more irrational in the pre-
 
 30 
 
 tended children of Light, than to enlist themselves under the 
 banners of Truth, and yet rest their hopes on an alliance with 
 Delusion. 
 
 Among the numerous artifices, by which austere truths are 
 to be softened down into palateable falsehoods, and Virtue and 
 Vice, like the atoms of Epicurus, to receive that insensible 
 clinamen which is to make them meet each other half way, I 
 have an especial dislike to the expression, Pious Frauds. 
 Piety indeed shrinks from the very phrase, as an attempt to 
 mix poison with the cup of Blessing : while the expediency of 
 the measures which this phrase was framed to recommend or 
 palliate, appears more and more suspicious, as the range of our 
 experience widens, and our acquaintance with the records of 
 History becomes more extensive and accurate. One of the 
 most seductive arguments of Infidelity grounds itself on the 
 numerous passages in the works of the Christian Fathers, as- 
 serting the lawfulness of Deceit for a good purpose. That the 
 Fathers held, almost without exception, "That wholly without 
 breach of duty it is allowed to the Teachers and heads of the 
 Christian Church to employ artifices, to intermix falsehoods 
 with truths, and especially to deceive the enemies of the faith, 
 provided only they hereby serve the interests of Truth and the 
 advantage of mankind,"* is the unwilling confession of Rieof: 
 (Program, de Oeconomia Patrum.) St. Jerom, as is shewn by 
 the citations of this learned Theologian, boldly attributes this 
 management (falsitatem dispensativam) even to the Apostles 
 themselves. But why speak I of the advantage given to the 
 opponents of Christianity? Alas! to this doctrine chiefly, and 
 to the practices derived from it, we must attribute the utter 
 
 * Intes^nim omnino Dodorihiis ct ccetus Christiani Antistitibus esse, id dolos 
 versent, falsa veris intcrrniscant et imprimis religionis hostes J'uUani, elummodo 
 veritatis commodis et idilitati inservant. — I ti'iist, I need not udd, tliat tliu iiu- 
 j)iitatioii of such principles of actii^n to the first insjjired Propagators of 
 Christianity, is fonndod on the gross niisconstruction of tliose passages in the 
 writings of St. I'anl, in wliich the necessity of employing different argu- 
 ments to men of different cajtacities and prejudices, is supposed and acceded 
 to. In other words, St. Paul strove to speak intelligibly, willingly sacrificed 
 indifferent things to matters of importance, and acted courteously as a man, 
 in order to win attention as an Ai)ostlc. A traveller prefers for daily use the 
 coin of the nation through wliich ho is passing, to bullion or th<^ mintage of 
 his own countiy: and is this to justify n succeeding trnvelier in (ha use of 
 counterfeit coin ?
 
 31 
 
 corruption of the Religion itself for so many ages, and even 
 now over so large a portion of the civilized world. By a sys- 
 tem of accommodating Truth to Falsehood, the Pastors of the 
 Church gradually changed the life and light of the Gospel into 
 the very superstitions which they were commissioned to disperse, 
 and thus paganized Christianity in order to christen Paganism. 
 At this very hour Europe groans and bleeds in consequence. 
 
 So much in proof and exemplification of the probable expedi- 
 ency of pious deception, as suggested by its known and record- 
 ed consequences. An honest man, however, possesses a clear- 
 er light than that of History. He knows, that by sacrificing 
 the law of his reason to the maxim of pretended prudence, he 
 purchases the sword with the loss of the arm that is to wield it. 
 The duties which we owe to our own moral being, are the 
 ground and condition of all other duties; and to set our nature 
 at strife with itself for a good purpose, implies the same sort of 
 prudence, as a priest of Diana would have manifested, who 
 should have proposed to dig up the celebrated charcoal foun- 
 dations of the mighty Temple of Ephesus, in order to furnish 
 fuel for the burnt-offerings on its altars. Truth, Virtue and 
 Happiness, may be distinguished from each other, but cannot 
 be divided. They subsist by a mutual co-inherance, which 
 gives a shadow of divinity even to our human nature. " Will 
 ye speak deceitfully for God ?" is a searching question, which 
 most affectingly represents the grief and impatience of an un- 
 corrupted mind at perceiving a good cause defended by ill 
 means : and assuredly if any temptation can provoke a well-regu- 
 lated temper to intolerance, it is the shameless assertion, that 
 Truth and Falsehood are indifferent in their own natures ; that 
 the former is as often injurious (and therefore criminal) and the 
 latter on many occasions as beneficial (and consequently meri- 
 torious) as the former. 
 
 I feel it incumbent on me, therefore, to place immediately be- 
 fore my Readers in the fullest and clearest light, the whole 
 question of moral obligation respecting the communication of 
 Truth, its extent and conditions. I would fain obviate all ap- 
 prehensions either of my incaution on the one hand, or of any 
 insincere reserve on the other, by proving that the more strictly 
 we adhere to the Letter of the moral law in this respect, the 
 more completely shall we reconcile the law with prudence ; 
 thus securing a purity in the principle without mischief from
 
 32 
 
 fhe practice. I would not, I could not dare, address my coun- 
 trymen as a Friend, if I might not justify the assumption of that 
 sacred title by more than mere veracity, by open-heartedness. 
 Pleasure, most often delusive, may be born of delusion. Pleas- 
 ure, herself a sorceress, may pitch her tents on enchanted ground. 
 But Happiness (or, to use a far more accurate as well as more 
 comprehensive term, solid Well-being) can be built on Virtue 
 alone, and must of necessity have Truth for its foundation. 
 Add to the known fact that the meanest of men feels himself 
 insulted by an unsuccessful attempt to deceive him ; and hates 
 and despises the man who had attempted it. What place then 
 is left in the heart for Virtue to build on, if in any case we may 
 dare practice on others what we should feel as a cruel and con- 
 temptuous wrong in our own persons ? Every parent possesses 
 the opportunity of observing, how deeply children resent the 
 injury of a delusion ; and if men laugh at the falsehoods that 
 were imposed on themselves during their childhood, it is be- 
 cause they are not good and wise enough to contemplate the 
 past in the present, and so to produce by a virtuous and thought- 
 ful sensibility that continuity in their self-consciousness, which 
 Nature has made the law of their animal life. Ingratitude, sen- 
 suality, and hardness of heart, all flow from this source. Men 
 are ungrateful to others only when they have ceased to look 
 back on their former selves with joy and tenderness. They 
 exist in fragments. Annihilated as to the Past, they are dead 
 to the Future, or seek for the proofs of it everywhere, only not 
 (where alone they can be found) in themselves. A contem- 
 poraiy Poet has expressed and illustrated this sentiment with 
 equal fineness of thought and tenderness of feeling : 
 
 My heart leaps up when I l)eliold 
 
 A rain-how in the sky ? 
 So was it, when my life began ; 
 So is it now I am a man ; 
 So let it he, when I grow old, 
 
 Or let mc die. 
 The Child is Father of the Man, 
 And I icoxdd tvish. my days to be 
 Bound each to each by natural piety* 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 * I am informed, that these very lines have been rited, as a specimen of 
 despicable puerility. So much the worse for the citer. Not willingly in his
 
 Alas ! the pernicious influence of this lax morality" t»"ii» i^^ 
 from the nursery and the school to the cabinet and senate. It 
 is a common weakness with men in power, who have used dis- 
 simulation successfully, to form a passion for the use of it, dupes 
 to the love of duping ! A pride is flattered by these lies. He 
 who fancies that he must be perpetually stooping down to the 
 prejudices of his fellow-creatures, is perpetually reminding 
 and re-assuring himself of his own vast superiority to them. 
 But no real greatness can long co-exist with deceit. The 
 whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to noble ener- 
 gies ; and he who is not earnestly sincere, lives in but half his 
 being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed. 
 
 The latter part of the proposition, which has drawn me into 
 this discussion, that 1 mean in which the morality of intention- 
 al falsehood is asserted, may safely be trusted to the Reader's 
 own moral sense. Is it a groundless apprehension, that the 
 patrons and admirers of such publications may receive the pun- 
 ishment of their indiscretion in the conduct of their sons and 
 daughters ? The suspicion of methodism must be expected by 
 every man of rank and fortune, who carries his examination 
 respecting the books which are to lie on his breakfast-table, 
 farther than to their freedom from gross verbal indecencies, and 
 broad avowals of atheism in the title-page. For the existence 
 of an intelligent first cause may be ridiculed in the notes of 
 one poem, or placed doubtfully as one of two or three possible 
 hypotheses, in the very opening of another poem, and both be 
 considered as works of safe promiscuous reading "virginibus 
 puerisque :" and this too by many a father of a family, who 
 would hold himself highly culpable in permitting his child to 
 
 presence would I beliold the sun setting behind our mountains, or listen to a 
 tale of distress or virtue; I should bo ashamed of the quiet tear on my own 
 cheek. But let the dead l)ury the dead ! The Poet sang for tlie Living, Of 
 what value indeed, to a sane mind, are the likings or disJikings of one man, 
 grounded on the mere assertions of another ? Opinions formed fiom opin- 
 ions — what are they, but clouds sailing under clouds, which inij)ress shadows 
 upon shadows ? 
 
 Funguin pclle procul, jubeo ! nam quid mihi fungo? 
 Conveninnt stomacho non minus ista suo. 
 I was a'vvays i»leased with the motto placed under the figure of the Rose- 
 mary in old llerbals: 
 
 Sus, apage! Ilaud tibi spiro.
 
 / 
 
 the praejtiits of familiar acquaintance with a person of loose ha- 
 bits, and think it even criminal to receive into his house a 
 private tutor without a previous inquiry concerning his opin- 
 ions and principles, as well as his manners and outward conduct. 
 How little I am an enemy to free inquiry of the boldest kind, 
 and where the authors have differed the most widely from my 
 own convictions and the general faith of mankind, provided 
 only, the enquiry be conducted with that seriousness, which 
 naturally accompanies the love of truth, and that it is evidently 
 intended for the perusal of those only, who may be presumed 
 to be capable of weighing the arguments, I shall have abund- 
 ant occasion of proving, in the course of this work. Qiiin 
 ipsa philosophia talibus e disputationibus non nisi beneficium 
 recipit. Nam si vera proponit homo ingeniosus veritatisque 
 amanSy nova ad earn accessio fiet : sin falsa, refutatione eorum 
 priores tanto magis stabilientur .* Galilei Syst. Cosm. p. 42. 
 
 The assertion, that truth is often no less dangerous than 
 falsehood, sounds less offensively at the first hearing, only be- 
 cause it hides its deformity in an equivocation, or double mean- 
 ing of the word truth. What may be rightly affirmed of truth, 
 used as synonymous with verbal accuracy, is transferred to it 
 in its higher sense of veracity. By verbal truth we mean no 
 more than the correspondence of a given fact to given words. 
 In moral truth, we involve likewise the intention of the speak- 
 er, that his words should correspond to his thoughts in the 
 sense in which he expects them to be understood by others : 
 and in this latter import we are always supposed to use the 
 word, whenever we speak of truth absolutely, or as a possible 
 subject of a moral merit or demerit. It is verbally true, that in 
 the sacred Scriptures it is written : " As is the good, so is the 
 sinner, and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath. A 
 man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to 
 drink, and to be merry. For there is one event unto all : the 
 living know they shall die, but the dead know not any thing, 
 neither have they any more a reward." But he who should 
 
 * (Translation.) — Moreover, Pliilosoph}' itself cannot hut derive benefit from 
 such discussions. For if a man of genius and a lover of Truth brings just 
 positions before the Public, there is a fiesh accession to the stock of Philo- 
 Pf)phic Insight; but if erroneous positions, the former Truths will by their 
 confutation be establisjied so much the jnore firnilv.
 
 35 
 
 repeat these words, with this assurance, to an ignorant man in 
 the hour uf his temptation, lingering at the door of the ale- 
 house, or hesitating as to the testimony required of him in the 
 court of justice, would, spite of this verbal truth, be a liar, 
 and the murderer of his brother's conscience. Veracity, there- 
 fore, not mere accuracy ; to convey truth, not merel}^ to say 
 it ; is the point of duty in dispute : and the only difficulty in 
 the mind of an honest man arises from the doubt, whether 
 more than veracity (i. e. the truth and nothing but the truth) 
 is not demanded of him by the law of conscience ; whether it 
 does not exact simjilicity ; that is, the truth only, and the 
 whole truth. If we can solve this difficulty, if we can deter- 
 mine the conditions under which the law of universal reason 
 commands the communication of the truth independently of con- 
 sequences altogether, we shall then be enabled to judge wheth- 
 er there is any such probability of evil consequences from such 
 communication, as can justify the assertion of its occasional 
 criminality, as can perplex us in the conception, or disturb us 
 in the performance, of our duty. 
 
 The conscience, or effective reason, commands the design of 
 conveying an adequate notion of the thing spoken of, when this 
 is practicable : but at all events a right notion, or none at all. 
 A school-master is under the necessity of teaching a certain 
 rule in simple arithmetic empirically, (do so and so, and the 
 sum will always prove true) the necessary truth of the rule 
 (i. e. that the rule having been adhered to, the sum must al- 
 ways prove true) requiring a knowledge of the higher mathe- 
 matics for its demonstration. He, however, conveys a right 
 notion, though he cannot convey the adequate one. 

 
 E88AY VI. 
 
 Uolvfiad-lij xu'qiu i^iEV McpeXtsi, y.u'qra 8e (HaitiBno'v e'xovTa 'wcfeX6Ei> 
 fiep TO V dt^Lo" t' "ui'dQix, ^Xu'niei, ds to' v ^rjtdiwg q)0)rev~viu nav Unog 
 xul iv Tiavil 8 rf 1.1(0. Xqif 8e xuioov' /ust^u si8eyuf oocpiijg )'uQ ou'^iog, 
 "oQog, "oi 8e ti.01 xutoov' Qtfaif jnovaixifv TTSTiPVftsi'Mg 'utiaojuif, d" u 
 nuQu8exovTui iv UQyirj yro)' fjyv, uheiv 8^ (melius utiiijr) t/ovav fio)giug. 
 
 Heraclitus apud Stobceum, (Serm. xxxiv. 
 
 Ed. Lgd. p. 216.; 
 
 ( Trcmslfdion.) — General Knowledge and ready Talent maybe of verygi'eat 
 benefit, but they may likewise be of very great disservice to the possessor. 
 They are highly advantageous to the man of sound judgment, and dexterous 
 in applying thein ; but tlicy injure your fluent holder-fortli on all sulyects in 
 all companies. It is necessary to know the measures of the time and occa- 
 sion : for this is the very boundary of wisdom — (that by which it is defined, 
 and distinguished from mere ability.) But he, who without regard to the un- 
 fitness of the time and the audience "will soar in the high reason of his fan- 
 cies with his garland and singing rjbes about him," will not acquire the credit 
 of seriousness amidst frivolity, but will be condenmed for his silliness, as the 
 greatest idler of the company because the most unseasonable. 
 
 The Moral Law, it has J)een shewn, permits an inadequate 
 communication of unsophisticated jruth, on the condition that 
 it alone is practicable, and binds us to silence when neither is 
 in our power. We must first enquire then. What is necessary 
 to constitute, and what may allowably accompany, a right though 
 inadequate notion .'' And secondly, what are the circumstances, 
 from which we may deduce the impracticability of conveying 
 even a right notion ; the presence or absence of which circum- 
 stances it therefore becomes our duty to ascertain .'' In answer 
 to the first question, the conscience demands : 1. That it should 
 be the wish and design of the mind to convey the truth only ;
 
 S7 
 
 that if in addition to the negative loss implied in its inadequate- 
 ness, the notion communicated should lead to any positive error, 
 the cause should lie in the fault or defect of the Recipient, not 
 of the Communicator, whose paramount duty, whose inaliena- 
 ble right it is to preserve his own Integrity * the integral char- 
 acter of his own moral Being. Self-respect ; the reverence 
 which he owes to the presence of Humanity in the person of 
 his neighbor ; the reverential upholding of the faith of man in 
 man ; gratitude for the particular act of confidence ; and reli- 
 gious awe for the divine purposes in the gift of language ; are 
 duties too sacred and important to be sacrificed to the guesses 
 of an individual, concerning the advantages to be gained by 
 the breach of them. 2. It is further required, that the suppos- 
 ed error shall not be such as will pervert or materially vitiate 
 the imperfect truth, in communicating which we had unwilling- 
 ly, though not perhaps unwittingly, occasioned it. A Barbari- 
 an so instructed in the power and intelligence of the Infinite 
 Being as to be left Avholly ignorant of his moral attributes, 
 would have acquired none but erroneous notions even of the 
 former. At the very best, he would gain only a theory to sa- 
 tisfy his curiosity with ; but more probably, would deduce the 
 belief of a Moloch or a Baal. (For the idea of an irresistible 
 
 *The best and most forcible sense of a word is often tbat, wbich is con- 
 tained in its Etymology. The Author of the Poems ( The Sij7iagog^ue) fre- 
 quently affixed to Herbert's " Temple," gives the original purport of the 
 word Integrity, in the following lines (fourth stanza of the eighth Poem.) ' 
 
 Next to Sincerity, remember still, 
 
 Thou must resolve upon Integrity. 
 
 God will have all thou hast, thy mind, thy will. 
 
 Thy thoughts, thy words, thy works. 
 
 And again, after some verses on Constancy and Humility, the Poem con- 
 cludes with — 
 
 He tliat desires to sec 
 The face of God, in his religion must 
 Sincere, entire, constant and huml)le be. 
 
 Having mentioned tiie name of Herbed, that model of a man, a Gentle- 
 man, and a Clergyman, let me add, that the quaintness of some of his 
 thoughts not of his diction, than which nothing can be more pure, manly, 
 and unaffected, has blinded modern readers to the great general merit of his 
 Poenjs, which are for tha most part exquisite in their kind.
 
 38 
 
 invisible Being naturally produces terror in the mind of unin- 
 structed and unprotected man, and with terror there will be 
 associated whatever had been accustomed to excite it, as anger, 
 vengeance, &c. ; as is proved by the Mythology of all barba- 
 rous nations.) This must be the case with all organized truths; 
 the component parts derive their significance from the idea of 
 the whole. Bolingbroke removed Love, Justice, and Choice, 
 from Power and Intelligence, and yet pretended to have left 
 unimpaired the conviction of a Deity. He might as consistent- 
 ly have paralyzed the optic nerve, and then excused himself by 
 affirming, that he had, however, not touched the eye. 
 
 The third condition of a right though inadequate notion is, 
 that the error occasioned be greatly outweighed by the impor- 
 tance of the truth communicated. The rustic would have little 
 reason to thank the philosopher, who should give him true con- 
 ceptions of the folly of believing in ghosts, omens, dreams, &c. 
 at the price of abandoning his faith in Providence and in the 
 continued existence of his fellow-creatures after their death. 
 The teeth of the old serpent planted by the Cadmuses of French 
 Literature, under Lewis XV. produced a plenteous crop of 
 Philosophers and Truth-trumpeters of this kind, in the reign 
 of his Successor. They taught many truths, historical, political, 
 physiological, and ecclesiastical, and diffused their notions so 
 widely, that the very ladies and hair-dressers of Paris became 
 fluent Encyclopedists : and the sole price which their scholars 
 paid for these treasures of new information, was to believe 
 Christianity an imposture, the Scriptures a forgery, the worship 
 (if not the belief) of God superstition, hell a fable, heaven a 
 dream, our life without Providence, and our death without hope. 
 They became as gods as soon as the fruit of this Upas tree of 
 knowledge and liberty had opened their eyes to perceive that 
 they were no more than beasts — somewhat more cunning per- 
 haps, and abundantly more mischievous. What can be conceiv- 
 ed more natural than the result, — that self-acknowledged beasts 
 should first act, and next suffer themselves to be treated as 
 beasts. We judge by comparison. To exclude the great is to 
 magnify the little. The disbelief of essential wisdom and good- 
 ness, necessarily prepares the imagination for the supremacy of 
 cunning with malignity. Folly and vice have their appropriate 
 religions, as well as virtue and true knowledge; and in some
 
 39 
 
 way or other fools will dance round the golden calf, and wicked 
 men beat their timbrels and kettle-drums 
 
 To Moloch, horrid king, besmeared wiih blood 
 Of human sacrifice and paient's tears. 
 
 My feelings have led me on, and in my illustration I had 
 almost lost from my view the subject to be illustrated. One 
 condition yet remaims : that the error foreseen shall not be of 
 a kind to prevent or impede the after acquirement of that 
 knowledge which will remove it. Observe, how graciously 
 Nature instructs her human children. She cannot give us the 
 knowledge derived from sight without occasioning us at first to 
 mistake images of reflection for substances. But the very con- 
 sequences of the delusion lead inevitably to its detection ; and 
 out of the ashes of the error rises a new flower of knowledge. 
 We not only see, but are enabled to discover by what means 
 we see. So too we are under the necessity, in given cir- 
 cumstances, of mistaking a square for a round object: but 
 ere the mistake can have any practical consequences, it is not 
 only removed, but in its removal gives us the symbol of a new 
 fact, that of distance. In a similar train of thought, though more 
 fancifully, I might have elucidated the preceding condition, and 
 have referred our hurrying enlighteners and revolutionary am- 
 putators to the gentleness of Nature, in the oak and the beech, 
 the dry foliage of which she pushes off only by the propulsion 
 of the new buds, that supply its place. My friends! a cloth- 
 ing even of withered leaves is better than bareness. 
 
 Having thus determined the nature and conditions of a right 
 notion, it remains to determine the circumstances which tend 
 to render the communication of it impracticable, and oblige 
 us of course, to abstain from the attempt — oblige us not to 
 convey falsehood under the pretext of saying truth. These 
 circumstances, it is plain, must consist either in natural or mo- 
 ral impediments. The former, including the obA'ious gradations 
 of constitutional insensibility and derangement, preclude all 
 temptation to misconduct, as well as all probability of ill-con- 
 sequences from accidental oversight, on the part of the commu- 
 nicator. Far otherwise is it with the impediments from moral 
 causes. These demand all the attention and forecast of the 
 genuine lovers of truth in the matter, the manner, and the time 
 of their communications, public and private; and these are the
 
 40 
 
 ordinary materials of the vain and the factious, determine them 
 in the choice of their audiences and of their arguments, and to 
 each argument give powers not its own. They are distinguish- 
 able into two sources, the streams from which, however, must 
 often become confluent, viz. hindrances from ignorance (I 
 here use the word in relation to the habits of reasoning as well 
 as to the previous knowledge requisite for the due comprehen- 
 sion of the subject) and hindrances from predominant pas5io?is.* 
 From both these the law of conscience commands us to ab- 
 stain, because such being the ignorance and such the passions 
 of the supposed auditors, we ought to deduce the impractica- 
 bility of conveying not onlj^ adequate but even right notions of 
 our own convictions : much less does it permit us to avail our- 
 selves of the causes of this impracticability in order to procure 
 nominal proselytes, each of whom will have a difterent, and all 
 a false, conception of those notions that were to be conveyed 
 for their truth's sake alone. Whatever is (or but for some de- 
 fect in our moral character would have been) foreseen as pre- 
 venting the conveyance of our thoughts, makes the attempt an 
 act of self-contradiction : and whether the faulty cause exist in 
 our choice of unfit words or our choice of unfit auditors, the 
 result is the same and so is the guilt. We have voluntarily 
 communicated falsehood. 
 
 Thus (without reference to consequences^ if only one short 
 digression be excepted) from the sole principle of self-consist- 
 ence or moral integrity, we have evolved the clue of right 
 reason, which we are bound to follow in the communication of 
 truth. Now then we appeal to the judgment and experience 
 of the reader, whether he who most faithfully adheres to the 
 letter of the law of conscience will not likewise act in strictest 
 correspondence to the maxims of prudence and sound policy. 
 I am at least unable to recollect a single instance, either in his- 
 tory or in my personal experience, of a preponderance of in- 
 jurious consequences from the publication of any truth, under 
 the observance of the moral conditions above stated : much less 
 can I even imagine any case, in which truth, as truth, can be 
 pernicious. But if the assertor of the indifferency of truth and 
 falsehood in their own natures, attempt to justify his position 
 
 * See the Author's Secoml Lay Sermon, from p. 10 to p. 2.'5.
 
 41 
 
 by confining the word truth, in the first instance, to the cor- 
 respondence of given words to given facts, without reference 
 to the total impression left by such words ; what is this more 
 than to assert, that articulated sounds are things of moral in- 
 differency ? and that we may relate a fact accurately and nev- 
 ertheless deceive grossly and wickedly ? Blifil related accu- 
 rately Tom Jones's riotous joy during his benefactor's illness, 
 only omitting that this joy was occasioned by the physician's 
 having pronounced him out of danger. Blifil was not the less 
 a liar for being an accurate matter-of-fact liar. Tell-truths in 
 the service of falsehood we find every where, of various names 
 and various occupations, from the elderly young women that 
 discuss the love-afi'airs of their friends and acquaintance at the 
 village tea-tables, to the anonymous calumniators of literary 
 merit in reviews, and the more darling malignants, who dole 
 out discontent, innovation and panic, in political journals : and a 
 most pernicious race of liars they are ! But who ever doubted 
 it ? Why should our moral feelings be shocked, and the holiest 
 words with all their venerable associations be profaned, in or- 
 der to bring forth a Truism ? But thus it is for the most part 
 with the venders of startling paradoxes. In the sense in which 
 they are to gain for their author the character of a bold and 
 original thinker, they are false even to absurdity ; and the sense 
 in which they are true and harmless, conveys so mere a Tru- 
 ism, that it even borders on Nonsense. How often have we 
 heard "The Rights of Man — hurra! The Sovereign- 
 ty OF the People — hurra !" roared out by men who, if call- 
 ed upon in another place and before another audience, to ex- 
 plain themselves, would give to the words, a meaning, in which 
 the most monarchical of their political opponents would admit 
 them to be true, but which would contain nothing new, or 
 strange, or stimulant, nothing to flatter the pride or kindle the 
 passions of the populace. 
 
 6
 
 E8SAY YII. 
 
 .^/ profanum vvlgiis lectorum quomodo arcendum est ? Lihnsne nostris juhca- 
 mit^, ut coram indignu obmutescant ? Si Unguis, ut dicitur, emoiluis utamWy 
 eheu ! ingenium quoque nobis emortuum jacet : sin aliter, Mmervce secreta eras- 
 sis ludihrium divtdgamus, d Dianam nostrum impuris hvjus swcidi Adaonihns 
 nudam proferimus. Rtspondeo : — ad incommoditates knjusmodi evitandas, 
 ntc Greece nee Latini scrihere opus est. SiiJUciet, nos sicca luce usos fuisse et 
 stnctiore argumentandi methodo. Siifficiet, innoeenter, utUiter scripsisse : even- 
 tus est apud lectorem. JVuper eynptum est a nobis Ciceronianum istud " de 
 ojficiis,'" opus quod semper pwne Christiano dignum putabamus. Mirinn ! libel- 
 lus factum J'uerat famosissimus. Credisne ? Vix : at quomodo ? Maligna 
 quodam, nescio quem, plena margine et super tergo, annotatum est et exeinplis, 
 calwmiiis potius, superfmtatum ! Sic et qui introrsum xiritur hiflammationes 
 aninii vel Catonianis (ne dicam, sacrosanctis) paginis accipit. Omni aiwd 
 mons, omnibus scriptis mens, igniia vcscitur. 
 
 RuDOLPHi Langii Epist: ad Amicuin qnemdam Italicum in qua 
 Lingute patrifie et hodierna> usiim dcfenilit et cniditis coinmendat. 
 
 JVec me fcdlit, ut in corponbus hominum sic in animis multiplici passione affectis, 
 medicamenta verborum multis inefficacia visum in. Sed nee illud quoque me 
 pndeiit, ut inviiihihs animorum 7norbos, sic invisibilia esse rcmedia. Falsis 
 opinionibus circumventi veris senteidiis liberandi sunt, ut qui audiendo ceci- 
 dcrant audiendo consurgant. 
 
 Petrarcha : Piefat. in lib. de renied. utriusqiie fortima?. 
 
 (Translation.) But liow are we to jruard against tlie herd of promiscuous 
 Readers? Can we bid our books he silent in the presence of the unworthy? 
 If we employ what are called the dead languages, our own geuiu.'^, alas! 
 becomes fljit and t]v;\i\ : and if we emi)ody our thoughts in the words native 
 to them or in which they were conceived, we divulge the secrets of Miner- 
 va to the ridicule of blockheads, and expose our Diana to tlic Actirons of a 
 sensual age. I reply : that in order to avoid inconvejiienccs of this kind, we 
 need write neither in Greek or in Latin. It will be enougli, if we abstain 
 from ajtpealing to the bad passions and low appetites, and confine ourselves 
 to a strictly consequent method of reasoning. 
 
 To iiave written innocently, and for wise purj)oses, is all that can be re- 
 quired of us: the event lies with the Reader. I purchased lately Cicero's
 
 4n 
 O 
 
 work, de officiis, which I had always considered us iihiiost worthy of a 
 Christian. To my surprize it had i)econie a most flagrant hbel. Nay ! but 
 liow? — Some one, I know not who, out of the fruitfulness of his own maUg- 
 nity had tilled all the margins and other blank spaces with annotations — a 
 true supeifatation of examples, that is, of false and slanderous tales! In like 
 manner, the slave of impure desires will turn the pages of Cato, not to say. 
 Scripture itself, into occasions and excitements of wanton imaginations. 
 There is no wind but feeds a volcano, no work but feeds and fans a combus- 
 tible mind. 
 
 I am well aware, that words will appear to many as inefficacious medi- 
 cines when administered to minds agitated with manifold passions, as when 
 they are muttered by way of charm over bodily ailments. But neither does 
 it escape me, on the other hand, tliat as the diseases of the mind are invisi- 
 ble, invisble must the remedies likewise be. Those who have been entrapped 
 by false opinions are to be liberated by convincing truths: that thus having im- 
 bibed the poison through the car they may receive the antidote by the same 
 channel. 
 
 That our elder writers, to Jeremy Taylor inclusive, quoted 
 to excess, it would be the very blindness of partiality to deny. 
 More than one might be mentioned, whose works might be char- 
 acterized in the words of Milton, as "a paroxysm of citations, 
 pampered metaphors, and aphorisming pedantry." On the oth- 
 er hand, it seems to me that we now avoid quotations with an 
 anxiety that oil'ends in the contrary extreme. Yet it is the beau- 
 ty and independent worth of the citations far more than their 
 appropriateness which have made Johnson's Dictionary popular 
 even as a reading book — and the niottos with the translations 
 of them are known to add considerably to the value of the 
 Spectator. With this conviction I have taken more than com- 
 mon pains in the selection of the mottos for the Friend : and of 
 two mottos equally appropriate prefer always that froin the book 
 which is least likely to have come into my Reader's hands. 
 For I often please myself with the fancy, now that I may have 
 saved from oblivion the only striking passage in a whole volume, 
 and now that I may have attracted notice to a writer undeserve- 
 dly forgotten. If this should be attributed to a silly ambition in 
 the display of various reading, I can do no more than deny any 
 consciousness of having been so actuated : and for the rest, I 
 must console myself by the reflection, tltat if it be one of the 
 most foolish, it is at the same time one of the most harmless, of 
 human vanities.
 
 44 
 
 The passages prefixed lead at once to the question, which 
 will probably have more than once occurred to the reflecting 
 reader of the preceding Essay. How will these rules apply to 
 the most important mode of communication ? to that, in which 
 one man may utter his thoughts to myriads of men at the same 
 time, and to myriads of myriads at various times and through 
 successions of generations ? How do they apply to authors, 
 whose foreknowledge assuredly does not inform them who, or 
 how many, or of what description their Readers will be ? 
 How do these rules apply to books, which once published, are 
 as likely to fall in the way of the incompetent as of the judi- 
 cious, and will be fortunate indeed if they are not many times 
 looked at through the thick mists of ignorance, or amid the glare 
 of prejudice and passion ? — We answer in the first place, that 
 this is not universally true. The readers are not seldom picked 
 and chosen. Relations of certain pretended miracles performed 
 a few years ago, at Holywell, in consequence of prayers to the 
 Virgin Mary, on female servants, and these relations moralized 
 by the old Roman Catholic arguments without the old protest- 
 ant answers, have to my knowledge been sold by travelling 
 pedlars in villages and farm-houses, not only in a form which 
 placed them within the reach of the narrowest means, but sold 
 at a price less than their prime cost, and doubtless, thrown in 
 occasionally as the make-weight in a bargain of pins and stay- 
 tape. Shall I be told, that the publishers and reverend au- 
 thorizers of these base and vulgar delusions had exerted no 
 choice as to the purchasers and readers? But waiving this, or 
 rather having first pointed it out, as an important exception, we 
 further reply : that if the Autlior have clearly and rightly es- 
 tablished in his own mind the class of readers, to which he 
 means to address his communications ; and if both in this 
 choice, and in the particulars of the manner and matter of his 
 work, he conscientiously observes all the conditions which rea- 
 son and conscience have been shewn to dictate, in relation to 
 those for whom the work was designed ; he will, in most in- 
 stances, have effected his design and realized the desired cir- 
 cumscription. 'J'he posthumous work of Spinoza [Ethica or- 
 dine geometrico demonstrata) may, indeed, accidentally fall into 
 the hands of an incompetent reader. But (not to mention, 
 that it is written in a dead language) it will be entirely harm- 
 less, because it must needs be utterly unintelligible. I ven-
 
 45 
 
 ture to assert, that the whole first book, De Deo, might be read 
 in literal English translation to any congregation in the kingdom, 
 and that no individual, who had not been habituated to the 
 strictest and most laborious processes of reasoning, would even 
 suspect its orthodoxy or piety, however heavily the few who 
 listened would complain of its obscurity and want of interest. 
 This, it may be objected, is an extreme case. But it is not 
 so for the present purpose. We are speaking of the probability 
 of injurious consequences from the communication of Truth. 
 This I have denied, if the right means have been adopted, and 
 the necessary conditions adhered to, for its actual communica- 
 tion. Now the truths conveyed in a book are either evident of 
 themselves, or such as require a train of deductions of proof: 
 and the latter will be either such as are authorized and gener- 
 ally received ; or such as are in opposition to received and au- 
 thorized opinions ; or lastly, truths presented for the appropri- 
 ate test of examination, and still under trial (adhuc sub lite.) 
 Of this latter class I affirm, that in neither of the three sort can 
 an instance be brought of a preponderance of ill-consequences, 
 or even of an equilibrium of advantage and injury from a work, 
 in which the understanding alone has been appealed to, by re- 
 sults fairly deduced from just premises, in terms strictly appro- 
 priate. Alas ! legitimate reasoning is impossible without severe 
 thinking, and thinking is neither an easy nor an amusing em- 
 ployment. The reader, who would follow a close reasoner to 
 the summit and absolute principle of any one important subject, 
 has chosen a Chamois-hunter for his guide. Our guide will, 
 indeed, take us the shortest way, will save us many a weari- 
 some and perilous wandering, and warn us of many a mock road 
 that had formerly led himself to the brink of chasms and preci- 
 pices, or at best in an idle circle to the spot from whence he 
 started. But he cannot carry us on his shoulders : we must 
 strain our own sinews, as he has strained his ; and make firm 
 footing on the smooth rock for ourselves, by the blood of toil 
 from our own feet. Examine the journals of our humane and 
 zealous missionaries in Hindostan. How often and how feel- 
 ingly do they describe the ditiicuUy of maicing the simplest 
 chain of reasoning intelligible to the ordinary natives : the ra- 
 pid exhaustion of their whole power of attention, and with what 
 pain and distressful effort it is exerted, while it lasts. Yet it is 
 among this class, that the hideous practices of self-tortur« chief-
 
 46 
 
 ly, indeed almost exclusively, prevail. if folly were no easier 
 than wisdom, it being often so very much more grievous, how 
 certainly might not these miserable men be converted to Chris- 
 tianity ? But alas ! to swing by hooks passed through the back, 
 or to walk on shoes with nails of iron pointed upward on the 
 soles, all this is so much less ditficult, demands so very inferior 
 an exertion of the w ill than to tfmik, and by thought to gain 
 Knowledge and Tranquility ! 
 
 It is not true, that ignorant persons have no notion of the 
 advantages of Truth and Knowledge. They confess, they see 
 those advantages in the conduct, the immunities, and the supe- 
 rior powers of the possessors. Were these attainable by Pil- 
 grimages the most toilsome, or Penances the most painful, we 
 should assuredly have as many Pilgrims and as many Self-tor- 
 mentors in the service of true Religion and Virtue, as now ex- 
 ist under the tyranny of Papal or Brahman superstition. This 
 inefficacy of legitimate Reason, from the want of fit objects, 
 this its relative weakness and how narrow at all times its im- 
 mediate sphere of action must be, is proved to us by the impos- 
 tors of all professions. What, I pray, is their fortress, the rock 
 which is both their quarry and their foundation, from which 
 and on which they are built ? The desire of arriving at the 
 end without the effort of thought and will, which are the ap- 
 pointed means. Let us look backwards three or four centuiies. 
 Then, as now, the great mass of mankind were governed by the 
 three main wishes, the wish for vigor of body, including the 
 absence of painful feelings : for wealth, or the power of procur- 
 ing the internal conditions of bodily enjoyment: these during 
 life — and security from pain and continuance of happiness after 
 death. Then, as now, men were desirous to attain them by 
 some eaiser means than those of Temperance, Industry, and 
 strict Justice. They gladly therefore applied to the Priest, who 
 could ensure them happiness hereafter without the performance 
 of their duties here ; to the Lawyer who could make money a 
 substitute for a right cause ; to the Physician, whose medicines 
 promised to take the sting out of the tail of their sensual indul- 
 gences, and let them fondle and play wath vice, as with a 
 charmed serpent ; to the Alchemist, whose gold-tincture would 
 enrich them without toil or economy ; and to the Astrologer, 
 fioni whom they could purchase foresight without knowledge or 
 reflection. The established professions were, without exception, 
 no other than licensed modes of witchcraft. The Wizards,
 
 41 
 
 who would now find their due reward in Bridewell, and their 
 appropriate honors in the pillory, sate then on episcopal thrones, 
 candidates for Saintship, and already canonized in the belief of 
 their deluded contemporaries ; while the one or two real teach- 
 ers and Discoverers of Truth were exposed to the hazard of fire 
 and faggot, a dungeon the best shrine that was vouchsafed to a 
 Roger Bacon and a Galileo ! 
 
 ESSAY VIII. 
 
 Pray, Avhy is it, that people say that men are not such fools now-a-days as they 
 were in the days of yore ? I would fain know, whether you would have us 
 understand by this same saying, as indeed you logically may, that formerly 
 men were fools, and in this generation are grown wise ? How many and 
 what disjjositions made them fools ? How many and what dispositions 
 were wanting to make 'em wise ? Why were those fools ? How should 
 these be wise? Pray, how came you to know that men were formerly 
 fools ? How did you find, that they are now wise ? Who made them fools ? 
 Who in Heaven's name made us wise ? Who d'ye think are most, those 
 that loved mankind foolisii, or those that love it wise? How long has it 
 been wise? How long otherwise? Whence proceeded the foregoing fol- 
 ly ? Whence the following wisdom ? Why did the old folly end now and 
 no later ? Why did the noodern wisdom begin now and no sooner ? What 
 were we the worse for the former folly ? What the better for the suc- 
 ceeding wisdom ? How should the ancient folly have come to nothing? 
 How siiould this same new wisdom be started up and established ? Now 
 
 answer me, an't please you ! 
 
 Fr. Rabelais' Preface to his 5th Book. 
 
 Monsters and Madmen canonized and Galileo blind in a 
 dungeon! It is not so in our times. Heaven be praised, that 
 in this respect, at least, we are, if not better, yetbetter off than 
 our foretathers. But to what, and to whom (under Provi- 
 dence) do we owe the improvement? To any radical change 
 in the moral affections of mankind in general ? Perhaps the
 
 48 
 
 great majority of men are now fully conscious that they are 
 born with the god-like faculty of Reason, and that it is the bu- 
 siness of life to develope and apply it ? The Jacob's ladder of 
 Truth, let down from heaven, with all its numerous rounds, is 
 now the common highway, on which we are content to toil up- 
 ward to the object of our desires ? We are ashamed of expect- 
 ing the end without the means ? In order to answer these 
 questions in the affirmative, I must have forgotten the Animal 
 Magnetists ; the proselytes of Brothers, and of Joanna South- 
 cot ; and some hundred thousand fanatics less original in their 
 creeds, but not a whit more rational in their expectations ! I 
 must forget the infamous Empirics, whose advertisements pol- 
 lute and disgrace all our Newspapers, and almost paper the 
 walls of our cities ; and the vending of whose poisons and poi- 
 sonous drams (with shame and anguish be it spoken) support 
 a shop in every market-town? I must forget that other oppro- 
 brium of the nation, that Mother-vice^ the Lottery ! I must for- 
 get that a numerous class plead Prudence for keeping their 
 fellow-men ignorant and incapable of intellectual enjoyments, 
 and the Revenue for upholding such temptations as men so ig- 
 norant will not withstand — yes! that even senators and officers 
 of state hold forth the Revenue as a sufficient plea for uphold- 
 ing, at every fiftieth door throughout the kingdom, temptations 
 to the most pernicious vices, which fill the land with mourning, 
 and fit the laboring classes for sedition and religious fanaticism! 
 Above all I must forget the first years of the French Revolu- 
 tion, and the millions throughout Europe who confidently ex- 
 pected the best and choicest results of Knowledge and Virtue, 
 namely, Liberty and universal Peace, from the votes of a tu- 
 multuous Assembly — that is, from the mechanical agitation of 
 the air in a large room at Paris — and this too in the most light, 
 unthinking, sensual and profligate of the European nations, a 
 nation, the very phrases of whose language are so composed, 
 that they can scarcely speak without lying ! — No ! Let us not 
 deceive ourselves. Like the man who used to pull off his hat 
 with great demonstration of respect whenever he spoke of 
 himself, we are fond of styling our own the enlightened age : 
 though as Jortin, I think, has wittily remarked, the golden age 
 would be more appropriate. But in spite of our great scien- 
 tific discoveries, for which praise be given to whom the praise 
 is due, and in spite of that general indifference to all the truths
 
 49 
 
 and all the principles of truth, that belong to our permanent 
 being, and therefore do not lie within the sphere of our senses, 
 (that same indifference which makes toleration so easy a virtue 
 with us, and constitutes nine-tenths of our pretended illumina- 
 tion) it still remains the character of the mass of mankind to 
 seek for the attainment of their necessary ends by any means 
 rather than the appointed ones ; and for this cause only, that 
 the latter imply the exertion of the Reason and the Will. But 
 of all things this demands the longest apprenticeship, even 
 an apprenticeship from Infancy ; which is generally neglected, 
 because an excellence, that may and should belong to all men, 
 is expected to come to every man of its own accord. 
 
 To whom then do we owe our ameliorated condition ? To 
 the successive Few in every age (more indeed in one genera- 
 tion than in another, but relatively to the mass of mankind al- 
 ways few) who by the intensity and permanence of their ac- 
 tion have compensated for the limited sphere, within which 
 it is at any one time intelligible ; and whose good deeds pos- 
 terity reverence in their result, though the mode, in which we 
 repair the inevitable waste of time, and the style of our addi- 
 tions, too generally furnish a sad proof, how little we under- 
 stand the principles. I appeal to the Histories of the Jewish, 
 the Grecian, and the Roman Republics, to the Records of the 
 Christian Church, to the History of Europe from the Treaty 
 of Westphalia (1648). What do they contain but accounts of 
 noble structures raised by the wisdom of the few, and gradual- 
 ly undermined by the ignorance and profligacy of the many? 
 If therefore the deficiency of good, which every- where sur- 
 rounds us, orginate in the general unfitness and aversions of 
 men to the process of thought, that is, to continuous reasoning, 
 it must surely be absurd to apprehend a preponderance of evil 
 from works which cannot act at all except as far as they call 
 the reasoning faculties into full co -exertion with them. 
 
 Still, however, there are truths so self-evident or so imme- 
 diately and palpably deduced from those that are, or are ac- 
 knowledged for such, that they are at once intelligible to all 
 men, who possess the common advantages of the social state ; 
 although by sophistry, by evil habits, by the neglect, false 
 persuasions, and impostures of an anti-christian priesthood join- 
 ed in one conspiracy with the violence of tyrannical governors, 
 the understandings of men may become so darkened and their 
 7
 
 50 
 
 consciences so lethargic, that there may arise a necessity for 
 the republication of these truths, and this too with a voice of 
 loud alarm, and impassioned warning. Such were the doc- 
 trines proclaimed by the first Christians to the Pagan world ; 
 such were the lightnings flashed by Wickliff, Huss, Luther, 
 Calvin, Zuinglius, Latimer, &c. across the Papal darkness ; and 
 such in our own times the agitating truths, with which Thomas 
 Clarkson, and his excellent confederates, the Quakers, fought 
 and conquered the legalized banditti of men-stealers, the numer- 
 ous and powerful perpetrators and advocates of rapine, murder, 
 and (of blacker guilt than either) slavery. Truths of this kind 
 being indispensable to man, considered as a moral being, 
 are above all expedience, all accidental consequences : for as 
 sure as God is holy, and man immortal, there can be no evil so 
 great as the ignorance or disregard of them. It is the very 
 madness of mock prudence to oppose the removal of a poison- 
 ed dish on account of the pleasant sauces or nutritious viands 
 which would be lost with it ! The dish contains destruction 
 to that, for which alone we ought to wish the palate to be grati- 
 fied, or the body to be nourished. 
 
 The sole condition, therefore, imposed on us by the law of 
 conscience in these cases is, that we employ no unworthy and 
 heterogeneous means to realize the necessary end, that we en- 
 trust the event wholly to the full and adequate promulgation of 
 the truth, and to those generous aifections which the constitu- 
 tion of our moral nature has linked to the full perception of it. 
 Yet evil may, nay it will be occasioned. Weak men may take 
 offence, and wicked men avail themselves of it; though we 
 must not attribute to the promulgation, or to the truth promul- 
 gated, all the evil, of which wicked men (predetermined, like 
 the wolf in the fable, to create some occasion) may choose to 
 make it the pretext. But that there ever was or ever can be 
 a preponderance of evil, I defy either the Historian to instance 
 or the philosopher to prove. " Let* it fly away, all that chaff 
 of light faith that can fly off" at any breath of temptation ; the 
 cleaner will the true grain be stored up in the granary of the 
 Lord," we are entitled to say with Tertullian : and to ex- 
 
 * Avolent quantum volent palese levis fidei quocunque afflatu tentatinnum ! 
 eo purior nriassa frumenti in horrea doinini reponetur. Tebtclliak.
 
 51 
 
 claim with heroic Luther, " Scandal* and offence ! Talk not 
 to me of scandal and offence. Need breaks through stone- 
 walls, and recks not of scandal. It is my duty to spare weak 
 consciences as far as it may be done without hazard of my soul. 
 Where not, I must take counsel for my soul, though half or the 
 whole world should be scandalized thereby." 
 
 Luther felt and preached and wrote and acted, as beseemed 
 a Luther to feel and utter and act. The truths, which had been 
 outraged, he re-proclaimed in the spirit of outraged truth, at the 
 behest of his conscience and in the service of the God of truth. 
 He did his duty, come good, come evil : and made no question, 
 on which side the preponderance would be. In the one scale 
 there was gold, and the impress thereon the image and super- 
 scription of the Universal Sovereign. In all the wide and ev- 
 er widening commerce of mind with mind throughout the world, 
 it is treason to refuse it. Can this have a counter-weight ? 
 The other scale indeed might have seemed full up to the very 
 balance-yard ; but of what worth and substance were its con- 
 tents ? Were they capable of being counted or weighed against 
 the former? The conscience indeed is already violated when 
 to moral good or evil we oppose things possessing no moral in- 
 terest. Even if the conscience dared waive this her preven- 
 tive veto, yet before we could consider the twofold results in 
 the relations of loss and gain, it must be known whether their 
 kind is the same or equivalent. They must first be valu- 
 ed, and then they may be weighed or counted, if they are 
 worth it. Rut in the particular case at present before us, the 
 loss is contingent, and alien ; the gain essential and the tree's 
 own natural produce. The gain is permanent, and spreads 
 through all times and places ; the loss but temporary and, owing 
 its very being to vice or ignorance, vanishes at the approach of 
 knowledge and moral improvement. The gain reaches all good 
 men, belongs to all that love light and desire an increase of 
 light: to all and of all times, who thank Heaven for the gra- 
 cious dawn, and expect the noon-day ; who welcome the first 
 gleams of spring, and sow their fields in confident faith of the 
 
 * Aergerniss hin, Aergerniss her! Noth bricht Eisen, und hat kein Aerger- 
 niss. Ich soil der solnvachen Gewisseii schonen so fern es ohne Gefahr 
 meiner Seelen geschehn mag. Wo nicht, so soil ich meiuer Seelen rath«n« 
 ©8 argere 6ich daran die ganze oder halba Walt.
 
 52 
 
 ripening summer and the rewarding harvest-tide ! But the los^ 
 is confined to the unenlightened and the prejudiced — say rather, 
 to the weak and the prejudiced of a single generation. The 
 prejudices of one age are condemned even by the prejudiced 
 of the succeeding ages: for endless are the modes of folly, and 
 the fool joins with the wise in passing sentence on all modes 
 but his own. Who cried out with greater horror against the mur- 
 derers of the Prophets, than those who likewise cried out, cruci- 
 fy him ! crucify him ! The truth-haters of every future genera- 
 tion will call the truth-haters of the preceding ages by their 
 true names: for even these the stream of time carries onward. 
 In fine, Truth considered in it itself and in the eifects natural 
 to it, may be conceived as a gentle spring or water-source, 
 warm from the genial earth, and breathing up into the snow 
 drift that is piled over and around its outlet. It turns the ob- 
 stacle into its own form and character, and as it makes its way 
 increases its stream. And should it be arrested in its course 
 by a chilling season, it suffers delay, not loss, and waits only for 
 a change in the wind to awaken and again roll onwards. 
 
 / semplici pastori 
 
 Sul Vesolo nevoso 
 
 Fatti curvi e canuti, 
 
 Z)' alto stupor son viuti 
 
 Mirando alfonte omhroso 
 
 11 Po con pochi umori , 
 
 Poscia udendo gli onori 
 
 DelV urna angusta e stretta, * 
 
 C/^e7 Adda che'l Tesino 
 
 Soverchia in siio camnwio, 
 
 Che ampio al mar'' s affrdta 
 
 Che si spimia, e si suona, 
 
 Che gli si da corona! * Chiabrera. 
 
 Literal Translation. " Tlie simple shepherds grown bent and hoary-head- 
 ed on the snowy Vesolo, are mute witli deep astonislinient, gazing in the 
 overshadowed fountain on the Po with his scanty waters ; then liearing of 
 the honors of his confined and narrow urn, how he receives as a sovereign 
 the Adda and the Tesino in liis course, how ample he hastens on to the sea, 
 how he foams, how mighty his voice, and that to liini the crown is assigned." 
 
 * I give literal translations of my poetic as well as prose quotations: be- 
 cause the propriety of their introduction often depends on the exact sense and 
 order of the words : which it is impossible always to retain in a metrical ver- 
 sion.
 
 ESSAY IX. 
 
 Great men have livM among us, Heads tliat plann'd 
 
 And Tongues that utter'd Wisdom — better none. 
 ********* 
 
 Even so doth Heaven protect us ! 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 In the preceding Number I have explained the good, that is, 
 the natural consequences of the promulgation to all of truths 
 which all are bound to know and to make known. The evils 
 occasioned by it, with few and rare exceptions, have their ori- 
 gin in the attempts to suppress or pervert it ; in the fury and 
 violence of imposture attacked or undermined in her strong 
 holds, or in the extravagances of ignorance and credulity rous- 
 ed from their lethargy, and angry at the medicinal disturbance — 
 awakening not yet broad awake, and thus blending the mon- 
 sters of uneasy dreams with the real objects, on which the 
 drowsy eye had alternately half-opened and closed, again half- 
 opened and again closed. This re-action of deceit and super- 
 stition, with all the trouble and tumult incident, I would com- 
 pare to a fire which bursts forth from some stifled and ferment- 
 ing mass on the first admission of light and air. It roars and 
 blazes, and converts the already spoilt or damaged stuff" with all 
 the straw and straw-like matter near it, first into flame and the 
 next moment into ashes. The fire dies away, the ashes are 
 scattered on all the winds, and what began in worthlessness 
 ends in nothingness. Such are the evil, that is, the casual con- 
 sequences of the same promulgation. 
 
 It argues a narrow or corrupt nature to lose the general and 
 lasting consequences of rare and virtuous energy, in the brief 
 accidents, which accompanied its first movements — to set light-
 
 54 
 
 \y by the emancipation of the human reason from a legion of 
 
 devils, in our complaints and lamentations over the loss of a 
 herd of swine ! The Cranmers, Hampdens, and Sidneys : the 
 
 counsellors of our Elizabeth, and the friends of our other great 
 Deliverer, the third William, — is it in vain, that these have 
 been our countrymen ? Are we not the heirs of their good 
 deeds ? And what are noble deeds but noble truths realized ? 
 As Protestants, as Englishmen, as the inheritors of so ample an 
 estate of might and right, an estate so strongly fenced, so rich- 
 ly planted, by the sinewy arms and dauntless hearts of o-ur 
 forefathers, we of all others have good cause to trust in the 
 truth, yea, to follow its pillar of lire through the darkness and 
 the desart, even though its light should but suffice to make us 
 certain of its own presence. If there be elsewhere men jeal- 
 ous of the light, who prophecy an excess of evil over good 
 from its manifestation, we are entitled to ask them, on what ex- 
 perience they ground their bodings ? Our own country bears 
 no traces, our own history contains no records, to justify them. 
 From the great seras of national illumination we date the com- 
 mencement of our main national advantages. The tangle of 
 delusions, which stifled and distorted the growing tree, have 
 been torn away ; the parasite Aveeds, that fed on its very roots, 
 have been plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there 
 remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual im- 
 provement, the cautious unhazardous labors of the industrious 
 though contented gardener — to prune, to engraft, and one by 
 one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and the 
 caterpillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and 
 senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our pre- 
 decessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence, to 
 which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither tempta- 
 tion or pretext. That the very terms, with which the bigot or 
 the hireling would blacken the first publishers of political and 
 religious Truth, are, and deserve to be, hateful to us, we owe 
 to the effects of its publication. We ante-date the feelings in 
 order to criminate the authors of our tranquility, opulence, and 
 security. But let us be aware. Effects will not, indeed, im- 
 mediately disappear with their causes ; but neither can they 
 long continue without them. If by the reception of Truth in 
 the spirit of Truth, we became what we are: only by the re- 
 tention of it in the same spirit, can we remain what we are.
 
 55 
 
 The narrow seas that form our boundaries, what were they in 
 times of old ? The convenient highway for Danish and Nor- 
 man pirates. What are they now? Still but "a Span of Wa- 
 ters." — Yet they roll at the base of the inisled Ararat, on 
 which the Ark of the Hope of Europe and of Civilization 
 rested ! 
 
 Even so doth God protect us, if we be 
 Virtuous and Wise. Winds blow and Waters roll, 
 Strength to the Brave, and Power and Deity: 
 Yet in tiiemselves are nothing ! One Decree 
 Spake Laws to them, and said that by the Sold 
 Only the Nations shall be great and free ! 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 ESSAY X. 
 
 I deny not but that it is of greatest concernment in the church and com- 
 monwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well 
 as men. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a pro- 
 geny of life in them to be as active as that soul was v\ hose progeny the}'^ are. 
 I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous 
 dragon's teeth: and being sown up and down may chance to spring up arm- 
 ed men. And 3'et on the other liand, unless wariness be used, as good al- 
 most kill a man as kill a good book. Many a man lives a burthen to the 
 earth ; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, em- 
 balmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. — Miltoj^'s Speech 
 for the Liberty of unlicensed Pnnting. 
 
 Thus far then I have been conducting a cause between an 
 individual and his own mind. Proceeding on the conviction, 
 that to man is entrusted the nature, not the result of his ac- 
 tions, I have presupposed no calculations. I have presumed 
 no foresight. — Introduce no contradiction into thy own con- 
 sciousness. Acting or abstaining from action, delivering or 
 withholding thy thoughts, whatsoever thou dost, do it in single- 
 ness 0/ heart. In alt things therefore let thy means correspond
 
 56 
 
 to thy purpose, and let the purpose be one with the purport. — 
 To this principle I have referred the supposed individual, and 
 from this principle solely I have deduced each particular of his 
 conduct. As far, therefore, as the court of Conscience ex- 
 tends, (and in this court alone I have been pleading hitherto) 
 I have won the cause. It has been decided, that there is no 
 just ground for apprehending mischief from Truth communica- 
 ted conscientiously, (i. e. with a strict observance of all the 
 conditions required by the Conscience) — that what is not so 
 communicated, is falsehood, and that to the Falsehood, not to 
 the Truth, must the ill consequences be attributed. 
 
 Another and altogether different cause remains now to be 
 pleaded ; a different cause, and in a different court. The par- 
 ties concerned are no longer the well-meaning Individual and 
 his Conscience, but the Citizen and the State — The Citizen, 
 who may be a fanatic as probably as a philosopher, and the 
 State, which concerns itself with the Conscience only as far as 
 it appears in the action, or still more accurately, in the fact ; 
 and which must determine the nature of the fact not merely by 
 a rule of Right formed from the modification of particular by 
 general consequences, not merely by a principle of compromise, 
 that reduces the freedom of each citizen to the common mea- 
 sure in which it becomes compatible with the freedom of all ; 
 but likewise by the relation which the facts bear to its (the 
 State's) own instinctive principle of self-preservation. For 
 erery depository of the Supreme Power must presume itself 
 rightful : and as the source of law not legally to be endanger- 
 ed. A form of government may indeed, in reality, be most 
 pernicious to the governed, and the highest moral honor may 
 await the patriot who risks his life in order by its subversion 
 to introduce a better and juster constitution ; but it would be 
 absurd to blame the law by which his life is declared forfeit. 
 It were to expect, that by an involved contradiction the law 
 should allow itself not to be law, by allowing the State, of 
 which it is a part, not to be a State. For as Hooker has M^ell 
 observed, the law of men's actions is one, if they be respected 
 only as men ; and another, when they are considered as parts 
 of a body politic. 
 
 But though every government subsisting inlaw (for pure 
 lawless despotism grounding itself wholly on terror precludes 
 all consideration of duty) — though every government subsist-
 
 57 
 
 ing in law must, and ought to, regard itself as the life of the 
 body politic, of which it is the head, and consequently must pun- 
 ish every attempt against itself as an act of assault or murder, 
 i. e. sedition or treason ; yet still it ought so to secure the life as 
 not to prevent the conditions of its growth, and of that adapta- 
 tion to circumstances, without which its very life becomes in- 
 secure. In the application, therefore, of these principles to 
 the public communication of opinions by the most efficient 
 means, the Press — we have to decide, whether consistently 
 with them there should be any liberty of the press ; and if this 
 be answered in the affirmative, what shall be declared abuses 
 of that liberty, and made punishable as such ; and in what way 
 the general law shall be applied to each particular case. 
 
 First then, should there be any liberty of the press .'' we 
 will not here mean, whether it should be permitted to print 
 books at all; (for our Essay has little chance of being read in 
 Turkey, and in any other part of Europe it cannot be supposed 
 questionable ) but whether by the appointment of a Censorship 
 the Government should take upon itself the responsibility of each 
 particular publication. In Governments purely monarchical 
 (i. e. oligarchies under one head) the balance of the advan- 
 tage and disadvantage from this monopoly of the press will un- 
 doubtedly be affected by the general state of information ; 
 though after reading Milton's " Speech for the liberty of unli- 
 censed Printing*" we shall probably be inclined to belive, that 
 the best argument in favor of licensing, &c. under any constitu- 
 tion is that, which supposing the ruler to have a different inter- 
 est from that of his country, and even from himself as a rea- 
 sonable and moral creature, grounds itself on the incompatibili- 
 ty of knowledge with folly, oppression, and degradation. What 
 our prophetic Harrington said of religious, applies eqally to li- 
 terary toleration. " If it be said that in France there is liberty 
 of conscience in part, it is also plain that while the hierarchy 
 is standing, this liberty is falling ; and that if on the contrary, 
 
 * II y a un voile qui doit toujour couvrir tout ce que I'on peut du-e et tout 
 ce qu' on peut croire du Droit des peuples et de celui des princes, que ne 
 s' accordent jamais si bien ensemble que dans le silence. 
 
 Menu du Card. de. Retz. 
 
 How severe a satire where it can be justly applied! how false and calum- 
 nious if meant as a general mnxim! 
 
 8
 
 58 
 
 it comes to pull down the Hierarchy, it pulls down that Mon- 
 archy also ; wherefore the Monarcliy or Hierarchy will be be- 
 forehand with it, if they see their true interest." On the other 
 hand, there is no slight danger from general ignorance; and 
 the only choice, which providence has graciously left to a vi- 
 cious Government, is either to fall by the People, if they are 
 suffered to become enlightened, or ivith them, if they are kept 
 enslaved and ignorant. 
 
 The nature of our Constitution, since the revolution, the state 
 of our literature, and the wide diilusion, if not of intellectual 
 yet of literary power, and the almost universal interest in the 
 productions of literature, have set the question at rest relative- 
 ly to the British press. However great the advantages of pre- 
 vious examination might be under other circumstances, in this 
 country it would be both impracticable and inefficient. I need 
 only suggest in broken sentences — the prodigious number of 
 licensers that would be requisite — the variety of their attain- 
 ments, and (inasmuch as the scheme must be made consistent 
 with our religious freedom) the ludicrous variety of their prin- 
 ciples and creeds — their number being so great, and each ap- 
 pointed censor being himself a man of letters, quis custodiet 
 ipsos ciistodes ? — If these numerous licensers hold their offices 
 for life, and independent of the ministry pro tempore, a new 
 heterogeneous, and alarming power is introduced, which can 
 never be assimilated to the constitutional powers already ex- 
 isting: — if they are removeable at pleasure, that which is he- 
 retical and seditious in 1809, may become orthordox and loj^il 
 in 1810 — and what man, whose attainments and moral respec- 
 tability gave him even an endurable claim to this awful trust, 
 would accept a situation at once so invidious and so precarious ? 
 And what institution can retain any useful influence in so free 
 a nation, when its abuses have made it contemptible? — Lastly, 
 and which of itself would suffice to justify the rejection of such 
 a plan — unless all proportion between crime and punishment 
 were abandoned, what penalties could the law attach to the 
 assumption of a liberty, which it had denied, more severe than 
 those which it now attaches to the abuse of the liberty, which 
 it grants ? In all those instances at least, which it would be 
 most the inclination — perhaps the duty — of the State to prevent, 
 namely, in seditious and incendiary publications (whether ac- 
 tually such, or only such as the existing Government chose so
 
 69 
 
 to denominate, makes no difference in the argument) the pub- 
 lisher, who hazards the punishment now assigned to seditious 
 publications, would assuredly hazard the penalties of unlicens- 
 ed ones, especially as the very practice of licensing would na- 
 turally diminish the attention to the contents of the works pub- 
 lished, the chance of impunity therefore be so much greater, 
 and the artifice of prefixing an unauthorised license so likely 
 to escape detection. It is a fact, that in many of the former 
 German States in which literature flourished, notwithstanding 
 the establishment of censors or licensors, three fourths of the 
 books printed were unlicensed — even those, the contents of 
 which were unobjectionable, and where the sole motive for eva- 
 ding the law, must have been either the pride and delicacy of 
 the author, or the indolence of the bookseller. So difficult 
 was the detection, so various the means of evasion, and worse 
 than all, from the nature of the law and the affront it offers to 
 the pride of human nature, such was the merit attached to the 
 breach of it — a merit commencing perhaps with Luther's Bible, 
 and other prohibited works of similar great minds, published 
 with no dissimilar purpose, and thence by many an intermedi- 
 ate link of association finally connected with books, of the very 
 titles of which a good man would wish to remain ignorant. 
 The interdictory catalogues of the Roman hierarchy always pre- 
 sent to my fancy the muster-rolls of the two hostile armies of 
 Michael and Satan printed promiscuously, or extracted at hap- 
 hazard, save only that the extracts from the former appear 
 somewhat the more numerous. And yet even in Naples, and 
 in Rome itself, whatever difficulty occurs in procuring any ar- 
 ticle catalogued in these formidable folios, must arise either 
 from the scarcity of the work itself, or the absence of all inter- 
 est in it. Assuredly there is no difficulty in procuring from the 
 most respectable booksellers the vilest provocatives to the ba- 
 sest crimes, though intermixed with gross lampoons on the 
 heads of the Church, the religious orders, and on religion it- 
 self. The stranger is invited into an inner room, and the loath- 
 some wares presented to him with most significant looks and 
 gestures, implying the hazard, and the necessity of secrecy. 
 A creditable English bookseller would deem himself insulted, 
 if such works were even inquiied after at his shop. It is a 
 well-known fact, that with the mournful exception indeed of 
 political provocatives, and the titillations of vulgar envy provi-
 
 60 
 
 ded by our anonymous critics ; the loathsome articles are among 
 us vended and offered for sale almost exclusively by Foreign- 
 ers. Such are the purifying effects of a free Press, and the 
 dignified habit of action imbibed from the blessed air of Law 
 and Liberty, even by men who neither understand the princi- 
 ple or feel the sentiment of the dignified purity, to which they 
 yield obeisance from the instinct of character. As there is a 
 national guilt which can be charged but gently on each indi- 
 vidual, so are there national virtues, which can as little be im- 
 puted to the individuals, — no where, however, but in countries 
 where Liberty is the presiding influence, the universal medi- 
 um and menstruum of all other excellence, moral and intellec- 
 tual. Admirably doth the admirable Petrarch* admonish us : 
 
 Nee sibi vero quisquam falso persuadeat, eos qui pro lieer- 
 TATE excubant, alienum agere negotium non suum. In hac una 
 reposita sibi omnia n«5rint omnes, securitatem mercator, gloriam 
 miles, utilitatem agricola. Postremo, in eadem libertate Re- 
 ligiosi caerimonias, otium studiosi, requiem senes, rudimenta 
 disciplinarum puez'i, nuptias et castitatem puellas, pudicitiam 
 matronoe, pietatem et antiqui laris sacra patres familias spem 
 atque gaudium omnes invenient. Huic uni igitur reliquse ce- 
 dant curae ! Si hanc omittitis, in quanta libet occupatione nihil 
 agitis : si huic incumbitis, et nihil agere videmini, cumulate ta- 
 men et civium et virorum implevistis officia. 
 
 Petrarch^ Horta. 
 
 (Translation.) — Nor let any one falsely persuade himself, 
 that those who keep watch and ward for liberty, are med- 
 
 *I qiioto Petrarch often in the hope of drawing the attention of Scholars 
 to his inestiniahlc Latin Writings. Let me add, in the wish likewise of re- 
 comtncnding a Translation of select passages from his Treatises and Letters 
 to the London rnblishers. If I except tJie German writings and origina] 
 Letters of the heroic Luthei-, I do not remetnher a work from which so de- 
 lightful and instructive a volume might be compiled. 
 
 To give the true bent to the above extract, it is necessary to bear in mind, 
 that he who keeps watch and ward for Freedom, has to guard against two 
 enemies, t\n\ Despotism of the Few and the nesi)otism of the Many — but es- 
 pecially in the present day against the Syco|)hants of the Populace. 
 
 Licence thky mean, when tli(\y cry Liberty! 
 For who loves that, must first be wise and good.
 
 61 
 
 diino' with things that do not concern them, instead of minding 
 their own business. For all men should know, that all bles- 
 sings are stored and protected in this one, as in a common re- 
 pository. Here is the tradesman's security, the soldier's honor, 
 the agriculturist's profit. Lastly, in this one good of Liberty 
 the Religious will find the permission of their rites and forms 
 of worship, the students their learned leisure, the aged their re- 
 pose, boys the rudiments of the several branches of their edu- 
 cation, maidens their chaste nuptials, matrons their womanly 
 honor and the dignity of their modesty, and fathers of families 
 the dues of natural affection and the sacred privileges of their 
 ancient home. To this one solicitude therefore let all other 
 cares yield the priority. If you omit this, be occupied as much 
 and sedulously as you may, you are doing nothing: If you ap- 
 ply your heart and strength to this, though you seem to be do- 
 ing nothing, you will, nevertheless, have been fulfilling the du- 
 ties of citizens and of men, yea, in a measure pressed down 
 and running over. 
 
 ESSAY XI. 
 
 Nemo vero fallatur, quasi minora sint animonun coiitagia quatu corporum. 
 Majora sunt; gravius Isedunt ; altius descendunt, serpuntque latent] us. 
 
 Petrarch, de Fit. Solit. L. 1. s. 3. c. 4. 
 
 (Translation.) — And let no man be deceived as if the contagions of the soul 
 were less than those of the body. They are yet greater ; they convey 
 more direful diseases ; they sink deeper, and creep on more unsuspectedly. 
 
 We have abundant reason then to infer, that the Law of 
 England has done well and concluded wisely in proceeding on 
 the principle so clearly worded by Milton ; that a book should 
 be as freely admitted into the world as any other birth ; and if 
 it prove a monster, who denies but that it may justly be burnt 
 or sunk into the sea ? We have reason then, I repeat, to rest
 
 62 
 
 satisfied with our Laws, which no more prevent a book from 
 coming into the world unlicensed, lest it should prove a libel, 
 than a traveller from passing unquestioned through our turn- 
 pike-gates, because it is possible he may be a highwayman. 
 Innocence is presumed in both cases. The publication is a 
 part of the otience, and its necessary condition. Words are 
 moral acts, and words deliberately made public the law consid- 
 ers in the same light as any other cognizable overt-act. 
 
 Here however a difficulty presents itself. Theft, Robbery, 
 Murder, and the like, are easily defined : the degrees and 
 circumstances likewise of these and similar actions are defin- 
 ite, and constitute specific offences, described and punishable 
 each under its own name. We have only to prove the fact 
 and identify the offender. The intention too, in the great 
 majority of cases, is so clearly implied in the action, that the 
 Law can safely adopt it as its universal maxim, that the proof 
 of the malice is included in the proof of the fact : especially 
 as the few occasional exceptions have their remedy provided 
 in the prerogative of pardon entrusted to the supreme Magis- 
 trate. But in the case of Libel, the degree makes the kind, 
 the circumstances constitute the criminality ; and both degrees 
 and circumstances, like the ascending shades of color or the 
 shooting hues of a dove's neck, die away into each other, inca- 
 pable of definition or outline. The eye of the understanding, 
 indeed, sees the determinate difference in each individual case, 
 but language is most often inadequate to express what the eye 
 perceives, much less can a general statute anticipate and pre-de- 
 fine it. Again : in other overt-acts a charge disproved leaves 
 the Defendant either guilty of a different fault, or at best simply 
 blameless. A man having killed a fellow-citizen is acquitted of 
 murder — the act was Manslaughter only, or it was justifiable 
 Homicide. But when we reverse the iniquitous sentence passed 
 on Algernon Sidney, during our perusal of his work on Govern- 
 ment; at the moment we deny it to have been a traiterous Libel, 
 our beating hearts declare it to have been a benefaction to our 
 country, and under the circumstances of those times the perform- 
 ance of an heroic duty. P^rom this cause therefore, as well as 
 from a Libel's being a thing made up of degrees and circumstan- 
 ces (and these too discriminating oifence from merit by such dim 
 and ambulant boundaries) the intention of the agent, wherever 
 it can be independently or inclusively ascertained, must be al-
 
 C3 
 
 lowed a great share in determining the character of the action, 
 unless the Law is not only to be divorced from moral Justice,* 
 but to wage open hostility against it. 
 
 Add too, that Laws in doubtful points are to be interpreted 
 according to the design of the legislator, where this can be 
 certainly inferred. But the Laws of England, which owe their 
 own present supremacy and absoluteness to the good sense 
 and generous dispositions diffused by the Press more, far more, 
 than to any other single cause, must needs be presumed fa- 
 vorable to its general influence. Even in the penalties attached 
 to its abuse, we must suppose the Legislature to have been ac- 
 tuated by the desire of preserving its essential privileges. The 
 Press is indifferently the passive instrument of Evil and of Good ; 
 nay, there is some good even in its evil. " Good and Evil," 
 says Milton, in the Speech from which I have selected the Mot- 
 to of the preceding Essay, "in the field of this world, grow up 
 together almost inseparably : and the knowledge of Good is so in- 
 tervolved and interwoven with the knowledge of Evil, and in so 
 many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those 
 confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant 
 labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. 
 As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there 
 be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowl- 
 edge of Evil ? He that can apprehend and consider Vice with 
 all her baits and seeming pleasures and yet abstain, and yet 
 distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the 
 true way-faring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and clois- 
 tered virtue, that never sallies out and sees her adversary : — 
 that which is but a youngling in the contemplation of Evil, and 
 knows not the utmost that Vice promises to her followers, and 
 rejects it, is but a blank Virtue, not a pure. — Since, therefore, 
 the knowledge and survey of Vice is in this world so necessa- 
 ry to the constituting of human Virtue, and the scanning of 
 Error to the confirmation of Truth, how can we more safely 
 and with less danger scout into the regions of Sin and Falsity, 
 than by reading all manner of Tractates, and hearing all man- 
 ner of reason ?" Again — but, indeed the whole Treatise is one 
 
 * Ar.conling to the old adage: you are not hung for stealing a horse, but 
 that horses may not be stolen. To what extent this is true, we shaJi have 
 occasion to examine hereafter.
 
 64 
 
 strain of moral wisdom and political prudence — " Why should 
 we then affect a rigor contrary to the manner of God and of Na- 
 ture, by abridging or scanting those means, which Books, free- 
 ly permitted, are both to the trial of Virtue and the exercise of 
 Truth ? It would be better done to learn, that the Law must 
 needs be IVivolous, which goes to restrain things uncertainly, 
 and yet equally working to Good and to Evil. And were I 
 the chooser, a dram of well-doing should be preferred before 
 many times as much the forcible hindrance of Evil-doing. For 
 God sure esteems the growth and completion of one virtuous 
 person, more than the restraint of ten vicious." 
 
 The evidence of History is strong in favor of the same prin- 
 \y ciplcs, even in respect of their expediency. The average re- 
 sult of the Press from Henry VIII. to Charles I. was such a 
 diffusion of religious light as first redeemed and afterwards 
 saved this nation from the spiritual and moral death of Popery ; 
 and in the following period it is to the Press that we owe the 
 gradual ascendency of those wise political maxims, which cast- 
 ing philosophic truth in the moulds of national laws, customs, 
 and existing orders of society, subverted the tyranny without 
 suspending the government, and at length completed the mild 
 and salutary revolution by the establishment of the House of 
 Brunswick. To what must we attribute this vast over-balance 
 of Good in the general effects of the Press, but to the over- 
 balance of virtuous intention in those who employed the Press ? 
 The Law, therefore, will not refuse to manifest good intention 
 a certain weight even in cases of apparent error, lest it should 
 discourage and scare away those, to whose efforts we owe the 
 comparative infrequency and weakness of error on the whole. 
 The Law may however, nay, it must demand, that the external 
 proofs of the author's honest intentions should be supported by 
 the general style and matter of his work, and by the circum- 
 stances, and mode of its publication. A passage, which in a 
 grave and regular disquisition would be blameless, might be- 
 come highly libellous and justly punishable, if it were applied 
 to present measures or persons for immediate purposes, in a 
 cheap and popular tract. I have seldom felt greater indigna- 
 tion than at finding in a large manufactory a sixpenny pamph- 
 let, containing a selection of inflamatory paragraphs from the 
 prose-writings of Milton, without a hint given of the time, oc- 
 casion, state of government, &c. under which they were written
 
 65 
 
 not a hint, that the Freedom, which we now enjoy, exceeds all 
 that Milton dared hope for, or deemed practicable ; and that 
 his political creed sternly excluded the populace, and indeed 
 the majority of the population, from all pretensions to political 
 power. If the manifest bad intention would constitute this 
 publication a seditious Libel, a good intention equally manifest 
 can not justly be denied its share of influence in producing a 
 contrary verdict. 
 
 Here then is the difficulty. From the very nature of a libel 
 it is impossible so to define it, but that the most meritorious 
 works will be found included in the description. Not from 
 any defect or undue severity in the particular Statute, but from 
 the very nature of the off'ence to be guarded against, a work 
 recommending reform by the only rational n ode of recommend- 
 ation, that is, by the detection and exposure of corruption, 
 abuse, or incapacity, might, though it should breathe the best 
 and most unadulterated English feelings, be brought within the 
 definition of libel equally with the vilest incendiary Brochure^ 
 that ever aimed at leading and misleading the multitude. Not 
 a paragraph in the Morning Post during the peace of Amiens, 
 (or rather the experimental truce so called) though to the im- 
 mortal honour of the then editor, that newspaper was the chief 
 secondary means of producing the unexampled national una- 
 nimity, with which the war re-commenced and has since been 
 continued — not a paragraph warning the nation, as need was 
 and most imperious duty commanded, of the perilous designs 
 and unsleeping ambition of our neighbor, the mimic and cari- 
 caturist of Charlemagne, but was a punishable libel. The sta- 
 tute of libel is a vast aviary, which incages the awakening cock 
 and the geese whose alarum preserved the capitol, no less than 
 the babbling magpye and ominous screech-owl. And yet will 
 we avoid this seeming injustice, we throw down all fence and 
 bulwark of public decency and public opinion; political calum- 
 ny will soon join hands with private slander ; and every prin- 
 ciple, every feeling, that binds the citizen to his country and 
 the spirit to its Creator, will be undermined — not by reasoning, 
 for from that there is no danger ; but — by the mere habit of 
 hearing them reviled and scoffed at with impunity. Were we 
 to contemplate the evils of a rank and unweeded press only in 
 its eff"ects on the manners of a people, and on the general tone 
 of thought and conversation, the greater the love, which we 
 
 9
 
 66 
 
 bore to literature and to all the means and instruments of hu- 
 man improvement, the greater would be the earnestness with 
 which we should solicit the interference of law : the more 
 anxiously should we wisli for some Ithureal spear, that might 
 remove from the ear of the public, and expose in their own 
 fiendish shape those reptiles, which inspiring venom and for- 
 ging illusions as they list^ 
 
 thence raise, 
 
 At least distempered discontented thoughts, 
 
 Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires. 
 
 Paradise Lost. 
 
 ESSAY XIT. 
 
 QuomoJo antem idfidunim sit, ne qitis mcredihUe arbUretur, osfendam. In pri- 
 mis viidtiplicabitur regnum, et summa rentm potestas per plurimos dissipata et 
 co7icisa mitiuttur. Tunc discordice civiles serentur, ntc idla reqxdes bellis exifi- 
 alibus erit, dum exercitibiis in immensum coactis, reges disperdent omnia, et com- 
 minuent : donee adversus eos dux potenlissimus a plebe orietui\ et assumetur in 
 socictatem a caicris, et princeps omnium consiituetur. Hie ins^tstentabili domi- 
 natione vexahit orbem, diinna et hnmana miscebit : infanda dictii et execrabilia 
 molietur : nova consUia in pectore stio vohdabit, id proprium sibi constituat im- 
 perium : leges commutabit, et siias sanciet, contaminabit, diripiet, spcliahit, occi- 
 det. Denique immutatis nomiyiibus, et impeiii sede iranslata, confusio ac per- 
 turbatio kumayii generis consequetiu: Turn vere dctestabile, et atqne abominan- 
 dum tcmpus cxistet, quo nidli hominum sit vita jucimda. 
 
 Lactantius de Vita Beata, lAb. vii. c. 16. 
 
 7 
 
 But lest this should be deemed incredible, I shew the manner in which it 
 is to take place. First, there will be a multiplication of independent sove- 
 reignties ; and the supreme magistracj' of the Empire, scattered and cut up in- 
 to fragments, will be enfeebled ui the exercise of power by law and authority. 
 Then will be sowed the seeds of civil discords, nor will there be any rest or 
 pause to wasteful and ruinous wars, while the solditiy kept together in im- 
 mense standing armies, the Kings will crash and lay waste at their will ; — un- 
 til at length there will rise uj) against them a most puissant military chieftain 
 of low birth, who will have acceded to him a fellowship with the other Sove- 
 reigns of the earth, and will finally be constituted the head of all. This-man 
 will hanoss the civilized world witli an insujiponable despotism, he will con-
 
 67 
 
 found and commix all things spiritual and temporal. He will form plans and 
 preparations of the most execrable and sacrilegious nature. He will be for- 
 ever restlessly turning over new schemes in his imagination, in order that he 
 may fix the imperial power over all in his own name and possessions. He 
 will change the former laws, he will sanction a code of his own, he wll 
 contaminate, pillage, lay waste and massacre. At length, when he has suc- 
 ceeded in the change of names and titles, and in the transfer of the seat of 
 Empire, there will follow a confusion and perturbation of the human race ; 
 then will there be for a while an sera of horror and abomination, during which 
 no man will enjoy his Ufe in quietness. 
 
 I interpose this Essay as an historical comment on the words 
 " mimic and caricaturist of Charlemagne," as applied to the 
 despot, whom since the time that the words were first printed, 
 we have, thank heaven ! succeeded in incaging. The Motto 
 contains the most striking instance of an uninspired prophecy 
 fulfilled even in its minutiae, that I recollect ever to have met 
 with : and it is hoped, that as a curiosity it will reconcile my 
 readers to its unusual length. But though my chief motive was 
 that of relieving (by the variety of an historical parallel) the 
 series of argument on this most important of all subjects, the 
 communicability of truth, yet the Essay is far from being a di- 
 gression. Having in the preceding number given utterance 
 to quicquid in rem tarn malejicam indignatio dolorque dictarcnt^ 
 concerning the mischiefs of a lawless Press, I held it an act of 
 justice to give a portrait no less lively of the excess to which 
 the remorseless ambition of a government might accumulate its 
 oppressions in the one instance before the discovery of Print- 
 ing, and in the other during the suppression of its freedom. 
 
 I have translated the following from a voluminous German 
 work, Michael Ignuz Schmidt's History of the Germans ; in 
 which this Extract forms the conclusion of the second chapter 
 of the third book, from Charles the Great to Conrade the First. 
 The late Tyrant's close imitation of Charlemagne was suffi- 
 ciently evidenced by his assumption of the Iron Crown of Italy ; 
 by his imperial coronation with the presence and authority of 
 the Holy Father; by his imperial robe embroidered with bees 
 in order to mark him as a successor of Pepin ; and even by his 
 ostentatious revocation of Charlemagne's grants to the Bishop 
 of Rome. But that the differences might be felt likewise, I
 
 68 
 
 prefaced the translation here re-printed with the few following 
 observations. 
 
 Let it be remembered then, that Charlemagne, for the great- 
 er part, created for himself the means of which he availed 
 himself; that his very education was his own work, and that 
 unlike Peter the Great, he could find no assistants out of his 
 own realm; that the unconquerable courage and heroic dispo- 
 sitions of the nations he conquered, supplied a proof positive 
 of real superiority, indeed the sole positive proof of intellectual 
 power in a warrior : for how can we measure force but by the 
 resistance of it ? But all was prepared for Buonaparte ; Europe 
 weakened in the very heart of all human strength, namely, in 
 moral and religious principle, and at the same time accidentally 
 destitute of any one great or commanding mind : the French 
 people, on the other hand, still restless from revolutionary fana- 
 ticism ; their civic enthusiasm already passed into military pas- 
 sion and the ambition of conquest ; and alike by disgust, terror, 
 and characteristic unfitness for freedom, ripe for the reception 
 of a despotism. Add too, that the main obstacles to an unlimi- 
 ted system of conquest, and the pursuit of universal monarchy 
 had been cleared away for him by his pioneers the Jacobins, 
 viz. the influence of the great land-holders, of the privileged 
 and of the commercial classes. Even the naval successes of 
 Great Britain, by destroying the trade, rendering useless the 
 colonies, and almost annihilating the navy of France, were in 
 some respects subservient to his designs by concentrating the 
 powers of the French empire in its armies, and supplying them 
 out of the wrecks of all other employments, save that of agri- 
 culture. France had already approximated to the formidable 
 state so prophetically described by Sir James Stuart, in his Po- 
 litical Economy, in which the population should consist chiefly 
 of soldiers and peasantry : at least the interests of no other 
 classes were regarded. The great merit of Buonaparte has 
 been that of a skillful steersman, who with his boat in the most 
 violent storm still keeps himself on the summit of the waves, 
 which not he, but the winds had raised. I will now proceed 
 to my translation. 
 
 That Charles was an hero, his exploits bear evidence. The 
 subjugation of the Lombards, protected as they were by the 
 Alps, by fortresses and fortified towns, by numerous armies, and 
 by a great name ; of the Saxons, secured by their savage reso-
 
 69 
 
 lutenees, by an untameable love of freedom, by their desart plains 
 and enormous foiests, and by their own poverty ; the humbling 
 of the Dukes of Bavaria, Aquitania, Bretagne, and Gascony ; 
 proud of their ancestry as well as of their ample domains ; the 
 ^ almost entire extirpation of the Avars, so long the terror of Eu- 
 rope ; are assuredly works which demand a courage and a 
 firmness of mind such as Charles only possessed. 
 
 How great his reputation was, and this too beyond the 
 limits of Europe, is proved by the embassies sent to him out of 
 Persia, Palestine, Mauritania, and even from the Caliphs of 
 Bagdad. If at the present day an embassy from the Black or 
 Caspian Sea comes to a prince on the Baltic, it is not to be 
 wondered at, since such are now the political relations of the 
 four quarters of the world, that a blow which is given to any 
 one of them is felt more or less by all the others. Whereas in 
 the times of Charlemagne, the inhabitants in one of the known 
 parts of the world scarcely knew what was going on in the rest. 
 Nothing but the extraordinary, all-piercing report of Charles's 
 exploits could bring this to pass. His greatness, which set the 
 world in astonishment, was likewise, without doubt, that which 
 begot in the Pope and the Romans the first idea of the re-es- 
 tablishment of their empire. 
 
 Is it true, that a number of things united to make Charles a 
 great man — favorable circumstances of time, a nation already 
 disciplined to warlike habits, a long life, and the consequent 
 acquisition of experience, such as no one possessed in his whole 
 realm. Still, however, the principal means of his greatness 
 Charles found in himself. His great mind was capable of ex- 
 tending its attention to the greatest multiplicity of afi'airs. In 
 the middle of Saxony he thought on Italy and Spain, and at 
 Rome he made provisions for Saxony, Bavaria, and Pannonia. 
 He gave audience to the Ambassadors of the Greek emperor 
 and other potentates, and himself audited the accounts of his 
 own farms, where every thing was entered even to the number 
 of the eggs. Busy as his mind was, his body was not less in 
 one continued state of motion. Charles would see into every 
 thing himself, and do every thing himself, as far as his powers 
 extended : and even this it was too, w hich gave to his under- 
 takings such a force and energy. 
 
 But with all this the government of Charles was the gov- 
 ernment of a conqueror, that is splendid abroad and fearfully
 
 70 
 
 oppressive at home. What a grievance must it not have been 
 for the people that Charles for forty years together dragged 
 them now to the Elbe, then to the Ebro, after this to the Po, and 
 from thence back again to the Elbe, and this not to check an 
 invading enemy, but to make conquests which little profited 
 the French nation ! Tliis must prove too much, at length, for 
 a hired soldier : how much more for conscripts, who did not 
 live only to fight, but who were fathers of families, citizens, 
 and proprietors? But above all, is it to be wondered at, that 
 a nation like the French, should suffer themselves to be used 
 as Charles used them. But the people no longer possessed 
 any considerable share of influence. All depended on the 
 great chieftains, who gave their willing suffiage for endless 
 wars, by which they were always sure to win. They found the 
 best opportunity, under such circumstances, to make themselves 
 great and mighty at the expense of the freemen resident with- 
 in the circle of their baronial courts; and when conquests 
 were made, it was far more for their advantage than that of the 
 monarchy. In the conquered provinces there was a necessity, 
 for dukes, vassal kings, and different high offices : all this fell 
 to their share. 
 
 I would not say this if we did not possess incontrovertible 
 original documents of those times, which prove clearly to us 
 that Charles's government was an unhappy one for the people, 
 and that this great man, by his actions, labored to the direct 
 subversion of his first principles. It was his first pretext to es- 
 tablish a greater equality among the members of his vast com- 
 munity, and to make all free and equalsub jects under a common 
 sovereign. And from the necessity occasioned by continual 
 war, the exact contrary took place. Nothing gives us a better 
 notion of the interior state of the French Monarchy, than the 
 third capitular of the year 811. [compare with this the four 
 or five quarto vols, of the present French Conscript Code.) 
 All is full of complaint ; the Bishops and Earls clamouring 
 against the freeholders, and these in their turn against the 
 Bishoj)S and Earls. And in truth the freeholders had no small 
 reason to be discontented and to resist, as far as they dared, 
 even the imperial levies. A dependant must be content to fol- 
 low his lord without further questioning : for he was paid for 
 it. But a free citizen, who lived wholly on his own property, 
 might reasonably object to suffer himself to be dragged about
 
 n 
 
 in all quarters of the world, at the fancies of his lord : espe- 
 cially as there was so much injustice intermixed. Those who 
 gave up their properties entirely, or in part, of their own ac- 
 cord, were left undisturbed at home, while those, who refused 
 to do this, were forced so often into service, that at length, be- 
 coming impoverished, they were compelled by want to give up, 
 or dispose of their free tenures to the Bishops or Earls. (It 
 loould require no great ingenuity to discover j^orallels, or at 
 least^ equivalent hardships to these^ in the treatment of, and 
 regulations concerning the reluctant conscripts.) 
 
 It almost surpasses belief to what a height, at length, the 
 aversion to war rose in the French nation, from the multitude 
 of the campaigns and the grievances connected with them. 
 The national vanity was now satiated by the frequences of vic- 
 tories ; and the plunder which fell to the lot of individuals, 
 made but a poor compensation for the losses and burthens sus- 
 tained by their families at home. Some, in order to become 
 exempt from military service, sought for menial employments 
 in the establishments of the Bishops, Abbots, Abbesses, and 
 Earls. Others made over their free property to become te- 
 nants at will of such Lords, as from their age or other circum- 
 stances, they thought would be called to no further military 
 services. Others, even privately took away the life of their 
 mothers, aunts, or other of their relatives, in order that no 
 family residents might remain through whom their names might 
 be known, and themselves traced ; others voluntarily made 
 slaves of themselves, in order thus to render themselves inca- 
 pable of the military rank. 
 
 When this Extract was first published, namely, September 7, 
 1809, I prefixed the following sentence. "This passage con- 
 tains so much matter^br j>olitical anticipation and well-ground- 
 ed hope., that I feel no apprehension of the Reader's being dis- 
 satisfied with its length." I trust, that I may derive the same 
 confidence from his genial exultation, as a Christian ; and from 
 his honest ])ride as a Briton ; in the retrospect of its comple- 
 tion. In this belief I venture to conclude the Essay with the 
 following Extract from a " Comparison of the French Republic, 
 under Buonaparte, with the Roman Empire under tlie first 
 Cajsars," published by mc in the Morning Post, Tuesday, 
 21 Sept. 1802. 
 
 If then there is no counterpoise of dissimilar circumstances,
 
 73 
 
 the prospect is gloomy indeed. The commencement of the 
 public slavery in Rome was in the most splendid sera of human 
 genius. Any unusually flourishing period of the arts and sci- 
 ences in any country, is, even to this day, called the Augustan 
 age of that country. The Roman poets, the Roman historians, 
 the Roman orators, rivalled those of Greece ; in military tac- 
 tics, in machinery, in all the conveniences of private life, the 
 Romans greatly surpassed the Greeks. With few exceptions, 
 all the emperors, even the worst of them, were, like Buona- 
 parte,* the liberal encouragers 'of all great public works, and 
 of every species of public merit not connected with the asser- 
 tion of political freedom. 
 
 O Juvenes, circumspicit ct agitat vos, 
 
 Materiamque sibi Ducis indulgentia qujerit 
 
 It is even so, at this present moment, in France, Yet, both 
 in France and in Rome, we havepearned, that the most abject 
 dispositions to slavery rapidly trod on the heels of the most 
 outrageous fanaticism for an almost anarchical liberty. Ruere 
 in servitium patres et populnm. Peace and the coadunation of 
 all the civilized provinces of the earth were the grand and plau- 
 sible pretexts of Roman despotism : the degeneracy of the hu- 
 man species itself, in all the nations so blended, was the melan- 
 choly effect. To-morrow, therefore, we shall endeavour to de- 
 
 * Imitators succeed l)etter in copying the vices tlian the excellences or their 
 archetypes. Where shall we find in the First Consul of France a counter- 
 part to the generous and dreadless clemency of the first Caesar? Acerbe lo- 
 quentibus satis habuit pro concione denunciare, ne persevarent. Aulique 
 CtEcinte criminosissinio libro, et Pitholai canniniljus malcdicentissimis lacera- 
 tam existiniationcm suani civili animo tiilit. 
 
 It deserves translation, for our English readers. " If any spoke bitterly 
 against him, he held it sufficient to conif)laiji of it publicly, to prevent them 
 from persevering in the use of such language. His character had been man- 
 gled in a most libellous work of Anlus C.vcina, and he had been grossly lam- 
 pooned in some verses by Pitholaus; but he boie both with the temper of a 
 good citizen." 
 
 For this part of the First Consul's character, if common report speaks the 
 truth, we must seek a parallel in tlie dispositions of the third Caesar, who 
 dreaded the pen of a paragraph writer, hlntin«- aught against his morals and 
 measures, with as great anxiety, and witli as vindiclive feelings, as if it h.id been 
 the dagger of an assassin lifted up against his life. From the third Ctesar, too, 
 he adopted the abrogation of all poj)ulor elections.
 
 \ 
 
 7i 
 
 tect all those points and circumstances of dissimilarity, which, 
 though they cannot impeach the rectitude of the parallel, for 
 the present, may yet render it probable, that as the same Con- 
 stitution of Government has been built up in France with in- 
 comparably greater rapidity, so it may have an incomparably 
 shorter duration. We are not conscious of any feelings of bit- 
 terness towards the First Consul ; or, if any, only that venial 
 prejudice, which naturally results from the having hoped proud- 
 ly of any individual, and the having been miserably disappoint- 
 ed. But we will not voluntarily cease to think freely and speak 
 openly. We owe grateful hearts, and uplifted hands of thanks- 
 giving to the Divine Providence, that there is yet one Europe- 
 an country (and that country our own) in which the actions of 
 public men may be boldly analyzed, and the result publicly 
 stated. And let the Chief Consul, who professes in all things 
 to follow his FATE, learn to submit to it if he finds that it is 
 still his FATE to struggle with the spirit of English freedom, 
 and the virtues which are the offspring of that spiiit ! If he 
 finds, that the Genius of Great Britain, which blew up his 
 Egyptian navy into the air, and blighted his Syrian laurels, still 
 follows him with a calm and dreadful eye ; and in peace, equal- 
 ly as in war, still watches for that liberty, in which alone the 
 Genius of our Isle lives, and moves, and has his being ; and 
 which being lost, all our commercial and naval greatness would 
 instantly languish, like a flower, the root of which had been 
 silently eat away by a worm ; and without which, in any coun- 
 try, the public festivals, and pompous merriments of a nation 
 present no other spectacle to the eye of Reason, than a mob of 
 maniacs dancing in their fetters. 
 
 10
 
 ESSAY XIII. 
 
 Must there be still some discord mixt among 
 The harmony of men, whose mood accords 
 Best with contention tun'd to notes of wrong ? 
 That when War fails, Peace must make war with words. 
 With w ords unto destruction arm'd more strong 
 Than ever were our foreign Foemans' swords: 
 Making as deep, tho' not yet Weeding wounds ? 
 What War left scarless. Calumny confounds. 
 
 Truth lies entrapp'd where Cunning finds no har : 
 Since no proportion can there he betwixt 
 Our acti<jns which in endless motions are, 
 And ordinances which are always fixt. 
 Ten thousand Laws more cannot reach so far, 
 But Malice goes beyond, or lives conmiixt 
 So close with Goodness, that it ever will 
 CoiTupt, disguise, or counterfeit it still. 
 
 And therefore would our glorious Alfred, who 
 Join'd with the King's the good man's Majesty, 
 Not leave Law's labyrinth withont a clue — 
 Gave to deep Skill its just authority, — 
 
 But the lost .Tiidgnifiit (this his .Tury's jil.ui) 
 Left to the natural sense of Work-ilay IVfan. 
 
 Mapted from an elder Poet. 
 
 We recur to the dileinina stated in our eighth number. How 
 shall we solve this pro])lcni ? Its solution is to be found in that 
 spirit which, like the universal menstruum sought for by the old 
 alchemists, can blend and harmonize the most discordant ele- 
 ments — it is found to be in the spirit of a rational Freedom dif- 
 fused and become national, in the consequent influence and 
 control of public opinion, and in its most precious organ, the
 
 7S 
 
 jury. It is to be found, wherever Juries are sufficiently en- 
 lightened to perceive the difference, and to comprehend thi. 
 origin and necessity of the difference, between libels and other 
 criminal overt-acts, and are sufficiently independent to act upon 
 the conviction, that in a charge of libel, the degree, the circum- 
 stances, and intention, constitute (not merely modify^) the of- 
 fence, give it its Being, and determine its legal name. The 
 words '■'■maliciously and advisedly," must here have a force of 
 their own and a proof of their own. They will consequently 
 consider the written law as a blank power provided for the pun- 
 ishment of the offender, not as a light by which they are to deter- 
 mine and discriminate the ojfence. The understanding and con- 
 science of the Jury are the Judges, in toto : the statute a blank 
 conge d'elire. The Statute is the Clay and those the Potter's 
 wheel. Shame fall on that Man, who shall labor to confound 
 what reason and nature have put asunder, and who at once, as far 
 as in him lies, would render the Press ineffectual and the Law 
 odious ; who would lock up the main river, the Thames of our 
 intellectual commerce ; would throw a bar across the stream, that 
 that must render its navigation dangerous or partial, using as his 
 materials the very banks, that were intended to deepen its chan- 
 nel and guard against its inundations ! Shame fall on him, and a 
 a participation of the infamy of those, who misled an English 
 Jury to the murder of Algernon Sidney ! 
 
 But though the virtuous intention of the writer must be al- 
 io wed a certain influence in facilitating his acquittal, the degree 
 of his moral guilt is not the true index or mete-wand of his 
 condemnation. For Juries do not sit in a Court of Conscience, 
 but of Law ; they are not the representatives of religion, but 
 the guardians of external tranquillity. The leading principle, 
 the Pole Star, of the judgment in its decision concerning the 
 libellous nature of a published writing, is its more or less re- 
 mote connection with after overt-acts, as the cause or occasion 
 of the same. Thus the publication of actual facts may be, and 
 most often will be, criminal and libellous, when directed against 
 private characters : not only because the charge will reach the 
 minds of many who cannot be competent judges of the truth 
 or falsehood of facts to which themselves were not witnesses, 
 against a man whom they do not know, or at best know imper- 
 fectly ; but because such a publication is of itself a very serious 
 overt-act, by which the author without authority and without tri-
 
 .7# 
 
 al, has inflicted punishment on a fellow subject, himself being 
 witness and jury, judge and executioner. Of such publications 
 there can be no legal justification, though the wrong may be 
 palliated by the circumstance that the injurious charges are not 
 only true but wholly out of the reach of the law. But in libels 
 on the government there are two things to be balanced against 
 each other : first, the incomparably greater mischief of the 
 overt-acts, supposing them actually occasioned by the libel — 
 (as for instance, the subversion of government and property, 
 if the principles taught by Thomas Paine had been realized, or 
 if even an attempt had been made to realize them, by the ma- 
 ny thousands of his readers;) and second, the very great im- 
 probability that such effects will be produced by such writings. 
 Government concerns all generally, and no one in particular. 
 The facts are commonly as well known to the readers, as to the 
 writer : and falsehood therefore easily detected. It is proved, 
 likewise, by experience, that the frequency of open political 
 discussion, with all its blameable indiscretion, indisposes a na- 
 tion to overt-acts of practical sedition or conspiracy. They 
 talk ill, said Charles the Fifth, of his Belgian Provinces, but 
 they suffer so much the better for it. His successor thought 
 differently: he determined to be master of their words and 
 opinions, as well as of their actions, and in consequence lost 
 one half of those provinces, and retained the other half at an 
 expense of strength and treasure greater than the original worth 
 of the whole. An enlightened Jury, therefore, will require 
 proofs of some more than ordinary malignity of intention, as 
 furnished by the style, price, mode of circulation, and so forth; 
 or of punishable indiscretion arising out of the state of the 
 times, as of dearth, for instance, or of whatever other calamity 
 is likely to render the lower classes turbulent and apt to be al- 
 ienated from the government of their country. For the absence 
 of a right disposition of mind must be considered both in law 
 and in morals, as nearly equivalent to the presence of a wrong 
 disposition. Under such circumstances the legal paradox, that 
 a libel may be the more a libel for being true, becomes strictly 
 just, and as such ought to be acted upon. 
 
 Concerning the right of punishing by law the authors of he- 
 retical or deistical writings, 1 reserve my remarks for a future 
 Essay, in which I hope to state the grounds and limits of tole- 
 ration more accurately than they seem to me to have been hith-
 
 75 
 
 erto traced. There is one maxim, however, which T am 
 tempted to seize as it passes across me. If I may trust my 
 own memory, it is indeed a very old truth : and yet if the fash- 
 ion of acting in apparent ignorance thereof be any presumption 
 of its novelty, it ought to be new, or at least have become so 
 by courtesy of oblivion. It is this : that as far as human prac- 
 tice can realize the sharp limits and exclusive proprieties of 
 Science, Law and Religion should be kept distinct. There 
 IS, strictly speaking, no proper opposition but between the 
 
 TWO POLAR forces OF ONE AND THE SAME POWER.* If I Say 
 
 then, that Law and Religion are natural opposites, and that the 
 latter is the requisite counterpoise of the former, let it not be 
 interpreted, as if I had declared them to be contraries. The 
 Law has rightfully invested the Creditor with the power of 
 arresting and imprisoning an insolvent Debtor, the Farmer with 
 the Power of transporting, mediately at least, the Pillagers of 
 his Hedges and Copses ; but the Law does not compel him to 
 exercise that power, while it will often happen, that Religion 
 commands him to forego it. Nay, so well was this understood 
 by our Grandfathers, that a man who squares his conscience 
 by the Law was a common paraphrase or synonyme of a 
 wretch without any conscience at all. We have all of us 
 learnt from History, that there was a long and dark period, 
 during which the Powers and the Aims of Law were usurped 
 
 * Every Power in Nature and in Spirit must evolve an opposite, as the sole 
 means and condition of its manifestation: and all opposition is a tendencit 
 TO Re-union. This is the universal Law of Polarity or essential Dualism, 
 first i)rornulgated by Heraclilus, 2000 years afterwards re-published, and made 
 tlie foundation both of Logic, of Physics, and of Metaphysics by Giordano 
 linino. The Principle may be thus cxi)ressed. The Identity of Thesis and 
 Antithesis is the substance of all Being; their Opposition the condition of all 
 Existeiice, or Being manifested; and every Thing or Vhsenontenon is the Ex- 
 ponent of a Synthesis as long as the oi)posite energies are retained in that 
 Syntliesis. Thus Water is neither Oxygen nor Hydrogen, nor yet is it a 
 commixture of both ; but the Synthesis or Indifference of the two: and as 
 long as the copula endures, by which it becomes Water, or rather which 
 alone is Water, it is not less a simple Body than either of the imaginary Ele- 
 ments improperly called its Ingredients or Components. It is the ohj(!Ct of 
 the mechanical atomistic Psilosophy to •confound Synthesis with synartesis, 
 or rather with mere juxta-position of Corpuscles separated by inviiiible In- 
 terspaces. I find it difficult to determine, whether tliis theory contradicts 
 tlie Reason or tlie Senses most: for it is alike inconceivable and unimaginable.
 
 78 
 
 in the name of Religion by the Clergy and the Courts Spiritu- 
 al : and we all know the result. Law and Religion thus in- 
 terpenetrating neutralized each other ; and the baleful product, 
 or tertium Aliquid, of this union retarded the civilization of 
 Europe for Centuries. Law splintered into the minutiae of Re- 
 ligion, whose awful function and prerogative it is to take ac- 
 count of every ^Hdle ivord,^^ became a busy and inquisitorial 
 tyranny : and Religion substituting legal terrors for the eno- 
 bling influences of Conscience remained Religion in name 
 only. The present age appears to me approaching fast to 
 a similar usurpation of the functions of Religion by Law : and 
 if it were required, I should not want strong presumptive 
 proofs in favor of this opinion, whether I sought for them in 
 the Charges from the Bench concerning Wrongs, to which Re- 
 ligion denounce the fearful penalties of Guilt, but for which 
 the Law of the Land assigns Damages only : or in sundry sta- 
 tutes, and (all praise to the late Mr. Wyndham, Romanorum 
 ultimo) in a still greater number of attempts towards new sta- 
 tutes, the authors of which displayed the most pitiable igno- 
 rance, not merely of the distinction between perfected and im- 
 perfected Obligations but even of that still more sacred dis- 
 tinction between Things and Persons. What the Son of Si- 
 rach advises concerning the Soul, everj^ Senator should apply 
 to his legislative capacity — Reverence it in meekness, know- 
 ing how feeble and how mighty a Thing it is ! 
 
 From this hint concerning Toleration, we may pass by an 
 easy transitition to the, perhaps, still more interesting subject 
 of Tolerance. And here 1 fully coincide with Frederic H. 
 Jacobi, that the only true spirit of Tolerance consists in our 
 conscientious toleration of each other's intolerance. Whatever 
 pretends to be more than this, is either the unthinking cant of 
 fashion, or tl;ie soul-palsying narcotic of moral and religious in- 
 difference. All of us without exception, in the same mode 
 though not in the same degree, are necessarily subjected to the 
 risk of mistaking positive opinions for certainty and clear in- 
 sight. From this yoke we cannot free ourselves, but by ceas- 
 ing to be men ; and this too not in order to transcend but to 
 sink below our human nature. For if in one point of view it 
 be the mulct of our fall, and of the corruption of our will ; it 
 is equally true, that contemplated from another point, it is the 
 jprice and consequence of our progressiveness. To him who
 
 79tf 
 
 is compelled to pace to and fro within the high walls and in 
 tlic narrow courtyard of a prison, all objects may appear clear 
 and distinct. It is the traveller journeying onward, full of 
 heart and hope, with an ever-varying horrizon, on the boundless 
 plain, that is liable to mistake clouds for mountains, and the 
 mirage of drouth for an expanse of refreshing waters. 
 
 But notwithstanding this deep conviction of our general fal- 
 libility, and the most vivid recollection of my own, I dare 
 avow with the German philosopher, that as far as opinions, 
 and not motives ; principles, and not men, are concerned ; I 
 neither am tolerant^ nor wish to be regarded as such. Accor- 
 ding to my judgment, it is mere ostentation, or a poor trick 
 that hypocrisy plays with the cards of nonsense, when a man 
 makes protestation of being perfectly tolerant in respect of all 
 principles, opinions and persuasions, those alone excepted which 
 render the holders intolerant. For he either means to say by 
 this, that he is utterly indifl'erent towards all truth, and finds 
 nothing so insufferable as the persuasion of their being any such 
 mighty value or importance attached to the profession of the 
 Truth as should give a marked preference to any one convic- 
 tion above any other ; or else he means nothing, and amuses 
 himself with articulating the pulses of the air instead of inha- 
 ling it in the more healthful and profitable exercise of yawning. 
 That which doth not withstand, hath itself no standing place. 
 To Jill a station is to exclude or repel others, — and this is not 
 less the definition of moral, than of material, solidity. We live 
 by continued acts of defence, that involve a sort of offensive 
 warfare. But a man's principles, on which he grounds his 
 Hope and his Faith, are the life of his life. We live by Faith, 
 says the philosophic Apostle ; and faith without principles is 
 but a flattering phrase for wilful positiveness, or fanatical bodily 
 sensation. Well, and of good right therefore, do we maintain 
 with more zeal, than we should defend body or e'state, a deep 
 and inward conviction, which is as the moon to us ; and like 
 the moon with all its massy shadows and deceptive gleams, it 
 yet lights us on our way, poor travellers as we are, and benight- 
 ed pilgrims. With all its spots and changes and temporary 
 eclipses, with all its vain halos and bedimming vapors, it yet 
 reflects the light that is to rise on us, which even now is rising, 
 though intercepted from our immediate view by the mountains 
 that enclose and frown over the vale of our mortal life.
 
 This again is the mystery and the dignity of our human nature, 
 that we cannot give up our reason, without giving up at the 
 same time our individual personality. For that must appear to 
 each man to be his reason which produces in him the highest 
 sense of certainty; and yet it is 7iot reason, except as far as it 
 is of universal validity and obligatory on all mankind. There 
 is a one heart for the whole mighty mass of Humanity, and eve- 
 ry pulse in each particular vessel strives to beat in concert with 
 it. He who asserts that truth is of no importance except in 
 the sense of sincerity, confounds sense with madness, and fhe 
 word of God with a dream. If the power of reasoning be the 
 Gift of the Supreme Reason, that we be sedulous, yea, and 
 militant in the endeavor to reason aright, is his implied Com- 
 mand. But what is of permanent and essential interest to one 
 man must needs be so to all, in proportion to the means and op- 
 portunities of each. Woe to him by whom these are neglected, 
 and double woe to him by whom they are withheld ; for he robs 
 at once himself and his neighbor. That man's Soul is not dear 
 to himself, to whom the Souls of his Brethren are not dear. 
 As far as they can be influenced by him, they are parts and 
 properties of his own soul, their faith his faith, their errors his 
 burthen, their righteousness and bliss his righteousness and his 
 reward — and of their Guilt and Misery his own will be the echo! 
 As much as I love my fellow-men, so much and no more will I 
 be intolerant of their Heresies and Unbelief — and I will honor 
 and hold forth the right hand of fellowship to every individual 
 who is equally intolerant of that which he conceives such in me. 
 We will both exclaim — I know not, what antidotes among the 
 complex views, impulses and circumstances, that form your 
 moral Being, God's gracious Providence may have vouchsafed 
 to you against the serpent fang of this Error — but it is a viper, 
 and its poison deadly, although through higher influences some 
 men may take the reptile to their bosom, and remain unstung. 
 In one of these viperous Journals, which deal out Profane- 
 ness, Hate, Fury, and Sedition throughout the Land, I read the 
 following Paragraph. " The Brahman believes that every man 
 will be saved in his own persuasion, and that all religions are 
 equally pleasing to the God of all. The Christian confines 
 salvation to the Believer in his own Vedahs and Shasters. 
 Which is the more humane and philosophic creed of the two ?" 
 Let question answer question. Self-complacent Scoffer !
 
 81 
 
 Whom meanest thou by God ? The God of Truth ? and can 
 He be pleased with falsehood and the debasement or utter sus- 
 pension of the Reason which he gave to man that he might re- 
 ceive from him the sacrifice of Truth ? Or the God of love and 
 mercy ? And can He be pleased with the blood of thousands 
 poured out under the wheels of Juggernaut, or with the shrieks 
 of children offered up as fire offerings to Baal or to Moloch ? 
 Or dost thou mean the God of holiness and infinite purity ? and 
 can He be pleased with abominations unutterable and more 
 than brutal defilements ? and equally pleased too as with that 
 religion, which commands us that we have no fellowship with 
 the unfruitful works of darkness but to reprove them ? With 
 that religion, which strikes the fear of the Most High so deeply, 
 and the sense of the exceeding sinfulness of sin so inwardly, 
 that the Believer anxiously enquires : " Shall I give my first- 
 born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my 
 soul ?" — and which makes answer to him. — " He hath shewed 
 thee, man, what is good ; and what doth the Lord require of 
 thee, but to walk justly, and to love mercy, and to walk hum~ 
 bly with thy God." But I check myself. It is at once folly 
 and profanation of Truth, to reason with the man who cart 
 place before his eyes a minister of the Gospel directing th& 
 eye of the widow from the corse of her husband upward to his 
 and her Redeemer, (the God of the living and not of the dead) 
 and then the remorseless Brahmin goading on the disconsolate 
 victim to the flames of her husband's funeral pile, abandoned 
 by, and abandoning, the helpless pledges of their love — and 
 yet dare ask, which is the more humane and philosophic creed 
 of the two ? No ! No ! when such opinions are in question I 
 neither am, or will be, or wish to be regarded as, tolerant. 
 
 \\
 
 ESSAY XIV. 
 
 Knowing the heart of Man is set to be 
 The centre of this world, about the which 
 These revohitions of disturbances 
 Still roll ; where al! th' aspects of misery 
 Predominate ; whose strong effects are such, 
 As he must bear, being powerless to redress : 
 And that unless above himself he can 
 Erect himself, how poor a thing is Man ! 
 
 Daniel. 
 
 I have thus endeavoured, with an anxiety which may per- 
 haps have misled me into prolixity, to detail and ground the 
 conditions under which the communication of truth is com- 
 manded or forbidden to us as individuals, by our conscience; 
 and those too, under which it is permissible by the law wiiich 
 controls our conduct as members of the state. But is the 
 subject of suificient importance to deserve so minute an ex- 
 amination ? that my readers would look round the world, as 
 it now is, and make to themselves a faithful catalogue of its 
 many miseries! From what do these proceed, and on what do 
 they depend for their continuance ? Assuredly for the great- 
 er part on the actions of men, and those again on the want of 
 y a vital principle of action. We live by faith. The essence of 
 virtue consists in the principle. And the reality of this, as 
 well as its importance, is belived by all men in fact, few as 
 there may be who bring the truth forward into the light of dis- 
 tinct consciousness. Yet all men feel, and at times acknow- 
 ledge to themselves, the true cause of their misery. There is 
 no man so base, but that at some time or other, and in some way 
 or other, he admits that he is not what he ought to be, though
 
 83 
 
 by a curious art of self-delusion, by an effort to keep at peace 
 with himself as long and as much as possible, he will throw off 
 the blame from the amenable part of his nature, his moral prin- 
 ciple, to that which is independent of his will, namely, the 
 degree of his intellectual faculties. Hence, for once that a 
 man exclaims, how dishonest I am, on what base and unwor- 
 thy motives I act, we may hear a hundred times, what a fool I 
 am ! curse on my folly?* and the like. 
 
 Yet even this implies an obscure sentiment, that with clearer 
 conceptions in the understanding, the principle of action would 
 become purer in the will. Thanks to the image of our Maker 
 not wholly obliterated from any human soul, we dare not pur- 
 chase an exemption from guilt by an excuse, which would place 
 our amelioration out of our own power. Thus the very man, 
 who will abuse himself for a fool but not for a villian, would 
 rather, spite of the usual professions to the contrary, be con- 
 demned as a rogue by other men, than be acquitted as a block- 
 head. But be this as it may, out of himself, however, he sees 
 plainly the true cause of our common complaints. Doubtless, 
 there seem many physical causes of distress, of disease, of po- 
 verty and of desolation — tempests, earthquakes, volcanoes, wild 
 or venomous animals, barren soils, uncertain or tyrannous cli- 
 mates, pestilential swamps, and death in the very air we breathe. 
 Yet when do we hear the general wretchedness of mankind 
 attributed to these? In Iceland, the earth opened and sent 
 forth three or more vast rivers of fire. The smoke and va- 
 pour from them dimmed the light of Heaven through all Eu- 
 rope, for months- even at Cadiz, the sun and moon, for sever- 
 al weeks, seemed turned to blood. What was the amount of 
 the injury to the human race ? sixty men were destroyed, and 
 of these the greater part in consequence of their own inspru- 
 dence. Natural calamities that do indeed spread devastation 
 wide, (for instance, the Marsh Fever,) are almost without ex- 
 ception, voices of Nature in her all-intelligible language — do 
 this I or cease to do that ! By the mere absence of one su- 
 
 * We do not consider as exceptions the tliousands tliat abuse themselves 
 by rote w'nh lii)-j)eniteiice, or the wild ravin<;s of fanaticism: for tJiese per- 
 sons at the very time they speak so vehemently of the wickedness and rot- 
 teness of their hearts, are then connnonly the warmest in their own good 
 opinion, covered round and comfortable in the wrap-rascal of self-hypocrisy.
 
 84 
 
 perstition, and of the sloth engendered by it, the Plague would 
 cease to exist throughout Asia and Africa. Pronounce medita- 
 tively the name of Jenner, and ask what might we not hope, 
 what need we deem unattainable, if all the time, the effort, the 
 skill, which we waste in making ourselves miserable through 
 vice, and vicious through misery, were embodied and mar- 
 shalled to a systematic war against the existing evils of na- 
 ture ? No, " It is a wicked loorld /" This is so generally the 
 solution, that this very wickedness is assigned by selfish men, 
 as their excuse for doing nothing to render it better, and for op- 
 posing those who would make the attempt. What 'have not 
 Clarkson, Granville Sharp, Wilberforce, and the Society^of the 
 Friends, effected for the honor, and if we believe in a retribu- 
 tive providence, for the continuance of the prosperity of the 
 English nation, imperfectly as the intellectual and moral facul- 
 ties of the people at large are developed at present ? What 
 may not be effected, if the recent discovery of the means of 
 educating nations (freed, however, from the vile sophistications 
 and mutilations of ignorant mountebanks,) shall have been ap- 
 plied to its full extent ? Would I frame to myself the most in- 
 spiriting representation of future bliss, which my mind is ca- 
 pable of comprehending, it would be embodied to me in the 
 idea of Bell receiving, at some distant period, the appropri- 
 ate reward of his earthly labours, when thousands and ten 
 thousands of glorified spirits, Avhose reason and conscience had, 
 through Ms efforts, been unfolded, shall sing the song of their 
 own redemption, and pouring forth praises to God and to their 
 Saviour, shall repeat his " New name" in Heaven, give thanks 
 for his earthly virtues, as the chosen instruments of divine mer- 
 cy to themselves, and not seldom perhaps, turn their eyes to- 
 ward hiin^ as from the sun to its image in the fountain, with se- 
 condary gratitude and the perm.itted utterance of a human love ! 
 Were but a hundred men to combine a deep conviction that 
 virtuous habits may be formed by the very means by which 
 knowledge is communicated, that men may be made better, not 
 only in consequence, but by the mode and in the process, of 
 instruction : were but an hundred men to combine that clear 
 conviction of this, which I myself at this moment feel, even as 
 I feel the certainty of my being, with the perseverance of a 
 Clarkson or a Bell, the promises of ancient prophecy would 
 disclose themselves to our faith, even as when a noble castle
 
 85 
 
 hidden Irom us by an intervening mist, discovers itself by its 
 reflection in the tranquil lake, on the opposite shore of which 
 we stand gazing. What an awful duty, what a nurse of all 
 other, the fairest virtues, does not hope become ! We are bad 
 ourselves, because we despair of the goodness of others. 
 
 If then it be a truth, attested alike by common feeling and 
 common sense, that the greater part ot human misery depends 
 directly on human vices and the remainder indirectly, by what 
 means can we act on men so as to remove or preclude these 
 vices and purify their principle of moral election ? The ques- 
 tion is not by what means each man is to alter his own charac- 
 ter — in order to this, all the means prescribed and all the aid- 
 ances given by religion, may be necessary for him. Vain, of 
 themselves, may be, 
 
 the sayings of the wise 
 
 III ancient and in modern books inroUed 
 ******** 
 
 Unless he feel within 
 Some source of consolation from above — 
 Secret refreshings, that repair his strength 
 And fainting spirits uphold. 
 
 Samson Agomstes. 
 
 This is not the question. Virtue would not be virtue, could 
 it be given by one fellow-creature to another. To make use ol 
 all the means and appliances in our power to the actual attain- 
 ment of Rectitude, is the abstract of the Duty which we owe 
 to ourselves ; to supply those means as far as we can, comprizes 
 our Duty to others. The question then is, what are these 
 means? Can they be any other than the communication of 
 knowledge, and the removal of those evils and impediments 
 which prevent its reception ? It may not be in our power to 
 combine both, but it is in the power of every man to contribute 
 to the former, who is sufficiently informed to feel that it is his 
 duty. If it be said, that we should endeavour not so much to 
 remove ignorance, as to make the ignorant religious : Religion 
 herself, through her sacred oracles, answers for me, that all 
 effective faith pre-supposes knowledge and individual convic- 
 tion. If the mere acquiescence in truth, uncomprehended and 
 unfathomed, were sufficient, few indeed would be the vicious 
 and the miserable, in this country at least where speculative 
 infidelity is, Heaven be praised, confined to a small number.
 
 86 
 
 Like bodily deformity, there Is one instance here and another 
 there ; but three in one place are already an undue proportion. 
 It is highly worthy of observation, that the inspired writings 
 received by Christians are distinguishable from all other books 
 pretending to inspiration, from the scriptures of the Bramins, 
 and even from the Koran, in their strong and frequent recom- 
 mendations of truth. I do not here mean veracity, which can- 
 not but be enforced in every code which appeals to the reli- 
 gious principle of man; but knowledge. This is not only ex- 
 tolled as the crown and honor of a man, but to seek after it is 
 again and again commanded us as one of our most sacred du- 
 ties. Yea, the very perfection and final bliss of the glorified 
 spirit is represented by the Apostle as a plain aspect, or intui- 
 tive beholding of truth in its eternal and immutable source. 
 Not that knowledge can of itself do all ! The light of religion 
 is not that of the moon, light without heat ; but neither is its 
 warmth that of the stove, warmth without light. Religion is 
 the sun, whose warmth indeed swells, and stirs, and actuates 
 the life of nature, but who at the same time beholds all the 
 growth of life with a master eye, makes all objects glorious on 
 which he looks, and by that glor}^ visible to all others. 
 
 But though knowledge be not the only, yet that it is an in- 
 dispensable and most effectual agent in the direction of our ac- 
 tions, one consideration will convince us. It is an undoubted 
 fact of human nature, that the sense of impossibility quenches 
 all will. Sense of utter inaptitude does the same. The man 
 shuns the beautiful flame, which is eagerly grasped at by the 
 infant. The sense of a disproportion of certain after-harm to 
 present gratification — produces effects almost equally uniform : 
 though almost perishing with thirst, we should dash to the 
 earth a goblet of wine in which we had seen a poison infused, 
 though the poison, were without taste or odour, or even added 
 to the pleasures of both. Are not all our vices equally inapt 
 to the universal end of human actions, the satisfaction of the 
 agent ? Are not their pleasures equally disproportionate to the 
 after-harm? Yet many a maiden, who will not grasp at the 
 fire, will yet purchase a wreath of diamonds at the price of her 
 health, her honor, nay (and she herself knows it at the mo- 
 ment of her choice) at the sacrifice of her peace and happiness. 
 The sot would reject the poisoned cup, yet the trembling hand 
 with which he raises his daily or hourly draught to his lips,
 
 87 
 
 has not left him ignorant that this too is altogether a poison. 
 I know it will be objected, that the consequences foreseen 
 are less immediate ; that they are diffused over a larger space 
 of time ; and that the slave of vice hopes where no hope is. 
 This, however, only removes the question one step further : 
 for why should the distance or diffusion of known consequences 
 produce so great a difference ? Why are men the dupes of the 
 present moment ? Evidently because the conceptions are in- 
 distinct in the one case, and vivid in the other ; because all 
 confused conceptions render us restless ; and because restless- 
 ness can drive us to vices that promise no enjoyment, no not 
 even the cessation of that restlessness. This is indeed the 
 dread punishment attached by nature to habitual vice, that its 
 impulses wax as its motives wane. No object, not even the 
 light of a solitary taper in the far distance, tempts the benight- 
 ed mind from before ; but its own restlessness dogs it from be- 
 hind, as with the iron goad of Destiny. What then is or can 
 be the preventive, the remedy, the counteraction, but the ha- 
 bituation of the intellect to clear, distinct, and adequate con- 
 ceptions concerning all things that are the possible objects of 
 clear conception, and thus to reserve the deep feelings which 
 belong, as by natural right to those obscure ideas* that are neces- 
 sary to the moral perfection of the human being, notwithstand- 
 ing, yea, even in consequence, of their obscurity — to reserve 
 these feelings, I repeat, for objects, which their very sublimity 
 renders indefinite, no less than their indefiniteness renders them 
 sublime : namely, to the Ideas of Being, Form, Life, the Rea- 
 son, the Law of Conscience, Freedom, Immortality, God ! To 
 connect with the objects of our senses the obscure notions and 
 consequent vivid feelings, which are due only to immaterial 
 and pennanent things, is profanation relatively to the heart, 
 
 * I have not expressed myself as clearly as I could wish. But the truth of 
 the assertion, that deep feeling has a tendency to combine with obscure ideas, 
 in preference to distinct and clear notions, may be proved by the history of 
 I'"'auatics and Fanaticism in all ages and countries. The odiuni theologicum 
 is even proverbial: and it is the common complaint of Philosophers and phi- 
 losophic Historians, that the passions of the disputants are commonly violent 
 in proportion to the subUety and obscurity of the questions in dispute. Nor 
 is this fact confined to professional theologians : for whole nations have dis- 
 played the same agitations, and have sacrificed national policy to the more 
 powerful interest of a controverted obscurity.
 
 88 
 
 and superstition in the understanding. It is in this sense, that 
 the philosophic Apostle calls Covetousness Idolatry. Could we 
 emancipate ourselves from the bedimming influences of custom, 
 and the transforming witchcraft of early associations, we should 
 see as numerous tribes o( Fetish- Worshippers in the streets of 
 London and Paris, as we hear of on the coasts of Africa. 
 
 ESSAY XV, 
 
 A palace when 'tis that which it Bhoiild be 
 Leaves growing, aiul stands such, or else decays 
 With him who dwells there, 'tis not so : for he 
 Should still urge upward, and his fortune raise. 
 
 Our bodies had their morning, have their noon, 
 And shall not better — the next change is night ; 
 But their fair larger guest, t'whom sun and moon 
 Are spai-ks and short-lived, claims another right. 
 
 The noble soul by age grows lustier. 
 Her aj)petite and her digestion mend ; 
 We must not starve nor hope to pamper her 
 With woman's milk and pap unto the end. 
 
 Provide you manlier diet ! Donne. 
 
 I am fully aware, that what I am writing and have written 
 (in these latter Essays at least) will expose me to the censure 
 of some, as bewildering myself and readers with JMetaphysics ; 
 to the ridicule of others as a school-boy declaimer on old and 
 worn-out truisms or exploded fancies ; and to the objection of 
 most as obscure. The last real or supposed defect has already re- 
 ceived an answer both in the preceding Numbers, and in page 
 34 of the Appendix to the Author's First Lay-Sermon, entitled
 
 / 
 
 89 
 
 the Statesman's Manual. Of the two former, I shall take 
 the present opportunity of declaring my sentiments : especially 
 as I have already received a hint that my " idol, Milton, has 
 represented Metaphysics as the subjects which the bad spirits 
 in hell delight in discussing." And truly, if I had exerted my / 
 subtlety and invention in persuading myself and others that we 
 are but living machines, and that (as one of the late followers 
 of Hobbes and Hartley has expressed the system) the assassin 
 and his dagger are equally fit objects of moral esteem and ab- 
 horrence ; or if with a writer of wider influence and higher 
 authority, I had reduced all virtue to a selfish prudence eked 
 out by superstition, (for assuredly, a creed which takes its cen- 
 tral point in conscious selfishness, whatever be the forms or 
 names that act on the selfish passion, a ghost or a constable, can 
 have but a distant relationship to that religion, which places its 
 essence in our loving our neighbor as ourselves, and God above 
 all) I know not, by what arguments I could repel the sarcasm. 
 But what are my metaphysics ? merely the referring of the 
 mind to its own consciousness for truths indispensable to its own 
 happiness ! To what purposes do I, or am I about to employ 
 them ? To perplex our clearest notions and living moral in- 
 stincts ? To deaden the feelings of will and free power, to 
 extinguish the light of love and conscience, to make myself 
 and others worthless, soul-less, God-less ? No ! to expose the 
 folly and the legerdemain of those who have thus abused the 
 blessed machine of language ; to support all old and vener- 
 able truths ; and by them to support, to kindle, to project the 
 spirit ; to make the reason spread light over our feelings, to 
 make our feelings, with their vital warmth, actualize our reason ; 
 — these are my objects, these are my subjects, and are these 
 the metaphysics which the bad spirits in hell delight in ? 
 
 But how shall I avert the scorn of those critics who laugh at 
 the oldness of my topics, Evil and Good, Necessity and Arbi- 
 trament, Immortality and the Ultimate Aim ? By what shall I 
 regain their favor ? My themes must be new, a French con- 
 stitution ; a balloon ; a change of ministry ; a fresh batch of 
 kings on the Continent, or of peers in our happier island ; or 
 who had the best of it of two parliamentary gladiators, and 
 whose speech, on the subject of Europe bleeding at a thousand 
 wounds, or our own country struggling for herself and all hu- 
 man nature, was cheered by the greatest number of laughs, loud 
 12
 
 90 
 
 laughs, and very loud laughs ; ( which, carefully marked by 
 italics, form most conspicuous and strange parentheses in the 
 newspaper reports.) Or if I must be philosophical, the last 
 chemical discoveries, provided I do not trouble ray reader with 
 the principle which gives them their highest interest, and the 
 character of intellectual grandeur to the discoverer ; or the last 
 shower of stones, and that they were supposed, by certain phi- 
 losophers, to have been projected from some volcano in the 
 moon, taking care, however, not to add any of the cramp rea- 
 sons for this opinion ! Something new, however, it must be, • 
 quite new and quite out of themselves ! for whatever is within 
 them, whatever is deep within them, must be as old as the first 
 dawn of human reason. But to find no contradiction in the 
 union of old and new, to contemplate the ancient of days 
 with feelings as fresh, as if they then sprung forth at his own 
 fiat, this characterizes the minds that feel the riddle of the 
 world, and may help to unravel it! To carry on the feelings of 
 childhood into the powers of manhood, to combine the child's 
 sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every 
 day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar, 
 
 With Sun and Moon and Stars throughout the year, 
 And Man and Woman- • 
 
 this is the cbaracter and privilege of genius, and one of the 
 marks which distinguish genius from talents. And so to pre- 
 sent familiar objects as to awaken the minds of others to a like 
 freshness of sensation concerning them (that constant accom- 
 paniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence) — to 
 the same modest questioning of a self-discovered and intelli- 
 gent ignorance, which, like the deep and massy foundations of 
 a Roman bridge, forms half of the whole structure [prudens in- 
 terrogatio dimidium sciential, says Lord Bacon ) — this is the 
 prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of mani- 
 festation. Who has not, a thousand times, seen it snow upon 
 water ? who has not seen it with a new feeling, since he has 
 read Burns' comparison of sensual pleasure. 
 
 To snow that falls \\\wn a river, 
 
 A moment white — then jjone for ever! 
 
 o^ 
 
 In philosophy equally, as in poetry, genius produces the 
 strongest impressions of novelty, while it rescues the stalest
 
 91 
 
 and most admitted truths from the impotence caused by the 
 very circumstance of their universal admission. Extremes 
 meet — a proverb, by the bye, to collect and explain all the in- 
 stances and exemplifications of which, would constitute and ex- 
 haust all philosophy. Truths, of all others the most awful and 
 mysterious, yet being at the same time of universal interest, 
 are too often considered as so true that they lose all the powers 
 of truth, and lie bed-ridden in the dormitory of the soul, side 
 by side with the most despised and exploded errors. 
 
 But as the class of critics, whose contempt I have anticipa- 
 ted, commonly consider themselves as men of the world, in- 
 stead of hazarding additional sneers by appealing to the au- 
 thorities of recluse philosophers, ( for such in spite of all histo- 
 ry, the men who have distinguished themselves by profound 
 thought, are generally deemed, from Plato and Aristotle to 
 Tully, and from Bacon to Berkeley) I will refer them to the 
 Darlingyaf the polished Court of Augustus, to the man, whose 
 works hav& been in all ages deemed the models of good sense, 
 and are still the pocket-companion of those who pride them- 
 selves on uniting the scholar with the gentleman. This ac- 
 complished man of the world has given us an account of the 
 subjects of conversation between himself and the illustrious 
 statesman who governed, and the brightest luminaries who then 
 adorned the empire of the civilized world : 
 
 Semio oiilur non de villis domibusve almiis 
 JVec, nude, nee ne lepus saltet. Sed quod inagis ad nos 
 Pertinet, et nescire mcdum est, agUamus : idrumne 
 Divitm homines, an sint virtide becdi'? 
 Et quo sit natura boni ? summumqiie quid eius ? - 
 
 HoRAT. Serm. L. 11. Sat. 6. v. 78.* 
 Berkeley indeed asserts, and is supported in his assertion by 
 the great statesmen, Lord Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, that 
 without an habitual interest in these subjects, a man may be a 
 dexterous intriguer, but never can be a statesman. Would to 
 Heaven that the verdict to be passed on my labors depended 
 
 * (Literal Translation.) Conversation arises not concerning the country 
 Beats or families of strangers, nor wlicther the dancing hare performed well 
 or ill. But we discuss what more nearly concerns ue, and which it is an evil ^ 
 not to know : whether men are made happy by riches or by \ irtue ? And hi 
 what consists the nature of good ? and whet is the ultimate or suj remo ? (i. e. 
 the Sumnmm Bomtm.) 
 
 I 
 
 \
 
 93 
 
 on those who least needed them ! The water lilly in the midst 
 of waters lifts up its broad leaves, and expands its petals at the 
 first pattering of the shower, and rejoices in the rain with a 
 quicker sympathy, than the parched shrub in the sandy desart. 
 
 God created man in his own image. To be the image of his 
 own eternity created he man ! Of eternity and self-existence 
 what other likeness is possible in a finite being, but immortali- 
 ty and moral self-determination ! In addition to sensation, per- 
 ception, and practical judgment (instinctive or acquirable) 
 concerning the notices furnished by the organs of perception, 
 all which in kind at least, the dog possesses in common with 
 his master ; in addition to these, God gave us reason, and 
 with reason he gave us reflective self-consciousness ; gave 
 us PRINCIPLES, distinguished from the maxims and generaliza- 
 tions of outward experience by their absolute and essential 
 universality and necessity ; and above all, by superadding to 
 reason the mysterious faculty of free-will and consequent per- 
 sonal amenability, he gave us conscience — that law of con- 
 science, which in the power, and as the indwelling word, of 
 an holy and omnipotent legislator commands us — from among 
 the numerous ideas mathematical and philosophical, which the 
 reason by the necessity of its own excellence creates for itself, 
 unconditionally commands us to attribute reality, and actual ex- 
 istencCy to those ideas and to those only, without which the con- 
 science itself would be baseless and contradictory, to the ideas 
 of Soul, of Free-will, of Immortality, and of God ! 
 
 To God, as the reality of the conscience and the source of 
 all obligation ; to Free-will, as the power of the human being 
 to maintain the ob^L-L'Jti^ce, which God through the conscience 
 has commanded, against all the might of nature ; and to the 
 Immortality of the Soul, as a state in which the weal and woe 
 of man shall be proportioned to his moral worth. 
 
 With this faith all nature, 
 
 ■ all the mighty world 
 
 Of eye and ear- 
 
 presents itself to us, now as the aggregated material of duty, 
 and now as a vision of the Most High revealing to us the mode, 
 and time, and particular instance of applying and realizing that 
 universal rule, pre-established in the heart of our reason ! 
 " The displeasure of some Readers may, perhaps, be incur-
 
 93 
 
 red by my having surprized them into certain reflections and 
 inquiries, for which they have no curiosity. But perhaps some 
 others may be pleased to find themselves carried into ancient 
 times, even though they should consider the hoary maxims, de- 
 fended in these Essays, barely as Hints to awaken and exer- 
 cise the inquisitive Reader, on points not beneath the atten- 
 tion of the ablest men. Those great men, Pythagoras, Plato, 
 and Aristotle, men the most consummate in politics, who found- 
 ed states, or instructed princes, or wrote most accurately on 
 public government, were at the same time the most acute at 
 all abstracted and sublime speculations : the clearest Hght being 
 ever necessary to guide the most important actions. And what- 
 ever the world may opine^ he who hath not much meditated up^ 
 on God^ the Human Mind, and the Summum Bonum, may pos- 
 sibly make a thriving Earth-worm, but will most indubitably 
 make a blundering Patriot and a sorry statesman.''^ 
 
 SiRis, § 350. 
 
 ESSAY XVI. 
 
 Blind is that soul wliicli from this truth can swerve, 
 No state stands sure, but on the grounds of right, 
 Of virtue, knowledge ; judgment to presei-ve, 
 And all the powers of learning requisite ! 
 Though other shifts a present turn may serve, 
 Yet in the trial they will weigh too light. 
 
 Daniel. 
 
 I earnestly entreat the reader not to be dissatisfied eithei 
 with himself or with the author, if he should not at once under- 
 stand every part of the preceding Number ; but rather to con- 
 sider it as a mere annunciation of a magnificent theme, the dif- 
 ferent parts of which are to be demonstrated and developed, 
 explained, illustrated, and exemplified in the progress of the
 
 94 
 
 work. I likewise entreat him to peruse with attention and with 
 candor, the weighty extract from the judicious Hooker, prefix- 
 ed as the motto to a following Number of the Friend. In works 
 of reasoning, as distinguished from narration of events or state- 
 ments of facts ; but more particularly in works, the object of 
 which is to make us better acquainted with our own nature, a 
 writer, whose meaning is every where comprehended as quick- 
 ly as his sentences can be read, may indeed have produced an 
 amusing composition, nay, by awakening and re-enlivening our 
 recollections, a useful one ; but most assuredly he will not have 
 added either to the stock of our knowledge, or to the vigor of 
 our intellect. For how can we gather strength, but by exercise } 
 JHow can a truth, new to us, be made our own without examin- 
 ation and self-questioning — any new truth, I mean, that relates 
 to the properties of the mind, and its various faculties and af- 
 fections ! But whatever demands effort, requires time. Igno- 
 rance seldom vaults into knowledge, but passes into it through 
 an intermediate state of obscurity, even as night into day 
 through twilight. All speculative Truths begin with a Postu- 
 late, even the Truths of Geometry. They all suppose an act 
 of the Will ; for in the moral being lies the source of the intel- 
 lectual. The first step to knowledge, or rather the previous 
 condition of all insight into truth, is to dare commune with our 
 very and permanent self. It is Warburton's remark, not the 
 Friend's, that " of all literary exercitations, whether designed 
 for the use or entertainment of the world, there are none of so 
 much importance, or so. immediately our concern, as those which 
 let us into the knowledge of our own nature. Others may ex- 
 ercise the understanding or amuse the imagination ; but these 
 only can improve the heart and form the human mind to wis- 
 dom." 
 
 The recluse Hermit oft'times more doth know 
 
 Of the woild's inmost wheels, than worldlings can. 
 
 As Man is of the World, the Heart of Man 
 
 Is an Epitome of God's great Book 
 
 Of Creatures, and Men need no further look. 
 
 Donne. 
 
 The higher a man's station, the more arduous and full of peril 
 his duties, the more comprehensive should his Foresight be, 
 the more rooted his tranquillity concerning Life and Death. But 
 these are gifts which no experience can bestow, but the ex-
 
 95 
 
 perience from within : and there is a nobleness of the whole 
 personal being, to which the contemplation of all events and 
 phsenomena in the Light of the three Master Ideas, announced 
 in the foregoing pages, can alone elevate the spirit. Anima 
 sapiens^ (says Giordano Bruno, and let the sublime piety of the 
 passage excuse some intermixture of error, or rather let the 
 words, as they well may, be interpreted in a safe sense) Anima 
 sapiens non timet mortem^ immo interdum illam ultro appetite 
 illi ultro occurrit. Manet quippe substantiam omnem pro Du- 
 ratione Eternitas, pro Loco Immensitas, pro Actu Omniformi- 
 tas. Non levem igitur acfutilem, atqui gr avis simam p erf ecto- 
 que Homine dignissimam Contemplationis Partem persequimur 
 uhi divinitatiSj naturceque splendorem, fusionem, et communi- 
 cationem, non in Cibo, Potu, et ignobiliore quadam materia 
 cum attonitorum seculo perquirimus ; sed in augustd Omnipo- 
 tentis Regia^ immenso cetheris spacio, in injinita naturce gemi- 
 ncB omnia fientis et omnia facientis potentia, unde tot astrorumy 
 mundorum inquam et numinum, uni altissimo concinentium at- 
 que saltantium absque numero atquefine juxta propositos ubique 
 fines atque ordines^ contemplamur. Sic ex visibilium cBterno^ 
 immenso et innumerabili ejfectu, sempiterna immensa ilia Ma- 
 jestas atque bonitas intellecta conspicitur, proque sua dignitate 
 innumerabilium Deorum (mundorum. dico) adsistentia^ conci- 
 nentia, et gloria, ipsius enarratione, immo ad occulos expressa 
 condone glorificatur. Cui Immenso mensum non quadrabit 
 Domicilium atque Temjjlum — ad cujus majestatis plenitudinem 
 a^noscendam atque percoleiidam, numerabilium ministorum 
 nullus esset ordo. Eia igitur ad omniformis Dei omniformem 
 Imaginem conjectemus oculos, vivum et magnum illius admire- 
 mar simulacrum ! — Hinc miraculum magnum a Trismegisto 
 appellabatur Homo, qui in Deum transeat quasi ipse sit Deus 
 qui conatur omnia fieri sicut Deus est omnia ; ad objectum sine 
 fine, ubique tamem finiendo, contendit, sicut infinitus est Deus 
 immensus, ubique totus.* 
 
 * Tmnslation. — A wise spirit does not fear death, nay, sometimes, [as in ca- 
 ses of voluntary martyrdom) seeks and goes forth to meet it, of its own accord. 
 For there awaits all actual beings, for duration and eternity, for place immen- 
 sity, for action onmiformity. We pursue, therefore a species of contemplation 
 not light or futile, but the weightiest and most worth j' of an accomplished 
 man, while we examine and seek for the splendor, the interfusion, and com- 
 munication of the Divinity and of Nature, not in meats or drink, or in any yet
 
 96 
 
 If this be regarded as the fancies of an enthusiast, by such as 
 
 deem themselves most' free, 
 When they within this gross and visable sphere 
 Chain down the winged soul, scoffing ascent. 
 Proud in then- meanness, 
 
 by such as pronounce every man out of his senses who has not 
 lost his reason; even such men may find some weight in the 
 historical fact tliat from persons, who had previously strength- 
 ened their intellects and feelings by the contemplation of Prin- 
 ciples — Principles, the actions correspondent to which involve 
 one half of their consequences, by their ennobling influence on 
 the agent's own soul, and have omnipotence, as the pledge for 
 the remainder — we have derived the surest and most general 
 maxims of prudence. Of high value are they all. Yet there 
 is one among them Avorth all the rest, which in the fullest and 
 primary sense of the word, is indeed, the Maxim^ (i. e. the 
 Maximum) of human Prudence ; and of which History itself in 
 all that makes it most worth studying, is one continued comment 
 and exemplification. It is this : that there is a Wisdom higher 
 
 ignohlor matter, with tlie race of the thunder-stricken ; but in the august palace 
 of the Omnipotent, in the illimitable etherial space, in the infinite power, 
 that creates all things, and is the abiding being of all things. 
 
 There we may contemplate the Host of Stars, of Worlds and their guardi- 
 an Deities, numbers without number, each in its appointed sphere, singing 
 together, and dancing in adoration of the One Most High. Thus from the 
 perpetual, immense, and innumerable goings on of the visible world, that sem- 
 piternal and absolntply infinite Majesty is intellectually beheld, and is glorifi- 
 ed according to his gloiy, by the attendance and choral synii)honies of innu- 
 merable gods, who utter forth the glory of their ineffable Creator in the ex- 
 pressive language of Vision ! To him illimitable, a limited temple will not 
 correspond — to the acknowledgement and due worship of the Plentitude of 
 his Majesty there would be no ])roportion in any niunerable army of minis- 
 trant spirits. Let us then cast our eyes upon the omniform image of the At- 
 tributes of the all-creating Sufweme, nor admit any rejiresentation of his Ex- 
 cellency but the living Universe, which he has created! — Thence Was man 
 entitled by Trismegistus, "the gn at INliraclc, "inasmuch as he has been made 
 capable of entering into imion with God, as if he were himself a divine na- 
 tm"e ; tries to become all things, even as in God all things are; and in limitless 
 progression of limited Statis of Being, urges onward to the ultimate aim, even 
 as God is sinniltaneously infinite, and every where All! 
 
 In the last volume of the work, announced and its nature and objects ex- 
 plained, at the dose of the present, 1 purpose, to give an account of the life of 
 Giordano Bruno, the friend of Sir Philip Sidney, who was bunit under jho-
 
 97 
 
 than Prudence, to which Prudence stands in the same relation 
 as the Mason and Carpenter to the genial and scientific Archi- 
 tect : and from the habits of thinking and feeling, that in this 
 Wisdom had their first formation, our Nelsons and Wellingtons 
 inherit that glorious hardihood, which completes the under- 
 taking, ere the contemptuous calculator (who has left nothing 
 omitted in his scheme of probabilities, except the might of the 
 human mind) has finished his pretended proof of its impossi- 
 bility. You look to Facts and profess to take Experience for 
 your guide. Well ! I too appeal to Experience : and let Facts 
 be the ordeal of my position! Therefore, although I have in 
 this and the preceding Numbers quoted more frequently and 
 copiously than I shall permit myself to do in future, I owe it to 
 the cause I am pleading, not to deny myself the gratification of 
 supporting this connection of practical heroism with previous 
 habits of philosophic thought, by a singularly appropriate pas- 
 sage from an author whose works can be called rare only from 
 their being, I fear, rarely read, however commonly talked of. 
 It is the instance of Xenophon as stated by Lord Bacon, who 
 would himself furnish an equal instance, if there could be found 
 an equal commentator. 
 
 " It is of Xenophon the Philosopher, who went from Socra- 
 tes's School into Asia, in the expedition of Cyrus the younger, 
 against King Artaxerxes. This Xenophon, at that time, was 
 very young, and never had seen the wars before ; neither had 
 any command in the army, but only followed the war as a vol- 
 unteer, for the love and conversation of Proxenus, his friend. 
 He was present when Falinus came in message from the king 
 
 tence of Atheism, at Rome, in the year IGOO; and of hig works, which are 
 perhaps the scarcest books ever printed. They are singularly interesting as 
 portraits of a vigorous mind struggling after truth, amid inany prejudices, 
 which from the state of the Roman Cliurch, in which he was born, have a 
 claim to much indulgence. One of them (entitled Ember Week) is curious 
 for its hvelyaccounts of the rude state of London, at that time, both as to the 
 streets and the manners of the citizens. The most industrious Historians of 
 speculative Philosophy, have not been able to procure more than a few of 
 his works. Accidentally I have been more fortunate in this respect, than 
 those who have written hitherto on the unhappy Philosopher of JVola : as out 
 of eleven works, the titles of which are preserved to us, I have had an op- 
 portunity of perusing six. I was told, when in Germany, that there is a com- 
 plete collection of them in the Royal Libraiy at Copenhagen. If so, it ia 
 unique. 
 
 13
 
 98 
 
 to the Grecians, after that Cyrus was slain in the Field, and 
 they, a handful of men, left to themselves in the midst of the 
 King's territories, cut off from their country by many navigable 
 rivers, and many hundred miles. The message imported, that 
 they should deliver up their arms and submit themselves to the 
 King's mercy. To v*'hich message, before answer was made, di- 
 vers of the army conferred familiarly with Falinus, and amongst 
 the rest Xenophon happened to say: Why, Falinus! we have 
 now but two things left, our arras and our virtue ; and if we 
 yield up our arms, how shall we make use of our virtue ? Where- 
 to Falinus, smiling on him, said, 'If I be not deceived. Young 
 Gentleman, you are an Athenian, and I believe, you study 
 Philosophy, and it is pretty that you say ; but you are much 
 abused, if you think your virtue can withstand the King's pow- 
 er.' Here was the scorn : the wonder followed — which was, 
 that this young Scholar or Philosopher, after all the Captains 
 were murdered in parly, by treason, conducted those ten thou- 
 sand foot through the heart of all the King's high countries from 
 Babylon to Grecia, in safety, in despight of all the King's forces, 
 to the astonishment of the world, and the encouragement of the 
 Grecians, in times succeeding, to make invasion upon the kings 
 of Persia ; as was after purposed by Jason the Thessalian, at- 
 tempted by Agesilaus the Spartan, and achieved by Alexander 
 the Macedonian, all upon the ground of the act of that young 
 Scholar.'*^ 
 
 Often have I reflected with awe on the great and dispropor- 
 tionate power, which an individual of no extraordinary talents 
 or attainments may exert, by merely throwing off all restraint 
 of conscience. What then must not be the power, where an 
 individual, of consummate wickedness, can organize into the 
 unity and rapidity of an individual will all the natural and arti- 
 ficial forces of a populous and wicked nation ? And could we 
 bring within the field of imagination, the devastation eflTected 
 in the moral world, by the violent removal of old customs, fa- 
 miliar sympathies, willing reverences, and habits of subordina- 
 tion almost naturalized into instinct; of the mild influences of 
 reputation, and the other ordinary props and aidances of our 
 infirm virtue, or at least, if virtue be too high a name, of our 
 well-doing; and above all, if we could give form and body 
 to all the effects produced on the principles and dispositions of 
 nations by the infectious feelings of insecurity, and the soul- 
 sickening sense of unsteadiness in the whole edifice of civil
 
 99 
 
 society ; the horrors of battle, though tlie miseries of a whole 
 war were brought together before our eyes in one disastrous field, 
 would present but a tame tragedy in comparison. Nay, it would 
 even present a sight of comfoit and of elevation, if this field 
 of carnage were the sign and result of a national resolve, of a 
 general will, so to die, that neither deluge nor fire should take 
 away the name of Country from their graves, rather than to 
 tread the same clods of earth, no longer a country, and them- 
 selves alive in nature, but dead in infamy. What is Greece at 
 this present moment ? It is the country of the Heroes from 
 Codrus to Philopaemen ; and so it w^ould be, though all the sands 
 of Africa should cover its corn fields and olive gardens, and 
 not a flower were left on Hymettus for a bee to murmur in. 
 
 If then the power wdth which wickedness can invest the hu- 
 man being be thus tremendous, greatl}^ does it behove us to 
 enquire into its source and causes. So doing we shall quickly 
 discover that it is not vice, as vice, which is thus mighty ; but 
 systematic vice! Vice self-consistent and entire; crime corres- 
 ponding to crime ; villainy entrenched and barricadoed by vil- 
 lainy ; this is the condition and main constituent of its power. 
 The abandonment of all principle of right enables the soul to 
 choose and act upon a principle of wrong, and to subordinate to 
 this one principle all the various vices of human nature. For 
 it is a mournful truth, that as devastation is incomparably an 
 easier w'ork than production, so may all its means and instru- 
 ments be more easily arranged into a scheme and system. Even 
 as in a seige every building and garden, which the faithful go- 
 vernor must destroy, as impeding the defensive means of the 
 garrison, or furnishing means of offence to the besieger, occa- 
 sions a wound in feelings which virtue herself has fostered : 
 and virtue, because it is virtue, loses perforce part of her ener- 
 gy in the reluctance with which she proceeds to a business so 
 repugnant to her wishes, as a choice of evils. But He, who 
 has once said with his whole heart. Evil, be thou my Good ! has 
 removed a world of obstacles by the very decision, that he will 
 have no obstacles but those of force and brute matter. The 
 road of Justice 
 
 " Curves round the coni-fickl and the hill of vines 
 "Honoring the holy bounds of property! 
 
 But the path of the lightning is straight : and straight the fear- 
 ful path
 
 100 
 
 "Of the cannon-ball. Direct it flies and rajjid 
 
 " Shatt'ring tiiatit wiai/ reacli, and shatt'ring what it reaches."* 
 
 Happily for mankind, however, the obstacles which a consist- 
 ently evil mind no longer finds in itself, it finds in its own un- 
 suitableness to human nature. A limit is fixed to its power: 
 but within that limit, both as to the extent and duration of its 
 influence, there is little hope of checking its career, if giant 
 and united vices are opposed only by mixed and scattered vir- 
 tues : and those too, probably, from the want of some combining 
 Principle, which assigns to each its due place and rank, at 
 civil war with themselves, or at best perplexing and counteract- 
 ing each other. In our late agony of glory and of peril, did we 
 not too often hear even good men declaiming on the horrors and 
 crimes of war, and softening or staggering the minds of their 
 brethren by details of individual wretchedness ? Thus under 
 pretence of avoiding blood, they were withdrawing the will 
 from the defence of the very source of those blessings without 
 which the blood would flow idly in our veins ! thus lest a few 
 should fall on the bulwarks in glory, they were preparing us to 
 give up the whole state to baseness, and the children of free 
 ancestors to become slaves, and the fathers of slaves ! 
 
 Machiavelli has well observed, " Sono di tre generazione Cer- 
 velli : Puno intende per se ; Valtro intende quanto da altri gli 
 e mostro ; il terzo non intende ne per se stesso neper demostra- 
 zione d^altri.''^ " There are brains of three races. The one 
 understands of itself; the second understands as much as is 
 shewn it by others ; the third neither understands of itself nor 
 w^hat is shewn it by others." I should have no hesitation in 
 placing that man in the third Class of Brains, for whom the 
 History of the last twenty years has not supplied a copious 
 comment on the preceding Text. The widest maxims of pru- 
 dence are like arms without hearts, disjoined from those feelings 
 which flow forth from princijile as from a fountain. So little 
 
 *Wallenstein, from Schiller, by S. T. Coleridge. I return my thanks to 
 the unknown Author of Waverly, Guy Mannering, &c., for having (juoted 
 tliis free Translation from Schiller's best ;and therefore most neglected) Drama 
 with applause : and am not ashamed to avow, that I have derived a peculiar 
 gratification, that the first men of our age have united in giving no ordinary 
 praise to a work, which our anonymous critics were equally unanimous in 
 abusing as below all criticism : though they charitably added, that the fault 
 was, doubtless, chiefly if not wholly, in the Translator's dullness and inca- 
 pacity.
 
 101 
 
 are even the genuine maxims of expedience likely to be per- 
 ceived or acted upon by those who have been habituated to ad- 
 mit nothing higher than expedience, that I dare hazard the as- 
 sertion, that in the whole Chapter-of-Contents of European 
 Ruin, every article might be unanswerably deduced from the 
 neglect of some maxim that had been repeatedly laid down, 
 demonstrated, and enforced with a host of illustrations, in some 
 one or other of the works of Machiavelli, Bacon, or Harring- 
 ton.* Indeed I can remember no one event of importance 
 which was not distinctly foretold, and this not by a lucky prize 
 drawn among a thousand blanks out of the lottery wheel of con- 
 jecture, but legitimately deduced as certain consequences from 
 established premises. It would be a melancholy, but a very 
 profitable employment, for some vigorous mind, intimately ac- 
 quainted with the recent history of Europe, to collect the 
 weightiest Aphorisms of Machiavelli alone, and illustrating by 
 appropriate facts the breach or observation of each, to render 
 less mysterious the present triumph of lawless violence. The 
 apt motto to such a work would be, — " The Children of Dark- 
 ness are wiser in their Generation than the Children of Light." 
 So grievously, indeed, have men been deceived by the showy 
 mock theories of unlearned mock thinkers, that there seems a 
 tendency in the public mind to shun all thought, and to expect 
 help from any quarter rather than from seriousness and reflec- 
 tion : as if some invisible power would think for us, when we 
 gave up the pretence of thinking for ourselves. But in the 
 first place, did those, who opposed the theories of invocators, | 
 conduct their untheoretic opposition with more wisdom or to a/ 
 happier result ? And secondly, are societies now constructed 
 on principles so few and so simple, that we could, even if we 
 wished it, act as it were by instinct, like our distant Forefa- 
 thers in the infancy of States ? Doubtless, to act is nobler than 
 to think : but as the old man doth not become a child by means 
 of his second childishness, as little can a nation exempt itself 
 from the necessity of thinking, which has once learnt to think. 
 Miserable was the delusion of the late mad Realizer of mad 
 Dreams, in his belief that he should ultimately succeed in trans- 
 forming the nations of Europe into the unreasoning hordes of a 
 Babylonian or Tartar Empire, or even in reducing the age to 
 the simplicity, (so desirable for tyrants) of those times, when 
 
 * See The Statesman's Manual : a Lay Sermon by the Author.
 
 102 
 
 the sword and the plough were the sole implements of human 
 skill. Those are epochs in the history of a people which hav- 
 ing been can never more recur. Extirpate all civilization and 
 all its arts by the sword, trample down all ancient Institutions, 
 Rights, Distinctions, and Privileges, drag us backward to our 
 old Barbarism, as beasts to the den of Cacus — deemed you that 
 thus you could re-create the unexamining and boisterous youth 
 of the world when the sole questions were — "What is to be 
 conquered ? and who is the most famous leader !" 
 
 In an age in which artificial knowledge is received almost 
 at the birth, intellect, and thought alone can be our upholder 
 and judge. Let the importance of this Truth procure pardon 
 for its repetition. Only by means of seriousness and medita- 
 tion and the free infliction of censure in the spirit of love, can 
 the true philanthropist of the present time, curb-in himself and 
 his contemporaries ; only by these can he aid in preventing the 
 evils which threaten us, not from the terrors of an enemy so 
 much as from our fears of our own thoughts, and our aversion 
 to all the toils of reflection ? For all must now be taught in 
 sport — Science, Morality, yea. Religion itself. And yet few 
 now sport from the actual impulse of a believing fancy and in 
 a happy delusion. Of the most influensive class, at least, of 
 our literary guides, (the anonymous authors of our periodical 
 publications) the most part assume this character from cowar- 
 dice or malice, till having begun with studied ignorance and a 
 premeditated levity, they at length realize the lie, and end in- 
 deed in a pitiable destitution of all intellectual power. 
 
 To many I shall appear to speak insolently, because the 
 PUBLIC, (for that is the phrase which has succeeded to " The 
 Town," of the wits of the reign of Charles the Second) — the 
 public is at present accustomed to find itself appealed to as the 
 infallible Judge, and each reader complimented with excellen- 
 cies, which if he really possessed, to what purpose is he a 
 reader, unless, perhaps, to remind himself of his own superiori- 
 ty ! I confess that I think widely difl"erent. 1 have not a deep- 
 er conviction on earth, than that the principles both of Taste, 
 Morals, and Religion, which are taught in the commonest books 
 of recent composition, are false, injurious, and debasing. If 
 these sentiments should be just, the consequences must be so 
 important, that every well-educated man, who professes them 
 in sincerity, deserves a patient hearing. He may fairly appeal
 
 103 
 
 even to those whose persuasions are most opposed to his own, 
 in the words of the Philosopher of Nola : " Ad ist hocc qiiceso 
 vos, qvaliaciinquc primo videantur aspectu^ adtendite, ut qui 
 vohisforsan insanire videar, saltern quihus insaniamrationihus 
 cognoscatis.^'' What I feel deeply, freely will I utter. Truth 
 is not detraction ; and assuredly we do not hate him, to whom 
 we tell the Truth. But with whomsoever we play the deceiv- 
 er and flatterer, him at the hottom we despise. We are, in 
 deed, under a necessity to conceive a vileness in him, in or- 
 der to diminish the sense of the wrong we have committed, by 
 the worthlessness of the object. 
 
 Through no excess of confidence in the strength of my tal- 
 ents, but with the deepest assurance of the justice of my cause, 
 I bid deiiance to all the flatterers of the folly and foolish self- 
 opinion of the half-instructed Many ; to all who fill the air with 
 festal explosions and false fires sent up against the lightnings 
 of Heaven, in order that the people may neither distinguish 
 the warning Flash nor hear the threatening thunder ! How re- 
 cently did we stand alone in the word .'' And though the one 
 storm has blown over, another may even now be gathering : 
 or haply the hollow murmur of the Earthquake within the 
 Bowels of our own Commonweal may strike a direr terror than 
 ever did the Tempest of foreign Warfare. Therefore, though 
 the first quatrain is no longer applicable, yet the moral truth 
 and the sublime exhortation of the following Sonnet can never 
 be superannuated. With it I conclude this Number, thanking 
 Heaven ! that I have communed with, honored, and loved its 
 wise and high-minded author. To know that such men are 
 among us, is of itself an antidote against despondence. 
 
 Another year ! — another deadly blow ! 
 
 Another mighty Emj)iro overthrown! 
 
 And we are left, or shall be left, alone ; 
 
 The last that dares to strnggle with the Foe. 
 
 'Tis well ! from this day forward we shall know ' ^ • 
 
 That in ourselves our safety must be sought; 
 
 That by our own right hands it must be wrought; 
 
 That we must stand unpropt or be laid low. 
 
 O Dastard! whom such foretaste doth not cheer! 
 
 We shall exult, if They, who rule the land, 
 
 Be Men who hold its many blessings dear, 
 
 Wise, upright, vahant ; not a venal Band, 
 
 Who are to judge of danger which they fear, 
 
 And honour, which they do not understand. Wordsworth.
 
 THE 
 
 L.ANDINCJ-PL.ACE: 
 
 OR 
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 INTERPOSED 
 
 FOR AMUSEMENT, RETROSPECT, 
 
 AND 
 PREPARATION. 
 
 MISCELLANY THE FIRST. 
 
 Etiairi a mtisis si qimndo aninuun paulisper abducanius, apud Musas nihil- 
 ominus feriamur : at reclines quideiri, at otioeas, at de his et illis inter se li- 
 bere colloquentee. 
 
 w 
 
 14
 
 ESSAY r. 
 
 O blessed Letters ! that combine iii one 
 All ages past, and make one live with all : 
 By you we do confer with who are gone 
 And the Dead-living unto Council call! 
 By you the Unborn shall have communion 
 Of what we feel and what doth us befall. 
 
 Since Writings are the Veins, the Arteries, 
 And undecaying Life-strings of those Hearts, 
 That still shall pant and still shall exercise 
 Their mightiest powers when Nature none imparts: 
 And the strong constitution of their Praise 
 Wear out the infection of distemper'd days. 
 
 Daniel's Musophilus. 
 
 The Intelligence, which produces or controls human actions 
 and occurrences, is often represented by the Mystics under the 
 name and notion of the supreme Harmonist. I do not myself 
 approve of these metaphors: they seem to imply a restlessness 
 to understand that which is not among the appointed objects of 
 our comprehension or discursive faculty. But certainly there 
 is one excellence in good music, to which, without mysticism, .' 
 we may find or make an analogy in the records of History. I 
 allude to that sense of recognition^ which accompanies our 
 sense of novelty in the most original passages of a great com- 
 poser. If we listen to a Symphony of Cimarosa, the present 
 strain still seems not only to recal, l)ut almost to renew^ some past 
 movement, another and yet the same ! Each present movement 
 bringing back, as it were, and embodying the spirit of some 
 lijelody that had gone before, anticipates and seems trying to 
 overtake something that is to come : and the musician has 
 reached the summit of his art, when having thus modified the
 
 y. 
 
 108 
 
 Present by the Past, he at the same time weds the Past in the 
 Present to some prepared and corresponsive Future. The audi- 
 tor's thoughts and feelings move under the same influence : re- 
 trospection blends with anticipation, and Hope and Memory (a 
 female Janus) become one power with a double aspect. A simi- 
 lar effect the reader may produce for himself in the pages of His- 
 ory, if he will be content to substitute an intellectual compla- 
 cency for pleasurable sensation. /-The events and characters of 
 one age, like the strains in music, recal those of another, and 
 the variety by which each is individualized, not only gives a 
 charm and poignancy to the resemblance, but likewise renders 
 the whole more intelligible J Meantime ample room is afforded 
 for the exercise both of the judgment and the fancy, in distin- 
 guishing cases of real resemblance from those of intentional 
 imitation, the analogies of nature, revolving upon herself, from 
 the masquerade figures of cunning and vanity. 
 
 It is not from identity of opinions, or from similarity of events 
 and outward actions, that a real resemblance in the radical char- 
 acter can be deduced. fOn the contrary, men of great and stir- 
 ring powers, who are destined to mould the age in which they 
 are born, must first mould themselves upon it,^ Mahomet born 
 twelve centuries later, and in the heart of Europe, would not 
 have been a false Prophet ; nor would a false Prophet of the 
 present generation have been a Mahomet in the sixth century. 
 I have myself, therefore, derived the deepest interest from the 
 comparison of men, whose characters at the first view appear 
 widely dissimilar, who yet have produced similar eff'ects on 
 their different ages, and this by the exertion of powers which 
 on examination will be found far more alike, than the altered 
 drapery and costume would have led us to suspect. Of the 
 heirs of fame few are more respected by me, though for very 
 different qualities, than Erasipus and Luther : scarcely any one 
 has a larger share of my aversion than Voltaire ; and even of 
 the better-hearted Rousseau I was never more than a very 
 lukewarm admirer. I should perhaps too rudely affront the 
 general opinion, if I avowed my whole creed concerning the 
 proportions of real talent between the two purifiers of revealed 
 Religion, now neglected as obsolete, and the two modern con- 
 spirators against its authority, who are still the Alpha and Ome- 
 ga of Continental Genius. Yet when I abstract the questions of 
 evil and good, and measure only the effects produced and the
 
 109 
 
 mode of producing them, I have repeatedly found the idea of 
 Voltaire, Rosseau, and Robespierre, recal in a similar cluster 
 and connection that of Erasmus, Luther, and Munster. 
 
 Those who are familiar with the works of Emsmu s, and who 
 know the influence of his wit, as the pioneer of the reformation ; 
 and who likewise know, that by his wit, added to the vast va- 
 riety of knowledge communicated in his works, he had won 
 over by anticipation so large a part of the polite and lettered 
 world to the Protestant party ; will be at no loss in discovering 
 the intended counterpart in the life and writings of the veteran 
 Frenchman, t^^hey will see, indeed, that the knowledge of 
 the one was solid through its whole extent, and that of the 
 other extensive at a cheap rate, by its superficiality ; that the 
 wit of the one is always bottomed on sound sense, peoples and 
 enriches the mind of the reader with an endless variety of 
 distinct images and living interests : and that his broadest 
 laughter is every where translatable into grave and weighty 
 truth; while the wit of the Frenchman, without imagery, with- 
 out character, and without that pathos which gives the magic 
 charm to genuine humor, consists, when it is most perfect, in 
 happy turns of phrase, but far too often in fantastic incidents, 
 outrages of the pure imagination, and the poor low trick of 
 combining the ridiculous with the venerable, where he, who 
 does not laugh, abhorSy Neither will they have forgotten, that 
 the object of the one was to drive the thieves and mummers 
 out of the temple, while the other was propelling a worse 
 banditti, first to profane and pillage, and ultimately to raze it. 
 Yet not the less will they perceive, that the effects remain par- 
 allel, the circumstances analagous, and the instruments the 
 same. In each case the effects extended over Europe, were at- 
 tested and augmented by the praise and patronage of thrones 
 and dignities, and are not to be explained but by extraordinary 
 industry and a life of literature ; in both instances the circum- 
 stances were supplied by an age of hopes and promises — the 
 age of Erasmus restless from the first vernal influences of real 
 knowledge, that of Voltaire from the hectic of imagined supe- 
 riority. In the voluminous works of both, the instruments em- 
 ployed are chiefly those of v/it and amusive erudition, and alike 
 in both the errors and evils (real or imputed) in Religion and 
 Politics are the objects of the battery. And here we must 
 stop. The two Men were essentially different. Exchange
 
 no 
 
 mutually their dates and spheres of action, yet Voltaire, had he 
 been ten-fold a Voltaire, could not have made up an Erasmus ; 
 and Erasmus must have emptied himself of half his greatness and 
 all his goodness, to have become a Voltaire. 
 
 Shall we succeed better or worse with the next pair, in this 
 our new dance of death, or rather of the shadows which we 
 have brought forth — two by two — from the historic ark ? In 
 our first couple we have at least secured an honorable retreat, 
 and though we failed as to the agents, we have maintained a 
 fair analogy in the actions and the objects. Byt the heroic 
 Luther, a Giant awaking in his strength ! and the crazy 
 Rousseau, the Dreamer of love-sick Tales, and the spinner 
 of speculative Cobwebs; shy of light as the Mole, but as quick- 
 eared too for every whisper of the public opinion ; the Teacher 
 of stoic Pride in his principles, yet the victim of morbid Vani- 
 ty in his feelings and conduct. From what point of likeness 
 can we commence the comparison between a Luther and a 
 Rousseau? And truly had 1 been seeking for characters that, 
 taken as they really existed, closely resemble each other, and 
 this too to our first apprehensions, and according to the com- 
 mon rules of biographical comparison, I could scarcely have 
 made a more unlucky choice : unless I had desired that my 
 parallel of the German " Son of Thunder" and the Visionary of 
 Geneva, should sit on the same bench with honest Fluellin's 
 of Alexander the Great and Harry of Monmouth. Still, how- 
 ever, the same analogy would hold as in m}- former instance : 
 the effects produced on their several ages by Luther and Rous- 
 seau, were commensurate with each other, and were produced 
 in both cases by (what their contemporaries felt as) serious 
 and vehement eloquence, and an elevated (one of moral feel- 
 ing : and Luther, not less than Rousseau, was actuated by an 
 almost superstitious hatred of superstition, and a turbulent pre- 
 judice against prejudices. In the relation too which their wri- 
 tings severally bore to those of Erasmus and Voltaire, and the 
 way in which the latter co-operated with them to the same 
 general end, each finding its own class of admirers and Prose- 
 lytes, the parallel is complete. 
 
 I cannot, however, rest here ! Spite of the apparent incon- 
 gruities, I am disposed to plead for a resemblance in the Men 
 themselves, for that similarity in their radical natures, which 
 I abandoned all pretence and desire of shewing in the instances
 
 '^ 
 
 in 
 
 of Voltaire and Erasmus. But then my readers must think of 
 Luther not as he really was, hut as he might have been, if he 
 had been born in the age and under the circumstances of the 
 Swiss Philosopher. For this purpose I must strip him of many 
 advantages which he derived from his own times, and must 
 contemplate him in his natural weaknesses as well as in his 
 original strength. Each referred all things to his own ideal. 
 The ideal was indeed widely different in the one and in the 
 other : and this was not the least of Luther's many advantages, 
 or (to use a favorite phrase of his own) not one of his least 
 favors of preventing grace. Happily for him he had derived 
 his standard from a common measure already received by the 
 good and wise : I mean the inspired writings, the study of 
 which Erasmus had previously restored among the learned. 
 To know that we are in sympathy with others, moderates our 
 feelings, as well as strengthens our convictions : and for the 
 mind, which opposes itself to the faith of the multitude, it is 
 more especially desirable, that there should exist an object out 
 of itself, on which it may fix its attention, and thus balance its 
 own energies. 
 
 Rousseau, on the contrary in the inauspicious spirit of his age 
 and birth-place,* had slipped the cable of his faith, and steer- 
 ed by the compass of unaided reason, ignorant of the hidden 
 currents that were bearing him out of his course, and too proud 
 to consult the faithful charts prized and held sacred by his 
 forefathers. But the strange influences of his bodily tempera- 
 ment on his understanding ; his constitutional melancholy pam- 
 pered into a morbid excess by solitude ; his wild dreams of 
 suspicion ; his hypochondriacal fancies of hosts of conspirators 
 all leagued against him and his cause, and headed by some 
 arch-enemy, to whose machinations he attributed every trifling 
 mishap, (all as much the creatures of his imagination, as if in- 
 stead of Men he had conceived them to be infernal Spirits and 
 Beings preternatural) — these, or at least the predisposition to 
 them, existed in the ground-work of his nature : they were 
 
 * Infidelity was so common in Geneva about that time, that Voltaire in one 
 of his Letters exults, that in this, Calvin's own City, some half dozen on- 
 ly of the most ignorant believed in Christianity under any form. This was, 
 no doubt, one of Voltaire's usual lies of exaggeration : it is not however to 
 be denied, that here, and throughout Switzerland, he and the dark Master in 
 whose service he employed himself, had ample grounds of triumph.
 
 112 
 
 parts of Rousseau himself. And what corresponding in kind 
 to these, not to speak of degree, can we detect in the character 
 of his supposed parallel ? This difficulty will suggest itself at 
 the first thought, to those who derive all their knowledge of 
 Luther from the meagre biography met with in " The Lives of 
 eminent Reformers," or even from the ecclesiastical Histories 
 of Mosheim or Milner : for a life of Luther, in extent and style 
 of execution proportioned to the grandeur and interest of the 
 subject, a Life of the Man Luther, as well as of Luther the 
 Theologian, is still a desideratum in English Literature, though 
 perhaps there is no subject for which so many unused materi- 
 als are extant, both printed and in manuscript.* 
 
 *Tlie affectionate respect in which I hold the name of Dr. Joitin (one of 
 the many iUustrious Nurslings of the College to which I deem it no small 
 honor to have belonged — Jesus, Cambridge) renders it painful to me to assert, 
 that the above remark holds almost equally true of a Life of Erasmus. But 
 every Scholai* well read in the writings of Erasmus and his illustrious Con- 
 temporaries, must have discovered, that Jortin had neither collected sufficient, 
 nor the best, materials for his work : and (jjerhaps from that very cause) he 
 grew weary of his task, before he had made a fidl use of the scanty materi- 
 als which ho had collected.
 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 Is it, I ask, most itnportant to the best interests of Mankind, temporal aa 
 Avell as spiritual, tliat certain Works, the names and number of which are 
 fixed and unalterable, should be distinguished from all other Works, not 
 in a degree only but even in kind'} And that these, collectively should form 
 THE Book, to which in all the concerns of Faith and Morality the last re- 
 course is to be made, antl from the decisions of which no man dare appeal? 
 If the mere existence of a Book so called and charactered be, as the Koran 
 itself suffices to evince, a mighty Bond of Union, among nations whom all 
 other causes tend to separate ; if moreover the Book revered by us and our 
 forefathers has been the Foster-nurse of Learning in the darkest, and of 
 Civilization in the rudest, times; and lastly, if this so vast and wide a Bless- 
 ing is not to be founded in a Delusion, and doomed therefore to the Im- 
 permanence and Scorn in which sooner or later all delusions must end ; 
 how, I pray you, is it conceivable that this should be brought about and se- 
 cured, otherwise than by a special vouchsafement to this one Book, exclu- 
 sively, of that Divine Mean, that uniform and perfect middle ivay, which in all 
 points is at safe and equal distance from all errors whether of excess or de- 
 fect ? But again if this be true, (and what Protestant christian worthy of his 
 baptismal dedication will deny its truth) surely we ought not to be hard and 
 over-stern in our censures of the mistakes and infirmities of those, who pre- 
 tending to no wan'ant of extraordinaiy Inspiration have yet been raised up- 
 by God's providence to be of highest power and eminence in the reformation 
 of his Church. Far rather does it behove us to consider, in how many in- 
 stances the peccant humor native to the man had been wi'ought upon by tho 
 faithful study of that only faultless Model, and corrected into an unsinning, 
 or at least a venial, Predominance in the Writer or Preacher. Yea, that not 
 seldom the Infirmity of a zealous Soldier in the Warfare of Christ has been 
 made the very mould and ground-work of that man's peculiar gifts and vir- 
 tues. Grateful too we should be, that the very Faults of famous Men have 
 been fitted to the age, on which they were to act: and that thus the folly of 
 man has proved the wisdom of God, and been made the instrument of his 
 mercy to mankind. Anon. 
 
 Whoever has sojourned in Eisenach,* will assuredly have 
 
 *Durchflage durch Deutchland, die Niederlnnde und Frankreich : zweit. — 
 Theil. ]). 12fi. 
 
 15
 
 114 
 
 visited the Warteburg, interesting by so many historical asso- 
 ciations, which stands on a high rock, about two miles to the 
 south from the City Gate. To this Castle Luther was taken on 
 his return from the imperial diet, where Charles the Fifth had 
 pronounced the ban upon him, and limited his safe convoy to one 
 and twenty days. On the last but one of these days, as he was 
 on his way to Waltershausen (a town in the dutchy of Saxe 
 Gotha, a few leagues to the south-east of Eisenach) he was 
 stopped in a hollow behind the Castle Altenstein, and carried 
 to the Warteburg. The Elector of Saxony, who could not 
 have refused to deliver up Luther, as one put in the ban by the 
 Emperor and the Diet, had ordered John of Berleptsch the 
 governor of the Warteburg and Burckhardt von Hundt, the 
 governor of Altenstein, to take Luther to one or the other 
 of these Castles, without acquainting him which ; in order that 
 he might be able, with safe conscience, to declare, that he did 
 not know where Luther was. Accordingly they took him to the 
 Warteburg, under the name of the Chevalier (Ritter) George. 
 
 To this friendly imprisonment the reformation owes many of 
 Luther's most important labours. In this place he wrote his 
 works against auricular confession, against Jacob Latronum, the 
 tract on the abuse of Masses, that against clerical and monastic 
 vows, composed his Exposition of the 22, 27, and 68 Psalms, 
 finished his Declaration of the Magnificat, began to write his 
 Church Homilies, and translated the New Testament. Here 
 too, and during this time, he is said to have hurled his ink-stand 
 at the Devil, the black spot from which yet remains on the stone 
 wall of the room he studied in ; which surely, no one will have 
 visited the Warteburg without having had pointed out to him by 
 the good Catholic who is, or at least some few years ago was, 
 the Warden of the Castle. He must have been either a very 
 supercilious or a very incurious traveller if he did not, for the 
 gratification of his guide at least, inform himself by means of 
 his pen-knife, that the said marvellous blot bids defiance to ail 
 the toils of the scrubbing brush, and is to remain a sign for 
 ever ; and with this advantage over most of its kindred, that 
 being capable of a double interpretation, it is equally flattering 
 to the Protestant and the Papist, and is regarded by the won- 
 der-loving zealots of both parties, with equal faith. 
 
 Whether the great man ever did throw his ink-stand at his 
 Satanic Majesty, whether he ever boasted of the exploit, and
 
 115 
 
 himself declared the dark blotch on his Study-Wall in the 
 VVarteburg, to be the result and relict of this author-like hand- 
 grenado, (happily for mankind he used his ink-stand at other 
 times to better purpose, and with more effective hostility against 
 the arch-fiend) I leave to my reader's own judgment ; on con- 
 dition, however, that he has previously perused Lutlier's table- 
 talk, and other writings of the same stamp, of some of his most 
 illustrious contemporaries, which contain facts still more strange 
 and whimsical, related by themselves and of themselves, and 
 accompanied with solemn protestations of the Truth of their 
 statements. Luther's table-talk, which to a truly philosophic 
 mind, will not be less interesting than Rousseau's confessions, 
 I have not myself the means of consulting at present, and can- 
 not therefore say, whether this ink-pot adventure is, or is not, 
 told or referred to in it ; but many considerations incline me to 
 give credit to the story. 
 
 Luther's unremitting literary labor and his sedentary mode of 
 life, during his confinement in the Warteburg, where he was 
 treated with the greatest kindness, and enjoyed every liberty 
 consistent with his own safety, had begun to undermine his for- 
 mer unusually strong health. He suffered many and most dis- 
 tressing effects of indigestion and a deranged state of the di- 
 gestive organs. Melancthon, whom he had desired to consult 
 the Physicians at Erfurth, sent him some de-obstruent medi- 
 cines, and the advice to take regular and severe exercise. At 
 first he followed the advice, sate and laboured less, and spent 
 whole days in the chase ; but like the younger Pliny, he strove 
 in vain to form a taste for this favorite amusement of the " Gods 
 of the earth," as appears from a passage in a letter to George 
 Spalatin, which I translate for an additional reason : to prove 
 to the admirers of Rousseau, (who perhaps will not be less af- 
 fronted by this biographical parallel, than the zealous Luther- 
 ans will be offended) that ii' my comparison should turn out 
 groundless on the whole, the failure will not have arisen either 
 from the want of sensibility in our great reformer, or of angry 
 aversion to those in high places, whom he regarded as the op- 
 pressors of their rightful equals. " I have been," he writes^ 
 " employed for two days in the sports of the field, and was wil- 
 ling myself to taste this bitter-sweet amusement of the great 
 heroes : we have caught two hares, and one brace of poor lit- 
 tle partridges. An employment this which does not ill suit 
 quiet leisurely folks : for even in the midst of the ferrets and
 
 116 
 
 dogs, I have had theological fancies. But as much pleasure as 
 the general appearance of the scene and the mere looking on 
 occasioned me, even eo much it pitied me to think of the mys- 
 tery and emblem which lies beneath it. For what does this 
 symbol signify, but that the Devil, through his godless hunts- 
 man and dogs, the Bishops and Theologians to wit, doth privily 
 chase and catch the innocent poor little beasts ? Ah ! the simple 
 and credulous souls came thereby far too plain before my eyes. 
 Thereto comes a yet more frightful mystery : as at my earnest 
 entreaty we had saved alive one poor little hare, and I had con- 
 cealed it in the sleeve of my great coat, and had strolled off a 
 short distance from it, the dogs in the mean time found the poor 
 hare. Such, too, is the fury of the Pope with Satan, that he 
 destroys even the souls that had been saved, and troubles him- 
 self little about my pains and entreaties. Of such hunting then 
 1 have had enough." In another passage he tells his corres- 
 pondent, "you know it is hard to be a Prince, and not in some 
 degree a Robber, and the greater a Prince the more a Robber." 
 Of our Henry the Eighth, he says, " I must answer the grim 
 Lion that passes himself oft" for King of England. The igno- 
 rance in the Book is such as one naturally expects from a King ; 
 but the bitterness and impudent falsehood is quite leonine." 
 And in his circular letter to the Princes, on occasion of the 
 Peasant's War, he uses a language so inflammatory, and holds 
 forth a doctrine which borders so near on the holy right of in- 
 surrection, that it may as well remain untranslated. 
 
 Had Luther been himself a Prince, he could not have de- 
 sired better treatment than he received during his eight months 
 stay in the Warteburg ; and in consequence of a more luxuri- 
 ous diet than he had been accustomed to, he was plagued with 
 temptations both from the "Flesh and the Devil." It is evi- 
 dent from his letters* that he suffered under great irritability 
 of his nervous system, the common eff'ect of deranged digestion 
 in men of sedentary habits, who are at the same time intense 
 thinkers : and this irritability added to, and revivifying, the 
 
 * I can scarcely conceive a more delightful Volume than might be made 
 from Luther's Letters, especially from those that were written from the War- 
 teburg, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy, idiomatic, Aear^i/ mother- 
 tongue of the original. A difficult task I admit — and scarcely possible for any 
 man, however great hie talents in other respects, whose favorite reading has 
 not lain among the English writers fj-oni Edward the Sixth to Charles ths 
 First.
 
 117 
 
 impressions made upon him in early life, and fostered by the 
 theological systems of his manhood, is abundantly sufficient to 
 explain all his apparitions and all his nightly combats with 
 evil spirits. I see nothing improbable in the supposition, that 
 in one of those unconscious half sleeps, or rather those rapid 
 alternations of the sleeping with the half-waking state, which 
 is the true witching time, 
 
 " the season 
 
 Wherein tlie spirits hold their wont to walk," 
 
 the fruitful matrix of Ghosts — I see nothing improbable, that 
 in some one of those momentary slumbers, into which the sus- 
 pension of all Thought in the perplexity of intense thinking so 
 often passes ; Luther should have had a full view of the Room 
 in which he was sitting, of his writting Table and all the Im- 
 plements of Study, as they really existed, and at the same 
 time a brain-image of the Devil, vivid enough to have acquired 
 apparent Outness, and a distance regulated by the proportion 
 of its distinctness to that of the objects really impressed on the 
 outward senses. 
 
 If this Christian Hercules, this heroic Cleanser of the Au- 
 gean Stable of Apostacy, had been born and educated in the 
 present or the preceding generation, he would, doubtless, have 
 held himself for a man of genius and original power. But 
 with this faith alone he would scarcely have removed the 
 mountains which he did remove. The darkness and super- 
 stition of the age, which required such a Reformer, had mould- 
 ed his mind for the reception of ideas concerning himself, bet- 
 ter suited to inspire the strength and enthusiasm necessary for 
 the task of reformation, ideas more in sympathy with the spir- 
 its whom he was to influence. He deemed himself gifted with 
 supernatural influxes, an especial servant of Heaven, a chosen 
 Warrior, fighting as the General of a small but faithful troop, 
 against an Army of evil Beings headed by the Prince of the 
 Air. These were no metaphorical beings in his apprehension. 
 He was a Poet indeed, as great a Poet as ever lived in any 
 age or country ; but his poetic images were so vivid, that they 
 mastered the Poet's own jnind ! Pie was j^ossessed with them, 
 as with substances distinct from himself: Luther did not 
 write, he acted Poems. The Bible was a spiritual indeed but 
 not a figurative armoury in his belief; it was the magazine
 
 118 
 
 of his warlike stores, and from thence he was to arm himself, 
 and supply both shield and sword, and javelin, to the elect. 
 Methinks 1 see him sitting, the heroic Student, in his Cham- 
 ber in the VVarterburg, with his midnight Lamp before him, 
 seen by the late Traveller in the distant Plain of Bischqfsroda, 
 as a Star on the Mountain ! Below it lies the Hebrew Bible 
 open, on which he gazes his brow pressing on his palm, brood- 
 ing over some obscure Text, which he desires to make plain 
 to the simple Boor and to the humble Artizan, and to transfer 
 its whole force into their own natural and living Tongue. And 
 he himself does not understand it ! Thick darkness lies on the 
 original Text , he counts the letters, he calls up the roots of 
 each separate word, and questions them as the familiar Spirits 
 of an Oracle. In vain ! thick darkness continues to cover it! 
 not a ray of meaning dawns through it. With sullen and an- 
 gry hope he reaches for the Vulgate, his old and sworn ene- 
 my, the treacherous confederate of the Roman Antichrist, 
 which he so gladly, when he can, re-rebukes for idolatrous 
 falsehoods, that had dared place 
 
 " Within the sanctuary itself their shrines, 
 Abominations!" 
 
 Now — thought of humiliation — he must entreat its aid. See ! 
 there has the sly spirit of apostacy worked-in a phrase which 
 favors the doctrine of purgatory, the intercession of Saints, 
 or the efficacy of Prayers for the Dead. And what is worst 
 of all, the interpretation is plausible. The original Hebrew 
 might be forced into this meaning : and no other meaning 
 seems to lie in it, none to hover above it in the heights of 
 Allegory, none to lurk beneath it even in the depths of Caba- 
 la ! This is the work of the Tempter ! it is a cloud of dark- 
 ness conjured up between the truth of the sacred letters 
 and the eyes of his understanding, by the malice of the evil 
 one, and for a trial of his faith ! Must he then at length con- 
 fess, must he subscribe the name of Luther to an Exposition 
 which consecrates a weapon for the hand of the idolatrous Hie- 
 rarchy ? Never ! never ! 
 
 There still remains one auxiliary in reserve, the translation 
 of the seventy. The Alexandrine Greeks, anterior to the 
 Church itself, could extend no support to its corruptions — the 
 Septuagint will have profaned the Altar of Truth with no in- 
 cense for the Nostrils of the universal Bishop to snuff up.
 
 119 
 
 And here again his hopes are baffled ! Exactly at this per- 
 plexed passage had the Greek Translator given his understand- 
 ing a holiday, and made his pen supply its place. O honored 
 Luther ! as easily mightest thou convert the whole City of 
 Rome, with the Pope and the conclave of Cardinals inclusive 
 as strike a spark of light from the words, and nothing but ivords, 
 of the Alexandrine Version. Disappointed, despondent, en- 
 raged, ceasing to think, yet continuing his brain on the stretch 
 in solicitation of a thought ; and gradually giving himself up to 
 angry fancies, to recollections of past persecutions, to uneasy 
 fears and inward defiances and floating Images of the evil Be- 
 ing, their supposed personal author ; he sinks, without perceiv- 
 ing it, into a trance of slumber : during which his brain retains 
 its waking energies, excepting that what would have been 
 mere thoughts before now (the action and counterweight of 
 his senses and of their impressions being withdrawn ) shape and 
 condense themselves into things, into realities ! Repeatedly 
 half-wakening, and his eye-lids as often re-closing, the objects 
 which really surrounded him form the place and scenery of his- 
 dream. All at once he sees the Arch-fiend coming forth on the 
 wall of the room, from the very spot perhaps, on which his eyes 
 had been fixed vacantly during the perplexed moments of his 
 former meditation : the Ink-stand, which he had at the same 
 time been using, becomes associated with it : and in that strug- 
 gle of rage, which in these distempered dreams almost constant- 
 ly precedes the helpless terror by the pain of which we are 
 finally awakened, he imagines that he hurls it at the intruder, 
 or not improbably in the first instant of awakening, while yet 
 both his imagination and his eyes are possessed by the dream, 
 he actually hurls it. Some weeks after, perhaps, during which 
 interval he had often mused on the incident, undetermined 
 whether to deem it a visitation of Satan to him in the body or 
 out of the body, he discovers for the first time the dark spot 
 on his wall, and receives it as a sign and pledge vouchsafed 
 to him of the event having actually taken place. 
 
 Such was Luther under the influences of the age and coun- 
 trv in and for which he was born. Conceive him a citizen of 
 Geneva, and a contemporary of Voltaire : suppose the French 
 language his mother tongue, and the political and moral philos- 
 ophy of English Free-thinkers re-modelled by Parisian Fort 
 Esprits, to have been the objects of his study ; — conceive this
 
 120 
 
 change of circumstances, and Luther will no longer dream of 
 Fiends or of Antichrist — but will we have no dreams in their 
 place ? His melancholy will have changed its drapery ; but 
 will it find no new costume wherewith to clothe itself? His 
 impetuous temperament, his deepworking mind, his busy and 
 vivid imaginations — would they not have been a trouble to 
 him in a world, where nothing was to be altered, where nothing 
 was to obey his power, to cease to be that which had been, in 
 order to realize his pre-conceptions of what it ought to be ? 
 His sensibility, which found objects for itself, and shadows of 
 human suii'ering in the harmless Brute, and even the Flowers 
 which he trod upon — might it not naturally, in an unspiritual- 
 ized age, have wept, and trembled, and dissolved, over scenes 
 of earthly passion, and the struggles of love with duty? His 
 pity, that so easily passed into rage, would it not have found 
 in the inequalities of mankind, in the oppressions of govern- 
 ments and the miseries of the governed, an entire instead of 
 a divided object ? And might not a perfect constitution, a gov- 
 ernment of pure reason, a renovation of the social contract, 
 have easily supplied the place of the reign of Christ in the 
 new Jerusalem, of the restoration of the visible Church, and 
 the union of all men by one faith in one charity? Hencefor- 
 ward then, we will conceive his reason employed in building 
 up anew the edifice of earthly society, and his imagination as 
 pledging itself for the possible realization of the structure. 
 We will lose the great reformer, who was born in an age 
 which needed him, in the Philosopher of Geneva, who was 
 doomed to misapply his energies to materials the properties of 
 which he misunderstood, and happy only that he did not live 
 to witness the direful effects of his system. 
 
 X' i
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 Pectora cui credam ? quis me leniro docebit 
 Monlaces ciiras, quis longas falleie noctes 
 Ex quo summa dies tulerit Dauwna sub umbras ? 
 Omnia paulatim consumit longior aetas, 
 Viveudoque simul morimur, rapimurque manendo. 
 Ite tamen, lacryma? ! purum colis sethera, Damon ! 
 Nee mihi conveniunt lacryma?. Non omnia terrae 
 Obruta ! vivit amor, vivit dolor ! era negatur 
 Dulcia conspicere : flere et meminisse relictum est. 
 
 The two following Essays I devote to elucidation, the first of 
 the theory of Luther's Apparitions stated perhaps too briefly 
 in the preceding Number : the second for the purpose of re- 
 moving the only difficulty, which I can discover in the next 
 section of the Friend to the Reader's ready comprehension ot 
 the principles, on which the arguments are grounded. First, \ 
 will endeavor to make my Ghost-Theory more clear to those of 
 my readers, who are fortunate enough to find it obscure in conse- 
 quence of their own good health and unshattered nerves. The 
 window of my library at Keswick is opposite to the fire-place, 
 and looks out on the very large garden that occupies the whole 
 slope of the hill on which the house stands. Consequently, 
 the rays of the light transmitted through the glass, (i. e. the 
 rays from the garden, the opposite mountains, and the bridge, 
 river, lake, and vale interjacent) and the rays reflected yrom 
 it, (of the fire-place, &c.) enter the eye at the same moment. 
 At the coming on of evening, it was my frequent amusement 
 to watch the image or reflection of the fire, that seemed burn- 
 ing in the bushes or between the trees in diftercnt parts of the 
 garden or the fields beyond it, according as there was more or 
 
 less light ; and which still arranged itself among the real objects 
 16
 
 122 
 
 of vision, with a distance and magnitude proportioned to its 
 greater or lesser faintness. For still as the darkness encreased, 
 the image of the fire lessened and grew nearer and more dis- 
 tinct ; till the twilight had depened into perfect night, when 
 all outward objects being excluded, the window became a per- 
 fect looking-glass : save only that mj books on the side shelves 
 of the room were lettered, as it were, on their backs with 
 stars, more or fewer as the sky was more or less clouded, (the 
 rays of the stars being at that time the only ones transmitted.) 
 Now substitute the Phantom from Luther's brain for the ima- 
 ges of re^ec^ed light (the fire for instance) and the forms of 
 his room and his furniture for the transmitted rays, and you 
 have a fair resemblance of an apparition, and a just conception 
 of the manner in which it is seen together with real objects. 
 I have long wished to devote an entire work to the subject 
 of Dreams, Visions, Ghosts, Witchcraft, &c. in which I might 
 first give, and then endeavor to explain the most interesting 
 and best attested fact of each, Avhich has come within my 
 knowledge, either from books or from personal testimony. I 
 might then explain in a more satisfactory way the mode in 
 which our thoughts, in states of morbid slumber, become at 
 times perfectly drmnatic (for in certain sorts of dreams the 
 dullest Wight becomes a Shakespeare) and by what law the 
 Form of the vision appears to talk to us its own thoughts in a 
 voice as audible as the shape is visible ; and this too often- 
 times in connected trains, and not seldom even with a concen- 
 tration of power which may easily impose on the soundest 
 judgements, uninstructed in the Optics and Acoustics of the 
 inner sense, for Revelations and gifts of Prescience. In aid of 
 the present case, I will only remark, that it would appear in- 
 credible to persons not accustomed to these subtle notices of 
 self observation, what small and remote resemblances, what 
 mere hints of likeness from some real external object, especi- 
 ally if the shape be aided by colour, will suffice to make a 
 vivid thought consubstantiate with the real object, and derive 
 from it an outward perceptibility. Even when we are broad 
 awake, if we are in anxious expectation, how often will not 
 the most confused sounds of nature be heard by us as articu- 
 late sounds? For instance, the babbling of a brook will appear 
 for a moment the voice of a Friend, for whom we are waiting, 
 calling out our own names, &c. A short meditation, there-
 
 123 
 
 fore, on the great law of the imagination, that a likeness in part 
 tends to become a likeness of the whole, will make it not on- 
 ly conceivable but probable, that the ink-stand itself, and the 
 dark-coloured stone on the wall, which Luther perhaps had 
 never till tiien noticed, might have a considerable influence in 
 the production of the Fiend, and of the hostile act by which 
 his obtrusive visit was repelled. 
 
 A lady once asked me if I believed in ghosts and apparitions. 
 I answered with truth and simplicity : No^ madam I I have 
 seen far too many myself. I have indeed a whole memorandum 
 book filled with records of these Phajnomena, many of them 
 interesting as facts and data for Psychology, and affording some 
 valuable materials for a theory of preception and its dependence 
 on the memory and imagination. " In omnem actum Percep- 
 tionis imaginatio influet efiicienter." — Wolfe. But He is no 
 more, who would have realized this idea : who had already 
 established the foundations and the law of the theory ; and for 
 whom I had so often found a pleasure and a comfort, even 
 during the wretched and restless nights of sickness, in watch- 
 ing and instantly recording these experiences of the world 
 within us, of the " gemina natura, quae fit et facit, et creat et 
 creatur !" He is gone, my friend ! my munificent co-patron, 
 and not less the benefactor of my intellect ! — He who, beyond 
 all other men known to me, added a fine and ever-wakeful sense 
 of beauty to the most patient accuracy in experimental Philoso- 
 phy and the profounder researches of metaphysical science ; 
 he who united all the play and spring of fancy with the subtlest 
 discrimination and an inexorable judgement; and who control- 
 led an almost painful exquisiteness of taste by a warmth of 
 heart, which in the practical relations of life made allowances 
 for faults as quick as the moral taste detected them; a warmth 
 of heart, which was indeed noble and pre-eminent, for alas ! 
 the genial feelings of health contributed no spark toward it ! 
 Of these qualities I may speak, for they belonged to all man- 
 kind. — The higher virtues, that were blessings to his friends, 
 and the still higher that resided in and for his own soul, are 
 themes for the energies of solitude, for the awfulness of pray- 
 er ! — virtues exercised in the barrenness and desolation of his 
 animal being ; while he thirsted with the full stream at his lips, 
 and yet with unwearied goodness poured out to all around him, 
 like the master of a feast among his kindred in the day of his
 
 124 
 
 own gladness ! Were it but for the remembrance of him alone 
 and of his lot here below, the disbelief of a future state would 
 sadden the earth around me, and blight the very grass in the 
 field. 
 
 ESSAY IV. 
 
 Xuls^io" I', U)' Saiiio' rie, fuj" TraQudei'/'jiiacri, ^fgo/juevof ixuvurg epdfixpua- 
 O'ui It fw »■ i.ihi'Cfi' vi»v. xirdvrev'ei, yuQ rf fxotv txuqog oiov ''ovuq, eidut^g 
 '''uTTiefiu, Tiufi' u~v Tiu'lti' vj"a7itQ"v7iuQ u'yi'oeiv. 
 
 Plato, Polit. p. 47. Ed. Bip. 
 
 Translation. — It is iliflicult, excellent friend! to make any comprehensive 
 
 tnilh completely intelligible, unless we avail ourselves of an example. 
 
 Otiierwise we may as in a dream, seem to know all, and then as it were, 
 
 awaking find that we know nothing. 
 
 Plato. 
 
 Among my earliest impressions I still distinctly remember 
 that of my first entrance into the mansion of a neighboring 
 Baronet, awfully known to me by the name of The Great 
 House, its exterior having been long connected in my childish 
 imagination with the feelings and fancies stirred up in me by 
 the perusal of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments.* Beyond 
 
 * As 1 iiad read one volume of these tales over and over again before my 
 fifth birth-day, it may be readily conjectured of what sort these fancies and 
 f(.'elings mnf^t have been. Tlie Ijook, I well remember, used to lie in a cor- 
 ner of the parlour window at my dear Father's Vicarage-house : and lean 
 never forg(!t with what a strange mixUn-e of obscure dread and intense de- 
 sire I used to look at the volume and tvatch it, till the morning sunshine had 
 reached and nearly covered it, whfen, and not before, I felt the courage given 
 me to seize the precious treasure and hurry off with it to some sunny corner 
 in our play-ground.
 
 125 
 
 all other objects, I was most struck with the magnificent stair- 
 case, relieved at well proportioned intervals by spacious land- 
 ing-places, this adorned with grand or shewy plants, the 
 next looking out on an extensive prospect through the stately 
 window with its side panes of rich blues and saturated amber 
 or orange tints : while from the last and highest the eye com- 
 manded the whole spiral ascent with the marbled pavement of 
 the great hall from which it seemed to spring up as if it merely 
 used the ground on which it rested. My readers will find no 
 difficulty in translating these forms of the outward senses into 
 their intellectual analogies, so as to understand the purport of 
 the Friend's jlanding-places, and the objects, he proposed to 
 himself, in the small groups of Essays interposed under this ti- 
 tle bet\w;en the main divisions of the work. 
 
 My best powers would have sunk within me, had I not sooth- 
 ed my solitary toils with the anticipation of many readers — 
 ( whether during the Writer's life, or when his grave shall have 
 shamed his detractors into a sympathy with its own silence, 
 formed no part in this self-flattery ) who would submit to any 
 reasonable trouble rather than read " as in a dream seeming to 
 know all, to find on awaking that they know nothing." Hav- 
 ing, therefore in the three preceding numbers selected from my 
 conservatory a few plants, of somewhat gayer petals and a live- 
 lier green, though like the Geranium tribe of a sober character 
 in the whole physiognomy and odor, I shall first devote a few 
 sentences to a catalogue raisonne of my introductory lucubra- 
 tions, and the remainder of the Essay to the prospect, as far as 
 it can be seen distinctly from our present site. Within a short 
 distance, several ways meet : and at that point only does it ap- 
 pear to me that the reader will be in danger of mistaking the 
 road. Dropping the metaphor, I would say that there is one 
 term, the meaning of which has become unsettled. To differ- 
 ent persons it conveys a different idea, and not seldom to the 
 same person at different times ; while the force, and to a cer- 
 tain extent, the intelligibility of the following sections depend 
 on its being interpreted in one sense exclusively. 
 
 Essays from I. to IV. inclusive convey the design and con- 
 tents of the work ; the Friend's judgement respecting the style, 
 and his defence of himself from the charges of Arrogance and 
 Presumption. Say rather, that such are the personal threads 
 of the discourse : for it will not have escaped the Reader's ob-
 
 126 
 
 servation, that even in these prefatory pages principles and 
 truths of general interest form the true contents, and that amid 
 all the usual compliments and courtesies of the The Friend's 
 first presentation of himself to his Reader's acquaintance the 
 substantial object is still to assert the practicability, without 
 disguising the difficulties, of improving the morals of mankind 
 by a direct appeal to their Understandings ; to shew the dis- 
 tinction between Attention and Thought, and the necessity of 
 the former as a habit or discipline without which the very 
 word. Thinking, must remain a thoughtless substitute for dream- 
 ing with our eyes open ; and lastly, the tendency of a certain 
 fashionable style with all its accommodations to paralyse the 
 very faculties of manly intellect by a series of petty stimulants. 
 After this preparation The Friend proceeds at once t» lay the 
 foundations common to the whole work by an inquiry into the 
 duty of communicating Truth, and the conditions under which 
 it may be communicated with safety, from the Fifth to the 
 Sixteenth Essay inclusive. Each Essay will, he believes, be 
 found complete in itself, yet an organic part of the whole con- 
 sidered as one disquisition. First, the inexpediency of pious 
 Frauds is proved from History, the shameless assertion of the 
 indifference of Truth and Falsehood exposed to its deserved 
 infamy, and an answer given to the objection derived from the 
 impossibility of conveying an adequate notion of the truths, we 
 may attempt to communicate. The conditions are then de- 
 tailed, under which, right though inadequate notions may be 
 taught without danger, and proofs given, both from facts and 
 from reason, that he, who fulfils the conditions required by 
 Conscience, takes the surest way of answering the purposes of 
 Prudence. This is, indeed, the main characteristic of the mor- 
 al system taught by the Friend throughout, that the distinct 
 foresight of Consequences belongs exclusively to that infinite 
 Wisdom which is one with that Almighty Will, on which all 
 consequences depend ; but that ybr Man — to obey the simple 
 unconditional commandment of eschewing every act that im- 
 plies a self-contradiction, or in other words, to produce and 
 maintain the greatest possible Harmony in the component im- 
 pulses and faculties of his nature, involves the effects of Pru- 
 dence. It is, as it were. Prudence in short-hand or cypher. 
 A pure Conscience, that inward something, that &£&? oixsjof, 
 which being absolutely unique no man can describe^ because
 
 127 
 
 every man is bound to know, and even in the eye of the Law 
 is held to be a person no longer than he may be supposed to 
 know it — the Conscience, I say, bears the same relation to 
 God, as an accurate Time-piece bears to the Sun. The Time- 
 piece merely indicates the relative path of the Sun, yet we 
 can regulate our plans and proceedings by it with the same con- 
 fidence as if it was itself the efficient cause of light, heat, and 
 the revolving seasons; on the self-evident axiom, that in what- 
 ever sense two things (for instance, A. and c D E-) are both 
 equal to a third thing (B.) they are in the same sense equal to 
 each other. Cunning is circuitous folly. In plain English, to 
 act the knave is but a round about way of playing the fool ; and 
 the man, who will not permit himself to call an action by its 
 proper name without a previous calculation of all its probable 
 consequences, may be indeed only a coxcomb, who is looking 
 at his fingers through an opera glass ; but he runs no small risk 
 of becoming a knave. The chances are against him. Though 
 he should begin by calculating the consequences with regard to 
 others, yet by the mere habit of never contemplating an action 
 in its own proportions and immediate relations to his moral be- 
 ing it is scarcely possible but that he must end in selfishness : 
 for the YOU, and the they will stand on different occasions for 
 a thousand different persons, while the I is one only, and recurs 
 in every calculation. Or grant that the principle of expedien- 
 cy should prompt to the same outward deeds as are commanded 
 by the law of reason ; yet the doer himself is debased. But if 
 it be replied, that the re-action on the agent's own mind is to 
 form a part of the calculation, then it is a rule that destroys it- 
 self in the very propounding, as will be more fully demonstra- 
 ted in the second or ethical division of the Friend, when we 
 shall have detected and exposed the equivoque between an ac- 
 tion and the series of motions by which the determinations of 
 the Will are to be realized in the world of the senses. What 
 modification of the latter corresponds to the former, and is en- 
 titled to be called by the same name, will often depend on time, 
 place, persons, and circumstances, the consideration of which 
 requires an exertion of the judgement ; but the action itself re- 
 mains the same, and like all other ideas pre-exists in the rea- 
 son,* or (in the more expressive and perhaps more precise and 
 
 'See the Statesman's Manual, p. 2.3.
 
 128 
 
 philosophical language of St. Paul) in the spirit, unalterable 
 because unconditional, or with no other than that most awful 
 condition, as sure as God liveth, it is so ! 
 
 These remarks are inserted in this place, because the prin- 
 ciple admits of easiest illustration in the instance of veracity 
 and the actions connected with the same, and may then be in- 
 telligibly applied to other departments of morality, all of which 
 Wollaston indeed considers as only so many different forms of 
 truth and falsehood. So far the Friend has treated of oral 
 communication of the truth. The applicability of the same 
 principle is then tried and affirmed in publications by the 
 Press, first as between the individual and his own conscience 
 and then between the publisher and the state : and under this 
 head the Friend has considered at large the questions of a 
 free Press and the law of libel, the anomalies and peculiar 
 difficulties of the latter, and the only possible solution com- 
 patible with the continuance of the former : a solution rising 
 out of and justified by the necessarily anomalous and unique 
 nature of the law itself. He confesses, that he looks back on 
 this discussion concerning the Press and its limits with a satis- 
 faction unusual to him in the review of his own labours : and 
 if the date of their first publication (September, 1809) be re- 
 membered, it will not perhaps be denied on an impartial com- 
 parison, that he has treated this most important subject (so es- 
 pecially interesting in the present times) more fully and more 
 systematically than it had hitherto been. Interim tum recti 
 conscientia, tum illo me consolor, quod octimis quibusque certe 
 non improbamur, fortassis omnibus placituri, simul atque livor 
 ab obitu conquieverit. 
 
 Lastly, the subject is concluded even as it commenced, and 
 as beseemed a disquisition placed as the steps and vestibule of 
 the whole work, with an enforcement of tlie absolute necessi- 
 ty of principles grounded in reason as the basis or rather as the 
 living root of all genuine expedience. Where these are de- 
 spised or at best regarded as aliens from the actual business of 
 life, and consigned to the ideal world of speculative philosophy 
 and Utopian politics, instead of state-wisdom we shall have 
 state-craft, and for the talent of the governor the cleverness of 
 an embarrassed spendthrift — which consists in tricks to shift off 
 difficulties and dangers when they are close upon us, and to 
 keep them at arm's length, not in solid and grounded courses
 
 129 
 
 to preclude or subdue them. We must content ourselves with 
 expedient-makers — with fire-engines against fires, Life-boats 
 against inundations : but no houses built fire-proof, no dams 
 that rise above the water-mark. The reader will have observ- 
 ed that already has the term, reason, been frequently contra- 
 distinguished from the understanding, and the judgement. If 
 the Friend could succeed in fully explaining the sense in which 
 the word Reason, is employed by him, and in satisfying the 
 reader's mind concerning the grounds and importance of the 
 distinction, he would feel little or no apprehension concerning 
 the intelligibility of these Essays from first to last. The fol- 
 lowing section is in part founded on this distinction : the which 
 remaining obscure, all else will be so as a system, however 
 clear the component paragraphs may be, taken separately. In "y 
 the appendix to his first Lay Sermon, the Author has indeed "^ 
 treated the question at considerable length, but chiefly in rela- 
 tion to the heights of Theology and Metaphysics. In the next 
 number he attempts to explain himself more popularly, and 
 trusts that with no great expenditure of attention the reader 
 will satisfy his mind, that our remote ancestors spoke as men 
 acquainted with the constituent parts of their ow^n moral and 
 intellectual being, when they described one man as being out 
 his senses, another as out of his ivits, or deranged in his un~ 
 derstanding, and a third as having lost his reason. Observe, 
 the understanding may be deranged, weakened, or perverted ; 
 but the reason is either lost or not lost, that is, wholly present 
 or wholly absent. 
 
 17
 
 ESSAY V. 
 
 Man may rather be defined a religious than a rational character, in regard 
 that in other creatures there majf be something of Reason, but there ia 
 
 nothing of Religion. 
 
 Harrington. 
 
 If the Reader will substitute the word " Understanding" for 
 " Reason," and the word " Reason" for " Religion," Harring- 
 ton has here completely expressed the Truth for which the 
 Friend is contending. But that this was Harrington's meaning 
 is evident. Otherwise instead of comparing two faculties with 
 each other, he would contrast a faculty with one of its own ob- 
 jects, which would involve the same absurdity as if he had said, 
 that man might rather be defined an astronomical than a seeing 
 animal, because other animals possessed the sense of Sight, but 
 were incapable of beholding the satellites of Saturn, or the 
 nebulae of fixed stars. If further confirmation be necessary, it 
 may be supplied by the following reflections, the leading thought 
 of which I remember to have read in the works of a continen- 
 tal Philosopher. It should seem easy to give the definite dis- 
 tinction of the Reason from the Understanding, because we 
 constantly imply it when we speak of the difference between 
 ourselves and the brute creation. No one, except as a figure 
 of speech, eA'er speaks of an animal reason;* but that many 
 
 *I have this moment looked over a Translation of Bhnvicnbach's Physiolo- 
 gy by Dr. Elliotson, which forms a glaring exception, p. 45. I do not know 
 Dr. Elliotson, but I do know Professor Bhuncnbach, and was an assiduous 
 attendant on the Lectures, of whicli this classical work was tlie text-book: 
 and I know that that good and great man woukl start back with surprize and 
 indignation at the gross materialism morticed on to his work : the moro so 
 because during the whole period, in which the identification of Man with tho
 
 131 
 
 animals possess a share of Understanding, perfectly distinguisha- 
 ble from mere Instinct, we all allow. Few persons have a fa- 
 vorite dog without making instances of its intelligence an oc- 
 casional topic of conversation. They call for our admiration of 
 the individual animal, and not with exclusive reference to the 
 Wisdom in Nature, as in the case of the storge or maternal in- 
 stinct of beasts ; or of the hexangular cells of the bees, and the 
 wonderful coincidence of this form with the geometrical demon- 
 stration of the largest possible number of rooms in a given space. 
 Likewise, we distinguish various degrees of Understanding 
 there, and even discover from inductions supplied by the Zoo- 
 logists, that the Understanding appears (as a general rule) in 
 an inverse proportion to the Instinct. We hear little or noth- 
 ing of the instincts of "the half-reasoning elephant," and as 
 little of the Understanding of Caterpillars and Butterflies. 
 (N. B. Though KEASONiNG does not in our language, in the 
 lax use of words natural in conversation or popular writings, 
 imply scientific conclusion, yet the phrase "half-reasoning" is 
 evidently used by Pope as a poetic hyperbole.) But Reason 
 is wholly denied, equally to the highest as to the lowest of the 
 brutes ; otherwise it must be wholly attributed to them, and 
 with it therefore Self -consciousness, and personality^ or Moral 
 Being. 
 
 I should have no objection to define Reason with Jacobi, and 
 with his friend Hemsterhuis, as an organ bearing the same re- 
 lation to spiritual objects, the Universal, the Eternal, and the 
 Necessary, as the eye bears to material and contingent phseno- 
 mena. But then it must be added, that it is an organ identical 
 with its appropriate objects. Thus, God, the Soul, eternal 
 Truth, &c. are the objects of Reason; but they are themselves 
 reason. We name God the Supreme Reason; and Milton says, 
 "Whence the Soul i?e«son receives, and Reason is her Being." 
 
 Brute in kind wsLSihe. fashion of Naturalists, Bluiucnbach remained ari/e?i< and 
 instant in controverting the opinion, and exposing its fallacy and falsehood, 
 both as a man of sense and as a Naturalist. I may truly say, that it was up- 
 permost in his htiart and foremost in his speech. Therefore, and from no hos- 
 tile feeling to Dr. Elliotson (wiiom I hear spoken of with great regard and 
 respect, and to whom I myself give credit for his manly openness in the avowal 
 of his opinions) I have felt the present aniniadversion a duty of justice asj 
 well as gratitude. 
 
 S. T. C. 8 April, 1817.
 
 132 
 
 Whatever is conscious /S'eZ/'-knowledge is Reason ; and in this 
 sense it may be safely defined the organ of the Supersensuous ; 
 even as the Understanding wherever it does not possess or use 
 the Reason, as another and inward eye, may be defined the 
 conception of the Sensuous, or tlie faculty by which we gener- 
 alize and arrange the phrenomena of perception : that faculty, 
 the functions of which contain the rules and constitute the pos- 
 sibility of outward Experience. In short, the Understanding 
 supposes something that is understood. This may be merely 
 its own acts or forms, that is, formal Logic; but real objects, 
 the materials of substantial knowledge, must be furnished, we 
 might safely say revealed^ to it by Organs of Sense. The un- 
 derstanding of the higher Brutes has only organs of outward 
 sense, and consequently material objects only ; but man's un- 
 derstanding has likewise an organ of inward sense, and there- 
 fore the power of acquainting itself with invisible realities or 
 spiritual objects. This organ is his Reason. Again, the Un- 
 derstanding and Experience may exist* without Reason. But 
 Reason cannot exist without Understanding ; nor does it or can 
 it manifest itself but in and through the understanding, which 
 in our elder writers is often called discourse, or the discursive 
 faculty, as by Hooker, Lord Bacon, and Hobbes : and an un- 
 derstanding enlightened by reason Shakspeare gives as the con- 
 tra-distinguishing character of man, under the name discourse 
 of reason. In short, the human understanding possesses two 
 distinct organs, the outward sense, and " the mind's eye" 
 which is reason: wherever we use that phrase (the mind's 
 eye) in its proper sense, and not as a mere synonyme of the 
 memory or the fancy. In this way we reconcile the promise 
 of Revelation, that the blessed will see God, with the decla- 
 ration of St. John, God hath no one seen at any time. 
 
 We will add one other illustration to prevent any misconcep- 
 
 * Of this no one would feel inclined to doubt, who had seen the poodle dog 
 whom the celebrated BLUMErs'BACH,/a name so dear to science, as a pliytJiolo- 
 gist and Comparative Aiiatoinist, and not less dear as a man, to all Ihiglish- 
 nien who have ever resi<ic(l at Gottingen in the coiu'se of their education, 
 trained u]), not only to hach the eggs of the hen with all the mother's care 
 and patience, but to attend the chicken atlerwards, and find the food for them. 
 I have myself known a Newfcjundland dog, who watched and guarded a 
 family of young children with ail the intelligence of a nurse, during tlieir 
 walks.
 
 133 
 
 tion, as it" we were dividing the human soul into different es- 
 sences, or ideal persons. In this piece of steel I acknowledge 
 the properties of hardness, brittleness, high polish, and the 
 capability of forming a mirror. 1 find all these likewise in the 
 plate glass of a friend's carriage ; but in addition to all these, 
 I find the quality of transparency, or the power of transmitting 
 as well as of reflecting the rays of light. The application is 
 obvious. 
 
 If the reader therefore will take the trouble of bearing in 
 mind these and the following explanations, he will have re- 
 moved before hand every possible difficulty from the Friend's 
 political section. For there is another use of the word, Rea- 
 son, arising out of the former indeed, but less definite, and 
 more exposed to misconception. In this latter use it means 
 the understanding considered as using the Reason, so far as by 
 the organ of Reason only we possess the ideas of the Necessa- 
 ry and the Universal ; and this is the more common use of the 
 word, when it is applied with any attempt at clear and distinct 
 conceptions. In this narrower and derivative sense the best de- 
 finition of Reason, which, I can give, will be found in the 
 third member of the following sentence, in which the under- 
 standing is described in its three-fold operation, and from each 
 receives an appropriate name. The sense, (vis sensitiva vel 
 intuitiva) perceives: Vis regulatrix (the understanding, in its 
 own peculiar operation) conceives: Vis rationalis (the Reason 
 or rationalized understanding) comprehends. The first is im- 
 pressed through the organs of sense, the second combines 
 these multifarious impressions into individual Notions^ and by 
 reducing these notions to Rules, according to the analogy of all 
 its former notices, constitutes Experience : the third subordi- 
 nates both these notions and the rules of Experience to abso- 
 lute Principles or necessary Laws : and thus concerning ob- 
 jects, which our experience has proved to have real existence, 
 it demonstrates moreover, in what v/ay they are possible^ and 
 in doing this constitutes Science. Reason therefore, in this 
 secondary sense, and used, not as a spiritual Organ but as a 
 Faculty (namely, the Understanding or Soul enlightened by 
 that organ) — Reason, I say, or the scientific Faculty, is the In- 
 tellection of the possibility or essential properties of things by 
 means of the Laws that constitute them, 'i'hus the rational
 
 134 
 
 idea of a Circle is that of a figure constituted by the circum- 
 volution of a straight line with its one end fixed. 
 
 Every man must feel, that though he may not be exerting 
 different faculties, he is exerting his faculties in a different 
 way, when in one instance he begins with some one self-evi- 
 dent truth, (that the radii of a circle, for instance, are all equal,) 
 and in consequence of this being true sees at once, without any 
 actual experience, that some other thing must be true like- 
 wise, and that, this being true, some third thing must be equal- 
 ly true, and so on till he comes, we will say, to the properties 
 of the lever, considered as the spoke of a circle ; which is capa- 
 ble of having all its marvellous powers demonstrated even to a 
 savage who had never seen a lever, and without supposing 
 any other previous knowledge in his mind, but this one, that 
 there is a conceivable figure, all possible lines from the middle 
 to the circumference of which are of the same length : or 
 when, in the second instance, he brings together the facts of 
 experience, each of which has its own separate value, neither 
 encreased nor diminished by the truth of any other fact which 
 may have preceded it ; and making these several facts bear 
 upon some particular project, and finding some in favor of it^ 
 and some against the project, according as one or the other class 
 of facts preponderate: as, for instance, whether it would be 
 better to plant a particular spot of ground with larch, or with 
 Scotch fir, or with oak in preference to either. Surely every 
 man will acknowledge, that his mind was very differently em- 
 ployed in the first case from what it was in the second, and all 
 men have agreed to call the results of the first class the truths 
 of science, such as not only are true, but which it is impossible 
 to conceive otherwise : while the results of the second class 
 are called facts, or things of experience : and as to these latter 
 we must often content ourselves with the greater probability, 
 that they are so, or so, rather than otherwise — nay, even when 
 we have no doubt that they are so in the particular case, we 
 never presume to assert that they must continue so always, and 
 under all circumstances. On the contrary, our conclusions de- 
 pe7id altogether on conting-ent circumstances. Now when the 
 mind is employed, as in the case first-mentioned, I call it Rea- 
 isoning, or the use of the pure Reason ; but, in the second 
 (Ease, the Understanding or Prudence. 
 
 IhiS i^ason applied to the motives of our conduct, aiid coiu-
 
 - «• 
 
 135 
 
 billed with the sense of our moral responsibility, is the condi- 
 tional cause of Conscience^ which is a spiritual sense or testi- 
 fying state of the coincidence or discordance of the free will 
 with the REASON. But as the Reasoning consists wholly in a 
 man's power of seeing, whether any two ideas, which happen 
 to be in his mind, are, or are not in contradiction with each 
 other, it follows of necessity, not only that all men have reason, 
 but that every man has it in the same degree. For Reasoning 
 (or Reason, in this its secondary sense) does not consist in the 
 Ideas, or in their clearness, but simply, when they are in the 
 mind, in seeing whether they contradict each other or no. 
 
 And again, as in the determinations of Conscience the only 
 knowledge required is that of my own intention — whether in 
 doing such a thing, instead of leaving it undone, I did what I 
 should think right if any other person had done it ; it follows 
 that in the mere question of guilt or innocence, all men have 
 not only Reason equally, but likewise all the materials on 
 which the reason, considered as Conscience, is to work. But 
 when we pass out of ourselves, and speak, not exclusively of 
 the agent as meaning well or ill, but of the action in its con- 
 sequences, then of course experience is required, judgement 
 in making use of it, and ail those other qualities of the mind 
 which are so differently dispensed to different persons, both by 
 nature and education. And though the reason itself is the same 
 in all men, yet the means of exercising it, and the materials 
 (i. e. the facts and ideas) on which it is exercised, being pos- 
 sessed in very different degrees by different persons, the 
 practical Result is, of course, equally different — and the whole 
 ground work of Rousseau's Philosophy ends in a mere No- 
 thingism. — Even in that branch of knowledge, on which the 
 ideas, on the congruity of which with each other, the Reason 
 is to decide, are all possessed alike by all men, namely, in Ge- 
 ometry, (for all men in their senses possess all the component 
 images, viz. simple curves and straight lines) yet the power 
 of attention required for the perception of linked Truths, even i 
 oi such Truths, is so very different in A and in B, that Sir 
 Isaac Newton professed that it was in this power only that he 
 was superior to ordinary men. In short, the sophism is as gross 
 as if I should say — The Souls of all men liave the faculty of 
 sight in an equal degree — forgetting to add, that this faculty 
 cannot be exercised without eyes, and that some men are blind
 
 136 
 
 and others short-sighted, &c. — and should then take advantage 
 of this my omission to conclude against the use or necessity of 
 spectacles, microscopes, &;c. — or of choosing the sharpest sight- 
 ed men for our guides. 
 
 Having exposed this gross sophism, I must warn against an 
 opposite error — namely, that if Reason, distinguished from 
 Prudence, consists merely m knowing that Black cannot be 
 White — or when a man has a clear conception of an inclosed 
 figure, and another equally clear conception of a straight line, 
 his Reason teaches him that these two conceptions are incom- 
 patible in the same object, i. e. that two straight lines cannot 
 include a space the said Reason must be a very insignifi- 
 cant faculty. But a moment's steady self-reflection will shew 
 us, that in the simple determination " Black is not White" — or 
 " that two straight lines cannot include a space" — all the pow- 
 ers are implied, that distinguish Man from Animals — first, the 
 power oi reflection — 2d. of comparison — 3d. and therefore of 
 suspension of the mind — 4th. therefore of a controlling will, 
 and the power of acting from notions, instead of mere images 
 exciting appetites ; from motives, and not from mere dark m- 
 stincts. Was it an insignificant thing to weigh the Planets, to 
 determine all their courses, and prophecy every possible rela- 
 tion of the Heavens a thousand years hence ? Yet all this 
 mighty chain of science is nothing but a linking together of 
 truths of the same kind, as, the ivhole is greater than its part : 
 — or, if A and B = C, then A = B — or 3 -*- 4 = 7, therefore 
 7 -*- 5 = 12, and so forth. X is to be found either in A or B, 
 or C or D : It is not found in A, B, or C, therefore it is to be 
 found in D. — What can be simpler? Apply this to an animal — 
 a Dog misses his master where four roads meet — he has come 
 up one, smells to two of the others, and then with his head 
 aloi't darts forward to the third road without any examination. 
 If this was done by a conclusion, the Dog would have Reason 
 — how comes it then, that he never shews it in his ordinary 
 habits ? Why does this story excite either wonder or increduli- 
 ty .^ — If the story be a fact, and not a fiction, I should say — the 
 Breeze brought his Master's scent down the fourth Road to the 
 Dog's nose, and that therefore he did not put it down to the 
 Road, as in the two former instances. So aweful and almost 
 miraculous does the simple act of concluding, that take 2> from 
 4, there remains one, appear to us when attributed to the most 
 sagacious of all animals.
 
 THE FRIEND. 
 
 SECTION THE FIRST. 
 
 ON THE 
 
 PRINCIPLES 
 
 O F 
 
 POLITICAL KNOWLEDGE. 
 
 18
 
 Hoc potissimum pacto felicem ac magnum regem se fore judicans : non si 
 quam plurimis sed si quam oplimis imperet. Proinde parum esse putat justis 
 prsesidiis regnum suum muniisse, nisi idem viris eriiditione juxta ac vitse integ- 
 ritate prJKcellentibus ditet atque honestet. Nimirum intelligit , haec demum 
 esse vera regni decora, has veras opes. 
 
 Erasmus : epist. ad Episc, Paris.
 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 Dum PoLiTici scppiuscvle hominibus magis iiisidiaiitur quant consulunt, potius 
 callidiquam sapientcs ; Theoretici e contrano se rem divinam facere et sapi- 
 entim culmen attingcre credunt, qiwmdo humanam naturam, qua nvllihi est, 
 mvltis modis laudare, et earn, qua re vera est, didis lacessere nonmt. Unde 
 factum est, ut nunquatn Politicain concepennt qua. possit ad uswn revocari ; 
 sed qua in Utopia vel in illo poetarum aureo saculo, ubi scilicet minime necesse 
 erat, institui potuisset. At mild plane persuadeo, Experientiam omnia civita- 
 tum genera, qua concipi possunt id homines concorditer vivant, et siinul me- 
 dia, quibus midtitudo dirigi, seu quibus intra cetios limites contineri debeat, 
 ostendisse : ita ut non credam, nos posse aliquid, quod ab experientia sive, 
 praxi non abhorreat, cogitatione de hoc re assequi, quod nondum expertum com- 
 pertumque sit. 
 
 Cum igitur animum ad Pcliticam applicuerim, nihil quod novum vel inauditum 
 est ; sed tantw7i ea qua cum praxi optime conveniunt, certa et indubitata ra- 
 tixme demonstrare aid ex ipsa humana naiura conditione deducere, intendi. 
 Et ut ea quae ad hanc scientiam spectant, eadem animi libertate, qua res mathcma- 
 ticas solemus, inquirerem, sedulo ciiravi humanas actiones non ridere, non 
 lugere, neque detestari ; sed intelligere. JVec ad imperii securitatem refert 
 quo animo homines inducantur ad res recte administrandum, modo res recte ad- 
 ministrentur. Animi eniin libertas, seu fortitudo, privata virtus est; at impe- 
 rii virtus securitas. 
 
 Spinoza, op. Post. p. 267. 
 
 Translation. — While the mere practical Statesman too often rather plots 
 against mankind, than consults their interest, crafty not wise; the mere The- 
 orists, on the oTIicr hand, imagine that they are employed in a glorious 
 work, and believe themselves at the very summit of earthly Wisdom, when 
 they are able, in set and varied language, to extol that Hunian Nature, which 
 exists no where (except indeed hi their own fancy) and to accuse and vilify 
 our nature as it really is. Hence it has happened, that these men have never 
 conceived a practicable scheme of civil policy, but, at best, such forms of 
 Government onl}', as might have been instituted in Utopia, or during the gol- 
 den age of the poets : that is to say, forms of government excellently ada[)tcd 
 for those who need no government at all. But I am fully persuaded, that ex- 
 perience has already brought to light all conceivable sorts of political Institu- 
 tions under which human society can be maintained in concord, and like- 
 wise the chief means of directing the multitude, or retaining them within 
 given boundaries: so that I can hardly believe, that on this subject the deep- 
 est research would arrive at any result, not abhorrent tiom expei'ience and 
 f)ractice, which has not been already tried and jiroved.
 
 140 
 
 When, therefore, I applied my thoughts to the study of Political Econo- 
 my, I ])roposed to myself nothing original or strange as the fruits of my re- 
 flections ; but simply to demonstrate from plain and undoubted principles, or 
 to deduce from the very condition and necessities of human nature, those 
 plans and maxims which square the best with piactice. And that in all 
 things which relate to this province, I might conduct my investigations with 
 the same freedom of intellect with which we jiroceed in questions of pure 
 science, I sedulously disciplined my mind neither to laugh at, or bewail, or 
 detest, the actions of men ; but to understand them. For to the safety of the 
 state it is not of necessaiy importance, what motives induce men to adminis- 
 ter public affairs rightly, provided only that public affairs be rightly adminis- 
 tered. For moral strength, or freedom from the selfish passions, is the virtue 
 of individuals; but security is the virtue of a state. 
 
 ON THE PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 All the different philosophical systems of political justice, 
 all the Theories on the rightful Origin of Government, are re- 
 ducible in the end to three classes, correspondent to the three 
 different points of view, in which the Human Being itself may 
 be contemplated. The first denies all truth and distinct mean- 
 ing to the words, Right and Duty, and affirming that the hu- 
 man mind consists of nothing, but manifold modifications of 
 passive sensation, considers men as the highest sort of ani- 
 mals indeed, but at the same time the most wretched ; inas- 
 much as their defenceless nature^ forces them into society, 
 while such is the multiplicity of wants engendered by the 
 social state, that the wishes of one are sure to be in contra- 
 diction with those of some otlicr. The assertors of this sys- 
 tem consequently ascribe the origin and contii^ance of Gov- 
 ernment to fear, or the power of the stronger, aided by the 
 force of custom. This is the systein of Hobbes. Its state- 
 ment is its confutation. It is, indeed, in the literal sense of 
 the word preposterous : for fear pre-supposes conquest, and 
 conquest a previous union and agreement between the con- 
 querors. A vast Empire ma?/ perhaps be governed by fear; 
 at least the idea is not absolutely inconceivable, under circum- 
 stances which prevent the consciousness of a common strength. 
 A million of men united by mutual confidence and free inter- 
 course of thoughts form one power, and this is as much a real 
 thing as a steam engine ; but a million of insulated individuals 
 is only an abstraction of the mind, and but one told so many
 
 141 
 
 times over without addition, as an ideot would tell the clock 
 at noon — one, one, one, &c. But when, in the tirst instances, 
 the descendants of one family joined together to attack those of 
 another family, it is impossible that their chief or leader should 
 have appeared to them stronger than all the rest together : 
 thej must therefore have chosen him, and this as for particular 
 purposes, so doubtless under particular conditions, expressed 
 or understood. Such we know to be the case with the North 
 American tribes at present ; such we are informed by History, 
 was the case with our own remote ancestors. Therefore, even 
 on the system of those who, in comtempt of the oldest and 
 most authentic records, consider the savages as the first and 
 natural state of man, government must have originated in j 
 choice and an agreement. The apparent exceptions in Africa 
 and Asia are, if possible, still more subversive of this system : 
 for they will be found to have originated in religious imposture, 
 and the first chiefs to have secured a willing and enthusiastic 
 obedience to themselves, as Delegates of the Deity. 
 
 But the whole Theory is baseless. We are told by History, 
 we learn from our experience, we know from our own hearts, 
 that fear, of itself, is utterlj^ incapable of producing any regu- 
 lar, continuous and calculable effect, even on an individual ; 
 and that the fear, which does act systematically upon the mind 
 always presupposes a sense of duty, as its cause. The most 
 cowardly of the European nations, the Neapolitans and Sicili- 
 ans, those among whom the fear of death exercises the most 
 tyrannous influence relatively to their own persons, are the ve- 
 ry men who least fear to take away the life of a fellow citizen 
 by poison or assassination ; while in Great Britain, a tyrant 
 who has abused the power, which a vast property has given 
 him, to oppress a whole neighborhood, can walk in safety un- 
 armed, and unattended, amid a hundred men, each of whom 
 feels his heart burn with rage and indignation at the sight of 
 him. " It was this Man who broke my Father's heart" — or 
 " it is through Him that my Children are clad in rags, and cry 
 for the Food which I am no longer able to provide for them." 
 And yet they dare not touch a hair of his head ! Whence 
 does this arise ? Is it from a cowardice of sensihility that 
 makes the injured man shudder at (he thought of shedding 
 blood ? Or from a cowardice of selfishness which makes him 
 afraid of hazarding his own life ! Neither the one or the
 
 142 
 
 other ! The Field of Waterloo, as the most recent of an hun- 
 dred equal proofs, has borne witness, 
 
 That " bring a Briton fra his hill, 
 ***** 
 
 Say, such is Royal George's will, 
 And there's the foe, 
 He has nae thought but how to kill 
 
 Twa at a blow. 
 Nae cauld, faint-hearted doubtings tease him ; 
 Death comes, wi' fearless eye he sees him , 
 Wi' bloody hand, a welcome gies him ; 
 
 And when he fa's 
 His latest draught o' breathin leaves him 
 
 In faint huzzas." 
 
 Whence then arises the difference of feeling in the formei 
 case ? To what does the oppressor owe his safety ? To the 
 spirit-quelling thought the laws of God and of my country 
 have made his life sacred ! I dare not touch a hair of his head ! 
 — " Tis Conscience that makes Cowards of us all," — but ! oh ! 
 it is Conscience too which makes Heroes of us all.
 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 ht plus fort ri'est jamais assezfort pour Hre toujours le Tuaitre, s^U ne transforme 
 sa force en droit et Vobeissance en devoir. Rousseau. 
 
 Wr'ihus parantur provincia, ]nre retinentur. Igitur breve iff gaudium, qidppe 
 Gemiani victi magis, quam domiti. Flor. iv 12. 
 
 Translation. — The strongest is never strong enough to be alivm/s the mas- 
 ter, unless he transform his Power into Right and Obedience into Duty. 
 
 Rousseau. 
 
 Provinces are taken by force, but they are kept by right. This exultation 
 therefore was of brief continuance, inasmuch as the Germans had been 
 overcome, but not subdued. Florus. 
 
 A TRULT great man, (the best and greatest public character 
 that I had ever the opportunity of making myself acquainted 
 with) on assuming the command of a man of war, found a mu- 
 tinous crew, more than one half of them uneducated Irishmen, 
 and of the remainder no small portion had become sailors by 
 compromise of punishment. What terror could effect by se- 
 verity and frequency of acts of discipline, had been already 
 effected. And what was this effect ? Something like that of 
 a polar winter on a flask of brandy. The furious spirit concen- 
 tered itself with tenfold strength at the heart ; open violence 
 was changed into secret plots and conspiracies ; and the con- 
 sequent orderliness of the crew, as far as they were orderly, 
 was but the brooding of a tempest. The new commander in- 
 stantly commenced a system of discipline as near as possible 
 to that of ordinary law — as much as possible, he avoided, in 
 his own person, the appearance of any will or arbitrary power 
 to vary, or to remit, punishment. The rules to be observed 
 were afiixed (o a conspicuous part of the ship, with the particu- 
 lar penalties for the breach of each particular rule ; and care 
 was taken that every individual of the ship should know and
 
 144 
 
 understand this code. With a single exception in the case of 
 mutinous behavior, a space of twenty-four hours was appointed 
 between the first charge and the second hearing of the cause, 
 at which time the accused person was permitted and required 
 to bring forward whatever he thought conducive to his defence 
 or palliation. If, as was commonly the case (for the officers 
 well knew that the commander would seriously resent in 
 them all caprice of will, and by no means permit to others 
 what he denied to himself) if no answer could be returned to 
 the three questions — Did you not commit the act ? Did you 
 not know that it was in contempt of such a rule, and in defi- 
 ance of such a punishment.^ And was it not wholly in your 
 own power to have obeyed the one and avoided the other.' — 
 the sentence was then passed with the greatest solemnity, and 
 another, but shorter, space of time was again interposed be- 
 tween it and its actual execution. During this space the feel- 
 ings of the commander, as a man, were so well blended with 
 his inflexibility, as the organ of the law ; and how much he 
 suffered previous to and during the execution of the sentence 
 was so well known to the crew, that it became a common say- 
 ing with them, when a sailor was about to be punished, " The 
 captain takes it more to heart than the fellow himself." But 
 whenever the commander perceived any trait of pride in the 
 off'ender, or the germs of any noble feeling, he lost no oppor- 
 tunity of saying, " It is not the pain that you are about to suf- 
 fer which grieves me ! You are none of you, I trust, such 
 cowards as to turn faint-hearted at the thought of that ! but 
 that, being a man and one who is to fight for his king and coun- 
 try, you should have made it necessary to treat you as a vi- 
 cious beast, it is this that grieves me." 
 
 I have been assured, both by a gentleman who was a lieu- 
 tenant on board that ship at the time when the heroism of its 
 captain, aided by his characteristic calmness and foresight, 
 greatly influenced the decision of the most glorious battle re- 
 corded in the annals of our naval glory ; and very recently by 
 a grey-headed sailor, who did not even know my name, or 
 could have suspected that I was previously acquainted with the 
 circumstances — I have been assured, I say, that the success of 
 this plan was such as astonished the oldest officers, and convin-^ 
 ced the most incredulous. Ruffians, who like the old Buccan- 
 eers, had been used to inflict torture on themselves for sport, or
 
 145 
 
 in order to harden themselves beforehand, were tamed and 
 overpowered, how or why they themselves knew not. From 
 the fiercest spirits were heard the most eaniest entreaties for 
 the forgiveness of their commander : not before the punish- 
 ment, for it was too well known that then they would have 
 been to no purpose, but days after it, when the bodily pain was 
 remembered but as a dream. An invisible power it was, that 
 quelled them, a power, which was therefore irresistible, be- 
 cause it took aw^ay the very will of resisting. It was the awe- 
 ful power of Law, acting on natures pre-configured to its influ- 
 ences. A faculty was appealed to in the Offender's own being; 
 a Faculty and a Presence, of which he had not been previously 
 made aware — but it answered to the appeal ! its real existence 
 therefore could not be doubted, or its reply rendered inaudible! 
 and the very struggle of the wilder passions, to keep upper- 
 most counteracted its own purpose, by wasting in internal con- 
 test that energy, which before had acted in its entirenes on 
 external resistance or provocation. Strength may be met with 
 strength ; the power of inflicting pain may be baffled by the 
 pride of endurance ; the eye of rage may be answered by the 
 stare of defiance, or the downcast look of dark and revengeful 
 resolve;, and with all this there is an outward and determined 
 object to which the mind can attach its passions and purposes, 
 and bury its own disquietudes in the full occupation of the 
 senses. But who dares struggle with an invisible combatant ? 
 with an enemy which exists and makes us know its existence 
 but where it is, we ask in vain. — No space contains it — time 
 promises no control over it — it has no ear for my threats — it 
 has no substance, that my hands can grasp, or my weapons find 
 vulnerable — it commands and cannot be commanded — it acts 
 and is insusceptible of my reaction — the more I strive to sub- 
 due it, the more am I compelled to think of it — and the more 
 I think of it, the more do I find it to possess a reality out of 
 myself, and not to be a phantom of my own imagination ; that 
 all, but the most abandoned men, acknowledge its authority, 
 and that the whole strength and majesty of my country are 
 pledged to support it ; and yet that for me its power is the 
 same with that of my own permanent Self, and that all the 
 choice, which is permitted to me, consists in having it for my 
 Guardian Angel or my avenging Fiend ! This is the Spirit of 
 Law ! the Lute of Amphion, the Harp of Orpheus ! This is 
 
 the true necessity, which compels man into the social state, 
 19
 
 146 
 
 now and always, by a still-beginning, nerer-ceasing force of 
 moral cohesion. 
 
 Thus is man to be governed, and thus only can he be gov- 
 erned. For from his creation the objects of his senses were 
 to become his subjects, and the task allotted to him was to sub- 
 due the visible world within the sphere of action circumscribed 
 by those senses, as far as they could act in concert. What 
 the eye beholds the hand strives to reach ; what it reaches, it 
 conquers and makes the instrument of further conquest. We 
 can be subdued by that alone which is analogous in kind to 
 that by which we subdue: therefore by the invisible powers 
 of our nature, whose immediate presence is disclosed to our 
 inner sense, and only as the symbols and language of which all 
 shapes and modifications of matter become formidable to us. 
 
 A machine continues to move by the force which first set 
 it in motion. If only the smallest number in any state, pro- 
 perly so called, hold together through the influence of any fear 
 that does not itself presuppose the sense of duty, it is evident 
 that the state itself could not have commenced through animal 
 fear. We hear, indeed, of conquests ; but how does History 
 represent these ? Almost without exception as the substitu- 
 tion of one set of governors for another : and so far is the con- 
 queror from relying on fear alone to secure the obedience of 
 the conquered, that his first step is to demand an oath of feal- 
 ty from them, by which he would impose upon them the be- 
 lief, that they become subjects : for Avho would think of ad- 
 ministering an oath to a gang of slaves? But what can make 
 the difference between slave and subject, if ^lot the existence 
 of an implied contract in the one case, and not in the other.-* 
 And to what purpose would a contract serve if, however it 
 might be entered into through fear, it were deemed binding 
 only in consequence of fear .'' To repeat my former illustra- 
 tion — where fear alone is relied on, as in a slave ship, the 
 chains that bind the poor victims must be material chains : for 
 these only can act upon feelings which have their source wholly 
 in the material organization. Hobbes has said that Laws with- 
 out the sv/ord are but bits of parchment. Plow far this is true, 
 every honest man's heart will best tell him, if he will content 
 himself with asking his own heart, and not falsify the answer 
 by his notions concerning the hearts of other men. But were 
 it true, still the fair answer would be — Well ! but without the 
 Laws the sword is but a piece of iron. The wretched tyrant,
 
 147 
 
 who disgraces the present age and human nature itself, had 
 exhausted the whole magazine of animal terror, in order to 
 consolidate his truly satanic Government. But look at the new 
 French catechism, and in it read the misgivings of the mon- 
 ster's mind, as to the insufiiciency of terror alone ! The sys- 
 tem, which I have been confuting, is indeed so inconsistent 
 with the facts revealed to us by our own mind, and so utterly 
 unsupported by any facts of History, that I should be censura- 
 ble in wasting my own time and my Reader's patience by the 
 exposure of its falsehood, but that the arguments adduced have 
 a value of themselves independent of their present application. 
 Else it would have been an ample and satisfactory reply to an 
 assertor of this bestial Theory — Government is a thing which 
 relates to men, and what you say applies only to beasts. 
 
 Before I proceed to the second of the three Systems, let me 
 remove a possible misunderstanding that may have arisen from 
 the use of the word Contract : as if I had asserted, that the 
 whole duty of obedience to Governors is derived from, and 
 dependent on, the fact of an original Contract. I freely ad- 
 mit, that to make this the cause and origin of political obliga- 
 tion, is not only a dangerous but an absurd Theory ; for what 
 could give moral force to the Contract ? The same sense of 
 Duty which binds us to keep it, must have pre-existed as im- 
 pelling us to make it. For what man in his senses would re- 
 gard the faithful observation of a contract entered into to plun- 
 der a neighbor's house but as a treble crime ? First the act, 
 which is a crime of itself: — secondlv, the enterina; into a Con- 
 tract which it is a crime to observe, and yet a weakening of one 
 of the main pillars of human confidence not to observe, and thus 
 voluntarily placing ourselves under the necessity of choosing 
 between two evils ; — and thirdly, the crime of chusing the 
 greater of the two evils, by the unlawful observance of an un- 
 lawful promise. But in my sense, the word Contract is mere- 
 ly synonimous with the sense of duty acting in a specific direc- 
 tion, i. e. determining our moral relations, as members of a 
 body politic. If I have referred to a supposed origin of Gov- 
 ernment, it has been in courtesy to a common notion : for I 
 myself regard the supposition as no more than a means of sim- 
 plifying to our apprehension the ever-continuing causes of social 
 union, even as the conservation of the world may be represented 
 as an act of continued Creation. For, what if an original 
 Contract had really been entered into, and formally recorded ?
 
 148 
 
 Still it could do no more than bind the contracting parties to 
 act for the general good in the best manner, that the existing 
 relations among themselves, (state of property, religion, &c.) 
 on the one hand, and the external circumstances on the other 
 (ambitious or barbarous neighbors, &c.) required or permit- 
 ted. In after times it could be appealed to only for the gen- 
 eral principle, and no more than the ideal Contract, could 
 it affect a question of ways and means. As each particular 
 age brings with it its own exigencies, so must it rely on its 
 own prudence for the specific measures by which they are to 
 be encountered. 
 
 Nevertheless, it assuredly cannot be denied, that an original 
 (in reality, rather an ever-originating) Contract is a very natu- 
 ral and significant mode of expressing the reciprocal duties of 
 subject and sovereign. We need only consider the utility of 
 a real and formal State Contract, the Bill of Rights for in- 
 stance, as a sort of est demonstraium in politics ; and the con- 
 tempt lavished on this notion, though sufficiently compatible 
 with the tenets of a Hume, will seem strange to us in the wri- 
 tings of a Protestant clergyman, who surely owed some respect 
 to a mode of thinking which God himself had authorized by 
 his own example, in the establishment of the Jewish constitu- 
 tion. In this instance there was no necessity for deducing the 
 will of God from the tendency of the Laws to the general hap- 
 piness : his will was expressly declared. Nevertheless, it 
 seemed good to the divine wisdom, that there should be a co- 
 venant, an original contract, between himself as sovereign, and 
 the Hebrew nation as subjects. This, I admit, was a wriHen 
 and formal Contract ; but the relations of mankind, as mem- 
 bers of a body spiritual, or religious commonwealth, to the 
 Saviour, as its head or regent — is not this too styled a covenant, 
 though it would be absurd to ask for the material instrument 
 that contained it, or the time when it was signed or voted by 
 the members of the church collectively.* 
 
 * It is ])crl)aps to be regretted, that the words, Old and New Testament, 
 they having lost llie sense intended by the translators of the Bible, have not 
 been changed into the Old and New Covenant. We cannot too carehUly keep 
 in sight a notion, which appeared to the primitive church the fittest and mopt 
 scrij)tiiral uio<lo of representing the f>nm of the contents of the sacred wri- 
 tingp.
 
 149 
 
 With this explanation, the assertion of an original (still bet- 
 ter, of a perpetual) Contract is rescued from all rational ob- 
 jection ; and however speciously it may be urged, that History 
 can scarcely produce a single example of a state dating its pri- 
 mary establishment from a free and mutual covenant, the answer 
 is ready : if there be any difference between a Government 
 and a band of robbers, an act of consent must be supposed on 
 the part of the people governed. 
 
 ESSAY 
 
 Human institutions cannot be whollj^ constructed on principles of Science, 
 which is proper to immutable olyccts. In the government of the visible 
 world the supreme Wisdom itself submits to be the Author of the J3etter: 
 not of the Best, but of tlie Best possible in the subsisting Relations. Much 
 more must all human Legislators give way to many Evils rather than en- 
 courage the Discontent that would lead to worse Remedies. If it is not in 
 the power of man to construct even the arch of a Bri«'!ge that shall exact- 
 ly correspond in its strength to the cal ulations of Geometry, how much 
 less can human Science construct a Constitution excef)t by rendering it- 
 self flexible to Experience and Exj)ediency : where so many things must 
 fall out SccidentaHy. and come not into any com])liance with the precon- 
 ceived ends; but men are forced to comply subsequently, and to strike in 
 with thnigs as they fall out, by after applications of them to their puri)osea, 
 or by framing their purposes to them. South. 
 
 Thk second system corresponds to the second point of view 
 under which the human being may be considered, namely, as 
 an animal gifted with understanding, or the faculty of suiting 
 measures to circumstances. According to this theory, every 
 institution of national origin needs no other justitution than a
 
 160 
 
 proof, that under the particular circumstances it is expedient. 
 Having in my former Numbers expressed myself (so at least I 
 am conscious I shall have appeared to do to many persons) with 
 comparative slight of the understanding considered as the sole 
 guide of human conduct, and even with something like con- 
 empt and reprobation of the maxims of expedience, when 
 represented as the only steady light of the conscience, and the 
 absolute foundation of all morality; 1 shall perhaps seem guilty 
 of an inconsistency, in declaring myself an adherent of this sec- 
 ond system, a zealous advocate for deriving the origin of all gov- 
 ernment from human prudence^ and of deeming that to be just 
 which experience has proved to be expedient. From this 
 charge of inconsistency* I shall best exculpate myself by the 
 full statement of the third systera,^and by the exposition of its 
 grounds and consequences. 
 
 The third and last S}'»tem-4hen denies all rightful origin to 
 
 ^Distinct notions do not suppose difterent things. WJicn we make a three- 
 fold distinction in Inurian nature, we are fully aware, that it is a distinction 
 not a division, and that in every act of Mind the Man unites the properties of 
 Sense, Understanding, and Reason. Nevertheless, it is of great practical im- 
 portance, that these distinctions should he made and understood, the igno- 
 rance or perversion of them being alike injurious; as the tirst French Con- 
 stitution has most lamentably proved. It was fashion in the profligate times 
 of Charles the Second, to laugh^at the Presbyterians, for distinguishing be- 
 tween the Person and the King; wiiile in fact they were ridiculing the most 
 venerable maxims of English Law ; — (the King never dies — the King can 
 do no wrong, &c.) and subverting the principles of genuine loyalty, in ord(U' 
 to prepare the minds of the peo])le for despotism. 
 
 Under the term Semse, I comprise, whatever is passive in our being, with- 
 out any reference to ths questions of ]\Iaterialism or Inmiaterialism ; all that 
 man is in conuncn with animals, in Jdnd at least — his sensations,' and impress- 
 ions, whether of his outward senses, or the inner sense of imagination. This 
 in the language of tlie Schools, was called the vis receptiva, or recipient pro- 
 perty of the soul, from the original constitution of which we perceive and 
 imagine all things under the forms of sp.ace and time. Byjhe u>'derstand- 
 iNG, 1 mean the facidty of thinking and forming judgments on the notices 
 furnished by the sense, according to certain rules existing in itself, which 
 rules constitute its distinct natm-e. By the pure Keasox, 1 mean the power 
 by which we become possess(!d of piinciple, (tiie eternal verities of Plato 
 and Descartes) and of ideas, (N. B. not images) as the ideas of a j)oint, a line, 
 a circle, in Mathematics; .and of Justice, Holiness, Free- Will, &c. in Mo- 
 rals. Hence in works of pure science the definitions of necessity precede 
 the reasoning, in other works the}' more a])tlyform the conclusion. 
 
 To marjy of my readers it will, I trust, be somc-reconimendation of these
 
 151 
 
 government, except as far as they are derivable from principles 
 contained in the reason of Man, and judges all the relations 
 of men in Society by the Laws of moral necessity, according to 
 IDEAS (I here use the word in its highest and primitive sense, \ 
 and as nearly synonimous with the modern word ideal) accord- 
 ing to archetypal ideas co-essential with the Reason, and the 
 consciousness of which is the sign and necessary product of its 
 full developement. The following then is the fundamental 
 principle of this theory: Nothing is to be deemed rightful in 
 civil society, or to be tolerated as such, but what is capable of 
 being demonstrated out of the original laws of the pure Rea- 
 son. Of course, as there is but one system of Geometry, so 
 according to this theory there can be but one constitution and 
 one system of legislation, and this consists in the freedom, 
 which is the common right of all men, under the control of that | 
 moral necessity, which is the common duty of all men. What- 
 ever is not every ivhere necessary, is no where right. On this . 
 assumption the whole theory is built. To state it nakedly is to/ 
 confute it satisfactorily. So at least it should seem! But in 
 how winning and specious a manner this system may be repre- 
 sented even to minds of the loftiest order, if undisciplined and 
 unhumuled by practical experience, has been proved by the 
 general impassioned admiration and momentous effects of Rou- 
 seau's Du Contrat Social^ and the writings of the French 
 economists, or as they more appropriately entitled themselves, 
 
 distinctions, that they are more than once expressed, and every where sup- 
 posed, in the writings of St. Paul. I have no hesitation in undertaking to 
 prove, that every Heresy which has disquieted the Christian Churcli, from 
 Tritheism to Socinianisni, has originated in, and supported itself by, argu- 
 ments rendered plausible only by tlie confusion of these faculties, and thus 
 deznanding for the objects of one, a sort of evidence appropriated to those of 
 another faculty. — These disquisitions have the misfortune of being in ill-re- 
 I)ort, as dry and unsatisfactory ; but I hope, in the com-se of the work, to 
 gain tlieni a better character — and if elucidations of their practical impor- 
 tance from the most momentous events of History, can render them interesting, 
 to give them that interest at least. Besides, there is surely some good in the 
 knowledge of Truth, as Truth — (we were not made to live by Bread alone) 
 and in the strengthening of the intellect. It is an exellent Remark of Sca- 
 liger's — " Harum indagatio Subtilitafum, elsi non est idilis ad maclmias J'ari- 
 nuAas conficiendas, exuit animuvi tamen insciticB ruiigiiie acuitque ad aha." 
 ScALiG. Exerc. 307. §§ 3. i. e. The investigation of these subtleties, tliough 
 it is of no use to the construction of machines to grind corn with, yet clears 
 the mind from the rust of ignorance, and sharpens it for other thing*
 
 152 
 
 Physiocratic Philosophers : and in how tempting and danger- 
 ous a manner it maybe represented to the populace, has been 
 made too evident in our own country by the temporary effects 
 of Paine's Rights of Man. Relatively, however, to this latter 
 work it should be observed, that it is not a legitimate offspring 
 of any one theory, but a confusion of the immorality of the 
 first system with the misapplied universal principles of the 
 last : and in this union, or rather lawless alternation, consists the 
 essence of Jacobinism, as far as Jacobinism is any thing but a 
 term of abuse, or has any meaning of its own distinct from de- 
 mocracy and sedition. 
 
 A constitution equally suited to China and America, or to 
 Russia and Great Brittain, must surely be equally unfit for both, 
 and deserve as little respect in political, as a quack's panacsea 
 in medical practice. Yet there are three weighty motives for 
 a distinct exposition of this theory,* and of the ground on 
 which its pretentions are bottomed: and I care aflirm, that for 
 the same reasons there are few subjects which in the present 
 state of the world have a fairer claim to the attention of every 
 serious Englishman, who is likely, directly or indirectly, as 
 partizan or as opponent, to interest himself in schemes of Re- 
 form. 
 
 The first motive is derived from the propensity of mankind 
 to mistake the feelings of disappointment, disgust, and abhor- 
 ance occasioned by the unhappy effects or accompaniments of 
 a particular system for an insight into the falshood of its princi- 
 ples which alone can secure its permanent rejection. For by 
 a wise ordinance of nature our feelings have no abiding-place 
 in our memory, nay the more vivid they are in the moment of 
 their existence the more dim and difScult to be remembered do 
 they make the thoughts which accompanied them. Those of 
 my readers who at any tinie of their life have been in the habit 
 of reading novels may easily convince themselves of this Truth 
 
 *As"MKTAPiiysics" aro the science wliich dotennincs what can, and what 
 cannot, be known of Being and the Laws of J5eing, a priori (that is from 
 those necessities of the mind or forms of tiiiiiking, wliich, though first re- 
 vealed to us by experience, must yet have pre-existed in order to make ex- 
 perience itself possi!)lc, even as the eye must exist previous to any particular 
 act of seeing, thnugli by sight only can we know that we have eyes) — so 
 might the philosophy of Rousseau and his followers not inaptly bo entitled 
 METAPOLrncs, and the Doctors of this School, 3Ietapoliticians.
 
 153 
 
 by comparing their recollections of those stories, which inosl 
 excited their curiosity and even painfully affected their feel- 
 ings, with their recollections of the calm and meditative pathos 
 of Shakspeare and Milton. Hence it is that human experi- 
 ence, like the stern lights of a ship at sea, illumines only the 
 path which we have passed over. The horror of the Peasant's 
 War in Germany, and the direful effects of the Anabaptist te- 
 nets, which were only nominally different from those of Jacobin- 
 ism by the substitution of religious for philosophical jargon, 
 struck all Europe for a time with affright. Yet little more than 
 a century was sufficient to obliterate all effective memory of 
 those events: the same principles budded forth anew and pi'o- 
 duced the same fruits from the imprisonment of Charles the 
 First to the restoration of his Son. In the succeeding genera- 
 tions, to the follies and vices of the European Courts, and to 
 the oppressive privileges of the nobility, were again transfer- 
 ed those feelings of disgust and hatred, which for a brief while 
 the multitude had attached to the crimes and extravagances of 
 political and religious fanaticism : and the same principles aid- 
 ed by circumstances, and dressed out in the ostentatious garb 
 of a. fashionable philosophy, once more rose triumphant, and ef- 
 fected the French Revolution. That man has reflected little 
 on human nature who does not perceive that the detestable 
 maxims and correspondent crimes of the existing French des- 
 potism, have already dimmed the recollections of the democrat- 
 ic phrenzy in the minds of men ; by little and little, have 
 drawn off to other objects the electric force of the feelings, 
 which had massed and upheld those recollections; and that a 
 favourable concurrence of occasions is alone wanting to awak- 
 en the thunder and precipitate the lightning from the opposite 
 quarter of the political Heaven.* The true origin of human 
 events is so little susceptible of that kind of evidence which 
 can compel our belief even against our will ; and so many are 
 the disturbing forces which modify the motion given by the 
 first projection ; and every age has, or imagines it has, its own 
 circumstances which render past experience no longer applica- 
 ble to the present case ; that there will never be wanting an- 
 swers and explanations, and specious flatteries of hope. I 
 
 *The Reailer will recollect that thes^ Essays were first published in 1809. 
 20
 
 154 
 
 well remember, that when the examples of former Jacobins, 
 Julius Caesar, Cromwell, &c. were adduced in France and En- 
 gland at the commencement of the French Consulate, it was 
 ridiculed as pedantry and pedants' ignorance, to fear a repeti- 
 tion of such usurpation at the close of the enlightened eighteenth 
 century. Those who possess the Monitew^s of that date will 
 find set proofs, that such results were little less than impossible, 
 and that it was an insult to so philosophical an age, and so en- 
 lightened a nation, to dare direct the public eye towards them 
 as lights of admonition and warning. 
 
 It is a common foible with official statesmen, and with those 
 who deem themselves honored by their acquaintance, to at- 
 tribute great national events to the influence of particular per- 
 sons, to the errors of one man and to the intrigues of another, 
 to any possible spark of a particular occasion, rather than to 
 the true cause, the predominant state of public opinion. I have 
 known men who, with most significant nods, and the civil con- 
 tempt of pitying half smiles, have declared the natural expla- 
 nation of the French Revolution, to be the mere fancies of Gar- 
 (/ retteers, and then with the solemnity of Cabinet Ministers, 
 have proceeded to explain the whole by anecdotes. It is so 
 stimulant to the pride of a vulgar mind, to be persuaded that 
 it knows what few others know and that it is the impor- 
 tant depository of a sort of state secret, by communicating 
 which it confers an obligation on others ! But I have like- 
 wise met with men of intelligence, who at the commence- 
 ment of the Revolution were travelling on foot through the 
 French provinces, and they bear witness, that in the remo- 
 test villages every tongue was employed in echoing and en- 
 forcing the doctrines of the Parisian Journalists, that the pub- 
 lic highways were crowded with enthusiasts, some shouting 
 the watch-words of the revolution, others disputing on the 
 most abstract principles of the universal constitution, which 
 they fully believed, that all the nations of the earth were short- 
 ly to adopt ; the most ignorant among them confident of his 
 fitness for the highest duties of a legislator; and all prepared 
 to shed their blood in the defence of the inalienable sovereign- 
 ty of the self-governed people. The more abstract the notions 
 were, with the closer affinity did they combine with the most 
 fervent feelings and all the immediate impulses to action. 
 The Lord Chancellor Bacon lived in an age of court intrigues, 
 and was familiarly acquainted with all the secrets of personal
 
 155 
 
 influence. He, if any man, was qualified to take the guage 
 and measurement of their comparative power, and he has told 
 us, that there is one, and but one infallible source of political 
 prophecy, the knowledge of the predominant opinions and the 
 speculative principles of men in general, between the age of 
 twenty and thirty. Sir Philip Sidney, the favorite of Queen 
 Elizabeth, the paramount gentleman of Europe, the nephew, 
 and (as far as a good man could be) the confidante of the in- 
 triguing and dark-minded Earl of Leicester, was so deeply 
 convinced that the principles diffused through the majority of 
 a nation are the true oracles from whence statesmen are to 
 learn wisdom, and that " when the people speak loudly it is 
 from their being strongly possessed either by the godhead or 
 the daemon," that in the revolution of the Netherlands he con- 
 sidered the universal adoption of one set of principles, as a 
 proof of the divine presence. "If her majesty," '»ays he 
 " were the fountain, I would fear, considering what I daily 
 find, that we should wax dry. But she is but a means which 
 God useth." But if my Readers wish to see the question of 
 the efficacy of principles and popular opinions for evil and 
 for good proved and illustrated with an eloquence worthy of 
 the subject, I can refer them with the hardiest anticipation 
 of their thanks, to the late work " concerning the relations of 
 Great Britain, Spain and Portugal, by my honored friend, 
 William Wordsworth* quern quoties lego^ non verba mihi vi- 
 deor audire^ sed tonitrua ! 
 
 * I consider this reference to, and strong recommendation of the Works 
 above mentioned, not as a vokmtary tribute of admiration, but as an act of 
 mere justice both to myself and to the readers of The Friend. I\ly own 
 heart bears me witness, that I am actuated by the deepest sense of the truth 
 of the principles, whicli it has been and still more will be my endeavor to 
 enforce, and of their paramoiuit importance to tlie well-being of Society at 
 tlie present juncture; and that the duty of making the attempt, and the hope 
 of not wholly falling in it, are, far more than the wish for the doubtful good 
 of literary reputation, or any yet meaner object, my great and ruling motives. 
 Mr. Wordsworth I deem a fellow-laborer in the same vineyard, actuated i)y 
 the same motives and teaching the same jjrinciples, but witli far greater pow- 
 ers of mind, and an eloquence more adequate to the importance and majesty 
 of the cause. I am strengthened too i)y the knowledge, that I am not un- 
 authorized by the sympathy of many wise and good men, and men acknow- 
 ledged as such by the Public, in my admiration of his pami)hlet, — JVcque enim 
 debet operibus ejit^ obesse, quod vivil. An si inter cos, quos nunquam vidimus.
 
 156 
 
 That erroneous political notions (they having become general 
 and a part of the popular creed,) have practical consequences, 
 and these, of course, of a most fearful nature, is a truth as cer- 
 tain as historic evidence can make it : and that when the feel- 
 ings excited by these calamities have passed away, and the in- 
 terest in them has been displaced by more recent events, the 
 same errors are likely to be started afresh, pregnant with the 
 same calamities, is an evil rooted in Human Nature in the pre- 
 sent state of general information, for which we have hitherto 
 found no adequate remedy. (It may, perhaps in the scheme of 
 Providence, be proper and conducive to its ends, that no ade- 
 quate remedy should exist : for the folly of men is the wisdom 
 of God.) But if there be any means, if not of preventing, yet 
 
 JJoruisset, vo7i solum libros ejus, verum etiam imagines conquireremiis, cjiisdem 
 nunc honb'r prasentis, et gratia quasi satietale languescet? Jit hoc pravum, mal- 
 ignumque est, non adniirari hominem admiratione dignissimum, quia videre^ 
 complect! , nee laudare iantum, verum etiam amare contingit, PLi?f. E[)ist. Lib. I. 
 It is hardly possible for a man of ingenuous mind to act under the fear that 
 it shall be suspected by honest men of the vileness of praising a work to the 
 public, nieroly because he happens, to be personally acquainted Avith the 
 Author. That this is so commonly done in Reviews, furnishes only an addi- 
 tional proof of the morbid hardness produced in the moral sense by the habit 
 of writing anonymous criticisms, especially under the further disguise of a 
 pretended board or association of Critics, each man expressing himself, to 
 use the words of Andrew Marvel, as a syncdical individuum. With regard 
 however, to the probability of the judgment being warped by partiality, I can 
 only say that I judge of all Works indifferently by certain fixed rules previ- 
 ously formed in my mind with all the power and vigilance of my judgment ; 
 and that I should certainly of the two apply them with greater rigor to the 
 production of a friend than that of a person indifllrent to me. But \a herever 
 I find in any Work all the conditions of excellence in its kind, it is not the 
 accider.t of the Author's being my cotemporary or even my friend, or the 
 sneers of bad-hearted men, that shall prevent me from speaking of it, as in 
 my inmost convictions I deem it deserves. 
 
 no, friend ! 
 
 Though it be now the fashion to commend. 
 As men of strong minds, those alone who can 
 Censure with judgment, no such piece of man 
 Makes up my spirit : where desert does live. 
 There will I plant my wonder, and there give 
 My best endeavors to build up his glory, 
 That truly merits ! 
 
 Recommendatory n?rse» to one of the old Plays'
 
 157 
 
 of palliating the disease and, in the more favored nations, of 
 checicing its progress at the first symptoms ; and if these means 
 are to be at all compatible with the civil and intellectual free- 
 dom of mankind ; they are to be found only in an intelligible 
 and tiiorough exposure of the error, and, thiough that discove- 
 ry, of the source, from which it derives its speciousness and 
 powers of influence on the human mind. This therefore is 
 my first motive for undertaking tlie disquisition. 
 
 The second is, that though the French code of revolutionary 
 principles is now generally rejected as a system, yet everywhere 
 in the speeches and writings of the English reformers, nay, not 
 seldom in those of their opponents, I find certain maxims assert- 
 ed or appealed to, which are not tenable, except as constituent 
 parts of that system. INIanj^ of the most specious arguments in 
 proof of the imperfection and injustice of the present constitu- 
 tion of our legislature will be found, on closer examination, to 
 pre-suppose the truih of certain principles, from which the ad- 
 ducers of these arguments loudly profess their dissent. But in 
 political changes no permanence can be hoped for in the ed- 
 ifice, without consistency in the foundation. 
 
 The third motive is, that by detecting the true source of the 
 influence of these principles, we shall at the same time discover 
 their natural place and object : and that in themselves they are 
 not only Truths, but most important and sublime Truths ; and 
 that their falsehood and their danger consist altogether in their 
 misapplication. Thus the dignity of Human Nature will be 
 secured, and at the same time a lesson of humility taught to 
 each individual, when we are made to see that the universal, 
 necessary Laws, and pure ideas of Reason, were given us, not 
 for the purpose of flattering our Pride and enabling us to be- 
 come national legislators ; but that by an energy of continued 
 self-conquest, we might establish a free and yet absolute gov- 
 ernment in our own spirits.
 
 ESSAY IV. 
 
 Albeit therefore, much of that we are to speak in this present cause, may 
 seem to a number perhaps tedious, j)erhaps obscure, dark and intricate, (for 
 many talk of the Truth, which never sounded the depth from whence it 
 springeth : and therefore, when they are led thereunto, they are soon weary, 
 as men drawn from those beaten paths, wherewith they have been inured ;) 
 yet this may not so far prevail, as to cut off that which the matter itself re- 
 quireth, howsoever the nice, humour of some be therewith pleased or no. 
 They unto whom we shall seem tedious, are in no wise injured by us, be- 
 cause it is in their own hands to spare that labor which they are not willing 
 to endure. And if any com})lain of obscurity, they must consider, that in 
 these matters it cometh no otherwise to pass, than in sundry the works both 
 of Art, and also of Natiue, where that which hath greatest force in the very 
 things we see, is, notwithstanding, itself oftentimes not seen. The stateliness 
 of houses, the goodliness of trees, when we behold them, delighteth the eye : 
 but the foundation which beareth up the one, that root which ministereth unto 
 the other nourishment and life, is in the bosom of the earth concealed, and 
 if there be occasion at any time to search into it, such labor is then more ne- 
 cessary than pleasant,]both to them which undertake it and for the lookers-on. 
 In like maimer, the use and benefit of good laws, all that live under them, 
 may enjoy with delight and comfort, albeit the grounds and first original 
 causes from whence they have sprung, be unknown, as to the greatest part 
 "of men they are. But when they who withdraw their obedience, pretend 
 that ihe laws which they should obey are corrupt and vicious: for better ex- 
 amination of their quality, it behoveth the very foimdation and root, the high- 
 est well-spring and fountain of them to be discovered. Which because we 
 are not oftentimes accustomed to do, when we do it, the pains we take are 
 more needful a great deal than acceptable, and the matters which we handle, 
 seem by reason of newness, (till ihe mind grow better acquainted with thcni) 
 dark, intricate, and unfiimiliar. For as much help whereof, as may be in this 
 case, I have endeavored throughout the body of this whole Discourse, that 
 every former part might give strength to all that follow, and every latter bring 
 some light to all before: so that if the judgments of men do but hold them- 
 selves in suspense, as touching tlicse first more general Meditations, till in or- 
 der they have i)erused the rest that ensue, what may seem dark at the first, 
 will afterwards be found more plain, even as the latter particular decisions 
 will appear, I doubt not, more strong when the other have been read before. 
 
 Hooker's Ecdcsiast. PoUty.
 
 159 
 
 ON THE GROUNDS Or GOVERNMENT AS LAID EXCLUSIVELY IN 
 THE PURE reason; OR A STATEMENT AND CRITIQUE OF THE 
 THIRD SYSTEM OF POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY, VIZ. THE THEO- 
 RY OF ROUSSEAU AND THE FRENCH ECONOMISTS. 
 
 I return to my promise of developing from its embryo prin- 
 ciples the Tree of French Liberty, of which the declaration of 
 the Rights of Man, and the Constitution of 1791 were the leaves, 
 and the succeeding and present state of France the fruits. 
 Let me not be blamed, i(^ in the interposed Essays, introduc- 
 tory to this Section, I have connected this system, though on- 
 ly in the imagination, though only as a possible case, with a 
 name so deservedly reverenced as that of Luther. It is some 
 excuse, that to interweave with the Reader's recollections a 
 certain life and dramatic interest, during the perusal of the ab- 
 stract reasonings that are to follow, is the only means I pos- 
 sess of bribing his attention. We have most of us, at some 
 period or other of our lives, been amused with dialogues of the 
 dead. Who is there, that wishing to form a probable opinion 
 on the grounds of hope and fear for an injured people warring 
 against mighty armies, would not be pleased with a spirited 
 fiction, which brought before him an old Numantian discours- 
 ing on that subject in Elysium, with a newly-arrived spirit 
 from the streets of Saragossa or the Walls of Gerona ? 
 
 But I have a better reason. I wished to give every fair ad- 
 vantage to the opinions, which I deemed it of importance to 
 confute. It is bad policy to represent a political system as ha- 
 ving no charms but for robbers and assassins, and no natural 
 origin but in the brains of fools or mad-men, when experience 
 has proved, that the great danger of the system consists in the 
 peculiar fascination it is calculated to exert on noble and ima- 
 ginative spirits ; on all those, who in the amiable intoxication of 
 youthful benevolence, are apt to mistake their own best virtues 
 and choicest powers for the average qualities and attributes of 
 the human character. The very minds, which a good man 
 would most wish to preserve or disentangle from the snare, 
 are by these angry misrepresentations rather lured into it. Is 
 it wonderful, that a man should reject the arguments unheard, 
 when his own heart proves the falsehood of the assumptions 
 by which they are prefaced ? or that he should retaliate on the 
 aggressors their own evil thoughts ? I am well aware, that the
 
 IGO 
 
 provocation was great, the temptation almost inevitable ; yet 
 still I cannot repel the conviction from my mind, that in part 
 to this error and in part to a certain inconsistency in his funda- 
 mental principles, we are to attribute the small number of con- 
 verts made by Burke during his life time. Let me not be 
 misunderstood. I do not mean, that this great man supported 
 different principles at different aeras of his political life. On the 
 contrary, no man was ever more like himself ! From his first pub- 
 lished speech on the American colonies to his last posthumous 
 Tracts, we see the same man, the same doctrines, the same 
 uniform wisdom of practical councils, the same reasoning and 
 the same prejudices against all abstract grounds, against all de- 
 duction of Practice from Theory. The inconsistency to which 
 I allude, is of a different kind : it is the want of congruity in 
 the principles appealed to in different parts of the same Work, 
 it is an apparent versatility of the principle with the occasion. 
 If his opponents are Theorists, then every thing is to be found- 
 ed on Prudence, on mere calculations of Expediency: and 
 every man is represented as acting according to the state of his 
 own immediate self-interest. Are his opponents calculators .'* 
 T/tCTi calculation itself is represented as a sort of crime. God 
 has given us Feelings, and we are to obey them ! and the 
 most absurd prejudices become venerable, to which these 
 Feelings have given consecration. I have not forgotten, that 
 Burke himself defended these half contradictions, on the pre- 
 text of balancing the too much on the one side by a too much 
 on the other. But never can 1 believe, but that the straight 
 line must needs be the nearest ; and that where there is the 
 most, and the most unalloyed truth, there will be the greatest 
 and most permanent power of persuasion. But the fact was, 
 that Burke in his public character found himself, as it were, in 
 a Noah's Ark, with a very few men and a great many beasts ! 
 He felt how much his immediate power was lessened by the 
 very circumstance of his measureless superiority to those about 
 him : he acted, therefore, under a perpetual system of com- 
 promise — a compromise of greatness with meanness ; a com- 
 promise of comprehension with narrowness; a compromise of 
 the philosopher (who armed with the twofold knowledge of 
 History and the Laws of Spirit, as with a telescope, looked far 
 around and into the far distance) with the mere men of busi- 
 ness, or with yet coarser intellects, who handled a truth, which
 
 161 
 
 they were required to receive, as they would handle an ox, 
 which they were desired to purchase. But why need I repeat 
 what has been already said in so happy a manner by Goldsmith, 
 of this great man : 
 
 "Who, bom for the universe narrow'd his mind, 
 And to party gave up wliat was meant for mankind. 
 TJio' fraught with all learning, yet straining his throat, 
 To persuade Tommy Townsend to give him a vote; 
 Who too deep for his hearers, still went on refining, 
 And tliought of convincing, while they thought of dining." 
 
 And if in consequence it was his fate to " cut blocks with a 
 razor^^^ I may be permitted to add, that in respect of Truth 
 though not of Genius, the weapon was injured by the misappli- 
 cation. 
 
 The Friend, however, acts and will continue to act under 
 the belief, that the whole truth is the best antidote to falsehoods 
 which are dangerous chiefly because they are half-truths : and 
 that an erroneous system is best confuted, not by an abuse of 
 Theory in general, nor by an absurd opposition of Theory to 
 Practice, but by a detection of the errors in the particular The- 
 ory. For the meanest of men has his Theory : and to think at 
 all is to theorize. With these convictions I proceed immedi- 
 ately to the system of the economists and to the principles on 
 which it is constructed, and from which it must derive all its 
 strength. 
 
 The system commences with an undeniable truth, and an im- 
 portant deduction therefrom equally undeniable. All voluntary 
 actions, say they, having for their objects, good or evil, are 
 moral actions. But all morality is grounded in the reason. 
 Every man is born with the faculty of Reason : and whatever 
 is without it, be the shape what it may, is not a man or person, 
 but a THING. Hence the sacred principle, recognized by all 
 Laws, human and divine, the principle indeed, which is the 
 ground-ivork of all law and justice, that a person can never 
 become a thing, nor be treated as such without wrong. But 
 the distinction between person and thing consists herein, that 
 the latter may rightfully be used, altogether and merely, as a 
 means ; but the former must always be included in the end, and 
 form a part of the final cause. We plant the tree and we cut 
 it down, we breed the sheep and we kill it, wholly as means to 
 
 our own ends. The wood-cutter and the hind are likewise em- 
 21
 
 162 
 
 ployed as means, but on an agreement of reciprocal advantage, 
 ■which includes them as well as their employer in the end. 
 Again : as the faculty of Reason implies free-agency, morality 
 (i. e. the dictate of Reason) gives to every rational being the 
 right of acting as a free agent, and of finally determining his 
 conduct by his own will, according to his own conscience : and 
 this right is inalienable except by guilt, which is an act of self- 
 forfeiture, and the consequences therefore to be considered as 
 the criminal's own moral election. In respect of their Reason* 
 all men are equal. The measure of the Understanding and of 
 all other faculties of man, is different in different persons : but 
 Reason is not susceptible of degree. For since it merely de- 
 cides whether any given thought or action is or is not in con- 
 tradiction with the rest, there can be no reason better, or more 
 reason, than another. 
 
 Reason ! best and holiest gift of Heaven and bond of union 
 with the Giver ! The high title by which the majesty of man 
 claims precedence above all other living creatures ! Myste- 
 rious faculty, the mother of conscience, of language, of tears, 
 and of smiles ! Calm and incorruptible legislator of the soul, 
 without whom all its other powers would " meet in mere 
 oppugnancy." Sole principle of permanence amid endless 
 change ! in a world of discordant appetites and imagined self- 
 interests the one only common measure ! which taken away, 
 
 "Force sliould be riglit ; or, rather right and wrong 
 (Between whose endless jar justice resides) 
 Should lose their names and so should justice too. 
 Then eveiy thing includes itself in power, 
 Power into will, will into appetite ; 
 And appetite, an universal wolf, 
 So doubly seconded with will and po\ver, 
 Must make perforce an universal prey !" 
 
 Thrice blessed faculty of Reason ! all other gifts, though goodly 
 and of celestial origin, health, strength, talents, all the powers 
 and all the means of enjoyment, seem dispensed by chance or 
 sullen caprice — thou alone, more than even the sunshine, more 
 than the common air, art given to all men, and to every man 
 alike ! To thee, who being one art the same in all, we owe 
 
 *Thi3 position has been already explained, and the sophistiy grounded on 
 it detected and exposed, in the last Essay of the Landing-Place, in this vol- 
 ume.
 
 163 
 
 the privilege, that of all we can become one, a living whole! 
 that we have a Country ! Who then shall dare prescribe a 
 law of moral action for any rational Being, which does not flow 
 immediately from that Reason, which is the fountain of all mor- 
 ality ? Or how without breach of conscience can we limit or 
 coerce the powers of a free agent, except by coincidence with 
 that law in his own mind, which is at once the cause, the con- 
 dition, and the measure, of his free agency ? Man must be 
 free ; or to what purpose was he made a Spirit of Reason, and ' 
 not a Machine of Instinct? Man must obey ; or wherefore has^ 
 he a conscience ? The powers, which create this difficulty, 
 contain its solution likewise : for their service is perfect free- 
 dom. And whatever law or system of law compels any other 
 service, disennobles our nature, leagues itself with the animal 
 against the godliiie, kills in us the very principle of joyous 
 well-doing, and fights against humanity. 
 
 By the application of these principles to the social state there 
 arises the following system, which as far as respects its first 
 grounds is developed the most fully by J. J. Rousseau in his 
 work Du Contrat Social. If then no individual possesses the 
 right of prescribing any thing to another individual, the rule of 
 which is not contained in their common Reason, Society, 
 which is but an aggregate of individuals, can communicate this 
 right to no one. It cannot possibly make that rightful which 
 the higher and inviolable law of human nature declares con- 
 tradictory and unjust. But concerning Right and Wrong, the 
 Reason of each and every man is the competent judge : for how 
 else could he be an amenable Being, or the proper subject of 
 any law ? This Reason, therefore, in any one man, cannot 
 even in the social state be rightfully subjugated to the Reason ; 
 of any other. Neither an individual, nor yet the whole multi- 
 tude which constitutes the state, can possess the right of com- 
 pelling him 10 do any thing, of which it cannot be demonstrated 
 that his own Reason must join in prescribing it. If therefore 
 society is to be under a rightful constitution of government, 
 and one that can impose on rational Beings a true and moral 
 obligation to obey it, it must be framed on such principles that 
 every individual follows his own Reason while he obeys the 
 laws of the constitution, and performs the will of the state 
 while he follows the dictates of his own Reason. This is ex- 
 pressly asserted by Rousseau, who states the problem of a per-
 
 164 
 
 feet constitution of government in the following words : Ti'ou- 
 verune forme d^ Association — par laquelle chacun s^ tmissant 
 dtous, n'oheisse pourtant qu* a lui meine, et reste aussi libre qu' 
 auparavant, i. e. To find a form of society according to 
 which each one uniting with the whole shall yet obey himself 
 only and remain as free as before. This right of the individu- 
 al to retain his w|iole natural independence, even in the social 
 state, is absolutely inalienable. He cannot possibly concede 
 or compromise it : for this very Right is one of his most sacred 
 Duties. He would sin against himself, and commit high trea- 
 son against the Reason which the Almighty Creator has given 
 him, if he dared abandon its exclusive right to govern his ac- 
 tions. 
 
 Laws obligatory on the conscience, can only therefore pro- 
 ceed from that Reason which remains always one and the 
 same, whether it speaks through this or that person : like the 
 voice of an external Ventriloquist, it is indifferent from whose 
 lips it appears to come, if only it be audible. The individuals 
 indeed are subject to errors and passions, and each man has 
 his own defects. But when men are assembled in person or 
 by real representatives, the actions and re-actions of individual 
 Self-love balance each other ; errors are neutralized by oppo- 
 site errors ; and the winds rushing from all quarters at once 
 with equal force, produce for the time a deep calm, during 
 which the general will arising from the general Reason dis- 
 plays itself. "It is fittest," says Burke himself, (see his Note 
 on his Motion relative to the Speech from the Throne, Vol. H. 
 Page 647, 4to. Edit.) " It is fittest that sovereign authority 
 should be exercised where it is most likely to be attended 
 with the most effectual correctives. These correctives are 
 furnished by the nature and course of parliamentary proceed- 
 ings, and by the infinitely diversified characters who compose 
 the two Houses. The fulness, the freedom, and publicity of 
 discussion, leave it easy to distinguish what are acts of power, 
 and what the determinations of equity and reason. There 
 prejudice corrects prejudice, and the different asperities of par- 
 ty zeal mitigate and neutralize each other." 
 
 This, however, as my readers will have already detected, is 
 no longer a demonstrable deduction from Reason. It is a mere 
 probability, against which other probabilities may be weighed : 
 as the lust of authority, the contagious nature of enthusiasm,
 
 ^'^. 
 
 165 
 
 and other of the acute or chronic diseases of deliberative as- 
 semblies. But which of these results is the more probable, 
 the correction or the contagion of evil, must depend on cir- 
 cumstances and grounds of expediency : and thus we already 
 find ourselves beyond the magic circle of the pure Reason, and 
 within the sphere of the understanding and the prudence. Of 
 this important fact Rousseau was by no means unaware in his 
 theory, though with gross inconsistency he takes no notice of 
 it in his application of the theory to practice. He admits the 
 possibility, he is compelled by History to allow even the pro- 
 bability^ that the most numerous popular assemblies, nay even 
 whole nations, may at times be hurried away by the same pass- 
 ions, and under the dominion of a common error. This will of 
 all is then of no more value, than the humours of any one in- 
 dividual : and must therefore be sacredly distinguished from 
 the pure will which ilows from universal Reason. To this 
 point then I entreat the Reader's particular attention : for in 
 this distinction, established by Rousseau himself between the 
 Volontc de Tous and the Volonte generate, (i. e. between the 
 collective will, and a casual overbalance of wills) the falsehood 
 or nothingness of the whole system becomes manifest. For 
 hence it follows, as an inevitable consequence, that all which 
 is said in the Contrat Social of that sovereign will, to which 
 the right of universal legislation appertains, applies to no one 
 Human Being, to no Society or assemblage of Human Beings, 
 and least of all to the mixed multitude that makes up the Peo- 
 ple : but entirely and exclusively to Reason itself, which, it 
 is true, dwells in every man potentially ^ but actually and in 
 perfect purity is found in no man and in no body of men. This 
 distinction the latter disciples of Rousseau chose completely to 
 forget and, (afar more melancholy case!) the constituent le- 
 gislators of France forgot it likewise. With a wretched par- 
 rotry they wrote and harrangued without ceasing of the Volon- 
 te generate — the inalienable sovereignty of the people : and by 
 these high-soundding phrases led on the vain, ignorant, and in- 
 toxicated populace to wild excesses and wilder expectations, 
 which entailing on them the bitterness of dissappointment 
 cleared the way for military despotism, for the satanic Govern- 
 ment of Horror under the Jacobins, and of Terror under the 
 Corsican. 
 
 Luther lived long enough to see the consequences of the
 
 166 
 
 doctrines into which indignant pity and abstract ideas of right 
 had hurried hiin — to see, to retract and to oppose them. If 
 the same had been the lot of Rousseau, I doubt not that his 
 conduct would have been the same. In his whole system 
 there is beyond controversy much that is true and well reason- 
 ed, if only its application be not extended farther than the na- 
 ture of the case permits. But then we shall find that little or 
 nothing is won by it for the institutions of society ; and least of 
 all for the constitution of Governments, the Theory of which 
 it was his wish to ground on it. Apply his principles to any 
 ease, in which the sacred and inviolable Laws of Morality are 
 immediately interested, all becomes just and pertinent. No 
 power on earth can oblige me to act against my conscience. 
 No magistrate, no monarch, no legislature, can without tyranny 
 compel me to do any thing which the acknowledged law^s of 
 God have forbidden me to do. So act that thou mayest be 
 able, without involving any contradiction, to will that the max- 
 im of thy conduct should be the law of all intelligent Beings — 
 is the one universal and sufficient principle and guide of mo- 
 rality. And why ? Because the object of morality is not the 
 outward act, but the internal maxim of our actions. And so 
 far it is infallible. But with what shew of Reason can we 
 pretend, from a principle by which we are to determine the 
 purity of our motives, to deduce the form and matter of a 
 rightful Government, the main office of which is to regulate 
 the outward actions of particular bodies of men, according to 
 their particular circumstances ? Can we hope better of con- 
 stitutions framed by ourselves, than of that which was given by 
 Almighty Wisdom itself? The laws of the Hebrew^ common- 
 wealth, which tlowed from the pure Reason, remain and are 
 immutable ; but the regulations dictated by Prudence, though 
 by the Divine prudence, and though given in thunder from the 
 Mount, have passed away ; and while they lasted, were binding 
 only for that one state, the particular circumstances of which 
 rendered them expedient. 
 
 Rousseau indeed asserts, that thereis an inalienable sove- 
 reignty inherent in every human being possessed of Reason : 
 and from this the framers of the constitution of 1791 deduce, 
 that the people itself is its own sole rightful legislator, and at 
 most dare only recede so far from its right as to delegate to 
 chosen deputies the power of representing and declaring the
 
 167 
 
 general will. But this is wholly without proof; for ft has al- 
 ready been fully shewn, that according to the principle out of 
 .which this consequence is attempted to be drawn, it is not the 
 actual man, but the abstract Reason alone, that is the sovereign 
 and rightful Lawgiver. The confusion of two things so differ- 
 ent is so gross an error, that the Constituent Assembly could 
 scarce proceed a step in their declaration of rights, without 
 some glaring inconsistency. Children are excluded from all 
 political power — are they not human beings in whom the faculty 
 of Reason resides ! Yes ! but in them the faculty is not yet 
 adequately developed. But are not gross ignorance, invete- 
 rate superstition, and the habitual tyranny of passion and sen- 
 suality, equal preventives of the developement, equal impedi- 
 ments to the rightful exercise of the Reason, as childhood and 
 early youth ? Who would not rely on the judgment of a well-' 
 educated English lad, bred in a virtuous and enlightened fami- 
 ly, in preference to that of a brutal Russian, who believes that 
 he can scourge his wooden idol into good humor, or attributes 
 to himself the merit of perpetual prayer, when he has fastened 
 the petitions, which his priest has written for him, on the wings 
 of a windmill ? Again : women are likewise excluded — a full 
 half, and that assuredly the most innocent, the most amiable 
 half, of the whole human race, is excluded, and this too by a 
 constitution which boasts to have no other foundations but those 
 of universal Reason ! Is Reason then an affair of sex ? No ! 
 But women are commonly in a state of dependance, and are not 
 likely to exercise their Reason with freedom. Well! and does 
 not ihis ground of exclusion apply with equal or greater force 
 to the poor, to the infirm, to men in embarrassed circumstances, 
 to all in short whose maintenance, be it scanty or be it ample, de- 
 pends on the will of others ? How far are we to go ? Where must 
 we stop ? What classes should we admit ? Whom must we dis- 
 franchise ? The objects, concerning whom we are to determine 
 these questions, are all human beings and differenced from each 
 other by degrees only, these degrees too oftentimes changing. 
 Yet the principle on which the whole system rests is, that Rea- 
 son is not susceptible of degree. Nothing therefore, which 
 subsists wholly in degrees, the changes of which do not obey 
 any necessary law, can be subjects of pure science, or deter- 
 minable by mere Reason. For these things we must rely on 
 our Understandings, enlightened by past experience and ira-
 
 168 
 
 mediate observation, and determining our choice by comparisons 
 of expediency. 
 
 It is therefore altogether a mistaken notion, that the theory 
 which would deduce the social Rights of Man and the sole 
 rightful form of government from principles of Reason, in- 
 volves a necessary preference of the democratic, or even 
 the representative, constitutions. Accordingly, several of the 
 French economists, although devotees of Rousseau and the 
 physiocratic system, and assuredly not the least respectable of 
 their party either in morals or in intellect ; and these too, men 
 who lived and wrote under the unlimited monarchy of France, 
 and who were therefore well acquainted with the evils connect- 
 ed with that system ; did yet declare themselves for a pure 
 monarchy in preference to the aristocratic, the popular, or the 
 mixed form. These men argued, that no other laws being al- 
 lowable but those which are demonstrably just, and founded in 
 the simplest ideas of Reason, and of which every man's reason 
 is the competent judge, it is indifferent whether one man, or 
 one or more assemblies of men, give form and publicity to them. 
 For being matters of pure and simple science, they require no 
 experience in order to see their Truth, and among an enlight- 
 ened people, by whom this system had been once solemnly 
 adopted, no sovereign would dare to make other laws than those 
 of Reason. They further contend, that if the people were not 
 enlightened, a purely popular government could not co-exist 
 with this system of absolute justice; and if it were adequately 
 enlightened, the influence of public opinion would supply the 
 place of formal representation, while the form of the govern- 
 ment would be in harmony with the unity and simplicity of its 
 principles. This they entitle le Despotisme legal sous V Em- 
 pire de V Evidence. (The best statement of the theory thus 
 modified, may be found in Mercier de la Riviere, Vordre naturel 
 el essentiel des societcs politiques.) From the proofs adduced in 
 the preceding paragrapli, to which many others might be added, 
 I have no hesitation in affirming that this latter party are the 
 more consistent reasoners. 
 
 It is worthy of remark, that the influence of these writings 
 contributed greatly, not indeed to raise the present emperor, 
 but certainly to reconcile a numerous class of politicians to his 
 unlimited authority : and as far as his lawless passion for war 
 and conquest allows him to govern according to any prin-
 
 ciples, he favors those of the phystocratlo philosophers. His 
 early education must have given him a predilection for a theory 
 conducted throughout with mathematical precision ; its very 
 simplicity promised the readiest and most commodious machine 
 for despotism, for it moulds a nation into as calculable a power as 
 an army ; while the stern and seeming greatness of the whole, 
 and its mock-elevation above human feelings, flattered his pride, 
 hardened his conscience, and aided the efforts of self-delusion. 
 Reasoiv is the sole sovereign, the only rightful legislator : but 
 Reason to act on man must be impersonated. The Providence 
 which had so marvellously raised and supported him, had 
 marked him out for the representative of Reason, and had 
 armed him with irresistible force, in order to realize its laws. 
 In Him therefore Might becomes Right, and his cause and 
 that of destiny (or as the wretch now chooses to word it, ex- 
 changing blind nonsense for staring blasphemy) his cause and 
 the cause of God are one and the same. Excellent postulate 
 for a choleric and self-willed tyrant ! What avails the im- 
 poverishment of a few thousand merchants and manufacturers ? 
 What even the general wretchedness of millions of perishable 
 men, for a short generation? vShould these stand in the way 
 of the chosen conqueror, the " Innovator Mundi^ et Stupor Soe- 
 culorum,^^ or prevent a constitution of things, which erected on 
 intellectual and perfect foundations, " groweth not old," but like 
 the eternal justice, of which it is the living image, 
 
 ■ " may despise 
 
 " The strokes of Fate and see tlie World's last boiir !" 
 
 For Justice, austere unrelenting Justice, is every where held 
 up as the one thing needful : and the only duty of the citizen, 
 in fulfilling which he obeys all the laws, is not to encroach on 
 another's sphere of action. The greatest possible happiness of 
 a people is not, according to this system, the object of a gov- 
 ernor ; but to preserve the freedom of all, by coercing within 
 the requisite bounds the freedom of each. Wliatever a gov- 
 ernment does more than this, comes of evil : and its best em- 
 ployment is the repeal of laws and regulations, not the estab- 
 lishment of them. Each man is the best judge of his own hap- 
 piness, and to himself must it therefore be entrusted. Remove 
 all the interferences of positive statutes, all monopoly, all boun- 
 ties, all prohibitions, and all encouragements of importation and 
 
 22
 
 170 
 
 exportation, of particular growth and particular manufactures : 
 let the Revenues of the State be taken at once from the Produce 
 of the Soil ; and all things will find their level, all irregularities 
 will correct each other, and an indestructible cycle of harmoni- 
 ous motions take place in the moral equally as in the natural 
 world. The business of the Governor is to watch incessantly, 
 that the State shall remain composed of individuals, acting as 
 individuals, by which alone the freedom of all can be secured. 
 Its duty is to take care that itself remain the sole collective 
 power, and that all the citizens should enjoy the same rights, 
 and without distinction be subject to the same duties. 
 
 Splendid promises ! Can any thing appear more equitable 
 than the last proposition, the equality of rights and duties ? Can 
 any thing be conceived more simple in the idea ? But the exe- 
 cution — ? let the four or five quarto volumes of the Conscript 
 Code be the comment! But as briefly as possible I shall 
 prove, that this system, as an exclusive total, is under any 
 form impracticable ; and that if it were realized, and as far 
 as it were realized, it would necessarily lead to general 
 barbarism and the most grinding oppression ; and that the 
 final result of a general attempt to introduce it, must be a mil- 
 itary despotism inconsistent with the peace and safety of man- 
 kind. That Reason should be our guide and governor is an 
 undeniable Truth, and all our notion of right and wrong is built 
 thereon : for the whole moral nature of man originated and 
 subsists in his Reason. From Reason alone can we derive the 
 principles which our Understandings are to apply, the Ideal to 
 which by means of our Uunderstandings we should endeavor 
 to approximate. This however gives no proof that Reason 
 alone ought to govern and direct human beings, either as Indi- 
 viduals or as States. It ought not to do this, because it can- 
 not. The Laws of Reason are unable to satisfy the first condi- 
 tions of Human Society. We will admit that the shortest code 
 of law is the best, and that the citizen finds himself most at 
 ease where the Government least intermeddles with his affairs, 
 and confines its efforts to the preservation of public tranquillity 
 — we will suffer this to pass at present undisputed, though the 
 examples of England, and before the late events, of Holland 
 and Switzerland, (surely the three happiest nations of the 
 world) to which perhaps we might add the major part of the 
 former German free towns, furnish stubborn facts in presump- 
 tion of the contrary — yet still the proof is wanting that the first
 
 171 
 
 and most general applications and exertions of the power ol 
 man can be definitely regulated by Reason unaided by the posi- 
 tive and conventional laws in the formation of which the Un- 
 derstanding must be our guide, and which become just because 
 they happen to be expedient. 
 
 The chief object for which men first formed themselves into 
 a State was not the protection of their lives but of their prop- 
 erty. Where the nature of the soil and climate precludes all 
 property but personal, and permits that only in its simplest 
 forms, as in Greenland, men remain in the domestic state and 
 form Neighbourhoods, but not Governments. And in North 
 America, the Chiefs appear to exercise government in those 
 tribes only which possess individual landed property. Among 
 the rest the Chief is their General ; but government is exer- 
 cised only in Families by the Fathers of Families. But where 
 individual landed property exists, there must be inequality of 
 property : the nature of the earth and the nature of the mind 
 unite to make the contrary impossible. But to suppose the 
 Land the property of the State, and the labor and the produce 
 to be equally divided among all the Members of the State, in- 
 volves more than one contradiction : for it could not subsist 
 without gross injustice, except where the Reason of all and 
 of each was absolute master of the selfish passions of sloth, 
 envy, &c.: and yet the same state v/ould preclude the greater 
 part of the means by which the Reason of man is developed. 
 In whatever state of society you would jilace it, from the most 
 savage to the most refined, it would be found equally unjust 
 and impossible ; and were there a race of men, a country, and 
 a climate, that permitted such an order of things, the same 
 causes would render all Government superfluous. To proper- 
 ty, therefore, and to its inequalities, all human laws directly or 
 indirectly relate, which would not be equally laws in the state 
 of Nature. Now it is impossible to deduce the Right of 
 Property* from pure Reason. The utmost which Reason could 
 give would be a property in the forms of things, as far as the 
 forms w^ere produced by individual power. In the matter it 
 
 *I mean, practically and with the incqualitiad inseparable from the actual 
 existence of Property. Abstractedly, the Right to Property is deducilde from 
 the Frec-ageucy of man. If to act freely be a Right, a sphere of action must 
 lie 60 too.
 
 1T2 
 
 could give no property. We regard angels, and glorified spir- 
 its as Beings of pure Reason : and whoever thought of Proper- 
 ty in Heaven ? Even the simplest and most moral form of it, 
 namely, Marriage, (we know from the highest authority) is 
 excluded from the state of pure reason. Rousseau himself 
 expressly admits, that Property cannot be deduced from the 
 Laws of Reason and Nature ; and he ought therefore to have 
 admitted at the same time, that his whole theory was a thing of 
 air. In the most respectable point of view he could regard 
 his system as analogous to Geometry. (If indeed it be pure- 
 ly scientific, how could it be otherwise?) Geometry holds forth 
 an Ideal which can never be fully realized in Nature, even be- 
 cause it is Nature : because bodies are more than extension, 
 and to pure extension, of space only the mathematical theorems 
 wholly correspond. In the same manner the moral laws of the 
 intellectual world, as far as they are deducible from pure Intel- 
 'lect, are never perfectly applicable to our mixed and sensitive 
 nature, because Man is something besides Reason ; because his 
 Reason never acts by itself, but must clothe itself in the sub- 
 stance of individual Understanding and specific Inclination, in 
 order to become a reality and an object of consciousness and 
 experience. It wuU be seen hereafter that together with this, 
 the key-stone of the arch, the greater part and the most spe- 
 cious of the popular arguments in favour of universal suffrage 
 fall in and are crushed. I will mention one only at present. 
 Major Cartwright, in his deduction of the Rights of the Sub- 
 ject from Principles "not susceptible of proof, being self-evi- 
 dent — if one of which be violated all are shaken," aiTirms 
 (Principle 98th; though the greater part indeed are moral 
 aphorisms, or blank assertions, not scientific principles) "that 
 a power which ought never to be used ought never to exist." 
 Again he affirms that " Laws to bind all must be assented to 
 by all, and consequently every man, even the poorest, has an 
 equal right to suffrage :" and this for an additional reason, be- 
 cause " all without exception are capable of feeling happiness 
 or misery, accordingly as they are well or ill governed." But 
 are they not then capable of feeling happiness or misery ac- 
 cording as they do or do not possess the means of a comforta- 
 ble subsistence ? and who is the judge, what is a comfortable 
 subsistence, but the man himself? Might not then, on the same 
 or equivalent principles a Leveller construct a right to equal
 
 17S 
 
 property? The inhabitants of this country witnout property 
 form, doubtless, a great majority : each of these has a right to 
 a suffrage, and the richest man to no more : and the object of 
 this suffrage is, that each individual may secure himself a true 
 efficient Representative of his Will. Here then is a legal 
 power of abolishing or equalizing property : and according to 
 himself, a power which ought never to he used ought not to 
 exist. 
 
 Therefore, unless he carries his system to the whole length 
 of common labour and common possession, a right to universal 
 suffrage cannot exist ; but if not to universal ^suffrage, there 
 can exist no natural right to suffrage at all. In whatever way 
 he would obviate this objection, he must admit expedience 
 founded on Experience and particular circumstances, which 
 will vary in every different nation, and in the same nation at 
 different times, as the maxim of all Legislation and the ground 
 of all Legislative Power. For his universal principles, as far 
 as they are principles and universal, necessarily suppose uni- 
 form and perfect subjects, which are to be found in the Ideas 
 of pure Geometry and (I trust) in the Realities of Heaven, 
 but never, never, in creatures of flesh and blood.
 
 THE rMIE 
 
 ESSAY I.* 
 ON THE ERRORS OF PARTY SPIRIT: OR EXTREMES MEET. 
 
 " And it was no wonder if some good and innocent men, especially such as 
 lie (Lightfoot) who was generally more concerned about what was done 
 in Judea many centiu'ies ago, than what was transacted in his own time in 
 his own country — it is no wonder if some such were for a while borne 
 away to the approval of opinions which they after more sedate reflection 
 disowned. Yet his innocency fi-om any self-interest or design, together 
 with his learning, secured him from the extravagancies of tlemagogues, the 
 people's oracles." — Lightfoot's fForks, Publisher's Pre/ace to the Reader. 
 
 I have never seen Major Cartwright, much less enjoy the 
 honour of his acquaintance ; but I know enougli of his charac- 
 ter from the testimony of others and from his own writings, 
 to respect his talents, and revere the purity of his motives. 1 
 am fully persuaded, that there are few better men, few more 
 fervent or disinterested adherents of iheir country or the laws 
 of their country, of whatsoever things are lovely, of whatsoever 
 
 *Witli this Essay commences the second volume of the English edition uf 
 The Friend, to which the ibllovving (piotation is prefixed as a motto : 
 
 Imolcns, vichercule foret, omnia urhis alicujus cediftcia dirucrc, ad hoc solum id, 
 iisdem postea indiori ordine ct forma cxtrudi^, ejus platem pulchiores cvaderent. 
 Jit ccrte non insokns est dominum rmius domus ad illa^n destruendam adhortari, 
 ut ejus loco meliorem wdifwet. Immo sccpe vmlti hoc facere cogunlur nempe cum 
 (cdes hahent vclustate jam faliacentes, vel qtue injirmis fundamentis superslructie 
 ruinam mirumlur. Cartesius De Methodo.
 
 175 
 
 things are honorable ! It would give mo great pain should I be 
 supposed to have introduced, disrespectfully, a name, which 
 from my early youth I never heard mentioned without a feel- 
 ing of affectionate admiration. I have indeed quoted from this 
 venerable patriot, as from the most respectable English advo- 
 cate for the Theory, which derives the rights of government, 
 and the duties of obedience to it, exclusively from principles 
 of pure Reason. It was of consequence to my cause that I 
 should not be thought to have been waging war against a straw 
 image of my own setting up, or even against a foreign idol that 
 had neither worshippers nor advocates in our own country ; and 
 it was not less my object to keep my discussion aloof from those 
 passions, which more unpopular names might have excited. I 
 therefore introduced the name of Cartwright, as 1 had previ- 
 ously done that of Luther, in order to give every fair advan- 
 tage to a theory, which I thought it of importance to confute ; 
 and as an instance that though the system might be made tempt- 
 ing to the Vulgar, yet that, taken unmixed and entire, it was 
 chiefly fascinating for lofty and imaginative spirits, who mistook 
 their own virtues and powers for the average character of 
 men in general. 
 
 Neither by fair statements nor by fair reasoning, should I 
 ever give offence to Major Cartv/right himself, nor to his judi- 
 cious friends. If I am in danger of offending them, it must 
 arise from one or other of two causes ; either that I have 
 falsely represented his principles, or his motives and the ten- 
 dency of his writings. In the book from which I quoted ("The 
 People's Barrier against undue Influence, &c." the only one of 
 Major Cartwright's which I possess) I am conscious that there 
 are six foundations stated of constitutional Government. There- 
 fore, it may be urged, the Author cannot be justly classed with 
 those who deduce our social Rights and correlative Duties 
 exclusively from principles of pure Reason, or unavoidable 
 conclusions from such. My answer is ready. Of these six 
 foundations three ire but dift'erent words for one and the same, 
 viz. the Law of Reason, the Law of God, and first Principles: 
 and the three that remain cannot be taken as different, in- 
 asmuch as they are afterwards aflirmed to be of no validity 
 except as far as they are evidently deduced from the former ; 
 that is, from the Principles implanted by God in the universal 
 Reason of man. These three latter foundations are, the gen-
 
 176 
 
 eral customs of the realm, particular customs, and acts of Par- 
 liament. It might be supposed that the Author had not used 
 his terms in the precise and single sense in which they are de- 
 fined in my former Essay : and that self-evident Principles may 
 be meant to include the dictates of manifest Expedience, the 
 Inductions of the Understanding as well as the Prescripts of 
 the pure Reason. But no ! Major Cartwright has guarded 
 against the possibility of this interpretation, and has expressed 
 himself as decisively, and with as much warmth, against found- 
 ing Governments on grounds of Expedience, as the Editor of 
 The Friend has done against founding Morality on the same. 
 Euclid himself could not have defined his words more sternly 
 within the limit of pure Science : For instance, see the 1st. 
 2d. 3d. and 4th. primary Rules. " A Principle is a manifest 
 and simple proposition comprehending a certain Truth. Prin- 
 ciples are the proof of every thing : but are not susceptible of 
 external proof, being self-evident. If one Principle be viola- 
 ted, all are shaken. Against him, who denies Principles, all 
 dispute is useless, and reason unintelligible, or disallowed, so 
 far as he denies them. The Laws of Nature are immutable." 
 Neither could Rousseau himself (or his predecessors, the fifth 
 Monarchy Men) have more nakedly or emphatically identified 
 the foundations of government in the concrete with those of 
 religion and morality in the abstract : see Major Cartwright's 
 Primary Rules from 31 to 39, and from 44 to 83. In these it 
 is affirmed : that ihe legislative Rights of Every Citizen are 
 inherent in his nature ; that being natural Rights they must be 
 equal in all men ; that a natural right is that right which a Citi- 
 zen claims as being a Man, and that it hath no other foundation 
 but his Personality or Reason : that Property can neither in- 
 crease or modify any legislative Right ; that every one Man 
 shall have one Vote however poor, and for any one Man, how- 
 ever rich, to have any more than one Vote, is against natural 
 Justice, and an evil measure ; that it is better for a nation to 
 endure all adversities, than to assent to one evil measure ; that 
 to be free is to be governed by Laws, to which we have our- 
 selves assented, either in Person or by Representative, for 
 whose election we have actually voted : that all not having a 
 right of Suffrage are Slaves, and that a vast majority of the 
 People of Great Britain are Slaves ! To prove the total coinci- 
 dence of Major Cartwright's Theory with that which I have
 
 177 
 
 stated (aiid I trust confuted) in the preceding Number, it only 
 remains for me to prove, that the former, equally v/ith the lat- 
 ter, confounds the sufficiency of the conscience to make every 
 person a moral and amenable Being, with the sufficiency of 
 judgment and experience requisite to the exercise of political 
 Riglit. A single quotation will place this out of all doubt, 
 which from its length I shall insert in a Note.* 
 
 Great stress, indeed, is laid on the authority of our ancient 
 Laws, both in this and the other works of our patriotic author ; 
 and whatever his system may be, it is impossible not to feel, 
 that the autlior himself possesses the heart of a genuine English- 
 man. But still his system can neither be changed nor modi- 
 
 * "But the equality (observe, that Major Cartwright ia here speaking of the 
 ncUural riglit to universal Suffrage and consequently of the universal right of 
 (."iigihility, as well as of election, independent of character or property) — the 
 ('([uality and dignity of human nature in all men, whether rich or poor, is 
 placed in the highest point of view by St. Paul, when he reprehends the Co- 
 rinthian believers for their litigations one with another, in the Courts of Law 
 where unbelievers presided ; and as an argument of the competency of all men 
 to judge for theinsalves, he alludes to that elevation in the kingdom of heaven 
 which is promised to every man Vvfho shall bo virtuous, in the language of 
 that time, a Saint. ' Do ye not know,' says he, ' that the Sainta shall judge the 
 world ? And if the world shall be judged by you, are yo unworthy to judge 
 the smallest matters ? Know ye not that ye shall judge the angels ? How 
 much more thi7}gs that pcHain to this life T If after such autlioritics, such 
 manifestations of truth as these, any Christian through those prejudices, 
 which ai-e the etFccts of long habits of injustice and oppression, and teach us 
 to ' despise the poor,* shall still think it right to exclude tliat part of the com- 
 monalty, consisting of ' Tradesmen, Artificers, and Laborers,'' or any of them, 
 from voting in elections of members to serve in parliament, I must sincerely 
 lament such a persuasion as a misfortune both to himself and his country. 
 And if any man, (not having given himself the trouble to consider Avhether 
 or not the Scripture bo nn authority, but who, nevertheless, is a friend to 
 the rights of mankind) u[)on grounds of mere prudence, policy, or expedien- 
 cy, shall think it advisable to go against the whole current of our constitu- 
 tional and law maxims, by which it is self-evident that every man, as being a 
 MAN, is created free, born to freedom, and, without it, a Thing, a Slave, a 
 Beast ; and shall contend for dra^^■ing a line of exclusion at freeholders of 
 forty poimtfe a year, or forty shillings a year, or liouse-holders, or pot-boilers, so 
 that all who are below that line shall not have a vote in the election of a le- 
 gislative guardian, — which is taking fi-om a citizen the power even of self- 
 preservation, — such a man, I venture to say, is bolder than he who wrestled 
 with the angel; for ho wrestles with God himself, who established </)«.?« ;?rinct- 
 ples in the eiermd laws of nature, never to he viohded by any of his Creatures." 
 P. 23—24. 
 
 23
 
 178 
 
 fied by these appeals : for among the primary maxims, which 
 form the ground-work of it, we are informed not only that 
 Law in the abstract is the perfection of Reason : but that the 
 Law of God and the Law of the Land are all one ! What ? 
 The Statutes against Witches? Or those bloody Statutes 
 against Papists, the abolition of which gave rise to the infamous 
 Riots in 1780? Or (in the author's own opinion) the Stat- 
 utes of Disfranchisement and for making Parliaments septen- 
 nial ? — Nay! but (Principle 28) "an unjust Law is no Law:" 
 and (P. 22.) against the Law of Reason neither prescription, 
 statute, nor custom, may prevail ; and if any such be brought 
 against it, they be not prescriptions, statute, nor customs, but 
 things void : and (P. 29.) " What the Parliament doth shall be 
 holdenfor naughty whensoever it shall enact that which is con- 
 trary to a natural Right !" We dare not suspect a grave wri- 
 ter of such egregious trifling, as to mean no more by these as- 
 sertions, than that what is wrong is not right; and if more 
 than this be meant, it must be that the subject is not bound 
 to obey any Act of Parliament, which according to his convic- 
 tion entrenches on a Principle of natural Right ; which natural 
 Rights are, as we have seen, not confined to the man in his 
 individual capacity, but are made to confer universal legislative 
 privileges on every subject of every state, and of the extent of 
 which every man is competent to judge, who is competent to 
 be the object of Law at all, i. e. every man who has not lost 
 his Reason. 
 
 In the statement of his principles therefore, I have not mis- 
 represented Major Cartwright. Have I then endeavored to 
 connect public odium with his honored name, by arraigning 
 his motives, or the tendency of his Writings ? The tendency 
 of his Writings, in my inmost conscience I believe to be per- 
 fectly harmless, and I dare cite them in confirmation of the 
 opinions which it was the object of my introductory Essays to 
 establish, and as an additional proof, that no good man commu- 
 nicating what he believes to be the Truth for the sake of Truth 
 and according to the rules of Conscience, will be found to 
 have acted injuriously to the peace or interests of Society. 
 The venerable State-Moralist (for this is his true character, 
 and in this title is conveyed the whole error of his system ) is 
 incapable of aiding his arguments by the poignant condiment 
 of personal slander, incapable of appealing to the envy of the
 
 179 
 
 multitude by bitter declamation against the follies and oppres- 
 sions of the higher classes ! He would shrink with horror 
 from the thought of adding a false and unnatural influence to 
 the cause of Truth and Justice, by details of present calamity 
 or immediate suffering, fitted to excite the fury of the multi- 
 tude, or by promises of turning the current of the public Reve- 
 nue into the channels* of individual Distress and Poverty, so 
 as to bribe the populace by selfish hopes ! It does not belong 
 to men of his character to delude the uninstructed into the 
 belief that their shortest way of obtaining the good things of 
 this life, is to commence busy Politicians, instead of remaining 
 industrious Laborers. He knows, and acts on the knowledge, 
 that it is the duty of the enlightened Philanthropist to plead 
 for the poor and ignorant, not to them. 
 
 No ! — From Works written and published under the control 
 of austere principles, and at the impulse of a lofty and gener- 
 ous enthusiasm, from Works rendered attractive only by the 
 fervor of sincerity, and imposing only by the Majesty of Plain 
 Dealing^ no danger will be apprehended by a wise man, no 
 offence received by a good man. I could almost venture to 
 warrant our Patriot's publications innoxious^ from the single 
 circumstance of their perfect freedom from personal themes in 
 this AGE OF PERSONALITY, this age of literary and political 
 Gossiping^ when the meanest insects are worshipped with a 
 sort of Egyptian superstition, if only the brainless head be 
 atoned for by the sting oi personal malignity in the tail; when 
 the most vapid satires have become the objects of a keen pub- 
 lic interest purely from the number of contemporary characters 
 named in the patch-work Notes (which possess, however, the 
 comparative merit of being more poetical than the Text), and 
 because, to increase the stimulus, the Author has sagaciously 
 left his own 7iame for whispers and conjectures ! — In an age, 
 when even Sermons are published with a double Appendix 
 stuffed with names — in a generation so transformed from the 
 
 * I must again remind the Reader, that these Essays were Vv'ritten October 
 1809. If Major Cartwright however, since then acted in a different si)irit, 
 and tampered pei-sonally with the distresses, and consequent irritabihty of 
 the ignorant, tlie inconsistency is his, not the Author's. If M'hat I then bc- 
 heved and avowed should now appear a severe satire in tl)0 sliapo of a false 
 prophecy, any siianie I might feel for my luck of penetration would be lost 
 in the sincerity of my regret.
 
 characteristic reserve of Britons, that from the ephemeral sheet 
 of a London Newspaper to the everlasting Scotch Professorial 
 Quarto, almost every publication exhibits or flatters the epidemic 
 distemper ; that the very " Last year's Rebuses" in the Lady's 
 Diary, are answered in a serious Elegy " On my Father'^s 
 Beath.,^'' with the name and habitat of the elegiac (Edipus sub- 
 scribed ; — and ^^ other ingenious solutions were likeioise given'''' 
 to the said Rebuses — not, as heretofore, by Crito, Philander, 
 A B, X Y, &c. but by fifty or sixty plain English Sirnames at 
 full length, with their several places of abode ! In an age, 
 when a bashful Philalethes or Phileleutheros is as rare on the 
 title-pages and among the signatures of our Magazines, as a 
 real name used to be in the days of our shy and notice-shunning 
 grandfathers! When (more exquisite than all) I see an Epic 
 Poem ( Spirits of Maro and M«onides, make ready to welcome 
 your new compeer!) advertised with the special recommenda- 
 tion, that the said Epic Poem contains more than a hundred 
 names of living persons ! No — if Works as abhorrent, as those 
 of Major Cartwright, from all unworthy provocatives to the 
 vanity, the envy, and the selfish passions of mankind, could 
 acquire a sufficient influence on the public mind to be mis- 
 chievous, the plans proposed in his pamphlets would cease to 
 be altogether visionary : though even then they could not ground 
 their claims to actual adoption on self-evident principles of 
 pure Reason, but on the happy accident of the virtue and good 
 sense of that public, for whose suffrages they were presented. 
 (Indeed with Major Cartwright's p/ans I have no present con- 
 cern ; but with the principles, on which he grounds the obliga- 
 tions to adopt them.) 
 
 But I must not sacrifice Truth to my reverence for individual 
 purity of intention. The tendency of one good man's writ- 
 ings is altogether a different thing from the tendency of the sys- 
 tem itself, when seasoned and served up for the unreasoning 
 multitude, as it has been by men whose names I would not 
 honor by writing them in the same sentence with Major Cart- 
 wright's. For this system has two sides, and holds out very 
 different attractions to its admirers that advance towards it from 
 different points of the compass. It possesses qualities, that can 
 scarcely fail of winning over to its banners a numerous host of 
 shallow heads and restless tempers, men who without learning 
 (or, as one of my Friends has forcibly expressed it, " Strong
 
 181 
 
 Book-mindedness*^ ) live as alms-folks on the opinions of their 
 contemporaries, and who, ( well pleased to exchange the humil- 
 ity of regret for the self-complacent feelings of contempt) re- 
 concile themselves to the sans-culotterie of their Ignorance, by 
 Bcoffing at the useless fox-brush of Pedantry.* The attach- 
 ment of this numerous class is owing neither to the solidity and 
 depth of foundation in this theory, or to the strict coherence 
 of its arguments ; and still less to any genuine reverence of 
 humanity in the abstract. The physiocratic system promises to 
 deduce all things, and every thing relative to law and govern- 
 ment, with mathematical exactness and certainty, from a few 
 individual and self-evident principles. But who so dull, as not 
 to be capable of apprehending a simple self-evident principle, 
 and of following a short demonstration ? By this system, the 
 SYSTEM, as its admirers were wont to call it, even as they na- 
 med the writer who first applied it in systematic detail to the 
 whole constitution and administration of civil policy, D. Ques- 
 noy to wit, le Docteur, or the Teacher ; — by this system the 
 observation of Times, Places, relative Bearings, History, na- 
 tional Customs and Character, is rendered superfluous : all, in 
 short, which according to the common notion makes the attain- 
 ment of legislative prudence a work of difficulty and long-con- 
 tinued effort, even for the acutest and most comprehensive 
 minds. The cautious balancing of comparative advantages, the 
 painful calculation of forces and counter-forces, the preparation 
 of circumstances, the lynx-eyed watching for opportunities, are 
 all superseded ; and by the magic oracles of certain axioms and 
 definitions it is revealed how the world with all its concerns 
 should be mechanised, and then let go on of itself. All the 
 positive Institutions and Regulations, which the prudence of 
 our ancestors had provided, ai'e declared to be erroneous or in- 
 
 *"Hc (Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk) knowing that learning hath no 
 enemy hut Ignorance, did susjject always tlic want of it in those men who 
 derided the habit of it in others: like the Fox in the Fable, who being without 
 a Tail, woukl persuade others to cutoff theirs as a burthen. But he liked well 
 the Philosoi)hcr's division of men into three ranks — some who knew good 
 and were willing to teach others ; those he said were like Gods among men — 
 others who tlK>ugh they knew not much yet were willing to learn ; these ho 
 said were like Men among Beasts — arid some who know not good and yet de- 
 spised such us should teach them ; these he esteemed as Beasts among Men." 
 
 LloycPs State Ivorthica, p. 3o.
 
 182 
 
 terested perversions of the natural relations of man ; and the 
 whole is delivered over to the faculty, which all men possess 
 equally, i. e. the common sense or universal Reason. The sci- 
 ence of Politics, it is said, is but the application of the common 
 sense, which every man possesses, to a subject in which every 
 man is concerned. To be a Musician, an Orator, a Painter, a 
 Poet, an Architect, or even to be a good Mechanist, presuppo- 
 ses Genius ; to be an excellent Artizan or Mechanic, requires 
 more than an average degree of Talent ; but to be a legislator 
 requires nothing but common Sense. The commonest human 
 intellect therefore suffices for a perfect insight in the whole sci- 
 ence of civil Polity, and qualifies the possessor to sit in judg- 
 ment on the constitution and administration of his own country, 
 and of all other nations. This must needs be agreeable tidings 
 to the great mass of mankind. There is no subject, which men 
 in general like better to harangue on, than Politics : none, the de- 
 ciding on which more flatters the sense of self-importance. For 
 as to what Doctor Johnson calls plebeian envy, I do not believe 
 that the mass of men are justly chargeable with it in their po- 
 litical feelings ; not only because envy is seldom excited except 
 by definite and individual objects, but still more because it is a 
 painful passion, and not likely to co-exist with the high delight 
 and self-complacency with v/hich the harangues on States and 
 Statesmen, Princes and Generals, are made and listened to in 
 ale-house circles or promiscuous public meetings. A certain 
 portion of this is not merely desirable, but necessary in a free 
 country. Heaven forbid ! that the most ignorant of my coun- 
 trymen should be deprived of a subject so well fitted to 
 
 -"impart 
 
 I" 
 
 An hour's importance to the poor man's heait ! 
 
 But a system which not only flatters the pride and vanity of men, 
 but which in so plausible and intelligible a manner persuades 
 them, not that this is wrong and that that ought to have been 
 managed otherwise ; or that Mr. X. is worth a hundred of Mr. 
 Y. as a Minister or Parliament Man, &c. &e. ; but that all is 
 wrong and mistaken, nay, all most unjust and wicked, and that 
 every man is competent, and in contempt of all rank and prop- 
 erty, on the mere title of iiis Personality, possesses the Right, 
 and is under the most solemn moral obligation, to give a help- 
 ing hand toward overthrowing it : this confusion of political
 
 183 
 
 with religious claims, this transfer of the rights of Religion dis- 
 joined from the austere duties of self-denial, with which reli- 
 gious rights exercised in their proper sphere cannot fail to be 
 accompanied ; and not only disjoined from self-restraint, but 
 united with the indulgence of those passions (self-will, love of 
 power, &c.) which it is the principal aim and hardest task of 
 Religion to correct and restrain — this, I say, is altogether dif- 
 ferent from the Village Politics of Yore, and may be pronoun- 
 ced alarming and of dangerous tendency by the boldest Advo- 
 cates of Reform not less consistently, than the most timid es- 
 chewers of popular disturbance. 
 
 Still, however, the system had its golden side for the noblest 
 minds : and I should act the part of a coward, if I disguised 
 my convictions, that the errors of the Aristocratic party were 
 full as gross, and far less excusable. Instead of contenting 
 themselves with opposing the real blessings of English law to 
 the splendid promises of untried theory, too large a part of those, 
 who called themselves Aiiti- Jacobins^ did all in their power to 
 suspend those blessings ; and thus furnished new arguments to 
 the advocates of innovation, when they should have been an- 
 swering the old ones. The most prudent, as well as the most 
 honest mode of defending the existing arrangements, would 
 have been, to have candidly admitted what could not with 
 truth be denied, and then to have shewn that, though the 
 things complained of were evils, they were necessary evils ; 
 or if they were removable^ yet that the consequences of the 
 heroic medicines recommended by the Revolutionists would be 
 far more dreadful than the disease. Now either the one or the 
 other point, by the double aid of History and a sound Philoso- 
 phy, they might have established with a certainty little short 
 of demonstration, and with such colours and illustrations as 
 would have taken strong hold of the very feelings which had 
 attached to the democratic system all the good and valuable 
 men of the party. But instead of this they precluded the possi- 
 bility of being listened to even by the gentlest and most in- 
 genuous among the friends of the French Revolution, denying 
 or attempting to palliate facts, that were equally notorious and 
 unjustifiable, and supplying the lack of brain by an overflow of 
 gall. While they lamented with tragic outcries the injured Mon- 
 arch and the exiled Noble, they displayed the most disgusting 
 insensibility to the privations, sufferings, and manifold oppress-
 
 184 
 
 ions of the great mass of the Continental population, and a 
 blindness or callousness still more offensive to the crimes* and 
 unutterable abominations of their oppressors. Not only was 
 the Bastile justified, but the Spanish Inquisition itself — and 
 this in a pamphlet passionately extolled and industriously circu- 
 lated by the adherents of the then ministry. Thus, and by 
 their infatuated panegyrics on the former state of France, they 
 played into the hands of their worst and most dangerous antag- 
 onists. In confounding the conditions of the English and the 
 French peasantry, and in quoting the authorities of Milton, 
 Sidney, and their immortal compeers, as applicable to the pres- 
 ent times and the existing government, the Demagogues ap- 
 peared to talk only the same language as the Anti-jacobins them- 
 selves employed. For if the vilest calumnies of obsolete big- 
 ots were applied against these great men by the one party, with 
 equal plausibility might their authorities be adduced, and their 
 arguments for increasing the power of the people be reapplied 
 to the existing government, by the other. If the most dis- 
 gusting forms of despotism were spoken of by the one in the 
 same respectful language as the executive power of our own 
 country, what wonder if the irritated partizans of the other 
 were able to impose on the populace the converse of the prop- 
 osition, and to confound the executive branch of the English 
 sovreignty with the despotisms of less happy lands ? The first 
 duty of a wise advocate is to convince his opponents, that he 
 understands their arguments and sympathizes with their just 
 feelings. But instead of this, these pretended Constitutional- 
 ists recurred to the language of insult, and to measures of per- 
 secution. In order to oppose Jacobinism they imitated it in its 
 worst features ; in personal slander, in illegal violence, and 
 even in the thirst for blood. They justified the corruptions of 
 the state in the same spirit of sophistry, by the same vague ar- 
 guments of general Reason, and the same disregard of ancient 
 ordinances and established opinions, with which the state it- 
 self had been attacked by the Jacobins. The wages of state- 
 dependence were represented as sacred as the property won 
 by industry or derived from a long line of ancestors. 
 
 * I do not incnn tlio Sovereigns, but the old Nobility of both Germany nnd 
 i'^rancc. The extravagantly false ;uul flattering i)ictur(>, which IJurke gave of 
 the French Nobility and llisrarrhy, has alwayw a]>i)ear<'d to me the greatest 
 dcli'ct of his, in po many rcsjx'ctri, mvaluable Work.
 
 185 
 
 It was, indeed, evident to thinking men, that both parties 
 were playing the same game with ditl'erent counters. If the 
 Jacobins ran wild with the Rights of Man, and the abstract 
 sovereignty of the people, their antagonists flew off" as extrav- 
 agantly from the sober good sense of our forefathers, and idol- 
 ized as mere an abstraction in the Rights of Sovereigns. Nor 
 was this confined to Sovereigns. They defended the exemp- 
 tions and privileges of all privileged orders on the presumption 
 of their inalienable right to them, however inexpedient they 
 might have been found, as universally and abstractly as if these 
 privileges had been decreed by the Supreme Wisdom, instead 
 of being the offspring of chance or violence, or the inventions 
 of human prudence. Thus, while they deemed themselves de- 
 fending, they were in reality blackening and degrading the un- 
 injurious and useful privileges of our English nobility, which 
 (thank Heaven !) rest on nobler and securer grounds. Thus 
 too, the necessity of compensations for dethroned princes was 
 affirmed as familiarly, as if kingdoms had been private estates : 
 and no more disapprobation was expressed at the transfer of 
 five or ten millions of men from one proprietor to another, than 
 of as many score head of cattle. This most degrading and su- 
 perannuated superstition, or rather this ghost of a defunct ab- 
 surdity raised up by the necromancy of a violent re-action 
 (such as the extreme of one system is sure to occasion in the 
 adherents of its opposite ) was more than once allowed to reg- 
 ulate our measures in the conduct of a war on which the inde- 
 pendence of the British empire and the progressive civilization 
 of all mankind depended. I could mention possessions of par- 
 amount and indispensable importance to first-rate national in- 
 terests, the nominal sovereign of which had delivered up all 
 his sea-ports and strong-holds to the French, and maintained a 
 French army in his dominions, and had therefore, by the law of 
 nations, made his territories French dependencies — which poss- 
 essions were not to be touched, though the natural inhabitants 
 were eager to place themselves under our permanent protec- 
 tion — and why ? — They were the property of the king of ! 
 
 All the grandeur and majesty of the law of nations, which 
 taught our ancestors to distinguish between a European sove- 
 reign and the miserable despots of oriental barbarism, and to 
 consider the former as the representative of the nation which 
 he governed, and as inextricably connected with its fortunes as 
 24
 
 186 
 
 Sovereign, were merged in the basest personality. Instead of 
 the interest of mighty nations, it seemed as if a mere law-suit 
 were carrying on between John Doe and Richard Roe ! The 
 happiness of millions was light in the balance, weighed against 
 a theatric compassion for one individual and his family, who, 
 (I speak from facts that I myself know) if they feared the 
 French more, hated us worse. Though the restoration of good 
 sense commenced during the interval of the peace of Amiens, 
 yet it was not till the Spanish insurrection that Englishmen of 
 all parties recurred, m toto, to the old English principles, and 
 spoke of their Hampdens, Sidneys and Miltons, with the old 
 enthusiasm. During the last war, an acquaintance of mine 
 (least of all men a political zealot) had christened a vessel 
 which he had just built — The Liberty ; and was seriously 
 admonished by his aristocratic friends to change it for some 
 other name. What? replied the owner very innocently — 
 should I call it The Freedom ? That (it was replied) would 
 be far beter, as people might then think only of Freedom of 
 Trade ; Whereas Liberty has a Jacobinical sound with it ! 
 Alas! (and this is an observation of Sir J. Denham and of 
 Burke) is there then no medium between an ague-fit and a 
 frenzy-fever ? 
 
 I have said that to withstand the arguments of the lawless, 
 the Anti-jacobins proposed to suspend the Law, and by the 
 interposition of a particular statute to eclipse the blessed light 
 of the universal Sun, that spies and informers might tyrrannize 
 and escape in the ominous darkness. Oh ! if these mistaken 
 men intoxicated with alarm and bewildered by that panic of 
 property, which they themselves were the chief agents in ex- 
 citing, had ever lived in a country where there was indeed a 
 general disposition to change and rebellion ! Had they ever 
 travelled through Sicily, or through France at the first coming 
 on of the Revolution, or even alas ! through too many of the 
 provinces of a sister-island, they could not but have shrunk 
 from their own declarations concerning the state of feeling and 
 opinion at that time predominant throughout Great Britain. 
 There was a time ( Heaven grant that that time may have pass- 
 ed by) when by crossing a narrow strait they might have learnt 
 the true symptoms of approaching danger and have secured 
 themselves from mistaking the meetings and idle rant of such 
 sedition as shrunk appalled from the sight of a constable, for
 
 187 
 
 the dire murmuring and strange consternation which precedes 
 the storm or earthquake of national discord. Not only in Cof- 
 fee-houses and public Theatres, but even at the tables of the 
 wealthy, they w^ould have heard the advocates of existing Gov- 
 ernment defend their cause in the language and with the tone 
 of men, who are conscious that they are in a minority. But in 
 England, when the alarm was at the highest, there was not a 
 city, no, not a town in which a man suspected of holding dem- 
 ocratic principles could move abroad without receiving some 
 unpleasant proof of the hatred in which his supposed opinions 
 were held by the great majority of the people : and the only 
 instances of popular excess and indignation were on the side 
 of the Government and the Established Church. But why need 
 I appeal to these invidious facts ? Turn over the pages of His- 
 tory, and seek for a single instance of a revolution having been 
 effected witliout the concurrence of either the Nobles, or the 
 Ecclesiastics, or the monied classes, in any country in which the 
 influences of property had ever been predominant, and where 
 the interests of the proprietors were interlinked ! Examine the 
 revolution of the Belgic provinces under Philip the Second ; 
 the civil wars of France in the preceding generation, the his- 
 tory of the American revolution, or the yet more recent events 
 in Sweden and in Spain ; and it will be scarcely possible not to 
 perceive, that in England, from 1791 to the peace of Amiens, 
 there were neither tendencies to confederacy nor actual confe- 
 deracies, against which the existing Laws had not provided both 
 sufficient safeguards and an ample punishment. But alas ! the 
 panic of property had been struck in the first instance for party 
 purposes : and when it became general, its propagators caught 
 it themselves, and ended in believing their own lie : even as • 
 our bulls in Burrowdale sometimes run mad with the echo of 
 their own bellowing. The consequences were most injurious. 
 Our attention was concentrated to a monster which could not 
 survive the convulsions in which it had been brought forth, 
 even the enlightened Burke himself too often talking and rea- 
 soning as if a perpetual and organized anarchy had been a pos 
 sible thing ! Thus while we were warring against French doc- 
 trines, we took little heed whether the means by which we at- 
 tempted to overthrow them, were not likely to aid and augment 
 the far more formidable evil of French ambition. Like chil-
 
 188 
 
 dren we ran away from the yelping of a cur and took shelter at 
 the heels of a vicious war horse. 
 
 The conduct of the aristocratic party was equally unwise in 
 private life and to individuals, especially to the young and inex- 
 perienced, whowere surely to be forgiven for having had their 
 imagination dazzled, and their enthusiasm kindled, by a novelty 
 so specious, that even an old and tried Statesman had pro- 
 nounced it " a stupendous monument of human wisdom and 
 human happiness." This was indeed a gross delusion, but as- 
 suredly for young men at least, a very venial one. To hope too 
 boldly of Human Nature is a fault which all good men have an 
 interest in forgiving. Nor was it less removable than venial, 
 if the party had taken the only way by which the error could 
 be, or even ought to have been, removed. Having first sym- 
 pathized with the warm benevolence and the enthusiasm for 
 Liberty, which had consecrated it, they should have then 
 shewn the young Enthusiasts that Liberty was not the only 
 blessing of Society ; that though desirable, even for its own 
 sake, it yet derived its main value as the means of calling forth 
 and securing other advantages and excellencies, the activities 
 of Industry, the security of Life and Property, the peaceful 
 energies of Genius and manifold Talent, the development of 
 the moral virtues, and the independence and dignity of the 
 nation in its relations to foreign powers : and that neither these 
 nor Liberty itself could subsist in a country so various in its 
 soils, so long inhabited and so fully peopled as Great Britain, 
 without difference of ranks and without laws which recognized 
 and protected the privileges of each. But instead of thus 
 winning them back from the snare, they too often drove them 
 into it by angry contumelies, which being in contradiction with 
 each other could only excite contempt for those that uttered 
 them. To prove the folly of the opinions, they were repre- 
 sented as the crude fancies of unfledged wit and school-boy 
 statesmen; but when abhorrence was to be expressed, the self- 
 same unfledged school-boys were invested with all the attri- 
 butes of brooding conspiracy and hoary-headed treason. Nay, 
 a sentence of absolute reprobation was passed on them ; and 
 the speculative error of Jabobinism was equalized to the mys- 
 terious sin in Scripture, which in some inexplicable manner 
 excludes not only mercy but even repentance. It became the 
 watch-word of the party, " once a Jacobin always a Jacob-
 
 189 
 
 IN." And wherefore ?* (We will suppose this question asked 
 by an individual, who in his youth or earliest manhood had 
 been enamoured of a system, which for him had combined the 
 austere beauty of science, at once with all the light and colours 
 of imagination, and with all the warmth of wide religious chari- 
 ty, and who, ov'erlooking its ideal essence, had dreamt of ac- 
 tually building a government on personal and natural rights 
 alone.) And wherefore ? " Is Jacobinism an absurdity, and have 
 we no understanding to detect it with ? Is it productive of all 
 misery and all horrors, and have we no natural humanity to 
 make us turn away with indignation and loathing from it ? Up- 
 roar and confusion, insecurity of person and of property, the 
 tyranny of mobs or the domination of a soldiery; private 
 houses changed to brothels, the ceremony of marriage but an 
 initiation to harlotry, and marriage itself degraded to mere con- 
 cubinage — these, the wiser advocates of Aristocracy have said, 
 and truly said, are the effects of Jacobinism ! In private life, 
 an insufi'erable licentiousness, and abroad an intolerable despot- 
 ism ? " Once a Jacobin, always a Jocobin^^ — wherefore ? Is 
 it because the Creed which we have stated is dazzling at first 
 sight to the young, the innocent, the disinterested, and those, 
 who judging of men in general from their own uncorrupted 
 hearts, judge erroneously, and expect unwisely ? Is it, be- 
 cause it decieves the mind in its purest and most flexible pe- 
 riod ? Is it, because it is an error, that every day's experience 
 aids to detect ? An error against which all history is full of 
 warning examples ? Or is it because the experiment has been 
 tried before our eyes and the error made palpable .'' 
 
 From what source are we to derive this strange phasnomenon, 
 that the young and the enthusiastic, who, as our daily exper- 
 ience informs us, are deceived in their religious antipathies, and 
 
 * The passage which follows was first published in the Morning Post, in 
 the year 1800, and contained, if I mistake not, the fii-st philosophical appopria- 
 tion of a precise import to the word Jacobin, as distinct from Republican, 
 Democrat, and Demagogue. The whole Essay has a peculiar interest to my- 
 self at the present moment, (1 May 1817) from the recent notorious publica- 
 tion of Mr. Southey's juvenile Drama, the Wat Tyler, and the consequent 
 assault on his character by an M. P. in his senatoiial capacity, to whom the 
 Publishers are doubtless knit by the two-fold tie of sympathy and gratitude. 
 The names of the Pubhshers are Sherwood, Nealy and Jones ; their bene- 
 factor's name is William Smith.
 
 190 
 
 grow wiser ; in their friendships, and grow wiser ; in theii- 
 modes of pleasure, and grow wiser; should, if once deceived 
 in a question of abstract politics, cling to the error for ever 
 and ever? And this too, although in addition to the natural 
 growth of judgment and information with increase of years, they 
 live in the age in which the tenets have been acted upon ; and 
 though the consequences have been such, that every good man's 
 heart sickens, and his head turns giddy at the retrospect. 
 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 Truth I pursued, as Fancy sketcli'd the way, \ 
 
 And wiser men than I went worse astray. 
 
 MSS. 
 
 I was never myself, at any period of my life, a convert to 
 the system. From my earliest manhood, it was an axiom 
 in Politics with me, that in every country where property 
 prevailed, property must be the grand basis of the government ; 
 and that that government was the best, in which the power or 
 political influence of the individual was in proportion to his 
 property, provided that the free circulation of property was 
 not impeded by any positive laws or customs, nor the tenden- 
 cy of wealth to accumulate in abiding masses undul}^ encoura- 
 ged. 1 perceived, that if the people at large were neither ig- 
 norant nor immoral, there could be no motive for a sudden 
 and violent change of government ; and if they were, there 
 could be no hope but of a change for the worse. " The Tem- 
 ple of Despotism, like that of the Mexican God, would be re- 
 built with human skulls, and more firmly, though in a different
 
 191 
 
 architecture."* Thanks to the excellent education which I 
 had received, my reason was too clear not to draw this " circle 
 of power " round me, and my spirit too honest to attempt to 
 break through it. My feelings, however, and imagination did 
 not remain unkindled in this general conflagration ; and I con- 
 fess I should be more inclined to be ashamed than proud of 
 myself, if they had ! I was a sharer in the general vortex, though 
 my little world described the path of its revolution in an orbit 
 of its own. What I dared not expect from constitutions of 
 government and whole nations, I hoped from Religion and a 
 small company of chosen individuals, and formed a plan, as 
 harmless as it was extravagant, of trying the experiment of hu- 
 man perfectibility on the banks of the Susquehannah ; where 
 our little society, in its second generation was to have com- 
 bined the innocence of the patriarchal age with the knowledge 
 and genuine refinements of European culture : and where I 
 dreamt that in the sober evening of my life, I should behold 
 the Cottages of Independence in the undivided Dale of Industry, 
 
 "And oft, soothed sadly by some dirgefiil wind, 
 Muse on the sore ills I had left behind !" 
 
 Strange fancies ! and as vain as strange ! yet to the intense in- 
 terest and impassioned zeal, which called forth and strained 
 every faculty of my intellect for the organization and defence 
 of this scheme, I owe much of whatever I at present possess, 
 my clearest insight into the nature of individual man, and my 
 most comprehensive views of his social relations, of the true 
 uses of trade and commerce, and how far the wealth and re- 
 lative power of nations promote or impede their welfare and 
 inherent strength. Nor were tliey less serviceable in securing 
 myself, and perhaps some others, from the pitfalls of sedition : 
 and when we gradually alighted on the firm ground of common 
 sense, from the gradually exhausted balloon of youthful en- 
 thusiasm, though the air-built castles, which we had been pur- 
 suing, had vanished with all their pageantry of shifting forms 
 and glowing colours, we were yet free from the stains and im- 
 purities which might have remained upon us, had we been tra- 
 velling with the crowd of less imaginative malcontents, through 
 the dark lanes and foul bye roads of ordinary fanaticism. 
 
 * To the best of my recollection, these were Mr. Southey's words in the 
 year 1794.
 
 192 
 
 But oh ! there were thousands as young and as innocent as 
 myself who, not like me, sheltered in the tranquil nook or in- 
 land cove of a particular fancy, were driven along with the 
 general current ! Many there were, young men of loftiest 
 minds, yea the prime stuff out of which manly wisdom and 
 practicable greatness is to be formed, who had appropriated 
 their hopes and the ardour of their souls to mankind at large, 
 to the wide expanse of national interests, which then seemed 
 fermenting in the French Republic as the main outlet and chief 
 crater of the revolutionary torrents ; and who confidently be- 
 lieved, that these torrents, like the lavas of Vesuvius, were 
 to subside into a soil of inexhaustible fertility on the circum- 
 jacent lands, the old divisions and mouldering edifices of which 
 they had covered or swept away — Enthusiasts of kindliest tem- 
 perament, who to use the words of the Poet (having already 
 borrowed the meaning and the metaphor) had approached 
 
 " the shield 
 
 Of human nature from the golden side, 
 
 And would have fought even to the death to attest 
 
 The quality of the metal which they saw." 
 
 My honored friend has permitted me to give a value and relief 
 to the present Essay, by a quotation from one of his unpublish- 
 ed Poems, the length of which I regret only from its forbidding 
 me to trespass on his kindness by making it yet longer. I trust 
 there are many of my Readers of the same age with myself 
 who will throw themselves back into the state of thought and 
 feeling in which they were when France was reported to 
 have solemnized her first sacrifice of error and prejudice on the 
 bloodless altar of Freedom, by an oath of peace and good-will 
 to all mankind. 
 
 Oh ! pleasant exercise of hope and joy ! 
 For mighty were the auxijiars, which then stood 
 Upon our side, we who were strong in love ! 
 BHss was it in that dawn to bo alive, 
 But to be yoinig was very heaxen ! oh ! times, 
 In wliich the meagre stale forl)idding ways 
 Of custom, law, and statute, took at once 
 The attraction of a coiuitry in Romance ! 
 When Reason secm'd tlic most to assert her rights, 
 When most intent on making of herself 
 A prime Enchanter to assist the work,
 
 193 
 
 Which then was going forward in her name ! 
 
 Not favor'd spots alone, but the whole earth 
 
 The beauty wore of promise — that which sets 
 
 (To take an image which was felt no doubt 
 
 Among the bowers of Paradise itself) 
 
 The budding rose above the rose full blown. 
 
 What temper at the prospect did not wake 
 
 To ha})phiess unthougt of? The inert 
 
 Were roused, and lively natures rapt away ! 
 
 Tliey who had fed their childhood upon dreams, 
 
 The play-fellows of fancy, who had made 
 
 All powers of swiftness, subtilty, and strength 
 
 Then* ministers, used to stir in lonily wise 
 
 Among the grandest objects of the sense 
 
 And deal with whatsoever they found there 
 
 As if they had within some lin-king right 
 
 To yield it ; — they too, who of gentle mood 
 
 Had watch'd all gentle motions, and to these 
 
 Had fitted their own thoughts, scliemers more mild 
 
 And m the region of their peaceful selves; — 
 
 Now was it that both found, the Meek and Lofty 
 
 Did both find helpers to their heart's desire 
 
 And stuff at hand, jilastic as they could wish !— 
 
 Were call'd upon to exercise their skill 
 
 Not in Utopia, subterraneous fields. 
 
 Or some secreted island, heaven knows where! 
 
 But ill the veiy world, which is the world 
 
 Of all of us, the place where in the end 
 
 We find our happiness, or not at all 1 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 The Peace of Amiens deserved the name of peace, for it 
 gave us unanimity at home, and reconciled Englishmen with 
 each other. Yet it would be as wild a fancy as any of which 
 we have treated, to expect that the violence of party spirit is 
 never more to return. Sooner or later the same causes, or their 
 equivalents, will call forth the same opposition of opinion, and 
 bring the same passions into play. Ample would be my recom- 
 pense, could I foresee that this present Essay would be the 
 means of preventing discord and unhappiness in a single fami- 
 ly ; if its words of warning, aided by its tones of sympathy, 
 should arm a single* man of genius against the fascinations of 
 his own ideal world, a single philanthropist against the enthusi- 
 asm of his own heart ! Not less would be my satisfaction, dared 
 I flatter myself that my lucubrations would not be altogether 
 without effect on those who deem themselves Men of Judgment, 
 
 23
 
 194 
 
 faithful to the light of Practice and not to be led astray by the 
 wandering fires of Theory ! If I should aid in making these 
 aware, that in recoiling with too incautious an abhorrence from 
 the bugbears of innovation, they may sink all at once into the 
 slough of slavishness and corruption. Let such persons recol- 
 lect that the charms of hope and novelty furnish some pallia- 
 tion for the idolatry to which they seduce the mind ; but that 
 the apotheosis of familiar abuses and of the errors of selfishness 
 is the vilest of superstitions. Let them recollect too, that no- 
 thing can be more incongruous than to combine the pusillani- 
 mity, which despairs of human improvement, with the arro- 
 gance, supercilious contempt, and boisterous anger, which have 
 no pretensions to pardon except as the overflowings of ardent 
 anticipation and enthusiastic faith ! And finally, and above all, 
 let it be remembered by both parties, and indeed by controver- 
 sialists on all subjects, that every speculative error which boasts 
 a multitude of advocates, has its golden s.s well as its dark side ; 
 that there is always some Truth connected with it, the exclu- 
 sive attention to which has misled the Understanding, some mo- 
 ral beauty which has given it charms for the heart. Let it be 
 remembered, that no Assailant of an Error can reasonably hope 
 to be listened to by its Advocates, who has not proved to 
 them that he has seen the disputed subject in the same point 
 of view, and is capable of contemplating it with the same feel- 
 ings as themselves : (for why should we abandon a cause at the 
 persuasions of one who is ignorant of the reasons which have 
 attached us to it ?) Let it be remembered, that to write, how- 
 ever ably, merely to convince those who are already convin- 
 ced displays but the courage of a boaster ; and in any subject 
 to rail against the evil before we have inquired for the good, 
 and to exasperate the passions of those who think with us, by 
 caricaturing the opinions and blackening the motives of our an- 
 tagonists, is to make the Understanding the pander of the pas- 
 sions ; and even though we should have defended the right 
 cause, to gain for ourselves ultimately, from the good and the 
 wise no other praise than the supreme Judge awarded to the 
 friends of .Job for their partial and uncharitable defence of his 
 Justice : " My wrath is kindled against you, for ye have not 
 spoken of me rightfully.''^
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 ON THE VULGAR ERRORS RESPECTING TAXES AND 
 
 TAXATION* 
 
 ' OnsQ yuQ 'oi T(e'; ey/eXeig ■d-rjQd)' j-ievoi nsnov&u;- 
 " Oiav fiep 'ij Xi/iiri] xuiui^if, Xa^iHu I'ovcnv o'vdev 
 Ea'v 8" ci'vb} re kui yu'rwio'v ^ooBooov xvyo) aiv, 
 yfl'oovar xui, av XuitSu'retg, ifr rrfv no'Xiv laou'rirjg. 
 
 Translation. — It is with you as with those that are hunting for eels. While 
 the pond is clear and settled, they take nothing ; but if they stir up the mud 
 high and low, then, they bring up the fish : — and you succeed only as far as 
 you can set the State in tumult and confusion. 
 
 In a passage in the last Essay, I referred to the second part 
 of the " Rights of Man," in which Paine assures his Readers 
 that their Poverty is the conseqtience of Taxation : that taxes 
 are rendered necessary only by wars and state corruption ; that 
 war and corruption are entirely owing to monarchy and aristo- 
 cracy ; that by a revolution and a brotherly alliance with the 
 French Republic, our land and sea forces, our revenue officers, 
 and three-fourths of our pensioners, placemen, &c. &c. would 
 be rendered superfluous ; and that a small part of the expences 
 thus saved, would suffice for the maintenance of the poor, the 
 infirm, and the aged, throughout the kingdom. Would to hea- 
 ven ! that this infamous mode of misleading and flattering the 
 lower classes were confined to the writings of Thomas Paine. 
 But how often do we hear, even from the mouths of our par- 
 liamentary advocates for popularity, the taxes stated as so much 
 money actually lost to the people ; and a nation in debt repre- 
 
 * For the moral effects of our present System of Finance, and its conse- 
 quences on the ivelfare of the Nation, as distinguished from its wealth, the 
 Reader is referred to the Author's Second Lay Sermon, and to the Section of 
 Morals in the Thkd Volume of this Work.
 
 196 
 
 8€nted as the eame both in kind and consequences, aB an indi- 
 vidual tradesman on the brink of bankruptcy ? It is scarcely- 
 possible, that these men should be themselves deceived ; that 
 they should be so ignorant of history as not to know that the 
 freest nations, being at the same time commercial, have been 
 at all times the most heavily taxed : or so void of common 
 sense as not to see that there is no analogy in the case of a 
 tradesman and his creditors, to a nation indebted to itself. 
 Surely, a much fairer instance would be that of a husband and 
 wife playing cards at the same table against each other, where 
 what the one loses the other gains. Taxes may be indeed, and 
 often are injurious to a country : at no time, however, from 
 their amount merely, but from the time or injudicious mode in 
 which they are raised. A great Statesman, lately deceased, in 
 one of his antiministerial harangues against some proposed im- 
 post, said : the nation has been already bled in every vein, and 
 is faint with loss of blood. This blood, however, was circu- 
 lating in the mean time through the whole body of the state, 
 and what was received into one chamber of the heart was in- 
 stantly sent out again at the other portal. Had he wanted a 
 metaphor to convey the possible injuries of Taxation, he might 
 have found one less opposite to the fact, in the known disease 
 of aneurism, or relaxation of the coats of particular vessels, 
 by a disproportionate accumulation of blood in them, which 
 sometimes occurs when the circulation has been suddenly and 
 violently changed, and causes helplessness, or even mortal stag- 
 nation, though the total quantity of blood remains the same in 
 the system at large. 
 
 But a fuller and fairer symbol of Taxation, both in its possi- 
 ble good and evil effects, is to be found in the evaporation of 
 waters from the surface of the planet. The sun may draw up 
 the moisture from the river, the morass, and the ocean, to be 
 given back in genial showers to the garden, the pasture; and 
 the corn-field ; but it may likewise force away the moisture 
 from the fields of tillage, to diop it on the stagnant pool, the 
 saturated swamp, or the un])rofitable sand-waste. The gar- 
 dens in the south of Europe supply, perhaps, a not less apt 
 illustration of a system of Finance judiciously conducted, where 
 the tanks or reservoirs would represent the capital of a nation, 
 and the hundred rills hourly varying their channels and direc- 
 tions under the gardener's spade, give a pleasing image of the
 
 197 
 
 dispersion of that capital through the .whole population, by the 
 joint effect of Taxation and Trade. For Taxation itself is a 
 part of Commerce, and the Government may be fairly consid- 
 ered as a great manufacturing house carrying on in different 
 places, by means of its partners and overseers, the trades of 
 the ship-builder, the clother, the iron-founder, &c. &c. 
 
 There are so many real evils, so many just causes of com- 
 plaint in the Constitution and Administration of Governments, 
 our own not excepted, that it becomes the imperious Duty of 
 every Well-wisher of his country, to prevent, as much as in 
 him lies, the feelings and efforts of his compatriots from losing 
 themselves on a wrong scent. Whether a Svstem of Taxation 
 is injurious or beneficial on the whole, is to be known, not by 
 the amount of the sum taken from each individual, but by that 
 which remains behind. A War will doubtless cause a stagna- 
 tion of certain branches of Trade, and severe temporary dis- 
 tress in the places where those branches are carried on ; but 
 are not the same effects produced in time of Peace by prohi- 
 bitory edicts and commercial regulations of foreign powers, or 
 by new rivals with superior advantages in other countries, or 
 in different parts of the same ? Bristol has, doubtless, been inju- 
 red by the rapid piosperity of Liverpool and its superior spirit 
 of Enterprize ; and the vast Machines of Lancashire have over- 
 whelmed and rendered hopeless the domestic industry of the 
 females in the Cottages and small farm-houses of Westmoreland 
 and Cumberland. But if Peace has its stagnations as well as 
 War, does not War create or re-enliven numerous branches of 
 Industry as well as Peace ? Is it not a fact, that not only our 
 own military and naval forces, but even a part of those of our 
 enemy are armed and clothed by British manufacturers ? It 
 cannot be doubted, that the whole of our immense military 
 force is better and more expensively clothed, and both these 
 and our sailors better fed than the same persons would be in 
 their individual capacities : and this forms one of the real ex- 
 pences of War. Not, I say, that so much more money is rai- 
 sed, but that so much more of the means of comfortable exist- 
 ence are consumed, than would otherwise have been. But 
 does not this, like all other luxury, act as a stimulus on the pro- 
 ducing classes, and this in the most useful manner, and on the 
 most important branches of production, on the tiller, on the 
 grazier, the clothier, and the maker of arms ? Had it been oth-
 
 198 
 
 ervvise, is it possible that the receipts from the Property Tax 
 should have increased instead of decreased, notwitlistanding all 
 the rage of our enemy ? 
 
 Surely, never from the beginning of the world was such a 
 tribute of admiration paid by one power to another, as Bona- 
 parte within the last years has paid to the British Empire ! With 
 all the natural and artificial powers of almost the whole of con- 
 tinental Europe, with all the fences and obstacles of all public 
 and private morality broken down before him, with a mighty 
 empire of fifty millions of men, nearly two-thirds of whom speak 
 the same language, and are as it were fused together by the in- 
 tensest nationality ; with this mighty and swarming empire, or- 
 ganized in all its parts for war, and forming one huge camp, 
 and himself combining in his own person the two-fold power 
 of Monarch and Commander in Chief, with all these advantages 
 with all these stupendous instruments and inexhaustible resour- 
 ces of offence, this mighty Being finds himself imprisoned by 
 the enemy whom he most hates and would fain despise, insult- 
 ed by every wave that breaks upon his shores, and condemned 
 to behold his vast flotillas as worthless and idle as the sea-weed 
 that rots around their keels ! After years of haughty menace 
 and expensive preparations for the invasion of an island, the 
 trees and buildings of which are visible from the roofs of his 
 naval store-houses, he is at length compelled to make open 
 confession, that he possesses one mean only of ruining Great 
 Britain. And what is it ? The ruin of his own enslaved sub- 
 jects ! To undermine the resources of one enemy, he reduces 
 the Continent of Europe to the wretched state in which it 
 was before the wide difiiisions of Trade and Commerce, de- 
 prives its inhabitants of comforts and advantages to which they 
 and their fathers had been for more than a century, habituated, 
 and thus destroys, as far as his power extends a principal 
 source of civilization, the origin of a middle class throughout 
 Christendom, and with it the true balance of society, the parent 
 of international law, the foster-nurse of general humanity, and 
 (to sum up all in one) the main principle of attraction and re- 
 pulsion, by which the nations were rapidly though insensibly 
 drawing together into one system, and by which alone they 
 could combine the manifold blessings of distinct character and 
 and national independence, with the needful stimulation and 
 general influences of intercommunity, and be virtually united
 
 190 
 
 without being crushed together by conquest, in order to waste 
 away under the tabes and slow putrefaction of a universal mon- 
 archy. This boasted Pacificator of the World, this earthly Pro- 
 vidence* as "his Catholic Bishops blasphemously call him, pro- 
 fesses to entertain no hope of purchasing the destruction of 
 Great Britain at a less price than that of the barbarism of all 
 Europe ! By the ordinary war of government against govern- 
 ment, fleets against fleets, and armies against armies, he could 
 eff"ect nothing. His fleets might as well have been built at his 
 own expence in our Dock-yards, as tribute-oflerings to the Mas- 
 ters of the Ocean : and his Army of England lay encamped on 
 his Coasts like Wolves baying the Moon ! 
 
 Delightful to humraie and contemplative minds was the idea 
 of countless individual efforts working together by common in- 
 stinct and to a common object, under the protection of an un- 
 written code of religion, philosoph}^ and common interest, 
 which made peace and brotherhood co-exist with the most ac- 
 tive hostility. Not in the untamed Plains of Tartary, but in 
 the very bosom of civilization, and himself indebted to its fos- 
 tering care for his own education and for all the means of his 
 elevation and power, did this genuine offspring of the old ser- 
 pent warm himself into the fiend-like resolve of waging war 
 against mankind and the quiet growth of the world's improve- 
 ment, in an emphatic sense the enemy of the human race ! By 
 these means only he deems Great Britain assailable, (a strong 
 presumption, that our prosperity is built on the common inter- 
 ests of mankind !) — this he acknowledges to be his only hope — 
 and in this hope he has been utterly baffled ! 
 
 To what then do we owe our strength and our immunity ? 
 The sovereignty of law: the incorruptness af its administra- 
 tion ; the number and political importance of our religious 
 sects, which in an incalculable degree have added to the dig- 
 nity of the establishment ; the purity, or at least the decorum 
 
 *It Jias been well remarked, tliat there is something far more shocking in 
 the tyrant's pretentions to tlic gracious attribntes of the Supreme Ruler, than 
 in his most remorseless cruelties. There is a sort of wild granduer, not im- 
 gratifying to the imagination, in the answer of Timur Khan to one who re- 
 monstrated with him on tlje inhumaniii/ of his devastations: cur mo hominem 
 putas, et uon polius irani Dei in terris agentem ob perniciem humani generis ? 
 Why do you deem mo a man, and not rather the incarnate wrath of God act- 
 ing on the eai'th for the ruin of mankind ?
 
 200 
 
 of private morals, and the independence, activity, and weight, 
 of public opinion ? These and similar advantages are doubt- 
 less the materials of the fortress, but what has been the ce- 
 ment ? What has bound them together ? What has rendered 
 Great Britain, from the Orkneys to the Rocks of Scilly, in- 
 deed and with more than metaphorical propriety a body poli- 
 tic, our Roads, Rivers, and Canals being so truly the veins, ar- 
 teries, and nerves, of the state ; that every pulse in the metro- 
 polis produces a correspondent pulsation in the remotest village 
 on its extreme shores ! What made the stoppage of the na- 
 tional Bank the conversation of a day without causing one ir- 
 regular throb, or the stagnation of the commercial current in 
 the minutest vessel ? I answer without hesitation, that the 
 cause and mother principle of this unexampled confidence, of 
 this system of credit, which is as much stronger than mere 
 positive possessions, as the soul of man is than his body, or as 
 the force of a mighty mass in free motion, than the pressure of 
 its seperate component parts would be in a state of rest — the 
 main cause of this, I say, has been our national debt. What 
 its injurious effects on the Literature, the Morals, and religious 
 Principles, have been, I shall hereafter develope with the same 
 boldness. But as to our political strength and circumstantial 
 prosperity, it is the national debt which has wedded in indisso- 
 luble union all the interests of the state, the landed with the 
 commercial, and the man of independent fortune with the stir- 
 ring tradesman and reposing annuitant. It is the National 
 Debt, which by the rapid nominal rise in the value of things, 
 has made it impossible for any considerable number of men 
 to retain their own former comforts without joining in the 
 common industry, and adding to the stock of national produce ; 
 which thus first necessitates a general activity, and then by the 
 immediate and ample credit, which is never wanting to him, 
 who has any object on which his activity can employ itself, 
 gives each man the means not only of preserving but of en- 
 creasing and multiplying all his former enjoyments, and all the 
 symbols of the rank in Avhich he was born. It is this which 
 has planted the naked hills and enclosed the bleak wastes, in 
 the lowlands of Scotland not less than in the wealthier dis- 
 tricts of South Britain : it is this, which leaving all the other 
 causes of patriotism and national fervor undiminished and un- 
 injured, has added to our public duties the same feeling of ne-
 
 201 
 
 cessity, the same sense of immediate self-interest, which in 
 other countries actuates the members of a single family in their 
 conduct toward each other. 
 
 Somewhat more than a year ago, I happened to be on a visit 
 with a friend, in a small market town in the South- West of 
 England, when one of the company turned the conversation to 
 the weight of Taxes and the consequent hardness of the times. 
 1 answered, that if the Taxes were a real weight, and that in 
 proportion to their amount, we must have been ruined long 
 ago : for Mr. Hume, who had proceeded, as on a self-evident 
 axiom, on the hypothesis, that a debt of a nation was the same 
 as a debt of an individual, had declared our ruin arithmetical- 
 ly demonstrable, if the national debt encreased beyond a cer- 
 tain sum. Since his time it has more than quintupled that 
 sum, and yet — True, answered my Friend, but the principle 
 might be right though he might have been mistaken in the 
 time. But still, I rejoined, if the principle were right, the 
 nearer we came to that given point, and the greater and the 
 more active the pernicious cause became, the more manifest 
 would its effects be. We might not be absolutely ruined, but 
 our embarrassments would encrease in some proportion to their 
 cause. Whereas instead of being poorer and poorer, we are 
 richer and richer. Will any man in his senses contend, that 
 the actual labor and produce of the country has not only been 
 decupled within half a century, but increased so prodigiously 
 beyond that decuple as to make six hundred millions a less 
 weight to us than fifty millions were in the days of our grandfa- 
 thers ? But if it really be so, to what can we attribute this stu- 
 pendous progression of national improvement, but to that sys- 
 tem of credit and paper currency, of which the National Debt 
 is both the reservoir and the water-works ? A constant cause 
 should have constant effects ; but if you deem that this is some 
 anomaly, some strange exception to the general rule, explain 
 its mode of operation, make it comprehensible, how a cause 
 acting on a whole nation can produce a regular and rapid en- 
 crease of prosperity to a certain point, and then all at once pass 
 from an Angel of Light into a Daemon of Destruction ? That 
 an individual house may live more and more luxuriously upon 
 borrowed funds, and that when the suspicions of the creditors 
 are awakened, and their patience exhausted, the luxurious 
 spendthrift may all at once exchange his Palace for a Prison — ■ 
 26
 
 202 
 
 this I can understand perfectly : for I understand, whence the 
 luxuries could be produced for the consumption of the individu- 
 al house, and who the creditors might be, and that it might be 
 both their inclination and their interests to demand the debt, 
 and to punish the insolvent Debtor. But who are a Nation's 
 Creditors? The answer is, every Man to every Man. Whose 
 possible interest could it be either to demand the Principal, or 
 to refuse his share toward the means of paying the Interest ? 
 Not the Merchant's : for he would but provoke a crash of 
 Bankruptcy, in which his own House would as necessarily be 
 included, as a single card in a house of cards ! Not the land- 
 holder's : for in the general destruction of all credit, how could 
 he obtain payment for the Produce of his Estates ? Not to 
 mention the improbability that he would remain the undisturbed 
 Possessor in so direful a concussion — not to mention, that on 
 him must fall the whole weight of the puplic necessities — not to 
 mention that from the merchant's credit depends the ever-en- 
 creasing value of his land and the readiest means of improving it. 
 Neither could it be the laborer's interest : for he must be either 
 thrown out of employ, and lie like the fish in the bed of a River 
 from which the water has been diverted, or have the value of his 
 labor reduced to nothing by the inruption of eager competitors. 
 But least of all could it be the wish of the lovers of liberty, which 
 must needs perish or be suspended, either by the horrors of 
 anarchy, or by the absolute Power, with which the Govern- 
 ment must be invested, in order to prevent them. In short, 
 with the exception of men desperate from guilt or debt, or mad 
 with the blackest ambition, there is no class or description of 
 men who can have the least Interest in producing or permit- 
 ting a Bankruptcy. If then, neither experience has acquainted 
 us with any national impoverishment or embarrassment from the 
 increase of National Debt, nor theory renders such eflorts com- 
 prehensible, (for the predictions of Hume went on the false 
 assumption, that a part only of the Nation was interested in the 
 preservation of the Public Credit) on what authority are we to 
 ground our apprehensions? Does History record a single Na- 
 tion, in which relatively to Taxation there were no privileged 
 or exempted classes, in which there Avere no compulsory prices 
 of labor, and in which the interest of all the different classes 
 and all the different districts, were mutually dependent and vi- 
 tally co-organized, as in Great Britain — has History, I say, re- 
 corded a single instance of such a Nation ruined or dissolved
 
 20S 
 
 by the weight of Taxation ? In France there was no publie 
 credit, no communion of Interests : its unprincipled Govern- 
 ment and the productive and taxable Classes were as two Indi- 
 viduals with separate Interests. Its Bankruptcy and the con- 
 sequences of it are sufficiently comprehensible. Yet the Ca'ii- 
 ers, or the instructions and complaints sent to the National As- 
 sembly, from the Towns and Provinces of France, (an immense 
 mass of documents indeed, but without examination and patient 
 perusal of which, no man is entitled to write a History of the 
 French Revolution) these proved, beyond contradiction, that 
 the amount of the Taxes was one only, and that a subordinate 
 cause of the revolutionary movement. Indeed, if the amount 
 of the Taxes could be disjoined from the mode of raising them, 
 it might be fairly denied to have been a cause at all. Holland 
 was taxed as heavily and as equally as ourselves ; but was it 
 by Taxation that Holland was reduced to its present miseries? 
 The mode in which Taxes are supposed to act on the mar- 
 ketableness of our manufactures in foreign marts, I shall exa- 
 mine on some future occasion, when I shall endeavor to explain 
 in a more satisfactory way than has been hitherto done, to my 
 apprehension at least, the real mode in which Taxes act, and 
 how and why and to what extent they affect the wealth, and 
 what is of more consequence, the well-being of a nation. But 
 in the present exigency, when the safety of the nation depends, 
 on the one hand, on the sense which the people at large have 
 of the comparative excellencies of the Laws and Government, 
 and on the firmness and wisdom of the legislators and enlight- 
 ened classes in detecting, exposing, and removing its many 
 particular abuses and corruptions on the other, right views on 
 this subject of Taxation are of such especial importance ; and 
 I have besides in my inmost nature such a loathing of factious 
 falsehoods and moh-sycophancy^ i. e, the flattering of the mul- 
 titude by informing against their betters ; that I cannot but re- 
 vert to that point of the subject from which I began, namely, 
 
 that THE WEIGHT OF TaXES IS TO BE CALCULATED NOT BY 
 
 WHAT IS PAID, BUT BY WHAT IS LEFT. What matteis it to a 
 man, that he pays six times more Taxes than his father did, if, 
 notwithstanding, he with the same portion of exertion enjoys 
 twice the comforts which his father did ? Now this I solemnly 
 affirm to be the case in general, throughout England, according 
 to all the facts which I have collected during an examination of
 
 204 
 
 years, wherever I have travelled, and wherever I have been re- 
 sident. (I do not speak of Ireland, or the lowlands of Scot- 
 land : and if I may trust to what I myself saw and heard there, 
 I must even except the Highlands.) In the conversation which 
 I have spoken of as taking place in the south-west of England, 
 by the assistance of one or other of the company, we went 
 through every family in the town and neighborhood, and my 
 assertion was found completely accurate, though the place had 
 no one advantage over others, and many disadvantages, that 
 heavy one in particular, the non-residence and frequent change 
 of its Rectors, the living being always given to one of the Ca- 
 nons of Windsor, and resigned on the acceptance of better pre- 
 ferment. It was even asserted, and not only asserted but pro- 
 ved, by my friend (who has from his earliest youth devoted a 
 strong, original understanding, and a heart warm and benevo- 
 lent even to enthusiasm, to the service of the poor and the la- 
 boring class,) that every sober Laborer, in that part of England 
 at least, who should not marry till thirty, might, without any 
 hardship or extreme self-denial, commence house-keeping at 
 the age of thirty, with from a hundred to a hundred and 
 twenty pounds belonging to him. I have no doubt, that on 
 seeing this Essay, my friend will communicate to me the proof 
 in detail. But the price of labor in the south-west of England 
 is full one-third less than in the greater number, if not all, of, 
 the Northern Counties. What then is wanting ? Not the re- 
 peal of Taxes ; but the increased activity both of the gentry 
 and clergy of the land, in securing the instruction of the lower 
 classes. A system of education is wanting, such a system as 
 that discovered, and to the blessings of thousands realized, by 
 Dr. Bell, which I never am, or can be weary of praising, 
 ■while my heart retains any spark of regard for Human Nature, 
 or of reverence for Human Virtue — A system, by which in the 
 very act of receiving knowledge, the best virtues and most 
 useful qualities of the moral character are awakened, develo- 
 ped, and formed into habits- Were there a Bishop of Durham 
 (no odds whether a temporal or a spiritual Lord) in every 
 county or half county, and a Clergyman enlightened with the 
 views and animated with the spirit of Dr. Bell, in every par- 
 ish, we might bid defiance to the present w^eight of Taxes, and 
 boldly challenge the whole world to shew a Peasantry as well 
 fed and clothed as the English, or with equal chances of im-
 
 205 
 
 proving thetr situation, and of securing an old age of repose 
 and comfort to a life of cheerful industry. 
 
 I will add one other anecdote, as it demonstrates, incontro- 
 vertibly, the error of the vulgar opinion, that Taxes make 
 things really dear, taking in the whole of a man's expen- 
 diture. A friend of mine, who had passed some years in Ame- 
 rica, was questioned by an American Tradesman, in one of 
 their cities of the second class, concerning the names and num- 
 ber of our Taxes and Rates. The answer seemed perfectly to 
 astound him : and he exclaimed, " How is it possible that men 
 can live in such a country ? In this land of liberty we never 
 866 the face of a Tax-gatherer, nor hear of a duty except in 
 our sea-ports." My friend, who was perfect master of the 
 question, made semblance of turning off the conversation to 
 another subject : and then, without any apparant reference to 
 the former topic, asked the American, for what sum he thought 
 a man could live in such and such a style, with so many ser- 
 vants, in a house of such dimensions and such a situation (still 
 keeping in his mind the situation of a thriving and respectable 
 shop-keeper and householder in different parts of England,) 
 first supposing him to reside in Philadelphia or New York, and 
 then in some town of secondary importance. Having received 
 a detailed answer to these questions, he proceeded to convince 
 the American, that notwithstanding all our Taxes, a man might 
 live in the same style, but with incomparably greater comforts, 
 on the same income in London as in New York, and on a con- 
 siderably less income in Exeter or Bristol, than in any Ameri- 
 can provincial town of the same relative importance. It would 
 be insulting my Readers to discuss on how much less a person 
 may vegetate or brutalize in the back settlements of the repub- 
 lic, than he could live as a man, as a rational and social being, 
 in an English village ; and it would be wasting time to inform 
 him, that where men are comparatively few, and unoccupied 
 land is in inexhaustible abundance, the Laborer and common 
 Mechanic must needs receive (not only nominally but really) 
 higher wages than in a populous and fully occupied country. 
 But that the American Laborer is therefore happier, or even in 
 possession of more comforts and conveniences of life than a 
 sober or industrious English Laborer or Mechanic, remains to 
 be proved. In conducting the comparison we must not how- 
 ever exclude the operation of moral causes, when these causes
 
 206 
 
 are not accidental, but arise out of the nature of the country and 
 the constitution of the Government and Society. This being 
 the case, take away from the American's wages all the Taxes 
 which his insolence, sloth, and attachment to spiritous liquors 
 impose on him, and judge of the remainder by his house, his 
 household furniture, and utensils — and if I have not been grie- 
 vously deceived by those whose veracity and good sense I 
 have found unquestionable in all other respects, the cottage of 
 an honest English husbandman, in the service of an enlighten- 
 ed and liberal Farmer, who is paid for his labor at the price 
 usual in Yorkshire or Northumberland, would in the mind of a 
 man in the same rank of life, who had seen a true account of 
 America, excite no ideas favourable to emigration. This how- 
 ever, I confess, is a balance of morals rather than of circum- 
 stances : it proves, however, that where foresight and good mo- 
 rals exist, the Taxes do not stand in the way of an industrious 
 man's comforts. 
 
 Dr. Price almost succeeded in persuading the English nation 
 (for it is a curious fact, that the fancy of our calamitous situa- 
 tion is a sort of necessary sauce without which our real prospe- 
 rity would become insipid to us) Dr. Price, I say, alarmed the 
 country with pretended proofs that the island was in a rapid 
 state of depopulation, that England at the Revolution had been, 
 Heaven knows how much ! more populous ; and that in queen 
 Elizabeth's time or about the Reformation (!!!) the number of 
 inhabitants in England, might have been greater than even at 
 the Revolution. My old mathematical master, a man of an un- 
 commonly clear head, answered this blundering book of the 
 worthy Doctor's, and left not a stone unturned of the pompous 
 cenotaph in which the efhgy of the still living and bustling 
 English prosperity lay interred. And yet so much more suita- 
 ble was the Doctor's book to the purposes of faction, and to 
 the November mood of (what is called) the Public, that Mr. 
 Wales's pamphlet, though a master piece of perspicacity as well 
 as persi)icuity, was scarcely heard of. This tendency to politi- 
 cal night-mares in our countrymen reminds me of a supersti- 
 tion, or rather nervous disease, not uncommon in the highlands 
 of Scotland, in which men, though broad awake, imagine they 
 see themselves lying dead at a small distance from them. The 
 act of Parliament for ascertaining the population of the empire 
 has laid forever this uneasy ghost : and now, forsooth ! we are
 
 207 
 
 on the brink of ruin from the excess of population, and he who 
 would prevent the poor from rotting away in disease, misery, 
 and wickedness, is an enemy to his country ! A lately decea- 
 sed miser, of immense wealth, is reported to have been so de- 
 lighted with this splendid discovery, as to have offered a hand- 
 some annuity to the Author, in part of payment, for this new 
 and welcome piece of heart-armour. This, however, we may 
 deduce from the fact of our increased population, that if cloth- 
 ing and food had actually become dearer in proportion to the 
 means of procuring them, it would be as absurd to ascribe this 
 effect to increased Taxation, as to attribute the scantiness of 
 fare, at a public ordinary, to the landlord's bill, when twice the 
 usual number of guests had sat down to the same number of 
 dishes. But the fact is notoriously otherwise, and every man has 
 the means of discovering it in his own house and in that of his 
 neighbors, provided that he makes the proper allowances for 
 the disturbing forces of individual vice and imprudence. If 
 this be the case, I put it to the consciences of our literary dem- 
 agogues, whether a lie, for the purposes of creating public dis- 
 union and dejection, is not as much a lie, as one for the purpose 
 of exciting discord among individuals. I entreat my readers to 
 recollect, that the present question does not concern the effects 
 of taxation on the public independence and on the supposed 
 balance of the free constitutional powers, (from which said ba- 
 lance, as well as from the balance of trade, I own, I have ne- 
 ver been able to elicit one ray of common sense.) That the 
 nature of our constitution has been greatly modified by the 
 funding system, I do not deny : whether for good or for evil, on 
 the whole, will form part of my Essay on the British Constitu- 
 tion as it actually exists. 
 
 There are many and great public evils, all of which are to 
 be lamented, some of which may be, and ought to be removed, 
 and none of which can consistently with wisdom or honesty be 
 kept concealed from the public. As far as these originate in 
 false Principles, or in tlie contempt or neglect of right ones 
 (and as such belonging to the plan of The Friend,) I shall 
 not hesitate to make known my opinions concerning them, with 
 the same fearless simplicity with which I have endeavoured to 
 expose the errors of discontent and the artifices of faction. 
 But for the very reason that there are great evils, the more 
 does it behove us not to open out on a false scent.
 
 208 
 
 I will conclude this Essay with the examination of an arti- 
 cle in a provincial paper of a recent date, which is now lying 
 before me ; the accidental perusual of which, occasioned the 
 whole of the preceding remarks. In order to guard against a 
 possible mistake, I must premise, that I have not the most dis- 
 tant intention of defending the plan or conduct of our late ex- 
 peditions, and should be grossly calumniated if I were repre- 
 sented as an advocate for carelessness or prodigality in the 
 management of the public purse. The money may or may not 
 have been culpably wasted. I confine myself entirely to the 
 general falsehood of the principle in the article here cited; for 
 I am convinced, that any hopes of reform originating in such 
 notions, must end in disappointment and public mockery. 
 
 « OJ^LY A FEW MILLIOXS! 
 
 We have unfortunately of late been so much accustomed to read of mil- 
 lions being spent in one expedition, and millions being spent in another, that a 
 comparative insignificance is attached to an immense sum of money, by cal- 
 ling it only a few millions. Perhaps some of our readers may liave their judg- 
 ment a little improved by making a few calculations, like those below, on 
 the millions which it has been estimated will be lost to the nation by the 
 late expedition to Holland ; and then perhaps, they will be led to reflect on 
 the many millions which are annually expended in expeditions, which have 
 almost invariably ended in absolute loss. 
 
 In the first j)lace, with less money than it cost the nation to take Walcbe- 
 ren, &c. with the view of taking or destroying the French fleet at Antwerp, 
 consisUng of nine sail of the line, we could have completely built and equip- 
 ped, ready for sea, a fleet of ujiwards of one hundred sail of the line. 
 
 Or, secondly, a new town could be built in every county of England, and 
 each town consist of upwards of 1,000 substantial houses for a less sum. 
 
 Or, thirdly, it would have been enough to give 100/. to 2.000 i)oor fanjilies 
 in every county in England and Wales. 
 
 Or, fourtiily, it would be more than sufficient to give a handsome marriage 
 portion to 200,000 young women, who probably, if they had even less than 
 50Z. woidd not long remain unsolicited to enter the hajipy state. 
 
 Or, fifthly, a much less sum would enable the legislature to establish a life 
 boat in every port in the United Kingdom, and provide for 10 or 12 men to 
 be kept in constant attendance on each; and 100,000/. couKl be fimded, the 
 interest of which to be ajjplied in premiums, to those who should prove to 
 be particularly active in saving lives from wrecks, &c. and to provide for 
 the widows and children of those men who may accidentally lose dieir lives 
 in the cause of humanity. 
 
 This interrstiiig apjnopriation of 10 millions sterling, may lead our rea- 
 ders to think of the great good that can be done by only a few millions." 
 
 The exposure of this calculation will require but a few sen- 
 tences. These ten millions were expended, I presume, in arms,
 
 J0» 
 
 artillery, ammunition, clothing, provision, &c. &e. for about one 
 hundred and twenty thousand British subjects : and I presume 
 that all these consumables were produced by, and purchased 
 from, other British subjects. Now during the building of these 
 new towns for a thousand inhabitants each in every county, or 
 the distribution of the hundred pound bank notes to the two 
 thousand poor families, were the industrious ship-builders, cloth- 
 iers, charcoal-burners, gunpowder-makers, gunsmiths, cutlers, 
 cannon-founders, tailors, and shoemakers, to be left unemploy- 
 ed and starving ? or our brave soldiers and sailors to have re- 
 mained without food and raiment ? And where is the proof, 
 that these ten millions, which (obseive) all remain in the king- 
 dom, do not circulate as beneficially in the one way as they 
 would in the other ? Which is better ? To give money to the 
 idle, the houses to those who do not ask for them, and towns to 
 counties which have already perhaps too many ? Or to afford 
 opportunity to the industrious to earn their bread, and to the en- 
 terprizing to better their circumstances, and perhaps found new 
 families of independent proprietors ? The only mode, not abso- 
 lutely absurd, of considering the subject, would be, not by the 
 calculation of the money expended, but of the labour o( which 
 the money is a symbol. But then the question would be remo- 
 ved altogether from the expedition : for assuredly, neither the 
 armies were raised, nor the fleets built or manned for the sake 
 of conquering the Isle of Walcheren, nor would a single regi- 
 ment have been disbanded, or a single sloop paid off, though 
 the Isle of Walcheren had never existed. The whole dispute, 
 therefore, resolves itself to this one question: whether our sol- 
 diers and sailors would not be better employed in making canals 
 for instance, or cultivating waste lands, than in fighting or in 
 learning to fight ; and the tradesman, &c. in making grey coats 
 instead of red or blue — and ploughshares, &c. instead of arms. 
 When I reflect on the state of China and the moral character of 
 the Chinese, I dare not positively affirm that it icould be better. 
 When the fifteen millions, which form our present population, 
 shall have attained to the same purity of morals and of primi- 
 tive Christianity, and shall be capable of being governed by the 
 same admirable discipline, as the Society of the Friends, I doubt 
 not that we should be all Quakers in this as in the other points 
 of their moral doctrine. But were this transfer of employment 
 desirable, is it practicable at present, is it in our power ? These 
 27
 
 210 
 
 men know, that it is not. What then does all their reasoning 
 amount to ? Nonsense ! 
 
 ESSAY IV. 
 
 I have not intentionally either hidden or disguised the Truth, like an advocate 
 ashamed of his client, or a bribed accomptant who falsifies the quotient to 
 make the bankrupt's ledgers square with the creditor's inventory. My con- 
 science forbids the use of falsehood and the arts of concealment: and were 
 it otherwise, yet I am persuaded, that a system which has produced and pro- 
 tected so great prosperity, cannot stand in need of them. If therefore Ho- 
 nesty and the Knowledge of the whole Truth be the things you aim at, 
 you will find my principles suited to your ends : and as I like not the demo- 
 cratic forms, so am I not fond of any others above the rest. That a suc- 
 ession of wise and godly men may be secured to the nation in the highest 
 power is that to which I have directed your attention in this Essay, which 
 if you will read, perhaps you may see the error of those j)rinciples which 
 have led you into errors of practice. I wrote it purposely for the use of the 
 multitude of well-meaning people, that are tempted in these times to usurp 
 authority and meddle with government before they have any call from duty 
 or tolerable understanding of its principles. I never intended it for learned 
 men versed in politics ; but for such as will be jjractitioners before they 
 have been students." 
 
 Baxter's Holy Commontvealth, or Political Aphorisms. 
 
 The metaphysical (or as I have proposed to call them, meta- 
 political) reasonings hitherto discussed, belong to Government 
 in the abstract. But there is a second class of Reasoners, who 
 argue for a change in our Government from former usage, and 
 from statutes still in force, or which have been repealed, (so 
 these writers affirm ) either through a corrupt influence, or to 
 ward off temporary hazard or inconvenience. This class, which 
 is rendered illustrious by the names of many intelligent and 
 virtuous patriots, are advocates for reform in the literal sense of
 
 211 
 
 the word. They wish to bring hack the Government of Great 
 Britain to a certain /orm, which they affirm it to have once pos- 
 sessed ; and would melt the bullion anew in order to recast it 
 in the original mould. 
 
 The answer to all arguments of this nature is obvious, and to 
 my understanding appears decisive. These Reformers assume 
 the character of Legislators or of Advisers of the Legislature, 
 not that of Law Judges or appellants to Courts of Law. Sun- 
 dry statutes concerning the rights of electors (we will suppose) 
 still exist ; so likewise do sundry statutes on other subjects (on 
 witchcraft for instance) which change of circumstances have 
 rendered obsolete, or increased information shewn to be absurd. 
 It is evident, therefore, that the expediency of the regulations 
 prescribed by them, and their suitableness to the existing cir- 
 cumstances of the kingdom, must first be proved : and on this 
 proof must be rested all rational claims for the enforcement of 
 the statutes that have not, no less than for the re-acting of those 
 that have been, repealed. If the authority of the men, who 
 first enacted the Laws in question, is to weigh with us, it must 
 be on the presumption that they were wise men. But the wis- 
 dom of Legislation consists in the adaptation of Laws to cir- 
 cumstances. If then it can be proved, that the circumstances*, 
 under which those laws were enacted, no longer exist ; ana 
 that other circumstances altogether dift'erent, and in some in- 
 stances opposite, have taken their place ; we have the best 
 grounds for supposing, that if the men were now alive, they 
 would not pass the same statutes. In other words, the spirit of 
 the statute interpreted by the intention of the Legislator would 
 annul the letter of it. It is not indeed impossible, that by a 
 rare felicity of accident the same law may apply to two sets of 
 circumstances. But surely the presumption is, that regulations 
 well adapted for the manners, the social distinctions, and the 
 state of property, of opinion, and of external relations of Eng- 
 land in the reign of Alfred, or even in that of Edward the 
 First, will not be well suited to Great Britain at the close of 
 the reign of George the Third. For instance : at the time 
 when the greater part of the cottagers and inferior farmers 
 were in a state of villenage, when Sussex alone contained seven 
 thousand, and the Isle of Wight twelve hundred families of 
 bondsmen, it was the law of the land that every /ree»ian should 
 vote in the Assembly of the Nation personally or by his re-
 
 212 
 
 presentative. An act of Parliament in the year 1660 confirm- 
 ed what a concurrence of causes had previously effected : — ^ 
 every Englishman is now born free, the laws of the land are 
 the birth-right of every native, and with the exception of a few 
 honorary privileges all classess obey the same Laws. Now, ar- 
 gues one of our political writers, it being made the constitution 
 of the land by our Saxon ancestors, that every freeman should 
 have a vote, and all Englishmen being now born free, there- 
 fore, by the constitution of the land, every Englishman has now 
 a right to vote. How shall we reply to this without breach of 
 that respect, to which the Reasoner at least, if not the Reason- 
 ing, is entitled ? If it be the definition of a pun, that it is the 
 confusion of two ditferent meanings, under the same or similar 
 sound, we might almost characterize this argument as being 
 grounded on a grave pun. Our ancestors established the right 
 of voting in a particular class of men, forming at that time the 
 middle rank of society, and known to be all of them, or almost 
 all, legal proprietors — and these were then called the Freemen 
 of England : there/ore they established it in the lowest classes 
 of society, in those who possess no property, because these too 
 are now called by the same name !! Under a similar pretext, 
 grounded on the same precious logic, a Mameluke Bey extort- 
 ed a large contribution from the Egyptain Jews : " These books 
 (the Pentateuch ) are authentic ?" — Yes ! " Well, the debt then 
 is acknowledged : — and now the receipt, or the money, or your 
 heads! The Jews borrowed a large treasure from the Egyp- 
 tians ; but you are the Jews, and on you, therefore, I call for the 
 repayment." Besides, if a law is to be interpreted by the 
 known intention of its makers, the Parliament in 1660, which 
 declared all the natives of England freemen, but neither altered 
 nor meant thereby to alter the limitations of the right of elec- 
 tion, did to all intents and purposes except that right from the 
 common privileges of Englishmen, as Englishmen. 
 
 A moment's reflection may convince us, that every single 
 Statute is made under the knowledge of all the other Laws, 
 with which it is meant to co-exist, and by which its action is 
 to be modified and determined. In the legislative as in the 
 religious code, the text must not be taken without the context. 
 Now, I think, we may safely leave it to the Reformers them- 
 selves to make choice between the civil and political privileges 
 of Englishmen at present, considered as one sum total, and
 
 213 
 
 those of our Ancestors in any former period of our History, 
 considered as another, on the old principle, take one and leave 
 the other ; hut whichever you take, take it all or none. 
 Laws seldom become obsolete as long as they are both useful 
 and practicable ; but should there be an exception, there is no 
 other way of reviving its validity but by convincing the exist- 
 ing Legislature of its undiminished practicability and expedi- 
 ence ; which in all essential points is the same as the recom- 
 mending of a new Law. And this leads me to the third class 
 of the advocates of Reform, those, namely, who leaving an- 
 cient statutes to Lawyers and Historians, and universal princi- 
 ples with the demonstrable deductions from them to the Schools 
 of Logic, Mathematics, Theology, and Ethics, rest all their 
 measures, which they wish to see adopted, wholly on their 
 expediency. Consequently, they must hold themselves pre- 
 pared to give such proof, as the nature of comparative expe- 
 diency admits, and to bring forward such evidence, as experi- 
 ence and the logic of probability can supply, that the plans 
 which they recommend for adoption, are : first, practicable ; 
 secondly, suited to the existing circumstances ; and lastly, ne- 
 cessary or at least requisite, and such as will enable the Gov- 
 ernment to accomplish more perfectly the ends for which it 
 was instituted. These are the three indispensable conditions 
 of all prudent change, the credentials, with which Wisdom 
 never fails to furnish her public envoys. Whoever brings for- 
 ward a measure that combines this threefold excellence, wheth- 
 er in the Cabinet, the Senate, or by means of the Press, mer- 
 its emphatically the title of a prtriotic Statesman. Neither are 
 they without a fair claim to respectful attention as State-Coun- 
 sellors, who fully aware of these conditions, and with a due 
 sense of the difficulty of fulfilling them, employ their time and 
 talents in making the attempt. An imperfect plan is not ne- 
 cessarily a useless plan : and in a complex enigma the great- 
 est ingenuity is not always shewn by him who first gives the 
 complete solution. The dwarf sees farther than the giant, 
 when he has the giant's shoulders to mount on. 
 
 Thus, as perspicuously as I could, I have exposed the erro- 
 neous principles of political Philosophy, and pointed out the one 
 only ground on which the constitution of Governments can be 
 either condemned or justified by wise men. 
 
 If I interpret aright the signs of the times, that branch of
 
 214 
 
 politios which relates to the necessity and practicability of in- 
 fusing new life into our Legislature, as the best means of secu- 
 ring talent and wisdom in the Cabinet, will shortly occupy the 
 public attention with a paramount interest.* I would gladly 
 therefore suggest the proper state of feeling and the right pre- 
 paratory notions with which this disquisition should be entered 
 upon : and I do not know how I can eifect this more naturally, 
 than by relating the facts and circumstances which influenced 
 my own mind. I can scarcely be accused of egotism as in 
 the communications and conversations which I am about to 
 mention as having occurred to me during my residence abroad, 
 I am no otherwise the hero of the tale, than as being the pas- 
 sive receiver or auditor. But above all, let it not be forgotten, 
 that in the following paragraphs I speak as a Christian Moralist, 
 not as a Statesman. 
 
 To examine any thing wisely, two conditions are requisite : 
 first, a distinct notion of the desirable ends, in the complete 
 accomplishment of which would consist the perfection of such 
 ;a thing, or its ideal excellence ; and, secondly, a calm and 
 Itindly mode of feeling, without which we shall hardly fail ei- 
 ther to overlook, or not to make due allowances for, the cir- 
 cumstances which prevent these ends from being all perfectly 
 realized in the particular thing which we are to examine. For 
 instance, we must have a general notion what a Man can be and 
 ought to be, before we can fitly proceed to determine on the 
 merits or demerits of any one individual. For thg examina- 
 tion of our own Government, 1 prepared my mind, therefore, 
 by a short Catechism, which I shall commum'cate in the next 
 Essay, and on which the letter and anecdotes that follow, will, 
 I flatter myself, be found an amusing, if not an instructive com- 
 mentary. 
 
 *I am ill doubt whether the five hundred petitions, presented at the same 
 time to the House of Commons by tlie Member for VV^estminster, are to he 
 considered as a fulfihncnt of this prophecy. I have heard the echoes of a 
 single bhmderbuss, on one of our Cumberland lakes, imitate the volley from 
 a whole regiment.
 
 ESSAY V . 
 
 Hoc potissimum pacio felicem ac magnum regem se fore jitdicans : 7ion si quam 
 plurimis sed si quam optimis imperet. Proinde parum esse putal jiistis proesi- 
 diis rtgnum suum nmniisse, Jiisi idem viris eruditione juxta ac vita integritate 
 prczcellentihus ditet aique honestet. J^/imirum inttUigit hcsc demum esse vera 
 regni decora, has veras opes : hunc veram et mdlis unquam secidis cessuram glo- 
 riam. — Eras. Rot. R. S. Poncherio, Episc. Parisien. Ejtistola. 
 
 Translation. — Judging that he will have employed the most effectual means 
 of being a happj^ and powerful king, not by governing the most numerous 
 but the most moral people. He deemed of small sufficiency to have pro- 
 tected the country by fleets and garrison, unless he should at the same time: 
 enrich and ornament it with men of eminent learning and sanctity. 
 
 In what do all States agree.'' A number of men — exert — 
 power — in union. Wherein do they differ ? 1st. In the qua- 
 lity and quantity of the potvers. One possesses Chemists, Me- 
 chanists, Mechanics of all kinds, Men of Science ; and the arts 
 of war and peace ; and its Citizens naturally strong and of 
 habitual courage. Another State may possess none or a few 
 only of these, or the same more imperfectly . Or of two States 
 possessing the same in equal perfection the one is more numer- 
 ous than the other, as France and Switzerland. 2d. In the 
 more or less perfect union of these powers. Compare Mr. 
 Leckie^s valuable and authentic documents respecting the state 
 of Sicily with the preceding Essay on Taxation. 3dly. In the 
 greater or less activity of exertion. Think of the ecclesiasti- 
 cal State and its silent metropolis, and then of the county of 
 Lancaster and the towns of Manchester and Liverpool. What 
 is the condition of powers exerted in union by a number of 
 men .'' A Government. What are the ends of Government .-* 
 They are of two kinds, negative and positive. The negative 
 ends of Government are the protection of life, of personal
 
 216 
 
 freedom, of property, of reputation, and of religion, from for- 
 eign and from domestic attacks. The positive ends are, 1st. to 
 make the means of subsistence more easy to each individual : 
 2d. that in addition to the necessaries of life he should derive 
 from the union and division of labour a share of the comforts 
 and conveniences which humanize and ennoble his nature ; and 
 at the same time the power of perfecting himself in his own 
 branch of industry by having those things which he needs pro- 
 vided for him by others among his fellow-citizens ; including 
 the tools and raw or manufactured materials necessary for his 
 own employment. / knew a profound mathematician in Sici- 
 ly, who had devoted a full third of his life to the perfecting 
 the discovery of the Longitude, and who had convinced not on- 
 ly himself but the principal mathematicians of Messina and 
 Palermo that he had succeeded ; hut neither throughout Sicily 
 or Naples could he find a single Artist capable of constructing 
 the instrument which he had invented.* 3dly. The hope of 
 bettering his own condition and that of his children. The civil- 
 ized man gives up those stimulants of hope and fear which 
 constitute the chief charm of the savage life : and yet his ma-- 
 her has distinguished him from the brute that perishes, by ma- 
 king Hope an instinct of his nature and an indispensable con- 
 dition of his moral and intellectual progression. But a natu- 
 ral instinct constitutes a natural right, as far as its gratifica- 
 tion is compatible with the equal rights of others. Hence our 
 ancestors classed those who were bound to the soil (addicti gle- 
 bce) and incapable by law of altering their condition from that 
 of their parents, as bondsmen or villeins, however advantage- 
 
 *The good nirtn, wlio is ])oor. old, and blind, universally esteemed for the 
 innocence and austerity of his hfe not less than for his learning, and yet uni- 
 versally neglected, except hy persons almost as poor as himself, strongly i-e- 
 miiided me of a German epigram on Kepler, which may be thus translated :: 
 
 No mortal spirit yet had clomb so high 
 As Kepler — yet his country saw him die 
 For very want ! the ininds alone he fed, 
 And so the bodies left him without bread. 
 
 The good old man presented me with the book in which he has described 
 and demonstrated his invention: and I should with great pleasure transmit it 
 to any mathematician who would feel an interest in examining it and com- 
 niunicnting his opinions on ita merits.
 
 217 
 
 ously they might otherwise he situated. Reflect on the direful 
 effects of casts in Hindostan, and then trasfer yourself infan- 
 cy to an English cottage^ 
 
 " Where o'er the cradled Infant bending 
 Hope has fix'd her wishful gaze," 
 
 and the fond mother dreams of her child^s future fortunes — 
 who knows but he may come home a rich merchant, like such a 
 one 9 or be a bishop or a judge ? The prizes are indeed few 
 and rare ; but still they are possible : and the hope is univer- 
 sal, and perhaps occasions more happiness than even its fulfil- 
 ment. Lastly, the developement of those faculties which are 
 essential to his human nature by the knowledge of his moral 
 and religious duties, and the increase of his intellectual powers 
 in as great a degree, as is compatible with the other ends of 
 social union, and does not involve a contradiction. The poor- 
 est Briton possesses much and important knowledge, ivhich he 
 would not have had, if Newton, Luther, Calvin, and their com-^ 
 peers had not existed ; but it is evident that the means of sci- 
 ence and learning could not exist, if all men had a right to be- 
 made profound Mathematicians or men of extensive erudition.. 
 Still instruction is one of the ends of Government : for it is- 
 that only which makes the abandonment of the savage state an 
 ABSOLUTE DUTY : and that Constitution is the best, under which 
 the average sum of useful knowledge is the greatest, and the 
 causes that aivaken and encourage talent and genius, the most 
 powerful and various. 
 
 These were my preparatory notions. The influences under 
 which I proceeded to re-examine our own Constitution, were 
 the following, which I give, not exactly as they occurred, but 
 in the order in which they will be illustrative of the different 
 articles of the preceding paragraph. That we are better and 
 happier than others is indeed no reason for our not becoming 
 still better ; especially as with states, as well as individuals, 
 not to be progressive is to be retrograde. Yet the comparison 
 will usefully temper the desire of improvement with love and 
 a sense of gratitude for what we already are.
 
 218 
 
 I. A Letter received, at Malta from an Amej'ican officer of 
 high rank, ivho has since received the thanks and rewards of 
 the congress for his services in the Mediterranean. 
 
 Grand Cairo, Dec. 13, 1804. 
 Sir, — The same reason, which induced me to request letters 
 of introduction to his Britannic Majesty's Agents here, sug- 
 gested the propriety of shewing an English jack at the main 
 topgallant mast head, on entering the port of Alexandria on 
 
 the 26th ult. The signal was recognized ; and Mr. B was 
 
 immediately on board. 
 
 We found in port, a Turkish Vice Admiral, with a ship of 
 the line, and six frigates ; a part of which squadron is station- 
 ed there to preserve the tranquillity of the country ; with just 
 as much influence as the same number of Pelicans would have 
 on the same station. 
 
 On entering and passing the streets of Alexandria, I could 
 not but notice the very marked satisfaction, which every ex- 
 pression and every countenance of all denominations, of peo- 
 ple, Turks and Frenchmen only excepted, manifested under 
 an impression that we were the avant-courier of an English 
 army. They had conceived this from observing the English 
 jack at our main, taking our flag perhaps for that of a saint, 
 and because as is common enough every where, they were rea- 
 dy to believe what they wished. It would have been cruel to 
 have undeceived them : consequently without positively assum- 
 ing it, we passed in the character of Englishmen among the 
 middle and lower orders of society, and as their allies among 
 those of better information. Wherever we entered or where- 
 ever halted, we were surrounded by the wretched inhabitants ; 
 and stunned with their benedictions and prayers for blessings 
 on us. " Will the English come ? Are they coming ? God 
 grant the English may come ! we have no commerce — we have 
 no money — we have no bread ! When will the English ar- 
 rive !" My answer was uniformly. Patience ! The same tone 
 was heard at Rosetta as among the Alexandrians, indicative of 
 the same dispositions; only it was not so loud, because the in- 
 habitants are less miserable, although without any traits of hap- 
 piness. On the fourth we left that village for Cairo, and for 
 our security as well as to facilitate our procurement of accom- 
 modations during our voyage, as well as our stay there, the 
 resident directed his secretary, Capt. V , to accompa-
 
 219 
 
 ny us, and to give us lodgings in his house. We ascended the 
 Nile leisurely, and calling at several villages, it was plainly 
 perceivable that the rational partiality, the strong and open ex- 
 pression of which proclaimed so loudly the feelings of the 
 Egyptians of the sea coast, was general throughout the coun- 
 try : and the prayers for the return of the English as earnest 
 as universal. 
 
 On the morning of the sixth we went on shore at the village 
 of Sabour. The villagers expressed an enthusiastic gladness 
 at seeing red and blue uniforms and round hats (the French, I 
 believe, wear three-cornered ones.) Two days befoie, five 
 hundred Albanian deserters from the Viceroy's army had pilla- 
 ged and left this village ; at which they had lived at free quar- 
 ters about four weeks. — The famishing inhabitants were now 
 distx-essed with apprehensions from another quarter. A com- 
 pany of wild Arabs were encamped in sight. They dreaded 
 their ravages and apprised us of danger from them. We were 
 eighteen in the party, well armed ; and a pretty brisk fire 
 which we raised around the numerous flocks of pigeons and 
 other small fowl in the environs, must have deterred them 
 from mischief, if, as is most probable, they had meditated any 
 against us. Scarcely, however, were we on board and under 
 weigh, when we saw these mounted marauders of the desert 
 fall furiously upon the herds of camels, buffaloes, and cattle of 
 the village, and drive many of them off wholly unannoyed on 
 the part of the unresisting inhabitants, unless their shrieks 
 could be deemed an annoyance. They afterwards attacked 
 and robbed several unarmed boats, which were a few hours 
 astern of us. The most insensible must surely have been 
 moved by the situation of the peasants of that village. The 
 while we were listening to their complaints, they kissed our 
 hands, and with prostrations to the ground, rendered more af- 
 fecting by the inflamed state of the eyes almost universal 
 amongst them, and which the new traveller might venially im- 
 agine to have been the immediate effect of weeping and an- 
 guish, they all implored English succour. Their shrieks at 
 the assault of the wild Arabs seemed to implore the same still 
 more forcibly, while it testified what multiplied reasons they 
 had to implore it. I confess, I felt an almost insurmountable 
 impulse to bring our little party to their relief, and might per- 
 haps have done a rash act, had it not been for the calm and
 
 220 
 
 just observation of Captain V 's that " these were common 
 
 occurrences, and that any relief which we could afford, would 
 not merely be only tem])orary, but would exasperate the plun- 
 derers to still more atrocious outrages after our departure." 
 
 On the morning of the seventh we landed near a village. 
 At our approach the villagers fled : signals of friendship brought 
 some of them to us. When they were told that we were En- 
 glishmen, they flocked around us with demonstrations of joy, 
 offered their services, and raised loud ejaculations for our esta- 
 blishment in the country. Here we could not procure a pint 
 of milk for our coffee. The inhabitants had been plundered 
 and chased from their habitations by the Albanians and Desert 
 Arabs, and it was but the preceding day, they had returned to 
 their naked cottages. 
 
 Grand Cairo differs from the places already passed, only as 
 the presence of the tyrant stamps silence on the lips of misery 
 with the seal of terror. Wretchedness here assumes the form 
 of melancholy ; but the few whispers that are hazarded, con- 
 vey the same feelings and the same wishes. And wherein 
 does this misery and consequent spirit of revolution consist ? 
 Not in any form of government but in a formless despotism, 
 an anarchy indeed ! for it amounts literally to an annihilation of 
 every thing that can merit the name of government or justify 
 the use of the word even in the laxest sense. Egypt is under 
 the most frightful despotism, yet has no master ! The Turkish 
 soldiery, restrained by no discipline, seize every thing by vio- 
 lence, not only all that their necessities dictate, but whatever 
 their caprices suggest. The Mamelukes, who dispute with 
 these the right of domination, procure themselves subsistence 
 by means as lawless though less inssupportably oppressive. 
 And the wild Arabs availing themselves of the occasion, plun- 
 der the defenceless wherever they find plunder. To finish the 
 whole, the talons of the Viceroy fix on every thing which can 
 be changed into currency, in order to find the means of sup- 
 porting an ungoverned, disorganized banditti of foreign troops, 
 who receive the harvest of his oppression, desert and betray 
 him. Of all this rapine, robbery, and extortion, the wretched 
 cultivators of the soil are the perpetual victims. — A spirit of 
 revolution is the natural consequence. 
 
 The reason the inhabitants of this country give for prefer- 
 ring the English to the French, whether true or false, is as na-
 
 221 
 
 tural as it is simple, and as influential as natural. " The En- 
 glish," say they, "pay for every thing — the French pay noth- 
 ing, and take every thing." They do not like this kind of de- 
 liverers. 
 
 Well, thought I, after the perusal of this Letter, the Slave 
 Trade (which had not then been abolished) is a dreadful crime, 
 an English iniquity ! and to sanction its continuance under full 
 conviction and parliamentary confession of its injustice and in- 
 humanity, is, if possible, still blacker guilt. Would that our 
 discontents were for a while confined to our moral wants ! 
 whatever may be the defects of our Constitution, we have at 
 least an eflfective Government, and that too composed of men 
 who were born with us and are to die among us. We are at 
 least preserved from the incursions of foreign enemies ; the in- 
 tercommunion of interests precludes a civil war, and the volun- 
 teer spirit of the nation equally with its laws, give to the dark- 
 est lanes of our crowded metropolis that quiet and security 
 which the remotest villager at the cataracts of the Nile prays 
 for in vain, in his mud hovel ! 
 
 JVot yet enslaved nor wholly vile, 
 
 O Albion, O my mother isle ! 
 
 Thy vallies fair, as Eden's bowers. 
 
 Glitter green with sunny showers ; 
 
 Thy grassy uplands' gentle swells 
 
 Echo to the bleat of flocks ; 
 
 (Those grassy hills, those glitt'ring dulls 
 
 Proudly ramparted with rocks) 
 
 And ocean mid his uproar wild 
 
 Speaks safety to his island-child. 
 
 Hence for many a fearless age 
 
 Has social quiet lov'd thy shore ; 
 
 Nor ever sworded warrior's rage 
 
 Or sack'd thy towers or stain'd thy fields with gore. 
 
 Coleridge's Poems. 
 
 II. Anecdote of Buonaparte. 
 
 Buonaparte, during his short stay at Malta, called out the 
 Maltese regiments raised by the Knights, amounting to fifteen 
 hundred of the stoutest young men of the islands. As they 
 were drawn up on the parade, he informed them, in a bombastic 
 harangue, that he had restored them to liberty ; but in proof that
 
 222 
 
 his attachment to them was not bounded by this benefaction, 
 he would now give them an opportunity of adding glory to free- 
 dom — and concluding by asking who of them would march for- 
 ward to be his fellow-soldier on the banks of the Nile, and con- 
 tribute a flower of Maltese heroism to the immortal wreaths of 
 fame, with which he meant to crown the pyramids of Egypt! 
 Not a man stirred : all gave a silent refusal. They were in- 
 stantly surrounded by a regiment of French soldiers, marched 
 to the Marino, forced on board the transports, and threatened 
 with death if any one of them attempted his escape or should 
 be discovered in any part of the islands of Malta or Goza. At 
 Alexandria they were always put in front, both to save the 
 French soldiery, and to prevent their running aw ay: and of the 
 whole number, fifty only survived to revisit their native coun- 
 try. From one of these survivors I first learned this fact which 
 was afterw^ards confirmed to me by several of his remaining 
 comrades, as well as by the most respectable inhabitants of Vi- 
 lette. 
 
 This anecdote recalled to my mind an accidental conversation 
 with an old countryman in a central district of Germany. I 
 purposely omit names because the day of retribution has come 
 and gone by. I was looking at a strong fortress in the distance, 
 which formed a highly interesting object in a rich and varie4 
 landscape, and asked the old man, who had stopped to gaze at 
 me, its name, &c. adding — how beautiful it looks ! It may be 
 well enough to look at, answered he, but God keep all chris- 
 tians from being taken thither! He then proceeded to gratify 
 the curiosity which he had thus excited, by informing me that 
 
 the Baron had been taken out of his bed at midnight and 
 
 carried to that fortress — that he was not heard of for nearly two 
 years, when a soldier who had fled over the boundaries sent in- 
 formation to his family of the place and mode of his imprison- 
 ment. As I have no design to work on the feelings of my 
 readers, I pass over the shocking detail: had not the language 
 and countenance of my informant precluded such a suspicion, I 
 might have supposed that he had been repeating some tale of 
 horror from a Romance of the dark ages. What was his crime ! 
 I asked — The report is, said the old man, that in his capacity 
 
 as minister he had remonstrated with the concerning the 
 
 extravagance of his mistress, nn outlandish countess ; and that
 
 223 
 
 she in revenge persuaded the sovereign, that it was the Baron 
 w^ho had communicated to a professor at Gottingen the particu- 
 lars of the infamous sale of some thousand of his subjects as 
 soldiers. On the same day I discovered in the landlord of a 
 small public house one of the men who had been thus sold. He 
 seemed highly delighted in entertaining an English gentleman, 
 and in once more talking English after a lapse of so many 
 years. He w'as far from regretting this incident in his life, but 
 his account of the manner in which they were forced away, ac- 
 corded in so many particulars with Schiller's empassioned de- 
 scription of the same, or a similar scene, in his Tragedy of 
 Cabal, and Love, as to leave a perfect conviction on my mind, 
 that the dramatic pathos of that description was not greater than 
 its historic fidelity. 
 
 As I was thus reflecting, I glanced my eye on the leading 
 paragraph of a London newspaper, containing much angry de- 
 clamation, and some bitter truths, respecting our military ar- 
 rangements. It were in vain, thought I, to deny that the in- 
 fluence of parliamentary interest, which prevents the immense 
 patronage of the crown from becoming a despotic power, is 
 not the most likely to secure the ablest commanders or the fit- 
 test persons for the management of our foreign empire. How- 
 ever, thank heaven ! if we fight, we fight for our own king and 
 country : and grievances which may be publicly complained of, 
 there is some chance of seeing remedied. 
 
 HI. A celebrated Professor in a German University, shewed 
 me a very pleasing print, entitled, " Toleration." — A Catholic 
 Priest, a Lutheran Divine, a Calvinist Minister, a Quaker, a 
 Jew, and a Philosopher, were represented sitting round the 
 same Table, over which a winged figure hovered in the atti- 
 tude of protection. For this harmless print, said my friend, 
 the artist was imprisoned, and having attempted to escape, was 
 sentenced to draw the boats on the banks of the Danube, with 
 robbers and murderers : and there died in less than two months, 
 from exhaustion and exposure. In your happy country, sir, this 
 print w ould be considered as a pleasing scene from real life : 
 for in every great town throughout your empire you may meet 
 with the original. Yes, I replied, as far as the the negative 
 ends of Government are concerned we have no reason to com- 
 plain. Our Government protects us from foreign enemies, and
 
 234 
 
 our Laws secure our lives, our personal freedom, our property, 
 reputation, and religious rights, from domestic attacks. Our 
 taxes, indeed are enormous — Oh ! talk not of taxes, said my 
 friend, till you have resided in a country where the boor dis- 
 poses of his produce to strangers for a foreign mart, not to bring 
 back to his family the comforts and conveniences of foreign ma- 
 nufactures, but to procure that coin which his lord is to squan- 
 der away in a distant land. Neither can I with patience hear 
 it said, that your laws act only to the negative ends of govern- 
 ment. They have a manifold positive influence, and their in- 
 corrupt administration gives a colour to all your modes of think- 
 ing, and is one of the chief causes of your superior morality in 
 private as well as public life.* 
 
 My limits compel me to strike out the different incidents 
 which I had written as a commentary on the three former of the 
 positive ends of Government. To the moral feelings of my 
 Readers they might have been serviceable; but for their un- 
 derstandings they are superfluous. It is surely impossible to 
 peruse them, and not admit that all three are realized under 
 our Government to a degree unexampled in any other old and 
 long peopled country. The defects of our Constitution (in 
 which word I include the Laws and Customs of the Land as 
 well as its scheme of Legislative and Executive Power) must 
 exist, therefore, in the fourth, namely, the production of the 
 highest average of general information, of general moral and 
 religious principles, and the excitements and opportunities 
 which it affords to paramount genius and heroic power in a 
 
 *"The administration of justice throughout the Continent is partial, venal 
 and infamous. I have, in conversation with many sensible men, met with 
 sometliing of content with their governments in all other respects than this ; 
 but upon the question of expecting justice to be really and fairly administer- 
 ed every one confessed there was no such thing to be looked for. The con- 
 duct of the judges is profligate and atrocious. Upon almost every cause that 
 comes before them interest is openly made with the judges; and woe betide 
 tlie man, who, with a cause to support had no means of conciliating favour, 
 either by the beauty of a handsome wife, or by other methods." — This quo- 
 tation is confined in the original to France under the monarchy ; I have ex- 
 tended the application, and adopted the words as comprizing the result of my 
 own experience: and I take this opportunity of declaring, that the mosi im- 
 portant parts of Mr. Leckie's statement concerning Sicily I myself A;nou» to be 
 accurate, and am authorized by what I myself saw there, to rely on the whole 
 »s R fair and unexaggerated representation.
 
 225 
 
 sufficient number of its citizens. These are points in which 
 it would be immorality to rest content with the presumption, 
 however well founded, that we are better than others, if we 
 are not what we ought to be ourselves, and not using the means 
 of improvement. The fii*st question then is, what is the fact ? 
 The second, supposing a defect or deficiency in one or all of 
 these points, and that to a degree which may affect our power 
 and prosperity, if not our aboslute safety, are the plans of Leg- 
 islative Reform that have hitherto been proposed fit or likely 
 to remove such defect, and supply such deficiency ? The 
 third and last question is — Should there appear reason to deny 
 or doubt this, are there then any other means, and what are 
 they ? — Of these points in the concluding Essay of this Sec- 
 tion. 
 
 A French gentleman in the reign of Lewis the 14th, was 
 comparing the French and English writers with all the boast- 
 fulness of national prepossession. Sir ! ( replied an Englishman 
 better versed in the principles of Freedom than the canons of 
 criticism) there are but two subjects worthy the human intel- 
 lect: Politics and Religion, our state here and our state 
 hereafter ; and on neither of these dare you write. Long may 
 the envied privilege be preserved to my countrymen of wri- 
 ting and talking concerning both ! Nevertheless, it behoves 
 us all to consider, that to write or talk concerning any suject, 
 without having previously taken the pains to understand it, is a 
 breach of duty which we owe to ourselves, though it may be 
 no offence against the laws of the land. The privilege of 
 talking and even publishing nonsense is necessary in a free 
 state ; but the more sparingly we make use of it the better. 
 
 29
 
 ESSAY VI. 
 
 Then we may thank ourselves, 
 Who spell-bound by the magic name of Peace 
 Dream golden dreams. Go, warlike Biitain, go. 
 For the grey olive-branch change thy green laurels : 
 Hang up thy rusty helmet, that the bee 
 May have a hive, or spider find a loom ! 
 Instead of doubling drum and thrilling fife 
 Be lull'd in lady's lap with amorous flutes. 
 But for Najjoleon, know, he'll scorn this calm : 
 The ruddy ])lanet at his birth bore sway. 
 Sanguine, a dust his htunor, and wild fire 
 His ruling clement. Rage, revenge, and cunning 
 Make up the temper of tliis captain's valor. 
 
 Adapted from an old Play. 
 
 Little prospective wisdom can that man obtain, who hurrying 
 onward with the current, or rather torrent, of events, feels no 
 interest in their importance, except as far as his curiosity is ex- 
 cited by their novelty ; and to whom all reflection and retro- 
 spect are wearisome. If ever there were a time when the 
 formation of just public principles becomes a duty of private 
 morality ; when the principles of morality in general ought to 
 be made to bear on our public sufiVages, and to affect every great 
 national determination ; when, in short, his country should 
 have a place by every Englishman's fire-side ; and when the 
 feelings and truths which give dignity to the fire-side and tran- 
 quillity to the death-bed, ought to be present and influencive 
 in the cabinet and in the senate — that time is now with us. As 
 an introduction to, and at the same time as a commentary on, the 
 subject of international law, I have taken a review of the cir- 
 rumstances that led to the Treaty of Amiens, and the recom-
 
 227 
 
 mencement of the war, more especially with regard to the oc- 
 cupation of Malta. 
 
 In a rich commercial state, a war seldom fails to become un- 
 popular by length of continuance. The first, or revolution war 
 which toivards its close^ had become just and necessary, per- 
 haps beyond any former example, had yet causes of unpopular- 
 ity peculiar to itself. Exhaustion is the natural consequence of 
 excessive stimulation, in the feelings of nations equally as in 
 those of individuals. Wearied out by overwhelming novelties ; 
 stunned, as it were, by a series of strange explosions ; sick too 
 of hope long delayed ; and uncertain as to the real object and 
 motive of the war, from the rapid change and general failure 
 of its ostensible objects and motives ; the public mind for many 
 months preceding the signing of the preliminaries, had lost all 
 its tone and elasticity. The consciousness of Pxiutual errors and 
 mutual disappointments, disposed the great majority of all par- 
 ties to a spirit of diffidence and toleration, which, amiable as it 
 may be in individuals, yet in a nation, and above all in an opu- 
 lent and luxurious nation, iy c.lways too nearly akin to apathy 
 and selfish indulgence. An unmanly impatience for peace be- 
 came only not universal. After as long a resistance as the na- 
 ture of our Constitution and national character permitted or even 
 endured, the government applied at length the only remedy 
 adequate to the greatness of the evil, a remdey which the mag- 
 nitude of the evil justified, and which nothing but an evil of 
 that magnitude could justify. At a high price they purchased 
 for us the name of peace, at a time when the views of France 
 became daily more and more incompatible with our vital inte- 
 rests. Considering the peace as a mere truce of experiment, 
 wise and temperate men regarded with complacency the Trea- 
 ty of Amiens, for the very reasons that would have ensured 
 the condemnation of any other treaty under any other circum- 
 stances. Its palpable deficiencies were its antidote : or rather 
 they formed its ver}^ essence, and declared at first sight, what 
 alone it was, or was meant to be. Any attempt at that time 
 and in this Treaty to have secured Italy, Holland, and the Ger- 
 man Empire, would have been in the literal sense of the word, 
 preposterous. The Nation would have withdrawn all faith in 
 the pacific intentions of the ministers, if the negociation had 
 been broken off on a plea of this kind : for it had taken for 
 granted the extreme desirableness, nay, the necessity of a
 
 228 
 
 peace, and, this once admitted, there would, no doubt, have 
 been an absurdity in continuing the war for objects which the 
 war furnished no means of realizing. If the First Consul had 
 entered into stipulations with us respecting the Continent they 
 would have been observed only as long as his interests from oth- 
 er causes miglit have dictated ; they would have been signed 
 with as much sincerity and observed with as much good faith 
 as the article actually inserted in the Treaty of Amiens, re- 
 specting the integrity of the Turkish empire. This article in- 
 deed was wisely insisted on by us, because it affected both our 
 national honor, and the interests of our Indian empire immedi- 
 ately ; and still more, perhaps, because this of all others was 
 the most likely to furnish an early proof of the First Consul's 
 real dispositions. But deeply interested in the fate oi the Con- 
 tinent, as we are thought to be, it would nevertheless have 
 been most idle to have abandoned a peace, supposing it at all 
 desirable, on the ground that the French government had re- 
 fused that which v/ouid have been of no value had it been 
 granted. 
 
 Indeed there results one serious disadvantage from insisting 
 on the rights and interests of Austria, the Empire, Switzerland, 
 &c. in a treaty between England and France : and, as it should 
 seem, no advantage to counterbalance it. For so, any attack on 
 those rights instantly pledges our character and national dignity 
 to commence a war, however inexpedient it might happen to be, 
 and however hopeless : while if a war were expedient any atttack 
 on these countries by France furnishes a justifiable cause of 
 war in its essential nature, and independently of all positive 
 treaty. Seen in this light, the defects of the treaty of Amiens 
 become its real merits. If the government of France made 
 peace in the spirit of peace, then a friendly intercourse and the 
 humanizing influences of commerce and reciprocal hospitality 
 would gradually bring about in both countries the dispositions 
 necessary for the calm discussion and sincere conclusion of a 
 genuine, efficient, and comprehensive treaty. If the contrary 
 proved the fact, the Treaty of Amiens contained in itself the 
 principles of its own dissolution. It was what it ought to be. 
 If the First Consul had both meant and dealt fairly by us, the 
 treaty would have led to a true settlement : but he acting as all 
 prudent men expected that he would act, it supplied just rea- 
 sons for the commencement of war — and at its decease left us, 
 as a legacy, blessings that assuredly far outweighed our losses
 
 229 
 
 by the peace. It left us popular enthusiasm, national unani- 
 mity, and simplicity of object : and removed one inconvenience 
 which cleaved to the last war, by attaching to the right objects, 
 and enlisting under their proper banners, the scorn and hatred 
 of slavery, the passion for freedom, all the high thoughts and 
 high feelings that connect us with the honored names of past 
 ages ; and inspire sentiments and language, to which our Hamp- 
 dens, Sidneys, and Russels, might listen without jealousy. 
 
 The late Peace then was negociated by the Government, ra- 
 tified by the Legislature, and received by the nation, as an ex- 
 periment: as the only means of exhibiting such proof as would 
 be satisfactory to the people in their then temper ; whether 
 Buonaparte devoting his ambition and activity to the re-esta- 
 blishment of trade, colonial tranquillity, and social morals, in 
 France, would abstain from insulting, alarming and endanger- 
 ing the British empire. And these thanks at least were due 
 to the First Consul, that he did not long delay the proof. 
 With more than papal insolence he issued edicts of anathema 
 against us, and excommunicated us from all interferrence in 
 the affairs of the Continent. He insulted us still more inde- 
 cently by pertinacious demands respecting our constitutional 
 Laws and Rights of Hospitality ; by the official publication of 
 Sebastiani's Report; and by a direct personal outrage offered 
 in the presence of all the foreign ministers to the king, in the 
 person of his ambassador. He both insulted and alarmed us 
 by a display of the most perfidious ambition in the subversion 
 of the independence of Switzerland, in the avowal of designs 
 against Egypt, Syria, and the Greek Islands, and in the mission 
 of military spies to Great Britain itself. And by forcibly 
 maintaining a French army in Holland, he at once insulted, 
 alarmed, and endangered us. What can render a war just 
 (pre-supposing its expedience) if insult, repeated alarm, and 
 danger do not ? And how can it be expedient lor a rich, uni- 
 ted, and powerful Island-empire to remain in nominal peace 
 and unresenting passiveness with an insolent neighbor, who 
 has proved that to wage against it an unmitigated war of insult, 
 alarm, and endangerment is both his temper and his system? 
 
 Many attempts were made by Mr, Fox to explain away the 
 force of the greater number of the facts here enumerated : but 
 the great fact, for which alone they have either force or mean- 
 ing, the great ultimate fact, that Great Britain had been insult- 
 ed, alarmed, and endangered by France, Mr. Fox himself ex-
 
 230 
 
 pressly admitted. But the opposers of the present war con- 
 centre the strength of their cause in the following brief argu- 
 ment. Supposing, say they, the grievances set forth in our 
 manifesto to be as notorious as they are asserted to be, yet 
 more notorious they cannot be than that other fact which utter- 
 ly annuls them as reasons for a war — the fact, that ministers 
 themselves regard them only as the pompous garnish of the 
 dish. It stands on record, that Buonaparte might have purchas- 
 ed our silence for ever, respecting these insults and injuries, 
 by a mere acquiescence on his part in our retention of Malta. 
 The whole treaty of Amiens is little more than a perplexed 
 bond of compromise respecting Malta. On Malta we rested 
 the peace : for Malta we renewed the war. So say the oppos- 
 ers of the present war. As its advocates we do not deny the 
 fact as stated by them ; but we hope to achieve all, and more 
 than all the purposes of such denial, by an explanation of the 
 fact. The difficulty then resolves itself into two questions : 
 first, in what sense of the words can we be said to have gone 
 to war for Malta alone ? Secondly, wherein does the impor- 
 tance of Malta consist ? The answer to the second will be 
 found in the third volume, in the Life of the Liberator and 
 Political Father of the Maltese : while the attempt to settle 
 the first question, so at the same time to elucidate the Law or 
 Nations and its identity with the Law of Conscience, will oc- 
 cupy the remainder of the present Essay. 
 
 L In what sense can we he offirmed to have renewed the war 
 
 for Malta alone ? 
 If we had known or could reasonably have believed, that the 
 views of France were and would continue to be friendly or 
 negative toward Great Britain, neither the subversion of the 
 independence of Switzerland, nor the maintenance of a French 
 army in Holland, would have furnished any prudent ground for 
 war. For the only way by which we could have injured France, 
 namely, the destruction of her commerce and navy, would in- 
 crease her means of continental conquests, by concentrating all 
 the resources and energies of the French empire in her military 
 powers : while the losses and miseries which the French peo- 
 ple would suffer in consequence, and their magnitude, compa- 
 red with any advantages that might accrue to them from the 
 extension of the name France, were facts which, we knew by 
 experience, would weigh as nothing with the existing Govern-
 
 231 
 
 ment. It3 attacks on the independence of its continental neigh- 
 bors become motives to us for the recommencement of hostility, 
 only as far as they give proofs of a hostile intention toward 
 ourselves, and facilitate the realizing of such intention. If any 
 events had taken place, increasing the means of injuring this 
 country, even though these events furnished no moral ground 
 of complaint against France, (such for instance, might be the 
 great extension of her population and revenue, from freedom 
 and a wise government) much more, if they were the fruits of 
 iniquitous ambition, and therefore in themselves involved the 
 probability of an hostile intention to us — then, I say, every 
 after occurrence becomes important, and both a just and expe- 
 dient ground of war, in proportion, not to the importance of 
 the thing in itself, but to the quantity of evident proq/ afford- 
 ed by it of an hostile design in the Government, by whose 
 power our interests are endangered. If by demanding the im- 
 mediate evacuation of Malta, when he had himself done away 
 the security of its actual independence (on his promise of pre- 
 serving which our pacific promises rested as on their sole found- 
 ation) and this too, after he had openly avowed such designs on 
 Egypt, as not only in the opinion of our ministers, but in his 
 own opinion, made it of the greatest importance to this country, 
 that Malta should not be under French influence ; if by this 
 conduct the First Consul exhibted a decisive proof of his inten- 
 tion to violate our rights and to undermine our national inte- 
 rests ; then all his preceding actions on the Continent became 
 proofs likewise of the same intention ; and any one* of these 
 
 *An hundred cases might be imagined which v.ould place this assertion 
 in its true light. Su[)pose, for instance, a country according to the laws of 
 which a parent might not disinherit a son without having first convicted him 
 of some one of sundiy crimes enumerated in a specific statute. Caius, by a 
 series of vicious actions has so nearly convinced his father of his utter 
 worthlessness, that the father resolves on the next provocatiou to use the ve- 
 ly first opportunity of legally disinheriting this son. The provocation occurs, 
 and ill itself furnishes this op])orrunity, and Caius is disinherited, though for 
 an action much less glaring and intolerahle than most of his preceding de- 
 Jinqnencies had been. The advocates of Caius complain that he should be 
 thus punished for a comparative trifle, so many worse misdemeanors iiaving 
 been passed over. The father replies : " This, his last action, is not the cause 
 of the disinheritance ; but the means of disinheriting him. I pimished him 
 hy it rather than /or it. In truth it was not for any of his actions that I have thut
 
 232 
 
 aggressions involves the meaning of the whole. Which of them 
 is to determine as to war must be decided by other and pru- 
 dential considerations. Had the First Consul acquiesced in our 
 detention of Malta, he would thereby have furnished such proof 
 of pacific intentions, as would have led to further hopes, as 
 would have lessened our alarm from his former acts of ambition, 
 and relatively to us have altered in some degree their nature- 
 It should never be forgotten, that a Parliament or national 
 Council is essentially different from a Court of Justice, alike in 
 its objects and its duties. In the latter, the Juror lays aside 
 his private knowledge and his private connections, and judges 
 exclusively according to evidence adduced in the Court : in 
 the former, the Senator acts upon his own internal convictions, 
 and oftentimes upon private information, which it would be 
 imprudent or criminal to disclose. Though his ostensible Reason 
 ought to be a true and just one, it is by no means necessary that 
 it should be his sole or even his chief reason. In a Court of 
 Justice, the Juror attends to the character and general inten- 
 tions of the accused party, exclusively, as adding to the proba- 
 bility of his having or not having committed the one particular 
 action then in question. The Senator, on the contrary, when 
 he is to determine on the conduct of a foreign power, attends 
 to particular actions, chiefly in proof of characler and existing 
 intentions. Now there were many and very powerful Reasons 
 why, though appealing to the former actions of Buonaparte, as 
 confirmations of his hostile spirit and alarming ambition, we 
 should nevertheless make Malta the direct object and final de- 
 terminant of the war. Had we gone to war avowedly for the 
 independence of Holland and Switzerland, we should have fur- 
 nished Bounaparte with a colourable pretext for annexing both 
 countries immediately to the French empire,* which, if he 
 
 punished liiin, but for his vices; tliat is, not so much for the injuries whicli I 
 have suffered, as for the dispositions which these actions evinced ; for the in- 
 solent and alaniiiiig intentions of which they are proofs. Now of this liabitu- 
 al temper, of these dangerous piu'poses, his last action is as true and complete 
 a manifestation as any or all of his preceding offences ; and it therefore may 
 and must be taken as their common representative.'''' ' 
 
 * This disquisition was written in the year 1804, in Malta, at the request 
 of Sir Alexander Ball, [with the exception of the latter paragraphs, which I 
 have therefore included in crotchets.]
 
 233 
 
 should do (as if his power continues he most assuredly will 
 sooner or later) by a mere act of violence, and undisguised ty- 
 ranny, there will follow a moral weakening of his power in the 
 minds of men, which may prove of incalculable advantage to 
 the independence and well-being of Europe; but which, un- 
 fortunately, for this very reason, that it is not to be calculated, 
 is too often disregarded by ordinary Statesmen. At all events, 
 it would have been made the plea for banishing, plundering, 
 and perhaps murdering numbers of virtuous and patriotic indi- 
 viduals, as being the partizans of " the Enemy of the Conti- 
 new^." Add to this, that we should have appeared to have 
 rushed into a war for objects which by war we could not hope 
 to realize ; we should have exacerbated the misfortunes of the 
 countries of which we had elected ourselves the champions ; 
 and the war would have appeared a mere w^ar of revenge and 
 reprisal, a circumstance always to be avoided where it is possi- 
 ble. The ablest and best men in the Batavian Republic, those 
 who felt the insults of France most acutely, and were suffering 
 from her oppressions the most severely, entreated our Govern- 
 ment, through their minister, that it would not make the state 
 of Holland the great ostensible reason of the war. The Swiss 
 patriots too believed, that we could do nothing to assist them at 
 that time, and attributed to our forbearance the comparatively 
 timid use which France has hitherto made of her absolute pow- 
 er over that country. Besides Austria, whom the changes on 
 the Continent much more nearly concerned than England, ha- 
 ving refused all co-operation with us, there is reason to fear 
 that an opinion (destructive of the one great blessing purcha- 
 sed by the peace, our national unanimity) would have takert 
 root in the popular mind, that these changes were mere pretexts. 
 Neither should we forget, that the last war had left a dislike in 
 our countrymen to continental interference, and a not unplausi- 
 ble persuasion, that where a nation has not sufficient sensibility 
 to its wrongs to commence a war against the aggressor, unbri- 
 bed and ungoaded by Great Britain, a war begun by the Go- 
 vernment of such a nation, at the instance of our Government, 
 has little chance of other than a disastrous result, considering 
 the character and revolutionary resources of the enemy. What- 
 ever may be the strength or weakness of this argument, it is 
 however certain, that there was a strong predilection in the 
 British people for a cause indisputably and peculiarly British. 
 30
 
 234 
 
 And this feeling is not altogether ungrounded. In practical po- 
 litics and the great expenditures of national power, we must 
 not pretend to be too far-sighted : otherwise even a transient 
 peace would be impossible among the European nations. To 
 future and distant evils we may always oppose the various un- 
 foreseen events that are ripening in the womb of the future. 
 Lastly, it is chiefly to immediate and unequivocal attacks on 
 our own interests and honour, that we attach the notion of 
 Right with a full and efficient feeling. Now, though we may 
 be first stimulated to action by probabilities and prospects of 
 advantage, and though there is a perverse restlessness in human 
 nature, which renders almost all wars popular at their com- 
 mencement, yet a nation always needs a sense of positive Right 
 to steady its spirit. There is always needed some one reason, 
 short, simple, and independent of complicated calculation in or- 
 der to give a sort of muscular strength to the public mind, 
 when the power that results from enthusiasm, animal spirits, 
 and the charm of novelty, has evaporated. 
 
 There is no feeling more honourable to our nature, few that 
 strike deeper root when our nature is happily circumstanced, 
 than the jealousy concerning a positive right, independent of 
 an immediate interest. To surrender, in our national charac- 
 ter, the merest trifle, that is strictly our right, the merest rock on 
 which the waves will scarcely permit the seafowl to lay its eggs, 
 at the demand of an insolent and powerful rival, on a shop- 
 keeper's calculation of loss and gain, is in its final, and assured- 
 ly not very distant consequences, a loss of every thing — of na- 
 tional spirit, of national independence, and with these, of the 
 very wealth for which the low calculation was made. This feel- 
 ing in individuals, indeed, and in private life, is to be sacrific- 
 ed to religion. Say rather, that by religion, it is transmuted into 
 a higher virtue, growing on an higher and engrafted branch, yet 
 nourished from the same root : that it remains in its essence 
 the same spirit, but 
 
 Made pure by Thought, and naturalized in Heaven ; 
 
 and he who cannot perceive the moral diff'erences of national 
 and individual duties, comprehends neither the one or the 
 other, and is not a whit the better Christian for being a bad 
 patriot. Considered nationally, it is as if the captain of a man 
 of war should strike and surrender his colours under the pre-
 
 235 
 
 tence, that it would be folly to risk the lives of so many good 
 Christian sailors for the sake of a/ew yards of coarse canvass ! 
 Of such reasoners we take an indignant leave in the words of 
 an obscure poet. 
 
 Fear never wanted arguments : you do 
 Reason yourselves into a careful bondage, 
 Circumspect only to your Misery. 
 I could urge Freedom, Charters, Country, Laws, 
 Gods, and Religion, and such precious names — 
 Nay, what you value higher, Wealth ! But that 
 You sue for bondage, yielding to demands 
 As impious as they're insolent, and have 
 Only this sluggish name — to perish full ! 
 
 Cartwright. 
 
 • And here we find it necessary to animadvert on a principle 
 asserted by Lord Minto, (in his speech, June 6th, 18U3, and 
 afterwards published at full length) that France had an un- 
 doubted right to insist on our abandonment of Malta, a right 
 not given, but likewise not abrogated, by the Treaty of Amiens. 
 Surely in this effort of candor, his Lordship must have forgot- 
 ten the circumstances on which he exerted it. The case is sim- 
 ply thus : the British government was convinced, and the French 
 government admitted the justice of the conviction, that it was 
 of the utmost importance to our interests, that Malta should re- 
 main uninfluenced by France. The French government binds 
 itself down by a solemn treaty, that it will use its best endea- 
 vors in conjunction with us, to secure this independence. This 
 promise was no act of liberality, no generous free-gift on the 
 part of France, No ] we purchased it at a high price. We dis- 
 banded our forces, we dismissed our sailors, and we gave up 
 the best part of the fruits of our naval victories. Can it there- 
 fore with a shadow of plausibility be affirmed, that the right to 
 insist on our evacuation of the island was unaltered by the 
 Treaty of Amiens, when this demand is strictly tantamount to 
 our surrender of all the advantages which we had bought of 
 France at so high a price ? Tantamount to a direct breach on 
 her part, not merely of a solemn treaty, but of an absolute bar- 
 gain? It was not only the perfidy of unprincipled ambition — the 
 demand was the fraudulent trick of a sharper. For what did 
 France ? She sold us the independence of Malta: then exerted 
 her power, and annihilated the very possibility of that indepen-
 
 236 
 
 dence, and lastly, demanded of us that we should leave it bound 
 hand and foot for her to seize without trouble, wdienever her 
 ambitious projects led her to regard such seizure as expedient. 
 We bound ourselves to surrender it to the Knights of Malta — 
 not surely to Joseph, Robert or Nicolas, but to a known order, 
 clothed with certain powers, and capable of exerting them in 
 consequence of certain revenues. We found no such order. 
 The men indeed and the name we found : and even so, if we 
 Jiad purchased Sardinia of its sovereign for so many millions of 
 money, which through our national credit, and from the equiva- 
 lence of our national paper to gold and silver, he had agreed 
 to receive in bank notes, and if he had received them — doubt- 
 less, he would have the bank notes, even though immediately 
 after our payment of them we had for this very purpose forced 
 the Bank Company to break. But would he have received the 
 debt due to him ? It is nothing more or less than a practical 
 2nm, as wicked though not quite so ludricrous, as the (in all 
 senses) execrable pun of Earl Godwin, who requesting basium 
 (i. e. a kiss) from the archbishop, thereupon seized on the 
 archbishop's manor of Baseham. 
 
 A Treaty is a writ of mutual promise between two independ- 
 ent States, and the Law of Promise is the same to nations as 
 to indivdiuals. It is to be sacredly performed by each party in 
 that sense in which it knew and permitted the other party to 
 understand it, at the time of the contract. Any thing short of 
 this is criminal deceit in individuals, and in governments impi- 
 ous perfidy. After the conduct of France in the affair of the 
 guarantees, and of the revenues of the order, we had the same 
 right to preserve the island independent of France by a British 
 garrison, as a lawful creditor has to the household goods of a 
 fugitive and dishonest debtor. 
 
 One other assertion of his Lordship's, in the same speech, 
 bears so immediately on the plan of The Friend, as far as it 
 proposed to investigate the principle of international, no less 
 than of private morality, that I feel myself in some degree un- 
 der an obligation to notice it. A Treaty (says his Lordship) 
 ought to be strictly observed by a nation in its literal sense, 
 even though the utter ruin of that nation should be the certain 
 and fore-know'n consequence of that observance. Previous to 
 any remarks of my own on this high llight of diplomatic virtue, 
 we will hear what Harrington has said on this subject. " A
 
 237 
 
 man may devote himself to death or destruction to save a na- 
 tion ; but no nation will devote itself to death or destruction to 
 save mankind. Machiavel is decried for saying, "that no 
 consideration is to be had of what is just or unjust, of what is 
 merciful or cruel, of what is honorable or ignominous, in case 
 it be to save a state or to preserve liberty :' which as to the 
 manner of expression may perhaps be crudely spoken. But to 
 immagine that a nation will devote itself to death or destruc- 
 tion any more after faith given, or an engagement thereto tend- 
 ing, than if there had been no engagement made or faith giv- 
 en, were not piety but folly." Crudely spoken indeed ! and 
 
 not less crudely thought : nor is the matter much mended by 
 the commentator. Yet every man, who is at all acquainted 
 with the world and its past history, knows that the fact itself 
 is truly stated : and what is more important in the present ar- 
 gument, he cannot find in his heart a full, deep, and downright 
 verdict, that it should be otherwise. The consequences of 
 this perplexity in the moral felings, are not seldom extensively 
 injurious. For men hearing the duties which would be bind- 
 ing on two individuals living under the same laws, insisted on 
 as equally obligatory on two independent states, in extreme 
 cases, where they see clearly the impracticability of realizing 
 such a notion ; and having at the same time a dim half-con- 
 sciousness, that two States can never be placed exactly on the 
 same ground as two individuals ; relieve themselves from their 
 perplexity by cutting what they cannot untie, and assert that 
 national policy cannot in all cases be subordinated to the 
 laws of morality : in other words, that a government may act 
 with injustice, and yet remain blameless. This assertion was 
 hazarded (I record it with unfeigned regret) by a Minister of 
 State, on the affair of Copenhagen. Tremendous assertion ! 
 that would render every complaint, which we make, of the 
 abominations, of the French tyrant, hypocrisy, or mere incen- 
 diary declamation for the simple-headed multitude ! But, thank 
 heaven ! it is as unnecessary and unfounded, as it is tremend- 
 ous. For what is a treaty ? a voluntary contract between two 
 nations. So we will state it in the first instance. Now it is 
 an impossible case, that any nation can be supposed by any oth- 
 er to have intended its own absolute destruction in a treaty, 
 which its interests alone could have prompted it to make. 
 The verj> thought is self-contradictory. Not only Athens (we
 
 - 238 
 
 will say ) could not have intended this to have been under- 
 stood in any specific promise make to Sparta ; but Sparta could 
 never have imagined that Athens had so intended it. And 
 Athens itself must have known, that had she even affirmed the 
 contrary, Sparta could not have believed — nay, would have 
 been under a moral obligation not to have believed her. Were 
 it possible to suppose such a case — for instance, such a treaty 
 made by a single besieged town, under an independent gov- 
 ernment as that of Numantium — it becomes no longer a state, 
 but the act of a certain number of individuals voluntarily sac- 
 rificing themselves, each to preserve his separate honor. For 
 the state was already destroyed by the circumstances which 
 alone could make such an engagement conceivable. — But we 
 have said, nations. — Applied to England and France, relative- 
 ly to treaties, this is but a form of speaking. The treaty is re- 
 ally made by some half dozen, or perhaps half a hundred indi- 
 viduals, possessing the government of these countries. Now 
 it is a universally admitted part of the Law of Nations, that an 
 engagement entered into by a minister with a foreign power, 
 when it was known to this power that the minister in so doing 
 had exceeded and contravened his instructions, is altogether 
 nugatory. And is it to be supj)osed for a moment, that a whole 
 nation, consisting of perhaps twenty millions of human souls, 
 could ever have invested a few individuals — whom, altogether 
 for the promotion of its welfare, it had intrusted with its gov- 
 ernment — with the right of signing away its existence ?
 
 ESSAY VTI. 
 
 Arnicas reprehensiones gratissime accipiamiis, oportet : etiam si reprehendi nort 
 meruit opinio nostra, vel Jianc propter causam, quod recte defendi potest. Si 
 vero iiifirmitas vel humana vel propria, etiam cum veraciter arguitur, non potest 
 non aliquantulum conlristari, melius tumor dolet cum curatur, quam duni ei 
 parcitur et non sanatur. Hoc enim est quod acute vidit, qui dixit : utiliores esse 
 Imvd raro inimicos objurgantes, quam arnicas objurgare metuentes. llli enim 
 dwm rixantur, dicimt aliquando vera qitce corrigamus : isti autem minoremy 
 quam oportet, exhibent justitice libertatem, dum amicitice timent exasperare dul- 
 cedinem. — Augustinus Hieronymo : Epist. xciii. Hierou Opera. To/ii. ii. p> 
 233. 
 
 Translation — Censures offered in friendliness, we ought to receive with grati- 
 tude : yea, though our o])inions did not merit censure, we should still be 
 thankful for tlie attack on them, were it only that it gives us an opportu- 
 nity of successfully defending the same. (For never doth an impoHant truth 
 spread its roots so uide or clasp the soil so stuhhornly, as when it has braved the 
 winds of controversy. There is a stirring and a far-heard music sent forth from 
 the tree of sound knoioledge, when its branches are fighting ivith the storm, which 
 passing onward shrills out at once TrutKs tnumph and its own defeat.) But '\€ 
 the infirmity of human nature, or of our own constitutional temperament, 
 cannot, even when we have been fairly convicted of error, but suffer some 
 small mortification, yet better suffer pain from its extirpation, than from the 
 consequences of its continuance, and of the false teridemess that had with- 
 held the remedy. This is what the ^oHto ol>&erver had in his mind, who 
 said, that upbraiding enemies were not seldom more profitable than friends 
 afraid to find fault. For the former amidst their quarrelsome invectives 
 may chance on some home truths, which we may amend in consequence ; 
 while the latter from an over delicate a])prehension of ruflling the smooth 
 surface of friendship shrink from its duties, and from the manly fi-eedom 
 which Truth and Justice demand. 
 
 Only a few privileged individuals are authorized to pass into 
 the theatre without stopping at the door-keeper's hox ; but ev- 
 ery man of decent appearance may put down the play-price there,
 
 240 
 
 and thenceforward has as good a right as the managers them- 
 selves not only to see and hear, as far as his place in the house, 
 and his own ears and eyes permit him, but likewise to express 
 audibly his approbation or disapprobation of what may be go- 
 ing forv/ard on the stage. If his feelings happen to be in uni- 
 son with those of the audience in general, he may without 
 breach of decorum persevere in his notices of applause or dis- 
 like, till the wish of the house is complied with. If he finds 
 himself unsupported, he rests contented with having once ex- 
 erted his common right, and on that occasion at least gives no 
 further interruption to the amusement of those who feel differ- 
 ently from him. So it is, or so it should be, in Literature. A 
 few extraordinary minds may be allowed to pass a mere opin- 
 ion : though in point of fact those, vvho alone are entitled to 
 this privilege, are ever the last to avail themselves of it. Add 
 too, that even the mere opinions of such men may in general 
 be regarded either as promissory notes, or as receipts referring 
 to a former payment. But every man's opinion has a right to 
 pass into the common auditory, if his reason for the opinion is 
 paid down at the same time : for arguments are the sole cur- 
 rent coin of intellect. The degree of influence to which the 
 opinion is entitled, should be proportioned to the weight and 
 value of the reasons for it ; and whether these are shillings 
 or pounds sterling, the man, who has given them, remains 
 blameless, provided he contents himself with the place to which 
 they have entitled him, and does not attempt by the strength of 
 lungs to counterbalance its disadvantages, or expect to exert as 
 
 „„ -c i''"*i" «i^ influence in the back seats of the upper eallerv, 
 as il he haa p..,^ . , ^ , , , . , , 
 
 n . r ^ , ;i gold and been seated in the stage box. 
 
 But unfortunateh , , , , , ..? ♦ ^^ 
 
 I , , , ' ^nd here commence ^^-o r<-'inis oi dilier- 
 
 ence between the theatric and the Literary Public) in the o-reat 
 theatre of Literature there are no authorized door-keepers • 
 for our anonymous critics are self-elected. I shall not fear the 
 charge oi calumny if I add, that they have lost all credit with 
 wise men, by unfair dealing: such as their refusal to receive 
 an honest man's money, (that is, his argument) because they 
 anticipate and dislike his opinion, while others of suspicious 
 character and the most unseemly appearance, are suffered to 
 pass without payment, or by virtue of orders which they have 
 themselves distributed to known partisans. Sometime, the 
 honest's man's intellectual coin is refused under pretence that
 
 241 
 
 it is light or counterfeit, without any proof given either by the 
 money scales, or by sounding the coin in dispute together with 
 one of known goodness. We may carry the metaphor still far- 
 ther. It is by no means a rare case, that the money is return- 
 ed because it had a different sound from that of a counterfeit, 
 the brassy blotches on which seemed to blush for the impudence 
 of the silver wash in which they were inisled, and rendered 
 the mock coin a lively emblem of a lie self-detected. Still 
 oftener does the rejection take place by a mere act of insolence, 
 and the blank assertion that the candidate's money is light or 
 bad, is justified by a second assertion, that he is a fool or knave 
 for offering it. 
 
 The second point of difference explains the preceding, and 
 accounts both for the want of established door-keepers in the 
 auditory of Literature, and for the practices of those, who un- 
 der the name of Reviewers volunteer this office. There is 
 no royal mintage for arguments, no ready means by which all 
 men alike, who possess common sense, may determine their 
 value and intrinsic worth at the first sight or sound. Certain 
 forms of natural Logic indeed there are, the inobservance of 
 which is decisive against an argument; but the strictest adhe- 
 rence to them is no proof of its actual (though an indispensable 
 condition of its possible) validity; in the arguer's own con- 
 science there is, no doubt, a certain value, and an infallible cri- 
 terion of it, which applies to all arguments equally : and this 
 is the sincere conviction of the mind itself. But for those to 
 whom it is offered, these are only conjectural marks ; yet such 
 as will seldom mislead any man of plain sense, who is both 
 honest and observant. These characteristics the Friend at- 
 tempted to comprize in the concluding paragraph of the Fourth 
 Essay of the Volume, and has described them more at large in 
 the Essays that follow, "On the communicating of Truth." If 
 the honest warmth, which results from the strength of the par- 
 ticular conviction, be tempered by the modesty which belongs 
 to the sense of general fallibility; if the emotions, which ac- 
 company all vivid perceptions, are preserved distinct from the 
 expression of personal passions, and from appeals to them in the 
 heart of others ; if the Reasoner asks no respect for the opinion, 
 as his opinion, but only in proportion as it is acknowledged by 
 that Reason, which is common to all men ; and, lastly, if he 
 supports an opinion on no subject which he has not previously 
 31
 
 242 
 
 examined, and furnishes proof both that he possesses the means 
 of enquiry by his education or the nature of his pursuits, and 
 that he has endeavored to avail himself of those means ; then, 
 and with these conditions, every human Being is authorized to 
 make public the gi'owids of any opinion which he holds, and 
 of course the opinion itself, as the object of them. Conse- 
 quently, it is the duty of all men, not always indeed to attend 
 to him, but, if they do, to attend to him with respect, and with 
 a sincere as well as apparent toleration. I should offend against 
 my own Laws, if I disclosed at present the nature of my con- 
 victions concerning the degree, in which this virtue of tolera- 
 tion is possessed and practised by the majority of my contem- 
 poraries and countrymen. But if the contrary temper is felt 
 and shewn in instances where all the conditions have been ob- 
 served, which have been stated at full in the preliminary num- 
 bers that form the Introduction of this Work, and the chief of 
 which I have just now recapitulated; I have no hesitation in 
 declaring that whatever the opinion may be, and however op- 
 posite to the hearer's or reader's previous persuasions, one or 
 other or all of the following defects must be taken for granted. 
 Either the intolerant person is not master of the grounds on 
 which his own faith is built: which therefore neither is or can 
 be his own faith, tbough it may very easily be his imagined 
 intei'est, and his habit of thought. In this case he is angry, not 
 at the opposition to Truth, but at the interruption of his own 
 indolence and intellectual slumber, or possibly at the apprehen- 
 sion, that his temporal advantages are threatened, or at least the 
 ease of mind, in which he had been accustomed to enjoy them. 
 Or, secondly, he has no love of Truth for its own sake ; no re- 
 verence for the divine command to seek earnestly after it, which 
 command, if it had not been so often and solemnly given by 
 Revelation, is yet involved and expressed in the gift of Reason 
 and in the dependence of all our virtues on its developement. 
 He has no moral and religious awe for freedom of thought, 
 though accompanied both by sincerity and humility ; nor for 
 the right of free communication which is ordained by God, to- 
 gether with that freedom, if it be true that God has ordained 
 us to live in society, and has made the progressive improvement 
 of all and each of us depend on the reciprocal aids, which di- 
 rectly or indirectly each supplies to all, and all to each. But if 
 his alarm and his consequent intolerance, are occasioned by his
 
 CM^^ 
 
 243 
 
 eternal rather than temporal interests, and if as is most com- 
 monly the case, he does not deceive himself on this point, 
 gloomy indeed, and erroneous beyond idolatry, must have been 
 his notions of the Supreme Being ! For surely the poor Heathen 
 who represents to himself the divine attributes of wisdom, jus- 
 tice, and mercy, under multiplied and forbidden symbols in the 
 powers of Nature or the souls of extraordinary men, practises 
 a superstition which (though at once the cause and effect of 
 blindness and sensuality) is less incompatible with inward pie- 
 ty and true religious feeling, than the creed of that man, who 
 in the spirit of his practice, though not in direct words, loses 
 sight of all these attributes, and substitutes " servile and thrall- 
 like fear instead of the adoptive and cheerful boldness, which 
 our new alliance with God requires of us as Christians."* Such 
 fear-ridden and thence angry believers, or rather acquiescents^ 
 would do well to re-peruse the book of Job, and observe the 
 sentence passed by the all-just on the friends of the sufferer, 
 who had hoped, like venal advocates, to pwchase the favor of 
 deity by uttering truths of which in their own hearts they had 
 neither conviction nor comprehension. The Truth from the 
 
 LIPS DID NOT ATONE FOR THE LIE IN THE HEART, wllilo the 
 
 rashness of agony in the searching and bewildered complainant, 
 was forgiven in consideration of his sincerity and integrity 
 in not disguising the true dictates of his Reason and Con- 
 science, but avowing his incapability of solving a problem by 
 his Reason, which before the Christian dispensation the Al- 
 mighty was pleased to solve only by declaring it to be beyond 
 the limits of human Reason. Having insensibly passed into a 
 higher and more serious style than I had first intended, I will 
 venture to appeal to these self-obscurants, whose faith dwells 
 in the Land of the Shadow of Darkness, these Papists without 
 
 * Milton'' s Rifonnation hi England. " For in very deed, the superstitious 
 man by liis good will is an Atheist ; but being scared from thence by the 
 pangs of conscience, shuffles up to himself such a God and such a Worship 
 as is most accordant to his fear : which fear of his as also his hope, being fix- 
 ed only ui)on the flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his ai)prehension 
 carnal, and all the inward acts of worship issuing from the native strength of 
 the Soul, j-un out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a cruM of for- 
 mality. Hence men came to scan the Scriptures by the letter, ani in the co- 
 venant of our redemption magnified the external signs more than the quick- 
 ening power of the Spirit.
 
 244 
 
 Pope, and Protestants who protest only against all protesting ; 
 and will appeal to them in words which yet more immediately 
 concern them as Christians, in the hope that they will lend a 
 fearless ear to the learned apostle, when he both assures and 
 labors to persuade them that they were called in Christ to all 
 perfectness in spiritual knowledge and full assurance of un- 
 derstanding in the mystery of God. There can be no end 
 without means : and God furnishes no means that exempt us 
 from the task and duty of joining our own best endeavors. 
 I'he original stock, or wild-olive tree of our natural powers, 
 was not given us to be burnt or blighted, but to be grafted on. 
 We are not only not forbidden to examine and propose our 
 doubts, so it be done with humility and proceed from a real 
 desire to know the Truth ; but we are repeatedly commanded 
 so to do : and with a most unchristian spirit must that man have 
 read the preceding passages, if he can interpret any one sen- 
 tence as having for its object to excuse a too numerous class, 
 who, to use the words of St. Augustine, qucerunt non ut fidem 
 sed ut infidelitatem inveniant : i. e. such as examine not to find 
 reasons for faith, but pretexts for infidelity.
 
 ESSAY VIII. 
 
 Such is the iniquity of men, that they euck in opinions as wild asses do the 
 wind, without distinguishing the wholesome from the comipted air, and 
 then hve upon it at a venture : and when all their confidence is huilt upon 
 zeal and mistake, yet therefore because they are zealous and mistake n 
 they are impatient of contradiction. Taylor's Epist. Dedic. to the Lib- 
 erty of Prophesying. 
 
 "If," (observes the eloquent Bishop in the 13th section of 
 the work, from which my motto is selected) " an opinion plain- 
 ly and directly brings in a crime, as if a man preaches treason 
 or sedition, his opinion is not his excuse. A man is neverthe- 
 less a traitor because he believes it lawful to commit treason ; 
 and a man is a murtherer if he kills his brother unjustly, al- 
 though he should think that he was doing God good service 
 thereby. Matters of fact are equally judicable^ whether the 
 principle of them he from within or from without^ 
 
 To dogmatize a crime, that is, to teach it as a doctrine, is it- 
 self a crime, great or small as the crime dogmatized is more or 
 less palpably so. You say (said Sir John Cheke, addressing 
 himself to the Papists of his day) that you rebel for your reli- 
 gion. First tell me, what religion is that which teaches you 
 to rebel. As my object in the present section is to treat of 
 Tolerance and Intolerance in the public bearings of opinions 
 and their propagation, I shall embrace this opportunity of se- 
 lecting the two passages, which I have been long inclined to 
 consider as the most eloquent in our English Literature, though 
 each in a very different style of eloquence, as indeed the au- 
 thors were as dissimilar in their bias, if not in their faith, as 
 two bishops of the same church can well be supposed to have 
 been. I think too, I may venture to add, that both the ex-
 
 246 
 
 tracts will be new to a very great majority of my readers. For 
 the length I make no apology. It was part of my plan to allot 
 two numbers of The Friend, the one to a selection from our 
 prose writers, and the other from our poets; but in both cases 
 Irom works that do not occur in our ordinary reading. 
 
 The following passages are both on the same subject : the 
 first from Taylor's Dissuasive from Popery : — the second from 
 a Letter of Bishop Bedell's to an unhappy friend who had de- 
 serted the church of England for that of Rome. 
 
 1. The Rise and Progress of a controversy, from the specu- 
 lative Opinion of an Individual to the Revolution or Intestine 
 War of a Nation. 
 
 This is one of the inseparable characters of an heretic ; he 
 sets his whole communion and all his charity upon his article ; 
 for to be zealous in the schism, that is the characteristic of a 
 good man, that is his note of Christianity ; in all the rest he ex- 
 cuses you or tolerates you, provided you be a true believer ; 
 then you are one of the faithful, a good man and a precious, 
 you are of the congregation of the saints, and one of the god- 
 ly. All Solifidians do thus ; and all that do thus are Solifidians, 
 the church of Rome herself not excepted ; for though in words 
 she proclaims the possibility of keeping all the commandments ; 
 yet she dispenses easier with him that breaks them all, than 
 with him that speaks one word against any of her articles, 
 though but the least ; even the eating of fish and forbidding 
 flesh in Lent. So that it is faith they regard more than chari- 
 ty, a right belief more than a holy life ; and for this you shall 
 be with them upon terms easy enough, provided you go not a 
 hair's breadth from any thing of her belief. For if you do, 
 they have provided for you two deaths and two fires, both in- 
 evitable and one eternal. And this certainly is one of the 
 greatest evils, of which the Church of Rome is guilty : for this 
 in itself is the greatest and un worthiest uncharitableness. But 
 the procedure is of great use to their ends. For the greatest 
 part of Christians are those that cannot consider things leisure- 
 ly and wisely, searching their bottoms and discovering their 
 causes, or foreseeing events which are to come after ; but are 
 carried away by fear and hope, by affection and prepossession : 
 and therefore the Roman doctors are careful to govern them as 
 they will be governed. If you dispute, you gain, it may be, 
 one, and lose five ; but if ye threaten them with damnation,
 
 247 
 
 you keep them in fetters ; for they that are, Hn fear of death, 
 are all their life time in bondage^* (saith the Apostle:) and 
 there is in the world nothing so potent as fear of the two 
 deaths, which are the two arms and grapples of iron by which 
 the church of Rome takes and keeps her timorous or conscien- 
 tious proselytes. The easy Protestant calls upon you from 
 scripture to do your duty, to build a holy life upon a holy faith, 
 the faith of the Apostles and first disciples of our Lord ; he 
 tells you if you err, and teaches ye the truth ; and if ye will 
 obey it is well, if not, he tells you of your sin, and that all sin 
 deserves the wrath of God ; but judges no man's person, 
 much less any states of men. He knows that God's judg- 
 ments are righteous and true ; but he knows also, that his mer- 
 cy absolves many persons, Avho, in his just judgment, were 
 condemned : and if he had a warrant from God to say, that he 
 should destroy all the papists, as Jonas had concerning the 
 Ninevites; yet he remembers that every repentance, if it be 
 sincere, will do more, and prevail greater, and last longer than 
 God's anger will. Besides these things, there is a strange 
 spring, and secret principle in every man's understanding, that 
 it is oftentimes turned about by such impulses, of which no 
 man can give an account. But we all remember a most won- 
 derful instance of it, in the disputation between the two Rey- 
 nolds's, John and William ; the former of which being a Papist, 
 and the latter a Protestant, met and disputed, with a purpose to 
 confute, and to convert each other. And so they did : for 
 those arguments, which were used, prevailed fully against 
 their adversary, and yet did not prevail with themselves. The 
 Papist turned Protestant, and the Protestant became a Papist, 
 and so remained to their dying day. Of which some ingen- 
 ious person gave a most handsome account in the following ex- 
 cellent Epigram, 
 
 Bella, inter geminos, plusquarn civilia, fratres 
 
 Traxerat ambiguiis Religionis apex. 
 Ille lefonnatae fidei propartibus instat : 
 
 Iste reformandain denegat esse fidem. 
 Propositis causae rationibus ; alter utrinque 
 
 ConcuiTere pares, et cecidere pai-es. 
 Quod fuit in votis, fratrem capit alter uterq ; 
 
 * Hebrews, ii. 15.
 
 248 
 
 Quod fuit in fatis, perdit uterque fidem. 
 Captivi gemini sine captivante fuerunt, 
 
 Et victor victi transfuga castra petit. 
 Quod genTis hoc pugnae est, ubi victus gaudet uterq ; 
 
 Et tamen alteruter se superasse dolet ? 
 
 But further yet, he considers the natural and regular infirmi- 
 ties of mankind ; and God considers them much more ; he 
 knows that in man there is nothing admirable but his ignorance 
 and weakness ; his prejudice,^ and the infallible certainty of 
 being deceived in many things ; he sees, that wicked men of- 
 tentimes know much more than many very good men ; and that 
 the understanding is not of itself considerable in morality, and 
 effects nothing in rewards and punishments ; it is the will only 
 that rules man, and can obey God. He sees and deplores it, 
 that many men study hard, and understand little , that they dis- 
 pute earnestly, and understand not one another at all; that 
 affections creep so certainly, and mingle with their arguing, that 
 the argument is lost, and nothing remains but the conflict of 
 two adversaries' affections ; that a man is so willing, so easy, so 
 ready, to believe what makes for his opinion, so hard to under- 
 stand an argument against himself, that it is plain, it is the prin- 
 ciple within, not the argument without, that determines him. 
 He observes also that all the world (a few individuals except- 
 ed ) are unalterably determined to the religion of their country, 
 of their family, of their society ; that there is never any con- 
 siderable change made, but what is made by war and empire, 
 by fear and hope. He remembers that it is a rare thing, to see 
 a Jesuit of the Dominican opinion ; or a Dominican ( until of 
 late) of the Jesuit; but every order gives laws to the under- 
 standing of their novices, and they never change. He consid- 
 ers there is such ambiguity in words, by which all Lawgivers 
 express their meaning ; that there is such abstruseness in mys- 
 teries of religion, that some things are so much too high for us, 
 that we cannot understand them rightly ; and yet they are so 
 sacred, and concerning, that men will think they are bound to 
 look into them, as far as they can ; that it is no wonder if they 
 quickly go too far, where no understanding, if it were fitted for 
 it, could go far enough ; but in these things it will be hard not 
 to be deceived ; since our words cannot rightly express those 
 things. That there is such variety of human understandings, 
 that men's faces differ not so much as their souls; and that if 
 there were not so much difFicnlty in things, yet they could not
 
 249 
 
 but be variously apprehended by several men. And hereto he 
 considers, that in twenty opinions, it may be that not one of 
 them is true ; nay, whereas Varro reckoned, that among the old 
 Philosophers there were eight hundred opinions concerning the 
 summum bonum, that yet not one of them hit the right. He 
 sees also that in all religions, in all societies, in all families, 
 and in all things, opinions differ ; and since opinions are too often 
 begot by passion, by passions and violence they are kept ; and 
 every man is too apt to overvalue his own opinion ; and out of 
 a desire that every man should conform his judgment to his that 
 teaches, men are apt to be earnest in their persuasion, and 
 overact the proposition ; and from being true as he supposes, he 
 w ill think it profitable ; and if you warm him either with con- 
 fidence or opposition, he quickly tells you it is necessary ; and 
 as he loves those that think as he does, so he is ready to hate 
 them that do not ; and then secretly from wishing evil to him, he 
 is apt to believe evil will come to him ; and that it is just it 
 should ; and by this time the opinion is troublesome, and puts 
 other men upon their guard against it ; and then while passion 
 reigns, and reason is modest and patient, and talks not loud like 
 a storm, victory is more regarded than truth, and men call God 
 into the party, and his judgments are used for arguments, and 
 the threatnings of the Scripture are snatched up in haste, and 
 men throw arrows, fire-brands, and death, and by this time all 
 the world is in an uproar. All this, and a thousand things more 
 the English protestants considering deny not their communion 
 to any Christian who desires it, and believes the Apostles' 
 Creed, and is of the religion of the four first general councils ; 
 they hope well of all that live well ; they receive into their bo- 
 som all true believers of w-hat church soever ; and for them 
 that err, they instruct them, and then leave them to their liber- 
 ty, to stand or fall before their own master. — 
 
 2. A Doctrine not the less safe for being the more charitable. 
 
 " Christ our Lord hath given us, amongst others, two infalli- 
 ble notes to know the church." "My sheep," saith he, " hear 
 my voice :" and again, " By this shall all men know that you 
 are my disciples, if ye love one another." — What, shall we stand 
 upon conjectural arguments from that which men say? We are 
 partial to ourselves, malignant to our opposites. Let Christ be 
 heard who be his, who not. And for the hearing of his voice — 
 
 O that it might be the issue ! But I see you decline it, there- 
 32
 
 250 
 
 fore I leave it also for the present. That other is that which 
 now I stand upon : "the badge of Christ's sheep." Not a like- 
 lihood, but a certain token whereby every man may know them ; 
 "by this," saith he, "shall all men know that ye are my disci- 
 ples, if ye have charity one towards another." — Thanks be to 
 God, this mark of our Saviour is in us which you with our 
 schismaticks and other enemies want. As Solomon found the 
 true mother by her natural affection, that chose rather to yield 
 to her adversary's plea, claiming her child, than endure that it 
 should be cut in pieces ; so may it soon be found at this day 
 whether is the true mother. Ours, that saith, give her the 
 living child and kill him not ; or yours, that if she may not 
 have it, is content it be killed rather than want of her will. 
 Alas! (saith ours even of those that leave her) these be my 
 children ! I have borne them to Christ in baptism : I have nour- 
 ished them as I could with mine own breasts, his testaments. 
 I would have brought them up to man's estate, as their free 
 birth and parentage deserves. Whether it be their lightness or 
 discontent, or her enticing words and gay shews, they leave 
 me : they have found a better mother. Let them live yet, 
 though in bondage. I shall have patience; I permit the care 
 of them to their father, I beseech him to keep them that they 
 do no evil. If they make their peace with him, I am satisfied : 
 they have not hurt me at all. Nay, but saith yours, I sit alone 
 as Queen and Mistress of Christ's Family, he that hath not me 
 for his Mother, cannot have God for his Father. Mine there- 
 fore are these, either born or adopted : and if they will not be 
 mine they shall be none. So without expecting Christ's sen- 
 tence she cuts with the temporal sv.ord, hangs, burns, draM^s, 
 those that she perceives inclined to leave her, or have left her 
 already. So she kills with the spiritual sword those that sub- 
 ject not to her, yea thousands of souls that not only have no 
 means so to do, but many which never so much as have heard, 
 whether there be a Pope of Rome or no. Let our Solomon be 
 judge between them, yea, judge you, Mr. Waddesworth ! more 
 seriously and maturely, not by guesses, but by the very mark 
 of Christ, which wanting yourselves you have unawares disco- 
 vered in us : judge, I say, without passion and partiality, ac- 
 cording to Christ's word : which is his flock, which is his church.
 
 ESSAY IX. 
 ON THE LAW OF NATIONS. 
 
 riQO'g Ttolsojg svduifioi'iuv xui dixuioav'vrjv itu via idico'rov tfinoaod-ev 
 riraytTui (pv'asi- to'vto)v de tu pei' "" av&Q(x)' mva dig tu x^iicc, la 8s 
 ■d-eia eig lo'v 'r]ye/jo^ra No'vv Sv'finavTa dsi: ^Xiiteiv, o'v/ 'wg nQog 
 ageiyg il fiOQior, alXa nqo'g aQSiijf if ugsraig ast 'v7to/iBi'ou~(ruP, 'wi; 
 Tiqo'g vo\uoi' livu fOf^tod'SioTvi'iu. 
 
 nluiMV Tiegl Noi.imv. 
 
 Translation. — For all things that regard the well-being and justice of a State 
 are pre-ordained and established in the nature of the individual. Of these 
 it behoves that the merely human (the temporal andjluxional) should be re- 
 ferred and subordinated to the Divine in rnan, and the Divine hi like man- 
 ner to the Supreme Mind, so however that the State is not to regulate its 
 actions by reference to any particular form and fragment of virtue, but 
 must fix its eye on that virtue, which is the abiding spirit and (as it were) 
 substratum in all the virtues, as on a law that is itself legislative. 
 
 It were absurd to suppose, that individuals should be under 
 a law of Moral obligation, and yet that a million of the same 
 individuals acting collectively or through representatives, should 
 be exempt from all law : for morality is no accident of human 
 nature, but its essential characteristic. A being absolutely 
 without morality is either a beast or a fiend, according as we 
 conceive this want of conscience to be natural or self-produ- 
 ced ; or (to come nearer to the common notion, though with 
 the sacrifice of austere accuracy) according as the being is 
 conceived without the law, or in unceasing and irretrievable 
 rebellion to it. Yet were it possible to conceive a man wholly 
 immoral, it would remain impossible to conceive him without a 
 moral obligation to be otherwise ; and none, but a madman, 
 will imagine that the essential qualities of any thing can be al- 
 tered by its becoming part of an aggregate ; that a grain of 
 corn, for instance, shall cease to contain flour, as soon as it is
 
 252 
 
 part of a peck or bushel. It is therefore grounded in the na- 
 ture of the thing, and not by a mere fiction of the mind, that 
 wise men, who have written on the h\w of nations, have al- 
 ways consideied the several states of the civilized world, as 
 so many individuals, and equally with the latter under a moral 
 obligation to exercise their free agency within such bounds, as 
 render it compatible with the existence of free agency in oth- 
 ers. We may represent to ourselves this original free agency, 
 as a right of commonage, the formation of separate states as 
 an enclosure of this common, the allotments awarded severally 
 to the co-proprietors as constituting national rights, and the 
 law of nations as the common register office of their title 
 deeds. But in all morality, though the principle, which is the 
 abiding spirit of the law, remains perpetual and unaltered, 
 even as that supreme reason in whom and from whom it has its 
 being, yet the letter of the law, that is, the application of it to 
 particular instances, and the mode of realizing it in actual 
 practice, must be modified by the existing circumstances. What 
 we should desire to do, the conscience alone will inform us ; 
 but how and when we are to make the attempt, and to what 
 extent it is in our power to accomplish it, are questions for the 
 judgment, and require an acquaintance with facts and their 
 bearings on each other. Thence the improvement of our 
 judgment, and the increase of our knowledge, on all subjects 
 included within our sphere of action, are not merely advanta- 
 ges recommended by prudence, but absolute duties imposed on 
 us by conscience. 
 
 As the circumstances then, under which men act as States- 
 men, are different from those under which they act as individu- 
 als, a proportionate difference must be expected in the practical 
 rules by which their public conduct is to be determined. Let 
 me not be misunderstood : I speak of a difference in the prac- 
 tical rules, not in the moral law itself which these rules point 
 out, the means of administering in particular cases, and under 
 given circumstances. The spirit continues one and the same, 
 though it may vary its form according to the element into 
 which it is transported. This dift'erence with its grounds and 
 consequences it is the province of the philosophical juspublic- 
 ist to discover and display : and exactly in this point (I speak 
 with unfeigned diffidence ) it appears to me that the Writers
 
 253 
 
 on the Law of Nations,* whose works I have had the oppor- 
 tunity of studying, have been least successful. In what does 
 the Law of Nations differ from the Laws enacted by a particu- 
 lar State for its own subjects ? The solution is evident. The 
 Law of Nations, considered apart from the common principle 
 of all morality, is not fixed or positive in itself, nor supplied 
 with any regular means of being enforced. Like those duties 
 in private life which, for the same reasons, moralists have enti- 
 tled imperfect duties (though the most atrocious guilt may be 
 involved in the omission or violation of them,) the Law of 
 Nations appeals only to the conscience and prudence of the 
 parties concerned. Wherein then does it differ from the moral 
 laws which the Reason, considered as Conscience, dictates for 
 the conduct of individuals ? This is a more difficult question ; 
 but my answer would be determined by, and grounded on the 
 obvious differences of the circumstances in the two cases. Re- 
 member then, that we are now reasoning, not as sophists or 
 system-mongers, but as men anxious to discover what is right 
 in order that we may practice it, or at least, give our suffrage 
 and the influence of our opinion in recommending its practice. 
 We must therefore confine the question to those cases, in which 
 honest men and real patriots can suppose any controversy to 
 exist between real patriotism and common honesty. The ob- 
 jects of the patriot are, that his countrymen should as far as 
 circumstances permit, enjoy what the Creator designed for the 
 enjoyment of animals endowed with reason, and of course de- 
 veloped those faculties which were given them to be developed. 
 He would do his best that every one of his countrymen should 
 possess whatever all men may and should possess, and that a 
 sufficient number should be enabled and encouraged to acquire 
 those excellencies which, though not necessary or possible 
 for all men, are yet to all men useful and honorable. He 
 
 * Grotius, Bykenshoek, Puffendorf. Wolfe, and Vatel ; to wliose works I 
 must add, as coinj>rizing wliatever is most valuable in the preceding 
 Authors, with many important inipi-ovemcnts and additions, Robinson's Re- 
 ports of the Causes of tlie Court of Admiralty under Sir W. Scott: to whom 
 international law is under no less obligation than the law of commercial pro- 
 ceedings was to the late Lord Mansfield. As I have never seen Sir VV. Scott, 
 nor either by myself or my connections enjoy the honor of the remotest ac- 
 quaintance with him, I trust that even by those who may think my opinion 
 erroneous, I shall at least not be suspected of intentional flatteiy.
 
 254 
 
 knows, that patriotism itself is a necessary link in the golden 
 chain of our affections and virtues, and turns away with indig- 
 nant scorn from the false Philosophy or mistaken Religion, 
 which would persuade him that Cosmopolitism is nobler than 
 Nationality, and the human race a sublimer object of love than 
 a people ; that Plato, Luther, Newton, and their equals, formed 
 themselves neither in the market nor the senate, but in the 
 world, and for all men of all ages. True ! But where, and 
 among whom are these giant exceptions produced ? In the wide 
 empires of Asia, where millions of human beings acknowledge 
 no other bond but that of a common slavery, and are distin- 
 guished on the map but by a name which themselves perhaps 
 never heard, or hearing abhor? No ! In a circle defined by hu- 
 man affections, the first firm sod within which becomes sacred 
 beneath the quickened step of the returning citizen — here, 
 where the powers and interests of men spread without confu- 
 sion through a common sphere, like the vibrations propagated 
 in the air by a single voice, distinct yet coherent, and all uni- 
 ting to express one thought and the same feeling ! here, where 
 even the common soldier dares force a passage for his comrades 
 by gathering up the bayonets of the enemy into his own breast : 
 because his country ^^ expected every man to do his duty /" and 
 this not after he has been hardened by habit, but, as probably, 
 in his first battle ; not reckless or hopeless, but braving death 
 from a keener sensibility to those blessings which make life 
 dear, to those qualities which render himself worthy to enjoy 
 them ? Here, where the royal crown is loved and worshipped 
 as a glory around the sainted head of Freedom ! Where the 
 rustic at his plough whistles with equal enthusiasm, " God save 
 the King^^'' and " Britons never shall he Slaves ;" or, perhaps, 
 leaves one thistle unweeded in his garden, because it is the sym- 
 bol of his dear native land !* Here, from within this circle de- 
 
 * I cannot here refuse myself the pleasure of recording a speech of the 
 Poet Burns, related to nie by the lady to whom it was addressed. Having 
 been asked by her, why in his more serious jjoems he had not changed the 
 two or three Scotch words which seemed only to disturb the purity of the 
 style ? the Poet ^vitll great sweetness, and in his usual hajipiness in reply 
 answered why in truth it would have been better, but — 
 
 The rough bur-thistle spreading wide 
 Aniang the bearded bear,
 
 255 
 
 fined, as light by shade, or rather as light within light, by its 
 intensity, here alone, and only within these magic circles, rise 
 up the awful spirits, whose words are oracles for mankind, 
 whose love embraces all countries, and whose voice sounds 
 through all ages ! Here, and here only, may we confidently 
 expect those mighty minds to be reared and ripened, whose 
 names are naturalized in foreign lands, the sure fellow-travel- 
 lers of civilization ! and yet render their o-vvn country dearer 
 and more proudly dear to their own countrymen. This is in- 
 deed Cosmopolitism, at once the nursling and the nurse of pa- 
 triotic affection ! This, and this alone, is genuine Philanthro- 
 py, which like the olive tree, sacred to Concord and to Wis- 
 dom, fattens not exhausts the soil, from which it sprang, and in 
 which it remains rooted. It is feebleness only which cannot be 
 generous without injustice, or just without ceasing to be gene- 
 rous. Is the morning star less brilliant, or does a ray less fall 
 on the golden fruitage of the earth, because the moons of Sa- 
 turn too feed their lamps from the same Sun ? Even Germany,, 
 though curst with a base and hateftd brood of nobles and prince- 
 lings, cowardly and ravenous jackals to the very flocks en- 
 trusted to them as to shepherds, who hunt for the tiger and 
 whine and wag their tails for his bloody offal — even Germany,, 
 whose ever-changing boundaries superannuate the last year's 
 map, and are altered as easily as the hurdles of a temporary 
 sheep-fold, is still remembered with filial love and a patriot's 
 pride, when the thoughtful German hears the names of Luther 
 and Leibnitz. "Ah! why," he sighs, "why for herself in 
 vain should my country have produced such a host of immortal 
 minds !" Yea, even the poor enslaved, degraded, and barbarized 
 Greek, can still point to the harbour of Tenedos, and say, " there 
 lay our fleet when we were besieging Troy." Reflect a moment 
 on the past history of this wonderful people ! What were they 
 while they remained free and independent ? when Greece re- 
 sembled a collection of mirrors set in a single frame, each having 
 its own focus of patriotism, yei all capable, as at Marathon and 
 
 I tiirn'd the weeder-clips aside 
 An' spar'd the symbol dear. 
 
 An author may be allowed to quote from his own poe;ns, when he does it 
 with as much modesty and felicity as Burns did in this instance.
 
 256 
 
 Platea, of converging to one point and of consuming a common 
 foe ? What were they then ? The fountains of light and civil- 
 ization, of truth and of beauty, to all mankind ! they were the 
 thinking head, the beating heart of the whole world ! They 
 lost their independence, and with their independence their pat- 
 riotism ; and became the cosmopolites of antiquity. It has been 
 truly observed (by the author of the work for which Palm was 
 murdered) that, after the first acts of severity, the Romans 
 treated the Greeks not only more mildly than their other slaves 
 and dependants, they behaved to them even affectionately and 
 with munificence. The victor nation felt reverentially the pre- 
 sence of the visible and invisible deities that give sanctity to 
 every grove, every fountain, and every forum. " Think (writes 
 Pliny to one of his friends) that you are sent into the province 
 of Achaia, that true and genuine Greece, where civilization, 
 letters, even corn, are believed to have been discovered; that 
 you are sent to administer the affairs of free states, that is, to 
 men eminently free, who have retained their natural right by 
 valor, by services, by friendship, lastly by treaty and by religion. 
 Revere the Gods, their founders, the sacred influences repre- 
 sented in those Gods, revere their ancient glory and this very 
 old age which in man is venerable, in cities sacred. Cherish 
 in thyself a reverence of antiquity, a reverence for their great 
 exploits, a reverence even for their fables. Detract nothing 
 from the proud pretensions of any state ; keep before thine 
 eyes that this is the land which sent us our institutions, which 
 gave us our laws, not after it was subjugated, but in compli- 
 ance with our petition."* And what came out of these men, 
 who were eminently free without patriotism, because with- 
 out national independence? (which eminent freedom, how- 
 ever, Pliny himself, in the very next sentence, styles the 
 shadow and residuum of liberty.) While they were intense 
 patriots, they were the benefactors of all mankind, legisla- 
 tors for the very nation that afterwards subdued and ensla- 
 ved them. When, therefore, they became pure cosmopolites, 
 and no partial aflections interrupted their philanthropy, and 
 when yet they retained their country, their language, and their 
 arts, what noble works, what mighty discoveries may we not 
 expect from them ? If the applause of a little city (a first rate 
 
 Plin. Epist. Lib. VIII.
 
 257 
 
 town of a country not much larger than Yorkshire) and the 
 encouragement of a Pericles, produced a Phidias, a Sopho- 
 cles, and a constellation of other stars scarcely inferior in glo- 
 ry, what will not the applause of the world effect, and the 
 boundless munificence of the world's imperial master? Alas! 
 no Sophocles appeared, no Phidias was born ! individual genius 
 fled with national independence, and the best products were 
 cold and laborious copies of what their fathers had thought and 
 invented in grandeur and majesty. At length nothing remain- 
 ed, but dastardly and cunning slaves, who avenged their own 
 ruin and degradation by assisting to degrade and ruin their con- 
 querors ; and the golden harp of their divine language remain- 
 ed only as the frame on which priests and monks spun their 
 dirty cobwebs of sophistry and superstition ! 
 
 If then in order to be men we must be patriots, and patriot- 
 ism cannot exist without national independence, we need no 
 new or particular code of morals to justify us in placing and 
 preserving our country in that relative situation which is more 
 favorable to its independence. But the true patriot is aware 
 that this subject is not to be accomplished by a system of gen- 
 eral conquest, such as was pursued by Philip of Macedon and 
 his son, nor yet by the political annihilation of the one state, 
 which happens to be its most formidable rival : the unwise 
 measure recommended by Cato, and carried into effect by the 
 Romans, in the instance of Carthage. Not by the latter: for 
 rivalry between two nations conduces to the independence of 
 both, calls forth or fosters all the virtues by which national se- 
 curity is maintained. Still less by the former : for the victor 
 nation itself must at length, by the very extension of its own 
 conquests, sink into a mere province ; nay, it v*'ill most probably 
 become the most abject portion of the Empire, and the most cru- 
 elly oppressed, both because it will be more feared and sus- 
 pected by the common tyrant, aiid because it will be the sink 
 and centre of his luxury and corruption. Even in cases of ac- 
 tual injury and just alarm the Patriot sets bounds to the repri- 
 sal of national vengeance, and contents himself with such se- 
 curities as are compatible with the welfare, though not with 
 the ambitious projects of the nation, whose aggressions had 
 given the provocation : for as patriotism inspires no super-hu- 
 man faculties, neither can it dictate any conduct which would 
 
 require such. He is too conscious of his own ignorance of the 
 S3
 
 258 
 
 future, to dare extend his calculations into remote periods ; 
 nor, because he is a statesman, arrogates to himself the cares 
 of Providence and the government of the world. How does 
 he know, but that the very independence and consequent vir- 
 tues of the nation, which in the anger of cowardice he would 
 fain reduce to absolute insignificance, and rob even of its an- 
 cient name, may in some future emergence be the destined 
 guardians of his own country ; and that the power which now 
 alarms, may hereafter protect and preserve it? The experi- 
 ence of History authorizes not only the possibility, but even 
 the probability of such an event. An American commander, 
 who has deserved and received the highest honors which his 
 grateful country, through her assembled Representatives, could 
 bestow upon him, once said to me with a sigh : In an evil 
 hour for my country did the French and Spaniards abandon 
 Louisiana to the United States. We were not sufficiently a 
 country before ; and should we ever be mad enough to drive 
 the English from Canada and her other North American Prov- 
 inces, we shall soon cease to be a country at all. Without lo- 
 cal attachment, without national honour, we shall resemble a 
 swarm of insects that settle on the fruits of the eaith to cor- 
 rupt and consume them, rather than men who love and cleave 
 to the land of their forefathers. After a shapeless anarchy, 
 and a series of civil wars, we shall at last be formed into ma- 
 ny countries ; unless the vices engendered in the process should 
 demand further punishment, and we should previously fall be- 
 neath the despotism of some military adventurer, like a lion, 
 consumed by an inward disease, prostrate and helpless, be- 
 neath the beak and talons of a vulture, or yet meaner bird of 
 prey. 
 
 ,--- ^ 
 
 "u V
 
 ESSAY X. 
 
 0,Ti jUEv TTQo'g ro'p tS d'lov nlo'viov, ftu IXov 8e ttqo" cjlcpuvjaa^u noXebig 
 anu'uTjg, o" nurruxv ^■'^' ovdu/ntf tci, (f^^si f.iu'ii'ijfiu xul eniTj/ devfiUf 
 Tov'xo xoifcfifiov y.ui aoipov tI do^ua&ijatTur jofv ds m'AAojj' xuruysXa' 
 o' TToliJixog- jnv'irjv nfv uniuv %Qif qa ranov' (ji]'ts u'D.o xaXor, fAj/rs 
 Tu ngo'g jo'v no'lef^oJ' (leyul.ongenwg "uaxeTr zug no'keig, Tofv noXl- 
 TWJ' jua'V ei'ioTB 'ovx uifuw'r d'l'TUjr, dv(TTV-(ov'rToi i' ye /"/''• Hufg 
 Xsyeig; JJuTg /iiey ov~v "uvrovg o' u Xeyoifi' av to naqa nuv du(nv;(fig, 
 olg ys ara'yxTj dlu Biov netvoj at nfv cpv;(ifv usi rifv <xvTi]r dia^eX- 
 
 ■&EIV. JJluTQJV, 
 
 Translation. — Whatever study or doctrine bears upon the wealth of the 
 whole, say rather on a certain Phantom of a State in toto, whicJi is every 
 where and no where, this shall be deemed most useful and wise ; and all 
 else is the state-craftman's scorn. Tliis we dare pronounce the cause why 
 nations torpid on their dignity in general, conduct their wars so little in 
 a grand and magnanimous spirit, while the Citizens are too often wretched, 
 though endowed with high capabilities by Nature. Hoiv say you? Nay, 
 how should I not call them wretched, who are under the luirelenting neces- 
 sity of wasting away their life in the mere search after tlie means of sup- 
 porting it? 
 
 Plato, de Legibus, viii. 
 
 In the preceding Essay we treated of what may be wisely 
 desired in respect to our foreign relations. The same sanity of 
 mind will the true Patriot display, in all that regards the internal 
 prosperity of his country. He will reverence not only what- 
 ever tends to make the component individuals more happy, and 
 more worthy of happiness : but likewise whatever tends to 
 bind them more closely together as a people ; that as a multi- 
 tude of parts and functions make up one human body, so the 
 whole multitude of of his countrymen may, by the visible and 
 invisible influences of religion, language, laws, customs, and
 
 260 
 
 the reciprocal dependence and re-action of trade and agri- 
 culture, be organized into one body politic. But much as he 
 desires to see all become a whole, he places limits even to 
 this wish, and abhors that system of policy, which would blend 
 men into a state by the dissolution of all those virtues which 
 make them happ}' and estima])le as individuals. Sir James 
 Stuart (Poiit. Econ. Vol. I. p. 8S.) after stating the case of the 
 vine-dresser, who is proprietor of a bit of land, on which grain 
 (enough, and no more) is raised for himself and family — and 
 who provides for their other wants of clothing, salt, &c. by his 
 extra labor, as a vine dresser, observes — " From this example 
 we discover the difference between Agriculture exercised as 
 a trade, and as a direct means of subsisting. We have the 
 two species in tlie vine-dresser : he labours the vineyard as a 
 trade, and his spot of ground for subsistence. We may farther 
 conclude, that as to the last part he is only useful to himself; 
 but as to the first, he is useful to the societv and becomes a 
 member of it ; consequently were it not for his trade the State 
 would lose nothing, although the vine-dresser and his land were 
 both swallowed up by an earthquake." 
 
 Now this contains the sublime philosophy of the sect of 
 Economists. They worship a kind of non-entity under the 
 different words, the State, the Whole, the Society, &c. and to 
 this idol they make bloodier sacrifices than ever the Mexicans 
 did to Tescalipoca. All, that is, each and every sentient Be- 
 ing in a given tract, are made diseased and vicious, in order 
 that eacli may become useful to all, or the State, or the Socie- 
 ty, — that is, to the word, all, the Word, State, or the word. So- 
 ciety. The absurdity may be easily perceived by omitting the 
 words relating to this idol — as for instance — in a former para- 
 graph of the same (in most respects) excellent work: " If it 
 therefore happens that an additional number produced do more 
 than feed themselves, then I perceive no advantage gained 
 from their production." What no advantage gained by, for 
 instance, ten thousand happy, intelligent, and immortal Be- 
 ings having been produced ? — yes ! but no advantage " to 
 this Society. — What is this Society ? this " Whole ?" this 
 " State ?" Is it any thing else but a word of convenience to 
 express at once the aggregate of confederated individuals liv- 
 ing in a certain district ? Let the sum total of each man's hap- 
 piness be supposed — 1000 ; and suppose ten thousand men pro- 
 duced, who neither made swords or poison, or found corn or
 
 261 
 
 clothes for those who did — but who procured by their labor 
 food and raiment for themselves, and for their children — would 
 not that Society be richer by 10,000,000 parts of happiness? 
 And think you it possible, that ten thousand happy hu.-.ian Be- 
 ings can exist together without increasing each others happi- 
 ness, or that it will not overHow into countless channels,* and 
 diffuse itself througli the rest of the Society. 
 
 The poor vine-dresser rises from sweet sleep, worships his 
 Maker, goes with his wife and children into his little plot — re- 
 turns to his hut at noon, and eats the produce of the similar 
 labor of a former day. Is he useful? No ! not yet. Suppose 
 then, that during the remaining hours of the day he endea- 
 voured to provide for his moral and intellectual appetites, by 
 physical experiments and philosophical research, by acquiring 
 knowledge for himself, and communicating it to his wife and 
 children. Would he be useful then ? " He useful ? The 
 state would lose nothing although the vine-dresser, and his land 
 were both swallowed up by an earthquake !" Well then, in- 
 stead of devoting the latter half of each day to his closet, his 
 laboratory, or to neighborly conversation, suppose he goes to the 
 vineyard, and from the ground which would maintain in health, 
 virtue, and wisdom, twenty of his fellow-creatures, helps to 
 raise a quantity of liquor that will disease the bodies, and de- 
 bauch the souls of an hundred — Is he useful noio ? — yes ! 
 — a very useful man, and a most excellent citizen !! 
 
 In what then does the law between state and^ state differ 
 from that between man and man ? For hitherto we seem to 
 have discovered no variation. The law of nations is the law of 
 common honestj^, modified by the circumstances in which States 
 differ from individuals. According to the friend's best un- 
 derstanding, the differences may be reduced to this one point: 
 that the influences of example in any extraordinary case, as the 
 possible occasion of an action apparently like, though in real- 
 
 * Well, and in the spirit of genuine philosopliy, does the poet describe 
 such beings as men 
 
 " Who being innocent do for that cause 
 
 Bestir them in good deeds" 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Providence, by the ceaseless activity which it has implanted in our natm-e, 
 has sufficiently guarded against an innocence without virtue.
 
 262 
 
 ity very different, is of considerable importance in the moral 
 calculations of an individual ; but of little, if any, in those of 
 a nation. The reasons are evident. In the first place, in 
 cases concerning which there can be any dispute between an 
 honest man and a true patriot, the circumstances, which at once 
 authorize and discriminate the measure, are so marked and 
 peculiar and notorious, that it is incapable of being drawn into 
 a precedent by any other state under dissimilar circumstances ; 
 except perhaps as a mere pretext for an action, w'hich had been 
 predetermined without reference to this authority, and which 
 w^ould have taken place, though it had never existed. But if 
 so strange a thing slioidd happen, as a second coincidence of 
 the same circumstances, or of circumstances sufficiently similar 
 to render the piior measure a fair precedent ; then if the one 
 action Avas justifiable, so will the other be ; and without any 
 reference to the former, which in this case may be useful as a 
 light, but cannot be requisite as an authority. Secondly, in 
 extraordinary cases it is ridiculous to suppose that the conduct 
 of states v/ill be determined by example. We know that they 
 neither will, nor in the nature of things can be determined by 
 any other consideration but that of the imperious circumstances 
 which render a particular measure advisable. But lastly, and 
 more important than ail, individuals are and must be under po- 
 sitive lavvs : and so very great is the advantage which results 
 from the regularity of legal decisions, and their consequent ca- 
 pability of being foreknown and relied upon, that equity itself 
 must sometimes be sacrified to it. For the very letter of a 
 positive law is part of its spirit. But states neither are, nor 
 can be, under positive laws. The only fixed part of the law 
 of nations is the spirit : the letter of the law consists wholly in 
 the circumstances to which the spirit of the law is applied. It 
 is mere puerile declamation to rail against a country, as having 
 imitated the very measures for which it had most blamed its 
 ambitious enemy, ii that enemy had previously changed all the 
 relative circumstr.nces which had existed for him^ and there- 
 fore rendered his conduct iniquitous ; but w hich, having been 
 remover^, however iniquitously, cannot w^ithout absurdity be 
 supposed any longer to control the measures of an innocent 
 nation, necessitated to struggle for its own safety : especially 
 when the measures in question were adopted for the very pur- 
 pose of restoring those circumstances.
 
 263 
 
 There are times when it would be wise to regard patriotism 
 as a light that is in danger of being blown out, rather than as 
 a fire which needs to be fanned by the winds of party spirit. 
 There are times when party spirit, w^ithout any unwonted ex- 
 cess, may yet become faction ; and though in general not less 
 useful than natural in a free government, may under particular 
 emergencies prove fatal to freedom itself. I trust I am writing 
 to those who think with me, that to have blackened a ministry, 
 however strong or rational our dislike may be of the persons 
 who compose it, is a poor excuse and a miserable compensation 
 for the crime of unnecessarily blackening the character of our 
 country. Under this conviction, I request my reader to cast 
 his eye back on my last argument, and then to favor me with 
 his patient attention while I attempt at once to explain its pur- 
 port and to shew its cogenc}^ 
 
 Let us transport ourselves in fancy to the age and country 
 of the Patriarchs, or, if the reader prefers it, to some small 
 colony uninfluenced by the mother country, which has not or- 
 ganized itself into a state, or agreed to acknowledge any one par- 
 ticular governor. We will suppose this colony to consist of from 
 twenty to thirty households or separate establishments, differing 
 greatly from each other in the number of retainers and in ex- 
 tent of possessions. Each household, however, possesses its 
 own domain, the least equally with the greatest, in full right ; 
 and its master is an independent sovereign within his own boun- 
 daries. This mutual understanding and tacit agreement we 
 may well suppose to have been the gradual result of many feuds, 
 which had produced misery to all and real advantage to none : 
 and that the same sober and reflecting persons, dispersed through 
 the different establishments, who had brought about this state of 
 things, had likewise coincided in the propriet}^ of some other 
 prudent and humane regulations, which from the authority of 
 these wise men on points, in which they were unanimous, and 
 from the evident good sense of the rules themselves, were ac- 
 knowledged throughout the whole colony, though they were 
 never voted into a formal law, though the determination of the 
 cases, to which these rules were applicable, had not been en- 
 trusted to any recognized judge, nor their enforcement delega- 
 ted to any particular magistrate. Of these virtual laws this, 
 we may safely conclude, would be the chief: that as no man 
 ought to interfere in the aff"airs of another against his will, so if
 
 264 
 
 any master of a household, instead of occupying himself with 
 the improvement of his own fields and flocks, or with the bet- 
 ter regulation of his own establishment, should be foolish and 
 wicked enough to employ his children and servants in breaking 
 down the fences and taking possession of the lands and pro- 
 perty of a fellow-colonist, or in turning the head of the family 
 out of his house, and forcing those that remained to acknow- 
 ledge himself as their governor instead, and to obey whomever 
 he might please to appoint as his deputy — that it then became 
 the duty and interest of the other colonists to join against the 
 aggressor, and to do all in their power to prevent him from 
 accomplishing his bad purposes, or to compel him to make 
 restitution and compensation. The mightier the aggressor, and 
 the weaker the injured party, the more cogent would the mo- 
 tive become for restraining the one and protecting the other. 
 For it was plain that he who was suflered to overpower, one by 
 one, the weaker proprietors, and render the members of their 
 establishment subservient to his will, must soon become an 
 overmatch for those who were formerly his equals : and the 
 mightiest would differ from the the meanest only by being the 
 last victim. 
 
 This allegoric fable faithfully pourtrays the law of nations 
 and the balance of power among the European states. Let us 
 proceed with it in the form of History. In the second or third 
 generation the proprietors too generally disregarded the good 
 old opinion, that what injured any could be real advantage to 
 none ; and treated those, who still professed it, as fit only to 
 instruct children in their catechism. Ry the avarice of some, 
 the cowardice of others, and by the corruption and want of 
 foresight in the greater part, the former state of things had 
 been completely changed, and the tacit compact set at nought 
 the general acknowledgment of which had been so instrumen- 
 tal in producing this state and in preserving it, as long as it 
 lasted. The stronger had preyed on the weaker, whose wrongs, 
 however, did not remain long unavenged. For the same sel- 
 fishness and blindness to the future, which had induced the 
 wealthy to trample on the rights of the poorer proprietors, pre- 
 vented them from assisting each other effectually, when they 
 were themselves attacked, one after the other, by the most 
 powerful of all : and from a concurrence of circumstances at- 
 tacked so successfully, that of the whole colony few remained,
 
 265 
 
 that were not, directly or indirectly, the creatures and depen- 
 dents of one overgrown establishment. Say rather, of its new 
 master, an adventurer whom chance and poverty had brought 
 thither, and who in better times w^ould have been employed in 
 the swine-yard, or the slaughter-house, from his moody tem- 
 per and his aversion to all tiie Arts that tended to improve either 
 the land or those that were to be maintained by its produce. 
 He was however eminent for other qualities, which w^ere still 
 better suited to promote his power among those degenerate co- 
 lonists: for he feared neither God nor his own conscience- The 
 most solemn oaths could not bind him ; the most deplorable ca- 
 lamities could not a^vaken his pity ; and when others were 
 asleep, he was either brooding over some scheme of robbery 
 and murder, or with a part of his banditti actually employed in 
 laying waste his neighbor's fences, or in undermining the walls 
 of their houses. His natural cunning, undistracted by any honest 
 avocations, and meeting with no obstacle either in his head or 
 heart, and above all, having been quickened and strengthened 
 by constant practice and favored by the times with all conceiva- 
 ble opportunities, ripened at last into a surprising genius for op- 
 pression and tyranny : and, as we must distinguish him by some 
 name we will call him IMisetes. The only estate, which remain- 
 ed able to bid defiance to this common enemy, w as that of Pam- 
 PHiLus, superior to Misetes in wealth, and his equal in strength ; 
 though not in the power of doing mischief, and still less in the 
 wish. Their characters were indeed perfectly contrasted : for 
 it may be truly said, that throughout the whole colony there was 
 not a single establishment which did not owe some of its best 
 buildings, the increased produce of its fields, its improved im- 
 plements of industry, and the general more decent appearance 
 of its members, to the information given and the encourage- 
 ments afforded by Pamphilus and those of his household. Who- 
 ever raised more than they wanted for their own establishment, 
 were sure to find a ready purchaser in Pamphiltis, and often- 
 times for articles which they had themselves been before accus- 
 tomed to regard as worthless, or even as nuisances : they recei- 
 ved in return things necessary or agreeable, and always in one re- 
 spect at least useful, that they roused the purchaser to industry 
 and its accompanying virtues. In this intercommunionall were 
 benefited : for the wealth of Pamphilus was increased by the in- 
 creasing industry of his fellow-colonists, and their industry need- 
 34
 
 266 
 
 ed the support and encouraging influences of Pamphilus's capital. 
 To this good man and his estimable household Misetes bore the 
 most implacable hatred, and had publicly sworn that he would 
 root him out ; the only sort of oath which he was not likely to 
 break by any want of will or effort on his own part. But for- 
 tunately for Pamphilus, his main property consisted of one com- 
 pact estate divided from Misetes and the rest of the colony by a 
 wide and dangerous river, with the exception of one small 
 plantation which belonged to an independent proprietor whom 
 we will name Lathrodacnus : a man of no influence in the 
 colony, but much respected by Pamphilus. They were indeed 
 relations by blood originally and afterwards by intermarriages ; 
 and it was to the power and protection of Pamphilus that 
 Lathrodacnus o\%ed his independence and prosperity, amid the 
 general distress and slavery of the other proprietors. Not less 
 fortunately^ did it happen, that the means of passing the river 
 were possessed exclusively by Pamphilus and his above men- 
 tioned kinsman ; and not only the boats themselves, but all the 
 means of constructing and navigating them. As the very ex- 
 istence of Lathrodacnus, as an independent colonist, had no 
 solid ground, but in the strength and prosperity of Pamphilus ; 
 and as the interests of the one in no respect interfered with 
 those of the other; Pamphilus for a considerable time remained 
 without any anxiety, and looked on the river-craft of Lathro- 
 dacnus with as little alarm, as on those of his own establishment. 
 It did not disquiet him, that Lathrodacnus had remained neutral 
 in the quarrel. Nay, though many advantages, which in peace- 
 ful times w^ould have belonged to Pamphilus, were now trans- 
 ferred to his Neighbor, and had more than doubled the extent 
 and profit of his concern, Pamphilus, instead of repining at this, 
 was glad that some good at least to some one came out of the 
 general evil. Great then was his surprise, when he discover- 
 ed, that without any conceivable reason Lathrodacnus had em- 
 ployed himself in building and collecting a very unusual num- 
 ber of such boats, as were of no use to him in his traffic, but 
 designed exclusively as ferry-boats: and what was still stran- 
 ger and more alarming, that he chose to keep these in a bay 
 on the other side of the river, opposite to the one small plant- 
 ation, along side of Pamphilus' estate, from which plantation 
 Lathrodacnus derived the materials for building them. Willing 
 to believe this conduct a transient whim of his neighbor's, oc-
 
 267 
 
 casioned partly by his vanity, and partly by envy ( to which 
 latter passion the want of liberal education, and the not suffi- 
 ciently cotuprehending the g'ounds of his own prosperity, had 
 rendered huu subject) Pamphilus contented himself for awhile 
 with urgent yet friendly remonstrances. The only answer, 
 which Lathrodacnus vouchsafed to return, was, that by the law 
 of the colony, which Pamphilus had made so many professions 
 of revering, every proprietor was an independent sovereign 
 within his own boundaries ; that the boats were his own, and 
 the opposite shore, to which they were fastened, part of a field 
 which belonged to him ; and, in short, that Pamphilus had no 
 right to interfere with the management of his property, which, 
 trifling as it might be, compared with that of Pamphilus, was 
 no less sacred by the law of the colony. To this uncourteous 
 rebuff Pamphilus replied with a fervent wish, that Lathrodacnus 
 could with more propriety have appealed to a law, as still sub- 
 sisting, which, he well knew, had been effectually annulled by 
 the unexampled tyranny and success of Misetes, together wi;h 
 the circumstances which had given occasion to the Lw, and 
 made it wise and practicable. He further urged, that this law 
 was not made for the benefit of any one man, but for the common 
 safety and advantage of all : that it was absurd to suppose that 
 either he (Pamphilus) or that Lathrodacnus himself, or any 
 other proprietor, ever did or could acknowledge this law in the 
 sense that it was to survive the very circumstances, of which 
 it was the mere reflex. Much less could they have even tacitly 
 assented to it, if they had ever understood it as authorizing one 
 neighbor to endanger the absolute ruin of another, who had 
 perhaps fifty times the property to lose, and perhaps ten times 
 the number of souls to answer for, and yet forbidding the in- 
 jured person to take any steps in his own defence ; and lastly, 
 that this law gave no right without imposing a corresponding 
 duty. Therefore if Lathrodacnus insisted on the 7'ights given 
 him by the law, he ought at the same time to perform the duties 
 which it required, and join heart and hand with Pamphilus in 
 his endeavors to defend his independence, to restore the former 
 state of the colony, and with this to re-enforce the old law in 
 opposition to Misetes who had enslaved the one and set at 
 nought the other. So ardently was Pamphilus attached to the 
 law, that excepting his own safety and independence there was 
 no price which he would not pay, no sacrifice Avhich he would
 
 268 
 
 not make for its restoration. His reverence for the very me- 
 mory of the law was such, that the mere appearance of trans- 
 gressing it would be a heavy affliction to him. In hope there- 
 fore of gaining from the avarice of Lathrodacnus that consent 
 w^hich he could not obtain from his justice or neighborly kind- 
 ness, he offered to give hira in full right a plantation ten times 
 the value of all his boats, and yet, whenever the colony should 
 once more be settled, to restore the boats : if he would only 
 permit Pamphilus to secure them during the present state of 
 things, on his side of the river, retaining whatever he really 
 wanted for the passage of his own household. To all these per- 
 suasions and entreaties Lathrodacnus turned a deaf ear ; and 
 Pamphilus remained agitated and undetermined, till at length 
 he received certain intelligence that Lathrodacnus had called a 
 council of the chief members of his establishment, in conse- 
 quence of the threats of Misetes, that he would treat him as 
 the friend and ally of Pamphilus, if he did not declare himself 
 his enemy. Partly for the sake of a large meadow belonging 
 to him on the other side of the river which it was not easy to 
 secure from the tyrant, but still more from envy and the irrita- 
 ble temper of a proud inferior, Lathrodacnus, and with him the 
 majority of his advisers (though to the great discontent of the 
 few wise heads among them) settled it finally that if he should 
 be again pressed on this point by Misetes, he would join him 
 and commence hostilities against his old neighbor and kinsman. 
 It is indeed but too probable that he had long brooded over this 
 scheme : for to what other end could he have strained his in- 
 come, and over-worked his servants in building and fitting up 
 such a number of passage-boats ? As soon as this information 
 was received by Pamphilus, and this from a quarter which it 
 was impossible for him to discredit, he obeyed the dictates of 
 self-preservation, took possession of the passage-boats by force, 
 and brought them over to his own grounds ; but without any fur- 
 ther injury to Lathrodacnus, and still urging him to accept a com- 
 pensation and continue in that amity which was so manifestly 
 their common interest. Instantly a great outcry was raised 
 against Pamphilus, who was charged in the bitterest terms with 
 having first abused Misetes, and then imitated him in his worst 
 acts of violence. In the calmness of a good conscience Pam- 
 philus contented himself with the following reply : "Even so, 
 if I were out on a shooting party with a quaker for my com-
 
 269 
 
 panion, and saw coming on towards us an old footpad and 
 murderer, who had made known his intention of killing me 
 wherever he might meet me ; and if my companion the Quaker 
 would neither give me up his gun, nor even discharge it as (we 
 will suppose) I had just before unfortuatelj discharged my own ; 
 if he would neither promise to assist me nor even promise to 
 make the least resistance to the robber's attempt to disarm him- 
 self; you might call me a robber for wresting this gun from 
 my companion, though for no other purpose but that I might at 
 least do for by myself, what he ought to have done, but would 
 not do either for or with me ! Even so, and as plausibly, you 
 might exclaim, O the hypocrite Pamphilus ! Who has not been 
 deafened with iiis complaints against robbers and footpads ? 
 and lo ! he himself has turned footpad, and commenced by rob- 
 bing his peaceful and unsuspecting companion of his double- 
 barrelled gun !" It is the business of The Friend to lay down 
 principles not to make the applications of them to particular, 
 much less to recent cases. If any such there be to which these 
 principles are fairly applicable, the reader is no less master of 
 the facts than the Writer of the present Essay. If not, the 
 principles remain ; and The Friend has finished the task which 
 the plan of his work imposed on him, of proving the identity 
 of international law and the law of morali(y in spirit, and the 
 reasons of their difference in practice, in those extreme cases 
 in which alone they have been allowed to differ. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 The preceding Essay has more than its natural interest for the 
 author from the abuse, which it brought down on him as the 
 defender of the attack on Copenhagen, and the seizure of the 
 Danish fleet. The odium of the measure rested wholly on the 
 commencement of hostilities without a previous proclamation 
 of war. Now it is remarkable, that in a work published ir.any 
 years before this event Professor Beck had made this very 
 point the subject of a particular chapter in his admirable Com- 
 ments on the Law of Nations : and every one of the circum- 
 stances stated by him as forming an except to the moral ne- 
 cessity of previous proclamation of war, concurred in the Co- 
 penhagen expedition. I need mention two only. First by the 
 act or acts, which provoked the expedition, the party attacked
 
 270 
 
 had knowingly placed himself in a state of war. Let A stand 
 for the D.^nish, B for the British, government. A had done 
 that which he himself was iuHj aware would produce immedi- 
 ate hostilities on the p.u t of B, the moment it came to the 
 knowledge of the latter. Tae act itse f was a waging of war 
 against B on the part of A. B therefore was the party attack- 
 ed : and common sense dictates, that to resist and baiile an ag- 
 gression requires no proclamation to justify it. 1 perceived a 
 dagger aimed at my back, in consequence of a warning given 
 me, just time enough to prevent the blow, knock the assassin 
 down, and disarm him : and he reproaches me with treachery, 
 because forsooth I had not sent hiai a challenge ! Secondly, 
 when the object which justifies and necessitates the war would 
 be frustrated by the proclamation. For neither State or Indi- 
 vidual can be presumed to have given either a formal or a tacit 
 assent to any such modification of a positive Right, as would 
 suspend and virtually annul the Right itself: the Right of self- 
 preservation, for instance. This second exception will often 
 depend on the existence of the first, and must alv ays receive 
 additional strength and clearness from it. That both of these 
 exceptions appertained to the case in question, is now notori- 
 ous. But at the time 1 found it necessary to publish the fol- 
 lowing comment, which 1 adapt to the present rifacciamento 
 of The Friend, as illustrative of the fundamental principle of 
 public justice ; viz. that personal and national morality, ever 
 one and the same, dictate the same measures under the same 
 circumstances, and diderent measures only as far as the circum- 
 stances are dilferent. 
 
 As my limits will not allow me to do more in the second, or 
 ethical section of The Friend, than to propose and develope my 
 own system, without controverting the systems of others, I shall 
 therefore devote the Essay, which follows this Postscript, to 
 the consideration of the problem : How far is the moral na- 
 ture of an action constituted by its individual circumstances? 
 
 It was once said to me, when the Copenhagen affair was in 
 dispute, "Vou do not see the enormity, because it is an affair 
 between state and state : conceive a similar case between man 
 and man, and you would both see and abhor it." Now, I was 
 neither defending or attacking the measure itself. My argu- 
 ments were confined to the grounds which had been taken 
 both in the arraigning of that measure and in its defence, be-
 
 271 
 
 cause I thought both equally untenable. I was not enough 
 master of facts to form a decisive opinion on the enterprize, 
 even for my own mind ; but I had no hesitation in affirming, 
 that the principles^ on which it was defended in the legislature, 
 appeared to me fitter objects of indignant reprobation than the 
 act itself. This having been premised, I replied to the asser- 
 tion above stated, by asserting the direct contrary : namely, 
 that were a similar case conceived between man and man, the 
 severest arraigners of the measure, would, on their grounds^ 
 find notbing to blame in it. How was I to prove this assertion ? 
 Clearly, by imagining some case between individuals living in 
 the same relations toward each other, in which the several 
 states of Europe exist or existed. My allegory, therefore, so 
 far from being a disguise, was a necessary part of the main ar- 
 gument, a case in jjoint^ to prove the identity of the law of 
 nations with the law of conscience. We have only to conceive 
 Individ lals in the same relations as states, in order to learn 
 that the rules emanating from international law, diff"er from 
 those of private honesty, solely through the difference of the 
 circumstances. 
 
 But why did not the Friend avow the application of the 
 principle to the seizure of tlie Danish fleet ! Because I did 
 not possess sufficient evidence to prove to otheis, or even to 
 decide for myself, that my principle was applicable to this par- 
 ticular act. In (he case of Pamphilus and Lathrodacnus, the 
 prudence and necessity of the measure was certain ; and, this 
 taken for granted, I shewed its perfect rightfulness. In the 
 aft'air of Copenhagen, 1 had no doubt of our right to do as we 
 did, supposing the necessity, or at least the extreme prudence 
 of the measure; taking for granted that there existed a mo- 
 tive adequate to the action, and that the action was an ade- 
 quate means of realizing the motive. 
 
 But this I was not authorized to take for granted in the real, 
 as I had been in the imaginary case. I saw many reasons for the 
 affirmative, and many for the negative. For the former, the 
 certainty of an hostile design on the part of the Danes, the 
 alarming state of Ireland, that vulnerable heel of the British 
 Achilles ! and the immense difference between military and na- 
 val superiority. Our naval power collectively might have defi- 
 ed that of t!ie whole world ; but it was widely scattered, and a 
 combined operation from the Baltic, Holland, Brest, and Lisbon,
 
 272 
 
 might easily bring together a fleet double to that which we could 
 have brought against it during the short time that might be ne- 
 cessary to convey thirty or forty thousand men to Ireland. On 
 the other hand, it seemed equally clear that Buonaparte needed 
 sailors rather than ships ; and that we took the ships and left 
 him the Danish sailors, whose presence in the fleet at Antwerp 
 turned the scale, perhaps, in favor of the worse than disastrous 
 expedition to Walcheren. 
 
 But I repeat, that the Friend had no concern with the mea- 
 sure itself; but only with the grounds or principles on which 
 it had been attacked or defended. Those who attacked it de- 
 clared that a right had been violated by us, and that no motive 
 could justify such violation, however imperious that motive 
 might be. In opposition to such reasoners, I proved that no 
 such right existed, or is deducible either from international law 
 or the law of private morality. Those again who defended the 
 seizure of the Danish fleet, conceded that it was a violation of 
 right; but afiirmed, that such violation was justified by the 
 urgency of Ihe motive. It was asserted (as I have before no- 
 ticed in the introduction to the subject) that national policy 
 cannot in all cases be subordinated to the laws of morality ; in 
 in other words, that a government may act with injustice, and 
 yet remain blameless. To prove this assertion as groundless 
 and unnecessary as it is tremendous, formed the chief object of 
 the whole disquisition. I trust then, that my candid judges 
 will rest satisfied that it is not only the profession and pretext 
 of The Friend, but his constant plan and actual intention, to 
 establish Principles ; that he refers to particular facts for no 
 other purpose than that of giving illustration and interest to 
 those principles : and that to invent principles with a view to 
 particular cases, whether with the motive of attacking or ar- 
 raigning a transitory cabinet, is a baseness which will scarcely 
 be attributed to the The Friend by any one who understands 
 the work, even though the suspicion should not have been pre- 
 cluded by a knowledge of the author.
 
 ESSAY XI. 
 
 Ja, ich bin der Atheist und Gottlose, der einer imagiiiaren Berechnungslehre, 
 einer blosen Eiiiliildiing von allgemeinen Folgen, die nie folgen konnen, 
 zuwider — lugen will, wie Desdemoxa sterbend log ; lugen undbetrilgen will, 
 wie der fur Orest sich darstellende Pylades ; Tempelraul) unternehmen, 
 wie David; ja, Aehren aiisiaiifen am Saljbath, audi nur darum, weil mich 
 hungert, und das Gesetz um des menschen tvillen gemacht ist, nicht derMensch 
 um des Gezdzes willen. Jacobi an Fichte. 
 
 Translation. — Yes, I am that Atheist, that godless person, who in opposition 
 to an imaginary Doctrine of Calculation, to a mere ideal Fabric of gen- 
 eral Consequences, that can never be realized, would lie, as the djdng Des- 
 DEMOXA lied;* lie and deceive as Pylades when he personated Orestes; 
 would conmiit saorilcge with David; yea and pluck ears of corn on the 
 Sabbath, for no other reason than that I was fainting from lack of food, 
 and that the Law was made for Man and not Man for the Law. 
 
 Jacobi's letter to Fichte. 
 
 If there be no better doctrine, I would add — Much and of- 
 ten have I suffered from having ventured to avow my doubts 
 concerning the truth of certain opinions, which had been sanc- 
 tified in the minds of many hearers, by the authority of some 
 reigning great name ; even though in addition to my own rea- 
 sons, I had all the greatest names from the Reformation to the 
 
 * (Emilia. — O who hath done 
 This deed ? 
 
 Desd. Nobody. I myself. Farewell. 
 
 Commend me to my kind Lord. — O — farewell. 
 
 Othello. — You heard her say yourself, It was not I. 
 
 (Emilia. — She said so. I must needs report the truth. 
 
 Othello. — She's like a liar gone to burning hell ! 
 
 'Twas I that killed her! 
 (EmUia. — The more angel she! 
 
 35
 
 274 
 
 Revolution on my side. I could not, therefore, summon cour- 
 age, without some previous pioneering, to declare publicly, that 
 the principles of morality taught in the present work will be 
 in direct opposition to the system of the late Dr. Paley. This 
 confession I should have deferred to future time, if my opin- 
 ions on the grounds of international morality had not been con- 
 tradictory to a fundamental point in Paley's System of moral 
 and political Philosophy. I mean that chapter which treats of 
 GENERAL, CONSEQUENCES, as the chief and best criterion of the 
 right or wrong of particular actions. Now this doctrine I con- 
 ceive to be neither tenable in reason nor safe in practice : and 
 the following are the grounds of my opinion. 
 
 First ; this criterion is purely ideal, and so far possesses no 
 advantages over the former systems of Morality : while it la- 
 bours under defects, with which those are not justly chargea- 
 ble. It is ideal : for it depends on, and must vary with, the 
 notions of the individual, who in order to determine the nature 
 of an action is to make the calculation of its general conse- 
 quences. Here, as in all other calculation, the result depends 
 on that faculty of the soul in the degrees of which men most 
 vary from each other, and which is itself most affected by acci- 
 dental advantages or disadvantages of education, natural tal- 
 ent, and acquired knowledge — the faculty, I mean, of foresight 
 and systematic comprehension. But surely morality, which is 
 of equal importance to all men, ought to be grounded, if pos- 
 sible, in that part of our nature which in all men may and 
 ought to be the same : in the conscience and the common 
 sense. Secondly : this criterion confounds morality with law ; 
 and when the author adds, that in all probability the divine 
 Justice will be regulated in the final judgment by a similar 
 rule, he draws away the attention from the will, that is, from 
 the inward motives and impulses which constitute the essence 
 of morality, to the outward act : and thus changes the virtue 
 commanded by the gospel into the mere legality, which was 
 to be enlivened by it. One of the most persuasive, if not one 
 of the strongest, arguments for a future state, rests on the be- 
 lief, that although by the necessity of things our outward and 
 temporal welfare must be regulated by our outward actions, 
 which alone can be the objects and guides of human law, there 
 must yet needs come a juster and more appropriate sentence 
 hereafter, in which our intentions will be considered, and our
 
 275 
 
 happiness and misery made to accord with the grounds of our 
 actions. Our fellow-creatures can only judge what we are by 
 what we do ; but in the eye of our Maker what we do is of 
 no worth, except as it flows from what we are. Though the 
 fig-tree should produce no visible fruit, yet if the living sap is 
 in it, and if it has struggled to put forth buds and blossoms 
 which have been prevented from maturing by inevitable con- 
 tingencies of tempests or untimely frosts, the virtuous sap will 
 be accounted as fruit : and the curse of barrenness will light 
 on many a tree, from the boughs of which hundreds have been 
 satisfied, because the omniscient judge knows that the fruits 
 were threaded to the boughs artificially by the outward work- 
 ing of base fear and selfish hopes, and were neither nourished by 
 the love of God or of man, nor grew out of the graces engraft- 
 ed on the stock by religion. This is not, indeed, all that is 
 meant in the apostle's use of the word, faith, as the sole prin- 
 ciple of justification, but it is included in his meaning and forms 
 an essential part of it, and I can conceive nothing more ground- 
 less, than the alarm, that this doctrine may be prejudicial to 
 outward utility and active well-doing. To suppose that a man 
 should cease to be beneficent by becoming benevolent^ seems to 
 me scarcely less absurd, than to fear that a fire may prevent 
 heat, or that a perennial fountain may prove the occasion of 
 drought. Just and generous actions may proceed from bad mo- 
 tives, and both may, and often do, originate in parts and as it 
 were fragments of our nature. A lascivious man may sacri- 
 fice half his estate to rescue his friend from prison, for he is 
 constitutionally sympathetic, and the better part of his nature 
 happened to be uppermost. The same man shall afterwards 
 exert the same disregard of money in an attempt to seduce that 
 friend's wife or daughter. But faith is a total act of the soul : 
 it is the whole state of the mind, or it is not at all ! and in this 
 consists its power, as well as its exclusive Avorth. 
 
 This subject is of such immense importance to the welfare of 
 all men, and the understanding of it to the present tranquillity 
 of many thousands at this time and in this country, that should 
 there be one only of all my Readers, who should receive con- 
 viction or an additional light from what is here written, I dare 
 hope that a great majority of the rest would in consideration of 
 that solitary effect think these paragraphs neither wholly unin- 
 teresting or altogether without value. For this cause I will
 
 276 
 
 endeavor so to explain this principle, that it maybe intelligible 
 to the simplest capacity. The apostle tells those who would sub- 
 stitute obedience for faith (addiessing the man as obedience per- 
 sonified) " Know that thou bearest not the Root, but the ROOT 
 thee'''' — a sentence which, methinks, should have rendered all 
 disputes concerning faith and good woiks impossible among 
 those who profess to take the Scriptures for their guide. It 
 would appear incredible, if the fact were not notorious, that 
 two sects should ground and justify their opposition to each 
 other, the one on the words of the apostle, that we are justified 
 by faith, i. e. the inward and absolute ground of our actions ; 
 and the other on ti;e declaration of Christ, that he will judge 
 us according to our actions. As if an action could be either 
 good or bad disjoined from its principle ! as if it could be, in 
 the christian ar.d only proper sense of the word, an action at 
 all, and not rather a mechanic series of lucky or unlucky mo- 
 tions ! Yet it rany be well worth the while to shew the beauty 
 and harmony of these twin truths, or rather of this one great 
 truth considered in its two prin-wipal bearings. God will judge 
 each man before all men : consequently he will judge us rela- 
 tively to man. But man knows not the heart of man ; scarcely 
 / does any one know his own. There must therefore be outward 
 ' and visible signs, by which men may be able to judge of the 
 inward state : and thereby justify the ways of God to iheir own 
 spirits, in the reward or punishment of themselves and their 
 fellow-men. Now good works are these signs, and as such be- 
 come necessary. In short there are two parties, God and the 
 human race : and both are to be satisfied ! first, God, who seeth 
 the root and knoweth the heart : therefore there must be faith, 
 or the entire and absolute principle. Then man, who can judge 
 only by the fruits : therefore that faith must bear fruits of right- 
 eousness, that principle must mrnifest itself by actions. But 
 that which God sees, that alone justifies ! V/liat man sees, does 
 in this life shew^ that the justifying principle may be the root of 
 the thing seen; but in the final judgment the acceptance of 
 these actions will shew, that this principle actually ivas the 
 root. In this world a good life is a jxresumption of a good man : 
 his virtuous actions are the only possible, though still ambigu- 
 ous, manifestations of his virtue : but the absence of a good 
 life is not only a presumption, but a proof of the contrary, as 
 long as it continues. Good works may exist without saving
 
 277 
 
 principles, and therefore cannot contain in themselves the prin- 
 ciple of salvation ; but saving principles never did, never can, 
 exist without good works. On a subject of such infinite impor- 
 tance, I have feared prolixity less than obscurity. Men often 
 talk against faith, and make strange monsters in their imagina- 
 tion of those who profess to abide by the words of the Apostle 
 interpreted literally: and yet in their ordinary feelings they 
 themselves judge and act by a similar principle. For what is 
 love without kind offices, wherever they are possible ? (and 
 they are always possible, if not by actions commonly so called, 
 yet by kind words, by kind looks ; and, where even these are 
 out of our power, by kind thoughts and fervent prayers ! ) yet 
 what noble mind would not be offended, if he were suppo- 
 sed to value the serviceable offices equally with the love that 
 produced them ; or if he were thought to value the love for 
 the sake of the services, and not the services for the sake of 
 the love ? 
 
 I return to the question of general consequences, considered 
 as the criterion of moral actions. The admirer of Paley's Sys- 
 tem is required to suspend for a short time the objection, which, 
 I doubt not, he has already made, that general consequences 
 are stated by Paley as the criterion of the action, not of the 
 agent. I will endeavor to satisfy him on this point, when I 
 have completed my present chain of argument, it has been 
 shewn, that this criterion is no less ideal than that of any for- 
 mer system : that is, it is no less incapable of receiving any ex- 
 ternal experimental proof, compulsory on the understandings 
 of all men, such as the criteria exhibited in chemistry. Yet, 
 unlike the elder Systems of Morality, it remains in the world 
 of the senses, without deriving any evidence therefrom. The 
 agent's mind is compelled to go out of itself in order to bring 
 back conjectures^ the probability of which will vary with the 
 shrewdness of the individual, Rut this criterion is not only 
 ideal : it is likewise imaginary. If we believe in a scheme of 
 Providence, all actions alike work for good. There is not the 
 least ground for supposing that the crimes of Nero were less 
 instrumental in bringing about our present advantages, than 
 the virtues of the Antonines. Lastly : the criterion is either 
 nugatory or false. It is demonstrated, that the ouly real conse- 
 quences cannot be meant. The individual is to imagine what
 
 278 
 
 the general consequences would be, all other things remaining 
 the same, if all men were to act as he is about to act. I 
 scarcely need remind the reader, what a source of self delusion 
 and sophistry is here opened to a mind in a state of temptation. 
 Will it not say to itself, I know that all men will not act so: 
 and the immediate good consequences, which I shall obtain, are 
 reaZ, while the bad consequences are imaginary and improba- 
 ble ? When the foundations of morality have once been laid 
 in outward consequences, it will be in vain to recall to the mind, 
 what the consequences would be, were all men to reason in the 
 same way : for the very excuse of this mind to itself is, that 
 neither its action nor its reasoning is likely to have any conse- 
 quences at all, its immediate object excepted. But suppose the 
 mind in its sanest state. How can it possibly form a notion of 
 the nature of an action considered as indefinitely multiplied, 
 unless it has previously a distinct notion of the nature of the 
 single action itself, which is the multiplicand ? If I conceive a 
 crown multiplied a hundred fold, the single crown enables me 
 to understand what a hundred crowns are ; but how can the 
 notion hundred teach me what a crown is ? For the crown sub- 
 stitute X. Y. or abracadabra, and my imagination may multiply 
 it to infinity, yet remain as much at a loss as before. But if 
 there be any means of ascertaining the action in and for itself, 
 what further do we want ? Would we give light to the sun, or 
 look at our fingers through a telescope ? The nature of every 
 action is determined by all its circumstances : alter the circum- 
 stances and a similar set of motions may be repeated, but they 
 are no longer the same or similar action. What would a sur- 
 geon say, if he were advised not to cut off a limb, because if 
 all men were to do the same, the consequences would be dread- 
 ful ? Would not his answer be — " Whoever does the same un- 
 der the same circumstances, and with the same motives, will 
 do right ; but if the circumstances and motives are different, 
 what have I to do with it ?" I confess myself unable to divine 
 any possible use, or even meaning, in this doctrine of general 
 consequences, unless it be, that in all our actions we are bound 
 to consider the effect of our example, and to guard as much as 
 possible against the hazard of their being misunderstood. I will 
 not slaughter a lamb, or drown a litter of kittens in the pre- 
 sence of ray child of four years old, because the child cannot 
 understand my action, but will understand that his father has
 
 279 
 
 inflicted pain, and taken away life from beings that had never 
 offended him. All this is true, and no man in his senses ever 
 thought otherwise. But methinks it is strange to state that as 
 a criterion of morality, which is no more than an accessary ag- 
 gravation of an action bad in its own nature, or a ground of 
 caution as to the mode and time in which we are to do or sus- 
 pend what is in itself good or innocent. 
 
 The duty of setting a good example is no doubt a most im- 
 portant duty ; but the example is good or bad, necessary or un- 
 necessary, according as the action may be, which has a chance 
 of being imitated. I once knew a small, but (in outward cir- 
 cumstances at least) respectable congregation, four-fifths of 
 whom professed that they went to church entij'ely for the ex- 
 ample's sake ; in other words to cheat each other and act a 
 common lie ! These rational Christians had not considered, 
 that example may increase the good or evil of an action, but 
 can never constitute either. If it was o. foolish thing to kneel 
 when they were not inwardly praying, or to sit and listen to a 
 discourse of which they believed little and cared nothing, they 
 were setting a foolish example. Persons in their respectable 
 circumstances do not think it necessary to clean shoes, that by 
 their example they may encourage the shoe-black in continuing 
 his occupation : and Christianity does not think so meanly of 
 herself as to fear that the poor and afflicted will be a whit the 
 less pious, though they should see reason to believe that those, 
 who possessed the good things of the present life, were deter- 
 mined to leave all the blessings of the future for their more 
 humble inferiors. If I have spoken with bitterness, let it be 
 recollected that my subject is hypocrisy. 
 
 It is likewise fit, that in all our actions we should have con- 
 sidered how far they are likely to be misunderstood, and from 
 superficial resemblances to be confounded with, and so appear 
 to authorize actions of a very different character. But if this 
 caution be intended for a moral rule, the misunderstanding must 
 be such as might be made by persons who are neither very 
 weak nor very wicked. The apparent resemblances between 
 the good action we were about to do and the bad one which 
 might possibly be done in mistaken imitation of it, must be ob- 
 vious : or that which makes them essentially different, must be 
 subtle or recondite. For what is there which a wicked man 
 blinded by his passions may not, and which a madman will not,
 
 280 
 
 misunderstand ? It is ridiculous to frame rules of morality with 
 a view to those who are fit objects only for the physician or the 
 magistrate. 
 
 The question may be thus illustrated. At Florence there 
 is an unfinished bust of Brutus, by Michael Angelo, under 
 which a Cardinal wrote the following distich: 
 
 Diim Bruti effigicm sculptor tie luarmore finxit, 
 In menteni sceleris venit ; et absdnuit. 
 
 As the Sculptor ivas forming the effigy of Brutus, in marble, he recollected his 
 
 act of guilt and refrained. 
 
 An English Nobleman, indignant at this distich, wrote immedi- 
 ately under it the following : 
 
 Briitiun efRiixisset sculptor, sed mente recursat 
 Multa viri virtus; stetit et obstupuit. 
 The Scidptor looidd have framed a Brutus, but the vast and manifold virtue of 
 the man flashed upon his thought : he stopped and remained 
 in astonished admiration. 
 
 Now which is the nobler and more moral sentiment, the Ita- 
 lian Cardinal's, or the English Nobleman's ? The Cardinal 
 would appeal to the doctrine of general consequences, and pro- 
 nounce the death of Caesar a murder, and Brutus an assassin. 
 For (he would say) if one man may be allowed to kill another 
 because he thinks him a tyrant, religious or political phrenzy 
 may stamp the name of tyrant on the best of kings ; regicide 
 will be justified under the pretence of tyrannicide, and Brutus 
 be quoted as authority for the Clements and Ravilliacs. From 
 kings it may pass to generals and statesmen, and from these to 
 any man whom an enemy or enthusiast may pronounce unfit to 
 live. Thus we may have a cobbler of Messina in every city, 
 and bravos in our common streets as couimon as in those of 
 Naples, with the name Brutus, on their stilettos. 
 
 The Englishman would commence his answer by comment- 
 ing on the words "because he thinks him a tyrant." No ! he 
 would reply, not because the patriot thinks him a tyrant ; but 
 because he knows him to be so, and knows likewise, that the 
 vilest of his slaves cannot deny the fact, that he has by violence 
 raised himself above the laws of his country — because he knows 
 that all good and wise men equally with himself abhor the fact ! 
 If there be no such state as that of being broad awake, or no 
 means of distinguishing it when it exists ; if because men
 
 281 
 
 sometimes dream that they are awake, it must follow that no 
 man, when awake, can be sure that he is not dreaming ; if be- 
 cause an hypochondriac is positive that his legs are cylinders 
 of glass, all other men are to learn modesty, and cease to be so 
 positive that their legs are legs ; what possible advantage can 
 your criterion of general, consequences possess over any 
 other rule of direction ? If no man can be sure that w^hat he 
 thinks a robber with a pistol at his breast demanding his purse, 
 may not be a good friend enquiring after his health ; or that a ty- 
 rant (the son of a cobbler perhaps, who at the head of a regiment 
 of perjured traitors, has driven the representatives of his coun- 
 try out of the senate at the point of the bayonet, subverted the 
 constitulion which had trusted, enriched and honored him, tram- 
 pled on the laws which before God and Man he had sworn to 
 obey, and finally raised himself above all law) may not, in spite 
 of his own and his neighbors' knowledge of the contrary be a 
 lawful king, who has received his power, however despotic it 
 may be, from the kings his ancestors, who exercises no other 
 power than what had been submitted to for centuries, and been 
 acknowledged as the law of the country ; on what ground can 
 you possibly expect less fallibility, or a result more to be relied 
 upon in the same man's calculation of your general conse- 
 quences ? Would A,e, at least, find any difficulty in converting 
 your criterion into an authority for his act ? What should pre- 
 vent a man, whose perceptions and judgments are so strangely 
 distorted, from arguing, that nothing is more devoutly to be 
 wished for, as a general consequence, than that every man, who 
 by violence places himself above the laws of his country, should 
 in all ages and nations be considered by mankind as placed by 
 his own act out of the protection of law, and be treated by them 
 as any other noxious wild beast would be? Do you think it 
 necessary to try adders by a jury ? Do you hesitate to shoot a 
 mad dog, because it is not in your power to have him firil ii.'ed 
 and condemned at the Old Bailey? On the other hand, what 
 consequence can be conceived more detestable, than one which 
 w^ould set a bounty on the most enormous crime in human na- 
 ture, and establish as a law of religion and morality that the 
 accomplishment of the most atrocious guilt invests the perpe- 
 trator with impunity, and renders his person forever sacred and 
 inviolable ? For madmen and enthusiasts what avail your mo- 
 ral criterions ? But as to your Neapolitan Bravos, if the act 
 36
 
 282 
 
 of Brutus who " In pity to the general ivrong of Rome, Sleia 
 his best lover for the good of Rome,'''' authorized by the laws 
 of his country, in manifest opposition to all selfish interests in 
 the face of the Senate, and instantly presenting himself and 
 his cause first to that Senate, and then to the assembled Com- 
 mons, by them to stand acquitted or condemned — if such an 
 act as this, with all its vast out-jutting circumstances of distinc- 
 tion, can be confounded by any mind, not frantic, with the 
 crime of a cowardly skulking assassin who hires out his dagger 
 for a few crowns to gratify a hatred not his own, or even with 
 the deed of that man who makes a compromise between his 
 revenge and his cowardice, and stabs in the dark the enemy 
 whom he dared not meet in the open field, or summon before 
 the laws of his country — what actions can be so different, that 
 they may not be equally confounded ? The ambushed soldier 
 must not fire his musket, lest his example should be quoted by 
 the villain who, to make sure of his booty, discharges his piece 
 at the unsuspicious passenger from behind a hedge The phy- 
 sician must not administer a solution of arsenic to the lep- 
 rous, lest his example should be quoted by professional poi- 
 soners. If no distinction, full and satisfactory to the con- 
 science and common sense of mankind be afforded by the de- 
 testation and horror excited in all men, (even in the meanest 
 and most vicious, if they are not wholly monsters) by the act 
 of the assassin, contrasted with the fervent admiration felt by 
 the good and wise in all ages when they mention the name of 
 Brutus ; contrasted with the fact that the honor or disrespect 
 with which that name w^as spoken of, became an historic crite- 
 rion of a noble or a base age ; and if it is in vain that our own 
 hearts answer to the question of the Poet 
 
 " Is tliere among the adamantine spheres 
 Wheehng unshalien through tlie boundless void, 
 Aught that witli half such majesty can fill 
 The human bosom, as when Brutus rose 
 Refulgent from the stroke of Caesar's fate 
 Amid the croud of Patriots ; and his arm 
 Aloft fxtoiidjng, hke eteriialJove, 
 When guilt brings down the thunder, call'd idoud 
 On Tully's name, and shook his crimson sword, 
 And bade the Father of his Country, Hail ! 
 For lo the Tyrant prostrate on the dust 
 And Rome again is free !"
 
 283 
 
 If, I say, all this be fallacious and insufficient, can we have any 
 firmer reliance on a cold ideal calculation of imaginary gen- 
 eral CONSEQUENCES, wliich, if they were general, could not bo 
 consequences at all : for they would be eft'ects of the frenzy or 
 frenzied wickedness, which alone could confound actions so ut- 
 terly dissimilar? No ! (would the ennobled descendant of our 
 Russels or Sidneys conclude) No! Calumnious bigot! never 
 yet did a human being become an assassin from his own or the 
 general admiration of the hero Brutus; but I dare not warrant, 
 that villains might not be encouraged in their trade of secret 
 murder, by finding their own guilt attributed to the Roman 
 patriot, and might not conclude, that if Brutus be no better 
 than an assassin, an assassin can be no worse than Brutus. 
 
 I request that the preceding be not interpreted as my own 
 judgment on tyranicide. I think.with Machiaveland with Spin- 
 osa for many and weighty reasons assigned by those philoso- 
 phers, that it is diificult to conceive a case, in which a good 
 man would attempt tryrannieide, because it is difficult to con- 
 ceive one, in which a wise man would recommend it. In a 
 small state, included within the walls of a single city, and where 
 the tyranny is maintained by foreign guards, it may be other- 
 wise ; but in a nation or empire it is perhaps inconceivable, 
 that the circumstances which made a tyranny possible, should 
 not likewise render the removal of the tyrant useless. The 
 patriot's sword may cut off the Hydra's head ; but he possesses 
 no brand to stanch the active corruption of the body, which is 
 sure to re-produce a successor. 
 
 I must now in a few words ansv/er the objection to the for- 
 mer part of my argument (for to that part only the objection 
 applies,) namely, that the doctrine of general consequences 
 was stated as the criterion of the action, not of the agent. I 
 might answer, that the author himself had in some measure jus- 
 tified me in not noticing this distinction by holding forth the 
 probability, that the Supreme Judge will proceed by the same 
 rule. The agent may then safely be included in the action, if 
 ])oth here and hereafter the action only and its general conse- 
 quences will be attended to. Rut my main ground of justification 
 is that the distinction itself is merely logical, not real and vital. 
 The character of the agent is determined by his view of the 
 action ; and that system of morality is alone true and suited to 
 human nature, which unites the intention and the motive, the
 
 284 
 
 warmth and the light, in one and the same act of mind. This 
 alone is worthy to be called a moral principle. Such a prin- 
 ciple may be extracted, though not without difficulty and dan- 
 ger, from the ore of the stoic philosophy ; but it is to be found 
 unalloyed and entire in the Christian system, and is there call- 
 ed Faith. 
 
 ESSAY XII. 
 
 The following Address was delivered at Bristol, in the year 1794-95. Tlie 
 only omissions regard the names of persons : and I insert them here in sup- 
 port of the assertion made by me, p, 190 — 194, and because this very Lectnre 
 has been referred to in an infamons Libel in proof of the Author's former 
 Jacobinism. Different as my present convictions are on the subject of philo- 
 sophical Necessity, I have for tliis reason left the last page unaltered. 
 
 Aet ynQ Tt]Q Elevd-e.Qutg ecpie^iur noXla de sr xai, TOtg q)t}.£Xsvd-eQOis 
 fiiarjiEtt, ui'islev&eQu. 
 
 Translation. — For I am always a lover of Liberty ; but in those who would 
 appropriate the Title, I find too many points destructive of Liberty and 
 hateful to her genuine advocates. 
 
 Companies resembling the present will, from a variety of 
 circumstances, consist chiefly of the zealous Advocates for 
 Freedom. It will therefore be our endeavor, not so much to 
 excite the torpid, as to regulate the feelings of the ardent : 
 and above all, to evince the necessity of bottoming on fixed 
 Principles, that so we may not be the unstable Pal riots of Pas- 
 sion or Accident, nor hurried away by names of which we have 
 not sifted the meaning, and by tenets of which we have not
 
 285 
 
 examined the consequences. The Times are trying; and in 
 order to be prepared against their difficulties, we should have 
 acquired a prompt facility of adverting in all our doubts to some 
 grand and comprehensive Truth. In a deep and strong soil 
 must that tree fix its roots, the height of which is to " reach to 
 Heaven, and the sight of it to the ends of all the Earth." 
 
 The examj5le of France is indeed a " Warning to Britain." 
 A nation wading to their rights through blood, and marking the 
 track of Freedom by Devastation ! Yet let us not embattle our 
 Feelings against our Reason. Let us not indulge our malig- 
 nant passions under the mask of Humanity. Instead of railing 
 with infuriate declamation against these excesses, we shall be 
 more profitably employed in developing the sources of them. 
 French Freedom is the beacon which if it guides to Equality 
 should shew us likewise the dangers that throng the road. 
 
 The annals of the French Revolution have recorded in let- 
 ters of blood, that the knowledge of the few cannot counter- 
 act the ignorance of the many ; that the light of philosophy, when 
 it is confined to a small minority, points out the possessors as 
 the victims, rather than the illuminators, of the multitude. 
 The patriots of France either hastened into the dangerous and 
 gigantic error of making certain evil the means of contingent 
 good, or were sacrificed by the mob, with whose prejudices and 
 ferocity their unbending virtue forbade them to assimilate. 
 Like Sampson, the people w^ere strong — like Sampson, the 
 people were blind. Those two massy pillars of the temple of 
 Oppression, their Monarchy and Aristocracy, 
 
 With horrible Convulsion to and fro 
 
 They tugg'rl, tliey shook — till down they came and drew 
 
 The whole roof after them with burst of thunder 
 
 Upon the heads of all who sat beneath, 
 
 Lords, Ladies, Captains, Counsellors, and Priests, 
 
 Their choice nobility ! Milton. Sam. Agon. 
 
 The Girondists, who were the first republicans in power, 
 were men of enlarged views and great literary attainments ; 
 but they seem to have been deficient in that vigour and daring 
 activity, which circumstances made necessary. Men of genius 
 are rarely either prompt in action or consistent in general conduct. 
 Their early habits have been those of contemplative indolence ; 
 and the day-dreams, with which they have been accustomed 
 to amuse their solitude adapt them for splendid speculation
 
 286 
 
 not temperate and practicable counsels. Brissot, the leader of 
 the Gironde party, is entitled to the character of a virtuous man, 
 and an eloquent speaker ; but he was rather a sublime visionary, 
 than a quick-eyed politician ; and his excellences equally with 
 his faults rendered him unfit for the helm in the stormy hour of 
 Revolution. Eobespierre, who displaced him, possessed a 
 glowing ardor that still remembered the end, and a cool feroci- 
 ty that never either overlooked, or scrupled the means. What 
 that end was, is not known : that it was a wicked one, has by 
 no means been proved. I rather think, that the distant pros- 
 pect, to which he was travelling, appeared to him grand and 
 beautiful ; but that he fixed his eye on it with such intense ea- 
 gerness as to neglect the foulness of the road. If however his 
 intentions were pure, his subsequent enormities yield us a me- 
 lancholy proof, that it is not the character of the possessor which 
 directs the power, but the power which shapes and depraves the 
 character of the possessor. In Robespierre, its influence was as- 
 sisted by the properties of his disposition. — Enthusiasm, even in 
 the gentlest temper, v.^ili frequently generate sensations of an un- 
 kindly order. If Vve clearly perceive any one thing to be of 
 vast and infinite importance to ourselves and all mankind, our 
 first feelings impel us to turn with angry contempt from those, 
 who doubt and oppose it. The ardor of undisciplined benevo- 
 lence seduces us into malignity : and whenever our hearts are 
 warm, and our objects great and excellent, intolerance is the sin 
 that does most easily beset us. But this enthusiasm in Robes- 
 pierre was blended with gloom, and suspiciousness, and inor- 
 dinate vanity. His dark imagination v.'as still brooding over 
 supposed plots against freedom — to prevent tyranny he became 
 a tyrant — and having realized the evils which he suspected, a 
 wild and dreadful tyrant. — Those loud tongued adulators, the 
 mob, overpowered the lone whispered denunciations of con- 
 science — he despotized in all the pomp of patriotism, and mas- 
 queraded on the bloody stage of revolution, a Caligula with the 
 cap of liberty on his head. 
 
 It has been afiSrmed, and I believe with truth, that the sys- 
 tem of Terrorism by suspending the struggles of contrariant 
 factions communicated an energy to the operations of the Re- 
 public, which had been hitherto unknown, and without which 
 it could not have been preserved. The system depended for 
 its existence on the general sense of its necessity and when it
 
 287 
 
 had answered its end, it was soon destroyed by the same power 
 that had given it birth — popular opinion. It must not however 
 be disguised, that at all times, but more especially when the 
 public feelings are wavy and tumultuous, artful demagogues may 
 create this opinion : and they, who are inclined to tolerate evil 
 as the means of contingent good, should reflect, that if the 
 excesses of terrorism gave to the Republic that efficiency and 
 repulsive force which its circumstances made necessary, they 
 likewise afforded to the hostile courts the nxost powerful sup- 
 port and excited that indignation and horror, which every 
 where precipitated the subject into the designs of the ruler. 
 Nor let it be forgotten that these excesses perpetuated the war 
 in La Vendee and made it more terrible, both by the accession 
 of numerous partizans, who had fled from the persecution of 
 Robespierre, and by inspiring the Chouans with fresh fury, 
 and an unsubmitting spirit of revenge and desperation. 
 
 Revolutions are sudden to the unthinking only. Political 
 disturbances happen not without their warning harbingers. 
 Strange rumblings and confused noises still precede these earth- 
 quakes and hurricanes of the moral vrorld. The process of 
 revolution in France has been dreadful, and should incite us 
 to examine with an anxious eye the motives and manners of 
 those, whose conduct and opinions seem calculated to forward 
 a similar event in our own country. The oppositionists to 
 " things as they are," are divided into many and difl'erent class- 
 es. To delineate them with an unflattering accuracy may be a 
 delicate, but it is a necessary task, in order that we may en- 
 lighten, or at least beware of the misguided men who have en- 
 listed under the banners of liberty, from no principles or with 
 bad ones; whether they be those, who 
 
 admire they know not wliat, 
 And know not wlioni, but as one leads to the other : 
 
 or whether those, 
 
 Whose end is private hate, not help to fieedoni. 
 Adverse and turbulent when she would lead 
 To virtue. 
 
 The majority of democrats appear to me to have attained that 
 portion of knowledge in politics, which infidels possess in re- 
 ligion. 1 would by no means be supposed to imply, that the
 
 288 
 
 objections of both are equally unfounded, but that they both 
 attribute to the system which they reject, a'l the evils existing 
 under it; and that both contemphiting truth and justice "in the 
 nakedness of abstraction," condemn constitutions and dispensa- 
 tions without having suificiently examined the natures, circum- 
 stances and capacities of their recipients. The first class among 
 the professed friends of liberty is composed of men, who un- 
 accustomed to the labor of thorough investigation, and not par- 
 ticularly oppressed by the burthens of state, are yet impelled 
 by their feelings to disapprove of its grosser depravities, and 
 prepared to give an indolent vote in favor of reform. Their 
 sensibilities unbraced by the co-operation of fixed principles, 
 they offer no sacrifices to the divinity of active virtue. Their 
 political opinions depend with weather-cock uncertainty on the 
 the winds of rumor, that blow from France. On the report of 
 French victories they blaze into republicanism, at a tale of 
 French excesses they darken into aristocrats. These dovgh-ba- 
 ked patriots are not however useless. This oscillation of political 
 opinion will retard the day of revolution, and it will operate as a 
 preventive to its excesses. Indecisiveness of character, though 
 the effect of timidity, is almost always associated with benevo- 
 lence. 
 
 Wilder ieatures characterize the second class. Sufficiently 
 possessed of natural sense to despise the priest, and of natural 
 feeling to hate the oppressor, they listen only to the inflamma- 
 tory harangues of some mad-headed enthusiast, and imbibe from 
 them poison, not food ; rage, not liberty. Unillumined by phi- 
 losophy, and stimulated to a lust of revenge by aggravated 
 wrongs, they would make the altar of freedom stream with 
 blood, while the grass grew in the desolated halls of justice. 
 
 We contemplate those principles with horror. Yet they pos- 
 sess a kind of wild justice well calculated to spread them among 
 the grossly ignorant. To unenlightened minds, there are terrible 
 charms in the idea of retribution, however savagely it be incul- 
 cated. The groans of the oppressors make fearful yet pleasant 
 music to the ear of him, whose mind is darkness, and into whose 
 soul the iron has entered. 
 
 This class, at present, is comparatively small — Yet soon to 
 form an overwhelming majority, unless great and immediate 
 efforts are used to lessen the intolerable grievances of our poor 
 brethren, and infuse into their sorely wounded hearts the healing
 
 ^9 
 
 qualities of knowledge. For can we wonder that men should want 
 humanity, who want all the circumstances of life that humanize ? 
 Can we wonder that with the ignorance of brutes they should 
 unite their ferocity ? Peace and comfort be with these ! But let 
 us shudder to hear from men of dissimilar opportunities senti- 
 I ments of similar revengefulness. The purifying alchemy of ed- 
 / ucation may transmute the fierceness of an ignorant man into 
 ' virtuous energy — but what remedy shall we apply to him, whom 
 plenty has not softened, whom knowledge has not taught bene- 
 volence ? This is one among the many fatal efifects which re- 
 sult from the want of fixed principles. 
 ^ There is a third class among the friends of freedom, who 
 possess not the wavering character of the first description, nor 
 the ferocity last delineated. They pursue the interests of free- 
 dom steadily, but with narrow and self-centering views : they 
 anticipate with exultation the abolition of privileged orders, and 
 of acts that persecute by exclusion from the right of citizen- 
 ship. They are prepared to join in digging up the rubbish of 
 mouldering establishments, and stripping off the tawdry pa- 
 geantry of governments. Whatever is above them they are 
 most willing to drag dowai ; but every proposed alteration that 
 would elevate the ranks of our poorer brethren, they regard 
 with suspicious jealousy, as the dreams of the visionary ; as if 
 there were any thing in the superiority of Lord to Gentleman, 
 so mortifying in the barrier, so fatal to happiness in the con- 
 sequences, as the more real distinction of master and servant, 
 of rich man and of poor. Wherein am I made worse by my en- 
 nobled neighbor ? Do the childish titles of Aristocracy detract 
 from my domestic comforts, or prevent my intellectual acquisi- 
 tions ? But those institutions of society which should condemn 
 me to the necessity of twelve hours daily toil, would make my 
 soul a slave, and sink the rational being into the mere animal. 
 It is a mockery of our fellow creatures' wrongs to call them 
 equal in rights, when by the bitter compulsion of their wants 
 we make them inferior to us in all that can soften the heart, or 
 dignify the understanding. Let us not say that this is the work 
 of time — that it is impracticable at present, unless we each in 
 our individual capacities do strenuously and perseveringly en- 
 deavor to diffuse among our domestics those comforts and that 
 illumination which far beyond all political ordinances are the 
 
 true equalizers of men. 
 37
 
 290 
 
 We turn with pleasure to the contemplation of that small but 
 glorious band, whom we may truly distinguish by the name of 
 thinking and disinterested patriots. These are the men who 
 have encouraged the sympathetic passions till they have become 
 irresistible habits, and made their duty a necessary part of their 
 self-interest, by the long-continued cultivation of that moral 
 taste which derives our most exquisite pleasures from the con- 
 templation of possible perfection, and proportionate pain from 
 the perception of existing depravation. Accustomed to regard all 
 the affairs of man as a process, they never hurry and they never 
 pause. Theirs is not that twilight of political knowledge which 
 gives us just light enough to place one foot before the other ; as 
 they advance the scene still opens upon them, and they press 
 right onward with a vast and various landscape of existence 
 around them. Calmness and energy mark all their actions. 
 Convinced that vice originates not in the man, but in the sur- 
 rounding circumstances ; not in the heart, but in the under- 
 standing ; he is hopeless concerning no one — to correct a vice 
 or generate a virtuous conduct he pollutes not his hands with the 
 scourge of coercion ; but by endeavouring to alter the circum- 
 cumstances would remove, or by strengthening the intellect, 
 disarms the temptation. The unhappy children ot vice and fol- 
 ly, whose tempers are adverse to their own happiness as well 
 as to the happiness of others, will at times awaken a natural 
 pang : but he looks forward with gladdened heart to that glo- 
 rious period when justice shall have established the universal 
 fraternity of love. These soul-ennobling views bestow the 
 virtues which they anticipate. He whose mind is habitually 
 imprest with them soars above the present state of humanity, 
 and may be justly said to dwell in the presence of the Most 
 High. 
 
 would the forms 
 
 Of servile custom cramp the patriot's power ? 
 Would sordid policies the barbarous growth 
 Of ignorance and rapine, bow him down 
 To tame pursuits, to indolence and fear ? 
 Lo ! he appeals to nature, to the winds 
 And roUing waves, the sun's lui wearied course 
 The elements and seasons — all declare 
 For wiiat the Eternal Maker has ordained 
 The powers of man : we ftcl within ourselves 
 His energy divnie: he tells the heart
 
 291 
 
 He meant, he made us to behold and love 
 
 What he beholda and loves, the general orb 
 
 Of life and being — to be great like him, 
 
 Beneficent and active. Akensidb. 
 
 That the general illumination should precede revolution, 
 is a truth as obvious, as that the vessel should be cleansed be- 
 fore we fill it with a pure liquor. But the mode of diffusing it 
 is not discoverable with equal facility. We certainly should 
 never attempt to make proselytes by appeals to the selfish feel- 
 ings — and consequently, should plead ybr the oppressed, not to 
 them. The author of an essay on political justice considers 
 private societies as the sphere of real utility — that (each one 
 illuminating those immediately beneath him,) truth by a gra- 
 dual descent, may at last reach the lowest order. But this is 
 rather plausible than just or practicable. Society as at present 
 constituted does not resemble a chain that ascends in a contin- 
 uity of links. Alas ! between the parlour and the kitchen, the 
 tap and the coffee-room — there is a gulph that may not be pass- 
 ed. He would appear to me to have adopted the best as well 
 as the most benevolent mode of diffusing truth, who uniting the 
 zeal of the Methodist with the views of the Philosopher, should 
 be personally among the poor, and teach them their duties in 
 order that he may render them susceptible of their rights. 
 
 Yet by what means can the lower classes be made to learn 
 their duties, and urged to practise them ? The human race 
 may perhaps possess the capability of all excellence ; and truth, 
 I doubt not, is omnipotent to a mind already disciplined for its 
 reception ; but assuredly the over- worked labourer, skulking 
 into an ale-house, is not likely to exemplify the one, or prove 
 the other. In that barbarous tumult of inimical interests, 
 which the present state of society exhibits, religion appears to 
 offer the only means universally efficient. The perfectness of 
 future men is indeed a benevolent tenet, and may operate on 
 a few visionaries whose studious habits supply them with em- 
 ployment, and seclude them from temptation. But a distant 
 prospect which we are never to reach, will seldom quicken our 
 footsteps, however lovely it may appear ; and a blessing, which 
 not ourselves but posterity are destined to enjoy, will scarcely 
 influence the actions of any — still less of the ignorant, the pre- 
 judiced, and the selfish. 
 
 Go preach the Gospel, to the poor." By its simplicity it 
 
 (.(.
 
 292 
 
 will meet their comprehension, by its benevolence soften their 
 affections, by its precepts it will direct their conduct, by the 
 vastness of its motives ensure their obedience. The situation 
 of the poor is perilous : they are indeed both 
 
 " fiom within and from without 
 Unarmed to all temptations." 
 
 Prudential reasonings will in general be powerless with them. 
 For the incitements of this world are weak in proportion as we 
 are wretched — 
 
 The world is not my friend, nor the world's law. 
 The world has got no law to make me rich. 
 
 They too, who live from hand to mouthy will most frequently 
 become improvident. Possessing no stock of happiness they ea- 
 gerly seize the gratifications of the moment, and snatch the froth 
 from the wave as it passes by them. Nor is the desolate state 
 of their famih'es a restraining motive, unsoftened as they are 
 by education, and benumbed into selfishness by the torpedo 
 touch of extreme want. Domestic affections depend on asso- 
 ciation. We love an object if, as often as we see or recollect 
 it, an agreeable sensation arises in our minds. But alas ! how 
 should he glow with the charities of father and husband, who 
 gaining scarcely more than his own necessities demand, must 
 have been accustomed to regard his wife and children, not as 
 ^^he soothers of finished labor, but as rivals for the insufficient 
 meal ! In a man so circumstanced the tyranny of the Present 
 can be overpowered only by the ten-fold inightiness of the Fu- 
 ture. Religion will cheer his gloom with her promises, and by 
 habituating his mind to anticipate an infinitely great Revolution 
 hereafter, may prepare it even for the sudden reception of a 
 less degree of amelioration in this world. 
 
 But if we hope to instruct others, we should familiarize our 
 own minds to some fixed and determinate principles of action. 
 The world is a vast labyrinth, in which almost every one is 
 running a different way, and almost every one manifesting ha- 
 tred to those who do not run the same way. A few indeed 
 stand motionless, and not seeking to lead themselves or others 
 out of the maze, laugh at the failures of their brethren. Yet 
 with little reason : for more grossly than the most bewildered 
 wanderer does he err, who never aims to go ri^ht. It is more
 
 293 
 
 honorable to the head, as well as to the heart, to be misled by 
 our eagerness in the pursuit of Truth, than to be safe from 
 blundering by contempt of it. The happiness of mankind is the 
 end of virtue, and truth is the knowledge of the means; which 
 he will never seriously attempt to discover, who has not habitu- 
 ally interested himself in the welfare of others. The searcher 
 after truth must love and be beloved ; for general benevolence 
 is a necessary motive to constancy of pursuit ; and this general 
 benevolence is begotten and rendered permanent by social and 
 domestic affections. Let us beware of that proud philosophy, 
 which affects to inculcate philanthropy while it denounces every 
 home-born feeling by which it is produced and nurtured. The 
 paternal and filial duties discipline the heart and prepare it for 
 the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachments 
 encourages, not prevents, universal Benevolence. The nearer 
 we approach to the sun, the more intense his heat : yet what 
 corner of the system does he not cheer and vivify ? ~\. 
 
 The man who would find Truth, must likewise seek it with 
 an humble and simple heart, otherwise he will be precipitant 
 and overlook it ; or he will be prejudiced, and refuse to see it. 
 To emancipate itself from the tyranny of association, is the 
 most arduous effort of the mind, particularly in religious and 
 political disquisitions. The assertors of the system have asso- 
 ciated with it the preservation of order and public virtue ; the 
 oppugner of imposture and wars and rapine. Hence, when 
 they dispute, each trembles at the consequences of the other's 
 opinions instead of attending to his train of arguments. Of 
 this however we may be certain, whether we be Christians or 
 Infidels, Aristocrats or Republicans, that our minds are in a 
 state unsusceptible of Knowledge, when we feel an eagerness 
 to detect the falsehood of an adversary's reasonings, not a sin- 
 cere wish to discover if there be Truth in them ; — when we ex- 
 amine an argument in order that we may answer it, instead of 
 answering because we have examined it. 
 
 Our opponents are chiefly successful in confuting the Theory 
 of Freedom by the practices of its advocates : from our lives 
 they draw the most forcible arguments against our doctrines. 
 Nor have they adopted an unfair mode of reasoning. In a 
 science the evidence suffers neither diminution or increase from 
 the actions of its professors ; but the comparative wisdom of 
 political systems depends necessarily on the manners and ca-
 
 294 , 
 
 pacities of the recipients. Why should all things be thrown in- 
 to confusion to acquire that liberty which a faction of sensual- 
 ists and gamblers will neither be able or willing to preserve ? 
 A system of fundamental Reform will scarcely be effected by 
 massacres mechanized into Revolution. We cannot therefore 
 inculcate on the minds of each other too often or with too great 
 earnestness the necessity of cultivating benevolent affections. 
 We should be cautious how we indulge the feelings even of 
 virtuous indignation. Indignation is the handsome brother of 
 Anger and Hatred. The temple of Despotism, like that of Tes- 
 calipoca, the Mexican deity is built of human skulls, and ce- 
 mented with human blood ; — let us beware that we be not 
 transported into revenge while we are levelling the loathsome 
 pile ; lest when we erect the edifice of Freedom we but vary 
 the style of architecture, not change the materials. Let us not 
 wantonly offend even the prejudices of our weaker brethren, 
 nor by ill-timed and vehement declarations of opinion excite in 
 t?iem malignant feelings towards us. The energies of mind 
 are wasted in these intemperate effusions. Those materials of 
 projectile force, which now carelessly scattered explode with 
 an offensive and useless noise, directed by wisdom and union 
 might heave rocks from their base, — or perhaps (dismissing 
 the metaphor) might produce the desired effect without the 
 jconvulsion. 
 
 For this " subdued sobriety" of temper a practical faith in 
 the doctrine of philosophical necessity seems the only prepara- 
 tive. That vice is the effect of error and the offspring of sur- 
 rounding circumstsnces, the object therefore of condolence not 
 of anger, is a proposition easily understood, and as easily dem- 
 onstrated. But to make it spread from the understanding to 
 the affections, to call it into action, not only in the great exer- 
 tions of patriotism, but in the daily and hourly occurrences of 
 social life, requires the most watchful attentions of the most 
 energetic mind. It is not enough that we have once swallowed 
 these truths — we must feed on them, as insects on a leaf, till the 
 whole heart be coloured by their qualities, and shew its food 
 in every the minutest fibre. 
 
 Finally; in the words of an Apostle, 
 
 Watch ye ! Stand fast in the principles of which ye have 
 been convinced : Quit yourselves like men ! Be strong ! Yet let 
 all things be done in the spirit of love.
 
 THE 
 
 SECOND 
 
 li A N D I K G-F L. A C E 
 
 OR 
 
 ESSAYS 
 
 INTERPOSED 
 
 FOR AMUSEMENT, RETROSPECT, 
 
 AND 
 
 PREP AR ATIO N. 
 
 MISCELLANY THE SECOND. 
 
 Etiam a musis si quando animum paulisper abducamus, apud Musas nihil- 
 ominus feriamur: at reclines quidem, at otiosas, at de his etillis inter se libere 
 coUoquentes.
 
 ESSAY 1 . 
 
 It were a wantonness anil would demand 
 
 Severe reproof if we were men whose hearts 
 
 Could hold vain dalliance with the misery 
 
 l']ven of the dead ; contented thence to draw 
 
 A momentary pleasure, never mark'd 
 
 By reason, barren of all future good. 
 
 But we have known that there is often found 
 
 In mournful thoughts, and always might be found 
 
 A power to virtue friendly. Wordsworth. MSS. 
 
 I know not how I can better commence my second Landing 
 Place, as joining on to the section of Politics, than by the fol- 
 lowing proof of the severe miseries which misgovernment may 
 occasion in a country nominally free. In the homely ballad of 
 the Three Graves (published in my Sybilline Leaves) I 
 have attempted to exemplify the effect, which one painful idea 
 vividly impressed on the mind under unusual circumstances, 
 might have in producing an alienation of the understanding ; 
 and in the parts hitherto published, I have endeavored to trace 
 the progress to madness, step by step. But though the main 
 incidents are facts, the detail of the circumstances is of my 
 own invention : that is, not what I knew, but what I con- 
 ceived likely to have been the case, or at least equivalent to 
 it. In the tale that follows, I present an instance of the same 
 causes acting upon the mind to the production of conduct as 
 wild as that of madness, but without any positive or permanent 
 loss of the Reason or the Understanding ; and this in a real 
 occurrence, real in all its parts and particulars. But in truth 
 this tale overflows with a human interest, and needs no philo- 
 sophical deduction to make it itnpressive. The account was pub- 
 lished in the city in which the event took place, and in the 
 
 same year I read it, when I was in Germany, and the impres- 
 
 38
 
 298 
 
 sion made on my memory was so deep, that though I relate it 
 in my own language, and with my own feelings, and in reliance 
 on the fidelity of my recollection, I dare vouch for the accura- 
 cy of the narration in all important particulars. 
 
 The imperial free towns of Germany are, with only two or 
 three exceptions, enviably distinguished by the virtuous and 
 primitive manners of the citizens, and by the parental charac- 
 ter of their several governments. As exceptions, however ,we 
 must mention Aix la Chapelle, poisoned by French manners, 
 and the concourse of gamesters and sharpers; and Nurem- 
 berg, whose industrious and honest inhabitants deserve a better 
 fate than to have their lives and properties under the guardian- 
 ship of a wolfish and merciless oligarchy, proud from ignorance, 
 and remaining ignorant through pride. It is from the small 
 States of Germany, that our writers on political economy might 
 draw their most forcible instances of actually oppressive, and 
 even mortal, taxation, and gain the clearest insight into the 
 causes and circumstances of the injury. One other remark, 
 and I proceed to the story. I well remember, that the event 
 I am about to narrate, called forth, in several of the German 
 periodical publications, the most passionate (and in more than 
 one instance, blasphemous) declamations, concerning the in- 
 comprehensibility of the moral government of the world, and 
 the seeming injustice and cruelty of the dispensations of Provi- 
 dence. But, assuredly, every one of my readers, however 
 deeply he may sympathize with the poor sufferers, will at once 
 answer all such declamations by the simple reflection, that no 
 one of these awful events could possibly have taken place un- 
 der a wise police and humane government, and that men have 
 no right to complain of Providence for evils which they them- 
 selves are competent to remedy by mere common sense, join- 
 ed with mere common humanity. 
 
 Maria Eleonora Schoning, was the daughter of a Nu- 
 remberg wire-drawer. She received her unhappy existence at 
 the price of her mother's life, and at the age of seventeen she 
 followed, as the sole mourner, the bier of her remaining parent. 
 From her thirteenth year she had passed her life at her father's 
 sick-bed, the gout having deprived him of the use of his limbs : 
 and beheld the arch of heaven only when she went to fetch 
 food or medicines. The discharge of her filial duties occupied
 
 299 
 
 €ae whole of her time and all her thoughts. She was his only 
 nurse, and for the last two years they lived without a servant. 
 She prepared his scanty meal, she bathed his aching limbs, and 
 though weak and delicate from constant confinement and the 
 poison of melancholy thoughts, she had acquired an unusual 
 power in her arms, from the habit of lifting her old and suffer- 
 ing father out of and into his bed of pain. Thus passed away 
 her early youth in sorrow : she grew up in tears, a stranger to 
 the amusements of youth, and its more delightful schemes and 
 imaginations. She was not, however unhappy : she attributed, 
 indeed, no merit to herself for her virtues, but for that reason 
 were they the more her reward. The peace which passeih all 
 understanding , disclosed itself in all her looks and movements. 
 It lay on her countenence, like a steady unshadowed moon- 
 light ; and her voice, which was naturally at once sweet and sub- 
 tle, came from her, like the fine flute-tones of a masterly perfor- 
 mer which still floating at some uncertain distance, seem to be 
 created by the player, rather than to proceed from the instru- 
 ment. If you had listened to it in one of those brief sabbaths of 
 the soul, when the activity and discursiveness of the thoughts 
 are suspended, and the mind quietly eddies round, instead of 
 flowing onward — (as at late evening in the spring I have seen 
 a bat wheel in silent circles round and round a fruit-tree in full 
 blossom, in the midst of which, as within a close tent of the 
 purest white, an unseen nightingale was piping its sweetest 
 notes) — in such a mood you might have half-fancied, half-felt, 
 that her voice had a separate being of its own — that it was a 
 living something, whose mode of existence was for the ear on- 
 ly : so deep was her resignation, so entirely had it become the 
 unconscious habit of her nature, and in all she did or said, so 
 perfectly were both her movements and her utterance without 
 efibrt and without the appearance of effort ! Her dying father's 
 last words, addressed to the clergyman who attended him, were 
 his grateful testimony, that during his long and sore trial his 
 good Maria had behaved to him like an angel : that the most 
 disagreeable offices and the least suited to her age and sex, 
 had never drawn an unwilling look from her, and that whenev- 
 er his eye had met her's, he had been sure to see in it either 
 the tear of pity or the sudden smile expressive of her affection 
 and wish to cheer him. God (said he) will reward the good girl 
 for all her long dutifulness to me ! He departed during the in- 
 
 C)
 
 300 
 
 ward pi^yer, which followed these his last words. His wfsh 
 will be fulfilled in eternity ; but for this world the prayer of 
 the dying man was not heard ! 
 
 Maria sate and wept by the grave, which now contained her 
 father, her friend, the only bond by which she was linked to 
 life. But while yet the last sound of his death-bell was mur- 
 muring away in the air, she was obliged to return with two 
 Revenue Officers, who demanded entrance into the house, in 
 order to take possession of the papers of the deceased, and from 
 them to discover whether he had always given in his income, 
 and paid the yearly income tax according to his oath, and in 
 proportion to his property.* After the few documents had been 
 looked through and collated with the registers, the officers 
 found, or pretended to find, sufficient proofs, that the deceased 
 had not paid his tax proportionably, which imposed on them the 
 duty to put all the effects under lock and seal. They therefore 
 desired the maiden to retire to an empty room, till the Ransom 
 Office had decided on the afiair. Bred up in suffering, and ha- 
 bituated to immediate compliance, the affrighted and weeping 
 maiden obeyed. She hastened to the empty garret, while the 
 Revenue Officers placed the lock and seal upon the other doors, 
 and finally took away the papers to the Ransom Office. 
 
 Not before evening did the poor faint Maria, exhausted with 
 weeping, rouse herself with the intention of going to her bed : 
 but she found the door of her chamber sealed up and must pass 
 the night on the floor of the garret. The officers had had the 
 humanity to place at the door the small portion of food that hap- 
 pened to be in the house. Thus passed several days, till the 
 
 * This tax called the Losung or Ransom, in Niiremhiirir, was at first a vo- 
 luntary contrihution : every one gave aceordingto his liking or circumstances 
 but in the beginning of the 15th centui-y the heavy contribution levied for the 
 sei-vice of the empire, forced the magistiates to determine the proportions and 
 make the payment compulsory. At the time in which this event took place, 
 1787, every citizen must yearly take what was called his Ransom Oath (Los- 
 ungseid) that the sum paid by him had been in the strict determinate propor- 
 tion to his property. On the death of any citizen, the Ransom Office, or 
 commissioners for this income or projjeity tax, possess the right to examine 
 his books and papers, and to compare his yearly payment as found in their 
 registers with the j)roperty he appears to have possessed during that time. If 
 any disproportion ajipeared, if the yearly declarations of the deceased should 
 have been inaccurate in the least degree, his whole effects are confiscated, and 
 though ho should have left wife and child the state treasury becomes his heir.
 
 301 
 
 officers returned with an order that Maria Elenora Schoiving 
 should leave the house without delay, the commission Court 
 having confiscated the whole property to the City Treasury. 
 The father before he was bed-ridden had never possessed any 
 considerable property; but yet, by his industry, had been able 
 not only to keep himself free from debt, but to lay up a small 
 sum for the evil day. Three years of evil days, three whole 
 years of sickness, had consumed the greatest part of this ; yet 
 still enough remained not only to defend his daughter from im- 
 mediate want, but likewise to maintain her till she could get 
 into some service or employment, and have recovered her spi- 
 rits sufficiently to bear up against the hardships of life. With 
 this thought the dying father comforted himself, and this hope 
 too proved vain ! 
 
 A timid girl, whose past life had been made up of sorrow and 
 privation, she went indeed to solicit the commissioners in her 
 own behalf; but these were, as is mostly the case on the Con- 
 tinent, advocates — the most hateful class, perhaps, of human 
 society, hardened by the frequent sight of misery, and seldom 
 superior in moral character to English pettifoggers or Old Bai- 
 ley attornies. She went to them, indeed, but not a word could 
 she say for herself. Her tears and inarticulate sounds — for these 
 her judges had no ears or eyes. Mute and confounded, like an 
 unfledged dove fallen out from its mother's nest, Maria betook 
 herself to her home, and found the house door too now shut up- 
 on her. Her whole wealth consisted in the clothes she wore. 
 She had no relations to whom she could apply, for those of her 
 mother had disclaimed all acquaintance with her, and her father 
 was a Nether Saxon by birth. She had no acquaintance, for all 
 the friends of old Schoning had forsaken him in the first year of 
 his sickness. She had no play-fellow, for who was likely to 
 have been the companion of a nurse in the room of a sick man ? 
 Surely, since the creation never was a human being more soli- 
 tary and forsaken, than this innocent poor creature, that now 
 roamed about friendless in a populous city, to the whole of 
 whose inhabitants her filial tenderness, her patient domestic 
 goodness, and all her soft yet difficult virtues, might well have 
 been the model. 
 
 " But homeless near n thousand homes she stood, 
 And near a thousand tables pin'd and wanted food !"
 
 302 
 
 The night came, and Maria knew not where to find a shelter. 
 She tottered to the ehurch-jard of the St. James' church in 
 Nuremberg, where the body of her father rested. Upon the 
 yet grassless grave she threw herself down ; and could anguish 
 have prevailed over youth, that night she had been in heaven. 
 The day came, and like a guilty thing, this guiltless, this good 
 being, stole away from the crowd that began to pass through the 
 church-yard, and hastening through the streets to the city gate, 
 she hid herself behind a garden hedge just beyond it, and there 
 wept away the second day of her desolation. The evening clo- 
 sed in : the pang of hunger made itself felt amid the dull ach- 
 ing of self-wearied anguish, and drove the sufferer back again 
 into the city. Yet what could she gain there ? She had not the 
 courage to beg, and the very thought of stealing never occurred 
 to her innocent mind. Scarce conscious whither she was going, 
 or why she went, she found herself once more by her father's 
 grave, as the last relict of evening faded away in the horizon. 
 I have sate for some minutes with my pen resting : I can scarce 
 summon the courage to tell, what I scarce know, whether I 
 ought to tell. Were I composing a tale of fiction, the reader 
 might justly suspect the purity of my own heart, and most cer- 
 tainly would have abundant right to resent such an incident, as 
 an outrage wantonly offered to his imagination. As I think of 
 the circumstance, it seems more like a distempered dream : but 
 alas ! what is guilt so detestable other than a dream of madness, 
 that worst madness, the madness of the heart ? I cannot but be- 
 lieve, that the dark and restless passions must first have drawn 
 the mind in upon themselves, and as with the confusion of im- 
 perfect sleep, have in some strange manner taken away the 
 sense of reality, in order to render it possible for a human being 
 to perpetrate what it is too certain that human beings have per- 
 petrated. The church-yards in most of the German cities, and too 
 often, I fear in those of our own country, are not more injuiious 
 to health than to morality. Their former venerable character 
 is no more. The religion of the place has followed its super- 
 stitions, and their darkness and loneliness tempt worse spirits 
 to roam in them than those whose nightly wanderings appalled 
 the believing hearts of our biave fore-fathers ! It was close by the 
 new-made grave of her father, that the meek and spotless daugh- 
 ter became the victim to brutal violence, which weeping and 
 watching and cold and hunger had rendered her utterly unable
 
 303 
 
 to resist. The monster left her in a trance of stupefaction, and 
 into her right hand, which she had clenched convulsively, he had 
 forced a half-dollar. 
 
 It was one of the darkest nights of autumn : in the deep and 
 dead silence the only sounds audible were the slow blunt tick- 
 in"- of the church clock, and now and then the sinking down of 
 bones in the nigh charnel house. Maria, when she had in some 
 degree recovered her senses, sate upon the grave near which — 
 not her innocence had been sacrificed, but that which, from the 
 frequent admonitions, and almost the dying words of her father, 
 she had been accustomed to consider as such. Guiltless, she 
 felt the pangs of guilt, and still continued tp grasp the coin, 
 which the monster had left in her hand, with an anguish as sore 
 as if it had been indeed the wages of voluntary prostitution. 
 Giddy and faint from want of food, her brain became feverish 
 from sleeplessness, and this unexampled concurrence of calami- 
 ties, this complication and entanglement of misery in misery ! 
 she imagined that she heard her father's voice bidding her leave 
 his sight. His last blessings had been conditional, for in his 
 last hours he had told her, that the loss of her innocence would 
 not let him rest quiet in his grave. His last blessings now 
 sounded in her ears like curses, and she fled from the church- 
 yard as if a dsemon had been chasing her; and hurrying along 
 the streets, through which it is probable her accursed violator 
 had walked with quiet and orderly step* to his place of rest 
 
 *It must surely have been after hearing of or witnessing some similar 
 event or scene of wretchedness, thattlie most eloquent of our Writers (I had 
 almost said of our Poets) Jeremy Taylor, wrote the following paragraph, 
 which at least in Longinus's sense of the word, we may place among the most 
 suhlime ])assages in English Literature. "He that is no fool, but can consider 
 wisely, if he be in love with this world we need not despair but that a witty 
 man might reconcile him with tortures, and make him think charira])ly of the 
 rack, and be brought to admire the liarmony that is made by a herd of eve- 
 ning wolves when they miss their draught of blood in their midnight revels. 
 The groans of a man in a fit of the stone are worse than all these ; and the 
 distractions of a troubled conscience are woise than those groans : andyet a 
 careless merry sinner is worse than all that. Rut if we could from one of the 
 battlements of Heaven espy, how many men and women at this time lie 
 fainting and dying for want of bread, how many young men are hewn down 
 by the sword of war ; how many orphans ai-e now weeping over the graves 
 of their fiither, by whose life they were enabled to eat ; if we could but hear 
 how many mariners and passengers are at this present time in a storm, and
 
 304 
 
 and security, she was seized by the watchman of the night — a 
 welcome prey, as they receive in Nuremburg half a gulden from 
 the police chest, for every woman that they fmd^in the streets 
 after ten o'clock at night. It was midnight, and she was taken 
 to the next watch-house. 
 
 The sitting magistrate, before whom she was carried the next 
 morning, prefaced his first question with the most opprobrious 
 title that ever belonged to the most hardened street-walkers, 
 and which man born of woman should not address even to these, 
 were it but for his own sake. The frightful name awakened 
 the poor orphan from her dream of guilt, it brought back the 
 consciousness of .her innocence, but with it the sense likewise 
 of her wrongs and of her helplessness. The cold hand of death 
 seemed to grasp her, she fainted dead away at his feet, and was 
 not without difficulty recovered. The magistrate was so far 
 softened, and only so far, as to dismiss her for the present ; but 
 with a menace of sending her to the House of Correction if 
 she were brought before him a second time. The idea of her 
 own innocence now became uppermost in her mind ; but min- 
 gling with the thought of her utter forlornness, and the image of 
 her angry father, and doubtless still in a state of bewilderment, 
 she formed the resolution of drowning herself in the river Peg- 
 nitz — in order (for this was the shape which her fancy had ta- 
 ken) to throw herself at her father's feet, and to justify her in- 
 nocence to him in the World of Spirits. She hoped that her 
 father would speak for her to the Saviour, and that she should 
 be forgiven. But as she was passing through the suburb, she 
 was met by a soldier's wife, who during the life-time of her 
 father had been occasionally employed in the house as a chare- 
 woman. This poor woman was startled at the disordered ap- 
 parel, and more disordered looks of her young mistress, and 
 questioned her with such an anxious and heartfelt tenderness, 
 as at once brought back the poor orphan to her natural feelings 
 
 Khri(;k out b('raMS(^ their koel dashes against a rock, or bulges under them ; 
 how many peoi)lo there are that weep with want, and are mad with o])j)res- 
 sion, or are desperate by a too quick sense of a constant infehcity ; in all rea- 
 son we should be glad to be out of the noise and participation of so many 
 evils. This is a place of sorrows and tears, of great evils and constant cala- 
 mities: let us remove hence, ut least in aftl;cti(jns and prci)arations of u)ind. 
 
 Holy Dying, Chap. 1. Sect 5
 
 305 
 
 and the obligations of religion. As a frightened child throws' 
 itself into the arras of its raother, and hiding its head on her 
 breast, half tells amid sobs what has happened to it, so did she 
 throw herself on the neck of the woman who had uttered the 
 the first words of kindness to her since her father's death, and 
 with loud weeping she related what she had endured and what 
 she was about to have done, told her all her affliction and mise- 
 ry, the wormwood and the gall ! Her kind-hearted friend min- 
 gled tears with tears, pressed the poor forsaken-one to her 
 heart ; comforted her with sentences out of the hymn-book ; 
 and with the most affectionate entreaties conjured her to give 
 up her horrid purpose, for that life was short, and heaven was 
 forever. 
 
 Maria had been bred up in the fear of God : she now trem- 
 bled at the thought of her former purpose, and followed her 
 friend Harlin, for that was the name of her guardian angel, to 
 her home hard by. The moment she entered the door she 
 sank down and lay at her full length, as if only to be motion- 
 less in a place of shelter had been the fulness of delight. As 
 when a withered leaf, that has been long whirled about by the 
 gusts of autumn, is blown into a cave or hollow tree, it stops 
 suddenly, and all at once looks the very image of quiet — such 
 might this poor orphan appear to the eye of a meditative ima- 
 agination. 
 
 A place of shelter she had attained, and a friend willing to 
 comfort her, all that she could : but the noble-hearted Harlin 
 was herself a daughter of calamity, one who from year to year 
 must lie down in weariness and rise up to labour ; for whom 
 this world provides no other comfort but sleep which enables 
 them to forget it ; no other physician but death, which takes 
 them out of it ! She was married to one of the city guards, who, 
 like Maria's father, had been long sick and bed-ridden. Him, 
 herself, and two little children, she had to maintain by wash- 
 ing and charing;* and sometime after Maria had been do- 
 mesticated with them, Harlin told her that she herself had been 
 once driven to a desperate thought by the cry of her hungry 
 children, during a want of employment, and that she had been 
 
 * I am ignorant, whether there be any classical authority for this word ; but 
 I know no other word that expresses occasional day labor in the houses of 
 others. 
 
 39
 
 306 
 
 on the point of killing one of the little-ones, and then surren- 
 dering herself into the hands of justice. In this manner, she had 
 conceived, all would be well provided for ; the surviving child 
 would be admitted, as a matter of course, into the Orphan 
 House, and her husband into the Hospital ; while she herself 
 would have atoned for her act by a public execution, and together 
 with the child that she had destroyed, would have passed into 
 a state of bliss. All this she related to Maria, and those tragic 
 ideas left but too deep and lasting impression on her mind. 
 Weeks after, she herself renewed the conversation, by express- 
 ing to her benefactress her inability to conceive how it was 
 possible for one human being to take away the life of another, 
 especially that of an innocent little child. For that reason, 
 replied Harlin, because it was so innocent and so good, I wish- 
 ed to put it out of this wicked world. Thinkest thou then that 
 I would have my head cut off for the sake of a wicked child ? 
 Therefore it was little Nan, that I meant to have taken with 
 me, who, as you see, is always so sweet and patient ; little 
 Frank has already his humours aud naughty tricks, and suits 
 better for this world. This was the answer. Maria brooded 
 awhile over it in silence, then passionately snatched the child- 
 ren up in her arms, as if she would protect them against their 
 
 own mother. 
 
 For one whole year the orphan lived with the soldier's wife, 
 
 and by their joint labors barely kept off absolute want. As a 
 little boy (almost a child in size, though in his thirteenth year) 
 once told me of himself, as he was guiding me up the Brocken, 
 in the Hartz Forest, they had but " little of that, of which a 
 great deal tells but for little. But now came the second win- 
 ter, and with it came bad times, a season of trouble for this 
 poor and meritorious household. The wife now fell sick: too 
 constant and too hard labor, too scanty and too innutritions food, 
 had gradually wasted away her strength. Maria redoubled her 
 efforts in order to provide bread and fuel for their washing 
 which they took in; but the task was above her powers. Be- 
 sides, she was so timid and so agitated at the sight of stran- 
 gers, that sometimes, with the best good-will she was left with- 
 out employment. One by one, every article of the least value 
 which they possessed was sold off, except the bed on which the 
 husband lay. He died just before the approach of spring ; but 
 about the same time the wife gave signs of convalescence. The
 
 307 
 
 physician, though ahnost as poor as his patients, had been kind 
 to them : silver and gold had he none, but he occasionally 
 brought a little wine, and often assured them that nothing was 
 wanting to her perfect recovery, but better nourishment and a 
 little wine every day. This, however, could not be regularly 
 procured, and Harlin's spirits sank, and as her bodily pain left 
 her she became more melancholy, silent, and self-involved. And 
 now it was that Maria's mind was incessantly racked by the 
 frightful apprehension, that her friend might be again medita- 
 ting the accomplishment of her former purpose. She had grown 
 as passionately fond of the two children as if she had borne 
 them under her own heart ; but the jeopardy in which she con- 
 ceived her friend's salvation to stand — this was her predomin- 
 ant thought. For all the hopes and fears, which under a hap- 
 pier lot would have been associated with the objects of the 
 senses, were transferred, by Maria, to her notions and images 
 of a future state. 
 
 In the beginning of March, one bitter cold evening, Maria star- 
 ted up and suddenly left the house. The last morsel of food 
 had been divided betw^ixt the two children for their breakfast ; 
 and for the last hour or more the little boy had been crying for 
 hunger, while his gentler sister had been hiding her face in 
 Maria's lap, and pressing her little body against her knees, in 
 order by that mechanic pressure to dull the aching from empti- 
 ness. The tender-hearted and visionary maiden had watched 
 the mother's eye, and had interpreted several of her sad and 
 steady looks according to her preconceived apprehensions. 
 She had conceived all at once the strange and enthusiastic 
 thought, that she would in some way or other offer her own 
 soul for the salvation of the soul of her friend. The money, 
 which had been left in her hand, flashed upon the eye of her 
 mind, as a single unconnected image : and faint with hunger 
 and shivering with cold, she sallied forth — in search of guilt ! 
 Awful are the dispensations of the Supreme, and in his sever- 
 est judgments the hand of mercy is visible. It was a night so 
 wild with wind and rain, or rather rain and snow mixed toge- 
 ther, that a famished wolf would have stayed in his cave, and 
 listened to a howl more fearful than his own. Forlorn Maria ! 
 thou wert kneeling in pious simplicity at the grave of thy fa- 
 ther, and thou becamest the prey of a monster ! Innocent thou 
 wert and without guilt didst thou remain. Now thou goest
 
 308 
 
 forth of thy own accord — hut God will have pity on thoe ! 
 Poor bewildered innocent ! in thy spotless imagination dwelt 
 no distinct conception of the evil which thou wentest forth to 
 brave ! To save the soul of thy friend was the dream of thy 
 feverish brain, and thou wert again apprehended as an outcast 
 of shameless sensuality, at the moment when thy too spirit- 
 ualized fancy was busied with the glorified forms of thy friend 
 and of her little ones interceding for thee at the throne of the 
 Redeemer ! 
 
 At this moment her perturbed fancy suddenly suggested to her 
 a new mean for the accomplishment of her purpose : and she 
 replied to the night-watch, who with a brutal laugh bade her 
 expect on the morrow the unmanly punishment, which to the 
 disgrace of human nature the laws of Protestant states (alas! 
 even those of our own country,) inflict on female vagrants, that 
 she came to deliver herself up as an infanticide. She was in- 
 stantly taken before the magistrate, through as wild and pitiless 
 a storm as ever pelted on a houseless head ! through as black 
 and " tyrannous a night,^'' as ever aided the workings of a heat- 
 ed brain ! Here she confessed that she had been delivered 
 of an infant by the soldier's wife, Harlin, that she deprived it 
 of life in the presence of Harlin, and according to a plan pre- 
 concerted with her, and that Harlin had buried it somewhere 
 in the wood, but where she knew not. During this strange tale 
 she appeared to listen with a mixture of fear and satisfaction, 
 to the howling of the wind ; and never sure could a confession 
 of real guilt have been accompanied by a more dreadfully ap- 
 propriate music ! At the moment of her apprehension she had 
 formed the scheme of helping her friend out of the world in a 
 state of innocence. When the soldier's widow was confronted 
 with the orphan, and the latter had repeated her confession 
 to her face, Harlin answered in these words, " For God's sake, 
 Maria ! how have I deserved this of thee ?" Then turning to 
 the magistrate, said, " I know nothing of this." This was the 
 sole answer which she gave, and not another word could they 
 extort from her. The instruments of torture were brought, and 
 Harlin was warned, that if she did not confess of her own ac- 
 cord, the truth would be immediately forced from her. This 
 menace convulsed Maria Schoning with aff"right: her intention 
 had been to emancipate herself and her friend from a life of 
 unmixed suffering, without the crime of suicide in either, and
 
 309 
 
 with no guilt at all on the part of her friend. The thought of 
 her friend's being put to the torture had not occurred to her. 
 Wildly and eagerly she pressed her friend's hands, already 
 bound in preparation for the torture — she pressed them in ago- 
 ny between her own, and said to her, " Anna ! confess it ! 
 Anna, dear Anna ! it will then be well with all of us ! all, all 
 of us ! and Frank and little Nan will be put into the Orphan 
 House !" Maria's scheme now passed, like a flash of lightning 
 through the widow's mind, she acceded to it at once, kissed Ma- 
 ria repeatedly, and then serenely turning her face to the judge, 
 acknowledged that she had added to the guilt by so obstinate a 
 denial, that all her friend had said, had been true, save only 
 that she had thrown the dead infant into the river, and not bu- 
 ried it in the wood. 
 
 They were both committed to prison, and as they both perse- 
 vered in their common confession, the process was soon made 
 out and the condemnation followed the trial : and the sentence, 
 by which they were both to be beheaded with the sword, was or- 
 dered to be put in force on the next day but one. On the mor- 
 ning of the execution, the delinquents were brought together, 
 in order that they might be reconciled with each other, and join 
 in common prayer for forgiveness of their common guilt. 
 
 But now Maria's thoughts took another turn. The idea that 
 her benefactress, that so very good a woman, should be violent- 
 ly put out of life, and this with an infamy on her name which 
 would cling forever to the little orphans, overpowered her. 
 Her own excessive desire to die scarcely prevented her from 
 discovering the whole plan ; and when Harlin Was left alone 
 with her, and she saw her friend's calm and affectionate look, 
 her fortitude was dissolved : she burst into a loud and passion- 
 ate weeping, and throwing herself into her friend's arms ; with 
 convulsive sobs she entreated her forgiveness. Harlin pressed 
 the poor agonized girl to her arms; like a tender mother, she 
 kissed and fondled her wet cheeks, and in the most solemn and 
 emphatic tones assured her, that there was nothing to forgive. 
 On the contrary, she was her greatest benefactress and the in- 
 strument of God's goodness to remove her at once from a mise- 
 rable world and from the temptation of committing a heavy 
 crime. In vain ! Her repeated promises, that she would answer 
 before God for them both, could not pacify the tortured con- 
 science of Maria, till at length the presence of a clergyman and
 
 310 
 
 the preparations for receiving the sacrament occasioning the 
 widow to address her thus — " See, Maria ! this is the Body and 
 Blood of Christ, which takes away all sin ! Let us partake to- 
 gether of this holy repast with full trust in God and joyful hope 
 of our approaching hyppiness." These words of comfort, ut- 
 tered with cheering tones, and accompanied with a look of 
 inexpressible tenderness and serenity, brought back peace for 
 a while to her troubled spirit. They communicated together, 
 and on parting, the magnanimous woman once more embraced 
 her young friend : then stretching her hand toward Heaven, 
 said, "Be tranquil, Maria ! by to-morrow morning we are there, 
 and all our sorrows stay here behind us." 
 
 I hasten to the scene of execution : for I anticipate my read- 
 er's feelings in the exhaustion of my own heart. Serene and 
 with unaltered countenance the lofty-minded Harlin heard the 
 strokes of the death bell, stood before the scaffold while the 
 staff was broken over her, and at length ascended the steps, 
 all with a steadiness and tranquillity of manner which was not 
 more distant from fear than from defiance and bravado. Alto- 
 gether different was the state of poor Maria : with shattered 
 nerves and an agonizing conscience that incessantly accused 
 lier as the murderess of her friend, she did not walk but stag- 
 gered towards the scaffold, and stumbled up the steps. While 
 Harlin, who went first, at every step turned her head round and 
 still whispered to her, raising her eyes to heaven, — "but a few 
 minutes, Maria ! and we are there !" On the scaffold she again 
 bade her farewell, again repeating " Dear Maria ! but one mi- 
 nute now, and we are together with God." But when she 
 knelt down and her neck v/as bared for the stroke, the unhap- 
 py giri lost all self-command, and with a loud and piercing 
 shriek she bade them hold and not murder the innocent. " She 
 is innocent ! I have borne false witness ! I alone am the mur- 
 deress !" She rolled herself now at the feet of the execution- 
 er, and now at those of the clergyman, and conjured them to 
 stop the execution : that the whole story had been invented by 
 herself; that she had never brought forth, much less destroyed, 
 an infant ; that for her friend's sake she had made this discove- 
 ry ; that for herself she wished to die, and would die gladly, if 
 they would take away her friend, and promise to free her soul 
 from the dreadful agony of having murdered her friend by false 
 witness. The executioner asked Harlin, if there were any
 
 311 
 
 truth in what Maria Schoning had said. The Heroine answer- 
 ed with manifest reluctance : " most assuredly she has said the 
 truth: I confessed myself guilty, because I wished to die and 
 thought it best for both of us : and now that my hope is on the 
 moment of its accomplishment, I cannot be supposed to declare 
 myself innocent for the sake of saving my life — but any wretch- 
 edness is to be endured rather than that poor creature should 
 be hurried out of the world in a state of despair." 
 
 The outcry of the attending populace prevailed to suspend 
 the execution : a report was sent to the assembled magistrates, 
 and in the mean time one of the priests reproached the widow 
 in bitter words for her former false confession. " What," she 
 replied sternly but without anger, " what could the truth have 
 availed ? Before I perceived my friend's purpose I did deny it : 
 my assurance was pronounced an impudent lie : I was already 
 bound for the torture, and so bound that the sinews of my liands 
 started, and one of their worships in the large white peruke^ 
 threatened that he would have me stretched till the sun shone 
 through me ! and that then I should cry out, Yes, when it was 
 too late." The priest was hard-hearted or superstitious enough 
 to continue his reproofs, to which the noble woman condescen- 
 ded no further answer. The other clergyman, however, was 
 both more rational and more humane. He succeeded in silen- 
 cing his colleague, and the former half of le long hour, which 
 the magistrates took in making speeches on the improbability: 
 of the tale instead of re-examining the culprits in person, he 
 employed in gaining from the widow a connected account of 
 all the circumstances, and in listening occasionally to Maria's 
 passionate descriptions of all her friend's goodness and magna- 
 nimity. For she had gained an influx of life and spirit from 
 the assurance in her mind, both that she had now rescued Har- 
 lin from death and was about to expiate the guilt of her purpose 
 by her own execution. For the latter half of the time the cler- 
 gyman remained in silence, lost in thought, and momentlj^ ex- 
 pecting the return of the messenger. All which during the 
 deep silence of this interval could be heard, was one exciama- 
 mation of Harlin to her unhappy friend — " Oh ! Maria ! Maria ! 
 couldst thou but have kept up thy courage but for another mi- 
 nute, we should have been now in heaven ! The messenger 
 
 came back with an order from the magistrates to proceed 
 
 with the execution ! With re-animated countenance Harlin
 
 312 
 
 placed her neck on the block and her head was severed from 
 her body amid a general shriek from the crowd. The execu- 
 tioner fainted after the blow, and the under hangman was or- 
 dered to take his place. He was not wanted. Maria was al- 
 ready gone : her body was found as cold as if she had been 
 dead for some hours. The flower had been snapped in the 
 storm, before the scythe of violence could come near it. 
 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 Tlie History of Times representetli the magnitude of actions and the pub- 
 lic faces or deportment of persons, and passeth over in silence the smaller 
 passages and motions of men and matters. But such being the workman- 
 ship of God, that he doth hang the greatest weight upon the smallest wires, 
 maxima e minimis suspendens : it comes therefore to pass, that Histories 
 do rather set fortii the pomp of business than the true and inward resorts 
 thereof But Lives, if they be well written, propounding to themselves a 
 person to represent in \ ',.0111 actions botii greater and smaller, public and 
 private, have a commixture, must of necessity contain a more true, native, 
 and lively representation. — Lord Bacon. 
 
 Mankind in general are so little in the habit of looking 
 steadily at their own meaning, or of weighing the words by which 
 they express it, that the writer, who is careful to do both, will 
 sometimes mislead his readers through the very excellence 
 which qualifies him to be their instructer : and this with no other 
 fault on his part, than the modest mistake of supposing in those, 
 to whom he addresses himself, an intellect as watchful as his own. 
 The inattentive Reader adopts as unconditionally true or per- 
 haps rails at his Author for having stated as such, what upon 
 examination would be found to have been duly limited, and 
 would so have been understood, if opaque spots and false re- 
 fractions were as rare in the the mental as in the bodily eye.
 
 313 
 
 The motto, for instance, to this Paper has more than once ser- 
 ved as an excuse and authority for huge volumes of hiographi- 
 cal minutiae, which render the real character almost invisible, 
 like clouds of dust on a portrait, or the counterfeit frankincense 
 which sinoke-blacks the favorite idol of a Catholic village. Yet 
 Lord Bacon, by the words which I have marked in italics, evi- 
 dently confines the Biographer to such facts as are either sus- 
 ceptible of some useful general inference, or tend to illustrate 
 those qualities which distinguish the subject of them from or- 
 dinary men ; while the passage in general was meant to guard 
 the Historian against considering, as trifles, all that might ap- 
 pear so to tlioso who recognize no greatness in the mindj 
 and can conceive no dignity in any incident, which does not act 
 on their senses by its external accompaniments, or on their 
 curiosity by its immediate consequences. Things apparently 
 insignificant are recommended to our notice, not for their own 
 sakes, but for their bearings or influences on things of impor- 
 tance : in other words, when they are insignificant in appear- 
 ance only. 
 
 An inquisitiveness into the minutest circumstances and cas- 
 ual sayings of eminent contemporaries, is indeed quite natural', 
 but so are all our follies and the more natural they are, the 
 more caution should we exert in guarding against them. To 
 scribble trifles even on thj perishable glass of an inn window, 
 is the mark of an idler ; but to engrave them on the marble 
 monument, sacred to the memory of the departed Great, is 
 something worse than idleness. The spirit of genuine Biog- 
 raphy is in nothing more conspicuous, than in the firmnees with 
 which it withstands the cravings of worthless curiosity, as dis- 
 tinguished from the thirst after useful knowledge. For, in the 
 first place, such anecdotes as derive their whole and sole inter- 
 est from the great name of the person concerning whom they 
 are related, and neither illustrate his general character nor his 
 particular actions, would scarcely have been noticed or reraem- 
 bei'ed except by men of weak minds ; it is not unlikely there- 
 fore, that they were misapprehended at the time, and it is most 
 probable that they have been related as incorrectly, as they 
 were noticed injudiciously. Nor are the consequences of such 
 garrulous Biography merely negative. For as insignificant sto- 
 ries can derive no real respectability from the eminence of the 
 
 person who happens to be the subject of them, but rather an 
 40
 
 314 
 
 additional deformity of disproportion, they are apt to have their 
 insipidity seasoned by the same bad passions that accompany 
 the habit of gossiping in general ; and the misapprehension of 
 weak men meeting with the misinterpretations of malignant 
 men, have not seldom formed the ground of the most grievous 
 calumnies. In the second place, these trifles are subversive of 
 the great end of Biography, which is to fix the attention, and to 
 interest the feelings, of men on those qualities and actions which 
 have made a particular life worthy of being recorded. It is, 
 no doubt, the duty of an honest Biographer, to portray the pro- 
 minent imperfections as well as excellencies of his Hero ; but 
 I am at a loss to conceive how this can be deemed an excuse 
 for heaping together a multitude of particulars, which can prove 
 nothing of any man that might not have been safely taken for 
 granted of all men. In the present age (emphatically the age 
 of personality !) there are more than ordinary motives for with- 
 holding all encouragement from this mania of busying ourselves 
 with the names of others, which is still more alarming as a 
 symptom, than it is troublesome as a disease. The Reader must 
 be still less acquainted with contemporary literature than myself 
 — a case not likely to occur — if he needs me to inform him, that 
 there are men, who trading in the silliest anecdotes, in unpro- 
 voked abuse and senseless eulogy, think themselves neverthe- 
 less employed both worthily and honorably, if only all this be 
 done " wi good set ierms,''^ and Irom the press, and of public 
 characters : a class which has increased so rapidly of late, that 
 it becomes difficult to discover what characters are to be consi- 
 dered- as private. Alas ! if these wretched misusers of lan- 
 guage, and the means of giving wings to thought, the means of 
 multiplying the presence of an individual mind, had ever known, 
 how great a thing the possession of any one simple truth is, and 
 how mean a thing a mere fact is, except as seen in the light of 
 some comprehensive truth ; if they had but once experienced 
 the unborrowed complacency, the inward independence, the 
 home-bred strength, with which every clear conception of the 
 reason is accompanied : they would shrink from their own pa- 
 ges as at the remembrance of a crime. For a crime it is, (and 
 the man who hesitates in pronouncing it such, must be ignorant 
 of what mankind owe to books, what he himself owes to them 
 in spite of his ignorance ) thus to introduce the spirit of vulgar 
 scandal and personal inquietude into the Closet and the Library,
 
 315 
 
 environing with evil passions the very Sanctuaries, to which we 
 should flee for refuge from them ! For to what do these Publi- 
 cations appeal, whether they present themselves as Biography 
 or as anonymous Criticism, but to the same feelings which the 
 scandal-bearers and time-killers of ordinary life seek to gratify 
 in themselves and their listeners ? And both the authors and 
 admirers of such publications, in what respect are they less tru- 
 ants and deserters from their own hearts, and from their ap- 
 pointed task of understanding and amending them, than the 
 most garrulous female Chronicler, of the goings-on of yesterday 
 in the families of her neighbors and townsfolk ? 
 
 The Friend has reprinted the following Biographical sketch, 
 partly indeed in the hope that it may be the means of introdu- 
 cing to the Reader's knowledge, in case he should not have 
 formed an acquaintance with them already, two of the most in- 
 teresting biographical Works in our language, both for the 
 weight of the matter, and the mcuriosa felicitas of the style. 
 I refer to Roger North's Examen, and the Life of his brother, 
 the Lord Chancellor North. The pages are all alive with the 
 genuine idioms of our mother-tongue. -4- 
 
 A fastidious taste, it is true, will find offence in the occasion- 
 al vulgarisms, or what we now call slang, which not a few of 
 our writers, shortly after the Restoration of Charles the Sec- 
 ond, seem to have affected as a mark of loyalty. These in- 
 stances, however, are but a trifling drawback. They are not 
 sought for, as is too often and too plainly done by L'Estrange, 
 Collyer, Tom Brown, and their imitations. North never goes 
 out of his wav either to seek them or to avoid them ; and in 
 the main his language gives us the very nerve, pulse, and sinew 
 of a hearty healthy conversational English. 
 
 This is The Friend's first reason for the insertion of this 
 Extract. His other and principal motive may be found in the 
 kindly good-tempered spirit of the passage. But instead of 
 troubling the Reader with the painful contrast which so many 
 recollections force on my own feelings, I will refer the charac- 
 ter-makers of the present day to the Letters of Erasmus and 
 Sir Thomas More to Martin Dorpius, that are commonly annex- 
 ed to the Encomium Moriae ; and then for a practical comment on 
 the just and affecting sentiments of these two great men, to the 
 works of Roger North, as proofs how alone an English scholar 
 and gentleman will permit himself to delineate his contempora-
 
 316 
 
 rjes even imdtir the strongest prejudices of party spirit, and 
 though employed on the coarsest subjects. A coarser subject 
 than L. C.J. Saunders cannot well be imagined ; nor does 
 North use his colors with a sparing or very delicate hand. 
 And yet the final impression is that of kindness. 
 
 EXTRACT FROM NORTH's EXAMEN. 
 
 The Lord Chief Justice Saunders succeeded in the room of 
 Pemberton. His character, and his beginning were equally 
 strange. He was at first no better than a poor boy, if not a 
 parish-foundling, without knowing parents or relations. He 
 had found a way to live by obsequiousness in Clement's Inn, 
 as I remember, and courting the attorney's clerks for scraps. 
 The extraordinary observance and diligence of the boy, made 
 the society willing to do him good. He appeared very ambi- 
 tious to learn to write, and one of the attorneys got a board 
 knocked up ai a window on the top of a stair-case; and that 
 was his desk, where he sat and wrote after copies of court, and 
 other hands the clerks gave him. He made himself so expert 
 a writer that he took in business, and earned some pence by 
 hackney-writing. And thus by degrees he pushed his faculties 
 and fell to forms, and by books that were lent him, became an 
 exquisite entertaining clerk ; and by the same course of improve- 
 ment of himself, an able counsel, first in special pleading, then at 
 large : after he was called to the Bar, had practice in the King's 
 Bench Court equal with any there. As to his person he was very 
 corpulent and beastly, a mere lump of morbid tiesh. He used 
 to say, by his troggs, (such an humorous way of talking he af- 
 fected) none could say he wanted issue of his body, for he had 
 nine in his back. He was a fetid mass, that offended his neigh- 
 bors at the bar in the sharpest degree. Those whose ill for- 
 tune it was to stand near him, were confessors, and in the sum- 
 mer time, almost martyrs. This hateful decay of his carcase 
 came upon him by continual sottishness ; foi- to say nothing of 
 brandy, he was seldom without a pot of ale at his nose, or near 
 him. That exercise was all that he used ; the rest of his life 
 was sitting at his desk or piping at home ; and that home was 
 a tailor's house, in Butcher Row, called his lodging, and the 
 man's wife was his nurse or worse ; but by virtue of his money, 
 of which he had made little account, tliough he got a great deal 
 he soon became master of the family; and being no changling
 
 317 
 
 he never removed, but was true to his friends, and they 
 to him to the last hour of his life. So much for his person 
 and education. As for his parts none had them more lively 
 than he ; wit and repartee in an aflected rusticity were natural 
 to him. fie was ever ready and never at a loss ; and none 
 came so near as he to be a match for sergeant Mainerd. His 
 great dexterity was in the art of special pleading, and he would 
 lay snares that often caught his superiors who were not aware 
 of his traps. And he was so fond of success for his clients, 
 that rather than fail, he would set the court with a trick ; for 
 which he met, sometimes, with a reprimand which he would 
 ward off, so that no one was much ollended with him. But 
 Hales could not bear his irregularity of life ; and for that, and 
 suspicion of his tricks, used to bear hard upon him in the court. 
 But no ill-usage from the bench was too hard for his hold of 
 business, being such as scarce any could do but himself. With 
 all this he had a goodness of nature and disposition in so great 
 a degree, that he maybe deservedly styled a Philanthrope. He 
 was a very Silenus to the boys, as in this place I may term the 
 students of the law, to make them merry whenever they had a 
 mind to it. He had nothing of rigid or austere in him. If any 
 near him at the bar grumbled at his stench, he ever converted 
 the complaint into content and laughing with the abundance of 
 his wit. As to his ordinary dealing, he was as honest as the 
 driven snow w^as white ; and why not, having no regard for 
 money, or desire to be rich ? And for good nature and conde- 
 scension there was not his fellow. I have seen him for hours 
 and half-hours together, before the court sat, stand at the bar, 
 with an audience of Students over against him, putting of ca- 
 ses, and debating so as suited their capacities, and encouraged 
 their industry. And so in the Temple, he seldom moved with- 
 out a parcel of youths hanging about him, and he merry and 
 jesting with them. 
 
 It will be readily conceived that this man was never cut out 
 to be a Presbyter, or any thing that is severe and crabbed. In 
 no time did he lean to Inaction, but did his business without of- 
 fence to any. He put off officious talk of government or poli- 
 tics with jests, and so made his wit a catholicon or shield to co- 
 ver all his weak places or infirmities. When the court fell into 
 a steady course of using the law against all kinds of offenders, 
 this man was taken into the king's business; and had the part
 
 318 
 
 of drawing, and perusal of almost all indictments and informa- 
 tions that were then to be prosecuted, with the pleadings there- 
 on, if any were special ; and he had the settling of the large 
 pleadings in the quo Warranto against London. His Lordship 
 had no sort of conversation with him but in the way of business 
 and at the bar ; but once, after he was in the king's business, 
 he dined with his Lordship, and no more. And there he shew- 
 ed another qualification he had acquired, and that was to play 
 jigs upon an harpsichord ; having taught himself with the op- 
 portunity of an old virginal of his landlady's ; but in such a 
 manner, not for defect, but figure, as to see him were a jest. 
 The king observing him to be of a free disposition, loyal, friend- 
 ly, and without greediness or guile, thought of him to the Chief 
 Justice to the King's Bench at that nice time. And the minis- 
 try could not but approve of it. So great a weight was then at 
 stake, as could not be trusted to men of doubtful principles, or 
 such as any thing might tempt to desert them. While he sat 
 in the Court of King's Bench, he gave the rule to the general 
 satisfaction of the lawyers. But his course of life was so dif- 
 ferent from what it had been, his business incessant and withal 
 crabbed ; and his diet and exercise changed, that the constitu- 
 tion of his body, or head rather, could not sustain it, and he 
 fell into an apoplexy and palsy, which numbed his parts ; and he 
 never recovered the strength of them. He outlived the judg- 
 ment in the quo Warranto ; but was not present otherwise than 
 by sending his opinion by one of the judges, to be for the king, 
 who at the pronouncing of the judgment, declared it to the 
 court accordingly, which is frequently done in like cases.
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 Proinde si videbilur, Jingant istl me latruncidis inteiim anhni causa Ittsisse, aut 
 si malint, equitdsse in anindine longa. JVam qua tandem est iiiiquitas, cum 
 omni vitce instituto suos lusus concedamus, studiis nullum omnino lusumpermit- 
 tere : maxime si ita tractentur ludicra, ut ex his aliquando plu^ frrigis rejerat 
 lector non omnino naris obesce quam ex quonmdum tetricis ac splendidis argu- 
 mentis. Erasjii Praif. ad Mor. Enc. 
 
 Translation. — They may pretend, if they like, that I amuse myself with 
 playing Fox and Goose, or, if they prefer it, equitasse in arundine longa, 
 that I ride the cock-horse on my grandam's crutch. But wliercin, I pray, 
 consists the unfairness or impropriety, when every trade and profession is 
 allowed its own sport and travesty, in extending the same permission to 
 literature : esiiecially if trifles are so handled, that a reader of tolerable 
 quickness may occasionally derive more food for {)rofitable reflection than 
 from many a work of grand or gloomy argument.^ 
 
 Irus, the forlorn Irus, whose nourishment consisted in bread 
 and water, whose clothing of one tattered mantle, and whose 
 bed of an arm-full of straw, this same Irus, by a rapid transition 
 of fortune, became the most prosperous mortal under the sun. 
 It pleased the Gods to snatch him at once out of the dust, and 
 to place him by the side of princes. He beheld himself in the 
 possession of incalculable treasures. His palace excelled even 
 the temple of the gods in the pomp of its ornaments ; his least 
 sumptuous clothing was of purple and gold, and his table might 
 well have been named the compendium of luxury, the summary 
 of all that the voluptuous ingenuity of men had invented for the 
 gratification of the palate. A numerous train of admiring de- 
 pendents followed him at every step ; those to whom he vouch- 
 safed a gracious look, were esteemed already in the high road 
 of fortune, and the favored individual who was permitted to 
 kiss his hand, appeared to be the object of common envy. The
 
 320 
 
 name of Irus sounding in his ears an unwelcome memento and 
 perpetual reproach of liis former poverty, lie for this reason na- 
 med himself Ceraunius, or the Lightning-flasher, and the whole 
 people celebrated this splendid change of title by public rejoic- 
 ings. The poet, who a few years ago had personified poverty it- 
 self under his former name of Irus, now made a discovery which 
 had till that moment remained a profound secret, but was now re- 
 ceived by all with implicit faith and warmest approbation. Ju- 
 piter, forsooth, had become enamored of the mother of Ceraun- 
 ius, and assumed the form of a mortal in order to enjoy her love. 
 Henceforward they erected altars .to him, they swore by his 
 name, and the priests discovered in the entrails of the sacrifi- 
 cial victim, that the great Ceraunius, this worthy son of 
 Jupiter, was the sole pillar of the western world. Toxaris, his 
 former neighbor, a man whom good fortune, unwearied industry, 
 and rational frugality, had placed among the richest citizens, 
 became the first victim of the pride of this new demi-god. In 
 the time of his poverty Irus had repined at his luck and pros- 
 perity, and irritable from distress and envy, had conceived that 
 Toxaris had looked contemptuously on him ; and now was the 
 time that Ceraunius would make him feel the power of him 
 whose father grasped the thunder-bolt. Three advocates, newly 
 admitted into the recently established order of the Cygnet gave 
 evidence that Toxaris had denied the gods, committed pecula- 
 tions on the sacred Treasury, and increased his treasure by acts 
 of sacrilege. He was hurried off to prison and sentenced to 
 an ignominious death, and his v/ealth confiscated to the use of 
 Ceraunius, the earthly representative of the deities. Ceraunius 
 now found nothing wanting to his felicity but a bride worthy of 
 his rank and blooming honors. The most illustrious of the land 
 were candidates for his alliance. Euphorbia, the daughter of 
 the noble Austrius, v/as honored with his final choice. To no- 
 bility of birth nature had added for Euphorbia a rich dowry of 
 beauty, a nobleness both of look and stature. The flowing 
 ringlets of her hair, her lofty forehead, her brilliant eyes, her 
 stately figure, her majestic gait, had enchanted the haughty 
 Ceraunius : and all the bards told what the inspiring muses had 
 revealed to them, that Venus more than once had pined with 
 jealousy at the sight of her superior charms. The day of es- 
 pousal arrived, and the illustrious son of Jove was proceeding 
 in pomp to the temple, when the anguish-stricken wife of Toxa-
 
 321 
 
 aris, with his innocent children, suddenly threw themselvee at 
 his feet, and with loud lamentations entreated him to spare the 
 life of her husband. Enraged by this interruption, Ceraunius 
 spurned her from him with his feet and — Irus awakened, and 
 found himself lying on the same straw on which he had lain 
 down, and with his old tattered mantle spread over him. With 
 his returning reason, conscience too returned. He praised the 
 gods and resigned himself to his lot. Ceraunius indeed had 
 vanished, but the innocent Toxaris was still alive, and Irus poor 
 yet guiltless. 
 
 Can my reader recollect no character now on earth, who 
 sometime or other will awake from his dream of empire, poor 
 as Irus, with all the guilt and impiety of Ceraunius .'' 
 
 P. S. The reader will bear in mind, that this fable was writ- 
 ten and iirst published at the close of 1809. 
 
 Qe-/d^ev 8s Ts PTj'niog eyi'Ct). 
 
 CHRISTMAS WITHIN DOORS, IN THE NORTH OF GERMANY. 
 
 EXTRACTED FROM SATYRANE's LETTERS. 
 
 Ratzehurg. 
 There is a Christmas custom here which pleased and interested 
 me. — The children make little presents to their parents, and to 
 each other ; and the parents to their children. For three or four 
 months before Christmas the girls are all busy, and the boys 
 save up their pocket-money, to make or purchase these pre- 
 sents. What the present is to be is cautiously kept secret, and 
 the girls have a world of contrivances to conceal it — such as 
 working when they are out on visits and the others are not with 
 them ; getting up in the morning before day-light, &c. Then 
 on the evening before Christmas day one of the parlors is light- 
 ed up by the children, into which the parents must not go. A 
 great yew bough is fastened on the table at a little distance from 
 the wall, a multitude of little tapers are fastened in the bough, 
 but so as not to catch it till they are nearly burnt out, and co- 
 loured paper, &c. hangs and flutters from the twigs. — Under 
 this bough the children lay out in great order the presents they 
 mean for their parents, still concealing in their pockets what 
 they intend for each other. Then the parents are introduced^-r- 
 and each presents his little gift — and then bring out the rest one 
 41
 
 322 
 
 by one from their pockets, and present them with kisses and 
 embraces. — Where I witnessed this scene, there were eight or 
 nine children, and the eldest daughter and the mother wept 
 aloud for joy and tenderness ; and the tears ran down the face 
 of the father, and he clasped all his children so tight to his 
 breast — it seemed as if he did it to stifle the sob that was rising 
 within him. — I was very much affected. — The shadow of the 
 bough and its appendages on the wall, and arching over on the 
 ceiling, made a pretty picture — and then the raptures of the 
 very little ones, when at last the twigs and their needles began 
 to take fire and snap — it was a delight for them ! — On the 
 next day, in the great parlor, the parents lay out on the table the 
 presents for the children ; a scene of more sober joy succeeds, 
 as on this day, after an old custom, the mother says privately 
 to each of her daughters, and the father to his sons, that which 
 he has observed most praise-worthy and that which was most 
 faulty in their conduct. — Formerly, and still in the smaller 
 towns and villages throughout North Germany, these presents 
 were sent by ail the parents to some one fellow who in high 
 buskins, a white robe, a mask, and an enormous flax wig, per- 
 sonates Knecht Rupert, i. e. the servant Rupert. On Christ- 
 mas night he goes round to every house and says, that Jesus 
 Christ his master sent him thither — the parents and elder chil- 
 dren receive him with great pomp of reverence, while the little 
 ones are most terribly frightened — He then enquires for the 
 children, and according to the character which he hears from 
 the parent, he gives them the intended present as if they came 
 out of heaven from Jesus Christ. — Or, if they should have been 
 bad children, he gives the parents a rod, and in the name of 
 his master recommends them to use it frequently. — About seven 
 or eight years old the children are let into the secret, and it is 
 curious how faithfully they keep it ! 
 
 CHRISTMAS OUT OF DOORS. 
 The whole Lake of Ratzeburg is one mass of thick transpa- 
 rent ice — a spotless mirror of nine miles in extent ! The low- 
 ness of the hills, which rise from the shore of the lake, pre- 
 clude the awful sublimity of Alpine scenery, yet compensate 
 for the want of it by beauties, of which this very lowness is a
 
 323 
 
 necessary condition. Yester-morning I saw the lesser lake com- 
 pletely hid by mist ; but the moment the sun peeped over tho 
 hill, the mist broke in the middle, and in a few seconds stood 
 divided, leaving a broad road all across the lake ; and between 
 these two walls of mist the sunlight bitrnt upon the ice, forming 
 a road of golden fire, intolerably bright ! and the mist-walls 
 themselves partook of the blaze in a multitude of shining co- 
 lours. This is our second frost. About a month ago, before 
 the thaw came on, there was a storm of wind ; during the whole 
 night, such were the thunders and bowlings of the breaking ice, 
 that they have left a conviction on my mind, that there are 
 sounds more sublime than any sight can be, more absolutely sus- 
 pending the power of comparison, and more utterly absorbing 
 the mind's self-consciousness in its total attention to the object 
 working upon it. Part of the ice which the vehemence of the 
 wind had shattered, was driven shore-ward and froze anew. 
 On the evening of the next day, at sun-set, the shattered ice 
 thus frozen, appeared of a deep blue and in shape like an agi- 
 tated sea ; beyond this, the water, that ran up between the 
 great islands of ice which had preserved their masses entire 
 and smooth, shone of a yellow green : but all these scattered 
 ice-islands, themselves, were of an intensely bright blood co- 
 lour — they seemed blood and light in union ! On some of the 
 largest of these islands, the fishermen stood pulling out their 
 immense nets through the holes made in the ice for this pur- 
 pose, and the men, their net-poles, and their huge nets, were a 
 part of the glory ; say rather, it appeared as if the rich crimson 
 light had shaped itself into these forms, figures, and attitudes, to 
 make a glorious vision in mockery of earthly things. 
 
 The lower lake is now all alive with scaters, and with ladies 
 driven onward by them in their ice cars. Mercury, surely, was 
 the first maker of scates, and the wings at his feet are symbols 
 of the invention. In seating there arc three pleasing circumstan- 
 ces : the infinitely subtle particles of ice which the scate cuts up, 
 and which creep and run before the scate like a low mist, and 
 in sun-rise or sun-set become coloured ; second, the shadow of 
 the scater in the water, seen through the transparent ice ; and 
 third, the melancholy undulating sound from the scate, not with- 
 out variety; and when very many are seating together, the 
 sounds and the noises give an impulse to the icy trees, and the 
 woods all round the lake tinkle.
 
 324 
 
 Here I stop, having in truth transcribed the preceding in 
 great measure, in order to present the lovers of poetry with a 
 descriptive passage, extracted, with the author's permission, 
 from an unpublished Poem on the Growth and Revolutions of 
 an Individual IMind, by Wordsworth. 
 
 an Orphic tale indeed, 
 
 A tale divine of high and passionate thoughts 
 
 To their own music chaunted ! S. T. C. 
 
 GROWTH OF GENIUS FROM THE INFLUENCES OF NATURAL OB- 
 JECTS, ON THE IMAGINATION IN BOYHOOD, AND EARLY YOUTH. 
 
 Wisdom ! and Spirit of the Universe ! 
 
 Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of Thought ! 
 And giv'st to forms and images a breath 
 And everlasting motion ! not in vain, 
 By day or star-light, thus from my first dawn 
 Of Childhood didst Thou intertwine for me 
 The passions that build up our human Soul, 
 Nor with the mean and vulgar works of man 
 But with high objects, with enduring things, 
 With Life and Nature : purifying thus 
 The elements of feeUng and of thought, 
 And sanctifying by such discipline 
 Both pain and fear, until we recognize 
 A grandeur in the beatings of the heart. 
 
 Nor was this fellowship vouchsaf 'd to me ^ 
 With stinted kuidness. In November days 
 When vapors rolling down the vallies made 
 A lonely .scene more lonesome ; among woods 
 At noon, and mid the calm of summer nights, 
 When by the margin of the trembling lake, 
 Beneath the gloomy hills I homeward went 
 In solitude, such intercoui-se was mine ; 
 'Twas mine among the fields both day and night 
 And by the waters all the summer long. 
 
 And in the fi'osty season when the sun 
 Was set, and, visible for many a mile 
 The cottage windows through the twihght blazed, 
 I heeded not the summons : — happy time 
 It was indeed for all of us, to me 
 It was a time of rapture ! clear and loud 
 The village clock toU'd sLx! I wheel'd about, 
 Proud and exulting, like an untir'd horse 
 Thai car'd not for ita home. — All shod with stoel 
 W« hisa'd along the polish'd ice, iu games
 
 325 
 
 Confederate, imitative of tlio chace 
 And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn, 
 The pack loud bellowing, and the liunted hare. 
 So through the darkness and the cold we flew, 
 And not a voice was idle : with the din 
 Meanwhile the precipices rang aloud. 
 The leafless trees and every icy crag 
 Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills 
 Into the tumult sent an alien sound 
 Of melancholy — not unnoticed, while the stars 
 Eastward, were spai-kling clear, and in the west 
 The orange sky of evening died away. 
 
 Not seldom from the uproar I retired 
 Into a silent bay or sportively 
 Glanc'd sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng 
 To cut across the image of a star 
 That gleam'd upon the ice : and oftentimes 
 When we had given our bodies to the wind, 
 And all the shadowy banks on either side 
 Came sweeping through the darkness spinning still 
 The rapid line of motion, then at once 
 Have I reclining back upon my heels 
 Stopp'd short : yet still the solitaiy cliflfs 
 Wheel'd by me even as if the earth had roU'd 
 With visible motion her diurnal round ! 
 Behind me did they stretch in solemn train 
 Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch'd 
 Till all was tranquil as a summer sea.
 
 ESSAY I y. 
 
 Es ist fast traurig zu sehen, line man von der Hebraischen Quellen so ganz sich 
 ahgewendet hat. In JEgyptens selbst dunkeln unentrathselbaren Hieroglyphen 
 hoi man den Schliissel alter Weislieit suchen wollen ; jetzt ist von nichts als In- 
 diens Sprache und Weisheit die Rede ; aher die Rabbinische Schriften liegen 
 nnerforscht. Schelling. 
 
 Translation. — It is mournful to observe, how entirely we have turned our 
 backs oil the Hebrew sources. In the obscure iiisolvable riddles of the Egyp- 
 tian Hieroglyphics the Learned have been hoping to find the key of an- 
 cient doctrine, and now we hear of nothing but the language and wisdom 
 of India, while tlie writings and traditions of the Rabbins are consigned 
 to neglect witliout examination. 
 
 The lord helpeth man and beast. 
 
 During his march to conquer the world, Alexander the Ma- 
 cedonian, came to a people in Africa, who dwelt in a remote and 
 secluded corner in peaceful huts, and knew neither war nor 
 conqueror. They led him to the hut of their Chief, who re- 
 ceived him hospitably and placed before him golden dates, gol- 
 den figs, and bread of gold. Do you eat gold in this country .'' 
 said Alexander. I take it for granted (replied the Chief) that 
 thou wert able to find eatable food in thine own country. For 
 what reason then art thou come among us .'' Your gold has not 
 tempted me hither, said Alexander, but I would willingly be- 
 come acquainted with your manners and customs. So be it, 
 rejoined the other, sojourn among us as long as it pleaseth thee. 
 At the close of this conversation two citizens entered as into 
 their Court of Justice. The plaintilTsaid, I bought of this man 
 a piece of land, and as I was making a deep drain through it I 
 found a treasure. This is not mine, for I only bargained for 
 the land, and not for any treasure that might be concealed be-
 
 327 
 
 neath it : and yet the former owner of the land will not re- 
 ceive it. The defendant answered : I hope I have a con- 
 science as well as my fellow-citizen. I sold him the land with 
 all its contingent, as well as existing advantages, and conse- 
 quently the treasure inclusively. 
 
 The Chief, who was at the same time their supreme judge, 
 recapitulated their words, in order that the parties might see 
 whether or no he understood them aright. Then after some 
 reflection said : Thou hast a Son, Friend, I believe ? Yes ! 
 And thou (addressing the other) a Daughter? Yes! — Well 
 then, let thy Son marry thy Daughter, and bestow the trea- 
 sure on the young couple for their marriage portion. Alexan- 
 der seemed surprized and perplexed. Think you my sentence 
 unjust ? the Chief asked him — O no, replied Alexander, but it 
 astonishes me. And how, then rejoined the Chief, would the 
 case have been decided in your country ? — To confess the truth, 
 said Alexander, we should have taken both parties into custo- 
 dy and have seized the treasure for the king's use. For the 
 king's use ! exclaimed the Chief, now in his turn astonished. 
 Does the sun shine on that country ? — Yes ! Does it rain 
 there ? — Assuredly. Wonderful ! but are there tame Animals 
 in the country that live on the grass and green herbs ? Very 
 many, and of many kinds. — Aye, that must be the cause, said 
 the Chief: for the sake of those innocent Animals the All- 
 gracious Being continues to let the sun shine and the rain drop 
 down on your country. 
 
 WHOSO HATH FOUND A VIRTUOUS WIFE HATH A GREATER TREA- 
 SURE THAN COSTLY PEARLS. 
 
 Such a treasure had the celebrated Teacher Rabbi Meir 
 found. He sate during the whole of one sabbath day in the 
 public school, and instructed the people. During his absence 
 from his house his two sons died, both of them of uncommon 
 beauty and enlightened in the law. His wife bore them to her 
 bed-chamber, laid them upon the marriage-bed, and spread a 
 white covering over their bodies. In the evening Rabbi Meir 
 came home. Where are my two sons he asked, that I may 
 give them my blessing ? They are gone to the school, was the 
 answer. I repeatedly looked round the school, he replied, and
 
 328 
 
 I did not see them there. She reached to him a goblet, he 
 praised the Lord at the going out of the Sabbath, drank and 
 again asked : where are my Sons that they too may drink of the 
 cup of blessing ? They will not be far off, she said, and plac- 
 ed food before him that he might eat. He was in a glad- 
 some and genial mood, and when he had said grace after the 
 meal, she thus addressed him. Rabbi, with thy permission I 
 would fain propose to thee one question. Ask it then my love ! 
 he replied : A few days ago, a person entrusted some jewels to 
 my custody, and now he demands them again : should I give 
 them back again ? This is a question, said Rabbi Meir, which 
 my wife should not have thought it necessary to ask. What, 
 wouldst thou hesitate or be reluctant to restore to every one 
 his own ? — No, she replied ; but yet I thought it best not to 
 restore them without acquainting thee therewith. She then 
 led him to their chamber, and stepping to the bed, took the 
 white covering from the dead bodies. — Ah, my Sons, my Sons, 
 thus loudly lamented the Father, my Sons, the Light of mine 
 Eyes and the Light of my Understanding, I was your Father, 
 but ye were my Teachers in the Law. The mother turned 
 away and wept bitterly. At length she took her husband by 
 the hand and said. Rabbi didst thou not teach me that we must 
 not be reluctant to restore that which was entrusted to our 
 keeping ? See the Lord gave, the Lord has taken away, and 
 blessed be the name of the Lord ! Blessed be the name of the 
 Lord ! echoed Rabbi Meir, and blessed be his name for thy 
 sake too ! for well is it written ; whoso hath found a virtuous 
 Wife hath a greater Treasure than costly Pearls ; She openeth 
 her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kind- 
 ness. 
 
 CONVERSATION OF A PHILOSOPHER WITH A RABBI. 
 
 Your God in his Book calls himself a jealous God, who can 
 endure no other God beside himself, and on all occasions makes 
 manifest his abhorrence of idolatry. How comes it then that 
 he threatens and seems to hate the W'orshippers of false Gods 
 more than the false Gods themselves. A certain king, replied 
 the Rabbi, had a disobedient Son. Among other worthless 
 tricks of various kinds, he had the baseness to give his Dogs
 
 329 
 
 his Father's names and titles. Should the King show his anger 
 on the Prince or the Dogs ? — Well turned, rejoined the Philoso- 
 pher : but if your God destroyed the objects of idolatry he would 
 take away the temptation to it. Yea, retorted the Rabbi, if the 
 Fools worshipped such things only as were of no further use than 
 that to which their Folly applied them, if the Idol were always 
 as worthless as the Idolatry is contemptible. But they worship 
 the Sun, the Moon, the Host of Heaven, the Rivers, the Sea, 
 Fire, Air, and what not ? Would you that the Creator, for the 
 sake of these Fools, should ruin his own Works, and disturb 
 the laws appointed to Nature by his own Wisdom ? If a man 
 steals grain and sows it, should the seed not shoot up out of 
 the earth, because it was stolen ? no ! the wise Creator lets 
 Nature run her own course ; for her course is his own appoint- 
 ment. And what if the children of folly abuse it to evil ? The 
 day of reckoning is not far off, and men Avill then learn that 
 human actions likewise re-appear in their consequences by as 
 certain a law as the green blade rises up out of the buried 
 corn-seed. 
 
 42
 
 INTRODUCTION.* 
 
 Jlaqa He^rov Tifv ivvoiav to~v xaTa (pvaiv tifv, iioX ro" ae^ivov u'tx- 
 Xu'gojg, o/'ce xoluy.eiag /lifp Ttc/ai/g ngoaaregsgni' sii'at rifi' 'ojuiXiai' 
 uvTO'v, a tSeatuoi'TUTOf de tcuq' avjo'v exeu'ov to'v xu'iqop eivut- 
 Kal u f.ia fief cC nud-equrov eiyai, a fia de cpiXogoqyo'iaiov xcxi to" I8eiv 
 u vd-QMTtov aixqpoj'g tku' /igoi' jm'p suvto'v •Auloff ifyovfisvov tj^V av- 
 lo'v TTolvjUu&iijv. M. ANTSIN. ^i^. a. 
 
 Translation. — From Sextus, and from the contemplation of his cliaracter, I 
 learnt what it was to live a life in harmony with nature ; and that seemli- 
 ness and dignity of deportment, which ensured the profoundest reverence 
 at the very same time that his company was more winning tlian all the flat- 
 teiy in the world. To him I owe likewise that I have known a man at 
 once the most dispassionate, and the most affectionate, and who of all his 
 attractions set the least value on the multiplicity of his literary acquisitions. 
 
 M. Anton. Book I. 
 
 To THE Editor of The Friend. 
 
 Sir, 
 
 I hope you will not ascribe to presumption, the liberty I 
 take in addressing you, on the subject of your Work. I feel 
 deeply interested in the cause you have undertaken to support ; 
 and my object in writing this letter is to describe to you, in 
 
 * With this introduction commences the third volume of the English edi- 
 tion of The Friend ; to which volume the following lines are prefixed as a 
 motto : 
 
 Now for the writing of this werke, 
 
 I, who am a lonesome clerke, 
 
 Piu'poscd for to write a book 
 
 After the world, that whilomc took 
 
 Its course in old(^ days long passed : 
 
 But for men sayn, it is now lasaed
 
 331 
 
 j>art from my own feelings, what I conceive to be the state of 
 many minds, which may derive important advantage from your 
 instructions. 
 
 I speak, Sir, of those who, though bred up under our unfavora- 
 ble system of education, have yet held at times some intercourse 
 with nature, and with those great minds whose works have 
 been moulded by the spirit of nature : who, therefore, when 
 they pass from the seclusion and constraint of early study, bring 
 with them into the new scene of the world, much of the pure sen- 
 sibility which is the spring of all that is greatly good in thought 
 and action. To such the season of that entrance into the world 
 is a season of fearful importance ; not for the seduction of its 
 passions, but of its opinions. Whatever be their intellectual 
 powers, unless extraordinary circumstances in their lives, have 
 been so favorable to the growth of meditative genius, that their 
 speculative opinions must spring out of their early feelings, 
 their minds are still at the mercy of fortune ; they have no 
 inward impulse steadily to propel them : and must trust to the 
 chances of the world for a guide. And such is our present 
 moral and intellectual state, that these chances are little else 
 than variety of danger. There will be a thousand causes con- 
 spiring to coznplete the work of a false education, and by en- 
 closing the mind on every side from the influences of natural 
 feeling, to degrade its inborn dignity, and finally bring the heart 
 itself under subjection to a corrupted understanding. I am 
 anxious to describe to you what I have experienced or seen of 
 the dispositions and feelings that will aid every other cause of 
 danger, and tend to lay the mind open to the infection of all 
 those falsehoods in opinion and sentiment, which constitute the 
 degeneracy of the age. Though it would not be difficult to 
 prove, that the mind of the country is much enervated since 
 
 In worser plight than it was tho, 
 I thougiit me for to touch also 
 The woi'ld which neweth every day — 
 So, as I can, so as I may, 
 Albeit I sickness have and pain, 
 And long have had, yet would I fain 
 Do my mind's hest and bcsiness, 
 That in some part, so as I guess, 
 The gentle mind may be advised. 
 
 GowER, Pro. to tke Confess. JlmanUs.
 
 332 
 
 the days of her strength, and brought down from its moral dig- 
 nity, it is not yet so forlorn of all good, — there is nothing in the 
 face of the times so dark and saddening, and repulsive — as to 
 shock the first feelings of a generous spirit, and drive it at once 
 to seek refuge in the elder ages of our greatness. There yet 
 survives so much of the character bred up through long years 
 of liberty, danger, and glory, that even what this age produces 
 bears traces of those that are past, and it still yields enough of 
 beautiful, and splendid, and bold, to captivate an ardent but 
 untutored imagination. And in this real excellence is the be- 
 ginning of danger : for it is the first spring of that excessive 
 admiration of the age which at last brings down to its own le- 
 vel a mind born above it. If there existed only the general 
 disposition of all who are formed with a high capacity for good, 
 to be rather credulous of excellence than suspiciously and sev- 
 erely just, the error would not be carried far: — but there are 
 to a young mind, in this country and at this time, numerous 
 powerful causes concurring to inflame this disposition, till the 
 excess of the afi:ection above the worth of its object, is beyond 
 all computation. To trace these causes it will be necessary to 
 follow the history of a pure and noble mind from the first mo- 
 ment of that critical passage from seclusion to the world, which 
 changes all the circumstances of its intellectual existence, 
 shews it for the first time the real scene of living men, and 
 calls up the new feeling of numerous relations by which it is 
 to be connected with them. 
 
 To the young adventurer in life, who enters upon his course 
 with such a mind, every thing seems made for delusion. He 
 comes with a spirit whose dearest feelings and highest thoughts 
 have sprung up under the influences of nature. He transfers 
 to the realities of life the high wild fancies of visionary boyhood : 
 he brings with him into the world the passions of solitary and 
 untamed imagination, and hopes which he has learned from 
 dreams. Those dreams have been of the great and wonderful, 
 and lovely, of all which in these has yet been disclosed to him : 
 his thoughts have dwelt among the wonders of nature, and 
 among the loftiest spirits of men — heroes, and sages, and saints ; 
 — those whose deeds, and thoughts, and hopes, were high 
 above ordinary mortality, have been the familiar companions of 
 his soul. To love and to admire has been the joy of his ex-
 
 333 
 
 istence. Love and admiration are the pleasures he will de- 
 mand of the world. For these he has searched eagerly into the 
 ages that are gone : but with more ardent and peremptory ex- 
 pectation he requires them of that in which his own lot is cast : 
 for to look on life with hopes of happiness is a necessity of 
 his nature, and to him there is no happiness but such as is sur- 
 rounded with excellence. 
 
 See first how this spirit will affect his judgment of moral 
 character, in those with whom chance may connect him in the 
 common relations of life. It is of those with Avhom he is to 
 live, that his soul first demands this food of her desires. From 
 their conversation, their looks, their actions, their lives, she 
 asks for excellence. To ask from all and to ask in vain, would 
 be too dismal to bear : it would disturb him too deeply with 
 doubt and perplexity, and fear. In this hope, and in the revol- 
 ting of his thoughts from the possibility of disappointment, there 
 is a preparation for self-delusion : there is an unconscious de- 
 termination that his soul shall be satisfied ; an obstinate will to 
 find good every where. And thus his first study of mankind is 
 a continued effort to read in them the expression of his own 
 feelings. He catches at every uncertain shew and shadowy 
 resemblance of what he seeks ; and unsuspicious in innocence, 
 he is first won with those appearances of good which are in 
 fact only false pretensions. But this error is not carried far : 
 for there is a sort of instinct of rectitude, which like the pres- 
 sure of a talisman given to baffle the illusions of enchantment, 
 warns a pure mind against hypocrisy. — There is another delu- 
 sion more difficult to resist and more slowly dissipated. It is 
 when he finds, as he often will, some of the real features of 
 excellence in the purity of their native form. For then his 
 rapid imagination will gather round them all the kindred 
 features that are wanting to perfect beauty ; and make for him, 
 where he could not find, the moral creature of his expectation : 
 — peopling, even from this human world, his little circle of af- 
 fection, with forms as fair as his heart desired for its love. 
 
 But when, from the eminence of life which he has reached, 
 he lifts up his eyes, and sends out his spirit to range over the 
 great scene that is opening before him and around him, — the 
 whole prospect of civilized life — so wide and so magnificent: — 
 when he begins to contemplate, in their various stations of 
 power or splendor, the leaders of mankind — those men on
 
 334 
 
 wbos^e wisdom are hung the fortunes of nations — those whose 
 genius and valor wield the heroism of a people ; — or those, in 
 no inferior "pride of place," whose sway is over the mind of 
 society, — chiefs in the realm of imagination, — interpreters of 
 the secrets of nature, — rulers of human opinion what won- 
 der, when he looks on all this living scene, that his heart 
 should burn with strong affection, that he should feel that his own 
 happiness will be forever interwoven with the interests of man- 
 kind ? — Here then the sanguine hope with which he looks on life, 
 will again be blended with his passionate desire of excellence ; 
 and he will still be impelled to single out some, on whom his 
 imagination and his hopes may repose. To whatever department 
 of human thought or action his mind is turned with interest, ei- 
 ther by the sway of public passion or by its own impulse, among 
 statesmen, and warriors, and philosophers, and poets, he will 
 distinguish some favored names on which he may satisfy his ad- 
 miration And there, just as in the little circle of his own ac- 
 quaintance, seizing eagerly on every merit they possess, he will 
 supply more from his own credulous hope, completing real with 
 imagined excellence, till living men, with all their imperfec- 
 tions, become to him the representatives of his perfect ideal 
 creation : — Till, multiplying his objects of reverence, as he 
 enlarges his prospect of life, he will have surrounded himself 
 with idols of his own hands, and his imagination will seem to 
 discern a glory in the countenance of the age, which is but the 
 reflection of its own effulgence. 
 
 He will possess, therefore, in the creative power of gene- 
 rous hope, a preparation for illusory and exaggerated admira- 
 tion of the age in which he lives : — and this pre-disposition 
 will meet with many favoring circumstances, when he has grown 
 up under a system of education like ours, which (as perhaps all 
 education must that is placed in the hands of a distinct and em- 
 bodied class, who therefore bring to it the peculiar and heredi- 
 tary prejudices of their order) has controled his imagination to 
 a reverence of former times, with an unjust contempt of his 
 own. — For no sooner does he break loose from this control, 
 and begin to feel, as he contemplates the world for himself, 
 how much there is surrounding him on all sides, that gratifies 
 his noblest desires, than there springs up in him an indignant 
 sense of injustice, both to the age and to his own mind : and he 
 is impelled warmly and eagerly to give loose to the feelings
 
 335 
 
 that have been held in bondage, to seek out and to delight in 
 finding excellence that will vindicate the insulted world, while 
 it justifies too, his resentment of his own undue subjection, and 
 exalts the value of his new found liberty. 
 
 Add to this, that secluded as he has been from knowledge, 
 and, in the imprisoning circle of one system of ideas, cut off 
 from his share in the thoughts and feelings that are stirring 
 among men, he finds himself, at the first steps of his liberty, 
 in a new intellectual world. Passions and powers which he 
 knew not of, start up in his soul. The human mind, which he 
 had seen but under one aspect, now presents to him a thousand 
 unknown and beautiful forms. He sees it, in its varying pow- 
 ers, glancing over nature with restless curiosity, and with impe- 
 tuous energy striving for ever against the barriers which she has 
 placed around it ; sees it with divine power creating from dark 
 materials living beauty, and fixing all its high and transported 
 fancies in imperishable forms. — In the world of knowledge, 
 and science, and art, and genius, he treads as a stranger : — 
 in the confusion of new sensations, bewildered in delights, all 
 seems beautiful ; all seems admirable. And therefore he en- 
 gages eagerly in the pursuit of false or insufficient philosophy ; 
 he is won by the allurements 'of licentious art ; he follows 
 with wonder the irregular transports of undisciplined imagina- 
 tion. — Nor where the objects of his admiration are worthy, is 
 he yet skilful to distinguish between the acquisitions which the 
 age has made for itself, and that large proportion of its wealth 
 which it has only inherited ; but in his delight of discovery 
 and growing knowledge, all that is new to his own mind seems 
 to him new-born to the world, — To himself every fresh idea 
 appears instruction : every new exertion, acquisition of power: 
 he seems just called to the consciousness of himself, and to his 
 true place in the intellectual world ; and gratitude and rever- 
 ence towards those to whom he owes this recovery of his dig- 
 nity, tends much to subject him to the dominion of minds that 
 were not formed by nature to be the leaders of opinion. 
 
 All the tumult and glow of thought and imagination, which 
 seizes on a mind of power in such a scene, tends irresistibly 
 to bind it by stronger attachment of love and admiration to its 
 own age. And there is one among the new emotions which 
 belong to its entrance on the world — one — almost the noblest 
 of all — in which this exaltation of the age is essentially min-
 
 336 
 
 gled. The faith in the perpetual progression of human nature 
 towards perfection, gives birth to such lofty dreams, as se- 
 cure to it the devout assent of imagination ; and it will be yet 
 more grateful to a heart just opening to hope, flushed with the 
 consciousness of new strength, and exulting in the prospect of 
 destined achievements. There is, therefore, almost a compul- 
 sion on generous and enthusiastic spirits, as they trust that 
 the future shall transend the present, to believe that the pre- 
 sent transends the past. It is only on an undue love and ad- 
 miration of their own age, that they can build their confidence 
 in the amelioration of the human race. Nor is this faith, — 
 which in some shape, will always be the creed of virtue, — 
 without apparent reason, even in the erroneous form in which 
 the young adopt it. For there is a perpetual acquisition of 
 knowledge and art, — an unceasing progress in many of the 
 modes of exertion of the human mind, — a perpetual unfolding 
 of virtues with the changing manners of society : — and it is not 
 for a young mind to compare what is gained with what has 
 passed away ; to discern that amidst the incessant intellectual 
 activity of the race, the intellectual power of individual minds 
 may be falling off; and that amidst accumulating knowledge 
 lofty science may disappear ; — and still less, to judge, in the 
 more complicated moral character of a people, what is progres- 
 sion, and what is decline. 
 
 Into a mind possessed with this persuasion of the perpetual 
 progress of man, there may even imperceptibly steal both from 
 the belief itself, and from many of the views on which it rests 
 — something like a distrust of the wisdom of great men of for- 
 mer ages, and with the reverence — which no delusion will ever 
 overpower in a pure mind — for their greatness, a fancied dis- 
 cernment of imperfection; — of incomplete excellence, which 
 wanted for its accomplishment the advantages of later improve- 
 ments : there will be a surprize, that so much should have been 
 possible in times so ill prepared ; and even the study of their 
 works may be sometimes rather the curious research of a specu- 
 lative enquirer, than the devout contemplation of an enthusiast; 
 the watchful and obedient heart of a disciple listening to the in- 
 spiration of his master. 
 
 Here then is the power of delusion that will gather round 
 the first steps of a youthful spirit, and throw enchantment over 
 the world in which it is to dwell. Hope realizing its own
 
 3^7 
 
 dreams : — Ignorance dazzled and ravished with sudden sun- 
 shine : — Power awakened and rejoicing in its own conscious- 
 ness : — Enthusiasm liindling among multiplying images of great- 
 ness and beauty; and enamored, above all, of one splendid error: 
 and, springing from all these, such a rapture of life and hope, 
 and joy, that tlie soul, in the power of its happiness, transmutes 
 things essentially repugnant to it, into the excellence of its own 
 nature : — these are the spells that cheat the eye of the mind 
 with illusion. It is under these influences that a young man 
 of ardent spirit gives all his love, and reverence, and zeal, to 
 productions of art, to theories of science, to opinions, to sys- 
 tems of feeling, and to characters distinguished in the world, 
 that are far beneath his own original dignity. 
 
 Now as this delusion springs not from his worse but his bet- 
 ter nature, it seems as if there could be no warning to him from 
 within of his danger : for even the impassioned joy which he 
 draws at times from the works of Nature, and from those of 
 her mightier sons, and which would startle him from a dream 
 of unworthy passion, serves only to fix the infatuation : — for 
 those deep emotions, proving to him that his heart is uncorrupt- 
 ed, justify to him all its workings, and his mind confiding and 
 delighting in itself, yields to the guidance of its own blind im- 
 pulses of pleasure. His chance, therefore, of security, is the 
 chance that the greater number of objects occurring to attract 
 his honorable passions, may be worthy of them. But we have 
 seen that the whole power of circumstances is collected to ga- 
 ther round him such objects and influences as will bend his high 
 passions to unworthy enjoyment. He engages in it with a 
 heart and understanding unspoiled : but they cannot long be 
 misapplied with impunity. They are drawn gradually into clo- 
 ser sympathy with the falsehoods they have adopted, till, his 
 very nature seeming to change under the corruption, there dis- 
 appears from it the capacity of those higher perceptions and 
 pleasures to which he was born : and he is cast off from the 
 communion of exalted minds, to live and to perish with the age 
 to which he has surrendered himself. 
 
 If minds under these circumstances of danger are preserved 
 from decay and overthrow, it can seldom, I think, be to them- 
 selves that they owe their deliverance. It must be to a fortu- 
 nate chance which places them under the influence of some 
 more enlightened mind, from which they may first gain suspi- 
 43
 
 338 
 
 cioii and afterwards wisdom. There is a philosophy, which, 
 leading them by the light of their best emotions to the princi- 
 ples which should give life to thought and law to genius, will 
 discover to them in clear and perfect evidence, the falsehood 
 of the errors that have misled them ; and restore them to them- 
 selves. And this philosophy they will be willing to hear and 
 wise to understand ; but they must be led into its mysteries by 
 some guiding hand ; for they want the impulse or the power to 
 penetrate of themselves the recesses. 
 
 If a superior mind should assume the protection of others 
 just beginning to move among the dangers I have described, 
 it would probably be found, that delusions springing from their 
 own virtuous activity, were not the only difficulties to be en- 
 countered. Even ai'ter suspicion is awakened, the subjection 
 to falsehood may be prolonged and deepened by many weak- 
 nesses both of the intellectual and moral nature ; weaknesses 
 that will sometimes shake the authority of acknowledged truth. 
 There may be intellectual indolence ; an indisposition in the 
 mind to the effort of combining the ideas it actually possesses, 
 and bringing into distinct form the knowledge, which in its ele- 
 ments is already its own : — there may be, where the heart re- 
 sists the sway of opinion, misgivings and modest self-mistrust, 
 in him who sees, that if he trusts- his heart, he must slight the 
 judgment of all around him : — there may be too habitual yield- 
 ing to authority, consisting, more than in indolence or diffi- 
 dence, in a conscious helplessness, and incapacity of the mind 
 to maintain itself in its own place against the weight of general 
 opinion ; — and there may be too indiscriminate, too undiscipli- 
 ned a sympathy with others, which by the mere infection of 
 feeling will subdue the reason. — There must be a weakness in 
 dejection to him who thinks, with sadness, if his faith be pure, 
 how gross is the error of the multitude, and that multitude how 
 vast : — a reluctance to embrace a creed that excludes so many 
 whom he loves, so many whom his youth has revered : — a diffi- 
 culty to his understanding to believe that those whom he knows to 
 be, in much that is good and honorable, his superiors, can be 
 beneath him in this which is the most impoitant of all : — a sym- 
 pathy pleading importunately at his heart to descend to the fel- 
 lowship of his brothers, and to take their faith and wisdom for 
 his own. — How often, when under the impulses of those solemn 
 hours, in which he has felt with clearer insight and deeper faith
 
 339 
 
 his sacred truths, he labors to win to his own belief thoso whom 
 he loves, will he be checked by their indifference or their laugh- 
 ter ! and will he not bear back to his meditations a painful and 
 disheartening sorrow, — a gloomy discontent in that faith which 
 takes in but a portion of those whom he wishes to include in all 
 his blessings? Will he not be enfeebled by a distraction of in- 
 consistent desires, when he feels so strongly that the faith which 
 fills his heart, the circle within which he would embrace all 
 he loves — would repose all his wishes and hopes, and enjoy- 
 ments, is yet incommensurate with his affections ? 
 
 Even when the mind, strong in reason and just feeling united, 
 and relying on its strength, has attached itself to Truth, how 
 much is there in the course and accidents of life that is for ever 
 silently at work for its degradation. There are pleasures deem- 
 ed harmless, that lay asleep the recollections of innocence : — 
 there are pursuits held honorable, or imposed by duty, that op- 
 press the moral spirit • — above all there is that perpetual con- 
 nection with ordinary minds in the common intercourse of so- 
 ciety ; — that restless activity of frivolous conversation, where 
 men of all characters and all pursuits mixing together, nothing 
 mav be talked of that is not of common interest to all — nothina;, 
 therefore, but those obvious thoughts and feelings that float over 
 the surface of things : — and all which is drawn from the depth 
 of Nature, all which impassioned feeling has made original in 
 thought, would be misplaced and obtrusive. The talent that 
 is allowed to shew itself is that which can repay admiration by 
 furnishing entertainment : — and the display to which it is invi- 
 ted is that which flatters the vulgar pride of society, by aba- 
 sing what is too high in excellence for its sympathy. A dan- 
 gerous seduction to talents — which would make language — that 
 was given to exalt the soul by the fervid expression oi its pure 
 emotions — the instrument of its degradation. And even when 
 there is, as the instance I have supposed, too much uprightness 
 to choose so dishonorable a triumph, there is a necessity of 
 manners, by which every one must be controled w"ho mixes 
 much in society, not to offend those with whom he converses 
 by his superiority ; and whatever be the native spirit of a mind, 
 it is evident that this perpetual adaptation of itself to others — 
 this watchfulness against its own rising feelings, this studied 
 sympathy with mediocrity — must pollute and impoverish the 
 sources of its strength.
 
 340 
 
 From much of its own vreaknees, and from all the errors of 
 its misleading activities, may generous youth be rescued by 
 the interposition of an enlightened mind ; and in some degree 
 it may be guarded by instruction against the injuries to which 
 it is exposed in the world. His lot is happy who owes this 
 protection to friendship: who has found in a friend the watch- 
 ful guardian of his mind. He will not be deluded, having that 
 light to guide : he will not slumber with that voice to inspire ; 
 he will not be desponding or dejected, with that bosom to lean 
 on. — But how many must there be whom Heaven has left un- 
 provided, except in their own strength ; who must maintain 
 themselves, unassisted and solitary, against their own infirmi- 
 ties and the opposition of the world ! For such there may be 
 yet a protector. If a teacher should stand up in their genera- 
 tion, conspicuous above the multitude in superior power, and 
 yet more in the assertion and proclamation of disregarded 
 Truth — to Him — to his cheering or summoning voice all hearts 
 would turn, whose deep sensibility has been oppressed by the 
 indifference, or misled by the seduction of the times. Of one 
 such teacher who has been given to our own age, you have de- 
 scribed the power when you said, that in his annunciation of 
 truths he seemed to speak in thunders. I believe that mighty 
 voice has not been poured out in vain : that there are hearts 
 that have received into their inmost depthsallits varying tones : 
 and that even now, there are many to whom the name of Words- 
 worth calls up the recollection of their weakness, and the 
 consciousness of their strength. 
 
 To give to the reason and eloquence of one man, this com- 
 plete control over the minds of others, it is necessary, I think, 
 that he should be born in their own times. For thus what- 
 ever false opinion of pre-eminence is attached to the Age, be- 
 comes at once a title of reverence to him: and when with dis- 
 tinguished powers he sets himself apart from the Age, and 
 above it as the Teacher of high but ill-understood Truths, he 
 will appear at once to a generous imagination, in the dignity of 
 one whose superior mind outsteps the rapid progress of socie- 
 ty, and will derive from illusion itself the power to disperse 
 illusions. It is probable too, that he who labors under the er- 
 rors I have described, might feel the power of Truth in a wri- 
 ter of another age, yet fail in applying the full force of his 
 principles to his own times : but when he receives them from
 
 341 
 
 a Kving Teacher, there is no room for doubt or misapplica- 
 tion. It is the errors of his own generation that are denounc- 
 ed ; and whatever authority he may acknowledge in the ins- 
 tructions of his Master, strikes, with inevitable force, at his 
 veneration for the opinions and characters of his own times.-^ 
 And finally there will be gathered round a living Teacher, who 
 speaks to the deeper soul, many feelings of human love, that 
 will place the infirmities of the heart peculiarly under his con- 
 trol ; at the same time that they blend with and animate the 
 attachment to his cause. So that there will flow from him 
 something of the peculiar influence of a friend : while his 
 doctrines will be embraced and asserted, and vindicated with 
 the ardent zeal of a disciple, such as can scarcely be carried 
 back to distant times, or connected with voices that speak only 
 from the grave. 
 
 I have done what I proposed. I have related to you as much 
 as I have had opportunities of knowing of the difficulties from 
 within and from without, which may oppose the natural devel- 
 opement of true feeling and right opinion, in a mind formed 
 with some capacity for good : and the resources which such a 
 mind may derive from an enlightened contemporary writer. — 
 If what I have said be just, it is certain that this influence will 
 be felt more particulary in a work, adapted by its mode of pub- 
 lication to address the feelings of the time, and to bring to its 
 readers repeated admonition and repeated consolation. 
 
 I have perhaps presumed too far in trespassing on your at- 
 tention, and in giving way to my own thoughts : but I was 
 unwilling to leave any thing unsaid which might induce you to 
 consider with favor the request I was anxious to make, in the 
 name of all whose state of mind I have described, that you 
 would at times regard us more particularly in your instructions. 
 I cannot judge to what degree it may be in your power to give 
 the Truth you teach, a control over understandings that have 
 matured their strength in error : but in our class I am sure 
 you will have docile learners. Mathetes. 
 
 The Friend might rest satisfied that his exertions thus far 
 have not been wholly unprofitable, if no other proof had been 
 given of their influence, than that of having called forth the 
 foregoing letter, with which he has been so much interested, 
 that he could not deny himself the pleasure of communica- 
 ting it to his readers. — In answer to his Corresdondent, it need
 
 343 
 
 scarcely here be repeated, that one of the main purposes of 
 his work is to weigh, honestly and thoughtfully, the moral 
 worth and intellectual power of the age in which we live ; to 
 ascertain our gain and our loss; to determine what we are in 
 ourselves positively, and what we are compared with our an- 
 cestors ; and thus, and by every other means within his power, 
 to discover what may be hoped for future times, what and how 
 lamentable are the evils to be feared, and how far there is 
 cause for fear. If this attempt should not be made wholly in 
 vain, my ingenuous Correspondent, and all who are in a state 
 of mind resembling that of which he gives so lively a picture, 
 will be enabled more readily and surely to distinguish false 
 from legitimate objects of admiration : and thus may the per- 
 sonal errors which he would guard against, be more elfectually 
 prevented or removed, by the developeraent of general truth 
 for a general purpose, than by instructions specifically adapted 
 to himself or to the class of which he is the able representa- 
 tive. There is a lii'e and spirit in knowledge which we ex- 
 tract from truths scattered for the benefit of all, and which the 
 mind, by its own activity, has appropriated to itself — a life and 
 .spirit, which is seldom found in knowledge communicated by 
 formal and direct precepts, even when they are exalted and 
 endeared by reverence and love for the teacher. 
 
 Nevertheless, though I trust that the assistance which my 
 Correspondent has done me the honor to request, will in 
 course of time flow naturally from my labors, in a manner that 
 will best serve him, I cannot resist the inclination to connect, 
 at present, with his letter a few remarks of direct application 
 to the subject of it — remarks^ I say, for to such I shall con- 
 fine myself, independent of the main point out of which his 
 complaint and request both proceed, I mean the assumed infe- 
 riority of the present age in moral dignity and intellectual pow- 
 er, to those which have preceded it. For if the fact were 
 true, that we had even surpassed our ancestors in the best 
 of what is good, the main part of the dangers and impediments 
 which my Correspondent has feelingly portrayed, could not 
 cease to exist for minds like his, nor indeed would they be 
 much diminished ; as they arise out of the constitution of things, 
 from the nature of youth, from the laws that govern the growth 
 of the faculties, and from the necessary condition of the great 
 body of mankind. Let us throw ourselves back to the age of 
 Elizabeth, and call up to mind the heroes, the warriors, the
 
 343 
 
 statesmen, the poets, the divines, and the moral philosophers, 
 with which the reign of the virgin queen was illustrated. Or 
 if we be more strongly attracted by the moral purity and 
 greatness, and that sanctity of civil and religious duty, with 
 which the tyranny of Charles the First was struggled against, 
 let us cast our eyes, in the hurry of admiration, round that 
 circle ot glorious patriots — but do not let us be persuaded, that 
 each of these, in his course of discipline, was uniformly helped 
 forward by those with whom he associated, or by those whose 
 care it was to direct him. Then as now, existed objects, to 
 which the wisest attached undue importance; then, as now, 
 judgement was misled by factions and parties — time wasted in 
 controversies fruitless, except as far as they quickened the 
 faculties ; then as now, minds were venerated or idolized, 
 which owed their influence to the weakness of their contem- 
 poraries rather than to their own power. Then, though great 
 actions were wrought, and great works in literature and sci- 
 ence produced, yet the general taste was capricious, fantasti- 
 cal, or groveling : and in this point as in all others, was youth 
 subject to delusion, frequent in proportion to the liveliness of 
 the sensibility, and strong as the strength of the imagination. 
 Every age hath abounded in instances of parents, kindred, and 
 friends, who, by indirect influence of example, or by positive 
 injunction and exhortation have diverted or discouraged the 
 youth, who, in the simplicity and purity of nature, had deter- 
 mined to follow his intellectual genius through good and 
 through evil, and had devoted himself to knowledge, to the 
 practice of virtue and the preservation of integrity, in slight 
 of temporal rewards. Above all, have not the common duties 
 and cares of common life, at all times exposed men to injury, 
 from causes whose action is the more fatal from being silent 
 and unremitting, and which, wherever it was not jealously 
 watched and steadily opposed, must have pressed upon and 
 consumed the diviner spirit. 
 
 There are two errors, into which we easily slip when thinking 
 of past times. One lies in forgetting in the excellence of what 
 remains, the large overbalance of worthlessness that has been 
 swept away. Ranging over the wide tracts of antiquity, the 
 situation of the mind may be likened to that of a traveller* in 
 
 * Vide Ashe's Travels in America.
 
 344 
 
 some unpeopled part of America, who is attracted to the burhil 
 place of one of the primitive inhabitants. It is conspicuous 
 upon an eminence, " a mount upon a mount!" He digs into 
 it, and finds that it contains the bones of a man of mighty sta- 
 ture : and he is tempted to give way to a belief, that as there 
 were giants in those days, so that all men weie giants. But a 
 second and wiser thought may suggest to him, that this tomb 
 would never have forced itself upon his notice, if it had not 
 contained a body that was distinguished from others, that of a 
 man who had been selected as a chieftain or ruler for the very 
 reason that he surpassed the rest of his tribe in stature, and 
 who now lies thus conspicuously inhumed upon the mountain- 
 top, while the bones of his followers are laid unobtrusively 
 together in their burrows upon the plain below. The second 
 habitual error is, that in this comparison of ages we divide time 
 merely into past and present, and place these into the balance 
 to be weighed against each other, not considering that the pre- 
 sent is in our estimation not more than a period of thirty years, 
 or half a century at most, and that the past is a mighty accumu- 
 lation of many such periods, perhaps the whole of recorded 
 time, or at least the whole of that portion of it in which our 
 own country has been distinguished. We may illustrate this 
 by the familiar use of the words Ancient and Modern, when 
 applied to poetry — what can be more inconsiderate or unjust 
 than to compare a few existing writers with the whole succes- 
 sion of their progenitors ? The delusion, from the moment that 
 our thoughts are directed to it, seems too gross to deserve men. 
 tion ; yet men will talk for hours upon poetry, balancing against 
 each other the words Ancient and Modern, and be unconscious 
 that they have fallen into it. 
 
 These observations are not made as implying a dissent from 
 the belief of my Correspondent, that the moral spirit and in- 
 tellectual powers of this country are declining; but to guard 
 against unqualified admiration, even in cases where admiration 
 has been rightly fixed, and to prevent that depression, which 
 must necessarily follow, where the notion of the peculiar un- 
 favorableness of the present times to dignity of mind, has been 
 carried too far. For in proportion as we imagine obstacles to 
 exist out of ourselves to retard our progress, will, in fact, our 
 progress be retarded. Deeming then, that in all ages an ar- 
 dent mind will be baffled and led astray in the manner under
 
 345 
 
 contctn])lation, though in various degrees, I shall at present 
 content myself with a few practical and desultory comments 
 upon some of those general causes, to which my correspondent 
 justly attributes the errors in opinion, and the lowering or dead- 
 ening of sentiment, to which ingenuous and aspiring youth is 
 exposed. And first, for the heart-cheering belief in the perpe- 
 tual progress of the species towards a point of unattainable 
 perfection. If the present age do indeed transcend the past 
 in what is most beneficial and honourable, he that perceives 
 this, being in no error, has no cause for complaint; but if it be 
 not so, a youth of genius might, it should seem, be preserved 
 from any wrong influence of this faith, by an insight into a 
 simple truth, namely, that it is not necessary, in order to satisfy 
 the desires of our nature, or to reconcile us to the economy of 
 providence, that there should be at all times a continuous ad- 
 vance in what is of highest worth. In fact it is not, as a wri- 
 ter of the present day has admirably observed, in the power of 
 fiction, to pourtray in words, or of the imagination to conceive 
 in spirit, actions or characters of more exalted virtue, than those 
 which thousands of years ago have existed upon earth, as we 
 know from the records of authentic history. Such is the inhe- 
 rent dignity of human nature, that there belong to it sublimities 
 of virtues which all men may attain, and which no man can 
 transcend : and though this be not true in an equal degree, of 
 intellectual power, yet in the persons of Plato, Demosthenes, 
 and Homer, — and in those of Shakespeare, Milton, and Lord 
 Bacon, — were enshrined as much of the divinity of intellect 
 as the inhabitants of this planet can hope wall ever take up its 
 abode among them. But the question is not of the power or 
 worth of individual minds, but of the general moral or intel- 
 lectual merits of an age — or a people, or of the human race. 
 Be it so — let us allow and believe that there is a progress in 
 the species towards unattainable perfection, or whether this be 
 so or not, that it is a necessity of a good and greatly-gifted na- 
 ture to believe it — surely it does not follow, that this progress 
 should be constant in those virtues, and intellectual qualities, 
 and in those departments of knowledge, which in themselves 
 absolutely considered are of most value — things indepcndant 
 and in their degree indispensable. The progress of the species 
 neither is nor can be like that of a Roman road in a right line. 
 
 It mav be more justly co'.upared to that of a river, which both 
 44
 
 346 
 
 in its smaller reaches and larger turnings, is frequently forced 
 back towards its fountains, by objects which cannot otherwise 
 be eluded or overcome ; yet with an accompanying impulse that 
 will ensure its advancement hereafter, it is either gaining 
 strength every hour, or conquering in secret some difficulty, by 
 a labor that contributes as effectually to further it in its course, 
 as when it moves forward uninterrupted in a line, direct as that 
 of the Roman road with which we began the comparison. 
 
 It suffices to content the mind, though there may be an ap- 
 parent stagnation, or a retrograde movement in the species, that 
 something is doing which is necessary to be done, and the 
 effects of which, will in due time appear; — that something is 
 unremittingly gaining, either in secret preparation or in open 
 and triumphant progress. But in fact here, as every where, 
 we are deceived by creations which the mind is compelled to 
 make for itself: w^e speak of the species not as an aggregate, 
 but as endued with the form and separate life of an individual. 
 But human kind, what is it else than myriads of rational beings 
 in various degrees obedient to their Reason ; some torpid, 
 some aspiring ; some in eager chace to the right hand, some to 
 the left ; these wasting down their moral nature, and these 
 feeding it for immortality ? A w'hole generation may appear 
 even to sleep, or may be exasperated with rage — they that 
 compose it, tearing each other to pieces with more than brutal 
 fury. It is enough for complacency and hope, that scattered 
 and solitary minds are always laboring somewhere in the ser- 
 vice of truth and virtue ; and that by the sleep of the multitude, 
 the energy of the multitude may be prepared ; and that by the 
 fury of the people, the chains of the people may be broken. 
 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 Wickliff, like the sun," shot ori- 
 ent beams" through the night of Romish superstition ! — Yet 
 may the darkness and the desolating hurricane which immedi- 
 ately followed in the wars of York and Lancaster, be deemed 
 in their turn a blessing, with which the land has been visited. 
 
 May I return to the thought of progress, of accumulation, of 
 increasing light, or of any other image by which it may please 
 us to represent the improvement of the species ? The hundred 
 years that followed the usurpation of Henry the Fourth, were 
 a hurling-back of the mind of the country, a dilapidation, an
 
 347 
 
 extinction ; yet institutions, laws, customs, and habits, were 
 then broken down, which would not have been so readily, nop 
 perhaps so thoroughly destroyed by the gradual influence of 
 increasing knowledge ; and under the oppression of which, if 
 they had continued to exist, the virtue and intellectual prowess 
 of the succeeding century could not have appeared at all, much 
 less could they have displayed themselves with that eager haste, 
 and with those beneficent triumphs which will to the end of 
 time be looked back upon with admiration and gratitude. 
 
 If the foregoing obvious distinctions be once clearly perceived, 
 and steadily kept in view, I do not see why a belief in the pro- 
 gress of human nature towards perfection, should dispose a youth- 
 ful mind, however enthusiastic, to an undue admiration of his 
 own age, and thus tend to degrade that mind. 
 
 But let me strike at once at the root of the evil complained 
 of in my Correspondent's letter. — Protection from any fatal 
 effect of seductions, and hindrances which opinion may throw 
 in the way of pure and high-minded youth, can only be obtain- 
 ed with certainty at the same price by which every thing great 
 and good is obtained, namely, steady dependence upon volun- 
 tary and self-originating effort, and upon the practice of self-ex- 
 amination, sincerely aimed at and rigorously enforced. But how 
 is this to be expected from youth ? Is it not to demand the fruit 
 when the blossom is barely put forth, and is hourly at the mer- 
 cy of frosts and winds ? To expect from youth these virtues 
 and habits, in that degree of excellence to which in mature 
 years they 'may be carried, would indeed be preposterous. Yet 
 has youth many helps and aptitudes, for the discharge of these 
 difficult duties, which are withdrawn for the most part from 
 the more advanced stages of life. For youth has its own wealth 
 and independence ; it is rich in health of body and animal 
 spirits, in its sensibility to the impressions of the natural uni- 
 verse, in the conscious growth of knowledge, in lively sympa- 
 thy and familiar communion with the generous actions recorded 
 in history, and with the high passions of poetry; and, above 
 all, youth is rich in the possession of time, and the accompany- 
 ing consciousness of freedom and power. The young man feels 
 that he stands at a distance from the season when his harvest 
 is to be reaped, — that he has leisure and may look around — 
 may defer both the choice and the execution of his purposes. 
 If he makes an attempt and shall fail, new hopes immediately
 
 348 
 
 rush in, and new promises. Hence, in the happy confidence 
 of his feelings, and in the elasticity of his spirit, neither world- 
 ly ambition, nor the love of praise, nor dread of censure, nor 
 the necessity of wordly maintenance, nor any of those causes 
 which tempt or compel the mind habitually to look out of itself 
 for support ; neither these, nor the passions of envy, fear, ha- 
 tred, despondency, and the rankling of disappointed hopes, 
 (all which in after life give birth to, and regulate the efforts of 
 men, and determine their opinions) have power to preside 
 over the choice of the young, if the disposition be not natural- 
 ly bad, or the circumstances have not been in an uncommon 
 degree unfavorable. 
 
 In contemplation, then, of this disinterested and free condi- 
 tion of the youthful mind, I deem it in many points peculiarly 
 capable of searching into itself, and of profiting by a few sim- 
 ple questions — such as these that follow. Am I cliiefly gratified 
 by the exertion of my power from the pleasure of intellectual 
 activity, and from the knowledge thereby acquired ? In other 
 words, to what degree do I value my faculties and my attain- 
 ments for their own sakes ? or are they chiefly prized by me 
 on account of the distinction which they confer, or the superi- 
 ority which they give me over others ? Am I aware that im- 
 mediate influence and a general acknowledgement of merit, are 
 no necessary adjuncts of a successful adherence to study and 
 meditation, in those departments of knowledge which are of 
 most value to mankind ? that a recompence of honors and emol- 
 lumenls is far less to be expected — in fact, that there is little 
 natural connection between them ? Have I perceived this truth ? 
 and, perceiving it, does the countenance of philosophy conti- 
 nue to appear as bright and beautiful in my eyes .'' — Has no haze 
 bedimmed it ? has no cloud passed over and hidden from me 
 that look which was before so encouraging ? Knowing that it 
 is my duty, and feeling that it is my inclination, to mingle as a 
 social being with my fellow men ; prepared also to submit cheer- 
 fully to the necessity that will probably exist of relinquishing, 
 for the purpose of gaining a livelihood, the greatest portion of 
 my time to employments where I shall have little or no choice 
 how or when I am to act ; have I, at this moment, when I stand 
 as it were upon the threshold of the busy world, a clear intui- 
 tion of that pre-eminence in which virtue and truth (involving 
 in this latter word the sanctities of religion) sit enthroned above
 
 349 
 
 all denominations and dignities which, in various degrees of 
 exaltation, rule over the desires of men ? — Do I feel that, if 
 their solemn mandates shall be forgotten, or disregarded, or de- 
 nied the obedience due to them when opposed to others, I shall 
 not only have lived for no good purpose, but that I shall have sa- 
 crificed my birth-right as a rational being ; and that every other 
 acquisition will be a bane and disgrace to me ? This is not spoken 
 with reference to such sacrifices as present themselves to the 
 youthful imagination in the shape of crimes, acts by which the 
 conscience is violated ; such a thought, I know, would be recoiled 
 from at once, not without indignation ; but I WTite in the spirit of 
 the ancient fable of Prodicus, representing the choice of Hercu- 
 les — Here is the wort.d, a female figure approaching at the head 
 of a train of willing or giddy followers : — her air and deportment 
 arc at once careless, remiss, self-satisfied, and haughty : — and 
 there is Intellectual, Prowess, with a pale cheek and serene 
 brow, leading in chains Truth, her beautiful and modest captive. 
 The one makes her salutation with a discourse of ease, pleas- 
 ure, freedom, and domestic tranquillity ; or, if she invite to la- 
 bor, it is labor in the busy and beaten tract, with assurance of 
 the complacent regards of parents, friends, and of those with 
 whom we associate. The promise also may be upon her lip of 
 the huzzas of the multitude, of the smile of kings, and the mu- 
 nificent rewards of senates. The other does not venture to 
 hold forth any of these allurements ; she does not conceal from 
 him w hom she addresses the impediments, the disappointments, 
 the ignorance and prejudice which her followsr will have to en- 
 counter, if devoted when duty calls, to active life ; and if to 
 contemplative, she lays nakedly before him, a scheme of solita- 
 ry and unremitting labor, a life of entire neglect perhaps, or 
 assuredly a life exposed to scorn, insult, persecution, and ha- 
 tred ; but cheered by encouragement from a grateful few, by 
 applauding conscience, and by a prophetic anticipation, perhaps, 
 of fame — a late, though lasting consequence. Of these two, 
 each in this manner soliciting you to become her adherent, you 
 doubt not w^hich to prefer, — but oh ! the thought of moment is 
 not preference, but the degree of preference ; the passionate 
 and pure choice, the inward sense of absolute and unchangea- 
 ble devotion. 
 
 I spoke of a few simple questions — the question involved in 
 this deliberation is simple ; but at the same time ii is high and
 
 350 
 
 awful : and I would gladly know whether an answer can be re- 
 turned satisfactory to the mind. — We will for a moment suppose 
 that it cannot ; that there is a startling and a hesitation. — -Are 
 we then to despond ? to retire from all contest ? and to recon- 
 cile ouiselves at once to cares without a generous hope, and to 
 efforts in which there is no more moral life than that which is 
 found in the business and labors of the unfavored and unaspi- 
 ring many ? No — but if the inquiry have not been on just 
 grounds satisfactorily answered, we may refer confidently our 
 youth to that nature of which he deems himself an enthusias- 
 tic follower, and one who wishes to continue no less faithful 
 and enthusiastic. — We would tell him that there are paths which 
 he has not trodden ; recesses which he has not penetrated, that 
 there is beauty which he has not seen, a pathos which he has 
 not felt — a sublimity to v.'hich he hath not been raised. If 
 he have trembled because there has occasionally taken place 
 in him a lapse of which he is conscious ; if he foresee open or 
 secret attacks, which he has had intimations that he will neither 
 be strong enough to resist, nor watchful enough to elude, let 
 him not hastily ascribe this weakness, this deficiency, and the 
 painful apprehensions accompanying them, in any degree to the 
 virtues or noble qualities with which youth by nature is fur- 
 nished ; but let him first be assured, before he looks about for 
 the means of attaining the insight, the discriminating powers, 
 and the confirmed wisdom of manhood, that his soul has more 
 to demand of the appropriate excellencies of youth, than youth 
 has yet supplied to it ; — that the evil under which he labors is 
 not a superabundance of the instincts and the animating spirit 
 of that age, but a falling short, or a failure. — But what can he 
 gain from this admonition ? he cannot recall past time ; he can- 
 not begin his journey afresh ; he cannot untwist the links by 
 which, in no undelightful harmony, images and sentiments are 
 wedded in his mind. Granted that the sacred light of child- 
 hood is and must be for him no more than a remembrance. Pie 
 may, notwithstanding, be remanded to nature ; and with trust- 
 worthy hopes ; founded less upon his sentient than upon his in- 
 tellectual being — to nature, as leading on insensibly to the 
 society of reason ; but to reason and will, as leading back to 
 to the wisdom of nature. A re-union, in this order accomplish- 
 ed, will bring reformation and timely support ; and the two 
 powers of reason and nature, thus reciprocally teacher and
 
 351 
 
 taught, may advance together in a track to where there is no 
 limit. 
 
 We have been discoursing (by implication at least) of in- 
 fancy, childhood, boyhood, and youth, of pleasures lying upon 
 the unfolding intellect plenteously as morning dew-drops — of 
 knowledge inhaled insensibly like the fragrance — of disposi- 
 tions stealing into the spirit like music from unknown quarters 
 — of images uncalled for and rising up like exhalations — of 
 hopes plucked like beautiful wild flowers from the ruined 
 tombs that border the highways of antiquity, to make a garland 
 for a living forehead : — in a word, we have been treating of na- 
 ture as a teacher of truth through joy and through gladness, 
 and as a creatress of the faculties by a process of smoothness 
 and delight. We have made no mention of fear, shame, sor- 
 row, nor of ungovernable and vexing thoughts ; because, al- 
 though these have been and have done mighty service, they 
 are overlooked in that stage of life when youth is passing in- 
 to manhood — overlooked, or forgotten. We now apply for 
 succor which we need, to a faculty that works after a different 
 course : that faculty is Reason : she gives more spontaneously, 
 but she seeks for more ; she works by thought, through feeling ; 
 yet in thoughts she begins and ends. 
 
 A familiar incident may elucidate this contrast in the opera- 
 tions of nature, may render plain the manner in which a process 
 of intellectual improvements, the reverse of that which nature 
 pursues is by reason introduced : There never perhaps existed 
 a school-boy who, having when he retired to rest, carelessly 
 blown out his candle, and having chanced to notice, as he lay 
 upon his bed in the ensuing darkness, the sullen light which 
 had survived the extinguished flame, did not, at some time or 
 other, watch that light as if his mind were bound to it by a 
 spell. It fades and revives — gathers to a point — seems as if it 
 would go out in a moment — again recovers its strength, nay 
 becomes brighter than before : it continues to shine with an 
 endurance, which in its apparent weakness is a mystery — it 
 protracts its existence so long, clinging to the power which 
 supports it, that the observer, who had laid down in his bed so 
 easy-minded, becomes sad and melancholy : his sympathies 
 are touched — it is to him an intimation and an image of depart- 
 ing human life, — the thought comes nearer to him — it is the 
 life of a venerated parent, of a beloved brother or sister, or of
 
 352 
 
 an aged domestic ; who are gone to the grave, or whose desti- 
 ny it soon may be thus to linger, thus to hang upon the last 
 point of mortal existence, thus finally to depart and be seen no 
 more. This is nature teaching seriously and sweetly through 
 the affections — melting the heart, and, through that instinct of 
 tenderness, developing the understanding. — In this instance 
 the object of solicitude is the bodily life of another. Let us ac- 
 company this same boy to that period between youth and man- 
 hood, when a solicitude may be awakened for the moral life of 
 himself. — Are there any powers by which, beginning with a 
 sense of inward decay that affects not however the natural life, 
 he could call to mind the same image and hang over it with 
 an equal interest as a visible type of his own perishing spir- 
 it ? — Oh ! surely, if the being of the individual be under his 
 own care — if it be his first care — if duty begin from the point 
 of accountableness to our conscience, and through that, to God 
 and human nature ; — if without such primary sense of duty, all 
 secondary care of teacher, of friend, or parent, must be base- 
 less and fruitless ; if, lastly, the motions of the soul transcend 
 in worth those of the animal functions, nay give to them their 
 sole value ; then truly are there such powers : and the image 
 of the dying taper may be recalled and contemplated, though 
 with no sadness in the nerves, no disposition to tears, no un- 
 conquerable sighs, yet with a melancholy in the soul, a sink- 
 ing inward into ourselves from thought to thought, a steady 
 remonstrance, and a high resolve. — Let then the youth go back, 
 as occasion will permit, to nature and to solitude, thus admon- 
 ished by reason, and relying upon this newly acquired support. 
 A world of fresh sensations will gradually open upon him as 
 his mind puts off its infirmities," and as instead of being pro- 
 pelled restlessly towards others in admiration, or too hasty love, 
 he makes it his prime business to understand himself. New 
 sensations, 1 afiirm, will be opened out — pure, and sanctioned 
 by that reason which is their original author ; and precious 
 feelings of disinterested, that is self-disregarding joy and love 
 may be regenerated and restored : — and, in this sense, he may 
 be said to measure back the track of life he has trod. 
 
 In such disposition of mind let the youth return to the visi- 
 ble universe : and to conversation with ancient books ; and to 
 those, if such there be, which in the present day breathe the 
 ancient spirit : and let him feed upon that beauty which un-
 
 353 
 
 folds itaelf, not to his eye as it sees carelessly the things which 
 cannot possibly go unseen, and are remembered or not as acci- 
 dent shall decide, but to the thinking mind ; which searches, 
 discovers, and treasures up, — infusing by meditation into the 
 objects with which it converses an intellectual life ; whereby 
 they remain planted in the memory, now, and for ever. Hith- 
 erto the youth, I suppose, has been content for the mostp art to 
 look at his own mind, after the manner in which he ranges 
 along the stars in the firmament with naked unaided sight : 
 let him now apply the telescope of art — to call the invisible 
 stars out of their hiding places; and let him endeavor to look 
 through the system of his being, with the organ of reason ; sum- 
 moned to penetrate, as far as it has power, in discovery of the 
 impelling forces and the governing laws. 
 
 These expectations are not immoderate : they demand no- 
 thing more than the perception of a few plain truths ; namely, 
 that knowledge efficacious for the production of virtue is the 
 ultimate end of all effort, the sole dispenser of complacency 
 and repose. A perception also is implied of the inherent su- 
 periority of contemplation to action. The Friend does not 
 in this contradict his own words, where he has said heretofore, 
 tliat " doubtless it is nobler to act than to think." In those words, 
 it was his purpose to censure that barren contemplation, which 
 rests satisfied with itself in cases where the thoughts are of such 
 quality that they may be, and ought to be embodied in action. 
 But he speaks now of the general superiority of thought to ac- 
 tion ; — as proceeding and governing all action that moves to 
 salutary purposes ; and, secondly, as leading to elevation, the 
 absolute possession of the individual mind, and to a consis- 
 tency or harmony of the being within itself, which no outward 
 agency can reach to disturb or to impair : — and lastly, as pro- 
 ducing works of pure science ; or of the combined faculties of 
 imagination, feeling, and reason ; — works which, both from 
 their independence in their origin upon accident, their nature, 
 their duration, and the wide spread of their influence, are enti- 
 tled rightly to take place of the noblest and most beneficent 
 deeds of heroes, statesmen, legislators, or warriors. 
 
 Yet, beginning from the perception of this established supe- 
 riority, we do not suppose that the youth, whom we wish to 
 guide and encourage, is to be insensible to those influences of 
 
 wealth, or rank, or station, by which the bulk of mankind are 
 45
 
 354 
 
 Swayed. Our eyes have not been fixed upon virtue which lies 
 apart from human nature, or transcends it. In fact there is no 
 such virtue. "vVe neither suppose nor wish him to undervalue 
 or slight these distinctions as modes of power, things that may 
 enable him to be more useful to his contemporaries ; nor as 
 gratifications that may confer dignity upon his living person ; 
 and, through him, upon those who love him ; nor as they may 
 connect his name, through a family to be founded by his suc- 
 cess, in a closer chain of gratitude with some portion of poste- 
 rity, who shall speak of him, as among their ancestry, with a 
 more tender interest than the mere general bond of patriotism or 
 humanity would supply. We suppose no indiff"erence to, much 
 less a contempt of, these rewards ; but let them have their due 
 place ; let it be ascertained, when the soul is searched into, that 
 they are only an auxiliary motive to exertion, never the princi- 
 pal or originating force. If this be too much to expect from a 
 youth who, I take for granted, possesses no ordinary endowments, 
 and whom circumstances with respect to the more dangerous 
 passions have favored, then, indeed, must the noble spirit of 
 the country be wasted away : then would our institutions be 
 deplorable ; and the education prevalent among us utterly vile 
 and debasing. 
 
 But my Correspondent, who drew forth these thoughts, has 
 said rightly, that the character of the age may not without in- 
 justice be thus branded : he will not deny that, without speak- 
 ing of other countries, there is in these islands, in the depart- 
 ments of natural philosophy, of mechanic ingenuity, in the ge- 
 neral activities of the country, and in the particular excellence 
 of individual minds, in high stations civil or military, enough to 
 excite admiration and love in the sober-minded, and more than 
 enough to intoxicate the youthful and inexperienced. — I will 
 compare, then, an aspiring youth, leaving the schools in which 
 he has been disciplined, and preparing to bear a part in the con- 
 cerns of the world, I will compare him in this season of eager 
 admiration, to a newly-invested knight appearing with his blank 
 unsignalized shield, upon some day of solemn tournament, at 
 the Court of the Fairy-queen, as that sovereignty was concei- 
 ved to exist by the moral and imaginative genius of our divine 
 Spenser. He does not himself immediately enter the lists as a 
 combatant, but he looks round him with a beating heart : daz- 
 zled by the gorgeous pageantry, the banners, the impresses, 
 the ladies of overcoming beauty, the persons of the knights —
 
 355 
 
 now first seen by him, the fame of whose actions is carried by 
 the traveller, like merchandize, through the world ; and re- 
 sounded upon the harp of the minstrel. — But I am not at liberty 
 to make this comparison. H a youth were to begin liis career 
 in such an assemblage, with such examples to guide and to ani- 
 mate, it will be pleaded, there should be no cause for appre- 
 hension : he could not falter, he could not be misled. But ours, 
 is notwithstanding its manifold excellencies, a degenerate age : 
 and recreant knights are among us far outnumbering the true. 
 A false Gloriana in these days imposes worthless services, which 
 they who perform them, in their blindness, know not to be such ; 
 and which are recorapenced by rewards as worthless — yet ea- 
 gerly grasped at, as if they were the immortal guerdon of vir- 
 tue. 
 
 I have in this declaration insensibly overstepped the limits 
 which I had determined not to pass ; let me be forgiven : for 
 it is hope which hath carried me forward. In such a mixed 
 assemblage as our age presents, v»'ith its genuine merit and its 
 large overbalance of alloy, I may boldly ask into what errors, 
 either with respect to person or thing, could a young man fall, 
 who had sincerely entered upon the course of moral discipline 
 which has been recommended, and to which the condition of 
 youth, it has been proved, is favorable ? His opinions could no 
 where deceive him beyond the point to which, after a season, 
 he would find that it was salutary for him to have been de- 
 ceived. For, as that man cannot set a right value upon 
 health who has never known sickness, nor feel the blessing of 
 ease who has been through his life a stranger to pain, so can 
 there be no confirmed and passionate love of truth for him who 
 has not experienced the hoUowness of error. — Range against 
 each other as advocates, oppose as combatants, two several in- 
 tellects, each strenously asserting doctrines which he sincerely 
 believes ; but the one contending for the worth and beauty 
 of that garment which the other has outgrown and cast away. 
 Mark the superiority, the ease, the dignity, on the side of the 
 more advanced mind, how he overlooks his subject, commands 
 it from centre to circumference, and hath the same thorough 
 knowledge of the tenets which his adversary, with impetuous 
 zeal, but in confusion also, and thrown oxT his guard at every 
 turn of the argument, is laboring to maintain ! If it be a ques- 
 tion of the fine arts (poetry for instance) the riper mind not
 
 356 ( 
 
 only sees that his opponent is deceived ; but, what is of far 
 more importance, sees how he is deceived. The imagination 
 stands before him with all its imperfections laid open ; as duped 
 by shews, enslaved by words, corrupted by mistaken delicacy 
 and false refinement, — as not having even attended with care 
 to the reports of the senses, and therefore deficient grossly in 
 the rudiments of her ov»n power. He has noted how, as a 
 supposed necessary condition.^ the understanding sleeps in or- 
 der that the fancy may dream. Studied in the history of socie- 
 ty and versed in the secret laws of thought, he can pass regu- 
 iary through all the gradations, can pierce infallibly all the wind- 
 ings, wdiich false taste through ages has pursued — from the very 
 time when first, through inexperience, heedlessness, or afl^ecta- 
 tion, she took her departure from tlie side of Truth, her origin- 
 al parent. Can a disputant thus accoutered be withstood? 
 
 — to whom, further, every movement in the thoughts of his 
 antagonist is revealed by the light of his own experience ; who, 
 therefore, sympathises with weakness gently, and wins his way 
 by forbearance ; and hath, when needful, an irresistible power 
 of onset, — arising from gratitude to the truth which he vindi- 
 cates, not merely as a positive good for mankind, but as his own 
 especial rescue and redemption. 
 
 I might here conclude : but my Correspondent towards the 
 close of his letter, has written so feelingly upon the advanta- 
 ges to be derived, in his estimation, from a living instructor, 
 that I must not leave this part of the subject without a word of 
 direct notice. The Friend cited, some time ago, a passage IVom 
 the prose works of Milton, eloquently describing the manner 
 in which good and evil grow up together in the field of the 
 world almost inseparably ; and insisting, consequently, upon 
 the knowledge and survey of vice as necessary to the constitu- 
 ting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirma- 
 tion of Truth. 
 
 If this be so, and I have been reasoning to the same effect 
 in the preceding paragraph, the fact, and the thoughts which 
 it may suggest, will, if rightly applied, tend to moderate an 
 anxiety for the guidance of a more experienced or superior 
 mind. The advantage, where it is possessed, is far from be- 
 ing an absolute good : nay, such a preceptor, ever at hand, 
 might prove an oppression not to be thrown off, and a fatal 
 hinderance. Grant that in the general tenor of his intercourse
 
 357 
 
 with his pupil he is forbearing and circumspect, inasmuch as 
 he is rich in that knowledge (above all other necessary for a 
 teacher) which cannot exist without a liveliness of memory, 
 preserving for him an unbroken image of the winding, excur- 
 sive, and often retrograde course, along which his own intel- 
 lect has passed. Grant that, furnished with these distinct re- 
 membrances, he wishes that the mind of his pupil should be 
 free to luxuriate in the enjoyments, loves, and admirations ap- 
 propriated to its age ; that he is not in haste to kill what he 
 knows will in due time die of itself; or be transmuted, and put 
 on a nobler form and higher faculties otherwise unattainable. 
 In a word, that the teacher is governed habitually by the wis- 
 dom of patience waiting with pleasure. Yet perceiving how 
 much the outward help of art can facilitate the progress of na- 
 ture, he may be betrayed into many unnecessary or pernicious 
 mistakes where he deems his interference warranted by sub- 
 stantial experience. And in spite of all his caution, remarks 
 may drop insensibly from him which shall wither in tlie mind 
 of his pupil a generous sympathy, destroy a sentiment of appro- 
 bation or dislike, not merely innocent but salutary; and for 
 the experienced disciple how many pleasures may thus be cut 
 off, what joy, what admiration and what love ! while in their 
 stead are introduced into the ingenuous mind misgivings, a 
 mistrust of its own evidence, dispositions to affect to feel where 
 there can be no real feeling, indecisive judgments, a super- 
 structure of opinions that has no base to support it, and words, 
 uttered by rote with the impertinence of a parrot or a mocking- 
 biid, yet which may not be listened to with the same indiffe- 
 rence, as they cannot be heard without some feeling of moral 
 disapprobation. 
 
 These results, I contend, whatever ma}^ be the benefit to be 
 derived from such an enlightened Teacher, are in their degree 
 inevitable. And by this process, humility and docile disposi- 
 tions may exist towards the Master, endued as he is with the 
 power which personal presence confers ; but at the same time 
 they will be liable to over-step their due bounds, and to dege- 
 nerate into passiveness and prostration of niind. This towards 
 him ! while, with respect to other living men, nay even to the 
 mighty spirits of past times, there may be associated with such 
 weakness a want of modesty and humility. Insensibly may 
 steal in presumption and a habit of sitting in judgment in cases
 
 358 
 
 where no sentiment ought to have existed but diffidence or ve- 
 neration. Such virtues are the sacred attributes of Youth; its 
 appropiiate calling is not to distinguish in the fear of being de- 
 ceived or degraded, not to analyze with scrupulous minuteness, 
 but to accumulate in genial confidence ; its instinct, its safety, 
 its benefit, its glory, is to love, to admire, to feel, and to labor. 
 Nature has irrevocably decreed, that our prime dependence in 
 all stages of life after Infancy and Childhood have been passed 
 through (nor do I know that this latter ought to be excepted) 
 must be upon our own minds ; and that the way to knowledge 
 shall be long, difficult, winding, and oftentimes returning upon 
 itself. 
 
 What has been said is a mere sketch ; and that only of a part 
 of the interesting country into which we have been led : but 
 my Correspondent will be able to enter the paths that have 
 been pointed out. Should he do this and advance steadily for 
 a while, he needs not fear any deviations from the truth which 
 will be finally injurious to him. He will not long have his ad- 
 miration fixed upon unworthy objects ; he will neither be clog- 
 ged nor drawn aside by the love of friends or kindred, betray- 
 ing his understanding through his affections ; he will neither be 
 bowed down by conventional arrangements of manners produ- 
 -cing too often a lifeless decency : nor will the rock of his spirit 
 wear away in the endless beating of the waves of the world : 
 neither will that portion of his own time, which he must surren- 
 der to labors by which his livelihood is to be earned or his social 
 •duties performed, be unprofitable to himself indirectly, while it 
 is directly useful to others : for that time has been primarily 
 surrendered through an act of obedience to a moral law estab- 
 lished by himself, and therefore he moves then also along the 
 orbit of perfect liberty. 
 
 Let it be remembered, that the advice requested does not 
 relate to the government of the more dangerous passions, or 
 to the fundamental principles of right and wrong as acknow- 
 ledged by the universal conscience of mankind. I may there- 
 fore assure my youthful Correspondent, if he will endeavor to 
 look into himself in the manner which I have exhorted him to 
 do, that in him the wish will be realized, to him in due time 
 the prayer granted, which was uttered by that living Teacher 
 of whom he speaks with gratitude as a benefactor, when, in 
 his character of a philosophical Poet, having thought of Mora-
 
 359 
 
 tity as implying in its essence voluntary obedience, and produ- 
 cing the effect of order, he transfers in the transport of imagi- 
 nation, the law of moral to physical natures, and having con- 
 templated, through the medium of that order, all modes of ex- 
 istence as subservient to one spirit, concludes his address to 
 the power of Duty in the following words : 
 
 To humbler functions, awful Power ! 
 
 I call thee : I myself commend 
 
 Unto thy guidance from this hour ; 
 
 Oh, let my weakness have an end ! 
 
 Give unto me, made lowly wise, 
 
 The spirit of self-sacrifice ; 
 
 The confidence of reason give ! 
 
 And in the light of Truth thy Bondman let me live ! 
 
 W. W.
 
 THE FRIEND 
 
 SECTION THE SECOND. 
 
 ON THE 
 
 GROUND S 
 
 or 
 
 MORALS AND RELIGION, 
 
 AND THE 
 
 DISCIPLINE OF THE MIND REQUISITE FOR A TRUE UNDER- 
 STANDING OF THE SAME. 
 
 46
 
 I know, tho seeming and self-pleasing wisflom of our times consists much 
 in cavilling and unjustly carping at all tilings that see hght, and that there 
 are many who earnestly hunt after the publicke fame of Learning and Judg- 
 ment by this easily trod and desjiicable path, which, notwithstanding, they 
 tread with as much confidence as folly : for that, ofltimes, which they vainly 
 and unjustly brand with opprobrie, outlives their fate, and flourisheth when 
 it is forgot that ever any such, as they, had Being. — Dedication to Lord Herbert 
 of Ambrose Farcy's Works by Tliomas Johison^ the Translator, 1634.
 
 v^^ 
 
 ESSAY I . 
 
 We cannot but look up with reverence to the advanced natures of the natu- 
 ralists and moralists in highest repute amongst us: and wish they had 
 been heightened by a more noble ])nneiple, which had crowned all their 
 various sciences with the principal science, and in their brave strayings 
 after truth helpt them to better fortune than only to meet with her hand- 
 maids, and kept them from the fate of Ulysses, who wandering through the 
 shades met all the ghosts, yet could not see the queen. 
 
 J. H. (John Hall?) hi^ Motion to the Parllameirt of Eng- 
 land'f concerning the Advancement of Learning. 
 
 The preceding section had for its express object the princi- 
 ples of our duty as citizens, or morality as applied to politics. 
 According to his scheme there remained for the friend first, 
 to treat of the principles of morality generally, and then on 
 those of religion. But since the commencement of this edi- 
 tion, the question has repeatedly arisen in my mind, whether 
 morality can be said to have any principle distinguishable from 
 religion, or religion any substance divisible from morality ? Or 
 should I attempt to distinguish them by their objects, so that 
 morality were the religion which we owe to things and persons 
 of this life, and religion our morality toward God and the per- 
 manent concerns of our own souls, and those of our brethren : 
 yet it would be evident, that the latter must involve the for- 
 mer, while any pretence to the former without the latter would 
 be as bold a mockery as, if having withheld an estate from the 
 rightful owner, we should seek to appease our conscience by the 
 plea, that we had not failed to bestow alms on him in his beg- 
 gary. It was never my purpose, and it does not appear to be 
 the want of the age, to bring together the rules and induce- 
 ments of worldly prudence. But to substitute these for the
 
 SG4 
 
 laws of reason and conscience, or even to confound them un- 
 der one name, is a prejudice, say rather a profanation, which I 
 became more and more reluctant to flatter by even an appear- 
 ance of assent, though it were only in a point of form and tech- 
 nical arrangement. 
 
 At a time, when my thoughts were thus employed, I met with 
 a volume of old tracts, published during the interval from the 
 captivity of Charles the First to the restoration of his son. 
 Since my earliest manhood it had been among my fondest re- 
 grets, that a more direct and frequent reference had not been 
 made by our historians to the books, pamphlets, and flying sheets 
 of that momentous period, during which all the possible forms 
 of truth and error (the latter being themselves for the greater 
 part caricatures of truth) bubbled up on the surface of the pub- 
 lic mind, as in the ferment of a chaos. It would be difficult to 
 conceive a notion or a fancy, iu politics, ethics, theology, or 
 even in physics and physiology, which had not been anticipated 
 by the men of that age : in this as in most other respects sharply 
 contrasted with the products of the French revolution, which 
 was scarcely more characterized by its sanguinary and sensual 
 abominations than (to borrow the words of an eminent living 
 poet) by 
 
 A dreary want at once of books and men. 
 
 The parliament's army was not wholly composed of mere fana- 
 tics. There was no mean proportion of enthusiasts : and that 
 enthusiasm must have been of no ordinary grandeur, which 
 could draw from a common soldier, in an address to his com- 
 rades, such a dissuasive from acting in " the cruel spirit of fear !" 
 such words and such sentiments, as are contained in the following 
 extract which I would fain rescue from oblivion,* both for the 
 honor of our fore-fathers, and in proof of the intense difference 
 between the republicans of that period, and the democrats, or 
 rather demagogues, of the present. " I judge it ten times more 
 honorable for a single person, in witnessing a truth to oppose 
 
 * Tlie more so bccanse every year consumes its quota. The late Sir Wil- 
 fred Lawson'rf predecessor, from some pique or other, left a large and unique 
 collection, of the paniphlets''publi.shed from the commencement of the Parlia- 
 ment war to the restoration, to liis butler, and it supplied tlie chandlers' and 
 dniggists' shops of Penrith and Kendal for many years.
 
 365 
 
 the world in its power, wisdom and authority, this standing tn 
 its full strength, and he singly and nakedly, than fighting many 
 battles by force of arms, and gaining them all. I have no life 
 but truth : and if truth be advanced by my suffering, then mj 
 life also. If truth live, I live : if justice live, I live : and these 
 cannot die, but by any man's suffering for them are enlarged, 
 enthroned. Death cannot hurt me. I sport with him, am above 
 his reach. I live an immortal life. What we have within, that 
 only can we see without. I cannot see death : and he that hath 
 not this freedom is a slave. He is in the arms of that, the phan- 
 tom of which he beholdeth and seemeth to himself to flee from. 
 Thus, you see that the king hath a will to redeem his present 
 loss. You see it by means of the lust after power in your own 
 hearts. For my part I condemn his unlawful seeking after it. 
 I condemn his falsehood and indirectness therein. But if he 
 should not endeavor the restoring of the kingliness to the 
 realm, and the dignity of its kings, he were false to his trust, 
 false to the majesty of God that he is intrusted with. The 
 desire of recovering his loss is justifiable. Yea, I should 
 condemn him as unbelieving and pusillanimous, if he should 
 not hope for it. But here is his misery and yours too at pre- 
 sent, that ye are unbelieving and pusillanimous, and are, both 
 alike, pursuing things of hope in the spirit of fear. Thus 
 you condemn the parliament for acknowledging the king's pow- 
 er so far as to seek to him by a treaty ; while by taking such 
 pains against him you manifest your own belief that he hath a 
 great power — which is a wonder, that a prince despoiled of all 
 his authority, naked, a prisoner, destitute of all friends and 
 helps, wholly at the disposal of others, tied and bound too with 
 all obligations that a parliament can imagine to hold him, should 
 yet be such a terror to you, and fright you into such a large re- 
 monstrance, and such perilous proceedings to save yourselves 
 from him. Either there is some strange power in him, or you 
 are full of fear that are so affecled with a shadow. 
 
 But as you give testimony to his power, so you take a course 
 to advance it ; for there is nothing that hath any spark of God 
 in it, but the more it is suppressed, the more it rises. If you 
 did indeed believe, that the original of power were in the peo- 
 ple, you would believe likewise that the concessions extorted 
 from the king would rest with you, as doubtless, such of them 
 as in righteousness ought to have been given, would do ; but 
 that your violent courses disturb the natural order of thinga,
 
 3^6 
 
 an which they still tend to their centre : and so far from being the 
 way to secure what we have got, they are the way to lose them, 
 and (for a time at least) to set up princes in a higher form than 
 ever. For all things by force compelled from their nature will 
 fly back with the greater earnestness on the removal of that 
 force : and this, in the present case, must soon weary itself out, 
 and hath no less an enemy in its own satiety than in the disap- 
 pointment of the people. 
 
 Again : you speak of the king's reputation — and do not con- 
 sider that the more you crush him, the sweeter the fragrance 
 that comes from him. While he suffers, the spirit of God and 
 glory rests upon him. There is a glory and a freshness spark- 
 ling in him by sufFering, an excellency that was hidden, and 
 which you have drawn out. And naturally men are ready to 
 pity sufferers. When nothing will gain me, affliction will. I 
 confess his sufferings make me a royalist, who never cared for 
 him. He that doth and can suffer shall have my heart: you 
 had it while you suffered. But now your severe punishment of 
 him for his abuses in government, and your own usurpations, 
 will not only win the hearts of the people to the oppressed suf- 
 fering king, but provoke them to rage against you, as having 
 robbed them of the interest which they had in his royalty. For 
 the king is in the people, and the people in the king. The 
 king's being is not solitary, but as he is in union with his people, 
 who are his strength in which he lives ; and the people's being 
 is not naked, but an interest in the greatness and wisdom of the 
 king who is their honor which lives in them. And though you 
 will disjoin yourselves from kings, God will not, neither will I, 
 God is King of kings, kings' and princes' God, as well a peo- 
 ple's, theirs as well as ours, and theirs eminently (as the speech 
 enforces, God of Israel, that is, Israel's God above all other 
 nations : and so king of kings,) by a near and especial kindred 
 and communion. Kingliness agrees with all Christians, who 
 are indeed Christians. For they are themselves of a royal na- 
 ture, made kings with Christ, and cannot but be friends to it, 
 being of kin to it : and if there were not kings to honor, they 
 would want one of the appointed objects to bestow that fulness 
 of honor which is in their breasts. A virtue would lie unem- 
 ployed vi-ithiu them, and in prison, pining and restleps from the 
 want of it3 outv/ard correlative, it is a bastard religion, that 
 is inconsistent with the majesty and the greatness of the most
 
 367 
 
 splendid monarch. Such spirits are strangers from the king- 
 dom of heaven. Either they know not the glory in which 
 God lives : or they are of narrow minds that are corrupt them- 
 selves, and not able to bear greatness, and so think that God 
 will not, or cannot, qualify men for such high places with cor- 
 respondent and proportionable power and goodness. Is it not 
 enough to have removed the malignant bodies which eclipsed 
 the royal sun, and mixed their bad influences with his.-' And 
 would you extinguish the sun itself to secure yourselves ? 
 this is the spirit of bondage to fear, and not of love and a 
 sound mind. To assume the office and the name of champions 
 for the common interest, and of Christ's soldiers, and yet to 
 act for self safety is so poor and mean a thing that it must 
 produce most vile and absurd actions, the scorn of the old pa- 
 gans, but for Christians who in all things are to love their 
 neighbor as themselves, and God above both, it is of all affec- 
 tions the unworthiest. Let me be a fool and boast, if so I may 
 shew you, while it is yet time, a little of that rest and security 
 which I and those of the same spirit enjoy, and which you have 
 turned your backs upon ; self, like a banished thing, Vv^andering 
 in strange ways. First, then, I fear no party, or interest, for I 
 love all, I am reconciled to all, and therein I lind all reconciled 
 to me. I have enmity to none but the son of perdition. It is 
 enmity begets insecurity : and while men live in the flesh, and 
 in enmity to any party, or interest, in a private, divided, and 
 self good, there will be, there cannot but be, perpetual wars : 
 except that one particular should quite ruin all other parts and 
 live alone, which the universal must not, will not suffer. For 
 to admit a part to devour and absorb the others, were to de- 
 stroy the whole, which is God's presence therein ; and such a 
 mind in any part doth not only fight with another part, but 
 against the whole. Every faction of men, therefore, striving 
 to make themselves absolute, and to owe their safety to their 
 strength, and not to their sympathy, do directly war against 
 God who is love, peace, and a general good, gives being to all 
 and cherishes all, and, therefore, can have neither peace or se- 
 curity. But we being enlarged into the largeness of God, and 
 comprehending all things in our bosoms by the divine spirit, are 
 at rest with all, and delight in all ; for we know nothing but 
 what is, in its essence, in our own hearts. Kings, nobles, are 
 much beloved of us, because they are in us, of us, one with ua,
 
 368 
 
 we 36 Christians being kings and lords by the anointing af 
 God." 
 
 But such sentiments, it will be said, are the flights of Spe- 
 culative Minds. Be it so ! Yet to soar is nobler than to 
 creep. We attach, likewise, some value to a thing on the mere 
 score of its rarity ; and Speculative Minds, alas ! have been 
 rare, though not equally rare, in all ages and countries of civi- 
 lized man. With us the very word seems to have abdicated its 
 legitimate sense. Instead of designating a mind so constituted 
 and disciplined as to find in its own wants and instincts an 
 interest in truths for their truth's sake, it is now used to 
 signify a practical schemer, one who ventures beyond the 
 bounds of experience in the formation and adoption of new 
 ways and means for the attainment of wealth, or power. To 
 possess the end in the means, as it is essential to morality in 
 the moral world, and the contra-distinction of goodness from 
 mere prudence, so is it, in the intellectual world, the moral con- 
 stituent of genius, and that by which true genius is contra-dis- 
 tinguished from mere talent. (See the postsci'ipt at the end of 
 this essay.) 
 
 The man of talent, who is, if not exclusively, yet chiefly and 
 characteristically a man of talent^ seeks and values the means 
 wholly in relation to some object not therein contained. His 
 means may be peculiar ; but his ends are conventional, and com- 
 mon to the mass of mankind. Alas ! in both cases alike, in that 
 of genius, as well as in that of talent, it too often happens, that 
 this diversity in the " moruW of their several intellects, ex- 
 tends to the feelings and impulses properly and directly morale 
 to their dispositions, habits, and maxims of conduct. It char- 
 acterizes not the intellect alone, but the whole man. The one 
 substitutes prudence for virtue, legality in act and demeanor, 
 for warmth and purity of heart : and too frequently becomes 
 jealous, envious, a coveter of other men's good gifts, and a de- 
 tractor from their merits, open or secretly, as his fears or his 
 passions chance to preponderate.* 
 
 * According to the principles of Spurzhcim's Crauioscopy (a scheme, the 
 indicative or gnomoiik parts of vvliich have a stronger support in facts than 
 the theory in reason or common sense) we should find in the skull of such an 
 inflividunl the organs of circumspection and appropriation disproportionately 
 lar^e and prominent compared with those of ideality and benevolence. It is
 
 359 
 
 The other, on the contrary, might remind us of the zealots 
 for legitimate succession after the decease of our sixth Edward, 
 who not content with having placed the rightful sovereign on 
 the throne, would wreak their vengeance on " the meek usurp- 
 er," who had been seated on it by a will against which she had 
 herself been the first to remonstrate. For with that unhealth- 
 ful preponderance of impulse over motive, which, though no 
 part of genius, is too often its accompaniment, he lives in con- 
 tinued hostility to prudence, or banishes it altogether ; and 
 thus deprives virtue of her guide and guardian, her prime 
 functionary, yea, the very organ of her outward life. Hence a 
 benevolence that squanders its shafts and still misses its aim, or 
 like the charmed bullet that, levelled at the wolf brings down 
 the shepherd ! Hence desultoriness, extremes, exhaustion 
 
 And thereof comes in the end despondency and madness ! 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 Let it not be forgotten, however, that these evils are the dis- 
 ease of the man, while the records of biography furnish ample 
 proof, that genius, in the higher degree, acts as a preservative 
 against them : more remarkably, and in more frequent instan- 
 ces, when the imagination and preconstructive power have ta- 
 ken a scientific or philosophic direction : as in Plato, indeed in 
 almost all the first-rate philosophers — in Kepler, Milton, Boyle, 
 Newton, Leibnitz, and Berkley. At all events, a certain num- 
 ber of speculative minds is necessary to a cultivated state of 
 society, as a condition of its progressiveness : and nature her- 
 self has provided against any too great increase in this class of 
 her productions. As the gifted masters of the divining Rod to 
 the ordinary miners, and as the miners of a country to the 
 husbandmen, mechanics, and artisans, such is the proportion of 
 the Trismegisti, to the sum total of speculative minds, even of 
 those, I mean, that are truly such ; and of these again, to the 
 remaining mass of useful laborers r.nd " operatives''^ in science, 
 literature, and the learned professions. 
 
 certain that the organ of appropriation, or (more correctly) the part of the 
 skull asserted to be significant of that tendency anc. cciVespondent to the or- 
 gan, is strikingly large in a cast of the head of the famous Dr. Dodd ; and it 
 was found of equal dimension in a literary man, whose skull puzzled the 
 cranioscopist more than it did me. Nature, it should seem, makes no dis- 
 tinction between manuscripts and money-drafts, though the law does. 
 47
 
 370 
 
 This train of thought brings to ray recollection a conversation 
 with a friend of my youth, an old man of humble estate ; but 
 in whose society I had great pleasure. The reader will, I 
 hope, pardon me if I embrace the opportunity of recalling old 
 affections, afforded me by its fitness to illustrate the present 
 subject. A sedate man he was, and had been a miner from his 
 boyhood. Well did he represent the old " lo7ig syne,^^ when 
 every trade was a mystery and had its own guardian saint ; 
 when the sense of self-importance was gratified at home^ and 
 Ambition had a hundred several lotteries, in one or other of 
 which every freeman had a ticket, and the only blanks were 
 drawn by Sloth, Intemperance, or inevitable Calamity ; when 
 the detail of each art and trade (like the oracles of the proph- 
 ets, interpretable in a double sense) was ennobled in the eyes 
 of its professors by being spiritually improved into symbols and 
 mementos of all doctrines and all duties, and every craftsman 
 had, as it were, two versions of his Bible, one in the common 
 language of the country, another in the acts, objects, and pro- 
 ducts of his own particular craft. There are not many things 
 in our elder popular literature, more interesting to me than 
 those contests, or Amoibean eclogues, between workmen for 
 the superior worth and dignity of their several callings, which 
 used to be sold at our village fairs, in stitched sheets, neither 
 untitled nor undecorated, though without the superfluous costs 
 of a separate title-page. 
 
 With this good old miner I was once walking through a corn- 
 field at harvest-time, when that part of the conversation, to 
 which I have alluded, took place. At times, said I, when you 
 were delving in the bowels of the arid mountain or foodless 
 rock, it must have occurred to your mind as a pleasant thought, 
 that in providing the scythe and the sword you were virtually 
 reaping the harvest and protecting the harvest-man. Ah! he 
 replied with a sigh, that gave a fuller meaning to his smile, out 
 of all earthly things there come both good and evil : the good 
 through God, and the evil from the evil heart. From the look 
 and weight of the ore I learnt to make a near guess, how much 
 iron it would yield ; but neither its heft, nor its hues, nor its 
 breakage would prophecy to me, whether it was to become a 
 thievish pick-lock, a murderer's dirk, a slave's collar, or the 
 woodman's axe, the feeding ploughshare, the defender's sword, 
 or the mechanic's tool. So perhaps, my young friend ! I have
 
 371 
 
 cause to be thankful, that the opening upon a fresh vein gives 
 me a delight so full as to allow no room for other fancies, and 
 leaves behind it a hope and a love that support me in my labor, 
 even for the labor's sake. 
 
 As, according to the eldest philosophy, life being in its own 
 nature aeriform, is under the necessity of renewing itself by 
 inspiring the connatural, and therefore assimilable air, so is it 
 with the intelligential soul with respect to truth : for it is itself 
 of the nature of truth, revo.as'vv) hx hsupias^ y.ai 'hia\WL Ssrov, (fiidiv 
 ex^iM (piXo'hsoLiJ.ova u*ap5(ii. Plotinus. But the occasion and brief 
 history of the decline of true speculative philosophy, with the 
 origin of the separation of ethics from religion, I must defer to 
 the following number. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 As I see many good, and can anticipate no ill consequences, 
 in the attempt to give distinct and appropriate meanings to 
 words hitherto synonymous, or at least of indefinite and fluctu- 
 ating application, if only the proposed sense be not passed up- 
 on the reader as the existing and authorized one, I shall make 
 no other apology for the use of the word. Talent, in this pre- 
 ceding Essay and elsewhere in my works than by annexing the 
 following explanation. I have been in the habit of consider- 
 ing the qualities of intellect, the comparative eminence in 
 which characterizes individuals and even countries, under four 
 kinds — Genius, Talent, Sense, and Cleverness. The first 
 I use in the sense of most general acceptance, as the faculty 
 which adds to the existing stock of power, and knowledge by 
 new views, new combinations, &c. In short, I define Genius, 
 as originality in intellectual construction : the moral accompa- 
 niment, and actuating principle of which consists, perhaps, in 
 the carrying on of the freshness and feelings of childhood into 
 the powers of manhood. 
 
 By Talent, on the other hand, I mean the comparative fa- 
 cility of acquiring, arranging, and applying the stock furnished 
 by others and already existing in books or other conservato- 
 ries of intellect. 
 
 By Sense I understand that just balance of the faculties which 
 is to the judgment what health is to the body. The mind seems
 
 372 
 
 to act en masses by a synthetic rather than an analytic process : 
 even as the outward senses, from which the metaphor is taken, 
 perceive immediately, each as it were by a peculiar tact 
 or intuition, v/ithout any consciousness of the mechanism by 
 which the perception is realized. This is often exemplified 
 in well-bred, unallected, and innocent women. I know a lady, 
 on whose judgment, from constant experience of its rectitude, 
 I could rely almost as on an oracle. But when she has some- 
 times proceeded to a detail of the grounds and reasons for her 
 opinion — then, led by similar experience I have been tempted 
 to interrupt her with — " I will take your advice," or, " I shall 
 act on your opinion : for I am sure, you are in the right. But 
 as to the jO}'s and becauses^ leave them to me to find out." 
 The general accompaniment of Sense is a disposition to avoid 
 extremes, whether in theory or in practice, with a desire to 
 remain in sympatiiy with the general mind of the age or coun- 
 try, and a feeling of the necessity and utility of compj'omise. 
 If Genius be the initiative, and Talent the administrative, 
 Sense is the conservative^ branch, in the intellectual re- 
 public. 
 
 By Clt:verness (which I dare not with Dr. Johnson call a 
 lota word, while there is a sense to be expressed which it alone 
 expresses) I mean a comparative readiness in the invention and 
 use of moans, for the realizing of objects and ideas — often of 
 such ideas, which the man of genius only could have origina- 
 ted, and which the clever man perhaps neither fully compre- 
 hends nor adequately appreciates, even at the moment that he 
 is prompting or executing the machinery of their accomplish- 
 ment. In short. Cleverness is a sort of genius for instrumen- 
 tality. It is the brain in the hand. In literature Cleverness is 
 more frequently accompanied by wit, Genius and Sense by hu- 
 mor. 
 
 If I take the three great countries of Europe, in respect of 
 intellectual character, namely, Germany, England, and France, 
 I should characterize them thus — premising only that in the 
 first line of the two first tables I mean to imply that Genius, 
 rare in all countries, is equal in both of these, the instances 
 equally numerous — and characteristic therefore not in relation 
 to each other, but in relation to the third country. The other 
 qualities are more general characteristics.
 
 373 
 
 GEmMjVY. 
 Genius, 
 Talent, 
 Fancy. 
 
 The latter chiefly as exhibited in wild combination and in 
 pomp of ornament. N. B. Imagination is implied in Genius. 
 
 E^GLJUVD. 
 Genius, 
 
 Sense, 
 Humor. 
 
 FIL/IJVCE. 
 Cleverness, 
 Talent, 
 Wit. 
 So again with regard to the forms and effects, in which the 
 qualities manifest themselves, i. e. intellectually. 
 
 GERMANY. 
 Idea, or Law anticipated,* 
 Totality,! 
 Distinctness. 
 
 EMGLAJVD. 
 Law discovered,! 
 Selection, 
 Clearness. 
 
 * This as co-ordinate witii Genius in the first table, applies likewise to tho 
 few only: and conjoined with the two following qualities, as genera) charac- 
 teristics of German intellect, includes or supposes, as its consequences and 
 accompaniments speculation, system, method ; which in a somewhat lower 
 class of minds appear as notionality (or a predilection for noumena, mundua 
 intelligibilis, as contra-distinguished from phenomena, or mundus sensibilis) 
 scheme; arrangement; orderliness. 
 
 f In totality I imply encycloptedic learning, exhaustion of the subjects treat- 
 ed of, and the passion for completing and the love of the complete. 
 
 XSee the following Essays on Method. It might have been expressed — as the 
 contemplation of ideas objectively, as existing powers, while the German of 
 equal genius is predisposed to contemplate law subjectively, with anticipation 
 of a correspondent in nature.
 
 374 
 
 FRAXCE. 
 Theory invented, 
 Particularity.* 
 Palpability. 
 
 Lastly, we might exhibit the same qualities in their moral, 
 religious, and political manifestations : in the cosmopolitism of 
 Germany, the contemptuous nationality of the Englishman, and 
 the ostentatious and boastful nationality of the Frenchman. The 
 craving of sympathy marks the German : inward pride the Eng- 
 lishman : vanity the Frenchman. So again, enthusiasm, vision- 
 ariness seems the tendency of the German : zeal, zealotry of 
 the English : fanaticism of the French. But the thoughtful 
 reader will find these and many other characteristicj points 
 contained in, and deducible from the relations in which the mind 
 of the three countries bears to Time. 
 
 GEmMMY. 
 Past and Future. 
 
 EMGLAJSTD. 
 Past and Present. 
 
 FRA^rCE. 
 The Present. 
 
 A whimsical friend of mine, of more genius than discretion, 
 characterizes the Scotchman of literature (confining his remark, 
 however, to the period since the Union) as a dull Frenchman 
 and a superficial German. But when I recollect the splendid ex- 
 ceptions of Hume, Robertson, Smollett, Reid, Thomson (if 
 
 * Tendency to individualize, embody, insulate, ex.gr. the vitreous and the 
 resinous fluids instead of the positive and negative forces of the power of 
 electricity. Thus too, it was not sufficient that oxygen was the principal, 
 and with one exception, the only then known acidifying substance ; the pow- 
 er and principle of acidification must be embodied and as it were impersona- 
 ted and hypostasized in this gas. Hence the idolism of the French, here ex- 
 pressed in one of its results, viz. palpability. Ideas are here out of the ques- 
 tion. I had almost said, that Ideas and a Parisian Philosopher are incompa- 
 tible terms, since the latter half, I mean, of the reign of Lewis XVI. But 
 even the Conceptions of a Frenchman, whatever lie admits to be conceivable 
 must be imageable, and the imageable must be fancied tangible — the non-appa- 
 rency of either or both being accounted for by the disproportion of our senses, 
 not by the nature of the conceptions.
 
 375 
 
 this last instance be not objected to as savoring of geographical 
 pedantry, that truly amiable man, and genuine poet having been 
 born but a few furlongs from the English border,) Dugald 
 Stewart, Burns, Walter Scott, Hogg and Campbell — not 
 to mention the very numerous physicians and prominent dis- 
 senting ministers, born and bred beyond the Tweed — I hesitate 
 in recording so wild an opinion, which derives its plausibility, 
 chiefly from the circumstance so honorable to our northern sis- 
 ter, that Scotchmen generally have more, and a more learned, 
 education than the same ranks in other countries, below the 
 first class ; but in part likewise, from the common mistake of 
 confounding the general character of an emigrant, whose ob- 
 jects are in one place and his best affections in another, with 
 the particular character of a Scotchman : to which we may add, 
 perhaps, the clannish spirit of provincial literature, fostered un- 
 doubtedly by the peculiar relations of Scotland, and of which 
 therefore its metropolis may be a striking, but is far from being 
 a solitary, instance. 
 
 ESSAY II. 
 
 'H. "odog y.urio' 
 The road downward, 
 
 Heraclit. Fragment. 
 
 Amour de moi meme ; mais bien calcule : was the motto 
 and maxim of a French philosopher. Our fancy inspirited by 
 the more imaginative powers of hope and fear enables us to 
 present to ourselves the future as the present : and thence to 
 accept a scheme of self-love for a system of morality. And
 
 376 
 
 doubtless, an enlightened self-interest would recommend the 
 same course of outward conduct, as the sense of duty would 
 do ; even though the motives in the former case had respect to 
 this life exclusively. But to show the desirableness of an ob- 
 ject, or the contrary, is one thing: to excite the desire, to con- 
 stitute the aversion, is another : the one being to the other as a 
 common guide-post to the " chariot instinct with spirit," which 
 at once directs and conveys, or (to use a more trival image) as 
 the hand, and hour-plate, or at the utmost the regulator, of a 
 watch to the spring and wheel work, or rather to the whole 
 watch. Nay, where the sufficiency and exclusive validity of 
 the former are adopted as the maxim (regula maxima) of the 
 moral sense, it would be a fairer and fuller comparison to say, 
 that it is to the latter as the dial to the sun, indicating its path 
 by intercepting its radiance. 
 
 But let it be granted, that in certain individuals from a hap- 
 py evenness of nature, formed into a habit by the strength of 
 education, the influence of example, and by favorable circum- 
 stances in general, the actions diverging from self-love as their 
 center should be precisely the same as those produced from the 
 Christian principle, which requires of us that we should place 
 our self and our neighbor at an equi-distance, and love both 
 alike as modes in which we realize and exhibit the love of God 
 above all : wherein would the difference be then? I answer 
 boldly : even in that, for which all actions have their whole 
 worth and their main value — in the agents themselves. So 
 much indeed is this of the very substance of genuine morality, 
 that wherever the latter has given way in the general opinion 
 to a scheme of ethics founded on utility, its place is soon chal- 
 lenged by the spirit of honor. Paley, who degrades the spir- 
 it of honor into a mere club-law among the higher classes ori- 
 ginating in selfish convenience, and enforced by the penalty of 
 excommunication from the society which habit had rendered 
 indispensable to the happiness of the individuals, has miscon- 
 strued it not less than Shaftsbury, who extols it as the noblest 
 influence of noble natures. The spirit of honor is more in- 
 indeed than a mere conventional substitute for honesty ; but 
 on the other hand instead of being a finer form of moral life, it 
 may be more truly described as the shadow or ghost of virtue 
 deceased. For to take the word in a sense, which no man of 
 honor would acknowledge, may be allowed to the writer of sa-
 
 377 
 
 ttres, but not to the moral philosopher. Honor implies a rer- 
 erence for the invisible and supersensual in our nature, and so 
 far it is virtue ; but it is a virtue that neither understands it- 
 self or its true source, and therefore often unsubstantial, not 
 seldom fantastic, and always more or less capricious. Abstract 
 the notion from the lives of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, or 
 Henry the Fourth of France : and then compare it with the 1 
 Corinth, xiii. and the epistle to Philemon, or rather with the 
 realization of this fair ideal in the character of St. Paul* him- 
 self. I know not a better test. Nor can I think of any inves- 
 tigation, that would be more instructive where it would be sa/e, 
 but none likewise of greater delicacy from the probability of 
 misinterpretation, than a history of the rise of konor in the 
 European monarchies as connected with the corruptions of 
 Christianity ; and an inquiry into the specific causes of the in- 
 efficacy which has attended the combined efforts of divines 
 and moralists against the practice and obligation of duelling. 
 
 Of a widely different character from this moral K)ps(?J5, yet as a 
 derivative from the same root, we may contemplate the heresies 
 of the Gnostics in the early ages of the church, and of the fa- 
 
 * This has struck tlie better class even of infidels. Collins, one of the 
 most learned of our English Deists, is said to have declared, that contradic- 
 tory as miracles appeared to his reason, he would believe in them notwith- 
 standing, if it could be proved to him that St. Paul had asserted any one as 
 having been worked hy himself in the modern sense of the word, miracle ; 
 adding, "S. Paul tvas so perfect a gerdlemun and a man of honor!" When I 
 call duelling, and similar aberrations of honor, a moral heresy; I refer to the 
 force of the Greek 'aiQeaig as signifying a principle or opinion taken up by 
 THE WILL for the wilVs sake, as a proof and pledge to itself of its own power 
 of self-determination, independent of all other motives. In the gloomy grat- 
 ification derived or ruiticipated from the exercise of this aweful power — the 
 condition of all moral good while it is latent, and hidden, as it were, in the 
 center ; but the essential cause of fiendish guilt, v/hen^it makes itself exist- 
 ential and peripheric — si quando in circumferentiam erumpat: (in both cases 
 I have purposely adopted the language of the old mystic thcosophers)— I find 
 the only explanation of a moral phcenornenon not very uncommon in the last 
 moments of condemned felons — viz. the obstinate denial, not of the main guilt, 
 which might be accounted for by ordinai-y motives, but of some paiticularact 
 which had been proved beyond all ])ossibility of doubt, and attested by the 
 criminal's own accomplices and fellow sufferers in their last confessions: and 
 this too an act, the non-perpetration of wliich, if believed, could neither mit- 
 igate the sentence of the law, nor even the opinions of men after the sen- " 
 tence had been carried into execution. 
 48
 
 378 
 
 mily of love, with other forms of Antinomianism, since the 
 Reformation to the present day. But lest in uttering truth I 
 should convey falsehood and fall myself into the error which it 
 is my object to expose, it will be requisite to distinguish an 
 apprehension of the whole of a truth, even where that appre- 
 hension is dim and indistinct, from a partial perception of the 
 same rashly assumed^ as a perception of the whole. The first 
 is rendered inevitable in many things for many, in some points 
 for all, men from the progressiveness no less than from the im- 
 perfection of humanity, which itself dictates and enforces the 
 precept. Believe that thou mayest understand. The most 
 knowing must at times be content with the facit of a sum too 
 complex or subtle for us to follow nature through the antece- 
 dent process. The Greek verb, rfuvi'svai, which we render by 
 the word, understand, is literally the same as our own idiomat- 
 ic phrase, to go along with. Hence in subjects not under the 
 cognizance of the senses wise men have always attached a high 
 value to general and long-continued assent, as a presumption of 
 truth. After all the subtle reasonings and fair analogies which 
 logic and induction could supply to a mighty intellect, it is yet 
 on this ground that the Socrates of Plato mainly rests his faith 
 in the immortality of the soul, and the moral Government of 
 the universe. It had been held by all nations in all ages, but 
 with deepest conviction by the best and wisest men, as a belief 
 connatural with goodness and akin to prophecy. The same ar- 
 gument is adopted by Cicero, as the principal ground of his ad- 
 herence to divination. Gentem quidem nullam video neque 
 tam immanem tamque barbaram, quae non significari futura et a 
 quibusdam intelligi prsedicique posse censeat.* I confess, I 
 
 *= (Translation) — I find indeed no people or nation, however civilized and 
 cultivated, or however wild and barbarous, but have deemed tliat there are 
 antecedent signs of future events, and some men ca])able of understanding 
 and predicting them. 
 
 I am tempted to add a passage from my own translation of Sciiiller's 
 Wallenstein, the more so that the work has been long ago ii^ed up, as ^^ wind- 
 ing sheets for pilchards," or extant only by (as I would fain flatter myself) the 
 kind partiality of tiie trunk-makers : though with rxcp|)tion of works for 
 which pubhc adniiration supersedes or includes individual commendations, I 
 scarce remember a book that has been more honored by the cxiuess attesta- 
 tions in its favor of eminent and even of pojjular literati, among whom I 
 take this oi)portunity of expressing my acknowledgements to the author of
 
 379 
 
 can never read the De Divinatione of this great orator, states- 
 man, and patriot, without feeling myself inclined to consider 
 this opinion as an instance of the second class, namely, of 
 fractional truths integrated by fancy, passion, accident, and that 
 preponderance of the positive over the negative in the memo- 
 ry, vrhich makes it no less tenacious of coincidences than for- 
 getful of failures. 
 
 Countess. What? dost thou not believe, that oft in dreaina 
 A. voice of warning si)eaks prophetic to us ? 
 
 Wallenstein. I will not doubt that there have been such voices; 
 Yet I would not call them 
 Voices of ivarning, that announce to us 
 Only the inevitable. As the sun, * 
 
 Ere it is risen, sometimes paints its image 
 In the atmosphere : so often do the spirits 
 Of great events stride on before events 
 And in to-day already ivalks to-morrow. 
 That which we read of the Fourth Henry's death 
 Did ever vex and haunt me, like a tale 
 Of my own future destiny. The king 
 Felt iu his breast the phantom of the knife. 
 Long ere Ravaillac arm'd himself therewith. 
 His quiet mind forsook him: the phantasma 
 Started him in his Louvre, chaced him forth 
 Into the open air. Like funeral knells 
 Sounded that coronation festival; 
 And still with boding sense he heard the tread 
 Of tliose feet, that even then were seeking him 
 Throughout the streets of Paris. 
 
 Wallenstein, part ii. act v. scene i. 
 
 ^O' 
 
 I am indeed firmly persuaded, that no doctrine was ever 
 widely diffused, among various nations through successive ages, 
 
 Waverly, Guy Mannering, &c. How (asked Ulysses, addressing his guar- 
 dian goddess) shall I be aiile to recognize Proteus, in the swallow that skims 
 round our houses whom I have been accustomed to behold as a swan of 
 Phcebus, measuring his movements to a celestial music ? In both alike, she 
 replied, thou canst I'ecognize the god. 
 
 So supported, I dare avow that I have thought my translation worthy of a 
 more favorable reception from the public and their literary guides and pur- 
 veyors. But when I recollect, that a much better and very far more valua- 
 ble work, the Rev. IMr. Carey's incomparable translation of Dante, had very 
 nearly met with the same fate, I lose all right, and, I trust, all inclinauon to 
 complain: an inchnation, which the mere sense of its folly and uselessneas 
 will not always sufBce to preclude.
 
 380 
 
 and onder different religions (such, for instance, as the tenets 
 of original sin and of redemption, those fundamental articles of 
 every known religion professing to have been revealed), which 
 is not founded either in the nature of things, or in the necessi- 
 ties of human nature. Nay, the more strange and irreconcile- 
 able such a doctrine may appear to the understanding, the 
 judgments of which are grounded on general rules abstracted 
 from the world of the senses, the stronger is the presumption 
 in its favor. For whatever satirist may say, or sciolists ima- 
 gine, the human mind has no predilection for absurdity. I 
 would even extend the principle (proportionately I mean) to 
 sundry tenets, that from their strangeness or dangerous tenden- 
 cy, appear only to be generally reprobated, as eclipses in the 
 belief of barbarous tribes are to be frightened away by noises 
 and execrations; but which rather resemble the luminary itself 
 in this one respect, that after a longer or shorter interval of 
 occultation, they are still found to re-emerge. It is these, the 
 re-appearance of which (nomine lantum mutato), from age to 
 age, gives to ecclesiastical history a deeper interest than that of 
 romance and scarcely less wild, for every philosophic mind. I 
 am far from asserting that such a doctrine (the Antinomian, 
 for instance, or that of a latent mystical sense in the words of 
 Scripture, according to Emanuel Swedenborg) shall be always 
 the best possible, or not a distorted and dangerous, as well as 
 partial, representation of the truth, on which it is founded. 
 For the same body casts strangely different shadows in different 
 positions and different degrees of light. But I dare, and do, 
 affirm that it always does shadow out some important truth, and 
 from it derives its main influence over the faith of its adher- 
 ents, obscure as their perception of this truth may be, and 
 though they may themselves attribute their belief to the super- 
 natural gifts of the founder, or the miracles by which his 
 preaching had been accredited. See Wesley^s Journal. But 
 we have the highest possible authority, that of Scripture itself, 
 to justify us in putting the question: Whether miracles can, 
 of themselves, work a true conviction in the mind ? There are 
 spiritual truths which must derive their evidence from within, 
 which whoever rejects, " neither will he believe though a man 
 were to rise from the dead" to confirm them. And under the 
 Mosaic law a miracle in attestation of a false doctrine subjected 
 ^he miracle-worker to death : whether really or only seemingly
 
 381 
 
 supernatural, makes no difference in the present argument, its 
 power of convincing, whatever that power may be, whether 
 great or small, depending on the fulness of the belief in its 
 miraculous nature. Est quibus esse videtur. Or rather, that I 
 may express the same position in a form less likely to offend, is 
 not a true efficient conviction of a moral truth, is not "the cre- 
 ating of a new heart," which collects the energies of a man's 
 whole being in the focus of the conscience, the one essential 
 miracle, the same and of the same evidence to the ignorant and 
 learned, which no superior skill can counterfeit, human or dae- 
 moniacal ? Is it not emphatically that leading of the Father, 
 without which no man can come to Christ ? Is it not that im- 
 plication of doctrine in the miracle, and of miracle in the doc- 
 trine, which is the bridge of communication between the senses 
 and the soul ? That predisposing warmth that renders the un- 
 derstanding susceptible of the specific impression from the his- 
 toric, and from all other outward, seals of testimony ? Is not 
 this the one infallible criterion of miracles, by which a man can 
 know whether they be of God? The abhorrence in which the 
 most savage or barbarous tribes hold witchcraft, in which how- 
 ever their belief is so intense* as even to control the springs 
 of life, — is not this abhorrence of witchcraft under so full a 
 conviction of its reality a proof, how little of divine, how little 
 fitting to our nature, a miracle is, when insulated from spiritual 
 truths, and disconnected from religion as its end ? What then can 
 we think of a theological theory, which adopting a scheme of 
 prudential legality, common to it with " the sty of Epicurus" 
 as far at least as the S2)rings of moral action are concerned, 
 makes its whole religion consist in the belief of miracles ! As 
 well might the poor African prepare for himself a fetisch by 
 plucking out the eyes from the eagle or the lynx, and enshri- 
 ning the same, worship in them the power of vision. As the 
 tenet of professed christians (I speak of the principle not of 
 the men, whose hearts will always more or less correct the er- 
 rors of their understandings) it is even more absurd, and the 
 pretext for such a religion more inconsistent than the religion 
 itself. For they profess to derive from' it their whole faith in 
 
 * I refer the reader to Hearne'a Travels among the Copper Indians, and to 
 Bryan Edwards's account of the Oby in the West Indies, grounded on judicial 
 docAimentfl and personal observation.
 
 383 
 
 that futurity, which if they had not previously believed on the 
 evidence of their own consciences, of Moses and the Prophets, 
 they are assured by the great Founder and Object of Christian- 
 ity, that neither will they believe it, in any spiritual and profit- 
 able sense, though a man should rise from the dead. 
 
 For myself, I cannot resist the conviction, built on particular 
 and general history, that the extravagances of Antinomianism 
 and Solifidianism are little more than the counteractions to this 
 Christian paganism : the play, as it were, of antagonist muscles. 
 The feelings will set up their standard against the understand- 
 ing, whenever the understanding has renounced its allegiance to 
 the reason : and what is faith but the personal realization of the 
 reason by its union with the will ? If we would drive out the de- 
 mons of fanaticism from the people, we must begin by exorcising 
 the spirit of Epicureanism in the higher ranks, and restore to their 
 teachers the true Christian enthusiasm,* the vivifying influences 
 of the altar, the censer, and the sacrifice. They must neither be 
 ashamed of, nor disposed to explain away, the articles of preve- 
 nient and auxiliary grace, nor the necessity of being born again 
 to the life from which our nature had become apostate. They 
 must administer indeed the necessary medicines to the sick, the 
 motives of fear as well as of hope ; but they must not withhold 
 from thera the idea of health, or conceal from them that the 
 medicines for the sick are not the diet of the healthy. Nay, 
 they must make it a part of the curative process to induce the 
 patient, on the first symptoms of recovery, to look forward with 
 prayer and aspiration to that state, in which perfect love shut- 
 teth out fear. Above all, they must not seek to make the 
 mysteries of faith what the world calls rational by theories of 
 original sin and redemption borrowed analogically from the im- 
 perfection of human law-courts and the coarse contrivances of 
 state expedience. 
 
 Among the numerous examples with which I might enforce 
 this warning, I refer, not without reluctance, to the most elo- 
 quent, and one of the most learned of our divines ; a rigorist, 
 indeed, concerning the authority of the Church, but a Latitudi- 
 narian in the articles of its f^iith ; who stretched the latter almost 
 
 * The oiiginal meaning of the Greek, Enthousiasmos, is ; the influence 
 of the divinity such as was supposed to take possession of the priest during 
 tlie performance of the services at the altar. 
 
 *^
 
 38^ 
 
 to the advancea posts of Socinianism, and strained the former 
 to a hazardous conformity with the assumptions of the Roman 
 hierarchy. With what emotions must not a pious mind peruse 
 such passages as the following : — " Death reigned upon them 
 whose sins could not be so imputed as Adam's was ; but although 
 it was not wholly imputed upon their own account, yet it was 
 imputed upon their's and Adam's. For God was so exaspera- 
 ted with mankind^ that being angry he would still continue 
 that punishment to lesser sins and sinners, which he had first 
 threatened to Adam only. The case is this ; Jonathan and Mi- 
 chael were Saul's children. It came to pass, that seven of Saul's 
 issue were to be hanged ; all equally innocent — equally culpa- 
 ble.* David took the five sons of Michael, for she had left him 
 unhandsomely. Jonathan was his friend, and therefore he 
 spared his son, Mephibosheth. Here it was indifferent as to 
 the guilt of the persons [observe^ no guilt was attached to 
 either of them) whether David should take the sons of Michael 
 or of Jonathan ; but it is likely that, as upon the kindness which 
 David had to Jonathan, he saved his son, so upon the just pro- 
 vocation of Michael, he made that evil to fall upon them, which, 
 it may be, they should not have suffered, if their mother had 
 been kind. Adam was to god, as Michael to David !!! (Tay- 
 lor's Polem. Tracts, p. 711.) And this, with many passages 
 equally gross, occurs in a refutation of the doctrine of original 
 sin, on the ground of its incongruity with reason, and its in- 
 compatibility with God's justice ! Exasperated with those 
 whom the Bishop has elsewhere, in the same treatise, declared 
 to have been " innocent and most unfortunate" — the two things 
 that most conciliate love and pity ! Or, if they did not re- 
 main innocent, yet, those whose abandonment to a mere na- 
 ture, while they Avere subjected to a law above nature, he af- 
 firms to be the irresistible cause that they, one and all did sin ! 
 — and this at once illustrated and justified by one of the worst 
 actions of an imperfect mortal ! So far could the resolve to 
 coerce all doctrines within the limits of reason (i. e. the indi- 
 vidual's power of comprehension) and the prejudices of an 
 Arminian against the Calvinist preachers, carry an highly-gift- 
 
 * These two words are added without the least ground in scrii>turc, accord- 
 ing to which (2 Samuel, xxi.) no charge was laid to them but that they wore 
 the children of Saul ! and sacrificed to a point of state expedience.
 
 364 
 
 cd and excmpUiy divine. Let us be on our guard, lest similar 
 effects should resist from the zeal, however well-srounded 
 in some respects, against the Church Calvinisis of our davs. 
 The writer s belief is perhaps, equi-distant from that of both 
 parties the Grotian and the Genevan. But, confinins mv re- 
 mark exclusively to the doctrines and the practical deductions 
 from them, I could never read Bishop Tavlor's Tract on the 
 doctrine and practice of Repentance, without being tempted to 
 characterize high Calvinism as ( comparatively) a lamb in woll^s 
 skin, and strict Arminianism as approachins to the reverse. 
 
 Actuated bv these motives, I have devoted the followins es- 
 say to a brief history of the rise and occasion of the Latitudin- 
 arian system in its first birth-place in Greece, and a faithful ex- 
 hibition both of its parentage and its offspring. The reader will 
 find it strictly correspondent to the motto of both essays, h hccc 
 —the wav downwards. 
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 OS THE ORIGI5^ A3>D PHOGHESs OF THE SECT OF SOPHISTS LS 
 
 GREECE. 
 
 'H "oSo; xartb*. 
 
 The road dofmwaid. 
 
 H£&ACLiT. Pragatad. 
 
 As Pythagoras, f5S4 a. c.) declining the title of the wise 
 man, is said to have first named himself Philosopheb. or lo- 
 ver of wisdom, so Protagoras, followed by Gorgias, Prodicus, 
 
 . (444 A. c.) found even the former word too narrow for his 
 opinion of himself, and fir^ assumed the titie of Sophist ;
 
 385 
 
 this word originallr signityins: one who professes the power of 
 making others wise, a wholesale and retail dealer in wisdom — 
 a wisdom-monger, in the same sense as we say, an iron-mon- 
 ger. In this and not in their abuse of the arts of reasoning, 
 hare Plato and Aristotle placed the essential of the sophistic 
 character. Their sophisms were indeed its natural products and 
 accompaniments, but must yet be distinguished from it, as the 
 fruits from the tree. 'Ex-'.^jC r.c, xirrX?^, a-T;^J.>.ri: TTji -X TTC 
 •-L'>7/ y^rT^Liarc — a vender, a market-man. in moral and intellect- 
 ual knowledges ( connoissances j — one who hires himself out 
 or puts himself up at auction, as a carpenter and upholsterer to 
 the heads and hearts of his customers — such are the phrases, 
 by which Plato at once describes and satyrizes the proper so- 
 phist. Nor does the StagArite fall short of his great master 
 and rival in the reprobation of these professors of wisdom, or 
 differ from him in the sn'ounds of it. He too s^^es the base- 
 ness of the motives joined with the impudence and delusive na- 
 ture of the pretence as the generic character. 
 
 Xext to this pretence of selling wisdom and eloquence, they 
 were distinguished by their itinerancy. Athens was. indeed, 
 their great emporium and place of rendezvous : but by no means 
 their domicile. Such were Protagoras. Gorgias. Prodicus, Hip- 
 pias, Polus, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and a whole host of so- 
 phists minorum gentium : and though many of the tribe, like 
 the Euthydemus and Dionysiodoras so dramatically portrayed 
 by Plato, were mere emty disputants, sleight -ot'-icord jugslers, 
 this was far from being their common character. Both Plat« 
 and Aristotle repeatedly admit the brilliancy of their talents 
 and the extent of their acquirements. The following passage 
 from the Timjeus of the former will be my best commentary 
 as well as authority. " The race of sophists, again, I acknow- 
 ledge for men of no common powers, and of eminent skill and 
 experience in many and various kinds of knowledge, and these 
 too not seldom truly fair and ornamental of our nature ; but I 
 tear that somehow, as being itinerants from city to city, loose 
 from all permanent ties of house and home, and everA"where 
 aliens, they shoot wide of the proper aim of man whether 
 as philosopher or as citizen." The few remains of Zeno 
 the Eleatic, his paradoxes against the reality of motion, are 
 mere identical propositions spun out into a sort of whimsical 
 conundrums, as in the celebrated paradox euiiikd Achilles and 
 49
 
 386 
 
 the Tortoise, the whole plausibility of which rests on the trick 
 ef assuming a minimum of time while no minimum is allowed to 
 space, joined with that of exacting from Intelligibilia (N^fxsva) 
 the conditions peculiar to objects of the senses {(pumixsvu.) The 
 passages still extant from the works of Gorgias, on the other 
 hand, want nothing but the form* of a premise to undermine 
 by a legitimate deductio ad absurdum all the philosophic sys- 
 tems that had been hitherto advanced with the exception of the 
 Heraclitic, and of that too as it was generally understood and 
 interpreted. Yet Zeno's name was and ever will be held in 
 reverence by philosophers ; for his object was as grand as his 
 motives were honorable — that of assigning the limits to the 
 claims of the senses, and of subordinating them to the pure 
 reason : while Gorgias will ever be cited as an instance of pro- 
 stituted genius from the immoral nature of his object and the 
 baseness of his motives. These and not his sophisms constitu- 
 ted him a sophist, a sophist whose eloquence and logical skill 
 rendered him only the more pernicious. 
 
 Soon after the repulse of the Persian invaders, and as a 
 heavy counter-balance to the glories of Marathon and Platsea, 
 we may date the commencement of that corruption first in pri- 
 vate and next in public life, which displayed itself more or less 
 in all the free states and communities of Greece, but most of 
 all in Athens. The causes are obvious, and such as in popular 
 republics have always followed, and are themselves the effects 
 of, that passion for military glory and political preponderance, 
 which may be well called the bastard and the parricide of 
 liberty. In reference to the fervid but light and sensitive 
 Athenians, we may enumerate, as the most operative, the gid- 
 diness of sudden aggrandizement ; the more intimate connec- 
 tion and frequent intercourse with the Asiatic states ; the in- 
 trigues with the court of Persia ; the intoxication of the citi- 
 zens at large, sustained and increased by the continued allusions 
 to their recent exploits, in the flatteries of the theatre, and the 
 funereal panegyrics ; the rage for amusement and public shows ; 
 and lastly the destruction of the Athenian constitution by the 
 
 * Viz. If either the world itself as an animated whole, according to the 
 Italian school ; or if atoms, according Democritus ; or any one primal ele- 
 ment, as water or fii'c, according to Thalcs or Empedocles, or if a nous, as 
 eict'lsijied by Anaxagoras ; be assumed as the absolutely first ; then, &c.
 
 387 
 
 ascendancy of its democratic element, During the operation 
 pf these causes, at an early period of the process, and no unr 
 important part of it, the Sophists made their first appearance^ 
 Some of these applied the lessons of their art in their own per- 
 sons, and traded for gain and gainful influence in the character 
 of demagogues and public orators ; but the greater number of- 
 fered themselves as instructors, in the arts of persuasion and 
 temporary impression, to as many as could come up to the high 
 prices, at which they rated their services. Nswv xai 'h-XojCicajv sjj.- 
 fji-iffSoi 2rr)^euTai (these are Plato^s ivords) — Hireling hunters of 
 the young and rich, they offered to the vanity of youth and the 
 ambition of wealth a substitute for that authority, which by the 
 institutions of Solon had been attached to high birth and pro- 
 perty, or rather to the moral discipline, the habits, attainments, 
 and directing motives, on which the great legislator had calcu- 
 lated (not indeed as necessary or constant accompaniments, but 
 yet) as the regular and ordinary results of comparative opulence 
 and renowned ancestry. 
 
 The loss of this stable and salutary influence was to he sup- 
 plied by the arts of popularity. But in order to the success of 
 this scheme, it was necessary that the people themselves should 
 be degraded into a populace. The cupidity for dissipation and 
 sensual pleasure in all ranks had kept pace with the increasing 
 inequality in the means of gratifying it The restless spirit of 
 republican ambition, engendered by their success in a just war, 
 and by the romantic character of that success, had already form- 
 ed a close alliance with luxury in its early and most vigorous 
 state, when it acts as an appetite to enkindle, and before it has 
 exhausted and dulled the vital energies by the habit of enjoy- 
 ment. But this corruption was now to be introduced into the 
 citadel of the moral being,'^and to be openly defended by the 
 very arms and instruments, which had been given for the pur- 
 pose of preventing or chastising its approach. The understand- 
 ing was to be corrupted by the perversion of the reason, and 
 the feelings through the medium of the understanding. For 
 this purpose all fixed principles, whether grounded on reason, 
 religion, law or antiquity, were to be undermined, and then, 
 as now, chiefly by the sophistry of submitting all positions alike, 
 however heterogeneous, to the criterion of the mere under- 
 standing, disguising oi concealing the fact, that the rules which 
 alone they applied, were abstracted from the objects of the
 
 38b 
 
 senses, and applicable exclusively to things of quantity and re- 
 lation. At ail events, the minds of men were to be sensualiz- 
 ed; and even if the arguments themselves failed, yet the prin- 
 ciples so attacked were to be brought into doubt by the mere 
 frequency of hearing all things doubted, and the most sacred 
 of all now openly denied, and now insulted by sneer and ridi- 
 cule. For by the constitution of our nature, as far a« it is hu- 
 man nature, so awful is truth, that as long as we have faith in 
 its attainability and hopes of its attainment^ there exists no 
 bribe strong enough to tempt us wholly and permanently from 
 our allegiance. 
 
 Religion, in its widest sense, signifies the act and habit of 
 reverencing the Invisible, as the highest both in ourselves 
 and in nature. To this the senses and their immediate objects 
 are to be made subservient, the one as its organs, the other as 
 its exponents : and as such therefore, having on their own ac- 
 count no true value, because no inherent ivorth. They are a 
 language, in short: and taken independently of their represen- 
 tative function, from words they become mere empty sounds, 
 and differ from noise only by exciting expectations which they 
 cannot gratify — lit ingredients of the idolatrous charm, the po- 
 tent Abracadabra, of a sophisticated race, who had sacrificed 
 the religion of faith to the superstition of the senses, a race of 
 animals, in whom the presence of reason is manifested solely 
 by the absence of instinct. 
 
 The same principle, which in its application to the whole of 
 our being becomes religion, considered speculatively is the ba- 
 sis of metaphysical science, that, namely, which requires an 
 evidence beyond that of sensible concretes, which latter the an- 
 cients generalized in the word, physica, and therel'ore (prefix- 
 ing the preposition, meta, i. e. beyond or transcending) named 
 the superior science, metaphysics. The Invisible was assumed 
 as the supporter of the apparent, -uv (paivof^s'vwv — as their substance, 
 a term which, in any other interpretation, expresses only the 
 striving of the imaginative power under conditions that involve 
 the necessity of its frustration. If the Invisible be denied, or 
 (which is equivalent) considered invisible from the defect of 
 the senses and not in its own nature, the sciences even of ob- 
 servation and experiment lose their essential copula. The com- 
 ponent parts can never be reduced into an harmonious whole, 
 but must owe their systematic arrangement to accidents of an
 
 389 
 
 ever-shifting perspective. Much more then must this apply to 
 the moral world disjoined from religion. Instead of morality, 
 we can at best have only a scheme of prudence, and tliis too 
 a prudence fallible and short-sighted : for were it of such a 
 kind as to be bona fida coincident with morals in reference to 
 the agent as well as to the outward action, its first act would be 
 that of abjuring its own usurped primacy. By celestial ob- 
 servations alone can even terrestrial charts he constructed sci- 
 entifically. 
 
 The first attempt therefore of the sophists was to separate 
 ethics from the faith in the Invisible, and to stab morality 
 through the side of religion — an attempt to which the idolatrous 
 polytheism of Greece furnished too many facilities. To the 
 zeal with which he counteracted this plan by endeavours to pu- 
 rify and ennoble that popular belief, which, from obedience to 
 the laws, he did not deem himself permitted to subvert, did 
 Socrates owe his martyr-cup of hemlock. Still while any one 
 principle of morality remained, religion in some form or other 
 must remain inclusively. Therefore, as they commenced by 
 assailing the former through the latter, so did they continue 
 their warfare by reversing the operation. The principle was 
 confounded with the particular acts, in which under the guid- 
 dance of the understanding or judgment it was to manifest 
 itself. 
 
 Thus the rule of expediency, which properly belonged to 
 one and the lower part of morality, was made to be the whole. 
 And so far there was at least a consistency in this : for in two 
 ways only could it subsist. It must either be the mere servant 
 of religion, or its usurper and substitute. Viewed as princi- 
 ples^ they were so utterly heterogeneous, that by no grooving 
 could tlie two be fitted into each other — by no intermediate 
 could they be preserved in lasting adhesion. The one or the 
 other was sure to decompose the cement. We cannot have a 
 stronger historical authority for the truth of this statement, 
 than the words of Polybius, in which he attributes the ruin of 
 the Greek states to the frequenc}^ of perjur}^, which they had 
 learnt from the sophists to laugh at as a trifle that broke no 
 bones, nay, as in some cases, an expedient and justifiable ex- 
 ertion of the power given us by nature over our own words, 
 without which no man could have a secret that might not be 
 extorted from him by the will of others. In the same spirit.
 
 390 
 
 the sage and observant historian attributes the growth and 
 strength of the Roman republic to the general reverence of tho 
 invisible powers, and the consequent horror in which the break- 
 ing of an oath was held. This he states as the causa causa- 
 rum, as the ultimate and inclusive cause of Roman grandeur. 
 
 Under such convictions therefore as the sophists labored with 
 such fatal success to produce, it needed nothing but the excite- 
 ment of the passions under circumstances of public discord to 
 turn the arguments of expedience and self-love against the 
 whole scheme of morality founded on them, and to procure a 
 favorable hearing of the doctrines, which Plato attributes to the 
 sophist Callicles. The passage is curious, and might be enti- 
 tled, a Jacobin Head, a genuine antique, in high preservation. 
 " By nature," exclaims this Napoleon of old, " the ivorse off is 
 always the more infamous, that, namely, which suffers wrong ; 
 but according to the law it is the doing of wrong. For no 
 man of noble spirit will let himself be wronged : this a slave 
 only endures, who is not worth the life he has, and under in- 
 juries and insults can neither help himself or those that belong 
 to him. Those, who first made the laws, were, in my opinion, 
 feeble creatures, which in fact the greater number of men are ; 
 or they would not remain entangled in these spider-webs. 
 Such, however, being the case, laws, honor, and ignominy 
 were all calculated for the advantage of the law makers. But 
 in order to frighten away the stronger, whom they could not 
 coerce by fair contest, and to secure greater advantages for 
 themselves than their feebleness could otherwise have procur- 
 ed, they preached up the doctrine, that it was base and contra- 
 ry to right to wish to have any thing beyond others ; and that 
 in this wish consisted the essence of injustice. Doubtless it 
 was very agreeable to them, if being creatures of a meaner 
 class they were allowed to share equally with their natural su- 
 periors. But nature dictates plainly enough another code of 
 right, namely, that the nobler and stronger should possess 
 more than the weaker and more pusillanimous. Where the 
 power is, there lies the substantial right. The whole realm of 
 animals, nay the human race itself as collected in independent 
 states and nations, demonstrate, that the stronger has a right 
 to control the weaker for his own advantage. Assuredly, 
 they have the genuine notion of right, and follow the law of 
 nature, though truly not that which is held valid in our govern-
 
 391 
 
 ments. But the minds of our youths are preached aw ay from 
 them by declamations on the beauty and fitness of letting them- 
 selves be mastered, till by these verbal conjurations the no- 
 blest nature is tamed and cowed, like a young lion born and 
 bred in a cage. Should a man with full untamed force but 
 once step forward, he would break all your spells and conjura- 
 tions, trample your contra-natural laws under his feet, vault in- 
 to the seat of supreme power, and in a splendid style make 
 the right of nature be valid among you." 
 
 It would have been well for mankind, if such had always been 
 the language of sophistry ! A selfishness, that excludes partner- 
 ship, all men have an interest in repelling. Yet the principle 
 is the same ; and if for power we substitute pleasure and the 
 means of pleasure it is easy to construct a system well fitted to 
 corrupt natures, and the more mischievous in proportion as it is 
 less alarming. As long as the spirit of philosophy reigns in the 
 learned and highest class, and that of religion in all classes, a ten- 
 dency to blend and unite will be found in all objects of pursuit 
 and the whole discipline of mind and manners will be calcu- 
 lated in relation to the worth of the agents. With the preva- 
 lence of sophistry, when the pure will (if indeed the existence 
 of a will be admitted in any other sense than as the temporary 
 main current in the wide gust-eddying stream of our desires and 
 aversions) is ranked among the means to an alien end, instead 
 of being itself the one absolute end, in the participation of which 
 all other things are worthy to be called good — with this revolu- 
 tion commences the epoch of division and separation. Things 
 are rapidly improved, persons as rapidly deteriorated ; and for 
 an indefinite period the powers of the aggregate increase, as the 
 strength of the individual declines. Still, however, sciences 
 may be estranged from philosophy, the practical from the spe- 
 culative, and one of the two at least may remain. Music may 
 be divided from'poetry, and both may continue to exist, though 
 with diminished influence. But religion and morals cannot be 
 disjoined without the destruction of both : and that this does not 
 take place to the full extent, we owe to the frequency with which 
 both take shelter in the heart, and that men are always better 
 or worse than the maxims which they adopt or concede. 
 
 To demonstrate the hollowness of the present system, and to 
 deduce the truth from its sources, is not possible for me without 
 a previous agreement as to the principles of reasoning in gene-
 
 392 
 
 ral. The attempt could neither be made within the limits of the 
 present work, nor would its success greatly affect the immediate 
 moral interests of the majority of the readers for whom this 
 work was especially written. For as sciences are systems on 
 principles, so in the life of practice is morality a principle with- 
 out a system. Systems of morality are in truth nothing more 
 than the old books of casuistry generalized, even of that casuis- 
 try, which the genius of protestantism gradually worked off from 
 itself like an heterogeneous humor, together with the practice 
 of auricular confession : a fact the more striking, because in 
 both instances it was against the intention of the first teachers 
 of the reformation : and the revival of both was not only urged, 
 but provided for, though in vain, by no less men than Bishops 
 Saunderson and Jeremy Taylor. 
 
 But there is yet another prohibitory reason — and this I can- 
 not convey more effectually than in the words of Plato to 
 Dionysius — 
 
 AXXw, iroliv Ti fxvjV tovt' sg'iv^ d Tf'a Ai'^jvurfiou xai Aw^j'(5o<:, to ipui-v^yM. K 
 Twv-rwv fij-riov ip xay.Cjv ; fj:<aXXcv (5i f; tsp; To'jrou wr5,y sv rij ■^v'XlJ syynvoij.s- 
 
 nXarwv Aiuvvo'uo s-Tfig" Ssjt. 
 
 (Translation) — But M'hat a question is lliis, wliich you propose, Oh son of 
 Dionysius and Doris! — ^\liJit is the origin and cause of all evil? But rather is 
 the darkness and tra^ail concerning this, that thorn in the sou] whicli luiless 
 a man shall have had removed, never can he partake of the truth that is verily 
 and indeed truth. 
 
 Yet that I may fulfil the original scope of the Friend, I shall 
 attempt to provide the preparatory steps for such an investiga- 
 tion in the following Essays on the Principles of Method com- 
 mon to all investigations : which I here present, as the basis of 
 my future philosophical and theological writings, and as the ne- 
 cessary introduction to the same. And in addition to this, I 
 can conceive no object of inquiry more appropriate, none which, 
 commencing with the most familiar truths, with facts of hourly 
 experience, and gradually winning its way to positions the most 
 comprehensive and sublime, will more aptly prepare the mind 
 for the reception of specific knowledge, than the full exposition 
 of a ])rinciplc which is the condition of all intellectual progiess, 
 and which may be said even to constitute the science of educa- 
 tion, alike in the narrowest and in the most extensive sense of
 
 393 
 
 the word. Yet as it is but fair to let the public know before- 
 hand, what the genius of my philosophy is, and in what spirit 
 it will be applied by me, whether in politics, or religion, I con- 
 clude with the following brief history of the last 130 years, by 
 a lover of Old England : 
 
 Wise and necessitated confirmation and explanation of the 
 law of England, erroneously entitled The English Revohition 
 of 1G88 — Mechanical Philosophy, hailed as a kindred revolu- 
 tion in philosophy, and espoused, as a common cause, by the 
 partizans of the revolution in the state. 
 
 The consequence is, or was, a system of natural rights instead 
 of social and hereditary privileges — acquiescence in histoi;ic tes- 
 timony substituted for faith — and yet the true historical feeling, 
 the feeling of being an historical people, generation linked to 
 generation by ancestral repution, by tradition, by heraldry — this 
 noble feeling, I say, openly stormed or perilously undermined. 
 
 Imagination excluded from poesy ; and fancy paramount in 
 physics ; the eclipse of the ideal by the mere shadow of the 
 sensible — subfiction for supposition. Plehs pro Senatu Popu- 
 loque — the wealth of nations for the well-being of nations, and 
 of man ! 
 
 Anglo-mania in France ; followed by revolution in America — 
 constitution of America appropriate, perhaps, to America ; but 
 elevated from a particular experiment to an universal model. 
 The word constitution altered to mean a capitulation, a treaty, 
 imposed by the people on their own government, as on a con- 
 quered enemy — hence giving sanction to falsehood, and uni- 
 versality to anomaly ! ! ! 
 
 Despotism ! Despotism ! Despotism ! of finance in statis- 
 tics — of vanity in social converse — of presumption and over- 
 weening contempt of the ancients in individuals ! 
 
 French Revolution ! — Pauperism, revenue laws, govern- 
 ment by clubs, committees, societies, reviews, and newspapers I 
 
 Thus it is that nation first sets fire to a neighbouring nation ; 
 then catches fire and burns backward. 
 
 Statesmen should know that a learned class is an essential 
 element of a state — at least of a Christian state. But you wish 
 for general illumination ! You begin with the attempt to popu- 
 larize learning and philosophy ; but you will end in the plehifi- 
 caiton of knowledge. A true philosophy in the learned class 
 is essential to a true religious feeling in all classes. 
 50
 
 394 
 
 In fine, religion, true or false, is and ever has been the moral 
 centre of gravity in Christendom, to which all other things must 
 and will accommodate themselves. 
 
 ESSAY IV. 
 
 " O 8s Siy.aiov igt noieiv, u'aovs nofg /g?^ b/f.iv s/us y.ui as ngo^g^aXXj]- 
 Xovg. El fisv "oAwg (fiXoaocpiag xaruTtccpqo' vijy.ag, ear xaiqeiv ii ds 
 ttocq' steqov ^ay.jf y.oag if ^avjo'g ^elriova e'vQrjy.ag toTv ttuq^ ifid'i, sk- 
 Biva xifia- ii d' "aga tu nag'' 'jjfiw'i' aol 'ugecrxsi, ti,fii]Teov xal ifiB 
 fiu'i.iqa. 
 
 UAATJllV- JISIN: enic,- dsvrsga. 
 
 Translation. — ^Hear then what are the terms on which you and I ought to 
 stand toward each other. If you hold philosophy altogether in contempt, 
 bid it farewell. Or if you have heard from any other person, or have your- 
 self found out a better than mine, then give honor to that, whichever it be. 
 But if the doctrine taught in these our works please you, then it is but just 
 tliat you should honor nic too m the same proportion. 
 
 Plato's 2d Letter to Dion. 
 
 What is that which first strikes us, and strikes us at once, 
 in a man of education? And which, among educated men, so 
 instantly distinguishes the man of superior mind, that (as was 
 observed with eminent propriety of the late Edmund Burke) 
 " we cannot stand under the same arch-way during a shower of 
 rain, without finding him out 9^^ Not the weight or novelty of 
 his remarks ; not any unusual interest of facts communicated 
 by him ; for we may suppose both the one and the other preclu- 
 ded by the shortness of our intercourse, and the triviality of 
 the subjects. The difference will be impressed and felt, though 
 the conversation should be confined to the state of the weather
 
 396 
 
 or the pavement. Still less will it arise from any peculiarity in 
 his words and phrases. For if he be, as we now assume, a well- 
 educated man as well as a man of superior powers, he will not 
 fail to follow the golden rule of Julius Csesar, Insolens verbum^ 
 tanquam scopulum^ evitare. Unless where new things neces- 
 sitate new terms, he will avoid an unusual word as a rock. It 
 must have been among the earliest lessons of his youth, that the 
 breach of this precept, at all times hazardous, becomes ridicu- 
 lous in the topics of ordinary conversation. There remains but 
 one other point of distinction possible ; and this must be, and 
 in fact is, the true cause of the impression made on us. It is 
 the unpremeditated and evidently habitual arrangement of his 
 words, grounded on the habit of foreseeing, in each integral 
 part, or (more plainly) in every sentence, the whole that he 
 then intends to communicate. However irregular and desul- 
 tory his talk, there is method in the fragments. 
 
 Listen, on the other hand, to an ignorant man, though per- 
 haps shrewd and able in his particular calling ; whether he be 
 describing or relating. We immediately perceive, that his me- 
 mory alone is called into action ; and that the objects and 
 events recur in the narration in the same order, and with the 
 same accompaniments, however accidental or impertinent, as 
 they had first occurred to the narrator. The necessity of tak- 
 ing breath, the efforts of recollection, and the abrupt rectifica- 
 tion of its failures, produce all his pauses ; and v/ith exception 
 of the '■'•and then,^^ the ^'' and iliere,'^ and the still less signi- 
 ficant, '■^and so," they constitute likewise all his connections. 
 
 Our discussion, however, is confined to Method as employed 
 in the formation of the understanding, and in the constructions 
 of science and literature. It would indeed be superfluous to 
 attempt a proof of its importance in the business and economy 
 of active or domestic life. From the cotter's hearth or the 
 workshop of the artizan, to the palace of the arsenal, the first 
 merit, that which admits neither substitute nor equivalent, is 
 that every thing is in its place. Where this charm is wanting, 
 every other merit either loses its name, or becomes an addi- 
 tional ground of accusation and regret. Of one, by whom it is 
 eminently possessed, we say proverbially, he is like clock- 
 work. The resemblance extends beyond the point of regular- 
 ity, and yet falls short of the truth. Both do, indeed, at once 
 divide and announce the silent and otherwise indistinguishable
 
 396 
 
 lapse of time. But the man of methodical industry and honor- 
 able pursuits, docs more : he realizes its ideal divisions, and 
 gives a character and individuality to its moments. If the 
 idle are described as killing time, he may be justly said to call 
 it into life and moral being, while he makes it the distinct ob- 
 ject not only of the consciousness, but of the conscience. He 
 organizes tlie hours, and gives them a soul : and that, the very 
 essence of which is to ileet away, and evermore to have been, 
 he takes up into his ow^i permanence, and communicates to it 
 the imperishableness of a spiritual nature. Of the good and 
 faithful servant, whose energies, thus directed, are thus metho- 
 dized, it is less truly affirmed, that He lives in time, than that 
 Time lives in him. His days, months, and years, as the stops 
 and punctual marks in the records of duties performed, will 
 survive the wreck of worlds, and remain extant when time it- 
 self shall be no more. 
 
 But as the importance of Method in the duties of social life 
 is incomparably greater, so are its practical elements propor- 
 tionably obvious, and such as relate to the will far more than to 
 the understanding. Henceforward, therefore, we contemplate 
 its bearings on the latter. 
 
 The difference between the products of a wxll-disciplined 
 and those of an uncultivated understanding, in relation to what 
 we will now venture to call the Science of Method, is often and 
 admirably exhibited by our Dramatist. We scarcely need re- 
 fer our readers to the Clown's evidence, in the first scene of 
 the second act of " Measure for Measure," or the Nurse in 
 " Romeo and Juliet." But not to leave the position, without 
 an instance to illustrate it, we will take the " easy-yielding " 
 Mrs. Quickley's relation of the circumstances of Sir John Fal- 
 staff's debt to her. 
 
 Falstaff. What is the gross sum that I owe thee ? 
 
 Mrs. QuicKLEY. Marry, if thou wert an honest man, thyself and the money 
 too. Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet, sitting in iny dolphin 
 chamber, at the round table, by a sea-coal tire, on Wednesday in Whitsun week 
 when the prince broke thy head for likening his father to a singing-man in 
 Windsor — thou didst swear to me then, as I was washing thy wound, to marry 
 me and make me my lady thy wife. C mst thou deny it? Did not good- 
 wife Keech, the butcher's wife, come in then and call me gossip Quickley ? — 
 coming in to borrow a mess of vinegar: telling us she had a good dish of 
 prawns— whcrel)y thou didst desire to cat some— whereby I told thee they 
 were ill for a green wound, &c. &c. &c. Henry IV 1st. pt. act ii. ec. 1.
 
 397 
 
 And this, be it observed, is so far from being carried beyond 
 the bounds of a fair imitation, that " the poor soul's" thoughts 
 and sentences are more closely interlinked than the truth of 
 nature would have required, but that the connections and se- 
 quence, which the habit of Method can alone give, have in this 
 instance a substitute in the fusion of passion. For the absence 
 of Method, which characterizes the uneducated, is occasioned 
 by an habitual submission of the understanding to mere events 
 and images as such, and independent of any power in the mind 
 to classify or appropriate them. The general accompaniments 
 of time and place are the only relations which persons of this 
 class appear to regard in their statements. As this constitutes 
 their leading feature, the contrary excellence, as distinguishing 
 the well-educated man, must be referred to the contrary habit. 
 Method, therefore, becomes natural to the mind which has 
 been accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their 
 own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, 
 either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the 
 state and apprehension of the hearers. To enumerate and 
 analyze these relations, with the conditions under which alone 
 they are discoverable, is to teach the science of Method. 
 
 The enviable results of this science, when knowledge has 
 been ripened into those habits which at once secure and evince 
 its possession, can scarcely be exhibited more forcibly as well 
 as more pleasingly, than by contrasting with the former extract 
 from Shakspeare the narration given by Hamlet to Horatio of 
 the occurrences during his proposed transportation to England, 
 and the events that interrupted his voyage. 
 
 Ham. Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting 
 That would not let me sleep : niethoiight I lay 
 Worse than the mutines in the bilboes. Rashly, 
 
 And prais'd be rashness for it Ld us know, 
 
 Our indiscretion sometimes serves us ivell. 
 When our deep plots do /ail: and that shotdd teach us. 
 There's a divinity that shapes our ends. 
 Rough-hew them hoiv we ivill. 
 
 HoR. That is most certain. 
 
 Ham. Up from my cabin, 
 My sea-gown scarf 'd about me, in the dark 
 Gro])'d I to find out them ; had my desire ; 
 Fingcr'd their pocket; and, in fine, withdrew 
 To my own room again : rnakuig so bold, 
 My feurs forgetting munners, to unseal
 
 398 
 
 Their grand commission ; where / found, Horatio, 
 A royal knavcr}'— an exact coniiiiand. 
 Larded tcith many several sorts of reasons, 
 Importing Denmark'' s health, and England's too, 
 Witii, ho! such bugs and goblins iu ?ft?/ life, 
 That on the supervize, no leisure bated, 
 No, not to stay the grinding of the axe, 
 My head should be struck off! 
 
 HoR. Is't possible ? 
 
 Ham. Here's the commission, — Read it at more leisure. 
 
 Act V. so. 2. 
 
 Here the events, with the circumstances of time andfplace, 
 are all stated with equal compression and rapidity, not one in- 
 troduced which could have been omitted without injury to the 
 intelligibility of the whole process. If any tendency is dis- 
 coverable, as far as the mere facts are in question, it is the ten- 
 dency to omission : and, accordingly, the reader will observe, 
 that the attention of the nanator is called back to one material 
 circumstance, which he was hurrying by, by a direct question 
 from the friend to whom the story is communicated, " How 
 WAS THIS SEALED ?" But by a trait which is indeed peculiarly 
 characteristic of Hamlet's mind, ever disposed to generalize, 
 and meditative to excess (but which, with due abatement and 
 reduction, is distinctive of every powerful and methodizing in- 
 tellect), all the digressions and enlargements consist of reflec- 
 tions, truths, and principles of general and permanent interest, 
 either directly expressed or disguised in playful satire. 
 
 -I sat me down ; 
 
 Devis'd a new commission ; wrote it fair, 
 
 I once did hold it, as our statists do, 
 
 A baseness to write fair, and laboured much 
 
 Hoiv to forget that learning: but, sir, now 
 
 It did me yeoman's service. Wilt thou know 
 
 The effect of what I wrote ? 
 
 HoR. Aye, good my lord. 
 
 Ham. An earnest conjuration from the king. 
 As England was his faithful tributary ; 
 As love between them, like the palm, might flourish ; 
 As peace should still her ivheaten garland ivear, 
 And vmny such like As's of great charge — 
 That On the view and knowing of these contents 
 He should the bearers put to sudden death. 
 No shriving time allowed. 
 
 HoR. How was tliis sealed ? 
 
 Ham. Why, even in that was heaven ordinant.
 
 399 
 
 I had my father's signet in my purse. 
 Which was the model of that Danish seal: 
 Folded the wxit up in the form of the other ; 
 Subscribed it ; gave't the impression ; placed it safely, 
 The changeling never known. Now, the next day 
 Was our sea-fight ; and what to this was sequent, 
 Tliou knowest already. 
 
 HoR. So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't ? 
 
 Ham. Why, man, they did make love to this emi)loyinont 
 They are not near my conscience : their defeat 
 Doth by their own insinuation grow. 
 'TYs dangerous when the baser nature cornea 
 Between the pass and fell incensed points 
 Of mighty apposites. 
 
 It would, perhaps, be sufficient to remark of the preceding 
 passage, in connection with the humorous specimen of narration, 
 
 " Fermenting o'er with frothy circumstances," 
 
 in Henry IV. ; that if overlooking the different value of the 
 matter in each, we considered the form alone, we should find 
 both immethodical ; Hamlet from the excess, Mrs. Quickley 
 from the want, of reflection and generalization ; and that Method, 
 therefore, must result from the due mean or balance between 
 our passive impressions and the mind's own re-action on the 
 same. (Whether this re-action do not suppose or imply a pri- 
 mary act positively oi'iginating in the mind itself, and prior to 
 the object in order of nature, though co-instantaneous in its 
 manifestation, will be hereafter discussed.) But we had a fur- 
 ther purpose in thus contrasting these extracts from our " myriad- 
 minded Bard," (;j.u^iovous avvjp.) We wished to bring forward, 
 each for itself, these two elements of Method, or (to adopt an 
 arithmetical term) its two main/actors. 
 
 Instances of the want of generalization are of no rare occur- 
 rence in real life : and the narrations of Shakspeare's Hostess 
 and the Tapster, differ from those of the ignorant and unthink- 
 ing in general, by their superior humor, the poet's own gift 
 and infusion, not by their want of Method, which is not greater 
 than we often meet with in that class, of which they are the 
 dramatic representatives. Instances of the opposite fault, aris- 
 ing from the excess of generalization and reflection in minds 
 of the opposite class, will, like the minds themselves, occur 
 less frequently in the course of our own personal experience. 
 Yet they will not have been wanting to our readers, nor will
 
 400 
 
 they have passed unobserved, though the great poet himself 
 ( T-rjv savTou •vJ'^X''^^ '^'^^^ uXr,v Tiva d^ojiJMTov /J.opoai^ ntom'Kug fj.oP(pCi<jac:* ) 
 has more conveniently supplied the illustrations. To complete, 
 therefore, the purpose aforementioned, that of presenting each 
 of the two components as separately as possible, we chose an 
 instance in which, by the surplus of its own activity, Hamlet's 
 mind disturbs the arrangement, of v/hich that very activity had 
 been the cause and impulse. Thus exuberance of mind, on 
 the one hand, interferes with the forms of Method ; but ste- 
 rility of mind, on the other, wanting the spring and impulse to 
 mental action, is w^holly destructive of Method itself. For in 
 attending too exclusively to the relations which the past or 
 passing events and objects bear to general truth, and the moods 
 of his own Thought, the most intelligent man is sometimes in 
 danger of overlooking that other relation, in which they are 
 likewise to be placed to the apprehension and sympathies of 
 his hearers. His discourse appears like soliloquy intermixed 
 with dialogue. But the uneducated and unreflecting talker over- 
 take all mental relations, both logical and psychological ; and 
 consequently precludes all Method, that is not purely acci- 
 dental. Hence the nearer the things and incidents in time and 
 place, the more distant, disjointed, and impertinent to each 
 other, and to any common purpose, will they appear in his nar- 
 ration : and this from the want of a staple, or starting-post, in 
 the narrator himself; from the absence of the leading Thought, 
 which, borrowing a phrase from the nomenclature of legisla- 
 tion, we may not inaptly call the Initiative. On the contra- 
 ry, where the habit of Method is present and efiective, things 
 the most remote and diverse in time, place, and outward cir- 
 cumstance, are brought into mental contiguity and succession, 
 the more striking as the less expected. But while we would 
 impress the necessity of this habit, the illustrations adduced 
 give proof that in undue preponderance, and when the prero- 
 gative of the mind is stretched into despotism, the discourse 
 may degenerate into the grotesque or the fantastical. 
 
 With what a proiound insight into the constitution of the hu- 
 man soul is this exhibited to us in the chararter of the Prince 
 of Denmark, where Hying from the sense of reality, and seek- 
 
 TVanslation. — He that moulded his own soul, as some incorporeal material, 
 into various forms. Themistius.
 
 401 
 
 ing a reprieve from the pressure of its duties, in that ideal ac- 
 tivity, the overbalance of which, with the consequent indispo- 
 sition to action, is his disease, he compels the reluctant good 
 sense of the high yet healthful-minded Horatio, to follow him 
 in his wayward meditation amid the graves ? " To what base 
 uses we may return, Horatio ! Why may not imagination trace 
 the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung- 
 hole 9 HoR. It were to consider too curiously to consider so. 
 Ham. No, faith, not a jot ; but to follow him thither with 
 modesty enough and likelihood to lead it. As thus : Alexan- 
 der died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust — 
 the dust is earth ; of earth lue make loam : and why of that 
 loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer^ 
 barrel ? 
 
 Imperial Casar, dead and turned to clay, 
 Might stop a hole to keep the wind away /" 
 
 But let it not escape our recollection, that when the objects 
 thus connected are proportionate to the connecting energy, re- 
 latively to the real, or at least to the desirable sympathies of 
 mankind ; it is from the same character that we derive the ge- 
 nial method in the famous soliloquy, " To be 9 or not to be ?'*" 
 which, admired as it is, and has been, has yet received only the 
 first-fruits of the admiration due to it. 
 
 We have seen that from the confluence of innumerable im- 
 pressions in each moment of time the mere passive memory 
 must needs tend to confusion — a rule, the seeming exceptions to 
 which (the thunder-bursts in Lear, for instance) are really con- 
 firmations of its truth. For, in many instances, the predomi- 
 nance of some mighty Passion takes the place of the guiding 
 Thought, and the result presents the method of Nature, rather 
 than the habit of the Individual. For Thought, Imagination 
 (and we may add. Passion,) are, in their very essence, the 'first, 
 connective, the latter co-adunative : and it has been shown, 
 that if the excess lead to Method misapplied, and to connec- 
 tions of the moment, the absence, or marked deficiency, either 
 precludes Method altogether, both form and substance : or (as 
 the following extract will exemplify) retains the outward form 
 only. 
 
 My lii'ge and madam! to expostulate 
 What inajeMy shmdd he, what duty is, 
 
 51
 
 402 
 
 Mliy day is day, night night, and time is time, 
 Were nothing hut to ivaste night, day and time. 
 Tlierefore — since brevity is the soul of unt, 
 And tediousness the limbs and outward Jlourishes, 
 I loill be brief. Your noble son is mad : 
 Mad call I it— for to define true madness, 
 What isH, but to be nothing else but mad! 
 But let that go. 
 
 Queen. More matter loith less art. 
 
 Pol. Madam! I swear, I use no art at all. 
 That he is mad, 'tis true : His true, His pity : 
 And pity His, His true (a foolish figure ! 
 But farewell it, for I will use no art.) 
 Mad let us grant him then : and now remains, 
 Tltat tve find out the cause of this efi'ect : 
 Or rather say the cause of this defect : 
 For this effect defective comes by cause. 
 Thus it remains, and the remainder thus 
 Perpend ! 
 
 Hamlet, act ii. scene 2. 
 
 Does not the irresistible sense of the ludicrous in this flourish 
 of the soul-surviving body of old Polonius's intellect, not less 
 than in the endless confirmations and most undeniable matters 
 of fact, of Tapster Pompey or " the hostess of the tavern " 
 prove to our feelings, even before the word is found which pre- 
 sents the truth to our understandings, that confusion and forma- 
 lity are but the opposite poles of the same null-point. 
 
 It is Shakspeare's peculiar excellence, that throughout the 
 whole of his splendid picture gallery (the reader Avill excuse 
 the confest inadequacy of this metaphor), we find individuality 
 every where, mere portrait no where. In all his various cha- 
 racters, we still feel ourselves communing with the same human 
 nature, which is every where present as the vegetable sap in 
 the branches, sprays, leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruits, their 
 shapes, tastes, and odours. Speaking of the effect, i. e. his works 
 themselves, we may define the excellence of their method as 
 consisting in that just proportion, that union and interpenetra- 
 tion of the universal and the particular, which must ever per- 
 vade all works of decided genius and true science. For Method 
 implies a progressive transition^ and it is the meaning of the 
 word in the original language. Tiie Greek MsSoVc, is literally a 
 way, or path of Transit. Thus we extol the Elements of Eu- 
 clid, or Socrates' discourse with the slave in the Menon, as me- 
 thodical, a term which no one who holds himself bound to think
 
 403 
 
 or speak correctly, would apply to the alphabetical order or ar- 
 rangement of a common dictionary. But as, without continu- 
 ous transition, there can be no Method, so without a pre-con- 
 ception there can be no transition with continuity. The term, 
 Method, cannot therefore, otherwise than by abuse, be applied 
 to a mere dead arrangement, containing in itself no principle of 
 progression. 
 
 ESSAY V. 
 
 ScienUis idem quod planfis. Si plantd aliqua uti in animo habeas, de radice quid- 
 fiat, nil reftrt : si vero transferre cnpias in aliud solum, tidius est radicibus idi 
 quam surculis. Sic tradiiio, qua nunc in «Sii est, exhihct plane tanquam truncos 
 (pulchros illos quidem) scientiarum ; sed tanien absque radicibus fahro lignario 
 certe commodos, at plantaton inuiiks. (^uod si, disciplinoi ut crescant, tibi 
 cordi sit, de truncis minus sis solicitus : ad id curam adhibe, id radices illwscR 
 etiam cum aliquantulo terras adficerentis, extrahantur : dummodo hoc pacto et 
 scientiam propiiam revisere, vestigia que cognitionis luce remetiri possis ; ej 
 earn sic iransplantare in animum alienum, siciU crevit in tuo. 
 
 Baco de Augment. Sclent. 1. vi. c. ii. 
 
 [Translation.) — It is with science as with trees. If it be your purpose to make 
 some particular M5e of the tree, you need not concern yourself about the 
 roots. But if you wish to transfer it into another soil, it is then safer to em- 
 ploy the roots, than the scyons. Thus the mode of teaching most conunon 
 at present exhibits clearly enough the trunks, as it were, of the sciences, 
 and those too of handsome growth; but nevertheless, without the roots, 
 valuable and convenient as they undoubtedly are to the carpenter, they are 
 useless to the i)lanter. But if you have at heart the advancement of edu- 
 cation, as that which proposes to itself the general discipline of the mind 
 for its end and aim, be less anxious concerning the trunks, and let it be 
 your care, that the roots should l)e extracted entire, even though a small 
 portion of the soil should adhere to them : so tliat at all events you may be 
 able, by this means, both to review your own scientific acquirements, re- 
 ineasuring as it were the steps of your knowledge for your own satisfaction, 
 and at the same time to transplant it into the minds of others, just as it grew 
 in your own.
 
 404 
 
 It has been observed, in a preceding page, that the rela- 
 tions of objects are prime materials of Method, and that the 
 contemplation of relations is the indispensable condition of 
 thinking methodically. It becomes necessary therefore to add, 
 that there are two kinds of relation, in which objects of mind 
 may be contemplated. The first is that of Law, which, in its 
 absolute perfection, is conceivable only of the Supreme Being, 
 whose creative idea not only appoints to each thing its posi- 
 tion, but in that position, and in consequence of that position, 
 gives it its qualities, yea, it gives its very existence, as that 
 particular thing. Yet in whatever science the relation of the 
 parts to each other and to the whole is predetermined by a 
 truth originating in the mind, and not abstracted or generalized 
 from observation of the parts, there we affirm the presence of 
 a law, if we are speaking of the physical sciences, as of As- 
 tronomy for instance ; or tlie presence of fundamental ideas, if 
 our discourse be upon those sciences, the truths of which, as 
 truths absolute, not merely have an independent origin in the 
 mind, but continue to exist in and for the mind alone. Such, 
 for instance, is Geometry, and such are the ideas of a perfect 
 circle, of asymptots, &c. 
 
 We have thus assigned the first place in the science of Me- 
 thod to Law ; and first of the first, to Laiv, as the absolute 
 kind which comprehending in itself the substance of every 
 possible degree precludes from its conception all degree, not 
 by generalization but by its own plenitude. As such, there- 
 fore, and as the sufficient cause of the reality correspondent 
 thereto, we contemplate it as exclusively an attribute of the 
 Supreme Being, inseparable from the idea of God : adding, how- 
 ever, that from the contemplation of law in this, its only per- 
 fect form, must be derived all true insight into all other 
 grounds and principles necessary to Method, as the science 
 common to all sciences, which in each Tvy-^uvsi uv aXko avrrig T^g 
 h'jdsriM?- Alienated from this (intuition shall we call it ? or sted- 
 fast faith?) ingenious men may produce schemes, conducive to 
 the peculiar purposes of particular sciences, but no scientific 
 system. 
 
 But though we cannot enter on the proof of this assertion, 
 we dare not remain exposed to the suspicion of having obtruded 
 a mere private opinion, as a fundamental truth. Our authorities 
 are such that our only difficulty is occasioned by their number.
 
 405 
 
 The following extract from Aristocles (preserved with other 
 interesting fragments of the same writer by Eusebius) is as ex- 
 plicit as peremptory. 'E(piXo(j'o:pr)a's i^sv nXa-wv. si xai ris c/Xkos 'ruv 
 ituiforSj 'yvri(fiuc: xal -sXs'iws" -i^fis 5s ihrj Sdvaff'bai <ra txvSpwTiva xariShv y){i-a4^ 
 h i^rj Tu SsFa "n-poTs^ov ocp^s'rf). EusEB. Praep. Evan. xi. 3,* And 
 Plato himself in his De Republica, happily still extant, evident- 
 ly alludes to the same doctrine. For personating Socrates 
 in the discussion of a most important problem, namely, whe- 
 ther political justice is or is not the same as private hones- 
 ty, after many inductions, and much analytic reasoning, he 
 breaks off with these words — s-l 7' i'tf^n, w rXawajv, us v ^V^ <5o|a, 
 AKPIBQ2 MEX TOXTO 'EK TOIOTTON MEGOAfiN, OIAI2; NTN 
 EN T0I2 AOrOI2 XPfiMEGA, OT MHnOTE AABQMEN- AAAA 
 TAP MAKPOTEPA KAI HAEIfiN 0a02 H EHI TOT TO AEOT- 
 2Af — not however, he adds, precluding the former (the ana- 
 lytic, and inductive, to wit) which have their place likewise, 
 in which (but as subordinate to the other) they are both use- 
 ful and requisite. If any doubt could be entertained as to the 
 purport of these words, it would be removed by the fact stated 
 by Aristotle in his Ethics, that Plato had discussed the prob- 
 lem, whether in order to scientific ends we must set out from 
 principles, or ascend towards them : in other words, whether 
 the synthetic or analytic be the right method. But as no such 
 question is directly discussed in the published works of the 
 great master, Aristotle must either have received it orally from 
 Plato himself, or have found it in the c.y^acpa doyixara, the private 
 text book or manuals constructed by his select disciples, and 
 intelligible to these only who like themselves had been en- 
 trusted with the esoteric (interior or unveiled) doctrines of 
 Platonism. Comparing this therefore with the writings, which 
 
 * {TVanslaiion. — Plato, wlio philosophized legitimately and perfectively if 
 ever any man did in any age, held it for an axiom, that it is not possible for us 
 to have an insight into things human (i. e. tlic nature and relations of man, and 
 the objects presented by nature for his investigation,) without any previous con- 
 templation (or intellectual vision) of things divine : that is, of truths that 
 are to be affirmed concemiing the absolute, as far as they can be made known 
 to us. 
 
 I (Translation). — Rut know well, O Glaucon, as my firm persuasion, that 
 by such methods, as we have liithnrto used in this inquisition, we can never 
 attain to a satisfactory insight : for it is a longer and ampler way that con- 
 ducts to this. — Plato De republican iv.
 
 406 
 
 lie held it safe or not profane to make public, we may safely 
 conclude, that Plato considered the investigation of truth a 
 posteriori as that which is employed in explaining the results 
 of a more scientific process to those, for whom the knowledge 
 of the results was alone requisite and sufficient ; or in prepa- 
 ring the mind for legitimate method, by exposing the insuffi- 
 ciency or self-contradictions of the proofs and results obtained 
 by the contrary process. Hence therefore the earnestness with 
 which the genuine Platonists opposed the doctrine (that all de- 
 monstration consisted of identical propositions) advanced by 
 Stilpo, and maintained by the Megaric school, who denied the 
 synthesis and as Hume and others in recent times, held geom- 
 etry itself to be merely analytical. 
 
 The grand problem, the solution of which forms, according 
 to Plato, the final object and distinctive character of philoso- 
 phy is this : /or all that exists conditionally (i. e. the exis- 
 tence of which is inconceivable except under the condition 
 of its dependency on some other as its antecedent) to find a 
 ground that is unconditional and absolute, and thereby to re- 
 duce the aggregate of human knowledge to a system. For the 
 relation common to all being known, the appropriate orbit of 
 each becomes discoverable, together with its peculiar relations 
 to its concentrics in the common sphere of subordination. 
 Thus the centrality of the sun having been established, and 
 the law of the distances of the planets from the sun having 
 been determined, we possess the means of calculating the dis- 
 tance of each from the other. But as all objects of sense are 
 in continual flux, and as the notices of them by the senses 
 must, as far as they are true notices, change with them, while 
 scientific principles (or laws) are no otherwise principles of 
 science than as they are permanent and always the same, the 
 latter were appointed to the pure reason, either as its products 
 or as * implanted in it. And now the remarkable fact forces 
 itself on our attention, viz, that the material world is found to 
 
 * Which of these two (ioctriiies was Plato's own oj)ininon, it is hard to say. 
 In many passages of liis works, tl)e latter (i. e. the doctrine of innate, or ra-, 
 ther of connate, ideas) seems to be it ; but from the character and avowed 
 purpose of these works, as adressed to a promiscuous public, and therefore 
 j)reparatory and for the discipline of the mind rather than directly doctrinal, 
 it is not improbable that Plato chose it as the more popular representation, 
 and as belonging to the poetic drapery of his Philosophemeta,
 
 407 
 
 obey the same laws as had been deduced independently from 
 the reason : and that the masses act by a force, which cannot be 
 conceived to result from the component parts, known or imagi- 
 nable. In the phaenomena of magnetism, electricity, gal- 
 vanism, and in chemistry generally, the mind is led instinctive- 
 ly, as it were, to regard the working powers as conducted, 
 transmitted, or accumulated by the sensible bodies, and not as 
 inherent. This fact has, at all times, been the strong hold 
 alike of the materialists and of the spiritualists, equally solva- 
 ble by the two contrary hypotheses, and fairly solved by neither. 
 In the clear and masterly* review of the elder philosophies, 
 which must be ranked among the most splendid proofs of judg- 
 ment no less than of genius; and more expressly in the critique 
 on the atomic or corpuscular doctrine of Democritus and his 
 followers as the one extreme, and that of the pure rationalism 
 of Zeno and the Eleatic school as the other, Plato has proved 
 
 * I can conceive no better remedy for the overweening self-complacency of 
 of modern philosopliy, than the annulment of its pretended originality. The 
 attempt has been made by Duiens, but he failed in it by flying to the opposite 
 extreme. When he should have coutined himself to the jjhilosophieSj 
 he extended his attack to the sciences and even to the main discoveries of 
 later times: and thus instead of vindicating the ancients, he became the ca- 
 lumniator of the moderns: as far at least as detraction is calunuiy. It is my 
 intention to give a course of lectures in the course of the present season, com- 
 prizing the origin, and |)rogress, the fates and fortunes of phi!oso|)liy, from 
 Pythagoras to Locke Avitlijthe lives and succession of the philosophers in each 
 sect: tracing the progress of speculative science chit fly in relation to the gra- 
 dual developmeiit of the human mind, but without omitting the favourable or 
 inauspicious iufluence of circumstance s and the accidents of individual genius. 
 The main divisions will be, 1. From Thales and Pythagoras to the appear- 
 ance of the Sophists. 2. And of Socrates. The character and effects of So- 
 crates' life and doctrines, illustrated in the instances of Xenoplion, as his most 
 faithful representative, and of Antislheues or the Cynic sect as the one par- 
 tial view of his philosophy, and of Aristippus or the Cyrenaic sect as the other 
 and opposite extreme. 3. Plato, and Platonism. 4. Aristotle and the Peri- 
 patetic school. 5. Zeno, and Stoicism, Epicurus and Ej)icurianism, with the 
 effects of these in the Roman Repuiilic and empire. G. The rise of the 
 Eclectic or Alexjindrian philosophy, the attempt to set up a pseudo-Platonic 
 Polytheism against Christianity, the degradation of philosophy itself into mys- 
 ticism and magic, and its final disappearance, as philosojjhy, under Justinian. 
 7. The resumption of riie Aristuteliun philosophy in the tliiiteenth century, 
 and the successive re-api)earance of the ditierent sects from the restoration of 
 hterature to om* own times. S. T. C.
 
 408 
 
 incontrovertiblj, that in both alike the basis is too narrow to 
 support the superstructure ; that the grounds of both are false 
 or disputable ; and that, if these were conceded, yet neither the 
 one nor the other is adequate to the solution of the problem : 
 viz. what is the ground of the coincidence between reason and 
 experience ? Or between the laws of matter and the ideas of 
 the pure intellect ? The only answer which Plato deemed the 
 question capable of receiving, compels the reason to pass out of 
 itself and seek the ground of this agreement in a supersensual 
 essence, which being at once the ideal of the reason and the 
 cause of the material world, is the pre-establisher of the har- 
 mony in and between both. Religion therefore is the ultimate 
 aim of philosophy, in consequence of which philosophy itself 
 becomes the supplement of the sciences, both as the con- 
 vergence of all to the common end, namely, wisdom ; and as 
 supplying the copula, which modified in each in the comprehen- 
 sion of its parts to one whole, is in its principles common to all, 
 as integral parts of one system. And this is Method, itself a 
 distinct science, the immediate offspring of philosophy, and the 
 link or mordant by which philosophy becomes scientific and the 
 sciences philosophical. 
 
 The second relation is that of Theory, in which the exist- 
 ing forms and qualities of objects, discovered by observation 
 or experiment, suggest a given arrangement, of many under 
 one point of view : and this not merely or principally in order 
 to facilitate the remembrance, recollection, or communication 
 of the same ; but for the purposes of understanding, and in 
 most instances of controlling, them. In other words, all The- 
 ory supposes the general idea of cause and effect. The sci- 
 entific arts of Medicine, Chemistry, and Physiology in general, 
 are examples of a method hitherto founded on this second sort 
 of relation. 
 
 Between these tv.o lies the Method in the Fine Arts, 
 which belongs indeed to this second or external relation, be- 
 cause the effect and position of the parts is always more or 
 less influenced by the knowledge and experience of their pre- 
 vious qualities ; but which nevertheless constitute a link con- 
 necting the second form of relation with the first. For in all, 
 that truly merits the name of Poetry in its most comprehen- 
 sive sense, there is a necessary predominance of the Ideas 
 (i. e. of that which originates in the artist himself, and a com-
 
 409 
 
 parative indifference of the materials. A true musical taste is 
 soon dissatisfied with the Harmonica, or any similar instrument 
 of glass or steel, because the body of the sound (as the Ital- 
 ians phrase it), or that effect which is derived from the mate- 
 rials, encroaches too far on the effect from the proportions of 
 the notes, or that which is given to Music by the mind. To 
 prove the high value as well as the superior dignity of the 
 first relation ; and to evince, that on this alone a perfect Meth- 
 od can be grounded, and that the Methods attainable by the 
 second are at best but approximations to the first, or tentative 
 exercise in the hope of discovering it, form the first object of 
 the present disquisition. 
 
 These truths we have (as the most pleasing and popular 
 mode of introducing the subject) hitherto illustrated from 
 Shakespeare. But the same truths, namely the necessity of a 
 mental Initiative to all Method, as well as a careful attention 
 to the conduct of the mind in the exercise of Method itself, 
 may be equally, and here perhaps more characteristically, pro- 
 ved from the most familiar of the Sciences. We may draw 
 our elucidation even from those which are at present fashiona- 
 ble among us : from Botany or from Chemisty. In the low- 
 est attempt at a methodical arrangement of the former science, 
 that of artificial classification for the preparatory purpose of a 
 nomenclature, some antecedent must have been contributed by 
 the mind itself; some purpose must have been in view ; or 
 some question at least must have been proposed to nature, 
 grounded, as all questions are, upon some idea of the answer. 
 As for instacce, the assumption, 
 
 " That two great sexes animate the world." 
 
 For no man can confidently conceive a fact to be universally 
 true who does not with equal confidence anticipate its necessity , 
 and who does not believe that necessity to be demonstrable by 
 an insight into its nature, whenever and wherever such insight 
 can be obtained. We acknowledge, we reverence the obliga- 
 tions of Botany to Linnaeus, who, adopting from Bartholinus 
 and others the sexuality of plants, grounded thereon a scheme of 
 classific and distinctive marks, by which one man's experience 
 may be communicated to others, and the objects safely reasoned 
 on while absent, and recognized as soon as and whenever they 
 
 are met with. He invented an universal character for the lan- 
 32
 
 V> 410 
 
 guage of Botany chargeable with no greater imperfections than 
 are to be found in the alphabets of every particular language-. 
 As for the study of the ancients, so of the works of nature, an 
 accidence and a dictionary are the first and indispensable requi- 
 sites : and to the illustrious Swede, Botany is indebted for both. 
 But neither was the central idea of vegetation itself, by the 
 light of which we might have seen the collateral relations of the 
 vegetable to the inorganic and to the animal world ; nor the 
 constitutive nature and inner necessity of sex itself, revealed 
 to Linnseus.* Hence, as in all other cases where the master- 
 
 * The word Nature has been used in two senses, viz. actively and pas- 
 sively ; enei-getic (^zfornia fonnans), and material (^forma fommta). In the 
 first (the sense in which the word is used in the text) it signifies the inward 
 principle of whatever is reqviisit^ fi)r the reality of a thing, as existent : while 
 the essence, or essential property, signifies the inner principle of all that ap- 
 pertains to the possihilitij of a thing. Hence, in accurate language we say the 
 essence of a niatheuiatica! circle or other geometrical figure, not the nature : 
 because in the conception of forms purely geometrical there is no expression 
 or implication of their real existence. In the second, or material sense, of 
 the word Nature, we mean by it the sum total of all things, as far as they are 
 objects of our senses, and consequently of possible experience — the aggre- 
 gate of phaeaomena, whether existing for our outward senses, or for our 
 inner sense. The doctrine concerning material nature would therefore (the 
 word Physiology being both ambiguous in itself, and already otherwise ap- 
 propriatedj be more properly entitled Phsenomenology, distinguished into its 
 two grand divisions, Somatalogy and Psychology. The doctrine concerning 
 enei'getic nature is comprised in the science of Dv^amics ; the union of which 
 with Phajnomenology, and the alliance of both with tlie sciences of the Pos- 
 sible, or of the Conceivable, viz. Logic and Mathematics, constitute Natural 
 Philosophy. 
 
 Having thus explained the term Nature, we now more especially entreat 
 the reader's attention to the sense, in vvhich here, and every where through 
 this Essay, we use the word Idea. We assert, that the very impulse to uni- 
 versalize any phtenomenoii involves the prior assumption of some cflicicnt 
 law in nature, which in a thousand different forms is evermore, one and the 
 same; entn-e in each, yet com]>re bending all ; and incapable of being abstract- 
 ed or generalized from any number of pliccnomena, because it is itself pre- 
 supposed in each and all as their common ground and condition ; and because 
 every definition of a genus is the adequate definition of the lowest sjiecies 
 alone, while the efficient law must contain the ground of all in all. It is attri- 
 butedf never derived. The utmost we ever venture to say is, that the falling 
 of an apple suggested the law of gravitation to Sir I. Newton. Now a law and 
 an idea are correlative terms, and differ only as object and sui)ject, as being 
 and truth. 
 
 Such is the doctrine of tlie Novum Organum of Lord Bacon, agreeing
 
 411 
 
 light is missing, so in this : the reflective mind avoids Scylla 
 only to lose itself on Chaiybdis. If we adhere to the general 
 notion af sex, as abstracted from the more obvious modes and 
 forms in which the sexual relation manifests itself, we soon meet 
 with whole classes of plants to which it is fouiid inapplicable. 
 If arbitrarily, we give it infinite extension, it is dissipated into 
 the barren truism, that all specific products suppose specific 
 means of production. 
 
 (as we sliall more largely show in tlie text) in all essential points with the true 
 doctrine of Plato, the apparent difibrenccs being for the greater part occasion- 
 ed by the Grecian sage having ajiplied his principles chiefly to the investiga- 
 tion of the mind, and the method of evolving its powers, and tlje English 
 philosojdier to the devlo}>enient of natare. That our great countryman speaks 
 too often detractingly of the divine philosopher must: be explained, jjartly by 
 the tone given to thinking minds by the Reformation, the founders and fathers 
 of which saw in the Aristotelians, or schoolmen, the antagonists of Protestant- 
 ism, and in the Italian Platonists the despissrs and secret enemies of Christi- 
 anity itself; and partly, by his having formed his notions of Plato's doctrines 
 from the absurdities and phantasms of his misinterpreters, rather than fi-om 
 an unprejudiced study of "the original works.
 
 ESSAY VI. 
 
 Seeking the reason of all things from without, they preclude reason. 
 
 Theoph. in Mel. 
 
 Thus a growth and a birth are distinguished by the mere 
 verbal definition, that the latter is a whole in itself, the former 
 not : and when we would apply even this to nature, we are 
 baffled by objects (the flower polypus, &c. &c.) in which each 
 is the other. All that can be done by the most patient and ac- 
 tive industry, by the widest and most continuous researches ; 
 all that the amplest survey of the vegetable realm, brought un- 
 der immediate contemplation by the most stupendous collections 
 of species and varieties, can suggest ; all that minutest dissec- 
 tion and exactest chemical analysis, can unfold ; all that varied 
 experiment and the position of plants and of their component 
 parts in every conceivable relation to light, heat, (and what- 
 ever else we distinguish as imponderable substances) to earth, 
 air, water, to the supposed constituents of air and water, sepa- 
 rate and in all proportions — in short all that chemical agents 
 and re-agents can disclose or adduce ; — all these have been 
 brought, as conscripts, into the field, with the completest accou- 
 trement, in the best discipline, under the ablest commanders. 
 Yet after all that was effected by Linnaeus himself, not to men- 
 tion the labours of Caesalpinus, Ray, Gesner, Tournefort, and 
 the other heroes who preceded the general adoption of the 
 sexual system, as the basis of artificial arrangement — after all 
 the successive toils and enterprises of Hedwig, Jussieu, Mir- 
 BEL, Smith, Knight, Ellis, &c. &c. — what is Botany at this 
 present hour ? Little more than an enormous nomenclature ; 
 a huge catalogue, hien arrange^ yearly and monthly augmented,
 
 413 
 
 in various editions, each with its own scheme of technical me- 
 mory and its own conveniences of reference ! A dictionary 
 in which (to carry on the metaphor) an Ainsworth arranges 
 the contents by the initials ; a Walker by the endings ; a Sca- 
 pula by the radicals ; and a Cominius by the similarity of the 
 uses and purposes ! The terms system, method, science, are mere 
 improprieties of courtesy, when applied to a mass enlarging by 
 endless oppositions, but without a nerve that oscillates, or a 
 pulse that throbs, in sign oi growth or inward sympathy. The 
 innocent amusement, the healthful occupation, the ornamental 
 accomplishment of amateurs (most honorable indeed and de- 
 serving of all praise as a preventive substitute for the stall, the 
 kennel, and the subscription-room), it has yet to expect the 
 devotion and energies of the philosopher. 
 
 So long back as the first appearance of Dr. Darwin's Phy- 
 tonomia, the writer, then in earliest manhood, presumed to ha- 
 zard the opinion, that the physiological botanists were hunting 
 in a false direction ; and sought for analogy where they should 
 have looked for antithesis. He saw, or thought he saw, that 
 the harmony between the vegetable and animal world, was not 
 a harmony of resemblance, but of contrast ; and their relation 
 to each other that of corresponding opposites. They seemed 
 to him (whose mind had been formed by observation, unaided, 
 but at the same time unenthralled, by partial experiment) as 
 two streams from the same fountain indeed, but flowing the one 
 due west, and the other direct east ; and that consequently, 
 the resemblance would be as the proximity, greatest in the 
 first and rudimental products of vegetable and animal organiza- 
 tion. Whereas, according to the received notion, the highest 
 and most perfect vegetable, and the lowest and rudest animal 
 forms, ought to have seemed the links of the two systems, 
 which is contrary to fact. Since that time, the same idea has 
 dawned in the minds of philosophers capable of demonstrating 
 its objective truth by induction of facts in an unbroken series 
 of correspondences in nature. From these men, or from minds 
 enkindled by their labors, we hope hereafter to receive it, or 
 rather the yet higher idea to which it refers us, matured into 
 laws of organic nature ; and thence to have one other splendid 
 proof, that with the knowledge of Law alone dwell Power 
 and Prophesy, decisive Experiment, and, lastly, a scientific 
 method, that dissipating with its earliest rays the gnomes of
 
 414 
 
 hypothesis and the mists of theory may, within a single gener- 
 ation, open out on the philosophic Seer discoveries that had 
 baflled the gigantic, but blind and guideless industry of ages. 
 
 Such, too, is the case with the assumed indecomponiblc sub- 
 stances of the Laboratory. They are the symbols of ele- 
 mentary powers and the exponents of a law, which, as the root 
 of all these powers, the chemical philosopher, whatever his 
 theory may be, is instinctively laboring to extract. This in- 
 stinct, again, is itself but the form, in which the idea, the 
 mental Correlative of the law, first announces its incipient ger- 
 mination in his own mind : and hence proceeds the striving af- 
 ter unity of principle through all the diversity of forms, with a 
 feeling resembling that which accompanies our endeavours to 
 reccoUect a forgotten name ; when we seem at once to have 
 and not to have it ; which the memory feels but cannot find. 
 Thus, as " the lunatic, the lover, and the poet," suggest each 
 other to Shakespeare's Theseus, as soon as his thoughts pre- 
 sent him the one form, of which they are but varieties ; so 
 water and flame, the diamond, the charcoal, and the mantling 
 champagne, with its ebullient sparkles, are convoked and fra- 
 ternized by the theory of the chemist. This is, in truth, the 
 first charm of chemistry, and the secret of the almost univer- 
 sal interest excited by its discoveries. The serious compla- 
 cency which is aftbrded by the sense of truth, utility, perma- 
 nence, and progression, blends with and enobles the exhilira- 
 ting suiprize and the pleasurable sting of curiosity, which ac- 
 company the propounding and the solving of an Enigma. It is 
 the sense of a principle of connection given by the mind, and 
 sanctioned by the correspondency of nature. Hence the strong 
 - hold which in all ages chemistry has had on the imagination. 
 If in Shakespeare v.e find nature idealized into poetry, through 
 the creative powder of a profound yet observant meditation, so 
 through the meditative observation of a Davy, a Woollas- 
 TON, or a Hatchett ; 
 
 " By some connatural force, 
 
 Powerful at greatest distance to unite 
 With secret amity things of like kind," 
 
 we find poetry, as it were, substantiated and realized in nature: 
 yea, nature itself disclosed to us, geminam istam naturam, 
 qucB flit et facit, et creat et creafur, as at once the poet and 
 the poem!
 
 ESSAY VII. 
 
 Tavirf Tolri'v dicclgu) /o'^tc /^e>', ov^g vv~v dif tlF.ysg cpilo&su f.iova. g re, 
 xui (filore/iovg, y.cd nQuxTixovg, xul x^^'Q'S ^^~ '^^Q'' ^>'' '" Ao yog, ov g 
 fio' rovg ut' rig o'g&iog nqoaeinoi, cpiloao (povg, w'g ^liv yiyvwaxuvjug, 
 ili'og tc,i>' BTn^ifiiij iy.it c,}} tov'zmv toj v emcrjjULO)', o' Tvy/u'vei d'v 
 alio avTifg Tifgcnigrj' /^irjg. FIAATRN. 
 
 (Translation-) — In the following then I distinguish, first, those whom you in- 
 deed may call Philotheorists, or Philotechnists, or Practicians, and se- 
 condly those whom alone you may rightly denominate Philosophers, as 
 knowing what the science of all these branches of science is, which may 
 prove to be something more than the mere aggregate of the knowledges 
 in any particular science. — Plato. 
 
 From Shakspeare to Plato, from the philosophic poet to the 
 poetic philosopher, the transition is easy, and the road is crowd- 
 ed with illustrations of our present subject. For of Plato's 
 works, the larger and more valuable portion have all one com- 
 mon end, which comprehends and shines through the particular 
 purpose of each several dialogue ; and this is to establish the » 
 sources, to evolve the principles, and exemplify the art of Me- / 
 THOD. This is the clue, without which it would be difficult to / 
 to exculpate the noblest productions of the divine philosopher 
 from the charge of being tortuous and labyrinthine in their pro- 
 gress, and unsatisfactory in their ostensible results. The latter 
 indeed appear not seldom to have been drawn for the purpose 
 of starting a new problem, rather than that of solving the one 
 proposed as the subject of the previous discussion. But with 
 the clear insight that the purpose of the v.'riter is not so much 
 to establish any particular truth, as to remove the obstacles, the 
 continuance of which is preclusive of all truth ; the whole 
 scheme assumes a different aspect, and justifies itself in all its 
 dimensions. We sec, that to open anew a v.-ell of springing
 
 416 
 
 water, not to cleanse the stagnant tank, or fill, bucket by buck- 
 et, the leaden cistern ; that the Education of the intellect, by 
 awakening the principle and method of self-developement, was 
 his proposed object, not any specific information that can be 
 conveyed in it from without : not to assist in storing the passive 
 mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if 
 the human soul were a mere repository or banqueting-room, but 
 to place it in such relations of circumstance as should gradually 
 excite the germinal power that craves no knowledge but what 
 it can take up into itself, what it can appropriate, and re-pro- 
 duce in fruits of its own. To shape, to dye, to paint over, and 
 to mechanize the mind, he resigned, as their proper trade, to 
 the sophists, against whom he waged open and unremitting war. 
 For the ancients, as well as the moderns, had their machinery 
 for the extemporaneous mintage of intellects, by means of 
 which, off-handy as it were, the scholar was enabled to make a 
 figure on any and all subjects, on any and all occasions. They 
 too had their glittering vapors, that (as the comic poet tells us) 
 fed a host of sophists — 
 
 fieya'Xav &eai, avSqa aiv agyotg 
 Alneq yrco/iijjv xal diaXe^iv xul vov v if fiiv nage^ovaiVj 
 Kul leqajEiav xal nsgiXa^iv xui xqov'aiv xal xona'h^xpiv. 
 ^ API^TOlJ. Nscp. 2x. d. 
 
 IMITATED. 
 
 Great goddesses are they to lazy folks, 
 Who pour down on us gifts of fluent speech, 
 Sense most sententious, wonderful fine effect, 
 And how to talk ahout it and ahout it, 
 Thoughts brisk as bees, and pathos soft and thawy. 
 
 In fine, as improgressive arrangement is not Method, so nei- 
 ther is a mere mode or set fashion of doing a thing. Are fur- 
 ther facts required ? We appeal to the notorious fact that 
 Zoology, soon after the commencement of the latter half of 
 the last century, was falling abroad, weighed down and crush- 
 ed, as it were, by the inordinate number and manifoldness of 
 facts and pha^nomena apparently separate, without evincing the 
 least promise of systematizing itself by any inward combination, 
 any vital interdependence of its parts* John Hunter, who 
 appeared at times almost a stranger to the grand conception, 
 which yet never ceased to work in him as his genius and go-
 
 417 
 
 verning spirit, rose at length in the horizon of physiology and 
 comparative anatomy. In his printed works, the one directing 
 thought seems evermore to flit before him, twice or thrice on- 
 ly to have been seized, and after a momentary detention to 
 have been again let go : as if the words of the charm had been 
 incomplete, and it had appeared at its own will only to mock 
 its calling. At length, in the astonishing preparations for his 
 museum, he constructed it for the scientific apprehension out 
 of the unspoken alphabet of nature. Yet notwithstanding the 
 imperfection in the annunciation of the idea, how exhilarating 
 have been the results ! We dare appeal to* Abernethy, to 
 EvERARD Home, to Hatchett, whose communication to Sir 
 Everard on the egg and its analogies, in a recent paper of the 
 latter (itself of high excellence) in the Philosophical Trans- 
 actions, we point out as being, in the proper sense of the term, 
 the development of a fact in the history of physiology, and to 
 which we refer as exhibiting a luminous instance of what we 
 mean by the discovery of a central phenomenon. To these 
 we appeal, whether whatever is grandest in the views of Cu- 
 viER be not either a reflection of this light or a continuation of 
 its rays, well and wisely directed through fit media to its ap- 
 propriate object. f 
 
 We have seen that a previous act and conception of the mind 
 is indispensable even to the mere semblances of Method ; that 
 neither fashion, mode, nor orderly arrangement can be produc- 
 ed without a prior purpose, and " a pre-cogitation ad intentio- 
 nem ejus quod queer itur^'''' though this purpose may have been it- 
 
 * Since the first delivery of this sheet, Mr. Abernethy has realized this an- 
 ticipation, dictated solely by the writer's wishes, and at that time justified on- 
 ly l)y his general admiration of Mr. A's talents and princii)les ; but composed 
 without the least knowledge that he was then actually engaged in proving 
 tlie assertion here hazarded, at large and in detail. See his eminent "Phy- 
 siological Lectures," lately published in one \olume octavo. 
 
 f Nor should it be wholly unnoticed, that Ciivier, who, we understand, was 
 not born in France, and is not of unmixed French exti-action, had prepared 
 himself for his illustrious lal)ors (as we learn from a reference in the first 
 chapter of his great work, and should have concluded from the general style 
 of thinking, though the language betrays suppression, as one who doubted 
 the symi)athy of his readers or audience) in a very different school of metho- 
 dology and philosophy than Paris could have afforded. 
 
 53
 
 418 
 
 self excited, and this " pre-cogitation" itself abstracted from the 
 perceived likenesses and differences of the objects to be arrang- 
 ed. But it has likewise been shown, that fashion, mode, or- 
 donnance, are not Method, inasmuch as all Method supposes a 
 PRINCIPLE or UNITY WITH PROGRESSION ; iu othor words, pro- 
 gressive transition without breach of continuity. But such a 
 principle, it has been proved, can never in the sciences of ex- 
 periment or in those of observation be adequately supplied by 
 a theory built on generalization. For what shall determine the 
 mind to abstract and generalize one common point rather than 
 another ? and within what limits, from what number of indivi- 
 dual objects, shall the generalization be made .'' The theory 
 must still require a prior theory for its own legitimate construc- 
 tion. With the mathematician the definition makes the object, 
 and pre-establishes the terms which, and which alone, can oc- 
 cur in the after-reasoning. If a circle be found not to have the 
 radii from the centre to the circumference perfectly equal, which 
 in fact it would be absurd to expect of any material circle, it fol- 
 lows that it was not a circle : and the tranquil geometrician would 
 content himself with smiling at the Quid pro Quo of the simple 
 objector. A mathematical theoria seu contemplatio may there- 
 fore be perfect. For the mathematician can be certain, that he 
 has contemplated all that appertains to his proposition. The ce- 
 lebrated EuLER, treating on some point respecting arches, makes 
 this curious remark, " All experience is in contradiction to this ; 
 sed potius fidendum est analysi ; i. e. but this is no reason for 
 doubting the analysis." The words sound paradoxical ; but in 
 truth mean no more than this, that the properties of space are not 
 less certainly the properties of space because they can never be 
 entirely transferred to material bodies. But in physics, that is, in 
 all the sciences which have for their objects the things of nature, 
 and not the entia rationis — more philosophically, intellectual acts 
 and the products of those acts, existing exclusively in and for 
 the intellect itself — the definition must follow, and not precede 
 the reasoning. It is representative not constitutive, and is in- 
 deed little more than an abbreviature of the preceding obser- 
 vation, and the deductions therefrom. But as the observation 
 though aided by experiment, is necessarily limited and imper- 
 fect, the definition must be equally so. The history of theories,
 
 419 
 
 and the frequency of their subversion by the discovery of a single 
 new fact, supply the best illustrations of this truth.* 
 
 As little can a true scientific method be grounded on an hy- 
 pothesis, unless where the hypothesis is an exponential image 
 or picture-language of an idea which is contained in it more or 
 less clearly ; or the symbol of an undiscovered law, like the 
 characters of unknown quantities in algebra, for the purpose of 
 submitting the ph£enomena to a scientific calculus. In all other 
 instances, it is itself a real or supposed pha^nomenon, and there- 
 fore a part of the problem which it is to solve. It may be 
 among the foundation-stones of the edifice, but can never be 
 the ground. 
 
 But in experimental philosophy, it may be said how much do 
 we not owe to accident ? Doubtless : but let it not be for- 
 gotten, that if the discoveries so made stop there ; if they do 
 
 * The following extract from a most respectable scientific Journal contains 
 an exposition of the impossibility of a perfect Theory in Physics, the more 
 striking because it is directly against the purpose and izitention of the writer. 
 We content ourselves with one question, What if Kepler, what if Newton 
 in his investigations concerning the Tides, had held tiieniselves bound to this 
 canon, and instead of propounding a law, had employed themselves exclu- 
 sively in collecting materials for a Theory? 
 
 " The magnetic influence has long been known to have a variation which 
 is constantly changing ; but that change is so slow, and at the same time so 
 different in various (different'}) parts of the world, that it v.'ould be in vain to 
 seek for the t-^eans of reducing it to established rules, until all its local and 
 particular cir' umstances are clearly ascertained and recorded bj" accurate ob- 
 servations made in various parts of tJie globe. The necessity and importance 
 of such observations are now pretty generally understood, and they have been 
 actually cainying on for some years past ; but these {and by pcuity of reason the 
 incomparably greater number thai remain to be made) must be collected, collated, 
 proved, and afterwards brought together into one focus before ever a founda- 
 tion can be f()rmcd upon which any thing like a sound and stable Theory can 
 be constituted for the explanation of such changes." — Journal of Science and 
 the Arts, No, vii. p. 103. 
 
 An intelligent friend, on reading the words " into one focus," observed : 
 But wliat and where is the lens ? I however fully agree with the writer. All 
 this and much more must have been atchieved before " a sound and stable 
 Theory" could be " constituted'' — which even then (except as far as it might 
 occasion the discovery of a law) might possibly explain ( ex \)\^\c\s plana red- 
 dere\ but never account for, the facts in question. But the most satisfactory 
 comment on these and similar assertions woidd be afforded by a matter of 
 fact history of the rise and progress, tlie accelerating and retarding momenta, 
 of science in the civilized world.
 
 420 
 
 not excite to some master idea ; if they do not lead to some 
 LAW (in what ever dress of theory or hypotheses the fashion 
 and prejudices of the time may disguise or disfigure it:) the 
 discoveries may remain for ages limited in their uses, insecure 
 and unproductive. How many centuries, we might have said 
 millennia, have passed, since the first accidental discovery of 
 the attraction and repulsion of light bodies by rubbed amber, 
 &c. Compare the interval with the progress made within less 
 than a century, after the discovery of the phsenomena that led 
 immediately to a theory of electricity. That here as in many 
 other instances, the theory was supported by insecure hypothe- 
 ses ; that by one theorist two heterogeneous fluids are assumed, 
 the vitreous and the resinous ; by another, a plus and minus of 
 the same fluid ; that a third considers it a mere modification of 
 light ; while a fourth composes the electrical aura of oxygen, 
 hydrogen, and caloric : this does but place the truth we have 
 been evolving in a stronger and clearer light. For abstract 
 from all these suppositions, or rather imaginations, that which 
 is common to, and involved in them all ; and we shall have nei- 
 ther notional fluid or fluids, nor chemical compounds, nor ele- 
 mentary matter, — but the idea of two — opposite— for-ces^ tend- 
 ing to rest by equilibrium. These are the sole factors of the 
 calculus, alike in all the theories. These give the law^ and 
 in it the method^ both of arranging the phsenomena and of sub- 
 stantiating appearances into facts of science ; with a success 
 proportionate to the clearness or confusedness o£' the insight 
 into the law. For this reason, we anticipate the greatest im- 
 provements in the method^ the nearest approaches to a system 
 of electricity from these philosophers, who have presented the 
 law most purely, and the correlative idea as an idea : those, 
 namely, who, since the year 1798, in the true spirit of experi- 
 mental dynamics, rejecting the imagination of any material sub- 
 strate, simple or compound, contemplate in the pbsenomena of 
 electricity the operation of a law which reigns through all na- 
 ture, the law of polarity, or the manifestation of one pow- 
 er by opposite forces : who trace in these appearances, as the 
 most obvious and striking of its innumerable forms, the agency 
 of the positive and negative poles of a power essential to all 
 material construction ; the second, namely, of the three prima- 
 ry principles, for which the beautiful and most appropriate sym- 
 bols are ^ven by the mind in three ideal dimensions of space.
 
 491 
 
 The time is, perhaps, nigh at hand, when the same compari- 
 son between the results of two unequal periods ; the interval be- 
 tween the knowledge of a fact, and that from the discovery of 
 the law, will be applicable to the sister science of magnetism. 
 But how great the contrast between magnetism and electricity, 
 at the present moment ! From the remotest antiquity, the attrac- 
 tion of iron by the magnet was known and noticed ; but cen- 
 tury after century, it remained the undisturbed property of 
 poets and orators. The fact of the magnet and the fable of 
 phoenix stood on the same scale of utility. In the thirteenth 
 century, or perhaps earlier, the polarity of the magnet and its 
 communicability to iron was discovered ; and soon suggested a 
 purpose so grand and important, that it may well be deemed 
 the proudest trophy ever raised by accident * in the service of 
 mankind — the invention of the compass. But it led to no idea, 
 to no law, and consequently to no Method : though a variety of 
 phsenomena, as startling as they are mysterious, have forced on 
 us a presentiment of its intimate connection with all the great 
 agencies of nature ; of a revelation, in ciphers, the key to 
 which is still wanting. We can recall no incident of human 
 history that impresses the imagination more deeply than the 
 moment when Columbus, f on an unknown ocean, first perceiv- 
 
 * If accident it were : if the compass did not obscurel}' travel to us from 
 the remotest east : if its existence tiiere docs not point to an a<,^e and a race, 
 to which scholars of liighest rank in the world of letters, Sir W. Jones, 
 Bailly, Schlegel have attached faith ! That it was known before the sera gen- 
 erally assumed for its invention, and not spoken of as a novelty, has been 
 proved by Mr. Southey and others. 
 
 fit cannot be deemed alien from the purposes of this disquisition, if we 
 are anxious to attract the attention of our readers to the importance of spe- 
 culative meditation, even for tlie loorlUy interests of mankind ; and to that 
 concurrence of nature and historic event with the great revolutionaiy move- 
 ■ ments of individual genius, of which so many instances occur in tlie study 
 of History— how nature (why should we licsitate in saying, that which in 
 nature itself is more than nature ?) J5ccms to come forward in order to meet, 
 to aid, and to reward everj' idea excited by a contemplation of her methods 
 in the spirit of filial care, and with the humility of love ! It is with this view 
 tliat we extract from an ode of Chiabrera's the following lines, which, in the 
 strength of the thought and the lofty majesty of the poetiy, has but "few 
 peers in ancient or in modern song." 
 
 Columbus. 
 Oei?to dal cor, eh' alto Destin non ecelse,
 
 423 
 
 ed one of these startling facts, the change of the magnetio 
 needle ! 
 
 In what shall we seek the cause of this contrast between 
 the rapid progress of electricity and the stationary condition of 
 magnetism? As many theories, as many hypotheses, have 
 been advanced in the latter science as in the former. But the 
 theories and fictions of the electricians contained an idea^ and 
 all the same idea, which has necessarily led to Method ; im- 
 plicit indeed, and only regulative hitherto, which requires lit- 
 tle more than the dismission of the imagery to become constit- 
 uent like the ideas of the geometrician. On the contrary, the 
 assumptions, of the magnetists (as for instance, the hypothe- 
 sis that the planet itself is one vast magnet, or that an im- 
 mense magnet is concealed within it ; or that of a concentric 
 ;globe within the earth, revolving on its own independent axis) 
 are but repetions of the same fact or phsenomenon looked at 
 through a magnifying glass ; the reiteration of the problem, 
 not its solution. The naturalist, who cannot or will not see, 
 ihat one fact is often worth a thousand, as including them all 
 
 Son 1' imprese magnanime neglette ; 
 
 Ma le bell' aline alle bell' opre elette 
 
 Sanno gioir nelle fatiche eccelse : 
 
 Ne biasmo popolar, frale catena, 
 
 Spirto d' onore il suo cammin rafFrena. 
 
 Cosi liinga stagion per modi indegni 
 
 Emopa disprezzo 1' inclita spenie : 
 
 Schernendo il vulgo (e seco i Regi insieme) 
 
 Nudo nocchier promettitor di regni ; 
 
 Ma per le sconosciute onde marine 
 
 L' inviua prora ei pur sospinse al fine. 
 
 Qual uom, die torni al gentil consorte, 
 
 Tal ei da sua magion spiego 1' antenne ; 
 
 L' ocean corse, e i turbini sostenne, 
 
 Vinse le crude iinagini di morte ; 
 
 Poscia, dell' ami)io mar spenta la guerra, 
 
 Scorse la dianzi favolosa Terra. 
 
 Alior dal cavo Pin scende veloce 
 
 E di grand' Orma il nuovo mondo imprime ; 
 
 Ne men ratto per I'Aria crge sublime, 
 
 Segno del Ciel, insuperabil Croce ; 
 
 E porse umile esempio, onde adorarla 
 
 Debba sua Gente. 
 
 Chiabrera, vol. i.
 
 423 
 
 in itself, and that it first makes all the others facts ; who has 
 not the head to comprehend, the soul to reverence, a central 
 experiment or observation (what the Greeks would perhaps 
 have called a protophcBuomon); will never receive an auspicious 
 answer from the oracle of nature. 
 
 ESSAY VIII. 
 
 The sun doth give 
 Brightness to the eye: and some may say, that the sun 
 If not enlightened by the intelligence 
 That doth inhaliit it, would shine no more 
 Than a dull clod of earth. 
 
 Cartwright. 
 
 It is strange, yet characteristic of the spirit that was at work 
 during the latter half of the last century, and of which the 
 French revolution was, we hope the closing monsoon^ that the 
 writings of Plato should be accused of estranging the mind from 
 sober experience and substantial matter-of-fact^ and of debauch- 
 ing it by fictions and generalities. Plato, whose method is in- 
 ductive throughout, who argues on all subjects not only from, 
 but in and 61/, inductions of facts ! Who warns us indeed against 
 that usurpation of the senses, which quenching the " lumen sic- 
 cum " of the mind, sends it astray after individual cases for their 
 own sakes ; against that tenuem et manipularem experuntiamP^ 
 which remains ignorant even of the transitory relations, to which 
 the " pauca particularia" of its idolatory not seldom owe their 
 fluxional existence ; but who so far oftener, and with such un- 
 mitigated hostility, pursues the assumptions, abstractions, gene-
 
 434 
 
 ralities, and verbal legerdemain of the sophists ! Btrange, but 
 still more strange, that a notion so groundless should be entitled 
 to plead in its behalf the authority of Lord Bacon, from whom 
 the Latin words in the preceding sentence are taken, and 
 whose scheme of logic, as applied to the contemplation of nature, 
 is Platonic throughout, aud differing only in the mode : which 
 in Lord Bacon is dogmatic, i. e. assertory, in Plato tentative, 
 and (to adopt the Socratic' phrase) obstetric. We are not the 
 first, or even among the first, who have considered Bacon's 
 studied depreciation of the ancients, with his silence, or worse 
 than silence, concerning the merits of his contemporaries, as 
 the least amiable, the least exhilarating side in the character of 
 our illustrious countryman. His detractions from the Divine 
 Plato it is more easy to explain than to justify or even than to 
 palliate : and that he has merely retaliated Aristotle's own 
 unfair treatment of his predecessors and contemporaries, may 
 lessen the pain, but should not blind us by the injustice of the 
 aspersions on the name and works of this philosopher. The 
 most eminent of our recent zoologists and mineralogists have 
 acknowledged with respect, and even with expressions of won- 
 der, the performances of Aristotle, as the first clearer and 
 breaker-up of the ground in natural history. It is indeed scarce- 
 ly possible to peruse the treatise on colors, falsely ascribed to 
 Theophrastus, the scholar and successor of Aristotle, after a due 
 consideration of the state and means of science at that time, 
 without resenting the assertion, that he had utterly enslaved his 
 investigations in natural history to his own system of logic (lo- 
 gicse suae prorsus mancipavit). Nor let it be forgotten that the 
 sunny side of Lord Bacon's character is to be found neither in 
 his inductions, nor in the application of his own method to par- 
 ticular phajnomena, or particular classes of physical facts, which 
 are at least as crude for the age of Gilbert, Galileo, and Kepler, 
 as Aristotle's for that of Philip and Alexander. Nor is it to be 
 found in his recommendation (which is wholly independent of 
 scientific method ) of tabular collections of particulars. Let any 
 unprejudiced naturalist turn to Lord Bacon's questions and pro- 
 posals for the investigation of single problems ; to his Discourse 
 on the Winds ; or to the almost comical caricature of this scheme 
 in the " Method of improving Natural Philosophy;" (page 22 
 to 48), by Robert Hooke (the history of whose multifold inven- 
 tions, and indeed of his whole philosophical life, is the best
 
 4^6 
 
 answer to the scheme, if a scheme so palpably impracticable needs 
 any answer), and put it to his conscience, whether any desira- 
 ble end could be hoped for from such a process ; or inquire of 
 his own experience, or historical recollections whether any im- 
 portant discovery was ever made in this way.* For though 
 Bacon never so far deviates from his own principles, as not to 
 admonish the reader that the particulars are to be thus collect- 
 ed, only that by careful selection they may be concentrated into 
 universals ; yet so immense is their number, and so various and 
 almost endless the relations in which each is to be separately 
 considered, that the life of an ante-deluvian patriarch would be 
 expended, and his strength and spirits have been wasted, in 
 merely polling the votes, and long before he could commence 
 
 * We refer the reader to the Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, M. D. 
 F. R. S. &c. Folio, published under the auspices of the Royal Society, by 
 Richard Waller: and especially to die pages from p. 22 to 42 inclusive, as con- 
 containing the preluninary knowledges requisite or desirable for the naturalist, 
 before he can form " even a foundation upon which any thing like a sound 
 and stable Theory can be constituted." As a small specimen of this appalling 
 catalogue of preliminaries with which he is to make himself conversant, take 
 the following : — " The history of potters, tobacco-pipe-makers, glaziers, glass- 
 grinders, looking-glass-makers or foilers, spectacle-makers, and optic-glass- 
 makers, makers of counterfeit pearl and precious stones, bugle-makers, lamp- 
 blowers, colour-makers, colour-grinders, glass-painters, enamellers, vamishers, 
 colour-sellers, painters, limners, picture-drawers, makers of baby-heads, of little 
 bowling-stones or marbles, fustian-makers, (query whether poets are included 
 in this trade ?) music-masters, tinsey-makers, and taggers. — The histoiy of 
 schoolmasters, writ-ng-masters, printers, book -binders, stage-players, dancing- 
 masters, and vaulters, apothecaries, chirurgeons, seamsters, butchers, barbers, 
 laun-dressers, and cosmetics .' &c. &c. &c. &c. (the true nature of which be- 
 ing actually detcrmmed) will hugely facilitate our inquiries m philo- 
 
 sophy ! ! !" 
 
 As a summary of Dr. R. Ilooke'smidtifarious recipe for the growth of Sci- 
 ence may he fairly placed that of the celebrated Dr. Watts for the improve- 
 ment of the mind, which was thought by Dr. Knox, to be worthy of inser- 
 tion in the Elegant Extracts, Vol. ii. p. 456, under the head of 
 Directions concerning our Ideas. 
 
 "Furnish yourselves with a rich variety of Ideas. Acquaint yourselves with 
 things ancient and modern ; things natural, civil, and religious ; things of your 
 native land, and of foreign countries ; things domestic and national ; things pre- 
 sent, past, and future ; and above all, be well acquainted witli God and your- 
 selves ; with animal nature, and the workings of your own spirits. Such a 
 general acquaintance with tMngs will be qf very great advanlage.'^ 
 
 54
 
 426 
 
 the process of simplification, or have arrived in sight of the law 
 which was to reward the toils of the over-tasked Psyche.* 
 
 We yield to none in our grateful veneration of Lord Bacon's 
 philosophical writings. We are proud of his very name, as 
 men of science : and as Englishmen, we are almost vain of it. 
 But we may not permit the honest workings of national attach- 
 ment to degenerate into the jealous and indiscriminate partial- 
 ity of clanship. Unawed by such as praise and abuse by 
 wholesale, we dare avow that there are points in the character 
 of our Verulam, from which we turn to the life and labors of 
 John Kepler,f as from gloom to sunshine. The beginning 
 and the close of his life were clouded by poverty and domestic 
 troubles, while the intermediate years were comprised within 
 the most tumultuous period of the history of his country, when 
 the furies of religious and political discord had left neither eye, 
 ear, nor heart for the Muses. But Kepler seemed born to 
 prove that true genius can overpower all obstacles. If he 
 gives an account of his modes of proceeding, and of the views 
 under which they first occurred to his mind, how unostentatious- 
 ly and in transitu^ as it were, does he introduce himself to our 
 notice : and yet never fails to present the living germ out of 
 which the genuine method, as the inner form of the tree of 
 science, springs up ! With what affectionate reverence does he 
 express himself of his master and immediate predecessor, 
 Tycho Brake ! with what zeal does he vindicate his services 
 iagainst posthumous detraction ! How often and how gladly 
 does he speak of Copernicus ! and with what fervent tones of 
 faith and consolation does be proclaim the historic fact that the 
 great men of all ages have prepared the way for each other, as 
 pioneers and heralds ! Equally just to the ancients and to his 
 contemporaries, how circumstantially, and with what exactness 
 of detail, does Kepler demonstrate that Elucid copernicises — 
 ws 'Jf^o Tou Ko'jrs^v/xou xoits^vixi^si EuxX£i(5>is ! and how elegant the com- 
 pliments which he addresses to Porta ! with wliat cordiality 
 
 * See the beautiful allegoric tale of Cupid and Psyche, in the original of 
 Apuleius. The tasks imposed on her by the jealousy of her mother-in-law, 
 and the agcncj^ by which they are at length self-pcrfonned, are noble instan- 
 ces of that hidden wisdom, " where more is meant than meets the ear." 
 
 fBorn 1571, ton years after Lord Bacon: died 1630, four years after the 
 death of Bacon.
 
 427 
 
 he thanks him for the invention of the camera obscura, as en- 
 larging his views into the laws of vision ! But while we can- 
 not avoid contrasting this generous enthusiasm with Lord Ba- 
 con's cold invidious treatment of Gilbert, and his assertion 
 that the works of Plato and Aristotle had been carried down 
 the stream of time, like straws, by their levity alone, when 
 things of weight and worth sunk to the bottom : still in the Foun- 
 der of a revolution, scarcely less important for the scientific, 
 and even for the commercial world, than that of Luther for 
 the world of religion and politics, we must allow much to the 
 heat of protestation, much to the vehemence of hope, and 
 much to the vividness of novelty. Still more must we attrib- 
 ute to the then existing and actual state of the Platonic and 
 Peripatetic philosophy, or rather to the dreams or verbiage 
 which then passed current as such. Had he but attached to 
 their proper authors the schemes and doctrines which he con- 
 demns, our illustrious countryman would, in this point at least, 
 have needed no apology. And surely no lover of truth, con- 
 versant with the particulars of Lord Bacon's life, with the ve- 
 ry early, almost boyish age, at which he quitted the university, 
 and the manifold occupations and anxieties in which his public and 
 professional duties engaged, and his courtly, — alas ! his servile, 
 prostitute, and mendicant — ambition, entangled him in his after 
 years, will be either surprised or oilended, though we should avow 
 our conviction, that he had derived his opinions of Plato and 
 Aristotle from any source, rather than from a dispassionate and 
 patient study of the originals themselves. At all events it will 
 be no easy task to reconcile many passages in the De Augmen- 
 tis, and the Redargutio Philosophiarum, with the author's own 
 fundamental principles, as established in his Novum Organum, 
 if we attach to the words the meaning which they may bear, 
 or even, .in some instances, the meaning which might appear 
 to us, in the present age, more obvious ; instead of the sense 
 in which they were employed by the professors, whose false 
 premises and barren methods Bacon was at that time contro- 
 verting. And this historical interpretation is rendered the 
 more necessary by his fondness for point and antithesis in his 
 style, where we must often disturb the sound in order to arrive 
 at the sense. But with these precautions ; and if, in collating 
 the philosophical works of Lord Bacon with those of Plato, 
 we, in both cases alike, seperate tiie grounds and essential
 
 428 
 
 principles of their philosophic systems from the inductions 
 themselves ; no inconsiderable portion of which, in the British 
 sage, as well as in the divine Athenian, is neither more nor 
 less crude and erroneous than might be anticipated from the 
 infant state of natural history, chemistry, and physiology, in 
 their several ages ; and if we moreover separate their princi- 
 ples from their practical application, which in both is not sel- 
 dom impracticable, and, in our countryman, not always recon- 
 cileable with the principles themselves : we shall not only ex- 
 tract that from each, which is for all ages, and which consti- 
 tutes their true systems of philosophy, but shall convince our- 
 selves that they are radically one and the same system : in that 
 namely, which is of universal and imperishable worth ! — the 
 science of Method, and the grounds and conditions of the sci- 
 ence of Method. 
 
 ESSAY IX. 
 
 A great authority may be a poor proof, but it is an excellent presumption : 
 ami few tilings give a wise man a truer delight than to reconcile two gi-eat 
 authorities, that had been commonly but falsely held to be dissonmit. 
 
 Stapylton. 
 
 Under a deep impression of the importance of the truths we 
 have essayed to develope, we would fain remove every preju- 
 dice that does not originate in the heart rather than in the un- 
 derstanding. For Truth, says the wise man, will not enter a 
 malevolent spirit. 
 
 To offer or to receive names in lieu of sound arguments, is 
 only less reprehensible than an ostentatious contempt of the 
 great men of former ages ; but we may well and wisely avail 
 ourselves of authorities, in confirmation of truth, and above all, 
 in the removal of prejudices founded on imperfect information.
 
 429 
 
 We do not see, therefore, how we can more appropriately con- 
 clude this first, explanatory and controversial section of our 
 inquiry, than by a brief statement of our renowned country- 
 man's own principles of Method, conveyed for the greater part 
 in his own words. Nor do we see, in what more precise form 
 we can recapitulate the substance of the doctrines asserted and 
 vindicated in the preceding pages. For we rest our strongest 
 pretensions to a calm and respectful perusal, in the first in- 
 stance, on the fact, that we have only re-proclaimed the coin- 
 ciding prescripts of the Athenian Verulam, and the British 
 Plato — genuinam scilicet Platonis Dialecticem ; et Methodo- 
 logiam Principialem 
 
 FRANCISCI DE VERULAMIO. 
 
 In the first instance, Lord Bacon equally with ourselves, de- 
 mands what we have ventured to call the intellectual or mental 
 initiative, as the motive and guide of every philosophical ex- 
 periment ; some well-grounded purpose, some distinct impres- 
 sion of the probable results, some self-consistent anticipation 
 as the ground of the *■'- prudens qumstio''' (the fore-thoughtful 
 query), which he affirms to be the prior half of the knowl- 
 edge sought, dimidium scienticB. With him, therefore, as 
 with us, an idea is an experiment proposed, an experiment is 
 an idea realized. For so, though in other words, he himself 
 informs us : " neque scientiam molimur tam sensu vel instru- 
 mentis quam expeiHmentis ; etenim experimentorum longe ma- 
 jor est subtilitas quam sensus ipsius, licit instrumentis exquisitis 
 adjuti. Nam de Us loquimur experimentis qua ad intentionem 
 ejus quod qcBvitur perite et secundum artem excogitata et ap- 
 posita sunt. Itaque pereeptioni sensus immediatae et propriae 
 non multum tribuimus : sed eo rem deducimus, ut sensus tan- 
 tum de experimento, experimentum de rejudicet^ This last 
 sentence is, as the attentive reader will have himself detected 
 one of those faulty verbal antitheses, not unfrequent in Lord 
 Bacon's writings. Pungent antitheses, and the analogies of 
 wit in which the resemblance is too often more indebted to 
 the double or equivocal sense of a word, than to any real con- 
 formity* in the thing or image, form the dulcia vitia of his style, 
 
 * Thus (to take the first instance tliat occurs), Bacon says, that some knowl- 
 edges, Uke the stars, are so high that they give no light. Where the word 
 "high," means deep or sublime, "in the one case and distant" in the other.
 
 430 
 
 the Dalilahs of our philosophical Sampson. But in this in- 
 stance, as indeed throughout all his works, the meaning is clear 
 and evident — namely, that the sense can apprehend, through the 
 organs of sense, only the phaenomena evoked by the experiment: 
 vis vero mentis ea, quie experimentum excogitaverat, de Re ju- 
 dicet : i. e. that pov/er which, out of its own conception had 
 shaped the experiment, must alone determine the true import 
 of the phaenomena. If again we ask, what.it is which gives birth 
 to the question, and then ad intentionem quffistionis suae experi- 
 mentum excogitat, unde de Re judicet, the answer is : Lux In- 
 tellectiis, lumen siccimi, the pure and impersonal reason, freed 
 from all the various idols enumerated by our great legislator of 
 science [idola tribuc, specus^ fori, theatri) ; that is, freed 
 from the limits, the passions, the prejudices, the peculiar ha- 
 bits of the human understanding, natural or acquired ; but 
 above all, pure from the r\rrogance, which leadsman to take the 
 forms and mechanism of his own mere reflective faculty, as the 
 measure of nature and of Deity. In this indeed we find the 
 great object both of Plato's and of Lord Bacon's labors. They 
 both saw that there could be no hope of any fruitful and secure 
 method, while forms merely subjective, were pi-esumed as the 
 true and proper moulds of objective truth. This is the sense in 
 which Lord Bacon uses the phrases, — intellectus humanus, 
 mens hominis, so profoundly and justly characterized in the 
 preliminary (Distributio Operis) of his De Augment. Scient. 
 And with all right and propriety did he so apply them : for this 
 was, in fact, the sense in which the phrases were applied by 
 the teachers, whom he is controverting ; by the doctors of the 
 schools ; and the visionaries of the laboratory. To adopt the 
 bold but happy phrase of a late ingenious French writer, it is 
 the homme particulier, as contrasted with I'homme generate ; 
 against which, Ileraclitus and Plato, among the ancients, and 
 among the moderns, Bacon and Stewart (rightly under- 
 stood), warn and pre-admonish the sincere inquirer. Most 
 truly, and in strict consonance with his two great predecessors, 
 does our immortal Verulam teach — that the human understand- 
 ing, even independent of the causes that always, previously to its 
 purification by philosophy, render it more or less turbid or une- 
 ven, "ipsa sua natura radios ex figura et sectione propria immu- 
 tat :" that our understanding not only reflects the objects subjec- 
 tively, that is, substitutes, for the inherent laws and properties of
 
 431 
 
 the objects the relations which the objects bear to its own par- 
 ticular constitution ; but that in all its conscious presenta- 
 tions and reflexes, it is itself only a phaenomenon of the inner 
 sense, and requires the same corrections as the appearances 
 transmitted by the outward senses. ' But that there is poten- 
 tially, if not actually, in eA^ery rational being, a somewhat, call 
 it what you will, the pure reason, the spirit, lumen siccura, 
 vou?, cpug vofc-^^ov, intellectual intuition, $ic. kc. ; and that in this 
 are to be found the indispensable conditions of all science, and 
 scientific research, whether meditative, contemplative, or ex- 
 perimental ; is often expressed, and every where supposed, by 
 Lord Bacon. And that this is not only the right but the possi- 
 ble nature of the human mind, to which it is capable of being 
 restored, is implied in the various remedies prescribed by him 
 for its diseases, and in the various means of neutralizing or 
 converting into useful instrumentality the imperfections which 
 cannot be removed. There is a sublime truth contained in his 
 favorite phrase — Idola intellectus. He thus tells us, that the 
 mind of man is an edifice not built with human hands, which 
 needs only be purged of its idols and idolatrous services to 
 become the temple of the true and living Light. Nay, he has 
 shown and established the true criterion between the ideas 
 and the idola of the mind — namely, that the former are mani- 
 fested by their adequacy to those ideas in nature, which in and 
 through them are contemplated. " Non leve quiddam interest 
 inter humanse mentis idola et divinse mentis ideas, hoc est, 
 inter placita quaedam inania et veras signaturas atque impress- 
 iones factas in creaturis, prout Ratione sana et sicci luminis^ 
 quam docendi causa interpretem naturse vocare consuevimus, 
 inveniuntur." Novum Organum xxiii. & xxvi. Thus the 
 difference, or rather distinction between Plato and Lord Bacon 
 is simply this : that philosophy being necessarily bi-polar, Pla- 
 to treats principally of the truth, as it manifests itself at the 
 ideal pole, as the science of intellect (i. e. de mundo intelligi- 
 bili); while Bacon confines himself, for the most part, to the 
 same truth, as it is manifested at the other, or material pole, 
 as the science of nature (i. e. de mundo sensibili). It is as 
 necessary, therefore, that Plato should direct his inquiries 
 chiefly to those objective truths that exist in and for the intel- 
 lect alone, the images and representatives of which we con- 
 struct for ourselves by figure, number, and word ; as that Lord
 
 432 
 
 Bacon should attach his main concern to the truths which have 
 their signatures in nature, and which (as he himself plainly 
 and often asserts) may indeed be revealed to us through and 
 withj but never by the senses, or the faculty of sense. Other- 
 wise, indeed, instead of being more objective than the former 
 (which they are not in any sense, both being in this respect 
 the same), they would be less so, and, in fact, incapable of be- 
 ing insulated from the " Idola tribus quae in ipsa natura fun- 
 data sunt, atque in ipsa tribu seu gente hominum : cum omnes 
 perceptiones tam sensus quam mentis, sunt ex analogia hominis 
 non ex analogia universi." (N. 0. xli.) Hence too, it will 
 not surprise us, that Plato so often calls ideas living laws, in 
 which the mind has its whole true being and permanence ; or 
 that Bacon, vice versa, names the laws of nature, ideas ; and 
 represents what we have, in a former part of this disquisition, 
 called /acis of science and central phcenomena^ as signatures, 
 impresssions, and symbols of ideas. A distinguishable power 
 self-affirmed, and seen in its unity with the Eternal Essence, is, 
 according to Plato, an Idea : and the discipline, by which the 
 human mind is purified from its idols (tifJwXa) and raised to the 
 contemplation of Ideas, and thence to the secure and ever pro- 
 gressive, though never-ending, investigation of truth and real- 
 ity by scientific method, comprehends what the same philoso- 
 pher so highly extols under the title of Dialectic. According to 
 Lord Bacon, as describing the same truth seen from the oppo- 
 site point, and applied to natural philosophy, an idea would be 
 defined as — Intuitio sive inventio, quae in perceptione sensus 
 non est (ut quae purse et sicci luminis Intellectioni est propria) 
 idearum divinae mentis, prout in creaturis per signaturus suas 
 sese patefaciant. That (saith the judicious Hooker) which doth 
 assign to each thing the kind, that which determines the force 
 and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure of 
 working, the same we term a Law. 
 
 We can now, as men furnished with fit and respectable cre- 
 dentials, proceed to the historic importance and practical appli- 
 cation of Method, under the deep and solemn conviction, that 
 without this guiding Light neither can the sciences attain to 
 their full evolution, as the organs of one vital and harmonious 
 body, nor that most weighty and concerning of all scien- 
 ces, the science of Education, be understood in its first ele-
 
 433 
 
 ments, much less display its powers, as the nisus formativus* of 
 social man, as the appointed protoplast of true humanity. 
 
 * So our medical writere commonly translate Professor Bliimenbach's BU- 
 dungstrieb, the vis plastica, or vis vJta3 formatrix of the eldest ])hysiologists, 
 and the life or living principle of John Hunter, the profoundest, we had al- 
 most saifl the only, ])hysiological philosopher of the latter half of the ])rece- 
 ding century. For in what other sense can ivc understand either his asser- 
 tion, that this principle or agent is "independent of organization," which yet 
 it animates, sustains, and repairs, or the purport of that magnificent commen- 
 taiy on his system, the Hunterian MusfBum, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. The 
 Hunterian idea of a life or vital principle, "independent of the organization" 
 yet in each organ working instuictively towards its preservation, as the ants 
 or termites in repairing the nests of their own fabrication, demonstrates that 
 John Hunter did not, as Stahl and others had done, individualize, or make an 
 hypostasis of the principles of life, as a somewhat manifestable per se, and 
 consequently itself a Phsenomenon ; the latency of which was to be attribu- 
 ted to accidental, or at least contingent causes, ex. gr. ; the limits or imper- 
 fection of our senses, or the inaptness of the media: but that herein he phi- 
 losophized in the spirit of the purest Newtonians, who in like manner refu- 
 sed to hypostasize the law of gravitation into an ether, which even if its ex- 
 istence were conceded, would need another gravitation for itself. The Hun- 
 terian position is a genuine philosophic idea, the negative test of which as of 
 all Ideas is, that it is equi-distant from an ens logicum (= an abstraction,) an 
 ens reprsesentativum (= a generalization,) and an ens phantosticum (= an 
 imaginary thing or pheenomenon.) 
 
 Is not the progressive enlargement, the boldness without temerity, of chi- 
 rurgical views and chirurgical practice since Hunter's time to the present day, 
 attributable, in almost every instance, to his substitution of what may per- 
 haps be called experimental Dynamic, for the mechanical notions, or the less 
 injurious traditional empiricism, of his predecessors? And this, too, though 
 the light is still struggling through a cloud, and though it is shed on many who 
 see either dimly or not at all the Idea from which it is eradicated? Willingly 
 would we designate, what we have elsewhere called the mental initiative, by 
 some term less obnoxious to the a)iti-Platonic reader, than this of Idea — ob- 
 noxious, we mean, as soon as any ])recise and peculiar sense is attached to 
 the sound. Willingly would we exchange the Term, might it be done with- 
 out sacrifice of the Import: and did we not see, too, clearty, that it is the 
 meaning, not the word, that is the object of that aversion, which, fleeing from 
 inward alarm, tries to shelter itself in outward contempt — that is at once folly 
 and a stumbling-l)Iock to the partizans of a crass and sensual materialism 
 the advocates of the Nihil nisi ab extra. 
 
 They, like moles. 
 Nature's mute monks, live mandrakes of the ground, 
 Shrink fi-om the light, then listen for a sound ; 
 Sue but to dread, and dread they know not why, 
 The natural alien of their negative eye ! S. T. C. 
 
 h5
 
 434 
 
 Never can society comprehend fully, and in its whole practical 
 extent, the permanent distinction, and the occasional contrast, 
 between cultivation and civilization ; never can it attain to a 
 due insight into the momentous fact, fearfully as it has been, 
 and even now is exempiiiied in a neii^hbor country, that a na- 
 tion can never be a too cultivated, but may easily becom.e an 
 over-civilized, race: while we oppose ourselves voluntarily to 
 that gr:\nd prerogative of our nature, a hungering and thirst- 
 ing AFTER TRUTH, as tlie appropriate end of our intelligential, 
 and its point of union with, our moral nature ; but therefore 
 after truth, that must be found within us before it can be infel- 
 ligibly reflected back on the mind from without, and a religious 
 regard to which is indispensable, both as a guide and object to 
 the just formation of the human being, poor and rich : while, 
 in a word, we are blind to the master-light, which we have al- 
 ready presented in various points of view, and recommended 
 by whatever is of highest authority with the venerators of the 
 ancient, and the adherents of modern philosophy.
 
 ESSAY X. 
 
 I7o).uua\}irj I'oov ov 8it)aoy.fi- eivui yao ev to aoqor^ Fni^ua&ui vvo^trfV 
 'tjts tyy.vSa^t'Tjai'.i rruviu 8iu ttuitvii-'. 
 
 (Trandation.) — The effsctive education of th?; reason is not to be supplied 
 
 by multifarious accpiirements ; for tliere is but one knowledge that merits to 
 
 be called ^visdonl, a knowledge that is !-ne with a law which shall govern 
 
 all ill and through all. 
 
 IIerac. aj)ud Diogenem Laert. ix. § 1 
 
 HISTORICAL AND ILLUSTRATIVE. 
 
 There is still preserved in the Royal Observatory at Rich- 
 mond the model of a bridge, constructed by the late justly 
 celebrated Mr. Atwood (at that time, however, in the decline 
 of life), in the confidence, that he had explained the wonder- 
 ful properties of the arch as resulting from compound action of 
 simple wedges, or of the rectilinear solids of which the mate- 
 rial arch was composed : and of which supposed discovery, his 
 model was to exhibit ocular proof. Accordingly, he took a suffi- 
 cient number of wedges of brass highly polished. Arranging 
 these at first on a skeleton arch of wood, he then removed this 
 scaffolding or support ; and the bridge not only stood firm, 
 without any cement between the squares; but he could take 
 away any given portion of them, as a third and a half, and ap- 
 pending a correspondent weight, at either side, the remaining 
 part stood as before. Our venerable sovereign, who is known 
 to have had a particular interest and pleasure in all works and 
 discoveries of niechanic science or ingenuity, looked «t it for 
 awhile steadfastly, and, as his manner was, with quick and bro- 
 ken expressions of praise and courteous approbation, in the 
 form of answers to his own quesiions. At length turning to 
 the constructor, he said, " But, Mr. Atwood, you have presum- 
 ed the figure. You have put the arch first in this wooden ske-
 
 436 
 
 leton. Can you build a bridge of the same wedges in any oth- 
 er figure ? A straight bridge, or with two lines touching at the 
 apex ? If not, is it not evident, that the bits of brass derive 
 their continuance in the present position from the property of the 
 arch, and not the arch from the property of the wedge ?" The 
 objection was fatal ; the justice of the remark not to be resist- 
 ed ; and we have ever deemed it a forcible illustration of the 
 Aristotelian axiom, with respect to all just reasoning, that the 
 whole is of necessity prior to its parts ; nor can we conceive a 
 more apt illustration of the scientific principles we have already 
 laid down. 
 
 All method supposes a union of several things to a common 
 end, either by disposition, as in the works of man ; or by con- 
 vergence, as in the operations and products of nature. That 
 we acknowledge a method^ even in the latter, results from the 
 religious instinct which bids us " find tongues in trees ; books 
 in the running streams; sermons in stones: and good (that is, 
 some useful end answering to some good purpose) in every 
 thing." In a self-conscious and thence reflecting being, no 
 instinct can exist, without engendering the belief of an object 
 corresponding to it, either present or future, real or capable of 
 being realized : much less the instinct, in which humanity itself 
 is grounded : that by vvhich, in every act of conscious perception, 
 we at once identify our being with that of the world without 
 us and yet place ourselves in contra-distinction to that world. 
 Least of all can this mysterious pre-disposition exist without 
 evolving a belief that the productive power, which is in nature 
 as nature, is essentially one (i. e. of one kind) with the intel- 
 lio-ence, which is in the human mind above nature : however 
 disfigured this belief may become, by accidental forms or ac- 
 companiments, and though like heat in the thawing of ice, it 
 may appear only in its eflects. So universally has this convic- 
 tion leavened the ver}^ substance of all discourse, that there is 
 no language on earth in winch a man can abjure it as a preju- 
 dice, without employing terms and conjunctions that suppose its 
 reality, with a feeling very different from that which accom- 
 panies a figurative or metaphorical use of words. In all aggre- 
 '■•ates of construction, therefore, which we contemplate as 
 wholes, whether as integral parts or as a system, we assume 
 an intention, as the initiative, of which the end is the correla- 
 tive.
 
 \ 
 
 437 
 
 Hence proceeds the introduction of final causes in the works 
 of nature equally as in those of man. Hence their assumption, 
 as constitutive and explanatory by the mass of mankind ; and 
 the employment of the presumption, as an auxiliary and regula- 
 tive principle, by the enlightened naturalist, whose office it is 
 to seek, discover, and investigate the efficient causes. Without 
 denying, that to resolve the efficient into the final may be the 
 ultimate aim of philosophy, he, of good right, resists the sub- 
 stitution of the latter for the former, as premature, presumptu- 
 ous, and preclusive of all science ; well aware, that those sci- 
 ences have been most progressive, in which this confusion has 
 been either precluded by the nature of the science itself, as in 
 pure mathematics, or avoided by the good sense of its cultivator. 
 Yet even he admits a teleological ground in physics and physiolo- 
 gy : that is, the presumption of something analogous to the caus- 
 ality of the human will, by which, without assigning to nature, as 
 nrture, a conscious purpose, he may yet distinguish her agency 
 from a blind and lifeless mechanism. Even he admits its use, 
 and, in many instances, its necessity, as a regulative principle ; 
 as a ground of anticipation, for the guidance of his judgment 
 and for the direction of his observation and experiment : brief- 
 ly in all that preparatory process, which the French language 
 so happily expresses by s''orienter, i. e. to find out the east for 
 one's self. When the naturalist contemplates the structure of 
 a bird, for instance, the hollow cavity of the bones, the position 
 of the wings for motion, and of the tail for steering its course, 
 &c. he knows indeed that there must be a correspondent me- 
 chanism, as the nexus effectivus. But he knows, likewise, that 
 this will no more explain tho particular existence of the bird, 
 than the principles of cohesion, &c. could inform him why of 
 two buildings, one is a palace, and the other a church. Nay, 
 it must not be overlooked, that the assumption of the nexus ef- 
 fectivus itself originates in the mind, as one of the laws under 
 which alone it can reduce the manifold of the impression from 
 without into unity, and thus contemplate it as one thing ; and 
 could never (as hath been clearly proved by Mr. Hume) have 
 been derived from outward experience, in which it is indeed 
 presupposed, as a necessary condition. Notio nexus causalis 
 non oritur, sed supponitur, a sensibus. Between the purpose 
 and the end the component parts are included, and thence re- 
 ceive their position and character as means, i. e. parts contem- 
 
 \ 
 \
 
 438 
 
 plated as parts. It is in this sense, we will affirm, that the 
 parts, as means to an end, derive their position, and therein 
 their qualities (or character) nay, we dare add, their very ex- 
 istence — as particular things — from the antecedent method, or 
 self-organizing purpose ; upon which therefore we have dwelt 
 so long. 
 
 We are aware, that it is with our cognitions as with our 
 children. Ti.ere is a period in which the method of nature is 
 working for them ; a period of aimless activity and unregula- 
 ted accumulation, during which it is enough if we can pre- 
 serve them in health and out of harm^s way. Again, there is 
 a period of orderliness, of circumspection, of discipline, in 
 which we purify, separate, deflne, select, arrange, and settle 
 the nomenclature of communication. There is also a period 
 of dawning and twilight, a period of anticipation, afibrding 
 trials of strength. And all these, both in the growth of the 
 sciences, and in the mind of a jightly-educated individual, will 
 precede the attainment of a scientific Method. But, notwith- 
 standing this, unless the importance of the latter be felt and 
 acknowledged, unless its attainment be looked forward to and 
 from the very beginning prepared for, there is little hope and 
 small chance that any education will be conducted aright ; or 
 will ever prove in reality worth the name. 
 
 Much labor, much wealth may have been expended, yet the 
 final result will too probably warrant the sarcasm of the Scythian 
 traveller : " Vse ! quantum nihili !" and draw from a w ise 
 man the earnest recommendation of a full draught from Lethe, 
 as the first and indispensable preparative for the waters of the 
 true Helicon. Alas ! how many examples are now present to 
 our memory, of young men the most anxiously and expensive- 
 ly be-schoolmastered, be-tutored, be-lectured, any thing but 
 educated ; who have received arms and ammunition, instead of 
 skill, strength, and courage ; varnished rather than polished ; 
 perilously over-civilized, and most pitiably uncultivated ! And 
 all from inattention to the method dictated by nature herself, to 
 the simple truth, that as the forms in all organized existence, 
 so must all true and living knowledge proceed fiom within ; 
 that it may be trained, supported, fed, excited, but can never 
 be infused or impressed. 
 
 Look back on the history of the Sciences. Review the Me- 
 thod in which Providence has brought the more favored portion
 
 439 
 
 of mankind to the present state of Arts and Sciences. Lord 
 Bacon has justly remarked, Antiquitas temporis juventus mun- 
 di et ScienticB — Antiquity of time is the youth of the world and 
 of Science. In the childhood of the human race, its education 
 commenced with the cultivation of the moral sense ; the object 
 proposed being such as the mind only could apprehend, and the 
 principle of obedience being placed in the will. The appeal 
 in both was made to the inward man. "Through faith we un- 
 derstand that the worlds were framed by the word of God ; so 
 that things which were seen were not made of things which do 
 appear." (The solution of Phmiomena can never be derived 
 from Phcenomena.) Upon this ground, the writer of the epis- 
 tle to the Hebrews (chap, xi.) is not less philosophical than 
 eloquent. The aim, the method throughout was, in the first 
 place, to awaken, to cultivate, and to mature the truly human 
 in human nature, in and through itself, or as independently as 
 possible of the notices derived from sense, and of the motives 
 that had reference to the sensations ; till the time should arrive 
 when the senses themselves might be allowed to present sym- 
 bols and attestations of truths, learnt previously from deeper 
 and inner sources. Thus the first period of the education of 
 our race was evidently assigned to the cultivation of humanity 
 itself; or of that in man, which of all known embodied crea- 
 tures he alone possesses, the pure reason, as designed to regu- 
 late the will. And by what method was this done? First, by 
 the excitement of the idea of their Creator as a spirit, of an 
 idea which they were strictly forbidden to realize to themselves 
 under any image ; and, secondly, by the injunction of obedi- 
 ence to the will of a super-sensual Being. Nor did the method 
 stop here. For, unless we are equally to contradict Moses and 
 the New Testament, in compliment to the paradox of a War- 
 burton^ the rewards of their obedience were placed at a dis- 
 tance. For the time present they equally with us were to 
 " endure^ as seeing him who is invisible." Their bodies 
 they were taught to consider as fleshly tents, which as pilgrims 
 they were bound to pitch wherever the invisible Director of 
 their route should appoint, however barren or thorny the spot 
 might appear. " Few and evil have the days of the years of 
 my life been," says the aged Israel. But that life was but "his 
 pilgrimage ; and he trusted in the promises^ 
 
 Thus were the very first lessons in the Divine School assign-
 
 440 
 
 ed to the cultivation of the reason and of the will : or rather 
 of both as united in Faith. The common and ultimate object 
 of the will and of the reason was purely spiritual.^ and to be 
 present in the mind of the disciple — /xo'vov Iv Io='*/, [j/qdaiui] iiSuXixus 
 i. e. in the idea alone, and nevei" as an image or imagination. 
 The means too, by which the idea was to be excited, as well 
 as the symbols by which it was to be communicated, were to be, 
 as far as possible, intellectual. 
 
 Those, on the contrary, who willfully chose a mode opposite 
 to this method, who determined to shape their convictions and 
 deduce their knowledge from without, by exclusive observa- 
 tion of outward and sensible things as the only realities, be- 
 came, it appears, rapidly civilized ! They built cities, invent- 
 ed musical instruments, were artificers in brass and in iron, and 
 refined on the means of sensual gratification, and the conven- 
 iences of courtly intercourse. They became the great masters 
 of the AGREEABLE, which fraternized readily with cruelty and 
 rapacity : these being, indeed, but alternate moods of the 
 same sensual selfishness. Thus, both before and after the 
 flood, the vicious of mankind receded from all true cultivation, 
 as they hurried towards civilization. Finally, as it was not in 
 their power to make themselves wholly beasts, or to remain 
 without a semblance of religion ; and yet continuing faithful to 
 their original maxim, and determined to receive nothing as 
 true, but what they derived, or believed themselves to derive 
 from their senses, or (in modern phrase) what they could 
 prove a posteriori, — they became idolaters of the Heavens 
 and the material elements. From the harmony of operation 
 they concluded a certain unity of nature and design, but were 
 incapable of finding in the facts any proof of a unity of per- 
 son. They did not, in this respect, pretend to find what they 
 must themselves have first assumed. Having thrown away the 
 clusters, which had grown in the vineyard of revelation, they 
 could not — as later reasoners, by being born in a Christian 
 country, have been enableld to do — hang the grapes on thorns, 
 and then pluck them as the native growth of the bushes. But 
 the men of sense, of the patriarchal times, neglecting reason 
 and having rejected faith, adopted what the facts seemed to in- 
 volve and the most obvious analogies to suggest. They ac- 
 knowledged a whole bee-hive of natural Gods ; but while they
 
 441 
 
 were employed in building a temple* consecrated to the mate- 
 rial Heavens, it pleased divine wisdom to send on them a con- 
 fusion of lip^ accompanied with the usual embitterment of con- 
 troversy, where all parties are in the wrong, and the grounds 
 of the quarrel are equally plausible on all sides. As the modes 
 of error are endless, the hundred forms of Polytheism had each 
 its group of partizans who, hostile or alienated, henceforward 
 formed separate tribes kept aloof from each other by their am- 
 bitious leaders. Hence arose, in the course of a few centuries, 
 the diversity of languages, which has sometimes been confoun- 
 ded with the miraculous event that was indeed its first and 
 principal, though remote, cause. 
 
 Following next, and as the representative of the youth and 
 approaching manhood of the human intellect, we have ancient 
 Greece, from Orpheus, Linus, Musseus, and the other mytholo- 
 gical bards, or perhaps the brotherhoods impersonated under 
 those names, to the time when the republics lost their indepen- 
 dence, and their learned men sunk into copyists and commenta- 
 tors of the works of their forefathers. That we include these as 
 educated under a distinct providential, though not miraculous, 
 dispensation, will surprise no one, who reflects that in whatever 
 has a permanent operation on the destinies and intellectual con- 
 dition of mankind at large — that in all which has been mani- 
 festly employed as a co-agent in the mightiest revolution of the 
 moral world, the propagation of the Gospel ; and in the intel- 
 lectual progress of mankind, the restoration of Philosophy, 
 Science, and the ingenuous Arts — it were irreligion not to ac- 
 knowledge the hand of divine Providence. The periods, too, 
 join on to each other. The earliest Greeks took up the religious 
 
 *AVe are fur from being Hiitchinsonians, nor have we found much to res- 
 pect in the twelve volumes of Hutchinson's works, either as biblical com- 
 ment or natural ])liilos()]iliy: though we give him credit for orthodoxy and 
 good intentions. But his interpretation of the first nine verses of Genesis 
 xi. seems not only rational in itself, and consistent with after accounts of the 
 sacred historian, but proved to be the literal sense of the Hebrew text. His 
 explanation of the cherubim is pleasing and plausible: we dare not say more. 
 Those who would wish to learn the most important points of the Hutchin- 
 sonian doctrine in the most favorable form, and in the shortest possil)le space, 
 we can refer to Duncan Forbes's Letter to a bishop. If our own judgement 
 did not withhold our assent, we should never be ashamed of a conviction 
 held, professed, and advocated by so good, and wise a man, as Duncan 
 Forbes. 
 
 56
 
 442 
 
 and lyrical poetry of the Hebrews ; and the schools of the 
 Prophets were, however partially and imperfectly, represented 
 by the mysteries, derived through the corrupt channel of the 
 Phoenicians. With these secret schools of physiological theo- 
 logy the mythical poets were doubtless in connection : and it 
 was these schools, which prevented Polytheism from producing 
 all its natural barbarizing effects. The mysteries and the my- 
 thical Hymns and Pagans shaped themselves gradually into 
 epic Poetry and History on the one hand, and into the ethical 
 Tragedy and Philosophy on the other. Under their protection, 
 and that of a youthful liberty secretly controlled by a species of 
 internal Theocracy, the Sciences and the sterner kinds of the 
 Fine Arts ; viz. Architecture and Statuary, grew up together : 
 followed, indeed, by Painting, but a statuesque and austerely 
 idealized painting, which did not degenerate into mere copies 
 of the sense, till the process, for which Greece existed, had 
 been completed. Contrast the rapid progress and perfection of 
 all the products, which owe their existence and character to 
 the mind's own acts, intellectual or imaginative, with the rude- 
 ness of their application to the investigation of physical laws and 
 phsenomena: then contemplate the Greeks (Feaio' «£' irai5sg) as 
 representing a portion only of the education of man : and the 
 conclusion is inevitable. 
 
 In the education of the mind of the race, as in that of the indi- 
 vidual, each different age and purpose requires dift'erent objects 
 and different means : though all dictated by the same principle, 
 tending toward the same end, and forming consecutive parts of 
 the same method. But if the scale taken be sufficiently large to 
 neutralize or render insignificant the disturbing forces of acci- 
 dent, the degree of success is the best criterion by which to 
 appreciate, both the wisdom of the general principle, and the 
 fitness of the particular objects to the given epoch or period. 
 Now it is a fact, for the greater part of universal acceptance, and 
 attested as to the remainder by all that is of highest fame and 
 authority, by the great, wise, and good, during a space of at 
 least seventeen centuries — weighed against whom the opinions 
 of a few distinguished individuals, or the fashion of a single 
 age, must be held light in the balance,— that whatever could 
 be educed by the mind out of its own essence, by attention to 
 its own acts and laws of action, or as the products of the same ; 
 and whatever likewise could be reflected from material masses
 
 443 
 
 transformed as it were into mirrors, the excellence of which is 
 to reveal, in the least possible degree, their own original forms 
 and natures — all these, whether arts or sciences, the ancient 
 Greeks carried to an almost ideal perfection : while in the appli- 
 cation of their skill and science to the investigation of the laws 
 of the sensible world, and the qualities and compositio«i of ma- 
 terial concretes, chemical, mechanical, or organic, their essays' 
 were crude and improsperous, compared with those of the mo- 
 derns during the early morning of their strength, and even at 
 the first re-ascension of the light. But still more striking will 
 the difference appear, if we contrast the physiological schemes 
 and fancies of the Greeks with their own discoveries in the re- 
 gion of the pure intellect, and with their still unrivalled success 
 in arts of imagination. In the aversion of their great men from 
 any jiractical use of their philosophic discoveries, as in the well- 
 known instance of Archimedes, " the soul of the world" was 
 at work ; and the few exceptions were but as a rush of billows 
 driven shoreward by some chance gust before the hour of tide, 
 instantly retracted, and leaving the sands bare and soundless 
 long after the momentary glitter had been lost in evaporation. 
 
 The third period, that of the Romans, was devoted to the 
 preparations for preserving, propagating, and realizing the la- 
 bors of the preceding ; to war, empire, law ! To this we may 
 refer the defect of all originality in the Latin poets and philo- 
 sophers, on the one hand, and on the other, the predilection of 
 the Romans for astrology, magic, divination, in all its forms. It 
 was the Roman instinct to appropriate by conquest and to give 
 fixture by legislation. And it was the bewilderment and pre- 
 matur'ity of the same instinct which restlessly impelled them 
 to materialize the ideas of the Greek philosophers, and to ren- 
 der them practical by superstitious uses. 
 
 Thus the Hebrews may be regarded as the fixed mid point of 
 the living line, toward which the Greeks as the ideal pole, and 
 the Romans as the material, were ever approximating ; till the 
 co-incidence and final synthesis took place in Christianity, of 
 which the Bible is the law, and Christendom the phsenome- 
 non. So little confirmation from History, from the process of 
 education planned and conducted by unerring Providence, do 
 those theorists receive, who would at least begin (too many, 
 alas! both begin and end) with the objects of the senses ; as 
 if nature herself had not abundantly performed this part of
 
 444 
 
 the task, by continuous, irresistible enforcements of attention 
 to her presence, to the direct beholding, to the apprehension 
 and observation, of the objects that stimulate the senses! as if 
 the cultivation of the mental powers, by methodical exercise 
 of their own forces, were not the securest means of forming the 
 true correspondents to them in the functions of comparison, 
 judgment, and interpretation. 
 
 ESSAY XI. 
 
 Sapiinus aniino, fruimur anima : sine ammo anima est debilis. 
 
 L. Accii Fragmenta. 
 
 As there are two wants connatural to man, so are therp 
 main directions of human activity, pervading in modern .-v;S 
 the whole civilized world ; and constituting and sustaining that 
 nationality which yet it is their tendency, and, more or less, 
 their effect^ to transcend and to moderate — Trade and Litera- 
 ture. These were they, which, after the dismemberment of the 
 old Roman world, gradually reduced the conquerors and the 
 conquered at once into several nations and a common Chris- 
 tendom. The natural law of increase and the instincts of fam- 
 ily may produce tribes, and under rare and peculiar circum- 
 stances, settlements and neighborhoods : and conquest may form 
 empires. But without trade and literature, mutually commin- 
 gled, there can be no nation ; without commerce and science, 
 no bond of nations. As the one hath for its object the wants 
 of the body, real or artificial, the desires for which are for the 
 greater part, nay, as far as respects the origination of trade 
 and commerce, altogether excited from without ; so the other 
 bas for its origin, as well as for its object, the wants of the mind.
 
 445 
 
 the gratification of which is a natural and necessary condition of 
 its growth and sanity. And the man (or the nation, considered 
 according to its predominant character as one man) may be re- 
 garded under these circumstances, as acting in two forms of me- 
 thod, inseparably co-existent, yet producing very different effects 
 according as one or the other obtains the primacy.* x\s is the 
 rank assigned to each in the theory and practice of the governing 
 classes, and, according to its prevalence in forming the foundation 
 of their public habits and opinions, so will be the outward and 
 inward life of the people at large : such will the nation be. 
 In tracing the epochs, and alternations of their relative sover- 
 eignty or subjection, consists the Philosophy of History. In 
 the power of distinguishing and appreciating their several re- 
 sults consists the historic Sense. And that under the ascen- 
 dency of the mental and moral character the commercial rela- 
 tions may thrive to the utmost desirable point, while the re- 
 verse is ruinous to both, and sooner or later effectuates the fall 
 or debasement of the country itself — this is the richest truth 
 obtained for mankind by historic Research : though unhappily 
 it is the truth, to which a rich and commercial nation listens 
 with most reluctance and receives with least faith. Where 
 the brain and the immediate conductors of its influence re- 
 main healthy and vigorous, the defects and diseases of the eye 
 will most often admit either of a cure or a substitute. And so 
 is it with the outward prosperity of a state, where the well-be- 
 ing of the people posesses the primacy in the aims of the 
 governing classes, and in the public feeling. But what avails 
 the perfect state of the eye, 
 
 Tho' clear 
 To outward view of blemish or of spot, 
 
 where the optic nerve is paralyzed by a pressure on the brain ? 
 And even so is it not only with the well-being, but ultimately 
 with the prosperity of a people, where the former is consider- 
 ed (if it be considered at all) as subordinate and secondary to 
 wealth and revenue. 
 
 In the pursuits of commerce the man is called into action 
 
 * The senses, the memory, and the nnderstaiiding (i. e. tlie retentive, reflec- 
 tive, and judicial functions of his mind) l)eing common to both methods.
 
 446 
 
 from without, in order to appropriate the outward world, as far 
 as he can bring it within his reach, to the purposes of his sen- 
 ses and sensual nature. His ultimate end is — appearance and 
 enjoAMiient. Where on the other hand the nurture and evolu- 
 tion of humanity is the final aim, there will soon be seen a 
 general tendency toward, an earnest seeking after, some ground 
 common to the w'orld and to man, therein to find the one prin- 
 ciple of permanence and identity, the rock of strength and re- 
 fuge, to which the soul may cling amid the fleeting surge-like 
 objects of the senses. Disturbed as by the obscure quickening 
 of an inward birth ; made restless by swarming thoughts, that, 
 like bees when they first miss the queen and mother of the 
 hive, with vain discursion seek each in the other what is 
 the common need of all ; man sallies forth into nature — in na- 
 ture, as in the shadows and reflections of a clear river, to dis- 
 cover the originals of the forms presented to hira in his own 
 intellect. Over these shadows, as ii they were the substantial 
 powers and presiding spirits of the stream. Narcissus like, he 
 hangs delighted : till finding nowhere a representative of that 
 free agency w'hich yet is a fact of immediate consciousness 
 sanctioned and made fearfully significant by his prophetic con- 
 science, he learns at last that what he seeks he has left behind 
 and but lengthens the distance as he prolongs the search. Un- 
 der the tutorage of scientific analysis, haply first given to him 
 by express revelation (e ccelo descendit, rNQQI liEATTON) he 
 separates the relations that are wholly the creatures of his 
 own abstracting and comparing intellect, and at once discovers 
 and recoils from the discovery, that the reality, the objective 
 truth, of the objects he has been adoring, derives its whole 
 and sole evidence from an obscure sensation, which he isalike 
 unable to resist or to comprehend, which compels him to con- 
 template as without and independent of himself what yet he 
 could not contemplate at all, were it not a modification of his 
 nwn beinK. ■ 
 
 'O* 
 
 Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own ; 
 Yearnings she liath in her own natural kiud, 
 And, even with something of a Mother's mind, 
 And no unworthy aim, 
 The homely Nurse doth all she can 
 To make her Foster-child, hor Inmate Man, 
 Forget the glories lie Ijath known,
 
 447 
 
 And tliat iniporial palace whence he came. 
 
 * * * * * 
 
 O joy ! that in our embers 
 Is something that doth liv^e, 
 Tliat nature yet remembers 
 What was so fugitive ! 
 
 The thought of our past years in me doth breed 
 Peqietual benedictions : not indeed 
 For that which is most worthy to be blest ; 
 Delight and liberty, the simple creed 
 Of childhood, whether busy or at rest, 
 With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast : — 
 Not for these I raise 
 The song of thanks and praise , 
 But for those obstinate questionings 
 Of sense and outwaid things, 
 Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
 Blank misgivings of a Creature 
 Moving about in worlds not realized, 
 High instincts, before which our mortal Nature 
 Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprized ! 
 But for those first affections, 
 Those shadowy recollections, 
 
 Which, be they what they may. 
 Are yet the fountain light of all our day. 
 Are yet a master light of all our seeing ; 
 
 Uphold us — cherish — and have ]50wer to make 
 Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
 Of the eternal Silence : truths that wake. 
 
 To perish never ; 
 Which neither hstlessness, nor mad endeavour, 
 
 Nor Man nor Boy, 
 Nor all tliat is at enmity with joy. 
 Can utterly abolish or destroy! 
 
 Hence, in a season of calm weather. 
 Though inland fiir we be. 
 Our soids have sight of that immortal sea 
 Which brought us hither ; 
 Can in a moment travel thither — 
 And see the Children sjjort upon the shore. 
 And hear the mighty waters rolhng evermore. 
 
 Wordsworth. * 
 
 * During my residence ui Rome I had the pleasure of reciting this sublime 
 ode to the illustrious Baron Von Humboldt, then the Prussian minister at the 
 papa] court, and now at the court of St. James's. By those who knew and
 
 448 
 
 Long indeed will man strive to satisfy the inward querist with 
 the phrase, laws of nature. But though the individual may rest 
 content with the seemly metaphor, the race cannot. If a law 
 of nature he a mere generalization, it is included in the above 
 as an act of the mind. But if it be other and more, and yet 
 manifestable only in and to an intelligent spirit, it must in act 
 and substance be itself spiritual : for things utterly heteroge- 
 neous can have no intercommunion. In order therefore to the 
 recognition of himself in nature man must first learn to com- 
 prehend nature in himself, and its laws in the ground of his 
 own existence. Then only can he reduce Phsenomenato Prin- 
 ciples — then only will he have achieved the method, the self- 
 unravelling clue, which alone can securely guide him to the 
 conquest of the former — when he has discovered in the basis 
 of their union the necessity of their differences ; in the prin- 
 ciple of their continuance the solution of their changes. It is 
 the idea of the common centre, of the universal law, by which 
 all power manifests itself in opposite yet interdependent forces 
 (t) ya^ ATA2 a;i ira^a Movcc5i xa&rjra;, y.ai vos^aig c.g'^a'TfTEi roaaic: ) that en- 
 lightening enquiry, multiplying experiment, and at once inspir- 
 ing humility and perseverance will lead him to comprehend 
 gradually and progressively the relation of each to the other, 
 of each to all, and of all to each. 
 
 Such is the second of the two possible directions in which 
 the activity of man propels itself: and either in one or other 
 of the sechannels — or in some one of the rivulets which not with- 
 standing their occasional refluence (and though, as in successive 
 schematisms of Becher, Stahl, and Lavoisier, the varying stream 
 
 honored both the brothers, tl)e talents of the ])lenipotenti<'xry were held equal 
 to those of the scientific traveller, his judgment superior. I can only say, that 
 I know few Englishmen, whom I could compare with him in the extensive 
 knowledge and just ai)preciation of English literature and its various epochs. 
 He listened to the ode with evident delight, and as evidently not wi hoiit sur- 
 prise, and at the close of the recitation exclaimed, " And is this the work of a 
 living English poet? I should have attributed it to the age of Elizabeth not 
 that 1 recollect any writer, whose style it resembles ; but rather with wonder; 
 that so great and original a poet should have escaped my notice." — Often as I 
 repeat passages from it 1o myself" I recur to the words of Dante: 
 
 Canzon ! io eredo, che saraimo radi 
 
 Che tua ragione bene intenderanno : 
 
 Tanto lor sei faticoso ed alto.
 
 449 
 
 may for a time appear to comprehend and inisle some particular 
 department of knowledge which even then it only peninsulates) 
 are yet flowing towards this mid channel, and will ultimately fall 
 into it — all intellectual method has its bed, its banks, and its 
 line of progression. For be it not forgotten, that this discourse is 
 confnied to the evolutions and ordonnance of knowledge, as pre- 
 scribed by the constitution of the human intellect. Whether there 
 be a correspondent reality, whether the Knowing of the Mind 
 has its correlative in the Being of Nature, doubts may be felt. 
 Never to have felt them, would indeed betray an unconscious 
 unbelief, which traced to its extreme roots will be seen ground- 
 ed in a latent disbelief. How should it not be so ? if to conquer 
 these doubts, and out of the confused multiplicity of seeing with 
 which " the films of corruption" bewilder us, and out of the 
 unsubstantial shows of existence, which, like the shadow of an 
 eclipse, or the chasms in the sun's atmosphere, are but nega- 
 tions of sight, to attain that singleness of eye, with which ^^ the 
 whole body shall be full of light,'''' be the purpose, the means, 
 and the end of our probation, the method which is "profitable 
 to all things, and hath the promise in this life and in the life to 
 come!" Imagine the unlettered African, or rude yet musing 
 Indian, poring over an illumined manuscript of the inspired vo- 
 lume, with the vague yet deep impression that his fates aud for- 
 tunes are in some unknown manner connected with its contents. 
 Every tint, every group of characters has its several dream. 
 Say that after long and dissatisfying toils, he begins to sort, 
 first the paragraphs that appear to resemble each other, then 
 the lines, the words — nay, that he has at length discovered that 
 the whole is formed by the recurrence and interchanges of a 
 limited number of cyphers, letters, marks, and points, which, 
 however, in the very height and utmost perfection of his attain- 
 ment, he makes twenty fold more numerous than they are, by 
 classing every different form of the same character, intentional 
 or accidental, as a separate element. And the whole is with- 
 out soul or substance, a talisman of superstition, a mockery of 
 science : or employed perhaps at last to feather the arrows of 
 death, or to shine and flutter amid the plumes of savage vanityj 
 The poor Indian too truly represents the state of learned and 
 systematic ignorance — arrangement guided by the light of no 
 leading idea, mere orderliness without method ! 
 
 But see ! the friendly missionary arrives. He explains to him 
 57
 
 450 
 
 the nature of written words, translates them for him into his 
 native sounds, and thence into the thoughts of his heart — how 
 many of these thoughts then first evolved into consciousness, 
 which yet the awakening disciple receives, and not as aliens ! 
 Henceforward, the book is unsealed for him ; the depth is 
 opened out ; he communes with the spirit of the volume as a 
 living oracle. The words become transparent, and he sees 
 them as though he saw them not. 
 
 We have thus delineated the two great directions of man 
 and society with their several objects and ends. Concerning 
 the conditions and principles of method appertaining to each, 
 we have affirmed (for the facts hitherto adduced have been ra- 
 ther for illustration than for evidence, to make our position 
 distinctly understood rather than to enforce the conviction of 
 its truth ) that in both there must be a mental antecedent ; but 
 that in the one it may be an image or conception received 
 through the senses, and originating from without, the inspirit- 
 ing passion or desire being alone the immediate and proper 
 offspring of the mind ; while in the other the initiative thought, 
 the intellectual seed, must itself have its birth-place within, 
 whatever excite ;ent from without may be necessary for its 
 germination. Will the soul thus awakened neglect or under- 
 value the outward and conditional causes of her growth ? For 
 rather, might we dare borrow a wild fancy from the Mantuan 
 bard, or the poet of Arno, will it be with her, as if a stem or 
 trunk, suddenly endued with sense and reflection, should con- 
 template its green shoots, their leaflets and budding blossoms, 
 wondered at as then .first noticed, but welcomed nevertheless 
 as its own growth : while yet with undiminished gratitude, and 
 a deepend sense of dependency, it would bless the dews and 
 the sunshine from without, deprived of the awakening and fos- 
 tering excitement of which, its own productivity would have 
 remained for ever hidden from itself, or felt only as the ob- 
 scure trouble of a bafiled instinct. 
 
 Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of ex- 
 istence, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast 
 thou ever said to thyself thougiitfully, it is ! heedless in that 
 moment, whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a 
 grain of sand ? Without reference, in short, to this or that par- 
 ticular mode or form of existence ? If thou hast indeed at- 
 tained 10 this, thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery,
 
 451 
 
 which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder. The ve- 
 ry words, There is nothing ! or, There was a time, when there 
 was nothing ! are self-contradictory. There is that within us 
 which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous 
 light, as if it bore evidence aginst the fact in the right of its 
 own eternity. 
 
 Not TO BE, then, is impossible : TO, BE, incomprehensi- 
 ble. If thou hast mastered this intuition of absolute existence, 
 thou wilt have learnt likewise, that it was this, and no other, 
 which in the earlier ages seized the nobler minds, the elect 
 among men, with a sort of sacred horror. This it was which 
 fust caused them to feel within themselves a something ineffa- 
 bly greater than their own individual nature. It was this 
 which, raising them aloft, and projecting them to an ideal dis- 
 tance from themselves, prepared them to become the lights and 
 awakening voices of other men, the founders of law and re- 
 ligion, the educators and foster-gods of mankind. The power, 
 which evolved this idea of Being, Being in its essence, Be- 
 ing limitless, comprehending its own limits in its dilatation, 
 and condensing itself into its own apparent mounds — how shall 
 we name it? The idea itself, which like a mighty billow at 
 once overwhelnjs and bears aloft — what is it ? Whence did it 
 come ? In vain would we derive it from the organs of sense : 
 for these supply only surfaces, undulations, phantoms ! In vain 
 from tiie instruments of sensation : for these furnish only the 
 chaos, the shapeless elements of sense ! And least of all may 
 we hope to find its origin, or sufficient cause, in the moulds 
 and mechanism of the understanding, the whole purport and 
 functions of which consists in individualization, in outlines and 
 differ encings by quantity, quality and relation. It were wiser 
 to seek substance in shadow, than absolute fulness in mere ne- 
 gation. 
 
 We have asked then for its birth-place in all that constitutes 
 our relative individuality, in all that each man calls exclusively 
 himself. It is an alien of which they know not : and for them 
 the question itself is purposeless, and the very words that con- 
 vey it are as sounds in an unknown language, or as the vision 
 of heaven and earth expanded by the rising sun, which falls 
 but as warmth on the eye-lids of the blind. To no class of 
 phenomena or particulars can it be referred, itself being none : 
 therefore, to no faculty by which these alone are apprehend-
 
 453 
 
 ed. As little dare we refer it to any form of abstraction or gen- 
 eralization : for it has neither co-ordinate or analogon ! It is ab- 
 solutely one, and that it is, and affirms itself to be, is its only 
 predicate. And yet this power nevertheless, is! In eminence 
 of Being it IS ! And he for whom it manifests itself in its 
 adequate idea, dare as little arrogate it to himself as his own, 
 can as little appropriate it either totally or by partition, as he 
 can claim owneiship in the breathing air, or make an enclo- 
 sure in the cope of heaven.* He bears witness of it to his 
 own mind, even as he describes life and light : and, with the 
 silence' of light, it describes itself and dwells in us only as far 
 as we dwell in it. The truths which it manifests are such as 
 it alone can manifest, and in all truth it manifests itself. By 
 what name then canst thou call a truth so manifested ? Is it 
 not REVELATION ? Ask thysclf whether thou canst attach to 
 that latter word any consistent meaning not included in the 
 idea of the former. And the manifesting power, the source 
 and the correlative of the idea thus manifested — is it not GOD .'' 
 Either thou knowest it to be GOD, or thou hast called an idol 
 by that awful name ! Therefore in the most appropriate, no 
 less than in the highest, sense of the word were the earliest 
 teachers of humanity inspired. They alone were the true seers 
 of GOD, and therefore prophets of the human race. 
 
 Look round you and you behold every where an adaptation 
 of means to ends. Meditate on the nature of a Being whose 
 ideas are creative, and consetjuently more real, more substan- 
 tial than the things that, at the height of their creaturely state, 
 aie but their dim reflexes :f and the intuitive conviction will a- 
 
 *Sec p. 11 — 19 of the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual ; and p. 47 — 
 59 of the second Lat-Sermon. 
 
 f If we may not rathei- resem])le them to the resurgent ashes, with which 
 (according to the tales of the later alchemists) the substantial forms of bird 
 and flower made themselves visible, 
 
 '/2c Tu y.dxtfg "vh]g fiXagi]' /taia )(g7]gu y.itl eaO^lu'. 
 
 A.nd let me be permitted to add, in especial reference to this passage, a pre- 
 monition quoted from the same work (Zoroastri Oracula, Francisci Patririi) 
 
 "A Nov~; IsyPt, tco voo'vi'Tt d)f nn leys v. 
 
 Of the flower apparitions so solemnly aflii-med by Sir K. Bigby, Kcrcher, 
 Ilclmont, &:r. see a full and most interesting account in Southey's Omniana, 
 with a probable solution of this chemical marvel.
 
 453 
 
 rise that in such a Being there could exist no motive to the cre- 
 ation of a machine for its own sake ; that therefore, the mate- 
 rial work! must have been made for the sake of man, at once 
 the high-priest and representative of the Creator, as far as he 
 partakes of that reason in which the essences of all things co- 
 exist in all their distinctions yet as one and indivisible. But 
 I speak of man in his idea, and as subsumed in (he divine hu- 
 manity, in whom alone God loved the world. 
 
 If then in all inferior things, from the grass on the house top 
 to the giant tree of the forest, to the eagle which builds in its 
 summit, and the elephant which browses on its branches, we 
 behold — first, a subjection to the universal laws by which each 
 thing belongs to the Whole, as interpenetrated by the powers 
 of the Whole ; and, secondly the intervention of particular 
 laws by which the universal laws are suspended or tempered 
 for the weal and sustenance of each particular class, and by 
 which each species, and each individual of every species, be- 
 comes a system in and for itself, a world of its own — if we 
 behold this economy everywhere in the irrational creation, 
 shall we not hold it probable that a similar temperament of uni- 
 versal and general laws by an adequate intervention of appro- 
 priate agency, will have been effected for the permanent inter- 
 est of the creature destined to move progressively towards that 
 divine idea which we have learnt to contemplate as the final 
 cause of all creation, and the centre in which all its lines con- 
 verge ? 
 
 To discover the mode of intervention requisite for man's de- 
 velopement and progression, we must seek then for some gen- 
 eral law by the untempered and uncounteracted action of which 
 both would be prevented and endangered. But this we shall 
 find in that law of his understanding and fancy, by which he is 
 impelled to abstract the outward relations of matter and to ar- 
 range these phenomena in time and space, under' the form of 
 causes and eff"ects. And this was necessary, as being the con- 
 dition under which alone experience and intellectual growth 
 are possible. But, on the other hand, by the same law he is 
 inevitably tempted to misinterpret a constant precedence into 
 positive causation, and thus to break and scatter the one divine 
 and invisible lii'e of nature into countless idols of the sense ; 
 and falling prostrate before lifeless images, the creatures of his 
 own abstraction, is himself sensualized, and becomes a slave
 
 454 
 
 to the things of which he was formed to be the conqueror and 
 sovereign. From the fetisch of the imbruted African to the 
 soul debasing errors of the proud fact-hunting materialist we 
 may trace the various ceremonials of the same idolatry, and 
 shall find selfishness, hate and servitude as the results. If, 
 therefore, by the over-ruling and suspension of the phantom- 
 cause of this superstition ; if by separating effects from their 
 natural antecedents ; if by presenting the phenomena of time (as 
 far as is possible) in the absolute forms of eternity ; the nurs- 
 ling of experience should, in the early period of his pupilage, 
 be compelled, by a more impressive experience, to seek in the 
 invisible life alone for the true cause and invisible Nexus of the 
 things that are seen, we shall not demand the evidences of or- 
 dinary experience for that which, if it ever existed, existed as 
 its antithesis and for its counteraction. Was it an appropriate 
 mean to a necessary end ? Has it been attested by lovers of 
 truth ; has it been believed by lovers of wisdom ? Do we see 
 throughout all nature the occasional intervention of particular 
 agencies in counter-check of universal laws? (And of what 
 other definition is a miracle susceptible ?) These are the ques- 
 tions : and if to these our answer must be affirmative, then we 
 too will acquiesce in the traditions of humanity, and yielding, 
 as to a high interest of our own being, will discipline ourselves 
 to the reverential and kindly faith, that the guides and teachers 
 of mankind were the hands of power, no less than the voices 
 of inspiration : and little anxious concerning the particular 
 forms and circumstances of each manifestation we will give an 
 histoiic credence to the historic fact, that men sent by God 
 have come with signs and wonders on the earth. 
 
 If it be objected, that in nature, as distinguished from man, 
 this intervention of particular laws is, or with the increase of 
 science will be, resolvable into the universal laws which they 
 had appeared to counterbalance — we will reply : Even so it 
 may be in the case of miracles ; but wisdom forbids her children 
 to antedate their knowledge, or to act and feel otherwise, or 
 further than they know. But should that time arrive, the sole 
 difference, that could result Irom such an enlargement of our 
 view, would be this : that what we now consider as miracles 
 in opposition to ordinary experience, we should then reverence 
 with a yet higher devotion as harmonious parts of one great 
 complex miracle, when the antithesis between experience and
 
 455 
 
 belief would itself be taken up into the unity of intuitive rea- 
 son. 
 
 And what purpose o{ philosophy can this acqiescence answer ? 
 A gracious purpose, a most valuable end : if it prevent the en- 
 ergies of philosophy from being idly wasted, by removing the 
 opposition without confounding the distinction between philoso- 
 phy and faith. The philosopher will remain a man in sympa- 
 thy with his fellow men. The head will not be disjoined from 
 the heart, nor will speculative truth be alienated from practical 
 wisdom. And vainly without the union of both shall we ex- 
 pect an opening of the inward eye to the glorious vision of 
 that existence which admits of no question out of itself, ac- 
 knowledges no predicate but the I AM IN THAT I AM ! 
 0aufJ!.a^ovT£g (piXorfocpSfxev (piXorfoip'Jja'avTSg Sa|x/3S(xsv. \\\ wonder [tco "^om- 
 (jia^siv) says Aristotle does philosophy begin : and in astound- 
 ment (tm aajx/Ssiv) says Plato, does all true philosophy .^nisA-. As 
 every faculty, with every the minutest organ of our nature, 
 owes its whole reality and comprehensibility to an existence 
 incomprehensible and groundless, because the ground of all 
 comprehension : not without the union of all that is essential 
 in all the functions of our spirit, not without an emotion tran- 
 quil from its very intensity, shall we worthily contemplate in 
 the magnitude and integrity of the world that life-ebullient 
 stream which breaks through every momentary embankment, 
 again, indeed, and evermore to embank itself, but within no 
 banks to stagnate or be imprisoned. 
 
 But here it behooves us to bear in mind, that all true reality 
 has both its ground and its evidence in the will, without which 
 as its complement science ilself is but an elaborate game of 
 shadows, begins in abstractions and ends in perplexity. For 
 considered merely intellectually, individuality, as individuality, 
 is only conceivable as with and in the Universal and Infinite, 
 neither before or after it. No transition is possible from one 
 to the other, as from the architect to the house, or the watch to 
 its maker. The finite form can neither be laid hold of, nor is 
 it any thing of itself real, but merely an apprehension, a frame- 
 work which the human imagination forms by its own limits, as 
 the foot measures itself on the snow; and the sole truth of 
 which we must again refer to the divine imagination, in virtue 
 of its omniformity ; even as thou art capable of beholding the 
 transparent air as little during the absence as during the pre-
 
 456 
 
 sence of light, so canst thou behold the finite things as actually 
 existing neither with nor without the substance. Not without, 
 for then the forms cease to be, and are lost in night. Not 
 with it, for it is the light, the substance shining through it, 
 which thou canst alone really see. 
 
 The ground-work, therefore, of all true philosophy is the full 
 apprehension of the difference between the contemplation of 
 reason, namely, that intuition of things, which arises when we 
 possess ourselves, as one with the whole, which is substantial 
 knowledge, and that which presents itself when transferring 
 reality to the negations of reality, to the evervarying frame- 
 work of the uniform life, we think of ourselves as separated 
 beings, and place nature in antithesis to the mind, as object to 
 subject, thing to thought, death to life. This is abstract know- 
 ledge, or the science of mere understanding. By the former, 
 we know that existence is its own predicate, self-affirmation, 
 the one attribute in which all others are contained, not as parts, 
 but as manifestations. It is an eternal and infinite self-rejoi- 
 cing, self-loving, with a joy unfathomable, with a love all com- 
 prehensive. It is absolute ; and the absolute is neither singly 
 that which affirms, nor that which is affirmed ; but the identity 
 and living copula of both. 
 
 On the other hand, the abstract knowledge which belongs to 
 us as finite beings, and which leads to a science of delusion 
 then only, when it would exist for itself instead of being the 
 instrument of the former — instead of being, as it were, a trans- 
 lation of the living word into a dead language, for the purpos- 
 es of memory, arrangement, and general communication — it is 
 by this abstract knowledge that the understanding distinguishes 
 the affirmed from the affirming. Well if it distinguish without 
 dividing ! Well ! if by distinction it add clearness to fulness, 
 and prepare for the intellectual re-union of the all in one, in 
 that eternal reason whose fullness hath no opacity, whose 
 transparency hath no vacuum. 
 
 Thus we prefaced our inquiry into the Science of Method 
 with a principle deeper than science, more certain than demon- 
 stration. For that the very ground, saith Aristotle, is ground- 
 less or self-grounded, is an identical proposition. From the in- 
 demonstrable flows the sap, that circulates through every branch 
 and spray of the demonstration. To this principle we referred 
 the choice of the final object, the control over time — or, to
 
 457 
 
 comprize all in one, the Method of the will. From this Wv 
 started (or rather seemed to start: for it still moved before us, 
 as an invisible guardian and guide), and it is this whose re-ap- 
 pearance announces the conclusion of our circuit, and wel- 
 comes us at our goal. Yea (saith an enlightened physician), 
 there is but one principle, which alone reconciles the man with 
 himself, with others and with the world ; which regulates all 
 relations, tempers all passions, and gives power to overcome or 
 support all suffering ; and which is not to be shaken by aught 
 earthly, for it belongs not to the earth — namely, the principle 
 of religion, the living and substantial faith "which passeth all 
 understanding^'''' as the cloud piercing rock, which overhangs 
 the strong-hold of which it had been the quarry and remains 
 the foundation. This elevation of the spirit above the sem- 
 blances of custom and the senses to a world of spirit, this life 
 in the idea, even in the supreme and godlike, which alone 
 merits the name of life, and without which our organic life is 
 but a state of somnambulism ; this it is which affords the sole 
 sure anchorage in the storm, and at the same time the substan- 
 tiating principle of all true wisdom, the satisfactory solution of 
 all the contradictions of human nature, of the whole riddle of 
 the world. This alone belongs to and speaks intelligibly to all 
 alike, the learned and the ignorant, if but the heart listens. 
 For alike present in all, it may be awakened, but it cannot be 
 given. But let it not be supposed, that it is a sort of knowl- 
 edge : No ! it is a form of being, or indeed it is the only 
 knowledge that truly ««, and all other science is real only as 
 far as it is symbolical of this. The material universe, saith a 
 Greek pjiiloscpher, is but one vast con)plex Mythos (i. e. 
 symbolical representation) : and mythology the apex and com- 
 plement of all genuine physiology. But as this principle can- 
 not be implanted by the discipline of logic, so neither can it be 
 excited or evolved by the arts of rhetoric. For it is an immu- 
 table truth, that what comes fkom the heart that alone 
 
 GOES TO the heart : WHAT PROCEEDS FROM A DIVINE IM- 
 PULSE, THAT THE GODLIKE ALONE CAN AWAKEN. 
 
 68
 
 THE 
 
 THIRD 
 
 L. A N D I N G-P LACE: 
 
 OR 
 
 ESSAYS 
 MISCELLANEOUS. 
 
 Etiam a musis si quando animum paulieper abducamus, apud Musas nihil- 
 ominus feriamur; at reclines quidem, at otiosas, at de his et illis inter se libe- 
 ra colloquentes.
 
 ESSAY 1. 
 
 Fortuna plerurnque est veluti 
 
 Galaxia qiiarundarn obscurarum 
 
 Viftutum sine nomine. Verulam. 
 
 (Translation.) — Fortune is for tJie most part but a galaxy or milky way, as it 
 were, of certain obscure virtues without a name. 
 
 ^^ Does fortune favor fools? or how do you explain the ori- 
 gin of the proverb, which, differently worded, is to be found 
 in all the languages of Europe ?" 
 
 This proverb admits of various explanations, according to 
 the mood of mind in which it is used. It may arise from pity, 
 and the soothing persuasion that Providence is eminently 
 watchful over the helpless, and extends an especial care to 
 those who are not capable of caring for themselves. So used, 
 it breathes the same feeling as " God tempers the wind to the 
 shorn lamb" — or, the more sportive adage, that " the fairies 
 take care of children and tipsy folk." The persuasion itself, in 
 addition to the general religious feeling of mankind, and the 
 scarcely less general love of the marvellous, may be account- 
 ed for from our tendency to exaggerate all effects, that seem 
 disproportionate to their visible cause, and all circumstances 
 that are in any way strongly contrasted with our notions of the 
 persons under them. Secondly, it arises from the safety and 
 success which an ignorance of danger and difficulty sometimes 
 actually assists in procuring ; inasmuch as it precludes the 
 despondence, which might have kept the more foresighted from 
 undertaking the enterprize, the depression which would retard 
 its progress, and those overwhelming influences of terror in 
 cases where the vivid perception of the danger constitutes the 
 greater part of the danger itself. Thus men are said to have 
 swooned and even died at the sight of a narrow bridge, ov»r
 
 462 
 
 which they had rode, the night hefoie, in perfect safety ; or at 
 tracing the footmarks along the edge of a precipice which the 
 darkness had concealed from them. A more obscure cause, 
 yet not wholly to be omitted, is afforded by the undoubted fact, 
 that the exertion of the reasoning faculties tends to extinguish 
 or bedim those mysterious instincts of skill, which, though for 
 the most part latent, we nevertheless possess in common with 
 other animals. 
 
 Or the proverb may be used invidiously : and folly in the 
 vocabulary of envy or baseness may signify courage and mag- 
 nanimity. Hardihood and fool-hardiness are indeed as different 
 as green and yellow, yet will appear the same to the jaundiced 
 eye. Courage multiplies the chances of success by sometimes 
 making opportunities, and always availing itself of them : and 
 in this sense fortune may be said to favor fools by those, who, 
 however prudent in their own opinion, are deficient in valor 
 and enterprize. Again : an eminently good and wise man, 
 for whom the praises of the judicious have procured a high 
 reputation even with the world at large, proposes to himself 
 certain objects, and, adapting the right means to the right 
 end, attains them ; but his objects not being what the world 
 calls fortune, neither money nor artificial rank, his admitted 
 inferiors in moral and intellectual worth, but more prosperous 
 in their wordly concerns, are said to have been favored by for- 
 tune and he slighted : although the fools did tlie same in their 
 line as the w ise man in his ; they adapted the appropriate 
 means to the desired end and so succeeded. In this sense 
 the proverb is current by a misuse, or a catachresis at least, of 
 both the words, fortune and fools. 
 
 How seldom friend ! a good great man inherits 
 Honor or wealth with all his worth and pains ! 
 It sounds, like stories from the land of spirits, 
 if any man obtain that which he merits, 
 Or any merit that which be obtains. 
 
 REPLY. 
 
 For shame, dear friend ! renounce this canting strain 
 What would'st thou have a good gi*eal man obtain .' 
 Place? titles ? salaiy ? a gilded chain.'' 
 Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain ? 
 Greatness ^nd goo.lness ai'e iiot means but cnda! 
 Ilath he not always treasures, always friend%
 
 463 
 The good great man? Threo treasures, love and 
 
 LIGHT, 
 
 And CALM THOUGHTS fcgular as infant's hreatli : 
 
 J And three firm friends, more sure than day and uight^ 
 
 Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death. 
 
 s. T, c. 
 
 But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached 
 to fortune, distinct both from prudence and from cour- 
 age ; and distinct too from that absence of depressing or 
 bewildering passions, which (according to my favorite pro- 
 verb, " extremes meet,") the fool not seldom obtains in 
 as great perfection by his ignorance, as the wise man by 
 the highest energies of thought and self-discipline. Luck 
 has a real existence in human affairs from the infinite number 
 of powers, that are in action at the same time, and from the 
 co-existence of things contingent and accidental (such as to 
 MS at least are accidental) with the regular appearances and 
 general laws of nature. A familiar instance will make these 
 words intelligible. The moon waxes and wanes according to 
 a necessary law. — The clouds likewise, and all the manifold 
 appearances connected with them, are governed by certain laws 
 no less than the phases of the moon. But the laws which de- 
 termine the latter, are known and calculable : while those of 
 the former are hidden from us. At all events, the number and 
 variety of their effects baffle our powers of calculation : and 
 that the sky is clear or obscured at any particular time, we 
 speak of, in common language, as a matter of accident. Well ! 
 at the time of full moon, but when the sky is completely cov- 
 ered with black clouds, I am walking on in the dark, aware of 
 no particular danger : a sudden gust of wind rends the cloud 
 for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses to me a chasm 
 or precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced my 
 foot. This is what is meant by luck, and according to the more 
 or less serious mood or habit of our mind we exclaim, how 
 lucky I or, how providential ! The co-presence of numberless 
 phsenomena, which from the complexity or subtlety of their 
 determining causes are called contingencies , and the co-exis- 
 tence of these with any regular or necessaiy phaenomenon (as 
 the clouds with the moon for instance) occasion coincidences^ 
 which, when they are attended by any advantage or injury, 
 and are at the same time incapable of being calculated or fore- 
 seen by human prudence, fori© good or ill luck. On a hot 
 sunshiny afternoon came on a sudden storm and spoilt the far-
 
 464 
 
 raer's hay : and this is called ill luck. We will suppose the 
 event to take place, when meteorology shall have been perfect- 
 ed into a science, provided with unerring instruments; but 
 which the farmer had neglected to examine. This is no longer 
 ill luck, but imprudence. Now apply this to our proverb. 
 Unforeseen coincidences may have greatly helped a man, yet if 
 they have done for him only what possibly from his own abili- 
 ities he might have effected for himself, his good luck will ex- 
 cite less attention and the instances be less remembered. 
 That clever men should attain their objects seems natural, and 
 we neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that suc- 
 cess of themselves without the intervention cf skill or foresight ; 
 but we dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, 
 when the same happens to a weak or ignorant man. So too, 
 though the latter should fail in his undertakings from concur- 
 rences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his 
 failure being no more than might have been expected and ac- 
 counted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but 
 fleets away among the other undistinguished waves in which the 
 stream of ordinary ilfe murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had 
 it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-em- 
 bracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the 
 art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one great 
 constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion and the 
 power of prophecy ; if these discoveries, instead of having been 
 as they really were preconcerted by meditation, and evolved 
 out of his own intellect, had occured by a set of lucky accidents 
 to the illustrious father and founder of philosopic alchemy ; if 
 they had presented themselves to Professor Davy exclusively 
 in consequence of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic 
 battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was concerned, had 
 itself been an accident^ and not (as in point of fact it was) 
 desired and obtained by him for the purpose of ensuring the 
 testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind 
 down material nature under the inquisition of reason, and force 
 from her, as by torture, unequivocal answer io prepared and pre- 
 conceived questions — ^yet still they would not have been talked 
 of or described, as instances of luck^ but as the natural results 
 of his admitted genius and known skill. But should an acci- 
 dent have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Bir- 
 mingham or Sheffield, and if (he man should grow rich in con-
 
 4Go 
 
 sequence, and partly by the envy of his niegbors, and partly 
 with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par 
 in the general powers of his understanding ; then, " O what a 
 lucky fellow ! — Well, Fortune does favor fools — that's for cer- 
 tain ! — It is always so !" — And forthwith the exclaimer relates 
 half a dozen similar instances. Thus accumulating the one 
 sort of facts and never collecting the other, we do, as poets in 
 their diction, and quacks of all denominations do in their rea- 
 soning, put a part for the whole, and at once soothe our envy 
 and gratify our love of the marvellous, by the sweeping pro- 
 verb, " Fortune favors fools." 
 
 ESSAY II 
 
 Quod me non movet eestimationc : 
 Verum, est fivijfioovvov mei sodalis. 
 
 Catull xii. 
 
 (Translalion.) — It interested not by any conceit of its value ; but it is a 
 remembrance of my honored friend. 
 
 The philosophic ruler, who secured the favors of fortune by 
 seeking wisdom and knowledge in preference to them, has pa- 
 thetically observed — " The heart knoweth its own bitterness ; 
 and there is a joy in which the stranger intermeddleth not." 
 A simple question founded on a trite proverb, with a discur- 
 sive answer to it, would scarcely suggest, to an indifferent per- 
 son, any other notion than that of a mind at ease, amusing it- 
 self with its own activity. Once before (I believe about this 
 time last year) I had taken up the old memorandum book, from 
 which I transcribed the preceding Essay, and that had then 
 attracted my notice by the name oi the illustrious chemist 
 mentioned in the last illustration. Exasperated by the base 
 59
 
 4G6 
 
 and cowardly attempt, that had been made, to detract from the 
 honors due to his astonishing genius, I had slightly altered the 
 concluding sentences, substituting the more recent for his ear- 
 lier discoveries ; and without the most distant intention of pub- 
 lishing what I then wrote, I had expressed my own convictions 
 for the gratification of my own feelings, and finished by tran- 
 quilly paraphrasing into a chemical allegory ,the Homeric ad- 
 venture of Menelaus with Proteus. Oh ! with what difierent 
 feelings, with what a sharp and sudden emotion did I re-peruse 
 the same question yester-morning, having by accident opened 
 the book at the page, upon which it was written. I was mov- 
 ed : for it was Admiral Sir Alexander Ball, who first proposed 
 the question to me, and the particular satisfaction, which he 
 expressed, had occasioned me to note down the substance of 
 my reply. I was moved : because to this conversation, I was 
 indebted for the friendship and confidence with which he af- 
 terwards honored me ; and because it recalled the memory of 
 one of the most delightful mornings I ever passed ; when as 
 we were riding together, the same person related to me the 
 prnicipal events of his own life, and introduced them by ad- 
 verting to this conversation. It recalled too the deep impres- 
 sion left on my mind by that narrative, the impression, that I 
 had never known any analogous instance, in which a man so 
 successful, had been so little indebted to fortune, or lucky ac- 
 cidents, or so exclusively both the architect and builder of his 
 own success. The sum of his history may be comprised in this 
 one sentence : Hcee, sub numine, nobismet fecimus, sapientia 
 duce, fortuna permittente. (i. e. These things, under God, 
 we have done for ourselves, through the guidance of wisdom, 
 and with the permission of fortune.) Luck ^aye him nothing: 
 in her most generous moods, she only worked with him as 
 with a friend, not for him as for a fondling : but more often 
 she simply stood neuter and suff'ered him to work for himself. 
 Ah ! how could I be otherwise than affected, by whatever re- 
 minded me of that daily and familiar intercourse with him which 
 made the fifteen months from May 1801, to October 1805, in 
 many respects, the most memorable and instructive period of 
 my life ? — Ah ! how could I be otherwise than most deeply af- 
 fected : when there w^as still lying on ray table the paper which, 
 the day before, had conveyed to me the unexpected and most 
 awful tid'ngs of this man's death ! his death in the fulness of all
 
 467 
 
 his powers, in the rich autumn of ripe yet undecaying man- 
 hood! I once knew a lady, who after the loss of a lovely child con- 
 tinued for several days in a state of seeming indifference, the 
 weather, at the same time, as if in unison with her, being calm, 
 though gloomy : till one morning a burst of sunshine breaking 
 in upon her, and suddenly lighting up the room where she 
 was sitting, she dissolved at once into tears, and wept passion- 
 ately. In no verj- dissimilar manner, did the sudden gleam of 
 recollection at the sight of this memorandum act on myself. I 
 had been stunned by the intelligence, as by an outward blow, till 
 this trifling incident startled and disentranced me : (the sud- 
 den pang shivered through my whole frame : ) and if I repress- 
 ed the outward shows of sorrow, it was by force that I repres- 
 sed them, and because it is not by tears that I ought to mourn 
 for the loss of Sir Alexander Ball. 
 
 He was a man above his age : but for that very reason the age 
 has the more need to have the master-features of his character 
 portrayed and preserved. This I feel it my duty to attempt, 
 and this alone : for having received neither instructions nor 
 permission from the family of the deceased, I cannot think 
 myself allowed to enter into the particulars of his private his- 
 tory, strikingly as man}^ of them would illustrate the elements 
 and composition of his mind. For he was indeed a living con- 
 futation of the assertion attributed to the Prince of Conde, 
 that no man appeared great to his valet de chambre — a saying 
 which, I suspect, owes it's currency less to it's truth, than to 
 the envy of mankind and the misapplication of the word, great, 
 to actions unconnected with reason and free will. It will be 
 sufficient for my purpose to observe, that the purity and strict 
 propriety of his conduct, which precluded rather than silenced 
 calumny, the evenness of his temper and his attentive and af 
 fectionate manners, in private life, greatly aided and increased 
 his public utility : and, if it should please Providence, that a 
 portion of his spirit should descend with his mantle, the virtues 
 of Sir Alexander Ball, as a master, a husband, and a pa- 
 rent, will form a no less remarkable epoch in the moral history of 
 the Maltese than his wisdom, as a governor, has made in that 
 of their outward circumstances. That the private and per- 
 sonal qualities of a first magistrate should have political effects, 
 will appear strange to no reflecting Englishman, who has at- 
 tended to the workings of men's minds during the first ferment
 
 468 
 
 of revolutionary principles, and must therefore have witness- 
 ed the influence of our own sovereign's domestic character in 
 counteracting them. But in Malta there were circumstances 
 which rendered such an example peculiary requisite and bene- 
 ficent. The very existence, for so many generations, of an 
 Order of Lay Cselibates in that island, who abandoned even 
 the outward shows of an adherence to their vow of chastity, 
 must have had pernicious effects on the morals of the inhabi- 
 tants. But when it is considered too that the Knights of 
 Malta had been for the last fifty years or more a set of use- 
 less idlers, generally illiterate,* for they thought literature no 
 part of a soldier's excellence ; and yet effeminate, for they 
 were soldiers in name only : when it is considered, that they 
 were, morover, all of them aliens^ who looked upon them- 
 selves not merely as of a superior rank to the native nobles, 
 but as beings of a different race (I had almost said, species)^ 
 from the Maltese collectively ; and finally that these men pos- 
 sessed exclusively the government of the Island : it may be 
 safely concluded that they were little better than a perpetual 
 influenza, relaxing and diseasing the hearts of all the families 
 within their sphere of influence. Hence the peasantry, who 
 fortunately were below their reach, notwithstanding the more 
 than childish ignorance in which they were kept by their 
 priests, yet compared with the middle and higher classes, were 
 both in mind and body, as ordinary men compared with dwarfs. 
 Every respectable family had some one night for their patron, 
 as a matter of course ; and to him the honor of a sister or a 
 daughter was sacrificed, equally as a matter of course. But 
 why should I thus disguise the truth ? Alas ! in nine in- 
 stances out of ten, this patron was the common paramour of ev- 
 ery female in the family. Were I composing a state memo- 
 rial, I should abstain from all allusion to moral good or evil, 
 as not having now first to learn, that with diplomatists, and 
 
 *The personal effects of every kniglit were, after his death, appropriated to 
 the Order, and his books, if he had any, devolved to the i)iihlic library. 
 This library therefore, which has been accumulating from the time of their 
 first settlement in the island, is a fair criterion of the nature and degree of 
 their literary studies, as an average. Even in respect to works of military 
 science, it is contemptible — as the sole publicjibrary of so numerous and 
 opulent an order, most contemptible — ard in all other departments of litera- 
 ture it is below contempt.
 
 469 
 
 with practical statesmen of every denomination, it would pre- 
 clude all attention to its other contents, and have no result but 
 that of securing for its author's name the official private mark of 
 exclusion or dismission, as a weak or suspicious person. But 
 among those for whom I am novv writing, there are, I trust, 
 many who will think it not the feeblest reason for rejoicing in 
 our possession of Malta, and not the least worthy motive for 
 wishing its retention, that one source of human misery and cor- 
 ruption has been dried up. Such persons will hear the name 
 of Sir Alexander Ball with additional reverence, as of one 
 who has made the protection of Great Britain a double bless- 
 ing to the Maltese, and broken, " the bonds of iniquity'''' as 
 well as unlocked the fetters of political oppression. 
 
 When we are praising the departed by our own fire-sides, 
 we dwell most fondly on those qualities which had won our 
 personal affection, and which sharpen our individual regrets. 
 But when impelled by a loftier and more meditative sorrow, 
 we would raise a public monument to their memory, we praise 
 them appropriately when we relate their actions faithfully : 
 and thus preserving their example for the imitation of the liv- 
 ing, alleviate the loss, while we demonstrate its magnitude. 
 My funeral eulogy of Sir Alexander Ball, must therefore be a 
 narrative of his life : and this friend of mankind will be de- 
 frauded of honor in proportion as that narrative is deficient 
 and fragmentary. It shall, however, be as complete as my 
 information enables, and as prudence and a proper respect 
 for the feelings of the living permit me to render it. His 
 fame (1 adopt the words of our elder writers) is so great 
 throughout the world that he stands in no need of an encomi- 
 um : and yet his worth is much greater than his fame. It is 
 impossible not to speak great things of him, and jet it will be 
 very difficult to speak what he deserves. But custom requires 
 that something should be said : it is a duty and a debt which 
 we owe to ourselves and to mankind, not less than to his memo- 
 ry ; and I hope his great soul, if it hath any knowledge of 
 what is done here below, will not be offended at the small- 
 ness even of my offering. 
 
 Ah ! how little, when among the subjects of The Friend 
 I promised " Characters met with in Real Life," did I antici- 
 pate the sad event, which compels me to weave on a cypress 
 branch, those sprays of laurel, which I had destined for his bust,
 
 470 
 
 not his monument ! He lived as we should all live ; and, I 
 doubt not, left the world as we should all wish to leave it. 
 Such is the power of dispensing blessings, which Providence 
 has attached to the truly great and good, that they cannot even 
 die without advantage to their fellow-creatures : for death con- 
 secrates their example ; and the wisdom, which might have 
 been slighted at the council-table, becomes oracular from the 
 shrine. Those rare excellencies, which make our grief poign- 
 ant, make it likewise profitable ; and the tears, which wise 
 men shed for the departure of the wise, are among those that 
 are preserved in heaven. It is the fervent aspiration of my spir- 
 it, that I may so perform the task which private gratitude, and 
 public duty impose on me, that " as God hath cut this tree of 
 paradise down, from its seat of earth, the dead trunk may yet 
 support a part of the declining temple, or at least serve to 
 kindle the fire on the altar."* 
 
 *Ei). .Ter. Taylor.
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 Si partem tactiisse veliin, qiiodeunique relinqiiani, 
 Majus erit. Veteres actus, primainquc juventani 
 Prosequar? Ad sese mentem proesentia ducunt. 
 Narrem justitian? Resplendet gloria Martis. 
 Ai'mati referam vires ? Plus egit inermis. 
 
 CLAUDI.4jy DE LACD. STIL. 
 
 (Translation.) — If I desire to pass over a part in silence, whatever I omit, will 
 seem the most worthy to have been recorded. Shall I pursue his old ex- 
 ploits and early youth ? His recent merits recall the mind to them- 
 selves. Shalt I dwell on his justice ? The glory of the warrior rises before 
 me resplendent. Shall I relate his strength in arms ? He performed yet 
 greater things unarmed. 
 
 There is something (says Harrington in the Preliminaries 
 of the Oceana) first in the making of a commonwealth, then in 
 the governing of it, and last of all in the leading of its armies, 
 ■which though there be great divines, great lawyers, great men 
 in all ranks of life, seems to be peculiar only to the genius of a 
 gentleman. For so it is in the universal series of history that if 
 any man has founded a commonwealth, he was first a gentleman. 
 Such also he adds as have got any fame as civil governors have 
 been gentlemen, or persons of known descent. Sir Alexander 
 Ball was a gentleman by birth ; a younger brother of an old and 
 respectable family in Gloucestershire. He went into the navy 
 at an early age from his own choice, and as he himself told me, 
 in consequence of the deep iafpression and vivid images left on 
 his mind by the perusal of Robinson Crusoe. It is not my in- 
 tention to detail the steps of his promotion, or the services in 
 which he was engaged as a subaltern. I recollect many par- 
 ticulars indeed, but not the dates with such distinctness as would
 
 472 
 
 enable me to state them (as it would be necessary to do if I 
 stated them at all) in the order of time. These dates might 
 perhaps have been procured from the metropolis : but incidents 
 that are neither characteristic nor instructive, even such as 
 would be expected with reason in a regular life, are no part of 
 my plan ; while those which are both interesting and illustra- 
 tive I have been precluded from mentioning, some from motives 
 which have been already explained, and others from still higher 
 considerations. The most important of these may be deduced 
 from a reflection with which he himself once concluded a long 
 and affecting narration : namely that no body of men can for any 
 length of time be safely treated otherwise than as rational be- 
 ings ; and that therefore the education of the lower classes was of 
 the utmost consequence to the permanent security of the empire, 
 even for the sake of our navy. The dangers apprehended from 
 the education of the lower classes, arose (he said) entirely 
 from its not being universal, and from the unusualness in the 
 lowest classes of those accomplishments, which He, like Doctor 
 Bell, regarded as one of the means of education, and not as edu- 
 cation itself.* If, he observed, the lower classes in general pos- 
 sessed but one eye or one arm, the few who were so fortunate 
 as to possess two, would naturally become vain and restless, 
 and consider themselves as entitled to a higher situation. He 
 illustrated this by the faults attributed to learned women, and 
 that the same objections were formerly made to educating wo- 
 men at all : namely, that their knowledge made them vain, af- 
 fected, and neglectful of their proper duties. Now that all 
 women of condition are well-educated, we hear no more of 
 these apprehensions, or observe any instances to justify them. 
 Yet if a lady understood the Greek one-tenth part as well as 
 the whole circle of her acquaintances understood the French 
 language, it w-ould not surprise us to find her less pleasing from 
 the consciousness of her superiority in the possession of an un- 
 usual advantage. Sir Alexander Ball quoted the speech of an 
 old admiral, one of whose two great wishes was to have a ship's 
 
 * Which consists in educing, or to adopt Dr. Boll's own expression, eliciting 
 the faculties of the luiinan mind, and at the same time subordinating them to 
 the reason and conscience ; varying the means of this common end accor- 
 ding to the sphere and particular mode in which the individual is likely to 
 act and become useful.
 
 473 
 
 crew composed altogether of serious Scotchmen. He spoke 
 with great reprobation of the vulgar notion, the worse man, the 
 better sailor. Courage, he said, was the natural product of fa- 
 miliarity with danger, which thoughtlessness would oftentimes 
 turn into fool-hardiness; and that he had always found the most 
 usefully brave sailors the gravest and most rational of his crew. 
 The best sailor, he had ever had, first attracted his notice by 
 the anxiety which he expressed concerning the means of re- 
 mitting some money which he had received in the West Indies^ 
 to his sister in England ; and this man, without any tinge of me- 
 thodisra, was never heard to swear an oath, and was remarkable 
 for the firmness with which he devoted a part of every Sunday 
 to the reading of his Bible. I record this with satisfaction as a 
 testimony of great weight, and in all respects unexceptionable ; 
 for Sir Alexander Ball's opinions throughout life remained un- 
 warped by zealotry, and were those of a mind seeking after 
 truth, in calmness and complete self-possession. He was much 
 pleased with an unsuspicious testimony furnished by Dampier. 
 (Vol. ii. Part 2, page 89). " I have particularly observed," 
 writes this famous old navigator, " there and in other places, that 
 such as had been well-bred, were generally most careful to im- 
 prove their time and would be very industrious and frugal where 
 there was any probability of considerable gain ; but on the con- 
 trary, such as had been bred up in ignorance and hard labor 
 when they came to have plenty would extravagantly squander 
 away their time and money in drinking and making a bluster.'''* 
 Indeed it is a melancholy proof, how strangely power warps 
 the minds of ordinary men, that there can be a doubt on this 
 subject among persons who have been themselves educated. It 
 tempts a suspicion, that unknown to themselves they find a com- 
 fort in the thought that their inferiors are something less than men;: 
 or that they have an uneasy half-consciousness that, if this were 
 not the case, they would themselves have no claim to be their 
 superiors. For a sober education naturally inspires self-respect. 
 But he who respects himself will respect others, and he who 
 respects both himself and others, must of necessity be a brave 
 man. The great importance of this subject, and the increasing 
 interest which good men of all denominations feel in the bring- 
 ing about of a national education, must be my excuse for having 
 entered so minutely into Sir Alexander Ball's opinions on this 
 
 head, in which, however, I am the more excusable, being now 
 60
 
 474 
 
 on that part of his life which I am obliged to leave almost a 
 blank. 
 
 During his lieutenancy, and after he had perfected himself in 
 the knowledge and duties of a practical sailor, he was compel- 
 led by the state of his health to remain in England for a consid- 
 erable length of time. Of this he industriously availed himself 
 to the acquirement of substantial knowledge from books ; and 
 during his whole life afterwards, he considered those as his 
 happiest hours, which, without any neglect of olficial or profes- 
 sional duty, he could devote to reading. He preferred, indeed 
 he almost confined himself to, history, political economy, voy- 
 ages and travels, natural history, and latterly agricultural 
 W'orks : in short, to such books as contain specific facts, or prac- 
 tical principles capable of specific application. His active life, 
 and the particular objects of immediate utility, some one of 
 which he had always in his view, precluded a taste for works 
 of pure speculation and abstract science, though he highly hon- 
 ored those who were eminent in these respects, and considered 
 them as the benefactors of mankind, no less than those who af- 
 terwards discovered the mode of applying their principles, or 
 ■who realized them in practice. Works of amusement, as nov- 
 els, plays, &c. did not appear even to amuse him : and the on- 
 ly poetical composition, of which I have ever heard him speak, 
 was a manuscript* poem written by one of my friends, which I 
 read to his lady in his presence. To my surprise he after- 
 wards spoke of this with warm interest ; but it was evident to 
 me, that it was not so much the poetic merit of the composition 
 that had interested him, as the truth and psychological insight 
 with which it represented the practicability of reforming the 
 most hardened minds, and the various accidents which may 
 awaken the most brutalized person to a recognition of his no- 
 bler being. I will add one remark of his own knowledge ac- 
 quired from books, which appears to me both just and valuable. 
 The prejudice against such knowledge, he said, and the custom 
 of opposing it to that which is learnt by practice, originated in 
 those times when books w^ere almost confined to theology, and 
 to logical and metaphysical subtleties; but that at present there 
 is scarcely any practical knowledge, which is not to be found 
 
 * Though it remains, I believe, iny:)ubHsliecl, I cannot resist the temptation 
 of recording tJiat it was Mr. Wordsworth's Peter Bell.
 
 475 
 
 in books : The press is the means by which intelligent men 
 now converse with each other, and persons of all classes and 
 all pursuits convey, each the contribution of his individual ex- 
 perience. It was therefore, he said, as absurd to hold book- 
 knowledge at present in contempt, as it would be for a man to 
 avail himself only of Ins own eyes and ears, and to aim at no- 
 thing which could not be performed exclusively by his own 
 arms. The use and necessity of personal experience consisted 
 in the power of choosing and applying what had been read, 
 and of discriminating by the light of analogy the practicable 
 from the impracticable, and probability from mere plausibility. 
 Without a judgment matured and steadied by actual experience, 
 a man would read to little or perhaps to bad purpose ; but yet 
 that experience, which is exclusion of all other knowledge has 
 been derived from one man's life, is in the present day scarce- 
 ly worthy of the name — at least for those who are to act in the 
 higher and wider spheres of duty. An ignorant general, he 
 said, inspired him with terror ; for if he were too proud to take 
 advice he would ruin himself by his own blunders ; and if he 
 were not, by adopting the worst that was offered. A great 
 genius may indeed form an exception ; but we do not lay down 
 rules in expectation of wonders. A similar remark I remem- 
 ber to have heard from a gallant officer, who to eminence in 
 professional science and the gallantry of a tried soldier, adds 
 all the accomplishments of a sound scholar, and the powers of 
 a man of genius. 
 
 One incident, which hapened at this period of Sir Alexan- 
 der's life, is so illustrative of his character, and furnishes so 
 strong a presumption, that the thoughtful humanity by which he 
 was distinguished, was not wholly the growth of his latter 
 years, that though it may appear to some trilling in itself, I will 
 insert it in this place, with the occasion on which it was com- 
 municated to me. In a large party at the Grand Master's pal- 
 ace, I had observed a naval officer of distinguished merit lis- 
 tening to Sir Alexander Ball, whenever he joined in the con- 
 versation, with so marked a pleasure, that it seemed as if his 
 very voice, independent of what he said, had been delightful 
 to him : and once as he fixed his eyes on Sir Alexander Ball, I 
 could not but notice the mixed expression of awe and affection, 
 which gave a more than common interest to so manly a counte- 
 nance. During his stay in the island, this ofl&cer honored me
 
 476 
 
 not unfrequently with his visits ; and at the conclusion of my 
 last conversation with him, in which I had dwelt on the wisdom 
 of the Governor's* conduct in a recent and difficult emergency, 
 he told me that he considered himself as indebted to the same 
 excellent person for that which was dearer to him than his life. 
 Sir Alexander Ball, said he, has (I dare say) forgotten the cir- 
 cumstance ; but v/hen he was Lieutenant Ball, he was the offi- 
 cer whom I accompanied in my first boat expedition, being then 
 a midshipman and only in my fourteenth year. As we were 
 rowing up to the vessel which we were to attack, amid a dis- 
 charge of musquetry, I was overpowered by fear, my knees 
 trembled under me, and I seemed on the point ot fainting away. 
 Lieutenant Ball, who saw the condition I was in, placed himself 
 close beside me, and still keeping his countenence directed 
 toward the enemy, took hold of my hand, and pressing it in the 
 most friendly manner, said in a low voice, " Courage, my dear 
 boy don't be afraid of yourself ! you will recover in a minute or 
 so — I was just the same, when I first went out in this w^ay." 
 Sir, added the officer to me, it was as if an angel had put a 
 new soul into me. With the feeling, that I was not yet dis- 
 honored, the whole burthen of agony was removed ; and from 
 that moment I was as fearless and forward as the oldest of the 
 boat's crew, and on our return the lieutenant spoke highly of me 
 to our captain. I am scarcely less convinced of my own being, 
 than that I should have been what I tremble to think of, if, in- 
 stead of his humane encouragment, he had at that moment scoff- 
 ed, threatened, or reviled me. And this was the more kind in 
 him, because, as I afterwards understood, his own conduct in his 
 first trial, had evinced to all appearances the greatest fearless- 
 ness and that he said this therefore only to give me heart, and 
 restore me to my own good opinion. — This anecdote, I trust, will 
 
 ^' Such Sir Alexander Ball was in reality, and such was his general appel- 
 lation in the Mediterranean: I adopt this title therefore, to avoid the un- 
 graceful repetition of his own name on the one hand, and on the other the 
 confusion of ideas, which might arise from the use of his real title, viz. "His 
 Majesty's civil Commissioner for the Island of Malta and its dependencies; 
 and Minister Plcnipotentiaiy to the Order of St. John." This is not the place 
 to expose tlie timid and unsteady pohcy which continued the latter title, or 
 the petty jealousies which interfered to prevent Sir x\lexander Ball from 
 having the title of Govenor from one of the very causes which rendered him 
 fitted for the oflic
 
 477 
 
 hare some weight with those who may have lent an ear to any of 
 those vague calumnies from which no naval commander can 
 secure his good name, who knowing the paramount necessity of 
 regularity and strict discipline in a ship of war, adopts an ap- 
 propriate plan for the attainment of these objects, and remains 
 constant and immutable in the execution. To an Athenian, 
 who, in praising a public functionary had said, that every one 
 either applauded him or left him without censure, a philoso- 
 pher replied — " How seldom then must he have done his 
 duty !" 
 
 Of Sir Alexander Ball's character, as Captain Ball, of his 
 measures as a disciplinarian, and of the wise and dignified prin- 
 ciple on which he grounded those measures, I have already 
 spoken in a former part of this work, and must content myself 
 therefore with entreating the reader to re-peruse that passage 
 as belonging to this place, and as a part of the present narration. 
 Ah ! little did I expect at the time I wrote that account, that 
 the motives of delicacy, which then impelled me to withhold 
 the name, would so soon be exchanged for the higher duty 
 which now justifies me in adding it ! At the thought of such 
 events the language of a tender superstition is the voice of na- 
 ture itself, and those facts alone presenting themselves to our 
 memory which had left an impression on our hearts, we assent 
 to, and adopt the poet's pathetic complaint : 
 
 " O Sir ! the good die, 
 
 And those whose hearts are diy as summer dust 
 Burn to the socket." ' 
 
 Thus the humane plan described in the pages now referred 
 to, that a system in pursuance of which the captain of a man 
 of war uniformly regarded his sentences not as dependent on his 
 own will, or to be affected by the state of his feelings at the 
 moment, but as the pre-established determinations of known 
 laws, and himself as the voice of the law in pronouncing the 
 sentence, and its delegate in enforcing the execution, could 
 not but furnish occasional food to the spirit of detraction, must 
 be evident to every reflecting mind. It is indeed little less 
 than impossible, that he, who in order to be effectively humane 
 determines to be inflexibly just, and v.ho is inexorable to his 
 own feelings when they would interrupt the course of justice ; 
 who looks at each particular act by the light of all its conse-
 
 478 
 
 quenees, and as the representative of ultimate good or evil ; 
 should not sometimes be charged with tyranny by weak minds. 
 And it is too certain that the calunmny will be willingly be- 
 lieved and eagerly propagated by all those, who would shun 
 the presence of an eye keen in the detection of imposture, in- 
 capacity, and misconduct, and of a resolution as steady in their 
 exposure. We soon hate the man whose qualities we dread, 
 and thus have a double interest, an interest of passion as well 
 as of policy, in decrying and defaming him. But good men 
 will rest satisfied with the promise made to them by the divine 
 Comforter, that by her children shall wisdom be justi- 
 fied. 
 
 ESSAY lY. 
 
 the generous spirit, who, when brought 
 
 Among the tasks of real Hfe, hath wrouglit 
 Upon the plan that pleas'd his childish thought: 
 Whose higli endeavors are an inward light 
 That make the path before him always bright ; 
 Who doom'd to go in company with Pain, 
 And Fear and Bloodshed, miserable train ! 
 Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; 
 By objects, which might force the soul to abate 
 Her feeling, render d more compassionate 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 At the close of the American war, Captain Ball was en- 
 trusted with the protection and convoying of an immense mer- 
 cantile fleet to America, and by his great prudence and unex- 
 ampled attention to the interests of all and eaeh, endeared his 
 name to the American merchants, and laid the foundation of 
 that hi"-h respect and predilection which both the Americans 
 and their government ever afterwards entertained for him. 
 My recollection does not enable me to attempt any accura- 
 cy in the date or circumstances, or to add the particulars of
 
 479 
 
 his services in the West Indies ; and on the coast of America, 
 I now therefore merely allude to the fact with a prospec- 
 tive reference to opinions and circumstances, which I shall 
 have to mention hereafter. Shortly after the general peace 
 was established, Captain Ball, who was now a married man, 
 passed some time with his lady in France, and, if I mistake not 
 at Nantz. At the same time, and in the same town, among 
 the other English visitors Lord (then Captain) Nelson, hap- 
 pened to be one. In consequence of some punctilio, as to 
 whose business it was to pay the compliment of the first call, 
 they never met, and this trifling affair occasioned a coldness be- 
 tween the two naval commanders, or in truth a mutual preju- 
 dice against each other. Some years after, both their ships 
 being together close off Minorca and near Port Mahon, a vio- 
 lent storm nearly disabled Lord Nelson's vessel, and in addi- 
 tion to the fury of the wind, it was night-time and the thickest 
 darkness. Captain Ball, however, brought his vessel at length 
 to Nelson's assistance, took his in tow, and used his best en- 
 deavors to bring her and his own vessel into Port Mahon. The 
 difficulties and the dangers increased. Nelson considered the 
 case of his own ship as desperate, and that unless she was imme- 
 diatly left to her own fate, both vessels would inevitably be 
 lost. He, therefore, with the generosity natural to him, repeat- 
 edly requested Captain Ball to let him loose ; and on Captain 
 Ball's refusal, he became impetuous, and enforced his demand 
 with passionate threats. Captain Ball then himself took the 
 speaking-trumpet, which the fury of the wind and the waves 
 rendered necessary, and with great solemnity and without the 
 least disturbance of temper, called in reply, " I feel confident 
 that I can bring you in safe ; I therefore must not, and, by the 
 help of Almighty God ! I will not leave you !" What he pro- 
 mised he performed ; and after they were safely anchored, 
 Nelson came on board of Ball's ship, and embracing him with 
 all the ardor of acknowledgement, exclaimed — " a friend in 
 need is a friend indeed !" At this time and on this occasion 
 commenced that firm and perfect friendship between these two 
 great men, which was interrupted only by the death of the 
 former. The pleasing task of dwelling on this mutual attachment 
 I defer to that part of the present sketch which will relate to 
 Sir Alexander Ball's opinions of men and things. It will be 
 sufficient for the present to say, that the two men, whom Lord
 
 480 
 
 Nelson especially honored, were Sir Thomas Troubridge and 
 Sir Alexander Ball ; and once, when they were both present, 
 on some allusion made to the loss of his arm, he replied, 
 " Who shall dare to tell me that I want an arm, when I have 
 three right arms — this (putting forward his own) and Ball and 
 Troubridge ?" 
 
 In the plan of the battle of the Nile it was Lord Nelson's de - 
 sign, that Captains Troubridge and Ball should have led up the 
 attack. The former was stranded ; and the latter, by accident 
 of the wind, could not bring his ship into the line of battle till 
 some time after the engagement had become general. With 
 his characteristic forecast and activity of (what may not im- 
 properly be called ) practical imagination, he had made arrange- 
 ments to meet every probable contingency. All the shrouds and 
 sails of the ship, not absolutely necessary for its immediate man- 
 agement, were thoroughly wetted and so rolled up, that they 
 were as hard and as little inflammable as so many solid cylinders 
 of wood ; every sailor had his appropriate place and function and a 
 certain number were appointed as the firemen, whose sole duty it 
 was to be on the watch if any part of the vessel should take fire : 
 and to these men exclusively the charge of extinguishing it was 
 committed. It was already dark when he brought his ship into 
 action, and laid her alongside I'Orient. One particular only I 
 shall add to the known account of the memorable engagement 
 between these ships, and this I received from Sir Alexander 
 Ball himself. He had previously made a combustible prepara- 
 tion, but which from the nature of the engagement to be ex- 
 pected, he had purposed to reserve for the last emergency. But 
 just at the time when, from several s3^mptoms, he had every rea- 
 son to believe that the enemy would soon strike to him, one of 
 the lieutenants, without his knowledge, threw in the combustible 
 matter ; and this it was that occasioned the tremendous explo- 
 sion of that vessel, which, with the deep silence and interruption 
 of the engagement which succeeded to it, has been justly 
 deemed the sublimest war incident recorded in history. Yet 
 the incident which followed, and which has not, I believe, been 
 publicly made known, is scarcely less impressive, though its 
 sublimity is of a different character. At the renewal of the 
 battle Captain Ball, though his ship was then on fire in three 
 different parts laid her alongside a French eighty-four: and a 
 second longer obstinate contest began. The firing on the part
 
 481 
 
 and then altogether ceased, and yet no sign given of surrender, 
 the senior lieutenant came to Captain Ball and informed him, 
 that the hearts of his men were as good as ever, but that they 
 were so completely exhausted, that they were scarcely capable 
 of lifting an arm. He asked, therefore, whether, as the enemy 
 had now ceased firing, the men might be permitted to lie down 
 by their guns for a short time. After some reflection, Sir Alex- 
 ander acceded to the proposal, taking of course the proper pre- 
 cautions to rouse them again at the moment he thought requi- 
 site. Accordingly, with the exception of himself, his officers, 
 and the appointed watch, the ship's crew lay down, each in the 
 place to which he was stationed, and slept for twenty minutes. 
 They were then roused ; and started up, as Sir Alexander expres- 
 sed it, more like men out of an ambush than from sleep, so coin- 
 stantaneously did they all obey the summons ! They recommen- 
 ced their fire, and in a few minutes the enemy surrendered ; and 
 it was soon after discovered, that during that interval, and almost 
 immediately after the French ship had first ceased firing, the 
 crew had sunk down by their guns, and there slept almost by 
 the side, as it were, of their sleeping enemy. 
 
 ESSAY V. 
 
 Whose powers shed round him m the common strife, 
 
 Or mild concerns, of ordinaiy hfe 
 
 A constant influence, a peculiar gi-ace ; 
 
 But who if he be call'd upon to face 
 
 Some awful moment, to which heaven has join'd 
 
 Great issues, good or bad for human kind, 
 
 Is happy as a lover, is attired 
 
 With sudden brightness like a man inspired ; 
 
 And through the heat of conflict keeps the law 
 
 In calnmess made, and sees what he foresaw. 
 
 Wordsworth. 
 
 An accessibility to the sentiments of others on subjects of 
 
 importance often accompanies feeble minds, yet it is not the less 
 
 a true and constituent part of practical greatness, when it exists 
 
 wholly free from that passiveness to impression which renders 
 
 61
 
 482 
 
 counsel itself injurious to certain characters, and from that weak- 
 ness of heart which, in the literal sense of the word, is always 
 craving advice. Exempt from all such imperfections, say rather 
 in perfect harmony with the excellencies that preclude them, 
 this openness to the influxes of good sense and information, from 
 whatever quarter they might come, equally characterized both 
 Lord Nelson and Sir Alexander Ball, though each displayed it 
 in the way best suited to his natural temper. The former with 
 easy hand collected, as it passed by him, whatever could add to 
 his own stores, appropriated what he could assimilate, and levied 
 subsidies of knowledge from all the accidents of social life and 
 familiar intercourse. Even at the jovial board, and in the height 
 of unrestrained merriment, a casual suggestion, that flashed a 
 new light on his mind, changed the boon companion into the 
 hero and the man of genius ; and with the most graceful transi- 
 tion he would make his company as serious as himself. When 
 the taper of his genius seemed extinguished, it was still sur- 
 rounded by an inflammable atmosphere of its own and rekind- 
 led at the first approach of light, and not seldom at a distance 
 which made it seem to flame up self-revived. In Sir Alexander 
 Ball, the same excellence was more an aff'air of system : and 
 he would listen, even to weak men with a patience, which, in 
 so careful an economist of time, always demanded my admira- 
 tion, and not seldom excited my wonder. It was one of his 
 maxims, that a man may suggest what he cannot give : adding 
 that a wild or silly plan had more than once, from the vivid 
 sense, and distinct perception of its folly, occasioned him to 
 see what ought to be done in a new light, or with a clearer in- 
 sight. There is, indeed, a hopeless sterility, a mere negation 
 of sense and thought, which, suggesting neither difference nor 
 contrast, cannot even furnish hints for recollection. But on 
 the other hand, there are minds so whimsically constituted that 
 they may sometimes be profitably interpreted by contraries, a 
 process of which the great Tycho Brache is said to have avail- 
 ed himself in the case of the little Lackwit, who used to sit and 
 mutter at his feet while he was studying. A mind of this sort we 
 may compare to a magnetic needle, the poles of which had been 
 suddenly reversed by a flash of lightning, or other more ob- 
 scure accident of nature. It may be safely concluded, that to 
 those whose judgment or information he respected, Sir Alexan-
 
 483 
 
 der Ball did not content himself with giving access and atten- 
 tion. No ! he seldom failed of consulting them whenever the 
 subject permitted any disclosure ; and where secrecy was ne- 
 cessary, he well knew how to acquire their opinion without 
 exciting even a conjecture concerning his immediate object. 
 
 Yet, with all this readiness of attention, and with all this zeal 
 in collecting the sentiments of the well informed, never was a 
 man more completely uninfluenced by authority than Sir Alex- 
 ander Ball, never one who sought less to tranquillize his own 
 doubts by the mere suffrage and coincidence of others. The 
 ablest suggestions had no conclusive weight with him, till he 
 had abstracted the opinion from its author, till he had reduced 
 it into a part of his own mind. The thoughts of others were 
 always acceptable as affording him at least a chance of adding 
 to his materials for reflection ; but they never directed his judg- 
 ment, much less superseded it. He even made a point of 
 guarding against additional confidence in the suggestions of his 
 own mind, from finding that a person of talents had formed the 
 same conviction : unless the person, at the same time, furnished 
 some new argument or had arrived at the same conclusion by a 
 different road. On the latter circumstance he set an especial 
 value, and, I may almost say, courted the company and conver- 
 sation of those, whose pursuits had least resembled his own, 
 if he thought them men of clear and comprehensive faculties. 
 During the period of our intimacy, scarcely a week passed in 
 which he did not desire me to think on some particular subject, 
 and to give him the result in writing. Most frequently by the 
 time I had fulfilled his request, he would have written down his 
 own thoughts, and then, with the true simplicity of a great 
 mind, as free from ostentation, as it was above jealousy, he 
 would collate the two papers in my presence, and never ex- 
 pressed more pleasure than in the few instances in which I had 
 happened to light on all the arguments and points of view which 
 had occurred to himself, with some additional reasons which 
 had escaped him. A single new argument delighted him more 
 than the most perfect coincidence, unless, as before stated the 
 train of thought had been very different from his own and jct 
 just and logical. He had one quality of mind, which I have 
 heard attributed to the late Mr. Fox, that of deriving a keen 
 pleasure from clear and powerful reasoning for its own sake, a
 
 484 
 
 quality in the intellect which is nearly connected with veracity 
 and a love of justice in the moral character.* 
 
 Valuing in others merits which he himself possessed, Sir Al- 
 exander Ball felt no jealous apprehension of great talent. Un- 
 like those vulgar functionaries, whose place is too big for them, 
 a truth which they attempt to disguise from themselves, and 
 yet feel, he was under no necessity of arming himself against 
 the natural superiority of genius by factitious contempt and an 
 industrious association of extravagance and impracticability, 
 with every deviation from the ordinary routine ; as the geogra- 
 phers in the middle ages used to designate on their meagre 
 maps, the greater part of the world, as desarts or wildernesses, 
 inhabited by griffins and chimseras. Competent to weigh each 
 system or project by its own arguments, he did not need these 
 preventive charms and cautionary amulets against delusion. He 
 endeavored to make talent instrumental to his purposes in what- 
 ever shape it appeared, and with whatever imperfections it 
 might be accompanied ; but wherever talent was blended with 
 moral worth, he sought it out, loved and cherished it. If 
 it had pleased Providence to preserve his life, and to place 
 him on the same course on which Nelson ran his race of glory, 
 there are two points in which Sir Alexander Ball would most 
 closely have resembled his illustrious friend. The first is, that 
 in his enterprizes and engagements he would have thought 
 nothing done, till all had been done that was possible: 
 
 " Nil actum I'eputans, si quid superesset agendum." 
 
 The second, that he would have called forth all the talent and 
 
 * It may not be amiss to add, tliat the pleasure from the perception of truth 
 was so well poised and regulated by the equtil or greater delight in utility, that 
 his love of real accuracy was accompanied with a proportionate disUke of 
 that hollow appearance of it, which may be produced by tmns of phrase, 
 words placed in balanced antithesis and those epigrammatic points that pass 
 for subtle and luminous distinctions with ordinary readers, but are most com- 
 monly translatable into mere truisms or trivialities if indeed they contain any 
 meaning at all. Having observed in some casual conversation, that though 
 there were doutbless masses of matter unorganized, I saw no ground for 
 asserting a mass of unorganized maiter ; Sir A. B. paused and then said to 
 me, with that frankness of manner which maile his very rebukes gratifying, 
 " The distinction is just; and now 1 understand you, abundantly obviousj but 
 hardly worth tho trouble of your inventing a puzzle of worda to make it op^ 
 pear otherwise." I Uiist the relwike waa not lost on me.
 
 485 
 
 virtue that existed within his sphere of influence, and created 
 a band of heroes, a gradation of officers, strong in head and 
 strong in heart, worthy to have been his companions and his 
 successors in fame and public usefulness. 
 
 Never was greater discernment shown in the selection of 
 a fit agent, than ^vhen Sir Alexander Ball was stationed off the 
 coast of Malta to intercept the supplies destined for the French 
 garrison, and to watch the movements of the French com- 
 manders, and those of the inhabitants who had been so basely 
 betrayed into their power. Encouraged by the well-timed 
 promises of the English captain, the Maltese rose through all 
 their casals (or country towns) and themselves commenced 
 the work of their emancipation, by storming the citadel at Ci- 
 vita Vecchia, the ancient metropolis of Malta, and the central 
 height of the island. Without discipline, without a military 
 leader, and almost without arms, these brave peasants succeed- 
 ed, and destroyed the French garrison by throwing them over the 
 battlements into the trench of the citadel. In the course of this 
 blockade, and of the tedious siege of Vallette, Sir Alexander 
 Ball displayed all that strength of character, that variety and 
 versatility of talent, and that sagacity, derived in part from ha- 
 bitual circumspection, but which, when the occasion demand- 
 ed it, appeared intuitive and like an instinct ; at the union of 
 which, in the same man, one of our oldest naval commanders 
 once told me, "he could never exhaust his wonder." The 
 citizens of Vallette v/ere fond of relating their astonishment, 
 and that of the French, at Captain Ball's ship wintering at an- 
 chor out of the reach of the guns, in a depth of fathom unex- 
 ampled, on the assured impracticability of which the garrison had 
 rested their main hope of regular supplies. Nor can I forget, or 
 remember without some portion of my original feeling, the so- 
 lemn enthusiasm with which a venerable old man, belonging to 
 one of the distant casals, showed me the sea coombe, where 
 their father Ball, (for so they commonly called him) first 
 landed ; and aftervtards pointed out the very place, on which 
 he first stepped on their island, while the countenances of his 
 townsmen, v»'ho accompanied him, gave lively proofs, that the 
 old man's enthusiasm was the repiesentative of the common 
 feeling. 
 
 There is no reason to suppose, that Sir Alexander Ball was 
 at any time chargeable with that weakness so frequent in En-
 
 48G 
 
 glishraen, and so injurious to our interests abroad, of despising 
 the inhabitants of other countries, of losing all their good 
 qualities in their vices, of making no allowance for those vi- 
 ces, from their religious or political impediments, and still 
 more of mistaking for vices, a mere difference of manners and 
 customs. But if ever he had any of this erroneous feeling, he 
 completely freed himself from it, by living among the Maltese 
 during their arduous trials, as long as the French continued 
 masters of the capital. He witnessed their virtues, and learnt 
 to understand in what various shapes and even disguises the 
 valuable parts of human nature may exist. In many individu- 
 als, whose littleness and meanness in the common intercourse 
 of life would have stamped them at once as contemptible and 
 w^orthless, with ordinary Englishmen, he had found such vir- 
 tues of disinterested patriotism, fortitude, and self-denial, as 
 would have done honor to an ancient Roman. 
 
 There exists in England, a gentlemanly character, a gentle- 
 manly feeling, very different even from that, which is the most 
 like it, the character of a well-born Spaniard, and unexampled in 
 the rest of Europe. This feeling probably originafedin the for- 
 tunate circumstance, that the titles of our English nobility fol- 
 low the law of their property, and are inherited by the eldest 
 sons only. From this source, under the influences of our con- 
 stitution, and of our astonishing trade, it has diffused itself in dif- 
 ferent modifications through the Avhole country. The uniformity 
 of our dress among all classes above that of the day laborer, 
 while it has authorized all classes to assume the appearance of 
 gentlemen, has at the same time inspired the wish to conform 
 their manners, and still more their ordinary actions in social 
 intercourse, to their notions of the gentlemanly ,^ the most com- 
 monly received attribute of which character, is a certain gener- 
 osity in trifles. On the other hand, the encroachments of the 
 lower classes on the higher, occasioned, and favored by this 
 resemblance in exteriors, by this absence of any cognizable 
 marks of distinction, have rendered each class more reserved 
 and jealous in their general communion, and far more than our 
 climate, or natural temper, have caused that haughtiness and re- 
 serve in our outward demeanor, which is so generally complain- 
 ed of among foieigners. Far be it from me to depreciate the 
 value of this gentlemanly feeling : I respect it under all its 
 forms and varieties, from the House of Commons to the gentle-
 
 487 
 
 men in the one shilling gallery. It is always the ornament of 
 virtue, and oftentimes a support ; but it is a wretched substitute 
 for it. Its ivo7'th, as a moral good, is by no means in proportion 
 to its value, as a social advantage. These observations are not 
 irrelevant : for to the want of reilxion, that this didusion of 
 gentlemanly feeling among us, is not the growth of our moral ex- 
 cellence, but the effect of various accidental advantages peculiar 
 to England ; to our not considering that it is unreasonable and un- 
 charitable to expect the same consequences, where the same 
 causes have not existed to produce them : and, lastly, to our 
 proneness to regard the absence of this character (which, as I 
 have before said, does, for the greater part, and, in the common 
 apprehension, consist in a certain frankness and generosity in 
 the detail of action) as decisive against the sum total of personal 
 or national worth ; we must, I am convinced, attribute a large 
 portion of that conduct, which in many instances has left the in- 
 habitants of countries conquered or appropriated by Great Bri- 
 tain, doubtful whether the various solid advantages which they 
 derived from our protection and just government, were not 
 bought dearly by the wounds inflicted on their feelings and pre- 
 judices, by the contemptuous and insolent demeanor of the En- 
 glish as individuals. The reader who bears this remark in 
 mind, will meet, in the course of this narration, more than one; 
 passage that will serve as its comment and illustration. 
 
 It was, I know, a general opinion among the English in the 
 Mediterranean, that Sir Alexander Ball thought too well of the 
 Maltese, and did not share in the enthusiasm of Britons, concern- 
 ing their own superiority. To the former part of the charge, I 
 shall only reply at present, that a more venial, and almost de- 
 sirable fault, can scarcely be attributed to a governor, than that 
 of a strong attachment to the people whom he was sent to 
 govern. The latter part of the charge is false, if we are to 
 understand by it, that he did not think his countrymen superior 
 on the whole to the other nations of Europe ; but it is true, as far 
 as relates to his belief, that the English thought themselves still 
 better than they are ; that they dwelt on, and exaggerated their 
 national virtues, and weighed them by the opposite vices of 
 foreigners, instead of the virtues which those foreigners pos- 
 sessed, and they themselves wanted. Above all, as statesmen, 
 we must consider qualities by their practical uses. Thus — he 
 entertained no doubt, that the English were superior to all
 
 488 
 
 others in the kind, and the degree of their courage, which is 
 marked by far greater enthusiasm, than the courage of the Ger- 
 mans and northern nations, and by a far greater steadiness and 
 selfsubsistence, than that of the Fiench. It is more closely 
 connected with the character of the individual. The courage of 
 an English army (he used to say) is the sum total of the courage 
 which the individual soldiers bring with them to it, rather than 
 of that which they derive from it. This remark of Sir Alex- 
 ander's was forcibly recalled to my mind, when I was at Na- 
 ples. A Russian and an English regiment were drawn up to- 
 gether in the same square — " See," said a Neapolitan to me, 
 who had mistaken me for one of his countrymen, " there is but 
 one face in that whole regiment while in thaV^ (pointing to 
 the English) " every soldier has a face of his own." On the 
 other hand, there are qualities scarcely less requisite to the 
 completion of the military character, in which Sir A. did not 
 hesitate to think the English inferior to the continental nations: 
 as for instance, both in the power and the disposition to endure 
 privations ; in the friendly temper necessary, when troops of 
 different nations are to act in concert ; in their obedience to 
 the regulations of their commanding officers, respecting the 
 treatment of the inhabitants of the countries through which 
 they are marching ; as well as in many other points, not imme- 
 diately connected with their conduct in the field : and, above 
 all, in sobriety and temperance. During the siege of Vallette, 
 especially during the sore distress to which the besiegers were 
 for some time exposed from the failure of provision, Sir Alex- 
 ander Ball had an ample opportunity of observing and weigh- 
 ing the separate merits and demerits of the native, and of 
 the English troops ; and surely since the publication of Sir John 
 Moore's campaign, there can be no just offence taken, though 
 I should say, that before the walls of Vallette, as well as in 
 the plains of Gallicia, an indignant commander might, with too 
 great propriety, have addressed the English soldiery in the 
 words of an old Dramatist — 
 
 Will you still owe your virtues to your bellies ? 
 And only then think nobly when y'arc full? 
 Doth fodder keep you lionest? Arc you bad 
 When out of Flesh ? And think you't an excuse 
 Of vile and ignominious actions, that 
 
 Y' are lean and out of liking ? 
 
 Cartwkight's Love's Convert.
 
 489 
 
 From the first insurrectionary movement to the final depart- 
 ure of the French from the Island, though the civil and milita- 
 ry powers and the whole of the Island, save Vallette, were in 
 the hands of the peasantry, not a single act of excess can be 
 charged against the Maltese, if we except the razing of one 
 house at Civita Vecchia belonging to a notorious and abandon- 
 ed traitor, the creature and hireling of the French. In no in- 
 stance did they injure, insult, or plunder, any one of the na- 
 tive nobility, or employ even the appearance of force toward 
 them, except in the collection of the lead and iron from their 
 houses and gardens, in order to supply themselves with bul- 
 lets : and this very appearance was assumed from the gener- 
 ous wish to shelter the nobles from the resentment of the 
 French, should the patriotic efforts of the peasantry prove un- 
 successful. At the dire command of famine the Maltese troops 
 did indeed once force their wav to the ovens, in which the 
 bread for the British soldiery was baked, and were clamorous 
 that an equal division should be made. I mention this unpleas- 
 ant circumstance, because it brought into proof the firmness of 
 Sir Alexander Ball's character, his presence of mind, and gen- 
 erous disregard of danger and personal responsibility, where 
 the slavery or emancipation, the misery or the happiness, of an 
 innocent and patriotic people were involved ; and because his 
 conduct in this exigency evinced, that his general habits of 
 circumspection and deliberation were the result of wisdom 
 and complete self-possession, and not the easy virtues of a 
 spirit constitutionally timorous and hesitating. He was sitting 
 at table with the principal British ofiicers, when a certain gen- 
 eral addressed him in strong and violent terms concerning this 
 outrage of the Maltese, reminding him of the necessity of ex- 
 erting his commanding influence in the present case, or the 
 consequences must be taken. " What," replied Sir Alexander 
 Ball, " would you have us do ? Would you have us threaten 
 death to men dying with famine ? Can you suppose that the 
 hazard of being shot will weigh with whole regiments acting 
 under a common necessity ? Does not the extremity of hun- 
 ger take away all difference between men and animals ? and is 
 it not as absurd to appeal to the prudence of a body of men 
 starving, as to a herd of famished wolves ? No, general, I will 
 not degrade myself or outrage humanity by menacing famine 
 
 with massacre ! More effectual means must be taken." With 
 
 62
 
 490 
 
 these words he rose and left the room, and having first consult- 
 ed with Sir Thomas Troubridge, he determined at his own 
 risk on a step, which the extreme necessity warranted, and 
 which the conduct of the Neapolitan court amply justified. For 
 this court, though terrror-stricken by the French, was still ac- 
 tuated by hatred to the English, and a jealousy of their pow- 
 er in the Mediterranean : and this in so strange and senseless 
 a manner, that we must join the extremes of imbecility and 
 treachery in the same cabinet, in order to find it comprehensi- 
 ble.* Though the very existence of Naples and Sicily, as a 
 nation, depended Avholely and exclusively on British support ; 
 though the royal family owed their personal safety, to the Brit- 
 ish fleet ; though not only their dominions and their rank, but 
 the liberty and even the lives of Ferdinand and his family, 
 were interwoven with our success ; yet with an infatuation 
 scarcely credible, the most affecting representations of the dis- 
 tress of the besiegers, and of the utter insecurity of Sicily if 
 the French remained possessors of Malta, were treated with ne- 
 glect ; and the urgent remonstrances for the permission of im- 
 porting corn from Messina, were answered only by sanguinary 
 edicts precluding all supply. Sir Alexander Ball sent for his 
 senior lieutenant, and gave him orders to proceed immediately 
 to the port of Messina, and there to seize and bring with him 
 to Malta the ships laden with corn, of the number of which 
 Sir Alexander had received accurate information. These or- 
 ders were executed without delay, to the great delight and 
 profit of the ship owners and proprietors ; the necessity of rai- 
 sing the siege was removed ; and the author of the measure 
 
 * It cannot be doubted, that the sovereign himself was kept in a state of 
 delusion. Both his undcistanding and his moral principles are far better than 
 could reasonably be expected from the infamous mode of his education : if 
 indeed the systematic preclusion of all knowledge, and the unrestrained in- 
 dulgence of his passions, adopted by the Spanish court for the purposes of 
 preserving liim dependent, can be called by the name of education. Of 
 the other influencing persons in the Neapolitan government, Mr. Leckie has 
 given us a true and lively account. It will be greatly to the advantage of the 
 present narration, if the i-eader should have previously iJerused Mr. Leckie's 
 pamphlet on the state of Sicily : the facts which I shall have occasion to 
 mention hereafter will reciprocally confirm and be confirmed by the docu- 
 ments I'urnishcd in that most interesting work ; in which I sec but one blem- 
 ish of importance, namely, that the author appears too frequently to consider 
 justice and tiue policy as capabable of being contradistinguished.
 
 491 
 
 wafted in calmness for the consequences that might result to 
 himself personally. But not a complaint, not a murmur pro- 
 ceeded from the court of Naples. The sole result was, that 
 the governor of Malta became an especial object of its hatred, 
 its fear, and its respect. 
 
 The whole of this tedious siege, from its commencement to the 
 signing of the capitulation, called forth into constant activity 
 the rarest and most difficult virtues of a commanding mind ; 
 virtues of no show or splendor in the vulgar apprehehsion, yet 
 more infallible characteristics of true greatness than the most 
 unequivocal displays of enterprize and active daring. Scarce- 
 ly a day passed, in which Sir Alexander Ball's patience, for- 
 bearance, and inflexible constancy, were not put to the severest 
 trial. He had not only to remove the misunderstandings that 
 arose between the Maltese and their allies, to settle the differ- 
 ences among the Maltese themselves, and to organize their 
 efforts: he was likewise engaged in the more difficult and un- 
 thankful task of counteracting the weariness, discontent, and 
 despondency, of his own countrymen — a task however, which 
 he accomplished by management and address, and an alternation 
 of real firmness with apparent yielding. During many months 
 he remained the only Englishman who did not think the siege 
 hopeless and the object worthless. He often spoke of the 
 time in which he resided at the country seat of the grand master 
 at St. Antonio, four miles from Vallette, as perhaps the most 
 trying period of his life. For some weeks Captain Vivian was 
 his sole English companion, of whom., as his partner in anxiety, 
 he always expressed himself with affectionate esteem. Sir Al- 
 exander Ball's presence was absolutely necessary to the Mal- 
 tese, who, accustomed to be governed by him, became incapable 
 of acting in concert without his immediate influence. In the 
 out-burst of popular emotion, the impulse, which produces an 
 insurrection, is for a brief while its sufficient pilot : the attrac- 
 tion constitutes the cohesion, and the common provocation, sup- 
 plying an immediate object, not only unites, but directs, the 
 multitude. But this first impulse had passed away, and Sir Al- 
 exander Ball was the one individual who possessed the general 
 confidence. On him they relied with implicit faith : and even 
 after they had long enjoyed the blessings of British government 
 and protection, it was still remarkable with what child-like help- 
 lessness they were in the habit of applying to him, even in
 
 492 
 
 their private concerns. It seemed as if they thought him made 
 on purpose to think for them all. Yet his situation at St. An- 
 tonio was one of great peril : and he attributed his preservation 
 to the dejection, wliich had now begun to prey on the spirits 
 of the French garrison, and which rendered them unenterpri- 
 zing and almost passive, aided by the dread which the nature 
 of the country inspired. For subdivided as it was into small 
 fields, scarcely larger than a cottage garden, and each of these 
 little squares of land enclosed with substantial stone walls ; 
 these too from the necessity of having the fields perfectly level, 
 rising in tiers above each other; the whole of the inhabited part 
 of the island was an effective fortification for all the purposes 
 of annoyance and offensive warfare. Sir Alexander Ball exer- 
 ted himself successfully in procuring information respecting the 
 state and temper of the garrison, and by the assistance of the 
 clergy and the almost universal fidelity of the Maltese, contriv- 
 ed that the spies in the pay of the French should be in truth 
 his own most confidential agents. He had already given splen- 
 did proofs that he could outfight them ; but here, and in his af- 
 ter diplomatic intercourse previous to the recommencement of 
 the war, he likewise out-witted them. He once told me with 
 a smile, as we were conversing on the practice of laying wa- 
 gers, that he was sometimes inclined to think that the final 
 perseverance in the siege was not a little indebted to several 
 valuable bets of his ov/n, he well knowing at the time, and 
 from information which himself alone possessed, that he should 
 certainly lose them. Yet this artifice had a considerable effect 
 in suspending the impatience of the officers, and in supplying 
 topics for dispute and conversation. At length, however, the 
 two French frigates, the sailing of which had been the subject 
 of these wagers, left the great harbour on the 24th of August, 
 1800, with a part of the garrison: and one of them soon be- 
 came a piizc to the English. Sir Alexander Ball related to 
 me the circumstances which occasioned the escape of the oth- 
 er ; but I do not reccollect them with sufficient acuracy to dare 
 repeat them in this place. On the 15th of September follow- 
 ing, the capitulation was signed, and after a blockade of two 
 years the English obtained possession of Valette, and remain- 
 ed masters of the whole island and its dependencies. 
 
 Anxious not to give offence, but more anixous to communi- 
 cate the truth, it is not without pain that I find myself under
 
 493 
 
 the moral obligation of remonstrating against the silence con- 
 cerning Sir Alexander Ball's services or the transfer of them 
 to others. More than once has the latter roused my indigna- 
 tion in the reported speeches of the house of Commons; and 
 as to the former, I need only state that in Rees's Cyclopaedia 
 there is an historical article of considerable length under the 
 word Malta, in which vSir Alexander's name does not once oc- 
 cur ! During a residence of eighteen months in that island, I 
 possessed and availed myself ot the best possible means of 
 information, not only from eye-witnesses, but likewise from 
 the principal agents themselves. And I now thus publicly and 
 unequivocally assert, that to Sir A. Ball i^re-eminently — and if 
 I had said, to Sir A. Ball alone, the ordinary use of the word 
 under such circumstances would bear me out — the capture and 
 the preservation of Malta was owing, with every blessing that 
 a powerful mind and a wise heart could confer on its docile 
 and grateful inhabitants. With a similar pain I proceed to 
 avow my sentiments on this capitulation, by which Malta was 
 delivered up to his Britannic Majesty and allies, without the 
 least mention made of the Maltese. With a warmth honorable 
 both to his head and his heart. Sir Alexander Ball pleaded, as 
 not less a point of sound policy than of plain justice, that the 
 Maltese, by some representatives, should be made a party in 
 the capitulation, and a joint subscriber in the signature. They 
 had never been the slaves or the property of the knights of St. 
 John, but freemen and the true landed proprietors of the coun- 
 try, the civil and military government of which, under certain 
 restrictions, had been vested in that order; yet checked by the 
 rights and influences of the clergy and the native nobility, and 
 by the customs and ancient laws of the island. This trust the 
 knights had, with the blackest treason and the most profligate 
 perjury, betrayed and abandoned. The right of government of 
 of course reverted to the landed proprietors and the clergy. 
 Animated by a just sense of this right, the Maltese had risen 
 of their own accord, had contended for it in defiance of death 
 and danger, had fought bravely, and endured patiently. With- 
 out undervaluing the military assistance afterwards furnished 
 by Great Britain (though how scanty this was before the arrival 
 of General Pigot is well known,) it remained undeniable, that 
 the Maltese had taken the greatest share both in the fatigues 
 and in the privations consequent on the siege ; and that had
 
 494 
 
 not the greatest virtues and the most exemplary fidelity been 
 uniformly displayed by them, the English troops (they not be- 
 ing more numerous than they had been for the greater part of 
 the two years) could not possibly have remained before the 
 fortifications of Valette, defended as that city was by a French 
 garrison, that greatly outnumbered the British besiegers. Still 
 less could there have been the least hope of ultimate success ; 
 as if any part of the Maltese peasantry had been friendly to the 
 French, or even indiilerent, if they had not all indeed been 
 most zealous and persevering in their hostility towards them, it 
 would have been impracticable so to blockade that island as to 
 have precluded the arrival of supplies. If the seige had pro- 
 ved unsuccessful, the Maltese were well aware that they 
 should be exposed to all the horrors which revenge and woun- 
 ded pride could dictate to an unprincipled, rapacious, and san- 
 guinary soldiery ; and now that success has crowned their ef- 
 forts, is this to be their reward, that their own allies are to 
 bargain for them with the French as for a herd of slaves, 
 whom the French had before purchased from a former proprie- 
 tor ? If it be urged, that there is no established government 
 in Malta, is it not equally true, that through the whole popu- 
 lation of the island there is not a single disentient ? and thus 
 that the chief inconvenience, which an established authority is 
 to obviate, is virtually removed by the admitted fact of their 
 unanimity ? And have they not a bishop, and a dignified cler- 
 gy, their judges and municipal magistrates, who were at all 
 times sharers in the power of the government, and now, sup- 
 ported by the unaniinous suffrage of the inhabitants, have a 
 rightful claim to be considered as its representatives ? Will it 
 not be oftener said than answered, that the main difference be- 
 tween French and English injustice rests in this point alone, 
 that the French seized on the Maltese without any previous 
 pretences of friendship, while the English procured possession 
 of the island by means of their friendly promises, and by the 
 co-operation of the natives afforded in confident reliance on 
 these promises ? -The impolicy of refusing the signature on 
 the part of the Maltese was equally evident : since such re- 
 fusal could answer no one purpose but that of alienating their 
 affections by a wanton insult to their feelings. For the Mal- 
 tese were not only ready but desirous and eager to place them- 
 selves at the same time under British protection, to take the
 
 495 
 
 oaths of loyalty as subjects of the British crown, and to ac- 
 knowledge their island to belong to it. These representations, 
 however, were over- ruled : and I dare affirm, from my own 
 experience in the Mediterranean, that our conduct in this in- 
 stance, added to the impression which had been made at Cor- 
 sica, Minorca, and elsewhere, and was often referred to by 
 men of reflection in Sicily, who have more than once said to 
 me, " a connection with Great Britain, with the consequent 
 extension and security of our commerce, are indeed great bless- 
 ings : but who can rely on their permanence ? or that we shall 
 not be made to pay bitterly for our zeal as partizans of En- 
 gland, whenever it shall suit its plans to deliver us back to our 
 old oppressors?" 
 
 ESSAY VI. 
 
 The way of ancient ordinance, though it winds 
 
 Is yet no devious way. Straight forward goes 
 
 Tlie hghtning's path ; and straight the fearful path 
 
 Of the cannon-ball. Direct it flies and rapid, 
 
 Shattering that it may reach, and shattering what it reaches. 
 
 My son! the road, the human being travels. 
 
 That on which Blessing conies and goes, doth follow 
 
 The river's course, the valley's playful windings. 
 
 Curves round the corn-field and the hill of vines, 
 
 Honoring the holy boiuuls of property! 
 
 There exists 
 
 An higher than the warrior's excellence. 
 
 Wallje>"stein. 
 
 Captain Ball's services in Malta were honored wih his 
 sovereign's approbation, transmitted in a letter from the Secreta- 
 ry Dundas and with a baronetcy. A thousand pounds * were at 
 
 * I scarce know whether it be worth mentioning, that this sum remained 
 
 undemanded till the spring of the year 1805 : at which time the writer of 
 
 these sketches, during an examination of the treasui-y accounts, observed the 
 
 circumstance and noticed it to the Governor, who had suffered it to escape
 
 496 
 
 the same time directed to be paid him from the Maltese trea- 
 sury. The best and most appropriate addition to the applause 
 of his king and his country, Sir Alexander Ball found in the 
 feelings and faithful affection of the Maltese. The enthusiasm 
 manifested in reverential gestures and shouts of triumph when- 
 ever their friend and deliverer appeared in public, was the ut- 
 terance of a deep feeling, and in no wise the mere ebullition of 
 animal sensibility ; which is not indeed a part of the Maltese 
 character. The truth of this observation will not be doubted 
 by any person, v/ho has witnessed the religious processions in 
 honor of the favorite saints, both at Vallette and at Messina 
 or Palermo, and who must have been struck with the contrast 
 between the apparent apathy, or at least the perfect sobriety, 
 of the Maltese, and the fanatical agitations of the Sicilian po- 
 pulace. Among the latter each man's soul seems hardly con- 
 tainable in his body, like a prisoner, whose jail is on fire, flying 
 madly from one barred outlet to another ; while the former 
 might suggest the suspicion, that their bodies were on the 
 point of sinking into the same slumber with their under- 
 standings. But their political deliverance was a thing that 
 came home to their hearts, and intertwined with their most 
 empassioned recollections, personal and patriotic. To Sir Al- 
 exander Ball exclusively the Maltese themselves attributed 
 their emancipation : on him too they rested their hopes of the 
 future. Whenever he appeared in Vallette, the passengers on 
 each side, through the whole length of the street stopped, and 
 remained uncovered till he had psssed : the very clamors of the 
 
 altogether from his memory, for the latter years at least. The value attach- 
 ed to the present by tlie receiver, must have depended on his construction 
 of its purpose and meaning: for in a pecuniaiy point of view, the sum was 
 not a moiety of what Sir Alexander had expended from his private fortune 
 during the blockade. His innnediate appointment to tiie government of 
 the island, so earnestly prayed for by the Maltese, would doubtless have furnish- 
 ed a less questionable proof that his services were as highly estimated by the 
 minsitry as they were graciously accepted by his sovereign. But this was 
 ■withheld as long as it remained possible to doubt,whether great talents, join- 
 ed to local experience, and the confidence and affection of the inhabitants, 
 miglit not be dispensed with in the ])er.son entrusted with that government. 
 Crimen ingrati animi quod magnis Ingeniis hand raro objicitur, saepius nil 
 aliud est quam perspicacia quaedam in causam beneficii collati. See VVal- 
 liENSTEiiV, Part I. p. 177.
 
 497 
 
 market-place were hushed at his entrance, and then exchanged 
 for shouts of joy and welcome. Even after the lapse of years 
 he never appeared in any one of their casals,* ^vhich did not 
 lie in the direct road between Vallette and St. Antonio, his 
 summer residence, but the women and children, with such of 
 the men who were not at labor in their fields, fell into ranks, 
 and followed, or preceded him, singing the Maltese song which 
 had been made in his honor, and which was scarcely less fami- 
 liar to the inhabitants of Malta and Goza, than God save the 
 King to Britons. W/ien he went to the gate through the city, 
 the youns; men refrained talking ; and the aged arose and stood 
 up. When the ear heard, then it blessed him ; and when the eye 
 saw him, it gave witness to him : because he delivered the poor 
 that cried, and the fatherless, and those that had none to help 
 them. The blessing of them that were ready to perish come 
 upon\him ; and he caused the widow'' s heart to sing for joy. 
 
 These feelings were afterwards amply justified by his admin- 
 istration of the government ; and the very accesses of their 
 gratitude on their first deliverance proved, in the end, only to 
 be acknowledgments antedated. For some time after the de- 
 parture of the French, the distress was so general and so se- 
 vere, that a large proportion of the lower classes became 
 mendicants, and one of the greatest thorough fares of Vallette 
 still retains the name of the " Nix Mangiare Stairs,''^ from 
 the crowd who used there to assail the ears of passengers with 
 cries of " nix mangiare," or " nothing to eat," the former word 
 nix being the low German pronunciation of nichts, nothing. 
 By what means it was introduced into Malta, I know not ; but 
 it became the common vehicle both of solicitation and refusal, 
 the Maltese thinking it an English word, and the English sup- 
 posing it to be Maltese. I often felt it as a pleasing remembrancer 
 of the evil day gone by, when a tribe of little children, quite 
 naked, as is the custom of that climate, and each with a pair 
 
 * It was the Governor's custom to visit every ca.sal througliout the island 
 once, if not twice, in the course of each summer ; and during my residence 
 there, I had the honor of being his constant, and most often, liis only com- 
 l)anion in these rides ; to which I owe some of the happiest and most instruc- 
 tive hours of my hfe. In the poorest house of the most distant casal two 
 rude paintings were sure to be found : A picture of the Virgin and Child ; 
 and a portrait of Sir Alexander Ball. 
 
 63
 
 498 
 
 of gold ear-rings in its ears, and all fat and beautifully propor- 
 tioned, would suddenly leave their play, and, looking round to 
 see that their parents were not in sight, change their shouts of 
 moiriment for " nix mangiare /" awkwardly imitating the 
 plaintive tones of mendicancy ; while the white teeth in their 
 little swarthy faces gave a splendor to the happy and confes- 
 sing laugh, with which they received the good-humored re- 
 buke or refusal, and ran back to their former sport. 
 
 In the interim between the capitulation of the French garri- 
 son and Sir Alexander Ball's appointment as his Majesty's civil 
 commissioner for Malta, his zeal for the Maltese was neither 
 suspended nor unproductive of important benefits. He was 
 enabled to remove many prejudices and misunderstandings ; and 
 to persons of no inconsiderable influence gave juster notions of 
 the true importance of the island to Great Britain. He dis- 
 played the magnitude of the trade of the Mediterranean in its 
 existing state ; showed the immense extent to which it might be 
 carried, and the hollowness of the opinion, that this trade was 
 attached to the south of France by any natural or indissoluble 
 bond of connection. I have some reason likewise for believing, 
 that his wise and patriotic representations prevented Malta from 
 being made the seat and pretext for a numerous civil establish- 
 ment, in hapless imitation of Corsica, Ceylon, and the Cape 
 of Good Hope. It was at least generally rumoured, that it had 
 been in the contemplation of the ministry to appoint Sir Ralph 
 Abercrombie as governor, with a salary of 10,000Z. a year; 
 and to reside in England, while one of his countrymen was 
 to be the lieutenant-governor, at 5,000Z. a year ; to which 
 were added a long et cetera of other offices and places of 
 proportional emolument. This threatened appendix to the state 
 calendar may have existed only in the imaginations of the re- 
 porters, yet inspired some uneasy apprehensions in the minds 
 of many well-wishers to the Maltese, who knew that — for a 
 foreign settlement at least, and one too possessing in all the 
 ranks and functions of society an ample population of its own — 
 such a stately and wide-branching tree of patronage, though de- 
 lightlul to the individuals who are to pluck its golden apples, 
 sheds, like the manchinecl, unwholesome and corrosive dews 
 on the multitude who are to rest beneath its shade. It need 
 not however, be doubted, that Sir Alexander Ball would exert 
 himself to preclude any such intention, by stating and evincing
 
 499 
 
 the extreme impolicy and injustice of the plan, as well as its 
 utter inutility, in the case of Malta. With the exception of the 
 governor, and of the public secretary, both of whom undoubtedly 
 should be natives of Great Britain, and appointed by the British 
 government, there was no civil office that could be of the remo- 
 test advantage to the island which was not already filled by the 
 natives and the functions of which none could perform so well as 
 they. The number of inhabitants (he would state) was prodi- 
 gious compared with the extent of the island, though from the 
 fear of the Moors one-fourth of its surface remained unpeopled 
 and uncultivated. To deprive, therefore, the middle and low- 
 er classes of such places as they had been accustomed to 
 hold, would be cruel ; while the places held by tlie no- 
 bility, wcie, for the greater part, such as none but natives 
 could perform the duties of. By any innovation we should 
 affront the higher classes and alienate the affections of all, 
 not only without any imaginable advantage but with the cer- 
 tainty of great loss. Were Englishmen to be employed, the 
 salaries must be increased four-fold, and would yet be scarce- 
 ly worth acceptance ; and in higher offices such as those of 
 the civil and criminal judges, the salaries must be augment- 
 ed more than ten-fold. For, greatly to the credit of their 
 patriotism and moral character, the Maltese gentry sought 
 these places as honorable distinctions, which endeaied them to 
 their fellow-countrymen, and at the same time rendered the 
 yoke of the order somewhat less grievous and galling. With 
 the exception of the Maltese secretarj', whose situation was one 
 of incessant labor, and who at the same time performed the 
 duties of law counsellor to the government, the highest salaries 
 scarcely exceeded lOOl. a year, and were barely sufficient to 
 defray the increased expenses of the functionaries for an addi- 
 tional equipage, or one of more imposing appearance. Besides, 
 it was of importance that the person placed at the head of that 
 government, should be looked up to by the natives, and possess 
 the means of distinguishing and rewarding those who had been 
 most faithful and zealous in their attachment to Great Britain, 
 and hostile to their former tyrants. The number of the em- 
 ployments to be conferred would give considerable influence 
 to his Majesty's civil representative, while the trifling amount 
 of the emolument attached to each precluded all temptation of 
 abusing it.
 
 500 
 
 Sir Alexander Ball would likewise, it is probable, urge that 
 the commercial advantages of Malta, which were most intelli- 
 gible to the English public, and best fitted to render our reten- 
 tion of the island popular, must necessarily be of very slow 
 growth, though finally they would become great, and of an ex- 
 tent not to be calculated. For this reason, therefore, it was 
 highly desirable, that the possession should be, and appear to 
 be, at least inexpensive. After the British Government had 
 made one advance for a stock of corn sufficient to place the 
 island a year before-hand, the sum total drawn from Great 
 Britain need not exceed 25, or at most 30,000/. annually ; ex- 
 cluding of course the expenditure connected with our own 
 military and navy, and the repair of the fortifications, which 
 latter expense ought to be much less than at Gibraltar, from 
 the multitude and low wages of the laborers in Malta, and from 
 the softness and admirable quality of the stone. Indeed much 
 more might safely be promised on the assumption, that a wise 
 and generous system of policy were adopted and persevered 
 in. The monopoly of the Maltese corn-trade by the govern- 
 ment formed an exception to a general rule, and by a strange, 
 yet valid, anomaly in the operations of political economy, was 
 not more necessary than advantageous to the inhabitants. The 
 chief reason is, that the produce of the island itself ha 'Ay 
 suffices for one-fourth of its inhabitants, although fruits ana vege- 
 tables form so large a part of their nourishment. Meantime 
 the harbors of Malta, and its equi-distance from Europe, Asia, 
 and Africa, gave it a vast and unnatural importance in the pre- 
 sent relations of the great European powers, and imposed on 
 its government, whether native or dependent, the necessity of 
 considering the whole island as a single garrison, the provis- 
 ioning of which could not be trusted to the casualties of ordi- 
 nary commerce. What is actually necessary is seldom injuri- 
 ous. Thus in Malta bread is better and cheaper on an aver- 
 age than in Italy or the coast of Barbary : while a similar in- 
 terference with the corn trade in Sicily impoverishes the inha- 
 bitants and keeps the agriculture in a state of barbarism. But 
 the point in question is the expense to Great Britain. Wheth- 
 er the monopoly be good or evil in itself, it remains true, that 
 in this established usage, and in the gradual enclosure of the 
 uncultivated district, such resources exist as without the least 
 oppression might render the civil government in Valette inde-
 
 501 
 
 pendent of the Treasury at home, finally taking upon itself 
 even the repair of the fortifications, and thus realize one in- 
 stance of an important possession that cost the country noth- 
 ing. 
 
 But now the time arrived, which threatened to frustrate the 
 patriotism of the Maltese themselves and all the zealous efforts 
 of their disinterested friend. Soon after the war had for the 
 first time become indisputably just and necessary, the people 
 at large and a majority of independent senators, incapable, as 
 it might seem, of translating their fanatical anti-jacobinism into 
 a well grounded, yet equally impassioned, anti-Gallicanism, 
 grew impatient for peace, or rather for a nanie^ under which 
 the most terrific of all war would be incessantly waged against 
 us. Our conduct was not much wiser than that of the weary 
 traveller, who having proceeded half way on his journey, pro- 
 cured a short rest for himself by getting up behind a chaise 
 which was going the contrary road. In the strange treaty of 
 Amiens, in which we neither recognized our former relations 
 with France or with the other European powers, nor formed 
 any new ones, the compromise concerning Malta formed the 
 prominent feature : and its nominal re-delivery to the Order of 
 St. John was authorized in the mind of the people, by Lord 
 Nelson's opinion of its worthlessness to Great Britain in a po- 
 litical or naval view. It is a melancholy fact, and one that must 
 often sadden a reflective and philanthropic mind, how little moral 
 considerations weigh even with the noblest nations, how vain 
 are the strongest appeals to justice, humanity, and national hon- 
 or, unless v.'hen the public mind is under the immediate influ- 
 ence of the cheerful or vehement passions, indignation or av- 
 aricious hope. In the whole class of human infirmities there 
 is none, that makes such loud appeals to prudence, and yet sO; 
 frequently outrages its plainest dictates, as the spirit of fear. 
 The worst cause conducted in hope is an overmatch for the no- 
 blest managed by despondence : in both cases an unnatural 
 conjunction that recals the old fable of Love and Death, taking 
 each the arrows of the other by mistake. When islands that 
 had courted British protection in reliance upon British honor, 
 are with their inhabitants and proprietors abandoned to the re- 
 sentment wiiich we had tempted them to provoke, what wonder, 
 if the opinion becomes general, that alike to England as to 
 France, the fates and fortunes of other nations are but the
 
 502 
 
 counters, with which the bloody game of war is played : and 
 that notwithstanding the great and acknowledged difference be- 
 tween the two governments during possession, yet the protec- 
 tion of France is more desirable because it is more likely to 
 endure ? for what the French take, they keep. Often both in 
 Sicily and Malta have I heard the case of Minorca referred to, 
 where a considerable portion of the most respectable gentry 
 and mercbants (no provision having been made for their pro- 
 tection on the re-delivery of that island to Spain) expiated in 
 dungeons the warmth and forwardness of their predilection for 
 Great Britain. 
 
 It has been by some persons imagined, that Lord Nelson was 
 considerably influenced, in his public declaration concerning 
 the value of Malta, by ministerial flattery, and his own sense 
 of the great serviceableness of that opinion to the persons in 
 ofiice. This supposition is, however, wholly false and ground- 
 less. His lordship's opinion was indeed greatly shaken after- 
 wards, if not changed ; but at that time he spoke in strictest cor- 
 respondence with his existing convictions. He said no more 
 than he had often previously declared to his private friends : it 
 was the point on which, after some amicable controversy, his 
 , lordship and Sir Alexander Ball had '■^agreed to differ''\ Though 
 the opinion itself may have lost the greatest part of its inter- 
 est, and except for the historian is, as it were, superannuated; 
 yet the grounds and causes of it, as far as they arose out of 
 Lord Nelson's particular character, and may perhaps tend to 
 re-enliven our recollection of a hero so deeply and justly be- 
 loved, will for ever possess an interest of their own. In an 
 essay, too, which purports to be no more than a series of 
 sketches and fragments, the reader, it is hoped, will readily ex- 
 cuse an occasional digression, and a more desultory style of 
 narration than could be tolerated in a work of regular biography. 
 Lord Nelson was an admiral every inch of him. He looked 
 at every thing, not merely in its possible relations to the na- 
 val service in general, but in its immediate bearings on his 
 squadron ; to his officers, his men, to the particular ships them- 
 selves, his affections were as strong and ardent as those of a 
 lover. Hence, though his temper was constitutionally irritable 
 and uneven, yet never was a commander so enthusiastically 
 loved by men of all ranks, from the Captain of the fleet to the 
 youngest ship-boy. Hence too the unexampled harmony which
 
 503 
 
 reigned in his fleet, year after year, under circumstances that 
 might well have undermined the patience of the best-balanced 
 dispositions, much more of men with the impetuous character of 
 British sailors. Year after year, the same dull duties of a 
 wearisome blockade, of doubtful policy — little if any oppor- 
 tunity of making prizes ; and the few prizes, which accident 
 might throw in the way, of little or no value — and when at last 
 the occasion presented itself which would have compensated 
 for all, then a disappointment as sudden and unexpected as it 
 was unjust and cruel, and the cup dashed from their lips ! — 
 Add to these trials the sense of enterprizes checked by fee- 
 bleness and timidity elsewhere, not omitting the tiresomeness 
 of the Mediterranean sea. sky, and climate ; and the unjarring 
 and cheerful spirit of affectionate brotherhood, which linked 
 together the hearts of that whole squadron, will appear not 
 less wonderful to us than admirable and affecting. When the 
 resolution was taken of commencing hostilities against Spain,^ 
 before any intelligence was sent to Lord Nelson, another ad- 
 miral, with two or three ships of the line, was sent into the 
 Mediterranean, aud stationed before Cadiz, for the express 
 purpose of intercepting the Spanish prizes. The admiral dis- 
 patched on this lucrative service gave no information to Lord 
 Nelson of his arrival in the same sea, and five weeks elapsed 
 before his lordship became acquainted with the circumstances. 
 The prizes thus taken were immense. A month or two sufficed 
 to enrich the commander and officers of this small and highly- 
 favored squadron : while to Nelson and his fleet the sense of hav- 
 ing done their duty, and the consciousness of the glorious ser- 
 vices which they had performed, were considered, it must be 
 presumed, as an abundant remuneration for all their toils and 
 long suffering! It was indeed an unexampled circumstance, 
 that a small squadron should be sent to the station which had 
 been long occupied by a large fleet, commanded by the darling of 
 the navy, and the glory of the British empire, to the station 
 where this fleet had for years been wearing away in the most 
 barren, repulsive, and spirit-trying service, in Avhich the navy 
 can be employed ! and that this minor squadron should be 
 sent independent of, and without any communication with the 
 commander of the former fleet, for the express and solitary 
 purpose of stepping between it and the Spanish prizes, and as 
 soon as this short and pleasant service was performed, of bring-
 
 504 
 
 fng home the unshared booty with all possible caution and dis- 
 patch. The substantial advantages of naval service were per- 
 haps deemed of too gross a nature for men already rewarded 
 with the grateful affections of their own countrymen, and the 
 admiration of the whole world ! They were to be awarded, 
 therefore, on a principle of compensation to a commander less 
 rich in fame, and whose laurels, though not scant}^, were not 
 yet sufficiently luxuriant to hide the golden crown, which is the 
 appropriate ornament of victory in the bloodless war of com- 
 mercial capture ! Of all the wounds which were ever inflicted 
 on Nelson's feelings (and there were not a few), this was the 
 deepest ! this rankled most ! " I had thought," (said the gallant 
 man, in a letter written on the first feelings of the affront) — " I 
 fancied — but nay, it must have been a dream, an idle dream — 
 yet, I confess it, I did fancy, that I had done my country service — 
 and thus they use me. Jt was not enough to have robbed me 
 once before of my West-India harvest — now they have taken 
 away the Spanish — and under what circumstances, and with 
 what pointed aggravations ! Yet, if I know my own thoughts, 
 it is not for myself, or on my own account chiefly, that I feel 
 the sting and the disappointment ; no ! it is for my brave officers ! 
 for my noble-minded friends and comrades — such a gallant set 
 of fellows ! such a band of brothers ! My heart swells at the 
 
 thought of them !" ■ 
 
 This strong attachment of the heroic admiral to his fleet, 
 faithfully repaid by an equal attachment on their part to their 
 admiral, had no little influence in attuning their hearts to each 
 other ; and when he died it seemed as if no man was a stran- 
 ger to another : for all were made acquaintances by the rights 
 of a common anguish. In the fleet itself, many a private quar- 
 rel was forgotten, no more to be remembered ; many, who had 
 been alienated, became once more good friends ; yea, many a 
 one was reconciled to his very enemy, and loved, and (as it 
 were) thanked him, for the bi(terness of his grief, as if it had 
 been an act of consolation to himself in an intercourse of pri- 
 vate sympathy. The tidings arrived at Naples on the day that 
 I returned to that city from Calabria : and never can I forget 
 the sorrow and consternation that lay on every countenance. 
 Even to this day there are times when I seem to see, as in a 
 vision, separate groupes and individual faces of the picture. 
 Numbers stopped and shook hands with me, because they had
 
 505 
 
 seen the tears on my cheek, and conjectured, that 1 was an En- 
 glishman ; and several, as they held my hand, burst, themselves, 
 into tears. And though it may awake a smile, yet it pleased 
 and affected me, as a proof of the goodness of the human heart 
 struggling to exercise its kindness in spite of prejudices the 
 most obstinate, and eager to carry on its love and honor into 
 the life beyond life, that it was whispered about Naples, that 
 Lord Nelson had become a good Catholic before his death. 
 The absurdity of the fiction is a sort of measurement of the 
 fond and affectionate esteem which had ripened the pious wish 
 of some kind individual through all the gradations of possibility 
 and probability into a confident assertion believed and affirmed 
 by hundreds. The feelings of Great Britain on this awful 
 event, have been described well and worthily by a living poet, 
 who has happily blended the passion and wild transitions of lyric 
 song with the swell and solemnity of epic narration. 
 
 Thou art fall'n ! fall'n, in the lap 
 
 Of victoiy. To thy country thou cam'st back, 
 Thou conqueror, to tiiumphal Albion caui'st 
 A corse ! I saw before tliy hearse pass on 
 The comrades of thy perils and renown. 
 The frequent tear upon their dauntless breasts 
 Fell. I beheld the pomp thick gather'd round 
 The trophy'd car that bore thy grac'd remaina 
 Thro' arm'd ranks, and a nation gazing on. 
 Bright glow'd the sun, and not a cloud distain'd 
 Heaven's arch of gold, but all was gloom beneath. 
 A holy and untterable pang 
 Thrill'd on the soul. Awe and mute anguish fell 
 On all, — Yet high the public bosom throbb'd 
 With triumjjh. And if one, 'mid that vast pomp, 
 If but the voice of one bad shouted forth 
 The name of Nelson : Thou hadst past along, 
 Thou in thy hearse to burial past, as oft 
 Before the van of battle, proudly rode 
 Thy prow, down Britain's hne, shout after shout 
 Rending the air with triumph, ere thy hand 
 Had lanc'd the bolt of victory. 
 
 SoTHEBY (Saul, p. 80.) 
 
 I introduced this digression with an apology, yet have ex- 
 tended so much further than I had designed, that I must once 
 
 more request my reader to excuse me. It was to be expected 
 64
 
 506 
 
 (I have said) that Lord Nelson would appreciate the isle of 
 Malta from its relations to the British fleet on the Mediterra- 
 nean station. It was the fashion of the day to style Egypt the 
 key of India, and Malta the key of Egypt. Nelson saw the 
 hoUowness of this metaphor : or if he only doubted its appli- 
 cability in the former instance, he was sure that it was false in 
 the latter. Egypt might or might not be the key of India ; but 
 Malta was certainly not the key of Egypt. It was not intend- 
 ed to keep constantly two distinct fleets in that sea ; and the 
 largest naval force at Malta would not supersede the necessity 
 of a squadron off" Toulon. Malta does not lie in the direct 
 course from Toulon to Alexandria : and from the nature of 
 the winds (taking one time with another) the comparative 
 length of the voyage to the latter port will be found far less 
 than a view of the map would suggest, and in truth of little 
 practical importance. If it were the object of the French fleet 
 to avoid Malta in its passage to Egypt, the port-admiral at Val- 
 lette would in all probability receive his first intelligence of 
 its course from Minorca or the squadron off" Toulon, instead of 
 communicating it. In what regards the refitting and provis- 
 ioning of the fleet, either on ordinary or extraordinary occa- 
 sions, Malta was as inconvenient as Minorca was advantage- 
 ous, not only from its distance (which yet was sufficient to 
 render it almost useless in cases of the most pressing necessi- 
 ty, as after a severe action or injuries of tempest) but likewise 
 from the extreme difficulty, if not impracticability, of leaving 
 the harbour of Valette with a N. W. wind, which often lasted 
 for weeks together. In all these points his lordship's observa- 
 tions were perfectly just : and it must be conceded by all per- 
 sons acquainted with the situation and circumstances of Malta, 
 that its importance, as a British possession, if not exaggerated 
 on the whole, was unduly magnified in several important par- 
 ticulars. Thus Lord Minto, in a speech delivered at a county 
 meeting and afterwards published, affirms, that supposing (what 
 no one could consider as unlikely to take place) that the court 
 of Naples should be compelled to act under the influence of 
 France, and that the Barbary powers were unfriendly to us ei- 
 ther in consequence of French intrigues or from their own ca- 
 price and insolence, there would not be a single port, harbor, 
 bay, creek, or road-stead in the whole Mediterranean, from 
 which our men of war could obtain a single ox or an hogshead
 
 507 
 
 of fresh water : unless Great Britain retained possession of 
 Malta. The noble speaker seems not to have been aware, that 
 under the circumstances supposed by him, Odessa too being 
 closed against us by a Russian war, the island of Malta itself 
 would be no better than a vast almshouse of 75,000 persons, 
 exclusive of the British soldiery, all of whom must be regu- 
 larly supplied with corn and salt meat from Great Britain or 
 Ireland. The population of Malta and Goza exceeds 100,000 : 
 while the food of all kinds produced on the two islands would 
 barely suffice for one-fourth of that number. The deficit is 
 procured by the growth and spinning of cotton, for which corn 
 could not be substituted from the nature of the soil, or were it 
 attempted, would produce but a small proportion of the quan- 
 tity which the cotton raised on the same fields and spun* into 
 thread, enables the Maltese to purchase, not to mention that 
 the substitution of grain for cotton would leave half of the in- 
 habitants without employment. As to live stock, it is quite out 
 of the question, if we except the pigs and goats, which per- 
 form the office of scavengers in the streets of Valette and the 
 towns on the other side of the Porto Grande. 
 
 Against these arguments Sir A. Ball placed the following 
 considerations. It had been long his conviction, that the Medi- 
 terranean squadron should be supplied by regular store- 
 ships, the sole business of which should be that of carriers for 
 the fleet. This he recommended as by far the most economic 
 plan, in the first instance. Secondly, beyond any other it 
 would secure a system and regularity in the arrival of supplies. 
 And, lastly, it would conduce to the discipline of the navy, 
 and prevent both ships and officers from being out of the way 
 on any sudden emergence. If this system were introduced, 
 
 * The Maltese cotton is naturally of a deep buff, or dusky orange color, and 
 by the laws of the island, must be spun before it can be exported. I have 
 heard it asserted, by persons apparently well informed on the subject, that 
 the raw material would fetch as high a price as the thread, weight for 
 weight : the thread from its coarseness being applicable to few purposes. It 
 is manufactured likewise for the use of the natives themselves into a coarse 
 nankin, which never loses its color by washing, and is durable beyond any 
 cloathing I have ever known or heard of. The cotton seed is used as a food 
 for the cattle that are not immediately wanted for the market: it is very nu- 
 tritious, but changes the fat of the animal into a kind of guct, congealing 
 quickly, of an adhesive substance.
 
 508 
 
 the objections to Malta, from its great distance, &c. would 
 have little force. On the other hand, the objections to Min- 
 orca he deemed irre move able. The same disadvantages which 
 attended the getting out of the harbor of Vallette, applied to 
 vessels getting into Port Mahon ; but while fifteen hundred or 
 two thousand British troops might be safely entrusted with the 
 preservation of Malta, the troops for the defence of Minorca 
 must ever be in proportion to those which the enemy may be 
 supposed likely to send against it. It is so little favored by 
 nature or by art, that the possessors stood merely on the level 
 with the invaders. Cseteris paribus, if there 12,000 of the 
 enemy landed, there must be an equal number to repel them ; 
 nor could the garrison, or any part of it be spared for any sud- 
 den emergence without risk of losing the island. Previously 
 to the battle of Marengo, the most earnest representations 
 were made to the governor and commander at Minorca, by the 
 British admiral, who offered to take on himself the whole re- 
 sponsibility of the measure, if he would permit the troops at 
 Minorca to join our allies. The governor felt himself com- 
 pelled to refuse his assent. Doubtless, he acted wisely, for re- 
 sponsibility is not transferable. The fact is introduced in proof 
 of the defenceless state of Minorca, and its constant liability 
 to attack. If the Austrian Army had stood in the same rela- 
 tion to eight or nine thousand British soldiers at Malta, a sin- 
 gle regiment would have precluded all alarms, as to the island 
 itself, and the remainder have perhaps changed the destiny of 
 Europe. What might not, almost I would say, what must not 
 eight thousand Britons have accomplished at the battle of Ma- 
 rengo, nicely poised as the fortunes of the two armies are now 
 known to have been ? Minorca too is alone useful or desirable 
 during a war, and on the supposition of a fleet off Toulon. 
 The advantages of Malta are permanent and national. As a 
 second Gibraltar, it must tend to secure Gibraltar itself; for if 
 by the loss of that one place we could be excluded from the 
 Mediterranean, it is diificult to say what sacrifices of blood and 
 treasure the enemy would deem too high a price for its con- 
 quest. Whatever Malta may or may not be respecting Egypt, 
 its high importance to the indej)endence of Sicily cannot be 
 doubted, or its advantages, as a central station, for any portion 
 of our disposable force. Neither is the influence which it 
 will enable us to exert on the Barbary powers, to be wholly
 
 609 
 
 neglected. I shall only add, that during the plague at Gibral- 
 ter, Lord Nelson himself acknowledged that he began to see 
 the possession of Malta in a different light. 
 
 Sir Alexander Ball looked forward to future contingencies 
 as likely to increase the value of Malta to Great Britain. He 
 foresaw that the whole of Italy would become a French pro- 
 vince, and he knew, that the French government had been 
 long intriguing on the coast of Barbary. The Dey of Algiers 
 was believed to have accumulated a treasure of fifteen millions 
 sterling, and Buonaparte had actually duped him into a treaty, 
 by which the French were to be permitted to erect a fort on 
 the very spot where the ancient Hippo stood, the choice be- 
 tween which and the Hellespont as the site of New Rome, is 
 said to have perplexed the judgment of Constantino. To this 
 he added an additional point of connection with Russia, by 
 means of Odessa, and on the supposition of a war in the Baltic, 
 a still more interesting relation to Turkey, and the Morea, and 
 the Greek islands. — It has been repeatedly signified to the Brit- 
 ish government, that from the Morea and the countries adjacent, 
 a considerable supply of ship timber and naval stores might be 
 obtained, such as would at least greatly lessen the pressure of 
 a Russian war. The agents of France were in full activity in 
 the Morea and the Greek islands, the possession of which, by 
 that government, would augment the naval resources of the 
 French to a degree of which few are aware, who have not made 
 the present state of commerce of the Greeks, an ( bject of par- 
 ticular attention. In short, if the possession of Malta were ad- 
 vantageous to England solely as a convenient watch-tower, as a 
 centre of intelligence, its importance would be undeniable. 
 
 Although these suggestions did not prevent the signing away 
 of Malta at the peace of Amiens, they doubtless were not with- 
 out effect, when the ambition of Buonaparte had given a full 
 and final answer to the grand question : can we remain in peace 
 with France ? I have likewise reason to believe, that Sir Alex- 
 ander Ball, baffled by exposing an insidious proposal of the 
 French government, during the negociations that preceded the 
 re-commencement of the war — that the fortifications of Malta 
 should be entirely dismantled, and the island left to its inhabi- 
 tants. Without dwelling on the obvious inhumanity and flagi- 
 tious injustice of exposing the Maltese to certain pillage and 
 slavery, from their old and inveterate enemies, the Moors, ho
 
 510 
 
 showed that the plan would promote the interests of Buonaparte 
 even more than his actual possession of the islands, which 
 France had no possible interest in desiring, except as the means 
 of keeping it out of the hands of Great Britain. 
 
 But Sir Alexander Ball is no more. The writer still clings 
 to the hope, that he may yet be enabled to record his good 
 deeds more fully and regularly ; that then with a sense of com- 
 fort not without a subdued exultation, he may raise heavenward 
 from his honored tomb the glistening eye of an humble, but 
 ever grateful Friend. 
 
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