THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS GIFT OF WILSON SMITH SEASON AND FAITH, AND OTHER MISCELLANIES OP HENRY ROGERS, "THE ECLIPSE OF FAITH." SECOND THOUSAND. BOSTON: CROSBY, NICHOLS, AND COMPANY. NEW YORK: CHARLES S. FRANCIS AND COMPANY. 1853. LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA DAVIS CAMBRIDGE: METCALF AND COMPANY, PRIMERS TO THE PNIYERSITT. CONTENTS. PAGE LIFE AND WHITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER 1 ANDREW MAEVELL . , , . r . . . 42 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER . " .. . . 90 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL . '..-.. . - . . 141 SACRED ELOQUENCE I THE BRITISH PULPIT . . . .197 THE VANITY AND GLORY OF LITERATURE . . .""'. . 241 RIGHT OF PRIVATE JUDGMENT ..... . . 290 REASON AND FAITH: THEIR CLAIMS AND CONFLICTS 339 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER.* THE republication, within the last few years, of all the principal works of this singular author, affords us an oppor tunity, by no means unwelcome, of canvassing his merits, and assigning him his proper niche in the temple of our lit erature. Nor is it necessary, we are sure, to make any apol ogy for dedicating a few of our pages to such a subject. He cannot be unworthy of attention, who was a favorite author of Coleridge and Lamb, and of whom the former (certainly in a moment of unreflecting enthusiasm) could write thus: " Next to Shakspeare,! am not certain whether Thomas Ful ler, beyond all other writers, does not excite in me the sense and emotion of the marvellous ; the degree in which any given faculty, or combination of faculties, is possessed and manifested, so far surpassing what one would have thought possible in a single mind, as to give one's admiration the * "Edinburgh Review," January, 1842. 1. The Church History of Britain. By THOMAS FULLER, D. D. New Edition. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1831. 2. The Worthies of England. By THOMAS FULLER, D. D. New Edition. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1840. 3. The History of 'the Holy War. By THOMAS FULLER, D. D. New Edition. 12mo. London. 1840. 4. The Holy State and the Profane State. By THOMAS FULLER, D. D. New Edition. 8vo. London. 1841. 5. Good Thoughts in Bad Times^ and Good Thoughts in Worse Times. By THOMAS FULLER, D. D. New Edition. 12mo. London. 1840. 1 2 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. flavor and quality of wonder." Let this statement of a critic, the soundness of whose judgments, though they are generally correct, and often admirable, cannot always be relied upon, require what abatement it may, it may be safely said, that there is scarcely any writer, whose intellectual character will better repay an attempt at analysis than that of Fuller. We set about our task the more willingly, as we believe it to be an act of bare justice. We are convinced that pos terity has dealt hardly by his memory, and that there are hundreds who have been better remembered with far less claims to that honor. Thus, it is singular that even Mr. Hal- lam, in his recent " History of European Literature," should not have bestowed upon him any special notice ; dismissing him with only a slight allusion, in a note upon another sub ject.* Yet Fuller was not only one of the most voluminous, an equivocal indication of merit, it must be allowed, but "one of the most original writers of our language. If he had merely resembled those of his dull contemporaries, who wrote apparently for writing's sake, without genius or fan cy, without any of those graces of thought or diction, which have a special claim on the historian of literature ; if his folios had been collections of third-rate sermons or heavy commentaries ; of commonplace spread out to the last de gree of tenuity, scarcely tolerable even in the briefest form in which truisms can be addressed to our impatience, and perfectly insupportable when prolonged into folios, there would be sufficient reason for the critic's neglect. But it is far otherwise ; though Fuller's works, like those of many of * Hallam, Vol. III. p. 104. It must not be supposed that any serious censure of Mr. Hallara's great work is here intended. If it be singular that Fuller has been so summarily dealt with, it would have been far more singular had there been no important omissions. The real wonder is, that the author should have been able at all to dispose of subjects, so immense and so multifarious, in so moderate a compass ; to daguerreo type so boundless a landscape, on so small a surface, with such fidelity and distinctness. LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 3 his contemporaries, are sometimes covered with rubbish, and swollen with redundances, they are, as is the case also with some of them, instinct with genius. Like Taylor, and Bar row, and Sir Thomas Brown, he wrote with a vigor and orig inality, with a fertility of thought and imagery, and a gen eral felicity of style, which, considering the quantity of his compositions, and the haste with which he produced them, impress us with wonder at his untiring activity and preternat ural fecundity. He has scattered with careless prodigality, over the pages of his many works, thoughts and images which, if collected, properly disposed, and purified from the worthless matter which incrusts, and often buries them, would have insured him a place beside those who, by writing less and elaborating it more, by concentrating their strength on works of moderate compass and high finish, have secured themselves a place, not only in the libraries, but in the mem ories, of their readers ; and are not simply honored with an occasional reference, but live in perpetual and familiar quo tation. Before proceeding further with the analysis of Fuller's in tellectual character, it may be advisable to give a rapid sketch of the principal events of his life. He was born in 1608, at Aldwincle, in Northamptonshire ; his father was the Rev. T. Fuller, rector of St. Peter's in that village. His early education seems to have been con ducted chiefly under the paternal roof, and that so success fully, that at twelve years of age he was sent to Queen's College, Cambridge ; the master of which was his maternal uncle, Dr. Davenant, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury. In 1624 - 5, he took his degree of B. A., and that of M. A. in 1628. He then removed to Sidney College, and, after a short interval, was chosen minister of St. Bennett's, Cam bridge, where his great talents as a preacher soon rendered him extremely popular. Preferment now came rapidly. In 1631, he was chosen fellow of Sidney College, and made a prebendary of Salisbury. The same year was signalized by 4 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. his maiden publication. Like many other men of powerful imagination, who have eventually distinguished themselves as prose-writers, he had in early life toyed a little with the Muses. His first work was poetical, and we may be sure that it was steeped in the quaintness which was equally char acteristic of the age and of the individual. The very title, in deed, smacks of that love of alliteration of which his writ ings are so full. It was entitled " David's Heinous Sin, Hearty Repentance, and Heavy Punishment." It is now extremely scarce. Peace to its ashes ! its author's prose writings have a better and a surer claim to remembrance. Soon after entering priest's orders, he was presented to the rectory of Broad Winsor, in Dorsetshire. In 1635, he re paired again to Cambridge, to take his degree of Bachelor of Divinity ; and, on his return to Broad Winsor, got rid of an other kind of bachelorship in a happy marriage. This event took place in 1638 ; but his felicity was not of long con tinuance. After giving birth to one son, his wife died, about the year 1641. In the quietude of Broad Winsor " he began to complete, " to use a curious phrase of one of his biographers, " several works he had planned at Cambridge " ; but, getting sick of solitude, and impatient to know something more of public affairs, he repaired to London, where his pul pit talents soon obtained him an invitation to the lectureship of the Savoy. In 1640 he published his deservedly cele brated " History of the Holy War," which gained him some money and more reputation. He was a member of the Con vocation which assembled at Westminster in 1640, and has left us a minute account of its proceedings in his " Church History." In 1642 he preached at Westminster Abbey, on the anniversary of the king's inauguration ; and the sermon contained some dangerous allusions to the state of public affairs. His text was characteristic : " Yea, let him take all, so that my lord the king return in peace." The sermon, when printed, gave great umbrage to the Parliamentary par ty, and involved the preacher in no little odium. In this year LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 5 he published his best and most popular work, entitled " The Holy and Profane State." Refusing to take an oath to the Parliament, except with certain reservations, Fuller now left London, and repaired to the king at Oxford, by whom he was well received. The king was anxious to hear him preach. Fuller t complied ; but, strange to say, he managed to dis please the royalists as much as he had before displeased the patriots. His ill-success on both occasions may be taken as an argument of his sincerity and moderation, whatever may be thought of his worldly wisdom. During his stay at Oxford he resided at Lincoln College ; but he was not long to escape the cup which, in those sad times, came round to all parties. Sequestration was pro nounced against him, and was embittered by the loss of all his books and manuscripts. This misfortune was partly re paired by the generosity of Henry Lord Beauchamp and Lio nel Cranfield, Earl of Middlesex, the latter of whom be stowed upon him the remains of his father's library. In or der to obviate the suspicion of indifference to the king's cause, he now sought and obtained, from Sir Ralph Hopton, a chap laincy in the royal army ; and employed his leisure, while rambling through the country, in collecting materials for his future work, " The Worthies of England." It appears that, in his capacity of chaplain, he could, on occasion, beat u drum ecclesiastic " as well as any of the preachers in Cromwell's army ; for we are told, that, when a party of the royalists were besieged at Basinghouse, Fuller animated the garrison to so vigorous a defence, that Sir William Waller was com pelled to abandon the siege. When the royal forces were driven into Cornwall, Fuller, taking refuge in Exeter, resumed his studies, and preached regularly to the citizens. During his stay here, he was appointed chaplain to the Princess Hen rietta Maria (then an infant), and was presented to the living of Dorchester. He was present at the siege of Exeter, in the course of which an incident occurred, so curious in itself, and narrated by Fuller (who vouches for the truth of his i* LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. statement) in so characteristic a style, that no apology is necessary for inserting his account of it here ; leaving the reader to philosophize upon it in any way that may seem to him most proper. The extract is from " The Worthies of England " : " When the city of Exeter was besieged by the Parliamentary forces, so that only the south side thereof, towards the sea, was open unto it, incredible numbers of larks were found in that open quarter, for multitude like quails in the wildernesse, though (blessed be God !) unlike them both in cause and effect ^ as not desired with man's destruction, nor sent with God's anger, as appeared by their safe digestion into wholesome nourishment : hereof I was an eye and a mouth witnesse. I will save my credit in not con jecturing any number, knowing that herein, though I should stoop beneath the truth, I should mount above belief. They were as fat as plentiful ; so that, being sold for twopence a dozen and under, the poor, who could have no cheaper, as the rich no better meat, used to make pottage of them, boyl- ing them down therein. Several natural causes were as signed hereof. However, the cause of causes was Divine Providence." After the taking of Exeter, Fuller once more repaired to London, where he obtained the lectureship at St. Clement's, Lombard Street, and subsequently that of St. Bride's, Fleet Street. He does not appear to have long discharged the functions of either, " having been forbidden," to use his own language, " till further order, the exercise of his public preaching." Silenced though he was, however, this did not prevent his being presented, in 1648, to the living of Wal- tham. For this he was indebted to the Earl of Carlisle, to whom he had become chaplain. To men of less activity of mind, and less zealous to do good, compulsory silence might have been no unacceptable concomitant of a rich living ; but not to Fuller. This year and the following he spent chiefly in the preparation of one of the quaintest of all his writings, his " Pisgah-sight of Palestine and the Confines thereof, LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 7 with the History of the Old and New Testaments acted there on." The work was illustrated by several curious engrav ings, in which the artists seemed to have vied in quaintness with the author, and which are as characteristic of the spirit of the age as the letter-press which accompanied them. In the two or three following years he published several tracts and sermons, which have long since passed into oblivion. In 1654 he married again, and into a noble family ; his wife being the sister of Viscount Baltinglass. In 1655, as Mr. Chalmers tells us, he persisted in the discharge of his minis terial functions, " notwithstanding Cromwell's prohibition of all persons from preaching or teaching schools, who had been adherents of the late king." We shall not stop to inquire whether the biographer has been altogether just to Cromwell, in omitting to state that the ordinance in question was imme diately modified, on Archbishop Usher's representation of its hardship, and its application limited to such clergymen as had been political offenders. It is more to our purpose to observe, that we may account for Fuller's continuing to preach, without either accusing him of rash zeal, or praising him for conscientious resistance ; inasmuch as he was duly authorized so to do by the Court of " Triers," before whom he had been examined. Calamy has given us a droll ac count of Fuller's perplexities when summoned to this ordeal. He doubtless had some misgivings as to whether he might be able to answer satisfactorily all the inquisitorial inquiries of this strange court ; and whether he might not get limed by some of their theological subtilties. In this dilemma, he ap plied to the celebrated John Howe (then one of Cromwell's chaplains), whose catholic spirit ever prompted him to exert whatever influence he possessed in behalf of the good men of all parties. " You may observe, Sir," said Fuller to him, " that I am a somewhat corpulent man, and I am to go through a very strait passage. I beg you would be so good as to give me a shove, and help me through." Howe gave him the best advice in his power. When the " Triers " in- 8 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. quired, " whether he had ever had any experience of a work of grace in his heart ? " Fuller replied, in terms of cautious generality, that " he could appeal to the Searcher of all hearts, that he made a conscience of his very thoughts " ; implying, doubtless, that it was not without the most diligent investigation of his motives, that he had ventured on the sacred office. With this answer they were satisfied, and it was, perhaps, well for Fuller that it was not more specific. In 1656, he published his " Church History of Great Britain," to which was appended " The History of the Uni versity of Cambridge," and " The History of Waltham Ab bey." His " Church History " called forth some animad versions from Dr. Heylyn, to which Fuller replied. In 1658, Lord Berkeley, one of his many patrons, made him his chap lain, and presented him to the rectory of Cranford in Middle sex. Just before the Restoration, he was reinstated in his lectureship in the Savoy, as also in his prebend at Salisbury ; and, shortly after that event, was appointed chaplain extra ordinary to the king, and created Doctor of Divinity by manda mus. He was within sight of a bishopric, when death brought all his earthly prospects to a close, in 1661. He was buried in his church at Cranford, in the chancel of which there is a monument to his memory. The Latin inscription, which has the rare merit of telling but little more than the truth, closes with an antithetical conceit, so much in Fuller's vein, that it would have done his heart good, could he but have read the following sentence : " Hie jacet Thomas Fuller Qui dum viros Anglise illustres opere posthumo immortali- tate consecrare meditatus est, ipse immortalitatem est conse- cutus." This alludes to " The Worthies of England," partly printed before his death, but published by his son. Fuller is one of the few voluminous authors who are never tedious. No matter where we pitch, we are sure to alight on something which stimulates attention ; and perhaps there is no author equally voluminous, to whom we could so fear- LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 9 lessly apply the ad aperturam libri test. Let the subject be ever so dry or barren, he is sure to surround it with some un looked-for felicity, or at least some entertaining oddity of thought or expression : the most meagre matter of fact shall suggest either some solid reflection or curious inference, some ingenious allusion or humorous story ; or, if nothing better, some sportive alliteration or ludicrous pun. To this must be added, that his reflections and his images are in general so exceedingly novel, (often, it is true, far-fetched and quaint enough, but often also very beautiful,) that they surprise as well as please ; and please in a great measure by surprising us. Probably there is no author who so often breaks upon his readers with turns of thought for which they are totally unprepared ; nor would it be unamusing to watch the countenance of any intelligent man while perusing his pages. We will venture to say, that few other writers in the English language could produce more rapid variations of ex pression. We should see the face, in succession, mantling with a smile, distended into a broad grin, breaking out into loud laughter ; the eyebrows now arched to an expres sion of sudden wonder and pleased surprise ; the whole visage now clouded with a momentary shade of vexation over some wanton spoiling of a fine thought, now quieted again into placidity by the presentation of something truly wise or beautiful, and anon chuckling afresh over some out rageous pun or oddity. The same expression could not be maintained for any three paragraphs, perfect gravity scarcely for three sentences. The activity of Fuller's suggestive faculty must have been immense. Though his principal characteristic is wit, and that too so disproportionate, that it conceals in its ivy-like luxuriance the robust wisdom about which it coils itself, his illustrations are drawn from every source and quarter, and are ever ready at his bidding. In the variety, frequency, and novelty of his illustrations, he strongly resembles two of the most imaginative writers in our language, though in all other 10 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. respects still more unlike them than they were unlike one another, Jeremy Taylor and Edmund Burke. Each, in deed, has his peculiar characteristics, even in those very points in which they may be compared. The imagination of Jeremy Taylor takes its hue from his vast learning, and de rives from classical and historical allusions more than half its sources of illustration ; that of Fuller, from the wit which forms the prime element in his intellectual constitution. Burke, on the other hand, had little wit ; at least it was no characteristic of his mind : the images his mind supplies are chiefly distinguished by splendor and beauty. Still, in a boundless profusion of imagery of one kind or another, avail able on all occasions and on all subjects, and capable of cloth ing sterility itself with sudden freshness and verdure, they all resemble one another, and are almost unequalled among English prose-writers. Most marvellous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy, which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked- for beauty, make flowerets bloom even on the brow of the precipice, and, when nothing better can be had, can turn the very substance of rock itself into moss and lichens. This faculty is incomparably the most important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of truth to the minds of men ; and, taken in connection with other qualities, which neither Taylor nor Fuller possessed, namely, method and taste, will do more to give books permanent power and popularity, than even the very truths they contain. Indeed, that, to a great extent, may be said of every discourse, which Fuller says more particular ly of sermons, " that though reasons are the pillars of the fab ric, similitudes are the windows which give the best lights." We have said that Fuller's faculty of illustration is bound less ; surely it may be safely asserted, since it can diffuse even over the driest geographical and chronological details an unwonted interest. We have a remarkable exemplification of this in those chapters of his "Holy War" in which he gives what he quaintly calls "a Pisgah-sight, or Short Sur- LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 11 vey of Palestine in general " ; and a still stronger, if possible, in his " Description of the Citie of Jerusalem." In these chapters, what in other hands would have proved little more than a bare enumeration of names, sparkles with perpetual wit, and is enlivened with all sorts of vivacious allusions. One or two short specimens of the arts by which he manages to make such a " survey " attractive, will be found below ; * but much of the effect is lost by their being presented in a detached form. The principal attribute of Fuller's genius is unquestiona bly wit ; though, as Coleridge has well observed, " this veiy circumstance has defrauded him of his due praise for the practical wisdom of the thoughts, for the beauty and vari ety of the truths into which he shaped the stuff. " If it be in quired what was the character of his wit, it must be replied, it is so various, and assumes so many different shapes, that one might as well attempt to define wit itself; and this, see- * " Nain, where our Saviour raised the widow's son, so that she was twice a mother, yet had but one child." " Mount Carmel, the Jewish Parnassus, where the prophets were so conversant." "Aphek, whose walls falling down, gave both death and gravestones (!) to 27,000 of Benhadad's soldiers." "Tyre, anciently the Royal Exchange of the world." " The River Kishon, the besom to sweep away Sisera's army." " Gilboa, the mountain that David cursed, that neither dew nor rain should fall on it; but of late, some English travellers climbing this mountain were well wetted, David not cursing it by a prophetical spirit, but in a poetical rapture." " Gilgal, where the manna ceased, the Isra elites having till then been fellow-commoners with the angels." " Gib- eon, whose inhabitants cozened Joshua with a pass of false-dated an tiquity. Who could have thought that clouted shoes could have cov ered so much subtility ? " " Gaza, the gates whereof Samson carried away ; and being sent for to make sport in the house of Dagon, acted such a tragedy as plucked down the stage, slew himself and all the spec tators." " Macphelah, where the patriarchs were buried, whose bodies took lively and seisin in behalf of their posterity, who were to possess the whole land." " Edrei, the city of Og, on whose giant-like propor tions the rabbis have more giant-like lies." "Pisgah, where Moses viewed the land : hereabouts the angel buried him, and also buried the grave, lest it should occasion idolatry." 12 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. ing the comprehensive Barrow has contented himself with an enumeration of its forms, in despair of being able to include them all within the circle of a precise definition, we certainly shall not at present attempt. Suffice it to say, that all the va rieties recorded in that singularly felicitous passage are exem plified in the pages of our author. Of Us wit, as of wit in general, it may be truly said, that " sometimes it lieth in pat allusion to a known story, or in seasonable application of a trivial saying, or in forging an apposite tale ; sometimes it playeth in words and phrases, taking advantage from the am biguity of their sense, or the affinity of their sound ; some times it is wrapped in a dress of humorous expression ; some times it lurketh under an odd similitude ; sometimes it is lodged in a sly question, in a smart answer, in a quirkish rea son, in a shrewd intimation, in cunningly diverting or clev erly retorting an objection ; sometimes it is couched in a bold scheme of speech, in a tart irony, in a lusty hyperbole, in a startling metaphor, in a plausible reconciling of contradic tions, or in acute nonsense ; sometimes a scenical representa tion of persons or things, a counterfeit speech, a mimical look or gesture, passeth for it ; sometimes an affected simplicity ; sometimes a presumptuous bluntness giveth it being ; some times it riseth only from a lucky hitting upon what is strange ; sometimes from a crafty wresting obvious matter to the pur pose. Often it consisteth in one knows not what, and spring- eth up one can hardly tell how. Its ways are unaccountable and inexplicable ; being answerable to the numberless rovings of fancy, and windings of language." Of all the preceding varieties of wit, next to the " play with words and phrases," perhaps Fuller most delighted in " pat allusions to a known story " ; " in seasonable applica tion of a trivial saying " ; " in a tart irony " and " an af fected simplicity " ; in the " odd similitude " and the " quirk ish reason." In these he certainly excelled. We have noted some brief specimens, which we here give the reader. Speaking of the Jesuits he says : " Such is the charity of the LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 13 Jesuits, that they never owe any man any ill-will, making present payment thereof." Of certain prurient canons in ; which virtue is in imminent danger of being tainted by impure descriptions of purity, he shrewdly remarks : " One may justly admire how these canonists, being pretended virgins, ; could arrive at the knowledge of the criticisms of all obscen ity." Touching the miraculous coffin in which St. Audre was deposited, he slyly says : " Under the ruined walls of Grantchester or Cambridge, a coffin was found, with a cover i correspondent, both of white marble, which did fit her body so exactly, as if (which one may believe was true) it was made for it." On MachiavePs saying, " that he who under takes to write a history must be of no religion," he observes : " If so, Machiavel himself was the best qualified of any in his age to be a good historian." On the unusual conjunction of great learning and great wealth in the case of Selden, he re marks : " Mr. Selden had some coins of the Roman emperors, and a great many more of our English kings." After com menting on the old story of St. Dunstan's pinching the Devil's nose with the red-hot tongs, he absurdly cries out : " But away with all suspicions and queries. None need to doubt of the truth thereof, finding it in a sign painted in Fleet Street, near Temple Bar." The bare, bald style of the schoolman, he tells us, some have attributed to design, " lest any of the vermin of equivocation should hide themselves under the nap of their words." On excessive attention to fashion in dress, he says : " Had some of our gallants been with the Israelites in the wilderness, when for forty years their clothes waxed not old, they would have been vexed, though their clothes were whole, to have been so long in one fashion." Speaking of the melancholy forebodings which have sometimes haunted the death-bed of good men, he quaintly tells us, " that the Devil is most busy in the last day of his term, and a tenant to be outed cares not what mischief he does." Of unreasonable expectations he says, with characteristic love of quibbling: u Those who expect what in reason they cannot expect, may 2 14 LIFE AT*D WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. expect." He thus happily illustrates the aid which the mem ory derives from method : " One will carry twice more weight trussed and packed up in bundles, than when it lies untoward- ly flapping and hanging about his shoulders." The court jester he wittily and truly characterizes thus : " It is an of fice which none but he that hath wit can perform, and none but he that wants wit will perform." Of modest women, who nevertheless dress themselves in questionable attire, he says : " I must confess some honest women may go thus, but no whit the honester for going thus. That ship may have Cas tor and Pollux for the sign, which, notwithstanding, has St. Paul for the lading." He thus speaks of anger : " He that keepeth anger long in his bosom, giveth place to the Devil. And why should we make room for him who will crowd in too fast of himself? Heat of passion makes our souls to crack, and the Devil creeps in at the crannies." Of mar riages between the young and the old, he shrewdly remarks : " They that marry ancient people, merely in expectation to bury them, hang themselves in hopes some one may come and cut the halter." Of the affectedly grave he tells us : " These sometimes not only cover their defects, but get praise. They do wisely to counterfeit a reservedness, and to keep their chests always locked, not for fear any should steal treasure thence, but lest some should look in and see that there is nothing in them." After telling us that an undutiful child will be repaid in the same coin by his own children, he says : " One complained that never father had so undutiful a child as he had. ' Yes,' said the son, with more truth than grace, ' my grandfather had.' " By way of illustrating the superior efficacy of example, he says : " A father that whipt his son for swearing, and swore himself while he whipt him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction." Of the intellectual deficiencies in the very tall, he remarks, that " ofttimes such who are built four stories high, are ob served to have little in their cockloft "; and of " naturals," that " their heads are sometimes so little, that there is no room LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 15 for wit ; sometimes so long, that there is no wit for so much room." And again : " Generally nature hangs out a sign of simplicity in the face of a fool, and there is enough in his countenance for a hue and cry to take him on suspicion. Yet some by their faces may pass current enough till they cry themselves down by their speaking, for men know the bell is cracked when they hear it tolled." Of the " quirkish reason," mentioned as one of the species of wit in the above-recited passage of Barrow, the pages of our author are full. What can be more ridiculous than the reason he assigns, in his description of the " good wife," for the order of Paul's admonitions to husbands and wives in the third chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians ? " The Apostle first adviseth women to submit themselves to their husbands, and then counselleth men to love their wives. And sure it was fitting that women should first have their lesson given them, because it is hardest to be learned, and therefore they need have the more time to con it. For the same reason we first begin with the character of a good wife." Not less droll, or rather far more so, is the manner in which he subtilizes on the command, that we are not " to let the sun go down on our wrath." u Anger kept till the next morning, with manna, doth putrefy and corrupt ; save that manna, corrupted not at all, (and anger most of all,) kept the next Sabbath. St. Paul saith, ' Let not the sun go down on your wrath,' to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's meaning rather than his words, with all possible speed to depose our passion ; not understand ing him so literally that we may take leave to be angry till sunset ; then might our wrath lengthen with the days, and men in Greenland, where day lasts above a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope of revenge." : One more specimen of * On this passage Charles Lamb makes the following characteristic remarks : " This whimsical prevention of a consequence which no one would have thought of deducing, setting up an absurdum on purpose to hunt it down, placing guards, as it were, at the very outposts of possi- 16 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. the " quirkish reason," and we will have done. Of memory he says : " Philosophers place it in the rear of the head ; and it seems the mine of memory lies there, because there men naturally dig for it, scratching it when they are at a loss ! " Of all the forms of wit, Fuller affects that of the satirist least. Though he can be caustic, and sometimes is so, he does not often indulge the propensity ; and when he does, it is without bitterness ; a sly irony, a good-humored gibe, which tickles, but does not sting, is all he ventures upon. Perhaps there is no mental quality whatever, which so much depends on the temperament and moral habitudes of the individual, as this of wit ; so much so, indeed, that often they will wholly determine its character. We are inclined to think, that he who is master of any one species of wit, might make himself no mean proficient in all ; whether it shall have the quality of waspish spleen, or grave banter, or broad and laughing hu mor, depends far more on moral than on intellectual causes. Imagine Fuller's wit in a man of melancholic temperament, querulous disposition, sickly health, morbid sensibility, or irri table vanity, and we should have a satirist whose malignity would repel still more than his wit would attract. The sal lies of our author are enjoyed without any drawback, even when they are a little satirical ; so innocent, so childlike, so free from malice, are they. His own temperament eminent ly favored the development of the more amiable qualities of wit : he was endowed with that happy buoyancy of spirit, which, next to religion itself, is the most precious possession of man ; and which is second only to religion, in enabling us bility, gravely giving out laws to insanity, and prescribing moral fen ces to distempered intellects, could never have entered into a head less entertainingly constructed than that of Fuller, or Sir Thomas Browne, the very air of whose style the conclusion of this passage most aptly im itates." Lamb has made a small selection from the racy sayings of Ful ler, very few of which, however, are included in those we have here pre sented to the reader. In truth, they are so numerous, that they may be picked up in every page. LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 17 to bear with ease the trials and burdens of humanity. Both conspired to render him habitually light-hearted. With such a temperament, thus added to unfeigned piety and unfeigned benevolence ; with a heart open to all innocent pleasures, and purged from the " leaven of malice and uncharitable- ness," it was as natural that he should be full of good-tem pered mirth, as it is for the grasshopper to chirp, or the bee to hum, or the birds to warble, in the spring breeze and the bright sunshine. His very physiognomy was an index to his natural character. As described by his contemporaries, he had light flaxen hair, bright, blue, and laughing eyes, a frank and open visage. Such a face was a sort of guaranty, that the wit with which he was endowed could not be employed for any purpose inconsistent with constitutional good-nature. Accordingly, never was mirth more devoid of malice than his ; unseasonable and in excess it doubtless often is, but this is all that can be charged upon it. His gibes are so pleasant, so tinctured by an overflowing bonhommie, that we doubt wheth er the very subjects of them could forbear laughing in sym pathy, though at their own expense. Equally assured we are, that, as he never uttered a joke on another with any malice, so he was quite ready to laugh when any joke was uttered upon himself. Never dreaming of ill-will to his neighbor, and equally unsuspicious of any towards himself, it must have been a bitter joke indeed in which he could not join. It is rarely that a professed joker relishes wit when directed against himself ; and the manner in which he receives it may usually be taken as an infallible indication of his temper. He well knows the difference between laughing at another and being laughed at himself. Fuller was not one of that irritabile ge nus, who wonder that any should be offended at their innocent pleasantry ; and yet can never find any pleasantry innocent but their own ! There is a story told, which, though not true, ought *to have been true, and which, if not denied by Fuller, would have been supposed to authenticate itself. It is said that he once " caught a Tartar " in a certain Mr. Sparrow- 2* 18 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. hawk, of whom he asked, " What was the difference between an owl and a sparrowhawk ? " The reply was, that " an owl was fuller in the head, and fuller in the face, and fuller all over ! We believe that, if the retort had been really ut tered, it would have been received by the object of it, not with that curious expression of face so common on such oc casions, in which constrained mirth struggles with mortified vanity, and stimulated laughter vainly strives to cover real annoyance, but with a peal of hearty gratulation.* As the temperament of Fuller was most cheerful, and a pledge for the innocence of his wit, so he jested by what may be called a necessity of his nature, on all subjects, at all times, under all circumstances. Wit, in one or other of its multitudinous shapes, was the habitual attire of his thoughts and feelings. With the kindest heart in the world, he could not recite even a calamitous story without investing it with a * The story is, however, more than doubtful ; it is expressly denied by Fuller himself, in his reply to Heylyn's " Examen Historicum." The circumstances which led to the denial are curious. Fuller, in his " Ecclesiastical History," had related of Laud, that having once demand ed of a lady, who had lately become a proselyte to Popery, the reason of the change, he received for answer, that " she hated a crowd." Upon being further pressed to explain so dark a saying, she said, " Your Lord ship and many others are making for Eome as fast as ye can, and there fore, to prevent a press, I went before you." This anecdote roused the indignation of Heylyn, who, by way of showing the impropriety of re cording in print idle reports to the disadvantage of individuals, tells of a " retort " on Fuller, substantially the same with that related of Mr. Sparrowhawk, but disguised in a form, and attended with circumstances, which rob it of more than half its point, and make Fuller appear to greater disadvantage than that of having merely been discomfited by a happy repartee. Fuller thus replied : " My tale was true and new, never printed before ; whereas his is old (made, it seems, on one of my name, printed before I was born) and false, never by man or woman retorted on me. I had rather my name should make many causelessly merry, than any justly sad ; and seeing it lieth equally open and obvious to praise and dispraise, I shall as little be elated when flattered ' Fuller of wit and learning,' as dejected when flouted ' Fuller of folly and ignorance.' " LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 19 tinge of the ludicrous. It would seem as if, in his case, a jest were the natural expression of all emotion ; he is no more to be wondered at for mingling his condolence and his lamentations with merriment, than are other men for accom panying them with tears and sighs. An epitaph in his hand would have been a sort of epigram, not free from grotesque humor ; and his ordinary pulpit discourses must, we are con vinced, have often contained passages which severely tried the gravity of his audience. In confirmation of all we have said, we may remark, that he actually finds it impossible to suppress his vivacious pleasantry even in the most tragical parts of his " histories," and tells the most rueful tidings in so droll a manner as sets all sobriety at defiance. One or two odd specimens we cannot refrain from laying before the reader. He thus recounts a " lamentable accident " which befell a congregation of Catholics at Blackfriars : " The sermon began to incline to the middle, the day to the end thereof; when on the sudden the floor fell down whereon they were assembled. It gave no charitable warning groan beforehand, but cracked, broke, and fell, all in an instant. Many were killed, more bruised, all frighted. Sad sight, to behold the flesh and blood of different persons mingled to gether, and the brains of one on the head of another ! One lacked a leg ; another, an arm ; a third, whole and entire, wanting nothing but breath, stifled in the ruins." Was ever such a calamity so mirthfully related ? But one of the most singular instances of the peculiarity in question is contained in his account of the capture and execution of the principal conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot. It is so characteristic, that no apology is required for inserting one or two extracts below.* * " Meantime Catesby, Percy, Rookwood, both the Wrights, and Thomas Winter, were hovering about London, to attend the issue of the matter. Having sat so long abrood, and hatching nothing, they began, to suspect all their eggs had proved addle. Yet, betwixt hope and fear, they and their servants post down into the country, through Warwick 20 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. So exuberant is Fuller's wit, that, as his very melancholy is mirthful, so his very wisdom wears motley. But it is wis dom notwithstanding ; nor are there many authors, in whom and Worcester, into Staffordshire. Of traitors they turn felons, break ing up stables and stealing horses as they went. But many of their own men, by a far more lawful felony, stole away from their masters, leaving them to shift for themselves. The neighboring counties, and their own consciences, rise up against these riotous roisterers, as yet un known for traitors. At last Sir Richard Walsh, high sheriff of Worces tershire, overtook them at Holbeck, in Staffordshire, at the house of Mr. Stephen Littleton ; where, upon their resistance, the two Wrights were killed, Rookwood and Thomas Winter shrewdly wounded. As for Per cy and Catesby, they fought desperately for their lives, as knowing no quarter but quartering would be given unto them ; and, as if they scorned to turn their backs to any but themselves, setting back to back, they fought against all that assaulted them. Many swords were drawn upon them, but ' gunpowder ' must do the deed, which discharged that bullet which despatched them both. Never were two bad men's deaths more generally lamented of all good men ; only on this account, that they lived no longer, to be forced to a further discovery of their secret asso ciates. It must not be forgotten, how, some hours before their appre hension, as these plotters were drying dank gunpowder in an inn, a mil ler casually coming in (haply not heeding the black meal on the hearth), by careless casting on of a billet, fired the gunpowder : up flies the chim ney with part of the house ; all therein are frightened, most hurt ; but especially Catesby and Rookwood had their faces soundly scorched, so bearing in their bodies, not crriy/zara, ' the marks of Our Lord Jesus Christ,' but the print of their own impieties. Well might they guess how good that their cup of cruelty was, whose dregs they meant others should drink, by this little sip which they themselves had unwillingly tasted thereof. The rest were all at London solemnly arraigned, con victed, condemned. So foul the fact, so fair the proof, they could say nothing for themselves. Master Tresham dying in the prison, prevented a more ignominious end." " They all craved testimony that they died Roman Catholics. My pen shall grant them this their last and so equal petition, and bears witness to all whom it may concern, that they lived and died in the Romish religion. And although the heinousness of their offence might, with some color of justice, have angered severity into cruelty against them, yet so favorably were they proceeded with, that most of their sons or heirs, except since disinherited by their own prod igality, at this day enjoy their paternal possessions." LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 21 we shall find so much solid sense and practical sagacity, in spite of the grotesque disguise in which they mask them selves. Nothing can be more true than the remark already quoted from Coleridge, that Fuller's wit has defrauded him of some of the praise of wisdom which is his due. There was nothing, however, of the reality, whatever there might be of the appearance, of profane or inhuman levity, in his mode of dealing with sacred or serious subjects. His was the natural expression of much hilarity conjoined with much wit. He would have been mirthful, whether he had had much wit or not ; having also much wit, his mirth expressed itself in the forms most natural to him. He spoke only as he* felt ; and though we may think that another mode of speech would have been more proper, and better adapted to the ordinary feelings of mankind under the circumstances, we cannot consent to rank the facetice, of Fuller on grave subjects, with the profane, heartless witticisms of those with whom nothing is sacred, and who speak lightly because they feel lightly. His whole life, and even his whole writings, prove him to have been possessed of genuine veneration for all that is divine, and genuine sympathy with all that is human. The limits within which wit and humor may be lawfully used, are well laid down by himself in his " Holy and Pro fane State," in the essays on " Jesting and Gravity," and in his character of the " Faithful Minister." It would be too much to say that he has always acted strictly up to his own maxims ; but it may be safely asserted that he seldom vio lates the most important of them, and that, when he did, it was in perfect unconsciousness of so doing. Of profane jests, he says in his strong manner : " Jest not with the two-edged sword of God's word. Will nothing please thee to wash thy hands in but the font ? or to drink healths in but the church chalice ? " On inhuman jests, he says : " Scoff not at the natural defects of any which are not in their power to amend. Oh, it is cruelty to beat a cripple 22 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. with his own crutches ! " In another place, he quaintly says, " It is unnatural to laugh at a natural." Speaking of the " Faithful Minister," he says, " that he will not use a light comparison to make thereof a grave application, for fear lest his poison go farther than his antidote." But his sermons on the book of " Ruth " contain many curious instances of his oblivion of this maxim ; of which a striking one is given by the editor of the recent edition of his " Holy and Profane State." In his essay on " Gravity," he touchingly pleads for a charitable construction of the levities of a mirth ful temperament. " Some men," says he, " are of a very cheerful disposition ; and God forbid that all such should be condemned for lightness ! Oh, let not any envious eye dis inherit men of that which is their ' portion in this life, com fortably to enjoy the blessings thereof ' ! Yet gravity must prune, not root out, our mirth." Gravity must have had hard work to do this in his own case ; for as he himself says in another place, beautifully commenting on a well-known line of Horace : " That fork must have strong tines where with one would thrust out nature." The imagination of Fuller, though generally displaying it self in the forms imposed by his overflowing wit, was yet capable of suggesting images of great beauty, and of true poetic quality. Though lost in the perpetual obtrusion of that faculty to which every other was compelled to minister, it is brilliant enough to have made the reputation of any in ferior writer ; and we believe that what Coleridge has said of his wisdom, might as truly be said of his fancy ; his wit has equally defrauded both of the admiration due to them. Fuller's imagination is often happily employed in embody ing some strong apothegm, or maxim of practical wisdom, in a powerful and striking metaphor ; the very best form in which they can be presented to us. There occur in his writ ings very many sentences of this kind, which would not be altogether unworthy of Bacon himself, and in which, as in LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 23 that far greater genius, we have the combination of solid truth, beautiful imagery, and graceful expression ; where we know not which most to admire, the value of the gem, the lustre of the polish, or the appropriateness of the setting. In many respects, Fuller may be considered the very type and exemplar of that large class of religious writers of the seventeenth century, to which we emphatically apply the term " quaint." That word has long ceased to mean what it once meant. By derivation, and by original usage, it first signified " scrupulously elegant," " refined," " exact," " ac curate," beyond the reach of common art. In time it came to be applied to whatever was designed to indicate these characteristics, though excogitated with so elaborate a sub- tilty, as to trespass on ease and nature. In a word, it was applied to what was ingenious and fantastic, rather than taste ful or beautiful. It is now wholly used in this acceptation ; and always implies some violation of true taste, some devia tion from what the " natural " requires under the given cir cumstances. The application of the word, both to literary compositions and to the more material products of art, of course simultaneously underwent similar modifications. Now, the age in which Fuller lived was the golden age of " quaintness " of all kinds ; in gardening, in architecture, in costume, in manners, in religion, in literature. As men improved external nature with a perverse expenditure of money and ingenuity, made her yews and cypresses grow into peacocks and statues, tortured and clipped her luxuri ance into monotonous uniformity, turned her graceful curves and spirals into straight lines and parallelograms, compelled things incongruous to blend in artificial union, and then measured the merits of the work, not by the absurdity of the design, but by the difficulty of the execution ; so in literature, the curiously and elaborately unnatural was too often the sole object. Far-fetched allusions and strained similitudes, fantastic conceits and pedantic quotations, the eternal jingle of alliteration and antithesis, puns and quirks 24 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. and verbal pleasantries of all kinds, these too often formed the choicest objects of the writer's ambition. The excellence of the product was judged, not by its intrinsic beauty, but by the labor it involved, and the ingenuity it displayed. But while much of the " quaint " literature of that age is now as little relished as the ruffs, wigs, and high-backed chairs of our great-great-grandfathers, there is not a little which will be held in everlasting remembrance. Not only are the works of powerful, although often perverted genius, full of thoughts, and images, and felicities of expression, which, being the offspring of truth and fancy, will be beau tiful through all time ; but the aspect in which the " quaint " itself appears to us will depend upon the character of the individual writer, and the nature of the subjects he treats. The constitution of Fuller's mind had such an affinity with the peculiarities of the day, that what was " quaint " in others seems to have been his natural element, the sort of attire in which his active and eccentric genius loved to clothe itself. The habit which others perhaps slowly attained, and at length made (by those strong associations which can for a while sanctify any thing in taste or fashion) a second nature, seems to have cost him nothing. Allusions and images may appear odd, unaccountably odd, but in him they are evidently not far-fetched ; they are spontaneously and readily pre sented by his teeming fancy : even his puns and alliterations seem the careless, irrepressible exuberances of a very sportive mind, not racked and tortured out of an unwilling brain, as is the case with so many of his contemporaries. We are aware, of course, that it is the office of a correct judgment to circumscribe the extravagances of the suggestive faculty, and to select from the materials it offers only what is in har mony with good taste. All we mean is, that in the case of Fuller, the suggestions, however eccentric, were spontane ous, not artificial, offered, not sought for. The water, however brackish or otherwise impure, still gushed from a natural spring, and was not brought up by the wheel and LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 25 axle. His mind was a fountain, not a forcing-pump. Thus his very "quaintness" is also "nature," nature in him, though it would not be so in others ; and we therefore read his most outrageous extravagances with very different feel ings from those with which we glance at the frigid conceits and dreary impertinences of many of his contemporaries. Nor do we simply feel indulgence towards them as spon taneous ; their very spontaneity insures them an elasticity and vivacity of expression, which we should seek m vain in writers whose minds had less affinity with the genius of the | day. Nor are we to forget that there are certain subjects to which the " quaint " style of those times is better adapted than to others ; and in which it appears not destitute of a certain fantastic grace and fitness. We mean subjects in which little of passion or emotion would be expected. When conviction or persuasion is the object, and directness of pur pose and earnestness of feeling are essential, we do not say to success, but merely to gain a hearing, nothing can be more repulsive, because nothing more unnatural, than the " quaint " style ; nothing being more improbable than that far-fetched similitudes and labored prettinesses should offer themselves to the mind at such a moment; except, indeed, where universal custom has made (as in the case of some of our forefathers) quaintness itself a second nature. When lachry matories were the fashion, it might, for aught we can tell, have been easy for the ancient mourner to drop a tear into the little cruet at any given moment. But, ordinarily, nothing is more certain than that the very sight of such a receptacle would, as it was carried round to the company, instantly an nihilate all emotion, even if it did not turn tears into laugh ter. Not less repellent, under ordinary circumstances, are all the forms of the " quaint," when the object is to excite emotion, strong or deep. But it is not so with certain other subjects, in which the " quaint " itself is not without its recommendations. For example, in enforcing and illustrat- 3 26 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. ing moral maxims, in calmly inculcating lessons of life and manners, in depicting varieties of human character, in all which cases no continuous reasoning, no warmth of passion, is expected or required ; the fancy may well be indulged in her most sportive and playful moods, and allowed to attire the sententious aphorisms she is commissioned to recommend, in any way that seems to her best. She may travel in any circuit, however wide, for her illustrations, may employ analogies, the very oddity of which shall insure their being remembered, may lock up wisdom in any curious casket of antithesis or alliteration, nay, may not disdain even a quip or a pun, when these may serve to stimulate attention, or to aid the memory. The very best specimens of the quaint style, at all events, are on such themes. Such, to mention a single example, is Earle's " Microcosmography " ; such, also, are the best and most finished of Fuller's own writings, as his " Profane and Holy State," his " Good Thoughts in Bad Times," his " Good Thoughts in Worse Times," and his " Mixed Contemplations." The composition in such works often reminds us of some gorgeous piece of cabinet-work from China or India, in which ivory is richly inlaid with gems and gold. Though we may not think the materials al ways harmonious, or the shape perfectly consistent with our notions of elegance, we cannot fail to admire the richness ot the whole product, and the costliness and elaboration of the workmanship. We have said, that in many respects Fuller may be con sidered the master of the quaint school of the seventeenth century. It is by no means to be forgotten, however, that he is almost entirely free from many of the most offensive peculiarities of that school. As those qualities of quaintness he possesses in common with his contemporaries are, as al ready intimated, natural to him, so, from those which could hardly be natural in any, he is for the most part free. Thus he is almost wholly untainted by that vain pedantry, which so deeply infects the style of many of the greatest writers of LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 27 his age ; more especially Burton, Jeremy Taylor, Donne, and Browne. His quotations are very rare, and generally very apt, introduced for use, not ostentation. You nowhere find that curious mosaic-work of different tongues, which is so common in the pages of Burton and Taylor. You never find him, as you do this last writer, enforcing some common place of moral wisdom by half a dozen quotations from dif ferent writers, as though afraid to allow even a truism to walk abroad, except under the guard of some venerable names; or as though men would not believe their own senses, unless they had the authority of antiquity for doing so. From all the forms of learned pedantry, Fuller may be pronounced almost entirely free. His reading was various, and his learning great ; though not to be compared to those of the above writers, whose powers, vast as they were, often sank beneath the load of their more prodigious erudition. Fuller's style is also free, to a great extent, from the Latin- isms which form so large an element in that of many of his great contemporaries. Both in style and diction, he is much more idiomatic than most of them. The structure of his sentences is far less involved and periodic, while his words are in much larger proportion of Saxon derivation. Some thing may, no doubt, be attributed to the character of his mind ; his shrewd practical sense leading him, as it generally leads those who are strongly characterized by it, to prefer the homely and universally intelligible in point of expression. Still more, however, is to be attributed to the habits of his life. He was not the learned recluse which many of his contemporaries were, and neither read nor wrote half so much in the learned tongues. He loved to gossip with the common people ; and when collecting materials for his his torical works, would listen, we are told, for hours together, to their prolix accounts of local traditions and family legends. Many, very many of the good old English words now lost, may be found in his writings. One passage of vigorous idio matic English, and which is, in many other respects, a strik- 28 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. ing exemplification of Fuller's manner, we cannot refrain from quoting. It is from his "Essay on Tombs." " Tombs are the clothes of the dead. A grave is but a plain suit, and a rich monument is one embroidered. Most moderate men have been careful for the decent interment of their corpses ; both hereby to prevent the negligence of heirs, and to mind him of his mortality. Virgil tells us, that when bees swarm in the air, and two armies, meeting together, fight as it were a set battle, with great violence, cast but a little dust upon them, and they will be quiet : { Hi motus animorum, atque hsec certamina tanta, Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt.' " Thus the most ambitious motions and thoughts of man's mind are quickly quelled when dust is thrown on him, whereof his fore- prepared sepulchre is an excellent remembrancer. Yet some seem to have built their tombs therein to bury their thoughts of dying ; never thinking thereof, but embracing the world with greater greediness. A gentleman made choice of a fair stone, and, intend ing the same for his gravestone, caused it to be pitched up in a field, a pretty distance from his house, and used often to shoot at it for his exercise. 'Yea, but,' said a wag that stood by, 'you would be loath, Sir, to hit the mark.' And so are many unwilling to die, who, notwithstanding, have erected their monuments. " Tombs ought, in some sort, to be proportioned, not to the wealth, but deserts, of the party interred. Yet may we see some rich man of mean worth, loaden under a tomb big enough for a prince to bear. There were officers appointed in the Grecian games, who always, by public authority, did pluck down the statues erected to the victors, if they exceeded the true symmetry and proportion of their bodies. " The shortest, plainest, and truest epitaphs are best. I say, ' the shortest'; for when a passenger sees a chronicle written on a tomb, he takes it on trust some great man lies there buried, without taking pains to examine who he is. Mr. Camden, in his ' Remains,' presents us with examples of great men that had little epitaphs. And when once I asked a witty gentleman, an honored friend of mine, what epitaph was fittest to be written on Mr. Camdeirs tomb, ' Let it be,' said he, ' " Camden's Remains." I say also, ' the plainest ' ; for except the sense lie above ground, few will trouble LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 29 themselves to dig for it. Lastly, it must be ' true ' ; not as in some monuments, where the red veins in the marble may seem to blush at the falsehoods written on it. He was a witty man that first taught a stone to speak, but he was a wicked man that taught it first to lie. " To want a grave is the cruelty of the living, not the misery of the dead. An English gentleman, not long since, did lie on his death-bed in Spain, and the Jesuits did flock about him to pervert him to their religion. All was in vain. Their last argument was, ' If you will not turn Roman Catholic, then your body shall be un- buried.' ' Then,' answered he, * I will stink ' ; and so turned his head and died. Thus love, if not to the dead, to the living, will make him, if not a grave, a hole A good memory is the best monument. Others are subject to casualty and time ; and we know that the pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders. To conclude ; let us be careful to provide rest for our souls, and our bodies will provide rest for them selves. And let us not be herein like unto gentlewomen, who care not to keep the inside of the orange, but candy, and preserve only the outside thereof." One other Essay, . which is not only a fine specimen of Fuller's best manner, but is full of sound practical criticism, we cannot resist the temptation to cite. It is on " Fancy." " Fancy is an inward sense of the soul, for a while retaining and examining things brought in thither by the common sense. It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul ; for, whilst the understanding and the will are kept as it were in liberd custodia to their objects of verum et bonum, the fancy is free from all engage ments. It digs without spade, sails without ship, flies without wings, builds without charges, fights without bloodshed ; in a mo ment striding from the centre to the circumference of the world, by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating things in an in stant ; and things divorced in nature are married in fancy, as in a lawful place. It is also most restless ; whilst the senses are bound, and reason in a manner asleep, fancy, like a sentinel, walks the round, ever working, never wearied. " The chief diseases of the fancy are either, that it is too wild and high-soaring, or else too low and grovelling, or else too desul tory and over-voluble. 3* 30 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. " Of the first : If thy fancy be but a little too rank, age itself will correct it. To lift too high is no fault in a young horse ; be cause, with travelling, he will mend it for his own ease. Thus, lofty fancies in young men will come down of themselves ; and, in process of time, the overplus will shrink to be but even measure. But if this will not do it, then observe these rules : " Take part always with thy judgment against thy fancy, in any thing wherein they shall dissent. If thou suspectest thy conceits too luxuriant, herein account thy suspicion a legal conviction, and damn whatsoever thou doubtest of. Warily Tully : Benk monent, qui vetant quicquam facere de quo dubitas, aquwn sit an iniquum. "Take the advice of a faithful friend, and submit thy inventions to his censure. When thou pennest an oration, let him have the power of Index Eocpurgatorius, to expunge what he pleaseth ; and do not thou, like a fond mother, cry if the child of thy brain be corrected for playing the wanton: Mark the arguments and reasons of his alterations, why that phrase least proper, this passage more cautious and advised ; and, after a while, thou shalt perform the place in thine own person, and not go out of thyself for a cen- surer. " If thy fancy be too low and humble, let thy judgment be king, but not tyrant, over it, to condemn harmless, yea commendable, con ceits. Some, for fear their orations should giggle, will not let them smile. Give it also liberty to rove, for it will not be extravagant. There is no danger that weak folks, if they walk abroad, will strag gle far, as wanting strength. " Acquaint thyself with reading poets, for there fancy is in her throne ; and, in time, the sparks of the author's wit will catch hold on the reader, and inflame him with love, liking, and desire of imi tation. I confess there is more required to teach one to write than to see a copy. However, there is a secret force of fascination in reading poems, to raise and provoke fancy. " If thy fancy be over-voluble, then whip this vagrant home to the first object whereon it should be settled. Indeed, nimbleness is the perfection of this faculty, but levity the bane of it. Great is the difference betwixt a swift horse, and a skittish, that will stand on no ground. Such is the ubiquitary fancy, which will keep long residence on no one subject, but is so courteous to strangers, that it ever welcomes that conceit most which comes last, and new species supplant the old ones, before Seriously considered. If this be the LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 31 fault of thy fancy, I say, whip it home to the first object whereon it should be settled. This do as often as occasion requires, and by degrees the fugitive servant will learn to abide by his work without running away. " Acquaint thyself by degrees with hard and knotty studies, as school-divinity, which will clog thy over-nimble fancy. True, at the first, it will be as welcome to thee as a prison, and their very solutions will seem knots unto thee. But take not too much at once, lest thy brain turn edge. Taste it first as a potion for physic ; and by degrees thou shalt drink it as beer for thirst ; prac tice will make it pleasant. Mathematics are also good for this pur pose ; if beginning to try a conclusion, thou must make an end, lest thou losest thy pains that are past, and must proceed seriously and exactly. I meddle not with those Bedlam fancies, all whose conceits are antics ; but leave them for the physicians to purge with hellebore. " To clothe low creeping matter with high-flown language is not fine fancy, but flat foolery. It rather loads than raises a wren, to fasten the feathers of an ostrich to her wings. Some men's speeches are like the high mountains in Ireland, having a dirty bog in the top of them ; the very ridge of them in high words having nothing of worth, but what rather stalls than delights the auditor. " Fine fancies in manufactures invent engines rather pretty than useful. And, commonly, one trade is too narrow for them. They are better to project new ways than to prosecute old, and are rather skilful in many mysteries than thriving in one. They affect not voluminous inventions, wherein many years must constantly be spent to perfect them, except there be in them variety of pleasant employment. " Imagination (the work of the fancy) hath produced real effects. Many serious and sad examples hereof may be produced. I will only insist on a merry one. A gentleman having led a company of children beyond their usual journey, they began to be weary, and jointly cried to him to carry them; which, because of their multi tude, he could not do, but told them he would provide them horses to ride on. Then cutting little wands out of the hedge as nags for them, and a great stake as a gelding for himself, thus mounted, fancy put mettle into their legs, and they came cheerfully home. " Fancy runs most furiously when a guilty conscience drives it. One that owed much money, and had many creditors, as he walked 32 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. London streets in the evening, a tenter-hook caught his cloak. ' At whose suit ? ' said he, conceiving some bailiff had arrested him. Thus guilty consciences are afraid where no fear is, and count every creature they meet a sergeant sent from God to punish them." The historical works of Fuller are simply a caricature of the species of composition to which they professedly belong ; a systematic violation of all its proprieties. The gravity and dignity of the historic Muse are habitually violated by him. Nay, more ; not only is he continually cracking his jokes, and perpetrating his puns ; his matter is as full of treason against the laws of history as his manner. His very method if we may be allowed such an abuse of language con sists in a contempt of all method. He has so constructed his works as to secure himself the indulgence of perpetual digres sion, of harboring and protecting every vagrant story that may ask shelter in his pages, of rambling hither and thither, as the fit takes him, and of introducing all sorts of things, where, when, and how he pleases. To this end he has cut up his " Histories " into little paragraphs or sections, which often have as little connection with one another as with the general subject. Any curious fact, any anecdote, is sufficient warrant in his opinion for a digression ; provided only it has any conceivable relation to the events he happens to be narrating. A mere chronological connection is always deemed enough to justify him in bringing the most diverse matters into juxtaposition ; while the little spaces which divide his sections from one another, like the little compartments in a cabinet of curiosities, are thought sufficient lines of de marcation between the oddest incongruities. His " Worthies of England " is in fact a rambling tour over the English Counties, taken in alphabetical order, in which, though his chief object undoubtedly is to give an account of the prin cipal families resident in each, and of the illustrious men they have severally produced, be cannot refrain from thrust ing in a world of gossip on their natural history and geogra phy ; on their productions, laws, customs, and proverbs. It LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 33 may be said that this was an unfinished work ; that we have not the fabric itself, but only the bricks and mortar of which it was to be constructed. We reply that the general plan is sufficiently disclosed, and could not have been materially altered had the author lived to complete the work. But is his " Church History " a whit better in this respect ? Never was there such a medley. First, each book and section is introduced by a quaint dedication to one or other of his many admirers or patrons. Nicholson in his " English Historical Library " is rather severe on his motives for such a multipli cation of dedications. Secondly, the several paragraphs into which the " Church History" is divided (most of them intro duced by some quaint title) are many of them as little con nected with church history as with the history of China. Thus, in one short " section," comprising the period from 1330 to 1361, we find " paragraphs" relating to " the igno rance of the English in curious clothing," to " fuller's earth," which, he tells us, " was a precious commodity," to the manufacture of " woollen cloth," and to the sumptuary laws which " restrained excess in apparel." Here is a strange mixture in one short chapter ! Church history, as all the world knows, is compelled to treat of mat ters which have a very remote relation to the Church of Christ ; but who could have suspected that it could, by possi bility, take cognizance of fuller's earth and woollens ? Even Fuller himself seems a little astonished at his own hardihood ; and lest any should at first sight fail to see the perfect con- gruity of such topics, he engages, with matchless effrontery, to show the connection between them. His reasons are so very absurd, and given so much in his own manner, that we cannot refrain from citing them. " But enough of this sub ject, which let none condemn for a deviation from church history. First, because it would not grieve me to go a little out of the way, if the way be good, as the digression is for the credit and profit of our country. Secondly, it reductively belongeth to the church history, seeing many poor people, 34 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. both young and old, formerly charging the parishes (as ap peared by the account of the church officers) were hereby enabled to maintain themselves " ! ! It may well be supposed, after what has been said, that his " Histories " are not to be judged by the ordinary rules applied to that class of compositions. They possess intrinsic value only as collections and repertories of materials for other and less eccentric writers. In this point of view he often modestly represents them ; and, in fact, as we conjecture, for the very purpose of securing the larger license for rambling. The praise of method and regularity (if indeed he formed any notion of these) he coveted little, compared with the free indulgence of his vagrant and gossiping humor. He loved, like Edie Ochiltree, " to daunder along the green lanes," to leave the dusty high-road of continuous history, and solace himself in every " by-path meadow " that invited his feet by its softness and verdure. Even as a collector of materials, his merits have been strongly called in question by Bishop Nicholson. " Through the whole of his ' Church History,' " says the critic, " he is so fond of his own wit, that he does not seem to have minded what he was about. The gravity of an historian (much more of an ecclesiastical one) requires a far greater care, both of the matter and style of his work, than is here to be met with. If a pretty story comes in his way that affords scope for clinch and droll, off it goes with all the gayety of the stage, without staying to inquire whether it have any foundation in truth or not ; and even the most seri ous and authentic parts of it are so interlaced with pun and quibble, that it looks as if the man had designed to ridicule the annals of our Church into fable and romance. Yet if it were possible to refine it well, the work would be of good use, since there are in it some things of moment hardly to be had elsewhere, which may often illustrate dark passages in more serious writers. These are not to be despised where his authorities are cited, and appear credible. But in other matters, where he is singular, and without his vouchers, LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 35 That Fuller has intermingled a great deal of gossip and rubbish with his facts is, indeed, most true ; but then, usually, he neither receives such matter for truth himself, nor delivers it for truth to others ; so that the worst that can be said of him on that score is, that he is content to merge his historic character in that of a retailer of amusing oddities. But that he is careless in the admission or investigation of facts, we cannot admit, without better proof than Nicholson has fur nished ; and we much fear that the censure of the critic was excited rather by Fuller's candor, than by either his partiality or his negligence. If he had been a more thorough partisan, and on the side of his censor, we should have been spared some of the indignation of this " historian " of " historians." With indolence in his researches, at all events, Fuller cannot be justly taxed. Frequently compelled, in his capacity of chaplain to the royal army, to change his quarters, often writing without the advantage of books and access to docu ments, it was impossible that he should not fall into serious errors ; but he diligently availed himself of such resources as were within his reach. As already intimated, he would spend hours in patiently listening to the long-winded recitals of rustic ignorance, in hopes of gleaning some neglected tra dition, or of rescuing some half- forgotten fact from oblivion. His works everywhere disclose the true antiquarian spirit, the genuine veneration for whatever bears the " charming rust," or exhales the musty odor of age ; and it is plain that, if his opportunities had been equal either to his inclinations or his aptitudes, he would have been no mean proficient in the arts of spelling out and piercing the mouldering records of antiquity, of deciphering documents, of adjusting dates, of investigating the origin of old customs, and the etymology of old names, of interpreting proverbial say ings, of sifting the residuum of truth in obscure tradition, and of showing the manner in which facts have passed into fable. Like many men of the same stamp, however, he had not the faculty of discriminating the relative value of the 36 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. facts thus elicited ; but frequently exhibits the most insignifi cant with as much prominence as the most valuable : like them, too, he often mistakes probability for demonstration, and magnifies conjecture into certainty. In some respects he bore a sort of resemblance (though in others how differ ent !) to Herodotus and Froissart. The charm of continuous narrative, indeed, for which they are so justly eminent, he possessed not ; still less the happy art of a picturesque and graceful disposition of his materials. But in his diligent heed to traditional stories, in the personal pains and labor which he was willing to take in the accumulation of his materials, in the eagerness and the patience with which he prosecuted the chase, in the large infusion of merely curious and amusing matter amongst the sober verities of history, by which his " Worthies " and his " Church History" are equally marked, there is some resemblance. The traditions, and " the reports," and the " sayings " of the common people, were as dear to him as was the a>s \eyovo-i to the father of history. Like the above writers, too, he usually lets us know for what he vouches, and what he gives on the report of others ; and we believe that, as in their case, his principal statements will be found more nearly true the more they are investigated. But, after all, his professedly historical works are not to be read as histories; their strange want of method, the odd intermixture of incongruous and irrelevant matter they contain, and the eccentricities of all kinds with which they abound, will for ever prevent that. They are rather books of amusement ; in which wisdom and whim, impor tant facts and impertinent fables, solid reflections and quaint drolleries, refined wit and wretched puns, great beauties and great negligences, are mingled in equal proportions. Pe rused as books of amusement, there are few in the English language which a man, with the slightest tincture of love for our early literature, can take up with a keener relish ; while an enthusiast, whether by natural predisposition or acquired habit, will, like Charles Lamb, absolutely riot in their wild luxuriance. LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 37 Faulty as Fuller's Histories are, it will be seen that he yet possessed in great perfection many of the most essential con ditions of excellence in that department of composition. His spirit of research, his love of minute investigation, his fine imagination, his boundless vivacity, his freedom from prejudice, his liberality and candor, would seem to have in sured success ; and that success would doubtless have been eminent, had he not given such license to his inordinate wit, so freely indulged his oddities of manner, and set all method at defiance. These defects have gone far to neutralize his other admirable qualifications for historical composition ; and what was absurdly said of Shakspeare, might with some pro priety be said of him, " that a pun was the Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it." In a moral and religious point of view, the character of Fuller is entitled to our veneration, and is altogether one of the 'most attractive and interesting which that age exhibits to us. His buoyant temper, and his perpetual mirthfulness, were wholly at variance with that austerity and rigor which characterized so many of the religionists of his time ; but his life and conduct bore ample testimony that he possessed genuine and habitual piety. Amidst all his levity of manner, there was still the gravity of the heart, deep veneration for all things sacred ; and while his wit clothed even his religious thoughts and feelings with irresistible pleasantry, his manner is as different from that of the scorner, as the inno cent laugh of childhood from the malignant chuckle of a demon. In all the relations of domestic and social life, his conduct was most exemplary. In one point, especially, does he appear in honorable contrast with the bigots of all parties in that age of strife, he had learned, partly from his natural benevolence, and partly from a higher principle, the lessons of " that charity which thinketh no evil," and which so few of his contemporaries knew how to practise. His very moderation, however, as is usually the case, made him sus pected by the zealots of both parties. Though a sincere 38 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. friend of the Church of England, he looked with sorrow (which in his " Church History " he took no pains to dis guise) on the severities practised towards the Puritans ; and everywhere adopts the tone of apology for their supposed errors, and of compassion for their undoubted sufferings. His candor and impartiality in treating some of the most delicate portions of our ecclesiastical history as, for ex ample, the Hampton Court controversy, and the administra tion of Laud are in admirable contrast with the resolute spirit of partisanship which has inspired so many of the writers of the Church of England. There were not wanting persons, however, who, as we have seen, insinuated that his candor in these and other instances was nothing but a peace- offering to the men in power at the time he published his " Church History." But, not to urge that he has said too much on the other side to justify such a supposition, his whole manner is that of an honest man, striving to be im partial, even if not always successful. Had he been the un principled timeserver this calumny would represent him, he would have suppressed a little more. Coleridge says that he was " incomparably the most sensible, the least prejudiced, great man of an age that boasted a galaxy of great men." If this statement be confined to " religious prejudices," there are, it must be confessed, few of his age who can be com pared with him. As to prejudices of other kinds, he seems to have shared in those of most of his contemporaries. It is hard, or rather impossible, to be wholly beyond one's age. He believed in witches ; he was a resolute stickler for the royal prerogative of curing the king's evil ; though whether his loyalty or philosophy had most to do with his convictions on that point, may well admit of doubt. It is true that he treats the idle legends and fabled miracles of Romish super stition with sovereign contempt ; but then his Protestantism came to the aid of his reason, and, considering the super stitions he has himself retained, the former may be fairly supposed to have offered the more powerful logic of the two. LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 39 Though Fuller cannot be accused of sharing the bigotry and bitterness of his age, he is by no means perfectly free from a very opposite vice with which that age was nearly as chargeable, we mean flattery. His multitudinous dedica tions to his numerous patrons, contained in the " Church History," are, many of them, very striking, and even beauti ful compositions, and full of ingenious turns of thought ; but they certainly attribute as much of excellence to the objects of them, as either history, or tradition, or charity can war rant us in ascribing. Something may, however, be pardoned to the spirit of the age, and something to the gratitude or necessities of the author. But that any author, even a hungry one, could be brought to write them is a wonder ; that any patron could, either with or without a blush, appropriate them, is a still greater one. It is in the conclusion to his character of the " Good King," in his " Holy State," that our author has fallen most unworthily into the complimentary extravagance of the times. He, of course, makes the reign ing monarch the reality of the fair picture, and draws his character in language which truth might well interpret into the severest irony. It would be improper to close this analysis of one of the most singular intellects that ever appeared in the world of letters, without saying a word or two of the prodigies related of his powers of memory. That he had a very tenacious one may easily be credited, though some of its traditional feats almost pass belief. It is said that he could " repeat five hundred strange words after once hearing them, and could make use of a sermon verbatim, under the like circum stances." Still further, it is said that he undertook, in pass ing from Temple Bar to the extremity of Cheapside, to tell, at his return, every sign as it stood in order on both sides of the way, (repeating them either backwards or forwards,) and that he performed the task exactly. This is pretty well, con sidering that in that day every shop had its sign. The inter pretation of such hyperboles, however, is very easy ; they 40 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. signify, at all events, thus much, that he had an extraor dinary memory. That many of the reports respecting it were false or exaggerated, may be gathered from an amus ing anecdote recorded by himself. " None alive," says he, " ever heard me pretend to the art of memory, who in my book (Holy State) have decried it as a trick, no art ; and, indeed, is more of fancy than memory. I confess, some ten years since, when I came out of the pulpit of St. Dunstan's East, one (who since wrote a book thereof) told me in the vestry, before credible people, that he, in Sidney College, had taught me the art of memory. I returned unto him, that it was not so, for I could not remember that I had ever seen him before ! which, I conceive, was a real refutation." One is prepared to meet with all sorts of oddities of man ner about such a man, for it would be strange that a person so eccentric in all his writings should not have been eccen tric in his private habits ; but really the following account of his method of composition passes belief. It is said that he was in " the habit of writing the first words of every line near the margin down to the foot of the paper, and that then, beginning again, he filled up the vacuities exactly, with out spaces, interlineations, or contractions " ; and that he " would so connect the ends and beginnings that the sense would appear as complete as if it had been written in a con tinued series, after the ordinary manner." This, we pre sume, is designed to be a compliment to the ease with which he performed the process of mental composition, and the ac curacy with which his memory could transfer what he had meditated to paper. But though he might occasionally per form such a feat for the amusement of his friends, it never could have been his ordinary practice. As we quoted, at the commencement of this essay, the opinion entertained of our author by Coleridge, we shall con clude it by citing that of Charles Lamb, than whom there could not be a more competent judge. " The writings of Fuller," says he, " are usually ^ designated by the title of LIFE AND WRITINGS OF THOMAS FULLER. 41 quaint, and with sufficient reason ; for such was his natural bias to conceits, that I doubt not, upon most occasions, it would have been going out of his way to have expressed him self out of them. But his wit is not always lumen siccum, a dry faculty of surprising ; on the contrary, his conceits are oftentimes deeply steeped in human feeling and passion. Above all, his way of telling a story, for its eager liveliness, and the perpetual running commentary of the narrator, hap pily blended with the narration, is perhaps unequalled." * * Since the preceding essay was published, have appeared " Memo rials of the Life and Works of Fuller, by Rev. Arthur T. Russell, B. C. L." In that volume, all that either history or tradition has left re specting our author has been laboriously and faithfully compiled ; and thither the reader, curious about the biography of this eccentric genius, is referred for more minute information than could be given in the sketch at the commencement of this essay. ANDKEW MARVELL.* ANDREW MARVELL was a native of Kingston-upon-Hull, where he was born November 15, 1620. His father, of the same name, was master of the grammar-school, and lec turer of Trinity Church in that town. He is described by Fuller and Echard as " facetious," so that his son's wit, it would appear, was hereditary. He is also said to have dis played considerable eloquence in the pulpit ; and even to have excelled in that kind of oratory which would seem at first sight least allied to a mirthful temperament, that is, the pathetic. The conjunction, however, of keen wit and deep sensibility has been found in a far greater number of instances than would at first sight be imagined ; as might be easily proved by examples, if this were the place for it. Nor would it be difficult to give the rationale of the fact. Each has its natural affinities with genius, and both very generally accompany it. The diligence of Mr. Marvell's pulpit preparations has been celebrated by Fuller in his " Worthies," with character istic quaintness. " He was a most excellent preacher," says he, " who never broached what he had new brewed, but preached what he had pre-studied some competent time be- * " Edinburgh Review," January, 1844. The Life of Andrew Marvel! , the celebrated Patriot ; with Extracts and Selections from his Prose and Poetical Works. BY JOHN DOVE. 12mo. London. 1832. ANDREW MARVELL. 43 fore, insomuch that he was wont to say, that he would cross the common proverb, which called Saturday the working day and Monday the holiday of preachers." The eloquence of the pulpit he enforced by the more persuasive eloquence of a consistent life. During the pestilential epidemic of '1637, we are told that he distinguished himself by an intrepid discharge of his pastoral functions. Having given early indications of superior talents, young Andrew was sent, when not quite fifteen years of age, to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was partly or wholly maintained by an exhibition from his native town. He had not been long there, when, like Chillingworth, he was en snared by the proselyting arts of the Jesuits ; who, with sub tlety equal to their zeal, commissioned their emissaries spe cially to aim at the conversion of such of the university youths as gave indications of signal ability. It appears that he was inveigled from college to London. Having been tracked thither by his father, he was discovered after some months in a bookseller's shop, and restored to the univer sity ; where, during the two succeeding years, he pursued his studies with diligence. About this period he lost his fa ther under circumstances worth relating. The death of this good man forms one of those little do mestic tragedies, not infrequent in real life, to which imagination itself can scarcely add one touching incident, and which are as affecting as any that fiction can furnish. It ap pears that on the other side of the Humber lived a lady (an intimate friend of MarvelPs father) who had an only daugh ter, equally lovely and beloved. This idol her mother could scarcely bear to be out of her sight. On one occasion, how ever, she yielded to the importunity of Mr. Marvell, and suf fered her daughter to cross the water to Hull, to be present at the baptism of one of his children. The day after the ceremony the young lady was to return. The weather was tempestuous, and on reaching the river's side, accompanied by^ Mr. Marvell, the boatmen endeavoured to dissuade 'her 44 ANDREW MARVELL. from attempting the passage. But, afraid of alarming her mother by prolonging her absence, she persisted. Mr. Mar- vell added his importunities to the arguments of the boatmen, but in vain. Finding her inflexible, he told her that, as she had incurred this peril for his sake, he felt himself " bound in honor aud conscience " not to desert her ; and, having pre vailed on some boatmen to hazard the passage, they em barked together. As they were putting off, he flung his gold-headed cane on shore, and told the spectators, that, in case he should never return, it was to be given his son, with the injunction " to remember his father." The boat was up set and both were lost. As soon as the mother had a little recovered the shock, she sent for the orphan, intimated her intention to provide for his education, and at her death left him all she possessed. One of his biographers informs us that young Marvell took his degree of B. A. in the year 1638, and was admitted to a scholarship.* If so, he did not retain it very long. Though in no further danger from the Jesuits, he seems to have been beset by more formidable enemies in his own bosom. Either from too early becoming his own master, or from being be trayed into follies to which his lively temperament and so cial qualities peculiarly exposed him, he became negligent of his studies ; and having absented himself from certain " exer cises," and otherwise been guilty of sundry unacademic ir regularities, he, with four others, was adjudged by the master and seniors unworthy of " receiving any further benefit from the college," unless they showed just cause to the contrary within three months. The required vindication does not ap pear to have been found, or at all events was never offered. The record of this transaction bears date September 24, 1641. Soon after this, probably at the commencement of 1642, Marvell seems to have set out on his travels, in the course of which he visited a great part of Europe. At Rome he * Cooke, in the Life prefixed to Marvell's Poems. 1726. ANDREW MARVELL. 45 stayed a considerable time, where Milton was then residing, and where, in all probability, their lifelong friendship com menced. With an intrepidity, characteristic of both, it is said they openly argued against the superstitions of Rome within the precincts of the Vatican. It was here, also, that Marvell made the first essay of his satirical powers in a lampoon on Richard Flecknoe. It is now remembered only as having suggested the more effective satire of Dryden on the laureate Shadwell. At Paris he made another attempt at satire in Latin, of about the same order of merit. The sub ject of it was an abbe named Lancelot Joseph de Maniban, who professed to interpret the characters and prognosticate the fortunes of strangers by an inspection of their hand writing. After this we have no trace whatever of Marvell for some years ; and his biographers have, as usual, endeavored to supply the deficiency by conjecture, some of them so idly, that they have made him secretary to an embassy which had then no existence. ,Mr Dove* says, that this lack of information respecting * We gladly admit that Mr. Dove's little volume is a tolerably full and accurate compilation of what is known to us of Andrew Marvell's history, and contains some pleasant extracts from his writings. But we must express our regret that he has been, in a trifling degree, misled, by adhering too literally to the etymology of the word " compilation." It is true that " compilation " comes from compilatio, and equally true that compilatio means " pillage " ; but it does not follow that " compilation " is to be literally " pillage." A considerable number of sentences, some times whole paragraphs, are transferred from Mr. D'Israeli's Miscella nies, and from two articles on Andrew Marvell which appeared in the " Retrospective Review " some thirty years ago, without alteration, and without any sort of acknowledgment. Had they been printed between inverted commas, and the sources specified, we should have called it " compilation," but no "pillage"; as it is, we must call it pillage, and not compilation. Mr. Dove may, it is true, have been the author of the articles in question. If so, there was no conceivable reason why he should not have owned them ; and we can only regret that he has omit ted to do it. If not, we cannot justify the use he has made of them. 46 ANDREW MARVELL. Marvell extends over eleven years ; not quite, however, even on his own showing ; for the very next record he supplies tells us at least how the first four years of this period were spent, and a considerable though indeterminate portion at the close of it. The record referred to is a recommendatory letter of Milton to Bradshaw, dated February 21, 1652. It ap pears that Marvell was then an unsuccessful candidate for the office of assistant Latin secretary. In this letter, after de scribing Marvell as a man of " singular desert," both from " report " and personal " converse," he proceeds to" say : " He hath spent four years abroad, in Holland, France, Italy, and Spain, to very good purpose, as I believe, and the gain ing of those four languages ; besides, he is a scholar, and well read in the 'Latin and Greek authors, and no doubt of an approved conversation ; for he comes now lately out of the house of the Lord Fairfax, where he was intrusted to give some instructions in the languages to the lady, his daughter" Milton concludes the letter with a sentence which fully dis closes the very high estimate he had formed of Marvell's abilities : " This, my lord, I write sincerely, without any other end than to perform my duty to the public in helping them to a humble servant ; laying aside those jealousies and that emulation which mine own condition might suggest to me by bringing in such a coadjutor." In the following year, 1653, Marvell was appointed tutor to Cromwell's nephew, Mr. Button. Shortly after receiving his charge, he addressed a letter to the Protector, from which we extract one or two sentences characteristic of his caution, good sense, and conscientiousness. " I have taken care," says he, speaking of his pupil, " to examine him several times in the presence of Mr. Oxenbridge, as those who weigh and tell over money before some witness ere they take charge of it ; for I thought there might be possibly some lightness in the coin, or error in the telling, which hereafter I should be bound to make good." l: He is of a gentle and waxen disposition ; and God be praised, I cannot say he hath brought ANDREW MARVELL. 47 with him any evil impression, and I shall hope to set nothing into his spirit but what may be of a good sculpture. He hath in him two things that make youth most easy to be managed, modesty, which is the bridle to vice, and emulation, which is the spur to virtue Above all, I shall labor to make him sensible of his duty to God ; for then we begin to serve faithfully when we consider He is our master." On the publication of Milton's second " Defence," Marvell was commissioned to present it to the Protector. After doing so, he addressed a letter of compliment to Milton, the terms of which evince the natural admiration with which his illus trious friend had inspired him. His eulogy of the " De fence " is as emphatic as that of the Paradise Lost, in the well-known recommendatory lines prefixed to most editions of that poem. In 1657, Marvell entered upon his duties as assistant Latin secretary with Milton ; Cromwell died in the following year ; and from this period till the Parliament of 1660, there is no further trace of him. We have seen it affirmed that he be came member for Hull in 1658. But this is not true, and would be at variance with the statement in his epitaph, where it is said that he had occupied that post nearly twenty years. Had he been first elected in 1658, he would have been mem ber somewhat more than that period. During his long Parliamentary career, Marvell maintained a close correspondence with his constituents, regularly sending to them, almost every post-night during the sittings of Parliament, an account of its proceedings. These letters were first made public by Captain Thompson, and occupy about four hundred pages of the first volume of his edition of MarvelPs works. They are written with great plainness, and with a business-like brevity, which must have satisfied, we should think, even the most laconic of his merchant con stituents. They are chiefly valuable now, as affording proofs of the ability and fidelity with which their author discharged his public duties; and as throwing light on some curious 48 ANDREW MARVELL. points of Parliamentary usage and history. Some few sen tences, interesting on these accounts, may be worth extract ing. Of his diligence, the copiousness and punctuality of the correspondence itself are themselves the best proofs ; but many of the letters incidentally disclose others not less significant. The following evidence of it, few members now- a-days would be disposed to give, and no constituency, we should imagine, would be unreasonable enough to expect : " Sir, I must beg your excuse for paper, pens, writing, and every thing ; for really I have by ill chance neither eat nor drank from yesterday at noon till six o'clock to-night, that the House rose." * And again : " Really the business of the House hath been of late so earnest daily, and so long, that I have not had the time and scarce vigor left me, by night, to write to you ; and to-day, because I would not omit any longer, I lose my dinner to make sure of this letter." t On another occasion he says : " 'T is nine at night, and we are but just now risen ; and I write these few words in the post- house, for sureness that my letter be not too late." J In one letter we find him saying : " I am something bound up, that I cannot write about your public affairs ; but I assure you they break my sleep" Of his minute attention to all their local interests, and his vigilant care over them, these letters afford ample proof; and in this respect are not unworthy of the study of honorable members of the present day. He usually commences each session of Parliament by requesting his constituents to con sider, whether there were any local affairs in which they might more particularly require his aid, and to give him timely notice of their wishes. His prudence is conspicuous in his abstinence from any dangerous comments on public affairs ; he usually contents himself with detailing bare facts. This caution was absolutely necessary at a period when the * Marvell's Letters, p. 302. t Ibid., p. 83. \ Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 33. ANDREW MARVELL. 49 officials of the post-office made no scruple of breaking the seal of private correspondence for the purpose of obtaining information for the government. On one occasion this seems to have been done in his own case. He tells his constituents that a letter of his had been shown about town : they, in a very complimentary reply, vehemently disclaim all knowl- -edge of any breach of trust. In acknowledging, this letter, he says : " I am very well satisfied, Gentlemen, by your letter, that it was none of you ; but it seems, therefore, that there is some sentinel set both upon you and upon me, and to know it, therefore, is a sufficient caution : the best of it is, that none of us, I believe, either do say or write any thing, but what we care not though it be made public, although we do not desire it." * He, notwithstanding, repeatedly admon ishes them not to let his letters be seen by any but them selves. In this respect, there is a striking yet perfectly nat ural contrast between the cautious statements of facts in his public correspondence, and the lively comments upon them in his private letters ; in which his indignant patriotism ex presses itself with characteristic severity against the corrup tions of the court. Thus, in a letter to a friend in Persia, we find the following memorable passage : " Now, after my usual method, leaving to others what relates to business, I address myself, which is all that I am good for, to be your gazetteer. The King having, upon pretence of the great preparations of his neighbors, demanded three hundred thou sand pounds for his navy (though, in conclusion, he hath not set out any), and that the Parliament should pay his debts (which the ministers would never particularize to the House of Commons), our House gave several bills. You see how far things were stretched, though beyond reason, there being no satisfaction how those debts were contracted, and all men foreseeing that what was given would not be applied to dis charge the debts, which I hear are at this day risen to four * Marvell's Letters, p. 262. 5 50 ANDREW MARVELL. millions ; but diverted, as formerly. Nevertheless, such was the number of the constant courtiers increased by the apos tate patriots, who were bought off for that turn, some at six, others ten, one at fifteen thousand pounds in money, be sides what offices, lands, and reversions to others, that it is a mercy they gave not away the whole land and liberty of Eng land." * In the same letter, he thus speaks of the shamelessness with which the Parliament emulated the profligacy of the court, prostituting its own and the nation's honor as vilely as the royal mistresses it enriched had prostituted theirs : " They have signed and sealed ten thousand pounds a year more to the Duchess of Cleveland, who has likewise near ten thousand pounds a year out of the new farm of the country excise of beer and ale, five thousand pounds a year out of the post-office, and, they say, the reversion of all the King's leases, the reversion of all places in the custom-house, the green wax, and indeed what not ? All promotions, spiritual and temporal, pass under her cognizance." t On the King's unwelcome visits to the House of Peers, he says : " Being sat, he told them it was a privilege he claimed from his an cestors to be present at their deliberations. That therefore they should not, for his coming, interrupt their debates, but proceed, and be covered. They did so. It is true that this has been done long ago ; but is now so old that it is new, and so disused that, at any other but so bewitched a time as this, it would have been looked on as a high usurpation and breach of privilege. He indeed sat still, for the most part, and interposed very little, sometimes a word or two After three or four days' continuance, the Lords were very well used to the King's presence, and sent the Lord Steward and Lord Chamberlain to him, [to learn] when they might wait, as a House, on him, to render their humble thanks for the honor he did them ? The hour was appointed them, and * Marvell's Letters, p. 405. t Ibid., p. 406. ANDREW MARVELL. 51 they thanked him, and he took it well. So this matter, of such importance on all great occasions, seems riveted to them and us, for the future, and to all posterity The King has ever since continued his session among them, and says it is better than going to a play" * Marvell's stainless probity and honor everywhere appear ; and in no case more amiably than in the misunderstanding with his colleague, or " his partner," as he calls him, Colonel Gilby, in 1661, and which seems to have arisen out of some electioneering proceedings. With such uncommon talents for ridicule as Marvell possessed, inferior men could not have resisted the temptation to indulge in some ebullition of witty malice. But his magnanimity was far superior to such mean retaliation. He is eager to do his opponent the amplest jus tice, and to put the fairest construction on his conduct. He is fearful only lest their private quarrel should be of the slightest detriment to the public service. He says : " The bonds of civility betwixt Colonel Gilby and myself being unhappily snapped in pieces, and in such a manner that I cannot see how it is possible ever to knit them again : the only trouble that I have is, lest by our mis-intelligence your business should receive any disadvantage Truly, I believe, that as to your public trust and the discharge thereof, we do each of us still retain the same principles upon which we first undertook it ; and that, though perhaps we may some times differ in our advice concerning the way of proceeding, yet we have the same good ends in the general ; and by this unlucky falling out, we shall be provoked to a greater emu lation of serving you." t Yet the offence, whatever it was, must have been a grave one, for we find him saying, at the conclusion of the same letter : " I would not tell you any tales because there are nakednesses which it becomes us to cover, if it be possible ; as I shall, unless I be obliged to make some vindications by any false report or misinterpretations. * Marvell's Letters, pp. 417 -419. t Ibid., pp. 33, 34. 52 ANDREW MARVELL. In the mean time, pity, I beseech you, my weakness ; for there are some things which men ought not, others that they cannot, patiently suffer" * Of his integrity even in little things, of his desire to keep his conscience pure and his reputation untarnished, we have also some striking proofs. On one occasion he had been employed by his constituents to wait on the Duke of Monmouth, then governor of Hull, with a complimentary letter, and to present him with a purse containing " six broad pieces " as an honorary fee. He says : " He had, before I came in, as I was told, considered what to do with the gold ; and but that I by all means prevented the offer, I had been in danger of being reimbursed with it." t In the same letter he says: "I received the bill which was sent me on Mr. Nelehorpe ; but the surplus of it exceeding much the expense I have been at on this occasion, I desire you to make use of it, and of me, upon any other opportunity." J Few in those corrupt days were likely to be troubled with any such incon venient scrupulosity. In one of his letters appears the following declaration, which we have no doubt was perfectly sincere, and, what is still more strange, implicitly believed : "I shall, God will ing, maintain the same incorrupt mind and clear conscience, free from faction or any self-ends, which I have, by his grace, hitherto preserved. " We have said that these letters are also interesting as inci dentally illustrating Parliamentary usage. Marvell was one of the last, if not the very last, who received the " wages " which members were entitled by law to demand of their constituents. To this subject he makes some curious references. On more than one occasion, it appears that members had sued their constituents for arrears of pay ; while others had threatened to do so, unless the said constitu- * MarvelPs Letters, p, 36. t Ibid., p. 210. | Ibid., p. 210. Ibid., p. 276. ANDREW MARVELL. 53 ents agreed to reelect them at the next election ! " To-day," says he in a letter dated March 3, 1676 - 7, " Sir Harbottle Grimstone, Master of the Rolls, moved for a bill to be brought in, to indemnify all counties, cities, and boroughs for the wages due to their members for the time past, which was in troduced by him upon very good reason ; both because of the poverty of many people not able to supply so long an arrear, especially new taxes now coming upon them, and also because Sir John Shaw, the Recorder of Colchester, had sued the town for his wages ; several other members also having, it seems, threatened their boroughs to do the same, unless they should choose them, upon another election, to Parliament." * The conditions of reelection are strange ly altered now ; it is no longer possible to drive so thrifty a bargain, or bribe after so ingenious a fashion. But these " wages," moderate as they were, only about two shillings a day to a member of a borough, and to a county member four, were in some cases alleged to be so heavy a tax, that instances occur of unpatriotic boroughs begging to be disfranchised, to escape the intolerable honor of sending members to Parliament ! Nor was the reluctance always on one side. At earlier periods of our history we have accounts of members who, notwithstanding this liberal pay, not much more than that of a hedger and ditcher in these more luxurious days, found the inconveniences of membership so great, and the honor in their unambitious estimate so small, that they shrank from representing a borough, as much as the borough from the dignity of being represented ; and expressed their aversion with as much sincerity as ever primitive bishop, in times of persecution, cried, " Nolo episco- pari" There are authentic cases on record, in which the candidates fairly ran away from the proffered dignity, and even resisted it vi et armis. Strange revolutions ! one is ready to exclaim ; that a man should now be willing to Marvell's Letters, p. 289. 5* 54 ANDREW MARVELL. spend a fortune even in the unsuccessful pursuit of an honor which his ancestors were reluctant to receive even when paid for it ; and that constituencies should resist, as the last insult and degradation, that disfranchisement which many of them in ancient times would have been but too happy to accept as a privilege ! In such a state of things we can hardly wonder that the attendance of members was not very prompt and punctual, or that great difficulty was often found in obtaining a full House. Severe penalties were threatened at various times against the absentees. In one letter we are told : " The House was called yesterday, and gave defaulters a fortnight's time, by which, if they do not come up, they may expect the greatest severity." * In another : " The House of Com mons was taken up for the most part yesterday in calling over their House, and have ordered a letter to be drawn up from the Speaker to every place for which there is any de faulter, to signify the absence of their member, and a solemn letter is accordingly preparing, to be signed by the Speaker. This is thought a sufficient punishment for any modest man ; nevertheless, if they shall not come up hereupon, there is a further severity reserved." t More than once we find a proposition, that these absentees should be punished by being compelled to pay double propor tions toward the interminable subsidies. One member pro posed that the mulcts thus extorted from negligent or idle senators, should be exclusively employed in building a ship, to be called " The Sinners' Frigate," surely an ill-boding name, however applicable to such a vessel : " Built in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark." Though the law-makers of that age were paid at little more than the rate of a journeyman tailor of modern times, still it appears that their performances, if estimated by their value, * Marvell's Letters, p. 1 17. t Ibid., p. 240. ANDREW MARVELL. 55 were exorbitantly overpaid. When we see in Marvell's cor respondence what were the occupations of the right honorable House, shamefully betraying the nation with whose in terests they were intrusted, taxing the groaning people to support the royal profligacy, ingeniously contriving the most elaborate and comprehensive methods of national ruin, and pursuing the worst ends by the worst means, dimin ishing, by their absurd enactments in relation to trade and commerce, that very revenue which was almost their sole object of solicitude, addressing the King, that he will be pleased to abstain from wearing one shred of foreign manu facture, and to discountenance the use of it in his subjects, bringing in bills that all nonconformists shall pay double taxes, and that all persons shall be buried in woollens " for the next six or seven years"; when we see them engaged with pernicious industry in these and other things of a similar nature, we cannot forbear lifting up our hands in admiration of the " wisdom of our ancestors." Some strange scenes appear now and then to have oc curred in the Commons, and worthy rather of an Arkansas House of Assembly than of a British Parliament ; of which the following is an example. As usual in such squabbles, the " Pickwickian construction " of all offensive words seems to have prevailed at last. " One day, upon a dispute of tell ing right upon division, both parties grew so hot that all order was lost ; men came running up confusedly to the table, grievously affronted one by another ; every man's hand on his hilt, quieted though at last by the prudence of the Speaker ; every man in his place being obliged to stand up and engage his honor not to resent any thing of that day's proceeding." * The disputes with the House of Lords were frequent, and difficult of adjustment. The following is a droll complica tion of their relations, and almost as hopeless as the cele- ' * Marvell's Letters, p. 426. 56 ANDREW MARVELL. brated " dead-lock " in the " Critic " : "I have no more time than to tell you, that the Lords, having judged and fined the East India Company, as we think illegally, upon the petition of one Skyner, a merchant, and they petitioning us for redress, we have imprisoned him that petitioned them, and they have imprisoned several of those that petitioned us It is a business of very high and dangerous consequence." * In a letter to William Ramsden, Esq., occurs another specimen of the awkward relations between the two Houses : "I think I have not told you that, on our bill of subsidy, the Lord Lucas made a fervent bold speech against our prodi gality in giving, and the weak looseness of the government, the King being present ; and the Lord Clare another, to per suade the King that he ought not to be present. But all this had little encouragement, not being seconded. Copies going about everywhere, one of them was brought into the Lords' House, and Lord Lucas was asked whether it was his. He said, part was and part was not. Thereupon they took ad vantage, and said it was a libel even against Lucas himself. On this they voted it a libel, and to be burned by the hang man, which was done ; but the sport was, the hangman burned the Lords' order with it. I take the last quarrel be twixt us and the Lords to be as the ashes of that speech." t One or two other brief extracts from these letters seem not unworthy of insertion. The following is a curious example of the odd accidents on which important events often depend. Sir G. Carteret had been charged with embezzlement of pub lic money. " The House dividing upon the question, the ayes went out, and wondered why they were kept out so ex traordinary a time ; the ayes proved 138, and the noes 129 ; and the reason of the long stay then appeared : The tellers for the ayes chanced to be very ill reckoners, so that they were forced to tell several times over in the House ; and when at last the tellers for the ayes would have agreed the noes to be 142, * Marvell's Letters, p. 106. t Ibid., p. 416. ANDREW MARVELL. 57 the noes would needs say that they were 143 ; whereupon those for the ayes would tell once more, and then found the noes to be indeed but 129, and the ayes then coming in proved to be 138, whereas if the noes had been content with the first error of the tellers, Sir George had been quit upon that observation." * The following sounds odd : " Yesterday, upon complaint of some violent arrests made in several churches, even during sermon time, nay, of one taken out betwixt the bread and the cup in receiving the sacrament, the House ordered that a bill be brought in for better observing the Lord's Day." t Not seldom, to the very moderate " wages " of a legisla tor, was added some homely expression of good-will on the part of the constituents. That of the Hull people generally appeared in the shape of a stout cask of ale, for which Marvell repeatedly returns thanks. In one letter he says: " We must first give you thanks for the kind present you have pleased to send us, which will give occasion to us to re member you often : but the quantity is so great that it might make sober men forgetful." \ MarvelPs correspondence extends through nearly twenty years. From June, 1661, there is, however, a considerable break, owing to his absence for an unknown period, prob ably about two years, in Holland. He showed little dis position to return till Lord Bellasis, then High Steward of Hull, proposed to that worthy corporation to choose a substi tute for their absent member. They replied that he was not far off, and would be ready at their summons. He was then at Frankfort, and at the solicitation of his constituents imme diately returned, April, 1663. But he had not been more than three months at home, when he intimated to his correspondents his intention to ac cept an invitation to accompany Lord Carlisle, who had been * Marvell's Letters, pp. 125, 126. t Ibid., p. 189. J Ibid., pp. 14, 15. 58 ANDREW MARVELL. appointed Ambassador Extraordinary to Russia, Sweden, and Denmark. He formally solicits the assent of his constituents to this step, urges the precedents for it, and assures them that, during his watchful colleague's attendance, his own services may be dispensed with. His constituents consented. He sailed in July, and appears to have been absent rather more than a year. We find him in his place in the Parlia ment that assembled at Oxford, 1665. In 1671, for some unknown reason, there is another hiatus in his correspondence. It extends over three years. From 1674, the letters are regularly continued till his death. There is no proof that he ever spoke in Parliament ; but it appears that he took copious notes of all the debates. The decisive tone which Marvell ever assumed in politics, the severe, satirical things which he had said and written from time to time, and the conviction of his enemies, that it was impossible to silence him by the usual methods of a place or a bribe, must have rendered a wary and circumspect conduct peculiarly necessary ; and, in fact, we are told that on more than one occasion he was menaced with assassina tion. But, though hated by the Court party generally, he was as generally feared, and in some few instances respected. Prince Rupert continued to honor him with his friendship long after the rest of the Court party had honored him with their hatred, and occasionally visited the patriot at his lodg ings. When he voted on the side of Marvell, which was not unfrequently the case, it used to be said that u he had been with his tutor." Inaccessible as Marvell was to flattery and offers of prefer ment, it certainly was not for want of temptations. The ac count of his memorable interview with the Lord Treasurer Danby has been often repeated, and yet it would be un pardonable to omit it here. Marvell, it appears, once spent an evening at Court, and charmed the merry monarch by his accomplishments and wit. At this we need not wonder: Charles loved wit above all things except vice ; and to his ANDREW MARVELL. 59 admiration of it he was continually sacrificing his royal dig nity. On the morning after the above-mentioned interview, he sent Lord Danby to wait on the patriot with a special mes sage of regard. His Lordship had some difficulty in ferreting out Marvell's residence ; but at last found him on a second floor, in a dark court leading out of the Strand. It is said that, groping up the narrow staircase, he stumbled against the door of Marvell's humble apartment, which, flying open, discovered him writing. Not a little surprised, he asked his Lordship, with a smile, if he had not mistaken his way. The latter replied, in courtly phrase, " No ; since I have found Mr. Marvell." He proceeded to inform him that he came with a message from the King, who was impressed with a deep sense of his merits, and was anxious to serve him. Marvell replied, with somewhat of the spirit of the founder of the Cynics, but no doubt in a very different manner, " that his Majesty had it not in his power to serve him." * Becoming more serious, however, he told his Lordship that he well knew that he who accepted Court favors was expected to vote in his interest. On his Lordship's saying, " that his Majesty only desired to know whether there was any place at Court he would accept," the patriot replied, " that he could ac cept nothing with honor ; for either he must treat the King with ingratitude, by refusing compliance with Court meas ures, or be a traitor to his country by yielding to them." * Another and less authentic version of this anecdote has been long current, much more circumstantial, indeed, but on that very account more apocryphal. If the too dramatic additions to the story, however, be fictions, they are amongst those fictions which have gained extensive circulation only because they are felt to be not intrinsically improbable. Some pains have been taken to investigate the origin of this version ; but we can trace it no further than to a pamphlet printed in Ireland about the middle of the last century. Of this we have not been so fortunate as to get a sight. Suffice it to say, that the narrative it con tains of the above interview, and which has been extensively circulated, is not borne out by the early biographies ; for example, that of Cooke, 1726. 60 ANDKEW MARVELL. The only favor, therefore, he begged of his Majesty was, to esteem him as a loyal subject, and truer to his interests in refusing his offers than he could be by accepting them. His Lordship, having exhausted this species of logic, tried the argumentum ad crumenam, and told him that his Majesty re quested his acceptance of .1,000. But this, too, was rejected with firmness ; " though," says his biographer, " soon after the departure of his Lordship, Marvell was compelled to bor row a guinea from a friend." In 1672 commenced Marvell's memorable controversy with Samuel Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, of which we shall give a somewhat copious account. To this it is en titled, from the important influence which it had on Marvell's reputation and fortunes ; and as having led to the composition of that work on which his literary fame, so far as he has any, principally depends, " The Rehearsal Transprosed." Parker was one of the worst specimens of the highest of the high-churchmen of the reign of Charles II. It is diffi cult, in such times as these, to conceive of such a character as, by universal testimony, Parker is proved to have been. Even Addison's Tory fox-hunter who thought there had been " no good weather since the Revolution," and who pro ceeded to descant on the " fine days they used to have in King Charles II. 's reign " ; whose dog was chiefly endeared to him because he had once " like to have worried a Dissent ing teacher" ; and who "had no other notion of religion but that it consisted in hating Presbyterians" does not ade quately represent him. Such men could not well flourish in any other age than that of Charles II. ; happily, the race, even then not numerous, could not propagate itself. Only in such a period of unblushing profligacy, of public corrup tion unexampled in the history of England, could we ex pect to find a Bishop Parker, and his patron and parallel, Archbishop Sheldon. Such men managed to combine the most hideous bigotry with an absence of all religious earnest ness, a zeal worthy of a " Pharisee " with a character ANDREW MARVELL. 61 which would have disgraced a " publican." Apparently as much attached to the veriest minutia? of high-church ortho doxy as the sincerest disciples of the present Oxford school, they yet gave reason to their very friends to doubt whether they did not secretly despise even the cardinal doctrines of Christianity.* Equivocal Christians in creed, and absolute infidels in practice, they yet insisted on the most scrupulous compliance with the most trivial points of ceremonial ; and persisted in persecuting thousands of devout and honest men because they hesitated to obey. Things which they admitted to be indifferent, and which, without violation of conscience, they might have forborne to enforce, they remorselessly urged on those who solemnly declared that without such a violation they could not comply. More tolerant of acknowl edged vice than of supposed error, they deemed drunkenness and debauchery venial, compared with doubts about the pro priety of making the sign of the cross in baptism, or using the ring in marriage ; it would have been better for a man to break half the commands in the decalogue, than admit a doubt of the most frivolous of their cherished rites. Equally trucu lent and servile, they displayed to all above them a meanness proportioned to the insolence they evinced to all below them. While preferring, on behalf of the Church, the most extrava gant pretensions, they were far from participating in any jealousy of the state, which they were ready to arm with the most despotic authority. They formally invested the * Of Sheldon, Bishop Burnet says, that " he seems not to have had ' any clear sense of religion, if any at all." Of Parker, he speaks yet more strongly. But, perhaps, the most striking testimony is that of the Jesuit father, Edward Petre, cited by Mr. Dove. He says : " The Bishop of Oxford has not yet declared himself openly : the great obstacle is his wife, whom he cannot rid himself of: though I do not see how he can be further useful to us in the religion he is in, because he is suspected, and of no esteem among the heretics of the English Church If he had believed my counsel, which was to temporize for some longer time, he would have done better." Surely this Jesuit and his pupil were well matched for honesty. 62 ANDREW MARVELL. monarch with absolute power over the consciences of his subjects ; and, with a practice in harmony with their princi ples, were ready at any moment to surrender their own, if they had had any. As far as appears, they would have been willing to embrace the faith of Mahometans or Hindoos at the bidding of his Majesty ; and to believe and disbelieve as he commanded them. Extravagant as all this may seem, we shall shortly see it gravely propounded by Parker himself. It was fit that those who were willing to offer such vile adu lation should be suffered to present it to such an object as Charles II., that so grotesque an idolatry should have as grotesque an idol. The god was, indeed, every way worthy of the worshippers. In a word, these men seemed to recon cile the most opposite vices and the widest contrarieties : bigotry and laxity, pride and meanness, religious scru pulosity and mocking scepticism, a persecuting zeal against conscience and an indulgent latitudinarianism towards vice, the truculence of tyrants, and the sycophancy of parasites. Happily, the state of things which generated such men has long since passed away. But examples of this sort of high- churchmanship were not infrequent in the age of Charles II. ; and perhaps Bishop Parker may be considered the most per fect specimen of them. His father was one of Oliver Crom well's most obsequious committee-men ; the son, who was born in 1640, was brought up in the principles of the Puri tans, and was sent to Oxford in 1659. He was just twenty at the Restoration, find immediately commenced and soon completed his transformation into one of the most arrogant and timeserving of high-churchmen. Some few propositions, for which he came earnestly to contend as " for the faith once delivered to the saints," may give an idea of the principles and the temper of this singular successor of the Apostles. He affirms, " That unless prin ces have power to bind their subjects to that religion they ap prehend most advantageous to public peace and tranquillity, and restrain those religious mistakes that tend to its subver- ANDREW MARVELL. 63 sion, they are no better than statues and images of authority : That in cases and disputes of public concernment, private men are not properly sui juris ; they have no power over their own actions ; they are not to be directed by their own judgments, or determined by their own wills, but by the com mands and the determinations of the public conscience ; and that if there be any sin in the command, he that imposed it shall answer for it, and not I, whose whole duty it is to obey. The commands of authority will warrant my obedience ; my obedience will hallow, or at least excuse, my action, and so secure me from sin, if not from error ; and in all doubtful and disputable cases 't is better to err with authority, than to be in the right against it : That it is absolutely necessary to the peace and happiness of kingdoms, that there be set up a more severe government over men's consciences and re ligious persuasions than over their vices and immoralities ; and that princes may with less hazard give liberty to men's vices and debaucheries than their consciences." * He must have a very narrow mind or uncharitable heart, who cannot give poor human nature credit for the sincere adoption of the most opposite opinions. Still there are limits to this exercise of charity ; there may be such a concurrence of suspicious symptoms, that our charity can be exercised only at the expense of our common sense. We can easily conceive, under ordinary circumstances, of Dissenters be coming Churchmen, and Churchmen becoming Dissenters ; Tories and Whigs changing sides ; Protestants and Roman ists, like those two brothers mentioned in Locke's second " Letter on Toleration," t so expert in logic as to convert one another, and then, unhappily, not expert enough to con vert one another back again, and all without any suspicion of insincerity. But when great revolutions of opinion are also very sudden, and exquisitely well-timed in relation to * The Rehearsal Transprosed, Vol. I. pp. 97, 98, 99, 100, 101. t Locke's Works, Vol. V. p. 79. 64 ANDREW MARVELL. private interest; when these changes, let them be what they may, are always like those of the heliotrope, towards the sun; when a man is utterly uncharitable even to his own previous errors, and foully maligns and abuses all who still retain them, it is impossible to doubt the motives which have animated him. On this subject Marvell himself well observes : " Though a man be obliged to change a hundred times backward and forward, if his judgment be so weak and variable, yet there are some drudgeries that no man of honor would put himself upon, and but few submit to it if they were imposed ; as, suppose one had thought fit to pass over from one persuasion of the Christian religion into another, he would not choose to spit thrice at every article that he relin quished, to curse solemnly his father and mother for having edacated him in those opinions, to animate his new acquaint ances to the massacring of his former comrades. These are businesses that can only be expected from a renegade of Algiers and Tunis ; to overdo in expiation, and gain better credence of being a sincere Mussulman." * Marvell gives an amusing account of the progress of Par ker's conversion, of the transformation by which the mag got became a carrion-fly. In the second part of the " Re hearsal," after a humorous description of his parentage and youth, he tells us that at the Restoration " he came to Lon don, where he spent a considerable time in creeping into all corners and companies, horoscoping up and down " (" as- trologizing " as he elsewhere expresses it) " concerning the duration of the government; not considering any thing as best but as most lasting and most profitable : and after hav ing many times cast a figure, he at last satisfied himself that the Episcopal government would endure as long as this King lived, and from thenceforward cast about how to be admitted into the Church of England, and find the highway to her preferments. In order to do this, he daily enlarged, not only * Kehearsal Transprosed, Vol. I. pp. 91, 92. ANDREW MARVELL. 65 his conversation, but his conscience, and was made free of some of the town vices ; imagining, like Muleasses, King of Tunis, (for I take witness that on all occasions I treat him rather above his quality than otherwise,) that, by hiding him self among the onions, he should escape being traced by his perfumes." * Marvell sketches the early history and char acter of Parker in both parts of the " Rehearsal," though, as might be expected, with greater severity in the second than in the first. A few sentences may not displease the reader. He says : " This gentleman, as I have heard, after he had read Don Quix ote and the Bible, besides such school-books as were necessary for his age, was sent early to the university ; and there studied hard, and in a short time became a competent rhetorician, and no ill dis putant. He had learned how to erect a thesis, and to defend it pro and con with a serviceable distinction And so, thinking him self now ripe and qualified for the greatest undertakings and highest fortune, he therefore exchanged the narrowness of the university for the town ; but coming out of the confinement of the square cap and the quadrangle into the open air, the world began to turn round with him, which he imagined, though it were his own giddiness, to be nothing less than the quadrature of the circle. This accident concurring so happily to increase the good opinion which he natu rally had of himself, he thenceforward applied to gain a like repu tation with others. He followed the town life, haunted the best companies ; and to polish himself from any pedantic roughness, he read and saw the plays with much care, and more proficiency than most of the auditory. But all this while he forgot not the main chance ; but hearing of a vacancy with a nobleman, he clapped in, and easily obtained to be his chaplain : from that day you may take the date of his preferments and his ruin ; for having soon wrought himself dexterously into his patron's favor, by short graces and ser mons, and a mimical way of drolling upon the Puritans, which he knew would take both at chapel and at table, he gained a great au thority likewise among all the domestics. They all listened to him as an oracle; and they allowed him, by common consent, to have not only all the divinity, but more wit, too, than all the rest of the * Kehearsal Transprosed, Vol. II. pp. 77, 78. 66 ANDREW MARVELL. family put together Nothing now must serve him, but he must be a madman in print, and write a book of Ecclesiastical Pol ity. There he distributes all the territories of conscience into the prince's province, and makes the hierarchy to be but bishops of the air ; and talks at such an extravagant rate in things of higher con cernment, that the reader will avow that in the whole discourse he had not one lucid interval."* The work here mentioned, the " Ecclesiastical Polity," was published in the year 1670. But the book which called forth Marvell was a Preface to a posthumous work of Arch bishop BramhalPs, which appeared in 1672. In this piece Parker had displayed his usual zeal against the nonconform ists, with more than usual acrimony, and pushed to the utter most extravagance his favorite maxims of ecclesiastical tyr anny. Like his previous works on similar matters, it was anonymous, though the author was pretty well known. Mar- veil dubs him " Mr. Bayes," under which name the Duke of Buckingham had ridiculed Dryden in the well-known play of " The Rehearsal " ; from the title of which Marvell designated his book, " The Rehearsal Transprosed." The latter word was suggested by the scene in which Mr. Bayes gives an ac count of the manner in which he manufactured his plays : "Bayes. Why, sir, my first rule is the rule of transver- sion, or regula duplex, changing verse into prose, or prose into verse, alternative, as you please. Smith. Well, but how is this done by rule, sir ? Bayes. Why thus, sir ; nothing so easy when understood. I take a book in my hand, either at home or elsewhere, for that 's all one : if there be any wit in 't, as there is no book but has some, I trans verse it ; that is, if it be prose put it into verse, (but that takes up some time,) and if it be verse put it into prose. Johnson. Methinks, Mr. Bayes, that putting verse into prose should be called transprosing. Bayes. By my troth, sir, it is a very good notion, and hereafter it shall be so." * Rehearsal Transprosed, Vol. I. pp. 62 - 69. ANDREW MARVELL. 67 The success of the " Rehearsal *' was instant and signal. " After Parker had for some years entertained the nation with several virulent books," says Burnet, " he was attacked by the liveliest droll of the age, who wrote in a burlesque strain, but with so peculiar and entertaining a conduct, that, from the King down to the tradesman, his books were read with great pleasure : that not only humbled Parker, but the whole party ; for the author of the c Rehearsal Transprosed ' had all the men of wit (or, as the French phrase it, all the laughers] on his side." In fact, Marvell exhibited his adversary in so ridiculous a light, that even his own party could not keep their counte nances. The unhappy churchman resembled Gulliver at the court of Brobdignag, when the mischievous page stuck him into the marrow-bone. He cut such a ridiculous figure, that, says the author just cited, even the King and his courtiers could not help laughing at him. The first part of the " Rehearsal " elicited several answers. They were written for the most part in very unsuccessful imitation of Marvell's style of banter, and are now wholly forgotten. Marvell gives an amusing account of the efforts which were made to obtain effective replies, and of the hopes of preferment which may be supposed to have inspired their authors. Parker himself for some time declined any reply. At last came out his " Reproof to the Rehearsal Transprosed," in which he urged the government " to crush the pestilent wit, the servant of Cromwell, and the friend of Milton." To this work, Marvell replied in the second part of the "Re hearsal." He was further spirited to it by an anonymous letter, pleasant and laconic enough, left for him at a friend's house, signed " T. G.," and concluding with the words : 44 If thou darest to print any lie or libel against Dr. Parker, by the eternal God, I will cut thy throat ! " He who wrote it, whoever he was, was ignorant of Marvell's nature, if he thought thereby to intimidate him into silence. His intrepid spirit was simply provoked by this insolent threat, which he DO ANDREW MARVELL. took car?, to publish in the title-page of his Reply. To this publ cation Parker attempted no rejoinder. Anthony Wood himself tells us, that Parker " judged it more prudent to lay down the cudgels, than to enter the lists again with an un- towardly combatant, so hugely well versed and experienced in the then but newly refined art, though much in the mode and fashion ever since, of sporting and jeering buffoonery. It was generally thought, however, by many of those who were otherwise favorers of Parker's cause, that the victory lay on Marvell's side, and it wrought this good effect on Parker, that for ever after it took down his great spirit " : and Burnet tells us, that he " withdrew from the town, and ceased writing for some years." Of this, the principal work of Marvell's singular genius, it is difficult, even were there space for it, to present the reader with any considerable extracts. The allusions are often so obscure, the wit of one page is so dependent on that of another, the humor and pleasantry are so continu ous, and the character of the work, from its very nature, is so excursive, that its merits can be appreciated only on a regular perusal. There are other reasons, too, which render lengthened citations scarcely practicable. The composition has faults which would inevitably disgust the generality of modern readers, or rather deter them altogether from giving any long extracts a continuous perusal. The work is also characterized by not a little of the coarseness which was so prevalent in that age, and from which Marvell was by no means free ; though, as we shall endeavor hereafter to show, his spirit was far from partaking of the malevolence of ordi nary satirists. Some few instances of felicitous repartee or ludicrous imagery, which we have noted in a reperusal of the work, will be found further on. Yet the reader must not infer that the sole, or even the chief, merit of the " Rehearsal Transprosed " consists in wit and banter. Not only is there, amidst all its ludicrous levities, " a vehemence of solemn reproof, and an eloquence of invec- ANDREW MARVELL. 69 tive, that awes one with the spirit of the modern Junius " ; * but there are many passages of very powerful reasoning, in advocacy of truths which were then but ill understood, and of rights which had been shamefully violated. Perhaps the most interesting passages of the work are those in which Marvell refers to his great friend, John Milton. Parker, with his customary malignity, had insinuated that the poet, who was then living in cautious retirement, might have been the author of the " Rehearsal," apparently with the view of turning the indignation of government upon the illustrious recluse. Marvell had always entertained towards Milton a feeling of reverence akin to idolatry, and this stroke of deliberate malice was more than he could bear. He generously hastened to throw his shield over his aged and prostrate patron. About three years after the publication of the second part of the " Rehearsal," Marvell's chivalrous love of justice im pelled him again to draw the sword. In 1675, Dr. Croft, Bishop of Hereford, had published a work entitled, " The Naked Truth, or the True State of the Primitive Church, by a Humble Moderator." This work deserved the character of that sermon which Corporal Trim shook out of the vol ume of Stevinus. " If you have no objections," said Mr. Shandy to Dr. Slop, " Trim shall read it." " Not in the least," replied Dr. Slop, " for it does not appear on which side of the question it is wrote ; it may be a composition of a divine of our church, as well as of yours, so that we run equal risks." " 'T is wrote upon neither side," quoth Trim, " for it is only upon conscience, an' it please your honors." Even so was it with the good bishop's little piece. It was written on neither side. It enjoined on all religious parties the unwelcome duties of forbearance and charity ; but as it especially exposed the danger and folly of enforcing a mi nute uniformity, it could not be suffered to pass unchallenged * D'Israeli. 70 ANDREW MARVELL. in that age of high-church intolerance. It was petulantly at tacked by Dr. Francis Turner, Master of St. John's College, Cambridge, in a pamphlet entitled, " Animadversions on the Naked Truth." This provoked our satirist, who replied in a pamphlet entitled, " Mr. Smirke, or the Divine in Mode." He here fits his antagonist with a character out of Etherege's " Man of Mode," as he had before fitted Parker with one from Buckingham's " Rehearsal." The merits and defects of this pamphlet are of much the same order as those of his former work, it is perhaps less disfigured by coarseness and vehemence. Of Dr. Croft's pamphlet he beautifully expresses a feeling, of which we imagine few can have been unconscious when perusing any work which strongly appeals to our reason and conscience, and in which, as we proceed, we seem to recognize what we have often thought, but never uttered. " It is a book of that kind, that no Christian can peruse it without wishing himself to have been the author, and almost imagining that he is so ; the conceptions therein being of so eternal an idea, that every man finds it to be but a copy of the original in his own mind." To this brochure was attached " A Short Historical Essay concerning General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions in Matters of Religion." It is characterized by the same strong sense and untiring vivacity as his other writings, and evinces a creditable acquaintance with ecclesiastical history ; but it is neither copious nor profound enough for the subject. In 1677, Marvell published his last controversial piece, elicited like the rest by his disinterested love of fair play. It was a defence of the celebrated divine, John Howe, whose conciliatory tract on the "Divine Prescience" had been rudely assailed by three several antagonists. This little volume, which is throughout in Marvell's vein, is now ex tremely scarce. It is not included in any edition of his works, and appears to have been unknown to all his biographers. His last work of any extent was entitled, " An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in Eng- ANDREW MARVELL. 71 land." It first appeared in 1678. It is written with much vigor, boldly vindicates the great principles of the consti tution, and discusses the limits of the royal prerogative. The gloomy anticipations expressed by the author were but too well justified by the public events which transpired subse quently to his death. But the worst consequences of the principles and policy he denounced, were happily averted by the Revolution of 1688. A reward was offered by the government for the discov ery of the author of this " libel," as it was pleasantly des ignated. Marvell seems to have taken the matter very cool ly, and thus humorously alludes to the subject, in a private letter to Mr. Ramsden, dated June 10, 1678 : " There came out about Christmas last, here, a large book concerning the growth of Popery and arbitrary government. There have been great rewards offered in private, and considerable in the Gazette, to any one who could inform of the author or print er, but not yet discovered. Three or four printed books since have described, as near as it was proper to go (the man being a member of Parliament), Mr. Marvell to have been the author ; but if he had, surely he should not have escaped being questioned in Parliament, or some other place." Marvell published, during the latter years of his life, sev eral other political pamphlets, which, though now forgotten, were doubtless 'not without their influence in unmasking cor ruption, and rousing the nation to a consciousness of its po litical degradation. One jeu d'esprit, a parody on the speeches of Charles II., in which the flippancy and easy impudence of those singular specimens of royal eloquence are happily mimicked and scarcely caricatured, is very characteristic of his caustic humor. A few sentences may not displease the reader. " I told you at our last meeting, the winter was the fittest time for business, and truly I thought so, till my lord-treasurer assured me the spring was the best season for salads and subsidies Some of you, perhaps, will think it dangerous to make me too rich ; 72 ANDREW MARVELL. but I do not fear it, for I promise you faithfully, whatever you give me, I will always want ; and, although in other things my word may be thought a slender authority, yet in that you may rely on me, I will never break it I can bear my straits with patience ; but my lord-treasurer does protest to me that the revenue, as it now stands, will not serve him and me too. One of us must pinch for it, if you do not help me What shall we do for ships then? I hint this only to you, it being your business, not mine. I know by experience I can live without ships. I lived ten years abroad without, and never had rny health better in my life ; but how you will be without, I will leave to yourselves to judge, and therefore hint this only by the by. I don't insist upon it. There is another thing I must press more earnestly, and that is this : it seems a good part of my revenue will expire in two or three years, ex cept you will be pleased to continue it. I have to say for it, Pray, why did you give me so much as you have done, unless you resolve to give on as fast as I call for it? The nation hates you already for giving so much, and I will hate you too if you do not give me more. So that, if you do not stick to me you will not have a friend in England Therefore look to it, and take notice, that if you do not make me rich enough to undo you, it shall lie at your door. For my part I wash my hands on it I have con verted my natural sons from Popery 3 T would do one's heart good to hear how prettily George can read already in the psalter. They are all fine children, God bless 'em, and so like me in their understandings ! But, as I was saying, I have, to please you, given a pension to your favorite, my Lord Lauderdale, not so much that I thought he wanted it, as that you would take it kindly. I know not, for my part, what factious men would have ; but this I am sure of, my predecessors never did any thing like this to gain the good-will of their subjects. So much for your religion, and now for your property I must now acquaint you, that, by my lord-treasurer's advice, I have made a considerable re trenchment upon my expenses in candles and charcoal, and do not intend to stop ; but will, with your help, look into the late embez zlements of my dripping-pans and kitchen-stuff, of which, by the way, upon my conscience, neither my lord-treasurer nor my Lord Lauderdale are guilty."* * Marvell's Works, Vol. I. pp. 428, 429. ANDREW MARVELL. 73 Marvell's intrepid patriotism and bold writings had now made him so odious to the corrupt Court, and especially to the bigoted James, that he was compelled frequently to con ceal himself, for fear of assassination. He makes an affect ing allusion to this in one of his private letters. " Magis occidere," says he, " metuo quam occidi ; non quod vitam tanti astimem, sed ne imparatus moriar." * He died August 16, 1678, the year that his obnoxious work on the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government ap peared ; and, as he was in vigorous health just before, sus picions were entertained that he had been poisoned. In person, according to the description of Aubrey, who knew him well, Marvel 1 " was of a middling stature, pretty strong set, roundish-faced, cherry-cheeked, hazel- eyed, brown-haired. In his conversation he was modest, and of very few words. He was wont to say he would not drink high or freely with any one with whom he could not trust his life." Captain Thompson gives a somewhat different account of his complexion and the color of his eyes ; but, as is often the case in more important points, he does not mention his authority. It seems probable that he has been giving us a description from the impression conveyed by his portraits (of which there are two), without allowing for the effects of time ; so that we have but the picture of a picture. Of the editions of MarvelPs collected works, that of 1726, in two volumes duodecimo, contains only his poems and some of his private letters. That of Captain Thompson, in three volumes quarto, was published in 1776. Yet even this, as already said, omits one treatise. The Captain's diligence is indeed worthy of commendation, and his enthusiasm may be pardoned. But he was far from being a correct or judicious editor, and is often betrayed by his indiscriminate admiration into excessive and preposterous eulogy. The only separate biography is, we believe, the little volume mentioned at the head of this article. * Cooke's Life of Marvell, prefixed to his Poems, p. 14. 7 74 ANDREW MARVELL. The characteristic attribute of MarvelPs genius was un questionably wit, in all the varieties of which brief, sen tentious sarcasm, fierce invective, light raillery, grave irony, and broad, laughing humor he seems to have been by na ture almost equally fitted to excel. To say that he has equal ly excelled in all would be untrue, though striking examples of each might easily be selected from his writings. The ac tivity with which his mind suggests ludicrous images and analogies is astonishing ; he often positively startles us by the remoteness and oddity of the sources from which they are supplied, and by the unexpected ingenuity and felicity of his repartees. His forte, however, appears to be a grave, ironical banter, which he often pursues at such a length that there seems no limit to his fertility of invention. In his accumulation of ludicrous images and allusions, the untiring, exhaustive ridicule with which he will play upon the same topics, he is unique ; yet this peculiarity not seldom leads him to drain the generous wine even to the dregs ; to spoil a series of felicitous railleries by some far-fetched conceit or unpardon able extravagance. But though Marvell was so great a master of wit, and es pecially of that caustic species which is appropriate to satir ists, he seems to have been singularly free from many of the faults which distinguish that irritable brotherhood. Unspar ing and merciless as his ridicule is, contemptuous and ludi crous as are the lights in which he 1 exhibits his opponent ; nay, further, though his invectives are not only often terribly severe, but (in compliance with the spirit of the age) often grossly coarse and personal, it is still impossible to detect a single particle of malignity. His general tone is either that of broad, mirthful banter, or of the most cutting invective ; but he appears equally devoid of malevolence in both. In the one, he seems amusing himself with opponents, for whom he has too much contempt to feel anger ; in the other, to act with the stern, imperturbable gravity of one who is perform- ANDREW MARVELL. 75 ing the unpleasant but necessary functions of a public execu tioner. This freedom from the usual faults of satirists may be traced to several causes ; partly to the lonliommie which, with all his talents for satire, was a peculiar characteristic of the man, and which rendered him as little disposed to take offence, and as placable when it was offered, as any man of his time ; partly to the integrity of his nature, which, while it prompted him to champion any cause in which justice had been outraged or innocence wronged, effectually preserved him from the wanton exercise of his wit for the gratification of malevolence ; partly, perhaps principally, to the fact, that both the above qualities restricted him to encounters in which he had personally no concern. If he carried a keen sword, it was a most peaceable and gentlemanly weapon ; it never left the scabbard except on the highest provocation, and, even then, only on behalf of others. His magnanimity, self-con trol, and good temper restrained him from avenging any in sult offered to himself; his chivalrous love of justice instant ly roused all the lion within him on behalf of the injured and oppressed. It is perhaps well for Marveli's fame that his quarrels were not personal : had they been so, it is hardly probable that such powers of sarcasm and irony should have been so little associated with bitterness of temper. Nor let it be said, that this freedom from malignity in the exercise of his wit scarcely deserves much praise ; for though it is true, that there is no necessary connection between that quality of mind and the malevolent passions (as numberless illustrious examples sufficiently prove), yet it offers great temptations to their indulgence, and is almost always com bined with that constitutional irritability of genius which it so readily gratifies, and, by gratifying, transforms into something worse. Half the tendencies of our nature pass into habits only from the facilities which encourage their development. Quarrels were infinitely more frequent when all men were accustomed to wear arms ; and, similarly, many a waspish temper has become so, principally from being in possession 76 ANDREW MARVELL. of the weapon of satire. Not seldom, too, it must be sorrow fully admitted, the most exquisite sense of the ridiculous has been strangely combined with a morbid, saturnine tempera ment, which looks on all things with a jaundiced imagination, and surveys human infirmities and foibles with feelings not more remote from those of compassionate benevolence than of genuine mirth. Happy when, as in the case of Cowper, the influence of a benign heart and unfeigned humility pre vents this tendency from degenerating into universal malevo lence. There are few things more shockingly incongruous than the ghastly union of wit and misanthropy. Wit should be ever of open brow, joyous, and frank-hearted. Even the severest satire may be delicious reading when penned with the bonhommie of Horace or of Addison, or the equanimity of Plato or of Pascal. Without pretending that Marvell had aught of the elegance or the delicacy of any of these immor tal writers, we firmly believe he had as much kindly feeling as any of them. Unhappily, the two by no means go togeth er ; there may be the utmost refinement without a particle of good-nature ; and a great deal of good-nature without any refinement. It were easy to name writers, who, with the most exquisite grace of diction, can as little disguise the mal ice of their nature, as Marvell, with all his coarseness, can make us doubt his benevolence. Through the veil of their language (of beautiful texture, but too transparent) we see chagrin poorly stimulating mirth ; anger struggling to appear contempt, and failing ; malevolence writhing itself into an as pect of ironical courtesy, but with grim distortion in the at tempt ; and sarcasms urged by the impulses which, under different circumstances, and in another country, would have prompted to the use of the stiletto. It is impossible, indeed, not to regret the coarseness, often amounting to buffoonery, of Marvell's wit ; though, from the consideration just urged, we regard it with the more forbear ance. Other palliations have been pleaded for him, derived from the character of his adversaries, the haste with which he ANDREW MARVELL. 77 wrote, and the spirit of the age. The last is the strongest. The tomahawk and the scalping-knife were not yet discredit able weapons, or thrown aside as fit only for savage warfare ; and it is even probable that many of the things which we should regard as gross insults then passed as pardonable jests. It is difficult for us, of course, to imagine that callousness which scarcely thinks any thing an insult but what is enforced by the argumentum baculinum. Between the feelings of our forefathers and our own, there seems to have been as great a difference as between those of the farmer and the clergyman, so ludicrously described by Covvper in his " Yearly Dis tress " : " 0, why are farmers made so coarse, Or clergy made so fine ? A kick that scarce would move a horse May kill a sound divine." The haste with which Marvell wrote must also be pleaded as an excuse for the inequalities of his works. It was not the age in which authors elaborated and polished with care, or submitted with a good grace to the Hmce labor; and if it had been, Marvell allowed himself no leisure for the task. The second part of the " Rehearsal," for example, was published in the same year in which Parker's " Reproof" appeared. We must profess our belief that no small portion of his writ ings stand in great need of this apology. Exhibiting, as they do, amazing vigor and fertility, the wit is by no means al ways of the first order. We must not quit the subject of his wit, without presenting the reader with some few of his pleasantries ; premising that they form but a very small part of those which we had marked in the perusal of his works ; and that, whatever their merit, it were easy to find many others fully equal to them, if we could afford space for citation. Ironically bewailing the calamitous effects of printing, our author exclaims : " O Printing ! how hast .thou disturbed the 78 ANDREW MARVELL. peace of mankind ! Lead, when moulded into bullets, is not so mortal as when founded into letters. There was a mistake, sure, in the story of Cadmus ; and the serpents' teeth which he sowed were nothing else but the letters which he invent ed." Parker having declared, in relation to some object of his scurrility, that he had written, " not to impair his esteem, but to correct his scribbling humor," Marvell says : " Our author is as courteous as lightning, and can melt the sword without ever hurting the scabbard." After alleging that his opponent often has a by-play of malignity even when bestow ing commendations, he remarks : " The author's end was only railing. He could never have induced himself to praise one man but in order to rail on another. He never oils his hone but that he may whet his razor, and that not to shave, but to cut men's throats." On Parker's absurd and bombas tic exaggeration of the merits and achievements of Bishop Bramhall, Marvell wittily says : " Any worthy man may pass through the world unquestioned and safe, with a moderate recommendation ; but when he is thus set off and bedaubed with rhetoric, and embroidered so thick that you cannot dis cern the ground, it awakens naturally (and not altogether unjustly) interest, curiosity, and envy. For all men pretend a share in reputation, and love not to see it engrossed and monopolized ; and are subject to inquire (as of great estates suddenly got) whether he came by all this honestly, or of what credit the person is that tells the story ? And the same hath happened as to this bishop Men seeing him furbished up in so martial accoutrements, like another Odo, Bishop of Baieux, and having never before heard of his prowess, begin to reflect what giants he defeated, and what damsels he rescued After all our author's bom bast, when we have searched all over, we find ourselves bilked in our expectation ; and he hath created the bishop, - like a St. Christopher in the popish churches, as big as ten porters, and yet only employed to sweat under the burden of an infant." Of the paroxysms of rage with which Parker re- ANDREW MARVELL. 79 fers to one of his adversaries, whom he distinguishes by his initials, Marvell says : " As oft as he does but name those two first letters, he is like the island of Fayal, on fire in threescore and ten places " ; and affirms, " that if he were of that fellow's diet here about town, that epicurizes on burn ing coals, drinks healths in scalding brimstone, scranches the glasses for his dessert, and draws his breath through glowing tobacco-pipes, he could not show more flame than he always does upon that subject." Parker, in a passage of unequalled absurdity, having represented Geneva as on the south side of the Lake Leman, Marvell ingeniously represents the blunder as the subject of discussion in a private company, where va rious droll solutions are proposed, and where he, with exqui site irony, pretends to take Parker's part. " I," says Mar- veil, " that was still on the doubtful and excusing part, said, that, to give the right situation of a town, it was necessary first to know in what position the gentleman's head then was when he made his observation, and that might cause a great diversity, as much as this came to." Having charged his adversary with needlessly obtruding upon the world some petty matters which concerned only himself, from an exag gerated idea of his own importance, Marvell drolly says : " When a man is once possessed with this fanatic kind of spirit, he imagines, if a shoulder do but itch, that the world has galled it with leaning on it so long, and therefore he wisely shrugs to remove the globe to the other. If he chance but to sneeze, he salutes himself, and courteously prays that the foundations of the earth be not shaken. And even so the author of the ' Ecclesiastical Polity,' ever since he crept up to be but the weathercock of a steeple, trembles and creaks at every puff of wind that blows him about, as if the Church of England were falling, and the state tottered." After ludicrously describing the effect of the first part of the " Rehearsal " in exacerbating all his opponent's evil pas sions, he remarks : " He seems not so fit at present for the archdeacon's seat, as to take his place below in the church 80 ANDREW MARVELL. amongst the energumeni" Parker had charged him with a sort of plagiarism for having quoted so many passages out of his book. On this Marvell observes : " It has, I believe, indeed angered him, as it has been no small trouble to me ; but how can I help it ? I wish he would be pleased to teach me an art (for, if any man in the world, he hath it) to answer a book, without turning over the leaves, or without citing pas sages. In the mean time, if to transcibe so much out of him must render a man, as he therefore styles me, a ' scan dalous plagiary,' I must plead guilty ; but by the same law, whoever shall either be witness or prosecutor in behalf of the King, for treasonable words, may be indicted for a highway man." Parker having viewed some extravaganza of Mar- veil's riotous wit as if worthy of serious comment, the latter says : " Whereas I only threw it out like an empty cask to amuse him, knowing that I had a whale to deal with, and lest he should overset me ; he runs away with it as a very serious business, and so moyles himself with tumbling and tossing it, that he is in danger of melting his spermaceti. A cork, I see, will serve without a hook ; and, instead of a harping-iron, this grave and ponderous creature may, like eels, be taken and pulled up only with bobbing." After ex posing, in a strain of uncommon eloquence, the wickedness and folly of suspending the peace of the nation on so frivo lous a matter as " ceremonial," he says : " For a prince to adventure all upon such a cause, is like Duke Charles of Burgundy, who fought three battles for an imposition upon sheep-skins " ; and " for a clergyman to offer at persecution upon this ceremonial account, is (as is related of one of the popes) to justify his indignation for his peacock, by the ex ample of God's anger for eating the forbidden fruit." He justifies his severity towards Parker in a veryjudicrous way: " No man needs letters of marque against one that is an open pirate of other men's credit. I remember, within our own time, one Simons, who robbed always on the bricolle, that is to say, never interrupted the passengers, but still set upon ANDREW MARVELL. 81 the thieves themselves, after, like Sir John Falstaff, they were gorged with a booty ; and by this way so ingenious that it was scarce criminal he lived secure and unmolested all his days, with the reputation of a judge rather than of a high wayman." The sentences we have cited are taken from the " Rehearsal." We had marked many more from his " Di vine in Mode," and other writings, but have no space for them. But he who supposes Marvell to have been nothing but a wit, simply on account of the predominance of that quality, will do him injustice. It is the common lot of such men, in whom some one faculty is found on a great scale, to fail of part of the admiration due to other endowments ; possessed in more moderate degree, indeed, but still in a degree far from ordinary. We are subject to the same illusion in gaz ing on mountain scenery. Fixing our eye on some solitary peak, which towers far above the rest, the groups of surround ing hills look positively diminutive, though they may, in fact, be all of great magnitude. This illusion is further fostered by another circumstance in the case of great wits. As the object of wit is to amuse, the owl-like gravity of thousands of common readers is apt to decide that wit and wisdom must dwell apart, and that the humorous writer must necessarily be a trifling one. For sim ilar reasons, they look with sage suspicion on every signal display, either of fancy or passion ; think a splendid illustra tion nothing but the ambuscade of a fallacy, and strong emo tion as tantamount to a confession of unsound judgment. As Archbishop Whately has well remarked, such men, hav ing been warned that " ridicule is not the test of truth," and that " wisdom and wit are not the same thing, distrust every thing that can possibly be regarded as witty ; not having judgment to perceive the combination, when it occurs, of wit and sound reasoning. The ivy wreath completely conceals from their view the point of the thyrsus." The fact is, that all Marvell's endowments were on a large scale, though his wit greatly predominated. His judgment 82 ANDREW MARVELL. was remarkably clear and sound, his logic by no means con temptible, his sagacity in practical matters great, his talents for business apparently of the first order, and his industry indefatigable. His imagination, though principally employed in ministering to his wit, would, if sufficiently cultivated, have made him a poet considerably above mediocrity : though chiefly alive to the ludicrous, he was by no means insensible to the beautiful. We cannot, indeed, bestow all the praise on his Poems which some of his critics have assigned them. They are very plentifully disfigured by the conceits and quaintnesses of the age, and as frequently want grace of ex pression and harmony of numbers. Of the compositions which Captain Thompson's indiscriminate admiration would fain have affiliated to his Muse, the best are proved not to be his ; and one is of doubtful origin. The hymn beginning, " When Israel, freed from Pharaoh's hand," is a well-known composition of Dr. Watts ; while the ballad of " William and Margaret " is of dubious authorship. Though probably of earlier date than the age of Mallet, its reputed author, the reasons which Captain Thompson gives for assign ing it to Marvell are altogether unsatisfactory. Still, there are unquestionably many of his genuine poems which indicate a rich, though ill-cultivated fancy ; and in some few stanzas there is no little grace of expression. The little piece on the Pilgrim Fathers, entitled " The Emigrants," the fanciful " Dialogue between Body and Soul," the " Dialogue between the Resolved Soul and Created Pleasure," and the " Coronet," all contain lines of much elegance and sweetness. It is in his satirical poems, that, as might be expected from the char acter of his mind, his fancy appears most vigorous ; though these too are largely disfigured by the characteristic defects of the age, and many, it must be confessed, are entirely with out merit. With two or three lines from his ludicrous satire on Holland, we cannot refrain from amusing the reader. Some of the strokes of humor are certainly happy : ANDREW MARVELL. 83 " Holland, that scarce deserves the name of land, As' but the offscouring of the British sand ; And so much earth as was contributed By English pilots when they heaved the lead ; Or what by th' ocean's slow alluvion fell, Of shipwrecked cockle and the muscle-shell ; This indigested vomit of the sea Fell to the Dutch by just propriety. Glad then, as miners who have found the ore, They, with mad labor, fished the land to shore ; And dived as desperately for each piece Of earth, as it had been of ambergris ; Collecting anxiously small loads of clay, Less than what building swallows bear away ; For as with pigmies who best kills the crane, Among the hungry he that treasures grain, Among the blind the one-eyed blinkard reigns, So rules among the drowned he that drains. Not who first sees the rising sun commands : But who could first discern the rising lands. Who best could know to pump an earth so leak, Him they their lord, and country's father, speak." His Latin poems are amongst his best. The composition often shows no contemptible skill in that language ; and here and there the diction and versification are such as would not have absolutely disgraced his great coadjutor, Milton. In all the higher poetic qualities, there can, of course, be no com parison between them. With such a mind as we have ascribed to him, and we think his works fully justify what has been said, with such aptitude for business, soundness of judgment, powers of rea soning, and readiness of sarcasm, one might have anticipated that he would have taken some rank as an orator. Nature, it is certain, had bestowed upon him some of the most impor tant intellectual endowments of one. It is true, indeed, that with his principles and opinions he would have found himself strangely embarrassed in addressing any Parliament in the days of Charles II., and stood but a moderate chance of ob- 84 ANDREW MARVELL. taining a candid hearing. But we have no proof that he ever made the trial. His Parliamentary career in this respect resembled that of a much greater man, Addison, who with wit even superior to his own, and with much more ele gance, if not more strength of mind, failed signally as a speaker. MarvelPs learning must have been very extensive. His education was superior ; and, as we have seen from the testi mony of Milton, his industry had made him master, during his long sojourn on the Continent, of several Continental lan guages. It is certain, also, that he continued to be a student all his days : his works bear ample evidence of his wide and miscellaneous reading. He appears to have been well versed in most branches of literature, though he makes no pedan tic display of erudition, and in this respect is favorably distin guished from many of his contemporaries ; yet he cites his authors with the familiarity of a thorough scholar. In the department of history he appears to have been particularly well read ; and derives his witty illustrations from such re mote and obscure sources, that Parker did not hesitate to avow his belief that he had sometimes drawn upon his inven tion for them. In his reply, Marvell justifies himself in all the alleged instances, and takes occasion to show that his op ponent's learning is as hollow as all his other pretensions. The style of Marvell is very unequal. Though often rude and unpolished, it abounds in negligent felicities, presents us with frequent specimens of vigorous idiomatic English, and now and then attains no mean degree of elegance. It bears the stamp of the revolution which was then passing on the language, being a medium between the involved and peri odic structure, so common during the former half of the cen tury, and which was ill adapted to a language possessing so few inflections as ours, and that simplicity and harmony which were not fully attained till the age of Addison. There is a very large infusion of short sentences, and the structure in gen eral is as unlike that of his great colleague's prose as can be ANDREW MARVELL. 85 imagined. Many of MarvelPs pages flow with so much ease and grace, as to be not unworthy of a later period. To that revolution in style to which we have just alluded, he must, in no slight degree, have contributed ; for, little as his works are known or read now, the most noted of them were once uni versally popular and perused with pleasure, as Burnet testi fies, by every body, " from the king to the tradesman." Numerous examples show, that it is almost impossible for even the rarest talents to confer permanent popularity on books which turn on topics of temporary interest, however absorbing at the time. If Pascal's transcendent genius has been unable to rescue even the " Lettres Provinciates " from partial oblivion, it is not to be expected that Marvell should have done more for the " Rehearsal Transprosed." Swift, it is true, about half a century later, was pleased, while express ing a similar opinion, to make an exception in favor of Mar- veil. " There is indeed," says he, " an exception when any great genius thinks it worth his while to expose a foolish piece ; so we still read Marvell's answer to Parker with pleasure, though the book it answers be sunk long ago." But this state ment is scarcely applicable now. It is true that the " Re hearsal " is occasionally read by the curious ; but it is by the resolutely curious alone. Yet assuredly he has not lived in vain who has successfully endeavored to abate the nuisances of his own time, or to put down some insolent abetter of vice and corruption. Nor is it possible in a world like this, in which there is such contin uity of causes and effects, where one generation transmits its good and its evil to the next, and the consequences of each revolution in principles, opinions, or tastes are propagated along the whole line of humanity, to estimate either the degree or perpetuity of the benefits conferred by the com plete success of works even of transient interest. By modi fying the age in which he lives, a man may indirectly modify the character of many generations to come. His works may be forgotten while their effects survive. 86 ANDREW MARVELL. MarvelPs history affords a signal instance of the benefits which may be derived from well-directed satire. There are cases in which it may be a valuable auxiliary to decency, vir tue, and religion, where argument and persuasion both fail. Many, indeed, doubt both the legitimacy of the weapon itself, and the success with which it can be employed. But facts are against them. To hope it can ever supply the place of religion as a radical cure for vice or immorality, would be chimerical ; but there are many pernicious customs, violations of propriety, ridiculous, yet tolerated follies, which religion can scarcely touch without endangering her dignity. To as sail them is one of the most legitimate offices of satire ; nor is there the slightest doubt that the " Spectator " did more to abate many of the prevailing follies and pernicious customs of the age, than a thousand homilies. This, however, may be admitted, and yet it may be said that it does not reach the case of Marvell and Parker. Society, it may be argued, will bear the exposure of its own evils with great equanimity, and perhaps profit by it ; no individual being pointed at, and each being left to digest his own lesson under the pleasant convic tion that it was designed principally for his neighbors. As corporations will perpetuate actions of which each individual member would be ashamed, so corporations will listen to charges which every individual member would regard as in sults. But no man, it is said, is likely to be reclaimed from error or vice by being made the object of merciless ridicule. All this we believe most true. But then it is not to be forgot ten, that it may not be the satirist's object to reclaim the individ ual, he may have little hope of that, he may write for the sake of those whom his victim maligns and injures. When the exorcist takes Satan in hand, it is not because he is an Ori- genist, and " believes in the conversion of the Devil," but in pity to the supposed objects of his malignity. It is much the same when a man like Marvell undertakes to satirize a man like Parker. Even such a man may be abashed and con founded, though he cannot be reclaimed ; and if so, the satir- ANDREW MARVELL. 87 1st gains his object, and society gains the benefit. Experi ence fully shows us that there are many men who will be re strained by ridicule long after they are lost to virtue, and that they are accessible to shame when they are utterly inacces sible to argument. This was just the good that Marvell effected. He made Parker, it is true, more furious ; but he diverted, if he could not turn, the tide of popular feeling, and thus prevented much mischief. Parker, and others like him, were doing all they could to inflame angry passions, to revive the most extrava gant pretensions of tyranny, and to preach up another cru sade against the nonconformists. MarvelPs books were a conductor to the dangerous fluid ; if there was any explosion at all, it was an explosion of merriment. " He had all the laughers on his side," says Burnet. In Charles II.'s reign there were few who belonged to any other class ; and then, as now, men found it impossible to laugh and be angry at the same time. It is our firm belief, that Marvell did more to humble Parker, and neutralize the influence of his party, by the " Rehearsal Transprosed," than he could have done by writing half a dozen folios of polemical divinity ; just as Pas cal did more to unmask the Jesuits and damage their cause by his " Provincial Letters," than had been effected by all the efforts of all their other opponents put together. But admirable as were MarvelPs intellectual endowments, it is his moral worth, after all, which constitutes his principal claim on the admiration of posterity, and which sheds a re deeming lustre on one of the darkest pages of the English annals. Inflexible integrity was the basis of it, integrity by which he has not unworthily earned the glorious name of the " British Aristides." With talents and acquirements which might have justified him in aspiring to almost any office, if he could have disburdened himself of his conscience ; with wit which, in that frivolous age, was a surer passport to fame than any amount either of intellect or virtue, and which, as we have seen, mollified even the monarch himself, in spite of prejudice ; Marvell preferred poverty and independence 88 ANDREW MARVELL. to riches and servility. He had learned the lesson, prac tised by few in that age, of being content with little, so that he preserved his conscience. He could be poor, but he could not be mean ; could starve, but could not cringe. By economizing in the articles of pride and ambition, he could afford to keep what their votaries were compelled to retrench, the necessaries, or rather the luxuries, of integrity and a good conscience. Neither menaces, nor caresses, nor bribes, nor poverty, nor distress, could induce him to abandon his integ rity ; or even to take an office in which it might be tempted or endangered. He only who has arrived at this pitch of magnanimity, has an adequate security for his public virtue. He who cannot subsist upon a little, who has not learned to be content with such things as he has, and even to be content with almost nothing ; who has not learned to familiarize his thoughts to poverty, much more readily than he can familiar ize them to dishonor, is not yet free from peril. Andrew Marvell, as his whole course proves, had done this. But we shall not do full justice to his public integrity, if we do not bear in mind the corruption of the age in which he lived ; the manifold apostasies amidst which he retained his conscience ; and the effect which such wide-spread profligacy must have had in making thousands almost sceptical as to whether there were such a thing as public virtue at all. Such a relaxation in the code of speculative morals is one of the worst results of general profligacy in practice. But Andrew Marvell was not to be deluded ; and amidst corruption perfectly unparal leled, he still continued untainted. We are accustomed to hear of his virtue as a truly Roman virtue, and so it was ; but it was something more. Only the best pages of Roman his tory can supply a parallel ; there was no Cincinnatus in those ages of her shame which alone can be compared with those of Charles II. It were far easier to find a Cincinnatus during the period of the English Commonwealth, than an Andrew Marvell in the age of Commodus. The integrity and patriotism which distinguished him in his relations to the Court, also marked all his public conduct. ANDREW MARVELL. 89 He was evidently most scrupulously honest and faithful in the discharge of his duty to his constituents ; and, as we have seen, punctilious in guarding against any thing which could tarnish his fair fame, or defile his conscience. On reviewing the whole of his public conduct, we may well say that he at tained his wish, expressed in the lines which he has written in imitation of a chorus in the Thyestes of Seneca : " Climb at court for me that will Tottering favor's pinnacle ; All I seek is to lie still. Settled in some secret nest, In calm leisure let me rest, And, far off the public stage, Pass away my silent age. Thus, when without noise, unknown, I have lived out all my span, I shall die without a groan, An old, honest countryman." He seems to have been as amiable in his private as he was estimable in his public character. So far as any documents throw light upon the subject, the same integrity appears to have been the basis of both. He is described as of a very reserved and quiet temper ; but like Addison, (whom in this respect, as in some few others, he resembled,) exceedingly facetious and lively amongst his intimate friends. His disin terested championship of others is no less a proof of his sympathy with the oppressed than of his abhorrence of op pression ; and many pleasing traits of amiability occur in his private correspondence, as well as in his writings. On the whole, we think that Marvell's epitaph, strong as the terms of panegyric are, records little more than the truth ; and that it was not in the vain spirit of boasting, but in the honest con sciousness of virtue and integrity, that he himself concludes a letter to one of his correspondents in the words, " Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem ; Fortunam ex aliis." 8* LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHAR ACTER.* THE familiar letters of a great man, if they are sufficiently copious, written on a variety of themes, and really unpre meditated, probably furnish us with more accurate data for estimating his character, than either the most voluminous de liberate compositions, or the largest traditional collections of his conversation. The former will always conceal much which letters will disclose ; will give not only an imperfect, but perhaps false idea, of many points of character ; and will certainly suggest an exaggerated estimate of all the ordinary habitudes of thought and expression. The latter will often fall as much below the true mean of such a man's merits ; and, what is of more consequence, must depend except in the rare case in which some faithful Boswell continually dogs the heels of genius on the doubtful authority and leaky memory of those who report it. Letters, on the other hand, * "Edinburgh Review," July, 1845. Dr. Martin Luther's Brief e, Sendschreiben und Bedenken, vollstandig aus den verschiedenen A usgaben seiner Werke und Brief e, aus andern Buchern und noch unbenutzten Handschriften gesammelt. Kritisch und historisch bear- beitet von DR. WILHELM MARTIN LEBERECHT DE WETTE. 5 vols. 8vo. Berlin. (Dr. Martin Luther's Entire Correspondence, carefully compiled from the various Editions of his Works and Letters, from other Books, and from Manuscripts as yet private. Edited, with Critical and Historical Notes, by DR. WILHELM MARTIN LEBERECHT DE WETTE.) LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 91 if they be copious, unpremeditated, and not intended for the eye of the world, will exhibit the character in all its moods and phases, and by its own utterances. While some will dis close to us the habitual states of thought and feeling, and admit us even into the privacy of the heart, others, composed under the stimulus of great emergencies, and in those occa sional auspicious expansions of the faculties, which neither come nor cease at our bidding, will furnish no unworthy cri terion of what such a mind, even in its most elevated moods, or by its most deliberate efforts, can accomplish. If ever any man's character could be advantageously stud ied in his letters, it is surely that of Luther. They are addressed to all sorts of persons, are composed on an immense diversity of subjects, and, as to the mass of them, are more thoroughly unpremeditated, as well as more completely sug gested ex visceribus causce, to use the phrase of Cicero, than those of almost any other man. They are also more copious ; as copious as those even of his great contemporary, Erasmus, to whom letter-writing was equally business and amusement. What appear voluminous collections in our degenerate days, those of Sevigne, Pope, Walpole, Cowper, even of Swift, dwindle in comparison. In De Wette's most authentic and admirable edition, they occupy five very thick and closely printed volumes. The learned compiler, in a preface amus ingly characteristic of the literary zeal and indefatigable re search of Germany, tells us, that he has unearthed from ob scure hiding-places and mouldering manuscripts more than a hundred unprinted letters, and enriched the present collection with their contents. By himself, or his literary agents, he has ransacked " the treasures of the archives of Weimar, the libraries at Jen'a, Erfurt, Gotha, Wolfenbiittel, Frankfort-on- the-Maine, Heidelberg, and Basle " ; and has received " pre cious contributions" from Breslau, Riga, Strasburg, Munich, Zurich, and other places. There are many, no doubt, which time has consigned to oblivion, and perhaps some few which still lie unknown in public or private repositories, undetect- 92 ed even by the acute literary scent of De Wette, and his em issaries. But there are enough in all conscience to satisfy- any ordinary appetite, and to illustrate, if any thing can, the history and character of him who penned them. Even in a purely literary point of view, these letters are not unworthy of comparison with any thing Luther has left behind him. They contain no larger portion of indifferent Latin, scarcely so much of his characteristic violence and rudeness ; while they display in beautiful relief all the more tender and amiable traits of his character, and are fraught with brief but most striking specimens of that intense and burning eloquence for which he was so famed. Very rrfany of them well deserve the admiration which Coleridge (who regretted that selections from them had not been given to the English public) has so strongly expressed. " I can scarcely conceive," he says, " a more delightful volume than might be made from Luther's letters, especially those written from the Wartburg, if they were translated in the simple, sinewy, idio matic, hearty mother tongue of the original A diffi cult task I admit." He is speaking, of course, of Luther's German letters. Almost all, however, from the Wartburg are in Latin. Of late years they have received considerable attention. M. Michelet, in his very pleasing volumes, in which he has made Luther draw his own portrait, by presenting a series of extracts from his writings, has derived no small portion of his materials from the letters ; while all recent historians of the Reformation, especially D'Aubigne and Waddington,* * We cannot mention the name of Dr. Waddington without thanking him for the gratification we have derived from the perusal of the three volumes of his li History of the Reformation," and expressing our hopes that he will soon fulfil his promise of a fourth. Less brilliant than that of D'Aubigne, his work is at least its equal in research, certainly not in ferior in the comprehensiveness of its views, or the solidity of its reflec tions, and in severe fidelity is perhaps even superior. Not that, in this last respect, we have much to complain of in D'Aubigne ; but as he has LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 93 have dug deep, and with immense advantage, in the same mine. Not only do they form, as De Wette says, " a diary, as it were, of Luther's life," " gleichsam ein Tagebuch seines Lebens " ; but they enable us to trace better than in almost any history, because more minutely, the whole early progress of the Reformation. As we conceive that Luther's character could be nowhere more advantageously studied than in this voluminous corre spondence, we propose in the present article to make it the basis of a few remarks on his most prominent intellectual and moral qualities. No modern author, in our opinion, has done such signal injustice to Luther's intellect as Mr. Hallam, whose excellent and well-practised judgment seems to us, in this instance, to have entirely deserted him. " Luther's amazing influence on the revolutions of his own age, and on the opinions of man kind, seems," says he, " to have produced, as is not unnatu ral, an exaggerated notion of his intellectual greatness." ! And he then proceeds to reduce it to assuredly veiy moderate dimensions, founding his judgment principally on Luther's writings. Now, if Mr. Hallam had been nothing more than a mere critic, we should not have wondered at such a decision. Il would have been as natural in that case to misinterpret the genius of Luther, as for Mallet to write the life of Bacon and " forget that he was a philosopher." But when we reflect great skill in the selection and graphic disposition of his materials, so he sometimes sacrifices a little too much to gratify it, as, for example, in the dramatic form he has given to Luther's narrative of his interview with Miltitz (Vol. II. pp. 8-12). There is also a too uniform brilliancy, and too little repose about the style. But it were most ungrateful to de ny the rare merits of the work. We only hope its unprecedented pop ularity may not deprive us of another volume from the pen of Dr Wad- dington. His u History of the Reformation " is, in our judgment, very superior to his " Church History," though that has no inconsiderable merit. * Introduction to the Literature of Europe, Vol. I. p. 513. 94 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. that Mr. Hallam is not a mere literary critic, and that what soever honors he may have achieved in that capacity are yet inferior to those which he has attained as a philosophical historian, we confess our astonishment at the low estimate he seems to have formed of Luther's intellect. This seems to have arisen from contemplating Luther's character too exclusively in the point of view suggested by the literary nature of the work on which the critic was at the time engaged. It is true that the Reformer's mind did not belong exclusively, or even prevailingly, to either of the two principal types with which we more usually associate genius, and which almost divide the page of literary history between them. The one is the prevailingly philosophical tempera ment, with numberless specific differences ; the other, the prevailingly poetical, with differences equally numerous : the passion of the one class of minds is speculative and scientific truth ; that of the other, ideal beauty. Yet there is another, and not less imposing, form of human genius, though it does not figure much on the page of literary history, which has made men as illustrious as man was ever made, either by depth or subtlety of speculation, by opulence or brilliancy of fancy. This class of minds unite some of the rarest en dowments of the philosophical and poetical temperaments ; and though the reason in such men is not such as would have made an Aristotle, nor the imagination such as would have made a Homer, these elements are mingled in such propor tions and combinations as render the product the tertium quid not less wonderful than the greatest expansion of ei ther element alone. To these are superadded some qualities which neither bard nor philosopher ever 'possessed, and the whole is subjected to the action of an energetic will and pow erful passions. Such are the minds which are destined to change the face of the world, to originate or control great revolutions, to govern the actions of men by a sagacious cal culation of motives, or to govern their very thoughts by the magical power of their eloquence. They are the stuff out LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 95 of which great statesmen, great conquerors, great orators, are made ; by the last, however, not meaning the mere " mob orator," who attains and preserves a powerful influence by just following the multitude he appears to lead, and who, if popular, is popular in virtue of Swift's receipt for becoming^ a wise man, that is, by agreeing with whatever any one may say ; we mean the man who, if need be, can stem the torrent as well as drift upon it ; who, upon occasion, can tell unpalatable truths and yet rivet attention. To be such an orator requires many of the qualities of the philosophical statesman, the same deep knowledge of the mechanism of human nature in general, the same keen perception of the motives and feelings of the so-conditioned humanity with which it has to deal, the same ready appreciation of the top ics and arguments likely to prevail, the same sagacity in cal culating moral causes and effects ; and we need not wonder, therefore, that the great statesman and the persuasive orator have so often been found united in the same individual. Now, to achieve any of the great tasks to which this class of minds seem born ; to manage vast and difficult affairs with address, and bring them to an unexpectedly prosperous issue ; to know how to seize the critical moment of action with prop er decision, or to exercise patience and self-control in waiting for it ; to penetrate the springs of human conduct, whether in the genus or the individual ; to sway the minds of whole communities, as whole forests bow at once before the voice of the tempest ; to comprehend and calculate the inter action of numberless causes and effects ; to originate and ex ecute daring enterprises in the face of many obstacles, phys ical and moral, and not only in the midst of opposite wills and conflicting interests, but often by means of them, all this seems to us to imply as wonderful a combination of intel lectual qualities as that which enables the mathematical ana lyst to disentangle the intricacies of a transcendental equation, or the metaphysician to speculate profoundly on the freedom of the human will, or the origin of evil. Nor do those who have 96 thus been both authors and actors in the real drama of history, appear to us less worthy of our admiration than those who have but imagined what the former have achieved. There are, un questionably, men who have been as famous for what they have done, as others have been or can be for what they have written. It is precisely to such an order of genius, whatever his merits or defects as a writer, that the intellect of Luther is, in our judgment, to be referred ; and, considered in this point of view, we doubt whether it is very possible to exaggerate its greatness. In a sagacious and comprehensive survey of the peculiarities of his position in all the rapid changes of his most eventful history ; in penetrating the characters and de tecting the motives of those with whom he had to deal ; in fertility of expedients ; in promptitude of judgment and of action ; in nicely calculating the effect of bold measures, es pecially in great emergencies, as when he burnt the papal bull, and appeared at the Diet of Worms ; in selecting the arguments likely to prevail with the mass of men, and in that contagious enthusiasm of character which imbues and inspires them with a spirit like its own, and fills them with boundless confidence in its leadership ; in all these respects, Luther does not appear to us far behind any of those who have played illustrious parts in this world's affairs, or obtained an empire over the minds of their species. And surely this is sufficient for one man. No one ever denies the intellect of Pericles or Alexander, Cromwell or Napoleon, to be of the highest order, merely because none of these have left ingenious treatises of philosophy, or exqui site strains of poetry, or exhibited any of the traces either of a calm or beautiful intellect : and in like manner it is enough for Luther to be known as the author of the Reformation. Such are the original limitations of the human faculties, and so distinct the forms of intellectual excellence, that it is at best but one comparatively little sphere that even the greatest of men is qualified to fill. Take him out of that, and the giant be comes a dwarf, the genius a helpless changeling. Aristotle, LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 97 though he wrote admirably on rhetoric, would have made, we fear, but an indifferent Demosthenes ; and Demosthenes would probably have been but an obscure expounder of the princi ples of his own art. After making all allowances for the influence of education, and conceding that it is difficult to calculate the condition of any mind under a different training, we are compelled to admit that there are cases, and those usually of minds preeminently great in a single department, where the native bias is so strong, that it is beyond the art of all the schoolmastering in the world to alter it. Earnestly contending that Luther's intellect is to be princi pally regarded in the light we have indicated, we yet must profess our belief, that, even in a purely literary point of view, Mr. Hallam has done him less than justice. When we consid er the popular design of his writings, and that they fulfilled it, many of their apparent defects will disappear ; and when we consider their voluminousness, the rapidity with which they were thrown off, and the overwhelming engagements under the pressure of which they were produced, many real defects may well be pardoned. A word or two on each of these topics. As to their character, they were chiefly designed ad popu- lum, addressed to human nature so-and-so conditioned; and whether we look at what history has told us of the state of that public mind to which they appealed, or to their notori ous effects, we think it must be admitted, that they were ad mirably calculated to accomplish their purpose. It has been already said, that we must look in the mind of Luther for the species of greatness which may fairly be expected there, and not for one to which an intellect so constituted could make no pretensions. No man will challenge for him the praise of metaphysical subtlety, or calmness of judgment in dealing with evidence. To neither the one nor the other surely can Tie lay claim, who flatters himself that he has found an escape from the absurdities of transubstantiation in the equal absurd ities of consubstantiation ; or who thinks himself warranted in setting aside the evidence for the authenticity of the Epis- 98 tie of James, because he supposes he has found a sentence in it which contradicts his interpretation of an Epistle of Paul, the authenticity of which has no higher evidence. The class of intellects to which we have ventured to refer that of Luther are robust and sagacious, rather than subtle or profound ; lit tle fitted for the investigation of abstract truth, and impatient of whatever is not practical ; better adapted for a skilful ad vocacy of principles than for calm investigation of them, and little solicitous, in their exhibition, of philosophic precision or theoretic completeness. Seizing with instinctive sagacity those points which are best calculated to influence the com mon mind, they are not very ambitious (even if they could attain it) of the praise of a severely logical method. But they well know how to do that for which the mere philosopher in his turn would find himself strangely incapacitated. They estimate precisely the measure of knowledge or of ignorance, the prejudices and the passions, of those with whom they have to deal, and pitch the whole tone of argument in unison with it. They judge of arguments, not so much by their abstract value, or even by the degree of force they may have on their minds, as by the relation in which they are likely to be viewed by others : if necessary, they prefer even a comparatively feeble argument, if it can be made readily intelligible, and be forci bly exhibited, to a stronger one, if that stronger one be so re fined as to escape the appreciation of the common mind. And such topics they treat with a vivacity and vehemence of which a philosopher would be as incapable as he would be disgusted with the method. He is but too apt, when he as sumes the uncongenial office of a popular instructor, to gener alize particular statements into their most abstract expression ; he resembles the mathematician, who is not satisfied till he has clothed the determinate quantities of arithmetic in the universal symbols of algebra ; he must assign each argument its place, not according to its relative weight, but according to his own notions of its abstract conclusiveness ; he must adopt the only method which philosophical precision demands, and 99 to violate it would be more than his fastidious taste can prevail upon itself to concede to that vulgar thing, the practical. It is not necessary to institute any comparison as to the comparative value or dignity of the functions of those whose calm intellect best qualifies them to investigate truth, and of those whose prerogative it is to make it triumph, not only over the understandings of men, but over their imaginations and affections ; to give it a vivid presence in the heart. It suffices that neither class can be fully equipped for their high tasks without a mental organization exquisitely adapted to its object, and well worthy of the highest admiration. They are the complements of each other, and neither can be perfect alone. " The wise in heart," says Solomon, " shall be called prudent, but the sweetness of the lips increaseth learning." Truth at the bottom of her well is of about as much use as water there, and is of very little use without some appliances to bring it to the lips of the thirsty. Those who would do such a man as Luther justice in the perusal of his controversial writings, must bear such consid erations in mind. It must be recollected that they were most of them composed pro re nata^ for the purpose of impress ing the popular mind in given circumstances, in an age of great ignorance, barbarism, and coarseness. We are at best not altogether qualified to judge how far they were wisely adapted to their end ; but we are convinced that the more carefully the whole relations of Luther and his age are stud ied, the more will they be found to illustrate his general sa gacity, and the less reason will they leave us to wonder at their astonishing success. Even his positive faults as, for example, his violence of invective and his excessive diffuseness, which we do not deny flowed in a great measure, the one from the vehemence of his nature, and the other from the haste with which he wrote were often deliberately committed by him, as most likely to answer his purpose. We should hesitate to state 100 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. this, were it not for Luther's repeated and explicit declara tions on this very point, in his letters. We should hesitate, because we are jealous of that biographical prejudice which will still find out that the object of its blind eulogy had some deep design even in the veriest blunders ; and that foibles and failings not only " leaned to virtue's side," but were themselves virtues. In both the above points, Luther unquestionably has sins enough to answer for ; he is as often tedious and inelegant as offensively coarse. Still, however it may be thought that we are defending his sagacity at the expense of things quite as valuable, his taste and good feeling, nothing is clearer, from his own admissions, than that he often commit ted these faults of set purpose, and with his eyes wide open. Thus he apologizes for the diffuseness of certain compositions in his letters (No. 32 and No. 134), on the ground that they were designed for the " rudest ears and understandings." To the common mind of his day, truths which are to us tru isms, which will hardly bear the briefest expression, which, in fact, are so familiar that they are forgotten, were startling novelties. The populace required, in his judgment, " line upon line, and precept upon precept " ; not only " here a little, and there a little," but here and there, and everywhere, a great deal. The same apology is required for the diffuse- ness of other theologians of that -day, of far severer intellect, and much more elegance, Calvin and Melancthon, for ex ample. As to his arrogant tone and rude invective, though both were natural expressions of the enthusiasm and vehe mence of his character, they also were systematically adopted, and were both, no doubt, upon the whole, most subservient to his purpose. Timidity and irresolution would have been his ruin. On the other hand, his self-reliance and fearlessness, the grandeur and dilation of his carriage, his very con tempt of his adversaries, all tended to give courage and confidence to those who possessed them not, and to inspire his party with his own spirit. His voice never failed to act LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 101 like a trumpet-call upon the hearts of his followers, to re assure them when depressed, and to rally them when defeat ed. No other tone, no other language, could have had the same effect. Considering his position, there is a sort of sub limity in his audacity. " I know and am certain," says he to Spalatin (1521), "that Jesus Christ our Lord lives and reigns ; and, buoyant in this knowledge and confidence, I will not fear a hundred thousand popes." " My doctrines will stand," .says he the following year, in his reply to King Hen ry, " and the Pope will fall in spite of all the powers of air, earth, hell. They have provoked me to war ; they shall have it. They scorned the peace I offered them, peace they shall have no longer. God shall look to it ; which of the two shall first retire from the struggle, the Pope or Lu ther ! " Five hundred such expressions might be cited. On the whole, we are disposed to acquiesce in the judgment of Dr. Waddington, expressed in relation to the last-mentioned work of the Reformer. "I have no question," says he, " that the cause of Luther was, upon the whole, advanced and recommended even by the temerity of his unsparing in vective ; and that, had he given less offence to his enemies, he would have found less zeal, less courage, and far less de votion in his friends." * It is not uninstructive to hear Luther in some of his letters defending on plan the vehemence of his invective. " I am determined," he says in his reply to King Henry, " to assume, day by day, a loftier and loftier tone against these senseless little tyrants, and to meet their madness with a madness like their own." " I suppress many things," he writes to Spala tin as early as 1519, " for the sake of the Elector and the University, which I would otherwise pour out against Rome, that destroyer alike of Scripture and the Church. It can not be that the truth respecting either can be treated without giving offence to that wild beast. Do not hope that I shall * History of the Reformation, Vol. II. p. 32. 102 keep quiet and safe, unless you wish to see me abandon the ology altogether. Let your friends think me mad if they will." * " What is it to me," he says to Spalatin in his account of the Leipsic disputation, "what is it to me if I speak rashly and offensively, if I but speak truth, and that Catholic truth ? Why, it was always so ; truth has ever been rash, bitter, seditious, offensive What is it to me that the Thomists are offended with truth ? It is sufficient for me that it is neither heretical nor erroneous." t " I knew," he says to Spalatin in 1522, " that whatever I might write against the King of England would offend many, but I chose to do it, sed ita placuit mihi, and many causes rendered it necessary." J And to another friend (un known), in August of the same year, he says : " My gracious prince and many other friends have often admonished me on this subject ; but my answer is, that I will not comply, nor ought I. My cause is not a cause of middle measures (ein mittelhandel), in which one may concede or give way, even as I, like a fool, have hitherto done." Few readers of Lu ther, however, will think there was much reason for this self- accusation. It will not be supposed for a moment, that we are the apol ogists of his too habitual virulence and ferocity of invective. Not even the spirit of the age can form an apology for them ; though in all fairness it ought to be remembered, that so completely were these offensive qualities of controversy char acteristic of it, that then, and long after, they were exhibited by men who had neither Luther's vehement passions nor his provocations to plead in extenuation ; often so unconsciously, indeed, that the refined and equable Thomas More imitates and transcends the Reformer's coarseness, even while he re proves it. But whatever the defects and inequalities of Luther's writ- * De Wette, Vol I. p. 260. t Ibid., pp. 300, 301. t Ibid., Vol. II. p. 244. Ibid., p. 244. 103 ings, there is one quality not unsparingly displayed, which ought to have protected him from so low an estimate as Mr. Hallam seems to have formed, we mean his eloquence ; for which he was famed by all his contemporaries, which he was not grudgingly admitted to possess even by his enemies, and which still lives in numberless passages of his writings to justify their eulogiums. Yet Mr. Hallam says, that, in his judgment, Luther's Latin works at least " are not marked by any striking ability, and still less by any impressive elo quence." Surely he must have been thinking only of the moderate Latinity when he used the last expression ; for un questionably the soul of eloquence is often there, however rugged the form. Far more justly speaks Frederic Schlegel. " Luther," says he, " displays a most original eloquence, surpassed by few names that occur in the whole history of literature. He had, indeed, all those properties which render a man fit to be a revolutionary orator." If this be so, the intellect of Luther must be regarded as one of the rarest phe nomena which appear in the world of mind. Such, at least, has been hitherto the uniform judgment of criticism. To possess a genius for consummate eloquence is always con sidered to imply intellectual excellence of the highest order ; and, whether we consider the paucity of examples of such genius, or how various, how exquisitely balanced and adjusted, are the powers which must equip the truly great orator, we shall see no reason whatever to quarrel with this judgment. So peculiar are the required modifications and combinations of intellect, imagination, and passion, that it may be pretty safely averred we shall as soon see the reproduction of an Aristotle as of a Demosthenes. All the prime elements of this species of mental power, Luther seems to have possessed in perfection. It has been admitted that he had not a mind well fitted for the investigation of abstract truth ; but he had what was to him of more im portance, great practical sagacity, and vast promptitude and vigor of argument. His imagination, though as little solici- 104 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. tous about the abstractly beautiful, as his reason about the ab stractly speculative, was fertile of those brief, homely, ener getic images which are most effective in real eloquence ; and in intensity and vehemence of passion, even Demosthenes was not his superior. His native language he wrote with the ut most force ; and, when he pleased, no one could express him self with a more pregnant brevity. To the continuous excel lence, the consummate taste, the exquisite finish, the minute graces, of him who " fulmined over Greece," Luther, it is true, had no pretensions, as indeed might be expected, considering the circumstances and the age in which his intel lect was developed ; but in every part of his controversial works, most frequently in his briefer writings, as in his " Ap peal to a Future Council," his " Babylonish Captivity," his " Appeal to the German Nobility," and not least in his let ters, occur frequent bursts of the most vivid and impassioned eloquence. He abounds in passages, which, even at this dis tance of time, make our hearts throb within us as we read them. Such is that expression with which he defied the sen tence of excommunication. " As they have excommunicated me in defence of their sacrilegious heresy, so do I excom municate them on behalf of the holy truth of God ; and let Christ, our judge, decide whether of the two excommunica tions has the greater weight with him." Such is that memo rable sentence with which he dropped the papal bull into the flames, and which, even from his lips, would, a few years before, have thrilled the assembled multitudes with horror. " As thou hast troubled and put to shame the Holy One of the Lord, so be thou troubled and consumed in the eternal fires of hell." Such, above all, is that noble declaration with which he concluded his defence at Worms. " Since your Majesty requires of me a simple and direct answer, I will give one, and it is this : I cannot submit my faith either to popes or councils, since it is clear as noonday that they have often erred, and even opposed one another. If, then, I am not confuted by Scripture, or by cogent reasons, I LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 105 neither can nor will retract any thing ; for it cannot be right for a Christian to do any thing against his conscience. Here I stand ; I cannot do otherwise ; God help me ! " This elo quence, indeed, is transient ; it flashes out, like the lightning, for an instant, and again withdraws into the cloud. But it is lightning that blasts and scathes wherever it strikes. The influence which Luther's eloquence exerted over his contemporaries is testified, not only by the deference with which he was listened to by those who were predisposed to applaud, a very inadequate criterion of merit, but by the profound attention which he was able to command, even from those who were hostile or alienated. This was seen, not only on great occasions, as at Worms, not only in the enthusi asm with which he had imbued a whole nation, but by the success with which he performed the equally difficult task of restraining the fanatical excesses of some of his own followers. When, under the leadership of the acute but impetuous Carl- stadt, some of them had been induced, during his residence at the Wartburg, to outrun Luther's zeal, and to do what he admitted might be right to be done, but in a wrong spirit, with violence and uncharitableness, all eyes were directed to Luther as the only man who could appease the tumult. Braving all personal danger, and in defiance of the wishes of the Elector himself, he descended from his retreat, and all was quiet again. For many successive days he preached against the innovators, though without mentioning Carlstadt's name, and his progress was one continued triumph. It is true, that, in his subsequent visit to Orlamund, he had not the same success ; but, in addition to his being in the wrong on the Sacramentarian question, Carlstadt was at that spot regard ed as another Luther. Of the briefer compositions of Luther, few are more elo quent than the letter he addressed to Frederic, when the Legate Cajetan wrote to urge that prince to abandon the hated monk to the tender mercies of Rome. In this remark able composition, which was thrown off on the same day in 106 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. which he received the legate's letter, he assures Frederic that he would prefer exile, to protection at the peril of his prince's safety. The nobility of mind, the magnanimity it displays, are well worthy of Luther ; but, without denying them, we cannot but think that the whole letter, as well as that to Spa- latin on the same occasion, is constructed with consummate skill ; and that, while resolving on that course which his own bold and lofty spirit prompted, he has introduced all those topics which were likely either to move the sympathy or alarm the pride of the prince. " If we praise his magna nimity," says Dr. Waddington, " we must at the same time admire his forethought and discretion." The very pathos is irresistible. " I am waiting your strictures," says he to Spa- latin, though the letter was, of course, intended for his ' mas ter's eye, " on the answer that I have sent to the legate's let ter, unless you think it unworthy of any reply. But I am looking daily for the anathemas from Rome, and setting all things in order ; so that, when they arrive, I may go forth prepared and girded like Abraham, ignorant whither I shall go, nay, rather, well assured whither, for God is every where." * One brief passage in this letter, not given by Waddington, and sadly mutilated by D'Aubigne, seems to us must happily conceived and expressed. Cajetan had urged the Elector to give up the monk, but contents himself with simply averring his " certain knowledge " of his guilt. Luther thus replies : " But this I cannot endure, that my accuser should endeavor to make my most sagacious and prudent sovereign play the part of another Pilate. When the Jews brought Christ before that ruler, and were asked, 'What accusation they preferred, and what evil the man had done ? ' they said, ' If he had not been a malefactor, we would not have delivered him to thee.' So this most reverend legate, when he has presented brother Martin, with many injurious speeches, and the prince possibly asks, fc What has the little brother done ? ' will reply, ' Trust * De Wette, Vol. I. p. 188. LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 107 me, illustrious prince, T speak the truth from certain knowl edge, and not from opinion.' / will answer for the prince : 1 Let me know this certain knowledge ; let it be committed to writing ; formed into letters : and when this is done, I will send brother Martin to Rome, or rather I will seize and slay him myself; then I will consult my honor, and leave not a stain upon my fair fame. But as long as that " certain knowledge " shuns the light, and appears only in assertions, I cannot trust myself in the dark.' Thus would I answer him, illustrious prince. But your far-famed sagacity needs neither instructor n*r prompter." * Of Cajetan, during the negotiations with him, he writes tc Carlstadt : " The legate will not permit me to make either a public or private defence. His wish, so he says, is to act the part of a father, rather than of a judge ; and yet he will listen to nothing from me but the words, ' I recant and ac knowledge my error,' and these words will I never utter. He styles me, 4 sein lieben SohnS I know how little that means. Still, I doubt not I should be most acceptable and beloved if I would but speak the single word revoco. But I will not become a heretic by renouncing the faith which has made me a Christian. Sooner would I be banished, burnt, excommunicated." f In the same lofty spirit of faith he eloquently exclaims, in a passage not cited by Waddington or D'Aubigne : " Let who will be angry, of an impious silence will not I be found guilty, who am con scious that I am 4 a debtor to the truth,' howsoever unworthy. Never without blood, never without danger, has it been pos sible to assert the cause of Christ ; but as he died for us, so, in his turn, he demands that, by confession of his name, we should die for him. 4 The servant is not greater than his Lord.' 'If they have persecuted me,' he himself tells us, 4 they will also persecute you ; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.' " J * De Wette, Vol. I. pp 183, 184. t Ibid., p. 161. J Ibid., p. 33. 108 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. Passages such as these are constantly occurring in Luther's letters ; and if they contain not the elements of eloquence, we profess that we are yet to seek the meaning of the term. And even if Luther's writings were less fraught with the traces of a vigorous intellect than they are, there are two achievements of his, the like of which were never performed except where there was great genius. First, such was his mastery over his native language, that, under his plastic hand and all-subduing energy, it ceased to be a rugged and barba rous dialect, almost unfit for the purposes of literature ; for which, indeed, he may be said to have created it. Secondly, he achieved, almost single-handed, the translation of the whole Scriptures ; and (whatever the faults which necessarily arose from the defective scholarship of the age) with such idiomatic strength and racy energy, that his version has ever been the object of universal veneration, and is unapproachable by any which has since appeared. The enthusiasm with which such a man as Frederic Schlegel speaks of it, shows that, in the eye of those who are most capable of judging, it is thought to have immense merit. In estimating the genius of Luther, as reflected in his writ ings, it is impossible to leave wholly out of consideration their quantity, the rapidity with which they were composed, and the harassing duties amidst which they were produced. He died at the no very advanced age of sixty-two, and yet his collected works amount to seven folio volumes. His corre spondence alone fills five bulky octavos. When we reflect that these works were not the productions of retired leisure, but composed amidst all the oppressive du ties and incessant interruptions of a life like his, we pause aghast at the energy of character which they display ; and wonder that that busy brain and ever-active hand could sus tain their office so long. Of the distracting variety and com plication of his engagements, he gives us, in more than one of his letters, an amusing account. Their very contents, indeed, bear witness to them. The centre and mainspring of LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 109 the whole great movement, the principal counsellor in great emergencies, the referee in disputes and differences amongst his own party, solicited for advice alike by princes, and scholars, and pastors, on all sorts of matters, public and private, having the " care of all the churches," and beset at the same time by a host of inveterate and formidable ad versaries, the wonder is, not that he discharged many of his duties imperfectly, but that he could find time to discharge them at all. Not only are there numberless letters on all the ordinary themes of condolence and congratulation, of rec ommendation on behalf of poor scholars and pastors, of advice to distant ministers and churches in matters of ecclesi astical order and discipline ; but letters sometimes affording whimsical proofs of the triviality of the occasions on which his aid was sought, and the patience with which it was given. Now he replies to a country parson who wanted to know how to manage the exordium and peroration of his sermons ; now to a worthy prior to tell him the best mode of keeping his conventual accounts, that he may know precisely how much " beer " and " wine " " cerevisia et vinum " was con sumed in the Jwspitium and " refectory " respectively ; * now to make arrangements for the wedding festival of a friend ; now to plead the cause of a maiden of Torgau, whose betrothed (no less than the Elector's own barber) had given her the slip.f The very style of the letters bears evidence to the pressure of duty under which they were written. Most of the shorter ones are expressed with a brevity, a business-like air, which reminds us of nothing so much as the style of a merchant's counting-house. Of the variety of his engagements, even before the conflict of his life commenced (1516), he says to his friend John Lange : u I could find employment almost for two amanuen ses ; I do scarcely any thing all day but write letters, so that I * De Wette, Vol. I. p. 23. t Ibid., Vol. II. p. 317. 10 110 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND, CHARACTER. know not whether I may not be writing what I have already written : you will see. I am conventual preacher, chaplain t pastor, and parish minister, director of studies, vicar of the priory, that is, prior eleven times over, inspector of the fish eries at Litzkau, counsel to the inns of Herzeberg in Torgau, lecturer on Paul, and expounder of the Psalms." At a later period he found there might be engagements yet heavier than these. In excuse of an absurd blunder in translating a Hebrew word, he writes (1521): "I was distracted and occupied, as often happens, with various thoughts. I am one of the busiest of men : I preach twice a day ; I am compil ing a psalter, laboring at the postils, replying to my adversa ries, assailing the bull both in Latin and German, and defend ing myself, to say nothing of writing letters," &c.* " I would have written to both our friends," he says to James Strauss (1524), " but it is incredible with what business I am overwhelmed, so that I can scarcely get through my let ters alone. The whole world begins to press me down, so that I could even long to die, or be translated, " " opto vel mori vel tolli" f These last two passages, not cited by D'Aubigne or Wad- dington, perhaps better illustrate the pressure of his duties than the first, which they both have given. When, in addition to all this, we take into account the promptitude of his pen, and that his antagonists seldom had to wait long for an answer, we cannot be surprised that much which he wrote should have inadequately represented his mental powers. Nor is mere bulk to be left out of consideration in estimating the vigor of his intellect ; for, though it is itself no criterion of genius, many of the most voluminous writers having been amongst the worst and dullest, yet if we find large fragments of such writings richly veined with gold, however impure the ore in which it is discovered, we may reasonably * De Wette, Vol. I. p. 554. I Ibid. , Vol. II. p. 505. Ill infer, that, if their authors had written less and with more elaboration, they would have left behind them far more splen did monuments of their genius ; and thus, in the estimate of its true dimensions, the quantity of what they have written becomes an essential element. This consideration ought, in all fairness, to be applied, not only to Luther, but to all his great contemporaries, and to all the theologians of any emi nence in the succeeding age. They wrote with far too great rapidity and frequency to do themselves full justice. The gold of genius is in their works, but spread out thin ; its essence is there, but undistilled ; in the shape of a huge pile of leaves, not in a little phial of liquid perfume. None can be more deeply convinced that the hasty and voluminous writings of Luther afforded but an inadequate index of his powers than was Luther himself. This is evi dent from his own estimate of his writings, formed at the close of life, and expressed in the general preface to his collected works.' He there laments the hurry in which they had often been composed, and the want of accuracy and method which distinguishes them. He even speaks of them in terms of unjust depreciation, and declares, no doubt in sincerity, but in strange ignorance of himself, his willingness that they should be consigned to oblivion, and other and better works which had subsequently appeared substituted in their place. The following are sentences from this memorable preface : " Mul- tum diuque restiti illis qui meos libros, sen verius confusiones mearum lucubrationum voluerunt editas, turn quod nolui anti- quorum labores meis novitatibus obrui, et lectorem a legend is illis impediri, turn quod nunc, Dei gratia, exstant methodici libri quam plurimi His rationibus adductus, cupiebam omnes libros meos perpetua oblivione sepultos, ut melioribus esset locus." But whatever the merits of Luther's writings, it has been already admitted that it is not in them that we recognize the cheif evidences of the power and compass of his intellect. His pretensions to be considered one of the great minds of 112 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. his species, are more truly, as well as more wisely, rested on his actions ; on the skill and conduct which he displayed through all the long conflict with his gigantic adversary, and the ineffaceable traces which he left of himself on the mind of his age, and on that of all succeeding ages. The more his position at various periods is studied, and the deeper the insight into the history of his times, the more obvious, we are per suaded, will appear his practical sagacity, the soundness as well as promptitude of his judgment, the wisdom as well as boldness of his measures. It will be seen, too, that in not a few instances his very boldness was itself wisdom. From his first encounter with Tetzel, and the appearance of the celebrated Theses, to the Diet of Worms, and his ab duction to the Wartburg, his history is perhaps as eventful as that of any man has ever been ; and it is impossible, we think, not to see that he conducted his arduous enterprise with infinite address, as well as energy. Again and again did his formidable enemy, unfamiliar with defeat, before whom every antagonist had for ages been crushed, exhaust her power, her menaces, her flatteries, her arts, in vain. For the first time, her famed diplomacy, her proverbial craft, were at fault ; nuncios and legates returned bootless to their papal master. Cajetan, and Miltitz, and Eck, and Aleander were all foiled at their own weapons. But he displayed his singu lar sagacity not more strongly by his address in these nego tiations, and in the fertile expedients by which he frustrated or parried the efforts of his enemies, than in his quick per ception of the turning-points of the great controversy, and the judicious positions in which he intrenched himself accord ingly. Let us be permitted to remind the reader of a few instan ces. Against the usurping and all-presuming spirit of Rome, he opposed the counter principle of the absolute supremacy of Scripture, and to every clamorous demand for retraction replied to legates, nuncios, Diets, alike, " Let my errors be first proved by that authority." Nothing is more frequently LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 113 iterated by him than this maxim, which he often lays down with a brief energy which reminds us of the celebrated sen tence of Chillingworth. Aware that this principle involved another equally opposed to the jealous policy of Rome, he foresaw the immense im portance to his cause of placing the Bible in every body's hands ; and promptly providing the means as well as fore-* seeing the results, he toiled day and night till he had un locked for the people the treasures of Scripture in his own rich and idiomatic version. If he did not always consistently pursue this principle to its extreme limits, and practically assert the right of private judgment, yet he admitted it in theory. Such expressions as the following will prove this : "The right of inquiring and judging concerning matters of faith belongs to all Christians, and to each ; and so abso lutely, that cursed be he who would abridge this right by a single hair's breadth." * In opposition to that system of spiritual barter, which formed the essence of Romanism, and by which it had so deeply degraded the Gospel, he arrayed, sometimes too para doxically it is true, the forgotten doctrine of justification by faith. Perceiving that the dominion of Rome was founded in ignorance, and that his constant appeal must be to the intelli gence of the people, he labored incessantly to promote the interests of learning and the diffusion of knowledge ; and did much by his enlightened advocacy to give the Reforma tion one of its most glorious characteristics, its close alli ance with scholarship and science. t Deeply disgusted with that scholastic philosophy, which, without being perhaps fully versed in it, he knew to be a main pillar of the Romish sys- * Cont. Reg. Anglise, L. Op., Vol. II. p. 532. t This is fully proved by citations from Luther's writings given by D'Aubigne, Vol. III. pp. 236 - 243. Luther's truly enlarged views on this subject are also frequently disclosed in his correspondence. 10* 114 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. tern, he not only labored to supplant it by a Scriptural the ology, but was scarcely less anxious than Erasmus himself that polite letters should be substituted in its stead. An equally decisive example of his sagacity is to be seen in the uniform repudiation of physical force, as fatal to his cause ; the more remarkable, when we reflect on the impetuosity of his own character, and the notions of that age, an age when violence was so familiar, and almost the sole, as it was the most welcome, instrument of all revolutions. He con sistently asserted the moral power of truth throughout his whole career, even when the menaces of his enemies seemed to justify an opposite course, and when the indiscreet zeal of some of his friends, more especially Philip, Landgrave of Hesse,* Sickingen, and Von Hutten, were impatient to try sharper weapons than those of argument. In January, 1521, (not June, as stated by Dr. Waddington,) he writes to Spala- tin : " You see what Hutten wants. But I am averse to strive for the Gospel by violence and bloodshed. By the word of God was the world subdued, by that word has the Church been preserved, and by that word shall it also be repaired."! "I hear," he writes to Melancthon from the Wartburg, " that an attack has been made at Erfurdt on the house of the priests. I wonder that the senate has permitted or connived at it, and that Prior Lange has been silent. For though it is well that these impious adversaries should be restrained, yet the mode of doing it must bring reproach and a just defeat upon the Gospel." J " We have a right to speak," he firmly admonished the rash innovators, who had begun * If Luther had as strongly resisted every other erring impulse of this impetuous prince, he would have escaped the heaviest imputation on his character. But, alas ! the document in which, for state, reasons, Luther, and Melancthon, and Bucer, and others, sanctioned Philip in bigamy, dispensing, in his case, with what they admitted to be a gen eral law of Christian morals, remains ; and can be read only with grief and shame. t De Wette, Vol. I. p. 543. j Ibid., Vol. II. pp. 7, 8. LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 115 to demolish images and windows, " but none whatever to compel. Let us preach ; the rest belongs to God. If I ap peal to force, what shall I gain ? Grimace, forced uniform ity, and hypocrisy. But there will be no hearty sincerity, no faith, no love. Where these are wanting, all are want ing ; and I would not give a straw for such a victory." We all know that it was not for want of courage that Luther adopted this pacific course. The fearlessness with which he faced the plague in 1516, saying, "The world will not perish because brother Martin falls," followed him through life. It is a noble trait of his character, that on the above occasion he sent the students away, though he per sisted in not quitting his post himself ; and, on a subsequent occasion, he was anxious that his friend Melancthon should not imitate his own heroism. " Obsecro," he writes to Spa- latin (1521), " ne Philippus maneat, si pestis irruat." Nor was his sagacity less shown in much of the by-play of the great drama. On his letter to Frederic, and the skill with which he pleaded his cause, even while he seemed to abandon it, we have already touched. Let us take another instance. The centre of a stupendous revolution, surrounded by enthusiastic spirits, an enthusiast himself, it is astonishing how free, for the most part, he kept himself and his follow ers from practical fanaticism.* When Mark Stubner and * We, of course, do not mean to assert that Luther was always thus personally superior to spiritual illusion. His reputed encounters with the Devil at the Wartburg are quite sufficient to prove this. But the ex ample of Cromwell and many others may teach us that religious enthu siasm, or even fanaticism, is not inconsistent with the deepest practical sagacity and the wisest conduct of affairs. We are also disposed to think, that very many of the expressions on which this species of illu sion has been charged on Luther, are but strong tropical modes of rep resenting those internal conflicts of which every Christian is sensible, hut which few have waged with so intense an agony as himself, 'The incidents at the Wartburg cannot be thus accounted for. But none will be surprised at these who will peruse the accounts he himself gives of his health, in the letters written from that place. Deep solitude, un- 116 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. his associates appeared at Wittemberg with their confident claims to revelation, during Luther's residence at the Wart- burg, even Melancthon wavered. Luther remained firm : he adhered to his great principle of the supremacy of the Scriptures, disclaimed all new revelations, and declared that any messenger from God must prove his commission by the only credentials, the power of working miracles. He, at the same time, adhered to another equally sound principle, and declared that these fanatics ought not to be subjected to persecution. In the deplorable " war of the peasants," we have similar proofs of his penetration. He pleaded for a timely redress of many of their wrongs, and foretold the wonted diet, prolonged sleeplessness, intense anxiety, had evidently pro duced the most extensive derangement of all the digestive processes. The distressing "tinnitus capitis" of which he complains, as well as other exquisitely painful symptoms to which we cannot more particularly advert, show the condition he was in. No physician read ing certain sentences (Vol. II. pp. 2, 6, 17, 22) would wonder at any fancies in which Luther's hypochondriacal imagination might indulge ; or that in his case those fancies took the direction of his habitual thoughts. The same hypochondriacal symptoms often appeared subse quently ; and they are, as might be expected, generally associated with religious depression. On the subject of Luther's spiritual encounters (as well as on some other interesting points of his history), we beg to refer the reader to some remarks in an article in this journal (Vol. LXIX. p. 273) ; since claimed, and reprinted with others, by its accomplished author, Sir J. Stephen. Had that admirable essay been seen when this was composed (an interval of seven years elapsed between the appearance of the two), it is probable that the latter would never have seen the light. On com parison, however, it will be found, as usually happens when two writers, however inferior one may be to the other, independently meditate the same subject, that the topics selected are far from being always the same. With a general harmony of views, the points principally insisted upon in the one essay are not those which are |chiefly treated in the other. The magnitude of the theme sufficiently accounts for this ; so spacious and rich a field as Luther's genius would still leave enough to fill the sheaf of a humble gleaner like myself, even after the sickle of so able a reaper as my accomplished friend had been employed upon it. LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 117 consequences of neglecting them. But when the people commenced their horrid excesses, he advocated with super fluous, and even rabid violence, the adoption of the severest measures of chastisement. Some of his expressions, indeed, are perfectly shocking ; and we can only account for their vehemence by supposing, that, foreseeing what was actu ally the case that the popular excesses would be malig nantly attributed to the Reformation itself, he was determined to anticipate slander, and provide, as he has done by even an ostentatious opposition, for the defence of himself and his adherents. The same singular sagacity is seen in the temperate man ner in which he attempted to realize the results of the Ref ormation, and to reconstruct the edifice he had demolished. He was no violent iconoclast, no wholesale innovator like Carlstadt. But we need say nothing on this head ; the sub ject has been beautifully noticed by D'Aubigne in the com mencement of his third volume ; where he shows, that the impression that Luther was a rash, headlong revolutionist, is altogether erroneous. But it may be further asserted, that, in the most audacious actions of his life, that very audacity, in the majority of in stances, was itself wisdom. Take, for example, his letter from the Wartburg to Albert, Archbishop of Mayence, com manding, rather than beseeching, him not to revive the infa mous Indulgences. We do not defend the taste or decency of the style ; but the result proves that Luther knew his man. It was followed by a reply as deferential as if the monk had been the archbishop, and the archbishop the monk. It was on this occasion that he used some most remarkable expressions to Spalatin, who had enjoined silence, and who had enforced his injunctions by those of Frederic. " I have seldom read more unwelcome letters than your last," he writes ; " so that I not only delayed to reply, but had deter mined not to reply at all. I will not bear what you have said, that the Prince will not suffer the Archbishop to be 118 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER/ written to, and that the public peace must not be disturbed. I will rather lose you, the Prince, and every creature on earth. If I have resisted the Archbishop's creator, the Pope, shall I succumb to the Pope's creature ? . . . . Non sic, Spalatine ; non sic, Princeps I am resolved not to lis ten to you ; fixum est, te non auditum iri." * In like manner, his " Appeal to a Future Council," pre pared while awaiting the fulmination of the bull, but surrep titiously published before it came (as Luther expressly af firms), brought thousands to his standard ; and still more may be said for those bold and unsparing invectives against the abuses of Rome, in the " Babylonish Captivity," and in the " Address to the German Nobility." It may be similarly asserted, that no measure whatever could have been so crit ically well timed as that most decisive one of committing the decretals and entire pontifical code to the flames, and crown ing the hecatomb with the formidable bull itself. It is not only one of the most striking events of history, and exhibits the chief actor in an attitude truly sublime, but was a most felicitous and politic expedient. It is curious, however, to hear Luther admitting, in his correspondence, that even his heart sometimes misgave him before the performance of that most significant act. " I burnt the papal books and the bull," he writes to Staupitz, a month after, " with trembling and prayer ; but I am now better pleased with that act than with any other of my whole life." t The same wisdom marked the courageous obstinacy with which, in spite of entreaties, intimidations, and sickness, he persisted in presenting himself at the Diet of Worms. He alone, of all his party, seemed duly to appreciate the impor tance, the necessity, of that act to the safety of his great enterprise. At that critical moment, advance as well as retreat was full of danger ; but the path of true policy, as well as of true magnanimity, was to advance. His obstinacy * De Wette, Vol. II. p. 94. t Ibid., Vol. I. p. 543. LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 119 at this crisis has something absolutely sublime about it. While his enemies, more perspicacious than his friends, dis trusted, and at last dreaded his appearance, employed all sorts of machinations to deter him, and plainly hinted that the road to Worms was the road to destruction, while his friends, with a terrible remembrance of the fate of Huss, to whom even the Imperial safe-conduct had been no protection, painted, in appalling colors, the certain martyrdom to which he was exposing himself, Luther remained inflexible. The repeated and varied forms in which he energetically ex pressed his purpose, showed the importance he attached to the act, and the obstinacy with which he had resolved upon it. Two are well known : " Should they light a fire which should blaze as high as heaven, and reach from Wittemberg to Worms, at Worms I will still appear." " Though there were as many devils in Worms as there are tiles on the houses, in would I go, noch woll ich hinein." But his let ters, written on his progress thither, abound in expressions of the same inflexibility. " We come, my Spalatin," he writes from Frankfort " We will enter Worms in spite of all the gates of hell, and all the powers of the air." * " Will you go on ? " said the Imperial herald to him at Wei mar, where they were placarding the Imperial edict against him. " Twill," replied Luther, " though I should be put un der interdict in every town, I will go on." And his appearance and language at Worms did more to promote the cause of the Reformation than any other act, whether of preceding or succeeding years. He himself, as he repeatedly intimates in his correspondence, had serious apprehensions that his career would terminate at Worms, and evidently left it with much of the same feeling with which a man might find that he had got safely out of a lion's den. There is an obvious tone of hilarity in the letters dated im mediately after his departure from the Diet, which contrasts * De Wette, Vol. I. p. 587. 120 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. oddly enough with regrets that he must escape, in temporary concealment, the honors of martyrdom. Witness the follow ing to Luke Cranach, the painter, in which he ludicrously characterizes the proceedings of the Diet with all the point, brevity, and sarcastic energy, which he could so well assume : " I thought that his Imperial Majesty would have summoned some doctor, or some fifty, and eloquently confuted the monk. But nothing more is done than just this : ' Are these books thine ? ' 4 Yes.' ' Will you retract them or not ? ' * No.' 1 Then get about your business.' So heb dich" During the sittings of the celebrated Diet of Augsburg (held nearly ten years after that of Worms), Luther, it is well known, was persuaded to remain at Coburg, whence he watched with intense and, as his letters at this period so often tes tify, impatient interest, the proceedings of his less prompt and perspicacious colleagues. On this occasion he showed his thorough knowledge of the treacherous and crafty policy, the spirit of subtle intrigue, which had so often characterized Rome ; those " Italian arts," Italitates as he designates them, when speaking so many years before of the feigned cordialities of the Nuncio Miltitz, which he dreaded for Melancthon more than violence, and of which the papal diplo macy was never more prodigal than on this occasion. While the timid Melancthon was " cutting and contriving " to per form impossibilities, to find a common measure of incommen- surables, " sewing new cloth upon old garments, and putting new wine into old bottles," striving to diminish to an invis ible line the interval between some of the doctrines of his adversaries and his own, and adopting all sorts of little artifices and convenient ambiguities of expression, to show the harmo ny of doctrines which must be eternally discordant, Luther boldly remonstrates against a policy so ruinous ; assures him that, whatever the apparent pliability of Rome, nothing but absolute submission would satisfy her imperious spirit ; and that the true policy- of the Reformers was what it had ever been, that of uncompromising firmness. In the most en- LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 121 ergetic language, he denounces the vanity of all projects of verbal compromise ; refuses all participation in acts which should have that object ; and threatens to shiver in atoms any league by which Rome and Luther should be bound together. " I have received your Apology," he writes to Melancthon, " and wonder what you mean when you ask, What and how much should be conceded to the Pope ? For myself, more than enough has already been conceded in that Apology ; and if they refuse that, I see not what more I can possibly grant them." * And shortly after : " For myself, I will not yield a hair's breadth, or suffer any thing to be restored. I will rather endure every extremity. Let the Emperor do as he will." t And again, two days after, to Spalatin : " Hope not for agreement. If the Emperor will publish an edict, let him. He published one at Worms ! " J " Should it come to pass," he writes to the same friend a month after, " that you concede any thing plainly against the Gospel, and inclose that eagle in a vile sack, Luther (never doubt it), Luther will come, and, in a magnificent fashion, set the noble bird free." M. D'Aubigne's work has not yet reached this period ; but there are no letters of Luther more interesting than the series which relate to the proceedings of this memorable Diet. With such talents for the conduct of affairs, we need not wonder that the prudent Frederic so often sought his counsels ; that Melancthon should have so eulogized his sagacity in his funeral panegyric ; or that Cajetan should have wished to de cline further encounters with him. " I will have nothing more to do with this beast, for he has deep-set eyes, and won derful speculations in his head." We have repeatedly stated, that the intellect of Luther did not particularly fit him for the investigation of abstract or speculative truth ; but in all matters of a practical nature, in all that concerned the management of affairs, or the conduct De Wette, Vol. IV. p. 52. t Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 155. 11 122 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. of life, his judgment was both penetrating and profound. Hence, while nothing can be more flimsy than his metaphys ics, nothing can be more generally sound than his practical judgments. Incapable of stating truth with philosophical pre cision, or laying it down with all its requisite limitations, he was a great master of that rough moral computation, which contents itself for practical purposes with approximate ac curacy. This was especially the case in relation to that class of truths, in which a magnanimous mind, and lofty mor al instincts, anticipate the lagging deductions of reason ; and which are better understood and enforced by the heart than by the head. His writings abound in weighty and solid max ims, in which both the data and the demonstration are alike suppressed. To great sagacity, Luther also added, in a preeminent de gree, that passionate earnestness of character which leads men not only to hold truth tenaciously, but* to take every means in their power to diffuse, propagate, and realize it ; to make it victorious. In Luther, no doubt, the principal spring of this impulse was depth of religious conviction ; but the tendency itself is as much an element of character in some men, as the love of contemplation is in others. It is a form of am bition, a noble one, it is true, the ambition of intellectual dominion ; and has actuated many a philosopher who flattered himself that he was single-eyed in his pursuit of wisdom. This warlike and polemic spirit is, no doubt, often most in consistent with a calm and cautious survey of all the relations and details of great questions. But it is well for the world that there are some who, with speculative powers at least robust enough to enable them to seize large fragments of the truth, are immediately impelled to communicate it. Partial truth diffused is better than perfect truth suppressed, bet ter than stark ignorance and error, better than that condi tion of things in which Luther found the world. And if the vehemence, natural to such minds, sometimes precipitates the conclusions of reason, or substitutes prejudices LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 123 for them, it is to be remembered that it will be long before the same earnestness and zeal, in contending for truth, will be manifested by those intellects which abstractedly are best qualified to investigate it. It would, doubtless, be* very beauti ful to see the tranquillity of the philosopher conjoined with the fire of the advocate, first, intellect without passion, and then intellect with it. But it is a condition denied to us. If there be great energy of character, the processes of reason will often be precipitated or disturbed ; if there be the coolness and equanimity of temperament which these require, the same qualities wilj unhappily continue to operate when their work is completed. The philosopher will still be apt to vindicate his character, and look most prbvokingly philosophic as to whether his views are effectually urged on mankind or not. Even if he become a zealous writer on their behalf, it still requires something more to encounter suffering for them ; and while almost every religion has had those who have dared all and .endured all in its defence, the annals of science scarcely present us with the name of a single authentic mar tyr. Philosophers have been illustrious benefactors of man kind ; but it requires more energy of passion, and a sterner nature than generally falls to their lot, to ruffle it with the world, to encounter obloquy, persecution, and death in defence of truth. Even Galileo was but too ready to recant when menaced with martyrdom, and to set the sun, which he had so impiously stopped, on his great diurnal journey again. It is true that he is said to have relapsed into heresy the mo ment after he had recanted, and drolly whispered, " But the earth does move though ! " Yet while the profession of error was uttered aloud, the confession of truth was made sotto vo- ce. As Pascal says of the reservations of the Jesuits, C^est dire la verite tout bas, et un mensonge tout haut. Nor can it be said that the class of philosophers have in general been disposed to risk more, where truth has been practical and better calculated to influence the affections. The ancient philosophers are a notorious example of the con- 124 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. trary. They saw and scorned the puerilities of the ancient systems of superstition, but without vigorously attempting to destroy them, or to substitute better notions in their place. It was sufficient for them to make the convenient distinction between the exoteric and the esoteric. They could join in the popular rites with gravity of face and laughter in their hearts, and worship their gods and sneer at them at the same time. The vehemence of Luther's passions, and the energy of his will, formed most remarkable features of his character, as much so assuredly as any quality of his intellect, and enabled him, in conjunction with that lofty confidence, that heroic faith, which seemed to take for literal truth the declaration, " What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them," - to effect greater things than were probably ever effected by the same qualities before. Not only the pliant Melancthon yielded to the superior decision and energy of his nature, as much, at least, as to his judgment, but princes and nobles often yielded to it ; and as to the common people, his confident bearing and resolute will achieved more than half his victory over them. In many instances, he seems to have made his way solely by the influence of an all-conquering enthusiasm and an inflexible purpose. His faith realized its own visions, and almost literally proved itself to be capable " of removing mountains." On comparatively trivial occasions, and. when in the wrong (not seldom the case), this intensity of passion, and inflexi bility of purpose, must have made him no very pleasant co adjutor. Even the amiable Melancthon murmured after his death at the severity of that yoke, which, while Luther lived, he bore with much-enduring meekness. We wish, for Me- lancthon's own manhood, he had either murmured earlier or not murmured at all. But in a great crisis, and where the Reformer was in the right, the qualities of mind we are now considering exhibit him in aspects full of grandeur. His LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 125 enthusiasm is heroic, his energy of will sublime. It is curious to contrast his almost childish obstinacy and rabid virulence, in relation to Zwingle and the Sacramentarians, with the dignity of his deportment, under the influence of similar in flexibility of character, before and at the Diet of Worms. It was with him as with many powerful minds, great occa sions calmed him ; the energy was commensurate to the objects which called it forth ; the weight upon the machine was proportional to its momentum ; and slow and majestic movement took the place of a self-destroying and turbulent force. There was one peculiarity about Luther, of which we know not whether it most illustrates the robustness of his intellect, or the energy of his will, but it renders his character absolutely unique. We mean the rapidity and comparative ease with which he triumphed over the deepest prejudices of his age and education; Roman Catholics would doubtless say, over his happiest prepossessions. But this matters not to our present observation, which respects the singular char acter of the transformation, not its nature ; though Protes tants have pretty well made up their minds, that, in all the great principles he so vigorously extricated and so boldly avowed, he showed as well the rectitude as the force of his understanding ; in his advocacy, for example, of the su premacy of the Scriptures, and in his condemnation (under the guidance of that principle) of indulgences, of the monastic institute, of the celibacy of the clergy, of the mass, of the usurpations of the Pope. The spectacle is a noble one. The maxims and the institutes which he denounced with so much energy and confidence, had been consecrated by universal veneration, and were covered by the " awful hoar of ages." The prejudices which he vanquished had been instilled into his childhood, and they were retained till he reached man hood ; they were the prejudices of all his contemporaries ; they held dominion, not only over the most timid, but over the most powerful intellects ; they had bound even " kings in 11 * 126 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. chains, and nobles in fetters of iron " ; and almost every attempt, certainly all recent attempts to demolish them, had been crushed by a despotism which united the utmost degree of craft with the most ruthless employment of violence, and was the most compact and formidable the world ever saw. That he should have been able to denude himself of such prejudices, boldly to avow this great mental revolution, and give utterance to a series of novel and startling dogmas in opposition to them, is an example of independence and fearlessness of mind, which the world had never before wit nessed. Our wonder is still further increased, when we reflect that Luther himself was originally as passionate a devotee of the system he renounced, as he afterwards became of that for which he renounced it. Nor could he have been otherwise. The very depth and sincerity of his character forbade that he should hold any thing lightly ; and whether he was right or wrong, he was always in earnest. While he was a Papist, he was a blind one ; like Paul, " an Hebrew of the Hebrews ; and, as touching the law, a Pharisee." He was none of those half-infidel ecclesiastics who abounded at Rome, and were the natural offspring of the age ; men who saw through the superstition which they yet sanctioned, and conducted, with edifying solemnity of visage, the venerable rites at which they were all the while internally chuckling. He himself tells us (1539): "I may and will affirm with truth, that at the present time there is no Papist so conscientiously and earnestly a Papist as I once was ! " He repeats this in various forms in his Letters. The account of his youthful visit to Rome, as given by himself, confirms this statement. The profound veneration with which he approached the holy city ; the passionate devo tion with which he visited sacred places and engaged in public rites ; the shock and revulsion of feeling with which he dis covered that others were not so much in earnest as himself, all show how sincerely he was then attached to the ancient LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 127 system, and by what severe struggles his spirit must have shaken off its thraldom. The spectacle of this mental revo lution is rendered still more imposing by the comparative rapidity with which it was effected. In 1516, Luther was still a zealous Papist; in October, 1517, he published his Theses against Indulgences, and in less than four years from that date, he had committed himself to a contest with Rome on all the great principles of the Reformation. How rapidly those principles disclosed themselves, as the controversy pro ceeded, is sufficiently clear from the examination of his cor respondence. In a letter dated December 2, 1518, when expecting banishment by Frederic, he says to Spalatin : " If I remain here, I shall be without freedom of speech and writing ; if I go, I will discharge my conscience, and pour out my life for Christ." A week after, he says : " I shall yet one day be a little freer against these Roman hydras." Three months later, he writes to Lange : " Our friend Eck is meditating new contests against me, and will compel me to do what I have often thought of ; that is, by the blessing of Christ, to inveigh more seriously against these monsters. For, hitherto, I have but been playing and trifling in this matter." He repeats nearly the same words, a fortnight after, to Scheurl : " I have often said, that hitherto I have been trifling ; but now more serious assaults are to be directed against the Roman pontiff and the arrogance of his minis ters." In Mai'ch, 1519, he made this memorable confession : " I am reading the pontifical decretals," (for the Leipsic dis putation,) " and I know not whether the Pope is Antichrist himself, or only his apostle." In February, 1520, he writes : " I have scarcely a remaining doubt that the Pope is verily Antichrist, so well does he agree with him in his life, his acts, his words, and his decrees." On the 10th of July, soon after the appearance of the bull of condemnation, he says to Spalatin : " For me the die is cast, jacta est alea ; the papal wrath and papal favor are alike despised by me ; I will never be reconciled to them, nor communicate with 128 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. them more. Let them burn my writings. I, unless I am unable to get a little fire [doubtless alluding to the interdict], will condemn and publicly burn the whole pontifical code." Perhaps, next to his journey to Worms, the two most dar ing acts of his life were the burning the papal bull, and his marriage. Of the former, and of the tremendous defiance it implied, we have already spoken. But the latter step re quired almost equal courage. His prejudices in relation to his monastic vows, as is seen by his correspondence, troubled him as much as any he had to vanquish. Nor had he van quished them fully till his return from the Wartburg. When he resolved to marry (a resolution taken suddenly enough), one of his prime motives, if we may believe himself, was to give the utmost practical efficiency to his convictions, and encourage his followers in a conflict with a most powerful, because most distressing, class of associations. Supposing this his motive, it was certainly not only one of the boldest, but one of the most politic, expedients he could have adopted. He assures us, after giving other reasons for the step, that one was, " ut confirmem/acZo qua3 docui, tarn multos invenio pusillanimes in tanta luce evangelii." * That this was his principal motive, we may well doubt ; with passions so strong as his, it was not likely to be more than coordinate with others. But Jhat it was a very real motive, we may safely conclude : he was now past the hey day of passion, was forty-two years old, had lived in the most blameless celibacy, and had at first predestined his Catharine for another. Never did the cloister close upon one who was better qualified to appreciate and reciprocate the felicities of domestic life. As a husband and a father, his character is full of tenderness and gentleness ; nor is there any part of his correspondence more interesting than his letters to his " Kate," and their " little Johnny " ; or those in which he alludes to his fireside. * De Wette, Vol. III. p. 13. LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 129 The clamors of his adversaries showed how bold was the step on which he had ventured. "Nothing less than Anti christ," they said, " could be the fruit of the union of a monk and a nun." The taunt well justified the caustic sarcasm of Erasmus : " That there must already have been many Anti christs if that was the sole condition of their appearance." Comparatively rapid as was Luther's conquest over his own prejudices, the revolution still required much time. It was in perfect analogy with similar revolutions in other minds. It was only more extensive and less gradual. Gradual such a change must ever be, from the limited capacities of our nature, and its law of progressive development. It would be not less absurd to suppose, that, when he first protested against Indulgences, he foresaw the results of that contest, than it would be to suppose that Cromwell anticipated his protectorate at the time of the battle of Newbury ; or that Napoleon had already predestined himself to more than half the thrones of Europe when he entered on his Italian cam paigns. As with them, so with Luther in his more hallowed enterprise, the horizon continually widened as he climbed the hill. Nor was it, as the confessions of Luther abundantly prove, without severe struggles, and momentary vacillations of purpose, that he pursued his arduous way. This is espe cially seen in that wavering letter to the Pope, written at the suggestion of Miltitz, in which, in language which more than approached servility and adulation, he deprecated the anger of Leo, and declared that nothing was further from his pur pose than to question the authority, or separate from the com munion of Rome. We do not mean to affirm that Luther intended to deceive his enemies ; such a course was foreign from his whole nature, and opposed to his ordinary conduct. Yet it is certain that, before this period, he had intimated his increasing doubts whether the Pope was not Antichrist, and his convictions that the war with Rome was but just com menced. We cannot defend the servility of the letter at all ; and can only defend its honesty, on the supposition that 130 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. it was written in one of those moments of vacillation to which we have adverted ; with the wish, inspired by his recent con ferences with the nuncio, that the controversy might be amicably set at rest, and with his mind almost exclusively bent on whatever promised such an issue.* Marvellously rapid as was the revolution in his mind compared with what might be expected, it was by repeated exorcisms, and terrible convulsions of spirit, that the legion of demons was expelled. The current did not flow all one way ; it was the flux and reflux of a strong tide. The very honesty of purpose and love of truth by which he was unquestionably actuated, prevented at all events any artificial obstacles to his progress. He did not attempt, as so many do, to reconcile inconsistencies and harmonize counter- declarations. He frankly acknowledged the fallibility of his nature, his early errors and imperfect views. To every taunt of having receded from any position, he boldly said, in effect : " I thought so once ; I was wrong. I think so no more. I appeal from Luther in ignorance, to Luther well informed." This was the case in relation to the memorable letter to which we have just referred. " I am truly grieved," says he, " that I did make such serious submissions ; but, in truth, I then held respecting popes and councils just what is vulgarly taught us But as I grew in knowledge, I grew in courage ; and in truth they were at infinite pains to unde ceive me, by an egregious display of their ignorance and flagitiousness." One of the most striking facts in the correspondence of Luther, is the indication it affords of very early discontent with the prevailing system of theology, and the actual con dition of the Church. It is evident that he was predestined to be a great reformer ; that the germ of the Reformation ex isted in his bosom long before the dispute with Tetzel ; and * Dr. Waddington has given an exceedingly fair and impartial state ment on this subject. LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 131 that, if the dispute respecting Indulgences had not led to its development, something else would. Even before Tetzel's " drum " was heard in the neighborhood of Wittemberg, he speaks with absolute loathing of the scholastic subtleties ; ex presses his conviction of the necessity of returning to a Scrip tural theology ; loudly contends for that doctrine of justifica tion by faith which he afterwards made the lever of the Ref ormation ; and expresses an abhorrence of Aristotle, which might more justly have been transferred to those dreaming commentators who had absurdly exalted a heathen philoso pher into an oracle of the Christian Church. Most of these passages will be found in the two Histories so often men tioned. It has often been matter of surprise, that the great contest of the Reformation should have turned upon so comparatively trivial a controversy as that which respected the Indulgences, a point which was soon after absolutely forgotten. But it is not the first time that a skirmish of outposts has led to a general engagement. It may be added, that, insignificant as that one point may at first sight appear, it was most natural that the contest should begin there. And though the tide of battle rolled away from it, partly because even the hardihood of Rome could scarcely dare to defend such a post, and part ly because the Reformers ceased to think of it in those more comprehensive corruptions which formed the object of their general assault, (in which, indeed, this particular abuse, with many others like it, originated,) it was not only the most natural point at which the conflict should begin, but it was improbable that it should not begin there. Habituated as men's minds were to the corruptions of the Church, steeped in superstition from their very childhood, it could only be by some revolting paradox that they could possibly be roused to think, examine, and remonstrate. The whole enormous ex pansion of the papal power had been but one long experi ment on the patience and credulity of mankind. Each suc cessive imposition was, it is true, worse than that which had 132. LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. preceded it ; but when once it had fastened itself upon men's minds, and they had grown familiar with it, there was no further chance of awakening them from their apathy. Some thing further was needed, and a still more prodigious corrup tion must minister the hope of reformation. Now Indulgen ces, as proclaimed in the gross system of Tetzel, and of other spiritual quacks like him, was at once the ultimate and con sistent limit of that huckstering in " merits," to which almost all the other corruptions of the Church had been more plau sibly subservient ; and formed just that startling exaggeration of familiar abuses which was necessary to awaken men's minds to reconsideration. The notion of selling pardons for sins, wholesale and retail, of collecting into one great treas ury the superfluous merits of the saints, and of doling them out by the pennyweight at prices fixed in the compound ratio of the necessities and means of the purchaser, was a no tion which, however monstrous, however calculated to awaken the drowsy consciences of mankind, was in harmony with the specious nonsense of works of supererogation, and the doc trine of penance. It was simply the substitution of the more valuable medium of solid coin for mechanical rites of devo tion, tiresome pilgrimages, and acts of austerity ; of golden chalices or silver candlesticks for scourges and horse-hair shirts ; and, provided it implied the same amount of self- denial, what did it matter ? The former plan was undeniably more profitable to Holy Church, and as to the penitent, few in our day but will admit that either plan was likely to be equally efficacious. The substitution of the merits of great saints for the transgressions of great sinners, or the remission of the pains of purgatory, might, for aught we can see, be as reasonably effected by pounds, shillings, and pence, as by walking twenty miles with pebbles in one's shoes. The system of Indulgences, therefore, in the grosser form in which such men as Tetzel proclaimed it, was but the dark aphelion of the eccentric orbit .in which the Church of Christ had wandered ; and from that point it naturally be- LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 133 gan to retrace its path to the " fountain itself of heavenly radiance." It may be said, perhaps, that the system of Indulgences had been proclaimed, under one modification or another, for more than a century and a half before Tetzel appeared, with out producing any remarkable reaction. We answer, first, that they had seldom or never been proclaimed in so disgust ing and offensive a form, or with such consummate impu dence, as by Tetzel ; and secondly, that the reception given even to the more cautious and limited exhibitions of the sys tem, proves the truth of what we have been asserting ; for it was always on this, as the most obvious and revolting corrup tion, that the earlier reformers and satirists of the Church most bitterly fastened. The moral instincts of such men, in deed, were not so vitiated as to render them insensible to the vices and profligacies of the ecclesiastical system generally ; but the idea of bartering the justice and mercy of God him self for gold, naturally seemed the quintessence of every other corruption. What, indeed, could rouse mankind, if the spectacle of the ghostly peddler openly trafficking in his parchment wares of pardon for the past, and indulgence for the future, haggling over the price of an insult to God, or a wrong to man, letting out crime to hire, and selling the glories of heaven as a cheap pennyworth, did not fill them with abhorrence and indignation ? The contempt with which Chaucer's Pilgrims listen to the impudent offer of the Par doner, well shows the feelings which such outrages on all common sense and every moral instinct could not fail to excite. So gross was this abuse, that even the most bigoted Papists Eck, for example were compelled to denounce it ; nor were there any more caustic satirists of it than some of themselves. Witness the witty comedy of Thomas Hey- wood, who, though a Catholic, hated the mendicant friars as heartily as any of his Protestant contemporaries. But no satire, however extravagant, could be a caricature of the fol- 12 134 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. lies and knaveries of this class of men. One of the wittiest sarcasms of the play is but a translation of TetzePs impudent assertion, that " no sooner did the money chink in the box, than the souls for which it was offered flew up into heaven." " With small cost and without any pain, These pardons bring them to heaven plain ; Give me but a penny or two-pence ; And, as soon as the soul departeth hence, In half an hour, or three quarters at most, The soul is in heaven with the Holy Ghost." And we doubt not that that most humorous chapter in the ancient and popular satire of Howleglass, in which that wor thy enacts the part of a Franciscan friar, is little more than a literal version of the tricks of a class of men, of whom, knave as he was, he was but an insufficient representative.* But though it was natural that the struggle of the Refor mation should commence with Indulgences, it was impossible that it should end there. Luther soon quitted the narrow ground, and the mean antagonist, of his first conflicts, and asserted against that whole system of spiritual barter and merit-mongering, of which TetzePs doctrine was but an ex treme type, his counter principle of the perfect gratuitous- ness of salvation, of "justification by faith alone." On his mode of exhibiting this great doctrine, we shall now offer a very few remarks. With that pregnant brevity with which he knew so well how to express himself, he showed his sense of the impor tance of this doctrine, and its commanding position in the evangelical system, by describing it as Articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesice. He might more truly have called it so, if he had always duly guarded the statement of it ; if, while repudiating the doctrine, under whatsoever modification, that the tribunal of heaven can be challenged, or its rewards * The same story is also found, with certain variations, in "Friar Gerund," and other fictions of the like class. LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 135 achieved in virtue of deeds, of which every good man is him self the first to acknowledge the manifold imperfections, much less by fantastical devices of human invention, destitute of all moral qualities, he had uniformly connected his doc trine in expression, as he did in fact, with its just practical consequences. This, however, he did not do ; and we are constrained to lament, with Mr. Hallam, the very frequent occurrence of exaggerated expressions, to which the critic gives the name of Antinomian paradoxes. We do not think, however, that even here Mr. Hallam has quite done the Re former justice. He candidly admits, indeed, that Luther " could not mean to give any encouragement to a licentious disregard of moral virtue"; "though," he adds, "in the technical language of his theology, he might deny its proper obligation." * More truly, in our judgment, has Jortin, whose doctrinal moderation is well known, represented the matter in his Life of Erasmus : " Luther's favorite doctrine was jus tification by faith alone ; but we must do him the justice to observe, that he perpetually inculcated the necessity of good works. According to him, a man is justified only by faith ; but he cannot be justified without works ; and where those works are not found, there is assuredly no true faith." And Melancthon, in a passage cited by Mr. Hallam himself, de clares : " De his omnibus," (after enumerating with other doc trines the necessity of good works,) " scio re ipsa Lutherum sentire eadem, sed ineruditi qusedam ejus fopTiKurfpa dicta, cum non videant quo pertineant, nimium amant." Dr. Wad- dington truly remarks, that not even the strongest passages in Luther's treatise, " De Libertate Christiana," prove that the author would deny the necessity of good works except as a means of justification ; as a ground, in fact, of saying to the Divine Being, " You must reward me, for I am entitled to it." In proof of this, Dr. Waddington cites the passage, " Non liberi sumus profidem Christi ab operibus, sed ab opinionibus * Introduction to the Literature of Europe, Vol. I. p. 416. 136 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. operum, i. e. a stulta prsesumptione justificationis per opera quaesitee. Fides enim conscientias nostras redimit, rectificat, et servat, qua cognoscimus justitiam esse non in operibus, licet opera alesse neque possint neque debeant." Every thing obviously depends on the sense in which Lu ther " would deny the necessity of good works." While he would have denied that any man can challenge " the free gift" of salvation (Scripture itself calls it by that name) as the " wages " of good works, he would as strenuously have affirmed that good works form the only real evidence and the necessary result of the possession of that " faith which justi fies." With relation to the influence of the system he advo cated, and the system he opposed, on practical morality, he would have said that the principal difference was, not that the former dispensed with it, but that it appealed mainly to totally different principles of our nature for its production ; to the cheerful impulses of gratitude and hope, rather than to the " spirit of bondage " and the depressing influence of fear. And both philosophy and fact may convince us, that they are certainly not the least powerful impulses of the two. But whatever Luther's early paradoxes on this subject, of which we are by no means the apologists, and regret that there should have been so much cause for censure, his later writings afford ample proof that he had corrected them. When Agricola had adopted and justified them in their unlimited form, and pushed them to their theoretic results, with a reck lessness which perhaps first roused Luther to take alarm at their danger, the Reformer instantly assailed, refuted, and condemned him, and succeeded in compelling the rash theo logian to retract. Several deeply interesting documents on this subject occur in the Correspondence,* which fully show that the faith which Luther made the basis of his theology was that of which the only appropriate evidence is holiness, and which necessarily creates it. * Vol. V. LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 137 Mr. Hallam admits that passages inconsistent with the ex treme views he attributes to the Reformer may be adduced from his writings ; but affirms, " that, in treating of an author so full of unlimited propositions, no positive proof as to his tenets can be refuted by the production of inconsistent pas sages." But the question is, whether these inconsistent passages ought not to modify those which establish the sup posed " positive proof." If we are to pause at the unquali fied reception of the one class of propositions, we may well pause also before the like reception of the other. If two statements, in a writer " much given to unlimited propo sitions," appear inconsistent, we should endeavor to make the one limit the other ; and even if they are absolutely irrecon cilable, we are hardly justified in taking either as the exclu sive exponent of the writer's views, without the adjustment arising from a collation of passages. There are propositions of Scripture itself which may be, and which have been, as much wrested to the support of " Antinomian paradoxes," as almost any declarations of Luther could be. Such a candid construction of Luther's real views seems to us the more necessary, precisely because, as Mr. Hallam justly says, he is so " full of unlimited propositions." It is ever the characteristic of oratorical genius to express the truths it feels with an energy which borders on paradox. Anxious to penetrate and exclusively occupy the minds of others with their own views and sentiments, such as eminently possess this species of genius are seldom solicitous to state propositions with the due limitations. It may be further remarked, that Luther's abhorrence of prevailing errors naturally increased this tendency ; action and reaction, as usual, were equal ; the liberated pendulum passed, as was to be expected, beyond the centre of its arc of oscillation. This we believe to be one principal cause of the many really objectionable statements of Luther on this subject. Our veneration for the great Reformer, and the influence which even the errors of such a writer as Mr. Hallam are apt 12 * 138 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. to exercise, must be our apology for the freedom of the pre ceding strictures. The work containing the observations upon which we have felt ourselves constrained thus to remark, is one for which all intelligent inquirers must always be largely indebted to its author, both for instruction and rational delight. On the whole, few names have such claims on the gratitude of mankind as that of Luther. Even Rome owes him thanks ; for whatever ameliorations have taken place in her system, have been owing far more to him than to herself. If there are any two facts which history establishes, it is the desperate condition of the Church at the time Luther appeared, and the vanity of all hopes of a self-sought and voluntary reformation. On the former we need not dwell, for none now deny it ; it appears not only on every page of contemporary history, but in all forms especially the more popular of mediaeval literature. Never was a remark more just than that of Mr. Hallam, that the greater part of the literature of the Middle Ages may be considered as artillery levelled against the clergy. Of the second great fact, the hopelessness of any effec tive internal reform, history leaves us in as little doubt. The heart itself was the chief seat of disease ; and reforma tion must have commenced where corruption was most invet erate. Nor until certain long-forgotten principles should be reclaimed, and the Bible and its truths restored, a result necessarily fatal to a system which was founded on their per version, and which was safe only in their suppression, could any reformation be either radical or permanent. It would be as nugatory as that which was sometimes directed against subordinate parts of the system, Monachism, for instance. Again and again did reformation strive to purify that institute, and as often, after running through the same cycle of precisely similar changes, did it fall into the same corruptions. Each new order commenced with the profession, often with the reality, of voluntary poverty and superior austerity, and ended, as reputed sanctity brought wealth and power, in all the con- LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. 139 catenated vices of the system. The reason is obvious ; its principles were vicious, and hence the rapidity and uniform ity of the decline, one of the most remarkable and instruc tive phenomena of ecclesiastical history. " That which is crooked cannot be made straight " ; and if man will attempt even a style of supposed virtue for which God never consti tuted him, he will meet with the same recompense as attends every other violation of the Divine laws. For similar reasons, nothing but the recovery of principles fatal to the Papal System could be expected to effect the Reformation ; and about these the champions of that system could not be expected to busy themselves. A usurper will hardly abdicate his own throne, however wrongfully gained. Any reform which had merely touched externals, and left the essence of the system the same, would have been useless ; the Church would soon have fallen back, like the purified forms of monasticism, into its ancient corruptions. Nor was it amongst the least proofs of the sagacity of Luther, that he so early perceived, and so systematically contended, that a reformation of doctrine the restoration of evangelic truth was essential to every other reform. But in fact, even the most moderate reforms, owing to the corruption of Rome itself, and its interest in their maintenance, were all but hope less. Often did the Papal Court admit its own delinquencies, and as often evade their correction. The papal concessions on this point were a perpetual source of triumph to Luther and the Reformers. Even when a pope really sought some amendments, he found it impossible to resist the influences around him. Adrian, the successor of the refined and luxu rious Leo, gave infinite disgust by the severity of his manners, and his sincere desire to see some sort of reformation ; and his long catalogue of abuses which he wished to be corrected, delivered in at the Diet of Nuremburg, (and inconsistently accompanied with loud calls for the violent suppression of the Reformation,) was never forgiven by his own adherents. " The Church," said he, " stands in need of a reformation, 140 LUTHER'S CORRESPONDENCE AND CHARACTER. but we must take one step at a time." Luther sarcastically remarked : " The Pope advises that a few centuries should be permitted to intervene between the first and second step." Hence we may see the comparative futility of the small, timeserving expedients of Erasmus. His satire, bitter as it was, was not directed against the heart of the system, he waged war only with the Friars. Not that we undervalue his labors ; as a pioneer he was invaluable. Nor, if we ex cept Luther, Melancthon, and Zwingle, do we know any man who really effected so much for the cause of the Reformation. The labors of Luther and himself terminated in one result ; the streams, however different, flowed at last in one channel : " Ubi Rhodanus inges amne preerapido fluit, Ararque dubitans quo suos fluctus agat." Such are our deliberate views of the character, labors, and triumphs of Luther. We have been the more copious in our account of them, that we may do what in us lies to honor his memory, at a period when there is a large party of degener ate Protestants, who, not content with denying the unspeak able benefits which he conferred upon mankind, have not hesitated to speak of him with contempt and contumely, and in some cases even to question the honesty of his motives and the sincerity of his religion ! * * " Some of the Oxford men," says Dr. Arnold, " now commonly re vile Lulher as a bold, bad man ; how surely they would have reviled Paul ! " Life and Correspondence, Vol. H. p. 250. GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL.* So much has been written of late years respecting Pascal, and so much that is worth reading, that we should scarcely have been induced to make him the subject of present crit icism, had it not been for the appearance of the remarkable volumes of M. Faugere. It seems strange to say, that the most popular work of an author who has been dead nearly two hundred years, and who has obtained a world-wide reputation, a work which * " Edinburgh Review," January, 1847. 1. Des Pens6es de Pascal. Rapport a VAcademie Franfaise sur la necessitd d'une nouvelle edition de cet ouvrage. Par M. V. COUSIN. 8vo. Paris. 1843. 2. Pensees, Fragments, et Lettres de Blaise Pascal: publics pour la premiere fois conformement aux manuscrits originaux, en grande partie inedits. Par M. PROSPER FAUGERE. 2 vols. 8vo. Paris. 1844. [This essay has been twice translated into French. The greater part of it first appeared in the " Revue Britannique," the conductors of which have conferred a similar honor on several others contained in this vol ume. M. Faugere, the editor of the " Pensees," having, as he thought, and not unreasonably, ground for complaint at the omission of certain passages, in which his labors had been applauded, published a new trans lation of the whole. As far as the author is able to judge, it is an ad mirable specimen of skill and fidelity in the very difficult operation of intellectual transfusion. It may be as well also to mention, that, since the appearance of the present essay, an entirely new translation of nearly the whole of Pascal's writings all, in fact, except his strictly scientific writings has been published by G. Pearce, Esq.] 142 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. has passed through numberless editions, and been translated into most European languages, has never been published in an authentic form till now. Yet this is strictly true of the " Pensees " of Pascal. It is hardly possible to convey to the reader a just idea of the merits of this improved edition, or the circumstances which led to it, without relating some of the more important incidents of Pascal's life. A formal biography, however, it cannot be necessary to give ; for who has not read some account of the life of Blaise Pascal ? It will be sufficient briefly to advert to the principal facts of this great man's his tory, and the dates of their occurrence. He was born at Clermont, in Auvergne, in the" year 1623, and died in the year 1662, at the early age of thirty-nine. When we think of the achievements which he crowded into that brief space, and which have made his name famous to all generations, we may well exclaim with Corneille, " A peine a-t-il vecu, quel nom il a laisse ! " It is well known that Pascal exhibited from the earliest childhood the most precocious proofs of inventive genius, especially in the department of mathematics. Having, if we may believe the universally received tradition, been pur posely kept in ignorance of Geometry, lest his propensity in that direction should interfere with the prosecution of other branches of knowledge, his self-prompted genius discovered for itself the elementary truths of the forbidden science. At twelve years of age, he was surprised by his father in the act of demonstrating, on the pavement of an old hall, where he used to play, and by means of a rude diagram traced by a piece of coal, a proposition which corresponded to the thirty-second of the First Book of Euclid.* At the age of sixteen, he composed a little tractate on the Conic Sections, which provoked the mingled incredulity and admiration of * His sister, Madame Perier, has left an interesting and circumstantial account of this matter. GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 143 Descartes. At nineteen, he invented his celebrated Arith metical Machine ; and at the age of six-and-twenty, he had composed the greater part of his mathematical works, and made those brilliant experiments in Hydrostatics and Pneu matics which have associated his name with those of Torri- celli and Boyle, and ranked him amongst the first philoso phers of his age. Yet, strange to say, he now suddenly renounced the splendid career to which his genius so un equivocally invited him, and abandoned himself to totally different studies. This was principally attributable to the strong religious impulse imparted to his mind at this period, rendered deeper by early experience in the school of affliction. From the age of eighteen, he was a perpetual sufferer. In 1647, when only in his twenty-fourth year, he was attacked by paralysis. His ill health was mainly, if not wholly, occasioned by his devotion to study ; and of him it is literally true, that his mind consumed his body. So complete was his abandonment of science, that he never returned to it but on one memorable occasion, and then only for a short interval. It was when he solved the remarkable problems relating to the curve called the Cycloid. The accounts which have been transmitted to us by his sister, of the manner in which these investigations were suggested and completed, accounts which are authenticated by a letter of his own to Fermat, strongly impress us with the vigor and brilliancy of his genius. We are assured that, after long abandonment of mathematics, his attention was directed to this subject by a casual train of thought suggested in one of the many nights which pain^made sleepless. The thoughts thus suddenly originated, his inventive mind rapidly pursued to all the brilliant results in which they terminated ; and in the brief space of eight days the investigations were completed. Partly in compliance with the fashion of the age, and partly from the solicitation of his friend the Duke de Roannes, he concealed for a time the discoveries at which he had arrived, and offered the problems for solution to all 144 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. the mathematicians of Europe, with a first and second prize to successful candidates. If no solution were offered in three months, Pascal promised to publish his own. Several were forwarded, but as none, in the estimation of the judges, com pletely fulfilled the conditions of the challenge, Pascal re deemed his pledge, under the name of Amos Dettonville, an anagram of Louis de Montalte, the famous name under which the " Provincial Letters " had appeared, "this was in 1658 - 9, when he was thirty-six years of age. With this brief exception, Pascal may be said to have practically abandoned science from the age of twenty-six. Yet he did not at once become a religious recluse. For some years he lived a cheerful, and even gay, though never a dissipated life, in Paris, in the centre of literary and polite society, loved and admired by a wide circle of friends, and especially by his patron, the Duke de Roannes. To the accomplished sister of this nobleman, M. Faugere conjec tures (as we think plausibly) that Pascal was secretly at tached, but, from timidity and humility, " never told his love." In part, probably, from the melancholy which this hopeless attachment inspired, but certainly much more in consequence of the deeper religious convictions, produced by a memora ble escape from an appalling death, in 1654, his indifference to the world increased ; and he at length sought for solitude at Port Royal, already endeared to him by the residence there of his sister Jacqueline. Here, it is well known, he produced his immortal " Provin cial Letters "; and, wjien death cut short his brief career, was meditating an extensive work on the fundamental prin ciples of religion, especially on the existence of God and the evidences of Christianity, for the completion of which he required " ten years of health and leisure." An outline of the work had been sometimes (and on one occasion some what fully) imparted in conversation to his friends, but no part of it was ever completed. Nothing was found after his GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 145 death but detached " Thoughts " (interspersed with some on other subjects) on the principal topics appropriate to such a work. They were the stones of which the building was to have consisted, many of them unhewn, and some few such as the builder, had he lived, would no doubt have laid aside. The form in which the Thoughts were put together comported but too well with their fragmentary character. It appears that he did not even use a commonplace book ; but when, after profound meditation, any thought struck him as worth record ing, he hastily noted it on any scrap of paper that came to hand, often on the backs of old letters ; these he strung to gether on a file, or tied up in bundles, and left them till bet ter health and untroubled leisure should permit him to evoke a new creation out of this chaos. It is a wonder, therefore, that the " Pensees " of Pascal have come down to us at all. Never, surely, was so precious a freight committed to so crazy a bark. The Sibyl herself was not more careless about those leaves, rapidis ludibria ventis, on which she in scribed her prophetic truths, than was Pascal about those which contained the results of his meditations. Of these results, however, we are in part defrauded, by something far worse than either the fragility of the materials on which they are inscribed, or their utter want of arrangement. Many of the " Thoughts " are themselves only half developed ; others, as given us in the literal copy of M. Faugere, break off in the middle of a sentence, even of a word. Some casual in terruption frequently, no doubt, some paroxysm of pain, to which the great author, in his latter years, was incessantly subject broke the thread of thought, and left the web im perfect for ever. It is humiliating to think of the casualties which, possibly in many cases, have robbed posterity of some of the most precious fruits of the meditations of the wise ; perhaps arrest ed trains of thought which would have expanded into bril liant theories of grand discoveries ; trains which, when the genial moment of inspiration has passed, it has been found 13 - 146 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. impossible to recall ; or which, if recalled up to the point at which they were broken off, terminate only in a wall of rock, in which the mountain path, which had been before so clearly seen, exists no longer. It is humiliating to think that a fit of the toothache, or a twinge of the gout, might have thus ar rested no more to return the opening germ of conjec ture, which led on to the discovery of the Differential Calcu lus, or the Theory of Gravitation. The condition of man, in this respect, affords, indeed, one striking proof of that com bined " greatness and misery " of his nature, on which Pascal so profoundly meditated. It is wonderful that a being, such as he, should achieve so much ; it is humiliating that he must depend on such casualties for success. On the precarious control which even the greatest men have over their own minds, Pascal himself justly says : " The mind of this sover eign of the world is not so independent as not to be discom posed by the first tintamarre that may be made around him. It does not need the roar of artillery to hinder him from think ing ; the creaking of a vane or a pulley will answer the pur pose. Be not surprised that he reasons ill just now ; a fly is buzzing in his ears, it is amply sufficient to render him incapable of sound deliberation. If you wish him to discover truth, be pleased to chase away that insect who holds his reason in check, and troubles that mighty intellect which governs cities and kingdoms ! Le plaisant dieu que voild ! O ridicolosissimo eroe ! " * On the imperfect sentences and half-written words, which are now printed in the volumes of M. Faugere, we look with something like the feelings with which we pore on some half- defaced inscription on an ancient monument, with a strange commixture of curiosity and veneration ; and, whilst we wonder what the unfinished sentences may mean, we mourn * Faugere, Tom. II. p. 54. It may be proper to observe, that all our citations from the " Pensees " are from this new and solely authentic edition. GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 147 over the malicious accident which has, perhaps, converted what might have been aphorisms of profoundest importance into a series of incoherent ciphers. One of the last things, assuredly, which we should think of doing with such frag ments, would be to attempt to alter them in any way ; least of all, to supplement them, and to divine and publish Pascal's meaning. There have been learned men, who have given us supplements to the lost pieces of some ancient historians ; erudite Freinsheimiuses, who hand us a huge bale of indif ferent Latin, and beg us only to think it Livy's lost " De cades." But what man would venture to supplement Pascal ? Only such, it may be supposed, as would feel no scruple in scouring an antique medal, or a worthy successor of those monks who obliterated manuscript pieces of Cicero, that they might inscribe them with some edifying legend. Alas ! more noted people than these were scarcely more scrupulous in the case of Pascal. His friends decided that the fragments which he had left behind him, imperfect as they were, were far too valuable to be consigned to oblivion ; and so far all the world will agree with them. If, further, they had selected whatever appeared in any degree coherent, and printed these verbatim et literatim, in the best order they could devise, none would have censured, and all would have thanked them. But they did much more than this ; or rather, they did both much more and much less. They deemed it not sufficient to give Pascal's Remains with the statement, that they were but fragments ; that many of the thoughts were very imperfectly developed ; that none of them had had the advantage of the author's revision, apologies with which the world would have been fully satisfied ; but they ventured upon mutilations and alterations of a most unwarrantable de scription. In innumerable instances, they changed words and phrases ; in many others, they left out whole paragraphs, and put a sentence or two of their own in the place of them ; they supplemented what they deemed imperfect with an exor dium or conclusion, without any indication as to what were 148 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. the respective ventures in this rare species of literary copart- nery. It must have been odd to see this committee of critics sitting in judgment on Pascal's style, and deliberating with what alterations, additions, and expurgations it would be safe to permit the author of the " Provincial Letters " to appear in public. Arnauld, Nicole, and the Duke de Roannes were certainly no ordinary men ; but they were no more capable of divining the thoughts which Pascal had not expressed, or of improving the style where he had expressed them, than of completing a sketch of Raphael. It appears that, large as was the editorial discretion they assumed, or rather, large as was their want of all discretion, they had contemplated an enterprise still more audacious, nothing less than that of completing the entire work which Pascal had projected, partly out of the materials he had left, and partly from what their own ingenuity might supply. It even appears that they had actually commenced this heteror geneous structure ; and an amusing account has been left by M. Perier, both of the progress the builders of this Babel had made, and of the reasons for abandoning the design. " At last," says he, " it was resolved to reject the plan, because it was felt to be almost impossible thoroughly to enter into the thoughts and plan of the author ; and, above all, of an author who was no more ; and because it would not have been the work of M. Pascal, but a work altogether differ ent, un ouvrage tout different!" Very different indeed ! If this naive expression had been intended for irony, it would have been almost worthy of Pascal himself. M. Perier also tells us, that, if this plan had but been prac ticable, it would have been the most perfect of all ; but he candidly adds, il etait aussi tres-difficile de la Hen executer. But though the public was happily spared this fabric of -por phyry and common brick, it will not be supposed by any reader of M. Cousin's " Rapport," or of M. Faugere's new edition of the " Pensees," that Pascal's editors did not allow themselves ample license. " En effet," says the former, GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 149 " toutes les infidelites qu'il est possible de concevoir, s'y ren- contrent, omissions, suppositions, alterations." " J'ai donne des echantillons nombreux de tous les genres d 'alterations, alterations de mots, alterations de tours, al terations de phrases, suppressions, substitutions, additions, compositions arbitraires et absurdes, tantot d'un paragraphe, tantot d'un chapitre entier, a 1'aide de phrases et de para- graphes etrangers les uns aux autres, et, qui pis est, decom positions plus arbitraires encore et vraiment inconcevables de chapitres qui, dans le manuscrit de Pascal, se presentaient parfaitement lies dans toutes leurs parties et profondement travailles." * Subsequent editors have taken similar liberties, if not so flagrant. While the original editors left out many passages from fear of the Jesuits, Condorcet, in his edition, omitted many of the most devout sentiments and expressions, under the influence of a very different feeling. Infidelity, as well as superstition, has its bigots, who would be well pleased to have their index expurgatorius also, t Unhappy Pascal ! Between his old editors and his new, he seemed to be in the condition of the persecuted bigamist in the fable, whose elder wife would have robbed him of all his black hairs, and his younger of the gray. Under such opposite editing, it is hard to say what might not have disappeared at last. It had been long felt that no thoroughly trustworthy edition of Pascal's " Thoughts " had yet been published ; that none knew what was precisely his, and what was not. M. Cousin, in the valuable work from which we have just quoted, demon- * Rapport, Avant-Propos, pp. ii., ix. t " Condorcet, par un prejug6 contraire, supprima les passages em- preints d'un sentiment de piete ou d'elevation mystique Par exemple, on ne retrouve pas, dans 1'edition de Condorcet, ces pages ravissantes oil Pascal, penetrant dans les plus hautes regions du spiritu- alisme Chretien, caracterise la grandeur de la saintete et de la charite, comparee & la grandeur de la puissance et a celle de 1'esprit." FAU- GERE, Introduction, pp. xxviii., xxix. 13* 150 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. strated the necessity of a new edition, founded upon a diligent collation of original manuscripts. This task M. Faugere has performed with incredible industry and exactitude, in the two volumes mentioned at the head of the present article. We must refer the reader to his interesting " Introduction " for the proof of this statement. There he has given the details of his editorial labors. Suffice it to say, that every accessi ble source of information has been carefully ransacked ; every fragment of manuscript, whether in Pascal's own hand, or in that of members of his family, has been diligently examined ; and every page offers indications of minute attention, even to the most trivial verbal differences. Speaking of the auto graph MS. preserved in the Royal Library at Paris, a folio, into which the original loose leaves are pasted, or, when writ ten on both sides, carefully let into the page, encadres, he says : " We have read, or rather studied, this MS. page by page, line by line, syllable by syllable, from the beginning to the end ; and, with the exception of some words which are illegible, it has passed entire into the present edition." As the public, in the former editions, did not exactly know what was Pascal's and what was not, M. Faugere has been com pelled to do what, under other circumstances, it would not have been desirable, and indeed hardly just, to do, what, indeed, any author of reputation would vehemently protest against in his own case. He has been obliged to give every fragment, however imperfect, literatim et verbatim. The extracts, as we have said, often terminate in the middle of a sentence, sometimes even of a word. As M. Vinet has just ly observed in relation to this feature of M. Faugere's labors, Pascal himself would hardly have been satisfied " with either his old editors or the new." At the same time, it must be confessed, that, apart from this circumstance, it is deeply in teresting to contemplate the first rude forms of profound or brilliant thought, as they presented themselves to the ardent mind of Pascal. This, M. Faugere has often enabled us to do, more especially in the singular collection of the rough \ GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 151 notes for the " Provincial Letters." * It is like looking at the first sketch of a great painting of Raphael ; or, as M. Vinet observes, " we are taken into the great sculptor's studio, and behold him at work, chisel in hand." M. Cousin, we should think, must be satisfied with the ac curacy and completeness of this edition ; and also of the in sufficiency of his own argument, that Pascal was, in fact, a " universal sceptic," who embraced the truths of religion, not as a hypocrite, indeed, but in the exercise of a blind faith, in fact, in a sort of paroxysm of despair ; as if he believed, that what he had proved false in physics was still true in mor als, "that nature abhors a vacuum" ! M. Cousin, in part, founds his theory on the fact, that the first editors had tamed down some of the more startling statements of Pascal, and omitted others ; and seems to suppose that a new edition would reveal the sceptic in his full dimensions. He must now, we should think, see his error. There is little or noth ing in the old editions, capable of proving Pascal's abiding conviction of the sufficiency of the evidence for the funda mental truths of religion, or the divine origin of Christianity, which does not reappear in the new, and with much new matter to confirm it. To this subject we shall return, after offering some observations on the genius and character of Pascal. In one respect, his genius strongly resembled that of a recent subject of our criticism, Leibnitz. His was one of the rare minds, apparently adapted, almost in equal measure, to the successful pursuit of the most diverse departments of philosophy and science, of mathematics and physics, of metaphysics and criticism. Great as was his versatility, it may be doubted whether in that respect he did not yield somewhat to Leibnitz, as also in his powers of acquisition, and most assuredly in the extent of his knowledge. It is not, however, to be forgotten, that he died at little more than half * Tom._I. pp. 293-314. 152 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. the age of the veteran philosopher of Germany ; and there can be no doubt that, for his years, his attainments were very extensive. Still it is true, that that perfectly unique charac teristic of Leibnitz, his equal aptitude and appetite for reading and thinking, for the accumulation of knowledge and for original speculation, could never have been in the same degree a characteristic of Pascal ; and still less in such amaz ingly diversified directions. Pascal followed in this respect the predominant law of all very inventive minds. He was fonder of thought than of books, of meditation than of ac quisition. Even this tendency of mind manifested itself within a more restricted sphere ; ample enough, it is true, that of philosophy and theology. To Leibnitz, jurisprudence, history, and antiquities were nearly as familiar as these. But if the character of Pascal's genius was less excursive than that of Leibnitz, and the literary element in it far less active, these points of inferiority were amply compensated by a superiority in other qualities, in which there can be no comparison between them. In inventiveness, they may per haps have been equal, but even here, only in mathemat ics ; in moral science, the science of man, we know of noth ing out of Bacon, who may be said to set all comparison at defiance, certainly nothing in Leibnitz, that will bear comparison in depth, subtlety, and comprehensiveness, with some of the " Thoughts " of Pascal. But in another char acteristic of true genius, and which, for want of another name, we must call felicity, neither Leibnitz, nor, it might almost be affirmed, any one else, can, in the full import of the term, be compared with Pascal. Endowed with original ity the most active and various, all that he did was with grace. Full of depth, subtlety, brilliancy, both his thoughts and the manner in which he expresses them are also full of beauty. His just image is that of the youthful athlete of Greece, in whom was seen the perfection of physical beauty and physi cal strength ; in whom every muscle was developed within the just limits calculated to secure a symmetrical development GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 153 of all ; the largest possible amount of power and flexibility in union. In all the manifestations of Pascal's mind, this rare felicity is exuberantly displayed ; in the happy methods by which he lighted on truth and pursued scientific discovery ; in the se lection and arrangement of topics in all his compositions ; in the peculiar delicacy of his wit, so strongly contrasted with all the ordinary exhibitions of that quality, with which his coarse age was familiar ; and, above all, in that indescriba ble elegance of expression which uniformly characterizes his finished efforts, and often his most negligent utterances, and which even time can do nothing to impair. Let us be per mitted to say a word or two further on these topics. In his scientific writings, the traces of this felicity may be discerned almost equally in the matter and the form. In re lation to the former, there is probably a little illusion practised upon us. In reading his uniformly elegant and perspicuous exposition of his own scientific discoveries, we are apt to un derrate the toil and intellectual struggles by which he achieved them. We know that they were, and must have been, attend ed with much of both, nay, that his shattered health was the penalty of the intensity of his studies. Still, it is hardly possible to read his expositions without having the impression that his discoveries resembled a species of inspiration ; and that his mind followed out the first germinant thought to its consequences, with more ease and rapidity than is usually ex emplified. We can scarcely imagine it would have been neces sary for him to have undergone the frightful toils of Kepler, had he been led into the same track of discoveries. And, in fact, whatever illusion his ease and elegance of manner may produce, we know that, comparatively speaking, his achieve ments were rapidly completed. It was so with the problems on the Cycloid ; it was so with his discoveries in Pneumatics and Hydrostatics. In fact, though his " Traite de PEquilibre des Liqueurs," and the one, " De la Pesanteur de PAir," were not composed till 1653, they seem to have been only 154 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. another form of the treatise he promised in his " Nouvelles Ex periences touchant le Vide," published in 1647, and of which that tract was avowedly an abridgment. Indeed, as already said, Pascal had nearly quitted these investigations before the completion of his twenty-sixth year. There was no scientific subject which Pascal touched, in which the felicity of his genius, the promptitude and bril liancy of his mind, did not shine forth. We see these qualities eminently displayed in his " Traite du Triangle Arithmetique," in the invention and construction of his Arithmetical Machine, in the mode of solving the problems respecting the Cycloid, in which, while employing Cavalieri's " Method of Indivisibles," he proposes to remove the prin cipal objection which had been made to it, by conceptions which bring him within a step of the Fluxions of Newton, and the Calculus of Leibnitz. The same qualities of mind are eminently displayed in the manner in which he establishes the hydrostatic paradox ; and, generally, in the experiments detailed in the " Nouvelles Experiences," and the other con nected pieces ; most of all, in that celebrated Crucial experi ment on the Puy-de-D6me, by which he decided the cause of the suspension of the mercury in the barometrical tube. As there are few things recorded in the history of science more happily ingenious than the conception of this experiment, so never was there any thing more pleasantly naive than the manner in which he proposes it, in his letter to M. Perier. " You doubtless see," says he, " that this experiment is deci sive of the question ; and that if it happen that the mercury shall stand lower at the top than at the bottom of the moun tain (as I have many reasons for thinking, although all those who have meditated on this subject are of a contrary opin ion), it will necessarily follow, that the weight and pressure of the air are the sole cause of this suspension of the mer cury, and not the horror of a vacuum ; since it is very cer tain that there is much more air to press at the base than on the summit of the mountain ; while, on the other hand, we GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 155 surely cannot say that nature abhors a vacuum more at the bottom of a mountain than on the top of it ! " * The usual felicity of his style is seen throughout his phil osophical, as well as his other works. They appear to us to possess the highest merit which can belong to a scientific composition. It is true that, in his purely mathematical writ ings, partly from the defective notation of his age, itself a result of the want of that higher Calculus, the invention of which was reserved for Newton and Leibnitz, he is often compelled to adopt a more prolix style of demonstration than would have been subsequently necfessary ; but even here, and still more in all the fragments which relate to natural phi losophy, his style is in striking contrast with the clumsy ex pression of the generality of contemporary writers. His Fragments abound in that perspicuous elegance which the French denominate by the expressive word nettete. The arrangement of thought and the turn of expression are alike * Descartes claimed the suggestion of this brilliant experiment. All we can say is, that Pascal, who was the very soul of honor, repeatedly declares, that he had meditated this experiment from the very time he had verified Torricelli's, and only waited the opportunity of performing it. On the other hand, Descartes was jealous of the discoveries of others, and, as Leibnitz truly observes, slow to give to them all the praise and admiration which were their due. With all his great powers, he had but little magnanimity. It is possible that he may have thought of a similar experiment, and that he may have conferred upon the subject with Pascal ; but, if the latter speaks truth, it is impossible that he should not already have determined upon it. Indeed, it is hardly prob able that, had it been originally a conception of Descartes, he would not have made the experiment for himself, and thus gained the honor undis puted and undivided. Pascal was, in like manner, accused of having appropriated the honor of Torricelli's experiments. Nothing can be more perfectly beautiful than the manner in which he vindicates his integrity and candor, in his letter to M. de Ribeyre on this subject. He shows triumphantly, that, in his original " Nouvelles Experiences," he had not only not claimed, but had most distinctly disclaimed, all credit for the experiments in question, and had been at much pains to give honor where honor was due. 156 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. beautiful. Probably no one ever knew so well when to stay his hand. But it is, of course, in his writings on moral and critical subjects in which we should chiefly expect this felicity to appear ; and here we may well say, in the eloquent language of M. Faugere, it is a " style grand sans exageration, partout rempli d'emotion et contenu, vif sans turbulence, personnel sans pedanterie et sans amour-propre, superbe et modeste tout-ensemble" ; or, as he elsewhere expresses it, " tellement identifie avec Tame de Pecrivain qu'il n'est que la pensee elle-meme, paree de sa chaste nudite comme une statue antique." By the confession of the first French critics, the " Lettres Provinciales " did more than any other composition to fix the French language. On this point, the suffrages of all the most competent judges of Voltaire and Bossuet, D'Alembert and Condorcet are unanimous. " Not a sin gle word occurs," says the first, " partaking of that vicissi tude to which living languages are so subject. Here, then, we may fix the epoch when our language may be said to have assumed a settled form." " The French language," says D'Alembert, " was very far from being formed, as we may judge by the greater part of the works published at that time, and of which it is impossible to endure the reading. In the ' Provincial Letters ' there is not a single word that has become obsolete ; and that book, though written above a century ago, seems as if it had been written but yesterday." And as these Letters were the first model of French prose, so they still remain the objects of unqualified admiration. The writings of Pascal have, indeed, a paradoxical destiny ; " flourishing in immortal youth," all that time can do is to superadd to the charms of perpetual beauty the veneration which belongs to age. His style cannot grow old. When we reflect on the condition of the language when he appeared, this is truly wonderful. It was but partially reclaimed from barbarism, it was still an imperfect instru ment of genius. He had no adequate models, he was to GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 157 create them. Thus to seize a language in its rude state, and compel it, in spite of its hardness and intractability, to become a malleable material of thought, is the exclusive pre rogative of the highest species of minds : nothing but the intense fire of genius can fuse these heterogeneous elements, and mould them into forms of beauty. As a proof, it may be remarked, that none but the highest genius has ever been equal to this task. Genius of less than the first order will often make improvements in the existing state of a language, and give it a perceptible impulse ; but none but the most creative and plastic power can at once mould a rude language into forms which cannot become obsolete, which remain in perpetuity a part of the current literature, amidst all the changes of time and the sudden caprices of fashion. Thus it required a Luther to mould the harsh German into the lan guage of his still unrivalled translation of the Scriptures ; in which, and in his vernacular compositions, he first fairly re claimed his native language from its wild state, brought it under the yoke, and subjected it to the purposes of literature. Pascal was in a similar manner the creator of the French. Yet each performed his task in a mode as characteristic, as the materials on which they operated were different. Energy was the predominant quality of Luther's genius ; beauty, of Pascal's. The rugged German, under the hand of Luther, is compelled to yield to an irresistible application of force ; it is the lightning splitting oak and granite. The French, under that of Pascal, assumes forms of beauty by a still and noiseless movement, and as by a sort of enchantment ; it is " the west wind ungirding the bosom of the earth, and calling forth bud and flower at its bidding." It may be thought strange by some, that this complete mas tery of an unformed language should be represented, not only as so signal a triumph, but as an index of the highest genius. But it will not appear unphilosophical to those who duly consider the subject. If, even when language has reached its full development, we never see the full capacities 14 158 GENIUS AND WHITINGS OF PASCAL. of this delicate instrument put forth except by great genius, how can we expect it when the language is still imperfect ? As used in this rude state, language resembles the harsh music of the Alpine horn, blown by the rude Swiss herd- boy : it is only when the lofty peaks around take it up, that it is transmuted by their echoes into exquisite melody. The severely pure and simple taste which reigns in Pas cal's style seems, when we reflect on those vices which more or less infected universal letters, little less than a miraculous felicity. One wonders by what privilege it was that he freed himself from the contagion of universal example, and rose so superior to his age. Taste was yet almost unfelt ; each writer affected extravagance of some kind or other; strained metaphor, quaint conceits, far-fetched turns of thought, un natural constructions. These were the vices of the day ; not so much perhaps in France as in England, but to a great extent in both. From all these blemishes Pascal's style is perfectly free ; he anticipated all criticism, and became a law to himself. Some of his observations, however, show that his taste was no mere instinct ; they indicate how deeply he had revolved the true principles of composition. His " thoughts " " sur 1'Eloquence et le Style " * are well worth the perusal of every writer and speaker. In one of them he profoundly says : " The very same sense is materially affect ed by the words that convey it. The sense receives its dig nity from the words, rather than imparts it to them." In another, he says : " All the false beauties that we condemn in Cicero have their admirers in crowds." And, in a third, he admirably depicts the prevailing vice of strained antitheses. " Those," says he, " who frame antitheses by forcing the sense, are like men who make false windows for the sake of symmetry. Their rule is not to speak justly, but to make just figures." The time spent on his own compositions shows that even such felicity as his own could not dispense * Faug^re, Vol. I. p. 249. GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 159 with that toil, which is an essential condition of all perfect writing, indeed of all human excellence ; and affords one other proof of the extreme shallowness of that theory which would have us believe that, to attain success, genius alone is all-sufficient. He is said, when engaged on his " Lettres Pro- vinciales," to have sometimes employed twenty days in per fecting a single letter. Another circumstance which, as already intimated, indi cates Pascal's felicity of genius, is the peculiar delicacy and refinement of his wit. We say its delicacy and refinement, for the mere conjunction of great wit with great aptitude for science cannot be considered as a felicity peculiar to Pascal. It is the character of that wit. The conjunction of distin guished wit, in one or other of its many forms, with elevated genius, is far too common to be regarded as a peculiarity of his mind. Paradoxical as the statement may at first sight appear to many who have been accustomed to consider wis dom and wit as dwelling apart, it may be doubted whether there is any one attribute so common to the highest order of mind, whether scientific or imaginative, as some form or other of this quality. The names of Bacon, Shakspeare, Plato, Pascal, Johnson, Byron, Scott, and many more, will instantly occur to the reader. It is true that the history of our species reveals to us minds either really adapted so exclusively to the abstrusest branches of science, or so incessantly immersed in them, that, if they possessed the faculty of wit at all, it was never developed. Aristotle and Newton though some few sayings of the former which tradition has preserved are not a little racy may be named as examples. But, in gen eral, and the whole history of science and literature will show it, this attribute, in one or other of its thousand vari eties, has formed an almost perpetual accompaniment of the finest order of minds. And we may add, that, a priori, we should expect it to be so. That same activity of suggestion, and aptitude for detecting resemblances, analogies, and differ ences, which qualify genius for making discoveries in science, 160 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. or, under different modifications, for evoking the creations of imagination, may well be supposed not to desert their posses sor, when, for playful purposes, and in moments of relaxation, he exercises himself in the detection of the analogies on which wit and drollery are founded. Yet, clear as this truth seems to be, and strongly as it is corroborated by the history of ge nius, the opposite opinion has been, we believe, oftener ex pressed, and the highest order of mind pronounced incompat ible with such a conjunction. It is not, then, the activity, but the peculiar delicacy of Pascal's wit, which renders this feature of his genius so truly worthy of admiration ; the more admirable, when it is remembered that the wit of that age, and especially among polemics, so generally took the form of gross scurrility and buffoonery ; and, even when it did not sink so low as that, was overgrown with every species of quaintness and affecta tion. Almost in no instance was it found pure from one or other of these debasements. The wit of Pascal, on the con trary, appears even now exquisitely chaste and natural, attired in a truly Attic simplicity of form and expression. In one quality that of irony nothing appears to us to ap proach it, except what we find in the pages of Plato, between whom and Pascal (different, and even opposite, as they were in many respects) it were easy to trace a resemblance in oth er points besides the character of their wit. Both possessed surpassing acuteness and subtlety of genius in the department of abstract science, both delighted in exploring the depths of man's moral nature, both gazed enamored on the ideal forms of moral sublimity and loveliness, both were char acterized by eminent beauty of intellect, and both were abso lute masters of the art of representing thought, each with exquisite refinement of taste, and all the graces of language. The Grecian, indeed, possessed a far more opulent imagina tion, and indulged in a more gorgeous -style, than the French man ; or rather, Plato may be said to have been a master of all kinds of style. His dramatic powers, however, in none GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 161 of his dialogues, can be greater than those which Pascal has displayed in his " Lettres Provinciales." Nothing could be apter for the purpose, that of throwing into strong light the monstrous errors of the system be opposed, than the ma chinery the author has selected. The affected ignorance and naivete of M. Montalte, in quest of information respecting the theological disputes of the age, and especially the doctrines of the Jesuits, the frankness of the worthy Jesuit father, of whom he seeks instruction, and who, in the boundless ad miration of his order, and the hope of making a convert, details without hesitation, or rather with triumph, the admira ble contrivances by which their casuists had, in fact, inverted every principle of morals, and eluded all the obligations of Christianity, the ironical compliments of the supposed nov ice, intermingled with objections and slightly expressed doubts, all delivered with an air of modest ingenuousness, which humbly covets further light, the arch simplicity with which he involves the worthy father in the most perplexing dilem mas, the expressions of unsophisticated astonishment, which but prompt his stolid guide eagerly to make good every asser tion by a proper array of authorities, a device which, as Pascal has used it, converts what would have been in other hands only a dull catalogue of citations into a source of per petual amusement, the droll consequences which, with infinite affectation of simplicity, he draws from the Jesuit's doctrines, the logical exigencies into which the latter is thrown in the attempt to obviate them, all these things, managed as only Pascal could have managed them, render the book as amusing as any novel. The form of letters en ables him at the same time to intersperse, amidst the conver sations they record, the most eloquent and glowing invectives against the doctrines he exposes. Voltaire's well known pan egyric does not exceed the truth, " that Moliere's best comedies do not excel them in wit, nor the compositions of Bossuet in sublimity." " This work," says D'Alembert, " is so much the more admirable, as Pascal, in composing it, 14* 162 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. seems to have theologized two things which seem not made for the theology of that time, language and pleasantry." The success of the work is well known. By his inimit able pleasantry, Pascal succeeded in making even the dullest matters of scholastic theology and Jesuitical casuistry as at tractive to the people as a comedy ; and, by his little volume, did more to render the formidable Society the contempt of Eu rope, than was ever done by all its other enemies put together. The Jesuits had nothing for it but to inveigh against the Letters as "the immortal liars," les menteurs immortelles. To their charge of having garbled citations, and tampered with evidence in order to produce an unfair impression against the Society, (practices utterly abhorrent from all Pas cal's habits of mind and dispositions of heart,) he replies, with the characteristic boldness and frankness of his nature : " I was asked if I repented of having written l Les Pro- vinciales.' I reply, that, far from having repented, if I had to write them now, I would write yet more strongly. I was asked why I have given the names of the authors from whom I have taken all the abominable propositions I have cited. I answer, that if I lived in a city where there were a dozen fountains, and that I certainly knew that there was one which was poisoned, I should be obliged to advertise all the world to draw no water from that fountain ; and as they might think that it was a pure imagination on my part, I should be obliged to name him who had poisoned it, rather than expose all the city to the danger of being poisoned by it. I was asked why I had employed a pleasant, jocose, and diverting style. I reply, that if I had written in a dogmatical style, it would have been only the learned who would have read, and they would have had no necessity to do it, being at least as well acquainted with the subject as myself : thus, I thought it a duty to write so as to be comprehended by women and men of the world, that they might know the danger of those maxims and propositions which were then universally propagated, and of which they permitted them- GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 163 selves to be so easily persuaded. I was asked, lastly, if I had myself read all the books I have cited. I answer, No ; for in that case it would have been necessary to have passed my life in reading very bad books ; but I had read through the whole of Escobar twice, and, for the others, I caused them to be read by my friends. But I have never used a single passage without having myself read it in the book cited, or without having examined the subject on which it is adduced, or without having read both what precedes and what follows it, in order that I might not run the risk of quoting what was, in fact, an objection for a reply to it, which would have been censurable and unjust." The moral aspects of Pascal's character are as inviting as those of his intellect : here, too, he was truly great. Some infirmities, indeed, he had, for he was no more than man : he is nevertheless one of the very few who as passion ately pursue the acquisition of moral excellence, as the quest after speculative truth ; who, practically as well as theoret ically, believe that the highest form of humanity is not in tellect, but goodness. Usually it is far otherwise ; there is no sort of proportion between the diligence and assiduity which men are ordinarily willing to expend on their own intellectual and moral culture. Even of those who are in a good degree under the influence of moral and religious prin ciples, and whose conduct in all the more important instances of life shows it, how few are there who make that compre hensive rectitude, the obligation of which they acknowledge, and the ideal of which they admire, the study of their lives, the rule of their daily actions in little things as well as great ; who analyze their motives, or school their hearts, in relation to the habitual expressions of thought and feeling, in con scious obedience to it ! Nor is it less than an indication of something wrong about human nature, a symptom of spirit ual disease, that of those three distinct orders of " greatness," which Pascal has so exquisitely discriminated in his " Pen- sees," power, intellect, and goodness, the admiration 164 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL." inspired by the two first should be so much greater than that inspired by the last. The reverence for genius, in particular, often degenerates into a species of idolatry ; so much so, as to lead to the proverbial, but most culpable, extenuation of grave faults on the part of biographers, who cannot bear to see a spot on the bright luminary they admire ! Even if moral excellence be theoretically allowed to claim equal enthusiasm of admiration, it rarely receives it. How vivid, after all, is the sentiment which the intellect of a Bacon or a Shakspeare usually excites in the young and ardent, com pared with that with which they regard a Howard or a Martyn ! Yet invincible patience, heroic constancy, that honesty of pur pose which is proof against all flatteries and all menace, per fect candor, the spirit of unfeigned humility, benevolence, and charity, are surely not less worthy of our most enthusiastic ad miration, than those .qualities of mind which prompt the dis coveries of the philosopher, or inspire the strains of the poet. It is one of the proofs, according to Paley's ingenious remark, of the originality of the Gospel, and one of the marks of the divinity of its origin, that it chiefly insists on the cultivation of an order of virtues which had been least applauded by man, and in which, as that very fact would indicate, man was most deficient ; of humility, meekness, patience, rather than of those opposite virtues to which the active principles of his nature would most readily prompt him, and which have been accordingly the chief objects of culture and admiration. We may extend the remark, and observe, that it is an equal indication of the originality of the Gospel and of the divinity of its origin, that the ideal of greatness which it has presented to us, is of a different char acter from that which has chiefly fixed the enthusiastic gaze of man. It is not one in which power and intellect consti tute the predominant qualities, associated with just so much virtue as serves to make the picture free from all grave re proach ; but the perfection of truth, rectitude, and love, to which even the attributes of superhuman power and super- GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 165 human wisdom, with which they are blended, are so won derfully subordinated, that they seem, as they are, intrinsi cally of inferior lustre. Glorious as is their light, it is abso lutely quenched in the brighter effulgence of ineffable and supernal goodness. We think of Csesar as the great warrior and the great statesman ; of Shakspeare as the great poet ; of Newton as the great philosopher : when the Christian thinks of his Master, though he believes him to be possessed of immeasurably greater power and wisdom than theirs, his first, last thought is, that he is THE GOOD. The character of greatness in Christ, Pascal has beauti fully touched. " The distance between Matter and Mind typifies the infinitely greater distance between Mind and Love All the eclat of external greatness has no lustre for men profoundly engaged in intellectual researches Their greatness, again, is invisible to the noble and the rich Great geniuses have their empire, their splendor, their victory, their renown These are seen with the eyes of the mind, and that is sufficient Holy men, again, have their empire, their victory, and their renown. Archimedes would have been venerable even without rank. He gained no battles ; but to the intellectual world he has bequeathed great discoveries. How illustrious does he look in their eyes ! In like manner Jesus Christ, without external splendor, without the outward repute of science, is great in his own order of holiness It had been idle in Archimedes to have insisted on his royal de scent in his books of geometry. And it had been as useless for our Lord Jesus Christ to assume the state of a king for the purpose of giving splendor to his reign of holiness. But he came fully invested with the lustre of his own order." Few men have ever dwelt on this ideal of moral perfec tion, or sought to realize its image in themselves, with more ardor than Pascal, not always, indeed, as regards the mode, with as much wisdom as ardor. Yet, upon all the great features of his moral character, one dwells with the 166 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. serenest delight. Much as he is to be admired, he is yet more to be loved. His humility and simplicity, conspicuous as his genius and acquisitions, were those of a veiy child. The favorite of science, repeatedly crowned, as an old Greek might have said of some distinguished young hero at Olympia, with the fairest laurels of the successful mathema tician and the unrivalled polemic, making discoveries even in his youth which would have intoxicated many men even to madness, neither pride nor vanity found admission to his heart. Philosophy and science produced on him only their proper effect, and taught him, not how much he knew, but how little ; not merely what he had attained, but of how much more he was ignorant. His perfect love of truth was beautifully blended with the gentlest charity ; and his contempt of fraud and sophistry never made him forget, while indignantly exposing them, the courtesies of a gentle man and the moderation of the Christian : and thus the se verest raillery that probably ever fell from human lips, flows on in a stream undiscolored by one particle of malevolence, and unruffled by one expression of coarseness or bitterness. The transparency and integrity .of his character not only shone conspicuous in all the transactions of his life, but seem even now to beam upon us as from an open ingenuous coun tenance, in the inimitable frankness and clearness of his style. It is impossible to read the passages in his philosophical writings, in which he notices or refutes the calumnies to which he had been exposed, by which it was sometimes sought to defraud him of the honor of the discoveries he had made, and in one instance to cover him with the infamy of appropriating discoveries which had been made by others, without being convinced of the perfect candor and upright ness of his nature.* His generosity and benevolence were unbounded ; so much so, indeed, as to become almost vices * See more particularly his letters to Father Noel, M. le Pailleur, and M. de Bibeyre. GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 167 by excess ; passing far beyond that mean in which the Sta- gyrite fixes the limits of all virtue. He absolutely beggared himself by his prodigal benefactions ; he did what few do, mortgaged even his expectancies to charity. To all which we may add, that he bore the prolonged and excruciating suf ferings of his latter years with a patience and fortitude which astonished all who witnessed them. The failings of Pascal for to these we must advert were partly the result of that system of faith in which he had been educated, and which, though he did so much to expose many of the worst enormities which had attached themselves to it, still exercised considerable influence over him. It is lamentable to see such a mind as his surrendering itself to some of the most grievous extravagances of asceticism. Yet the fact cannot be denied ; nor is it improbable that his life brief perhaps at the longest, considering his intense study and his feeble constitution was yet made more brief by these pernicious practices. We are told, not only that he lived on the plainest fare, and performed the most menial offices for himself; not only that he practised the severest abstinence and the most rigid devotions ; but that he wore beneath his clothes a girdle of iron, with sharp points affixed to it ; and that, whenever he found his mind disposed to wan der from religious subjects, or take delight in things around him, he struck the girdle with his elbow, and forced the sharp points of the iron into his side. We even see but too clearly that his views of life, to a considerable extent, became per verted. He cherished mistrust even of its blessings, and acted, though he meant it not, as if the very gifts of God were to be received with suspicion, as the smiling tempters to evil, the secret enemies of our well-being. He often ex presses himself as though he thought, not only that suffering is necessary to the moral discipline of man, but as though nothing but suffering is at present safe for him. " I can ap- pro^e," he says in one place, " only of those who seek in tears for happiness." " Disease," he declares in another 168 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. place, " is the natural state of Christians." It is evident that the great and gracious Master, in whose school we all are, and whose various dispensations of goodness and sever ity are dictated by a wisdom greater than our own, does not think so. If he did, health would be the exception, and dis ease the rule. It is but too true, indeed, that not only is suffering necessary to teach us our feebleness and depend ence, and to abate the pride and confidence of our nature, but that we are but too apt to forget, with the return of pros perity, all the wise reflections and purposes which we had made in sorrow. Jeremy Taylor likens us, in one of his many fanciful images, to the fabled lamps in the tomb of Terentia, which " burned under ground for many ages to gether," but which, as soon as ever they were brought into the air and saw a brighter light, went out in darkness. " So long as we are in the retirements of sorrow, of want, of fear, of sickness, we are burning and shining lamps ; but when God lifts us up from the gates of death, and carries us abroad into the open air, to converse with prosperity and temptations, we go out in darkness, and we cannot be preserved in light and heat, but by still dwelling in the regions of sorrow." There is beauty, and, to a certain extent, truth, in the figure ; but it by no means follows that continuous suffering would be good for man. On the contrary, it would be as remote from producing the perfection of our moral nature, as unmitigated prosperity. It would be apt to produce a morbid and ghast ly piety ; the " bright lamps " of which Taylor speaks would still irradiate only a tomb. Since the end of suffering, as a moral discipline, is to ena ble us at last to bear unclouded happiness, what guaranty can we now have of its beneficial effect on us, except by partial experiments of our capacity of recollecting and prac tising the lessons of adversity in intervals of prosperity ? It is true that there is no more perilous ordeal through which man can pass, no greater curse which can be imposed on him, as he is at present constituted, than that of being GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 169 condemned to walk his life long in the sunlight- of unshaded prosperity. His eyes ache with that too untempered bril liance, he is apt to be smitten with a moral coup de soleil. But it as little follows that no sunshine is good for us. He who made us, and who tutors us, alone knows what is the exact measure of light and shade, sun and cloud, storm and calm, frost and heat, which will best tend to mature those flowers which are the object of his celestial husbandry ; and which, when transplanted into the paradise of God, are to bloom there for ever in amaranthine loveliness. Nor can it be without presumption that we essay to interfere with these processes ; our highest wisdom is to fall in with them. And certain it is that every man will find by experience that he has enough to do, to bear with patience and fortitude the real afflictions with which God may visit him, without venturing to fill up the intervals in which He has left him ease, and even invites him to gladness, by a self-imposed and artificial sorrow. Nay, if his mind be well constituted, he will feel that the learning how to apply, in hours of happiness, the truths which he has pondered in the school of sorrow, is not one of the least difficult lessons which sorrow has to teach him ; not to mention that the grateful reception of God's gifts is as true a part of duty, and even a more neglected part of it, than a patient submission to his chastisements. It is at our peril, then, that we seek to interfere with the discipline which is provided for us. He who acts as if God had mistaken the proportions in which prosperity and adver sity should be allotted to us, and seeks by hair-shirts, pro longed abstinence, and self-imposed penace, to render more perfect the discipline of suffering, only enfeebles, instead of invigorating, his piety ; and resembles one of those hypo- chondriacal patients the plague and torment of physicians who, having sought advice, and being supposed to follow it, are found not only taking their physician's well-judged prescriptions, but secretly dosing themselves in the intervals with some quackish nostrum. Thus it was even with a Pas- is 170 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. ca j ? and we cannot see that the experiment was attended in his case with any better effects. It is indeed pitiable to read, that during his last days his perverted notions induced him to refrain from the natural ex pressions of fondness and gratitude towards his sisters and attendants, lest that affection with which they regarded him should become inordinate ; lest they should transfer to an earthly creature the affection due only to the Supreme. Something like an attempted justification of such conduct, indeed, occurs in his "Pensees." "II est injuste qu'on s'at- tache a moi, quoiqu'on le fasse avec plaisir et volontairement. Je tromperais ceux a qui j'en ferais naitre le desir ; car je ne suis la fin de personne, et n'ai pas de quoi les satisfaire. Ne suis-je pas pret a mourir ? Et ainsi Pobjet de leur attach ment mourra done. Comme je serais coupable de faire croire une faussete, quoique je la persuadasse doucement et qu'on la crut avec plaisir, et qu'en cela on me fit plaisir ; de meme je suis coupable de me faire aimer." ! Madame Perier has cited this passage in the life of her brother, as ac counting for his apparent coldness to herself.f It is wonderful that a mind so powerful as his should be misled by a pernicious asceticism to adopt such maxims ; it is still more wonderful, that a heart so fond should have been able to act upon them. To restrain, even in his dying hours, expressions of tenderness towards those whom he so loved, and who so loved him, to simulate a coldness which his feelings belied, to repress the sensibilities of a grateful and confiding nature, to inflict a pang by affected indifference * Tom. I. p. 198. t The passage of Madame Perier is deeply affecting. " Meanwhile, as I was wholly a stranger to his sentiments on this point, I was quite surprised and discouraged at the rebuffs he would give me upon certain occasions. I told my sister of it, and not without complaining, that my brother was unkind, and did not love me ; and that it looked to me as if I put him in pain, even at the very moment I was studying to please him, and striving to perform the most affectionate offices for him in his illness." Madame PC-tier's Memoirs of Pascal. GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 171 on hearts as fond as his own, here was indeed a proof of the truth upon which he so passionately meditated, the " greatness and the misery " of man, of his strength and his weakness ; weakness in supposing that such perversion of all nature could ever be a dictate of duty, strength in performing, without wincing, a task so hard. The Ameri can Indian bearing unmoved the torture of his enemies ex hibits not, we may rest assured, greater fortitude than Pascal, when, with such a heart as his, he received in silence the last ministrations of his devoted friends, and even declined, with cold and averted eye, the assiduities of their zealous love. That same melancholy temperament which, united with a pernicious asceticism, made him avert his gaze even from in nocent pleasures, and suspect a serpent lurking in every form of pleasure, also gave to his representations of the depravity of our nature an undue intensity and Rembrandt-like depth of coloring. His mode of expression is often such, that, were it not for what we otherwise know of his character, it might al most be mistaken for an indication of misanthropy. With this vice, accordingly, Voltaire does not hesitate to tax him. '* Ce fameux ecrivain, misanthrope sublime." Nothing can be more unjust. As to the substance of what Pascal has said of human frailty and infirmity, most of it is at once verified by the appeal to individual consciousness ; and as to the manner, we are not to forget that he everywhere dwells as much upon the " greatness " as upon the " misery " of man. " It is the ruined archangel," says Hallam, with equal justness and beauty, " that Pascal delights to paint." It is equally evident that he is habitually inspired by a desire to lead man to truth and happiness ; nor is there any thing more affecting than the passage with which he closes one of his expostulations with infidelity, and which M. Cousin finely characterizes as " une citation glorieuse a Pascal." " This argument, you say, delights me. If this argument pleases you, and appears strong, know that it proceeds from one, who, both before and after it, fell on his knees before that Infinite 172 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. and Invisible Being to whom he has subjected his whole soul, to pray that He would also subject you to Himself for your good and for His glory ; and that thus omnipotence might give efficacy to his feebleness." In addition to this, it must be said, that, in his most bitter reflections, this truly humble man is thinking as much of him self as of others, and regards Blaise Pascal as but a type of the race whose degeneracy he mourns. His most bitter sar casms often terminate with a special application to the writer. Thus he says : " Vanity is so rooted in the heart of man, that a common soldier, a scullion, will boast of himself, and will have his admirers. It is the same with the philosophers. Those who write would fain have the fame of having written well ; and those who read it, would have the glory of having read it ; and 1, who am writing, probably feel the same de sire, and not less those who shall read it" It is true, indeed, that some of his reflections are as caustic and bitter as those of Rochefoucauld himself. For example : " Curiosity is but vanity. Often we wish to know more, only that we may talk of it. People would never traverse the sea, if they were never to speak of it ; for the mere pleasure of seeing, without the hope of ever telling what they have seen." And again : " Man is so constituted, that, by merely telling him he is a fool, he will at length believe it ; and, if he tells himself so, he will constrain himself to believe it. For man holds an internal intercourse with himself, which ought to be well regulated, since even here ' Evil communications corrupt good manners.' " It may not be without, amusement, perhaps instruction, to cite one or two other specimens of this shrewd and caustic humor. " Certain authors, speaking of their works, say, ' My book, my commentary, my history.' It were better to say, ' Our book, our history, our commentary ' ; for generally there is more in it belonging to others than to themselves." " I lay it down as a fact, that, if all men knew what they GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 173 say of one another, there would not be four friends in the world. This appears by the quarrels which are sometimes caused by indiscreet reports." Still, as it is the motive which gives complexion to all our moral actions, so Pascal's bitter wisdom, or even his unjust satire, is something very different from misanthropy. Byron found an apology for his Cain in Milton's delineation of Satan ; but few besides himself could ever see its force. With as little reason could a Timon plead the example of a Pascal. Those who cannot see a deep benevolence in all that he wrote respecting our corrupted nature, must indeed be blind. It is with no demoniacal chuckle, no smile of malicious tri umph, that he publishes the result of his researches into the depths of man's moral nature. On the contrary, it is with profoundest pity. He gazes on the noble ruins of humanity as on those of some magnificent temple, and longs to see the fallen columns and the defaced sculpture restored. With what noble eloquence with what deep sympathy with humanity does he rebuke the levity of those infidels who tell us, as if it were a matter of triumph, that we are " the inhabitants of a fatherless and forsaken world " ; and who talk as if their vaunted demonstration of the vanity of our immortal hopes gave them a peculiar title to our gratitude and admiration ! " What advantage is it to us to hear a man saying that he has thrown off the yoke ; that he does not think there is any God who watches over his actions ; that he considers himself as the sole judge of his conduct, and that he is accountable to none but himself? Does he imagine that we shall here after repose special confidence in him, and expect from him consolation, advice, succor, in the exigencies of life ? Do such men imagine that it is any matter of delight to us to hear that they hold that our soul is but a little vapor or smoke, and that they can tell us this in an assured and self-sufficient tone of voice ? Is this, then, a thing to say with gayety ? Is it not rather a thing to be said with tears, as the saddest thing in the world ? " 15* 174 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. On the whole, in contemplating the richly diversified char acteristics of this exalted genius in its different moods and phases, the combination of sublimity and depth with light ness and grace, of the noblest aptitudes for abstract spec ulation with the utmost delicacy of taste and sensibility of feeling, of profound melancholy with the happiest and most refined humor and raillery, the grandeur of many aspects of his character, and the loveliness of others, we seem to be reminded of the contradictory features of Alpine scenery, where all forms of sublimity and beauty, of loveli ness and terror, are found in singular proximity ; where up land valleys of exquisite verdure and softness lie at the foot of the eternal glaciers ; where spots of purest pastoral repose and beauty smile under the very shadow of huge, snowy peaks, and form the entrance of those savage gorges, in which reigns perpetual, but sublime desolation ; where the very silence is appalling, broken only by the roar of the distant cataract, and the lonely thunder of the avalanche. We must now make some remarks on the projected trea tise, of which the " Pensees " were designed to form the rude materials. It is impossible to determine, from the undeveloped char acter of these u Thoughts," the precise form of the work ; all we are told is, that it was to have treated of the primary truths of all religion, and of the evidences of Christianity. It is clear, that about half the " thoughts " which relate to theology at all, have reference to the former. In Pascal's time, however, both subjects might have been naturally in cluded in one work. The great deistical controversies of Europe had not yet commenced, and there had been little reason to discriminate very nicely the limits of the two in vestigations. Pascal himself could hardly have anticipated the diversified forms which the subject of the evidences of Christianity alone would assume, so diversified, indeed, that they are probably insusceptible from their variety (ex- GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 175 ternal and internal) of being fully exhibited by one mind, or, consequently, in one volume. The evidences of Chris tianity almost form a science of themselves. Fragmentary as the " Pensees " are, it is easy to see, both from their general tenor, and from the character of the au thor's mind, where the principal strength of such a work would lie. His proofs of the truths of natural religion would have been drawn from within, rather than from without ; and his proofs of the truths of Christianity from its internal rather than external evidences ; including in this term " internal," not only the adaptation of the doctrines revealed to the moral nature of man, but whatsoever indications the fabric of Scrip ture itself may afford of the divinity of its origin. It is evident, that he had revolved all these topics pro foundly. None had explored more diligently the abyss of man's moral nature, or mused more deeply on the " great ness and misery of man," or orf the " contrarieties " which characterize him, or on the remedies for his infirmities and corruptions. And there are few, even since his time, who seem to have appreciated more fully the evidences of Christianity arising from indications of truth in the genius, structure, and style of the Scriptures ; or from the difficul ties, not to say impossibilities, of supposing such a fiction as Christianity the probable product of any human artifice, much less of such an age, country, and, above all, such men, as the problem limits us to. In one passage, he gives ex pression to a thought which has been expanded into the beautiful and eminently original work of Paley, entitled " Horse Paulinas." He says : " The style of the Gospel is admirable in many respects, and, amongst others, in this, that there is not a single invective against the murderers and enemies of Jesus Christ If the modesty of the evan gelical historians had been affected, and, in common with so many other traits of so beautiful a character, had been affect ed only that they might be observed, then, if they had not ventured to advert to it themselves, they would not have 176 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. failed to get their friends to remark on it, to their advantage. But as they acted in this way without affectation, and from a principle altogether disinterested, they never provided any one to make such a criticism. And, in my judgment, there are many points of this kind which have never been noticed hitherto ; and this testifies to the simplicity with which the thing was done." * He has also, with characteristic comprehensiveness, con densed into a single paragraph the substance of the cele brated volume of " Bampton Lectures," on the contrasts between Mahometanism and Christianity. " Mahomet found ed his system on slaughter ; Jesus Christ by exposing his disciples to death ; Mahomet by forbidding to read ; the Apostles by commanding it. In a word, so opposite is the plan of one from that of the other, that, if Mahomet took the way to succeed according to human calculation, Jesus Christ certainly took the way to fail ; and instead of arguing, that, since Mahomet succeeded, Jesus Christ might also succeed, we ought rather to say, that, since Mahomet succeeded, it is impossible but that Jesus Christ should fail." f On the subject of the External Evidences, we doubt whether he would have been equally successful, partly because the spirit of accurate historic investigation had not yet been developed, and partly from the character of his own mind. On the subject of Miracles, too, he scarcely seems to have worked his conceptions clear ; and in relation to that of Prophecy, he was evidently often inclined to lay undue stress on analogies between events recorded in the Old Testament and others recorded in the New, where Scripture itself is silent as to any connection between them ; analogies in one or two cases as fanciful as any of those in which the Fathers saw so many types and prefigurations of undeveloped truths. This disposition to forget the limits between the analogies which may form the foundation of a * Tom. II. p. 370. t Ibid., p. 337. GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 177 logical argument, and those which, after all, can yield only poetical illustrations, has too often obtruded itself even into the domain of physical science ; and is one from which the most philosophic minds, if they have much imaginativeness, are by no means exempt. Even Bacon, in several instan ces, has been the dupe of this delusion, one of the idola tribus which he was so anxious to expose. There is one subject on which, after reading the " Pen- sees," one would fain have seen a treatise from the hand of Pascal. If he had enjoyed leisure, health, and an unclouded mind, there is probably no man who could have written more profoundly or more wisely on the Prima Philosophia, the first principles of all knowledge, the limits within which man can hopefully speculate, and the condition and principles of belief. On all these subjects he had reflected much and deeply. His remarks on the position of man be tween " the two infinitudes," which he has so finely illus trated, on the Dogmatists and Pyrrhonists, on the influ ence of the affections and passions on the understanding, and his observations entitled, " De PArt de Persuader," and " De PEsprit Geometrique," all show how deeply he had revolved the principal topics of such a work. We have already alluded to the charge preferred against Pascal by M. Cousin, of no less than universal and hopeless scepticism ; from which, as is said, he took refuge in faith by a blind effort of will, without evidence, and in utter de spair of obtaining it. One or two brief citations will show the extent to which this charge is pushed. " Ce dessein [des 4 Pensees,'] je Pai demontre dans ce Rapport, etait d'accabler la philosophic Cartesienne, et avec elle toute philosophic, sous le scepticisms, pour ne laisser a la foi naturelle de Phomme d'autre asile que la religion. Or en cela, Padver- saire des Jesuites en devient, sans s'en douter, le serviteur et le soldat." * " Lui aussi, il a pour principe que le * Bapport, pp. xiii., xviii. 178 GENIUS AND WHITINGS OF PASCAL. Pyrrhonisme est le vrai" "II est sceptique, et, comme Huet, il se propose de conduire Phomme a la foi par la route du scepticisme." * M. Cousin even goes the length of saying that Pascal's religion " was not the solid and pleasant fruit which springs from the union of reason and feeling de la raison et du cceur in a soul well constituted and wisely cultivated ; it is a bitter fruit, reared in a region desolated by doubt, under the arid breath of despair." t He also tells us, that " the very depth of Pascal's soul was a universal scep ticism, from which he could find no refuge except in a volun tarily blind credulity." " Le fond meme de rdme de Pascal est un scepticisme universel, contre lequel il ne trouve d^asile que dans unefoi volontairement aveugle" These are certainly charges which, without the gravest and most decisive proof, ought not to be preferred against any man ; much less against one possessing so clear and powerful an intellect as Pascal. It is, in fact, the most de grading picture which can be presented of any mind ; for what weakness can be more pitiable, or what inconsistency more gross, than that of a man who, by a mere act of will, if, indeed, such a condition of mind be conceivable, surrenders himself to the belief of the most stupendous doc trines, while he at the same time acknowledges that he has no proof whatever of their certainty ? We have great respect for M. Cousin as a philosopher and historian of philosophy, and we willingly render him the homage of our thanks for his liberal and enlightened sur vey of the intellectual philosophy of Scotland ; but he must excuse us for dissenting from, and freely examining, his startling view of the scepticism of Pascal. That charge we do not hesitate to pronounce unjust, for the following reasons : 1. It appears to us that M. Cousin has forgotten that Pas cal by no means denies that there is sufficient evidence of * Rapport, p. xix. t Ibid., p. 162. GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 179 the many great principles to which scepticism objects ; he only maintains that we do not arrive at them by demonstra tion. He has powerfully vindicated the certainty of those intuitive principles which are not ascertained by reasoning, but are presupposed in every exercise of reasoning. Let us hear him. " The only strong point," says he, " of the Dog matists is, that we cannot consistently with honesty and sin cerity doubt our own intuitive principles We know the truth, not only by reasoning, but by feeling, and by a vivid and luminous power of direct comprehension ; and it is by this last faculty that we discern first principles. It is vain for reasoning, which has no share in discovering these principles, to attempt subverting them The Pyrrho- nists who attempt this must try in vain The knowledge of first principles, as the ideas of space, time, motion, number, matter, is as unequivocally certain as any that reasoning imparts. And, after all, it is on the perceptions of feeling and common sense that reason must at last sustain itself, and base its argument Principles are perceived, prop ositions are deduced : each part of the process is certain, though in different modes. And it is as ridiculous that rea son should require of feeling and perception proofs of these first principles before she assents to them, as it would be that perception should require from reason an intuitive im pression of all the propositions at which she arrives. This weakness, therefore, ought only to humble that reason which would constitute herself the judge all things, but not to inval idate the convictions of common sense, as if reason * only could be our guide and teacher." Can he who thus speaks be a " universal sceptic," when it is the peculiar character istic of Pyrrhonism that is, universal scepticism to con trovert the certainty of principles perceived by intuition, and * It is true that, in these and many similar passages, Pascal, as M. Cousin rightly observes, often employs the word reason as if it were synonymous with reasoning. But this only respects the propriety of his expressions ; his meaning is surely tolerably clear. 180 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. to plume itself upon having successfully done this, when it has shown that they cannot be demonstrated by reasoning ? But let us hear him still more expressly on the subject of Pyrrhonism. " Here, then, is open war proclaimed amongst men. Each must take a side ; must necessarily range him self with the Pyrrhonists or the Dogmatists ; for he who would think to remain neuter is a Pyrrhonist par excellence. He who is not against them is for them. What, then, must a person do in this alternative ? Shall he doubt of every thing ? Shall he doubt that he is awake, or that he is pinched or burned ? Shall he doubt that he doubts ? Shall he doubt that he is ? We cannot get so far as this ; and I hold it to be a fact, that there never has been an absolute and perfect Pyrrhonist." M. Cousin must suppose Pascal to have made an exception in favor of himself, if it indeed be true that he was a " universal sceptic." 2. It does not appear to us that M. Cousin has sufficiently reflected, that, in those cases in which conclusions truly in volve processes of reasoning, Pascal would not deny that the preponderance of truth rested with the truths he believed, though he denied the demonstrative nature of that proof. And he applies this with perfect fairness to the evidences of Christianity, as well as to the truths of natural theology. It may well be, that minds so differently constituted as those of Pascal and Cousin may form different conclusions as to the degree of success which may attend the efforts of human reasoning ; but a man is not to be straightway branded with the name of a universal sceptic, because he believes that there are very few subjects on which evidence can be said to be demonstrative. The more deeply a man reflects, the fewer will he think the subjects on which this species of cer tainty can be obtained ; and the study neither of ancient nor of modern philosophy will convince him that he is far wrong in this conclusion. But he will not, for all that, deny that there is sufficient evidence on all the more important subjects to form the belief and determine the conduct of man, evi- GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 181 dence of precisely the same nature with that which does form the one, and does determine the other, in all the ordinary af fairs of life. And this alone, where a man rejects such evi dence, is sufficient to condemn him ; for what right has he to decline, in the more important instances, a species and de gree of evidence which he never hesitates to act upon in all other cases ? Now, that Pascal believed that there was sufficient evidence of this character, for all the fundamental truths of religion, is manifest from many express declarations. " There is light enough," says he, " for those whose sincere wish is to see ; and darkness enough to confound those of an opposite disposition." * Of Christianity he says : " It is impossible to see all the proofs of this religion combined in one view, with out feeling that they have a force which no reasonable man can withstand." f " The proofs of our religion are not of that kind that we can say they are geometrically convincing. But their light is such that it outshines, or at the least equals, the strongest presumption to the contrary : so much so, that sound reason never can determine not to accept the evidence, and probably it is only the corruption and depravity of the heart that do." It is not without reason that M. Fau- gere says, in reference to the charge of scepticism urged against Pascal : " Faith and reason may equally claim him. If they sometimes appear to clash in his mind, it is because he wanted time, not only to finish the work on which he was engaged, but even to complete that internal revision, son cBuvre interieure, which is a kind of second creation of ge nius ; and to melt into one harmonious whole the diverse ele ments of his thoughts Amongst the inedited frag ments of Pascal we find these remarkable lines : * II faut avoir ces trois qualities ; Pyrrhonien, geometre, Chretien sou- mis ; et elles s^accordent et se temper ent en doutant oil il faut, en assurant ou il faut, en se soummettant oil il fautS * Tom. II. p. 151. t Ibid., p. 365. 16 182 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. These bold words comprise the entire history of Pascal, and express in brief the state of his mind." * 3. While we admit that the severely geometrical cast of Pascal's mind, as well as his gloomy temperament, have led him at times into extravagant expressions on this subject, so accomplished a critic as M. Cousin needs not be told that it is not fair to take such expressions alone, and in their utmost strictness, if they can be confronted with others which mod ify or explain them. The former, in common candor, are to be interpreted only in connection with the latter. This is the course we always pursue in interpreting the language of writers who have indulged in unlimited propositions ; and if it be found even impossible to harmonize certain expressions, if they be absolutely contradictory, all we feel at lib erty to do is to affirm the inconsistency of the writer ; not to assume that he meant all that could possibly be implied in the one class of expressions, and nothing by the other. We know it is so natural for an author of much imagination or sensibility to give an inordinately strong expression to a pres ent thought or feeling, and to forget the judge in the advo cate, that he must be taken in another mood, or rather in several, if we wish to ascertain the true mean of his senti ments. Pascal has in one of his " Pensees " indicated this only reasonable method of procedure. Now M. Cousin is surely aware of the fact, that the ex pressions to which he has given such an unfavorable inter pretation, may be easily confronted with others of a differ ent tendency. He himself, indeed, proclaims it. He even says, no man ever contradicted himself more than Pascal. " Jamais homme ne s'est plus contredit." " Confounding," says he, " reasoning and reason, forgetting that he has him self judiciously discriminated primary and indemonstrable truths discovered to us by that spontaneous intuition of reason which we also with him call instinct, sentiment, feel- * Tom. I. p. Ixxvii. Introduction. GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. 183 ing from truths which are deduced from them by the method of reasoning, or which we draw from experience by induction ; forgetting that he has thus himself replied be forehand to all the attacks of scepticism, Pascal demands all these principles from experience and reasoning, and by that means, without much trouble, confounds them all." * Now we do not stay to inquire here into the justness of the latter part of this representation ; but we simply ask, Why should all the " replies " which, as our author admits, " Pascal has himself made to scepticism," go for nothing, and only the sentences in which he appears to favor it be remembered ; and not only remembered, but taken as the sole exponents of his opinions ? Surely a sceptic might as well take the oppo site side, and say, " Alas ! after Pascal seems in many expres sions to have conceded much to scepticism, he forgets all- he had said ; and shows, by his whole talk of ' intuitive truths,' and 'sentiment,' and 'feeling,' that he is no better than a dogmatist." Might we not say to the two objectors, " Wor thy friends ! you are the two knights in the fable ; one is looking on the golden, and the other on the silver side of the same shield." 4. Nor is it to be forgotten, that, while such a mode of in terpretation as that of M. Cousin would hardly be just in the case of any work of any author, it is especially unfair to ap ply it to such a work, or rather mere materials of a work, as the " Pensees." They were, we are to recollect, mere notes for Pascal's own use, and were never intended to be published as they are. Many of them are altogether imperfect and un developed ; some scarcely intelligible. It is impossible to tell with what modifications, and in what connection, they would have stood in the matured form which the master mind, here hastily recording them for private reference, would have ultimately given them. Nay, there can scarcely be a doubt, that many of them were mere objections which * Kapport, p. 157. 184 GENIUS AND WRITINGS OF PASCAL. Pascal noted for refutation, not opinions to be maintained by him ; and this in many places may be not obscurely infer red : some, again, are mere quotations from Montaigne and other authors, extracted for some unknown purpose, but not distinguished in these private memoranda from the writer's own expressions ; so that the first editors of the " Pensees " actually printed them in some cases as his. And lastly, some were dictated, in moments of sickness and pain, to an old domestic, who has scrawled them in a fashion which suffi ciently shows that it is very possible that some errors may lie with the amanuensis.* Yet M. Cousin, while straining every expression on which he founds his charge of scepticism to its utmost strictness of literal meaning, never seems to have adverted to one of these very reasonable considerations. 5. The weight which any deliberate opinion of M. Cousin must reasonably possess, may in this case well be confronted with that of Bayle ; whose notorious scepticism would have been but too glad to find an ally in so admired a genius as Pascal, had there been any plausible pretext on which to claim him. Yet that subtle and acute critic declares, that Pascal knew perfectly well what to render to faith, and what to reason. 6. In our judgment, Pascal's projected work is itself a suffi cient confutation of M. Cousin's supposition. For, did ever man before meditate an elaborate work on the " evidences " of truths for which he believed no evidence but a blind faith could be given ? 7. We maintain, lastly, that even if it be proved (which is, doubtless, very true) that Pascal, at different periods and in different moods of mind, formed varying estimates of the evidence on behalf of the great truths in which he was so * Of one of these expressions, on which M. Cousin has founded much, M. Faugere says : " Tout ce morceau, dicte a une personne visiblement fort peu lettree, presente 7rtov 77, p.SX\ov Se, KOL ^cru^curepa, Kai rots eiSe